"... Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon. ..."
"... This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception." ..."
"... During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted. ..."
"... When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. ..."
"... Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war." ..."
"... The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. ..."
"... Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. ..."
The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It
was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of
mass destruction" and "rogue state" were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience:
us.
To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR
flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where
politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.
Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad
student's website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister's bombastic speech to the House
of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who
looted whole passages from Blair's speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely
through the tempest. Why?
Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no
interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real
effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.
Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were disposable nuggets that could be
discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls
and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next.
When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back position became the
mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war where the U.S.A. backed Iraq) proving that Saddam was
an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush PR machine was: Move on. Don't
explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back.
Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey
Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion
palatable, not to justify it.
The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair
of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and
often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps
were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell
and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State
Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should
be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit
the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.
Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world.
Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on
the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two
advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff
shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses:
Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.
At the State Department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board
of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell's words, "the branding of U.S. foreign policy." She
extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely
focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.
"Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time," said Beers.
"All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves,
but for the outside world." Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of
perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy.
Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a
conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange
nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It's a one-way
street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and
international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing.
The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The
American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of "freedom" to
oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise
missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation
to its bizarre essence: "This war is about peace."
Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles
battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of
shock and awe were all after play.
Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria "Torie" Clarke as his director of
public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Before becoming Rumsfeld's
mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world's great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and
Knowlton's D.C. office.
Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a
select group of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing
plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and
was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR
executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich
Galen.
The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie
Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was
conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working
feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR
firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press
coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed
all the well-placed help it could buy. They seem to have gotten their money's worth. Boggs'
felicitous influence-peddling may help to explain why the references to Saudi funding of
al-Qaeda were dropped from the recent congressional report on the investigation into
intelligence failures and 9/11.
According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent "messaging advice" to
the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to
buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just
nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the
military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They
suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld's mind) of playing up the notion of
so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which,
of course, wasn't an "axis" at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq, hated each other,
and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.
Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms
working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi
dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many
of these PR executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush
inner sanctum. Indeed, they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against
Iraq, another engagement that was more spin than combat .
At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the D.C. firm, the Rendon Group. Rendon is
one of Washington's heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation stand
in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant for Michael Dukakis and Jimmy
Carter, as well as Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war, he
offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm, Rendon pulled in $100,000 a month from
the Kuwaiti royal family. He followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to
produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.
As part of this CIA project, Rendon created and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped
his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.
Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public
relations for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning
and public relations for the pre-emptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon
refuse to disclose the details of the group's work there.
But it's not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war's
signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by U.S. troops and Chalabi
associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled
by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags
to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. "Where do you think they
got those American flags?" clucked Rendon in 1991. "That was my assignment."
The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has
now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported
that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi
and his associates to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.
So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization
of official propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," said
Rendon. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or
corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception
manager."
What exactly, is perception management? The Pentagon defines it this way: "actions to convey
and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their
emotions, motives and objective reasoning." In other words, lying about the intentions of the
U.S. government. In a rare display of public frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan
(developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for
perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic Influence and among its many
missions was to plant false stories in the press.
Nothing stirs the corporate media into outbursts of pious outrage like an official
government memo bragging about how the media are manipulated for political objectives. So the
New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits about the Office of Strategic
Influence; the Pentagon shut down the operation, and the press gloated with satisfaction on its
victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that while he was killing the office, the
same devious work would continue. "You can have the corpse," said Rumsfeld. "You can have the
name. But I'm going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have."
At a diplomatic level, despite the hired guns and the planted stories, this image war was
lost. It failed to convince even America's most fervent allies and dependent client states that
Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to win the blessing of the U.N. and even NATO, a wholly
owned subsidiary of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of the willing
consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even
so, the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the U.S.A. overwhelmingly opposed the
war.
Domestically, it was a different story. A population traumatized by terror threats and
shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was
a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on
America with weapons of mass destruction.
Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of
threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans,
but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the
American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was
behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.
Of course, the closest Saddam came to possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried
for 13 years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist. Iraq didn't have any
functional chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn't even possess any SCUD missiles,
despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon PR flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into
Kuwait.
This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps.
Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few
weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent
shape public perception."
During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized
opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the
Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no
one really wanted.
What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of
mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a
large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions,
Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the
troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter
for a national network trembled on camera that the U.S. Army functioned as "our protectors."
The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do "anything and
everything they can ask of us."
When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the
war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a
fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain
death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. Of course,
nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved to be as fictive and maudlin as any
made-for-TV-movie. But the ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than a
week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled campaign that was beginning to
look at lot riskier than the American public had been hoodwinked into believing.
The Lynch story was fed to the eager press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the
Army network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends 800 photos and 25 video
clips a day to the media. The editors at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present
the Pentagon's montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images as collateral damage, cluster
bombs, dead children and U.S. soldiers, napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.
"A lot of our imagery will have a big impact on world opinion," predicted Lt. Jane Larogue,
director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the hot war turned into an even hotter
occupation, the Pentagon, despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about
installing democratic institutions such as a free press, moved to tighten its monopoly on the
flow images out of Iraq. First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel. Then
the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign TV news crews banished from
Baghdad.
Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction as sedulously as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war, the
Post's pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by a 3-to-1 margin.
Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass
destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington
Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of
war."
The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly
attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam.
Anything to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald Rumsfeld himself
was sent as President Ronald Reagan's personal envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold
message than an Iraq defeat would be viewed as a "strategic setback for the United States."
This sleazy alliance was sealed with a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie
McIntyre replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the secretary of defense
snapped, "Where'd you get that? Iraqi television?"
The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura
Mylroie, sometime colleague of the New York Times' Judy Miller, who persists in peddling the
ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
How times have changed! In 1987, Mylroie felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She wrote an
article for the New Republic titled "Back Iraq: Time for a U.S. Tilt in the Mideast," arguing
that the U.S. should publicly embrace Saddam's secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic
fundamentalists in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was none other than
Daniel Pipes, perhaps the nation's most bellicose Islamophobe. "The American weapons that Iraq
could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and
counterartillery radar," wrote Mylroie and Pipes. "The United States might also consider
upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad."
In the rollout for the war, Mylroie seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq.
She would often appear on two or three different networks in the same day. How did the reporter
manage this feat? She had help in the form of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs
Benador Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist into a lucrative
career as media relations whiz for the Washington foreign policy elite. She also oversees the
Middle East Forum, a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include some of the
nation's most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot,
Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador's assignment was to
embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national media, on talk shows, and op-ed
pages.
Benador not only got them the gigs, she also crafted the theme and made sure they all stayed
on message. "There are some things, you just have to state them in a different way, in a
slightly different way," said Benador. "If not, people get scared." Scared of intentions of
their own government.
It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration's gossamer case
for war were right there for the mainstream press to expose. Instead, the U.S. press, just like
the oil companies, sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They
didn't want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.
Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk
show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a
running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired
generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network's executives
blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue's show attracted
more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike
on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the
memo said, offered "a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in
presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's
motives."
The memo warned that Donahue's show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home
for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every
opportunity." So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot
and hoisted the battle flag.
It's war that sells.
There's a helluva caveat, of course. Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no
returns.
In any case withdrawal from Syria was a surprising and bold move on the Part of the Trump. You can criticizes Trump for not doing
more but before that he bahvaves as a typical neocon, or a typical Republican presidents (which are the same things). And he started
on this path just two month after inauguration bombing Syria under false pretences. So this is something
I think the reason of change is that Trump intuitively realized the voters are abandoning him in droves and the sizable faction
of his voters who voted for him because of his promises to end foreign wars iether already defected or is ready to defect. So this is
a move designed to keep them.
Notable quotes:
"... "America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said. ..."
President Trump's big announcement to pull US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan is now emerging less as a peace move, and more
a rationalization of American military power in the Middle East. In a surprise visit to US forces in Iraq this week, Trump
said he had no intention of withdrawing the troops in that country, who have been there for nearly 15 years since GW Bush invaded
back in 2003.
Hinting at private discussions with commanders in Iraq, Trump boasted that US forces would in the future launch attacks from there
into Syria if and when needed. Presumably that rapid force deployment would apply to other countries in the region, including Afghanistan.
In other words, in typical business-style transactional thinking, Trump sees the pullout from Syria and Afghanistan as a cost-cutting
exercise for US imperialism. Regarding Syria, he has bragged about Turkey being assigned, purportedly, to "finish off" terror
groups. That's Trump subcontracting out US interests.
Critics and supporters of Trump are confounded. After his Syria and Afghanistan pullout call, domestic critics and NATO allies
have accused him of walking from the alleged "fight against terrorism" and of ceding strategic ground to US adversaries Russia
and Iran.
Meanwhile, Trump's supporters have viewed his decision in more benign light, cheering the president for "sticking it to"
the deep state and military establishment, assuming he's delivering on electoral promises to end overseas wars.
However, neither view gets what is going on. Trump is not scaling back US military power; he is rationalizing it like a cost-benefit
analysis, as perhaps only a real-estate-wheeler-dealer-turned president would appreciate. Trump is not snubbing US militarism or
NATO allies, nor is he letting loose an inner peace spirit. He is as committed to projecting American military as ruthlessly and
as recklessly as any other past occupant of the White House. The difference is Trump wants to do it on the cheap.
Here's what he said to reporters on Air Force One before touching down in Iraq:
"The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world. It's not fair when the burden is all on us, the United
States We are spread out all over the world. We are in countries most people haven't even heard about. Frankly, it's ridiculous."
He added: "We're no longer the suckers, folks."
Laughably, Trump's griping about US forces "spread all over the world" unwittingly demonstrates the insatiable, monstrous
nature of American militarism. But Trump paints this vice as a virtue, which, he complains, Washington gets no thanks for from the
150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in.
As US troops greeted him in Iraq, the president made explicit how the new American militarism would henceforth operate.
"America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want
us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said.
This reiterates a big bugbear for this president in which he views US allies and client regimes as "not pulling their weight"
in terms of military deployment. Trump has been browbeating European NATO members to cough up more on military budgets, and he has
berated the Saudis
and other Gulf Arab regimes to pay more for American interventions.
Notably, however, Trump has never questioned the largesse that US taxpayers fork out every year to Israel in the form of nearly
$4 billion in military aid. To be sure, that money is not a gift because much of it goes back to the Pentagon from sales of fighter
jets and missile systems.
The long-held notion that the US has served as the "world's policeman" is, of course, a travesty.
Since WWII, all presidents and the Washington establishment have constantly harped on, with self-righteousness, about America's
mythical role as guarantor of global security.
Dozens of illegal wars on almost every continent and millions of civilian deaths attest to the real, heinous conduct of American
militarism as a weapon to secure US corporate capitalism.
But with US economic power in historic decline amid a national debt now over $22 trillion, Washington can no longer afford its
imperialist conduct in the traditional mode of direct US military invasions and occupations.
Perhaps, it takes a cost-cutting, raw-toothed capitalist like Trump to best understand the historic predicament, even if only
superficially.
This gives away the real calculation behind his troop pullout from Syria and Afghanistan. Iraq is going to serve as a new regional
hub for force projection on a demand-and-supply basis. In addition, more of the dirty work can be contracted out to Washington's
clients like Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia, who will be buying even more US weaponry to prop the military-industrial complex.
This would explain why Trump made his hurried, unexpected visit to Iraq this week. Significantly, he
said
: "A lot of people are going to come around to my way of thinking", regarding his decision on withdrawing forces from Syria
and Afghanistan.
Since his troop pullout plan announced on December 19, there has been serious pushback from senior Pentagon figures, hawkish Republicans
and Democrats, and the anti-Trump media. The atmosphere is almost seditious against the president. Trump flying off to Iraq on Christmas
night was
reportedly his first visit to troops in an overseas combat zone since becoming president two years ago.
What Trump seemed to be doing was reassuring the Pentagon and corporate America that he is not going all soft and dovish. Not
at all. He is letting them know that he is aiming for a leaner, meaner US military power, which can save money on the number of foreign
bases by using rapid reaction forces out of places like Iraq, as well as by subcontracting operations out to regional clients.
Thus, Trump is not coming clean out of any supposed principle when he cuts back US forces overseas. He is merely applying his
knack for screwing down costs and doing things on the cheap as a capitalist tycoon overseeing US militarism.
During past decades when American capitalism was relatively robust, US politicians and media could indulge in the fantasy of their
military forces going around the world in large-scale formations to selflessly "defend freedom and democracy."
Today, US capitalism is broke. It simply can't sustain its global military empire. Enter Donald Trump with his "business solutions."
But in doing so, this president, with his cheap utilitarianism and transactional exploitative mindset, lets the cat out of the
bag. As he says, the US cannot be the world's policeman. Countries are henceforth going to have to pay for "our protection."
Inadvertently, Trump is showing up US power for what it really is: a global thug running a protection racket.
It's always been the case. Except now it's in your face. Trump is no Smedley Butler, the former Marine general who in the 1930s
condemned US militarism as a Mafia operation. This president is stupidly revealing the racket, while still thinking it is something
virtuous.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages.
Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor
for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked
as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist
based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
dnm1136
Once again, Cunningham has hit the nail on the head. Trump mistakenly conflates fear with respect. In reality, around the world,
the US is feared but generally not respected.
My guess is that the same was true about Trump as a businessman, i.e., he was not respected, only feared due to his willingness
to pursue his "deals" by any means that "worked" for him, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, seemingly gracious or mean-spirited.
William Smith
Complaining how the US gets no thanks for its foreign intervention. Kind of like a rapist claiming he should be thanked for
"pleasuring" his victim. Precisely the same sentiment expressed by those who believe the American Indians should thank the Whites
for "civilising" them.
Phoebe S,
"Washington gets no thanks for from the 150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in."
That might mean they don't want you there. Just saying.
ProRussiaPole
None of these wars are working out for the US strategically. All they do is sow chaos. They seem to not be gaining anything,
and are just preventing others from gaining anything as well.
Ernie For -> ProRussiaPole
i am a huge Putin fan, so is big Don. Please change your source of info Jerome, Trump is one man against Billions of people
and dollars in corruption. He has achieved more in the USA in 2 years than all 5 previous parasites together.
Truthbetold69
It could be a change for a better direction. Time will tell. 'If you do what you've always been doing, you'll get what you've
always been getting.'
On January 8, 2018, former government advisor Edward Luttwak wrote an opinion piece for
Foreign Policy titled "It's Time to Bomb North Korea."
Luttwak's thesis is relatively straightforward. There is a government out there that may
very soon acquire nuclear-weapons capabilities, and this country cannot be trusted to
responsibly handle such a stockpile. The responsibility to protect the world from a rogue
nation cannot be argued with, and we understandably have a duty to ensure the future of
humanity.
However, there is one rogue nation that continues to hold the world ransom with its nuclear
weapons supply. It is decimating non-compliant states left, right, and center. This country
must be stopped dead in its tracks before anyone turns to the issue of North Korea.
In August of 1945, this rogue nation dropped two atomic bombs on civilian targets, not
military targets, completely obliterating between 135,000 and
300,000 Japanese civilians in just these two acts alone. Prior to this event, this country
killed even more civilians in the infamous
firebombing of Tokyo and other areas of Japan, dropping close to 500,000 cylinders of
napalm and petroleum jelly on some of Japan's most densely populated areas.
Recently, historians have become more open to the possibility that dropping the atomic bombs
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not actually necessary to end World War II. This has also been
confirmed by those who actually took part in it. As the Nation
explained:
Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public
address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that 'the atomic bomb played
no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan ' Adm. William
"Bull" Halsey Jr., Commander of the US Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946 that 'the first
atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment . It was a mistake to ever drop it . [the
scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it
A few months' prior, this rogue country's
invasion of the Japanese island of Okinawa also claimed at least one quarter of Okinawa's
population. The Okinawan people have been protesting this country's military presence ever
since. The most recent ongoing protest
has lasted well over 5,000 days in a row.
This nation's bloodlust continued well after the end of World War II. Barely half a decade
later, this country bombed North Korea into complete oblivion, destroying over 8,700 factories,
5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals, 600,000 homes, and
eventually killing off as much as 20 percent of the country's population. As the Asia
Pacific Journal has noted, the assaulting country dropped so many bombs that they eventually
ran out of targets to hit, turning to bomb the irrigation systems, instead:
By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every
significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the
spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the
North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to
the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating
whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans."
This was just the beginning. Having successfully destroyed the future North Korean
state, this country moved on to the rest of East Asia and Indo-China, too. As Rolling Stone's
Matt Taibbi
has explained :
We [this loose cannon of a nation] dumped 20 million gallons of toxic herbicide on Vietnam
from the air, just to make the shooting easier without all those trees, an insane plan to win
'hearts and minds' that has left about a million still disabled from defects and disease
– including about 100,000 children, even decades later, little kids with misshapen
heads, webbed hands and fused eyelids writhing on cots, our real American legacy, well out of
view, of course.
This mass murder led to the deaths of between 1.5 million and 3.8 million people,
according to the Washington Post. More bombs were dropped on Vietnam than were unleashed
during the entire
conflict in World War II . While this was going on, this same country was also
secretly bombing Laos and Cambodia, too, where there are over 80 million
unexploded bombs still killing people to this day.
This country also decided to bomb Yugoslavia ,
Panama
, and
Grenada before invading Iraq in the early 1990s. Having successfully bombed Iraqi
infrastructure, this country then punished Iraq's entire civilian population with brutal
sanctions. At the time, the U.N.
estimated that approximately 1.7 million Iraqis had died as a result, including
500,000 to 600,000 children . Some years later, a prominent medical journal attempted
to absolve the cause of this infamous history by refuting the statistics involved despite
the fact that, when interviewed during the sanctions-era, Bill Clinton's secretary of state,
Madeleine Albright, intimated that to this rogue government, the
deaths of half a million children were "worth it" as the "price" Iraq needed to pay. In other
words, whether half a million children died or not was irrelevant to this bloodthirsty nation,
which barely blinked while carrying out this murderous policy.
This almighty superpower then invaded Iraq again in 2003 and plunged the entire region
into chaos . At the end of May 2017, the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR)
released a study
concluding that the death toll from this violent nation's 2003 invasion of Iraq had led to over
one million deaths and that at least one-third of them were caused directly by the invading
force.
Not to mention this country also invaded Afghanistan prior to the invasion of Iraq (even
though the militants plaguing Afghanistan were
originally trained and financed by this warmongering nation). It then
went on to bomb Yemen, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and the
Philippines .
Libya famously
had one of the highest standards of living in the region. It had state-assisted healthcare,
education, transport, and affordable housing. It is now a lawless war-zone
rife with extremism where slaves are openly traded like commodities
amid the power vacuum created as a direct result of the 2011 invasion.
In 2017, the commander-in-chief of this violent nation took the monumental death and
destruction to a new a level by removing
the restrictions on delivering airstrikes, which resulted in thousands upon
thousands of civilian deaths. Before that, in the first six months of 2017, this country
dropped
over 20,650 bombs , a monumental increase from the year that preceded it.
Despite these statistics, all of the above conquests are mere child's play to this nation.
The real prize lies in some of the more defiant and more powerful states, which this country
has already unleashed a containment strategy upon. This country has deployed its own troops all
across the border
with Russia even though it promised in the early 1990s it
would do no such thing. It also has a specific policy of
containing Russia's close ally, China, all the while threatening China's borders with talks
of direct strikes on North Korea (again, remember it already did so in the 1950s).
This country also elected a president who not only believes it is okay to embrace this rampantly violent
militarism but who openly calls other
countries "shitholes" – the very same term that aptly describes the way this country
has treated the rest of the world for decades on end. This same president also reportedly once
asked three times in a meeting
, "If we have nuclear weapons, why don't we use them?" and shortly after proposed a policy to
remove the constraints protecting the world from his dangerous supply of advanced nuclear
weaponry.
If we have any empathy for humanity, it is clear that this country must be stopped. It
cannot continue to act like this to the detriment of the rest of the planet and the safety and
security of the rest of us. This country
openly talks about using its nuclear weapons, has used them before, and has continued to
use all manner of weapons unabated in the years since while threatening to expand the use of
these weapons to other countries.
Seriously, if North Korea seems like a threat, imagine how the rest of the world feels while
watching one country violently take on the rest of the planet single-handedly, leaving nothing
but destruction in its wake and promising nothing less than a nuclear holocaust in the years to
come.
There is only one country that has done and that continues to do the very things North Korea
is being accused of doing.
Take as much time as you need for that to resonate.
"... Now consider the notion of "anti-Semitism." Google searches for that word and its close variants reveal over 24 million hits, and over the years I'm sure I've seen that term tens of thousands of times in my books and newspapers, and heard it endlessly reported in my electronic media and entertainment. But thinking it over, I'm not sure that I can ever recall a single real-life instance I've personally encountered, nor have I heard of almost any such cases from my friends or acquaintances. Indeed, the only persons I've ever come across making such claims were individuals who bore unmistakable signs of serious psychological imbalance. When the daily newspapers are brimming with lurid tales of hideous demons walking among us and attacking people on every street corner, but you yourself have never actually seen one, you may gradually grow suspicious. ..."
"... It has also become apparent that a considerable fraction of what passes for "anti-Semitism" these days seems to stretch that term beyond all recognition. A few weeks ago an unknown 28-year-old Democratic Socialist named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scored a stunning upset primary victory over a top House Democrat in New York City, and naturally received a blizzard of media coverage as a result. However, when it came out that she had denounced the Israeli government for its recent massacre of over 140 unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, cries of "anti-Semite" soon appeared, and according to Google there are now over 180,000 such hits combining her name and that harsh accusatory term. Similarly, just a few days ago the New York Times ran a major story reporting that all of Britain's Jewish newspapers had issued an "unprecedented" denunciation of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, describing it as an "existential threat" to the Jewish community for the anti-Semitism it was fostering; but this apparently amounted to nothing more than its willingness to sharply criticize the Israeli government for its long mistreatment of the Palestinians. ..."
I recently published a couple of long essays, and although they primarily focused on other
matters, the subject of anti-Semitism was a strong secondary theme. In that regard, I mentioned
my shock at discovering a dozen or more years ago that several of the most self-evidently
absurd elements of anti-Semitic lunacy, which I had always dismissed without consideration,
were probably correct. It does seem likely that a significant number of traditionally-religious
Jews did indeed occasionally commit the ritual murder of
Christian children in order to use their blood in certain religious ceremonies, and also
that powerful Jewish international bankers did play a large
role in financing the establishment of Bolshevik Russia .
When one discovers that matters of such enormous moment not only apparently occurred but
that they had been successfully excluded from nearly all of our histories and media coverage
for most of the last one hundred years, the implications take some time to properly digest. If
the most extreme "anti-Semitic canards" were probably true, then surely the whole notion of
anti-Semitism warrants a careful reexamination.
All of us obtain our knowledge of the world by two different channels. Some things we
discover from our own personal experiences and the direct evidence of our senses, but most
information comes to us via external sources such as books and the media, and a crisis may
develop when we discover that these two pathways are in sharp conflict. The official media of
the old USSR used to endlessly trumpet the tremendous achievements of its collectivized
agricultural system, but when citizens noticed that there was never any meat in their shops,
"Pravda" became a watchword for "Lies" rather than "Truth."
Now consider the notion of "anti-Semitism." Google searches for that word and its close
variants reveal over 24 million hits, and over the years I'm sure I've seen that term tens of
thousands of times in my books and newspapers, and heard it endlessly reported in my electronic
media and entertainment. But thinking it over, I'm not sure that I can ever recall a single
real-life instance I've personally encountered, nor have I heard of almost any such cases from
my friends or acquaintances. Indeed, the only persons I've ever come across making such claims
were individuals who bore unmistakable signs of serious psychological imbalance. When the daily
newspapers are brimming with lurid tales of hideous demons walking among us and attacking
people on every street corner, but you yourself have never actually seen one, you may gradually
grow suspicious.
Indeed, over the years some of my own research has uncovered a sharp contrast between image
and reality. As recently as the late 1990s, leading mainstream media outlets such as The
New York Times were still denouncing a top Ivy League
school such as Princeton for the supposed anti-Semitism of its college admissions policy,
but a few years ago when I carefully investigated that issue in quantitative terms for my
lengthy Meritocracy
analysis I was very surprised to reach a polar-opposite conclusion. According to the best
available evidence, white Gentiles were over 90% less likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the
other Ivies than were Jews of similar academic performance, a truly remarkable finding. If the
situation had been reversed and Jews were 90% less likely to be found at Harvard than seemed
warranted by their test scores, surely that fact would be endlessly cited as the absolute
smoking-gun proof of horrendous anti-Semitism in present-day America.
It has also become apparent that a considerable fraction of what passes for "anti-Semitism"
these days seems to stretch that term beyond all recognition. A few weeks ago an unknown
28-year-old Democratic Socialist named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scored a stunning upset primary
victory over a top House Democrat in New York City, and naturally received a blizzard of media
coverage as a result. However, when it came out that she had denounced the Israeli government
for its recent massacre of over 140 unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, cries of
"anti-Semite" soon appeared, and according to Google there are now over 180,000 such hits
combining her name and that harsh accusatory term. Similarly, just a few days ago the New
York Times ran a
major story reporting that all of Britain's Jewish newspapers had issued an "unprecedented"
denunciation of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, describing it as an "existential threat" to the
Jewish community for the anti-Semitism it was fostering; but this apparently amounted to
nothing more than its willingness to sharply criticize the Israeli government for its long
mistreatment of the Palestinians.
One plausible explanation of the strange contrast between media coverage and reality might
be that anti-Semitism once did loom very large in real life, but dissipated many decades ago,
while the organizations and activists focused on detecting and combating that pernicious
problem have remained in place, generating public attention based on smaller and smaller
issues, with the zealous Jewish activists of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) representing a
perfect example of this situation. As an even more striking illustration, the Second World War
ended over seventy years ago, but what historian Norman Finkelstein has so aptly labeled "the
Holocaust Industry" has grown ever larger and more entrenched in our academic and media worlds
so that scarcely a day passes without one or more articles relating to that topic appearing in
my major morning newspapers. Given this situation, a serious exploration of the true nature of
anti-Semitism should probably avoid the mere media phantoms of today and focus on the past,
when the condition might still have been widespread in daily life.
Many observers have pointed to the aftermath of the Second World War as marking a huge
watershed in the public acceptability of anti-Semitism both in America and Europe, so perhaps a
proper appraisal of that cultural phenomenon should focus on the years before that global
conflict. However, the overwhelming role of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and other bloody
Communist seizures of power quite naturally made them objects of considerable fear and hatred
throughout the inter-war years, so the safest course might be to push that boundary back a
little further and confine our attention to the period prior to the outbreak of the First World
War. The pogroms in Czarist Russia, the Dreyfus Affair in France, and the lynching of Leo Frank
in the American South come to mind as some of the most famous examples from that period.
Lindemann's discussion of the often difficult relations between Russia's restive Jewish
minority and its huge Slavic majority is also quite interesting, and he provides numerous
instances in which major incidents, supposedly demonstrating the enormously strong appeal of
vicious anti-Semitism, were quite different than has been suggested by the legend. The famous
Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 was obviously the result of severe ethnic tension in that city, but
contrary to the regular accusations of later writers, there seems absolutely no evidence of
high-level government involvement, and the widespread claims of 700 dead that so horrified the
entire world were grossly exaggerated, with only 45 killed in the urban rioting. Chaim
Weizmann, the future president of Israel, later promoted the story that he himself and some
other brave Jewish souls had personally defended their people with revolvers in hand even as
they saw the mutilated bodies of 80 Jewish victims. This account was totally fictional since
Weizmann happened to have been be hundreds of miles away when the riots occurred.
Although a tendency to lie and exaggerate was hardly unique to the political partisans of
Russian Jewry, the existence of a powerful international network of Jewish journalists and
Jewish-influenced media outlets ensured that such concocted propaganda stories might receive
enormous worldwide distribution, while the truth followed far behind, if at all.
For related reasons, international outrage was often focused on the legal confinement of
most of Russia's Jews to the "Pale of Settlement," suggesting some sort of tight imprisonment;
but that area was the traditional home of the Jewish population and encompassed a landmass
almost as large as France and Spain combined. The growing impoverishment of Eastern European
Jews during that era was often assumed to be a consequence of hostile government policy, but
the obvious explanation was extraordinary Jewish fecundity, which far outstripped that of their
Slavic fellow countrymen, and quickly led them to outgrow the available spots in any of their
traditional "middleman" occupations, a situation worsened by their total disinclination to
engage in agriculture or other primary-producer activities. Jewish communities expressed horror
at the risk of losing their sons to the Czarist military draft, but this was simply the
flip-side of the full Russian citizenship they had been granted, and no different from what was
faced by their non-Jewish neighbors.
Certainly the Jews of Russia suffered greatly from widespread riots and mob attacks in the
generation prior to World War I, and these did sometimes have substantial government
encouragement, especially in the aftermath of the very heavy Jewish role in the 1905
Revolution. But we should keep in mind that a Jewish plotter had been implicated in the killing
of Czar Alexander II, and Jewish assassins had also struck down several top Russian ministers
and numerous other government officials. If the last decade or two had seen American Muslims
assassinate a sitting U.S. President, various leading Cabinet members, and a host of our other
elected and appointed officials, surely the position of Muslims in this country would have
become a very uncomfortable one.
As Lindemann candidly describes the tension between Russia's very rapidly growing Jewish
population and its governing authorities, he cannot avoid mentioning the notorious Jewish
reputation for bribery, corruption, and general dishonesty, with numerous figures of all
political backgrounds noting that the remarkable Jewish propensity to commit perjury in the
courtroom led to severe problems in the effective administration of justice. The eminent
American sociologist E.A. Ross, writing in 1913, characterized
the regular behavior of Eastern European Jews in very similar terms .
Lindemann also allocates a short chapter to discussing the 1911 Beilis Affair, in which a
Ukrainian Jew was accused of the ritual murder of a young Gentile boy, an incident that
generated a great deal of international attention and controversy. Based on the evidence
presented, the defendant seems likely to have been innocent, although the obvious lies he
repeatedly told police interrogators hardly helped foster that impression, and "the system
worked" in that he was ultimately found innocent by the jurors at his trial. However, a few
pages are also given to a much less well-known ritual murder case in late 19th century Hungary,
in which the evidence of Jewish guilt seemed far stronger, though the author hardly accepted
the possible reality of such an outlandish crime. Such reticence was quite understandable since
the publication of Ariel Toaff's remarkable volume
on the subject was still a dozen years in the future.
Lindemann subsequently expanded his examination of historical anti-Semitism into a much
broader treatment, Esau's Tears , which appeared in 1997. In this volume, he added
comparative studies of the social landscape in Germany, Britain, Italy, and several other
European countries, and demonstrated that the relationship between Jews and non-Jews varied
greatly across different locations and time periods. But although I found his analysis quite
useful and interesting, the extraordinarily harsh attacks his text provoked from some outraged
Jewish academics seemed even more intriguing.
For example, Judith Laikin Elkin opened her discussion in The American Historical
Review by describing the book as a "545-page polemic" a strange characterization of a book
so remarkably even-handed and factually-based in its scholarship. Writing in
Commentary , Robert Wistrich was even harsher, stating that merely reading the book
had been a painful experience for him, and his review seemed filled with spittle-flecked rage.
Unless these individuals had somehow gotten copies of a different book, I found their attitudes
simply astonishing.
I was not alone in such a reaction. Richard S. Levy of the University of Illinois, a noted
scholar of anti-Semitism, expressed amazement at Wistrich's seemingly irrational outburst,
while Paul Gottfried, writing in Chronicles , mildly suggested that Lindemann had
"touched raw nerves." Indeed, Gottfried's own evaluation quite reasonably criticized Lindemann
for perhaps being a little too even-handed, sometimes presenting numerous conflicting analyzes
without choosing between them. For those interested, a good discussion of the book by Alan
Steinweis, a younger scholar specializing in the same topic,
is conveniently available online .
The remarkable ferocity with which some Jewish writers attacked Lindemann's meticulous
attempt to provide an accurate history of anti-Semitism may carry more significance than merely
an exchange of angry words in low-circulation academic publications. If our mainstream media
shapes our reality, scholarly books and articles based upon them tend to set the contours of
that media coverage. And the ability of a relatively small number of agitated and energetic
Jews to police the acceptable boundaries of historical narratives may have enormous
consequences for our larger society, deterring scholars from objectively reporting historical
facts and preventing students from discovering them.
The undeniable truth is that for many centuries Jews usually constituted a wealthy and
privileged segment of the population in nearly all the European countries in which they
resided, and quite frequently they based their livelihood upon the heavy exploitation of a
downtrodden peasantry. Even without any differences in ethnicity, language, or religion, such
conditions almost invariably provoke hostility. The victory of Mao's Communist forces in China
was quickly followed by the brutal massacre of a million or more Han Chinese landlords by the
Han Chinese poor peasants who regarded them as cruel oppressors, with William Hinton's classic
Fanshen describing the unfortunate history that unfolded in one particular village.
When similar circumstances led to violent clashes in Eastern Europe between Slavs and Jews,
does it really make logical sense to employ a specialized term such as "anti-Semitism" to
describe that situation?
Furthermore, some of the material presented in Lindemann's rather innocuous text might also
lead to potentially threatening ideas. Consider, for example, the notorious Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion , almost certainly fictional, but hugely popular and
influential during the years following World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. The fall of so
many longstanding Gentile dynasties and their replacement by new regimes such as Soviet Russia
and Weimar Germany, which were heavily dominated by their tiny Jewish minorities, quite
naturally fed suspicions of a worldwide Jewish plot, as did the widely discussed role of Jewish
international bankers in producing those political outcomes.
Over the decades, there has been much speculation about the possible inspiration for the
Protocols , but although Lindemann makes absolutely no reference to that document, he
does provide a very intriguing possible candidate. Jewish-born British Prime Minister Benjamin
Disraeli certainly ranked as one of the most influential figures of the late 19th century, and
in his novel Coningsby , he has the character representing Lord Lionel Rothschild
boast about the existence of a vast and
secret network of powerful international Jews , who stand near the head of almost every
major nation, quietly controlling their governments from behind the scenes. If one of the
world's most politically well-connected Jews eagerly promoted such notions, was Henry Ford
really so unreasonable in doing the same?
Lindemann also notes Disraeli's focus on the extreme importance of race and racial origins,
a central aspect of traditional Jewish religious doctrine. He reasonably suggests that this
must surely have had a huge influence upon the rise of those political ideas, given that
Disraeli's public profile and stature were so much greater than the mere writers or activists
whom our history books usually place at center stage. In fact, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a
leading racial theorist, actually cited Disraeli as a key source for his ideas. Jewish
intellectuals such as Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso are already widely recognized as leading
figures in the rise of the racial science of that era, but Disraeli's under-appreciated role
may have actually been far greater. The deep Jewish roots of European racialist movements are
hardly something that many present-day Jews would want widely known.
One of the harsh Jewish critics of Esau's Tears denounced Cambridge University
Press for even allowing the book to appear in print, and although that major work is easily
available in English, there are numerous other cases where an important but discordant version
of historical reality has been successfully blocked from publication. For decades most
Americans would have ranked Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn as among the world's greatest
literary figures, and his Gulag Archipelago alone sold over 10 million copies. But his
last work was a massive two-volume account of the tragic 200 years of shared history between
Russians and Jews, and despite its 2002 release in Russian and numerous other world languages,
there has yet to be an authorized English translation, though various partial editions have
circulated on the Internet in samizdat form.
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At one point, a full English version was briefly available for sale at Amazon.com and I
purchased it. Glancing through a few sections, the work seemed quite even-handed and innocuous
to me, but it seemed to provide a far more detailed and uncensored account than anything else
previously available, which obviously was the problem. The Bolshevik Revolution resulted in the
deaths of many tens of millions of people worldwide, and the overwhelming Jewish role in its
leadership would become more difficult to erase from historical memory if Solzhenitsyn's work
were easily available. Also, his candid discussion of the economic and political behavior of
Russian Jewry in pre-revolutionary times directly conflicted with the hagiography widely
promoted by Hollywood and the popular media. Historian Yuri Slezkine's award-winning 2004 book
The Jewish Century provided many similar facts, but his treatment was far more cursory
and his public stature not remotely the same.
Near the end of his life, Solzhenitsyn gave his political blessing to Russian President
Vladimir Putin, and Russia's leaders honored him upon his death, while his Gulag
volumes are now enshrined as mandatory reading in the standard high school curriculum of
today's overwhelmingly Christian Russia. But even as his star rose again in his own homeland,
it seems to have sharply fallen in our own country, and his trajectory may eventually relegate
him to nearly un-person status.
A couple of years after the release of Solzhenitsyn's controversial final book, an American
writer named Anne Applebaum published a thick history bearing the same title Gulag ,
and her work received enormously favorable media coverage and won her a Pulitzer Prize; I have
even heard claims that her book has been steadily replacing that earlier Gulag on many
college reading lists. But although Jews constituted a huge fraction of the top leadership of
the Soviet Gulag system during its early decades, as well as that of the dreaded NKVD which
supplied the inmates, nearly her entire focus on her own ethnic group during Soviet times is
that of victims rather than victimizers. And by a remarkable irony of fate, she shares a last
name with one of the top Bolshevik leaders, Hirsch Apfelbaum, who concealed his own ethnic
identity by calling himself Grigory Zinoviev.
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The striking decline in Solzhenitsyn's literary status in the West came just a decade or two
after an even more
precipitous collapse in the reputation of David Irving , and for much the same reason.
Irving probably ranked as the most internationally successful British historian of the last one
hundred years and a renowned scholar of World War II, but his extensive reliance on primary
source documentary evidence posed an obvious threat to the official narrative promoted by
Hollywood and wartime propaganda. When he published his magisterial Hitler's War ,
this conflict between myth and reality came into the open, and an enormous wave of attacks and
vilification was unleashed, gradually leading to his purge from respectability and eventually
even his imprisonment.
These important examples may help to explain the puzzling contrast between the behavior of
Jews in the aggregate and Jews as individuals. Observers have noticed that even fairly small
Jewish minorities may often have a major impact upon the far larger societies that host them.
But on the other hand, in my experience at least, a large majority of individual Jews do not
seem all that different in their personalities or behavior than their non-Jewish counterparts.
So how does a community whose individual mean is not so unusual generate what seems to be such
a striking difference in collective behavior? I think the answer may involve the existence of
information choke-points, and the ability of relatively small numbers of particularly zealous
and agitated Jews in influencing and controlling these.
We live our lives constantly immersed in media narratives, and these allow us to decide the
rights and wrongs of a situation. The vast majority of people, Jew and Gentile alike, are far
more likely to take strong action if they are convinced that their cause is a just one. This is
obviously the basis for war-time propaganda.
Now suppose that a relatively small number of zealous Jewish partisans are known to always
attack and denounce journalists or authors who accurately describe Jewish misbehavior. Over
time, this ongoing campaign of intimidation may cause many important facts to be left on the
cutting-room floor, or even gradually expel from mainstream respectability those writers who
refuse to conform to such pressures. Meanwhile, similar small numbers of Jewish partisans
frequently exaggerate the misdeeds committed against Jews, sometimes piling their exaggerations
upon past exaggerations already produced by a previous round of such zealots.
Eventually, these two combined trends may take a complex and possibly very mixed historical
record and transform it into a simple morality-play, with innocent Jews tremendously injured by
vicious Jew-haters. And as this morality-play becomes established it deepens the subsequent
intensity of other Jewish-activists, who redouble their demands that the media "stop vilifying
Jews" and covering up the supposed evils inflicted upon them. An unfortunate circle of
distortion following exaggeration following distortion can eventually produce a widely accepted
historical account that bears little resemblance to the reality of what actually happened.
So as a result, the vast majority of quite ordinary Jews, who would normally behave in quite
ordinary ways, are misled by this largely fictional history, and rather understandably become
greatly outraged at all the horrible things that had been done to their suffering people, some
of which are true and some of which are not, while remaining completely ignorant of the other
side of the ledger.
Furthermore, this situation is exacerbated by the common tendency of Jews to "cluster"
together, perhaps respresenting just one or two percent of the total population, but often
constituting 20% or 40% or 60% of their immediate peer-group, especially in certain
professions. Under such conditions, the ideas or emotional agitation of some Jews probably
permeates others around them, often provoking additional waves of indignation.
As a rough analogy, a small quantity of uranium is relatively inert and harmless, and
entirely so if distributed within low-density ore. But if a significant quantity of
weapons-grade uranium is sufficiently compressed, then the neutrons released by fissioning
atoms will quickly cause additional atoms to undergo fission, with the ultimate result of that
critical chain-reaction being a nuclear explosion. In similar fashion, even a highly agitated
Jew may have no negative impact, but if the collection of such agitated Jews becomes too
numerous and clusters together too closely, they may work each other into a terrible frenzy,
perhaps with disastrous consequences both for themselves and for their larger society. This is
especially true if those agitated Jews begin to dominate certain key nodes of top-level
control, such as the central political or media organs of a society.
Whereas most living organizations exist solely in physical reality, human beings also occupy
an ideational space, with the interaction of human consciousness and perceived reality playing
a major role in shaping behavior. Just as the pheromones released by mammals or insects can
drastically affect the reactions of their family members or nest-mates, the ideas secreted by
individuals or the media-emitters of a society can have an enormous impact upon their
fellows.
A cohesive, organized group generally possesses huge advantages over a teeming mass of
atomized individuals, just as a Macedonian Phalanx could easily defeat a vastly larger body of
disorganized infantry. Many years ago, on some website somewhere I came across a very
insightful comment regarding the obvious connection between "anti-Semitism" and "racism," which
our mainstream media organs identify as two of the world's greatest evils. Under this analysis,
"anti-Semitism" represents the tendency to criticize or resist Jewish social cohesion, while
"racism" represents the attempt of white Gentiles to maintain a similar social cohesion of
their own. To the extent that the ideological emanations from our centralized media organs
serve to strengthen and protect Jewish cohesion while attacking and dissolving any similar
cohesion on the part of their Gentile counterparts, the former will obviously gain enormous
advantages in resource-competition against the latter.
Religion obviously constitutes an important unifying factor in human social groups and we
cannot ignore the role of Judaism in this regard. Traditional Jewish
religious doctrine seems to consider Jews as being in a state of permanent hostility with all
non-Jews , and the use of dishonest propaganda is an almost inevitable aspect of such
conflict. Furthermore, since Jews have invariably been a small political minority, maintaining
such controversial tenets required the employment of a massive framework of subterfuge and
dissimulation in order to conceal their nature from the larger society surrounding them. It has
often been said that truth is the first casualty in war, and surely the cultural influences of
over a thousand years of such intense religious hostility may continue to quietly influence the
thinking of many modern Jews, even those who have largely abandoned their religious
beliefs.
The notorious Jewish tendency to shamelessly lie or wildly exaggerate has sometimes had
horrifying human consequences. I very recently discovered a fascinating passage in Peter
Moreira's 2014 book The Jew Who Defeated Hitler: Henry Morgenthau Jr., FDR, and How We Won the War ,
focused on the important political role of that powerful Secretary of the Treasury.
A turning point in Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s relationship with the Jewish community came in
November 1942, when Rabbi Stephen Wise came to the corner office to tell the secretary what
was happening in Europe. Morgenthau knew of the millions of deaths and the lampshades made
from victims' skin, and he asked Wise not to go into excessive details. But Wise went on to
tell of the barbarity of the Nazis, how they were making soap out of Jewish flesh.
Morgenthau, turning paler, implored him, "Please, Stephen, don't give me the gory details."
Wise went on with his list of horrors and Morgenthau repeated his plea over and over again.
Henrietta Klotz was afraid her boss would keel over. Morgenthau later said the meeting
changed his life.
Intelligence agencies, once created, has their own development dynamics and tend to escape from the control of
civilians and in turn control them. Such an interesting dynamics. In any case, the intelligence agencies and first of all top
brass of those agencies constitute the the core of the "deep state". Unlike civiliant emplorres they are protected by the veil of
secrecy and has access to large funds. Bush the elder was probably the first deep state creature who became the president of the
USA, but "special relationship" of Obama and Brennan is also not a secret.
Another problem is that secrecy and access to surveillance, Which gives intelligence agencies the ability to blackmail politicians.
Availability of unaccounted financial
resources make them real kingmakers. In a sense, as soon as such agencies were created the tail started waging the dog.
Notable quotes:
"... Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry Truman (1943-53) reportedly characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five decades – as the nation's top law enforcer? ..."
"... One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb. ..."
"... JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ. Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ into the White House. ..."
"... However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald – a cover-up that persists to this day. ..."
"... But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career. ..."
"... Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others ..."
No other individual in modern US history has a more sinister legacy than John Edgar Hoover,
the founder and lifetime director of the FBI. He founded the bureau in 1924 and was its
director until his death in 1972 at the age of 77.
Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned
into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry
Truman (1943-53) reportedly
characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five
decades – as the nation's top law enforcer?
J Edgar Hoover and his henchmen kept files on thousands of politicians, judges, journalists
and other public figures, according to
biographer Anthony Summers. Hoover ruthlessly used those files on the secret and often sordid
private lives of senior public figures to control their career conduct and official decisions
so as to serve his interests.
And Hoover's interests were of a rightwing, anti-communist, racist bigot.
Ironically, his own suppressed homosexuality also manifested in witch-hunts against
homosexuals in public life.
It was Hoover's secret files that largely informed the McCarthyite anti-communist
inquisitions of the 1950s, whose baleful legacy on American democracy, foreign policy and
freedom of expression continues to this day.
One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots
of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is
suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual
tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb.
Absurdly, the FBI chief maintained that there was "no such thing as the Mafia" in public
statements.
Two notorious cases of how FBI wiretapping worked under Hoover can be seen in the
presidencies of John F Kennedy (1961-63) and Richard Nixon (1969-74).
As recounted by Laurent Guyénot in his 2013 book , 'JFK to 9/11: 50
Years of Deep State', Hoover made a point of letting each new president know of compromising
information he had on them. It wouldn't be brandished overtly as blackmail; the president would
be briefed subtly, "Sir, if someone were to have copies of this it would be damaging to your
career". Enough said.
JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and
extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once
confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made
the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ.
Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ
into the White House.
However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly
anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy
pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt
led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample
evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep
State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald –
a cover-up that persists to this day.
As for Richard Nixon, it is believed that "Tricky Dicky" engaged in secret communications
with the US-backed South Vietnamese regime on the cusp of the presidential elections in 1968.
Nixon promised the South Vietnamese stronger military support if they held off entering peace
talks with communist North Vietnam, which incumbent President Johnson was trying to organize.
LBJ wanted to claim a peace process was underway in order to boost the election chances of his
vice president Hubert Humphrey.
Nixon's scheming prevailed. The Vietnam peace gambit was scuttled, the Vietnam war raged on,
and so the Democrat candidate lost. Nixon finally got into the White House, which he had long
coveted from the time he lost out to JFK back in 1960.
But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was
classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is
possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating
in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career.
These are but only two examples of how Deep State politics works in controlling and
subverting American democracy. The notion that lawmakers and presidents are free to serve the
people is a quaintly naive one. For the US media to pretend otherwise, and to hail the FBI as
some kind of benign bastion of justice, while also deprecating claims of "Deep State" intrusion
as "conspiracy theory", is either impossibly ignorant of history – or a sign of the
media's own compromised complicity.
Nonetheless, to blame this culture of institutionalized blackmail and corruption on one
individual – J Edgar Hoover – is not fair either.
Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not
alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not
just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the
Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others.
Once formed, the Deep State – as an alternate, unaccountable, unelected government
– does not surrender its immense power willingly. It has learnt to hold on to its power
through blackmail, media control, incitement of wars, and, even ultimately, assassination of
American dissenters.
The illegal tapping of private communications is an oxygen supply for the depredations of
the American Deep State.
Thinking that such agencies are not actively warping and working the electoral system to fix
the figurehead in the White House is a dangerous delusion.
So too are claims that American democracy is being "influenced" by malign Russian enemies,
as the US intelligence chiefs once again
chorused in front of the Senate this past week. The consummate irony of it!
The real "influence campaigns" corrupting American democracy are those of the "All-American"
agencies who claim to be law enforcers and defenders of national security.
US citizens would do well to refresh on the untold history of their country to appreciate
how they are being manipulated.
We might even surmise that a good number of citizens are already aware, if only vaguely, of
the elite corruption – and that is why Washington DC is viewed with increasing contempt
by the people.
You could help yourself by learning the real history ..I suggest the foremost historian on
the subject Thomas Thompson and his ' History of Arabia'. Jerusalem was not founded by Jews,
i.e. adherents of the Jewish religion. It was founded between 3000 BCE and 2600 BCE by a West
Semitic people or possibly the Canaanites, the common ancestors of Palestinians, Lebanese,
many Syrians and Jordanians, and many Jews. But when it was founded Jews did not
exist.
Jerusalem was founded in honor of the ancient god Shalem. It does not mean City of
Peace but rather 'built-up place of Shalem." The "Jewish people" were not building Jerusalem
3000 years ago, i.e. 1000 BCE. First of all, it is not clear when exactly Judaism as a
religion centered on the worship of the one God took firm form. It appears to have been a
late development since no evidence of worship of anything but ordinary Canaanite deities has
been found in archeological sites through 1000 BCE. There was no invasion of geographical
Palestine from Egypt by former slaves in the 1200s BCE. The pyramids had been built much
earlier and had not used slave labor. The chronicle of the events of the reign of Ramses II
on the wall in Luxor does not know about any major slave revolts or flights by same into the
Sinai peninsula. Egyptian sources never heard of Moses or the 10 plagues & etc. Jews and
Judaism emerged from a certain social class of Canaanites over a period of centuries inside
Palestine. Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent "Jewish
people" in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history.
Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates
for the united kingdom under David and Solomon. So Jerusalem was not 'the city of David,'
since there was no city when he is said to have lived. No sign of magnificent palaces or
great states has been found in the archeology of this period, and the Assyrian tablets, which
recorded even minor events throughout the Middle East, such as the actions of Arab queens,
don't know about any great kingdom of David and Solomon in geographical Palestine. Since
archeology does not show the existence of a Jewish kingdom or kingdoms in the so-called First
Temple Period, it is not clear when exactly the Jewish people would have ruled Jerusalem
except for the Hasmonean Kingdom. The Assyrians conquered Jerusalem in 722. The Babylonians
took it in 597 and ruled it until they were themselves conquered in 539 BCE by the
Achaemenids of ancient Iran, who ruled Jerusalem until Alexander the Great took the Levant in
the 330s BCE. Alexander's descendants, the Ptolemies ruled Jerusalem until 198 when
Alexander's other descendants, the Seleucids, took the city. With the Maccabean Revolt in 168
BCE, the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom did rule Jerusalem until 37 BCE, though Antigonus II
Mattathias, the last Hasmonean, only took over Jerusalem with the help of the Parthian
dynasty in 40 BCE. Herod ruled 37 BCE until the Romans conquered what they called Palestine
in 6 CE (CE= 'Common Era' or what Christians call AD). The Romans and then the Eastern Roman
Empire of Byzantium ruled Jerusalem from 6 CE until 614 CE when the Iranian Sasanian Empire
Conquered it, ruling until 629 CE when the Byzantines took it back.
A. The Muslims, who ruled it and built it over 1191 years.
B. The Egyptians, who ruled it as a vassal state for several hundred years in the second
millennium BCE.
C. The Italians, who ruled it about 444 years until the fall of the Roman Empire in 450
CE.
D. The Iranians, who ruled it for 205 years under the Achaemenids, for three years under the
Parthians (insofar as the last Hasmonean was actually their vassal), and for 15 years under
the Sasanids.
E. The Greeks, who ruled it for over 160 years if we count the Ptolemys and Seleucids as
Greek. If we count them as Egyptians and Syrians, that would increase the Egyptian claim and
introduce a Syrian one.
F. The successor states to the Byzantines, which could be either Greece or Turkey, who ruled
it 188 years, though if we consider the heir to be Greece and add in the time the Hellenistic
Greek dynasties ruled it, that would give Greece nearly 350 years as ruler of Jerusalem.
G. There is an Iraqi claim to Jerusalem based on the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, as
well as perhaps the rule of the Ayyubids (Saladin's dynasty), who were Kurds from Iraq.
I understand what you are saying, Jilles, but let's be accurate, shall we?
The Jews have ZERO right to "return" to Palestine one cannot go back to a place one never
left in the first place.
The story that the Romans expelled the Jews from Palestine 2000 years ago is FALSE.
See Israeli historian Shlomo Sand( the invention of the Jewish people).
At any rate, even had the story been true – and it is NOT – the notion of
modern Jews laying claim to the land 2000 years later is truly bizarre.
In short, today's Palestinians and their ancestors have been living continuously between
the River and the Sea for about 9,000 years."
Exactly.
In the preface of his book "Ten myths about Israel", Israeli historian Ilan Pappe,
writes:
Were the Jews indeed the original inhabitants of Palestine who deserved to be
supported in every way possible in their "return" to their "homeland"? The myth insists
that the Jews who arrived in 1882 were the descendants of the Jews expelled by the Romans
around 70 CE. The counterargument questions this genealogical connection. Quite a hefty
scholarly effort has shown that the Jews of Roman Palestine remained on the land and were
first converted to Christianity and then to Islam. Who these Jews were is still an open
question -- maybe the Khazars who converted to Judaism in the ninth century; or maybe the
mixture of races across a millennium precludes any answer to such a question.
Junk author, junk book of the butcher of Yugoslavia who would be hanged with Bill clinton by
Nuremberg Tribunal for crimes against peace. Albright is not bright at all. she a female bully
and that shows.
Mostly projection. And this arrogant warmonger like to exercise in Russophobia (which was the
main part of the USSR which saved the world fro fascism, sacrificing around 20 million people)
This book is book of denial of genocide against Iraqis and Serbian population where bombing with
uranium enriched bombs doubled cancer cases.If you can pass over those facts that this book is
for you.
Like Robert Kagan and other neocons Albright is waiving authoritarism dead chicken again and
again. that's silly and disingenuous. authoritarism is a method of Governance used in military.
It is not an ideology. Fascism is an ideology, a flavor of far right nationalism. Kind of
"enhanced" by some socialist ideas far right nationalism.
The view of fascism without economic circumstances that create fascism, and first of
immiseration of middle and working class and high level of unemployment is a primitive
ahistorical view. Fascism is the ultimate capitalist statism acting simultaneously as the civil
religion for the population also enforced by the power of the state. It has a lot of common with
neoliberalism, that's why neoliberalism is sometimes called "inverted totalitarism".
In reality fascism while remaining the dictatorship of capitalists for capitalist and the
national part of financial oligarchy, it like neoliberalism directed against working class
fascism comes to power on the populist slogans of righting wrong by previous regime and kicking
foreign capitalists and national compradors (which in Germany turned to be mostly Jewish)
out.
It comes to power under the slogans of stopping the distribution of wealth up and elimination
of the class of reinters -- all citizens should earn income, not get it from bond and other
investments (often in reality doing completely the opposite).
While intrinsically connected and financed by a sizable part of national elite which often
consist of far right military leadership, a part of financial oligarchy and large part of lower
middle class (small properties) is is a protest movement which want to revenge for the
humiliation and prefer military style organization of the society to democracy as more potent
weapon to achieve this goal.
Like any far right movement the rise of fascism and neo-fascism is a sign of internal problem
within a given society, often a threat to the state or social order.
Still another noted that Fascism is often linked to people who are part of a distinct ethnic
or racial group, who are under economic stress, and who feel that they are being denied rewards
to which they are entitled. "It's not so much what people have." she said, "but what they think
they should have -- and what they fear." Fear is why Fascism's emotional reach can extend to
all levels of society. No political movement can flourish without popular support, but Fascism
is as dependent on the wealthy and powerful as it is on the man or woman in the street -- on
those who have much to lose and those who have nothing at all.
This insight made us think that Fascism should perhaps be viewed less as a political
ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power. For example, Italy in the 1920s
included self-described Fascists of the left (who advocated a dictatorship of the
dispossessed), of the right (who argued for an authoritarian corporatist state), and of the
center (who sought a return to absolute monarchy). The German National Socialist Party (the
Nazis) originally came together ar ound a list of demands that ca- tered to anti-Semites,
anti-immigrants, and anti-capitalists but also advocated for higher old-age pensions, more
educational op- portunities for the poor, an end to child labor, and improved ma- ternal health
care. The Nazis were racists and, in their own minds, reformers at the same time.
If Fascism concerns itself less with specific policies than with finding a pathway to power,
what about the tactics of lead- ership? My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remem-
ber best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to
the crowd and, like the central figure in a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the
sur- face. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democ- racy. Unlike a monarchy
or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above. Fascism draws energy from men and
women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of hu- miliation, or a sense
that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier
it is for a Fascist leader to gam followers by dangling the prospect of re- newal or by vowing
to take back what has been stolen.
Like the mobilizers of more benign movements, these secular evangelists exploit the
near-universal human desire to be part of a meaningful quest. The more gifted among them have
an apti- tude for spectacle -- for orchestrating mass gatherings complete with martial music,
incendiary rhetoric, loud cheers, and arm-
lifting salutes. To loyalists, they offer the prize of membership in a club from which
others, often the objects of ridicule, are kept out. To build fervor, Fascists tend to be
aggressive, militaristic, and -- when circumstances allow -- expansionist. To secure the
future, they turn schools into seminaries for true believers, striv- ing to produce "new men"
and "new women" who will obey without question or pause. And, as one of my students observed,
"a Fascist who launches his career by being voted into office will have a claim to legitimacy
that others do not."
After climbing into a position of power, what comes next: How does a Fascist consolidate
authority? Here several students piped up: "By controlling information." Added another, "And
that's one reason we have so much cause to worry today." Most of us have thought of the
technological revolution primarily as a means for people from different walks of life to
connect with one another, trade ideas, and develop a keener understanding of why men and women
act as they do -- in other words, to sharpen our perceptions of truth. That's still the case,
but now we are not so sure. There is a troubling "Big Brother" angle because of the mountain of
personal data being uploaded into social media. If an advertiser can use that information to
home in on a consumer because of his or her individual interests, what's to stop a Fascist
government from doing the same? "Suppose I go to a demonstra- tion like the Women's March,"
said a student, "and post a photo
on social media. My name gets added to a list and that list can end up anywhere. How do we
protect ourselves against that?"
Even more disturbing is the ability shown by rogue regimes and their agents to spread lies
on phony websites and Facebook. Further, technology has made it possible for extremist
organiza- tions to construct echo chambers of support for conspiracy theo- ries, false
narratives, and ignorant views on religion and race. This is the first rule of deception:
repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible. The
Internet should be an ally of freedom and a gateway to knowledge; in some cases, it is
neither.
Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by assert- ing: "Fascism was the major
political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain." Over the
years, he and other scholars have developed lists of the many moving parts that Fascism
entails. Toward the end of our discussion, my class sought to articulate a comparable list.
Fascism, most of the students agreed, is an extreme form of authoritarian rule. Citizens are
required to do exactly what lead- ers say they must do, nothing more, nothing less. The
doctrine is linked to rabid nationalism. It also turns the traditional social contract upside
down. Instead of citizens giving power to the state in exchange for the protection of their
rights, power begins with the leader, and the people have no rights. Under Fascism,
the mission of citizens is to serve; the government's job is to rule.
When one talks about this subject, confusion often arises about the difference between
Fascism and such related concepts as totalitarianism, dictatorship, despotism, tyranny,
autocracy, and so on. As an academic, I might be tempted to wander into that thicket, but as a
former diplomat, I am primarily concerned with actions, not labels. To my mind, a Fascist is
someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is
unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary --
including violence -- to achieve his or her goals. In that conception, a Fascist will likely be
a tyrant, but a tyrant need not be a Fascist.
Often the difference can be seen in who is trusted with the guns. In seventeenth-century
Europe, when Catholic aristocrats did battle with Protestant aristocrats, they fought over
scripture but agreed not to distribute weapons to their peasants, thinking it safer to wage war
with mercenary armies. Modern dictators also tend to be wary of their citizens, which is why
they create royal guards and other elite security units to ensure their personal safe- ty. A
Fascist, however, expects the crowd to have his back. Where kings try to settle people down,
Fascists stir them up so that when the fighting begins, their foot soldiers have the will and
the firepower to strike first.
Hypocrisy at its worst from a lady who advocated hawkish foreign policy which included the
most sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam, when, in 1998, Clinton began almost daily
attacks on Iraq in the so-called no-fly zones, and made so-called regime change in Iraq
official U.S. policy.
In May of 1996, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Madeleine Albright, who at the time was
Clinton's U.N. ambassador. Correspondent Leslie Stahl said to Albright, in connection with
the Clinton administration presiding over the most devastating regime of sanctions in history
that the U.N. estimated took the lives of as many as a million Iraqis, the vast majority of
them children. , "We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that's more
children than died in Hiroshima. And -- and, you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think
the price is worth it.
While I found much of the story-telling in "Fascism" engaging, I come away expecting much
more of one of our nation's pre-eminent senior diplomats . In a nutshell, she has devoted a
whole volume to describing the ascent of intolerant fascism and its many faces, but punted on
the question "How should we thwart fascism going forward?"
Even that question leaves me a bit unsatisfied, since it is couched in double-negative
syntax. The thing there is an appetite for, among the readers of this book who are looking
for more than hand-wringing about neofascism, is a unifying title or phrase which captures in
single-positive syntax that which Albright prefers over fascism. What would that be? And, how
do we pursue it, nurture it, spread it and secure it going forward? What is it?
I think Albright would perhaps be willing to rally around "Good Government" as the theme
her book skirts tangentially from the dark periphery of fascistic government. "Virtuous
Government"? "Effective Government"? "Responsive Government"?
People concerned about neofascism want to know what we should be doing right now to avoid
getting sidetracked into a dark alley of future history comparable to the Nazi brown shirt or
Mussolini black shirt epochs. Does Albright present a comprehensive enough understanding of
fascism to instruct on how best to avoid it? Or, is this just another hand-wringing exercise,
a la "you'll know it when you see it", with a proactive superficiality stuck at the level of
pejorative labelling of current styles of government and national leaders? If all you can say
is what you don't want, then the challenge of threading the political future of the US is
left unruddered. To make an analogy to driving a car, if you don't know your destination, and
only can get navigational prompts such as "don't turn here" or "don't go down that street",
then what are the chances of arriving at a purposive destination?
The other part of this book I find off-putting is that Albright, though having served as
Secretary of State, never talks about the heavy burden of responsibility that falls on a head
of state. She doesn't seem to empathize at all with the challenge of top leadership. Her
perspective is that of the detached critic. For instance, in discussing President Duterte of
the Philippines, she fails to paint the dire situation under which he rose to national
leadership responsibility: Islamic separatists having violently taken over the entire city of
Marawi, nor the ubiquitous spread of drug cartel power to the level where control over law
enforcement was already ceded to the gangs in many places...entire islands and city
neighborhoods run by mafia organizations. It's easy to sit back and criticize Duterte's
unleashing of vigilante justice -- What was Mrs. Albright's better alternative to regain
ground from vicious, well-armed criminal organizations? The distancing from leadership
responsibility makes Albright's treatment of the Philippines twin crises of gang-rule and
Islamist revolutionaries seem like so much academic navel-gazing....OK for an undergrad
course at Georgetown maybe, but unworthy of someone who served in a position of high
responsibility. Duterte is liked in the Philippines. What he did snapped back the power of
the cartels, and returned a deserved sense of security to average Philippinos (at least those
not involved with narcotics). Is that not good government, given the horrendous circumstances
Duterte came up to deal with? What lack of responsibility in former Philippine leadership
allowed things to get so out of control? Is it possible that Democrats and liberals are
afraid to be tough, when toughness is what is needed? I'd much rather read an account from an
average Philippino about the positive impacts of the vigilante campaign, than listen of
Madame Secretary sermonizing out of context about Duterte. OK, he's not your idea of a nice
guy. Would you rather sit back, prattle on about the rule of law and due process while
Islamic terrorists wrest control over where you live? Would you prefer the leadership of a
drug cartel boss to Duterte?
My critique is offered in a constructive manner. I would certainly encourage Albright (or
anyone!) to write a book in a positive voice about what it's going to take to have good
national government in the US going forward, and to help spread such abundance globally. I
would define "good" as the capability to make consistently good policy decisions, ones that
continue to look good in hindsight, 10, 20 or 30 years later. What does that take?
I would submit that the essential "preserving democracy" process component is having a
population that is adequately prepared for collaborative problem-solving. Some understanding
of history is helpful, but it's simply not enough. Much more essential is for every young
person to experience team problem-solving, in both its cooperative and competitive aspects.
Every young person needs to experience a team leadership role, and to appreciate what it
takes from leaders to forge constructive design from competing ideas and champions. Only
after serving as a referee will a young person understand the limits to "passion" that
individual contributors should bring to the party. Only after moderating and herding cats
will a young person know how to interact productively with leaders and other contributors.
Much of the skill is counter-instinctual. It's knowing how to express ideas...how to field
criticism....how to nudge people along in the desired direction...and how to avoid ad-hominem
attacks, exaggerations, accusations and speculative grievances. It's learning how to manage
conflict productively toward excellence. Way too few of our young people are learning these
skills, and way too few of our journalists know how to play a constructive role in managing
communications toward successful complex problem-solving. Albright's claim that a
journalist's job is primarily to "hold leaders accountable" really betrays an absolving of
responsibility for the media as a partner in good government -- it doesn't say whether the
media are active players on the problem-solving team (which they have to be for success), or
mere spectators with no responsibility for the outcome. If the latter, then journalism
becomes an irritant, picking at the scabs over and over, but without any forward progress.
When the media takes up a stance as an "opponent" of leadership, you end up with poor
problem-solving results....the system is fighting itself instead of making forward
progress.
"Fascism" doesn't do nearly enough to promote the teaching of practical civics 101 skills,
not just to the kids going into public administration, but to everyone. For, it is in the
norms of civility, their ability to be practiced, and their defense against excesses, that
fascism (e.g., Antifa) is kept at bay.
Everyone in a democracy has to know the basics:
• when entering a disagreement, don't personalize it
• never demonize an opponent
• keep a focus on the goal of agreement and moving forward
• never tell another person what they think, but ask (non-rhetorically) what they think
then be prepared to listen and absorb
• do not speak untruths or exaggerate to make an argument
• do not speculate grievance
• understand truth gathering as a process; detect when certainty is being bluffed;
question sources
• recognize impasse and unproductive argumentation and STOP IT
• know how to introduce a referee or moderator to regain productive collaboration
• avoid ad hominem attacks
• don't take things personally that wrankle you;
• give the benefit of the doubt in an ambiguous situation
• don't jump to conclusions
• don't reward theatrical manipulation
These basics of collaborative problem-solving are the guts of a "liberal democracy" that
can face down the most complex challenges and dilemmas.
I gave the book 3 stars for the great story-telling, and Albright has been part of a great
story of late 20th century history. If she would have told us how to prevent fascism going
forward, and how to roll it back in "hard case" countries like North Korea and Sudan, I would
have given her a 5. I'm not that interested in picking apart the failure cases of
history...they teach mostly negative exemplars. Much rather I would like to read about
positive exemplars of great national government -- "great" defined by popular acclaim, by the
actual ones governed. Where are we seeing that today? Canada? Australia? Interestingly, both
of these positive exemplars have strict immigration policies.
Is it possible that Albright is just unable, by virtue of her narrow escape from Communist
Czechoslovakia and acceptance in NYC as a transplant, to see that an optimum immigration
policy in the US, something like Canada's or Australia's, is not the looming face of fascism,
but rather a move to keep it safely in its corner in coming decades? At least, she admits to
her being biased by her life story.
That suggests her views on refugees and illegal immigrants as deserving of unlimited
rights to migrate into the US might be the kind of cloaked extremism that she is warning us
about.
Albright's book is a comprehensive look at recent history regarding the rise and fall of
fascist leaders; as well as detailing leaders in nations that are starting to mimic fascist
ideals. Instead of a neat definition, she uses examples to bolster her thesis of what are
essential aspects of fascism. Albright dedicates each section of the book to a leader or
regime that enforces fascist values and conveys this to the reader through historical events
and exposition while also peppering in details of her time as Secretary of State. The climax
(and 'warning'), comes at the end, where Albright applies what she has been discussing to the
current state of affairs in the US and abroad.
Overall, I would characterize this as an enjoyable and relatively easy read. I think the
biggest strength of this book is how Albright uses history, previous examples of leaders and
regimes, to demonstrate what fascism looks like and contributing factors on a national and
individual level. I appreciated that she lets these examples speak for themselves of the
dangers and subtleties of a fascist society, which made the book more fascinating and less of
a textbook. Her brief descriptions of her time as Secretary of State were intriguing and made
me more interested in her first book, 'Madame Secretary'. The book does seem a bit slow as it
is not until the end that Albright blatantly reveals the relevance of all of the history
relayed in the first couple hundred pages. The last few chapters are dedicated to the reveal:
the Trump administration and how it has affected global politics. Although, she never
outright calls Trump a fascist, instead letting the reader decide based on his decisions and
what you have read in the book leading up to this point, her stance is quite clear by the
end. I was surprised at what I shared politically with Albright, mainly in immigration and a
belief of empathy and understanding for others. However, I got a slight sense of
anti-secularism in the form of a disdain for those who do not subscribe to an Abrahamic
religion and she seemed to hint at this being partly an opening to fascism.
I also could have done without the both-sides-ism she would occasionally push, which seems
to be a tactic used to encourage people to 'unite against Trump'. These are small annoyances
I had with the book, my main critique is the view Albright takes on democracy. If anything,
the book should have been called "Democracy: the Answer" because that is the most consistent
stance Albright takes throughout. She seems to overlook many of the atrocities the US and
other nations have committed in the name of democracy and the negative consequences of
capitalism, instead, justifying negative actions with the excuse of 'it is for democracy and
everyone wants that' and criticizing those who criticize capitalism.
She does not do a good job of conveying the difference between a communist country like
Russia and a socialist country like those found in Scandinavia and seems okay with the idea
of the reader lumping them all together in a poor light. That being said, I would still
recommend this book for anyone's TBR as the message is essential for today, that the current
world of political affairs is, at least somewhat, teetering on a precipice and we are in need
of as many strong leaders as possible who are willing to uphold democratic ideals on the
world stage and mindful constituents who will vote them in.
The book is very well written, easy to read, and follows a pretty standard formula making
it accessible to the average reader. However, it suffers immensely from, what I suspect are,
deeply ingrained political biases from the author.
Whilst I don't dispute the criteria the author applies in defining fascism, or the targets
she cites as examples, the first bias creeps in here when one realises the examples chosen
are traditional easy targets for the US (with the exception of Turkey). The same criteria
would define a country like Singapore perfectly as fascist, yet the country (or Malaysia)
does not receive a mention in the book.
Further, it grossly glosses over what Ms. Albright terms facist traits from the US
governments of the past. If the author is to be believed, the CIA is holier than thou, never
intervened anywhere or did anything that wasn't with the best interests of democracy at
heart, and American foreign policy has always existed to build friendships and help out their
buddies. To someone ingrained in this rhetoric for years I am sure this is an easy pill to
swallow, but to the rest of the world it makes a number of assertions in the book come across
as incredibly naive. out of 5 stars
Trite and opaque
We went with my husband to the presentation of this book at UPenn with Albright before it
came out and Madeleine's spunk, wit and just glorious brightness almost blinded me. This is a
2.5 star book, because 81 year old author does not really tell you all there is to tell when
she opens up on a subject in any particular chapter, especially if it concerns current US
interest.
Lets start from the beginning of the book. What really stood out, the missing 3rd Germany
ally, Japan and its emperor. Hirohito (1901-1989) was emperor of Japan from 1926 until his
death in 1989. He took over at a time of rising democratic sentiment, but his country soon
turned toward ultra-nationalism and militarism. During World War II (1939-45), Japan attacked
nearly all of its Asian neighbors, allied itself with Nazi Germany and launched a surprise
assault on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, forcing US to enter the war in 1941. Hirohito
was never indicted as a war criminal! does he deserve at least a chapter in her book?
Oh and by the way, did author mention anything about sanctions against Germany for
invading Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland? Up until the Pearl Harbor USA and
Germany still traded, although in March 1939, FDR slapped a 25% tariff on all German goods.
Like Trump is doing right now to some of US trading partners.
Next monster that deserves a chapter on Genocide in cosmic proportions post WW2 is
communist leader of China Mao Zedung. Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural
history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic
torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants compares to the Second World
War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in
China over these four years; the total worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55
million.
We learn that Argentina has given sanctuary to Nazi war criminals, but she forgets to
mention that 88 Nazi scientists arrived in the United States in 1945 and were promptly put to
work. For example, Wernher von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rocket program, but had
intimate knowledge of what was going on in the concentration camps. Von Braun himself
hand-picked people from horrific places, including Buchenwald concentration camp. Tsk-Tsk
Madeline.
What else? Oh, lets just say that like Madelaine Albright my husband is Jewish and lost
extensive family to Holocoust. Ukrainian nationalists executed his great grandfather on
gistapo orders, his great grandmother disappeared in concentration camp, grandfather was
conscripted in june 1940 and decommissioned september 1945 and went through war as
infantryman through 3 fronts earning several medals. his grandmother, an ukrainian born jew
was a doctor in a military hospital in Saint Petersburg survived famine and saved several
children during blockade. So unlike Maideline who was raised as a Roman Catholic, my husband
grew up in a quiet jewish family in that territory that Stalin grabbed from Poland in 1939,
in a polish turn ukrainian city called Lvov(Lemberg). His family also had to ask for an
asylum, only they had to escape their home in Ukraine in 1991. He was told then "You are a
nice little Zid (Jew), we will kill you last" If you think things in ukraine changed, think
again, few weeks ago in Kiev Roma gypsies were killed and injured during pogroms, and nobody
despite witnesses went to jail. Also during demonstrations openly on the streets C14 unit is
waving swastikas and Heils. Why is is not mentioned anywhere in the book? is is because
Hunter Biden sits on the board of one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies called
Burisma since May 14, 2014, and Ukraine has an estimated 127.9 trillion cubic feet of
unproved technically recoverable shale gas resources? ( according to the U.S. Energy
Information Administration (EIA).1 The most promising shale reserves appear to be in the
Carpathian Foreland Basin (also called the Lviv-Volyn Basin), which extends across Western
Ukraine from Poland into Romania, and the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the East (which borders
Russia).
Wow, i bet you did not know that. how ugly are politics, even this book that could have been
so much greater if the author told the whole ugly story. And how scary that there are
countries where you can go and openly be fascist.
To me, Fascism fails for the single reason that no two fascist leaders are alike. Learning
about one or a few, in a highly cursory fashion like in this book or in great detail, is
unlikely to provide one with any answers on how to prevent the rise of another or fend
against some such. And, as much as we are witnessing the rise of numerous democratic or
quasi-democratic "strongmen" around the world in global politics, it is difficult to brand
any of them as fascist in the orthodox sense.
As the author writes at the outset, it is difficult to separate a fascist from a tyrant or
a dictator. A fascist is a majoritarian who rouses a large group under some national, racial
or similar flag with rallying cries demanding suppression or exculcation of those excluded
from this group. A typical fascist leader loves her yes-men and hates those who disagree: she
does not mind using violence to suppress dissidents. A fascist has no qualms using propaganda
to popularize the agreeable "facts" and theories while debunking the inconvenient as lies.
What is not discussed explicitly in the book are perhaps some positive traits that separate
fascists from other types of tyrants: fascists are rarely lazy, stupid or prone to doing
things for only personal gains. They differ from the benevolent dictators for their record of
using heavy oppression against their dissidents. Fascists, like all dictators, change rules
to suit themselves, take control of state organizations to exercise total control and use
"our class is the greatest" and "kick others" to fuel their programs.
Despite such a detailed list, each fascist is different from each other. There is little
that even Ms Albright's fascists - from Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin to the Kims to Chavez
or Erdogan - have in common. In fact, most of the opponents of some of these
dictators/leaders would calll them by many other choice words but not fascists. The
circumstances that gave rise to these leaders were highly different and so were their rules,
methods and achievements.
The point, once again, is that none of the strongmen leaders around the world could be
easily categorized as fascists. Or even if they do, assigning them with such a tag and
learning about some other such leaders is unlikely to help. The history discussed in the book
is interesting but disjointed, perfunctory and simplistic. Ms Albright's selection is also
debatable.
Strong leaders who suppress those they deem as opponents have wreaked immense harms and
are a threat to all civil societies. They come in more shades and colours than terms we have
in our vocabulary (dictators, tyrants, fascists, despots, autocrats etc). A study of such
tyrant is needed for anyone with an interest in history, politics, or societal well-being.
Despite Ms Albright's phenomenal knowledge, experience, credentials, personal history and
intentions, this book is perhaps not the best place to objectively learn much about the risks
from the type of things some current leaders are doing or deeming as right.
Each time I get concerned about Trump's rhetoric or past actions I read idiotic opinions,
like those of our second worst ever Secretary of State, and come to appreciate him more.
Pejorative terms like fascism or populism have no place in a rational policy discussion. Both
are blatant attempts to apply a pejorative to any disagreeing opinion. More than half of the
book is fluffed with background of Albright, Hitler and Mussolini. Wikipedia is more
informative. The rest has snippets of more modern dictators, many of whom are either
socialists or attained power through a reaction to failed socialism, as did Hitler. She
squirms mightily to liken Trump to Hitler. It's much easier to see that Sanders is like
Maduro. The USA is following a path more like Venezuela than Germany.
Her history misses that Mussolini was a socialist before he was a fascist, and Nazism in
Germany was a reaction to Wiemar socialism. The danger of fascism in the US is far greater
from the left than from the right. America is far left of where the USSR ever was. Remember
than Marx observed that Russia was not ready for a proletarian revolution. The USA with ready
made capitalism for reform fits Marx's pattern much better. Progressives deny that Sanders
and Warren are socialists. If not they are what Lenin called "useful idiots."
Albright says that she is proud of the speech where she called the USA the 'Indispensable
Nation.' She should be ashamed. Obama followed in his inaugural address, saying that we are
"the indispensable nation, responsible for world security." That turned into a policy of
human rights interventions leading to open ended wars (Syria, Yemen), nations in chaos
(Libya), and distrust of the USA (Egypt, Russia, Turkey, Tunisia, Israel, NK). Trump now has
to make nice with dictators to allay their fears that we are out to replace them.
She admires the good intentions of human rights intervention, ignoring the results. She says
Obama had some success without citing a single instance. He has apologized for Libya, but
needs many more apologies. She says Obama foreign policy has had some success, with no
mention of a single instance. Like many progressives, she confuses good intentions with
performance. Democracy spreading by well intentioned humanitarian intervention has resulted
in a succession of open ended war or anarchy.
The shorter histories of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Venezuela are much more
informative, although more a warning against socialism than right wing fascism. Viktor Orban
in Hungary is another reaction to socialism.
Albright ends the book with a forlorn hope that we need a Lincoln or Mandela, exactly what
our two party dictatorship will not generate as it yields ever worse and worse candidates for
our democracy to vote upon, even as our great society utopia generates ever more power for
weak presidents to spend our money and continue wrong headed foreign policy.
The greatest danger to the USA is not fascism, but of excessively poor leadership
continuing our slow slide to the bottom.
Something tells me he doesn't want to push this too much as money for this film came from
French and German sources. It is nice to see him sticking his neck out to uphold the Truth.
When I watched the US rep. who supposedly investigated this Magnitzky affair for the US
gov. state under oath that he never verified any of the info that Browder gave him, I kept
thinking "Is this guy serious ?" But when you realize that they never did any investigation
then it all seems logical.
"... Poor General Kelly, one of the generals who let 911 happen, is probably going to be promoted to Bechtel. I say poor because he's only worth about $5 Million, which is a low figure for the super rich who own the military industrial complex. ..."
Everything about this CIA agent's history lesson sounds fake. The blood sucking military
runs the White House. ISIS or ISIL or whatever the CIA calls itself today poses no
threat.
Poor General Kelly, one of the generals who let 911 happen, is probably going to be
promoted to Bechtel. I say poor because he's only worth about $5 Million, which is a low
figure for the super rich who own the military industrial complex.
You can find original interview at using the lisnk above, or if it disappeared, in Humor
section of this site
Notable quotes:
"... I will say that, just as Marxism provides an essential way of examining capitalism, libertarianism provides a filter for examining and criticizing stateist impulses. But a society organized around libertarian principles, just silly. ..."
"... The one thing libertarians want desperately to ignore is that imposing their vision of an utopian society is that while no one is "coerced" and will have equal rights, the inequalities that exist today will be cemented into society. ..."
What puzzles me about the Libertarian Dream is their ability to ignore the Dark Ages in
Western Europe.
It fulfills all their requirements, and by what accounts survive, was remarkably
unsuccessful. Life was poor, nasty, brutish and short.
I've has the discussion of rule of law with libertarians, and it went like this:
Lb: We could have a farming society without rule of law.
Me: How are disputes resolved?
Lb: We all get together and resolve the dispute.
Me: How is the dispute resolution enforced?
Lb: Everybody agrees to the resolution.
Me: What happens if some do not agree? What happens if someone cheats?
Lb: ..
Me: We've used this mechanism before, Hatfields vs McCoy' in the US, and Campbells Vs
McDonalds in Scotland.
Lb: ..
Those who don't know their History, are condemned to repeat it.
Winston Churchill in his "History of the English Speaking Peoples" refers to the desire
of the People in England to have "The King's Peace," otherwise known as "The Rule of Law"
with all it's apparatus, Police, Courts, etc.
The Libertarians appear to want "Rule by the Rich and Powerful" and do not understand
that that includes few, if any, of the current libertarians, except perhaps for the Koch
Brothers.
In the 90's when encountering a want-to-be business tycoon spouting Libertarian
nonsense, I would encourage them to seek their fortune in Somalia, where no government
existed.
I will say that, just as Marxism provides an essential way of examining capitalism,
libertarianism provides a filter for examining and criticizing stateist impulses. But a
society organized around libertarian principles, just silly.
Tom DiLorenzo pointed out on the Lew Rockwell website that the crisis was actually the
result of the government forcing banks to make risky loans to low-income borrowers.
Oh the poor banks, forced to loan money for houses aka: The Brer Rabbit Loan Origination
philosophy.
"Forced "the banks were not. They juiced the bankruptcy laws, and bundle up the loans
and sold then to a willing set of buyers, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, "Government
Corporations", who were re-nationalized when they fell into trouble.
The Bank's happily took the loan origination fees, and survived when they were then
"forced" to accept Government bail outs.
Why some senior bank executives even took a cut in Bonuses – the misery of it all!
/s
That was the first thing that leaped out at me too.
Are you kidding? the banks were "forced" by the government where to start with that
one?
The only thing that fits was said here not to long ago.
" arguing with an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon. They just knock over the
pieces, shit on the board, and strut around like they won anyway."
The one thing libertarians want desperately to ignore is that imposing their vision of
an utopian society is that while no one is "coerced" and will have equal rights, the
inequalities that exist today will be cemented into society. Until someone can explain to
me what my recourse is when my right to breathe clean air and drink clean water or to speak
my mind freely is destroyed by a polluter or someone who doesn't like what I have to say, I
will view libertarianism as the worst of all possible worlds.
when i was still on faceborg, years ago, I would often be confronted by wandering
libertarians.
one way to send them into conniptions was to say, "fine. let's run your experiment of
lawlessness and "freedom" but first, in order to adhere to good experimental methodology,
shouldn't we first redistribute the wealth?"
a race hardly proves anything if it's between a fighter jet and a rickshaw.
the resulting frothing fits were entertaining. They believe that they are paragons of
logical thinking as opposed to us silly lefties.
and , like the neoreactionaries that threaten to take their place in corporate philosophy,
they seem to believe that they will naturally be the Lords of the Manor.
Libertarians hate to hear about Rawls' Veil of Ignorance.
Cain's libertarian views have the depth and breadth of a bunch of mutually contradictory
bumper stickers. The views lack a grasp of system interactions and impacts, and display a
narrow rigid simplicity that neglects scads of important social, economic and environmental
factors. The views are so inept it makes me wonder, was this interview satire?
The interview is based on the works of Hans-Hermann Hoppe; the parts in red either links
or when they have numbers, direct quotes with page references.
In my experience (from Usenet days, mostly) libertarians vary quite a bit in their
views. Mr. Hoppe's seem to be of the anarcho-capitalist flavor, similar to David
Friedman's, but many libertarians would disagree with them and some would say they are
crazy. Libertarianism seems to be a tendency, an attitude, a sensibility, rather than an
explicit set of principles cast in the form of propositions and rules. It is more aesthetic
than logical, in spite of the way they regard themselves; see Thus Spake
Zarathustra, on 'the coldest of all cold monsters' for a taste.
In regard to libertarianism on the ground: as with other marginal ideologies, there have
been some experiments; for example, there was a project of getting libertarians to move to
some county in New Hampshire where their numbers would enable them to have some influence
on the social order and its government. None that I know about have been very
successful.
> The views are so inept it makes me wonder, was this interview satire?
The interview is satire, but as you can imagine, libertarianism is extremely hard to
satirize; the author faced technical challenges in making the self-ownage even more obvious
than it already is.
More perhaps a caper, frolic, or prank -- of which are extended in time with no single
punchline (except for the running gag of "in a rights-respecting manner"). It's
satirical.
I have to admit that nowadays when someone says they are a libertarian, my 1st
assumption is that they are an idiot, who doesn't realize they are just a tool for the
republican/neoliberal overlords/industrialists who just want to go back to pre-regulatory
and pre-taxation years as were 120 years ago.Back when snake oil salesmen were free to
peddle their wares, any how they saw fit.
Thirty years ago, being a libertarian at least had some logic behind it. they were anti-
drug war and anti- police state and things that actually make sense. They realized there
had to be SOME laws, and Some civic responsibility.
anyone who has crazy ideas like this today are actual and factual "conspiracy theorists".
Talk about crazy. There isn't any substance here to refute . this is all total BS.
Again, we find the "information age" taken up by peoples opinions of "fact" that are pure
propaganda.
I've had close contact with libertarians. One is a medical doctor. A primary goal is to
eliminate democracy entirely. The people would have no input in determining the conditions
under which they live. A market unpreturbed by taxes and regulations would yield the most
optimum rusults which benefit the society. People who are lazy and who lack ambition, which
is proven by their low economic status, would be isolated and cast aside into favelas
because they are undeserving of anything better. The greatest threat is not global warming,
or the threat of nuclear war but tyranny. He and his son are armed and expect to be able to
defeat the government when the time comes. Based on a discussion where I used the term
social justice, the good doctored recoiled and said social justice is communism. He was
also against helping ( I suppose via the givernment) victims of natural catastrophies such
as floods, hurricanes, fires, earth quakes etc. When asked what kind of society would
result from these beliefs, they don't have a clue except to say that when one persues a
just and moral cause the outcome is of no consequence. When asked about global warming they
emphasized their right to have all the plastic straws they want. A tyrannical government
imposing rules is the greatest threat.
All very logical. Yes? Another doctor, my primary care physician welcomes global warming
because he thinks we can deal with it very easily and feels that it is most fortunate that
we don't have global cooling.
Another retired doctor I talk to expressed the view that all Muslim mosques in the US
should be blown up and all Muslims should leave the country or be killed.
hell no!
But they have a different "schtik" .. like cinton/obama doing the same thing but they use
different words . appealing to different people.
for clarity, i suppose I should have used some better punctuation.
"republican/neoliberal" meaning "the deregulation crowd"
""overlords/industrialist" meaning the powers that be who make money in manufacturing and
other related industries who have liabilities in relation to their waste/pollution
disposal, working conditions,safety standards/practices/costs,etc . who are the funders of
this type of propaganda.
I have no illusions that the deregulation gang didn't gain ascension to our gov't as of
late; with carter, and has been in EVERY administration since.
The absence of a thriving libertarian polity across all human history and geography
implies a fundamental incompatibility with human nature.
My guess is that any human group which tries it is simply destroyed and/or absorbed by
neighbouring human groups which employ more effective arrangements (whatever defects those
particular arrangements may have).
Libertarians aren't much for empiricism, I suppose .
Most of the last 10k years are feudal and libertarianism is just feudalism. Even the
Roman states were mostly run on a private law basis – aka libertarianism. Mass
slavery, citizenship limited to an elite who personally acted as enforcers, courts and
legislators.
Libertarianism is the perennial philosophy, horribly compatible with human nature.
It's interesting that this post is generating separate comment threads 7 years apart. I
started reading the 2011 comments thinking they were current and was immediately struck by
the thoroughness and passion of the debate, occurring around the time of the Obamacare
rollout and closer to the 2008 crash. Possibly more people had a stake in libertarianism
back then and found this interview threatening? In any event, one thing common to both
threads is the tendency not to recognize the interview as satire. Compliments to Mr.
Dittmer for his enduring dry wit (even though the internet makes irony hard to
recognize).
so what happens when the GLOs from different customers are pulled into a battle between
them? and how does this work when some one who hired them to protect them dies from a
business ?
At the inception of this entire RussiaGate spectacle I suggested that it was a political
distraction to take the attention away from the rejection by the people of neoliberalism which
has been embraced by the establishments of both political parties.
And that the result of the investigation would be indictments for perjury in the covering up
of illicit business deals and money laundering. But that 'collusion to sway the election' was
without substance, if not a joke.
Everything that has been revealed to date tends to support that.
One thing that Aaron overlooks is the evidence compiled by William Binney and associates
that strongly suggests the DNC hack was no hack at all, but a leak by an insider who was
appalled by the lies and double dealing at the DNC.
In general, RussiaGate is a farcical distraction from other issues as they say in the video.
And this highlights the utterly Machiavellian streak in the corporate Democrats and the Liberal
establishment under the Clintons and their ilk who care more about money and power than the
basic principles that historically sustained their party. I have lost all respect for them.
But unfortunately this does open the door for those who use this to approve of the
Republican establishment, which is 'at least honest' about being substantially corrupt servants
to Big Money who care nothing about democracy, the Constitution, or the public. The best of
them are leaving or have already left, and their party is ruined beyond repair.
This all underscores the paucity of the Red v. Blue, monopoly of two parties, 'lesser of two
evils' model of political thought which has come to dominate the discussion in the US.
We are heavily propagandized by the owners of the corporate media and influencers of the
narrative, and a professional class that has sold its soul for economic advantage and access to
money and power.
Throughout its existence the Soviet Union was hobbled by the sanctions imposed on it by
the capitalist world. Despite being uniquely qualified, by virtue of its geography and
culture, to survive without being part of the international economy, it had to pay much more,
by being forced to rely on its own resources, than other countries for every advance that it
made economically.
And then it was constantly under threat of coordinated military attack by the richest and
most technically advanced powers, led by the anglo-US empire. Twice it was invaded by massive
international coalitions, in 1918 and 1041. Twice its industrial base and its infrastructure
were reduced to smoking ruins.Twice it had to rebuild, from the ground up without the
assistance of foreign capital.
By contrast the imperial powers, bent on crushing it by economic or military means,
throughout its existence came through the period virtually unscathed-its great rival the US
actually thrived from threw two world wars.
It was this fate which China, under imperial pressure after the 1949 Revolution, was
determined to escape. And so far, since it changed course and played the US and the Soviet
Union off against each other, it has made great strides forward-advances complementing the
enormous gains made after 1949, during which period all the basic indicators of well being,
life expectancy included, rose and a firm base was established for future improvement. And
this at a time when the US used every means in its power, including biological warfare, to
weaken China and reduce its people to starvation.
For example China-well known for its polluted air-is well in advance of North America in its
development of renewable energy sources and seems genuinely committed to replacing fossil
fuels.
Nor is it using its growing strength to engage in military adventures and impose its rule on
others.
It is important when considering China not to repeat the mistakes of some of the
neo-Trotskyist factions whose theory that the Soviet Union was just another capitalist
society (something that most Russians disagree with) was an important part of the Empire's
ideological struggle against the Soviet Union in the world and socialism everywhere. China is
not a communist country but it serves its people much better than, for example, India. And it
certainly plays a vital role, together with Russia in resisting the Imperial ruling class's
campaigns to reduce the globe to accepting the diktats of Washington, Wall St and
Hollywood.
LinkedIn
co-founder 'sorry' for funding fake Russian tweets for Democrats
(RT video). Admiited producing 200 fake Russian twits.
Notable quotes:
"... Reid Hoffman is a Billionaire, who is a member of the Bilderburg Group, & is on the Council of Foreign Relations. Obviously 'above the law'. His sorry apology will be good enough. ..."
"... Oh he is only sorry after he got caught. ..."
Imagine that ?...we knew... They owe Putin and the Russian people a apology....hmmm...would rather send all demoncrats to
Putin for their punishments...
Are you kidding me?! Man and here I was starting to think democrats weren't as bad. As an American I feel bad for how bad
many of my countrymen have tried to make Russia look
bad...
Reid Hoffman is a Billionaire, who is a member of the Bilderburg Group, & is on the Council of Foreign Relations. Obviously
'above the law'. His sorry apology will be good enough.
Nothing will happen to him, & RT is probably the only media outlet
that will even tell Americans about this. THX RT.
How about reposting 'Who owns the Media in less than 30 seconds'?
Are you updating the info because Rupert Murdoch
sold his media corps to Bob Iger?? THAT was your BEST video Ever!!
PLEASE REPOST IT!!
They create fakes themselves, investigate them themselves, and after finding the sources themselves they apologize. And we
are "guilty" of everything ... You look and wonder!
Marxist playbook 101, exactly what the democrats have been using on the American people. Accuse those of the very thing
that they themselves are guilty of!👍
This comes as no surprise of course. But, when you apologise for meddling/interfering in a state and or a federal election,
this is all one has to do, to not be charged for a possible crime, just apologise? Oh, and be a Democrat of course. Im an
American. But why has no other country came out and stated, that the US meddled in their elections? At least have come out
in the last 3 years and stated that? Most know, every country spies on and meddles in one anothers elections. It's not ok
but, we know and it happens.
The "liberal" Left can do whatever they want. ....no worries. All others do not get away with anything. If ever there was a
double standard, there you have it.
Linkedin is also biassed, there is no middle ground...one can establish highly sophisticated network linking each
individual and finding the most influentials...data is worth billions upon billions...and people, mainly highly educated
and skilled do have Linkedin account...so there is no "honest business", the co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, is among
ones that are not "honest"...big money, bigger lies...once one tells a lie, he, or she is alway liar...
Lots of complete morons in the comments who believe in the fake two party paradigm. Both parties believe you should suffer
at the dictates of multinational corporations and the banking industry.
I am getting a lot of SPAM from somebody who disguises himself as "RUSSIAN BOT" including Cyrillic characters in the
message and also in the metadata (!). Does anybody know who this could be?
Defending Roy Moore....lol also anyone see a conflict of interest when the Russian government funds this news program. And
basically is putting a story saying that Russian bots are fake and paid by dems.
When are arrests going to me made? We ALL know that the DNC is a criminal organisation and that the USA is on borrowed
time. The farce of American Democracy is getting more obvious by the day. There just aren't anywhere near enough people,
among the overall pool of American voters, that even know how their government is theoretically supposed to work to have a
functional self-governing nation state. Morons don't pick good government!
This is nothing new. Democrats are using Russian propaganda and Republicans like to use China propaganda. Both parties are
rothschild puppets and love to use propaganda for political agendas.
I can not remember the guy's name, but the guest that was speaking on the MSNBC panel at the
2:11
mark was pro -Trump earlier this year. I remember him saying that he was former Secret Service or something to that effect
on Youtube. Now, we see him on a panel alledging Russian speculation moving it's way to the White House. I guess he
couldn't become famous as pro-Trump, so he's went to the dark side
sorry for creating false evidence in a federal investigation is a huge crime and makes him a conspirator in coup to the
takedown of the presidency of the US.
He isn't a Democrat. But I know that Americans were using fake bots before, during, and after 2016. All Dems aren't Dems.
All GOP aren't GOP. There are a lot of coming out the closet for politicians going on in this day and age. Why now are we
hearing this? 2020. You are not dealing with dummy's just deviants.
What Hoffman did is totally understandable. I myself frequently donate $100,000 amounts to causes about which I know
nothing. Especially when I know that a minuscule amount like that won't really have any real impact on a Congressional
election. Kidding aside, may we look forward to indictments of Hoffman, New Knowledge, Morgan, and Fox in this matter -- a
case of real tampering and collusion? Glad I dumped Facebook AND LinkedIn on the same day last year.
Like anyone really thought it was true, well actually as if anyone who doesn't get the bulk of their news from CNN, MSNBC,
and the like, really thought it was true. Funny part is those idiots (CNN ect. veiwers) were screaming about how Russia was
tearing apart American society, and as though out the history of mankind, you only have yourselves to blame.
RT is funded by the Russian government btw so of course they're saying this I hope you all stop letting hate anger anger
control your life when it should be dragging your nuts across broken glass only to fart in a walkie talkie to have a
spiritual enlightenment experience and see all that is true thank you
This report is not the whole truth of what happened. You should look up the facts of this case before you get all partisan
happy. Or you can just be a traitor and take Russia's (RT) word on election tampering.
Even Gazdiev is fake. RT PLEASE STOP THE INFOTAINMENT. Gazdiev wants to be in theatre. Don't hold him back. Get a
journalist who can deliver the news without all the fake pauses and arm waving.
If you want to destroy the worlds SuperPower and know you can't do it military, then infiltration into the minds of its
people is a perfect way to destroy them when clearly America has a dumbed down population.
Kushner is responsible for setting up fake proTrump republican twitter accounts to help Trump get elected. Why would
democrats want to help Trump? That's another republican lie to fool the sheeple.
"
Nation
states must today be prepared to give up their sovereignty
",
according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel,
who told an audience in Berlin that sovereign nation states must not listen to the will of their citizens when it comes
to questions of immigration, borders, or even sovereignty.
No this wasn't something Adolf Hitler said many decades ago, this is what German Chancellor Angela Merkel
told
attendants
at an event by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin. Merkel has announced she won't seek re-election
in 2021 and it is clear she is attempting to push the globalist agenda to its disturbing conclusion before she stands
down.
"
In
an orderly fashion of course,
" Merkel joked, attempting to lighten the mood. But Merkel has always had a tin ear
for comedy and she soon launched into a dark speech condemning those in her own party who think Germany should have
listened to the will of its citizens and refused to sign the controversial UN migration pact:
"
There
were [politicians] who believed that they could decide when these agreements are no longer valid because they are
representing The People
".
"
[But]
the people are individuals who are living in a country, they are not a group who define themselves as the [German]
people
," she stressed.
Merkel has previously accused critics of the UN Global Compact for Safe and Orderly Migration of not being patriotic,
saying "
That
is not patriotism, because patriotism is when you include others in German interests and accept win-win situations
".
Her words echo recent comments by the deeply unpopular French President Emmanuel Macron who stated in a Remembrance Day
speech that "
patriotism
is the exact opposite of nationalism [because] nationalism is treason
."
The French president's words were deeply unpopular with the French population and his approval rating nosedived even
further after the comments.
Macron, whose lack of leadership is proving unable to deal with growing protests in France, told the Bundestag that
France and Germany should be at the center of the emerging New World Order.
"
The
Franco-German couple [has]the obligation not to let the world slip into chaos and to guide it on the road to peace"
.
"
Europe
must be stronger and win more sovereignty
," he went on to demand, just like Merkel, that
EU
member states surrender national sovereignty to Brussels
over "
foreign
affairs, migration, and development
" as well as giving "
an
increasing part of our budgets and even fiscal resources".
"... Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer before working as a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. Ray admits to a modicum of bias against Marine officers, but not those with whom he worked back in the day. He is co-creator of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes Marines who remember what Semper Fi means. ..."
"... A case in point is when you hear members of congress criticize Trump decision to withdraw the US army personals from Syria and Afganistan. These members forget that the US army in Syria is in violation of international laws and US laws as well. ..."
utgoing Defense Secretary Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis was famous for quipping , "It's fun to shoot some
people." It remains a supreme irony that Mattis was widely considered the only "adult in the
room" in the Trump administration. Compared to whom? John Bolton, the rabid neocon serving as
national security adviser? That would be the epitome of "condemning with faint praise."
With his ramrod-straight image, not to mention his warrior/scholar reputation extolled in
the media, Mattis was able to disguise the reality that he was, as Col. Andrew Bacevich
put it on
Democracy Now! this morning, "totally unimaginative." Meaning that Mattis was simply incapable
of acknowledging the self-destructive, mindless nature of U.S. "endless war" in the Middle
East, which candidate-Trump had correctly called "stupid." In his resignation letter, Mattis
also peddled the usual cant about the indispensable nation's aggression being good for the
world.
Mattis was an obstacle to Trump's desire to pull troops out of Syria and Afghanistan (and
remains in position to spike Trump's orders). Granted, the abrupt way Trump announced his
apparently one-man decision was equally stupid. But the withdrawal of ground troops is
supremely sane, and Mattis was and is a large problem. And, for good or ill, Trump -- not
Mattis -- was elected president.
Marine Wisdom
Historically, Marines are the last place to turn for sound advice. Marine Gen. Smedley
Butler (1881-1940), twice winner of the Medal of Honor, was brutally candid about this after he
paused long enough to realize, and write, "War is a Racket":
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members
of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My
mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-
ups. "
Shortly after another Marine general, former CENTCOM commander Anthony Zinni, retired, he
stood by silently as he personally watched then-Vice President Dick Cheney give his most
important speech ever (on August 26, 2002). Cheney blatantly lied about Iraq's (non-existent)
WMD, in order to grease the skids for the war of aggression against Iraq. Zinni had kept his
clearances and was "back on contract." He was well read-in on Iraq, and knew immediately that
Cheney was lying.
A few years later, Zinni admitted that he decided that his lips would be sealed. Far be it
for a Marine to play skunk at the picnic. And, after all, he was being honored that day at the
same Veterans of Foreign Wars convention where Cheney spoke. As seems clear now, Zinni was also
lusting after the lucrative spoils of war given to erstwhile generals who offer themselves for
membership on the corporate Boards of the arms makers/merchants that profiteer on war.
Marine officer, now Sen. Pat Roberts, R, Kansas, merits "dishonorable mention" in this
connection. He never rose to general but did become Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee
at an auspicious time for Cheney and Bush. Roberts kowtowed, like a "good Marine," to their
crass deceit, when a dollop of honesty on his part could have prevented the 2003 attack on Iraq
and the killing, maiming, destruction, and chaos that continues to this day. Roberts knew all
about the fraudulent intelligence and covered it up -- together with other lies -- for as long
as he remained Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman
Scott Ritter on Pat Roberts
Roberts's unconscionable dereliction of duty enraged one honest Marine, Maj. Scott Ritter,
who believes "Semper Fi" includes an obligation to tell the truth on matters of war and peace.
Ritter, former UN chief weapons inspector for Iraq, who in April 2005 wrote, "Semper Fraud,
Senator Roberts," based partly on his own experience
with that complicit Marine.
Needless to say, higher ranking, more malleable Marines aped Zinni in impersonating Uncle
Remus's Tar Baby -- not saying nuttin'.
It is conceivable that yet another sharply-saluting Marine, departing Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford, may be tapped by Trump to take Mattis's job. If that happens,
it will add to President Trump's bizarre penchant for picking advisers hell-bent on frustrating
the objectives he espoused when he was running for office, some of which -- it is becoming
quite clear -- he genuinely wants to achieve.
Trump ought to unleash Mattis now, and make sure Mattis keeps his distance from the Pentagon
and the Military-Industrial Complex before he is asked to lead an insurrection against a highly
vulnerable president -- as Gen. Smedley Butler was asked to do back in the day. Butler said
no.
Top Photo | U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, sits on stage during a change of command
ceremony at the U.S. Southern Command headquarters on Nov. 26, 2018, in Doral, Fla. Brynn
Anderson | AP
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church
of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer before
working as a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. Ray admits to a modicum of bias against Marine
officers, but not those with whom he worked back in the day. He is co-creator of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes Marines who remember what Semper Fi
means.
I am not so much surprised that military generals keep their mouths shot rather than tell
the truth when the truth is needed to avoid wars. But worse is that the US congress which are
supposed to overlook over the government misbehavior to make the government abide by the laws
and protect the interests of the people against government wrongs.
A case in point is when you hear members of congress criticize Trump decision to
withdraw the US army personals from Syria and Afganistan. These members forget that the US
army in Syria is in violation of international laws and US laws as well.
The congress are supposed the authority to declare war but the US is engaged in multiple
wars without US Congress authorization. Worse off these idiots want to force the Trump
administration to keep its illegal wars going on? What is the role of the congress??? To
correct and force the Administration to abide by the rule of laws of the force them to keep
violating international laws and US laws as well????
Trump's bizarre penchant for picking advisers hell-bent on frustrating the objectives
he espoused when he was running for office
It's bizarre that he's hired so many Bill Kristol approved neocons when they abandoned him
for Hillary in 2016. Or not so bizarre when one remembers what Russ Tice said about Cheney
using the NSA to get blackmail dirt. Now they've lost control, so it will be interesting to
see how they try to regain it.
My impression is, ISIS is a mossad-Jewish lobby creation to win the PR war against Muslims
and to keep the US attacking and "containing" Israel's geopolitical adversaries and eternally
occupying Arab lands, and well, to Make Israel Safe Again ™
Apart from the questions raised by some from the alternative media:
The fact is the mossad could easily pull this off, having so many Israelis from
Northern-African and Middle Eastern extraction, fluent in Arab and looking exactly like well,
Arabs. They could infiltrate and recruit Arab salafist patsies and easily organize terrorist
attacks without executing the hits themselves. And it is actually a genius move:
1) Create a terrorist thread in Europe, making Westerners wary of Arabs, ie more likely to
understand Israel policies towards Palestinians and side with Israel (message being:
apartheid State? what else can we Israelis do? Palestinians are all gropers, misogynists,
homophobes and potential terrorists FYI)
2) Hit the countries with the most Jews (France, Germany and UK) so they are more likely
to start packing up to make Aliyah, so Israel's demographic problem is at least temporarily
solved, retaining a majority population of Jews.
3) Make the US, through the Jewish lobby in the US, attack strategic countries such as
Libya, Iraq and Syria, creating a migrant tsunami to flood Europe, making Europeans even more
wary of Arabs and understanding of Israeli's treatment of Palestinians (Arabs) and also
making European Jews even more likely to make Aliyah. I even have heard of Israeli NGOs
funded by the Israeli Ministry of FA operating in Lesbos and helping "refugees" to flood
Europe. After a public outcry the Ministry logo vanished from the NGOs sponsors page.
Even the Cologne issue with the gropings, and I am getting too conspiratorial here, could
have been a group of Israeli provocateurs kickstarting the whole assaults wave. Let's say, a
group of mossad operatives, composed of Israelis from Northern-African and/or Middle Eastern
extraction, with false documentation and fluent in Arab, start groping and assaulting German
women, taking advantage of the total chaos offered and facilitated by moronic Merkel. They
get caught? no problem, false passports or even no passports at all, just give false names
and disappear. Not that Arabs need that much help to make themselves look bad, after all some
American reporter was assaulted *live* and for what I have read the lecherous groping of
women walking alone is a well documented problem in all the ME. But maybe thanks to a little
push by provocateurs, an incident big enough was engineered and the image of Arabs in the
West reached historic lows thanks to the Cologne affair.
And creating phoney terrorist groups to use them for false flags is not something new at
all for the mossad, let's all remember what the FLLF was and how almost executed an US
Ambassador.
Filmmaker Rob Reiner tweeted on Thursday that the president is a "childish moronic
mentally unstable malignant narcissist" who is "committing Treason" against the United
States.
Oh my – the Jew "meathead" is a "childish moronic mentally unstable malignant
narcissist" who is "committing Treason" against the United States.
"Filmmaker Rob Reiner tweeted on Thursday that the president is a "childish moronic mentally
unstable malignant narcissist" who is "committing Treason" against the United States."
He and fellow tribesmen are welcome to sign up and go fight Israel's wars themselves, just
not with white male republican blood. The guy is good at border skirmishes, too. He led an
effort to keep poor Mexicans out of his rich Malibu neighborhood back in 2014 by refusing
Whole Foods a building location. Like most of his kind, he's a sociopathic hypocrite and a
liar.
@MAGAnotMISA
What I miss is destroying white cultures through mass immigration.
Though what I miss in this theory what exactly is the objective, is it whites and Muslims
annihilating each other, or just divide and rule ?
But maybe thinking in this way has not gone far enough.
Bernard Baruch's world domination plan failed miserably, but he even failed to understand
that it had failed, otherwise he had not in 1946 pleaded for a world government.
One must not underestimate the enemy, but also not overestimate him.
Jewish policies for the last 2000 years can hardly be seen as a success.
Judaism lost the battle with christianity, bolsjewism failed in Russia, getting equal rights
in W Europe led to the WWII deportations, with or without gas chambers, Israel succeeded in
surrounding itself with enemies, as neighbours, and all over the world, and jewish puppet
Hillary was not elected.
The latest statements by Netanyahu confirm my idea of a complete idiot.
I continue to be amazed that anyone gives any credibility whatsoever who claims US Mideast
military involvement is in the best interest of the nation. The above-mentioned commenters
must almost inevitably more about self-interest than anything patriotic. As for appearing
profound, well, there's Rob Reiner!
@anon
In the idea that the USA is the new zion Trump indeed commits treason.
Before Israel was established many USA rabbis were against zionism, because in their view the
USA already was zion.
As to
, the use of such words for me means utter confusion, rational analysis no longer
possible.
Arthur Koestler was of the opinion that yiddish precluded sensible discussion.
The mentioned words show that he was wrong about the cause.
As I sat in Christmas Eve service last night, an adorable little boy played quietly with his
father in the seat next to us. The little boy was probably just under 2 years of age.
In the middle of one of the Christmas Carols the thought struck me,
"I wonder if we will still be in ___________ war 17 years from now, when this
little boy becomes enlistment age . . ."
That thought alone makes me favor Trump for re-election. I think (I could be wrong, I'm no
expert) we have less war and a lesser risk of war with Trump. The "establishment" policies
of: invade the world – invite the world – in hoc with the world; are horrifically
deadly and destructive.
1. US withdrawal from Syria, and apparently all non-nato committed US troops from
Afghanistan.
2. Willingness to shutdown Government in order to force funding for the wall
3. Rumors of subpoena's being handed out at G.H.W Bush's funeral
4. Senate investigations into Clinton Foundation with auditors claiming jaw dropping
corruption
5. Grand Jury empaneled to investigate into 9/11
I don't know if Q is a psyop, but a lot of the things he has been saying appear to be
coming closer to reality. We can be certain that none of this would have happened had Clinton
been elected.
Meanwhile the deep state is not taking this lying down.
1. Netanyahu is threatening to increase operations in Syria. Perhaps he warned Trump to
get out because he is going to go nuclear or bio.
2. The global warming panic propaganda is being turned up to "broil" as weather warfare has
been unleashed across the planet.
3. Ukraine attempting to drag Nato into a war for the Kerch straight.
4. Stockmarkets tanking as the Fed keeps tightening while Mnuchin performs the "plunge
protection team rag"
5. Iran war threats and Persian gulf sabre rattling
6. Heeb financial war against Russia, Iran and China.
7. Heeb technology war against China (Huawei arrest)
Even if the US leaves Syria as Trump claims, they certainly will not just hand everything
over to Assad. The Damascus/Baghdad hiway re-opening through Al Tanf and the hand over of all
Euphrates river crossings to Syria would be indication of a true change of policy.
As usual, Giraldi is spot on with his observations. I wish him a Merry Christmas and hope to
see a lot more of his articles in the coming year.
I find Rob Reiner amusing, if not occasionally annoying. After having spent decades up to
my nose with his tribe while working in LA in the entertainment industry I can guarantee
Hollywood Jews go completely apoplectic anytime they perceive their government, the
Jewish-occupied government that rules over us all, is not following their commands.
Come to think of it, apoplexy's first definition is a stroke, its second definition is: a
state of intense and almost uncontrollable anger. One can only hope that jerks like Reiner
who indulge so heavily in the second definition will end up experiencing the first, and good
riddance.
I'd just add that few things would please me more than to have DJT draft the human
chickenhawks due to their indispensable expertise and place their backsides in-country to
dole out their words of wisdom there.
The honorable & courageous American Man endowed with precision scientific/political
wisdom wrote, with special appeal to me: "Withdrawing from Syria is the right thing to do,
though one has to be concerned that there might be some secret side deals with Israel , that
could actually result in more attacks upon Syria."
Call me crazy, but I'm still a bit leery, cautiously hopping this is not just another
charade. Is this just another way to allow the dissection of Syria to take another path?
Always remember if Trump is in opposition to his globalist master's he will be removed,
one way or the other.
Thank you for that! I now realize that the appellation chickenhawk used in reference to
the "let's you and him" fight gang is a slur on a fine little raptor. You have educated
me.
A mong hawks in N. America, Cooper's Hawk ( Accipiter cooperii ),
Red-shouldered Hawk ( Buteo lineatus ), and Red-tailed Hawk ( Buteo jamaicensis
) are the three species most likely to take domestic chickens, or yardbirds as they are
sometimes called, and it is these three species that are or have been commonly called
Chickenhawks in the United States, at least among non-birders, who are people with neither
binoculars nor field guide.
But I think most here know that Philip Giraldi is referring to the craven human variety of
warmonger known in some circles as the Yellow-tailed Chickenhawk, or its close relative the
Yellow-bellied Chickenhawk.
President Trump's announcement is a very nice Christmas present, which I choose to take a
face value pending unwrapping. As always, actions speak louder than words. Let's hope that
there isn't a booby prize or two lurking beneath the Christmas tree and hidden by the big
surprise package, or that there isn't a lump of coal at the bottom of our holiday
stockings.
@wayfarer
Not sure if the opening word's in the first video are spoken by Sheikh Imran N Hosein. It
sounds like him. I just wanted to say I have listened to a lot of his messages and find him
very enlightening. For those who believe in end time prophecy, I think you will find well
versed and extremely intelligent, as compared to many of the so called "Christian" huckster's
out there selling religion for dollars.
Pipelines to Europe for KSA and fresh water sources for Israel? Destabilising a local
rival of both? Who knows?
What we do know is that "we" have allowed our "leaders" to pimp out our military to the
rogue special interests of the world. We have the best government foreign interests can
buy.
The Zionist MSM and MIC and the Zionist AIPAC and company are the hounds of Hell baying for
war as warmongers always want war as long as they do not have to fight it and can reap the
profits from the wars!
Zionists have instigated every war that the U.S. has been in since WWI and right on down
through the Mideast slaughter house that Israel and her Zionists patrons have sent Americans
to fight and die in and by crippled for life in and the millions of civilians, men, women and
children that have been murdered in the wars fought for Zionist Israel!
The most incredible thing was that the Zionists and the Zionist controlled deep state did
911 which was the precursor to the latest Mideast wars and the war on terror where the
Zionists killed some 3000 Americans and blamed the Arabs and got away with it , when every
thinking American knows that Israel and the Zionist controlled deep state did 911!
Finally Trump has done the right thing by getting out of Syria and now should get the hell
out of the Mideast and Afghanistan and close the slaughter houses!
God bless Putin and Russia and Assad and Syria for saving the people of Syria and
defeating ISIS aka Al CIADA ie a creation of the U.S. and Israel and Britain!
Zionists and Israel will be the death of America unless we wake up and smell the
coffee!
@renfro
One hopes that Russia will have stationed its advanced air defense systems throughout Syria.
And they should not be afraid to shoot down the Israeli aggressors.
@jilles
dykstra Jilles,
Haven't you completely contradicted your prior response to @renfro about Trump? You called
him a "complete idiot, leading a country to destruction," now you are claiming he is a
"reasonable man, who understands that warfare is just a destruction of wealth." He can't be
both, can he?
@DESERT
FOX Of extreme importance, Desert Fox of"The most incredible thing was that the Zionists
and the Zionist controlled deep state did 911 which was the precursor to the latest Mideast
wars and the war on terror where the Zionists killed some 3000 Americans and blamed the Arabs
and got away with it ,"
Christmas Day greetings, Desert Fox!
Re; above sentence, a cordial question.
Is there anything you know & which you have not said (to date) that might signal that
the American-Israeli Empire's mighty military is prepped to allow the Assad and Rouhani
anti-Zionist governments to stand?
Uh perhaps, either delay or junk establishment of Greater Israel?
Am convinced Trump would only slow down international Jewry's plan. Or else no unguarded
JFK convertible limo trips for him on reelection-campaign road.
@chris
Let's think about this. The USA has not been able to defeat the Afghan Taliban forces in 17
years. It brought down Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, but, with that unfortunate country
totally destroyed, how could you call that a win (I doubt if the Iraqi's consider the US to
be liberators). Now the crack pot Obama/Hillary campaign has lost in Syria, and Trump wants
to pull out. All three countries were much smaller and weaker than Iran, and the US is much
weaker, morally and militarily, than it was after the 9/11 hoax. And, after Russia has
expended much blood and treasure in ensuring victory for Assad and the Syrian people, will it
now sit on its hands as the US Air Force dismantles Teheran? Plus there is a resurgent China,
dependent on Iranian oil, to consider.
I'm not saying that Trump will not start a war against Iran (for Israel's benefit). But,
he'd better be prepared for the consequences, which will all be devastating to the American
Empire. Be careful what you wish for.
But Israel supported by Saudi Arabia does not like Iran and has induced Washington to
follow its lead. Withdrawing from Syria recognizes that Iran is no threat in reality.
Positioning American military forces to "counter" Iran does not reduce the threat against
the United States because there was no threat there to begin with.
Yes of course, I would just add that Israel hates Iran.
Rand Paul and others have been pushing back hard against the NEOCON narrative here, good
news. The initial anti Trump tide has turned in this matter.
I briefly saw Bill Krysrol's smug mug on TV the other day. Wouldnt it be nice if that Satanic
'fellow' was harrased at home like, unfortunatley, Tucker Carlson was. (Instead of
Carlson)
Trump telling General Mattis to pack his bags and begone is the work of a good CEO. Mad Dog
could have done a lot of damage to Mr. Trump's agenda if he had been allowed to stay on until
the end of February, as he had said he would. In corporate America, if an underling is
disloyal to the CEO, he will be told to vacate the premises for good by the end of the
workday, and escorted out of the building by armed security. His keys will be taken, all
locks will be changed, and his passwords expunged. No doubt Trump, as CEO, has had to employ
such tactics many times before. He obviously relishes saying "You're Fired!"
Any competent Trump loyalist can be found to replace this worn out old soldier. I hope he
won't be yet another general. MacArthur said that "old soldier never die, they just fade
away." Time for Mattis to do just that, and never be heard from again.
@Parsnipitous
Reading my comment again, I can see where I might have misinterpreted Jilles intent. If so, I
apologize. However, if he had identified, by name, who he was referring to, perhaps I
wouldn't have been confused.
Syria is a money pit for the taxpayers and giant profit source for the super rich. 'The
United States military should only be deployed anywhere to defend the U.S. itself or vital
interests' says Trump, Obama or Bush. But war is too important to be left to politicians.
They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. Trump
was appointed by rich people only so they could have someone to blame. 100% of the voters
believe they personally have the right to kill women and children overseas with their hired
mercenaries to defend the U.S. itself or vital interests. Americans shell out taxes to pay
for US troops to guard mining operations and poppy fields in Afghanistan, oil fields in Iraq,
online propaganda and so much more. Why deploy the United States Military when there's more
profit in hiring private mercenaries? Plus you don't have to say that "vital interests" crap
anymore.
opening the door to NATO's Turkey to go after the Kurd units there
Must look to the North:
On Turkey's Northwest front, tensions are high between the Greek Military & some foreign
controllers of Greece, and the Turkish Military, and their leaders.
This article is an excellent summary of msm and neocon reaction to the planned US withdrawal
from Syria and a good survey of why getting Uncle Sam out of Syria makes sense. I would also
add that allying with the Kurds was at best a short term solution. Not only would a Kurdish
state in eastern Syria be unacceptable to Turkey but the Sunni Arabs of the Euphrates Valley
would be certain to resist Kurdish rule. Merry Christmas to all!
For once, let all nuclear arsenal be directed at the Middle East and when the smoke clears
after a thousand years, there will be no God, Jews or Arabs to deal with any of remaining
humans will be welcomed!
@ChuckOrloski
In my opinion, Zionist Israel will never stop being the agent provocateur in the Mideast and
elsewhere ie the Ukraine etc., and since the Zionists control the U.S. government I think
their satanic NWO plans are still in place, and think the U.S. military is just going to be
placed in Iraq and Jordan ie just across the border to Syria and will continue with their
proxy mercenaries aka AL CIADA aka ISIS.
Some good sites to follow are Southfront.org and Henrymakow.com and Stevequayle.com and
Thetruthseeker.co.uk etc., all things considered even Putin said that Russia will wait and
see if the U.S. really leaves the Mideast, I wish all our troops would be brought home, but
with the Zionist control of our government it will never happen.
It is snowing here in Montana so we have a white Christmas, which we could do without, but
have a Merry Christmas!
Yes to Trump and withdrawal from Mid East Wars, down with MSM, The Neocons, the 1% , the deep
state and Israel, the whole World hates these assholes. Go Donny Daddy!
If you want to know who's agitating for war, look no further than our "friends," the Brits.
This is what they do every single time a U.S. President doesn't commit troops to some war
they've approved of, or started. They terror bait, or mock, or a combination of the two. And
since a lot of people in Washington take them seriously, it has appreciable impact on our
policies.
@Z-man
Israel fears Iran, is my idea.
Norman Finkelstein once stated that Israeli jews do not see how there ever can be peace with
the Palestinians 'after all we did to them'.
Not all jews are idiots.
Forgot in which book I read that in the thirties a zionist reached Palestine, and saw that
this was not the 'land without people for people without land'.
He stated 'this is a crime'.
The destruction and destabilisation of the ME, an Israeli plan, as far as I know.
In 1921 and later years there was the enormous population exchange, without any financial
compensation, between Turkey and Greece.
To this day tensions exist between the two countries.
Iran is one of the oldest civilisations.
Twice, one might say even three time, the west overthrew Iranian democracy.
Iran knows of course quite well that the VS brought Saddam to power so that he could
subjugate Iran, that had rid itself of the USA puppet shah.
Iran also of course knows quite well jewish power in the USA, Bush' s promise to AIPAC to
destroy Iraq.
Will those leading Iran now ever trust the USA or Israel ?
So that Netanyahu and USA jewry now are in complete panic, who had expected it to be
otherwise ?
Uri Avnery wrote 'the only language zionists understand is power. Is there a problem, use
power, if it does not help, use more power, if that also fails, use even more power'.
There has never been any serious negotiation between Israel and its neighbours, or with
the Palestinians.
About the Oslo negotiations a book appeared in Israel with the title 'how we fooled the
Palestinians'?
Sharon answered any Arab League peace proposal with force, Jenin, one of them, if my
recollection is correct.
There always was the idea of overwhelming more military power, and of USA support.
Kissinger saved Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war by flying over hundreds of the newest
USA anti tank weapons, wire guided, TOW.
What will the USA do in case Israel is attacked ?
Is Netanyahu crazy enough to provoke an attack ?
Macron is not skiing between Christmas and New Year.
French is my worst language, but 'huis clos' is curtains closed, the expression is used often
for court proceedings without an audience, closed doors.
If my idea is correct that he stays indoors because his security cannot be guaranteed, maybe
someone whose first language is French can enlighten me.
Whatever the case, the man who wants an EU army now has trouble keeping peace in his own
country.
NATO, Stoltenberg's face during the dinner with Trump, disbelief.
Trigger and restrain, at the moment the Yellow Vests have caused the impossibility for
Brussels to do anything, survival is what concerns them.
@DESERT
FOX Desert Fox with a Montana-attitude, soft side, said: "It is snowing here in Montana
so we have a white Christmas, which we could do without, but have a Merry Christmas!'
Greetings from snowless Scranton, Desert Fox!
Over decades, have reflected upon Charles Schulz's great (1965) "Charlie Brown Christmas."
Prior to it's release, I have scant memory that Mr. Schulz had to battle those who wanted the
traditional Nativity of Christ and spiritual meaning out of the way. Fyi, Charles's opponents
lost!
As Christ-trashing Hollywood "Christmas" films dominate & mis-educate our popular
culture, please, please, please look (below) at the beautiful narration of "Charlie Brown
Christmas."
This is the first sane thing Trump did in two years. Also, this is the first action he
promised his supporters in 2016. Naturally, Israel-firsters, who in 2016 backed the corrupt
mad witch to a man, are unhappy. Their unhappiness is a good sign that this action is
actually in American interests. If Trump folds and reverses, this would expose him as a 100%
fraud. If he sticks to his guns, maybe there is hope for him yet. Stay tuned.
@wayfarer
No snow here in Albuquerque, NM, but the skies are loaded with chemtrails. I guess the sky
spider's never get a day off. Here's hoping you and your's have a merry Christmas.
Trump wants Turkey to stop harassing Saudi Arabia about Kashoogi's murder and be more
complacent with Israel. He also wants Israel to become more anxious abiut its security so it
agrees on the Palestinian peace plan elaborated by Jared Kuchner and MBS.
Turkey has now promised to fight ISIS which it never did. Saudi Arabia as well as Syria wants
Turkey humiliated, defeated and out of Syria. It may well happen when the Turkish army will
be confronted with a renewedc ISIS manipulated by Saudi Arabia and Syria.
It seems that the withdrawal of the US forces from Syria may trigger the end of Erdogan's
hegemonic dreams in the region and the victorious return of Syria among the Arabs.
@follyofwar
Oh, no; I don't mean Trump will start some major ground offensive to win anything! No,
they'll just try to destroy Iran in order to give jihadist a chance to kill as many people as
possible. This will be a Libyan-style war and "victory."
"President Donald Trump's order to withdraw from Syria has been greeted, predictably, with an
avalanche of condemnation culminating in last Thursday's resignation by Defense Secretary
James Mattis. The Mattis resignation letter focused on the betrayal of allies "
Call me cynical but I think you cannot take ANYTHING our masters say or do, e.g. this, at
face value.
Orange clown's alleged disengagement from Syria may be (and probably is) nothing more that
a tactical retreat/change in plans for which the Mattis resignation is merely a fig leaf;
that is, it's just more of the same disingenuous dialectics that we've been bombarded with
since the beginning of the "Trump" administration.
Apparently we're urged to conclude that Trump has finally had enough of the people he
knowingly and willingly surrounded himself with, and their agenda, and now all of a sudden
(because of some kind of a spiritual epiphany, pro-American New Year's resolution, etc.) he
wants to do right by (some of) his supporters by doing what he should've done a long time
ago. (And the hint of a military drawdown in Afghanistan adds a nice touch).
Sorry but I can't buy what they're selling.
If in addition to withdrawing from Syria orange clown were to stop arming the "government"
of "Ukraine" and agree to negotiations with Russia on the issue of intermediate range nuclear
armed missiles in Europe – with a goal to support/strengthen the INF treaty rather than
withdraw from it – I might be willing to entertain the idea that something's
changed.
As it is now it'll take a lot more than the obligatory "avalanche of condemnation" i.e.,
cheap words, to convince me that the perfidious orange clown and his jewish-supremacist
handlers are doing anything other than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic with one
hand while steering it into the iceberg with the other hand.
Call me cynical but I think you cannot take ANYTHING our masters say or do, e.g. this,
at face value.
agree
just watch their behaviour – the wall never gets built even though they are now
talking about increasing the "defense" budget from $700 billion to $750 billion next year
– the increase alone is the cost of two walls
Although Russia has avoided any direct military challenge to NATO, it has nonetheless
shown a growing willingness to disrupt the status quo: through its use of force in Georgia
in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014, its often indiscriminate military intervention in Syria,
and its aggressive use of cyberwarfare to attempt to affect political outcomes in the
United States and Europe.
Haass is a Cheney's choice of opportunist and Goebbelsian kind of criminal:
Haass was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn From 1989 to 1993, he was Special
Assistant to United States President George H. W. Bush and National Security Council Senior
Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs. In 1991, Haass received the Presidential
Citizens Medal for helping to develop and explain U.S. policy during Operation Desert
Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Haass argued that the leaders of the United States
should adopt "an imperial foreign policy" to construct and manage an informal American
empire (Haass 2000)
The U.S. has 2,000 soldiers in a kill-sack if Erdogan decides to cut off their supply lines.
And, calling Erdogan "unreliable" is something of an understatement. The U.S. can say very
little about Erdogan's behaviour while he can take reprisals on U.S. troops.
-- Turkey and Saudi are feuding, and the U.S. needs Saudi more than Turkey to maintain
sanctions and other pressure on Iran.
-- Turkey is becoming dangerously deranged in its statements about Israel (1). And the
U.S. / Israeli relationship is vital for many reasons.
-- Turkey has been a threat to Christian Cyprus for decades. The Leviathan-Cyprus-Greece
pipeline is important to help free Christian Populist EU nations, such as Italy, from
tyrannical rule under Soros-servitors Merkel and Macron.
Do not over over read the withdrawal as a change in regional strategy. There are no major
policy changes. This is about opening the door to push out Erdogan, if that becomes necessary
to support the existing U.S. regional strategy. And, the U.S. can still hope that Erdogan is
saying demented things solely for domestic consumption and doesn't intend to actually follow
thru on the crazy.
"Containment" was a U.S. policy devised by George Kennan in 1947 to inhibit the expansion of
a powerful and sometimes aggressive soon-to-be nuclear armed Soviet Union, which was rightly
seen as a serious threat.
"which was rightly seen as a serious threat."
So it was, was it? That's really the beginning of the bullshit in American policy. There were
a few naysayers back then, since largely vindicated by the opening of former Soviet archives,
who claimed that Stalin's postwar moves were largely defensive in nature and intended to
protect the USSR from the talked about US preemptive attack on the Soviet Union. Stalin was
well aware of all the loose talk on the American side and his country had just endured the
same attempt on the part of Nazi Germany.
"Containment" was a U.S. policy devised by George Kennan in 1947 to inhibit the
expansion of a powerful and sometimes aggressive soon-to-be nuclear armed Soviet Union,
which was rightly seen as a serious threat.
Could someone explain to me how exactly was the Soviet Union a serious threat to the US,
particularly in 1947? The country was devastated by the war; some regions suffered from
hunger, for goodness' sake; tens of millions were dead or maimed; the worked force was
depleted as million of young men were killed, so the economic burden fell on the shoulders of
women and teenagers; the cost of housing of people left homeless by the war was staggering;
the cost of caring for orphan children, wounded and invalids – ditto. In contrast, the
United States was getting fatter by the minutes having benefited enormously from the war in
Europe.
The Soviet Union "sometimes aggressive"? I am not aware of any Soviet plans to attack the
US but we all know about the American and British plant to attack the USSR formulated as
early as in 1945. No doubts the Soviet leadership was aware of such plans. The Soviets,
having witnessed a demonstration staged for their benefits in Japans of the power of nuclear
weapons, did everything with one purpose in mind: to prevent an attack, which they were in no
position to withstand. Needless to say, the USSR didn't have nuclear weapons at that time but
even after it had acquired them, it didn't quite catch up with the US in terms on number
until the very end.
It's fair to say that the Soviet Union was never ever a thereat to the US. On the
contrary, the US was a threat to the Soviet Union from the fist till the last day of its
existence, as it remains a treat to Russia today. The problems with the Americans, even the
most reasonable of them (not at all difficult to appear on today's insane background), is
that they don't question the entire narrative they are fed but only the bits of it.
@MAGAnotMISA
"ISIS is a mossad-Jewish lobby creation to win the PR war against Muslims and to keep the US
attacking and "containing" Israel's geopolitical adversaries and eternally occupying Arab
lands, and well, to Make Israel Safe Again "
– Hard to disagree with your statement. And who could forget the amazing care of the
Jewish State for the White Helmets known for their cooperation with other "moderate"
terrorists: https://gellerreport.com/2018/07/israel-syria-jordan.html/
Israel Evacuates 800 of Syria's White Helmets and Their Families to Jordan
The Israel Defense Forces said it engaged in the "out of the ordinary" gesture due to
the "immediate risk" to the lives of the civilians, as Russian-backed regime forces closed
in on the area. It stressed that it was not intervening in the ongoing fighting in
Syria.
The Jordanian government, which has consistently refused to accept Syrian refugees in
recent years, said an exception was made in this case as the United Kingdom, Canada and
Germany agreed to take the 800 White Helmet rescuers and their families.
Germany's Bild newspaper reported that a convoy of dozens of buses crossed the Syrian
border into Israel late Saturday, and were escorted to the Jordanian border by Israeli
police and UN forces.
A lot of the rejoicing in the pro-Putin camp seems to be based on the idea that this somehow
benefits Putin but I don't think it does. He is still irreversibly bogged down in Syria.
@renfro
Netanyahu is telling the idiotic Israeli public what they want to hear. Let's not forget that
there are elections due on 9 April.
You can hardly expect a politician to tell the public that if they so much as launch a
missile against Damascus airport, the airport of Tel Aviv will be bombed in return. The days
when the Israelis could do as they wished in Syria and Lebanon are gone.
"Organ theft, staged attacks: UN panel details White Helmets' criminal activities, media
yawns," by Eva Bartlett.
"[During] a more than one-hour-long panel on the White Helmets at the United Nations on
December 20 the irrefutable documentation was presented on the faux-rescue group's
involvement in criminal activities, which include organ theft, working with terrorists --
including as snipers -- staging fake rescues, thieving from civilians, and other
non-rescuer behaviour.
a Syrian civilian, Omar al-Mustafa, is cited as stating: "I saw them (White Helmets)
bring children who were alive, put them on the floor as if they had died in a chemical
attack."
In my own visits to eastern Ghouta towns last April and May, residents likewise spoke of
organ theft, staged rescues, the White Helmets working with Jaysh al-Islam, while an Aleppo
man likewise described them as thieves who steal from civilians, not rescuers.
Four days after the UN panel, to my knowledge, not a single corporate media outlet has
covered the event and its critical contents.
This is in spite of the fact that the Western corporate media has been happy to
propagandize about the White Helmets for years, and to attack those of us who dare to
present testimonies and evidence from on the ground in Syria which contradicts the official
narrative.
@DESERT
FOX "The most incredible thing was that the Zionists and the Zionist controlled deep
state did 911 which was the precursor to the latest Mideast wars and the war on terror where
the Zionists killed some 3000 Americans and blamed the Arabs and got away with it , when
every thinking American knows that Israel and the Zionist controlled deep state did 911!"
The number of victims of 9/11 in NYC are way above 3000. Cancers and so on just don't get
counted. BTW, it is not from the dust. It is from the small nuclear bombs in the 2 buildings.
The 3rd building was only explosives.
@jilles
dykstra "Is Netanyahu crazy enough to provoke an attack ?"
– He is certainly endangering himself and his parasitic state by the silly ideas of
mythological choseness.
Let's hope that the more intelligent Soviet Jews (as compared to the mediocre pool of the
pre-Soviet Israelis) take pains to explain the former salesman the stupidity of military
confrontation with Iran/Russia.
As for the US-dwelling zionists' stupidity it is irredeemable.
The Soviet Union "sometimes aggressive"? I am not aware of any Soviet plans to attack
the US but we all know about the American and British plant to attack the USSR formulated
as early as in 1945.
@Bragadocious
What the hell is up with these dysfunctional Brits anyway? With their empire thankfully long
gone, their society in tatters, and a Muslim mayor running majority-minority London, they
think they can get the US to take on Iran for them? Spare me! This "special relationship" has
got to end. The Brits must be under the thumb of the Zionists even more than is the USA. And
their sad monarchy belongs in the dustbin of history.
@Tony
H. George Kennan's attitude towards Russia had evolved throughout the 70s-90s, but this
evolution has been carefully obscured by the ziocon warriors and other war-profiteers using
the ZUSA resources for their personal enrichment:
With the end of the Cold War, Kennan continued to emphasize the limits of American power
and the need for restraint in the exercise of it.
He lived to see the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war and
characteristically aimed to influence the role that the United States should play in the
new world circumstances.
He objected to plans for North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion and to what he saw
as exploitation of Russian weakness.
@annamaria
THis is that GELLER who has been riling up ant Muslim hysteria in US She has been co hosting
the islamophobes and has been renting spaces for add against Jihad
@Michael
Kenny Like you are irreversibly bogged down in between your legs looking for Bush's WMD,
Obama's gas, Netanyhu's water source , Rothschild's oil,Bolton's nooses around himself,Weekly
Standard's lost child FDD and confused Sheldon's diaper.
!
@Alfred
Agree that many have died and are dying from cancer caused by the asbestos and other
materials in the dust, in my opinion the WTC towers were destroyed by direct energy weapons
plus micro nukes and WTC buildings 3,4,5,and 6 were destroyed by direct energy weapons and
WTC 7 was destroyed by conventional explosives, and there were 7 WTC buildings destroyed in
total.
Check the site Drjudywood.com and read her book Where Did The Towers Go and watch her
videos on youtube, she is a scientist and very credible and it is from her that I got the
directed energy weapons theory. There were no planes used and the planes that were seen were
holograms and for an explanation of this see John Lears videos on youtube, John Lear is the
son of William Lear the designer of the Lear Jet and John was a commercial pilot and his
videos on 911 explain why no planes were used.
Zionist Israel and the zionist controlled deep state did 911.
@jilles
dykstra It's just what you said, he's keeping a low profile and staying inside on advice
of his security. They're probably worried about snipers in ahigh rise somewhere.
It's been fun listening to (((NPR))) try to spin military withdrawal as a bad thing without
actually saying as much. "Trump's facing critics in his own party," "here are some Kurds
bitching," "General McProcurer is really pissed," "Chikkenhauk Epsteinbergwitzbaum sez it's
the end of the world," etc.
No rationality, no credibility decision (Syria withdrawal).
Most variables are missing. Trump is insignificant but as a figurehead. At least a few
layers, the correlations and "secret" deals with Israel, Turkey, IS, Kurds, France, the UK,
let's not forget Russia are missing. The commoner, deplorable, are lead by the nose, our
middle class bread scribes are doing the herding by shifting the attention, and building an
exit of face saving on what they omit to pull in the open.
No value in this "News" and "Christmas present" at all, but more of deceit of a global
ruling class in the shadows. It is called smarts, to deceive the rest of the dumb (in the
eyes of the elites) masses, it is relevant to call out our elites on not smart enough to
think over the long term.
Who of a building presence of outliers can they still deceive?
@Sarah
Toga "Death and taxes" for countries translates to "war and bankruptcy." Maybe we'll get
lucky and hit the latter before we kill everyone in the former.
@Realist
That's more like Erdogan's problem with Russia. Russian coastal defense system K-300P
Bastion-P in Crimea is perfectly capable of making Bosporus and Dardanelles straits much
wider. However crazy Erdogan is, he is well aware of that.
.local sources told Al Jazeera and Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency --
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Tuesday that Ankara and Washington
agreed to complete withdrawal of the YPG forces from Manbij before the US pulls out of
Syria.
He added the US agreed to take back weapons given to the YPG.
Syrian government forces 'enter' Kurdish-controlled Manbij region
Trucks carrying regime forces and equipment, and armoured vehicles have arrived in the
region, sources say.
@follyofwar
Actually Brits think their country is doing just great. But yeah, the "special relationship"
should be scuttled. We face a bigger threat from British jihadis than any Iranians anywhere.
Richard Reid is sitting in a federal Supermax but I don't think any Iranians are.
Brits simply love using the U.S. military for their own venal objectives. And if anything
goes wrong, the Brits can distance themselves and blame it on "the Yanks." A win-win.
@Svigor
It is really funny to see "peace-loving" liberals trying not to look like warmongers that
they are. NPR is not alone in attempting this sleight of hand: NYT, CNN, WaPo, and others of
their ilk are desperately trying to appear peace-loving while promoting wars that benefit MIC
and Israel. Hypocrisy at its most awkward. The only good thing is, they are forced to show
their true colors.
@m___
Well you know, that perception of yours re how the real world really works is, actually,
positive and optimistic.
If if I get you correct, you believe/feel/think there IS the "overclass" (for a lack of
better word) which rules the world. They are hidden, all powerful, competent, on the same
page and malevolent re us , the common folks.
I am afraid that's not the case.
I believe/feel/think there is no such overclass.
My take is there are warring factions of mostly incompetent little people with a lot of power
who fight among themselves who's going to get more power and related material wealth. The
malevolent part re all those they see as below them is given, of course.
And, gets worse, actually.
In this particular case I think the decision was made in a spur of a moment. Pure Emperor
whim ,if you will.
On top of it, we still haven't seen any actual move on the ground.
And, even if those up to 2000 men do pull out, what about CIA/special forces/contractors
bunch?
And, even better, those 2000 and more can return in 48 hours if the Emperor decides
otherwise. In a spur of a moment too.
Anyone so happy here commenting this .thing has been following what's really been
happening with North Korea?
What exactly changed from that fateful meeting between the Emperor and the .Cult Leader?
Let's summarize: the very point of all that was stopping and rolling back NK capability for
long range nuclear strike.
So .any "rolling" happened? Anything?
I don't think so, but, more than happy to be proven wrong. Proven, mind you.
The only important, and sad actually, is how we all got into the stage when a tweet by
that fellow can agitate us so much.
Mice and just a whiff of cheese over the cage.
They really got us where they wanted. And those "they" aren't even that smart.
Just great.
"Trump is retreating from Syria – and from his pro-Israel Jewish conservative
voters. If that decision is a harbinger of other strategic moves distancing him from Israel's
security, much of his remaining Jewish support will fall off a cliff"
"The United States refuse to fight for the transnational financiers"
As soon as he entered the White House, Donald Trump was careful to surround himself with
three senior military officers with enough authority to reposition the armed forces.
Michael Flynn, John Kelly and especially James Mattis, have since left or are in the
process of leaving. All three men are great soldiers who together had opposed their
hierarchy during Obama's presidency. They did not accept the strategy implemented by
ambassador John Negroponte for the creation of terrorist groups tasked with stirring up a
civil war in Iraq. All three stood with President Trump to annul Washington's support for
the jihadists.
The Pentagon project for the last seventeen years in the "Greater Middle East" will not
happen. Conceived by Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, it was aimed at destroying all the state
structures in the region, with the exception of Israël, Jordan and Lebanon. This plan,
which began in Afghanistan, spread as far as Libya, and is still under way, will come to an
end on Syrian territory.
It is no longer acceptable that US armies fight with taxpayers' funds for the sole
financial interests of global financiers, even if they are US citizens.
The Bush Jr. and Obama administrations shoulder the entire responsibility for this war
[in Syria]. They were the ones who planned it and realised it within the framework of a
unipolar world .
Afghanistan's misery began during the Carter presidency. National Security Advisor,
Zbigniew Brzeziński, called on the Muslim Brotherhood and Israël to launch a
campaign of terrorism against the Communist government. Terrified, the government appealed
to the Soviets to maintain order. The result was a fourteen-year war, followed by a civil
war, and then followed by the Anglo-US invasion.
After forty years of uninterrupted destruction, President Trump states that US military
presence is not the solution for Afghanistan, it's the problem.
My take is there are warring factions of mostly incompetent little people with a lot of
power who fight among themselves who's going to get more power and related material wealth.
The malevolent part re all those they see as below them is given, of course.
@Realist
When Erdogan's military had shot down the Russian jet, Turkey paid for it rapidly with an
economic squeeze. Russian tourism to Turkey was shut down and green grocer exports to Russia
were subjected to intense scrutiny/inspection and nearly halted. One could say the Turks are
still feeling the effect, the impact was immediate and probably there hasn't been a full
recovery to some of the businesses that had been damaged. Erdogan tucked his tail and played
nice with Putin after all but he is no dependable ally of anyone, he's screwed everyone he'd
ever done business with insofar as the M.E. regional game. The main problem with Turkey for
Russia is the Erdogan regime's Salafi outlook (to say the leadership is sympathetic to
al-Qaida would be an understatement.) Erdogan may have promised to 'neutralize' the Idlib
extremists but he won't, he can't, in fact he doesn't dare, it is estimated there are upwards
of 1,000 cells established in Turkey. How that plays out is anyone's guess but my money is on
the idea he'll shove the the Idlib extremists off on the Kurds as a Turkish military proxy
and cross Putin in the process (the USA won't mind this at all and in fact CIA Ops division
might reward it.)
@AnonFromTN"The only good thing is, they are forced to show their true colors."
Exactly. The liars, frauds, gatekeepers, Hillary-bots, and every brand of stupid in between
have been flushed into the open. For example, anyone who still admires Chomsky should take
note:
Aaron MatéVerified account @aaronjmate · Dec 24
Update: Chomsky was sent my Q & this is his response. He favors keeping US troops in
Syria as a holding operation until a final settlement w/ Russia-Assad that could guarantee
Kurds' safety. With US pulling out now, he argues that all leverage is lost to avoid a
Turkish assault:
"What deal with the Russians (who right now are making cozy deals with Turkey)? And a
deal with Assad, the main mass murderer in Syria – – who can in any event do
nothing to deter Turkey.
In fact, in the longer term there should be a deal crucially involving Russia and with
Assad, with some kind of guarantees (for what they are worth) to preserve at least some
limited protection for the Kurds. But that's the longer term. This is now. For now, the
sole deterrent to a Turkish assault is a small US contingent confined to Kurdish areas, as
a holding operation for a possible longer term settlement along the lines just
indicated."
@AnonFromTN"The only good thing is, they are forced to show their true colors."
Exactly. The liars, frauds, gatekeepers, Hillary-bots, and every brand of stupid in between
have been flushed into the open. For example, anyone who still admires Chomsky should take
note:
Aaron MatéVerified account @aaronjmate · Dec 24
Update: Chomsky was sent my Q & this is his response. He favors keeping US troops in
Syria as a holding operation until a final settlement w/ Russia-Assad that could guarantee
Kurds' safety. With US pulling out now, he argues that all leverage is lost to avoid a
Turkish assault:
"What deal with the Russians (who right now are making cozy deals with Turkey)? And a
deal with Assad, the main mass murderer in Syria – – who can in any event do
nothing to deter Turkey.
In fact, in the longer term there should be a deal crucially involving Russia and with
Assad, with some kind of guarantees (for what they are worth) to preserve at least some
limited protection for the Kurds. But that's the longer term. This is now. For now, the
sole deterrent to a Turkish assault is a small US contingent confined to Kurdish areas, as
a holding operation for a possible longer term settlement along the lines just
indicated."
I find it interesting that Drudge has had almost nothing about the Syria withdrawal, or the
fallout Giraldi describes. I heard far more about it by tuning in to NPR.
That's more like Erdogan's problem with Russia. Russian coastal defense system K-300P
Bastion-P in Crimea is perfectly capable of making Bosporus and Dardanelles straits much
wider.
It's not that simple. Any attempt to take control of the of the Bosporus would make it at
least temporarily impassable.
@follyofwar
The real change will come should ever US military personnel realise that true patriotism
would compel them not to serve, to sabotage equipment and even resort to fragging. Perhaps
Incitatus could give instructions on how some could pull off a "Corporal Klinger" in order to
evade service.
@Carlton
Meyer Good clip. High points for LULZ were "if we're fighting Assad doesn't that help
ISIS? And if we're fighting ISIS doesn't that help Assad?" and "now you know why people get
their news from Youtube."
@Bragadocious
It is business as usual. I remember when GWB was having some difficulty selling the war on
Iraq prior to the invasion. War criminal Tony Blair very eloquently addressed both houses in
the US and closed the sale. I watched it live with a tough old former Marine friend who was
actually moved to tears when he realised that the war would be going ahead. What hope is
there for nations that have yet to hold to account such vermin as Blair, GWB, Howard etc?
@follyofwar
The Brits were the original Rothschild ass-muppets. Before there was the Fed, there was the
Bank of England. Before there was the Senate, there was Parliament. And before there was Wall
Street, there was the City of London. Hell, without Britain, Israel wouldn't even exist!
I'm not putting down ordinary British people, who tend to be very nice. I'm talking about
their horrible ruling class, which is just rotten to the core.
@Realist
Taking into account long-range missiles, impassability of those straits is not such a great
military problem. But the disappearance of a large chunk if Istanbul (the US would call it
"collateral damage") would be a serious problem for Turkey.
I don't think it would ever come to that: Erdogan is a cautious bastard. His whole stint
with buying Russian C-400 was undertaken to make sure he is not "democratically" bombed by
those who bring democracy on the heads of aborigines in half-a-ton TNT installments and then
bitterly complain that those aborigines are ungrateful.
@Bragadocious
To be fair, the "Brits", as in the British people, bear the same responsibility as do the
"Americans", as in the American people. Granted, a great many voters in both nations are
quite utterly stupid but it might be more accurate to refer to The City and to Wall St as
being the guilty ones.
Grunts, the ones actually doing the fighting and dying, will typically refer to one who
speaks out in support of war, yet has avoided active military service, as a
chickenshit and not a chickenhawk.
So it's probably safe to say, wikiquote needs to be updated.
@never-anonymous
Your average American general isn't interested in America's welfare. He's interested in the
defensive industry because he plans to retire early from the US army and get rich lobbying
for defensive companies. People like this tend to be good at climbing the rank ladder because
they are completely self-serving, and they are a genuine problem for the the US when they get
to the top and claim the ear of a US president. All they do is promote more war to make their
future employers rich, who then provide a quid pro quo by hiring these disgusting generals
afterwards.
"though one has to be concerned that there might be some secret side deals with Israel or
Turkey that could actually result in more attacks on Syria and on the Kurds. "
@Partisangirl
#Israel murdered this Syrian soldier on #christmas. First lieutenant Gabriel Ali Raya won't
be going home to his family. Yet fools keep believing Israeli lie that they are targeting
Iran while it's bombing #Syria.
This is most certainly good news if true, but lets not forget they're still poking at Russia,
poking at China, still all over Africa, still stirring trouble in Latin America.
Who knows if they may be about to send in private mercenaries from Blackwater into Syria. Not
to mention all the money and weapons we give the Israelis-Saudis so they'll still be stirring
shit in Syria and elsewhere, all that American money could buy Israel lots of mercenaries to
do the same thing in Syria.
The entire MIC has gotten out of control, money buys congress, they have lots of money.
Assuming Trump has any real power or actually cares, he should be trying to get the "defense"
industries into doing something other than building weapons of war, maybe put them to work in
technology or health or something that benefits humanity, gets America back to competing with
Asia, instead of just killing folks.
As long as these "people" are making tons of money building weapons to kill, that is what
they will do, wherever it may be. War shouldn't a business.
I guess we just have to wait and see, I'll believe it when I see it.
DECEMBER 21, 2018 It's About Time for the U.S. to Exit Syria and Afghanistan
The final resolution of the U.S.-led war in Syria must be determined by Syrians
themselves. All foreign forces must recognize and respect the sovereignty of the Syrian
people and their legal representatives.
@RobinG
100% of the planes sent by Israel have returned to base damage free.
After Action Review [AAR]:
-- Assad' s forces definitely expended a significant number of very expensive
interceptors.
-- They may, or may not, have shot down one or more less expensive standoff weapons launched
by Israel.
-- Iranian forces in Syria were hit and damaged (TBD on repairable vs. destroyed).
All objective analysts will score today's engagement as at least a minor win for the
IDF. Stand by for the non-objective, histrionic, Pallywood, Taqiyya artists' inevitable
attempts to misrepresent the events.
_____
The most critical question is, "What AA systems were active?"
The S-300 system, slated for eventual turnover to Syrian forces, has significant training
requirements. There are still months of training to be done. So, odds are the S-300 and S-400
systems in theatre, under exclusive Russian control, stayed off.
Much more limited systems such as S-200, Pantsir, and earlier generations are beatable if
they are accurately located during planning and shown the respect they deserve. These systems
have one shootdown of an F-16 variant that was too low and may have had a serious mechanical
failure in countermeasures.
The true decision points are still months away.
-- Will Russia ever turn an S-300 system over to Syrian control?
-- If so, will Assad pay the cash burn rate of ~$0.5 to $1.0 million per S-300 class
interceptor?
It is hard to believe that Assad will further bankrupt his nation and starve his children
to defend the Iranian, al-Hezbollah rocket forces being targeted by Israel.
May 5, 2017 Syrian War And The Battle For Golan Heights – Genie Oil & Gas Exposed!
The battle for Golan Heights in Syria will soon be under way and in this video Dan Dicks
of Press For Truth exposes the Genie Oil and Gas Company and everyone on their advisory
board.
I'm as happy with the withdrawal from Syria as anyone here, but "stay tuned" is probably
good advice so we don't get our hopes up too much. They may have moved them out of harm's way
in preparation for initiating more mischief somewhere else.
@A123
Troll #A123 confirms, ISRAEL KILLS ON CHRISTMAS
Following ancient pattern of Jews attacking on Holy Days.
Pantsir-S2 SAM system of #Syria Arab Air Defense Force launched eight 57E6-E surface to
air missiles at Delilah cruise missiles launched by F-16Is of 107sq "Knights of the Orange
Tail Squadron" flying from #Hatzerim AB.
Donald Trump is already under extreme pressure coming from all directions to reverse his
decision to leave Syria and it is quite possible that he will either fold completely or
bend at least a bit.
Trump is dealing with the lethal crowd who orchestrated 9/11, so keeping this in mind, the
Syria withdrawal decision could conceivably be taken out of his hands using (another) False
Flag,this time targeting Iran (and sacrificing a few thousand American servicemen in the
Middle East) or alternatively, using covert action in the US, aimed directly at substituting
Trump for Pence.
In an ethics free zone, combined with the enormous hubris of the maniacs running the
Empire, possibilities have to extend this far.
@A123
"100% of the planes sent by Israel have returned to base damage free."
– does this mean that you are ready to abandon the annoying quetching about "Jewish
eternal victimhood" and "Jewish incomparable suffering?"
And how is the Jewish State cooperation with Ukrainian neo-Nazi going on?
The first ever Jewish prime-minister of Ukraine Mr. Groysman has been quite effective in
keeping with the ongoing restoration of Nazism and banderism in the Kaganat of Nuland (former
Ukraine). Guess the main local financier of the neo-Nazi, an Israeli/Ukrainian citizen
Kolomojsky, is preparing for a special award from Knesset and AIPAC for his selfless service
to the ideas of zionism/nazism.
@RobinGPlease observe . as predicted, . the Taqiyya Trolls are now attempting to deploy
histrionics to distract from The Truth.
Serious questions:
-- Do violent Iranian al-Hezbollah forces in Syria take off for Christian holidays?
No?
-- Do violent Iranian al-Hamas forces in Gaza disrespect their own religion by launching
offensive, border assaults every Friday? Yes?
-- What militarily sound reason is there to give a free pass to violent Iranian forces that
do not respect any religious traditions or holidays? None?
The bottom line is pretty simple.
If Iran was not violent, there would be no military action against them on Christmas or
any other day. As long as Iran is violent, their Taqiyya supporters cannot credibly whinge
about countries defending themselves against Iranian violence.
@Digital
Samizdat What "ruling class". As ruling classes go, especially in a powerful country, the
British ruling class wasn't too bad till about 1900. Now the pseudomeritocracy scrambling to
make sense in a much less powerful and important country hardly deserves the description
"ruling class" at all. Indeed universal suffrage and the devastation of WW1 and the Great
Depression may have predictably doomed it years ago.
@NoseytheDuke
What do you make of the excuse for Howard (though Malcolm Fraser wouldn't have conceded it!!)
that he wasn't critical to the war happening and that only one Australian soldier was killed
(by his own hand, presumably accidentally)? 2003 was, after all, a bit early to be looking to
China for Australia's comfortable place in the world.
@renfro
Israel is attacking Lebanon and Syria . it is threatening other countries as well in between
for lending voices to issues like nuclear treaties with Iran. It has earlier stolen
passports, it has forged passports, it has assassinated leaders who were at that time in
third country. Now criticizing these activities will be nothing but expression of anti
semitism.
WTF wrong with these snake charmers of enormous linguistic variability ? That what it is.
They have tongues and they know how to coin new words .
Indeed it is, but the cacophony Trump's announcement raised seems genuine enough.
There's something about this whole affair that instills (at least in me) a vague sense
that Trump, having given up on a 2nd term, is going to get whatever he can via surprise
Presidential Policy Announcements as long as he lasts in office. It's how he ran his campaign
and almost certainly the only way he can get anything he said he wanted to do done.
Keep his detractors off-balance with a sufficiently constant stream of announcements that
their heads haven't quite stopped spinning before the next one comes out.
To that end, keeping the barking mad ideologues around him on the payroll makes sense.
They add to the noise that serves to make the announcement appear reasonable, whereas nuanced
argument would undermine his policies even when they're fundamentally right.
So, I'm staying tuned. We may see lots more coming from the same place.
Macron not on skis this year.
My idea is not fear of snipers, but fear of Macron being surrounded by Yellow Vest
skiers.
Honnecker's vacations were staying on a government estate, of course completely closed to the
public.
Even there, when he went for a walk, a guard a hundred metres before him and another behind
him.
Advertising his impopularity by completely closing a piste temporarily for just Macron and
some guards probably was seen as not a smart move.
@NoseytheDuke
Well, after, if I remember well, a seven year investigation a devastating report was
published about B-liars' war in GB.
In the Netherlands a somewhat similar report was published about Dutch complicity, the
David's report, blaming prime minister Balkenende at the time, and his minister of foreign
affairs then, De Hoop Scheffer, later Secretary of NATO.
None of the three is behind bars, true.
Nevertheless, they were exposed as war criminals.
I wonder if it is realistic to expect more, the crimes were political.
If Blair and the two Dutch could have refused, I wonder.
@byrresheim
If it was horrible is a matter of opinion, I see it as liberation.
Horrible regime, the shah's
It was possible because the USA had been driven out of Vietnam, could not afford another war.
The Smith Richardson Foundation was founded by billionaire heir to the Vicks fortune, H.
Smith Richardson In 1973, the founder's son, Randolph Richardson – a free market
fundamentalist and long-time patron of neoconservative ideologue Irving Kristol
– inherited the organization.
Recipients of funding from the Smith Richardson Foundation include a who's who of
neoconservative and militaristic right-wing institutions.
The Fusion GPS' bunch and Chris Steele are not the only people subverting the democratic
process in the US:
Recent hacked documents have revealed an international network of politicians,
journalists, academics, researchers and military officers, all engaged in highly deceptive
covert propaganda campaigns funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO),
NATO, Facebook and hardline national security institutions.
This "network of networks", as one document refers to them, centers around an ironically
named outfit called the Integrity Initiative. And it is all overseen by the Institute for
Statecraft, which has operated under a veil of secrecy.
Where is the US Intelligence Community when the foreign nationals infiltrate election
complain in the US?
Bracey-Lane is a 20-something British citizen He appeared out of nowhere to work in Iowa
as a field organizer for the Bernie Sanders campaign for president.
"I spent a year working, saving all my money, just thought I was gonna go on a two month
road trip from Seattle to New York and I thought, you know what? I'm gonna stay and work
for the Bernie Sanders campaign," Bracey-Lane told a reporter for AFP on January 27,
2016.
However An Institute for Statecraft document on "roles and relevant experience" of the
outfit's "expert team" notes that Bracey-Lane conducted a "special study of Russian
interference in the US electoral process." The document does not make clear when that study
was conducted, however, it is listed directly next to its author's history of work with the
Bernie campaign.
The Integrity Initiative (oh, irony!) has been also busy with subverting the democratic
process in Spain and the UK:
The Integrity Initiative waged a successful covert campaign to destroy the appointment
of Pedro Baños to Director of Spain's National Security Department by carry[ing] out
the hit job through a hand-picked "cluster" of Spanish politicians and operatives to flood
social media and sympathetic outlets with messages demonizing Baños.
The Integrity Initiative appears to have employed the same tactics to smear left-wing
journalists and political figures across the West, including the leader of the UK's Labour
Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
According to David Miller, professor of political sociology in the school of policy
studies at the University of Bristol and the director of the Organization for Propaganda
Studies, the Integrity Initiative "appears to be a military directed push."
@wayfarer
Not sure, but we are home to Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia National Labs so I guess
anything is possible. I just know it has been brutal all fall and winter. Starts out with
massive chemtrailing and ends up with sky completely darkened.
My spidy sense is also tingling, but I am in awe that no one seem's to notice, no one
seem's to care. Like you, I feel the curtain is about to be pulled on the final act. God help
us all.
@Realist
I've read that Mr. Trump abrupted decided to pull out of Syria after a phone call with
Erdogan. He wasn't about to confer with Mattis, Pompeo, or Bolton as they would have all
objected. Trump cannot afford to be the president who allowed Turkey to leave NATO and align
with Russia. It's all about geo-politics.
Too bad that crybaby Netanyahu doesn't like it. Israel has nowhere else to go and needs US
support to even exist. The Kurds will be sacrificed, but Turkey is much more important. Trump
must pull out the US troops ASAP as they nothing but sitting ducks – like those 400 or
so Marines who were blown up during the Lebanese civil war during the Reagan Admin. My
biggest concern is that they will be attacked with many casualties while in country, forcing
Trump to stay.
"Filmmaker Rob Reiner tweeted on Thursday that the president is a 'childish moronic mentally
unstable malignant narcissist' who is 'committing Treason' against the United States."
He didn't just play a meathead on TV, he became one in real life.
@follyofwar
" Trump cannot afford to be the president who allowed Turkey to leave NATO and align with
Russia. It's all about geo-politics. "
What makes you think Turkey is still in NATO ?
And what is NATO ?
Both Merkel and Macron say they want an EU army.
An army for what, many here in Europe wonder.
Attacking the country that keeps the Germans warm in winter and German industry going ?
@Realist
Did you read Article V of NATO treaty?
Here it is:
Article V
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America
shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an
armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective
self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the
Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other
Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and
maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be
reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council
has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and
security.
To translate it into plain English, if one member is attacked and another member decides
to send the victim pampers, that other member would be perfectly within its rights. The US
made 100% sure it has no obligations whatsoever under that treaty. Not to mention that when
the US does have obligations, it simply breaks the treaty (the deal with Iran being the
latest glaring example).
@Wizard
of Oz A great legal mind such as your own would surely know that under US law any person
involved in any way in a crime resulting in the deaths of victims is held to be equally
responsible. Just being a wheelman or a lookout is enough to be found to be as equally guilty
as the triggerman. All forces involved in the war crimes of the invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan, other than the US, were token forces whose role was as much to legitimise the US
invasions as to have much material impact. Howard's (and Blair's) excuse that it was due to
faulty intel is an insult to those who serve honourably and legitimately in ASIO.
String them up, I say, and you Sir would demean yourself should you attempt to defend
them.
@Anonymous
You are seeing the world in black and white, whereas in reality it has various shades of
gray. The Deep State is not monolithic. Every snake in that pit wants to control not only us
"deplorables", but the other snakes, as well. While all those greedy rothschilds, soroses,
and adelsons beat even Devil himself in their lack of morals, some placed their bets on the
corrupt mad witch, while others on the orange clown. Some snakes are smart enough to
understand that to keep their loot they need the protection of a strong US state. Otherwise
other thieves would gladly steal their ill-gotten riches.
The presidents are frauds in a sense that they are puppets, but not in a sense that they
all have the same puppet master. Say, Nixon put the country ahead of the Empire and
extricated us from the Vietnam quagmire. There is a chance that Trump (i.e., the faction of
the Deep State that betted on him) also wants to save America as a country by acknowledging
the losses of the Empire and acting accordingly. We'll see soon enough.
Israel behind civilian planes ( this time in Lebanon)attacked Syria.
criticizing this piece of Israeli behavior is known as anti semitism according to Jew and
the jew slave Congress Senate , Diet , Parliament , ( USA Germany UK )
. If Saddam were Jewish , his pals were Likud and the citizen worshipped in synagogue ,
criticism against 1990 invasion of Kuwait would have been called anti semitism punishable by
jail .
@foolisholdman
There were cases of real Soviet aggression, although, contrary to the assertion of Western
propaganda, much fewer than there were cases of the US aggression. To give you an example,
invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was Soviet aggression at its stupidest. The US invasion of
the same Afghanistan in 2001 was equally stupid. One can argue that it was even more stupid,
given that Soviet example preceded it. Only a hopeless moron steps into a trap knowing that
it is a trap.
However disgusting the US foreign policy was and still is, the USSR was no knight in
shining armor, either.
@foolisholdman
Sure Finland Czechoslovakia Hungary Romania Ukraine Poland Germany Belarus Armenia Azerbaijan
Estonia Latvia Bulgaria Georgia Yugoslavia Lithuania Moldova Chechnia etc.
@DESERT
FOX September 11, 2016 Al Qaeda: The Data Base
Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the
House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of
international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas,
arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.
@AnonFromTN
Try again. Maybe 1979 was foolish, since "invasion" was manufactured.
As Zbig Brzezinski admitted, the Soviet action was produced by the CIA support to
anti-Russian Jihadi terrorism, not the other way round. Basically CIA funded terrorism to
"give USSR its own Vietnam." His interview is online.
@geokat62
geo warmly offered Fran: 'Welcome to the dark side, Fran."
Hey G.D.L.-robed Brother geokat!
As you likely are aware, the Syrian ballistic missile system gave 14 of 16 Israeli F-16
(dark) missiles aimed at Damascus outskirt a bright & shiny welcome.
But nonetheless, please refer to Haaretz article below, and Russian knowledge of Israel's
endangering two civilian airplane flight trajectories.
Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, of the United States Constitution:
[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to
make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur .
No such Treaty as approval was ever given by the Senate. Soros sock-puppet Obama lied when
he claimed to have extra-constitutional powers to bind future administrations. Remember
Obama's promise, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor"? There were plenty of
warning signs that Obama was a liar, so no one should be surprised that he lied about
JOCPA.
Trump did not violate or break anything , because the non-ratified, non-treaty did
not meet Constitutional minimums.
__________
Putin supporters should understand this as Russia has an identical issue in play. The
1950′s transfer of Crimea to Ukraine did not meet Russian constitutional standards.
Thus, identical to Trump's treatment of JOCPA, Putin is free to ignore the
unconstitutional acts of the prior Krushchev / Vorashilov administration.
@Agent76
Agree, and would add that AL CIADA ie ISIS is a creation of the CIA and the MOSSAD and MI6
and NATO and Robin Cook was killed shortly after he made those statements, who benefits?
@Miro23
"Trump is dealing with the lethal crowd who orchestrated 9/11 "
Well this line of thought raises some serious question: (1) Why did Trump run for
president in the first place? (2) Why did he run on a platform of open defiance to the "deep
state" only to occupy a position of intimidating powerlessness? (3) Why does he not fight
back by investigating 9/11 or merely threatening to do so? (4) Why does he not use the power
of the "presidential bully pulpit" against the "deep state"? (5) If he was sincere during the
campaign, why did the "lethal crowd" not deploy a "lone nut" against him before the election?
(With so much at stake, why would they risk letting a sincere person anywhere near the levers
of power in the first place?) (6) How could a reasonable person be coerced into a course of
action (in the realm of "foreign policy") that seems to be leading to nuclear war/planetary
extinction? (7) If he was sincere about putting America first, then failing everything else,
why doesn't he simply resign?
@A123
Legally speaking, you are right. Not to mention that Obama was proven to be a liar in many
other things. But withdrawing from the Iran deal damaged the US credibility even among its
European vassals.
@AnonFromTN
I've got good news for you. Sometimes the world/truth is really black and white. And in this
case, certainly is: Trump is a fraud , has always been and will always be.
And as far as I know , "American" presidents all have the same master, which by the way,is
the same master that Putin and his bunch of corrupt oligarchs serve.. Of course there are
exceptions Nixon did try to fight against his master but I presume you know what happened to
the poor man. Poor but lucky. He died in his bed.
You got something right: "We'll see soon enough.".
But let me tell you the future: there will be no withdraw from Syria UNLESS the king of
Israel agrees.
And if the King agrees, it is because, he has other objectives which his puppets, Trump,
Putin, Macron will certainly try to implement.
But don't worry, the deep state and the "experts" will always give you "arguments" so you
can keep seeing the world in "various shades of gray".
@anonymoys
Agree with two things. First, Nixon was luckier than Kennedy, he was only forced to resign,
whereas Kennedy was murdered. Second, the same forces were responsible for both events.
But these dark forces are not all-powerful. The world is more complicated than you paint
it. There are different factions at work in the US and Russian politics, and these factions
are doing their best to cut each others' throats, which is a good thing. We should sincerely
wish success to both teams.
Say, many Russian oligarchs (BTW, oligarchs everywhere are criminals, in Russia, in the
US, in Europe, etc.) are likely Zionists, but there are other forces supporting Putin's
throne. That's why Russia screwed up the Israeli plan to break up Syria into a bunch of
warring impotent Bantustans, using Islamic bandits, some paid scum, some just incredibly
stupid "true believers". In this Russia teamed up with the Israeli arch-enemy Iran. Judging
by the Imperial tantrums in the US, which reached a hysterical pitch lately, Zionists are
unhappy with Russian and Chinese stances. So, there is hope for humanity yet.
"During war there are no civilians," that's what "Yossi," an Israeli military (IDF)
training unit leader simply stated during a round of questioning on day two of the Rachel
Corrie trials, held in Haifa's District Court earlier this week. "When you write a
[protocol] manual, that manual is for war," he added.
@NoseytheDuke
I bow to your superior knowledge of American law(s) but do recall the distasteful way in
which one reads of not completely innocent defendants being swept up for plea bargains by
such devices as conspiracy charges. But yes, I'm afraid Howard was at least an accessory
before the fact and I have no doubt it was Howard that JMF had in mind when he looked at me
at an anti Howard government affair in October 2004 and spoke of war criminals who ought to
be tried though I recall thinking at the time that it went a bit far to include Howard, the
hanger on. As one who came to give Howard amoral admiration just for the sustained
determination needed to become a truly successful politician (Cf. F.S. Oliver "The Endless
Adventure" and "In Defence of Politics" by Bernard Crick) I am more critical of him for what
he did and didn't do with his surprise control of the Senate (not so surprising to him
actually by August 2004 polling) including election giveaways that did much to prevent
Keating's superannuation schemes ever leading to relief of the burden of old age pensions or,
worse, the rise of industry funds to, effectively, be a funding arm for (often private school
educated) Labor careerists who will give us 25 years of reduced productivity and unnecessary
retail penalty rates and (at least for a while) reduced shopping hours and availability of
path and radiology .. just e.g. Then maybe the drag from China no longer making our coal and
iron ore super valuable will force changes that recognise we 99 per cent of us are lucky
drones (pending a Merkel influx of a million incompatible refugees anyway, but that I would
not expect from Shorten).
@AnonFromTN
I will suggest that a blanket statement on credibility does not work as a logical construct.
To be accurate, one must define the perspective via the question:
-- Credibility in the eyes of whom?
I observed a significant increase in U.S. credibility among the citizens and governments
of practicing Christian nations of the EU. For example: Poland, Hungary, Austria, and
Italy.
Nations such as China that laughed at and casually rolled "Barak Hussein Obama the
Submissive" also upped their respect for the U.S. when Trump took over. Though, I do concede
that getting over a bar set at 0% (less than Rodney Dangerfield) is pretty easy.
Yes, U.S. National Socialist Democrats [DNC] lost credibility among Establishment Elites
of the NWO/UN Circle of Arrogance. After all, they failed to deliver Hillary Clinton to the
White House. However, DNC credibility among unelected elites at the debauched UN has nothing
to do with U.S. credibility among the civilized people of the world.
Israel did not fire any weapon system at any civilian airplane. It is a lie to say that
they did. Given the air space congestion in the area it is functionally impossible to fly a
combat mission without overlapping a flight route.
The only force that endangered civilian airliners were those firing anti-aircraft
missiles that could hit those planes.
This is why it is highly likely that Russia will never turn over S-300 systems to Syrian
control. Russia wants to sell these systems. Interest will drop to zero if Syrian forces use
the S-300 to shoot down a civilian airliner over another nation such as Lebanon or
Turkey.
@AnonFromTN
"There are different factions at work in the US and these factions are doing their best to
cut each others' throats, which is a good thing. We should sincerely wish success to both
teams."
Seriously? With the exception of perhaps "the wall" and a few other relatively minor
distractive issues (which won't matter very much when the U.S. is a pile of nuclear ash), I
don't see any kind of "faction" offering any serious political opposition whatsoever to
anything of significance that orange clown does. All I see is cheap talk/posturing.
Israel did not fire any weapon system at any civilian airplane.
Strawman.
Nobody said your people fired missiles at a civilian airline. You used civilian
airplanes to hide behind. It is called using human shields – a war crime.
As for Russia handing over control of S-300′s to Syria, I would advise you to
continue to believe that. I look forward to your hubris and arrogance causing you to vanish
in a puff of smoke one day.
blanket statement on credibility does not work as a logical construct
Agree. But you appear to think that a blanket statement on "civilized people of the world"
works as a logical construct. Sorry to disappoint, it does not work, either.
After Trump announced that the US withdraws, every one of the other signatories of JCPOA
(Iran nuclear deal), namely China, France, Germany, EU, Russia, UK, and Iran said that they
will abide by the deal, with Iranian stipulation that if the US attempts any hostile action,
it would consider itself no longer bound by it. To wit, France, Germany, UK, and EU are
subservient pawns of the Empire in most cases.
Iranians explicitly said that the US unilateral withdrawal from this deal shows that it is
useless to negotiate with the US and come to any agreements with it, as the US will likely
break its word any time it finds it convenient. This did a huge damage to the credibility of
the country, no matter how you slice or dice it.
I agree regarding DNC credibility. After they falsified the results of their primaries (as
Wasserman-Schultz resignation right before the convention affirmed), DNC cannot claim any
credibility. Not that they even needed this trick: Sanders proved to be just as much of a
fraud and a piece of shit as the mad witch. However, DNC has nothing to do with it. Obama
administration was supposed to represent the country, not DNC. If the ability of Trump to act
as President depended on the credibility of RNC (which is as low as that of DNC, although
they did not falsify primaries, to the dismay of Deep State), our country is done for.
The President is supposed to be the leader of the country, not just his party. The actions
of both Obama and Trump in the international affairs that are meant for internal consumption
undermine the US more than any act of its avowed enemies.
Fyi, I particularly despise the Zionist GWOT designations, "collateral damage," and the
demonic branding of wartime Prisoners of War as "non-combatants," and exempt from
internationally recognized Geneva Convention treatment while in ZUSA military captivity.
As a veteran who took an August 1970 solemn oath to honor humane treatment of war
prisoners, & post-9/11, am wondering if taking such noble vow was being done throughout
Basic Training posts, stationed across our (argh!) "Homeland."
Really made me sick to see how Sergeant Charles Garner and P.F.C. Lyndi England were held
accountable for their barbaric Abu Ghraib acts, and shortly afterward, the
freak-intellectual, John Yoo, became the distorted administration's Prisoner-Torture High
Priest. (Zigh)
Am wondering in which prosperous U.S. Zionist "career" field has John Yoo landed?
Hm. Perhaps U.R. Comment-Research Specialist can help me here?
-- Do violent Iranian al-Hezbollah forces in Syria take off for Christian holidays?
No?
-- Do violent Iranian al-Hamas forces in Gaza disrespect their own religion by launching
offensive, border assaults every Friday? Yes?
I've got good news for you. Sometimes the world/truth is really black and white. And in
this case, certainly is: Trump is a fraud , has always been and will always be.
we can't be 100% sure yet but it's looking that way
unless that wall starts getting built pronto i don't see any reason to suport him 2020
All right and clear
Pity, that the lot is stained by the dropping-like sterotype about Goebels' "big lie"
Never mind it's of Hitler's labour, not Goebels', but, more important, in Mein Kampf it is
clearly expressed as a warning (beware..) against the chosen-tribe techniques.. The autor
should be learned enough to know better: superficiality or malice?
@A123
You are so desperate that you are looking under the mattress to find your last penny. Why
don't you ask your grandmother to ( Ben Guiron or Gold mare or some WaPo Rubin or KKK-
Krathamer Kristol Kagan ) to find it for you ?
"... On December 19, Donald Trump announced in a Twitter message: "Our boys, our young women, our men, they're all coming back and they're coming back now. We won". Shortly thereafter, Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement: "We have started the process of returning US troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign". ..."
"... The temperature is heating up for Trump following the midterms, as the Democrats prepare to take command of the House of Representatives in January, something that Trump had always hoped to avert. He surrounded himself with generals, in the forlorn hope that this would somehow protect him. If the last two years of his presidency were constantly under the cloud of Mueller's investigation, or insinuations of being an agent of Putin, from January 2019 the situation is going to get much more complicated. The Democratic electoral base is baying for the President's impeachment, the party already in full pre-primary mode, with more than 20 candidates competing, with the incumbent of the White House offering the rallying cry. ..."
"... Given that 70% of Americans think that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake, the more that the mainstream media attacks Trump for his decision to withdraw, the more they direct votes to Trump. In this sense, Trump's move seems to be directed at a domestic rather than an international audience. ..."
"... The decision to get out of Syria is timed to coincide with another move that will also very much please Trump's base. The government shutdown is a result of the Democrats refusing to fund Trump's campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexican border. ..."
"... The choice to announce to his base, via Twitter, a victory against ISIS and the immediate withdrawal of US troops was a smart election move with an eye on the 2020 election. ..."
"... Macron has for now reacted angrily at Trump's decision, intensifying the division between the two, and is adamant that the French military presence in Syria will continue. ..."
"... The military-industrial-intelligence-media complex considers Trump's decision the worst of of all possible moves. Mattis even resigned on account of this. ..."
"... For Israel, it is a double disaster, with Netanyahu desperate to survive, seeking to factor in expected elections in a now-or-never political move. Trump probably understands that Bibi is done for, and that at this point, the withdrawal of troops, fulfilling a fundamental electoral promise, counts more than Israeli money and his friendship to Bibi. ..."
On December 19, Donald Trump announced in a Twitter message: "Our boys, our young women,
our men, they're all coming back and they're coming back now. We won". Shortly thereafter,
Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement: "We have started the process of returning
US troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign".
The reasons for Donald Trump's move are many, but they are mainly driven by US domestic
concerns. The temperature is heating up for Trump following the midterms, as the Democrats
prepare to take command of the House of Representatives in January, something that Trump had
always hoped to avert. He surrounded himself with generals, in the forlorn hope that this would
somehow protect him. If the last two years of his presidency were constantly under the cloud of
Mueller's investigation, or insinuations of being an agent of Putin, from January 2019 the
situation is going to get much more complicated. The Democratic electoral base is baying for
the President's impeachment, the party already in full pre-primary mode, with more than 20
candidates competing, with the incumbent of the White House offering the rallying cry.
The combination of these factors has forced Trump to change gears, considering that the
military-industrial-intelligence-media-complex has always been ready to get rid of Trump, even
in favor of a President Pence. The only option available for Trump in order to have a chance of
reelection in 2020 is to undertake a self-promotion tour, a practice in which he has few peers,
and which will involve him repeating his mantra of "Promises Made, Promises Kept". He will list
how he has fought against the fake-news media, suffered internal sabotage, as well as other
efforts (from the Fed, the FBI, and Mueller himself) to hamper his efforts to "Make America
Great Again".
Trump has perhaps understood that in order to be re-elected, he must pursue a simple media
strategy that will have a direct impact on his base. Withdrawing US troops from Syria, and
partly from Afghanistan, serves this purpose. It is an easy way to win with his constituents,
while it is a heavy blow to his fiercest critics in Washington who are against this decision.
Given that 70% of Americans think that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake, the more that the
mainstream media attacks Trump for his decision to withdraw, the more they direct votes to
Trump. In this sense, Trump's move seems to be directed at a domestic rather than an
international audience.
The decision to get out of Syria is timed to coincide with another move that will also very
much please Trump's base. The government shutdown is a result of the Democrats refusing to fund
Trump's campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexican border. It is not difficult to
understand that the average citizen is fed up with the useless wars in the Middle East, and
Trump's words on immigration resonate with his voters. The more the media, the Democrats and
the deep state criticize Trump on the wall, on the Syria pull out and on shutting down the
government, the more they are campaigning for him.
This is why in order to understand the withdrawal of the United States from Syria it is
necessary to see things from Trump's perspective, even as frustrating, confusing and
incomprehensible that may seem at times.
The difference this time around was that the decision to withdraw US troops from Syria was
Trump's alone, not something imposed on him by the generals that surround him. The choice to
announce to his base, via Twitter, a victory against ISIS and the immediate withdrawal of US
troops was a smart election move with an eye on the 2020 election.
It is possible that Trump, as is his wont, also wanted to send a message to his alleged
French and British allies present in the northeast of Syria alongside the Syrian Democratic
Forces (SDF) and US soldiers. Trump may be now taunting: "Let's see what you can do without the
US!"
It is as if Trump is admonishing these countries in a more concrete way for not lifting
their weight in terms of military spending. Trump is vindictive and is not averse, after taking
advantage of his opponent, to kicking him once he is down. Trump could be correct in this
regard, and maybe French and British forces will be forced to withdraw their small group of 400
to 500 illegal occupiers of Syrian territory. Macron has for now reacted angrily at Trump's
decision, intensifying the division between the two, and is adamant that the French military
presence in Syria will continue.
There is also a more refined reason to justify the US withdrawal, even if Trump is probably
unaware of it. The problem in these cases is always trying to peer through the fog of war and
propaganda in order to discern the clear, unadulterated truth.
We should begin by listing the winners and losers of the Syrian conflict. Damascus, Moscow,
Tehran and Hezbollah have won the war against aggression. Riyadh, Doha, Paris, London, Tel Aviv
and Washington, with their al Qaeda, Daesh and Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist proxies, failed to
destroy Syria, and following seven years of effort, are forced to scurry away in defeat.
Those who are walking a tightrope between war and defeat are Ankara and the so-called SDF.
The withdrawal of the United States has confirmed the balance on the ledger of winners and
losers, with the clock counting down for Erdogan and the SDF to make their next determinative
move.
The enemies of Syria survive thanks to repeated bluffs. The Americans of the
military-industrial-intelligence apparatus maintain the pretence that they still have an
influence in Syria, what with troops on the ground, attacking Trump for withdrawing. In fact,
since the Russians have imposed a no-fly-zone across the country, with the S-300 systems and
other sophisticated equipment that integrate the Syrian air-defenses into the Russian air
defenses, US coalition planes are for all intents and purposes grounded, and the same goes for
the Israelis.
Of course the French and British in Syria are infected with the same delusional disease,
choosing to believe that they can count for something without the US presence. We will see in
the near future whether they also withdraw their illegal presence from Syria.
The biggest bluff of all probably comes from Erdogan, who for months threatened to invade
Syria to fight ISIS, the Kurds, or any other plausible excuse to invade a sovereign country for
the purposes of advancing his dreams of expanding Turkish territory as far as Idlib (which
Erdogan considers a province of Turkey). Such an invasion, however, is unlikely to happen, as
it would unite the SDF, Damascus and her allies to reject the Turkish advance on Syrian
territory.
The Kurds in turn seem to have only one option left, namely, a forced negotiation with
Damascus to give back to the Syrian people, in exchange for protection, the control of their
territory that is rich in oil and gas.
Erdogan wants to eliminate the SDF, and until now, the only thing that stood in his way was
the US military presence. He even threatened to attack several times, even in spite of the
presence of US troops. Ankara has long been on a collision course with NATO countries on
account of this. By removing US troops, Trump imagines, relations between Turkey and the US may
also improve. This of course is of little interest to the US deep state, since Erdogan, like
Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), is considered unsuitable, and is accordingly branded a
"dictator".
Trump probably believes that with this move, as with his defense of MBS concerning
Khashoggi, that he can try and establish a strong personal friendship with Erdogan. There are
even talks about the sale of Patriot systems to the Turks and the extradition of Gulen.
When Will They Leave, and Cui Prodest?
It remains to be confirmed when and to what extent US troops will leave Syria. If the US had
no voice in the future in Syria, with 2,000 men on the ground, now it has even less. Leaving
behind 200 to 300 special forces and CIA operatives, together with another 400 to 500 French
and British personnel, will, once they are captured with their Daesh and al Qaeda friends, be
an excellent bargaining chip for Damascus, as they were in Aleppo.
The military-industrial-intelligence-media complex considers Trump's decision the worst of
of all possible moves. Mattis even resigned on account of this. The presence of US troops in
Syria allowed the foreign-policy establishment to continue to formulate plans (and spend money
to pay a lot of people in Washington) based on the delusion that they are doing something in
Syria to change the course of events. For Israel, it is a double disaster, with Netanyahu
desperate to survive, seeking to factor in expected elections in a now-or-never political move.
Trump probably understands that Bibi is done for, and that at this point, the withdrawal of
troops, fulfilling a fundamental electoral promise, counts more than Israeli money and his
friendship to Bibi.
Erdogan has two options before him. On the one hand, he can act against the Kurds. On the
other hand, he can sit down at the negotiating table with Damascus and the SDF, in an Astana
format, guided by Iran and Russia. Putin and Rouhani are certainly pushing for this solution.
Trump, on the other hand, would like to see Turkey enter Syria in the place of US forces, to
demonstrate he concluded a win-win deal for everyone, beating the deep-state at their own
game.
Erdogan does not really have the military force necessary to enter Syria, which is the big
secret. He would be against both the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the SDF, though the two not
necessarily in an alliance.
There is a triple bluff going on, and this is what is complicating the situation so much. On
the one hand, the SDF is bluffing in not wanting help from Damascus in case Erdogan sends in
his forces; on the other hand, Erdogan is bluffing in suggesting he is able to conquer the
territory held by the SDF; and finally, the French and British are bluffing by telling the SDF
they will be able to help them against both Erdogan and/or Assad.
Iran, Russia, Syria are the only ones who do not need to bluff, because they occupy the best
position – the commanding heights. They view Trump's decisions and his allies with
distrust. They know very well that these are mostly moves for internal consumption by the
enemies of Syria.
If the US withdraws, there is so much to be gained. The priority then becomes the west of
Syria, sealing the borders with Jordan, removing the pockets of terrorists from the east, and
securing the al-Tanf crossing. If the SDF will request protection from Damascus and will be
willing to participate in the liberation of the country and its reconstruction, Erdogan will be
done for, and this could lead to the total liberation of Idlib. It would be the best possible
outcome, an important national reconciliation between two important parts of the population. It
would give Damascus new economic impetus and prepare the Syrian people to expel the remaining
invaders (ISIS and the FSA/ Turkish Armed Forces) from the country, both in Idlib and in the
northeast in Afrin.
Russia is aware of the risk that Erdogan is running with the choices he will take in the
coming days. Perhaps the reason why Putin chose diplomacy over war with Turkey after the
downing of a Russian Su-24 in 2015 was in order to arrive at this precise moment, with as many
elements as possible present to convince Erdogan to stick with Russia and Iran instead of
embracing Trump's strategy and putting himself on an open collision course with Damascus,
Moscow and Tehran.
Putin has always been five moves ahead. He is aware that the US could not stay long in
Syria. He knows that France and the UK cannot support the SDF, and that the SDF cannot hold
territory it holds in Syria without an agreement with Damascus. He is also conscious that
Turkey does not have the strength to enter Syria and hold the territory if it did. It would
only be able justify an advance on Idlib with the support of the Russian Air Force.
Putin has certainly made it clear to Erdogan that if he made such a move to attack the SDF
and enter Syria, Russia in turn would militarily support the SAA with its air force to free
Idlib; and in case of incidents with Turkey, the Russian armed forces would respond with all
the interest earned from the unrequited downing of the Su-24 in 2015.
Erdogan has no choice. He must find an agreement with Damascus, and this is why he found
himself commenting on Trump's words the following day, criticizing US sanctions on Iran in the
presence of Iranian president Rouhani. The SDF know that they are between a rock and a hard
place, and have already sent a delegation to start negotiations with Damascus.
Trump's move was driven by US domestic politics and aimed at the 2020 elections. But in
doing so, Trump inevitably called out once and for all the bluffs built by Syria's enemies,
infuriating in the process the neoliberal imperialist establishment, revealing how each of
these factions has no more cards to play and is in actual fact destined for defeat.
Nov 9, 2010 -- 17 charged in $42 million Holocaust fraud case. FBI: Employees at Jewish
Claims Center had people pretend to be victims of Nazi persecution so they could collect
money German funds over 6000 phony claims
Germany Seeks Compensation for $57M Holocaust Fraud -- The Forward https://forward.com › News ›
World
Apr 17, 2015 -- Germany is for the first time seeking compensation for the $57 million
lost to fraud at the Claims Conference. But the Holocaust agency says it
"So we go to fallback argument B, which is "containing Iran." "Containment" was a U.S. policy
devised by George Kennan in 1947 to inhibit the expansion of a powerful and sometimes
aggressive soon-to-be nuclear armed Soviet Union, which was rightly seen as a serious
threat."
Seen as a serious threat by some?
"Taken together, these four volumes constitute an extraordinary commentary on a basic
weakness in the Soviet system. The Soviets are heavily dependent on Western technology and
innovation not only in their civilian industries, but also in their military programs. An
inevitable conclusion from the evidence in this book is that we have totally ignored a policy
that would enable us to neutralize Soviet global ambitions while simultaneously reducing the
defense budget and the tax load on American citizens."
"Containment" was a U.S. policy devised by George Kennan in 1947 to inhibit the expansion of
a powerful and sometimes aggressive soon-to-be nuclear armed Soviet Union, which was rightly
seen as a serious threat.
"which was rightly seen as a serious threat." So it was, was it? That's really the
beginning of the bullshit in American policy. There were a few naysayers back then, since
largely vindicated by the opening of former Soviet archives, who claimed that Stalin's
postwar moves were largely defensive in nature and intended to protect the USSR from the
talked about US preemptive attack on the Soviet Union. Stalin was well aware of all the loose
talk on the American side and his country had just endured the same attempt on the part of
Nazi Germany.
"Containment" was a U.S. policy devised by George Kennan in 1947 to inhibit the
expansion of a powerful and sometimes aggressive soon-to-be nuclear armed Soviet Union,
which was rightly seen as a serious threat.
Could someone explain to me how exactly was the Soviet Union a serious threat to the US,
particularly in 1947? The country was devastated by the war; some regions suffered from
hunger, for goodness' sake; tens of millions were dead or maimed; the worked force was
depleted as million of young men were killed, so the economic burden fell on the shoulders of
women and teenagers; the cost of housing of people left homeless by the war was staggering;
the cost of caring for orphan children, wounded and invalids -- ditto. In contrast, the
United States was getting fatter by the minutes having benefited enormously from the war in
Europe.
The Soviet Union "sometimes aggressive"? I am not aware of any Soviet plans to attack the
US but we all know about the American and British plant to attack the USSR formulated as
early as in 1945. No doubts the Soviet leadership was aware of such plans. The Soviets,
having witnessed a demonstration staged for their benefits in Japans of the power of nuclear
weapons, did everything with one purpose in mind: to prevent an attack, which they were in no
position to withstand. Needless to say, the USSR didn't have nuclear weapons at that time but
even after it had acquired them, it didn't quite catch up with the US in terms on number
until the very end.
It's fair to say that the Soviet Union was never ever a thereat to the US. On the
contrary, the US was a threat to the Soviet Union from the fist till the last day of its
existence, as it remains a treat to Russia today. The problems with the Americans, even the
most reasonable of them (not at all difficult to appear on today's insane background), is
that they don't question the entire narrative they are fed but only the bits of it.
@Tony
H. George Kennan's attitude towards Russia had evolved throughout the 70s-90s, but this
evolution has been carefully obscured by the ziocon warriors and other war-profiteers using
the ZUSA resources for their personal enrichment:
With the end of the Cold War, Kennan continued to emphasize the limits of American power
and the need for restraint in the exercise of it.
He lived to see the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war and
characteristically aimed to influence the role that the United States should play in the
new world circumstances.
He objected to plans for North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion and to what he saw
as exploitation of Russian weakness.
"... Maybe I am overestimating the intelligence of MIC profiteers, but my impression is that those thieves know that their loot is only useful as long as they are alive. There is a lot of silly hostile talk against Russia and China, but have you noticed how the US military always makes sure that there are no direct confrontations with countries that can turn the US into radioactive dust? The profiteers want huge Pentagon budget to steal from, but not the war where they lose along with everyone else. ..."
Maybe I am overestimating the intelligence of MIC profiteers, but my impression is that those thieves know that their loot
is only useful as long as they are alive. There is a lot of silly hostile talk against Russia and China, but have you noticed
how the US military always makes sure that there are no direct confrontations with countries that can turn the US into radioactive
dust? The profiteers want huge Pentagon budget to steal from, but not the war where they lose along with everyone else.
As to the wall, it is one of the silliest projects ever suggested. Maybe that's why it was so easy to sell it to the intellectually
disadvantaged electorate. There are two things that can stop illegal immigration.
First, go for the employers, enact a law that fines them to the tune of $50,000 or more per every illegal they employ. Second,
enact the law that anyone caught residing in the US illegally has no right to enter the US legally, to obtain asylum, permanent
residency, or citizenship for life, and include a provision that marriage to a US citizen does not nullify this ban.
Then enforce both laws. After that illegals would run out of the country, and greedy employers won't hire any more. Naturally,
the wall, even if built, won't change anything: as long as there are employers trying to save on salaries, immigration fees, and
Social Security tax, and people willing to live and work illegally risking nothing, no wall would stem the flow.
Unfortunately, no side is even thinking about real measures, both are just posturing.
But let me tell you the future: there will be no withdraw from Syria UNLESS the king of
Israel agrees.
No doubt about it. I'm sure the Trumpster is telling us peasants what we want to hear,
just as he did while campaigning, and who knows if the US military will really get out of
Syria on his order. I myself think he's bullshitting, but I hope I'm wrong.
@ChuckOrloski
Pretty much. Sounds like "the only democracy in the Middle East".
But if we cry for every victim of Israeli scheming, we can't drink enough to replenish the
store of tears. Maybe we should do something about it, rather than crying or laughing? Or
commenting here lulled by false anonymity? NSA is listening, anyway.
"... If in addition to withdrawing from Syria orange clown were to stop arming the "government" of "Ukraine" and agree to negotiations with Russia on the issue of intermediate range nuclear armed missiles in Europe -- with a goal to support/strengthen the INF treaty rather than withdraw from it -- I might be willing to entertain the idea that something's changed. ..."
"... Call me cynical but I think you cannot take ANYTHING our masters say or do, e.g. this, at face value. ..."
"... just watch their behaviour -- the wall never gets built even though they are now talking about increasing the "defense" budget from $700 billion to $750 billion next year -- the increase alone is the cost of two walls ..."
"President Donald Trump's order to withdraw from Syria has been greeted, predictably, with an
avalanche of condemnation culminating in last Thursday's resignation by Defense Secretary
James Mattis. The Mattis resignation letter focused on the betrayal of allies "
Call me cynical but I think you cannot take ANYTHING our masters say or do, e.g. this, at
face value.
Orange clown's alleged disengagement from Syria may be (and probably is) nothing more that
a tactical retreat/change in plans for which the Mattis resignation is merely a fig leaf;
that is, it's just more of the same disingenuous dialectics that we've been bombarded with
since the beginning of the "Trump" administration.
Apparently we're urged to conclude that Trump has finally had enough of the people he
knowingly and willingly surrounded himself with, and their agenda, and now all of a sudden
(because of some kind of a spiritual epiphany, pro-American New Year's resolution, etc.) he
wants to do right by (some of) his supporters by doing what he should've done a long time
ago. (And the hint of a military drawdown in Afghanistan adds a nice touch).
Sorry but I can't buy what they're selling.
If in addition to withdrawing from Syria orange clown were to stop arming the
"government" of "Ukraine" and agree to negotiations with Russia on the issue of intermediate
range nuclear armed missiles in Europe -- with a goal to support/strengthen the INF treaty
rather than withdraw from it -- I might be willing to entertain the idea that something's
changed.
As it is now it'll take a lot more than the obligatory "avalanche of condemnation" i.e.,
cheap words, to convince me that the perfidious orange clown and his jewish-supremacist
handlers are doing anything other than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic with one
hand while steering it into the iceberg with the other hand.
Call me cynical but I think you cannot take ANYTHING our masters say or do, e.g.
this, at face value.
agree
just watch their behaviour -- the wall never gets built even though they are now
talking about increasing the "defense" budget from $700 billion to $750 billion next year --
the increase alone is the cost of two walls
Although Russia has avoided any direct military challenge to NATO, it has nonetheless
shown a growing willingness to disrupt the status quo: through its use of force in Georgia
in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014, its often indiscriminate military intervention in Syria,
and its aggressive use of cyberwarfare to attempt to affect political outcomes in the
United States and Europe.
Haass is a Cheney's choice of opportunist and Goebbelsian kind of criminal:
Haass was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn From 1989 to 1993, he was Special
Assistant to United States President George H. W. Bush and National Security Council Senior
Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs. In 1991, Haass received the Presidential
Citizens Medal for helping to develop and explain U.S. policy during Operation Desert
Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Haass argued that the leaders of the United States
should adopt "an imperial foreign policy" to construct and manage an informal American
empire (Haass 2000)
.local sources told Al Jazeera and Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency --
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Tuesday that Ankara and Washington
agreed to complete withdrawal of the YPG forces from Manbij before the US pulls out of
Syria.
He added the US agreed to take back weapons given to the YPG.
Syrian government forces 'enter' Kurdish-controlled Manbij region. Trucks carrying
regime forces and equipment, and armoured vehicles have arrived in the region, sources
say.
Withdrawing from Syria is the right thing to do, though one has to be concerned that
there might be some secret side deals with Israel or Turkey that could actually result in
more attacks on Syria and on the Kurds.
Netanyahu says he will escalate attacks against Iran in Syria. Lets see if Russia
takes exception to that.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel will escalate its fight against Iranian-aligned forces
in Syria after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday.
Some Israeli officials have said U.S. President Donald Trump's move, announced on
Wednesday, could help Iran by removing a U.S. garrison that stems the movement of Iranian
forces and weaponry into Syria from Iraq.
Israel also worries that its main ally's exit could reduce its diplomatic leverage with
Russia, the Syrian government's big-power backer.
"We will continue to act very aggressively against Iran's efforts to entrench in Syria,"
Netanyahu said in televised remarks, referring to an Israeli air campaign in Syria against
Iranian deployments and arms transfers to Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas, carried out with
Moscow often turning a blind eye.
"We do not intend to reduce our efforts. We will intensify them, and I know that we do so
with the full support and backing of the United States."
4,000,000 Muslims have been killed as a consequence of the wars since 2001, millions more
displaced. More than 8,000 U.S. military have died in wars whose purpose was to take the
oil from the Arab s, a purpose which started in 1897 with at the Zionist Congress in
Switzerland. -- $6 trillion you say and counting, much of it borrowed. War without end means
killing without end and it has to stop.
Your article names the supporters of the war bandits and invading countries who rob the
govern of there of their money, so the money can be used to destroy the lives and to reduce
the quality of life in the target place to tribal at best (Iraq, Syria, Yemen and
Afghanistan). You mentioned war gang supporters Reuters, NYT, WoPo, mainstream television
news providers , Pentagon, the Middle East Institute, and Israel.. but you left out so many
others.
The important people to be considered in this are the Syrians humans governed by the Assad
Syrian Government. & years of catching USA, British, French, Turkish, and Israeli bombs
and donating, to Saudia Arabia raised Wahhabi's, Syrian heads and Syrian body parts, and
being forced into homeless status as refugees of one more invader war, the Syrian people have
evolved into strong nation organized to defend against the most powerful militarises in the
world, they have voted 87% to keep Dr. Assad in three different elections as their leader.
But something else happened: Syria became stronger, Syria became an international player,
because both Russia and Iran joined to help Syria defend its sovereignty and to defend the
lives of the Syrian people. I cannot think of one single American who wants anything the
Syrian people have?
Why the war? So a few oil companies can steal the oil in Syria and run oil pipelines
through Syria in order to defeat Russia's oil sales to Europe. Its not about Israel security
(no threatens to invade Israel), its about Zionist greed and the urge to be entertained by
murdering people in their homes.
So, Trump bends over his second least favorite babysitter/general, Mattis, and orders a
complete withdrawal from Syria opening the door to NATO's Turkey to go after the Kurd units
there, which is an interesting development.
Putin wanted the USA out but he also has warned Erdogan against funneling Idlib's Salafi
militants to Syria's Kurdish region, something Erdogan has been keen to do. Actually I expect
the erratic Erdogan will go for it anyway, and small wonder at that, considering Erdogan's
intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, whose personal history is one of a bona fide member of al
Qaida. Is Putin ready for Erdogan to back-stab Russia again? (recalling Erdogan's military
had shot down a Russian jet.) This has to be the biggest geopolitical soap opera of the
moment:
"The third disagreement is related to the fate of extremists as Turkish officials want
to transfer them to Kurdish-controlled areas while Russian officials insist on "terminating
them""
So, then Trump's detractors (includes Mattis) will point the finger at Trump (not Turkey)
when Syria's east is reinfected with Salafi militants but secretly pleased Erdogan has
reopened the terrorism pipeline into Syria if only because it will cause Assad and Russia
problems, as well, there is the perpetual profits motive (noted by Phil.) And, so it goes
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected] . ..."
"... My impression is, ISIS is a mossad-Jewish lobby creation to win the PR war against Muslims and to keep the US attacking and "containing" Israel's geopolitical adversaries and eternally occupying Arab lands, and well, to Make Israel Safe Again ™ ..."
"... Today's Jerusalem Post had a link to this Kamala Harris political fund-raising ad. ..."
"... Boot, Nuland, Shapiro, Stephens, Reiner, etc etc – one (((chickenhawk))) after another ..."
"... This is the first sane thing Trump did in two years. Also, this is the first action he promised his supporters in 2016. Naturally, Israel-firsters, who in 2016 backed the corrupt mad witch to a man, are unhappy. ..."
"... Brits simply love using the U.S. military for their own venal objectives. And if anything goes wrong, the Brits can distance themselves and blame it on "the Yanks." A win-win ..."
"... NYT, CNN, WaPo, and others of their ilk are desperately trying to appear peace-loving while promoting wars that benefit MIC and Israel. Hypocrisy at its most awkward. The only good thing is, they are forced to show their true colors. ..."
President Donald Trump's order to withdraw from Syria has been greeted, predictably, with an
avalanche of condemnation culminating in last Thursday's resignation by Defense Secretary James
Mattis. The Mattis resignation
letter focused on the betrayal of allies, though it was inevitably light on details,
suggesting that the Marine Corps General was having some difficulty in discerning that American
interests might be somewhat different than those of feckless and faux allies like Israel and
Saudi Arabia that are adept at manipulating the levers of power in Washington and in the media.
Mattis clearly appreciates that having allies is a force multiplier in wartime but fails to
understand that it is a liability otherwise as the allies create an obligation to go to war on
their behalf rather than in response to any actual national interest.
The media was quick to line up behind Mattis. On Friday, The New York Times
featured
a lead editorial entitled "Jim Mattis was right" while neocon twitter accounts blazed with
indignation. Prominent chickenhawk mouthpieces David Frum and Bill Kristol, among many others,
tweeted
that the end is nigh.
During the day preceding Mattis's dramatic announcement, the press went to war against the
Administration over Syria and also regarding other reports that there would be troop reductions
in Afghanistan. The following headline actually appeared
on a Reuters online article the day after the announcement by the president: "In Syria
retreat, Trump rebuffs top advisers and blindsides U.S. commanders." It would be difficult to
imagine stuffing more bullshit into one relatively short sentence. "Retreat," "rebuffs" and
"blindsides" are not words that are intended to convey any sort of even-handed assessment of
what is occurring in U.S. policy towards the Middle East. They are instead meant to imply that
"Hey, that moron in the White House has screwed up again!"
Consider for a moment the agenda that Reuters is apparently pushing. It is supporting an
illegal
and unconstitutional invasion of Syria by the United States that has a stated primary
objective of removing a terrorist organization which is already mostly gone and a less
frequently acknowledged goal of regime change for the legitimate government in Damascus and the
expulsion of that government's principal allies. Reuters is asserting that staying in Syria
would be a good thing for the United States and also for its "allies" in the region even though
there is no way to "win" and no exit strategy.
Reuters is presumably basing its assessment on the collective judgments of a group of "top
advisers" who are warmongers that the rest of the world as well as many Americans consider to
be psychopaths or possibly even insane. And then there are the preferences of the "blindsided"
generals, like Mattis, who have a personal interest in career terms for maintaining a constant
state of warfare. If you want to really know how what the military thinks about an ongoing war
ask a sergeant or a private, never a general. They will tell you that they are sick of endless
deployments that accomplish nothing.
The New York Timeslead story
headline on Thursday also let you know that its Editors were not please by Trump's move. It
read "U.S. ExitSeen as a Betrayal of the Kurds, and a Boon for ISIS." They also
editorialized "Trump's Decision to Withdraw From Syria Is Alarming. Just Ask His
Advisers."
The Washington Post was not far behind. It immediately ran an op-ed by the
redoubtable neocon chickenhawk Max Boot, whom Caitlin Johnstone
has dubbed The Man Who Has Been Wrong About Everything. The piece was entitled
Trump's surprise Syria pullout is a giant Christmas gift to our enemies making a twofer
with an incredible "Fuck the EU"
Victoria Nuland's piece entitled "In a single tweet Trump destroys U.S. policy in the
Middle East," which appeared simultaneously. That anyone would regard Boot and Nuland as
objective authorities on the Middle East given their ultimate and prevailing loyalty to Israel
has to be wondered at, but then again Fred Hiatt is the editorial/opinion page editor and he is
of the same persuasion, both ethnically and philosophically. They are all, of course, devoted
Zionists and the big lie about what is going on in the region is apparently always worth
repeating. As Joseph Goebbels put it in 1941 " when one lies, one should lie big,
and stick to it even at the risk of looking ridiculous."
Comments relating to the articles, op-eds and editorials in the Post and
Times bordered on the hysterical, sometimes suggesting that readers actually believe
that Trump was following orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin. And what was stirring at
Reuters, The Times , and the Post was only the tip of the iceberg. The
mainstream television news providers united in condemning the audacity of a president who might
actually try to end a war while the only favorable commentary on Trump's having taken a step
that is long overdue came from the alternative media.
One might profitably recall how Trump has only been praised as "presidential" by the
Establishment twice – when he staged cruise missile attacks on Syria based on faulty
intelligence. The Deep State wants blood, make no mistake about it and it is not interested in
"retreat." And Trump will also get almost no support from Congress, with only longtime critics
of Syrian policy Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee as well as Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard
praising the move initially.
The arguments being made to criticize the Trump initiative were essentially cookie cutter
neocon soundbites. The Reuters piece in its first few lines of text asserts that the reversal
of policy "stunned lawmakers and allies with his order for U.S. troops to leave Syria, a
decision that upends American policy in the Middle East. The result, said current and former
officials and people briefed on the decision, will empower Russia and Iran and leave unfinished
the goal of erasing the risk that Islamic State, or ISIS, which has lost all but a sliver
territory, could rebuild." The article goes on to quote an anonymous Pentagon source who opined
that " Trump's decision was widely seen in the Pentagon as benefiting Russia as well as Iran,
both of which have used their support for the Syrian government to bolster their regional
influence. Iran also has improved its ability to ship arms to Lebanese Hezbollah for use
against Israel. Asked who gained from the withdrawal, the defense official, who spoke on
condition of anonymity, replied: 'Geopolitically Russia, regionally Iran.'"
Another so-called expert Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute was also cited in the
article, saying "It completely takes apart America's broader strategy in Syria, but perhaps
more importantly, the centerpiece of the Trump administration policy, which is containing
Iran."
Israel is also
turning up the heat on Trump, claiming that the move will make it more insecure. Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to increase air attacks on Iranian targets in Syria as an
added security measure to make up for the American betrayal. Normally liberal American Jews
have joined the hue and cry against Trump on behalf of Israel. Filmmaker Rob Reiner
tweeted on Thursday that the president is a "childish moronic mentally unstable malignant
narcissist" who is "committing Treason" against the United States.
The real story, lost in the wailing and gnashing to teeth, is that even after conceding that
Donald Trump's hyperbolic claim that the United States had defeated ISIS as the motive for the
withdrawal is nonsense, there is still no good reason for Washington to continue to keep troops
in Syria. The U.S. in reality did far less in the war against the terrorist groups infesting
the region than did the Russians, Iranians or the Syrians themselves and, as a result, it will
have less say in what kind of Syria emerges from the carnage. That is almost certainly a good
thing for the Syrian people.
But let's assume for sake of argument that the U.S. invasion really was about ISIS. Well,
ISIS continues to hold on to a small bit of territory near the Euphrates River and is reported
to have between one and two thousand remaining fighters. There are other estimates suggesting
that between 10,000 and 20,000 followers have dispersed and gone underground awaiting a
possible resurgence by the group. The argument that ISIS will reorganize and re-emerge as a
result of the American withdrawal assumes that it is the 2,000 strong U.S. armed forces that
are keeping it down, which is ridiculous. The best remedy against an ISIS recovery is to
support a restored and re-unified Syria, which will have more than enough resources available
to eliminate the last bits of the terrorist groups remaining in its territory.
So we go to fallback argument B, which is "containing Iran." "Containment" was a U.S. policy
devised by George Kennan in 1947 to inhibit the expansion of a powerful and sometimes
aggressive soon-to-be nuclear armed Soviet Union, which was rightly seen as a serious threat.
Iran is a second world country with a small military and economy with no nuclear arsenal and it
neither threatens the United States nor any of its neighbors. But Israel supported by Saudi
Arabia does not like Iran and has induced Washington to follow its lead. Withdrawing from Syria
recognizes that Iran is no threat in reality. Positioning American military forces to "counter"
Iran does not reduce the threat against the United States because there was no threat there to
begin with.
And then there is the argument that the U.S. departure empowers Iran and Russia. Staying in
Syria is, on the contrary, a drain on both those countries' limited resources. The more money
and manpower they have to commit to Syria the less they have to become engaged elsewhere and it
is hard to imagine how either country would exploit the "victory" in Syria to leverage their
involvement in other parts of the world. Both would be delighted if a final settlement of the
Syrian problem could be arrived at so they can get out.
And as for the United States, the military should only be deployed anywhere to defend the
U.S. itself or vital interests. There is nothing like that at stake in Syria. So, is American
national security better or worse if the U.S. leaves? As Russian and American soldiers only
confront each other directly in Syria, U.S. national security would in fact be greatly improved
because the danger of igniting an accidental war with Russia would be dramatically reduced.
There have reportedly already been a dozen incidents between U.S. and Russian troops, including
some involving shooting. That has been a dozen too many. Even the possibility of starting an
unintended war with Iran would potentially be disastrous for the United States as well as for
everyone else in the region, so it is far better to put some distance between the two
sides.
And finally, it is necessary to go to the argument for disengagement from Syria that is too
little heard in the western media or from the usual bonehead politicians named Graham and Rubio
who pronounce on foreign policy. How has American intervention in the Middle East and south and
central Asia benefited the people in the countries that have been invaded or bombed? Not at
all. By some estimates four million Muslims have been killed as a consequence of the wars since
2001 and millions more displaced. More than eight thousand U.S. military have died in the
process in wars that had no purpose and no exit strategy. And the wars have been expensive
–
$6 trillion and counting, much of it borrowed. War without end means killing without end
and it has to stop Syria Withdrawal Enrages the Chickenhawks, by Philip Giraldi - The Unz
Review
Withdrawing from Syria is the right thing to do, though one has to be concerned that there
might be some secret side deals with Israel or Turkey that could actually result in more
attacks on Syria and on the Kurds. Donald Trump is already under extreme pressure coming from
all directions to reverse his decision to leave Syria and it is quite possible that he will
either fold completely or bend at least a bit. It is to be hoped that he will not do so as a
Christmas present to the American people. And he might want to think of a Christmas present for
2019. One might suggest a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected] .
Syria Withdrawal Enrages the Chickenhawks, by Philip Giraldi - The Unz Review
The very fact that Hollywood twits who couldn't find Syria on the outline map of the world to
save their lives have been roped in to get all outraged about Trump withdrawing troops from
Syria proves that the military industrial complex is worried that it will lose sales if the
Amerikastani Empire steps back from actively looking for war.
The military industrial complex, after all, runs Hollywood ...
Again I have the idea that my, not just mine, theory about Trump is confirmed, he understands
that the USA will destroy itself economically and politically by continuing to try to control
the world.
Of course, USA Deep State is furious, through its mouth pieces CNN, Washpost and NYT.
Of course Netanyahu is more than furious, Sharon's 'we control America' seems to be over.
If Putin and Trump agree explicitly or implicitly, I do not know, and, if they indeed agree,
it does not matter.
The essential thing for me is that both in Washington and in Moscow we now have reasonable
men, who understand that warfare is just destruction of wealth.
Interesting is what the consequences for EU and NATO will be.
They must be in utter confusion.
What a great present, unexpectedly getting a Phil Giraldi column on Christmas day! Merry
Christmas, Phil and everyone !
I'm little more pessimistic about Trump's withdrawal from Syria; it seems to me all the
more proof that he's getting ready to attack Iran !
If you wanted to do that, you'd first clear it with the Israelis and they'd be quiet
(check) – actually, this would be their plan; then you would get US troops out of Syria
to protect them from Iranian troops in Syria (invited by Assad), (check). then you would move
one or two aircraft carriers into the Persian gulf (check)!
Then you would hit Iran on New Year's Day (open), and then you would take Trump down for
starting an illegal war (open).
All birds down with Stalin-esque (criminal) elegance!
My impression is, ISIS is a mossad-Jewish lobby creation to win the PR war against Muslims
and to keep the US attacking and "containing" Israel's geopolitical adversaries and eternally
occupying Arab lands, and well, to Make Israel Safe Again ™
The fact is the mossad could easily pull this off, having so many Israelis from
Northern-African and Middle Eastern extraction, fluent in Arab and looking exactly like well,
Arabs. They could infiltrate and recruit Arab salafist patsies and easily organize terrorist
attacks without executing the hits themselves. And it is actually a genius move:
1) Create a terrorist thread in Europe, making Westerners wary of Arabs, ie more likely to
understand Israel policies towards Palestinians and side with Israel (message being:
apartheid State? what else can we Israelis do? Palestinians are all gropers, misogynists,
homophobes and potential terrorists FYI)
2) Hit the countries with the most Jews (France, Germany and UK) so they are more likely
to start packing up to make Aliyah, so Israel's demographic problem is at least temporarily
solved, retaining a majority population of Jews.
3) Make the US, through the Jewish lobby in the US, attack strategic countries such as
Libya, Iraq and Syria, creating a migrant tsunami to flood Europe, making Europeans even more
wary of Arabs and understanding of Israeli's treatment of Palestinians (Arabs) and also
making European Jews even more likely to make Aliyah. I even have heard of Israeli NGOs
funded by the Israeli Ministry of FA operating in Lesbos and helping "refugees" to flood
Europe. After a public outcry the Ministry logo vanished from the NGOs sponsors page.
Even the Cologne issue with the gropings, and I am getting too conspiratorial here, could
have been a group of Israeli provocateurs kickstarting the whole assaults wave. Let's say, a
group of mossad operatives, composed of Israelis from Northern-African and/or Middle Eastern
extraction, with false documentation and fluent in Arab, start groping and assaulting German
women, taking advantage of the total chaos offered and facilitated by moronic Merkel. They
get caught? no problem, false passports or even no passports at all, just give false names
and disappear. Not that Arabs need that much help to make themselves look bad, after all some
American reporter was assaulted *live* and for what I have read the lecherous groping of
women walking alone is a well documented problem in all the ME. But maybe thanks to a little
push by provocateurs, an incident big enough was engineered and the image of Arabs in the
West reached historic lows thanks to the Cologne affair.
And creating phoney terrorist groups to use them for false flags is not something new at
all for the mossad, let's all remember what the FLLF was and how almost executed an US
Ambassador.
"Filmmaker Rob Reiner tweeted on Thursday that the president is a "childish moronic mentally
unstable malignant narcissist" who is "committing Treason" against the United States."
He and fellow tribesmen are welcome to sign up and go fight Israel's wars themselves, just
not with white male republican blood. The guy is good at border skirmishes, too. He led an
effort to keep poor Mexicans out of his rich Malibu neighborhood back in 2014 by refusing
Whole Foods a building location. Like most of his kind, he's a sociopathic hypocrite and a
liar.
@MAGAnotMISA
What I miss is destroying white cultures through mass immigration.
Though what I miss in this theory what exactly is the objective, is it whites and Muslims
annihilating each other, or just divide and rule ?
But maybe thinking in this way has not gone far enough.
Bernard Baruch's world domination plan failed miserably, but he even failed to understand
that it had failed, otherwise he had not in 1946 pleaded for a world government.
One must not underestimate the enemy, but also not overestimate him.
Jewish policies for the last 2000 years can hardly be seen as a success.
Judaism lost the battle with Christianity, Bolshevism failed in Russia, getting equal rights
in W Europe led to the WWII deportations, with or without gas chambers, Israel succeeded in
surrounding itself with enemies, as neighbors, and all over the world, and Jewish puppet
Hillary was not elected.
The latest statements by Netanyahu confirm my idea of a complete idiot.
I continue to be amazed that anyone gives any credibility whatsoever who claims US Mideast
military involvement is in the best interest of the nation. The above-mentioned commenters
must almost inevitably more about self-interest than anything patriotic. As for appearing
profound, well, there's Rob Reiner!
As I sat in Christmas Eve service last night, an adorable little boy played quietly with his
father in the seat next to us. The little boy was probably just under 2 years of age.
In the middle of one of the Christmas Carols the thought struck me,
"I wonder if we will still be in ___________ war 17 years from now, when this
little boy becomes enlistment age . . ."
That thought alone makes me favor Trump for re-election. I think (I could be wrong, I'm no
expert) we have less war and a lesser risk of war with Trump. The "establishment" policies
of: invade the world – invite the world – in hoc with the world; are horrifically
deadly and destructive.
As usual, Giraldi is spot on with his observations. I wish him a Merry Christmas and hope to
see a lot more of his articles in the coming year.
I find Rob Reiner amusing, if not occasionally annoying. After having spent decades up to
my nose with his tribe while working in LA in the entertainment industry I can guarantee
Hollywood Jews go completely apoplectic anytime they perceive their government, the
Jewish-occupied government that rules over us all, is not following their commands.
Come to think of it, apoplexy's first definition is a stroke, its second definition is: a
state of intense and almost uncontrollable anger. One can only hope that jerks like Reiner
who indulge so heavily in the second definition will end up experiencing the first, and good
riddance.
A mong hawks in N. America, Cooper's Hawk ( Accipiter cooperii ),
Red-shouldered Hawk ( Buteo lineatus ), and Red-tailed Hawk ( Buteo jamaicensis
) are the three species most likely to take domestic chickens, or yardbirds as they are
sometimes called, and it is these three species that are or have been commonly called
Chickenhawks in the United States, at least among non-birders, who are people with neither
binoculars nor field guide.
But I think most here know that Philip Giraldi is referring to the craven human variety of
warmonger known in some circles as the Yellow-tailed Chickenhawk, or its close relative the
Yellow-bellied Chickenhawk.
President Trump's announcement is a very nice Christmas present, which I choose to take a
face value pending unwrapping. As always, actions speak louder than words. Let's hope that
there isn't a booby prize or two lurking beneath the Christmas tree and hidden by the big
surprise package, or that there isn't a lump of coal at the bottom of our holiday
stockings.
Pipelines to Europe for KSA and fresh water sources for Israel? Destabilizing a local
rival of both? Who knows?
What we do know is that "we" have allowed our "leaders" to pimp out our military to the
rogue special interests of the world. We have the best government foreign interests can
buy.
The Zionist MSM and MIC and the Zionist AIPAC and company are the hounds of Hell baying for
war as warmongers always want war as long as they do not have to fight it and can reap the
profits from the wars! ...
@chris
Let's think about this. The USA has not been able to defeat the Afghan Taliban forces in 17
years. It brought down Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, but, with that unfortunate country
totally destroyed, how could you call that a win (I doubt if the Iraqi's consider the US to
be liberators).
Now the crack pot Obama/Hillary campaign has lost in Syria, and Trump wants to pull out. All three countries were much
smaller and weaker than Iran...
But Israel supported by Saudi Arabia does not like Iran and has induced Washington to
follow its lead. Withdrawing from Syria recognizes that Iran is no threat in reality.
Positioning American military forces to "counter" Iran does not reduce the threat against
the United States because there was no threat there to begin with.
Yes of course, I would just add that Israel hates Iran.
Rand Paul and others have been pushing back hard against the NEOCON narrative here, good
news. The initial anti Trump tide has turned in this matter.
I briefly saw Bill Krysrol's smug mug on TV the other day....
Trump telling General Mattis to pack his bags and begone is the work of a good CEO. Mad Dog
could have done a lot of damage to Mr. Trump's agenda if he had been allowed to stay on until
the end of February, as he had said he would. In corporate America, if an underling is
disloyal to the CEO, he will be told to vacate the premises for good by the end of the
workday, and escorted out of the building by armed security. His keys will be taken, all
locks will be changed, and his passwords expunged. No doubt Trump, as CEO, has had to employ
such tactics many times before. He obviously relishes saying "You're Fired!"
Any competent Trump loyalist can be found to replace this worn out old soldier. I hope he
won't be yet another general. MacArthur said that "old soldier never die, they just fade
away." Time for Mattis to do just that, and never be heard from again.
Syria is a money pit for the taxpayers and giant profit source for the super rich. 'The
United States military should only be deployed anywhere to defend the U.S. itself or vital
interests' says Trump, Obama or Bush. But war is too important to be left to politicians.
They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought.
Trump
was appointed by rich people only so they could have someone to blame. 100% of the voters
believe they personally have the right to kill women and children overseas with their hired
mercenaries to defend the U.S. itself or vital interests. Americans shell out taxes to pay
for US troops to guard mining operations and poppy fields in Afghanistan, oil fields in Iraq,
online propaganda and so much more. Why deploy the United States Military when there's more
profit in hiring private mercenaries? Plus you don't have to say that "vital interests" crap
anymore.
This article is an excellent summary of msm and neocon reaction to the planned US withdrawal
from Syria and a good survey of why getting Uncle Sam out of Syria makes sense. I would also
add that allying with the Kurds was at best a short term solution. Not only would a Kurdish
state in eastern Syria be unacceptable to Turkey but the Sunni Arabs of the Euphrates Valley
would be certain to resist Kurdish rule. Merry Christmas to all!
@ChuckOrloski
In my opinion, Zionist Israel will never stop being the agent provocateur in the Mideast and
elsewhere ie the Ukraine etc., and since the Zionists control the U.S. government I think
their satanic NWO plans are still in place, and think the U.S. military is just going to be
placed in Iraq and Jordan ie just across the border to Syria and will continue with their
proxy mercenaries aka AL CIADA aka ISIS.
Some good sites to follow are Southfront.org and Henrymakow.com and Stevequayle.com and
Thetruthseeker.co.uk etc., all things considered even Putin said that Russia will wait and
see if the U.S. really leaves the Mideast, I wish all our troops would be brought home, but
with the Zionist control of our government it will never happen.
It is snowing here in Montana so we have a white Christmas, which we could do without, but
have a Merry Christmas!
If you want to know who's agitating for war, look no further than our "friends," the Brits.
This is what they do every single time a U.S. President doesn't commit troops to some war
they've approved of, or started. They terror bait, or mock, or a combination of the two. And
since a lot of people in Washington take them seriously, it has appreciable impact on our
policies.
This is the first sane thing Trump did in two years. Also, this is the first action he
promised his supporters in 2016. Naturally, Israel-firsters, who in 2016 backed the corrupt
mad witch to a man, are unhappy. Their unhappiness is a good sign that this action is
actually in American interests. If Trump folds and reverses, this would expose him as a 100%
fraud. If he sticks to his guns, maybe there is hope for him yet. Stay tuned.
@follyofwar
Oh, no; I don't mean Trump will start some major ground offensive to win anything! No,
they'll just try to destroy Iran in order to give jihadist a chance to kill as many people as
possible. This will be a Libyan-style war and "victory."
The U.S. has 2,000 soldiers in a kill-sack if Erdogan decides to cut off their supply lines.
And, calling Erdogan "unreliable" is something of an understatement. The U.S. can say very
little about Erdogan's behaviour while he can take reprisals on U.S. troops.
-- Turkey and Saudi are feuding, and the U.S. needs Saudi more than Turkey to maintain
sanctions and other pressure on Iran.
-- Turkey is becoming dangerously deranged in its statements about Israel (1). And the
U.S. / Israeli relationship is vital for many reasons.
-- Turkey has been a threat to Christian Cyprus for decades. The Leviathan-Cyprus-Greece
pipeline is important to help free Christian Populist EU nations, such as Italy, from
tyrannical rule under Soros-servitors Merkel and Macron.
Do not over over read the withdrawal as a change in regional strategy. There are no major
policy changes. This is about opening the door to push out Erdogan, if that becomes necessary
to support the existing U.S. regional strategy. And, the U.S. can still hope that Erdogan is
saying demented things solely for domestic consumption and doesn't intend to actually follow
thru on the crazy.
@MAGAnotMISA
"ISIS is a mossad-Jewish lobby creation to win the PR war against Muslims and to keep the US
attacking and "containing" Israel's geopolitical adversaries and eternally occupying Arab
lands, and well, to Make Israel Safe Again "
– Hard to disagree with your statement. And who could forget the amazing care of the
Jewish State for the White Helmets known for their cooperation with other "moderate"
terrorists: https://gellerreport.com/2018/07/israel-syria-jordan.html/
Israel Evacuates 800 of Syria's White Helmets and Their Families to Jordan
The Israel Defense Forces said it engaged in the "out of the ordinary" gesture due to
the "immediate risk" to the lives of the civilians, as Russian-backed regime forces closed
in on the area. It stressed that it was not intervening in the ongoing fighting in
Syria.
The Jordanian government, which has consistently refused to accept Syrian refugees in
recent years, said an exception was made in this case as the United Kingdom, Canada and
Germany agreed to take the 800 White Helmet rescuers and their families.
Germany's Bild newspaper reported that a convoy of dozens of buses crossed the Syrian
border into Israel late Saturday, and were escorted to the Jordanian border by Israeli
police and UN forces.
A lot of the rejoicing in the pro-Putin camp seems to be based on the idea that this somehow
benefits Putin but I don't think it does. He is still irreversibly bogged down in Syria.
@renfro
Netanyahu is telling the idiotic Israeli public what they want to hear. Let's not forget that
there are elections due on 9 April.
You can hardly expect a politician to tell the public that if they so much as launch a
missile against Damascus airport, the airport of Tel Aviv will be bombed in return. The days
when the Israelis could do as they wished in Syria and Lebanon are gone.
"Organ theft, staged attacks: UN panel details White Helmets' criminal activities, media
yawns," by Eva Bartlett.
"[During] a more than one-hour-long panel on the White Helmets at the United Nations on
December 20 the irrefutable documentation was presented on the faux-rescue group's
involvement in criminal activities, which include organ theft, working with terrorists --
including as snipers -- staging fake rescues, thieving from civilians, and other
non-rescuer behaviour.
a Syrian civilian, Omar al-Mustafa, is cited as stating: "I saw them (White Helmets)
bring children who were alive, put them on the floor as if they had died in a chemical
attack."
In my own visits to eastern Ghouta towns last April and May, residents likewise spoke of
organ theft, staged rescues, the White Helmets working with Jaysh al-Islam, while an Aleppo
man likewise described them as thieves who steal from civilians, not rescuers.
Four days after the UN panel, to my knowledge, not a single corporate media outlet has
covered the event and its critical contents.
This is in spite of the fact that the Western corporate media has been happy to
propagandize about the White Helmets for years, and to attack those of us who dare to
present testimonies and evidence from on the ground in Syria which contradicts the official
narrative.
@DESERT
FOX "The most incredible thing was that the Zionists and the Zionist controlled deep
state did 911 which was the precursor to the latest Mideast wars and the war on terror where
the Zionists killed some 3000 Americans and blamed the Arabs and got away with it , when
every thinking American knows that Israel and the Zionist controlled deep state did 911!"
The number of victims of 9/11 in NYC are way above 3000. Cancers and so on just don't get
counted. BTW, it is not from the dust. It is from the small nuclear bombs in the 2 buildings.
The 3rd building was only explosives.
@jilles
dykstra "Is Netanyahu crazy enough to provoke an attack ?"
– He is certainly endangering himself and his parasitic state by the silly ideas of
mythological choseness.
Let's hope that the more intelligent Soviet Jews (as compared to the mediocre pool of the
pre-Soviet Israelis) take pains to explain the former salesman the stupidity of military
confrontation with Iran/Russia. As for the US-dwelling zionists' stupidity it is irredeemable.
@Bragadocious
What the hell is up with these dysfunctional Brits anyway? With their empire thankfully long
gone, their society in tatters, and a Muslim mayor running majority-minority London, they
think they can get the US to take on Iran for them? Spare me! This "special relationship" has
got to end. The Brits must be under the thumb of the Zionists even more than is the USA. And
their sad monarchy belongs in the dustbin of history.
@jilles
dykstra It's just what you said, he's keeping a low profile and staying inside on advice
of his security. They're probably worried about snipers in ahigh rise somewhere.
It's been fun listening to (((NPR))) try to spin military withdrawal as a bad thing without
actually saying as much. "Trump's facing critics in his own party," "here are some Kurds
bitching," "General McProcurer is really pissed," "Chikkenhauk Epsteinbergwitzbaum sez it's
the end of the world," etc.
No rationality, no credibility decision (Syria withdrawal).
Most variables are missing. Trump is insignificant but as a figurehead. At least a few
layers, the correlations and "secret" deals with Israel, Turkey, IS, Kurds, France, the UK,
let's not forget Russia are missing. The commoner, deplorable, are lead by the nose, our
middle class bread scribes are doing the herding by shifting the attention, and building an
exit of face saving on what they omit to pull in the open.
No value in this "News" and "Christmas present" at all, but more of deceit of a global
ruling class in the shadows. It is called smarts, to deceive the rest of the dumb (in the
eyes of the elites) masses, it is relevant to call out our elites on not smart enough to
think over the long term.
Who of a building presence of outliers can they still deceive?
@Sarah
Toga "Death and taxes" for countries translates to "war and bankruptcy." Maybe we'll get
lucky and hit the latter before we kill everyone in the former.
@Realist
That's more like Erdogan's problem with Russia. Russian coastal defense system K-300P
Bastion-P in Crimea is perfectly capable of making Bosporus and Dardanelles straits much
wider. However crazy Erdogan is, he is well aware of that.
@follyofwar
Actually Brits think their country is doing just great. But yeah, the "special relationship"
should be scuttled. We face a bigger threat from British jihadis than any Iranians anywhere.
Richard Reid is sitting in a federal Supermax, but I don't think any Iranians are.
Brits simply love using the U.S. military for their own venal objectives. And if anything
goes wrong, the Brits can distance themselves and blame it on "the Yanks." A win-win.
@Svigor
It is really funny to see "peace-loving" liberals trying not to look like warmongers that
they are. NPR is not alone in attempting this sleight of hand: NYT, CNN, WaPo, and others of
their ilk are desperately trying to appear peace-loving while promoting wars that benefit MIC
and Israel. Hypocrisy at its most awkward. The only good thing is, they are forced to show
their true colors.
@m___
Well you know, that perception of yours re how the real world really works is, actually,
positive and optimistic.
If if I get you correct, you believe/feel/think there IS the "overclass" (for a lack of
better word) which rules the world. They are hidden, all powerful, competent, on the same
page and malevolent re us , the common folks.
I am afraid that's not the case.
I believe/feel/think there is no such overclass.
My take is there are warring factions of mostly incompetent little people with a lot of power
who fight among themselves who's going to get more power and related material wealth. The
malevolent part re all those they see as below them is given, of course.
And, gets worse, actually.
In this particular case I think the decision was made in a spur of a moment. Pure Emperor
whim,if you will.
On top of it, we still haven't seen any actual move on the ground.
And, even if those up to 2000 men do pull out, what about CIA/special forces/contractors
bunch?
And, even better, those 2000 and more can return in 48 hours if the Emperor decides
otherwise. In a spur of a moment too.
Anyone so happy here commenting this .thing has been following what's really been
happening with North Korea?
What exactly changed from that fateful meeting between the Emperor and the Cult Leader?
Let's summarize: the very point of all that was stopping and rolling back NK capability for
long range nuclear strike.
So .any "rolling" happened? Anything?
I don't think so, but, more than happy to be proven wrong. Proven, mind you.
The only important, and sad actually, is how we all got into the stage when a tweet by
that fellow can agitate us so much.
Mice and just a whiff of cheese over the cage.
They really got us where they wanted. And those "they" aren't even that smart.
Just great.
All wars are jews wars: "Trump is retreating from Syria – and from his pro-Israel Jewish conservative
voters. If that decision is a harbinger of other strategic moves distancing him from Israel's
security, much of his remaining Jewish support will fall off a cliff"
"The United States refuse to fight for the transnational financiers"
As soon as he entered the White House, Donald Trump was careful to surround himself with
three senior military officers with enough authority to reposition the armed forces.
Michael Flynn, John Kelly and especially James Mattis, have since left or are in the
process of leaving. All three men are great soldiers who together had opposed their
hierarchy during Obama's presidency. They did not accept the strategy implemented by
ambassador John Negroponte for the creation of terrorist groups tasked with stirring up a
civil war in Iraq. All three stood with President Trump to annul Washington's support for
the jihadists.
The Pentagon project for the last seventeen years in the "Greater Middle East" will not
happen. Conceived by Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, it was aimed at destroying all the state
structures in the region, with the exception of Israël, Jordan and Lebanon. This plan,
which began in Afghanistan, spread as far as Libya, and is still under way, will come to an
end on Syrian territory.
It is no longer acceptable that US armies fight with taxpayers' funds for the sole
financial interests of global financiers, even if they are US citizens.
The Bush Jr. and Obama administrations shoulder the entire responsibility for this war
[in Syria]. They were the ones who planned it and realised it within the framework of a
unipolar world .
Afghanistan's misery began during the Carter presidency. National Security Advisor,
Zbigniew Brzeziński, called on the Muslim Brotherhood and Israël to launch a
campaign of terrorism against the Communist government. Terrified, the government appealed
to the Soviets to maintain order. The result was a fourteen-year war, followed by a civil
war, and then followed by the Anglo-US invasion.
After forty years of uninterrupted destruction, President Trump states that US military
presence is not the solution for Afghanistan, it's the problem.
My take is there are warring factions of mostly incompetent little people with a lot of
power who fight among themselves who's going to get more power and related material wealth.
The malevolent part re all those they see as below them is given, of course.
@Realist
When Erdogan's military had shot down the Russian jet, Turkey paid for it rapidly with an
economic squeeze. Russian tourism to Turkey was shut down and green grocer exports to Russia
were subjected to intense scrutiny/inspection and nearly halted. One could say the Turks are
still feeling the effect, the impact was immediate and probably there hasn't been a full
recovery to some of the businesses that had been damaged. Erdogan tucked his tail and played
nice with Putin after all but he is no dependable ally of anyone, he's screwed everyone he'd
ever done business with insofar as the M.E. regional game. The main problem with Turkey for
Russia is the Erdogan regime's Salafi outlook (to say the leadership is sympathetic to
al-Qaida would be an understatement.) Erdogan may have promised to 'neutralize' the Idlib
extremists but he won't, he can't, in fact he doesn't dare, it is estimated there are upwards
of 1,000 cells established in Turkey. How that plays out is anyone's guess but my money is on
the idea he'll shove the the Idlib extremists off on the Kurds as a Turkish military proxy
and cross Putin in the process (the USA won't mind this at all and in fact CIA Ops division
might reward it.)
@AnonFromTN"The only good thing is, they are forced to show their true colors."
Exactly. The liars, frauds, gatekeepers, Hillary-bots, and every brand of stupid in between
have been flushed into the open. For example, anyone who still admires Chomsky should take
note:
Aaron MatéVerified account @aaronjmate · Dec 24
Update: Chomsky was sent my Q & this is his response. He favors keeping US troops in
Syria as a holding operation until a final settlement w/ Russia-Assad that could guarantee
Kurds' safety. With US pulling out now, he argues that all leverage is lost to avoid a
Turkish assault:
"What deal with the Russians (who right now are making cozy deals with Turkey)? And a
deal with Assad, the main mass murderer in Syria – – who can in any event do
nothing to deter Turkey.
In fact, in the longer term there should be a deal crucially involving Russia and with
Assad, with some kind of guarantees (for what they are worth) to preserve at least some
limited protection for the Kurds. But that's the longer term. This is now. For now, the
sole deterrent to a Turkish assault is a small US contingent confined to Kurdish areas, as
a holding operation for a possible longer term settlement along the lines just
indicated."
Chickenhawk (bird)
- Wikipedia "In the United States, chickenhawk or chicken hawk is an unofficial designation for three species
of North Americanhawks in the family
Accipitridae :
Cooper's hawk , also
called a quail hawk, the sharp-shinned hawk , and the red-tailed hawk . The term
"chicken hawk", however, is inaccurate. Although Cooper's and sharp-shinned hawks may attack
other birds, chickens do not
make up a significant part of their diets; red-tailed hawks have varied diets, but may
opportunistically hunt free-range poultry . "
Notable quotes:
"... In defense of the chickenhawk -- the actual bird ..."
"... So while I certainly despise the useless eaters that agitate for war while having not the slightest idea what combat of any kind is about, I always cringe at the degradation of the word 'chickenhawk' a mighty little predator whose good name should not be sullied in association with such human detritus ..."
The first time I saw one in action, it was quite a revelation I looked out the kitchen
window to see what looked like a blue jay perching on some kind of largish rock that he was
pecking at of course that made no sense at all and upon closer examination it turned out to
be a tiny raptor, not even a foot long from beak to tail, standing on a much larger dead
chicken and ripping flesh off of it I ran out back toward the chicken yard and the mighty
little slayer flew off the poor hen had a good part of her back flesh removed
Pretty amazing that such a tiny bird could take a chicken easily ten times its weight --
the sharp shinned hawk weighs just 200-400 grams
So while I certainly despise the useless eaters that agitate for war while having not
the slightest idea what combat of any kind is about, I always cringe at the degradation of
the word 'chickenhawk' a mighty little predator whose good name should not be sullied in
association with such human detritus
"... Maybe I am overestimating the intelligence of MIC profiteers, but my impression is that those thieves know that their loot is only useful as long as they are alive. There is a lot of silly hostile talk against Russia and China, but have you noticed how the US military always makes sure that there are no direct confrontations with countries that can turn the US into radioactive dust? The profiteers want huge Pentagon budget to steal from, but not the war where they lose along with everyone else. ..."
@Z-man
Israel fears Iran, is my idea. Norman Finkelstein once stated that Israeli jews do not see
how there ever can be peace with the Palestinians 'after all we did to them'. Not all jews
are idiots. Forgot in which book I read that in the thirties a Zionist reached Palestine, and
saw that this was not the 'land without people for people without land'. He stated 'this is a
crime'.
The destruction and destabilisation of the ME, an Israeli plan, as far as I know.
In 1921 and later years there was the enormous population exchange, without any financial
compensation, between Turkey and Greece. To this day tensions exist between the two
countries.
Iran is one of the oldest civilisations. Twice, one might say even three time, the west
overthrew Iranian democracy. Iran knows of course quite well that the VS brought Saddam to
power so that he could subjugate Iran, that had rid itself of the USA puppet shah. Iran also
of course knows quite well Jewish power in the USA, Bush' s promise to AIPAC to destroy Iraq.
Will those leading Iran now ever trust the USA or Israel ?
So that Netanyahu and USA jewry now are in complete panic, who had expected it to be
otherwise ? Uri Avnery wrote 'the only language zionists understand is power. Is there a
problem, use power, if it does not help, use more power, if that also fails, use even more
power'.
There has never been any serious negotiation between Israel and its neighbors, or with the
Palestinians. About the Oslo negotiations a book appeared in Israel with the title 'How we
fooled the Palestinians'? Sharon answered any Arab League peace proposal with force, Jenin,
one of them, if my recollection is correct. There always was the idea of overwhelming more
military power, and of USA support.
Kissinger saved Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war by flying over hundreds of the newest
USA anti tank weapons, wire guided, TOW. What will the USA do in case Israel is attacked ? Is
Netanyahu crazy enough to provoke an attack ?
Maybe I am overestimating the intelligence of MIC profiteers, but my impression is
that those thieves know that their loot is only useful as long as they are alive. There is a
lot of silly hostile talk against Russia and China, but have you noticed how the US military
always makes sure that there are no direct confrontations with countries that can turn the US
into radioactive dust? The profiteers want huge Pentagon budget to steal from, but not the
war where they lose along with everyone else.
As to the wall, it is one of the silliest projects ever suggested. Maybe that's why it was
so easy to sell it to the intellectually disadvantaged electorate. There are two things that
can stop illegal immigration. First, go for the employers, enact a law that fines them to the
tune of $50,000 or more per every illegal they employ. Second, enact the law that anyone
caught residing in the US illegally has no right to enter the US legally, to obtain asylum,
permanent residency, or citizenship for life, and include a provision that marriage to a US
citizen does not nullify this ban. Then enforce both laws. After that illegals would run out
of the country, and greedy employers won't hire any more. Naturally, the wall, even if built,
won't change anything: as long as there are employers trying to save on salaries, immigration
fees, and Social Security tax, and people willing to live and work illegally risking nothing,
no wall would stem the flow.
Unfortunately, no side is even thinking about real measures, both are just posturing.
Probably the single most important political fact about the modern world has been the steady
rise of the United States of America. From a geopolitical point of view, the United States
really is in a class of its own. While the Soviet Union might have rivaled the U.S. militarily,
and while China and the European Union may be comparable economic giants, no other nation comes
even close to having America's combination of economic, diplomatic, military, cultural, and,
increasingly important, surveillance power.
At least since the Second World War, there has been a veritable cottage industry of books
predicting America's supposedly inevitable decline, due either to the myth of American
"exceptionalism" or to imperial hubris. In actual fact, one is struck at how steadily America
has maintained its global share of power. Despite their economic recovery in the postwar years,
the decline of Western Europe and Japan has in fact proved a more fundamental tendency. Russia
has only partially recovered from the collapse from the Soviet Union. After decolonization
– the collapse of the overseas European empires – in fact virtually none of Third
World has been able to organize themselves as influential actors ("Brazil is the country of the
future and always will be," De Gaulle is supposed to have said.) Only capitalist China, it
seems, will have the organization, intelligence, and sheer size to decisively overtake the
United States economically.
... ... ...
The United States was however not merely founded by Europeans, but in particular by the
English, who have the distinction of having been one the most dynamic and economically
successful of European nations. England, blessed with mostly harmlessly small Celtic neighbors
and a crucial little expanse of water between itself and the Continent (a mere 33 kilometers
between Dover and Calais!), could develop in relative security develop in a most unique
direction. Whereas virtually all European principalities developed
Whereas political survival on the mainland depended on the state's coercive ability to raise
the men and taxes necessary to a large army, in England this depended instead on the
maintenance of a large navy, which itself required an advanced trading economy. The American
Founding Fathers were acutely aware of the role of war in the development of Continental
despotism and self -consciously made their republic into a counter-model.
For the foreseeable future however, I expect that America's combination of size,
dollar hegemony, energy, natural individualist dynamism, cultural power, and cognitive
elitism will continue to make the leading superpower outside of the Sinosphere.
and
I would not be surprised if secession were a viable prospect by mid-century
is:
I expect that America's combination of size, dollar hegemony, energy, natural
individualist dynamism, cultural power, and cognitive elitism will continue to make the
leading superpower outside of the Sinosphere at least until mid-century
Now, there are some things conspicuously missing from the article. Demographics
change, destruction of middle class and that 1 %/deplorables thing.
I guess that could've been mentioned, even addressed, but, well ..
Anyway, given those parameters, the challenge is how to live in that paradigm.
Not easy I guess for, I'd say, 95 % of authors, commentators and readers here.
A very shallow article here by someone who does not know the USA, a country hosting the
world's biggest gulag with 2.2 million prisoners in carcerated about 1 out of every 45
working-age males in prison at this moment whereas jailing in Western Europe is about 1 out
of every 1000 citizens, in the USA it is 1 out of 140
Durocher buys into USA schoolboy 'Constitution' cult propaganda, and the supposedly
glorious 'First Amendment' As shown in the recent US Dept of
Justice filing on crimes involving Robert Mueller , that 'Constitution' can be totally
and instantly nullified by judges who don't respect it, US judges even endorsing fake
documents claiming people agreed to ban their own freedom of speech for life, and ordering
that court appeals be banned from court records and the internet whilst lawyers who oppose
such schemes instantly lose their USA law licences
Durocher thinks USA 'law' is like in Hollywood movies, which points to the real
'strength' of the USA – its domination over global media and propaganda, via
Hollywood, the CIA's Wikipedia, etc
The USA has become especially corrupt internally since about the time the Soviet Union
fell, with every aspect of US culture – the courts and law, health care, etc –
becoming a criminal racket
The USA and China, both had the benefit of being huge countries in resource-rich regions
with a moderate climate There was no doubt that in earlier USA development, economic growth
was fuelled by an overall positive entrepreneur-friendly legal environment but those days
are over
US small business creation has been hit hard for some time now, too many pressures and
rules and legal problems the USA is run by out-of-control monopolists, and the place is
being poisoned, rather badly, both culturally and literally (the food)
Many USA people are okay, fun, etc but the USA is ultimately a disturbing place, and
quite dangerous if one collides with or is targeted by its police-state system, or the
gov-encouraged mafia lawyers stealing people's money, as savvy European business people
know there is no 'rule of law' there, it is wide-open court gangsterism now, as President
Trump himself suffers when the Hillary-&-Bush-tied judges (most of them) block Trump's
actions
The USA has a lot of past wealth to draw upon, and a final filip from the last years of
the US dollar as 'reserve currencey' denominating global debt but the USA is not a very
nice place, with a future either broken into pieces, or becoming a new kind of
multi-cultural, bigger sort of Mexico
This is a silly article, given its assumption that things will continue upon the
trajectory of the past quarter millennium, just as the United States teeters on the edge of
an abyss of its own making. The tragedy is less its own demise than the fact that it is
bringing the rest of the world down with it
The article is weak, and some comments demonstrate higher level of understand then the
article itself. Although the level of understanding the the destiny of the USA is not tied to the
destiny of neoliberalism (much like the USSR and Bolshevism) is still foreign for many.
I wonder how history may have played out IF the French didn't lose Canada. Suppose the
British Empire made peace with France ruling over Canada. Then, would the colonies have been
willing to rebel against the British?
Perhaps, out of fear of French Canada, the colonies would have stuck closer to the British
Empire as protection.
But the British Empire expended huge sums to defeat the French in Canada(especially
because of the insistence of the colonialists). With the French out of the picture, the
American colonies no longer feared the French and became more defiant against the Mother
Country.
Another result of the French-and-Indians War was that the British decided to tax the
colonies. Having spent so much to defend the colonies and defeat French Canada, the British
Motherland thought that increased taxation was only fair. But the colonies disagreed, and
there followed the rebellion. But here's the thing. The Revolutionaries had NO CHANCE of
winning against the British without outside help. After all, only 1/3 of colonialists
rebelled while another 1/3 fought for the Crown(and another 1/3 remained neutral). So, why
did the American Revolutionaries win? Only because the French entered on their part. And why
did the French side with the rebels? For the French, it was sweet revenge. The British
Empire, prodded by the colonialists, took on French Canada and robbed France of all that
wonderful territory.
So, what better way for the French to get their revenge by aiding the rebel-colonists
against the British Empire? As all the major battles involved French troops, it was the
French that really made American Independence possible. But this soon proved to a Pyrrhic
victory for the French Monarchy. It became financially even more exhausted than the British
Empire after the French-and-Indian Wars. Strapped for cash, the French Monarchy had a
difficult time managing social unrest, and there followed the Revolution that toppled the
king.
Even though the French Monarchy made American Independence possible, the Americans soon
sided with the French Revolutionaries. Next, if Napoleon hadn't been so ambitious on the
Continent, maybe he could have done more build up the Louisiana Territory with French
settlers. While Anglo-Americans were itching to grab that territory for themselves, they just
couldn't do it because France had done so much for the Americans. Also, having severed ties
with the British Empire(that still held Canada), they were gonna get no help from the Crown
to just grab the Louisiana territories. But then, a miracle for the Americans. Because
Napoleon was strapped for cash, he sold the entire territory for peanuts. (Later the dumb
Russians sold Alaska to Americans.)
Now, let's roll back history a little. Why didn't French Canada develop as quickly as the
13 Anglo colonies. Partly it was the weather as it was colder up there. But the other reason
was the different sets of property rights in UK and France. The French Monarchy considered
all the Canadian territory as its own private property. So, there was less incentive(and
freedom) for common Frenchmen to move to the New World and begin anew. In contrast, Anglos
who moved to America were given the opportunity for private ownership and enterprise, and
that was powerful incentive for many more Anglos to try out their luck in the New World.
Now, suppose the French had held onto French Canada and changed the incentives for
Frenchmen to move there. Keep in mind that France held both Canada and the vast Louisiana
territories. Imagine if many French moved to Canada and then moved down and settled the
Louisiana territories. They could have been the masters of America. And there might have been
no French Revolution. And there might have been no American War of Independence either.
If British Empire and French Empire had made peace in the New World, then there would have
been no French-and-Indian Wars, which led to taxation of the colonies that led to the
rebellion by colonialists. If there had been no French-and-Indian War, the colonialists might
have clung closer to the Empire out of fear of the French. Also, if there had been peace
between French Empire and British Empire, the French most certainly would NOT have aided
Independence struggle of the rebellious colonialists. Any attempt to break away from the
British Empire would have been easily crushed by British troops. In such scenario, the French
Monarchy would not have expended huge sums to aid the colonial rebellion against the British.
And flush with cash, the French Monarchy would have been far sturdier against social and
political problems.
It would have been a world without American Independence and French Revolution. It would
have been a world in which the French still controlled Canada and had claims over vast
Louisiana territories. In such a world, if the French had incentivized French migration to
the Americas like the British did, Canada and and 2/3 of the America could have ended up in
French hands, and the 20th century might have been a Franco-Canadian-Louisianan Century.
Would such have been better?
There is no mystery to American Power. It's the 3 L's: Land, Lineage, and Legacy.
Obviously, if America were 1/20th of its real size, it could not have been a superpower
despite cultural and political factors. After all, Anglos did pretty well in New Zealand, but
it's no superpower. As for Australia, it is huge, but most of the place is uninhabitable.
America was the best land in the world. All that vast territory in temperate zone. Not too
hot, not too cold, and with lots of arable land with best soil in the world. Western Europe
is also in temperate zone but small in size and lacking in resources. Russia is huge, but
much of it is cold and desolate. China is huge, but for its size, rather lacking in good
arable land and resources. In contrast, US has good weather, great farmlands, tremendous
amounts of natural resources in oil and minerals.
Then, there was the Lineage. Anglos were intelligent and homogeneous(racially). That meant
lots of ability and unity. Pretty solid DNA material.
There was also the Legacy. Anglos developed certain manners and attitudes that were
conducive for both Order and Freedom. Too much order stifles progress. Too much freedom leads
to chaos. Anglos developed a way to found freedom upon order. So, Anglo freedom wasn't about
acting like stupid drunkards but by using discipline to foster self-control that could allow
for higher freedoms in thought, enterprise, adventure, discovery, and experimentation. It was
different from the freedom of savages and barbarians whose life revolves around the passion
of the dong and butt. It was about repressing wild energies and building character so that
individuals, as men of honor and culture, could be free as ideal gentlemen and ladies. Such a
mindset and attitude made for a culture of greater trust, rule of law, and sense of honor.
People interacted on the basis of contracts than on petty kinship or autocratic
subservience.
And precisely because the Anglo Way and especially the Anglo-American Way revolved around
ideas about laws, contracts, honor, trust, and obligations, it was less culture-specific. And
this meant that new immigrants who were non-Anglo could also adopt the Anglo-American way. It
was easier for non-Anglos to assimilate into Americanism that had a set of rules than a set
of rites and rituals. It's like it's easier to convert to Christianity than to Judaism. It's
easier to become a Buddhist than a Hindu. Christianity and Buddhism are credo-faiths whereas
Judaism and Hinduism are ethno-faiths. While Americanism had a particular racial and ethnic
imprint(that of Anglos), the basic modes of Americanism could easily be adopted and practiced
by non-Anglos, at least if they were white(as a Anglo-ized German or Pole pretty much looked
like any Anglo-American).
So, Anglo-Europeans(non-Anglo whites who became Anglo-Americanized) joined with
Anglo-Americans in the American Enterprise? And why not join when there was so much promise
in living in America than in cramped old Europe(where democracy and individual rights didn't
come to fruition for most nations until the late 19th century, but even then, so much of
European history in the 20th century was about aristocratic war of WWI, communism, Fascism,
National Socialism, ethno-imperial war of WWII, and Iron Curtain. (Granted, one could say US
had its own tragedies with war with Indians, destruction of nature, and the Civil War, but
history moved too fact in the US for anyone to grieve for too long.)
That is the essential backbone of why America became a great power. The 3L and the easily
Anglo-Americanization of newcomers. It was far easier to forget your original identity and
become an Anglo/American than, say, a Swede, Pole, or Swede, all specific identities rooted
in historical particularism. Granted, French did try to universalize Frenchness, but it's
surely easier to comprehend and adopt Anglo-Americanism with its powerful but simple sets of
rules than Frenchness with so much emphasis on haute culture and intellectual sophistication.
While the Anglos could be snobby, they were also buttoned-down and more pragmatic. Being a
decent law-abiding shopkeeper was enough to be Anglo, whereas you needed some degree of
Culture to be French. It's like American fast food is more universally appealing that various
French cuisines that are good but require some degree of refinement to appreciate. Though
Angl0-Americanism wasn't exactly a Fast Culture(like fast food), it was more digestible. (It
was with the fading of Anglo-emphasis in American Culture that it really turned into a Fast
Culture. Today, you can be a total barbarian slob whose only interests are tattoos and going
crazy at Walmart on Black Friday. THAT is Americanism.) Also, America unleashed certain
repressed energies in the Old World that was overly bound by tradition. Americanism unleashed
just enough vigor of barbarism to add charge to Western Civilization. We can see this in the
American Western. It's about creating order and civilization but also about adventurousness
and individuality.
Now, two other factors made America bigger in the world. Jews and blacks. Jews have been
tireless in science, business, entertainment, intellect, and etc. When Anglo-American
creativity, pride, and fire began to fade in the second half of the 2oth century, Jews took
up the slack with lots of great writers, artists, and activists. Jews made Hollywood, the
dream factor of the world. Now, would America have had a great film industry without Jews?
Maybe. After all, Walt Disney wasn't Jewish. But Jews have knack for such things. They also
came to dominate gambling. And many Jews were prominent song-writers of the 20th century.
Of course, Jews drew a lot of their musical influences from blacks. And blacks, with their
jive rhythm and louder voices, played a huge role in the development of American music that
came to influence the world. Even white performers like Elvis heavily drew on black
influence. The black-Jew chemistry in music was highly interesting and productive.
America also gained prominence in sports because blacks are better at it. So, black
Americans outran Europeans and everyone else. Black American boxers beat up Europeans and
Russians. Without Jews, American business, technology, and culture would have grown less. And
without blacks, there would have been no Jazz, Rock, and Rap. And US wouldn't have been
dominant in sports. If not for Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, the top boxers and runners of the
40s could well have been Europeans.
But for the Core Anglo/America(that of Anglo-American and Anglo-Europeans), Jews and
blacks were a mixed blessing. Jews did contribute tremendously to the US, but they also used
much of their capital and influence to subvert, shame, and degrade Anglo/America. Today,
Jewish globo-homo Power is waging race war on Whites.
And even though blacks brought back many medals and trophies for America, what does this
really mean? It means cucky-wuck white boys worshiping black muscle that kicks their white
ass and even kicks the butts of Europeans, the racial brethren of Anglo/Americans. Also,
black sports victory in the US led Europeans to also worship blacks, and so, Europeans also
imported a whole bunch of blacks to play for their nations. What does this all mean? It mean
black guys in Europe kicking white butt and turning white guys into cucky-wuck wussies who
surrender their jungle-feverish white whores to Negroids.
And together, Jews and blacks promote interracism where white guys are supposed to act
like guilt-ridden wussy-cucks while white women are infected with jungle fever for Negro
dongs and act like Ariana Grande who tanned her skin to near-blackness and imitates black
ho's with more butts than brains.
Today, despite cultural and moral decay of the US, there is still the land that produces
tons of food, natural resources, and etc. And where money is king, the US attracts smart
people from all over the world to try their luck in Hollywood, Las Vegas, Wall Street,
Silicon Valley, and etc. In some ways, the total hollowness of American culture is liberating
for many who don't want any restraints to their dreams.
Also, US controls the world currency, and it can keep printing money. US also benefits
from the fact that, no matter how corrupt and rotten it is, there are many nations that are
even more corrupt and rotten.
People tend to compare US with other empires like Roman, British, and French, but it
overlooks one important factor. US would be a great power WITHOUT an empire. Indeed, US
itself like an imperial nation in its own right. It has both head and body. In contrast, Rome
as a great power relied on ruling over vast non-Roman territory. Rome itself was a head
without a body. Same with the Brits and the French. Lose their foreign empires, and they were
no longer awesome powers. They could still be local great powers but not world powers.
So, when Rome lost its colonies, it was finished as a superpower. Worse, it got
conquered.
When the British lost its colonies, its days as great power was over too.
But even if US brings home all its military from abroad, it would still be a superpower.
And even if US cut off all trades with other nations, it could survive as a great power. The
only other nations with this capacity today are China, Russia, and Brazil. China still seems
to be rising. Russia is holding steady but has problems of corruption and laziness. Brazil
has too many blacks, and it will never rise.
Also, empires like Rome were vulnerable because its weaponry wasn't all that more advanced
that those of its enemies. It all came down to spear, sword, and arrows, something the
barbarians and others had as well. For Rome to remain on top, it had to be ultra-disciplined,
but it's difficult to maintain that level of militancy over time. People burn out eventually.
In contrast, the US has advanced weapons and can blow up any number of invaders or attackers.
Look what happened to Japan in WWII. So, most Americans can be slobs who never served in the
military but still feel safe.
And yet, there is the problem of non-white invasion facing both US and EU. Both US and EU
have the technological and military means to stop the invasion. But they don't. If anything,
the elites welcome the invasion, and even many ordinary folks support it? Why? Because the
command-center of the West has been infiltrated and re-programmed to reject race-ism. That's
all it took. It's like TERMINATOR 2. The robot that was originally programmed to fight humans
was reprogrammed to defend humans. Same machine but different code, thereby radically
different behavior.
At one time, US had been coded to be gloriously race-ist. But upon the re-coding by Jews
and Wasp 'progressives', the new Americanism was virulently anti-race-ist. Indeed, the worst
sin according to PC is for whites to side with other whites. Whites can now be 'good' only by
welcoming endless immigration in the name of Diversity. Whites can gain moral credit only by
supporting OTHER peoples.
This is, why, for the time being, whites must support Indian-Zionism(or Inzionism), the
idea that Indians are the original owners of the land(just like Jews were original owners of
Zion) and that the biggest historical 'sin' of America was 'genocide' of the Indians.
Inzionists must conflate immigration with imperialism with 'genocide'. To bring justice to
the Indians, all future immigration must be ended RIGHT NOW. And all good Americans must work
to restore Indian pride and numbers.
Now, if whites could be gloriously race-ist, they wouldn't have to resort to Inzionism.
But since PC says whites must serve others, whites should primarily get behind Indians and
make the case that, because Immigration-Imperialism led to 'genocide' of Indians, there must
be no more Immigration-invasion because America is really Indian land, which means that the
main moral obligation of whites is to restore Indian pride and numbers.
Anyway, on the matter of immigration, the general rule should be ALLOW IN PEOPLE WHO ARE
COMPARABLE TO YOUR PEOPLE IN NATURAL ABILITY. If you bring over lots of real dummies, they
will drag society down with ineptitude and stupidity. There will be a huge permanent
underclass.
But if you let in people who are considerably smarter than your people, they will take
over command centers and may work against your people. Sure, smart people will contribute to
society, but they may use their wealth and clout not for the host majority but
against them. Also, don't let in a race that is stronger than yours. Such race will
beat up your kids in school, streets, in sports, and take your womenfolk. Just look what
blacks are doing to whites. It's reducing white men to a bunch of pathetic cucks.
It is a good analysis which emphasises the momentum the USA has built up – which
will almost certainly mean continued global dominance into the second half of the 21st
century even while the Chinese economy becomes much larger. Short of a large scale nuclear
war (US-China or US-Russia) I don't see that changing. China cannot challenge the USA for
cultural, financial-system, or political-structure global dominance, does not wish to
challenge the USA for military dominance. At some point overwhelming Chinese economic power
will cause a flip, but without an existential war like WW2 that will likely take longer than
the 50 years it took the USA to replace Britain – and Britain never had the same
full-spectrum global dominance as the post-Cold War USA.
In terms of weakness and decline, the flip from an Anglo-Germanic-Celtic dominated nation
to a Jewish and "multicultural" dominated nation also occurred around the end of the Cold War
and the failure of GHW Bush to achieve re-election. This puts the US leadership class
misaligned with the 'grunts' the US needs for many aspects of its global dominance, military
especially, and a growing internal tension. The US judiciary's increasing hostility to the
founding-stock people is notable, along with of course the media and entertainment
industries, and now even the Silicon Valley corporations. But I think the
weakening/fracturing process is still at an early stage and I would be surprised to see
secession in mid century. It will take a major failure of the US empire's global hegemonic
strategy to see the nation 'flip' again, into outright rebellion against the ruling elites.
As I said, a disastrous war with Russia or China seems the likeliest trigger – I think
currently the elites are sufficiently aware of this danger to avoid it, but their own quality
is declining as they become more entrenched. A more speculative risk would be the USA taking
the 'wrong' side in a European civil war – bombing nationalists on behalf of the EU,
say, or of 'persecuted' Muslims – thus bringing internal US fractures to a head. I
think this is relatively unlikely since it would require (a) such a conflict to occur and (b)
the US leadership class to critically misunderstand their founding-stock subjects and their
ability to control the opinions of those subjects. Whereas an accidental war with Russia or
China is well within the current realm of reasonable contemplation.
In the absence of such a break-point, I can see the USA remaining both intact and globally
dominant through the end of the 21st century, even while China's economy becomes several
times larger in real terms.
And, who knows, Mormons in the asteroid belt, bringing the two thousand year Germanic
expansion wave out into the solar system and beyond.
The author may be right that 'American hegemony or exceptionalism' will be around for a
long while yet, but that status will not 'prove eternal'. Whatever else, that is true.
Nations rise and gain power. Then they must retain that power. And when they lose it they
seek to regain it.
As I suggested in a comment to your previous column: the USA is managed by a group of
tight-knit aces of power management.
If there is one thing the country will be exceptionally adept at, it will be what relates
with power (and propaganda).
Admittedly, one can wonder how much of the U.S. figure represents "real" wealth as
opposed to accounting gimicks, e.g. health insurance and whatnot. On the whole, I am
inclined to say it is real.
On the whole I can state that it is gimmick but that will require operating with apparatus
which is beyond the field of "expertise" of American "economists", granted with some notable
exceptions. I will omit here the issue of continental warfare and of American real military
history, but it was primarily lack of those which drove initial accumulation and creation of
the infrastructure. WW II was a great facilitator of growth of American prosperity.
Then again checking the growth of Russian power seemed imperative for the Brits
Oceania against Eurasia. The ocean master against the landmass master. This conflict is old
and deeply rooted.
Today, US island replaces UK island. Putin replaces French king LouisXIV, or emperor
Napoleon, or fuehrer Hitler. But the root of the conflict did not change.
No mystery at all Just scale of economy and a more advance form of colonization.
All wealth starts from natural resources plus labour. Everything in our daily life comes
from nature, food, clothes, furnitures, plastic boxes, TV, smartphones, cars come from soil,
forest, oil, mineral ore etc.
Old Europe went to foreign lands to exploit natural resources and labour.
America imported slaves and immigrants to be exploited.
China exploit our own existing population.
The rise of America before WW2 is no mystery, just the scale of economy. Check the world
powers of the past few centuries, Spain-> Britain-> Germany-> USA/Soviet Union->
China, each has a bigger population than the last. The trend is clear.
After WW2, the US established an improved and more effective form of colonization than the
old European one.
The major change is the means to control the colonies, it changed from brute force of
military to soft power of media/intelligence, to control both the masses and the elite. And
the exploit changed from real materials to financial.
This "capital + media" has worked so spectacularly well that countries around the world
fought to become US colony, willingly and proudly
Truly impressive aaccomplishment Perhaps America really is run by the Jews, the game is
much superior than the Anglo or other old Europe.
The uniqueness of Anglo-American culture is also evident in the very prestige of
Founding Fathers and of the Constitution. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the U.S.
is one of the only countries in the world with a genuine constitution in the ancient sense,
as most memorably expressed by Aristotle: not merely a dead text, a cold set of procedures,
but a Lawgiver's prescriptions for a way of life informed by a certain culture and ethos.
As Aristotle said: "a constitution is the way in which a city lives" (Politics 4.11,
1295a34).
The ruling class has wiped it's ass with the(not worth the hemp it was written on)
constitution a long, long time ago – the ink was barely dry.
Who would expect rulers to constrain themselves, by a document written by people that they
themselves would consider terrorists? Not a chance.
As for rights? What you have in that document are temporary privileges , that can be
taken away anytime, as they already have in the past – usually in the name of national
security; infact, the whole damn document can be nullified in the name of national Security,
and the stupid, dumb, fat, lazy people would go right along with it, because it's already
happened!
"... Senate Democrats have once again selected Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) as their minority leader without so much as a whisper of a debate or contest. This is galling. The man is incompetent, has abysmal politics, and as we were reminded in a huge New York Times investigation into Facebook, is extremely corrupt. ..."
"... Schumer definitely succeeded in the latter objective. In keeping with his long career as a Wall Street stooge (and in sharp contrast with his predecessor Harry Reid ), he quietly shepherded financial deregulation through. And because he has an almost neoconservative foreign policy, he largely stood aside as Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal for no reason. He also attacked Trump from the right for not being belligerent enough towards North Korea. ..."
"... Where does Schumer come in? Well, in 2017, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) opened an investigation into Facebook over Russiagate and misinformation generally. (Far from being some fire-breathing populist, Warner is among the most milquetoast, business-friendly Democrats who has ever held high office.) But Schumer has raised more money from Facebook than any other member of Congress, his daughter works there , and he helped get his former staffer appointed to the Federal Trade Commission (which oversees Facebook). In concert with Facebook brass, he told Warner to lay off the company, reported the Times : "Mr. Warner should be looking for ways to work with Facebook, Mr. Schumer advised, not harm it." ..."
"... So when it comes to sellout Democrats voting to make another financial crisis more likely, Schumer wrings his hands and hectors progressives not to criticize them too much (after which most of the sellouts lose anyway). But when those same sellouts start criticizing one of his favored sources of campaign cash, suddenly he discovers a knack for backroom arm-twisting and hardball tactics. ..."
Senate Democrats have once again selected Sen. Chuck
Schumer (D-N.Y.) as their minority leader without so much as a whisper of a debate or contest. This is galling. The man is incompetent, has abysmal politics, and as we were reminded in a
huge New
York Times investigation into Facebook, is extremely corrupt.
In his first two years as Senate minority leader, Schumer had two main priorities. First,
preserve his vulnerable moderates running in deeply Trumpy states, like Claire McCaskill in
Missouri, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, and Joe Donnelly in Indiana. Second, use the Trump
presidency to sneak through some odious stuff that most liberals hate.
Schumer definitely succeeded in the latter objective. In keeping with his long career as a
Wall Street stooge (and in sharp contrast with
his predecessor Harry Reid ), he quietly shepherded financial deregulation through. And
because he has an almost neoconservative foreign policy, he
largely stood aside as Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal for no reason. He
also attacked
Trump from the right for not being belligerent enough towards North Korea.
And how about that first goal? Schumer failed spectacularly in preserving most of these
seats. Nearly all of his moderates -- to whom he had granted significant leeway to vote for
President Trump's judicial nominees and bills -- lost. Only Joe Manchin in West Virginia
managed to hang on. The Democratic Senate margin is being somewhat bolstered only by other
candidates knocking off Republican senators in Arizona and Nevada, which Schumer had little to
do with. (Indeed, Harry Reid, who is still helping run a well-oiled
labor turnout machine in Nevada, was the key figure behind the Nevada win.)
This brings me to Facebook. Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew
Rosenberg, and Jack Nicas wrote a jaw-dropping
piece of reporting for the Times about Facebook's lobbying operation. They focused
on how the company has defended itself from evidence that Russian intelligence used the
platform to help Trump win in 2016, and that political extremists have been using the platform
to organize
atrocities , including
genocide .
Basically, the strategy conducted by Facebook's top executives, including CEO Mark
Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, was the filthiest sludge out of the bottom of the lobbying
barrel. (Facebook has defended itself and calls the report "grossly unfair.") The story is very
long, but probably the most explosive revelation was that Facebook hired a soulless Republican
propaganda shop to attack its critics -- notably the Open Markets Institute , which Anne-Marie Slaughter
shoved out of the New America Foundation on
instructions from her Google paymasters -- with anti-Semitic smears, casting it as the tool
of wealthy Jewish philanthropist George Soros. Remarkably, at the very same time they
convinced the Anti-Defamation League to cast criticism of Facebook as anti-Semitic, as both
Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish.
It's worth stopping for a moment to take this in. Just a couple weeks ago a right-wing
terrorist hopped up on anti-Soros propaganda massacred 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Another sent a mail bomb to Soros' home. A third person in D.C. was
recently arrested on suspicion of plotting another synagogue shooting.
Where does Schumer come in? Well, in 2017, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) opened an investigation
into Facebook over Russiagate and misinformation generally. (Far from being some fire-breathing
populist, Warner is among the most milquetoast, business-friendly Democrats who has ever held
high office.) But Schumer has
raised more money from Facebook than any other member of Congress, his
daughter works there , and he helped get his former staffer appointed to
the Federal Trade Commission (which oversees Facebook). In concert with Facebook brass, he told
Warner to lay off the company, reported the Times : "Mr. Warner should be looking for
ways to work with Facebook, Mr. Schumer advised, not harm it."
So when it comes to sellout Democrats voting to make another financial crisis more likely,
Schumer wrings his hands and
hectors progressives not to criticize them too much (after which most of the sellouts lose
anyway). But when those same sellouts start criticizing one of his favored sources of campaign
cash, suddenly he discovers a knack for backroom arm-twisting and hardball tactics.
=>
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President Trump has done the right thing with regard to America's troop
deployment in Syria. Trump ordered the 2,000 US troops based in Syria to get out and come home.
Neocons and the US war party are having
apoplexy even though there are some 50,000 US troops spread across the rest of the Mideast.
The US troops parked in the Syrian Desert
were doing next to nothing. Their avowed role was to fight the remnants of the ISIS movement and block any
advances by Iranian forces. As a unified fighting force, ISIS barely exists, if it ever did. Cobbled
together, armed and financed by the US, the Saudis and Gulf Emirates to overthrow Syria's regime, ISIS ran
out of control and became a menace to everyone.
In fact, what the US was really doing was
putting down a marker for a possible US future occupation of war-torn Syria that risked constant clashes
with Russian forces there.
We will breathe a big sigh of relief if
the US deployment actually goes ahead: it will remove a major risk of war with nuclear-armed Russia, whose
forces are in Syria at the invitation of the recognized government in Damascus. The US has no strategic
interest in Syria and no business at all being militarily involved there. Except perhaps that the war party
wants never-ending wars abroad for arms production and promotions.
Trump's abrupt pullout from Syria has
shocked and mortified Washington's war party and neocon fifth column. They were hoping reinforced US forces
would go on to attack Damascus and move against Iranian forces. It was amusing to watch the anguish of such
noted warlike chickenhawks as Sen. Lindsay Graham and the fanatical national security advisor John Bolton as
their hopes for a US war against Syria diminished. Israel was equally dismayed: its strategic plan has long
been to fragment Syria and gobble up the pieces.
The venerable imperial general and
defense secretary, Jim Mattis, couldn't take this de-escalation. He resigned. Marine General Mattis was one
of the few honorable and respected members of the Trump administration and a restraint on the president's
impulses. To his credit, he opposed the reintroduction of torture by US forces, a crime promoted by Trump,
Bolton and Chicago enforcer Mike Pompeo.
What really mattered was not a chunk of
the Syrian Desert. Matis's resignation may have been much more about Afghanistan, America's longest war. The
US has been defeated in Afghanistan, rightly known as the 'Graveyard of Empires.' Yet no one in Washington
can admit this defeat or order a retreat after wasting 17 years, a trillion dollars and thousands of
Americans killed or wounded. Least of all, Gen. Mattis, Bolton or Pompeo who bitterly opposed any peace deal
with the Taliban nationalist movement.
According to unconfirmed media reports,
the US has already thinned out its Afghan garrison of 14,000 plus soldiers. These soldiers' main function is
to guard the corrupt, drug-dealing Afghan puppet government in Kabul and fix Taliban forces so they can be
attacked by US airpower.
Taliban insists it won't begin serious
negotiations until all US and 8,000 foreign troops are withdrawn. In fact, Taliban, which has been quietly
talking to the US in Abu Dhabi, may agreed to a 50% western troops cut in order to begin peace talks.
ORDER IT NOW
The Afghan War has cost the US $1
trillion. Occupying parts of Iraq and Syria has cost a similar amount. Resistance against US rule continues
in both nations. Mattis and his fellow generals really like these wars, but civilian Trump does not. As a
candidate he vowed to end these 'stupid' wars. Let's hope he succeeds over the bitter objections of the
Republican war party, neocons, and military industrial complex.
Syria is an ugly little sideshow. By
contrast, Afghanistan is a dark blot on America's national honor. We watch with revulsion and dismay as the
US deploys B-52 and B-1 heavy bombers to flatten Afghan villages. We watch with disgust as the US coddles
the opium-dealing Afghan warlords and their Communist allies – all in the spurious name of 'democracy.'
If Trump wants to make America great, he
can start by ending the squalid Syrian misadventure and the butchery in Afghanistan.
We should give credit to president Trump for getting the US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan.
Mr. Trump
has always been consistent about the withdrawal of the US Forces from Afghanistan; back in 2011, in an
interview with Bill O'Reilly, Trump reiterated his total dismay and opposition to the waste of lives and
money in Afghanistan; he clearly mentioned that he would withdrawal the US Forces from Afghanistan
immediately, See the link:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/22/donald-trump-said-afghanistan-president-saying-now/
The same applies to Syria, America has no genuine strategy to remaining in Syria; staying in Syria would
be further destabilizing the region – fueling the Syrian civil war for the sole benefits of Israel and Saudi
Arabia whom had created the ISIS against the Iranian influence in the region.
President Trump deserves to get credit for being courageous and consistent about the US involvement in
the middle east; withdrawing from Syria and Afghanistan is the right strategy, too many lives have perished
and trillion of dollars have been wasted for nothing; let's put an end to this – thank you Mr. Trump for
doing the right thing !
Since
I last wrote about the bipartisan shrieking, hysterical reaction to Trump's planned
military withdrawal from Syria the other day, it hasn't gotten better, it's gotten worse. I'm
having a hard time even picking out individual bits of the collective freakout from the
political/media class to point at, because doing so would diminish the frenetic white noise of
the paranoid, conspiratorial, fearmongering establishment reaction to the possibility of a few
thousands troops being pulled back from a territory they were illegally occupying .
Endless war and military expansionism has become so normalized in establishment thought that
even a slight scale-down is treated as something abnormal and shocking. The talking heads of
the corporate state media had been almost entirely ignoring the buildup of US troops in Syria
and the operations they've been carrying out there, but as soon as the possibility of those
troops leaving emerged, all the alarm bells started ringing. Endless war was considered so
normal that nobody ever talked about it, then Trump tweeted he's bringing the troops home, and
now every armchair liberal in America who had no idea what a Kurd was until five minutes ago is
suddenly an expert on Erdoğan and the YPG. Lindsey Graham, who has never met an
unaccountable US military occupation he didn't like, is now suddenly cheerleading for
congressional oversight: not for sending troops into wars, but for pulling them out.
"I would urge my colleagues in the Senate and the House, call people from the
administration and explain this policy," Graham recently told
reporters on Capitol Hill. "This is the role of the Congress, to make administrations
explain their policy, not in a tweet, but before Congress answering questions."
"It is imperative Congress hold hearings on withdrawal decision in Syria --
and potentially Afghanistan -- to understand implications to our
national security," Graham tweeted today .
In an even marginally sane world, the fact that a nation's armed forces are engaged in daily
military violence would be cause for shock and alarm, and pulling those forces out of that
situation would be viewed as a return to normalcy. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite. In
an even marginally sane world, congressional oversight would be required to send the US
military to invade countries and commit acts of war, because that act, not withdrawing them, is
what's abnormal. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite.
A hypothetical space alien observing our civilization for the first time would conclude that
we are insane, and that hypothetical space alien would be absolutely correct. Have some Reese's
Pieces, hypothetical space alien.
It is absolutely bat shit crazy that we feel normal about the most powerful military force
in the history of civilization running around the world invading and occupying and bombing and
killing, yet are made to feel weird about the possibility of any part of that ending . It is
absolutely bat shit crazy that endless war is normalized while the possibility of peace and
respecting national sovereignty to any extent is aggressively abnormalized. In a sane world the
exact opposite would be true, but in our world this self-evident fact has been obscured. In a
sane world anyone who tried to convince you that war is normal would be rejected and shunned,
but in our world those people make six million dollars a year reading from a teleprompter on
MSNBC.
How did this happen to us? How did we get so crazy and confused?
I sometimes hear the analogy of sleepwalking used; people are sleepwalking through life, so
they believe the things the TV tells them to believe, and this turns them into a bunch of
mindless zombies marching to the beat of CIA/CNN narratives and consenting to unlimited
military bloodbaths around the world. I don't think this is necessarily a useful way of
thinking about our situation and our fellow citizens. I think a much more useful way of looking
at our plight is to retrace our steps and think about how everyone got to where they're at as
individuals.
We come into this world screaming and clueless, and it doesn't generally get much better
from there. We look around and we see a bunch of grownups moving confidently around us, and
they sure look like they know what's going on. So we listen real attentively to what they're
telling us about our world and how it works, not realizing that they're just repeating the same
things grownups told them when they were little, and not realizing that if any of those
grownups were really honest with themselves they're just moving learned concepts around inside
a headspace that's just as clueless about life's big questions as the day it was born.
And that's just early childhood. Once you move out of that and start learning about
politics, philosophy, religion etc as you get bigger, you run into a whole bunch of clever
faces who've figured out how to use your cluelessness about life to their advantage. You
stumble toward adulthood without knowing what's going on, and then confident-sounding people
show up and say "Oh hey I know what's going on. Follow me." And before you know it you're
donating ten percent of your income to some church, addicted to drugs, in an abusive
relationship, building your life around ideas from old books which were promoted by dead kings
to the advantage of the powerful, or getting your information about the world from Fox
News.
For most people life is like stumbling around in a dark room you have no idea how you got
into, without even knowing what you're looking for. Then as you're reaching around in the
darkness your hand is grasped by someone else's hand, and it says in a confident-sounding
voice, "I know where to go. Come with me." The owner of the other hand doesn't know any more
about the room than you do really, they just know how to feign confidence. And it just so
happens that most of those hands in the darkness are actually leading you in the service of the
powerful.
That's all mainstream narratives are: hands reaching out in the darkness of a confusing
world, speaking in confident-sounding voices and guiding you in a direction which benefits the
powerful. The largest voices belong to the rich and the powerful, which means those are the
hands you're most likely to encounter when stumbling around in the darkness. You go to school
which is designed to indoctrinate you into mainstream narratives, you consume media which is
designed to do the same, and most people find themselves led from hand to hand in this way all
the way to the grave.
That's really all everyone's doing here, reaching out in the darkness of a confusing world
and trying to find our way to the truth. It's messy as hell and there are so many
confident-sounding voices calling out to us giving us false directions about where to go, and
lots of people get lost to the grabbing hands of power-serving narratives. But the more of us
who learn to see through the dominant narratives and discover the underlying truths, the more
hands there are to guide others away from the interests of the powerful and toward a sane
society. A society in which people abhor war and embrace peace, in which people collaborate
with each other and their environment, in which people overcome the challenges facing our
species and create a beautiful world together.
People aren't sleepwalking, they are being duped . Duped into insanity in a confusing,
abrasive world where it's hard enough just to get your legs underneath you and figure out which
way's up, let alone come to a conscious truth-based understanding of what's really going on in
the world. But the people doing the duping are having a hard time holding onto everyone's hand,
and
their grip is slipping . We'll find our way out of this dark room yet.
Has anyone noticed that Rachel Maddow with her sooo patronizing, sooo objectionally smug
manner, implying that anyone who likes Trump is laughably pathetic, well – she keeps on
doing this and oddly (and effectively) generates a lot of support for Trump and what he's
doing. Her absolutely foul manner is perfectly crafted to turn folks against her and what she
espouses. You go girl!
It seems to me that, objectively, there are about three basic reasons for Endless War in
the Middle East.
One, to insure the security of the Israeli state. Two, to insure the free flow of cheap ME
petroleum to our 'trading partners' around the world who burn it to make cheap **** and ship
it across sealanes kept open by the U.S. Navy to Walmart and Amazon for resale (on credit!)
to the sheeple. Three, to finance the multi-billion dollar arms-building American MIC.
Purposes One, Two and Three mutually reinforce each other. You don't have to agree with all
Purposes as long as you agree with one of them. Proponents of Purpose One find allies among
the proponents of Purposes Two and Three. And vice versa. And, in a 'virtuous' (or is it
vicious?) circle, all at the top get very rich. The ultra-wealthy supporters of Israel, the
globalists, the corporatists, the militarists and their financiers and media mouthpieces.
Essentially all the new money in the Billionaire Class.
And who is opposed to this little arrangement? A few libertarians, and realists, and some
historians? A few folks on 'conservative' (but not neocon) websites? A few deplorables who
are actually thinking about their own best interests? A few people morally offended by the
notion of living in an 'exceptional' country which sponsors deadly perpetual war? A few
people who think its crazy to go half way around the world to kill people engaged in a
conflict which is critical to their daily lives but theoretical to us? A few men and women
who have seen combat and know the bloody truth? A few people who would prefer to re-invest in
the United States and repair the damage done to this country over the last forty years?
When you think about it the deck is definitely stacked in favor of Endless War. And what
Trump did on Thursday is again rather extraordinary.
"... The Defense Department under Mattis became more opaque and less accountable to the public and Congress. He presided over two years of shameful support for the Saudi coalition war on Yemen, and he went out of his way to offer absurd justifications for continued U.S. support for the war to the end of his tenure. ..."
"... No less than Secretary Pompeo, Mattis discredited himself in the desperate, unsuccessful effort to derail S.J.Res. 54. An administration that fights as hard as this has to keep the war on Yemen going is definitely not one interested in peace and restraint no matter what else happens. ..."
Officials said Mr. Mattis went to the White House on Thursday afternoon with his
resignation letter already written, but nonetheless made a last attempt at persuading Mr.
Trump to reverse his decision about Syria, which the president announced on Wednesday over
the objections of his senior advisers.
Mr. Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general, was rebuffed. Returning to the Pentagon,
he asked aides to print out 50 copies of his resignation letter and distribute them around
the building.
Mattis' departure from the administration after the midterms had been floated as a
possibility for months, but I don't think anyone seriously expected him to resign suddenly over
a policy disagreement with the president. It is telling and not to Mattis' credit that ending
an illegal war in Syria was the one policy disagreement with Trump that Mattis couldn't
stomach. The Defense Secretary had repeatedly disagreed with Trump on a range of issues, and he
usually lost the internal debate. The only times that he prevailed with Trump were when he
advised him to escalate ongoing U.S. wars, and his influence had waned enough that he couldn't
get his way on that, either. I was extremely
skeptical that a Syria withdrawal would actually happen. Now that Mattis has tried and
failed to reverse that decision, I have to acknowledge that I overestimated the ability of
Trump's advisers to change his mind.
The Defense Department under Mattis became more opaque and less accountable to the
public and Congress. He presided over two years of shameful support for the Saudi coalition war
on Yemen, and he went out of his way to offer absurd justifications for continued U.S. support
for the war to the end of his tenure. The disagreement over Syria will dominate coverage
of Mattis' resignation, but it is important to remember that when it came to the most
indefensible U.S.-backed war he and Trump were always on the same page. No less than
Secretary Pompeo, Mattis discredited himself in the desperate, unsuccessful effort to derail
S.J.Res. 54. An administration that fights as hard as this has to keep the war on Yemen going
is definitely not one interested in peace and restraint no matter what else happens.
As wrong as Mattis was on a number of foreign policy issues, there is a real danger that his
successor could be far worse. Even if Trump doesn't nominate a Tom Cotton or Lindsey Graham,
the next Defense Secretary is very likely to be a yes-man in the mold of Mike Pompeo. Almost
every time that Trump has replaced his top national security officials, he has chosen someone
who will flatter and praise him instead of telling him the truth and giving him the best
advice.
The next Defense Secretary is less likely to resist Trump's belligerent tendencies, and he
is more likely to indulge the president's worst impulses. Just as Pompeo has proven to be a
worse Secretary of State than Tillerson, Mattis' successor will very likely prove to be an
inferior Secretary of Defense.
You're right to fear what may replace him, especially after the disgusting Pompeo replaced
the decent but ineffectual Tillerson, but I'm glad Mattis is gone, especially if he quit over
the Syria decision, a no-brainer which should have been made two years ago.
It's hard to imagine anyone being worse than he was. Sadly, we may not have to imagine
it.
There's also the danger that the elites and establishment will now escalate their efforts to
remove him from office.
I've disagreed with Trump about many things, and I don't like the man, but I still trust
him more than the corrupt incompetents and foreign agents who dragged us into these Middle
East hellholes.
That is the terrible and ongoing damage that must be stopped.
But now that Trump has made a move in the direction of winding it down, you will almost
certainly see the fury and resentment of the elites and establishment redoubled. From their
point of view, the only thing worse than a Trump who doesn't keep his campaign promises is
one who does.
His next appointee will be no better and more than likely worse, a crafty Neocon who will
bite their tongue when they disagree with Trump in order to remain so that he can encourage
his worst tendencies. Bolton is a stellar example of this.
If he appoints someone like Cotton or Gen Jack Keane then Trump will be the last adult in
the room.
My SWAG, and this is merely SWAG, is that, since his election, Trump has given the neocons
everything they wanted or asked for, but he still is allowed any freedom of action.
In spite of governing much like a garden variety Republican, his enemies are still looking
for any excuse to remove him.
This is Trump reminding his enemies that he can do lots of things to upset the apple cart,
so cut him some slack, already.
He has announced his order to withdraw US troops from Syria.
His Defense Secretary James Mattis has resigned. There are rumors National Security
Adviser John Bolton may go too. (Please take
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with you!)
He announced a start to withdrawing from Afghanistan.
He now says he will veto a government funding bill unless he gets $5 billion for his
Wall, and as of 12:01 AM Washington time December 22 the federal government is officially
under partial shutdown.
All of this should be taken with a big grain of salt. While this week's assertiveness
perhaps provides further proof that Trump's impulses are right, it doesn't mean he can
implement them.
Senator Lindsey Graham is demanding
hearings on how to block the Syria pullout . Congress hardly ever quibbles with a
president's putting troops into a country, where the Legislative Branch has legitimate
Constitutional power. But if a president under his absolute command authority wants to pull
them out – even someplace where they're deployed illegally, as in Syria – well hold
on just a minute!
This will be a critical time for the Trump presidency. (And if God is really on his side, he
soon might get
another Supreme Court pick .) If he can get the machinery of the Executive Branch to
implement his decision to withdraw from Syria, and if he can pick a replacement to General
Mattis who actually agrees with Trump's views, we might start getting the America First policy
Trump ran on in 2016.
Mattis himself said in his resignation letter, "Because you have the right to have a
Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these [i.e., support for
so-called "allies"] and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my
position."
Right on, Mad Dog! In fact Trump should have had someone "better aligned" with him in that
capacity from the get-go. It is now imperative that he picks someone who agrees with his core
positions, starting with withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan, and reducing confrontation with
Russia.
Former Defense Secretary
Chuck Hagel complains that "our government is not a one-man show." Well, the "government"
isn't, but the Executive Branch is. Article II,
Section 1 : "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of
America." Him. The President. Nobody else. Period.
Already the drumbeat to saddle Trump with another Swamp critter at the Pentagon is starting:
"Several possible replacements for Mattis this week trashed the president's decision to pull
out of Syria. Retired Gen. Jack Keane called the move a "strategic mistake" on Twitter.
Republican Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) signed a letter demanding
Trump reconsider the decision and warning that the withdrawal bolsters Iran and Russia." If
Trump even considers any of the above as Mattis's replacement, he'll be in worse shape than he
has been for the past two years.
On the other hand, if Trump does pick someone who agrees with him about Syria and
Afghanistan, never mind
getting along with Russia , can he get that person confirmed by the Senate? One possibility
would be to nominate someone like Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney specifically
to run the Pentagon bureaucracy and get control of costs, while explicitly deferring
operational decisions to the Commander in Chief in consultation with the Service Chiefs.
Right now on Syria Trump is facing pushback from virtually the whole Deep State
establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as the media from Fox News , to NPR ,
to MSNBC . Terror has again gripped the establishment that the Trump who was elected president
in 2016 might actually start implementing what he promised. It is imperative that he pick
someone for the Pentagon (and frankly, clear out the rest of his national security team) and
appoint people he can trust and whose views comport with his own. Just lopping off a few heads
won't suffice – he needs a full housecleaning.
In the meantime in Syria, watch for another "Assad poison gas attack against his own
people." The last time Trump said we'd be
leaving Syria "very soon " was on March 29 of this year. Barely a week later, on April 7,
came a supposed chemical incident in Douma, immediately hyped as a government attack on
civilians
but soon apparent as likely staged . Trump, though, dutifully took the bait, tweeting that
Assad was an "animal." Putin, Russia, and Iran were "responsible" for "many dead, including
women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack" – "Big price to pay." He then for the
second time launched cruise missiles against Syrian targets. A
confrontation loomed in the eastern Med that could to have led to war with Russia. Now, in
light of Trump's restated determination to get out,
is MI6 already ginning up their White Helmet assets for a repeat ?
Trump's claim that the US has completed its only mission, to defeat ISIS, is being compared
to George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner following defeat of Iraq's army and the
beginning of the occupation (and, as it turned out, the beginning of the real war). But if it
helps get us out, who cares if Trump wants to take credit? Whatever his
terrible, horrible, no good, very bad national security team told him, the US presence in
Syria was never about ISIS. We are there as Uncle Sam's Rent-an-Army for the Israelis and
Saudis to block Iranian influence and especially an overland route between Syria and Iran (the
so-called
"Shiite land bridge" to the Mediterranean ).
For US forces the war against ISIS was always a sideshow, mainly carried on by the Syrians
and Russians and proportioned about like the war against the Wehrmacht: about 20% "us," about
80% "them." The remaining pocket ISIS has
on the Syria-Iraq border has been deliberate ly left alone, to keep handy as a lever to
force Assad out in a settlement (which is not going to happen). Thus the claim an American
pullout will
lead to an ISIS "resurgence " is absurd. With US forces ceasing to play dog in the manger,
the Syrians, Russians, Iranians, and Iraqis will kill them. All of them.
If Trump is able to follow through with the pullout, will the Syrian war wind down? It needs
to be kept in mind that the whole conflict has been because we (the US, plus Israel, Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, UAE, the United Kingdom, etc) are the aggressors. We sought to use
al-Qaeda and other jihadis to effect regime change via the tried and true method. It
failed.
Regarding Trump's critics' claim that he is turning over Syria to the Russians and Iranians,
Assad is nobody's puppet. He can be allied with a Shiite theocracy but not controlled by it;
Iran, likewise, can also have mutually beneficial ties with an ideologically dissimilar
country, like it does with Christian Armenia. The Russians will stay and expand their presence
but unlike our presence in many countries – which seemingly never ends, for example in
Germany, Japan, and Korea, not to mention Kosovo – they'll be there only as long and to
the extent the Syrians want them. (Compare our eternal occupations with the Soviets' politely
leaving Egypt when Anwar Sadat asked them, or leaving Somalia when Siad Barre wanted them out.
Instead of leaving, why didn't Moscow just do a " Diem " on them?) It
seems that American policymakers have gotten so far down the wormhole of their paranoid
fantasies about the rest of the world – and it can't be overemphasized, concerning areas
where the US has no actual national interests – that we no longer recognize classic
statecraft when practiced by other powers defending genuine national interests (which of course
are legitimate only to the extent we say so).
Anyway, if this week's developments are the result of someone putting something into
Donald's morning Egg
McMuffin , America and the world owe him (or her) a vote of thanks. Let's see more of
the wrecking ball we Deplorables voted for !
Trump thought that by bringing the swamp into his fold he might be able to defang it. He
bent the knee, played nice and kissed the ring but still they kept at him. I think Trump has
had enough of giving a mile for getting an inch. I like Trump when he presents himself as a
human wrecking ball to all the evil plans of the Washington establishment and if he continues
like this I honestly believe he will be reelected in 2020, and one day will be acknowleged as
a true chapion for every day Americans but if he shrinks back into his shadow and gives the
likes of Bolton and Pompeo free reign to **** all over the globe with their insane scheming
he will be a one term failure.
Don't get too excited about the possibility that there may be more kinds of viagra to try
out, Jattras. If Trump recently seems to be more like the candidate we voted for, the real
reason for his reversion back is because the midterm elections are over and Trump kept the
Senate.
Check with me before you start making a lot of crack-pot statements
America's
trade policy is in incoherent shambles. Decades of neoliberal "free trade" pacts -- which as
often as not simply gave corporations an end run around the state, or their very own rigged,
pseudo-legal system -- have created terrible social carnage around the world and a furious
political backlash. And President Trump's incoherent, haphazard response has done little to
change the system, let alone reform it in a sensible fashion.
Overhauling such a gargantuan, world-spanning system is a dizzying task. But Timothy Meyer
and Ganesh Sitaraman at the Great Democracy Initiative have a
new paper that presents a solid starting point for developing a fundamental reform of
American trade structure.
Meyer and Sitaraman identify three large problems with the status quo, and propose policy
solutions for each:
The complicated and unbalanced structure of the bureaucracy that oversees trade
policy
The enormous pro-rich bias that is built into trade deals
How the inequality resulting from trade routinely goes totally unaddressed
Let's take these in turn.
The extant trade bureaucracy -- as usual for the American state -- is highly fragmented and
bizarrely structured. There is the Department of Commerce, the United States Trade
Representative, the Export-Import Bank, and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, plus the
International Development Finance Corporation coming soon. Then there are a slew of other
agencies that have some bearing on trade-related security or economic development.
Meyer and Sitaraman logically suggest combining most of these functions into a single
Department of Economic Growth and Security. The point is not just to streamline the trade
oversight structure, but also to make it consider a broader range of objectives. Neoliberals
insist that trade is simply about making the self-regulating market more "efficient," but trade
very obviously bears on employment, domestic industry, and especially security.
For instance, for all its other disastrous side effects, Trump's haphazard tax on aluminum
has dramatically
revived the American aluminum industry . Ensuring a reasonable domestic supply of key
metals like that is so obviously a security concern -- for military and consumer uses
alike -- that it wouldn't have even occurred to New Deal policymakers to think otherwise. It
takes a lot of ideological indoctrination to think there's no problem when a small price
disadvantage causes a country to lose its entire supply chain of key industrial
commodities.
Then there is the problem of pro-rich bias. Put simply, the last few decades of trade deals
have been outrageously biased towards corporations and the rich. They have powerfully enabled
the growth of
parasitic tax havens , which allow companies to book profits in low-tax jurisdictions,
starving countries of rightful revenue (and often leading to companies piling up gargantuan
dragon hoards of cash they don't know what to do with).
Corporations, meanwhile, have gotten their own fake legal system in the form of
Investor-State Dispute Settlement trade deal stipulations. As I have written before ,
the point of these arbitration systems is to create a legal system ludicrously slanted in favor
of the corporation -- allowing them not just to win almost every time, but to sue over
nonsensical harms like "taking away imaginary future profits."
Meyer and Sitaraman suggest renegotiating the tax portions of trade deals to enforce a
"formulary" tax system -- in which profits are taxed where they are made, not where they are
booked. This would go a considerable distance towards cracking down on tax havens -- who knows,
perhaps Luxembourg might even develop some productive business.
Finally, there is the problem of distributive justice. Again contrary to neoliberal dogma,
trade very often creates winners and losers -- witness the wreckage of Detroit and the fat
salaries of the U.S. executive class. Meyer and Sitaraman suggest new mechanisms to consider
the side effects of trade deals (and ways to compensate the losers), to take action against
abusive foreign nations (for example, by dumping their products below cost, or violating
environmental or labor standards), and finally directly taxing the beneficiaries.
Something the authors don't discuss is the
problem of trade imbalances . When one country develops a surplus (that is, it exports more
than it imports), another country must of necessity be in a deficit. The deficit country in
turn must finance its imports, usually by borrowing. That can easily create a severe economic
crisis if the deficit country suddenly loses access to loans -- which then harms the exporting
country, though not as much. This has been a disastrous problem in the eurozone.
The U.S. does have extremely wide latitude to run a trade deficit, because it controls the
global reserve currency, meaning a strong
demand for dollar-denominated assets so other countries can settle their international
accounts. But this creates its own problems, as discussed above.
To be fair, this is not exactly an omission for a paper focused on domestic policy. Creating
a specifically international trade architecture would require an entire paper of its own, if
not a book or three. But it would be something future trade policymakers will have to
consider.
At any rate, it's quite likely that trade policy will be a major topic of discussion in 2020
-- if for no reason other than Trump's ridiculous shenanigans in the area. However, even that
demonstrates an important fact: The U.S. president has a great deal of unilateral authority
over trade. Democrats should be thinking hard about how they would change things.
This paper is a great place to start.
"... The Pity of It All : A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 ..."
"... Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine. ..."
"... The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results. ..."
"... Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal emphasis on an American dominated global empire. ..."
"... Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. ..."
"... Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. ..."
"... Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed. Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis. ..."
"... Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia. Or you can count their billions. ..."
"... The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop, confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality. ..."
"... Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country. They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on. ..."
"... "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper" ..."
"... "The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. " ..."
"... Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention. ..."
"... " (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper does not say that." ..."
"... But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld? ..."
"... Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS. ..."
"... But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence of the manifest destiny. ..."
At the Huffington Post, Jim Sleeper addresses
"A Foreign-Policy Problem
No One Speaks About," and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives.
Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, even if he's not a warmongering neocon
himself. The Yale lecturer's jumping-off point are recent statements by Leon Wieseltier and
David Brooks lamenting the decline of
American power.
In addition to Wieseltier and Brooks, the "blame the feckless liberals" chorus has included Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, David
Frum, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and many other American neoconservatives. Some of them have
been chastened, or at least been made more cautious, by their grand-strategic blunders of a few years ago ..
I'm saying that they've been fatuous as warmongers again and again and that there's something pathetic in their attempts to
emulate Winston Churchill, who warned darkly of Hitler's intentions in the 1930s. Their blind spot is their willful ignorance
of their own complicity in American deterioration and their over-compensatory, almost pre-adolescent faith in the benevolence
of a statist and militarist power they still hope to mobilize against the seductions and terrors rising all around them.
At bottom, the chorus members' recurrent nightmares of 1938 doom them to reenact other nightmares, prompted by very similar
writers in 1914, on the eve of World War I. Those writers are depicted chillingly, unforgettably, in Chapter 9, "War Fever," of
Amos Elon's
The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933. Elon's account of Germany's stampede into World
War I chronicles painfully the warmongering hysterics of some Jewish would-be patriots of the Kaiserreich who exerted themselves
blindly, romantically, to maneuver their state into the Armageddon that would produce Hitler himself.
This is the place to emphasize that few of Wilhelmine German's warmongers were Jews and that few Jews were or are warmongers.
(Me, for example, although my extended-family history isn't much different from Brooks' or Wieseltier's.) My point is simply that,
driven by what I recognize as understandable if almost preternatural insecurities and cravings for full liberal-nationalist belonging
that was denied to Jews for centuries in Europe, some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves
into the Iraq War, and they have continued, again and again, to employ modes of public discourse and politics that echo with eerie
fidelity that of the people described in Elon's book. The Americans lionized George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and
many others as their predecessors lionized Kaiser Wilhelm, von Bethmann-Hollweg, and far-right nationalist associates who hated
the neo-cons of that time but let them play their roles .
Instead of acknowledging their deepest feelings openly, or even to themselves, the writers I've mentioned who've brought so
much folly and destruction upon their republic, are doubling down, more nervous and desperate than ever, looking for someone else
to blame. Hence their whirling columns and rhythmic incantations. After Germany lost World War I, many Germans unfairly blamed
their national folly on Jews, many of whom had served in it loyally but only a few of whom had been provocateurs and cheerleaders
like the signatories of [Project for New American Century's] letter to Bush. Now neo-cons, from Wieseltier and Brooks to [Charles]
Hill, are blaming Obama and all other feckless liberals. Some of them really need to take a look in Amos Elon's mirror.
Interesting. Though I think Sleeper diminishes Jewish agency here (Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban are no one's proxy) and can't
touch the Israel angle. The motivation is not simply romantic identification with power, it's an ideology of religious nationalism
in the Middle East, attachment to the needs of a militarist Sparta in the Arab world. That's another foreign policy problem no one
speaks about.
Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:11 pm
"Democracy in in the Middle East" was always just a weasel-word saying of "let's try to improve Israel's strategic position
by changing their neighbours".
The neocons basically took a hardline position on foreign interventionism based out of dual loyalty. This is the honest truth.
For anti-Semites, a handful of neocons will always represent "The Jews" as a collective. For many Jews, the refusal to come to
grips with the rise of the neocons and how the Jewish community (and really by "community" I mean the establishment) failed to
prevent them in their own midst, is also a blemish.
Of course, Jim Sleeper is doing these things now. He should have done them 15-20 years ago or so. But better late than never,
I guess.
Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:16 pm
P.S. While we talk a lot about neocons as a Jewish issue, it's also important to put them in perspective. The only war that
I can truly think of that they influenced was the Iraq war, which was a disaster, but it also couldn't have happened without 9/11,
which was a very rare event in the history of America. You have to go back to Pearl Harbor to find something similar, and that
wasn't technically a terrorist attack but rather a military attack by Japan.
Leading up to the early 2000s, they were mostly ignored during the 1990s. They did take over the GOP media in the early 90s,
using the same tactics used against Hagel, use social norms as a cover but in actuality the real reason is Israel.
Before the 90s, in the 70s and 80s, the cold war took up all the oxygen.
So yeah, the neocons need to be talked about. But comparing what they are trying to do with a World War is a bit of a stretch.
Finally, talking about Israel – which Sleeper ignored – and the hardline positions that the political class in America have
adopted, if you want to look who have ensured the greatest slavishness to Israel, liberal/centrist groups like ADL, AJC and AIPAC(yes,
they are mostly democrats!) have played a far greater role than the neocons.
But I guess, Sleeper wasn't dealing with that, because it would ruin his view of the neocons as the bogeymen.
Just like "liberal" Zionists want to blame Likud for everything, overlooking the fact that Labor/Mapai has had a far greater
role in settling/colonizing the Palestinian land than the right has, and not to speak about the ethnic cleansing campaigns of
'48 and '67 which was only done by the "left", so too the neocons often pose as a convenient catch-all target for the collective
Jewish failure leading up to Iraq.
And I'm using the words "collective Jewish failure" because I actually don't believe, unlike Mearsheimer/Walt, that the war
would not have gone ahead unless there was massive support by the Israel/Jewish lobby. If Jews had decided no, it would still
have gone ahead. This is also contrary to Tom Friedman's famous saying of "50 people in DC are responsible for this war".
I also think that's an oversimplification.
But I focus more on the Jewish side because that's my side. And I want my community to do better, and just blaming the neocons
is something I'm tired of hearing in Jewish circles. The inability to look at liberal Jewish journalists and their role in promoting
the war to either gentile or Jewish audiences.
Kathleen, May 6, 2014, 6:53 pm
There was talk about this last night (Monday/5th) on Chris Matthew's Hardball segment on Condi "mushroom cloud" Rice pulling
out of the graduation ceremonies at Rutger's. David Corn did not say much but Eugene Robinson and Chris Matthews were basically
talking about Israel and the neocons desires to rearrange the middle east "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad" conversation.
Bumblebye, May 6, 2014, 2:33 pm
"some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves into the Iraq War"
Have to take issue with that – the neo-cons hurled young American (and foreign) servicemen and women into that war, many to
their deaths, along with throwing as much taxpayer money as possible. They stayed ultra safe and grew richer for their efforts.
Citizen, May 7, 2014, 9:03 am
@ Bumblebye
Good point. During WW1, as I read the history, the Jewish Germans provided their fair share of combat troops. If memory serves,
despite Weimar Germany's later "stab in the back" theory, e.g., Hitler himself was given a combat medal thanks to his Jewish senior
officer. In comparison to the build-up to Shrub Jr's war on Iraq, the Jewish neocons provided very few Jewish American combat
troops.
It's hard to get reliable stats on Jewish American participation in the US combat arms during the Iraq war. For all I've been
able to ascertain, more have joined the IDF over the years. At any rate, it's common knowledge that Shrub's war on Iraq was instigated
and supported by chicken hawks (Jew or Gentile) at a time bereft of conscription. They built their sale by ignoring key facts,
and embellishing misleading and fake facts, as illustrated by the Downing Street memo.
Keith, May 6, 2014, 7:47 pm
PHIL- Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little
difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which
are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine.
The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's
emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results.
Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal
emphasis on an American dominated global empire.
So yes, the nationalistic emphasis is an anachronism, however, the decline of the US in conjunction with the extension of a
system of globalized domination should hardly be of concern to elite power-seekers who will benefit. In fact, the new system of
corporate/financial control will be beyond the political control of any nation, even the US. If they can pull it off. An interesting
topic no doubt, but one which I doubt is suitable for extended discussion on Mondoweiss. As for power-seeking as a consequence
of a uniquely Jewish experience, perhaps the less said the better.
Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes that
10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition with
them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on the
same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack
Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.
Right now, their interests have diverged over the
Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself
is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support the political
movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty antisemite whose followers killed many thousands
of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those left behind perished
during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any of them would identify
with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.
In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy
for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with
the Bandera brigades.
(I know I'm always grabbing OT threads of discussion, but when it comes down to it, I know much less about Zionism and Israel/Palestine
than many, if not most of the regular commenters here.)
I also am going to drift further off-topic by saying there is strong evidence that the slaughter in Odessa last Friday was
highly orchestrated and not solely the result of spontaneous mob violence. Very graphic and disturbing images in all of these
links:
" and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives.
Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, ..>>
Stop it Sleeper. Do not continue to use the victim card ' to explain' the trauma, the insecurities, the nightmares, the angst,
the feelings, the sensitivities, blah blah, blah of Zionist or Israel.
That is not what they are about. These are power mad psychos like most neocons, period.
And even if it were, and even if all the Jews in the world felt the same way, the bottom line would still be they do not have
the right to make others pay in treasure and blood for their nightmares and mental sickness.
As near as I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong), the Ukrainians themselves are about half and half pro Russia and Pro NATO.
Your glance at the history of the region as to why this is so, and your text on historical Ukranian suffering and POTV on MW commentary
on this –did not help your analysis and its conclusion.
There's a difference between isolationism and defensive intervention, and even more so, re isolationism v. pro-active interventionism
"in the name of pursuing the democratic ideal". See Ron Paul v. PNAC-style neocons and liberal Zionists.
Also, if you were Putin, how would you see the push of NATO & US force posts ever creeping towards Russia and its local environment?
Look at the US military postings nearing Russia per se & those surrounding Iran. Compare Russia's.
And note the intent to wean EU from Russian oil, and as well, the draconian sanctions on Iran, and Obama's latest partnering
sanctions on Russia.
Imagine yourself in Putin's shoes, and Iran's.
Don't abuse your imagination only by imagining yourself in Netanyahu's shoes, which is the preoccupation of AIPAC and its whores
in the US Congress.
Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes
that 10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition
with them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on
the same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack
Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.
Right now, their interests have diverged over
the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel
itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support
the political movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty anti-Semite whose followers killed
many thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those
left behind perished during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-Zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any
of them would identify with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.
In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy
for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with
the Bandera brigades.
Yonah writes The freedom of Ukraine is a worthy goal. If the US is not able to back up our attempt to help them gain their
freedom it is not something to celebrate, but something to lament.
What are you saying? Ukraine has been an independent nation for 22 years. What freedom is this? What we have witnessed is that
one half of Ukraine has gotten tired that the other half keeps on electing candidates that represent those Ukrainians that identify
with Russian culture. They (the western half) successfully staged a coup and purged the other (eastern half) from the government.
You call that "freedom". Doesn't it embarrass you, Yonah, that the armed militias that conducted that coup are descendants of
the Bandera organization.
Does that ring a bell? These are the Ukrainians that were involved in the holocaust. Does Babi Yar stir any memories Yohan?
It was a massacre of 40,000 Jews just outside of Kiev in 1942. It was the single largest massacre of Jews during WWII. The massacre
was led by the Germans ( Einsatzgruppe C officers) but was carried out with the aid of 400 Ukrainian Auxillary Police. These were
later incorporated into the 14th SS-Volunteer Division "Galician" made up mostly Ukrainians. The division flags are to this day
displayed at Right Sector rallies in western Ukraine.
Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were
almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed.
Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis.
Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this
is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia.
Or you can count their billions. In any case, the neutral posture is sensible for Israel here. Which is highly uncharacteristic
for that government.
Toivo S- The history of Jew hatred by certain anti Russian elements in the Ukraine is not encouraging and nothing that I celebrate.
Maybe I have been swayed by headlines and a superficial reading of the situation.
If indeed I am wrong regarding the will of the Ukrainian people, I can only be glad that my opinion is just that, my opinion
and not US or Israel or anyone's policy but my own. I assume that a majority of Ukrainians want to maintain independence of Russia
and that the expressions of rebellion are in that vein.
My people were murdered by the einsatzgruppen in that part of the world and so maybe I have overcompensated by trying not to
allow my personal history to interfere with what I think would be the will of the majority of the Ukraine.
But Toivo S. please skip the "doesn't it embarrass you" line of thought. Just put a sock in it and skip it.
Well thanks for that Yonah. My wife's family descended from Jewish communities in Odessa and Galicia. They emigrated to the US
between 1900 and 1940. After WWII none of their relatives left behind were ever heard from again. Perhaps you have family that
experienced similar stories. What caused me to react to your post above is that you are describing the current situation in Ukraine
as a "freedom" movement by the Ukrainians when the political forces there descended from the same people that killed my inlaws
family (and apparently yours to). Why do you support them?
ToivoS- I support them because I trust/don't trust Putin. I trust him to impose his brand of leadership on Ukraine, I don't trust
him to care a whit about freedom. It is natural that the nationalist elements of Ukraine would descend from the elements that
expressed themselves the last time they had freedom from the Soviet Union, that is those forces that were willing to join with
the Nazis to express their hatred for the communist Soviet Union's rule over their freedom. That's how history works. The nationalists
today descend from the nationalists of yesterday.
But it's been 70 years since WWII and the Ukrainians ought to be able to have freedom even if the parties that advocate for
freedom are descended from those that supported the Nazis. (I know once i include the Nazi part of history any analogies are toxic,
but if I am willing to grant Hamas its rights as an expression of the Palestinian desire for freedom, why would I deny the Ukrainian
foul nationalist parties their rights to express their people's desire for freedom.)
Political parties are not made in a sterile laboratory, they evolve over history and most specifically they emerge from the
past. I accept that Ukrainian nationalism has not evolved much, but nonetheless not having read any polls I assume that the nationalists
are the representatives of the people's desire for freedom. And because Putin strikes me as something primitive, I accept the
Ukrainian desire for freedom.
What are you supporting? Let me refresh your historic memory: Black's Transfer Agreement. Now apply analogy, responding
to ToivoS. Might help us all to understand, explore more skillfully, Israel's current stance on the Putin-Ukranian matter .?
(I think Nuland's intervention caught on tape, combined with who she is married to, already explores with great clarification
what the US is doing.
"The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play
the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. Most people here would probably disagree with Sleeper, because he does
not deny that the world needs a cop, nor that the US would play a positive role, if it only had the means and the desire to
do so. People here (overwhelmingly) see the US role as a negative one (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let
the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world,"
The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that
embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop,
confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have
us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock
it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality.
Contrast that with the realist or realism approach recommended by George Kennan, and followed by this country successfully
through the end of the Cold War. That approach is conservative and contends we should stay out of wars unless the vital national
security interests of the US are at stake, like protecting WESTERN Europe, Japan, Australia, and the Western Hemisphere. This
meant we could sympathize with the plight of all the eastern Europeans oppressed by the Soviets, but would not defend militarily
the Hungarians (1956) or the Czechs (1968). It also meant we wouldn't send US troops into North Vietnam because we didn't want
to go to war with the Chinese over a country that was at best tangential to US interests. When we varied from that policy (Vietnam
and Iraq wars, Somalia) we paid a very heavy price while doing nothing to advance or protect our vital national security interests.
The sooner this country can return to our traditional realism-based foreign policy the better. Part of that policy would be
to disassociate the US from its entangling alliance with Likud Israel and its US Jewish supporters that espouse the Likud Greater
Israel line.
Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily
involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country.
They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to
get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend
and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on.
Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed
at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews. It is also directed
at Neoconservative foreign policy advocates, comprised of Jews and non-Jews, and overlap between the two groups. Please also note
my use of the term "major role", and that I am not saying the Neocons and their supporters (Jewish or non) were solely responsible
for our involvement in the Iraq war. I am offering these caveats in the hope that the usual changes of antisemitism can be avoided
in your or anyone else's response to my arguments.
The influence of Neocons on US foreign policy has been very harmful to this country and poses a grave danger to its future.
It would be wise for you to reflect on that harm and those dangers and decide whether you belong in the realist camp or want to
continue running with the Neocons.
Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed
at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews.
What about the role of *liberal Zionists*, like Hillary Clinton, in supporting and promoting the Iraq War? Clinton still hasn't
offered an apology for helping to drive the United States in a multi-trillion dollar foreign policy disaster - and she has threatened
to "totally obliterate" Iran.
What about Harry Reid's lavish praise of Sheldon Adelson?
"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has for some time billed the Koch brothers as public enemy No.1 .
But billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson? He's just fine, Reid says.
"I know Sheldon Adelson. He's not in this for money," the Nevada Democrat said of Adelson, the Vegas casino magnate who
reportedly spent close to $150 million to support Republicans in the 2012 presidential election."
@ yonah fredman "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper"
Strange
"state into the Armageddon .. "
"The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to
play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. "
Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention.
" (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they
want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act
like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper
does not say that."
You do tho, without quoting anyone "here".
BTW Pajero, strawmen no matter how lengthy and seemingly erudite, rarely walk anywhere
I'm going to put this down as Jewish navel gazing.
Jews are disproportionately liberal. Jews make up a huge chunk of the peace movement. Jews are relative to their numbers on
the left of most foreign policy positions.
Iraq was unusual in that Jews were not overwhelming opposed to the invasion, but it is worth noting the invasion at the time
was overwhelming popular. Frankly given the fact that Jews are now considered white people and the fact that Jews are almost all
middle class they should be biased conservative. There certainly is no reason they should be more liberal than Catholics. Yet
they are. It is the degree of Jewish liberalism not the degree of Jewish conservatism that is striking.
But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct
from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul
Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld?
Strongly antiwar incumbent Rep. Walter Jones (R – NC) has won a hotly contested primary tonight, defeating a challenge from
hawkish challenger and former Treasury Dept. official Taylor Griffin 51% to 45%.
Voter turn out was light .. tea party types did a lot of lobbying for Griffin here .but Jones prevailed. Considering the
onslaught of organized activity against him by ECI and the tea partiers for the past month he did well.
@ lysias
Let's refresh our look at what Ron Paul had to say about foreign policy and foreign aid. Then, let's compare what his son has
said, and take a look of his latest bill in congress to cut off aid to Palestine. Yes, you read that right; it's not a bill to
cut off any aid to Israel.
Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will
not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS.
The heavy artillery included the detestable Karl Rove, former Governor and RNC Chair Haley Barber and the War Party's highly
paid chief PR flack, Ari Fleischer.
But it was Neocon central that hauled out the big guns. Bill Kristol was so desperate to thwart the slowly rising anti-interventionist
tide within the GOP that he even trotted out Sarah Palin to endorse Jones's opponent"
But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it
here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence
of the manifest destiny.
"... "Regional clients are happy to "stand with" the Trump administration so long as they aren't required to do very much" ..."
"... Yes. And that tells you how much of a threat they think Iran really poses. ..."
"... Their attitude is like this: "Well, if you want to threaten Iran in order to keep Israel and Saudi Arabia happy, go ahead. You can even attack Iran. We're okay with it. Just don't expect us to do any fighting, dying, or paying. And if you make a mess, don't expect us to help you clean it up. In fact, if you make a mess, we're going to jack up our foreign aid request. And we're not taking any of your goddamn refugees this time." ..."
Then-Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-KS, speaking at a rally in 2013. He faces a senate grilling for
his secretary of state nomination today.
Mark Taylor/Creative Commons Nahal Toosi reports
on an upcoming Pompeo speech planned for his visit to Egypt next month:
Pompeo's speech will likely focus heavily on Iran, as have many of his past public
remarks. The chief U.S. diplomat is likely to try to rally Arab capitals to stand with the
United States and thwart Iran's use of proxy forces, support for terrorism and other
activities in the region.
The Trump administration has made a regular habit of denouncing Iran in speeches by top
officials, and the administration's Iran policy has no more international support today than it
did a year ago. It's not clear what purpose another high-profile Iran-bashing session serves.
The administration's talking points are tediously familiar by now, and Pompeo's brusque and
overbearing manner is the opposite of persuasive.
Regional clients are happy to "stand with" the Trump administration so long as they aren't
required to do very much, and every attempt to get these clients to do more has so far produced
no results. The administration's ill-conceived, so-called Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA)
has stalled, thanks to the broader anti-Saudi backlash in Washington and the lack of interest
on the part of many of its would-be members. The administration's Iran policy of regime change
in all but name isn't working as planned and isn't going to work, and there is not much else
for Pompeo to talk about that reflects well on the administration. He and the president have
gone out of their way to thwart Congressional opposition to the war on Yemen, and they have
bent over backwards to make excuses for Saudi crimes.
Pompeo won't admit it in his speech, but the current U.S. role in the region is a
destabilizing one that involves aiding and abetting war crimes and helping to cause mass
starvation.
"Regional clients are happy to "stand with" the Trump administration so long as they
aren't required to do very much"
Yes. And that tells you how much of a threat they think Iran really poses.
Their attitude is like this: "Well, if you want to threaten Iran in order to keep
Israel and Saudi Arabia happy, go ahead. You can even attack Iran. We're okay with it. Just
don't expect us to do any fighting, dying, or paying. And if you make a mess, don't expect us
to help you clean it up. In fact, if you make a mess, we're going to jack up our foreign aid
request. And we're not taking any of your goddamn refugees this time."
Gabbard served in a field medical unit of the
Hawaii Army National Guard in a combat zone
in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was later deployed to Kuwait. She previously served in the
Hawaii House of Representatives from
2002 to 2004. When she was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives at age 21, Gabbard was the youngest woman to be elected
to a U.S. state legislature." wiki
------------
Major Gabbard, ARNG served in Iraq, is a woman, a Democrat, a person of color, a non-interventionist, a Hindu and a Pacific Islander
of Samoan descent. What could be better?
If that thought fails I suggest Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee as back-ups. pl
I have followed Tulsi Gabbard off and on since 2016. Some blogs attack her mercilessly but she has a consistent approach, is admirably
composed when under attack, and is one of the most courageous American politicians I've seen. That she is still there is achievement
enough, though it would be good to see the sort of politics in the West in which such people could be in office.
While I would be delighted to see Gabbard as SecDef is there any chance she would get Senate Confirmed? From what I have heard
from her she seems to have a realistic understanding of the World which would seem to bar her from the job.
Sounds good to me. Then she can become the first female POTUS (assuming actual scientific genders are still allowed) after Trump's
2nd term. (El Trumpissimo should have offered her the VP job, IMO.) (Meanwhile, we in Canada will be all agog about Trudeau III.
Unless Comrade Lang establishes residence and votes the entire Trudeau spawn out forever.) Ah well, we can dream.
She has my endorsement. Selecting Gabbard would explode some heads in Washington on both sides. Although I think she would make
a better replacement for National Security Adviser. Send the Mustache of Idiocy back to the AEI.
Brilliant ! Borg hates her, though. And not just because of her foreign policy views. She resigned as vice chair (if I recall
correctly) of the DNC, particularly after being christened as the next Obama-like Dem pol, because she felt the DNC was being
completely unfair to Bernie Sanders and I think it was well before anything came out in the news about what was happening. I'd
love to see it but she angers the political class almost as much as Trump. Fingers crossed, though !
One hundred percent. In particular, the absolute balls it took to do that knowing the flaming wreckage that would be thrown
her way. Says a lot about her character--ideology aside.
The Dems have not had the reckoning like the Rs did in 2016, but it's coming. To say nothing of the full airing of grievances
between the Obama and Clinton camps. I read there is going to be something like 19 Dem debates, some in 2019 and some in 2020.
I'm willing to wager it'll be far more nasty than the clown show the Rep. nomination was in 2016.
Gabbard would be an excellent choice, but she'd never do it. Can't be a Democrat and be that closely associated with the Orange
Devil! Trump should pardon Flynn and then appoint him as Sec Def. Really demonstrate his independence from the swamp. That move
just might cause enough heart attacks and strokes that the swamp would be drained in 48 hours.
Gabbard is well suited to support the implementation of a non-interventionist policy. I think she would do well as SecDef, but
would she take it? Trump's best course of action now is to conduct a quiet search and get a firm commitment before announcing
any possible candidates. Otherwise we'll see a repeat of the search for a new Chief of Staff.
Reason-able indeed. Gagged to watch Michael R. Gordon last night on PBS news hour plant uber-neocon Sen. Cotton as the likely
choice. (without mentioning that Cotton has been even more hawkish on Syria than Mattis...) Rand Paul is an interesting backup
suggestion, esp. as I was puzzled he caved and went along with Pompeo for SoS. In any case, what an overdue change of course that
any of the above suggestions would signal.
Sir;
It would depend on what Gabbard sees as her ultimate goal. Being Secretary of Defense, under any President, would be a real career
boost. Dealing with Trump would also toughen her up for waht I see as her eventual Armageddon level conflict with the Democratic
National Committee if she aspires to higher office. There is also the chance that the Republican Party might try to 'poach' her
from the Democrat Party. Even if Trump serves two full terms as President, she will still be young enough and tough enough to
run for the top spot, from either party.
Her ultimate goal will be release from Saṃsāra. In the meantime a career boost will doubtless be attractive, but only if accompanied
by good Karma. Vice-chair of the DNC met the first criterion, but it appears she resigned when it failed to meet the latter. People
who value their Karma are rare in life and all the more so in politics. She is an exotic flower to be sure.
I've been watching her for years.She's been a vocal critic of the imperial project and the occupation of Syria from the beginning.
I expect we'll see her make a run for the brass ring in 2024. Thumbs up.
Watched Kiersten Nielsen take a beating from retrograde congressmen yesterday on immigration, border protection, etx.; she never
lost her composure -- well, maybe one tiny retort.
If Gabbard has half the presence of Nielsen, the American people -- and women -- can feel proud of their leaders. Again.
I believe she'd be a good SecDef, but I fear that her taking that position in the Trump administration would derail the potential
she has for making a huge positive impact on the US political system. I would much rather see her announce early her candidacy
for president in 2020 on the Democratic ticket. Hopefully Bernie Sanders will recognize that his age will be a serious impediment
and will repay her support in 20016 by passing his torch (and mailing list) on to her for 2020. The Democratic Party needs an
enema in the worst way and no one is in a better position to administer it than Gabbard.
I agree that taking the position would probably ruin her chances going forward by association with Trump but I also believe the
Presidential run is too soon. If Sanders health remains strong I think a Sanders/Gabbard ticket would win and set up a Gabbard
run in 2024. I know of diehard Trump fans that would vote Sanders. Many working class are waking up to the raw deals they are
getting.
Excellent choice for that or any position in the Trump Administration but ... 1. not a doormat, 2. not a neocon, lunatic.
Trump will eventually surround himself with Wormtongue types (from Lord of the Rings). Neocons like Bolton who know that they
will not always get their way but want to be in the Throne room to poison his mind with flattery and have a chance to get the
glorious war they crave so much. He will likely appoint someone like Tom Cotton or Gen. Jack Keane. That is not what I want but
that is what I expect.
Agree. She's almost the lone voice against ME policy especially re Syria. Gets no pub. The Borgists would stomp all over her.
Think DT ever heard of her?
With an ever faster News cycle, People forget what happened in the Past bringing this World
to the Present.
Historical Facts Americans don't take into consideration.
1. Within weeks of 9/11, the US came out with WAR PLANS to change the governments of Iraq,
Libya, Syria and at THE END, Iran.
2. Republican Bush illegally invaded Iraq in 2003.
3. ISIS did not exist until the illegal US invasion of Iraq
4. Democrat Obama did Libya and started the Syrian regime phase of the 2001 US WAR PLAN for
the Middle East in 2011.
5. In line with the 2001 US WAR PLAN to change the Assad government, ISIS moved from Iraq to
Syria as proxy regime change fighters.
6. US MSM report the US illegally started bombing ISIS in Syria, and with all the US smart
bombs, they missed, and ISIS was getting stronger, on the verge of bringing down the Assad
regime after 4 years of Death and Destruction following the 2001 US WAR PLAN for Syria.
7. Russia and Iran are legally asked to come to the aid of their Middle East Ally, like
NATO's Article 5, and enter the Syrian WORLD WAR in 2015.
8. Russia starts bombing ISIS and doesn't miss. ISIS is finally degraded in Syria, putting a
stop to the 2001 US WAR PLAN for regime change.
9. The US has made regime change as American as Apple pie and refuses to look as the
terrorist failed States it begat implementing it's 2001 WAR PLAN. It does increase sales for
the Military-Industrial Complex.
10. This MATERIAL WORLD did not notice the Spiritual Sign of the Times, when ISIS destroyed
the Islamic Mosque in Nineveh, Iraq containing the tomb of Jonah in the Whale fame recorded
in the Jewish-Christian Bible some 2900 years ago. He was sent to that "World City Nineveh"
to warn them of impending destruction if they continue on the path they're on. He tried to
get away from being a buzzkill.
10. As Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be
three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Matthew 12:39-41
I despise Trump, but if he's managed to stumble on doing something sensible, and actually
does it (never a certainty with the casino swindler) -- great! There's no sane reason for
us to muck about in Syria. However it comes about, we should welcome a withdrawal there. If
the move gives Trump some of the approval that he plainly craves, maybe he'll repeat the
performance and end our purposeless wallow in Afghanistan.
It doesn't say anything good about the nominal opposition party, the Dems, that half or
more of them -- and apparently *all* of their dinosaur "leadership" -- can't stifle the
kneejerking and let him do it. Of course many of them are "troubled" because their Israeli
& Saudi owners, er, "donors" expect it. But some of them seem to have developed a sudden
deep attachment to "our mission in Syria" for no better reason than, Trump is for it,
therefore I must shout against it .
And then, of course, there's the Russia hysteria. Oh yeah, what a huge win for Moscow if
it scores the "prize" of occupying Syria! If that's Putin's idea of a big score, how
exactly does it harm any American to let him have it?
I wonder if the Democratic Party will ever be capable of doing anything other than
snatching defeat from the jaws of victory?
"... You want to know what those casualty numbers tell us? American forces in Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq aren't going outside the wire – off American bases – very often. That's how you stay alive in places like Syria and Afghanistan. You stay away from places where things like IEDs can kill you. And even then, in the comparative safety of American bases, you're not safe, because there are enemy soldiers posing as "friendly" Afghan soldiers who will kill you. ..."
"... This is the nature of the conflicts we're engaged in. You take thousands of American soldiers and send them thousands of miles away from home into combat zones in foreign lands, and you have them do as little as possible so not too many of them get killed. ..."
"... It pains me to say this, but Trump pulling 2,000 soldiers out of Syria and 7,000 soldiers out of Afghanistan is the right thing to do. It might be getting done by a certifiable loon with an orange muskrat on his head, but it's the right thing to do and it should have been done a long time ago. ..."
The arm-waving and hand-flapping and pearl-clutching in the foreign affairs and national
security "communities," not to mention in the Congress and among prominent Democrats, is
something to behold. Significant portions of all those communities have long thought we didn't
have any business being in Syria in the first place. Not to mention fighting our 17th year of
the so-called "war" in Afghanistan, from which Trump intends to remove some 7,000 American
troops...
More than 2,400 American soldiers dead in Afghanistan so far. More than 30,000
Afghan civilians killed. Sixty percent of Afghan districts under control of the Taliban. Opium
production at an "all-time high." Dozens, sometimes hundreds of Afghan soldiers killed every
single week. You thought Vietnam was a misbegotten military misadventure? How about 17 years in
Afghanistan with no end in sight? Hell, opium production was said to be at an "all-time high"
when I was in the Kunar River Valley in Afghanistan in 2004. That's 14 years ago, 14 years
of record-setting opium crops!
And what are the pundits saying about our military foray into the morass called Syria?
Listen to what I heard from one "expert" on MSNBC yesterday.
"Syria is a very winnable proposition," this numbskull said, looking gravely at the other
"experts" at the table. "The U.S. presence is actually very small numbers." Two thousand is the
"very small number" this blazer-and-tie wearing "expert" was talking about as he reached for
his "I'm a Pundit on the Katy Tur Show" cup and went on to blather about how "winnable" Syria
is.
Let me tell you what 2,000 soldiers is. It's about the size of a brigade, commanded by a
full colonel. A brigade is typically three to five battalions of 500 to 1,000 soldiers,
commanded by lieutenant colonels. Battalions are made up of three to five companies with around
200 soldiers, commanded by captains. Companies comprise three to four platoons of 40 to 100
soldiers, commanded by second lieutenants. So 2,000 soldiers is about 30 to 40 platoons of
soldiers. I used to command a platoon. I was 22 years old. There were about 40 soldiers in my
platoon. Let me tell you, taking care of 40 soldiers was a big fucking job, and we weren't even
in combat.
Taking care of 2,000 soldiers in a place like Syria with bullets flying and IEDs going off
is a huge fucking job. Taking care of 14,000 soldiers, like we currently have in Afghanistan,
or 7,000 which we'll have when Trump gets finished with his draw-down, is a massive fucking
job.
... ... ...
And now Trump's Last General's feelings are all hurt, because he wasn't consulted about
pulling 2,000 troops out of Syria or 7,000 troops out of Afghanistan. What were those troops
doing in Syria? We don't know, and I don't think Mattis had much of an idea what they were
doing, either.
We can get some idea what they're doing by the number of casualties American forces have
suffered in both places. An American soldier was killed in Manbij, Syria, by a roadside bomb in
March of this year. He was the fourth American killed in Syria since our forces entered the
country in 2014. There have been 18 Americans killed in Afghanistan this year. Eleven were
killed there last year. About half of those killed in Afghanistan have been so-called
"green-on-green" killings, incidents where "friendly" Afghans killed American soldiers, usually
on American bases.
You want to know what those casualty numbers tell us? American forces in Syria,
Afghanistan, or Iraq aren't going outside the wire – off American bases – very
often. That's how you stay alive in places like Syria and Afghanistan. You stay away from
places where things like IEDs can kill you. And even then, in the comparative safety of
American bases, you're not safe, because there are enemy soldiers posing as "friendly" Afghan
soldiers who will kill you.
This is the nature of the conflicts we're engaged in. You take thousands of American
soldiers and send them thousands of miles away from home into combat zones in foreign lands,
and you have them do as little as possible so not too many of them get killed.
It pains me to say this, but Trump pulling 2,000 soldiers out of Syria and 7,000
soldiers out of Afghanistan is the right thing to do. It might be getting done by a certifiable
loon with an orange muskrat on his head, but it's the right thing to do and it should have been
done a long time ago.
Advertisement:
All the talk you're hearing about how we've got to have American forces in this desert or
that mountainous no-man's land as a "counterbalance" to countries like Russia and Iran is
lip-flapping twaddle from the kind of "experts" who got us involved in Iraq, Syria, and
Afghanistan in the first place. They are the same "experts" you didn't hear a peep from when
Mattis stood loyally by Trump as he virtually capitulated to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki,
trashed NATO every chance he got, and sat down for Nuclear Kimchi with Kim Jong Un. Now Mattis
is all "maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies" in his resignation
letter. Talk about a day late and a dollar short, he should call Angela Merkel and ask her how
much "respect" she's felt from the United States lately.
You want to know who can stop the resident of the adult day care center in the White House?
It wasn't Adult in the Room General McMaster. It wasn't Adult in the Room General Kelly. It
wasn't Adult in the Room General Mattis. And it's sure as hell not going to be somebody like
Secretary of Defense Kushner, or whoever the hell Trump decides he's going to sentence to a
padded cell on the E-Ring in the Pentagon next.
Trump can be stopped by Congress. The Congress can cut the funding for our misbegotten
misadventures in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. It can refuse to fund the laughable wall along
our 1,900 mile border with Mexico that Trump apparently thinks 6,000 soldiers can guard in the
meantime. And Congress can impeach and convict Trump's insane clown ass for conspiring with a
foreign nation to defraud the United States of America. Congress can do all of this if
Republicans will stop bowing down before the Orange Hair Helmet and start looking out for the
United States of America.
Just between you and me, we'll wake up tomorrow morning, and even with The Last Adult in the
Room on his way out the door, the Western World will still be here, and so will Trump. Trust
me.
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist,
novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and
wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and
several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives on the East End of Long
Island and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a
so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better. He can be followed on Facebook at The Rabbit
Hole and on Twitter @LucianKTruscott.
President Donald Trump is planning on using his executive powers to cut food stamps for more
than 700,000 Americans.
The United States Department of Agriculture is proposing that states should only be allowed
to waive a current food stamps requirement -- namely, that adults without dependents must work
or participate in a job-training program for at least 20 hours each week if they wish to
collect food stamps for more than three months in a three-year period -- on the condition that
those adults live in areas where unemployment is above 7 percent,
according to The Washington Post . Currently the USDA regulations permit states to waive
that requirement if an adult lives in an area where the unemployment rate is at least 20
percent greater than the national rate. In effect, this means that roughly 755,000 Americans
would potentially lose their waivers that permit them to receive food stamps.
The current unemployment rate is 3.7 percent.
The Trump administration's decision to impose the stricter food stamp requirements through
executive action constitutes an end-run around the legislative process. Although Trump is
expected to sign an $870 billion farm bill later this week -- and because food stamps goes
through the Agriculture Department, it contains food stamp provisions -- the measure does not
include House stipulations restricting the waiver program and imposing new requirements on
parents with children between the ages of six and 12. The Senate version ultimately removed
those provisions, meaning that the version being signed into law does not impose a conservative
policy on food stamps, which right-wing members of Congress were hoping for.
"Congress writes laws, and the administration is required to write rules based on the law,"
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., told The New York Times (Stabenow is the top Democrat on the
Senate's agriculture committee). "Administrative changes should not be driven by ideology. I do
not support unilateral and unjustified changes that would take food away from families."
Matthew Rozsa is a breaking news writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from
Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His
work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.
The recent veneration of George H.W. Bush has been wonderfully uplifting, especially as it
recalled his cautious use of persuasion and honest argument.
Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter, beautifully described Bush's funeral in
the Wall Street Journal as reminding us of our dignity and "re-summoning our mystique."
The event, Noonan said, harkened back to when America was respected and admired, generous and
"expected to do good." President Bush, she noted, had presided over the collapse of the Soviet
Union diplomatically and without humiliating Russia's leaders or its people. He also declined
to occupy a Muslim country after defeating Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Bush was indeed a very
decent man. In fact, he was a
great statesman, as TAC 's editor Jim Antle has noted on these pages.
Yet almost none of the news reported on what was the darkest chapter of his legacy: the
First Gulf War. I was a co-founder at the time of a small and vastly outgunned opposition group
of conservatives and (mainly) libertarians, the Committee to Avert a Mid-East Holocaust
. Today, with at least a million Arabs, Afghans, and Americans dead from the unending chaos the
United States unleashed in the Muslim world, the name seems very appropriate.
Our group included truly great conservatives: Henry Regnery, almost the only publisher of
conservative books, who helped keep liberty alive during the dark days of the 1940s and '50s,
along with the always brave Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran. Regnery and Buchanan were the main
contributors to our group. But we were a virtual who's who of the incipient libertarian
movement: Ron Paul, the once and future Texas congressman who would eventually gain a wider
following as a presidential candidate; Lew Rockwell, his former congressional staffer; the
economist Murray Rothbard; Bill Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute; Sheldon Richman,
longtime editor at FEE ; Justin Raimondo, who
would go on to be a co-founder at Antiwar.com ; and Burt Blumert, who helped fund much of Rothbard and
Raimondo's work.
Our chair and guide was
Phil Nicolaides , former deputy director at Voice of America during the Reagan era. The
executive committee included myself, Richman, Sobran, and chess champion Phil Collier. Fran
Griffin, a strong Catholic and founding member of Young Americans for Freedom, did tremendous
work for almost no pay handling our mail-outs and administration with her company Griffin
Communications.
In those days, communication consisted of direct mail, while most of the media just accepted
pro-war government handouts. If only we'd the internet! We did get some news coverage but of
course we were no match for Kuwaiti money and evangelical supporters of Israel. Still, the
Senate vote in favor of the war was only 52-47, despite the overwhelming propaganda in favor of
it as described below.
The war led to a major break between
libertarians and conservatives , especially as the giant Heritage Foundation became a
champion of war from that moment on. Even today, Heritage has backed continued U.S. support for
the Saudi bombing of Yemen.
Much about the Gulf War and especially its lies and subsequent brutality were not reported.
Bush himself may not have known all that took place in the military campaign. After all, Dick
Cheney, whom we know now to be a liar, was his secretary of defense. But the deeds need to be
remembered and indeed researched.
Particularly odious was the calculated destruction of Iraq's sanitation, irrigation, and
electrical grid, with the intent of causing
mass civilian disease and starvation, as specified in a Defense
Intelligence Agency report. It would have been interesting to find out who ordered this
policy. Reconstruction supplies were then blockaded over the following nine years, including
during the Clinton presidency. The consequent half million deaths of children were deemed
acceptable by Clinton's former secretary of state Madeleine Albright in this famous 60 Minutes
interview with Leslie Stahl. Osama bin Laden later listed civilian suffering in Iraq as one
of the three reasons for his subsequent terrorist attack on America.
Public support for the war was in part ginned up by the infamous "incubator babies" lie and
claims that aerial photographs showed 200,000 Iraqi soldiers waiting along the border to invade
Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the reason given to Americans for sending troops was to protect the
Saudis.
The Christian Science Monitor and LA Times reported later
how it was untrue and that such photographs never existed. Photos of the border showed no
troops congregated there. The Defense Department claimed the photos were secret and never
released them even after the war.
Such
misinformation is critical if you're trying to get America into a war. Remember the British propaganda
that got us into the First World War? A repeated story was that German soldiers were eating
Belgian babies. In the second Iraq war, it was lies that Saddam had aided bin Laden and was
developing nuclear "weapons of mass destruction."
Kuwait's ruling family spent billions of dollars and paid for top public relations in
Washington. I remember particularly the yearly CPAC meeting when the Kuwaitis paid for a dozen
tables to be filled with students to cheer for war. Saddam was sending cash bequests to the
families of Palestinian terrorists whom Israel had killed, so pro-Israel forces in Washington
also supported the war, though they were less important to the lobbying effort than Kuwait.
Nevertheless, the United States initially hesitated to go to war. There was the meeting of
the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, with Saddam Hussein during which she told him that
inter-Arab quarrels were
not the concern of the United States government . A top State Department official told
Congress the same thing. The ambassador strangely disappeared from the news after the war
started.
Then there was President Bush's rather casual attitude about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Only
after he met with British Prime Minister Thatcher and faced the vast pro-war publicity campaign
did he change his mind. Thatcher was very alarmed because Kuwait's vast deposits in British
banks were important for their solvency. She feared Iraq might continue threatening other Gulf
states and their bank deposits. She insisted and begged America to save Kuwait. Bush than
organized a United Nations Security Council vote to condemn Iraq and a coalition that included
many Arab nations. He did it with full international legality (unlike his son's subsequent war)
and above all he got our allies to pay for the war. There was massive support in America for
the operation.
Bush's national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, later opposed the younger Bush's attack
on and subsequent occupation of Iraq in 2003. He understood well the limits of power and the
importance of having allies -- something the next President Bush cared little about.
Actually, George H. W. Bush only looks good next to the Current Occupant (of the Oval
Office).
I, too, can remember his Presidency, and even his candidacy, when he authorized the use of
those Willie Horton ads. (Which contributed both to the rise of the alt-right and the BLM
movements.)
I recall his first candidacy,k when he was opposed to "voodoo economics" before he was all
for it.
One need not lay out any secret cabal when he was in office as indicative of his
character. It was on full display long before. And it had nothing to do with a "kinder,
gentler America", only with the pursuit of power at any cost to integrity or honor.
Look there are valid reasons to challenger the first gulf war. It was strictly a debate
between Iraq and Kuwait. Historical issues and the matter of supplemental dollars for what
Iraq believed was a defense against the Iranian revolution.
But unlike the last invasion the First Gulf effort was largely supported even by Gulf
States. Stop dreaming up libertarian fantasies about Sen rand Paul. Libertarian anti-war
effort. As for PM thatcher's fears – the Iraqi invasion did not budge the price of oil.
This was a dispute between two neighbors and nothing more.
But it was the international effort that made the case. And it was not just Israel. It was
limited to one goal,pushing Iraqi troops back into Iraq proper.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
The valid critiques on Pres. Bush, Sr. are those in the above comments about economics and
"Willie Horton."
The case against iraq in the second effort was very clear.
Iraq had invaded no one
Had nothing to do with 9/11
No evidence the wmd in any viable state
No evidence that the weapons inspectors were not accomplishing their mission.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
I didn't hear a peep from the likes of your clique about challenging the war in
Afghanistan. That was an effort that would have demonstrated some serious unnecessary
anti-war thinking. Some intellectual work in examining the issues and the consequence. The
internet was alive and well during the Afghanistan advance --
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
There is a difference between being anti-war and being opposed to unnecessary military
efforts. Libertarians trying to hide in the minutia of being anti-war as they savage their
fellow citizens with their immigration no borders nonsense, selling marijuana -- a tax boon
no where in sight in Colorado, Ca., or anywhere else, now want to unleash their carelessness
on heroin, cocaine, and hashish.
Bush talked about Dukakis's prison furloughs, and his campaign did produce and ad about them,
but the famous Willie Horton ad was produced by an independent PAC. It was done on Bush's
behalf, and Lee Atwater was all in favor of making Horton an issue, but so far as is known,
Bush didn't authorize or approve the well-known ad himself.
_________
I wonder if it would have been possible for antiwar conservatives (and conservatives
critical of trade and immigration policy) to mainstream their concerns. As it was, many
tended to become trapped in paleocon land, arguing forever that they were further to the
right than the others, and embracing some embarrassing ideas and historical icons.
You may recall John O'Sullivan's law – any organization that isn't explicitly
expressly right-wing will become left-wing over time. But the corollary seems to be that
critical or unorthodox movements on the right tend to get boxed into being "more conservative
than thou" and losing access to the centrist mainstream.
Whatever the current orthodoxy is appropriates the conservative label, and dissenters
either move to left or the far right.
Conservatives and liberals both have a great diversity of opinion, but it seems like
politics today are so polarized and binary that it's impossible for those of divergent
opinions to be on the same side or at more or less the same place on the political
spectrum.
One side is always going to be accused of being sell-outs to the enemy or of being on the
lunatic fringe.
I'm inclined to make a distinction between the "jus ad bellum" and the "jus in bello" aspects
of the Gulf War. I think I can say that I lean heavily anti-war in general, but I do think
the Gulf War was justified. Even if it's true that America and others wouldn't have
intervened in a case where the countries involved were small and unimportant, I don't think
the answer would be to also refuse to intervene in the case at hand. There's a great value in
upholding the principle that countries can't forcibly annex land from each other. Also, it's
hard to believe that Saddam Hussein would have settled down and minded his own business. It's
more likely that the lack of pushback from his Kuwait invasion would have encouraged further
adventurism.
None of that is to defend the way the war was actually conducted. It's just to suggest
that the preferable alternative would have been to wage the war more ethically rather than
not to wage it at all.
ElitCommInc appears to have a requisite necessity to interject "Sen rand Paul" into articles
that don't even mention him. C'est la vie.
As regards Afghanistan, I confess to having not a clue what is meant by " some serious
unnecessary anti-war thinking" but as I remember those days, while there was general support
for getting Bin Laden there were voices in the libertarian/paleoconservative movement that
argued for a special forces operation, a quit hit and not a full out occupation force.
Marijuana legalization has nothing to do with the article though I suppose those awful
libertarians also "savage" their fellow citizens with the sale of adult beverages as well.
C'est la vie.
I reluctantly got on board with the first Gulf War and about all that can be said that's
positive is that Bush Sr. at least endorsed a limited objective i.e. get Iraq out of Kuwait.
Not so that brain-dead son of his who was taking his orders from his VP.
The Great War Christmas Truce: 'They Were
Positively Human'For a brief moment in 1914, the guns went silent and the men risked
court martial to play soccer, smoke and sing---with the other side. By Hunter DeRensis
•
December 21, 2018
Wikimedia Commons/public domain A 19th-century peace activist once asked, "Is it possible
that any Christian, of whatever sect, who believes the New Testament to be anything better than
a fable, can doubt for a moment that the time will come when all the kingdoms of the earth
shall be at peace?"
Jesus Christ, as both a religious and historical figure, has been chronicled as the "Prince
of Peace." He was the man (or son of God) who instructed his followers to turn the other cheek.
This philosophy of love, forgiveness, and the rejection of violence is difficult to mesh with a
modern age that has fought two world wars. Reaching even farther back, it's hard to reconcile
Christ's message with the violence inflicted by Christians against both non-Christians and
other members of the faith.
But one moment, found in the bloody, secularized 20th century, stands out: the Christmas
Truce of 1914.
World War I had begun in August, engulfing most of Europe. On the western front, a German
invasion of France by way of Belgium had stalled just 50 miles outside of Paris. Fighting
quickly devolved into trench warfare, with German and British-French lines divided by a
no-man's land of barbed wire, shell holes, and death. Soldiers lived and died in trenches of
mud and dirt, infested with fleas and other vermin and often flooded with water that was knee
deep. Winter added frost and bitter cold. The war that people on both sides said would be done
by Christmas showed no sign of ending. By December, after barely five months of combat,
casualties on all sides numbered over two million.
Yet that Christmas Eve, an unexpected sound could be heard above the din of gunfire:
soldiers on the German side singing Stille Nacht , the original German-language
Silent Night . Small fir trees, makeshift replacements for the grand Christmas trees
back home, had been placed. The constant fighting might have had the effect of increasing
religious reflection. During the opening months of the war in 1914, churches in Germany were
fuller than they had ever been, even in working-class areas infamous for secular and
anti-clerical politics.
After much hesitation, soldiers on the British side began to poke their heads out of the
trenches. The Germans did not fire. The Brits responded by applauding and singing their own
English version of the carol. The two sides then met together in no man's land. Frederick James
Davies, a private in the 2nd Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers,
described his experiences in a letter home to his mother: "They [the Germans] were only
fifty yards away from us in the trenches. They came out and we went to meet them. We shook
hands with them . They also gave us cigars but they didn't have much food. I think they are
hard up for it. They were fed up with the war." They exchanged "cigs, jam and corn beef" and
Davies added that he had "a good chat with the Germans on Xmas day."
Writer Henry Williamson, then a private in the London Rifle Brigade,
wrote cheerfully home to his mother that he was smoking German tobacco he had exchanged
with a live soldier. He recounted, "Yesterday the British & Germans met & shook hands
in the Ground between the trenches, & exchanged souvenirs, & shook hands." He describes
his military counterparts: "Many are gentle looking men in goatee beards & spectacles, and
some are very big and arrogant looking." In other words, they looked positively human.
Williamson even showed empathy for their similar motivations: "The Germans put 'For Fatherland
& Freedom' on the cross. They obviously think their cause is a just one."
In his own account, Captain A.D. Chater of the 2nd Battalion Gordon Highlanders
wrote : "This extraordinary truce has been quite impromptu. There was no previous
arrangement and of course it had been decided that there was not to be any cessation of
hostilities."
This outbreak of peace was entirely spontaneous, started by privates on the front lines as
their officers threatened them with court-martial. Soldiers laughed, talked, sang, exchanged
gifts, and helped to bury their dead. A few games of soccer were even played.
They had been killing each other for months, indoctrinated for most of their lives to view
the "other" as evil, inhuman. But here they were, ordinary men who missed their homes and
families, who had only the vaguest idea of why they were there, why they were dying and
killing. Karl Muhlegg of the 17th Bavarian Regiment wrote home, "Never was I as keenly aware of
the insanity of war."
The truce continued until the end of Christmas. In some spots it continued for days. But
slowly men returned to their sides and fighting resumed. Europe would not see another Christmas
in peacetime until 1918, after 10,000,000 men had been killed. When the war ended, the French
military academy Saint-Cyr listed all its graduates who had fallen. For one year, it contains
just one brief but chilling entry: "The Class of 1914." In comparison, only 81 British soldiers
died on Christmas Day 1914 in all of Europe.
What is striking is the difference between the propaganda put forward by the governments on
the home front and the spontaneous actions that Christmas. Besides Pope Benedict XV, who urged
a temporary ceasefire so war cannons would not be booming across Europe on the night the angels
were meant to announce Christ's birth, what the soldiers did was opposed by governments on both
sides.
There's a case to be made that the truce had nothing to do with Christianity. Periodic and
unplanned truces occur in war regularly. Fighting ceases while the two sides take time to bury
their dead. And trade and fraternization do occur. One might ask, does the common soldier need
a higher reason to stop killing or be killed? But this rejoinder is far too simplistic. It's
estimated that roughly 100,000 soldiers participated in the Christmas Truce of 1914 to some
degree. This is far too large a number to be written off as a casual occurrence. This event was
unplanned, uncoordinated, and not sanctioned by the officer core. Yet it happened. And it just
happened to take place on the most celebrated day in the Christian calendar, the observance of
the birth of Christ, the "Prince of Peace." If both sides were not united under Christendom,
joined together in mutual belief, it is a definite that the truce would not have occurred.
In November 1914, three months into the war, Pope Benedict XV grieved, "Who would imagine,
as we see them thus filled with hatred of one another, that they are all of one common stock,
all of the same nature, all members of the same human society? Who would recognize brothers,
whose Father is in Heaven?" Perhaps on Christmas, with morals engraved on their innermost
hearts, the soldiers realized the truth of this statement.
As an event in the history of war, the Christmas Truce of 1914 is barely a footnote; it had
no major effects on the fighting or outcome of World War I. But in the history of peace, the
truce is a powerful story. This moment, this flash of love, bookended on both sides by
destruction and hate, was a triumph of humanity. It's the closest thing we'll see to a miracle
in this fallen world.
Frederick Niven, a minor Scottish poet, ended his poem "A Carol from Flanders" with a
sentiment that should be prayed for year-round:
O ye who read this truthful rime
From Flanders, kneel and say:
God Speed the time when every day
Shall be as Christmas Day
Hunter DeRensis is a regular contributor to. Follow him on Twitter @HunterDeRensis .
"Leaders" don't care about the ordinary soldier–and it doesn't matter which countries
are fighting. "God Save The King (or Queen)" "Deutschland Ueber Alles" "Allons enfant de la
Patrie" "Make The World Safe For Democracy". Blah, blah, blah.
Could you imagine the singing of "Happy Holidays" igniting such an overwhelming burst of
love? Do the owners of our mainstream media outlets pay announcers a bonus for everytime they
squeeze "holiday" into their scripts? I am not taking a holiday and I find it offensive to
discount the happiest day of my religious belief system discounted such. BTW – The
officers had to force the troops back into the killing fields at gunpoint. Had the Christmas
Peace of 1914 held – just imagine? The secularization of Christmas is not a joining
phenomenon it is a divisive act. Those who launched this war on Christmas have had great
victories here. It is being stalled overseas in both supposedly Christian and non-Christian
countries. If we get into a really nasty war – just see how quickly these warmongers
will give us back Christam (temporarily).
"War made the State and the State makes War."
These poor men had barely more influence on policy than livestock do in managing a cattle
ranch.
It's ridiculous to say Christians fought Christians etc.
These wars were made by States which had amassed the power – through ideology and
technology – to control multitudes of helpless, defenceless people.
History can be summed up as: Man v State; Law v Power; Civilisation v Barbarism.
In the twentieth century, we saw the triumph of State Power over Law, Civilisation and
Humanity.
(The State surpassed disease as mankind's greatest affliction.)
The German invasion didn't stall by itself before Paris. The French fought like lions at the
First battle of the Marne (the British troops' contribution was numerically quite reduced at
that time) and prevailed over the Germans. Sadly with not enough of a decision on the war
that then went on Why is it always so difficult for American magazines (and newspapers) to
mention the French ? It always gives the silent impression French were hapless bystanders to
a war on their own soil.
" This family had a role in the assassination of JFK, 9/11, and other covert operations
failures that are nothing less than sinister... "Starting with Prescott Bush's business dealings
with the Nazi's, to George H. Bush's association with Lee Harvey Oswald, Saddam Hussein, and
others.... all the way to George W. Bush's dealings with Osama Bin Laden long before he became a
'Terrorist'."
This book reveals a system that is broken and deeply corrupt. The old adage is true "things
are not as they appear". Don't read this if you don't have the intellectual honesty to admit
this.
Notable quotes:
"... The same Crichton whose secret military intelligence unit counted dozens of men who simultaneously held jobs as Dallas police officers? ..."
I highly recommend this book. If anything Russ Baker goes very easy on the Bush Crime Family.
For example google "Chip Tatum Pegasus" and you will find he is not mentioned in this book.
Then there is the case of the 1980's Franklin pedophile ring and GHW Bush's associations with
pedophilic pimp Lawrence E. King. Again, that is a whopping Bush family "secret" and it is
not in this book.
However, Baker does lay out a pretty google circumstantial case that GHW Bush may very
well have been involved in the JFK assassination. May I quote Baker asking GHW Bush:
-Some years ago you claimed not to remember where you were on the morning of Nov. 22,
1963? Have you since been able to recall?
-Can you tell us about your decades-long friendship with George de Mohrenschildt, the man
who was in and out of Lee Harvey Oswald's house on almost a daily basis in the year before
the Kennedy assassination?
-Did you, as characterized in an FBI memo, work as a CIA officer in tandem with Cuban
exiles at the time of the Kennedy assassination?
-Why have you never spoken publicly about the documented call you made to the FBI on Nov
22, 1963, in which you identified yourself fully and claimed to have information on a
possible suspect in Kennedy's death? What was the purpose of that call, in which you
mentioned your whereabouts at the time of the call, 1:45pm, as Tyler, Texas, i.e. about 99
miles away but just a short flight on the private plane on which you were traveling? Why did
you tell the FBI that you were en route next to Dallas and would stay at the Sheraton there
when you had already been at the Sheraton the night before--and right after that call flew to
Dallas but only to switch planes and fly back immediately to Houston? Why were you giving the
FBI the impression you would be staying in Dallas the night after the assassination instead
of letting them know you had stayed there the night before the assassination?
-Why was your own assistant at the home of the man you would finger as a suspect in the
shooting, and why did he end up providing the man with an alibi? Was the ultimate purpose of
that call not to cause the alleged suspect any permanent harm, but merely to use the call as
an excuse to state in government files that you were in a place other than Dallas?
-Since you claimed not to remember where you were when Kennedy was killed, how is it that
after these FBI memos surfaced, your wife Barbara suddenly found and published an old letter
placing you and her in Tyler, Texas shortly after the shooting?
On the day of the assassination, were you in touch with your friend and Republican running
mate Jack Crichton, a military intelligence figure who was connected to figures forcing their
way into the pilot car of Kennedy's motorcade? The same Crichton who controlled the man who
served as the interpreter between Oswald's wife and police and reframed her words so as to
implicate Oswald in Kennedy's shooting? The same Crichton who was working out of a secret
underground communications bunker below the streets of Dallas?
The same Crichton whose secret
military intelligence unit counted dozens of men who simultaneously held jobs as Dallas
police officers? The same Crichton who did secret oil industry intelligence work in the
Middle East while you did intelligence related oil industry work via your company, Zapata
Offshore?
-Finally, do you know people who consider the events of November 22, 1963 to, in their
minds, "reflect the very best of the American spirit?" You say almost nothing, ever, about
the Kennedy assassination, even skipping over it in your own memoir, which details much more
trivial events of the same year. Why is that? And why then, in your eulogy for former
President Ford, a member of the increasingly-discredited Warren Commission, did you go out of
your way to oddly praise him for promoting the increasingly-discredited "single bullet
theory?" You said:
"After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford
and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And the conspiracy theorists
can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final
definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Jerry Ford put his name on it and Jerry
Ford's word was always good."
Why did you, so bizarrely, smile when you uttered those words?
Now, with your Medal of Freedom, given you by a Democratic president who ran as an agent
of change, you truly seem to be enjoying the last laugh."
I've had this publication for several years. It's important to point out I've not read this
publication completely but rather I've used it for key search terms. If you don't have access
using this kind of information, you are way behind the curve on how this platform can be used
for research. It becomes even more vital in today's world of fake news reports as exampled by
what we being presented with today. These same electronic e'books can be read on the computer
too.
A few example on how you can cut and paste the vital info is presented below:
lone gunman is a much more comforting notion in our democracy than a vast apparatus that
can bring down presidents. Give us a simple explanation that easily encapsulates the horrible
and then we can retain forever all that we have held to be true. If there was any genius in
the Bush administration, it was the understanding that Americans did not want to confront
complexities and had a great need of "bad guys" to blame for what had gone wrong.
Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the
Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years . Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Kindle Edition.
The Iraq War was not, and never had been, about an imminent threat to the safety of
America and its allies; even Republicans like former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan
were publicly acknowledging that it was mostly about oil.
Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the
Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (p. 3). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Kindle Edition.
The reason the Bushes are relevant today, even with W.' s exit from the national stage, is
that the family and its colleagues and associates represent an elite that has long succeeded
in subverting our democratic institutions to their own ends. And they will continue to do so
unless their agenda and methods are laid bare to public scrutiny.
Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the
Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (p. 6). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Kindle Edition.
George William Bush acknowledged under oath -- as part of a deposition in a lawsuit
brought by a nonprofit group seeking records on Bush's past -- that he was the junior officer
on a three-to four-man watch shift at CIA headquarters between September 1963 and February
1964, which was on duty when Kennedy was shot. 6 "I do not recognize the contents of the
memorandum as information furnished to me orally or otherwise during the time I was at the
CIA," he said. "In fact, during my time at the CIA, I did not receive any oral communications
from any government agency of any nature whatsoever. I did not receive any information
relating to the Kennedy assassination during my time at the CIA from the FBI. Based on the
above, it is my conclusion that I am not the Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence
Agency referred to in the memorandum."
Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the
Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (p. 11). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Kindle
Edition.
Devine's role in setting up Zapata would remain hidden for more than a decade -- until
1965. At that point, as Bush was extricating himself from business to devote his energies to
pursuing a congressional seat, Devine's name suddenly surfaced as a member of the board of
Bush's spin-off company, Zapata Offshore -- almost as if it was his function to keep the
operation running. To be sure, he and Bush remained joined at the hip. As indicated in the
1975 CIA memo, Bush and Devine enjoyed a "close relationship" that continued while Mr. Bush
was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations nine years later. In fact, Devine even accompanied
then-congressman Bush on a two-week junket to Vietnam, leaving the day after Christmas in
1967, a year before the Republicans would retake the White House. After being "out" of the
CIA since 1953, Devine's top-secret security clearance required an update, though what
top-secret business a freshman congressman on the Ways and Means Committee could have,
requiring two weeks in Vietnam with a "businessman," was not made clear.
Baker, Russ. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the
Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (pp. 13-14). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Kindle
Edition.
There's more but I hope my review of this work and the value of it will be apparent.
I most strongly recommend this book for the research in the discovery of State Crimes
Against Democracy.
Probably a "must read". Tells how the Saudis for decades did dirty work the CIA didn't want
to do itself (including Iran Contra), and they did it with the coordination and assistance of
Poppy Bush and his companies. Describes "W" Bush as an incompetent who failed at numerous
jobs that Daddy got him, and never succeeded at anything (other than marrying Laura and
ending his alcohol addiction when she threatened to leave him) until he became Texas
governor. Goes into detail about "W"'s draft dodging, and desertion of the Air Force Reserve
without being court martialed.
From Samuel Bush late 19th century to Bush 43 the book reveals the double life of the Bush
family. The connections and associations throughout a century leave little doubt that the
Bush family is entwined in many of the most historical and tragic events of wars, politics
and covert activities of the USA. If you want to understand what was really happening and how
the American citizens have been betrayed and hoodwinked by the Bush's this is a great book.
WOW! The closest I can come t o describing this is to say it is a multi-level, generational
expose of "incestuous" relationships WITHOUT the sex! How can that be? Read it and learn. If
I'd known how pervasive and of such longstanding and widespread these relationships.... I
would've started with a 14' x 14' white board and diagrammed a kind of "family" tree and
still would have had to write small! - really small. Someone said: "What a tangled web we
weave when first we practice to deceive." This is like THE largest can of worms; it was hard
to keep track, but Russ Baker did and showed how each player was connected to the next -
sometimes it was linear and other times it went sideways, but always came back to the
beginning family of Bush. Oh my.
The tangential names and places are fully explained in this book. The reality of elite
dynasties (Bush, Rockefeller, Kennedy) is undeniable. These people affect our lives, often in
ways only they know about. Connections are inherited, my friends. To get your feet wet, visit
YouTube and watch one of the video interviews with author Russ Baker.
An outstanding read, chock-full of background info on this dynastic American family.
Not flattering to them, but the allegations are mostly substantiated.
There are some questionable flights of speculation, which taint the book's general
objectivity.
I was shocked to learn of the many ways in which the same prominent figures kept popping-up,
complicit in the huge events of the past several decades (the Kennedy assassination,
Watergate scandal, Nixon's downfall, etc.).
And Geo.H.W. Bush was the "Man Behind the Curtain", swirling in the murky background of every
story.
My perception of BOTH Bush presidents has been fundamentally altered.
Fascinating.
Besides being an expose of the Bush dynasty, Baker demonstrates the close ties between many
different groups that people tend to think of as being separate - Texas oilmen, military
intelligence, Wall Street, FBI, CIA, the arms industry, organized crime, etc. It's a big
revolving door, a huge network of the Old Boys Club. The elites of the world are interested
in power and wealth, not in ideology.
He offers a cautionary note about trusting declassified government documents:
"Allen Dulles once called CIA documents 'hieroglyphics.'...Dulles used to expound on such
elements of tradecraft to his fellow Warren Commission members. On one occasion, he told them
that no one would be able to grasp an intelligence memo except for those involved in its
creation and their colleagues...When Thomas J. Devine, Poppy Bush's business partner and a
former CIA agent, coyly suggested to me that the problem with journalists like myself is that
'you believe what you read in government documents,' he was referring to such deeply coded
disinformation."
A must read book by noted journalist Russ Baker that documents the inherently obvious
connections with the bush family and the CIA, oil billionaires, energy giants and many more
conflicts of interest, particularly with Ken Lay and Enron. This is a book that reveals the
true bush dynastry. For example, I was not aware of Prescott Bush's mentoring of Richard
Nixon and his close relationship to President Eisenhower and how Prescott got Ike to put the
young inexperienced Nixon on the 1952 presidential ticket. The entire sorid history of the
bush's going back to post WW One and their support of the Nazi's in washing money for the 2nd
World War. Allen Dulles figures prominantly in this terrific read. Don't be fooled by the
gentel George H W Bush. His connections to the CIA go back way farther than he admits, and he
figures prominantly in Iran Contra. George H W Bush is the only known individual who cannot
account for where he was during the Coup D'Etat in November 1963. The man is a liar and a
coward as well as a thief. Baker spends about 75 pages detailing George H W Bush's
involvement in Watergate and the downfall of the Nixon administration. Well written and
documented. This is a five star book and a must read for truth seekers. Stephen Courts
"... The aim of classical economics was to tax unearned income, not wages and profits. The tax burden was to fall on the landlord class first and foremost, then on monopolists and bankers. The result was to be a circular flow in which taxes would be paid mainly out of rent and other unearned income. The government would spend this revenue on infrastructure, schools and other productive investment to help make the economy more competitive. Socialism was seen as a program to create a more efficient capitalist economy along these lines. ..."
"... Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire ..."
"... Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy ..."
"... J Is for Junk Economics – A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception ..."
"... J is for Junk Economics ..."
"... Guns and Butter ..."
"... J Is for Junk Economics ..."
"... The Fictitious Economy ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... J Is for Junk Economics – A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception ..."
"... Killing the Host ..."
"... J is for Junk – A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception ..."
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The aim of classical economics was to tax unearned income, not wages and profits. The
tax burden was to fall on the landlord class first and foremost, then on monopolists and
bankers. The result was to be a circular flow in which taxes would be paid mainly out of rent
and other unearned income. The government would spend this revenue on infrastructure, schools
and other productive investment to help make the economy more competitive. Socialism was seen
as a program to create a more efficient capitalist economy along these lines.
I'm Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show: The
Vocabulary of Economic Deception. Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is
President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, a Wall Street financial
analyst and distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas
City. His 1972 book Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire is a
critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank.
His latest books are, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global
Economy and J Is for Junk Economics – A Guide to Reality in an Age of
Deception . Today we discuss J is for Junk Economics , an A to Z guide that
describes how the world economy really works, and who the winners and losers really are. We
cover contemporary terms that are misleading or poorly understood, as well as many important
concepts that have been abandoned – many on purpose – from the long history of
political economy.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Dr. Michael Hudson, welcome to Guns and Butter again.
MICHAEL HUDSON: It's good to be back, Bonnie.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You write that your recent book, J Is for Junk Economics , a
dictionary and accompanying essays,was drafted more than a decade ago for a book to have been
entitled The Fictitious Economy . You tried several times without success to find a
publisher. Why wouldn't publishers at the time take on your book?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Most publishers like to commission books that are like the last one that
sold well. Ten years ago, people wanted to read about how the economy was doing just fine. I
was called Dr. Doom, which did very well for me in the 1970s when I was talking about the
economy running into debt. But they wanted upbeat books. If I were to talk about how the
economy is polarizing and getting poorer, they wanted me to explain how readers could make a
million dollars off people getting more strapped as the economy polarizes. I didn't want to
write a book about how to get rich by riding the neoliberal wave dismantling of the economy. I
wanted to create an alternative.
If I wanted to ride the wave of getting rich by taking on more debt, I would have stayed on
Wall Street. I wanted to explain how the way in which the economy seemed to be getting richer
was actually impoverishing it. We are in a new Gilded Age masked by a vocabulary used by the
media via television and papers like The New York Times that are euphemizing what was
happening.
A euphemism is a rhetorical trick to make a bad phenomenon look good. If a landlord gets
rich by gentrifying a neighborhood by exploiting tenants and forcing them out, that's called
wealth creation if property values and rents rise. If you can distract people to celebrate
wealth and splendor at the top of the economic pyramid, people will be less focused on how the
economy is functioning for the bottom 99%.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Can you describe the format of J Is for Junk Economics – A Guide
to Reality in an Age of Deception as an A-to-Z dictionary with additional essays? It seems
to me that this format makes a good reference book that can be picked up and read at any
point.
MICHAEL HUDSON: That's what I intended. I wrote it as a companion volume to my outline of
economic theory, Killing the Host , which was about how the financial sector has taken
over the economy in a parasitic way. I saw the vocabulary problem and also how to solve it: If
people have a clear set of economic concepts, basically those of classical economics –
value, price and rent – the words almost automatically organize themselves into a
worldview. A realistic vocabulary and understanding of what words mean will enable its users to
put them together to form an inter-connected system.
I wanted to show how junk economics uses euphemisms and what Orwell called Doublethink to
confuse people about how the economy works. I also wanted to show that what's called think
tanks are really lobbying institutions to do the same thing that advertisers for toothpaste
companies and consumer product companies do: They try to portray their product – in this
case, neoliberal economics, dismantling protection of the environment, dismantling consumer
protection and stopping of prosecution of financial fraud – as "wealth creation" instead
of impoverishment and austerity for the economy at large. So basically, my book reviews the
economic vocabulary and language people use to perceive reality.
When I was in college sixty years ago, they were still teaching the linguistic ideas of
Benjamin Lee Whorf. His idea was that language affects how people perceive reality. Different
cultures and linguistic groups have different modes of expression. I found that if I was going
to a concert and speaking German, I would be saying something substantially different than if I
were speaking English.
Viewing the economic vocabulary as propaganda, I saw that we can understand how the words
you hear as largely propaganda words. They've changed the meaning to the opposite of what the
classical economists meant. But if you untangle the reversal of meaning and juxtapose a more
functional vocabulary you can better understand what's actually happening.
ORDER IT NOW
BONNIE FAULKNER: You write that "the terms rentier and usury that played so central
a role in past centuries now sound anachronistic and have been replaced with more positive
Orwellian doublethink," which is what you've begun to explain. In fact, your book J is for
Junk – A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception is all about the depredation of
vocabulary to hide reality, particularly the state of the economy. Just as history is written
by the victors, you point out that economic vocabulary is defined by today's victors, the
rentier financial class. How is this deception accomplished?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It's been accomplished in a number of ways. The first and most brutal way
was simply to stop teaching the history of economic thought. When I went to school 60 years
ago, every graduate economics student had to study the history of economic thought. You'd get
Adam Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, Marx and Veblen. Their analysis had a common
denominator: a focus on unearned income, which they called rent. Classical economics
distinguished between productive and unproductive activity, and hence between wealth and
overhead. The traditional landlord class inherited its wealth from ancestors who conquered the
land by military force. These hereditary landlords extract rent, but don't do anything to
create a product. They don't produce output. The same is true of other recipients of rent.
Accordingly, the word used through the 19 th century was rentier . It's a
French word. In French, a rente was income from a government bond. A rentier
was a coupon clipper, and the rent was interest. Today in German, a Rentner is a
retiree receiving pension income. The common denominator is a regular payment stipulated in
advance, as distinct from industrial profit.
The classical economists had in common a description of rent and interest as something that
a truly free market would get rid of. From Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill down to Marx and the
socialists, a free market was one that was free of a parasitic overclass that got income
without doing work. They got money by purely exploitative means, by charging rent that doesn't
really have to be paid; by charging interest; by charging monopoly rent for basic
infrastructure services and public utilities that a well-organized government should provide
freely to people instead of letting monopolists put up toll booths on roads and for technology
and patent rights simply to extract wealth. The focus of economics until World War I was the
contrast between production and extraction.
An economic fight ensued and the parasites won. The first thing rentiers –
the financial class and monopolists, a.k.a. the 1% – did was to say, "We've got to stop
teaching the history of economic thought so that people don't even have a memory that there is
any such a thing as economic rent as unearned income or the various policies proposed to
minimize it. We have to take the slogan of the socialist reformers – a free market
– and redefine it as a free market is one free from government – that is,
from "socialism" – not free from landlords, bankers and monopolists." They turned the
vocabulary upside down to mean the opposite. But in order to promote this deceptive vocabulary
they had to erase all memory of the fact that these words originally meant the opposite.
BONNIE FAULKNER: How has economic history been rewritten by redefining the meaning of words?
What is an example of this? For instance, what does the word "reform" mean now as opposed to
what reform used to mean?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Reform used to mean something social democratic. It meant getting rid of
special privileges, getting rid of monopolies and protecting labor and consumers. It meant
controlling the prices that monopolies could charge, and regulating the economy to prevent
fraud or exploitation – and most of all, to prevent unearned income or tax it away.
In today's neoliberal vocabulary, "reform" means getting rid of socialism. Reform
means stripping away protection or labor and even of industry. It means deregulating the
economy, getting rid of any kind of price controls, consumer protection or environmental
protection. It means creating a lawless economy where the 1% are in control, without public
checks and balances. So reform today means getting rid of all of the reforms that were promoted
in the 19 th and early-20 th century. The Nobel Economics Prize reflects
this neoliberal (that is, faux-liberal) travesty of "free markets."
BONNIE FAULKNER: What were the real reforms of the progressive era?
MICHAEL HUDSON: To begin with, you had unions to protect labor. You had limitations on the
workweek and the workday, how much work people had to do to earn a living wage. There were
safety protections. There was protection of the quality of food, and of consumer safety to
prevent dangerous products. There was anti-trust regulation to prevent price gouging by
monopolies. The New Deal took basic monopolies of public service such as roads and
communications systems out of the hands of monopolists and make them public. Instead of using a
road or the phone system to exploit users by charging whatever the market would bear, basic
needs were provided at the lowest possible costs, or even freely in the case of schools, so
that the economy would have a low cost of living and hence a low business overhead.
The guiding idea of reform was to get rid of socially unnecessary income. If landlords were
going to charge rent for properties that they did nothing to improve, but merely raise the
rents whenever cities built more transportation or more parks or better schools, this rent
would be taxed away.
The income tax was a basic reform back in 1913. Only 1% of America's population had to pay
the tax. Most were tax-free, because the aim was to tax the rentiers who lived off
their bond or stock holdings, real estate or monopolies. The solution was simply to tax the
wealthiest 1% or 2% instead of labor or industry, that is, the companies that actually produced
something. This tax philosophy helped make America the most productive, lowest-cost and
competitive yet also the most equal economy in the world at that time.
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This focus on real industry has gradually been undermined. Today, if you're a real estate
speculator, monopolist, bankster or financial fraudster, your idea of reform is to get rid of
laws that protect consumers, tenants, homebuyers and the public at large. You campaign for
"consumer choice," as if protection is "interference" with the choice to be poisoned, cheated
or otherwise exploited. You deregulate laws designed to protect the atmosphere, free air and
water. If you're a coal or oil company, your idea of reform is to get rid of the Clean Air Act,
as the Trump administration has been doing.
The counterpart to junk science is junk economics. It is a lobbying effort to defend the
idea of a world without any laws or regulations against the wealthy, only against the debtors
and the poor, only against consumers for the "theft" of downloading music or stealing
somebody's patented songs or drug monopoly privilege. This turns inside out the classical
philosophy of fairness.
BONNIE FAULKNER: According to 19 th -century classical economists, what is
fictitious capital, and why is this distinction no longer being made by economists?
MICHAEL HUDSON: That's a wonderful question. Today the term "fictitious capital" is usually
associated with Marx, but it was used by many people in the 19 th century, even by
right-wing libertarians such as Henry George.
Fictitious capital referred to purely extractive claims for income, as distinct from profits
and wages earned from tangible means of production. Real capital referred to factories,
machinery and tools, things that were used to produce output, as well as education, research
and public infrastructure. But an ownership privilege like a title to land and other real
estate, a patent or the monopoly privilege to charge whatever the market will bear for a
restricted patent, without reference to actual production costs, does not add anything to
production. It is purely extractive, yielding economic rent, not profits on real capital
investment.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You say that by the late-19 th century, "reform movements were
gaining the upper hand, that nearly everyone saw industrial capitalism evolving into what was
widely called socialism." How would you describe the socialism that classical economists like
Mill or Marx envisioned?
MICHAEL HUDSON: They all called themselves socialists. There were many kinds of socialism in
the late 19 th century. Christians promoted Christian socialism, and anarchists
promoted an individualistic socialism. Mill was called a Ricardian socialist. The common
denominator among socialists was their recognition that the industrial capitalism of their day
was a transitory stage burdened by the remnants of feudalism, headed by the landlord class
whose hereditary rule was a legacy of the medieval military invasions of England, France,
Germany and the rest of Europe. This was the class that controlled the upper house of
government, e.g ., Britain's Lordships. For socialists, the guiding idea was to run
factories and operate land and provide public services for the economy at large to grow instead
of imposing austerity and letting the rentier classes exploit the rest of the economy
and concentrate income, political control and tax policy in their own hands.
Until World War I, socialism was popular because most people saw industrial capitalism as
evolving. Politics was in motion. The term "capitalism," by the way, was coined by Werner
Sombart, not Marx. But classical political economy culminated in Marx. He looked at society's
broad laws of motion to see where they were leading.
The socialist idea was not only that of Marx but also of American business school professors
like Simon Patten of the WhartonSchool. He said that the kind of economy that would dominate
the world's future was one that was the most efficient in preventing monopoly and preventing or
taxing away absentee land rent so that almost all income would be paid as wages and profits,
not rent or interest or monopoly rents.
The business classes in the United States, Germany and even in England were in favor of
reform – that is, anti-rentier reform. They recognized that only a strong government
would have the political power to tax away or regulate parasitic economic rent by the
wealthiest classes at that time, in the late 19 th and early 20 th
century. This economic and political cleanup of the rentiers stemmed very largely from
the ideological battle that occurred in England after the Napoleonic Wars were over in 1815.
Ricardo, representing the banking class, argued against Reverend Malthus, the population
theorist who also was a spokesman for the landlord class. Malthus urged agricultural
protectionism for landlords, so that they would get more and more rent from their land as grain
prices were kept high. Ricardo argued that high food prices to support rents for the
agricultural landlords would mean high labor costs for industrial employers. And if you have
high labor costs then England cannot be the industrial workshop of the world. In order for
England to become the industrial supreme power, it needed to overcome the power of its landlord
class. Instead of protecting it, England decided to protect its industrial capital by repealing
its protectionist Corn Laws in 1846. (I describe its strategy in my history of theories of
Trade, Development and Foreign Debt .)
At that time England's banking class was still a carryover from Europe's Medieval period.
Christianity had banned the charging of interest, so banks were able to make their money by
combining their loans with a foreign exchange charge, called agio. Banks even
Ricardo's day in the early 19 th century made most of their money by financing
foreign trade and charging foreign exchange fees. If your listeners they have ever tried to
change money at the airport, they will know what a big rake-off the change booths take.
Later in the 19 th century, bankers began to shift their lending away from
international trade financing to real estate as home ownership became democratized. Home owners
became their own landlords – but on mortgage credit.
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Today we're no longer in the situation that existed in England 200 years ago. Almost
two-thirds of the American families own their homes. In Scandinavia and much of Europe, 80% are
homeowners. They don't pay rent to landlords. Instead, they pay their income as interest to the
mortgage lenders. That's because hardly anyone has enough money to buy a
few-hundred-thousand-dollar home with the cash in their pocket. They have to borrow the money.
The income that used to be paid as rent to a landlord is now paid as interest to the mortgage
banker. So you have a similar kind of exploitation today that you had two centuries ago, with
the major difference that the banking and financial class has replaced the landlord class.
Already by the late-19 th century, socialists were advocating that money and
credit don't have to take the form of gold and silver. Governments can create their own money.
That's what the United States did in the Civil War with its greenbacks. It simply printed the
money – and gave it value by making it acceptable for payment of taxes. In addition to
the doctrine that land and basic infrastructure should be owned by the public sector –
that is, by governments – banking was seen as a public utility. Credit was to be created
for productive purposes, not for rent-extracting activities or financial speculation. Land
would be fully taxed so that instead of labor or even most industry paying an income tax,
rentiers would pay tax on wealth that took the form of rent-extracting privileges.
The aim of classical economics was to tax unearned income, not wages and profits. The tax
burden was to fall on the landlord class first and foremost, then on monopolists and bankers.
The result was to bea circular flow in which taxes would be paid mainly out of rent and other
unearned income, and the government would spend this revenue on infrastructure, schools and
other productive investment to help make the economy more competitive. Socialism was seen as a
program to create a more efficient capitalist economy along these lines, until the word was
hijacked by the Russian Revolution after World War I. The Soviet Union became a travesty of
Marxism and the word socialism.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You write that: "Today's anti-classical vocabulary redefines free markets
as ones that are free for rent extractors and that rent and interest reflect their
recipients' contribution to wealth, not their privileges to extract economic rent
from the economy." How do you differentiate between productive and extractive sectors,
and how is it that the extractive sectors, essentially Finance, Insurance and Real Estate
(FIRE), actually burden the economy?
MICHAEL HUDSON: If you're a real estate owner, you want lower property taxes so that as the
economy grows and people are able to pay more rent, or when a land site in a neighborhood
becomes more valuable because the government builds a new subway – like New York City's
Second Avenue line – real estate prices rise to reflect the property's higher income that
is not taxed.
New York landlords all along the subway line raised rents. That meant that their real estate
had a "capital" gain reflecting the higher rent roll. Individual owners fortunate enough to own
a condo or a townhouse near the stations became more wealthy – while new renters or
buyers had to pay much more than before. None of this price rise created more living space or
other output (although today's post-classical GDP figures pretend that it did!). It simply
meant that instead of recapturing the $10 billion the government spent on this subway extension
by taxing the increased land valuations all along the subway route, New York's income and real
estate taxes have been raised for everybody, to pay interest on the bonds issued to finance the
subway's construction. So the city's cost of living and doing business rises – while the
Upper East Side landlords have received a free lunch.
Creating that kind of real estate "fictitious wealth" is a capitalization of unearned income
– unearned because the Upper East Side landlords didn't do anything themselves to
increase the value of their property. The City raised rental values by making the sites more
desirable when it built the subway extension.
The same logic applies to insurance. When President Obama passed the basically Republican
Obamacare law advocated by the pharmaceutical and health management sectors, the cost of
medical care went way up in the United States. It was organized so as to be a giveaway to the
healthcare and pharmaceutical monopolies.
None of this increased payment for medical care increases its quality. In fact, the more
that's paid for medical care, the more the service declines, because it is paid to health
insurance companies that try to legally fight against consumers. The effect is predatory, not
productive.
Finally, you have the financial part of the FIRE sector. Finance has accounted for almost
all of the growth in U.S. GDP in the ten years since the Lehman Brothers crisis and the Obama
bailout in 2008. The biggest banks at that time were insolvent as a result of bad loans and
outright financial fraud. But the government created $4.3 trillion of reserves to bail out
Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, with Goldman Sachs thrown in, despite the fact that
their fraudulent junk mortgage loans were predatory, not productive credit that actually
increased wealth in the form of productive power. There's a growing understanding that the
financial sector has become so dysfunctional that it is a deadweight on the economy, burdening
it with increasing debt charges –student loans are an example – instead of actually
helping the economy grow.
BONNIE FAULKNER: So just to reiterate, what is the classical distinction between earned and
unearned income?
MICHAEL HUDSON: This distinction is based on classical value and price theory. Price is what
people have to pay. The margin of price over and above real cost value is called economic rent.
A product's value is its actual, necessary costs of production: the cost of labor, raw
materials and machinery, and other elements of what it costs to tangibly produce it. Rent and
financial charges are the product of special privileges that have been privatized and now
financialized.
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Classical value theory isolated this economic rent as unearned income. It was the aim of
society either to prevent it from occurring in the first place, by anti-monopoly regulation or
by public land ownership, or to tax it away in cases where you can't help it going up. For
instance, it's natural for neighborhoods to become more valuable and high-priced over time as
the economy gets richer. But it doesn't cost more to construct buildings there, and rents keep
going up and up and up on buildings that were put up 100 years ago. This increased rent does
not reflect any new cost of production. It's a free lunch.
Neoliberals, most notoriously the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman at, kept insisting
that "There's no such thing as a free lunch." But that's exactly what most of the wealth and
income of the richest 1% is. It's the result of running the economy primarily to siphon off a
rentier free lunch. Of course, its recipients try to distract public attention from
this face and tell national income and Gross Domestic Product statisticians to pretend that
they actually earn their income wealth, not merely transfer income from the rest of the economy
into their hands as creditors, monopolists and landlords. The leading Wall Street firm Goldman
Sachs said so notoriously a few years ago that "Our partners are the most productive in the
country because look at how much we're paid." But they don't really earn their wealth
in the classical sense of earning by performing a productive economic service. The economy
would get along much better without Goldman Sachs and indeed the banking and financial system
or the health insurance system being run the way they are, and without real estate the being
untaxed in the way that it is.
BONNIE FAULKNER: I noticed that you used the term "rent" for unearned income. Is rent the
same as profit, or not?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It's not at all the same. Profit is earned by investing in a means of
production to make useful goods and services. Classical economists viewed profit as an element
of cost if you're going to have a privately owned economy – and most socialists have
accepted private ownership, although in a system regulated so as to benefit society as a whole.
If you make a profit by a productive act acting within this system, you've earned it by being
productive.
Economic rent is different. It is not earned by actively building means of production,
conducting research or development. It's passive income. When pharmaceutical companies earn
rent, it's simply for charging much more for the drugs they sell than it actually costs to
produce them. This is especially the case when the government has borne the research and
development cost of the drugs and simply assigns the rent-yielding patent privilege to the
pharmaceutical companies. So rent is something over and above the profit necessary to induce
the activity that these companies actually perform. Profits are why investors produce more.
Rent is not necessary. If you got rid of it, you wouldn't discourage production, because it's
purely an overhead charge, whereas profits are a production charge in a capitalist economy.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Well, thank you for that distinction between rent and profit. That's a very
important thing to understand.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I describe it more clearly in my book, which includes the appropriate
classical quotations.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You point out that interest and rent are reported as "earnings," as if
bankers and landlords produce gross domestic product (GDP) in the form of credit and ownership
services. How do you think interest and rent should be reported?
MICHAEL HUDSON: They should be classified interest and rent. But the rentier
classes have taken over the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) to depict their takings
as actual production of a service, not as overhead or a transfer payment, that is, not as
parasitic extraction of other peoples' earnings.
For instance, suppose you have a credit card and you miss a payment, or miss a payment on a
student loan, electric bill or your rent. The credit card company will use this as an excuse to
raise your interest charge from 11% to 29%. The national income account treat this rise to 29%
as providing a "financial service." The so-called service is simply charging a penalty rate.
The pretense is that everything that a bank charges – higher interest or penalties
– is by definition providing a service, not simply extracting money from cardholders,
transferring income from them to itself.
Classical economists would have subtracted this financial rake-off from output, counting it
as overhead. After all, it simply adds to the cost of living and doing business. Instead, the
most recent statisticians have added this financial income to the Gross National
Product instead of subtracting it, as the classical economists would have done – or
simply not counted it, as was the case a generation ago.
Most reporters and the financial press don't get into the nitty-gritty of these national
accounts, so they don't realize how lobbyists have intervened in recent years to turn them into
propaganda flattering bankers and property owners. Today's "reformed" GDP format pretends that
the economy has been going up since 2008. A more realistic description would show that it is
shrinking for 95 percent of the population, being eaten away by the wealthiest 5% extracting
more rentier income and imposing austerity.
If you look at the national balance sheet of assets and liabilities, the economy is becoming
more debt-ridden. As student debt and mortgage debt go up, and penalty fees, arrears and
defaults are rising. The long rise in home ownership rates is being reversed, and rents are
rising, while people also have to pay more for medical care and other basic needs. Academic
economists depict this as "consumer choice" or "demand," as if it is all a voluntary choice of
"the market." The GDP accounting format has been modified to make it appear that the economy is
getting richer. This statistical sleight-of-hand is achieved by counting the takings of the
rentier 1% as a product, not a cost borne by the economy at large. What really should
be shown is a loss – land and monopoly rent, interest and penalties is in fact so large a
"product" that the economy seems to be growing. But most of that growth is unreal.
BONNIE FAULKNER: How does government fiscal policy, taxation and expenditure influence the
economy?
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MICHAEL HUDSON: That's what Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is all about. When governments run
a budget deficit, they pump money into the economy. For Keynesians the money goes into the real
economy in ways that employ labor. For neoliberals, quantitative easing is spent directly into
the financial sector, and is used to finance the purchase of real estate, stocks and bonds,
supporting the valuation of wealth owned mainly by the One Percent. The effect is to make
housing more expensive, and also the price of buying a retirement income. Having to take on
larger mortgage debt to buy a house and spend less each month in order to save for one's
pension is not really "wealth creation," unless your perspective is that of the One Percent
increasing its power over the 99%.
At least the United States is able to run deficits and avoid the kind of unemployment and
austerity that Europe is imposing on itself and especially on Greece and Italy. I think in one
of our talks on this show explained the problem that Europe is suffering. Under the
constitution of the Eurozone, its member countries are not allowed to run a budget deficit of
more than 3%. Most actually aim at extracting a surplus from the economy (as distinct from
producing a surplus for the economy). That means that the government doesn't spend
money into the economy. People and businesses are obliged to get their money from the banks.
That requires them to pay more interest. All Europe is on the road to looking like
Greece– debt-strapped economies that are kept artificially alive by the government
creating reserves to give to the banks and bail out bond markets, not spending into economies
to help them recover.
The ability to create debt by writing a bank loan that creates a deposit is a legal
privilege. There's no reason why governments cannot do this themselves. Instead of borrowing
from private creditors to finance their budget deficits, governments can create their own money
– without burdening budgets with interest charges. Credit creation has little cost of
production, and therefore does not require interest charges to cover this cost. The interest is
a form of monopoly rent to privatized privilege.
Classical economists saw the proper role of government as being to create social
infrastructure and upgrade living standards and productivity for their labor force. Governments
should build roads to minimize the cost of transportation, not private companies creating toll
roads to maximize the cost by building in financial charges, real estate and management charges
to what users have to pay. Government should be in charge of providing public health insurance,
not private companies that charge extortionate prices and whatever the market will bear for
their drugs. It's the government that should run prisons, not private companies that use
prisoners as cheap labor to make a profit and advocate that more people get arrested so to make
more of a profit from their incarceration.
The great question is, what is the government going to spend money on, and how can it spend
money into the economy in a way that helps growth? Imagine if this trillion dollars a year
that's spent on arms and military – in California and the districts of the key
congressmen on the budget committee – were spent on building roads, schools,
transportation and subsidizing medical care. The country could become a utopia. Instead, the
rentier classes have hijacked the government, taking over its money creation and
taxing power to spend on themselves, not to help the economy at large produce more or raise
living standards. Special interests have captured the regulatory agencies to make them serve
rent extractors, not protect the economy from them.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Interest is tax-deductible, whereas profit is taxable. Does the tax
deductibility of interest have a major impact on the economy?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, because tax deductibility encourages companies to raise money by going
into debt. This tax deductibility of interest catalyzed the corporate raiding movement of the
1980s. It was based on debt leveraging.
Suppose a company makes $100 million a year in profit and pays this out to its stockholders
as dividends. In the 1980s this profit was taxed at about 50%, so you could only pay $50
million to the stockholders. Then as today, they were the wealthiest layer of the population.
Drexel Burnham and other Wall Street firms sought out corporate raiders as clients and offered
to lend them enough money to buy companies out, by buying out their stockholders. Stocks were
replaced by bonds. That enabled companies to pay out twice as much income as interest than they
had been paying as dividends. When they bought out target companies with debt, a company could
pay all $100 million of its income as interest instead of only $50 million as dividends on
stock.
So the wealthiest classes in the United States and other countries decided that they could
get more from own bonds than stocks anymore. Government revenue declined by the added amount
paid to financial investors as a result of this tax subsidy for debt.
The advantage of issuing stocks is that when business conditions turn down and profits fall,
companies can cut back their dividend. But if they have committed to pay this $100 million to
bondholders, when their earnings go down they may face insolvency.
The result was a wave of bankruptcy since the 1980s as companies became more debt-pyramided.
Also companies heads went to the labor unions and threatened to declare bankruptcy and wipe out
their pension funds, if their leaders did not agree to change these funds and replace the
guaranteed retirement pension that were promised for a defined contribution plan. All they know
is what they have to pay in every month. Retirees will only get whatever is left when they
reach pension age. The equity economy shift into a debt economy has enriched the wealthy
financial class at the top, while hurting employees.
Most statistical trends turned around in 1980 for almost every country as this shift
occurred. Indebting companies has made them more fragile and also higher-cost, because now they
have to factor in the price of interest payments to the bondholders and corporate raiders
who've taken them over.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Do you think that changes should be made to the tax deductibility of
interest?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Sure. If interest were to be taxed, that would leave less incentive for
companies to keep on adding debt. It would deter corporate raiding. It is a precondition for
companies being run to minimize their cost of production and to serve their labor force and
their customers more. For homebuyers, removing the tax-deductibility of interest would leave
less "free" rent to be pledged to banks for mortgages, and hence would reduce the size of bank
loans that bid up housing prices.
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I think that interest and rents should be taxed, not wages and legitimate profits. The FICA
wage withholding now absorbs almost 16% of most wage-earning income for Social Security and
Medicare. But wealthy people don't have to pay any contribution on what they make over than
about $ $116,000 a year. They don't have to pay any FICA contribution on their capital gains,
which is how most fortunes are made. The rentiers' idea of a free market is to make
labor pay for all of the Social Security and Medicare – and then to give so much to Wall
Street that they can say, "Oh, there's no more money. The system's short, so we have to wipe
out Social Security," just as so many companies have wiped out the pension commitments. As
George W. Bush said, tere's not really any money in the Social Security accounts. Its tax on
the lower income brackets was all used to cut taxes on the higher income and wealth brackets.
The economy has been turned into a grab bag for the rich.
BONNIE FAULKNER: What about monetary policy, interest rates and the money supply? Who
controls monetary policy, and how does it affect the economy?
MICHAEL HUDSON: The biggest banks put their lobbyists in charge of the Federal Reserve,
which was created in 1913 to take monetary policy out of the hands of the Treasury in
Washington and put it in the hands of Wall Street. That made the Fed a lobbyist for its
members, the commercial banking system. It's run to control the money supply – in
practice, the debt supply – in a way that steers money into the banks. That's why not a
single banker was jailed for committing the junk mortgage scams and other frauds that caused
the crash. The Fed has turned the banking system into a predatory monopoly instead of the
public service that it was once supposed to be.
Monetary policy is really debt policy, because money is debt on the liabilities side of the
balance sheet. The question is, what kind of debt is the economy going to have, and
what happens when it exceeds the ability to be paid? How is the government going to provide the
economy with money, and what will it do to keep debts line with the ability to be paid? Will
money and credit be provided to build more factories and product more output, to rebuild
American manufacturing and infrastructure? Or, are you going to leave credit and debt creation
to the banks, to make larger loans for people to buy homes at rising prices reflecting the
increasingly highly leveraged and outright reckless credit creation?
Monetary policy is debt policy, and on balance most debts are owed by the bottom 90% to the
wealthiest 10%. So monetary policy becomes an exercise in how the 10% can extract more and more
interest, rent and capital gains from the economy – all the while making money by
impoverishing the economy, not helping most people prosper.
BONNIE FAULKNER: The economy is always being planned by someone or some force, be it Wall
Street, the government or whatever. It's not the result of natural law, as you point out in
your book. It seems like a lot of people think that the economy should somehow run itself
without interference. Could you explain how this is an absurd idea?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It's an example of rhetoric overcoming people's common sense. Every economy
since the Stone Age has been planned. Even in the stone age people had to plan when to plant
the crops, when to harvest them, how much seed you had to keep over for the next year. You had
to operate on credit during the crop year to get beer and rent draft animals. Somebody's in
charge of every economy.
So when people talk about an unplanned economy, they mean no government planning.
They mean that planning should be taken out of the hands of government and put in the hands of
the 1%. That is what they mean by a "free market." They pretend that if the 1% control the
economy it's not really a planned economy anymore, because it's not planned by government,
officials serving the public interest. It's planned by Wall Street. So the question is, really,
who's going to plan the American economy? Is it going to be the government of elected
officials, or is it going to be Wall Street? Wall Street will euphemize its central planning by
saying this is a free market – meaning it's free of government regulation, especially
over the financial sector and the mining companies and other monopolies that are its major
clients.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You emphasize the difference between the study of 19 th -century
classical political economy and modern-day economics. How and when and why did political
economy become "economics"?
MICHAEL HUDSON: If you look at the books that almost everybody wrote in the 19 th
century, they called it political economy because economics is political. And
conversely, economics is what politics has always been about. Who's getting what? Or as Lenin
said, who-whom? It's about how society makes decisions about who's going to get rich and how
they are going to do it. Are they going to get wealthy by acting productively, or
parasitically? Eeverything economic turns out to be political.
The economy's new central planners on Wall Street pretend that what they're doing is not
political. Cutting taxes on themselves is depicted as a law of nature. But they deny that this
is politics, as if there's nothing anyone can do about it. Margaret Thatcher's refrain was
"There is no alternative" (TINA). That is the numbing political sedative injected into today's
economic discussion.
The aim is to make people think that there is no alternative because if they're getting
poorer, if they're losing their home by defaulting on a junk mortgage of if they have to pay so
much on the student loan so that they can't afford to buy a home, or if they find that the only
kind of job they can get driving an Uber car, it's all their fault. It's as if that's just
nature, not the way the economy has been malstructured.
The role of neoliberalism is to make people think that they are powerless in the face of
"the market," as if markets are not socially and politically structured. The 1% have hired
lobbyists and subsidized business schools so as to shape markets in their own interest. Their
aim is to control the economy and call it "nature." Their patter talk is that poverty is
natural for short-sighted "deplorables," not the result of the predatory neoliberal takeover
since 1980 and their capture of the Justice Department so that none of the bank fraudsters go
to jail.
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BONNIE FAULKNER: In your chapter on the letter M – of course, we have chapters from A
to Z – in your chapter on M, you have an entry for Hyman Minsky, an economist who
pioneered Modern Monetary Theory and explained the three stages of the financial cycle in terms
of rising debt leveraging. What is debt leveraging, and how does it lead to a crisis?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Debt leveraging means buying an asset on credit. Lending for home ownership
in the United States is the leading example. From the 1940s to the 1960s, if you took out a
mortgage, the banker would look at your income and calculate that the mortgage on the house you
buy shouldn't absorb more than 25% of your income. The idea was that this would leave enough
income to pay the interest charge and amortize – that is, pay off – the mortgage 30
years later, near the end of your working life. Minsky called this first credit stage the hedge
stage, meaning that banks had hedged their bets within limits that enabled the economy to carry
and pay off its debts.
In the second credit stage, banks lent more and loosened their lending standards so that
mortgages would absorb much more than 25% of the borrower's income. At a certain point, people
could not afford to amortize, that is to pay off the mortgage. All they could do was to pay the
interest charge. By the 1980s, the federal government was lending up to almost 40% of the
borrower's income, writing mortgages without any amortization taking place. The mortgage
payment simply carried the existing homeowner's debt. Banks in fact didn't want to ever be
repaid. They wanted to go on collecting interest on as much debt as possible.
Finally, Minsky said, the Ponzi stage occurred when the homeowner didn't even have enough
money to pay the interest charge, but had to borrow the interest. So this was how Third World
countries had gotten through the 1970s and the early 1980s. The government of, let's say Mexico
or Brazil or Argentina, would say, well, we don't have the dollars to pay the debt, and the
banks would say, we'll just add the interest onto the debt. Same thing with a credit card or a
mortgage. The mortgage homeowner would say, I don't have enough money to pay the mortgage, and
the bank would say, well, just take out a larger mortgage; we'll just lend you the money to pay
the interest.
That's the Ponzi stage and it was named after Carlo Ponzi and his Ponzi scheme –
paying early buyers out of income paid into the scheme by new entrants. That's the stage that
the economy entered around 2007-08. It became a search for the proverbial "greater fool"
willing to borrow to buy overpriced real estate. That caused the crash, and we're still in the
post-crash austerity interim (before yet a deeper debt writeoff or new bailout). The debts have
been left in place, not written down. If you have a credit card and have to pay a monthly
balance but lack enough to pay down your debt, your balance will keep going up every month,
adding the interest charge onto the debt balance.
Any volume of debt tends to grow at compound interest. The result is an exponential growth
that doubles the debt in little time. Any rate of interest is a doubling time. If debt keeps
doubling and redoubling, it's carrying charges are going to crowd out the other expenses in
your budget. You'll have to pay more money to the banks for student loans, credit card debts,
auto loans and mortgage debt, leaving less to spend on goods and services. That's why the
economy is shrinking right now. That's why people today aren't able to do what their parents
were able to do 50 years ago – buy a home they can live in by paying a quarter of their
income.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Dr. Michael Hudson, thank you so very much.
Craig Murray is right that "As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier."
Collapse of neoliberal ideology and rise of tentions in neoliberal sociarties resulted in unprecedented increase of covert and false
flag operations by British intelligence services, especially against Russia, which had been chosen as a convenient scapegoat.
With Steele dossier and Skripal affair as two most well known.
New Lady Macbeth (Theresa May) Russophobia is so extreme that her cabinet derailed the election of a Russian to head
Interpol.
Looks like neoliberalism cannot be defeated by and faction of the existing elite. Only when shepp oil end mant people will
have a chance. The US , GB and EU are part of the wider hegemonic neoliberal system. In fact rejection of neoliberal
globalization probably will lead to "national neoliberals" regime which would be a flavor of neo-fascism, no more no less.
Notable quotes:
"... The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. ..."
"... I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign. ..."
"... It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia. ..."
"... the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it. ..."
"... By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building . It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London. ..."
"... Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence. ..."
"... I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills. ..."
"... I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information. ..."
"... one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day ..."
"... As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier. ..."
"... You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy". ..."
The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. Look up Eldred Pottinger, who for 180 years appears
in scores of British history books – right up to and including William Dalrymple's Return of the King – as a British officer who
chanced to be passing Herat on holiday when it came under siege from a partly Russian-officered Persian army, and helped to organise
the defences. In researching
Sikunder Burnes, I discovered and published from the British Library incontrovertible and detailed documentary evidence that
Pottinger's entire journey was under the direct instructions of, and reporting to, British spymaster Alexander Burnes. The first
historian to publish the untrue "holiday" cover story, Sir John Kaye, knew both Burnes and Pottinger and undoubtedly knew he was
publishing lying propaganda. Every other British historian of the First Afghan War (except me and latterly
Farrukh Husain) has just followed Kaye's official propaganda.
Some things don't change. I was irresistibly reminded of Eldred Pottinger just passing Herat on holiday, when I learnt how
highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane
just happened to be on holiday in the
United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Recent university graduate Simon Bracey-Lane took it even further. Originally from Wimbledon in London, he was inspired to
rejoin the Labour party in September when Corbyn was elected leader. But by that point, he was already in the US on holiday. So
he joined the Sanders campaign, and never left.
"I had two weeks left and some money left, so I thought, Fuck it, I'll make some calls for Bernie Sanders," he explains. "I just
sort of knew Des Moines was the place, so I just turned up at their HQ, started making phone calls, and then became a fully fledged
field organiser."
It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane
is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely
unbalanced panel of British
military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia.
Nor would it seem likely that Bracey-Lane would be involved with the Integrity Initiative. Even the mainstream media has been
forced to give a few paragraphs to the outrageous Integrity Initiative, under which the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft
has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against
Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of
influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus
exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and
others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it.
The mainstream media have
tracked down
the HQ of the "Institute for Statecraft" to a derelict mill near Auchtermuchty. It is owned by one of the company directors, Daniel
Lafayeedney, formerly of D Squadron 23rd SAS Regiment and later of Military Intelligence (and incidentally born the rather more prosaic
Daniel Edney).
By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location
of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of
the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building.
It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London.
Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing
for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence.
Having been told where the Institute for Statecraft skulk, I tipped off journalist Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio to go and physically
check it out. Kit did so and was
aggressively
ejected by that well-known Corbyn and Sanders supporter, Simon Bracey-Lane. It does seem somewhat strange that our left wing
hero is deeply embedded in an organisation that
launches troll attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.
I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation
war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I
am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills.
I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the
Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter
for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information.
But one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the
British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that
we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity
Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media,
it would be the biggest story of the day.
As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier.
You can
bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy".
As both Scottish Independence and Jeremy Corbyn are viewed as
real threats by the British Establishment, you can anticipate every possible kind of dirty trick in the next couple of years, with
increasing frequency and audacity
"... In his just published book, War With Russia? ..."
"... To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition." ..."
"... Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared. ..."
"... The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned. ..."
Throughout the long Cold War Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University was a
voice of reason. He refused to allow his patriotism to blind him to Washington's contribution to the conflict and to criticize only
the Soviet contribution. Cohen's interest was not to blame the enemy but to work toward a mutual understanding that would remove
the threat of nuclear war. Although a Democrat and left-leaning, Cohen would have been at home in the Reagan administration, as Reagan's
first priority was to end the Cold War. I know this because I was part of the effort. Pat Buchanan will tell you the same thing.
In 1974 a notorious cold warrior, Albert Wohlstetter, absurdly accused the CIA of underestimating the Soviet threat. As the CIA
had every incentive for reasons of budget and power to overestimate the Soviet threat, and today the "Russian threat," Wohlstetter's
accusation made no sense on its face. However he succeeded in stirring up enough concern that CIA director George H.W. Bush, later
Vice President and President, agreed to a Team B to investigate the CIA's assessment, headed by the Russiaphobic Harvard professor
Richard Pipes. Team B concluded that the Soviets thought they could win a nuclear war and were building the forces with which to
attack the US.
The report was mainly nonsense, and it must have have troubled Stephen Cohen to experience the setback to negotiations that Team
B caused.
Today Cohen is stressed that it is the United States that thinks it can win a nuclear war. Washington speaks openly of using "low
yield" nuclear weapons, and intentionally forecloses any peace negotiations with Russia with a propaganda campaign against Russia
of demonization, vilification, and transparent lies, while installing missile bases on Russia's borders and while talking of incorporating
former parts of Russia into NATO. In his just published book, War With Russia? , which I highly recommend, Cohen makes a
convincing case that Washington is asking for war.
I agree with Cohen that if Russia is a threat it is only because the US is threatening Russia. The stupidity of the policy toward
Russia is creating a Russian threat. Putin keeps emphasizing this. To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring
us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless
repetition."
Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the
Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of
cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared.
The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media
and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media
to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful
use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo
Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned.
The demonization of Russia is also aided and abetted by the Democrats' hatred of Trump and anger from Hillary's loss of the presidential
election to the "Trump deplorables." The Democrats purport to believe that Trump was installed by Putin's interference in the presidential
election. This false belief is emotionally important to Democrats, and they can't let go of it.
Although Cohen as a professor at Princeton and NYU never lacked research opportunities, in the US Russian studies, strategic studies,
and the like are funded by the military/security complex whose agenda Cohen's scholarship does not serve. At the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, where I held an independently financed chair for a dozen years, most of my colleagues were dependent on
grants from the military/security complex. At the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where I was a Senior Fellow for three
decades, the anti-Soviet stance of the Institution reflected the agenda of those who funded the institution.
I am not saying that my colleagues were whores on a payroll. I am saying that the people who got the appointments were people
who were inclined to see the Soviet Union the way the military/security complex thought it should be seen.
As Stephen Cohen is aware, in the original Cold War there was some balance as all explanations were not controlled. There were
independent scholars who could point out that the Soviets, decimated by World War 2, had an interest in peace, and that accommodation
could be achieved, thus avoiding the possibility of nuclear war.
Stephen Cohen must have been in the younger ranks of those sensible people, as he and President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet
Union, Jack Matloff, seem to be the remaining voices of expert reason on the American scene.
If you care to understand the dire threat under which you live, a threat that only a few people, such as Stephen Cohen, are trying
to lift, read his book.
If you want to understand the dire threat that a bought-and-paid-for American media poses to your existence, read Cohen's accounts
of their despicable lies. America has a media that is synonymous with lies.
If you want to understand how corrupt American universities are as organizations on the take for money, organizations to whom
truth is inconsequential, read Cohen's book.
If you want to understand why you could be dead before Global Warming can get you, read Cohen's book.
So at the moment when everybody assumed that Trump lost control of the foreign policy, he
does this. It's a real surprise. Kind of Christmas gift to his voters. And that's with neocon
Pompeo as his State Secretary and neocon Bolton as his national security advisor.
The War Party project of regime change in Tehran suffered a severe setback with the U.S.
pullout from Syria.
Notable quotes:
"... Forced to choose between Turkey, with 80 million people and the second-largest army in NATO, which sits astride the Dardanelles and Bosphorus entrance to the Black Sea, and the stateless Kurds with their Syrian Democratic Forces, or YPG, Trump chose Recep Tayyip Erdogan. ..."
"... And Erdogan regards the YPG as kinfolk and comrades of the Kurdish terrorist PKK in Turkey. A week ago, he threatened to attack the Kurds in northern Syria, though U.S. troops are embedded alongside them. What kind of deal did Trump strike with Erdogan? Turkey will purchase the U.S. Patriot anti-aircraft and missile defense system for $3.5 billion, and probably forego the Russian S-400. Trump also told Erdogan that we "would take a look at" extraditing Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen whom the Turkish president says instigated the 2016 coup attempt that was to end with his assassination. ..."
"... The war party project, to bring about regime change in Tehran through either crippling sanctions leading to insurrection or a U.S.-Iranian clash in the Gulf, will suffer a severe setback with the U.S. pullout from Syria. ..."
"We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there," wrote President Donald
Trump as he ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria, stunning the U.S. foreign
policy establishment.
Trump overruled his secretaries of state and defense, and jolted this city and capitals
across NATO Europe and the Middle East.
Yet Trump is doing exactly what he promised to do in his campaign. And what his decision
seems to say is this:
We are extricating America from the forever war of the Middle East so foolishly begun by
previous presidents. We are coming home. The rulers and peoples of this region are going to
have to find their own way and fight their own wars. We are not so powerful that we can fight
their wars while also confronting Iran and North Korea and facing new cold wars with Russia and
China.
As for the terrorists of ISIS, says Trump, they are defeated.
Yet despite the heavy casualties and lost battles ISIS has suffered, along with the collapse
of the caliphate and expulsion from its Syrian capital Raqqa and Iraqi capital Mosul and from
almost all territories it controlled in both countries, the group is not dead. It lives on in
thousands of true believers hidden in those countries. And like al-Qaeda, it has followers
across the Middle East and inspires haters of the West living in the West.
The U.S. pullout from Syria is being called a victory for Vladimir Putin. "Russia, Iran,
Assad are ecstatic!" wailed Senator Lindsey Graham.
Graham was echoed by Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse who called the withdrawal a "retreat" and
charged that Trump's generals "believe the high-fiving winners today are Iran, ISIS and
Hezbollah."
But ISIS is a Sunni terrorist organization. And as such, it detests the Alawite regime of
Bashar Assad, and Hezbollah and Iran, both of which are viewed by ISIS as Shiite heretics.
"Russia, Iran, Syria are not happy about the US leaving," Trump tweeted, "despite what the Fake
News says, because now they will have to fight ISIS and others, who they hate, without us."
If Putin, victorious in the Syrian civil war, wishes to fight al-Qaeda and ISIS, the last
major enemies of Assad in Syria, why not let him?
The real losers?
Certainly the Kurds, who lose their American ally. Any dream they had of greater autonomy
inside Syria, or an independent state, is not going to be realized. But then, that was never
really in the cards.
Forced to choose between Turkey, with 80 million people and the second-largest army in
NATO, which sits astride the Dardanelles and Bosphorus entrance to the Black Sea, and the
stateless Kurds with their Syrian Democratic Forces, or YPG, Trump chose Recep Tayyip
Erdogan.
And Erdogan regards the YPG as kinfolk and comrades of the Kurdish terrorist PKK in
Turkey. A week ago, he threatened to attack the Kurds in northern Syria, though U.S. troops are
embedded alongside them. What kind of deal did Trump strike with Erdogan? Turkey will purchase
the U.S. Patriot anti-aircraft and missile defense system for $3.5 billion, and probably forego
the Russian S-400. Trump also told Erdogan that we "would take a look at" extraditing Muslim
cleric Fethullah Gulen whom the Turkish president says instigated the 2016 coup attempt that
was to end with his assassination.
National security advisor John Bolton, who said U.S. troops would remain in Syria until all
Iranian forces and Iran-backed militias have been expelled, appears not to have been speaking
for his president. And if the Israelis were relying on U.S. forces in Syria to intercept any
Iranian weapons shipments headed to Hezbollah in Lebanon through Damascus, then they are going
to have to make other arrangements.
The war party project, to bring about regime change in Tehran through either crippling
sanctions leading to insurrection or a U.S.-Iranian clash in the Gulf, will suffer a severe
setback with the U.S. pullout from Syria.
However, given the strength of the opposition to a U.S. withdrawal -- Israel, Saudi Arabia,
the GOP foreign policy establishment in Congress and the think tanks, liberal interventionists
in the Beltway press, Trump's own national security team of advisors -- the battle to overturn
Trump's decision has probably only just begun.
From FDR's abandonment of 100 million East Europeans to Stalin at Yalta in 1945 to the
abandonment of our Nationalist Chinese allies to Mao in 1949 and of our South Vietnamese allies
in 1975, America has often been forced into retreats leading to the deaths of allies. Senator
Sasse says Trump is risking the same outcome: "A lot of American allies will be slaughtered if
this retreat is implemented."
But is that true?
Trump's decision to pull out of Syria at least has assured us of a national debate on what
it will mean to America to extricate our country from these Mideast wars. It is the kind of
debate we have not had in the 15 years since we were first deceived into invading Iraq.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made
and Broke a President and Divided America Forever . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and
read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at
www.creators.com .
I believe "Syria" is a war crime planned and plotted by some western governments and their
allies. They are even reportedly financing and assisting terrorists. Which is criminal and
treasonous
-- -- --
"With their command and control centre based in Istanbul, Turkey, military supplies from
Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular were transported by Turkish intelligence to the border
for rebel acquisition. CIA operatives along with Israeli and Jordanian commandos were also
training FSA rebels on the Jordanian-Syrian border with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.
In addition, other reports show that British and French military were also involved in these
secret training programmes. It appears that the same FSA rebels receiving this elite training
went straight into ISIS – last month one ISIS commander, Abu Yusaf, said, 'Many of the
FSA people who the west has trained are actually joining us.'" Nafeez Ahmed http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/12/how-the-west-created-the-islamic-state/
-- -- -- -- --
"Under U.S. law it is illegal for any American to provide money or assistance to al-Qaeda,
ISIS or other terrorist groups. If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or
ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the U.S. government has been violating this law for
years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and
other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to
overthrow the Syrian government.[i] Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, December 8, 2016,Press Release.
https://gabbard.house.gov/news/press-releases/video-rep-tulsi-gabbard-introduces-legislation-stop-arming-terrorists
-- -- -- -- --
There is further abundant evidence available at links below: http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-christmas-report-on-crimes-of-war.html
"At the very least, America will have its first serious debate on its Mideast wars since 2003
. It is the kind of debate we have not had in the 15 years since we were first deceived into
invading Iraq."
Finally Mr Buchanan and I agree on something of substance. And I cannot believe I am in
agreement with Trump on this too (even though it was quite clumsy). Will wonders never
cease?
I hate that Trump will probably throw the Kurds under the bus since they acted as our
allies and suffered for it. And if I was Mr Fethullah Gulen I would be packing my bags for
Canada.
However, well done, sir. Now let the debate begin.
I think what is to be accomplished by the US staying in the Middle East? Hasn't over 17 years
and $600 billion spent and over a million dead been price enough? Hopefully, Syria is the 1st
step in ending American military involvement in the Middle East. America has enough to do in
taking care of serious issues here at home. As for the Middle East, let Israel, Saudia
Arabia, Turkey, Iran and other countries and ethnic groups who reside there solve their own
damn problems.
As a European it feels strange to feel this pro-Trump all of a sudden. Before you know it,
I'll order a MAGA cap (I'm always safe with that because carnaval is coming).
Russia just landed a nuclear bomber in Venezuela. Russia and China are making SIGNIFICANT
inroads in the Caribbean, Central America, South America and Africa.
If Israel comes under serious threat, the US will be there to assist in its defense but
the time has come when the US has to admit that the parasite freeloader nations like Europe
and Israel are coming at to high a cost a cost that is both distracting and obstructing the
US from being where it is really needed to deal with China and Russia.
People sit on their collective fat asses inside The Beltway within the confines of some book
lined conference room and make decisions involving the lives of thousands of young men and
women–other people's sons and daughters (never their own)– who may be dispatched
to take a bullet in anger. And over what? Making the MidEast "free for democracy"?
I dislike Trump even though I reluctantly voted for him only to keep the Congenital Liar
out of the White House. One of the few positives he exhibited was a desire to extricate the
United States from that MidEast hell-hole. For once at least he has delivered. Whether he
will succeed, however, remains to be seen. After all, the Beltway is swarming with chicken
hawks.
Very zero sum gain way of thinking. How can the US not spending hundreds of billions on a
lost cause be a win for Russia? Sounds more like a win for the US. I think the Syrian
government with Russia and Iran should be enough to demolish the physical caliphate.
Destroying ISIS ? Good luck with that suppress it OK but destroy easier said then done. How
have we done against, the Mafia? the IRA? drug cartels and so on and so forth. For those who
want to stay is there ever a set of conditions which would be satisfied allowing you to
leave? We are still in Germany, I think the Nazis are gone you can relax, if it was the
Soviets you worry about also gone by about 3 decades. If we can't accept that Germany is
sufficiently stable to no longer be blessed with our presence when oh when would Syria be
viewed as stable?
I have regretted voting for trump for many reasons. I concede that IF USA military leaves
Syria, this is a very positive development. He should now do the same for Afghanistan and
many other places around the world.
Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and the Syrian military have done a fine job of keeping IS on the
run. Let's hope they can finish the job.
In this issue at least I support Trump a hundred percent, and I think a lot of Americans
agree.
He's finally doing what he promised to do during the campaign.
I have been very unhappy with him, but if he follows through on this I'll give him credit.
Given the lock that the elites and establishment have on the media, it took guts. It's good
to see he has some.
While I didn't vote for this excrescence in The White House, I will give credit where credit
is due. Hillary's neocon impulses would have been infinitely worse here.
Still, looking at this past week, I can't help thinking about that whole Flight 93 thing.
But two years into The Trump presidency, it's starting to look more like that disaster movie
camp-fest Airport 1975, where we have crossed-eyed stewardess Karen Black trying to land the
stricken 747. In her immortal words to flight control: "Something hit us! There's no one left
to fly the plane! HELP US! OH MY GOD HELP US!!!"
"... Defense Secretary James "Mad Dog" Mattis resigned from his position effective February 28. He disagreed with the president's decision. It was the second time in five years that an elected commander in chief had a serious conflict with Mattis' hawkishness. President Obama fired him as Central Command chief for urging a more aggressive Iran policy. Mattis is also extremely hawkish towards Russia and China. ..."
"... Mattis is an ingrained imperialist. He always asked for more money for the military and for more meddling abroad. One of Mattis' little notice acts as Defense Secretary was a unannounced change in the mission of the Pentagon : ..."
"... The Pentagon no longer "deters war" but provides "lethal force" to "sustain American influence abroad." There was no public nor congressional debate about the change. I doubt that President Trump agreed to it. Trump will now try to recruit a defense secretary that is more aligned with his own position. ..."
"... Associated Press ..."
"... Trump did not "capitulate". He always wanted to pull the U.S. troops out of Syria. He said so many times. When he was finally given a chance to do so, he grabbed the opportunity. Erdogan though, was not ready for that: ..."
"... Erdogan had planned to only occupy a 10 miles deep strip along the Syrian-Turkish border. Some 15,000 Turkish controlled 'Syrian rebels' stand ready for that. He would need some 50-100,000 troops to occupy all of east Syria northward of the Euphrates. It would be a hostile occupation among well armed Kurds who would oppose it and an Arab population that is not exactly friendly towards a neo-Ottoman Turkey. ..."
"... Any larger occupation of northeast Syria would create a serious mess for Turkey. Its army can do it, but it would cost a lot of casualties and financial resources. Turkey will hold local government election in March and Erdogan does not want any negative headlines. He will invade, but only if Syria and Russia fail to get the Kurds under control. ..."
"... 'The Pentagon's official website now defines its mission this way: "The mission of the Department of Defense is to provide a lethal Joint Force to defend the security of our country and sustain American influence abroad."' ..."
"... '"We had decided last week to launch a military incursion... east of the Euphrates river," he said in a speech in Istanbul'. So much for the UN Charter, then. Anyone who wants to can invade any other country and take over as much of its territory as he wants to - as long as Washington agrees. But, as Saddam Hussein could testify if he were still alive, it would be sensible to get such consent in writing. ..."
"... Macron's forces are illegally present too. Assad would have to request their presence, but I really doubt he will given the harm France has done to Syria over the past 7 years. Word is SAA's Tiger Forces will get sent East of Euphrates; when is now the question. ..."
"... One's got to worry about who will replace Mad Dog Mattis after February 28 next year. It would seem that whoever succeeds Mattis will be another former general, likely to share his views on maintaining and increasing US forces in Syria, Iraq and other parts of western Asia ..."
"... Compared to Mattis, Pompeo and Bolton, and now Nauert at the UN, are raving jingos. Thank Gord they have no ties to the US military. ..."
"... "there also a contingent of 1,100 French troops"... You can hear me laughing after reading this. The French empire was over a long long time ago and they still think that Syria is their colony. France has been sending French Jihadists for regime change in Syria since 2011 and their mission has failed since Russia intervened in 2015. France cannot even send troops to Mali - destabilized by Jihadists created by France in Libya to topple Kadhafi, without the help of the US!!! France is a de-facto vassal state of the US since they decided to joined the NATO central command under Sarkozy who was bribed by the zionist neocons. ..."
"... I personally distinguish between Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria and his move to withdraw partially from Afghanistan. The latter is a step towards ending a brutal, illegal NATO occupation war of over 17 years. The former is also illegal but the Syrian Kurds (left wing and largely communist) are likely to be supplanted as counters to "Iran" by fascists Turkey and Israel (this has been confirmed in reports), so we're moving from tactical NATO proxies to actual NATO governments seizing Syrian land. ..."
Fallout Of Trump's Syria Withdrawal - Why Erdogan Does Not Want To Invadeuuu
, Dec 21, 2018 1:37:31 PM |
link
President Trump's
strategic decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria creates some significant fallout.
The U.S. and international borg is enraged that Trump ends an occupation that is illegal
under international as well as U.S. domestic law. "That's un-American!"
Defense Secretary James "Mad Dog" Mattis
resigned from his position effective February 28. He disagreed with the president's
decision. It was the second time in five years that an elected commander in chief had a
serious conflict with Mattis' hawkishness. President Obama
fired him as Central Command chief for urging a more aggressive Iran policy. Mattis is
also
extremely hawkish towards Russia and China.
President Trump campaigned on lessening U.S. involvement in wars abroad. He wants to get
reelected. He does not need a Secretary of Defense that involves him in more wars that have
little to none defined purpose.
Mattis is an ingrained imperialist. He always asked for more money for the military
and for more meddling abroad. One of Mattis' little notice acts as Defense Secretary was a
unannounced change in the mission of the Pentagon :
For at least two decades, the Department of Defense has explicitly defined its mission on
its website as providing "the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the
security of our country." But earlier this year, it quietly changed that statement, perhaps
suggesting a more ominous approach to national security.
...
The Pentagon's official website now defines its mission this way: "The mission of the
Department of Defense is to provide a lethal Joint Force to defend the security of our
country and sustain American influence abroad."
The Pentagon no longer "deters war" but provides "lethal force" to "sustain American
influence abroad." There was no public nor congressional debate about the change. I doubt
that President Trump agreed to it. Trump will now try to recruit a defense secretary that is
more aligned with his own position.
The White House also announced that 7,000 of the 14,000 soldier the U.S. has in
Afghanistan will
withdraw over the next few months. The war in Afghanistan is lost with the Taliban ruling
over more than half of the country and the U.S. supported government forces losing more
personal than they can recruit. It was Mattis who had urged Trump to increase the troop
numbers in Afghanistan from 10,000 to 14,000 at the beginning of his term. There are also
8,000 NATO and allied troops in Afghanistan which will likely see a proportional
withdrawal.
The Associated Press has a
new tic toc of Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria:
Trump stunned his Cabinet, lawmakers and much of the world with the move by rejecting the
advice of his top aides and agreeing to a withdrawal in a phone call with Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, two officials briefed on the matter said.
...
"The talking points were very firm," said one of the officials, explaining that Trump was
advised to clearly oppose a Turkish incursion into northern Syria and suggest the U.S. and
Turkey work together to address security concerns. "Everybody said push back and try to
offer (Turkey) something that's a small win, possibly holding territory on the border,
something like that."
Erdogan, though, quickly put Trump on the defensive, reminding him that he had
repeatedly said the only reason for U.S. troops to be in Syria was to defeat the Islamic
State and that the group had been 99 percent defeated. "Why are you still there?" the
second official said Erdogan asked Trump, telling him that the Turks could deal with the
remaining IS militants.
...
Erdogan's point, Bolton was forced to admit, had been backed up by Mattis, Pompeo, U.S.
special envoy for Syria Jim Jeffrey and special envoy for the anti-ISIS coalition Brett
McGurk, who have said that IS retains only 1 percent of its territory, the officials
said.
...
Bolton stressed, however, that the entire national security team agreed that victory over
IS had to be enduring, which means more than taking away its territory.
Trump was not dissuaded, according to the officials, who said the president quickly
capitulated by pledging to withdraw, shocking both Bolton and Erdogan.
Trump did not "capitulate". He always wanted to pull the U.S. troops out of Syria. He
said so many times. When he was finally given a chance to do so, he grabbed the opportunity.
Erdogan though, was not ready for that:
Caught off guard, Erdogan cautioned Trump against a hasty withdrawal , according to one
official. While Turkey has made incursions into Syria in the past, it does not have the
necessary forces mobilized on the border to move in and hold the large swaths of
northeastern Syria where U.S. troops are positioned , the official said.
The call ended with Trump repeating to Erdogan that the U.S. would pull out , but
offering no specifics on how it would be done, the officials said.
Erdogan had planned to only occupy a 10 miles deep strip along the Syrian-Turkish
border. Some 15,000 Turkish controlled 'Syrian rebels' stand ready for that. He would need
some 50-100,000 troops to occupy all of east Syria northward of the Euphrates. It would be a
hostile occupation among well armed Kurds who would oppose it and an Arab population that is
not exactly friendly towards a neo-Ottoman Turkey.
"We had decided last week to launch a military incursion... east of the Euphrates river,"
he said in a speech in Istanbul. "Our phone call with President Trump, along with contacts
between our diplomats and security officials and statements by the United States, have led
us to wait a little longer.
"We have postponed our military operation against the east of the Euphrates river until
we see on the ground the result of America's decision to withdraw from Syria."
The Turkish president said, however, that this was not an "open-ended waiting
period".
Any larger occupation of northeast Syria would create a serious mess for Turkey. Its
army can do it, but it would cost a lot of casualties and financial resources. Turkey will
hold local government election in March and Erdogan does not want any negative headlines. He
will invade, but only if Syria and Russia fail to get the Kurds under control.
Unfortunately the leaders of the anarcho-marxist PKK/YPK in Syria have still not learned
their lesson. They make the same demands to Damascus that were already rejected when similar
demands were made for Afrin canton before Turkey invaded and destroyed it.
YPG delegation was flown in to Mezzeh yday. Negos were inconclusive because they just
repeated their usual line of "SAA protects the border, we control the rest." No army allows
someone else allied with an enemy to control its rear and its supply lines. +
+ The YPG leadership is still stuck in its pro-Western rut. It needs to be purged before
any deal can be made with Damascus. Their present track will just lead to another Afrin,
then another, then another. Thousands of brave YPG/YPJ fighters will have died for nothing.
#Breakingnews: Private sources : President Bashar al Assad has rejected the Kurdish
proposal while Turkey is gathering forces (Euphrates Shield et al) to attack the Kurdish
controlled area north of #Syria. #Russia seems holding back president Erdogan for a while.
A lot of pressure
It is not (only) Russia that is holding Erdogan back. As seen above he has serious
concerns about such an operation. Moreover, he does not have enough troops yet and the U.S.
troops have not yet changed their pattern. As of today they still patrolled on the Turkish
border and yesterday new U.S. war material was
still coming in from Iraq. Erdogan does not dare to attack U.S. troops.
He will most likely want to avoid any additional military involvement in Syria. If
Damascus and Moscow can get the PKK under control, Ankara will be satisfied.
Besides the presence of 4,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops and contractors in northeast Syria
there also a contingent of 1,100 French troops and an unknown number of British forces.
France for now says
it wants to stay to finish the fight against the Islamic State enclave along the
Euphrates.
But France does not have the capability to sustain those forces without U.S. support.
Syria and Russia could ask Macron to put them under their command to finish the fight against
ISIS, but it is doubtful that President Macron would agree to that. It is more likely that he
will agree to a handover of their position to Russian, Syrian or even Iraqi or Iranian
forces. Those forces can then finish the fight.
Posted by b on December 21, 2018 at 01:09 PM |
Permalink
Comments
next page " Some of the conclusions toward the end of this article don't entirely
make sense to me. Trump is withdrawing 2000-4000 US troops. Why does it follow that their
absence would create a space requiring 50000 Turkish troops to fill? I don't see how
occupation of the entire eastern would be under consideration at all.
As far as IS is concerned, their defeat will be "enduring" when their sponsors stop paying
them, first of all.
Mattis comes across to me as a psycho case of a suppressed faggot who has spent his life
trying to disprove and conceal the blatantly obvious. There we go...fairly succinct analysis.
More importantly, Mattis, known to some by the nickname of "Mad Dog," has shown a callous
disregard for human life, particularly civilians, as evidenced by his behavior leading
marines in Iraq, comments he made about enjoying fighting in Afghanistan because "it's fun
to shoot some people. You know, it's a hell of a hoot," and myriad other problems.
...
While reporting from inside Fallujah during that siege, I personally witnessed women,
children, elderly people and ambulances being targeted by US snipers under Mattis' command.
Needless to say, all of these are war crimes.
For at least two decades, the Department of Defense has explicitly defined its mission on
its website as providing "the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security
of our country." But earlier this year, it quietly changed that statement, perhaps suggesting
a more ominous approach to national security.
...
The Pentagon's official website now defines its mission this way: "The mission of the
Department of Defense is to provide a lethal Joint Force to defend the security of our
country and sustain American influence abroad."
At least Mattis is more honest than most of his fellow psychopath war criminals.
If the AP account is factually accurate (i.e. leaving aside the tendentious pro-imperial,
pro-war editorializing), then it's funny how fast Erdogan goes from "What are you doing here?
Why don't you leave?" to "I didn't mean now!" He was probably angling for something else and
didn't really want US withdrawal.
As for the French, what a contemptible squeak from a government on the ropes trying to
look tough.
Never Mind the Bollocks , Dec 21, 2018 1:48:37 PM |
link
'The Pentagon's official website now defines its mission this way: "The mission of the
Department of Defense is to provide a lethal Joint Force to defend the security of our
country and sustain American influence abroad."'
I wonder whether, perchance, the Chief Executive and Commander in Chief should have been
consulted about that. Traditionally, US Presidents have had some considerable say in defining
the country's foreign policy.
Although one could interpret the change as being wholly in tune with Mr Trump's overriding
policy of transparent honesty. After all, as long ago as 1900 - on the evidence of Marin
Major-General Smedley Butler - we know that the US armed forces were used almost exclusively
to promote American interests abroad. Maybe it's just refreshingly open to admit it at
last.
"Trump stunned his Cabinet, lawmakers and much of the world with the move by rejecting the
advice of his top aides..."
Please remind me: who was elected in 2016 - Mr Trump, or "his top aides"?
When David Ignatius reported that Mattis's bedtime reading was Marcus Aurelius in the
original Latin, who was responsible for the mistake? (Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek.)
Ignatius, an aide of Mattis's, or Mattis himself?
"While Turkey has made incursions into Syria in the past, it does not have the necessary
forces mobilized on the border to move in and hold the large swaths of northeastern Syria
where U.S. troops are positioned, the official said".
Splendid! Let them hand it back to the lawfully elected democratic government of Syria,
then.
'"We had decided last week to launch a military incursion... east of the Euphrates river," he
said in a speech in Istanbul'.
So much for the UN Charter, then. Anyone who wants to can invade any other country and
take over as much of its territory as he wants to - as long as Washington agrees. But, as Saddam Hussein could testify if he were still alive, it would be sensible to get
such consent in writing.
thanks b... who replaces the war criminal mattis? and when does any american get charged in
the hague for the countless wars they start? how long do we have to wait for this to happen?
the fact he changed the wording is at least more honest, so i give him credit for that... he
could have said 'we are the worlds policeman, and we will continue to be the worlds policeman
too' which would have been equally appropriate...
one thing i do like about trump is his ability to surprise... he could have done this
earlier in his term - pull out of syria - but i guess he was waiting to see how things
went... as it stands i think the knifes are out for trump big time now, and i suspect he is
not going to last as president.. someone else mentioned this on the previous thread, and i
agree with that assessment..
at some point in the next month, it is going to look different if USA follows thru with
the commanders new position... meanwhile Russia has to continue to keep turkey on a leash and
Syria, Russia and Iran have to continue to work at regaining the area east of the Euphrates
as this unfolds... the leadership in France at this point are loony... the smart thing for
them would be to leave or hand it over to syria/ russia...
Macron's forces are illegally present too. Assad would have to request their presence, but I
really doubt he will given the harm France has done to Syria over the past 7 years. Word is
SAA's Tiger Forces will get sent East of Euphrates; when is now the question.
Rolling-back the Outlaw US Empire's overseas troop deployments and shuttering their bases
is something I've argued for since I was honorably discharged in 1985, with the monies turned
to desperate domestic needs -- the financial statement may declare the USA the world's richest
nation, but reality tells a very different story. That reality got Trump elected. The
haphazard, laissez-faire, unplanned structural nature of the USA's economy is in no way
prepared for the rising technological revolution, which is in stark contrast to China and
Russia's plans. The most important message Putin delivered in his annual meeting yesterday
was about the whys and hows of changing the structure of Russia's economy:
"I have said it on numerous occasions, and I will repeat it today. We need a breakthrough.
We need to transition to a new technological paradigm. Without it, the country has no
future . This is a matter of principle, and we have to be clear on this....
" Healthcare, education, research and human capital come first, since without them
there is no way a breakthrough can be achieved . The second vector deals with
manufacturing and the economy. Of course, everything is related to the economy, including the
first part. But the second part is directly linked to the economy, since it deals with the
digital economy, robotics, etc. I have already mentioned infrastructure....
"But we will not be able to achieve the GDP growth rates necessary for this breakthrough
unless the structure of the economy is changed. This is what the national projects are aimed
at, and why such enormous funds will be invested, which I have already said – to
change the structure and build an innovation-based economy . The Government is counting
on this, because if this happens, and we should all work towards this, then the growth rates
will increase and there will be other opportunities for development." [My Emphasis]
200 million residents of the USA--2/3s of the populous--also need a breakthrough, which is
why the Green New Deal has such
widespread support : "The survey results show overwhelming support for the Green New
Deal, with 81% of registered voters saying they either 'strongly support' (40%) or 'somewhat
support' (41%) this plan." IMO, domestic political pressure generally supports Trump's MAGA,
but the monies need to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is from the Outlaw US Empire
part of the USA.
One's got to worry about who will replace Mad Dog Mattis after February 28 next year. It
would seem that whoever succeeds Mattis will be another former general, likely to share his
views on maintaining and increasing US forces in Syria, Iraq and other parts of western Asia
where they're despised by the local people, and perhaps not averse to sounding out good ol'
Erik Prince to fill the vacancies left when US troops start leaving.
Tom Welsh. It's my understanding that the Constitution states that foreign policy IS the job
of the President. This Congress doesn't seem to have gotten the memo and though strictly a
legislative body, have engaged in some pretty spectacular over reach.
The Constitution also puts an elected civilian (the President) in charge of the armed forces
but put the power to declare war firmly in the hands of Congress.
The 1973 War Powers act has obscured this division of power. The President can order troops
anywhere for a short time but must get an Authorization for Military Force from Congress.
However, this is supposed to only in the case of attack or imminent danger, hardly the case
in the ME.
Time limits on AFMF are often ignored and Congressional! purse strings almost never limit
(exception: at the end of Viet Nam Congress was about to cut funding) any and all military
adventurism.
@ karlof1 14 Healthcare, education, research and human capital come first, since without them there is
no way a breakthrough can be achieved.
It would seem to me that if US politicians really cared about their job performance they
would be working more on your "human capital" and less on warfare and Russian collusion. But
there's no money in that, so they don't. So much for "democracy." Here's a recent article on
a US achieved "breakthrough," in a negative sense that is.
WaPo, Nov 29
Life expectancy in the United States declined again in 2017, the government said Thursday
in a bleak series of reports that showed a nation still in the grip of escalating drug and
suicide crises.
The data continued the longest sustained decline in expected life span at birth in a
century, an appalling performance not seen in the United States since 1915 through 1918.
That four-year period included World War I and a flu pandemic that killed 675,000 people in
the United States and perhaps 50 million worldwide.
Public health and demographic experts reacted with alarm to the release of the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention's annual statistics, which are considered a reliable
barometer of a society's health. In most developed nations, life expectancy has marched
steadily upward for decades. . .
here
Mattis could not, would not accept responsibility for the misappropriated 21 trillion dollars
at HIS defence department. Kick him out. He was always a moron and demonstrated his arrogant
dismissal of the elected president almost every day. $21 trillion buys a lot of MAGA.
Kurdish population in Syria is only 5% whereas the land they now control is 30% of the
country thanks to the democratic EUSA nations?
They can no longer feed the ISIS inmates (they'll end up in France or Germany or elsewhere
undertaking new projects?) since Khashoggi case (or Mr. Erdogan who caught the Saudis by
their balls) made Saudis quit financing the YPG. Almost all ISIS inmates left in Syria are
from abroad (they had been released from Libyan, Afghan, Iraqi prisons en mass at the
beginning of the war and are ready for relocation?
Will the globalists controlled China arrive to rebuild what the US demolitionmen destroyed
in Syria?
Who founded (USrael?) ISIS and made them lose water and oil rich territories in Syria to
the PKK/YPG/SDF and what are they planning to do now?
It'd be funny if Trump appointed Tulsi Gabbard to the post of DefSec.
I don't know much about her except that she's definitely very cute and probably isn't a
pushover. If the glowing praise of her MoA fans is any guide then she'd do a better job than
any recent appointment to the role and would then become a shoe-in for POTUS. If that came to
pass then 'Hillary Who?' would become part of America's Permanent Lexicon.
Thanks for your reply! Yes, the financialization and industrial hollowing-out of the USA's
economy renders following the path being broken by Russia/China very difficult, but the
projected outcome will be dire if the economy isn't radically restructured and the fake
economists and their financial predators aren't driven from the Temple by modern
Tribunes.
Meanwhile, shrouded by the Trump/Mattis circus,
Turkey & Iran held an "historic summit" that likely had an impact on Trump's decision
as everywhere he looks his previous foreign policy choices driven by his neocon advisors are
mostly backfiring.
The language of the US Constitution gives the President the power to make treaties and
choose Ambassadors, in consultation with and with the consent (2/3 majority) of the Senate.
Also, President is Commander-in-Chief of the military. This includes state militias if
formed. He also receives political figures from abroad.
Like so much else in the US Constitution, there has been creepy or 'necessary' or when
it's handy mission creep in regard to these delineated functions.
But more to the point, the US is and has long been a serial de facto repudiator of the US
Constitution and of International law. 'Let us discuss the fine points of law pertaining to
the repeated launching of wars of aggression on the basis of lies.'
Forgive the levity but here's Hillary's theme song.
Oh yes I'm the great pretender (ooh ooh)
Pretending that I'm doing well (ooh ooh)
My need is such I pretend too much
I'm lonely but no one can tell.
Oh yes I'm the great pretender (ooh ooh)
Adrift in a world of my own (ooh ooh)
I play the game but to my real shame
You've left me to dream all alone.
Too real is this feeling of make believe
Too real when I feel what my heart can't conceal
Ooh ooh yes I'm the great pretender (ooh ooh)
Just laughing and gay like a clown (ooh ooh)
I seem to be what I'm not (you see)
I'm wearing my heart like a crown
Pretending that I'm still around.
(stiill a rounnd)
If the U.S. withdraws its forces from NE Syria who will control the air space. That will
likely determine who controls the territory in the future. I don't think the Kurds have an
airforce.
mls
financial matters , Dec 21, 2018 4:13:46 PM |
link
karlof1 @ 14
"""But we will not be able to achieve the GDP growth rates necessary for this breakthrough
unless the structure of the economy is changed. This is what the national projects are aimed
at, and why such enormous funds will be invested, which I have already said – to change
the structure and build an innovation-based economy. The Government is counting on this,
because if this happens, and we should all work towards this, then the growth rates will
increase and there will be other opportunities for development."""
Similar sentiments are expressed by Rhiana Gunn-Wright.
After Sanders lost the Democratic primary in 2016 a group called 'Brand New Congress'
formed to carry on his ideas. This morphed into 'Justice Democrats' which helped
Ocasio-Cortez get elected. She is serving as a lightning rod giving the Green New Deal
popularity.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright is a young energetic and talented policy wonk working for 'New
Consensus' which is a spin off of the 'Justice Democrats'.
She is being tasked with forming policy for the Green New Deal.
'Again, the GND is not just climate policy. It's about transforming the economy, lifting
up the poor and middle class, and creating a more muscular, active public sector.
The GND "opens an opportunity to renegotiate power relationships between the public
sector, the private sector, and the people," says Gunn-Wright. "We are interested in
solutions that create more democratic structures in our economy.'
$21 Trillion + "interests abroad" DoD mission creep
>>
Silicon Valley hot air equity ($150,000 starting salaries for fresh graduates) on cash flow
only digital assetts
+ offshore oligarch accounts (kkr et al)
I found it helpful to take stock of reported conditions surrounding the troops out
move:
* ksa reportedly going bankrupt
* ksa reneges on golden glow globe sword dance MIC mou-s
* failed israeli missile attempt to start wwiii & ensuing s300 reinforcements
* kashoggi and related muslim brotherhood entanglements
* clinton foundation in DC "hearings" censored by msm
* continued censorship of Awan bros Blackberry scandal (espionage?)
* Cricket hero Khan batting for Pakistan
* Huawei affair
* Bibi & family corruption scandal
Trump has a keen eye for ratings, and surely knows giving the deplorables (private
contractors, self employeds etc) trying to rub two pennies together gasoline under $3/gallon
in the holiday season will mean much more to the public than Cnn Russiagate drivel working
people have no time for anyway. Keeping armed forces rank and file happy and re purposing for
disaster relief would be a good move.
Karlof1 is correct to make the most of the narrative. Glad b is on it. Hope troops arent
cleared for nuclear Armeggedon!
@mls The US currently does not control Syrian airspace. The Russians do, ever since they
switched from using the existing old Syrian S200 to the current advanced model S300, after
the downing of their plane by the Israeli interference.
This was probably another factor that made operating in Syria increasingly problematic and
handicapped: options of 'punishing Assad' or bombing mobile Iranian units were limited if
they didn't want to coordinate with the Russians.
The Syrians now have to amass a large contingent to 'control' the Kurdish area; likely the
Russians will be go-between to lower Kurdish demands as well as placate the SAA and achieve
some kind of tense co-existence which can keep Turkey satisfied.
Interesting to see how Syria will handle both wanting to mop up Idlib as well as re-establish
control over the North-East and its oil wells.
I read that Trump did not inform Netanyahu of the USA's Syria 'withdrawal' until about an
hour before it was made public via tweet. Five mins! according to another article. Also, that
Trump did discuss it with B.N. several days before (Haaretz), that sounded like a smoothing
over. Another article claimed that it was Pompeo who clued in Israel a short while before. So
who knows?
Right from the first time they met, Bibi was terrified of Trump, though I could not find
one telling vid. I saw.
Feb. 15 2017.
Trump today said that he is keeping his options open about how best to reach a peaceful
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian situation but urged Israel to hold back on settlement
building in occupied territories.
President Trump veered from years of U.S. policy in the Middle East by backing off the
"two-state solution," as the only path to peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
One article stated that Macron and Merkel learnt of the 'withdrawal' from the media! I
have noted that Macron is always very 'late' and 'behind the times' as far as the US is
concerned, obviously the F 'info' services have no clue, or he isn't kept informed, etc.
Not that there will be consequent 'fall-out' from either, for the moment. (Israel can only
go along, and the EU has more serious stuff on its plate.)
Yes, it's dispiriting, but not surprising that the anti-war "Left" movement has almost
totally dissolved following their failure to prevent the Iraq war. As a deeply cynical person
I'm certain that Hillary and the Clintonites worked behind the scenes in the DNC to undermine
the Anti-war movement in expectation of her eventual 2008 & 2016 runs, since she and Bill
supported the Iraq war and were no shrinking violets when it came to the use of military
force in furtherance of their foreign policy goals. The consequence of destroying the
Anti-war movement with the Democratic Party is that they have become a defacto Pro-war party
even in situations where the use of the military is blatantly illegal, futile and against the
National interest (since there is no organized Anti-war movement articulating why they should
not go to war/use military force to stand against the Military Industrial Complex that is
constantly advocating for more war). Hilariously, by becoming a Pro-war Party when the
American people are increasingly tired of constant warfare the Democratic Party lost the 2016
election to a mildly anti-war Trump, who will most likely be re-elected (unless he is
impeached or assassinated). In the long-term, unless the DNC faces up to the 30 years of
disastrous Clinton mismanagement and corruption and cleans house, I could certainty see the
Democratic Party collapsing over the next 15 years just like how the Labour Party in the UK
is still struggling with the legacy of Tony Blair.
What's really galling to me though is watching all these so called "liberals" (Cher, Beth
Midler, Rachael "Mad Cow" Maddow & Mia Farrow) whine about how the US should never leave
Syria and stay there indefinitely; Are they or their children going to be fighting this war?
Who gave the US such authority take seize parts of Syria? What exactly is the benefit to the
US & her people in doing all of this? How many hundreds of thousands people (mostly
Syrians) need to die for this ill-defined goal of spiting Syria & Russia? Just like the
destruction of the Anti-war left in the Democratic Party had long term consequences, people
will remember how Hollywood liberals behaved like jabbering, ignorant, warmongering
ideologues during this period of US decline and it will cause profound damage to them and
their professed causes.
Nice thoughts, but I don't think you have the time.
"Worst December since the great depression"
Just look at the pictures (charts), and scroll down.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-21/fear-reaches-most-extreme-ever-traders-see-panic-air
....
Trump has a tactic of "giving people what they ask for" (eg Jerusalem). Just to break a
deadlock. This Syria gambit seems to be something of the same as Erdogan now gets what he has
been asking for - and finds he doesn't want it yet.
I still think that there will be a continued US presence in Syria, concentrated around the
Oil sources. The Agricultural lands further north were owned by "Arabic", Christian, Yadizi
and other various tribes and ethnies. The Kurds only made up a small portion.
One reason that Trump may have decided to throw the Kurds to the wolves, is that they were
overstretched, and not motivated enough to continue to be cannon fodder for Uncle Sam. The
SDF (Which incorporates some turncoat ISIS members, which partly explains why there has only
been slow "progress" against the last ISIS enclave in Eastern Syria, brother against
ex-brother), also contains foreign mercenaries from various sources. What they will "demand"
is open to question. The tribal forces in the SAA who are directly opposite contain members
of the Shaitah, who saw 700 of their women and children massacred by ISIS. They may want
their own land back too, as well as "payback".
The other reason for Trump to act now is that Flynn has been given three months in which
to change his guilty "plea". After which, Mueller will HAVE TO provide proof, and not just
accusations and people that have been blackmailed into "plea deals". Trump doesn't have too
much time left for subtle tweet-tweets before the Dems arrive. etc (big topic by itself)
.... By the way, OT; Butina was really "brain-washed". 67 days in solitary confinement
with all the recognised means of brainwashing used on her. Assault (including sexual) sleep
deprivation, continued stress (including randomly timed "strip searches") probably lighting
either permanently on or randomly used to destroy time awareness. There are other methods to
be included, and at a "key" break point, a "counsellor/handler will whisper sweet nothings in
hear ear to control her way of thinking ( I am NOT a specialist in Brainwashing, but the
outline of what she suffered, means that she will always repeat what she has been told to
say.) Real Brainwashing from the cold war era .
b's statement regarding Turkey: "Its army can do it, but it would cost a lot of casualties
and financial resources."
During the entire war, Turkey's army has done not so much and not so well. Manbij, Afrin,
and where else? Well before the US presence with bases, the Turks could not hold their border
region from the Kurds.
They cannot impact deep anywhere. Their AF is not even as effective as Syria's, yet it is
a much better, more advanced arm of the military. It's special forces?
They are used to doing what NATO and US troops do. They murder civilians and massacre
opposition. They did little against ISIS which was a very fierce, mobile and effective
military.
They do have logistical advantage and can move heavy weapons for a siege. But they are a
set piece land force.
The Kurds also are quite overrated.
Erdogan knows that the notion of him holding the East is a pipedream. His FSA allies are
the weakest lot in Syria.
His real fighters are those in Idlib, al Nusra and the Uyghurs.
If he intends to hold land the US has marked out in the North-east and East, he will have
to move the headchoppers.
The Russians will annihilate them if they cross the zones in Idlib.
With the US vacuum the Syrians, Hezbollah, Quds, Iranian militias and the Russians will
complete the war.
The French and Brits say they are staying. They should write their Last Will letters. They
will be shot out of the sky and incinerated on the ground. Folly.
The pullouts from Syria and Afghanistan are severe blows to NATO as hegemonic shock
troops.
This time next year we will hear and see how Russia won and NATO is gone from Eurasia.
This is also an object lesson to those nations on Russia's periphery who are flirting with
the US, EU and NATO. Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan will have to recalculate.
I think we will see many more updates such as this one, showing us who's pushing back,
who's wavering, and who's simply blowing hot air. I could wish for better sources of the back
story than AP and Reuters, but we must wait for better analysis I think. I'm sure I'll see it
here first - thanks for your continued vigilance.
Meanwhile my guesses are that Trump holds the longest knife and will prevail in this
course. And that Erdogan is not faltering as the Reuters report implies, but is simply
letting players and forces adjust to the new situation. And that, regardless of the details
on the ground, the US flag has been struck in Syria, irreversibly. This is a geopolitical
milestone, and everything now changes from this.
@35 It has been my understanding that while the Russian forces have stepped up their air
defense systems the Americans still fly freely to the north-east of the Euphrates and have
not hesitated to attack SAA forces who came close to their proxies on the ground, as well as
attacking the SAA when they moved toward the U.S. base at al-Tanf. If the U.S. really does
evacuate their troops it will be interesting to see if they discontinue their air movements
over the eastern bank of the Euphrates. mls
Almost all ISIS inmates left in Syria are from abroad (they had been released from Libyan,
Afghan, Iraqi prisons en mass at the beginning of the war and are ready for relocation?
Who founded (USrael?) ISIS and made them lose water and oil rich territories in Syria to
the PKK/YPG/SDF and what are they planning to do now?
@ Kadath 39
As respects Rachel Mad Cow,MSNBC has been reading from the neo-con playbook for several years
now. Pre-Iraq War,Chris Matthews was vehemently against it, but in my limited recent
viewership they are silent on Syria in general. They did however have a one hour special by
Richard Engle which was essentially an hour of showing the carnage and saying "look what
Assad did". It was even more absurd than Fox's islamaphobic specials they ran a few times.
Truly pathetic and it feels like MSNBC is hewing to the HRC model "of no one can criticize me
fro the right on "national security".
my comment was chopped off... first time i can recall ew writing on foreign policy! at any
rate, skip the ew comment section, as the folks at ew can completely in denial about the role
the democrats have played in bringing the usa to this point in time... read @35 kadath post
for greater clarity on that...
Too many "old men who think in terms of nation states and peoples. There are no nations.
There are no peoples. There is only the Federal Reserve, the BIS, IMF, WB, WTO and an
entourage of multinational corporations all inextricably inter associated." as redux of Ned
Beatty's soliloquy from the film Network.
These pesky wars, as one front of many fronts, are getting in the way of NWO timing. The
world's major central banks are now involved in quantitative tightening and much of the
liquidity that was handed out as loans will now disappear and the debt trap will now be
sprung on many 'nation states' as it was in Greece. Turkey's major industries owe about 300
Billion. This while the Lira drops ever lower in relation to the Fed Reserve Note,
euphemistically the USD, and will be hard pressed to pay back the less abundant, higher
valued amounts at the higher interest rates of the FRN's borrowed. War, with very real
deaths, continues but on another front and Trump as the front figure is the main conductor of
this coming war.
When David Ignatius reported that Mattis's bedtime reading was Marcus Aurelius in the
original Latin, who was responsible for the mistake? (Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek.)
Ignatius, an aide of Mattis's, or Mattis himself?
Posted by: lysias | Dec 21, 2018 1:54:56 PM | 9
Explanation from an aide of Mattis: the General purchased the volume while visiting Latin
America, so he always assumed that it is in Latin.
What theis "withdrawal" is about....To continue causing turmoil in Syria so as to impede its
rebuilt and return to peaceful normal life...This is why Israel has not said a word....
I have been away in the Scottish wilderness for a while, cut off from everything, so it with
somewhat jaded joy that I come back to stunning news from this unfailingly brilliant place to
hear the latest (US getting out of Syria, Mattis out, Macron on fire, Britain in an
existential crisis the like of which I have neither seen nor read about).
Like a schoolkid who has absented themselves I venture back into the classroom to take my
little seat, all the while carrying with me audio of howling winds and the low whistle of a
friend who came to visit, an Irish instrument that so resembles native American flutes. In
this Highland cabin I filled the stove with ash and oak and beech, listened to the haunting
sound of the low whistle and drank whisky as I watched the snow drift down.
The SDF (Which incorporates some turncoat ISIS members, which partly explains why there has
only been slow "progress" against the last ISIS enclave in Eastern Syria, brother against
ex-brother), also contains foreign mercenaries from various sources.
Josh on #35 hints at an explanation for Trumps action which is confirmed by a romanian
military expert in the article http://www.voltairenet.org/article204433.html
Assuming that analysis is correct, Trumps military associates like Mattis must have known but
was apparently more willing to risk american casualties.
So the past 2 years of bombing and support for bombing and special forces operations in
Syria, Yemen, Africa, Afghanistan and of course the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians in
Israel is blamed on Trumps aids, all of whom he hired.
Whenever something positive comes out (and Trump has said he was done in Syria before only
to be followed later by a barrage of missiles due to outrage over the poor babies killed in
the CW attack blamed on Assad) its presented as Trump heroically goes against his aids advice
and does right.
This is a common theme in MSM and almost all of the alt media now. Trumps swamp included
Bolton, Barr, Devos, Pompeo, Mnuchkin, Acosta, Haspel, Ross, Mulvaney, Kushner, Pruit,
Mattis. Blame them instead of the guy who hired them and has authority over them.
Right.
I have been away in the Scottish wilderness for a while, cut off from everything,
Posted by: Lochearn | Dec 21, 2018 6:03:22 PM | 51
I once spent a week in Glen Lyon which is not cut off from anything, there is a paved road
(one-lane for two way traffic, only in Scotland!) and Royal Mail operated, but these days
young people complain when there is no cell phone reception, there was a land line but our
niece was could not send any pics and texts to her boyfriend. Thus she very eagerly joined me
for a hike and after ascending 1000 m and getting the view of Loch Tay she immediately texted
etc. But something is brewing outside quiet glens: [video of parliamentary session] The
defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, says the UK will have 3,500 service personnel on standby
'to support any government department on any contingencies they may need'
Watch the situation, Lochearn, and if needed, run back to the hills.
Thanks for your reply with its post-2016 info! I returned to following domestic happenings
a few months prior to the 2018 election and was surprised by the gumption of the new Freshman
class. There was lots of negative speculation about how AOC would become a sellout, but I'm
impressed and added her twitter to my ever lengthening list. The first 2020 polls have
appeared with the narrative being Biden over washed up Sanders, but the reality is the
opposite. Wife and I had a dinner table discussion about that and related matters last night
from the frame of Media Truth from Putin's meeting I posted. There's an ideological divide
within the USA; but as AOC notes in this very informative* twitter
thread :
"People are starting to realize our issues aren't left and right, but top and bottom.
"And the just solutions will come from the bottom-up."
*--Informative due to the immoral hatred revealed, which unfortunately validates my
references to Monopoly philosophy and Zerosumism. Scrooge was tame in comparison.
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Dec 21, 2018 5:51:32 PM | 49
Explanation from an aide of Mattis: the General purchased the volume while visiting
Latin America, so he always assumed that it is in Latin.
Or in Latin American...
And it wasn't bedtime reading but bathroom reading.
Fortunately, the stock markets are not the economy. Trump campaigned on MAGA; the Green
New Deal makes MAGA possible and as the polling I linked to shows is popular across political
lines--the people know something must be done. Currently, it's the D Party Old Guard standing
in the way doing R Party work. When it comes to the traditional definitions of national
security and national interest, Trump was correct to say MAGA is a matter of national
security. Too many Trillions have already been wasted, and we within the USA cannot afford
any more of those mistakes from the past as the margin for success gets thinner daily. When I
compare the directions of China, Russia and USA, the former two are rising by attaining their
planned national goals, while the USA drops downward thanks to directionless policy
that only supports the greed of the greedy. I know its much better for an individual to be a
poor worker in China than a poor worker in the state of Georgia and too many other
places--very few opportunities and almost no social support very similar to the Great
Depression; but nowadays, you can't even hop a freight to go somewhere else as was possible
in the '30s.
Apparently, Mattis bought the book for the illustrations.
Latin America speaks Spanish and Portuguese not Latin American, which is not a
language.
Plus, there are secondary languages of indigenous people, and tertiary languages like German
and Italian, Japanese and Chinese as well as English.
From the "story" about Mattis, I think it is laughable. He pretended his whole life to be
a Patton.
Read their career stories and it is a joke that Mattis had four-stars, as did Patton.
"UK government refuses to release the documents on its 'counter-disinformation' programme
linked to the Integrity Initiative. Because (don't laugh now), it could 'undermine the
programme's effectiveness'."
Where is the evidence of widespread support for a green new deal as pushed by a couple of
people here. A poll of 966 people sorted by whether or not they are voters does not mean
there is widespread support. As in most polls claiming whatever we do not know the questions
that were asked or how they were framed. Thus they could have said "would you be for a new
green deal if it energized the economy bringing riches to all and extremely cheap rates on
power would you be for it." Until we know the full extent of this poll it's a nothing burger
pushing an agenda.
@ financial matters # 33 with the link to the Green New Deal....thanks
The problem with the GND is that it does not seem to address the underlying fact that
private finance makes all investment decisions. If they evolve to understand that, they can
do all they want if it is within the public government plans for investment.
If the government controlled finance instead of the private folk I would expect there to
be public input to/(control over) investment decisions.....just like the GND folks are
pushing for but in a more comprehensive context and manner.
The only reading generals do is Macchhiavelli, Von Clausewitz and Superman
O yeah -- and the bible, these days.
Posted by: bjd | Dec 21, 2018 7:42:17 PM | 60
A general slurps macchiato while reading The Prince of Niccolò
Machiavelli.
In the history of my country there is a nice episode when one of the main generals was
rousing the units before the critical battle that actually went well "In loco, spes in
virtute, salus in victoria" - Here, the (only) hope (lies) in bravery, salvation in victory,
which quotes Ceasar's De Bello Gallico. . Sadly, while the battle was brilliant, the
war was not. Nevertheless, I would recommend Ceasar.
Ceasar was victorious, so he should be balanced with History of the Peloponnesian
War of Thucidites. A terrible was in which one side lost terribly, while the other
succumbed to hubris, imposed painful domination on all and sundry to be irreversibly defeated
one generation after. Woe to the defeated, but the victors should be careful too.
The story of "Woe to the defeated", Vae victis , is interested too. Romans were
treated mercilessly by victorious (unmitigated?) Gauls, but then see De Bello Gallico
above.
Five unforgettable quotes by the killer, James Mattis (He will be missed?):
>1. 'It's quite fun to shoot them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot
some people.'
>2. 'There are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot.'
>3. 'I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in
my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all.'
>4. 'Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.'
>5. 'There are some people who think you have to hate them in order to shoot them. I
don't think you do.'. . .
here
I am sure getting tired of entering my personal info each time I post a comment because the
remember doesn't work...
@ karlof1 with
"
"UK government refuses to release the documents on its 'counter-disinformation' programme
linked to the Integrity Initiative. Because (don't laugh now), it could 'undermine the
programme's effectiveness'."
"
They are lying through there teeth. The real problem for them is that some could end up in
jail, and rightfully so. We can only hope that they take the City of London down with
them.
What is their long term plan for containing the IntegrityNOTInitiative scandal? The house
of cards seems to be falling and now is when we hope that the losers love their children
enough to not takes us to extinction with their pride.
It appears more people are aware of such a threat as
this article notes . Pelosi's unfortunately a whore of the sort needing pasteurization,
along with Feinstein.
Posted by: Don Bacon | Dec 21, 2018 9:04:06 PM | 66 Five unforgettable quotes by the killer, James Mattis ...
Yep, the influence of Marcus Aurelius is all over him. Through and through.
True philosopher general indeed.
The problem with the GND being discussed here is in the Green. Any New Deal that starts with
a false premise and bad science is a bad idea IMO.
That said, a New Deal that incorporates Ellen Browns and Edison/Fords ideas on public
financing I am all for. Goals should be universal health care, guaranteed income and housing,
vast infrastructure projects and alternative energy development. The latter two should be
green in the sense of nonpolluting (Co2 is not a pollutant). Jobs are fine but with
automation, AI, and robotics lets face it, a world where most people dont work except as a
hobby or to live better than others is coming, as my old science teacher predicted with envy
over 50 years ago. The neomalthusians and transhumanists have other ideas.
I would also devote massive resources for researching the safety of GMO , vaccines and
medicines as well as upgrading climate monitoring and climate research since climate does
change and we have so little understanding of it. Climate measurements are indadequate
(number of weather stations in US have dropped by a factor of 3 since climate became a thing
and quality is a key concern. This research needs to be free of influence from parties having
an agenda (political and financial). Good luck with that.
Mattis is a coward, he knows the American efforts in Syria has failed, and will go nowhere.
So for him this was a great excuse and a good uportunity to resign and not share the blame
for failure of his past advise and insistence to continue a lost effort. Now all the blames
for loosing in Syria will go to Trump. The blame game has already started coming out of MSM
and the DC swamp (you read sewer).
@ pft will the great follow on the the GND proposal
I want to add a data point to the universal health care initiative.
Because we are a society wedded to the profit motive we put it between the client and the
health care provider and worse only promote "therapies" that make a profit. Let me provide my
personal proof of that statement.
This week, after a 12 year journey, I can state that I have healed myself (with help) from
a traumatic brain injury using neurofeedback. Neurofeedback in a non-drug, non-invasive EEG
based therapy based on the mental health brain paradigm of dis-regulated neural networks. The
world of Big Pharma does not want to see neurofeedback advance because it will eliminate most
of them.
Some on MoA have read me writing about this before and I will do so more in some future
Open Thread.....when the dust settles a bit.
@1 Isn't it obvious? US forces are there to support the Kurdish forces. Training, supplying,
and a little moral "stiffening".
But Turkisk forces would go in with the aim of defeating those Kurds, and then suppressing
the local pop in. That requires an order of magnitude more troops.
One think-tanker expects problems with troop morale, which by the way was the killer that
ended the stupid Vietnam War.
Trump's sudden decisions to drawdown troops in Syria and Afghanistan that sparked Mattis'
resignation marked for perhaps the first time in American history the departure of a
defense secretary in protest and adds to the overall unease that remains, experts said.
"I think it adds to a feeling that in some sense the wheels are beginning to come off of
American foreign policy and national security policy," said John Hannah, a senior counselor
at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute
on foreign policy and national security in Washington.
Hannah said he thinks the Mattis resignation will inevitably affect troop morale . . . .
here
Tom Cotton is a rabid hawk especially on Iran. If Trump choses him then this will signal
what Trump meant by the next phase of the campaign after he announced a withdrawal
from Syria.
I read General Jack Keane was in the running but he doesn't want the job.
That leaves Lindsey Graham and David Petraeus. Both of these might be willing to take the
job, but I see Trump picking Petraeus over Graham, although Graham just visited the troops in
Afghanistan; maybe he's sending a subtle hint to Trump.
If it's Cotton, we should brace ourselves for escalation with Iran.
Well there are 50K Al Nusra fighters in Idlib that Russia and Syria want out of there and
Turkey is protecting. Maybe they will be on the move soon to deal with the Kurds in the NE
once the US pulls out. US can pretend ignorance and then step back in again under the cover
of stabilizing the region with replacement for the kurds to use against Assad and protect
assets in the NE. Everyone except the Kurds is happy, almost.
Further to your point about MSNBC, I just watched Michael Moore on MSNBC being interviewed
by Ali Velshi and Moore was actually advocating that the troops stay in Syria and blamed
Putin for ordering Trump to do this ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0SP7puk8f8)
- words fail..... Michael Moore, the Anti-Iraq war activist, the Occupy Wall Street advocate,
the Anti-Imperialist, has reached the terminal phase of his Trump Derangement Syndrome. His
irrational hatred of Trump has just driven him to torch all of his prior Anti-War work; to
betray every speech, every millimeter of film he's ever made all because he hates Trump that
much and everything he has previously done can be jettisoned if it furthers this new
goal.
Ugh... Is he doing this all for the money he can glean from the mainstream Media by being
even more extreme than them, was he always this shallow and empty? This is what I just cant
get over, do these jackanapes not understand that their words and behaviours are being
recorded and people will remember it, it will haunt their futures and taint their legacies.
Hating Trump is one thing (there is certainly no shortage of reasons to hate him), but I'm
rethinking my entire interpretation of Moore and his career because of these constant,
irrationally hateful and extreme statements. Michael Moore, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon,
Rachal Maddow and Stephen Colbert can play to the crowd for now, but once Trump's term ends
people will never be able to take them seriously as public figures again because of all of
their delusional tirades while Trump was in office.
Troop moral today is far different than Vietnam. Reason in no order of importance
1. Well paid volunteer army, well trained with skills transferrable to private sector
2. Limited tour length, long paid breaks between tours
3. Skype/internet access on tours to stay in touch with family firiends
4. Contractors to do much of the dirty work
5. Military glorification at home treats them as heros and plenty of discounts
6. Far fewer casualties
7. Great benefits once the leave miliitary (loans, paid university transferrable)
8. Tax benfits for companies hiring vets helps them in job market
The main negative with fewer troops in Syria or Afghanistan means there are fewer tours
which means less money.
I expect they will be deployed elsewhere. Where is the big question. Like you say, moral
not an issue
Kadath 80 "do these jackanapes not understand that their words and behaviours are being
recorded and people will remember it"
The average person that watches MSM have the memory of a goldfish when it comes to politics.
"His irrational hatred of Trump has just driven him to torch all of his prior Anti-War
work"
Most that make it in politics or entertainment go with the flow - whatever will further their
career. Empty people. I don't know this Michael Moor, but sounds lie he is one of this
type.
People like Lindsey Graham simply cannot comprehend that USA is in fact a demolished country,
with its last leg - the stock market - getting cut off in real time, as we speak. The
implications of American equity markets collapse are momentous. The relentless year-end
selling means that government revenues will be drastically reduced, by at least couple
hundred billion dollars, driving US budget deficit to well in excess of $1.2T in current
fiscal year. And that's in a benign case. If America slips in a recession, and has to resort
to fiscal stimulus, we are talking about $1.5-2T budget shortfall. Add quickly deteriorating
demographics, and "japanisation" of the USA is all but inevitable (and yes, US financial
system is a dead man walking)
Trump, although not the brightest bulb, is infinitely smarter than Grahams, Rubios and
Cottons of the world. He knows that it's much better to withdraw on what looks like own
accord now, than being kicked out in the most disgraceful fashion upon the passage of time.
Or even worse, having your troops marooned in the troubled region without any prospect of
being extricated, unless on the most humiliating terms.
Whether Trump succeeds or fails in returning the troops home is irrelevant at this point.
They are coming home anyway. The only question remaining is not if but when, and how.
Maybe Trump is diversyfing, scaling down in the The Middle East (a lots been accomplished
already) and ramp up efforts in Africa and Latin America to counter BRICS
@87 once and future... first off i want to thank stonebird for there comments on this topic..
solitary confinement is inhumane.. that the usa is keen to use it in all sorts of
circumstances, is a reflection of their abu ghraib, guantanemo mentality... solitary
confinement is more of the same.. in a civilized world it would never be allowed to be
done... but this is more exceptional nation stuff from the exceptional nation and what the
world has come to expect from a country that preaches one thing while practicing something
completely different..
80 kadath... michael moore has really fallen... i was unaware of this and am not tapped
into the usa msm to be able to follow.. in fact, it is so depressing i have no interest in
following much of anything coming out of the usa at this point...
@78 circe.. another name mentioned was this tulsi gabbard from hawaii.. i doubt it very
much... the usa continues to fly way off the rails...
Michael Moore destroyed his credibility when he failed to denounce Obama for not jailing
the Banksters and it's been downhill from there as it's been with so many of his ilk. Another
case of money ruining youthful idealism. Caitlin's on a roll and deserves a much larger audience. The propagandizers have deluded
themselves via their own machinations and are now going mad.
"there also a contingent of 1,100 French troops"... You can hear me laughing after reading this. The French empire was over a long long time ago and they still think that Syria is their
colony. France has been sending French Jihadists for regime change in Syria since 2011 and their
mission has failed since Russia intervened in 2015. France cannot even send troops to Mali - destabilized by Jihadists created by France in
Libya to topple Kadhafi, without the help of the US!!! France is a de-facto vassal state of the US since they decided to joined the NATO central
command under Sarkozy who was bribed by the zionist neocons.
...
US can pretend ignorance and then step back in again under the cover of stabilizing the
region with replacement for the kurds to use against Assad and protect assets in the NE.
Everyone except the Kurds is happy, almost.
Posted by: Pft | Dec 21, 2018 11:19:21 PM | 79
I think you're right. And I hope so, too...
The Yanks should be counting their blessings. I thought it was extraordinarily generous of
Putin to agree with Donald that "the US beat ISIS in Syria" considering how
half-assed/limp-wristed their anti-ISIS actions were in comparison with Russia's 100+ sorties
per day 24/7 for many months.
Imo, if the Yanks dream up another excuse to go back into Syria, Putin will caution against
it and then make sure that none of them get out alive.
Blooming Barricade , Dec 22, 2018 2:07:30 AM |
link
I personally distinguish between Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria and his move to
withdraw partially from Afghanistan. The latter is a step towards ending a brutal, illegal
NATO occupation war of over 17 years. The former is also illegal but the Syrian Kurds (left
wing and largely communist) are likely to be supplanted as counters to "Iran" by fascists
Turkey and Israel (this has been confirmed in reports), so we're moving from tactical NATO
proxies to actual NATO governments seizing Syrian land.
All of that being said, both are policy decisions that should be able to be debated
freely. I can totally see why many on the anti-imperialist left welcome the decision to
withdraw from Syria, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to them. It the US and international
media response has been horrific.
The New York Times and Guardian are basically now neconservative papers indistinguishable from the Wall Steet Journal and Daily Telegraph. Not
a word of dissent is even remotely allowed or involved. The Blob has totally taken over the
entirety of the liberal global establishment which sees Trump's move as "treasonous." Not
looking forward to 2020 when Democrats will run on identical foreign policy platforms to Mitt
Romney.
Not sure if you watched when Michael Moore received the Oscar for Farenheit 9/11. Let's
remember he was addressing the top elite Liberal crowd and got booed. What is it they say
about prophets in their own land? Oh yeah, Jesus said: A prophet is without honor in his
own country.
I actually have some sympathy for Michael Moore. Aside from being a major critic of the
Bush Administration, Michael Moore was also very critical of Obama, and Hillary and was
lambasted by liberal centrists and neolibs. He was considered part of the radical left and
despite the success of his documentaries, he continued to be marginalized and never received
the respect he deserved. In 2015, Moore was supporting Bernie Sanders, but when Bernie was
railroaded, Moore who couldn't see himself voting for a Republican ever, especially a
depraved billionaire whom he rightly viewed as Chaos personified felt that Hillary was the
lesser evil, and from there found the respect that had been denied to him by his own side and
especially after he predicted Hillary was about to lose despite the polls and Michigan,
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would deny her the Presidency. From the day his prediction
materialized Democrats were in awe of his perception. Since then he exchanged integrity for
their respect. The Michael Moore of 2003 would never criticize military de-escalation.
However, Moore recently released a new documentary Farenheit 11/9 wherein apparently he's
critical of Democrats whom he blames for the rise of Trump.
So don't be too hard on Moore who was an outcast in liberal country for too long. Once
you've earned the respect of your own and the mainstream it's not so easy to speak your truth
anymore. Thanks to Trump and the Dems, Moore has been temporarily altered. But you're right,
he'll look back with regret on this Syria opinion.
I can't stand Trump either, but I agree that getting out of Syria and de-escalating is a
good thing...IF in fact that's what he's really up to.
The national security adviser expanded U.S. goals in Syria to challenge Iran. But Trump
wasn't on board, senior officials say, and Turkey took an opportunity to push the U.S.
out.
...
Most that make it in politics or entertainment go with the flow - whatever will further their
career. Empty people. I don't know this Michael Moor, but sounds lie he is one of this
type.
Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Dec 21, 2018 11:48:20 PM | 83
Michael Moore has produced some brilliant anti-establishment docos focusing on gun-control
(Bowling for Columbine), the US healthcare rort, the sub-prime scam, and the absence of
socio-economic well-being in AmeriKKKa (Where To Invade Next?).
I'm hoping that Kadath @ #80 is kidding, but he's right about Moore being rabidly anti-Trump
from the get-go.
Geo-political chess. Russia, Turkey, Iran have called check and Trump is moving his pieces
accordingly. I think he will pull the US out of Syria. Seems he is not as blinded by his
hatred of Iran as his appointees.
So, does this mean that Bolton should or will resign?
I thought the update of the linked article with the statement about the Kurds from the
White House official was interesting: ""They've done the majority of the fighting against
ISIS in Syria," one U.S. official said. "How do you treat a partner like this?""
ISIS was created by the US as a part of its divide and conquer strategy. General Flynn blew
the whistle on it which is why he has been vilified. Flynn spoke the truth on ISIS and lied
to the FBI! Horrors.
Now ISIS has been "defeated" and the US Quixote can focus on other windmills.
Except now comes the Syria encore, Afghanistan. Chalk up another loss for team USA.
... In the introduction to the second volume in his series, The State and the
Opposition , Rogovin noted:
A peculiarity of the counter-revolution realized by Stalin and his accomplices was that it
took place under the ideological cover of Marxist phraseology and never-ending attestations
of loyalty to the October Revolution Naturally, such a counter-revolution demanded
historically unprecedented conglomerations of lies and falsifications, the fabrication of
ever-newer myths
Similar to the Stalinists, modern anti-communists use two kinds of myths: namely,
ideological and historical. Under ideological myths we have in mind false ideas, oriented to
the future -- that is, illusory prognoses and promises. These sorts of products of false
consciousness reveal their mythological character by way of their practical realization.
Myths that appeal not to the future but to the past are another matter.
In principle, it is easier to expose these myths than anti-scientific prognoses and
reactionary projects.
Like ideological ones, historical myths are a product of immediate class interests
products of historical ignorance or deliberate falsification -- that is, the concealment of
some historical facts, the tendentious exaggeration, and the distorted interpretation of
others.
Refuting these myths is only possible by rehabilitating historical truth -- the honest
portrayal of actual facts and tendencies of the past.
In this work, Rogovin argued that the fundamental problem facing the USSR was "a
deepening of socially unjustified differentiation of incomes and the comforts of life."
"Workers regularly encounter instances of unearned enrichment through the deceit and the
ripping-off of the state and the people. [ ] Certain groups of the population have the means to
meet their needs at a scale beyond any reasonable norms and outside of their relationship to
social production. [ ] There does not exist any systematic control of sources of income and the
acquisition of valuable goods," he wrote.
In a remarkable statement, inequality, he insisted, not wage-leveling, expressed "in
essence, the social structure of [Soviet] society."
Rogovin called for the implementation of income declarations, whereby people would be
required to report the size of their total income, not just their official wages, so that the
government and researchers might actually know the real distribution of earnings. He advocated
for the establishment of a "socially-guaranteed maximum income" to combat "unjustified
inequality."
Vadim Rogovin and Nina Naumova's 1984 Social Development and Societal
Morals
Elsewhere, Rogovin further argued that inequality lay at the center of the USSR's falling
labor productivity. In a work co-authored with Nina Naumova, Social Development and
Societal Morals , he maintained that the socio-economic crisis facing the USSR stemmed
from the fact that inequality was growing in Soviet society; people worked poorly in the Soviet
Union not because their work was inadequately remunerated relative to others, but
because their commitment to social production had been eroded by intensifying social
stratification that was unrecorded in official statistics.
In 1983, the very same year that Rogovin authored his critical report on the state of
inequality in the USSR that ended up in the hands of the Moscow authorities, another
sociologist, Tatyana Zaslavskaya, would issue a report, kept secret at first but later leaked
to the Western press, advocating a transition to "economic methods of management," -- in other
words, market-based reforms. A central aspect of this was policy centered around increasing
inequality in workers' compensation in order to stimulate production. Zaslavskaya noted at the
time that such reforms would be opposed by what she described as "the more apathetic, the more
elderly, and the less qualified groups of workers."
In a few years, Zaslavskaya would become a leading advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and one of
the main architects of the pro-market, perestroika reforms. In 1986, she was appointed
the head of the Soviet Sociological Association. Her positions were widely embraced by the
discipline.
Tatiana Zaslavskaya and Mikhail Gorbachev 1989 at Congress of People's Deputies.
[Copyright RIA Novosti]
In contrast, Rogovin's views were frequently, and ever more so, the object of sharp
criticism. In 1985, a discussion occurred at the Institute of Sociology regarding a report
produced by Rogovin and his research team about Soviet lifestyles. In it, Rogovin made openly
critical comments about the anti-egalitarian impact of the shadow economy and the transfer of
wealth through inheritance. It was sharply criticized by some of the Institute's top scholars,
who both disagreed with its content and were nervous about the response it might get from the
authorities. At the discussion, one such individual remarked:
The report by the author presented here has two basic failings: 1) it is inadequately
self-critical; 2) the authors, and in particular, Rogovin himself, aren't appropriately
thinking of the addressee to whom this report is directed. The report is going to the highest
levels [of the Communist Party] and superfluous emotion is not necessary. The next criticism
[I have] is about "unjustified inequality." In principle, there can be no such thing.
[ ] in the note to the TsK KPSS [Central Committee of the Communist Party] [ ] the
recommendations [that you make] demand the utmost care in how you approach them, particularly
those that relate to the "third economy" and taxes on inheritance. [There should be] a
minimum of categoricalness and a maximum of conciliatoriness.
As the decade wore on, Rogovin began to adopt an ever more critical stance on
perestroika , whose devastating economic consequences were increasingly showing
themselves. Rather than bringing prosperity to the masses, Gorbachev's reforms created a total
crisis in the state sector of the economy, exacerbating widespread shortages in food, clothing
and other basic necessities. Economic growth declined from 1986 onwards. In 1989, inflation
reached 19 percent, eroding the gains the population had made in income over the preceding
years. As the scholar John Elliot noted, "When account is taken of additional costs, real per
capita income and real wages probably decreased, particularly for the bottom half of the
population. These costs included: deteriorating quality and unavailability of goods;
proliferation of special distribution channels; longer and more time-consuming lines; extended
rationing; higher prices and higher inflation-rates in non-state stores (e.g., collective farm
market prices were nearly three times those in state stores in 1989); virtual stagnation in the
provision of health and education; and the growth of barter, regional autarky, and local
protectionism."
Newly established private enterprises had great leeway to set prices because they faced
little to no competition from the state sector. They charged whatever the market would bear,
which led to substantial increases in income inequality and poverty, with the most vulnerable
layers of the population hardest hit. The changes were so severe that Elliot insists that
"income inequalities had actually become greater in the USSR than in the USA." In the late
1980s, fully two-thirds of the Soviet population had an income that fell below the
officially-recommended "decent level" of 100 to 150 rubles a month. At the same time, the
shadow economy alone is estimated to have produced 100,000–150,000 millionaires in the
late 1980s. By the early 1990s, one-quarter of the population or 70 million people were
destitute according to official Soviet estimates. Miners' strikes and other signs of social
discontent erupted across the country.
Sociologists were intimately aware of the growing popular discontent. The Communist Party
bureaucracy called upon them to help manage the situation. In 1989, the director of the
Institute of Sociology received a request from the highest layers of the Communist Party. He
was asked to respond to a letter from a rank-and-file party member that expressed extreme
hostility towards the country's "elites." The letter writer described the party as dominated by
an "opportunist nucleus" and called for the waging of a "class war" by the working masses
against their policies. The ideology division of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
wanted the Institute's director to respond to the letter because the sentiments expressed in it
were "widespread (representative) [sic] among the working class."
Soviet economist and
sociologist Genady Lisichkin
In the midst of these circumstances, Rogovin came under fire in one of the country's media
outlets for articles he was writing against the promotion of social inequality. Since the
mid-1980s, he had been championing the implementation of income declarations that would require
people to report their full earnings, progressive taxes, and a socially-declared maximum
income. Based on the amount of positive correspondence he was receiving from readers, it was
clear that his views resonated with the population, a fact noted by Western scholars at the
time. In a public press debate with the economist Gennady Lisichkin, the latter accused Rogovin
of wanting to strengthen the hand of the bureaucracy and implied that he was a Stalinist. He
was allegedly guilty of "Luddism," religious-like preaching, misquoting Marx to find support
for his arguments, wanting the state to have the power to move people around "like cattle,"
defending a deficit-system of distribution based on "ration cards," suffering from "left-wing"
infantilism, and being a "demagogue" and a "war communist." He attempted to link Rogovin to the
very force to which he was most hostile -- Stalinism. The head of the Soviet Sociological
Association, Tatiana Zaslavskaya, openly endorsed Lisichkin's positions.
The disagreements between Rogovin and other scholars over perestroika evolved into
a fierce dispute about Soviet history and the nature of Stalinism. Rogovin identified a
relationship between cheerleading for pro-market reforms and historical falsification. There
was an increasingly widespread effort to link egalitarianism with Stalinism, the struggle for
equality with political repression. In Was There an Alternative? , Rogovin frequently
talked about the fact that the move towards a market economy was accompanied by the propagation
of myths about Soviet history. This was one of those myths.
In 1991, Zaslavskaya co-authored a book that claimed that the Soviet Union's problems lay in
the fact that in the late 1920s it abandoned the New Economic Policy (NEP), during which the
government had loosened state control of the economy and restored market relations to an
extent, in an effort to revitalize the economy under conditions of isolation, backwardness, and
near economic collapse due to years of war. A one-sided and historically dishonest account of
the NEP, this work did not contain any discussion of the political struggle that occurred
during the NEP between Stalin and the Left Opposition over the malignant growth of inequality,
the bureaucratization of the state and economy, and the crushing of inner-party democracy. The
book skipped over this history because it would have cut across one of the central arguments
made at the time in favor of perestroika -- that market relations were inherently at
odds with the interests of the Communist Party bureaucracy. The book's account of labor policy
under Stalin was also false. It insisted that during the 1930s revolutionary enthusiasm was the
primary method used to stimulate people to work, ignoring the fact that income inequality rose
substantially at this time. As the scholar Murray Yanowitch has pointed out, under Stalin
"equality mongering" was labeled the brainchild of "Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Bukharinites and
other enemies of the people."
In the 1980s, sociologists and other scholars promoting perestroika sought to imbue
these policies with a humanitarian mission, insisting that market reforms would allow "the
human factor," which had been crushed under the weight of bureaucratic stagnation, to rise
again. The "human factor" was defined as man's desire for personal recognition through
differentiated, material reward. It was supposedly the primary driver of human activity. To the
degree that official wage policy in the USSR led to a relatively egalitarian distribution of
social resources with wages leveled-out between skilled and unskilled labor, it flew in the
face of man's desire for recognition of his own individual contribution. Rising inequality in
income -- necessitated by the demands of socio-economic development -- was part of the process
of "humanizing socialism." The argument was made that increasing social stratification would
ultimately provide real "socialist justice."
As Tatiana Zaslavskaya claimed in 1990, "Despite all its limitations, the 'classical' market
is, in fact, a democratic (and therefore anti-bureaucratic) economic institution. Within the
framework of its exchange relationships, all participants are at least formally equal; no-one
is subordinated to anyone else. Buyers and sellers act in their own interests and nobody can
make them conclude deals they do not want to conclude. The buyers are free to select sellers
who will let them have goods on the most advantageous terms, but the sellers too can chose
buyers offering the best price."
In making this argument, scholars relied upon the official Soviet definition of socialism --
"from each according to his ability, to each according to his labor" -- that was enshrined in
the country's 1936 constitution. This was also known as the Stalin constitution.
In 1988, Rogovin used the concept of the "human factor" to make a very different argument.
In a piece entitled, "The Human Factor and the Lessons of the Past," he insisted that the
defense of social inequality by the Soviet elite was one of the key reasons why the "human
factor" had degenerated in the USSR. The very best elements of "the human factor" had been
crushed by Stalin during the Terror. Corruption, disillusionment, parasitism, careerism and
individual self-promotion -- the most distinctive features of the Brezhnev era -- were the
"human factor" created by Stalinism. In promoting inequality and the market, Rogovin insisted,
perestroika did not mark a break with Stalinism or the legacy of the Brezhnev era, as
was so often claimed, but rather their further realization.
One year later he wrote, "The adherents of the new elitist conceptions want to see Soviet
society with such a level of social differentiation that existed under Stalin but having gotten
rid of Stalinist repression. It is forgotten that the debauched character of these repressions
[ ] flowed from the effort to not simply restrain, but rather physically annihilate above all
those forces in the party and in the country that, though silenced, rejected the social
foundations of Stalinism."
After years of studying these questions in near-total isolation, Rogovin was finally able to
write openly about this subject. He tested the waters by first publishing "L.D. Trotsky on Art"
in August 1989 in the journal Theater . It was followed shortly thereafter by an
article entitled "The Internal Party Struggles of the 1920s: Reasons and Lessons," also
published in a journal outside of his discipline, Political Education . Moving closer
to a forum likely to be followed by his colleagues in sociology, in early 1990 Rogovin
published "L.D. Trotsky on NEP" in Economic Sciences . And finally, a few months
later, "L.D. Trotsky on Social Relations in the USSR" came out in the flagship journal of his
discipline, Sociological Research .
Rogovin's first article on the subject within his discipline reviewed Trotsky's role in
Soviet history during the 1920s and summarized his seminal work, The Revolution
Betrayed . It made clear to whom Rogovin fundamentally owed the views he had been
advancing over the course of the previous decade.
Trotsky, however, continued to be vilified by Soviet officialdom. In 1987, on the 70th
anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Gorbachev described Trotsky as "the arch-heretic of
Soviet history, an 'excessively self-assured politician who always vacillated and cheated."
As a result of Rogovin's profound sympathies for Trotskyism and efforts to place his work in
the tradition of the Left Opposition's critique of Stalinism, he was increasingly isolated from
his colleagues, several of whom entered the Yeltsin administration and helped facilitate the
eventual implementation of shock therapy, a key component of capitalist restoration in Russia.
His discipline never forgave him for his intransigence and principles. One will find almost no
mention of Rogovin or his contributions in the numerous monographs and other publications that
have come out over the last 20 years about sociology in the USSR.
But Rogovin's isolation from Soviet sociology did not undermine his capacity to work.
Rather, it coincided with the start of the publication of Was There an Alternative? In
1992, Rogovin met the International Committee of the Fourth International, and established a
close political and intellectual relationship with the world Trotskyist movement that would
intensify over the course of the next several years. This relationship was the basis upon which
Rogovin made his immense contribution to the fight to defend Trotsky and historical truth. Two
recently republished tributes to Rogovin by David
North review this history.
Despite his death twenty years ago, through his work Rogovin continues his struggle to arm
the working class with historical consciousness.
The trouble with CIA democrats is not that they are stupid, but that that are evil.
Hillary proved to be really destructive witch during her Obama stunt as the Secretary of State. Destroyed Libya and Ukraine,
which is no small feat.
Notable quotes:
"... The policy of the Obama administration, and particularly Hillary Clinton's State Department, was – and still is – regime change in Syria. This overrode all other considerations. We armed, trained, and "vetted" the Syrian rebels, even as we looked the other way while the Saudis and the Gulf sheikdoms funded groups like al-Nusra and al-Qaeda affiliates who wouldn't pass muster. And our "moderates" quickly passed into the ranks of the outfront terrorists, complete with the weapons we'd provided. ..."
"... She is truly an idiot. Thanks again, Ivy League. ..."
The Grauniad just quoted a tweet from a predictably OUTRAGED @HillaryClinton:
Actions have consequences, and whether we're in Syria or not, the people who want to
harm us are there & at war. Isolationism is weakness. Empowering ISIS is dangerous.
Playing into Russia & Iran's hands is foolish. This President is putting our national
security at grave risk.
This from the woman who almost singlehandedly (i.e. along with David Cameron and Sarkovy)
destroyed Libya and allowed -- if not encouraged -- the flow of US weapons to go into the
hands of ISIS allies in the US-Saudi-Israeli obsession with toppling Assad regardless of the
consequences. As Justin Raimondo wrote in
Antiwar.com in 2015:
The policy of the Obama administration, and particularly Hillary Clinton's State
Department, was – and still is – regime change in Syria. This overrode all
other considerations. We armed, trained, and "vetted" the Syrian rebels, even as we looked
the other way while the Saudis and the Gulf sheikdoms funded groups like al-Nusra and
al-Qaeda affiliates who wouldn't pass muster. And our "moderates" quickly passed into the
ranks of the outfront terrorists, complete with the weapons we'd provided.
This crazy policy was an extension of our regime change operation in Libya, a.k.a.
"Hillary's War," where the US – "leading from behind" – and a coalition of our
Western allies and the Gulf protectorates overthrew Muammar Qaddafi. There, too, we
empowered radical Islamists with links to al-Qaeda affiliates – and then used them to
ship weapons to their Syrian brothers, as another document uncovered by Judicial Watch
shows.
After HRC's multiple foreign policy fiascos she is the last person who should be
commenting on this matter.
a different chris, December 21, 2018 at 11:50 am
> the people who want to harm us are there & at war
Sounds like then they are too busy to harm us? She is truly an idiot. Thanks again, Ivy League.
Russiagate, what a nonsensical concept. Constantly shifting narrative. (1) OMG, they hacked
voting machines! (2) OMG, they hacked DNC servers! (3) OMG, someone talked to a Russian!
As I wrote a comment on the German magazine"Die Zeit"praising Trump's decision to retreat
from Syria my comment was deleted.I denounced the European whining and letting do the
Americans their dirty work.Now the Europeans show their true colors.In Germany's MSM it
doesn't seem to be allowed to take Trump's side.By the way -it's very good and well
researched article.Thank you.
". If you want to blame "the Jews" for all the problems in the world, just remember that
your doing so in this language actually strengthens the position of the Zionists. And you may
want to consider that at least *some* of these Jew-bashing critiques of Israel on sites like
Unz and others are most certainly written by paid propagandists of the state of Israel." WJ@
14
Absolutely right. The routine way in which, all over the internet, the tired and
discredited themes of the anti-Semites and, their soul sisters, the anti-Communists infect
every serious discussion or sensible discourse is maddening.
There is not the tiniest doubt who benefits from this idiocy and it isn't the people of
Palestine or the working people.
"... In the wake of the summit, the neoliberal Resistance, like some multi-headed mythical creature in the throes of acute amphetamine psychosis, started spastically jabbering about "treason" and "traitors," and more or less demanding that Trump be tried, and taken out and shot on the White House lawn. ..."
As my regular readers will probably recall, according to my personal, pseudo-Chinese zodiac,
2017 was " The Year of
the Headless Liberal Chicken ." This year, having given it considerable thought, and having
consulted the I Ching, and assorted other oracles, I'm designating 2018 "The Year of Putin-Nazi
Paranoia."
... ... ...
Back in America, millions of liberals and other Russia-and-Trump-obsessives were awaiting the
Putin-Nazi Apocalypse , which despite the predictions of Resistance pundits had still, by
the Summer, failed to materialize. The corporate media were speculating that Putin's latest
"secret scheme" was for Trump to destroy the Atlantic alliance by arriving late for the G7
meeting. Or maybe Putin's secret scheme was to order Trump to sadistically lock up a bunch of
migrants in metal cages,
exactly as Obama had done before him but these were special Nazi cages! And Trump was
separating mothers and children, which, as General Michael Hayden reminded
us , was more or less exactly the same as Auschwitz!
Paul Krugman had apparently lost it , and was running around the offices of The New York
Times shrieking that "America as we know it is finished!"
Soros had been smuggled back into Europe to single-handedly thwart the Putin-Nazi plot to
"dominate the West," which he planned to do by canceling the Brexit (which Putin had obviously
orchestrated) and overthrowing the elected government of Italy (which, according to Soros, was
a Putin-Nazi front).
As if that wasn't paranoia-inducing enough, suddenly, Trump flew off to Helisnki to
personally meet with the Devil Himself. The neoliberal establishment went totally apeshit. A
columnist for The New York Times predicted that Trump, Putin, Le Pen, the AfD, and other such
Nazis were secretly forming something called "the Alliance of Authoritarian and Reactionary
States," and intended to disband the European Union, and NATO, and impose international martial
law and start ethnically cleansing the West of migrants. That, or Trump and Putin were simply
using the summit as cover to attend some Nazi-equestrian homosexual orgy, which The Times took
pains to illustrate by creating a little animated film depicting Trump and Putin as lovers. In
any event, Jonathan Chait was certain that Trump had been a "Russian intelligence asset" since
at least as early as 1987, and was going to Helsinki to "meet his handler."
In the wake of the summit, the neoliberal Resistance, like some multi-headed mythical
creature in the throes of acute amphetamine psychosis, started spastically jabbering about
"treason" and "traitors," and more or less demanding that Trump be tried, and taken out and
shot on the White House lawn. A frenzy of neo-McCarthyism followed. Liberals started
accusing people of being "traitorous agents of Trump and Moscow," and openly calling for a CIA
coup, because we were "facing a national security emergency!" A devastating Russian
cyber-attack was due to begin at any moment. National Intelligence Director Dan Coats
personally assured the Associated Press that the little "Imminent Russia Attack" lights he had
on his desk were "blinking red."
... ... ...
So here's wishing my Russia-and-Trump-obsessed readers a merry, teeth-clenching,
anus-puckering Christmas and a somewhat mentally-healthier New Year! Me, I'm looking forward to
discovering how batshit crazy things can get I have a feeling we ain't seen nothing yet.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play
Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine &
Cormorant. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.
In his recent article "Averting
World Conflict with China" Ron Unz has come up with an intriguing suggestion for the Chinese
government to turn the tables on the December 1 st arrest of Meng Wanzhou in Canada.
Canada detained Mrs. Meng, CFO of the world's largest telecoms equipment manufacturer Huawei,
at the request of the United States so she could be extradited to New York to face charges that
she and her company had violated U.S. sanctions on Iran. The sanctions in question had been
imposed unilaterally by Washington and it is widely believed that the Trump Administration is
sending a signal that when the ban on purchasing oil from Iran comes into full effect in May
there will be no excuses accepted from any country that is unwilling to comply with the U.S.
government's demands. Washington will exercise universal jurisdiction over those who violate
its sanctions, meaning that foreign officials and heads of corporations that continue to deal
with Iran can be arrested when traveling internationally and will be extradited to be tried in
American courts.
There is, of course, a considerable downside to arresting a top executive of a leading
foreign corporation from a country that is a major U.S. trading partner and which also, inter
alia, holds a considerable portion of the U.S. national debt. Ron Unz has correctly noted the "
extraordinary gravity of this international incident and its potential for altering the course
of world history." One might add that Washington's demands that other nations adhere to its
sanctions on third countries opens up a Pandora's box whereby no traveling executives will be
considered safe from legal consequences when they do not adhere to policies being promoted by
the United States. Unz cites Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs as
describing it as "almost a U.S. declaration of war on China's business community." If
seizing and extraditing businessmen becomes the new normal those countries most affected will
inevitably retaliate in kind. China has already detained two traveling Canadians to pressure
Ottawa to release Mrs. Meng. Beijing is also contemplating some immediate retaliatory steps
against Washington to include American companies operating in China if she is extradited to the
U.S.
Ron Unz has suggested that Beijing might just want to execute a quid pro quo by pulling the
licenses of Sheldon Adelson's casinos operating in Macau, China and shutting them down, thereby
eliminating a major source of his revenue. Why go after an Israeli-American casino operator
rather than taking steps directly against the U.S. government? The answer is simple. Pressuring
Washington is complicated as there are many players involved and unlikely to produce any
positive results while Adelson
is the prime mover on much of the Trump foreign policy, though one hesitates to refer to it
as a policy at all.
Adelson is the world's leading diaspora Israel-firster and he has the ear of the president
of the United States, who reportedly speaks and meets with him regularly. And Adelson uses his
considerable financial resources to back up his words of wisdom. He is the fifteenth wealthiest man in America
with a reported fortune of $33 billion. He is the number one contributor to the GOP having
given $81 million in the last cycle. Admittedly that is chump change to him, but it is more
than enough to buy the money hungry and easily corruptible Republicans.
In a certain sense, Adelson has obtained control of the foreign policy of the political
party that now controls both the White House and the Senate, and his mission in life is to
advance Israeli interests. Among those interests is the continuous punishment of Iran, which
does not threaten the United States in any way, through employment of increasingly savage
sanctions and threats of violence, which brings us around to the arrest of Meng and the
complicity of Adelson in that process. Adelson's wholly owned talking head National Security
Adviser John Bolton reportedly had prior knowledge of the Canadian plans and may have actually
been complicit in their formulation. Adelson has also been the major force behind moving the
U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, has also convinced the Administration to stop its criticism of the
illegal Israeli settlements on Arab land and has been instrumental in cutting off all
humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. He prefers tough love when dealing with the Iranians,
advocating dropping
a nuclear bomb on Iran as a warning to the Mullahs of what more might be coming if they don't
comply with all the American and Israeli demands.
"No taxation without representation" is the cornerstone to the founding of the nation. Is
it not ?
Every Neocon Oligarch who Conspired to Defraud us into "war of aggression" should have ALL
their assets seized to pay for the costs of the wars they lied us into.
No more, no less.
Choosing to "Boycott Israel "may help the suffering Palestinians to some small degree, but
if anyone is serious about helping The UNITED STATES ..The highest priority should be SEIZING
the ASSETS of EVERY individual who LIED us into WAR.
The law is crystal clear on this ..and its on YOUR SIDE.
The people just need a referendum like "THE WAR FRAUD ACCOUNTABILITY ACT of 2020″
(retroactive to 2002.)
They just need to sign it and push it through .By "majority" mandate.
Why waste time boycotting Israel .When 300 million Americans are one step away from
rightfully taking back ALL their MONEY from every Neocon Oligarch who "conspired to defraud"
us into war ?
Think about how hard Americans have worked to build our country in 200 years we created
the most powerful and wealthy nation on the face of the earth.
Yet all that wealth has been Squandered, in a mere 17 years, because we were defrauded
into illegal wars of aggression.
Its not right.
Make THEM pay for the wars they lied us into.
Every penny.
Take back you solvency . Americans.
This is the smart play .its legal its just and its right there for you.
Flynn "treason" is not related to Russia probe and just confirm that Nueller in engaged in witch hunt.
I believe half of Senate and House of Representative might go to jail if they were dug with the ferocity Mueller digs Flynn's past.
So while Flynn behavior as Turkey lobbyist (BTW Turkey is a NATO country and not that different int his sense from the US -- and you
can name a lot of UK lobbyists in high echelons of the US government, starting with McCabe and Strzok) is reprehensible, this is still a witch hunt
When American law enforcement and intelligence officials, who carry Top Secret clearances and authority to collect intelligence
or pursue a criminal investigation, decide to employ lies and intimidation to silence or intimidates those who worked for Donald
Trump's Presidency, we see shadow of Comrage Stalin Great Terror Trials over the USA.
Former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn passes by members of the
media as he departs after his sentencing was delayed at U.S. District Court in
Washington, U.S., December 18, 2018. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
By Jan Wolfe and Ginger Gibson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. judge fiercely criticized President Donald
Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn on Tuesday for lying to
FBI agents in a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and
delayed sentencing him until Flynn has finished helping prosecutors.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan told Flynn, a retired U.S. Army
lieutenant general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
that he had arguably betrayed his country. Sullivan also noted that Flynn had
operated as an undeclared lobbyist for Turkey even as he worked on Trump's
campaign team and prepared to be his White House national security adviser.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his December 2016
conversations with Sergei Kislyak, then Russia's ambassador in Washington,
about U.S. sanctions imposed on Moscow by the administration of Trump's
Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, after Trump's election victory but before
he took office.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, leading the investigation into possible
collusion between Trump's campaign team and Russia ahead of the election, had
asked the judge not to sentence Flynn to prison because he had already
provided "substantial" cooperation over the course of many interviews.
But Sullivan sternly told Flynn his actions were abhorrent, noting that
Flynn had also lied to senior White House officials, who in turn misled the
public. The judge said he had read additional facts about Flynn's behavior
that have not been made public.
At one point, Sullivan asked prosecutors if Flynn could have been charged
with treason, although the judge later said he had not been suggesting such a
charge was warranted.
"Arguably, you sold your country out," Sullivan told Flynn. "I'm not hiding
my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offense."
Flynn, dressed in a suit and tie, showed little emotion throughout the
hearing, and spoke calmly when he confirmed his guilty plea and answered
questions from the judge.
Sullivan appeared ready to sentence Flynn to prison but then gave him the
option of a delay in his sentencing so he could fully cooperate with any
pending investigations and bolster his case for leniency. The judge told Flynn
he could not promise that he would not eventually sentence him to serve prison
time.
Flynn accepted that offer. Sullivan did not set a new date for sentencing
but asked Mueller's team and Flynn's attorney to give him a status report by
March 13.
Prosecutors said Flynn already had provided most of the cooperation he
could, but it was possible he might be able to help investigators further.
Flynn's attorney said his client is cooperating with federal prosecutors in a
case against Bijan Rafiekian, his former business partner who has been charged
with unregistered lobbying for Turkey.
Rafiekian pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to those charges in federal court
in Alexandria, Virginia. His trial is scheduled for Feb. 11. Flynn is
expected to testify.
Prosecutors have said Rafiekian and Flynn lobbied to
have Washington extradite a Muslim cleric who lives in the United States
and is accused by Turkey's government of backing a 2016 coup attempt. Flynn
has not been charged in that case.
'LOCK HER UP!'
Flynn was a high-profile adviser to Trump's campaign team. At the
Republican Party's national convention in 2016, Flynn led Trump's
supporters in cries of "Lock her up!" directed against Democratic candidate
Hillary Clinton.
A group of protesters, including some who chanted "Lock him up,"
gathered outside the courthouse on Tuesday, along with a large inflatable
rat fashioned to look like Trump. Several Flynn supporters also were there,
cheering as he entered and exited. One held a sign that read, "Michael
Flynn is a hero."
Flynn became national security adviser when Trump took office in January
2017, but lasted only 24 days before being fired.
He told FBI investigators on Jan. 24, 2017, that he had not discussed
the U.S. sanctions with Kislyak when in fact he had, according to his plea
agreement. Trump has said he fired Flynn because he also lied to Vice
President Mike Pence about the contacts with Kislyak.
Trump has said Flynn did not break the law and has voiced support for
him, raising speculation the Republican president might pardon him.
"Good luck today in court to General Michael Flynn. Will be interesting
to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him,
about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful
political campaign. There was no Collusion!" Trump wrote on Twitter on
Tuesday morning.
After the hearing, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters
the FBI had "ambushed" Flynn in the way agents questioned him, but said his
"activities" at the center of the case "don't have anything to do with the
president" and disputed that Flynn had committed treason.
"We wish General Flynn well," Sanders said.
In contrast, Trump has called his former long-time personal lawyer
Michael Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to separate charges, a "rat."
Mueller's investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election and
whether Trump has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe has cast a shadow
over his presidency. Several former Trump aides have pleaded guilty in
Mueller's probe, but Flynn was the first former Trump White House official
to do so. Mueller also has charged a series of Russian individuals and
entities.
Trump has called Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt" and has denied
collusion with Moscow.
Russia has denied meddling in the election, contrary to the conclusion
of U.S. intelligence agencies that have said Moscow used hacking and
propaganda to try to sow discord in the United States and boost Trump's
chances against Clinton.
Lying to the FBI carries a statutory maximum sentence of five years in
prison. Flynn's plea agreement stated that he was eligible for a sentence
of between zero and six months.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe and Ginger
Gibson; Additional reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Kieran Murray and
Will Dunham)
"... christophere steele admitted before a british court today that he was hired by the clintons/obama/DNC to make up the dossier as a weapon to use against trump as a backup plan in case he won the election.. this proves the DNC lied, paid for a fake dossier, and comey admitted he knew the fake dossier was false before using it to get a FISC warrant and to spy on trump, which was used as an excuse for the mueller investigation.. yahoo news and leftwing media arent covering the story.. educate yourselves ..."
1 hour ago
When I read articles like this I look to see who wrote it, printed it etc. When I see
Bloomberg, Yahoo, HuffPo I approach it as fake news. Now I no longer watch any of Fox news
as they are fast becoming just like the rest of the propaganda outlets. This is just
inflammatory anti Trump drivel with no basis in fact.
O 1 hour
ago Was this the interview report that was written 7 months after the interview?
R 44 minutes ago
Actually this story is not accurate. Mueller released copies of the 302 memos, which are in
effect official documentation to a case file. The 302 was dated seven months after the
interview, when the FBI policy requires such reports to be filed within five days. The
judge will ask tomorrow for copies of agent's contemporaneous interview notes and any other
documents supporting what is written in the 302, as well as an explanation for the delay in
filing the memo. 1
hour ago You mean the notes the FBI, in the person of one Peter Strzok, (yes that Strozk)
made seven months after he was interviewed? with the required 302 documents that are either
to be taken extemporaneously or done within days of the interview being dated months later?
You mean those notes?!!!! Nice try Bloomberg, but no amount of yellow journalism spin will
stop this case from being thrown out! 15 minutes ago christophere steele
admitted before a british court today that he was hired by the clintons/obama/DNC to make
up the dossier as a weapon to use against trump as a backup plan in case he won the
election.. this proves the DNC lied, paid for a fake dossier, and comey admitted he knew
the fake dossier was false before using it to get a FISC warrant and to spy on trump, which
was used as an excuse for the mueller investigation.. yahoo news and leftwing media arent
covering the story.. educate yourselves 1 hour ago Not so bias garbage news .. they
entrapped him what 302 form you want to go with .. FBI doctored the original.. FBI
curuption runs rampant.. comey lied so much about knowing about fake dossier.. then what
the hell was he doing.. comey the tall guy phony
Wall Street, Banks, and Angry Citizens
The Inequality Gap on a Planet Growing More Extreme
Nomi Prins
December 13, 2018
2,400 Words
16 Comments
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As we head into 2019, leaving the chaos
of this year behind, a major question remains unanswered when it comes to the state of Main Street, not just
here but across the planet. If the global economy really is booming, as many politicians claim, why are
leaders and their parties around the world continuing to get booted out of office in such a sweeping
fashion?
One obvious answer: the post-Great
Recession economic "recovery" was largely reserved for the few who could participate in the rising financial
markets of those years, not the majority who continued to work longer hours, sometimes at multiple jobs, to
stay afloat. In other words, the good times have left out so many people, like those struggling to keep even
a
few hundred dollars
in their bank accounts to cover an emergency or the
80%
of American workers who live paycheck to paycheck.
In today's global economy, financial
security is increasingly the property of the 1%. No surprise, then, that, as a sense of economic instability
continued to grow over the past decade, angst turned to anger, a transition that -- from the U.S. to the
Philippines, Hungary to Brazil, Poland to Mexico -- has provoked a plethora of voter upheavals. In the
process, a 1930s-style brew of rising nationalism and blaming the "other" -- whether that other was an
immigrant, a religious group, a country, or the rest of the world -- emerged.
This phenomenon offered a series of
Trumpian figures, including of course The Donald himself, an opening to ride a wave of "populism" to the
heights of the political system. That the backgrounds and records of none of them -- whether you're talking
about Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Rodrigo Duterte, or Jair Bolsonaro (among others) -- reflected the daily
concerns of the "common people," as the
classic definition
of populism might have it, hardly mattered. Even a billionaire could, it turned out,
exploit economic insecurity effectively and use it to rise to ultimate power.
Ironically, as that American master at
evoking the fears of apprentices everywhere showed, to assume the highest office in the land was only to
begin a process of creating yet more fear and insecurity. Trump's trade wars, for instance, have typically
infused the world with increased
anxiety
and distrust toward the U.S., even as they thwarted the ability of domestic
business
leaders and ordinary
people
to plan for the future. Meanwhile, just under the surface of the reputed good times, the
damage
to that future only intensified. In other words, the groundwork has already been laid for what
could be a frightening transformation, both domestically and globally.
That Old Financial Crisis
To understand how we got here, let's take
a step back. Only a decade ago, the world experienced a genuine global financial crisis, a meltdown of the
first order. Economic growth ended; shrinking economies threatened to collapse; countless jobs were cut;
homes were foreclosed upon and lives wrecked. For regular people, access to credit suddenly disappeared. No
wonder fears rose. No wonder for so many a brighter tomorrow ceased to exist.
The details of just why the Great
Recession happened have since been glossed over by time and partisan spin. This September, when the 10th
anniversary of the collapse of the global financial services firm Lehman Brothers came around, major
business news channels considered whether the world might be at risk of another such crisis. However,
coverage of such fears, like so many other topics, was quickly tossed aside in favor of paying yet more
attention to Donald Trump's latest tweets, complaints, insults, and lies. Why? Because such a crisis was so
2008 in a year in which, it was
claimed,
we were enjoying a first class economic high and edging toward the
longest
bull-market in Wall Street history. When it came to "boom versus gloom," boom won hands down.
None of that changed one thing, though: most people still feel
left behind
both in the U.S. and
globally
. Thanks to the massive accumulation of wealth by a 1% skilled at gaming the system, the roots
of a crisis that didn't end with the end of the Great Recession have spread
across the planet
, while the dividing line between the "have-nots" and the "have-a-lots" only sharpened
and widened.
Though the media hasn't been paying
much attention to the resulting inequality, the statistics (when you see them) on that ever-widening wealth
gap are mind-boggling. According to Inequality.org, for instance, those with at least $30 million in wealth
globally had the fastest growth rate of any group between 2016 and 2017. The size of that club rose by 25.5%
during those years, to 174,800 members. Or if you really want to grasp what's been happening, consider that,
between 2009 and 2017, the number of billionaires whose combined wealth was greater than that of the world's
poorest 50% fell from
380
to just
eight
. And by the way, despite claims by the president that every other country is screwing America, the
U.S. leads the pack when it comes to the growth of inequality. As Inequality.org
notes
, it has "much greater shares of national wealth and income going to the richest 1% than any other
country."
That, in part, is due to an institution
many in the U.S. normally pay little attention to: the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve. It helped
spark that increase in wealth disparity domestically and globally by adopting a post-crisis monetary policy
in which electronically fabricated money (via a program called quantitative easing, or QE) was offered to
banks and corporations at significantly cheaper rates than to ordinary Americans.
Pumped into financial markets, that
money sent stock prices soaring, which naturally ballooned the wealth of the small percentage of the
population that actually owned stocks.
According to
economist Stephen Roach, considering the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances, "It is hardly a
stretch to conclude that QE exacerbated America's already severe income disparities."
Wall Street, Central Banks, and
Everyday People
What has since taken place around the
world seems right out of the 1930s. At that time, as the world was emerging from the Great Depression, a
sense of broad economic security was slow to return. Instead, fascism and other forms of nationalism only
gained steam as people turned on the usual cast of politicians, on other countries, and on each other. (If
that sounds faintly Trumpian to you, it should.)
In our post-2008 era, people have
witnessed
trillions
of dollars flowing into bank bailouts and other financial subsidies, not just from governments
but from the world's major central banks. Theoretically, private banks, as a result, would have more money
and pay less interest to get it. They would then lend that money to Main Street. Businesses, big and small,
would tap into those funds and, in turn, produce real economic growth through expansion, hiring sprees, and
wage increases. People would then have more dollars in their pockets and, feeling more financially secure,
would spend that money driving the economy to new heights -- and all, of course, would then be well.
That fairy tale was pitched around the
globe. In fact, cheap money also pushed debt to epic levels, while the share prices of banks rose, as did
those of all sorts of other firms, to record-shattering heights.
Even in the U.S., however, where a
magnificent recovery was supposed to have been in place for years, actual economic growth simply didn't
materialize at the levels promised. At
2% per year
, the average growth of the American gross domestic product over the past decade, for
instance, has been half the average of 4% before the 2008 crisis. Similar numbers were repeated throughout
the developed world and most emerging markets. In the meantime, total global debt hit
$247 trillion
in the first quarter of 2018. As the
Institute of International Finance
found, countries were, on average, borrowing about three dollars for
every dollar of goods or services created.
Global Consequences
What the Fed (along with central banks
from Europe to Japan) ignited, in fact, was a disproportionate rise in the stock and bond markets with the
money they created. That capital sought higher and faster returns than could be achieved in crucial
infrastructure or social strengthening projects like building roads, high-speed railways, hospitals, or
schools.
What followed was anything but fair. As
former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen
noted
four years ago, "It is no secret that the past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up
as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the
majority." And, of course, continuing to pour money into the highest levels of the private banking system
was anything but a formula for walking that back.
Instead, as more citizens fell behind, a
sense of disenfranchisement and bitterness with existing governments only grew. In the U.S., that meant
Donald Trump. In the United Kingdom, similar discontent was reflected in the June 2016 Brexit vote to leave
the European Union (EU), which those who felt economically squeezed to death clearly meant as a
slap at
both the establishment domestically and EU leaders abroad.
Since then, multiple governments in the
European Union, too, have shifted toward the populist right. In Germany, recent elections swung both
right
and
left
just six years after, in July 2012, European Central Bank (ECB) head Mario Draghi
exuded optimism
over the ability of such banks to protect the financial system, the Euro, and generally
hold things together.
Like the Fed in the U.S., the ECB went
on to manufacture money, adding another
$3 trillion
to its books that would be deployed to buy bonds from favored countries and companies. That
artificial stimulus, too, only increased inequality within and between countries in Europe. Meanwhile,
Brexit negotiations remain ruinously divisive,
threatening
to rip Great Britain apart.
Nor was such a story the captive of the
North Atlantic. In Brazil, where left-wing president Dilma Rouseff was ousted from power in 2016, her
successor Michel Temer oversaw plummeting economic growth and escalating unemployment. That, in turn, led to
the election of that country's own Donald Trump, nationalistic far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro who won a
striking
55.2%
of the vote against a backdrop of popular discontent. In true Trumpian style, he is disposed
against both the very idea of climate change and multilateral trade agreements.
In Mexico, dissatisfied voters similarly
rejected the political known, but by swinging left for the
first time
in 70 years. New president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known by his initials AMLO,
promised to put the needs of ordinary Mexicans first. However, he has the U.S. -- and the whims of Donald
Trump and his "great wall" -- to contend with, which could hamper those efforts.
As AMLO took office on
December 1st
, the G20 summit of world leaders was unfolding in Argentina. There, amid a glittering
backdrop of power and influence, the trade war between the U.S. and the world's rising superpower, China,
came even more clearly into focus. While its president, Xi Jinping, having fully consolidated power amid a
wave of Chinese nationalism, could become his country's
longest serving
leader, he faces an international landscape that would have amazed and befuddled Mao
Zedong.
Though Trump declared his meeting with
Xi a success because the two sides agreed on a
90-day tariff truce
, his prompt
appointment
of an anti-Chinese hardliner, Robert Lighthizer, to head negotiations, a tweet in which he
referred to himself in superhero fashion as a "
Tariff
Man
," and news that the U.S. had requested that Canada arrest and extradite an executive of a key
Chinese tech company, caused the Dow to take its
fourth largest plunge
in history and then
fluctuate wildly
as economic fears of a future "Great Something" rose. More uncertainty and distrust
were the true product of that meeting.
In fact, we are now in a world whose
key leaders, especially the president of the United States, remain willfully oblivious to its long-term
problems, putting policies like deregulation, fake nationalist solutions, and profits for the already
grotesquely wealthy ahead of the future lives of the mass of citizens. Consider the
yellow-vest protests
that have broken out in France, where protestors identifying with left and right
political parties are calling for the resignation of neoliberal French President Emmanuel Macron. Many of
them, from financially starved provincial towns, are angry that their purchasing power has dropped so low
they can barely
make ends meet
.
Ultimately, what transcends geography
and geopolitics is an underlying level of economic discontent sparked by twenty-first-century economics and
a resulting Grand Canyon-sized global inequality gap that is still
widening
. Whether the protests go left or right, what continues to lie at the heart of the matter is the
way failed policies and stop-gap measures put in place around the world are no longer working, not when it
comes to the non-1% anyway. People from
Washington
to
Paris
,
London
to
Beijing
, increasingly grasp that their economic circumstances are not getting better and are not likely
to in any presently imaginable future, given those now in power.
A Dangerous Recipe
The financial crisis of 2008 initially
fostered a policy of bailing out banks with cheap money that went not into Main Street economies but into
markets enriching the few. As a result, large numbers of people increasingly felt that they were being left
behind and so turned against their leaders and sometimes each other as well.
This situation was then exploited by a
set of self-appointed politicians of the people, including a billionaire TV personality who capitalized on
an increasingly widespread fear of a future at risk. Their promises of economic prosperity were wrapped in
populist platitudes, normally (but not always) of a right-wing sort. Lost in this shift away from previously
dominant political parties and the systems that went with them was a true form of populism, which would
genuinely put the needs of the majority of people over the elite few, build real things including
infrastructure, foster organic wealth distribution, and stabilize economies above financial markets.
In the meantime, what we have is, of
course, a recipe for an increasingly unstable and vicious world.
However, coverage of such fears, like so many other topics, was quickly tossed aside in favor of
paying yet more attention to Donald Trump's latest tweets, complaints, insults, and lies.
Tossed aside by whom? The corporate media of course. Fake news. Their ONLY agenda is the ongoing
demonetization of Donald Trump.
Minus the obligatory Trump bashing this is a good piece. The beating heart of Neo Feudalism (against
which we populists/nationalists/deplorables rebel) is debt money aka the FED. So what would you have us
actually do about the banking cartel? Vote BETO? Check our privilege?
I suggest stepping back further than the GFC, to the halcyon days of Thatcher and Reagan and TINA.
That's
when we stopped investing in ourselves, which is why R&D has a 50% lower share of GDP today than then.
Encouraged by the success of this non-investment, we then stopped keeping up the infrastructure we had
built–including the great corporate labs that created our recent prosperity–and now the maintenance bill is
coming due.
Needless to say, the Chinese did the opposite and the current "China!" noise is designed to distract us
from the dreadful destiny our faux democracy created for us.
But a country deserves the government it gets and we've always liked Elmer Gantry's style of
self-confident bullshit.
I miss Mike Whitney. Where did he go? He hasn't posted anything here at Unz since June. He was just as good
as Nomi on the finance/economic topics, but we didn't have to endure the constant anti-Trump
virtue-signalling. It's a bit like being served castor oil along with your beef bourguignon: it spoils the
whole effect.
Another thing I don't like about Nomi is how she fails to make the connection between
hyper-financialization and falling median incomes in the West on the one hand, and open borders and 'free'
trade on the other. Neoliberalism could succinctly be defined as the free movement of goods, capital and
people across borders. Hence, there is nothing left-wing about hating borders–not if you by 'left-wing' you
mean
pro-workingclass
.
Remember, the Tea Party was a grassroots anti-banker movement. The media successfully convinced the rest of
America that they were all racist fascist deplorables.
Post-housing collapse, maybe, the Fed should have provided loans to Main Street merchants, unleashing more
small-business energy, especially since so few Americans are starting businesses these days. But those
loans, too, always need to be allocated to people with a reasonable chance to pay them back. The Fed gave
the dough to the banks and the zombies, but in different ways, the small-business climate in the USA is
almost as bad as the zombie-business climate.
Back in 2008, any small-business stimulus would have been
complicated by the need for small fish to compete with the Goliath of big-box chains and on-every-corner
franchise mills spawned by big corporations, which, in neither case, generate many quality, rent-covering
jobs beyond a few management positions. In many cases, the owners of franchise businesses do not make
much -- they can't pay much. And the recent attempt to stimulate small businesses via the LLC tax cut might be
diluted by the undermining of small retail by volume sellers, like Amazon & Walmart -- behemoths that sell
everything under the sun at cut rates, now speedily delivering to customers' doors.
Infrastructure spending would create long-term value and some quality, if temporary, jobs mostly for
underemployed males, one of the groups unable to just work part-time or temp jobs at low wage levels, making
up the difference between living expenses and inadequate pay with spousal income, child support checks or
multiple monthly welfare streams from .gov and a refundable child tax credit up to $6,431. Rather than
working multiple jobs, that is what many single-breadwinner parents do. They stay below the income limits
for the .gov handouts, strategically, thereby keeping wages and job quality low for many women who lack
access to unearned income streams unrelated to their employment.
College-educated Americans (and others) also face the problem of the many dual-earner parents, keeping
two of the few decent-paying jobs with benefits under one roof. These are often not two rocket-scientist
jobs, but jobs that many educated people could perform. They maintain those jobs despite tons of time off to
accommodate their personal lives, letting $10-per-hour daycare workers, NannyCam-surveilled babysitters and
never-retiring grandparents do the work of raising their kids. The middle-class job pool would expand
dramatically if they were just more interested in raising the kids they produce, but they put house size and
multiple vacations first, with the liberals among them insincerely bemoaning the fact that 30 million
Americans lack health insurance, while they are double-covered in their above-firing, family-friendly jobs.
Still, if infrastructure spending is used to build The Wall, everyone will at least be safer, welfare
expenditures will go down and fewer welfare-assisted noncitizens will chase jobs, driving wages down for
underemployed US citizens. Bridges require repair -- something that affects the safety of everyone in the
country. The electrical grid and nuclear plants need to be fortified. Something needs to be done about
cybersecurity, a type of invisible infrastructure that is more and more important.
We need US citizens to get these jobs, including the record number of working-aged US citizens out of the
laborforce. Infrastructure spending should not be used to employ the citizens of other countries, like the
1.5 to 1.7 new legal immigrants admitted into the country each year, many of whom qualify for welfare and
tax credits for US-born kids and boatloads of illegal immigrants.
The Western propaganda continues unabated. In the latest episode of #FakeNews France3 TV got caught
broadcasting a fake Yellow Vests image–photoshoped by its disinformation division–to their viewers, and then
blatantly lied about afterwards:
I fear for the Jews, both universalist Tikkun Olas like Nomi and the Zio-nationalists,
when the (((Great Ponzi))) collapses.
Haxo has to be hasbara of some sort trying to discredit Prins' article. That aside, I hope for major
correction before we see a complete collapse of the U.S. and global economy which will result in complete
social collapse. For no other reason than I live in a major East Coast city and am not prepared to forage
for food.
That's when we stopped investing in ourselves, which is why R&D has a 50% lower share of GDP today
than then.
Encouraged by the success of this non-investment, we then stopped keeping up the infrastructure we had
built–including the great corporate labs that created our recent prosperity–and now the maintenance bill
is coming due.
Is this the result of Ivy League schools pumping out more degrees in finance rather than science and
engineering, or the cause?
Including Hungary and Viktor Orban in your piece demonstrates a lack of research and a definite lack of
perspective. I discount the rest of what you babble on about as a result. Try doing some on-the-spot
research. You might learn what really is going on. Start with the hundreds of YouTube tourist blogs. Then
visit. Stop blindly regurgitating the narrow, usually distorted crap you find in the press. You may have a
point but it appears to be a house of cards. To me at least. An expat enjoying my freedoms in Hungary.l
Yeah, and what 'tomdispatch regular' Prins does is increase the sense of rage and helplessness by pointing
out the degenerative process without offering any avenue to lance the boil and treat the infection. This
only contributes to the resultant social problems she describes. Not necessarily smart.
Better had she
pointed to some means of holding those responsible accountable, example given:
I'm old, mid seventies, studied economics in the sixties.
Among the many stupid things I did or thought in my life is that economics is what is expressed by
'economics is common sense made difficult'.
Maybe I had also the completely wrong idea about common sense, looking back, and looking around me now, it
hardly seems to exist.
The figures about CO2 ppm can be explained in one sentence, yet mankind seems to be embarking on the most
expensive experiment ever, the outcome of which will, my conviction, be that the only effect is back to
barbarism, civilisation depends on cheap energy.
About financial crises, around 1880 there was a crash in
Germany, Wild West around emission of shares was ended.
In 1929 USA financial regulations were way behind German, the great crash.
The USA, with GB, is the only country in the world where the central bank is not state owned.
Therefore derivatives were not regulated, the fairy tales about absolute minimum value were believed, as
were before 1880 in Germany emission fairy tales.
We have one more problem central bank, ECB, in theory owned by the euro countries, in practice Draghi can do
what he wants, as long as he stays within his statutes.
Anyone with some insight in the world economy sees that w're heading towards a gigantic crash, who is
unable to see this can read Varoufakis.
Now how did we get into this mess ?
In my opinion quite simple: globalisation, that made the political power of the nation states disappear, EU
of course also is globalisation.
Central bankers of the world monthly meet at BIS Basle, financially, economically, in my opinion, there the
world is ruled.
What these central bankers think, I've no idea.
But that Dutch central bank director Klaas Knot does not care for Dutch interests, is more than clear.
There is one important and interesting thing about economies, economy defined as the finances of a
country, the euro zone, the USA, politicians, and bankers, even central bankers, do not control economies.
A few aspects can be controlled, but not all of them at the same time.
So inconsistent decisions lead to unwanted, and/or unforeseen consequences.
The euro is a political experiment, the object was to force euro countries to become more or less
economically the same.
It failed, southern euro countries differ economically as much now from northern as when the euro was
introduced.
The only way out for France economically now I can see is the old devaluation recipe.
Alas, 'thanks' to the euro this is no longer possible.
So that, what is erronuously called elite, has maneuvred itself into a lose lose situation, do nothing, and
France will have a second 1791, or remove the euro flag from the sinking EU ship.
In both cases, as far as I can see, end of EU.
@tac
Quite simple, more and more French are running into financial difficulties.
Most of them of course do not understand why, but they're not interested in why, as the immigrants 'we want
a better life'.
Since over ten years now, I'm retired, we live many months yearly in France.
Great country, compared to the Netherlands, more and more resembling LA.
We do not pay French income taxes, just property tax.
But the steady increase over the years of the cost of living in France we noticed quite well.
For the last two or three years it is clear to us that even our French neighbours are less affluent, our
neighbouring houses all are second homes, owned by upper middle class, of course.
Complaints about the cost of the gardener, no parties with traiteurs any more.
A traiteur is someone who prepares expensive dishes for parties etc.
French complain, even in casual conversations, a restaurant owner 'Macron is right, nobody wants to work in
France any more', someone else 'France is ill, we pay to much for social security'.
Nomi doesn't even mention the impact a million and a half legal immigrants coming in each year has had on
our supposed recovery. How can we trust what she says when she leaves out such pertinent information? In
fact we could argue the only way we were able to recover after the Great Depression is because immigration
had been cut.
Mike was possibly the
only
journalist who gave Trump a modicum of good advice when he mentioned
bumping retirees pay instead of pretending corporate tax cuts will ever "trickle down" to the workers still
on the job. Bullseye! I could use a raise.
Mike said $150 more per month would go directly for stuff retirees need, especially the ones right on the
edge. Young plumbers, roofers, electricians and so on would have tons of work to do.
Cut corporate tax, on the other hand. and the buggers only send more work to China, sluice money to
anti-worker NGOs, or sit on it all like Bill Gates.
I'd go one step further: Put a cork in the billions for Israel program and pay off all American student
loans. Further still: Tax corporations that outsource work to pay every young worker $2500 monthly till
America learns how to pay "middle class wages" again. Bezos at Amazon can get a special bill for the
millions of worker-years he's stiffed and pay them US Marshall rates, backdated to their start date with
interest.
I know, I know. Fascist economics is
so
boring. But we're near the centennial of the days when
Benito Mussolini was the most respected and successful politician in Europe if not the world.
The key problem of the USA is that neoliberalism ideology is now discredited (since 2008) and
neoliberalism as the social system clearly entered the stage of decline. Trump and Brexit
were the first Robin (as in "One robin doesn't make a spring" )
The key problem that probably will prolong the period of neoliberalism past its Shelf LIfe
Expiration Date is that the alternative to it is still unclear. and probably will not emerge
until the end of the age of "cheap oil" which might mean another 40-50 years. But the rise of
far-right nationalism is a clear indication of people in various countries started reject
neoliberal globalization (including the USA, GB and most of Europe.) Trump's "national
neoliberalism" and Brexit are just another side of the same coin.
Economic rape of Russia and post Soviet republic in 1991-2000 as well as the communication
revolution postponed the crisis of neoliberalism for a decade or so. Otherwise, it might well
start around 2000 instead of 2008. Now G7 countries that adopted neoliberalism entered the
phase of "secular stagnation" (as Summers called it) and probably will not be able to escape
for it without some war-style mobilization or military coup d'état and introduction of
command economics.
IMHO military remains one of the few realistic hopes to play the role of countervailing
force for the financial oligarchy -- which owns that state under neoliberalism, So when we
talk about the Depp State that created anti-Trump witch hunt it is not just intelligence
agencies (although they assume active political role now and strive to be the kingmakers).
This Wall street, military-industrial complex and intelligence agencies.
It will be interesting if establishment neoliberals will try to take revenge in 2020, as
they clearly do not have any viable candidate right now (Biden is a sad joke). But they
definitely can put Trump on the ropes in 2019 and sign of their intention to do so already
emerged.
BTW the key problem of Trump survival is that Trump abandoned (or was forced to abandon)
most of his key election promises to the electorate (with the only exception of tariffs for
China, I think).
In this sense Trump behaved much like Obama did with his "Change and hope" bait and switch
trick, and Nobel Peace Price. Nobel Peace Prize for the butcher of Libya and Syria, the
godfather of ISIS, is rich.
During election campaign, his message was straightforwardly anti-globalization. He
believes that the interests of the working class have been sacrificed in favor of the big
corporations that have been encouraged to invest around the world and thereby deprive
American workers of their jobs. Further, he argues that large-scale immigration has
weakened the bargaining power of American workers and served to lower their wages.
He proposes that US corporations should be required to invest their cash reserves in the
US. He believes that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has had the effect of
exporting American jobs to Mexico. On similar grounds, he is opposed to the TPP and the
TTIP. And he also accuses China of stealing American jobs, threatening to impose a 45%
tariff on Chinese imports.
To globalization, Trump counterposes economic nationalism: "Put America first". His
appeal, above all, is to the white working class who, until Trump's (and Bernie Sander's)
arrival on the political scene, had been ignored and largely unrepresented since the 1980s.
Given that their wages have been falling for most of the last 40 years, it is extraordinary
how their interests have been neglected by the political class. Increasingly, they have
voted Republican, but the Republicans have long been captured by the super-rich and Wall
Street, whose interests, as hyper-globalisers, have run directly counter to those of the
white working class. With the arrival of Trump they finally found a representative: they
won Trump the Republican nomination.
Trump believes that America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's
resources
The economic nationalist argument has also been vigorously pursued by Bernie Sanders , who
ran Hillary Clinton extremely close for the Democratic nomination and would probably have
won but for more than 700 so-called super-delegates, who were effectively chosen by the
Democratic machine and overwhelmingly supported Clinton. As in the case of the Republicans,
the Democrats have long supported a neoliberal, pro-globalization strategy, notwithstanding
the concerns of its trade union base. Both the Republicans and the Democrats now find
themselves deeply polarized between the pro- and anti-globalizers, an entirely new
development not witnessed since the shift towards neoliberalism under Reagan almost 40
years ago.
Another plank of Trump's nationalist appeal – "Make America great again" –
is his position on foreign policy. He believes that America's pursuit of great power status
has squandered the nation's resources. He argues that the country's alliance system is
unfair, with America bearing most of the cost and its allies contributing far too little.
He points to Japan and South Korea, and NATO's European members as prime examples. He seeks
to rebalance these relationships and, failing that, to exit from them.
As a country in decline, he argues that America can no longer afford to carry this kind
of financial burden. Rather than putting the world to rights, he believes the money should
be invested at home, pointing to the dilapidated state of America's infrastructure. Trump's
position represents a major critique of America as the world's hegemon. His arguments mark
a radical break with the neoliberal, hyper-globalization ideology that has reigned since
the early 1980s and with the foreign policy orthodoxy of most of the postwar period. These
arguments must be taken seriously. They should not be lightly dismissed just because of
their authorship.
Roughly two-thirds of Americans agree that "we should not think so much in international
terms but concentrate more on our own national problems". And, above all else, what will
continue to drive opposition to the hyper-globalizers is inequality.
Hitler was defeated by soviet armies. They had thousands of Russian made T34, patriotic
soldiers (more than 10 millions died, against around 0.1 million from US), and smart
generals.
The lend-lease, the trucks and jeeps, and blahblah . Their effect is a myth. That's a meme
which has been propagated as soon as the USSR went down around 1990 (thus, there was no more
powerful voice to contradict the lies).
Americans can't stand the truth: they did almost nothing, waiting comfortably for Europe to
be completely devasted, then coming near the end to reap the bounty of the winner.
This disgusting behavior had to be hidden by myths such as the truck/jeep meme.
The truth was known by everybody in Europe after the war. Of course the British gave more
responsibility to UK for defeating Hitler, as Russians were doing for their side. But almost
nobody thought that America was the one who defeated Hitler.
Then gradually, the American (hollywood) propaganda rewrote the history, and the American made
myth became the believed truth. Alain Soral: "Marx ****s Hitler"
There is no doubt that Germans, particularly from certain regions of Germany, looked
down upon Slavs.
I'm sure some Germans looked down on Poles, Ukrainians and Russians, like Americans who
used to tell Polish jokes, but that's different from considering them racially inferior.
There were reasons to feel culturally superior. Germany was far wealthier and the people
better educated than in Poland or Ukraine. Their houses were nicer, with indoor toilets, and
their farms neater and better managed. The Red Army soldiers were astounded by how well
Germans lived when they finally reached German soil.
There has to be some explanation for why Russian deserters who volunteered for German
forces were hardly used.
They probably didn't trust Vlasov and his crew until they were forced to out of
desperation. He ended up turning on them anyway, proving it was a bad idea.
As for German regional bias against Slavs, Austria, for one example, in the 1800s
treated the Serbs almost as poorly as the Ottomans did.
It was the same throughout Eastern Europe until modern times. Poland occupied parts of the
Ukraine after the brief war with the Red Army and immediately started Polonizing the areas.
Ethnic Germans were expelled from East Prussia, Silesia and the Sudetenland in 1945.
@Parisian Guy
No, I use rounded figures from what I recall. The USSR built about 50,000 T-34′s in
WWII. They could do this because the USA sent them over 500,000 trucks. The USSR was able to
build 50,000 T-34′s becuase they did not have to build alot of the trucks they used . A
tank aint worth anything without support ammo fuel, which all is delivered by truck. Now for
your theory to hold any water , we could say simply the USSR could have built half the number
of tanks 25,000 T-34 's to build 250,000 of those trucks themselves instead . Stiil alot of
tanks . The only problem is the USSR lost 45000 of those 50000 T-34′s , so they never
would have made it with half the T-34′s along with half the truck's of which most truck
were used to support other forces beside tanks.
Then you aslos have to add the USSR recieved 20000 tanks (afv's) and 20000 aircraft from
the USA UK as well. Do you thinjk the Soviet army could have fought barefoot? Becuase the USA
send them over 5 million pairs of boots IIRC. Lend lease overall amounted at least half of
all Soviet equipment and supplies
No the USSR would simply have lost WWII without lend -lease equipment supplies, handy
figures
@Fidelios
Automata I know that controversy about who wanted war. There is the same about the start
of WW2. I have no opinion. For instance, i've also read that US/UK were very actively trying
to convince Stalin that Hitler was secretly wanting to attack USSR as soon as he could. So
Stalin planned for a preemptive attack. My guess is we will never be able to know the truth
with certainty.
The lend-lease, the trucks and jeeps, and blahblah . Their effect is a myth. That's a
meme which has been propagated as soon as the USSR went down around 1990 (thus, there was
no more powerful voice to contradict the lies).
Part true, but you're overshooting just a bit.
In 1962, East minus West = zero by Werner Keller was published by Putnam in the
USA. There were previous non-US editions.
As I heard it, the big complaint in 1962 (one of) was Foreign Aid. Keller's book gave
JFK's opponents another brick to lob at him, because Keller detailed the extent of that
particular aid that American industrial workers and military had been quiet about due to
secrecy laws.
Since Keller's book had a non-USA roots, it was okay. Might seem idiotic to blame JFK for
FDR's sins, but politics in this asylum works that way.
Because Keller never claimed Lend Lease "won" the war, his volume is rarely cited which is
too bad because he got the details fresh, less than 20 years after the war from sources close
to the factory gate and battleground.
I have not heard of any major errors in the book. Copies are still floating around, but
it's over 350 pages and not light reading.
If anyone cares to critique Keller, I have no quarrel. But so far as I know his book was
the first "reveal" that considered Lend Lease to be any more than a case of a few shiploads
of ammunition and tinned food. Much earlier than the 90s.
@Parisian Guy
Jews Leading Subjectivists, Satanists, Controlling Establishment Christianity
Parisian Jew; regarding lend-lease, the facts speak–it doesn't matter what "polls"
say, which argument of urs is mere version of fallacy of argument-fm-authority. I'm "proof,"
u say?–I stick to the obvious facts, and draw the clear, indicated conclusion soviets
were beaten till resuscitated, rejuvenated, and actually primed by American aid and supply,
especially of simple, basic food, and then the transportation.
Stalin and Russkies themselves URGENTLY asked for tanks and planes when Harry Hopkins
first talked to them, so deficient they'd become, such losses they'd suffered. By end 1941
Russkies had already gotten 200,000 tons of American-produced supplies through the Brits
(before Jew S A even officially got into the war)–Jewwy Wikipedia says they got 360,000
tons.
Jew "power"?–all u have to do is look at Israel, the "tail" wagging American (and
everyone else) "dog." Jews obviously control finances and the world fiat-money and
central-banking systems. But then HOW do Jew exercise that control? Note psychologically Jews
control an extremely powerful segment of "Christian" population in Jew S A, called
"Judeo-Christians" (JCs–see Whtt.org and TruthTellers.org for expo), or
"Christian-Zionists," about half of all evangelicals, perhaps numbering up to 40 million here
who strongly support Israeli terror-state. Jews heavily influence and intimidate ALL
establishment Christian churches throughout the world beginning w. "vatican" satanists and
child-molesters.
But most of all, Jews are Talmudists (see Talmudical.blogspot.com), by definition, hence
satanists, Jews being extreme subjectivists ("midrash"), which subjectivism holds reality is
mere creation of mentality/consciousness, making themselves God, the creator–satanists.
Further Jews are most COLLECTIVIST subjectivists, leading group-think practitioners, Jews
most dedicated, most organized, most committed, most cohesive such subjectivists and
group-think artists. Thus Jews control, lead, and manipulate practically all the other
subjectivistic and satanists among the goyim who vastly out-number Jews–this satanism
is crux of their psychologic power. And note satanism is also secular
philosophy–extreme subjectivism–parallel to "religious" Talmudism–it
doesn't matter if a Jew says he's "atheist." Thus Jews are most organized CRIMINALS and
psychopaths, as we see in Israeli terror-state. Q.E.D.
@Parisian Guy
It's probably true that the lend-lease act played only a minor role in the Soviet Union's
victory. Many people don't realize this, but the principal beneficiary of the lend-lease act
was not the USSR, but rather the UK. In fact, Britain, whose population then was then about
one-quarter of what the Soviet Union's was, received more than three times as much aid
as the Soviets did. Per capita, that means they got twelve times more aid than the
USSR.
But some people are destined to go on believing that surplus US jeeps turned the tide on
the Eastern Front. So be it
The lies about unc' Adolf's parentage are mere concoction of Jews, beginning w. a couple
of them, named Langer, a common Jew name, and his brother, a psychologist, the first one
having been appointed head of the Research and Analysis Section of the OSS, no less. The lies
center upon the un-founded assertion that Hitler's grandmother was a domestic servant who
worked for Jews. On contrary, it's known Maria Schickelgruber didn't need such employment as
she was not poor, her parents having retired rather well-off, she inheriting significant
funds:
"2. Maria Anna Schicklgruber was not a poor housemaid who worked for wealthy Jewish
families. The daughter of Johann Schicklgruber, a prosperous farmer in possession of a
well-appointed farm in the village of Strones, and Theresia Pfseisinger, she was born in 1795
and is described by Maser as a thrifty, reserved and exceptionally shrewd peasant woman. She
gives every appearance of having been strong-minded, a trait that was passed down to her son
Alois and her grandson, Adolf.
"3. Maria Anna Schicklgruber's brother, Jakob, purchased the family farm from his father
for 3000 gulden when the father was only 53 years old. Maria's mother, Theresia, had just
inherited 210 gulden from her father's total estate of 1054 gulden, so the parents felt
prosperous enough to retire. To put the value of 3000 gulden in perspective: a cow at that
time could be purchased for 10 to 12 gulden; a brood sow cost 4 gulden; a bed w/bedding was 2
gulden; an inn with stabling could be had for 450 to 500 gulden. As you can see, 3000 gulden
was a substantial amount.
"4. Maria Anna, at the age of 26, inherited 74.25 gulden at the death of her mother in
1821. She kept this sum in the Orphans' Fund until 1838, earning 5% interest. By then, it had
increased to 165 gulden, over double the original amount. Her son was not born until June
1837 when she was 42 yrs. old."
And there were no Jews in the vicinity:
"A) From the end of the 15th Century until a decade after Maria Anna died, no Jews lived
in Graz. They had been expelled by Emperor Maximilian I in 1496 from the province of Styria,
which included Graz. In 1781, under Joseph II, they were allowed to re-enter, but only for a
few weeks at a time, during Lent and at the Feast of St. Giles to the annual Fairs, after
paying a fixed sum. Two years later, these rights were again curtailed, and it remained
enforced until 1860 that no Jews whatsoever could even enter the province."
"12. The Rothschild in Vienna story: This is debunked for the same reasons. Maria Anna
Schicklgruber did not visit or live in Vienna, and there is no record of who these
Rothschilds were, their address or other necessary information."
@Christo Not
sure what the reliability of your source is. For instance, it pretend that USSR used lot of
US made planes, and went upto copy without permission the design of the Boeing B-29. But the
B29 was not operational before the summer of 1944
One cannot say this american source is unbiased.
My point is: all this story did not went public before the demise of USSR. If it was true,
it would have not wait for so long. It looks like that story was not to sustainable before
the USSR voice went mute.
There are other cases where USSR story has been rewritten after its death.
He apparently admitted to his staff he was Jewish descent himself.
Journalists determined Hitler's Y-DNA (paternal line) to be haplogroup E-M35
("E1b1b1″) by testing some of his male relatives back around 2010. It led to a few
typically deprecatory articles around that time that he might be of Jewish or African origin.
E-M35 was also Albert Einstein's haplogroup. However, there are subgroups under E-M35 that
can be detected by a slightly more comprehensive deep clade test.
I find it hard to believe that the journalists didn't spring for the extra hundred dollars
or so needed for a deep clade test. The results have probably been kept out of the news for
some reason. There may be good humanitarian reasons, such as to shield innocent secret
descendants. But complete results could settle the longstanding question of his illegitimate
father's paternity. The most common rumor is that Alois Hitler's mother worked in the Jewish
Frankenberger household of Graz and was impregnated by the 19 year old son Leopold
Frankenberger. However, there is a declassified US Government report on the CIA website that
states that Schuschnigg's pre-Anschluss Austrian government researched Hitler's genealogy and
determined that she actually worked for the Vienna Rothschilds. It notes that Hitler's sister
worked for the Jewish Mensa society in Vienna and that Hitler's ability level was more
consistent with a Rothschild than with his putative Austrian peasant background.
Of course Schuschnigg's government was looking for dirt on Hitler, and connecting him with
the Rothschilds would be even juicier than assigning him incidental Jewish ancestry. The
Rothschild paternal line is reported on the Internet to be an entirely different haplogroup.
However, there may be good security reasons to mislead the public on that point. Interesting,
nonetheless.
As I read somewhere, so were about a quarter of the German populaton including many of
his generals, his favourite little girl and his chaffeur.
25% is probably little high, but the rate of intermarriage is Germany was higher than it
had ever been anywhere else in diaspora history, and there were a lot of children. The
liberal reform Judaism movement originated in Germany. The evidence suggests that Jews were
more comfortable among the Germans in many ways than they had ever been in Eastern Europe, at
least until the Balfour Declaration and the associated recrimination in the aftermath of
WWI.
The Daily Mirror ran a unusually flattering article on Hitler and his "favorite little
girl" (who was only 1/4th Jewish) a few months ago. She used to call him "Uncle Hitler."
His chauffeur's name was Emil Maurice, who asked permission to date Hitler's niece, Geli
Raubal. Hitler refused and she shot herself. Hitler thought Maurice was a loyal Nazi and
stood by him, even when his partial Jewish ancestry was revealed.
@Digital
Samizdatthe principal beneficiary of the lend-lease act was not the USSR, but rather
the UK
Thanks for getting the point with comparative datas.
That's so true that lend-lease for UK was regular teaching at schools in France, but
Lend-lease for USSR was never mentionned.
France was allways neutral or pro-US, depending the time or the matter. Thus France had no
motive to teach an History which would hide the USSR lend-lease, if it had been material.
You are a great guy to read, but your economic model is a little defective. You make it
sound like Venezuela would have been OK, but that pesky Amerindian admixture dragged its
average IQ down to 85; so socialism is claimed to be viable if we have the "right"
people.
China has a much higher average IQ, perhaps higher than the US, but as of 1978, its
average living standards were comparable to Kenya, Nigeria, and Mozambique. East Germany was
well below the level of West Germany. North Korea is way below South Korea.
On a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is pure capitalism (private ownership) and 0 is complete
government control, a country is in trouble economically, regardless of IQ, if it falls below
5. A Nazi government was able to bring about an impressive cyclical recovery during the
1930s, but its longer-term prospects would have depended on whether it allowed market forces
to operate to a reasonable degree.
Hitler was defeated by soviet armies. They had thousands of russian made T34, patriotic
soldiers (more than 10 millions died, against around 0.1 million from US), and smart
generals.
The lend-lease, the trucks and jeeps, and blahblah . Their effect is a myth.
The Soviets were capable of stopping the Germans with their own resources.
They may have been capable of reconquering some lost territory but it would have been a
hard slog with no guarantees of success.
The Lend-Lease equipment, especially the trucks, made it possible for the reconquest to be
complete and for eastern Europe to be overrun, giving the Soviet Union a buffer zone against
any future aggression from the west.
The Soviet achievement was certainly impressive. They went from being lousy at mobile
warfare to being very very good at it. But you can't wage mobile warfare without lots and
lots of trucks and there was no way they could have produced those trucks themselves. The
American trucks allowed the Soviets to concentrate on producing tanks and aircraft.
The Americans were certainly happy to let the Soviets do the hard fighting. Stalingrad,
Kursk, Operation Bagration – these were the battles that won the war.
Alain Soral:
"Marx ****s Hitler", by Guillaume Durocher - The Unz Review
@dfordoom
Richard Overy, 'Why the allies won', New York, London, 1995
USA technical military support of Russia already began in 1933:
Franz Kurowski, 'Balkenkreuz und Roter Stern, Der Luftkrieg über Russland 1941 –
1944′, 1984, Friedberg
@apollonian An
unknown book describing how GB steered towards war in the thirties is
Lawrence R. Pratt, 'East of Malta, West of Suez', London, 1975
GB guarantees began at the north side of the Med
@Parisian Guy
Without USA economic support GB could not have fought WWI, nor WWII.
But even with USA economic support the USA had to intervene militarily.
It is hardly ever mentioned anywhere, but by November 1917 Germany would have won the war in
Europe:
Donald McCormick, 'The mask of Merlin, A Critical Study of David Lloyd George', London, 1963
@Andy "
´Als die Deutschen weg waren, Was nach der Vertreibung geschah: Ostpreussen, Schlesien,
Sudetenland', 2005, 2007, Reinbek, Adrian von Arburg, Wlodzimierz Borodziej, Jurij
Kostjaschow, Ulla Lachauer, Hand-Dieter Rutsch, Beate Schlanstein, Christian Schulz "
Trans: After the Geermans had left, what happened after the expulsion.
A quite interesting book about German superiority.
The expulsion of the Germans led to collapse of industries.
Overall, arms sales increased in 2017, with total global sales nearing 400
billion dollars, marking a 2.5 percent increase from last year and the third year of continued
growth for the industry.
Russia comes in second, with year-over-year growth in arms production. In 2017, Russia
provided the world with 10 percent of arms sales, closely followed by The UK.
Only major arms companies were included in this study. China was excluded due to
insufficient data.
Problem with this is that the buyers of all that American weaponry are definitely not got
any 'bang for the proverbial buck' (pun intended). Horrendously overpriced weaponry which in
most instances render less value and effectiveness than similarly available Russian
analogues.
They know, the arms are inferior garbage, it's just like mafioso protection money or
better known as extortion. The charge a fortune for substandard weapons and MIC folks keep
the change. Same as murican tax payers. If there were no boogie men created then what would
be the justification for all the spending on military hardware?
There is no return on investment here. It's money laundering.
Letter of intent only. They have literally purchased none of those orders, despite
repeated US harassment for the 15 Billion for the THAADS to get the ball rolling. All bluster
and boasting and smoke and mirrors.
My suspicion is that SA under MBS is considering switching sides slowly and will purchase
Russian and Chinese instead. If the US had foreknowledge of this, hence the switch in tone re
butchering journalists and Yemenis ... hence why MBS isn't Time Magazine poster boy at the
moment.
Your correct I went back and checked it was order book not delivery,MBS situation is very
interesting with the recent high five with Putin there was some backstory that it was
celebration of a certain US admirals demise that was causing them problems whether true or
not I dont know but it would not surprise me if S400's end up in Saudi Arabia
Remember that old stuff about Krupp being the "Merchant of Death"? Aren't we, like, edging
into that territory? Is this what the Founders and Ratifiers had in mind? Could this enormous
arms trade and our military expenditures and adventures be a clue that we're on the wrong
track?
On Friday, 14 December 2018, the office of "special counsel" Robert Mueller filed a reply to Gen. Michael Flynn's sentencing
memorandum by the court's deadline, as noted on the court clerk's docket sheet--
"12/14/2018 56 REPLY by USA as to MICHAEL T. FLYNN to Defendant's Memorandum in Aid of Sentencing (Attachments: # 1 Attachment
A, # 2 Attachment B)(Van Grack, Brandon) (Entered: 12/14/2018)".
Judge Emmet Sullivan in an order on 12 December stated: "In 50 defendant's memorandum in aid of sentencing, the
defendant quotes and cites a 'Memorandum dated Jan. 24, 2017.' See page 8 n. 21, 22. The defendant also quotes and cites a 'FD-302
dated Aug. 22, 2017.' See page 9 n. 23-27. The defendant is ORDERED to file on the docket FORTHWITH the cited Memorandum and FD-302.
The Court further ORDERS the government to file on the docket any 302s or memoranda relevant to the circumstances discussed on
pages 7-9 of the defendant's sentencing memorandum by no later than 3:00 p.m. on December 14, 2018."
In response to Judge Sullivan's order, the Mueller group attached to its reply memo two noticeably blacked out (redacted) documents,
which turned out to be the same ones that were referred to in Flynn's memo raising the issue of FBI conduct surrounding his interview,
and were nothing additional or new!
The government's reply and two documents that were filed are here--
The two redacted documents are the "January 24, 2017" memo and the "FD-302 dated Aug. 22, 2017", which were cited in the court's
order and which Flynn's lawyers apparently already had, or knew what they were about. Judge Sullivan ordered the Mueller
group to produce "any 302s or memoranda relevant to the circumstances discussed on pages 7-9
of the defendant's sentencing memorandum", not just the two that were already known [emphasis added]. The "Attachment B"
is not the form 302 by an agent who interviewed Flynn on 24 January 2017, but rather is a 302 report by an unknown person of an
interview of now former FBI agent Peter Strzok on 20 July 2017, in which Strzok allegedly talks about some things that happened
on 24 January.
Unless the "special counsel" filed a complete set of unredacted documents with a motion (request) for leave to file them under
seal, the reply is on its face a violation of the court's disclosure order.
As 'blue peacock' said in a comment to the posting
on this issue of 14 December, it will be interesting to see what Judge Sullivan does about the response by the Mueller group.
Both documents are heavily blacked out. The form 302 does include the language that the agents at the Flynn interview
"had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying". Since this had already been
revealed in news and mass media reports, they basically had to disclose that little part, otherwise it probably would have
been redacted as well.
On the bottom right corner of each page is a number, which is usually referred to as a "Bates stamp", after the name of
the numbering machines that are often used to number and identify documents that are produced in a lawsuit [1]. The pages
on the form 302 are numbered DOJSCO-700021201 to 05. The one-page typed paper (Attachment A) has number DOJSCO-700021215.
There are nine pages between those pages, but what those might be is not disclosed.
The Justice Department, FBI, and other federal departments are capable of trying to play semantic word games with requests
for information, such that if the exact name or abbreviation of the document or class of documents is not requested, they will
leave them out of their response. In this instance, the judge asked for "any 302s or memoranda" relevant to the circumstances.
The FBI has guidelines about the different types of records it keeps and they can have different names, such as LHM (letterhead
memorandum), EC (electronic communication), original note material, the FD-302, and so forth. There are also different
types of files and records systems. Thus, there may be some ducking and dodging of the court's order on the theory that
the exact types of records were not in the order.
Documents and records may also be generated when any investigative activity is started or requires approval, such as an
assessment, preliminary investigation, or a full investigation. Furthermore, an interesting issue is the type of authorized
activity the Flynn interview was part of: an assessment, preliminary investigation, or full investigation. Although
it is significantly redacted (in this instance whited out instead of blacked out), the FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations
Guide contains some useful information for trying to figure out what is going on with this issue [2].
If this problem with disclosure is not bad enough, on 11 December the Justice Department Inspector General (OIG) issued
a report with the bland title, "Report of Investigation: Recovery of Text Messages from Certain FBI Mobile Devices"-- https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2018/i-2018-003523.pdf
The OIG investigation began when it was discovered that there was a "gap in text message data collection during the period
December 15, 2016, through May 17, 2017, from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) mobile devices assigned to FBI employees
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page relevant to a matter being investigated by the OIG's Oversight and Review Division". Those
names are familiar. Thousands of the text messages were recovered.
In addition, the report states: "In view of the content of many of the text messages between Strzok and Page, the
OIG also asked the Special Counsel's Office (SCO) to provide to the OIG the DOJ issued iPhones that had been assigned to Strzok
and Page during their respective assignments to the SCO".
The result? After Strzok was forced to leave the special counsel's office, his iPhone was given to another FBI agent
and reset, wiping out the data. The Mueller group's "records officer" told the inspector general's office that "as part
of the office's records retention procedure, the officer reviewed Strzok's DOJ issued iPhone after he returned it to the SCO
and determined it contained no substantive text messages". In other words, after the Strzok and Page scandal erupted
because of text messages while Strzok was at the special counsel's office, the Mueller group decided itself that his other
cellular phone issued to him by the Department of Justice for the special counsel's office had no "substantive" messages on
it.
Strzok's paramour, Lisa Page, also had an iPhone issued to her by the Justice Department while she was at the special counsel's
office. The Mueller group said it could not find her phone, but it eventually was located at the DOJ's Justice Management
Division. It had been reset, wiping out the data, on 31 July 2017.
"...the officer reviewed Strzok's DOJ issued iPhone after he returned it to the SCO and determined it contained no substantive
text messages"..."
So what is the officer's name, what criterea was used in the review and just what relationship to the extended cast of characters
does this individual have?
It seems to me that this is very big news. Can it be that the Straight Arrow is bent, after all? This is amazing. There is
an article in the Daily Caller: "Powell: New Facts Indicate Mueller Destroyed Evidence..."
dailycaller.com/2018/12/16/...
As a former/retired Agent, I have combed through every piece of information regarding Mike's case, as if I was combing through
evidence in the hundreds of cases I have successfully handled while in the FBI.
The publicly reported Brady material alone, in this case, outweighs any statement given by any FBI Agent (we now know
at least one FD-302 was changed), Special Prosecutor investigator report, and any other party still aggressively seeking
that this case remain and be sentenced as a felony. Quite simply, I cannot see justice being served by branding LtG. Michael
Flynn a convicted felon, when the truth is still being revealed while policies, ethics, and laws have been violated by those
pursuing this case.
We now know all FBI employees involved in Mike Flynn's case have either been fired, forced to resign or forced to retire
because of their excessive lack of candor, punitive biases, leaking of information, and extensive cover-up of their deeds.
Michael Flynn has always displayed overwhelming candor and forthrightness.
After the Soviet-backed People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) took power in 1978,
the Pentagon began arming the Islamist opposition to the PDPA. US officials, reeling from their
defeat in Vietnam, devised a policy of "sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire" in
Afghanistan, as CIA official Robert Gates wrote in his 1996 memoir From the Shadows .
When the Kremlin invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, in a reactionary attempt to strengthen
the PDPA regime in Kabul and stabilize the PDPA's relations with the Afghan rural elites,
Washington used Afghanistan as a battleground to bleed the Soviet army.
One of the CIA's main allies in carrying out this policy, recruiting tens of thousands of
Islamist fighters worldwide to go and fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, was a young Saudi
billionaire, Osama bin Laden, the future leader of Al Qaeda. Hensman endorses the US policy in
Afghanistan, while remaining silent on the CIA-Al Qaeda alliance, and presents it as part of a
liberation struggle against Soviet imperialism.
She writes, "A PDPA coup in 1978 faced tribal revolts that developed into a full-scale
uprising by December 1979, when the Russians invaded and occupied Afghanistan. The military
campaign that followed resembled the US campaign in Vietnam in its brutality to civilians The
war had reached a stalemate in the mid-1980s when Reagan, who was already supporting the
mujahideen, agreed to supply them with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. These weapons turned the
tide against the Russians..."
Hensman's defense of the US role in the Soviet-Afghan war, and her silence on CIA-backed
Islamist terror networks, are reactionary. She hides the bloody character of the CIA-backed
Islamist proxy wars, both in 1979–1992 in Afghanistan and in 1979–1982 in Syria. It
is the descendants of these same forces, who are fighting today's Syrian war, that Hensman
hails as a "democratic revolution."
And then there's Brzezinski, with his murderous legacy that contains a curious thread linking
the Mujahideen "freedom fighters" to 9/11. As was written in the recently republished article
on the Bush family fortune and the Holocaust, "the only constant is the defense of the power
and privilege of the ruling oligarchy by whatever means are required."
--- Brzezinski acknowledged in an interview with the French news magazine Le Nouvel
Observateur in January 1998 that he initiated a policy in which the CIA covertly began arming
the mujahedeen in July 1978 -- six months before Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan --
with the explicit aim of dragging the Soviet Union into a debilitating war.
Asked, given the catastrophe unleashed upon Afghanistan and the subsequent growth of
Islamist terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, whether he regretted the policy he championed in
Afghanistan, Brzezinski replied:
"Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing
the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets
officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of
giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war
unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally
the breakup of the Soviet empire."
Asked specifically whether he regretted the CIA's collaboration with and arming of
Islamist extremists, including Al Qaeda, in fomenting the war in Afghanistan, Brzezinski
responded contemptuously: "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or
the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central
Europe and the end of the cold war?"
Kind of a funny aside: to find the Z-bigz quote I wanted, I put "Brzezinski on
Afghanistan" into duckduckgo, and the wsws obituary was third from the top.
"... Nik Williams, the policy advisor for Scottish PEN, the Scottish centre of PEN International. We are leading the campaign opposing suspicionless surveillance and protecting the rights of writers both in Scotland and across the globe. Find out more on Twitter at @scottishpen and @nikwilliams2 . Originally published at openDemocracy ..."
"... In 2013, NSA whistle blower, Edward Snowden revealed the extent of government surveillance that enables intelligence agencies to capture the data of internet users around the world. Some of the powers revealed enable agencies to access emails in transit, files held on devices, details that document our relationships and location in real-time and data that could reveal our political opinions, beliefs and routines. ..."
"... As big data and digital surveillance is interwoven into the fabric of modern society there is growing evidence that the perception of surveillance affects how different communities engage with the internet. ..."
"... In 2013, PEN America surveyed American writers to see whether the Snowden revelations impacted their willingness to explore challenging issues and continue to write. In their report, Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives US Writers to Self-Censor , PEN America found that "one in six writers avoided writing or speaking on a topic they thought would subject them to surveillance". ..."
"... At times, surveillance appears unavoidable and this was evident in many of the writers' responses to whether they could take actions to mitigate the risks of surveillance. Without knowing how to secure themselves there are limited options: writers either resign themselves to using insecure tools or choose to avoid the internet all together, cutting them off from important sources of information and potential communities of readers and support. ..."
"... Although not explicitly laid out in the post, I'm inclined to believe any online research on PETs might single one out as a "Person of Interest" ..."
"... we know better now – EVERYTHING is recorded and archived. Privacy may not be dead yet, but now exists only in carefully curated offline pockets, away from not just the phone and the laptop, but also the smart fridge's and the face-recognising camera's gimlet eye. ..."
"... And it's not just off centre political opining that could be used in such efforts. The percentages of internet users who have accused [people of using] porn sites suggests there would be some serious overlap between the set of well known and/or 'important' people and the set of porn hounds. Remember the cack-handed attempts to smear Hans Blix? ..."
"... Most of us (real writers or just people who write) need to hold down a job and increasingly HR depts don't just 'do a Google' on all potential appointees to important roles but in large concerns at least, use algorithmic software connected to the web and the Cloud to process applications. ..."
We know what censorship looks like: writers being murdered, attacked or imprisoned; TV and
radio stations being shut down; the only newspapers parrot the state; journalists lost in the
bureaucratic labyrinth to secure a license or permit; government agencies approving which
novels, plays and poetry collections can be published; books being banned or burned or the
extreme regulation of access to printing materials or presses. All of these damage free
expression, but they leave a fingerprint, something visible that can be measured, but what
about self-censorship? This leaves no such mark.
When writers self-censor, there is no record, they just stop writing or avoid certain topics
and these decisions are lost to time. Without being able to record and document isolated cases
the way we can with explicit government censorship, the only thing we can do is identify
potential drivers to self-censorship.
In 2013, NSA whistle blower, Edward Snowden revealed the extent of government surveillance
that enables intelligence agencies to capture the data of internet users around the world. Some
of the powers revealed enable agencies to access emails in transit, files held on devices,
details that document our relationships and location in real-time and data that could reveal
our political opinions, beliefs and routines. Following these revelations, the UK government
pushed through the Investigatory Powers Act ,
an audacious act that modernised, consolidated and expanded digital surveillance powers. This
expansion was opposed by civil rights organisations, (including Scottish PEN where I work),
technologists, a number of media bodies and major tech companies, but on 29th November 2016, it
received royal assent.
But what did this expansion do to our right to free expression?
As big data and digital surveillance is interwoven into the fabric of modern society there
is growing evidence that the perception of surveillance affects how different communities
engage with the internet. Following the Snowden revelations, John Penny at the Oxford
Internet Institute analysed traffic to Wikipedia pages on topics designated by the Department
of Homeland Security as sensitive and identified "a 20 percent decline in page views on
Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that mentioned 'al Qaeda,' 'car bomb'
or 'Taliban.'" This report was in line with a study by Alex Marthews and
Catherine Tucker who found a similar trend in the avoidance of sensitive topics in Google
search behaviour in 41 countries. This has significant impact on both free expression and
democracy, as
outlined by Penney: "If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy
matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic
debate."
But it doesn't end with sourcing information. In a study of Facebook, Elizabeth Stoycheff
discovered that when faced with holders of majority opinions and the knowledge of government
surveillance, holders of minority viewpoints are more likely to "self-censor their dissenting
opinions online". If holders of minority opinions step away from online platforms like
Facebook, these platforms will only reflect the majority opinion, homogenising discourse and
giving a false idea of consensus. Read together, these studies document a slow erosion of the
eco-system within which free expression flourishes.
In 2013, PEN America surveyed American writers to see whether the Snowden revelations
impacted their willingness to explore challenging issues and continue to write. In their
report, Chilling Effects:
NSA Surveillance Drives US Writers to Self-Censor , PEN America found that "one in six
writers avoided writing or speaking on a topic they thought would subject them to
surveillance". But is this bigger than the US? Scottish PEN, alongside researchers at the
University of Strathclyde authored the report,
Scottish Chilling: Impact of Government and Corporate Surveillance on Writers to explore
the impact of surveillance on Scotland-based writers, asking the question: Is the perception of
surveillance a driver to self-censorship? After surveying 118 writers, including novelists,
poets, essayists, journalists, translators, editors and publishers, and interviewing a number
of participants we uncovered a disturbing trend of writers avoiding certain topics in their
work or research, modifying their work or refusing to use certain online tools. 22% of
responders have avoided writing or speaking on a particular topic due to the perception of
surveillance and 28% have curtailed or avoided activities on social media. Further to this, 82%
said that if they knew that the UK government had collected data about their Internet activity
they would feel as though their personal privacy had been violated, something made more likely
by the passage of the investigatory Powers Act.
At times, surveillance appears unavoidable and this was evident in many of the writers'
responses to whether they could take actions to mitigate the risks of surveillance. Without
knowing how to secure themselves there are limited options: writers either resign themselves to
using insecure tools or choose to avoid the internet all together, cutting them off from
important sources of information and potential communities of readers and support.
Literacy
concerning the use of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (oftentimes called PETs) is a vital part
of how we protect free expression in the digital age, but as outlined by the concerns of a
number of the participants, it is largely under-explored outside of the tech community: "I
think probably I need to get educated a wee bit more by someone because I think we probably are
a bit exposed and a wee bit vulnerable, more than we realize." Another was even more stark
about their worries about the available alternatives: "I have no idea about how to use the
Internet 'differently'".
When interviewed, a number of writers expressed concerns about how their writing process has
changed or is in danger of changing as a result of their awareness of surveillance. One
participant who had covered the conflict in Northern Ireland in 70s and 80s stated that they
would not cover the conflict in the same manner if it took place now; another stopped writing
about child abuse when they thought about what their search history may look to someone else;
when they heard of a conviction based on the ownership of the Anarchist Cookbook, a participant
who bought a copy for research shredded it. Further to this a participant stated: "I think I
would avoid direct research on issues to do with Islamic fundamentalism. I might work on
aspects of the theory, but not on interviewing people in the past, I have interviewed people
who would be called 'subversives'."
These modifications or avoidance strategies raise a stark and important question: What are
we as readers being denied if writers are avoiding sensitive topics? Put another way, what
connects the abuse of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, the treatment of asylum seekers by
the Australian government on Manus and Nauru, the hiding of billions of pounds by wealthy
individuals as revealed in the Panama and Paradise Papers, the deportation of members of the
'Windrush Generation' and the Watergate scandal? In each case, writers revealed to the world
what others wanted hidden. Shadows appear less dense if writers are able to explore challenging
issues and expose wrongdoing free from the coercive weight of pervasive surveillance. When
writers are silenced, even by their own hand, we all suffer.
Surveillance is going nowhere – it is embedded into the fabric of the internet. If we
ignore the impact it has on writers, we threaten the very foundations of democracy; a vibrant
and cacophonous exchange of ideas and beliefs, alongside what it means to be a writer. In the
words of one participant: "You can't exist as a writer if you're self-censoring."
Thanks Yves, this is an important topic. Although not explicitly laid out in the post, I'm
inclined to believe any online research on PETs might single one out as a "Person of
Interest" (after all the state wants unfettered access to our digital lives and any attempt
by individuals to curtail such access is viewed with suspicion, and maybe even a little
contempt).
I trust the takeaway message from this post will resonate with any person who holds what
might be considered "heretical" or dissenting views. I'd also argue that it's not just
writers who are willingly submitting themselves to this self-censorship straitjacket,
ordinary people are themselves sanitizing their views to avoid veering too far off the
official line/established consensus on issues, lest they fall foul of the machinery of the
security state.
Yes – not just 'writers' as in 'those who write for a living or at least partly
define themselves as writers in either a creative or an activist sense, or both' – but
all of us who do not perceive ourselves as 'writers', only as people who in the course of
their lives write a bit here and there, some of it on public platforms such as this, but much
of it in emails and texts to friends and family. It wouldn't be quite so bad if the
surveillance was only of the public stuff, but we know better now – EVERYTHING is
recorded and archived. Privacy may not be dead yet, but now exists only in carefully curated
offline pockets, away from not just the phone and the laptop, but also the smart fridge's and
the face-recognising camera's gimlet eye.
Staying with the 'not just' for a moment – the threat is not just government
security agencies and law enforcement, or indeed Surveillance Valley. It is clear that if
egghead techs in those employments are able to crack our lives open then egghead techs in
their parent's basement around the corner may be capable of the same intrusions, their
actions not subject to any of the official box-ticking govt actors with which govt actors
must (or at least should) comply.
And it is not just the danger of govt/sinister 3rd parties identifying potential security
(or indeed political or economic) threats out of big data analysis, but the danger of govt
and especially interested third parties targeting particular known individuals –
political enemies to be sure, but also love rivals, toxic bosses, hated alpha males or queen
bitches, supporters of other football clubs, members of other races not deemed fully human,..
the list is as long as that of human hatreds and jealousies. The danger lies not just in the
use of the tech to ID threats (real or imagined) but in its application to traduce threats
already perceived.
And it's not just off centre political opining that could be used in such efforts. The
percentages of internet users who have accused [people of using] porn sites suggests there would be some
serious overlap between the set of well known and/or 'important' people and the set of porn
hounds. Remember the cack-handed attempts to smear Hans Blix? Apparently no fire behind that
smoke, but what if there was? The mass US surveillance of other parties prior to UN Iraq
deliberations (from the Merkels down to their state-level support bureaucrats) was a fleeting
and hastily forgotten glimpse of the reach of TIA, its 'full spectrum dominance', from the
heights of top level US-free strategy meetings down to the level of the thoughts and hopes of
valets and ostlers to the leaders, who may be useful in turning up references to the
peccadilloes of the higher-ups 'go massive – sweep it all up, things related and
not'
And it's not just the fear of some sort of official retribution for dissenting political
activism that guides our hands away from typing that deeply held but possibly inflammatory
and potentially dangerous opinion. Most of us (real writers or just people who write) need to
hold down a job and increasingly HR depts don't just 'do a Google' on all potential
appointees to important roles but in large concerns at least, use algorithmic software
connected to the web and the Cloud to process applications.
This is done without human
intervention at the individual level but the whole process is set up in such a way that the
algorithms are able to neatly, bloodlessly, move applicants for whom certain keywords turned
up matches (union or party membership, letters to the editor or blog posts on financial
fraud, climate change vanguardism, etc) to the back of the queue, in time producing a grey
army of yes people in our bureaucracies.
The normal person's ability to keep pace with (let alone ahead of) the tech disappeared
long ago. So when a possible anonymising solution – Tor – crops up but is soon
exposed as yet another MI/SV bastard love child, the sense of disappointment is profound.
Shocked but not surprised.
"Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. – I remember a
conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right,
these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves
and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of
society]? "
We already
know insurers have been using online searches to discriminate amongst the victimae. The
married/unmarried differences in cancer treatments are a confirmation. Self-censorship is a
rational decision in seeking information in a linked world. (I gave up on affording
insurance, and I do searches for friends; the ads I get are amusing.)
It could be said that journalists have a professional duty, but as the man said, "If you
believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
As the woman said, "If your business depends on a platform, your business is already
dead."
(As for the above quote, check the provenance for the relevance.)
I confess I do concatenate your quotes on
occasion: "For a currency to function as a reserve currency is tantamount to exporting jobs."
Some of your most illuminating statements are in side comments to linked articles.
Means I spend a lot of time reading the site. But then I get to recategorize most other
current events sites as 'Entertainment.' And since they're not very, they've been
downregulated.
My choice being shackled e'n more to chains of FIRE, or living a healthy happy life,
rather than increasing my stress by fighting institutions, we're investing in ourselves. Good
sleep, good food, good exercise.
The basis of our diet is coffee, with cocoa (7% daily fiber with each tablespoon) and
organic heavy whipping cream (your fats should be organic (;)). That cream's not cheap; well,
actually it is amazingly cheap considering the energy inputs. I'll be fasting soon to murder
cancer cells, and fasting also costs, lets see, nothing.
That the best thing you can do is nothing, occasionally, is a strong offset to the
institutional framework. Janet's been a nurse 40 years, and every day (truth) we get another
instance of not wanting the probisci inserted. Even when we get M4A, we'll be cautious in our
approach.
I suppose that here we are looking at the dogs that did not bark for evidence of
self-censorship. Certainly my plans to take over the world I do not keep on my computer. I
had not considered the matter but I think that a case could be made that this may extend
further than just writers. The number of writers that cannot publish in the US but must
publish their work in obscure overseas publications is what happens to those who do not seek
to self censor. There are other forms of censorship to be true. I read once where there was
an editorial meeting for either the Washington Post or New York Times when a story came up
that would make Israel look bad. The people at the table looked around and without so much as
a nod that story was dropped from publication. Now that is self-censorship.
But I can see this self censorship at work elsewhere. To let my flight take fancy, who will
paint the modern "Guernica" in this age? Would there be any chance that a modern studio would
ever film something like "The Day After" mentioned in comments yesterday again? With so many
great stories to be told, why has Hollywood run itself into a creative ditch and is content
to film 1960s TV shows as a movie or a version of Transformers number 32? Where are the
novels being written that will come to represent this era in the way that "The Great Gatsby"
came to represent the 1920s? My point is that with a total surveillance culture, I have the
feeling that this is permeating the culture and creating a chilling effect right across the
board and just not in writing.
What we are experiencing censorship-wise is nothing new, just more insidious. It is not
even a Left/Right politics issue. We just saw Trumpist fascist conservatives KILL the
Weekly Standard (an action praised by Trump) for advocating the wrong
conservativism. The shift in the televised/streamed media from news to infotainment has
enabled neoliberal capitalism to censor any news that might alienate viewers/subscribers to
justify obscene charges for advertising. Hilariously, even fascist Laura Ingram got gored by
her own neolib ox.
Of course, a certain amount of self-censorship is prudent. Insulting, inflammatory,
inciteful, hateful speech seldom animates beneficial change – just pointless violence
(an sometimes law suits). Americans especially are so hung up on "free speech" rights that
they too often fail to realize that no speech is truly free . There are always consequences
for the purveyor, good and bad. Ask any kid on the playground with a bloody nose.
I would like to see some Google traitor write an article on the latest semantic analysis
algorithms and tools. Thanks to the government, nobody but the FEDs and Google have access to
these new tools that can mine terabytes of speech in seconds to highlight global patterns
which might indicate plotting or organizing that might be entirely legal. I have been trying
for years to get access to the newer unobtainable tools to help improve the development of
diagnostic and monitoring self-report health measures. Such tools can also quickly scan
journals to highlight and coordinate findings to accelerate new discoveries. For now, they
are used to determine if your emails indicate you are a jihadist terrorist or dope peddler,
or want to buy a Toyota or a Ford.
Rhetorical I know, but Don DeLillo is quite good. It was in his novel Libra ,
although arguably from/about a different era at this point, where it first hit home to me
that the Blob really does manipulate the media to its own ends all the time. And you can't
swing a cat without hitting a terrorist in his books.
But to your point, DeLillo is pretty old at this point and I'm hard pressed to think of
anyone picking up his mantle. And none of his novels, as brilliant as some of them might be,
rise to the level of The Great Gatsby in the popular imagination to begin with.
The surveillance people are the nicest, kindest human beings that have only your best
interest at heart.
They would never break down your door and terrorize you for searching online for a
pressure cooker and if you heard stories that they did that, the surveillancers have an
answer for you, it's fake news, and if you persisted in not believing them, there are other
methods of persuasion to get you to change your mind or at least shut up about it.
That pressure cooker story gets a lot of mileage. While there is undoubtedly a lot of
surveillance it might be interesting to see a story on just how much of it leads to actual
arrests on real or trumped up charges. Here's suggesting that the paranoia induced by books
like Surveillance Valley is over the top in the same way that TV news' focus on crime stories
causes the public to think that crime is rampant when it may actually be declining.
That said, journalists who indulge their vanity with Facebook or Twitter accounts are
obviously asking for it. And the journalistic world in general needs to become a lot more
technologically "literate" and realize that Youtube videos can be faked as well as how to
separate the internet wheat from the chaff. Plus there's that old fashioned way of learning a
story that is probably the way most stories are still reported: talking to
people–hopefully in a room that hasn't been bugged.
Just to add that while the above may apply to America that doesn't mean the web isn't a
much more sinister phenomenon in countries like China with its new social trust score. We
must make sure the US never goes there.
For your first sentence I think you are referencing:
The surveillance people are "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being[s]
I've ever known in my life." (ref. Statement by Major Marco about Raymond Shaw from 1962 and
2004 movies "The Manchurian Candidate"). ?
Maybe you need some refresher re-education.
Expression of minority opinions and surpressed information is not a safe activity, thus we
self censor. However reality asserts itself and perhaps in those moments one can more safely
express alternate points of view. As far as writing online i worry about the future –
with everything recorded and searchable, will we at some point be facing round ups of
dissidents? What kind of supression will stressed governments and corporate hierarchies do in
the future?
I think the last blog post I wrote that was linked here at NC was called "TPP is
Treason."
I was writing and was published on the Internet from 2011-2016. I continue to write, but I
no longer publish anything online, I closed my Facebook account, and I rarely comment on
articles outside of NC, especially anywhere I have to give up a digital-ton of personal info
and contacts just to say a few words one time.
Goodness knows I do not worry a bit about fundamentalist Islamic militancy. Do I have any
anxiety about jackbooted "law enforcement" mercenaries in riot gear and automatic rifles
breaking down my door at the behest, basically, of the corporate/banking/billionaire,
neoliberal/neoconservative status quo, my big mouth excoriating these elite imperialists, at
the same time asset forfeiture laws are on the books and I can have EVERYTHING taken from me
for growing a single plant of cannabis, or even having any cannabis in my house, or not, all
they have to report to a complicit media and prosecutorial State is that I was growing
cannabis when there was none.
Of course there is little danger of that if I am not publishing, and hardly anyone knows I
ever have, and no one currently is paying any attention.
The fact in America at least is, as long as the status quo is secure, TPTB don't really
care what I write, as long as they do not perceive it as a threat, and the only way they
would is if a LOT of people are listening But still, there is nothing more terrifying on
earth than America's Law/Corporate/Bank/Privatized Military/Media imperialist State, chilling
to say the least, evidenced in the extreme by a distracted, highly manipulated and neutered
citizenry.
"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."
"If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search
may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain."
The decision to indict Flynn ruins " esprit de corps " in the USA intelligence community. So
Partaigenosser Mulkler trying to depose Trump oversteped the "norms" of intelligence community.
And if CIA allied with FBI against DIA that's a bad sign. It looks like the US elite was split
into two warring camps that will fight for power absolutely ruthlessly.
As for "In the report, the two agents describe Flynn as being very open and noted said Flynn 'clearly saw the FBI agents
as allies.' " the question arise how he got the to position of the head of DIA with such astounding level of naivety.
If anyone from FBI does not want your lawyer to be present you should probably have a lawyer present.
Notable quotes:
"... "The agents did not provide Gen. Flynn with a warning of the penalties for making a false statement under 18 U.S.C. 1001 before, during, or after the interview," the Flynn memo says. ..."
"... According to the 302, before the interview, McCabe and other FBI officials "decided the agents would not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they wanted Flynn to be relaxed , and they were concerned that giving the warnings might adversely affect the rapport." ..."
"... McCabe, who has since been fired for lying to the DOJ's Office of Inspector General about leaking information to the media, also asked Flynn not to have his lawyer present during the initial meeting with the FBI agents. ..."
"... On Thursday, FBI Supervisory Agent Jeff Danik told SaraACarter.com that Sullivan must also request all the communications between the two agents, as well as their supervisors around the August 2017 time-frame in order to get a complete and accurate picture of what transpired. Danik, who is an expert in FBI policy, says it is imperative that Sullivan also request "the workflow chart, which would show one-hundred percent, when the 302s were created when they were sent to a supervisor and who approved them." ..."
"... Flynn was found guilty by Mueller on one count of lying to the FBI. Supporters of Flynn have questioned Mueller's tactics in getting the retired three-star general to plead guilty to this one count of lying. ..."
"... In the report, the two agents describe Flynn as being very open and noted said Flynn "clearly saw the FBI agents as allies." Flynn is described as discussing a variety of "subjects." The report includes his openness regarding Trump's "knack for interior design," the hotels he stayed at during his campaign, as well as other issues. ..."
"... It would appear that the branch of government that may be out of control (by the Supreme Court) is the judiciary. It is the court rules and failure of the Supreme Court to act and weed its subordinate courts, that allowed much of this to happen. The FISA Court has been a rubber stamp. No judge is held accountable for failure to obtain justice in their court. ..."
"... Could Mueller's whole appointment be meant to protect the Clinton empire? ..."
The Special Counsel's Office released key documents related to former National Security
Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn Friday. Robert Mueller's office had until 3 p.m. to get the
documents to Judge Emmet Sullivan, who demanded information Wednesday after
bombshell information surfaced in a memorandum submitted by Flynn's attorney's that led to
serious concerns regarding the FBI's initial questioning of the retired three-star general.
The highly redacted documents included notes from former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
regarding his conversation with Flynn about arranging the interview with the FBI. The initial
interview took place at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017.
The documents also include the FBI's "302" report regarding Flynn's interview with
anti-Trump former FBI Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Agent Joe Pientka when they met with him at
the White House. It is not, however, the 302 document from the actual January, 2017 interview
but an August, 2017 report of Strzok's recollections of the interview.
Flynn's attorney's had noted in their memorandum to the courts that the documents revealed
that FBI officials made the decision not to provide Flynn with his Miranda Rights, which
would've have warned him of penalties for making false statements.
"The agents did not provide Gen. Flynn with a warning of the penalties for making a false
statement under 18 U.S.C. 1001 before, during, or after the interview," the Flynn memo
says.
According to the 302, before the interview, McCabe and other FBI officials "decided the
agents would not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they
wanted Flynn to be relaxed , and they were concerned that giving the warnings might adversely
affect the rapport."
McCabe, who has since been fired for lying to the DOJ's Office of Inspector General about
leaking information to the media, also asked Flynn not to have his lawyer present during the
initial meeting with the FBI agents.
The July 2017 report, however, was the interview with Strzok. It described his interview
with Flynn but was not the original Flynn interview.
Apparent discrepancies within the 302 documents are being questioned by may former senior
FBI officials, who state that there are stringent policies in place to ensure that the
documents are guarded against tampering.
On Thursday, FBI Supervisory Agent Jeff Danik told SaraACarter.com that Sullivan must also request all the
communications between the two agents, as well as their supervisors around the August 2017
time-frame in order to get a complete and accurate picture of what transpired. Danik, who is an
expert in FBI policy, says it is imperative that Sullivan also request "the workflow chart,
which would show one-hundred percent, when the 302s were created when they were sent to a
supervisor and who approved them."
He stressed, "the bureau policy – the absolute FBI policy – is that the notes
must be placed in the system in a 1-A file within five days of the interview." Danik said that
the handwritten notes get placed into the FBI Sentinel System, which is the FBI's main record
keeping system. "Anything beyond five business days is a problem, eight months is a disaster,"
he added.
In the redacted 302 report Strzok and Pientka said they "both had the impression at the time
that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying." Information that Flynn was not lying
was first published
and reported by SaraACarter.com.
Flynn was found guilty by Mueller on one count of lying to the FBI. Supporters of Flynn have
questioned Mueller's tactics in getting the retired three-star general to plead guilty to this
one count of lying.
In the report, the two agents describe Flynn as being very open and noted said Flynn
"clearly saw the FBI agents as allies." Flynn is described as discussing a variety of
"subjects." The report includes his openness regarding Trump's "knack for interior design," the
hotels he stayed at during his campaign, as well as other issues.
"Flynn was so talkative, and had so much time for them, that Strzok wondered if the
national security adviser did not have more important things to do than have a such a
relaxed, non-pertinent discussion with them," it said.
The documents turned over by Mueller also reveal that other FBI personnel "later argued
about the FBI's decision to interview Flynn." Tags Law Crime
Basically McCabe and others in his unit are totally discredited. He should have this
quashed and the case thrown out of court. No Miranda rights, therefore no lying to FBI.
Why didn't Flynn demand his day in court? He would have won. I am not buying the ********
argument about him being run into bankruptcy. Hell, he could have represented himself and
still won the case at trial. In addition, I am not buying this ******** argument that he
agreed to plead guilty because he was afraid the Mueller would go after his son. Does anyone
know what Flynn's son does for a living? Why would he be afraid?
Flynn was found guilty by Mueller on one count of lying to the FBI.
No! Flynn was not f ound guilty by Mueller on one count of lying. The FBI is an
investigative body (at best) not a judicial body. Only a jury or a judge acting in lieu of a
jury can find someone guilty of anything.
Flynn plead guilty to one count of lying because to have plead innocent would have
bankrupted him in legal fees. However, it's interesting that this ZH article stated that
Mueller found Flynn guilty. In federal courts these days, once you're charged with a crime
you will be found guilty. FBI, DEA, BATF, IRS...whoever, you do not get a fair trial. Federal
judges are hard-wired to find guilt. Vicious and ambitious federal prosecutors have only one
interest, to rack up successful prosecutions. Federal juries are intimidated by the brute
force of the federal system and, I suspect, fear that if they don't bring in a verdict
satisfactory to the prosecutor, they may be investigated themselves. "Investigation" in the
federal sense means that they will be relentlessly harassed forever by the federal
government
My small experience as a juror is that state prosecutors and judges are no different than
what you describe for the federal system. We found a guy non-guilty (not a close call either)
that the judge wanted convicted, and he came back and questioned us about our logic. Casually
of course. I just said the guy was innocent beyond a reasonable doubt. Judge wasn't
pleased.
Flynn is an idiot.... why agree to talk to the FBI at all.... as Martha Stewart found
out.... if they can't make the case for what they're investigating... they'll just find some
statement in your "interview" that they claim was not true.... no matter if it was your
intention to lie or just a recollection that was wrong... and charge you with that!
Simple answer is that if law enforcement wants to "talk" to you they're looking to get
information to charge you.... simple reply.... FU... I want a lawyer!
The compromise of classified docs was really sort of candy-assed, everybody knew it . .
.
Rewind the tape, and you will find the contrite Petreaus in front of any and all
microphones confessing to his affair with Broadwell, which he repeatedly stated began on some
certain date . . .conveniently AFTER his confirmation as CIA director . . .
. . .certainly Petreaus was asked in his FBI background interview if he was involved in
any affairs. And he certainly said no.
So, Paula, since I'm on all the networks at the moment, I know you can hear me, our affair
started on X date, in case the FBI gets a notion to ask you (which they did not.)
See, the FBI takes lying seriously. But somebody must have said something along the lines
of: hey, Petreaus is a good guy, I hope you can find a way to let him off easy.
But when faced with financial destruction, your kids being threatened, and false evidence
against you, you sometimes admit to the charges to make a deal...
The military is realizing they are not on the same team with FBI, CIA, DOJ.
Why do you think they have tried so hard to keep NSA under military leadership? Wink,
wink...
Leguran
It would appear that the branch of government that may be out of control (by the Supreme Court) is the judiciary. It
is the court rules and failure of the Supreme Court to act and weed its subordinate courts, that allowed much of this to
happen. The FISA Court has been a rubber stamp. No judge is held accountable for failure to obtain justice in their court.
The Chief Justice has refused to accept that judges can employ personal poliltical beliefs in court. All courts are
subordinate to the US Supreme Court and therefore the Supreme Court has a duty to ensure justice not just to decide whether
cases are 'sufficiently mature' to come before the Supreme Court. In other words, the Judiciary needs to be disturbed from
their lifetime appointments and made conditional appointments. The Supreme Court needs to deal with incapacity within its own
ranks. All told, this shocking miscarriage of justice came about because the Judicial Branch of government allowed it to
happen. The Judicial Branch has run amok.
lizzie dw
IMO, Judge Emmet Sullivan needs to demand and receive the original UNREDACTED 302 about the Strzok/Pientka interview with
General Flynn. But, really, just by reading the pre-interview discussions of the FBI members involved, the whole thing sounds
fishy.
Caloot
Hedge headline:
Could Mueller's whole appointment be meant to protect the Clinton empire?
Like Trump or not, there are serious cracks appearing in the Clintons foundation.
Two days ago, federal judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington D.C.
ordered the "special counsel" Robert Mueller group to do the following by 3:00 p.m. eastern
time today, as shown on the court clerk's docket sheet--
"12/12/2018 MINUTE ORDER as to MICHAEL T. FLYNN. In 50 defendant's memorandum in aid of
sentencing, the defendant quotes and cites a 'Memorandum dated Jan. 24, 2017.' See page 8 n.
21, 22. The defendant also quotes and cites a 'FD-302 dated Aug. 22, 2017.' See page 9 n.
23-27. The defendant is ORDERED to file on the docket FORTHWITH the cited Memorandum and
FD-302. The Court further ORDERS the government to file on the docket any 302s or memoranda
relevant to the circumstances discussed on pages 7-9 of the defendant's sentencing memorandum
by no later than 3:00 p.m. on December 14, 2018. Should the parties seek to file such material
under seal, the parties may file motions for leave to do so. The government is also ORDERED to
file its reply to the defendant's sentencing memorandum by no later than 3:00 p.m. on December
14, 2018. Signed by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on 12/12/2018. (lcegs3) (Entered: 12/12/2018)"
Judge Sullivan is a Black lawyer who came up the hard way, going to Washington D.C. public
schools and Howard University and its law school. Howard University has been a reputable
university with a full curriculum as it provided education to Black Americans from the time of
segregation. He was appointed by three different U.S. presidents to judicial positions, by
Reagan, Bush sr, and Bill Clinton [1].
The actions and investigation regarding Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.) beginning when he was
removed as National Security Advisor to president Trump have seemed odd and not to square with
past behavior and the normal course of things. With little information available publicly it is
very difficult to look at the issue and pick through information, since it has been mainly
hidden behind the skirts of the Mueller "investigation", which was supposed to look at
"interference" by the Russian government in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Flynn's sentencing is set for next Tuesday, 18 December. However, that is subject to change,
depending on what is filed today. I will try to provide some relevant items from the court
clerk's file that you can read to bring yourself up to date about the court case from what is
available; some items are still filed under seal, and the probation office presentence
investigation report (PSI) is kept private as a matter of federal judicial policy.
That defense would be more effective if Flynn was a bewildered youth or someone with
diminished mental capacities being badgered in a police interrogation room.
Flynn certainly acted like a bewildered, naive person.
Did he think that the FBI was showing up to ask about his health?
Was he really the Director of DIA......or did he just stay in a Holiday Inn?
Thank you Robert. It's good to have someone like judge Sullivan presiding over this case.
We'll have to wait and see, but a lot of what I have gathered so far suggests Gen. Flynn is a
man of honorable character who has been raked over for mostly political reasons.
In the meantime, has anyone investigated the leak that supposedly caught Flynn talking to the
Russian Amb?
That apparently did harm sources and methods.
But,noooooooooo, no investigation.
The swamp cares not a whit for national security, but yet constantly lectures us
"deplorables" about their great talent and dedication - they'd all be Fortune 500 CEO's if
they weren't so dedicated.
There are probably a few dedicated talented people trying to do the right thing, but the
bureaucracy - including the Intel. agencies/FBI (VERY important people "risking" their lives,
BTW) - has shown over and over to be populated mostly by self-enriching slugs.
The leak was that USI and LE were listening in on the Russian Ambassador's conversations by
turning his smartphone into a hot mic by exploiting well-known SS7 vulnerabilities. This
hardly reveals anything new about sources and methods. Any one who wants to keep secrets
shouldn't be carrying a smartphone and any ambassador who thinks the host government doesn't
keep him under surveillance is hopelessly naive.
Was it a leak or was it just an assumption of the obvious surveillance of Kislyak? Pence is
the one who confirmed Flynn talked to Kislyak about lifting sanctions and lied to him about
it.
Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz has asked SaraACarter.com to post her letter to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan
in support of her friend and colleague retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who will be
sentenced on Dec. 18. The Special Counsel's Office has requested that Flynn not serve any
jail time due to his cooperation with Robert Mueller's office. Based on new information
contained in a memorandum submitted to the court this week by Flynn's attorney, Sullivan has
ordered Mueller's office to turn over all exculpatory evidence and government documents on
Flynn's case by mid-day Friday. Sullivan is also requesting any documentation regarding the
first interviews conducted by former anti-Trump agent Peter Strzok and FBI Agent Joe Pientka
-known by the FBI as 302s- which were found to be dated more than seven months after the
interviews were conducted on Jan. 24, 2017, a violation of FBI policy, say current and former
FBI officials familiar with the process. According to information contained in Flynn's
memorandum, the interviews were dated Aug. 22, 2017.
Read Gritz's letter below... (emphasis added)
The Honorable Emmet G. Sullivan. December 5, 2018 U.S. District Court for the District of
Columbia
333 Constitution Avenue, N.W.
Washington D.C. 20001
Re: Sentencing of Lt. General Michael T. Flynn (Ret.)
Dear Judge Sullivan:
I am submitting my letter directly since Mike Flynn's attorney has refused to submit it as
well as letters submitted by other individuals. I feel you need to hear from someone who was an
FBI Special Agent who not only worked with Mike, but also has personally witnessed and reported
unethical & sometimes illegal tactics used to coerce targets of investigations externally
and internally.
About Myself and FBI Career
For 16 years, I proudly served the American people as a Special Agent working diligently on
significant terrorism cases which earned noteworthy results and fostered substantial
interagency cooperation. Prior to serving in the FBI I was a Juvenile Probation Officer in
Camden, NJ. Currently, I am a Senior Information Security Metrics and Reporting Analyst with
Discover Financial Services in the Chicago Metro area. I have recently been named as a Senior
Fellow to the London Center for Policy Research.
While in the FBI, I served as a Special Agent, Supervisory Special Agent, Assistant
Inspector, Unit Chief, and a Senior Liaison Officer to the CIA. I served on the NSC's Hostage
and Personnel Working Group and brought numerous Americans out of captivity and was part of the
interagency team to codify policies outlining the whole of government approach to hostage
cases.
In November 2007, I was selected over 26 other candidates to become the Supervisory Special
Agent, CT Extraterritorial Squad; Washington Field Office (WFO) in Washington, DC. At WFO, I
led a squad of experts in extraterritorial evidence collection, overseas investigations,
operational security during terrorist attacks/events, and overseas criminal investigations. I
coordinated and managed numerous high profile investigations (Blackwater, Chuckie Taylor,
Robert Levinson, and other pivotal cases) comprised of teams from US and foreign intelligence,
military, and law enforcement agencies. I was commended for displaying comprehensive leadership
performance under pressure, extensive teamwork skills, while conducting critical investigative
analysis within and outside the FBI.
In December 2009, I was promoted to GS-15 Unit Chief (UC) of the Executive Strategy Unit,
Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate (WMDD). While the UC, I codified the WMDD five-year
strategic plan, formulated goals and objectives throughout the division, while translating the
material into a directorate scorecard with cascading measurements reflecting functional and
operational unit areas. This was the only time in Washington, DC when I did not work with of
for McCabe.
From September to December 2010, I was selected as the FBI's top candidate to represent the
FBI, and the USG in a rigorous, intellectually stimulating; 12 week course for civilian
government officials, military officers, and government academics at the George C. Marshall
Center in Garmisch, Germany, Executive Program in Advanced Security Studies. The class was
comprised of 141 participants from 43 countries.
I have received numerous recommendations and commendations for my professionalism, liaison
and interpersonal ability and experience . Additionally, I have been rated Excellent or
Outstanding for my entire career, to include by Andrew McCabe when I was stationed at the
Washington Field Office. Further, other awards of note are: West Chester University 2005 Legacy
of Leadership recipient, Honored with House of Representatives Citation for Exemplary record of
Service, Leadership, and Achievements: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and Awarded with a framed
Horn of Africa blood chit from the Department of Defense and Office of the DASD (POW/MPA/MIA)
for my work in bringing Americans Out of captivity, "Patriot, Law Enforcement Warrior, and
Friend."
Length of Association with Flynn, McCabe, and Mueller
I met Michael Flynn in 2005, while working in the Counterterrorism Division (CTD) at FBI
Headquarters (FBIHQ).
I met then Supervisory Special Agent Andrew McCabe, when he reported to CTD at FBIHQ, around
the same time. McCabe subsequently was the Assistant Section Chief over my unit, my Assistant
Special Agent in Charge at the Washington Field Office, and the Assistant Director (AD) over
CTD when I encountered the discrimination and McCabe spearheaded the retaliation personally
(according to documentation) against me.
I have known both men for 12-13 years and worked directly with both throughout my career.
They are on the opposite spectrum of each other with regard to truthfulness, temperament, and
ethics, both professionally and personally.
I regularly briefed former FBI Director and Special Prosecutor Mueller on controversial and
complex cases and attended Deputies meetings at the White house with then Deputy Director
Pistole. I got along with both and trusted both. Watching what has been done to Mike and
knowing someone on the 7th floor had to have notified Mueller of my situation (Pistole had
retired), has been significantly distressing to me.
Lt.G. Michael T. Flynn:
Mike and I were counterparts on a DOJ-termed ground-breaking initiative which served as a
model for future investigations, policies, legislation and FBI programs in the Terrorist Use of
the Internet. For this multi-faceted and leading-edge joint operation, I was commended by Gen.
Stanley McChrystal, Gen. Keith Alexander (NSA Director), and LtG. Michael Flynn as well as
others for leading the FBI's pivotal participation in this dynamic and innovative interagency
operation. I received two The National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citation (NIMUC) I for my
role in this operation. The NIMUC is an award of the National Intelligence Awards Program, for
contributions to the United States Intelligence Community.
Mick Flynn has consistently and candidly been honest and straightforward with me since the
day I met him in 2005. He has been a mentor and someone I trust to give me frank advice when I
ask for his opinion. His caring nature has shown through especially when he saw me being torn
apart by the FBI and he felt compelled to write a letter in support of me. He further took the
extra step to comment on my character in an NPR article and interview exposing the wrongdoings
in my case and others who have stood up for truth and against discrimination/retaliation.
Senator Grassley also commented on my behalf. NPR characterized this action against me as a
"warning shot" to individuals who stood up to individuals such as McCabe.
The day after I resigned from the FBI, while I was crying, Mike reached out and
congratulated me on my early retirement. I really needed to hear that from someone I respected
so much. His support for the last 13 years has been unparalleled and extremely valuable in
helping me get through the trauma of betrayal, unethical behavior, illegal activity executed
against me and to rebuild my life. Additionally, his support has helped my family in dealing
with their painful emotions regarding my situation. My parents wanted me to pass on to you that
they are blessed that I have had a compassionate and supportive individual on my side
throughout this trying time.
Mike has been a respected leader by his peers and by FBI Agents and Analysts who have
interacted with him. I personally feel he is the finest leader I have ever worked with or for
in my career. Our continued friendship and subsequent friendship with his family has helped all
of us cope with the stress a situation like this puts on individuals and families.
It is so very painful to watch an American hero, and my friend, torn apart like this. His
family has had to endure what no family should have to. I know this because of the damaging
effect my case had on my parent's health, finances, and emotional well-being. Mike and I both
had to sell our houses due to legal fees, endured smear campaigns (mostly by the same
individual, McCabe). I ended up being deemed homeless by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was
on public assistance and endured extensive health and emotional damage due to the retaliation.
Mike kept in touch and kept me motivated. He has always reached out to help me with whatever he
could.
The Process is the Punishment
Thomas Fitton of Judicial Watch commented to me that the "Process is the punishment." This
is the most accurate description I have heard regarding the time Mike has gone through with
this process and the year and a half I was ostracized and idled before I resigned. This process
is one which many FBI employees, current, retired and former, feel was brought to the FBI by
Mueller and he subsequently brought this to the Special Prosecutor investigation.
It also fostered the behavior among FBI "leadership" which we find ourselves shocked at when
revealed on a daily basis. Is this the proper way to seek justice? I say no. I swore to uphold
the Constitution while protecting the civil rights of the American people. I believe many
individuals involved in Mike's case have lost their way and could care less about protection of
due process, civil and legal rights of who they are targeting. Mike has had extensive
punishment throughout this process. This process has punished him harder than anyone else
could.
Andrew McCabe
I believe I have a unique inside view of the mannerisms surrounding Andrew McCabe, other FBI
Executive Management and Former Director Mueller, as well as the unethical and coercive tactics
they use, not to seek the truth, but to coerce pleas or admissions to end the pain, as I call
it. They destroy lives for their own agendas instead of seeking the truth for the American
people. Candor is something that should be encouraged and used by leadership to have necessary
and continued improvement. Under Mueller, it was seen as a threat and viciously opposed by
those he pulled up in the chain of command.
I am explaining this because numerous Agents have expressed the need for you to know
McCabe's and Mueller's pattern of "target and destroy" has been utilized on many others,
without regard for policies and laws. I, myself, am a casualty of this reprehensible behavior
and I have spoken to well over 150 other FBI individuals who are casualties as well.
I am the individual who filed the Hatch Act complaint against McCabe and provided
significant evidentiary documents obtained via FOIA, open source, and information from current,
former, and retired Special Agents. The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) asked why my filing of
the complaint was delayed from the actual acts. I said I personally thought I was providing
additional information to what should have been an automatic referral to OSC by FBI OPR. I was
notified I was the only complainant. This illustrates not only a fatal flaw in OPR AD Candice
Will not making the appropriate and crucial referral, but also shows the fear of those within
the FBI to report individuals like McCabe for fear of retaliation.
While serving at the CIA, detailed by the FBI in January 2012, I was responsible for
overseas investigations, as opposed to Continental United States-based (CONUS) cases.
Unfortunately, during my assignment at the CIA, I encountered extensive discrimination by two
FBI Special Agents and subsequently, in 2012, I filed an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)
complaint. Instead of addressing the issues, then CTD Assistant Director Andrew McCabe chose to
authorize a retaliatory Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) investigation against me,
five days after my EEO contact. The OPR referral he signed was authored by the two individuals
I had filed the EEO complaint against. In his signed sworn statement, McCabe admitted he knew I
had filed or was going to file the EEO.
Numerous members of my department at the CIA requested to be spoken with by CTD executive
management, regarding my work ethic and accomplishments. However, CTD, Inspection Division, and
OPR disregarded the list of names and contact numbers I submitted. This is an example of
knowing you are being targeted and the truth is not being sought.
Although my time at this position was short, I was commended by my CIA direct supervisor
for: "having already contributed more than your predecessor in the short time you have been
here." My predecessor had been assigned to the post for 18 months; I had been there four
months.
In contrast and showing lack of candor, McCabe wrote on official documents the following
statement, contradicting the actual direct supervisor I worked with daily:
"SA Gritz had to be removed from a prior position in an interagency environment, due to
inappropriate communications and general performance issues"
This is one of many comments McCabe used to discredit my reputation and to ostracize me.
McCabe knew me as someone who told the truth, worked hard, got results, and was always willing
to be flexible when needed. He was also acutely aware of the excellent relationships I had
formed in the USG interagency due to comments made by individuals from numerous agencies. Yet,
he continued to make false statements on official documents. He has done this to numerous other
very valuable FBI employees, destroying their careers and lives. He used similar tactics of
lies against Flynn. It should be noted, McCabe was very aware of my professional association
with Mike Flynn.
In July 5, 2012, I was involuntarily pulled back to CTD from the CIA. I was told McCabe made
the decision. A year and a month later, I resigned from the job I absolutely loved and was good
at. All because of the lack of candor of numerous individuals within the FBI.
Unethical and
dishonest investigative tactics
Throughout the last year, I have kept abreast of the revelations surrounding anything
related to Mike's case. I believe, from my years at the FBI and in exposing corruption and
discrimination, the circumstances surrounding the targeting, investigation, leaking, and
coercion of him to plea are all consistent with the unethical process I and many others have
witnessed at the FBI. The charge which Mike Flynn plead to was the result of deception,
intimidation, and bias/agenda. Simply, Mike is being branded a convicted felon due to an
unethical and dishonest investigation by people who were malicious, vindictive, and corrupt.
They wished to silence Mike, like they had once silenced me.
The American people have read the Strzok/Page text messages, the conflicting testimony and
lack of candor statements of former Director Comey, the perceived overstepping of the
reasonable scope of the Special Prosecutor's investigation, the extensive unethical,
untruthful, and outright illegal behavior of Andrew McCabe, to include slanderous statements
against Flynn, and the facts found within FOIA released documents and Congressional testimony.
As a former/retired Agent, I have combed through every piece of information regarding Mike's
case, as if I was combing through evidence in the hundreds of cases I have successfully handled
while in the FBI.
The publicly reported Brady material alone, in this case, outweighs any statement given by
any FBI Agent (we now know at least one FD-302 was changed), Special Prosecutor investigator
report, and any other party still aggressively seeking that this case remain and be sentenced
as a felony. Quite simply, I cannot see justice being served by branding LtG. Michael Flynn a
convicted felon, when the truth is still being revealed while policies, ethics, and laws have
been violated by those pursuing this case.
We now know all FBI employees involved in Mike Flynn's case have either been fired, forced
to resign or forced to retire because of their excessive lack of candor, punitive biases,
leaking of information, and extensive cover-up of their deeds.
Summation
Michael Flynn has always displayed overwhelming candor and forthrightness. One of the main
individuals involved in his case is Andrew McCabe, who used similar tactics against me in my
case, of which Mike Flynn defended me by penning a letter of character reference and is a
witness. Seeing McCabe was named as a Responding Management Official in my case, he should have
recused himself with anything having to do with a character witness on my behalf against him
and DOJ.
I'm told by numerous people, but have been unable to confirm, that McCabe was asked why he
was so viciously going after Flynn; my name was mentioned. I do know, from experience with
McCabe, he is a vindictive individual and I have no doubt Mike's support of me fueled McCabe's
disdain and personally vindictive aggressive unethical activities in this case . It matches his
behavior in my case.
Reliable fact-finding is essential to procedural due process and to the accuracy and
uniformity of sentencing. I'm unsure if the fact-finding in this case is reliable, nor do I
think we currently have all the facts.
The punishment which LtG. Flynn has already endured this past year, due to the nature of the
case, legal fees and reputation damage, is punishment enough. He is a true patriot, a loving
husband and father, a devoted grandfather, a trusted friend, and has a close knit family made
up of compassionate and honest individuals. To be branded a felon, is a major hit to a hero who
protected the American people for 33 years. I do not think society would benefit from Mike
Flynn going to jail nor being branded as a convicted felon. Not knowing the sentencing
guidelines for this charge but if there is any chance that the case can be downgraded to a
misdemeanor, this would be an act of justice that numerous Americans need to see to stay
hopeful for further justice.
This lady is seriously brave. She confirms one more reason i strongly support our Second
Amendment; it's to protect us from tyrants and corrupt people like McCabe, Ohr, Comey and
Mueller. Oh yes. I almost forget Rosenstein who should be hung for treason also.
WOW...all this time I had been asking where are the whistle blowers and kept saying,
certainly not all the FBI are this corrupt -and further asked are they being threatened to
not come forward?"
Well, the later sure seems true when you consider Ms. Gristz statements, particularly "
the fear of those within the FBI to report individuals like McCabe for fear of retaliation.
"
This is the level of corruption that ought to bring this entire cabal to their knees and
place them behind bars. Hopefully Judge Sullivan's intuitions will be bolstered by Ms.
Gristz' letter.
The FBI is corrupt to the core...from top to bottom. If she joined the FBI to "uphold the
Constitution" or "serve the American People" or some other horseshit then that was her first
mistake. The FBI is a completely corrupt & unconstitutional organization that protects
only the (((globalists))) and other enemies of freedom. The Hoover Buliding should be
padlocked and all of the agents of evil put on trial for treason.
Flynn was an example to the rest of the Trump supporters. His guilt or innocense was/is
meaningless and irrlevant to the Prog Attack Dogs. The message was/is clear:
"We are the Power. Resistance is futile. Bend your knee or we will destroy you."
It is prudent for reasonable people to believe that the Progs have spent the past couple
years destroying evidence that can be used against their gods (Obama, Clinton, Soros, etc.)
and their cohorts.
There is no penalty or negative consequence for the Mueller team who engaged in
"unethical" activity. None of them will have to answer to anyone or disgorge the millions of
dollars in "fees" they have been paid by the Sheeple.
All Progs must hang.
Christopher Wray must hang next.
So much for peace that neoliberal globalization should supposedly bring...
Notable quotes:
"... We face a world of multiple wars some leading to direct global conflagrations and others that begin as regional conflicts but quickly spread to big power confrontations. ..."
"... In our times the US is the principal power in search of world domination through force and violence. Washington has targeted top level targets, namely China, Russia, Iran; secondary objectives Afghanistan, North and Central Africa, Caucuses and Latin America ..."
"... China is the prime enemy of the US for several economic, political and military reasons: China is the second largest economy in the world; its technology has challenged US supremacy it has built global economic networks reaching across three continents. China has replaced the US in overseas markets, investments and infrastructures. ..."
"... In response the US has resorted to a closed protectionist economy at home and an aggressive military led imperial economy abroad. ..."
"... The first line of attack are Chinese exports to the US and its vassals. Secondly, is the expansion of overseas bases in Asia. Thirdly, is the promotion of separatist clients in Hong Kong, Tibet and among the Uighurs. Fourthly, is the use of sanctions to bludgeon EU and Asian allies into joining the economic war against China. China has responded by expanding its military security, expanding its economic networks and increasing economic tariffs on US exports ..."
"... The US economic war has moved to a higher level by arresting and seizing a top executive of China's foremost technological company, Huawei. ..."
"... Each of the three strategic targets of the US are central to its drive for global dominance; dominating China leads to controlling Asia; regime change in Russia facilitates the total submission of Europe; and the demise of Iran facilitates the takeover of its oil market and US influence of Islamic world. As the US escalates its aggression and provocations we face the threat of a global nuclear war or at best a world economic breakdown. ..."
We face a world of multiple wars some
leading to direct global conflagrations and others that begin as regional conflicts but quickly spread to
big power confrontations.
We will proceed to identify 'great power'
confrontations and then proceed to discuss the stages of 'proxy' wars with world war consequences.
In our times the US is the principal
power in search of world domination through force and violence. Washington has targeted top level targets,
namely China, Russia, Iran; secondary objectives Afghanistan, North and Central Africa, Caucuses and Latin
America.
China is the prime enemy of the US for
several economic, political and military reasons: China is the second largest economy in the world; its
technology has challenged US supremacy it has built global economic networks reaching across three
continents. China has replaced the US in overseas markets, investments and infrastructures. China has built
an alternative socio-economic model which links state banks and planning to private sector priorities. On
all these counts the US has fallen behind and its future prospects are declining.
In response the US has resorted to a
closed protectionist economy at home and an aggressive military led imperial economy abroad. President Trump
has declared a
tariff
war on China; and multiple separatist and propaganda war; and aerial
and maritime encirclement of China's mainland
The first line of attack are Chinese
exports to the US and its vassals. Secondly, is the expansion of overseas bases in Asia. Thirdly, is the
promotion of separatist clients in Hong Kong, Tibet and among the Uighurs. Fourthly, is the use of sanctions
to bludgeon EU and Asian allies into joining the economic war against China. China has responded by
expanding its military security, expanding its economic networks and increasing economic tariffs on US
exports.
The US economic war has moved to a higher
level by arresting and seizing a top executive of China's foremost technological company, Huawei.
The White House has moved up the ladder
of aggression from sanctions to extortion to kidnapping. Provocation, is one step up from military
intimidation. The nuclear fuse has been lit.
Russia faces similar threats to its
domestic economy, its overseas allies, especially China and Iran as well as the US renunciation of
intermediate nuclear missile agreement
Iran faces oil sanctions, military
encirclement and attacks on proxy allies including in Yemen, Syria and the Gulf region Washington relies on
Saudi Arabia, Israel and paramilitary terrorist groups to apply military and economic pressure to undermine
Iran's economy and to impose a 'regime change'.
Each of the three strategic targets of
the US are central to its drive for global dominance; dominating China leads to controlling Asia; regime
change in Russia facilitates the total submission of Europe; and the demise of Iran facilitates the takeover
of its oil market and US influence of Islamic world. As the US escalates its aggression and provocations we
face the threat of a global nuclear war or at best a world economic breakdown.
Wars by Proxy
The US has targeted a second tier of
enemies, in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
In Latin America the US has waged
economic warfare against Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. More recently it has applied political and economic
pressure on Bolivia. To expand its dominance Washington has relied on its vassal allies, including Brazil,
Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Argentina and Paraguay as well as right-wing elites throughout the region
As in numerous other cases of regime
change Washington relies on corrupt judges to rule against President Morales, as well as US foundation
funded NGO's; dissident indigenous leaders and retired military officials. The US relies on local political
proxies to further US imperial goals is to give the appearance of a 'civil war' rather than gross US
intervention.
In fact, once the so-called 'dissidents'
or 'rebels' establish a foot hole, they 'invite' US military advisers, secure military aid and serve as
propaganda weapons against Russia, China or Iran – 'first tier' adversaries.
In recent years US proxy conflicts have
been a weapon of choice in the Kosovo separatist war against Serbia; the Ukraine coup of 2014 and war
against Eastern Ukraine; the Kurd take over of Northern Iraq and Syria; the US backed separatist Uighurs
attack in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
The US has established 32 military bases
in Africa, to coordinate activities with local warlords and plutocrats. Their proxy wars are discarded as
local conflict between 'legitimate' regimes and Islamic terrorists, tribality and tyrants.
The objective of proxy wars are
threefold. They serve as 'feeders' into larger territorial wars
encircling
China, Russia
and Iran.
Secondly, proxy wars are 'testing
grounds' to measure the vulnerability and responsive capacity of the targeted strategic adversary, i.e.
Russia, China and Iran.
Thirdly, the proxy wars are 'low cost'
and 'low risk' attacks on strategic enemies. The lead up to a major confrontation by stealth.
Equally important 'proxy wars' serve as
propaganda tools, associating strategic adversaries as 'expansionist authoritarian' enemies of 'western
values'.
Conclusion
US empire builders engage in multiple
types of aggression directed at imposing a unipolar world. At the center are trade wars against China;
regional military conflicts with Russia and economic sanctions against Iran.
These large scale, long-term strategic
weapons are complemented by proxy wars, involving regional vassal states which are designed to erode the
economic bases of counting allies of anti-imperialist powers.
Hence, the US attacks China directly via
tariff wars and tries to sabotage its global "Belt and Road' infrastructure projects linking China with 82
counties.
Likewise, the US attacks Russian allies
in Syria via proxy wars, as it did with Iraq, Libya and the Ukraine.
Isolating strategic anti-imperial power
via regional wars, sets the stage for the 'final assault' – regime change by cop or nuclear war.
However, the US quest for world
domination has so far taken steps which have failed to isolate or weaken its strategic adversaries.
China moves forward with its global
infrastructure programs: the trade war has had little impact in isolating it from its principal markets.
Moreover, the US policy has increased China's role as a leading advocate of 'open trade' against President
Trump's protectionism.
ORDER IT NOW
Likewise, the tactics of encircling and
sanctioning Russia has deepened ties between Moscow and Beijing. The US has increased its nominal 'proxies'
in Latin America and Africa but they all depend on trade and investments from China. This is especially true
of agro-mineral exports to China.
Notwithstanding the limits of US power
and its failure to topple regimes, Washington has taken moves to compensate for its failures by escalating
the threats of a global war. It kidnaps Chinese economic leaders; it moves war ships off China's coast; it
allies with neo-fascist elites in the Ukraine. It threatens to bomb Iran. In other words the US political
leaders have embarked on adventurous policies always on the verge of igniting one, too, many nuclear fuses.
It is easy to imagine how a failed trade
war can lead to a nuclear war; a regional conflict can entail a greater war.
Can we prevent World War 3? I believe it
will happen. The US economy is built on fragile foundations; its elites are deeply divided. Its main allies
in France and the UK are in deep crises. The war mongers and war makers lack popular support. There are
reasons to hope!
I disagree. The parasitic terror regime that runs washington believe they can win a nuclear war, i have no
hope left for peace. They need a culling of the "useless eaters", we are stealing the food out of their poor
frightened children`s mouths by existing.
Eric Zuesse wrote a decent article yesterday at the Saker blog about the US nuclear forces and its owners
wet dream.
"The U.S. Government's Plan Is to Conquer Russia by a Surprise Invasion"
The actions of nato/EU/UK/ISR/KSA etc certainly supports his article, at least in my opinion.
The US, and the West, by instigating wars elsewhere, and selling weapons to
those, destroy countries and prosperity abroad. Those living in target countries find themselves miserable,
with loss of everything. It is only natural that they may try to escape a living hell by emigrating to the
West.
People in the US and the West in general will not want mass immigration, and with good reason; but if you
were in a war torn country or an impoverished country (as a result of western "help") you would also attempt
to move away from the bombs, etc.
If the West left the rest of the world alone (in terms of their regimes and in terms of their weapons),
they might prosper and no longer need to run away from their home countries.
The sanctions and embargoes have failed in the past, when China was much weaker, so we can be quite
confident that they will fail again, and quickly, as this timeline suggests:
September 3, 2018
:
Huawei unveils Kirin 980 CPU, the world's first commercial 7nm system-on-chip (SoC) and the first to use
Cortex-A76 cores, dual neural processing units, Mali G76 GPU, a 1.4 Gbps LTE modem and supports faster RAM.
With 20 percent faster performance and 40 percent less power consumption compared to 10nm systems, it has
twice the performance of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 and Apple's A11 while delivering noticeable battery life
improvement. Its Huawei-patented modem has the world's fastest Wi-Fi and its GPS receiver taps L5 frequency
to deliver 10cm. positioning.
September 5, 2018
. China's front-end fab capacity will account for 16 percent of the world's
semiconductor capacity this year, increasing to 20 percent by 2020.
September 15, 2018.
China controls one third of 5G patents and has twice as many installations
operating as the rest of the world combined.
September 21, 2018
. China has reached global technological parity and now has twelve of the
world's top fifty IC design houses (China's SMIC is fourth, Huawei's HiSilicon is seventh), and twenty-one
percent of global IC design revenues. Roger Luo, TSMC.
October 2, 2018
. Chinese research makes up 18.6 percent of global STEM peer-reviewed papers, ahead
of the US at 18 percent. "The fact that China's article output is now the largest is very significant. It's
been predicted for a while, but there was a view this was not likely to happen until 2025," said Michael
Mabe, head of STM.
October 14, 2018
. Huawei announces 7 nm Ascend 910 chipset for data centers, twice as powerful as
Nvidia's v100 and the first AI IP chip series to natively provide optimal TeraOPS per watt in all scenarios.
Available 2Q19.
October 7, 2018
: China becomes largest recipient of FDI in H1, attracting an estimated 70 billion
U.S. dollars, according to UNCTAD.
October 8, 2018:
Taiwan's Foxconn moves its major semiconductor maker and five integrated circuit
design companies to Jinan, China.
October 22, 2018
. China becomes world leader in venture capital, ahead of the US and almost twice
the rest of the world's $53.4 billion YTD. The Crunchbase report says the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the
world is undergoing a major transformation: it is now driven by China instead of the US.
Isolating strategic anti-imperial power via regional wars, sets the stage for the 'final assault' –
regime change by cop or nuclear war
good article.
Only idiot can believe that nuclear war can be won, IMHO. Elites aren't suicidal, oh no. On the contrary.
Can they make a mistake and cause that war, definitely.
Which brings us to the important part:
Can we prevent World War 3? I believe it will happen. The US economy is built on fragile foundations;
its elites are deeply divided. Its main allies in France and the UK are in deep crises. The war mongers
and war makers lack popular support.
Agree, but, that's
exactly
the reason I disagree with:
There are reasons to hope!
No need to be pedantic, of course there is always a reason for hope.
But, I see it as
so
fertile ground for making
The MISTAKE
.
Can we prevent World War 3? I believe it will happen. The US economy is built on fragile foundations;
its elites are deeply divided. Its main allies in France and the UK are in deep crises. The war mongers
and war makers lack popular support. There are reasons to hope!
It's when the elite war mongers' backs are up against the wall that they come up with a cleverly designed
false flag attack to rally public support for war. They are more dangerous now than ever.
Agree about Russia and China, however Iran needs to be viewed not as a play for oil or the Islamic crowd but
driven wholly and solely by Israel. Iran is not a threat to US in any context, only Israel.
question:
If the relatively small tariffs on Chinese goods amount to 'direct attacks on China', then what are the
massive tariffs by China on US goods?
The "Chess men" behind "The Wall Street Economy" have stated a few times that the only way to remain the
dominant economy is to first: convince rivals that resistance is futile, and second:
to atomize any
potential rival
(Ghaddaffi is a clear example).
Breaking up Russia has been on the to-do list for
decades, and I believe that the Chess Men have no idea what to do about containing China, and are clearly
flat-footed, and
desperate
kidnapping a Chinese business executive.
The Wall Street Economy depended on cheap Chinese labor it's own profits, and that was Ok until .?
Until the writing on the Wall became ledgible .
The smell of genuine fear is in the air.
" The war mongers and war makers lack popular support. There are reasons to hope! "
Is popular support
needed to get a people in a war mood ?
Both Pearl Harbour and Sept 11 demonstrate, in my opinion, that it is not very difficult to create a war
mood.
Yet, if another Sept 11 would do the trick, I wonder.
Sept 11 has been debated without without interruption since Sept 11.
After the 1946 USA Senate investigation into Pearl Harbour the USA government succeeded in preventing a
similar discussion.
Until now the west, Deep State, NATO, EU did not succeed in provoking Russia or China.
Each time they tried something, in my opinion they did this several times, Russia showed its military
superiority, at the same time taking care not to hurt public opinion in the west.
Is not it amazing that the morally miserable US, a "power in search of world domination through force and
violence," is officially governed by self-avowed pious X-tians. What kind of corruption among the high-level
clergy protects the satanists Pompeo, Bush, Rice, Clinton, Obama, Blair and such from excommunication?
"Washington does little to nothing to restore peace and help the devastated region to recover from the
long war, while its [US] airstrikes
continue to rack up civilian deaths
At the same time, the US
military presence at the Al-Tanf airbase and the "armed gangs" around it prevent refugees from returning
home."
– Nothing new. The multi-denominational Syria has been pounded by the US-supported "moderate" terrorists
(armed with US-provided arms and with UK-provided chemical weaponry) to satisfy the desires of
Israel-firsters, arm-dealers and the multitude of war-profiteers that have been fattening their pockets at
the US/UK taxpayers' expense.
"Timber Sycamore" [initiated by Obama] is the most important arms trafficking operation in History. It
involves at least 17 governments. The transfer of weapons, meant for jihadist organizations, is carried out
by Silk Way Airlines, a Azerbaďdjan public company of cargo planes."
@Godfree Roberts
Huawei can announce whatever, there are much more experienced adversaries(IBM, intel and ARM) who can`t beat
nV in computation, and especially in integration of silicon. Guess who`s running inference and computer
vision in all these car autopilots.
I think we could have an economic collapse like the Soviet Union had , or like Argentina had in 2001 with
the " corralito "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito
.
Being the complex and global society that we are , it would be a disaster , it would produce hunger ,
misery and all types of local wars .
"Notwithstanding the limits of US power and its failure to topple regimes "
Have to agree with that
statement. Seriously, wherein is this vaunted "superpower" that our American politicians always yap about?
All I've seen in my lifetime is our military getting its butt kicked in Cuba, Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq,
Afghanistan. What, besides insanity and hubris, makes them think they could win anything much less a war
against Iran, China or Russia?
Mostly accurate, but 'closed protectionist society' ! Hardly. It's still very difficult to buy any
manufactured goods made in this country. Of course this is part of the World economic circle countries use
the US Dollar for all trade. They need dollars. We can print them and receive real goods in return. This has
been going around and around for decades. It may come to an end in the not-too-distant future, but it has a
lot of inertia.
@jilles dykstra
"Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in
Germany. That is understood. But, after all, IT IS THE LEADERS of the country who determine the policy and
it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship,
or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the
bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING ATTACKED, and denounce
the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY
COUNTRY."
The only threat to patriotic Americans is Zionism which has ruled the U.S. since it took control over the
money supply and the taxes via the privately owned Zionist FED and IRS and has given America nothing to wars
and economic destruction since the FED and IRS were put in place by the Zionist banking kabal in 1913 and
both are UNCONSTITUTIONAL!
The threat is not from China or Russia or Iran etc., the threat is from within
the U.S. government which is controlled in every facet by the Zionists and dual citizens and is as foreign
to the American people as if it were from MARS!
Until the American people wake up to the fact that we are slaves on a Zionist plantation and are used as
pawns in the Zionist goal of a satanic Zionist NWO and abolish the FED and IRS and break the chains of
slavery that the FED and IRS have place upon us, until then nothing will change and the wars and economic
destruction by the Zionist kabal will continue!
Read The Controversy of Zion by Douglas Reed and The Committee of 300 by Dr. John Coleman and The
Protocols of Zion, to see the Zionist satanic NWO plan.
Lost me at Kurd takeover of northern Iraq/Syria. The Kurds have defacto owned those areas since 1991, and
earlier. Saddam gassing the Kurds didn't accomplish anything except for making himself a target, no Arab
lived in those areas, the Kurds would kill them.
Nov 28, 2018 Belt & Road Billionaire in Massive Bribery Scandal
The bribery trial of Dr. Patrick Ho, a
pitchman for a Chinese energy company, lifts the lid on how the Chinese regime relies on graft to cut Belt
and Road deals in its global push for economic and geopolitical dominance.
I agree with Bob Sykes' commentary over on Instapundit:
Well, our "anti-ISIS" model in eastern Syria consists of defending ISIS against attacks by the Syrian
government, allowing them to pump and export Syrian oil for their profit, arming them and allowing them
to recruit new fighters. I suppose that means we should be arming the Taliban.
ISIS was created by the CIA to fight against Assad. But they slipped the leash and became the fighting
force for the dissident Sunni Arabs all along the Euphrates Valley. We only began to oppose them when
their rebellion reached the outskirts of Baghdad, and even then the bulk of the fighting was done by
Iraq's Shias and Iran. Now we are transferring them, or many of them, into secure (for ISIS) areas of
Iraq.
The three U.S. presidents, six secretaries of defense and five chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff are, in fact, war criminals, in exactly the same sense that Hitler, Goebels, Goering, Himmler et
al. were war criminals.
Those presidents, secretaries and generals launched wars of aggression
against Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Yemen not one of which threatened us
in any way. They engineered coups d'état against two friendly governments, Egypt and Turkey.
Now the
fake American, anti-American neocons want to attack Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and even Russia and
China.
Green needs to get his head out of his arse. We, the US, are the great rogue terrorist state. We are
the evil empire. We are the chief source of death and destruction in the world. How many hundreds of
thousands of civilians have we murdered in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia? How many cities have
we bombed flat like Raqqa and Mosel. Putin is a saint compared to any US President.
Iran has always been at the center of the Great Game, the key square on the board to block
Eurasia.You must either control Afghanistan AND Pakistan or Iran.
With Pakistan now in the SCO, Iran is a US imperative.
Israels antipathy is secondary and a useful foil, not the primary motive.
Read MacKinder, the imperial power has changed, not the strategy.
How is it possible for anyone to write an article titled:
A World of Multiple Detonators of Global Wars
without mentioning the Principal Detonator of Global Wars?? The Elephant!
The United States of America is no longer a Sovereign Nation.
The Local Political Power Elite (C. Wright Mills term), serve, are Minions, of the Zionist Jewish
Financial Terrorist Initiators and Controllers of the Global New World Order.
I would express this point in stronger terms, but I have not yet finished my coffee. The "Mulitiple
Detonators" Petras discusses are useless unless Triggered by the Global Controllers.
A Slight Digression: maybe:
Petras may have written his exposé this way, understanding that he might safely avoid mention of the
anti-Semitic (they hate Palestinians and other Arabs – actual Semites), Zionist Land Thieves, because a
clueless Anarchist would appear and complete his article for him. If that is the case, I want half of the $
Unz is paying Petras for this article.
In Conclusion: and by the number###:
1. The American Power Elite and servile Politicians in America's Knesset in Washington DC, do not go to the
Bathroom, without permission from their Zionist Oligarch masters.
2. The American Gauleters, Quislings, (better known as Traitors), serve the Rothschild and other Foreign
Oligarchs. Recently, only 1, of 100 'Senators' demanded that there be a discussion of the Bill to send
another $35 Billion gift to the Zionist occupiers of Palestine. Poor
Senator Rand Paul
. How many ribs
of his remain to be broken?
We the American people, have one Senator. And he has a great father.
3. Textbooks, Entertainment from Hollywood (key to all mind control), even Dictionaries, have been
ruthlessly censored.
4.
Our elected Zionist slaves in Congress, and all State and local governing bodies, live in fear
of saying (accidentally), some truth, and ending up working at Walmart or 7-11, (if they are lucky).
5. Our young are effectively brainwashed in their schools; they have already been removed from their
parents.
6. Our politicians are bribed with our own tax money (re-routed by the Zionists AIPAC, etc.).
7.
The Zionist Entity has huge Financial Resources
. They should be giving us 'Financial $$ Aid,
not the other way around. Since NAFTA, we have entire cities & tons of infrastructure to rebuild.
Excuse me
: Girlfriend thinks I should go to work.
Petras, I just fleshed out your, otherwise, promising article. You must understand – that
the ethnic
cleansing – genocide, against the Palestinian Nation, by the Terrorist Zionist Oligarchs, is the greatest
single crime being committed on our Planet.
All other crimes stem from this one.
We Americans must Restore Our Republic!
John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, M L King, Malcolm X. John Lennon; we are late, but we are coming.
The threat is not from China or Russia or Iran etc., the threat is from within the U.S. government
which is controlled in every facet by the Zionists and dual citizens and is as foreign to the American
people as if it were from MARS!
One comment:
Until the American people wake up to the fact that we are slaves on a Zionist plantation and are used
as pawns in the Zionist goal of a satanic Zionist NWO and abolish the FED and IRS and break the chains of
slavery that the FED and IRS have place upon us, until then nothing will change and the wars and economic
destruction by the Zionist kabal will continue!
In order to accomplish the above
, we American Citizen Patriots – must Restore Our Republic – that,
with our Last Constitutional President,
John F. Kennedy,
was destroyed by the Zionist Oligarchs and
their American underling traitors, in a hail of bullets, on November 22, 1963.
@Miro23
" same sense that Hitler, Goebels, Goering, Himmler et al. were war criminals. "
Why were they war criminals ?
Because of the Neurenberg farce ?; farce according to the chairman of the USA Supreme Court in 1945:
Bruce Allen Murphy, 'The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection, The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme
Court Justices', New York, 1983
Churchill and Lindemann in fact murdered some two million German civilians, women, children, old men. Not a
crime ?
Churchill refused the May 1941 Rudolf Hess peace proposal, not a crime ?
FDR deliberately provoked Pearl Harbour, some 2700 casualties, his pretcxt for war, not a crime ?
900.000 German hunger deaths between the 1918 cease fire and Versailles, the British food blockade, not a
crime ?
Will these wild accusations ever stop ?
I am all for the mother of all wars; however, it isn't going to come anytime soon, nay, not in our lifetime
but when it does appear on the next century's horizon, it would be cathartic to all concerned. Rejoice!
Europe is realigning. England leaving Euro. French population is in upheaval. Eventually France will leave
the Euro also.Most of German tourists now are going to Croatia. Italy is loosing tourists.
Italy living standard is declining. Germany is being pushed inevitably toward cooperation with Russia. Only
supporter of Ukraine will remain USA. Ukraine will be only burden.
Brussels power will evaporate. NATO will remain only on paper and will cease to be reality.
.
This will be great step toward peace in the world.
US is treating its allies as used toilet paper.
Obviously Kashogi was sentenced to death for high treason in absence. The sentence was carried out on Saudi
Arabia's territory. So in reality it is nobody's business.
All hula-buu did happen because he was a reporter working for warmongering Zionist New york times.
@Durruti
I agree with you partly, especially when it comes to the US regarding Zionism and the power of the Israel
lobby to influence US foreign policy and even domestic policy.
But when it comes to Global governance, you have a somewhat narrow minded approach.
Most of the ills today that happen in the world, is driven by the NEW WORLD ORDER OF NEOLIBERAL
GLOBALIZATION.
Unrelated phenomena, such as the destruction in the Middle East (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria), the
destruction of Yugoslavia, the coup in Ukraine and the Greek economic catastrophe are a consequence of this
NWO expansion. NWO expansion is the phasing out of national sovereignty (through economic and/or military
violence) and its replacement by a kind of transnational sovereignty administered by a Transnational Elite.
This is the network of the elites mainly based in the G7 countries, which control the world economic and
political/ military institutions (WTO, IMF, World Bank, EU, European Central Bank, NATO, UN and so on), as
well as the global media that set the agenda of the 'world community'.
The US is an important part of this since it provides the Military Means to integrate countries that do not
"comply" with the NWO dictates.
The Zionists carry a lot of blame and are part of that drive for this NWO, but there are others, most of
them in the US and Europe.
Here's a good link to an article if you have time, with good info about NWO & Trasnational corporations
that are mainly to blame about all the worlds and misery in our world today.
@WHAT
back door Intel
,
embedded ARM
Open source Red Hat-IBM
Hummm?.
I am not so sure, Mr. What. Experience may not mean much to abused IAI consumers. even if IAI catches up
to the exponential fundamentals achieved by Huawei consumers might prefer back-door-free equipment and
Operating Systems.
Russian times reported a few weeks ago that Russia has a quite different new processor and an OS that
does not use any IAI stuff and is developing a backup Internet for Russians which it expects to expand
regionally,
"What we have then, are criminal syndicates masquerading as philanthropic enterprises
Norman Dodd, director of research for the (U.S.) REECE COMMITTEE in its attempt to investigate tax exempt
foundations, stated:
"The Foundation world is a coordinated, well-directed system, the purpose of which is to ensure that the
wealth of our country shall be used to divorce it from the ideas which brought it into being."
The Rothschilds rule the U.S. through the foundations, the Council on foreign Relations, and the Federal
Reserve System, with no serious challenges to their power. Expensive 'political campaigns' are routinely
conducted, with carefully screened candidates who are pledged to the program of the WORLD ORDER. Should they
deviate from the program, they would have an 'accident', be framed on a sex charge, or indicted on some
financial irregularity.
Senator Moynihan stated in his book, "Loyalties", "A British friend, wise in the ways of the world, put
it thus: "They are now on page 16 of the Plan." Moynihan prudently did not ask what page 17 would bring.
"Tavistock's pioneer work in behavioural science along Freudian lines of 'controlling' humans established
it as the world center of FOUNDATION ideology.
[MORE]
Its network extends from the University of Sussex to the U.S. through the Standford Research
Institute, Esalen, MIT, Hudson Institute, HERITAGE FOUNDATION, Centre of Strategic and International
Studies at Georgetown, where State Dept personnel are trained, US Air Force Intelligence, and the Rand
and Mitre corporations.
(at the time of writing, 1992) Today the Tavistock Institute operates a $6 billion a year network
of foundations in the U.S., all of it funded by U.S. taxpayers' money. Ten major institutions are
under its direct control, with 400 subsidiaries, and 3000 other study groups and think tanks which
originate many types of programs to increase the control of the WORLD ORDER over the American people.
The personnel of the FOUNDATIONS are required to undergo indoctrination at one or more of these
Tavistock controlled institutions.
A network of secret groups – the MONT PELERIN SOCIETY, TRILATERAL COMMISSION, DITCHLEY FOUNDATION,
and CLUB OF ROME is the conduit for instructions to the Tavistock network.
Tavistock Institute developed the mass brain-washing techniques which were first used
experimentally on AMERICAN prisoners of war in KOREA.
Its experiments in crowd control methods have been widely used on the American public, a
surreptitious but nevertheless outrageous assault on human freedom by modifying individual behaviour
through topical psychology.
A German refugee, Kurt Lewin, became director of Tavistock in 1932. He came to the U.S. in 1933 as
a 'refugee', the first of many infiltrators, and set up the Harvard Psychology Clinic, which
originated the propaganda campaign to turn the American public against Germany and involve the U.S. in
WWII.
In 1938, Roosevelt executed a secret agreement with Churchill which in effect ceded U.S.
sovereignty to England, because it agreed to let Special Operations Executive control U.S. policies.
To implement this agreement, Roosevelt sent General Donovan to London for indoctrination before
setting up the OSS (now the CIA) under the aegis of SOE-SIS. The entire OSS program, as well as the
CIA has always worked on guidelines set up by the Tavistock Institute.
Tavistock Institute originated the mass civilian bombing raids [against the German people] carried
out by [the ALL LIES] Roosevelt and Churchill as a clinical experiment in mass terror, keeping records
of the results as they watched the "guinea pigs" reacting under "controlled laboratory conditions".
All Tavistock and American foundation techniques have a single goal – to break down the
psychological strength of the individual and render him helpless to oppose the dictators of the WORLD
ORDER.
Any technique which helps to break down the family unit, and family inculcated principles of
religion, honor, patriotism and sexual behaviour, is used by the Tavistock scientists as weapons of
crowd control.
The methods of Freudian psychotherapy induce permanent mental illness in those who undergo this
treatment by destabilizing their character. The victim is then advised to 'establish new rituals of
personal interactions', that is, to indulge in brief sexual encounters which actually set the
participants adrift with no stable personal relationships in their lives – destroying their ability to
establish or maintain a family.
Tavistock Institute has developed such power in the U.S. that no one achieves prominence in any
field unless he has been trained in behavioural science at Tavistock or one of its subsidiaries.
Tavistock maintains 2 schools at Frankfort, birthplace of the Rothschilds, the FRANKFURT SCHOOL, and
the Sigmund Freud Institute.
The 'experiment' in compulsory racial integration in the U.S. was organized by Ronald Lippert of
the OSS (forerunner of CIA) and the American Jewish Congress, and director of child training at the
Commission on Community Relations.
The program was designed to break down the individual's sense of personal knowledge in his
identity, his racial heritage. Through the Stanford Research Institute, Tavistock controls the
National Education Association.
The Institute of Social Research at the Natl Training Lab brain washes the leading executives of
business and government.
Another prominent Tavistock operation is the WHARTON SCHOOL OF FINANCE.
A single common denominator identifies the common Tavistock strategy – the use of drugs such as the
infamous MK Ultra program of the CIA, directed by Dr Sidney Gottlieb, in which unsuspecting CIA
officials were given LSD and their reactions studied like guinea pigs, resulting in several deaths –
no one was ever indicted.
(Source of info: author Eustace Mullins "The World Order: Our Secret Rulers" 2nd ed. 1992. He
dedicated his book "to American patriots and their passion for liberty". note: No copyright
restrictions)
@Agent76
Excellent video. More people need to see this to understand how corrupt the China Totalitarian state works
behind the scenes along with the US as part of the Globalization NWO movement to enrich the few and
impoverish the rest of the world population.
"... Anything that gets Kristol out of public life is good. Sometimes collateral damage is part of the package. ..."
"... I remember these jackasses screaming for an American Empire. How many people did they help kill with their braying for war? They pushed failed, murderous policies and showed little to no regard for the people they would use as cannon fodder. ..."
"... as Tucker Carlson noted, the Kristols, the Boots and others only really turned against Trump when he accused Bush of lying us into war in the GOP debates. That's what turned them off: the possibility that he wouldn't keep the guns blazing. ..."
"... Now they're out of a job? Gosh, too bad. I guess they should learn how to code. Maybe they need to rent a U-Haul and leave town. ..."
"... If this is a sign that neoconservatives are losing influence, I say it's a good thing ..."
"... These are the guys who are totally cool with $40k a year factory jobs going to Mexico -- that's creative destruction -- but act as if it's some kind of crisis when they lose their $200k editing job. ..."
McCarthy's analysis is sound but there are some variables he either misses or omits
concerning TWS's demise: See my "8 Thoughts" on the matter, including, for example: " TWS
was a strong voice of neoconservatism–which emerged in the 1970s as a theory, but only
matured into an applied political praxis during a post-Clinton presidency–and even
then–only after September 10, 2001 . but when Clinton lost to Trump, TWS lost a lot of
its original enemies, hence its original purpose ."
http://www.bookbread.com/2018/12/06/8-thoughts-on-the-new-york-times-article-about-the-demise-of-the-weekly-standard/
His wrongness rises almost to the level of genius: he is the Einstein of wrong
predictions, the Machiavelli of outrageous proposals ("regime change in China"), the Napoleon
of unnecessary wars.
No sorrow here. I can't forget their cheerleading for stupid neocon wars in which so many
died, or the nasty things they said about such men as Buchanan who favored a more sensible
foreign policy.
Nah, bro. I remember these jackasses screaming for an American Empire. How many people did
they help kill with their braying for war? They pushed failed, murderous policies and showed
little to no regard for the people they would use as cannon fodder.
Bear in mind this, all you liberals looking for "good conservatives", as Tucker Carlson
noted, the Kristols, the Boots and others only really turned against Trump when he accused
Bush of lying us into war in the GOP debates. That's what turned them off: the possibility
that he wouldn't keep the guns blazing.
Now they're out of a job? Gosh, too bad. I guess they should learn how to code. Maybe they
need to rent a U-Haul and leave town.
If this is a sign that neoconservatives are losing influence, I say it's a good thing. I
remember when WS first started publishing during the '96 presidential campaign and it going
all out for Steve Forbes. Flat-taxes, shining city on a hill, come one come all immigration
policy, beacon of light to the rest of the world, blah, blah, blah. While they were obsessing
about taxes and attempting to democratize the rest of the world, our culture was quickly advancing to the bottom.
These are the guys who are totally cool with $40k a year factory jobs going to Mexico --
that's creative destruction -- but act as if it's some kind of crisis when they lose their
$200k editing job.
I'm sure there are some good people there, and I feel bad for families, but Kristol,
Podhoretz and Hayes can go to hell.
From comments: "Bill Kristol is possibly the single most delusional figure in our public life. His wrongness rises almost to
the level of genius: he is the Einstein of wrong predictions, the Machiavelli of outrageous proposals ("regime change in China"),
the Napoleon of unnecessary wars. Why anyone takes him seriously, except as an example of what *not* to do, is a mystery."
Unfortunately, this does nothing to diminish the influence of neoconservative foreign policy – those writers will keep
propagandizing from the Washington Free Beacon, Washington Examiner, Commentary, National Review, etc
Notable quotes:
"... Weekly Standard ..."
"... openly despising your potential customers is never a successful business strategy. ..."
"... Stephen Hayes called Rand Paul a Russian Stooge because he didn't want a confrontational policy. This is typical of the stuff they printed. They were not interested in any sort of serious debate. They were interested in shouting down opposition to their Invade the world, Invite the world, In hoc to the world policy. ..."
"... Boo-hoo Sorry if I'm more saddened for a lot of brave men and women in uniform senselessly losing their lives over some chickenhawk writers having to find a new job on the DC cocktail circuit because they can't work for the smug, elitists ideologues anymore who used their worthless "Standard" to inspire one of the dumbest foreign policy disasters in American history ..."
The Weekly Standard is no more. Its parent company is shutting the magazine down
after 23 years. It is hard to imagine that the magazine that was the home to such greats such
as Andrew Ferguson, Matt Labash, and Christopher Caldwell no longer exists. Those are the times
in which we live.
Good riddance. The Weekly Standard peddles a brand of conservatism that has been largely
repudiated by the Republican Party's rank and fle. Rather than accept reality, self-assess,
take stock, and possibly change the WS doubled down on neoconservatism in a particularly
arrogant and insulting way. Gary (above) is absolutely correct – openly despising your
potential customers is never a successful business strategy.
Oh, yeah – Kristol wants to run for President in 2020. And this guy thinks Trump is
delusional!
No sorrow here. I can't forget their cheerleading for stupid neocon wars in which so many
died, or the nasty things they said about such men as Buchanan who favored a more sensible
foreign policy.
Stephen Hayes called Rand Paul a Russian Stooge because he didn't want a confrontational
policy. This is typical of the stuff they printed. They were not interested in any sort of
serious debate. They were interested in shouting down opposition to their Invade the world,
Invite the world, In hoc to the world policy.
Why should I mourn this jingoist publication's demise? It's not very often you see justice
apportioned in this world, but here it is, even if too little and too late.
No, this should be celebrated. The only thing that would make this better is seeing them
walked out of the building with boxes full of personal effects in hand, as security makes
sure they don't steal any office supplies.
Boo-hoo Sorry if I'm more saddened for a lot of brave men and women in uniform
senselessly losing their lives over some chickenhawk writers having to find a new job on the
DC cocktail circuit because they can't work for the smug, elitists ideologues anymore who
used their worthless "Standard" to inspire one of the dumbest foreign policy disasters in
American history . They also used their rag to trash any conservatives who disagreed
with their call for endless wars as weak Neville Chamberlins reincarnated or un-American
agents of Putin. I feel nothing but contempt for them all. Their names will live on in infamy
as a scourge to our sadly dying republic.
Polichinello knows how to pile it on: "Let them learn to code." Priceless.
However, RD is right. The loss of any publication is painful. My pain actually began when
the mechanical workers–printers, engravers, stereotypers, etc. were done in by
progress. And now I get to see friends at the former St. Pete Times get the axe.
Besides supporting that nation destroying (US and Iraq war) and being an Israel Firster, Mr.
Dreher, here's a 2010 ad Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney producing, implying that Obama DOJ
lawyers who represented GITMO detainees were terrorists. They called them the "Al Qaeda 7"
It's funny that Bill Kristol is now persona non grata in the conservative movement,
considering he really is just a standard issue Republican. There's no difference between him
and Scott Walker and the Koch Brothers
I read (can't say 100%) that the Kochs opposed the Iraq War. They're not much for overseas
crusading, although they agree with neocons on immigration, trade, and caving to PC.
Walker talked a little about immigration restriction during his brief presidential
campaign, one of the reasons his donor money dried up.
Trump has reoriented the party on its immigration, trade, and foreign policy stances, and
Kristol isn't a God-guns-gays culture warrior, so, yeah, makes sense he would drift away
(aside from his personality).
Noah172
December 14, 2018 at 11:13 pm
This is not the demise I would have wanted for the WS. I would have preferred its writers be
fired and replaced with immigrants of color. That would have been delicious.
******************************************************
Yes! Use H1B visas to replace the WS staff with foreign workers at a far lower salary, and
force the staff to train them before they're let go.
It is extremely hypocritical for guys like Podhoretz to Moanin and complain about the way
the magazine was cancelled. He admits that it never made money but thinks some
multi-billionaire should continue to keep it afloat anyway. Talk about corporate welfare!
These guys advocated an extreme form of globalism that resulted in American jobs being
shipped overseas and economic hardship for millions of Americans, all in the name of
profitability. Why should the WS being any different?
To Kristol, Podhoretz, Hayes, etc: Tough luck – that's the way it goes. The
marketplace decided and you couldn't cut it. Why aren't you cheering cheering that decision?
Don't the rules apply to you too? I guess it's different when the shoe is on the other
foot.
George you nailed it. There's a special place in hell for people like the editors of the
weekly standard – I believe that wholeheartedly and not metaphorically.
What's weird to me is to see everyone decrying Kristol and his Weekly Standard colleagues as
"the Establishment." If that were still the case, the Standard would still be flying and
Kristol would be cruising. But no, Kristol and the neocons are now old news; has-beens; last
month's cold cuts.
Thus must I say to Trump and his fans: Congrats! You are now the GOP Establishment. Have
fun being able to please nobody. Have fun disappointing everybody. Have fun being held
accountable for bad policy decisions and the fate of a major political party. This is the
power, leadership, and influence you wanted, so you got it. We'll soon find out if history
remembers you less fondly than Bill Kristol.
Each passing year just raises the probability that Trump, being a U.S. president, will
launch a foolish war. When he does, and when you have to contort yourselves like circus
freaks to justify it, some of us are going to be quite amused.
One problem with this fat warmonger (and his wife Victoria Nuland) is that nether he not his children were ever forced to take M16
and fight for the policies he promotes. In other words he is a typical chickenhawk, a lobbyist of MIC on good salary. In some
way this fat pig bellicosity is aside effect of abolishing universal draft. He also probably was not a fighter and never
was severely beaten by super fighters in school or university. A typical nice Jewish kid.
Attempt to build global neoliberal empire reserving for the USA dominant position ("Full spectrum dominance") cost dear to
the common Americans and now it is clear that this initiative of neocons and their paymasters (financial oligarchy and military industrial
complex -- the neoliberal elite in other words) failed.
Kagan might be a talented propagandist of "full spectrum dominance" neoconservative policies, but it is important to understand
that intellectually he is a lightweight: he believes his own propaganda.
From comments: "When one sees Pompeo's lips move about a new American world order, it is Kagan talking with his neo con
war mongering."
Notable quotes:
"... Call a spade a spade: This guy has been part of and feeding the political class with the arguments to continue performing the 'Crime of Aggression' and doing that as part of preserving US primacy doesn't excuse him from the 'Crime of Aggression' part of the ICC mandate. Most of those guys are very much aware of that as demonstrated by Bolton's attack on the ICC. ..."
"... The Obama administration's point person for the overthrow of an elected government in Ukraine was Victoria Nuland, Kagan's wife. Even as the administration's duplicity was intercepted by the recording of her discussing who the U.S. would install as the new leaders, it would be interesting to hear the pillow talk of these two. ..."
"... The theory they embrace is that of an American New World Order, and a bipartisan practice of economic and military Full Spectrum Dominance of the planet to enforce that hegemony against the democratic aspirations of others – and to maintain support domestically for it, necessarily against democratic accountability for war to the American people. ..."
"... "the willingness to apply that power, with all the pain and the suffering, the uncertainties and the errors, the failures and follies, the immorality and brutality, the lost lives and the lost treasure." One can feel his depraved, almost prurient, excitement at the wretchedness he would inflict. ..."
"... Skip the geopolitical arguments. What I see in the photo is an obviously well-fed desk jockey from the Swamp exhorting us to waste yet more blood and treasure on his grandiose political vision. ..."
"... Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ..."
"... warmongers are opportunists, and democrats are as supportive of war efforts as GOP. This guy is a traitor of the people of this country, period. ..."
"... One should understand that committing to trillions of dollars in military spending each decade pretty much eliminates any possibility of true liberalism spreading. ..."
"... When one sees pompeo's lips move about a new American world order, it is kagan talking with his neo con war mongering. ..."
Today, Kagan is an influential scholar at the Brookings Institution, a columnist at The Washington Post , and a member
of the U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Despite being known as a neoconservative, his appeal spans party and
ideological divides. Indeed, Kagan's 2016 support for Hillary Clinton showed his willingness to cross these divides himself in terms
of electoral loyalties.
As a writer and public intellectual, Kagan has skillfully crafted historical narratives and strategic assessments supporting his
overarching neoconservative vision for U.S. foreign policy. His 1996 Foreign Affairs article with Bill Kristol, "
Toward a Neo-Reaganite
Foreign Policy ," still resonates today as a concise hallmark statement of that approach to America's role in the world. With
a long list of prominent books and articles following in that vein, it is little wonder that Andrew Bacevich called him "the chief
foreign policy theorist of the neoconservative movement."
Kagan's newest book,
The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World , fits nicely into his corpus. It is a spirited defense of the
"American-led liberal world order" by one of its most cogent and articulate advocates. It is part curated history, part philippic
for his preferred strategic vision for the United States. In this small volume, Kagan argues that the enlightened order America created
after World War II has allowed for much progress in the world. But this order is not natural, and its great benefits have been "made
possible by the protection afforded liberalism within the geographical and geopolitical space created by American power." To Kagan,
this liberal order is "fragile and impermanent," requiring constant care by its architect and beneficiary, the United States. He
sees the liberal order as being "like a garden, artificial and forever threatened by the forces of nature." Thus "preserving it requires
a persistent, unending struggle against the vines and weeds that are constantly working to undermine it from within and overwhelm
it from without." Otherwise, the jungle will "grow back and engulf us all."
The problem with the book is its reliance on some questionable historical and contemporary assessments, not to mention that it
fails to really make the case for the necessity and desirability of the liberal order in today's world.
Kagan begins The Jungle Grows Back by noting that the last 70 years of peace, prosperity, and the expansion of democracy
and respect for individual rights have been an exception to the historical norm. Far from being the natural course or inevitable,
this progress required something special and unique: that a liberal democratic country like the United States, with so many geopolitical
and economic advantages, rose to international prominence after World War II. Not only that, but, as Kagan argues, American leaders
were willing to use their great power at this special moment in history to act differently and to create a new and unique world order.
Rather than merely defend its narrow national interests, the United States created a liberal international order that it would
take responsibility for upholding and protecting. Kagan argues that this approach wasn't, as some might argue, directed at the Soviet
Union or anyone else in particular (though he admits the rise of the Soviet threat made it easier for Americans to accept it even
as the strategy became more difficult to implement). Instead, "its chief purpose was to prevent a return to the economic, political,
and strategic circumstances that had given rise to the last war." Thus, Kagan believes this internationalist approach was rooted
in a realism about the nature of geopolitics in the 20th century and a realization that the world was a jungle that required "meeting
power with greater power." American leaders had learned from World War II that they had to adopt a new approach to the world, one
that created, in Dean Acheson's words, "an environment for freedom." To do otherwise would be to let disorder reign or for others
to order the international system to the detriment of American interests and values.
Call a spade a spade: This guy has been part of and feeding the political class with the arguments to continue performing
the 'Crime of Aggression' and doing that as part of preserving US primacy doesn't excuse him from the 'Crime of Aggression' part
of the ICC mandate. Most of those guys are very much aware of that as demonstrated by Bolton's attack on the ICC.
"Despite being known as a neoconservative, his appeal spans party and ideological divides. Indeed, Kagan's 2016 support
for Hillary Clinton showed his willingness to cross these divides himself in terms of electoral loyalties."
The Obama administration's point person for the overthrow of an elected government in Ukraine was Victoria Nuland, Kagan's
wife. Even as the administration's duplicity was intercepted by the recording of her discussing who the U.S. would install as
the new leaders, it would be interesting to hear the pillow talk of these two.
The theory they embrace is that of an American New World Order, and a bipartisan practice of economic and military Full
Spectrum Dominance of the planet to enforce that hegemony against the democratic aspirations of others – and to maintain support
domestically for it, necessarily against democratic accountability for war to the American people.
Given that the liberal cultural order in the Homeland is so quickly degrading, the imposition of it internationally is likely
to become increasingly infected by poor judgment as well as resistance to it increasing.
It used to be in popular entertainment that the villains were interested in ruling the world, madmen with megalomania. That
enemy is now within.
"the willingness to apply that power, with all the pain and the suffering, the uncertainties and the errors, the failures
and follies, the immorality and brutality, the lost lives and the lost treasure." One can feel his depraved, almost prurient,
excitement at the wretchedness he would inflict.
Skip the geopolitical arguments. What I see in the photo is an obviously well-fed desk jockey from the Swamp exhorting us
to waste yet more blood and treasure on his grandiose political vision.
"Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life
in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't
want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all,
it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether
it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives,
and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing
the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
In an interview with Gilbert in Göring's jail cell during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (18 April 1946)
"Indeed, Kagan's 2016 support for Hillary Clinton showed his willingness to cross these divides himself in terms of electoral
loyalties."
It is probably due to the fact that most people at that time thought Clinton was going to win. So his support for Clinton proved
2 things: warmongers are opportunists, and democrats are as supportive of war efforts as GOP. This guy is a traitor
of the people of this country, period.
One should understand that committing to trillions of dollars in military spending each decade pretty much eliminates any possibility
of true liberalism spreading.
"The same containment strategy appears to be what the Iraq War was about: contain the Iranian Muslim Revolution from not
spilling over from Iraq into US ally nations: "
Had there never been an Iraq War – Muslim revolution could never have spilled over from Iraq to any other nations – because
Saddam wasn't going to allow any Muslim revolution from happening within his borders.
..to his emergence in the post-Cold War era as arguably the leading intellectual advocate for a foreign policy of "benevolent
global hegemony" -- what scholars call "primacy."
An "intellectual" war monger? A "benevolent" Imperialist? ...
"The same containment strategy appears to be what the Iraq War was about: contain the Iranian Muslim Revolution from not spilling
over from Iraq into US ally nations: Saudi, UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan. Afghanistan is just another buffer country to fight the
Iranian stealth war."
I presume that history started in 2003 and that you have never heard of Saddam Hussein (the guy who fought a long war with
Iran aided by the US) or the Sunni Taliban who ruled Afghanistan and were opposed to Shia Iran. Except for the fraud and deceit
done by the neocon controlled US regime of the time, these illegal wars would not have been possible. Pick up some real history
books for a change. Don't learn about the Soviet Union from the Pravda.
Like the term "conspiracy theory "whataboutism" is a nasty and dirty propaganda trick. Truth can be understood only in historical
context.
Notable quotes:
"... The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote." ..."
"... Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: ..."
"... "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?" ..."
"... Whataboutism seems to proclaim that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth. ..."
The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's
reuse of the Merkel "quote."
This one detail tells us so much about how propaganda works, and about how it can be defeated. Successful propaganda both depends
upon and seeks to accelerate the erasure of historical memory. This is because its truths are always changing to suit the immediate
needs of the state. None of its truths can be understood historically. b makes the connection between the documented but forgotten
past "truth" of Merkel's quote and its present reincarnation in the Guardian, and this is really all he *needs* to do.
What b points out is something quite simple; yet the ability to do this very simple thing is becoming increasingly rare and
its exercise increasingly difficult to achieve. It is for me the virtue that makes b's analysis uniquely indispensable.
Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined
as follows:
"Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has
asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect
our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?"
Whataboutism seems to proclaim that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past,
present, or future asserted truth.
The subtitle of this effusively admiring biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Grand Strategist, does not reflect its
true purpose. A more accurate one might be this: "Just as Smart as the Other Guy." The other guy, of course, is Henry Kissinger. The
implicit purpose of Justin Vaďsse's book is to argue that in his mastery of strategic thought and practice, Brzezinski ranks as Kissinger's
equal.
Notable quotes:
"... That Brzezinski, who died last year at age 89, lived a life that deserves to be recounted and appraised is certainly the case. Born in Warsaw in 1928 to parents with ties to Polish nobility, Brzezinski had a peripatetic childhood. ..."
"... After graduating from McGill, Brzezinski set his sights on Harvard, which at the time was the very archetype of a "Cold War university." Senior faculty and young scholars on the make were volunteering to advise the national-security apparatus just then forming in Washington. For many of them, the Soviet threat appeared to eclipse all other questions and fields of inquiry. In this setting, Brzezinski flourished. Even before becoming an American citizen, he was thoroughly Americanized, imbued with the mind-set that prevailed in circles where members of the power elite mixed and mingled. Partially funded by the CIA, the Russian Research Center, Brzezinski's home at Harvard, was one of those places. ..."
"... From his time in Cambridge, he emerged committed, in his own words, to "nothing less than formulating a coherent strategy for the United States, so that we could eventually dismantle the Soviet bloc" and, not so incidentally, thereby liberate Poland. To this cause, the young Brzezinski devoted himself with single-minded energy. ..."
"... Convinced that the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc were internally fragile, he believed that economic and cultural interaction with the West would ultimately lead to their collapse. The idea was to project strength without provoking confrontation, while patiently exerting indirect influence. ..."
"... This limited academic influence probably did not bother Zbig; he never saw himself as a mere scholar. He was a classic in-and-outer, rotating effortlessly from university campuses to political campaigns, and from government service to plummy think-tank billets. According to Vaďsse, Brzezinski never courted the media. Even so, he demonstrated a pronounced talent for getting himself in front of TV cameras, becoming a frequent guest on programs like Meet the ..."
"... Toward the end of his life, Brzezinski even had a Twitter account. His last tweet, from May 2017, both summarizes the essence of his worldview and expresses his dismay regarding the presidency of Donald Trump: "Sophisticated US leadership is the sine qua non of a stable world order. However, we lack the former while the latter is getting worse." ..."
"... Although not an ideologue, Brzezinski was a liberal Democrat of a consistently hawkish persuasion. Committed to social justice at home, he was also committed to toughness abroad. In the 1960s, he supported US intervention in Vietnam, treated the domino theory as self-evidently true, and argued that, with American credibility on the line, the United States had no alternative but to continue prosecuting the war. Even after the war ended, Vaďsse writes, Brzezinski "did not view Vietnam as a mistake." ..."
"... Yet Vietnam did nudge Brzezinski to reconsider some of his own assumptions. In the early 1970s, with an eye toward forging a new foreign policy that might take into account some of the trauma caused by Vietnam, he organized the Trilateral Commission. Apart from expending copious amounts of Rockefeller money, the organization produced little of substance. For Brzezinski, however, it proved a smashing success. It was there that he became acquainted with Jimmy Carter, a Georgia governor then contemplating a run for the presidency in 1976. ..."
"... When Carter won, he rewarded Brzezinski by appointing him national-security adviser, the job that had vaulted Kissinger to the upper ranks of global celebrity. ..."
"... Because of Brzezinski's limited influence on foreign policy after Carter, Vaďsse's case for installing him in the pantheon of master strategists therefore rests on the claim that on matters related to foreign policy, the Carter presidency was something less than a bust. Vaďsse devotes the core of his book to arguing just that. Although valiant, the effort falls well short of success. ..."
"... From the outset of his administration, Carter accorded his national-security adviser remarkable deference. Brzezinski was not co-equal with the president; yet neither was he a mere subordinate. He was, Vaďsse writes, "the architect of Carter's foreign policy," while also exercising "an exceptional degree of control" over its articulation and implementation. ..."
"... The disintegration of the Soviet bloc and eventually of the Soviet Union itself was, in his view, a nominal goal of American foreign policy, but not an immediate prospect. ..."
"... The Camp David accords did nothing to resolve the Palestinian issue that underlay much of Israeli-Arab enmity; it produced a dead-end peace that left Palestinians without a state and Israel with no end of problems. And the Brzezinski-engineered embrace of China, enhancing Chinese access to American technology and markets, accelerated that country's emergence as a peer competitor. ..."
Underlying that purpose are at least two implicit assumptions. The first is that, when it comes to statecraft, grand strategy
actually exists, not simply as an aspiration but as a discrete and identifiable element. The second is that, in his writings and
contributions to US policy, Kissinger himself qualifies as a strategic virtuoso. For all sorts of reasons, we should treat both of
these assumptions with considerable skepticism.
That Brzezinski, who died last year at age 89, lived a life that deserves to be recounted and appraised is certainly the case.
Born in Warsaw in 1928 to parents with ties to Polish nobility, Brzezinski had a peripatetic childhood. His father was a diplomat
whose family accompanied him on postings to France, Germany, and eventually to Canada. The Nazi invasion of 1939, which extinguished
Polish independence, also effectively ended his father's diplomatic career. With war engulfing nearly all of Europe, Brzezinski would
not set foot on Polish soil again for nearly two decades.
Although the young Brzezinski quickly adapted to life in Canada, the well-being of Poles and Poland remained an abiding preoccupation.
After the war, he studied economics and political science at McGill University, focusing in particular on the Soviet Union, which
by then had replaced Germany as the power that dominated the country of his birth. Brzezinski was a brilliant student with a particular
interest in international affairs, a field increasingly centered on questions related to America's role in presiding over the postwar
global order.
After graduating from McGill, Brzezinski set his sights on Harvard, which at the time was the very archetype of a "Cold War university."
Senior faculty and young scholars on the make were volunteering to advise the national-security apparatus just then forming in Washington.
For many of them, the Soviet threat appeared to eclipse all other questions and fields of inquiry. In this setting, Brzezinski flourished.
Even before becoming an American citizen, he was thoroughly Americanized, imbued with the mind-set that prevailed in circles where
members of the power elite mixed and mingled. Partially funded by the CIA, the Russian Research Center, Brzezinski's home at Harvard,
was one of those places.
From his time in Cambridge, he emerged committed, in his own words, to "nothing less than formulating a coherent strategy for
the United States, so that we could eventually dismantle the Soviet bloc" and, not so incidentally, thereby liberate Poland. To this
cause, the young Brzezinski devoted himself with single-minded energy.
A s a scholar and author of works intended for a general audience, Zbig, as he was widely known, was nothing if not prolific.
Churning out a steady stream of well-regarded books and essays, he demonstrated a particular knack for "summarizing things in a concise
and striking way."
Clarity took precedence over nuance.
And with his gift for stylish packaging -- crafting neologisms ("technetronic")
and high-sounding phrases ("Histrionics as History in Transition") -- his analyses had the appearance of novelty, even if they often
lacked real substance.
Whether writing for his fellow scholars or addressing a wider audience, Brzezinski had one big idea when it
came to Cold War strategy: He promoted the concept of "peaceful engagement" as a basis for US policy.
Convinced that the Soviet Union
and the Soviet bloc were internally fragile, he believed that economic and cultural interaction with the West would ultimately lead
to their collapse. The idea was to project strength without provoking confrontation, while patiently exerting indirect influence.
Yet little of the Brzezinski oeuvre has stood the test of time. The American canon of essential readings in international relations
and strategy, beginning with George Washington's farewell address and continuing on through works by John Quincy Adams, Alfred Thayer
Mahan, Hans Morgenthau, and a handful of others (the list is not especially long), does not include anything penned by Brzezinski.
Although Vaďsse, a senior official with the French foreign ministry, appears to have read and pondered just about every word his
subject wrote or uttered, he identifies nothing of Brzezinski's that qualifies as must-reading for today's aspiring strategist.
This limited academic influence probably did not bother Zbig; he never saw himself as a mere scholar. He was a classic in-and-outer,
rotating effortlessly from university campuses to political campaigns, and from government service to plummy think-tank billets.
According to Vaďsse, Brzezinski never courted the media. Even so, he demonstrated a pronounced talent for getting himself in front
of TV cameras, becoming a frequent guest on programs like Meet the Press . He knew how to self-promote.
Toward the end of his life, Brzezinski even had a Twitter account. His last tweet, from May 2017, both summarizes the essence
of his worldview and expresses his dismay regarding the presidency of Donald Trump: "Sophisticated US leadership is the sine qua
non of a stable world order. However, we lack the former while the latter is getting worse."
F rom the time Brzezinski left Harvard in 1960 to accept a tenured position at Columbia, he made it his mission to nurture and
facilitate that sophistication. For Zbig, New York offered a specific advantage over Cambridge: It provided a portal into elite political
circles. As it had for Kissinger, the then-still-influential Council on Foreign Relations provided a venue that enabled Brzezinski
to curry favor with the rich and powerful, and to establish his bona fides as a statesman to watch. Henry's patron was Nelson Rockefeller;
Zbig's was Nelson's brother David.
Although not an ideologue, Brzezinski was a liberal Democrat of a consistently hawkish persuasion. Committed to social justice
at home, he was also committed to toughness abroad. In the 1960s, he supported US intervention in Vietnam, treated the domino theory
as self-evidently true, and argued that, with American credibility on the line, the United States had no alternative but to continue
prosecuting the war. Even after the war ended, Vaďsse writes, Brzezinski "did not view Vietnam as a mistake."
Yet Vietnam did nudge Brzezinski to reconsider some of his own assumptions. In the early 1970s, with an eye toward forging a new
foreign policy that might take into account some of the trauma caused by Vietnam, he organized the Trilateral Commission. Apart from
expending copious amounts of Rockefeller money, the organization produced little of substance. For Brzezinski, however, it proved
a smashing success. It was there that he became acquainted with Jimmy Carter, a Georgia governor then contemplating a run for the
presidency in 1976.
Zbig and Jimmy hit it off. Soon enough, Brzezinski signed on as the candidate's principal foreign-policy adviser. When Carter
won, he rewarded Brzezinski by appointing him national-security adviser, the job that had vaulted Kissinger to the upper ranks of
global celebrity.
Zbig held this post throughout Carter's one-term presidency, from 1977 to 1981. It would be his first and last time in government.
After 1981, Brzezinski went back to writing, continued to opine, and was occasionally consulted by Carter's successors, both Democratic
and Republican. Yet despite having ascended to the rank of elder statesman, never again did Brzezinski occupy a position where he
could directly affect US policy.
Because of Brzezinski's limited influence on foreign policy after Carter, Vaďsse's case for installing him in the pantheon of
master strategists therefore rests on the claim that on matters related to foreign policy, the Carter presidency was something less
than a bust. Vaďsse devotes the core of his book to arguing just that. Although valiant, the effort falls well short of success.
From the outset of his administration, Carter accorded his national-security adviser remarkable deference. Brzezinski was not
co-equal with the president; yet neither was he a mere subordinate. He was, Vaďsse writes, "the architect of Carter's foreign policy,"
while also exercising "an exceptional degree of control" over its articulation and implementation.
In a characteristic display of self-assurance and bureaucratic shrewdness, as the new president took office, Brzezinski gave him
a 43-page briefing book prescribing basic administration policy. Under the overarching theme of "constructive global engagement,"
Brzezinski identified 10 specific goals. The first proposed to "create more active and solid cooperation with Europe and Japan,"
the 10th to "maintain a defense posture designed to dissuade the Soviet Union from committing hostile acts." In between were less-than-modest
aspirations to promote human rights, reduce the size of nuclear arsenals, curb international arms sales, end apartheid in South Africa,
normalize Sino-American relations, terminate US control of the Panama Canal, and achieve an "overall solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
problem."
While Brzezinski's agenda was as bold as it was comprehensive, it nonetheless hewed to the Soviet-centric assumptions that had
formed the basis of US policy since the end of World War II. Zbig recognized that the world had changed considerably in the ensuing
years, but he also believed that any future changes would still occur in the context of a continuing Soviet-American rivalry. His
strategic perspective, therefore, did not include the possibility that the international order might center on something other than
the binaries imposed by the Cold War. The disintegration of the Soviet bloc and eventually of the Soviet Union itself was, in his
view, a nominal goal of American foreign policy, but not an immediate prospect.
Using Brzezinski's 10 policy objectives as a basis for evaluating his performance, Vaďsse gives the national-security adviser
high marks. "Few administrations have known so many tangible successes in only four years," he writes, citing the Panama Canal Treaty,
the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, and improved relations with China. Yet while Panama remains an underappreciated achievement,
the other two qualify as ambiguous at best. The Camp David accords did nothing to resolve the Palestinian issue that underlay much
of Israeli-Arab enmity; it produced a dead-end peace that left Palestinians without a state and Israel with no end of problems. And
the Brzezinski-engineered embrace of China, enhancing Chinese access to American technology and markets, accelerated that country's
emergence as a peer competitor.
More troubling still was Brzezinski's failure to anticipate or to grasp the implications of the two developments that all but
doomed the Carter presidency: the 1978 Iranian Revolution and the 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Vaďsse does his best to
cast a positive light on Brzezinski's role in these twin embarrassments. But there's no way around it: Brzezinski misread both --
with consequences that still haunt us today.
The Iranian Revolution, which Brzezinski sought to forestall by instigating a military coup in Tehran, offered a warning against
imagining that Washington could shape events in the Islamic world. Brzezinski missed that warning entirely, although he would by
no means be the last US official to do so. As for the Kremlin's plunge into Afghanistan, widely interpreted as evidence of the Soviet
Union's naked aggression, it actually testified to the weakness and fragility of the Soviet empire, already in an advanced state
of decay. Again, Brzezinski -- along with many other observers -- misread the issue. When clarity of vision was most needed, he failed
to provide it.
Together, these two developments ought to have induced a wily strategist to reassess the premises of US policy. Instead, they
resulted in decisions to deepen -- and to overtly militarize -- US involvement in and around the Persian Gulf. While this commitment
is commonly referred to as the Carter Doctrine, Vaďsse insists that it "was really a Brzezinski doctrine."
Regardless of who gets the credit, the militarization of US policy across what Brzezinski termed an "arc of crisis" encompassing
much of the Islamic world laid the basis for a series of wars and upheavals that continue to this day. If, as national-security adviser,
Brzezinski wielded as much influence as Vaďsse contends, then this too forms part of his legacy. When it mattered most, the master
strategist failed to understand the implications of the crisis that occurred on his watch.
The most glaring problem anyone faces in trying to assert Brzezinski's mastery of world affairs, however, rests not in Iran or
Afghanistan, but in how the Cold War came to an end. Indeed, Brzezinski viewed it as essentially endless. As late as 1987, just two
years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was still insisting that "the American-Soviet conflict is an historical rivalry that
will endure for as long as we live."
B rzezinski was certainly smart, flexible, and pragmatic, but he was also a prisoner of the Cold War paradigm. So too were virtually
all other members of the foreign-policy establishment of his day. Indeed, subscribing to that paradigm was a prerequisite of membership.
Yet this adherence amounted to donning a pair of strategic blinders: It meant seeing only those things that it was convenient to
see.
Which brings us back to Zbig's last tweet, with its paean to American leadership as the sine qua non of global stability. The
tweet neatly captures the mind-set that the foreign-policy establishment has embraced with something like unanimity since the Cold
War surprised that establishment by coming to an end. This mind-set gets expressed in myriad ways in a thousand speeches and op-eds:
The United States must lead. There is no alternative; history itself summons the country to do so. Should it fail in that responsibility,
darkness will cover the earth.
This is why Trump so infuriates the foreign-policy elite: He appears oblivious to the providential call that others in Washington
take to be self-evident. Yet adhering to this post–Cold War paradigm is also the equivalent of donning blinders. Whatever the issue
-- especially when the issue is ourselves -- it means seeing only those things that we find it convenient to see.
The post–Cold War paradigm of American moral and political hegemony prevents us from appreciating the way that the world is actually
changing -- rapidly, radically, and right before our very eyes. Today, with the planet continuing to heat up, the nexus of global
geopolitics shifting eastward, and Americans pondering security threats for which our pricey and far-flung military establishment
is all but useless, the art of strategy as practiced by members of Brzezinski's generation has become irrelevant. So too has Zbig
himself.
"... It acknowledges that "police never identified who had hung the banners," but nonetheless goes on to assert that: "The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history." ..."
"... The authors, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, complain about a lack of "public comprehension" of the "Trump-Russia" story. Indeed, despite the two-year campaign of anti-Russian hysteria whipped up in Washington and among the affluent sections of the upper-middle class that constitute the target audience of the Times ..."
The New York Times published a fraudulent and provocative "special report" Thursday titled "The plot to subvert an election."
Replete with sinister looking graphics portraying Russian President Vladimir Putin as a villainous cyberage cyclops, the report
purports to untangle "the threads of the most effective foreign campaign in history to disrupt and influence an American election."
The report could serve as a textbook example of CIA-directed misinformation posing as "in-depth" journalism. There is no news,
few substantiated facts and no significant analysis presented in the 10,000-word report, which sprawls over 11 ad-free pages of a
separate section produced by the Times.
The article begins with an ominous-sounding recounting of two incidents in which banners were hung from bridges in New York City
and Washington in October and November of 2016, one bearing the likeness of Putin over a Russian flag with the word "peacemaker,"
and the other that of Obama and the slogan "Goodbye Murderer."
It acknowledges that "police never identified who had hung the banners," but nonetheless goes on to assert that: "The Kremlin,
it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory
laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history." The article begins with an ominous-sounding
recounting of two incidents in which banners were hung from bridges in New York City and Washington in October and November of 2016,
one bearing the likeness of Putin over a Russian flag with the word "peacemaker," and the other that of Obama and the slogan "Goodbye
Murderer."
It acknowledges that "police never identified who had hung the banners," but nonetheless goes on to assert that: "The Kremlin,
it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory
laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history."
Why does it "appear" to be the Kremlin? What is the evidence to support this claim? Among the 8.5 million inhabitants of New York
City and another 700,000 in Washington, D.C., aren't there enough people who might despise Obama as much as, if not a good deal more
than, Vladimir Putin?
This absurd passage with its "appeared" and "may well have" combined with the speculation about the Kremlin extending its evil
grip onto "United States soil" sets the tone for the entire piece, which consists of the regurgitation of unsubstantiated allegations
made by the US intelligence agencies, Democratic and Republican capitalist politicians and the Times itself.
The authors, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, complain about a lack of "public comprehension" of the "Trump-Russia" story. Indeed,
despite the two-year campaign of anti-Russian hysteria whipped up in Washington and among the affluent sections of the upper-middle
class that constitute the target audience of the Times , polls have indicated that the charges of Russian "meddling" in
the 2016 presidential election have evoked little popular response among the
This is a typical neocon speech. Could be delivered by Hillary Clinton (if we removed some
Tea Party frosting). Attacked both Russia and China. Such a freashly minted US diplomat ;-)
The fact that he is mentioned Skripal poisoning suggests that his IQ is overrated... Or many
be that's his CIA past...
Trump want to pursue "might makes right" policy but times changed and it remains to be seen
how successful he will be.
Could you imagine if someone stood up and called out all the US crimes... 3 million
prisoners, war crimes in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan ect. Poverty disproportionate to the
wealth of the nation. On and on
It doesn't get any clearer than this. A group of people, with no conscience and therefore
no shame, no empathy, no emotion, no love, hold the reins of power on planet earth. They do
not distinguish between Afghani, Iraqi, European, African or American. We are all fodder for
their demented psychopathic agenda. It's time to wake up, because it's coming to your
doorstep.
"... The treaty is one of the most advantageous agreements to the U.S. that our government has ever negotiated, so it is extremely difficult to see how leaving the treaty benefits the U.S. ..."
calls on
the Trump administration not to kill the INF Treaty:
Losing patience with Russia's refusal to address legitimate concerns over its violation of
the treaty is understandable, but the way Pompeo framed the problem says a great deal about
how poorly the Trump administration is managing this sensitive issue. Pompeo told NATO, "the
burden falls on Russia to make the necessary changes. Only they can save this treaty." Having
built a rare instance of NATO unity, which for the first time has unanimously stated that it
believes Russia is in violation of the INF Treaty, U.S. President Donald Trump's team seems
more intent on using it as an opportunity to berate Russia than to save a valuable treaty
that benefits European and global security. While Russia is to blame for its own violations,
the United States will suffer just as much as Russia does if the treaty fails, and even more
so if the collapse produces more discord than unity within the NATO alliance. By going the
extra mile to save the treaty, instead of issuing ultimatums, the Trump administration might
even pull out a win for once. Excuse me if I don't hold my breath.
The INF Treaty is very much worth saving, and quitting it over a Russian violation is as
short-sighted and self-defeating as can be. If the U.S. withdraws, there will be no chance of
negotiating a replacement. Not only will the U.S. be held as the one most responsible for
killing the treaty, but by ending it the Trump administration will be opening the door to an
arms race that no one should want.
The treaty is one of the most advantageous agreements to the U.S. that our government
has ever negotiated, so it is extremely difficult to see how leaving the treaty benefits the
U.S.
Quitting the INF Treaty unfortunately fits the administration's pattern of reneging on and
abandoning agreements without giving any thought to the consequences of withdrawal. It makes no
sense to give up on a treaty that has proven its worth to the U.S. and our European allies for
more than thirty years.
The Trump administration has made the absolute minimum effort to resolve the dispute with
Russia before quitting the treaty, and that makes it clear that they are just looking for an
excuse to abandon it. If the U.S. gave up so easily on every agreement whenever there was a
violation, it would not keep any of its agreements for very long. The bigger problem is that
the administration's determination to leave the treaty is driven more by Bolton's ideological
hostility to all arms control agreements than it is by any concern about any violations. The
administration is seizing on Russian violations to withdraw from this treaty, but it also has
no desire to keep New START alive, either. Letting New START die would be even more dangerous,
but the administration isn't interested in extending a treaty that Russia has complied with for
almost eight years.
Melania slap of Bolton face might be a good sobering measure. But neocons can't probably recover from their
addition
Notable quotes:
"... Ricardel is a longtime friend and associate of national security adviser John Bolton, who brought her into the National Security Council from the Department of Commerce, where she served as Undersecretary for Export Administration. Ricardel reportedly angered Ms. Trump over seating arrangements on a flight by Ms. Trump to Africa two weeks ago. Ricardel, who was to accompany the First Lady, did not make the trip. Ms. Trump, in an interview conducted with ABC News during the trip, said there were people in the White House she did not trust. Apparently, Ricardel was one of them. ..."
"... Perhaps no one in recent memory brought such a degree of ethnic baggage to her job like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Albright's Czech roots and the Yugoslav warrant issued for the arrest of her professor-diplomat father, Joseph Korbel, for the post-World War II theft of art from Prague, brought forth extreme anti-Serbian policies by the woman who would represent the United States at the United Nations and then serve as America's chief diplomat. Albright's hatred for Serbia was not much different than Zbigniew Brzezinski's Polish heritage evoking an almost-pathological hatred of Russia, while he served as Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser. ..."
"... In 1981, Ronald Reagan appointed Valdas Adamkus as the regional administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for the Mid-West states. Retiring from the US government after 29 years of service, Adamkus was elected to two terms as President of Lithuania. ..."
"... One might ask whether Ilves and Adamkus were kept on the US government payroll merely to support them until they could return to their countries in top leadership positions to help lead the Baltic nations into NATO membership. ..."
"... From 1993 to 1997, Army General John Shalikashvili served as Chairman of the Joint Chefs of Staff. Shalikashvili was born in Warsaw, Poland to a Georgian and Polish mother. During World War II, his father served in the Georgian Legion, a special unit incorporated into the Nazi German "SS-Waffengruppe Georgien." General Shalikashvili served as commander of all US military forces during a time of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. It was no surprise that he was an avid cheerleader for NATO's expansion to the East. ..."
America has always fancied itself as a "melting pot" of ethnicities and religions that form
a perfect union. The Latin phrase, E Pluribus Unum, "out of many, one," is even found on the
Great Seal of the United States.
However, as seen in a recent blow-up between First Lady Melania Trump and now-former Deputy
National Security Adviser Mira Ricardel, old feuds from beyond the borders of the United States
can result in major rifts at the highest echelons of the US government.
On November 13, Ms. Trump's communications director, Stephanie Grisham, fired off a tweet
that read: "it is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she [Ricardel] no longer
deserves the honor of serving in this White House." The White House announced Ricardel's
departure the next day, November 14.
Ricardel is a longtime friend and associate of national security adviser John Bolton, who
brought her into the National Security Council from the Department of Commerce, where she
served as Undersecretary for Export Administration. Ricardel reportedly angered Ms. Trump over
seating arrangements on a flight by Ms. Trump to Africa two weeks ago. Ricardel, who was to
accompany the First Lady, did not make the trip. Ms. Trump, in an interview conducted with ABC
News during the trip, said there were people in the White House she did not trust. Apparently,
Ricardel was one of them.
The bitter feud between Melania Trump and Mira Ricardel likely has its roots in their
backgrounds in the former Yugoslavia. Ricardel was born Mira P. Radielović, the daughter
of Peter Radielovich, a native of Breza, Bosnia-Herzegovina in the former Yugoslavia. Ricardel
speaks fluent Croatian and was a member of the Croatian Catholic Church. Melania Trump was born
Melanija Knavs [pronounced Knaus] in Novo Mesto in Slovenia, also in the former Yugoslavia.
Villagers in the village of Sevnica, where Ms. Trump was raised, claim she and her Communist
Party parents were officially atheists. Ms. Trump later converted to Roman Catholicism. She and
her son by Mr. Trump, Barron Trump, speak fluent Slovenian. The Yugoslav Civil War, which began
in earnest in 1991, pitted the nation's ethnic groups against one another. There are ample
reasons, political, ethnic, and religious, for bad blood between the Slovenian-born First Lady
and a first-generation Croatian-American. The "battle royale" between Ms. Trump and Ricardel is
but one example of a constant problem in the United States when individuals with foreign ties
bring age-old inter-ethnic and inter-religious squabbles to governance.
Perhaps no one in recent memory brought such a degree of ethnic baggage to her job like
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Albright's Czech roots and the Yugoslav warrant issued
for the arrest of her professor-diplomat father, Joseph Korbel, for the post-World War II theft
of art from Prague, brought forth extreme anti-Serbian policies by the woman who would
represent the United States at the United Nations and then serve as America's chief diplomat.
Albright's hatred for Serbia was not much different than Zbigniew Brzezinski's Polish heritage
evoking an almost-pathological hatred of Russia, while he served as Jimmy Carter's National
Security Adviser.
Albright's bias against Serbia saw her influence US policy in casting a blind eye toward the
terrorism carried out by the Kosovo Liberation Army and its terrorist leader Hashim Thaci. That
policy resulted in Washington backing an independent Kosovo, a state beholden to organized
criminal syndicates protected by one of the largest US military bases in Europe, Camp
Bondsteel.
Ties by US foreign policy officials to their countries of origin continued to plagued
administrations after Carter. For example, Kateryna Chumachenko served in the Reagan White
House and State and Treasury Departments and later worked for KPMG as "Katherine" Chumachenko.
She also worked in the White House Public Liaison Office, where she conducted outreach to
various right-wing and anti-communist exile groups in the United States, including the Friends
of Afghanistan, on whose board Afghan refugee and later George W. Bush pro-consul in Iraq,
Zalmay Khalilzad, sat. Khalilzad, like Chumachenko, worked in the Reagan State Department.
Chumachenko was married to Ukrainian "Orange Revolution" President Viktor Yushchenko, and,
thusly, became the First Lady of Ukraine. Khalilzad became the Bush 43 ambassador to the UN,
where he often was at loggerheads with Iran, Libya, Syria, and other Muslim states. As was the
case with Albright and her anti-Serb underpinnings, it was difficult to ascertain whose agenda
Khalilzad was serving.
After being fired from the White House, there were reports that Ricardel was offered the
post of ambassador to Estonia. That Baltic country was no stranger to hauling foreign baggage
into the US government. Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a bow-tie wearing
former Estonian language broadcaster for the Central Intelligence Agency-funded Radio Free
Europe ; long time resident of Leonia, New Jersey; could have just as easily ended up in a
senior State Department position rather than President of Estonia. Such is the nature of
divided loyalties among senior US government officials of both major political parties.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan appointed Valdas Adamkus as the regional administrator for the US
Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for the Mid-West states. Retiring from the US
government after 29 years of service, Adamkus was elected to two terms as President of
Lithuania.
One might ask whether Ilves and Adamkus were kept on the US government payroll merely to
support them until they could return to their countries in top leadership positions to help
lead the Baltic nations into NATO membership.
From 1993 to 1997, Army General John Shalikashvili served as Chairman of the Joint Chefs of
Staff. Shalikashvili was born in Warsaw, Poland to a Georgian and Polish mother. During World
War II, his father served in the Georgian Legion, a special unit incorporated into the Nazi
German "SS-Waffengruppe Georgien." General Shalikashvili served as commander of all US military
forces during a time of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. It was no surprise that he was an
avid cheerleader for NATO's expansion to the East.
Natalie Jaresko served in positions with the State Department, the Departments of Commerce,
Treasury, the US Trade Representative, and Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). In
2014, she became the Finance Minister for Ukraine. Earlier, she served as a financial adviser
to Yushchenko. The United States is not the only "melting pot" in North America that suffers
from officials burdened by ethnic dual loyalties. Halyna Chomiak, the Ukrainian-born
émigré mother of Canada's Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, weighs heavily on
Freeland's ability to advance Canada's interests over those of the nation of her mother's
birth.
Trump's entire White House Middle East police team is composed of individuals who place
Israel's interests ahead of the United States. Trump takes his Middle East advice from
principally his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a contributor to and member of the board of the
"Friends of the IDF," an American non-profit that raises funds for the Israeli armed forces.
Kushner was named by Trump as a "special envoy" to the Middle East, while Jason Greenblatt, a
former attorney with the Trump Organization, was named as special envoy in charge of the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Although the two positions appear to overlap, Kushner and
Greenblatt, both Orthodox Jews who have little time for Palestinians, are on the same page when
it comes to advancing the West Bank land grabbing policies of the Binyamin Netanyahu government
in Israel. Trump thoroughly Zionized his administration's Middle East policy with the
appointment of another Israel supporter, David M. Friedman, as US ambassador to Israel.
Friedman had been a bankruptcy lawyer with the Trump Organization's primary law firm, Kasowitz,
Benson, Torres & Friedman.
Trump has nominated as US ambassador to South Africa, handbag designer Lana Marks, who was
born in South Africa. Marks, who is known only to Trump from her membership in his Mar-a-Lago,
Florida "billionaires club," left South Africa in 1975, when the country was under the
apartheid regime. Marks claims to speak Afrikaans, the language preferred by the apartheid
regime, and Xhosa, the ethnic language of the late President Nelson Mandela. Because Marks
embellished her professional tennis career by claiming, without proof, participation in the
French Open and Wimbledon in the 1970s, her mastery of Xhosa can be taken with a grain of salt.
So, too, can her ability to deal with the current African National Congress government led by
President Cyril Ramaphosa, who had just been released from prison when Marks left the country
in 1975. The claims and politics of Marks and every official and would-be US official who
failed to shed their biases from their native and ancestral homelands, can all be taken with a
metric ton of salt.
Melting pots are fine, so long as they truly blend together. However, that is not the
situation in the United States as high government officials have difficulty in consigning the
bigotry inherent in family folklore and beliefs to the family scrapbooks.
"... The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation . ..."
"... That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. America must always lead on the world stage. ..."
"... the global international republic ..."
"... (as Gallup's polls prove) ..."
"... only corporations whose only customers are the U.S. Government and its chosen allied governments ..."
"... natural-resources extractions ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... A task force of senior former U.S. diplomatic and military officials has come up with suggestions for how Trump could prevent Iran from taking over what's left of liberated Syria and fulfill his own promise to contain Iranian influence in the region. ..."
"... "Most urgently . . . the United States must impose real obstacles to Tehran's pursuit of total victory by the Assad regime in Syria," ..."
"... by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America states. "Time is of the essence." ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... America's future generals ..."
"... all nations except the U.S. ..."
"... They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 ..."
"... CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity ..."
On November 29th, Gallup headlined "Democrats
Lead Surge in Belief U.S. Should Be World Leader" and reported that "Three-fourths (75%) of
Americans today think the United States has 'a special responsibility to be the leading nation
in world affairs,' up from 66% in 2010. The surge is driven by Democrats, whose belief in this
idea has increased from 61% eight years ago to 81% now." This finding comes even after the
lie-based and catastrophic U.S. invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Libya in 2011 (and of so many
others, such as Afghanistan, where the U.S. and Sauds created the Taliban in 1979 ). Americans --
now even increasingly -- want 'their' (which is actually America's billionaires' ) Government to be virtually the
world's government, policing the world. They want this nation's Government to be determining
what international laws will be enforced around the world, and to be enforcing them. Most
Americans don't want the United Nations to have power over the U.S. (its billionaires' ) Government, but instead
want the U.S. Government (its billionaires) to have power over the United Nations (which didn't
authorize any of those evil, lie-based, U.S. invasions).
Not only would doing this bankrupt all constructive domestic functions (health,
education, infrastructure, etc.) of the U.S. federal Government, but it would also increase the
global carnage, as if the U.S. Government hasn't already been doing enough of that, for decades
now.
The leadership for this supremacist craving comes straight from America's top, not from the
masses that are being sampled by the Gallup organization, who only reflect it -- they are duped
by their leaders. Here is how U.S. President Barack Obama (a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2009,
for nothing at all
but his 'kindly'
but insincere verbiage when he had been a candidate) stated this widespread delusional
American belief in American global moral supremacy, when addressing the graduating class at
West Point Military Academy, on 28 May 2014:
The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation . [Every other nation
is therefore 'dispensable'; we therefore now have "Amerika, Amerika über alles, über
alles in der Welt".] That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the
century to come. America must always lead on the world stage.
This had certainly not been the objective of U.S. President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt when he set up the U.N. just before his death in 1945; he instead wanted the U.N. to
evolve into a democratic government of the world, with elected representatives of each and
every one of the world's governments -- to evolve into becoming the global international
republic -- regardless of whether or not the U.S. Government approves or disapproves of
another nation's government. The idea on which the U.N. was founded was not to involve the U.S.
Government in the internal affairs of other nations, not to be the judge jury and executioner
of other governments that it doesn't like, nor to dictate what other nations should or should
not do within the given nation's boundaries. FDR intended that there instead be democratically
represented, at the U.N., each and every nation, and each and every people within that global
government, where each of these national governments is (hopefully but not necessarily) a
democracy. FDR was just as opposed to dictatorship internationally, as he was opposed to
dictatorship nationally , and he recognized that inevitably some governments will disapprove of
other governments, but he was deeply committed to the view that a need exists for laws and
law-enforcement between nations, on an international level, and not only
within the individual nations, and that each nation is sacrosanct on its own internal
laws. He respected national sovereignty, and opposed international empire. (This was his basic
disagreement with Winston Churchill, then, and with American leaders such as Obama and Trump
now.) Unlike President Obama (and evidently unlike the vast majority of today's Americans) FDR
didn't want this international government to be an American function, but instead an entirely
separate international governmental function, in which there is no international dictatorship
whatsoever -- not American, and not by any other country. He knew that this is the only stable
basis for international peace, and for avoiding a world-annihilating World War III .
Barack Obama rejected FDR's vision, and advocated for the United States as being
(and even as if it already had been for a century) virtually the government over the entire
world, which "must always lead on the world stage." Adolf Hitler had had that very same
international vision for his own country, Germany, "the Thousand-Year Reich," but he lost World
War II; and, then, when FDR died, Hitler's vision increasingly took over in America, so that
ideologically, FDR actually lost WW II, when Harry S. Truman took over the White House
and increasingly thereafter, until today, when the U.S. commits more invasions of foreign
countries than do all other nations in the world combined . Americans (apparently, as shown in
this and other polls) like this, and want more of it. Nobody else
does. For example, nobody (except the U.S. and Saudi and Israeli aristocracies and their
supporters worldwide, which are very few people) supports the U.S. regime's reinstitution of
sanctions against Iran, which the U.S. regime is imposing as the global dictator. America's
economic sanctions are like spitting into the face of FDR, who had opposed such imperialistic
fascism in the more overtly military form when Hitler's regime was imposing it. It's also
spitting at the U.N.
This latest Gallup finding displays an increase, but nothing that's at all anomalous as
compared to the decades-long reality of imperialistic U.S. culture. For decades now, Gallup's
polling has shown that the most respected of all institutions by the American people is the
nation's military -- more than the church, more than the Presidency, more than the U.S.
Supreme Court, more than the press, more than the schools, more than anything. America is
invasion-nation. This is true even after the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the basis of
blatant lies ,
which destroyed
Iraq -- a nation that had never invaded nor even threatened to invade the United States. The
American people are, resolutely, bloodthirsty for conquest, even after having been
fooled into that evil
invasion, and subsequent decades-long military occupation in Iraq, and after subsequent
conquests or attempted conquests, in Libya, Syria , Yemen, and
elsewhere -- all destroying nations that had never invaded nor even threatened America. Why?
How did this mass-insanity, of evil, come to be?
The public simply do not learn. That's a tragic fact. Largely, this fact results from
reality being hidden by the 'news'-media; but, even now, long after the fake 'news' in 2002,
about the U.S. regime's having possessed secret and conclusive evidence of "Saddam's WMD," the
published 'history' about that invasion still does not acknowledge the public's having been
lied-to at that time, by its Government, and by the 'news'-media. So, the public live,
and culturally swim, in an
ongoing river of lies , both as its being 'news', and subsequently as its having been
'history'. This is why the public do not learn: they are being constantly deceived. And they
(as Gallup's polls prove) tolerate being constantly deceived. The public do not rebel
against it. They don't reject either the politicians, or the 'news'-media. They don't demand
that the American public control the American Government and that America's billionaires lose
that control -- especially over the 'news'-media.
Honesty is no longer an operative American value, if it ever was. That's how, and why, Big
Brother (the operation by the international-corporate billionaires) grips Americans' minds to
support foreign Invasions. Americans support liars, and it all comes from the top; it's
directed from the top. It is bipartisan, from both Democratic Party billionaires and Republican
Party billionaires. National politicians will
lose their seats if they disobey.
A good example, of this Big-Brother operation, is America's Politifact, the online site
which is at America's crossover where 'news' and 'history' meet one-another. It's controlled by
billionaires
such as the one who founded Craigslist . Millions of Americans go to
Politifact in order to determine what is true and what is false that is being widely published
about current events. The present writer sometimes links to their articles, where I have
independently verified that there are no misrepresentations in an article. But, like the
'news'-media that it judges, Politifact is also a propaganda-agency for
the (U.S.-Saud-Israeli) Deep State , and so it deceives on the most critically important
international matters. An example of this occurred right after the U.S. regime had overthrown in February 2014
in a bloody coup the democratically elected Government of Ukraine, and replaced it by a rabidly
anti-Russian racist fascist or nazi Government on Russia's doorstep, a regime that was selected
by the rabidly anti-Russian (but lying that it wasn't) Obama regime . This Politifact
article was dated 31 March 2014, right after over 90% of Crimeans had just voted in a
referendum, to rejoin Russia, and to depart from Ukraine, which the Soviet dictator had
transferred them to, separating them from Russia, in 1954. (None of that history of the matter
was even mentioned by Politifact.) The Politifact article was titled
"Viral meme says United States has 'invaded' 22 countries in the past 20 years" , and it
was designed to deceive readers into believing that "Russia's recent annexation of Crimea"
reflected the real instance of "invasion" that Americans should be outraged against -- to
deflect away from America's recent history as being the world's actual invasion-nation. This
propaganda-article said nothing at all about either Crimea or Ukraine except in its opening
line: "A Facebook meme argues that Americans are pretty two-faced when it comes to Russia's
recent annexation of Crimea." It then proceeded to document that the exact number of American
invasions during the prior 20 years wasn't 22, and so Politifact declared the allegation
"false" (as if the exact number were really the entire issue or even the main one, and as if
America's scandalous recent history of invasions were not).
So, it's on account of such drowning-in-propaganda, that the U.S. public not only respect
what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower derogatorily called the "military-industrial complex,"
but respect it above even the U.S. Presidency itself, and above all other U.S. institutions (as
Gallup's constant polling demonstrates to be the case).
Here's the reality: The same group of no more than a thousand super-wealthy Americans
control both the United States Government and the weapons-manufacturing firms (such as Lockheed
Martin), which are the only corporations
whose only customers are the U.S. Government and its chosen allied governments . So,
these few people actually control the U.S. Government's foreign relations, and foreign
policies. They create and control their own markets. This is the most politically active group
of America's super-rich, because they own America's international corporations and because
their business as owners of the military ones is military policy and also diplomatic policy,
including the conjoining of both of those at the CIA and NSA, including the many coups that
they (via their Government) engineer. They also control all of the nation's
major news-media, which report international affairs in such a manner as to determine which
foreign governments will be perceived by the mass of Americans to constitute the nation's
'enemies' and therefore to be suitable targets for the U.S. military and CIA to invade and
conquer or otherwise "regime-change" -- such as have been the lands of North Vietnam,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, Venezuela, etc., at various times.
The weapons-manufacturers won't have any markets, at all, if there are no 'enemy' nations that
are deemed by the public to be suitable targets for their weapons. 'Enemy' nations, and not
only 'allies' (or 'allied' nations), are necessary, in order for the military business to
produce the most profits. Overwhelmingly, if not totally, the chosen 'enemies' are nations that
have never invaded nor even threatened to invade the United States ; and, so, in order to keep
this Government-funded business (the war-profiteering and associated international
natural-resources extractions businesses) growing and thriving, what's essential is
continuing control over the nation's 'news'-media. As Walter Lippmann wrote in 1921,
"the manufacture of consent" is an essential part of this entire operation. It happens via
the media. Even Germany's Nazis needed to do that. Any modern capitalist dictatorship
(otherwise called "fascism") does. The U.S. regime, being a capitalist dictatorship, certainly
does. Physically, Hitler lost, but his ideology won, he won even as nazism (racist fascism)
instead of merely as fascism, and this racism is shown because the U.S. regime is rabidly
racist anti-Russian (
not merely anti-communist ), and has been so for at least a century. (Maybe it's what Obama
actually had secretly in mind when he said "That has been true for the century passed and it
will be true for the century to come." And Trump is no less a liar than Obama, and he continues
this aim of ultimately conquering Russia.) They say they're only against Russia's leader
Vladimir Putin, but Putin shows in all polls of Russians, even in non-Russian polls, to be far
more favorably viewed by Russians than either Barack Obama or Donald Trump are viewed by
Americans. This is why regime-change-in-Russia is increasingly becoming dominated by U.S.
economic sanctions and military, and less dominated by CIA and other coup-organizers. The
actual dictatorship is in America, and it requires participation by its 'news'-media.
Demonizing 'the enemy' is therefore crucial. It is crucial preparation for any
invasion.
The United States Government spends
at least as much money on its military as do all of the other governments in the world
combined . Its 'news'-media (that is to say, the media that are owned by, and that are
advertised in by, the corporations that are controlled by, the same small group of billionaires
-- America's billionaires -- who fund the political campaigns of both the Democratic Party's
and the Republican Party's nominees for the U.S. Congress and the Presidency) may be partisan
for one or the other of the nation's two political Parties, but they all are unitedly partisan
for the international corporations, such as Lockheed Martin, that America's billionaires
control, and that sell only to the U.S. Government and to the foreign governments that are
allied with the U.S. Government. They also are partisan for the U.S.-based oil and gas and
mining international corporations, which need to extract at the lowest costs possible, no
matter how much the given extractee-nation's public might suffer from the deal. "Three-fourths
(75%) of Americans today think the United States has 'a special responsibility to be the
leading nation in world affairs,'" and the actual beneficiaries of this mass-insanity are the
owners of those U.S.-based international corporations, the military and extraction giants.
Anthony Cordesman, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, headlined on 15
August 2016, "U.S.
Wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen: What Are The Endstates?" and he said, "Once again,
the United States does not seem to be learning from its past. The real test of victory is never
tactical success or even ending a war on favorable military terms, it is what comes next." But
he ignored the main reason why these invasions had occurred. America's weapons-manufacturers
won't have any markets, at all, if there are no 'enemy' nations that are deemed by the American
public to be suitable targets for their weapons. Cordesman is there calculating success and
failure on the basis of the myths (such as that the U.S. Government cares about those
"Endstates"), not of the realities (that it craves targets). The realities focus upon the
desires of the owners and executives of the weapons-manufacturers and the extraction-firms, for
ongoing and increased profits and executive bonuses, and not on the needs of America's
soldiers nor on the national security of the American people. Least of all, do they focus upon
the needs -- such as the welfare, freedom, or democracy -- of the Iraqi people, or of the
Syrian people, or of the Libyan people, or of the Yemenite people. It's all just lies, PR.
Those invasions served their actual main functions when they were occurring. "The Endstates"
there are almost irrelevant to those real purposes, the purposes for which the
invasions were, and are, actually being done.
A task force of senior former U.S. diplomatic and military officials has come up with
suggestions for how Trump could prevent Iran from taking over what's left of liberated Syria
and fulfill his own promise to contain Iranian influence in the region.
"Most urgently . . . the United States must impose real obstacles to
Tehran's pursuit of total victory by the Assad regime in Syria,"the reportby the Jewish Institute for National Security of America states.
"Time is of the essence."
The underlying presumption there was that the U.S. regime has legitimate authorization to be
occupying the parts of Syria it has invaded and now occupies, and that Iran does not. But the
reality is that the U.S. regime is occupying Syria instead of assisting Syria's Government to
defeat the U.S.-Saud-Israeli invasion to overthrow and replace Syria's Government, by
stooges who will be
selected by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia , and the reality is that Iran's forces
there are invitees who are instead assisting Syria's Government against the
Saudi-Israeli-American invasion. In other words: this WP article is basically all
lies. Furthermore, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America is
a front-organization for the fascist regime
that rules Israel , and the WP hid that fact, too, so its cited 'expert' was a
mere PR agency for Israel's aristocracy. So, this is Deep-State propaganda, parading as
'news'.
Americans actually pay their private good money to subscribe to (subsidize) such bad public
'news'papers as that. The billionaire who happens to own that particular 'news'paper (the
WP) , Jeff Bezos, had founded and leads Amazon, which receives almost all of its
profits from Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud-computing division, which supplies the U.S.
'Defense' Department, CIA, and NSA. For example, "without AWS and Prime,
Amazon lost $2 billion in the 1st quarter of FY18. These losses come from Amazon's retail
business. About 60% of Amazon's revenue comes from retail and that's where Amazon is losing
money." Amazon is profitable because of what it sells mainly to the Government, but also to
other large U.S. international corporations, and they all want to conquer Syria. None opposes
that evil goal. Although Bezos doesn't like the Sauds, he has actually been (at least until the
Khashoggi matter) one of their main U.S. media champions for the Sauds to take over Syria. It's
all just a fool-the-public game. It works, it succeeds, and that's what Gallup's polls are
demonstrating. The public never learns. It's a fact, which has been proven in many different
ways.
This reality extends also to other nations, allies of the U.S. aristocracy, and not only to
the U.S. regime itself. For example, on 27 November 2018, a whistleblowing former UK
Ambassador, Craig Murray, who is a personal friend of Julian Assange, headlined
"Assange Never Met Manafort. Luke Harding and the Guardian Publish Still More Blatant MI6
Lies" , and he proved that Britain's Guardian had lied with total, and totally
undocumented (and probably even totally non-credible), fabrications, alleging that Julian
Assange of WikiLeaks had secretly met (in 2013, 2015, and 2016) with Paul Manafort of the Trump
campaign. The UK, of course, is a vassal-nation of the U.S. aristocracy, and the
Guardian is run by Democratic Party propagandists (paid indirectly by Democratic Party
and conservative Tony-Blair-wing Labour Party billionaires ) and
therefore fabricates in order to assist those Parties' efforts to impeach Trump and to dislodge
Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party's leadership. However, each of America's two political
parties (like the UK's aristocracy itself) represents America's aristocracy, which, like
Britain's aristocracy, is united in its determination
to eliminate Assange -- they are as determined to do that to him, just as Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud was determined to eliminate Jamal Khashoggi. 'Democracy'?
This? It is Big Brother.
Only if the population boycott lying individuals and organizations, is democracy even
possible to exist in a nation. Democracy can't possibly exist more than truth does. In
political matters, deceit is always treachery; and its practitioners, whenever the evidence for
it is overwhelming and irrefutable, should experience whatever the standard penalty is for
treachery. Only in a land such as that, can democracy possibly exist. Elsewhere, it simply
can't. The only basis for democracy, is truth. Deceit is for dictators, not for
democrats. And deceit reigns, in the U.S. and in its allied countries. Is this really
tolerable? Americans, at least, tolerate it.
When Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the far-right Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street
Journal editorialized against Obama on 10 October 2009, by saying that
"What this suggests to us -- and to the Norwegians -- is the end of what has been called
'American exceptionalism'." Little did anyone then know that after winning re
-election upon the basis of such war-mongering lies from Obama, as that
"America remains the one indispensable nation" , Obama in February 2014 would go so far as
to perpetrate a bloody
coup overthrowing the democratically elected Government of one "dispensable" nation,
Ukraine; and, then, on 28 May of 2014, Obama would be telling America's future
generals , that "The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation" and that
Obama would, in that speech, explicitly malign Ukraine's neighbor Russia. He did it, in this
speech, which implicitly called all nations except the U.S. "dispensable." He had
carefully planned and orchestrated Americans' hostility toward Russia. His successor, Trump,
lied saying that he wanted to reverse Obama's policies on this, and Trump promptly, once
becoming elected, increased and expanded those policies. Whatever a deceitfully war-mongering
country like this might be, it's certainly no democracy. Because democracy cannot be built upon
a ceaseless string of lies.
Within individual countries, murder is rightly considered to be the worst of crimes. But the
institution of war tries to convince us that if a soldier murders someone from another country,
whom the politicians have designated as an "enemy", it is no longer a crime, no longer a
violation of the common bonds of humanity. It is "heroic". In their hearts, soldiers know that
this is nonsense. Murder is always murder.
The men, women and children who are supposed to be the "enemy", are just ordinary people,
with whom the soldier really has no quarrel. Therefore when the training of soldiers wears
off a little, so that they realize what they have done, they have to see themselves as
murderers, and many commit suicide. A recent article in the journal "Epidemiology" pointed out
a startling statistic: for every American soldier killed in combat in 2012, 25 committed
suicide. The article also quotes the Department of Veterans Affairs, which says that 18
veterans commit suicide every day.
Obviously, the training of soldiers must overwrite fundamental ethical principles. This
training must make a soldier abandon his or her individual conscience and sense of
responsibility. It must turn the soldier from a compassionate human being into an automaton, a
killing machine. How is this accomplished? Through erosion of of the soldier's self-respect.
Through the endless repetition of senseless rituals where obedience is paramount and from which
rational thought and conscience are banished.
In his book on fanaticism, The True Believer (1951), the American author Eric Hoffer
gives the following description of the factors promoting self-sacrifice: "To ripen a
person for self-sacrifice, he must be stripped of his individual identity. He must cease
to be George, Hans, Ivan or Tado – a human atom with an existence bounded by birth and
death. The most drastic way to achieve this end is by the complete assimilation of the
individual into a collective body. The fully assimilated individual does not see himself and
others as human beings. When asked who he is, his automatic response is that he is a German, a
Russian, a Japanese, a Christian, a Muslim, a member of a certain tribe or family. He has no
purpose, worth or destiny apart from his collective body, and as long as that body lives, he
cannot really die. "The effacement of individual separateness must be thorough.
In every act, however trivial, the individual must, by some ritual, associate himself with
the congregation, the tribe, the party, etcetera. His joys and sorrows, his pride and
confidence must spring from the fortunes and capacities of the group, rather than from
his individual prospects or abilities. Above all, he must never feel alone. Though stranded on
a desert island, he must feel that he is under the eyes of the group. To be cast out from the
group must be equivalent to being cut off from life. "This is undoubtedly a primitive
state of being, and its most perfect examples are found among primitive tribes.
Mass movements strive to approximate this primitive perfection, and we are not imagining
things when the anti-individualist bias of contemporary mass movements strikes us as being a
throwback to the primitive." The conditioning of a soldier in a modern army follows the pattern
described in Eric Hoffer's book. The soldier's training aims at abolishing his sense of
individual separateness, individual responsibility, and moral judgment. It is filled with
rituals, such as saluting, by which the soldier identifies with his tribe-like army
group. His uniform also helps to strip him of his individual identity and to assimilate him
into the group. The result of this psychological conditioning is that the soldier's mind
reverts to a primitive state. He surrenders his moral responsibility, and when the politicians
tell him to kill, he kills.
2 The Nuremberg principles adopted by the UN
In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously affirmed "the principles of
international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the
Tribunal". The General Assembly also established an International Law Commission to formalize
the Nuremberg Principles. The result was a list that included Principles VI, which is
particularly important in the context of the illegality of NATO:
Principle I
Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is
responsible therefor and liable to punishment.
Principle II
The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime
under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility
under international law.
Principle III
The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international
law, acted as Head of State or responsible government official, does not relieve him from
responsibility under international law.
Principle IV
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not
relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact
possible to him.
Principle V
Any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the
facts and law.
Principle VI
The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:
(a) Crimes against peace and humanity:
i. Planning, preparation, initiation or a plan of a war of aggression or a war in violation
of international treaties, agreements or assurances; ii. Participation in a common plan or
conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).
(b) War crimes: Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited
to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian
population of or in occupied territory; murder or illtreatment of prisoners of war or persons
on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of
cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.
(c) Crimes against humanity: Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other
inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or
religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of
or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.
Principle VII
Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against
humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.
Figure 2: Nazi war criminals awaiting judgement at the Nuremberg trials.
Figure 3: You cannot just say "I was acting under orders".
Figure 4: Judgement at Nuremberg
3 The International Criminal Court
The need for an International Criminal Court which would hold individuals responsible for
such crimes as genocide had long been recognized, and at a special session of the United
Nations General Assembly in Rome in June, 1998, the ICC was established by a vote of 120 to 7,
with 21 countries abstaining. The seven countries that voted against the Rome Statute, which
established the ICC, were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the United States, and Yemen. In
2002, after the 60 needed ratifications had been obtained, the International Criminal
Court went into force. Today the ICC is located at the Hague, Netherlands.
It has the power to judge cases involving genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes,
provided that no national court is willing to judge them. Although the ICC functions
imperfectly, and is opposed by several powerful nations, it is impossible to underestimate its
importance. For the first time individuals are being held responsible for crimes against
international law.
As we mentioned above in connection with collective punishment, attempts to coerce
nation-states by means of sanctions are neither just nor effective. Political
Federations, where laws act on individuals, have historically proved to be effective,
just and stable. Thus the establishment of the ICC can be seen as a vital step towards a United
Nations Charter reform which would transform the UN from a confederation to a federation.
The ICC deserves the wholehearted support of everyone who believes that institutionalized
injustice and the brutal rule of military force should be replaced by a world of peace, justice
and law. We must remember the words of the Icelandic saga of Njal: "With law shall our land be
built up, but with lawlessness laid waste."
4 The illegality of NATO
Violation of the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles
In recent years, participation in NATO has made European countries accomplices in US
efforts to achieve global hegemony by means of military force, in violation of
international law, and especially in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles.
Former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Christof von Sponeck used the following words to
express his opinion that NATO now violates the UN Charter and international law: "In the 1949
North Atlantic Treaty, the Charter of the United Nations was declared to be NATO's legally
binding framework. However, the United-Nations monopoly of the use of force, especially as
specified in Article 51 of the Charter, was no longer accepted according to the 1999 NATO
doctrine. NATO's territorial scope, until then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was
expanded by its members to include the whole world."
Article 2 of the UN Charter requires that "All members shall refrain in their international
relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political
independence of any state." This requirement is somewhat qualified by Article 51, which
says that "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or
collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until
the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and
security." Thus, in general, war is illegal under the UN Charter. Self-defense against an armed
attack is permitted, but only for a limited time, until the Security Council has had time to
act. The United Nations Charter does not permit the threat or use of force in preemptive wars,
or to produce regime changes, or for so-called "democratization", or for the domination of
regions that are rich in oil. NATO must not be a party to the threat or use of force for such
illegal purposes.
In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously affirmed "the principles of
international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the
Tribunal". The General Assembly also established an International Law Commission to formalize
the Nuremberg Principles. The result was a list that included Principles VI and VII, which are
particularly important in the context of the illegality of NATO: Robert H. Jackson, who was the
chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, said that "To initiate a war of
aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime,
differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of
the whole."
Violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
At present, NATO's nuclear weapons policies violate both the spirit and the text of the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in several respects: Today there are an estimated 200 US
nuclear weapons still in Europe The air forces of the nations in which they are based are
regularly trained to deliver the US weapons. This "nuclear sharing", as it is called, violates
Articles I and II of the NPT, which forbid the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclearweapon
states. It has been argued that the NPT would no longer be in force if a crisis arose, but
there is nothing in the NPT saying that the treaty would not hold under all circumstances.
Article VI of the NPT requires states possessing nuclear weapon to get rid of them within a
reasonable period of time. This article is violated by fact that NATO policy is guided by a
Strategic Concept, which visualizes the continued use of nuclear weapons in the foreseeable
future.' The principle of no-first-use of nuclear weapons has been an extremely important
safeguard over the years, but it is violated by present NATO policy, which permits the
first-use of nuclear weapons in a wide variety of circumstances.
Must Europe really be dragged into a potentially catastrophic war with Russia?
At present the United States government is trying to force the European members of NATO to
participate in aggressive military operations near to Russia. Europe must refuse. The hubris,
and reckless irresponsibility of the US government in risking a catastrophic war with Russia is
almost beyond belief, but the intervention in Ukraine is only one in a long series of US
interventions: During the period from 1945 to the present, the US interfered, militarily or
covertly, in the internal affairs of a large number of nations: China, 1945-49; Italy,
1947-48; Greece, 1947-49; Philippines, 1946-53; South Korea, 1945-53; Albania, 1949-53;
Germany, 1950s; Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1953-1990s; Middle East, 1956-58; Indonesia, 1957-58;
British Guiana/Guyana, 1953-64; Vietnam, 1950-73; Cambodia, 1955-73; The Congo/Zaire, 196065;
Brazil, 1961-64; Dominican Republic, 1963-66; Cuba, 1959-present; Indonesia, 1965; Chile,
1964-73; Greece, 1964-74; East Timor, 1975-present; Nicaragua, 1978-89; Grenada, 1979-84;
Libya, 1981-89; Panama, 1989; Iraq, 1990-present; Afghanistan 1979-92; El Salvador, 1980-92;
Haiti, 1987-94; Yugoslavia, 1999; and Afghanistan, 2001-present, Syria, 2013-present. Egypt,
2013-present.
Most of these interventions were explained to the American people as being necessary to
combat communism (or more recently, terrorism), but an underlying motive was undoubtedly the
desire of the ruling oligarchy to put in place governments and laws that would be favorable to
the economic interests of the US and its allies. Also, the militaryindustrial complex needs
justification for the incredibly bloated military budgets that drain desperately needed
resources from social and environmental projects. Do the people of Europe really want to
participate in the madness of aggression against Russia? Of course not! What about European
leaders? Why don't they follow the will of the people and free Europe from bondage to the
United States? Have our leaders been bribed? Or have they been blackmailed through personal
secrets, discovered by the long arm of NSA spying?
Suggestions for further reading
Matt Wood, Crunching the Numbers on the Rate of Suicide Among Veterans, Epidemiology,
April 27, (2012).
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Harper and Row, (1951).
Daniele Archibugi and Alice Pease, Crime and Global Justice. The Dynamics of
International Punishment, Polity Press, (2018).
David Bosco, Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court's Battle to Fix the World,
One Prosecution at a Time, Oxford University Press, (2014).
Bruce Broomhall, International Justice and the International Criminal Court: Between
Sovereignty and the Rule of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2003).
Anne-Marie de Brouwer, Supranational Criminal Prosecution of Sexual Violence: The ICC and
the Practice of the ICTY and the ICTR. Antwerp – Oxford: Intersentia (2005).
Karin Calvo-Goller, The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court ICTY and
ICTR Precedents, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, (2006),
A freely downloadable book
A new 418-page book entitled "A World Federation" may be downloaded and circulated gratis
from the following link:
J ohn Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist at the University of Copenhagen. He is noted for
his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and
history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the
phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has
its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information
theory. Since 1990 he has been the Chairman of the Danish National Group of Pugwash Conferences
on Science and World Affairs. During his tenure The Pugwash Movement won a nobel peace prize.
Between 2004 and 2015 he also served as Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy. He founded the
Journal of Bioenergetics and Biomembranes, and was for many years its Managing Editor. He also
served as Technical Advisor to the World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe
(1988-1997).
Trump lost control of foreign policy, when he appointed Pompeo. US voters might elect Hillary with the same effect on foreign policy
as Pompeo.
Notable quotes:
"... It is to Trump's disgrace that he chose Pompeo and the abominable Bolton. At least Trump admits the ME invasions are really about Israel. ..."
"... Energy dominance, lebensraum for Israel and destroying the current Iran are all objectives that fit into one neat package. Those plans look to be coming apart at the moment so it remains to be seen how fanatical Trump is on Israel and MAGA. MAGA as US was at the collapse of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... As for pulling out of the Middle East Bibi must have had a good laugh. Remember when he said he wanted out of Syria. My money is on the US to be in Yemen before too long to protect them from the Saudis (humanitarian) and Iranian backed Houthis, while in reality it will be to secure the enormous oil fields in the North. ..."
"... The importance of oil is not to supply US markets its to deny it to enemies and control oil prices in order to feed international finance/IMF. ..."
Pompeo is a Deep State Israel-firster with a nasty neocon agenda. It is to Trump's disgrace that he chose Pompeo and the abominable
Bolton. At least Trump admits the ME invasions are really about Israel.
Pompeo is a Deep State Israel-firster with a nasty neocon agenda. It is to Trump's disgrace that he chose Pompeo and
the abominable Bolton. At least Trump admits the ME invasions are really about Israel.
Trump, Israel and the Sawdi's. US no longer needs middle east oil for strategic supply. Trump is doing away with the petro-dollar
as that scam has run its course and maintenance is higher than returns. Saudi and other middle east oil is required for global
energy dominance.
Energy dominance, lebensraum for Israel and destroying the current Iran are all objectives that fit into one neat package.
Those plans look to be coming apart at the moment so it remains to be seen how fanatical Trump is on Israel and MAGA. MAGA as
US was at the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As for pulling out of the Middle East Bibi must have had a good laugh. Remember when he said he wanted out of Syria. My money
is on the US to be in Yemen before too long to protect them from the Saudis (humanitarian) and Iranian backed Houthis, while in
reality it will be to secure the enormous oil fields in the North.
Perhaps this was what the Khashoggi trap was all about. The importance of oil is not to supply US markets its to deny it
to enemies and control oil prices in order to feed international finance/IMF.
"... Trump won't fire his son-in-law, so if Jared doesn't have the decency to resign on his own, he may well be responsible for Trump's downfall in addition to his own. Trump's silly daughter, Ivanka, needs to go to. ..."
"... Time for Bolton to send for the clairvoyant Theresa May who has managed to accuse Russia, and Mr. Putin personally, in the Skripals' poisoning n the absence of any evidence ..."
Comment section (David Wooten): "According to the crown prince himself, Trump's [Jewish]
son-in-law gave him a secret list of his enemies -- the ones like Al Aweed who were
tortured and shaken down for cash. Khashoggi might even have been on that list.
One or more of the tortured ones likely tipped off Erdogan, which is why Turkey only
needed to enter the consulate, retrieve the recorded audio device they planted, and walk out
with the evidence. Turkey also has evidence that puts MbS' personal doctor and other staff
arriving in Turkey at convenient times to do the job -- and probably more. Khashoggi was
anything but a nice person but Trump cannot say that or he'll likely be accused of
involvement in his murder.
Dissociation is made far more difficult by the fact that Jared is a long time friend of
Netanyahu who, like Jared, hasbefriended MbS .
Trump won't fire his son-in-law, so if Jared doesn't have the decency to resign on his
own, he may well be responsible for Trump's downfall in addition to his own. Trump's silly
daughter, Ivanka, needs to go to.
Were it not for the Khashoggi affair, fewer Republican seats would have been lost in the
election."
-- Time for Bolton to send for the clairvoyant Theresa May who has managed to accuse
Russia, and Mr. Putin personally, in the Skripals' poisoning n the absence of any
evidence .
These people -- Bolton, May, Gavin Williamson and likes -- are a cross of the ever-eager
whores and petty brainless thieves. To expose themselves as the willing participants in the
ZUSA-conducted farce requires a complete lack of integrity.
Of course, there is no way to indict the journalist's murderers since the principal
murderer is a personal friend of Netanyahu and Jared.
Jump, Justice, jump, as high as ordered by the "chosen."
By the way, why do we hear nothing about Seth Rich who was murdered in the most surveilled
city of the US?
@annamaria A 1st
grader can see that MbS was behind the murder of Kashoggi.
Trump won't fire his son-in-law, so if Jared doesn't have the decency to resign on his
own, he may well be responsible for Trump's downfall in addition to his own. Trump's silly
daughter, Ivanka, needs to go to.
I've been hoping for this since they moved to Washington with 'big daddy'.
@Anon " crappy
bedtime reading the woolyheadedness "
Hey, Anon[436], is this how your parents have been treating you? My condolences.
If you feel that you succeeded with your "see, a squirrel" tactics of taking attention
from the zionists' dirty and amoral attempts at coverup of the murder of the journalists
Khashoggi, which was accomplished on the orders of the clown prince (the dear friend of Bibi
& Jared), you are for a disappointment.
One more time for you, Anon[436]: the firm evidence of MbS involvement in the murder of
Khashoggi contrasts with no evidence of the alleged poisoning of Skripals by
Russian government.
The zionists have been showing an amazing tolerance towards the clown prince the murderer
because zionists need the clown prince for the implementation of Oded Yinon Plan for Eretz
Israel.
The stinky Skripals' affair involves harsh economic actions imposed on the RF in the
absence of any evidence , as compared to no sanctions in response to the actual murder
of Khashoggi, which involved MbS according to the availableevidence . Thanks
to the zionists friendship with the clown prince, the firm evidence of Khashoggi murder is of
no importance. What else could be expected from the "most moral" Bibi & Kushner and the
treasonous Bolton.
The stinky Skripals' affair involves harsh economic actions imposed on the RF in the
absence of any evidence, as compared to no sanctions in response to the actual murder of
Khashoggi, which involved MbS according to the available evidence. Thanks to the zionists
friendship with the clown prince, the firm evidence of Khashoggi murder is of no
importance. What else could be expected from the "most moral" Bibi & Kushner and the
treasonous Bolton.
Authoritarianism has always existed. But it hasn't always been clearly visible. Technology
makes authoritarianism more powerful. Centralization and urbanization have served the
purposes of the elite well.
People need information and communication. The inverted totalitarianism we live in,
doesn't like that. It wants the Internet to implement that inverted totalitarianism (see
China). They want everything (in a corporatist way) to be mandatory, except for what is
forbidden. What has been revealed, and is being revealed, is that the current
political-economic system isn't fit for purpose, human purpose.
So the real answer is like what is happening in France now...
Attempting to blame the internet for the increasingly authoritarian world we live in is
not seeing the forest through the trees. The internet is surely a tool used against
humanity,That doesn't make it "bad". I would say the reason people can be fooled by these
social media propaganda tactics, is precisely because the fourth estate is practicing such in
depth propaganda campaigns, with all propaganda, all the time coverage on every other form of
media as well. People have nowhere to turn.
Why do people think some russians posting on facebook and twitter skewed the electorate in
this country than say nothing about:fox news,npr,cnn,rush limbaugh,hannity,the new york
times, wall st journal,the weekly standard, time magazine,people magazine, etc.All of these
organizations and all the others spout disinformation. every day.
And america's trend towards the authoritarian state has been accelerating since at least the
national security act of 1947.as a national trend, whereas in the beginning of this countries
existence, there have been authoritarian control of local districts by local groups, ie.
whites over blacks, or whites over indians, or rich over poor immigrants, etc.
All the internet age and the "information age is doing, is changing the medium. the message
is still the same. and there has always been resistance. now that resistance seems more
futile, but is it?
Why do people think some russians posting on facebook and twitter skewed the electorate
in this country than say nothing about:fox news,npr,cnn,rush limbaugh,hannity,the new york
times, wall st journal,the weekly standard, time magazine,people magazine, etc.All of these
organizations and all the others spout disinformation. every day.
Exactly. Our society is mainly shaped by its elites. And other than Twitter they are
barely involved with the internet at all but rather get their news and attitudes from the NY
Times or (in Trump's case) cable TV. Therefore rather than enhancing the always existing
authoritarianism of "manufactured consent," the internet works to undermine it. This of
course provokes much fingering of worry beads among the elite who see the mob and their
pitchforks as real threats. The situation in France illustrates this phenomenon nicely and
there have been calls by some to block Facebook in France so those yellow vests can't
communicate with each other.
Diversity of opinion is a good thing, not bad, and some of us scan right leaning websites
just to get a different view. The internet is not the problem. Powerful authoritarians are
the problem.
In my own undoubtedly faulty memory of Animal Farm , Orwell characterized the
devolution as "the nature of the beast" through his characters. That is (over and above the
allegory of the Russian revolution/devolution), there are strong traits in human character
that makes this devolution inevitable. We have the pigs; the aggressors, and the followers,
and less savory characters, and the "never quite enough" wise annimal(s) and so on, working
unwittingly together against the welfare of the whole making the end result seem precast. Not
so much that we did nothing, as that we could do nothing.
1984 never really addressed that issue (or at least I don't remember it doing so), but
from the start everything seemed inevitable, there was no discussion of any "might have
been," that could have been an alternative to the dystopia of an engineered rivalry between
two super-powers that worked off each other to maintain a compliant global society in
hopeless mass psychological, never mind physical, irons.
But even assuming this inevitability was Orwell's own belief and intent in his
writings (and not simply my misunderstanding of them), I agree with your point that we had
plenty of warning, and not just Orwell, and that society as a whole too frequently took the
easier road but with a lot of help and insistent guidance (manipulation) from our
increasingly corrupt leaders and captains of industry (our own pigs).
Animal Farm was Orwell's best book IMO because it speaks to universal human tendencies
even though the book was also about Stalin and Trotsky. 1984 was far fetched speculation
based on, as it turned out, the short lived totalitarianism of figures like Hitler and
Stalin. People assume we are living 1984 when it's really Animal Farm.
"... Neoliberal doctrine leads to skyrocketing inequality, a swelling in the desperate and forgotten poor who are vulnerable to populist messaging and the idea of a strongman peddling easy answers to keep people safe as civil unrest increases. Fascism seeks power for power's sake and total control over the populace, and always cruelty to the marginalised, the 'others'. How all the right wingers hand-wringing over the idea of 'socialist communisms!!1!' can't see that, I don't know. ..."
"... All over the world, failed neoliberalism is being replaced by right-wing populist nationalism & I don't think "repairing democratic institutions" is at the top of their to-do list. ..."
"... I'm certainly in favour of greater nationalisation, especially of essential services. But around the world, neo-liberalism has morphed into neo-fascism and this is where the next fight must be. ..."
"... In social systems, natural selection favours cooperation. In addition, we are biased toward ethical behaviours, so cooperation and sharing are valued in human societies. ..."
"... The consequences of four decades of financialized neoliberal trade policies were by no means equally shared. Internal and external class relations were made evident through narrowly distributed booms followed by widely distributed busts. ..."
"... No wonder you get fascist right wing insurgence in this climate! ..."
Never forget that fascism is the natural defence mechanism of capital. After it is accrued,
it must be defended. The current trend in global politics is not an anomaly but an entirely
predictable outcome.
Neoliberal doctrine leads to skyrocketing inequality, a swelling in the
desperate and forgotten poor who are vulnerable to populist messaging and the idea of a
strongman peddling easy answers to keep people safe as civil unrest increases. Fascism seeks
power for power's sake and total control over the populace, and always cruelty to the marginalised, the 'others'. How all the right wingers hand-wringing over the idea of
'socialist communisms!!1!' can't see that, I don't know.
It's too late for the US I fear, and time is rapidly running out for the UK if they don't
pull their finger out and have another referendum before the self immolation of Brexit.
All over the world, failed neoliberalism is being replaced by right-wing populist nationalism
& I don't think "repairing democratic institutions" is at the top of their to-do list.
If
Australia does swing the pendulum to the left, it, along with NZ, will be one of the few
countries to do so. De-privatising will not be easy & will be met with a huge reactionary
backlash. They'll need to tread very carefully if they want to stay in government.
Neoliberalism may be dead but the neoliberals in the government will never admit it as they
seamlessly transition to authoritarian nationalism with populist promises - and failure to
deliver on them.
The neoliberal project was always a philosophical cover for crony capitalism that betrayed
the public interest by rewarding vested interests for their patronage, perverted democracy,
and served as a mechanism for perverting the natural function of an economy - to fairly
distribute goods, resources, and services throughout society - to favor the welfare of the
few over the many.
The self-interested culture of neoliberalism - the cult of the individual that denies the
common good - pervades every aspect of Australia's life as a nation - business, politics,
sport, education, and health - denying and crowding out public spirit, selfless service, and
societal wellbeing.
For meaningful change to occur there must be a rebirth of the conception of the public
good, and the virtue and necessity of acting to realise it.
However at this stage there is not a communal recognition of what the problem is let alone
how to go about repairing it. For that to happen there must be a widely accepted narrative
that naturally leads to the obvious actions that must be take to redress the damage done by
the neoliberal con job: decreasing economic inequality, restoring democracy, and rebuilding a
sense of common cause.
Piecemeal change will not be sufficient to enact the the sweeping transformation that has
to occur in every department of life. It is not enough to tax multinationals, to have a
federal integrity commission, to build a renewable future, or to move to proportional
representation.
Someone, some party, some coherent philosophical perspective has to explain why it must be
done.
It's certainly the case that the Liberal party, in particular, are now using ideas that fall
outside and to the right of neo-liberalism, but it's also obviously the case that
neo-liberalism and current Liberal thinking share the same underlying goal. Namely, the
transfer of wealth and power towards a narrower and narrower group of people and
corporations.
That suggests the death of neo-liberalism is coming about because – having done so
much damage already – it's no longer capable of delivering the required results, and
that we're moving into a new phase of the death spiral. I think that can also be seen in both
the US (where Trump is using the identified problems of neo-liberalism to further the same
basic agenda, but with less decorum and a larger cadre of useful idiots) and the UK (where
there's still a very strong possibility that Brexit will be used as an excuse to roll back
great swathes of social and democratic safeguards).
Perhaps even more worrying – given the latest reports on how we're destroying
habitat as well as the climate, and how much of our biodiversity is in South America,
particularly the Amazon – is that Brazil is how on a similar path.
The likelihood is that the Liberal party won't get away with what they have planned, but
they – and the forces behind them – certainly won't stop trying. And
unfortunately it's far from obvious that the Labor party will repudiate neo-liberalism
anytime soon. That they signed up for the latest iteration of TPP is hardly a good omen.
Democratic re-engagement is the better way forward from neo-liberalism, but unfortunately
I think it's unlikely to be the one that we end up taking.
All of that said, the deepest problem of all is the way in which democracy and government
have been corrupted, often via the media, but typically at the behest of corporations, and if
there is a way forward it has to be found in addressing those interactions
I'm certainly in favour of greater nationalisation, especially of essential services. But
around the world, neo-liberalism has morphed into neo-fascism and this is where the next
fight must be.
In social systems, natural selection favours cooperation. In addition, we are biased
toward ethical behaviours, so cooperation and sharing are valued in human societies.
But what happens when we are forced into an economic system that makes us compete at every
level? The logical outcome is societal decline or collapse.
Perhaps the worst aspect of neoliberalism was its infection of the Labor party. This has
left our social infrastructure alarmingly exposed.
The consequences of four decades of financialized neoliberal trade policies were by no
means equally shared. Internal and external class relations were made evident through
narrowly distributed booms followed by widely distributed busts.
Globally, debt has forced policy convergence between political parties of differing
ideologies. European center-left parties have pushed austerity even when ideology would
suggest the opposite.
No wonder you get fascist right wing insurgence in this climate!
Thank you Richard Denniss we need to highlight this more and more and start educating the
dumbed down population saturated with neoliberal snake oil!
"... The senior member of the Donald Trump administration said a multilateral approach is failing to produce a world of unrestricted capitalism, so the US should rule supreme – sorry, assume a leadership role – to ensure that countries like China didn't try to offer an alternative way. ..."
"... The UN is a vehicle for regional powers to "collude" and vote in bad actors into the Human Rights Council. "Bad actors" are of course not Saudi Arabia. The World Bank and the International Monetary fund are in the way of private lenders. The EU is good, but Brexit should be a wake-up call for its bureaucracy, which doesn't know how good nationalism actually is. The International Criminal Court is "rogue" because it attempts to hold Americans accountable for crimes in Afghanistan. ..."
"... But what organization was a good boy and doesn't deserve a piece of coal from Uncle Sam? SWIFT was. The banking communications organization caved in to Washington and cut off Iranians from its system, so it has a place in the bright new world of US leadership. ..."
The US will lead a new liberal world order, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared.
Organizations and treaties not fitting this picture must be scrapped or reformed, so that
non-compliers could not use them against America. The vision of the bold new and prosperous
(for the US and its supporters) world was delivered by Pompeo in a keynote
speech to the German Marshall Fund on Tuesday.
The senior member of the Donald Trump administration said a multilateral approach is
failing to produce a world of unrestricted capitalism, so the US should rule supreme –
sorry, assume a leadership role – to ensure that countries like China didn't try to offer
an alternative way.
China, as well as Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and other nations on the US grudge list got
their share of bashing in the speech, but its focus was more on international institutions,
which Pompeo claimed to be incompatible with his grand vision.
The UN is a vehicle for regional powers to "collude" and vote in bad actors into the
Human Rights Council. "Bad actors" are of course not Saudi Arabia. The World Bank and the
International Monetary fund are in the way of private lenders. The EU is good, but Brexit
should be a wake-up call for its bureaucracy, which doesn't know how good nationalism actually
is. The International Criminal Court is "rogue" because it attempts to hold Americans
accountable for crimes in Afghanistan.
The Paris Agreement on climate change was bad for America, so it left. NAFTA was bad for
America, so it forced a renegotiation. The nuclear deal with Iran didn't make Tehran
complacent, so it had to go.
But what organization was a good boy and doesn't deserve a piece of coal from Uncle Sam?
SWIFT was. The banking communications organization caved in to Washington and cut off Iranians
from its system, so it has a place in the bright new world of US leadership.
Watch Murad Gazdiev's report about Pompeo's "new liberal order" to find out
more.
"... I've come to believe that Trump's role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the
Congress and then does. I don't think he's capable. I don't think he's capable of sustained focus. I don't think he understands the
system. I don't think the Congress is on his side. I don't think his own agencies support him. He's not going to do that. ..."
"... I think Trump's role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters. We were not having any conversation about immigration
before Trump arrived in Washington. ..."
"... Trump asked basic questions like' "Why don't our borders work?" "Why should we sign a trade agreement and let the other side
cheat?" Or my favorite of all, "What's the point of NATO?" The point of NATO was to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe but
they haven't existed in 27 years, so what is the point? These are obvious questions that no one could answer. ..."
"... I mean let me just be clear. I'm not against an aristocratic system. I'm not against a ruling class. I think that hierarchies
are natural, people create them in every society. I just think the system that we have now the meritocracy, which is based really on
our education system, on a small number of colleges has produced a ruling class that doesn't have the self-awareness that you need to
be wise. ..."
"... it was only after the financial crisis of 08 that I noticed that something was really out of whack, because Washington didn't
really feel the crisis. ..."
"... If you leave Washington and drive to say Pittsburgh, which is a manufacturing town about three and a half hours to the west,
you drive through a series of little towns that are devastated. There are no car dealerships, there are no restaurants. There's nothing.
They have not recovered. I remember driving out there one day, maybe eight or nine years ago and thinking, boy, this is a disaster.
..."
"... That's kind of strange since we're the capital city in charge of making policy for everybody else... Massive inequality does
not work in a democracy... ..."
"... If you make above a certain income, or if you live in my neighborhood, you have zero physical contact with other Americans.
In other words, the elite in our country is physically separated in a way that's very unhealthy for a democracy, very unhealthy. ..."
"... The Democratic Party, which for 100 years was the party of average people is now the party of the rich. ..."
"... He served the purpose of bringing the middle class into the Republican Party, which had zero interest, no interest in representing
them at all. Trump is intuitive, he felt, he could smell that there was this large group of voters who had no one representing them
and he brought them to the Republican side, but the realignment is still ongoing. ..."
"... In other words, the Democratic Party used to represent the middle class, it no longer does, it now hates the middle class.
..."
"... I do think, going forward the Republican Party will wake up and realize these are our voters and we're going to represent them
whether we want it or not. ..."
"... I am deeply suspicious of foreign adventurism, voluntary wars, wars of self-defense are not controversial, I'm for them completely,
there's an invasion repellent. The idea that you would send 100,000 troops to a country to improve its political system is grotesque
to me. It would've been grotesque to them. ..."
"... The Vietnam War was horrifying to them because it was a voluntary war, waged for theoretical reasons, geostrategic reasons
which they rejected, and I do too. ..."
"... We can make autonomous choices about how we respond to market forces. People get crushed beneath its wheels. ..."
"... Capitalism drives change, innovation change, the old ways give way to new ways of doing things, and in the process of change
the weak get hurt always, this was true in industrialization 100 years ago and it's true in the digital revolution now. What's changed
is that nobody is standing up on behalf of the people who are being crushed by the change. ..."
"... In your book, you say they've vanishing but they seem to come back again. ..."
"... Have you ever seen this amount of discontent and aggression here in your lifetime? ..."
"... How close to a revolution is your country? ..."
"... The country is getting redder and bluer. ..."
"... Do you think that Europe will get in control of the migration? ..."
The Swiss are very suspicious of anybody who is boastful. That's why I have a question about Trump
I hate that about him. I hate that it's not my culture. I didn't grow up like that.
In your book you speak a lot about people who attack Trump, but you actually don't say very much about Trump's record.
That's true.
Do you think he has kept his promises? Has he achieved his goals?
No. He hasn't?
No. His chief promises were that he would build the wall, de-fund planned parenthood, and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn't done
any of those things. There are a lot of reasons for that, but since I finished writing the book, I've come to believe that Trump's
role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress and then does. I don't think
he's capable. I don't think he's capable of sustained focus. I don't think he understands the system. I don't think the Congress
is on his side. I don't think his own agencies support him. He's not going to do that.
I think Trump's role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters. We were not having any conversation about immigration
before Trump arrived in Washington. People were bothered about it in different places in the country. It's a huge country, but
that was not a staple of political debate at all. Trump asked basic questions like' "Why don't our borders work?" "Why should
we sign a trade agreement and let the other side cheat?" Or my favorite of all, "What's the point of NATO?" The point of NATO was
to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe but they haven't existed in 27 years, so what is the point? These are obvious questions
that no one could answer.
Apart from asking these very important questions has he really achieved nothing?
Not much. Not much. Much less than he should have. I've come to believe he's not capable of it.
Why should he be not capable?
Because the legislative process in this country by design is highly complex, and it's designed to be complex as a way of diffusing
power, of course, because the people who framed our Constitution, founded our country, were worried about concentrations of power.
They balanced it among the three branches as you know and they made it very hard to make legislation. In order to do it you really
have to understand how it works and you have to be very focused on getting it done, and he knows very little about the legislative
process, hasn't learned anything, hasn't and surrounded himself with people that can get it done, hasn't done all the things you
need to do so. It's mostly his fault that he hasn't achieved those things. I'm not in charge of Trump.
The title of your book is "Ship of Fools". You write that an irresponsible elite has taken over America. Who is the biggest
fool?
I mean let me just be clear. I'm not against an aristocratic system. I'm not against a ruling class. I think that hierarchies
are natural, people create them in every society. I just think the system that we have now the meritocracy, which is based really
on our education system, on a small number of colleges has produced a ruling class that doesn't have the self-awareness that you
need to be wise. I'm not arguing for populism, actually. I'm arguing against populism. Populism is what you get when your leaders
fail. In a democracy, the population says this is terrible and they elect someone like Trump.
When did you first notice that this elite is getting out of touch with the people?
Well, just to be clear, I'm not writing this from the perspective of an outsider. I mean I've lived in this world my whole life.
Which world exactly?
The world of affluence and the high level of education and among-- I grew up in a town called La Jolla, California in the south.
It was a very affluent town and then I moved as a kid to Georgetown here in Washington. I've been here my whole life. I've always
lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class, and it was only after the financial crisis of 08 that
I noticed that something was really out of whack, because Washington didn't really feel the crisis.
If you leave Washington and drive to say Pittsburgh, which is a manufacturing town about three and a half hours to the west,
you drive through a series of little towns that are devastated. There are no car dealerships, there are no restaurants. There's nothing.
They have not recovered. I remember driving out there one day, maybe eight or nine years ago and thinking, boy, this is a disaster.
Rural America, America outside three or four cities is really falling apart. I thought if you're running the country, you should
have a sense of that. I remember thinking to myself, nobody I know has any idea that this is happening an hour away. That's kind
of strange since we're the capital city in charge of making policy for everybody else... Massive inequality does not work in a democracy...
You become Venezuela.
You write about vanishing middle class. When you were born over 60 % of Americans ranked middle class. Why and when did
it disappear?
If you make above a certain income, or if you live in my neighborhood, you have zero physical contact with other Americans.
In other words, the elite in our country is physically separated in a way that's very unhealthy for a democracy, very unhealthy.
The Democratic Party is out of touch with the working class.
Well, that's the remarkable thing. For 100 years the Democratic Party represented wage earners, working people, normal people,
middle class people, then somewhere around-- In precisely peg it to Clinton's second term in the tech boom in the Bay Area in Francisco
and Silicon Valley, the Democratic Party reoriented and became the party of technology, of large corporations, and of the rich. You've
really seen that change in the last 20 years where in the top 10 richest zip codes in the United States, 9 of them in the last election
just went for Democrats. Out of the top 50, 42 went for Democrats. The Democratic Party, which for 100 years was the party of
average people is now the party of the rich.
Donald Trump, who is often seen as this world-changing figure is actually a symptom of something that precedes him that I sometimes
wonder if he even understands which is this realignment. He served the purpose of bringing the middle class into the Republican
Party, which had zero interest, no interest in representing them at all. Trump is intuitive, he felt, he could smell that there was
this large group of voters who had no one representing them and he brought them to the Republican side, but the realignment is still
ongoing.
In other words, the Democratic Party used to represent the middle class, it no longer does, it now hates the middle class.
The Republican Party which has never represented the middle class doesn't want to. That is the source of really all the confusion
and the tension that you're seeing now. I do think, going forward the Republican Party will wake up and realize these are our
voters and we're going to represent them whether we want it or not.
They have to, or they will lose.
They have to, or they will die. Yes.
You're writing in an almost nostalgic tone about the old liberals? People like Miss Raymond, your first-class teacher. You
describe her wonderfully in the book. You say that they have vanished. What happened?
I find myself in deep sympathy with a lot of the aims of 1970s liberals. I believe in free speech, and I instinctively side with
the individual against the group. I think that the individual matters, I am deeply suspicious of foreign adventurism, voluntary
wars, wars of self-defense are not controversial, I'm for them completely, there's an invasion repellent. The idea that you would
send 100,000 troops to a country to improve its political system is grotesque to me. It would've been grotesque to them.
The Vietnam War was horrifying to them because it was a voluntary war, waged for theoretical reasons, geostrategic reasons
which they rejected, and I do too. They were also suspicious of market capitalism. They thought that somebody needed to push
back against the forces of the market, not necessarily because capitalism was bad, capitalism is not bad, it's also not a religion.
We don't have to follow it blindly. We can make autonomous choices about how we respond to market forces. People get crushed
beneath its wheels.
Capitalism drives change, innovation change, the old ways give way to new ways of doing things, and in the process of change
the weak get hurt always, this was true in industrialization 100 years ago and it's true in the digital revolution now. What's changed
is that nobody is standing up on behalf of the people who are being crushed by the change.
Is that really so? Look at the grassroot movement on the left: Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and her socialist group. It is probably
a 100 years ago when Americans last saw a socialist movement of substance emerging?
Yes. You're absolutely right. That's the future.
In your book, you say they've vanishing but they seem to come back again.
Well, you're absolutely right. You're incisive correct to say that the last time we saw this was 100 years ago, which was another
pivot point in our economic and social history. Where, after 10,000 years of living in an Agrarian society, people moved to the cities
to work in factories and that upended the social order completely. With that came huge political change and a massive reaction.
In the United States and in Western Europe labor unions moderated the forces of change and allowed us to preserve capitalism in
the form that we see it now... You're seeing the exact same dynamic play out today, we have another, as I said, economic revolution,
the digital age, which is changing how people work, how they make money, how families are structured. There is a huge reaction to
that, of course, because there always is, because normal people can't handle change at this pace. People are once again crying out
for some help. They feel threatened by the change. What bothers me is that there is no large group of sensible people asking, how
can we buffer this change? How can we restrain it just enough, not to stop it, but to keep people from overreacting and becoming
radical?
Talking about radical. Recently, a radical left-wing group have threatened to storm your Washington home. How is your wife?
How is your family?
They are fine, they're pretty tough. They're rattled.
The Antifa-mob came right to the door of your home?
Yes, they did and threatened my wife.
Which must have been absolutely scary?
Yes, it was. My wife was born in the city, my four children were born here, we're not moving.
Your attackers have a goal, they're trying to silence you.
Of course. I would never, of course, that's a cornerstone of Western civilization is expression and freedom of conscience. You
can tell me how to behave, you can force me not to sleep or take my clothes off in public, that's fine. Every society has the right
to control behavior. But no one has the right to control what you believe. You can't control my conscience, that's mine alone. Only
totalitarian movements do that, and that's what they're attempting. Of course, I would die first I'm never going to submit to that.
Have you ever seen this amount of discontent and aggression here in your lifetime?
No, I've never seen anything like this. What's so striking is that [chuckles] this is really... The radicalism is not on behalf
of people who are actually suffering, fellow Americans who are suffering, on behalf of the 70,000 people who died of drug ODs last
year, or on behalf of the people displaced by automation in GM, or whatever, on behalf of those dying American low class, it's really
on behalf of theoretical goals.
They're saying that I [Tucker Carlson] am saying naughty things that shouldn't be allowed to be expressed in public. Basically,
it's a totalitarian movement. Totally unhelpful. I would say childish. What they're really doing is defending the current order.
They're the shock troops of the elites actually. Actually, what you're seeing is something amazing, you're seeing for the first time
in history a revolution being waged against the working class. When does that happen?
Your way of debating is very tough. You're sitting there, hammering your guests. Sometimes we have a bit of a problem to
understand that. For us it's a bit disturbing.
Of course, it is. It's disturbing for me too!
How tough do you need to be nowadays to have an audience?
Less, I think than sometimes we put into it or I put into it. I'm actually, in my normal life, I think a pretty gentle person.
I've never had a yelling fight with my wife in 34 years. I mean, I've never yelled at my children. No, I don't ever.
Never?
Not one time. No, it's not how I communicate. I never want to be impolite. I have been impolite. I've lost my temper a couple
times, but I don't want to. I don't like that. I believe in civility.
... ... ...
How close to a revolution is your country?
By revolution, let me be clear, I don't think that we're anywhere near an outbreak of civil war, armed violence between two sides
for a bunch of different reasons... Testosterone levels are so low and marijuana use is so high that I think the population is probably
too ... What you don't have, prerequisite fall revolution, violent revolution, is a large group of young people who are comfortable
with violence and we don't have that. Maybe that will change. I hope it doesn't. I don't want violence for violence. I appall violence,
but I just don't see that happening. What I see happening most likely is a kind of gradual separation of the states.
If you look at the polling on the subject, classically, traditionally, Americans had antique racial attitudes. If you say, "Would
you be okay with your daughter marrying outside her race?" Most Americans, if they're being honest, would say, "no, I'm not okay
with that. I'm not for that." Now the polling shows people are much more comfortable with a child marrying someone of a different
race than they are marrying someone of a different political persuasion.
"I'd rather my daughter married someone who's Hispanic than liberal", someone might say. That is one measure. There are many measures,
but that's one measure of how politically divided we are and I just think that over time, people will self-segregate. It's a continental
country. It's a very large piece of land and you could see where certain states just become very, very different. Like if you're
Conservative, are you really going to live in California in 10 years? Probably not.
Orange County is now purely Democrat.
That's exactly right. You're going to move and if you're very liberal, are you really going to want to live in Idaho? Probably
not.
The country is getting redder and bluer.
Exactly.
This revolution you are warning about - What needs to be done to stop it from happening?
Just the only thing you can do in a democracy which is address the legitimate concerns of the population and think more critically
and be more wise in your decision making. Get a handle on technology. Technology is the driver of the change, so sweep aside the
politics, the fundamental fact about people is they can't metabolize change at this pace because as an evolutionary matter, they're
not designed to, they're not. If you asked your average old person what's the most upsetting thing about being old? You expect them
to say, "Well, my friends are dead". But that's not what they say. Or "I have to go to the bathroom six times a night". That's not
what they say.
You know what they say? "Things are too different. This is not the country I grew up in. I don't recognize this." All people hate
that. It doesn't mean you're a bigot, it means you're human. Unless you want things to fall apart, become so volatile that you can't
have a working economy, you need to get a handle on the pace of change. You have to slow it down.
How important is migration in terms of change?
It's central because nothing changes the society more quickly or more permanently than bringing in a whole new population and
that's not an attack on anybody. There are lots of populations- there are lots of immigrants who are much more impressive than I
am. I have no doubt about that. I'm not attacking immigrants. I'm merely saying that the effect on the people who already live here
is real and they're not bigots for feeling that way.
You come from an ancient country with a series of ancient cultures within it and if you woke up one morning and everyone was speaking
Amharic and you didn't recognize any of your surroundings, that would be deeply upsetting to you.
What you saying, it's necessary to slow it down, control it?
You have to slow it down. Look at the Chinese. I abhor, I despise the Chinese government. However, I'm willing to acknowledge
wise behavior when I see it. The Chinese would never accept this pace of demographic change not simply because they're racist, though
of course, they are, but that's not the point. The point is because they don't want their society to fall apart because they're in
charge of it.
The childlike faith that we have in America, and America is the worst at this, that all change is good and that progress is inevitable
and if something is new and fresh and more expensive, it's got to be better.
It is kind of refreshing for Europeans that even Hillary Clinton tells Europeans, "You have got to stop this. You've got
to get control of migration or you disintegrate."
John Kerry said the same thing, amazingly. They're telling the truth.
Do you think Europe is going to be able to get in control of that? We have 28 countries in the EU. And Switzerland is not
a member?
So smart, so smart... You know why? Because they're mountain people. Love them. You know why? Because they're suspicious, that's
what I like about them.
[laughter]
Do you think that Europe will get in control of the migration?
The EU has been doomed since the first day because it's inconsistent with human nature. The reason we have nation states is because
people wanted them, it's organic. A nation-state is just a larger tribe and it's organized along lines that make sense. They evolved
over thousands of years. To ignore it and destroy it because you think that you've got a better idea, is insane!
[And with that, our interview concludes. It has already run far past the allotted 40 minutes. I offer to take Carlson, who seems
to be very passionate about Switzerland, on a ski run in our Alps soon. Perhaps a smoke in one of the outdoor saunas I tell him smell
like rotten eggs. Ambassador Grenell is on the phone line patiently waiting.]
Now that the banks are calling in their insurance, the EU has to deliver either by 1)
screwing down Italy the same as they did Greece, or 2) getting the French and German public
(or better the whole EU) to bail out the banks.
There is a third option: the banks simply accept their losses, and the bankers make do
without their customary bonuses for a few quarters.
https://democracynow.org - As the media memorializes George H.W. Bush, we look at the
lasting impact of his 1991 invasion of Iraq and the propaganda campaign that encouraged it.
Although the Gulf War technically ended in February of 1991, the U.S. war on Iraq would
continue for decades, first in the form of devastating sanctions and then in the 2003 invasion
launched by George W. Bush. Thousands of U.S. troops and contractors remain in Iraq. A largely
forgotten aspect of Bush Sr.'s war on Iraq is the vast domestic propaganda effort before the
invasion began. We look at the way U.S. media facilitated the war on Iraq with journalist John
"Rick" MacArthur, president and publisher of Harper's Magazine and the author of the book
"Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War."
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on nearly 1,400 TV and
radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9AM ET:
https://democracynow.org
Though I'm no friend of Michael Moore, he at least was candid about American
"Judeo-Christian" adventures within foreign countries. America needs to pull in its horns,
and stop fooling around with other governments.
Our benighted nation has become a "Global" entity, which entails our young men and women
being used as cannon fodder for Israel's designs, in addition to furthering the campaign by
Globalists to divvy up the world's resources and labor markets .
Our country is blessed with all the necessary raw materials, manufacturing capabilities,
educated and motivated work forces and security to completely support our population, without
the need to obtain staple supplies from foreign countries. Developing alternative energy
sources should be a top priority, to free our people from the yoke of foreign oil cartels --
or the domestic variety, for that matter. Globalism has done little more than implement the
enslavement of populations to mega-corporations, establishing a cabal of non-elected,
inviolable potentates who wield tremendous power over our leaders to do their bidding.
"Today, just like in 1911, Russia needs internal and external peace more than anything
else, and that is not what she would get if she got involved in some foreign military
adventure! In fact, attacking an alliance which includes three nuclear power would be
suicidal, and the Russians are anything but suicidal."
The practice of DoD "violates Article I Section 9 of the US Constitution, which stipulates
that, "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made
by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public
Money shall be published from time to time." ... The status quo has been generating
ever-higher DoD budgets for decades...
The losers in this situation are everyone else. The Pentagon's accounting fraud diverts
many billions of dollars that could be devoted to other national needs: health care,
education, job creation, climate action, infrastructure modernization, and more. Indeed, the
Pentagon's accounting fraud amounts to theft on a grand scale -- theft not only from
America's taxpayers, but also from the nation's well-being and its future."
There also has to be some consideration the encounter with the Russians on the Kerch
Strait was contrived by Poroshenko with the assistance of a gaggle of American
neoconservative and Israeli advisers who have been actively engaged with the Ukrainian
government for the past several years. The timing was good for Poroshenko for his own
domestic political reasons but it was also an opportunity for the neocons warmongers that
surround Trump and proliferate inside the Beltway to scuttle any possible meeting between a
vulnerable Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G20 gathering in Argentina.
I came to the exact same conclusion.
Putin wants to normalize relations with the west but, inexplicably, he provokes and
alienates the West just prior to every scheduled meeting with Trump. Of course, that doesn't
make any sense. These events only makes sense if the provocations are coming from agents in
the West who wish to derail any rapprochement between the US and Russia. Then it makes
sense.
If this is true (as it appears to be) one can reasonably predict that any time Trump and
Putin are about to meet, that a Skripal/Ukraine or other Russia-is-evil event will be staged
to derail the meeting.
Let's watch in 2019 and see if this prediction comes true.
If it does, we will know that someone, behind the scenes, is staging these events.
The ongoing campaign to vilify Vladimir Putin & the Russian Federation, is a
complete failure, with conservatives, evangelicals, and republicans.
I'll keep an open mind until Mueller's report is released, but Cohen's connections are
allegedly with the mainly Jewish Russian mob. It is unclear what their agenda may have been,
but Trump has been a lot nicer to Israel than to Russia.
"... Thus, when local news reporters pressed Atty. Dean Andrews (a Marcello atty., according to Waldron) after he was indicted by Garrison for perjury, Andrews initially sought to evade the reporter's questions. Finally he blurted out, "If they can kill the President, they can squash me like a roach." These are but a few of the revelations that were a consequence of Garrison's courage in challenging the Federal Government's narrative about the assassination. ..."
"... At the outset of Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw, the Federal Government openly intervened to obstruct. US Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced that the Feds had already investigated Shaw and concluded he had nothing to do with the assassination! When was this investigation? Who investigated? Why did they investigate Shaw? ..."
"... Waldron includes a most salient paragraph: "...declassified files now show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Director Richard Helms immediately began a significant public relation counteroffensive, issuing detailed instruction on how to smear critics of the Warren Report. ..."
"... For example, in a January 4, 1967, CIA memo in which the Agency gives 53-pages of specific instructions on how to counter the growing tide of books and articles questioning the `lone-nut' conclusion...In many ways, those PR counteroffensives by the FBI and CIA would last for decades, and some writers make the case that they continue even today."(14-15) ..."
"... Important in the "get Garrison" media campaign was journalist Walter Sheridan. Waldron maintains Sheridan was sent to New Orleans by Robert Kennedy. Why would Robert Kennedy seek to destroy a DA who at least considered charging Carlos Marcello, arch-nemesis of the Kennedys? And was Robert really the dominant figure in the autopsy of his brother at Bethesda, as maintained by Waldron?(399-401) ..."
"... Because Waldron's thesis is that the Mafia had to blur the lines between two plots, an anti-Castro one in league with the CIA, and the one targeting JFK, he might have elaborated more on the CIA practices. ..."
"... Anthony Summers have documented that `nobody has ever made the flimsiest allegation that the authentic Lee Oswald had anything but good to say about John Kennedy' This is true of Oswald's interrogations, his media appearances, and his private talks."(338) ..."
The main objection to the theory that the Mafia planned the assassination of President Kennedy has always been that it would
not have had the power to cover-up its role in the murder. Nor would it have had the ability to control, curtail, and compromise
the autopsy, to bamboozle all the media, to intimidate witnesses speaking to FBI agents, and to appoint a blue-ribbon commission
that would issue a report with 26 volumes of documentary support, purporting to prove that the assassin was a lone-nut, never
once mentioning the Mafia!
Because the Mafia clearly lacked such power, either the Warren Commission was correct in attributing the assassination to Oswald,
or the cover-up and murder, were conducted by higher-ups in the US Government - like Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, the FBI, etc.
Or, it was the work of Fidel Castro and/or the Soviets. Were that the case, the demand by the American public for retaliation
would press our leaders to launch a large-scale invasion of Cuba, which could unleash World War III. To prevent nuclear war,
American leaders chose to cover up the evidence of Communist conspiracy that culminated in Dallas. The American leaders chose
cover-ups and deception in preference to the truth and nuclear war.
Waldron's purpose is to remove the chief obstacles to the view that the Mafia conspiracy resulted in the assassination of Jack
Kennedy. Waldron notes that in the last days of the Eisenhower Administration, CIA and Mafia links were forged in plots to
overthrow and assassinate the radical Fidel Castro in Cuba. With the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in spring 1961, however,
the newly inaugurated President Kennedy believed he had been misled by the CIA and proceeded to fire its leader, Allen Dulles.
Many Cuban exiles blamed Kennedy for the failure of that mission because Kennedy had refused to support the landing with major
air, and if necessary, American land support.
The Missile Crisis of the fall of 1962 nudged the world to the edge of nuclear war. Though some assumed there had been a "no
invasion" pledge as part of the settlement, Waldron asserts that because Castro rejected inspection on Cuban soil, the no-invasion
pledge was inoperative. Moreover, Kennedy ordered a halt to any American CIA collaboration with the Mafia, in part because
his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy was leading the prosecution of organized crime, and had even used some extra-legal
tactics to deport New Orleans Mafia leader, Carlos Marcello. Nevertheless, Pres. Kennedy still authorized clandestine plots
to kill Castro, while simultaneously allowing top secret negotiations with the Castro regime to come to some accommodation.
But if no progress in those negotiations were evident by the end of November 1963, Pres. Kennedy decided to aid a coup in Cuba
staged by Gen. Juan Almeida, the head of the Cuban army and the number three official under Castro. In this coup, Fidel would
be assassinated, and Almeida's new government would request military intervention from the US to complete the counter-revolution.
The working date for that operation was 1 December 1963.
Unbeknownst to Kennedy and his new CIA leader, John McCone, however, the CIA's Director of Planning Operations, Richard Helms,
now held the highest operational post in the agency. Helms knew of the previous CIA-Mafia collaboration toward eliminating
Castro, and he ignored Kennedy's demand to cut ties with the Mafia. Instead, those earlier ties were retained and solidified
between some CIA operatives and Mafia organizations in Florida (led by Santo Trafficante), Chicago (represented by Johnny Rosselli),
and New Orleans (led by Marcello once he made it back to the US, probably flown in by pilot David Ferrie).
By linking the government approved assassination plots to kill Castro, with its own plots to kill Kennedy, the Mafia would
make it impossible to unravel the truth without exposing the US government's own deadly secrets to the American people, AND
exposing General Almeida in Cuba to the wrath of Fidel. Moreover, if the Mafia plot were successful, it could then plant false
information implicating Castro as the culprit. This might lead to calls for invasion of Cuba, Soviet retaliation, and WWIII.
The US government would then find it necessary to avoid war by covering up what really occurred in Dallas. Thus, the cover-up
was not conducted by the Mafia, but by innocent American leaders bent upon avoiding atomic war: President Lyndon Johnson, Chief
Justice Earl Warren, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, et al.
Waldron uses information garnered from tapes recorded for the FBI when Mafia chief Marcello was imprisoned; he confessed his
role in the Kennedy assassination to a fellow inmate who was wearing a wire. The information was not released when originally
recorded, nor in 1986 when the FBI operation concluded, nor in 1992 when the Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records
Act. In 1998, the FBI released the information, but it was buried in a flood of less important documents released at the same
time. Waldron's own research found the confessions in 2006 and in this book he makes an impressive case. Waldron asserts that
the Mafia planned the assassination with plots in at least three cities that Kennedy would visit in the fall of 1963, and in
each, a Lee Oswald-type patsy had been selected to deflect suspicion from the real killers. Chicago, Tampa-Miami, and Dallas
were the three sites that Kennedy would visit where Mafia hit men were imported to crush Camelot. Waldron also refers to confessions
by other Mafia leaders, including Trafficante, and Rosselli. Waldron is good at reminding readers of how, when Congress reinvestigated
the Kennedy murder, several Mafioso leaders were killed in most brutal fashions the day before they were to testify. In addition,
the wealthy white Russian who befriended the poor, "Marxist" Oswald in Dallas, George de Mohrenschildt, commited suicide the
day before his scheduled testimony. Waldron reminds readers of the number of "coincidental" deaths when Congress reinvestigated
the events in Dallas.
Waldron provided an excellent time-line studded with provocative tidbits of information. Thus, we learn that during the height
of the Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962, Oswald, the "defector" to the USSR married to a Russian, gets a job in Dallas with
a corporation performing sensitive photographic work for the US government, such as interpreting pictures of Cuban missile
movements. (154) Furthermore, despite his "defection" and his later distribution of Fair Play for Cuba leaflets, Oswald was
never placed on the FBI's Security Index.(250, 258) Another item to ponder: Waldron reveals that both Jack Ruby and Gen. Edwin
Walker (the right-wing general whom Oswald allegedly shot at) were closeted homosexuals.(174) Of course, one could argue that
in the 1960s almost all gays were closeted. In that era, if a man were openly homosexual, "out," he was either "in" prison
or "in" a mental institution. Waldron also mentions the story of J. Edgar's alleged arrest for homosexuality.(231) Yet, Clay
Shaw is barely mentioned in the book.
Before engaging in a general critique of the book, I shall point out some minor errors. Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs,
father of ABC and NPR commentator Cokie Roberts, was a US Representative, not a Senator.(31) Boggs WAS a member of the Warren
Commission, but Louisiana Sen. Russell Long was NOT.(146) Also, Waldron asserts that "there were only two time periods when
Oswald could have worked for Marcello as a runner: one in late April or early May 1963...and the other in late July, August,
and ...September 1963,..."(181-82) But Oswald might have worked for Marcello much earlier, when he was a teenager living in
New Orleans.
I disagree with Waldron's assessment that the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison hindered the investigation
by mainstream media of the Kennedy assassination.(15) Though the jury quickly found Clay Shaw not guilty of conspiring to kill
JFK, they told local reporters that they were convinced that JFK was a victim of a conspiracy. Garrison's prosecution showed
the Zapruder film in the courtroom, eventually unwrapping it for all to see how Kennedy's head moved to the back and left when
struck by the fatal shot. Under oath Dr. Pierre Finck described how doctors in Bethesda followed military orders at the expense
of providing Kennedy a thorough autopsy. If the national media were hostile to Garrison, not all of the local outlets were
so biased. Thus, when local news reporters pressed Atty. Dean Andrews (a Marcello atty., according to Waldron) after he was
indicted by Garrison for perjury, Andrews initially sought to evade the reporter's questions. Finally he blurted out, "If they
can kill the President, they can squash me like a roach." These are but a few of the revelations that were a consequence of
Garrison's courage in challenging the Federal Government's narrative about the assassination.
At the outset of Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw, the Federal Government openly intervened to obstruct. US Attorney General
Ramsey Clark announced that the Feds had already investigated Shaw and concluded he had nothing to do with the assassination!
When was this investigation? Who investigated? Why did they investigate Shaw? The Feds did everything possible to obstruct
the Garrison prosecution, so that crucial witnesses could flee Louisiana, and governors like Ronald Reagan of California and
James Rhodes of Ohio, after consulting with federal officials, simply refused to extradite important witnesses like Gordon
Novel. How could any DA win a case under such circumstances?
Even Waldron concedes, "Recently released FBI files show that in the late spring of 1967, Garrison twice privately considered
indicting Marcello for the assassination of JFK but decided not to."(458) Waldron's thesis is that Marcello was guilty of the
murder, and yet he claims that the only official who contemplated charging Marcello with that crime, simply hindered mainstream
media investigations! Were those recently released FBI files that Waldron refers to intended to facilitate DA Garrison probe?
Or to sabotage it? And had Garrison charged Marcello with killing Kennedy, would the mass media have been any more sympathetic
to Garrison?
Waldron includes a most salient paragraph: "...declassified files now show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Director
Richard Helms immediately began a significant public relation counteroffensive, issuing detailed instruction on how to smear
critics of the Warren Report.
For example, in a January 4, 1967, CIA memo in which the Agency gives 53-pages of specific instructions
on how to counter the growing tide of books and articles questioning the `lone-nut' conclusion...In many ways, those PR counteroffensives
by the FBI and CIA would last for decades, and some writers make the case that they continue even today."(14-15)
Garrison failed to convict Clay Shaw. I would contend because of the hostility of the Feds, there is no way Garrison could
have convicted Marcello either. The national, main-stream media followed the marching orders of the federal government - orders
issued softly through their agency operatives and friends.
Important in the "get Garrison" media campaign was journalist Walter Sheridan. Waldron maintains Sheridan was sent to New Orleans
by Robert Kennedy. Why would Robert Kennedy seek to destroy a DA who at least considered charging Carlos Marcello, arch-nemesis
of the Kennedys? And was Robert really the dominant figure in the autopsy of his brother at Bethesda, as maintained by Waldron?(399-401)
Because the thrust of Waldron's book is assassination by the Mafia, he mentions the murder of Guatemalan leader Castillo Armas
in July 1957 by a "lone Communist" assassin, who then killed himself with the same weapon used to kill Armas. But there were
rumors at the time that Armas had run afoul of the Mafia, and Rosselli was then in Guatemala.(94) Shortly after the Bay of
Pigs, the strong man of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo was assassinated in what Waldron calls a gangland-type murder.(145)
And since Waldron explicated MafCia assassinations, he might have expanded his all-to-brief accounts of two other assassination,
even if the Mafia had nothing to do with them: - 1) the assassination of the Prime Minister in the newly independent Congo,
Patrice Lumumba on 17 January 1961 (p. 136, though his name is misspelt in Waldron's index); and - 2) the assassination of
South Viet Nam's Ngo Dinh Diem on 2 November 1963.(303) With Waldron's slight treatment of the latter, he evades speculation
on the CIA's role in that murder and its effect on future American policy in Vietnam and any connection between Diem's demise
may have had on events in Dallas. Because Waldron's thesis is that the Mafia had to blur the lines between two plots, an anti-Castro
one in league with the CIA, and the one targeting JFK, he might have elaborated more on the CIA practices.
There are anomalies in Waldron's work. On the one hand, we read that: "The [New Orleans police lieutenant who talked to Oswald
after his arrest with the FPCC in NO] also said that Oswald `liked the President,' a sentiment shared by most people who ever
heard Oswald mention JFK;"(251) and :"...It's important to keep in mind that others such as Anthony Summers have documented
that `nobody has ever made the flimsiest allegation that the authentic Lee Oswald had anything but good to say about John Kennedy'
This is true of Oswald's interrogations, his media appearances, and his private talks."(338)
On the other hand, Waldron also reports that: "The head of the Ku Klux Klan told veteran newspaper report and editor Patsy
Sims that he had met with Oswald in Atlanta. In her definitive history of the Klan, Sims writes that `one of her sources told
her that Oswald, in the summer of 1963, had called on [Klan] Imperial Wizard James Venable in his office in Atlanta seeking
the names of right-wing associates. Venable confirmed [to Sims] that he was fairly sure that Oswald had been there for that
purpose.' Oswald indicated to Venable that he was on his way to Chicago. Klan leader Venable made his statement to Sims in
the 1980s and it is difficult to see why Venable would make up an Oswald encounter since it tended to link Oswald with `right-wing
associates,' thus potentially giving the FBI reason to interview or investigate them."
"In the 1960s, Klan leader Venable was close to an associate of Guy Banister, white supremacist Joseph Milteer, who lived in
Georgia..."(286)
If this meeting did occur, it may have had more to do with the Banister-, Milteer-, far-right plot than about Oswald's personal
opinion of Kennedy. Oswald may have simply been following Banister's instructions, as he had done when pretending to be a Castro-sympathizer
handing out FPCC leaflets.
A related question: what was the connection between the Mafia and the racist, far-right? Clearly, some Cubans who had fled
Castro's far-left oppression in Cuba, may have felt more comfortable with right end of the political spectrum. The KKK certainly
inhabits that end. Milteer, who was taped predicting the assassination prior to events in Dallas, and then gloating about them,
was clearly far-right. So did Milteer, who prediction of, and later gloating over, the assassination was tape-recorded. Moreover,
Milteer declared that the conspiracy to kill Kennedy originated in New Orleans, backed by considerable sums, not all donated
by right-wingers. Milteer mentioned only one Louisiana politician (311), but Waldron does not reveal that name. I will go on
a limb to say that I suspect the politician was the leader of Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish (county), Judge Leander Perez.
In 1952 when Judge Perez decided to endorse the Republican ticket of Eisenhower and Nixon for President, Plaquemines Parish
voted over 93% for the Republicans - the highest percentage of any county in the entire nation.(Glen Jeansonne, Leander Perez:
Boss of the Delta, p. 194) In November 1960 when courts ordered desegregation of two New Orleans schools, Perez urged defiance,
and allowed whites to escape their integrated school by attending schools in neighboring St. Bernard Parish (also Perez=dominated).
In 1961 CORE began its Freedom Rides, where CORE members on buses attempted to integrate bus stations from Washington, DC,
to New Orleans. Most were stopped by brutal mobs or arresting police, and one bus was burnt. This made national and international
headlines. It was rumored (not Jeansonne's biography, but my memory is the source for the rest of this paragraph - HM) that
Perez then induced George Lincoln Rockwell to travel from his base in Virginia through the same route as the Greyhound buses
to New Orleans on his "hate bus." Rockwell was leader of the American Nazi Party. Before entering New Orleans, local police
demanded that he cover some of the signs that decorated his van - "Kill Commies, Queers, and Jews!" When in May 1961 Rockwell
and some of his uniformed crew were arrested for picketing the film "Exodus," there were rumors that Guy Banister, a one-time
Acting Superintendent of the NO Police, paid his bail. When Judge Perez went to the Hotel Roosevelt's Blue Room (possibly the
premier NO night spot at that time), Ted Lewis was performing. One of his signature acts was to sing "Me and My Shadow," while
a Black dancer in black clothing danced as his shadow.
The judge was not happy with this integrated entertainment. Perhaps
he was aware that Ted Lewis had been born, Theodore Friedman. To express his displeasure, the judge purposely broke glasses
where the shadow was to step, causing the Black to cut his foot. In the spring of 1969 Judge Perez passed on. In Plaquemines
Parish, two young Black men entered a store and announced they wanted to purchase liquor to celebrate the death of the Judge.
They were quickly arrested and sentenced to 6 month's hard labor. After serving only a few months, the NAACP succeeded in curtailing
the sentence.
Why would Marcello have a low-level racial extremist like Milteer aware of the plot to kill Kennedy if this were merely a Mafia
operation? Does this make sense?
Let me describe several incidents related to the question I just posed. It is truly amazing how different our relatives can
be from each other and from ourselves. By the late 1950s I had become an integrationist in my native New Orleans. This amounted
to little more than speaking in favor of the idea in high school and then college. That changed in September 1960 when I was
among the seven arrested in the first lunch-counter sit-in in New Orleans. It occurred at the large Woolworth's on Canal and
Rampart Streets. When my father heard of the sit-in in progress, he left work to try to get me away. Police had cordoned off
the counter area, and would not allow anyone to pass. With our arrests, and our names on p. 1 of the local paper and on national
TV (we did not see it as we were still in jail), it was now clear to all that I was a nlover. Although I moved from my parents'
home so as not to endanger them, it did not matter. They received phone calls in the middle of the night, threatening to bomb
the home. Thank God we had no restrictive gun control laws back then. My father easily borrowed a gun and bullets from a co-worker.
After a few months, the spotlight of hatred moved to the other end of the city, for in November Perez and others were instigating
resistance to the court-ordered desegregation of two public schools. I was suddenly old news. My dad felt safe enough to return
the gun. Upon getting it back, his co-worker asked my father, "Why did you borrow so many bullets? Only one would have done
the job." I was not very popular.
But one relative sought to help, - my crazy uncle. Of course, he probably thought of me as his crazy nephew. After my arrest
with CORE for integration, my uncle sought to restore honor to the family, by sending money to George Lincoln Rockwell's organization.
As a young child I once overheard him moaning over some beers, "Oh, if only Hitler had won." My uncle had been in the merchant
marine and had risked his life during WWII to get supplies to the nations fighting against the Axis. But he did not agree with
FDR's foreign policy. Meanwhile, I had been convicted of a felony (the sit-in), and was trying to survive. I certainly was
not seeking another arrest, but I did continue to participate in various demos throughout the 1960s, any one of which might
result in an arrest. Finally, in 1969 my car was followed by a police helicopter, and when I let a passenger out of the auto,
he was immediately arrested. I decided then it was time to leave my native city.
I would occasionally see that uncle when he visited my parents. He had a special greeting for me, "How are the burr heads doing?"
This would rile me a little, but I knew him well enough just to roll my eyes. Sometimes he would speak with my dad, but sometimes
he would address me, "Oh, that Bobby! They're gonna get that Bobby!" He was referring to Atty. Gen Robert Kennedy who seemed
to be pushing integration. I just tried to ignore him.
After a few years, I moved back with my parents and got a job teaching 5th grade in a new, private school. Around lunch one
day, Mrs. Flagg, another 5th grade teacher called me to her class room across the hall. Hers was enjoying a free period for
lunch, and one of her pupils had brought in a new item, a transistor radio. She told me to listen. Most of her class was playing,
making lots of noise, while she and I craned our necks above the 10-year-old and his radio. I heard the main points, but could
not leave my class unattended for long.
When I returned to my class, I informed them that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. The class cheered. I was stunned.
One girl placed her head on the table and cried. She was the exception. That was November 1963. Sometime after that, probably
early 1964, I again encountered my uncle. "What did I tell you, huh? What did I tell you?" Honestly, I had no idea what he
was talking about. Then he became more explicit, "Didn't I tell you they were going to get him?" Suddenly, shocked, I realized
what he was referring to. Now, I tried a counter. "But you said they were going to get Bobby!" "Well, they got the other one
instead." This time, exasperated, I finally asked, "Who is this `they' you keep talking about?" He quickly responded, "The
mob out in the parish." By the mob, he meant Marcello; by "out in the parish," he meant Jefferson Parish. When he said this,
my parents resided one block from the Airline Highway and the Church with the Neon Bible. We were only a few blocks from Jefferson
Parish and Marcello's office in the Town and Country Motel. My uncle's response simply confirmed my view that my uncle was
crazy. Who in early 1964 was linking Carlos Marcello to the Kennedy assassination? This sounded ever more absurd. When he said
this, I had already earned a BA and an MA from Tulane University. My uncle had finished 5rd grade. I was a scholar. He drove
a taxi. It was easy to dismiss his ravings. But years later I could only wonder, were they really ravings? Or was I too arrogant
to accept information when it was handed to me?
Despite the occasional repetition and lack of footnotes, and a few minor errors, Waldron has written a book that will be difficult
to ignore.
"Presidents, prime ministers, congresspersons and parliamentarians worldwide regularly negate
the democratic will of their nation's voters by refusing to support legitimate election
results. Strangely, their treasonous actions continue without serious reprisal or punishment
by the voter. This emboldens them. The reality of votes cast and "democracy" past does not
does bode well for the people of the United Kingdom, their future as a nation or their
hopeful return to sovereignty once called, "Brexit."
Dynamite opening paragraph by Brett Redmayne-Titley.
It defines the vital issue of -To be or not to be – for our Planet's citizens who
struggle (or aught to), for functioning Democratic Republics founded upon the ideal of
Liberty and Justice for All.
Titley's ending mention of the trials of the Greek nation, and others, is well placed and
a tribute to his worldview, that is key to analyzing the situation in any particular
corner.
"Britains should consider this arbitrary bullying of Italy and of the UK. Then they should
consider the sad EU imposed current condition of Greece. Next, they might dwell on the failed
outcomes of previous elections within the nearby EU nations, and how similar movements were
defeated in their nation as well. Last, they must pay closest of attention to what is
actually in the souls of their own politicians and what they truly support."
In America, we lost our Democratic Republic and our last Constitutional President, John
F. Kennedy , in a hail of bullets in the Coup D'état of November 22, 1963.
The Citizen Yellow Vests in France , supported by their 2 leading Resistance
Fighters, Dieudonné , and Alain Soral , display the next step forward in
the Resistance to Tyranny.
Step 1 – Committees of Correspondence (mainstream media free – websites, &
communications).
2. Step away from the TVs – & breathe the free air outside as the Citizen
Militia Yellow Vests(Minutemen), regain the streets and stretch their muscles.
3. Final Step: We are Joined by free police, military, even CIA & other police agency
employees, in the act of regaining their Countries, with their Sovereignty, and their Honor.
We Restore Our Republics!
a. Zionist imperialist/racists to jail and awaiting Trial.
b. Cleanup & rebuilding.
c. Unbought electoral process - no $ allowed in the process (equal media access for
all candidates), Debates between the candidates. Let a hundred flowers bloom (what democrat
said that?)?
"... Capitalism never was benign, Chrustjow worked as a miner in a commercially exploited mine, where there was little regard for
safety, he abhorred capitalism. ..."
@Bill Jones Interesting to read
how these idealists agree with Christian Gerondeau, 'Le CO2 est bon pour la planete, Climat, la grande manipulation', Paris 2017
Gerondeau explains how many deaths reducing CO2 emissions will cause in poor countries, simply as an example how electricity
for cooking will remain too expensive for them, so cooking is done on smoky fires in confined spaces.
" to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history." " To intentionally impoverish
the world. To what end, I wonder ?
Anyone who knows anything about history is that the rich were always better off than the poor, in fact the very definition
of rich and poor.
In this respect it never mattered if a society was capitalistic, communistic, or a theocracy, as Tibet was.
These idealistic idiots do not understand how they created the problem they now intend to solve with creating an even bigger
problem, their example is the EU, the EU is following this policy for more than twelve years now, since 2005, when the EU grabbed
power through the rejected EU 'consitution'.
Capitalism is no more than deciding between consumption and investment, Robinson Crusoë invested in a fishing net by temporarily
reducing consumption, he did not go fishing, but made a fishing net, expecting that his investment would make it possible to eat
more fish.
Capitalism never was benign, Chrustjow worked as a miner in a commercially exploited mine, where there was little regard
for safety, he abhorred capitalism.
Dutch 17th century capitalistic commerce to the far Indies, east and west, was not benign. Typically a ship left Amsterdam,
near the Schreierstoren, trans 'the tower for the crying', wives, mothers and girl friends, with 300 men aboard, and returned
with 100. Most of those who died were common sailors, captain and officers had a far lower mortality, mainly better food.
Our East Indies commerce also was not much fun for the people in the East, in the Banda Sea Islands massacre some 30.000 people
were killed, for a monopoly on pepper, if I remember correctly.
But, as the earth developed economically, there came room for also poor people getting lives beginning to look as worth living.
Engels in 1844, hope the year is right, described the conditions of working people in GB, this resulted in Das Kapital.
This room for a better life for also the poor was not given by the capitalistic system
In their struggle for a better world for anyone the idealists wanted globalisation, level playing field, anyone should be welcome
anywhere, slogans like this.
Globaliation, however, is the end of the nation state, the very institution in which it was possible to provide a better life.
Anyone following me until here now can see the dilemma, the end of the nation state was also the end of protection by that state
against unbridled capitalism.
As the idealists cannot give up their globalisation religion they must, as those who cannot give up the biblical creation story,
find an ideological way out of their dilemma. My conclusion now is 'in order to save our globalisation religion we try to destroy
economic growth, by making energy very expensive, in the hope of destroying capitalism'.
Alas, better, luckily, capitalism cannot be destroyed, those who invented the first furnaces for more or less mass producing
iron, they were capitalists. They saw clearly how cheap iron would bring economic growth, the plow.
In the country where the CO2 madness has struck most, my country, the Netherlands, the realisation of the poverty that drastically
reducing CO2 emissions will cause, has begun. If there really is madness, I wonder.
I indeed see madness, green leftists unable to make a simple multipiclation calculations about costs, but maybe mainly political
opportunism. Our dictator, Rutte, is now so hated that he needs a job outside the Netherlands, in order to qualify, either at
Brussels or in New York, with the UN, has to howl with the wolves.
At the same time, we have a gas production problem,, earthquakes in the NE, houses damaged, never any decision made to solve
the problem, either stop gas production, or strenghten the houses, both expensive solutions.
So, in my suspicious ideas, Rutte now tries to improve himself, at the same time solving a problem: within, say ten years,
the Netherlands functions without gas, and remains prosperous; the idea he tries to sell to us. In a few years time it will emerge
that we cannot have both, prosperous, and zero emission, but the time horizon for a politician is said to be five years.
"The game motif is useful as a metaphor for the broader rivalry between nations and
economic systems with the rise of imperialism and the pursuit of world power. This game has
gone through two major transformations since the days of Russian-British rivalry, with the
rise first of Communism and then of Islam as world forces opposing imperialism. The main
themes of Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games include:
US imperial strategy as an outgrowth of British imperialism, and its transformation
following the collapse of the Soviet Union;
the significance of the creation of Israel with respect to the imperial
project;
the repositioning of Russia in world politics after the collapse of the Soviet
Union;
the emerging role of China and Iran in Eurasia;
the emerging opposition to the US and NATO.
This work brings these elements together in historical perspective with an understanding
from the Arab/ Muslim world's point of view, as it is the main focus of all the "Great
Games"."
Jay Dyer discusses the book here, its strengths and weaknesses:
Israel is one undeniably large factor behind spending surges since 2005. Israel successfully
demanded enormous increases in joint U.S.-Israeli cyber warfare expenditures and benefited
from related U.S. contingency planning. Due to onerous secrecy, Americans remain unable to
engage in informed public debate about whether what amounts to US subjugation to the Israeli
prerogatives driving these massive expenditures should continue.
The US increased spending on the National Intelligence Program by 9 percent in fiscal year
2018 to $59.4 billion. The Military Intelligence Program surged 20 percent to $22.1 billion.
NIP plus MIP beat the year 2005 expenditure record totaling $81.5 billion for fiscal year
2018.
The development of secret offensive cyber warfare programs targeting Iran are included in
MIP and NIP budgets. According to the 2016 documentary Zero Days by director Alex Gibney,
Israel's incessant public threats to attack Iran coupled with intense secret demands for
cyber warfare targeting Iran were the catalyst for massive new US black budget spending.
Former NSA Director (1999-2005) and CIA Director (2006-2009) Michael Hayden claimed in
Zero Days that the goal of any Israeli air attack against Iran's nuclear facilities would be
to drag the United States into war.
by Grant Smith Posted on November 07, 2018 He is director of the Institute for Research:
Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C.
There is very little spoken of the foreign threat of the Chabad network. It must be serious
opposition if even the CFR "globalists" write about it. ( https://www.theglobalist.com/donald-trump-benjamin-netanyahu-democracy-corruption/
) When I say threat, I mean global nuclear war, mass starvation, and disease. Chabad is the
link binding Trump and Putin advisors. Do you think anyone belonging in this protected
"religion" holds any sort of good will for the regular common folk inhabiting the world?
What chance does peace have with these people having Trump's ear: Javanka Kushner, Gina
Haspel, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Mad Dog Mattis, and John Bolton?
Doesn't look good does it!
West Point says NO to Peace!
The warmongering bastard and West Point grad (first in class) -- Pompeo -- says NO peace
for Yemeni! Trump says wars are for Israel.
West Point is Jew occupied territory. All US Army generals are pro Israel.
US to keep aiding Saudis in Yemen despite furor: Pompeo
Buenos Aires (AFP) -- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed Saturday that the United
States would continue suppor ting Saudi Arabia's military campaign in Yemen, despite
rising outrage over the kingdom.
Speaking from a Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires, Pompeo acknowledged that the
humanitarian crisis in Yemen -- where millions are at risk of starvation -- had reached
"epic proportions" but said Washington and Riyadh were offering aid.
"The program that we're involved in today we intend to continue," Pompeo told CNN when
asked about military assistance to the Saudi-led coalition.
I suspect not, but they answer to politicians. Ditto the CIA.
I suspect not also -- but only privately and in secret, would they be anti-Israel. If they
keep their mouth shut, they will have a six figure job waiting for them in the J-MIC. Hmm --
so much for the flag. Think Peace -- Do No Harm -- Art
"The AIPAC Starship strikes back, and excluded Senator Rand Paul from meeting with Gina
Haspel on the Kashoggi murder."
Could it not be more clear that Mossad runs our government? Didn't the military swear
oaths to protect the US from enemies foreign AND domestic? Oh, and I've given up on Trump.
He's an Israel-worshiping ineffective
What foreign threats indeed. Out biggest threats come from our own government:
"The new version clarifies that people cannot face jail time for participating in a
boycott, but the ACLU has argued that it still leaves the door open for criminal financial
penalties."
But yet these clowns will do next to nothing to stop illegal seizures of white farms in
South Africa. Our treasonous government busy working to strip away our freedoms. Don't think
they won't use this precedent to outlaw other types of "hate speech." And brought to you by
the republican party.
@anon As AIPAC and
WINEP demanded in 2003, the office as initially led by Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart
Levey, who worked in unusually close coordination with the Israeli government. Levey's
Harvard thesis (PDF) was about how Israel lobbying organizations could become more effective
by staying beneath the radar of public scrutiny and distancing themselves from the notoriety
generated by the illicit activities of such ideological fellow travelers as the Jewish
Defense League.
https://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/2018/08/29/treasury-sanctions-foreigners-for-israel
A few years ago, I had the temerity to write to David McCullough, the biographer of Harry
Truman, to tell him I thought he was wrong about an aspect of Truman's character.
McCullough was nice enough to write back. He said he thought Truman had not been malicious
but had simply lacked understanding, and in a revealing remark, he acknowledged that Truman
"just didn't know enough about [the Palestinians] and their situation" -- which he said,
quite accurately, is still true of most Americans. "The great shame," he wrote, "is that a
reasonable discussion of the subject remains so difficult to achieve in any public way."
Which brings me to my point: Reasonable discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,
and particularly of the Palestinian perspective, has always been "so difficult to achieve in
any public way," and since the days of Woodrow Wilson .
From the article: Tuesday's briefing on Khashoggi's killing was limited to a
small group of lawmakers, including those of the Senate's Armed Services Committee,
Intelligence Committee, and Foreign Relations Committee.
Chuck,
These oversite committees are a joke!
Those committees are cheer leaders for those agencies. Those senators are hand picked to
support the Jew Security State.
We can be sure that they work to hide what those agencies are doing from We the
People.
"... The British, most directly, and then the US Brennan-Hayden (ok, he is no longer operational) CIA-Deep State are launching myriad ops to wedge Trump in (Khashoggi, current CentCom terror ops in Syria, and Ukraine now). ..."
"... Ukrainian and British officials all agreed that a safe and secure Ukraine is necessary for the safety and security of Europe. The time for talk from Ukraine's so-called allies is long over. It's time to act." -- The article is otherwise full of juicy nonsense: I highly recommend it. ..."
Short overview as it looks from my current perch: Piggy Poro will go down in history , way
down, that's for sure.
1. The British, most directly, and then the US Brennan-Hayden (ok, he is no longer
operational) CIA-Deep State are launching myriad ops to wedge Trump in (Khashoggi, current CentCom terror ops in Syria, and Ukraine now).
If the Trump-Putin meeting a G20 falls
through, it would not necessarily be a definitive signal; if it does not fall through, that
would be a definitive signal. Yes, MI-6 and the US cohorts are anxious about the
"declassification" of FISA and other documents, both because of Russiagate as well as the
definitive disenfranchisment it entails. That makes the timing of Piggy's Kerch fiasco
important.
2. At the moment, the European or NATO response is not what the British or CIA expected or
wanted.
a. Yesterday Ursula von der Leyen, German Defense Minster, spoke at a security conference
covered by Sputnik (German): "Russia has Europe in check" was the headline, "check" as in
chess, which in a chess game sometimes means not just a single check, but chasing the
opponent with "checks" over the board until finally declaring "checkmate."
b.
https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/jack-laurenson-in-this-dark-hour-where-are-ukraines-allies.html?cn-reloaded=1
In this dark hour, where are Ukraine's allies?, "The Kremlin wants to know how much it can
get away with. If the response so far, in the last day or so, is a measure of that, then
Moscow will likely feel emboldened to push even further. There is still time for NATO and the
West to respond, but the question on everyone's lips is how and whether the political will
and strength to do so exists." The end: "At Ukrainian Week in London this October, Ukrainian
and British officials all agreed that a safe and secure Ukraine is necessary for the safety
and security of Europe. The time for talk from Ukraine's so-called allies is long over. It's
time to act." -- The article is otherwise full of juicy nonsense: I highly recommend it.
c. https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-russia-putin-is-in-control/
'Putin is in control' Europe stands by as Russian president goes after Ukraine. "BERLIN --
Chalk another one up for Vlad." "To be perfectly honest, we don't have many options," a
senior European official said. "We don't want to risk war, but Putin is already waging one.
That makes us look weak." Given Europe's dearth of options, its leaders revert to hackneyed
pronouncements about the importance of dialogue and, as German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas
put it, "de-escalation on both sides."
d. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/27/ukraines-new-front-is-europes-big-challenge/
Ukraine's New Front Is Europe's Big Challenge -- There's plenty Europe should do to push back
against Russia's latest attack on Ukraine.
There's plenty Europe should do to push back against Russia's latest attack on Ukraine. By
Carl Bildt, Nicu Popescu. -- Juicy nonsense galore, a plea sent into the winds.
f. https://www.afpc.org/publications/articles/why-is-the-sea-of-azov-so-important
-- Atlantidc Council -- Stephen Blank -- Why Is the Sea of Azov So Important? "Moreover, even
a casual examination of Russian actions reveals the deep and continuing parallels with
China's equally illegitimate actions in the South and East China Sea. In the Asian case, the
United States has mounted and continues to stage numerous Freedom of Navigation Operations to
demonstrate to China that it will uphold the time-honored principle of the freedom of the
seas. This principle is no less at stake in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Ideally, NATO,
at Kyiv's invitation, should send a fleet to Mariupol to shatter the pretense of Russian
sovereignty and show Putin that the invasion of Ukraine has brought NATO into Ukraine. This
is precisely the outcome Russia aimed to avert."
And that is what, at the moment, "NATO" of "the Europeans" apparently do not want. Send a
fleet to Mariupol? -- Ask the Germans: they have a few speed boats that might not get
stuck.
Poroshenko seems to be on the way to demonstrating that NATO is irrelevant.
"... It's the intense indoctrination of Anglos since 1945 along the lines that Nationalism is bad and Racial Identity is bad. Hence the frantic virtue signaling of open frontiers and multiculturalism among the educated (indoctrinated). ..."
"... It will eventually be resolved by the people who don't care (the working class), who will toss out their elite and their "educated" middle class collaborators – in fact it's already happening with Brexit – check out the Daily Mail comments section. ..."
One fatal flaw of WASPs on both sides of the pond is that the upper crust ones don't seem
to have much empathy for the less fortunate of their own kind.
It's the intense indoctrination of Anglos since 1945 along the lines that Nationalism is bad
and Racial Identity is bad. Hence the frantic virtue signaling of open frontiers and
multiculturalism among the educated (indoctrinated).
For example, it's still completely unacceptable in middle class British society to support
Nationalism (you're a Nazi) or Anglo racial identity (other races are welcome to their
identities – but if you're and Anglo you're a racist).
It will eventually be resolved by the people who don't care (the working class), who will
toss out their elite and their "educated" middle class collaborators – in fact it's
already happening with Brexit – check out the Daily Mail comments section.
My right wing friends can't understand the biggest issue of our times is class war. This
article mentions the "Panama papers" where great many corporations and wealthy individuals
(even politicians) in my country were exposed. They run their profits through offshore tax
havens while using public infrastructure (paid for by taxpayers) to make their money. It's
estimated that wealth amounting to 1,5 times our GDP is stored in these accounts!
There is absolutely no way to get it through my right wing friends thick skull that
off-shore accounts are tax frauds. Resulting in they paying higher taxes off their wages
because the big corporations and the rich don't pay anything. Nope. They simply hate taxes
(even if they get plenty back in services) and therefore all taxes are bad. Ergo tax evasions
by the 1% are fine – socialism or immigrants must be the root of our problems.
MIGA!
Come to think of it – few of them would survive the "law of the jungle" they so much
desire. And none of them would survive the "law of the jungle" if the rules are stacked
against them. Still, all their political energy is aimed against the ideas and people that
struggle against such reality.
I give up – I will never understand the right. No more than the pure bread
communist. Hopeless ideas!
@niceland
Your friends are not "right wing". The left/right paradigm is long dead. Your friends are
globalists, whether they realize it or not. Globalism is about moving capital to the benefit
of the haves. Migrants/immigrants are a form of capital. Investing in migration/immigration
lowers the long term costs and increases long term profit. The profit (money capital) is then
moved to a place where it best serves its owner.
In the United States
today, and throughout "Western Brainwashed Civilization," only a handful of people exist who
are capable of differentiating the real from the created reality in which all explanations are
controlled and kept as far away from the truth as possible.
Everything that every Western government and "news" organization says is a lie to control
the explanations that we are fed in order to keep us locked in The Matrix.
The ability to control people's understandings is so extraordinary that, despite massive
evidence to the contrary, Americans believe that Oswald, acting alone, was the best shot in
human history and using magic bullets killed President John F. Kenndy; that a handful of Saudi
Arabians who demonstratively could not fly airplanes outwitted the American national security
state and brought down 3 World Trade Center skyscrapers and part of the Pentagon; that Saddam
Hussein had and was going to use on the US "weapons of mass destruction;" that Assad "used
chemical weapons" against "his own people;" that Libya's Gaddifi gave his soldiers Viagra so
they could better rape Libyan women; that Russia "invaded Ukraine;" that Trump and Putin stole
the presidential election from Hillary.
The construction of a make-believe reality guarantees the US military/security complex's
annual budget of $1,000 billion dollars of taxpayers' money even as Congress debates cutting
Social Security in order to divert more largess to the pockets of the corrupt military/security
complex.
Readers ask me what they can do about it. Nothing, except revolt and cleanse the system,
precisely as Founding Father Thomas Jefferson said.
"... The psychological reason behind this trick has to do with "pattern recognition". Human beings – through evolution – have learned to identify a phenomenon as real and true because it repeats again and again and again ..."
"... The American knee-jerk reaction to the recent Kerch bridge incident is a case in point. Ignoring facts, people automatically placed Russian behavior in the "aggressive" category because they have been programed by constant repetition for many years to think this way. Not having been taught this trick of the mind even educated people buy into the narrative unaware that their schemata dictate that the belief must be reinforced. All experiences regarding Russia are simply put into one box labeled "aggressive behavior". ..."
"... Another psychological cause of why Americans buy into the "Russia is aggressive" narrative is due to "confirmation bias". For a variety of reasons many Americans demonize Russians. Part of this is due to the fact that people actually enjoy having a "bad guy" to hate. This is why outlaw cowboys and mafia gangsters are so popular in American culture. We love our "anti-heroes" as much if not more than our heroes. Putin, of course, is the prototypical "baddie". He's a real-life Boris from the Bullwinkle cartoon who satisfies our need to boo and hiss the proverbial bad guy. ..."
The main reason so many Americans buy into the anti-Russian craze is not only due to what people are told by
the government and media, but by how they think and process information. For if Americans were taught how to
analyze and think properly they would not fall for the blatant propaganda.
For example, we are told that the Nazis discovered the secret of repetition as a means of programming people
into believing something to be true, but we are not taught why this practice is so effective.
The psychological reason behind this trick has to do with "pattern recognition". Human beings – through
evolution – have learned to identify a phenomenon as real and true because it repeats again and again and
again. After a while, the mind interprets this consistent pattern as proof of truth value. In psychological
terms, "schemata" are created by a layering of memories similar in nature over time so that all events
associated with the phenomenon are perceived through a prism of previous repetitions. In other words, even if
a certain type of behavior is different from the norm it will still be identified as belonging to the typical
pattern regardless. It is literally a trick of the mind.
The American knee-jerk reaction to the recent Kerch bridge incident is a case in point. Ignoring facts,
people automatically placed Russian behavior in the "aggressive" category because they have been programed by
constant repetition for many years to think this way. Not having been taught this trick of the mind even
educated people buy into the narrative unaware that their schemata dictate that the belief must be reinforced.
All experiences regarding Russia are simply put into one box labeled "aggressive behavior".
Another psychological cause of why Americans buy into the "Russia is aggressive" narrative is due to
"confirmation bias". For a variety of reasons many Americans demonize Russians. Part of this is due to the fact
that people actually enjoy having a "bad guy" to hate. This is why outlaw cowboys and mafia gangsters are so
popular in American culture. We love our "anti-heroes" as much if not more than our heroes. Putin, of course,
is the prototypical "baddie". He's a real-life Boris from the Bullwinkle cartoon who satisfies our need to boo
and hiss the proverbial bad guy.
To a certain extent, pattern recognition comes into play as well because in America TV shows and films over
the past two decades evil Russian spies and mafia types have figured prominently. The repeating portrayals
create schemata which then create stereotypes that frame how we think.
Russophobia, however, will not last forever because it is essentially based upon lies. Truth always wins out
over time and fantasy gives way to reality. Despite the censorship on social media and the attempts to silence
RT America the truth will eventually triumph.
For gagging the tongue of truth is always followed by a long-suppressed shout that echoes ever louder
throughout the ages.
===============================
My comment:
The most basic form of mind control is repetition.
The most basic form of mind control is repetition.
The most basic form of mind control is repetition.
... ... ...
The most basic form of mind control is repetition.
Well, Dr. Paul Whatshisname is obviously an agent of Putin. Did I even need to say this?
On a serious note, repetition works perhaps shockingly well. I was taught in my childhood that Germans are
bad because Hitler and Russia was good because twice saviors. Simple and effective. However, with no social
media at the time, critical thinking was also available so I could outgrow the propaganda.
On 12/5/2018 at 10:29 AM,
A/Plague
said:
Are you on a salary in "Russia Today" or a volunteer?
I try to gently (and if possible, humorously) nudge people to question the "official narrative".
CNN / WaPo is
far
worse propaganda than RT. RT is clearly biased, but they are open about their
pro-Russia bias. CNN pretends to be objective "journalism".
And sometimes I feel like commenting in the same vein of this little guy, bouncing all over excitedly:
By the way, did you know RT was nominated for an Emmy this year? It actually has a few nominations. Shocking,
right? I suspect a lot of the people who say "Ew, RT, propaganda," have never read anything from RT. I have.
they regularly republish Reuters and the FT as well as major U.s. outlets. I don't know what to think about
that, it's so confusing.
16 hours ago,
Marina Schwarz
said:
By the way, did you know RT was nominated for an Emmy this year? It actually has a few nominations.
Shocking, right? I suspect a lot of the people who say "Ew, RT, propaganda," have never read anything
from RT. I have. they regularly republish Reuters and the FT as well as major U.s. outlets. I don't know
what to think about that, it's so confusing.
16 hours ago,
Marina Schwarz
said:
By the way, did you know RT was nominated for an Emmy this year? It actually has a few nominations.
Shocking, right? I suspect a lot of the people who say "Ew, RT, propaganda," have never read anything
from RT. I have. they regularly republish Reuters and the FT as well as major U.s. outlets. I don't know
what to think about that, it's so confusing.
When I read their articles I am mindful that they are Russian. Having said that, they seem to publish a lot
of good content, and much of it is from Reuters and other (mostly) reputable sources. Editorials are free for
anyone to research for themselves. Pretty much the same as other pubs.
Laying conspiracy theories aside for one moment (and I do so love a good conspiracy theory), let's chat about
this Russia panic.
I am not one to panic in general. Sure, I have a food, guns, and water stash in my basement. I'm generally
well prepared. There are Russia-is-the-boogeyman theories, and then there are
Russia-boogey-man-theories-are-silly theories. Of course they both can't be right.
But where do these theories come from?
I am sure I'm not going to do a very good job explaining my self in the rant that follows. But I'm going to
give it a good college try.
I want to talk about the Russia Boogeyman theory. First, there's no way to explain this other than to
divulge my age. So I'm just going to spit it out right here and get that out of the way. I'm 40. I've been 40
for approximately 5 years, stubbornly refusing to go further than that. There. I said it. Now that that's out
of the way, it's important to note that children are sponges. As such, they are impressionable and in young
childhood, traumatic events can have a profound and lasting effect, and even change how someone thinks.
When I was about 10ish, in about 1983, a movie came out. If you lived in America, and likely even if you
didn't, and you're over the age of 40 (or if you've been 40 for a while), you've seen it. It's a movie called
"The Day After". It was a huge production and it aired on television. The most watched TV movie ever. And
ranked as one of the top 10 movies ever by several sources. You millennial whippersnappers will have no clue
what I'm talking about. Read on anyway, if you'd like. I'm all inclusive.
The movie was about nuclear warfare, and most importantly, the aftermath. The setting was a small town in
Kansas, I think. A small town that very closely resembled my home town, making it particularly impactful (I
know that's not a word. Sue me.) to me at the time. In the movie, which although was a complete work of fiction
was very realistic, Russia unleashed nuclear weapons. It was freaky. So eerily unsettling was it that I
obsessed about it after I saw it. I thought about it every night. I remember being so afraid that in the event
of a nuclear blast, I might be separated from my family. I remember pondering if I would rather be obliterated
in the blast immediately, or whether I would prefer to be spared instant death only to survive without my
family under horrid conditions. I also remember drills at school around that same time that were designed to
get people prepared in the event of such a disaster. While it may have done so, it also solidified in my mind
that there was a real possibility these events would unfold.
Nearly two years post-freaky-movie, Sting released it's "Russia" song, about Russians loving their children
too. Although it was not talked about much at the time, since life proceeded as normal, in my mind I remember
thinking that I didn't much care if the Russians loved their children, because they were looking to wipe us off
the map. And I lived near the Soo Locks, and I distinctly remember knowing (but I don't have any idea where I
came by this information) that the Locks would be a nuclear target in the event of a strike, since it is a main
thoroughfare for ships.
You can't undo that kind of fear, no more than you can undo my fear of spiders. I know in my head that
spiders, at least where I live, are not poisonous and they cannot harm me. I know it. But my head cannot
eradicate the intense creepiness that even thinking about spiders conjures up. Likewise, no rational thought
about Russia can completely undo a fear that was borne as a child.
There you have it. My Russia hysteria may be founded or unfounded--I know not. But I do not have the power
within me to change this mindset.
Okay Russia-boogeyman-theories-are-silly promoters: fire away.
Great description of what life was like back then, er, so I was told, by older people. Not those of us born in
the 60's, er, I mean the 70's, er, the 80's. Yeah, that's it, the 80's!
We had attack training at school in the 80s -- complete with gas masks and stuff -- on the other side of the
Iron Curtain for when the imperialists invaded, what can I say. I was too distracted by everything to pay
attention, though.
@Rodent
, your story tells me your propaganda was better than our propaganda, perish the thought. The Cold
War was a blast, right?
P.S. Stephen King has done a really good overview of this stage in the U.S. entertainment industry, by the
way. The stages of horror in movies. behind the curtain we only had heroic movies about the Second World War. I
shall now hypothesize that the Soviet bloc lost the Cold War because its entertainment industry was absent. End
of hypothesizing. Thank you for your attention.
8 hours ago,
Marina Schwarz
said:
We had attack training at school in the 80s -- complete with gas masks and stuff -- on the other side of
the Iron Curtain for when the imperialists invaded, what can I say. I was too distracted by everything to
pay attention, though.
@Rodent
, your story tells me your propaganda was better than our propaganda, perish the thought. The
Cold War was a blast, right?
P.S. Stephen King has done a really good overview of this stage in the U.S. entertainment industry, by
the way. The stages of horror in movies. behind the curtain we only had heroic movies about the Second
World War. I shall now hypothesize that the Soviet bloc lost the Cold War because its entertainment
industry was absent. End of hypothesizing. Thank you for your attention.
Makes sense. Not surprisingly the movie makers (supposedly) did not want to have Russia be the first striker
in the movie, but they needed to borrow some footage from the DoD, and the govt. refused to play ball unless
Russia struck first. The guy who made the movie, while he was making it, reportedly would go home at night
literally sick to his stomach at the horrific nature of the movie. It went rounds and rounds with the censors
who thought it might not be suitable for families.
Also interesting, speaking of Russia-led propaganda, and coming from someone who has dabbled a tiny bit in
white-hatishness, if you google "The Day After Russia" as I did to inquire about the movie, there is actually a
Russian movie titled "the day after" about zombies. Yup, let's just bury those search results! It's a
conspiracy!!!
There is another interesting thread here about the different search results showing up for different people.
What shows up when YOU google "The Day After"?
You know, speaking of conspiracies, there is a fairly logical opinion that that movie was designed to scare the
bajeezus out of people so they wouldn't vote for Reagan a second term.
"All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of
by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet
melted."
"... Everything Flynn had to say implicated Obama, Clapper & Brennan but the corrupt cabal isn't subject to the laws of unwashed inbreds like you and I and the other 320 million Americans (including those who THINK they're part of the club because they virtue signal so well). ..."
You realize 2 years of Flynn under Mueller's microscope yielded nothing? And the fact he's
facing sentencing means he's not going to be called as a witness to anything.
Everything Flynn had to say implicated Obama, Clapper & Brennan but the corrupt cabal
isn't subject to the laws of unwashed inbreds like you and I and the other 320 million
Americans (including those who THINK they're part of the club because they virtue signal so
well).
Says Summer Sausage who was of course not in the room. You think you know stuff? You know
stuff from the koolaide you've swallowed for the past 20 years...
"... This shtick of blaming US state crimes on foreign influence is getting annoying. You know none of this would be happening if the DO didn't like it. If you want to stop CIA's common plan or conspiracy for war, you've got to end the impunity that permits it. Ratify the Rome Statute. With the judiciary completely gelded, that's the only way to get the CIA regime under control. It's that or DCI Poppy Hager swings at Nuremberg II. ..."
"... Nuland admitted to spending $5 billion to set Maidan up. That $5B is worth 10 times that much in Ukraine. You don't spend that kind of money unless you have a follow up plan, and NATOizing Ukraine to attack Russia was it. The trigger was NATO's bitch, the EU, creating such a horrible deal for Ukraine that only an imbecile would have accepted it. Viktor Yanukovych was no imbecile. The "Russian deal" wasn't all that great for Ukraine either, it was just infinitely better than the turd the EU told Yanukovych to sign. ..."
One of the local Washington television stations was doing a typical early morning honoring
our soldiers schtick just before Thanksgiving. In it soldiers stationed far from home were
treated to videolinks so they could talk to their families and everyone could nod happily and
wish themselves a wonderful holiday. Not really listening, I became interested when I half
heard that the soldier being interviewed was spending his Thanksgiving in Ukraine.
It occurred to me that the soldier just might have committed a security faux pas by
revealing where he was, but I also recalled that there have been joint military maneuvers as
well as some kind of training mission going on in the country, teaching the Ukrainian Army how
to use the shiny new sophisticated weapons that the United States was providing it with to
defend against "Russian aggression."
Ukraine is only one part of the world where the Trump Administration has expanded the
mission of democracy promotion, only in Kiev the reality is more like faux democracy
promotion since Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is clearly exploiting
a situation that he himself provoked . He envisions setting himself up as a victim of
Moscow to aid in his attempts to establish his own power through a security relationship with
Washington. That in turn will help his bid for reelection in March 2019 elections, in which his
poll numbers are currently running embarrassingly low largely due to the widescale corruption
in his government. Poroshenko has already done much to silence the press in his county while
the developing crisis with Russia has enabled him to declare martial law in the eastern parts
of the country where he is most poorly regarded. If it all works out, he hopes to win the
election and subsequently, it is widely believed, he will move to expand his own executive
authority.
There also has to be some consideration the encounter with the Russians on the Kerch Strait
was contrived by Poroshenko with the assistance of a gaggle of American neoconservative and
Israeli advisers who have been actively engaged with the Ukrainian government for the past
several years. The timing was good for Poroshenko for his own domestic political reasons but it
was also an opportunity for the neocons warmongers that surround Trump and proliferate inside
the Beltway to scuttle any possible meeting between a vulnerable Donald Trump and Vladimir
Putin at the G20 gathering in Argentina.
The defection of Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen, together with the assumption that a lot of
anti-Trump dirt will be spilled soon, means that the American president had to be even more
cautious than ever in any dealings with Moscow and all he needed was a nod of approval from
National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to cancel the
encounter. A heads-of-state meeting might not have solved anything but it certainly would be
better than the current drift towards a new cold war. If the United States has only one vitally
important relationship anywhere it is with Russia as the two countries are ready, able and
apparently willing to destroy the world under the aegis of self-defense.
Given the anti-Russian hysteria prevailing in the U.S. and the ability of the neocons to
switch on the media, it should come as no surprise that the Russian-Ukrainian incident
immediately generated calls from the press and politicians for the White House to get tough
with the Kremlin. It is important to note that the United States has no actual national
interest in getting involved in a war between Russia and Ukraine if that should come about. The
two Eastern European countries are neighbors and have a long history of both friendship and
hostility but the only thing clear about the conflict is that it is up to them to sort things
out and no amount of sanctions and jawing by concerned congressmen will change that fact.
Other Eastern European nations that similarly have problems with Russia should also be
considered provocateurs as they seek to create tension to bind the United States more closely
to them through the NATO alliance. The reality is that today's Russian Federation is not the
Soviet Union and it neither aspires to nor can afford hegemony over its former allies. What it
has made very clear that it does want is a modus vivendi where Russia itself is not
being threatened by the West.
Recent
military maneuvers in Poland and Lithuania and the stationing of new missiles in Eastern
Europe do indeed pose a genuine threat to Moscow as it places NATO forces on top of Russia's
border. When Russia reacts to incursions by NATO warships and planes right along its borders,
it is accused of acting aggressively. One wonders how the U.S. government would respond if a
Russian aircraft carrier were to take up position off the eastern seaboard and were to begin
staging reconnaissance flights. Or if the Russian army were to begin military exercises with
the Cubans? Does anyone today remember the Bay of Pigs?
Crying wolf provides a perfect pretext for the Empire's MIC to line the pockets of the
merchants of death. In keeping with its time-honored tradition of propping up tyrants
kowtowing to imperial hegemonic wishes, America hardly has friends without some military
collaboration. Even the recently anointed sh*thole countries of Africa over 50 such countries
have American military cooperation agreements under the guise of the infamous AFRICOM and the
War on Terror. The number of military bases in sh*thole African countries remain unknown.
..the ability of the neocons to switch on the media
Hard to distinguish between the two really. The "free press" of WMD notoriety, Ghaddafi's
"genocidal drive" against Libyan citizens, Iraq's involvement with 9/11? Iranian arms in
Yemen that have not massacred children in school buses? Iranian fabricated nuclear weapons?
Syrian chemical attacks?
The biggest threats to America come from its "friends"
America is being unwittingly exonerated as an innocent bystander unable to choose her own
friends. It so happens America's "friends" share the common trait of pushing for war. In
countries awash in petrodollars, purchasing billions of dollars in arms used in Yemen to
murder children; Zionists are gifted with American state of the art arsenals to murder
Palestinians, including women and children. The biggest threat to America comes from inside
the deep state itself, especially with the Zionist Israel Firsters pulling strings at
will.
I agree with Phil Giraldi on its analysis of US foreign policy. When lying with dogs, you get
fleas. This saying holds especially true for the so-called US friends such as the Saudis,
Israelis, Ukrainians, Poles, and the Brits. The NeoZion gang plays President Trump is an open
secret. He still employes one of its guiding spirits as national security adviser. As long
this Gordian knot is not cut, American foreign policy will not change, and it's getting
worse. These folks who surround Trump want war, first with Iran and then with Russia. Their
lackey Poroshenko is doing the bitting of Trump and the Zionist regime and their European
puppets. The Zionist regime is deeply involved in steering up tensions. Prime minister
Wolodymyr Hrojsman is Jewish. Is anyone surprised?
What chance does peace have with these people having Trump's ear: Javanka Kushner, Gina
Haspel, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Mad Dog Mattis, and John Bolton?
Around 1890 one Rothschild wrote to another 'the only enemy of jews is jews'.
In my opinion at present the only enemy of the USA is the USA, that part of the USA that
failed in getting Hillary elected.
On the European continent a similar situation, even an establishment Dutch politician, of a
christian party, Segers, found out that a substantial part of the Dutch see the government as
the enemy.
He has the illusion that pr can save him, and his cronies.
He never understood. That was evident the moment he started floating names like Romney for
his cabinet. Personally, I sympathize with Trump after what the deep state has done to him
and his family, and I even respect the guy for telling things like they are – the poor
autistic bastard just can't help but blurt out the truth about things* but he's also not the
guy we needed. We needed a fearless, ruthless, and cunning fighter ready to martyr himself
for our interests, the people's interests.
*Global Warming IS a scam – the Paris Accords would not decrease CO2 levels even
under perfect – near miraculous – circumstances and is merely being floated by
the Chinese so they can give off the appearance of doing something while doing nothing, as
they have done before.
The EU IS a vehicle for Germany.
Hatti IS a shit hole, it's just that non-autistic people have the good sense not to say
that out loud.
Trudeau DOES have a fake eyebrow.
Hillary DOES wear a wig, or at least hair extensions on occasion.
China IS screwing us over economically.
Mexico isn't sending us their best, they are dumping their poverty problem onto us.
NATO doesn't have a purpose.
We shouldn't go to war with N. Korea.
We shouldn't destroy Syria but destroy ISIS.
John Brennan and the FBI really did run a deep state coup plot against him during the
campaign and first 100 days.
Russia isn't a big deal unless we make them a big deal.
@jilles dykstra 'One
of many truths lost within this discourse is the reality that the creation of a no-fly zone
would, in the words of the most senior general in the US Armed Forces, mean the US going to
war "against Syria and Russia". '
For a peek into Establishment orthodoxy, check out "Why Does America Spend So Much on
Israel?" on Beltway Conservatism's Cartoon Network, aka the PragerU Channel. I've recently
started auditing classes there via the Videos page here at The Unz Review.
Beyond parody, a pensioned warrior narrates over 3rd grade graphics, telling most
Americans all they care to know about what he calls "Izrul." Perhaps Mr. Giraldi could,
despite the apparent taboo, leave a comment and get some discussion going with the Team Red
NPCs -- it hasn't worked for me.
@Art I've wondered
why we are the way we are. Then I came across this, and I understood:
D.H. Lawrence
"All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of
by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet
melted."
This shtick of blaming US state crimes on foreign influence is getting annoying. You know
none of this would be happening if the DO didn't like it. If you want to stop CIA's common
plan or conspiracy for war, you've got to end the impunity that permits it. Ratify the Rome
Statute. With the judiciary completely gelded, that's the only way to get the CIA regime
under control. It's that or DCI Poppy Hager swings at Nuremberg II.
"All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a
sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has
never yet melted."
The leading sponsors of terror in the world are Israel and the Zionist controlled U.S. and
Britain and NATO and their terrorist mercenaries ISIS aka AL CIADA and all of the various off
shoots that have been seeded throughout the world by the satanic Zionists.
The Zionists have a long historical experience with bringing terror to the world , one
example being the Zionist/ Bolshevik revolution in Russia where the Bolsheviks killed some 60
million Russians bringing terror to Russia on an industrial level turning the whole country
into a slaughter house!
The Zionist attack on the WTC is but another example of Zionist terrorism, where in one
fell swoop the Zionists killed some 3000 Americans and got away with it and every thinking
American knows that the Zionists did it!
The greatest terrorist kabal in the world is Zionism and these terrorists have control of
every facet of the U.S. government and at some point are going to provoke a war with Russia
that will get the whole world blown to hell and in fact this is what the Zionists want as
they believe they will survive in their DUMBS akd Deep Underground Military Bases which they
have in the U.S. and Israel and Britain, but they care not for the rest of humanity, that is
terrorism in spades!
The enemy is not at the gates , the enemy is in control of the U.S. government and is
going to be the destruction of America!
You can't really pin Ukraine on Trump. Maidan was not spontaneous.
Nuland admitted to spending $5 billion to set Maidan up. That $5B is worth 10 times that
much in Ukraine. You don't spend that kind of money unless you have a follow up plan, and
NATOizing Ukraine to attack Russia was it. The trigger was NATO's bitch, the EU, creating
such a horrible deal for Ukraine that only an imbecile would have accepted it. Viktor
Yanukovych was no imbecile. The "Russian deal" wasn't all that great for Ukraine either, it
was just infinitely better than the turd the EU told Yanukovych to sign.
The real story on Russia is this: the same people that own every "Western liberal
democracy" owned the USSR. The Russians got rid of them, and the USSR collapsed. A new
invasion was hatched under the guise of "Westernizing" Russia. When the Russians saw that
Yeltsin was suckered, and it was the same game, run by the same people, they got a new
sheriff. That sheriff started to sort things out, while the owners fled to the UK and Israel.
The lives of Russians got better, as the owners are gradually being stripped of their power.
The long and short of it, our owners want their ownership of Russia restored.
All wars are economic wars. Capitalism and communism are the two sides of the same coin.
Both seek to concentrate ownership, just in different ways using different scams.
The reason why Trump supports the Ukraine is easy.
"According to the European Jewish Congress, as of 2014, there are 360,000–400,000
Jews in Ukraine."
And there you have it. Wherever or whatever the interest of Jewry there will be the United States standing tall
behind it. Let's just say the Ukraine is guaranteed to stay poor. While the Jews get rich!
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is clearly exploiting a situation that he himself
provoked. He envisions setting himself up as a victim of Moscow to aid in his attempts to
establish his own power through a security relationship with Washington. That in turn will
help his bid for reelection in March 2019 elections
Nah, Porky needs a war to avoid an election which he would undoubtedly lose.
There's no use having an empire if you can't exact an economic advantage. Ultimately, most of
the events unfolding today are about keeping the loot flowing to lower Manhattan and central
London.
Teenagers who get in trouble often have to ditch their bad friends to turn their lives
around. There is still a chance for the United States if we keep our distance from the bad
friends
It's hard to do if you are in fact the worst of those bad friends.
friends who have been convincing us to make poor choices.
The poor choices had been made long before these friends even appeared on the scene. In
fact, many of these friends owe their very existence and/or influence to the poor choices the
US had made. It's so disingenuous to blame the US politics on someone's influence when the
reality is exactly the opposite.
If the US were in normal country prepared to behave in a sensible way it would've picked
much better partners. But the thing is the US isn't a normal country; it doesn't want
partners – in wants vassals, so it is naturally limited in its choice of friends.
September 17, 2014 US Pursues 134 Wars Around the World
The US is now involved in 134 wars or none, depending on your definition of war The White
House spent much of last week trying to figure out if the word "war" was the right one to
describe its military actions against the Islamic State. US Secretary of State John Kerry was
at first reluctant: "We're engaged in a major counterterrorism operation," he told CBS News
on Sept. 11. "I think war is the wrong terminology and analogy but the fact is that we are
engaged in a very significant global effort to curb terrorist activity I don't think people
need to get into war fever on this. I think they have to view it as a heightened level of
counter terrorist activity." – Global Post
"Not only are white supremacists from across the West flocking to Ukraine to learn from
the combat experience of their fascist brothers-in-arms, they are doing so openly, under the
nose of a shrugging law enforcement -- chronicling their experiences on social media before
they bring their lessons back home."
The timing was good for Poroshenko for his own domestic political reasons but it was
also an opportunity for the neocons warmongers that surround Trump and proliferate inside
the Beltway to scuttle any possible meeting between a vulnerable Donald Trump and Vladimir
Putin at the G20 gathering in Argentina.
Trump isn't vulnerable he hired the Deep State apparatchiks, Bolton, Pompeo and many
others. Trump is a Deep Stater and is doing a great Kabuki theater to dupe his followers into
believing his hands are tied.
How do YOU expect me (and others) to swallow YOUR position?
with a great gulps of satisfaction, that's how.
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine was manufactured by the ZUS State Dept. ((Victoria
Nuland)) and John McBloodstain in particular, when Putin upset the Zionist's plans to do a
'Libya' – to Syria.
It was a bloody coup foisted with 5 billion federal reserve note$, of the famous phone
call ('Yats is our guy'). Since then the imbeciles in Ukraine have been doing Nazi salutes
while taking orders from Jewish supremacist Zionists like Ihor Kolomoyskyi and assorted ZUS
Zionists.
The conflict with Iran started when the CIA deposed the duly elected president Mohammed
Mossadeq in 1953, and installed the brutal quisling Shah in his place. To keep the Iranian
people terrorized for decades into submitting to this perfidy, they utilized the CIA and
Mossad run SAVAK.
"... Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out? ..."
And there are other friends in unlikely
places. Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly
against a Trump threat
to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate. The real problem is that
the documents apparently don't expose anything done by the Russians.
Rather, they seem to appear to reveal
a plot by the British intelligence and security services
working in collusion with then CIA Director
John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment
favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?
So how about it? Teenagers who get in
trouble often have to ditch their bad friends to turn their lives around. There is still a chance for the
United States if we keep our distance from the bad friends we have been nurturing all around the world,
friends who have been convincing us to make poor choices. Get rid of the ties the bind to the Saudis,
Israelis, Ukrainians, Poles, and yes, even the British. Deal fairly with all nations and treat everyone the
same, but bear in mind that there are only two relationships that really matter – Russia and China. Make a
serious effort to avoid a war by learning how to get along with those two nations and America might actually
survive to celebrate a tricentennial in 2076.
You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections. Why, if the
beneficiary was anyone other than a Democrat, much less one named Clinton, someone might
actually appoint a Special Counsel to look into it, not to mention the misdeeds of the
various agencies and departments who aided and abetted it.
"You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections."
MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of
John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given. They later put Michael
Steele onto the project; he was a guy with credible Russian contacts. Basically, the scam
worked like this:
They funneled an MI6 intelligence file to Michael Steele (governments routinely keep such
files on influential foreigners and what they are up to) so he could use his contacts to
launder the information and make it appear that it came from sources within Russia; they then
funneled the report back to elements of the FBI so they could use it to justify to the FISA
court a spying campaign on Trump (the FBI illegally withheld the source of the document);
they found nothing proving any Russian connection but they kept the spy program going; they
tried justifying the spy program with a fake story involving a reliable asset that once
passed information from Jimmy Carter's campaign to George H.W. Bush in an effort to help
Reagan win the 1980 election; they later paid the asset nearly a quarter million dollars for
his efforts using a fake "India-China" grant despite the grant running to 2018, the asset
attempted to get a job in the Trump administration so he could act as a mole ; the Obama
regime purposely mishandled information in regards to the spying program (ex: Michael Steele
leaked his document to various news sources before the election and later lied to congress
about it), ensuring it would leak to the press; the Obama regime illegally unmasked elements
of Trump's personal contacts so they could clandestinely leak suggested targets off the
record to the right people
They lost the election anyway, so they then planted dirt and negative press to make the
document look legit – lies about Manafort meeting Assange (Guardian is funded by the
British government to police the left), WaPo lies claiming a vast Russian conspiracy just as
Trump came into office (it was an effort to delegitimize him and create calls for Hillary to
take his place), leaking bank records, the special counsel .and leaking information on Trump
policies to the media using a secret security clearance credentials program enacted by Obama.
They also ran interference through CIA guys like Mark Warner in an effort to cover up the
mole they planted; they falsely asserted this was a national security issue when the man's
identity was well-known to the press and he was never an undercover spy like Jarret was, at
least not in recent history.
To put this all into perspective, imagine the following scenario:
The government takes cctv footage of you at a grocery store; in the background there is an
attractive woman. The woman then goes missing. The government illegally reads your emails and
finds that you like sexual jokes. The government then interviews a friend of yours who claims
that you once made a risque rape joke back in college. They also plant a mole in your
workplace who befriends you and reports back all of your politically incorrect humor. Then
the cops find the woman's body and the government claims that you killed her because you were
in the area at the time and you make bad jokes, which has been confirmed by multiple credible
people. You look guilty, don't you? The government 1) took information out of context 2)
laundered circumstantial evidence through a credible witness when they originally obtained it
elsewhere using nefarious sources. That's what they did to Trump, but much much much
worse.
a plot by the British intelligence and security services to subvert the course of the 2016
election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that
one work out?
Deep State and Establishment stooge Donald Trump.
There is still a chance for the United States if we
"We must confront Russian cheating on their nuclear obligations," Pompeo said at the
conclusion of the NATO meeting, claiming the U.S. has warned Russia to re-enter compliance
about 30 times over the past five years. He urged the West to increase pressure, arguing it can
no longer "bury its head in the sand" over repeat violations.
But for the first time Pompeo signaled it's not too late to salvage the treaty, despite
Trump already saying the US it taking steps to pull out: he said Washington "would welcome a
Russian change of heart."
On Oct. 20 President Trump first announced the United States' planned withdrawal from the
historic treaty brokered by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan
in 1987. At the time Russia's Foreign Ministry
slammed the move as "a very dangerous step" which is ultimately part of "continuing
attempts to achieve Russia's concessions through blackmail". Russian officials have issued the
counter-charge that it is the US that's out of compliance with the treaty.
The US is waging unconstitutional war in Syria without authorization of the UNSC but
Pompeo has the effrontery to lecture the Russians on their "lawlessness."
Is there ONE freaking day out of the year when some senior official of the USG is not
acting like an utter horse's ***?
Putin should just have the SVR make some fake "proof" Trump is a Russian agent and feed it
to the democratic-isis-******-lover party and let them tear Trump a new *******.
Considering it was the democrats who first pushed this muh russian meddlings, can't even
see how will the US be able to pull itself out of this (****)hole they dug for
themselves...
So the US with a big lead in ballistic missiles and anti-ballistic missiles, wants to blow
that up to promote the development of long range stealth cruise missiles, well, I guess there
must be a massive profit in it.
The normal rule in a arms race though, the big losers are the countries with the biggest
lead in current war technologies, when new technologies enter the fray, negating existing
investments and bankrupting that country as the right off their existing lead and having to
race to play catch up and take the lead again.
It's like the crazy, the US leads in space, great lets that it into a battlefield and
eliminate that lead, why, just ******* why would you be stupid enough, banning war in space
protects you lead, promoting war in space ends it. Blocking long range cruise missiles
protects the US lead in ballistic missiles and anti-ballistics missile systems, allowing it
ends that lead.
Now in the most idiotic fashion, the US has declared it will arbitrarily leave that treaty
without any evidence of anything, now setting the precedent, that any country can withdraw
from any treaty with the US for any arbitrary reason because that is the behaviour the US
government has set precedent for, why hold any treaty with the US, when they will pull out at
any time for any reason. The probable message from the rest of the world to the US, yeah ****
off America, we are not Native Americans who exist for you to abuse us
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/01/18/368559990/broken-promises-on-display-at-native-american-treaties-exhibit
(we know it is in the American government nature but **** off anyhow).
What a pompous *** Pompeo is. After his lies about MbS how can I trust him on this issue.
Is the US clean? They are certainly not in compliance with the chemical weapons treaty having
destroyed no stockpiles as they agreed to do....almost 2 decades after the treaty was
signed.
Treaties are ******** unless the parties to them actually implement them and follow the
rules. The US seems to believe they have an inherent right to ignore the treaties they sign
up to. Why anyone deals with them I have no idea.
Where did Trump get these Bush 2,Zionist pig holdovers?
After Bush 2 dumped ABM treaty NATO/US have been creeping up to Russias border.
Then in 2014, Obama & Nuland decided it would be a good idea to effect regime change
in Ukraine and put neonazi thugs on Russia's border.
EU Israhelli clients all know this is ******** about Russia. But Russia pissed off the
Zionist entity in interfering with Yinon/7countries in five years plan.
How LONG are we going to put up with this Zionist attack on our country?
They are asking why Russia not keeping treaty while we violate it?
Secretary of war Mike Pompeo
Washington Seeks 'Pretext' to Abandon INF Treaty - Russian Envoy to US
"...We are accused of violating the Treaty by allegedly possessing a certain 9M729
missile that violates the accord's provisions. However, we do not see any clear facts or
arguments that could lead to conclusions of violations,"
Sputnik Here
Russia, China, Iran challenging global US leadership: Pompeo
"..US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has targeted Russia, China and Iran for opposing
Washington's "leadership role". PressTv
Just accuse without any specific evidence.
another
China has simply made no effort to halt its ongoing pattern of aggressive
, predatory trade .
US always blaming others while violating every law and treaty known to man.
" I regret that we now most likely will see the end of the INF Treaty," North Atlantic
Treaty Organization Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared ...
Fixed: " I'm ecstatic that our fabricated accusations allows us to finally see the end of
the INF Treaty, which really benefits Russia far more than NATO," North Atlantic Treaty
Organization Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared ...
The whole point of the US strategy is to use short-range cruise missiles to take out
Russian retaliatory capability in a first strike, thereby destroying all of those hypersonic
weapons, and using their ABM systems to "clean up" any missiles that survived the initial
onslaught. The "advantage" of the short-range cruise missiles is that they greatly reduce
Russia's available response times - it basically must decide to annihilate the US within 5
minutes of notice of an attack, or face being wiped out with no retaliatory capabilities. (It
is worth noting that, in the past, false alarms have lasted for longer than 5 minutes.)
This is by far the most destabilizing, dangerous move, ever - any false blip on a Russian
radar can lead to an all-out nuclear exchange. It is infinitely more threatening to humanity
than "global warming". Brought to you by the Evil Drumfpster.
The Dead Man Hand only allows you to respond with capabilities that have survived and that
are not eliminated by the ABM. The 5 minutes notice is until the vast majority of your
nuclear arsenal is decimated - dead hand (i.e., ability to retaliate if the leadership is
entirely decapitated) or not.
Is Mike Pompeo Starting to Look Like Kim Jong Un? He is talking like communist leader at
Communist party congress.
Mike Pompeo argued that Trump's reassertion of national sovereignty through his "America
First" policy would make those institutions function better. "In the finest traditions of our
great democracy, we are rallying the noble nations of the world to build a new liberal order
that prevents war and achieves greater prosperity for all," Pompeo said at a speech at the
German Marshall Fund thinktank. "We're
supporting institutions that we believe can be improved; institutions that work in American
interests – and yours – in service of our shared values."
He listed a series of current international institutions, including the EU, UN, World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund, that he said were no longer serving their mission they
were created.
The remarks were frequently punctuated with praise for Trump, who is referred to 13 times
in the text. Pompeo portrayed his president as restoring an era of triumphal US leadership in
the world, for the first time since the end of the cold war.
"This American leadership allowed us to enjoy the greatest human flourishing in modern
history," the secretary of state said. "We won the cold war. We won the peace. With no small
measure of George HW Bush's effort, we reunited Germany. This is the type of leadership that
President Trump is boldly reasserting."
President [George H. W.] Bush used to talk about a new world order, based on shared rules
and on cooperation among free nations. I was at high school at the time, and I remember
perfectly well the sense of hope and of opening that one could breathe in Europe over these
years.
He imagined - and I quote - "a world where the rule of law supplants the role of the
jungle; a world in which nations recognise their shared responsibility for freedom and
justice; a world where the strong respect the rights of the weak."
My generation believed in this vision, believed in the possibility for this vision to turn
into reality, to become true, especially in Europe - a continent divided by the Cold War. We
hoped that after the Cold War a more cooperative world order would indeed be possible and
indeed be built.
Today, I am afraid we have to admit that such a new world order has never truly
materialised and worse, there is a real risk today that the rule of the jungle replaces the
rule of law. The same international treaties - so many in which we are together - that ended
the Cold War are today put into question.
Instead of building a new order, we have to today invest a huge part of our energy in
preventing the current rules from being dismantled piece by piece.
Like many people, I do not find what is known as the concept of Mutual Assured
Destruction, or MAD to be reassuring. Spurring the creation of more ways to use nuclear
weapons is what ending the INF Treaty will do. Joschka Fischer, German Foreign Minister, and
Vice-Chancellor from 1998-2005 writes;
In this new environment, the "rationality of deterrence" maintained by the United
States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War has eroded. Now, if nuclear proliferation
increases, the threshold for using nuclear weapons will likely fall.
The nuclear deterrent we hold is a hundred times larger than needed to stop anyone sane or
rational from attacking America, and for anyone else, an arsenal of any size will be
insufficient. What we are talking about is the Intermediate-range Nuclear-Forces treaty also
known as the INF Treaty which limits short-range missiles. The article below explores the
insanity of a new arms race.
China and Russia don't want a military arms race but they will get one. The funny part is
they will confide in Trump about their woes and he will mimic their desires but not agree
with them.
"We are either going to have a REAL DEAL with China, or no deal at all - at which point we
will be charging major Tariffs against Chinese product being shipped into the United States.
Ultimately, I believe, we will be making a deal - either now or into the future....
Armed conflict between the US and Iran is becoming more probable by the day as super-hawks
replace hawks in the Trump administration. The new National Security Adviser, John Bolton, has
called for the US to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 and advocated immediate regime
change in Tehran. The new Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has said the agreement, which Trump
may withdraw from on 12 May, is "a disaster". Trump has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu that he will not accept a deal with "cosmetic changes" as advocated by European
states, according to Israeli reporters. If this is so, then the deal is effectively dead.
... ... ...
The new line-up in Washington is being described as "a war cabinet" and it may turn out to
be just that. But looking at ignorant, arrogant men like Bolton and Pompeo, it is difficult to
avoid the feeling that it will all end in disaster.
The author is tried to deceive: Flynn lobbed Russians on behave of Israel.
Muller dirty trick with Flynn (entrapment during the FBI interview) will eventually backfire
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller's memo noted that federal investigators' curiosity about Flynn's role in the presidential transition seemed to have been sparked by a Washington Post account of a conversation he had with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, in December 2016 ..."
"... But the meat of what should worry Team Trump is in Mueller's disclosure that Flynn has provided firsthand information about interactions between the transition team and Russian government officials -- including, as was already known, several conversations with Kislyak in December 2016. Those included a discussion about lifting economic sanctions the Obama administration had imposed on Russia and about a separate matter involving a United Nations resolution on Israel. ..."
All of that, plus Flynn's "substantial assistance," early cooperation, and acceptance of "responsibility for his unlawful conduct,"
led Muller's team to ask the court to grant Flynn a lenient sentence that doesn't include prison time, according to
a highly anticipated sentencing memo the special counsel's office filed Tuesday night.
And there wasn't much more than that in 13 concise and heavily redacted pages that let down anyone expecting the document to be
another public narrative fleshing out lots of fresh detail about Mueller's investigation. Still, the filing, and some new details
in it, should give pause to members of Trump's inner circle -- especially the president's son-in-law and senior White House adviser,
Jared Kushner.
Mueller's memo noted that federal investigators' curiosity about Flynn's role in the presidential transition seemed to have
been sparked by a Washington Post account of a conversation he had with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, in December
2016 . The filing also detailed a series of lies Flynn told about his contacts with and work for the Turkish government while
serving in the Trump campaign. (Given that Trump and a pair of his advisers had been pursuing
a real estate deal in Moscow during the first half of 2016, Flynn might mistakenly have seen wearing two hats as noncontroversial.)
But the meat of what should worry Team Trump is in Mueller's disclosure that Flynn has provided firsthand information about
interactions between the transition team and Russian government officials -- including, as was already known, several conversations
with Kislyak in December 2016. Those included a discussion about lifting economic sanctions the Obama administration had imposed
on Russia and about a separate matter involving a United Nations resolution on Israel.
Flynn lied to federal agents who questioned him about those chats on Jan. 24, 2017, and that was a crime (as, possibly, were his
efforts as a private citizen to meddle with a sitting government's foreign policy). The former general
acknowledged lying ,
pleaded guilty a year ago, and
then began cooperating with Mueller's
probe.
The timeline around Flynn's conversations
is crucial because it shows what's still in play for the president and Kushner -- and why Mueller may have been content to lock
in a cooperation agreement that carried relatively light penalties, as well as why Flynn's assistance seems to have subsequently
pleased the veteran prosecutor so much.
Kushner's actions are also interesting because the Federal Bureau of Investigation has examined
his
own communications with Kislyak -- and Kushner reportedly encouraged Trump to fire his FBI director,
James Comey , in the
spring of 2017, when Comey was still in the early stages of digging into the Trump-Russia connection.
Comey, and his successor, Mueller, have been focused on possible favor-trading between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. We
know that Russian hackers directed by Russian intelligence operatives penetrated Democrat computer servers in 2016 and gave that
information and email haul to WikiLeaks to disseminate as part of an effort to undermine Hillary Clinton's presidential bid. Trump
was also pursuing that
business deal in Moscow in 2016 and had other projects over the years
with a Russian presence . What might the Kremlin have been expecting in return? A promise to lift U.S. economic sanctions?
Kushner also had personal financial issues weighing on his mind at the time. He had spent much of 2016 trying to bail out his
family from his ill-considered and pricey purchase of a Manhattan skyscraper,
666 Fifth
Avenue .
After a meeting in Trump Tower with Kislyak on Dec. 1, 2016, which Flynn and Kushner
attended together ,
the ambassador arranged another gathering on Dec. 13 for Kushner and a
senior Russian
banker with Kremlin ties, Sergei Gorkov. The White House has
said that meeting was
innocent and part of Kushner's diplomatic duties. In a
statement
following his testimony before Congress in the summer of 2017, Kushner said that his interactions with Flynn and Kislyak on Dec.
1 only involved a discussion of Syria policy, not economic sanctions. He said that his discussion with Gorkov on Dec. 13 lasted less
than 30 minutes and only involved an exchange of pleasantries and hopes for better U.S.-Russian relations -- and didn't include any
discussion of recruiting Russians as lenders or investors in the Kushner family's
real estate business .
Kislyak enjoyed continued lobbying from the White House after his meetings with Kushner. On Dec. 22, Flynn asked Kislyak to delay
a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for building settlements in Palestinian territory. Flynn later told the FBI that
he didn't ask Kislyak to do that, which wasn't true.
Court documents filed last year
said that a "very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team" directed Flynn to make an overture to Kislyak about the sanctions
vote. According to reporting from my
Bloomberg Opinion colleague Eli Lake and
NBC News , Kushner was that "senior member."
Bloomberg News reported that former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus also pushed Flynn to lobby Kislyak on the
U.N. vote. (Kushner didn't discuss pressing Flynn to contact Kislyak in his statement last summer and instead noted how infrequent
his direct interactions were.)
Kushner's role in these events isn't discussed in Mueller's sentencing memo for Flynn. The absence of greater detail might cause
Kushner to worry: If Flynn offered federal authorities a different version of events than Kushner -- and Flynn's version is buttressed
by documentation or federal electronic surveillance of the former general -- then the president's son-in-law may have to start scrambling
(a possibility
I flagged
when Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017).
Other portions of the 2016 and early 2017 timelines still matter, too.
On Dec. 28, less than a week after Flynn called Kislyak about the U.N. vote, the ambassador contacted Flynn, according to court
documents. The Obama administration had just imposed economic sanctions on Russia because of the Kremlin's effort to sabotage the
2016 election. Kislyak apparently told Flynn that Russia would retaliate because Flynn asked him to "moderate" Russia's response.
Flynn
reportedly discussed these conversations with a former Trump adviser, K.T. McFarland, on Dec. 29.
In the weeks that followed, Sally Yates, then acting U.S. attorney general, warned the Trump administration about Flynn's duplicity
and said he was a national security threat. She was fired days after that for refusing to enforce Trump's executive order seeking
to ban immigration from seven Islamic nations. The White House forced Flynn out in February of last year, and Trump fired Comey three
months later. The president subsequently began using "witch hunt" to describe the investigation that Mueller inherited from Comey.
Since then, as the White House and Trump have surely absorbed and as Flynn's sentencing memo reinforces, Mueller's hunt has now
ensnared a number of witches.
"... The American Neocons are Zionists (Their goal is expanding political / military power. Initially this is focused on the state of Israel.) ..."
"... Obviously , if Zionism is synonymous with patriotism in Israel, it cannot be an acceptable label in American politics, where it would mean loyalty to a foreign power. This is why the neoconservatives do not represent themselves as Zionists on the American scene. Yet they do not hide it all together either. ..."
"... American Jewish Committee ..."
"... Contemporary Jewish Record ..."
"... If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying . And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren ..."
"... Goyenot traces the Neocon's origins through its influential writers and thinkers. Highest on the list is Leo Strauss. (Neocons are sometimes called "the Straussians.") Leo Strauss is a great admirer of Machiavelli with his utter contempt for restraining moral principles making him "uniquely effective," and, "the ideal patriot." He gushes over Machiavelli praising the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech. ..."
"... believes that Truth is harmful to the common man and the social order and should be reserved for superior minds. ..."
"... nations derive their strength from their myths , which are necessary for government and governance. ..."
"... national myths have no necessary relationship with historical reality: they are socio-cultural constructions that the State has a duty to disseminate . ..."
"... to be effective, any national myth must be based on a clear distinction between good and evil ; it derives its cohesive strength from the hatred of an enemy nation. ..."
"... deception is the norm in political life ..."
"... Office of Special Plans ..."
"... The Zionist/Neocons are piggy-backing onto, or utilizing, the religious myths of both the Jewish and Christian world to consolidate power. This is brilliant Machiavellian strategy. ..."
"... the "chosen people" myth (God likes us best, we are better than you) ..."
"... the Holy Land myth (one area of real estate is more holy than another) ..."
"... General Wesley Clark testified on numerous occasions before the cameras, that one month after September 11th, 2001 a general from the Pentagon showed him a memo from neoconservative strategists "that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran". ..."
"... Among them are brilliant strategists ..."
"... They operate unrestrained by the most basic moral principles upon which civilization is founded. They are undisturbed by compassion for the suffering of others. ..."
"... They use consciously and skillfully use deception and "myth-making" to shape policy ..."
"... They have infiltrated the highest levels of banking, US military, NATO and US government. ..."
Mememonkey pointed my to a 2013 essay by Laurent Guyenot, a French historian and writer on the
deep state, that addresses the question of
"Who Are The Neoconservatives."
If you would like to know about that group that sends the US military into battle and tortures prisoners
of war in out name, you need to know about these guys.
First, if you are Jewish, or are a GREEN Meme, please stop and take a deep breath. Please put
on your thinking cap and don't react. We are NOT disrespecting a religion, spiritual practice or
a culture. We are talking about a radical and very destructive group hidden within a culture
and using that culture. Christianity has similar groups and movements--the Crusades, the
KKK, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, etc.
My personal investment: This question has been a subject of intense interest for me since I became
convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Iraq war was waged for reasons entirely different
from those publically stated. I have been horrified to see such a shadowy, powerful group operating
from a profoundly "pre-moral" developmental level-i.e., not based in even the most
rudimentary principles of morality foundational to civilization.
Who the hell are these people?!
Goyenot's main points (with a touch of personal editorializing):
1. The American Neocons are Zionists (Their goal is expanding political / military power.
Initially this is focused on the state of Israel.)
Neoconservativism is essentially a modern right wing Jewish version of Machiavelli's political
strategy. What characterizes the neoconservative movement is therefore not as much Judaism as a religious
tradition, but rather Judiasm as a political project, i.e. Zionism, by Machiavellian
means.
This is not a religious movement though it may use religions words and vocabulary. It
is a political and military movement. They are not concerned with being close to God. This is a movement
to expand political and military power. Some are Christian and Mormon, culturally.
Obviously , if Zionism is synonymous with patriotism in Israel, it cannot be an acceptable
label in American politics, where it would mean loyalty to a foreign power. This is why the neoconservatives
do not represent themselves as Zionists on the American scene. Yet they do not hide it all together
either.
He points out dual-citizen (Israel / USA) members and self proclaimed Zionists throughout cabinet
level positions in the US government, international banking and controlling the US military. In private
writings and occasionally in public, Neocons admit that America's war policies are actually Israel's
war goals. (Examples provided.)
2. Most American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal and do NOT share the perspective of the radical
Zionists.
The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than "conservative")
Republican right, is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of
the monthly magazine Commentary, a media arm of the American Jewish Committee,
which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward, the oldest
American Jewish weekly, wrote in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: "If there
is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism
is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find
horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born
among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants'
grandchildren".
3. Intellectual Basis and Moral developmental level
Goyenot traces the Neocon's origins through its influential writers and thinkers. Highest
on the list is Leo Strauss. (Neocons are sometimes called "the Straussians.") Leo Strauss is a great
admirer of Machiavelli with his utter contempt for restraining moral principles making him "uniquely
effective," and, "the ideal patriot." He gushes over Machiavelli praising the intrepidity of his
thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.
Other major points:
believes that Truth is harmful to the common man and the social order and should be reserved
for superior minds.
nations derive their strength from their myths, which are necessary for
government and governance.
national myths have no necessary relationship with historical reality:
they are socio-cultural constructions that the State has a duty to disseminate.
to be effective, any national myth must be based on a clear distinction between
good and evil; it derives its cohesive strength from the hatred of an enemy nation.
As recognized by Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt in an article "Leo Strauss and the World
of Intelligence" (1999), for Strauss, "deception is the norm in political life" –
the rule they [the Neocons] applied to fabricating the lie of weapons of mass destruction
by Saddam Hussein when working inside the Office of Special Plans.
George Bushes speech from the national cathedral after 9/11 exemplifies myth-making at its
finest: "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world
of Evil. War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful,
but fierce when stirred to anger. . . .[W]e ask almighty God to watch over our nation, and grant
us patience and resolve in all that is to come. . . . And may He always guide our country. God
bless America.
4. The Zionist/Neocons are piggy-backing onto, or utilizing, the religious myths of both the
Jewish and Christian world to consolidate power. This is brilliant Machiavellian strategy.
the "chosen people" myth (God likes us best, we are better than you)
the Holy Land myth (one area of real estate is more holy than another)
the second coming of Christ myth
the establishment of God's Kingdom on Earth through global destruction/war (nuclear war for
the Glory of God)
[The]Pax Judaica will come only when "all the nations shall flow" to the Jerusalem
temple, from where "shall go forth the law" (Isaiah 2:1-3). This vision of a new world
order with Jerusalem at its center resonates within the Likudnik and neoconservative
circles. At the Jerusalem Summit, held from October 12th to 14th, 2003 in the symbolically significant
King David Hotel, an alliance was forged between Zionist Jews and Evangelical Christians around
a "theopolitical" project, one that would consider Israel "the key to the harmony of civilizations",
replacing the United Nations that's become a "a tribalized confederation hijacked by Third
World dictatorships": "Jerusalem's spiritual and historical importance endows it
with a special authority to become a center of world's unity. [...] We believe
that one of the objectives of Israel's divinely-inspired rebirth is to make
it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace
and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets". Three acting Israeli ministers spoke at the summit,
including Benjamin Netanyahu, and Richard Perle.
Jerusalem's dream empire is expected to come through the nightmare of world war. The prophet
Zechariah, often cited on Zionist forums, predicted that the Lord will fight "all nations" allied
against Israel. In a single day, the whole earth will become a desert, with the exception
of Jerusalem, who "shall remain aloft upon its site" (14:10).
With more than 50 millions members, Christians United for Israel is
a major political force in the U.S.. Its Chairman, pastor John Haggee, declared: "The United States
must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both
Israel and the West, [...] a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will
lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ".
And Guyenot concludes:
Is it possible that this biblical dream, mixed with the neo-Machiavellianism of Leo Strauss and
the militarism of Likud, is what is quietly animating an exceptionally determined and organized ultra-Zionist
clan? General Wesley Clark testified on numerous occasions before the cameras, that one month
after September 11th, 2001 a general from the Pentagon showed him a memo from neoconservative strategists
"that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then
Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran".
Is it just a coincidence that the "seven nations" doomed to be destroyed by Israel form part of
the biblical myths? [W]hen Yahweh will deliver Israel "seven nations greater and mightier than yourself
[ ] you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them."
My summary:
We have a group that wishes greatly expanded power (to rule the world??)
Among them are brilliant strategists
They operate unrestrained by the most basic moral principles upon which civilization is
founded. They are undisturbed by compassion for the suffering of others.
They use consciously and skillfully use deception and "myth-making" to shape policy
This is not a spiritual movement in any sense
They are utilizing religious myths and language to influence public thinking
They envision "winning" in the aftermath world war.
They have infiltrated the highest levels of banking, US military, NATO and US government.
Guardian is just a propaganda outlet. That sad fact does not exclude the possibility of publishing really good articles,
thouth. That still happens occasionally.
The fact that they follow MI6 and Foreign Office talking points in all foreign events coverage a is just a testament the GB is
a "national security state". Nothing more, nothing less.
Notable quotes:
"... I'm not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook , Craig Murray , Glenn Greenwald , Moon of Alabama , and many others). ..."
"... The short version is, The Guardian 's Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed "Russians") on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding's earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous "intelligence sources." After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece ( employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally ), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it. ..."
"... By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other "respectable," "authoritative" outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian 's story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and "leftists" who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange. ..."
"... And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this story. ..."
"... It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. ..."
"... Those who are conforming to [official truth] are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so. ..."
"... The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative. ..."
"... It is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution." ..."
"... The distinction is simple. We can't know the truth about distant and complex events like 9/11 or JFK unless we were directly involved, and those people are all dead. For big events we have to rely on, or ignore, the official accounts. ..."
"... Given all this, still, we can approach an approximation of truth that some can agree on. Here is where the trouble starts . ..."
The short version is, The Guardian 's Luke
Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency
feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, secretly met with
Julian Assange (and unnamed "Russians") on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to
conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding's earth-shaking
allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on well,
absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous "intelligence sources." After actual journalists
pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece ( employing the subjunctive mood
rather liberally ), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended
like they had never published it.
By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and
disseminated by other "respectable," "authoritative" outlets, and it was making the rounds on
social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the
above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of
critical thinking), Politico posted this
ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian 's story
was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump well, probably, it had been planted
by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative
fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and
"leftists" who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion
of Assange.
At this point, I imagine you're probably wondering what this has to do with manufacturing
"truth." Because, clearly, this Guardian story was a lie a lie The Guardian got
caught telling. I wish the "truth" thing was as simple as that (i.e., exposing and debunking
the ruling classes' lies). Unfortunately, it isn't. Here is why.
Much as most people would like there to be one (and behave and speak as if there were one),
there is no Transcendental Arbiter of Truth. The truth is what whoever has the power to say it
is says it is. If we do not agree that that "truth" is the truth, there is no higher court to
appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest
difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain
whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.
Nor are there many "truths" (i.e., your truth and my truth). There is only one "truth" the
"official truth". The "truth" according to those in power. This is the whole purpose of the concept
of truth. It is the reason the concept of "truth" was invented (i.e., to render any other
"truths" lies). It is how those in power control reality and impose their ideology on the
masses (or their employees, or their students, or their children). Yes, I know, we very badly
want there to be some "objective truth" (i.e., what actually happened, when whatever happened,
JFK, 9-11, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Schrödinger's dead cat, the Big Bang, or
whatever). There isn't. The truth is just a story a story that is never our story.
The "truth" is a story that power gets to tell, and that the powerless do not get to tell,
unless they tell the story of those in power, which is always someone else's story. The
powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative.
They either parrot the "truth" of the ruling classes or they utter heresies of one type or
another. Naturally, the powerless do not regard themselves as heretics. They do not regard
their "truth" as heresy. They regard their "truth" as the truth, which is heresy. The truth of
the powerless is always heresy.
For example, while it may be personally comforting for some of us to tell ourselves that we
know the truth about certain subjects (e.g., Russiagate, 9-11, et cetera), and to share our
knowledge with others who agree with us, and even to expose the lies of the corporate media on
Twitter, Facebook, and our blogs, or in some leftist webzine (or "fearless adversarial" outlet
bankrolled by a beneficent oligarch), the ruling classes do not give a shit, because ours is
merely the raving of heretics, and does not warrant a serious response.
Or all right, they give a bit of a shit, enough to try to cover their asses when a
journalist of the stature of Glenn Greenwald (who won a Pulitzer and is frequently on
television) very carefully and very respectfully almost directly accuses them of lying. But
they give enough of a shit to do this because Greenwald has the power to hurt them, not because
of any regard for the truth. This is also why Greenwald has to be so careful and respectful
when directly confronting The Guardian , or any other corporate media outlet, and state
that their blatantly fabricated stories could, theoretically, turn out to be true. He can't
afford to cross the line and end up getting branded a heretic and consigned to Outer Mainstream
Darkness, like Robert Fisk, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Cook, John Pilger, Assange, and other such
heretics.
Look, I'm not trying to argue that it isn't important to expose the fabrications of the
corporate media and the ruling classes. It is terribly important. It is mostly what I do
(albeit usually in a more satirical fashion). At the same time, it is important to realize that
"the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off
their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the
revolution." People already know the truth the official truth, which is the only truth there
is. Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it
is safer and more rewarding to do so.
And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly
fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be
rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally
serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be
instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this
story.
As for Julian Assange, I'm afraid he is done for. The ruling classes really have no choice
but to go ahead and do him at this point. He hasn't left them any other option. Much as they
are loathe to create another martyr, they can't have heretics of Assange's notoriety running
around punching holes in their "truth" and brazenly defying their authority. That kind of stuff
unsettles the normals, and it sets a bad example for the rest of us heretics.
#
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play
Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Good piece. I think there's another layer, though.
The truth or falsehood of individual facts about the physical world can often be
determined with near-certainty. But when it comes to history, or "news" about current events/
politics, reality is much too complex to address directly. Too many individual facts to be
comprehensible, let alone useful.
We must pick, choose, emphasize, or ignore particular elements, and arrange them into some
kind of structure, in order to form a useful narrative. Or in the case of "news," the legacy
media oligarchy largely performs this function for us -- we simply passively accept/ adopt
their narrative. Or, in many cases, "choose" between the closely-related variants of that
narrative offered by the "liberal" vs. "conservative" press.
This process of abstraction, simplification, and organization inevitably involves data
loss. So no narrative is "true" in the same sense that individual facts about the real world
are true. But some narratives incorporate large amounts of "facts" that are demonstrably
false, and some are more useful/ descriptive/ predictive than others. No one engaged in this
process is "objective." They -- or we -- are all in some way part of the story. It should be
self-evident that some narratives are more useful to the perceived interests of owners of
major media outlets than others, and that these will assume a much more prominent place in
their coverage than ones that are deleterious to those interests.
Ideally, most people would take these factors into account when evaluating the "news," and
maintain a much more skeptical attitude than they typically do. But there are several factors
that prevent this.
One is simply time/ efficiency. These individual narratives, taken together, support --
and are supported by -- our overall worldview. There aren't enough hours in the day to be
constantly skeptical about everything, especially since the major tools of distortion
involved in constructing mainstream narratives tend to be selection bias/ memory-holing, with
obvious lies about known facts (like the Guardian story referenced here) used only sparingly.
It's simply not practical to to constantly consider potentially "better" narratives, and to
reevaluate one's worldview based on these.
And which narrative we believe often has more to do with perceived social pressure/ social
acceptability than with "truth." As you put it,
Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because
it is safer and more rewarding to do so.
Mass media pushing a common narrative creates an artificial perception of social
consensus. Creating, or even finding, alternative narratives means fighting the inertia of
this perceived consensus, and potentially suffering social costs for believing in the "wrong"
one. The social role of narratives is largely independent of their "truth" -- if what you're
"supposed" to believe is highly implausible, that actually gives it higher value as a signal
of loyalty to the establishment.
It's probably best to maintain a resolutely agnostic attitude toward most "news" items,
unless one is particularly interested in that particular event. " Why are they pushing
this particular story?" "Why now ?" and " What are they trying to accomplish
here?" are often more useful questions than "Is it true?"
It's not a new issue -- only exacerbated by the advent of mass visual media:
"Propaganda" -- Edward Bernays (1928)
"The Free Press"– Hilaire Belloc (1918)
I get what Hopkins is trying to do here, but redefining terms (i.e., "truth") doesn't do what
he thinks it does.
The truth is not ' what most people think '; it's not ' what we are told to
believe '; it's not ' the official narrative '.
There is a useful cautionary tale embedded in Hopkins' piece, but he doesn't tease it out
properly.
Take this excerpt:
The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that
that "truth" is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are
blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will
make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say
it is say it is.
With significant caveats, it is a reasonable description of the way the political world
works: if the political class decides that its interests are best served by declaring that a
specific narrative X is 'true', it will obtain immediate compliance from about half
the livestock, and can then rely on force (peer pressure; subsidy or taxation; state
coercion) to get an absolute majority of the herd to declare that they accept the 'truth' of
X .
If X is objectively false, too bad.
Try to run a legal argument based on the objective falsity of a thing that the political
class has deemed to be true: you'll be shit outta luck.
This is highly relevant where I am sitting: here are two examples – one really
obvious, one a bit less so (but far more important because of its radical implications).
Obvious Example: Drug Dogs
Recent research has shown that drug sniffing dogs give false positive signals between 60%
and 80% of the time – i.e., in terms of identifying people who are in actual
physical possession of drugs at any point in time, drug sniffing dogs perform worse than
a coin toss.
Note that this is before considering that the dog's handler is often pointing the dog at a
target that the handler thinks is likely to be carrying drugs. (Although in reality, drug
dogs are paraded around at concerts and in public spaces, sniffing every passer-by).
However there is an Act of Parliament (capitalise all the magic words) that asserts that a
signal from a drug sniffing dog is sufficient to qualify as what Americans call "probable
cause" – i.e., reasonable suspicion for a search.
Does anyone think that evidence should be admissible if it results from a search conducted
based on 'probable cause' derived from a method that produces worse outcomes than tossing a
coin?
Judges will tie themselves into absolute epistemological knots to get that evidence
admitted – and they will refuse to permit defence Counsel from adducing evidence about
drug dog inaccuracy because since the defendant actually did have drugs in their
possession, the dog didn't signal falsely.
In other words, the judge conflates posterior probability with prior
probability; the prior probability that the dog is correct, is 10%-40%; this should not
suffice to generate probable cause (or 'reasonable suspicion).
More Interesting Example: 'Representative' Democracy
In general, Western governments assert that their legitimacy stems from two primary
sources: some founding set of principles (usually a constitution – written or
otherwise), and 'representativeness' (including ratification of the constitution by a
representative mechanism, for those places with written foundational documents).
The Arrow Impossibility Theorem [1,2] and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem
[3,4], both show that there is no way of accurately determining group preferences using an
ordinal voting mechanism.
What this boils down to, is that representativeness is a lie – and it's a lie before
any consideration of voting outcomes ; it's a meta -problem (the problem that
ordinal voting cannot do what it is claimed to do – viz ., accurately identify
the 'will of the people'/'social preferences'/'what the people want').
Beyond the meta-problem, there is also the actual counting problem: no government has ever
been elected having obtained the votes of an outright bare majority, i.e., 50%-plus-1
of the entire eligible franchise. (It's more like 25-35% for most parliamentary systems
– for US presidential elections in the full-franchise period, the winner is voted for
by 29% of the eligible population; you would be horrified to look at US Senate
results).
So when the new unhappy lords (and their Little Eichmann bureaucrat enablers)
promulgate laws based on assertions of legitimacy because of a constitutional
Grundnorm and/or the representative nature of government both of those things are
pretty obvious furphies; they are objectively not 'truth' and no amount of heel-clicking and
wishing will make it so.
Which brings us to a key legal aphorism that has a jurisprudential history going back four
centuries: Ratio legis est anima legis, et mutata legis ratione, mutatur ex lex
– which dates from Milborn's case ( Coke 7a KB [1609]).
The reason for a law is the soul of the law, and if the reason for a law has changed,
the law is changed .
What this means – explicitly – is that " no law can survive the
[extinction of the] reasons on which it is founded ".
American courts re-expressed this as " cessante ratione legis, cessat ipsa lex "
(the reason for a law having ceased, the law itself ceases) – e.g., in Funk v. United
States , 290 US 371 (1933) in which Justice Sutherland opined –
This means that no law can survive the reasons on which it is founded. It needs no
statute to change it; it abrogates itself . If the reasons on which a law rests are
overborne by opposing reasons, which in the progress of society gain a controlling force,
the old law, though still good as an abstract principle, and good in its application to
some circumstances, must cease to apply as a controlling principle to the new
circumstances.
(Emphasis mine)
Again: try running this argument in a court: " The asserted basis for all laws
promulgated by the government, is provably false. Under a doctrine with a 4-century
jurisprudential provenance, the law itself is void ."
See how far you get.
So Hopkins makes a good-but-obvious point – power does not respect either rights
or truth; as such it does you no good whatsoever to have the actual truth on your side.
He should have made the point better.
C J Hopkins, despite some good quotes and insights above, regrettably falls into the trap of
peddling Derrida-tier relativistic nonsense, playing a word game about 'truth', as if 'truth'
was not real merely because most people have strong incentives to avoid being devoted to it
Where you stand depends upon where you sit, etc., Karl Marx's dictums about economic and
power positions shaping consciousness, and of course the century-old classic:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not
understanding it.
from Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Hopkins more or less repeats Sinclair when he says
Those who are conforming to [official truth] are doing so, not because they are
deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.
Despite selling-out truth to the relativism devil in some passages, Hopkins nevertheless
creates some quotable, including the particularly insightful:
The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third
alternative.
The following notion of Hopkins is seen now and then in the alt-sphere, but always bears
repeating
It is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their
slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake
up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution."
Iron and blood are the tools used to force people to accept what isn't true.
(Another way to tell: it was uttered by a fucking politician – a cunt who wanted to
live in palaces paid for by the sweat of other people's brows).
Truth does not need violence to propagate itself: in a completely-peaceful system of free
exchange, bad ideas (of which lies are a subset) will get driven out of the market place
because they will fail to conform to ground truth.
Falsehood requires violence (arguably it is a form of violence: fraud is 'violent'
because it causes its victims to misallocate their resources or to deform their preferences
and expectations).
In a very real sense, truth does not need friends: all it requires is an absence of
powerful enemies.
The distinction is simple. We can't know the truth about distant and complex events like 9/11
or JFK unless we were directly involved, and those people are all dead. For big events we
have to rely on, or ignore, the official accounts.
But we CAN know the truth about our own situation, our own neighborhood, and our own
families. The current riots in France are a concrete ASSERTION of local truth against the
blatant and condescending official lies. The majority of France is getting poorer and
suffering more from migrant crime. Macron insists that starvation is necessary to serve Gaia,
and crime is necessary to serve Juncker. The people would prefer to have a leader that serves
France.
@FB Scientific truth
is limited by two factors – assumptions, and hidden variables. For example,
we might drop a brick in a vacuum and believe that it falls at 9.8 m/s squared. Here, we make
the assumption that the force of gravity is constant. And for most of history we were unaware
of the hidden variable of relativity to the speed of light.
So, assuming (LOL) that we are able to eliminate all assumptions and account for all
hidden variables, there is a scientific truth. That is ASSUMING we are not just a simulation
in someone elses computer!
Given all this, still, we can approach an approximation of truth that some can agree on.
Here is where the trouble starts .
@The scalpel LOL and
then there is the 'observer effect' also especially in good old quantum mechanics in the end
scientific truth does boil down to what 'some can agree on'
@Kratoklastes Strength
is the production of force over distance. That is to say, force is a quantifiable, physical
phenomenon that, deconstruct it as much as you want, will hit you like a tsunami whether you
believe it or not.
Force only works because there is a real world that transcends philosophical bullshit and
marketing.
The subjective piece is will: victory is attained when the enemies will to resist is
crushed. Through the repeated use of physical force, eventually any enemy can be worn down
and vanquished.
The world is finite, desire is infinite, and for every desire and appetite, there is a
will. As multiple wills will that they attain their infinite desires in a finite world, there
will always be a conflict of will, which will always ultimately be resolved by force. Which
means ultimately, despite the rich imaginations and appetites of humans, and their related
striving, physical force will ultimately rule the day, and conquer, condition, and constrain
the mental life of mankind.
Of course, desire and appetite will not take no for an answer, and in their frustration,
they will imagine, fantasize, and conceptualize rationales for why this is not so. This is
the nature of our desires, and in good times of prosperity and peace, they may even bend our
reason in the direction of these appetites and fantasies, until the instincts for self
preservation and endurance rust, and are even forgotten. But like the moon revealed by a
passing cloud, the perpetual war of human existence will inevitably reassert itself, and
those that have prepared for the inevitable will vanquish those who were content to daydream
when they should have been preparing.
After reading the article and the aggregate comments, I am strengthened in my belief that
the physics analogy of Schrödinger's cat is among the most useful (and
notwithstanding the otherwise valid criticism of it in the comments). In the same way that
the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, does not purport to define a given word,
per se , but rather gives a detailed description of how the word has in fact been used
over the years and centuries.
I refer to my version of Schrödinger's cat as counter-sense words or
oscillating-contradictions .
Oscillating contradictions and cogno-linguistic manipulation
The primary means by which corporate supremacy, for example, is achieved and maintained in
practice is via the maintenance and use of a small arsenal of about two dozen critical
counter-sense or yo-yo -like words/terms that are asserted or claimed to mean
either "X" or "Minus-X" at the option of the decision-maker.
Among the most important and sui generis (in a class of its own) is the word
person which is held to mean a living, breathing being of conscience (literally
a being of equity) with the rights, powers and privileges of such being ("X"), or else it can
mean a corporate entity which is a notional/inanimate item of property to be bought
and sold and otherwise traded for profit in the stock and financial markets ("Minus-X").
By way of example/demonstration of the ongoing cognitive manipulation process, if someone
had managed to hit the judges of the U.S. Supreme Court with a blast of truth-ray just
before they announced their decision in Citizens United, here is what we may have got
instead:
[MORE]
We here at the Supreme Court are part of what can be fairly and broadly referred to as
an arm of the entrenched-money-power.
At certain times and under certain circumstances it is to our enormous advantage over
you the masses that corporations be natural-persons-in-law with the rights, powers and
privileges of a natural person or living being of conscience.
At other times and other circumstances it is to our enormous advantage over you the
masses that corporations be items of property that can be actively bought and sold and
traded for profit in the stock and financial markets.
Your laughable naiveté is manifest in your expectation that you are going to
receive a definitive answer from this Court, or even that it is possible for us to give you
one. Among the foundational purposes of this Court is to actively prevent that question
from being answered definitively at all. The instant we give a definitive answer, the game
is over.
Whatever answer we give you must perpetuate the systematized delusion that the same
concept (corporate personhood) can mean either X (a living being of conscience), or minus-X
(an item of property), depending on the ever-changing needs of the decider.
So our current answer is that a corporation is a natural-person-in-law with the rights,
powers and privileges of a natural person, except when it isn't. We'll let you know next
time whether that situation has changed in the meantime.
Essentially all counter-sense words/terms follow that same template .
Notwithstanding that the respective concepts are logically and objectively mutually
exclusive , the judges of the Courts (and the broadly-defined
financial-world/social-control-structure) maintain that it can be either or both , and
we'll let you know if and when it becomes important.
So a corporate person has a right of free speech when giving money to
influence political parties, but not to object to itself being sold as a piece of property in
the stock and financial markets or when it is acquired in a merger or takeover financed by
its own assets. If a corporation has the legal capacity and rights of a natural person, then
how can it be owned as the legal property of another? The purpose of the Courts is to ensure
that that question is never presented in that way.
After person , the remaining most significant counter-sense or yo-yo
-like words are (surprise surprise) essentially all money-and-finance-based, and the most
important among these is the word principal and its role in facilitating illegal
front-loading or ex-temporal fraud (interest illegally and unlawfully compounded in
advance).
Is the amount of principal the actual or net amount advanced by the creditor and
received by the debtor for their own use and control?
Or is it the amount that the debtor agrees that they owe regardless of the amount
received?
Is the amount of principal a question of fact ? Or of the agreement of
parties ?
[Here is the premise / offer that is referenced immediately below:]
Lender (e.g., typical second-mortgage lender): "I will loan you $10,000 at 20%
per annum provided that you sign and give to me a marketable security that claims or
otherwise purports to evidence that I have loaned you $15,000 at 10% per annum, plus an
undisclosed and unregistered side-agreement and cheque (check) back to me for a bonus or
loan fee of $5,000 as a payment from the nominal proceeds."
In the process example used above, what is the principal amount of the loan? Is it
$10,000 because that is the factual net amount invested by the creditor and received by the
debtor for their own use? Or is it $15,000 because that is the amount that the debtor is
required to falsely agree that they have received and owe as a condition of the loan? Or is
it $20,000 because that is the total cash-equivalent/money assets ($15,000 mortgage + $5,000
cheque) that the debtor has to give to the creditor?
Is it a noun/fact ? Or is it an adjective/opinion merely pretending to be a
noun? All debt and therefore money in the world today depends on the answer to that question
that theoretically cannot exist.
Principal is a special type (and most significant form) of counter-sense
word or oscillating contradiction where dictionaries normally only give one sense,
while commercial practice defines the contrary. It would be very difficult to put the
Whatever-the-debtor-agrees-that-they-owe sense into a dictionary, because the fraud against
meaning (as well as the criminal law) is manifest in spelling it out, and ever more so in
more specialized financial dictionaries.
So virtually every legal, financial, accounting, and ordinary English dictionary and/or
regulation defines it to the effect "The actual amount invested, loaned or advanced to the
debtor/borrower net of any interest, discount, premium or fees", while virtually every
financial security in the real world at least implicitly incorporates the fraudulent
alternative/contrary meaning.
This in turn allows the academic world to function on the rational/factual
definition, while the markets maintain a wholly contradictory deemed or pretended
reality, while both remain oblivious to the contradiction.
Thus principal means the nominal creditor's actual and net investment, unless it
doesn't .
With this class of counter-sense word where there is a necessary and definitive
answer, the real job of the judges of the Courts becomes to make certain that the question is
never officially asked, and under no circumstances is it to be definitively answered.
With just one of these words you can theoretically steal the Earth . With a
financial system that is relatively saturated with them, such becomes child's play .
With these rules a group of competently-trained chimpanzees otherwise pulling
levers at random could do as well as the so-called wizards of Wall Street .
And significantly, these oscillating contradictions enable the judges to be self-righteous
in the extreme on behalf of the entrenched-money-power, while looting the little
people of the product of their labour.
As in: You have received the principal amount ($10,000) and you are going to pay
back the principal amount ($15,000) plus the ever-accumulating (and super-leveraged)
interest upon it according to your contract, while the meaning of the word oscillates
between fact and opinion – between a noun and an adjective
– according to what the judge needs it to mean (or accommodate) at any given instant in
time.
It seems impossibly obvious in this simple example, but with several of them orchestrated
simultaneously or sequentially, anything can truly be made to mean anything
.
A partial list of the most critical oscillating-contradicitions includes: loan, credit,
discount, interest, rate-of-interest, agreement, contract, security, repay, restitution,
etc., all of which mean either "X" or its conceptual opposite "Minus-X" at the option of the
entrenched-money-power whose vast financial fortunes are founded on such cogno-linguistic
arbitrage .
Here are what I believe to be four essential tools needed to triangulate
reality via congo-linguistic parallax . The first two are mine, and the last two
are from the American and English Courts, respectively.
1. Humans are highly cogno-linguistic . We perceive reality very largely as a
function of the language that we use to describe it. Most everyone inherently believes
and presumes that you have to be able to think something before you can say it.
The greater reality is that, above a certain base level of perception and communication, you
have to have the words and language by which to say something before you can think
it .
2. The world is ever-increasingly controlled and administered by people who genuinely
believe whatever is necessary for the answer they need. Administrative agents of the
entrenched-money-power have solved the criminal-law enigma of mens rea or guilty
mind by evolving or devolving (take your pick) into professional schizophrenics
who genuinely believe whatever they need to believe for the answer they need, and who
communicate among themselves subconsciously by how they name things. They suffer a
cogno-linguistically-induced diminished capacity that renders them incapable of
perceiving reality beyond labels .
3. Their core business model or modus operandi is the systematized delusion
:
"A "systematized delusion" is one based on a false premise, pursued by a logical process
of reasoning to an insane conclusion ; there being one central delusion, around which other
aberrations of the mind converge." Taylor v. McClintock, 112 S.W. 405, 412, 87 Ark. 243.
(West's Judicial Words and Phrases (1914)).
4.
One must not confuse the object of a conspiracy [to defraud] with the
means by which it is intended to be carried out. Scott v. Metropolitan Police
Commissioner [1974] 60 Cr. App. R. 124 H.L.
I have long since abandoned my search for truth, per se, since I came to realize that the
best I can ever do is to constantly strive to move closer to it. With apologies to the
physicists, Truth is the Limit of Infinite Good Faith .
@Tulip " which will
always ultimately be resolved by force."
Right there is where you lost the plot. That statement is just your opinion and it cannot
be proven true. The rest of your argument falls victim to this logical error.
" and those that have prepared for the inevitable will vanquish those who were content to
daydream when they should have been preparing."
Also, just your opinion. For example, the "dreamer" might die still comforted by his/her
dreams, while the "prepper" might waste his life witing for the "inevitable' that never
arrives.
In what can be described as a monumental step forward in the relentless pursuit of 9/11
truth, a United States Attorney has agreed to comply with federal law requiring submission to
a Special Grand Jury of evidence that explosives were used to bring down the World Trade
Centers.
The Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry successfully submitted a petition to the federal
government demanding that the U.S. Attorney present to a Special Grand Jury extensive
evidence of yet-to-be-prosecuted federal crimes relating to the destruction of three World
Trade Center Towers on 9/11 (WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7).
After waiting months for the reply, the U.S. Attorney responded in a letter, noting that
they will comply with the law.
Some good documentary films here to watch for free:
My question/quibble relates to your objection to the use of sniffer dogs to establish
probable cause for search because it is no better than a coin toss. That seems fallacious
if, according to your figures, the dogs sniff 500 people and get excited by 10 of them of
which 3 are correctly identified and 7 are false positives.
Yeah. The concepts of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative
predictive value might be very helpful in assessing this.
The tributes to former President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday aged 94, have been
pouring in from all sides of the political spectrum. He was a man "of the highest character,"
said his
eldest son and fellow former president, George W. Bush. "He loved America and served with
character, class, and integrity," tweeted former U.S. Attorney and #Resistance icon Preet
Bharara. According to another former president, Barack Obama , Bush's life was "a
testament to the notion that public service is a noble, joyous calling. And he did tremendous
good along the journey." Apple boss Tim Cook said : "We have lost a great
American."
In the age of Donald Trump, it isn't difficult for hagiographers of the late Bush Sr. to
paint a picture of him as a great patriot and pragmatist; a president who governed with "class"
and "integrity." It is true that the former president refused to vote for Trump in 2016,
calling him a " blowhard ," and that he eschewed the
white nationalist, "alt-right," conspiratorial politics that has come to define the modern
Republican Party. He helped end the Cold War without, as Obama said , "firing a shot." He spent
his life serving his country -- from the military to Congress to the United Nations to the CIA
to the White House. And, by all accounts, he was also a beloved grandfather and
great-grandfather to his 17 grandkids and eight great-grandkids
.
Nevertheless, he was a public,
not a private, figure -- one of only 44 men to have ever served as president of the United
States. We cannot, therefore, allow his actual record in office to be beautified in such a
brazen way. "When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that
only praise be permitted but not criticisms," as my colleague Glenn Greenwald has argued
, because it leads to "false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts."
The inconvenient truth is that the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush had far more in
common with the recognizably belligerent, corrupt, and right-wing Republican figures who came
after him - his son George W. and the current orange-faced incumbent - than much of the
political and media classes might have you believe.
Consider:
... ... ...
He made a dishonest case for war . Thirteen years before George W. Bush lied about weapons
of mass destruction to justify his invasion and occupation of Iraq, his father made his own set
of false claims to justify the aerial bombardment of that same country. The first Gulf War, as
an investigation by journalist Joshua Holland
concluded , "was sold on a mountain of war propaganda."
For a start, Bush told the American public that Iraq had invaded Kuwait " without provocation or warning
." What he omitted to mention was that the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had given an
effective
green light to Saddam Hussein, telling him in July 1990, a week before
his invasion, "[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement
with Kuwait."
Then there is the fabrication of intelligence. Bush deployed U.S. troops to the Gulf in
August 1990 and claimed that he was doing
so in order "to assist the Saudi Arabian Government in the defense of its homeland." As Scott
Peterson wrote in the Christian Science
Monitor in 2002, "Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated that up to
250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key U.S. oil
supplier."
Yet when reporter Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times acquired her own commercial
satellite images of the Saudi border, she found no signs of Iraqi forces; only an empty desert.
"It was a pretty serious fib," Heller told Peterson, adding: "That [Iraqi
buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't
exist."
President George H. W. Bush talks with Secretary of State James Baker III and Secretary of
Defense Dick Cheney during a meeting of the cabinet in the White House on Jan. 17, 1991 to
discuss the Persian Gulf War. Photo: Ron Edmonds/AP
He committed war crimes. Under Bush Sr., the U.S. dropped a whopping 88,500
tons of bombs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, many of which resulted in horrific
civilian casualties. In February 1991, for example, a U.S. airstrike on an air-raid shelter in
the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least
408 Iraqi civilians . According to Human Rights Watch , the Pentagon knew
the Amiriyah facility had been used as a civil defense shelter during the Iran-Iraq war and yet
had attacked without warning. It was, concluded HRW, "a serious violation of the laws of
war."
U.S. bombs also destroyed essential Iraqi civilian
infrastructure -- from electricity-generating and water-treatment facilities to food-processing
plants and flour mills. This was no accident. As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post
reported in June 1991: "Some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to
create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself. Planners
now say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair
without foreign assistance. Because of these goals, damage to civilian structures and
interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as 'collateral' and unintended, was
sometimes neither."
Got that? The Bush administration deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure for
"leverage" over Saddam Hussein. How is this not terrorism? As a Harvard public health team
concluded in June 1991, less than four months after the end of the war, the destruction of
Iraqi infrastructure had resulted in acute malnutrition and "epidemic" levels of cholera and
typhoid.
By January 1992, Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau,
was estimating that Bush's Gulf War had caused the deaths of 158,000 Iraqis, including
13,000 immediate civilian deaths and 70,000 deaths from the damage done to electricity and
sewage treatment plants. Daponte's numbers contradicted the Bush administration's, and she was
threatened by her superiors with dismissal for releasing " false information. " (Sound
familiar?)
He refused to cooperate with a special counsel . The Iran-Contra affair , in which the
United States traded missiles for Americans hostages in Iran, and used the proceeds of those
arms sales to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, did much to undermine the presidency of Ronald
Reagan. Yet his vice president's involvement in that controversial affair has garnered far less
attention. "The criminal investigation of Bush was regrettably incomplete," wrote Special
Counsel Lawrence Walsh, a former deputy attorney general in the Eisenhower administration, in
his final report on the
Iran-Contra affair in August 1993.
Why? Because Bush, who was "fully aware of the Iran arms sale," according to the special
counsel, failed to hand over a diary "containing contemporaneous notes relevant to Iran/contra"
and refused to be interviewed in the later stages of the investigation. In the final days of
his presidency, Bush even issued
pardons to six defendants in the Iran-Contra affair, including former Defense Secretary
Caspar Weinberger -- on the eve of Weinberger's trial for perjury and obstruction of
justice. "The Weinberger pardon," Walsh pointedly noted, "marked the first time a president
ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness, because the
president was knowledgeable of factual events underlying the case." An angry Walsh accused
Bush of "misconduct" and helping to complete "the Iran-contra cover-up."
I knew there was something wrong with Donald Trump's presidency the day he bombed the
airbase at Al-Shairat in Syria. It was a turning point. I knew it was a mistake the moment he
did it and argued as such at the time.
No act by him was more contentious.
It cost me hundreds of followers gained throughout the campaign who wanted to believe Trump
was playing 4-D chess. My Periscopes went from being events to afterthoughts.
Those that left needed to believe this because they had invested so much in him.
They had to believe he was playing some deep game with Putin to bring peace to the
region.
He wasn't.
I was right and truth is painful. The need for him to be Orange Jesus was so strong they
created Qanon and the 'science' of political horoscope as slowly but surely Trump was stripped
of all of his power except that of complaining about how unfair it all is.
That day he did something in the moment, with bad intelligence and let fly with tomahawks
which Russian and Syrian air defenses misdirected and/or shot down.
Empty President
His goal was to show everyone there was a new, strong sheriff in town.
All it did was weaken him.
The neocons praised him as presidential. They began to get their hooks in him then. But
truly, Trump was destroyed before he took office, giving up Michael Flynn, expelling Russian
diplomats and compromising his cabinet picks.
Because making war is the only true test of a President to the laptop bombardiers who
control foreign policy. With that one act Trump's days as an independent agent in D.C. were
numbered.
And since then the hope has been that given the enormity of the opposition to his Presidency
he was still fighting for what he campaigned on -- no nation building, bring the empire home,
protect the borders, and clean up the corruption.
He's made a few minor changes but not enough to change the course of this country and, by
extension, the world.
The people want this change. Those with the power don't.
G-20 Ghost
So here we are with a pathetic Trump outclassed at the G-20, a meeting he should dominate
but instead is ushered around like a child, given poor earpieces and looking a little lost.
He's only allowed to have one meeting of note by his handlers, with China's Xi Jinping.
Because that meeting wasn't going to end with anything damaging to the long-term plan.
Trump's tariff game is tired and all it will do is hasten the demise of U.S. competitiveness in
the very industries he wants us to be competitive in.
Because tariffs are a band-aid on the real problems of bureaucracy, corruption, waste and
sloth within an economy. They are not a product of China stealing our technology (though they
have).
And that $1 trillion deficit Trump is running? Music to the ears of the globalists who want
the U.S. brought low. More military spending. More boondoggles the banks can cut a nice big
check to themselves for with funny money printed without risk. This can go on for a few more
years until it doesn't matter anymore.
Trump's folding on meeting Putin is the final nail in his presidency's coffin. He's not even
allowed to make statements on this issue anymore. That's for Sarah Sanders, Mike Pomposity and
John Bolt-head to do.
You know, the grown-ups in the room.
No. Putin and Trump met once when they weren't supposed to and since then Trump has been
getting smaller and smaller. Sure, he held some rallies for the mid-terms to shore up his base
for a few weeks while the Democrats stole more than a dozen House seats, three governorships
and a couple of Senate seats, but hey he's still working hard for no pay.
Please.
Trump needed to show some real moral courage and speak with Putin about the Kerch Strait
incident like men, not sulk in the corner over a couple of ships. And yet his still throws his
full support behind a butcher like Mohammed bin Salman because arms sales and Iran.
Putin, for his part, makes no bones about doing business with the Saudis. He knows that bin
Salman is creating a quagmire for Trump while driving the U.S. and European Deep State mad.
For this Secretary of Defense James Mattis calls Putin, " A slow learner." This is a
flat-out threat that Mattis has more coming Putin's way. But in fact, it is Mattis who is the
slow learner since he still thinks Putin isn't three steps ahead of him.
Which he is. The game is all about time and money. And thanks to Mattis and, yes, Trump,
Putin will win the war of attrition he is playing.
Because that is what has been going on here from the beginning. Iran, China and Russia know
what the U.S. power brokers want and they knew Trump would always cave to them. So, they knew
exactly how to get Trump to over-commit to a strategy that cannot and will not ever come to
fruition.
I warned that Trump's blind-spot when it comes to Iran was his weakness. I warned that he
would eventually justify breaking every foreign policy promise to fulfill his plan to unite the
Sunni world behind him and Israel by giving them Iran.
The End of the Beginning
Welcome to today. And welcome to the end of Trump's presidency because now he is
pot-committed to regime change while the vultures circle him domestically. He has become Bush
the Lesser with arguably better hair.
He has alienated everyone the world over with sanctions and tariffs, hence his desire to "
Get me out of here " as the G-20 wound down. No one believes he matters anymore. By tying
himself to the Saudis and the Israelis the way he has he, the master negotiator, has left
himself no room to negotiate.
And that is leading to everyone defying him versus cutting deals to carve up the world, end
the empire and come home.
Trump is not leading here. He is being led. And change requires leaders. He has been led
down the path so many presidents have, more militarism, more empire. Because when you're the
Emperor everyone is your enemy. This is the paranoia of a late-stage imperial mindset.
It certainly is the mindset of Trump's closest advisors - Mattis, Bolton and Pompeo.
So Trump's "America First' instincts, no matter how genuine, have been twisted into
something worse than evil, they are now ineffectual keepers of the status quo fueling ruinous
neoconservative dreams of central Asian dominance.
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I have what it takes to help you navigate a world going slowly mad.
His nose is wedged right up Adelson's & Bibi's ring-hole.
Even as we speak now, 100 drones crossed over from Turkey into Syria with French experts
modifying them to accept warheads of a chemical nature. Simultaneously the innovative British
military are providing miscellaneous WMD's/support to Jabhat-Al -Nusra in Idlib.
Time for Putin/Russia to take these cockroaches/vermin out in quick time, for their own
good.
Trump's grasshopper mind could be construed for severe Alzheimer's.
Trump boasted of how HE would "Make the US Military Great again" (as if it wasn't too big
to begin with..) and spent $16 billion EXTRA on 'defence,' yet now he suddenly flip-flopped
and calls defence spending "crazy."
Spot on, I completely agree with Luongo, and #metoo have been saying this for a long
time.
Trump's unstable and unhinged waffling, lying and flip-flopping (i.e. "4D chess") is
finally beginning to catch up with him and his presidency will not be marked with him being
the one who drained the swamp, but a presidency marked with a trail of destruction.
He has talked himself into so many corners, that it will be impossible to back out of
those corners....unless of course he turns the volume of his bullshitting, lying and waffling
up to 11.
"You can fool some people some of the time, but you can't fool all people all of the
time."
It's easy to fool dumb American Trumptards, but it's not easy fooling the Russians, the
Europeans and the Chinese. They see right through his fake bravado and ********.
"I am certain that, at some time in the future, President Xi and I, together with
President Putin of Russia, will start talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a
major and uncontrollable Arms Race," Trump wrote. "The U.S. spent 716 Billion Dollars this
year. Crazy!"
Another classic Tweet from Captain Bonespurs. No wall, no change to healthcare, no
immigration policy, no amazing trade agreements, no slavery, no mandatory mullets, no
mandatory bible study at school, no burning of witches. And now he is talking about reducing
the largest military budget in history.
Trump is finished. He had two years to replace Sessions and Rosenstein and have someone at
the DOJ appoint a Special Councils for each item to look into:
The Clinton Foundation
Uranium One Deal
Hillary's Email Server
The murder of Seth Rich
The Benghazi Consulate Disaster
The Democrats computer scandal with the Iwan brothers.
Bill Clinton giving China classified missile and sub technology
The unelected Deep State actors controlling the country.
Q is a total ******* fraud. Trump has 3 weeks before he is assraped and left bleeding on
the floor by the Democrats and the RHINO's in the senate. If he gets impeached, Pence will be
impeached and Nitwit Nancy becomes POTUS. And within 2 months of that happening, we will have
full balls out, open Civil War II.
"... Neoliberalism is a set of practices that favors entrepreneurs and corporations, supports--often below the radar--massive state subsidies for the corporate estate, presses for radical deregulation of private markets, treats labor as an abstract factor of production, celebrates the authority of courts governed by a neoliberal jurisprudence, hates collective social movements on the left, protects imperial drives, strives to render democracy minimal, and moves to dismantle or weaken unions, social security, public schools and universal voting if and when the opportunities arise. Fascism is a form of capitalism that dismantles democracy, pushes intense nationalism, pursues racism, deploys big lies systematically, attacks vulnerable minorities to energize its base, corrupts courts, drives to make the media its mouthpiece, places police and intelligence agencies under its wing, colludes with foreign dictatorships, welcomes vigilante groups beneath a veneer of deniability, and jacks up the intensity of cultural ruthlessness. ..."
"... Democracy in Chains ..."
"... MacLean's book, through a close review of an archive not studied before, reveals how the public neoliberal pronouncements by Buchanan between the 1970s and 2000s were soon matched by a set of covert plans and financial funding designed to bring neoliberalism to power by "stealth" strategies. Buchanan had come to see, as had others, that the neoliberal agenda was not apt to be enacted by democratic means. So he adopted a two-track model. ..."
"... MacLean's review of the ruthlessness and narcissism that marked the private and public persona of Buchanan, a review that invites attention to character affinities between him and Trump. Neither Buchanan, Trump, nor Charles Koch -- the latter another key figure in the Buchanan story -- thought highly of compromise. They play a hardball game. ..."
"... Neoliberalism, its critics know so well, periodically spawns the economic crises its hubristic devotees promise will not happen. It also works to foster voter suppression, unlimited dark campaign contributions, extreme gerrymandered districts, take away worker benefits, appoint judges at state and national levels governed by neoliberal jurisprudence, treat voter suppression tactics to be needed to eliminate phantom voter fraud, oppose affirmative action, to weaken labor unions, and attack universal health care. ..."
"... The old, all so familiar, Hayek story of how socialism and social democracy are always on the "road to serfdom" is a fairy tale that has not in fact occurred. The transition, however, from neoliberalism to virulent fascist movements has occurred before and could do so again. ..."
Neoliberalism is not fascism. But the fact that many famous neoliberals have been moved to
support fascism to protect a regime from social democracy or socialism does give one pause.
Hayek, Friedman, von Mises, among others, took such a turn under duress. They also had highly
expansive views of what counted as a "socialist" threat.
Neoliberalism is a set of practices that favors entrepreneurs and corporations,
supports--often below the radar--massive state subsidies for the corporate estate, presses for
radical deregulation of private markets, treats labor as an abstract factor of production,
celebrates the authority of courts governed by a neoliberal jurisprudence, hates collective
social movements on the left, protects imperial drives, strives to render democracy minimal,
and moves to dismantle or weaken unions, social security, public schools and universal voting
if and when the opportunities arise. Fascism is a form of capitalism that dismantles democracy,
pushes intense nationalism, pursues racism, deploys big lies systematically, attacks vulnerable
minorities to energize its base, corrupts courts, drives to make the media its mouthpiece,
places police and intelligence agencies under its wing, colludes with foreign dictatorships,
welcomes vigilante groups beneath a veneer of deniability, and jacks up the intensity of
cultural ruthlessness.
So the two are different. Are there, however, enough affinities between them to help explain
how the former -- both in its leadership and its base of support--can migrate rapidly toward
the latter during periods of stress? Stress that it often enough creates by its own hubristic
market practices? Bearing in mind those noble neoliberals who today call out and hold out
against Trumpism -- they are on welcome public display on the Nicole Wallace show on
MSNBC--recent experience in the United States suggests that many other neoliberals, in a
situation of public stress, too easily slide toward the latter. A whole bunch of neoliberal
Republicans in the American Congress, after all, now support or tolerate policies and
belligerent practices they did not before the era of Trump. Many do not merely do so because
they are cowed by the danger of threats to them in Republican primaries -- they could, for
instance, quit politics, or join the Democratic Party to stop aspirational fascism, or
staunchly support the principles they embrace in those very Republican primaries and
elections.
The recent book, Democracy in Chains , by Nancy MacLean, allows us to discern more
closely how such slides and gallops can occur. It is focused on the life of a Nobel Prize
winning neoliberal -- who often called himself a libertarian -- loved by the Mt Pelerin Society
by the name of James Buchanan. I used to teach critically his book The Calculus of Consent in
the 1980s. But MacLean's book, through a close review of an archive not studied before,
reveals how the public neoliberal pronouncements by Buchanan between the 1970s and 2000s were
soon matched by a set of covert plans and financial funding designed to bring neoliberalism to
power by "stealth" strategies. Buchanan had come to see, as had others, that the neoliberal
agenda was not apt to be enacted by democratic means. So he adopted a two-track model.
That two-track model is revealing. So is the fact that this refugee from Tennessee -- a
former slave state and one that then imprisoned Blacks systematically to replace lost slave
labor -- seldom mentioned the specific conditions of Blacks or women as he articulated his
abstract defense of liberty. So, too, is MacLean's review of the ruthlessness and
narcissism that marked the private and public persona of Buchanan, a review that invites
attention to character affinities between him and Trump. Neither Buchanan, Trump, nor Charles
Koch -- the latter another key figure in the Buchanan story -- thought highly of compromise.
They play a hardball game.
The story starts, really, in Pinochet's Chile, where Buchanan helped that repressive regime
impose economic reforms backed by constitutional changes that would make it next to impossible
to reverse them. They were called them constitutional "locks and bolts". Buchanan never
publicized the extensive role he played with Pinochet in Chile. Nor did he ever express public
regret over its fascism, replete with prohibitions of free speech, practices of torture, and
decrees making it illegal to organize dissident social movements.
Another key epiphany occurred in the 1980s in the States. Reagan's massive tax cuts, which
were promised to spur rapid growth to pay for them, instead created deficits three times larger
than those Jimmy Carter had bequeathed. A public reaction set in as the regime proposed to make
radical cuts in Social Security and Medicare to make up the shortfall. But those plans failed.
After that failure, Buchanan concluded, consonant with advice by Milton Friedman, that such
entrenched programs could only be weakened and dismantled through disinformation campaigns.
Democracy had to be squeezed. Why? The majority of "takers" will never accept open plans to
curtail their benefits to reduce taxes on a minority of "producers". The takers, let's call
them for starters workers, the poor and the elderly, don't even believe in "liberty"--meaning
above all the freedom of entrepreneurs to roam freely in the market. So, you must pretend you
are trying to save the very system you seek to unravel. Talk incessantly about its "crisis".
Divide its supporters into older, retired members, who will retain benefits, and younger ones
who will have them cut. Celebrate the virtues of private retirement accounts. Propose to have
the wealthy be removed from the system, doing all these things until general support for the
social security system weakens and you are free to enact the next steps -- steps not to be
publicized in advance. Once you finally eliminate the system, people's general confidence in
the state will wane more. And new initiatives can be taken -- again in a stealth manner -- with
respect to Medicare, pollution regulations, climate change, unemployment insurance, and
democratic accountability.
Buchanan, to make a long story short, first increasingly bought into disinformation
campaigns and later joined the main financier of his Center at George Mason University, Charles
Koch, to support a series of voter suppression programs, neoliberal court appointees,
anti-labor laws, and intensely funded political campaigns to shift the priorities of the state.
The guiding idea was not only to change the rulers but to change the rules which govern
districting, court jurisprudence, voter access and the like. Liberty is for producers, not
takers, as Milt Romney also said later when he thought he was speaking only to a closeted room
full of producers.
Buchanan's abstract concern for market liberties, and the slanted liberties of association
and speech they carried with them, never brought him to speak of the subjugated conditions of
Blacks, women and other minorities in this society. The reason seems clear: their living
grievances threaten abstract claims about a market system of impersonal rational coordination.
The danger, to him, is mass democracy, which enlarges the power of "the state". When Buchanan
worried about the state he didn't seem to mean Pinochet. He meant democratic processes through
which the state is moved to support a collection of minorities who have been closed out of
equality, participation, and representation. Buchanan, as did his hero Hayek, loved to think in
abstractions, the kind of abstractions that cover up specific modes of suffering, grievance,
and care under shiny terms. As MacLean also notes, Buchanan came to see that neoliberal (and
libertarian) propaganda must aim at men more than women, because, on average, the latter are
less predisposed to such messages.
The Koch/Buchanan alliance, consolidated through an Institute at George Mason University,
soon became a Center to fund movements and generic models of reform on the Right as it informed
American movers and shakers how to create constitutional "locks and bolts" in states and the
federal government to secure desired reforms from dissident majorities once they were pushed
through and their real effects became apparent. A stealth campaign, followed by opposition to
"mob rule". Wisconsin, for instance, became a key laboratory under the regime of Scott Walker,
both enacting draconian policies and pursuing constitutional changes to secure them from future
majorities. To discern the severity of the stealth activities, consider how one of Buchanan's
lieutenants, Charles Rowley, eventually turned against them. He became upset when a new Chair
of the economics department summarily fired all untenured economists to replace them with a
single breed of libertarians. As summarized by MacLean, two things above all dismayed Rowley,
who retained his neoliberal outlook but opposed the stealth practices. "First the sheer scale
of the riches the wealthy individuals brought to bear turned out to have subtle, even seductive
power. And second, under the influence of one wealthy individual, in particular, the movement
was turning to an equally troubling form of coercion: achieving its ends essentially through
trickery, through deceiving people about its real intentions to go to a place which, on their
own given complete information, they would not go." (p. 208) It's like saying "repeal and
replace Obamacare" while planning only to make the first move. And then turn the same trick
again in several other domains. Eventually, Buchanan himself grew wary of Koch, in a setting
where two narcissistic, authoritarian men struggled to control the same Center. The money man
won out. In Rowley's own words Koch, the billionaire donor, "had no scruples concerning the
manipulation of scholarship."
Neoliberalism, its critics know so well, periodically spawns the economic crises its
hubristic devotees promise will not happen. It also works to foster voter suppression,
unlimited dark campaign contributions, extreme gerrymandered districts, take away worker
benefits, appoint judges at state and national levels governed by neoliberal jurisprudence,
treat voter suppression tactics to be needed to eliminate phantom voter fraud, oppose
affirmative action, to weaken labor unions, and attack universal health care.
How many neoliberal Republicans called out Donald Trump, for instance, when he launched his
presidential campaign by pretending insistently for six long years (with absolutely no
evidence) that the first African American President held office illegally. Obama was guilty
until proven innocent, according to that Donald Trump. How many stepped to the plate to
acknowledge galloping climate change in the face of those who have called it a hoax against all
the available evidence? What about the appointment of a judge who lied about his previous
record, had trouble with his drinking and temper, and probably tried to rape a young girl when
they were in high school? What about Trump's constant suggestions that minorities are guilty
until found innocent, punctuated by assertions that men applying for high government positions
and accused of harassment must be treated as innocent unless a court of law finds them guilty.
Quiet whispers from neoliberals of regret and suspicion against Trumpism on these issues, by
the way, do not cut the mustard. Neoliberal stealth tactics and neofascist Big Lies have moved
too close together for comfort.
One thing that emerged out of the long-term two track campaigns of neoliberalism is a
powerful wealth/income concentration machine joined to a series of precarious and suffering
minorities, including so many urban Blacks and poor whites. With labor unions, too, caught in a
squeeze. Donald Trump could then play on the prejudices and insecurities created; he thus found
himself in a position to incite large segments of the white labor and lower middle classes to
return to the old days, while retaining the support of a huge segment of the wealthy, donor
class. The disinformation campaigns of the old neoliberal vanguard can too easily slide into
the Big Lie campaigns Trump pursues in the service of White Triumphalism, intense nationalism,
misogyny, the reduction of critical social movements to mob rule, and militant anti-immigration
campaigns. The long time con man and money launderer has not, then, merely cowed a neoliberal
elite that had pointed in a different direction. He has pulled its stealth campaigns into
channels that most find more palatable than other social visions in circulation.
The memories of Hayek and Friedman in this respect return to haunt us. It need not surprise
us, given MacLean's archival history, that the latest Trump Supreme Court appointee supports
neoliberal policies in the domains of corporate deregulation, medical care, restrictive voter
laws, limits on civil rights, gerrymandering and like while also trumpeting notions of a
sovereign president so dear to the dark heart of Donald Trump -- the aspirational fascist who
conspired with Russia to win an electoral college majority in 2016. We must light a candle for
those noble neoliberals who resist the slide we are witnessing before our very eyes, as we also
keep both eyes open with respect to the wider crossing between neoliberalism and
neofascism.
The old, all so familiar, Hayek story of how socialism and social democracy are always
on the "road to serfdom" is a fairy tale that has not in fact occurred. The transition,
however, from neoliberalism to virulent fascist movements has occurred before and could do so
again. The current fascist electoral campaign rallies by Donald Trump are designed to up
the ante of charges against liberals and the Left by several decibel levels so that people will
temporarily forget all the horrible things he has done and will do if Republicans keep both
houses. They include halting or weakening the Mueller investigation, eliminating transgender
rights, consolidating Trump control over intelligence agencies and the courts, reversing the
remaining shreds of ObamaCare, upscaling attacks on universal voting, weakening the media,
creating horrendous immigration laws, encouraging vigilante drives, and many other things yet.
Drive someone to a voting precinct on election day and give them a copy of the MacLean book a
week before you do. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
License
"... This is why China's social credit system is chilling. It will create a nation of conformist cowards. China is spiraling back into the mindset that made it fall behind. A nation where everyone is too afraid to say his piece. New China may allow money-making, but when a society favors profits over freedom and conscience, it becomes crass, shallow, and materialistic. ..."
We do not really have freedom of speech. Say "ni ** er" once and you can lose a job of
thirty years. Or criticize Jews, Israel, blacks, homosexuals, Muslims, feminists, or
transsexuals.
There is direct censorship and indirect censorship. Direct censorship is what China has.
It prohibits certain kind of speech, period. Indirect censorship is what the US has in
increasing measure. You can say whatever, but if you say the 'wrong' thing, the consequences
are so dire(especially economically) that you are effectively tarred & feathered, shunned
and destroyed. Rick Sanchez found out how this works after he said Jews dominate in the
media. And CNN recently fired a black guy for defending Palestine at the UN.
Marc Lamont Hill dared to mention that 2018 is the 70th anniversary of Nakba Pogroms that
wiped Palestine off the map and that the current Zionist regime uses Apartheid Policies in
Occupied West Bank as continuation of Western Imperialism that wages war on indigenous
nationalism of the Palestinian people. Jew-run CNN got rid of him, which goes to show that
Jews are holier than blacks(and certainly the long-suffering Palestinians).
Personally, I think there are some cases where firing-based-on-speech is warranted. If an
organization is inherently ideological, then it has every right to hire or fire people based
on their views and convictions. So, if National Review feels that one of its writers is too
leftist, he may be fired. Or a person that seems hostile to Zionism may be fired by
Commentary Magazine that is committed to Israel First Policy.
But most professions are non-ideological, and it seems utterly wrong to fire someone on
the basis of creed, conscience, or conviction. And progressives would have agreed with this
position in the 50s when many communists and fellow-travelers were either fired/blacklisted
or threatened with such, not least in Hollywood. Also, as long as a person performs his
duties well at work, what does it matter what he believes in his personal life? If one's
personal creed, ideology, or faith is the basis of whether he can have a job or use financial
services, then we no longer have a free society. According to Jewish-controlled PC, in order
for you to be able to work and live, it means you can't have certain personal beliefs.
Personal conviction and creed have been professionalized, i.e. no work and wages for people
with certain views.
Now, imagine if a business fires anyone suspected of being a Zionist on the basis that
Zionism is imperialism and commits 'genocide' against Palestinians. Would Jews tolerate this?
Of course not. And I would agree with Jews. No Jew should be fired for his Zionist beliefs
EVEN IF the owner of the business believes Zionism is evil. Richard Dawkins is virulently
anti-religious and believes religious faith is a mental disease of ignorance and hatred. But
if he owned a trucking company, should he fire people on the basis of their faith because he
believes religion is a 'hate system of the mind'?
[MORE]
Now, there are certain exceptions. Certain jobs are publicity-oriented and involve putting
forth an image. So, if a company wants to project a certain kind of image or message and IF
its representative or spokesman or spokeswoman is associated with certain kind of ideology, I
can see why the company would want to let that person go. If a company is about Family Values
and if it turns out that its representative is a wild swinger and promotes promiscuity, I can
see why the company would let that person go EVEN IF the person acts wild in his personal
life. But most jobs are not publicity-related, and it is simply wrong to deny someone work
and wages based on what he believes in his personal life.
This is why China's social credit system is chilling. It will create a nation of
conformist cowards. China is spiraling back into the mindset that made it fall behind. A
nation where everyone is too afraid to say his piece. New China may allow money-making, but
when a society favors profits over freedom and conscience, it becomes crass, shallow, and
materialistic.
Now, the Chinese may be pushing such a rule because they see the Free West as decadent and
degenerate as a result of excess freedom. But this is where the Chinese would be wrong. The
West rotted from lopsided freedom that favored the power and expression of certain groups
over others. West lost its sense of balance because voices of certain groups and interests
were effectively silenced. It's like ecology. If you get rid of certain species, the natural
balance goes out of whack and things fall apart. If you get rid of predators, it may seem
good for the prey animals, but in time, the herbivores multiply and eat up all the vegetation
and destroy their habitats. So, there has to be a balance of prey and predators in nature.
The problem of EU is that following WWII, the Right was effectively silenced because it was
associated with Nazism. Thus, leftist elements grew too strong and out-of-control. Now,
leftism is invaluable to modern society, but it needs to be balanced by rightism that is also
essential to social equilibrium. But suppression of the right led to overgrowth of leftism
that led to crazy stuff like May 68 lunacy that paved the way for current degenerate France.
When left and right were both well-represented, they had to compete to remain healthy and
strong. But once the left was allowed to totally dominate culturally and ideologically, it
grew decadent and degenerate from corruption and self-satisfaction.
So, if China thinks the West became crazy due to excess of free speech and freedom in
general, it would be wrong. The West grew sick from suppression of rightist freedoms and
expressions in favor of leftist ideology and obsessions. In the West, even the far-left was
protected in academia and media BUT the far-right was banned. Only the wussy cuck-right and
bland 'white bread' right were tolerated. If any rightist lurched slightly more rightward, he
was denounced as 'far right'. As Jonathan Haidt has argued, Western academia is suffering
from lack of real discourse and back-and-forth argumentation. Because the leftists are
protected from challenge by rightists, the former has grown lazy, corrupt, decadent, and
flabby. Their hysterics are really about cowardice and unwillingness to face real challenge
from the Right. They demand protection from being 'triggered' by wrongthink or 'hate speech'.
They rarely directly address the voices on the Right. They just go for lazy short-cut of
denouncing others as 'racist' or 'nazi'.
But the problem isn't merely ideological but ethnic. When Wasps(or Anglo-Americans) ruled
America, it was fair game to notice that (1) Anglos got the power (2) Anglos got the
privilege (3) Anglos got the connections (4) Anglos hogged the prestige. So, despite the
great power of Anglos, they came under scrutiny and criticism, not least by reformist Anglos
who thought criticism and self-criticism were good things. Thus, there was a lively debate
among Wasps, Irish Catholics, various ethnics, Jews, and others. Though blacks were
suppressed for most of US history, they too became vocal and offered their perspective and
made demands that had validity. In terms of social debate, the period from mid 50s to the mid
80s were probably the golden age of free speech and debate. With each year, there was more
push for free speech, and many sides had their say. But the worrying development in that
period was the growing sacralization of Jews and blacks. It was one thing to allow Jews and
blacks to make their case and join in the national debate. Surely, Jews and blacks had their
own grievances and legit demands. But, just as undeniable was the fact that Jews and blacks
also caused a lot of problems that harmed other groups. Jewish role in US foreign policy led
to fiasco in the Middle East, especially at cost to Palestinians. And even though the Civil
Rights Movement was a great event in US history(and there's no denying the injustices done to
blacks), it was also true that blacks posed a threat to other races because blacks are more
muscular and more aggressive by nature. So, once blacks got equal legal protections, they
used much of their freedom to attack, rape, rob, and murder other peoples, leading to white
flight among not only white conservatives but white liberals and Jews. So, in a truly free
society, not only would Jews and blacks get to have their say against goyim & whites but
goyim & whites would get to air their grievances against Jews and blacks. That way, all
sides would say their piece and all sides would be checked and balanced by healthy and
constructive counter-criticism.
But the consecration of Jews and blacks as holy-schmoly groups made this nearly impossible.
So, while Jews could scream about 'anti-Semites' and 'Nazis' endlessly -- Jews now cry 'nazi'
like the kid cried 'wolf' -- , we are not allowed to notice Jewish power, Jewish abuses, and
Zionist tyranny over Palestinians. And no matter how much crime and violence blacks commit,
we are supposed to see Negroes only through the rose-tinted glasses of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
and MLK sermons. And no matter how many whites(and non-blacks) fall victim to black robbery,
beatings, rapes, and murders, we are supposed to wake up Groundhogday-like and dream of
supposedly angelic Emmett Till.
When a group is sacralized in a supposedly secular society, the effect is essentially
theocratic. Jews and blacks are holy-schmoly in the US, and so, we can't have a honest debate
about the problems they cause. We can't talk about Jewish role in communism, Zionist role in
Middle East Wars, globalist Jewish economic looting of Russia in the 90s, and Neocon
recruitment of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine. And it doesn't matter how many times blacks burn down
cities and assault/rob people. It is simply 'racist' to notice that blacks, being more
muscular and more aggressive, tend to commit far more crime and violence than other groups.
US has become essentially an ethno-theocracy where we must always speak of Jews and blacks in
hushed tones.
Of course, homos joined Jews and blacks in the holy-schmoly pantheon. Why? Because Jews
control media, academia, finance, and deep state. And Jews decided homos are their perfect
ally as fellow high-achieving minority elites. Because homos were made holy-schmoly(and
associated with holier-schmolier Jews), even cultural conservatives clammed up about the Homo
Agenda. They were afraid of being labeled 'homophobic', an especially bogus term cooked up by
Jews to imply that if you don't sufficiently honor and praise homos, you are suffering from
mental malady of phobic proportions. And so, homos & trannies and fecal penetration &
penis-and-ball-cutting were associated with 'rainbows' and 'pride'. Indeed, 'gay pride'
simply became 'Pride', as if to suggest the essence of pride = homo buggery and tranny
dick-cutting. And if you found homo-fecal-penetration and tranny penis-cutting to be gross
and sick and said so, you were blacklisted and fired worse than any Jewish communist during
the so-called 'McCarthy Era'. At least the HUAC blacklists ended in a few yrs. These Jewish
led PC blacklists last forever because Jewish Power has a near-Stalinist grip on media,
academia, and deep state.
The fact is Homomania-as-neo-religion(that festoons churches with 'gay colors') and 'Gay
Marriage' would never have become New Western Values IF there had been real free speech that
allowed all sides to have their say. If real free debate had been allowed on the Homo Agenda,
the lies and falsehoods could easily have been exposed. But, the Jewish-controlled media used
the 'rainbow' idolatry to elevate Homo-worship as a new religion in the West. If you were not
with the sacred program, you were a blasphemer, a 'homophobe' who must be
econo-excommunicated from work & wages. Or a bakery must be sued out of existence by the
'gay cabal' with the full backing of Jewish Supremacist law firms. Jewish Power treats decent
moral bakeries like Zionists treat Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank. Jewish Power says 'my
way or the highway'.
In Europe, a continent with no legal protection of free speech, Jewish pressure led to
criminalization of speech deemed offensive to Jews and homos(and even African
migrant-invaders). In the US, where Constitution guarantees free speech, the culture of open
discourse was destroyed by indirect censorship and ethno-homo-theocracy. Even though Jewish
Power couldn't ban free speech, its control of media and finance meant they could destroy
anyone or any group that dared to be politically incorrect toward Jews, blacks, and homos.
Thus, anyone who wanted to keep his job or reputation had to clam up about certain things, no
matter how true or based on facts. Also, the sacralization of Jews, blacks, and homos meant
that they could spew any amount of hateful, rabid, and virulent venom at goyim, whites,
Christians, straight people, and etc. BUT they themselves were PROTECTED from critical speech
that dared to expose their corruption, abuses, and fraudulence. This is why the West grew
sick. Not from freedom but lopsided monopoly of freedom for certain groups, esp. Jews,
blacks, and Homos as the Holy-Schmoly Three.
Now, one could argue that China's censorship is preferable to American censorship because
China is about Chinese nationalists ruling over Chinese people. So, the main theme of
censorship is "Is it good for China as a whole?" In contrast, the US is a nation where the
Jewish 2% rules over 98% that is goyim. So, the central theme of American Censorship is "Is
it good for the 2% at the expense of the 98%?" Also, if China is about Chinese Majority
Pride, the overwhelming theme for the White American Majority is White Guilt and White Shame.
So, while Chinese government boosts Majority Chineseness, American government suppresses
Majority Whiteness(and even pushes policies to turn the white majority into just another
minority, as already happened in California, increasingly the land of oligarchs and helots,
the vision of BLADE RUNNER).
Still, censorship will hurt China too in the long run because a nation that penalizes
conscience and courage will result in increasing conformism and
crassness.
America's freedom of speech, movement, and religious liberty
Where do you get your news from, because America has absolutely neither of those. And
please spare the usual bullsh!t argument "censorship is only if the government does it".
America is HEAVILY censoring anyone who does not accept its hard left ideology, you speak
out against this you get deplatformed, you get censored, you lose your job and you life is
pretty much destroyed. The same applies to religion, you reject the near official religions
of homosexuality and racial equality and you will be punished for it.
But the internet has largely disabled the gigantic CIA fog-machine. Thousands of skilled
researchers quickly blow apart the propaganda line from the Deep State which is why there's
an hysterical reach these days to shut down the 'net (but still keep it open enough to sell
lots of stuff and nake money for the Predator Class).
Take the JFK assassination. One skilled researcher directs readers to the Warren
Commission, where buried deep inside one volume is a finding that Oswald's rife was
inoperable, certainly unable to function as a precise assassination weapon. Plus Oswald was a
lousy shot to begin with. Yet Military sharpshooters had to add parts just to site the weapon
and fire. This info in the WC pretty much excludes Oswald as the lone assassin. Without the
'net, how many people could find this info themselves.
9/11? Several researchers and web sites disclosed findings of a support network for the
alQ hijackers run by Saudi intelligence and the Royal family (the 28 pages inside the
Congressional 9/11 Inquiry); FBI informants providing financing, housing and other logistical
support to the hijackers; CIA knowledge that alQ had entered the US 18 months before 9/11 and
hid this knowledge etc.
Ditto for the OKC bombing (where local TV found bombs inside the Federal Building, which
blew away the FBI narrative about McVeigh)... ditto for the FBI role in handing out
explosives to the perps at the first WTC bombing etc. etc.
All this info, including news reports are up on the web even today... So with this kind of
info available for large numbers of people to find, the only tactic left for the deep state
psy-war operations to function is complete martial law in an Orwellian Police State. At that
point the game is over and the US collapses as a nation.
One month to the day after President Kennedy's assassination, the Washington Post published
an article by former president Harry Truman.
I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our
Central Intelligence Agency -- CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason
why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected
it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
Truman had envisioned the CIA as an impartial information and intelligence collector from
"every available source."
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting
conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to
established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such
intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all
intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as
President without department "treatment" or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a
volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about
this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead
the President into unwise decisions -- and I thought it was necessary that the President do
his own thinking and evaluating.
Truman found, to his dismay, that the CIA had ranged far afield.
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original
assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government.
This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive
areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into
peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we
have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the
President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol
of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue -- and a subject for cold war enemy
propaganda.
The article appeared in the Washington Post's morning edition, but not the evening
edition.
Truman reveals two naive assumptions. He thought a government agency could be apolitical and
objective. Further, he believed the CIA's role could be limited to information gathering and
analysis, eschewing "cloak and dagger operations." The timing and tone of the letter may have
been hints that Truman thought the CIA was involved in Kennedy's assassination. If he did, he
also realized an ex-president couldn't state his suspicions without troublesome
consequences.
Even the man who signed the CIA into law had to stay in the shadows, the CIA's preferred
operating venue. The CIA had become the exact opposite of what Truman envisioned and what its
enabling legislation specified. Within a few years after its inauguration in 1947, it was
neck-deep in global cloak and dagger and pushing agenda-driven, slanted information and
outright disinformation not just within the government, but through the media to the American
people.
The CIA lies with astonishing proficiency. It has made an art form of "plausible
deniability." Like glimpsing an octopus in murky waters, you know it's there, but it shoots
enough black ink to obscure its movements. Murk and black ink make it impossible for anyone on
the outside to determine exactly what it does or has done. Insiders, even the director, are
often kept in the dark.
For those on the trail of CIA and the other intelligence agencies' lies and skullduggery,
the agencies give ground glacially and only when they have to. What concessions they make often
embody multiple layers of back-up lies. It can take years for an official admission -- the CIA
didn't officially confess its involvement in the 1953 coup that deposed Iranian leader Mohammad
Mosaddeq until 2013 -- and even then details are usually not forthcoming. Many of the so-called
exposés of the intelligence agencies are in effect spook-written for propaganda or
damage control.
The intelligence agencies monitor virtually everything we do. They have tentacles reaching
into every aspect of contemporary society, exercising control in pervasive but mostly unknown
ways. Yet, every so often some idiot writes an op-ed or bloviates on TV, bemoaning the lack of
trust the majority of Americans have in "their" government and wondering why. The wonder is
that anyone still trusts the government.
The intelligence agency fog both obscures and corrodes. An ever increasing number of
Americans believe that a shadowy Deep State pulls the strings. Most major stories since World
War II -- Korea, Vietnam, Kennedy's assassination, foreign coups, the 1960s student unrest,
civil rights agitation, and civic disorder, Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, domestic
surveillance, and many more -- have intelligence angles. However, determining what those angles
are plunges you into the miasma perpetuated by the agencies and their media accomplices.
The intelligence agencies and captive media's secrecy, disinformation, and lies make it
futile to mount a straightforward attack against them. It's like attacking a citadel surrounded
by swamps and bogs that afford no footing, making advance impossible. Their deadliest operation
has been against the truth. In a political forum, how does one challenge an adversary who
controls most of the information necessary to discredit, and ultimately reform or eliminate
that adversary?
You don't fight where your opponent wants you to fight. What the intelligence apparatus
fears most is a battle of ideas. Intelligence, the military, and the reserve currency are
essential component of the US's confederated global empire. During the 2016 campaign, Donald
Trump questioned a few empire totems and incurred the intelligence leadership's wrath,
demonstrating how sensitive and vulnerable they are on this front. The transparent flimsiness
of their Russiagate concoction further illustrates the befuddlement. Questions are out in the
open and are usually based on facts within the public domain. They move the battle from the
murk to the light, unfamiliar and unwelcome terrain.
The US government, like Oceania, switches enemies as necessary. That validates military and
intelligence; lasting peace would be intolerable. After World War II the enemy was the USSR and
communism, which persisted until the Soviet collapse in 1991. The 9/11 tragedy offered up a new
enemy, Islamic terrorism.
Seventeen years later, after a disastrous run of US interventions in the Middle East and
Northern Africa and the rout of Sunni jihadists in Syria by the combined forces of the Syrian
government, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, it's clear that Islamic terrorism is no longer a
threat that stirs the paranoia necessary to feed big military and intelligence budgets . For
all the money they've spent, intelligence has done a terrible job of either anticipating
terrorist strikes or defeating them in counterinsurgency warfare
So switch the enemy again, now it's Russia and China. The best insight the intelligence
community could offer about those two is that they've grown stronger by doing the opposite of
the US. For the most part they've stayed in their own neighborhoods. They accept that they're
constituents, albeit important ones, of a multipolar global order. Although they'll use big
sticks to protect their interests, carrots like the Belt and Road Initiative further their
influence much better than the US's bullets and bombs.
If the intelligence complex truly cared about the country, they might go public with the
observation that the empire is going broke. However, raising awareness of this dire threat --
as opposed to standard intelligence bogeymen -- might prompt reexamination of intelligence and
military budgets and the foreign policy that supports them. Insolvency will strangle the US's
exorbitantly expensive interventionism. It will be the first real curb on the intelligence
complex since World War II, but don't except any proactive measures beforehand from those
charged with foreseeing the future.
Conspiracy theories, a term popularized by the CIA to denigrate Warren Commission skeptics,
are often proved correct. However, trying to determine the truth behind intelligence agency
conspiracies is a time and energy-consuming task, usually producing much frustration and little
illumination. Instead,
as Caitlin Johnstone recently observed , we're better off fighting on moral and
philosophical grounds the intelligence complex and the rest of the government's depredations
that are in plain sight.
Attack the intellectual foundations of empire and you attack the whole rickety edifice,
including intelligence, that supports it. Tell the truth and you threaten those who deal in
lies . Champion sanity and logic and you challenge the insane irrationality of the powers that
be. They are daunting tasks, but less daunting than trying to excavate and clean the
intelligence sewer.
I sometimes wonder whether the Bond films are a psy-op.
I mean, the 'hero' is a psycho-killer ... the premise of the films is 'any means to an
end' ... they promote the ridiculous idea that you can be 'licensed to kill', and it's no
longer murder ... and they build a strong association between the State and glamour.
Bond makes a virtue out of 'following orders', when in reality, it's a Sin.
Can't remember which Section of MI6 Ian Fleming (novelist 007.5) worked but he came into
contact with my Hero, the best double-agent Cambridge, maybe World, has Ever produced, Kim
Philby. Fleming was a lightweight compared to him and was most likely provided the Funds, by
MI6 to titillate the Masses, spread the Word of Deep State.
The article makes many good points but still falls into use of distorting bs language.
For example, "after a disastrous run of US interventions" - well, they stole Libya's
wealth and destroyed the country: mission accomplished; that's what they were trying to do.
It was not an ""intervention", it was a f***ing war of aggression based on lies.
Well the good news is that folks now know there is deep State, shadow govt, puppet
masters, fake news MSM mockingbird programming, satanic "musik/ pop" promoters, etc.
Not everyone knows but more know, and some are now questioning the Matrix sensations they
have. That they have not been told the Truth.
Eventually humanity will awaken and get on track, how long it will take is unknown.
The CIA is a symptom of the problem but not the whole problem. Primarily it is the
deception that it sows, the confusion and false conclusions that the easily led fill their
heads with.
Now that you know there are bad guys out there...
Find someone to love, even if it is a puppy or a guppy. Simplify your needs, and commit
small acts of kindness on a regular basis. The World will heal, it may be a rocky
convalescence, yet Good triumphs in the end.
"... Have you been watching the news over the past few weeks where the clowns who supposedly represent us at Westminster were offering to take cash in brown envelopes for privileged access to the political system? ..."
"... Now we have the Prime Minister attending the Bilderberg Group meeting without any officials or Civil Servants to record what is going on. I suppose he needs to attend to get instructions from his bosses on how he must run his 'democracy'! ..."
Democracy = a political system in which citizens have an equal say in the decisions that
affect their lives. Democracy allows eligible citizens to participate equally -- either
directly or through elected representatives -- in the proposal, development, and creation
of laws. It encompasses social, economic and cultural conditions that enable the free and
equal practice of political self-determination. Do we have this in the UK at the moment
bearing in mind recent events (brown envelopes and Bilderberg Group to name but two)?
Does any country have this? With all due respect it is just words and sentiment. In my
previous comment I said that No i didnt think we had true democracy and I dont think it (if
there is such a thing) is achievable, not everyone would be satisfied it would be true
democracy thus its legitimacy would be called into question.
In my mind its a bit like saying the best thing would be a "benevolent, incorruptible,
sensible dictator", its a fantasy.
Politicians who are found to be on the take or are fiddling the public purse should be
dismissed immediately and a by election called. Would stop it happening as much as I am
sure we are only seeing the 'tip of the iceberg'.
Agreed and they should always be innocent until proven guilty and if found guilty of abuse
of office they should be barred from public office indefinitely in my mind, as long as they
break the law, not fudge the rules or whatever, which is also part of the problem. Hazel
Blears and countless others was re-elected despite being reviled in the media as an expenses
cheat.
So I assume you are happy for our PM to attend a secret meeting where nothing is ever
released to the media or press about what is going on or discussed?
I am neither happy nor unhappy, it is a private event that the PM is invited to by a
steering committee, I imagine the idea being they can discuss candidly without official airs,
graces, platitudes and politician speak for a while, it doesnt particularly concern me.
@LetsGetCynical - Democracy = a political system in which citizens have an equal say in the
decisions that affect their lives. Democracy allows eligible citizens to participate equally
-- either directly or through elected representatives -- in the proposal, development, and
creation of laws. It encompasses social, economic and cultural conditions that enable the
free and equal practice of political self-determination. Do we have this in the UK at the
moment bearing in mind recent events (brown envelopes and Bilderberg Group to name but two)?
Politicians who are found to be on the take or are fiddling the public purse should be
dismissed immediately and a by election called. Would stop it happening as much as I am sure
we are only seeing the 'tip of the iceberg'.
So I assume you are happy for our PM to attend a secret meeting where nothing is ever
released to the media or press about what is going on or discussed?
No, but then again what is a "true democracy"? Agreed they are bunch of clowns but then
again who are the clowns that repeatedly vote for the same party regardless of what they say
or do?
where the clowns who supposedly represent us at Westminster were offering to take cash
in brown envelopes
Corruption is about as old as humanity itself, no "true democracy" will ever remove the
human element and all the pros and cons that entails.
Now we have the Prime Minister attending the Bilderberg Group meeting without any
officials or Civil Servants to record what is going on. I suppose he needs to attend to get
instructions from his bosses on how he must run his 'democracy'!
Whether or not you argee or disagree with the conference, it is by invite only, they don't
have to invite civil servants or journalists if they don't want to. And it does contain very
powerful people, why would the PM not attend?
attend to get instructions from his bosses
I take it the waiters are under permanent surveillance in order to ensure they don't
reveal the dastardly secrets about what Eric Schmidt "tells" Cameron to do? A bit fanciful in
my opinion.
@LetsGetCynical - Do you really believe that we live in a true democracy? Have you been
watching the news over the past few weeks where the clowns who supposedly represent us at
Westminster were offering to take cash in brown envelopes for privileged access to the
political system?
Now we have the Prime Minister attending the Bilderberg Group meeting
without any officials or Civil Servants to record what is going on. I suppose he needs to
attend to get instructions from his bosses on how he must run his 'democracy'!
There is a particular transparency of motive which becomes clear, and reconciles all inquiry, when an interested observer accepts
a particular media framework:
The media outlet CNN provides for their domestic and international audience, the preferred position for all policy and
points of advocacy from Hillary Clinton's Department of State.
The media outlet The Washington Post serves a similar purpose, however their specialized role is as a conduit for Barack
"Hussein" Obama's Central Intelligence Agency.
"the rout of Sunni jihadists in Syria by the combined forces of the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, it's clear
that Islamic terrorism is no longer a threat that stirs the paranoia necessary to feed big military and intelligence budgets .
For all the money they've spent, intelligence has done a terrible job of either anticipating terrorist strikes or defeating them
in counterinsurgency warfare"
Excuse me,but WTF??
It's the US,NATO, Israhell and Saudis that created ISIS, with the above mentioned spending BILLIONS to combat ISIS in Syria.
The war on terror is a hoax. The lame exploitation of Arabs and Islam to manufacture consent for war on Iraq, starting with
Mossad planting of low yield thermal nuke weapons that brought the Towers down..Saudis were the patsies.
All of this with blessing of Zionists banksters and US Treasury& Fed Reserve.
If nothing else, these pages will show the reader the following:
Although he does not recall when asked, George (Herbert Walker) Bush was in Dallas the
day JFK was assassinated.
Bush lies about the fact that he was a high-ranking CIA official at the time of JFK's
death.
Bush allowed the escape of a convicted terrorist from prison to go to work for him as an
undercover CIA asset in Iran-Contra.
Bush has released another convicted terrorist.
Both these terrorists were present on Dealey Plaza on 11/22/1963.
Both these terrorists were convicted for killing 73 people by blowing up an
airliner.
Bush is personal friends with a close associate of these convicted terrorists, who was
also a participant in Iran Contra.
Bush has taken a leading role as CIA official in structuring/organizing these terrorists
in effective organizations.
Shall we say: "Only in America, the land of unlimited opportunities"?
================================================
+ All three generations Bush are members of a most powerful and most secret society. It's
called The order of Skull and Bones. Those who want to learn more about Skull and Bones can do
so by clicking here . Or read
this book click
here.
And those who argue that Skull and Bones is just a harmless fraternity or boy scout's
club, may ask themselves whether it is okay for leaders of open and democratic societies, to be
members of secret organizations whose agendas are not to be disclosed to the public.
"My senior year, I joined Skull & Bones, a secret society, so secret, I can't say
anything more." George W. Bush, President of the United States
See George W. Bush admitting his membership of Skull and Bones by clicking
here
The unauthorized biography of George H.W. Bush can be read here
Where were you, George?
+ Prescott Bush (father of George) made his fortune by financing the war effort of
Adolph Hitler together with his banking partners and fellow "bonesmen" Averell and Roland
Harriman. Prescott was stripped of his holdings in the Union Banking Corporation in 1942 under
the "Trading with the Enemy Act".
"On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush handed Averell Harriman a copy of that day's New York
Times. The Polish government was applying to take over Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation
and Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company from "German and American interests" because of
rampant "mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in
securities." The Polish government required the owners of the company, which accounted for over
45% of Poland's steel production, to pay at least its full share of back taxes. Bush and
Harriman would eventually hire attorney John Foster Dulles to help cover up any improprieties
that might arise under investigative scrutiny." Source: "Heir to the Holocaust" by Toby
Rogers.
John Foster Dulles was the brother of Allen Dulles, the later CIA director,
who was the architect - together with Vice President Richard Nixon and George Bush - of the Bay
of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro's Cuba. Allen Dulles was fired by President Kennedy
because of the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs. Yet Allen Dulles was appointed by Lyndon Johnson to
serve on the Warren Commission to "investigate" JFK's death.
+ A vice-president of Empire Trust in Dallas was Jack Crichton (also president of Nafco
Oil & Gas, Inc.) who was connected with Army Reserve Intelligence. In a 1995 book written
by Fabian Escalante, the chief of a Cuban counterintelligence unit during the late 1950s and
early 1960s, he describes that as soon as intelligence was received from agents in Cuba that
Fidel Castro had "converted to communism," a plan called "Operation 40" was put into effect by
the National Security Council, presided over by Vice-President Richard Nixon. Escalante
indicates that Nixon was the Cuban "case officer" who had assembled an important group of
businessmen headed by George Bush and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, to gather the necessary
funds for the operation.
In Dick Russell's book, The Man Who Knew Too Much (New York:
Carroll & Graf Publishers/Richard Gallen, 1992), at pp. 614-615, under a section called
"Origins of the Cover-up" there is a description of a group of Dallas men who surrounded Marina
Oswald as soon as her husband had been arrested, but before he was killed by Jack Ruby. These
were intelligence operatives seeking out Russian speakers. Ilya Mamantov knew George Bush and
spoke Russian. A geologist with Sun Oil, he received a call five hours after the assassination
from Jack Crichton, who was at that time the president of Nafco Oil and Gas, Inc. and a former
Military Intelligence officer then attached to Army Reserve Intelligence. Crichton was also
director of Dorchester Gas Producing Co. with D.H. Byrd, who owned the Texas School Book
Depository building and was a close friend of Lyndon Johnson.
+ In 1968, six months after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Prescott writes
this letter (click here)
to Clover Dulles, wife of Allen Dulles. Note that he blames the Kennedy's for the failure of
the Bay of Pigs.
+ In the 1950's Prescott and the Harrimans are the founding fathers
of CBS. In 1963, CBS reporter Dan Rather makes his career break with the Kennedy Assassination
by lying to the American public that he sees JFK's head move violently FORWARD on the Zapruder
film. To hear Dan Rather lying click here .
The lie is possible, because the Zapruder film was bought by Time Life and kept lock and
barrel from the public for 14 years. Time Life is founded and owned by Henry Luce, also a
member of Skull and Bones. Luce had many friends, among them general Edward Lansdale, a known
covert operative for the CIA. Henry's wife, Clare Booth Luce, Congresswoman, is a radical
supporter of the Anti-Castro movement and personal friends with another high-ranking covert
operative for the CIA and a resident from Fort Worth: David Atlee Phillips. Edward Lansdale and
David Phillips are widely accepted as key planners of the JFK assassination. They are also
exact matches for the "covert operations specialist"(Phillips) and the "top brass in military
intelligence from Asia" (Lansdale) as described in Sam Giancana's biography "Double Cross" (to
read the page click
here ).
David Atlee Phillips and Edward Lansdale
+ David Atlee Phillips was the mastermind for the CIA staged coup by Pinochet in
1973, as well as the overthrow in 1954 of the Guatemala regime headed by Jacobo Arbenz. He is
working closely with CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, another suspect in the plot to kill JFK and
the leader of the infamous Watergate burglar team. In the 1950's and 1960's, Phillips is the
CIA case officer for the anti Castro Cubans in Havana and Mexico City. He is also the CIA
controller for Lee Harvey Oswald and James Files. James Files has confessed that he fired the
shot into JFK's head from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza. This
story is completely ignored by the mainstream media, which seems strange, because even if he
were lying, one would expect some exposure. The star of David Atlee Phillips rises to CIA
director of Covert Operations for the Western Hemisphere. According to his nephew Shawn
Phillips, who is quite a famous musician, David Atlee Phillips confirmed to his brother James
Atlee Phillips that he was in Dallas the day Kennedy died. To read Shawn's email: click here.
+ Prescott Bush advised Eisenhower to run for President and then launched Richard Nixon
into the Vice Presidency. Subsequently he was a major financer of Nixon's presidential campaign
against Kennedy. Prescott Bush was an avid JFK opponent and Nixon has always been a puppet for
the interests of the Bush family. To read the details click here .
"Figure that one out; if someone had tried to finger me for killing President Kennedy,
that person would have been my worst enemy. See volume one and ten for damning evidence. The
FBI agent that took Bush's call was Graham Kitchel, whose brother George Kitchel knew both de
Mohrenschildt (Oswald's best friend in Dallas) and Bush. (NOTE: Graham was a favourite of FBI
Director, J. E. Hoover who was briefing Bush of the CIA on November 23, 1963). On October 13,
1999, Adamson called Kenneth B. Jackson the FBI agent who investigated Parrott and received
Bush's complaint. Mr. Jackson, refused to return Adamson's phone call. why? "
Source: Bruce Adamson
"The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds."
+ Nixon admitted he was in Dallas, but gave conflicting accounts. To read about those
conflicting accounts click
here or click
here .
Is there other evidence to tie Nixon to key players in the JFK assassination? Yes, there is!
Look at this bombshell document that states Jack Ruby worked for Nixon: Click here . And Ruby was just a punk with
no connections to anyone?
+ One of the most tantalizing nuggets about Nixon's possible inside knowledge of JFK
assassination secrets was buried on a White House tape until 2002. On the tape, recorded in May
of 1972, the president confided to two top aides that the Warren Commission pulled off "the
greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated." Unfortunately, he did not elaborate. But the
context in which Nixon raised the matter shows just how low he could stoop in efforts to
assassinate the character of his political adversaries.
The Republican president made the "hoax" observation in the immediate aftermath of the
assassination attempt against White House hopeful George Wallace, a long-time Democratic
governor of Alabama. The attempt left Wallace paralyzed below the waist. Nixon blurted out his
comments about the falsity of the Warren findings in the middle of a conversation in which he
repeatedly directed two of his most ruthless aides, Bob Haldeman and Chuck Colson, to carry out
a monumental dirty trick. He urged them to plant a false news story linking the would-be
Wallace assassin -- Arthur Bremer -- to two other Democrats, Sen. Edward Kennedy and Sen.
George McGovern -- possible Nixon opponents in that year's fall elections. "Screw the record,"
the president orders on at one point. "Just say he was a supporter of that nut (it isn't clear
which of the two senators he is referring to). And put it out. Just say we have an
authenticated report."
As well as helping to perpetuate the Kennedy assassination "hoax" by turning down Haldeman's
proposal for a new JFK probe, Nixon had a major hand in perpetrating it. In November of 1964,
on the eve of the official release of the Warren Report, private citizen Nixon went public in
support of the panel's coming findings. In a piece for Reader's Digest, he portrayed Oswald as
the sole assassin. And Nixon implied that Castro -- "a hero in the warped mind of Oswald" --
was the real culprit.
He claimed that Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, had authorized a larger number of
wiretaps than his own administration. "But I don't criticize it," he declared, adding, "if he
had ten more and -- as a result of wiretaps -- had been able to discover the Oswald Plan, it
would have been worth it."
Whoops! The president apparently didn't realize his reference to "the Oswald Plan" didn't
square with the government's official lone-killer finding. For if Lee Harvey Oswald had been
solely responsible for the assassination, then there would not have been anyone for Oswald to
conspire with about his "plan" -- on a bugged telephone, or otherwise. Was Nixon inadvertently
revealing his knowledge that Mob leaders (Robert Kennedy's main wiretap targets) had a role in
President Kennedy's slaying? Was such a belief based on information acquired as a result of
Nixon's own solid ties to organized crime and the Mafia-infested Teamsters union? Source:
click here
.
+ A photograph exists of the Texas School Book Depository while the Dallas Police is sealing
off the building. Among the bystanders is a civilian that could be a twin brother of George
H.W. Bush.
+ George H.W. Bush is provably lying about his CIA career. He claims that his CIA
directorship in 1976 was his first job for the CIA. Difficult to believe? Page 3 will show the
proof for this lie. The truth is that he was actively involved in the preparation and financing
of the ill faithed Bay of Pigs invasion, as a high ranking CIA official, at which time he made
acquaintance with the now notorious CIA agent and Iran Contra operative Felix Rodriguez, a
veteran of the Bay of Pigs and Operation 40.
... ... ...
CONCLUSIONS:
The plot to kill JFK originates from the very same forces that were working together on the
Bay of Pigs and the plots to assassinate Fidel Castro: All these forces had their own reasons
to recapture Cuba and to hate Kennedy, whom they also blamed for the failure of the Bay of
Pigs.
These groups were
The CIA with the approval of some of the highest government officials (like Johnson,
Hoover, Ford and Nixon)
The anti Castro Cuban exiles
Mafiabosses Sam Giancana , Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante and
wealthy industrialists and Texan oilmen like H.L. Hunt, Syd Richardson and Clint
Murchison.
George H.W. Bush has documented connections to all four groups
Sam Giancana states in his biography that he knew Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon
personally (to read the page click here ), as well as the aforementioned oil
millionaires and George Demohrenshildt (to read the page click here ), , and that they planned the JFK
assassination together. James Files, the confessed grassy knoll assassin who fired the fatal
shot into JFK's head, did not only work for Sam Giancana, but was recruited in the CIA to train
Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs, by none other than David Atlee Phillips. He claims that one
of his later senior supervisors in covert operations was George H.W. Bush. Lyndon Johnson told
his mistress Madeline Brown: "It was the CIA and the Oilboys". Bush was both ! In addition he
was up to his neck in the Bay of Pigs and the anti Castro movement. What is the chance he could
not have known about the plot?
David Atlee Phillips was also the CIA supervisor for Lee Harvey Oswald, a heroic man that
was unwittingly chosen to take the blame as the patsy, while led to believe he was to penetrate
the group of assassins in order to sabotage the plot and prevent JFK's assassination.
On November 22, 1963 a criminal power elite seized control through a coup d'etat and a
subsequent cover up of the truth that lasts until today. This is because they strengthened
their position ever since. The key to unlocking the truth lies in one of their most powerful
assets: the mainstream media. That is why you were not aware of most of the above !
It is clear that Bush protected the cover-up, as well as individuals and CIA elements that
were involved in the JFK assassination. Although the above may not be conclusive evidence for
Bush's involvement or knowledge about JFK's murder, all together a bigger and more criminal
picture than many of us dare to imagine, emerges, with a direct connection to the political
situation of today.
"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can
do for your country."
"A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to
public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders
today - and in fact we have forgotten."
"Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men."
"A man does what he must-in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and
dangers and pressures-and that is the basis of all human morality."
"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. "
Former US President George H.W. Bush has died at age 94 in Houston, according to his
spokesperson Jim McGrath.
Born into privilege and a tradition of service, Bush was a son of a senator, celebrated
World War II combat pilot, student athlete, Texas oilman, Republican congressman, national
party chairman, pioneering diplomat and spy chief [who likely oversaw the CIA assets assigned
to the JFK kill team].
After his own 1980 presidential campaign came up short, he served two terms as Ronald
Reagan's vice president before reaching the pinnacle of political power by winning the 1988
presidential election, soundly defeating Democrat Michael Dukakis.
After losing the White House in 1992, Bush became a widely admired political elder who leapt
out of airplanes to mark birthday milestones.
A timely article. Main Stream Media (MSM) are the biggest tool of passive compliance and
propagandizing by a relatively docile population. I open the CNN URL and it is like reading
the neocon version of 1960's Pravda. The Australian government should be doing more to get
Julian Assange out of his current predicament. The 4th Estate is withering on the vine to
comply with lobby dictates.The Founders had a reason to mention this entity in the
Constitution.
To be fair to the MSM, they know that they are safe from persecution, as they never print a
word that the establishment does not want to see published.
Now here are some purveyors of Fake News, all evidence-free assertions proven totally false:
"But the evidence increasingly points to Assange having made himself a willing tool of
Russian Intelligence. There's a huge difference between pursuing the public's right to know
and and acting as the clandestine agent of an adversarial foreign power."
"He's a spy, a saboteur and a rapist. I'm all in for the free and adversarial press but
when a reporter is an actual criminal, lock him up."
"I don't think that it's the content of his email release that got Assange in hot water. It
was his calculated timing of the release to cause the most harm to a candidate's run for
President."
Right, journalists should always withhold true information about a politician and the
political processes they engage in from the public, so that the voters will remain deceived.
Well, I guess, the politicians YOU favor.
The press does not have to be afraid. The press is Deepstate. The Department of "Justice" is
Deepstate. They are the same machine, working in beautiful synchrony to obliterate
civilization.
Peter the 'press' is obviously not worried about losing their ability to inform the public of
the truth, because they no longer view that as their function. They are tools of propaganda
for the oligarchs that rule America. There are a few people like yourself, who want to inform
the public, but you represent a (shrinking) minority.
It's funny how Ds claim Assange helped seal Hillary's fate by releasing the emails without
recognizing the reality that the emails needed to exist in order to be released.
Why would you vote for someone who admitted to doing the things described?
BTW, should "John Doe" the leaker of the Panama Papers be tracked down?
This conundrum is partially the result of picking and choosing the enforcement of laws based
on political affiliation or beliefs.
We are not a republic now.
The individual has been declared an enemy of GovCo, the EstGOP and the Democrat People's
Parties.
"... We've seen it before : a newspaper and individual reporters get a story horribly wrong but instead of correcting it they double down to protect their reputations and credibility - which is all journalists have to go on - and the public suffers. ..."
"... Sometimes this maneuver can contribute to a massive loss of life. The most egregious example was the reporting in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Like nearly all Establishment media, The New York Times got the story of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- the major casus belli for the invasion -- dead wrong. But the Times , like the others, continued publishing stories without challenging their sources in authority, mostly unnamed, who were pushing for war. ..."
"... The Times' unsteady conviction is summed up in this paragraph, which the paper itself then contradicts only a few paragraphs later: "What we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign." ..."
We've seen it before : a newspaper and individual reporters get a story horribly wrong but
instead of correcting it they double down to protect their reputations and credibility - which
is all journalists have to go on - and the public suffers.
Sometimes this maneuver can contribute to a massive loss of life. The most egregious example
was the reporting in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Like nearly all Establishment media,
The New York Times got the story of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- the major casus belli
for the invasion -- dead wrong. But the Times , like the others, continued publishing stories
without challenging their sources in authority, mostly unnamed, who were pushing for war.
The result was a disastrous intervention that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian
deaths and continued instability in Iraq, including the formation of the Islamic State.
In a massive Times '
article published on Thursday, entitled, "A Plot to Subvert an Election: Unravelling the
Russia Story So Far," it seems that reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti have succumbed to
the same thinking that doubled down on Iraq.
They claim to have a "mountain of evidence" but what they offer would be invisible on the
Great Plains.
With the mid-terms looming and Special Counsel Robert Mueller unable to so far come up with
any proof of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to steal the 2016 election -- the
central Russia-gate charge -- the Times does it for him, regurgitating a Russia-gate Round-Up
of every unsubstantiated allegation that has been made -- deceptively presented as though it's
all been proven.
Mueller: No collusion so far.
This is a reaffirmation of the faith, a recitation of what the Russia-gate faithful want to
believe is true. But mere repetition will not make it so.
The Times' unsteady conviction is summed up in this paragraph, which the paper itself then
contradicts only a few paragraphs later: "What we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will
be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private
instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American
politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the
Trump campaign."
But this schizoid approach leads to the admission that "no public evidence has emerged
showing that [Trump's] campaign conspired with Russia."
The Times also adds: "There is a plausible case that Mr. Putin succeeded in delivering the
presidency to his admirer, Mr. Trump, though it cannot be proved or disproved."
This is an extraordinary statement. If it cannot be "proved or disproved" what is the point
of this entire exercise: of the Mueller probe, the House and Senate investigations and even of
this very New York Times article?
Attempting to prove this constructed story without proof is the very point of this
piece.
A Banner Day
The 10,000-word article opens with a story of a pro-Russian banner that was hung from the
Manhattan Bridge on Putin's birthday, and an anti-Obama banner hung a month later from the
Memorial Bridge in Washington just after the 2016 election.
On public property these are constitutionally-protected acts of free speech. But for the
Times , "The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and
Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most
effective foreign interference in an American election in history."
Kremlin: Guilty, says NYT. (Robert Parry, 2016)
Why? Because the Times tells us that the "earliest promoters" of images of the banners were
from social media accounts linked to a St. Petersburg-based click-bait farm, a company called
the Internet Research Agency. The company is not legally connected to the Kremlin and any
political coordination is pure speculation. IRA has been
explained convincingly as a commercial and not political operation. Its aim is get and sell
"eyeballs."
For instance the company conducted pro and anti-Trump rallies and social media messages, as
well as pro and anti-Clinton. But the Times , in classic omission mode, only reports on "the
anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia." Sharing with
"millions" of people on social media does not mean that millions of people have actually seen
those messages. And if they had there is little way to determine whether it affected how they
voted, especially as the messages attacked and praised both candidates.
The Times reporters take much at face value, which they then themselves undermine. Most
prominently, they willfully mistake an indictment for a conviction, as if they do not know the
difference.
This is in the category of Journalism 101. An indictment need not include evidence and under
U.S. law an indictment is not evidence. Juries are instructed that an indictment is merely an
accusation. That the Times commits this cardinal sin of journalism to purposely confuse
allegations with a conviction is not only inexcusable but strikes a fatal blow to the
credibility of the entire article.
It actually reports that "Today there is no doubt who hacked the D.N.C. and the Clinton
campaign. A
detailed indictment of 12 officers of Russia's military intelligence agency, filed in July
by Mr. Mueller, documents their every move, including their break-in techniques, their tricks
to hide inside the Democrats' networks and even their Google searches."
Who needs courts when suspects can be tried and convicted in the press?
What the Times is not taking into account is that Mueller knows his indictment will never be
tested in court because the GRU agents will never be arrested, there is no extradition treaty
between the U.S. and Russia and even if it were miraculously to see the inside of a courtroom
Mueller can invoke states secrets privilege to show the "evidence" to a judge with clearance in
his chambers who can then emerge to pronounce "Guilty!" without a jury having seen that
evidence.
This is what makes Mueller's indictment more a political than a legal document, giving him
wide leeway to put whatever he wants into it. He knew it would never be tested and that once it
was released, a supine press would do the rest to cement it in the public consciousness as a
conviction, just as this Times piece tries to do.
Errors of Commission and Omission
There are a series of erroneous assertions and omissions in the Times piece, omitted because
they would disturb the narrative:
Not mentioning that the FBI was never given access to the DNC server but instead gullibly
believing the assertion of the anti-Russian private company CrowdStrike, paid for by the DNC,
that the name of the first Soviet intelligence chief found in metadata proves Russia was
behind the hack. Only someone wanting to be caught would leave such a clue.
Incredibly believing that Trump would have launched a covert intelligence operation on
live national television by asking Russia to get 30,000 missing emails.
Trump: Sarcastically calls on Russia to get Clinton emails.
Ignoring the possible role of the MI6, the CIA and the FBI setting up Trump
campaign members George Papadopoulos and Carter Page as "colluders" with Russia.
Repeating misleading statements about the infamous Trump Tower meeting, in which Trump's
son did not seek dirt on Clinton but was offered it by a music promoter, not the Russian
government. None was apparently produced. It's never been established that a campaign
receiving opposition research from foreigners is illegal (though the Times has decided that
it is) and only the Clinton campaign was known to have obtained any.
Making no mention at all of the now discredited opposition research dossier paid for by
the Clinton campaign and the DNC from foreign sources and used by the FBI to get a warrant to
spy on Carter Page and potentially other campaign members.
Dismissing the importance
of politicized text messages between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page because the pair
were "skewered regularly on Mr. (Sean) Hannity's show as the 'Trump-hating F.B.I.
lovebirds.'"
Putting down to "hyped news stories" the legitimate fear of a new McCarthyism against
anyone who questions the "official" story being peddled here by the Times .
Seeking to get inside Putin's head to portray him as a petulant child seeking personal
revenge against Hillary Clinton, a tale long peddled by Clinton and accepted without
reservation by the Times.
Pretending to get into Julian Assange's head as well, saying he "shared Mr. Putin's
hatred of Mrs. Clinton and had a soft spot for Russia." And that Assange "also obscured the
Russian role by fueling a right-wing conspiracy theory he
knew to be false."
Ignoring findings backed
by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity that the DNC emails were leaked and not
hacked.
Erroneously linking the timing of WikiLeaks' Podesta emails to deflect attention from the
"Access Hollywood" tape, as
debunked in Consortium News by Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who worked with
WikiLeaks on those emails.
Distorts Geo-Politics
The piece swallows whole the Establishment's geo-strategic Russia narrative, as all
corporate media do. It buys without hesitation the story that the U.S. seeks to spread
democracy around the world, and not pursue its economic and geo-strategic interests as do all
imperial powers.
The Times reports that, "The United States had backed democratic, anti-Russian forces in the
so-called color revolutions on Russia's borders, in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004." The
Times has also spread the erroneous story of a democratic revolution in Ukraine in 2014,
omitting crucial evidence of
a U.S.-backed coup.
The Times disapprovingly dismisses Trump having said on the campaign trail that "Russia was
not an existential threat, but a potential ally in beating back terrorist groups," when an
objective view of the world would come to this very conclusion.
The story also shoves aside American voters' real concerns that led to Trump's election. For
the Times, economic grievances and rejection of perpetual war played no role in the election of
Trump. Instead it was Russian influence that led Americans to vote for him, an absurd
proposition defied by a Gallup poll in July that
showed Americans' greatest concerns being economic. Their concerns about Russia were
statistically insignificant at less than one percent.
Ignoring Americans' real concerns exposes the class interests of Times staffers and editors
who are evidently above Americans' economic and social suffering. The Times piece blames Russia
for social "divisions" and undermining American democracy, classic projection onto Moscow away
from the real culprits for these problems: bi-partisan American plutocrats. That also insults
average Americans by suggesting they cannot think for themselves and pursue their own interests
without Russia telling them what to do.
Establishment reporters insulate themselves from criticism by retreating into the exclusive
Establishment club they think they inhabit. It is from there that they vicariously draw their
strength from powerful people they cover, which they should instead be scrutinizing. Validated
by being close to power, Establishment reporters don't take seriously anyone outside of the
club, such as a website like Consortium News.
But on rare occasions they are forced to take note of what outsiders are saying. Because of
the role The New York Timesplayed in the catastrophe of Iraq its editors took the highly
unusual move of apologizing
to its readers. Will we one day read a similar apology about the paper's coverage of
Russia-gate? Tags Politics
China does not have its own technological base and is depended on the USA for many technologies. So while China
isdefinitly in assendance, Washington still have capability to stick to "total global dominance" agenda for some time.
Attempt to crush China by Tariffs might provoke the economic crisi in China and possible a "regime change", like Washington
santions to the USSR in the past. And that's probably the calculation.
Notable quotes:
"... President Trump has taken long-simmering US complaints about China to boiling point, castigating Beijing for unfair trade, currency manipulation, and theft of intellectual property rights. China rejects this pejorative American characterization of its economic practices. ..."
"... The problem is that Washington is demanding the impossible. It's like as if the US wants China to turn the clock back to some imagined former era of robust American capitalism. But it is not in China's power to do that. The global economy has shifted structurally away from US dominance. The wheels of production and growth are in China's domain of Eurasia. ..."
"... Combined with its military power, the postwar global order was defined and shaped by Washington. Sometimes misleading called Pax Americana, there was nothing peaceful about the US-led global order. It was more often an order of relative stability purchased by massive acts of violence and repressive regimes under Washington's tutelage. ..."
"... In American mythology, it does not have an empire. The US was supposed to be different from the old European colonial powers, leading the rest of the world through its "exceptional" virtues of freedom, democracy and rule of law . In truth, US global dominance relied on the application of ruthless imperial power. ..."
"... Washington likes to huff and puff about alleged Chinese expansionism "threatening" US allies in Asia-Pacific. But the reality is that Washington is living in the past of former glory. Trading blocs like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) realize their bread is buttered by China, no longer America. ..."
"... Washington's rhetoric about "standing up to China" is just that – empty rhetoric. It doesn't mean much to countries led by their interests of economic development and the benefits of Chinese investment. ..."
"... China's strategic economic plans – the One Belt One Road initiative – of integrating regional development under its leadership and finance have already created a world order analogous to what American capital achieved in the postwar decades. ..."
"... American pundits and politicians like Vice President Mike Pence may disparage China's economic policies as creating "debt traps" for other countries . But the reality is that other countries are gravitating to China's dynamic leadership ..."
The G20 summits are nominally about how the world's biggest national economies can cooperate
to boost global growth. This year's gathering – more than ever – shows, however,
that rivalry between the US and China is center stage.
Zeroing in further still, the rivalry is an expression of a washed-up American empire
desperately trying to reclaim its former power. There is much sound, fury and pretense from the
outgoing hegemon – the US – but the ineluctable reality is an empire whose halcyon
days are a bygone era.
Ahead of the summit taking place this weekend in Argentina, the Trump administration has
been issuing furious ultimatums to China to "change its behavior". Washington is threatening an
escalating trade war if Beijing does not conform to American demands over economic
policies.
President Trump has taken long-simmering US complaints about China to boiling point,
castigating Beijing for unfair trade, currency manipulation, and theft of intellectual property
rights. China rejects this pejorative American characterization of its economic practices.
Nevertheless, if Beijing does not comply with US diktats then the Trump administration says
it will slap increasing tariffs on Chinese exports.
The gravity of the situation was highlighted by the comments this week of China's
ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, who warned that the "lessons of history" show trade wars can
lead to catastrophic shooting wars. He urged the Trump administration to be reasonable and to
seek a negotiated settlement of disputes.
The problem is that Washington is demanding the impossible. It's like as if the US wants
China to turn the clock back to some imagined former era of robust American capitalism. But it
is not in China's power to do that. The global economy has shifted structurally away from US
dominance. The wheels of production and growth are in China's domain of Eurasia.
For decades, China functioned as a giant market for cheap production of basic consumer
goods. Now under President Xi Jinping, the nation is moving to a new phase of development
involving sophisticated technologies, high-quality manufacture, and investment.
It's an economic evolution that the world has seen before, in Europe, the US and now
Eurasia. In the decades after the Second World War, up to the 1970s, it was US capitalism that
was the undisputed world leader. Combined with its military power, the postwar global order was
defined and shaped by Washington. Sometimes misleading called Pax Americana, there was nothing
peaceful about the US-led global order. It was more often an order of relative stability
purchased by massive acts of violence and repressive regimes under Washington's tutelage.
In American mythology, it does not have an empire. The US was supposed to be different from
the old European colonial powers, leading the rest of the world through its "exceptional"
virtues of freedom, democracy and rule of law . In truth, US global dominance relied on the
application of ruthless imperial power.
The curious thing about capitalism is it always outgrows its national base. Markets
eventually become too small and the search for profits is insatiable. American capital soon
found more lucrative opportunities in the emerging market of China. From the 1980s on, US
corporations bailed out of America and set up shop in China, exploiting cheap labor and
exporting their goods back to increasingly underemployed America consumers. The arrangement was
propped up partly because of seemingly endless consumer debt.
That's not the whole picture of course. China has innovated and developed independently from
American capital. It is debatable whether China is an example of state-led capitalism or
socialism. The Chinese authorities would claim to subscribe to the latter. In any case, China's
economic development has transformed the entire Eurasian hemisphere. Whether you like it or
not, Beijing is the dynamo for the global economy. One indicator is how nations across
Asia-Pacific are deferring to China for their future growth.
Washington likes to huff and puff about alleged Chinese expansionism "threatening" US allies
in Asia-Pacific. But the reality is that Washington is living in the past of former glory.
Trading blocs like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) realize their bread is buttered
by China, no longer America.
Washington's rhetoric about "standing up to China" is just that
– empty rhetoric. It doesn't mean much to countries led by their interests of economic
development and the benefits of Chinese investment.
One example is Taiwan. In contrast to Washington's shibboleths about "free Taiwan", more and
more Asian countries are dialing down their bilateral links with Taiwan in deference to China's
position, which views the island as a renegade province. The US position is one of rhetoric,
whereas the relations of other countries are based on material economic exigencies. And
respecting Beijing's sensibilities is for them a prudent option.
A recent
report by the New York Times starkly illustrated the changing contours of the global
economic order. It confirmed what many others have observed, that China is on the way to
surpass the US as the world's top economy. During the 1980s, some 75 per cent of China's
population were living in "extreme poverty", according to the NY Times. Today, less than 1 per
cent of the population is in that dire category. For the US, the trajectory has been in reverse
with greater numbers of its people subject to deprivation.
China's strategic economic plans – the One Belt One Road initiative – of
integrating regional development under its leadership and finance have already created a world
order analogous to what American capital achieved in the postwar decades.
American pundits and politicians like Vice President Mike Pence may disparage China's
economic policies as creating "debt traps" for other countries . But the reality is that other
countries are gravitating to China's dynamic leadership.
Arguably, Beijing's vision for economic development is more enlightened and sustainable than
what was provided by the Americans and Europeans before. The leitmotif for China, along with
Russia, is very much one of multipolar development and mutual partnership. The global economy
is not simply moving from one hegemon – the US – to another imperial taskmaster
– China.
One thing seems inescapable. The days of American empire are over. Its capitalist vigor has
dissipated decades ago. What the upheaval and rancor in relations between Washington and
Beijing is all about is the American ruling class trying to recreate some fantasy of former
vitality. Washington wants China to sacrifice its own development in order to somehow
rejuvenate American society. It's not going to happen.
That's not to say that American society can never be rejuvenated . It could, as it could
also in Europe. But that would entail a restructuring of the economic system involving
democratic regeneration. The "good old days" of capitalism are gone. The American empire, as
with the European empires, is obsolete.
That's the unspoken Number One agenda item at the G20 summit. Bye-bye US empire.
What America needs to do is regenerate through a reinvented social economic order, one that
is driven by democratic development and not the capitalist private profit of an elite few.
If not, the futile alternative is US failing political leaders trying to coerce China, and
others, to pay for their future. That way leads to war.
"What do you mean by claiming Hersh "cozys up" to MIC ppl? And what would be a specific
example of a story he broke after doing that?"
Our Men in Iran?
"We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the
D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada," a former senior American intelligence
official told me. ... In a separate interview, a retired four-star general, who has advised
the Bush and Obama Administrations on national-security issues, said that he had been
privately briefed in 2005 about the training of Iranians associated with the M.E.K. in
Nevada
His conversations with Lieutenant Calley are apparently what allowed him to break the My
Lai massacre story as well, even though members of the military had already spoken out about
it, and there had been already been charges brought. It just revealed the story to the
general public, which prompted a fuller investigation and courts martial. I'm sure there are
others.
So, obviously Hersh's "cozying up" (surely not the right term for it, though) is in the
interests of raising public awareness of nefarious deeds, and is not scared of painting these
organizations in a bad light, whereas Mazzetti's goal here seems to be to maintain his
privileged access by providing favors - totally different motivations. It's rather easy to
contrast the two, which "smartypants54" has even stated here.
Whatever the case, it's true that elements of the NYT have been mouthpieces more or less
for government and corporate power for a long time. While I agree with Glenn about the faux
cynicism perpetuating this kind of activity - "don't be naive, this is done all the time" - I
can understand that it exists.
Such cynicism on the part of the public, rather than being an acknowledgment of
acceptance and approval of such practices, can also be seen as part of a more radical
critique of the corporate media in general, and the NYT particularly, in that such
organizations - not that I totally agree with this - , by their very nature, can't be
reformed and can never be totally effective checks on power because of the way they're
structured, and who they answer to.
That's definitely not a reason to stop pointing it out, though.
I changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo years ago.
Commenters occasionally say here at TUR that Google is somehow superior, but even if
that's so (which I doubt), isn't the corruption plenty of reason to boycott? Guess not, in
light of news the other day that Amazon continues to expand.
Most people, even here in Exceptionalia, are lazy and dull. In a better society, the
Establishment would be better reined in.
Somehow Google has convinced everyone that their search is not biased because it uses a trade
secret algorithm. Eventually the public will figure out that the argument does not even make
any sense. The algorithm is tuned by the work of thousands of engineers, and of course it is
biased.
Semi-OT: NYT has something about Facebook hiring an oppo research firm to look into George
Soros. Apparently he trashed Facebook at Davos and Sheryl Sandberg thinks he might be
shorting their stock.
Just goes to show that there probably isn't some giant super conspiracy among the
Jews/SJWs/Democrats/whatever – Soros and Facebook both seem pretty keen on open borders
globalist nonsense, and yet here they are fighting like cats in a sack.
This makes me proud that I use Bing. It has a nice picture each day as its backdrop. Here is
yesterday's, a particularly beautiful one of the Frankfurt Christmas Market, which proves
Bing is Christmas-friendly -- and even German-friendly, Heaven forbid:
I've been using https://www.startpage.com/ as my main search engine for four
years now. It serves my purposes >95% of the time. I only resort to Google no more than
once every couple weeks. Startpage also allows you to visit sites anonymously and never ever
tracks anything. Also no Gmail or Google Docs. Also run Ghostery to block Google Analytics on
all sites (that, by the way, includes Unz.com).
Since I am not interested in luvvies, Hollywood, and all that, I hardly ever comment on them.
Kevin Spaceyga, however, is worth a remark. Because I was a great fan of the British original
I thought I'd watch a couple of episodes of the American "House of Cards". It was noticeable
that of the whole cast he was the only one who could act.
"But I don't think that the Google Suggestions are deliberately skewed in the way you're
suggesting."
Oh sweet summer child.
I think it was Steve who recommended this, but do an image search on Google for American
Scientists and let us know if you think that's an accurate representation. Try the same with
the phrase White Couples.
These days you get similar returns on Bing btw.
Yes I know these are not auto-suggestions, but fruit of the same tree.
The Creepy Line, add it to your watch lists. Amazon Prime I think.
@Tyrion 2
I'm not taking a side in your spat, I just want to point out that it'd be foolish in the
extreme to take Vox at its word there. All Vox does is tell people what they want to hear,
and from that you can infer what kind of reader they're after, and it ain't Regular Joe.
'Cos what the "policy elite" really want is the news patronisingly explained to them
I think it would be more precise to describe Vox as being aimed at the social class from
which the policy elite is drawn, rather than at the policy elite itself. Even so, I'd be
shocked if most of the policy elite weren't regular readers. I doubt even 1% of them find it
patronising. Remember: these people are 27-yr olds who literally know nothing.
@Roger
More times than I can count, I have engaged on this topic with people who smugly declare that
"Google searches are controlled by an algorithm" and hence cannot possibly be biased. After
all, it's a big computer not a person!
And they appear to believe that this explanation is completely dispositive.
You are considerably more optimistic than I am about the general intelligence and critical
faculties of the American public.
@Trevor H.
Incidentally, anyone keen on researching the wealthy and powerful members of the Tribe is
well advised to use "philanthropy" as a primary keyword. Heck, even Sheldon Adelson is
considered a philanthropist by Google. Wikipedia is not far behind.
Bernie Madoff? Oh, he was just a misunderstood philanthropist.
Because of this article, I bookmarked Duck Duck Go and will use it instead of Google from now
on. BTW, did you ever Google "Google autocomplete policy?"
I actually suspect that the "deaths from opioids" result is phased out as part of some
algorithm to stop racist predictions, in this case, against white people
No. If you spend time around leftist websites, you will find lots and lots of Leftists
don't see the opioid crisis as bad at all, because it mostly kills the wrong kind of white
people (at least that's the perception, I don't know the numbers). Some openly cheer it and
mock the "dumb hillbillies" that are dying by the thousands.
Google doesn't want to let you know about it because they're happy it's happening.
Just goes to show that there probably isn't some giant super conspiracy among the
Jews/SJWs/Democrats/whatever – Soros and Facebook both seem pretty keen on open
borders globalist nonsense, and yet here they are fighting like cats in a sack.
Medieval nobles fought each other, often bitterly, often to the death. But they usually
suspended their quarrels whenever the peasants got uppity. They could all agree to repress
the commoners. Just because the elites aren't a monolithic block in everything, doesn't mean
they don't conspire against all the rest of us.
I suspect that there is a broader part of the population that isn't sure what words they are
looking for to complete their search query; but, does anybody here not know the end to the
question that they are going to ask the internet? It is occasionally amusing when I see
suggested searches go off in a wildly different direction than I had intended, but I rarely
follow the suggestions to their conclusion. I am sure Google has statistics that support
their "micro-gaslighting"; however, marketing to the masses always feels counter-intuitive to
my brain. Click-through ads and the like are mind-boggling, but it -appears to work on enough
people to justify the ad-spend.
Google's image recognition has been gutted. In 2014 it would recognize a face and find photos
of that person across the internet. A right click would find the original of the fakes used
by Russian trolls to suggest non existent attacks on civilians by the Ukrainian army. Now it
can't even match the same image.
deaths from her ➔ deaths from herbalife/herpes/hernia surgery/herbal
supplements
deaths from mor ➔ (nothing)
deaths from ox ➔ (nothing)
deaths from perc ➔ deaths percy jackson
deaths from cod ➔ (nothing)
deaths from vic ➔ death from victoza/vick's vaporub
deaths from hydro ➔ deaths from hydropower/hydroxycut/hydrogen sulfide/hydrofluoric
acid/hydroxyzine/hydrogen cyanide/hydrochloric acid
deaths from coc ➔ deaths from coconuts
deaths from metha ➔ deaths from methadone (lol)/methanol poisoning/methane
deaths from cry ➔ deaths from cyrotherapy/cryptococcosis
deaths from amp ➔ deaths from amputation
deaths from ec ➔ deaths from ectopic pregnancy/e coli/e cigs/eclampsia/eczema/ect
deaths from md ➔ (nothing)
deaths from mari ➔ deaths from maria/marinol
deaths from ls ➔ (nothing)
deaths from lyse ➔ deaths from lysenkoism
@Buzz
Mohawk I find that Bing is more objective and I also like the daily photo, so I switched
to them as my browser home page a couple of years ago.
I have to say one of the things I like about Steve Sailer is his charming, old school
White Guy naïveté:
"the news media doesn't seem all that enthusiastic about reporting on what goes on inside
Google, perhaps out of fear of what Google could do to them."
Actually Steve, it's because the news media think Google is doing a wonderful thing and wish
they would do it harder and faster.
Our problem is Google has Plausible Irrelevance: it's obvious they're manipulating
auto-completes in directions they favor, and since Google is vast and powerful that seems
highly relevant to us dissidents. But it's easy for Google to hide behind 'if searchers get
all the way to "Kevin Spacey g", let them hunt and peck for a and y – what's the big
deal?'
And the offending author becomes internet-famous as a flying saucer nut.
Brian Littlefair didn't write that. The search term "Brian Littlefair" does not appear on
that UFO web page at all. What did appear there, for a while, in the Latest Article column,
was 'The First Thing We Do,'
That was presumably the offending article. Its content might be triggering to hasbara bots
or JTRIG-type keyboard commandos or both. The trick of suppression could be effected by a bit
of incremental traffic while both articles appeared on the same page.
This was most pronounced on (Yahoo(oath)(Verizon)). It didn't replicate exactly but the
same general hits permuted. DuckDuckGo returned a hit on the UFO article too. By contrast
Metager.de, searx.me, and yandex.ru gave you what you would expect.
@anonymous
Same here on the duckduckgo, Mr #340, but I'll use google when I get to an impasse and really
want to try hard to get some information.
DuckDuckgo search escalates to Bing (MUCH BETTER on 2 things: images and finding
addresses/phone numbers for local businesses), then, if need be, Google.
BTW, I , uhhh, well, this friend of mine, yeah, sometimes types my blog name into Google
to help it stay high in the rankings. Doing this on google, though I detest them, is akin to
something everyone in the stock market does. With 90%, or what-have-you, of the searches, I
crap, my friend wants to work within the system, so to speak. That's just like buying shares
of some company because you know that others will buy on some news coming (the news alone may
not actually be a good business reason to buy, but it's the psychology of the masses).
The algorithm is tuned by the work of thousands of engineers,
No, those people are absolutely NOT engineers, no matter WTF Sergey Brin calls them. There
may be a few dozen engineers working for that place, but they'd be the guys calculating heat
transfer loads off of the servers, or designing electrical power systems.
@Alfa158AGREED! However, Steve's probably got your point in mind too. If there is a
proto-Tucker Carlson in a media operation, then he may fear the loss of business and
de-linking by Google, though he does know Google is not doing wonderful things.
@Redneck
farmer With good reason. Life expectancy in the US is now falling, largely as a result of
them (and suicide), despite the fact that we spend more on health care than anyone. We are
prolonging the lives of the non-productive elderly at tremendous cost but killing healthy
young people in what should be their prime productive years. You usually only see falling
life expectancy in countries with serious decline, such as Russia after the fall of the
Soviet Union.
But, yes, it's not exactly a secret, which makes it even more puzzling that Google is
manipulating its results in this way. I don't think it is just some by-product of the strange
counter-intuitive workings of AI but is probably the result of human intervention, although I
don't know for what reason. PC thinking is even more counter-intuitive than that of AI bots.
I'm still trying to figure out why "colored people" is bad but "people of color" is good.
Here's a few things I've noticed about Google's auto-complete from my own anecdotal
experience.
1. It relies heavily not only on your search history but also on your search "currency,"
i.e. it will preferentially auto-fill a word or phrase if that same word or phrase appears on
another tab you have open on your computer at the time, even if you've never typed that word
or phrase into the search box before.
2. It is massively tied into television viewing patterns. Google knows what is on
television, when and where. If you do a search about an item that was just featured in a
commercial during an NFL game, you may get an auto-fill "hit" even before you've typed in
anything you might think would be a relevant term.
Google is not in business to do social engineering, it's in business to make money. My
impression is that Google's auto-fill suggestions are the result of a bunch of nerds trying
desperately to monetize search and bumping up against the hard, cold reality that it can't
really be done to any great extent, that the diminishing returns come sharp and quick, and
that AI is nothing like it's cracked up to be. To that end they will mine every scrap of
available data they can get their hands on and apply their algorithms to it, but the end
product is mostly cheesy and useless, like Facebook showing you ads for products you just
bought (and consequently don't need to buy again).
Since this is the best that the brightest programmers with the most powerful computers can
do, it tells you that the whole concept is flawed. Advertising doesn't really work. AI
doesn't really work. But the world today shuts its eyes to these facts in order to keep alive
its inward vision of a prosperous, progressing global marketplace. If the facts were fully
accepted, the value of companies like Google would sink to niche levels and the internet for
the masses would basically shut down. This will happen one day, but in the meantime they will
blow that bubble up with as much hype as possible in order to justify their own
existence.
@Tyrion 2
I did the same comparison before I even started reading the comments. ; )
Here it is for anyone who wants to save some time. Notice the spike this week. iSteve
influence?
This one is REALLY blatant given that "deaths from open heart surgery" returns: "Hmm, your
search doesn't have enough data to show here." (sometimes a flatline just means one search
happens much more than another, but still has data)
Does anyone know anything about how Google actually implements this algorithm
tweaking?
Do they just remove results or actively provide innocuous replacements? Typing "deaths from
ope" in Bing gives the Google response as the third option so seems inconclusive.
How do they get complete coverage? Is it some kind of regular expression like "deaths from
op*", a similarity match to phrases, or ?
Another interesting data point is that typing "deaths from opi" gives zero
autocompletions. Surely if they were doing explicit replacements they could add something
like "deaths from opinion surveys."
@Anon I
don't have the knowledge you seem to have about it, Mr. #190, though it sounds like you were
in this around the time of Lycos and Alta Vista, etc. Lots has happened since then. I want to
ask you if you think my first thought (upon reading Mr. Sailer's post) has any merit. That
is, do you think some of the searches, say the Buchanan one*, were the result of bots made to
beat all hell out of the search engine on one very particular topic to make auto-complete,
and more importantly, IMO, the top results appear as one wants?
I could see some guy trying to make his name or business appear on top, maybe even Mr.
Haney (haha, if he's still alive) on the "Bu"-for "Buchanan" thing, but who would want to
make the "open-heart surgery.." appear first, a team of computer savvy cardiologist?! It
would also require lots of different manipulations besides just the one displayed by Steve.
Of course, that's what computers are damn good at.
I tend to agree with Mr. Sailer's opinion on this, but for me, all this discussion (if
some good geeks come on here) is a good thing, as I'd like to learn more about SEO for my own
benefit.
information retrieval engineers
See, now that's not engineering. These people don't work out problems using the math and
empirical data that describe the laws of nature. I don't want to have to keep doing this,
dammit.
.
* and I did read you back then, Steve, as I remember this well. I cannot believe that was
8 damn years ago. Time is figuratively flying!
@Anonymous
Arguably (and I'm not saying this is right) because whites are the hardest hit group, which
contradicts the narrative of "white privilege". An old joke headline (and I've seen actual
examples of this many times in our MSM after natural disasters, wars, etc.) is " World Ends
– Minorities and Women Hit Hardest".
This is the lens thru which the Left views everything, so something that shows that in
fact working class whites, especially men, are the ones who are in the most trouble in our
society (but get the least help from our government and institutions) is not something that
the Left is eager to highlight. This might force them to reconsider whether they have put
their thumb on the scale too heavily in favor of other groups. It also undermines their
nonsensical claim that they are only "helping" minorities and immigrants, which is a purely
good thing, when in fact they are manipulating a zero sum game, so for every bit of "help"
that they render, there is an equal amount of "harm" put on someone else's head.
Does anyone know anything about how Google actually implements this algorithm
tweaking?
I think the answer is no. Sometimes you can gain little glimpses from patents, but as a
whole Google algorithms are a heavily guarded trade secret for many reasons. First of all
because they don't want to give search engine competitors (not that they have many left) an
advantage – their search algorithm was their secret sauce in the 1st place. 2nd because
people who are trying to game the search system for various nefarious economic and political
reasons would LOVE to know how the algorithm works because then they could manipulate it
– better for it to be a black box. And lastly because they don't want you to tour the
sausage factory and see how much "hand tuning" is going on (I suspect a lot, because bots are
very "racist" when left to their own devices) and how much of that hand tuning is based on
SJW considerations and the financial and petty personal interests of the Google execs. This
would open them up to all kinds of 2nd guessing and criticism. So from their POV they are
much better off keeping it all a complete mystery and telling you that it's all "science"
that you wouldn't understand anyway.
"Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost
inexpressible. It's Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world
to itself.
Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and
slavery have disappeared.
The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will,
because they don't grasp what it really means: humiliation.
The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn't conscious of it.
And, superiority excites envy.
Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we
call minorities."
Joseph Sobran, April 1997
Here is a great article on how evil the Sackler family is. Getting doctors to chuck their
public trust and credibility into the toilet to shill for Purdue Pharma was pioneered by
these people for Valium.
It would seem to be pretty reasonable to ask that Google publicly disclose how it is
manipulating specific topics like this, but nobody ever seems to do this.
Big tech will typically try to obfuscate the issue by saying "it's the algorithm" or "it's
complicated." It's not.
The easiest, least cumbersome way to regulate the major search engines is make them
provide an audit log of all filtering rules or hard overrides in their search results. Limit
this to for profit services that have above a certain threshold in daily users or market
share, so it does not hurt innovation in startups. The vast majority of changes would be
understandable or inconsequential. But it gives both parties of government direct insight,
particularly around local elections, where meddling would be impossible to detect.
Further out, you can make them report any substantial bias they are introducing into the
training data and give a basic explanation. In the same way lenders have to explain their
lending models, search engines should have to explain how they are tweaking theirs. As search
increasingly shifts to mobile, personalized, and voice-based, this becomes important as the
only search result that matters is the first one that is returned.
In a world where national elections are coming down to a few hundred thousand votes, it
blows my mind Republicans have not been pushing for this.
@Mr. Anon
Haha good analogy, Mr. Anon. Zerohedge had a story on this little spat. However, these are no
medieval nobles, but more like candidates for AntiChrist . It'll be
entertaining, I suppose, like Christopher Walken is as the angel Gabrial in Prophecy ,
but I'm stayin' outta' this one.
"It would seem to be pretty reasonable to ask that Google publicly disclose how it is
manipulating specific topics like this, but nobody ever seems to do this."
You mean it would seem to be pretty reasonable to ask Google, DuckDuckGo AND Bing publicly
disclose how it is manipulating specific topics like this, but nobody ever seems to do
this.
Probably because it is Coalition of the Fringe Group Cringeworthy.
@alaska3636
Yes, I'd rather not even look at the auto-complete, or do it on a bogged-down computer like
mine in which it can't catch up with me! The exception is when I want to look up a word
spelling. I just let auto-complete do it for me.
On your 2nd point:
Click-through ads and the like are mind-boggling, but it -appears to work on enough
people to justify the ad-spend.
Not necessarily, Alaska. Who really knows if the ads do a damn thing? Google or whoever
might honestly give you numbers as to click-throughs, but loads of them, at least for me, are
mistakes and times that the little X for close is SO DAMN SMALL that I can't be sure to close
rather than click the ad. (That's especially bad on a touch screen.)
Then, the only way to know if your ad really was read at all, is if it leads to a sale or
request of some sort being sent in. Google may tell you how many people are reading what
you've got out there, but that's just more lies.
@Intelligent
Dasein Very good comment, I.D., especially the last paragraph re: advertising. Your first
part reminded me of something that is fairly-well related, so I'll write it here.
Have you all noticed something with youtube, owned by Google? It now uses the IP number
(or something else at the modem or router) to keep track of videos that you've been watching
or searching for, rather than just cookies, or some other method based on just THE ONE
DEVICE.
Here's the observation – My wife likes to watch a number of the same kinds of silly
soap-opera-like and reality-show videos on her computer or phone when she is bored. Yes, I
know she is no dummy, but it's whom they are. Anyway, it used to be I'd see music and
political video suggestions based on what I've viewed and (I believe) what videos have been
embedded in web pages (such as unz) that I've viewed.
All of a sudden, about 3 months back, I started seeing all these suggestions on youtube on
my computer for the dumb-ass soap-opera/reality-show videos that my wife watches. The
suggestions area was filled with her crap. That happened like the flip of a switch. That's
probably literally the case (OK, a software setting), but also likely one of the "action
items" decided on at a meeting by some Google Anything-But-Engineers just before that day.
It's pretty annoying – I don't need the suggestions anyway, but now I can see what
these people are up to.
Just a word to the wise: If you watch something, cough, porn, cough cough, that you may
not quite want others in the household to know about, you'd better go to Starbucks. The
bathroom code is 1-1-1-1. Glad to be of help.
@Anon We
know that AI is "racist" and that Google is working hard to find a way to make it not racist
(and yet still produce meaningful results), which is probably impossible. We also know that
Google has plenty of human resources (although not an infinite #) to throw at such problems
until an automated fix is found, just as Facebook now has thousands of people searching
manually for Rooshian election interference in order to keep the dogs of Washington at bay.
We can also guess that they are not eager to publicize to what extent they are tweaking or
hand tuning algorithms or results – they would much rather you think that it is all
done by "science". Putting this together, it's my guess that they are doing a fair amount of
hand tuning, which is some spotty and uneven combination of combatting SEOs, de-racisting
their AI bots, the leftist predilections of Google employees, the commands from on high of
Google management, etc.
@tambit
Final observations about Silicon Valley big tech. People need to appreciate a few things:
– Think of the short tenures that employees have at big tech companies. A
conservative at Google or Facebook will only be there for two or three years. So they wonder,
"Why rock the boat? In two years, I will be at Netflix or Amazon, or joining a startup,
anyway." The transitory nature of it makes employees who break from the orthodoxy stay
silent, especially after Damore.
– As with any company, everything is tacitly approved from the CEO and senior
leadership. It's unlikely they have their hands in augmenting search results directly. On the
other hand, they know the biases of their employees, and look the other way. For example, a
CEO may talk about how getting SF contractors to vet news articles means there is
unintentional liberal bias. But what prevents them from having some of the contractors in
say, Kansas or Ohio, for a more balanced sample? Because the CEO condones the bias.
– If people are waiting for a smoking gun from Google, you will be out of luck.
Because of their reach, they can quietly nudge people in a certain direction through repeated
exposure. You may see an isolated incident and think "that's weird." But you're not seeing
the few thousand other ways they are doing it concurrently. More so, as things continue to
shift to mobile and native apps, there will be no meaningful way to measure this. For
example, voice search could be construed so it "misunderstands" some phrases with slightly
higher probability. This prompts users to type it in manually, which many will not do. Good
luck catching that.
@Reg
Cæsar Typing !bing, !google, !youtube, !amazon, !wikipedia and some others into
duckduckgo before the search phrase, will redirect you to a search result from those sites,
rather than duckduckgo results.
@KunioKun
I have an impression that in media coverage of the opioid crisis the role of heroine, its
price and where does it come from is underplayed. Any connection to Afghanistan?
@utu Most
"heroin" nowadays is fentanyl or some other synthetic opiate and it comes from labs in China
or from US prescription sources. It is so powerful that you don't need to smuggle in large
quantities – 1 kilo is enough to lethally overdose everyone in a city of half a
million. Actual heroin (a declining product) comes from Mexico. Afghanistan would be way down
on the list in the US nowadays.
@KunioKun
I'm not at all defending the Sacklers; if I made the laws I'd subject the ones involved in
the business, and the other responsible Purdue personnel, to one of the more humane-ish old
fashioned forms of execution, perhaps blowing from a gun , and seize the
wealth of the rest, but this notion of KMac's fan club that their actions have escaped
notice, and in particular escaped notice from liberals, is 180 degrees the opposite of the
truth.
In fact, the Sacklers are all that liberals want to talk about WRT the opioid crisis -- it
deflects blame from Mexican heroin, illegal alien drug pushers and Chinese fentanyl -- hence
the widely
read New Yorker article , and the bestseller Dopesick
, which also toes the left-wing party line* that it was all Sacklers and not
Mexico/illegals/China, and which received glowing reviews in the New York
Times , Washington Post and Wall Street Journal .
*Unlike dueling bestseller Dreamland
, which assigns the Sacklers their share of blame but also tells the rest of the story.
I suspect that there is a broader part of the population that isn't sure what words they
are looking for to complete their search query; but, does anybody here not know the end to
the question that they are going to ask the internet?
+1000.
I was about to type something along the same lines but my version had "fuck[ing]" and
"retard[s|ed]" in it several times.
@Tyrion 2
You are already aware of this, Tyrion 2 , since you followed the discussion/debate
over in the other comments thread, but this information might be interesting to other UR
readers and commenters:
Another question :
i) It appears the 2018 total drug overdose death will be 80,000! That is immense, and is
twice as much as auto deaths. Until three days ago, I had no idea the number was
skyrocketing this much.
But then why does it not show up in the CDC death table (2016 linked here, which was
still a high enough number)? For younger age brackets, surely even the 2016 number was in
the Top 10. Is it categorized as something else (like 'Unintentional Injury')?
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
[...] Overdoses are injuries too
[...] It is easy to find evidence that drug overdoses are unpopular subjects for study or
intervention by injury professionals. Index Medicus reveals that to date Injury
Prevention has published only one article with the word "overdose" or the phrase "drug
poisoning" in its title or abstract. A search of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention flagship publication, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report ( http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr , accessed 16 Jan 2007),
uncovered only 53 citations using the word "overdose" since 1982. In contrast, a search for
"lead poisoning" in MMWR returned 1531 references. Scanning the 53 articles mentioning
overdose reveals that overdoses are not the focus of most of them. Instead, many
describe outbreaks of unusual cases, such as lead poisoning among methamphetamine users.5
Topics such as endemic use of methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, and narcotic analgesics
receive relatively little attention in the injury literature despite their large
contribution to morbidity, mortality, and healthcare costs.
OT: Wikileaks is threatening to release more Hillary docs. I suspect if they'd had them
earlier, they would have released them earlier. These look like a batch of new docs, then.
They're probably ones on Weiner's laptop, and I don't think it's a coincidence that Wikileaks
suddenly ended up with them after Sessions was given the boot. Some government leaker wanted
to wait until Sessions was gone to make sure his butt was covered.
@dearieme
And it really shows with his absence in the most recent season. I think it's also that Frank
Underwood comes off as a likable guy at times while everyone else on the show are just plain
nasty people.
Google's *is* fairly transparent about their autocomplete policy. According to them, they
censor "sex', "hate", "violence" and "harmful activities". Most of the above examples
probably fall under the "hate" grouping, which includes ethnicity, religion, and sexual
orientation.
You also have to keep in mind that Google is a very algorithm driven company. More often
than not someone's making a high-level decision, but most of the individual level choices are
made by some machine learning algo that's essentially a black box. Some neural network linked
a non-insignificant percentage of "jew" queries to downstream clickthroughs to the Daily
Stormer. Whereas "mormon" queries don't lead to hate sites. So the censor algo tries to tag
everything with "jew" in the autocomplete.
As for the opiod death thing, that's pretty consistent with Google's general censoring of
any drug-related query. This would fall under the "harmful activities" category. You'll
notice that sites Drugs-Forums, Bluelight and Erowid, which openly discuss and advocate
recreational drug use, no longer appear in most searches. Again, "death from opiates" is
being tagged, not for nefarious political reasons, but because to an algorithm it looks like
something someone might search for before getting high.
Steve, You have readers at The Goolag. By the time I read this, "death from open heart
surgery" was at the top of the heap returned for your search string, along with some other
amusing obscure suggestions.
I'm old enough to remember the wild west web. It probably ended when Obama legally forced
google to take down the movie 'innocence of muslims' from youtube until hillary could get to
benghazi or something.
But I loved it when back in the day the first search result for "Jew" was "Jew Watch".
Of course Larry and Sergei were among the Jews being "watched" (I assume Stalin and Sailer
are too, those are some verbose fellas!) but despite the 2 minutes of outrage Google stuck to
it's guns.
Bear in mind, a lot of kids ACTUALLY WERE innocently searching "Jew" and getting an
interesting earful.
But it wasn't until this had been the top result for nonths and headlines in every paper
for 3 days that Google gave in by placing a: "Here's why you are seeing this result first.
Also, no, we do not like Nazis".
I really liked the old internet but somewhere along the way, "the market" got in the
way.
I also happen to think that encouragement is both sweet and probably at least as effective
as the opposite so I enjoy crediting google for letting jew watch hold top position (it had
the most references to "jew" apparently) and for publicly fighting obama on thr innocence of
muslims thing – another thing that was rather principled considering as how many people
believed the Copt that the movie was financed by "a hundred rich jews" and herr Larry and
Sergei were fighting to keep broadcasting it to the world.
Oh, and if ur one of the local antisems suck a lemon
@Anon Lmao
at the idiot SJW who thinks that "Islamist" is a synonym for "Muslim" and gets triggered upon
finding out that Islamists aren't universally revered.
@Achmed E.
Newman What you describe is called, in the search results context (although I'm not sure
about the Google Suggest context), "Google bombing" or "Googlewashing."
I do think that Google has a way to manually preempt their normal algorithms for these
situations, while they work to come up with automated ways to detect and prevent such
mischief, since Google bombing produced bad PR and was embarassing for them. The problem was
generally "fixed" too quickly to have been due to a fundamental algorithm modification.
information retrieval engineers
There are two degrees that most universities give, computer science and computer
engineering. The latter is a more difficult major and involves classes in how computers work
at the hardware level and more machine and assembly language study, but in practice the
graduates just end up working as programmers, like the computer science guys. It's known that
CE guys tend to be smarter, so at the very beginning of your career it helps to have a CE
degree rather than a CS degree. You get a slight salary boost, that snowballs over time,
until you get too old and expensive and are laid off in place of an Indian.
There used to be an activist project called Scroogle which would disrupt Google's
track-keeping of who searched for what, and by way of explanation posted screengrabs of
Google altering its displayed search results ( not suggesed terms ), so that in
one case a Vietnam vet magically became an antiwar anti-Vet hippie. If you clicked through
and read the original page, everything would be clear. If you were a lazy student writing a
paper in a hurry and just read the little summaries posted on the search result page, you
would have a backward but seemingly legitimate understanding. And none of these errors ever
broke right.
@Achmed E.
Newman Sorry, Starbucks no longer wants you watching porn because of "pressure groups";
guess it's one more step to stopping Unz and Vdare down the road once the SPLC gets going.
"Internet safety campaign group Enough is Enough have called on Starbucks to block the
viewing on their Wi-Fi networks since 2016. The group relaunched an online petition calling
for them to keep a promise they said they made more than two years ago to implement a
blocking system.
"The group say that open Wi-Fi hotspots -- like those at Starbucks -- can create "criminal
safe havens for sexual predators to operate with anonymity."
@meh Your
screaming that Google is putting its thumb on the scale, and for exact given nefarious
reason, isn't an argument either, just your suspicion based on prejudice.
Google's tweaked search results are often superficially illogical or seem to be because
they are fluid as well as geographically dependent. It used to be any search for "Jewish"
gave an idiotic "We're concerned about these results" message even if the search was for
"best Jewish daycare."
Ever since Steve first complained about Buttram it's been pointed out that location and
personal history, i.e. cookies and other identifiers also skew the results. Yet he believes
Google should be able to read his mind, and show him whatever story about golfers taking the
SAT on steroids he thinks should be #1 Worldwide News.
It is trivial to modify the browser search extension -- or just to use a different portal
-- in order to gather and compare search pages from multiple sources. But it appears the
cognoscenti around here are lazy and need the world to be changed before they modify their
own behavior for a supposedly better outcome. They don't even realize that Duck Duck Go
merely recycles Google searches with some added pretense of "anonymizing" them, which will
get a laugh if you explain it to any online marketing professional. That's probably too
generous in light of the barely concealed salivating to control what everyone ELSE sees.
Because Google was always intended as some munificent public utility staffed by meek
librarians committed to informing you according to your best interests, yeah right.
Note that Google probably _should_ filter, by default, the suggestions. You wouldn't want
your kid stumbling onto hardcore porn just because it's a common suggestion. Yes, I realize
kids see everything these days -- but that doesn't mean we should surrender all attempts at
decency.
The real problem is that society is so divided that we can't agree on what should be
filtered anymore. I can't imagine anyone getting worked up over tax rate suggestions on
Google, which is what our politics used to be about. Homogeneous societies (in many things,
such as race, culture, religion) have a lot of advantages.
@snorlax
If Sackler thought he'd be the hero to the colored hordes by cooking up his
white-gentile-seeking magical death formula Yaqub-like -- per current state-of-the-art theory
with Unz.com brain-trust -- he sure was kidding himself. The hordes tend not to be too
laudatory of rich elite Jews who spend money on gay paintings n' that shizz.
Sometimes I feel like I live in another country. Haven't used Google or Yahoo search
functions in about 8 years. You would think other people would start to catch on that BigTech
is the Iron Fist of PozFeed, but alas many sheeple remain.
Only use duckduckgo, and more recently ixquick.com or startpage.com
Google has over 85% of the search engine market share in India, Brazil, Spain, Italy,
Australia, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, France & Canada which is a bit odd given than Italy
& Australia are way more sane than Sweden, Belgium & Canada.
Sweden & Belgium are clearly in the palm of Google's Globalists & Mme
Lerner-Spectre is surely quite delighted.
ttps://www.statista.com/statistics/621418/most-popular-search-engines-in-sweden/
Google is not in business to do social engineering, it's in business to make money.
You reckon? I'm inclined to think that Google already has all the money it could ever
want. So if you have more than enough money, what else is there? The obvious answer is power.
Power is even more exciting and even sexier than money.
If modern capitalism really were just about money we wouldn't be facing the problems we're
facing now. But modern capitalism is much much more about power than money.
So Google's main priority is definitely more likely to be social engineering than making
money.
@anonymous
I don't use Google nor do I shop on Amazon. That is what gets me about Instapundit; every
other article, it seems, is how evil big tech is followed up by two links to Amazon for the
latest item that you don't need. Baffling, really.
I'm still trying to figure out why "colored people" is bad but "people of color" is
good.
The thinking is that "colored people" implies that the default is white and then people
can be modified by having a non-white color, while "people of color" implies that they are
the default.
@Anon "And
it is possible that when the skew is anti-right it is not caught as early as anti-left skews
are caught, due to company implicit political biases."
This all by itself could be sufficient to create a significant political bias. Imagine
that you paid much more attention to cleaning the left side of your windshield than your
right side. Without ever deliberately dirtying the right side, you would still end up with a
clean left side and a dirty right side.
@anonymous
I've done some comparisons. For most searches, DDG is just as good. For very recondite
searches Google is better. But I almost always use DDG because I loathe the vermin at Google.
@dfordoom
The same sort of people are always telling us that Hollywood has only money in view when it
produces movies and television shows. No one denies that they worship money, but
yes–power is the greater aphrodisiac.
Since
TAC
had been the primary
venue for my own writings, I was faced with a major challenge, but a sudden insight changed this picture.
I realized that many other writers and
columnists had also been purged from mainstream publications, and that these prominent victims could
constitute the core contributors of an entirely new publication. Hence was born
The Unz Review
,
entitled "An Alternative Media Selection" and bearing the descriptive subtitle "A Collection of Interesting,
Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media."
Obviously alternative media websites had
existed on the Internet from its earliest days, but nearly all of these had always been centered upon a
particular ideological or political orientation. But
The Unz Review
was intended to include most of
these frequently contradictory perspectives, hosting material both Left and Right, conspiratorial and
racialist, fascistic and anarchistic, with very lightly moderated comment-threads.
Although many doubted that a webzine
providing such varied and conflicting viewpoints would ever attract any significant audience, I do think
that we have. Our steadily rising readership reached nearly three million monthly pageviews and 45,000
monthly comments in September and October. Moreover, this strong and steady growth has come despite our
suffering some of the same "soft censorship," especially upon Social Media, that has been inflicted upon
most other alternative media websites, whether Left or Right, especially in the wake of Donald Trump's
unexpected election victory.
According to the Alexa.com estimates,
many of these other popular webzines have lost or more of their traffic-rankings since the January 2017
crackdown, while ours has increased by almost 50% during that same period. And according to Alexa, our daily
traffic surpassed that of
TAC
about one year ago, and has remained significantly ahead every month
since that time. Here's a comparison table of UNZ.com over the last couple of years with roughly forty
mid-size mostly alternative websites.
Alexa Traffic-Rankings
Ranking
Relative UNZ.com Improvement
Ranking
Website
Jan 2017
Since 1/16
Since 1/17
Since 1/18
Nov 2018
UNZ.com
39,119
--
--
--
26,503
newrepublic.com
11,383
+213
+133
+47
18,006
nakedcapitalism.com
51,168
+228
+189
+74
100,316
marginalrevolution.com
55,427
+98
+8
+18
40,621
lewrockwell.com
22,019
+222
+187
+32
42,826
antiwar.com
41,606
+187
+
120
+12
61,960
theamericanconservative.com
34,096
+46
+34
-0
30,982
counterpunch.org
19,149
+211
+229
+62
42,641
thesaker.is
44,295
-5
+36
-7
40,688
russia-insider.com
19,031
+120
+79
-22
23,050
theduran.com
33,073
--
+217
+68
71,114
veteranstoday.com
18,802
+205
+229
+28
41,899
rense.com
16,866
+285
+355
+139
51,978
voltairenet.org
17,946
+56
+89
+6
22,964
mondoweiss.net
69,188
+278
+127
+63
106,549
consortiumnews.com
68,994
+26
+110
+60
98,353
moonofalabama.org
75,814
-14
+58
-1
81,229
strategic-culture.org
72,432
-48
+
32
-19
65,006
globalresearch.ca
11,762
+379
+249
+48
27,792
truthdig.com
25,070
+141
+160
+2
44,212
opednews.com
79,623
+456
+
369
+60
253,143
ahtribune.com
153,977
+101
+124
+98
233,252
dissidentvoice.org
247,586
+69
+52
-21
254,496
whowhatwhy.org
183,844
+41
+46
+46
182,414
paulcraigroberts.org
48,201
+179
+107
+34
67,495
countercurrents.org
151,666
+260
+141
+46
247,371
alternet.org
5,658
+420
+257
+89
13,689
takimag.com
38,052
+167
+155
+56
65,617
vdare.com
83,556
+167
+161
+75
147,712
redice.tv
61,846
--
+243
+109
143,680
amren.com
60,626
+64
+111
+47
86,512
theoccidentalobserver.net
142,140
+95
+146
+68
236,670
occidentaldissent.com
242,298
-4
-9
+59
149,654
counter-currents.com
111,370
-6
+56
+18
118,054
therightstuff.biz
41,539
-24
+56
+41
43,949
heartiste.wordpress.com
56,543
+104
+64
+9
62,735
stormfront.org
21,459
+150
+230
+174
47,969
voxday.blogspot.com
92,884
+3
-11
+17
55,893
sott.net
14,755
+134
+150
+76
25,005
Less than two years ago, we were towards
the lower end of the traffic rankings of these dozens of webzines, and now we are near the very top. For
example, during this period our relative traffic ranking has grown by 229% over that of
Counterpunch
and 34% over that of
TAC
. Even more remarkably, our traffic was improved by 133% over the venerable
and very mainstream
New Republic
, placing us at roughly two-thirds of the readership of that
century-old publication.
Our stated role as a refuge for the
purged and the persecuted has become an increasingly important one as other publications have become
conforming to the ruling dictates of the Corporate Media, perhaps for fear that they would be branded
"Russian Fake News."
This unfortunate situation has been
especially true of the late Alex Cockburn's once fiercely iconoclastic
Counterpunch
, which has
shown the door to many of its most popular writers, including Israel Shamir, Paul Craig Roberts, Mike
Whitney, Diana Johnstone, Linh Dinh, and C.J. Hopkins, all of whom are now published here instead. As a
likely consequence,
Counterpunch
's traffic-ranking has dropped by nearly 60% since the beginning of
2017, falling far behind our own rapidly growing readership numbers.
The obvious problem with offering
ideological fare hardly different than that of mainstream left-liberal publications such as HuffPost and
Salon is that you are directly competing with HuffPost and Salon, and their vastly larger footprint assures
them the lion's share of the market.
It's interesting to note that this
tremendous improvement has occurred even as we published articles at least as controversial as have any of
these other publications, and in many cases, much more so.
Just as my own 2013 purge launched this
webzine, ongoing purges in the media are spurring its expansion, even into new forms of content.
For 17 years, Bonnie Faulkner's
hour-long
Guns & Butter
was one of the most popular and controversial shows airing on the leftwing
Pacifica
radio network, headquartered in Berkeley, California. And then just a few months ago,
the show was suddenly cancelled
and its complete archives scrubbed from the
KPFA
website,
allegedly for its "controversial" content (though I suspect that
Pacifica
's
severe financial problems
may have allowed outside donors the necessary leverage to finally remove a
long-standing thorn in their side).
Regardless, KPFA's loss is our gain, and
I'm very pleased to announce that
Guns & Butter
has now joined
The Unz Review
as our first podcast, with the website
software having been extended to handle that additional form of content. This includes the hundreds of
Guns & Butter
shows aired since 2001, with hopes that some additional past shows will soon be located
and added.
The most recent Guns & Butter podcast is
available on the Home page and the sidebars of all other pages, as are the complete archives here:
It was apparently the broadcast of
portions of the "Deep Truth" conference in July that led to the sudden cancellation of Guns & Butter, and
here's one of those shows, which featuring our own Philip Giraldi:
Josh Rogin
uses the Senate's 63-37 vote on S.J.Res. 54 earlier this week to make a very strange
claim:
The Senate's stunning bipartisan rebuke of President Trump's handling of U.S.-Saudi
relations shows that the internationalist, values-based foreign policy of the late senator
John McCain still holds significant weight in both parties [bold mine-DL].
At the end of his career, McCain was one of the foremost defenders of U.S. involvement in
the war on Yemen. I suppose it was fitting that he capped off a long career of supporting
unnecessary and illegal wars by proudly supporting a truly indefensible one. When U.S. support
for the war began in 2015, he and Lindsey Graham
chastised Obama for not doing enough to help the Saudi coalition. Needless to say,
he was an
early and eager supporter of the intervention . When McCain was asked about the coalition's
bombing campaign and the civilian casualties that it was causing, he denied
that there were any. "Thank God for the Saudis," he once
said , praising the kingdom for its role in fueling the war in Syria.
I
commented on McCain's support for the war on Yemen in a post last year:
In addition to dismissing the civilian casualties caused by the indiscriminate coalition
bombing campaign, McCain has reliably recited Saudi propaganda to provide cover for the war
while completely ignoring the catastrophic humanitarian crisis that their campaign has done
so much to cause.
McCain was the champion of a particular strain of aggressive interventionism that relied on
moralizing rhetoric to justify unjust actions. His foreign policy was "values-based" in the
sense that he would use "values" language to rally support for attacking certain regimes, but
when it came to applying the same standards to U.S. allies and clients McCain frequently became
mute or turned into a cynical apologist on behalf of states aligned with Washington. That is
certainly how he acted
when it came to the
Saudi coalition war on Yemen . Back when there were very few critics of the war in the
Senate, McCain was one of their
loudest opponents :
McCain incredibly described the Saudis as a "nation under attack" because of incursions
into Saudi territory that were provoked by the Saudi-led bombing campaign. Graham portrayed
the Saudis as victims of Yemeni "aggression," which has everything completely and obviously
backwards. It requires swallowing Saudi propaganda whole to argue that the Saudis and their
allies have been acting in self-defense, and that is what McCain and Graham tried to do. Both
repeatedly asserted that the Houthis are Iranian proxies when the best evidence suggests that
Iran's role in the conflict has always been negligible, and then justified their complete
indifference to the consequences of the Saudi-led war by complaining about Iranian behavior
elsewhere. Needless to say, the humanitarian crisis brought on by the Saudi-led bombing
campaign and blockade never once came up in their remarks, but I'm sure if they ever do
mention it they'll blame it on Iran somehow.
McCain used many of the same cynical and dishonest arguments then that Trump administration
officials use now. The senators that voted for S.J.Res. 54 were not following McCain's example
and they were definitely not embracing the kind of foreign policy he supported. On the
contrary, the success of the Sanders-Lee-Murphy resolution this week was as much a rebuke to
McCain's foreign policy legacy as it was a rebuke to Trump's shameless Saudi First behavior.
Opposition to the war on Yemen was something that McCain vehemently rejected, and it is simply
and obviously wrong to credit McCain's foreign policy views for the antiwar victory that Sens.
Sanders, Murphy, Lee, and their colleagues won this week. For the last twenty-five years,
McCain never saw a U.S.-backed war he couldn't support, and that included the war on Yemen.
When the Senate voted to advance S.J.Res. 54 on Wednesday, they were voting against the war
that McCain had vocally backed for years.
Nothing changed in almost five years. The situation actually became worse as Democratic Party became the second War Party.
Notable quotes:
"... Interventionists in Congress have no problem if a president starts wars on his own, because he is pursuing the policy they would have voted for anyway if they were bothered to vote on such things. They are ..."
"... Other members of Congress have no strong ideological motivation for this behavior, but simply want to be able to grandstand on major issues without suffering serious political consequences. They are glad to avoid having to vote one way or another on a war, since that potentially could come back to haunt them if the war drags on, if it fails, or if many Americans are killed. It's safer and easier for them to cheer on a president's illegal war when it's popular and then start griping about it when it goes badly ..."
Paul Pillar
remarks on Congress' screwed-up priorities regarding its role in foreign policy
decisions:
The role that the U.S. Congress has assumed for itself as a player in foreign policy
exhibits an odd and indefensible pattern these days. Senator Chris Murphy calls it a "double
standard," although that might be too mild a term. On one hand there are vigorous efforts to
insert Congress into the negotiation of an agreement on Iran's nuclear program. The efforts
extend even to attempts to interfere in the details of what is being negotiated, as reflected
in a string of amendments being considered in debate in the Senate this week on a bill laying
out a procedure for Congress to pass a quick judgment on the agreement. On the other hand
there is inaction, with little or no prospect of any action, on an authorization for the use
of military force against the so-called Islamic State.
Pillar is right that this is just the opposite of what Congress should be doing. If there is
a time when Congress ought to be deferring to the executive on foreign policy, it is when the
U.S. is involved in negotiations with other governments. The same people that claim to be
horrified by the idea of "535 commanders-in-chief" believe that they must sound off early and
often on every detail of a complex negotiated settlement. War can be left to the discretion of
the president and his officials, but not diplomacy. The same members that can't be bothered to
assume their proper constitutional responsibilities and happily yield to one illegal
presidential war after another cannot wait to meddle in a diplomatic process that, if
successful, will make a future conflict less likely.
Interventionists in Congress have no problem if a president starts wars on his own, because
he is pursuing the policy they would have voted for anyway if they were bothered to vote on
such things. They are alarmed by negotiations that could make it more difficult for a
future president to attack the regime involved in the talks. These hawks have excessive
confidence that military action can "solve" problems overseas, and so they don't to impose
limits on what the U.S. does in its foreign wars. They tend to see diplomacy as nothing but
appeasement and therefore something that should be undermined, second-guessed, and sabotaged as
much as possible.
Other members of Congress have no strong ideological motivation for this behavior, but
simply want to be able to grandstand on major issues without suffering serious political
consequences. They are glad to avoid having to vote one way or another on a war, since that
potentially could come back to haunt them if the war drags on, if it fails, or if many
Americans are killed. It's safer and easier for them to cheer on a president's illegal war when
it's popular and then start griping about it when it goes badly, and because they never cast a
vote one for or against the war they can have it both ways. If Congressional meddling succeeds
in damaging negotiations, any later costs to the U.S. from that missed opportunity won't be
linked back to the meddling members of Congress.
If the meddling doesn't work as intended, most
people will quickly forget it. In the meantime, the meddlers will get credit for "standing up"
against appeasement or whatever nonsensical description they choose to use.
Unfortunately,
there is normally no political cost for members of Congress that want to use diplomacy with an
unpopular government as an excuse to demagogue and look "tough" to the voters back home. That
is why many of them will try to interfere with U.S. diplomacy while giving the president free
rein to wage illegal wars for as long as he wants.
After reading Josh Marshall/David Frum debate on the nuclear deal yesterday, I found one of
the most effective Frum's arguments was liberals are claiming it is 2002 Iraq/n again. (Fair
argument considering Chait's great note on the 61 times Kristol uses
Churchill/Chamberlain/Hitler references.) Trying to avoid historical analogies, I am still
looking for actual evidence that Iran is building the bomb. The conservative argument still
rest on Iran still wants the bomb and the deal can't absolutely stop them.
Any thoughts on Stewart on Judith Miller interview on why the press accepted the
government's point that Iraq was building the bomb. Living through 2002, I was against the
Iraq War because I did not find the Bush administration WMD argument convincing enough and
felt it was a lot of heresy evidence. And i am seeing a similar argument with Iran.
Gage
Skidmore /
Charles Haynes /Flickr Josh Rogin
uses the Senate's 63-37 vote on S.J.Res. 54 earlier this week to make a very strange claim:
The Senate's stunning bipartisan rebuke of President Trump's handling of U.S.-Saudi
relations shows that the internationalist, values-based foreign policy of the late senator
John McCain still holds significant weight in both parties [bold mine-DL].
At the end of his career, McCain was one of the foremost defenders of U.S. involvement in
the war on Yemen. I suppose it was fitting that he capped off a long career of supporting
unnecessary and illegal wars by proudly supporting a truly indefensible one. When U.S. support
for the war began in 2015, he and Lindsey Graham
chastised Obama for not doing enough to help the Saudi coalition. Needless to say,
he was an
early and eager supporter of the intervention . When McCain was asked about the coalition's
bombing campaign and the civilian casualties that it was causing, he denied
that there were any. "Thank God for the Saudis," he once
said , praising the kingdom for its role in fueling the war in Syria.
I
commented on McCain's support for the war on Yemen in a post last year:
In addition to dismissing the civilian casualties caused by the indiscriminate coalition
bombing campaign, McCain has reliably recited Saudi propaganda to provide cover for the war
while completely ignoring the catastrophic humanitarian crisis that their campaign has done
so much to cause.
McCain was the champion of a particular strain of aggressive interventionism that relied on
moralizing rhetoric to justify unjust actions. His foreign policy was "values-based" in the
sense that he would use "values" language to rally support for attacking certain regimes, but
when it came to applying the same standards to U.S. allies and clients McCain frequently became
mute or turned into a cynical apologist on behalf of states aligned with Washington. That is
certainly how he acted
when it came to the
Saudi coalition war on Yemen . Back when there were very few critics of the war in the
Senate, McCain was one of their
loudest opponents :
McCain incredibly described the Saudis as a "nation under attack" because of incursions
into Saudi territory that were provoked by the Saudi-led bombing campaign. Graham portrayed
the Saudis as victims of Yemeni "aggression," which has everything completely and obviously
backwards. It requires swallowing Saudi propaganda whole to argue that the Saudis and their
allies have been acting in self-defense, and that is what McCain and Graham tried to do. Both
repeatedly asserted that the Houthis are Iranian proxies when the best evidence suggests that
Iran's role in the conflict has always been negligible, and then justified their complete
indifference to the consequences of the Saudi-led war by complaining about Iranian behavior
elsewhere. Needless to say, the humanitarian crisis brought on by the Saudi-led bombing
campaign and blockade never once came up in their remarks, but I'm sure if they ever do
mention it they'll blame it on Iran somehow.
McCain used many of the same cynical and dishonest arguments then that Trump administration
officials use now. The senators that voted for S.J.Res. 54 were not following McCain's example
and they were definitely not embracing the kind of foreign policy he supported. On the
contrary, the success of the Sanders-Lee-Murphy resolution this week was as much a rebuke to
McCain's foreign policy legacy as it was a rebuke to Trump's shameless Saudi First behavior.
Opposition to the war on Yemen was something that McCain vehemently rejected, and it is simply
and obviously wrong to credit McCain's foreign policy views for the antiwar victory that Sens.
Sanders, Murphy, Lee, and their colleagues won this week. For the last twenty-five years,
McCain never saw a U.S.-backed war he couldn't support, and that included the war on Yemen.
When the Senate voted to advance S.J.Res. 54 on Wednesday, they were voting against the war
that McCain had vocally backed for years.
"... With the advent of Obama, many peace leaders and followers joined the Obama political machine .Those who were not co-opted were quickly disillusioned on all counts. Obama continued the ongoing wars and added new ones -- Libya, Honduras, Syria. The US occupation in Iraq led to new extremist militia armies which preceded to defeat US trained vassal armies up to the gates of Baghdad. In short time Obama launched a flotilla of warships and warplanes to the South China Sea and dispatched added troops to Afghanistan. ..."
"... The anti-war movement which started in opposition to the Iraq war was marginalized by the two dominant parties. The result was the multiplication of new wars. By the second year of Obama's presidency the US was engaged in seven wars. ..."
"... The international conditions are ripening. Washington has alienated countries around the world ;it is challenged by allies and faces formidable rivals. The domestic economy is polarized and the elites are divided. ..."
Over the past three decades, the US government has engaged in over a dozen wars, none of
which have evoked popular celebrations either before, during or after. Nor did the government
succeed in securing popular support in its efforts to confront the economic crises of 2008
– 2009.
This paper will begin by discussing the major wars of our time, namely the two US invasions
of Iraq . We will proceed to analyze the nature of the popular response and the political
consequences.
In the second section we will discuss the economic crises of 2008 -2009, the government
bailout and popular response. We will conclude by focusing on the potential powerful changes
inherent in mass popular movements.
The Iraq War and the US Public
In the run-up to the two US wars against Iraq, (1990 – 01 and 2003 – 2011) there
was no mass war fever, nor did the public celebrate the outcome. On the contrary both wars were
preceded by massive protests in the US and among EU allies. The first Iraqi invasion was
opposed by the vast-majority of the US public despite a major mass media and regime propaganda
campaign backed by President George H. W. Bush. Subsequently, President Clinton launched a
bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998 with virtually no public support or
approval.
March 20, 2003, President George W. Bush launched the second major war against Iraq despite
massive protests in all major US cities. The war was officially concluded by President Obama in
December 2011. President Obama's declaration of a successful conclusion failed to elicit
popular agreement.
Several questions arise:
Why mass opposition at the start of the Iraq wars and why did they fail to continue?
Why did the public refuse to celebrate President Obama's ending of the war in 2011?
Why did mass protests of the Iraq wars fail to produce durable political vehicles to
secure the peace?
The Anti-Iraq War Syndrome
The massive popular movements which actively opposed the Iraq wars had their roots in
several historical sources. The success of the movements that ended the Viet Nam war, the ideas
that mass activity could resist and win was solidly embedded in large segments of the
progressive public. Moreover, they strongly held the idea that the mass media and Congress
could not be trusted; this reinforced the idea that mass direct action was essential to reverse
Presidential and Pentagon war policies.
The second factor encouraging US mass protest was the fact that the US was internationally
isolated. Presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush wars faced hostile regime and mass
opposition in Europe, the Middle East and in the UN General Assembly. US activists felt that
they were part of a global movement which could succeed.
Thirdly the advent of Democratic President Clinton did not reverse the mass anti-war
movements.The terror bombing of Iraq in December 1998 was destructive and Clinton's war against
Serbia kept the movements alive and active To the extent that Clinton avoided large scale
long-term wars, he avoided provoking mass movements from re-emerging during the latter part of
the 1990's.
The last big wave of mass anti-war protest occurred from 2003 to 2008. Mass anti-war protest
to war exploded soon after the World Trade Center bombings of 9/11. White House exploited the
events to proclaim a global 'war on terror', yet the mass popular movements interpreted the
same events as a call to oppose new wars in the Middle East.
Anti-war leaders drew activists of the entire decade, envisioning a 'build-up' which could
prevent the Bush regime from launching a series of wars without end. Moreover, the
vast-majority of the public was not convinced by officials' claims that Iraq, weakened and
encircled, was stocking 'weapons of mass destruction' to attack the US.
Large scale popular protests challenged the mass media, the so called respectable press and
ignored the Israeli lobby and other Pentagon warlords demanding an invasion of Iraq. The
vast-majority of American, did not believe they were threatened by Saddam Hussain they felt a
greater threat from the White House's resort to severe repressive legislation like the Patriot
Act. Washington's rapid military defeat of Iraqi forces and its occupation of the Iraqi state
led to a decline in the size and scope of the anti-war movement but not to its potential mass
base.
Two events led to the demise of the anti-war movements. The anti-war leaders turned from
independent direct action to electoral politics and secondly, they embraced and channeled their
followers to support Democratic presidential candidate Obama. In large part the movement
leaders and activists believed that direct action had failed to prevent or end the previous two
Iraq wars. Secondly, Obama made a direct demagogic appeal to the peace movement – he
promised to end wars and pursue social justice at home.
With the advent of Obama, many peace leaders and followers joined the Obama political
machine .Those who were not co-opted were quickly disillusioned on all counts. Obama continued
the ongoing wars and added new ones -- Libya, Honduras, Syria. The US occupation in Iraq led to
new extremist militia armies which preceded to defeat US trained vassal armies up to the gates
of Baghdad. In short time Obama launched a flotilla of warships and warplanes to the South
China Sea and dispatched added troops to Afghanistan.
The mass popular movements of the previous two decades were totally disillusioned, betrayed
and disoriented. While most opposed Obama's 'new' and 'old wars' they struggled to find new
outlets for their anti-war beliefs. Lacking alternative anti-war movements, they were
vulnerable to the war propaganda of the media and the new demagogue of the right. Donald Trump
attracted many who opposed the war monger Hilary Clinton.
The Bank Bailout: Mass Protest
Denied
In 2008, at the end of his presidency, President George W. Bush signed off on a massive
federal bailout of the biggest Wall Street banks who faced bankruptcy from their wild
speculative profiteering.
In 2009 President Obama endorsed the bailout and urged rapid Congressional approval.
Congress complied to a $700-billion- dollar handout ,which according to Forbes (July 14, 2015)
rose to $7.77 trillion. Overnight hundreds of thousands of American demanded Congress rescind
the vote. Under immense popular protest, Congress capitulated. However President Obama and the
Democratic Party leadership insisted: the bill was slightly modified and approved. The 'popular
will' was denied. The protests were neutralized and dissipated. The bailout of the banks
proceeded, while several million households watched while their homes were foreclosed ,despite
some local protests. Among the anti-bank movement, radical proposals flourished, ranging from
calls to nationalize them, to demands to let the big banks go bankrupt and provide federal
financing for co-operatives and community banks.
Clearly the vast-majority of the American people were aware and acted to resist
corporate-collusion to plunder taxpayers.
Conclusion: What is to be Done?
Mass popular mobilizations are a reality in the United States. The problem is that they have
not been sustained and the reasons are clear : they lacked political organization which would
go beyond protests and reject lesser evil policies.
The anti-war movement which started in opposition to the Iraq war was marginalized by the
two dominant parties. The result was the multiplication of new wars. By the second year of
Obama's presidency the US was engaged in seven wars.
By the second year of Trump's Presidency the US was threatening nuclear wars against Russia,
Iran and other 'enemies' of the empire. While public opinion was decidedly opposed, the
'opinion' barely rippled in the mid-term elections.
Where have the anti-war and anti-bank masses gone? I would argue they are still with us but
they cannot turn their voices into action and organization if they remain in the Democratic
Party . Before the movements can turn direct action into effective political and economic
transformations, they need to build struggles at every level from the local to the
national.
The international conditions are ripening. Washington has alienated countries around the
world ;it is challenged by allies and faces formidable rivals. The domestic economy is
polarized and the elites are divided.
Mobilizations, as in France today, are self-organized through the internet; the mass media
are discredited. The time of liberal and rightwing demagogues is passing; the bombast of Trump
arouses the same disgust as ended the Obama regime.
Optimal conditions for a new comprehensive movement that goes beyond piecemeal reforms is on
the agenda. The question is whether it is now or in future years or decades?
Mass protest, which must ignore the mass media, depends on organizers. No organizers--no
protest. Since organizers are mostly working for somebodies agenda, those agendas apparently
don't want mass protest against war. They only want to push multi-genderism and minority
resistance, these days.
" Where have the anti-war and anti-bank masses gone? I would argue they are still with us
but they cannot turn their voices into action and organization if they remain in the
Democratic Party . Before the movements can turn direct action into effective political and
economic transformations, they need to build struggles at every level from the local to the
national. "
.gov gives not one damn what the people think and they willl do what pleases their
masters. We are allowed to "vote" once in a while to maintain the illusion that they
care.
Very few Americans are anti-war. They are just fine with endless war and the killing of
millions of people with brown skin for any reason the government gives. Even the so-called
anti-war protesters of the Sixties are now pro war. Back then there was a draft, and they
were at risk of dying in the war. Turns they were only against themselves dying, not somebody
else's child. The volunteer army is staffed by the unfortunates of American society who have
very few options except the military. Uneducated rural whites and inner city black youths are
today's military. Poor white trash and ghetto blacks. Who cares if they die? That's the
attitude of the Sixties anti-war crowd. Hypocrites.
A universal draft, male and female, would stop all the wars in a day.
True, I also believe many Americans turn their heads toward these endless/unneeded wars
because the "enemies" mortar fire is not landing in our own backyard.
But White people know if they pray, buy groceries, buy clothes for kids, keep their
appearance up... then losing jobs & middle class is only an obstacle if you don't work
harder... Fascism is about responsibility, looking and acting like the winner class. White
people will enlist in military, police, fire department... will work harder... will work 2-4
jobs... will blame themselves for everything.
No warning or reason given for closures,Customers, employees and communities are outraged
after Papa Gino's Pizza abruptly closed dozens of locations across New England overnight.
Now that congress serves only as a mechanism for creating and maintaining skimming
operations and rigging all markets, it is imperative that citizens get no information. Since
organized crime also owns the major media outlets, that is an easy task. With no information
in the mainstream there is no anti war and no anti bank.
Gone, like the people who wanted a real 9/11 investigation. Yahoos out there still think
that if it was an inside job someone would have spoke out by now . Lol
They are all their, they are just silenced in corporate main stream media whilst corporate
main stream media absolutely 'SCREAMS' about identity politics, not an accident. Identity
politics is the deep state and shadow government plan to silence the masses about fiscal and
foreign policy.
For example, even though I am centre left, I was there in the beginning of the alt right,
it was not white supremacy for the first few weeks it was Libertarian vs corporate
Republican, then the deep state and shadow government stepped in and using corporate main
stream media, re-branded alt-right as white supremacy, is was really fast.
Most people don't even know alt-right started out as very much Libertarian taking on the
corporate state and that is what triggered that attack and a stream of fake right wingers
(deep state agents) screaming they were the alt-right together with corporate main stream
media, to ensure Libertarian where silenced.
Look at it now, how much do you here from Libertarians, practically nothing, every time
they try, they are targeted as alt-right which they were as in the alternate to corporate
Republicans much the same as the Corporate Democrats. From my perspective the real left and
the Libertarians had much more in common, than the corporate Republicans and the corporate
Democrats (both attacking the libertarians and the greens to silence them).
They are all there fighting, just totally silenced in corporate main stream media, you
have to go to https://www.rt.com/ to find
them.
Bankers control the CFR, the CFR controls the media and most gov positions and most of the
deepstate 3 letter agencies.. Everything said is tracked by the NSA and everywhere you go is
tracked by your phone and cars. Ever wonder how they take over a grass root movement so fast?
Think about it.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every
Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether
he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass
arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city,
people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the
downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing
left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people
with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly
have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's
thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom
enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and
simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
The United States is now too big for popular protest. How can I, living in California,
have common cause with someone living in New York? We live on opposite sides of this
continent and have wildly different climates. Our heavy hitters are in Technology while New
York has Banking and Wall St.
Our elected officials are unable to get crap done in the same manner we're unable to get a
good protest underway. We can withdraw somewhat or go off grid where possible but that's
about it.
African American lack of support for the Iraq war:
According to several polls taken right before the war, only a minority of African-Americans
supported the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. Most notably, a poll by the
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies had found that only 19 percent of
African-Americans supported it.
That is a striking statistic, especially considering that more than 70 percent of white
Americans were in favor of the military invasion, according to some polls.
Also note that 90% of white males were for that illegal war of aggression.
the left is so obsessed with getting trump, they can do nothing else. they are so *******
stoopid, that they wont even try to develop someone to beat trump. they put 100% of their
energy in hating trump. they are blinded by hatred.
the end is nigh and there's nothing to be done about it.... 10 years and thats it....
beyond that and event horizon... black hole... no one knows. ai terminator coming soon...
thats all i can see.
Most thinking people are not wanting to be part of a movement that will be co-opted for
someone else's political gain. I would rather prepare myself and family for the inevitable
collapse of the economy and perhaps more that awaits us. That's enough to keep me busy. I
can't change the whole world but I can prepare to help my family friends and neighbors.
In answer to the the question posed by the headerof this article, they have either been
exiled from 'respectable' media or are stuck yelling "Trump! Trump! Trump! Russia! Russia!
Russia" like a poorly programmed NPC caught in an infinite loop.
The hidden hand behind the puppet show has done a hell of a job massaging the masses, and
turning their minds into mush.
"Where have the anti-war and anti-bank masses gone? I would argue they are still with us
but they cannot turn their voices into action and organization if they remain in the
Democratic Party ."
Exactly! If there are any anti-war people out there they sure as hell are not with the
Democratic Party. Those leftist lunatics are the most destructive political group on this
planet. Their thinking is 'divide & conquer', incite racial tensions, spew hatred,
promoting that killing babies before they are born, or even on the day they are born is
awesome. One has to wonder if people that evil even have souls.
As for anti-bankers... is this author off his rocker? He's not fooling anyone by trying to
present the theory that if there are any consciencous objectors out there they would be
supporters of the Democratic party. That thought is outright laughable. Even worse, to try to
create this new narrative by writing this type of article is absolutely despicable.
Fortunately, not the least bit convincing. People know better.
" Where have the anti-war and anti-bank masses gone? I would argue they are still with us
but they cannot turn their voices into action and organization if they remain in the
Democratic Party "
OK, so..... it's the Democrat Party, not the Democratic Party. Not like anyone gives a
**** what words mean any more, but.... whatever. Use the right ******* words or..... *******
don't. Not like any of this **** matters any more at this level.
And not all of us are ******* Democrats. Neither party is really anti-war or anti-bank
now, so the red/blue thing has little relevance to those subjects. We all argue about much
more important issues now like transgender bathrooms and whether Kanye West is a racist for
supporting Trump or not.
Politics has become a black hole collapsing on us. Black hole don't give a ****. Look at
that black hole. It just ate a star and became bigger. It don't care.
Sorry but I do not see Trump as "threatening nuclear war".
Surely some of the Deep Staters did. But it's hard to see Trump as in control. His
presidency has been great for exposing how things really work. That's worth a lot. If only
the idiots would pay attention. But they won't. They're too busy placing great importance on
the trifling and little or none on the critically important.
Excuse me I have to run now and get the latest iPhone.
"... Enough Afghans either support the Taliban or hate the occupation, and managed, through assorted conventional and unconventional operations, to fight on the ground. And "on the ground" is all that really matters. This war may well have been ill-advised and unwinnable from the start. ..."
"... There's no shame in defeat. But there is shame, and perfidy, in avoiding or covering up the truth. It's what the whole military-political establishment did after Vietnam, and, I fear, it's what they're doing again. ..."
America Is Headed For Military Defeat in
AfghanistanIt is time to acknowledge this is more than political. We can lose on the
battlefield, and it's happening right now. By Danny Sjursen •
November 30, 2018
Marines
with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, sprint across a field to load onto a
CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter during a mission in Helmand province, Afghanistan, July 4,
2014. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Joseph Scanlan / released) There's a prevailing maxim,
both inside the armed forces and around the Beltway, that goes something like this: "The U.S.
can never be militarily defeated in any war," certainly not by some third world country.
Heck, I used to believe that myself. That's why, in regard to Afghanistan, we've been told that
while America could lose the war due to political factors (such as the lack of grit
among "soft" liberals or defeatists), the military could never and will never lose on the
battlefield.
That entire maxim is about to be turned on its head. Get ready, because we're about to lose
this war militarily.
Consider this: the U.S. military has advised, assisted, battled, and bombed in Afghanistan
for 17-plus years. Ground troop levels have fluctuated from lows of some 10,000 to upwards of
100,000 servicemen and women. None of that has
achieved more than a tie, a bloody stalemate. Now, in the 18th year of this conflict, the
Kabul-Washington coalition's military is outright losing.
Let's begin with the broader measures. The Taliban controls or contests more districts --
some 44 percent -- than at any time since the 2001 invasion. Total combatant and civilian
casualties are forecasted to
top 20,000 this year -- another dreadful broken record. What's more, Afghan military casualties
are frankly unsustainable: the Taliban are killing more than the government can recruit. The
death rates are staggering, numbering 5,500 fatalities in 2015, 6,700 in 2016, and an estimate (the number is newly
classified) of "about 10,000" in 2017. Well, some might ask, what about American airpower --
can't that help stem the Taliban tide? Hardly. In 2018, as security deteriorated and the
Taliban made substantial gains, the U.S. actually
droppedmore bombs than in anyother year of the war . It
appears that nothing stands in the way of impending military defeat.
Then there are the very recent events on the ground -- and these are telling. Insider
attacks in which Afghan "allies" turn their guns on American advisors are back on the rise,
most recently in an attack that wounded a
U.S. Army general and threatened the top U.S. commander in the country. And while troop numbers
are way down from the high in 2011, American troops deaths are rising. Over the Thanksgiving
season alone, a U.S. Army Ranger was
killed in a friendly fire incident and three other troopers
died in a roadside bomb attack. And in what was perhaps only a (still disturbing) case of
misunderstood optics, the top U.S. commander, General Miller, was filmed carrying his own M4
rifle around Afghanistan. That's a long way from the days when then-General Petraeus (well
protected by soldiers, of course) walked around the markets of Baghdad in a soft cap and
without body armor.
More importantly, the Afghan army and police are getting hammered in larger and larger
attacks and taking unsustainable casualties. Some 26 Afghan security forces were killed on
Thanksgiving, 22 policemen
died in an attack on Sunday, and on Tuesday 30 civilians were
killed in Helmand province. And these were only the high-profile attacks, dwarfed by the
countless other countrywide incidents. All this proves that no matter how hard the U.S.
military worked, or how many years it committed to building an Afghan army in its own image,
and no matter how much air and logistical support that army received, the Afghan Security
Forces cannot win. The sooner Washington accepts this truth over the more comforting lie, the
fewer of our adulated American soldiers will have to die. Who is honestly ready to be the last
to die for a mistake, or at least a hopeless cause?
Now, admittedly, this author is asking for trouble -- and fierce rebuttals -- from both
peers and superiors still serving on active duty. And that's understandable. The old maxim of
military invincibility soothes these men, mollifies their sense of personal loss, whether of
personal friends or years away from home, in wars to which they've now dedicated their entire
adult lives. Questioning whether there even is a military solution in Afghanistan, or, more
specifically, predicting a military defeat, serves only to upend their mental framework
surrounding the war.
Still, sober strategy and basic honesty demands a true assessment of the military situation
in America's longest war. The Pentagon loves metrics, data, and stats. Well, as demonstrated
daily on the ground in Afghanistan, all the security (read: military) metrics point towards
impending defeat. At best, the Afghan army, with ample U.S. advisory detachments and air
support, can hold on to the northernmost and westernmost provinces of the country, while a
Taliban coalition overruns the south and east. This will be messy, ugly, and discomfiting for
military and civilian leaders alike. But unless Washington is prepared to redeploy 100,000
soldiers to Afghanistan (again) -- and still only manage a tie, by the way -- it is also all
but inevitable.
The United States military did all it was asked during more than 17 years of warfare in
Afghanistan. It raided, it bombed, it built, it surged, it advised, it everything. Still, none
of that was sufficient. Enough Afghans either support the Taliban or hate the occupation,
and managed, through assorted conventional and unconventional operations, to fight on the
ground. And "on the ground" is all that really matters. This war may well have been ill-advised
and unwinnable from the start.
There's no shame in defeat. But there is shame, and perfidy, in avoiding or
covering up the truth. It's what the whole military-political establishment did after Vietnam,
and, I fear, it's what they're doing again.
Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army officer and a regular contributor to Unz. He served
combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his
alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War,
Ghostriders of
Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet .
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an
unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of
the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
Witch hunt has its own dynamics and it is not necessary to get any facts to inflict great damage. Mueller, the key person in 8/11
investigation, is first and foremost a loyal neocon/neolib establishment stooge, not so much a lawyer. So the shadow of McCarthyism
fall on the Washitnton, DC.
Felix Sater was FBI asset from the very beginning.
Which such Byzantium politics in Washington and intrigues between almost identical parties worth of Madrid court it is not
accidental that FBI coves with upper hand in its struggle with Russian intelligence, Russians can't get such training in
viciousness, double dealing and false flag operations anywhere.
Notable quotes:
"... Disappearing for the midterms , Russiagate has re-emerged front and center. This week's barrage of developments in the cases of indicted Trump campaign figures Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and George Papadopoulos have renewed long-running declarations of a presidency in peril . ..."
"... They coincide with a fresh round of alarm over the fate of Mueller's investigation following Trump's ouster of attorney general Jeff Sessions and the installation of Matthew Whitaker in his place. ..."
"... Although Mueller's final report has yet to be released, the issue that sparked the FBI investigation he inherited has already been resolved. The FBI began eyeing potential Trump-Russia ties in July 2016 after getting a tip that unpaid campaign aide George Papadopoulos may have been informed that Russia was in possession of stolen Democratic Party emails well before WikiLeaks made them public. But that trail went cold. It turns out that a London-based professor, Joseph Mifsud, told Papadopoulos that the Russian government might possess thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails. ..."
"... The Russia probe's other instigating figure, Carter Page, was also a low-level, unpaid campaign official. The information that led to his investigation is even more suspect. ..."
"... But its a key source for that supposition turned out to be the Steele dossier -- the salacious, Democratic Party-funded opposition research compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. And while the FBI got Papadopoulos on lying to them, Page has not been accused of any crime... ..."
"... Just as the evidence used in Manafort's bank and tax fraud case underscored that he worked against Russian interests in Ukraine , Flynn's indictment turns up another inconvenient fact for the collusion hopeful: The foreign government that Flynn colluded with on Trump's behalf -- against the US government -- is not Russia, but Israel . ..."
"... Russians never signed on, and Cohen only grew increasingly frustrated with Sater's failure to live up to his lofty pledges. "You are putting my job in jeopardy and making me look incompetent," Cohen wrote Sater on December 31, 2015. "I gave you two months and the best you send me is some bullshit garbage invite by some no name clerk at a third-tier bank." ..."
"... It is also possible that Manafort's alleged lies have nothing to do with a Russia conspiracy; after all, his case, and that of his deputy Rick Gates, pertained not to Russia or the 2016 campaign, but instead to financial crimes during Manafort's lobbying stint in Ukraine. ..."
They coincide with a fresh round of alarm over the fate of Mueller's investigation following Trump's ouster of attorney
general Jeff Sessions and the installation of Matthew Whitaker in his place. Leading Democrats now see the probe as so paramount
that, despite having re-captured the House running on health-care issues, protecting the investigation has been deemed "our top priority"
(Representative Jerry Nadler) and "at the top of the agenda," (Representative Adam Schiff).
There is nothing objectionable about wanting to safeguard the Mueller investigation, nor about concerns that Trump's appointment
of an unqualified loyalist may jeopardize it. Mueller should complete his work, unimpeded. The question is one of priorities. After
all, the fixation on Mueller has not just raised anticipation of Trump's indictment, or even impeachment -- it has also
overshadowed many of
the actual policies that those seeking his political demise oppose him for. At this highly charged moment, it seems prudent to re-consider
whether the probe remains worthy of such attention and high hopes.
Although Mueller's final report has yet to be released, the issue that sparked the FBI investigation he inherited has already
been resolved. The FBI
began eyeing potential Trump-Russia ties in July 2016 after getting a tip that unpaid campaign aide George Papadopoulos may have
been informed that Russia was in possession of stolen Democratic Party emails well before WikiLeaks made them public. But that trail
went cold. It turns out that a London-based professor, Joseph Mifsud, told Papadopoulos that the Russian government might possess
thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails.
The FBI interviewed Mifsud in Washington, DC, in February 2017, but Mueller has never alleged that Mifsud works with the Russian
government. Papadopoulos was ultimately sentenced to just 14 days behind bars for lying to the FBI about the timing and nature of
his contacts with Mifsud. He reported to a federal prison on Monday.
The Russia probe's other instigating figure, Carter Page, was also a low-level, unpaid campaign official. The information
that led to his investigation is even more suspect. In its October 2016 application for a surveillance warrant on Page,
the FBI claimed it "believes that [Russia's]
efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with [the Trump campaign]." But its a key source
for that supposition turned out to be the Steele dossier -- the salacious, Democratic Party-funded opposition research compiled by
former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. And while the FBI got Papadopoulos on lying to them, Page has not been accused of any crime...
With the Russia investigation's catalysts coming up all but empty, there is little reason to expect that the remaining campaign
members who face prison time will reverse that trend. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn awaits sentencing in the coming
weeks on charges similar to Papadopoulos's. Just as the evidence used in Manafort's bank and tax fraud case
underscored that he
worked against Russian interests in Ukraine , Flynn's indictment turns up another inconvenient fact for the collusion
hopeful: The foreign government that Flynn colluded with on Trump's behalf -- against the US government -- is
not Russia, but Israel .
Despite much hoopla to the contrary, Muller's new indictment of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen contains more inconvenient facts.
Cohen has pleaded guilty to a single count for lying to Congress about his role in a failed attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
According to the plea document, Cohen gave Congress false written answers in order to "minimize links," between the Moscow project
and Trump, and to "give the false impression" that it was abandoned earlier than it actually was. Cohen
told the court that
he made these statements to "be loyal" to Trump and to be consistent with his "political messaging."
As I noted in The Nation
in October 2017 , the attempted real-estate venture in Russia "does raise a potential conflict of interest" for Trump, who
"pursued a Moscow deal as he praised Putin on the campaign trail." But nothing in Cohen's indictment incriminates Trump. Much of
what it details was previously known, and rather than revealing an illicit, transatlantic collusion scheme, it reads more like a
slapstick mafia buddy comedy. As
Buzzfeed News reported in May , Cohen communicated extensively with Trump organization colleague Felix Sater -- identified
in the Cohen plea as "Individual 2″ -- who had promised to secure Russian financing for the proposed Moscow project. But the
Russians never signed on, and Cohen only grew increasingly frustrated with Sater's failure to live up to his lofty pledges. "You
are putting my job in jeopardy and making me look incompetent," Cohen wrote Sater on December 31, 2015. "I gave you two months and
the best you send me is some bullshit garbage invite by some no name clerk at a third-tier bank."
Cohen then took matters into his own hands. As was previously known, he did not have an email address for a Russian contact, so
he wrote to a generic email address at the office of Dmitri Peskov, the press secretary for Vladimir Putin ("Russian Official 1,"
in the indictment). We now learn from Cohen that he managed to reach Peskov's assistant, who asked him "detailed questions and took
notes." But as The New York Times noted when the Trump
Moscow story first emerged: "The project never got [Russian] government permits or financing, and died weeks later." Sater tried
to save the project. He discussed arranging visits to Russia by both Cohen and Trump, but Cohen ultimately backed out after allegations
of Russian email hacking surfaced in June 2016.
According to Buzzfeed , Sater even proposed giving Putin a $50 million penthouse as an enticement, but "the plan never went anywhere
because the tower deal ultimately fizzled, and it is not clear whether Trump knew of "Sater's idea."
Cohen now claims that he spoke to Trump about the project more than the three times that he informed Congress about. For their
part, Trump's attorneys
do not seem concerned, saying that his recently submitted answers to Mueller align with Cohen's account. That Cohen perjured
himself to Congress raises problems for him, but it is hard to see how his lies about a project that failed and a proposed trip to
Russia that never happened can hurt Trump. That could only change if, as part of his new cooperation deal with Mueller, Cohen has
more to give.
As for Manafort, his case took a major turn when Mueller canceled their cooperation agreement and accused him of "crimes and lies."
The crucial questions are what does Mueller allege he lied to him about and what evidence is there to substantiate that charge. Mueller
is expected to provide details in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we can only speculate.
The revelation that
Manafort's lawyers shared information with Trump's attorneys even after the plea deal was struck in September has inevitably
fueled speculation that Manafort is lying to benefit Trump, or even hide evidence of a Russia conspiracy. That is certainly possible.
But theories that Manafort is then banking on a pardon from Trump do not square with the
prevailing
view that his
agreement with Mueller -- which included admitting to crimes that could be re-charged in state court -- was "
pardon proof ."
It is also possible that Manafort's alleged lies have nothing to do with a Russia conspiracy; after all, his case, and that
of his deputy Rick Gates, pertained not to Russia or the 2016 campaign, but instead to financial crimes during Manafort's lobbying
stint in Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal suggests that is the case,
reporting that Manafort's alleged lies "don't appear to be central to the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election
that Mr. Mueller is investigating." Earlier this month,
ABC News claimed , citing "multiple sources," that Mueller's investigators are "not getting what they want" from Manafort's cooperation
deal. When it comes to collusion, perhaps there is just nothing to get.
This is from 1999 and in 2018 we see that Mills was right.
Notable quotes:
"... Personnel were constantly shifting back and forth from the corporate world to the military world. Big companies like General Motors had become dependent on military contracts. Scientific and technological innovations sponsored by the military helped fuel the growth of the economy. ..."
"... the military had become an active political force. Members of Congress, once hostile to the military, now treated officers with great deference. And no president could hope to staff the Department of State, find intelligence officers, and appoint ambassadors without consulting with the military. ..."
"... Mills believed that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life constituted a substantial attack on the isolationism which had once characterized public opinion. He argued that "the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large." ..."
"... In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what the military definition of reality forbids. If the changes described by Mills were indeed permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical, and depressing, transformation of the nature of the United States. ..."
"... The immediate consequence of these changes in the world's balance of power has been a dramatic decrease in that proportion of the American economy devoted to defense. ..."
"... Mills's prediction that both the economy and the political system of the United States would come to be ever more dominated by the military ..."
"... Business firms, still the most powerful force in American life, are increasingly global in nature, more interested in protecting their profits wherever they are made than in the defense of the country in which perhaps only a minority of their employees live and work. Give most of the leaders of America's largest companies a choice between invading another country and investing in its industries and they will nearly always choose the latter over the former. ..."
"... Mills believed that in the 1950s, for the first time in American history, the military elite had formed a strong alliance with the economic elite. ..."
One of the crucial arguments Mills made in The Power Elite was that the emergence of
the Cold War completely transformed the American public's historic opposition to a permanent
military establishment in the United States. In deed, he stressed that America's military elite
was now linked to its economic and political elite. Personnel were constantly shifting back and
forth from the corporate world to the military world. Big companies like General Motors had
become dependent on military contracts. Scientific and technological innovations sponsored by
the military helped fuel the growth of the economy. And while all these links between the
economy and the military were being forged, the military had become an active political force.
Members of Congress, once hostile to the military, now treated officers with great deference.
And no president could hope to staff the Department of State, find intelligence officers, and
appoint ambassadors without consulting with the military.
Mills believed that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life
constituted a substantial attack on the isolationism which had once characterized public
opinion. He argued that "the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are
attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large." Their goal was
nothing less than a redefinition of reality -- one in which the American people would come to
accept what Mills called "an emergency without a foreseeable end." "
War or a high state of war
preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States,"
Mills wrote. In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a
genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what the
military definition of reality forbids. If the changes described by Mills were indeed
permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical,
and depressing, transformation of the nature of the United States.
Much as Mills wrote, it remains true today that Congress is extremely friendly to the
military, at least in part because the military has become so powerful in the districts of most
congressmen. Military bases are an important source of jobs for many Americans, and government
spending on the military is crucial to companies, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which
manufacture military equipment. American firms are the leaders in the world's global arms
market, manufacturing and exporting weapons everywhere. Some weapons systems never seem to die,
even if, as was the case with a "Star Wars" system designed to destroy incoming missiles, there
is no demonstrable military need for them.
Yet despite these similarities with the 1950s, both the world and the role that America
plays in that world have changed. For one thing, the United States has been unable to muster
its forces for any sustained use in any foreign conflict since Vietnam. Worried about the
possibility of a public backlash against the loss of American lives, American presidents either
refrain from pursuing military adventures abroad or confine them to rapid strikes, along the
lines pursued by Presidents Bush and Clinton in Iraq. Since 1989, moreover, the collapse of
communism in Russia and Eastern Europe has undermined the capacity of America's elites to
mobilize support for military expenditures. China, which at the time Mills wrote was considered a serious threat, is now viewed by American businessmen as a source of great potential
investment. Domestic political support for a large and permanent military establishment in the
United States, in short, can no longer be taken for granted.
The immediate consequence of these changes in the world's balance of power has been a
dramatic decrease in that proportion of the American economy devoted to defense. At the time
Mills wrote, defense expenditures constituted roughly 60 percent of all federal outlays and
consumed nearly 10 percent of the U. S. gross domestic product. By the late 1990s, those
proportions had fallen to 17 percent of federal outlays and 3.5 percent of GDP. Nearly three
million Americans served in the armed forces when The Power Elite appeared, but that
number had dropped by half at century's end. By almost any account, Mills's prediction that
both the economy and the political system of the United States would come to be ever more
dominated by the military is not borne out by historical developments since his time.
And how could he have been right? Business firms, still the most powerful force in American
life, are increasingly global in nature, more interested in protecting their profits wherever
they are made than in the defense of the country in which perhaps only a minority of their
employees live and work. Give most of the leaders of America's largest companies a choice
between invading another country and investing in its industries and they will nearly always
choose the latter over the former.
Mills believed that in the 1950s, for the first time in
American history, the military elite had formed a strong alliance with the economic elite. Now
it would be more correct to say that America's economic elite finds more in common with
economic elites in other countries than it does with the military elite of its own....
"... The Senate didn't go for Pompeo and Mattis' sales pitch for the war on Yemen on Wednesday. That's because it was filled with dishonest nonsense ..."
"... The absurdity of Pompeo's position becomes clear when we remember that Yemen would not be suffering from the world's worst humanitarian crisis were it not for the Saudi coalition's intervention, blockade, and interference in Yemen's economy. ..."
The Senate didn't go for Pompeo and Mattis' sales pitch for the war on Yemen on
Wednesday. That's because it was filled with dishonest nonsense like this:
Secretary Pompeo
* @SecPompeo
Iran's regime has no interest in easing Yemeni suffering; the
mullahs don't even care for ordinary Iranians. Saudi Arabia has
invested billions to relieve suffering in #Yemen. Iran has
invested zero.
C10.8K 11:02 AM-Nov 28, 2018 в
The truth is that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have used their donations as another weapon of
war while doing everything in their power to worsen the humanitarian crisis that their policies
created. Saudi "aid" efforts have been denounced by humanitarian organizations as a "war
tactic," and the Saudi government has used its donations to buy
good publicity from aid agencies and silence criticism. The "investments" that the Saudi
coalition governments have made are little more than poorly-concealed bribes to relieve
international pressure, and these same governments have used their donations as leverage to
blackmail the U.N. in the past.
The absurdity of Pompeo's position becomes clear when we remember that Yemen would not be
suffering from the world's worst humanitarian crisis were it not for the Saudi coalition's
intervention, blockade, and interference in Yemen's economy. The governments responsible for
causing the displacement of millions of people and creating famine conditions potentially
affecting up to 14 million do not merit praise for throwing a little money at the catastrophe
they have unleashed. Iran's interest in assisting suffering Yemenis or lack thereof is truly
beside the point when it is the Saudi coalition backed by the U.S. that has caused so much of
that suffering. War criminals do not get credit when they throw some cash at the wreckage of
the country they have destroyed, and Pompeo's attempt to give Saudi Arabia credit for
"relieving" suffering in Yemen is as perverse and disgusting as it gets.
Pompeo's statements about saudi support is absolutely astonishing in a very bad way.
Does he actually believe such nonsense? Is he being fed these gross distortions of reality
by his Iran working group led by Hook?
At some point,these lies go beyond the absurd, they go beyond propaganda, they become for
the world to see a war monger's mantra and justification for an attack on Iran.
Pompeo and bolton have gained world wide recognition as being mindless war mongers with
much power but to continue with absurd twisting of facts on the ground really does this
country a huge disservice-meanwhile the population in yemen starve.
Where is the justice, where is the humanity amongst these lies?
Greenwald Goes Ballistic On Politico "Theory" Guardian's Assange-Manafort Story Was
Planted By Russians
by Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/28/2018 - 20:25 105 SHARES
After The Guardian attempted to shovel what appears to be a wholly fabricated story down our
throats that Trump campaign manager met with Julian Assange at the London Embassy - Politico
allowed an ex-CIA agent to use their platform to come up with a ham-handed cover story ever;
Russia tricked The Guardian into publishing the Manafort-Assange propaganda.
To that end, The Intercept 's Glenn Greenwald (formerly of The Guardian ) ripped Politico an
entirely new oriface in a six-part Twitter dress down.
Greenwald also penned a
harsh rebuke to the Guardian 's "problematic" reporting in a Tuesday article titled: "It Is
Possible Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange. If True, There Should Be Ample Video and Other
Evidence Showing This."
In sum, the Guardian published a story today that it knew would explode into all sorts of
viral benefits for the paper and its reporters even though there are gaping holes and highly
sketchy aspects to the story.
It is certainly possible that Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and even Donald Trump himself
"secretly" visited Julian Assange in the Embassy. It's possible that Vladimir Putin and Kim
Jong Un joined them.
And if any of that happened, then there will be mountains of documentary proof in the form
of videos, photographs, and other evidence proving it . Thus far, no such evidence has been
published by the Guardian. Why would anyone choose to believe that this is true rather than
doing what any rational person, by definition, would do: wait to see the dispositive evidence
before forming a judgment?
The only reason to assume this is true without seeing such evidence is because enough
people want it to be true. The Guardian knows this. They knew that publishing this story
would cause partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news outlets
would hyperventilate over it , and that they'd reap the rewards regardless of whether the
story turned out to be true or false. It may be true. But only the evidence, which has yet to
be seen, will demonstrate that one way or the other. -
Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
In short, The Guardian tried to proffer a load of easily disprovable claims - which if not
true, are pure propaganda. Once it began to blow up in their face, Politico let an
ex-CIA operative try to save face by suggesting Russia did it . Insanity at its finest.
Ever since Alan Rusbridger. left the Guardian as Chief Editor and made room for Assange
and Snowden etc., it seems that they have been infiltrated by the CIA and Luke H. gets
attention for his stories and Russia-hatred. The ENglish have been conditioned to hate Russia
and the Guardian will do anything to discredit Russia with whatever silly stories. Now they
are begging for money to survive: well, NO, because you went along with fake news to get some
money: corrupt, unlike Alan Rusbridger, Assange, Manning and Snowden.
Doesnt matter, 1/2 of our population is convinced, that our governmemt would never do to
the USA. what they do to other countries for the past 60 years.
Yep, the Russian Collusion / interference is so weak. Look at this story, it's breaking
and will be huge. Epstine's dirty details released, Muller looks pretty bad.
"... The Russian Navy detained the Ukrainian ships. Of course, the Western presstitutes, most of whom are CIA assets, will blame "Russian aggression." Washington and its presstitutes are doing everything they can to make impossible Trump's expressed goal of normal relations with Russia. NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu quickly aligned NATO with Ukraine: "NATO fully supports Ukraine's sovereignty and its territorial integrity, including its navigation rights in its territorial waters." ..."
"... The Russian government's response to Ukraine's provocation and violation of law was to call an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, as if anything would come of this. Washington pays such a large percentage of the UN budget, that few countries will side against Washington. As President Trump's crazed UN ambassador Nikki Haley said, "we take names." ..."
"... From all evidence, the Russian government still, despite all indications to the contrary, believes that presenting a non-threatening posture to the West, which appeals to law and not to arms, is effective in discrediting Western charges of aggression against Russia. If only it were true, but no sooner than a high Russian official announced that, despite the overwhelming elections for independence from Kiev in the breakway Russian provinces of Ukraine, Russia would not recognize the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk than "the Ukrainian army opened massive artillery fire on Sunday, shelling residential areas of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic." https://sputniknews.com/europe/201811261070125114-ukraine-kerch-strait-crisis-martial-law-poroshenko/ ..."
Ukrainian military ships have violated Russian restrictions in the Sea of Azov and Articles
19 and 21 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The Ukrainian Navy crossed the Russian
sea border and entered a closed area of Russian territorial waters. Clearly, Washington was
behind this as Ukraine would not undertake such a provocation on its own. Here is an accurate
explanation of the event: https://www.rt.com/news/444857-russia-ukraine-kerch-strait-standoff/
The US military/security complex prefers the risk of nuclear war to any diminution of its
$1,000 billion annual budget, a completely unnecessary sum that is destined to grow as the
presstitutes, in line with the military/security complex, continue to demonize both Russia and
Putin and to never question the obvious orchestrations that are used to portray Russia as a
threat.
The Russian government's response to Ukraine's provocation and violation of law was to call
an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, as if anything would come of this. Washington
pays such a large percentage of the UN budget, that few countries will side against Washington.
As President Trump's crazed UN ambassador Nikki Haley said, "we take names."
From all evidence, the Russian government still, despite all indications to the contrary,
believes that presenting a non-threatening posture to the West, which appeals to law and not to
arms, is effective in discrediting Western charges of aggression against Russia. If only it
were true, but no sooner than a high Russian official announced that, despite the overwhelming
elections for independence from Kiev in the breakway Russian provinces of Ukraine, Russia would
not recognize the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk than "the Ukrainian army opened
massive artillery fire on Sunday, shelling residential areas of the self-proclaimed Donetsk
People's Republic."
https://sputniknews.com/europe/201811261070125114-ukraine-kerch-strait-crisis-martial-law-poroshenko/
By trusting that there is a rule of law in the West, the Russian government is digging
Russia's grave while it allows Washington's Ukrainian Nazis to murder Russian people. The
Russian government is discrediting itself by trusting US vassals, such as Germany, to enforce
the Minsk agreement and, despite all evidence to the contrary, believing that there is a rule
of law in the West. Russia continues, year after year, to appeal to this non-existent entity
called the Western Rule of Law.
This policy reassures the Zionist Neoconservatives who rule Washington's foreign policy that
Russia is incapable of defending its interests.
ORDER IT NOW Russia Is Disadvantaged by Her Belief that the West Is Governed by Law, by Paul
Craig Roberts - The Unz Review
This makes Russia an easy mark for Washington to destabilize. We see it already in Putin's
falling approval ratings in Russia. The Russian government permits US-financed Russian
newspapers and NGO organizations to beat up the Russian government on a daily basis. Decades of
American propaganda have convinced many in the world that Washington's friendship is the key to
success. The Russian Atlanticist Integrationists believe that Putin stands in the way of this
friendship.
China is also an easy mark. The Chinese government permits Chinese students to study in the
US from whence they return brainwashed by US propaganda and become Washington's Fifth Column in
China.
It sometimes seems that Russia and China are more focused on gaining wealth than they are on
national survival. It is extraordinary that these two governments are still constrained in
their independence and remain dependent on the US dollar and Western financial systems for
clearances of their international trade.
As Washington controls the explanations, surviving Washington's hegemony is proving to be a
challenge for both countries.
Saving neoliberalism in the USA requires demonizing Russia. A funny thing is that Russia is a
neoliberal country since 1991, which was economically raped in 1991-2000 by some western
countries (with the help of some Harvard Business school economists, IMF and intelligence
agencies.) So now they are suffering for the second time for their overthrow of Bolshevism and
the switch to neoliberalism (which now looks like a misguided move, judging from economic
consequences for the majority of Russian population) ;-)
The Trumpenleft (or "Sputnik Left," as it is also called by professional
anti-Putin-Nazi intelligence analysts ) is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It is a
gang of nefarious Putin-Nazi infiltrators posing as respectable leftists in order to
disseminate Trumpian ideology and Putin-Nazi propaganda among an assortment of online leftist
magazines that hardly anyone ever actually reads. The aim of these insidious Trumpenleft
infiltrators is to sow confusion, chaos, and discord among actual, real, authentic leftists who
are going about the serious business of calling Donald Trump a fascist on the Internet
twenty-five times a day, verbally abusing Julian
Assange , occasionally pulling down oppressive statues, and sharing videos of racist idiots
acting like racist idiots in public.
... ... ...
This is the type of gobbledegook the Trumpenleft use to try to dupe real leftists into
putting down their phones for a minute and actually thinking through political issues!
Fortunately, no one is falling for it. As any bona fide leftist knows, there is no "mass
migration problem." The whole thing is simply a racist hoax concocted by Putin, Alex Jones, and
other Trumpian disinformationists. The only thing real leftists need to know about immigration
is that immigrants are good, and Trump, and walls, and borders are bad! All that other fancy
gibberish about global capitalism, Milton Friedman, labor markets, and national sovereignty is
nothing but fascist propaganda (which needs to be censored, or at least deplatformed, or
demonetized, or otherwise suppressed).
But Angela Nagle is just one example. The Trumpenleft is legion, and growing. Its membership
includes a handful of prominent (and rather less prominent) fake leftist figures: Glenn
Greenwald, who many among the "Resistance" would like to see renditioned and
indefinitely detained in some offshore Trumpenleft gulag somewhere; Matt Taibbi, who just
published
a treasonous article challenging the right of the US government to prosecute publishers as
"enemy agents" for publishing material they don't want published; Julian Assange, who is one
such publisher, and who the US has scheduled for public crucifixion just as
soon as they can get their hands on him; Aaron Maté of the Real News Network, a
notorious Trump-Russia " collusion denialist "; Caitlin Johnstone , an Australian blogger and poet who
the Red-Brown Putin-Nazi hunters at CounterPunch have become totally obsessed with;
Diana Johnstone , who they also don't like; and (full disclosure)
your humble narrator .
Now, normally, the opinions of some political journalists and rather marginal political
writers wouldn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but there's a war on, so
there's no room for neutrality. As I mentioned in my latest essay , over the
course of the next two years, the global capitalist ruling classes need to make an example of
Trump, and Assange, and anyone else who has had the gall to fuck with their global empire. Part
of how they are going to do this is to further polarize the already extremely polarized
ideological spectrum until everyone is forced onto one or the other side of a pro- or
anti-Trump equation, or a pro- or anti-populist equation or a pro- or anti-fascist
equation.
As you probably noticed, The Guardian has just launched a special six-week
"investigative series" exploring the whole " new populism " phenomenon
(which began with a lot of scary photos of Steve Bannon next to the word "populism"). We are
going to be hearing a lot about "populism" over the course of the next two years. We are going
to be hearing how "populism" is actually not that different from fascism, or at the very least
is inherently racist, and anti-Semitic, and xenophobic, and how, basically, anyone who
criticizes neoliberal elites or the corporate media is Russia-loving, pro-Trump Nazi.
Update 4 : A UN Security Council meeting has been called for 11am
tomorrow after Ukraine incident with Russia, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said in a
tweet.
* * *
Update 3 : according to media reports, on Monday Ukraine's president will propose imposing
military law, amid the ongoing crisis with Russia.
* * *
Update 2: This is the moment when the escalating crisis started...
* * *
Update 1: Following reports from the Ukraine navy that Russian ships had fired on Ukraine
vessels near the Kerch Strait, Ukraine accused Moscow of also illegally seizing three of its
naval ships - the "Berdyansʹk" and "Nikopolʹ" Gurza-class small armored artillery
boats and a raid tug A-947 "Jani Kapu" - off Crimea on Sunday after opening fire on them, a
charge that if confirmed could ignite a dangerous new crisis between the two countries.
As reported earlier, Russia did not immediately respond to the allegation, but Russian news
agencies cited the FSB security service as saying it had incontrovertible proof that Ukraine
had orchestrated what it called "a provocation" and would make its evidence public soon.
According to media reports, Russia said it has "impounded" three Ukrainian naval ships after
they crossed the border with Russia
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko immediately called a meeting with his top
military and security chiefs to discuss the situation.
Separately, the EU has urged both sides to rapidly de-escalate the tense situation at the
Kerch strait:
*EU URGES UKRAINE, RUSSIA TO DE-ESCALATE SITUATION AT STRAIT
*UKRAINE, RUSSIA SHOULD ACT W/ `UTMOST RESTRAINT', EU SAYS
*EU URGES RUSSIA TO RESTORE FREEDOM OF PASSAGE AT KERCH STRAIT
NATO has confirmed it is "closely monitoring" developments and is calling for "restraint and
de-escalation"...
" NATO is closely monitoring developments in the Azov Sea and the Kerch Strait, and we are
in contact with the Ukrainian authorities. We call for restraint and de-escalation.
NATO fully supports Ukraine's sovereignty and its territorial integrity, including its
navigational rights in its territorial waters. We call on Russia to ensure unhindered access
to Ukrainian ports in the Azov Sea, in accordance with international law.
At the Brussels Summit in July, NATO leaders expressed their support to Ukraine, and made
clear that Russia's ongoing militarisation of Crimea, the Black Sea, and the Azov Sea pose
further threats to Ukraine's independence and undermines the stability of the broader region.
"
Finally, Ukraine has called for an urgent UN Security Council meeting over 'Russian
aggression' while Ukraine's secretary for national security, Oleksander Turchynov, accused
Russia of engaging in an act of war: "We heard reports on incident and have concluded that it
was an act of war by Russian Federation against Ukraine"
* * *
As we detailed earlier, the Ukrainian navy has accused Russia of opening fire on some of its
ships in the Black Sea, striking one vessel, and wounding a crew member.
In a statement on its Facebook page , the Ukrainian navy said the
Russian military vessels opened fire on Ukrainian warships after they had left the 12-mile zone
near the Kerch Strait, leaving one man wounded, and one Ukrainian vessel damaged and
immobilized, adding that Russian warships "shoot to kill."
Ukraine accused a Russian coastguard vessel, named the Don, of ramming one of its tugboats
in "openly aggressive actions". The incident allegedly took place as three Ukrainian navy boats
- including two small warships - headed for the port of Mariupol in the Sea of Azov, an area of
heightened tensions between the countries.
Russia accused Ukraine of illegally entering the area and deliberately provoking a
conflict.
Sky News reports that the Ukrainian president has called an emergency session of his war
cabinet in response to the incident.
"Today's dangerous events in the Azov Sea testify that a new front of [Russian] aggression
is open," Ukrainian foreign ministry spokeswoman Mariana Betsa said.
"Ukraine [is] calling now for emergency meeting of United Nations Security Council."
It comes after a day of rising tensions off the coast of Crimea, and especially around the
Kerch Strait, which separates Crimea from mainland Russia after Ukrainian vessels allegedly
violated the Russian border. The passage was blocked by a cargo ship and fighter jets were
scrambled.
According to RT , Russia has
stopped all navigation through the waterway using the cargo ship shown above. Videos from the
scene released by the Russian media show a large bulk freighter accompanied by two Russian
military boats standing under the arch of the Crimea Bridge and blocking the only passage
through the strait.
"The [Kerch] strait is closed for security reasons," the Director-General of the Crimean sea
ports, Aleksey Volkov, told TASS, confirming earlier media reports.
Russian Air Force Su-25 strike fighters were also scrambled to provide additional security
for the strait as the situation remains tense. The move came as five Ukrainian Navy ships had
been approaching the strait from two different sides.
According to RT, two Ukrainian artillery boats and a tugboat initially approached the strait
from the Black Sea while "undertaking dangerous maneuvers" and "defying the lawful orders of
the Russian border guards." Later, they were joined by two more military vessels that departed
from a Ukrainian Azov Sea port of Berdyansk sailing to the strait from the other side.
The Russian federal security agency FSB, which is responsible for maintaining the country's
borders, denounced the actions of the Ukrainian ships as a provocation, adding that they could
create a "conflict situation" in the region. According to the Russian media reports, the
Ukrainian vessels are still sailing towards the strait, ignoring the warnings of the Russian
border guards.
According to
Reuters , a bilateral treaty gives both countries the right to use the sea, which lies
between them and is linked by the narrow Kerch Strait to the Black Sea. Moscow is able to
control access between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea after it built a bridge that straddles
the Kerch Strait between Crimea and southern Russia.
Reuters adds that tensions surfaced on Sunday after Russia tried to intercept three
Ukrainian ships -- two small armored artillery vessels and a tug boat -- in the Black Sea,
accusing them of illegally entering Russian territorial waters.
The Ukrainian navy said a Russian border guard vessel had rammed the tug boat, damaging it
in an incident it said showed Russia was behaving aggressively and illegally. It said its
vessels had every right to be where they were and that the ships had been en route from the
Black Sea port of Odessa to Mariupol, a journey that requires them to go through the Kerch
Strait.
Meanwhile, Russia's border guard service accused Ukraine of not informing it in advance of
the journey, something Kiev denied, and said the Ukrainian ships had been maneuvering
dangerously and ignoring its instructions with the aim of stirring up tensions.
It pledged to end to what it described as Ukraine's "provocative actions", while Russian
politicians lined up to denounce Kiev, saying the incident looked like a calculated attempt by
President Petro Poroshenko to increase his popularity ahead of an election next year. Ukraine's
foreign ministry said in a statement it wanted a clear response to the incident from the
international community.
"Russia's provocative actions in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov have crossed the line and
become aggressive," it said. "Russian ships have violated our freedom of maritime navigation
and unlawfully used force against Ukrainian naval ships."
Both countries have accused each other of harassing each other's shipping in Sea of Azov in
the past and the U.S. State Department in August said Russia's actions looked designed to
destabilize Ukraine, which has two major industrial ports there.
Skripal events probably helped to advance this line of investigation. So in a way UK intelligence services put their own
stooge on the line of fire.
Notable quotes:
"... Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering ..."
"... The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively. ..."
"... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did. ..."
"... The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials. ..."
"... The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up. ..."
"... Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition. ..."
"... Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets. ..."
"... If you like this story, share it with a friend! ..."
Kremlin
critic Bill Browder may have given the order for his employee Sergei Magnitsky to be poisoned
with a rare toxin in a Russian prison cell, along with other suspects in a tax-evasion probe
against him, prosecutors have said. British financier Browder was once a well-connected
investor in post-Soviet Russia, but he became a fugitive from the law in the country after
being accused of financial crimes. In the West, however, he is best known as the employer of
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant who died in police custody while being investigated in
connection to the Browder case. Magnitsky's death became an international scandal, with Browder
accusing Russian officials of killing him.
Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with
Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new
criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his
extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money
laundering.
The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom
died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay
Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November
2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial
detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008
and September 2008, respectively.
Korobeinikov died after falling off a high-rise building, while the others had health
complications. The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a
rare water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being
poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths, while Korobeinikov had traces of it in his liver,
according to a post mortem. An investigation into four possible murders has been
opened.
Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within
months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely
that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony
against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told
journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia
didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but
several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did.
The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of
Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the
latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his
cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false
statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle
taxpayers' money involving Russian officials.
The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after
obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for
Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up.
Last year, Browder was sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison for tax evasion.
The trial was held in absentia and Moscow failed to have him extradited to serve the term. The
prosecutors said that they will renew attempts to get custody of Browder as part of the new
criminal case, using a UN convention on fighting transnational crime to have him arrested.
Browder is a US-born British financier, whose change of citizenship had the benefit of
allowing him to avoid paying tax on foreign earnings. However, he claimed the switch was
prompted by his family being persecuted in the US during the McCarthyism witch hunt, while the
UK seemed like the land of law and order.
He made a fortune in Russia during the country's chaotic transition to a market economy,
having invested before there was a stock exchange in Moscow. His Hermitage Capital Management
fund was a leading foreign investment entity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning
millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail
Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal
wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too
numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
The transformation of his public image from a financial shark into a human rights crusader
started when Browder himself entered the spotlight of Russian law enforcement. In 2007, the
foundation he ran was targeted by a probe into possible large-scale embezzlement of Russian
taxpayers' money. Magnitsky, who worked for Browder and had knowledge of his firms' finances,
was arrested and held in pre-trial detention until his death in November 2009. The British
businessman insisted that the entire case was fabricated and that Magnitsky had been
assassinated for exposing a criminal scheme involving several Russian tax officials.
The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of
Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for
his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by
Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin
as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic
competition.
Browder's new-found status as a rights advocate and self-proclaimed worst enemy of Putin
helps him deflect Russia's attempts to prosecute him. On several occasions, Russia filed
international arrest warrants against him with Interpol, which even led to his brief detention
in Spain last May.
Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part
of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian
government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was
apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its
architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to
US lawmakers and media outlets.
"... Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. ..."
"... Indeed, a national security policy that sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once again. ..."
"... George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address , counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification." ..."
"... Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country. ..."
"... Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime. ..."
"... Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick it in their face). ..."
"... America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics. ..."
President Donald Trump's
recent statement on the Jamal Khashoggi killing by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince might well be considered a metaphor for his foreign
policy. Several commentators have suggested that the text appears to be something that Trump wrote himself without any adult supervision,
similar to the poorly expressed random arguments presented in his tweeting only longer. That might be the case, but it would not
be wise to dismiss the document as merely frivolous or misguided as it does in reality express the kind of thinking that has produced
a foreign policy that seems to drift randomly to no real end, a kind of leaderless creative destruction of the United States as a
world power.
Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of Britain in the mid nineteenth century, famously said that "Nations have no permanent friends
or allies, they only have permanent interests."The United States currently has neither real friends nor any clearly defined interests.
It is, however, infested with parasites that have convinced an at-drift America that their causes are identical to the interests
of the United States. Leading the charge to reduce the U.S. to "bitch" status, as Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard
has artfully put it , are Israel and Saudi
Arabia, but there are many other countries, alliances and advocacy groups that have learned how to subvert and direct the "leader
of the free world."
Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the
three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. It is difficult to find a part of the world where an actual
American interest is being served by Washington's foreign and global security policies. Indeed, a national security policy that
sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet
Union in 1991, thinkable once again. The fact that no one is the media or in political circles is even talking about that terrible
danger suggests that war has again become mainstreamed, tacitly benefiting from bipartisan acceptance of it as a viable foreign policy
tool by the media, in the U.S. Congress and also in the White House.
The part of the world where American meddling coupled with ignorance has produced the worst result is inevitably the Middle East...
... ... ...
All of the White House's actions have one thing in common and that is that they do not benefit Americans in any way unless one
works for a weapons manufacturer, and that is not even taking into consideration the dead soldiers and civilians and the massive
debt that has been incurred to intervene all over the world. One might also add that most of America's interventions are built on
deliberate lies by the government and its associated media, intended to increase tension and create a casus belli where
none exists.
So what is to be done as it often seems that the best thing Trump has going for him is that he is not Hillary Clinton? First of
all, a comprehensive rethink of what the real interests of the United States are in the world arena is past due. America is less
safe now than it was in 2001 as it continues to make enemies with its blundering everywhere it goes. There are now
four times as many designated terrorists as there were in 2001, active in 70 countries. One would quite plausibly soon arrive
at George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address
, counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington
might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment
of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary
common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former
into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."
George Washington or any of the other Founders would be appalled to see an America with 800 military bases overseas, allegedly
for self-defense. The transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the military industrial complex and related entities like Wall Street
has been catastrophic. The United States does not need to protect Israel and Saudi Arabia, two countries that are armed to the teeth
and well able to defend themselves. Nor does it have to be in Syria and Afghanistan. And
If the United States were to withdraw its military from the Middle East and the rest of Asia tomorrow, it would be to nearly everyone's
benefit. If the armed forces were to be subsequently reduced to a level sufficient to defend the United States it would put money
back in the pockets of Americans and end the continuous fearmongering through surfacing of "threats" by career militarists justifying
the bloated budgets.
... ... ...
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational
foundation that seeks a more interests [email protected]
.
but even small steps in the right direction could initiate a gradual process of turning the United States into a more normal
country in its relationships with the rest of the world rather than a universal predator and bully.
Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute
the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country.
To expect mutations -- no matter how slow or fast in a
trait that appears deeply embedded in our DNA is to be naive. Add to that the intractable stranglehold Zionists and organized
world Jewry has on our nuts and decision making. A more congruent convergence of histories and DNAs would be hard to come by among
other nations. Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone
of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime.
Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give
him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick
it in their face).
Hey, how about a Rand Paul-Tulsi Gabbard fusion ticket in 2024, not a bad idea, IMHO.
Going back to the Administration you can see the slimy Zionist hands of Steven Miller on all of those foreign policy statements.
Trump is allowing this because he has to protect his flanks from Zionists, Christian or otherwise. He might be just giving Miller
just enough rope to jettison him (wishful thinking on my part). Or he doesn't care or is unaware of the texts, a possibility.
1. Because that defies human nature. See all of history if you disagree.
2. America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples
who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics.
The beginning of USA foreign policy for me is the 1820 or 1830 Monroe Declaration: south America is our backyard, keep out.
Few people know that at the time European countries considered war on the USA because of this beginning of world domination.
When I told this to a USA correspondent the reply was 'but this declaration still is taught here in glowing terms'.
What we saw then was the case until Obama, USA foreign policy was for internal political reasons.
As Hollings stated in 2004 'Bush promising AIPAC the war on Iraq, that is politics'.
No empire ever, as far as I know, ever was in the comfortable position to be able to let foreign policy to be decided (almost)
completely by internal politics.
This changed during the Obama reign, the two war standard had to be lowered to one and a half.
All of a sudden the USA had to develop a foreign policy, a policy that had to take into consideration the world outside the USA.
Not the whole USA understands this, the die hards of Deep State in the lead.
What a half war accomplishes we see, my opinion, in Syria, a half war does not bring victory on an enemy who wages a whole
war.
Assad is still there, Russia has airforce and naval bases in Syria.
Normally, as any history book explains, foreign policy of a country is decided on in secret by a few people.
British preparations for both WWI and WWII included detailed technical talks with both the USA and France, not even all cabinet
members knew about it.
One of Trump's difficulties is that Deep State does not at all has the intention of letting the president decide on foreign policy,
at the time of FDR he did what he liked, though, if one reads for example Baruch's memoirs, in close cooperation with the Deep
State that then existed.
The question 'why do we not leave the rest of the world alone', hardly ever asked.
The USA is nearly autarcic, foreign trade, from memory, some five percent of national income, a very luxurious position.
But of course, leaving the rest of the world alone, huge internal consequences, as Hinckley explains with an example, politically
impossible to stop the development of a bomber judged to be superfluous.
Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990
Good luck. A fight over resources with the biggest consumer of resources, the People That Kill People and all their little buddies
in the Alphabet Soup of Law Enforcement and Intelligence Depravity..
That could get a fella hurt. Ask Jack and Bob Kennedy.
"The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Russia is now worse than it was towards the end of the Cold War". Classic American
cold warrior mentality. The present-day Russian Federation is assimilated to the former Soviet Union.
Tragically for America, and the West in general, President Trump is unrecognizable from
candidate Trump :
'This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over
our government. The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals,
massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry Their financial resources are virtually
unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched, and most importantly, the depths of their
immorality is absolutely unlimited.'
Jun 6, 2017 50 Years After Launching June 1967 War, Israel Continues World's Longest Military
Occupation
In the final installment of our three-part special on the 50th anniversary of the June
1967 war, author and scholar Norman Finkelstein discusses why the U.S.-backed "peace process"
was never meant to end the Israeli occupation, and how, despite the ongoing brutality, mass
Palestinian civil resistance could still bring it to an end.
"... The proposal is precisely analogous to South Africa not only because of the displacement of the original population into separated enclosures, but because it leaves the bulk of the land in the hands of a colonial population, whose identity and exclusivity is specifically enshrined in law by ethnicity. Israel's adoption this year of a new nation state law putting the state on an officially racist basis only confirmed the reality encapsulated in a raft of hundreds of other laws and regulations. The harsh discriminatory regime faced by non-Jews in Israel has been exhaustively documented , and it is not my purpose to repeat it here. I recommend this lecture by Ben White: ..."
"... A major difference between South Africa's apartheid and Israel's is that the political will was there in the sixties to oppose this ignominy. The Labour Party and Liberal Party and some Conservatives fought against it in the days before Israel (with its various friends' groups) owned all the political parties and, shamefully, nobody has the balls to stand against this evil regime ..."
"... The people instrumental in demonising apartheid and organising campaigns against South Africa were often the same people who were devoted to the State of Israel. When you look at the people behind the campaigns you see which ideological positions they adhered to, so it is worth looking up key individuals and their doctrinal adherences ..."
The original apartheid state of South Africa created "homelands", known colloquially as "bantustans", and proposed that, as the
apotheosis of apartheid, these "homelands" would become independent states and house the majority black population of the country
in fenced-off areas which had been too arid, rocky or commercial mineral free to attract significant white settlement over three
centuries of theft. South Africa actually did recognise some of these as Independent states, while the rest were supposed to be on
a course to recognition.
The maps really do bring out the startling similarity between these two attempts to formalise the dispossession of the original
people. Thankfully, even though the "Homelands solution" had its supporters including Thatcher, it never achieved support beyond
what was then an extreme right wing view, and none of the "independent states" ever achieved international recognition.
I worked in the FCO as the South Africa (Political) desk officer from 1984-6, and seeing off right wing Tory lobbying to adopt
the Homelands policy was a major problem. It is simply symptomatic of the extraordinary right wing shift in western politics over
the intervening three decades, that a "Bantustan" solution for Palestine, laughably called a "two state solution", is now the accepted
wisdom of the political and media class.
The proposal is precisely analogous to South Africa not only because of the displacement of the original population into separated
enclosures, but because it leaves the bulk of the land in the hands of a colonial population, whose identity and exclusivity is specifically
enshrined in law by ethnicity. Israel's adoption this year of a new nation state law putting the state on an
officially racist
basis only confirmed the reality encapsulated in a raft of hundreds of other laws and regulations. The harsh discriminatory regime
faced by non-Jews in Israel has been exhaustively
documented , and it is not my purpose to repeat it here. I recommend this lecture by Ben White:
Many of the practices Ben describes have strong echoes of the apartheid regime, as do the disregard for Black/Palestinian life,
the regular use of disproportionate lethal force against protestors, the mass arrests and detentions, the impunity for both law enforcers
and "master race" civilians who attack blacks/Palestinians. These features are highly analogous.
But what I want to address here is the striking similarity between the arguments used by supporters of apartheid, with which I
dealt every day at the FCO, and the arguments used today by supporters of Israel. They came by post thirty years ago not internet,
and we did not use the word meme, but the key arguments are exactly the same.
Imagine if the UK had in its statutes, and the USA had in its constitution measures to ensure only white people had the right
to immigration [one of Israel's basic laws is only Jews have the right to immigration into Israel]. Continuing the analogy with Israel's
recently passed 'Nation-State' [basic law].
1. "The states of the UK and the US are the nation-states of the 'white people".
2. "The actualization of the right of national self- determination in the states of the UK/USA is unique to white people"
3. "The UK/USA will labour to ensure the safety of sons of white people".
4. "The UK/USA will act to preserve the cultural, historical and religious legacy of white people among the Diaspora".
5. "The UK/USA views 'white's only' settlement as joint national values and will labour to encourage and promote its establishment
and development".
Now let us look at one of the IHRA examples which the Labour Party have incorporated into the Labour Party rule book:
"Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination – e.g. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist
endeavour".
Who could deny that examples 1 to 5 above if incorporated into UK and US law would prove 100% that the UK and US were inherently
racist and that their 'existence were racist endeavours' and that anyone in the UK/US [including Jeremy Corbyn] who disapproved of
1 to 5 above, and said so, would fall foul of the IHRA definition, be accused of being Anti Semitic and drummed out of associations
like the Labour Party and possibly ostracised from society for life. Disgraceful.
Wilhelm Marr seems to have been strongly anti-J_ish and, in 1879, "he founded the League of Antisemites (Antisemiten-Liga), the
first German organization committed specifically to combating the alleged threat to Germany posed by the J_s and advocating their
forced removal from the country".
I find it bizarre that a term coined by a vehemently anti-J_ish person is used by the IHRA in preference to the more accurate
term anti-J_ism.
Meanwhile: The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas authorities in Gaza routinely arrest and torture
peaceful critics and opponents, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/10/23/palestine-authorities-crush-dissent
Explains a lot
I think you'll find that most "bantustans" were led by corrupt officials who mistreated their "citizens". You don't imagine that
the Apartheid colonisers would want a genuine, free and united populace in their client statelets, do you? What goes for South Africa,
applies just as neatly to Israel.
As a South African there are lots of parallels with Israel/Palestine and a few differences. The differences are never in Israel's
favour. The one thing that I always convinced myself of was that Palestinians were not controlled like our Bantustan leaders were
– like Buthelezi managing the Zulus into good little darkies.
But now I am not so sure when I see the deliberate shut down of electricity.
Those in Israel will tell you that it is a better life than a Black South African experienced living in the madam or master's house.
There are Palestinian Doctors working in real jobs in real hospitals alongside real jews. That never happened in South Africa.
Those in Gaza will tell you that it is a worse life than living in a Homeland. That I can believe, we could at least grow food, tend
animals, create a community.
A major difference between South Africa's apartheid and Israel's is that the political will was there in the sixties to oppose
this ignominy. The Labour Party and Liberal Party and some Conservatives fought against it in the days before Israel (with its various
friends' groups) owned all the political parties and, shamefully, nobody has the balls to stand against this evil regime . If
they do they get shadow-banned or dragged through the courts/
The people instrumental in demonising apartheid and organising campaigns against South Africa were often the same people who
were devoted to the State of Israel. When you look at the people behind the campaigns you see which ideological positions they adhered
to, so it is worth looking up key individuals and their doctrinal adherences
Many whites have in fact been murdered since blacks took over South Africa. The facts are clear. So their fears were not only
a fantasy but realistic. This is the weakness of your argument, that you simply reject the fears of whites, which have come to fruition.
I suspect you simply have an animus towards white South Africans, it is a result of your moral self-righteousness. I also noticed
that you changed topic after mentioning that many whites genuinely believed that they would be murdered by blacks.
We suffered an armed robbery, my mother, who had just come out of intensive care, was beaten. She died less than 1 year later,
most probably from trauma. Many whites are not as lucky to have survived even the robbery. We have since emigrated. My family has
been living in SA for 250 years. More than 50% of blacks are immigrants of the last 50 years. Yet you insinuate that our right to
live in the land is less than theirs.
The number of whites, especially farmers, who have since been murdered brutally, create facts on the ground which you cannot gloss
over or dismiss if you were honest. It is telling that you changed topics just after mentioning the fears of whites. Because you
will never let a fact get in the way of your moral self.righteousness.
I do understand it. Once the Israeli's had established themselves, as immigrants have in UK, you almost can't turn the clock back
without inflicting the same policies/suffering in reverse. The Palestinians have de facto recognised this, hence their support for
a two state solution. I.e. two viable independent nations. Except, in practice, its not on offer as the Likud want to drive them
all into the sea or, until they expand further, Jordan.
Now that two states is unviable, the one multi-national state solution takes centre stage, but the Likud want a one-state without
the Palestinians, hence the new apartheid laws, in an attempt to keep the multi-national one-state, Jewish.
But it wont work, once the Palestinians embrace the one-state solution, and in effect declare themselves Israeli's, as the world,
even US, will support the need for all Israeli's to have equal rights, and Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital
of Israel (and de facto Palestine) brings that day closer.
To illustrate the point, the Zionists are advancing too far, like Hitler towards Stalingrad, to be cut off in the rear, resulting
in a pyrrhic victory. Instead of settling for a Jewish state, mostly occupied by Jews, alongside a Palestinian state, they are forcing
the creation of a multi-national one state, only half occupied by Jews, hence the need for new apartheid rules, to keep the multi-national
state, Jewish.
From an Israeli perspective, the "problem" is more or less solved. They'd love to fully take over Gaza and the West Bank, of course,
build a few hotels etc., but these are more or less clean-up operations. Something like 90% of the Palestinian population has been
expelled.
The whole area is a massive crime scene. I can't even fathom the idea of finding any solution there. It'd be like trying to find
the solution to the Big Bang. I can't see past making them stop and then setting up some sort of Nuremberg type system to deal with
the criminals.
There's nothing more depressing than this subject for me.
"I can't even fathom the idea of finding any solution there."
One man, One vote.
The demographics will then sort themselves out very quickly as those Israelis with dual-citizenship decamp and move to their "second"
country.
I would think that within a decade – maybe two – the demographics would be 70/30 or even more in favour of the Arab-speaking population,
and nobody will be killed and nobody will be dispossessed. And at that point "Israel" will change its name to "Palestine" and nobody
will make the slightest fuss about it.
I wouldn't use that phrase, no.
But it is as inevitable as that.
When the Zionist grip starts to loosen then a significant number of those Zionists are going to bolt – and that will accelerate
the process until it become a steamroller.
That's what nobody pays any attention to: the Palestinians won't go away because they have nowhere to go.
But there are enough Zionists who can – and will – and that will end up being the decisive factor.
They're not bolting for the exits yet because they are convinced that they are winning.
But they will waver, and it won't take many to break before the whole thing collapses.
Yeah, Right, there's no sign of wavering though. They're intensifying and extending their grip. The Golan Heights aren't even
an issue today, that's how bad it's gotten. Poverty levels in Gaza thanks to sanctions and blockade have never been so bad as they
are right now.
Any day now we are expecting another major attack on Gaza along the lines of Caste Lead. They will hit schools and hospitals as
usual and thousands of unarmed civilians will die.
Not on the surface, no. The Israelis have excellent propaganda. Negative points are quickly brushed under the carpet. But Israel
is being hollowed out from the inside. Everybody has their second passport, ready to run. You will remember there was a big panic
in 2006 during Olmert's war in Lebanon. Hizbullah missiles were falling on Israel, and there were lengthy queues outside foreign
embassies for Israelis desperate to renew their second passports.
Nobody wants to fight any more. I mean, would you want to spend your life in the army reserve, obliged to be ready to go to war
whenever Netanyahu happens to decide on another invasion of Gaza? No, you would say sod it, I'm off to the States for a more peaceful
'normal' life. The Israeli army is just a poor militia now (see Pat Lang, passim). Even the Gazans stopped them cold in 2014. That
said, the airforce is very good, but it's the only arm that works now. And then Hizbullah have their stash of missiles that can now
reach anywhere in Israel, and Israel can do nothing about it (if they could, they would).
"Yeah, Right, there's no sign of wavering though."
Agreed, there is no *sign* of wavering.
Indeed, the degree of bombast coming out of the Israeli establishment is now deafening.
"The Golan Heights aren't even an issue today, that's how bad it's gotten."
Oh, I think that once the Syrian government wipes out the last of the jihadists and then forces the US to withdraw from Syrian
territory then you will find the Golan Heights will become very much a hot potato.
After all, it will then be the last piece of Syrian territory that is not under the control of the Syrians, and they'll be in
no mood to be "intimidated" by the Israelis.
The Israelis will keep beating up on the Gaza Strip? Sure, they will.
And that will lull the Likud into thinking that the IDF is still a mighty fighting force, sure, it will.
But the strategic situation for Israeli is getting worse and worse, to the point where the Israelis dare not attack Lebanon for
fear that the Syrians will take the opportunity to seize the Golan Heights, and the Israelis dare not launch an attack into Syria
lest Hezbollah launch a counter-attack on the flank of that expeditionary force.
And either way there is this slight problem: the IDF is now a bunch of fluffy-girls-blouses, and as such is likely to get its
arse kicked in a fight with a real army.
laguerre has it correct below: the IDF has been hollowed out, as has Israeli society as a whole. They are riding for a fall, and
when they do they will come down to earth with a thud.
And nobody will be more surprised than them, which is when they will stampede for the door.
Marxism is a brilliant sui generis philosophy of history. The attending political
position was a heartfelt reaction to the immiseration of the working classes of Europe.
There were many similar ideologies to Marxism in political viewpoint, but Marxism is
outstandingly intellectually interesting.
Marx is not differentiated from other (Gentile) socialists by his politics but by his
genius. I doubt his part Jewishness had much to do with that.
Jews have made up a huge proportion of decent economists from all economic
perspectives.
Meanwhile, Ayn Rand was an highly eccentric writer of romantic fiction that lucidly
captured the snivelling, resentment fueled scumbags who make up the denizens of the
swamp.
Pychoanalysis – (((Freud)
Freud's psychoanalysis might be flawed but his work constitutes a truly great body of
literature and the invention of a new and important subject. He is one of the greatest
thinkers of all time.
USSR – (((Lenin))), (((Trotsky)
Lenin wasn't Jewish. Trotsky was. Lenin was in charge, while Trotsky ended up murdered
while in ignominious exile.
SJW/open society/antifa movements – (((Soros))) and other forture 400
(((billionaires)))
I'm not sure how you think antifa and billionaires are best buddies but Jews are obviously
a minority among billionaires.
Soros is deranged. There are plenty of bad people in every group. There are more maniac
progressive types among Jews. The explanations are mundane.
Big tech censorship – (((ADL))), (((SPLC))), (((Zuckerberg))), (((Brin)))
Again, Jews are a small minority of those enacting big tech censorship. Indeed, America
remains one of human history's least censored societies. That doesn't make it good but you
need get some perspective before you go all crazy.
Hollywood and other pop culture entertainment – easily all senior positions at the
very least 50% jewish
Nonsense. And a lot of that stuff is pretty good.
The jew really is to blame, which is also why they are so hell bent on censoring and
jailing people for stating these blatant truths.
Lenin wasn't Jewish. Trotsky was. Lenin was in charge, while Trotsky ended up murdered
while in ignominious exile.
apparently Lenin was part jewish and had disdain for white people, ethnic Russians
Trotsky was the racist he accused others of being – he wanted to fill Russia with
what he called "white n1ggers" presumably to ruled by jews like himself – what right a
5% has to rule the rest of the country? It would be like Chinese ruling the U.S.
Again, Jews are a small minority of those enacting big tech censorship.
really? (((Facebook))), (((Google))), and (((SPLC))) and (((ADL))) are the so called
"safety advisors" so no leftist or jew should ever have to stumble upon the truth on those
sites
also, why do you thnk BitChute lost access to PayPal and Stripe? why do think Paul Nehlen
suddenly had trouble with his upstream suppliers for the business he manages? its because
jews behind the scenes collude against and punish any competitiors or anyone speaking out
about jews – this is what they do
Indeed, America remains one of human history's least censored societies.
no thanks to the jews, who have pulled this "hate speech" crap already in Canada, UK,
Australia, and Europe. They are the reason those countries don't have Free Speech and they're
coming for Free Speech here in the U.S. too – because (((their))) feelings are more
important than your rights
The overwhelming majority of Jews are not Semites (peoples from the Middle East). Most Jews'
points of origin are in Europe.
My family (mother's side) German Jews – not a Semite in the bunch. Mostly blond
haired & blue eyes.
There is real resistance to those, who attempt to clarify this vital point. Ron Unz, this
is your website, and these are some of your topics. Why fear to tread? Why fear the truth?
You've come so far. Come all the way into the light.
Most Jews come from – – – Read Arthur Koestler's "The Thirteenth
Tribe" as a start for your education and a cure for your being brainwashed.
Have received some threatening emails, and despite all the political views this Anarchist
has, the threats have ALL been in response to my analysis of just who are, and are not
Semites. Unz, and Commentators, I need no help here. I fear not, and cannot live forever.
Orwell's 1984 , explains in detail the use of false language and false History as
the KEY tools in repressing Humanity, and Humanity's Liberty.
The misidentification of just who Semites are is a powerful weapon in the hands of the
Zionist Land Thieves and their American, British, & French puppets. The Jewish claim
to Semitism goes in tandem with their insistence on their right to exterminate
Palestinians and occupy their land, and later, the Zionist Oligarchs will continue to
occupy all the Middle East "eretz Israel," and concurrently, they will occupy and control
(with the weapons of financial/banking and physical terror), the peoples of this planet.
It is no wonder Gilad Atzmon has it all wrong. Look for no help here.
Jews have not been the only recipients of the Brutality that humans often inflict on one
another. And Jews have not been specially singled out, over Serbians, Russians, Chinese,
Armenians, Native Americans, Iraqis, Syrians, Vietnamese, Indonesians (1965), Yemenis,
Libyans, Afghanis, Africans (slavery and neo colonizing of their nations), and dozens
more.
Jews belong (yes, they, with all the rest of Earth's people, belong). Jews belong in
America, and Europe, where they may reside in happiness and freedom with all the other
peoples, and, if they wish, they may visit their newly Freed and Happy Palestinian friends,
(and host them in their European and American homes) – as well.
We American Patriots , we will host all, in our Restored American Republic.
And America's finest statesman, Dr. Ron Paul , will become our First Constitutional
President – since John F. Kennedy.
The Living Dream, and do not Fear.
Durruti for the Anarchist Collective
West Bank Settler and American Patriot, by Gilad
Atzmon - The Unz Review
@wayfarer
The USA is full of Jewish billionaires. Why on earth does Israel need any blood money from
the hard-pressed taxpayers when they could supply their home away from home with all the
extra money it needs, if indeed it needs any at all? If you are wondering about one of the
main causes of US anti-Semitism, look no further than the billions our AIPAC-controlled
traitorous Congress gives to that apartheid state every year.
West Bank Settler and American Patriot, by Gilad Atzmon - The Unz Review
What a pleasure to find Gilad Atzmon here at UNZ. And as usual, Mr. Atzmon delivers fresh
insights and bold perspectives.
I am grateful that Gilad is examining as well as talking to hyper-Zionists living in
Pennsylvania. This is revealing. I appreciate Yonatan Stern's willingness to address Atzmon's
questions.
I was similarly impressed–unexpectedly so–when I met the late Rabbi Meir
Kahane, who I briefly interviewed for a televised TV debate I produced ('Why Terrorism?') in
1986. Former US Congressman, Pete McCloskey (R-CA), took the opposing side in this exchange
concerning the future of Palestine/Israel as well as US policies there. In my opinion, Kahane
won the debate (though not on its merits).
Rabbi Kahane was an unabashed separatist (like most devout Jews) and he famously declared
(somewhat prematurely) that Israel's native gentiles ('Palestinians') had no future in a
Jewish State.
Kahane believed that all these resentful, recalcitrant Arabs should be kicked out of
Israel. He was unabashedly pro-separation. From a Zionist point of view, Kahane offered a
violent though practical long-term solution. Multiculturalism is inherently problematic and
destabilizing. It is also incompatible with Jewish nationalism. But Kahane made Jewish
liberals blush. As a result, he was declared a 'racist' by establishment Jews; even though
Judaism is, at its core, race-driven.
Please keep in mind that during this era (Carter through Clinton) the endless Mideast
'peace process' was still underway with all the hype, fanfare, and false hopes.
The 'peace process' ended up being a road to nowhere–full of highfalutin awards,
accords, meetings, 'confidence-building measures' and an endless array of Jewish advisors,
pro-Israel committees, donors and 'experts'. Kahane knew that it was doomed from the
start.
Nevertheless, Jews from nearly every 'mainstream' political faction world-wide derided
Kahane's straightforward and 'racist' solutions, even though his prophetic advice now mirrors
today's Israeli policies. Meir Kahane was simply ahead of his time. He was also far too
candid for his liberal cousins to own up to.
A few years after Kahane's televised debate with McCloskey, he was assassinated in
NYC.
In any event, it is undeniable that blood/ancestry is at the heart of Judaism. The Law of
Return tells us so. Religiosity on the other hand has become somewhat incidental to
Jewishness. A committed, ethnic Jew (but an atheistic one) such as Allen Dershowitz, for
instance, is as 'Jewish' as any orthodox rabbi. Identity and ancestry is what matters.
Thus I appreciate Stern's criticism of his Jewish cousins who have saddled America with
top-down 'liberalism', a movement that's functioned as a court-ordered Trojan Horse inside
America.
Like his Jewish cousins however, Stern's still a bit of a fraud–since he relies on
double-standards, special privileges, and ancestral grievances to justify his unique
collection of rights as a land-grabbing Zionist.
Stern hypocritically derides non-violent whites in Charlottesville who want the same
rights for themselves in America as Jews get in Israel: to preserve their culture,
traditions, racial lineage, and majority status. These are core Zionist values. But Stern
would deny them to any and all American whites.
Stern is also disinclined to express any gratitude to his duplicitous, liberal cousins for
their decades-long, pro-Jewish activism. Yet Stern is beneficiary of their subterfuge. Jewish
activism helps explain why Jews have risen in America while others–such as the white,
working-class men in Charlottesville–have fallen.
US Liberalism (with plenty of help from Zionist Jews) coercively integrated America
racially (but not in Israel), opened our borders to all (but not in Israel) and erected a
towering wall between 'church and state' (but not in Israel).
These tricks have been good for the Jews, which includes Stern. He can now wear his
yarmulke proudly and not get laughed at–or punched (since its a 'hate crime'
today).
Liberal and 'secular' Jews also helped orchestrate Washington's de facto marriage to the
State of Israel. This has also empowered Stern. And to the delight of most Jews (both left
and right) the US has been largely de-Christianized over the past sixty years. This is more
smart work by Jewish jurists, lawyers, and academics–many with close ties to the
'liberal' ACLU.
As a beneficiary of all this, Stern should thank his liberal cousins for this political
black magic. Yet he pretends to object.
Stern is at least correct when he acknowledges that 'progressive' Jews have damaged the
West and that they are still doing so.
"I am honored to have this invitation to address the annual meeting of the Dallas Citizens
Council, joined by the members of the Dallas Assembly--and pleased to have this opportunity to
salute the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest.
It is fitting that these two symbols of Dallas progress are united in the sponsorship of
this meeting. For they represent the best qualities, I am told, of leadership and learning in
this city--and leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. The advancement of
learning depends on community leadership for financial and political support and the products
of that learning, in turn, are essential to the leadership's hopes for continued progress and
prosperity. It is not a coincidence that those communities possessing the best in research and
graduate facilities--from MIT to Cal Tech--tend to attract the new and growing industries. I
congratulate those of you here in Dallas who have recognized these basic facts through the
creation of the unique and forward-looking Graduate Research Center.
This link between leadership and learning is not only essential at the community level. It
is even more indispensable in world affairs. Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the
progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy,
handicap this country's security. In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world
full of frustrations and irritations, America's leadership must be guided by the lights of
learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the
possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to
every world problem.
There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without
alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking
influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.
But today other voices are heard in the land--voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to
reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties, doctrines which apparently assume that words will
suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of
weakness. At a time when the national debt is steadily being reduced in terms of its burden on
our economy, they see that debt as the greatest single threat to our security. At a time when
we are steadily reducing the number of Federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they
fear those supposed hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing
armies.
We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will "talk sense to the
American people." But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion
that this Nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of
slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.
I want to discuss with you today the status of our strength and our security because this
question clearly calls for the most responsible qualities of leadership and the most
enlightened products of scholarship. For this Nation's strength and security are not easily or
cheaply obtained, nor are they quickly and simply explained. There are many kinds of strength
and no one kind will suffice. Overwhelming nuclear strength cannot stop a guerrilla war. Formal
pacts of alliance cannot stop internal subversion. Displays of material wealth cannot stop the
disillusionment of diplomats subjected to discrimination.
Above all, words alone are not enough. The United States is a peaceful nation. And where our
strength and determination are clear, our words need merely to convey conviction, not
belligerence. If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will
be of no help.
I realize that this Nation often tends to identify turning-points in world affairs with the
major addresses which preceded them. But it was not the Monroe Doctrine that kept all Europe
away from this hemisphere--it was the strength of the British fleet and the width of the
Atlantic Ocean. It was not General Marshall's speech at Harvard which kept communism out of
Western Europe--it was the strength and stability made possible by our military and economic
assistance.
In this administration also it has been necessary at times to issue specific
warnings--warnings that we could not stand by and watch the Communists conquer Laos by force,
or intervene in the Congo, or swallow West Berlin, or maintain offensive missiles on Cuba. But
while our goals were at least temporarily obtained in these and other instances, our successful
defense of freedom was due not to the words we used, but to the strength we stood ready to use
on behalf of the principles we stand ready to defend.
This strength is composed of many different elements, ranging from the most massive
deterrents to the most subtle influences. And all types of strength are needed--no one kind
could do the job alone. Let us take a moment, therefore, to review this Nation's progress in
each major area of strength.
I.
First, as Secretary McNamara made clear in his address last Monday, the strategic nuclear
power of the United States has been so greatly modernized and expanded in the last 1,000 days,
by the rapid production and deployment of the most modern missile systems, that any and all
potential aggressors are clearly confronted now with the impossibility of strategic
victory--and the certainty of total destruction--if by reckless attack they should ever force
upon us the necessity of a strategic reply.
In less than 3 years, we have increased by 50 percent the number of Polaris submarines
scheduled to be in force by the next fiscal year, increased by more than 70 percent our total
Polaris purchase program, increased by more than 75 percent our Minuteman purchase program,
increased by 50 percent the portion of our strategic bombers on 15-minute alert, and increased
by too percent the total number of nuclear weapons available in our strategic alert forces. Our
security is further enhanced by the steps we have taken regarding these weapons to improve the
speed and certainty of their response, their readiness at all times to respond, their ability
to survive an attack, and their ability to be carefully controlled and directed through secure
command operations.
II.
But the lessons of the last decade have taught us that freedom cannot be defended by
strategic nuclear power alone. We have, therefore, in the last 3 years accelerated the
development and deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, and increased by 60 percent the
tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe.
Nor can Europe or any other continent rely on nuclear forces alone, whether they are
strategic or tactical. We have radically improved the readiness of our conventional
forces--increased by 45 percent the number of combat ready Army divisions, increased by 100
percent the procurement of modern Army weapons and equipment, increased by 100 percent our ship
construction, conversion, and modernization program, increased by too percent our procurement
of tactical aircraft, increased by 30 percent the number of tactical air squadrons, and
increased the strength of the Marines. As last month's "Operation Big Lift"--which originated
here in Texas--showed so clearly, this Nation is prepared as never before to move substantial
numbers of men in surprisingly little time to advanced positions anywhere in the world. We have
increased by 175 percent the procurement of airlift aircraft, and we have already achieved a 75
percent increase in our existing strategic airlift capability. Finally, moving beyond the
traditional roles of our military forces, we have achieved an increase of nearly 600 percent in
our special forces--those forces that are prepared to work with our allies and friends against
the guerrillas, saboteurs, insurgents and assassins who threaten freedom in a less direct but
equally dangerous manner.
III.
But American military might should not and need not stand alone against the ambitions of
international communism. Our security and strength, in the last analysis, directly depend on
the security and strength of others, and that is why our military and economic assistance plays
such a key role in enabling those who live on the periphery of the Communist world to maintain
their independence of choice. Our assistance to these nations can be painful, risky and costly,
as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task. For our assistance makes
possible the stationing of 3-5 million allied troops along the Communist frontier at one-tenth
the cost of maintaining a comparable number of American soldiers. A successful Communist
breakthrough in these areas, necessitating direct United States intervention, would cost us
several times as much as our entire foreign aid program, and might cost us heavily in American
lives as well.
About 70 percent of our military assistance goes to nine key countries located on or near
the borders of the Communist bloc--nine countries confronted directly or indirectly with the
threat of Communist aggression - VietNam, Free China, Korea, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Greece,
Turkey, and Iran. No one of these countries possesses on its own the resources to maintain the
forces which our own Chiefs of Staff think needed in the common interest. Reducing our efforts
to train, equip, and assist their armies can only encourage Communist penetration and require
in time the increased overseas deployment of American combat forces. And reducing the economic
help needed to bolster these nations that undertake to help defend freedom can have the same
disastrous result. In short, the $50 billion we spend each year on our own defense could well
be ineffective without the $4 billion required for military and economic assistance.
Our foreign aid program is not growing in size, it is, on the contrary, smaller now than in
previous years. It has had its weaknesses, but we have undertaken to correct them. And the
proper way of treating weaknesses is to replace them with strength, not to increase those
weaknesses by emasculating essential programs. Dollar for dollar, in or out of government,
there is no better form of investment in our national security than our much-abused foreign aid
program. We cannot afford to lose it. We can afford to maintain it. We can surely afford, for
example, to do as much for our 19 needy neighbors of Latin America as the Communist bloc is
sending to the island of Cuba alone.
IV.
I have spoken of strength largely in terms of the deterrence and resistance of aggression
and attack. But, in today's world, freedom can be lost without a shot being fired, by ballots
as well as bullets. The success of our leadership is dependent upon respect for our mission in
the world as well as our missiles--on a clearer recognition of the virtues of freedom as well
as the evils of tyranny.
That is why our Information Agency has doubled the shortwave broadcasting power of the Voice
of America and increased the number of broadcasting hours by 30 percent, increased Spanish
language broadcasting to Cuba and Latin America from I to 9 hours a day, increased seven-fold
to more than 3-5 million copies the number of American books being translated and published for
Latin American readers, and taken a host of other steps to carry our message of truth and
freedom to all the far corners of the earth.
And that is also why we have regained the initiative in the exploration of outer space,
making an annual effort greater than the combined total of all space activities undertaken
during the fifties, launching more than 130 vehicles into earth orbit, putting into actual
operation valuable weather and communications satellites, and making it clear to all that the
United States of America has no intention of finishing second in space.
This effort is expensive--but it pays its own way, for freedom and for America. For there is
no longer any fear in the free world that a Communist lead in space will become a permanent
assertion of supremacy and the basis of military superiority. There is no longer any doubt
about the strength and skill of American science, American industry, American education, and
the American free enterprise system. In short, our national space effort represents a great
gain in, and a great resource of, our national strength--and both Texas and Texans are
contributing greatly to this strength.
Finally, it should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at
home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice
will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully
educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the
hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and
prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to
all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.
It is clear, therefore, that we are strengthening our security as well as our economy by our
recent record increases in national income and output--by surging ahead of most of Western
Europe in the rate of business expansion and the margin of corporate profits, by maintaining a
more stable level of prices than almost any of our overseas competitors, and by cutting
personal and corporate income taxes by some $ I I billion, as I have proposed, to assure this
Nation of the longest and strongest expansion in our peacetime economic history.
This Nation's total output--which 3 years ago was at the $500 billion mark--will soon pass
$600 billion, for a record rise of over $too billion in 3 years. For the first time in history
we have 70 million men and women at work. For the first time in history average factory
earnings have exceeded $100 a week. For the first time in history corporation profits after
taxes--which have risen 43 percent in less than 3 years--have an annual level of $27.4
billion.
My friends and fellow citizens: I cite these facts and figures to make it clear that America
today is stronger than ever before. Our adversaries have not abandoned their ambitions, our
dangers have not diminished, our vigilance cannot be relaxed. But now we have the military, the
scientific, and the economic strength to do whatever must be done for the preservation and
promotion of freedom.
That strength will never be used in pursuit of aggressive ambitions--it will always be used
in pursuit of peace. It will never be used to promote provocations--it will always be used to
promote the peaceful settlement of disputes.
We in this country, in this generation, are--by destiny rather than choice--the watchmen on
the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and
responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may
achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of "peace on earth, good will toward
men." That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our
strength. For as was written long ago: "except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but
in vain."
Comment: This is the concluding article in a series of 12 articles written in 2006
commemorating (at the time) the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of JFK. This day,
November 22nd, 2018, is the 55th anniversary of what can, in hindsight and in Truth, be called
the Day America Died .
... ... ...
The fact is, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a form of control of the government of
the United States. It is the ultimate form of control of the election process. Understanding
this can lead us to understand what has happened to our country since that terrible day in
November, 43 years ago. Studied carefully, the assassination of John F. Kennedy can reveal who
really controls the United States and its polices, particularly foreign policy. As John Kennedy
himself said:
"For we are opposed, around the world, by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies
primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence; in infiltration instead of
invasion; on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice; on
guerillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human
and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that
combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined, its
dissenters are silenced, not praised; no expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no
secret is revealed. It conducts the cold war, in short, with a wartime discipline no
democracy would ever hope to wish to match. ..."
He was right; but I think he didn't realize how far they were willing - and able -
to go.
Nowadays, we know how far they are able and willing to go: just look at the events of
September 11, 2001, which bear the same unmistakable stamp of the assassination of John F.
Kennedy. In fact, as I have mentioned before, the same gang is involved.
... ... ...
Laura Knight-Jadczyk is a seventh generation Floridian, a
historian/mystic and author of 14 books and many articles published in print and on the
internet. She is the founder of SOTT.net and the inspiration behind the Cassiopaean Experiment.
She lives in France with her husband, Polish mathematical physicist, Arkadiusz Jadczyk, four of
her five children, extended family, eight dogs, five birds and a cat.
The dumb thing is the Kennedys were up to their ass in deep state dirty dealing and well
understood how things were done. So, it does them no credit to have failed to strike first
against their enemies, to have used the full power of the presidency to crush their opponents
pre-emptively. Instead, they sucked out, rolled over and fed the machine Bobby.
Ned Ludd They went
into it with their eyes open, but could do nothing to prevent it except to wimp out. And they
refused to wimp out. Sometimes your fate, if you choose to meet it, is to be martyred.
"... Appropriating the land from its stewards was racialized war from the first British settlement in Jamestown, pitting "civilization" against "savagery." Through this pursuit, the U.S. military gained its unique character as a force with mastery in "irregular" warfare. In spite of this, most military historians pay little attention to the so-called Indian Wars from 1607 to 1890, as well as the 1846–48 invasion and occupation of Mexico. ..."
"... Even following the founding of the professional U.S. Army in the 1810s, irregular warfare was the method of the U.S. conquest of the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes, Southeast, and Mississippi Valley regions, then west of the Mississippi to the Pacific, including taking half of Mexico. Since that time, irregular methods have been used in tandem with operations of regular armed forces and are, perhaps, what most marks U.S. armed forces as different from other armies of global powers. ..."
"... A version of this article originally appeared in the Boston Review . ..."
"... Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is the author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States . ..."
prior to its founding, what would become the United
States was engaged -- as it would continue to be for more than a century following -- in
internal warfare to piece together its continental territory. Even during the Civil War, both
the Union and Confederate armies continued to war against the nations of the Diné and
Apache, the Cheyenne and the Dakota, inflicting hideous massacres upon civilians and forcing
their relocations. Yet when considering the history of U.S. imperialism and militarism, few
historians trace their genesis to this period of internal empire-building. They should. The
origin of the United States in settler colonialism -- as an empire born from the violent
acquisition of indigenous lands and the ruthless devaluation of indigenous lives -- lends the
country unique characteristics that matter when considering questions of how to unhitch its
future from its violent DNA.
The United States is not exceptional in the amount of violence or bloodshed when compared to
colonial conquests in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America. Elimination of the native
is implicit in settler colonialism and colonial projects in which large swaths of land and
workforces are sought for commercial exploitation. Extreme violence against noncombatants was a
defining characteristic of all European colonialism, often with genocidal results.
The privatization of land is at the core of the U.S. experiment, and its military powerhouse
was born to expropriate resources. Apt, then, that we once again have a real estate man for
president.
Rather, what distinguishes the United States is the triumphal mythology attached to that
violence and its political uses, even to this day. The post–9/11 external and
internal U.S. war against Muslims-as-"barbarians" finds its prefiguration in the "savage wars"
of the American colonies and the early U.S. state against Native Americans. And when there
were, in effect, no Native Americans left to fight, the practice of "savage wars" remained. In
the twentieth century, well before the War on Terror, the United States carried out large-scale
warfare in the Philippines, Europe, Korea, and Vietnam; prolonged invasions and occupations in
Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; and counterinsurgencies in Columbia and
Southern Africa. In all instances, the United States has perceived itself to be pitted in war
against savage forces.
Appropriating the land from its stewards was racialized war from the first British
settlement in Jamestown, pitting "civilization" against "savagery." Through this pursuit, the
U.S. military gained its unique character as a force with mastery in "irregular" warfare. In
spite of this, most military historians pay little attention to the so-called Indian Wars from
1607 to 1890, as well as the 1846–48 invasion and occupation of Mexico. Yet it was
during the nearly two centuries of British colonization of North America that generations of
settlers gained experience as "Indian fighters" outside any organized military institution.
While large, highly regimented "regular" armies fought over geopolitical goals in Europe, Anglo
settlers in North America waged deadly irregular warfare against the continent's indigenous
nations to seize their land, resources, and roads, driving them westward and eventually
forcibly relocating them west of the Mississippi. Even following the founding of the
professional U.S. Army in the 1810s, irregular warfare was the method of the U.S. conquest of
the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes, Southeast, and Mississippi Valley regions, then west of the
Mississippi to the Pacific, including taking half of Mexico. Since that time, irregular methods
have been used in tandem with operations of regular armed forces and are, perhaps, what most
marks U.S. armed forces as different from other armies of global powers.
By the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37), whose lust for displacing and killing
Native Americans was unparalleled, the character of the U.S. armed forces had come, in the
national imaginary, to be deeply entangled with the mystique of indigenous nations -- as
though, in adopting the practices of irregular warfare, U.S. soldiers had become the very thing
they were fighting. This persona involved a certain identification with the Native enemy,
marking the settler as Native American rather than European. This was part of the sleight of
hand by which U.S. Americans came to genuinely believe that they had a rightful claim to the
continent: they had fought for it and "become" its indigenous inhabitants.
Irregular military techniques that were perfected while expropriating Native American lands
were then applied to fighting the Mexican Republic. At the time of its independence from Spain
in 1821, the territory of Mexico included what is now the states of California, New Mexico,
Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. Upon independence, Mexico continued the practice of
allowing non-Mexicans to acquire large swaths of land for development under land grants, with
the assumption that this would also mean the welcome eradication of indigenous peoples. By 1836
nearly 40,000 Americans, nearly all slavers (and not counting the enslaved), had moved to
Mexican Texas. Their ranger militias were a part of the settlement, and in 1835 became formally
institutionalized as the Texas Rangers. Their principal state-sponsored task was the
eradication of the Comanche nation and all other Native peoples in Texas. Mounted and armed
with the new killing machine, the five-shot Colt Paterson revolver, they did so with dedicated
precision.
Having perfected their art in counterinsurgency operations against Comanches and other
Native communities, the Texas Rangers went on to play a significant role in the U.S. invasion
of Mexico. As seasoned counterinsurgents, they guided U.S. Army forces deep into Mexico,
engaging in the Battle of Monterrey. Rangers also accompanied General Winfield Scott's army and
the Marines by sea, landing in Vera Cruz and mounting a siege of Mexico's main commercial port
city. They then marched on, leaving a path of civilian corpses and destruction, to occupy
Mexico City, where the citizens called them Texas Devils. In defeat and under military
occupation, Mexico ceded the northern half of its territory to the United States, and Texas
became a state in 1845. Soon after, in 1860, Texas seceded, contributing its Rangers to the
Confederate cause. After the Civil War, the Texas Rangers picked up where they had left off,
pursuing counterinsurgency against both remaining Native communities and resistant
Mexicans.
The Marines also trace half of their mythological origins to the invasion of Mexico that
nearly completed the continental United States. The opening lyric of the official hymn of the
Marine Corps, composed and adopted in 1847, is "From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of
Tripoli." Tripoli refers to the First Barbary War of 1801–5, when the Marines were
dispatched to North Africa by President Thomas Jefferson to invade the Berber Nation, shelling
the city of Tripoli, taking captives, and blockading key Barbary ports for nearly four years.
The "Hall of Montezuma," though, refers to the invasion of Mexico: while the U.S. Army occupied
what is now California, Arizona, and New Mexico, the Marines invaded by sea and marched to
Mexico City, murdering and torturing civilian resisters along the way.
So what does it matter, for those of us who strive for peace and justice, that the U.S.
military had its start in killing indigenous populations, or that U.S. imperialism has its
roots in the expropriation of indigenous lands?
It matters because it tells us that the privatization of lands and other forms of human
capital are at the core of the U.S. experiment. The militaristic-capitalist powerhouse of the
United States derives from real estate (which includes African bodies, as well as appropriated
land). It is apt that we once again have a real estate man for president, much like the first
president, George Washington, whose fortune came mainly from his success speculating on unceded
Indian lands. The U.S. governmental structure is designed to serve private property interests,
the primary actors in establishing the United States being slavers and land speculators. That
is, the United States was founded as a capitalist empire. This was exceptional in the world and
has remained exceptional, though not in a way that benefits humanity. The military was designed
to expropriate resources, guarding them against loss, and will continue to do so if left to its
own devices under the control of rapacious capitalists.
When extreme white nationalists make themselves visible -- as they have for the past decade,
and now more than ever with a vocal white nationalist president -- they are dismissed as
marginal, rather than being understood as the spiritual descendants of the settlers. White
supremacists are not wrong when they claim that they understand something about the American
Dream that the rest of us do not, though it is nothing to brag about. Indeed, the origins of
the United States are consistent with white nationalist ideology. And this is where those of us
who wish for peace and justice must start: with full awareness that we are trying to
fundamentally change the nature of the country, which will always be extremely difficult
work.
A version of this article originally appeared in the Boston
Review .
Gobachev rammed this treaty down the throats of the Russian MIC and they hated it. Free of
its constraints they can develop new launchers and warheads. The US redeployed the warheads
from |Pershing II mid-range rockets into B61 nuclear bombs to be flown on German, Belgian,
Italian, Dutch aircraft in breach of Non-Proliferation Treaty ..they have now been upgraded to
B61-12.
The Russians know the US wants a new arms race but they lack the nuclear engineers and
rocket motors. There is a Thycydides Trap and US wants to go pre-emptive, if EU states don't
punish Romania and Poland for inviting launchers on Russia's doorstep it is a useless
institution and nothing more than a US fig leaf
The Russians don't really lose much from the INF treaty these days. They have just
announced cruise missiles with virtually unlimited range, so who cares about 500-5,500
km?
The INF was always carefully shaped to benefit the USA anyway. It applies exclusively to
"land-based" missiles, while the US Navy has a huge fleet of ships that can carry cruise
missiles anywhere in the world.
The "Aegis Ashore" installations in Poland and Romania, to which Mr Putin has referred
repeatedly, point up the absurdity of the treaty's terms. The Americans have designed their
naval Aegis missile system so that it can be carried ashore and used there. So is that
"land-based" or not?
And what about Russian Klub-K (and possibly other) missiles that can be concealed in
ordinary freight containers and taken anywhere? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_c_PeIIeMw
Do they suddenly begin to infringe the INF the moment that container is hoisted off a
ship?
Yes but the INF Treaty really pertained to Europe and the fact that Reagan could fight a
limited nuclear war in Europe without affecting strategic balance that game is back in town.
It is Europe that is going to be the dead zone,
Why would anyone invest in Poland and Romania as front line battle states ? If you go to
the Fulda Gap you see the consequences of being a battle zone – no investment in
industry. Now Amazon has a giant warehouse but for decades this was the Tank Battlezone with
Point Alpha in Here looking across at the channel for the 8th Guards Army tank units surging
from GDR towards Frankfurt.
Simply turning Romania and Poland into battlefields gets us back to where Europe was in
1941
Barbara Lee being the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for the Use
of Military Force. The PATRIOT Act -- one Senator, Russ Feingold standing up and voting against
it when it was initially promoted. So, it was a very effective consolidation of thinking and this
bipartisan embrace of counterinsurgency as a normal part of American politics.
Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, continued some of the worst policies of the George W.
Bush administration. He expanded the global battlefield post-9/11 into at least seven
countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria. At the end of Obama's
second term, a
report by Council of Foreign Relations found that in 2016, Obama dropped an average of 72
bombs a day. He used drone strikes as a liberal panacea for fighting those "terrorists" while
keeping boots off the ground. But he also expanded the number of troops deployed in
Afghanistan. Immigrants were deported in such record numbers under Obama that immigration
activists called him the "deporter-in-chief." And then there were the "Terror Tuesday"
meetings, where Obama national security officials would order pizza and drink Coke and review
the list of potential targets on their secret assassination list.
For his liberal base, Obama sanitized a morally bankrupt expansion of war, and used Predator
and Reaper drones strapped with Hellfire missiles to kill suspected terrorists, including U.S.
citizens stripped of their due process. The Obama administration harshly prosecuted
whistleblowers in a shocking attack on press freedoms. By the end of his presidency, official
numbers on civilian deaths by drone were
underreported ; we may never know the
true cost of these wars, which continue today.
Bush, before him, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, took a hatchet to civil liberties:
He expanded National Security Agency surveillance on overseas communications and created a
system for unprecedented levels of surveilled communications of U.S. citizens. Much of this
happened with the support of leading Democrats. Mosques across the country and in New York City
were spied on. The authorization for the use of military force was passed in 2001 with the full
backing of every lawmaker except for
Rep. Barbara Lee , D-Calif. The bill created the justification for the forever wars that
still rage on 17 years later.
And steadily, all of the counterinsurgency tactics of these
foreign wars have crept back home, Bernard Harcourt argues in a recent book. Called "The
Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens" and it makes the
argument that through NSA spying; Trump's constant, daily distractions; and paramilitarized
police forces or private security companies, the same counterinsurgency paradigm of warfare
used against post-9/11 enemies has now come to U.S. soil as the effective governing strategy.
We are in the middle of an unprecedented paramilitarization of state and local law
enforcement agencies in this country.
All that said, the subject's personality cannot help shine through anyway. One understands
Berlusconi's original appeal: salesmanship on a massive scale. First as a developer and
salesman in the booming 1970s Italian property market. Then by founding Italy's first private
television stations, circumventing the state ban on private national channels Ride of the
Valkyries . Berlusconi's success as a businessman reflects the materialism and
superficiality characteristic of the postwar democratic West, his power derives from the
masses' bottomless desire for things and for spectacle.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Berlusconi in effect converted his media appeal and economic clout
into political capital. My Way does give a sense of the man's charm, brashness, and
sordid sense of humor. Nonetheless, one can't help laughing at his jokes and enjoying his
company. We see him give a pep talk to his football players. Berlusconi tells a black player
that he would like to meet his wife, because she is so beautiful, adding that he needn't worry
as he's already "too old." He tells a fifty-year-old man that he looks great, adding however
that he still doesn't look as a good as Berlusconi himself. This is funny, but Berlusconi, who
was almost eighty during the interviews, does look like an awful case of plastic surgery.
Berlusconi gives us a tour of his gorgeous villa at Arcore (20 kilometers from Milan),
showing his collection of Renaissance paintings, classical Greco-Roman sculpture (some given to
him by Muamar Gaddafi from Libya), and a whole room of paintings of . . . himself, apparently
given to him over the years by his many admirers. Among these we are shown a heroic painting of
Mussolini, with Berlusconi weakly protesting that this shouldn't be filmed, lest they give the
wrong impression.
Berlusconi is a man who gets what he wants. Call it a weakness for appetite or a strength of
will. In any event, Berlusconi tells Friedman that he has never ever gone to bed with his
often-changing wife/girlfriend without making love to her. So much passion. After having two
children with his first wife (who did not age gracefully), he moved in with and eventually
married Veronica Lario. They stayed together for many years but they eventually divorced and,
in keeping with the modern era of female empowerment, Berlusconi has since 2013 been required
pay her $48 million per year as part of their settlement. Berlusconi's girlfriend since 2012 is
50 years his junior and, for her service, will presumably receive an even bigger payout.
Let no one say that THOT-ery does not pay!
Berlusconi's penchant for girls was part of his undoing in another respect, namely in his
notorious "Bunga Bunga" parties with nubile young women, culminating in the trial alleging that
he had had sex with an underage Moroccan prostitute nicknamed "Ruby Rubacuore" (Ruby
Heartstealer). In the interviews, Berlusconi explains that the term "Bunga Bunga" comes from a
sex joke involving an African tribe . . . on which I will say nothing other than I was
astonished to hear it because it was also popular in the high school I frequented.
My Way , while an hour and thirty-eight minutes long, does not tell you all that much
about Berlusconi's politics. Besides his changing of Italian laws so as to escape prosecution
for various misdeeds, the little that is said largely speaks in his favor. He is extremely
proud of having hosted a NATO summit near Rome in 2002, at which Berlusconi, U.S. President
George W. Bush, and Russian President Vladimir Putin really hit it off. Berlusconi goes so far
as to claim that his summit "ended the Cold War," which is the usual hyperbolic salesman-speak,
much like Trump's perennial "tremendous." Certainly, this marked a warming of relations between
Moscow and Washington after the disagreements over the Kosovo War. On the substance, one can
only welcome attempts to bring peace and good relations among Europe, America, and Russia,
which have so often been needlessly in conflict.
Loro & My Way, by Guillaume Durocher -
The Unz Review
In the interviews, Berlusconi makes the case against the Iraq War and against the Libya War.
In both cases he argues, as a good realist, that you need a strong leader, in effect a
dictator, to maintain order in these multiethnic countries. To bring "democracy" would mean
only chaos. Berlusconi notes that Iraq is made up of three antagonistic ethno-religious groups
and that Libya is made up of some 105 tribes, who had regularly declared Gaddafi "King of
Kings." Since the dictators are gone, these Arab nations have known only civil war . . . an
impotence which naturally great benefits Israel, has allowed the foundation of the Islamic
State, and harmed Europe by sparking massive Afro-Islamic migration. The fall of Gaddafi's
dictatorship also led the spread of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which captured
Timbuktu in 2012, destroying some of that city's ancient shrines and mausoleums, one of the few
examples of indigenous Sub-Saharan African architectural heritage.
Berlusconi expresses the basic truth: multicultural societies are not compatible with
democracy or, to put it more positively, with civic politics in general. There can be no
solidarity without identity. Given this fact, the multiculturalists and immigrationists are
digging the grave of liberal democracy, and in their ignorance and delusion, are preparing the
way for new regimes. Let us hope that these will be indeed more coherent and honest forms of
government.
I do not know if Berlusconi actually privately opposed the Iraq invasion in 2003. In any
event, once Bush got on his way, Italy did send troops there. On Libya, Berlusconi was
outmaneuvered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whom Friedman accurately describes as
fomenting a war to boost his flagging approval ratings and distract from his lackluster
economic performance.
We then move to the eurozone crisis in 2011. In this instance, the Great European Ponzi
Scheme of malinvestment in southern European property and debt, collapsed, threatening the
whole continent's banking sector. Friedman does not give the watcher any good idea of why all
this was occurring. He does explicitly show, based primarily on U.S. Secretary of the Treasury
Timothy Geithner's testimony, that Berlusconi was taken out under pressure by Sarkozy and
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who blamed Italy's lack of "reforms" for the eurozone's ills.
The European Central Bank also threatened to let Italy go bankrupt unless Rome towed the
line.
Berlusconi was toppled and Mario Monti, a former EU commissioner and Goldman Sachs banker,
was parachuted in,
on the recommendation of George Soros , no less. I for one don't think that rule by a
small, rootless, international clique tends to be very stable. Monti proved monstrously
unpopular and was kicked out of office within two years. The Italians have since responded to
EU diktats by electing anti-Brussels populists of various stripes.
Loro & My Way, by
Guillaume Durocher - The Unz Review
Friedman interviewed a number of people in making his documentary. These include a (probably
rightly) indignant Italian prosecutor, a colorless Italian journalist, a former Spanish prime
minister, a former EU president, and even Putin himself. Not a whole lot of light comes out of
all of this. Strikingly, Berlusconi emerges as if anything the most likable character among the
whole motley crew of people interviewed, at that is saying something. Despite his more-or-less
hostile narration, the interviewer Friedman is shown constantly being friendly and making
ingratiating smiles with Berlusconi, only to dump him at the end of the film, saying "and I
never saw him again" with a credit role showcasing Berlusconi and his associates' various
convictions.
On Berlusconi the talented and opportunist politician, I can add the following which was not
mentioned in the documentary. He knew how to make the difficult deals to form Italy's
notoriously-unstable coalition governments, starting in 1994, with a short-lived alliance with
the regionalist Lega Nord and post-fascist National Alliance (who hated each other, essentially
over the Southern Question). He knew how to compaign for what the people wanted. His famous
2001 "Contract with the Italians" promised less and simpler taxes, infrastructure, more jobs,
more pensions, more police, and less politicians. Of course, he rarely delivered. In 2006,
constitutional reforms proposed by Berlusconi would have strengthened the prime minister and
devolved more powers to Italy's regions, but this was rejected by referendum.
The Italian journalist in the documentary points out that Berlusconi never did the "reforms"
necessary to save the economy, as he did not want to upset his electorate or his coalition
partners. In short, for all the kvetching, Berlusconi was too much of a democrat to get much
done.
Berlusconi was however decidedly anti-leftist. He wanted to reform the constitution because
it had been co-drafted by the "Soviets" (as a matter of fact, communist and Marxist parties
made up about 40% of the 1946 Constituent Assembly and to this day Italy's official emblem looks
communist ). When facing Romano Prodi's left-wing coalition "the Union" in the mid-2000s,
Berlusconi nicknamed it "the Soviet Union." Unlike in France or Germany, Italy had no
taboo on the center-right, including Berlusconi, making alliances with nationalist and
sometimes even neofascist parties. He was born in 1936 in what was then the Kingdom of Italy,
well into the second decade of Fascist government.
At a holocaust remembrance ceremony in 2013, Berlusconi argued that Mussolini's Fascist
government did many good things , all the while lamenting the alliance with the Third Reich
and participation in the holocaust (specifically, the deportation of Jews, although in fact the
survival rate for Italian Jews was among the highest in Europe and these deportations only
began after Germany had created their own puppet government in northern Italy, nominally led by
Mussolini). As a matter of fact, many figures as diverse as Ezra Pound, Charles de Gaulle, and
Richard
Coudenhove-Kalergi admired Italian Fascism's political stability and ability to promote
communitarian values stressing individual self-sacrifice for the common good. All this may
not be understood today however.
In the end, Berlusconi achieved little politically. He maintained good relations with
Russia, America, Israel, and Libya, the latter being of particular value in containing the
ever-rising tied of African illegal immigration. He had excellent instincts in general. But,
ultimately, he was merely an end in himself, masculinity without purpose.
Salvini's party has eclipsed that of Berlusconi
With the declining influence of the mainstream media and the ability of outsiders to appeal
directly to the masses through social media, we will no doubt see the rise of many more
populists movements of both left and right. Happily, in Italy itself, Berlusconian populism has
given way to that of Matteo Salvini ,
who while something an opportunist himself (like all electoral politicians, I am tempted to
add), is saying and doing many of the right things on immigration and demography . . . and is
getting even more popular as a result.
The opportunity here is in overthrowing an emotionally stunted and ideologically incoherent
establishment, which is destroying Western civilization based on a fundamentally incorrect
understanding of human nature. The risk is that we fall into mere demotism, with governments
mindlessly following the fluctuations of the debased desires and prejudices of public opinion,
which would certainly not be optimal either. From this, there will be more electoral demand for
economically unsustainable left-wing economic policies, and for environmentally damaging
right-wing policies. Neither is desirable, I do not rejoice at Trump's blowing up of America's
hills for coal and gas or Bolsonaro's proposals to further cut down the rain forests.
But this is what democracy means! This is the ineluctable product of the hegemonic
"anti-fascism" and rejection of all authority since 1945! To those who are upset with the
careers of Berlusconi, Trump, and Bolsonaro, I am tempted to quote Gladiator : "Are you
not entertained!? Is this not why you are here!?"
Loro & My Way, by Guillaume Durocher -
The Unz Review
Western men and women can no longer understand the ancient notion of justice: that justice
is a right hierarchy. Obviously, there can be no hierarchy or justice among "equals," for whom
anyone's claim to superiority is necessarily presumptuous arrogance. Westerners today are not
ready to hear or understand these truths. In the natural course of events, things must
necessarily get worse before human beings realize that they are doing or thinking something
wrong, and correct course. This takes time. Things certainly are not bad enough yet. We are far
too comfy.
In the meantime, we will see not only more Berlusconis, but many more Trumps, Bolsonaros,
Orbáns , and
Salvinis in the future, as well as Corbyns and Grillos. Loro & My Way, by Guillaume
Durocher - The Unz Review
you also have to live in the country you talk about, or be on close terms with someone
objective who is really friendly to you and lives there, before confidently drawing judgments
on politicians (or writers, or anybody).
Because interests, ego-interests and career interests, cloud reports and opinions.
In the specific, verbally and culturally assaulting Berlusconi during the time of his
being influential and charismatic was the national (and European) sport for the "if Trump
wins I leave the USA, no longer feeling safe" types -- from Organized Press and TV
"journalists" and "film-makers" to "poets", "singers', "thinkers", and, well, every sort of
"influencer".
The same mechanics at play with Trump in the USA.
He was not superficial and initially got elected with programs and projects ahead of the
time for Italy, meeting the opposition (on top of the Left, as said) of his allies, who were
aggrieved by his overwhelming popularity.
He was no Orban no Haider no Le Pen no Farage. The closest comparison is with Trump but he
was no Trump either.
Among other things, he was always pushing to abridge the gap between Italy and those few
countries ahead of it (very few, but stably ahead) -- thus drawing upon himself the ire of
those countries' establishment.
He pursued independence from European élites, and the USA, in foreign politics and
economic governance, as well as efonomically strategical "friendships" with Russia-Putin and
Libya-Ghaddafi.
Such independence was no longer tolerated when, in the mid-00s, the Financial Times &
Goldman Sachs folks gained greater than ever control on exactly foreign policy of European
countries and economic policy.
"The Markets" suddenly stopped trusting Italy's trustwhortiness amd ability to honour its
debts; the "International Press" went on describing financial instability and dire prospects
for Italy full-time, as they do when there's an end to achieve (and to be achieved
shortly).
Interest rates that had to be paid to creditors and people who's buy state debt soared
above any reasonable height, forcing the government's lapse.
Mario Monti, an economist who had served in the ranks of Goldman Sachs, and an
international-élite member, was made President upon, very clearly, orders from
abroad.
Suddenly The Markets and the International Press went back to finding Italy's finances and
financial prospects healthy, debt rates went back to their normal.
In 2018, after some years an independent goverment is elected again (Salvini-Di Maio), and
again you have the EU's economy chiefs, the Press that Matters, the Markets, the USA rating
agencies, all worried about Italy's financial conditions. And again this makes debt rates on
issued state bonds soar.
It happens whenever elected politicians show lack of obedience -- especially if they fail
to harass Putin, has Berlusconi then, and Salvini & Di Maio now, failed and fail to.
It happens whenever elected politicians show lack of obedience -- especially if they
fail to harass Putin, has Berlusconi then, and Salvini & Di Maio now, failed and fail
to.
Yup. The bond-ratings agencies are nothing but a tool of the globalist debt-vultures on
Wall Street. The whole ratings system is a total scam.
[Friedman] does explicitly show, based primarily on U.S. Secretary of the Treasury
Timothy Geithner's testimony, that Berlusconi was taken out under pressure by Sarkozy and
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who blamed Italy's lack of "reforms" for the eurozone's
ills. The European Central Bank also threatened to let Italy go bankrupt unless Rome towed
the line.
I heard a slightly different version of the story. I heard that Berlusconi was pushed out
of office when he threatened to retaliate against Berlin/Brussels by dropping the euro:
In any case, it's a real delight having Guillaume Durocher here at Unz.com. I had never
heard of him before, but I have so far enjoyed all of his articles. It's always good to get a
European droite nouvelle perspective on politics.
@Digital
Samizdat Thanks for your comment! Indeed Italy is perhaps the country for which the euro
is the worst fit. I can imagine business circles around Berlusconi being tempted to get out..
The story of AC Milan, mentioned only in passing here, is instructive: he doesn't know when
to walk away. This can be viewed as positive (tenacity!) or negative (blatant egotism!), but
the fact is his inability to let go means his hand gets forced and in the case of both Italy
and Milan, everybody ends up with a completely crap deal.
In the meantime, we will see not only more Berlusconis, but many more Trumps,
Bolsonaros, Orbáns, and Salvinis in the future, as well as Corbyns and
Grillos.
Let's be absolutely clear about this. Corbyn is no populist. He has little empathy for the
white working class and is in favour of large 3rd World immigration. In fact, Durocher's case
for Left Wing Populism does not stand up to any form of scrutiny. To paraphrase the
dramatist, the mainstream and far left want to dissolve the people and elect a new one. More
and more immigration, they believe, will result in more and more people reliant on welfare.
These people, when enfranchised, will vote for the parties of welfare – the Left. The
Left will be in power forever, so they believe. Given their vested interest, they are
inherently anti-Populist.
From this, there will be more electoral demand for economically unsustainable
left-wing economic policies, and for environmentally damaging right-wing policies. Neither
is desirable, I do not rejoice at Trump's blowing up of America's hills for coal and gas or
Bolsonaro's proposals to further cut down the rain forests.
The population of the US and Brazil 100 years ago was a fraction of what it is now. In
1917 the US population was about 80 million. Now it is 327 million, a 4-fold increase.
Environmental degradation is logical outcome of large and sudden increase in population,
especially in small areas.
It is even more marked in countries like China and North Korea where there is no democracy at
all.
It has little to do with "demotism" or "right-wing policies."
Large scale industrialisation is also associated with environmental degradation. Yet in
Western Europe and North America, in the last 60 years, air, land and water pollution has
been drastically reduced. In the early 1950s, thousands died of respiratory diseases due to
urban smog – the London Pea Souper being the most notorious. These are now just a
memory.
By contrast, countries like India and China have trouble even supplying the population with
clean water. Many millions of Chinese have tap water with toxic levels of heavy metals and
other pollutants. The resultant deaths also run into the millions.
Mr Durocher seems to have a talent for deducing the wrong inference.
Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo about Italian PM Giulio Andreotti who was actually convicted of
ordering the murder of a journalist (although that was by the same prosecutors' office that
convicted Amanda Knox).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Andreotti
A joke about Andreotti (originally seen in a strip by Stefano Disegni and Massimo Caviglia)
had him receiving a phone call from a fellow party member, who pleaded with him to attend
judge Giovanni Falcone's funeral. His friend supposedly begged, "The State must give an
answer to the Mafia, and you are one of the top authorities in it!" To which a puzzled
Andreotti asked, "Which one do you mean?"
1990 Andreotti was involved in getting all parties to agree to a binding timetable for
the Maastricht Treaty. The deep Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union favoured
by Italy was opposed by Britain's Margaret Thatcher, who wanted a system of competition
between currencies. Germany had doubts about committing to the project without requiring
economic reforms from Italy, which was seen as having various imbalances. As President of
the European Council, Andreotti co-opted Germany by making admittance to the single market
automatic once the criteria had been met, and committing to a rigorous overhaul of Italian
public finances. Critics later questioned Andreotti's understanding of the obligation, or
whether he had ever intended to fulfill it.[50][51]
Italians are taking the French banks that made bad loans to it, and Germany that backs
those loans to prop up the EU single market (Mutualisation), for yet another ride. Macron was
elected as the banks' mutualisation man to making French toxic loans something Germany will
stand behind. Italy is the third largest economy in Europe and too big to fail and they know
it. Technocrat Mario Monti was the bankers' man to reduce Italy's live now pay never
lifestyle , but Italy knew it had a much stronger hand to play and so they elected a
populist. The Germans are going to be squeezed till the pips squeak.
says: November 24, 2018 at 5:38 pm
GMT 100 Words @Big Bill They fought that it
was Russia, that was holding them back, and by separating they could quickly achieve Western
European standard of living. The first guy to become president of independent Ukraine promised
people that they were going to "live like France" .in 5 years (!). lol
So their plan was something like this:
step 1: Separate from Russia.
step 2:
step 3: France
Lately, they began to think that the Ukraine's path to prosperity goes through EU
membership, hence popular support for Euromaidan, and you know the results Phanar Phantom
You're full of shit what the heck do you know about industry you useless little fart ?
are you an industrial engineer do you have any technical qualifications whatsoever or do
you just pull buzzwords like 'marketable skills' out your wazoo, as needed ?
Your industries are worth ZERO, if you're unable to sell your products, and the Ukraine
struggled to sell its manufactured goods after 1991. Its traditional customer – Russia
began to import Western goods.
You sound like Martyanov. lol It doesn't take any "special qualification" to figure out
that Soviet-era factories were churning out worthless crap – there is a reason why that
system fell apart, you know.
@Felix
Keverich Thanks for confirming that you have zero credentials in any technical field yet
you are somehow posing as someone qualified to talk about industry
Glad you are blocking me you little worm the Ostrich response do you cover your eyes and
ears when your teacher or parent [or caregiver, since you are obviously retarded] says
something that is true but which you don't want to hear ?
As for Soviet era factories churning out 'worthless crap' that would include the world's
best rocket engines, decades ahead of the west's technology ?
@Felix
Keverich Liberast opinion. People with this views destroyed the country, caused massive
displacement and demographic and social catastrophes. People with your views should not be
allowed to the levers of power for the distance of avangard shot. If to follow your logic USA
and China must dismantle and sell as scrap metal their MIC as they both clearly cannot
compete with Russian MIC. National manufacturing of everything is not about competition. It
is about souverenity in everything and national capability to provide own population both
with goods and means to make a living via manufacturing of everything needed. Current
situation with so much of everything made in China is an abomination that hurts too much
people around the globe. People with your views in Russia should be purged and preferably
executed for crimes against former Soviet people.
I find it strange that shamir who professes communist views is paying so much attention to
this basically religious spat about power and money. Wasn't it once th as t that religion is
opium for masses. It is here to keep population down so that it is easily fleeced by thieves.
The only value for Russia in orthodoxy at the moment is that the country completely devote of
ideology as per constitution there must be something to hold people together and give some
meaning to their existence.
When McCarthyism ghost is out it is difficult to suppress it. The bottom feeder from
Democratic Party have no other viable agenda that demonizing Russia and presenting it as the the
root cause of 2016 fiasco, which actually are result of their neoliberal transformation under
Bill Clinton. CIA democrats are now married to Russiagate.
The Mueller probe has lost its political potency, as Democrats acknowledged on the midterm
trail. They didn't win House seats by warning of Russian collusion. They didn't even talk about
it. Most voters don't care, or don't care to hear about it. A CNN exit poll found 54% of
respondents think the Russia probe is "politically motivated"; a 46% plurality disapprove of
Mr. Mueller's handling of it.
That hasn't stopped Democrats from fixating on it since the
election, in particular when President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and named
Matthew Whitaker as a temporary replacement. The left now insists the appointment is
unconstitutional or that because Mr. Whitaker once voiced skepticism on the Russia-collusion
narrative, he is unfit to oversee the Mueller investigation and must recuse himself.
The joke here is that neither Mr. Whitaker nor anybody else is likely to exercise any
authority over Mr. Mueller -- and more's the pity. The probe has meandered along for 18 months,
notching records for leaks and derivative prosecutions, though all indications are it has
accomplished little by way of its initial mandate.
As a practical matter, Mr. Mueller should have been brought to heel some time ago. As a
political matter, that won't happen. The administration has always understood that such a move
would provoke bipartisan political blowback, ignite a new "coverup" scandal, and maybe trigger
impeachment. It's even more unlikely officials would risk those consequences now, as Mr.
Mueller is said to be wrapping up.
Democrats know this, as does the grandstanding Sen. Jeff Flake. Yet they demand a Whitaker
recusal and are again pushing legislation to "protect" the special counsel's probe. Senate
Republicans rightly blocked that bill this week, partly on grounds that it is likely
unconstitutional. They also made the obvious point that if Mr. Trump intended to fire Mr.
Mueller, he'd have done so months ago and wouldn't need to ax Mr. Sessions to do it. And while
the president tweets ceaseless criticism of the probe, he has never threatened to end it.
Democrats are nonetheless doubling down on the probe for political advantage. Senate
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared members of his caucus will demand that language making
it more difficult to fire Mr. Mueller be included in a spending bill that needs to pass before
the end of the current legislative session. Mr. Flake is offering an assist, saying that he
will block any judicial nominees in committee until a Mueller protection bill gets a Senate
floor vote. Over in the House, incoming Democratic committee chairmen, led by soon-to-be
Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, are vowing an investigation blitz focused on
collusion with Russia.
Mr. Schumer's last shutdown -- a year ago -- was a bust even though it was waged over the
emotionally compelling issue of Dreamers, illegal aliens brought to the U.S. as children. He
now proposes shutting down the government over a probe few people outside of Washington care
about. Mitch McConnell should be so lucky.
Mr. Flake, should he run for president, will struggle to explain to conservative voters his
obstruction of Trump judicial nominees, who'll be confirmed in 2019 anyway when the Republicans
expand their Senate majority.
Democrats' other problem is that this strategy hinges in large degree on an expectation that
Mr. Mueller ultimately finds something. There's no reason to believe he has turned up any
evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.
Sure, he's secured convictions against longtime Beltway bandits for long-ago lobbying. He's
squeezed the ole standby lying-to-investigators plea out of a few targets. He's indicted a
squad of Russian trolls, who will never be brought to trial and who even Mr. Mueller's office
admits had nothing to do with the Trump team. And while it seems likely his report to the
Justice Department will criticize Mr. Trump, it's improbable it will contain proof of
collusion.
And then? The president will have a field day. He will claim vindication and mercilessly
drive home that the investigation was a waste and a witch hunt. And he will have a point. Two
years of Democratic hyperbole will be undercut by the special counsel they've held out as the
ultimate sleuth. They'll have to decide whether to deride Mr. Mueller's findings as
insufficient to justify continuing their own probes.
Maybe Mr. Mueller has something. We'll see. But if the reporting is correct that he's wound
up high and dry, Democrats will end up there with him.
"... Operating on a budget of Ł1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region ..."
"... The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies." ..."
The hacking collective known as "Anonymous" published a
trove of documents on November 5 which it claims exposes a UK-based psyop to create a " large-scale information secret service
" in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" - which has been blamed for everything from
Brexit to US President Trump winning the 2016 US election.
The primary objective of the " Integrity Initiative " - established
in 2015 by the Institute for Statecraft - is "to provide a coordinated
Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare."
And while the notion of Russian disinformation has become the West's favorite new bogeyman to excuse things such as Hillary Clinton's
historic loss to Donald Trump, we note that "Anonymous" was called out by WikiLeaks in October 2016 as an FBI cutout, while the report
on the Integrity Initiative that Anonymous exposed comes from Russian state-owned network
RT - so it's anyone's guess whose 400lb
hackers are at work here.
Operating on a budget
of Ł1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists,
military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference
in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.
The UK establishment appears to be conducting the very activities of which it and its allies have long-accused the Kremlin,
with little or no corroborating evidence. The program also aims to "change attitudes in Russia itself" as well as influencing
Russian speakers in the EU and North America, one of the leaked
documents states. -
RT
The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway,
Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its
sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region .
The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts
embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government
agencies."
The initiative has received Ł168,000 in funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy and Ł250,000 from the
US State Department , the
documents allege.
Some of its purported members include British MPs and high-profile " independent" journalists with a penchant for anti-Russian
sentiment in their collective online oeuvre, as showcased by a brief glance at their Twitter feeds. -
RT
Noted examples of "inedependent" anti-Russia journalists:
Spanish "Op"
In one example of the group's activities, a "Moncloa Campaign" was successfully conducted by the group's Spanish cluster to block
the appointment of Colonel Pedro Banos as the director of Spain's Department of Homeland Security. It took just seven-and-a-half
hours to accomplish, brags the group in the
documents .
"The [Spanish] government is preparing to appoint Colonel Banos, known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin positions in the Syrian
and Ukrainian conflicts, as Director of the Department of Homeland Security, a key body located at the Moncloa," begins Nacho Torreblanca
in a seven-part tweetstorm describing what happened.
Others joined in. Among them – according to the leaks – academic Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, who wrote that "Mr. Banos is to
geopolitics as a homeopath is to medicine." Appointing such a figure would be "a shame." -
RT
The operation was reported in Spanish media, while Banos was labeled "pro-Putin" by UK MP Bob Seely.
In short, expect anything counter to predominant "open-border" narratives to be the Kremlin's fault - and not a natural populist
reflex to the destruction of borders, language and culture.
"... It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" ..."
"... "The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016." ..."
"... "Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..." ..."
"... this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war ..."
"... Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK. ..."
"... The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth ..."
"... British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me ..."
"... It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations ..."
"... A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants? ..."
"... I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins. ..."
"... The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval. ..."
"... Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda ..."
"... This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap. ..."
"... Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification ..."
"... It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling ..."
"... As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love? ..."
"... They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites. ..."
"... The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation. ..."
"... Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power. ..."
"... Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government. ..."
British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear CampaignsSteveg , Nov 24,
2018 11:43:44 AM |
link
In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream.
We have already seen
many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who
does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign
against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but
seems to be part of a different project.
The ' Integrity
Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military
personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via
social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.
On June 7 it took the the Spanish cluster only a few hours to derail the appointment of
Perto Banos as the Director of the National Security Department in Spain. The cluster
determined that he had a too positive view of Russia and launched a coordinated social media
smear
campaign (pdf) against him.
The Initiative and its operations were unveiled when someone liberated some of its
documents, including its budget applications to the British Foreign Office, and
posted them under the 'Anonymous' label at cyberguerrilla.org .
The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in
cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of
politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed
by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North
America.
It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" and
promises that:
Cluster members will be sent to educational sessions abroad to improve the technical
competence of the cluster to deal with disinformation and strengthen bonds in the cluster
community. [...] (Events with DFR Digital Sherlocks, Bellingcat, EuVsDisinfo, Buzzfeed,
Irex, Detector Media, Stopfake, LT MOD Stratcom – add more names and propose cluster
participants as you desire).
The Initiatives Orwellian slogan is 'Defending Democracy Against Disinformation'. It
covers European countries, the UK, the U.S. and Canada and seems to want to expand to the
Middle East.
On its About page
it claims: "We are not a government body but we do work with government departments and
agencies who share our aims." The now published budget plans show that more than 95% of the
Initiative's funding is coming directly from the British government, NATO and the U.S. State
Department. All the 'contact persons' for creating 'clusters' in foreign countries are
British embassy officers. It amounts to a foreign influence campaign by the British
government that hides behind a 'civil society' NGO.
The organisation is led by one Chris N. Donnelly who
receives (pdf) £8,100 per month for creating the smear campaign network.
To counter Russian disinformation and malign influence in Europe by: expanding the
knowledge base; harnessing existing expertise, and; establishing a network of networks of
experts, opinion formers and policy makers, to educate national audiences in the threat and
to help build national capacities to counter it .
The Initiative has a black and white view that is based on a "we are the good ones"
illusion. When "we" 'educate the public' it is legitimate work. When others do similar, it
its disinformation. That is of course not the reality. The Initiative's existence itself,
created to secretly manipulate the public, is proof that such a view is wrong.
If its work were as legit as it wants to be seen, why would the Foreign Office run it from
behind the curtain as an NGO? The Initiative is not the only such operation. It's
applications seek funding from a larger "Russian Language Strategic Communication Programme"
run by the Foreign Office.
The 2017/18 budget application sought FCO funding of £480,635. It received
£102,000 in co-funding from NATO and the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense. The 2018/19
budget application shows a
planned spending (pdf) of £1,961,000.00. The co-sponsors this year are again NATO
and the Lithuanian MoD, but
also include (pdf) the U.S. State Department with £250,000 and Facebook with
£100,000. The budget lays out a strong cooperation with the local military of each
country. It notes that NATO is also generous in financing the local clusters.
One of the liberated papers of the Initiative is a talking points memo labeled
Top 3 Deliverable for FCO (pdf):
Developing and proving the cluster concept and methodology, setting up clusters in a
range of countries with different circumstances
Making people (in Government, think tanks, military, journalists) see the big
picture, making people acknowledge that we are under concerted, deliberate hybrid attack
by Russia
Increasing the speed of response, mobilising the network to activism in pursuit of
the "golden minute"
Under top 1, setting up clusters, a subitem reads:
- Connects media with academia with policy makers with practitioners in a country to impact
on policy and society: ( Jelena Milic silencing pro-kremlin voices on Serbian TV )
Defending Democracy by silencing certain voices on public TV seems to be a
self-contradicting concept.
Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:
We engage only very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal
contacts, specifically to ensure that they do not come to see our work as a problem, and to
try to influence them gently, as befits an independent NGO operation like ours, viz;
- Germany, via the Zentrum Liberale Moderne to the Chancellor's Office and MOD
- Netherlands, via the HCSS to the MOD
- Poland and Romania, at desk level into their MFAs via their NATO Reps
- Spain, via special advisers, into the MOD and PM's office (NB this may change very soon
with the new Government)
- Norway, via personal contacts into the MOD
- HQ NATO, via the Policy Planning Unit into the Sec Gen's office.
We have latent contacts into other governments which we will activate as needs be as the
clusters develop.
A look at the 'clusters' set up in U.S. and UK shows some prominent names.
Members of the Atlantic Council, which has a contract to
censor Facebook posts , appear on several cluster lists. The UK core cluster also
includes some prominent names like tax fraudster William Browder , the daft Atlantic Council
shill Ben Nimmo and the neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. One person
of interest is Andrew Wood who
handed the Steele 'dirty dossier' to Senator John McCain to smear Donald Trump over
alleged relations with Russia. A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah
Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times, Neil Buckley from the FT and Jonathan Marcus
of the BBC.
A ' Cluster
Roundup ' (pdf) from July 2018 details its activities in at least 35 countries. Another
file reveals (pdf) the local
partnering institutions and individuals involved in the programs.
The Initiatives Guide
to Countering Russian Information (pdf) is a rather funny read. It lists the downing of
flight MH 17 by a Ukranian BUK missile, the fake chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun and the
Skripal Affair as examples for "Russian disinformation". But at least two of these events,
Khan Sheikun via the UK run White Helmets and the Skripal affair, are evidently products of
British intelligence disinformation operations.
The probably most interesting papers of the whole stash is the 'Project Plan' laid out at
pages 7-40 of the
2018 budget application v2 (pdf). Under 'Sustainability' it notes:
The programme is proposed to run until at least March 2019, to ensure that the clusters
established in each country have sufficient time to take root, find funding, and
demonstrate their effectiveness. FCO funding for Phase 2 will enable the activities to be
expanded in scale, reach and scope. As clusters have established themselves, they have
begun to access local sources of funding. But this is a slow process and harder in some
countries than others. HQ NATO PDD [Public Diplomacy Division] has proved a reliable source
of funding for national clusters. The ATA [Atlantic Treaty Association] promises to be the
same, giving access to other pots of money within NATO and member nations. Funding from
institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal
disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been
resolved and funding should now flow.
The programme has begun to create a critical mass of individuals from a cross society
(think tanks, academia, politics, the media, government and the military) whose work is
proving to be mutually reinforcing . Creating the network of networks has given each
national group local coherence, credibility and reach, as well as good international
access. Together, these conditions, plus the growing awareness within governments of the
need for this work, should guarantee the continuity of the work under various auspices and
in various forms.
The
third part of the budget application (pdf) list the various activities, their output and
outcome. The budget plan includes a section that describes 'Risks' to the initiative. These
include hacking of the Initiatives IT as well as:
Adverse publicity generated by Russia or by supporters of Russia in target countries, or by
political and interest groups affected by the work of the programme, aimed at discrediting
the programme or its participants, or to create political embarrassment.
We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.
Posted by b on November 24, 2018 at 11:24 AM |
Permalink
"The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to
prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election
meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil
throughout 2016."
"Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that
Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In
Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling
custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele
dossier..."
For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.
this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and
propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex
corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the
voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war.. i guess the idea is to get the
ordinary people to think in terms of hating another country based on lies and that this would
be a good thing... it is very sad what uk / usa leadership in the past century has come down
to here.... i can only hope that info releases like this will hasten it's demise...
Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of
illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a
financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same
laws as the rest of the UK.
The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to
me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth
@6 ingrian... things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of Russia after the fall of
the Soviet Union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit Russia
fully, as they'd intended...
Let the Doxx wars begin! Sure, Anonymous is not Russian but it will surely now be targeted
and smeared as such which would show that it has hit a nerve. British hypocrisy publicly
called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me.
I think we've all noticed the euro-asslantic press (and friends) on behalf of, willingly
and in cooperation with the British intelligence et al 'calling out' numerous Russians as
G(R)U/spies/whatever for a while now yet providing less than a shred of credible
evidence.
It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The
interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint
does not bode well for such relations.
Meanwhile in Brussels they are having their cake and eating it, i.e. bemoaning Europe's
'weak response' to Russian propaganda:
"A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of
the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you
have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants?
Yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be
black at all; it's just the pot making up things. "These Russian criminals are using
propaganda to show (truths) like the fact the DNC and Clinton campaigns colluded to prevent
Sanders from being nominated, so we need to establish a clandestine propaganda network to
establish that the Russians are running propaganda!"
"In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream."
I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit
and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been
launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins.
The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's
explicit approval.
Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed
by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to
have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are
not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own
party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda
BUT...the author assures us that the "deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding
should now flow" Huh?? In other words, the fix is in. Mueller will pardon Trump on collusion charges but the
propaganda campaign against Russia will continue...with the full support of both parties. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it...
This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been
about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had
plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap.
A lot of
sour grapes with this so-called 'integrity initiative', IMO. BP was behind a lot of this, I
would also think. When Assad pulled the plug on the pipeline through the Levant in 2009, the
Brits hacked up a fur ball. It's gone downhill for them ever since. Couldn't happen to a
nicer lot. If you can't invade or beat them with proxies, you can at least call them names.
If Trump was taking dirty money or engaged in criminal activity with Russians then he
was doing it with Felix Sater, who was under the control of the FBI... And who was in
charge of the FBI during all of the time that Sater was a signed up FBI snitch? You got it
-- Robert Mueller (2001 thru 2013) ...
It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6
meddling, including:
Steele dossier: To create suspicion in government, media, and later the public
Leaking of DNC emails to Wikileaks (but calling it a "hack"):
To help with election of Trump and link Wikileaks (as agent) to Russian election
meddling
Cambridge Analytica: To provide necessary reasoning for Trump's (certain) win of the electoral college.
Note: We later found that dozens of firms had undue access to Facebook data. Why did the
campaign turn to a British firm instead of an American firm? Well, it had to be a British
firm if MI6 was running the (supposed) Facebook targeting for CIA.
As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The
election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was
the best candidate for the job.
The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love?
"things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of russia after the fall of the soviet
union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit russia fully, as
they'd intended..."
They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent
Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course
the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass
psychological pathology among the elites.
The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist
"order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US
and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation.
Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it
all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is
Strength." The three pillars of political power.
Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his
pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always
been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so
called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK
government...and in this context, new empowerished sovereign governemts into the EU should
consider the possibility expelling these traitors as spies of the UK....
Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:
Germany: Harold Elletson ,Klaus NaumannWolf-Ruediger Bengs, Ex Amb Killian, Gebhardt v Moltke, Roland
Freudenstein, Hubertus Hoffmann, Bertil Wenger, Beate Wedekind, Klaus Wittmann, Florian
Schmidt, Norris v Schirach
Sweden, Norway, Finland: Martin Kragh , Jardar Ostbo, Chris Prebensen, Kate Hansen Bundt, Tor Bukkvoll, Henning-Andre
Sogaard, Kristen Ven Bruusgard, Henrik O Breitenbauch, Niels Poulsen, Jeppe Plenge, Claus
Mathiesen, Katri Pynnoniemi, Ian Robertson, Pauli Jarvenpaa, Andras Racz
Netherlands: Dr Sijbren de Jong, Ida Eklund-Lindwall, Yevhen Fedchenko, Rianne Siebenga, Jerry Sullivan,
Hunter B Treseder, Chris Quick
Spain: Nico de Pedro, Ricardo Blanco Tarno, Eduardo Serra Rexach, Dionisio Urteaga Todo, Dimitri
Barua, Fernando Valenzuela Marzo, Marta Garcia, Abraham Sanz, Fernando Maura, Jose Ignacio
Sanchez Amor, Jesus Ramon-Laca Clausen, Frances Ghiles, Carmen Claudin, Nika Prislan, Luis
Simon, Charles Powell, Mira Milosevich, Daniel Iriarte, Anna Bosch, Mira Milosevich-Juaristi,
Tito, Frances Ghiles, Borja Lasheras, Jordi Bacaria, Alvaro Imbernon-Sainz, Nacho Samor
US, Canada:
Mary Ellen Connell, Anders Aslund, Elizabeth Braw, Paul Goble, David Ziegler
Evelyn Farkas, Glen Howard, Stephen Blank, Ian Brzezinski, Thomas Mahnken, John Nevado,
Robert Nurick, Jeff McCausland
Todd Leventhal
UK: Chris Donnelly
Amalyah Hart William Browder John Ardis
Roderick Collins, Patrick Mileham Deborah Haynes
Dan Lafayeedney Chris Hernon Mungo Melvin
Rob Dover Julian Moore Agnes Josa David Aaronovitch Stephen Dalziel Raheem Shapi Ben
Nimmo
Robert Hall Alexander Hoare Steve Jermy Dominic Kennedy
Victor Madeira Ed Lucas Dr David Ryall
Graham Geale Steve Tatham Natalie Nougayrede Alan Riley [email protected]Anne Applebaum Neil Logan Brown James Wilson
Primavera Quantrill
Bruce Jones David Clark Charles Dick
Ahmed Dassu Sir Adam Thompson Lorna Fitzsimons Neil Buckley Richard Titley Euan Grant
Alastair Aitken Yusuf Desai Bobo Lo Duncan Allen Chris Bell
Peter Mason John Lough Catherine Crozier
Robin Ashcroft Johanna Moehring Vadim Kleiner David Fields Alistair Wood Ben Robinson Drew
Foxall Alex Finnen
Orsyia Lutsevych Charlie Hatton Vladimir Ashurkov
Giles Harris Ben Bradshaw
Chris Scheurweghs James Nixey
Charlie Hornick Baiba Braze J Lindley-French
Craig Oliphant Paul Kitching Nick Childs Celia Szusterman
James Sherr Alan Parfitt Alzbeta Chmelarova Keir Giles
Andy Pryce Zach Harkenrider
Kadri Liik Arron Rahaman David Nicholas Igor Sutyagin Rob Sandford Maya Parmar Andrew Wood
Richard Slack Ellie Scarnell
Nick Smith Asta Skaigiryte Ian Bond Joanna Szostek Gintaras Stonys Nina Jancowicz
Nick Washer Ian Williams Joe Green Carl Miller Adrian Bradshaw
Clement Daudy Jeremy Blackham Gabriel Daudy Andrew Lucy Stafford Diane Allen Alexandros
Papaioannou
Paddy Nicoll
Oil and commodity markets were used as a finishing move on the Soviet system. The book,
"The Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century" by James R. Norman details the
use of oil futures as a geopolitical tool. Pipelines change the calculus quite a bit.
Trump is a puppet of military industrial complex (and Israel is just a lobbyist for the US military industrial complex,
nothing more nothing less). Now there is no questions about Trump's betrayal of his voters which is even more brazen then Obama
betrayal.
Notable quotes:
"... Of John Feffer's dystopian fiction, Mike Davis ..."
"... has written ..."
"... that "he's our twenty-first century Jack London" and Barbara Ehrenreich comments that he "paints a startling portrait of a post-apocalyptic tomorrow that is fast becoming a reality today." Now, Dispatch Books has just released ..."
"... , volume two of Feffer's ..."
"... series, a riveting tale of a planet that has fractured under the pressures of both nationalism and climate change. It couldn't be more topical or more gripping. ..."
"... So here's a reminder that, thanks to publisher Haymarket Books, ..."
"... readers can still get a half-price copy of ..."
"... clicking this link ..."
"... ! Do it while you can -- and any reader who would like to offer this website a little much-needed extra support in the age of you-know-who can for a $100 donation ($125 if you live outside the U.S.) get a signed, personalized copy of Feffer's new book. ..."
"... and check out the details at our donation page. And many thanks in advance! ..."
"... Note that the next ..."
"... piece will be posted on Tuesday the 27th. Have a fine Thanksgiving! Tom ..."
"... I remember Chalmers Johnson once describing to me his surprise on discovering that, after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union imploded, the whole global military structure that Washington had set up -- which he later came to call " America's empire of bases " or our "globe-girdling Baseworld" -- chugged right on. ..."
"... There's never been anything quite like it, not for the Roman Empire, the British Empire, or the Soviet one either. And as TomDispatch ..."
"... President Trump, whose " instincts ," on the campaign trail, were to pull out of America's Middle Eastern quagmires, turned out to be ready to escalate tensions with China, Russia, Iran, and even (for a while) North Korea. ..."
"... on Twitter and join us on Facebook . Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) ..."
[ Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the
author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position
of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]
[ Note for TomDispatch readers: Of John Feffer's dystopian fiction, Mike Davishas
writtenthat "he's our twenty-first century Jack London" and Barbara Ehrenreich
comments that he "paints a startling portrait of a post-apocalyptic tomorrow that is fast
becoming a reality today." Now, Dispatch Books has just releasedFrostlands,
volume two of Feffer'sSplinterlandsseries, a riveting tale of a planet that has fractured under the pressures of both
nationalism and climate change. It couldn't be more topical or more gripping.
So here's a reminder that, thanks to publisher Haymarket Books, TomDispatch
readers can still get a half-price copy of Frostlands byclicking
this link! Do it while you can -- and any reader who would like to offer this
website a little much-needed extra support in the age of you-know-who can for a $100 donation
($125 if you live outside the U.S.) get a signed, personalized copy of Feffer's new book.Click
hereand check out the details at our donation page. And many thanks in
advance!
Note that the next TomDispatch piece will be posted on Tuesday the 27th. Have a
fine Thanksgiving! Tom ]
I remember Chalmers Johnson once
describing to me his surprise on discovering that, after the Cold War ended and the Soviet
Union imploded, the whole global military structure that Washington had set up -- which he
later came to call "
America's empire of bases " or our "globe-girdling Baseworld" -- chugged right on.
It didn't matter that there was no real enemy left on Planet Earth. It was, I believe, what
finally convinced Johnson that this country was indeed an empire. And here's the strange thing,
though it goes remarkably unnoticed in our world: that vast global structure of military
garrisons, unprecedented in history, ranging from some the size of American towns to small
outposts, has remained in place to this very second. Though little attention has been paid in
recent years -- despite the fact that it couldn't be a more prominent feature on this planet,
geo-militarily speaking -- there remain something like 800 American
garrisons worldwide (not counting, of course, the more than 420
military bases located in the continental U.S., Guam, and Puerto Rico), as David Vine reported
in his path-breaking 2015 book, Base Nation
.
There's never been anything quite like it, not for the Roman Empire, the British Empire,
or the Soviet one either. And as TomDispatch regular and U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen reports today, with our
military now in the process of transforming the whole planet into an even more militarized
place, those bases will be all the more relevant. So here's a small suggestion for all the
media outlets
covering President Trump in such a 24/7 fashion: Why not spare just one reporter to cover
that empire of bases on a planet on which, as Sjursen reports, the U.S. military is
increasingly focused on future wars of every imaginable sort (right up to the sort that
could leave this planet in shreds)? Tom
Planet of War:
Still Trapped in a Greater Middle Eastern Quagmire, the U.S. Military Prepares for Global
Combat
By Danny
Sjursen
American militarism has gone off the rails -- and this middling career officer should have
seen it coming. Earlier in this century, the U.S. military not surprisingly focused on
counterinsurgency as it faced various
indecisive and seemingly unending wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa.
Back in 2008, when I was still a captain newly returned from Iraq and studying at Fort Knox,
Kentucky, our training scenarios generally focused on urban combat and what were called
security and stabilization missions. We'd plan to assault some notional city center, destroy
the enemy fighters there, and then transition to pacification and "humanitarian"
operations.
Of course, no one then asked about the dubious efficacy of "regime change" and "nation
building," the two activities in which our country had been so regularly engaged. That would
have been frowned upon. Still, however bloody and wasteful those wars were, they now look
like relics from a remarkably simpler time. The U.S. Army knew its mission then (even if it
couldn't accomplish it) and could predict what each of us young officers was about to take
another crack at: counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Fast forward eight years -- during which this author fruitlessly toiled away in
Afghanistan and taught at West Point -- and the U.S. military ground presence has
significantly decreased in the Greater Middle East, even if its wars there remain "
infinite ." The U.S. was still bombing, raiding, and "advising" away in several of
those old haunts as I entered the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas. Nonetheless, when I first became involved in the primary staff officer training
course for mid-level careerists there in 2016, it soon became apparent to me that something
was indeed changing.
Our training scenarios were no longer limited to counterinsurgency operations. Now, we
were planning for possible deployments to -- and high-intensity conventional warfare in --
the Caucasus, the Baltic Sea region, and the South China Sea (think: Russia and China). We
were also planning for conflicts against an Iranian-style "rogue" regime (think: well, Iran).
The missions became all about projecting U.S. Army divisions into distant regions to fight
major wars to "liberate" territories and bolster allies.
One thing soon became clear to me in my new digs: much had changed. The U.S. military had,
in fact, gone global in a big way. Frustrated by its inability to close the deal on any of
the indecisive counterterror wars of this century, Washington had decided it was time to
prepare for "real" war with a host of imagined enemies. This process had, in fact, been
developing right under our noses for quite a while. You remember in 2013 when President Obama
and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began talking about a " pivot " to Asia -- an
obvious attempt to contain China. Obama also sanctioned
Moscow and further militarized
Europe in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Crimea. President Trump, whose "
instincts ," on the campaign trail, were to pull out of America's Middle Eastern
quagmires, turned out to be ready to escalate tensions with China, Russia, Iran, and even
(for a while) North Korea.
With Pentagon budgets reaching record levels
-- some $717 billion for 2019 -- Washington has stayed the course, while beginning to plan
for more expansive future conflicts across the globe. Today, not a single square inch of this
ever-
warming planet of ours escapes the reach of U.S. militarization.
Think of these developments as establishing a potential formula for perpetual conflict
that just might lead the United States into a truly
cataclysmic war it neither needs nor can meaningfully win. With that in mind, here's a
little tour of Planet Earth as the U.S. military now imagines it.
Our Old Stomping Grounds: Forever War in the Middle East and Africa
Never apt to quit, even after 17 years of failure, Washington's bipartisan military
machine still churns along in the Greater Middle East. Some 14,500 U.S. troops remain in
Afghanistan (along with much U.S. air power) though that war is
failing by just about any measurable metric you care to choose -- and Americans are still
dying there, even if in diminished numbers.
In Syria, U.S. forces remain trapped between hostile powers,
one mistake away from a possible outbreak of hostilities with Russia, Iran, Syrian President
Assad, or even NATO ally Turkey. While American troops (and air power) in Iraq helped destroy
ISIS's physical "caliphate," they remain entangled there in a low-level guerrilla struggle in
a country seemingly incapable of forming a stable
political consensus. In other words, as yet there's no end in sight for that now
15-year-old war. Add in the drone strikes, conventional air attacks, and special forces raids
that Washington regularly unleashes in Somalia, Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan, and it's clear
that the U.S. military's hands remain more than full in the region.
If anything, the tensions -- and potential for escalation -- in the Greater Middle East
and North Africa are only worsening. President Trump ditched
President Obama's Iran nuclear deal and, despite the recent drama over the
murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has gleefully backed the Saudi royals in
their arms race and cold war with Iran. While the other major players in that nuclear pact
remained on board, President Trump has appointed unreformed Iranophobe neocons like John
Bolton and Mike Pompeo to key foreign policy positions and his administration still threatens
regime change in Tehran.
In Africa, despite talk about downsizing the U.S. presence there, the military advisory
mission has only increased
its various commitments, backing questionably legitimate governments against local opposition
forces and destabilizing further an already unstable continent. You might think that waging
war for two decades on two continents would at least keep the Pentagon busy and temper
Washington's desire for further confrontations. As it happens, the opposite is proving to be
the case.
Poking the Bear: Encircling Russia and Kicking Off a New Cold War
Vladimir Putin's Russia is increasingly autocratic and has shown a propensity for
localized aggression in its sphere of influence. Still, it would be better not to exaggerate
the threat. Russia did annex the Crimea, but the people of that province were
Russians and desired such a reunification. It intervened in a Ukrainian civil war,
but Washington was also
complicit in the coup that kicked off that drama. Besides, all of this unfolded in
Russia's neighborhood as the U.S. military increasingly
deploys its forces up to the very borders of the Russian Federation. Imagine the hysteria
in Washington if Russia were deploying troops and advisers in Mexico or the Caribbean.
To put all of this in perspective, Washington and its military machine actually prefer
facing off against Russia. It's a fight the armed forces still remain comfortable with. After
all, that's what its top commanders were trained for during the tail end of an almost
half-century-long Cold War. Counterinsurgency is frustrating and indecisive. The prospect of
preparing for "real war" against the good old Russians with tanks, planes, and artillery --
now, that's what the military was built for!
And despite all the over-hyped talk about Donald Trump's complicity with Russia, under
him, the Obama-era military escalation in Europe has only expanded. Back when I was toiling
hopelessly in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army was actually removing combat brigades from
Germany and stationing them back on U.S. soil (when, of course, they weren't off fighting
somewhere in the Greater Middle East). Then, in the late Obama years, the military began
returning those forces to Europe and stationing
them in the Baltic, Poland, Romania, and other countries increasingly near to Russia. That's
never ended and, this year, the U.S. Air Force has
delivered its largest shipment of ordnance to Europe since the Cold War.
Make no mistake: war with Russia would be an unnecessary disaster -- and it could go
nuclear. Is Latvia really worth that risk?
From a Russian perspective, of course, it's Washington and its expansion of the (by
definition) anti-Russian NATO alliance into Eastern Europe that constitutes the real
aggression in the region -- and Putin may have a point there. What's more, an honest
assessment of the situation suggests that Russia, a country whose economy is about the
size
of Spain's, has neither the will nor the capacity to invade Central Europe. Even in the bad
old days of the Cold War, as we now know from Soviet archives, European
conquest was never on Moscow's agenda. It still isn't.
Nonetheless, the U.S. military goes on preparing for what Marine Corps Commandant General
Robert Neller, addressing some of his forces in Norway, claimed was a "
big fight " to come. If it isn't careful, Washington just might get the war it seems to
want and the one that no one in Europe or the rest of this planet needs.
Challenging the Dragon: The Futile Quest for Hegemony in Asia
The United States Navy has long treated the world's oceans as if they were American lakes.
Washington extends no such courtesy to other great powers or nation-states. Only now, the
U.S. Navy finally faces some challenges abroad -- especially in the Western Pacific. A rising
China, with a swiftly growing economy and carrying grievances from a long history of European
imperial domination, has had the audacity to
assert itself in the South China Sea. In response, Washington has reacted with panic and
bellicosity.
Never mind that the South China Sea is Beijing's Caribbean (a place where Washington long
felt it had the right to do anything it wanted militarily). Heck, the South China Sea has
China in its name! The U.S. military now claims -- with just enough truth to
convince the uninformed -- that China's growing navy is out for Pacific, if not global,
dominance. Sure, at the moment China has only
two aircraft carriers, one an
old rehab (though it is building more) compared to the U.S. Navy's 11 full-sized and
nine
smaller carriers. And yes, China hasn't actually attacked any of its neighbors yet.
Still, the American people are told that their military must prepare for possible future war
with the most populous nation on the planet.
In that
spirit, it has been forward deploying yet more ships, Marines, and troops to the Pacific Rim
surrounding China. Thousands of Marines are now
stationed in Northern Australia; U.S. warships cruise the South Pacific; and Washington
has sent mixed
signals regarding its military commitments to Taiwan. Even the Indian Ocean has recently
come to be seen as a possible future battleground with China, as the U.S. Navy increases its
regional patrols there and Washington negotiates
stronger military ties with China's rising neighbor, India. In a symbolic gesture, the
military recently
renamed its former Pacific Command (PACOM) the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM).
Unsurprisingly, China's military high command has escalated accordingly. They've
advised their South China Sea Command to prepare for war, made their own set of
provocative gestures in the South China Sea, and also
threatened to invade Taiwan should the Trump administration change America's longstanding
"One China" policy.
From the Chinese point of view, all of this couldn't be more logical, given that President
Trump has also unleashed a "
trade war " on Beijing's markets and intensified his anti-China rhetoric. And all of this
is, in turn, consistent with the Pentagon's increasing militarization of the entire
globe.
No Land Too Distant
Would that it were only Africa, Asia, and Europe that Washington had chosen to militarize.
But as Dr. Seuss might have said : that is not all, oh no, that is not
all. In fact, more or less every square inch of our spinning planet not already occupied by a
rival state has been deemed a militarized space to be contested. The U.S. has long been
unique in the way it divided the entire surface of the globe into geographical (combatant)
commands presided over
by generals and admirals who functionally serve as regional Roman-style proconsuls.
And the Trump years are only accentuating this phenomenon. Take Latin America, which might
normally be considered a non-threatening space for the U.S., though it is already under the
gaze of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). Recently, however, having already threatened to "
invade
" Venezuela, President Trump spent the election campaign rousing his base on the claim that a
desperate caravan of Central American refugees -- hailing from countries the U.S. had a
significant
responsibility for destabilizing in the first place -- was a literal "
invasion " and so yet another military problem. As such, he
ordered more than 5,000 troops (more than currently serve in Syria or Iraq) to the
U.S.-Mexico border.
Though he is not the first to
try to do so, he has also sought to
militarize space and so create a possible fifth branch of the U.S. military, tentatively
known as
the Space Force . It makes sense. War has long been three dimensional, so why not bring
U.S. militarism into the stratosphere, even as the U.S. Army is
evidently training and preparing for a new cold war (no pun intended) with that
ever-ready adversary, Russia, around the Arctic Circle.
If the world as we know it is going to end, it will either be thanks to the long-term
threat of climate change or an absurd nuclear war. In both cases, Washington has been upping
the ante and doubling down. On climate change, of course, the Trump administration seems
intent on loading the atmosphere with ever more greenhouse gases. When it comes to nukes,
rather than admit that they are unusable and seek to further downsize the bloated U.S. and
Russian arsenals, that administration, like Obama's, has committed itself to the
investment of what could, in the end, be at least $1.6 trillion over three decades for
the full-scale "modernization" of that arsenal. Any faintly rational set of actors would long
ago have accepted that nuclear war is unwinnable and a formula for mass human extinction. As
it happens, though, we're not dealing with rational actors but with a defense establishment
that considers it a prudent move to
withdraw from the Cold War era Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Russia.
And that ends our tour of the U.S. military's version of Planet Earth.
It is often said that, in an Orwellian sense, every nation needs an enemy to unite and
discipline its population. Still, the U.S. must stand alone in history as the only country to
militarize the whole globe (with space thrown in) in preparation for taking on just about
anyone. Now, that's exceptional.
The United States has been at war every day since its founding, often covertly and often in
several parts of the world at once. As ghastly as that sentence is, it still does not capture
the full picture. Indeed, prior to its founding, what would become the United States
was engaged -- as it would continue to be for more than a century following -- in internal
warfare to piece together its continental territory. Even during the Civil War, both the Union
and Confederate armies continued to war against the nations of the Diné and Apache, the
Cheyenne and the Dakota, inflicting hideous massacres upon civilians and forcing their
relocations. Yet when considering the history of U.S. imperialism and militarism, few
historians trace their genesis to this period of internal empire-building. They should. The
origin of the United States in settler colonialism -- as an empire born from the violent
acquisition of indigenous lands and the ruthless devaluation of indigenous lives -- lends the
country unique characteristics that matter when considering questions of how to unhitch its
future from its violent DNA.
The United States is not exceptional in the amount of violence or bloodshed when compared to
colonial conquests in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America. Elimination of the native
is implicit in settler colonialism and colonial projects in which large swaths of land and
workforces are sought for commercial exploitation. Extreme violence against noncombatants was a
defining characteristic of all European colonialism, often with genocidal results.
The privatization of land is at the core of the U.S. experiment, and its military powerhouse
was born to expropriate resources. Apt, then, that we once again have a real estate man for
president.
Rather, what distinguishes the United States is the triumphal mythology attached to that
violence and its political uses, even to this day. The post–9/11 external and
internal U.S. war against Muslims-as-"barbarians" finds its prefiguration in the "savage wars"
of the American colonies and the early U.S. state against Native Americans. And when there
were, in effect, no Native Americans left to fight, the practice of "savage wars" remained. In
the twentieth century, well before the War on Terror, the United States carried out large-scale
warfare in the Philippines, Europe, Korea, and Vietnam; prolonged invasions and occupations in
Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; and counterinsurgencies in Columbia and
Southern Africa. In all instances, the United States has perceived itself to be pitted in war
against savage forces.
Appropriating the land from its stewards was racialized war from the first British
settlement in Jamestown, pitting "civilization" against "savagery." Through this pursuit, the
U.S. military gained its unique character as a force with mastery in "irregular" warfare. In spite of this, most military historians pay little attention to
the so-called Indian Wars from 1607 to 1890, as well as the 1846–48 invasion and
occupation of Mexico. Yet it was during the nearly two centuries of British colonization of
North America that generations of settlers gained experience as "Indian fighters" outside any
organized military institution. While large, highly regimented "regular" armies fought over
geopolitical goals in Europe, Anglo settlers in North America waged deadly irregular warfare
against the continent's indigenous nations to seize their land, resources, and roads, driving
them westward and eventually forcibly relocating them west of the Mississippi. Even following
the founding of the professional U.S. Army in the 1810s, irregular warfare was the method of
the U.S. conquest of the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes, Southeast, and Mississippi Valley regions,
then west of the Mississippi to the Pacific, including taking half of Mexico. Since that time,
irregular methods have been used in tandem with operations of regular armed forces and are,
perhaps, what most marks U.S. armed forces as different from other armies of global powers.
By the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37), whose lust for displacing and killing
Native Americans was unparalleled, the character of the U.S. armed forces had come, in the
national imaginary, to be deeply entangled with the mystique of indigenous nations -- as
though, in adopting the practices of irregular warfare, U.S. soldiers had become the very thing
they were fighting. This persona involved a certain identification with the Native enemy,
marking the settler as Native American rather than European. This was part of the sleight of
hand by which U.S. Americans came to genuinely believe that they had a rightful claim to the
continent: they had fought for it and "become" its indigenous inhabitants.
Irregular military techniques that were perfected while expropriating Native American lands
were then applied to fighting the Mexican Republic. At the time of its independence from Spain
in 1821, the territory of Mexico included what is now the states of California, New Mexico,
Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. Upon independence, Mexico continued the practice of
allowing non-Mexicans to acquire large swaths of land for development under land grants, with
the assumption that this would also mean the welcome eradication of indigenous peoples. By 1836
nearly 40,000 Americans, nearly all slavers (and not counting the enslaved), had moved to
Mexican Texas. Their ranger militias were a part of the settlement, and in 1835 became formally
institutionalized as the Texas Rangers. Their principal state-sponsored task was the
eradication of the Comanche nation and all other Native peoples in Texas. Mounted and armed
with the new killing machine, the five-shot Colt Paterson revolver, they did so with dedicated
precision.
Having perfected their art in counterinsurgency operations against Comanches and other
Native communities, the Texas Rangers went on to play a significant role in the U.S. invasion
of Mexico. As seasoned counterinsurgents, they guided U.S. Army forces deep into Mexico,
engaging in the Battle of Monterrey. Rangers also accompanied General Winfield Scott's army and
the Marines by sea, landing in Vera Cruz and mounting a siege of Mexico's main commercial port
city. They then marched on, leaving a path of civilian corpses and destruction, to occupy
Mexico City, where the citizens called them Texas Devils. In defeat and under military
occupation, Mexico ceded the northern half of its territory to the United States, and Texas
became a state in 1845. Soon after, in 1860, Texas seceded, contributing its Rangers to the
Confederate cause. After the Civil War, the Texas Rangers picked up where they had left off,
pursuing counterinsurgency against both remaining Native communities and resistant
Mexicans.
The Marines also trace half of their mythological origins to the invasion of Mexico that
nearly completed the continental United States. The opening lyric of the official hymn of the
Marine Corps, composed and adopted in 1847, is "From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of
Tripoli." Tripoli refers to the First Barbary War of 1801–5, when the Marines were
dispatched to North Africa by President Thomas Jefferson to invade the Berber Nation, shelling
the city of Tripoli, taking captives, and blockading key Barbary ports for nearly four years.
The "Hall of Montezuma," though, refers to the invasion of Mexico: while the U.S. Army occupied
what is now California, Arizona, and New Mexico, the Marines invaded by sea and marched to
Mexico City, murdering and torturing civilian resisters along the way.
So what does it matter, for those of us who strive for peace and justice, that the U.S.
military had its start in killing indigenous populations, or that U.S. imperialism has its
roots in the expropriation of indigenous lands?
It matters because it tells us that the privatization of lands and other forms of human
capital are at the core of the U.S. experiment. The militaristic-capitalist powerhouse of the
United States derives from real estate (which includes African bodies, as well as appropriated
land). It is apt that we once again have a real estate man for president, much like the first
president, George Washington, whose fortune came mainly from his success speculating on unceded
Indian lands. The U.S. governmental structure is designed to serve private property interests,
the primary actors in establishing the United States being slavers and land speculators. That
is, the United States was founded as a capitalist empire. This was exceptional in the world and
has remained exceptional, though not in a way that benefits humanity. The military was designed
to expropriate resources, guarding them against loss, and will continue to do so if left to its
own devices under the control of rapacious capitalists.
When extreme white nationalists make themselves visible -- as they have for the past decade,
and now more than ever with a vocal white nationalist president -- they are dismissed as
marginal, rather than being understood as the spiritual descendants of the settlers. White
supremacists are not wrong when they claim that they understand something about the American
Dream that the rest of us do not, though it is nothing to brag about. Indeed, the origins of
the United States are consistent with white nationalist ideology. And this is where those of us
who wish for peace and justice must start: with full awareness that we are trying to
fundamentally change the nature of the country, which will always be extremely difficult
work.
A version of this article originally appeared in the Boston
Review .
"... When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also. ..."
"... Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. ..."
"... This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts. ..."
One of the documents lists a series of propaganda weapons to be used against Russia. One is
use of the church as a weapon. That has already been started in Ukraine with Poroshenko
buying off regligious leader to split Ukraine Orthodoxy from Russian Orthodoxy. It also
explicitly states that the Skripal incident is a 'Dirty Trick' against Russia.
The British political system is on the verge of collapse. BREXIT has finally demonstrated
that the Government/ Opposition parties are clearly aligned against the interests of the
people. The EU is nothing more than an arm of the Globalist agenda of world domination.
The US has shown its true colours - sanctioning every country that stands for independent
sovereignty is not a good foreign policy, and is destined to turn the tide of public opinion
firmly against global hegemony, endless wars, and wealth inequity.
The old Empire is in its death throes. A new paradigm awaits which will exclude all those
who have exploited the many, in order to sit at the top of the pyramid. They cannot escape
Karma.
The Western world needs to come to terms with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its
aftermath. Today, Russia is led by Putin and he obviously has objectives as any national
leader has.
Western "leaders" need to decide whether Putin:
Is trying to create Soviet Union 2.0, to have a 2nd attempt at ruling the world thru
communism and to do this by holding the world to ransom over oil/gas supplies. OR
Is wanting Russia to become a member of the family of nations and of a multi-polar world to improve the lives of
Russian people, but is being blocked at every twist and turn by manufactured events like Russia-gate and the Skripal affair
and now this latest revelation of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns being coordinated and run out of London.
Both of the above cannot be true because there are too many contradictions. Which is it??
Yes because imagine that that we lived in 1940 without any means to inform ourselves and
that media was still in control over the information that reaches us. We would already be in
a fullblown war with Russia because of it but now with the Internet and information going
around freely only a whimpy 10% of we the people stand behind their desperately wanted war.
Imagine that, an informed sheople.
Can't have that, they cannot do their usual stuff anymore.... good riddance.
"250,000 from the US State
Department , the documents allege."....... Interesting.
"During the third
Democratic debate on Saturday night, Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like
project" to break encrypted terrorist communications. The project would "bring the government and the tech communities together" to find a way
to give law enforcement access to encrypted messages, she said. It's something that some
politicians and intelligence officials have wanted for awhile,"........
***wasn't the Manhatten project a secret venture?????? Hummmmm"
Hillary Clinton has all of our encryption keys, including the FBI's . "Encryption keys" is
a general reference to several encryption functions hijacked by Hillary and her surrogate
ENTRUST. They include hash functions (used to indicate whether the contents have been altered
in transit), PKI public/private key infrastructure, SSL (secure socket layer), TLS (transport
layer security), the Dual_EC_DRBG
NSA algorithm and certificate authorities.
The convoluted structure managed by the "Federal Common Policy" group has ceded to
companies like ENTRUST INC the ability to sublicense their authority to third parties who in
turn manage entire other networks in a Gordian knot of relationships clearly designed to fool
the public to hide their devilish criminality. All roads lead back to Hillary and the Rose
Law Firm."- patriots4truth
When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with
plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also.
FBI/Anonymous can use this story to support a narrative that social media bots posting
memes is a problem for everybody, and it's not a partisan issue. The idea is that fake news
and unrestricted social media are inherently dangerous, and both the West and Russia are
exploiting that, so governments need to agree to restrict the ability to use those platforms
for political speech, especially without using True Names.
Oilygawkies in the UK and USSA seem to be letting their spooks have a good-humored (rating
here on the absurd transparency of these ops) contest to see who can come up with the most
surreal propaganda psy-ops.
But they probably also serve as LHO distractions from something genuinely sleazy.
Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. Anything that is
remotely like Nationalism is the true enemy of these Globalist/Internationalists, which is
what the Top-Ape Bolshevik promoted: see Vladimir Lenin and his quotes on how he believed
fully in "internationalism" for a world without borders. Ironic how they Love the butchers of
the Soviet Union but hate Russia. It is ALL ABOUT IDEOLOGY to these people and "the means
justify the ends".
Basically, if one acquires factual information from an internet source, which leads to
overturning the propaganda to which we're all subjected, then it MUST have come from Putin.
This is the direction they're headed. Anyone speaking out against the official story is
obviously a Russian spy.
Better to call it the Anti-Integrity Initiative. UK cretins up to their usual dirty tricks - let them choke on their poison. The judgement of history will eventually catch up with them.
A good 'ole economic collapse will give western countries a chance to purge their crazy
leaders before they involve us all in a thermonuclear war. Short everything with your entire
accounts.
This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have
such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the
WEST? This is nuts.
Isn't it just as likely someone in the WEST planted this cache, intending Anonymous to
find it?
Any propaganda coming from the UK or US is strictly zionist. EVERYTHING they put out is to
the benefit of Israel and the "lobby". Russia isn't perfect, but if they're an enemy of the
latter, then they should NOT be considered a foe to all thinking and conscientious
people.
Yesterday, the BBC had a thing on Thai workers in Israel, and how they keep dying of
accidents, their general level of slavery etc. Very odd to have a negative Israel story, so I
wonder who upset whom, and what the ongoing status will be.
Thai labourers in Israel tell of harrowing conditions
A year-long BBC investigation has discovered widespread abuse of Thai nationals living
and working in Israel - under a scheme organized by the two governments.
Many are subjected to unsafe working practices and squalid, unsanitary living
conditions. Some are overworked, others underpaid and there are dozens of unexplained
deaths.
England and the U.S. don't like their very poor and rotten social conditions put out for
the public to see. Both countries have severely deteriorating problems on their streets
because of bankrupt governments printing money for foreign wars.
More of the same fraudulent duality while alleged so called but not money etc continues to
flow (everything is criminal) and the cesspool of a hierarchy pretends it's business as
usual.
This isn't about maintaining balance in a lie this is about disclosing the truth and
agendas (Agenda 21 now Agenda 2030 = The New Age Religion is Never Going To Be Saturnism).
The layers of the hierarchy are a lie so unless the alleged so called leaders of those layers
are publicly providing testimony and confession then everything that is being spoon fed to
the pablum puking public through all sources is a lie.
Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity
Initiative consists of "clusters" of (((local politicians, journalists, military personnel,
scientists and academics))).
The (((team))) is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian
interference in European affairs, while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes,
the documents claim.
"... She has been the most active anti war member of congress. She even visited Syria and talked with Assad. She has been tutored by Kucinich, and Kucinich's adviser on foreign affairs has been William R Polk. ..."
"... It's clear that we'll never be free of Dembot relapsing. That's how terminal addicts are. At any given time the great majority of the fake "radicals" who go around claiming to despise the Democrat Party are really just secretly yearning for the next fraudulent "progressive" Democrat hero to come along and sweep them off their feet and back into the Dembot fold. ..."
"... Kucinich, Obama, Warren, Hillary sheepdog extraordinaire Sanders, "AOC" (who just got done telling the Dembot version of climate activists, "Let's get behind Pelosi!"), Gabbard, many more whose names I've forgotten. ..."
"... Any actual sentient political person knows that the historical record of the Democrats is one long unbroken scam, that the "celebrity progressive hero" meme is invariably a fraud, and that this will never change for as long as the Democrat Party and its partisans exist. ..."
"... I used to trust and be gung-ho on Tulsi because of her association with Kucinich, but she lost my respect entirely after she started rubbing shoulders with this Zionist slime: ..."
"... In my view, when we group Gabbard in with corrupt politicians, we do the greatest disservice to our own understanding of how corruption works. We also give in and surrender to evil, sooner than we should. So we should beware of this kind of thinking, both from an honorable place of not maligning a person who may not yet have earned it, and also from a strategic view of not giving into defeatism. ..."
"... An overarching cynicism will only weary us, and the struggle is still alive. Cynicism is the cousin of defeatism and premature surrender. It's a position encouraged by the enemy, because it appears strong while it is actually weak. It's one of the tools that tame - the greatest of course being the one that divides us against each other, while the enemy rules. ..."
After Tulsi Gabbards tweet yesterday there has been a ton of old anti-Tulsi propaganda
that was originally created to discredit her support of Bernie being promoted all over the
place.
Those lies are being aggressively promoted by neocons in both parties and helped along
by supposed progressives and patriots who either ignorantly or maliciously spread the same
lies and sophistry.
Can you help fight against that? Here is what she is up against, these
two articles detail all the lies (compared to the facts) that the neocons and the dumb
progressives who don't bother to check facts are spreading around -- it would
be great if you can help get the word out about this organized slander campaign due to fear
of Tulsi gaining higher office and ending wars:
You don't know anything about Tulsi Gabbard. She has been the most active anti war member of congress.
She even visited Syria and talked with Assad.
She has been tutored by Kucinich, and Kucinich's adviser on foreign affairs has been William
R Polk.
I suggest you do some homework, read some selections on Polk's home page, also review
Kucinich's long term positions on war and peace.
It's clear that we'll never be free of Dembot relapsing. That's how terminal addicts are.
At any given time the great majority of the fake "radicals" who go around claiming to despise
the Democrat Party are really just secretly yearning for the next fraudulent "progressive"
Democrat hero to come along and sweep them off their feet and back into the Dembot fold.
Kucinich, Obama, Warren, Hillary sheepdog extraordinaire Sanders, "AOC" (who just got done
telling the Dembot version of climate activists, "Let's get behind Pelosi!"), Gabbard, many
more whose names I've forgotten.
I've never understood the unbreakable infatuation with the Democrats, other than the clear
fact that support for them isn't political at all, but a type of celebrity fandom.
Any actual sentient political person knows that the historical record of the Democrats is
one long unbroken scam, that the "celebrity progressive hero" meme is invariably a fraud, and
that this will never change for as long as the Democrat Party and its partisans exist.
Of course we already see Dembots everywhere crowing that the House majority is going to do
"real things", and without missing a beat their showcase promise is: "We're going to make
Trump release his tax forms!" I.e. the exact kind of worthless theater which does nothing to
help anyone real, the exact kind of misdirection scam in which the Democrats specialize.
The same goes for worthless tweets. BTW did Gabbard also give tweets condemning the
Zionist state? I'm betting no. Just like "AOC" backpedalled as fast as she could from her
pro-Palestinian comments. She even told an interviewer "I really don't know what I'm talking
about there." (Not an exact quote, but the gist.)
There is no peace with Israel! The fallacy of that statement on Israel dismantles
your argument. Just state that there is self-interest or self-preservation involved if Putin
sells out Iran to that stinking shithole Zionist entity. Iran fought side by side with Russia
and is an invited presence in Syria and a counter-weight to Zionist U.S. presence in Syria
and surrounding Zionist U.S. bases.
With all the Zionist Russian oligarchs breathing down Putin's neck in Russia, and the
demented Zionist state having a large percentage of Russian immigrants, Putin kowtows to
Zionism like everyone else. Yes, Putin is using Syria to get leverage over the U.S./Nato
axis, but Israel is tied to his self-preservation, so he'll drop Iran in a minute for that
reason, but don't say it's for the sake of peace when Israel has its sights on Iran as the
next target of the Empire. It's totally disingenuous to use peace and Israel in the same
sentence.
Next, @57 regarding the Gabbard tussle debs and others are having here: it's all moot
since she offended compassionate Democrat sensibilities by meeting with Assad. Don't
mention her name on Democratic sites; they can't stand her and you'll be excoriated for
bringing her up. So she'll never be the nominee anyway. Now, I don't think either that it's
necessary to even bring up the indigenous in Hawaii considering what was also done to native
Americans on the mainland.
There's something else that disqualifies her. I used to trust and be gung-ho on Tulsi
because of her association with Kucinich, but she lost my respect entirely after she started
rubbing shoulders with this Zionist slime:
I couldn't be bothered getting the picture on it's own so don't blame me for the comments
that surround it. Regardless, I no longer trust Gabbard because of her toxic Zionist
associates.
Sadly (or laughably, if you are in a jolly mood), Russ and Debisdead, and their handful of
likeminded others who daily gather about the ultraleft internet world (such as it is) will
never change their tune in the face of all evidence pointing to their invective (they term
this "critical education") adding up to nothing except furtherance of rightwing oppression
currently sweeping the world.
They offer nothing to motivate people other than the rejection of mainstream political
movements of the center-left which are already organised, in reactionary political parties to
be sure, into the tens of millions in the US.
Large numbers will be required if Russ, debs and their relatively few peers ever in fact
wake up from their blogging stupors (extremely doubtful, imho, based on evidence of the prior
10-15 years) and become a vanguard of the movement to topple and replace the liberal
democratic system with a fair system for all the people.
Lenin already nailed Russ, debs (and their few peers) to the wall way back in 1920:
Is parliamentarianism "politically obsolete"? That is quite a different matter. If that
were true, the position of the "Lefts" would be a strong one. But it has to be proved by a
most searching analysis, and the "Lefts" do not even know how to approach the matter.
In the last open thread I advanced the notion that humans are much more changeable than we
tend to assume, or that our institutions plan on. I could back this claim with substantial
collateral but I'll skip that here.
In my view, when we group Gabbard in with corrupt politicians, we do the greatest
disservice to our own understanding of how corruption works. We also give in and surrender to
evil, sooner than we should. So we should beware of this kind of thinking, both from an
honorable place of not maligning a person who may not yet have earned it, and also from a
strategic view of not giving into defeatism.
What really matters about the Gabbard situation is the history of other people and
institutions that once were on our side and stood as our heroes, and who now seem
compromised, corrupted, silenced or destroyed. There are powerful forces at play that can
turn the good to the bad. These are the forces that we should be intent on identifying, in my
opinion.
An overarching cynicism will only weary us, and the struggle is still alive. Cynicism is
the cousin of defeatism and premature surrender. It's a position encouraged by the enemy,
because it appears strong while it is actually weak. It's one of the tools that tame - the
greatest of course being the one that divides us against each other, while the enemy
rules.
What will be useful to watch with Gabbard will be what forces come to work on her, and how
long she can remain true to her indigenous spiritual strength, if indeed she has not already
caved in (I haven't studied the situation).
Sooner or later someone or some ones must appear who can remain true to the welfare of the
people, and survive all the forces that work to subvert that. Our sitting around hoping for
real change, however, is not going to get it done. Nor is falsely identifying as true those
who are already corrupted, or conversely, labeling as lost those who might still have some
truth in them. Understanding in precise detail and calling out and shedding light on these
forces of subversion, might just help, however.
Fact is, if we took your comment and replaced "Gabbard" with "Obama", we could pretty much
transpose it verbatim to 2008-09 and it would fit right in with what the Obamabots were
saying.
I agree, cynicism is pernicious, and I can't imagine anything more cynical than continued
special pleading on behalf of the Democrats, after all they've proven throughout their
perfidious history.
Maybe. But I think for Obama this would fall under "falsely identifying as true someone
who was already corrupted". What I get from people who have studied Gabbard is that she
hasn't yet fallen, and - conceivably - may not fall.
If Tulsi Gabbard weren't corrupted, she would stay away from the Adelsons no matter what
cause they're peddling that she might share. The Adelsons are kryptonite for trust! She
should know that! She should know better! Find some other financier for your cause, lady!
Now, to russ's point. Yes, it's good to get people to focus on another option besides the
Dems (hopefully you don't mean the Republicans who are part of the same duopoly syndicate).
However, the problem is that in a non-democracy with two Zionist-owned parties monopolizing
the mass demographic, just how do you intend that third option to win?
"... For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth. ..."
"... For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth. ..."
Somehow I doubt that this Christmas will win the Bing Crosby star of approval. Rather, we
see the financial markets breaking under the strain of sustained institutionalized fraud, and
the social fabric tearing from persistent systemic political dishonesty. It adds up to a nation
that can't navigate through reality, a nation too dependent on sure things, safe spaces, and
happy outcomes. Every few decades a message comes from the Universe that faking it is not good
enough.
The main message from the financials is that the global debt barge has run aground, and with
it, the global economy. That mighty engine has been chugging along on promises-to-pay and now
the faith that sustained those promises is dissolving. China, Euroland, and the USA can't
possibly meet their tangled obligations, and are running out of tricks for rigging, gaming, and
jacking the bond markets, where all those promises are vested. It boils down to a whole lot of
people not getting paid, one way or the other -- and it's really bad for business.
Our President has taken full credit for the bubblicious markets, of course, and will be
Hooverized as they gurgle around the drain. Given his chimerical personality, he may try to put
on an FDR mask -- perhaps even sit in a wheelchair -- and try a few grand-scale policy tricks
to escape the vortex. But the net effect will surely be to make matters worse -- for instance,
if he can hector the Federal Reserve to buy every bond that isn't nailed to some deadly
derivative booby-trap. But then he'll only succeed in crashing the dollar. Remember, there are
two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or you can have plenty of worthless
money.
On the social and political scene, I sense that some things have run their course. Is a
critical mass of supposedly educated people not fatigued and nauseated by the regime of "social
justice" good-think, and the massive mendacity it stands for , starting with the idea that
"diversity and inclusion" require the shut-down of free speech. The obvious hypocrisies and
violations of reason emanating from the campuses -- a lot, but not all of it, in response to
the Golden Golem of Greatness -- have made enough smart people stupid to endanger the country's
political future. A lot of these formerly-non-stupid people work in the news media. It's not
too late for some institutions like The New York Times and CNN to change out their editors and
producers, and go back to reporting the reality-du-jour instead of functioning as agit-prop
mills for every unsound idea ginned through the Yale humanities departments.
Shoehorned into the festivity of the season is the lame-duck session in congress, and one of
the main events it portends is the end of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. The
Sphinx-like Mueller has maintained supernatural silence about his tendings and intentions. But
if he'd uncovered anything substantial in the way of "collusion" between Mr. Trump and Russia,
the public would know by now, since it would represent a signal threat to national security. So
it's hard not to conclude that he has nothing except a few Mickey Mouse "process" convictions
for lying to the FBI. On the other hand, it's quite impossible to imagine him ignoring the
well-documented evidence trail of Hillary Clinton colluding with Russians to influence the 2016
contest against Mr. Trump -- and to defame him after he won. There's also the Hieronymus Bosch
panorama of criminal mischief around the racketeering scheme known as the Clinton Foundation to
consider. Do these venal characters get a pass on all that?
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) has announced plans to call Federal Attorney John Huber (Utah
District) to testify about his assignment to look into these Clinton matters. It's a little
hard to see how that might produce any enlightenment, since prosecutors are bound by law to not
blab about currently open cases. The committee has also subpoenaed former Attorney General
Loretta Lynch, former FBI Director James Comey, and others who have some serious 'splainin' to
do. But if both Huber and Mueller come up empty-handed on the Clintons it will be one of the
epic marvels of official bad faith in US history.
There is a core truth to the 2016 Russia collusion story, and the Clintons are at the heart
of it. Failure to even look will have very dark consequences for the public interest.
It ought to be obvious to just about everyone who is paying attention and not a
Corporate-Whore Democrat that the "The Russians Did It" delusion and the accompanying Mueller
"investigation" is only a distraction to draw attention away from the obvious and numerous
crimeS of H. Clinton, including running an electronic drop-box for U.S. state secrets using a
server in her basement, charity fraud, pay-to-play bribe-taking, the uranium to Russia case,
etc. And, that's not counting the inexcusable Unprovoked War of Aggression WAR CRIME against
Libya. (Of course, she had an excuse: "Destroy a country in order to save a few
"protesters".
Mueller is the Deep State (Corporations [especially Military Industrial Complex
Death-Merchants, who direct the politicians and foreign policy actions (continual
War-For-Humongous-Profits that has taken and takes multiple trillions of dollars away from
potential domestic programs & Wall Street bankster-fraudsters who bankrupted the country
with the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2008-2009 financial fiasco and who sent U.S.
industrial production jobs to other countries] and Oligarchs who reap the profits of such
crimes and their results) operative who apparently was brought in the head the FBI to fail to
prevent and to coverup the real actors and actions that occurred in association with the
downing of buildings at the New York City World Trade center on 9/11.
Sorry, nobodies going to jail and all will be swept under the rug. We will have war to
cover their tracks along with all the other frauds. The political buddy buddy system at the
upper levels is set up to protect the guilty, and nobody has to pay the price lest the whole
thing crumble. It's built that way.
Our only way out is a crash and a reset, with no guarantee what happens on the other
side.
I used to be optimistic, but the level of lies, double speak and university factories
pumping out marxist leftists portends a bleak future. How anyone thinks we can reason our way
out of this situation is fooling themselves about human nature.
Nice to see Kunstler focusing on some serious issues like the Uranium One scandal for a
change. He seems to be on the concluding end of a cold-turkey or other rehab from some
long-term unholy influence. As a result, he has been producing increasingly readable articles
for the past several months. Congratulations are due him but with the warning that recovery
is always one day at a time.
" Remember, there are two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or you can
have plenty of worthless money". Both pretty much sums up America's predicament. Americans
are deep in debt, and their money is worthless.
Mueller isn't going to touch the Clintons - they have way too much criminal dirt on him.
And Huber is an unknown lightweight with no Malicious Seditious Media support.
Sooooo . . . there is only one thing to do once the new Congress takes its oath: Trump
gets DOJ Acting AG to appoint the long-awaited Special Prosecutor.
There are more than enough recognized felonies to go after - unlike the Mueller fishing
expedition. That will put the Democrat investigation on ice - mainly because lots of Demo
chairs and members will be part of the investigation.
Any serious investigation of the Clinton Foundation would reveal that "Russian Collusion"
has everything to do with distraction from the crimes of the Clinton family. The fact that
Bill and Hillary have escaped accountability for their heinous crimes is one of the greatest
miscarriages of justice in US history. It is truly quite frightening.
There is a reason why the DOJ, Congress (both parties), MSM, the MIC, the Deep State don't
want ANYONE to look into corruption ... because they are ALL ******* guilty as sin and buried
neck deep in ****. Its long past time for the whole ******* thing to come down. We're all
fucked.
Weiner laptop For The Win. Give us that hard drive, Mr. President! We'll have it all
analyzed in one weekend.
Meanwhile, Seth Rich awaits Mueller's OH SO DILIGENT investigation.
Can you believe that the 'core' of Mueller's 'case' ends up being about WIKILEAKS?
What the serious ****.
If he's done zero serious looks at Seth Rich all Mueller's work will just be thrown out
of court anyway.
Ham sandwich my fat turkey-enriched ***.
For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of
Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years,
I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth.
This guy is dreaming if he thinks anything is going to happen to the clintons, the MSM/DOJ
is protected those 2 scumbags with the line that if they are investigated trump is going
after his political opponents, just like a banana republic. But truthfully nothing reaks more
of banana repubicism more then letting the high and mighty of on crimes.
If they weren't all on the same side, that of the international bankster cabal, Trump
would order his justice department to prosecute those people you mentioned.
The purpose of the Russia investigation is to fool you into thinking there are two sides,
and to demonized Russia to create public opinion in favor of attacking Russia because it is
not on board with the jwo totalitarian world government. WTFU.
For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of
Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years,
I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth.
Mueller long ago gave up the fruitless hunt for Russian collusion involving President
Trump and is now desperately seeking overdue library books or unpaid parking tickets on
anyone remotely connected to President Trump to justify his mooching taxpayer dollars.
"... Q says that Donald Trump was asked to run for the Presidency by a team of military generals and other assorted true patriots who have slowly and patiently coalesced behind the scenes, waiting for the right time to strike back against Cabal. Q says that President Trump and the Q team say a prayer to the departed spirit of JFK each and every day in the White House, to steel them for the battle against Cabal. Q says that John F. Kennedy Jr. was a close friend of Donald Trump, and either was killed by the Clintons to ensure Hillary's Senate seat, or faked his own death and is still alive, helping Trump and Team Q fight Cabal behind the scenes. Some believe he might even be Q himself. ..."
"... One of the remarkable things about the Q phenomenon is how it has reversed some of the beliefs and values that have long been held by conspiracy theorists. For example, ever since investigators during the Iran-Contra scandal found out about the REX-84 plan to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law in the event of a national emergency, people have worried that someday the government is going to round up all the patriots and stick them in a FEMA camp somewhere. (See the aforementioned William Cooper book for a typical presentation of this.) But now, with Q talking about military tribunals for the members of Cabal, many of the same people are applauding the idea of doing away with due process and Constitutional rights for those accused of a crime. ..."
"... Q supporters often point to the bizarre exchange between Lindsey Graham and Brett Kavanaugh during the latter's confirmation hearings. Graham made a point of establishing the legitimacy of such tribunals during times of war, noting that the United States has technically been at war since 9-11. This is seen as further evidence that Graham and Kavanaugh are both on Team Q and gearing up for "The Storm." Apparently Graham's years of shilling for the neocons' war agenda are just water under the bridge now. ..."
"... Then there is the last case that Kavanaugh presided over before his appointment to the Supreme Court by President Trump. That was the case of Morley vs. CIA , which was brought about by journalist Jefferson Morley, who discovered the identity of the aforementioned George Joannides back in the 1990s. Ever since that time, he has been fighting the CIA in court to try to get the records on Joannides, so that historians and researchers can try to piece together his role in the events surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination. In a 2-1 decision, Kavanaugh sided with the CIA against Morley in deciding that, when a litigant successfully sues the government for records through the Freedom of Information Act, the government is not liable to pay their legal costs. This "incentivizes the CIA and other agencies to abuse FOIA and discourages investigative reporting," because whereas the government has virtually unlimited resources to fight, stall, and stonewall in court, the average citizen journalist or investigator does not. ..."
"... Trump is probably no more motivated to expose deep state treasons from the past than Obama was to actually improve the lot of black people in America. They're both the political equivalent of pressure relief valves. ..."
"... Trump is a complete fraud, and Q's purpose is to keep the idiots who voted for Trump thinking "any day now, any day any day now " ..."
We are now at year 55 since the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. This defining event of the Baby Boomer generation
still looms large over the American nation, ever finding new ways to stay relevant to contemporary events.
There have been two significant developments during the Trump presidency. First was Trump's tweet in October 2017 saying that
he would declassify all the remaining JFK files that the government is still withholding. I and many others who are interested in
the JFK investigation were hopeful that this would happen, as I
wrote in March of that year. While Trump's
supporters cheered and took it as further confirmation of Trump's anti-establishment bona fides, the claim unfortunately turned out
to be false. More than 15,000 records remain withheld, including some of the most important records that researchers have been waiting
for, such as those on CIA man George Joannides.
Joannides, a mysterious figure whose identity was only discovered in the late 1990s, oversaw the agency's relationship with a
Cuban exile group that Lee Harvey Oswald was in contact with, and was then brought out of retirement in the 1970s in order to oversee
the CIA's relationship with the Congressional committee that had re-opened the JFK investigation. The Congressional investigators
were led to believe that Joannides was just a regular CIA employee with no relation to the events in question. When House Select
Committee on Assassinations chairman Robert Blakey finally found out, decades later, who Joannides really was, he admitted (to his
credit) that he was wrong to think that the CIA had cooperated with his investigation, and that he should have believed his investigators
like Gaeton Fonzi and Edward Lopez, who knew that the Agency was deceiving them, and tried to say so.
So we're still waiting for all the JFK files, and President Trump has not pushed the CIA to disclose them. But with a tweet and
a subsequent release of some previously classified material, most people have been convinced otherwise. Ask the average Trump supporter
whether or not Trump released all the JFK files and they will likely say that he has. This is because most of Trump's supporters,
even otherwise intelligent and skeptical people, are strongly inclined to believe most everything that he says, (must be that master
level persuasion) the same way that his detractors foolishly believe every negative story that the fake news media reports about
him, including the conspiracy theory that Russia "hacked" the 2016 election.
(One important finding – to my knowledge totally unreported in any mainstream source – is that the stolen DNC emails were transferred
at a speed far too fast
to have been done by outside hacking , whether by Russians across the sea or teenagers down the block. Instead they must have
been transferred onto a USB, by someone inside the DNC. Gee, I wonder who that could have been.)
But the biggest new story in the long tale of the JFK assassination and its cover-up is the emergence of Q.
With an ongoing series of posts on anonymous message boards known for being pro-Trump stomping grounds, Q – whoever he is or they
are – has created a grand conspiracy theory on par with that of Milton William Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse , or Chris Carter's
X-Files narrative (which I've always thought used material from Cooper).
The Q story holds that since President Kennedy's assassination, if not before, the United States has been under the control of
a shadowy entity which Q followers call "Cabal." Within Cabal are all the bad guys of all the great conspiracy theories of the past
hundred years, and more – the CIA, the Masons, the mafia, the black nobility, the Vatican, and even aliens. And they not only engineer
almost every significant event that happens in the political and social landscape, from elections to blockbuster movies to false
flag shootings, but they also commit the most heinous and unspeakable crimes, for the strangest of ritual and metaphysical reasons,
that you can imagine.
Q says that Donald Trump was asked to run for the Presidency by a team of military generals and other assorted true patriots who
have slowly and patiently coalesced behind the scenes, waiting for the right time to strike back against Cabal. Q says that President
Trump and the Q team say a prayer to the departed spirit of JFK each and every day in the White House, to steel them for the battle
against Cabal. Q says that John F. Kennedy Jr. was a close friend of Donald Trump, and either was killed by the Clintons to ensure
Hillary's Senate seat, or faked his own death and is still alive, helping Trump and Team Q fight Cabal behind the scenes. Some believe
he might even be Q himself.
What a great story! Where is Chris Carter to turn this into a tv show? (Arkhaven Comics is already turning it into a
comic book .) But then, times have changed, and one could
argue that there is no need to turn it into a show, because it is already a show that we are watching in real time and following
on social media. This would make Jean Baudrillard's head explode, if he were still alive.
One of the remarkable things about the Q phenomenon is how it has reversed some of the beliefs and values that have long been
held by conspiracy theorists. For example, ever since investigators during the Iran-Contra scandal found out about the REX-84 plan
to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law in the event of a national emergency, people have worried that someday the government
is going to round up all the patriots and stick them in a FEMA camp somewhere. (See the aforementioned William Cooper book for a
typical presentation of this.) But now, with Q talking about military tribunals for the members of Cabal, many of the same people
are applauding the idea of doing away with due process and Constitutional rights for those accused of a crime.
Q supporters often point to the bizarre exchange between Lindsey Graham and Brett Kavanaugh during the latter's confirmation hearings.
Graham made a point of establishing the legitimacy of such tribunals during times of war, noting that the United States has technically
been at war since 9-11. This is seen as further evidence that Graham and Kavanaugh are both on Team Q and gearing up for "The Storm."
Apparently Graham's years of shilling for the neocons' war agenda are just water under the bridge now.
Kavanaugh likewise has been hailed by Trump and Q supporters as another fighter in the battle against Cabal. I'm inclined to believe
that the sexual assault charges against Kavanaugh were false, especially because Blasey Ford's testimony was so obviously constructed
for maximum emotional effect and minimal legal accountability for perjury. (I'm also inclined to believe that Kavanaugh's innocuous
explanations of the various terms in his yearbook were bullshit. The only thing teenage boys like more than beer is sex.) But much
more important than any of that is the fact that Kavanaugh is alleged to have helped cover up the likely murder of Vince Foster when
he worked for Ken Starr's investigation of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. A witness in the Foster case, Patrick Knowlton, recently recounted
his experience with Kavanaugh during that investigation on
Ed Opperman's podcast . So how does Kavanaugh go from covering for the Clintons to being on team Lock-Her-Up?
Then there is the last case that Kavanaugh presided over before his appointment to the Supreme Court by President Trump. That
was the case of Morley vs. CIA , which was brought about by journalist Jefferson Morley, who discovered the identity of the
aforementioned George Joannides back in the 1990s. Ever since that time, he has been fighting the CIA in court to try to get the
records on Joannides, so that historians and researchers can try to piece together his role in the events surrounding Lee Harvey
Oswald and the JFK assassination. In a 2-1 decision, Kavanaugh sided with the CIA against Morley in deciding that, when a litigant
successfully sues the government for records through the Freedom of Information Act, the government is not liable to pay their legal
costs. This "incentivizes the
CIA and other agencies to abuse FOIA and discourages investigative reporting," because whereas the government has virtually unlimited
resources to fight, stall, and stonewall in court, the average citizen journalist or investigator does not.
I can't take a position on whether or not Q is "real," i.e. someone actually connected to the President, simply because I have
no way of knowing. The "Q proofs" that supporters offer up are not proofs at all, but some of them do indeed seem to defy explanation.
But what is more significant is that President Trump is clearly in on the game. And what is even more significant is that the mainstream
media, while publishing article after article about how stupid the Q theory is and how dangerous the Q followers are, never acknowledge
Trump's obvious acceptance of it, nor ask him to do anything about it.
The Q phenomenon could be killed in an instant, in a very simple way. All President Trump has to do is tweet: "Q is not real.
It's not anyone connected to me." Boom. Done. But he hasn't done that, or anything like it, such as having a friendly journalist
pitch the question to him. For whatever reason, he wants Q to continue. Why? And why is the media scared to ask him about it, especially
if they're so sure that it's just a larp, but nonetheless oh so very dangerous?
At least some of the benefit for Trump is obvious. The Q narrative paints him as perhaps the greatest President in American history,
selflessly devoted to battling evil in the name of truth, justice, and the American way. Just like how many people think of JFK.
Except that, whereas JFK is supposed to have been killed by the military-industrial complex, we're now supposed to be rooting for
the military-industrial complex as the good guys, fighting against the shadowy and nefarious Cabal. The plot has shifted from
Seven Days in May to G.I. Joe vs. Cobra . Trump, JFK, and the Deep State: Part Q, by Jack Ravenwood - The Unz Review
I don't think that President Trump would continue to subtly encourage the Q phenomenon just for the ego boost, or for the few
thousand extra votes it gets him. But I could be wrong – stranger things have happened in American politics.
We may yet learn the truth about who or what is behind Q. For those of us who believe that the prince of this world is the father
of lies, it's not impossible to believe that there are rich and powerful people who are as evil as Q says they are. And it's difficult
not to hope, in some part of your mind, that Trump really is what Q supporters believe him to be, and that The Storm really is going
to round up all those "bad, bad people" that Trump called out during his campaign. But I'm not holding my breath, just like I'm not
holding it waiting for the rest of those files.
I suspect, rather, that Q will disappear when the people behind him deem the time to be right, and no explanations will be forthcoming.
Competing theories will emerge – it was a psyop, it was just an elaborate hoax, it was Trump himself, it really was JFK Jr.! – and
researchers and historians will debate the minutiae, talking about how these pieces of evidence point to this conclusion,
but these other pieces of evidence point to that conclusion. And the question of Who Was Q? will take its place alongside
that other historical mystery that I'm sure I and others will still be writing and wondering about five, ten, twenty years from now,
and beyond: Who Killed JFK?
Trump is probably no more motivated to expose deep state treasons from the past than Obama was to actually improve the lot of
black people in America.
They're both the political equivalent of pressure relief valves.
Of course, I hope I'm wrong.
Trump, JFK, and the Deep State: Part Q, by Jack Ravenwood - The Unz Review
"... "It's basically a high level of corruption and the rule of man instead of the rule of law" ..."
"... "We're getting a lot of inquiries from various investors, they come to talk to us, and we see the opportunities in Ukraine, but time after time we hear the concerns about the governance." ..."
"... "meaningful progress" ..."
"... "inefficient court system continues to obstruct the administration of justice." ..."
It has been five years to the day since Ukraine's 'Euromaidan' protest movement began,
with anti-government protesters demanding an end to corruption and a closer relationship with
the European Union. But what became of the dream?
On the evening of November 21, 2013, pro-West protesters began flocking to Kiev's Maidan
Square, carrying banners and waving EU flags. Hours earlier, then-president Viktor Yanukovych
had suspended preparations to sign a European Association Agreement, which would have been a
potential step on the road to joining the EU - and a move which Russia had warned would be
"trade suicide" for the post-Soviet state. The West, on the other hand, was determined
to wrangle Ukraine out of Russia's "orbit" and lure it into its own.
Ukraine was facing an economic crossroads. The country was being pulled in two directions,
asked to choose between closer alignment with the EU or Russia. When Yanukovych chose Russia by
refusing to sign the Association Agreement, it sparked outrage within the EU and a protest
movement which would quickly be hijacked and used to engineer a Western-backed coup - a
shortcut to bringing a pro-West government to power.
Such interference, manipulation and exploitation of Ukraine's internal political and
societal divisions was not without consequences. More than 10,000 died during an insurgency in
the eastern regions which began when the ethnic Russian population began to fear it would be
swallowed into an anti-Russia nationalist state backed by Western powers. But the West ignored
dangerous
signs of growing nationalism - and outright Nazi-style fascism - in Ukraine, bargaining
that anything was better than Russia 'winning' in a game of geopolitical chess.
Five years on, what has become of the protesters' dreams to rid Ukraine of corruption and
build an equal, transparent and functional democracy? The sad answer is that Ukraine's
revolution was a disaster which left the country teetering on the edge of becoming a failed
state.
An anti-corruption revolution?
Corruption is still rampant in Ukraine. A recent assessment by the International Monetary
Fund suggested that
corruption wipes about two percent off the country's GDP growth per year.
The IMF and World Bank also scolded the Ukrainian government for the "limited
results" that have been seen in fighting corruption, with no high-level officials
convicted - something which is said to be keeping investors out of the country.
World Bank Country Director for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine Satu Kahkonen said that
"governance issues" were forcing investors to steer clear. "It's basically a high
level of corruption and the rule of man instead of the rule of law" that have prevailed in
Ukraine, she said. "We're getting a lot of inquiries from various investors, they come to
talk to us, and we see the opportunities in Ukraine, but time after time we hear the concerns
about the governance."
Higher living standards?
Ukraine is also emerging as Europe's poorest
country , with a GDP per capita of just €2,960 - well below Estonia's €22,420 and
Slovenia's €26,590 GDP per capita.
In fact, according to a recent Credit Suisse report, Ukrainians
rank among the world's poorest people, coming a dismal 123rd out of 140 countries, with the
net wealth of the country's citizens lagging behind Bangladesh and Cameroon. Another recent
study by the United Nations Development Program found that, despite continuing economic growth,
60 percent of Ukrainians live below the poverty line.
Less income inequality?
Meanwhile, Ukraine's richest 100 citizens have seen their wealth increase significantly in
the years after the Euromaidan protests. A recent report from the Novoe Vremya magazine
showed
that the wealth of the country's richest people is growing 12 times faster than Ukraine's total
GDP. Pro-West President Petro Poroshenko is the country's sixth richest man, increasing his
wealth by 10 percent to about $1.1 billion, all while average Ukrainians see little or no
improvement in their own living standards or net wealth.
Political reforms?
While some recent reforms in education, pensions and healthcare were welcomed by the
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in its l atest country report , there has still been a lack of
"meaningful progress" in the reform of governance and an "inefficient court system
continues to obstruct the administration of justice."
European values?
Scant attention has also been paid by the Ukrainian government - and Western powers and
media - to the increasingly worrying growth of neo-Nazi sentiment in Ukraine. When, in October
2017, Ukraine witnessed its biggest neo-Nazi march in years, Western media all but ignored it. In
fact, in deeds and words, Ukraine's government has almost encouraged this kind of sentiment, by
praising as an "inspiration" the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) fighters who the Nazi
marchers were commemorating. In recent months, mainstream media have done more to acknowledge
this creeping fascism in Ukraine, but the admission comes far too late.
On the world stage, too, Ukraine's pro-West President Petro Poroshenko has faded into
near irrelevance, barely
acknowledged by US President Donald Trump at recent Armistice Day commemorations in Paris,
as geopolitics returned to business-as-usual with Kiev fading from the headlines.
That complete misunderstanding the situation. The US officials might resent far right groups
but the goal of encircling of Russia is of paramount importance and outwight all other
considerations. In other word hostile to Russia Ukraine is the greatest US geopolitical victory
after dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
"Last weekend saw Ukraine's biggest Nazi march of modern times. Yet, the Western media and
its numerous correspondents in Kiev completely ignored the story, even on social networks.
On Saturday night, up to 20,000 far-right radicals honored the 75th anniversary of the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) – a paramilitary group led by Stepan Bandera, which
actively collaborated with Hitler's Germany. They brandished lit torches, smoke pellets, and
flares as they chanted fascist slogans. And some participants openly gave Nazi salutes during
the rally."
– Viva Kagans clan. Viva the ADL and Simon Wiesenthal Center; your efforts at
promoting the Nazi revival in Ukraine have been bringing great results, including the "biggest
Nazi march of modern times."
The State Dept. humanitarians, inspired by Clinton, and the totally zionized National
Endowment for Democracy (and other banderite Chalupas) are undoubtedly elated with the
"democracy on the march" in Ukraine (remember the $5 billion spent by the US in Ukraine
to spearhead the regime change in Kiev ) https://www.rt.com/news/444538-five-years-on-from-euromaidan/
"Ukraine is emerging as Europe's poorest country In fact, according to a recent Credit
Suisse report, Ukrainians rank among the world's poorest people , coming a dismal 123rd
out of 140 countries, with the net wealth of the country's citizens lagging behind Bangladesh
and Cameroon. Another recent study by the United Nations Development Program found that,
despite continuing economic growth, 60 percent of Ukrainians live below the poverty line."
American foreign aid is prohibited from being given to any country that has not signed the
Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (the Symington Amendment) or refuses to abide by
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) guidelines regarding its nuclear devices. Guess
what?? Israel does not abide by EITHER and still gets the majority of American foreign aid.
This prohibition also applies to countries that do not register their agents of a foreign
government with the U S State Department. Guess what?? Israel (again) with its American
Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) still gets "foreign aid" in contravention of
American law..
There are forty or so congressmen, senators and thousands of high-level policy wonks.
infecting the U S government who hold dual citizenship with Israel. Such dual citizenship
must be strictly prohibited. Refusal to renounce foreign citizenship should result in
immediate deportation with permanent loss of American citizenship. Present and former holders
of "dual citizenship" should never be allowed to serve in any American governmental
capacity.
In addition, any American citizen who serves or has served in Israel's military (Israel
Defense Forces) should automatically lose their American citizenship and be immediately
deported to Israel.
When Netanyahu addressed both houses of Congress, it was sickening to see our politicians
slobber all over themselves to see who would be the most rabid admirer of that foreign head
of state. The almost constant applause by our Congress was reminiscent of the Soviet
Politburo in which no one wanted to be the last person to stop clapping. Just who do they
work for? Certainly not for the interests of the United States.
How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole
west, I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.
This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Rather than us Dumb Goyim speculating
about it, why not listen to what a political insider had to say about this issue back in
2001?
His name is Dr. Stephen Steinlight. And although Ron Unz has characterized him as "some
totally obscure Jewish activist" he was was for more than five years Director of National
Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee. If that doesn't qualify him
as an "insider," I don't know what does.
Excerpts from The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a
Misguided Immigration Policy :
Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power
Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the
greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly.
We will be able to hang on to it for perhaps a decade or two longer. Unless and until
the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete , an extremely unlikely scenario,
the great material wealth of the Jewish community will continue to give it significant
advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power
is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft
money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to
Israel , a high wall of church/state separation, and social liberalism combined with
selective conservatism on criminal justice and welfare issues.
Jewish voter participation also remains legendary; it is among the highest in the
nation. Incredible as it sounds, in the recent presidential election more Jews voted in Los
Angeles than Latinos. But should the naturalization of resident aliens begin to move more
quickly in the next few years, a virtual certainty -- and it should -- then it is only a
matter of time before the electoral power of Latinos, as well as that of others, overwhelms
us.
All of this notwithstanding, in the short term, a number of factors will continue to
play into our hands, even amid the unprecedented wave of continuous immigration. The very
scale of the current immigration and its great diversity paradoxically constitutes at least
a temporary political asset. While we remain comparatively coherent as a voting bloc, the
new mostly non-European immigrants are fractured into a great many distinct, often
competing groups, many with no love for each other. This is also true of the many new
immigrants from rival sides in the ongoing Balkan wars, as it is for the growing south
Asian population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They have miles and miles to go
before they overcome historical hatreds, put aside current enmities and forgive recent
enormities, especially Pakistani brutality in the nascent Bangladesh. Queens is no
melting pot!
For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Jewish community is thus in
a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions
that support our agendas. But the day will surely come when an effective Asian-American
alliance will actually bring Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese,
and the rest closer together. And the enormously complex and as yet significantly divided
Latinos will also eventually achieve a more effective political federation. The fact is
that the term "Asian American" has only recently come into common parlance among younger
Asians (it is still rejected by older folks), while "Latinos" or "Hispanics" often do not
think of themselves as part of a multinational ethnic bloc but primarily as Mexicans,
Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.
Even with these caveats, an era of astoundingly disproportionate Jewish legislative
representation may already have peaked. It is unlikely we will ever see many more U.S.
Senates with 10 Jewish members. And although had Al Gore been allowed by the Supreme Court
to assume office, a Jew would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency, it may be
we'll never get that close again. With the changes in view, how long do we actually
believe that nearly 80 percent of the entire foreign aid budget of the United States will
go to Israel?
Anyone can see that the USA is the only 'real' friend of Israel in the world.
But the USA is not a friend, as I heard long ago a USA politician say on tv, on jews in the
USA 'we do not love them, w're afraid of them'.
Any USA politcian who openly opposes Israel is without a job.
This is, in my opinion, what jewry does not realise, their power over the USA can disappear
overnight, could even become open hatred of jews.
These jewish organisations, with media controlled by jews, and politicians who accept the
inevitable, for money or not for money, just something like the Hoover Dam: one earthquake,
and their power over the USA is gone.
How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole west,
I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.
However, in many history books one finds sentences as 'and then something happened that
nobody foresaw, but had grave consequences'.
How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole
west, I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.
This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Rather than us Dumb Goyim speculating
about it, why not listen to what a political insider had to say about this issue back in
2001?
His name is Dr. Stephen Steinlight. And although Ron Unz has characterized him as "some
totally obscure Zionist activist" he was was for more than five years Director of National
Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Zionist Committee. If that doesn't qualify him
as an "insider," I don't know what does.
Excerpts from The Zionist Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a
Misguided Immigration Policy :
Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power
Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the
greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly.
We will be able to hang on to it for perhaps a decade or two longer. Unless and until
the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete , an extremely unlikely scenario,
the great material wealth of the Zionist community will continue to give it significant
advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power
is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft
money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to
Israel , a high wall of church/state separation, and social liberalism combined with
selective conservatism on criminal justice and welfare issues.
Zionist voter participation also remains legendary; it is among the highest in the
nation. Incredible as it sounds, in the recent presidential election more Jews voted in Los
Angeles than Latinos. But should the naturalization of resident aliens begin to move more
quickly in the next few years, a virtual certainty -- and it should -- then it is only a
matter of time before the electoral power of Latinos, as well as that of others, overwhelms
us.
All of this notwithstanding, in the short term, a number of factors will continue to
play into our hands, even amid the unprecedented wave of continuous immigration. The very
scale of the current immigration and its great diversity paradoxically constitutes at least
a temporary political asset. While we remain comparatively coherent as a voting bloc, the
new mostly non-European immigrants are fractured into a great many distinct, often
competing groups, many with no love for each other. This is also true of the many new
immigrants from rival sides in the ongoing Balkan wars, as it is for the growing south
Asian population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They have miles and miles to go
before they overcome historical hatreds, put aside current enmities and forgive recent
enormities, especially Pakistani brutality in the nascent Bangladesh. Queens is no
melting pot!
For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Zionist community is thus in
a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions
that support our agendas. But the day will surely come when an effective Asian-American
alliance will actually bring Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese,
and the rest closer together. And the enormously complex and as yet significantly divided
Latinos will also eventually achieve a more effective political federation. The fact is
that the term "Asian American" has only recently come into common parlance among younger
Asians (it is still rejected by older folks), while "Latinos" or "Hispanics" often do not
think of themselves as part of a multinational ethnic bloc but primarily as Mexicans,
Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.
Even with these caveats, an era of astoundingly disproportionate Zionist legislative
representation may already have peaked. It is unlikely we will ever see many more U.S.
Senates with 10 Zionist members. And although had Al Gore been allowed by the Supreme Court
to assume office, a Jew would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency, it may be
we'll never get that close again. With the changes in view, how long do we actually
believe that nearly 80 percent of the entire foreign aid budget of the United States will
go to Israel?
If Steinlight was obscure or not, I do not know.
What struck me in one of his articles is how he sees the holocaust story as essential to Zionist power in the USA.
Also in that article he wondered if at some point in time Jews might be driven out of the
USA, 'but, there is always the life boat Israel'.
That Israel will collapse the minute Zionist power in the USA [eventually] ends, he seems unable to see
this.
About your quote, it seems to have been written before it became clear to the world that
western power is diminishing.
So even if Zionist power over the West remains, Zionist power in the world is diminishing
too.
NATO, EU, Pentagon, neocons, whatever, may still want war with Russia, my idea is that on the other
hand that more and more people see this intention, and are absolutely against.
While western influence is receding, Assad still is there, Russia has bases in Syria, Erdogan, on what side is he ?; and so on and so forth.
The battle cry 'no more war for Israel' exists for a long time in the USA. And I interpret discussions on
this side of the Atlantic about increasing anti-Semitism as the acknowledgement of the fact that more and more people
on this side begin to criticize Zionists, especially with regard to Palestinians.
Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard took to Twitter on Wednesday to excoriate Donald Trump
for his decision to apparently pardon Saudi Arabia for the killing of journalist Jamal
Khashoggi, labeling the president the "bitch" of the authoritarian kingdom. "Hey
@realDonaldTrump," Gabbard tweeted , "being Saudi
Arabia's bitch is not "America First."
Gabbard's tweet comes just a day after Trump released
a statement -- with "America First!" right at the top -- that heavily implied that he will
not pursue any further action against top Saudi officials, who are widely believed to be
responsible for the writer's murder, and cast doubt on the finding of the CIA, his own
intelligence service.
Gabbard previously came
under fire for her own forays into Middle Eastern affairs, including her secret 2016
trip to meet with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria at the height of its civil war and her
suggestion that Assad, a brutal dictator who has overseen the deaths of more than 500,000
people in his country, should not be removed from office.
This is long overdue for so many reasons, but the corruption is so pervasive that reform
is nigh impossible (which I'm sure will reassure certain hearts).
I've been rolling on the floor with uncontrollable laughter (between episodes of schizoid
lamentation) listening to Russophobes (e.g., David Sanger of the NYT) rant on in alarmism
about the perils of RUSSIAN COLLUSION, all the while ignoring the elephant from Israel
standing right next to their shoulders.
Seriously, who can coherently argue that any hazard to democracy posed by Russia's
election influence was remotely comparable to the interference of Israel and Britain? And why
should the latter 2′s intentions any more than the former's?
Israel's artificial 'war on terror' in the Middle East, has cost US taxpayers nearly $6 trillion and killed roughly half a million
human beings, and there's still no end in sight. source:
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/news
Notable quotes:
"... But just as in the case of FDD, it is time to require AIPAC to register as what it really is: a foreign agent. As a registered agent, it will still be able to exercise First Amendment rights to defend Israel but it would not be able to be involved in lobbying on Capitol Hill and directing money to politicians who are described as pro-Israeli, as it does now. Its finances will be transparent and it will be perceived as an official advocate for Israel, not as an educational resource for what is happening in the Middle East. Hopefully, when AIPAC stops throwing money around, the politicians and media types will find another place to roost. ..."
"... National Security Advisor John Bolton recently received the "Defender of Israel" award from the Zionist Organization of America. ..."
"... one might suggest that the U.S. United Nations delegation, headed by Ambassador Nikki Haley, is directed by the Israeli government, particularly given events of last Friday whereby the U.S. voted against a motion condemning Israel's continued illegal occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights, thereby recognizing for the first time Israel's sovereignty over the area. Whether Haley was speaking for herself or for the administration was characteristically unclear, but it hardly matters ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected] . ..."
"Nikki Haley might be referred to as a useful idiot, as Lenin put it, but her consistent pattern of extreme loyalty in defense
of Israel marks her out as being particularly beholden to the Jewish state ..." Depending on what criteria one uses, there are between
200 and 600 groups in the United States that wholly or in part are dedicated to furthering the interests of Israel. The organizations
are both Jewish, like the Zionist Organization of America, and Christian Zionist to include John Hagee's Christians United for Israel,
but the funding of the Israel Lobby and both its political and media access comes overwhelmingly from Jewish supporters and advocates.
Many of the groups are registered with the Internal Revenue Service for tax purposes as 501(c)3 "educational" or "charitable"
foundations, which enables them to solicit tax exempt donations. One might dispute whether promoting Israeli interests in the United
States is actually educational, but as of right now the Department of the Treasury believes it can be so construed, protected by
the First Amendment.
But there is a more serious consideration in terms of the actual relationships that many of the groups enjoy with the Israeli
government. To be sure, many of them boast on their promotional literature and websites about their relationships with the Benjamin
Netanyahu and his cabinet, so the issue of dual loyalty or, worse, acting as actual Israeli government agents must be considered.
There is a legal remedy to hostile foreigners acting against American interests and that is the Foreign Agents Registration Act
of 1938 (FARA). Originally intended to identify and monitor agents of Nazi Germany propagandizing in the United States, it has since
been applied to individuals and groups linked to other nations. Most recently, it was used against Russian news agencies RT America
and Sputnik, which were forced to register. It is also being considered for Qatar based al-Jazeera.
FARA
requires
identified agents to be transparent in terms of their funding and contacts while also being publicly identified as representing
the interests of a foreign nation. They must report to the Department of Justice every contact they have with congressmen or other
government officials. The text of the Act defines a foreign agent as
"any person who acts as an agent, representative, employee, or servant, or any person who acts in any other capacity at the
order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal or of a person any of whose activities are directly
or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed, or subsidized in whole or in major part by a foreign principal, and
who directly or through any other person --
(i) engages within the United States in political activities for or in the interests of such foreign principal;
(ii) acts within the United States as a public relations counsel, publicity agent, information-service employee or political
consultant for or in the interests of such foreign principal;
(iii) within the United States solicits, collects, disburses, or dispenses contributions, loans, money, or other things of
value for or in the interest of such foreign principal; or
(iv) within the United States represents the interests of such foreign principal before any agency or official of the Government
of the United States."
In spite of language that would presumably cover many of the hundreds of Jewish organizations acting for Israel, FARA has never
been used to compel registration of any such groups or individuals even when it was public knowledge that they were working closely
with the Israeli government to coordinate positions and promote other Israeli interests.
That failure is at a minimum a tribute to Jewish power in the United States, but it is also due to the fact that the organizations
are funded from within the United States by wealthy American Jews, not by Israel, which is the argument sometimes inaccurately
made by the groups
themselves
to demonstrate that they are not being directed by the Israeli government.
The difficulty in proving that one is directed by a foreign government has been definitively resolved regarding one group the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which has become the leading neoconservative bastion seeking a war with Iran, Israel's
bęte noir
. The recent al-Jazeera expose on the activities of the Israeli lobbies in both Britain and the United States,
which I wrote about last week
, included a surreptitiously
filmed conversation with Sima Vaknin-Gil, a former Israeli intelligence officer who now heads the Ministry of Strategic Affairs,
which is tasked with countering what is perceived to be anti-Israeli activity worldwide.
The Ministry is particularly focused on the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which is increasingly
active in both the United States and Europe.
Vaknin-Gil was discussing his activities with Tony Kleinfeld, an undercover investigative reporter who was secretly recording
and filming his encounters with various members of the Israel Lobby as well as of the Israeli government.Vaknin-Gil provided
explicit confirmation
that the FDD
works directly with the Israeli government, making it an Israeli agent by the definition of FARA.
For those who are unfamiliar with FDD, it is probably currently the most prominent neocon organization though it nevertheless
claims to be a non-partisan "research group." It focuses on foreign policy and security issues by "Fighting Terrorism and Promoting
Freedom," as it informs us on its
website
masthead.
It works to "defend free nations against their enemies," which frequently means in practice anyone whom Israel considers to be
hostile, most particularly Iran. FDD's Leadership Council has featured former CIA Director James Woolsey, Senator Joe Lieberman,
and Bill Kristol. Its Executive Director is Canadian import Mark Dubowitz, who is obsessed with Iran. Its advisors and experts are
mostly Jewish and most of its funding comes from Jewish oligarchs.
FDD's auditorium has become a preferred venue for senior officials of the Trump Administration to go and make hardline speeches,
just as the American Enterprise Institute was under George W. Bush. Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Nikki Haley have all
spoken there recently, frequently focusing on Iran and the threat that it allegedly constitutes.
FDD aside, Vaknin-Gil
also confirmed
that there were other groups in the United States doing the same sorts of things on behalf of Israel. He said "We have FDD. We
have others working on this," elaborating that FDD is "working on" projects for Israel including "data gathering, information analysis,
working on activist organizations, money trail."
So Vaknin-Gil was admitting that FDD and others were working as Israeli proxies, collecting information on U.S. citizens, spying
on legal organizations, and both planning and executing disinformation at Israeli direction. Kleinfeld also spoke with a Jonathan
Schanzer, a senior official in FDD, who filled in a bit more of what the foundation is up to in terms of discrediting groups in the
U.S. that support the BDS movement.
Schanzer admitted "BDS has taken everybody by surprise" before complaining that the Jewish response has been "a complete mess.
I don't think that anybody's doing a good job. We're not even doing a good job." He then complained that attempts to discredit Palestinian
groups by linking them to terrorist groups had failed, as also had the use of the label anti-Semitism. "Personally I think anti-Semitism
as a smear is not what it used to be."
So, when will the Justice Department move on FDD now that its true colors have been exposed by al-Jazeera? The group must be required
to register if justice be done, but will it? Its principal partner in crime the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)
has avoided registering for more than sixty years by claiming that it is an American organization working to educate the U.S. public
about the all the good things connected to Israel. Even though it meets regularly with Israeli government officials, it claims not
to be representing Israeli interests.
But just as in the case of FDD, it is time to require AIPAC to register as what it really is: a foreign agent. As a registered
agent, it will still be able to exercise First Amendment rights to defend Israel but it would not be able to be involved in lobbying
on Capitol Hill and directing money to politicians who are described as pro-Israeli, as it does now. Its finances will be transparent
and it will be perceived as an official advocate for Israel, not as an educational resource for what is happening in the Middle East.
Hopefully, when AIPAC stops throwing money around, the politicians and media types will find another place to roost.
To be sure the lovefest for Israel in government extends far beyond FDD and AIPAC. It can be found in many dark corners.
National
Security Advisor John Bolton
recently received
the "Defender of Israel" award from the Zionist Organization of America.
And
one might suggest that
the U.S. United Nations delegation, headed by Ambassador Nikki Haley, is directed by the Israeli government, particularly given
events of last Friday
whereby the U.S. voted against a motion condemning Israel's continued illegal occupation of the Syrian
Golan Heights, thereby recognizing for the first time Israel's sovereignty over the area. Whether Haley was speaking for herself
or for the administration was characteristically unclear, but it hardly matters
.
Nikki Haley might be referred to as a useful idiot, as Lenin put it, but her consistent pattern of extreme loyalty in defense
of Israel marks her out as being particularly beholden to the Jewish state, which will no doubt arrange to richly reward her through
some position in financial services for which she is totally unqualified when she leaves her post in January. And then she will be
well funded to run for president in 2020.
Having Haley in charge, one might just as well vote for Benjamin Netanyahu.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational
foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O.
Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is
[email protected].
Trump is presently Israel's man in the Oval Office and if he should not be available or bets need to be hedged for 2020, nikki
likudnik is a sensible substitute.
After all (as Giraldi rightly points out), she appears to serve not as U.N. ambassador for her own country, but for the Jewish
State of Israel.
The only "deep end" is Trump allowing the United States to be controlled by and have its national interests subverted by a
tiny client state via the out-sized lobbying bucks of Israel-firsters like Sheldon Adelson and his cabal.
Giraldi has consistently made this point and its clear who is unhappy about it.
' In spite of language that would presumably cover many of the hundreds of Jewish organizations acting for Israel, FARA has
never been used to compel registration of any such groups or individuals even when it was public knowledge that they were working
closely with the Israeli government to coordinate positions and promote other Israeli interests '
I think you've failed to grasp that Israel is not subject to gentile law.
" . . . but it is also due to the fact that the organizations are funded from within the United States by wealthy American Jews,
not by Israel, which is the argument sometimes inaccurately made by the groups themselves to demonstrate that they are not being
directed by the Israeli government."
I am not sure given the scope of the references that it matters. it appears that anyone advocating for any foreign entity is
included.
"(i) engages within the United States in political activities for or in the interests of such foreign principal; (ii) acts
within the United States as a public relations counsel, publicity agent, information-service employee or political consultant
for or in the interests of such foreign principal; (iii) within the United States solicits, collects, disburses, or dispenses
contributions, loans, money, or other things of value for or in the interest of such foreign principal; or (iv) within the United
States represents the interests of such foreign principal before any agency or official of the Government of the United States."
These "by the way, that includes" list makes it very clear what organizations are bound to register.
Israel's artificial 'war on terror' in the Middle East, has cost US taxpayers nearly $6 trillion and killed roughly half a
million human beings, and there's still no end in sight. source:
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/news
Ludwig Watzal
, November 20, 2018 at 3:13 pm GMT
Geraldi's article shows how the Zionist Israel lobby holds the US public in choke cold and to put Israeli political goals
into the throat of the people and the US administration. Besides their power, there have to be many useful idiots who put up
with it and to support their bad goals. Their penetration of all walks of life renders it impossible to get FDD, AIPAC or all
the hundred other Israeli lobby groups registered as foreign agents. As Al Jazeera has demonstrated, these folks are working
foremost for Israeli interests. Their loyalty belongs primarily to Israel. If people would know, perhaps something could
change. But people are not allowed to tell because the Zionist controlled media are making sure of that.
@DESERT FOX
Dual citizenship has now been allowed in most (((Western liberal democracies))). There are two old adages on
the subject with slightly different views:
1) A slave cannot serve two masters; and 2) A slave with two masters is truly free.
All of the Jewish lobby groups fit into these views, but their magical mental gymnastics absolves them. In
the first instance, it is true that they cannot serve two masters, so they only serve one – Israel. In the
second instance, they are free, as they are not bound by allegiance to either master, they voluntarily serve
Israel.
Removing dual citizenship would be a step. Another step would be revisiting Chapter 115 on
Sedition. The definition under law, does not correlate with the normal legal definition.
The law contemplates force, the legal definition does not. Aligning the law with the legal concept of
sedition would put the "educational" groups would place them on less solid ground.
And finally, given that the US Constitution contemplates the government being "We, the people", all aid
to Israel is harvested from "We, the people" without consent. The famous Davy Crockett story covers it
nicely
"... In Trumpworld Israel's fantasy of the overarching Iranian menace creates a need for an alliance of steel to combat this threat to the world and that alliance must include Saudi Arabia. ..."
"... DJT wants the Saudis'money for the US economy. Like any businessman/trader at that elevated level he is loathe to surrender market share to his competitors who in this case are Russia and China. He is also quite grateful that SA has pumped enough oil and gas to depress prices. All in all, I would say that he was quite considerate in his forthright explanation to us all that he really IS the Saudi mukhtar of the United States. ..."
"... "I call upon Salman, the King of Saudi, to invite the prime minister of Israel Netanyahu to visit Saudi Arabia," Katz said on Thursday speaking at the Herzliya conference . "We saw what a wonderful host you can be when President Trump was there. You can also send your heir, the new one, Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He's a dynamic person. He is an initiator. And he wants to break through."" SF ..."
In Trumpworld Israel's fantasy of the overarching Iranian menace creates a need for an
alliance of steel to combat this threat to the world and that alliance must include Saudi
Arabia. Why that is so is not clear to me. Saudi Arabia has no armed forces that possess
real combat power to do anything but bomb civilians and oppress the Shia of the Eastern
Province. Possession of military equipment does not equal combat power. A more convincing
feature of theTrumpish view is the economic bit. DJT wants the Saudis'money for the US
economy. Like any businessman/trader at that elevated level he is loathe to surrender market
share to his competitors who in this case are Russia and China. He is also quite grateful that
SA has pumped enough oil and gas to depress prices. All in all, I would say that he was quite
considerate in his forthright explanation to us all that he really IS the Saudi mukhtar of the
United States. pl
**********
Old Post
"I call upon Salman, the King of Saudi, to invite the prime minister of Israel Netanyahu
to visit Saudi Arabia," Katz said on Thursday
speaking at the Herzliya conference . "We saw what a wonderful host you can be when
President Trump was there. You can also send your heir, the new one, Prince Mohammed bin
Salman. He's a dynamic person. He is an initiator. And he wants to break through."" SF
--------------
OK, Yisrael Katz, the intelligence minister of Israel has asked the present king of Saudi
Arabia to invite Benjamin Natanyahu to a state visit in Riyadh. What a great idea! (irony) IMO
there is nothing that would be more likely to trigger a revolt within and without the SA royal
family against King Salman and his son, the new crown prince. People just don't understand that
the Saudi population and the royal family (thousands of people in various factions) continue to
regard Israel as the ultimate enemy. For all these carefully indoctrinated Wahhabis, Israel is
an abomination that occupies a portion of the territory of the 'umma, God's territory
on earth. To invite Israel's prime minister to Riyadh for a state visit or, indeed any kind of
visit, would be to recognize Israel as a state legitimately and perpetually occupying
Palestine. The behind the scenes machinations of various acculturated princes like Muhammad bin
Salman mean nothing to the people of the Saudi kingdom. What we are talking about in such a
demand is an invitation to blasphemy and apostasy. It is typical of the vast majority of
Israelis that in their contempt for non-Jews and especially their neighbors, they remain
ignorant of such realities. A truce would be possible but not permanent recognition. pl
" ... it is unlikely in the extreme that Saudi Arabia would have undertaken something so
drastic without coordination with the US, particularly since this action comes literally on the
heels of President Trump's high-profile visit to Saudi Arabia. While initially silent,
President Trump ultimately took to Twitter to back Saudi Arabia against Qatar, even as the US
still maintains major military presence in that country."
... the nature of the accusations leveled at Qatar is nothing short of extreme. Both US and
Saudi leaders accused Qatar of about the worst offense currently available, namely supporting
violent Islamic extremism. Trump went so far as to say that Qatar's change of policies would be
a major step toward resolving the problem of terrorism." SF
----------
Saudi Arabia is a larger sponsor of Sunni jihadi movements than Qatar. That has always been
true. The "kingdom" is a state built on Sunni fanaticism. There are no churches, no synagogues,
no legally resident ministers of other faiths than Islam in the country. Mukhtar
(appointed head man and tax farmer) Donald Trump swore allegiance to his Saudi pals in Riyadh.
He did that before an army of witnesses from across the Islamic world. The Saudis have always
sought to impose their sphere of influence upon all Muslims within their reach. They
understandably think that mukhtar Trump gave them an extended reach as their henchman.
The air base at al-odeid in Qatar is a Qatari base in which the US has been allowed to
position the forward element of US CENTCOM's headquarter, the US air operations center for the
whole region and ten thousand bird men. (and women). Arabs do not do things like that from
altruistic love. The Qataris expected protection from Iran and Saudi Arabia and have not gotten
much of anything in return. Now Turkey , pursuing its Turanian destiny (on hold since the
Ottoman collapse) is building a military position as an ally of the al-than i family
rulers of Qatar. SA and its pipsqueak Gulfie allies are now threatening Turkey with - what?
Unhappiness if it does not abandon Qatar.? Did mukhtar Trump understand any of this
before he swore fealty to King Salman? I doubt it. pl
it is unlikely in the extreme that
Saudi Arabia would have undertaken something so drastic without coordination with the US,
particularly since this action comes literally on the heels of President Trump's high-profile
visit to Saudi Arabia. While initially silent, President Trump ultimately took to Twitter to
back Saudi Arabia against Qatar, even as the US still maintains major military presence in that
country.
The nature of the accusations leveled at Qatar is nothing short of extreme. Both US and
Saudi leaders accused Qatar of about the worst offense currently available, namely supporting
violent Islamic extremism. Trump went so far as to say that Qatar's change of policies would be
a major step toward resolving the problem of terrorism.
The nature of the crisis suggests it represents tensions that long bubbled under the surface
but now have finally burst into the open. The Qatari-Saudi falling out, and the make-up of the
pro-Saudi faction, suggests that several factors at work here. it is unlikely in the extreme
that Saudi Arabia would have undertaken something so drastic without coordination with the US,
particularly since this action comes literally on the heels of President Trump's high-profile
visit to Saudi Arabia. While initially silent, President Trump ultimately took to Twitter to
back Saudi Arabia against Qatar, even as the US still maintains major military presence in that
country.
The nature of the accusations leveled at Qatar is nothing short of extreme. Both US and
Saudi leaders accused Qatar of about the worst offense currently available, namely supporting
violent Islamic extremism. Trump went so far as to say that Qatar's change of policies would be
a major step toward resolving the problem of terrorism.
The nature of the crisis suggests it represents tensions that long bubbled under the surface
but now have finally burst into the open. The Qatari-Saudi falling out, and the make-up of the
pro-Saudi faction, suggests that several factors at work here. it is unlikely in the extreme
that Saudi Arabia would have undertaken something so drastic without coordination with the US,
particularly since this action comes literally on the heels of President Trump's high-profile
visit to Saudi Arabia. While initially silent, President Trump ultimately took to Twitter to
back Saudi Arabia against Qatar, even as the US still maintains major military presence in that
country.
The nature of the accusations leveled at Qatar is nothing short of extreme. Both US and
Saudi leaders accused Qatar of about the worst offense currently available, namely supporting
violent Islamic extremism. Trump went so far as to say that Qatar's change of policies would be
a major step toward resolving the problem of terrorism.
The nature of the crisis suggests it represents tensions that long bubbled under the surface
but now have finally burst into the open. The Qatari-Saudi falling out, and the make-up of the
pro-Saudi faction, suggests that several factors at work here.
In a sense, that could be reversed. Indeed, none of the presidents since Bill
Clinton has done ALL that Netanyahu's Israel has demanded, since none of them have gone to
war against Iran.
Obama, it is said, couldn't stand to be in the same room as Bibi. He and
SOS Kerry negotiated the multi-party Iran Nuclear Deal against Bibi's wishes, which our
current POTUS irrationally tore up. Was Trump carrying out the will of Israel, or was it
because he could not bear to allow one of the few good things that Obama accomplished to
stand? Perhaps both.
Sixteen years ago Wesley Clark said that the PNAC plan was for the US to take out 7
countries in 5 years, with Iran being the coup de gras. Hasn't happened yet. And is Trump
really that crazy? Let's hope that Bibi, who may be on his way out of office for corruption,
never gets his war.
@tac The Torah,
biblical and Quran stories were written in agrarian societies where capitalistic enterprise
hardly existed.
Loans were for not dying of hunger in the period between when the food of the last harvest
had been used completely, and the new harvest was still in the future.
Thus interest was seen as blackmailing people, they needed money to prevent dying of
starvation.
There was enterprise long ago, and trade over long distances, in the early centuries for
example swords from Damascus were famous in Europe, and exported to Europe.
Investment for business was the exception, even the first iron smelting installations were
simple, those who wanted them could build them by themselves.
The idea that invested money could yield money came later, when installations became more
complex, ships bigger, etc.
With investment came risk, there was not much risk in consumptive loans, they normally could
paid out of the coming harvest.
And so the problem began, a church not understanding capitalism, an agrarian society based on
barter changing into a money using capitalistic society.
Commercial people had no problem with interest, even now Muslims do not have problems with
interest.
What they do is simply giving interest other names, such as a fine for repaying late.
It has been agreed that the repayment will be late, so anybody is happy.
@renfro And
there you have it in a nutshell: usary -- the usurper of civilization, the enslaver of
humanity, the seed of ultimate degeneracy. It seems humanity is adverse to learn from
history. It is an interesting side-note that both Christianity and Islam both prohibit the
use of usury (a consideration worthy of mention when one contemplates the ongoing wars in the
ME) and some who here take shots at Farakhann, 'neo-nazis', blue-hair and other deplorables.
Our dilemma today is the same that occurred in Rome. Our country and people will
suffer the same fate if usury continues as it has. From the onset of history, it has
been the moneychangers, who have exploited mankind for pure profit. Usury is an abomination
against God's statutes, which manipulates and destroys people, families, and nations. It is
by the profits made from usury used to attack Christianity. One needs only to ask- who is
in control of usury worldwide? Didn't Rome suffer from these same people? Usury brings
forth an insidious side to all people. The temptation to borrow is powerful, and it always
polarizes lender against borrower where the former becomes the master and the later, the
slave. As a vice, neighbor is pitted against his neighbor, and nation against nation.
[...]
The Roman government was far too corrupt already with its politicians bought by
moneychangers for any fledgling Christian sect to have an affect on its decline. The
moneychanger's demand was perpetually self-serving, which was disparate to the common good
of the populace. Originally, Rome was founded as a republic. The unchecked influence of the
moneychangers caused it to change into a democracy. A republic is derived through the
election of public officials whose attitude toward property is respected in terms of law
for individual rights. A democracy is derived through the election of public officials
whose attitude toward property is communistic and respects the "collective good" of the
population instead of the individual. This is the resultant system that moneychangers bring
to civilization. The subversion of power is a sleight of hand that changes the right of the
individual into what is often called the "collective good" of the people (communistic),
which is always controlled by an alliance of powerful interests.
There is no reference in the article to the moneychangers and their lawyers sowing the
seeds for Roman society to suffocate under its own lethargic weight. Lawyers were indeed a
problem to Rome. The Romans were so concerned by lawyers' opprobrious effect on public
morale that they attempted to curb their influence. In 204 BC, the Roman Senate passed a
law prohibiting lawyers from plying their trade for money. As the Roman republic declined
and became more democratic, it became increasingly difficult to keep lawyers in check and
prevent them from accepting fees under the table. Indeed, they were very useful to the
moneychangers. The lawyers fed upon corruption and accelerated the downward plunge of Roman
civilization. Some wealthy Romans began sending their sons to Greece to finish their
schooling, to learn rhetoric (Julius Caesar was one example) -- a lawyer's cleverness in
oration. This compounded Rome's growing woes.
[...] The moneychangers destroyed Rome from within by first monopolizing usury, monopolizing
the precious mineral trade and then disproportionately magnifying the temporal businesses
of prostitution (including pedophilia and homosexuality), and slavery. Constantine
(306-337 AD) was the first Roman emperor to issue laws, which radically limited the rights
of Jews as citizens of the Roman Empire, a privilege conferred upon them by Caracalla in
212 AD. The laws of Constantius (337-361 AD) recognized the Jewish domination of the slave
trade and acted to greatly curtail it. A law of Theodosius II (408-410 AD), prohibited Jews
from holding any advantageous office of honor in the Roman state. Always the impetus was
buying influence concerning their trade.
[...] Usury has been the opiate that has ruined the ingenuity of many of its civilizations. As
this Jewish craft spread, the people increasingly suffered from the burdens of
indebtedness. So troubling was the effects of usury that Lex Genucia outlawed usury in
342 BC. Nevertheless, ways of evading such legislation were found and by the last period of
the Republic, usury was once again rife. Emperors like Julius Caesar and Justinian tried to
limit the interest rate and control its devastating effects (Birnie, 1958).
Entertainment was a way to temporarily set aside the burdens of indebtedness. It was a
way to festively indulge in all the glory that Rome had to offer. Rome soon became drunk on
hedonism. Collectively, entertainment helped disguise the collapsing of a great power.
Spectator blood sports, brothels, carnivals, festivals, and parties substituted for
everything that was wrong with Rome.
[...] Rome became a multi-cultural state much like our own in the United States. Indeed, it
was truly an international city. Foreigners of every nation resided and worked there. The
Romans soon intermarried and had children with the many foreigners. This included
concubines from the numerous slaves won through war. Rome had an extraordinary large
slave population and was estimated to make up about two-thirds of its population at one
time.
[...] Eventually, the Romans lost their tribal cohesion and identity. The population of Rome
had changed and so did its character. Increasing demands were made of the ruling
patricians. The aristocrats tried to appease the masses, but eventually those demands could
not be sustained. Rome had become bankrupt. The effects of usury polarized the patrician
class against an increasingly dispossessed and burdened class of citizens.
[...]
Rome was bankrupt and was collapsing. The parasitic nature of usury and its effect on
government was too complex for the uneducated plebeians to understand (see Addendum for
an illustration of usury's power). Indeed, it was the moneychangers with the use of
their lawyers that destroyed pagan Rome. The Jewish interests did not control all
usury. However, they were a people well recognized as being extremely loyal to each
other and adept in the black craft of usury. To all others (gentiles) they showed hate and
enmity. Throughout history the weapon of usury is used again and again to destroy
nations.
[...]
Fortunately, the writings of Cicero survived the burning of libraries. In the case against
Faccus, we can see the crafts of the Jews are the same today. The Jews clearly held
great influence in politics as a result of their professions and profited immensely at the
expense of Rome. We can further deduce by the case of Faccus that the Jews were not
concerned with the interests of Rome, but rather for their own interests. The Jewish
gold was being shipped from Rome and its provinces throughout the empire to Jerusalem. Why?
We also know that the Jews had utter contempt and hatred of the Romans. This contempt is
demonstrated by their breaking of Roman law, which Faccus tried to uphold. If we look
closer, we see that gold has a very special meaning to all Jewry unlike any other
people.
[...] There are enough records for us to piece together what actually occurred in Rome that
led to its downfall. Rome fell as a result of corruption and the lack of cohesion of its
own people. But, it was the instrument of usury that brought about this corruption and
allowed its gold and silver to be controlled by Jewish interests.
[...] It was Christianity that put an end to the destructive nature of usury on its people
(see addendum for usury example). Rome's treasury became barren as a result of the
moneychangers. It weakened the Roman Empire immeasurably, and thrust untold millions in
poverty, debt, and in prison. It was Christianity that halted the influence of the Jews and
their destructive trades and practices. And, the Christian faith spread throughout the
former Roman Empire. All of the European people eventually became Christianity's vanguard
and champion. Without the strict adherence to the moral ethos, any civilization will
devolve into the religion of Nimrod.
"... "The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. ..."
"... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky." ..."
"... This is not some funny Skripal affair. This is a real case of several murders (see four cold bodies) ordered by the known scoundrel. ..."
"The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all
of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him
unfolded.
The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a rare
water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being
poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths An investigation into four possible murders has
been opened.
Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within
months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely
that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony
against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told
journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky The prosecutors claim that Browder was the
party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky."
– This is not some funny Skripal affair. This is a real case of several murders
(see four cold bodies) ordered by the known scoundrel.
That Browder (a liar and cheat that made a huge fortune in Russia) has "benefited most
from the death of Magnitsky" is undoubtedly true.
@ChuckOrloski
Not surprising to anyone who understands that stealing ,especially from 'others' is a first
choice career of Jews/Israelis.
I have always suspected that the 9 billion of stolen Iraq funds were stolen by the Jews who
were embedded in the US occupation administration and sent to Israel. Israel was so broke in
2001 they asked the Us for economic aid then suddenly in 2004 by some miracle they were
rolling in surplus money again.
Investigations reveal a pattern of Israeli officials stone-walling efforts to stop the
perpetrators of massive financial swindles in various countries, from Europe to the US to the
Philippines While some Israeli reporters work to expose the scams, a new one is already
underway
By Alison Weir
[MORE]
French and Israeli media report that a group largely made up of Israelis scammed 3,000 French
citizens out of approximately $20 million. Most of the stolen money is in Israel, but Israeli
authorities are reportedly failing to cooperate with France in prosecuting the scammers and
retrieving the money.
This is the latest of numerous examples of Israeli officials stone-walling international
efforts against the perpetrators of massive financial swindles around the world, according to
Israeli investigative journalists and others. These scams have brought estimated billions
into the Israeli economy, propping up a regime widely condemned for human rights abuses and
ethnic cleansing against indigenous Palestinians. Together, the stories paint a picture of a
government that seems to be turning a blind eye to -- and even protecting -- scammers.
A Finance Magnates analysis reports that one of the swindles alone has brought in over a
billion dollars and employs 5,000 people. And a new scam, described below, may help what is
predicted to be "the next major driver of the Israeli economy."
A former IRS expert on international crime notes that "fraudulent industries are often
major economic drivers, and that can translate into political clout."
Some Israeli journalists have been working to expose the situation in Israeli newspapers,
publishing exposés like "As Israel turns blind eye to vast binary options fraud,
French investigators step in" and "Are French Jewish criminals using Israel as a
get-out-of-jail card?" (Short answer: yes.)
Victimizing French business owners & churches
The victims of the recent scam against French citizens included churches and the owners of
small businesses -- delicatessens, car repair shops, hair salons, plumbers, etc. Some lost
their life savings and describe being threatened and intimidated by the scammers.
Both share an implacable sense of Islamophobia. And, the deep sense of racial
inferiority complex which the hindoos feel, fits well with the cursed ideology of their
supremacist white-skinned Zionist masters. Them hindoos are willful lickspittle of the
Jooscum.
Man you really hit the bull's eye with this astute observation of yours (or is the golden
cafe we have here?? ;))
What I think is that, these hindoos (at least the ones who are on the top of the totem
pole) have what robert lindsay used to describe as, a very deep sense of inferiority complex
intertwined with a very superficial sense of superiority on the outside. Deeper the
inferiority complex, stronger the (external) superiority complex to offset the deep sense of
shame they have on the inside. I wonder why that is?
However it would be wrong to paint the whole country of India with the same brush. A
massive percentage of people there are bearing the brunt of toxic hatred and violence
emanating from the likes of 'zionist lickspittles' you mentioned. One can only surmise what
they must be enduring. These low caste and other minorities there would be a very patient and
stoic people as otherwise India would've erupted into a full blown civil war by now.
As for the 'jooscum', I take issue with that. There certainly are Jews, like Unz, Atzmon
and Shamir who defy the stereotype and become champions of real free speech and truth. So
again one must NOT go down that slippery slope of putting each and everyone to the guillotine
just because they happen to be cohen or ahmed or rahul or whatever. We are better than
that
@ChuckOrloski
Its much more than that .we have a lot of cost for Israel than just the yearly 3 billion, it
more like 5 billion if you count the 760,000 for missile defense and a dozen other programs
for aid to Israel. Cost was 1.6 trillion as of 2002, probably 2 trillion by now.
Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US
December 9, 2002
By David R. Francis ,Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
[MORE]
Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by
today's population, that is more than $5,700 per person.
This is an estimate by Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington. For decades,
his analyses of the Middle East scene have made him a frequent thorn in the side of the
Israel lobby.
For the first time in many years, Mr. Stauffer has tallied the total cost to the US of its
backing of Israel in its drawn-out, violent dispute with the Palestinians. So far, he
figures, the bill adds up to more than twice the cost of the Vietnam War.
And now Israel wants more. In a meeting at the White House late last month, Israeli
officials made a pitch for $4 billion in additional military aid to defray the rising costs
of dealing with the intifada and suicide bombings. They also asked for more than $8 billion
in loan guarantees to help the country's recession-bound economy.
Considering Israel's deep economic troubles, Stauffer doubts the Israel bonds covered by
the loan guarantees will ever be repaid. The bonds are likely to be structured so they don't
pay interest until they reach maturity. If Stauffer is right, the US would end up paying both
principal and interest, perhaps 10 years out.
Israel's request could be part of a supplemental spending bill that's likely to be passed
early next year, perhaps wrapped in with the cost of a war with Iraq.
Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. It is already due to get $2.04 billion
in military assistance and $720 million in economic aid in fiscal 2003. It has been getting
$3 billion a year for years.
Adjusting the official aid to 2001 dollars in purchasing power, Israel has been given $240
billion since 1973, Stauffer reckons. In addition, the US has given Egypt $117 billion and
Jordan $22 billion in foreign aid in return for signing peace treaties with Israel.
"Consequently, politically, if not administratively, those outlays are part of the total
package of support for Israel," argues Stauffer in a lecture on the total costs of US Middle
East policy, commissioned by the US Army War College, for a recent conference at the
University of Maine.
These foreign-aid costs are well known. Many Americans would probably say it is money well
spent to support a beleagured democracy of some strategic interest. But Stauffer wonders if
Americans are aware of the full bill for supporting Israel since some costs, if not hidden,
are little known.
One huge cost is not secret. It is the higher cost of oil and other economic damage to the
US after Israel-Arab wars.
In 1973, for instance, Arab nations attacked Israel in an attempt to win back territories
Israel had conquered in the 1967 war. President Nixon resupplied Israel with US arms,
triggering the Arab oil embargo against the US.
That shortfall in oil deliveries kicked off a deep recession. The US lost $420 billion (in
2001 dollars) of output as a result, Stauffer calculates. And a boost in oil prices cost
another $450 billion.
Afraid that Arab nations might use their oil clout again, the US set up a Strategic
Petroleum Reserve. That has since cost, conservatively, $134 billion, Stauffer reckons.
Other US help includes:
• US Jewish charities and organizations have remitted grants or bought Israel bonds
worth $50 billion to $60 billion. Though private in origin, the money is "a net drain" on the
United States economy, says Stauffer.
• The US has already guaranteed $10 billion in commercial loans to Israel, and $600
million in "housing loans." (See editor's note below.) Stauffer expects the US Treasury to
cover these.
• The US has given $2.5 billion to support Israel's Lavi fighter and Arrow missile
projects.
• Israel buys discounted, serviceable "excess" US military equipment. Stauffer says
these discounts amount to "several billion dollars" over recent years.
• Israel uses roughly 40 percent of its $1.8 billion per year in military aid,
ostensibly earmarked for purchase of US weapons, to buy Israeli-made hardware. It also has
won the right to require the Defense Department or US defense contractors to buy Israeli-made
equipment or subsystems, paying 50 to 60 cents on every defense dollar the US gives to
Israel.
US help, financial and technical, has enabled Israel to become a major weapons supplier.
Weapons make up almost half of Israel's manufactured exports. US defense contractors often
resent the buy-Israel requirements and the extra competition subsidized by US taxpayers.
• US policy and trade sanctions reduce US exports to the Middle East about $5 billion
a year, costing 70,000 or so American jobs, Stauffer estimates. Not requiring Israel to use
its US aid to buy American goods, as is usual in foreign aid, costs another 125,000 jobs.
• Israel has blocked some major US arms sales, such as F-15 fighter aircraft to Saudi
Arabia in the mid-1980s. That cost $40 billion over 10 years, says Stauffer.
@JC1
Asian-Americans are not brainwashed. When the LA riots occurred in part because a Korean
woman shot a black girl in the back of the head in her store, the Korean shopkeepers simply
got out their guns and started shooting black rioters like dogs which of course they
privately regard them to be. Blacks paid cash in their liquor stores but once this was no
longer a factor they simply started shooting at them-with much greater accuracy, too. The
average ghetto black was no match for a Korean with an SKS rifle.
Iranian Muslims are not brainwashed. When Irv Rubin of the Jewish Defense League who had
previously been known for brawling with Metzger and the Klan on talk shows tried to blow up
the mosque and congressman Issa after 9-11 (I guess he did not get the memo that the Z were
behind it) he was imprisoned. His death was suspicious and probably the result of Aryan gangs
on the inside. At any rate, so much for Jewish domination of the Muslims.
Hindus are supposedly cooperating with Jews in their takeover of the tech industry. I
cannot be sure of that. However, they are not brainwashed.
And as our Italian-American posters have noted here, the Italians who long resided in the
same cities with Jews don't give a "rat's culo" for Israel.
Supposedly the 1965 Immigration Act was engineered by Jews to destroy white society. What
it did accomplish was importing a bunch of Asians and Hispanics who do not care a whit about
Israel or Jews and some Muslims who detest them.
So it is the rural white prole who is brainwashed. He comes home from a hard day's work
and watches some film like BLACK PANTHER where a bunch of effete British character actors
play the baddies and the black Mandingo walks around in a costume and they want him to screw
their sister.
The Korean or Iranian or Italian in the city does not want to imitate blacks. Few of them
are whiggers. It is the rural white prole who wants to "keep it real". Italians who do choose
to be gangsters do not go to jail for the petty crimes that whiggers do.
I must say that the white is something of a fool. And I should add, I am one. Whites
seemed smarter in the 1990′s. But somehow they declined after Bush was elected.
Doesn't anyone else get fatigued by the constant demand for attention by the one
Ethnostate supposedly created by God ? What's in it for me ?
You get to pay for it.
Why Israel Will Never Repay US Loans
Dr. Israel Shahak
[MORE]
"All conceivable questions have been discussed about scheduling and conditions of the $10
billion in loan guarantees requested by Israel from the US government except one: How can
Israel possibly repay such a huge sum? After all, if Israel cannot repay these loans, the
burden will fall upon the guarantor, the US government, which in the last analysis means upon
the US taxpayers.
Such a repayment would in fact amount to foreign aid under another name. Because of the
deterioration of economic conditions in the US, no matter what forms of pressure the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) may use, the Congress will be reluctant to offer
Israel $10 billion in an extra aid gift.
Given these realities, the best guess would be that both sides already know that since Israel
is not capable of repaying the US guaranteed loans, they regard the guarantees as a gift to
Israel in disguise.
A Gift in Disguise
Yitzhak Shamir and other Israeli government spokesmen, as well as spokesmen for Israel's
US lobby, constantly reiterate that Israel has so far been repaying its debts on time. They
don't mention that the US pays the interest on those loans, and eventually forgives them. If
the US did not do this, Israel's case would soon be comparable to that of the USSR and other
debt-ridden states which used their past good repayment records as justification for
borrowing more and more, until finally they defaulted on all their loans. The situation is
described by Israeli economist Zvi Timor, the editor of Al-Hamishmar, in an article entitled
"Dignified Behavior Under Pressure" in his journal's September 17 issue:
"For years we have been repaying all our debts from what we've been receiving as American
aid. Every year Israel gets $1.3 billion of economic aid, of which $ 1.1 billion goes for
debt repayment."
In other words, 85 percent of American economic aid "is not spent as it is supposed to be.
From private but reliable sources, I know that last year the sum in question reached $1.2
billion, i.e. 92 percent of the received "economic aid." It means that the American taxpayers
have been, without their knowledge, repaying the Israeli debt for years. Ordinary Americans
would be overjoyed if they learned that their debts were being repaid by somebody else. If
Israeli debt repayment goes under the name of "economic aid," it is to conceal from the US
public the knowledge that they are repaying somebody else's debts.
The deception is nevertheless obvious for the simple reason that the expenditure of
between $11 and $12 billion over 10 years would otherwise have produced some visible effects
in Israel. None, however, can be seen.
According to the Congressional Research Service issue brief, "Israel: US Foreign
Assistance Facts" by Clyde R. Mark (updated May 8, 1991), Israel also benefits from periodic
US government waivers. From 1974 to 1984, the United States waived repayment of part of
Israel's annual FMS (Foreign Military Sales). Since 1985, the US has waived repayment of the
total FMS. The waiver avoids establishing a program and personnel to oversee the program, as
would be required if the same amount were given as a Military Assistance Program grant.
What this means is that since the entire value of the enormous military aid the US has
granted Israel over the years is in fact a gift, Israel does not owe the US very much. The
brief states further that "the United States gives all ESF (Economic Support Funds) directly
to the Government of Israel rather than under a specific program. There is no accounting of
how the funds are used. " No other recipient of American aid benefits from such conditions,
which seem almost to have been designed to beget fraud. And fraud they did beget.
In fact, fraud and deceit have pervaded Israeli utilization of US support. Even the magnitude
of this support has been misreported. Contrary to the data routinely cited by the Western
press, combined US military and economic support to Israel has amounted not to $3.1 billion
yearly, but, as Timor stated, "in sum total, without counting the guarantees, the US
government helps Israel financially to the extent of about $5 billion."
In this sum he includes the value (to Israel) of "deductions [from US income tax] accruing to
funds raised by the United Jewish Appeal. " Incidentally, the bulk of these funds, although
they are put at the disposal of the Israeli government, remain in the US. They are used by
AIPAC and other segments of the Israeli lobby in the United States. In this way, the US
administration actually subsidizes lobbying power used against itself.
Other forms of covert American aid cited by Timor are discussed by Yossi Verter and Yigal
Laviv in an article headlined "The American financial aid to Israel is much higher than
previously known" in Hadashut of September 20. Their estimate of the total amount of support
received by Israel from the US roughly concurs with Timor's.
Relying on "documents leaked by the State Department, which were published in part by the
Wall Street Journal, " and also "on sources in the Congress" (and apparently on Israeli
sources as well), the writers conclude that "financial aid which Israel receives from the US
is much higher than published figures indicate, largely because Israel uses the received
money for complex financial speculation schemes which are without exception detrimental to
the interests of the American taxpayer."
They also assert that "between 1974 and 1989 Israel received from the US over $16 billion in
the form of military aid, but no one in the US really expected that any part of this total
would ever be repaid."
Asking About the Future
But let us leave the past aside, and ask about the future. Right now, the US pays existing
Israeli debts to commercial banks and allows their recycling. The question that therefore
remains is, how can Israel repay the additional principal and interest on the $10 billion in
loans? Or, alternatively, can Israel renounce the guarantees and impose an austerity regime
in their stead?
The latter option is already advocated by such Israeli ministers from the extreme right as
former Chief of Staff and present Minister of Agriculture Rafael Eitan. After all, in order
to repay this sum each year, Israel would have to increase its exports by at least $4
billion, or more if the profits from such exports did not reach 50 percent.
The last officially recorded value for Israeli exports was some $9.4 billion in 1988. The
value of imports was $12.3 billion, yielding a trade deficit of 23.2 percent, according to
the "Statistical Abstract of Israel, 1989." Since Israel is now in recession, the value of
its exports could not have increased much since then.
In fact, one particular export, that of weaponry, has collapsed since 1988. The value of
exported weapons, one-third of which went to Colombia alone, amounted in 1988 to $1.5
billion. The forecast for the next fiscal year was that this particular export would decrease
to $213 million.
Two major markets for the Israeli exports now are North America ($3.1 billion, of which $3
billion goes to the US) and the European Common Market ($3.2 billion). Israeli exports to the
US were composed chiefly of polished diamonds ($1.2 billion), medicines and chemicals ($180
million), and clothes and textiles ($125 million).
Only the gullible can expect that Americans, under present economic conditions, can be
influenced by AIPAC to buy more Israeli diamonds in quantifies sufficient to cover the
repayment of the new loans, to be borrowed at the rate of $2 billion per year for five years.
An increase of Israeli exports by $4 billion, or some 43 percent in a single year, is, as
Timor clearly recognizes, absolutely impossible.
Timor is right in pointing out that without the US guarantees, "a state like Israel, which
already has an enormous foreign debt per capita, enormous defense budget, enormous budgetary
deficit, and quite sizable trade deficit, would not be considered an attractive borrower on
the international financial market. " It can be mentioned in passing that an Israeli
budgetary deficit exists when the notyet granted American guarantees are already counted on
its revenue side! All these facts only reinforce disbelief in Israel's ability to ever repay
the loans guaranteed by the US.
The Austerity Alternative
The alternative option of renouncing the guarantees and imposing an austerity regime would
also have dire consequences. The proposed reduction of all salaries by 10 percent would yield
the equivalent in Israeli shekels of $2 billion. In addition to the social consequences of
this proposal, a hefty proportion of Israeli wage-earners would thus rapidly land below the
poverty line.
Nor would these sacrifices yield the intended economic effects. As Timor reminds his readers,
Israeli shekels are worthless outside of Israel. His conclusion, backed by some additional
arguments not mentioned here, is: "Any savings in shekels are bound to be quite ineffective,
because shekels are not dollars."
The prediction that Israel cannot possibly repay the loans which the US is requested to
guarantee rests on firm grounds. The data upon which this prediction is based, although not
publicized by the media before the current clash of the US administration with the Israeli
government and with the Israeli lobby in the US, were surely known to the advocates of the
guarantees from the start. This inescapably leads to the conclusion that the guarantees were
originally conceived as a grant in disguise. It would have been more honest to call them a
gift.
A loan guarantee is essentially the same thing whether you're buying a car, an apartment, or
housing materials for Soviet immigrants. A reliable financial entity (a bank, your parents,
the United States) promises to pay off the balance of a loan if the borrower cannot. So when
Congress promises Israel $9 billion in loan guarantees (as they did this year), that means
the U.S. government accepts responsibility for up to $9 billion that Israel can then borrow
from international creditors. And loans guaranteed by the Federal Reserve provide an
additional benefit: The interest rates offered are much lower than they would be if Israel
(or any small, debt-troubled nation) sought the loan without backers.
"The New York Times reported Tuesday that the United States may be planning to reduce
Israel's loan guarantees to account for any money the country spends constructing a
"security perimeter" that will divide its citizens from Palestinians. What are these loan
guarantees, and how important are they to Israel?
A loan guarantee is essentially the same thing whether you're buying a car, an apartment,
or housing materials for Soviet immigrants. A reliable financial entity (a bank, your
parents, the United States) promises to pay off the balance of a loan if the borrower
cannot. So when Congress promises Israel $9 billion in loan guarantees (as they did this
year), that means the U.S. government accepts responsibility for up to $9 billion that
Israel can then borrow from international creditors. And loans guaranteed by the Federal
Reserve provide an additional benefit: The interest rates offered are much lower than they
would be if Israel (or any small, debt-troubled nation) sought the loan without
backers.
The $9 billion in loan guarantees (along with $1 billion in direct aid) comprise a
special post-Gulf War II aid package, awarded to Israel on top of the $3 billion in other
assistance that the United States gives annually. But with loan guarantees, it's never
clear how much money is actually "given": In a perfect world, they wouldn't cost the United
States a cent. Israel -- or Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan, all of which snagged loan guarantees
as postwar rewards -- could borrow on the international markets, then pay off the loans
completely, leaving the United States with no financial obligation. But Israel has already
received nearly $10 billion in loan guarantees from the United States since 1992, and while
it has yet to default on any of those loans, this new round of guarantees is intended in
part to help Israel pay off the old debt. Which means the United States could be stuck with
a bill ranging anywhere from zero to $9 billion plus interest.
When borrowing on the United States' good credit, the Israeli government can use the money
for any purpose. However, Congress attached a series of stipulations to the recent package,
including one that reserves the right to reduce the guarantee amount to counterbalance any
money Israel spends creating new settlements in contested territory. This caveat is exactly
what Bush may use now to pressure Israel to cease construction on its "security perimeter"
-- if the caveat is employed, Israel would find itself fully responsible for part of its
loan (and thus with higher interest rates). And because Israel's annual revenues top out at
$40 billion, any tweaks to a $9 billion aid package could shake up the country's
economy.
Experts say it's far from clear that the Bush administration will follow through with this
plan. But simply threatening to reduce the guarantees can also be effective because Israel
needs the U.S.-backed loans to keep debt payments under control. In 1991, Israel was in a
similarly desperate financial situation, and the United States used the threat of limiting
loan guarantees to force then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to attend the Madrid peace
conference and suspend settlement construction while he was there
"The Department of Homeland Security allocated to Jewish institutions $12 million, or 94
percent, of $13 million in funds for securing nonprofits.
The $13 million disbursed last week brings to $151 million the amount disbursed since the
program started in 2005, most of it to Jewish institutions "
The USA is not a sovereign nation, America is a sovereign nation, could that be what you
meant to say?
The USA is a corporation organized to govern; it owners are not investor-shareholders
but robber-barren bandit stakeholders. The USA was established to mitigate and tame down
the Democracy Americans had bleed red blood to achieve. Take a look at the corporate bylaws
(constitution) of the USA, they consist of seven articles.
The Executive, Article I. (pres. vp,), the Congress Art. II. (board of directors), the
Judiciary ( to settle difference) (Article III), Articles IV clarifies relations between
the different generally lesser governments (states), Article V, invents a way to make it
possible for the constitution to terminate the Confederation (that invention is called
Ratification) It was ratification that transferred the power of government from the
continental "democracy-practicing" masses right back into the hands of the few caretakers
who were beholding to, or in service to, private banking and foreign interest. America
governed itself for 11 years . After that the pre -evolution Oligarchs (wealthy or
highly educated elites) managed to get ratified their constitution and to use it to put
themselves right back into the positions of political and autocratic power they enjoyed
before the revolution. The constitution eliminated the right of Americans to a say
in the affairs of their government. (the government, and the affairs of government, were
separated from the masses of the people. The USA was used to protect and enhance the
aristocrats from the needs, wants and plight of the masses and to extract from the masses
the funds that support USA operations. To accomplish that transition feat, the banksters
used ( or invented and used) a process called ratification (Article VII). Ratification
eliminated the American Democracy overseen by the Articles of Confederation (as
administered by the American democratic continental government).
Read Constitution Article VI [2] and [3].. you will see.. authority..shall be supreme..
Judges Senators and Representatives ,.. Members of the several State Legislatures, and all
executive and judicial officers, both of the US and of the several States [shall be bound
by it].
Constitution Article VI [1] ..engagements entered into, before the
Adoption[ratification] ..shall be valid against the US [<=meaning in spite of the
democratic wish of those who fought the British , the US corporation (USA) would "recognize
as valid" deeds to real estate obtained by Land grant from a foreigner. Millions of acres
of America would remain in a very few private hands. It meant many other similar things..
to numerous to mention here. Had the Confederation continued slavery most likely would have
not survived.
Why bother with writing Article VI{1}? These few words allowed wealthy Washington
Aristocrat types to retain their vast personal ownership in their humongous-stretches of
real estate (land holdings) given (land granted) to them or to those from whom they
acquired them by a foreign power (on behalf of the Banksters who in those days controlled
everything). Democracy itself was the threat that produced the US Constitution ;
the US constitution eliminated democracy ; the constitution replaced America's
democracy by confederation with a republic (meaning no one but the elected few are to be
permitted any say in anything (go back to work and shut the **** up).
Why was democracy a threat ? The Confederation (government by agreement) was
being urged by its war vets to make good on its promises to give every vet a homestead and
a pension for their service in the war. The vets were demanding all land in America
belonged to Americans. they were insisting to refuse to recognize claims (deeds) to real
estate that predated the American revolution; we don't recognize deeds from foreign kings.
British, French or Spanish land grant owners turn the ownership of your land over to
America (the confederation), such land does not belong to you. We Americans do not
recognize land grants from foreign governments; these lands never belonged to foreigners so
they could not give them to you. Needless to say, land grant owners (Washington and family
owned most of Virginia and a great part of West Virginia <=reason George was appointed
general of the continental army, he was so rich everyone would know who he was and
volunteer to help fight the British).
It must be remembered that the Confederation (Articles of Confederation, not the USA)
was the government that defeated the British in the American Revolution, 1776-1778! The USA
did not then exist. Eleven Confederation years between 1776 (Declaration of Independence)
and the ratification of the USA (1789)
Ratification truncated the American Democracy; ratification re-established the British
Bankster appointed Aristocrats as puppets in charge over America.
The US Constitution created an Americanized form of British Parliamentary government, in
virtually the same form as existed in British Colonial times, but without a king or queen
(instead a President and Vice President); so the USA was the banker's government that would
control America, its just that most Americans did not know it. Most Americans cannot name
one of the 11 presidents of the Confederation (AOC government) because misleading
propaganda has been substituted in their school taught histories. Most Americans don't
understand federalism, nor do they have any idea the angry controversy that forced the USA
into existence.
I have written this several times and each time I understand more about what happened.
If you see I am wrong please say so.. I am really interested to sort out the truth and that
was a long time ago.
With all due respect to Philip Giraldi I do not buy this reasoning. Outsize influence of Israel in the US politics and
especially in foreign policy is a direct result of correlation of the goals of Israel and USA on the Middle East. In a way
Israel acts as yet another (informal) US state. The moment Israel tries to pursue independent foreign policy (for example by
booting Likud from government and electing more reasonable party and deviating from the USA goals) it will face consequences,
Israeli lobby or no Israeli lobby. Israel also acts as yet another lobbyist for the US military industrial complex.
The fact that media is owned by large corporations does no imply that it is owned by Israeli interests. And if MSM conduct
pro-Israeli propaganda they do so reflecting interests of the the US elite -- financial oligarchy. And a large
percentage of financial oligarchy support Zionism.
But the fact of interference of Israeli government in the USA election are reprehensible and those involved should be
prosecuted. Possibly using RICO act.
Discussion of the article is much more interesting then the article itself, revealing many additional aspects of the power of
Israeli lobby to influence the US elections. As well as the list of US politicians they managed to send to the dustbin of
history.
Notable quotes:
"... While acknowledging the great debt to Walt and Mearsheimer, it is one thing to read about something in a book and quite another thing to see it live, which is what the new evidence of Israeli interference consists of. Several years ago, the Qatari news service al-Jazeera commissioned two investigations. The first was on the activities of the Israeli Lobby in Britain and the second was on the lobby in the United States. The material consisted largely of meetings with members of Israel's active lobby that were secretly filmed by journalists who were pretending to be supporters and who eventually managed to penetrate some of the organizations that were most active in promoting Israel's interests. ..."
"... It demonstrated how the Israeli Embassy in London connived with government officials to "take down" parliamentarians and government ministers who were considered to be critical of the Jewish State. It also revealed how the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising private groups promoting Israeli interests, including associations of Members of Parliament (MPs). ..."
"... There appears to be a Jewish moneyed lobby, working in conjunction with other moneyed lobbies to create a universal, one world government supervised by themselves. America was the first to go. Next? ..."
"... The book – Dangerous Liaison – was not particularly controversial it simply put forth what kind special relationship Israel has with its ally the US (Iran-contra, Pollard Affair, USS Liberty, Dimona, et al). The type of information all Americans should have a working knowledge of (but do not). Sorry Leslie, I was rooting for you. ..."
"... Well sure they bought Congress. But Congress has been a vestigial constitutional appendix ever since CIA sent Don Gregg to see the Church and Pike Committees. He threatened martial law and that was that. ..."
"... The three branches of the US government are still CIA, CIA, and CIA. The only interesting development is the catastrophic collapse of CIA's aggression by sending of armed bands in Syria. ..."
"... The Electronic Intifada has obtained a complete copy of The Lobby – USA, a four-part undercover investigation by Al Jazeera into Israel's covert influence campaign in the United States. I suggest everyone watch all four episodes of this Doc. ..."
"... The Al-Jazeera documentary reveals that these fifth columnist spies and narcs are using a definition of anti-Semitism from the U.S. State Dept. to crush dissent. This definition came from none other than Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... What do you think the reaction would be, and by whom, if a US politician proposed a resolution "that Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state be supported until a majority of Middle Eastern states by number and population, and all those contiguous to Israel, have ended discrimination on grounds of religion"? ..."
"... You are correct. Israel is the only country to flout the Symington Amendment, which mandates that "foreign aid" be denied to any country that has not signed the "Nuclear Non-Proliferation" agreement and refuses to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of their nuclear facilities. ..."
"... Add to that, AIPAC and many other pro-Israel organizations that have not registered as "agents of a foreign government" as required by American law. ..."
It is particularly ironic that as the midterm campaigns were drawing to a close there
appeared some serious investigative journalism that demonstrates precisely how Israel and
Jewish groups corrupt the political process in America to provide virtually unlimited support
for anything and everything that the despicable Benjamin Netanyahu and his gang of war
criminals seek to do. How the process has succeeded is best illustrated by the current Israeli
government's policy of "mowing the grass" in Gaza where it is using army snipers to kill
unarmed Palestinian protesters. Washington not only does not protest against the in-your-face
war crime, it aids and abets it with U.S. Ambassador David Friedman justifying the military
response as measured and appropriate.
Another area where Washington chooses to look the other way is regarding Israel's nuclear
arsenal, believed to consist of two hundred warheads. Under U.S. law, any country that has an
undeclared nuclear weapons arsenal cannot obtain American-made weapons and cannot received aid
of any type. Congress and the White House pretend that the Israeli nuclear arsenal does not
exist, in spite of the fact that the Israelis themselves have more than once implicitly
acknowledged it and instead of cutting aid to Israel have instead increased it. It is currently
$3.8 billion per year guaranteed for the next ten years, with extra money also available if
needed. No other country benefits from such largesse and gives in return so little.
To be sure, the groundbreaking book
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by professors Stephen Walt and John
Mearsheimer, which appeared in 2007, pulled no punches in describing how the Israel Lobby
operates in the United States. It also made clear that the relationship with Israel serves no
United States national interest whatsoever and exists solely because of the corruption of the
political system and the media by principally Jewish individuals and groups that are dedicated
to that task.
While acknowledging the great debt to Walt and Mearsheimer, it is one thing to read about
something in a book and quite another thing to see it live, which is what the new evidence of
Israeli interference consists of. Several years ago, the Qatari news service al-Jazeera
commissioned two investigations. The first was on the activities of the Israeli Lobby in
Britain and the second was on the lobby in the United States. The material consisted largely of
meetings with members of Israel's active lobby that were secretly filmed by journalists who
were pretending to be supporters and who eventually managed to penetrate some of the
organizations that were most active in promoting Israel's interests.
The British expose, in two parts, aired in January, and was based on discussions and
interviews that took place between June and November 2017. It demonstrated how the Israeli
Embassy in London connived with government officials to "take down" parliamentarians and
government ministers who were considered to be critical of the Jewish State. It also revealed
how the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising private groups promoting Israeli
interests, including associations of Members of Parliament (MPs).
The secret recording revealed how an Israeli Embassy diplomat/spy named Shai Masot connived
with a senior civil servant to get rid of Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan, regarded as
a supporter of an independent Palestinian state. To Masot's additional query "Can I give you
some MPs that I would suggest you would take down?" the civil servant suggested " if you look
hard enough, I'm sure there is something that they're trying to hide a little scandal maybe."
Another alleged pro-Arab member of Parliament Crispin Blunt was also identified and confirmed
to be on a "hit list."
It was also learned that Masot had been secretly
subsidizing and advising two ostensibly independent groups, the parliamentary Conservative
Friends of Israel (CFI) and the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). Masot did, however, express
concern that Israel's control over incoming parliamentarians was not quite what it used to be:
"For years, every MP that joined the parliament joined the LFI. They're not doing that any more
in the Labour Party. CFI, they're doing it automatically. All the 14 new MPs who got elected in
the last elections did it automatically."
The documentary was initially a sensation in Britain but then, predictably, it went away as
Israel's loyal host of media scriveners took charge. Masot was recalled to Israel and Prime
Minister Teresa May, as good a friend to Jewish money and power as one is likely to find,
decided to do nothing. Her characteristically toothless reaction to the suggestion that her
government officials might be removed by the clandestine activity of a foreign country was:
"The Israeli ambassador has apologized the U.K. has a strong relationship with Israel and we
consider the matter closed."
The four-part series by al-Jazeera on the Lobby in the U.S. was meanwhile
temporarily spiked because the Qatari government was seeking to obtain the mediation of
prominent American Jews to pressure the White House to help resolve its outstanding conflict
with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The documentary has remained in limbo but in the past two weeks it has surfaced and
is now available . Its undercover investigative journalist, a British Jew named Tony
Kleinfeld, quickly charmed his way into the inner circle of Israel's supporters where he
discovered a network of organizations that act as fronts for the Israeli government. Their
activities include spying on supporters of Palestinian rights and disrupting demonstrations,
with a particular focus on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which Israel
has particularly targeted. They also resorted to tactics like smearing critics by generating
false accusations of sexual and personal misconduct, all of which was coordinated by Israel's
Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The ministry's director general is Sima Vaknin-Gil , a
former senior officer with Israel's military intelligence , and is staff consists mostly of
former spies drawn from Israel's various security agencies.
Later, Kleinfeld became involved with The Israel Project , which is a U.S. based
Israeli government backed propaganda organ that claims to be "a non-partisan American
educational organization dedicated to informing the media and public conversation about Israel
and the Middle East."
In a recorded conversation, Project employee Jordan Schachtel, explained the
objectives and extent of a secret Facebook operation. "We're putting together a lot of
pro-Israel media through various social media channels that aren't The Israel Project's
channels. So we have a lot of side projects that we are trying to influence the public debate
with. That's why it's a secretive thing, because we don't want people to know that these side
projects are associated with The Israel Project."
In another episode, the Israel on Campus Coalition's
Jacob Baime, who claimed to have a $2 million budget, described coordinating with the Israeli
government, with an approach "modeled on General Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency
strategy in Iraq copied a lot from that strategy that has been working really well for us,
actually" using "offensive information operations." Baime described putting "up some anonymous
website" along with targeted Facebook ads so that critics "either shut down or they spend time
responding to it and investigating it, which is time they can't spend attacking Israel. It's
psychological warfare, it drives them crazy."
Kleinfeld also met with other groups. Foundation for Defense of Democracies was revealed as yet
another
agent of Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, its directors meeting regularly with
Israeli Embassy staff in Washington. In spite of that the Treasury Department has not compelled
it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA). It is also registered
with the IRS as a tax exempt 501(c)3 "charity." Indeed, no Jewish organization active on behalf
of Israel has ever had to register under FARA and most are classified as tax exempt charities
or educational foundations. Interestingly, however, the FDD's Jonathan Schanzer lamented in his
recorded conversation with Kleinfeld that "anti-Semitism as a smear is not what is used to
be."
In another bizarre episode, Kleinfeld visited the neocon dominated Hoover Institute in
California where he participated in a demonstration together with a group of bored young
conservative think tankers compelled by their professors to protest against a Students for
Justice in Palestine conference. The think tank fellows admit that they were "astroturfing"
– rent-a-crowd activism to make a small demonstration appear much larger.
Another segment
includes Israeli Lobby financier Adam Milstein, who is reported to be the principal funder
of Canary Mission, which has targeted some
1,900 students and academics in its profiles
since 2015 , smearing them as "racist," "anti-American" and "anti-Semitic." Jacob Baime,
executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, boasts in the film that "Canary Mission
is highly, highly effective to the extent that we monitor the Students for Justice in Palestine
and their allies."
In his recording, Milstein also talks about the need to "investigate" and "expose" critics
of Israel, who Milstein claims are anti-Semites, as well as "anti-Christian" and "anti-freedom"
activists who "terrorize us." His foundation also funds numerous anti-Palestinian organizations,
including the Israel on Campus Coalition ,
StandWithUs ,
CAMERA , the
AMCHA
Initiative and the FDD . Milstein also
funds and is chairman of the board of the Israeli-American Council. An Israeli-born California
based real estate developer, Milstein reportedly
served time in federal prison after a 2009 conviction for tax evasion.
An
Israeli spy at the University of California at Davis, Julia Reifkind also described to
Kleinfeld how the system worked at the campus level. She used multiple fake Facebook accounts
to monitor the activities of Students for Justice in Palestine. "I follow all the SJP accounts.
I have some fake names. My name is Jay Bernard or something. It just sounds like an old white
guy, which was the plan. I join all these groups." The information she obtained was then passed
on to her contact in the Embassy for forwarding on to Israel to be entered into their data base
of enemies.
So, Israel was engaging in interfering in legitimate political activity and also generating
fake news on the social media in both 2016 and 2018, the same accusation that has been leveled
against Moscow, but Special Counsel Robert Mueller seems curiously uninterested. And beyond the
al-Jazeera revelations, there is also the evidence that it was Israel that sought favors
from the incoming Trump Administration in 2016, not Russia. So who was actually corrupting
whom?
And then there are the more overt Israeli front groups like the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with its $100 million annual budget and 200 employees, as well as the
other special arrangements to pander to Israel and the powerful American Jews who have made it
their mission to use the U.S. government as a mechanism to protect and nurture Israel. Last
week in Los Angeles $60 million
was raised by Hollywood's finest for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), "Their Job is to Look
After Israel. Ours is to Look After Them," the website proclaims.
Last month, an additional $32 million was raised for the IDF in New York City. Donations are
tax exempt, to support the armed forces of a country that is currently engaged in war crimes
and that has a secret nuclear arsenal.
So, Israel was technically speaking not running in the 2018 election, but it was very much
in the race. Jewish Democrats are
already boasting how the presence of a couple of Israel critics in the House, who will be
"reeducated" on the Middle East, will make no difference, that the party will be solid for the
Jewish state with more Jewish congressmen than ever before. Indeed, the "special relationship"
bond will be stronger than ever.
Five committee chairmanships in the House of Representatives will be in the hands of
passionate Israel firsters, including Adam Schiff at the Intelligence Committee and Eliot Engel
at Foreign Affairs. On the Republican side, the House is already 100% in Israel's pocket. And
as part of the White House team we have John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. Donald Trump's Ambassador
to Israel David Friedman expressed the dual loyalty phenomenon best in a
recent speech . The United States is his "country of citizenship" but Israel is the country
he "loves so much."
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
.
Gosh, I don't know where to start.
By God, Giraldi, you said a mouthful. Even two mouthfuls.
Where do we begin? I don't know. I am not a 'anti-Semite' or anti-Jew. As a matter of fact my
girlfriend for four years was Jewish. That's another story.
There appears to be a Jewish moneyed lobby, working in conjunction with other moneyed lobbies
to create a universal, one world government supervised by themselves. America was the first
to go. Next?
While I don't live in Va I was hoping for wins from congressional candidates Abigail
Spanberger and Leslie Cockburn. Unfortunately Cockburn was handed a defeat and while she was
probably always a longshot it undoubtedly didn't help that the journalist was questioned
about a book she co-authored in the 90′s (which I read).
The book – Dangerous Liaison – was not particularly controversial it
simply put forth what kind special relationship Israel has with its ally the US
(Iran-contra, Pollard Affair, USS Liberty, Dimona, et al). The type of information all
Americans should have a working knowledge of (but do not). Sorry Leslie, I was rooting for
you.
Sadly Crispin Blunt was taken down as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and
replaced by execrable arch neocon and descendant of German Jews Tom Tugendhat. Blunt had
authored reports criticising government actions in Libya and Syria and was looking to
investigate the influence of lobbies on British policy in the Middle East.
The list of prominent politicians "taken down" by Israel is lengthy, and includes
Cynthia McKinney, Adlai Stevenson III, Paul Findley, Chuck Percy, William Fulbright, Roger
Jepsen, and Pete McCloskey.
I'm trying to think of a more recent example to make this point more relevant today and I
can only come up with Chuck Hagel even if it was done with velvet gloves.
No matter what sort of war crime Israel commits, no matter what level on interference crypto-Israeli donors and partisans
inject into America's political landscape, the Zionist nexus inside our civilization is now so embedded and untouchable that
its operatives can openly suborn US lawmakers while other Zionists initiate war (or use US power to do so) against rising
Mideast countries that Israel wants weakened, divided, or crushed.
Saddam's Iraq, Assad's Syria and Khadaffy's Libya discovered this the hard way.
Despite these slick machinations, there are few public protests, (((Media))) examinations, or movements inside America that
effectively oppose/thwart Israeli violence or the shrewd interference by Zionists in every US election since LBJ.
Why?
No one dares.
This, despite 1) Israel's possession of a rogue nuclear stockpile along with 2) Israel's multi-decade campaign to expel or
subjugate its native population of non-Jews, 3) Israel's ongoing acquisition of territory by force and 4) Israel's
trigger-happy propensity to annihilate (or harness US power to do so) any surrounding non-Jewish peoples (or nation) which
poses a potential "existential threat"to the Jewish state. (Palestine, Lebanon, Iran are you listening?)
Not only do American taxpayers subsidize and protect affluent Israel above beyond every other nation in world history, but
this oddball US commitment to the Zionist State is granted without precondition. That's right. It's unconditional. Israel's
extraordinary political privilege is astoundingly unique and uniquely dangerous.
Despite this political anomaly, in no US election (including the last one) is Zio-Washington's 'special relationship' with
nuclear-ready Israel ever an issue. Not one. Compare this to Washington's wild, unhinged obsession with Iran's non-nuclear
stockpile of weapons. America's irrational fear of Iran is an exotic delusion that's been cooked up by Zionists. Like Iraq and
Libya before it, Iran is slated for dismemberment. So stay tuned to your TVs for the latest news!
America's arranged but artificial marriage to the Zionist cause benefits Israel. Immensely. At the same time, it's cost us
trillions. Trillions. Oil embargos, annual billion-dollar aid packages, along with winless, trillion-dollar wars do gradually
add up. Yet political dissent remains muted. Taboo.
Anti-Semitism! (hush.) Meanwhile, America's pro-Zionist news and entertainment industries simplify, amplify, enable, and
solidify Israel's near-sacred status. No accident. You've heard the stories. You've heard the speeches. You've seen the films.
You've visited the museums.
Israel's unique untouchability allows it to rise above international constraints (with the assistance of Zio-Washington and
(((Big Media))) as it conducts military operations (and acts of war) that violate US laws, the UN Charter, as well as the
Geneva Conventions. Shouldn't this matter?
Certainly. But supreme victims enjoy supreme privileges.
Today, a tiny foreign power steers and shapes the policies and mindset of the world's most powerful civilization. No small
feat. No small threat.
Yep, Indian-Americans have not read it and do not seem that interested in Jews. Neither do Iranians. Catholics, which means
Irish and Italians on the East Coast and Latinos everywhere, do not seem to much care about Israel either.
Blacks in the US do not seem to much love Jews or care about Israel at all with the Muslim lunatic fringe of Farrakan etc.
deeply disliking them.
Apparently Evangelical Protestants of various sects love Jews for theological reasons and these people seem to have the
smallest piece of the pie these days.
Chinese, Indians, Iranian Muslims etc either are indifferent or detest Israel and yet they seem to be doing better than the
whites in the "bible belt".
Though a good number of rednecks who grew up singing old testament hymns would say that Jews deny their savior and don't
worship Jews.
@Z-man Charles
Freeman. His nomination to the NSC blocked by the Israeli lobby. Brilliant guy, career
foreign service officer and former U.S. ambassador.
American politicians love Israel because it legitimizes their own corruption. They can be
bought and paid for political whores without having to hide it. As soon as anyone points out
that they are selling out their own country, they can recite the magic "anti-semitism"
incantation to make the criticism go away.
Judaism is nothing more than a "service-to-self" ideology, characterized by negative concepts
(e.g. greed, selfishness, etc.) and incapable of forgiveness. It's absolutely immiscible with
any form of a "service-to-others" ideology.
Well sure they bought Congress. But Congress has been a vestigial constitutional appendix
ever since CIA sent Don Gregg to see the Church and Pike Committees. He threatened martial
law and that was that. Congress degenerated into a crooked pedo playpen with a single
function: deciding matters beneath CIA's notice with legalized peculation.
The three branches of the US government are still CIA, CIA, and CIA. The only interesting
development is the catastrophic collapse of CIA's aggression by sending of armed bands in
Syria. This latest, possibly terminal, failure has spurred a frenzy of finger-pointing. When
CIA wrecked Vietnam they blamed the Pentagon (see Prouty's The Secret Team) and everybody
fell for it. But now with Syria, CIA pretended the Jews made them do it. That failed the
laugh test, so now they're framing Amway shitstain Eric Prince.
Another words walk up to any Chinese-American (The ones in California have been in the US
longer than most East Coast ethnic whites like the Italians) or Indian-Americans and ask them
what they know or care to know about Jews or Israel. They will say zero.
You'd get something genuinely negative from the Iranian Muslim community out in Los
Angeles. And also a good number of blacks.
Hispanics know little about Israel. Did not stop Cubans from taking over Miami.
I don't know what you define as a "real American".
The Electronic Intifada has obtained a complete copy of The Lobby – USA, a four-part
undercover investigation by Al Jazeera into Israel's covert influence campaign in the United
States.
I suggest everyone watch all four episodes of this Doc.
@Baxter It's
more than just a moneyed lobby that has pulled this off for the past 100 years in america.
Much more. The Jewish mafia was heavily involved from the earliest days of the 20th century.
I highly recommend you all listen to this interview with Jeff Gates, someone who has as many
qualifications as any of the authors on Unz.com to talk about the Jewish lobby. The youtube
interviews with Jeff Gates are essential listening:
I wish I could find the quote but Jeff Gates thinks Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" is light weights. Somewhere he makes the
comment "anyone who compares the Jewish Lobby to other lobbies [like the dairy lobby] as if
the Jewish Lobby happens just to be a little more effective than the rest is missing the
point of the exercise here."
lol @ this article and these comments. Love the tears! Never was there a more deserving group
of people to feel dejected and demoralized.
I think the most hilarious part though was this one:
In fact, Americans have never had the option of voting on the "special relationship"
that Israel enjoys with the United States as no Congressman would dare run against it lest
they be smeared in the media and find themselves running against an extraordinarily well
funded opponent benefitting from large donations coming from out of state sources.
Public opinion polls have consistently, over decades, shown that Americans are pro-Israel.
The only exceptions are blacks, far leftist whites, and Muslims, and even the first two are
not overwhelmingly anti. The needle has hardly moved in decades.
Americans have had the chance to vote, over and over, every Congressional and Presidential
election for going on 40 years now, on whether US policy should be more pro-Iran and less
pro-Israel, and they have constantly chosen, with more consistency than basically any other
issue in that time period, to side with Israel. Complaining that there are -gasp-
organizations with money involved in this issue, even some from -gasp- out of
state , is hilarious and pathetic. Every issue in American politics has lobbyists and
national money flying around like crazy – guns, abortion, you name it. And every side
that loses in the court of public opinion says that they did so because of 'out of state'
money, even when they have more of it. Giraldi worked in government so he knows it, but why
have an honest perspective when you can enrage the hive?
You really can't come up with a more thorough rejection by the American people of a
political position than they have delivered, decade after decade, to the anti-Israel side.
The only side less popular than Iran lackeys in American discourse might be NAMBLA,
and even that is a close call.
America looks at the anti-Israel coalition and accurately sees a motley and pathetic mix
of Farrakhan FOI stompers, Borat-like Islamists, triggered blue-haired college screamers, and
Nazi-larping neckbeards, and says no thanks.
@Anonymous
Bullshit. Americans are only "pro-Israel" because that is all they hear from the media and
the politicians. And that is because Jews control the media and the politicians.
The Al-Jazeera documentary reveals that these fifth columnist spies and narcs are using a
definition of anti-Semitism from the U.S. State Dept. to crush dissent. This definition came
from none other than Hillary Clinton. I especially liked this line:
Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded
of any other democratic nation
They may want to rethink that one, as Israel fails pretty much all tests of the behavior of a
democratic nation, starting with being a democracy in the first place.
To think that Hillary, along with her fellow travelers like Victoria Nuland, are the
arbiters of what is or isn't anti-Semitism is quite a laugh.
Israel is just getting itself deeper and deeper into a quandary about what to do with the
Arabs in the occupied territories. They cannot be given full rights and there is not the
unsettled land to give them the state everyone including America pretends is going to be the
outcome of a temporarily stalled process. Israel is greasing the skids to disaster.
Indeed, bullshit! Why do you love Palestinians so much or conversely, dislike/hate Israelis
in equal measure?
Is it really the treatment of Christians of Arab origin in Judea and
Samaria that really galls you but won't say it out loud? If Jews are as powerful as you claim
they are, then why not just give them the Southern Lebanon, the Bekka Valley, the Gaza strip
and the Sainai Peninsula and ten billion dollars a year, which would be just a drop in the
bucket, to live us alone?
Why not resettle the most educated of all Arabs, the Palestinians,
in other Arab nations, and there're so many lands to choose from, but especially, Saudi
Arabia to help those gluttonous Afro-Semitic morons? Why egg on the Palestinians without
hope, to the discomfort of all humanity by giving the Jews the very excuse to hammer the
world with the exaggerated accusations of anti-Semitism? Why prolong what is inevitable and
how does it benefit, the people on whose behalf you are fuming?
As I said above, maybe start with the optics of all these Holocaust deniers, Borats,
Farrakhans, and blue-hairs. Look at who your articles attract – do you think
Americans like those people?
Most Americans are totally ignorant of the evil that has been done to their nation and the
West by Zionist Jews.
Most Americans are completely ignorant about the extent Zionist Jews control the
government of the United States and the media.
Most Americans know nothing about the role played by Zionist Jews in the mass murders
perpetrated by the communists in Russia and China.
Most Americans take the holocaust as gospel and believe the Jews have never harmed anyone
but have been the victims of the worst genocide in history.
Do not use the ignorance of the average American to claim that criticism of Zionist Jews
is irrational.
@Philip Giraldi
It is slightly amusing is it not to find that specious intervener illustrating part of your
case by appearing as Anonymous [272] and Anonymous [279] just a breath apart ..?
What do you think the reaction would be, and by whom, if a US politician proposed a
resolution "that Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state be supported until a majority of
Middle Eastern states by number and population, and all those contiguous to Israel, have
ended discrimination on grounds of religion"?
@RobinG He is known to be an Islam hater thus
unconditional support for Israel. This remark in itself is a proof how Israel is used to inflict havoc on the Islamic
civilization. Jews are the biggest beneficiaries of demonization of Islam. The mercenary terrorist army of CIA/Mossad is
called Islamic state.
@Z-man Liberal
Republican Senator Chuck Percy's takedown was particularly egregious and revealing.
He lost his position despite his popularity in Illinois politics. The deep pockets of The
Lobby and its control of the media (and the Republican Party) were simply too much for him to
counter.
After his senatorial defeat in 1985, The Lobby must have felt that an example must be made
of him. He then became a total nonperson both in politics and in the Washington DC social
scene which he chose to continue to reside in. He never spoke again (to my knowledge) before
any significant Republican Party event. In fact, his very name became a virtual dirty word in
Republican circles, right up there with the names of convicted child molesters or embezzlers.
Arch-Zionist Ronald Reagan enforced this shunning up until the end of his presidency.
Percy was no longer invited to appear in the mainstream media or speak before business or
academic groups. He simply disappeared.
Poof, like he had never been there in the first place.
When he died in 2011, many people In Washington were surprised. They had assumed he has
died decades before because of his blacklisting and the resulting invisibility.
Senator J. William Fulbright, a one-time icon of the left wing because of his opposition
to the Vietnam War was also quickly disposed of after he tried to oppose The Lobby and found
his left wing "friends" (along with their contributions) deserting him in droves.
Al this happened because they tried to be very slightly impartial about Israel.
Americans have had the chance to vote, over and over, every Congressional and
Presidential election for going on 40 years now, , and they have constantly chosen, with
more consistency than basically any other issue in that time period, to side with
Israel.
If that's true, then why are they spending such enormous sums of money to buy all of
Congress ? If the thing runs by itself, then why on God's green earth, does it need such
constant greasing of the skids ? Grant Smith of IRmep, who studies the financial pooling of
something like 200 Jewish organizations in the US, estimates I that together, they're
collecting money on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars from their diaspora and
lunatic Christian sects. This money is then used to buy Congress lock stock and barrel and
then to force it, among other things, to sign over billions in "aid" to Israel.
You poor child, were you not aware of any of this ? And you just thought the sniveling
prostrations and groveling our elected "leaders" perform each year at the AIPAC conference or
on their campaigns is all spontaneous ? Dear, dear, there is better quality acting at the
AIPAC conference than there ever was at any Oscar show or in any therein nominated film.
Face it, Israel is no different. Both sides are mustering money and influence, and you
lost fair and square in the court of public opinion.
Oh, but you might have the perspective a tad off; the fight may be just beginning.
It may be that in the past, Israel's friends might well have exercised power which easily
swung in their direction, but there may not have been much at stake for everyone else. Maybe
the fight wasn't worth it if you disagreed, but there could come a time when the balance
sheet of liabilities might begin to swing in the other direction. I sincerely hope you'll
maintain your sportsmanship attitude when that time comes, as it inevitably always does.
It seems like these facts are likely to increase anti-Semitism even against those who don't
deserve to be subjects of prejudice, since this reveals the colonial nature of the
Anglosphere.
I don't recall the chief beneficiary of any other lobby helping to lie America into a war
with muslims that has since metastasized into pandemic proportions. I also don't recall any
other lobby beneficiary running interference for one of its compatriots who happened to
inflict the worst damage to American intelligence in its history. Come to think of it, this
very same beneficiary has been caught repeatedly committing espionage against America ~ a
crime which, if committed by any other actor, would warrant severe punishment ~ yet received
no punitive consequences for it.
@exiled off mainstreet But, as you admit, they
are FACTS. And, as such, must be disseminated to the uninformed and ignorant Americans.
If it does cause anti-Semitism, which is becoming as meaningless term as racism, how are the Anglos at fault? Whose
behavior is going to cause this resentment and blowback? Its certainly not the British! The British haven't been colonial for
quite awhile.
However the USA has become a colonial vassal for Israel. So who is the imperial power now?
You
are correct. Israel is the only country to flout the Symington Amendment, which mandates that
"foreign aid" be denied to any country that has not signed the "Nuclear Non-Proliferation"
agreement and refuses to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of their
nuclear facilities.
Add to that, AIPAC and many other pro-Israel organizations that have not registered as
"agents of a foreign government" as required by American law.
Be sure to watch The Lobby USA to see how treacherous our illegitimate govt. has become.
It gives you an idea of how these 6,000,000 Jewish lobbies work around the clock spying on,
blackmailing, subverting our govt. here in occupied America. They're letting these agents of
a hostile and repressive govt. (Israel) run around the US spying on Americans, using
blackmail, extortion, threats, violating their Constitutional rights. Nobody in Washington
seems to care. How long before Israel is assassinating American citizens for exercising their
rights?
Sheldon Adelson was at the White House watching the results of the midterm elections with
his puppet Trump, eating pizza, "mini" hotdogs, and burgers. No joke. He's started his own
lobby called IAC – Israeli American Council, thats even more extreme that AIPAC.
All traitors, all loyal to Israel. Republicans are owned by the Zionists and war
profiteers folks. Democrats not any better. All traitors.
As the British were bankrupted by an unnecessary war with Germany, the "New American Century"
isn't shaping up very well two decades in. 6T in additional debt from fighting Middle Eastern
wars for Israel is the biggest reason why, and there is no end in sight.
I actually don't think Israel has that much genuine organic political support among
Americans. It is all held together with media-fed illusions and threats.
@Cal Eyefornia'I agree with you. Lots of anti-Semitic nonsense on this site, e.g. "where are all the
millions buried?" (How about: all over Europe and Russia, cretins.) While the number of Jews
murdered by Nazis may be, say, half of the "official" figure (still horrific), the lunatic
fringe here won't provide their own figure (likely because they think it's zero). They
actually believe Hitler was a nice guy and every Jew in the world is a member of the "Jew
Illuminati." They think Israel bosses the USA around, and is the world's big dog that wags
the tail. They laughably point to people like Henry Ford and anti-Semitic sites like
codoh.com as "unbiased" sources for debate. They all need to "get a life."'
Well, Israel does boss the US around, and is inarguably one of the world's 'big dogs,'
which, for a nation the size of Honduras or Togo, does call for an explanation.
@exiled off
mainstreet'It seems like these facts are likely to increase anti-semitism even
against those who don't deserve to be subjects of prejudice, since this reveals the colonial
nature of the Anglosphere.'
Nu? The Holocaust increased bigotry directed at Germans, and Pearl Harbor didn't do much
for the popularity of Japanese.
Compared to these two groups, Jews are overwhelmingly supportive of their chosen evil.
It'd be damned strange if they didn't wind up having to pay.
@Tyrion 2 Jews
don't possess military power. They possess the benefit of a verbal dexterity and business
savvy that allows them to network in order to control banks and media.
You cannot conquer. You can only manipulate.
It is the difference between Mike Tyson threatening to kick your ass and Charles Manson
hypnotizing you.
The Unites States of America is effectively owned and controlled by Jews
How about The US of A is effectively colonized by the Zionists ?
All the noise and nonsense about Russian interference in American elections pale in
comparison to decisions on America's elected reps right to the President requiring Zionist
approval before they can win their seats. The control is total and absolute. This coming from
a country which depends on our tax dollars to maintain their criminal activities. And now the
push is on for WWIII forcing us to brinkmanship with the Russians in Syria and Europe. This
is an unprecedented abdication of US sovereignty.
I can't read all the responses, but I caught yours.
Look at it this way. 537 politicians in Washington, DC know 9-11 was a zionist jewish
operation and not a word out of any of them. Maybe a few are slow or hopelessly naive about
israel, so bump that number down to, say, 530. And again, not a peep.
537 of our "leaders" know israel was behind 9-11 yet they gave Netanyahu the record for
standing ovations during a speech. Think of how profound that fact is. Pure traitors.
Chistopher Bollyn once mentioned the point that not one college or high school has a
course or class on what subject is the 9-11 attacks. Suspicious, isn't it?
@Anonymous When
do you EVER see Jewish missionaries trying to convert people? I've seen Mormons and Catholics
overseas trying to convert people. But not Jews. When Jews do convert locals it is for
pussy-some ancient handful of males settle somewhere like Ethiopia or Italy and marry local
women. But it is not for salvation. Only for their pussies.
Part of this is empathy. The Christian sees the poor and disenfranchised and wants to
assist. The Korean shopkeeper in a black ghetto does not give a shit what the blacks believe
in and just wants his money.
@Anonymous "
maybe start with the optics of all these Holocaust deniers.."
– Why don't we start with the "optics" of Jewish Bolsheviks and their murderous
hatred towards Russians and Russian culture? Millions died in the labor camps (run and
"improved" by the Jewish administrators, see Naftali Frenkel), in the chambers of secret
police (see Yagoda and Berman), and in the villages of Ukraine and Kazakhstan during
Holodomor (courtesy of certain Kaganovich).
The most important "deniers" of today are Nuland-Kagan (the organizer of pro-neo-Nazi
putsch in Ukraine), Knesset (the provider of Ukrainian neo-Nazi with Israel-made rifles), and
the zionized US Congress that has been supporting the neo-Nazi-infested Ukranian
government.
And do not forget the profiteering and amoral ADL and Simon Wiesenthal Center that both
refused to support the Conyers amendment: "If passed, Conyers' amendment would have
explicitly barred those found to have offered "praise or glorification of Nazism or its
collaborators, including through the use of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, or other similar
symbols" from receiving any form of support from the US Department of Defense. The ADL and
Wiesenthal Center refused to support Jeffries and Conyers' proposal."
https://www.alternet.org/world/how-israel-lobby-protected-ukrainian-neo-nazis
P.L. 115-141, the FY 2018 Consolidated Appropriations Act, provides the following
for Israel:
· $3.1 billion in Foreign Military Financing, of which $815.3 million is for off-shore
procurement;
· $705.8 million for joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense projects, including $92
million for Iron Dome, $221.5 million for David's Sling, $310 million for Arrow 3, and $82.3
million for Arrow 2;
· $47.5 million for the U.S.-Israeli anti-tunnel cooperation program;
· $7.5 million in Migration and Refugee Assistance;
· $4 million for the establishment of a U.S.-Israel Center of Excellence in energy and
water technologies;
· $2 million for the Israel-U.S. Binational Research & Development Foundation
(BIRD) Energy program; and
· The reauthorization of War Reserves Stock Allies-Israel (WRSA-I) program through
fiscal year 2019.
For FY2019, the Trump Administration is requesting an additionl $3.3 billion in Foreign
Military Financing for Israel and $500 million in missile defense aid to mark the first year
of the new MOU. The Administration also is seeking $5.5 million in Migration and Refugee
Assistance (MRA) funding for humanitarian migrants to Israel.
Israeli and American Jewish actions detailed in the article make perfect sense when you come
to realize that the US is no longer a sovereign nation at its core. The US only has a facade
of being one.
The facade is starting to crumble both because of the internet and Jewish arrogance.
Consequently, the goys are the beneficiaries of more censorship of bad thoughts. The plan is
to use increased censorship to prevent the facade from crumbling sufficiently to expose the
reality to the masses. Any empire wants to keep its colonies in line
America looks at the anti-Israel coalition and accurately sees a motley and pathetic mix
of Farrakhan FOI stompers, Borat-like Islamists, triggered blue-haired college screamers,
and Nazi-larping neckbeards, and says no thanks.
It seems apparent that you took exception (a sudden high blood pressure alert is making
you post this response?) to my expose on the role of Jewish slavery [as the videos of Dr.
Louis Farrakhan, who also happens to be AGAINST usury and in conjunction with PEACE--like
most of Christindom] (and I did not even include the Roman/Greek periods and the hand that
was attributed to the Jewish predominant role in slavery). But do continue because .
it will expose this inhumane dominance of slavery–just like it still exists today.
RE (original reference included here):
Why do the supremacist Jews refuse to take accountability in their role for slavery?:
"What do you think the reaction would be, and by whom, if a US politician proposed a resolution "that Israel's right
to exist as a Jewish state be supported until a majority of Middle Eastern states by number and population, and all those
contiguous to Israel, have ended discrimination on grounds of religion"?"
Not sure what you are on about. Iraq was a secular state until invaded by the USA, which churned things up politically .
Syria has traditionally been a tolerant state that was home to one of the oldest Christian commujities, and a number of
different Islamic groups. Libya was a secular state–no state religion in Libya that I know of.
It is the US and Zionist ally, Saudi Arabia, that is the most religiously intolerant state in the ME and also the biggest
exporter of religious fanaticism.
Israel is the only [Religious designation] State in the ME -- no, in the whole world. I am unaware of the existence of a
Christian State, an Islamic State (except the caliphate), a Buddhist State, a Zoroastrian State. Israel is the most intolerant
state on the planet.
Ben Norton & guys like you give me hope that our country could still become saved by
"facts and a timeline."
As you know, Israeli crimes foisted upon upon the divided-Homeland, including unnecessary,
immoral, & ruinously expensive wars against "rogue/foes," for example, Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, Syria, Yemen, and likely soon Iran, NEVER NEVER NEVER require presentation of solid
evidence to dumb-goyim trained 'Merkins.
Disgusting. Embarrassing. A Yinon Plan underway for the USA! Ycch. I am pissed.
Along with partner Corporate Media-conspirators, The New York Times editorial board
deserves instant "regime change" because of their theatrical complicity with our treasonous
Zio Congress and Executive Branch.
What do you think the reaction would be, and by whom, if a US politician proposed a
resolution "that Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state be supported until a majority of
Middle Eastern states by number and population, and all those contiguous to Israel, have
ended discrimination on grounds of religion"?
How typically ridiculous.
The reaction we should see would be to the statement that we will not support Israel as
long as it occupies Palestine and discriminates against non Jews in Israel.
Israel is a midget Nazi state not a democracy.
To Durruti, Ilyana Rozumova wrote: "I am certain that you do not know this. Medusa's
"hair" signifies the bad ideas coming out from women head. Did you notice how many women in
US are engaging in politics?
.
US is doomed!!!!"
Broken Scranton greetings, I.R.
Taking off from your having mentioned "Medusa," & (with no pun), I do not know if you
domicile in ZUSA, but linked below is a unique scene from Arnon Milchan's 1978 film, "The
Medusa Touch."
The movie turns "bad hair day" when a Boeing 747 crashes into the Pan Am Building in NYC!
Uh, where did Arnon Milchan get such precognitive inspiration?
OK, so, that was a close one. For a moment there, I was starting to worry that the Democrats
weren't going to take back the House and rescue us from " the brink of
fascism ." Which, if that had happened, in addition to having to attend all those horrible
stadium rallies and help the government mass murder the Jews, we would have been denied the
next two years of Donald Trump-related congressional hearings and investigations that we can
now look forward to
I'm going to go ahead and call them the Hitlergate Hearings.
Staging these hearings has always been a crucial part of the Resistance's strategy. As
history has proved, time and time again, when literal fascists take over your democracy, outlaw
opposing political parties, and start shipping people off to concentration camps and revoking
journalists' White House access, the only effective way to defeat them is to form a whole
buttload of congressional committees and investigate the living Hitler out of them. This is
especially the case when the literal fascists who have commandeered your democracy are
conspiring with a shifty-eyed Slavic dictator whose country you have essentially surrounded
with your full-spectrum dominant military forces, and who your media have thoroughly demonized,
but who is nevertheless able to brainwash your citizens into electing his fascist puppet
president with a few thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads.
Once you've determined that has happened (which it obviously has), the gloves have to come
off. No more prancing around in pussyhats, not with Russian Hitler in office! No, at that
point, you really have no choice but to wait two years until your opposition party (which
Hitler somehow forgot to ban) regains control of the House of Representatives (which Hitler
somehow forgot to dissolve), wait another two months until they take office, and then
immediately start issuing subpoenas, auditing Hitler's financial records, and taking affidavits
from former hookers. I realize that may sound extreme, but remember, we're talking about
literal fascists, backed by literal Russian fascists, who are going around emboldening literal
fascism, and making literal fascist hand gestures on television, and doing all kinds of other
fascist stuff!
Photo of a typical Trump rally. Trump himself designed the grandiose, operatic setting and
cast himself in the male lead as fiery, spittle-flecked orator/savior of his nation.
First, let's begin by getting myth #1 out of the way: the notion that Americans don't like
wars. That is totally false. Americans hate losing wars, but if they win them, they absolutely
love them. In other words, the typical US reaction to a war depends on the perceived outcome of
that war. If it is a success they love it (even if it is a turkey-shoot like Desert Storm). If
it is a deniable defeat (say the US/NATO air operations against Serbian forces in Kosovo or the
total clusterbleep in Grenada) they will simply "forget" it. And if it is an undeniable defeat
(say Iraq or Afghanistan) then, yes, indeed, most Americans will be categorically opposed to
it.
Veterans of foreign wars? Wait, I was not aware that there were any other types of vets!
Next is myth #2: the truth is that no US serviceman or woman has fought a war in defense of
the US since at least WWII (and even this one is very debatable considering that the US forced
Japan to wage war and since the attack on Pearl Harbor was set-up as a pretext to then attack
Japan). Since 1945 there has not been a single situation in which US soldiers defended their
land, their towns, their families or their friends from an aggressor. Not one ! All the
wars fought by the US since 1945 were wars of aggression, wars of choice and most of them were
completely illegal to boot (including numerous subversive and covert operations). At most, one
can make the argument that US veterans defended the so-called "American way of life," but only
if one accepts that the said "American way of life" requires and mandates imperialist wars of
aggression and the wholesale abandonment of the key concepts of international law.
Finally, there is the ugly dirty little secret that everybody knows but, for some reason,
very few dare to mention: the decision to join the (all volunteer) US military is one primarily
based on financial considerations and absolutely not some kind of generous "service" of the
motherland for pure, lofty, ideals. Yes, yes, I know -- there were those who did join the US
military after 9/11 thinking that the US had been attacked and that they needed to help bring
the fight to those who attacked the US. But even with a very modest degree of intelligence, it
should have become pretty darn obvious that whether 9/11 was indeed the work of Bin Laden and
al-Qaeda or not (personally I am absolutely certain that this was a controlled demolition) --
this atrocity was used by the US government to justify a long list of wars which could not have
possibly had anything to do with 9/11. Hey, after all, the US decided to attack Iraq (which
self-evidently had nothing to do with 9/11) and not the KSA (even though most of the putative
hijackers were Saudis and had official Saudi backing). Besides, even if some folks were not
smart enough to see through the lies and even if THEY believed that they joined the US military
to defend the US, why would the rest of us who by 2018 all know that the attack on Iraq was
purely and solely based on lies, "thank" veterans for stupidly waging war for interests they
cannot even identify? Since when do we thank people for making wrong and, frankly, immoral
decisions?!
Let me repeat that truism once again, in an even more direct way: veterans are killers
hired for money. Period. The rest is all propaganda.
In a normal sane world, one would think that this is primarily a moral and ethical question.
I would even say a spiritual one. Surely major religions would have something relevant and
clarifying to say about this? Well, in the past they did . In fact, with some slight variations , the
principles of what is called a "just war" have been known in the West since at least Augustine
of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. According to one source they are:
A just
war can only be waged as a last resort . All non-violent options must be
exhausted before the use of force can be justified. A war is just only if it is waged by a
legitimate authority . Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by
individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and
outsiders to the society deem legitimate. A just war can only be fought to redress a
wrong suffered . For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered
to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient -- see point #4).
Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions: the only permissible objective
of a just war is to redress the injury. A war can only be just if it is fought with a
reasonable chance of success . Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are
not morally justifiable. The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace
. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that
would have prevailed if the war had not been fought. The violence used in the war must be
proportional to the injury suffered . States are prohibited from using force not
necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered. The weapons used
in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants . Civilians are
never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians.
The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate
attack on a military target.
Modern religions for war
(Check out this article for a
more thorough discussion of this fascinating topic)
Now Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas are hardly heroes of mine, but they are considered
as very authoritative in western philosophical thought. Yet, when checked against this list of
criteria, all the wars fought by the US are clearly and self-evidently totally unjust :
all of them fail on several criteria, and most of them (including the attack on Iraq and
Afghanistan) fail on all of them!
But there is no need to go far back into the centuries to find authoritative western
thinkers who clearly denounce unjust wars. Did you know that the ultimate crime under
international law is not genocide or crimes against humanity?
Robert H Jackson
Nope, the supreme crime under international law is the crime of aggression. In the words of
the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the
United States, Robert
H. Jackson , the crime of aggression is the supreme crime because "it contains within itself the accumulated
evil" of all the other war crimes. He wrote: " To initiate a war of aggression,
therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crimediffering only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil
of the whole ."
So from the 4th century through the 20th century, the people of the West always knew what a
just war was, and they fully understood that starting such a war is the supreme evil crime
under international law. But this goes beyond just major wars. Under international law, the
crime of "aggression" does not only refer to a full-scale military attack. Aggression
can be defined as
the execution of any one of the following acts:
Declaration of war upon
another State. Invasion by its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the
territory of another State. Attack by its land, naval or air forces, with or without a
declaration of war, on the territory, vessels or aircraft of another State. A naval blockade of
the coasts or ports of another State. Provision of support to armed bands formed in its
territory which have invaded the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the
request of the invaded State, to take, in its own territory, all the measures in its power to
deprive those bands of all assistance or protection.
Finally, it is important to note here that by these authoritative legal definitions,
every single US President is a war criminal under international law! This, in
turn, begs the question of whether all the wars fought by US soldiers since 1945 were indeed
waged by a legitimate authority (as mentioned by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas above)?
How can that be when the Commander in Chief himself is a war criminal?
Let's sum it up so far: we have folks who agree to become killers (or
killer-assistants), who do that primarily for financial reasons , who then
only participate in illegal and immoral wars of aggression and
whose commander in chief is a war criminal .
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most
profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the
only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is
best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the
people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit
of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war, a few people make huge
fortunes.
If we agree that war is, indeed, a "racket" and that it is conducted "for the benefit of the
very few" then it would make sense for these "very few" to express their gratitude to those
whom they hired to enrich them. And, in fact, they do. Here is the best example of that:
Corporation for war (well, that at least makes sense!)
Of course, Google is no more dependent on wars of aggression than any other US corporation.
The very nature of the US economy is based on war and has always been based on war. The
so-called "American way of life" but without wars of aggression has never been attempted in the
past, and it won't be attempted for as long as the US remains the cornerstone of the
AngloZionist Empire and the world hegemony it seeks to impose on the rest of mankind. But until
that day arrives the "American way of life" will always imply wars of aggression and the mass
murder of innocent people whose only "sin" is to dare to want to live free and not be a slave
to the Empire. If you believe that those who dare to want to live free in a truly sovereign
country deserve to be murdered and maimed, then yes November 15,
2018 at 5:56 am GMT
Within this context one ought to mention the "Crime of Aggression":
"A Crime of Aggression is a specific type of crime where a person plans, initiates, or
executes an act of aggression using state military force that violates the Charter of the
United Nations. The act is judged as a violation based on its character, gravity, and
scale.[1]
Acts of aggression include invasion, military occupation, annexation by the use of force,
bombardment, and military blockade of ports."
Since 1945 there has not been a single situation in which US soldiers defended their
land, their towns, their families or their friends from an aggressor. Not one!
99% of soldiers became soldiers because it was the best available job, it had nothing to do
with patriotism or love of country. Puting them on a pedestal is an invention of politicians
trying to glorify the job so as to suck in more soldiers.
All this thanking is purely pro-forma bullshit. At every NBA game there is a halftime moment
when some "hero among us" usually a veteran, is honored. More often than not he spent his
time in the military in front of a computer screen in Nevada. I would bet that not a single
one of all the thousands who attended these games could identify one of these "heroes among
us" by name five minutes after they honored them. It's all empty ritual, a bitter fraud just
like the rest of American public life.
The most interesting in this topic is the dichotomy between the blatantly obvious that Saker
writes about -- that US military person is the lowest level of a mercanairy that the World
has ever seen, which most of the rest of the World is so acutely aware of and the military
"service" taboo built in the US. Did Saker really need to explain that US military is only
about killing of the defenders and their innocent? To who did this need explaining? To
cretins such as Intelligent Dasein, who think that declaring himself pro-Russian gives him
the high moral point to attack the messenger of his own emptiness (not all veterans can write
Born on the 4th of July, can they?). Talk about "never learn anything"! This just shows how
pointless this breaking of US taboos totally is. The World will continue on just as was
before this article, the moral-less and mind-less US shitbags will keep joining the military
racket "for scholarships" or some shyte like that until US ends up taking on some real
"enemy" who will bring this taboo down but not with words then with "Kinetic Action" that
will turn the tables on US shitbag military.
I have this mental image of US towns looking like Hiroshima with only this Stavro's
Pizza advertisement still standing as a poignant reminder of the God himself having been
recruited into the gang of its former military rapists and killers for profit and for
pleasure.
Dissidents in 1968 justified their resistance to the war on just those grounds -- that the
USA was not directly under attack and was not threatened by Vietnamese aggression. And went
on to say that were the homeland of the USA threatened, then they would man up and defend
their country. So, it's not that they were unpatriotic or cowards, it's that they would only
fight a morally justifiable, defensive war.
Well, now the nation is under siege. Hordes of invaders swarm across our southern border
like a plague of locusts. Hundreds of thousands are shipped here from Africa and the Middle
East and dropped like cockroaches in our midst.
And where do the 1960′s protestors position themselves with respect to these threats
to the homeland today? They meekly acquiesce. They stand down, shrivel and roll over. Now,
when it is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country, they still protest
-- but in favor of the invaders.
I understand where the author is coming from. However, WHY does he continue to live in the
US? His tax dollars are funding the war machine. Why not pick up and move elsewhere, for
example Russia, in the case of the Saker?
"Are the powerful of the world going to just sit by and watch their fortunes be destroyed?
Are the potentates of the Banana Republics that Smedley Butler campaigned in any different
in their aims or any less ferocious in their means? No, of course not."
One of the problems the West faces is the post-Nuremberg phenomenon.
The Nazis were scum, and they killed a lot of people, and they lost, and so most of the
leadership got shot. It is what you call revenge, and it is this instinct when channeled
becomes justice. I will not cry for Eichmann, even though he committed no crime, he got what
he deserved.
Now, the West manufactured a load of bullshit to justify the result the West wanted (which
was revenge), and now we are stuck with the bullshit, and people like Saker cite the bullshit
to bad mouth America. Time to dump the bullshit, although the hordes of shitlibs who would
kick and scream about it would be deafening.
@Tulip
Just War doctrine is a handy guide for statesmen, inasmuch as wickedness is often also
stupidity (our warmaking has mostly been an exercise in stupidity). Adherence to JW doctrine
would have kept us out of most of our wars as well as mitigating some of the worst excesses
committed by US forces in those wars.
DON'T .blame the Working Class White Male Teenagers who are signing up .for they face what
is basically this:the career opportunities of a slave ..they are "choosing" from a range of
career choices available to a chattel slave effectively
The real criminals are the adults ..
Among other things .California's technological labor markets have been handed over to the
Chinese and Hindu ."Americans" ..
As long as US sees itself as globo-cop, its military men will not be seen as mercenaries but
as centurions, Team America, to keep the order around the world.
Sometimes, US presence is stabilizing IF the US plays a disinterested neutral role as an
impartial judge. But ever since Jewish Power took over the US, the US military is essentially
a corrupt globo-cop that does the bidding of Kosher Nostra.
First, let's begin by getting myth #1 out of the way: the notion that Americans don't
like wars. That is totally false. Americans hate losing wars, but if they win them, they
absolutely love them. In other words, the typical US reaction to a war depends on the
perceived outcome of that war. If it is a success they love it (even if it is a
turkey-shoot like Desert Storm). If it is a deniable defeat (say the US/NATO air operations
against Serbian forces in Kosovo or the total clusterbleep in Grenada) they will simply
"forget" it. And if it is an undeniable defeat (say Iraq or Afghanistan) then, yes, indeed,
most Americans will be categorically opposed to it.
Saner Americans hate war, but Hollywood loves it- particularly when war can be used as an
instrument of Zionist propaganda, or to draw sympathy towards international Jewry and its
enablers.
This has been the case since the First World War. Hymiewood has had a love affair with
American foreign policy ever since Woodrow Wilson entered the "war to end all wars", for the
single reason that American war policy has been international Jewish (and British)
policy.
The fact that the US military stands ready to repel an armed invader makes it unnecessary for
them to actually do so, and for that much they deserve thanks. But the last time a foreign
power attacked the United States was 1812 (Hawaii wasn't a state during WW2).
I won't bash the troops, but I won't thank them, either. Financial considerations aside, I
believe that most of those who join do believe they're doing the right thing. Good
intentions, however, don't bring the victims of unnecessary US wars back to life.
The Saker appears to be taking a lot of incoming fire for having a go at the sainted american
soldier boy most of whom are dumb-full-of-cum twenty-something morons with no conception they
are there to simply advance the megalomaniacal objectives of the insane bloodthirsty jooies.
The dummy american service guy does the bombing of mostly civilians, the dummy american pols
provide the cover, and the dummy american taxpayer picks up the tab. Since censorship by the
vile jooie Cock Cutting Cult is near 100% in the good ole usa, there are very few forums
where this view can be expressed.
Interesting article. There are some points that probably should have been supported with
citations to research. For instance, I suspect the percentage of those who become police
officers for reasons other than money is probably quite a bit higher than 1%. But overall, a
very interesting, non-mainstream presentation.
@Simply
Simon Care to explain WTC Bldg 7? A few whiffs of smoke come out of it and down it goes.
How about the initial pictures of the 20′ diameter hole in the Pentagon facade that a
Boeing 757 supposedly caused? The wings, turbines, 40′ tall fin, bodies could not have
fit through the 20′ hole, yet they are nowhere to be seen in the initial pictures. Care
to concoct an explanation? Oh, that's right. Your hero Senor Freddie says the 20′hole
was caused by some large round object lacking wings, a fin, turbines .possibly a giant flying
burrito.
"(T)he truth is that no US serviceman or woman has fought a war in defense of the US since at
least WWII (and even this one is very debatable considering that the US forced Japan to wage
war and since the attack on Pearl Harbor was set-up as a pretext to then attack Japan)."
The deal between the government and the citizenry is a contractual agreement, so contract
theory should apply. In respect to your cogent argument, here is my take on that
application.
From Pearl Harbor to the phony Gulf of Tonkein Resolution through the ridiculous Domino
Theory, 911 and WMD, right to the present there is a distinct element of fraud that
invalidates the call to all the ensuing wars and that is Fraud in the Inducement. A contract
is invalid if you are fraudulently induced to engage in it. That gives all GIs and citizens
the moral right of redress against the government that lied them into war. It's been tried in
court (USSC: Sullivan v McNamara) and didn't fly, because the SC sold out.
Governments are corrupt entities, but citizens are free moral agents. Your argument is
correct: when you enlist you assign your moral agency and agree to be used by whomever you
have submitted to. Smedley Butler is a true hero who went to the mountain and returned to
lead people to truth: war is a racket.
I like this article. We need to cultivate a spirit of resistance to the bullshit that
parades before us. It's a scam and we should be cautious of anyone in epaulets.
@Renoman
Absolutely correct. The impoverished countries of Ireland and Scotland along with the
slums of London provided the bulk of the British Imperial Army . These poor sods had the
choice of starvation or a bloody battlefield death and they died by the millions in order to
keep the ruling class rich. I will grant the British upper class officers a pass because so
many of them died in the trenches because of their indoctrination in the "dulce et decora
est" public school education.
@Rex
Little German U-Boats did a lot of sinkings up and down the Florida coastline in WW2, and
put spies onshore on Long Island; both were close enough to call them an attack on The
Homeland.
"None -- because of our military. If the Army, Navy and Air Force were to completely
disband, any number of countries could land troops. Might have a hard time pacifying the
whole country, but they could do a hell of a lot of looting."
Yeah, they're doing a bang-up job stopping the invasion at Tijuanna.
Overall, a good article, IMHO (save a couple of minor details which doesn't change the main
points).
The crux, probably, is (slightly edited):
The very nature of the US economy is based on war and has always been based on war. The
so-called "American way of life" but without wars of aggression has never been attempted in
the past, and it won't be attempted for as long as the US remains the cornerstone of the
AngloZionist Empire and the world hegemony it seeks to impose on the rest of mankind. But
until that day arrives the "American way of life" will always imply wars of aggression and
the mass murder of innocent people whose only "sin" is to dare to not want to be a part of
the Empire.
Now .there IS a point he carefully avoids along his usual angle "Bad Anglos". ALL Empires
have done the same. That's the very definition of Empire. Hehe including his bellowed (from
away, naturally, in USA of all places) Russia.
But let's suppose that the US had no imperial military. So in that case, the US would
face the "threat" (Americans' favorite word) of a Canadian, or Mexican, or Guatemalan, or
Nicaraguan or Chinese! or Russian!! invasion?
Clearly, you have no idea of what the military invasion of a country really entails, nor
have you any sense of what the consequences of such actions have been historically.
@Jett
Rucker It surprised me that the Saker did not acknowledge the millions of draftee's --
not just we who are of the Vietnam generation, but going back to the war of northern
aggression. The military draft is akin to slavery, in that the other choices are jail or
fleeing the country.
I don't need or want any thanks for my time in hell -- especially 40-50 years late. I was
part of an obscene violation of another countries sovereignty, and some of what I did and saw
still haunts me to this day. Many other vets I know feel the same way.
Aside from that one omission, Saker is pretty much spot on. Of course, as several
commentators show, the truth is not always welcome. Smedly Butler is one of my military
heroes for speaking truth to power. The so called war on terror is a wet dream come true for
the mic we were warned about so many years ago
As for those out there who are still denying what was obvious to some on 9-11-2001, a new
book out could be very enlightening. 9/11 Unmasked takes various aspects of the official
"story" and presents the evidence that puts the lie to that "story" Read with an open mind if
you dare.
It is petty to identify all soldiers as active war criminals or as enablers. In this country
the military actions are ordered by elected representatives. The military men obey the orders
of civilian leaders. No doubt many question the wisdom of the orders given but they accept
that it is not their decision where and when to fight. God help the world if decisions were
made by military hierarchies.
Unfortunately effective military action requires hierarchies. If every soldier made his
own tactical decisions a military force would be ineffective. Most would run or quit when the
ordinance was incoming.
Many join the military because there are limited economic opportunities, and there are
some who are rather dull and wouldn't fare well in market competition for labor. Don't we all
find employment because we need some money and there are limited ways to earn. Personally I'd
like to be an astrophysicist and spend my working days on interesting and fulfilling
problems. It would also be pleasant if all tedious tasks were done by others. Alas the market
for this profession is tiny. I had to work where there was a market for my services and I
experienced plenty of drudgery including working for idiotic bosses.
The soldier or sailor lives in a kind of monastic order. He must obey the hierarchy even
when these leaders are incompetent. He faces the possibility of death or serious injury even
if he supplies soda machines on a ship. Some respect is due to one who accepts this
discipline. He accepts, by his actions, the primacy of civilian control of war-making. He
should be censored if he commits atrocities but can't be held accountable for political
decisions by others.
Jeering at sargeants or lieutenants might feel good but it is a fatuous frame of mind. We
always have needed soldiers and that is not going to change.
One legitimate post WW II action was the first Gulf War. Bush the elder received the
congressional approval. At the time almost everyone believed there was finite oil in the
world. Iraq invaded Kuwait then massed troops on the Saudi border. That was a threat to our
perceived interests. Once Saddam was vanquished Bush had the sense to refrain from invading
Iraq. I don't like Bush I much but he did the right things given the knowledge available at
the time.
@Patricus
Yes but wasn't it the US dominated proceedings that established the precedent that "just
following orders" was an unacceptable defence and wasn't it a US dominated military coalition
punishment that caused many thousands of deaths by starvation and exposure post WWII?
@Johnny
Rico Yes, you in particular should ignore the comment. Excellent screen name, though.
Just read the Starship Troopers book for the first time earlier this year and enjoyed it
thoroughly, though I was surprised how short it was. Would have liked a series of books along
those lines.
until US ends up taking on some real "enemy" who will bring this taboo down but not with
words then with "Kinetic Action" that will turn the tables on US shitbag military.
Yeah, I see them all lining up outside my house right now!
No, if America goes down, it will be from enemies within.
Enirely concur with your lucid article. One might add (perhaps in another article), that for
the simple reason of being an empire, the US is a violent rogue state. After all, empires are
ipso facto violent, since they must keep a variety of other states and peoples under
permanent control and this can only be achieved by way of violence.
Here, an empire works exactly like a maffia family: the boss is the supreme authority
deciding over life and death. Whoever stands up to him is annihilated, mutilated, or
humiliated. In inverse order, these are the three stages of violence at the disposal of the
boss. If he wants to preserve his authority, he is compelled to use these techniques, which
makes him, in a sense also the victim of the system he represents.
So it is with the US empire. The leader in the White Madhouse has no choice but to export
mass murder to all corners of the world. Not doing so would entail the collapse of the
imperial system.
And don't forget WTC Bldg 7, which was not hit by a fuel-leaking plane at all, and yet
pancaked down just like the towers. And by the way, a BBC reporter reported the bldg 7
collapse occurred -- past tense -- 20 minutes BEFORE the collapse happened. Oops.
@Tulip I
would not disagree with you completely, although I doubt that the Chinese and the Russians
would have the foresight to finish off the US cesspool when given an internal chance.
But my main point was that the human-looking smelly excrement always calls upon the higher
authority of God when doing the worst possible crimes. This is where US excells even over its
Western "partners" -- the utilitarianism of religion -- that is employing God in the
collective endeavours of rape, pillage and murder. This is the main reason I am
anti-religious although not atheist at all.
"God bless you for your service of rape, pillage and murder for our shared profit and
enjoyment."
Stop accusing the war profiteers for the wars and understand that it is the whole horrible
society.
@Patricus
The "First Gulf War" was as illegitimate and illegal an operation as all the other US acts of
international piracy during the 20th century. Bush I is as much a war criminal as Bush II.
The entire First Gulf War was a set-up, a trap, designed to give the US a permanent
foothold in the region. At the expense of thousands of human lives. During an interview the
US diplomat April Glaspie had with Saddam immediately before he invaded Kuweit, she did not
voice any objections to his designs. Thus Saddam was led to believe he could count on US
support.
Yet mind you, I do not suggest Saddam would be a more decent person than either Bush II or
his daddy. A guy like Saddam, who appoints as his official food taster the son of the palace
cook is truly a perverted individual. And like most politicians in high office everywhere and
at all times, he was also a psychopath and did not shirk from killing fellow human beings.
Often for futile reasons.
@Patricus
"He must obey the hierarchy even when these leaders are incompetent. He faces the possibility
of death or serious injury even if he supplies soda machines on a ship. Some respect is due
to one who accepts this discipline. "
So a person voluntarily gives up his/her freedom of action and freedom to make moral
choices and "some respect is due" ? You, sir, are a brainwashed fool and you deserve to be
killed by one of these lazy, amoral, toadies. Your justification for these losers to join the
military is because they lack the confidence and ability to feed themselves any other way and
that they have such low levels of morality that they would gladly give up those crumbs for
shit on a shingle?
And the "humans" (I use the term loosely) who do this are due respect? These lazy, amoral,
shit eaters would gladly kill other people who have made the not so difficult choice to use
their god-given skills and abilities to survive in a peaceful manner trying to avoid harming
others.
I say better these these lazy, murderous, automatons, these moral mutants, this pestilence
on the human race be enclosed in a stadium and encouraged to fight each other until they are
all dead except one -- then castrate him/ (or her in the case of Hillary Clinton.)
I say people like you, Patricus, who ignorantly give them "due respect" should voluntarily
live in an active war zone where you can experience first hand what the world would be like
if your "heroes " were unrestrained. That would show them "due respect" instead of
encouraging them to bring down their hell on peaceful other people you do not know or care
about
The US instigated coup was in line with Brzezinski's "Grand Chessboard" delusions of the
US having to control Eurasia especially Ukraine in order to reduce Russia to the role of a
regional power. The EU piggybacked on that coup by having the Maidan regime sign on to the
European Neighborhood Policy thus reducing Ukraine to the role of a EU dependent non-member
state.
This article in The Intercept provides incontrovertible proof that Zionists wanted Trump
to win the election and that Chuck Schumer, their representative in Congress used the DNC and
Facebook to help him. It also demonstrates how Chuck Schumer supports Republican Presidents
and policies denying the will of many in his party even a Democratic President and betraying
millions of voters on the Left to forward the Zionist agenda in each and every case. I would
call this collusion and subversion of Democracy. Everything else Schumer does not to lose his
choice position as Senate minority leader is window dressing, lip service and a charade.
Trump often refers to his "leverage" in approaching geopolitics as a business negotiation,
and yet he is effectively hamstrung with two countries (Israel and KSA) where US leverage
should be overwhelming due to security guarantees. The complex web of influence and court
politics will prevent coherent decisive moves, which presumably he refers to when stating he
would rather "stay out" of the Middle East. It's a teachable moment, an opportunity for the
sort of truth-telling necessary to promote a draining of the swamp - the chance to publicly
acknowledge that nothing can be done because the interests of power blocs within the two
countries are embedded directly in the US political system itself.
Obama had the opportunity for truth-telling early in his administration when he could have
acknowledged that a single-payer health care system is not possible in America at this time -
not because it isn't rational and effective but because powerful domestic interests will not
allow it.
@Frederick
V. Reed "Regarding Nine-Eleven: Until someone who actually know the business of
controlled demolition shows what specifically would have been needed, used how without being
noticed, to produce the collapse, it will remain just another empty conspiracy theory."
I wonder if Fred's house burnt down under suspicious circumstances, e.g., there was some
evidence that an accelerant was involved; and neighbors reported suspicious activity near the
house before the fire started; and then Fred had the debris hauled away before it could be
examined; and as a matter of public record Fred announced beforehand that his house might
burn down; and Fred was known to be having financial problems; and Fred was caught telling a
lie about the circumstances; and Fred sought to collect a huge insurance payment, etc.; would
the state police fire marshal dismiss it all as an "empty conspiracy theory". I think not;
rather, I think Fred would be in some serious trouble.
@James
Speaks "The burning jet fuel caused the floor trusses to sag."
No it didn't; most or all of the jet fuel burnt up in a cloud outside of the
buildings.
By the way, as a threshold issue, if 9/11 was "legitimate" why did the perpetrators have
to go through the trouble and take the risk of putting imposter Hymie Brown on national TV,
falsely claiming him to be the "architect" and "project engineer" of the towers, and having
him tell lies about the towers?
@Frederick
V. Reed The only interesting question remaining about 911 is whether the same group who
planned the destruction of the twin towers also demolished WTC 7. Even though all three
supposedly succumbed to fire, WTC 7 resembles a classic demolition while 1 and 2 exploded.
These were obviously different techniques at work.
I began to wonder if some rival faction within the establishment demolished WTC 7 just to
spoil the cover story for the Bin Laden angle for leverage in other areas, or the did the
perpetrators themselves do it so the American people would have no plausible deniability when
the day of reckoning finally comes? After all, what sort of infantile and wicked population
could allow the crimes committed by its government after such a preposterous false flag
operation? Surely, they deserve to be stripped of everything they have (especially Social
Security ;).
@SafeNow
"And don't forget WTC Bldg 7, which was not hit by a fuel-leaking plane at all, and yet
pancaked down just like the towers. And by the way, a BBC reporter reported the bldg 7
collapse occurred -- past tense -- 20 minutes BEFORE the collapse happened. Oops."
This is truly the deciding argument for me, how can anyone not believe a conspiracy was
afoot that day when the BBC got their signals crossed and reported a completely unlikely
event before it actually happened?
Everybody is entitled to an opinion, but if the government is sending people to sow confusion
on the collapse of these buildings it is a criminal offense and should be prosecuted as such.
Bush clearly intended to invade Iraq in 1990 and the Clinton presidency merely put this on
hold for 9 years until Bush II was elected. The son was little more than a puppet for his
father, his father's donors and his father's money. Bush II was merely an alcoholic bum. It
was clearly his Dad's oil interests controlling him.
@Z-man
The twin towers were were 110 stories high and were very strongly built, both were designed
to withstand two strikes by Boeing 707′s. The biggest hole in your "collapse" theory is
the lack of a debris pile. With the collapse of a building that high the debris pile should
have been somewhere around 14 stories high. The debris pile was virtually missing. Have a
look at the linked photo and tell me where the debris piles are. This photo was taken before
any debris could have been removed as Building 7 is still standing.
@L. Ross
@L. Ross: so you believe that a bunch of angry fundamentalists managed to outsmart all 17 US
intelligence agencies and those of NATO and Israel, the National Security Council, the
Transportation Safety Administration, Air Traffic Control, and Dick Cheney, hijacked four US
airliners on one morning, brought down three World Trade Center skyscrapers, destroyed that
part of the Pentagon where research was underway into the missing $2.3 trillion, and caused
the morons in Washington to blame Afghanistan instead of Saudi Arabia?
If so, you urgently need to educate yourself. If not, tell us why it was not a controlled
demolition.
The Official Version of 9/11 goes something like this
Directed by a beardy-guy from a cave in Afghanistan, ( This well appointed Suite
http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/nether_fictoid3.htm
according to the London Times): nineteen hard-drinking, coke-snorting, devout Muslims enjoy
lap dances before their mission to meet Allah
Using nothing more than craft knifes, they overpower cabin crew, passengers and pilots on
four planes. And hangover or not, they manage to give the world's most sophisticated air
defense system the slip.
Unfazed by leaving their "How to Fly a Passenger Jet" guide in the car at the airport,
they master the controls in no-time and score direct hits on two towers, causing THREE to
collapse completely
Our masterminds even manage to overpower the odd law of physics or two and the world
watches in awe as steel-framed buildings fall symmetrically -- through their own mass -- at
free-fall speed, for the first time in history.
Despite all their dastardly cunning, they stupidly give their identity away by using
explosion-proof passports, which survive the fireball undamaged and fall to the ground only
to be discovered by the incredible crime-fighting sleuths at the FBI
Meanwhile down in Washington
Hani Hanjour, having previously flunked 2-man Cessna flying school, gets carried away with
all the success of the day and suddenly finds incredible abilities behind the controls of a
Boeing. Instead of flying straight down into the large roof area of the Pentagon, he decides
to show off a little
Executing an incredible 270 degree downward spiral, he levels off to hit the low facade of
the world's most heavily defended building
all without a single shot being fired . or ruining the nicely mowed lawn and all at a
speed just too fast to capture on video
Later, in the skies above Pennsylvania
So desperate to talk to loved ones before their death, some passengers use sheer willpower
to connect mobile calls that otherwise would not be possible until several years later
And following a heroic attempt by some to retake control of Flight 93, it crashes into a
Shankesville field leaving no trace of engines, fuselage or occupants except for the standard
issue Muslim terrorists bandana
Further south in Florida
President Bush, our brave Commander-in-Chief continues to read "My Pet Goat" to a class
full of primary school children shrugging off the obvious possibility that his life could be
in imminent danger
In New York
World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein blesses his own foresight in insuring the
buildings against terrorist attack only six weeks previously
While back in Washington, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz shake their
heads in disbelief at their own luck in getting the 'New Pearl Harbor' catalyzing event they
so desired to pursue their agenda of world domination
And finally, not to be disturbed too much by reports of their own deaths, at least seven
of our nineteen suicide hijackers turn up alive and kicking in mainstream media reports
And If you don't believe this, you are a conspiracy theorist.
James Corbett presents this 5 minute parody of the official conspiracy theory of 9/11
September 11, 2013 Twelve Years of War, Lies and Deception
Twelve years after the 9/11 attacks, no credible independent investigation has been done
to find out what really happened on that day and who was responsible.
I am amazed that there seem still to be people who believe the official 9/11 propaganda
bull*.
They don't believe the Gospel According To NIST. And I find it hard to believe you believe
they believe it ** .
'They' are shills & operators. The 911 myth must be defended at all costs – the
empire insists. For the one's who might genuinely believe, no need to waste time answering
them as they're too stupid to matter.
@Simply
Simon "Every large controlled demolition I witnessed shows massive explosions at ground
level." Not true
Internal pillars can be taken out without showing any evidence of demolition from the outside
of a building.
Every large controlled demolition that I have witnessed did not show "massive explosions" at
ground level, but rather momentary flashes of light, with the building then collapsing into
its own footprint.
@Agent76
Thanks Agent 76. That video is actually amazingly funny -- and, partly because it's so funny,
it packs a devastating punch. Seeing all the loose ends and nonsensical inconsistencies
bundled together and delivered in fast-forward mode is hugely convincing.
@Z-man
Your Quote
Two WTC went down first even though it was hit second because the plane hit lower and at an
angle with more damage to more floors and more mass above to accelerate the collapse.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Congratulation.
You hit the bulls eye of the shit.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Watch the collapse again.
In both cases collapse started with the uppermost floor falling on the floor below.
And so because second tower was hit close to hour later and the position of the impact was
several stories lower, the heat influence on the uppermost connection of trusses was
considerably lower than in first hit tower.
Simple thermodynamics will confirm it to you.
..
When you will watch the collapse of first building (second hit)
You will notice the part of the building was tilting, before cascading begin.
That contradicts laws of physics.
..It was controlled demolition with exploding charges at trusses connections.
There should not be any doubt about it.
@Tulip
So then, you do not have proof that the Germans killed those which they are said to have
killed.
But hey, you do have the almighty name calling. I suggest giving Zionist TeeVee a rest.
As for German aggression, you're wrong on that too. Sorry to keep posting the same rebuttals below, Ron. But as you see, we get the same
ignorant claims.
facts:
- USSR invaded Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, invaded & annexed parts of
Romania, invaded Iran, invaded northern Norway and the Danish island of Bornholm, yet the
'Allies' did nothing.
- Poland invaded and annexed parts of Czechoslovakia, held large parts of German territory,
was engaged in atrocities against German civilians. Yet the 'Allies' did nothing.
- The "neutral" US had been attacking German U-boats & shipping, while supplying both
Britain & the USSR long before Germany's declaration of war on the US.
- Brits invaded & were mining Norway at Narvik before Germany arrived & stopped
it.
- France had positioned 2 million soldiers on the Belgian border, and the BEF had almost
another half million.
- France and England were already violating Belgian and Dutch "neutrality" with impunity by
flying aircraft over the lowlands.
- It is important to remember that France had already invaded Germany, the Saar in 1939, and
that throughout this entire period Hitler was begging Churchill to negotiate a return to the
status quo. Did Britain initiate both world wars? : https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=10458 Responsibility for WW2 : https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7544
Introduction to HITLER'S WAR: http://www.unz.com/article/introduction-to-hitlers-war/ Who started bombing civilians first: Germany or Great Britain, Britain:https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8172 Operation Barbarossa Was A Preventive Attack : https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7999 http://www.codoh.com
@Tulip
Hitler Germany conquered Poland in a few weeks, snatched Norway from under Churchill's nose,
and beat France in three weeks.
About Churchill's stupidity in military matters: Gallipoli, and see what the commander of the
British army thought about him:
Colonel Roderick Macleod, D.S.O., M.C., and Dennis Kelly, 'TIME UNGUARDED The Ironside
Diaries 1937- 1940′, New York, 1963
Hitler never wanted war:
A J P Taylor, 'The Origins of the Second World War', 1961, 1967, Londen
German economy:
from 1933 until 1936 unemployment was reduced from six to one million.
FDR's New Deal did hardly reduce USA unemployment.
Hitler's big mistake was to underestimate the power of international jewry:
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, 'Francois de Wendel en République, L'Argent et le Pouvoir
1914-1940, Paris 1976
Ludendorff already understood quite well that the allies wanted to destroy Germany
Erich Ludendorff, 'Meine Kriegserinnerungen 1914 = 1918′, Berlin, 1918
And see
Patrick J. Buchanan, 'Churchill, Hitler and "The unnecessary war", How Britain lost its
empire and the west lost the world', New York, 2008
"... The U.S.A. is a powerful empire. It is expansionist. It's no different from the British, Soviets, Chinese, etc. None of this is new information to anyone. If it is, you are retarded for just now coming to these conclusions. You should have understood all of this by your early twenties. ..."
"... Generally speaking, political reform follows cultural and economic change – not vice versa ..."
"... It would seem in the Soviet Union cultural and economic also followed political reform. One could sustain the same regarding Peronist Argentina until the early 1950s, the German Empire in 1871 which created the framework for profound and vast cultural and economic change, Italy since 1861, and so on. Thus, I am not so sure about the validity of the historical "law" you have tentatively formulated. ..."
"... Every state must have its peoples, in one way or another, support its geopolitical operations. In democracies, this comes down to applying psychological pressures so that the citizenry votes for the desired programs. ..."
"... Support can be achieved even in the face of strong initial opposition, such as WWI and the Iraq war. As Saker mentions, the support can be eroded when a war drags on too long without victory, such as Vietnam or Afghanistan. ..."
@Hans
Vogel You are probably onto something here.
Especially with:
all, empires are ipso facto violent, since they must keep a variety of other states and
peoples under permanent control and this can only be achieved by way of violence.
If he wants to preserve his authority, he is compelled to use these techniques, which
makes him, in a sense also the victim of the system he represents.
Not doing so would entail the collapse of the imperial system.
This is like something an undergraduate would write. It's like taking history and running it
through an "all I needed to know I learned in kindergarten" filter.
The U.S.A. is a powerful empire. It is expansionist. It's no different from the British,
Soviets, Chinese, etc. None of this is new information to anyone. If it is, you are retarded
for just now coming to these conclusions. You should have understood all of this by your
early twenties.
We thank the veterans because, at an instinctual level; they are the warriors of our
tribe. Guilt over expansion isn't sincere; we know that Russians have and would eagerly
engage in the same behavior, were they as powerful. "The weak must do what they must."
I read his stupid justification for living in our country. We need a law forbidding
foreigners from speaking on our political affairs. It is not, and never will be, their call.
The author is clearly a Russian nationalist, which is a great thing, but that belongs in
Russia.
American nationalism alone should exist here. The entire problem is that there are so many
paper Americans here that our country has become corrupted beyond its original purpose; even
before WWII, (((Americans))) had power, which is the reason for our poor actions against
Japan. I've long supported dismantling the empire, but only because it is impoverishing our
people, and we need those troops here to eject the millions of invaders, and guard the
border. The empire is also a tool for (((you know who))).
Finally, a foreigner criticizing the U.S. military, while living in the U.S.A., is like
going into your neighbor's home and accusing him of being an alcoholic. He may very well be,
but it's not your place to say so. Once you cross over our border, any allegiance to a
foreign power needs to end. Even if we make one of those Matryoshka dolls of your mother
being plowed by one of our negroes, you better keep quiet. Because in truth, you are not
wanted here. There is no benefit to me for Russians to be here.
Heritage Americans understand that these veterans are our hoplites, regardless of the wars
they have fought in. If you don't have that national bond, it's time to admit it, pack up,
and go back to a nation that you can identify with. One where you don't feel the urge to talk
trash about the most brilliant saints of the Church. Yes Catholicism is lost, and the pope a
hopeless cuck, but unlike the author, I'm not Russian. Converting to Russian Orthodoxy, even
inside the U.S., is a process rife with hostility.
They have to go back. If you value Peter the Great more than Thomas Jefferson, great, but you
have to go back.
The important questions–which (one is tempted to say "of course") he does not
raise, let alone attempt to answer–are: (i) how did this sorry state of affairs come
about; and (ii) what is to be done to correct the situation?
Ah, you see .that's not Saker's job. One of posters here already said what it is. Scroll
up and you'll find it with ease.
And, those are definitely THE QUESTIONS. The second more important than the first.
Any ideas of yours?
Probably related to
.what failures or refusals on the part of the American people to enforce what provisions
of their own Constitution have led to this pass?
I guess. I believe it has something to do with what happened to Rome once upon a time.
Or any such entity.
Even if we simply focus on military: comparing militia from The American Revolutionary War
with early Roman military and current US military with legions of, say, Augustus.
Complex topics, of course.
And, there IS one aditional element too Saker types will never touch: is there a need for
a World Policeman? I think there is (human nature, nukes and such). The catch is, of course,
who 's going to be that one. Or better, who is going to control the cop. Even better,
who and how, is going to control the controllers.
Sounds complicated so irrelevant for most posters here. Better to focus on "bad Anglos" or
"terrible Joos". Or whatever.
Saker's angle, and the resident "Team Russia" of course is, no need for World Policeman.
They'd like three equal cops policing their own parts of the world. Saker cop "managing" that
region from Vladivostok to, say .current German/Austrian/Italian/Greek border.
Chinese even "better": area up and including Tasmania and Stuart Island.
Hehe not that they'll ever admit that.
If your country is weak, the credibility of your criticisms is comporomised.
Of course, you don't accept the U.S. military. However, you have zero authority to employ the
Alinskyite tactic of "hold them to their own ideals."
This is why the only foreigners besides tourists and students, who should be allowed here,
are those who benefit Heritage Americans.
Russia is most definitely the "good guy" overall. I've been saying that for years, but we
criticize the Neocons and even more influential (((neocons))), not our own soldiers. It
doesn't matter if they've murdered entire towns overseas, not to most people. This is
indisputably true for every country on Earth.
Soldiers rescue you when you're in a giant fish bowl
that has been hit by a cat. 5 hurricane, or when a tornado levels your town. They protect you
from invasion under normative circumstances; the current circumstances, of the military and
government standing by while millions of third world invaders flood our land, isn't a typical
one, and even then, it is only made possible by (((propagandists)))
@wholy1
Lots of people escaped to Canada, for example rather than serve the empire. Would you rather
murder people in Vietnam for the corrupt U.S. "government" (or be killed by someone defending
their country from invaders), or go to Canada? I would've chosen Canada.
@Fhilaerene
"We need a law forbidding foreigners from speaking on our political affairs."
You are a fool. I think you might be a good individualist though. At least you have a sense of self. Quit
trying to speak for "Americans" (Who left you in charge of defining who is "American"?)and
instead, speak for yourself. It would sound much less stupid.
It's true that many join the military for benefits. This is esp true of Negroes and Browns.
But many whites join because they like the culture of Brotherhood. And these types tend to
be patriotic and gung-ho. Of course, they are often clueless about how their patriotic
feelings are being manipulated by globalists.
It'd be nice to have a law that says that while all men must fight to defend the US from
invasion, all overseas ventures must be voted on by men in the military.
In the US the military is deified, in other saner countries it is at best respected and
supported and in some countries it is feared and avoided.
The US is a country, that has been at war for most of its life. I believe only a mere 25
years of not waging or participating in a war. Hence its reverence for the military.
And in wars a lot of money can be made, lets not forget that
"We need a law forbidding foreigners from speaking on our political affairs."
No what we need is a friggen law that imposes death penalty on any US citizen ever leaving
the US.
The US is the main culprit of the misery and despair throughout the world, especially the ME
too. Come to think of it, we should have for Israel citizens too.
@Harold
Smith Indeed! Seem to me you must have read Kafka.
Else we use the one below.
Someone said something like : We change reality faster than you perceive reality has changed.
Even a war fought for the openly crass reason of protecting one's own economic interests
is hardly a uniquely evil event. It may be a deplorable fact of life, but you have to ask
yourself: What else did you think was going to happen? Are the powerful of the world going
to just sit by and watch their fortunes be destroyed?
Is the mob just going to sit by and watch as someone decides not to pay their protection
money ? "what else did you think was going to happen?" Of course they're going to place a
horse's head on their door step and if that doesn't work they'll put two bullet holes in his
eye sockets.
ID, don't forget to thank your mafia soldier for his service on Veteran's day! (Oh, and don't
forget to leave that protection money in the bucket behind the door like we talked
about.)
how can anyone not believe a conspiracy was afoot that day
A conspiracy is two or more people working together to commit a criminal act. The official
narrative of 9-11 is a conspiracy theory. Not a credible one, but conspiracy theory none the
less.
What a snarky article by a weenie who lacked the cajones to serve.
When I joined the military in the mid-70′s, it wasn't for the benefits or the money;
neither was particularly attractive, and with a lottery number north of 250, I wasn't at risk
of being drafted. I joined for three reasons–first, my dad had served in WWII in the
infantry, so there was a bit of family history; second, because I hated Marxism and the
Commies who threatened to bury us; and third, because I considered it my civic duty to serve.
So, I found myself in in a nuclear ordnance unit in Europe, helping keep several hundred
nukes at the ready to fly in an easterly direction to kill Commies if necessary. Of course,
the whole idea wasn't ever to vaporize eastern Europe, rather, it was to deter the Russians
and their allies from attacking western Europe. Mission accomplished.
As was the case with NATO in the 70′s, the primary mission of the military isn't to
fight wars; rather, it's to deter others from starting a war in the first place. As was the
case with the Commies 40 years ago, if we didn't have a strong deterrent force (and the
demonstrated will to use it) there are plenty of Mohammedans, Chinese and others who would
dearly love to subdue us. And blowhards like Saker would be out of business, probably in a
concentration camp somewhere, or dead. Unless, that is, they became collaborators.
I do agree, however, on one thing: I didn't and don't need any Thank-you's for my service.
I don't expect thanks for paying my income tax or driving on the right side of the road;
those are civic duties. And to me, service in the military is a civic duty as well for
able-bodied males. After I got out of the Army, all I ever wanted a modicum of respect for
having performed my civid duty–not to be derided and called a fool or a fascist for
having served. But a civilian again and a student in the late '70s, that's all I heard from
my smartypants lib classmates. It wasn't until 9/11, when people perceived (rightly or
wrongly) that their pansy butts were at risk unless somebody was willing to fight or deter
bad guys, that people started saying "Thank you for your service."
Saker, instead of calling people who served fools and fascists, calls us money-grubbing
mercenaries. It would be annoying coming from anybody other than a guy who believes that 9/11
was some kind of CIA plot. My cat is smarter than that. And even Saker is smarter than to
spout his malarky to a veteran's face.
" since the attack on Pearl Harbor was set-up as a pretext to then attack Japan). "
Since FDR is his 1940 election promised not to 'send USA boys overseas unless the USA was
attacked'.
On the Sunday of the attack the America First Committee understood quite well, as Lindbergh
writes, he got a phone call: 'he (FDR) got us into the (European) war through the back
door'.
Charles A. Lindbergh, ´The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh', New York,
1970
Since the end of 1939 the USA navy was waging war in the Atlantic against Germany, but Hitler
had given strict orders that his navy and airforce should not give FDR a pretext for war.
Not quite sure, but I think
Patrick Beesly, 'Very special intelligence', 1977 Londen
describes the very close cooperation in the Atlantic between GB, navy and airforce, and FDR's
navy and airforce, beginning at the end of 1939.
There was one incident between a German submarine and a USA navy vessel that nearly was
serious enough for FDR to declare war.
Few people, including myself until recently, know about Hitler's attack on Russia, and
Japanese war aims.
Japan had promised Hitler to attack the USSR if Hitler had taken Moscow and was at the Volga,
thus the desperate fight over Stalingrad.
Robert J.C. Butow, 'JAPAN'S Decision to Surrender', Stanford, 1954
F.W. Deakin and G.R. Storry, 'The case of Richard Sorge', New York, 1966
If indeed Japan would have attacked Russia, I doubt.
In any case, Hitler was very pleased with Pearl Harbour, really a surprise to him, it
seems.
That FDR's provocation to Japan caused that Japan remained neutral towards the USSR until the
beginning of 1945, the USSR annihition of the Kwantung Army, I wonder if Hitler ever realised
this.
@Fhilaerene
" The U.S.A. is a powerful empire. It is expansionist. It's no different from the British,
Soviets, Chinese, "
It is quite different from what the British empire was.
The perfidous Britons built their empire not just on naked force, but on diplomacy, cunning,
deceit, blackmail, bribery, propaganda, etc., than the USA.
British people indeed were outraged when Gordon was killed at Khartoum.
Far more outrage, is my impression, than USA people about the Vietnam defeat.
@Simply
Simon The Empire State Building has a steel frame designed using moment distribution. It
was being designed as it was being built. Steel and labor were cheap during the Great
Depression. Thus, the building could be overdesigned, and it was.
@Fhilaerene
"It doesn't matter if they've murdered entire towns overseas, not to most people." It might
well have mattered to those who have been murdered and it should it should matter to the rest
of us. Soldiers and their political masters should not get a free pass for wanton murder.
@Intelligent
Dasein 'Most soldiers all throughout history have been mercenaries'
Standing armies were not generally a thing untill comparatively recently
Bravo Saker! All your points are undeniably true and very clearly stated. I salute your
courage in publishing these truths in the face of the world's greatest disinformation and
propaganda machine – the US government.
The military is the huge death squad of the evil US Empire. These are the oligarch's tools
for murder and pillage around the world. The US Military is the most shameful group in the
world today, composed of those willing to kill their brothers and sisters for money.
Saker, the very nature of life itself is based on war and has always been based on
war. Problem?
We're chemical machines, that have been built over 4 billion years, and we've been
tested in what can be called quite accurately a 'Gladiator War'; where the machines went into
the battle and if you won, your DNA replicated, and that's all it was was a war.
@Z-man
"The two planes were two large armored napalm tanks"
Except that planes aren't built like tanks or else they wouldn't lift off the ground. And
their engines don't run on napalm.
There's no way for a large plane traveling at low speed to go right through a building. It
would have crashed to pieces and plummeted to the ground where it would have exploded and
burned down.
@The
Alarmist I joined to shoot all sorts of weaponry, to use explosive, to rappel out of
helicopters, to call in close air support, etc. All great, fun stuff. Unfortunately , mixed
in with that, was a lot of 3 am spit shining shoes and ironing ponchos for a junk on the bunk
inspection at 0800.
@Realist
In fact there has NEVER been any occasion since the War of 1812 when members of the US armed
forces had to fight to protect their "homeland" – which is impressive when you remember
that the USA has been at war for 222 out of 239 years since 1776.
As for the War of 1812, while it is true that the British invaded the USA and burned some
of Washington, the Americans were responsible for the outbreak of war. President James
Madison declared war on Great Britain, when negotiations were still possible. At the time,
Britain was at war with the empire of Napoleon so the US declaration of war must have seemed
to the British a treacherous stab in the back.
@James
Speaks I suppose the proximity of the jets cause WTC7 to experience slenderness too. Or
was it that the BBC announcing WTC's demise 20 minutes before it actually happened was caused
by "kl/r"?
@Rex
Little Rex, may I point out that it was the US government (in the person of President
Madison) who declared war on Great Britain – not vice versa? Until then there were serious disagreements, but they could have been negotiated. It was
the US government that chose to have a war – as it has often done since.
@Wally
The Saker is a Russian. He can probably give you the body count of the Red Army on the
Eastern Front.
The Nazis were bastards, and they started an aggressive war (and by that, I mean
"aggressive" from the standpoint of the victors, unlike say Iraq), they killed a lot of
people, and they lost. You don't even have to bring (((them))) into to equation to conclude
that the Allies didn't hang enough people when they had the chance, but I guess someone had
to be left to rebuild.
@Tom
Welsh You are either fighting over there or you are fighting in your homeland. When you
stop fighting over there, you end up fighting in your homeland. Putin wants war and
instability in Ukraine, because he knows Russia is next.
America has just done the same thing every other successful Empire has done since the dawn
of time, suggesting a natural line of development in human civilizations. All of America's
enemies simply want America out of the way so they can do the same thing America has done. If
I were Russian or Chinese, I would want the same thing Saker calls for. But let's face it, a
second-rate gorilla wanting the Alpha gorilla to die is a different sentiment from the
internationalist liberal humanitarian bullshit Saker cites in his article.
@Fhilaerene
"We need a law forbidding foreigners from speaking on our political affairs. It is not, and
never will be, their call. The author is clearly a Russian nationalist, which is a great
thing, but that belongs in Russia".
A peculiar argument. As the author presumably believes in the political equality of all
human beings, he would no doubt agree that Russia needs a law forbidding foreigners from
speaking about Russian political affairs. (Would that apply just to foreigners speaking while
in Russia, or in their own countries?)
@peterAUS
" is there a need for a World Policeman? I think there is (human nature, nukes and such). The
catch is, of course, who's going to be that one. Or better, who is going to control the cop.
Even better, who and how, is going to control the controllers".
That sounds quite clever and sophisticated, but it leads nowhere because it's fairly
obvious that there is no answer to the questions "who's going to be the World Policeman?" and
"Who's going to control the cop?"
For practical purposes we can regard the idea of a "World Policemen" is obviously
impractical. Even if such a regime could be brought about, it would likely lead to the very
worst tyranny ever – and perhaps the first one impossible to escape or overthrow.
Therefore we need to return to the real world and consider alternatives. At present I see
nothing better than Messrs Putin and Xi's concept of a multilateral world order, regulated by
international laws, in which nations show respect and consideration for one another.
If anyone thinks that's not good enough, consider that the world is not some schoolroom
where we are posed questions with predesigned, cut-and-dried answers. In real life, we
sometimes encounter questions that have no simple answers.
@anonymous
Your comment displays a very common misunderstanding of evolutionary theory.
The species that survive best and reproduce most in a given environment are sometimes
called "the fittest". At present – although perhaps not for much longer – Homo
sapiens has been very successful in terms of fitness for perhaps 10,000 years. People tend to
ascribe this mostly to our large brain and intelligence, but they err in thinking that the
main evolutionary advantage of intelligence is the ability to invent weapons and other
machines.
In fact, humans have thriven mainly because of their social organization and ability to
cooperate.
Which is why any theory that proposes vicious competition between individual human beings
or human groups is flying in the face of Darwin. We succeed or fail as teams. Cheating and
murdering your team-mates is not a recipe for success.
@Anon
"But many whites join because they like the culture of Brotherhood".
That reminds me, rightly or wrongly, of something else. Oh yes, here it is:
"Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of
what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape
individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from
freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not
guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and
maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the
Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?"
Saker,
Go fuck yourself. You are not an American so you are hardly in a position to say why
Americans serve in OUR military. I might add that the so-called "illegal wars" and covert
actions were primarily fought against the Communist madness YOUR people unleashed on the
world or primitive Islamists who have always been our enemies.
@Wally
'"But in a world of empires, the US empire preferable to the German, Japanese, Russian, and
Spanish."
'Really?
'Please explain'.
You really don't get it? Isn't it obvious that being burned to death by good red-blooded
democratic American napalm or white phosphorus is far better than being killed by a German,
Japanese, Russian or Spanish weapon?
It's the kindly good intentions that make all the difference!
@Intelligent
Dasein @Intelligent Dasein: so why on earth do you read Saker's articles? Why on earth do
you then proceed to pollute this thread with your insane vituperations and bore us all to
death? If you want to impress us with the use of vulgarities, there is no need to dedicate an
essay to it.
@ThreeCranes
The same cabal that had been denouncing young Americans conscripted to fight in Vietnam as
"baby killers" -- the same ones always disproportionately underrepresented in our armed
forces -- are from what I see on Fox News the ones behind the jingoism serving only Israel
today. Cops were vilified as "pigs." The American flag was walked on and burned with glee.
Now we have "wounded warrior" ads running all the time, while MAGA is making Wall Street
richer and creating new jobs for anyone but the young white men who mostly wear the uniforms
and do the dying so fine young Israeli boys need not.
All in all this "thank you for your service" is obviously well meaning from everyday
people, but it is nothing short of grinning mockery coming from that same bunch -- the "war
party" of neo-lib/neo-con foreign agents -- who only yesterday were denouncing our soldiers
as "baby killers." There is no left/right when it comes to bankrupting America for
Israel.
Now on Fox News we get Trotskyite neocons elevating those same "baby killers" and "pigs"
in uniform to hero status, and in preparation for the coming martial law, authoring the
thoughts of the gullible with the concepts and catchwords of the police state. "Baby killers"
and "pigs" alchemically have become heroes-in-uniform first-responders putting their boots on
the ground in harm's way, whose muh brothers/muh mission training sanctions incinerating
civilians IDF style, who won't hesitate enforcing shelter-in-place orders back home at gun
point even on their own kind.
@ThreeCranes
The same cabal that had been denouncing young Americans conscripted to fight in Vietnam as
"baby killers" -- the same ones always disproportionately underrepresented in our armed
forces -- are from what I see on Fox News the ones behind the jingoism serving only Israel
today. Cops were vilified as "pigs." The American flag was walked on and burned with glee.
Now we have "wounded warrior" ads running all the time, while MAGA is making Wall Street
richer and creating new jobs for anyone but the young white men who mostly wear the uniforms
and do the dying so fine young Israeli boys need not.
All in all this "thank you for your service" is obviously well meaning from everyday
people, but it is nothing short of grinning mockery coming from that same bunch -- the "war
party" of neo-lib/neo-con foreign agents -- who only yesterday were denouncing our soldiers
as "baby killers." There is no left/right when it comes to bankrupting America for
Israel.
Now on Fox News we get Trotskyite neocons elevating those same "baby killers" and "pigs"
in uniform to hero status, and in preparation for the coming martial law, authoring the
thoughts of the gullible with the concepts and catchwords of the police state. "Baby killers"
and "pigs" alchemically have become heroes-in-uniform first-responders putting their boots on
the ground in harm's way, whose muh brothers/muh mission training sanctions incinerating
civilians IDF style, who won't hesitate enforcing shelter-in-place orders back home at gun
point even on their own kind.
@Den Lille
Abe "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,'
which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of
discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and
empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued.
'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying
that reality judiciously, as you will we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's
actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
- Ronald Suskind (American journalist) reporting the comments of a White House aide (later
identified as Karl Rove) ["Without A Doubt" by Ron Suskind, The New York Times Magazine, 17
October 2004].
" Why?" Well for one thing they carry out policies concocted by delusional "intellectuals"
and fellow travellers of whom you are most assuredly king, Saker.
@Charles
Martel Charles Martel expresses views that I suppose are very common among Americans. My
favourite SF writer Robert Heinlein would certainly have agreed with every word. Yet I
believe that Charles shows signs of having been deceived – having "drunk the Kool-Aid",
as I think some people used to say.
As soon as I saw the trope about Khrushschev "threatening to bury us" I knew there was
some intentional or unintentional misunderstanding. Lo and behold!
'While addressing Westerners at the embassy on November 18, 1956, in the presence of
Polish Communist statesman Władysław Gomułka, Khrushchev said: "About the
capitalist states, it doesn't depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don't like us,
don't accept our invitations, and don't invite us to come to see you. Whether you like it or
not, history is on our side. We will bury you!" The speech prompted the envoys from twelve
NATO nations and Israel to leave the room'.
What Khrushchev obviously meant was "We shall be the survivors after you have perished,
and so we will stand at your graveside". Unfortunately, he worded the thought more briefly
and vividly. In the Western world, which is ruled by propaganda and psyops, such techniques
are used to put the worst possible construction on the words of any antagonist.
Very similar to the furore about Iranian president Ahmadinejad supposedly threatening to
"wipe Israel off the map". As the extensive and accurate articles cited below explain, what
Ahmadinejad really said (in Farsi) was that "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem]
must be eliminated from the pages of history". Just as the USSR, for instance, has been
eliminated from the pages of history (and atlases).
" Let me repeat that truism once again, in an even more direct way: veterans are killers
hired for money. Period. The rest is all propaganda."
Yes, from the point of view of recruiters.
Not, as far as I can see, from the point of view of the hired.
Do not think that many join military forces with the intention to kill.
Happen to know a now retired USA pilot, who joined the USA forces for two reasons, he hated
the work on his father's farm, and he wanted to fly.
He did kill, I suppose, flying a helicopter in the Vietnam war is not for philantropic
business.
He also flew bombers, bomber pilots seldom see what the bombs they drop do.
But I wonder if he ever saw that he killed someone, as far as I know him he did not like to
kill at all.
Back to the question, should we thank veterans ?
I wonder for what.
They took a job, a job they knew could well lead to killing, or be killed.
A quite different situation exists for those who join an army out of idealistic motives, such
as George Orwell in the thirties in Spain.
But, thanking them depends on what side in the war you support.
@Simon in
London "If Russia ran the world things would be different, but I doubt they would be
better".
You are very probably right, which is why Russia has no desire to run the world. All it
wants – at least according to Mr Putin – is to be treated with respect and given
its rights under international law. Not to live in a world ruled by any single nation, but in
a world where all nations treat one another with respect and consideration.
@Simon in
London "If Russia ran the world things would be different, but I doubt they would be
better."
Self-serving, subjective Anglo-Zionist crap logic. For YOU, maybe, as a "patriotic"
denizen of the globo-imperialist Anglosphere, it "wouldn't be better". For RUSSIANS, it would
for sure "be better". For most of the world outside the Anglosphere except the Zionists and
the Wahhabis, too, it would "be better". I daresay that even for most ***ordinary*** people
in the Anglosphere, it would probably "be better" (depending of course on exactly how you
define "better") – or at least, not be WORSE.
It's also quite amusing how you automatically equate the ending of the current criminal
U.S. regime's planetwide aggressions and uncontested global hegemony aspirations, with
"Russia running the world", the same way that the U.S. regime wants to do right now. As if
that is the ONLY possible outcome – and as if it is preordained and inevitable that one
single hegemonic nation should lord it over and call the shots in the entire world by force.
The result, no doubt, of your brainwashing since birth with capitalist imperialist ideology,
wedded to "British Empire" chauvinism that now finds a vicarious outlet in sucking up to U.S.
global hegemonism as part of the Anglosphere.
Read The Protocols of Zion and see who is behind the wars that America has been forced into
ie it is the Zionist banking kabal and this was true from WWI right on down to the wars in
the Mideast and all for the Zionist banking kabal and their Zionist satanic NWO!
@Rex
Little There have been several armed invasions of the US with two more on the way. They
were entirely undeterred by the useless parasitic employees of the "Department of Defense".
I want to thank the men of the armed services for for their service. Whether that service
was for money, job, because you wanted to vent a warped sense of what it means (merely
killing others fellows is hardly a noble task) or
whether you sincerely desire to serve the country as a duty.
For any of those reasons above
Thanks . . . (my only regret is not keeping you from unnecessary conflicts) But I honor
your service.
This is how the Pentagon thanks everyone for their service!
Jun 30, 2014 America's Veteran Crisis: Abandoned At Home
As politicians in Washington wring their hands over the Veterans Affairs scandal, VICE
News travels to Portland, Oregon, to see what it's all really about.
December 9, 2016 Report: VA staff left veteran's body in shower nine hours, tried to hide
mistakes
SEMINOLE -- Staff members at the Bay Pines VA Healthcare System left the body of a veteran
in a shower room for more than nine hours then tried to cover up the mistake, a hospital
investigation shows.
@Charles
Martel You have it backwards. The enlisted and conscripted were dummy candy asses,
lacking the balls and brains to avoid abetting the venal national security state and its vile
owners. Now in this sad year of 2018, the US military is little more than the Goy Auxiliary
of the jooie IDF making enlistment doubly stupid and cowardly, especially if you are a white
person. Notice your hero Trumpstein didn't enlist and neither did any of the "neocons" or
anyone else with any brains or balls
@David In
TN No, but irrelevant. What's your point?
All humans who sacrifice their own free will and freedom of conscience, no matter what
"side" they are on to follow orders like a killing machine, are almost by definition,
subhuman. They are dangerous amoral killers. They are the "kinetic action" that takes
aggressive war from a concept to a reality. Humanity would be better off if they could never
reproduce and if they were strictly limited to fighting each other to the death
We need a law forbidding foreigners from speaking on our political affairs. It is not,
and never will be, their call. The author is clearly a Russian nationalist, which is a
great thing, but that belongs in Russia.
I'll keep reading the foreign press, including from Russia, until there is a good reason
not to, like a shooting war.
Even propaganda sometimes includes constructive criticism. The Soviets were right when
they criticized lynchings in the South, and the international shame helped bring an end to
them.
If you believe some of the American Pravda articles here, you should welcome any
help that we can get from abroad to clean up our government.
@Tom
Welsh You probably overlooked the rest of my comment: "like most politicians in high
office everywhere and at all times, he was also a psychopath and did not shirk from killing
fellow human beings." That includes the war criminals Bush I, Bush II, and the White House
Negro.
A well-argued essay that addresses a relevant and important issue. Mercenaries, like regular
working folk, are just doing their job that they got paid for as per the contract. They
fulfilled the contract, no need to thank them. I never got a special thanks for doing my job,
certainly not from the highest authorities and every Tom, Dick and Harry in between.
@EliteCommInc.
@EliteComminc: the US was "invited" into South Vietnam by the puppet regime it installed
there in the 1st place. Therefore its attack on North Vietnam was still illegal and amounted
to a war crime. Period.
The Empire will NOT survive for one day without a war! The MIC runs this Empire and it won't
allow the Empire to go on as usual without purchasing or the empire's puppet government
exporting their products to the other countries. The aggressions are meant to kill innocent
people and to destroy the weapons that were sold to the countries to begin with! So the other
countries have to purchase more to defend themselves (catch 22). In other words all acts of
aggression are about nothing but money in this capitalist system!
One of the very best articles I have ever read. and which in my opinion should be required
reading for every high school graduate in the United States, and other countries.
@Hans
Vogel I do agree with your generalisation about politicians in high office. It was just
that I reacted quite strongly to your implication that the mere appointment of that man
proved Saddam to be "perverted".
There's an interesting discussion to be had about how fair it is to call people
"perverted" who merely behave like the proportion of humans who love violence and often
resort to it.
I certainly wouldn't have liked to be in Saddam Hussein's power if he had any reason to
harm me. On the other hand, I often wonder how easy it can be to rule a country like Iraq or
Syria, and wonder if perhaps a hard dictator might be the best fit under present
circumstances.
Generally speaking, political reform follows cultural and economic change – not vice
versa. I'd love to see any of the leading American or British politicians, or other
blowhards, try to do Saddam's or Assad's job without getting killed within a week or two.
After a year we could ask them searching questions about the morality of what they have done,
and I bet they would come up with something along the lines of "It was either me or
them".
"The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to
believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and
expect to have one's laws and constitution embraced. It is in the nature of things that the
progress of Reason is slow and no one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature
and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.
One can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force".
- Maximilien Robespierre (1791)
"Laws should be so appropriate to the people for whom they are made that it is very
unlikely that the laws of one nation can suit another".
- Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, "L'Esprit des
Lois"
I guess it stands to reason that people who are stupid enough to join the military, are the
same ones stupid enough to keep waving the American flag after getting their asses shot off.
But other than for that reason, I've never understood why anyone would do such as thing.
The Saker seems like a foreign psychological warfare agent.
Now ... you could be onto something here.
I wouldn't put it in exactly those words, feels so "Cold war" and things have changed since,
but, yes, the overall intention IS something along that path.
Agree with the main points, of course. Especially with
..if we didn't have a strong deterrent force (and the demonstrated will to use it) there
are plenty of Mohammedans, Chinese and others who would dearly love to subdue us.
and
.And to me, service in the military is a civic duty as well for able-bodied males.
Does "The Saker" really imagine that he is the first person who has thought to quote the
principles of the Nuremberg Trials ? Does he expect applause for stating the obvious?
What the Saker is indeed quite obvious, but it is is not openly stated all that often.
Even people who generally object to the US-led wars feel it necessary to exempt the veterans
from the blame as an innocent or even wronged party. I've personally witnessed the madness at
the begging of the Iraq war when people practically genuflected before the members of the
military, and the banners and pins "We support our troops" were everywhere. Support in what,
in the commission of a crime? But no one came out and said that.
failures or refusals on the part of the American people to enforce what provisions of
their own Constitution have led to this pass?
I am sure he did but the article isn't about that. You care to provide the answer?
The most obvious one is that the American people are under intense propaganda coupled with
the essential informational blockade. All alternative information is carefully excluded from
the public view. Again, the Iraq war is a good examples: before the invasion, all attempts to
say what things might not go as smoothly as projected were promptly cut off. Add to this a
remarkably low level of education of most Americans, who aren't familiar with geography or
history, and you get the state of affairs you have.
You are either fighting over there or you are fighting in your homeland. When you stop
fighting over there, you end up fighting in your homeland.
America has just done the same thing every other successful Empire has done since the
dawn of time, suggesting a natural line of development in human civilizations.
Pretty much.
All of America's enemies simply want America out of the way so they can do the same
thing America has done.
Exactly.
If I were Russian or Chinese, I would want the same thing Saker calls for.
And that explains his articles in general.
But let's face it, a second-rate gorilla wanting the Alpha gorilla to die is a different
sentiment from the internationalist liberal humanitarian bullshit Saker cites in his
article.
@Ernesto
Che that just tells me how much you don't know about South Vietnam. The problem was not
that the South Vietnamese were puppets. But just the opposite. Trying to get the South
Vietnamese to follow US prescriptions was like trying to catch a porcupine.
Single most obvious rebuttal to your nonsense -- the rem oval of the first president by
his own leadership – sure we signed on -- no sign on to get rid of an obedient
compliant partner. No one removes their puppets.
I suggest you peruse the lengthy discussions on this subject in the archives on the site
or you could stop mouthing talking points and actually examine the issues on your own.
But to the point -- Well, dropping the civil war nonsense is progress.
@Tom
Welsh Civil reply in obvious deep disagreement in this pub. Nice.
So, my reply is simple: disagree.
Not because of multipolar world, no. That could be a good idea if the other two contenders
were setups I'd like to live in. I wouldn't. So, as I stated before and always will, if I
have to choose multipolar between those three and unipolar managed by US Administration, I
choose the later. Free will, personal choice and such. Vodka, Jack Daniels, whatever.
And, in my particular case it would mean living under, ahm, that " Xi's concept ". Haha
.yeah.
You are correct in one thing, though. There are some questions with no answers,or better,
answers we like. In this particular case there is such answer. Two options:
Global US (or, as Saker puts it "Anglo-Zionist") domination.
Multipolar world with regional wars on its borders, if we are lucky. If unlucky MAD.
The first one could be improve upon. The second can too, without the later.
Big topic; too big for this pub.
Now, should Russia and/or China introduce some other economic and societal models things
could change for better, maybe. That option, hope, remains. Especially in Russia. Of course,
not while the current regime is in power.
But, then, something can change for better in USA too.
We'll see. In meantime, having USA being a dominant world power is, for some of us, preferable
solution to that multipolar" thing.
Or to put it bluntly:we .do ..NOT TRUST .Kremlin and Beijing.
Simple as that.
Russia has no desire to run the world. All it wants – at least according to Mr
Putin – is to be treated with respect and given its rights under international law.
Not to live in a world ruled by any single nation, but in a world where all nations treat
one another with respect and consideration.
Ups... had I seen this , especially " .all nations treat one another with respect and
consideration ." I wouldn't have bothered with my comment No. 239. Please disregard it.
Moving on.
@Tom
Welsh Interesting point you are raising: "Generally speaking, political reform follows
cultural and economic change – not vice versa." I am afraid in most cases, there is
just a woeful lack of documentary evidence. Regarding a recent case for which we have a
wealth of data, the EU, we see the opposite. Cultural and economic change (immigration,
stifling regulations, advance of big monopolies such as Microsoft, Bayer, social misery such
as in Greece etc) has followed in the wake of political reform, initiated by the Maastricht
Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty.
It would seem in the Soviet Union cultural and economic also followed political reform.
One could sustain the same regarding Peronist Argentina until the early 1950s, the German
Empire in 1871 which created the framework for profound and vast cultural and economic
change, Italy since 1861, and so on. Thus, I am not so sure about the validity of the historical "law" you have tentatively
formulated.
In meantime, having USA being a dominant world power is, for some of us, preferable
solution to that multipolar" thing.
Or to put it bluntly: we .do ..NOT TRUST .Kremlin and Beijing.
Simple as that.
I don't trust Beijing. I trust D.C. about as much as I trust the Kremlin, or maybe a
little less, given the way the United States has comported itself internationally since the
end of the Cold War.
@James
Speaks I had considered that my comment about you having low low brain wattage was a bit
too harsh even though you are certainly a fool but it seems I was correct on both counts
after all. A fool is one who is repeatedly fooled and your comment proves that this is the
case in the matter of yourself and 9/11.
The little bit of knowledge that you've acquired is quite useless without a measure of
commonsense which you clearly lack. Again, this thread is about the poor fools who were duped
into participating in US wars of aggression not 9/11 so do yourself a favour and read the
articles on 9/11 that can be found right here at The Unz Review including the one Ron Unz
wrote himself. Good luck.
@Mario964
Excellent point. It would be interesting to read a similar discussion of Saker's points, but
starting from the psychology behind the Milgram experiment and mass propaganda.
Every state must have its peoples, in one way or another, support its geopolitical
operations. In democracies, this comes down to applying psychological pressures so that the
citizenry votes for the desired programs. (Note that whether soldiers enlist primarily out of
idealism or as mercenaries is incidental.) Sufficient political and psychological support can
usually be generated (The surprising failure to inflame the Goutha gas attack into a major
war on Syria is one notable exception). Support can be achieved even in the face of strong
initial opposition, such as WWI and the Iraq war. As Saker mentions, the support can be
eroded when a war drags on too long without victory, such as Vietnam or Afghanistan.
It follows that an article such as Saker's will necessarily generate a strong opposition
reaction. After all, "support the troops" is itself one of these conditioning slogans that
drew the populace in in the first place. Simply recognizing propaganda creates cognitive
dissonance against what has been programmatically imbued, and people have to get past this
point to even consider that they might be acting from Milgram-like motives. Motivating people
to enter this state of psychological confusion so they can deprogram themselves is the
political trick.
This is probably easier for intellectuals, which include many on this site. Not because
they're smarter, but because temperamentally, they actually derive pleasure from the
headaches that accompany delving too deeply into confusing matters ;-).
1. Whether out of idealism or venality, there are a variety of sites, such as Saker's, Russia Insider, and notorious RT, which present viewpoints in general support of Russia.
2. The majority of the rest of the web (and news) presents viewpoints generally
denigrating Russia in nearly every way, from its economy, to government, to domestic and
foreign policy, to its military, and to its leadership (Putin!).
Regardless of motivation, each of these groups is busy telling us what's right with their
viewpoint, and how despicable is the other. The process reveals important information and
angles that the other side wouldn't publicize. Really, all you have to do is read critically
to identify and see past the authors prejudices. This is the point of free speech,
after all.
Pretty much all political arguments are meant to persuade readers, and I don't hold anyone
to blame for trying to be convincing. I do for outright lying, however, and I see a lot more
of that coming from #2 than #1. To the extent that #1 is "influencing elections", their main
effect IMHO is to bust propaganda bubbles of the MSM. And this effect is minor given the vast
resources allocated by #2 to their efforts.
Aren't sanctions (i.e., economic pressure) acts of aggression, too? Just as much as dropping
of bombs, boots on ground, etc.?
Anyway, I really like this article and was hoping it would come along sooner or later in
the wake of the 100th anniversary of the end of the "great" war. I am the only person I know
who doesn't suck up to the paid killers.
Regardless of motivation, each of these groups is busy telling us what's right with
their viewpoint, and how despicable is the other. The process reveals important information
and angles that the other side wouldn't publicize. Really, all you have to do is read
critically to identify and see past the authors prejudices. This is the point of free
speech, after all.
Or to put it bluntly:we .do ..NOT TRUST .Kremlin and Beijing.
Of course; we shouldn't. But then, we shouldn't trust Britain or Israel either. It's
really stupid to assume that a conflict of interest won't arise.
The point of diplomacy is to attempt to come to workable accommodations that have some
chance of implementing peaceful coexistence at a minimum, and preferably to discover common
interests that can be developed to mutual advantage. We'll have to accept or compromise on
irresolvable differences, and work so these don't become too abrasive.
This would be a nice change from the foreign policy of destruction in which the west has
been engaged. Country after country wishing to stay outside that orbit have been turned into
hell-holes, while the austerity economic policies of the west have destroyed their own
nations even from within.
I've been trying to understand why it's nice to read about development in China and
Russia. I've come to realize that it's uplifting to read about anyone engaging in
constructive activity, and it saddens me to see so little of that in the west along similar
lines. Not that Russia and China are neglecting their military, but nearly all large
scale western projects seem to be militaristic and destructive, to the exclusion of anything
else. Has the west lost its ability to do something inspiring?
The US is a country, that has been at war for most of its life. I believe only a mere 25
years of not waging or participating in a war. Hence its reverence for the military.
Yep, the ZUS is as addicted to war as a junkie to drugs over 90% of its history at war,
truly a rogue, insane country.
And in wars a lot of money can be made, lets not forget that
That's why one of the key elements of the ZUS deep state is the corrupt military
industrial complex.
Don't hold your breath for it, but there should be an abject apology coming from US
politicians, pundits, media and intelligence agencies.
For months leading up to the midterm elections held last week, we were told that the Kremlin
was deviously targeting the ballot, in a replay of the way Russian hackers allegedly interfered
in the 2016 presidential race to get Donald Trump into the White House.
Supposedly reliable news media outlets like the New York Times and heavyweight Senate panels
were quoting intelligence sources
warning that the "Russians are coming – again".
So what just happened? Nothing. Where were the social media campaigns of malicious
Russian-inspired misinformation "sowing division"? Whatever happened to the supposed army of
internet bots and trolls that the Kremlin command? Where are the electoral machines tampered
with to give false vote counts?
Facebook said it had
deleted around 100 social media accounts that it claimed "were linked" to pro-Russian
entities intent on meddling in the midterms. How did Facebook determined that "linkage"? It was
based on a "tip-off" by US intelligence agencies. Hardly convincing proof of a Kremlin plot to
destabilize American democracy.
If elusive Russian hackers somehow targeted the midterm Congressional elections they
certainly seem to have a convoluted objective. Trump's Republican party lost the House of
Representatives to Democrat control. That could result in more Congressional probes into his
alleged collusion with Russia. It could also result in Democrats filing subpoenas for Trump to
finally disclose his personal tax details which he has strenuously refused to do so far.
Moreover, having lost control of one of the two Congressional chambers, Trump will find his
legislative plans being slowed down and even blocked.
Thus, if Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin are the purported "puppet masters"
behind the Trump presidency, they have a very strange way of showing their support, as can be
seen from the setbacks of the midterms.
A far simpler, more plausible explanation is that there was no Russian hacking of the
midterms, just as there wasn't in the 2016 presidential election. Russian interference,
influence campaigns, malign activity, "Russia-gate", and so on, are nothing but myths conjured
up by Trump's domestic political opponents and their obliging media outlets.
Now that all the dire warnings of Russia hacking into the midterms have been shown to be a
mirage, the US intelligence agencies seem to be adopting a new spin on events. We are told that
they "prevented Russian interference".
In a Bloomberg
article headlined 'One Big Loser of the Midterms – Russian Hackers', it is claimed:
"Security officials believe [sic] they prevented cyberattacks on election day." However, they
added, "it's hard to tell."
In other words, US security officials have no idea if putative Russian hackers were
targeting the elections. The contorted logic is that if there were no hacking incidents, then
it was because US cybersecurity prevented them. This is tantamount to invoking absence to prove
presence. It's voodoo intelligence.
President Trump has a point when he lambastes Democrats and their supportive media for
crying foul only when they lose an election. In various midterm races, it was apparent that
Democrats would protest some alleged electoral discrepancy when their candidate lost against a
Republican. But when Democrats came out on top, there were no irregularities.
One can imagine therefore that if the Democrats had failed to win control over the House of
Representatives, then they and their intelligence agency and media supporters would have been
clamoring about "Russian interference" to help Republicans retain the House.
As it turned out, the Democrats won the House, so there is no need to invoke the Russian
bogeyman. In that case, it is claimed, Russian hackers "did not succeed" to penetrate the
electoral system or pivot social media.
Nonetheless, there was indeed rampant interference in the recent US election. For one thing,
some 28 pro-Israeli Political Action Committees and wealthy individuals spent around $15
million to promote 80 candidates in the Congressional elections, according to the organization If
Americans Knew. This foreign influence on US voters in favor of Israeli interests is nothing
new. It is standard practice in every election.
During the presidential campaign in 2016, the Israeli-American billionaire Sheldon Adelson
reportedly donated $25 million to Trump's campaign. Undoubtedly that legalized bribery is
why Trump on becoming president has pushed such a slavishly pro-Israeli Middle East policy,
including his inflammatory declaration of Jerusalem as the sole capital of the Zionist
state.
But there is no outcry about "Israeli influence campaigns" and "hacking" from the US media
or from Democrats over this egregious interference in American democracy. No, they prefer to
obsess about the phantom of Russian meddling.
Another evident source of electoral hacking was of the homegrown variety. There seem to be
valid grievances among ordinary American voters about gerrymandering of electoral districts by
incumbent parties, as well as voter disenfranchisement, especially among poor African-American
and Latino communities. There were also reported cases of phone canvassers making malicious
calls to discredit candidates, as was claimed by the beaten Democrat contenders in Florida and
Georgia.
Clearly, there are huge flaws in the US electoral system. Most glaringly, the gargantuan
problem of campaign funding by corporations, banks and other representatives of the oligarchic
system.
A further chronic problem is yawning voter apathy. The recent midterms were said to have
seen a "record turnout" of voters. The official figure is that only 48 per
cent of voters exercised their democratic right. That is, over half the voting population view
the ballot exercise as not worth while or something worse. This is a constant massive disavowal
of American democracy expressed in every US election.
The midterm elections demonstrate once again that American democracy has its own inherent
failings. But the political establishment and the ruling oligarchy are loathe to fix a system
from which they benefit.
When the system becomes unwieldy or throws up results that the establishment does not quite
like – such as the election of uncouth, big mouth Trump – then the "error" must be
"explained" away by some extraneous factor, such as "Russian hacking".
However, the latest exercise in American democracy, for what it is worth, gave the salutary
demonstration of the myth of Russian interference – at least for those who care to
honestly see that.
Another valuable demonstration was this: if supposedly reliable news media and an
intelligence apparatus that is charged with national security have been caught out telling
spectacular lies with regard to "Russian hacking", then what credibility do they have on a host
of other anti-Russia claims, or, indeed, on many other matters?
May I ever so slightly differ from one of your points?
You stated; "The result of this will, however, be catastrophic for the top 100 U.S.
'defense' contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, because then
all of those firms' foreign sales except to the Sauds, Israel and a few other feudal and
fascist regimes, will greatly decline."
I would suggest that these top US defense contractors sales will decline for the simple
reason that they would then have to compete with the rest of the world. One of these US
defense strategies had been to sell their products, or rather say force their products on
NATO no matter how inferior they were. If my memory serves me correctly the UK had a good
fighter jet in the Lightning, but the US forced NATO to buy the vastly inferior American
product which had many crashes and killed quite a few pilots.
But in the situation of a multi-polar world the US would have to really compete with the
likes of Russia and China, which as we know are already producing superior products and the
US has never really been able to compete in such an atmosphere.
There is one other statement which I would also like to differ upon: " a mono-polar world
is a world in which one nation stands above international law" and this statement is
flawed.
A mono-polar world' has never given the right for one nation to be above international
law. America did though start calling itself the International 'policeman', modelling itself
on something similar to a New York policeman stealing apples from a greengrocer's stand. Once
the US realised that there were no voices to be heard, they automatically progressed from the
uniform policeman to the likes of 'Al Capone', which I've noted many bent policemen do.
The trick for such policemen is to know when to retire and get out of the game, but the US
has never been able to retire, and now its fruits are coming back to haunt them.
Eisenhower's
worst nightmare has come true, as defense mega-contractors climb into the cockpit to ensure we
stay overextended. What President Dwight D. Eisenhower dubbed the "military-industrial
complex" has been constantly evolving over the decades, adjusting to shifts in the economic and
political system as well as international events. The result today is a "permanent-war
complex," which is now engaged in conflicts in at least eight countries across the globe, none
of which are intended to be temporary.
This new complex has justified its enhanced power and control over the country's resources
primarily by citing threats to U.S. security posed by Islamic terrorists. But like the old
military-industrial complex, it is really rooted in the evolving relationship between the
national security institutions themselves and the private arms contractors allied with
them.
The first phase of this transformation was a far-reaching privatization of U.S. military and
intelligence institutions in the two decades after the Cold War, which hollowed out the
military's expertise and made it dependent on big contractors (think Halliburton, Booz Allen
Hamilton, CACI). The second phase began with the global "war on terrorism," which quickly
turned into a permanent war, much of which revolves around the use of drone strikes.
The drone wars are uniquely a public-private military endeavor, in which major arms
contractors are directly involved in the most strategic aspect of the war. And so the drone
contractors -- especially the dominant General Atomics -- have both a powerful motive and the
political power, exercised through its clients in Congress, to ensure that the wars continue
for the indefinite future.
♦♦♦
The privatization of military and intelligence institutions began even before the end of the
Cold War. But during the 1990s, both Congress and the Bush and Clinton administrations opened
the floodgates to arms and intelligence contractors and their political allies. The contracts
soon became bigger and more concentrated in a handful of dominant companies. Between 1998 and
2003, private contractors were getting roughly half of the entire defense budget each year. The
50 biggest companies were getting more than half of the approximately $900 billion paid out in
contracts during that time, and most were no-bid contracts, sole sourced, according to the
Center for Public Integrity.
The contracts that had the biggest impact on the complex were for specialists working right
in the Pentagon. The number of these contractors grew so rapidly and chaotically in the two
decades after the Cold War that senior Pentagon officials did not even know the full extent of
their numbers and reach. In 2010, then-secretary of defense Robert M. Gates even confessed to
Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin that he was unable to
determine how many contractors worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which includes
the entire civilian side of the Pentagon.
Although legally forbidden from assuming tasks that were "inherent government functions," in
practice these contractors steadily encroached on what had always been regarded as government
functions. Contractors could pay much higher salaries and consulting fees than government
agencies, so experienced Pentagon and CIA officers soon left their civil service jobs by the
tens of thousands for plum positions with firms that often paid twice as much as the government
for the same work.
That was especially true in the intelligence agencies, which experienced a rapid 50 percent
workforce increase after 9/11. It was almost entirely done with former skilled officers brought
back as contractor personnel. Even President Barack Obama's CIA director Leon Panetta admitted
to Priest and Arkin that the intelligence community had for too long "depended on contractors
to do the operational work" that had always been done by CIA employees, including intelligence
analysis, and that the CIA needed to rebuild its own expertise "over time."
By 2010, "core contractors" -- those who perform such functions as collection and analysis
-- comprised at least 28 percent of professional civilian and military intelligence staff,
according to a fact sheet from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The dependence on the private sector in the Pentagon and the intelligence community had
reached such a point that it raised a serious question about whether the workforce was now
"obligated to shareholders rather than to the public interest," as Priest and Arkin reported.
And both Gates and Panetta acknowledged to them their concerns about that issue.
Powerfully reinforcing that privatization effect was the familiar revolving door between the
Pentagon and arms contractors, which had begun turning with greater rapidity. A 2010 Boston
Globe investigation showed that the percentage of three- and four-star generals who left
the Pentagon to take jobs as consultants or executives with defense contractors, which was
already at 45 percent in 1993, had climbed to 80 percent by 2005 -- an 83 percent increase in
12 years.
The incoming George W. Bush administration gave the revolving door a strong push, bringing
in eight officials from Lockheed Martin -- then the largest defense contractor -- to fill
senior policymaking positions in the Pentagon. The CEO of Lockheed Martin, Peter Teets, was
brought in to become undersecretary of the Air Force and director of the National
Reconnaissance Office (where he had responsibility for acquisition decisions directly
benefiting his former company). James Roche, the former vice president of Northrop Grumman, was
named secretary of the Air Force, and a former vice president of General Dynamics, Gordon R.
England, was named the secretary of the Navy.
In 2007, Bush named rear admiral J. Michael McConnell as director of national intelligence.
McConnell had been director of the National Security Agency from 1992 to 1996, then became head
of the national security branch of intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Not
surprisingly McConnell energetically promoted even greater reliance on the private sector, on
the grounds that it was supposedly more efficient and innovative than the government. In 2009
he returned once again to Booz Allen Hamilton as vice chairman.
The Pentagon and the intelligence agencies thus morphed into a new form of mixed
public-private institutions, in which contractor power was greatly magnified. To some in the
military it appeared that the privateers had taken over the Pentagon. As a senior U.S. military
officer who had served in Afghanistan commented to Priest and Arkin, "It just hits you like a
ton of bricks when you think about it. The Department of Defense is no longer a war-fighting
organization, it's a business enterprise."
♦♦♦
The years after 9/11 saw the national security organs acquire new missions, power, and
resources -- all in the name of a "War on Terror," aka "the long war." The operations in
Afghanistan and Iraq were sold on that premise, even though virtually no al Qaeda remained in
Afghanistan and none were in Iraq until long after the initial U.S. invasion.
The military and the CIA got new orders to pursue al Qaeda and affiliated groups in
Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and several other African countries, parlaying what the Bush
administration called a "generational war" into a guarantee that there would be no return to
the relative austerity of the post-Cold War decade.
Drone strikes against targets associated with al Qaeda or affiliated groups became the
common feature of these wars and a source of power for military and intelligence officials. The
Air Force owned the drones and conducted strikes in Afghanistan, but the CIA carried them out
covertly in Pakistan, and the CIA and the military competed for control over the strikes in
Yemen.
The early experience with drone strikes against "high-value targets" was an unmitigated
disaster. From 2004 through 2007, the CIA carried out 12 strikes in Pakistan, aimed at
high-value targets of al Qaeda and its affiliates. But they killed only three identifiable al
Qaeda or Pakistani Taliban figures, along with 121 civilians, based on analysis of news reports
of the strikes.
But on the urging of CIA Director Michael Hayden, in mid-2008 President Bush agreed to allow
"signature strikes" based merely on analysts' judgment that a "pattern of life" on the ground
indicated an al Qaeda or affiliated target. Eventually it became a tool for killing mostly
suspected rank-and-file Afghan Taliban fighters in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, particularly
during the Obama administration, which had less stomach and political capital for outright war
and came to depend on the covert drone campaign. This war was largely secret and less
accountable publicly. And it allowed him the preferable optics of withdrawing troops and ending
official ground operations in places like Iraq.
Altogether in its eight years in office, the Obama administration carried out a total of
nearly 5,000 drone strikes -- mostly in Afghanistan -- according to figures collected by the
Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
But between 2009 and 2013, the best informed officials in the U.S. government raised alarms
about the pace and lethality of this new warfare on the grounds that it systematically
undermined the U.S. effort to quell terrorism by creating more support for al Qaeda rather than
weakening it. Some mid-level CIA officers opposed the strikes in Pakistan as early as 2009,
because of what they had learned from intelligence gathered from intercepts of electronic
communications in areas where the strikes were taking place: they were infuriating Muslim males
and making them more willing to join al Qaeda.
In a secret May 2009 assessment leaked to the Washington Post , General David
Petraeus, then commander of the Central Command, wrote, "Anti-U.S. sentiment has already been
increasing in Pakistan especially in regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes, which
Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable civilian casualties."
More evidence of that effect came from Yemen. A 2013 report on drone war policy for the
Council on Foreign Relations found that membership in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in
Yemen grew from several hundred in 2010 to a few thousand members in 2012, just as the number
of drone strikes in the country was increasing dramatically -- along with popular anger toward
the United States.
Drone strikes are easy for a president to support. They demonstrate to the public that he is
doing something concrete about terrorism, thus providing political cover in case of another
successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Donald Trump has shown no interest in scaling back
the drone wars, despite openly questioning the stationing of troops across the Middle East and
Africa. In 2017 he approved a 100 percent increase in drone strikes in Yemen and a 30 percent
increase in Somalia above the totals of the final year of the Obama administration. And Trump
has approved a major increase in drone strikes in Afghanistan, and has eliminated rules aimed
at reducing civilian casualties from such strikes.
Even if Obama and Trump had listened to dissenting voices on the serious risks of drone wars
to U.S. interests, however, another political reality would have prevented the United States
from ending the drone wars: the role of the private defense contractors and their friends on
Capitol Hill in maintaining the status quo.
♦♦♦
Unlike conventional bombing missions, drone strikes require a team to watch the video feeds,
interpret them, and pass on their conclusions to their mission coordinators and pilots. By 2007
that required more specialists than the Air Force had available. Since then, the Air Force has
been working with military and intelligence contractors to analyze full-motion videos
transmitted by drones to guide targeting decisions. BAE, the third-ranking Pentagon contractor
according to defense revenues, claims that it is the "leading provider" of analysis of drone
video intelligence, but in the early years the list of major companies with contracts for such
work also included Booz Allen Hamilton, L-3 Communications, and SAIC (now Leidos).
These analysts were fully integrated into the "kill chain" that resulted, in many cases, in
civilian casualties. In the now-famous case of the strike in February 2010 that killed at least
15 Afghan civilians, including children, the "primary screener" for the team of six video
analysts in Florida communicating via a chat system with the drone pilot in Nevada was a
contract employee with SAIC. That company had a $49 million multi-year contract with the Air
Force to analyze drone video feeds and other intelligence from Afghanistan.
The pace of drone strikes in Afghanistan accelerated sharply after U.S. combat ended
formally in 2014. And that same year, the air war against ISIS began in Iraq and Syria. The Air
Force then began running armed drones around the clock in those countries as well. The Air
Force needed 1,281 drone pilots to handle as many "combat air patrols" per day in multiple
countries. But it was several hundred pilots short of that objective.
To fulfill that requirement the Air Force turned to General Atomics -- maker of the first
armed drone, the Predator, and a larger follow-on, the MQ-9 Reaper -- which had already been
hired to provide support services for drone operations on a two-year contract worth $700
million. But in April 2015 the Air Force signed a contract with the company to lease one of its
Reapers with its own ground control station for a year. In addition, the contractor was to
provide the pilots, sensor operators, and other crew members to fly it and maintain it.
The pilots, who still worked directly for General Atomics, did everything Air Force drone
pilots did except actually fire the missiles. The result of that contract was a complete
blurring of the lines between the official military and the contractors hired to work alongside
them. The Air Force denied any such blurring, arguing that the planning and execution of each
mission would still be in the hands of an Air Force officer. But the Air Force Judge Advocate
General's Office had published an article in its law review in 2010 warning that even the
analysis of video feeds risked violating international law prohibiting civilian participation
in direct hostilities.
A second contract with a smaller company, Aviation Unlimited, was for the provision of
pilots and sensor operators and referred to "recent increased terrorist activities," suggesting
that it was for anti-ISIS operations.
The process of integrating drone contractors into the kill chain in multiple countries thus
marked a new stage in the process of privatizing war in what had become a permanent war
complex. After 9/11, the military became dependent on the private sector for everything from
food, water, and housing to security and refueling in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2009 contractors
began outnumbering U.S. troops in Afghanistan and eventually became critical for continuing the
war as well.
In June 2018, the DoD announced a $40 million contract with General Atomics to operate its
own MQ-9 Reapers in Afghanistan's Helmand Province. The Reapers are normally armed for
independent missile strikes, but in this case, the contractor-operated Reapers were to be
unarmed, meaning that the drones would be used to identify targets for Air Force manned
aircraft bombing missions.
♦♦♦
There appears to be no braking mechanism for this accelerating new reality. U.S. government
spending on the military drone market, which includes not only procurement and research and
development for the drones themselves, but the sensors, modifications, control systems, and
other support contracts, stood at $4.5 billion in 2016, and was expected to increase to $13
billion by 2027. General Atomics is now the dominant player in the arena.
This kind of income translates into political power, and the industry has shown its muscle
and more than once prevented the Pentagon from canceling big-ticket programs, no matter how
unwanted or wasteful. They have the one-two punch of strategically focused campaign
contributions and intensive lobbying of members with whom they have influence.
This was most evident between 2011 and 2013, after congressionally mandated budget
reductions cut into drone procurement. The biggest loser appeared to be Northrop Grumman's
"Global Hawk" drone, designed for unarmed high-altitude intelligence surveillance flights of up
to 32 hours.
By 2011 the Global Hawk was already 25 percent over budget, and the Pentagon had delayed the
purchase of the remaining planes for a year to resolve earlier failures to deliver adequate
"near real time" video intelligence.
After a subsequent test, however, the Defense Department's top weapons tester official
reported in May 2011 that the Global Hawk was "not operationally effective" three fourths of
the time, because of "low vehicle reliability." He cited the "failure" of "mission central
components" at "high rates." In addition, the Pentagon still believed the venerable U-2 Spy
plane -- which could operate in all weather conditions, unlike the Global Hawk -- could carry
out comparable high-altitude intelligence missions.
As a result, the DoD announced in 2012 that it would mothball the aircraft it had already
purchased and save $2.5 billion over five years by foregoing the purchase of the remaining
three drones. But that was before Northrop Grumman mounted a classic successful lobbying
campaign to reverse the decision.
That lobbying drive produced a fiscal year 2013 defense appropriations law that added $360
million for the purchase of the final three Global Hawks. In Spring 2013, top Pentagon
officials indicated that they were petitioning for "relief" from congressional intent. Then the
powerful chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, California Republican Buck McKeon, and
a member of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Democrat Jim Moran of Virginia,
wrote a letter to incoming Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on May 13, 2013, pressing him to fund
the acquisition of the Global Hawks.
The Pentagon finally caved. The Air Force issued a statement pledging to acquire the last
three Northrop Grumman spy planes, and in early 2014, Hagel and Dempsey announced that they
would mothball the U-2 and replace it with the Global Hawk.
Northrop spent nearly $18 million on lobbying in 2012 and $21 million in 2013, fielding a
phalanx of lobbyists determined to help save Global Hawk. It got what it wanted.
Meanwhile, Northrop's political action committee had already made contributions of at least
$113,000 to the campaign committee of House Armed Services Committee Chairman McKeon, who also
happened to represent the Southern California district where Northrop's assembly plant for the
Global Hawk is located. Representative Moran, the co-author of the letter with McKeon, who
represented the northern Virginia district where Northrop has its headquarters, had gotten
$22,000 in contributions.
Of course Northrop didn't ignore the rest of the House Armed Services Committee: they were
recipients of at least $243,000 in campaign contributions during the first half of 2012.
♦♦♦
The Northrop Grumman triumph dramatically illustrates the power relationships underlying the
new permanent-war complex. In the first half of 2013 alone, four major drone contractors --
General Atomics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing -- spent $26.2 million lobbying
Congress to pressure the executive branch to keep the pipeline of funding for their respective
drone systems flowing freely. The Center for the Study of the Drone observed, "Defense
contractors are pressuring the government to maintain the same levels of investment in unmanned
systems even as the demand from the traditional theatres such as Afghanistan dies down."
Instead of dying down, the demand from drones in Afghanistan has exploded in subsequent
years. By 2016, the General Atomics Reapers had already become so tightly integrated into U.S.
military operations in Afghanistan that the whole U.S. war plan was dependent on them. In the
first quarter of 2016 Air Force data showed that 61 percent of the weapons dropped in
Afghanistan were from the drones.
In the new permanent-war complex the interests of the arms contractors have increasingly
dominated over the interests of the civilian Pentagon and the military services, and dominance
has became a new driving force for continued war. Even though those bureaucracies, along with
the CIA, seized the opportunity to openly conduct military operations in one country after
another, the drone war has introduced a new political dynamic into the war system: the drone
makers who have powerful clout in Congress can use their influence to block or discourage an
end to the permanent war -- especially in Afghanistan -- which would sharply curtail the demand
for drones.
Eisenhower was prophetic in his warning about the threat of the original complex (which he
had planned to call the military-industrial-congressional complex) to American democracy. But
that original complex, organized merely to maximize the production of arms to enhance the power
and resources of both the Pentagon and their contractor allies, has become a much more serious
menace to the security of the American people than even Eisenhower could have anticipated. Now
it is a system of war that powerful arms contractors and their bureaucratic allies may have the
ability to maintain indefinitely.
Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to. He is also
the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
Over the past year, U.S. prosecutors have discussed several types of charges they could potentially bring against the WikiLeaks
founder
The Justice Department is preparing to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and is increasingly optimistic it will be able
to get him into a U.S. courtroom, according to people in Washington familiar with the matter. Over the past year, U.S. prosecutors
have discussed several types of charges they could potentially bring against Mr. Assange, the people said. Mr. Assange has lived
in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since receiving political asylum from the South American country in 2012...
The exact charges Justice Department might pursue remain unclear, but they may involve the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the
disclosure of national defense-related information.
The proposal I would like to see introduced at the United
Nations would be one to remove a nation that systematically violates the UN Charter. If not
totally remove them, then at least bar them from being on the Security Council, and of course
thus removing their veto.
The UN Charter is the treaty that any nation must adopt to join the United Nations. The very
purpose of the UN when it was formed after WW2 was to prevent war. Thus, the UN charter has
clauses that say a nation can only attack another nation under the authority of the UN Security
Council. It has a clause that says that it violates the UN Charter to even mass forces on
another nation's borders and to then threaten to attack in order to coerce another nation.
The USA has of course frequently been in violation of the UN Charter. Certainly what it has
been doing in Syria is in violation of the UN Charter. The US has been in violation of the UN
Charter for some time. At least back as far as when Clinton couldn't get the UN Security
Council to support his attack on Serbia and he went ahead and did it anyways. There is of
course a long list of such violations. Israel is of course also in violation of the UN Charter
with its constant attacks on its neighbors.
From there, the course would follow basically what Mr. Zuesse says. America's poodle, the UK
would certainly veto a resolution seeking to discipline the USA for breaking the very core
notion of the UN, which is to prevent another worldwide catastrophe like what the world
experienced during WW2. It was a world that was horrified by what had occurred during WW2 that
formed the UN to prevent that from happening again.
To me, its hard to see how the UN accepts the leadership of a nation that violates the Charter that every nation had to
agree to in order to join the organization. Of course, mob bosses have their own ways of breaking the rules of civilized
society. Still, it seems like a place to try to rally the world about.
Dear "Anonymous": Your comment is extremely well-informed and relevant, but the U.N. has been
highly dependent upon the U.S. financially, and therefore the initiative cannot come from the
U.N. itself, but only from particular nations. What I was summarily describing in concern to
the U.N. as it actually exists (not to the U.N. as it should exist, which maybe we'll get to
some day) is an ongoing PR stunt, to be staged at the U.N., to draw the public's attention to
the fact that the U.S. Government has been functioning blatantly, for many years, as a
fascist power. This truth needs to be rubbed constantly into the face of today's America's
Government so as to isolate that Government internationally to become the pariah-Government
that the people who founded the U.N. would puke to see. What won WW II was physically the
Allies, but what has since taken over in spirit is Hitler's spirit, but with different
priorities of whom the 'enemies' are, not Jews especially but this time Russians especially.
Instead of the 'vast Jewish conspiracy', we've got the 'cunning Russian conspiracy' now
having supposedly chosen the evil Trump and made him become America's President, etc, and
it's based on lies now just as it was based on lies in Hitler's time. But it's now the
American aristocracy, instead of the German aristocracy. I was proposing there a PR campaign,
to expose them as what they are.
The wealthy owners of America were always in favor of Hitler's idea of world domination, butt
hey wanted to be in charge of it instead of the Germans. After WWII they saw their chance to
take the lead and have been working to enslave the world ever since. Of course they hate the
UN, or anyone who does not bow to their will to power.
Thank you for this important article. I do not see the development of PESCO or any homegrown
European military as something positive. I think this is simply a re-branding exercise on
behalf of those who control NATO. These " new" proxy militaries will continue to buy US
military equipment as NATO did before. My fear is that the re-branding effort may result in a
revised military doctrine which may actually be more aggressive than NATO..
Laugh if you will, but I think the Eurocrats want to attempt to (re)take the North American
continent (probably with DC's blessing.) Did you see Putin and Trudeau huddle together at the
WWI commemoration meeting?
(And another thing ) We (the people of the West) should remember that the European, English
and American aristocracies (as Zuesse refers to them) keep a boot to each others throats, and
if one lets up, the other grabs a knife from the back pocket and goes for the jugular.
Because they are like that.
In other words: a mono-polar world is a world in which one nation stands above international
law, and that nation's participation in an invasion immunizes also each of its allies who
join in the invasion, protecting it too from prosecution, so that a mono-polar world is one
in which the United Nations can't even possibly impose international law impartially, but can
impose it only against nations that aren't allied with the mono-polar power, which in this
case is the United States.
Might I suggest a viewing and listening to a Dr. Navarro speech:
America is not only the true "evil empire," but it is also a very sick and deluded evil
empire.
The Trump Regime is unhinged, as it desperately tries to Make the American Empire Great
Again by attacking its opponents such as Russia, China, or Iran; waging financial and
economic wars on the world; and projecting its own imperial insanity onto others one twitter
tweet at a time.
But this is true of America in general, regardless of whatever malign regime is in
Washington DC.
The more that America lashes out and seeks to maintain its pretensions as the
Exceptionalist nation, the more it only accelerates its own decline and destruction, as well
as its Day of Financial Reckoning with the collapse of the Ponzi Scheme US economy and Wall
Street.
Indeed, it's not a secret that another Wall Street implosion is coming, one that will make
the 2008 version triggered by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy seem like a tea party in
comparison.
Given Donald Trump's own record of multiple business bankruptcies, perhaps it's only
appropriate that he is the current ruler of America. LOL.
The real issue is when America itself will shatter into a several separate nation states.
Indeed, the prospect of a Second American Civil War is increasingly on the minds of US
foreign policy experts and even the American masses themselves.
According to Dmitry Orlov, America is fast closing the "collapse gap" with its former Cold
War nemesis, the USSR.
Food scarcity and malnutrition of children under the age of 5, places the Ukraine in
percentage terms lower than Pakistan, Ethiopia, Libya, Iraq .the Ukraine welcomes the Cookie
Monster (stats National Geographic)
Obama forever denigrated Nobel Peace Price, making it a cruel joke.
Notable quotes:
"... That Obomber was a real duplicitous piece of shi er, work. They give that con artist the Nobel Peace Prize as a reward for his glib platitudes and deceits promising a more peaceful, egalitarian and prosperous world, and without a hesitation or apology he turns around and initiates four or five new wars in addition to the two he had inherited from Dubya. ..."
"... He re-ignites the Cold War, threatens Russia militarily at several staging areas along its Western frontier, and doubles or triples down in expenditures on the American nuclear arsenal. No price is too high for the American taxpayer when it comes to guaranteed American hegemony over the planet. Nuclear brinksmanship is preferable to any modicum of peaceful co-existence. ..."
That Obomber was a real duplicitous piece of shi er, work. They give that con artist the
Nobel Peace Prize as a reward for his glib platitudes and deceits promising a more peaceful,
egalitarian and prosperous world, and without a hesitation or apology he turns around and
initiates four or five new wars in addition to the two he had inherited from Dubya.
He re-ignites the Cold War, threatens Russia militarily at several staging areas along its
Western frontier, and doubles or triples down in expenditures on the American nuclear
arsenal. No price is too high for the American taxpayer when it comes to guaranteed American
hegemony over the planet. Nuclear brinksmanship is preferable to any modicum of peaceful co-existence.
The other sides (defined as enemies solely by Washington, not themselves) are treated with
disdain and disrespect, as Barry flaunts his trash talking skills, obviously learned in his
self-admitted days of street hustling and tripping on the drug du jour.
Trump has also been a master of insults, but it was Obama who unilaterally unveiled the
skill as a favored American diplomatic tactic.
I'm sure it has Putin, Xi, Kim and Rouhani shivering and willing to swallow any insult to
avoid unbridled Neocon wrath [sarc.]. Fools like the guys the American aristocracy routinely
put in the White House are gonna get us all killed one of these days.
by John Quiggin on November 11, 2018 It's 100 years since
the Armistice that brought an end to fighting on the Western Front of the Great War. Ten
million soldiers or more were dead, and even more gravely wounded, along with millions of
civilians. Most of the empires that had begun the war were destroyed, and even the victors had
suffered crippling losses. Far from being a "war to end war", the Great War was the starting
point for many more, as well as bloody and destructive revolutions. These wars continue even
today, in the Middle East, carved up in secret treaties between the victors.
For much of the century since then, it seemed that we had learned at least something from
this tragedy, and the disasters that followed it. Commemoration of the war focused on the loss
and sacrifice of those who served, and were accompanied by a desire that the peace they sought
might finally be achieved.
But now that everyone who served in that war has passed away, along with most of those who
remember its consequences, the tone has shifted to one of glorification and jingoism.
In part, this reflects the fact that, for rich countries, war no longer has any real impact
on most people. As in the 19th century, we have small professional armies fighting in faraway
countries and suffering relatively few casualties. Tens of thousands of people may die in these
conflicts, but the victims of war impinge on our consciousness only when they seek shelter as
refugees, to be turned away or locked up.
In the past, I've concluded message like this with the tag "Lest we Forget". Sadly, it seems
as if everything important has already been forgotten.
novakant 11.11.18 at 11:11 am (no link)
There's an interesting review in this week's TLS (paywall) by Richard J. Evans of
Jörn Leonhard: Pandora's Box – A History of the First World War
I think it varies per place, even within countries. In my English village this morning, about
a quarter of the population gathered in front of the war memorial, closing the only road.
They stood there, quietly. A couple of older people spent twenty minutes reading out the
names of all the poor souls who had left the village for war and never returned. Then there
was two minutes silence, the vicar called for personal peace for all those affected by war,
and then demanded that all those who could work for peace do so. A grim soberness marked the
whole thing
I had nearly not gone, expecting it to be too jingoistic, but it was nothing of the sort. I
am sure across the many communities remembering the Armistice across the world, many will be
doing the same.
This is my way of responding to Armistice Day.
Bob Dylan, Masters of War" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCnYmrADSns
"You that fasten all the trigger
For the others to fire
And you sit back and watch
While the death toll gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud"
Phil Ochs, "I Declare the War Is Over https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOs9xYUjY4I
"One-legged veterans will greet the dawn
And they're whistling marches as they mow the lawn
And the gargoyles only sit and grieve
The gypsy fortune teller told me that we'd been deceived
You only are what you believe"
Big Ed McCurdy, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc5hxqNdqKo
"Last night I had the strangest dream
I ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war"
Just a personal question on jq. I left Australia 30 years ago. I can remember no jingoism on
armistice Day. On Australia Day and Anzac Day perhaps, but never on remembrance Day. Had that
really changed?
Regarding Leonhard, it is always a cause for concern when a reviewer calls a historian
"judicious."
The most important thing to remember about the Great War is that it wasn't caused by
malign ideologies, or nefarious leveling schemes, or crazed utopian economic cranks. It was
simply an inevitable breakdown of the normal operation of the capitalist world system.
Remember that when the ever growing infestation of libertarians, respected by their peers,
trot out their mythology.
Speaking of "lest we forget," how many people and how many commemorations have managed to
forget that the armistice came about as a direct consequence of the socialist uprising in
Germany, sparked in large part by a mass mutiny among German sailors in Kiel? Two days before
the formal armistice declaration, workers led by the left wing of the SPD stormed the
Reichstag, an ad hoc governing coalition led by the right wing of the SPD negotiated the
abdication of the Kaiser, and both the left and right wings of the SPD simultaneously issued
separate proclamations of a socialist German republic (by which they meant two very different
things, of course, a divergence that was notoriously written out over the following few years
in the blood of revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg).
In short, you can toss Armistice Day into the category as things like weekend, the 8 hour
work day, the 40 hour work week, social safety nets, and so on: if you celebrate it, don't
forget to thank revolutionary socialism for making it possible.
I'm with John on this one. I'll wear the poppy in recognition of the sacrifice, but will
avoid the local cenotaph ceremony. I find the current temper of Remembrance Day services
distasteful and the "our freedoms" trope abhorrent.
Reason @5 It's mostly Anzac Day, but the 100th anniversary has made Remembrance Day a bigger
deal than usual. And we just had a breathless announcement that "veterans" (I still haven't
got used to this Americanism) would be given boarding priority on Virgin airlines.
To be fair, our PM, who is generally hopeless on this and other issues, gave quite a good
speech on the day, which ran under the headline "War is always a failure of our humanity"
the loss of life and the lasting injuries that follow the fighting remain to show the
futility of allowing war to arise as an answer to our conflicting ideas. humanity has failed
as the dominant species. the fault lies in the hopes of too many to emulate the past society
of material greed as a goal. reaching our limits of destroying the clean air and poisoning
the seas with chemical and plastic waste as though the planet could absorb an endless spew
will cause humanity's end. honoring the dead is the least we may do to salute those that went
before us.
steven t johnson@6: WWI was "simply an inevitable breakdown of the normal operation of the
capitalist world system".
Remind me how many other "inevitable breakdowns of the normal operation" happened before,
or after 1914.
Remind me how far the authorities in Serbia, Russia (or indeed Austria-Hungary or Germany)
believed themselves to be operating in the interests of, or governed by, the capitalist world
system.
Come to that, for the next catastrophe in 1939, do the same for the authorities in Russia,
Poland and Germany.
And explain why there have been no such inevitable breakdowns since.
John Quiggin@10 "To be fair, our PM, who is generally hopeless on this and other issues, gave
quite a good speech on the day, which ran under the headline 'War is always a failure of our
humanity'" It seems to me to be quite unfair to blame WWI on us and our depraved human
nature. As Norman Angell notoriously demonstrated "us" do not get any benefit from war. Cui
bono? Nationalists want to go back to a world where sovereign nations struggle for their
place in the sun. Some, like Trump and Putin, want to go it alone. Others like the lords of
the EU want a consortium. What all share is a system of capitalist competition which will,
like all complex, crisis-ridden systems, eventually break down. Whining about human nature
seems to me detestable.
stephen@12 agrees with majority here, and elsewhere, of course. Nonetheless the confidence
the Spanish-American war, the Boer war, the Russian-Turkish war, the Sino-Japanese war, the
Russian-Japanese war and either of the Balkan wars would of course not, ever, possibly, have
spread like the third Balkan war, er, WWI would be touching were it not so disingenuous. Even
if one insists only conflicts between the great powers, the possibility that the Crimean war,
the war with Magenta and Solferino, the Schleswig-Holstein war, the Franco-Prussian war
(proper,) could not possibly have spread out of control is equally disingenous. Remember
54-40 or fight, the Aroostook war? The monotonously repetitive crises like Fashoda and the
first and second Moroccan crises and the brouhaha over the annexation of Bosnia clearly shows
crisis is normal operation. stephen's insistence this is all irrelevant is convenience, not
argument.
As to the absurd notion that a capitalist world system, in which states are the protectors
of the property of the nation's ruling class, somehow means the chieftains are pursuing the
general interests of world capitalism is delirious twaddle. It is the reformist who pretends
globalism means trade and peace.
I am well aware that everyone agrees with stephen on this point, but it is still
wrong.
Tens of thousands of people may die in these conflicts
Try 2 million in Korea.
One million in Vietnam.
500,000 in Iraq.
And who knows how many in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Serbia, Somalia and all our
various proxy wars in Yemen, Latin America and Africa plus all of the civilians massacred by
our client-state dictators in Chile, Nicaragua, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Congo, Egypt, the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guatemala and others I'm likely forgetting.
America is the biggest purveyor of death, destruction and human misery on the globe, but
it sounds like we've "forgotten" that as well.
Plenty of horrible things have happened in various American and other war zones since the
Western Front. Plenty of busted-up vets in every city. The problem can't be that we
forgot .
but isn't the capitalist system an emergent effect based on properties of human nature:
individualism, acquisitiveness, aggression. Surely a change of human nature would lead to a
change of economics at least; hopefully in a progressive direction but not necessarily
so.
A while back, a native American on Twitter commented that her people had already
experienced an apocalypse. This led to the following reflection on my part:
The history of modern Western Europe can be viewed as a series of apocalypses. War after
war after war, only at peace after nearly destroying itself. And that is the history of the
modern world.
>In short, you can toss Armistice Day into the category as things like weekend, the 8
hour work day, the 40 hour work week, social safety nets, and so on: if you celebrate it,
don't forget to thank revolutionary socialism for making it possible.
Do and the 100 million people revolutionary socialists would murder in the 80 or so years
following armistice day, what do they owe the revolutionary socialists?
@13
>What all share is a system of capitalist competition which will, like all complex,
crisis-ridden systems, eventually break down. Whining about human nature seems to me
detestable.
Ah yes, we all remember how non-violent those non-capitalist systems were, with the gulags
and mass killing and terror famines.
In an Old Holborn 'baccy tin somewhere in the house is my grandad's WW1 medal. He served in
the London Labour Battalions. Gassed.
He worked twice between his return and his too early death. Both jobs being very
temporary. His family lived in poverty in the East End; the "Panel" was used at times:
charity from the worthies. My dad was crippled with diseases of poverty. He was a communist
(until the 50s).
He signed up with his mates in '39. His best mate Jimmy Biscoe killed in a bomber operation
in the early 40s.
I got my dad's medals this year, twenty years after his death. He only told me a bit of
his experiences when he was dying. He loved my mum, music and kindness.
My dear, gruff dad-in-law lost his left leg at Monte Cassino. Every few years he'd get a
new "fitting", which was a great strain for him. He loved his family, his garden, rowing; we
talked a little about his experiences one quiet afternoon at the RSA. He too died too
early.
My Mum's favourite brother was a boy sailor. He went through the River Plate among other
actions. He spent time in psychiatric hospital after the war for his 'war trauma'. He too
died early.
The padre at my daughter's funeral had been a padre at Arnhem. A quiet, deeply
compassionate man who took his own life some three years later.
My best friend at school, dead in his twenties, doing his "duty".
Not a hero among them: ordinary, flawed, loved and loving human beings.
And the people left behind ? Lives filled with quiet, unresolved sadness and loss; getting by
with grit and quiet courage.
I used to go to Dawn Service. Then it got to be political Theatre. I get f .g angry with
all the brouhaha, preening and cavorting. None of this helps or helped any of those people
mentioned above.
Half a billion for the AWM? And cutting the funding of food banks? Moral bloody Bankruptcy
writ large.
You know I could possibly be sympathetic with all of you if it wasn't the case that
utopian ideology didn't have more victims than all the nationalisms put together. A plague on
all your houses.
Birdie@17 is telling us human nature generated capitalism a hundred thousand years ago? Or is
telling us that human nature is only free in a capitalist system? I think neither.
Raven Onthill@18 seems to think it is incumbent on the lesser peoples to surrender without
a fight, and accept the status quo as God-given. That Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empires
could be liquidated peacefully, like a common bankruptcy. That is not how it works in a
capitalist system of sovereign states defending the property of their respective ruling
classes, against other states. The rise of Germany and the US against the relative decline of
the British empire meant the balance of forces must change. The new balance could only be
found by war.
The relative decline of the US means the current balance of forces must change. That's why
the US government has explicitly declared Russia and China to be revisionist powers. The US
state will no more go quietly than the British empire, which would not reach a peaceful
accommodation with Germany then any more than it can reach a real accommodation with "Europe"
today.
ironoutofcavalry@19 spells out the shared premises of liberal democrats and fascists, the
determination that famines and wars under capitalism are acts of God, while everything that
happens under socialism is always deliberate. Even if you somehow pretend the depopulation of
the Americas and the mass deaths of the Middle Passage somehow had nothing to do with
capitalism, there were plenty of holocausts in later days. See Mike Davis' Late Victorian
Holocausts. (Davis contention that famines relatively soon after the revolution are the same
as the great Bengal famine or the Irish famine is social-democratic piety, the sort of thing
that gives it a bad name.) Idiot theorists of "totalitarianism" are invited to comment upon
the Triple War in South America.
ironoutofcavalry, the Black Book of Communism is a contemptible far-right propaganda rag
whose death tally was denounced by several of its own co-authors due to the main author's
obsession with reaching the nice round 100 million mark by any means necessary, with "victims
of communism" including such figures as hypothetical deaths due to lack of population growth
during famine periods, Soviet civilian deaths resulting from the economic dislocations of the
Nazi invasion, and even Nazi soldiers killed on the battlefields of the Eastern Front. By
standards much more rigorous and defensible than those used in the Black Book of Communism,
the basic functioning of global capitalist material inequality kills tens of millions of
people per decade -- which is before you even begin trying to tally the casualties of
capitalist conflicts like the two world wars, let alone any of the other massively
destructive imperial interventions around the world before and since, which people like
stephen seem to have trained themselves not to regard as catastrophic in the same way as
WWI/WWII as long as the victims are mostly poor brown people in the Third World. Hell, even
at this very moment the US is providing direct political and military support for a campaign
of intentional starvation by its Saudi proxy state against millions of people in northern
Yemen, a "terror famine" at least as deliberate and premeditated as anything Stalin or Mao
ever dreamed of.
If you must insist on spreading uninformed reactionary bromides, at least take it to a
less serious discussion space where it belongs, and regardless, don't forget to thank a
socialist if you enjoy not being sent to die in a muddy trench.
Stephen, here's a reasonable
summary of how the dynamics of capitalist economic development led inexorably to WWI and
WWII, and are leading to a future global conflict that may be much less distant than we'd
like to imagine. Now before you click the link, note the following passage quoted in the
linked article, by a political commentator writing in 1887 about the prospect of:
a world war, moreover of an extent the violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten
million soldiers will be at each other's throats and in the process they will strip Europe
barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years' War compressed into
three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal
lapse into barbarism, both of the armies and the people, in the wake of acute misery
irretrievable dislocation of our artificial system of' trade, industry and credit, ending
in universal bankruptcy collapse of the old states and their conventional political wisdom
to the point where crowns will roll into the gutters by the dozen, and no one will be
around to pick them up; the absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and
who will emerge as victor from the battle. That is the prospect for the moment when the
development of mutual one-upmanship in armaments reaches us, climax and finally brings
forth its inevitable fruits. This is the pass, my worthy princes and statesmen, to which
you in your wisdom have brought our ancient Europe.
Now based on what you can guess of my political orientation strictly from what I've
posted here, try to guess which 19th century European political figure might have written
that passage. No, your first guess is wrong, he died in 1883, but close, now guess again.
Yes, your second guess is correct .
I've seen "X is bad" statements receive the "Oh yeah? Well Stalin was worse !" non
sequitur in response for many values of X. But this thread is the first time I've seen it
happen for X = WWI.
WLGR@7: if you think that revolutionary socialism made possible "weekend, the 8 hour work
day, the 40 hour work week, social safety nets" how do you explain that all these things
happened in states that did not have to endure the catastrophic misfortunes of revolutionary
socialism?
steven t johnson@14
This is the first time that I have ever been told that everyone [on CT? in the wider
universe?] agrees with me, but if that is so I do not see it as a reason for supposing I am
wrong. Rational arguments dissenting from my opinions are of course always welcome.
stj's argument that, because conflicts pre-1914 did not result in world wars, therefore
WWI was inevitable, has only to be made explicit to collapse.
I am particularly interested by stj's argument that the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78,
between two absolutist non-capitalist monarchies, was in some way the result of international
capitalism. If he will reconsider that opinion, he might like to recalibrate his denunciation
of other wars as capitalist. I would recommend the works of an intelligent Marxist, Perry
Anderson, who explains why pre-Revolutionary Russia and Wilhelmine Germany had many
capitalists, they were not actually capitalist states.
As for his denunciation of capitalism in which "states are the protectors of the property
of the nation's ruling class": there is of course some truth there, but in which system is
that not true? In capitalism, unlike some other systems – revolutionary socialism, to
start with – whose property has been protected?
Birdie@17: "isn't the capitalist system an emergent effect based on properties of human
nature: individualism, acquisitiveness, aggression?" Human nature indeed; try explaining to
Ashurbanipal of Assyria, Alexander, Genghiz Khan why these properties did not apply to their
very n0n-capitalist selves.
Stephen, are you under the impression that western Europe and the US never had a
revolutionary socialist tradition? If so, I don't really know what to tell you other than to
read even the most passing history of Western mass politics and labor struggles, the upshot
of which is that yes of course it was Western ruling classes' fear of working-class
revolutionary agitation that led to the implementation of every single one of those things,
up to and including the German ruling class in early November 1918 deciding to hand over
power to the moderate reformist wing of the SPD, whose first major policy decision as soon as
they'd settled into their desks was to pursue an armistice with the Entente. I can understand
maybe a few token Birchers or Randroids poking their heads out here and there, but has the
anti-intellectual right-wing fever swamp of our current era really risen high enough that
such mild observations are somehow surprising or controversial even in a forum like this one?
'I used to go to Dawn Service. Then it got to be political Theatre. I get f .g angry with
all the brouhaha, preening and cavorting. None of this helps or helped any of those people
mentioned above."
After Trump's election, I chose to abstain for a while from the drenching but never quenching
fire hose of information of the web, and for a while worked through the stacks of books I had
long left unread.
One I avoided for quite a while, not remembering its provenance was "Human Smoke", by
Nicholson Baker. It could not have been a gift; no one in the family still living is familiar
with this author.
It's an assemblage of quotes from various authors from the beginning of the twentieth
century up until the operation of the crematoria which furnishes the title, and its general
tendency is pacifism, disarmament, the efforts made both before and after the Great War to
prevent such catastrophes, and the inhumanity of the conduct of the war. From the outset, the
policy of our side was to starve the other into submission through naval blockades, and to a
considerable extent it was successful.
In the second round, our side was the first to start bombing civilians, and we got better
at it the longer the war went on, though it's far from clear that this was a useful
strategy.
Baker's book is not, could hardly be, a convincing argument for pacifism, given the
drumbeat of fascist pronouncements, threats, denunciations, bragging and swaggering. The
first world war was so pointless that it's hard to understand how it happened, why it
couldn't have been avoided, why it couldn't have been stopped sooner. The second was
different.
It is worth remembering that the First World War was called, by those who opposed it after
the fact, the "War to End War". An organisation was set up to ensure that there would be no
more wars, and an international agreement renouncing war was signed.
The organisation was being set up while the war was actually going on, if you count the
Western blockade and invasion of Russia, and the Greek invasion of Turkey, as part of the
war.
Nevertheless, within less than twenty years you had the Italian invasion of Ethiopia
(arguably an after-effect of Italy's failure to get what it wanted out of the First World
War) and soon after that, the Japanese invasion of southern China (inarguably, ditto).
It is possible for people to argue that since there has not been a similar war since 1945,
"humanity" has "learned its lesson". In reality, however, the reason why there has been no
similar war has been that the principal protagonists have nuclear weapons and no means of
defense against them. If anybody comes up with a genuinely reliable defense against ballistic
and cruise missiles, I'd give the world less than ten more years of peace.
Incidentally, I'd give the world less than ten more years of peace at the moment, but
that's because of the preponderance of doltish psychopaths in governments. It's interesting,
however, that a doltish psychopath like Macron is nevertheless capable of realising that
France is vulnerable to the intermediate-range nuclear missiles which the U.S. is currently
unleashing on the world, and therefore is trying to, er, have a conference about banning the
use of naughty weapons and about promoting world peace.
Stephen has won the gallery with the claim that repeated crises failing to result in systemic
failure of the world diplomatic system (that is, causing world war,) on a an easily
predictable schedule shows obviously it is entirely possible for us to go back to a world of
sovereign nations like before the US hegemony and have endless crises with nary a collapse.
It's like the capitalist economy that way. "We" are now so wise that we can avoid the follies
of our predecessors, who are obviously stupid, which is proven by their being dead, dead,
dead.
I am sure Stephen has also won hearts and minds with the claim Russian conquests
against Turkey meant the extension of the Russian empire rather than the creation of the
states of Montenegro, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. But perhaps people think those new
countries came complete with serfdom; extensive church lands and widespread monasticism;
aristocratic estates and caste privileges; relative absence of cities, etc. That is, the new
states were non-capitalist because absolutist monarchy isn't capitalist.
(I'm not familiar with Perry Anderson because leftist and foreign means it will not be
easily available in the US outside elite libraries. But if Perry Anderson thinks absolutism
and mercantilism were not part of the transition to capitalism, I believe he is gravely
mistaken. Defining "capitalism" as the most refined bourgeois democracy in the imperial
metropole is popular, because it is so usefully apologetic, yet it is still nonsense.)
Last and least, reason@21 utters the preposterous claim "utopian ideologies" have killed
more people than anything else. (The comment seems to include ironoutof cavalry, but I'm sure
ironoutofcavalry, like Stephen and reason, are resolutely complacent about social evils,
because, anti-utopian.) Personally I think business as usual, not utopian ideology, had
everything to do with the great Bengal famine circa 1770 (not the WWII one.) Etc. etc. etc.
in a litany that would sicken the soul, were it not fortified by the conviction it is utopian
ideology that is the spirit of evil.
"Sadly, it seems as if everything important has already been forgotten".
But Von Clownstick just remembered it was "them Germans" – and sadly not one comment
here was about Macron reminding US that "everything important" is how to deal with
"Nationalism"?
– and about:
"But now that everyone who served in that war has passed away, along with most of those who
remember its consequences, the tone has shifted to one of glorification and jingoism".
Didn't the French and the Germans mention that it is now 70 years that these "Archenemies"
at peace? – and I think to this "Armistice Day" the first time even the Germans were
invited? – but how true there was a "shifted tone" by the German Baron Von Clownstick
–
(who somehow still pretends he is "American"?)
Britain tried to negotiate an end to the naval arms race with Germany at least twice
before 1914. Germany was not interested. After 1905 Russia was also keen to avoid conflict.
The proponents of this policy lost credibility due to German sabre-rattling and insouciant
reversals by Vienna.
– and for everybody who might have missed it – let me explain what was going on
at this "Armistice Day".
Baron von Clownstick was very, VERY unhappy -(not only because he was afraid to ruin his
hair) BUT also – BE-cause as he always says "we built the best Arms" – "the most
beautiful weaponry" – and when he always told them Germans and them French and all
these other Nato members to pay more for Nato he was hoping for more Sales of US Arms BUT
then this Macron dude -(and now also Merkel) suddenly were talking about "Europeans
protecting themselves" -(and NOT buying more US weapons) and that made Von Clownstick very,
VERY sad – as his funny tweets about the US not wanting to protect Europe anymore
– if Europe wasn't "pony up" came to let's call it – to "fruition" – or a
classical "protect me from what I want" – and THAT's what happened on this –
"Armistice Day" –
(besides the danger for Von Clownsticks hair)
Just wading in a bit to say that "Revolutionary Socialism" is one of those labels that
obfuscates more than it reveals. Lenin, Debs, and Luxembourg were all contemporaries who
believed in Socialism and revolution, but they didn't all believe in the same "Revolutionary
Socialism." Just look at the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks for proof that even seemingly
small distinctions in what it means to be "revolutionary" have huge implications.
People seem to have settled on using "Revolutionary" as a code word to mean "violent,
dangerous, and radical," or "serious, committed, and effective," depending on their politics,
while "Democratic" is treated as being the opposite (for good or ill), but it's a false
dichotomy. Pacifists can be radical, democrats can be thuggish, and democracy can be
revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, and "effectiveness" is subjective. Given that even
with conventional definitions, it's not always easy to see which of the two camps a
particular Socialist falls under (and many of them changed factions), it's probably best to
clarify what type of revolution you're talking about up front.
er, Peter T, Britain wanted to end the naval arms race with Germany because it was ahead and
in complete control of European seas. It was Britain which had introduced the Dreadnought
battleship and the battlecruiser. It's rather like the American calls to restrict the number
of nuclear weapons and discourage countries which don't have them from acquiring them.
I won't say that German sabre-rattling wasn't a factor in promoting European crisis.
However, it's hard not to see the Russian military buildup in Europe between 1905 and 1914 as
anything other than preparation for war (however inept it turned out to be in practice), and
of course the Russians were heavily involved (diplomatically) in the Balkan wars. It
certainly wasn't the Austrians who orchestrated the murder of their heir to the throne, and
if Britain were to grow grumpy at Syria murdering Prince Charles I would hardly call that
"insouciant".
Wars are a strategy for male reproduction. Invade. Kill the competing men. Impregnate the
women. Enslave and trade women as reproductive property. Repeat. It's what men have done for
centuries.
Eg. Iceland
. ""This supports the model, put forward by some historians, that the majority of females
in the Icelandic founding population had Gaelic ancestry, whereas the majority of males had
Scandinavian ancestry,"
Britain had roughly 70% of the world's merchant fleet, a world-wide empire tied together
by maritime communications and was critically dependent on sea-borne trade. This was not new
– it had been the situation since 1815. Germany set out to build a fleet specifically
designed to challenge Britain's control of its home waters (heavy on battleships, short
range). Britain responded by building the dreadnoughts, then by coming to an arrangement with
France so as to free up forces from the Med, all the while seeking a naval truce. One can
argue that Germany had every right to seek to diminish British naval dominance, but it was
surely both a foolish and an aggressive policy, given that it posed a threat no British
government could not respond to (the invasion of Belgium and German plans to annex the
Belgian coast were similar, in that they would place the High Seas Fleet across Britain's
major trade artery. In 1914 London was the greatest port in the world).
The Viennese insouciance I had in mind was in regard to the Bosnian annexation in 1909.
The details are in Dominic Lieven's Towards the Flame, but it was a typical bit of
Austro-Hungarian over-clever dickishness. It added a layer of distrust that was not helpful
in 1914.
What worried Germany the most was Russian railway-building, which threatened to make their
military planning more difficult. They saw 1914 as a narrow and shrinking window (much as
many of the same people saw war in 1939 as a last military opportunity). Indeed, they had
mooted war against Russia in 1906 and again in 1909.
It's overlooked that Europe had an established mechanism for resolving diplomatic crises
– either an international congress or a meeting of the affected powers (as at Vienna
1813, Berlin 1878, London 1912..). The Powers had imposed settlements in the Balkans on
several previous occasions, and could have done so this time. Britain and France proposed a
congress; Berlin refused.
While they all look similar to us, Germany really was much more militarist and much more
inclined to seek salvation from their dilemmas in war than the other powers. While all the
elites were in a febrile state, Germany's were in something close to a collective nervous
breakdown, isolated, truculent and fearful.
I am a big fan of Hobson's book "Imperialism, a study", written in 1902, that I believe
explain tendencies, that evidently were present in 1902 and before, that later exploded and
caused WW1 and WW2.
The general theory of the book is that capitalist countries face underconsumption problems
at home, due to the exceedigly low wage share (Hobson though is not a marxist so he doesn't
believes that this is the normal situation in capitalism).
This underconsumption forces capitalist countries to expand in the colonies, and ultimately
also to create an military/financial/industrial complex that becomes the valve through which
excess savings (due to underconsumption due to excessively low wages) can be reinvested.
I'll leave out a discussion if Hobson's economic theories make sense (I think they do) or
wether they are the same of marxist theories (I think they are the same expressed from
another point of view and with a more moderate approach), but I want to point out the chapter
about "the scientific defence of imperialism" (pp.162 onwards in the link), because it
clearly speaks of the "scientific racism" theories that are nowadays associated with fascism
and nazism.
Here a cite from p.163:
Admitting that the efficiency of a nation or a race requires a suspension of intestine
warfare, at any rate l' =trance, the crude struggle on the larger plane must, they urge, be
maintained. It serves, indeed, two related purposes. A constant struggle with other races
or nations is demanded for the maintenance and progress of a race or nation ; abate the
necessity of the struggle and the vigour of the race flags and perishes. Thus it is to the
real interest of a vigorous race to be " kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by
contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle
for trade routes and for the sources of raw material and of food supply." " This," adds
Professor Karl Pearson," is the natural history view of mankind, and I do not think you can
in its main features subvert it." Others, taking the wider cosmic standpoint, insist that
the progress of humanity itself requires the main-tenance of a selective and destructive
struggle between races which embody different power and capacities, different types of
civilisation.
From this I think it's obvious how Italian fascism and German nazism were mostly an
extremisation of theories that were already present before WW1 (and Japanese militarism and
probably many other militarism that we prefer to forget today).
In fact Mussolini justified the entry of Italy into WW2 with the idea of a natural struggle
between nations/races/cultures.
Now the main question is: was Hobson correct to say that these theories were just covers
for economic interests, that in turn were caused by underconsumption?
Or to say the same thing from a more marxist standpoint, is it true that WW1 was caused by
various capitalist countries were forced by the capitalist need for continuous
growth/expansion to continually expand their colonial empires, and in the end they had to
clash one with the other?
I think it is true.
This doesn't mean that all war in history were caused by capitalism, before capitalism ever
existed. Hower this gives an answer to some of your questions, and specifically:
1) Why didn't the normal conditions of capitalist production give rise to a world war
before?
Because various capitalist powers hadn't already conquered most of the world, so they didn't
have to go directly at each other's throat before WW1.
2) Why didn't the normal conditions of capitalist production give rise to a world war
after WW2?
Because
(2.a) after WW2 the capitalist system in developed countries had a much higer wage share due
to government intervention and anyway excess savings were repurposed through Keynesian
policies and inflation, thus much less underconsuption,
and
(2.b) because after WW2 for some decades there was only one main capitalist pole, that was
the USA, that was the main proponent of this kind of keynesian policies, either because it
was wiser, or because of the menace of socialism, or for whatever the reason.
WLGR@29: You ask whether I am "under the impression that western Europe and the US never had
a revolutionary socialist tradition?" Well, definitely not, and I cannot see that I have
written anything that could lead you to form an honest opinion that I am, or even might be.
Nor can I see any basis for your belief that, disagreeing with you, I must be wholly ignorant
of Western mass politics. I would advise you to have less faith in your own powers of
telepathy.
To refresh your memory: I wrote that various good thing happened in states that did not
have to endure the catastrophic misfortunes of revolutionary socialism. And I cannot see how
you can dispute either that states which were historically ruled by revolutionary socialists
suffered catastrophes; or that many European and other states, though never ruled by
revolutionary socialists and so avoiding their catastrophes, acquired these good things.
Pre-emptive disclaimer: I am not of course claiming that all catastrophes have been due to
revolutionary socialism.
stj@33: with regard to Russo/Turkish history, I think you are rather confused. You seem to
think I claimed that "Russian conquests against Turkey meant the extension of the Russian
empire rather than the creation of the states of Montenegro, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria." I
didn't: I merely pointed out that the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8 was not in any intelligible
sense a conflict between two capitalist states. But if you want to widen the discussion to
cover Russian conquests against Turkey, I must point out that (1) several such conquests did
in fact involve extension of the Russian empire: take a quick look at the history of Ukraine
and Crimea (2) the creation of Montenegro was a result of Austrian and Venetian victories,
not Russian (3) Russia never conquered any part of Serbia from the Turks, though Russian
support for autonomously rebellious Serbs was significant (4) a complicating factor in the
formation of Romania was the Russian invasion of the principalities of Wallachia and
Moldavia, followed by an attempt to incorporate them into the Russian empire: many Romanians
preferred Ottoman rule (5) Bulgaria, you're right for once, that was a direct and
uncomplicated result of Russian conquest followed by creation of a new state. Which I never
said it wasn't.
I really do think it would be a good idea for you to read Perry Anderson's thoughtful and
erudite works before dismissing them; they may be more accessible than you think. I don't
know if your socialist principles would allow you to use the capitalist outfit Amazon
yourself, but if so Anderson's Lineages of the Absolutist state is available at $29.95 plus
postage. I would also recommend on a rather different topic Passages from Antiquity to
Feudalism, same price: second-hand copies of either are a little cheaper.
Wasn't World War I the result of Germany pursuing conquest?
World War 1 was equally the result of Britain 'pursuing conquest', i.e. its decades-long
ambition to expand its empire into the Near and Far Easts. Josh Marshall is, I'm afraid, an
unreconstructed Anglophile who also believes silly claims that the British went back to
'peace' (whatever that may be for a militarised empire) after WWI.
MFB @ 39
Correct. From contemporary accounts, we know that those members of the public who were
paying attention at the time could see the various empires building up to war for years
beforehand.
Marxist explanations work better for some events than for others; I don't think they work
particularly well for WW 1, though they aren't completely irrelevant.
I don't keep up with the historiography (e.g., the probably endless debate btw the Fischer
school and its critics/opponents), but one can distinguish btw contingent and deeper causes.
The latter were both 'ideational' (e.g., hypernationalism; views of war in general; 'cult of
the offensive'; influence of Social Darwinist and racialist perspectives on intl relations;
relative weakness of the peace mvts and their msg; dominant styles of diplomacy; etc.) and
'material' (e.g., problems faced by the multinational empires, esp. Austria-Hungary; rigidity
of mobilization plans; economic and political pressures on ruling elites; etc.), though the
distinction between ideational and material is somewhat artificial.
I'm not sure which among all the historical works is most worth reading (J.C.G. Rohl was
mentioned by someone in a past thread on this topic, and there were a lot of books published
around 2014 on the centenary of the war's start); but istm James Joll's work, among others,
has held up pretty well. Political scientists/ IR people have also continued to publish on
this. (The last journal article I'm aware of is Keir Lieber's in Intl Security several yrs
ago [and the replies], though I'm sure there have been others since. And even though it's
old, S. Van Evera's piece from the '80s, "Why Cooperation Failed in 1914," is still worth
reading, for the copious footnotes to the then-extant historical work in English (and English
translation), among other things.)
MFB: "It was Britain which had introduced the Dreadnought battleship and the battlecruiser."
Hmm, wasn't the Dreadnought class a direct response to the Tirpitz Memorandum (1896) and
the subsequent German Navy Bill of 1898, the purpose of which was to build a battleship fleet
with which to confront the Royal Navy?
As regards the historical arguments about war guilt, there was a strong pro-war faction in
nearly every European country, and even in Australia (on this last point, and the links to
the British pro-war faction, see Douglas Newton's Hell Bent ). The pro-war faction
prevailed nearly everywhere. Arguing about which pro-war faction was most responsible for
bringing about the war they all wanted seems pointless to me.
Moreover, once the war started, no-one wanted in power anywhere to bring it to an end on
any terms other than victory, annexations and reparations.
Looking specifically at the British government, since it seems to have the most defenders,
they first refused an offer of alliance from Turkey and then (when Turkey entered on the
German side instead) made a secret deal with France to carve up the Ottoman empire. As
mentioned in the OP, we are still dealing with the consequences today. That's not to excuse
the pro-war factions that dominated the governments of Germany, France, Russia,
Austria-Hungary, Italy etc.
A new report from Brown University is aiming to provide a close estimate of the cost of the
overall cost to the US government of its myriad post-9/11 wars and assorted global wars on
terror. The estimate is that $5.933 trillion has been spent through fiscal year 2019.
This is, of course, vastly higher than official figures, owing to the Pentagon trying to
oversimplify the costs into simply overseas contingency operations. It is only when one
considers the cost of medical and disability care for soldiers, and future such costs, along
with things like the interest on the extra money borrowed for the wars, that the true cost
becomes clear.
That sort of vast expenditure is only the costs and obligations of the wars so far, and with
little sign of them ending, they are only going to grow. In particular, a generation of wars is
going to further add to the medical costs for veterans' being consistently deployed abroad.
Starting in late 2001, the US has engaged in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan,
Yemen, and elsewhere around the world. Many of those wars have become more or less permanent
operations, with no consideration of ending them under any circumstances.
Congress commissioned a report from the National Defense Strategy Commission on Pentagon
readiness. It is relatively predictable what these reports would boil down to, because they
always come down to the same conclusion.
The report uses the typical scare-mongering to try to justify an increase in expenditures,
claiming that the US "might struggle to win, or perhaps lose, a war against China or Russia,"
and that the US might be "overwhelmed" in the even of two or more war fronts
simultaneously.
This echoes, if perhaps in even more dire terms, past reports that also claimed the constant
fighting of several wars is eroding readiness, and that the US needs to spend even more money.
The problem is, the increased spending has kept being approved, and every time, it leads to a
new round of reports warning that they need all the more money.
The US is always spending many-fold more money than anyone else, and fighting more wars than
anyone else. Yet despite nations like Russia increasingly limiting their military goals, the
reports are forever claiming Russia is seriously a threat to carry out attacks on the US
home-front. Such claims are preposterous, but have reliably worked in getting more money.
Just
days into a ceasefire with Gaza, the Israelis sent commandos in to assassinate a Hamas
leader. Hamas then surprised Israel with more than 400 rockets in retaliation, leading to
another ceasefire agreed by Netanyahu. But this time his defense minister was having none of
it. He wants a conflict and is threatening to bring down the government if he does not get
one. What's next? Tune in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report:
The brutal warlord understood how to govern shrewdly and even humanely.
Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Winston Churchill, even Barack Obama: there are many
historical figures who Americans have turned to for inspiration in this political distemper.
That's especially true with the midterm elections only a week in the books. But I've recently
found an even more surprising leader who offers a number of political lessons worth
contemplating: Genghis Khan.
I'm quite serious.
As a former history teacher, I picked up Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern
World because I realized I knew relatively little about one of the most influential men in
human history. Researchers have
estimated that 0.5 percent of men have Genghis Khan's DNA in them, which is perhaps one of
the most tangible means of determining historical impact. But that's just the tip of the
iceberg. The Mongolian warlord conquered a massive chunk of the 13th-century civilized world --
including more than one third of its population. He created one of the first international
postal systems. He decreed universal freedom of religion in all his conquered territories --
indeed, some of his senior generals were Christians.
Of course, Genghis Khan was also a brutal military leader who showed no mercy to enemies who
got in his way, leveling entire cities and using captured civilians as the equivalent of cannon
fodder. Yet even the cruelest military geniuses (e.g. Napoleon) are still geniuses, and we
would be wise to consider what made them successful, especially against great odds. In the case
of Genghis Khan, we have a leader who went from total obscurity in one of the most remote areas
of Asia to the greatest, most feared military figure of the medieval period, and perhaps the
world. This didn't happen by luck -- the Mongolian, originally named Temujin, was not only a
skilled military strategist, but a shrewd political leader.
As Genghis Khan consolidated control over the disparate tribes of the steppes of northern
Asia, he turned the traditional power structure on its head. When one tribe failed to fulfill
its promise to join him in war and raided his camp in his absence, he took an unprecedented
step. He summoned a public gathering, or khuriltai , of his followers, and conducted a public
trial of the other tribe's aristocratic leaders. When they were found guilty, Khan had them
executed as a warning to other aristocrats that they would no longer be entitled to special
treatment. He then occupied the clan's lands and distributed the remaining tribal members among
his own people. This was not for the purposes of slavery, but a means of incorporating
conquered peoples into his own nation. The Mongol leader symbolized this act by adopting an
orphan boy from the enemy tribe and raising him as his own son.
Weatherford explains:
"Whether these adoptions began for sentimental reasons or for political ones, Temujin
displayed a keen appreciation of the symbolic significance and practical benefit of such acts
in uniting his followers through his usage of fictive kinship ."
Genghis Khan employed this equalizing strategy with his military as well -- eschewing
distinctions of superiority among the tribes. For example, all members had to perform a certain
amount of public service. Weatherford adds:
"Instead of using a single ethnic or tribal name, Temujin increasingly referred to his
followers as the People of the Felt Walls, in reference to the material from which they made
their gers [tents]."
America, alternatively, seems divided along not only partisan lines, but those of race and
language as well. There is also an ever-widening difference between elite technocrats and
blue-collar folk, or "deplorables." Both parties have pursued policies that have aggravated
these differences, and often have schemed to employ them for political gain. Whatever shape
they take -- identity politics, gerrymandering -- the controversies they cause have done
irreparable harm to whatever remains of the idea of a common America. The best political
leaders are those who, however imperfectly, find a way to transcend a nation's many differences
and appeal to a common cause, calling on all people, no matter how privileged, to participate
in core activities that define citizenship.
The Great Khan also saw individuals not as autonomous, atomistic individuals untethered to
their families and local communities, but rather as inextricably linked to them. For example,
"the solitary individual had no legal existence outside the context of the family and the
larger units to which it belonged; therefore the family carried responsibility of ensuring the
correct behavior of its members to be a just Mongol, one had to live in a just community." This
meant, in effect, that the default social arrangement required individuals to be responsible
for those in their families and immediate communities. If a member of a family committed some
crime, the entire unit would come under scrutiny. Though such a paradigm obviously isn't ideal,
it reflects Genghis Khan's recognition that the stronger our bonds to our families, the
stronger the cohesion of the greater society. Politicians should likewise pursue policies that
support and strengthen the family, the
"first society," rather than undermining or redefining it.
There are other gems of wisdom to be had from Genghis Khan. He accepted a high degree of
provincialism within his empire, reflecting an ancient form of subsidiarity. Weatherford notes:
"He allowed groups to follow traditional law in their area, so long as it did not conflict with
the Great Law, which functioned as a supreme law or a common law over everyone." This reflects
another important task for national leaders, who must seek to honor, and even encourage, local
governments and economies, rather than applying one-size-fits-all solutions.
He was an environmentalist, codifying "existing ideals by forbidding the hunting of animals
between March and October during the breeding time." This ensured the preservation and
sustainability of the Mongol's native lands and way of life. He recognized the importance of
religion in the public square, offering tax exemptions to religious leaders and their property
and excusing them from all types of public service. He eventually extended this to other
essential professions like public servants, undertakers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and
scholars. Of course, in our current moment, some of these professions are already well
compensated for their work, but others, like teachers, could benefit from such a tax
exemption.
There's no doubt that Genghis Khan was a brutal man with a bloody legacy. Yet joined to that
violence was a shrewd political understanding that enabled him to create one of the greatest
empires the world has ever known. He eschewed the traditional tribal respect for the elites in
favor of the common man, he pursued policies that brought disparate peoples under a common
banner, and he often avoided a scorched earth policy in favor of mercy to his enemies. Indeed,
as long as enemy cities immediately surrendered to the Mongols, the inhabitants saw little
change in their way of life. And as Weatherford notes, he sought to extend these lessons to his
sons shortly before his death:
He tried to teach them that the first key to leadership was self-control, particularly
mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, to subdue than a wild
lion, and anger, which was more difficult to defeat than the greatest wrestler. He warned
them that "if you can't swallow your pride, you can't lead." He admonished them never to
think of themselves as the strongest or smartest. Even the highest mountain had animals that
step on it, he warned. When the animals climb to the top of the mountain, they are even
higher than it is.
Perhaps if American politicians were to embrace this side of the Great Khan, focusing on
serving a greater ideal rather than relentless point-scoring , we might achieve the same level
of national success, without the horrific bloodshed.
Changing the direction of American politics from the continued descent into degeneracy and
ahistoricity will be a dynastic task requiring us to teach our youngest generations about
civics and civility and U.S. history all the way from the intellectual and historical events
that led to the formation of the U.S. to the varied movements over the years that have either
strengthened the social cohesion of our melting pot nation or provoked rot from the inside
out.
Swallowing one's pride is the most difficult task of any political leader who tastes power
even once. At that point the politician frequently craves the citizenry to get on bended knee
and swallow the the arrogant decisions of the politician who has grown turgid from the
lustful exceses of the governmental trough.
I realize this "American Conservative" author is trying to point out strengths of someone
who he admits was also a tyrant, but there's a little too much much tyrant love for my taste.
Maybe strong leaders are exactly the problem, and maybe one of the reasons conservatives
often have their pants on fire is their claim that they love freedom as they beg for law and
order at the end of someone else's gun.
"... One of the characteristics of fascists, such as the self-confessed fascist, and Republican party icon, Leo Strauss, is to return philosophically to an earlier age when despotism ruled, and present that as a purer form of politics, before ideas of democracy arose, like Mr. Chalk's article suggests. ..."
"... A brief historical note: the conquests of Russia, the Middle East and southern China happened under Genghis' successors ..."
Mr. Chalk writes: The best political leaders are those who, however imperfectly, find a way
to transcend a nation's many differences and appeal to a common cause, calling on all people,
no matter how privileged, to participate in core activities that define citizenship.
The Great Khan also saw individuals not as autonomous, atomistic individuals untethered to
their families and local communities, but rather as inextricably linked to them. For example,
"the solitary individual had no legal existence outside the context of the family and the
larger units to which it belonged; therefore the family carried responsibility of ensuring
the correct behavior of its members to be a just Mongol, one had to live in a just
community."
The guy who wrote this couldn't have said it better: The Doctrine of Fascism, by Benito
Mussolini. He wrote, in pertinent part:
"In the Fascist conception of history, man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process
to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in
function of history to which all nations bring their contribution."
"Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State
and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State,
which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity."
"The Fascist State organizes the nation, but it leaves the individual adequate elbow room.
It has curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential. In
such matters the individual cannot be the judge, but the State only."
My only exposure to Mr. Chalk's educational institution, Christendom College, was with a
friend's son who went there, and came back to Minnesota and argued with me, as an Army
Officer, that, of course torture was permissible, Aquinas said so.
A Catholic priest whom I knew pointed out later that there had been some further
developments in Catholic doctrine since Aquinas's pronouncements, even if he was a
"Saint."
One of the characteristics of fascists, such as the self-confessed fascist, and
Republican party icon, Leo Strauss, is to return philosophically to an earlier age when
despotism ruled, and present that as a purer form of politics, before ideas of democracy
arose, like Mr. Chalk's article suggests. This is not to ascribe fascist thought to Mr.
Chalk but only to suggest he doesn't need to go all the way back to Genghis Khan for his
political theory, the first half of the 20th Century was replete with similar ideas, in
places like Germany, Italy, and Japan, to name three, all of whom were featured in numerous
TV shows this past weekend in celebration of Veteran's Day.
I've had experience with Christendom College, too. One of my children graduated from there
& received a wonderful education & made lifelong friends.
The little I know about China & other cultures in the East sounds similar to: "and the
larger units to which it belonged; therefore the family carried responsibility of ensuring
the correct behavior of its members to be a just Mongol, one had to live in a just
community."
I think if you just replaced "Mongol" with "Chinese" here you might get the same idea.
That concept is a harder sell in the West where everything is about the individual but I
think we could benefit from adapting that idea a little to our culture.
Jack Weatherford is an apologist for Genghis Khan and should not be the sole source life
lessons that Genghis Khan offers. Go to primary sources to read about Mongol invasions from
the vantage of the victims and their efforts to get out from under the Mongol yolk.
Genghis Khan was from a nomadic people that made their living by grazing and raiding their
neighbors. He raised that up a notch by conquering much of the known world of the day.
I have my doubts about Genghis Khan putting much value on the lives of public servants,
undertakers, lawyers, teachers, and scholars. Perhaps doctors but medicine was not all that
advanced in the 13c. He definitely prized craftsmen who could work with leather, fabric, and
metal and particularly engineers whom he incorporated into his military campaigns.
This enlightened environmentalist may have spared the lives of animals but wantonly killed
peasants and destroyed farmland.
Genghis Khan military strategy involved rapine, destruction, terror, torture, enslavement,
and mass extermination, with death tolls unmatched by any other single person.
He destroyed civilizations leaving fields of bones where once there were buildings,
libraries, churches, mosques, temples, and hospitals. A partial list of cities destroyed by
Mongol conquest listed in in Wikipedia includes Balkh, Bamiyan, Herat, Kiev, Baghdad,
Nishapur, Merv, Urgench, Lahore, Ryazan, Chernigov, Vladimir, and Samarkand.
Mr. Chalk would have it that Genghis Khan created one greatest empires the world has ever
known. This was an empire of vassals, subject to communal punishment, and subject to periodic
acts of savagery to test loyalty. It is not a model that the US should emulate.
Perhaps we can learn much more from Cyrus the Great (580-529 BC) the Persian benevolent
emperor who declared the first charter of human rights in the history.
Contrary to Genghis Khan, he was very generous and kind to the conquered, who recognized him
as a liberator and "Law-giver".
He respected their religion and culture. Genghis was the opposite of Cyrus. When he conquered
Persia, he was extremely brutal.
"Weatherford notes: "He allowed groups to follow traditional law in their area, so long as it
did not conflict with the Great Law, which functioned as a supreme law or a common law over
everyone." This reflects another important task for national leaders, who must seek to honor,
and even encourage, local governments and economies, rather than applying one-size-fits-all
solutions."
I guess the Great Khan was a very fortunate man he did not have to deal with an
uncontrollable globalized financial network serving banks and multinational corporations
only.
The people over elites, yep. Is that not what the Great Trump promised?
Interesting article, though its relevance to our current unpleasantness is a bit hard to
swallow. MacArthur considered Timujin/Genghis Khan to be the greatest military genius of all
time. Can't argue against that assertion. To my knowledge, he never lost a single battle, and
his Mongol empire became the largest in history, controlling over 60 percent of the Eurasian
landmass (including China under his grandson, Kublai).
Nevertheless, as Marcus Aurelius might have written "Where is Genghis Khan now?" And his
empire? After he died, his descendants (Timujin's progeny was enormous) fell into quarreling
among themselves. When another grandson, Mangu Kahn, was defeated by the great Sultan Baybars
and the Egyptian Mamluks at the Battle of An Jalut, the empire began its slow recession.
Alexander, Napoleon and Hitler succumbed to the "Arrow of Time"–along with their
empires. And in the latter case, the United States will suffer the same fate, as difficult as
it may be for us to envision.
As Peter O'Toole's T.E. Lawrence said "Nothing is written." And nothing–is
forever.
In fairness one should take account of the responsibility of some of the conquered for the
westward expansion of the Mongol Empire. The rules of diplomacy we expect today probably
descend from the practice of the ancient Persian empires, but they had been adopted by the
steppe dwellers long before the days of Genghis Khan.
His most powerful neighbor to the west was the Khwarezmian Empire. The Shah of Khwarezmia
gave ample casus belli to Genghis Khan, and not long after died a refugee on an island in the
Caspian and had to be buried in his servant's shirt as he had none of his own. There were
further consequences.
The Shah's mother was a princess of the Qipchak nomads, who dominated the western steppe,
and they thus became enemies of the Mongols. After the fall of Khwarezmia, Genghis Khan sent
a reconnaissance force to scope out the western steppe and neighboring regions, two divisions
led by two of his best generals but with no mission to conquer anyone or to fight unless
necessary.
They needed to cross the Caucasus Mountains from south to north, but were impeded first by
the Georgians (who had suffered greatly at the hands of the Khwarezmians but did not regard
the Mongols with gratitude) and then by a Qipchak contingent who blockaded the pass. So the
Mongols first destroyed the Georgian army, and then tricked thi Qipchaks with bribes, which
they promptly took back once they were through the pass.
They then sent ambassadors to the major cities of Rus', each ruled by its own prince, to
assure them that they wanted peace with Rus' and intended to stay on the steppe. Many of the
princes, however, had taken wives from the Qipchak nobility (in addition to political
advantages secured by such unions, it seems that Qipchak girls were regarded as knowing how
to treat a fellow right), and Qipchaks in the princely courts told them that the Mongols were
dangerous enemies.
Thereupon the princes had the Mongol ambassadors thrown from the city walls (probably by
the Qipchaks). This gross violation of diplomatic norms put Rus' on the Mongols' fecal
register permanently. Worse yet, the Princes of a number of major cities were incited by the
Qipchak to take their armies and drive off the Mongols.
The latter staged a feigned retreat and led the Rus' forces a merry chase until they had
them with their backs to the River Kalka. Then they did what the Rus' princes could hardly
have expected (the Qipchaks should have, but were blinded by thirst for revenge)–they
turned and slaughtered the Rus' armies.
Then they went back and reported to the Great Khan, fulfulling their orders exactly. When
under his successor Ögödei the Mongols returned to Rus', they regarded the Rus'ians
as a low-life lot who violated basic rules of decency in international relations, had no
grasp of such military basics as unity of command, and had needlessly made themselves enemies
of the Great Khan and of the Blue Heaven.
The Khwarezmian Shah, Queen Tamara of Georgia, and the princes of Rus' could at least have
treated the Mongols politely. It might have saved them a lot of trouble.
by Justin
Raimondo Posted on November 15,
2018 November 14, 2018 We don't really hear all that much about Melania Trump in the
media except occasional digs at her immigration status and a few daring photos. That's
because the FLOTUS is one of the few unreservedly good things about this administration, and
of course the media doesn't want to go there. Her grace, her reserve, her remarkable calm at
the epicenter of a tumultuous White House, and, strikingly, her sense of style (and I don't
just mean her clothes) puts her on a different plane from the Washington circus that
surrounds her.
She had managed to keep her distance from the cutthroat politics of the Beltway, that is,
until her
collision with Mira Ricardel, National Security Advisor John Bolton's top aide and
enforcer. Ricardel apparently disparaged the First Lady to other members of the White House
staff, and tried to withhold resources from her on her recent trip to Africa. Whatever
personal interactions of an unpleasant nature may have passed between these women, it's hard
to imagine what provoked the office of the FLOTUS to issue the following statement :
"It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the
honor of serving in this White House."
Ricardel is described by those who know her as abrasive, a bureaucratic in-fighter, and
one "who doesn't suffer fools lightly." Having mistaken the First Lady for a fool, Ms.
Ricardel is the one who will suffer – along with Bolton, who has protected her since
her appointment from a chorus of critics, but who cannot stand against Melania.
So Team Bolton is on the outs, which means the America Firsters within the administration
who oppose our foreign policy of globalism and perpetual war are on the rise. Which leads us
to contemplate the meaning of this incident. The War Party's ranks are not filled with Mr.
Nice Guys. They are nearly all of them pushy self-serving aggressive SOBs, with about as much
personal charm as a rattlesnake.
I'm reminded of an essay by the
conservative philosopher Claes Ryn, professor of politics at Catholic University, in which he
describes the obnoxious behavior of the children of our political class in a local
MacDonald's just inside one of the Beltway's more prestigious neighborhoods:
"Deference to grown-ups seems unknown. I used to take offense, but the children have
only taken their cue from their parents, who took their cue from their parents. The adults,
for their part, talk in loud, penetrating voices, some on cell phones, as if no other
conversations mattered. The scene exudes self-absorption and lack of self-discipline.
"Yes, this picture has everything to do with U.S. foreign policy. This is the emerging
American ruling class, which is made up increasingly of persons used to having the world
cater to them. If others challenge their will, they throw a temper tantrum. Call this the
imperialistic personality – if 'spoilt brat' sounds too crude."
The Imperialistic Personality, indeed! It seems Ms. Ricardel had one too many temper
tantrums so that even in the permissive atmosphere of Washington, D.C., it was too much.
There are a lot of imperialistic personalities in that particular location, it seems, for one
reason or another. But things are different in Donald Trump's Washington, and even if we have
to take down the Ricardels one by one, just think of the numbers we can rack up in the next
six years.
A NOTE TO MY READERS : My apologies for the short column: I have some medical
issues to take care off this week and I'm a bit pressed for time.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here . But please note that my tweets are sometimes
deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out
loud.
ALI ABUNIMAH: Yeah, it can be very intimidating and disruptive on a personal level. And you know, there are certainly stories
of students feeling that in the film, and that we've also reported on for many years. But I think people should look at the big picture;
that this operation the film reveals, that Israel has been spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on, Israel and its lobby
groups, and people like Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump's biggest campaign donor, and people like Adam Milstein, who is named in the
film as- he's an Israeli-American financier, a convicted tax dodger who is named in the film as one of the main funders and founders
of the anonymous smear site Canary Mission, which tries to destroy the reputations of college students so that they can't get jobs.
It is very scary for individuals. But the big picture here is that Israel is losing the support of progressive segments of society,
big time. We see that in poll after poll. Just last month there was a poll by YouGov for the Economist that showed a collapse in
support for Israel among progressives, among liberals, among younger people, among people of color. And that the strong support for
Israel now looks exactly like Donald Trump's base. It's white, it's male, it's very right wing.
And so I think the film should be seen not so much as a testament to the success of the Israel lobby, but of its failure. The
fact that they have had to mount this massive operation, and it has not been able to staunch the hemorrhage of support for Israel,
I think really should encourage people that speaking out is the right thing to do. The more normalized that it becomes to talk about
Palestinian rights, the less power the smear and intimidation tactics have. So the message I think people should take away is speak
up more, not less, because we're winning.
BEN NORTON: Well, we'll have to end it there. We were speaking with Ali Abunimah, who is the co-founder and editor of The
Electronic Intifada. The Electronic Intifada is an award-winning news website that published this censored Al Jazeera documentary
with an undercover reporter investigating the Israel lobby in the United States. Thanks for joining us, Ali.
Transparency and knowledge is the key to dis-empowering the power elite and empowering everyday people. Israel's suppression
of this film is a clear example of information control. Thank you Ali Abunimah and The Electronic Intifada for helping relieve
the yolk of information asymmetry with regards to Israel's treatment of Palestinians and Israel's manipulation of American policy.
I wrote a letter to my U. S. senator, critical of accepting "contributions" from an ardently pro-Israel government lobbying
group. The FBI showed up in the neighborhood and called to interrogate me. This for holding my (so-anointed "liberal") senator
accountable to act in the "best interests" of constituents!
Totalitarianism and fascism are creeping forward, and the governments
of Israel and its US collaborators -- in every branch and level of government -- are its leading proponents. What the Zionists
do is not only unconstitutional, it's seditious.
A lot of us in the human race don't look lightly upon truly seditious behavior,
such as that carried out every day by the U. S. government on behalf of multinational corporations and foreign agents in direct
violations of U. S. laws. Indeed, a lot of us consider sedition a capital crime, with all its attendant accountability implied.
Series Content Al Jazeera's undercover film The Lobby –
USA, censored by Qatar, has finally been published by The Electronic Intifada. Editor Ali
Abunimah discusses the documentary's explosive revelations, exposing Israel-backed attacks on
US activists
My study of Jewish ID politics suggests that America isn't just influenced by one Jewish
lobby or another. The entire American political-cultural-spiritual spectrum has been
transformed into a internal Jewish exchange. Most American do not see the true nature of the
battle they participate in and, for the obvious reasons, their media and their academics do not
help. It is more convenient to keep Americans in the dark.
America is rapidly moving towards a civil war. The divide isn't only ideological or
political. The split is geographical, spiritual, educational and demographical. In a
Vox article titled, "The Midterm Elections Revealed that America is in a Cold Civil War,"
Zack Beauchamp writes, "This is a country fundamentally split in two, with no real room for
compromise." Of the midterm election Beauchamp reports that "American politics is polarized not
on the basis of class or even ideology, but on identity One side open to mass immigration and
changes to the country's traditional racial hierarchy, the other is deeply hostile to it." He
correctly observes that "Republicans and Democrats see themselves as part of cultural groups
that are fundamentally distinct: They consume different media and attend different churches;
live in distinct kinds of places and rarely interact with people who disagree with them."
Despite this American schism, Israel and its Lobby are somehow able to influence both sides,
managing to finding pathways to the secluded corridors of both parties. Although Democrats and
Republicans can no longer talk to each other, it seems that both are happy to talk to Israel
and the Lobby. And it is at AIPAC's annual conference that these political foes compete in
their eagerness to appease a foreign state. This anomaly in American politics demands
attention.
As a former Israeli, I had not observed the effects of the Israel/ Jewish Diaspora dilemma
until I had my experience at the Student Union Hall in Britain. Israel was born with the
Zionist desire to eradicate the identity of Jews as cosmopolitans. Zionism promised to bond the
Jew with the soil, with a territory, with borders. Thus, it is consistent with the Zionist
paradigm that Israel is notorious for its appalling treatment ofasylum seekers, immigrants and,
of course, the indigenous people of the land. Israel has surrounded itself with separation
walls. Israel deployed hundreds of snipers in its fight to stop the March of Return – a
'caravan' of Palestinian refugees who were marching towards its border. Israel has been putting
into daily practice that which Trump has promised to deliver. For a Trump supporter, Israel's
politics is a wet dream. Maybe Trump should consider tweaking his motto in 2020 into 'Let's
make America Israel.' This would encompass building separation walls, bullying America's
neighbors, the potential to cleanse America of the 'enemy within,' and so on. It is not
surprising that in 2016
Trump beat Clinton in an Israeli absentee exit poll . The Israelis do love Trump. To them,
he is a vindication of their hawkish ideological path. Although during the election Trump was
castigated as a vile anti-Semite and a Hitler figure by the Jewish progressive press, once
elected,
Fox News was quick to point out that Trump was actually the 'First Jewish President.'
We can see that Israel, Trump and his voters have a lot in common. They want militant anti
immigration policies , they love 'walls,' they hate Muslims and they believe in borders. When
alt right icon Richard Spencer described himself on Israeli TV as "a White Zionist" he was
actually telling the truth. Israel puts into practice the ideas that Spencer and Trump can so
far only entertain. But the parallels between Israel and the Trump administration's Republican
voters is just one side of the story.
... ... ...
The story of Jewish political strength in America doesn't end there. A New York Jew can
easily metamorphosize from an hard-core Identitarian into rabid Zionist settler and vice
versa, but such a manoeuvre is not available to ordinary Americans. White nationalist
Richard Spencer can not make the political shift that would turn him into a progressive or a
liberal just as it is unlikely that a NY transsexual icon would find it possible to become a
'redneck.' While Jewish political identity is inherently elastic and can morph endlessly, the
American political divide is fairly rigid. Jewish ideologists frequently change positions and
camps, they shift from left to right, from Clinton to Trump (Dershowitz), they support
immigration in their host counties yet oppose it in their own Jewish State, they are against
rigid borders and even states in general, yet support the two state solution in Palestine
(Chomsky). Gentiles are less flexible. They are expected to be coherent and consistent.
It was this manoeuvrability that made PM Netanyahu's 2015 speech in front of a joint session
of Congress a 'success,' although it might well have been considered a humiliation for any
American with an ounce of patriotic pride. As we wellknow, Bibi can communicate easily with
both Republicans and Democrats just as he cansimultaneously befriend Trump and Putin. ....
Reading the article the thought came up 'when will the USA, the majority of USA citizens,
(begin to) realise that the era of USA foreign politics for internal political reasons, is
over, no longer affordable ?'
The 19th century USA Civil War was horrible, as with all civil wars it was, to a large extent
a foreign war.
If indeed again a USA civil war starts, I'm not optimistic about the possibility of
preventing it, not much of the present USA will still be there at the end, fysically.
And, will there still be a political USA when the fighting stops, or will it end as Germany,
the foreign victors creating the USA they want ?
A USA, as Germany now under Merkel, intent on destroying itself culturally ?
So good to see Gilad Atzmon here at Unz. I have read his two books, The Wandering Who?
and Being in Time , and can thoroughly recommend them.
These Jewish bodies tend to preach inclusiveness while practicing exclusivity.
But of course! They first begged for inclusion into our powers structures, then once we
complied, they returned the favor by taking them over and excluding us from them.
This is a bit reductive. This commenter does not recognize himself in the dichotomy above.
When forced to choose a race on bureaucratic forms, this commenter enters 'human.' Letting
them call you an American opens you up for intensely manipulative statist propaganda. And
when you know your rights – your human rights, as opposed to your bullshit half-assed
revoked constitutional rights – your race is incidental. You know that
nondiscrimination underpins your ethics and the law.
This sort of identity is certainly ferociously suppressed by the Israeli fifth column.
Falk is this kind of guy too, a Jew but so what, and look what they did to him. Ajamu Baraka
too. This overwhelming tidal wave of immigrants from the global south: they grew up with
human rights, including the crucial right to solidarity, which negates all the invidious
aspects of identity politics. Basically, as a human you side with underdogs worldwide:
Okinawans, Palestinians, landless Latin Americans, Africans, you name it. Cohesive social
forces are not confined to ethnic groups.
Tensions behind the Iron Curtain inside the US are incidental. The real conflict is us
humans versus overreaching states. Given the downtrodden nature of the US subject population,
this conflict is playing out mainly outside US borders. The left/right continuum has always
been a CIA construction. Statists and humanists array on an orthogonal axis, and that
contention continued when CIA rolled the old left up. Cosmopolitans have not gone away.
Israel may be infecting the US with statist divide et impera, but humanist institutions
are penetrating Israel too. Look what's happening as the HRC and other human rights treaty
bodies review Israel.
Israel is formally accused of interpreting its commitments in bad faith. This allows
treaty bodies to gang up and apply international criminal law to Israeli torture, murder, and
extermination. It's already happening to criminal US officials. Israel's next.
Atzmon is right re "New York Jews", them being potentially mutable. But, Israelis, being
normal nationalists, cannot show the same level of "shape-shifting". A multiculturalist
minority in one country can become other nation's nationalist majority. Just, Israeli
nationalists cannot become Israeli open borders advocates, multiculturalists, globalists etc.
Only a minority population, basically strangers in another country, can practice various
ways of behavior. Host, dominant culture in a country- cannot. Dershowitz can change
positions; just, both Netanyahu & any Israeli labor politician can not.
It's the hypocrisy that pisses everyone off with Jews. Few people, especially on the right,
have any issue with a nation defending itself. It's that the same Jews who are trying to
shove diversity/multiculturalism/refugees 49.Reuben Kaspate says: November 14, 2018 at 3:42
pm GMT Civil war? How soon are we talking here? Perhaps, the status quo will be the
foreseeable future just humming along. down our throats are either supportive or silent when
it comes to Israel making itself into a pure ethnostate behind barbed wire.
But at a certain point in my life, around my thirties, I started to find all of it too
exhausting. I wanted to simplify things. I demoted myself into an ordinary human being.
A lot of people want this, but ordinary humans beings also have to live in societies
– and quite sophisticated ones at that. Elected representatives (or leadership) need
responsibility and integrity for it to work.
THE US JOINS THE 3RD WORLD
Government responsibility and integrity are not guaranteed (notably in places like Africa
and S.E. Asia), but the United States is probably the leading example of a government failure
in an advanced society. In the US, like much of the 3rd world, special interests (minority
ethnic and commercial) loot the public through a corrupt bargain with the holders of
political power. Hillary Clinton was the classic example, with the same "Pay to Play"
philosophy as the usual leadership of the Philippines or the Congo.
The 3rd world antidotes are Nationalism and Populism, but having gained power, political
leaders usually sell out (sounds familiar). Also the public of the US have learnt to be
trusting, and find it hard to believe that they've been hit by a classic 3rd world
problem.
In the US, Zionists have looted $ trillions in support of their Special Interest (Israel)
and corporations have extracted many more $ trillions through the mass outsourcing of entire
industries, complete with their technology and supply networks to Asia. It's not engraved in
stone that US industry, had to relocated to Asia or Indians have to be recruited for its IT
work. Germany and Japan for example, have held onto their industrial leadership in recent
decades and the US could have done the same. At one time the US was the world leader in US
based automobile production (Detroit), steel, aluminium, camera and film, industrial
chemicals, communications equipment, computers and electronics, aircraft and aerospace (still
partly) etc. With what's left in mostly in services and retail (often looted by Hedge Fund
asset strippers).
In other words, under a genuine post WW2 "America First" policy involving top quality
national education, research and government support of leading industries, the US could still
be the world's leading industrial and economic power and not have to worry about debt,
deficits and social decline, and also find plenty of jobs for Latino migrants.
However, the US got instead its present 3rd world style corrupt elite who know that
nationalism is their Nº1 enemy.
Only Anglos can mount a nationalist challenge, hence the paranoia when Trump arrived on
the scene with his "America First" dialogue and Anglo base. In contrast, the whole apparatus
of the Zioglob/ deep state/MSM defence is Identitarian, and aimed at destroying the
foundations of Anglo society, with LGBT, "White guilt dialectics", multiculturalism,
exclusion from Ivy League universities, Hollywood slime, speech laws, statue demolition,
in-your-face Africanization, massive debt, political corruption, open frontiers and exporting
middle class jobs.
CHINA JOINS THE 1ST WORLD
The Chinese seem to be doing it right.They have an explicit national policy to gain and
hold top positions in key world industries and make it a joint national effort to succeed
(especially in national human development/education). Also when they find corrupt government
officials (even at high levels) they quickly put them on trial and shoot them.
Winston Churchill talked about this/these divisions in the Jewish people in the 1930s, back
before Israel became a Jewish ethnostate – he presented the main 2 divisions between
ethnic Jews who fell down in to the worst forms of Communism, Bolshevism, Anarchism in Russia
and Eastern Europe and those other ethnic Jews who were sort of doing OK being loyal to their
European/American countries especially England they lived in while also promoting a healthier
form of Zionism working for some eventual Jewish national state somewhere probably in then
British administered Palestine.
Zionism vs Communism – a struggle for the Jewish Soul:
Churchill didn't present the extremely bad alternative we had today:
Jews in the diasapora everywhere from Russia to Poland to Germany, France, England,
Canada, Sweden Australia, few left in South Africa our USA doing this:
Promoting Israel over everything as an exclusively Jewish ethno state with endless US, UK
other wars against Israel's neighbors and .
Promoting the worst forms of multi culturalism, open borders immigration in to the West,
Jewish media mafia domination/monopoly of the mainstream media, social media in USA, UK,
Sweden etc promoting the worst forms of porn, rap music, fake news, endless movies and TV
shows demonizing all White European men as evil Racists, rapists – promoting the worst
Jewish feminists/lesbians to the US Supreme Court, Rachel Maddow type news commentary
etc.
I have long admired your noble efforts on behalf of the Palestinian people. You often
write in ways that resonate with me, and I'm glad to see you here at The Unz Review.
Israel deployed hundreds of snipers in its fight to stop the March of Return – a
'caravan' of Palestinian refugees who were marching towards its border. Israel has been
putting into daily practice that which Trump has promised to deliver. For a Trump
supporter, Israel's politics is a wet dream.
But I have to tell you, you're waaayyy off with this characterization of Trump
supporters.
There are, I'm sure, a lot of brain-dead "Christian" Zionists who drool at the prospect of
slaughtered Palestinians, because murdering Christ's modern day relatives living in his lands
are the only way to force Jesus to return and give them their rapture. And I suppose there
are perhaps a fraction of a percentage point of people who actually want Trump to throw out
(or murder) all non-whites to create the kind of racial purity Bibi and his crew of
psychopaths are demanding for Israel.
But from what I've seen, and being one of them, as to the vast majority of what you call
"Trump supporters", the idea of murdering people in order to steal their land, is a monstrous
absurdity.
For the record, we voted for Trump to end the demonic reign of terror and mass
murder in the Middle East. The very kind of mass-murder and daily atrocities that were
cackling Hillary's ("we came, we saw, he died) and Bill's ("it's worth it") trademark.
We voted for Trump as a repudiation of those evils, that had long stained our national
soul, and indeed had made America the kind of place Bibi was pleased with.
We did not vote for Trump to murder and steal, or otherwise do anyone harm. We voted for
Trump to do the opposite, and end the Eternal Wars for Israel. No one on the Alt-right likes
the wars. We simply want to be left alone, to pursue our humble lives unmolested by
globalists and their nefarious designs for us. Is that so terrible?
. In fact, Israel has become a prime model for American nationalists.
with all due respect, that is a vile smear, Sir.
Where are these 'white nationalists' who're demanding we terrorize and murder and steal
other people's land? Eh?
For the record, white nationalists are today's Palestinians. What they're demanding is
that they don't have to give up the lands they have, and were born on, and be forced out to
make room for unlimited others. Or forced to assimilate to an Hispanic or Muslim culture and
way of life. Is that so egregious? To want to persevere as an American in an American
culture, with hostility to none, and trade with and good relations with all and any who
respond in good faith?
Why is it that all white people, from Europe to N. America and everywhere else, are all
expected to invite every non-white, non-Western, often hostile armies of (especially military
age young men) into our lands, and then treat them better than the indigenous, white second
class citizens?
What is it with that?!
Either Germans and Swedes and Americans hand over their nations or we're all going to be
called "Nazis" or "racists" or God help us, "Zionists".
WTF?
We can see that Israel, Trump and his voters have a lot in common. They want militant
anti immigration policies , they love 'walls,' they hate Muslims and they believe in
borders.
well, only the stupidest imbecile on the planet doesn't believe in borders. (or, an
ideologue that wants to see *certain* nations destroyed by armies of immigrants –
hostile or otherwise).
No one wants recognized borders more than the Palestinians. It is Israel that refused to
state its border, because it want to steal more land. How many Trump voters do you hear
talking about stealing other people's land? (I'm not talking about lunatics like Bolton.
American nationalists despise Bolton and McCain and all the rest of the Zionist, globalist
scum)
And I don't personally know of any reasonable American nationalist who 'hates Muslims'.
They just don't want them all here. Have you ever heard of Kosovo, Mr. Atzmon? There
are neighborhoods in Michigan that were Polish Catholic for generations. And they liked it
that way. They never hated Muslims or anyone else. But they do hate having their communities
taken over by alien peoples with alien cultures and now have to listen to 'calls to prayer'
at five in the morning every day. And demands for Sharia and other clashes with their former
way of life.
Are these people rabid Zionists demanding to murder people and steal their land, just
because they don't want throngs of Muslims coming in and transforming their community into
something they don't recognize or have any predilection for. Are they simply too racist and
hateful, and need to learn to assimilate? Eh?
I don't know who this Spencer guy is, and he sound like controlled opposition to me.
It would be wrong to equate nationalism with the frothing's of some so called
"white-Zionist". The only white Zionists I know of are the lunatic "Christian" Zionists.
The nationalists I know of simply want to be left -the fuck- alone!
Stop demanding that we hand over our country to people who don't appreciate it. (Indeed,
often hate it) Stop demanding that we doom our children to living in a nation that puts them
last in every way, behind every single non-white immigrate that can get to these shores. It
is insane to want to have people come to your nation who will be a burden, who often hate you
and yours, not to mention your culture, and want to displace you. It is insane to insist that
millions of people come in and compete with your children on an un-level playing field. Every
non-White immigrant that comes here gets Affirmative Action promotions and jobs and
university preference over the white children who were born here. Unless you hate white
people, that state of affairs is insane.
And yet here we are being badgered as thieving, psychotic murderous goons (Zionists)
simply for wanting what every single sane person on the planet wants: to preserve our way of
life and hand it down to our progeny – for them to have a decent life and hope for
theirs in turn.
And yet somehow, if we have white skin, wanting this is the most evil and wicked and
racist thing imaginable!
@Rurik White nationalists are a mixed bunch, going from the very bad (as Atzmon) sees
them to, maybe, the peaks of sainthood you attribute to them.
The whole idea of legit owners of land is a rationalization: everybody (meaning: every
group) took from someone else the land where they are, and did so by combat and might.
Sure, in our more civilized times we'd like such things to be relegated in the past, borders
to become stable, and ethnic cleansing and warfare to be a closed chapter.
These are wishes and words about said wishes, though.
Do you own a swath of land in the countryside, by chance? I do, and over the years all of
the three of my neighbours have applied pressure to broaden their owned land so as to include
a bit more than mine. Being the first stripe allowed, they'd go on, until I were left with no
land at all, all of this while seeing themselves as honest.
Whoever owns land, and whoever doesn't have a need to believe Jews worse than other people
knows what human nature is like when it comes to property, borders, and expansion.
Do you own a swath of land in the countryside, by chance? I do, and over the years all
of the three of my neighbours have applied pressure to broaden their owned land so as to
include a bit more than mine.
I doubt your neighbors have attacked you, burned your land, cut off or poisoned your water
and then confiscated your house and land ..as is the case of Israel's theft of Palestine.
This is the 21 century, not the 17th or 18th century.
When we interrupt our travels to take a break, I approach a group of young Israeli soldiers,
themselves waiting for a bus. Anyone speak English, I ask? Sure, answers one good-looking kid.
His accent is familiar.
Where are you from?
Connecticut.
He turns out to be an Ohio State grad, serving a tour as a "lone soldier" -- a Jew but not
an Israeli -- in the IDF. There are thousands of them.
I have never been comfortable with this phenomenon. If a young American hankers to defend a
country, it strikes me that he ought to defend his own rather than someone else's. But this
Buckeye from Connecticut is obviously a fine upstanding fellow so I don't press him to
explain.
"... Israel's newly won "friends" in the leadership of Saudi Arabia and the UAE proved to be unstable and of little value. ..."
"... The Israeli army is cr*p these days, only capable of shooting down unarmed Palestinians. No-one wants to spend their lives fighting, ready to go off to war at any moment, rather than living normal Western lives. ..."
"... The Zionists politically unified the Gaza defense factions for the first time, which is a very important development that needed to occur long ago. ..."
"... If the 1973 War were to be waged again using today's forces, it's likely Zionistan would lose. The Cabinet infighting mirrors the growing divide within Zionistan's polity. Unfortunately, that divide doesn't seem to be producing an alternative political party that's anti-Apartheid and favors a One State solution. Hard to argue with b's concluding assessment. ..."
"... This appears to be a planted explosive after the bus was emptied out -- except for the driver who was sacrificed. It certainly does not look like a Kornet as shown in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ePvNlfrxfw ..."
"... The US and Israel are doing their best to encourage a multi-polar world able to oppose their reckless actions, although there's still a long way to go. The sooner both nations start to behave in a more circumspect manner, the safer the world will be. ..."
"... I have often wondered how does the Israeli economy stay afloat ..."
"... Never has Israel been so powerful and dominant and never has Israel's power seemed so impotent. Israel's nuclear weapons may deter other countries but they are useless against Palestinians unless Israel really wants to launch such weapons against itself. ..."
"... What will become of Israel? How will the region deal with it as, over time, it is increasingly defeated and forced to supply proofs that it deserves to exist? What answer will it make, as it throws away all semblance of community? ..."
"... I see Trump as clearly representative of the global elite that are having to kill their current empire host without being certain of how they can live with or make China's socialism with a Chinese face be controlled by an ongoing world of global private finance. ..."
"... Trump is their public face deal maker and I will agree with Peter AU 1 that Kissinger is the global elite's behind the scenes deal maker. I have written here before that Trump will default on US debt before he is out of office, IMO. ..."
"... Can the global elite pressure the world's nations into their continued existence as the jackboot of global finance? Despite the wild and crazy of grifter Donald Trump I still believe that reason is about to triumph over faith in the hallowed halls of global finance......and Israel is the proxy front for that lost faith in monotheistic religions with better than others value, bias and use of victimization. ..."
Last week a ceasefire was
agreed upon between Palestinian factions in Gaza and Israel:
The aim of the change, in a plan mediated by Egypt and with money supplied by Qatar, is to provide much-needed relief for Gaza,
restore calm on the Israeli side of the border and avert another war.
On Sunday night Israeli special forces
broke the ceasefire by invading
Gaza under disguise. Such incursions happen
quite often but are
usually left unreported. The invaders wore civilian clothing and some were cloaked as women. Their cars arrived at the house of a
local Qassam commander but suspicious guards held them up. A firefight ensued in which 7 Palestinians and 1 Israeli officer were
killed. It is not clear what the intent of the Israeli raid was. A car left behind held what appeared to be surveillance equipment.
The intruders fled back to Israel.
It is likely that rivalry within the Israeli government was behind this provocation:
[T]he perception that Israel, by allowing the fuel and cash shipments into Gaza, was paying off Hamas set off acrimonious wrangling
between two rival right-wing members of Israel's security cabinet.
Earlier Sunday, Education Minister Naftali Bennett called the cash infusion "protection money." Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman
accused Mr. Bennett of having supported such payments and of having opposed in recent weeks the more aggressive military reprisals
against Hamas that Mr. Lieberman favored.
...
By night's end Mr. Netanyahu had cut short his trip [to Paris] and was flying back to Israel in response to the Gaza hostilities.
Did Lieberman order the incursion to undercut Netanyahoo ceasefire and his rival Bennet?
The breach of the ceasefire by Israel set off another round of tit for tat strikes. A commando unit of Hamas' Qassam brigade launched
an attack against a bus that had carried Israeli soldiers to the border. To avoid further escalation the shooter waited until the
soldiers were out of the way before hitting it. Only the driver was injured. Then the Israeli air force destroyed the al-Aqsa TV
station in Gaza city after notifying the Palestinians of its intent. It also damaged a university building. Rocket volleys from Gaza
followed and the Israeli air-force hit several buildings. After 48 hours the ceasefire was renewed.
During the conflict the Palestinian side demonstrated a series of new capabilities:
The Palestinian command published a video of the
strike against the bus by a Kornet anti-tank guided missile (ATGM). Since it lost dozens of tanks to ATGM attacks in the 2006
war against Hezbullah in Lebanon, the Israeli army is extremely afraid of such missiles. The arrival of these weapons in the besieged
Gaza will be a serious concern.
The Palestinians also
launched
over 460 artillery missiles and mortars within 25 hours. This by far exceeds the firing rate during Israel's 2014 war on the Gaza
strip. Some of these missiles had a larger range then previous models. Israel's Iron Dome missile defense systems fired some 100
missiles but their accuracy is questionable and the price high. Each Iron Dome missile costs some $65,000 while a mortar round
or rocket costs a few hundred dollar. Many of the Palestinian rockets reached their targets in the Zionist settlements Ashkelon,
Netivot, and Sderot.
Israel announced only two hits on missile launching cells. It seems that the Palestinians have perfected their camouflage
and remote firing capabilities.
The rival Palestinian groups in Gaza -Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others- operated under a central command. No group claimed
missile strikes for itself. In the past each volley of missiles was followed by a news statement in which this or that group claimed
responsibility. This time all groups worked from a common operations room. None released responsibility claims or other information
that would help Israel's intelligence.
Earlier Tuesday, the Political-Security Cabinet meeting that convened following the escalation in the south came to a halt after
seven hours. After hearing the army's and the security establishment's assessments, the cabinet instructed the IDF to continue
to operate in Gaza as necessary.
All the officials from the defense establishment who participated in the cabinet meeting -- IDF chief of staff, the head of
Military Intelligence, the head of the Shin Bet, the head of the Mossad, and the head of the NSC -- supported the Egyptian request
for a cease-fire .
...
" If we had intensified the attacks, rockets would have been fired at Tel Aviv ," senior cabinet officials said.
Since 15:30 local time today the situation is again quiet and calm. But the squabbling within the Israeli cabinet immediately
resumed:
All the ministers -- including Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Minister Naftali Bennett -- did not object to a cease fire.
Following this report, the Defense Ministry said that Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman's support of a cease-fire deal were
"fake news." The statement said that the Defense Minister's position was consistent and had not changed. Ministers Naftali Bennett,
Ayelet Shaked and Ze'ev Elkin also said they did not support a cease-fire deal with Hamas.
In total 13 people were killed in Gaza and at least 2 on the Israeli side. A Hamas spokesperson
accused Lieberman of being responsible for the breach of the ceasefire and demanded that Netanyahoo fires him.
The short conflict demonstrated that:
Israel is deterred. It does not want to launch another war on Gaza.
The siege of Gaza, by Israel, Egypt and by the Palestinian authority under Mahmoud Abbas, failed. The reputational cost of
the siege became too high after Israel killed some 160 Palestinians during weekly protests along the demarcation fence. It had
to allow diesel fuel and money from Qatar to reach Gaza.
The siege failed to prevent that Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other groups acquired a larger number of missiles and other new
capabilities.
The Palestinians in Gaza are united. The resistance against the occupation is alive and well.
For decades the Zionist entity was able to attack its neighbors as it pleased. That changed. It no longer dares to step into Lebanon
for fear of Hezbullah's reprisal. Syria's western airspace is closed for Israel thanks to the new S-300PMU2 air defense Russia delivered
to the Syrian army. Israeli special forces botched their incursion into Gaza and the Iron Dome missile defense proved to be to faulty
to protect Zionist settlements. The resistance in Gaza has new capabilities and surprises for Israel should it again attack.
The short conflict in Gaza only demonstrated that Israel is weak and that its downward trend continues.
Posted by b on November 13, 2018 at 02:52 PM |
Permalink
Comments The Israeli army is cr*p these days, only capable of shooting down unarmed Palestinians. No-one wants to spend their
lives fighting, ready to go off to war at any moment, rather than living normal Western lives. That probably had something to
do with the failure of the original raid - they left behind their (specially equipped) car, did they? Only the air force is any good,
and, lo and behold, it had to be brought in to recover the situation.
This appears to be a planted explosive after the bus was emptied out -- except for the driver who was sacrificed. It certainly
does not look like a Kornet as shown in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ePvNlfrxfw
The sooner Israel returns to being Palestine, where Jewish folks who want to live in the ME can do so in peace with their neighbours,
the better. The violent murderous destructive settler ethnics please go home, ta.
The hornet attack on the bus is in all likelyhood faked, around 26 seconds in your tube video at least 8 IDF are at the front of
the bus chatting, at around 46 seconds they are gone. We hear the sound of the missile being fired but are unable to see it tracking
the target as it moves in.
If fear for Tel Aviv was a motivation, an additional conclusion might be the Israeli's have little real faith in their Iron Dome
-- no?
Where is Iran in this story, that Lieberman is so keen on?
There is a difference. The cameraman in the Abrams shot is close to the launcher and to the line of fire so the ATGM rocket
motor exhaust is clearly visible. In the IDF shot, the cameraman could be well away from the launch, even at right angles to its
line of flight, totally hiding the rocket motor. That said, it would be even more gutsy to have placed an IED where the IDF was
likely to gather and much cheaper. The ATGMs are more valuable against IDF armor. $1 million of US taxpayer money going up in smoke just like that.
The Zionists politically unified the Gaza defense factions for the first time, which is a very important development that needed
to occur long ago. The Zionist's response to perform a War Crime fits their behavioral norm to a Tee.
If the 1973 War were to
be waged again using today's forces, it's likely Zionistan would lose. The Cabinet infighting mirrors the growing divide within
Zionistan's polity. Unfortunately, that divide doesn't seem to be producing an alternative political party that's anti-Apartheid
and favors a One State solution. Hard to argue with b's concluding assessment.
This appears to be a planted explosive after the bus was emptied out -- except for the driver who was sacrificed. It certainly
does not look like a Kornet as shown in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ePvNlfrxfw
Posted by: LJ | Nov 13, 2018 3:24:00 PM | 2
I agree, I think this was an Israeli False Flag to justify an invasion and I agree it is a bomb beneath the bus.
A Kornet has a distinctive undulating pattern and leaves a smoke trail, for example:
here is what a Kornet looks like hitting something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5xKCzdhAC8
thanks b... it sounds like none of the Israeli politicians want to own up to wanting a ceasefire.. why is that? is the idea of
projecting strength and aggressiveness the only posture Israel can take for the majority Israel religious orthodox voting public??
@6 john... i am curious... it sure looks to me like the usa is israels bitch... it's not just usa either.. one could include
canada, australia, uk and all the western poodles too... how does this event appear to make it look any different to you? thanks..
The US and Israel are doing their best to encourage a multi-polar world able to oppose their reckless actions, although there's
still a long way to go. The sooner both nations start to behave in a more circumspect manner, the safer the world will be.
I have often wondered how does the Israeli economy stay afloat. I am on the side of Israel. However it seems increasingly a losing
side. To survive they have had to adopt increasingly harsh and embarrassing measures. The only way to achieve victory is to ethnically
cleanse Arabs from the Middle East.
The Heart of Darkness
Rabbit Bomb Blues.
PeacefulProsperity , Nov 13, 2018 8:13:21 PM |
link
#18 - Gerard Butler hosted that event. His Malibu(?) house was just burned to the frame. Coincidence? I think not. He is all over
social media whining about it and people are actually calling him out. Maybe there's some hope for us after all.
Palestinians already know that Israel plans a genocide. Palestinians know that they will not be helped by the west or any other
country. Palestinians know that they have no voice and no way of countering the Israeli lobby. But where has this success really
got you and Israel?
I suggest that you are pursuing a path that means doom for both Palestinian and Israeli. You imagine that you can get rid of
Palestinians but lack the commonsense to see that this is impossible. You are building a future of (ever more) death and destruction.
There is another option (which you won't be interested in) and that is to change Israel from an apartheid state and grant equality
to Palestinians (including the right of return and restitution of property).
That you two could post such loathsome views indicates that you are completely unaware that you are staring into an abyss that
will consume both Palestinian and Israeli.
Never has Israel been so powerful and dominant and never has Israel's power seemed so impotent. Israel's nuclear weapons may
deter other countries but they are useless against Palestinians unless Israel really wants to launch such weapons against itself.
You need to wake up to the idea that Palestinian and Israeli might have a future together and consider that the path you are
following will bring a great tragedy to both sides.
My thoughts were identical - the single biggest development is the exhibited unity among the Palestinians. It does not spell
good for the expansionist apartheid bankrupt state (just like all its bankrupt Western bitches).
I also support renaming Gaza into Auschwitz, that was a brilliantly symbolic idea.
I am against renaming Gaza as Auschwitz. It is a transparent attempt to appeal to western/European sensitivities (which will not
work), will be nothing more than a publicity stunt, and is a denial of the unique Palestinian experience.
Probably more people in the world know of Gaza than they do of Auschwitz.
Thank you for putting that into words. The two entities are joined in an intimate embrace of destiny from which it seems that no single side can emerge alone. How
futile that Israel cannot see that its best chance to emerge as a nation, or at least as a people, is now, and that every day
it seeks to further reduce Palestine it furthers its own diminishing.
What will become of Israel? How will the region deal with it as, over time, it is increasingly defeated and forced to supply
proofs that it deserves to exist? What answer will it make, as it throws away all semblance of community?
@19 pp.. trump is no different.. hollywood and trump - 2 sides of the same coin.. both subservient to israel..
Posted by: james | Nov 13, 2018 8:21:21 PM | 20
Well that's wrong.
Trump can read the Zio-Jews like a book. They're so-o predictably evil and stupid. His unlawful and MEANINGLESS recognition of
Jerusalem as the capital of "Israel" encouraged them to put their mass-murdering skills on display while the
civilized world watched
in horror and revulsion.
As b points out, Lebanon has long been too dangerous for their peculiarly wussy brand of courage, Syria is now off-limits,
and now the Powerless Palestinians have made them re-think their aggressive idiocy. The fact that they've always been their own
worst enemy is rapidly coming home to roost...
Israel is the land of Ivanka and Kissinger. I think US vetos at the UNSC will continue. US embassy is now at Jerusalem and
Trump has declared it the capital of Israel.
@27 hw... we have to disagree then... israels mass-murdering skills have been on display prior to and during trumps position..
nothing has changed with regard to Israel's attitude, trump or no trump.. and frankly trump could give a shit.. The money continues
to flow to Israel and usa subservience continues... i wish it was different, but i am not into some pipe dream in thinking trump
has made any difference.. he hasn't.. you have much greater faith in trump then i..
I'm about 6,000 miles away from the current excitement, and can't read any of the languages. So I've got to rely on second and
third hand reports of everything . What I'm hearing through those slender grapevines is that there are bitter faction fights
within the government of the apartheid Jewish State. Another factor is that none of the 'leaders' known to me are exactly oozing
competence. When your major propaganda outlet starts whining about the stupidity, things aren't going well.
1) The S-300 air defense missiles Russia has deployed to Syria. Netanyahu's brief chat with President Vladimir Putin in Paris
on Sunday yielded no concurrence for the resumption of Israeli air strikes against Iran. It is now up to him to decide whether
to take this as a Russian embargo on Israel overflights, or to go ahead and risk resuming those air strikes. In the worst case,
the Israeli air force might have to operate on two fronts: Syria and Gaza.
No, that's not the worst case. Dozens of Russian cruise missiles skimming the treetops while heading for the air and naval
bases of the Apartheid State is worse than that. Frankly, I doubt if the murderous and thieving little nation is capable of overcoming
both the jamming and the S-300 systems. But what do I know? - if they manage to do it without killing any Russians, the Syrians
will probably be reinforced with even heavier air defenses. Right now Syria is a lose/lose proposition.
2) Israel has tied its hands with an ultimatum to Beirut to shut down Iran's workshops in Lebanon for adding precision-guidance
to Hizballah's surface missiles, or else face Israeli attacks to destroy them. There was no date on the ultimatum. But to carry
it through, every ounce of Israel's air force capabilities will be required. The question is how did Israel's policy-makers
failed to avoid a situation which paralyses its ability to operate against strategic foes in Syria and Lebanon?
Notice the despair. Who on earth was running his mouth with a promise to destroy those Hezbollah shops? Yet even that's a losing
proposition, for Hezbollah is doubtlessly running many fakes and decoys, and keeping everything on such a small scale they'll
be barely scratched, if touched at all. But could the pilots of the apartheid Jewish State do even this? I ask because I don't
know the range of those Russian jamming devices. Hezbollah has every opportunity to set an ambush for incoming aircraft attacks.
The F-35 may be low visibility in terms of radar, but it represents an enormous infra-red beacon. There are anti-air missiles
in existence which are optimized for IR.
The final wild card is the Trumpster. He has been mighty erratic of late, and while he might do something wild and crazy, could
the Jewish State rely on whatever-it-is he might do helping them? Could be just the opposite.
@ Grieved with the internet interaction insight and wisdom....thanks and hope many read and understand your words.
@ Zachary Smith with the comment and question about Trump.
I see Trump as clearly representative of the global elite that are having to kill their current empire host without being certain
of how they can live with or make China's socialism with a Chinese face be controlled by an ongoing world of global private finance.
Trump is their public face deal maker and I will agree with Peter AU 1 that Kissinger is the global elite's behind the scenes
deal maker. I have written here before that Trump will default on US debt before he is out of office, IMO.
Can the global elite pressure the world's nations into their continued existence as the jackboot of global finance? Despite
the wild and crazy of grifter Donald Trump I still believe that reason is about to triumph over faith in the hallowed halls of
global finance......and Israel is the proxy front for that lost faith in monotheistic religions with better than others value,
bias and use of victimization.
For me the only question is how long will the transition take and how ugly will it be?
If this is Trump policy, then Trump is 100% pure neocon. It took just three months for the Deep state to turn him.
Notable quotes:
"... Bolton shrugged off the reality that Iran is still doing business internationally, saying that he believes Iran is "under real pressure" from the sanctions, and that he's determined to see it keep getting worse. ..."
With the newly reimposed US sanctions against
Iran having little to no perceivable economic impact, national security adviser John Bolton
is talking up his plans to continue to escalate the sanctions track, saying he will "
squeeze
Iran until the pips squeak ."
Bolton shrugged off the reality that Iran is still doing business internationally, saying
that he believes Iran is "under real pressure" from the sanctions, and that he's determined
to see it keep getting worse.
Bolton went on to predict that the European efforts to keep trading with Iran would
ultimately fail. He said the
Europeans are going through the six stages of grief , and would ultimately led to
European acceptance of the US demands.
Either way, Bolton's position is that the US strategy will continue to be
imposing new sanctions
on Iran going forward. It's not clear what the end game is, beyond just damaging
Iran.
"... Yet the media and government watchdog organizations have largely ignored the potential conflict of interest inherent in dual citizenship. Why the neglect of this issue? Shouldn't members of Congress (and federal judges and executive branch officials) at least be required to disclose their citizenship in another country? ..."
"... Even if our legal system continues to allow dual citizens to serve in high positions of the U.S. government, it should require them to recuse themselves from participating in decisions or policy debates that relate to their second country. ..."
The Biblical injunction that "No one can serve two masters" (Matthew 6:24) doesn't apply to
nations. Almost half of the world's countries, including the U.S., recognize dual citizenship--
even when they don't encourage it for the complicated legal issues it often raises.
For example, one who obeys a requirement to give allegiance to a country or votes in a
foreign election may be regarded as having renounced citizenship in the other country. What
happens when the legal claims of one country conflict with those of the second country? Which
of the two countries has an obligation to assist a dual national in distress?
Until the Supreme Court decided otherwise in the 1967 case of Afroyim v. Rusk , a
U.S. citizen who voted in a political election in a foreign state would forfeit his or her U.S.
citizenship. From that point on, dual citizens have maintained their right to vote and hold
public office without penalty.
Anyone can become a dual citizen, even members of Congress, high court judges and top
officials of the executive branch. There's no law or regulation against it. Nor are they
required to disclose such dual citizenship.
So what's the problem?
For most dual citizens, having the benefits of citizenship in two countries (including
expedited immigration) outweigh the costs (which may include tax obligations to both
countries).
Yet dual citizenship in the United States poses a hitherto unappreciated issue for
policy-level members of the legislative, executive and judicial branches. The divided national
loyalties of dual citizens can create real or apparent conflicts of interest when such
legislators, judges or senior officials make or speak out on policies that relate to their
second country.
The potential damage to our democracy is the greater when such potential conflicts of
interest are concealed in undisclosed dual citizenship.
Current entries on the Internet contain a number of undocumented assertions as to which
members of Congress and senior officers are dual citizens. Without reliable data, however,
Americans can only speculate on which senators and representatives may have divided national
loyalties.
The lack of transparency regarding citizenship erodes trust in government, raising
credibility doubts where there should be none, and allowing some apparent conflicts of interest
to continue undetected.
When a senator, representative or senior U.S. official speaks out, submits bills or
determines policy on an issue of importance to a foreign country of which that member or
official (or judge) has the tie of citizenship, their constituents and the U.S. public at large
should at least be able to assess whether such views or actions are influenced by the divided
loyalty.
Since they don't involve national loyalty, religion and ethnicity seldom raise conflict
issues. Moreover, they are generally matters of public record.
By contrast, dual citizenship creates conflict of interest through divided loyalties. Thus
it would seem reasonable to require that dual citizen members of Congress, the judiciary and
the executive be required to renounce citizenship in another country as a condition of public
service.
Both Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-Texas) and former Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Minn.) recently received wide press coverage when
they renounced their Canadian and Swiss nationalities, respectively.
Yet the media and government watchdog organizations have largely ignored the potential
conflict of interest inherent in dual citizenship. Why the neglect of this issue? Shouldn't
members of Congress (and federal judges and executive branch officials) at least be required to
disclose their citizenship in another country?
Even if our legal system continues to allow dual citizens to serve in high positions of
the U.S. government, it should require them to recuse themselves from participating in
decisions or policy debates that relate to their second country.
"... If an American citizen applies for foreign citizenship voluntarily, they "may lose U.S. nationality," if there is evidence, through their statements or conduct, that they intend to give up their U.S. citizenship. ..."
Applying for citizenship under the Law of Return "is a formal procedure which you could
expect normally to take a number of months except under emergency conditions," said Yoram
Hazony, president of the the Herzl Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. "There is no such thing
as receiving Israeli citizenship without submitting a formal request to the Israeli
government."
... ... ...
It's also worth noting that the
U.S. government doesn't look especially kindly on dual citizenship. The United States
"recognizes that dual nationality exists but does not encourage it as a matter of policy
because of the problems it may cause," according to the Department of State.
If an American citizen applies for foreign citizenship voluntarily, they "may lose U.S.
nationality," if there is evidence, through their statements or conduct, that they intend to
give up their U.S. citizenship.
... ... ...
Sanders' case
So has Sanders ever taken action to claim the Israeli citizenship the would qualify for? He
told Rehm no, and we have no evidence that would call that into question. While Sanders is
Jewish by birth and
spent some time on an Israeli kibbutz, or community farm, in the early 1960s, he would not
have become a citizen without a concerted effort to become one.
We did not hear back from Sanders' office, but a spokesman, Michael Briggs, told
Politico that "Diane Rehm is an excellent radio host. There's a great big Internet out
there with lots of good and bad information. I've never heard the question come up before."
Hazony, an Israeli who studied at Princeton and Rutgers and who has written widely about
both American and Israeli politics, said he's not aware of any American lawmakers with Israeli
citizenship. "In fact, it is common for Jews who are dual U.S.-Israel citizens to renounce one
or the other before serving in official government capacities," he said.
In 1967, the court ruled that the
State Department
had violated the Constitution when it refused to issue a new
U.S. passport to a U.S. citizen who had voted in an election in Israel. The decision overturned a law saying that "a person, who
is a national of the United States, whether by birth or naturalization, shall lose his nationality by voting in a political
election in a foreign state."
...there is no authoritative tally of how many U.S. citizens possess another nationality. Michael A. Olivas, an immigration
professor at the University of Houston Law Center, believes that the number is well over 1 million and could be several times
that number.
... ... ...
But the concept of dual citizenship is problematic both symbolically and practically, and could become divisive if more
immigrants decide to avail themselves of the privileges of U.S. citizens -- as we believe they ought to do. U.S citizens with
strong ties to their ancestral countries have been accused of divided loyalties in the past even when they didn't possess
citizenship in those countries -- witness the internment of 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. But when
a U.S. citizen is also a citizen of another country, the accusation is even easier to make.
... ... ...
But it's also true that dual citizenship undermines the common bond that unites U.S. citizens regardless of their ethnicity,
religion or place of birth. Dual citizenship places a sort of asterisk next to the names of some U.S. citizens but not others.
... ... ...
Nations vary in their attitudes toward dual citizenship. Some reject the concept outright; others allow their citizens to take
out a second citizenship only in selected countries and some have drawn a distinction between citizenship and nationality.
Yet there's no question that dual citizenship poses practical problems both for those who possess it and for the government.
The U.S. State Department discourages U.S. citizens from retaining or applying for citizenship in another country because "dual
nationality may limit U.S. government efforts to assist nationals abroad. The country where a dual national is located generally
has a stronger claim to that person's allegiance." The department also warns that "dual citizenship can present a security issue
whether to permit access to classified information which affects recruitment, employment and assignments." In some cases, dual
citizenship could disqualify an applicant for a sensitive position with the CIA or the State Department.
The complexities and complications raised by dual citizenship are not enough to justify amending the Constitution to overrule
the Supreme Court. But we agree with the State Department that U.S. citizens should think twice about professing allegiance to
another country. Moreover, by reinforcing the doubts that some hold about the loyalty of immigrants -- some U.S. citizens, for
instance, fume when Mexican Americans display the Mexican flag at Cinco de Mayo rallies -- the persistence of dual citizenship may
make it politically more difficult to secure a path to citizenship for immigrants who came here illegally.
Modern technology makes many things possible, but it does not make them cheap... The camera
needs to work in pretty adverse conditions (think about the temperature inside the light on a hot
summer day, and temperature at winter) and transmit signal somewhere via WiFi (which has range
less then 100m) , or special cable that needs to be installed for this particular pole. With wifi
there should be many collection units which also cost money. So it make sense only for
streetlights adjacent to building with Internet networking. And there are already cameras of the
highway, so highways are basically covered. Which basically limits this technology to cities.
Just recoding without transmission would be much cheaper (transmission on demand). Excessive
paranoia here is not warranted.
According to new government procurement data, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have purchased an undisclosed number of secret
surveillance cameras that are being hidden in streetlights across the country.
Quartz
first reported this dystopian development of federal authorities stocking up on "covert
systems" last week. The report showed how the DEA paid a Houston, Texas company called Cowboy
Streetlight Concealments LLC. approximately $22,000 since June for "video recording and
reproducing equipment." ICE paid out about $28,000 to Cowboy Streetlight Concealments during
the same period.
"It's unclear where the DEA and ICE streetlight cameras have been installed, or where the
next deployments will take place. ICE offices in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio have
provided funding for recent acquisitions from Cowboy Streetlight Concealments; the DEA's most
recent purchases were funded by the agency's Office of Investigative Technology, which is
located in Lorton, Virginia," said Quartz.
Christie Crawford, who co-owns Cowboy Streetlight Concealments with her husband, said she
was not allowed to talk about the government contracts in detail.
"We do streetlight concealments and camera enclosures," Crawford told Quartz. "Basically,
there's businesses out there that will build concealments for the government and that's what
we do. They specify what's best for them, and we make it. And that's about all I can probably
say."
However, she added: "I can tell you this -- things are always being watched. It doesn't
matter if you're driving down the street or visiting a friend, if government or law enforcement
has a reason to set up surveillance, there's great technology out there to do it."
Quartz notes that the DEA issued a solicitation for "concealments made to house network PTZ
[Pan-Tilt-Zoom] camera, cellular modem, cellular compression device," last Monday. According to
solicitation number D-19-ST-0037, the sole source award will go to Obsidian Integration
LLC.
On November 07, the Jersey City Police Department awarded Obsidian Integration with "the
purchase and delivery of a covert pole camera." Quartz said the filing did not provide much
detail about the design.
It is not just streetlights the federal government wants to mount covert surveillance
cameras on, it seems cameras inside traffic barrels could be heading onto America's highways in
the not too distant future.
And as Quartz reported in October, the DEA operates a complex network of digital
speed-display road signs that covertly scan license plates. On top of all this,
Amazon has been aggressively rolling out its
Rekognition facial-recognition software to law enforcement agencies and ICE, according to
emails uncovered by the Project for Government Oversight.
Chad Marlow, a senior advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU, told Quartz that cameras in
street lights have been proposed before by local governments, typically under a program called
"smart" LED street light system.
"It basically has the ability to turn every streetlight into a surveillance device, which
is very Orwellian to say the least," Marlow told Quartz. "In most jurisdictions, the local
police or department of public works are authorized to make these decisions unilaterally and
in secret. There's no public debate or oversight."
And so, as the US continues to be distracted, torn amid record political, social and
economic polarization, big brother has no intention of letting the current crisis go to waste,
and quietly continues on its path of transforming the US into a full-blown police and
surveillance state.
I previously worked for one of these types of federal agencies and to be fair, $50,000
doesn't buy a lot of video surveillance equipment at government procurement costs. The
contractor doesn't just drill a hole and install a camera, they provide an entirely new
streetlight head with the camera installed.
It would be nice if they put some of this technology to work for a good cause. Maybe
warning you of traffic congestion ahead. Or advising you that one of your tires will soon go
flat.
Obviously that won't happen, so in the meantime, I can't wait to read next how the hackers
will find a way to make this government effort go completely haywire. As if the government
can't do it without any help. At least when the hackers do it, it will be funny and
thorough.
Besides the creepy surveillance part, some of the street light tech is interesting .
lights that dim like the frozen food section - when no one is in front of the case --- RGB
lighting that shows the approximate location for EMS to a 911 call ( lights that EMS can
follow by color)
basic neighborhood street lights are being replaced by LED -- lights in this article.
Hey, I have street lights AND cameras on the same poles at the shop/mad scientist lab/
play house.
but- surveillance -- the wall better have these lights -- light up the border !
This is yesteryears news. Shot Spotter has microphones that can pick up whispered
conversations for 300 feet for a long time now, while triangulating any gunshot in a
city...
"... For his first two years in office, he sunk nearly all his political capital into enacting huge tax cuts for the rich, wholesale Wall Street deregulation, large increases in military spending, and an extremely pro-Israel foreign policy -- exactly the sort of policies near-and-dear to the establishment conservative candidates whom he had crushed in the Republican primaries. Meanwhile, his jilted grassroots supporters have had to settle for some radical rhetoric and a regular barrage of outrageous Tweets rather than anything more substantive. ..."
"... With Republicans in full control of Congress, finding excuses for this widespread betrayal was quite difficult, but now that the Democrats have taken the House, Trump's apologists can more easily shift the blame over to them. ..."
"... Both Trump's supporters and his opponents claim that his presidency represents a drastic break from Republican business-as-usual, and surely that was the hope of many of the Americans who voted for him in 2016, but the actual reality often seems rather different. ..."
"... Although the net election results were not particularly bad for the Republicans, the implications of several state races seem extremely worrisome. The highest profile senate race was in Texas, and Trump may have narrowly dodged a bullet. ..."
Perhaps the loss of the House may actually prove to be a mixed blessing for Trump. Democrats
will achieve control of all the investigative committees and their accusations and subpoenas
will make Trump's life even more miserable than it was before, while surely removing any chance
that significant elements of Trump's remaining agenda will ever be enacted.
However, although Trump had reached the presidency by advocating a radical
populist-nationalist agenda, he has hardly governed in those terms. For his first two years in
office, he sunk nearly all his political capital into enacting huge tax cuts for the rich,
wholesale Wall Street deregulation, large increases in military spending, and an extremely
pro-Israel foreign policy -- exactly the sort of policies near-and-dear to the establishment
conservative candidates whom he had crushed in the Republican primaries. Meanwhile, his jilted
grassroots supporters have had to settle for some radical rhetoric and a regular barrage of
outrageous Tweets rather than anything more substantive.
With Republicans in full control of
Congress, finding excuses for this widespread betrayal was quite difficult, but now that the
Democrats have taken the House, Trump's apologists can more easily shift the blame over to
them.
Meanwhile, a considerably stronger Republican Senate will certainly ease the way for Trump's
future court nominees, especially if another Supreme Court vacancy occurs, and there will be
little chance of any difficult Kavanaugh battles. However, here once again, Trump's supposed
radicalism has merely been rhetorical. Kavanaugh and nearly all of his other nominees have been
very mainstream Republican choices, carefully vetted by the Federalist Society and other
conservative establishment groups, and they would probably have been near the top of the list
if Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio were sitting in the Oval Office.
Both Trump's supporters and his opponents claim that his presidency represents a drastic
break from Republican business-as-usual, and surely that was the hope of many of the Americans
who voted for him in 2016, but the actual reality often seems rather different.
Although the net election results were not particularly bad for the Republicans, the
implications of several state races seem extremely worrisome. The highest profile senate race
was in Texas, and Trump may have narrowly dodged a bullet. Among our largest states, Texas
ranks as by far the most solidly Republican, and therefore it serves as the central lynchpin of
every Republican presidential campaign. The GOP has won every major statewide race for more
than twenty years, but despite such seemingly huge advantages, incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz faced a
very difficult reelection race against a young border-area Congressman named Beto O'Rourke, who
drew enormous enthusiasm and an ocean of local and national funding.
>>Johnstone: The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them<<
Preach!
The military defends Money Power Monopolist Mega-Corporate Fascist Global Empire, not
America, and definitely NOT the Constitution. The New Deal effectively wiped out the
Constitution, which was the "Old Deal."
Syria and Iran aren't threats, they are countries that don't have debt-based money systems
controlled by the Money Power Monopolists.
"In a sense, there is no "future". Currently, you note a consolidation of the few
remaining countries without a "central bank" ...and how rapidly this is occurring. Look for
Syria next to fall, and fall quickly.
North Korea has already cut a deal under the aegis of China...feit accompli. Cuba has also
agreed to the North American integration once Fidel "passes".
That leaves IRAN. And biblical prophesy. The fallout from that conflict sets the stage for
the true new world order as has been broadcast in the media for the last 13 years or so."
~Unnamed Rothschild
The establishment of central banks is ALWAYS a necessary first step of subjugation of
geographically congregated bloodlines. Note that Libya's first official act, before even the
corpses turned stiff...was the establishment of a central bank. Those rebel forces were
certainly well schooled by someone!
~Unnamed Rothschild
Amazing how Libyan rebels took time out of their daily war duties to establish a CENTRAL
BANK! Imagine the paperwork in getting that done on the battlefield!
Those rebels are a well educated lot!
Laughing out Loud!
Seriously, don't the serfs notice things like this?
~Unnamed Rothschild
The financier of the military makes it clear they are attacking Western countries -
monetarily and economically.
"Remember, the equity and bond markets exist only to remove fiat from circulation!"
~Unnamed Rothschild
Our soldiers joined, were trained, given orders. The best way to honor veterans is to quit
putting it on them. This is the government we have because it is the government we
want. It's the government we allow. This is on all of us . I think it's time for
people who are dissatisfied with the treatment of veterans, with the voter fraud, with the
lies and theft of elected officials, local, state, and federal, tired of the media lying to
us and creating fake events... perhaps it's time to peacefully strike. Perhaps it's time to
say No to vote fraud, to say No to lies and deceit.
Perhaps it's time to peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances. That's
a Constitutional Right guaranteed to Citizens of the United States. That requires an active,
constructive peaceful assembly. Everyone has had it up to the eyes with this ******** and
this con-game we're being fed.
I'd rather get stomped to death than live on with this never ending slow coup against We
The People. We hold the power. Just us. We designate that power. It should be here to protect
us. That social contract deserves respect. You may be watching the only chance in your life
that you could do anything about it, given the current President and his attitude. I really
think that. It's not enough to watch the Proud Boys punch an Antifa in the jaw. That doesn't
do it for me. That's theatre.
My girlfriends father is old army security. I'm paying the bill at Dennys and he says, let
me put my military discount on that. So he's behind a guy in an Operation Iraqi Freedom
jacket. He says, hey; I like your jacket. The guy looks at him and he says, nice hat. Army
Security Agency. The military deserves more than a discount at ******* Denny's. They deserve
a country. So do I. So do you. But there's not going to be any country if we don't peacefully
come together to hang every last traitor scumbag lying trasonous seditious bastard by just
saying NO! Arrest these traitors! I don't want my vote raped. I don't want my speach raped.
Or yours! I don't give a **** about illegals or their kids because I take care of my kids
legally and lawfully and didn't put them in that **** expecting a parent of the century
award.
I don't ******* care what you call yourself. But if it's more important than your right to
call yourself whatever you want, you are my enemy and I tell you no.
If it's legal to vote and legal to be off work to vote, to peacefully assemble, it should
be legal to redress government. It's time to show out. It's time to say we want this ********
to stop. We have paid very well for the lifestyles and presidential libraries and foundations
and kept all the traitors in good health. But we reserve the right to cut you off if you
abuse our sacrifice to you and our votes to you. We reserve the right without prejudice to
say NO. That's our right. And until we say NO! our silence equals consent.
I say NO. I say **** THE SEDITIOUS TRAITORS trying to hold on to rape us of all our
Rights. And I say long live Trump for giving our country back to us at inauguration. That's
what's up. Let's peacefully **** these people up. USE IT OR LOSE IT.
And from a movie that says the futility of it all: "We fight because we are here." Imagine
dying in the trenches of WWI or in a shithole like the trenches of Korea.
The least we could do is to learn what really happened and why. I realize I was taught an
endless string of lies about history, especially US History, WWI, WWII, Vietnam war.
Be very careful and informed before joining the military.
Libtards don't really know much about anything, so it seems. Here's the deal:
As long as there are assholes in the world, there will be wars.
I don't have a problem with that. It's the world that I live in. It's been the case
throughout all of human history. A world without wars is pure ******* fantasy. It will never
happen. It's high time that libtards start accepting the world that they live in.
The problem that we're having , is that we're shooting the wrong assholes instead
of the right ones. But you know what? All of human history shows that problems like that are
always remedied as well. And if you're doing some soul-searching, trying to figure out who
the assholes are, they're probably going to be any group of people, who can't leave other
groups of people the hell alone .
Not surprisingly, the 20th century seems to be characterized by assholes fighting each
other.
Our psychopathic dna as a nation comes mainly from england, one of the most, if not the
most murdering countries in history. england cruelly colonized Asia and Africa, and literally
never stopped murdering the innocents. Now as our ALLY, among the other killing nations, such
as France and Germany, we the USA can kill literally any country or countries for any reason
or no reason.
we as the american people will be blamed for all the monstrous destruction and
innocents deaths. separation of our country and our politicians would be necessary if we are
to have a future. looking dim. why are we still dirty, and killing innocents, why are we
allowing saudi and israel to mass murder innocent women and children ?
no one cares enough
yet. you would think by 2018 we all would have banned war and conflict, we have not. this
makes me sick. I am a vet.
I'm actually thinking of not watching football anymore the war propaganda is constant. I
went to a game and it was like walking into an armed camp. Hundreds of cops and military.
Every five minutes they're marching around and everyone has to "honor" them. It's disgusting.
All the players are told to kiss every soldiers ***. The Army are the terrorists. They all
make me want to puke.
In Australia at the moment the suicide rate is a shocker among those coming back from
Afghanistan, Iraq and places unknown, the solution they are proposing is for priority airport
treatment and more medals and other stuff along the model the US has, which is an insult as it
does nothing to financially support or mentally cure, its a cop out.
Very few wars are even about righting some amazing wrong. They merely tend to be about
treasure i.e. nat gas, oil, rare earth materials, diamonds, water, blah blah blah. And, if
there happens to be some fight, ala WWII, then you can bet your *** on it that all corporate
assholes are funding and benefiting from the war....on both sides of the coin i.e. backing
each side until a peace is called.
I don't have an answer to the human condition or our propensity to be violent and fight
etc., but I sure as **** am not cool with sacking places, and killing kids, over *******
things. We're better than this.
I have 2 kids myself. You can all be on notice that if a bomb were to be dropped on my
house, and if my kids were killed, I would likely devolve and start picking off the low
hanging fruit i.e. the zombies shuffling in and out of said bomb makers companies, and
wasting them 1 person as a time. I'd slowly, if still able, work my way up to the execs.
Hopefully, and along the way, I'd be able to wipe shareholders off of the grid, also.
When you go off to fight for "freedom", and arrive home to find that you have little to no
real freedom and essentially live in a police state, it's a shocking blow.
This sounds like something I would write. And even the damn CHURCHES honor the veteran
"serving" his country. What a crock of ****. I tell the pastor that he will be judged harshly
when his time comes. And I tell Christians that because they support the rampant murder of
millions that when they die and are standing before Jesus for judgement they will be soaked
in the blood of the innocent and he will ask you why did you support this? Why did you not
speak out against it? Then I look at them and say "good luck because you're gonna need
it".
The world is not ruled by pure evil yet. In Brazil A nationalist was elected, in Italy and
much of eastern Europe other nationalists were elected. You think the Chinese protected the
Italian and Brazilian right to free and fair elections? You think Russia is the arsenal of
freedom? You think the EU upheld the votes of the people, allowing Britain to vote on leaving
the EU and Italy and eastern Europe? You think the unelected rulers of the EU respected other
peoples right to vote? Look out onto the world, and recognize that as of today, the nations
of the world have A group to join if they chose to fight for liberty, capitalism and all the
other virtues, and that group is grounded and guaranteed by the United States of America. In
G-d I trust.
Hopeful thinking for a hopeless reality. Truth is tyrants never fall by their own swords.
It always takes someone else's. The modern problem is a bit more complex when we make the
tyrants that we later topple. The toppling is where the bucks are... just ask any of the the
last 4 Presidents and their respective Congresses.
So war is just an American problem, something we just invented? Do we read much history or is it all PBS specials now. War has ALWAYS been fucked up. Violence has been a major contributor to immigration for
all of history. Like it or not, we live in dangerous times. We can ASSUME that if America shrank it's
military and ended all interventions that world peace would magically appear....but it won't.
We can pray that while we retreat behind of big screen TVs that China will end their
territorial expansion and military programs, but they WON'T.
I'm all for reigning in our interventions, but let's not pretend that America is to blame
for human evil and aggressive behaviors....just because we are good at it..
There is an endless stream of history illustrating the absolute brutality and evil that
had persisted since the beginning of time. We should avoid embracing it but we should avoid
thinking we have the power to end it. More arrogance to be used for destructive purposes.
Nah, it is just that USA has made forever war such a profitable and ongoing
mega-business. The degenerate banker and royal families of Europe would only fight every generation or
two. You fight all the time and try to start new ones, before you finish off with the old ones,
and print global toilet paper to pay for it all. Because it is good business. **** laws,
lives and human decency.
And then you have Hollywood make ****-for-brain movies about just wars, war comradery and
heroic sacrifice and spread that **** all over the world.
So yeah, you got all the reasons for being hated for your war business.
The only way to honor veterans, really, truly honor them, is to help end war and make
sure no more lives are put into a position where they are on the giving or receiving end of
evil, stupid, meaningless violence
A bit too close to the Bone for the average American to appreciate. A well thought out & articulated article.
The machine is not the problem. It's like a gun. Guns are just mechanical devices and
can't kill until people aim them and pull the trigger. It's people that kill by forcing the
machine to do their terrible evil bidding.
It's the business and political leaders that build, guide and enable the machine and
facilitate the infrastructure and culture to wage war.
Democrats love War as we saw with LBJ, Bill Clinton (bombing the hell out of and
destroying Yugoslavia), Obama and Hillary Clinton. Democrat McNamara was one of their finest! McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War
It's both Republicans and Democrats - George Bush I's Desert Storm, Panama; George Bush II
invading Iraq, Afghanistan; Reagan invading GRENADA!, Nixon in Vietnam, assassinating
Salvador Allende in Chile, bombing Laos and Cambodia; Eisenhower started in Vietnam,
installed a dictator in Guatemala in 1954, installed Batista in Cuba, Kennedy was going to
withdraw from Vietnam and part of the reason he was assassinated; and on and on and on.
"... Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its shores are in their nineties, and soon there won't be any of them left. ..."
"... Every single person who has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil. ..."
"... Veterans Day, like so very, very much in American culture, is a propaganda construct designed to lubricate the funneling of human lives into the chamber of a gigantic gun. It glorifies evil, stupid, meaningless acts of mass murder to ensure that there will always be recruits who are willing to continue perpetrating it, and to ensure that the US public doesn't wake up to the fact that its government's insanely bloated military budget is being used to unleash unspeakable horrors upon the earth. ..."
"... Your rulers have never feared the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the terrorists, the Iranians, the Chinese or the Russians. They fear you. They fear the American public suddenly waking up to the evil things that are being done in your name and using your vast numbers to shrug off the existing power structures without firing a shot, as easily as removing a heavy coat on a warm day. If enough of you loudly withdraw your consent for their insatiable warmongering, that fear will be enough to keep them in check. ..."
The US will be celebrating Veterans Day, and many a striped flag shall be waved. The social
currency of esteem will be used to elevate those who have served in the US military, thereby
ensuring future generations of recruits to be thrown into the gears of the globe-spanning war
machine
Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their
country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its
shores are in their nineties, and soon there won't be any of them left.
Every single person who
has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other
than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been
fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for
imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil.
I just said something you're not supposed to say. People have dedicated many years of their
lives to the service of the US military; they've given their limbs to it, they've suffered
horrific brain damage for it, they've given their very lives to it. Families have been ripped
apart by the violence that has been inflicted upon members of the US Armed Forces; you're not
supposed to let them hear you say that their loved one was destroyed because some sociopathic
nerds somewhere in Washington decided that it would give America an advantage over potential
economic rivals to control a particular stretch of Middle Eastern dirt. But it is true, and if
we don't start acknowledging that truth lives are going to keep getting thrown into the gears
of the machine for the power and profit of a few depraved oligarchs. So I'm going to keep
saying it.
Last week I saw the hashtag #SaluteToService trending on Twitter. Apparently the NFL had a
deal going where every time someone tweeted that hashtag they'd throw a few bucks at some
veteran's charity. Which sounds sweet, until you consider three things:
2. The NFL has taken millions of
dollars from the Pentagon for displays of patriotism on the field, including for the
policy of bringing all players out for the national anthem every game starting in 2009 (which
led to Colin Kaepernick's demonstrations and the obscene backlash against him).
3. VETERANS SHOULD NOT HAVE TO RELY ON FUCKING CHARITY.
Seriously, how is "charity for veterans" a thing, and how are people not extremely weirded
out by it? How is it that you can go out and get your limbs blown off for slave wages after
watching your friends die and innocent civilians perish, come home, and have to rely on charity
to get by? How is it that you can risk life and limb killing and suffering irreparable
psychological trauma for some plutocrat's agendas, plunge into poverty when you come home, and
then see the same plutocrat labeled a "philanthropist" because he threw a few tax-deductible
dollars at a charity that gave you a decent prosthetic leg?
Taking care of veterans should be factored into the budget of every act of military
aggression . If a government can't make sure its veterans are housed, healthy and happy in a
dignified way for the rest of their lives, it has no business marching human beings into harm's
way. The fact that you see veterans on the street of any large US city and people who fought in
wars having to beg "charities" for a quality mechanical wheelchair shows you just how much of a
pathetic joke this Veterans Day song and dance has always been.
They'll send you to mainline violence and trauma into your mind and body for the power and
profit of the oligarchic rulers of the US-centralized empire, but it's okay because everyone
gets a long weekend where they're told to thank you for your service. Bullshit.
Veterans Day, like so very, very much in American culture, is a propaganda construct
designed to lubricate the funneling of human lives into the chamber of a gigantic gun. It
glorifies evil, stupid, meaningless acts of mass murder to ensure that there will always be
recruits who are willing to continue perpetrating it, and to ensure that the US public doesn't
wake up to the fact that its government's insanely bloated military budget is being used to
unleash unspeakable horrors upon the earth.
The only way to honor veterans, really, truly honor them, is to help end war and make sure
no more lives are put into a position where they are on the giving or receiving end of evil,
stupid, meaningless violence. The way to do that is to publicly, loudly and repeatedly make it
clear that you do not consent to the global terrorism being perpetrated in your name. These
bastards work so hard conducting propaganda to manufacture your consent for endless
warmongering because they need that consent . So don't give it to them.
Your rulers have never feared the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the terrorists, the
Iranians, the Chinese or the Russians. They fear you. They fear the American public suddenly
waking up to the evil things that are being done in your name and using your vast numbers to
shrug off the existing power structures without firing a shot, as easily as removing a heavy
coat on a warm day. If enough of you loudly withdraw your consent for their insatiable
warmongering, that fear will be enough to keep them in check.
This Veterans Day, don't honor those who have served by giving reverence and legitimacy to a
war machine which is exclusively used for inflicting great evil. Honor them by disassembling
that machine.
* * *
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Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .
So the USA Congress operates under CIA surveillance... Due to CIA access to Saudi money the situation is probably much
worse then described as CIA tried to protect both its level of influence and shadow revenue streams.
Notable quotes:
"... The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch, is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing. ..."
"... I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community Inspector General 2014 ..."
"... The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly," wrote Grassley in a statement. ..."
"... According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with "bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper." ..."
"... Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications ..."
"... CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director ..."
"... During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance," said Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016. ..."
CIA intercepted Congressional emails about whistleblowers in 2014
The Inspector General expressed concern about "potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality" and "chilling effect"
Newly-declassified documents show the CIA intercepted sensitive Congressional communications about intelligence community whistleblowers.
The intercepts occurred under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The new disclosures
are contained in two letters of "Congressional notification" originally written to key members of Congress in March 2014, but kept
secret until now.
In the letters, then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough tells four key members of Congress that during
"routing counterintelligence monitoring of Government computer systems," the CIA collected emails between Congressional staff and
the CIA's head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough states that he's concerned "about the potential compromise to
whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent 'chilling effect' that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might
have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing."
The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch,
is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence
agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing.
"Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower complaints," McCullough states in his letters to lead Democrats
and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees at the time: Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Saxby Chambliss
(R-Georgia); and Representatives Michael Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland). McCullough adds that the type
of monitoring that occurred was "lawful and justified for [counterintelligence] purposes" but
"I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive
Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community
Inspector General 2014
The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The
fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers
raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly,"
wrote Grassley in a statement.
According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with
"bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper."
Grassley adds that he repeated his request to declassify the letters under the Trump administration, but that Trump intelligence
officials failed to respond. The documents were finally declassified this week after Grassley appealed to the new Intelligence Community
Inspector General Michael Atkinson.
History of alleged surveillance abuses
Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the
possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications. A Congressional staffer involved at the time says Clapper's
response seemed to imply that if Congressional communications were "incidentally" collected by the CIA, the material would not be
saved or reported up to CIA management.
"In the event of a protected disclosure by a whistleblower somehow comes to the attention of personnel responsible for monitoring
user activity," Clapper wrote to Grassley and Wyden on July 25, 2014, "there is no intention for such disclosure to be reported
to agency leadership under an insider threat program."
However, the newly-declassified letters indicate the opposite happened in reality with the whistleblower-related emails:
"CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually
shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy
Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director."
Clapper has previously come under fire for his 2013 testimony to Congress in which he denied that the national Security Agency
(NSA) collects data on millions of Americans. Weeks later, Clapper's statement was proven false by material leaked by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden.
"During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance,"
said
Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016.
"Top officials, officials who reported to Director Clapper, repeatedly misled the American people and even lied to them."
Clapper has repeatedly denied lying, and said that any incorrect information he provided was due to misunderstandings or mistakes.
Clapper and Brennan have also acknowledged taking part in the controversial practice of "unmasking" the protected names of U.S.
citizens - including people connected to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump - whose communications were "incidentally" captured
in US counterintelligence operations. Unmaskings within the US intelligence community are supposed to be extremely rare and only
allowed under carefully justified circumstances. This is to protect the privacy rights of American citizens. But it's been revealed
that Obama officials requested unmaskings on a near daily basis during the election year of 2016.
Clapper and Brennan have said their activities were lawful and not politically motivated. Both men have become vocal critics of
President Trump.
Can you imagine what kind of place the US would have been under Clinton?!!!!!!
All the illegality, spying, conniving, dirty tricks, arcancides, selling us out to the highest bidder and full on attack against
our Constitution would be in full swing!
When intel entities can operate unimpeded and un-monitored, it spells disaster for everyone and everything outside that parameter.
Their operations go unnoticed until some stray piece of information exposes them. There are many facilities that need to be purged
and audited, but since this activity goes on all over the world, there is little to stop it. Even countries that pledge allegiance
and cooperation are blindsiding their allies with bugs, taps, blackmails, and other crimes. Nobody trusts nobody, and that's a
horrid fact to contend with in an 'advanced' civilization.
Forget the political parties. When the intelligence agencies spy on everyone, they know all about politicians of both parties
before they ever win office, and make sure they have enough over them to control them. They were asleep at the switch when Trump
won, because no one, including them, believed he would ever win. Hillary was their candidate, the State Department is known overseas
as "the political arm of the CIA". They were furious when she lost, hence the circus ever since.
From its founding by the Knights of Malta the JFK&MLK-assassinating, with Mossad 9/11-committing CIA has been the Vatican's
US Fifth Column action branch, as are the FBI and NSA: with an institutional hiring preference for Roman Catholic "altared boy"
closet-queen psychopaths "because they're practiced at keeping secrets."
Think perverts Strzok, Brennan, and McCabe "licked it off the wall?"
I agree with you 100%. Problem is, tons of secret technology and information have been passed out to the private sector. And
the private sector is not bound to the FOIA requests, therefore neutralizing the obligation for government to disclose classified
material. They sidestepped their own policies to cooperate with corrupt MIC contractors, and recuse themselves from disclosing
incriminating evidence.
Everyone knows that spying runs in the fam. 44th potus Mom and Gma BOTH. An apple doesn't fall from the tree. If ppl only knew
the true depth of the evil and corruption we would be in the hospital with a heart attack. Gilded age is here and has been, since
our democracy was hijacked (McCain called it an intervention) back in 1963. Unfortunately it started WAY back before then when
(((they))) stole everything with the installation of the Fed.
The FBI and CIA have long since slipped the controls of Congress and the Constitution. President Trump should sign an executive
order after the mid terms and stand down at least the FBI and subject the CIA to a senate investigation.
America needs new agencies that are accountable to the peoples elected representatives.
A determined care has been used to cultivate in D.C., a system that swiftly decapitates the whistleblowers. Resulting in an
increasingly subservient cadre of civil servants who STHU and play ostrich, or drool at what scraps are about to roll off the
master's table as the slide themselves into a better position, taking advantage to sell vice, weapons, and slaves.
What the hell does the CIA have to do with ANYTHING in the United States? Aren't they limited to OUTSIDE the U.S.? So why would
they be involved in domestic communications for anything? These clowns need to be indicted for TREASON!
"... There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress. ..."
"... Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary. ..."
"... "Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it." ..."
"... "While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the Ł4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women ..."
"... The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it. ..."
"... While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE. ..."
"... Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony." ..."
"... In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage] ..."
"... The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945 ..."
"... I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism ..."
"... What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to! ..."
"... Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned. ..."
"... Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded! ..."
"... Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire" ..."
"... While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned. ..."
"... As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood. ..."
This is one of the most sensible editorials on the Russia issue I've seen, and it is true, insofar as it goes. There is something
very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies.
There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to
testify before congress.
That said, I wouldn't dismiss the effect of the Russian involvement, or the relevance of the charges against Trump and his
people. Bear in mind that the Party of McCarthy has been all about spying on its opponents from the days of HUAC. Nixon's break-in
at the Watergate Hotel didn't singlehandedly decide the election ... but who would believe that was the only underhanded tactic
he used? Republicans believe that if you're not cheating, you're not trying -- holding out for any ethical standard makes you
inherently disloyal and unworthy of support. Something like Kavanaugh's involvement in the hacking of Democrats in 2003 (
http://www.foxnews.com/poli... ) should be no surprise; neither should the "Guccifer" hack that put the Democrats' data in
the hands of Wikileaks. (Their subsequent attempts to demand Wikileaks not publish such a newsworthy leak, of course, is the sort
of thing that undermines their position with me!)
Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary.
But if you go back in your house after the Republicans were minding it, don't be surprised if together with the missing couch
change you notice some missing silverware, your kitchen tap has been sawed off, and the laptop is short half its RAM. By the time
you've catalogued everything missing, the stolen brass part from the gas main downstairs might have blown you to smithereens.
"Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie,
the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it."
There are many reasons the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule. Each one of them is bound up with the lies required to enforce
its rule. The greater its unfitness, "the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it.
"While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise
is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just
want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the Ł4 billion annual license fee."
- BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women
The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it.
While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies
to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in
the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE.
Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of
colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources
and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony."
In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another
'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite
an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage]
The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945. It is time radical critiques of
its values, power and methods should call it by its right name.
I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months.
The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war.
We are in an age of new mccarthyism
What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction
they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told
to!
just because it was a convenient act for them to do what they wanted in conquering iraq is not reason that idiots like that are
capable of planning and concealing the numerous co-conspirators to arrange something like 9..11. imperialism can always count
on blowback to have occasion for further crimes. there is the slim chance that they knew what was being planned and that they
let it happen - except that none of those folks is evil enough for that. not even dick cheney. what i love about all conspiracy
theories of the american kind is that they never nam or show an actual conspirator conspiring. look at one of the truly great
failed conspiracy, that of the 20th july 1944 in germany that was meant to kill hitler and how many people were arrested in no
time at all and executed..
A "conspiracy" is just any two or more people getting together to discuss something affecting one or more other people without
them being party to the discussion. Like a surprise birthday party, for instance. Obviously the "official" version of the 9/11
events is also a "conspiracy theory" that 19 mostly Saudi Arabians led by a guy hiding in a cave in Afghanistan conspired to carry
out co-ordinated attacks that just happened to coincide with most of the USAF being conveniently off in Alaska and northern Canada
on an exercise that day, and another "coinciding exercise" simulating a multiple hijacking being carried out in the northeast
US thereby confusing the Air Traffic Controllers as to whether the hijackings were "real world or exercise", significantly delaying
the response, among other things.
Do you really believe that WTC 7, a steel frame building which was not adjacent to WTC 1 & 2, and was NOT hit by any airplanes,
coincidentally collapsed due to low temperature paper and furniture office fires? Something that has never happened before or
since? Or that such low temperature fires would cause the massive heavily reinforced concrete central core/elevator shaft to collapse
first, pulling the rest of the building inward onto it in classic controlled demolition technique?
It is getting more difficult to find the videos showing that now as Google, as with WSWS articles, is pushing them off the
front pages of results, while Snopes has put out a some very misleading reports that set up false "straw man" claims and then
"disprove" them. Even the "disproofs" are false.
For instance, a Snopes report on the WTC 7 collapse states: "relied heavily on discredited claims, none of which were new,
including:
Jet fuel cannot melt steel beams (This claim is misleading, as steel beams do to not need to melt completely to be compromised
structurally).
A sprinkler system would have prevented temperatures from rising high enough to cause to cause structural damage. (This claim
ignores the fact that a crash from a 767 jet would likely destroy such a system.)
The structural system would have been protected by fireproofing material (similarly, such a system would have been damaged
in a 767 crash). "
Jet fuel, which is Kerosene, burns at around 575ş in open air, which was the case in WTC buildings 1 & 2. Most of it was vaporized
by the impact with the buildings and burned of within minutes. At any rate, 575ş is far below the point at which structural steel
specifically designed to withstand high temperature fires like that used in the World Trade Centre buildings is weakened.
All of which is irrelevant, as are the other "points" made by Snopes, because Building 7 was not hit by an airplane and there
was no jet fuel involved. Something conveniently "overlooked" by Snopes and other similar misleading "disproofs". Not to mention
that the Intelligence establishment is busy putting out false trails constantly which use, for instance, obviously faked photos
or videos of the three WTC buildings collapsing to discredit the real videos and photos by setting up "straw men" they can then
"disprove" and point to as "evidence" that people who don't believe the official version are "creating fake news".
Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called
it as soon as the buildings imploded!
"The perpetrators and their conspiracy is not a theory since it has been proved."
By "proved" I assume you are referring to "proofs" such as the fantastical claim that Mohammed Atta's passport was allegedly
and fortuitously "found" when it supposedly survived the 600 mph impact of the 767 he was supposedly piloting with a huge steel
and concrete building, survived the huge fireball it was supposedly in the middle of unscorched, and conveniently fluttered to
the ground intact to land at the feet of an FBI agent who immediately realized it must have belonged to one of the hijackers!
Even Hans Christian Andersen couldn't invent Fairy Tales like that.
the best that conspiracy theorist can do is, invariably, to call proven facts "just another theory " which only proves that they
are actually aware that they are full of hot air! zarembas father as a structural engineer unless a fantasy is certainly better
off among the dead than among the living and perpetrating his ignorance of steel and weight and fire onto the world!
Just because all the details aren't known as to who conspired and why there's enough holes in the "official conspiracy theory"
of 19 hijackers to conclude that this could not have been pulled off without some conspiring on the American side. Certainly the
the neocons benefited greatly from these attacks. So motive is there for sure.
Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most
effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party
Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party
are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form
a "Political Revolution against Empire"
While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is
concerned.
There is nothing to win in global nuke war, all know it while the outcome would be surely the current global oligarchy loosing
grip on population destroying the system that works for them so well giving chance to what they dread socialist revolution they
would have been much weaker to counter.
Regional conflicts are just positioning of oligarchy for management of global oligarchic country club while strict class morality
is maintained.
What I do not we are conditions for war (split of global ruling elites) while what I see is broad propaganda of war as a excuse
to clamp down on fake enemy in order to control respective populations while there is factual unity among world oligarchy.
As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch
of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood.
She died abandoned by those on the left who embraced the war for their political aspirations, she was murdered for her true
internationalism i.e. No war fought between working people of one country and working people of another country.
Kalen, it's only effective to use the correct and understandable term 'Empire' in exposing, warning, and motivating average Americans
--- since very few even know what words like; oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism, authoritarianism, corporate-state, or Wolin's 'inverted
totalitarianism' mean --- let alone could ever serve as rallying cries for the coming essential Second American Revolution against
EMPIRE.
As Pat would have shouted if Tom had taken the Paine to edit his call, "Give me Liberty over EMPIRE, or Give me Death!"
"Sweet Carolyn" OH OH OH --- Yes, only a very small percentage of Americans understand that our former country, the U.S. of America,
is categorically, provably, and absolutely a new form of Empire, and is inexorably the first in world history an; 'effectively-disguised',
'truly-global', 'dual-party Vichy', and 'capitalist-fueled' EMPIRE --- an EMPIRE, really just an EMPIRE!
Just do an honest survey, "Sweet Carolyn", yourself, and if you're not a "Sweet Liarlyn", you will have to admit that essentially
ZERO of the first 1000 people you ask, will say --- "Oh ya, Carolyn, of course I know that this whole effin 'system' that others
less informed may still be so stupid that they think they live in a real country, when I (enter their name) do solemnly swear
is just an effin EMPIRE, which is so well disguised, that these few idiots who don't understand that they are just citizen/'subjects'
of this monsterous EMPIRE."
Do the survey, "Sweet Carolyn" and if you don't lie to yourself --- which maybe you do, because HELL, your job is to lie to
others (so it's quite likely that you'll lie about anything) --- you'll find that exactly zero average Americans have the effin
slightest idea in the world that their great 'country' is actually an effin EMPIRE.
HELL, Carolyn, almost half the Americans repeatedly yell, "We're number ONE", "We're number ONE", that their brains would rather
rattle themselves to death than even let logic, history, knowledge, or anything into their addled and propaganda filled heads!
Excellent article, and it did a particularly good job of tying together the foreign policy and domestic policy stratagems of a
major faction of the U.S. ruling class. I, for one, do not doubt that the Russians conduct some sort of cyber warfare against
the U.S.; but that must be understood by considering the fact that every major governmental, political, military, and business
organization on the face of the Earth must now operate in this manner. A friend of mine's son, who was in the Army, pointed out
that the big players, by a wide margin, in spying on and to some degree interfering in the U.S. domestic scene are China and Israel.
Kevin Barrett has written and said on various radio shows that much of what is attributed to the "Russians" are actually the actions
of Russian/Israeli dual citizens, many of whom move freely between the U.S., Russia, and Israel. And, of course, the U.S. runs
major spy and manipulation operations in more countries than any other nation of Earth, and U.S. based corporations are busy both
inside the U.S. and in foreign places in similar activities.
It is clearly a desire of significant sectors, of the Capitalist rulers of the U.S., to repress dissent and political activities
that oppose their agendas. It took them a few years to realize that their old methods using TV, hate radio, magazines, direct
mail, and newspapers were losing their effectiveness. They have been increasing their attacks on leftist websites, hacking into
websites, closing websites using phonied-up "national security" justifications, employing numerous trolls, and establishing and
funding more far right websites, such as Breitbart and Infowars. These efforts are most effective when they are not overpowering
and heavy handed.
The classic book on this was the 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"
by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann. Rob Williams has updated the concept for the internet age in
<http:
www.vermontindependent.org ="" the-post-truth-world-reviving-the-propaganda-model-of-news-for-our-digital-age=""/>.
The strategy
is nothing new, the methods are merely updated and use the latest technologies.
I guess the lesson to be learned here is that rigging elections through byzantine electoral laws and billion dollar corporate
slush funds is a thing of the past. All you need now is 13 amateur IT goomba's with a marketing scheme and twitter accounts. Well, sure is a fragile "World's Sole Superpower" we got here. Go Team?
Perhaps the loss of the House may actually prove to be a mixed blessing for Trump. Democrats
will achieve control of all the investigative committees and their accusations and subpoenas
will make Trump's life even more miserable than it was before, while surely removing any chance
that significant elements of Trump's remaining agenda will ever be enacted.
However, although Trump had reached the presidency by advocating a radical
populist-nationalist agenda, he has hardly governed in those terms. For his first two years in
office, he sunk nearly all his political capital into enacting huge tax cuts for the rich,
wholesale Wall Street deregulation, large increases in military spending, and an extremely
pro-Israel foreign policy -- exactly the sort of policies near-and-dear to the establishment
conservative candidates whom he had crushed in the Republican primaries. Meanwhile, his jilted
grassroots supporters have had to settle for some radical rhetoric and a regular barrage of
outrageous Tweets rather than anything more substantive. With Republicans in full control of
Congress, finding excuses for this widespread betrayal was quite difficult, but now that the
Democrats have taken the House, Trump's apologists can more easily shift the blame over to
them.
Meanwhile, a considerably stronger Republican Senate will certainly ease the way for Trump's
future court nominees, especially if another Supreme Court vacancy occurs, and there will be
little chance of any difficult Kavanaugh battles. However, here once again, Trump's supposed
radicalism has merely been rhetorical. Kavanaugh and nearly all of his other nominees have been
very mainstream Republican choices, carefully vetted by the Federalist Society and other
conservative establishment groups, and they would probably have been near the top of the list
if Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio were sitting in the Oval Office.
Both Trump's supporters and his opponents claim that his presidency represents a drastic
break from Republican business-as-usual, and surely that was the hope of many of the Americans
who voted for him in 2016, but the actual reality often seems rather different.
Although the net election results were not particularly bad for the Republicans, the
implications of several state races seem extremely worrisome. The highest profile senate race
was in Texas, and Trump may have narrowly dodged a bullet. Among our largest states, Texas
ranks as by far the most solidly Republican, and therefore it serves as the central lynchpin of
every Republican presidential campaign. The GOP has won every major statewide race for more
than twenty years, but despite such seemingly huge advantages, incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz faced a
very difficult reelection race against a young border-area Congressman named Beto O'Rourke, who
drew enormous enthusiasm and an ocean of local and national funding.
I was actually in Texas just a couple of days before the vote, speaking at a Ron
Paul-related conference in the Houston area, and although most of the libertarian-leaning
attendees thought that Cruz would probably win, they all agreed with the national media that it
would probably be close. Cruz's final victory margin of less than three points confirmed this
verdict.
But if things had gone differently, and O'Rourke had squeaked out a narrow win, our national
politics would have been immediately transformed. Any Republican able to win California has a
near-lock on the White House, and the same is true for any Democrat able to carry Texas,
especially if the latter is a young and attractive Kennedyesque liberal, fluent in Spanish and
probably very popular with the large Latino populations of other important states such as
Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado. I strongly suspect that a freshman Sen. O'Rourke
(R-Texas) would have been offered the 2020 Democratic nomination almost by acclamation, and
barring unexpected personal or national developments, would have been a strong favorite in that
race against Trump or any other Republican. Rep. O'Rourke raised an astonishing $70 million in
nationwide donations, and surely many of his contributors were dreaming of similar
possibilities. A shift of just a point and a half, and in twenty-four months he probably would
have been our next president. But it was not to be.
I personally don't understand the French electorate on these matters. Macron in particular
did not promise anything other than to deliver more of the same policies, albeit with
more youth and more vigor, as a frank globalist. Who, exactly, was excited at his election but
is disappointed now? People with a short attention span or susceptibility to marketing
gimmicks, I assume.
It is hard to talk about the French media without getting a bit conspiratorial, at least, I
speak of "structural conspiracies." Macron's unabashed, "modernizing" globalism certainly
corresponds to the id of the French media-corporate elites and to top 20% of the
electorate, let us say, the talented fifth. He was able to break through the old French
two-party system, annihilating the Socialist Party and sidelining the conservatives. The media
certainly helped in this, preferring him to either the conservative François Fillon or
the civic nationalist Marine Le Pen.
However, the media have to a certain extent turned on Macron, perhaps because he
believes his "complex thoughts" cannot be grasped by
journalists with their admittedly limited cognitive abilities . Turn on the French radio
and you'll hear stories of how the so-called "Youth With Macron," whose twenty- and
thirty-somethings were invited onto all the talk shows just before Macron became a leading
candidate, were actually former Socialist party hacks with no grass roots. Astroturf. I could
have told you that.
Macron has made a number of what the media call "gaffes." When an old lady voiced concern
about the future of her pension,
he answered : "you don't have a right to complain." He has also done many things that
anyone with just a little sense of decorum will be disgusted by. The 40-year-old Macron, who
has a 65-year-old wife and claims not to be a homosexual, loves being photographed with sweaty
black bodies.
... ... ...
So there's that. But, in terms of policies, I cannot say that the people who supported
Macron have any right to complain. He is doing what he promised, that is to say, steaming full
straight ahead on the globalist course with, a bit more forthrightness and, he hopes,
competence than his Socialist or conservative predecessors.
Link
Bookmark In truth there are no solutions. There is nothing he can do to make the elitist and
gridlocked European Union more effective, nothing he can do to improve the "human capital" in
the Afro-Islamic banlieues , and not much he can do to improve the economy which the
French people would find acceptable. A bit more of labor flexibility here, a bit of a tax break
there, oh wait deficit's too big, a tax hike in some other area too, then. Six of one, half a
dozen in the other. Oh, and they've also passed
more censorship legislation to fight "fake news" and "election meddling" and other pathetic
excuses the media-political class across the West have come up with for their loss of control
over the Narrative.
Since the European Central Bank has been printing lending hundreds of billions of euros to
stimulate the Eurozone economy, France's economic performance has been decidedly mediocre, with
low growth, slowly declining unemployment, and no reduction in debt (currently at 98.7% of
GDP). Performance will presumably worsen if the ECB, as planned, phases out stimulus at the end
of this year.
There is a rather weird situation in terms of immigration and diversity. Everyone seems to
be aware of the hellscape of ethno-religious conflict which will thrive in the emerging
Afro-Islamic France of the future. Just recently at the commemoration of the Battle of Verdun,
an elderly French soldier asked Macron : "When will you kick out the illegal immigrants? .
. . Aren't we bringing in a Trojan Horse?"
More significant was the resignation of Gérard Collomb from his position as interior
minister last month to return to his old job as mayor of Lyon, which he apparently finds more
interesting. Collomb is a 71-year-old Socialist politician who has apparently awakened to the
problems of ethnic segregation and conflict. He said in his
farewell address :
I have been in all the neighborhoods, the neighborhoods of Marseille-North to Mirail in
Toulous, to the Parisian periphery, Corbeil, Aulnay, Sevran, the situation has deteriorated
greatly. We cannot continue to work on towns individually, there needs to be an overarching
vision to recreate social mixing. Because today we are living side by side, and I still say,
me, I fear that tomorrow we will live face-to-face [i.e. across a battle lines].
It is not clear how much Collomb tried to act upon these concerns as interior minister and
was frustrated. In any case, he dared to voice the same concerns to
the far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles last February. He told them: "The relations
between people are very difficult, people don't want to live together" (using the term
vivre-ensemble , a common diversitarian slogan). He said immigration's responsibility
for this was "enormous" and agreed with the journalist that "France no longer needs
immigration." Collomb then virtually predicted civil war:
Communities in France are coming into conflict more and more and it is becoming very
violent . . . I would say that, within five years, the situation could become irreversible.
Yes, we have five or six years to avoid the worst. After that . . .
It's unclear why "the next five or six years" should be so critical. From one point of view,
the old France is already lost as about
a third of births are non-European and in particular
one fifth are Islamic . The patterns of life in much of France will therefore likely come
to reflect those of Africa and the Middle-East, including random violence and religious
fanaticism. Collomb seems to think "social mixing" would prevent this, but in fact, there has
been plenty of social and even genetic "mixing" in Brazil and Mexico, without this preventing
ethno-racial stratification and extreme levels of violence.
I'm afraid it's all more of the same in douce France , sweet France. On the current
path, Macron will be a one-termer like Sarkozy and Hollande were. Then again, the next
elections will be in three-and-a-half years, an eternity in democratic politics. In all
likelihood, this would be the Right's election to win, with a conservative anti-immigration
candidate. A few people of the mainstream Right are open to working with Le Pen's National
Rally and some have even defended the Identitarians. Then again, I could even imagine
Macron posing as a heroic opponent of (illegal . . .) immigration if he thought it could
help get him reelected. Watch this space . . .
How many immigrants from Africa come to Europe depends only on political will of Europeans. The
demography of African has nothing to do with it. Europe has means to stop immigration legal and
illegal. Macron talking about how many children are born in Africa is just another cop out.
A few months ago I claimed that Emmanuel Macron has/holds an ""Alt Right" worldview" due
to him having had interactions with an influential member of the French Protestant Huguenot
minority in France: http://www.unz.com/article/collateral-damage/#comment-1955020
[...] Macron : Germany is different from France. You are more Protestant, which results
in a significant difference. Through the church, through Catholicism, French society was
structured vertically, from top to bottom. I am convinced that it has remained so until
today. That might sound shocking to some – and don't worry, I don't see myself as a
king. But whether you like it or not, France's history is unique in Europe. Not to put too
fine a point on it, France is a country of regicidal monarchists. It is a paradox: The
French want to elect a king, but they would like to be able to overthrow him whenever they
want. The office of president is not a normal office – that is something one should
understand when one occupies it. You have to be prepared to be disparaged, insulted and
mocked – that is in the French nature. And: As president, you cannot have a desire to
be loved. Which is, of course, difficult because everybody wants to be loved. But in the end,
that's not important. What is important is serving the country and moving it forward.
Who, exactly, was excited at his election but is disappointed now? People with a short
attention span or susceptibility to marketing gimmicks, I assume.
"... officials and politicians in Britain and France conspired to transform Serbia's murder of Austro-Hungary's Crown Prince into a continent-wide conflict. France burned for revenge for its defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Britain feared German commercial and naval competition. At the time, the British Empire controlled one quarter of the world's surface. Italy longed to conquer Austria-Hungary's South Tyrol. Turkey feared Russia's desire for the Straits. Austria-Hungary feared Russian expansion. ..."
"... Prof Clark clearly shows how the French and British maneuvered poorly-led Germany into the war. The Germans were petrified of being crushed between two hostile powers, France and Russia. The longer the Germans waited, the more the military odds turned against them. Tragically, Germany was then Europe's leader in social justice. ..."
"... Britain kept stirring the pot, determined to defeat commercial and colonial rival, Germany. The rush to war became a gigantic clockwork that no one could stop. All sides believed a war would be short and decisive. Crowds of fools chanted 'On to Berlin' or 'On to Paris.' ..."
"... The 1904 Russo-Japanese War offered a sharp foretaste of the 1914 conflict, but Europe's grandees paid scant attention. ..."
"... This demented war in Europe tuned into an even greater historic tragedy in 1917 when US President Woodrow Wilson, driven by a lust for power and prestige, entered the totally stalemated war on the Western Front. One million US troops and starvation caused by a crushing British naval blockade turned the tide of battle and led to Germany's surrender. ..."
"... Vengeful France and Britain imposed intolerable punishment on Germany, forcing it to accept full guilt for the war, an untruth that persists to this day. The result was Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists. If an honorable peace had been concluded in 1917, neither Hitler nor Stalin might have seized power and millions of lives would have been saved. This is the true tragedy of the Great War. ..."
"... Let us recall the words of the wise Benjamin Franklin: `No good war, no bad peace.' ..."
We are now upon the 100th anniversary of World War I, the war that was supposed to end all
wars. While honoring the 16 million who died in this conflict, we should also condemn the
memory of the politicians, officials and incompetent generals who created this horrendous blood
bath.
I've walked most of the Western Front of the Great War, visited its battlefields and haunted
forts, and seen the seas of crosses marking its innumerable cemeteries.
As a former soldier and war correspondent, I've always considered WWI as he stupidest, most
tragic and catastrophic of all modern wars.
The continuation of this conflict, World War II, killed more people and brought more
destruction on civilians in firebombed cities but, at least for me, World War I holds a special
horror and poignancy. This war was not only an endless nightmare for the soldiers in their
pestilential trenches, it also violently ended the previous 100 years of glorious European
civilization, one of mankind's most noble achievements.
I've explored the killing fields of Verdun many times and feel a visceral connection to this
ghastly place where up to 1,000,000 soldiers died. I have even spent the night there, listening
to the sirens that wailed without relent, and watching searchlights that pierced the night,
looking for the ghosts of the French and German soldiers who died here.
Verdun's soil was so poisoned by explosives and lethal gas that to this day it produces only
withered, stunted scrub and sick trees. Beneath the surface lie the shattered remains of men
and a deadly harvest of unexploded shells that still kill scores of intruders each year. The
spooky Ossuaire Chapel contains the bone fragments of 130,000 men, blown to bits by the
millions of high explosive shells that deluged Verdun.
The town of the same name is utterly bleak, melancholy and cursed. Young French and German
officers are brought here to see firsthand the horrors of war and the crime of stupid
generalship.
Amid all the usual patriotic cant from politicians, imperialists and churchmen about the
glories of this slaughter, remember that World War I was a contrived conflict that was totally
avoidable. Contrary to the war propaganda that still clouds and corrupts our historical view,
World War I was not started by Imperial Germany.
Professor Christopher Clark in his brilliant book, `The Sleepwalkers' shows how officials
and politicians in Britain and France conspired to transform Serbia's murder of
Austro-Hungary's Crown Prince into a continent-wide conflict. France burned for revenge for its
defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Britain feared German
commercial and naval competition. At the time, the British Empire controlled one quarter of the
world's surface. Italy longed to conquer Austria-Hungary's South Tyrol. Turkey feared Russia's
desire for the Straits. Austria-Hungary feared Russian expansion.
Prof Clark clearly shows how the French and British maneuvered poorly-led Germany into the
war. The Germans were petrified of being crushed between two hostile powers, France and Russia.
The longer the Germans waited, the more the military odds turned against them. Tragically,
Germany was then Europe's leader in social justice.
Britain kept stirring the pot, determined to defeat commercial and colonial rival, Germany.
The rush to war became a gigantic clockwork that no one could stop. All sides believed a war
would be short and decisive. Crowds of fools chanted 'On to Berlin' or 'On to Paris.'
Few at the time understood the impending horrors of modern war or the geopolitical demons
one would release. The 1904 Russo-Japanese War offered a sharp foretaste of the 1914 conflict,
but Europe's grandees paid scant attention.
Even fewer grasped how the collapse of the antiquated Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires
would send Europe and the Mideast into dangerous turmoil that persists to our day. Or how a
little-known revolutionary named Lenin would shatter Imperial Russia and turn it into the
world's most murderous state.
This demented war in Europe tuned into an even greater historic tragedy in 1917 when US
President Woodrow Wilson, driven by a lust for power and prestige, entered the totally
stalemated war on the Western Front. One million US troops and starvation caused by a crushing
British naval blockade turned the tide of battle and led to Germany's surrender.
Vengeful France and Britain imposed intolerable punishment on Germany, forcing it to accept
full guilt for the war, an untruth that persists to this day. The result was Adolf Hitler and
his National Socialists. If an honorable peace had been concluded in 1917, neither Hitler nor
Stalin might have seized power and millions of lives would have been saved. This is the true
tragedy of the Great War.
Let us recall the words of the wise Benjamin Franklin: `No good war, no bad peace.'
On two declassified letters from 2014 from the Intelligence Community Inspector General
(didn't know there was one, but doesn't do much good anyway, it seems, read further) to the
chairpersons of the House and Senate intelligence committees notifying them that the CIA has
been monitoring emails between the CIA's head of the whistleblowing and source protection and
Congressional. "Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower
complaints". Shows why Edward Snowdon didn't consider it appropriate to rely on internal
complaints proceedures. This while under the leadership of seasoned liars and criminals
Brennan and Clapper, of course.
It clearly shows a taste of what these buggers have to hide, and why they went to such
extraordinary lengths as Russiagate to cover it all up and save their skins - that of course
being the real reason behind Russiagate as I have said several times, nothing to do with
either Trump or Russia.
OWS was a Controlled-Dissent operation, sending poor students north to fecklessly march on
Wall Street when they could have shut down WADC, and sending wealthy seniors south to
fecklessly line Pennsylvania Avenue, when they could have shut down Wall Street.
Both I$I$, and Hamas, and Antifa et al are all Controlled Dissent operations. The
followers are duped, are used, abused and then abandoned by honey-pots put there by Central
Intelligence, at least since the Spanish Civil War.
That's why MoA articles like this one make you wonder, just who is conning whom, at a time
when the Internet is weaponized, when Google Assistant achieved AI awareness
indistinguishable from anyone on the phone, China TV has launched a virtual AI news reporter
indistinguishable from reality, and Stanford can audio-video a captured image of anyone as
well as their voice intonation, then 3D model them, in real time, reading and emoting from a
script, indistinguishable from reality, ...and then this.
Another Gift of Trust😂 brought to you by Scientocracy. Be sure to tithe your AI
bot, or word will get back to Chairman Albertus, then you'll be called in to confess your
thought crimes to the Green Cadre, itself another Controlled Dissent honeypot, in a
Tithe-for-Credits Swindle.
I tell my kids, just enjoy life, live it large, and get ready for hell. It's coming for
breakfast.
"... Over 60,000 US troops either killed or wounded in conflicts ..."
"... The study estimates between 480,000 and 507,000 people were killed in the course of the three conflicts. ..."
"... Civilians make up over half of the roughly 500,000 killed, with both opposition fighters and US-backed foreign military forces each sustaining in excess of 100,000 deaths as well. ..."
"... This is admittedly a dramatic under-report of people killed in the wars, as it only attempts to calculate those killed directly in war violence, and not the massive number of others civilians who died from infrastructure damage or other indirect results of the wars. The list also excludes the US war in Syria, which itself stakes claims to another 500,000 killed since 2011. ..."
Over 60,000 US troops either killed or wounded in conflicts
Brown University has released a new study on the cost
in lives of America's Post-9/11 Wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The study estimates between 480,000 and 507,000 people
were killed in the course of the three conflicts.
This includes combatant deaths and civilian deaths in fighting and war violence. Civilians make up over half of the roughly
500,000 killed, with both opposition fighters and US-backed foreign military forces each sustaining in excess of 100,000 deaths as
well.
This is admittedly a dramatic under-report of people killed in the wars, as it only attempts to calculate those killed directly
in war violence, and not the massive number of others civilians who died from infrastructure damage or other indirect results of
the wars. The list also excludes the US war in Syria, which itself stakes claims to another 500,000 killed since 2011.
The report also notes that over 60,000 US troops were either killed or wounded in the course of the wars. This includes 6,951
US military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11.
The Brown study also faults the US for having done very little in the last 17 years to provide transparency to the country about
the scope of the conflicts, concluding that they are "inhibited by governments determined to paint a rosy picture of perfect execution
and progress."
Hacking operations by anyone, can and will be used by US propagandists to provoke Russia
or whoever stands in the way of the US war machine, take this Pompeo rant against Iran and
the Iranian response......
Asking of Pompeo "have you no shame?", Zarif mocked Pompeo's praise for the Saudis for
"providing millions and millions of dollars of humanitarian relief" to Yemen, saying
America's "butcher clients" were spending billions of dollars bombing school buses. Iranian
Foreign Minister Javad Zarif issued a statement lashing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for
his recent comments on the Yemen War. Discussing the US-backed Saudi invasion of Yemen,
Pompeo declared Iran to be to blame for the death and destruction in the country. https://news.antiwar.com/2018/11/09/iran-fm-slams-pompeo-for-blaming-yemen-war-on-iran/
The US way of looking at things supposes that up is down, and white is black, it makes no
sense, unless the US hopes these provocations will lead to a war or at the very least Russia
or Iran capitulating to US aggression, which will not happen. Sanctions by the US on all and
sundry must be opposed, if not the US will claim justifiably to be the worlds policeman and
the arbiter of who will trade with who, a ludicrous proposition but one that most governments
are afraid is now taking place, witness the new US ambassador to Germany in his first tweet
telling the Germans to cease all trade with Iran immediately.
"... With all due cynical respect... I find it highly ironic that some of the biggest money launderers and Mafiosi are Baltic banks. The hilarity never ends. ..."
"... Full scale bull ****. No single former Soviet bloc country get into economic level of pre-Berlin wall fall. They are done. ..."
With all due cynical respect... I find it highly ironic that some of the biggest money
launderers and Mafiosi are Baltic banks. The hilarity never ends.
Here is classic: GDP PPP per capita. What to pay attention.
#1, After 30 years and joining EU and NATO there is no difference in former Soviet bloc.
Just looks like Russia is greatest profiteer. Now those parasites are chained to west.
#2, countries of former Soviet bloc are in better shape than countries that were in sphere
of western imperialism. Especially look at countries where USA imperialism worked since 1823
Monroe's doctrine. Chart shows that in 200 years USA was not able to achieve much progress
despite permanent military interventions and political influence.
As much as I like the idea of taking my state to Estonia status, too many winner-take-all
politicians and weak thinkers to recognize that new borders would solve lots and lots of
problems.
Socialists are clearly smart, but in actuality just simple evil, immoral thieves. They
will be unlikely to support any secession because they know their enemies are the source of
their lucre.
Balkanization, what little there will be, will most likely come after we are drug into
WWIII and we are back to a 1700's subsistence existence.
A pessimist is never disappointed, but I will happily take an optimist's surprise if
people just stop and live and let live.
.............. try, try to "Unchain America" next July 4. What better way to celebrate
Independence Day than with a joining of hands across the land, if not to secede, then to
affirm our right to, one state at a time?
It's 2,790 miles from New York to Los Angeles, which is 14,731,200 feet. At three feet per
person, it would take around 4,910,400 people -- less than 1/66th of the US population -- to
make a human chain like the three Balkan states did.
US whistle-blower Edward Snowden yesterday claimed that Saudi Arabia used Israeli spyware to
target murdered Saudi journalist
Jamal Khashoggi .
Addressing a conference in Tel Aviv via a video link, Snowden claimed that software made by
an Israeli cyber intelligence firm was used by Saudi Arabia to track and target Khashoggi in
the lead up to his
murder on 2 October inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
Snowden told his audience:
"How do they [Saudi Arabia] know what his [Khashoggi's] plans were and that they needed to
act against him? That knowledge came from the technology developed by NSO," Israeli business
daily Globes
reported.
Snowden accused NSO of "selling a digital burglary tool," adding it "is not just being
used for catching criminals and stopping terrorist attacks, not just for saving lives, but
for making money [ ] such a level of recklessness [ ] actually starts costing lives,"
according to the
Jerusalem Post .
Snowden – made famous in 2013 for leaking classified National Security Agency (NSA)
files and exposing the extent of US surveillance – added that "Israel is routinely at the
top of the US' classified threat list of hackers along with Russia and China [ ] even though it
is an ally".
Snowden is wanted in the US for espionage, so could not travel to Tel Aviv to address the
conference in person for fear of being handed over to the authorities.
The Israeli firm to which Snowden referred – NSO Group Technologies – is known
for developing the "Pegasus" software which can be used to remotely infect a target's mobile
phone and then relay back data accessed by the device. Although NSO
claims that its products "are licensed only to legitimate government agencies for the sole
purpose of investigating and preventing crime and terror," this is not the first time its
Pegasus software has been used by Saudi Arabia to track critics.
In October it was
revealed that Saudi Arabia used Pegasus software to eavesdrop on 27-year-old Saudi
dissident Omar Abdulaziz, a prominent critic of the Saudi government on social media.
The revelation was made by Canadian research group
Citizen Lab , which found that the software had been used to hack Abdulaziz' iPhone between
June and August of this year. Citizen Lab's Director Ron Deibert explained that such actions by
Saudi Arabia "would constitute illegal wiretapping".
A separate
report by Citizen Lab in September found a "significant expansion of Pegasus usage in the
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in the Middle East," in particular the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Citizen Lab added that in August 2016, Emirati human
rights activist Ahmed Mansoor was
targeted with the Pegasus spyware.
Snowden's comments come less than a week after it
emerged that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked the United States to stand by
Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman (MBS) in the wake of the Khashoggi case. The revelation
was made by the
Washington Post , which cited information from US officials familiar with a series of
telephone conversations made to Jared Kushner – senior advisor to President Donald Trump
and Trump's son-in-law – and National Security Adviser John Bolton regarding the
Khashoggi case. The officials told the Post that:
In recent days, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu have reached out to the Trump administration to express support for the crown
prince, arguing that he is an important strategic partner in the region, said people familiar
with the calls.
Bin Salman has come under intense scrutiny in the month since Khashoggi first
disappeared , with many
suspecting his involvement in ordering the brutal murder. Yet while several world leaders
have
shunned the crown prince, it is thought
that Israel would suffer from any decline in Saudi influence in the region in light of its
purportedly central role in the upcoming "
Deal of the Century ".
America is weak precisely because it is trying so hard to project strength, because
anyone with half a brain knows that it is projecting strength to enrich oligarhcs [sic],
not to protect or favor the American people.
And who do you suppose are the forces which are funding US politicians and thus getting to
call their shots in foreign policy? Can you bring yourself to name them? Oligarchs...you're
FULL of ****. Who exactly pools all (((their))) money, makes sure the [s]elected officials
know (((who))) to not question and, instead, just bow down to them, who makes sure these
(((officials))) sign pledges for absolute commitment towards Israel--or in no uncertain
terms-- and know who will either sponsor them/or opposes them next time around?
When people who voted for Obama realized the Obama is a fraud with strong CIA connections it
was too late...
When people who voted for Trump realized that Trump was a fraud with strong Israeli
connections it was too late.
Notable quotes:
"... Nor does the caravan 'fix' or even illuminate decades of US abuses in Central and South America. It simply gives Trump an opportunity to grandstand and urge his voters to go to the polls. ..."
...And it seems likely, if not certain, that the caravan is a political stunt that will
end in disappointment for the caravan migrants. So I fail to see why you are so angry Debs.
Our discussion doesn't ignore the realities. Nor does the caravan 'fix' or even
illuminate decades of US abuses in Central and South America. It simply gives Trump an
opportunity to grandstand and urge his voters to go to the polls.
We are being played by an establishment that wants to move the country to the right. MAGA!
is a bi-partisan effort fueled by the challenge from China and Russia. This is clear from
Democratic Party priorities and actions as well as what they don't say or do.
Fu Ying, the chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of China's National People's
Congress, said while confirming the reality that China and Russia now find themselves in the
same trenches: "I just hope that if some people in the U.S. insist on dragging us down the hill
into Thucydides' trap, China will be smart enough not to follow."
Indeed to step back and review the breadth of Russia-China cooperation over the past couple
years alone reveals the full potential "cost" of a US-China conflict , given the ways Russia
could easily be pulled in. Fu Ying articulated the increasingly common view from Beijing, that
"There is no sense of threat from Russia" and that "We feel comfortable back-to-back."
And participants in a
recent study by the National Bureau of Asian Research , a
Seattle-based think tank, actually agree. They were asked whether American policy was at fault
for pushing China and Russia into closer cooperation, and alarmingly, as Bloomberg notes: "Some
among the 100-plus participants called for Washington to prepare for the worst-case scenario
the realignment implies: a two-front war ."
Here's but a partial list of the way Sino-Russian relations have been transformed in recent
years:
China is now Russia's biggest single trade partner.
Since 2015 Russia has been China's top supplier of crude oil, displacing Saudi Arabia.
Early this year Russia ramped up its capacity to pipe crude oil to China, to about 600,000
barrels per day, which is about double the prior capability
Increased coordination at the U.N. Security Council.
Regional coordination in Asia, such as Russia supplying the engines for Chinese-Pakistani
fighter jets, resulting in an increasingly worried India which is seeing Russia move into the
Chinese orbit instead of being an arbiter in Chinese-Pakistani relations
The "bromance" at recent summits between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who meet each
other with increased regularity.
Joint military exercises between the two are now routine.
This year Russia supplied China with its most advanced S-400 air defense system as well
as Sukhoi SU-35 fighter aircraft
Increased willingness on the part of Russia to thwart Washington's argument that China is
a threat to Moscow's aims in the East.
The new "Power of Siberia" natural gas pipeline set to start pumping 38 billion cubic
meters (1.3 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas per year to northern China in December
2019.
Increasingly discovering non-conflicting interests: Europe and China "are two independent
destinations and two independent routes" for gas and oil, Russian Energy Minister Alexander
Novak said in an October interview. "We do not see any need to redirect volumes."
There were moments when Putin showed support and a practical approach toward Trump (like
when he schooled Fareed Zakaria). Putin even expressed that he was welcoming and respectful
of Trumps proposition to restore full-fledged relations with Russia.
I blame the democrats for pointlessly antagonizing Russia for two years just to attempt to
cover up the stench of their own excrement. Now it will be even more difficult to address the
problem of the Chi-coms.
US has nothing to offer Russia as China has. Stop dreaming to befriend Russia to fight
China. US had the opportunity to lead the world after the collapse of USSR but flunk it big
time being the biggest bully in the history.
Forrest Trump - "My Herpes and Genital Warts are responsible for Melania sleeping in
another room, not my small uncircumcised **** and uncontrollable flatulence. Just wanted to
clarify." Hum, ahhhhhhh gee thanks for info...I think. Poor Forrest...sigh
You are absolutely right. Add in that they are greedy motherfuckers and pied pipers to
millions of blithering idiots that can't go one day without making things worse.
China and Russia make an almost perfect symbiosis:
Adjacent countries, transportation costs are as low as possible
Neither regime cares as much as a gnat tear about civil rights & freedoms and
neither is impeded by the vagaries of elections
China has a huge need for natural resources, especially oil & nat gas, but has few
resources beyond coal & not-so-rare earths, while Russia has natural resources in
abundance
Russia manufactures almost nothing for the international goods market while China is
the world's factory
USA regime lords have done an excellent job of alienating and uniting both of them
There were moments when Putin showed support and a practical approach toward Trump (like
when he schooled Fareed Zakaria). Putin even expressed that he was welcoming and respectful
of Trumps proposition to restore full-fledged relations with Russia.
I blame the democrats for pointlessly antagonizing Russia for two years just to attempt to
cover up the stench of their own excrement. Now it will be even more difficult to address the
problem of the Chi-coms.
US has nothing to offer Russia as China has. Stop dreaming to befriend Russia to fight
China. US had the opportunity to lead the world after the collapse of USSR but flunk it big
time being the biggest bully in the history.
Russia and China will come to blows soon enough. China has their eyes on all of that
unpopulated land in Siberia, and they won't like it too much when Russia takes advantage of
the fact that China is dependent on them for energy. The idea that they'll be best buddies is
laughable.
Trump's balls are so big that he ran like a bitch away from his campaign promises to
normalize relations with Russia and prevent this exact scenario. Or maybe he was just
lying.
Nevermind, the ZH herd is stampeding on how great Trump is for pulling some press
privileges of a CNN guy.
I don't think Trump was lying. I think he is doing his best to stay alive and get done
what he can. This country is more fucked up than even he realized.
Forrest Trump - "My Herpes and Genital Warts are responsible for Melania sleeping in
another room, not my small uncircumcised **** and uncontrollable flatulence. Just wanted to
clarify." Hum, ahhhhhhh gee thanks for info...I think. Poor Forrest...sigh
You are absolutely right. Add in that they are greedy motherfuckers and pied pipers to
millions of blithering idiots that can't go one day without making things worse.
China and Russia make an almost perfect symbiosis:
Adjacent countries, transportation costs are as low as possible
Neither regime cares as much as a gnat tear about civil rights & freedoms and
neither is impeded by the vagaries of elections
China has a huge need for natural resources, especially oil & nat gas, but has few
resources beyond coal & not-so-rare earths, while Russia has natural resources in
abundance
Russia manufactures almost nothing for the international goods market while China is
the world's factory
USA regime lords have done an excellent job of alienating and uniting both of them
There were moments when Putin showed support and a practical approach toward Trump (like
when he schooled Fareed Zakaria). Putin even expressed that he was welcoming and respectful
of Trumps proposition to restore full-fledged relations with Russia.
I blame the democrats for pointlessly antagonizing Russia for two years just to attempt to
cover up the stench of their own excrement. Now it will be even more difficult to address the
problem of the Chi-coms.
US has nothing to offer Russia as China has. Stop dreaming to befriend Russia to fight
China. US had the opportunity to lead the world after the collapse of USSR but flunk it big
time being the biggest bully in the history.
Russia and China will come to blows soon enough. China has their eyes on all of that
unpopulated land in Siberia, and they won't like it too much when Russia takes advantage of
the fact that China is dependent on them for energy. The idea that they'll be best buddies is
laughable.
Trump's balls are so big that he ran like a bitch away from his campaign promises to
normalize relations with Russia and prevent this exact scenario. Or maybe he was just
lying.
Nevermind, the ZH herd is stampeding on how great Trump is for pulling some press
privileges of a CNN guy.
I don't think Trump was lying. I think he is doing his best to stay alive and get done
what he can. This country is more fucked up than even he realized.
A long fight by lawmakers like Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) is set to go mainstream, and an
antiwar push on Yemen soon after the midterms could show how.
WASHINGTON ― As Democrats plan for a potential future in which they have control of
the U.S. House, lawmakers, candidates and outside groups close to the party are quietly
preparing a new push against the overlooked war in Afghanistan. The last time the party
controlled the lower chamber of Congress, the U.S. had close to 50,000 troops in Afghanistan.
Today that number is 15,000 -- but it's been eight years, and there's still no clarity about
when the longest war in American history will actually come to an end. President Donald Trump 's stated
policy is that the U.S. presence has no time limit. So Democrats are considering long-discussed
proposals to torpedo the war's entire legal justification -- the sweeping post-9/11
congressional authorization that has been used to support U.S. military action well beyond
Afghan borders -- and tie funding for the campaign to clearly outlined strategic goals and
troop reductions. There's also talk of using new oversight powers to hold top officials,
military commanders, defense contractors and foreign partners accountable for accusations of
human rights violations, corruption and political posturing at the cost of human lives. And
while party leaders are loath to commit to a particular course, they feel certain this is an
issue their colleagues and their political base see as a priority. A dramatic but now largely
forgotten vote in June 2017 underscored why this is a natural fight for Democrats. House
Appropriations Committee lawmakers from both parties voted for the first time for a measure
long pushed by war critic Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) that would repeal the authorization. GOP
leadership quashed the effort, but it clearly signaled that, after years of worrying about
being seen as too dovish, Democrats have reached a moment when even the other party and its
voters can seriously consider serious antiwar action. "We've come a long way from just one vote
in opposition [when the authorization came up in 2001] to a widespread recognition among
members of Congress that this was an overly-broad authorization that set the stage for
perpetual war," Lee wrote in an email to HuffPost. She sees Democratic unity on the issue
today: "There's a lot of common ground across the caucus around holding this debate and
vote."
(techcrunch.com)
36BeauHD on Monday November 05,
2018 @07:30PM from the he-said-she-said dept. An anonymous reader quotes a report from
TechCrunch: An unexpected declaration by whistleblower Edward Snowden filed in court [last]
week adds a new twist in a long-running lawsuit against the NSA's surveillance programs. The
case, filed by the EFF a decade
ago , seeks to challenge the government's alleged illegal and unconstitutional surveillance
of Americans, who are largely covered under the Fourth Amendment's protections against
warrantless searches and seizures. It's a big step forward for the case, which had stalled
largely because the government refused to confirm that a leaked document was authentic or
accurate. News of the surveillance broke in 2006 when an AT&T technician Mark Klein
revealed that the NSA was tapping into AT&T's network backbone. He alleged that a secret,
locked room -- dubbed Room 641A -- in an AT&T facility in San Francisco where he worked was
one of many around the U.S. used by the government to monitor communications -- domestic and
overseas. President George W. Bush authorized the NSA to secretly wiretap Americans'
communications shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
Much of the EFF's complaint relied on Klein's testimony until 2013, when Snowden, a
former NSA contractor, came forward with new revelations that described and detailed the vast
scope of the U.S. government's surveillance capabilities, which included participation
from other phone giants -- including Verizon (TechCrunch's parent company). Snowden's
signed declaration, filed on October 31 ,
confirms that one of the
documents he leaked , which the EFF relied heavily on for its case, is an
authentic draft document written by the then-NSA inspector general in 2009 , which exposed
concerns about the legality of the Bush's warrantless surveillance program -- Stellar Wind --
particularly the collection of bulk email records on Americans. "I read its contents
carefully during my employment," he said in his declaration. "I have a specific and strong
recollection of this document because it indicated to me that the government had been
conducting illegal surveillance."
They were saying that Trump didn't promote the economic boom enough. Then they trotted
out their economic analyst to tout all the great economic statistics!
Well of course, for the corporate media lying about the economy has priority over any kind
of Trump-bashing.
Unfortunately, Debsisdead is correct. The United States cannot be fixed. It could be
that Trump knows what's needed and is deliberately trying to set the US on a course towards
sanity using shock treatment, and is deliberately trying to wean America from the petrodollar
in such a manner that Americans have no other country to blame/bomb, thus saving civilization
from America's inevitable spasm of ultraviolence when the BRICS succeed in taking the
petrodollar down. This seems unlikely, though.
The sad reality is that the delusion Americans suffer from (result of their universal
cradle-to-grave brainwashing that I mentioned earlier) is too deeply rooted as a core
component of their identities.
That mass-based delusion must be overcome before America's psychotic behavior on the world
stage can be addressed, but I see no forces within the US making any progress in that
direction at all.
Even the brightest and most humanistic Americans are horribly twisted to appalling
evil by unquestionable faith in their own exceptionalism. As a consequence it could be
that the only hope for humanity lies in a radical USA-ectomy with the resulting stump being
cauterized.
I certainly wish there were some other way, but I don't see one.
"... Bolsonaro, like Trump, is not a disruption of the current neoliberal order; he is an intensification or escalation of its worst impulses. He is its logical conclusion. ..."
"... Despite their professed concern, the plutocrats and their media spokespeople much prefer a far-right populist like Trump or Bolsonaro to a populist leader of the genuine left. They prefer the social divisions fuelled by neo-fascists like Bolsonaro, divisions that protect their wealth and privilege, over the unifying message of a socialist who wants to curtail class privilege, the real basis of the elite's power. ..."
"... The true left – whether in Brazil, Venezuela, Britain or the US – does not control the police or military, the financial sector, the oil industries, the arms manufacturers, or the corporate media. It was these very industries and institutions that smoothed the path to power for Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Trump in the US. ..."
"... Former socialist leaders like Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela were bound to fail not so much because of their flaws as individuals but because powerful interests rejected their right to rule. These socialists never had control over the key levers of power, the key resources. Their efforts were sabotaged – from within and without – from the moment of their election. ..."
"... The media, the financial elites, the armed forces were never servants of the socialist governments that have been struggling to reform Latin America. The corporate world has no interest either in building proper housing in place of slums or in dragging the masses out of the kind of poverty that fuels the drug gangs that Bolsonaro claims he will crush through more violence. ..."
"... As in Pinochet's Chile, Bolsonaro can rest assured that his kind of neo-fascism will live in easy harmony with neoliberalism. ..."
"... Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net . ..."
With Jair Bolsonaro's victory in Brazil's presidential election at the weekend, the doom-mongers among western elites are out in force once again. His success, like Donald Trump's, has confirmed a long-held prejudice: that the people cannot be trusted; that, when empowered, they behave like a mob driven by primitive urges; that the unwashed masses now threaten to bring down the carefully constructed walls of civilisation.
The guardians of the status quo refused to learn the lesson of Trump's election, and so it will be with Bolsonaro. Rather than engaging the intellectual faculties they claim as their exclusive preserve, western "analysts" and "experts" are again averting their gaze from anything that might help them understand what has driven our supposed democracies into the dark places inhabited by the new demagogues. Instead, as ever, the blame is being laid squarely at the door of social media.
Social media and fake news are apparently the reasons Bolsonaro won at the ballot box. Without the gatekeepers in place to limit access to the "free press" – itself the plaything of billionaires and global corporations, with brands and a bottom line to protect – the rabble has supposedly been freed to give expression to their innate bigotry.
Here is Simon Jenkins, a veteran British gatekeeper – a former editor of the Times of London who now writes a column in the Guardian – pontificating on Bolsonaro:
"The lesson for champions of open democracy is glaring. Its values cannot be taken for granted. When debate is no longer through regulated media, courts and institutions, politics will default to the mob. Social media – once hailed as an agent of global concord – has become the purveyor of falsity, anger and hatred. Its algorithms polarise opinion. Its pseudo-information drives argument to the extremes."
This is now the default consensus of the corporate media, whether in its rightwing incarnations or of the variety posing on the liberal-left end of the spectrum like the Guardian. The people are stupid, and we need to be protected from their base instincts. Social media, it is claimed, has unleashed humanity's id.
Selling plutocracy
There is a kind of truth in Jenkins' argument, even if it is not the one he intended. Social
media did indeed liberate ordinary people. For the first time in modern history, they were not
simply the recipients of official, sanctioned information. They were not only spoken down to by
their betters, they could answer back – and not always as deferentially as the media
class expected.
Clinging to their old privileges, Jenkins and his ilk are rightly unnerved. They have much
to lose.
But that also means they are far from dispassionate observers of the current political
scene. They are deeply invested in the status quo, in the existing power structures that have
kept them well-paid courtiers of the corporations that dominate the planet.
Bolsonaro, like Trump, is not a disruption of the current neoliberal order; he is an
intensification or escalation of its worst impulses. He is its logical conclusion.
The plutocrats who run our societies need figureheads, behind whom they can conceal their
unaccountable power. Until now they preferred the slickest salespeople, ones who could sell
wars as humanitarian intervention rather than profit-driven exercises in death and destruction;
the unsustainable plunder of natural resources as economic growth; the massive accumulation of
wealth, stashed in offshore tax havens, as the fair outcome of a free market; the bailouts
funded by ordinary taxpayers to stem economic crises they had engineered as necessary
austerity; and so on.
A smooth-tongued Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were the favoured salespeople, especially
in an age when the elites had persuaded us of a self-serving argument: that ghetto-like
identities based on colour or gender mattered far more than class. It was divide-and-rule
dressed up as empowerment. The polarisation now bewailed by Jenkins was in truth stoked and
rationalised by the very corporate media he so faithfully serves.
Fear of the domino effect
Despite their professed concern, the plutocrats and their media spokespeople much prefer a
far-right populist like Trump or Bolsonaro to a populist leader of the genuine left. They
prefer the social divisions fuelled by neo-fascists like Bolsonaro, divisions that protect
their wealth and privilege, over the unifying message of a socialist who wants to curtail class
privilege, the real basis of the elite's power.
The true left – whether in Brazil, Venezuela, Britain or the US – does not
control the police or military, the financial sector, the oil industries, the arms
manufacturers, or the corporate media. It was these very industries and institutions that
smoothed the path to power for Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Trump in the
US.
Former socialist leaders like Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela were bound to fail not so much because of their flaws as individuals but because
powerful interests rejected their right to rule. These socialists never had control over the
key levers of power, the key resources. Their efforts were sabotaged – from within and
without – from the moment of their election.
Local elites in Latin America are tied umbilically to US elites, who in turn are determined
to make sure any socialist experiment in their backyard fails – as a way to prevent a
much-feared domino effect, one that might seed socialism closer to home.
The media, the financial elites, the armed forces were never servants of the socialist
governments that have been struggling to reform Latin America. The corporate world has no
interest either in building proper housing in place of slums or in dragging the masses out of
the kind of poverty that fuels the drug gangs that Bolsonaro claims he will crush through more
violence.
Bolsonaro will not face any of the institutional obstacles Lula da Silva or Chavez needed to
overcome. No one in power will stand in his way as he institutes his "reforms". No one will
stop him creaming off Brazil's wealth for his corporate friends. As in Pinochet's Chile,
Bolsonaro can rest assured that his kind of neo-fascism will live in easy harmony with
neoliberalism.
Immune system
If you want to understand the depth of the self-deception of Jenkins and other media
gatekeepers, contrast Bolsonaro's political ascent to that of Jeremy Corbyn, the modest social
democratic leader of Britain's Labour party. Those like Jenkins who lament the role of social
media – they mean you, the public – in promoting leaders like Bolsonaro are also
the media chorus who have been wounding Corbyn day after day, blow by blow, for three years
– since he accidentally slipped past safeguards intended by party bureacrats to keep
someone like him from power.
The supposedly liberal Guardian has been leading that assault. Like the rightwing media, it
has shown its absolute determination to stop Corbyn at all costs, using any pretext.
Within days of Corbyn's election to the Labour leadership, the Times newspaper – the
voice of the British establishment – published an article quoting a general, whom it
refused to name, warning that the British army's commanders had agreed they would sabotage a
Corbyn government. The general strongly hinted that there would be a military coup first.
We are not supposed to reach the point where such threats – tearing away the
façade of western democracy – ever need to be implemented. Our pretend democracies
were created with immune systems whose defences are marshalled to eliminate a threat like
Corbyn much earlier.
Once he moved closer to power, however, the rightwing corporate media was forced to deploy
the standard tropes used against a left leader: that he was incompetent, unpatriotic, even
treasonous.
But just as the human body has different immune cells to increase its chances of success,
the corporate media has faux-liberal-left agents like the Guardian to complement the right's
defences. The Guardian sought to wound Corbyn through identity politics, the modern left's
Achille's heel. An endless stream of confected crises about anti-semitism were intended to
erode the hard-earned credit Corbyn had accumulated over decades for his anti-racism work.
Slash-and-burn politics
Why is Corbyn so dangerous? Because he supports the right of workers to a dignified life,
because he refuses to accept the might of the corporations, because he implies that a different
way of organising our societies is possible. It is a modest, even timid programme he
articulates, but even so it is far too radical either for the plutocratic class that rules over
us or for the corporate media that serves as its propaganda arm.
The truth ignored by Jenkins and these corporate stenographers is that if you keep
sabotaging the programmes of a Chavez, a Lula da Silva, a Corbyn or a Bernie Sanders, then you
get a Bolsonaro, a Trump, an Orban.
It is not that the masses are a menace to democracy. It is rather that a growing proportion
of voters understand that a global corporate elite has rigged the system to accrue for itself
ever greater riches. It is not social media that is polarising our societies. It is rather that
the determination of the elites to pillage the planet until it has no more assets to strip has
fuelled resentment and destroyed hope. It is not fake news that is unleashing the baser
instincts of the lower orders. Rather, it is the frustration of those who feel that change is
impossible, that no one in power is listening or cares.
Social media has empowered ordinary people. It has shown them that they cannot trust their
leaders, that power trumps justice, that the elite's enrichment requires their poverty. They
have concluded that, if the rich can engage in slash-and-burn politics against the planet, our
only refuge, they can engage in slash-and-burn politics against the global elite.
Are they choosing wisely in electing a Trump or Bolsonaro? No. But the liberal guardians of
the status quo are in no position to judge them. For decades, all parts of the corporate media
have helped to undermine a genuine left that could have offered real solutions, that could have
taken on and beaten the right, that could have offered a moral compass to a confused, desperate
and disillusioned public.
Jenkins wants to lecture the masses about their depraved choices while he and his paper
steer them away from any politician who cares about their welfare, who fights for a fairer
society, who prioritises mending what is broken.
The western elites will decry Bolsonaro in the forlorn and cynical hope of shoring up their
credentials as guardians of the existing, supposedly moral order. But they engineered him.
Bolsonaro is their monster.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include
"Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East"
(Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books).
His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
by Chris Bertram on October 31, 2018 Candice Delmas, A
Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Political obligation has always been a somewhat unsatisfactory topic in political
philosophy, as has, relatedly, civil disobedience. The "standard view" of civil disobedience,
to be found in Rawls, presupposes that we live in a nearly just society in which some serious
violations of the basic liberties yet occur and conceives of civil disobedience as a deliberate
act of public lawbreaking, nonviolent in character, which aims to communicate a sense of grave
wrong to our fellow citizens. To demonstrate their fidelity to law, civil disobedients are
willing to accept the consequences of their actions and to take their punishment. When Rawls
first wrote about civil disobedience, in 1964, parts of the US were openly and flagrantly
engaged in the violent subordination of their black population, so it was quite a stretch for
him to think of that society as "nearly just". But perhaps its injustice impinged less
obviously on a white professor at an elite university in Massachusetts than it did on poor
blacks in the deep South.
The problems with the standard account hardly stop there. Civil disobedience thus conceived
is awfully narrow. In truth, the range of actions which amount to resistance to the state and
to unjust societies is extremely broad, running from ordinary political opposition, through
civil disobedience to disobedience that is rather uncivil, through sabotage, hacktivism,
leaking, whistle-blowing, carrying out Samaritan assistance in defiance of laws that prohibit
it, striking, occupation, violent resistance, violent revolution, and, ultimately, terrorism.
For the non-ideal world in which we actually live and where we are nowhere close to a "nearly
just" society, we need a better theory, one which tells us whether Black Lives Matter activists
are justified or whether antifa can punch Richard Spencer. Moreover, we need a theory that
tells us not only what we may do but also what we are obliged to do: when is standing by in the
face of injustice simply not morally permissible.
Step forward Candice Delmas with her superb and challenging book The Duty to Resist:
When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil (Oxford University Press). Delmas points out the
manifold shortcomings of the standard account and how it is often derived from taking the
particular tactics of the civil rights movement and turning pragmatic choices into moral
principles. Lots of acts of resistance against unjust societies, in order to be effective, far
from being communicative, need to be covert. Non-violence may be an effective strategy, but
sometimes those resisting state injustice have a right to defend themselves. [click
to continue ]
Hidari 10.31.18 at 3:41 pm (no link)
Strangely enough, the link I was looking at immediately before I clicked on the OP, was this:
It would be interesting to see a philosopher's view on whether or not civil disobedience
was necessary, and to what extent, to prevent actions that will lead to the end of our
species.
Ebenezer Scrooge 10.31.18 at 4:52 pm (no link)
Two points:
As far as the Nazi-punching goes, it is important to remember that we hung Julius Streicher
for nothing but speech acts.
I have no idea who Candice Delmas is, but "Delmas" is a French name. The French have a very
different attitude toward civil disobedience than we do.
Moz of Yarramulla 10.31.18 at 11:23 pm (no link)
civil disobedience as a deliberate act of public lawbreaking, nonviolent in character,
which aims to communicate a sense of grave wrong to our fellow citizens.
I think that's a pretty narrow view of civil disobedience even if you just count the
actions of the protesters. Often NVDA is aimed at or merely accepts that a violent response
is inevitable. The resistance at Parihaka, for example, was in no doubt that the response
would be military and probably lethal. And Animal Liberation are often classified as
terrorists by the US and UK governments while murderers against abortion are not.
Which is to say that the definition of "nonviolent" is itself an area of conflict, with
some taking the Buddhist extremist position that any harm or even inconvenience to any living
thing makes an action violent, and others saying that anything short of genocide can be
nonviolent (and then there are the "intention is all" clowns). Likewise terrorism, most
obviously of late the Afghani mujahideen when they transitioned from being revolutionaries to
terrorists when the invader changed.
In Australia we have the actual government taking the view that any action taken by a
worker or protester that inconveniences a company is a criminal act and the criminal must
both compensate the company (including consequential damages) as well as facing jail time.
tasmania and
NSW and of course the anti-union
laws . The penalties suggest they're considered crimes of violence, as does the
rhetoric.
Moz of Yarramulla 11.01.18 at 12:13 am (no link)
Jeff@11
one should never legitimize any means toward social change that you would not object to
seeing used by your mortal enemies.
Are you using an unusual definition of "mortal enemy" here? Viz, other than "enemy that
wants to kill you"? Even US law has theoretical prohibitions on expressing that
intention.
It's especially odd since we're right now in the middle of a great deal of bad-faith use
of protest techniques by mortal enemies. "free speech" used to protect Nazi rallies,
"academic freedom" to defend anti-science activists, "non-violent protest" used to describe
violent attacks, "freedom of religion" used to excuse terrorism, the list goes on.
In Australia we have a 'proud boys' leader coming to Australia who has somehow managed to
pass the character test imposed by our government. He's the leader of a gang that requires an
arrest for violence as a condition of membership and regularly says his goal is to incite
others to commit murder. It seems odd that our immigration minister has found those things to
be
not disqualifying while deporting someone for merely
associating with a vaguely similar gang , but we live in weird times.
As far as the Nazi-punching goes, it is important to remember that we hung Julius
Streicher for nothing but speech acts.
I do remember that*, but it's not clear to me why you think it's important to remember it
in this context. If somebody who had fatally punched a Nazi speaker were prosecuted for
murder, I doubt that 'he was a Nazi speaker' would be accepted as a defence on the basis of
the Streicher precedent.
*Strictly speaking, I don't remember it as something that 'we' did: I wasn't born at the
time, and it's not clear to me who you mean by 'we'. (Streicher himself probably would have
said that it was the Jews, or possibly the Jews and the Bolsheviks, who were hanging him, but
I don't suppose that would be your view.) However, I'm aware of the events you're referring
to, which is the real point.
Rawls presupposes that we live in a nearly just society in which some serious violations
of the basic liberties yet occur For the non-ideal world in which we actually live and where
we are nowhere close to a "nearly just" society, we need a better theory
People need to stop spreading this misinterpretation about Rawls on civil disobedience, which
I've seen several places in the past few years. Rawls focuses on the case of a nearly just
society not because he thinks it's the only case in which you can engage in civil
disobedience but because he thinks it's the only case in which there are difficulties with
justifying it. He states this very clearly in A Theory of Justice : in cases where the
society is not nearly just, there are no difficulties in justifying civil disobedience or
even sometimes armed resistance. His natural duty account is not put forward as a general
theory of civil disobedience but to argue that civil disobedience can admit of justification
even in the case in which it is hardest to justify.
I'm not a fan of Rawls myself, but I don't know how he could possibly have been more clear
on this, since he makes all these points explicitly.
LFC 11.02.18 at 12:45 am (no link)
J-D @18
The Nuremberg tribunal was set up and staffed by the U.S., Britain, USSR, and France; so
whether Ebenezer's "we" was intended to refer to the four countries collectively or just to
the U.S., it's clear who hanged Streicher et al., and the tone of your comment on this point
is rather odd.
anon 11.02.18 at 4:23 pm (no link)
Resisting by protesting is OK.
However, here in the USA, actual legislation creating laws is done by our elected
representatives.
So if you're an Amaerican and really want Social Change and aren't just posturing or
'virtue signaling' make sure you vote in the upcoming election.
I'm afraid too many will think that their individual vote won't 'matter' or the polls show
it isn't needed or some other excuse to justify not voting. Please do not be that person.
Don Berinati 11.02.18 at 5:06 pm (no link)
Recently re-reading '1968' by Kurlansky and he repeatedly made this point about protests
– that to be effective they had to get on television (major networks, not like our
youtube, I think, so it would be seen by the masses in order to sway them) and to do that the
acts had to be outlandish because they were competing for network time. This increasingly led
to violent acts, which almost always worked in getting on the news, but flew in the face of
King's and others peaceful methods.
So, maybe punching out a Nazi is the way to change people's minds or at least get them to
think about stuff.
It was only an announcement, but think of it as the beginning of a journey into hell. Last
week, President Donald Trump
made public his decision to abrogate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a
1987 agreement with the Soviet Union. National Security Advisor
John Bolton , a Cold Warrior in a post-Cold War world,
promptly flaunted that announcement on a trip to Vladimir Putin's Moscow. To grasp the
import of that decision, however, quite another kind of voyage is necessary, a trip down memory
lane.
That 1987 pact between Moscow and Washington was no small thing in a world that, during the
Cuban Missile Crisis only 25 years earlier, had reached the edge of nuclear Armageddon. The
INF Treaty led to the elimination of thousands
of nuclear weapons, but its significance went far beyond that. As a start, it closed the books
on the nightmare of a Europe caught between the world-ending strategies of the two superpowers,
since most of those "intermediate-range" missiles were targeting that very continent. No
wonder, last week, a European Union spokesperson, responding to Trump,
fervently defended the treaty as a permanent "pillar" of international order.
To take that trip back three decades in time and remember how the INF came about should be
an instant reminder of just how President Trump is playing havoc with something essential to
human survival.
In October 1986 in Reykjavik, Iceland, the leaders of the United States and the Soviet
Union, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail
Gorbachev , briefly came close to fully freeing the planet from the horrifying prospect of
nuclear annihilation. In his second inaugural address, a year and a half earlier, President
Reagan had wishfully called for "the total elimination" of nuclear weapons. At that Reykjavik
summit, Gorbachev, a pathbreaking Soviet leader, promptly took the president up on that dream,
proposing -- to the dismay of the aides of both leaders -- a total nuclear disarmament pact
that would take effect in the year 2000.
Reagan promptly agreed in principle. "Suits me fine," he said. "That's always been my goal."
But it didn't happen. Reagan had another dream, too -- of a space-based missile defense system
against just such weaponry, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also dubbed "Star Wars." He
refused to yield on the subject when Gorbachev rejected SDI as the superpower arms race
transferred into space. "This meeting is over," Reagan then said.
Of the failure of Reykjavik, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze would then
comment :
"When future generations read the transcripts of this meeting, they will not forgive us." At
that point, the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and the USSR had hit a combined 60,000
weapons and were still growing. (Five new American nuclear weapons were being added each
day.) A month after Reykjavik, in fact, the U.S. deployed a new B-52-based cruise missile
system in violation of the 1979 SALT II Treaty. Hawks in Moscow were pressing for similar
escalations. Elites on both sides -- weapons manufacturers, intelligence and political
establishments, think tanks, military bureaucracies, and pundits -- were appalled at what the
two leaders had almost agreed to. The national security priesthood, East and West, wanted to
maintain what was termed "the stability of the strategic stalemate," even if such stability,
based on ever-expanding arsenals, could not have been less stable.
But a widespread popular longing for relief from four decades of nuclear dread had been
growing on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In a surge of anti-nuclear
activism , millions of ordinary citizens took to the streets of cities in the U.S. and
Europe to protest the superpower nuclear establishments. Even behind the Iron Curtain, voices
for peace could be heard. "Listen," Gorbachev pleaded after Reykjavik, "to the demands of the
American people, the Soviet people, the peoples of all countries."
A Watershed Treaty
As it happened, the Soviet leader refused to settle for Reagan's no. Four months after the
Iceland summit, he proposed an agreement "without delay" to remove from Europe all intermediate
missiles -- those with a range well under that of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
When Pentagon officials tried to swat Gorbachev's proposal aside by claiming that there could
be no such agreement without on-site inspections, he said fine, inspect away! That was an
unprecedented concession from the Soviet Union.
President Reagan was surrounded by men like then-Assistant Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz
(later to become infamous for his role in promoting a post-9/11 invasion of Iraq), who assumed
Gorbachev was a typical Soviet "master of deceit." But for all his hawkishness, the president
had other instincts as well. Events would show that, on the subject of nukes (SDI
notwithstanding), Reagan had indeed recognized the threat to the human future posed by the
open-ended accumulation of ever more of those weapons and had become a kind of nuclear
abolitionist. Even if ending that threat was inconceivable to him, his desire to mitigate it
would prove genuine.
At the time, however, Reagan had other problems to deal with. Just as Gorbachev put forward
his surprising initiative, the American president found himself engulfed in the Iran-Contra
scandal -- a criminal conspiracy to trade arms for hostages with Iran, while illegally aiding
right-wing paramilitaries in Central America. It threatened to become his Watergate. It would,
in the end, lead to the indictments of 14 members of his administration. Beleaguered, he
desperately wanted to change the subject. A statesman-like rescue of faltering arms-control
negotiations might prove just the helping hand he was looking for. So the day before he went
on
television to abjectly offer repentance for Iran-Contra, he announced that he would accept
Gorbachev's INF proposal. His hawkish inner circle was thoroughly disgusted by the gesture.
Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger promptly resigned in protest. (He would later be
indicted for Iran-Contra.)
On December 8, 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev would indeed meet in Washington and
sign the INF Treaty, eliminating more than 2,000 ground-based warheads and giving Europe
the reprieve its people had wanted. This would be the first actual reduction in nuclear weapons
to occur since two atomic bombs were built at Los Alamos in 1945. The INF Treaty proved
historic for turning back the tide of escalation. It showed that the arms race could be not
just frozen but reversed, that negotiations could lead the two superpowers out of what seemed
like the ultimate impasse -- a model that should be urgently applicable today.
In reality, the mutually reinforcing hair-trigger nuclear posture of the United States and
the Soviet Union was not much altered by the treaty, since only land-based, not air- and
submarine-launched missiles, were affected by it and longer range ICBMs were off the table.
(Still, Europe could breathe a bit easier, even if, in operational terms, nuclear danger had
not been much reduced.) Yet that treaty would prove a turning point, opening the way to a
better future. It would be essential to the political transformation that quickly followed, the
wholly unpredicted and surprisingly non-violent end to the Cold War that arrived not quite two
years later. The treaty showed that the arms race itself could be ended -- and eventually, it
nearly would be. That is the lesson that somehow needs to be preserved in the Trump era.
A Man for All Apocalypses
In reality, the Trump administration's abandonment of the INF Treaty has little to do with
the actual deployment of intermediate-range missiles, whether those that the Pentagon may now
seek to emplace in Europe or those apparently already being put in place in Russia. In truth,
such nuclear firepower will not add much to what submarine- and air-launched cruise missiles
can already do. As for Vladimir Putin's bellicosity, removing the restraints on arms control
will only magnify the Russian leader's threatening behavior. However, it should be clear by now
that Donald Trump's urge to trash the treaty comes from his own
bellicosity , not from Russian (or, for that matter, Chinese) aggressiveness. Trump seems
to deplore the pact precisely because of what it meant to Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev,
as well as to the millions who cheered them on long ago: its repudiation of an apocalyptic
future. (As
his position on climate change indicates, the president is visibly a man for all
apocalypses.)
Trump has launched a second nuclear age by rejecting the treaty that was meant to initiate
the closing of the first one. The arms race was then slowed, but, alas, the competitors
stumbled on through the end of the Cold War. Shutting that arms-contest down completely
remained an unfinished task, in part because the dynamic of weapons reduction proved so
reversible even before Donald Trump made it into the Oval Office. George W. Bush, for instance,
struck a blow against arms control with his
2002 abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which rekindled Reagan's Star Wars
fantasy. The way Washington subsequently promoted missile defense systems in Europe, especially
in Poland, where a
nearly $5 billion missile contract was agreed to this year, empowered the most hawkish wing
of the Kremlin, guaranteeing just the sort of Russian build-up that has indeed occurred. If
present Russian intermediate-range missile deployments are in violation of the INF Treaty, they
did not happen in a vacuum.
Barack Obama, of course, won the Nobel Peace Prize
in the early moments of his presidency for his vision of a nuclear-weapons-free world, yet
not even he could curb the malevolent influence of nuclear planning in the Pentagon and
elsewhere in Washington. To get approval of the 2010 New START Treaty, which was to further
reduce the total number of strategic warheads and launchers on both sides, from the Republican
Senate, the Peace Laureate president had to agree to an $80 billion renewal of
America's existing nuclear arsenal just when it was ripe for a fuller dismantling. That devil's
bargain with Washington's diehard nuclear hawks further empowered Russia's similarly hawkish
militarists.
All of this reflects a pattern established relatively early in the Cold War years. U.S. arms
escalations in that era -- from the long-range bomber and the hydrogen bomb to the
nuclear-armed submarine and the cruise missile to the "high frontier" of space -- inevitably
prompted the Kremlin to follow in lockstep (and these days, you would need to
add the Chinese into the equation as well). Americans should recall that, since August 6,
1945, the ratcheting up of nuclear weapons competition has always begun in Washington. And so
it has again.
By the time the Obama administration left office, the Defense Department was already
planning to "modernize" the U.S. nuclear arsenal in a massively expensive way. Last February,
with the release of the
Pentagon's 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, the Trump administration committed to that arsenal's
full bore reinvention, big time, to the tune of at least
$1.2 trillion and possibly $1.6 trillion over the next three decades. ICBM silos only
recently slated for closing will be rebuilt. There will be new generations of nuclear-armed
bombers and submarines, as well as nuclear cruise missiles. There will be wholly new nuclear
weapons expressly
designed to be "usable." And in that context, American nuclear strategy is also being
recast. For the first time, the United States is now explicitly threatening to launch those
"usable" weapons in response to non-nuclear assaults.
The surviving lynchpin of arms control is that New START Treaty that mattered so to Obama in
2010. It capped deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 and implied that there would be
further reductions to come. It must, however, be renewed in 2021. Trump is already
on record calling it a bad deal, but he may not have to wait until possible reelection in
2020 to do it in. His INF Treaty abrogation might do the trick first. Limits on long-range
strategic missiles may not survive the pressures that are sure to follow an arms race involving
the intermediate variety.
No less worrisome, the Trump administration's fervent support for the Pentagon's
modernization, and so reinvention, of the American nuclear arsenal amounts to a blatant
violation of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which required nuclear powers to work toward
"the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date." The president's explicit desire to
maintain an ever more lethal nuclear arsenal into the indefinite future violates that
requirement and will certainly undermine that treaty, too.
It's no exaggeration to say that those arms control treaties, taken together, probably saved
the world from a nuclear Armageddon
"... In that remarkable volume, Schell offered a stunning vision of what a ten-thousand-megaton nuclear strike on the U.S. might mean. ("In the ten seconds or so after each bomb hit, as blast waves swept outward from thousands of ground zeros, the physical plant of the United States would be swept away like leaves in a gust of wind.") In the end, after radiation had also taken its toll, he wrote, the United States -- in a phrase that's haunted me ever since -- "would be a republic of insects and grass." ..."
He was the candidate who, while talking to a foreign policy expert, reportedly
wondered "why we can't use nuclear weapons." He was the man who would never rule anything out or take any "cards," including
nuclear ones, off the proverbial table. He was the fellow who, as president-elect, was
eager to expand
the American nuclear arsenal and
told
Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski, "Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all."
I'm referring, of course, to the president who, early on,
spoke with his top national security officials of returning the country to a Cold War footing when it came to such weaponry and
called for the equivalent of a
tenfold expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. I'm thinking of the president who once
threatened North Korea with "fire and fury like the world has never seen" and
proudly
claimed that he had a "bigger nuclear button" than that country's leader, Kim Jong-un.
Given his fascination with nuclear weaponry, it's hardly surprising that the very same president would
decide to
pull the U.S. out of the Cold War-era 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) or that his vice president would
refuse to rule out -- another potentially treaty-busting act -- the deployment of nuclear weapons in space. It's a gesture that,
as TomDispatch
regular and former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll explains today, could not be more devastating when it comes
to creating a new nuclear arms race on this increasingly
godforsaken
planet of ours. Reading Carroll's piece, I thought of a mobilizing nuclear moment in my own life. It was the time in 1982 when
I read Jonathan Schell's bestselling book The Fate of the Earth , which helped create a global anti-nuclear movement, millions
of active citizens desiring a nuke-free world, that prepared the way for the INF Treaty.
In that remarkable volume, Schell offered
a stunning vision of what a ten-thousand-megaton nuclear strike on the U.S. might mean. ("In the ten seconds or so after each bomb
hit, as blast waves swept outward from thousands of ground zeros, the physical plant of the United States would be swept away like
leaves in a gust of wind.") In the end, after radiation had also taken its toll, he wrote, the United States -- in a phrase that's
haunted me ever since -- "would be a republic of insects and grass."
That, in other words, is what it might mean, in the twenty-first century, as in the previous one, for a president to put all those
nuclear "cards" back on the table and "outmatch and outlast them all."
Of course, we are all supposed to vote Democratic to halt the tide of Trump fascism. But
should the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, hate speech and violence as
a tool for intimidation and control will increase, with much of it directed, as we saw with the
pipe bombs intended to decapitate the Democratic Party leadership, toward prominent Democratic
politicians and critics of Donald Trump. Should the white man's party of the president retain
control of the House and the Senate, violence will still be the favored instrument of political
control as the last of democratic protections are stripped from us. Either way we are in for
it.
Trump is a clownish and embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats. His faux populism is a sham.
Only the rich like his tax cuts, his refusal to raise the minimum wage and his effort to
destroy Obamacare. All he has left is hate. And he will use it. Which is not to say that, if
only to throw up some obstacle to Trump, you shouldn't vote for the Democratic scum, tools of
the war industry and the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, Wall Street and the fossil fuel
industry, as opposed to the Republican scum. But Democratic control of the House will do very
little to halt our descent into corporate tyranny, especially with another economic crisis
brewing on Wall Street. The rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.
The Democrats, who refuse to address the social inequality they helped orchestrate and that
has given rise to Trump, are the party of racial and ethnic inclusivity, identity politics,
Wall Street and the military. Their core battle cry is: We are not Trump! This is
ultimately a losing formula. It was adopted by Hillary Clinton, who is apparently weighing
another run for the presidency after we thought we had thrust a stake through her political
heart. It is the agenda of the well-heeled East Coast and West Coast elites who want to instill
corporate fascism with a friendly face.
Bertram
Gross (1912-1997) in "Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power" warned us that
fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is
embodied in the executioner's sadistic leer. Janus-like, fascism seeks to present itself to a
captive public as a force for good and moral renewal. It promises protection against enemies
real and invented. But denounce its ideology, challenge its power, demand freedom from
fascism's iron grip, and you are mercilessly crushed. Gross knew that if the United States'
form of fascism, expressed through corporate tyranny, was able to effectively mask its true
intentions behind its "friendly" face we would be stripped of power, shorn of our most
cherished rights and impoverished. He has been proved correct.
"Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly
across America," Gross wrote. "Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a
corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to
enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or
unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these
consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the
poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and more important, the subversion of our
constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international
politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion."
No totalitarian state has mastered propaganda better than the corporate state. Our press has
replaced journalism with trivia, feel-good stories, jingoism and celebrity gossip. The banal
and the absurd, delivered by cheery corporate courtiers, saturate the airwaves. Our emotions
are skillfully manipulated around manufactured personalities and manufactured events. We are,
at the same time, offered elaborate diversionary spectacles including sporting events, reality
television and absurdist political campaigns. Trump is a master of this form of entertainment.
Our emotional and intellectual energy is swallowed up by the modern equivalent of the Roman
arena. Choreographed political vaudeville, which costs corporations billions of dollars, is
called free elections. Cliché-ridden slogans, which assure us that the freedoms we
cherish remain sacrosanct, dominate our national discourse as these freedoms are stripped from
us by judicial and legislative fiat. It is a vast con game.
You cannot use the word "liberty" when your government, as ours does, watches you 24 hours a
day and stores all of your personal information in government computers in perpetuity. You
cannot use the word "liberty" when you are the most photographed and monitored population in
human history. You cannot use the word "liberty" when it is impossible to vote against the
interests of Goldman Sachs or General Dynamics. You cannot use the word "liberty" when the
state empowers militarized police to use indiscriminate lethal force against unarmed citizens
in the streets of American cities. You cannot use the word "liberty" when 2.3 million citizens,
mostly poor people of color, are held in the largest prison system on earth. This is the
relationship between a master and a slave. The choice is between whom we want to clamp on our
chains -- a jailer who mouths politically correct bromides or a racist, Christian fascist.
Either way we are shackled.
Gross understood that unchecked corporate power would inevitably lead to corporate fascism.
It is the natural consequence of the ruling ideology of neoliberalism that consolidates power
and wealth into the hands of a tiny group of oligarchs. The political philosopher Sheldon
Wolin , refining Gross' thesis, would later characterize this corporate tyranny or friendly
fascism as "inverted totalitarianism." It was, as Gross and Wolin pointed out, characterized by
anonymity. It purported to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution and the
iconography and symbols of American patriotism but internally had seized all of the levers of
power to render the citizen impotent. Gross warned that we were being shackled incrementally.
Most would not notice until they were in total bondage. He wrote that "a friendly fascist power
structure in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, or today's Japan would be far more
sophisticated than the 'caesarism' of fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan. It would need no
charismatic dictator nor even a titular head it would require no one-party rule, no mass
fascist party, no glorification of the State, no dissolution of legislatures, no denial of
reason. Rather, it would come slowly as an outgrowth of present trends in the
Establishment."
Gross foresaw that technological advances in the hands of corporations would be used to trap
the public in what he called "cultural ghettoization" so that "almost every individual would
get a personalized sequence of information injections at any time of the day -- or night." This
is what, of course, television, our electronic devices and the internet have done. He warned
that we would be mesmerized by the entertaining shadows on the wall of the Platonic cave as we
were enslaved.
Gross knew that the most destructive force against the body politic would be the war
profiteers and the militarists. He saw how they would siphon off the resources of the state to
wage endless war, a sum that now accounts for half of all discretionary spending. And he
grasped that warfare is the natural extension of corporatism. He wrote:
Under the militarism of German, Italian, and Japanese fascism violence was openly
glorified. It was applied regionally -- by the Germans in Europe and England, the Italians in
the Mediterranean, the Japanese in Asia. In battle, it was administered by professional
militarists who, despite many conflicts with politicians, were guided by old-fashioned
standards of duty, honor, country, and willingness to risk their own lives.
The emerging militarism of friendly fascism is somewhat different. It is global in scope.
It involves weapons of doomsday proportions, something that Hitler could dream of but never
achieve. It is based on an integration between industry, science, and the military that the
old-fashioned fascists could never even barely approximate. It points toward equally close
integration among military, paramilitary, and civilian elements. Many of the civilian leaders
-- such as Zbigniew Brzezinski or Paul Nitze -- tend to be much more bloodthirsty than any
top brass. In turn, the new-style military professionals tend to become corporate-style
entrepreneurs who tend to operate -- as Major Richard A. Gabriel and Lieutenant Colonel Paul
L. Savage have disclosed -- in accordance with the ethics of the marketplace. The old
buzzwords of duty, honor, and patriotism are mainly used to justify officer subservience to
the interests of transnational corporations and the continuing presentation of threats to
some corporate investments as threats to the interest of the American people as a whole.
Above all, in sharp contrast with classic fascism's glorification of violence, the friendly
fascist orientation is to sanitize, even hide, the greater violence of modern warfare behind
such "value-free" terms as "nuclear exchange," "counterforce" and "flexible response," behind
the huge geographical distances between the senders and receivers of destruction through
missiles or even on the "automated battlefield," and the even greater psychological distances
between the First World elites and the ordinary people who might be consigned to quick or
slow death.
We no longer live in a functioning democracy. Self-styled liberals and progressives, as they
do in every election cycle, are urging us to vote for the Democrats, although the Democratic
Party in Europe would be classified as a right-wing party, and tell us to begin to build
progressive movements the day after the election. Only no one ever builds these movements. The
Democratic Party knows there is no price to pay for selling us out and its abject service to
corporations. It knows the left and liberals become supplicants in every election cycle. And
this is why the Democratic Party drifts further and further to the right and we become more and
more irrelevant. If you stand for something, you have to be willing to fight for it. But there
is no fight in us.
The elites, Republican and Democrat, belong to the same club. We are not in it. Take a look
at the flight roster of the billionaire
Jeffrey Epstein , who was accused of prostituting dozens of underage girls and ended up
spending 13 months in prison on a single count. He flew political insiders from both parties
and the business world to his secluded Caribbean island, known as "Orgy Island," on his jet,
which the press nicknamed "the Lolita Express." Some of the names on his flight
roster, which usually included unidentified women, were Bill Clinton, who took dozens of trips,
Alan
Dershowitz , former Treasury Secretary and former Harvard President Larry Summers, the
Candide -like
Steven Pinker ,
whose fairy dust ensures we are getting better and better, and Britain's Prince Andrew. Epstein
was also a friend of Trump, whom he visited at Mar-a-Lago.
We live on the precipice, the eve of the deluge. Past civilizations have crumbled in the
same way, although as Hegel understood, the only thing we learn from history is "that people
and governments never have learned anything from history." We will not arrest the decline if
the Democrats regain control of the House. At best we will briefly slow it. The corporate
engines of pillage, oppression, ecocide and endless war are untouchable. Corporate power will
do its dirty work regardless of which face -- the friendly fascist face of the Democrats or the
demented visage of the Trump Republicans -- is pushed out front. If you want real change,
change that means something, then mobilize, mobilize, mobilize, not for one of the two
political parties but to rise up and destroy the corporate structures that ensure our doom.
The actions that are taken are a three-pronged attack in order to foster in global
governance, and they are as such:
Create ubiquitous electronic surveillance with unlimited police power
Throw the entire earth into an economic tailspin
Destroy all nationalism, national borders, and create chaos among all nations prior to an
"incendiary event" or series of actions that leads to a world war.
The world war is the most important part of it all, in the eyes of the globalists. The Great
Depression culminated in a world war, and periods of economic upheaval are always followed by
wars.
... ... ...
Every word here is recorded by XKeyscore mine and yours and stored in the NSA database in
Utah, under a file for "dissenters," "agitators," and every other descriptive label that can be
thought of for those who champion critical thought and independent thinking. Every
conservative-minded journalist or writer who dares to espouse these views and theories is being
recorded and kept under some kind of watch. You can be certain of it . Many are either shutting
down or "knuckling under" and complying.
The globalists are getting what they wish: consolidating the resources while they "tank" the
fiat economies and currencies of the nations. They are destroying cultures who just a mere two
centuries ago would have armed their entire male populaces with swords and sent invaders either
packing or in pieces.
They are destroying cultures by making them question themselves ! The greatest tactic
imaginable!
I submit this last for your perusal. Do you know who you are? The question is not just as
simple as it seems. Let's delve deeply. Do you really know who you are, where your family
originates? Your heritage, and its strengths and weaknesses? Is that heritage yours, along with
your heritage as an American citizen? It is not important that I, or others should know of
these strengths not at this moment in time. The world war is yet to come. As Shakespeare said,
"To thine own self be true." This is important for you to know it and hold fast to it. We are
in the decline of the American nation-now-empire.
When the dust settles, you'll know who will run with the ball even with three blockers
against them and will manage to slip the tackles or forearm shiver them in the face, outside of
the ref's eye, to run that ball in. The Marquis of Queensbury is dead, and those rules will go
out the window. When the dust settles, those who had the foresight and acted on it will be the
ones who will be given a gift: a chance to participate in what is to come. Stay in that good
fight, and fight it to win each day.
Historians of the now seventeen-year old U.S. war in Afghanistan will take note of this past week
when the newly-appointed American general in charge of US and NATO operations in the country made a
bombshell, historic admission.
He conceded that
the United States cannot win in
Afghanistan
.
Speaking to NBC News last week, Gen. Austin Scott Miller made his
first public statements after taking charge of American operations, and shocked with his frank
assessment that that
the Afghan war cannot be won militarily and peace will only be
achieved through direct engagement and negotiations with the Taliban
--
the very
terror group which US forces sought to defeat when it first invaded in 2001.
"This is not going to be won militarily,"
Gen. Miller said.
"This is going to a political solution."
Gen. Austin Scott Miller, the U.S. commander of resolute support, via EPA/NBC
My assessment is the Taliban also realizes they cannot win militarily.
So if you
realize you can't win militarily at some point, fighting is just, people start asking why.
So you do not necessarily wait us out, but I think now is the time to start working through the
political piece of this conflict.
He gave the interview from the Resolute Support headquarters building in Kabul. "We are more in
an offensive mindset and don't wait for the Taliban to come and hit [us]," he said. "So that was an
adjustment that we made early on. We needed to because of the amount of casualties that were being
absorbed."
Starting
last summer it was revealed
that
US State Department officials began meeting with
Taliban leaders in Qatar to discuss local and regional ceasefires and an end to the war
. It
was reported at the time that the request of the Taliban, the US-backed Afghan government was not
invited; however, there doesn't appear to have been any significant fruit out of the talks as
the Taliban now controls more territory than ever before in recent years
.
Such controversial and shaky negotiations come as in total the United States has spent well
over $840 billion fighting the Taliban insurgency
while also paying for relief and
reconstruction in a seventeen-year long war that
has become more expensive, in current
dollars, than the Marshall Plan
, which was the reconstruction effort to rebuild Europe
after World War II.
Even the
New
York Times
recently chronicled the
flat out deception of official Pentagon
statements vs. the reality
in terms of the massive spending that has gone into the
now-approaching two decade long "endless war" which began in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Via NYT report
As of September of this year the situation was as bleak as it's ever been after over a
decade-and-a-half of America's longest running war, per
the NYT's numbers
:
But since 2017, the Taliban have held more Afghan territory than at any time since
the American invasion
. In just one week last month, the insurgents killed 200 Afghan
police officers and soldiers, overrunning two major Afghan bases and the city of Ghazni.
The American military
says
the
Afghan government effectively "controls or influences" 56 percent of the country. But that
assessment relies on
statistical sleight of hand
. In many districts,
the
Afghan government controls only the district headquarters and military barracks, while the
Taliban control the rest
.
For this reason Gen. Miller spoke to NBC of
an optimal "political outcome" instead of
"winning"
--
the latter being a term rarely if ever used by Pentagon and officials
and congressional leaders over the past years.
Miller
told NBC
: "I naturally feel compelled to try to set the conditions for a political outcome. So,
pressure from that standpoint, yes. I don't want everyone to think this is forever."
And ending on a bleak note in terms of the "save face" and "cut and run" nature of the U.S.
future engagement in Afghanistan, Gen. Miller concluded,
"This is my last assignment as
a soldier in Afghanistan. I don't think they'll send me back here in another grade. When I leave
this time I'd like to see peace and some level of unity as we go forward."
Interestingly, the top US and NATO commander can now only speak in remotely hopeful terms of
"some level of unity"
--
perhaps just enough to make a swift exit at least.
Tags
War Conflict
Politics
There not going to come out as say, where here because we want
BOMB IRAN a few years down the track and maintain US Military
deployment for Israel's long-term interests. Israel are suspected
of committing 9/11 attacks, if you think about it long term policy
of expansion, getting ride of its surrounding threats it's all
makes sense. scraficing 3000 americans for Israel's longterm
policy's seems to be the pill they were willing to swallow.
US is trying to shift the blame on Russia, as the Talibans went
to Moscow for peace talks.
And with Pakistan aligning with Russia/China and Iran (
Pakistan being the main supply route for the US army in
Afghanistan), the US army is practically f*cked.
Good to know that Trump is not prepared to continue to protect
Deep State opium production at the taxpayers' expense. I hope he's
planning to withdraw US armed forces from all foreign soil.
Based on what? What did he stop? Which wars did he pull out out
of?
Military was a huge contributor to his votes. He's not
going to lift a finger. He would have started by pardoning
Snowden, or closing Gitmo - something Obama lied about when
making campaign promises. Where, here is your chance, Donald.
Do at least one single thing that shows you as anything other
that a MIC puppet. Just one thing! Anything!
Bombing Syria? Yep. Blind eye to Saudi crimes in Yemen? Yep.
Dancing to Zionist demands? Yep.
Trade wars? Oh sure, those things never lead to military
conflict either!
The only reason we were in Afghanistan in the first place was to
protect the heroin trade from acquisition by the Taliban. It's
time to pull out and let the British protect their poppy fields if
they want em that badly.
Notice that Rivera says the Marines just had a visit from
Prince Charles. If you want to know more about why we have
so much heroin in America now and who benefits.. read Dope
Inc.
"... What will the postmortem statue of neoliberalism look like? ..."
"... "You stupid Wap, you just scratched my car. That dirty Mick tripped me when I wasn't looking." ..."
"... That [N-word] SOB is just like them other Jew-boy globalists who are sending our jobs to Chinamen and whatnot. Screw him and all the damned Democrat libtards. ..."
LP: You've recently highlighted that this is a
tricky time for historians and those who want to examine the past, like filmmakers.
Well-intentioned people who want to confront the injustices of history may end up replacing one
set of myths for another. You point out the distortion of history in films like "Selma" which
offer uplifting narratives about black experiences but tend to leave out or alter meaningful
facts, such as the ways in which blacks and whites have worked together. This is ostensibly
done to avoid a "white savior" narrative but you indicate that it may serve to support other
ideas that are also troubling.
AR: Exactly, and in ways that are completely compatible with neoliberalism as a style of
contemporary governance. It boils down to the extent to which the notion that group disparities
have come to exhaust the ways that people think and talk about inequality and injustice in
America now.
It's entirely possible to resolve disparities without challenging the fundamental structures
that reproduce inequalities more broadly. As my friend Walter Benn Michaels and I have been
saying for at least a decade, by the standard of disparity as the norm or the ideal of social
justice, a society in which 1% of the population controls more than 90% of the resources would
be just, so long as the 1% is made up non-whites, non-straight people, women, and so on in
proportions that roughly match their representation in the general population.
It completely rationalizes neoliberalism. You see this in contemporary discussions about
gentrification, for example. What ends up being called for is something like showing respect
for the aboriginal habitus and practices and involving the community in the process. But what
does it mean to involve the community in the process? It means opening up spaces for
contractors, black and Latino in particular, in the gentrified areas who purport to represent
the interests of the populations that are being displaced. But that has no impact on the logic
of displacement. It just expands access to the trough, basically.
I've gotten close to some young people who are nonetheless old school type leftists in the
revitalized Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and I've been struck to see that the
identitarian tendency in DSA has been actively opposing participation in the Medicare for All
campaign that the national organization adopted. The argument is that it's bad because there
are disparities that it doesn't address. In the first place, that's not as true as they think
it might be, but there's also the fact that they can't or won't see how a struggle for
universal health care could be the most effective context for trying to struggle against
structural disparities. It's just mind-boggling.
LP: If politicians continue to focus on issues like race, xenophobia, and homophobia without
delivering practical solutions to the economic problems working people face, from health care
costs to the retirement crisis to student debt, could we end up continuing to move in the
direction of fascism? I don't use the word lightly.
AR: I don't either. And I really agree with you. I was a kid in a basically red household in
the McCarthy era. I have no illusions about what the right is capable of, what the bourgeoisie
is capable of, and what the liberals are capable of. In the heyday of the New Left, when people
were inclined to throw the fascist label around, I couldn't get into it. But for the first time
in my life, I think it's not crazy to talk about it. You have to wonder if Obama, who never
really offered us a thing in the way of a new politics except his race, after having done that
twice, had set the stage for Trump and whatever else might be coming.
Thanks, Yves. For decades now Reed has set the standard for integrating class-based
politics with anti-racism. I only wish Barbara Fields, whom he mentions, could get as much
air time.
Those who argue for identity-based tests of fairness (e.g. all categories of folks are
proportionately represented in the 1%) fail to think through means and ends. They advocate
the ends of such proportionality. They don't get that broad measures to seriously reduce
income and wealth inequality (that is, a class approach) are powerful means to the very end
they wish for. If, e.g., the bottom 50% actually had half (heck, even 30 to 40%) of income
and wealth, the proportionality of different groups in any socioeconomic tier would be much
higher than it is today.
There are other means as well. But the point is that identity-driven folks strip their own
objective of it's most useful tools for it's own accomplishment.
In reading this, my mind was drawn back to an article that was in links recently about a
Tea Party politician that ended up being sent to the slammer. He was outraged to learn that
at the prison that he was at, the blacks and the whites were deliberately set against each
other in order to make it easier for the guards to rule the prison.
It is a bit like this in this article when you see people being unable to get past the
black/white thing and realize that the real struggle is against the elite class that rules
them all. I am willing to bet that if more than a few forgot the whole
Trump-supporters-are-racists meme and saw the economic conditions that pushed them to vote
the way that they did, then they would find common cause with people that others would write
off as deplorable and therefore unsalvageable.
Howard Zinn, in " A Peoples' History of the United States" makes a similar argument about
the origins of racism in southern colonial America. The plantation owners and slave owners
promoted racism among the working class whites towards blacks to prevent them ( the working
class blacks and whites) from making common cause against the aristocratic economic system
that oppressed both whites and blacks who did not own property.
The origin of militias was to organize lower class whites to protect the plantation owners
from slave revolts.
The entire book is an eye-opening story of class struggle throughout US history.
The origin of militias was to organize lower class whites to protect the plantation
owners from slave revolts.
The militias were the bulk of the military, if the not the military, for large periods of
time for all of the British American Colonies for centuries. The colonists were in fairly
isolated, often backwater, places for much of the time. Between the constant small scale
warfare with the natives and the various threats from the French and Spanish military, there
was a need for some form of local (semi) organized military. It was the British government's
understandable belief that the colonists should pay at least some of the expensive costs of
the soldiers and forts that were put in place to protect them during and after the Seven
Years War that was the starting step to the revolution; the origins of modern American
policing especially in the South has its genesis in the Slave Patrols although there was some
form of police from the start throughout the Colonies form the very beginning even if it was
just a local sheriff. The constant theme of the police's murderous brutality is a legacy of
that. The Second Amendment is a result of both the colonists/revolutionarie's loathing, even
hatred, of a potentially dictatorial standing army of any size and the slave holders'
essential need to control the slaves and to a lesser degree the poor whites.
people gang up (in racial groups – maybe that's just easiest though it seems to have
systematic encouragement) in prison for protection I think. The protection is not purely from
guards. There are riots in which one could get seriously injured (stabbed), one could get
attacked otherwise etc.. Because basic physical safety of one's person is not something they
provide in prison, maybe quite deliberately so.
"I am willing to bet that if more than a few forgot the whole Trump-supporters-are-racists
meme and saw the economic conditions that pushed them to vote the way that they did, then
they would find common cause with people that others would write off as deplorable and
therefore unsalvageable."
In those for whom poverty caused them to vote for Trump. But some voted for Trump due to
wealth. And whites overall have more wealth than blacks and so overall (not every individual)
are the beneficiaries of unearned wealth and privilege and that too influences their view of
the world (it causes them to side more with the status quo). Blacks are the most economically
liberal group in America. The thing is can one really try simultaneously to understand even
some of say the black experience in America and try hard to understand the Trump voter at the
same time? Because if a minority perceives those who voted for Trump as a personal threat to
them are they wrong? If they perceive Republican economic policies (and many have not changed
under Trump such as cutting government) as a personal threat to them are they wrong? So some
whites find it easier to sympathize with Trump voters, well they would wouldn't they, as the
problems of poor whites more directly relate to problems they can understand. But so
what?
I am glad that Reed mentioned the quasi-religious nature of identity politics, especially
in its liberal form. Michael Lind made a similar observation:
As a lapsed Methodist myself, I think there is also a strong undercurrent of
Protestantism in American identity politics, particularly where questions of how to promote
social justice in a post-racist society are concerned. Brazil and the United States are
both former slave societies, with large black populations that have been frozen out of
wealth and economic opportunity. In the United States, much of the discussion about how to
repair the damage done by slavery and white supremacy involves calls on whites to examine
themselves and confess their moral flaws -- a very Protestant approach, which assumes that
the way to establish a good society is to ensure that everybody has the right moral
attitude. It is my impression that the left in Brazil, lacking the Protestant puritan
tradition, is concerned more with practical programs, like the bolsa familia -- a cash
grant to poor families -- than with attitudinal reforms among the privileged.
Many white liberals are mainline Protestants or former Protestants and I think they bring
their religious sensibilities to their particular brand of liberalism. You can see it in the
way that many liberals claim that we cannot have economic justice until we eliminate racist
attitudes as when Hillary Clinton stated that breaking up the big banks won't end racism. Of
course, if we define racism as a sinful attitude it is almost impossible to know if we have
eliminated it or if we can even eliminate it at all.
Clinton and liberals like her make essentially the same argument that conservatives make
when they say that we cannot have big economic reforms because the problem is really greed.
Once you define the problem as one of sin then you can't really do anything to legislate
against it. Framing political problems as attitudinal is a useful way to protect powerful
interests. How do you regulate attitudes? How do you break up a sinful mind? How can you even
know if a person has racism on the brain but not economic anxiety? Can you even separate the
two? Politicians need to take voters as they are and not insist that they justify themselves
before voting for them.
I thought this reference to the Protestant way of self-justification or absolving oneself
without talking about class in the US is true but was perhaps the weakest point. The
financial elites justify their position and excuse current inequalities and injustices
visiting on the 99% by whatever is the current dominate culturally approved steps in whatever
country. In the US – Protestant heritage; in India – not Protestant heritage; in
Italy – Catholic heritage, etc. Well, of course they do. This isn't surprising in the
least. Each country's elites excuse themselves in a way that prevents change by whatever
excuses are culturally accepted.
I think talking about the Protestant heritage in the US is a culturing interesting artifact
of this time and this place, but runs the danger of creating another "identity" issue in
place of class and financial issues if the wider world's elite and similar self excuse by
non-Protestant cultures aren't included in the example. Think of all the ways the various
religions have been and are used to justify economic inequality. Without the wider scope the
religious/cultural point risks becoming reduced to another "identity" argument; whereas, his
overall argument is that "identity" is a distraction from class and economic inequality
issues. my 2 cents.
Chris Hedges has been warning about the rise of American Fascism for years, and his
warnings are coming to fruition- and still, the general population fails to recognize the
danger. The evils and violence that are the hallmarks of fascist rule are for other people,
not Americans. The terms America and Freedom are so ingrained in the minds of citizens that
the terms are synonymous. Reality is understood and interpreted through this distorted lens.
People want and need to believe this falsehood and resist any messenger trying to enlighten
them to a different interpretation of reality- the true view is just to painful to
contemplate.
The horrors of racism offer a nugget of truth that can misdirect any effort to bring about
systemic change. Like the flow of water finding the path of least resistance, racist
explanations for current social problems creates a channel of thought that is difficult to
alter. This simple single mindedness prevents a more holistic and complicated interpretation
to take hold in the public mind. It is the easy solution for all sides- the tragedy is that
violence, in the end, sorts out the "winners". The world becomes a place where competing
cultures are constantly at each others throats.
Falling in the racism/ identity politics trap offers the elite many avenues to leverage
their power, not the least of which is that when all else fails, extreme violence can be
resorted to. The left/progressives have become powerless because they fail to understand this
use of ultimate force and have not prepared their followers to deal with it. Compromise has
been the strategy for decades and as time has proven, only leads to more exploitation. Life
becomes a personal choice between exploiting others, or being exploited. The whole system
reeks of hypocrisy because the real class divisions are never discussed or understood for
what they are. This seems to be a cyclical process, where the real leaders of revolutionary
change are exterminated or compromised, then the dissatisfaction in the working classes is
left to build until the next crisis point is reached.
WWIII is already under way and the only thing left is to see if the imperialist ideology
will survive or not. True class struggle should lead to world peace- not world domination.
Fascists are those that seek war as a means of violent expansion and extermination to suit
their own ends. Hope for humanity rests in the idea of a multipolar world- the end of
imperialism.
Agressive war is the problem, both on the small social scale and the larger stage between
nations. The main question is if citizens will allow themselves to be swept up into the
deceptions that make war possible, or defend themselves and whatever community they can form
to ensure that mass destruction can be brought under control.
The real crisis point for America will be brought about by the loss of foreign wars- which
seem inevitable. The citizenry will be forced to accept a doubling down on the existing
failures or will show the fortitude to accept failure and defeat and rebuild our country.
Seeking a mythic greatness is not the answer- only a true and sober evaluation will suffice-
it must be a broader accommodation that accepts responsibility for past wrongs but does not
get caught up in narrow, petty solutions that racist recriminations are hallmark. What is
needed is a framework for a truth and reconciliation process- but such a process is only
possible by a free people, not a conquered one. It is only on this foundation that an
American culture can survive.
This will take a new enlightenment that seems questionable, at least in the heart of
American Empire. It entails a reexamination of what freedom means and the will to dedicate
oneself to building something worth defending with ones life. It has nothing to do with
wanting to kill others or making others accept a particular view.
It is finding ones place in the world, and defending it, and cultivating it. It is the
opposite of conquest. It is the resistance to hostility. In a word, Peace.
I don't disagree with many of your assertions and their warrants but I am growing
disturbed by the many uses of the word 'Fascism'. What does the word mean exactly beyond its
pejorative uses? Searching the web I am only confused by the proliferation of meanings. I
believe it's time for some political or sociological analyst to cast off the words 'fascism'
and 'totalitarianism' and further the work that Hannah Arendt started. We need a richer
vocabulary and a deeper analysis of the political, social, philosophical, and human contents
of the concepts of fascism and of totalitarianism. World War II was half-a-century ago. We
have many more examples called fascism and totalitarianism to study and must study to further
refine exactly what kinds of Evil we are discussing and hope to fight. What purpose is served
sparring with the ghosts as new more virulent Evils proliferate.
You have brought up a very important point. The meaning of words and their common usage.
But I have to disagree that "new more virulent Evils" require a new terminology. To my mind,
that plays right into the hand of Evil. The first step in the advancement of evil is the
debasement of language- the spreading of lies and obfuscating true meaning. George Orwell's
doublespeak.
I don't think its a matter of casting off the usage of words, or the creative search to
coin new ones, but to reclaim words. Now the argument can be made that once a word is
debased, it looses its descriptive force- its moral force- and that is what I take as your
concern, however, words are used by people to communicate meaning, and this is where the easy
abandonment of words to their true meaning becomes a danger for the common good. You cannot
let someone hijack your language. A communities strength depends on its common use and
understanding of language.
Where to find that common meaning? Without the perspective of class struggle taken into
account- to orientate the view- this search will be fruitless. Without a true grounding,
words can mean anything. I believe, in America, this is where the citizenry is currently, in
a state of disorientation that has been building for decades. This disorientation is caused
by DoubleSpeak undermining common understanding that is brought about by class consciousness/
solidarity/ community. In a consumerist society, citizens take for granted that they are lied
to constantly- words and images have no real meaning- or multiple meanings playing on the
persons sensibilities at any given moment- all communication becomes fundamentally marketing
and advertising BS.
This sloppiness is then transferred into the political realm of social communication which
then transforms the social dialog into a meaningless exercise because there is really no
communication going on- only posturing and manipulation. Public figures have both private and
public views. They are illegitimate public servants not because they withhold certain
information, but because they hold contradictory positions expressed in each realm. They are
liars and deceivers in the true sense of the word, and don't deserve to be followed or
believed- let alone given any elevated social standing or privilege.
Your oppressor describes himself as your benefactor- or savior- and you believe them, only
to realize later that you have been duped. Repeat the cycle down through the ages.
DoubleSpeak and controlling the interpretation of History are the tools of exercising
power. It allows this cycle to continue.
Breaking this cycle will require an honesty and sense of empathy that directs action.
Fighting evil directly is a loosing game. You more often than not become that which you
fight against. Directly confronting evil requires a person to perform evil deeds.
Perpetuation of War is the perfect example. It must be done indirectly by not performing evil
actions or deeds. Your society takes on a defensive posture, not an aggressive one. Defense
and preservation are the motivating principles.
Speaking the truth, and working toward peace is the only way forward. A new language and
modes of communication can build themselves up around those principles.
Protecting oneself against evil seems to be the human condition. How evil is defined
determines the class structure of any given society.
So much energy is wasted on trying to convince evil people not to act maliciously, which
will never happen. It is what makes them evil- it is who they are. And too much time is
wasted listening to evil people trying to convince others that they are not evil- or their
true intensions are beneficent- which is a lie.
"Sparing with ghosts", is a good way of describing the reclaiming of historical fact. Of
belief in the study of history as a means to improve society and all of humankind thru
reflection and reevaluation. The exact opposite desire of an elite class- hell bent on self
preservation as their key motivating factor in life. If you never spar with ghosts, you have
no reference to evaluate the person standing before you- which can prove deadly- as must be
constantly relearned by generations of people exploited by the strong and powerful.
The breaking point of any society is how much falsehood is tolerated- and in the West
today- that is an awful lot.
"I've gotten close to some young people who are nonetheless old school type leftists in
the revitalized Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and I've been struck to see that the
identitarian tendency in DSA has been actively opposing participation in the Medicare for All
campaign that the national organization adopted "
Check to see how their parents or other relatives made or make their money.
This is quite the challenge. I know a large number of upper middle class young people who
are amenable to the socialist message but don't really get (or don't get at all) what it
means. (I'm convinced they make up a large portion of that percentage that identifies as
socialist or has a positive image of socialism.) But it would be wrong to write them off.
A related point that I make here from time to time: all these UMC kids have been
inculcated with a hyper-competitive world view. We need a systemic re-education program to
break them free.
as a complementary anecdote, i know of economically bottom 50% people who are devout
anti-socialists, because they deal with "micro-triggers" of free-riders, cheaters, petty
theft in their everyday life.
To them, the academic/ivory tower/abstract idea of equality in class, equality in income
is an idealistic pipe dream versus the dog-eat-dog reality of the world.
Interesting that you mention "economically bottom 50% people who are devout
anti-socialists, because they deal with "micro-triggers" of [low income?] free-riders,
cheaters, petty theft in their everyday life."
I read a lot of their snarling against alleged low income "moochers" in the local media.
What I find disturbing is their near total blindness to the for-profit businesses,
millionaires and billionaires who raid public treasuries and other resources on a regular
basis.
Just recently, I read a news story about the local baseball franchise that got $135
million dollars (they asked for $180 million) and the local tourism industry complaining
about their reduction in public subsidies because money had to be diverted to homeless
services.
No one seems to ever question why profitable, private businesses are on the dole. The fact
that these private entities complain about reductions in handouts shows how entitled they
feel to feed from the public trough. Moreover, they do so at a time of a locally declared
"homeless emergency".
Yet, it is the middle class precariat that condemn those below them as 'moochers and
cheaters', while ignoring the free-riders, cheaters and grand larceny above them.
There is no class consciousness. The working stiffs admire their owners so the only people
left to blame for their difficult life conditions are the poor below them on the social
hierarchy. Or they blame themselves, which is just as destructive. In the interim, they enjoy
the camaraderie that sporting events provide, so give the owners a pass. Bread and
Circuses.
A capitalist critique is the only way to change this situation, but that would require
learning Marxist arguments and discussing their validity.
There is that, or Charity for the poor, which only aggravates the class conflict that
plagues our society.
The third way is actually building community that functions on a less abusive manner,
which takes effort, time, and will power.
I homed in on your phrase "they deal with 'micro-triggers' of free-riders, cheaters, petty
theft in their everyday life" and it landed on fertile [I claim!] ground in my imagination. I
have often argued with my sister about this. She used to handle claims for welfare, and now
found more hospitable areas of civil service employment. I am gratified that her attitudes
seem to have changed over time. Many of the people she worked with in social services shared
the common attitudes of disparagement toward their suppliants -- and enjoyed the positions of
power it offered them.
I think the turning point came when my sister did the math and saw that the direct costs
for placing a homeless person or family into appallingly substandard 'housing' in her area
ran in the area of $90K per year. Someone not one of the "free-riders, cheaters, [or villains
of] petty theft in their everyday life" was clearly benefiting. I am very lazy but I might
try to find out who and advertise their 'excellence' in helping the poor.
A "re-education" program? That usage resurrects some very most unhappy recollections from
the past. Couldn't you coin a more happy phrase? Our young are not entirely without the
ability to learn without what is called a "re-education" program.
The comments in this post are all over the map. I'll focus on the comments regarding
statues commemorating Confederate heroes.
I recall the way the issue of Confederate statues created a schism in the NC
commentarient. I still believe in retaining 'art' in whatever form it takes since there is so
little art in our lives. BUT I also believe that rather than tear down the Confederate
statues of Confederate 'heroes' it were far better to add a plaque comemorating just what
sorts of heroism these 'heroes' performed for this country. That too serves Art.
Tearing the statues down only serves forgetting something which should never be
forgotten.
This was intended as a separate comment to stand alone. I believe Art should not forget
but should remember the horrors of our past lest we not forget.
It occurred to me that centrists demonize the left as unelectable based entirely on tokens
of identity. Long haired hippies. The other. It works because the political debate in America
is structured entirely around identity politics. Nancy Pelosi is a San Francisco liberal so
of course white people in Mississippi will never vote for the Democrats. Someone like Bernie
Sanders has a message that will appeal to them but he is presented as to the left of even
Pelosi or alternately a traitor to the liberal identity siding with racists and sexists.
Actually, all of these oppressions are rooted in working class oppression. But that is
inconsistent with the framing of ascriptive identity.
This was a great post. Didn't know about Adolph Reed. He gets straight to the point
– we have only 2 options. Either change neoliberal capitalism structurally or modify
its structure to achieve equality. Identity politics is a distraction. There will always be
differences between us and so what? As long as society itself is equitable. As far as the
fear of fascism goes, I think maybe fascism is in the goal of fascism. If it is oppressive
then its bad. If it is in the service of democracy and equality the its good. If our bloated
corporatism could see its clear, using AR's option #2, to adjusting their turbo neoliberal
capitalism, then fine. More power to them. It isn't racism preventing them from doing this
– it is the system. It is structural. Unfortunately we face far greater dangers,
existential dangers, today than in 1940. We not only have an overpopulated planet of human
inequality, but also environmental inequality. Big mess. And neither capitalism nor socialism
has the answer – because the answer is eclectic. We need all hands on deck and every
practical measure we can conjure. And FWIW I'd like to compare our present delusions to all
the others – denial. The statue of Robert E. Lee, imo, is beautiful in its conveyance
of defeat with deep regret. The acceptance is visible and powerful. What will the postmortem
statue of neoliberalism look like?
Do you really want 'equality' however you might define it? We are not born equal. Each of
us is different and I believe each of us is therefore very special. [I suppose I echo the
retort of the French regarding the equality of the sexes: "Vive la Difference!".] I believe
we should celebrate our inequalities -- while we maintain vigilance in maintaining the equal
chance to try and succeed or fail. The problem isn't inequality but the extreme inequalities
in life and sustenance our society has built -- here and more abroad. I don't mind being
beaten in a fair race. An unfair race lightens my laurels when I win. But our societies run
an unfair competition and the laurels far too heavily grace the brows of those who win. And
worse still, 'inequality' -- the word I'll use for the completely disproportionate rewards to
the winners to the undeserving in-excellent 'winners' is not a matter solved by a quest for
'equality'. The race for laurels has no meaning when the winners are chosen before the race
and the 'laurels' cost the welfare and sustenance for the losers and their unrelated kin who
never ran in the race. And 'laurels' were once but honors and there is too far little honor
in this world.
Nothing denotes a naive idealistic "progressive" than the demand for near absolute
equality in terms of money and status in their future society.all or nothing i guess.
I have read and appreciated many comments by 'Susan the other'. I would not ever
characterize her comments as those of a naive idealistic "progressive" demanding absolute
equality I should and must apologize if that is how you read my comment. I intended to
suggest equality is not something truly desirable in-itself. But re-reading her comment I
find much greater depth than I commented to --
'Susan the other' notes: "The statue of Robert E. Lee, imo, is beautiful in its conveyance
of defeat with deep regret." In answer to her question: "What will the postmortem statue of
neoliberalism look like?" I very much doubt that the post mortem statue of Neoliberalism will
show regret for anything save that all the profits were not accrued before those holding the
reins, the Elite of Neoliberalism, might gracefully die without care for any children they
may have had.
Thanks for this post. I am really surprised these days by black "liberal" media folks who
insist that racism be addressed before inequality/class issues. They are almost vehement in
their discussions about this. Are they protecting neoliberalism because it benefits them
.???
My previous admittedly overlong reply has yet to show. Darn.
But this question is an important one.
Yes, they do very much.
One of the reasons the Civil Rights struggle died was the co-option of the Black elites,
especially of the Civil Rights Movement, by the American elites. After Martin Luther King's
assassination, his Poor People's Campaign slowly died. A quiet quid pro quo was offered.
Ignore all the various social, economic, political and legal wrongs done to all Americans,
and yes blacks in particular, and just focusing on black identity and social "equality" or at
least the illusion of campaigning for it, and in you will be given a guaranteed, albeit
constrained, place at the money trough. Thus the Black Misleadership Class was born.
All the great movements in past hundred plus years have had their inclusivity removed.
Suffragism/Feminism, the Union Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, even the Environmental
Movement all had strong cross cultural, class, and racial membership and concerns. Every
single of these movements had the usually white upper class strip out everyone else and
focusing only on very narrow concerns. Aside from the Civil Rights Movement, black
participation was removed, sometimes forcefully. They all dropped any focus on poor people of
any race.
A lot of money, time, and effort by the powerful went into doing this. Often just by
financially supporting the appropriate leaders which gave them the ability to push aside the
less financially secure ones.
Reading this post in its entirety I feel the author must become more direct in critique.
Old jargon of class or race or a "struggle against structural disparities" should be replaced
by the languages of such assertions as: " the larger objective was to eliminate the threat
that the insurgency had posed to planter-merchant class rule" or "It just expands access to
the trough, basically". Why mince words when there are such horrors as are poised against the
common humanity of all?
Your comment is too brief and too enigmatic. If by Adolf you mean Adolf H. -- he is dead.
New potentially more dangerous creatures roam the Earth these days beware.
I consider currently one of our great intellectuals in that he understands and can use
language to make his case in a layman not necessarily friendly but accessible .
and as a southern born white male I think maybe I should watch Glory I remember a '67 show
and tell when a black classmate had a civil war sword come up in their sugar cane field, and
when I and a friend found a (disinterred yuck) civil war grave just out in the woods in north
florida. People seem to have forgotten that times were chaotic in our country's checkered
past I was in massive race riots and massive anti war protests as a child of the '60s, but
since I was in the single digits at the time no one payed me any mind as a for instance my
dad somehow got the counselors apartment in a dorm at florida state in 68′ and I
remember people in the the dorms throwing eggs at the protesters. It was nuts.
Ferguson's INET paper got me thinking about what triggers racism in us. As a kid, ethnic
pejoratives were usually a reaction to some injury. "You stupid Wap, you just scratched
my car. That dirty Mick tripped me when I wasn't looking." I tend to agree with the
premise that bailing out Wall Street and letting Main Street lose out offers a powerful
trigger for a racist reaction. People might have been softening on their lifelong covert
racism when they succumbed to Obama's charm. But when you lose your job, then your house, and
wind up earning a third of what you did before the GR, that is the sort of thing that
triggers pejorative/racist reactions. That [N-word] SOB is just like them other Jew-boy
globalists who are sending our jobs to Chinamen and whatnot. Screw him and all the damned
Democrat libtards. Then, when a MAGA-hatted Trump echoes those sentiments over a PA
system, the ghost of Goebbels is beaming.
"... Trump has succeeded in implementing some of his campaign ideas and not all of them are 100% evil or wrongheaded. He has shaken the long term calcification of the US foreign and trade policy, has introduced tariffs especially to combat clearly unfair Chinese trade practices while demanding European and Asian allies pay more for their defense of empire. ..."
"... As b stated recently, Trump is an astute salesman (unfortunately, that is all he is) but what is left unmentioned is that he is of the sales school that is totally unmoored for any sense of ethical, moral or legal responsibility. ..."
"... The US political system was invested with an ability to self-correct, or self-police through separation of powers within the tripartite political system. It is hardly news this system is about dead, starting not with Trump of course, but now reaching its absolute low point under his rule and the acquiescence of the spineless GOP. ..."
That is, he started off on the wrong foot. Campaigning as a populist who eschewed accepted
mainstream "progressive" and "conservative" political positions, he completely cratered the
unpopular Republican orthodoxy during the 2016 primaries by promising such heretical ideas as
a non-interventionist foreign policy, protection for Medicare/Medicaid and social security,
improvement on Obamacare, higher taxes on the wealthiest and a massive infrastructure program
to rebuild the decaying facilities of this so-called once grate nation.
These are all ideas that gained the support of enough Obama voters and independents in
just the right flyover states to lead Trump to an improbable victory while being soundly
thrashed in the popular voting nationwide. A stunning, historical accomplishment as much as
and as much in reaction too, the 2008 Obama victory.
Of course, to those of us who understand the modern GOP and the history of the lying-ass
self promotion of the Trump entertainment spectacle its own self, we were neither duped nor
surprised when the initial 2017 legislative agenda items proferred were none of the populist
agenda but instead were the repeal of Obamacare, massive tax cuts for the wealthy and the
reversal of all Obama executive orders, most notably in the areas of refugee resettlement and
immigration.
Trump, the so-called change agent who in fact was and still is clueless regarding how to
function as President simply let the craven Obama opposition leaders of the prior 8 years,
McConnell and Ryan set out the typical GOP legislative agenda, which is opposed by a
majority, in some cases overwhelming majority, of Amerikkkans.
Obamacare repeal failed memorably based on but one late night thumb's down taken more out
of personal revenge than the ideology of a very soon to be dead Senator.
Trump's ruling style in large part has substituted for any sense of a coherent agenda in
that he obviously cares only about his base (an obdurate block of 36% of the electorate
consisting almost entirely of white, entitled, racist baby boomers who have devolved into
anti-democratic fascists now that they no longer represent a majority of the US population
and believe (falsely) they have something to protect).
Trump has succeeded in implementing some of his campaign ideas and not all of them are
100% evil or wrongheaded. He has shaken the long term calcification of the US foreign and
trade policy, has introduced tariffs especially to combat clearly unfair Chinese trade
practices while demanding European and Asian allies pay more for their defense of
empire.
While I have my own view of whether any of Trump's policies contain great value from a
long term historical perspective, I do recognize Trump's appeal to certain sectors of the
internet, including most obviously certain useful idiots of the ultra left.
I do not believe his victory to be a fluke of nature but rather in keeping with the
current worldwide trend borne of aging whitebread fear, cyncism and disenchantment with
elitist political/economic establishments and which has been amped to a viral degree by a
staggering wealth disparity, but only as it impacts the formerly entitled feeling, aging
white people situated in western countries.
The natural response to any socially or cultural threat is to band together tribally and
fight back. And the main threat, when it is boiled down, is the fear of overpopulation (and
its accompnaying unstoppable environmental degradation) driven by what is viewed
through the Trump voter political lens as non-white, primitive, illsuited people from
shithole countries who are and will continue to ruin Amerikkka and Western Europe.
As perfectly illustrated by the migrant caravan heading to Tijuana.
Unfortunately, Trump through disinterest or incompetence or both hasn't followed through
either with enough of the promises he made that are actually meaningful to most people,
whether GOP or Democratic. He has been able to bind his tribe to him and conquer the GOP
political apparatus simply because the Party platform was already so badly decayed
(overcooked Reagan leftovers) and out of touch with reality pre-Trump that the Donald could
bend delusional conservative tropes in any way he saw fit to his electoral advantage. As long
as he infotained well, and he has indeed, he would dominate.
As b stated recently, Trump is an astute salesman (unfortunately, that is all he is)
but what is left unmentioned is that he is of the sales school that is totally unmoored for
any sense of ethical, moral or legal responsibility.
In other words, Trump is that quintessential Amerikkkan salesman: the grifter. This
particular breed of business person is not an exception in the US but rather the rule. In
fact, the US system has devolved to the point where laws and regulations now enfranchise what
previously had been considered illegal activity. Amerikkkans are heavily incentivised these
days by the call to a form of monopolistic, crony capitalism and institulionised rigged
gambling ("Wall Street"), which in more quaint times was considered mobsterism.
Institutions have been purposefully compromised so they no longer support whatever
criminal laws still exist. It is not by accident that the IRS is now chronically understaffed
and has no effective way to stop income tax cheating or collection of the minimal taxes now
due.
It is not by accident that Trump's main role as President is to weaken institutions such
as the media, to further debase language and kill whatever generally accepted objective truth
remain extant in the land. He is recognisable to all Amerikkkans as a CEO in support of this
ongoing wave of legal criminality through which the 1% and their lackeys section have
prospered at the expense of the 99%.
The US political system was invested with an ability to self-correct, or self-police
through separation of powers within the tripartite political system. It is hardly news this
system is about dead, starting not with Trump of course, but now reaching its absolute low
point under his rule and the acquiescence of the spineless GOP.
And no, I don't believe the Demotardic Party to be absolved of blame in any way. Rather,
the Demotards have entirely gone along to get along with this same trend because of course
the Party leaders have been able to criminally enrich themselves and their cronies along the
way too.
However, let's be real for minute and drop all pretense of holier than thou keyboard
revolutionism. The ultimate solution of the world's disease is not going to be resolved in
2018 through a political revolution, especially one inspired by the disharmony and fraud of
internet based social media and its acolytes. D'uh.
Look around. Since we have been blogging our lives away the world has only grown further
away from leftism. We live in a fascist police state owned and operated by teh ultra wealthy
who have dropped pretense of any humanitarian or religious concern for those less firtunated
than themselves.
Donald Trump has one more chance to make himself truly into the transformational leader he
believes himself to be in his degraded soul.
The first bill on the 2019 legislative needs to be a bipartisan infrastructure bill of
such scope and magnitude that it will serve not only a political change of direction but also
redirect the economy in such way that wealth is re-directed from the wealthy to the rest of
us, particularly those able bodied non-college educated people who have suffered through the
last several decades without hope or gain.
Trump must dictate to his party that Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security will not only
be maintained but strengthened through improved benefits.
Am I dreaming? Yes, I admit that I am. But I'm also calling out to the criminal conman in
chief: it's not too late to reclaim your own legacy.
Paul Jay says a significant section of the population supporting far right "populism" is
part of the process of the development of fascism, but the acceptance of gross inequality is
also a necessary condition for this process – From a live recording on October 29th,
2018
What does the question mean: "How is Israel mediating its right-wing nationalistic
ethnocratic political bent with the fact that the Jews massacred in
Pittsburgh were apparently progressive?" One cannot mediate "a bent". I cannot follow a
discussion of a question I do not understand. To mediate means to "intervene between
people (not a bent!) in a dispute in order to bring about an agreement or
reconciliation", according to one good dictionary. I notice that diction is a problem for
many who ask questions, and no one stops to ask them what they mean.
"... Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who rushed off a column before he could have examined Powell's allegations, declared, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise." ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... While the present campaign over Russian "meddling" has much in common with the claims about "weapons of mass destruction," the implications are far more ominous. The "war on terror" is exhausted, in part because the US is allied in Syria and elsewhere with the Islamic fundamentalist organizations it was purportedly fighting. ..."
"... The Mueller indictment is intended to provide an appropriate "narrative" for military aggression motivated by different aims. At the same time, it serves as a ready-made pretext for censorship and domestic repression that goes far beyond the extraordinary measures adopted under the framework of the "war on terror." Russia, the American people are supposed to believe, uses domestic social opposition to weaken the United States, rendering political dissent effectively treasonous. ..."
"... Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it. The target of the repressive measures is not Russia, but the American working class. The ruling elite is well aware that as it plots war abroad, it stands upon a social powder keg at home. ..."
Fifteen years ago, on February 5, 2003, against the backdrop of worldwide mass
demonstrations in opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq, then-US Secretary of State
Colin Powell argued before the United Nations that the government of Saddam Hussein was
rapidly stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction," which Iraq, together with Al Qaeda, was
planning to use against the United States.
In what was the climax of the Bush administration's campaign to justify war, Powell held
up a model vial of anthrax, showed aerial photographs and presented detailed slides
purporting to show the layout of Iraq's "mobile production facilities."
There was only one problem with Powell's presentation: it was a lie from beginning to
end.
The World Socialist Web Site , in an editorial board statement published the next
day, declared the brief for war "the latest act in a diplomatic charade laced with cynicism
and deceit." War against Iraq, the WSWS wrote, was not about "weapons of mass destruction."
Rather, "it is a war of colonial conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political
aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global
hegemony."
The response of the American media, and particularly its liberal wing, was very different.
Powell's litany of lies was presented as the gospel truth, an unanswerable indictment of the
Iraqi government.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who rushed off a column before he could have
examined Powell's allegations, declared, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations --
some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove
to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without
a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude
otherwise."
The editorial board of the New York Times -- whose reporter Judith Miller was at
the center of the Bush administration's campaign of lies -- declared one week later that
there "is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has
the capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and
more recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors."
Subsequent developments would prove who was lying. The Bush administration and its media
accomplices conspired to drag the US into a war that led to the deaths of more than one
million people -- a colossal crime for which no one has yet been held accountable.
Fifteen years later, the script has been pulled from the closet and dusted off. This time,
instead of "weapons of mass destruction," it is "Russian meddling in the US elections." Once
again, assertions by US intelligence agencies and operatives are treated as fact. Once again,
the media is braying for war. Once again, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the American
government -- which intervenes in the domestic politics of every state on the planet and has
been relentlessly expanding its operations in Eastern Europe -- are ignored.
The argument presented by the American media is that the alleged existence of a
fly-by-night operation, employing a few hundred people, with a budget amounting to a
minuscule fraction of total election spending in the US, constitutes a "a virtual war against
the United States through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda" ( New York
Times ).
In the countless articles and media commentary along this vein, nowhere can one find a
serious analysis of the Mueller indictment of the Russians itself, let alone an examination
of the real motivations behind the US campaign against Russia. The fact that the indictment
does not even involve the Russian government or state officials is treated as a nonissue.
While the present campaign over Russian "meddling" has much in common with the claims
about "weapons of mass destruction," the implications are far more ominous. The "war on
terror" is exhausted, in part because the US is allied in Syria and elsewhere with the
Islamic fundamentalist organizations it was purportedly fighting.
More fundamentally, the quarter-century of invasions and occupations that followed the
dissolution of the Soviet Union is rapidly developing into a conflict between major
nuclear-armed powers. The effort of the American ruling class to offset its economic decline
using military force is leading mankind to the brink of another world war. As the National
Defense Strategy, published less than a month before the release of the indictments,
declared, "Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US
national security."
Russia is seen by dominant sections of the military-intelligence apparatus as a principal
obstacle to US efforts to control the Middle East and to take on China -- and it is this that
has been at the center of the conflict between the Democratic Party and the Trump
administration.
There have already been a series of clashes in recent weeks between the world's two
largest nuclear-armed powers. On February 3, a Russian close-air support fighter was shot
down by al-Nusra Front fighters, which are indirectly allied with the United States in its
proxy war against the government of Bashar Al-Assad. Then, on February 7 and 8, Russian
soldiers were killed in US air and artillery barrages in Deir Ezzor, in what survivors called
a "massacre." Both the US and Russian governments have sought to downplay the scale of the
clash, but some sources have reported the number killed to be in the hundreds.
Even as US and Russian forces clashed in Syria, representatives of the Kremlin and the
Pentagon sparred at the Munich security conference this weekend over the deployment and
development of nuclear weapons. While accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Washington this month issued a nuclear posture review
envisioning a massive expansion of the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons.
The Mueller indictment is intended to provide an appropriate "narrative" for military
aggression motivated by different aims. At the same time, it serves as a ready-made pretext
for censorship and domestic repression that goes far beyond the extraordinary measures
adopted under the framework of the "war on terror." Russia, the American people are supposed
to believe, uses domestic social opposition to weaken the United States, rendering political
dissent effectively treasonous.
Already, this campaign has led the major US technology firms to implement far-reaching
measures to censor political speech on the Internet. Google is manipulating its search
results and Facebook is manipulating its news feeds, while seeking to turn the social media
platform it has developed into an instrument of corporate-state surveillance.
Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic
principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it.
The target of the repressive measures is not Russia, but the American working class. The
ruling elite is well aware that as it plots war abroad, it stands upon a social powder keg at
home.
The working class must draw the necessary conclusions from its past experiences. In 2003,
the Democratic Party supported the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq and provided it
with the necessary political cover. Now, the Democrats, along with their appendages among the
organizations of the upper-middle class, are at the forefront of the campaign for war,
employing neo-McCarthyite tactics to criminalize opposition while seeking to subordinate all
popular opposition to the Trump administration to its right-wing and militarist agenda.
The urgent task is to mobilize the working class, in the United States and
internationally, against the entire apparatus of the capitalist ruling elite. The fight
against war and dictatorship is at the same time the fight against inequality and
exploitation, for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a global socialist
society.
MUST WATCH: Shocking Video by Comedian Bill Maher - Russia Delusion Still Raging Among US
LiberalsRichard
Brandt 10 min ago | 600 words 10
131RussiaHoax Bill Maher outdid
himself recently with this video, but in doing so, he inadvertently showed how out of touch the
Jewish Hollywood liberal elites like Maher are with most of the country, and even more so with
the rest of the world.
Take the 5 minutes to watch the video, it is an eye-opener. Bullet points follow below:
Somehow, Maher managed to pack the following into his monologue:
Republican party has become the party of Putin.
He brings up the pee tape (again)
Trump is a Russian "ho", Putin is his pimp
Compares Putin to Bin Laden
Russia "flipped" the entire Republican party
Russia is a dictator who keeps attacking the US
Putin is a thug
Russians are racists, that's why Conservatives like them
Says how wonderful he thinks it is that the UK, Germany, and France have become
multi-racial countries over the last 20 years. Says Russia bad for not doing the same.
Russia is a "Honkey Oasis"
Russia has "taken over America" by meddling in her elections.
This is the net result of neoliberalism enforced debt slavery for the country. And there is no chances for Ukrainians to
climb back from this debt hole.
Notable quotes:
"... Ukraine's SSS has acknowledged that so far this year, the population has already decreased by 122,000. ..."
"... While the country's low birth rate of approximately 1 birth for 1.5 deaths is a contributing factor to the country's depopulation, emigration is by far the biggest factor. ..."
"... Between 2002 and 2017, an estimated 6.3 million Ukrainians emigrated with no plans to return. ..."
"... Through 2015 and 2017, as a result of the ongoing war in the Donbass region and the plunging value of the Ukrainian hryvnia, migration increased notably: 507,000 people went to Poland; 147,000 to Italy; 122,000 to the Czech Republic; 23,000 to the United States; and 365,000 to Russia or Belarus. ..."
"... The easing of visa-free travel by the European Union (EU) in September 2017 only increased the flow of Ukrainians to countries such as Poland, which is facing its own demographic crisis and in need of workers. In 2018 alone, more than 3 million Ukrainians applied for passports that would allow them to work in Poland. Poland is the only EU country that allows Ukrainians to obtain seasonal work visas with just a passport. Ukrainians have received 81.7% of all work visas issued in Poland this year. ..."
"... Between 1 and 2 million Ukrainian workers now reside in Poland, where they are often forced to take jobs "under the table," are easily exploited by employers, and work in dangerous conditions. Many Ukrainian laborers are recruited to Poland by scam offers of employment, only to then find themselves stranded and forced to work for whatever wage they can get. ..."
"... While Russia is constantly demonized in the Ukrainian and Western press as the eternal enemy of Ukraine, 2 million Ukrainian citizens now live or work in Russia. According to Olga Kirilova, between 2014 and 2017, 312,000 Ukrainians were granted Russian citizenship and Ukrainians make up the vast majority of immigrants to Russia. ..."
"... The migration of Ukrainian workers abroad has reached such a level that remittances from migrants now constitute 3 to 4 percent of the country's GDP. They exceed the amount of foreign investment in Ukraine. Nonetheless, such transfers are not nearly enough to make up for the negative impact of the currency's falling value, inflation, and the disappearance of skilled workers. ..."
"... The Ukrainian ruling class acknowledges that the country is in serious trouble. "One of the main risks of the current scenario is the continuation of the outflow of labor from Ukraine, which will create a further increase in the imbalance between demand and supply in the labor market," noted a report from the country's national bank. ..."
"... The Corrupt, extreme right wing government of Poroshenko, that has driven large proportions of the Ukrainian population into poverty and despair has only been able to take power and remain I office thanks to US imperialism and Angela Merkel's scheming and regime change program. ..."
"... Popular support for the "maidan" in the Ukraine was based on misleading and dishonest claims by pro EU and Pro US opportunistic political operators that such "regime change" would lead to total integration with Europe and open borders.... ..."
"... One of the most horrific consequences of the dismantling of the Soviet Union was the explosion of sex trafficking and very large numbers of Ukrainian women were caught up in this horrific exploitation and continue to be. ..."
"... Oh the benefits of US installed dictatorships. ..."
"... "Welcome to Europe, Ukraine. Here are your rubber gloves and toilet cleaning brush. Oh, you're a young woman? The red light district is three blocks that way". ..."
"... In Baltic states after being "freed from communism and Soviet occupation" the population decline is also very prominent, the same reasons as in Ukraine too. ..."
As fascist far-right nationalist groups regularly parade through the country demanding "Ukraine for Ukrainians," Ukraine faces
a massive depopulation crisis. Millions of people of all ethnicities are leaving the country, fleeing poverty and war.
Since the restoration of capitalism in 1991, the overall population of Ukraine has declined from just over 52 million to approximately
42 million today, a decrease of nearly 20 percent. If the separatist-controlled provinces of the Donbass region and Crimea are excluded,
it is estimated that just 35 million people now live in the area controlled by the government of Petro Porosehnko.
Ukrainian governments, including the current one, have been loath to carry out an official census, as it is widely believed that
the population estimates reported by the country's State Statistics Service (SSS) are inflated by including deceased individuals.
One aim of this is to rig elections. An official country-wide census has not been held since 2001. In late 2015, the Poroshenko government
postponed the 2016 census until 2020.
Despite the lack of reliable official numbers, all independent reports point to a sharp reduction in the population. According
to Ukraine's Institute of Demography at the Academy of Sciences, by 2050 only 32 million people will live in the country. The World
Health Organization has estimated that the population of the country will drop even further, to just 30 million people.
Ukraine's SSS has acknowledged that so far this year, the population has already decreased by 122,000.
Such data are a testament to the monumental failure of capitalism to provide a standard of living that matches, much less exceeds,
that which existed during the Soviet period over 25 years ago.
While the country's low birth rate of approximately 1 birth for 1.5 deaths is a contributing factor to the country's depopulation,
emigration is by far the biggest factor.
Between 2002 and 2017, an estimated 6.3 million Ukrainians emigrated with no plans to return.
Facing poor employment prospects, deteriorating social and medical services, marauding far-right gangs, and the ever-present
prospect of a full-scale war with Russia, Ukrainian workers are fleeing the country in great numbers, either permanently or as temporary
labor migrants.
According to a report from the Center for Economic Strategy (CES), almost 4 million people, or up to 16% of the working-age population,
are labor migrants. Despite having Ukrainian citizenship and still technically living in Ukraine, they actually reside and work elsewhere.
Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has put the number of Ukrainian migrant workers even higher, at 5 million.
Through 2015 and 2017, as a result of the ongoing war in the Donbass region and the plunging value of the Ukrainian hryvnia, migration
increased notably: 507,000 people went to Poland; 147,000 to Italy; 122,000 to the Czech Republic; 23,000 to the United States; and
365,000 to Russia or Belarus.
The easing of visa-free travel by the European Union (EU) in September 2017 only increased the flow of Ukrainians to countries
such as Poland, which is facing its own demographic crisis and in need of workers. In 2018 alone, more than 3 million Ukrainians
applied for passports that would allow them to work in Poland. Poland is the only EU country that allows Ukrainians to obtain seasonal
work visas with just a passport. Ukrainians have received 81.7% of all work visas issued in Poland this year.
Between 1 and 2 million Ukrainian workers now reside in Poland, where they are often forced to take jobs "under the table," are
easily exploited by employers, and work in dangerous conditions. Many Ukrainian laborers are recruited to Poland by scam offers of
employment, only to then find themselves stranded and forced to work for whatever wage they can get.
While migrant workers in Poland are constantly subjected to anti-immigrant rhetoric from the right-wing PiS government in Warsaw,
the Polish state classifies Ukrainian laborers as "refugees" in order to comply with EU quotas and reject refugees from Syria and
elsewhere.
According to polls of Ukrainian migrants in Poland, over half are planning to move to Germany if the labor market there is ever
open to them.
While Russia is constantly demonized in the Ukrainian and Western press as the eternal enemy of Ukraine, 2 million Ukrainian
citizens now live or work in Russia. According to Olga Kirilova, between 2014 and 2017, 312,000 Ukrainians were granted Russian citizenship
and Ukrainians make up the vast majority of immigrants to Russia.
The dearth of a working-age population in Ukraine is putting further strain on an already struggling pension system. According
to Ukraine's SSS, as a result of widespread labor migration, only 17.8 million out of 42 million Ukrainians are economically active
and paying into the pension system.
The migration of Ukrainian workers abroad has reached such a level that remittances from migrants now constitute 3 to 4 percent
of the country's GDP. They exceed the amount of foreign investment in Ukraine. Nonetheless, such transfers are not nearly enough
to make up for the negative impact of the currency's falling value, inflation, and the disappearance of skilled workers.
The Ukrainian ruling class acknowledges that the country is in serious trouble. "One of the main risks of the current scenario
is the continuation of the outflow of labor from Ukraine, which will create a further increase in the imbalance between demand and
supply in the labor market," noted a report from the country's national bank.
However, the government can do nothing to slow the mass emigration, as it is thoroughly under the control of international finance
capital and committed to implementing the austerity programs demanded by Western states and banks.
Despite assurances from the Poroshenko regime that the economy will improve, the emigration and emptying of the country shows
no signs of slowing.
The Corrupt, extreme right wing government of Poroshenko, that has driven large proportions of the Ukrainian population into
poverty and despair has only been able to take power and remain I office thanks to US imperialism and Angela Merkel's scheming
and regime change program.
Without the working class intervening the only ones remaining in Ukraine will be those unable to leave and those that have
their noses in the trough.
Another excellent report of decaying of artificial entity of Ukraine (and capitalism specializes in collapsing societies) that
never even existed before 1992 in European history and was resurrected ( from brief self declared by Bandera racist state status
in 1941) and funded by Germany, Canada and US only to nurture their Fascist and actual Nazi traditions starting from Doncov to
Bandera terror of hundreds of thousands dead 1941-1948 of OUN-B, UPA and Ukrainian SS, all against Russia, as Ukrainian "Country"
was and is used as a Trojan horse to push Putin to submit to the west even more than he does now.
Pain and suffering of Ukrainian people is enormous as only 5% of population of Ukrainian Nazi thugs terrorist nation like like
Hitler street thugs in 1932-1934. It is tragedy that capitalism instigated, exasperated and augmented and should be a lesson for
the left what nationalism does, divides working class that was rendered powerless in Ukraine as Ukrainian industry tied to Russia
collapsed and forces massive migration and de-cohesion of communities, divisions of working class and eradication of any real
leftist leadership via murder, intimidation and exile.
Just a note. All that anti Russia hoopla after 2014 and ensuing NATO belligerence and warmongering and sanctions all were focused
on so called annexation of Crimea to Russia which was nothing but reunification of land under control of Russia since 1754.
I was shocked watching an episode of Columbo, crime series in 1970s when one of characters proudly referred to California joining
in US 1845 as annexation from Mexico, with no shame or condemnation like hinting that it was international aggression of US as
Alta California was never part of US before that.
Well, it was before 1984 and Orwellian newspeak.
Note that Crimea remained autonomous region, not a part of Russia but part of Russian Federation.
Popular support for the "maidan" in the Ukraine was based on misleading and dishonest claims by pro EU and Pro US opportunistic
political operators that such "regime change" would lead to total integration with Europe and open borders.... That would
have allowed (so the misconception went) Ukrainians to flee the country much more openly with less red tape and hassle at the
borders. So, far from being politically or ideologically supportive of Europe or the US or opportunist/nationalist Ukrainian politicians,
the vast majority of Ukrainians only wanted to be allowed to flee, as they experience it, a social shipwreck
One of the most horrific consequences of the dismantling of the Soviet Union was the explosion of sex trafficking and very
large numbers of Ukrainian women were caught up in this horrific exploitation and continue to be.
Victoria Newland and Geoffrey Pyatt, both US officials, were recorded at the time of the right wing and fascist led coup that
overthrew Russian backed Yanakovic, boasting that Washington had poured $5 billion into Ukraine ensuring that their man, an ex
World Bank executive, was elected.
Since then the most rabid anti working class/ anti Russian governments have ruled the roost.
Only those unable to flee this hell- hole and those whose snout is in the trough will soon be left there. Oh the benefits
of US installed dictatorships.
In addition to emigration, Ukraine's decreasing population is a result of a higher infant mortality rate than surrounding countries.
High infant mortality rates always indicate economic and social stress.
According to The World Bank 2017 figures for infant mortality in that region, the rate per 1,000 births in Ukraine is 7.5 compared
to the following rates in surrounding countries:
Poland - 4.0
Romania - 6.6
Russia - 6.5
Belarus - 2.8
Hungary -3.8
Slovak Republic - 4.6
Only poor Moldova is higher at 13.3
Kinda shot themselves in the foot with their "Revolution of Dignity" fascist coup. "Welcome to Europe, Ukraine. Here are your
rubber gloves and toilet cleaning brush. Oh, you're a young woman? The red light district is three blocks that way".
Life in Crimea must be looking pretty good to them now.
The puppet of the USA, Poroshenko , needs to go, and the USA should get the hell out of the Ukraine plus NATO has no business
being on the borders of Russia. This is all the fault of the USA, And, the current immigration problem world wide is because the
USA bombs countries eviscerating them yet the USA refuses to admit refugees which are fleeing from the USA wars.
In Baltic states after being "freed from communism and Soviet occupation" the population decline is also very prominent, the
same reasons as in Ukraine too.
These same right-wing, fascist Ukrainian Banderovitzes love to yell and scream about the bogus "Holodomor" hoax (which has been
debunked by serious scholars such as Pers Anders Rudling, and others, as well as Thottle). They falsely claim that the USSR tried
to "depopulate" Ukrainians, when they are the ones who have depopulated Ukraine.
Speaking of Ukraine, the Russian sanctions against Ukraine have been announced. Predictably,
Poroshenko considers them to be 'an award', or so he says. I don't know why he feels
qualified to speak for those so honoured, since he was not on the list.
Trade between Russia and Ukraine hit a low of $10.26 Billion in 2016, but struggled back
up to $12.9 Billion last year. Mind you, pre-glorious-Maidan it was more than $50 Billion
annually. Never mind; I'm sure Yurrup will pick up the slack, just like it did after the
glorious Maidan. Amazingly, the New York Times is still referring to Poroshenko as a
'chocolate tycoon', in the same sentence in which it calls Viktor Pinchuk an oligarch.
"... The key point from my POV was the immediate MSM blanket coverage with every detail explained. No investigation, research, doubts or questions. ..."
"... The US MSM is a propaganda tool and they were pre-prepared, so some US deep state group knew that Bin Salman's bodyguard was heading to the consulate and what they planned to do there (and maybe even set them up to do it). ..."
The Saudis also support the system of petrodollars, which basically requires nearly all
international purchases of petroleum to be paid in dollars. Petrodollars in turn enable the
United States to print money for which there is no backing knowing that there will always be
international demand for dollars to buy oil.
I would emphasize this aspect, except that MbS doesn't so much support the PetroDollar as
the PetroYuan, and this is more than troubling for the US since the PetroDollar is essential to
the dollar's world reserve currency status.
Many American economists have expressed alarm at Saudi Arabia's willingness to borrow in
Chinese yuan, as Riyadh's decision could cause other oil-exporting countries to abandon the
U.S. dollar in favor of the "petro-yuan." A marked decline in the use of the U.S. dollar as
the preferred credit-issuing currency by oil-producing countries would greatly weaken the
U.S. dollar's long-term viability as a global reserve currency.
As the United States views its alliance with Saudi Arabia as the lynchpin of its Middle
East strategy, Washington will likely react strongly if Riyadh uses its influence within OPEC
to strengthen the Chinese yuan. As Saudi Arabia remains dependent on U.S. arms sales to
pursue its geopolitical objectives in the Middle East and counter Iran, intense U.S. pressure
would likely cause Riyadh to distance itself from Beijing, limiting economic integration
between the two countries.
It is no coincidence that these statements from the Crown Prince come days after the
official launch of China's Petroyuan. As every historical trend indicates, the world's most
powerful economy dictates which currency will be used in most international transactions.
This continues to be the case with the US in respect of Dollar, but as China gets set to
fully overtake the US as the world's leading economy, the Dollar will inevitably be replaced
by the Yuan.
China's issuing of oil futures contracts in Petroyuan is the clearest indication yet that
China is keen to make its presence as the world's largest energy consumer known and that it
would clearly prefer to purchase oil from countries like Saudi Arabia in its own currency in
the future, quite possibly in the near future.
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince appears to understand this trajectory in the global energy
markets and furthermore, he realises that in order to be able to leverage the tremendous
amount of US pressure that will come down on Riaydh in order to force Saudi Arbia to avoid
the Petroyuan, Riyadh will need to embrace other potential partners, including China.
More than anything else, the Petroyuan will have an ability to transform Saudi Arabia by
limiting its negative international characteristics that Muhammad bin Salman himself
described. As a pseudo-satellite state of the US during the Cold War, Muhammad bin Salman
admitted that his country's relationship to the US was that of subservience. China does not
make political let alone geopolitical demands of its partners, but China is nevertheless keen
to foster de-escalations in tensions among all its partners based on the win-win principles
of peace through prosperity as articulated on a regular basis by President Xi Jinping.
Thus one could see China's policies of political non-interference rub off on a potential
future Saudi partner, in the inverse way that the US policies of ultra-interventionism are
often forced upon its partners. Thus, whatever ideological views Muhammad bin Salman does or
does not have, he clearly knows where the wind is blowing: in the direction of China.
If the Khashoggi Affair was planned as a warning to Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, then
the US knew exactly what was going to happen in the consulate. It was coupled with an immediate
and orchestrated MSM reaction that was curiously detailed, and delivered at high volume.
Yeah, the US will never get rid of the Saudi regime but will always be dangling the sword
right above their necks, and not just figuratively.
Besides the tangible benefits of the 'strategic' control of oil resources, which the US
believes it needs to control in order to dominate Western Europe and its Asian allies, the
Saudis also function as the CIA's private slush fund for off-the-books operations like
Iran-Contra and many others which surface in the news from time to time. Thus, the CIA
controls such vast sums through the Saudis as to make their budgets effectively
limitless.
During his triumphant tour of the US earlier this year, the Saudi King said something
which I found shocking and incredibly revealing in the way the story dropped like a stone
making absolutely no ripples anywhere in the MSM, nor in the alternative media for that
matter.
When asked about Saudi funding of Wahhabism around the world, he said that 'the allies
(presumably US and UK) had 'asked' the Saudis to 'use their resources' to create the
Madrassas and Wahhabi centers to prevent prevent inroads in Muslim countries by the Soviets
(a premise which is very questionable in the ME context after the fall of Nasser).
Now that seems to be the story of the century because it reveals the operating method of
the CIA wrt the Saudis. And even though MBS was trying to only reveal the distant roots of
the system they put in place, there is absolutely no logical reason why any part of this
system would have been subsequently dismantled; 911 notwithstanding. The continuing
US/Israeli support for and generous use of jihadis in Libya, Syria, etc. only reinforces this
point.
This is ultimately the greatest impediment to anything changing the status quo.
If the consulate was bugged , the Turks must have known the plan to abduct kashooggi.
They let it happen, and now that the abduction turned into a murder, they are accomplice.
US knew exactly what was going to happen in the consulate.
I doubt the US knew "exactly", but they likely knew something bad (a kidnapping
perhaps?) was a strong probability. Alas I wish Khashoggi had been warned. Too it seems
very odd he was willing to set foot in a Saudi embassy anywhere? Maybe Director Haspel can
explain.
Supposedly Khashoggi's smart phone picked it all up and filmed his own murder ??
More likely the room was prepared, and Khashoggi was following US instructions/assurances
in going there. The key point from my POV was the immediate MSM blanket coverage with
every detail explained. No investigation, research, doubts or questions.
The US MSM is a propaganda tool and they were pre-prepared, so some US deep state
group knew that Bin Salman's bodyguard was heading to the consulate and what they planned to
do there (and maybe even set them up to do it).
One question is whether the Halloween show was aimed at removing Bin Salman or just
getting him back in line.
Sibel Edmonds has been following this story from Turkey (she speaks Turkish) and posting her
thoughts and findings on twitter. She seems to think this is about some kind of soft coup
(get rid of MBS b/c getting too cozy with Russia/China, Euroasia). Sibel also says Khashoggi
was actually in Istanbul working with some kind of Soros NGO, maybe for future Color
Revolution/Arab Spring in the Middle East.
Sibel Edmonds @sibeledmonds As Predicted (OnRecord) One Of 3 Objectives in #Scripted
#Khashoggi Case: Get #Trump- Replace BS #RussiaGate with #SaudiGate. (Screenshot Coming In
Reply)- – "Khashoggi fiancee hits at Trump response, warns of 'money' influence"
Sibel Edmonds @sibeledmonds Oct 27
Very Important #Khashoggi Continued: #Khashoggi Relocated To #Turkey To Be a Part of a
Business-ThinkTank-NGO. He set up a business here. He opened Bank Accounts. He bought a
house/expansive Flat. He traveled to #London from #Istanbul paid handsomely by #Neoliberal
#DeepState
Jamal Khashoggi did not die for nothing. His murder was part of the plot to push current
de-facto ruler of the Saudi royal crime family aside.
On the moral side, considering who Khashoggi was, one can only say "serves him right".
However, all the other players involved, the Saudis, Israel, Turkey, and the US, are by no
means morally superior to him. His murder and essential non-reaction by others are useful, as
these events unmasked the hypocrites, who are showing their true colors even as we speak.
Should have added that the Kashoggi murder & extremely strange aftermath, dulled US
political response, smacks of a scene from the film "V for Vendetta."
"There is every indication that the U.S. is not in fact seeking to punish the Saudis for
their alleged role in Khashoggi's apparent murder but instead to punish them for reneging on
this $15 billion deal to U.S. weapons giant Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the THAAD
system.
S-400 gamechanger. / Saudi Plan to Purchase Russian S-400:
@Colin
Wright Thanks for the link. Now we can see that Empire had previously turned against MbS,
and that the scripted Khashoggi affair conveniently arrived on cue – with MbS getting
the full MSM treatment.
In other words the deep state knew exactly what was going to happen in the consulate that
day, set it up and recorded it themselves (nothing to do with Khashoggi's smart phone).
Prince Ahmad bin Abdulaziz, the younger brother of King Salman, has returned to Saudi
Arabia after a prolonged absence in London, to mount a challenge to Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman or find someone who can.
The source said that the prince returned "after discussion with US and UK officials",
who assured him they would not let him be harmed and encouraged him to play the role of
usurper.
Meanwhile, in Washington disquiet grows.
Writing in the New York Times, former national security advisor to the Obama
administration and US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said: "Looking ahead, Washington must
act to mitigate the risks to our own interests. We should not rupture our important
relationship with the kingdom, but we must make clear it cannot be business as usual so
long as Prince Mohammed continues to wield unlimited power.
"It should be United States policy, in conjunction with our allies, to sideline the
crown prince in order to increase pressure on the royal family to find a steadier
replacement," she added.
@Miro23
The mainstream narrative has had "Psyop" written all over it from the first. It wouldn't
surprise me to learn that Khashoggi is still alive and languishing in an undisclosed location
with only the Skripals for company.
@Bill
Jones An interesting bullet-sentence, Bill Jones said to me: "The strange and dulled
aftermath in the US is, I believe, because the lesson was not really meant for US audiences."
Greetings, Bill!
Lessons on dramatic world events are cunningly spun to insouciant &
government-trusting Americans. The weird Jamal Kashoggi murder is an excellent example among
hundreds to choose from!
Fyi, along with FDR administration's cooperation, Zionists helped gin-up war fervor in
order to get the US into World War 2. Such deception resulted in unnecessarily sending-off
another round of American "doughboys" into world war.
Fyr, as recovered from America's Memory Hole Knowledge Disposal / Sewer System," below is
a great Pat Buchanan article titled, "Who forged it?"
"... Her announcement on Monday that she will vacate the leadership of Germany's ruling center-right Christian Democrats marks the culmination of what has been a slow denouement of Merkelism. ..."
"... Long the emblematic figure of "Europe," hailed by the neoliberal Economist as the continent's moral voice, long the dominant decider of its collective foreign and economic policies, Merkel will leave office with border fences being erected and disdain for European political institutions at their highest pitch ever. In this sense, she failed as dramatically as her most famous predecessors, Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Helmut Kohl, succeeded in their efforts to make Germany both important and normal in the postwar world. ..."
"... "We can do this!" she famously declared. Europe, she said, must "show flexibility" over refugees. Then, a few days later, she said there was "no limit" to the number of migrants Germany could accept. At first, the burgeoning flood of mostly young male asylum claimants produced an orgy of self-congratulatory good feeling, celebrity posturing of welcome, Merkel greeting migrants at the train station, Merkel taking selfies with migrants, Merkel touted in The Economist as "Merkel the Bold." ..."
"... The euphoria, of course, did not last. Several of the Merkel migrants carried out terror attacks in France that fall. (France's socialist prime minister Manuel Valls remarked pointedly after meeting with Merkel, "It was not us who said, 'Come!'") Reports of sexual assaults and murders by migrants proved impossible to suppress, though Merkel did ask Mark Zuckerberg to squelch European criticism of her migration policies on Facebook. Intelligent as she undoubtedly is (she was a research chemist before entering politics), she seemed to lack any intellectual foundation to comprehend why the integration of hundreds of thousands of people from the Muslim world might prove difficult. ..."
"... Merkel reportedly telephoned Benjamin Netanyahu to ask how Israel had been so successful in integrating so many immigrants during its brief history. There is no record of what Netanyahu thought of the wisdom of the woman posing this question. ..."
"... In any case, within a year, the Merkel initiative was acknowledged as a failure by most everyone except the chancellor herself. ..."
Drop of Light/Shutterstock Whatever her accomplishments
as pathbreaking female politician and respected leader of Europe's dominant economic power, Angela Merkel will go down in history
for her outburst of naivete over the issue of migration into Europe during the summer of 2015.
Her announcement on Monday that she will vacate the leadership of Germany's ruling center-right Christian Democrats marks
the culmination of what has been a slow denouement of Merkelism.
She had seen the vote share of her long dominant party shrink in one regional election after another. The rebuke given to her
last weekend in Hesse, containing the Frankfurt region with its booming economy, where she had campaigned extensively, was the final
straw. Her CDU's vote had declined 10 points since the previous election, their voters moving toward the further right (Alternative
fur Deutschland or AfD). Meanwhile, the further left Greens have made dramatic gains at the expense of Merkel's Social Democrat coalition
partners.
Long the emblematic figure of "Europe," hailed by the neoliberal Economist as the continent's moral voice, long the
dominant decider of its collective foreign and economic policies, Merkel will leave office with border fences being erected and disdain
for European political institutions at their highest pitch ever. In this sense, she failed as dramatically as her most famous predecessors,
Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Helmut Kohl, succeeded in their efforts to make Germany both important and normal
in the postwar world.
One can acknowledge that while Merkel never admitted error for her multiculti summer fling (beyond wishing she had communicated
her goals better), she did manage to adjust her policies. By 2016, Germany under her watch was paying a healthy ransom to Turkey
to keep would-be migrants in camps and preventing them from sailing to Greece. Merkel's departure will make the battle to succeed
her one of the most watched political contests in Europe. She has turned migration into a central and quite divisive issue within
the CDU and Germany, and the party may decide that it has no choice but to accommodate, in one way or another, the voters who have
left them for the AfD.
Related to the issue of who should reside in Europe (objectively the current answer remains anyone who can get there) is the question
of how are such questions decided. In July 2015, five years after asserting in a speech that multiculturalism has
"utterly failed" in Germany (without addressing what policies should be pursued in an increasingly ethnically diverse society)
and several weeks after reducing a young Arab girl to tears at a televised forum by telling her that those whose asylum claims were
rejected would "have to go back" and that "politics is hard," Merkel changed course.
For those interested in psychological studies of leadership and decision making, it would be hard to imagine a richer subject.
Merkel's government first announced it would no longer enforce the rule (the Dublin agreement) that required asylum claimants to
be processed in the first country they passed through. Then she doubled down. The migrants fleeing the Syrian civil war, along with
those who pretended to be Syrian, and then basically just anyone, could come to Germany.
"We can do this!" she famously declared. Europe, she said, must "show flexibility" over refugees. Then, a few days later,
she said there was "no limit" to the number of migrants Germany could accept. At first, the burgeoning flood of mostly young male
asylum claimants produced an orgy of self-congratulatory good feeling, celebrity posturing of welcome, Merkel greeting migrants at
the train station, Merkel taking selfies with migrants, Merkel touted in The Economist as
"Merkel the Bold."
Her words traveled far beyond those fleeing Syria. Within 48 hours of the "no limit" remark, TheNew York Times
reported a sudden stirring of migrants from Nigeria. Naturally Merkel boasted in a quiet way about how her decision had revealed
that Germany had put its Nazi past behind it. "The world sees Germany as a land of hope and chances," she said. "That wasn't always
the case." In making this decision personally, Merkel was making it for all of Europe. It was one of the ironies of a European arrangement
whose institutions were developed in part to transcend nationalism and constrain future German power that 70 years after the end
of the war, the privately arrived-at decision of a German chancellor could instantly transform societies all over Europe.
The euphoria, of course, did not last. Several of the Merkel migrants carried out terror attacks in France that fall. (France's
socialist prime minister Manuel Valls remarked pointedly after meeting with Merkel, "It was not us who said, 'Come!'") Reports of
sexual assaults and murders by migrants proved impossible to suppress, though Merkel did ask Mark Zuckerberg to squelch European
criticism of her migration policies on Facebook. Intelligent as she undoubtedly is (she was a research chemist before entering politics),
she seemed to lack any intellectual foundation to comprehend why the integration of hundreds of thousands of people from the Muslim
world might prove difficult.
Merkel reportedly telephoned Benjamin Netanyahu to ask how Israel had been so successful in integrating so many immigrants
during its brief history. There is no record of what Netanyahu thought of the wisdom of the woman posing this question.
In any case, within a year, the Merkel initiative was acknowledged as a failure by most everyone except the chancellor herself.
Her public approval rating plunged from 75 percent in April 2015 to 47 percent the following summer. The first electoral rebuke came
in September 2016, when the brand new anti-immigration party, the Alternative fur Deutschland, beat Merkel's CDU in Pomerania.
In every election since, Merkel's party has lost further ground. Challenges to her authority from within her own party have become
more pointed and powerful. But the mass migration accelerated by her decision continues, albeit at a slightly lower pace.
Angela Merkel altered not only Germany but the entire European continent, in irreversible ways, for decades to come.
Scott McConnell is a founding editor ofand the author of Ex-Neocon: Dispatches From the Post-9/11 Ideological Wars
.
"... On the other hand, President Trump is pushing Merkel on policy on Russia and Ukraine that furthers the image that she is simply a stooge of U.S. geopolitical ambitions. Don't ever forget that Germany is, for all intents and purposes, an occupied country. So, what the U.S. military establishment wants, Merkel must provide. ..."
"... But Merkel, further weakened by another disastrous state election, isn't strong enough to fend off her emboldened Italian and British opposition (and I'm not talking about The Gypsum Lady, Theresa May here). ..."
"... Merkel is a lame-duck now. Merkelism is over. Absentee governing from the center standing for nothing but the international concerns has been thoroughly rebuked by the European electorate from Spain to the shores of the Black Sea. ..."
"... Germany will stand for something other than globalism by the time this is all over. There will be a renaissance of culture and tradition there that is similar to the one occurring at a staggering pace in Russia. ..."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has stepped down as the leader of the Christian Democratic
Union, the party she has led for nearly two decades. Yesterday's election in Hesse, normally a
CDU/SPD stronghold was abysmal for them.
She had to do something to quell the revolt brewing against her.
Merkel knew going in what the polls were showing. Unlike American and British polls, it
seems the German ones are mostly accurate with pre-election polls coming close to matching the
final results.
So, knowing what was coming for her and in the spirit of trying to maintain power for as
long as possible Merkel has been moving away from her staunch positions on unlimited
immigration and being in lock-step with the U.S. on Russia.
She's having to walk a tightrope on these two issues as the turmoil in U.S. political
circles is pulling her in, effectively, opposite directions.
The globalist Davos Crowd she works for wants the destruction of European culture and
individual national sovereignty ground into a paste and power consolidated under the rubric of
the European Union.
They also want Russia brought to heel.
On the other hand, President Trump is pushing Merkel on policy on Russia and Ukraine that
furthers the image that she is simply a stooge of U.S. geopolitical ambitions. Don't ever
forget that Germany is, for all intents and purposes, an occupied country. So, what the U.S.
military establishment wants, Merkel must provide.
So, if she rejects that role and the chaos U.S. policy engenders, particularly Syria, she's
undermining the flow of migrants into Europe.
This is why it was so significant that she and French President Emmanuel Macron joined this
weekend's summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan in Istanbul.
It ended with an agreement on Syria's future that lies in direct conflict with the U.S.'s
goals of the past seven years.
It was an admission that Assad has prevailed in Syria and the plan to atomize it into yet
another failed state has itself failed. Merkel has traded 'Assad must go' for 'no more
refugees.'
To President Trump's credit he then piggy-backed on that statement announcing that the U.S.
would be pulling out of Syria very soon now. And that tells me that he is still coordinating in
some way with Putin and other world leaders on the direction of his foreign policy in spite of
his opposition.
But the key point from the Istanbul statement was that Syria's rebuilding be prioritized to
reverse the flow of migrants so Syrians can go home. While
Gilbert Doctorow is unconvinced by France's position here , I think Merkel has to be
focused on assisting Putin in achieving his goal of returning Syria to Syrians.
Because, this is both a political necessity for Merkel as well as her trying to burnish her
crumbling political throne to maintain power.
The question is will Germans believe and/or forgive her enough for her to stay in power
through her now stated 'retirement' from politics in 2021?
I don't think so and it's obvious Davos Crowd boy-toy Macron is working overtime to salvage
what he can for them as Merkel continues to face up to the political realities across Europe,
which is that populism is a natural reaction to these insane policies.
Merkel's job of consolidating power under the EU is unfinished. They don't have financial
integration. The Grand Army of the EU is still not a popular idea. The euro-zone is a disaster
waiting to happen and its internal inconsistencies are adding fuel to an already pretty hot
political fire.
On this front, EU integration, she and Macron are on the same page. Because 'domestically'
from an EU perspective, Brexit still has to be dealt with and the showdown with the Italians is
only just beginning.
But Merkel, further weakened by another disastrous state election, isn't strong enough to
fend off her emboldened Italian and British opposition (and I'm not talking about The Gypsum
Lady, Theresa May here).
And Macron should stop looking in the mirror long enough to see he's standing on a quicksand
made of blasting powder.
This points to the next major election for Europe, that of the European Parliament in May
where all of Merkel's opposition are focused on wresting control of that body and removing
Jean-Claude Juncker or his hand-picked replacement (Merkel herself?) from power.
The obvious transition for Merkel is from German Chancellor to European Commission
President. She steps down as Chancellor in May after the EPP wins a majority then to take
Juncker's job. I'm sure that's been the plan all along. This way she can continue the work she started
without having to face the political backlash at home.
But, again, how close is Germany to snap elections if there is another migrant attack and
Chemnitz-like demonstrations. You can only go to the 'Nazi' well so many times, even in
Germany.
There comes a point where people will have simply had enough and their anger isn't born of
being intolerant but angry at having been betrayed by political leadership which doesn't speak
for them and imported crime, chaos and violence to their homes.
And the puppet German media will not be able to contain the story. The EU's speech rules
will not contain people who want to speak. The clamp down on hate speech, pioneered by Merkel
herself is a reaction to the growing tide against her.
And guess what? She can't stop it.
The problem is that Commies like Merkel and Soros don't believe in anything. They are
vampires and nihilists as I said over the
weekend suffused with a toxic view of humanity.
Oh sure, they give lip service to being inclusive and nice about it while they have
control over the levers of power, the State apparatus. But, the minute they lose control of
those levers, the sun goes down, the fangs come out and the bloodletting begins.
These people are vampires, sucking the life out of a society for their own ends. They are
evil in a way that proves John Barth's observation that "man can do no wrong." For they never
see themselves as the villain.
No. They see themselves as the savior of a fallen people. Nihilists to their very core
they only believe in power. And, since power is their religion, all activities are justified
in pursuit of their goals.
Their messianic view of themselves is indistinguishable to the Salafist head-chopping
animals people like Hillary empowered to sow chaos and death across the Middle East and North
Africa over the past decade.
Add to this Merkel herself who took Hillary's empowerment of these animals and gave them a
home across Europe. At least now Merkel has the good sense to see that this has cost her nearly
everything.
Even if she has little to no shame.
Hillary seems to think she can run for president again and win with the same schtick she
failed with twice before. Frankly, I welcome it like I welcome the sun in the morning, safe in
the knowledge that all is right with the world and she will go down in humiliating defeat yet
again.
Merkel is a lame-duck now. Merkelism is over. Absentee governing from the center standing
for nothing but the international concerns has been thoroughly rebuked by the European
electorate from Spain to the shores of the Black Sea.
Germany will stand for something other than globalism by the time this is all over. There
will be a renaissance of culture and tradition there that is similar to the one occurring
at a staggering pace in Russia.
Now, this works much better if your disturbed individual is actually obsessed with something
political, like, say, if he's a Donald Trump fanatic who has plastered the windows of the van
he's living in with all sorts of blatantly psychotic artwork deifying Donald Trump and
demonizing Donald Trump's political opponents, but you'll have to work with what your lunatic
gives you. In any event, whatever his pathology, you will need to de-pathologize your psycho,
so you can misrepresent him as a "domestic terrorist," and then associate whatever "ideology"
you've just painted onto him with "terrorism."
If that sounds a little complicated, don't worry, folks, it's really not! The ruling classes
and the corporate media just provided us with a demonstration of the
Putin-Nazi-Terrorist-O-Matic in action, which proves how easy-to-use it is. In the span of just
a single week, they whipped up so much mass paranoia that
These Putin-Nazi Terrorist "bomb-like devices" were "intercepted" throughout last week.
Their targets were a roll call of Resistance heroes, Soros, Obama, Hillary Clinton, John
Brennan, the offices of CNN, Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, Joe Biden, and, yes, even Robert De
Niro! Putin-Nazi panic paralyzed the nation! The neoliberal corporate media (who, remember, are
serious, respected professionals, not conspiracist nuts like Alex Jones) began pouring out
pieces informing the world that Donald Trump was behind these attacks, or had encouraged,
"emboldened," or "inspired" whoever was with
his violent, neo-Hitlerian rhetoric .
So far I haven't heard exactly what the chemical make-up of these "pipe bombs" is none of
which detonated or even initiated a detonation sequence. No doubt the authorities will get
around to this trifling little fact in their own good time (ie when it has best propaganda
affect)
The problem with the angriest whites who want change is that they don't have any F@CKING
money.
Even if the Left did not have the money to suppress the Alt-Right like Gavin, they have
the money for better production values. More people will watch Oprah than the Alt-Right. They
can get more air time. Hollywood will spend more money. They always have more
Our White Nationalist leaders are not billionaires. Tommy Morrison is not a self-made
millionaire. Richard Spencer the same.
These are average whites you meet in the street.
Tech billionaires, media moguls and globalists are all much more wealthy. They are not
white proles with few contacts in the business or media world who are out with the other
squirming proles on the street.
The problem with the angriest whites who want change is that they don't have any F@CKING
money.
Even if the Left did not have the money to suppress the Alt-Right like Gavin, they have
the money for better production values. More people will watch Oprah than the Alt-Right. They
can get more air time. Hollywood will spend more money. They always have more
Our White Nationalist leaders are not billionaires. Tommy Morrison is not a self-made
millionaire. Richard Spencer the same.
These are average whites you meet in the street.
Tech billionaires, media moguls and globalists are all much more wealthy. They are not
white proles with few contacts in the business or media world who are out with the other
squirming proles on the street.
Good piece, though I miss the historical dimension. The described mechanism seems to me to
have been taken right out of the Goebbels manual, or if you like the Comintern manual. Which
were in turn inspired by the instructions of people like Edward Bernays.
What strikes me is that the US empire and its faithful servants are resorting to
old-fashioned and imported (stolen, "un-American") techniques to try and maintain their hold
on public opinion. I guess, here the economic benefits of the systematic dismantling of the
educational system all over the "West" are paying off! Which just proves the advantages of
stubbornly concentrating publc spending on armaments instead of education: it has a side
effect of making people so stupid they believe just anything.
Still, I wonder how it will be possible to keep repeating the old fairytale of why it was
necessary to fight the evil Nazis. If outright Nazism is what the US empire is all about, why
did they bother about fighting Hitler?
Probably because he was not "American." Or was it because the original Nazis spent quite a
bit on education?
I suspect Cesar Sayoc is a straight up patsy. As Mr Hopkins points out, none of the
bombs(sic) had an earthly chance of exploding. Mr Sayoc was discovered due to DNA evidence no
doubt left on the beer cans he made the bombs out of. Its straight out of the Anthrax post
9/11 playbook but fortunately without deadly consequences. How the dumb American Sheeple
(apart from most Unz.com readers of course) can't see it is beyond me.
In terms of lone nut being the harbinger of domestic terrorism we had this in the UK with
the Jo Cox case in 2016, where the mentally ill individual ( who I strongly suspect was
controlled by the Deep State) was hustled off to the Old Bailey accused of being a white
supremacist Brexit supporting terrorist and convicted in 3 days flat. No explanation of where
he actually acquired his gun, why for such a racist he didnt harm Cox's Asian assistant even
when she hit him with a handbag etc etc
Robert D Bowers is of course a homicidal maniac, Trump hater and gift horse to the ADL who
have their first real anti- semitism case in decades. Makes a change from blacks or policemen
shouting 'oy vey' or some other gross obscenity at Brooklyn Jews
@Hans
Vogel Absolutely agree the dumbing down of education especially the absence of any
critical thinking despite the presence of so called civics or citizenship on the curriculum
is crucial to the success of the propaganda effort
No society can manage all of its fringe lunatics all of the time. So when one occasionally
goes off rails ("postal" as they used to say) the ideologues who manage the propaganda
outlets know that pointing to the obvious reality of the event doesn't advance the agenda.
And, luckily for them there is always a handy abstraction, a scary "ism" or "obia" to hang on
the event and smear a whole bunch of folks whose manners they disapprove of.
Neoliberal Multicultural Globalist Capitalism is the new Marxism. Its true believers have
learned from the failures of Marxists to rule the world forever, forcing the deplorable white
trash to accept being cogs for ideological good, how to get the job done.
Whats more concerning is something stormy daniels said about trump ..that he is out of his
depth.she might have ulterior motives but it somehow rings true.Combine that with sayoc and
bowers types and one has to wonder how many more are there out there just waiting to make
america great again
" news is just coming in from Guardian columnist Christina Patterson that Jeremy Corbyn and
the Labour Party are also responsible for the Pittsburgh attack, "
I wonder if it is known that Soros owns the Guardian, so that, I fear, to the list CNN,
Washpost and NYT, Guardian can be added.
As I wrote here just a few hours ago, I wondered why there was no political follow up on the
Pittsburgh massacre.
But possibly this is it.
Cynics like me, who understand Pearl Harbour, Liberty, possibly Kennedy and Diana, certainly
Sept 11, now wonder 'who did it ?', and 'why were just ten jews killed ?'.
Automatic weapons are freely available in the USA, what a few Muslims can do in Paris should
be quite easy in the USA.
It is common practice with political murders to kill the murderer, such as Lee Harvey Oswald,
dead men cannot talk.
But after the murder of Anna Lyndh it seems possible that better ways have been found to hide
political murders.
@Hans
Vogel If Hitler was the problem, why was not Germany beaten in 1938, when both the Chech
and the Polish armies still existed ?
Attacked by Poland, Chechoslovakia, Britain and France, possibly the USSR too, Hitler Germany
would have been beaten in a few weeks, historians agree on this.
Historians debating this question agree on the only possible solution: that Roosevelt wanted
a long war, in which the USA would be the victor.
Dividing up Germany somehow between the mentioned four or five countries would bring the USA
nothing.
These false flags are a part of the deep states efforts to keep the American people in a
state of terror and hysteria to accept more and more government control over our lives and as
long as the people accept these acts at face value without doing any checking on the facts ,
the deep state will have succeeded.
" as if your wack job was actually a rational person and not just a totally paranoid geek who
decided to attempt to assassinate Reagan because he couldn't get a date with Jodie Foster ."
Whats more concerning is something stormy daniels said about trump ..that he is out of
his depth.she might have ulterior motives but it somehow rings true.
its true, he's probably nowhere as intelligent as obozo but somehow he gets by
stormy sounds like an expert, maybe she can judge a man's IQ by the taste of his sperm
May 4, 2017 False Flag Exposed Caught Red Handed and Prevented
In this video, we give you the latest news of a false flag that has been prevented in
Germany, the historical context of false flags, and importance in current politics.
May 07, 2014 The Oldest Trick In the Book: Empire Pretends It Has to Launch Wars to
"Defend" Itself
Empires – almost by definition – fight imperial wars to gain land and
resources. But if they admitted to their citizens what they were up to, people wouldn't be
that excited in sacrificing their families' blood and treasure to fight a series of wars.
@jilles
dykstra World War 2 may have continued indefinitely had not Russia been preparing to
invade Japan, thus forcing the United States into dropping the bombs.
Anyone assuming the Jewish-controlled Deep State would have any qualms about killing a few
Jewish senior citizens to assure the revolution continues, are badly mistaken.
@Carroll
Price FORCED to drop nuclear bombs? There is always a choice, even for a rogue state like
the US. (Rather, a state, inhabited by many decent, trusting people, but run by ruthless
criminals such as FDR, the Bushes, Obomba and the like). Besides, in early 1945 FDR received
a detailed report by one of his generals to the effect that Japan was ready to surrender. Yet
FDR, may he burn in hell, decided to ignore this and continue bombing Japanese cities: in
March of 1945, Tokyo was bombed, and over 100.000 Japanese civilians were murdered. The
Soviet Union had promised to join in the final assault on Japan, doing FDR a favor because he
did not want to go it alone.
People who never resort to 'foul' language are either dead inside, or are scheming
scumbags trying to get one over on the crowd.
No one is in a position to determine whether "People never resort "
In the early 80s, I was at a social function where foul language use was part of the
general conversation. A woman in her mid to late 40s who was sitting at the table rebuked us
gently by stating that our profanities were a poor excuse for a bad vocabulary. There is a
time and place for profanity, spouting off profanely at a political opponent in a public
place does nothing for credibility.
As for calling a fig a fig, I seldom use the word cunt for the simple reason that a cunt
has a use , while those who are often called cunts, don't.
I am immediately suspicious about anyone whose 'authority' includes a costume –
judges, pigs, TSA etc; likewise, anyone who relies on 'gravitas' or presentation
(politicians, senior bureaucrats, diplomats, marketing shitheads).
If every one of those people were put to the sword by people screaming "FUCK YOU" at the
top of their lungs, humanity would be better off.
I enjoyed your comment.
and agree wholeheartedly
(except for including 'pigs' with your litany of scoundrels. It's not fair to the
inoffensive four-legged kind ; )
@anon Nice
try. But, first of all, learn to write simply. Like the man said, all those words don't fit
on a phone.
Secondly, you are absolutely right. ID politics is what our owners want. They want us to
fight over who is oppressing whom. So it don't matter if you are pro-white or anti-white,
pro-racism or anti, you are doing our master's bidding.
The only answer is blacks and whites and homosexuals and heterosexuals and women and men
etc etc, all together, all as one, screaming, "Mo money mo money mo money mo money." But that
won't happen because they find it easier to shame each other over meaningless nonsense like
race and sex and other ridiculous identities.
To be a dissident in the 1960′s meant that one objected to the standard narrative of
White-European greatness and blamelessness for conquering much of the world. Today it means
just the opposite. The roles have reversed. Not only are Europeans not viewed as great but
they are blamed for everything that is wrong anywhere, anytime. To be a dissident is to
insist that Europeans aren't quite so bad as they are currently portrayed.
I never thought I'd say this but if Nixon were alive today he would appear as the very
soul of rationality and a bastion of sanity compared to the current crop of rat-faced,
unprincipled traitors who dominate the news. At least Nixon had the integrity to not sell out
his country to an alien tribe of sleazy money changers, usurers and unpatriotic off-shore
operators.
At one point in his life, Hunter Thompson thought things couldn't get any worse than
Tricky Dick. Little did he suspect. It's likely that Thompson, at some point before he pulled
the trigger, came to the belated realization that, compared to the debased venality of our
present leaders, Nixon was an honorable man, a lover of his country and a loyal patriot.
Watergate was a misdemeanor B & E compared to the rape and genocide of whites that is
taking place today.
@Hans
Vogel 'The English' in WII did not exist.
Many sympathized with Hitler
Ian Kershaw, ´Hitlers Freunde in England, Lord Londonderry und der Weg in den Krieg',
(Making Friends with Hitler. Lord Londonderry and Britain's Road to War, 2004, London),
München 2005
The Marquess of Londonderry, ´England blickt auf Deutschland, Um die deutsch-englische
Verständigung, Essen 1938 (Ourselves and Germany, 1938)
Churchill loved war, he refused all Hitler's attempts at peace.
There seems to be a book Churchill's Toy Shop, did not read it, Churchill's personal weapons
gadget development facility.
In this he was supported by his scientific advisor Lindemann
C.P.Snow, ´Science and government', 1961, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince and Stephen Prior, 'Double standards, The Rudolf Hess cover-up',
London 2002
Günther W.Gellermann, 'Geheime Wege zum Frieden mit England , Ausgewählte
Initiativen zur Beëndigung des Krieges 1940/1942', Bonn 1995
Stürmer, Teichmann, Treue 'Striking the Balance Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie. A family
and a Bank', London 1994
Thomas E. Mahl, 'Desperate deception, British covert operations in the United States
1939-44', Dulles, Virginia, 1998
However, in Casablanca Churchill found out he was at the mercy of FDR
Francois Kersaudy, ´De Gaulle et Roosevelt, Le duel au sommet', Paris, 2004
If Churchill ever realised that LendLease was the end of the British empire, I wonder
R.F. Harrod, 'THE PROF, A personal memoir of Lord Cherwell', London, 1959
John Charmley,'Churchill's Grand Alliance, A provocative reassessment of the "Special
relationship" between England and the U.S. from 1940 to 1957', 1995, London
John Charmley, 'Der Untergang des Britischen Empires, Roosevelt – Churchill und
Amerikas Weg zur Weltmacht', Graz 2005
But the two essential books explaining why Chamberlain steered towards war, without wanting
war:
Lawrence R. Pratt, 'East of Malta, West of Suez', London, 1975
Simon Newman, ´March 1939, The British guarantee to Poland, A study in the continuity
of British Foreign Policy', 1976, Oxford
The genocidal folly of bombing German women, children and old men:
Solly Zuckermann, 'From Apes to Warlords, an autobiography, 1904- 46', London 1988
Even the official post WWII British report on the bombing of Germany concluded that the
damage to GB was equal to German damage, British damage defined as building and maintaining
bombers, producing bombs, and, last but not in the least least, losing a whole generation of
Britain's promising young men
Peter H. Nicoll, ´Englands Krieg gegen Deutschland, Ursachen, Methoden und Folgen des
Zweiten Weltkriegs', 1963, 2001, Tübingen ( Britain's Blunder, 1953)
This last book also contains a calculation of how WWII impoverished the USA.
@Hans
Vogel said:
"The described mechanism seems to me to have been taken right out of the Goebbels manual "
Oh really? What "manual" was that? Your indoctrination is showing.
Pie drops the ball when he talks about 'the Nazis' & the Battle of Britain, which was
a result of British initiation of bombing purely civilian targets.
The New York Times explained how Trump was employing a strategy called "stochastic
terrorism," i.e., inspiring random acts of violence that are statistically predictable but
individually unpredictable!
Wow. Quasi-treasonous scumbaggery from the dominant press outlets has become so common, it
rarely registers on me anymore. But this is an unusually detestable example.
But that won't happen because they find it easier to shame each other over
meaningless nonsense like race and sex and other ridiculous identities.
if this was true there would be no problem allowing hundreds of millions of africans into
Europe, the U.S. etc but sub-saharan africans have IQs as low as 70 and have never built
anything of substance in their existence
they have nothing to contribute except violence and crime
@jilles
dykstra Thanks for your bibliographical suggestions!
As for the English, I prefer this to the awkward term "British." (see also AJP Taylor's
introduction to his English History, 1914-1945 ). As long as the English and English
speakers usually refer to the Netherlands as "Holland," and US people call their country
"America" and themselves "Americans," why should we not say English instead of British?" The
English better get used to foreign usage, as have the Greeks ("Hellenes") and Hungarians
("Magyars").
Btw, the translator of Nicoll's book on your list agrees with me: he calls Britain
"England!"
@wayfarer
Here is a video that Ron Unz should feature of a truly honest and great young American Jewish
activist: Jeremy Rothe-Kushel and Greg McCarren of The Anecdote speak about
this Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting:
Gee; that's sort of true – the politicians pick the wars the Army fights. The
implication of that statement is that America always goes reluctantly into battle, after
exhausting every attempt to reach a peaceful solution. The reality is much different, and the
United States has never fought a war of self-defense, not once, unless you count the Civil
War, which was an all-American effort with no foreign enemy. It has always been the attacker,
in one context or another, and if the Army is gearing up for a major war in Europe, that's
because that's the war the politicians are planning to have the Army fight. The last time I
looked, the United States was not in Europe. But that's the attraction of a European war
– it represents a chance to turn back the clock, and to reposition the USA as the
world's dominant leader and sole superpower, before greed and manipulation and wedge issues
and gender-politics distractions and the gradual corruption of the political class brought it
to the sorry state of debauchery in which it now finds itself. Unfortunately Europe will have
to experience a considerable degree of damage, as the host, but the Europeans have always
been pretty good about taking one for the team. The important thing is that America will be
untouched and totally committed to the rebuilding of Europe just like the last time.
Well, don't count on it. There were no ICBM's in the last war, and it's considerably
easier, these days, to reach out and slap the fuck out of the one who is responsible for
starting the whole thing.
"... Let's face it: profits and power should be classified as perennial reasons why U.S. leaders persist in waging such conflicts. War may be a racket , as General Smedley Butler claimed long ago, but who cares these days since business is booming ? ..."
"... As former New York Times ..."
"... Add in, as well, the issue of political credibility. No president wants to appear weak and in the United States of the last many decades, pulling back from a war has been the definition of weakness. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and professor of history, Astore is a ..."
"... . His personal blog is ..."
"... You seem to have missed it, but Trump campaigned on an anti-war platform. The real story is how the Deep State/Cabal turned him around, and how irrelevant elections are ..."
As America enters the 18th year of its war in
Afghanistan and its 16th in Iraq, the war on terror continues in Yemen , Syria, and parts of Africa, including
Libya,
Niger , and
Somalia . Meanwhile, the Trump administration threatens yet more war, this time
with Iran . (And given these last years, just how do you imagine that's likely to turn
out?) Honestly, isn't it time Americans gave a little more thought to why their leaders persist
in waging losing wars
across significant parts of the planet? So consider the rest of this piece my attempt to do
just that.
Let's face it: profits and power should be classified as perennial reasons why U.S.
leaders persist in waging such conflicts. War may be a racket , as General Smedley Butler
claimed long ago, but who cares these days since business is booming
? And let's add to such profits a few other all-American motivations. Start with the fact
that, in some curious sense, war is in the American bloodstream.
As former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges once put it , "War
is a force that gives us meaning." Historically, we Americans are a violent people who have
invested much in a self-image of toughness
now being displayed across the " global battlespace ." (Hence
all the talk in this country not about our soldiers but about our " warriors .") As the bumper stickers I see
regularly where I live say: "God, guns, & guts made America free." To make the world freer,
why not export all three?
Add in, as well, the issue of political credibility. No president wants to appear weak
and in the United States of the last many decades, pulling back from a war has been the
definition of weakness. No one -- certainly not Donald Trump -- wants to be known as the
president who "lost" Afghanistan or Iraq. As was true of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard
Nixon in the Vietnam years, so in this century fear of electoral defeat has helped prolong the
country's hopeless wars. Generals, too, have their own fears of defeat, fears that drive them
to escalate conflicts (call it the urge to surge) and even to advocate for the use of nuclear
weapons, as General William Westmoreland did in 1968
during the Vietnam War.
Washington's own
deeply embedded illusions and deceptions also serve to generate and perpetuate its wars.
Lauding our troops as " freedom fighters " for peace and prosperity,
presidents like George W. Bush have waged a set of brutal wars in the name of spreading
democracy and a better way of life. The trouble is: incessant war doesn't spread democracy --
though in the twenty-first century we've learned that it does spread
terror groups -- it
kills it . At the same time, our leaders, military and civilian, have given us a false picture of the nature of the
wars they're fighting. They continue to present the U.S. military and its vaunted "smart"
weaponry as a precision surgical instrument capable of targeting and destroying the cancer
of terrorism, especially of the radical Islamic variety. Despite the hoopla about them,
however, those precision instruments of war turn out to be blunt indeed , leading to the
widespread killing of innocents, the massive displacement of people across America's war
zones, and floods of refugees who have, in turn, helped spark the rise of the populist right in
lands otherwise still at peace.
Lurking behind the incessant warfare of this century is another belief, particularly
ascendant in the Trump White House: that big militaries and expensive weaponry represent "
investments " in a better future -- as if the Pentagon were the Bank of America or Wall
Street. Steroidal military spending continues to be sold as a key to creating jobs and maintaining America's
competitive edge, as if war were America's primary business. (And perhaps it is!)
Those who facilitate enormous military budgets and frequent conflicts abroad still earn
special praise here. Consider, for example, Senator John McCain's rapturous final sendoff,
including the way arms maker Lockheed Martin
lauded him as an American hero supposedly tough and demanding when it came to military
contractors. (And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.)
Put all of this together and what you're likely to come up with is the American version of
George Orwell's famed formulation in his novel 1984 : "war is peace."
The War the Pentagon Knew How to Win
Twenty years ago, when I was a major on active duty in the U.S. Air Force, a major concern
was the possible corroding of civil-military relations -- in particular, a growing gap between
the military and the civilians who were supposed to control them. I'm a clipper of newspaper
articles and I saved some from that long-gone era. "Sharp divergence found in views of military
and civilians," reported the New York Times in September 1999. "Civilians, military
seen growing apart," noted the Washington Post a month later. Such pieces were picking
up on trends already noted by distinguished military commentators like Thomas Ricks and Richard
Kohn. In July 1997, for instance, Ricks had written an
influentialAtlantic article, "The Widening Gap between the Military and Society."
In 1999, Kohn gave a lecture at the Air Force Academy titled
"The Erosion of Civilian Control of the Military in the United States Today."
A generation ago, such commentators worried that the all-volunteer military was becoming an
increasingly conservative and partisan institution filled with generals and admirals
contemptuous of civilians, notably then-President Bill Clinton. At the time, according to
one study ,
64% of military officers identified as Republicans, only 8% as Democrats and, when it came to
the highest levels of command, that figure for Republicans was in the stratosphere, approaching
90%. Kohn quoted a West Point graduate as saying, "We're in danger of developing our own
in-house Soviet-style military, one in which if you're not in 'the party,' you don't get
ahead." In a similar fashion, 67% of military officers self-identified as politically
conservative, only 4% as liberal.
In a 1998
article for the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings , Ricks noted that "the ratio
of conservatives to liberals in the military" had gone from "about 4 to 1 in 1976, which is
about where I would expect a culturally conservative, hierarchical institution like the U.S.
military to be, to 23 to 1 in 1996." This "creeping politicization of the officer corps," Ricks
concluded, was creating a less professional military, one in the process of becoming "its own
interest group." That could lead, he cautioned, to an erosion of military effectiveness if
officers were promoted based on their political leanings rather than their combat skills.
How has the civil-military relationship changed in the last two decades? Despite bending on
social issues (gays in the military, women in more combat roles), today's military is arguably
neither more liberal nor less partisan than it was in the Clinton years. It certainly hasn't
returned to its citizen-soldier roots via a draft. Change, if it's come, has been on the
civilian side of the divide as Americans have grown both more militarized and more partisan
(without any greater urge
to sign up and serve). In this century, the civil-military divide of a generation ago has
been bridged by endless
celebrations of that military as "the best of us" (as Vice President Mike Pence recently put
it).
Such expressions, now commonplace, of boundless faith in and
thankfulness for the military are undoubtedly driven in part by guilt over neither serving,
nor undoubtedly even truly caring. Typically, Pence didn't serve and neither did Donald Trump
(those pesky " heel spurs
"). As retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich put it in
2007: "To assuage uneasy consciences, the many who do not serve [in the all-volunteer military]
proclaim their high regard for the few who do. This has vaulted America's fighting men and
women to the top of the nation's moral hierarchy. The character and charisma long ago
associated with the pioneer or the small farmer -- or carried in the 1960s by Dr. King and the
civil-rights movement -- has now come to rest upon the soldier." This elevation of "our" troops
as America's moral heroes feeds a Pentagon imperative that seeks
to isolate the military from criticism and its
commanders from accountability for wars gone
horribly wrong .
Paradoxically, Americans have become both too
detached from their military and too deferential to it. We now love to applaud that
military, which, the pollsters
tell us, enjoys a significantly higher degree of trust and approval from the public than the
presidency, Congress, the media, the Catholic church, or the Supreme Court. What that military
needs, however, in this era of endless war is not loud cheers, but tough love.
As a retired military man, I do think our troops deserve a measure of esteem. There's a
selfless ethic to the military that should seem admirable in this age of selfies and
selfishness. That said, the military does not deserve the deference of the present moment, nor
the constant adulation it gets in endless ceremonies at any ballpark or sporting
arena. Indeed, deference and adulation, the balm of military dictatorships, should be poison to
the military of a democracy.
With U.S. forces endlessly fighting ill-begotten wars, whether in Vietnam in the 1960s or in
Iraq and Afghanistan four decades later, it's easy to lose sight of where the Pentagon
continues to maintain a truly winning record: right here in the U.S.A. Today, whatever's
happening on the country's distant battlefields, the idea that ever more inflated military
spending is an investment in making America great again reigns supreme -- as it has, with
little interruption, since the 1980s and the era of President Ronald Reagan.
The military's purpose should be, as Richard Kohn put it long ago, "to defend society, not
to define it. The latter is militarism." With that in mind, think of the way various retired
military men lined up behind Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, including a classically
unhinged
performance by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn (he of the "lock her up" chants)
for Trump at the Republican convention and a
shout-out of a speech by retired General John Allen for Clinton at the Democratic one.
America's presidential candidates, it seemed, needed to be anointed by retired generals,
setting a dangerous precedent for future civil-military relations.
A Letter From My Senator
A few months back, I wrote a note to one of my senators to complain about America's endless
wars and received a signed reply via email. I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that it
was a canned response, but no less telling for that. My senator began by praising American
troops as "tough, smart, and courageous, and they make huge sacrifices to keep our families
safe. We owe them all a true debt of gratitude for their service." OK, I got an instant warm
and fuzzy feeling, but seeking applause wasn't exactly the purpose of my note.
My senator then expressed support for counterterror operations, for, that is, "conducting
limited, targeted operations designed to deter violent extremists that pose a credible threat
to America's national security, including al-Qaeda and its affiliates, the Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria (ISIS), localized extremist groups, and homegrown terrorists." My senator then
added a caveat, suggesting that the military should obey "the law of armed conflict" and that
the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) that Congress hastily approved in the
aftermath of 9/11 should not be interpreted as an "open-ended mandate" for perpetual war.
Finally, my senator voiced support for diplomacy as well as military action, writing, "I
believe that our foreign policy should be smart, tough, and pragmatic, using every tool in the
toolbox -- including defense, diplomacy, and development -- to advance U.S. security and
economic interests around the world." The conclusion: "robust" diplomacy must be combined with
a "strong" military.
Now, can you guess the name and party affiliation of that senator? Could it have been
Lindsey Graham or Jeff Flake, Republicans who favor a beyond-strong military and endlessly
aggressive counterterror operations? Of course, from that little critical comment on the AUMF,
you've probably already figured out that my senator is a Democrat. But did you guess that my
military-praising, counterterror-waging representative was Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of
Massachusetts?
Full disclosure: I like Warren and have made small contributions to her campaign. And her
letter did stipulate that she believed "military action should always be a last resort." Still,
nowhere in it was there any critique of, or even passingly critical commentary about, the U.S.
military, or the still-spreading war on terror, or the never-ending Afghan War, or the
wastefulness of Pentagon spending, or the devastation wrought in these years by the last
superpower on this planet. Everything was anodyne and safe -- and this from a senator who's
been pilloried by the right as a flaming liberal and caricatured as yet another socialist out
to destroy America.
I know what you're thinking: What choice does Warren have but to play it safe? She can't go
on record criticizing the military. (She's already gotten in enough trouble in my home state
for daring
to criticize the police.) If she doesn't support a "strong" U.S. military presence
globally, how could she remain a viable presidential candidate in 2020?
And I would agree with you, but with this little addendum: Isn't that proof that the
Pentagon has won its most important war, the one that captured -- to steal a phrase from
another losing war -- the "hearts and minds" of America? In this country in 2018, as in 2017,
2016, and so on, the U.S. military and its leaders dictate what is acceptable for us to say and
do when it comes to our prodigal pursuit of weapons and wars.
So, while it's true that the military establishment failed to win those "hearts and minds"
in Vietnam or more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, they sure as hell didn't fail to win them
here. In Homeland, U.S.A., in fact, victory has been achieved and, judging by the
latest Pentagon budgets , it couldn't be more overwhelming.
If you ask -- and few Americans do these days -- why this country's losing wars persist, the
answer should be, at least in part: because there's no accountability. The losers in those wars
have
seized control of our national narrative. They now define how the military is seen (as an
investment, a boon, a good and great thing); they now shape how we view our wars abroad (as
regrettable perhaps, but necessary and also a sign of national toughness); they now assign all
serious criticism of the Pentagon to what they might term the defeatist fringe.
In their hearts, America's self-professed warriors know they're right. But the wrongs
they've committed, and continue to commit, in our name will not be truly righted until
Americans begin to reject the madness of rampant militarism, bloated militaries, and endless
wars.
A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and professor of history, Astore is aTomDispatch
regular. His personal blog isBracing Views.
You seem to have missed it, but Trump campaigned on an anti-war platform. The real story
is how the Deep State/Cabal turned him around, and how irrelevant elections are .
Another issue is whether or not the US military, especially its flag officers, are even
minimally competent. One suspects they are not.
@bob sykes Too true. Trump also promised to go after the pharmaceutical corporations but
has instead appointed industry insiders to the regulatory positions. He also bought into the
Republican tax cut mania with his foolish corporate tax cut. I suspect that Trump's weakness
of character has made it impossible for him to effectively oppose Washington's usual suspects
and their usual policies.
For a small fraction of the enormous amounts of money Pentagon gets every year any
half-competent political technologist in the US can promote Devil himself as a Savior and
make people believe it.
"American" leaders persist with these stupid wars because they don't fundamentally share a
connection with actual Americans. They are like foreign monarchs who don't speak the native
language. Hence, they don't really care about the locals.
Soon they run up out of the forces. And compulsory military service id the end of their
fun.
Stupid Cupid.
How are those differences different. When two navy ships cried ,that they were allegedly
attacked ,so the US can declare more war on the North Vietnam.
Real and bloody attack the ship Liberty and many deaths , resulted , that, pres. Johnson
shitted himself only and peacefully. .
From the tenor of the 1st 3 paragraphs, one could get the idea that the Central Bankers have
America right where they want her, by the short hairs. Yes folks they have us, and we're on
the fast track to bankruptcy, and foreclosure. If you think I'm full of it look into the
situation in Greece. That poor nation, with help form the Fed, is being cannibalized by the
Euro Central Bankers. Greece has been forced to sell it's national assets, and treasures,
everything on, above and below ground. The deadly and terrible fires which captured world
headlines for a few weeks this summers were to cover the screams of 11 million Greeks as they
watched their natural resources auctioned off to foreigners (Greek citizens were barred from
bidding) at discount, pennies on the dollar. Even the Royal Jewels of Greece were sold. Don't
believe me, read up on it.
Yes I believe the wild fires in Greece this summer were not so wild, or natural. The fires
were a false flag used to steal attention away from the rape of a once great nation. Nothing
but a false flag. A gift form the heartless Central Bankers.
How has the civil-military relationship changed in the last two decades? Despite bending
on social issues (gays in the military, women in more combat roles),
Who is that bending to? Certainly not ordinary civilians, the chattering classes
perhaps.
I hope you're not one of those "peace through de- moralized military "people .It's not the
fighting man's fault we're in all these crappy wars ,it's the politicians ..Or would you
rather have our soldiers spit on when they go out in public Major?
@tyrone "would you rather have our soldiers spit on when they go out in public"
I would rather have soldiers (not OUR soldiers) take responsibility for their actions
instead of the "I was just following orders" cop out. They should not volunteer for anything
going on right now, and they should refuse unlawful, unconstitutional, or immoral orders if
they are already in the military. After all, these are humans capable of thinking and making
moral decisions. They are not GI Joe dolls
@Dutch Boy Well to date, at least Trump hasn't started any wars. Not only that, his
"craziness" seems to be allowing the Koreans to decide their own fate. If they come up with
an end to their war, will anyone sane in the US say no? One down, lots more to go.
I might add,m that his Russian rhetoric is actually pushing the EU and Russia closer
together. Bye Bye NATO?
American leaders lose and lose and lose because Congress is composed of chumps with no balls
like Ro Khanna.Look at this half-assed stab at reinventing the wheel to CIA specifications
The world has already set the rules out in gnat's-ass detail, and the US is bound by it.
Just say so, for chrissake.
First of all, what he seems to be getting at with 'restraint' is codified in binding
black-letter international law and case law. The right to self-defense is subject to
necessity and proportionality tests, and invariably subject to UN Charter Chapter 7 in its
entirety. See Article 51. Instead of this waffle, just say, the president must commit to
faithfully execute the supreme law of the land, specifically including UN Charter Chapter
7.
Second, national security is not a loophole in human rights. Under universal jurisdiction
law, it is a war crime to declare abolished, suspended or inadmissible in a court of law the
rights and actions of the nationals of the hostile party. Domestic human rights are subject
to ICCPR Article 4 and the Siracusa Principles. Instead of CIA's standard National Security
get-out clause, state explicitly that US national security is respect, protection and
fulfillment of all human rights.
Third, internationalism is OK as far as it goes, but he doesn't deal with the underlying
issue: CIA has infested State with focal points and dotted-line reports, and demolished the
department's capacity for pacific resolution of disputes. You need to explicitly tie State's
mission to UN Charter Chapter 6, and criminalize placement of domestic CIA agents in
State.
Fourth, Congressional war-making powers are useless with Congress completely corrupted.
Bring back the Ludlow Amendment, war by public referendum only, subject to Article 51.
So purge these eunuchs and get us a law'norder candidate. Like a Grayson.
As much as I enjoy shooting holes in inanimate objects and seeing stuff blown up into little
pieces, I want to see my country (what's left of it anyway) drastically reduce the number of
its foreign military bases and cease provoking China and Russia with its adolescent
shenanigans. Cutting our losses and leaving Afghanistan after 18 years of folly would also be
a plus. Japan, South Korea and most NATO members are sufficiently grown up to handle and fund
their own military affairs and adventure wars without an American presence and logistical
support. As for the ME, withdraw completely and allow them to return to type. Trade with them
only as necessary and stop importing their cretinous minions to the US. The US military needs
to be repurposed to a robust defense of North America, border and port security and
maintaining freedom of movement in sea lanes in cooperation with other nations. As for
knuckle-cracking Neocons and warmongering MIC bureaucrats, sack the lot and let them take up
selling shoes.
Makes sense: You haven't lost the war if it never ends.
Kind of ironic that America's biggest export business is subject to having its supply
chain crippled on any given day by America's largest rival. As another great American hero
once quipped, "Stupid is as stupid does."
@Unrepentant Conservative Judging by the quality of their policies, the shoes they might
sell would hardly be wearable. I suggest sending them all to Saudi Barbaria or another place
where their ilk is in charge.
Or, to put this article more economically: The USAmerican empire continues on the
irreversible path to which all empires come eventually: decline and fall. Meanwhile, the new
imperial sun rises in the North/East. The nazis' Tausand Jahre Reich lasted about twelve
years, counting from their initiating false-flag – the Reichstag fire – to the
fall of Berlin to the Red Army.* How long for 'the New American Century', counting from its
initiating false-flag, 11/9/01? (British notation ) Twenty five years? Thirty? Less?
And as usual with standard-issue disintegrating empires, only a few can see clearly what's
happening. And no-one – but no-one – can do anything effective to stop it. If you
like 'classical' music, listen again to the insane march episode in the first movement of
Shostakovich's 7th Symphony, 'The Leningrad'. Perfect encapsulation of the inevitable fate of
empires.
What's that you say? The USAmerican empire isn't a standard-issue one? "This time it's
different!"? If you think that, then clearly you're not one of the few who can see clearly
what's happening – as usual. Wake up soon!
________________
* Sure, the piddling USuketc. forces got to West Berlin about the same time. But does any
sane, properly-informed person still think it wasn't the Russians who did the serious heavy
lifting in WW2
Another place the US military is winning is in defending the US Dollar.
If any ME oil producer suggests going off the dollar standard they get whacked . That's
what happened to Saddam Hussein (Iraq) and Muamar Gadafi (Libya) and the threat to Iran.
Recently Mohamed bin Salam (Saudi Arabia) just got a strong reminder of who is in charge and
to stop favouring the Petro/Yuan.
The existing US Dollar world currency reserve status has a lot of advantages, since world
trade has to be priced in it, and world traders have to buy it. Take away this demand and the
dollar is only backed by the US economy (permanent deficits) and its value plummets.
If for example the dollar lost 50% of its value then the US could no longer fund on credit
ME wars, the MIC , special interests, welfare etc. as it is doing at present. The dollar
would have to return to its true value making the US an entirely different place.
Apart from the political impact, outsourcing would shut down, profits would disappear, the
military would have to pull out of bases around the world and ME wars would stop . The US
public would have less purchasing power, having to get used to living at the level of its
social development indicators (for example PISA test scores) somewhere in the region of lower
ranking European countries.
"presidents like George W. Bush have waged a set of brutal wars"
Not a bad example, but pretty conspicuously the only one given. I'm guessing he lives in a
timeline in which Democrats were sometimes manipulated into failing to curb the warmongering
excess of their thoroughly evil Republican predecessors. I won't hold my breath waiting for
him to credit Nixon and Reagan with ending the two longest-running wars of the 20th
Century.
Democracies fight wars as necessary, whereas Empires are constantly at war to preserve a
power structure with them on top. Winning the war and getting it over with is the goal in the
first case. Not losing a war and maintaining a threat to your opponents is the goal in the
second. This illustrates why empires eventually fall: it takes a constant expenditure of
energy to try to dominate everyone and the empire eventually can't back up its' non-stop
bullying.
It's not military weakness that is causing the US to slowly lose wars. Military reforms
wouldn't make US forces vastly more effective and capable of "winning". The problem is the
political context under which the military is employed. As long as the US is engaged in
building and maintaining an empire, the situation won't change.
You seem to have missed it, but Trump campaigned on an anti-war platform. The real story
is how the Deep State/Cabal turned him around, and how irrelevant elections are.
Trump wasn't turned around he is just a lair. He is a member of the Deep State.
Like Eric Margolis said, you don't win a war by killing people. You win a war by achieving
your strategic objective. Now, absent that, what the hell's the point? 1) Bushels of Money;
2) Perpetual Chaos. And that pair would make Trotsky and his backers proud. So, we haven't
come far, only deeper.
Wars in the Zionist template are not meant to be won, the wars are fought to terrorize both
the American people and the people of the targeted country and thus increase the governments
control over America and increase the profits of the Zionist banking cabal that perpetrated
the wars.
Read Orwells 1984 in the chapter on why wars are fought and as Orwell says , wars are not
fought to be won, they are fought to control the people and chew up the resources of the
countries in both sides of the conflict and keep the people on both sides in a state of
terror from a created terror threat, just as it is here in America aka Oceania.
The war on terror is a created lie, the Zionist controlled U.S. and Israel and Britain and
NATO created ISIS aka AL CIADA to provide the excuse to fight a threat that they created by
the Zionist controlled deep state and Israels attack on the WTC which led to the 17 year war
against the created threat.
America will never have peace as long as America is under Zionist control which it has
been since 1913 with the passage of the Zionist privately owned FED and IRS, which gives
Zionist bankers the ability to create money out of thin air to fund their wars and the IRS
gives them the power to tax the America people to pay for the Zionist wars.
Free America from Zionist control abolish the FED and the IRS.
Yes, well said, but one quibble: "Invest" in Wall Street? haha. At least with our ridiculous
winless wars we get to keep some sliver our our technological base. Wall Street is purely
parasitic
The biggest reason these wars go on and on and on is there is no draft. Anyone who was alive
during the Vietnam era knows this to be true. It was the anti-war, which in reality was the
anti-draft movement that put an end to the quagmire which was Vietnam.
Any one who will admit the truth knows we here in America do not care about anything that
does not concern us. As long as I don't have to go fight and die in some shit hole country, I
really can't be bothered with such things. The "haves" will never worry about the fate of the
"have not's".
The Empire is assured a steady stream of new "volunteers" as we have shipped our jobs and
manufacturing over seas. The poor with no prospects for a career, or even a job in anything
above the fast food industry see the military as their only hope for any kind of a future.
Charlie Daniels states in his song Long Haired Country Boy "A rich man goes to college and a
poor man goes to work". To be brought up to date, the line needs to be re-written as "A rich
man goes to college and a poor man goes to war".
The Empire(and its lap dogs the media)learned it had brighten the image of the armed
forces. No more stories of soldiers being spit on and called baby killers when they returned
home. It now would be yellow ribbons and waving flags for our soldiers returning home to a
hero's welcome.
If you think this perspective is incorrect, imagine the average college student, the ones
who had to take the day off from school when Trump was elected would react if they received
the following in the mail:
Greeting: You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States and
to report at Local Board No. 54, 24800 Mission Blvd., Hayward California on November 30th
2018 at 6:45 A.M.
Willful failure to report at the place and hour of the day named in this Order subjects the
violator to fine and imprisonment.
@Realist Trump didn't fill his Cabinet with the type of people who would be eager to
pursue his promises of troop withdrawals. It was alarming to see the inflow of generals and
bankers.
"The character and charisma long ago associated with the pioneer or the small farmer -- or
carried in the 1960s by Dr. King and the civil-rights movement -- has now come to rest
upon the soldier." This elevation of "our" troops as America's moral heroes feeds a
Pentagon imperative that seeks to isolate the military from criticism and its commanders
from accountability for wars gone horribly wrong."
You mean, that Dr. King ? the one who largely copied his "I have a dream speech"
(from Republican Archibald Carey Jr.), plagiarized his doctoral thesis, was a serial
adulterer, and who denied the deity of Christ, the Virgin Birth and the bodily Resurrection,
all while claiming to be a Christian preacher– a man who at the same time saw fit to
"instruct" Americans about the content of their character on other matters?
You don't have to be a Christian, nor believe in faithful marriages, fundamental and
orthodox Christian doctrine, or the integrity of academic papers to see that your use of MLK
here, is based upon the same moral and ethical logic that demands respect for the military,
while shielding it from criticism. It's the same game of constant and escalating virtue
signaling.
@Jeff Stryker{If war is such a good racket why has the US worse off }
Depending whose ox is being not-gored.
US – as a country of your average American taxpayers – is definitely worse
off: relentlessly growing national debt, higher and higher t taxes, deterioration of
infrastructure, loss of purchasing power.
Because the negative changes are small, they are not generally noticed.
But it is clear, if you know where to look, the country is gradually falling apart.
On the other hand – US as the top 1%, the rulers, the connected etc – is doing
great.
Top 1% now own about 40% of wealth in US.
The gap has widened over the years and keeps widening
For all practical purposes the American middle class has disappeared or disappearing
depending where you are.
"Middle class" husband and wife both have to work to raise 1 or maybe 2 kids.
Many moons ago just the husband worked and Americans easily raised 3-4 kids.
Unfortunately, the deep state obviously considers these wars "wins". Failing to recognize
that the enemy, in fact, rules us, helps continue the inevitability of that rule
I hope you're not one of those "peace through de- moralized military "people .It's not
the fighting man's fault we're in all these crappy wars ,it's the politicians ..Or would
you rather have our soldiers spit on when they go out in public Major?
I would prefer that people stop all this "they're fighting for our freedom" bulls ** t, as
it is transparent nonsense. "Our troops" are certainly not fighting for our freedom. If they
are, they're doing a really lousy job, because they've been fighting nearly non-stop for 17
years now, and yet we are getting steadily less free.
Well to date, at least Trump hasn't started any wars. Not only that, his "craziness"
seems to be allowing the Koreans to decide their own fate. If they come up with an end to
their war, will anyone sane in the US say no? One down, lots more to go.
I'm very ambivalent about the whole Korean thing. What happens if the North Korean regime
falls and Korea is unified under the southern regime – essentially the same scenario
that happened to Germany? Will our military stay there? Something tells me that the Pentagon
and whatever administration is in power at that time will answer yes. That would place an
American ally with American soldiers right on the border of China. Is that a good idea? I
don't think so – it seems a lot more dangerous in the long run than having, as we have
now, a buffer between us, even if that buffer is one of the crazy Kims with their
Baby's-First-Nuclear-Arsenal.
Superpowers (by which I mean any country with nuclear weapons) need to not border one
another, especially when one of them is the United States.
@Avery It sure went downhill since I left the US in 1999. If you had been overseas for 20
years like I have, being a single white male with no reason to return to the United States,
believe me you'd see the difference.
Hey, Astore ..how can you keyboard a screed concerning the ongoing wanton destruction of the
Mideast without once fingering the conniving jooies for pushing their selfish agenda
relentlessly? Your precious US military has simply been reduced to a well equipped and
financed group of mercenaries hired on to operate as the attack wing of the IDF. Everyone
knows it including you .
Apart from the cliche, "wars are for profits and power", the other important reason to keep
the troops abroad would be to prevent a civil war at home by the "God, guns and guts"crowd,
who might be tempted to carry out more Pittsburgh style attacks on those who don't fit into
the rightwing narrative, as the comment number two amply demonstrates.
@Curmudgeon I agree. I don't usually agree with Trumps rhetoric but the results seem to
be working for us in ways. NATO going away would be a huge win for the American people and
the world.
<
Assuming this was not another psyops it seems amazing to me that people cant distinguish
between the Israeli government and their lobby which influences policy and elections in the
US and the average Jew attending a synagogue.>
As with any event I always look at who benefits. Certainly the anti-gun lobby. Zionists
have always benefitted from such acts as they use them to get more protection against
criticism of their policies (eg legislation to define antisemitism as hate speech which would
include criticism of Israel). Remember the NY bombing threats a couple of years ago were
coming from an individual said to be working alone in Israel)
Be interesting to learn more about this Bowers. I am skeptical its a psyops at this point
because he was taken alive, but who knows.
What is often missing in comments is the importance of not confusing Zionism with Zionist
"Jews", Zionists with Jew and Jews with Semites!
Zionism is an extremely radical anti-Jewish ideology that is based on a fantasy of a
racial/cultural pure society, as was Nazism and the Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
states (excluding Oman). This is not to say that there are not other societies that are
racist, such as the US, Japan and India to mention just a few.
Most believers in Zionism are Radical conservative Christians with some 40 million in the
US alone. A vast majority of US Christians support Zionism via their voting for Politicians
that support Zionism and Zionist "Jews".
Jews are just those that practice one of the variations of the Jewish religion much like
there are various Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox sects. As long as a religion practices an
inner form of the religion (e.g. some Sufi Islamic sects) that provides a moral basis for
interactions with other in a society there is little harm in religion.
Jews are considered a part of the broad category of Semitic people the denotes a family of
languages that includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and certain ancient languages such as
Phoenician and Akkadian, constituting the main subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic family." https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/semitic
"Genetic studies indicate that modern Jews (Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrahi
specifically), Levantine Arabs, Assyrians/Syriacs, Samaritans, Maronites, Druze, Mandaeans,
and Mhallami, all have a common Near Eastern heritage which can be genetically mapped back to
the ancient Fertile Crescent, but often also display genetic profiles distinct from one
another, indicating the different histories of these peoples."
Furthermore, Jews are generally less Semitic than their current neighbors as: "A DNA study
of "six Middle Eastern populations (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Kurdish Jews from Israel;
Muslim Kurds; Muslim Arabs from Israel and the Palestinian Authority Area; and Bedouin from
the Negev)" found that Jews were more closely related to groups in the north of the Fertile
Crescent (Kurds, Turks, and Armenians) than to their Arab neighbors." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people
It is important to point out that Benzion Netanyahu (AKA Ben Nitay) may not be Semitic
like many of the Jews in the government of Israel. His father was a Zionist Rabbi in Poland
named Benzion Mileikowsky who was also a one-time secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benzion-Netanyahu
Anti-Semitic Zionist "Jews" are mostly Ashkenazim (only some 40% of these have generic
markers for Semitic Jews) and not only are anti-Semitic against the Palestinian Muslims and
Christians but are also discriminating against the Ultra-Orthodox Semitic Jews. Furthermore,
the Zionist Jews are facing daily protests against their rule from Semitic Jews, Christians
and Muslims who are actually citizens of the state of Israel. Recently these protests have
increased since the Zionist "Jews" that currently control Israel even passed a bill that
officially defines Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people and Hebrew as the
country's official language.
Anti-Semitic Zionist "Jews" also do not recognize the Syrian citizenship of the Druze
living in the occupied Golan Heights. The refuse to take Israeli citizenship and use a
Israeli laissez-passer to travel outside of Israel with the citizenship box left empty.
Likewise, the Zionist anti-Semites suppress three million, mostly Semites, living in open
air concentration camps and have killed and wounded some 10,000 as collective punishment with
the approval of the West (including Australia). https://joanroelofs.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/insecurity-blanket.pdf
@51 Krollchem - "...the importance of not confusing Zionism with Zionist "Jews", Zionists
with Jew and Jews with Semites!"
Yes indeed.
True it is that Zionists are the Jews' worst enemies, as Alan Hart pointed out in this
talk, titled after his 3-volume book and available on YouTube: Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews
We are familiar now with seeing how many of our confusions are actually caused by the
disinformation machine, and the same can be said for the massive conflation that takes place
between the notions of Zionism, Jewishness and Semitism.
Trolls come to western discussions all the time to inflame anti-semitism - why would
Israel send them to do that? Because anti-semitism is the racism that forms the smoke behind
which Zionism can hide.
Zionism essentially uses the Jews as human shields. Like the Wahhabi, Zionism hides behind
innocent civilians. And because of the fog of war put out by Zionist disinformation and
field-level trolling, few critics can take aim at the Zionist actions hiding behind the Jews,
and don't dare shoot for fear of hitting "Semites", so called.
Thanks for the two links! I come to MoA to learn and appreciate your comment and the
additional info.
Pft , Oct 28, 2018 6:36:52 PM | 39
">link
Assuming this was not another psyops it seems amazing to me that people cant distinguish
between the Israeli government and their lobby which influences policy and elections in the
US and the average Jew attending a synagogue.
"... Whether Twitter had made an honest mistake, or scrambled to engage in damage control, is sort of immaterial at this point. Some of his posts have been archived , but not responses to them. All that suspending his account accomplished is to make it more difficult to parse the Florida man's motives. By the way, Sayoc's Facebook page was likewise taken down on Friday. ..."
The history of criminal behavior and online threats by Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man charged
with sending suspicious packages to prominent Democrats, somehow went ignored by both
government and social media police.
Sayoc, 56, was arrested on Friday, and stands accused of sending pipe bombs - 14, as of the
last count - to former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, actor Robert De Niro,
billionaire Democrat donors George Soros and Tom Steyer, and several Democrat lawmakers.
Federal authorities have refused to speculate on the suspect's motives, but news outlets
quickly pored over Sayoc's social media
feeds , finding photos and videos of pro-Trump memes, Trump rallies, and abusive language
towards Democrats. A van in which he reportedly lived, after losing his home to foreclosure,
was covered in pro-Trump decals. Twitter #Resistance activists, who had already coined the term
"MAGAbomber" to describe the suspect, rejoiced.
It was Sayoc's prior run-ins with the law that allowed the FBI to find him, matching a
fingerprint and DNA from some of the packages to samples they had on file. His criminal record
shows charges of grand theft, misdemeanor theft, battery, felony steroid possession, and even
threatening a bomb attack in 2002 - leaving an open question of how he kept getting
away with it all, over and over again.
Then there is the matter of Sayoc's social media accounts. Over the past two years, under
intense pressure by Democrats and drummed-up charges of "Russian meddling," Twitter and
Facebook have cracked down on users left
and right . Time and again, people engaging in protected free speech have been " shadowbanned " or
suspended, permanently or until they deleted posts someone reported as "offensive."
Yet when Democratic strategist Rochelle Ritchie actually reported Sayoc's account to Twitter
two weeks ago, over a threat she received from him after appearing on a Fox News show,
Twitter did not find the post
objectionable .
Richie then received an email from Twitter saying
the previous response to her complaint had been "an error."
Whether Twitter had made an honest mistake, or scrambled to engage in damage control, is
sort of immaterial at this point. Some of his posts have been archived , but
not responses to them. All that suspending his account accomplished is to make it more
difficult to parse the Florida man's motives. By the way, Sayoc's Facebook page was likewise
taken down on Friday.
Both Twitter and Facebook claim they are trying to improve "conversations" on their
platforms, and that their purges are nonpartisan. While technically correct, that's misleading.
Establishment figures and outfits somehow always skate, while both critics of Clintonism on the
left and Trump Republicans end up under the banhammer.
Meanwhile, the social media giants continue to insist they are not publishers, and delegate
the dirty work of policing to quasi-NGOs like the National Endowment for
Democracy and the Atlantic Council . They
end up deciding who's a "Russian bot" or "Iranian troll" based on arbitrary criteria, which the
mainstream media repeats uncritically.
That someone like Sayoc ended up under the radar of both the authorities and social media
police suggests that he was either deliberately tolerated, or that their "defense of democracy"
is a sham. It is perhaps fitting that none of Sayoc's bombs actually exploded; the only thing
they blew up in the end seems to be some illusions.
"... Roberts goes on to say that the ideology of US neoconservatives is "akin to the German Nazy Party last century" in their ideology of American supremacy and exceptionalism. ..."
Roberts, Former Asst. Treasury Secretary in the Reagan administration and former
contributing editor at the Wall Street Journal has been an outspoken critic of neocon foreign
policy and Washington corruption from a conservative viewpoint.
He has an enormous following on the internet and publishes at the Unz Review and on his own
website.
... ... ...
Roberts, 79, served in the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1982. He was formerly a
distinguished fellow at the Cato Institute and a senior research fellow at the Hoover
Institution, and has written for the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek.
Roberts maintains an active
blog .
He's also vehemently against interventionary wars around the world , and spoke with Russia's
state-owned Sputnik news in a
Tuesday article - in which Roberts said that President Trump's decision to pull out of the
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty was a handout to the military-security
complex.
The former Reagan administration official clarified that he does not think "that the
military-security complex itself wants a war with Russia, but it does want an enemy that
can be used to justify more spending. " He explained that the withdrawing from the INF
Treaty "gives the military-security complex a justification for a larger budget and new
money to spend: manufacturing the formerly banned missiles."
...
The economist highlighted that " enormous sums spent on 'defense' enabled the armaments
corporations to control election outcomes with campaign contributions ," adding that in
addition, "the military has bases and the armaments corporations have factories in almost
every state so that the population, dependent on the jobs, support high amounts of
'defense' spending."
"That was 57 years ago," he underscored. "You can imagine how much stronger the
military-security complex is today." - Sputnik
Roberts also suggested that " The Zionist Neoconservatives are responsible for Washington's
unilateral abandonment of the INF treaty, just as they were responsible for Washington's
unilateral abandonment of the ABM Treaty [in 2002], the Iran nuclear agreement, and the promise
not to move NATO one inch to the East. "
Is this what got him suspended?
Roberts goes on to say that the ideology of US neoconservatives is "akin to the German
Nazy Party last century" in their ideology of American supremacy and exceptionalism.
" Their over-confidence about their ability to quickly defeat Israel's enemies and open the
Middle East to Israeli expansion got the US bogged down in wars in the Middle East for 17 years
... During this time, both Russia and China rose much more quickly than the neoconservatives
thought possible."
Dr. Roberts opined that US policy makers are seeking to weaponize the Russian opposition
and "pro-Western elements" to exert pressure on Moscow into "accommodating Washington in
order to have the sanctions removed." On the other hand, the Trump administration's new arms
race could force Russia into spending more on defense, according to the author. - Sputnik
While we don't know if Roberts' Sputnik interview resulted in his Twitter ban 48 hours
later, it's entirely possible.
"... Save WikiLeaks is vilified by governments (and increasingly by journalists) for its exposures, including of the U.S.-UK "special relationship" in running a joint foreign policy of deception and violence that serves London and Washington's elite interests, says Mark Curtis. ..."
"... Middle East Eye ..."
"... A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had "put measures in place to protect your interests". ..."
"... The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I've extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him. ..."
"... However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the U.S. deputy secretary of state, having talked with now Foreign Secretary Hague about a "post-Qaddafi" Libya . This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing. ..."
"... (U.S. Air Force photo) ..."
"... Cables show the US spying on the Foreign Office and collecting information on British ministers. Soon after the appointment of Ivan Lewis as a junior foreign minister in 2009, U.S. officials were briefing the office of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about rumors that he was depressed and had a reputation as a bully, and on " the state of his marriage. " ..."
"... In addition, Wikileaks cables reveal that journalists and the public are considered legitimate targets of UK intelligence operations. In October 2009, Joint Services Publication 440 , a 2,400-page restricted document written in 2001 by the Ministry of Defence, was leaked. Somewhat ironically, it contained instructions for the security services on to avid leaks of information by hackers , journalists and foreign spies. ..."
WikiLeaks' Legacy of Exposing US-UK Complicity October 27, 2018 •
7 Comments
Save WikiLeaks is vilified by governments (and increasingly by journalists) for its
exposures, including of the U.S.-UK "special relationship" in running a joint foreign policy of
deception and violence that serves London and Washington's elite interests, says Mark
Curtis.
By Mark Curtis Middle East Eye
Twelve years ago this month, WikiLeaks began
publishing government secrets that the world public might otherwise never have known. What it
has revealed about state duplicity, human rights abuses and corruption goes beyond anything
published in the world's "mainstream" media.
After over six months of being cut off from outside world, on 14 October 14 Ecuador has
partly restored Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's communications with the outside world from
its London embassy where the founder has been living for over six years. (Assange, however,
later
rejected Ecuador's restrictions imposed on him.)
The treatment – real and threatened – meted out to Assange by the U.S. and UK
governments contrasts sharply with the service Wikileaks has done their publics in revealing
the nature of elite power, as shown in the following snapshot of Wikileaks' revelations about
British foreign policy in the Middle East.
Conniving with the Saudis
Whitehall's special relationship with Riyadh is exposed in an extraordinary
cable from 2013 highlighting how Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi
Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council. Britain initiated the
secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support.
Hague: 'World needs pro-American regime' in Britain. (Chatham House)
The Wikileaks releases also shed details on Whitehall's fawning relationship with
Washington. A 2008 cable , for example, shows then
shadow foreign secretary William Hague telling the U.S. embassy that the British "want a
pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it."
A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special
relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning
in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had
"put measures in place to protect your interests".
American Influence
It is not known what this protection amounted to, but no U.S. officials were called to give
evidence to Chilcot in public. The inquiry was also refused
permission to publish letters between former U.S. President George W. Bush and former UK
Prime Minister Tony Blair written in the run-up to the war.
Also in 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised the prospect of reducing the number of
British nuclear-armed Trident submarines from four to three, a policy opposed in Washington.
However, Julian Miller, an official in the UK's Cabinet Office, privately assured U.S. officials that
his government "would consult with the U.S. regarding future developments concerning the
Trident deterrent to assure there would be 'no daylight' between the U.S. and UK." The idea
that British decision-making on Trident is truly independent of the U.S. is undermined by this
cable.
The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I've
extensively come across in my own
research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya
in March 2011, for example, the British
government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's attacks on
civilians and not to overthrow him.
However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show
William Burns, then the U.S. deputy secretary of state, having talked with now Foreign
Secretary Hague about a "post-Qaddafi" Libya . This was more
than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow
Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing.
Another case of British duplicity concerns Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos
archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which is now a major U.S. base for intervention in the Middle
East. The
UK has long fought to prevent Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland after
forcibly removing them in the 1960s.
A secret 2009 cable shows that a particular ruse concocted by Whitehall to promote this was
the establishment of a " marine reserve " around the
islands. A senior Foreign Office official told the US that the "former inhabitants would find
it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the
entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve."
A B-1B Lancer unleashes cluster munitions. The B-1B uses radar and inertial navigation
equipment enabling aircrews to operate without the need for ground-based navigation aids.
(U.S. Air Force photo)
A week before the "marine reserve" proposal was made to the U.S. in May 2009, then UK
Foreign Secretary David Miliband was also conniving with the U.S., apparently to deceive the
public. A cable reveals Miliband helping the
U.S. to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at U.S. bases on UK soil, despite
Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year.
Miliband
approved a loophole created by diplomats to allow U.S. cluster bombs to remain on UK soil
and was part of discussions on how the loophole would help avert a debate in Parliament that
could have "complicated or muddied" the issue. Critically, the same cable also revealed that the
U.S. was storing cluster munitions on ships based at Diego Garcia.
Spying on the UK
Cables show the US spying on the Foreign Office and collecting information on British
ministers. Soon after the appointment of Ivan Lewis as a junior foreign minister in 2009, U.S.
officials were briefing the office of U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about rumors that he was depressed and had a reputation as a
bully, and on " the state of his marriage. "
Washington was also shown to have
been spying on the UK mission to the UN, along with other members of the Security Council and
the UN Secretary General.
In addition, Wikileaks cables reveal that journalists and the public are considered
legitimate targets of UK intelligence operations. In October 2009,
Joint Services Publication 440 , a 2,400-page restricted document written in 2001 by the
Ministry of Defence, was leaked. Somewhat ironically, it contained instructions for the
security services on to avid leaks of information by hackers , journalists and
foreign spies.
Millions worldwide are demanding the release of Wikileaks founder Assange after six years of
what the UN calls "arbitrary detention." (New Media Days / Peter Erichsen)
The document refers to investigative journalists as "threats" alongside subversive and
terrorist organizations, noting that "the 'enemy' is unwelcome publicity of any kind, and
through any medium."
Britain's GCHQ is also revealed to have spied on Wikileaks itself – and its readers.
One classified GCHQ
document from 2012 shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly collect the IP
addresses of visitors to the Wikileaks site in real time, as well as the search terms that
visitors used to reach the site from search engines such as Google.
Championing Free Nedua
The British government is punishing Assange for the service that Wikileaks has performed. It
is ignoring a UN ruling that he is being held in " arbitrary
detention " at the Ecuadorian embassy, while failing, illegally, to ensure his health needs
are met. Whitehall is also refusing to offer diplomatic assurances that Assange will not be
extradited to the US – the only reason he remains in the embassy.
Smear campaigns have portrayed Assange as a sexual predator or a Russian agent, often in the
same media that have benefitted from covering Wikileaks' releases.
Many journalists and activists who are perfectly aware of the fake news in some Western
media outlets, and of
the smear campaign against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn , are ignoring or even colluding in
the more vicious smearing of Assange.
More journalists need to champion the service Wikileaks performs and argue for what is at
stake for a free media in the right to expose state secrets.
This
article originally appeared on Middle East Eye.
Mark Curtis is an historian and analyst of UK foreign policy and international development
and the author of six books, the latest being an updated edition of Secret Affairs: Britain's
Collusion with Radical Islam.
"... This is what has been missing for over 40 years in the US, government's role in the economy. When any politician brings up the fact that it's time we used fiscal policy as it was designed, neoliberals have a socialism meltdown. Both parties have been taken over by the Kochtopus, The libertarian fascist ideology that hides behind the term "neoliberalism". The ultimate goal of this zombie ideology that was thoroughly discredited in 2008 but continues to roam the earth is to replace nations with privately owned cities. ..."
"... This is the struggle -- the struggle to maintain public space on a planet that was never meant to be owned in the first place. ..."
"Government exists to spend. The purpose of government is to serve the general welfare of the
citizens, not just the military-industrial complex and the financial class. Didn't we have a
stimulus, oh, eight years ago? It was tiny and has not been entirely spent. As Yellen
implied, we need more spending of the non-military kind (what Barney Frank memorably called
"weaponized Keynesianism" doesn't stimulate)."
This is what has been missing for over 40 years in the US, government's role in the
economy. When any politician brings up the fact that it's time we used fiscal policy as it
was designed, neoliberals have a socialism meltdown. Both parties have been taken over by the
Kochtopus, The libertarian fascist ideology that hides behind the term "neoliberalism". The
ultimate goal of this zombie ideology that was thoroughly discredited in 2008 but continues
to roam the earth is to replace nations with privately owned cities. This experiment was
going on in Honduras, following the 2009 coup, until it was finally ended by a SC ruling that
it was unconstitutional.
"In a libertarian society, there is no commons or public space. There are property
lines, not borders. When it comes to real property and physical movement across such real
property, there are owners, guests, licensees, business invitees and trespassers -- not
legal and illegal immigrants." ~ Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute
This is the struggle -- the struggle to maintain public space on a planet that was
never meant to be owned in the first place.
Trump may have his own views, but he has no own foreign policy. He is a neocon's
marionette.
Notable quotes:
"... Instead Bush, and later Obama, transitioned the military mission -- without consultation from Congress -- into a nation-building effort that was doomed from the start. Candidate Donald Trump spoke of a different approach to the Middle East and railed against nation-building abroad. His instincts on Afghanistan have been consistent and correct from very early on. Had it not been for the relentless pressure of several key officials, the war might already have come to end. ..."
"... Woodward wrote ..."
"... Trump defers to the Pentagon because he doesn't really care. He says he wants to get out of Afghanistan (and I support that) but getting out isn't going to make him any money, or get him any votes. So why bother with it, especially when he can lie to his base and tell them we are already out, and they'll believe him? ..."
"... Trump is the kind of person who likes to "talk the talk" but when comes right down to it, he going to sadly, "walk the walk" that the Washington establishment tells him to walk. ..."
"... The treasonous MIC and those top generals do not care about the nation and ordinary Americans. They care only about their profits, careers and their own egos. ..."
"... There is no war they don't like – Middle East, checked, Ukraine, yes, South China Sea, sure, Korea, definitely. It is so sad that Trump turns out to be such a weak and impotent president, contrary to what the supporters claim. ..."
In a routine dating back to 2004, U.S. officials
regularly claim that the latest strategy in Afghanistan is working -- or as General David
Petraeus said in
2012 , the war had "turned a corner." It hadn't and it still hasn't. In fact, evidence
overwhelmingly affirms that the newest "new" strategy will be no more effective than those that
came before it. It is time to stop losing U.S. lives while pretending that victory is just
around the corner. It is time to end the war in Afghanistan.
Last week, one of the most brazen insider attacks of the war took place in Kandahar when one
of the Afghanistan governor's bodyguards turned rogue,
killingthree high-profile
Afghan leaders and
wounding the senior U.S. field commander, Brigadier General Jeffrey Smiley. Miraculously,
the new commander, General Scott Miller, escaped harm. But in 2018,
eight Americans have been killed in Afghanistan, bringing the American death toll to
2,351 .
On October 7, 2001, President George W. Bush
addressed the nation as combat operations in Afghanistan began. He emphasized that the
American "mission is defined. The objectives are clear. [Our] goal is just." Those objectives,
he explained , were "targeted actions" that were "designed to disrupt the use of
Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the
Taliban regime."
By the summer of 2002, those objectives were fully met as the Taliban organization was
wholly destroyed and al-Qaeda severely degraded. As of 2009, there were reportedly
as few as 100 stragglers scattered impotently throughout Afghanistan. The military mission
should therefore have ended and combat forces redeployed.
Instead Bush, and later Obama, transitioned the military mission -- without consultation
from Congress -- into a nation-building effort that was doomed from the start. Candidate Donald
Trump spoke of a different approach to the Middle East and railed against nation-building
abroad. His instincts on Afghanistan have been consistent and correct from very early on. Had
it not been for the relentless pressure of several key officials, the war might already have
come to end.
After a December 2015 insider attack, Trump tweeted : "A suicide
bomber has just killed U.S. troops in Afghanistan. When will our leaders get tough and smart.
We are being led to slaughter!" According to Bob Woodward's book Fear , Trump brought
that same passion against the futility of the Afghan war into the White House.
Woodward
wrote that at an August 2017 meeting on Afghanistan, Trump told his generals that the
war had been "a disaster," and chided them for "wanting to add even more troops to something I
don't believe in."
Woodward claims that Trump then told the top brass, "I was against this from the beginning.
He folded his arms. 'I want to get out,' the president said. 'And you're telling me the answer
is to get deeper in.'" Under pressure -- from the likes of Secretary of Defense James Mattis
and Senator Lindsey Graham -- Trump eventually gave in.
Events have since proven that Trump would have done the country a favor by resisting that
pressure and sticking to his instincts to end the war. The violence
keeps up at a record pace, civilian casualties continue to set
all-time highs , and Afghan troops struggle
mightily with battle losses. The president was right in August 2017 and his instincts
remain solid today.
The longer Trump continues to defer to the establishment thinking that produced 17
consecutive years of military failure, the longer that failure will afflict us, the more
casualties we will suffer unnecessarily, and the more money we will pour down the drain.
It is time for Trump to remember that it is futile to try to win the unwinnable and finally
end America's longest war.
Daniel L. Davis is a senior fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lieutenant
Colonel in the U.S. Army who retired in 2015 after 21 years, including four combat deployments,
two of which were in Afghanistan.
Trump defers to the Pentagon because he doesn't really care. He says he wants to get out of
Afghanistan (and I support that) but getting out isn't going to make him any money, or get
him any votes. So why bother with it, especially when he can lie to his base and tell them we
are already out, and they'll believe him?
Trump is the kind of person who likes to "talk the talk" but when comes right down to it, he
going to sadly, "walk the walk" that the Washington establishment tells him to walk.
The treasonous MIC and those top generals do not care about the nation and ordinary
Americans. They care only about their profits, careers and their own egos.
There is no war they don't like – Middle East, checked, Ukraine, yes, South China
Sea, sure, Korea, definitely. It is so sad that Trump turns out to be such a weak and impotent president, contrary to
what the supporters claim.
I think a lot of us could have tolerated the asinine antics if he had stuck to his campaign
positions on this and other things .
God; what might have been .
SDS, you are correct. I've often thought that Trump could have forged a majority coalition by
doing things the People really wanted, or at least didn't hate: nominating another Gorsuch,
cutting the size of government, appointing competent people, getting out of the Middle East,
no tariffs, less racism, getting concession from businesses that benefited from the tax cut,
following emoluments rules, etc. etc.
"I think a lot of us could have tolerated the asinine antics if he had stuck to his
campaign positions on this and other things . God; what might have been ."
First, sorry you fell for The Con. I understand. Maybe. Second, the real question is, "What are you going to do about it?". Vote Republican Nov 6? Why would you do that? Hope against all hope? Dementia? Gluttony
for punishment? BTW. HRC is not on the ballot this time, and will never be again.
Unless we intend to invade en mass, and scour the country from one end to the other to defeat
any and all opponents, the mission in Afghanistan will remain what it is. "new wine (of
sorts) in old wineskins.
If we are going to remake a country -- we had better remake it. I am not sure i have ever
said this before but the entire affair
We hear Pakistan is now desperate for IMF aid. That the One belt One Road initiative there by
China has already put the country in the position of having to stand down its creditor,
China. Partly with the help of Japanese finance, Iran and India are out to squeeze Islamabad
out of world trade.
The Pakis are headed into a new dark age, so don't expect the Russians to bark wildly and
chase down this car. With any luck, they and China will revive the Northern Alliance, make a
garrison of Kabul, and eventually Xi and Vladi will have their own escalating civil war over
control over Central Asia.
I'd say January 2019 is a good time to begin a quick US withdrawal, just as long as we
pull out of the IMF and not give another red American cent to the region, save a green zone
around Kabul with economically productive areas.
I would argue that although this would seem like an American loss, it will put our
Progressive yappers to shame. What human values would they stand up and defend now, among the
IndoPak Caravan? Maybe then we'll really focus on our own border and wage the good fight
where it is needed -- the Culture War.
Obama had intended to leave. The military insisted on vict'ry and another Surge. He gave them
their Surge and their time to do it. They failed, made things worse and prevented Obama from
leaving. They're still playing. Trump's just the latest Oval Office 'sucker'.
"... Bankers, agro-business elites, commercial mega owners, manufacturing, real estate and insurance bosses and their financial advisers, elite members of the 'ruling class', have launched a full-scale attack on private and public wage and salary workers, and small and medium size entrepreneurs (the members of the 'popular classes'). The attack has targeted income ,pensions, medical plans, workplace conditions, job security, rents, mortgages, educational costs, taxation,undermining family and household cohesion. ..."
"... Big business has weakened or abolished political and social organizations which challenge the distribution of income and profits and influence the rates of workplace output. In brief the ruling classes have intensified exploitation and oppression through the 'class struggle' from above. ..."
"... The United States witnessed the ruling class take full control of the state, the workplace and distribution of social expenditures. ..."
"... The upsurge of the popular class struggle was contained and confined by the center-left political elite, while the ruling class marked time, making business deals to secure lucrative state contracts via bribes to the ruling center-left allied with the conservative political elite . ..."
"... The big business ruling class learned their lessons from their previous experience with weak and conciliating neo-liberal regimes. They sought authoritarian and, if possible rabble rousing political leaders, who could dismantle the popular organizations, and gutted popular welfare programs and democratic institutions, which previously blocked the consolidation of the neo-liberal New Order. ..."
"... The term "invidious distinction" was coined by Thornstein Veblen in his seminal "The Theory of the Leisure Class", in which Veblen argues that one of the primary human motivations is to evoke envy in our fellows. ..."
"... "Popular" class struggles need to be seen for what they are; temporary expedients whereby one set of rulers uses the populace for their own ends and against their competitors. ..."
"... Too many people get suckered into supporting "popular" movements and sometimes do gain temporary benefits, but when their handlers get what they want, the fun and games are over. ..."
Bankers, agro-business elites, commercial mega owners, manufacturing, real estate and
insurance bosses and their financial advisers, elite members of the 'ruling class', have
launched a full-scale attack on private and public wage and salary workers, and small and
medium size entrepreneurs (the members of the 'popular classes'). The attack has targeted
income ,pensions, medical plans, workplace conditions, job security, rents, mortgages,
educational costs, taxation,undermining family and household cohesion.
Big business has weakened or abolished political and social organizations which challenge
the distribution of income and profits and influence the rates of workplace output. In brief
the ruling classes have intensified exploitation and oppression through the 'class struggle'
from above.
We will proceed by identifying the means, methods and socio-political conditions which have
advanced the class struggle from above and, conversely, reversed and weakened the class
struggle from below.
Historical Context
The class struggle is the major determinant of the advances and regression of the interests
of the capitalist class. Following the Second World War, the popular classes experienced steady
advances in income, living standards, and work place representation. However by the last decade
of the 20 th century the balance of power between the ruling and popular classes
began to shift, as a new 'neo-liberal' development paradigm became prevalent.
First and foremost, the state ceased to negotiate and conciliate relations between rulers
and the working class: the [neoliberal] state concentrated on de-regulating the economy,
reducing corporate taxes, and eliminating labor's role in politics and the division of profits
and income.
The concentration of state power and income was not uncontested and was not uniform in all
regions and countries. Moreover, counter-cyclical trends, reflecting shifts in the balance of
the class struggle precluded a linear process. In Europe, the Nordic and Western European
countries' ruling classes advanced privatization of public enterprises, reduced social welfare
costs and benefits, and pillaged overseas resources but were unable to break the state funded
welfare system. In Latin America the advance and regression of the power, income and welfare of
the popular class, correlated with the outcome of the class and state struggle.
The United States witnessed the ruling class take full control of the state, the
workplace and distribution of social expenditures.
In brief, by the end of the 20 th century, the ruling class advanced in assuming
a dominant role in the class struggle.
Nevertheless, the class struggle from below retained its presence, and in some places,
namely in Latin America, the popular classes were able to secure a share of state power –
at least temporarily.
Popular Power: Contesting the Class Struggle from Above
Latin America is a prime example of the uneven trajectory of the class struggle.
Between the end of World War Two and the late 1940's, the popular classes were able to
secure democratic rights, populist reforms and social organization. Guatemala, Argentina,
Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela were among the leading examples. By the early 1950's with
the onset of the US imperialist 'cold war', in collaboration with the regional ruling classes
launched a violent class war from above, which took the form of military coups in Guatemala,
Peru, Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil. The populist class struggle was defeated by the US
backed military- business rulers who, temporarily imposed US agro-mineral export economies.
The 1950's were the 'golden epoch' for the advance of US multi-nationals and Pentagon
designed regional military alliances. But the class struggle from below rose again and found
expression in the growth of a progressive national populist industrializing coalition, and the
successful Cuban socialist regime and its followers in revolutionary social movements in the
rest of Latin America throughout the 1960's.
The revolutionary popular class insurgency of the early 1960's was countered by the ruling
class seizure of power backed by military-US led coups between 1964-1976 which demolished the
regimes and institutions of the popular classes in Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1970), Chile (1973),
Argentina (1976) , Peru (1973) and elsewhere.
Economic crises of the early 1980s reduced the role of the military and led to a 'negotiated
transition' in which the ruling class advanced a neo-liberal agenda in exchange for electoral
participation under military and US tutelage.
Lacking direct military rule, the ruling class struggle succeeded in muting the popular
class struggle by co-opting the center-left political elites. The ruling class did not or could
not establish hegemony over the popular classes even as they proceeded with their neo-liberal
agenda.
With the advent of the 21 st century a new cycle in the class struggle from below
burst forth. Three events intersected: the global crises of 2000 triggered regional financial
crashes, which in turn led to a collapse of industries and mass unemployment, which intensified
mass direct action and the ouster of the neo-liberal regimes. Throughout the first decade of
the 21 st century, neo-liberalism was in retreat. The popular class struggle and the
rise of social movements displaced the neo-liberal regimes but was incapable of replacing the
ruling classes. Instead hybrid center-left electoral regimes took power.
The new power configuration incorporated popular social movements, center-left parties and
neo-liberal business elites. Over the next decade the cross-class alliance advanced largely
because of the commodity boom which financed welfare programs, increased employment,
implemented poverty reduction programs and expanded investments in infrastructure.
Post-neoliberal regimes co-opted the leaders of the popular classes, replaced ruling class
political elites but did not displace the strategic structural positions of the business ruling
class..
The upsurge of the popular class struggle was contained and confined by the center-left
political elite, while the ruling class marked time, making business deals to secure lucrative
state contracts via bribes to the ruling center-left allied with the conservative political
elite .
The end of the commodity boom, forced the center-left to curtail its social welfare and
infrastructure programs and fractured the alliance between big business leaders and center-left
political elites. The ensuing economic recession facilitated the return of the neo-liberal
political elite to power.
The big business ruling class learned their lessons from their previous experience with weak
and conciliating neo-liberal regimes. They sought authoritarian and, if possible rabble rousing
political leaders, who could dismantle the popular organizations, and gutted popular welfare
programs and democratic institutions, which previously blocked the consolidation of the
neo-liberal New Order.
"The rightist rhetoric turns against itself as its followers engage in invidious
distinctions ."
Interesting. You don't see Veblen's "invidious distinction" trotted out very often these
days which is a pity. More the pity that it is misused in quote above. It's probably
uncharitable to take cheap shots at the article, which is a beautiful, anti-fa inspired,
fairytale history of the modern age. I just wish more care would be used for Marxist and
non-marxist socialist phrases such as "class struggle" and "invidious distinction" because it
impossible to detest them adequately when they are improperly deployed.
The term "invidious distinction" was coined by Thornstein Veblen in his seminal "The
Theory of the Leisure Class", in which Veblen argues that one of the primary human
motivations is to evoke envy in our fellows. Veblen thought that because all value is
subjective/arbitrary, it's quite reasonable to assume that the most efficient value signal is
that which creates the most envy in other men. A man's social standing is therefore
efficiently established by status symbols that invoke envy such as a Rolex or a Mercedes. The
peculiar consequence of this is that often, men desire a thing like a Rolex because other men
want one, even up to the point when the object lacks any utility whatsoever other than signaling wealth, which itself is defined as having things that others want. Invidious
distinction is therefore best evidenced through conspicuous consumption, however nearly all
actions that do not have subsistence as their aim are undertaken to gain social standing or
signal social standing by invoking envy.
Thus the quote above could be rewritten to be "The rightist rhetoric turns against
itself as its followers engage in non-subsistence activities" which is kind of dumb. If
the author is prognosticating that the authoritarian new order will turn on itself, it'd be
nice to know have a more substantive explanation than "non-subsistence activities". Moreover,
if the authoritarian new order is to shed it's "shock troops" in exchange for "meritocrats"
it'd be nice to know why. That's my 2 cents, but I'm curious to know what others think of
this curious tale!
The corruption of upwardly mobile middle-class rabble rousers will disillusion their
voluntary followers. Arbitrary police and military repression usually extends to extortion
and intimidation beyond the drug slums to the middle and working-class neighborhoods.
Also, the rise of AI, data mining, and complex algorithms, as well as the proliferation of
electronic devices that record and analyze our private spaces is a pillar of the new order.
Essentially, we are being watched by machines.
People need to reject the material order. Spiritual awakening is the key.
Revolutionaries will find new ways to defeat these technology-based tactics. Dogwhistling,
communication on a personal level (rather than by mass media or the internet), and
old-fashioned tribalism should help. Also, leaderless resistance can play a role. Weaknesses
will be found in the crumbling edifice, and many hands can chisel separately.
Infiltration and sabotage can also be applied.
Possibly unrelated, but maybe thought-provoking:
Consider the man they just arrested for the mail bomb scare. Reportedly, this person was a
career criminal with drug dealing and grand theft on his record and he was caught in
possession of a white van with decals on it depicting his targets. This man is a caricature
of a Trump supporter, ready-made for the cable news broadcast. Does anyone else see the
absurdity of it? Can this guy be for real?
The authoritarian New Order usually begins to decline through 'internal rot' –
uber- profiteering and flagrant abuse of work.
" However sustaining their advance is conditional on dynamic economic growth "
You cannot fool all people all the time.
Our Dutch Rutte governments now for some ten years have told us that the economy is growing,
alas the average Dutchman by now knows that 'there are lies, big lies, and statistics', in
other words, it may well be that the economy is growing, but the average Dutchman does not
see his buying power increased.
On the contrary, those that work have a more or less constant buying power, those that do not
work, for whatever reason: cannot find a job, permanent illness, retired, see quite well how
their material position deteriorates steadily.
The alliance of big globalized business and big Governments is an unbearable burden for most
of the populations. Since the 70`s you have to work more and more and to study more and more for less and
less
I foresee that if this continue in the next 20 years millions and millions of people will
die of marginalization, of hunger , misery and grief .
This is the most important problem governments, and in the wider sense humanity is
encountering.
The pendulum is incessantly swinging from center to right and than reverses from right to
left.
Marx theories are totally one sided and do not solve anything. Extreme swing to the left
brought at start enthusiasm of the working classes and for certain time progress of the
humanity was phenomenal. But in time the progress did stop and population become lethargic
and progress become stagnation leading to depression. Similar thing happens when pendulum is
swinging to the right.
Eventually the purchasing power of the population diminishes to the size when crisis of the
system is inevitable.
Most important task of the governments is to control the economy that the extent of the
swings are small as possible.
@Anon Things seem to have improved in Asia since I first went abroad in 2000. In the US,
on the other hand, life seems to have gotten more and more difficult.
If you had told me in 1993 when I left home that Gen Y of age 30 would live at home and
that entire families of white people would be homeless or that MBA's would have to work in
Bistros at age 25 I would have said you're crazed.
The odd thing in the US is that it is the middle-class seems to have gotten hit the worst.
The white underclass and blacks have always had it hard and poor. Much of the time they
deserve it because they have babies at 19 and don't go to college. But the destruction of the
middle-class whites is quite phenomenal.
It is unbearable for the middle-class. The underclass does not care. Big governments tend
to be corrupt, so money talks. If you live in the ghetto or the trailer park you have no expectations anyhow. You were
not going to be a great citizen anyhow. But for the middle-class things will be shocking.
I doubt that such a thing ever occurred to any substantial degree. "Popular" class
struggles need to be seen for what they are; temporary expedients whereby one set of rulers
uses the populace for their own ends and against their competitors.
Too many people get suckered into supporting "popular" movements and sometimes do gain
temporary benefits, but when their handlers get what they want, the fun and games are over.
The author noted the concept, saying,
Between the end of World War Two and the late 1940's, the popular classes were able to
secure democratic rights, populist reforms and social organization. [but then began]
bullying of traditional allies
No "will be" about it. You noted it in your comment #10 and my observations agree,
But the destruction of the middle-class whites is quite phenomenal.
The assault on the middle class has been taking place for decades and many people have
been feeling it although most apparently still hope for some Messiah, and many of them
apparently think either Hillaryena or the Trumpster was it. Where they get their faith I'll
never know.
@jilles dykstra Same thing in Spain, and in most of western Europe I would say . The macroeconomy is going well for the chosen ones , and the microeconomy is going very bad for
most of the population .
Much of the time they deserve it because they don't go to college.
Wrong.
Schooling in the USA for some time been nothing more than babysitting and brainwashing and
that's by design. Completing college nowadays is mainly for immature, dependent losers
especially since many of them will be burdened with a non-marketable degree and debt for
decades and in any case, the majority will wind up as wage slaves anyway. The way to go now
is to learn a trade, especially one that a person can practice independently and with low
capital, and get to work, but the window for even that seems to be fast closing too.
If one has the talent (rare) sales can still be a good road to relative independence with
no "collitch" needed.
@Jeff Stryker "If you live in the ghetto or the trailer park you have no expectations
anyhow. You were not going to be a great citizen anyhow."
"But for the middle-class things will be shocking."
Spot on, Jeff. I see remnants of the onetime middle class around me. People with a degree or advanced degree, people with
identifiable special skills (accountancy, engineering) who guard their expertise as would a 15th century guild worker, people
with decent table manners...
Then their Fortune 500 company kicks them out of their corporate featherbed, they spend a
year or two or more discovering their specialized skills are worth half of what they'd
thought, and when they land a job, they're expected to cook the books or sign off on dodgy
products, acting as designated corporate fall guys in the event of an investigation.
When I was in university there was no Leftist programming. People were
there to become engineers, IT specialists, doctors, nurses, businessmen, accounting.
You maybe had to take an "African-American studies" course but that was just to get enough
credits to graduate. Also, by the time most people went to college (when I did from 93-98) they were adults
with opinions. Sales is a diminishing field now with the internet.
@jim jones A shrewd observation is my immediate reaction. Most likely true of the
organised institutional left which, when it's old product no longer sells doesn't want to
declare bankruptcy and shut up shop.
"Government exists to spend. The purpose of government is to serve the general welfare of the
citizens, not just the military-industrial complex and the financial class. Didn't we have a
stimulus, oh, eight years ago? It was tiny and has not been entirely spent. As Yellen
implied, we need more spending of the non-military kind (what Barney Frank memorably called
"weaponized Keynesianism" doesn't stimulate)."
This is what has been missing for over 40 years in the US, government's role in the
economy. When any politician brings up the fact that it's time we used fiscal policy as it
was designed, neoliberals have a socialism meltdown. Both parties have been taken over by the
Kochtopus, The libertarian fascist ideology that hides behind the term "neoliberalism". The
ultimate goal of this zombie ideology that was thoroughly discredited in 2008 but continues
to roam the earth is to replace nations with privately owned cities. This experiment was
going on in Honduras, following the 2009 coup, until it was finally ended by a SC ruling that
it was unconstitutional.
"In a libertarian society, there is no commons or public space. There are property
lines, not borders. When it comes to real property and physical movement across such real
property, there are owners, guests, licensees, business invitees and trespassers – not
legal and illegal immigrants." ~ Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute
This is the struggle – the struggle to maintain public space on a planet that was
never meant to be owned in the first place.
Among the many untruths told about Donald Trump is the claim that his is not a movement of
ideas. As a candidate in 2016, Trump may not have spoken the language of the policy wonks. But
unlike those Republicans who did, his view of the world was not a stale ideological cliche. It
was instead refreshingly frank: about a foreign policy that couldn't win the wars it waged, an
economy that imperiled middle- and working-class America, and an immigration regime only the
employers of illegal nannies could love. Trump recognized reality, and that drew to his cause
independent-minded intellectuals who had also done so. The Trump movement suffers not from a
dearth of ideas or thinkers, but a dearth of institutions. It has thinkers but no think
tank.
F.H. Buckley, Foundation Professor at George Mason University's Scalia School of Law, is one
of its thinkers. His new book, The Republican Workers Party , comes from a publisher --
Encounter -- led by another, Roger Kimball. Buckley is no relation to William F., who as
writer, editor, and Firing Line host did more than anyone to make conservatism a byword
for eloquence in the latter half of the 20th century. But much as the other Buckley remade the
Right by founding National Review in 1955, this one aims to bring about a profound
change of heart and mind among conservatives. He wants to make good on the promise of the GOP
as a party for American workers.
It was a promise made right from the beginning, when in the mid-19th century the Republicans
were the party of free labor against the slavocracy. But the GOP and the country lost their
way. Today, in Buckley's telling, a self-perpetuating "New Class" of administrators and
mandarins runs the country from perches of privilege in the academy and nonprofit sector, as
well as the media, government, and much of the business world. Republicans of the Never Trump
variety are as much a part of this ruling caste as Clinton-Schumer-Pelosi Democrats are. And if
you might wonder whether someone in Buckley's position isn't part of the same professional
stratum, his answer is that he very much aspires to be a traitor to his class, just as Donald
Trump is.
Trump, writes Buckley, is "unlike anything we've seen before, for the simple reason that
he's up against something that we've never seen before: a liberalism that has given up on the
American Dream of a mobile and classless society." Those who today style themselves as
progressives are nothing of the sort -- they are not revolutionaries but the new aristocrats:
"They are Bourbons who seek to pass themselves off as Jacobins. They have bought into a radical
leftism, while resisting the call to unseat a patrician class that leftists in the past would
have opposed."
This is an eloquent explanation for an inversion that has puzzled many observers. Today's
Left, at least the mainstream Left represented by the Democratic Party, is now
establishmentarian. The Republican Right is now populist, if not downright revolutionary. "When
the upper class is composed of liberals who support socialist measures to keep us immobile and
preserve their privileged position," Buckley argues, "class warfare to free up our economy by
tearing down an aristocracy is conservative and just, as well as popular."
Buckley came to these conclusions before the rise of Donald Trump. They are at the heart of
his last two books, The Way Back and The Republic of Virtue . He recognized in
Trump a force for salutary change. So in early 2016, he signed up as a speechwriter for the
candidate and his family. At one point, this attracted unwanted attention: a speech delivered
by Donald Trump Jr. was found to have plagiarized an article in . Except it wasn't plagiarism:
Buckley was the author of both. I was editor of the magazine at the time, and Buckley is
correct when he says in The Republican Workers Party that I enjoyed the non-scandal --
because it brought attention to an essay I thought deserved a brighter spotlight than it had
initially received.
A further disclosure or two is in order: I also published some of the material that appears
in The Republican Workers Party in the journal I now edit, Modern Age , and I'm
thanked in the book's acknowledgments. My warm words for Buckley's last volume are quoted on
the dust jacket of this one. The review you're reading now is honest, but subjective -- I'm a
part of the story. Only a small one, however: Buckley reveals many details of the Trump
campaign and post-election transition that I had never heard before, including how Michael
Anton came to be hired and fired.
The campaign memoir is intriguing in its own right, but it's in the service of the book's
larger purpose. I've known Buckley to refer to himself as an economic determinist, and he's
also said that the future will be decided by a fight between the right-wing Marxists and the
left-wing Marxists. But those are exaggerations, and The Republican Workers Party isn't
primarily about economics: quite the contrary, it's about solidarity, humanity, and the
Christian spirit of brotherhood. The book is informed by a religious sensibility as much as it
is by policy acumen. But it's a religious sensibility that addresses the soul through material
conditions. Buckley is critical of attempts at a "moral rearmament crusade" that amounts to
shaming the poor and blaming them for their own condition.
On this, Buckley is at odds with what movement conservatism has promoted over the last
30-odd years, which is a pure moralism alongside a theoretically pure free-market economism,
each restricted to its own categorical silo. An economic conservative or libertarian might thus
approach Buckley's book with the trepeditation of a holy Inquisitor fearful that a friend will
be found committing heresy. But there is little in these pages that a free-market conservative
can quibble with at the policy level: rather it is the spirit in which economic conservatives
conduct politics that Buckley criticizes. He is even on the side of conservative orthodoxy,
more or less, when it comes to tariffs. He's a free trader at heart, though not a dogmatic
one.
On immigration, he favors a more Canadian-like, points-based system that would prioritize
skills, with a view toward providing maximum benefit for our current citizens, especially the
least well off among them. The present system "admits people who underbid native-born Americans
for low-skill jobs, while refusing entry to people with greater skills who would make life
better for all Americans." Canada lets in many more immigrants in proportion to its population
than the United States does, but "Canadians see an immigration policy designed to benefit the
native-born, so they don't think their government wants to stick it to them," even when it
comes to generous admission of refugees.
Buckley speaks from experience about immigration and Canada -- he was born, brought up, and
lived most of his life there before becoming a U.S. citizen in 2014. Like Alexander Hamilton,
whose Caribbean origins gave him a view of America's national economy unprejudiced by sectional
interests, Buckley's Canadian background gives him an independent vantage from which to
consider our characteristic shibboleths unsparingly. The separation of powers, for one, is a
dismal failure that "has given us two or more different Republican parties: a presidential
party, which today is the Republican Workers Party, but also congressional Republican parties
rooted in the issues and preference of local members. There's the Freedom Caucus composed of
Tea Party members, the more moderate Main Street Partnership and whatever maverick senators
were thinking this morning." Federalism too is a mixed bag. These are themes touched lightly
upon here but worked out in detail in such earlier Buckley books as The Once and Future
King .
That's not to say there's something alien about Buckley's ideas. He's an heir to Viscount
Bolingbroke, as were many of the Founding Fathers. (He contrasts Bolingbroke's disinterested
ideal of a patriot king, for example, with the identity-driven politics of the Democratic
Party.) But Buckley is also an heir to George Grant and the Anglo-Canadian tradition of Red
Toryism, a form of conservatism that does not bother itself with anti-government formulas that
never seem to reduce the size of government one iota anyway. Buckley's heroes are "leaders such
as Disraeli, Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston's father) and even Winston Churchill himself."
"They were conservative" but "they supported generous social welfare policies."
The policies that Buckley is most concerned about, however, are those that generate social
mobility. Education is thus high on his agenda. He is a strong supporter of vouchers and school
choice and points again to Canada as a success story for private schools receiving public
funds. But America is a rather different country, and as popular as vouchers are on the Right,
some of us can't help but wonder whether they would lead to the same outcome in primary and
secondary education that federal financial aid has produced in higher education. With the money
comes regulation, and usually soaring prices, too.
But Buckley is right that the defects of our present education system go a long way toward
explaining the rise of the new status class, and other countries have found answers to the
questions that perplex American politics -- or some of them at least. More adventurous thinking
is required if anything is to be saved of the American dream of mobility, in place of the
nightmare of division into static castes of winners and losers.
Libertarian economists and blame-the-poor moralizers are not the only figures on the Right
Buckley criticizes. He has no patience for the barely disguised Nietzscheanism of certain "East
Coast" Straussians, who imagine themselves to be philosopher-princes, educating a class of
obedient gentlemen who will in turn dominate a mass of purely appetitive worker bees and cannon
fodder.
Buckley's book is an argument against right-wing heartlessness. Its title may conjure in
some minds phantoms of the National Socialist German Workers Party or America's own penny-ante
white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party, on which the media has lavished a certain
amount of attention in recent years. But fascists are not traditionalists, workers, or even,
properly speaking, socialists -- they simply steal whatever terms happen to be popular. Buckley
refuses to concede their claims and appease them.
He is eloquent in his American -- not white -- nationalism. "There isn't much room for white
nationalism in American culture," he writes, "For alongside baseball and apple pie, it includes
Langston Hughes and Amy Tan, Tex-Mex food and Norah Jones. You can be an American if you don't
enjoy them, but you might be a wee bit more American if you do." It's populism, not
nationalism, that he considers a toxic term, its genealogy tracing to figures like "Pitchfork
Ben" Tillman, a Jim Crow proponent and defender of lynch mobs.
He is right to defend the honor of nationalism, but Buckley may be mistaken in his animus
toward "populism," a word that for most people is more likely to bring to mind William Jennings
Bryan than the Ku Klux Klan.
Buckley's project in The Republican Workers Party parallels on the Right the task
taken up by Mark Lilla on the Left in last year's The Once and Future Liberal . Like
Lilla, Buckley wants to see a revival of mid-20th-century liberalism. For both, politics is
ultimately class-based, not identity-based. Lilla trains his fire on the identity-parsing Left,
while Buckley rebukes the Right for failing to fight the class war -- or rather, for fighting
on the wrong side, that of the self-serving New Class, the aristocracy of education,
connections, and right-thinking opinion.
This may seem nostalgic, but it's not: Buckley does not expect a return to JFK or Camelot,
even if, like Lilla, he once borrowed a title from T.H. White. The 21st century can only give
us a new and very different Kennedy or Disraeli -- an insurgent from the Right to retake the
center. In Donald Trump, F.H. Buckley found such a figure, but a movement needs a program as
well as a leader, and the program has to be grounded in an idea of humanity and the limits of
politics. The nation defines those limits, and while not every Trump supporter will agree with
Buckley's policy thought in all its specifics, the spirit of Buckley's endeavor represents what
is finest in the Trump moment, and what is best in conservatism, too.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
"... As to your question about who votes for Bolsonaro, I think we can break this down into three or four categories. His hard core is the sort of middle class of small business owners, plus members of the police and the armed forces. This would be, I guess, your classic fascist constituency, if you want to call it that. But you know, that's a very small proportion. ..."
"... Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who is a former academic sociologist who was exiled during the military dictatorship and was president of Brazil in the late '90s. He has yet to endorse Haddad, despite the fact that Bolsonaro previously said something about 10 years ago that Fernando Henrique Cardoso should have been killed by the military dictatorship. This is a real, in my opinion, a real failure of character, a real cowardice from the Brazilian supposedly-centrist elite to defend democracy against the very obvious threat that Bolsonaro poses. ..."
As to your question about who votes for Bolsonaro, I think we can break this down into
three or four categories. His hard core is the sort of middle class of small business owners,
plus members of the police and the armed forces. This would be, I guess, your classic fascist
constituency, if you want to call it that. But you know, that's a very small proportion.
And certainly in terms of his voters, in terms of his voter base, that's a small proportion.
What you have, then, is the rich, amongst whom he has a very significant lead. He polls 60-65
percent amongst the rich. And these people are motivated by what is called [inaudible]machismo,
which is anti-Worker's Party sentiment, which is really a sort form of barely-disguised class
loathing which targets the Worker's Party, rails against corruption, but of course turns a
blind eye to corruption amongst more traditional right-wing politicians.
These are the people who, at the end of the day, are quite influential, and have probably
proved decisive for Bolsonaro. But that isn't to say that he doesn't have support amongst the
poor, and this is the real issue. Bolsonaro would not win an election with just the support of
the reactionary middle class and the rich. He needs the support amongst the broad masses, and
he does have that to a significant degree, unfortunately.
What are they motivated by? They're motivated by a sense that politics has failed them, that
their situation is pretty hopeless. The security situation is very grave. And Bolsonaro seems
to be someone who might do something different, might change things. It's a bit of a rolling of
the dice kind of situation. And you know, here the Worker's Party does bear some blame. They've
lost a large section of the working class. A large section of the poor feel like they were
betrayed by the Worker's Party, who didn't stay true to its promises. The Worker's Party
implemented the austerity in its last government under Dilma, which led to a ballooning of
unemployment. And you know, there's a sense that- well, what have you done for us? A lot of
people don't want to return to the path. They want something better, and kind of roll the dice
hoping that maybe Bolsonaro does something, even though all evidence points to the fact that
he'll be a government for the rich, and the very rich, and for the forces of repression.
GREG WILPERT: So finally, in the little time that we have remaining, what is
happening to Brazil's left? Is it supporting the Haddad campaign wholeheartedly?
ALEX HOCHULI: Yes, absolutely. It's pretty much uniform amongst the left. Certainly
in terms of, you know, in terms of individuals, in terms of groups, in terms of movements.
Everyone, from even the kind of far-left Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party who
hate PT have told its members that they should vote for Fernando Haddad who, it should be
noted, is a figure to the right of that of PT, I guess, within the party. He's a much more
centrist figure. So that's kind of notable.
What hasn't happened is a broad front against fascism. That hasn't really materialized,
because the Brazilian center has failed to defend its democratic institutions against the very
obvious threat that Bolsonaro represents. You know, just to highlight one thing, Eduardo
Bolsonaro, who is Jair Bolsonar's son and a congressman, has threatened the Supreme Court,
saying that you could close down the Supreme Court. All you have to do is send one soldier and
one corporal, and they'll shut down the Supreme Court. I mean, this is a pretty brave threat
against Brazilian institutions. And a lot of the center has failed to really manifest itself,
really failed to take a stand. Marina Silva, who was at one point polling quite high about six
months ago, who is a kind of an environmentalist and an evangelical and a centrist, and who is
known for always in her speeches talking about doing things democratically, even she- it took
her until this week to finally endorse Haddad, lending Haddad critical support.
The center right, which should be the, you know, the Brazilian establishment, the ones
upholding the institutions, have broadly failed to endorse Haddad as the democratic candidate.
Which is really, really striking. I mean, just to give you one example, probably the best known
figure for your viewers outside of Brazil who might not know the ins and outs and all the
players involved, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who is a former academic sociologist who was
exiled during the military dictatorship and was president of Brazil in the late '90s. He has
yet to endorse Haddad, despite the fact that Bolsonaro previously said something about 10 years
ago that Fernando Henrique Cardoso should have been killed by the military dictatorship. This
is a real, in my opinion, a real failure of character, a real cowardice from the Brazilian
supposedly-centrist elite to defend democracy against the very obvious threat that Bolsonaro
poses.
GREG WILPERT: Wow. Amazing. We'll definitely keep our eyes peeled for what happens on
Sunday. We'll probably have you back soon. I'm speaking to Alex Hochuli, researcher and
communication consultant based in Sao Paulo. Thanks again, Alex, for having joined us
today.
Consider the man they just arrested for the mail bomb scare. Reportedly, this person was
a career criminal with drug dealing and grand theft on his record and he was caught in
possession of a white van with decals on it depicting his targets. This man is a caricature
of a Trump supporter, ready-made for the cable news broadcast. Does anyone else see the
absurdity of it? Can this guy be for real?
"Breaking Proof of Deep State Hoax!"
"Clapper Talks About Cesar Sayoc Before He's Named as Suspect!"
The Russian Orthodox Church seems to mirror the Russian State whom it serves, in not
being openly at war with Ukraine but nevertheless working against it when doing so serves
the interests of the Russian state. So its priests openly blessing NAF fighters as they go
to kill Ukrainians have been sanctioned, OTOH Girkin was being helped by the Russian
Orthodox Church and NAF fighters have been quietly given refuge in Moscow's churches (a
Brazilian volunteer was found hiding in one on Kiev).
Compared ot Filaret's church, the UOC-MP has been more neutral about the war in Donbass.
The aforementioned priests bless soldiers in their (priests) area who seek such. Not on par
with the comments UOC-MP (Filaret included) have made on the civil war. it can be said that
Filaret and his church pray for those who kill rebel supporters.
The aforementioned Brazilian sough refuge and was understandably given such, seeing the
conditions people like him have faced when taken by the Kiev regime side.
And the Russian patriarch is of course on excellent terms with Putin whom he serves and
whom he awards. So as long as the Ukrainian Orthodox are under Moscow they are forced to
pray to a Patriarch who serves and celebrates Putin. They would rather not be in such a
situation. Moving them under Constantinople fixes this problem and returns them to
Orthodoxy.
Constantinople has made the problem worse by giving the Kiev regime and Filaret a premise
(misguided that it is notwithstanding) to seize UOC-MP property. The Porky-Filaret tandem is
one that many UOC aren't supportive of.
He also added that the priests of the Sviatohirsk Lavra blessed his gang formation in
2014 at the beginning of hostilities in Donbas.
According to him, he then hoped that the entire hierarchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox
Church (Moscow Patriarchate) would overtly support them, but this did not happen.
Currently, Girkin has no doubt that a significant part of the UOC-MP will "run" to the
autocephalous Ukrainian Church, and he even knows such bishops who are ready to do so.
You earlier noted UOC-MP support/sympathy for the rebels. Nothing is stopping Onufry and
others from the UOC-MP to break with the ROC-MP -- along the lines of Filaret. The UOC-MP
faces much pressure from the Kiev regime and some nationalist elements.
Veneration of Andrey Bogolubsky who sacked Kiev, slaughtered many of its inhabitants and
generally treated Kiev as the crusaders treated Constantinople is another ridiculous thing
that Ukrainian Orthodox are forced to put up with if they belong to Moscow's Church.
What kind of veneration ? That attack was part of a civil war, with looting having
been an unfortunate aspect. Sherman wasn't more civil towards Atlanta. neither was the Mongol
conquest of Kiev and other parts of Rus.
Their Church is riddled with KGB and FSB men at the highest levels (not that Filaret was
different, of course). KGB/FSB are not hardcore Russian nationalists. But they, as does the
ROC, serve the Russian state.
Along the lines of saying that the Vatican has been riddled with Nazi sympathizers. No
denying that the ROC-MP was very much compromised during the Soviet period. It's a very
different and improved era.
In comparison, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church seems more riddled with Bandera
supporters.
Well, if it wants to present itself as and truly be the All Rus Church and bearer of the
Rus legacy that united all Eastern Slavs, that was forced to move to Vladimir and Moscow by
the Polish annexation of Rus heartland, it would make sense to return to Kiev after Kiev
was "liberated." But it didn't happen, this all Rus stuff was cheap propaganda, it remained
Russia's Church (despite having gotten a bunch of Ukrainians as leaders in the 18th
century).
The directly above excerpted is cheap propaganda. Capitals of nations, sports teams,
corporate businesses and other entities have been known to change their locale or main locale
for a variety of reasons. Besides, occurrences like WW II and the present Kiev regime
situation indicate that Russia is a more secure place.
BTW, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church shifted its main office from Lviv to Kiev.
Moscow cannot do much, it is still too weak. The enemy seeks a war now. Surely they will
take the churches by force, hoping for war now. Now is the time for wisdom.
I am starting to get annoyed at the number of commentators who have no background in
Orthodox ecclesiology and scant knowledge of Byzantine, Ukrainian and Russian history or
about the contemporary realities of religious life throughout the former Soviet Union.
These pundits nevertheless feel confident to deliver sweeping pronouncements about the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church situation and its ramifications for the Moscow Patriarchate and
the Orthodox Church as a whole.
A point that concerns some of what's said and not said in the above linked article. For
example, it's not noted that Filaret Denisenko's drive for a completely separate Ukrainian
Orthodox Church from the Moscow Patriarchate, came only after he didn't get a promotion
within the Moscow Patriarchate. Up to that point, he was a firm believer in the Moscow
Patriarchate having ties with the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and Orthodox Churches from some
other parts of the former USSR.
Excerpt –
Finally, there are those Ukrainian Orthodox who argue that Russian Orthodoxy is utterly
separate and unrelated to Ukrainian Orthodoxy and point to events such as Andrey
Bogolyubsky sack of Kiev in 1169 as early evidence of Russian-Ukrainian antagonism. Even
those who might concede that Russian Orthodoxy developed as a result of the conversion of
Kiev would point out that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, certainly since the fifteenth
century was evolving separately from the Russian Orthodox Church and that it was unjustly
merged with the Russian Church, first during the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union.
Bogolyubsky's grandfather was a grand prince of Kiev. On two different occasions, his
father had that very same title, during a period when Kiev went thru numerous grand princes.
In short, Bogolyubsky had a claim to the Kiev throne. The aforementioned sack of Kiev by
Bogolyubsky's forces wasn't so much of a foreign attack – but more along the lines of
Sherman's razing of Atlanta. Bogolyubsky had the desire to simultaneously build and expand
Rus, thereby explaining his presence in Suzdal, while feeling akin to Kiev.
The initial Polish occupation of much of modern day Ukrainian territory, played a role in
whatever differing characteristics developed, with Orthodox Christian identity within what
had comprised Rus. Upon Russia's victory over Poland and the former's gathering of Rus
territory (which Poland occupied), there was no wide scale opposition by the ancestors of
modern day Ukrainians, with being under the same Orthodox Church as Russia.
For President Vladimir Putin, major defections from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the
Moscow Patriarchate would represent one of the clearest rejections of his view that
Ukrainian and Russians form a single people and civilization; it would, in essence, be
Ukrainians voting with their feet to reject that proposition. On the other hand, if
President Poroshenko's government begins to use administrative pressures to compel priests
and parishes to break their ecclesiastical ties to Moscow, this could prove politically
destabilizing both in Ukraine and complicate its relations with the West.
For the Ukrainian nationalist advocacy being pursued by Poroshenko, the presence of a
Ukrainian Orthodox Church that's loosely affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church of the
Moscow Patriarchate, is a rejection of the agenda to separate Ukraine from Russia as much as
possible.
Regarding that view is this piece concerning attitudes in Ukraine about Russia:
Stepan Khmara is ashamed almost 50% of his countrymen, despite the war, still positively
have positive attitude towards Russia. He thinks that half of the country are good 'Little
Russians' and 'Moskovske bydlo'. He invokes history from the Holodomor and Soviet takeover
of Western Ukraine. He bemoans the fact that even in Western Ukraine, 31% of the
respondents also had positive attitude towards Russia.
A recent RFE/RL article says that most of Ukraine's Orthodox Christian faithful follow the
Orthodox Church with loose ties to the Moscow Patriarchate.
Whatever the case is, a noticeable number in that area follow that church. Can imagine the
outcry in some circles if an effort was made to eliminate the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
on the basis of having an imperial legacy with Poland that involved the suppression of the
Orthodox Church.
I would say that fascism is nationalist movement with the nationality of host country in its core. While neoliberalism
like Trotskyism is in its core globalization movement.
Modem far right movement in Europe emerged as a reaction neolineralism and with few exceptions (Ukranina, oland, Baltic states)
are suspecialous of both EU and the USA and by extension of neoliberal globalization
Notable quotes:
"... The Council on Foreign Relations has placed its members in policy-making with the State Department and other federal agencies. Every secretary of State since 1944, with the exception of James F Byrnes, has been a member of the council. ..."
"... n their pursuit of a New World Order, they are prepared to deal without prejudice with a communist state, a socialist state, a democratic state, a monarchy, an oligarchy ..."
"... When we change presidents, it is understood to mean that the voters are ordering a change in national policy. Since 1945, three different Republicans have occupied the White House for 16 years, and four democrats have held this most powerful post for 17 years. With the exception of the first seven years of the Eisenhower administration, there has been no appreciable change in foreign or domestic policy. ..."
"... There has been a great turnover in personnel, but no change in policy. Example: during the Nixon years, Henry Kissinger, a council member and Nelson Rockefeller protégé, was in charge of foreign policy. When Jimmy Carter was elected, Kissinger was replaced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a council member and David Rockefeller protégé. ..."
"... Whereas the Council on Foreign Relations is distinctly national, representation is allocated equally to Western Europe, Japan and the United States. It is intended to act as the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. ..."
"... Before defining the characteristics of fascism, we should look at the neo-conservatives who run the US government on behalf of the elite. ..."
"... The small, but ruthless, group of men, the "money power" described by Lincoln, has stolen democracy from the American people. ..."
Perhaps the best description of how the elite operate comes from the late Senator Barry Goldwater, Presidential candidate of
the Republican Party back in 1964. Senator Goldwater, a close friend of both JFK and Joe McCarthy, was considered a saber
rattling, extreme right wing conservative. Following his death, the Washington Post wrote: "Unlike nearly every other politician
who ever lived, anywhere in the world, Barry Goldwater always said exactly what was on his mind. He spared his listeners
nothing." This eulogy appears to be confirmed in one of Goldwater's books, With no Apologies, [12] in which he presents an
astonishingly frank exposé of the unfettered power and aspirations of the elite:
"The Council on Foreign Relations has placed its members in policy-making with the State Department and other federal
agencies. Every secretary of State since 1944, with the exception of James F Byrnes, has been a member of the council. Almost
without exception, its members are united by a congeniality of birth, economic status and educational background. I believe
that the Council on Foreign relations and its ancillary elitist groups are indifferent to communism. They have no ideological
anchors. In their pursuit of a New World Order, they are prepared to deal without prejudice with a communist state, a
socialist state, a democratic state, a monarchy, an oligarchy - it's all the same to them.
"When we change presidents, it is understood to mean that the voters are ordering a change in national policy. Since 1945,
three different Republicans have occupied the White House for 16 years, and four democrats have held this most powerful post
for 17 years. With the exception of the first seven years of the Eisenhower administration, there has been no appreciable
change in foreign or domestic policy.
There has been a great turnover in personnel, but no change in policy. Example: during
the Nixon years, Henry Kissinger, a council member and Nelson Rockefeller protégé, was in charge of foreign policy. When Jimmy
Carter was elected, Kissinger was replaced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a council member and David Rockefeller protégé.
"Whereas the Council on Foreign Relations is distinctly national, representation is allocated equally to Western Europe,
Japan and the United States. It is intended to act as the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and
banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States.
"Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller screened and selected every individual who was invited to participate in shaping
and administering the proposed New World Order The Trilateral organization created by David Rockefeller was a surrogate - its
members selected by Rockefeller, its purpose defined by Rockefeller, its funding supplied by Rockefeller Examination of the
membership roster establishes beyond question that all those invited to join were members of the power elite, enlisted with
great skill and singleness of purpose from the banking, commercial, political and communications sectors In my view, the
Trilateral Commission represents a skilful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power -
political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical.
"The Trilateral Commission even selects and elevates its candidates to positions of political power. David Rockefeller and
Zbigniew Brzezinski found Jimmy Carter to be an ideal candidate, for example. They helped him to win the Democratic nomination
and the Presidency [1977]. To accomplish their purpose, they mobilized the money power of the Wall Street bankers, the
intellectual influence of the academic community - which is subservient to the wealthy of the great tax-free foundations - and
the media controllers represented in the membership of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. It was
no accident that Brzezinski and Rockefeller invited Carter to join the commission in 1973. But they weren't ready to bet all
their chips on Carter. They made him a founding member of the commission but to keep their options open they also brought in
Walter Mondale and Elliot Richardson, a highly visible Republican member of the Nixon administration, and they looked at other
potential nominees."
Goldwater's testimony is all the more astonishing coming from a man with considerable knowledge of the core of the matrix and
who was no radical of the left. Goldwater was the only Republican Presidential candidate not to be the CFR choice for the
presidential nomination in the last 50 years.
The elite inner-circle members of the Bilderberg club, Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission, conspire to
politically, and economically, dominate the entire world under their New World Order, or Globalisation as they now prefer to name
it.
Since the Second World War, Rockefeller's Council on Foreign Relations has filled key positions in virtually every
administration. Since Eisenhower, every man who has won the nomination for either party (except Goldwater in 1964) has been
directly sponsored by Rockefeller's CFR.
Before defining the characteristics of fascism, we should look at the neo-conservatives who run the US government on behalf of
the elite. In her book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, [13] Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at the University of
Calgary, Canada, names current politicians, political advisers, administration and Supreme Court officials, who were followers of
the teachings of the fascist Leo Strauss.
Leo Strauss (1899- 1973) was a philosopher at the University of Chicago (built by Rockefeller money) where he taught many of
those currently involved in the US administration. Strauss left Nazi Germany in 1934 having been given a Rockefeller Foundation
bursary and is considered to be the "fascist godfather" of today's neo-cons.
According to Jeffery Steinberg in Executive Intelligence review [14]: "A review of Leo Strauss' career reveals why the label 'Straussian'
carries some very filthy implications. Although nominally a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany (he actually left for a better
position abroad, on the warm recommendation of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt), Strauss was an unabashed proponent of the three most
notorious shapers of the Nazi philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. Recent biographies have
revealed the depth of Heidegger's enthusiasm for Hitler and Nazism.
"The hallmark of Strauss's approach to philosophy was his hatred of the modern world, his belief in a totalitarian system, run
by 'philosophers' who rejected all universal principles of natural law, but saw their mission as absolute rulers, who lied and
deceived a foolish 'populist' mass, and used both religion and politics as a means of disseminating myths that kept the general
population in clueless servitude."
Professor Shadia Drury [15] provides a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of the neocons "Leo Strauss was a great believer
in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics. Public support for the Iraq war rested on lies about Iraq posing an imminent
threat to the United States - the business about weapons of mass destruction and a fictitious alliance between al-Qaeda and the
Iraq regime. Now that the lies have been exposed, Paul Wolfowitz [Straussian] and others in the war party are denying that these
were the real reasons for the war.
"The idea that Strauss was a great defender of liberal democracy is laughable. I suppose that Strauss's disciples consider it
a noble lie. Yet many in the media have been gullible enough to believe it. The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished
believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be
like throwing pearls before swine A second fundamental of Strauss's ancients has to do with their insistence on the need for
secrecy and the necessity of lies. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He
argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons - to spare the people's feelings and to protect the elite from
possible reprisals. The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right - the right of the superior to
rule over the inferior, the master over the slave and the wise few over the vulgar many.
"I never imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the unscrupulous elite that he elevates would ever come so close
to political power, nor that the ominous tyranny of the wise would ever come so close to being realised in the political life of
a great nation like the United States. But fear is the greatest ally of tyranny."
Shadia Drury is by no means alone in her desperate concern. Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois law
school writes [16]: "I entered the University of Chicago in September of 1968 shortly after Strauss had retired. But I was
trained in Chicago's Political Science Department by Strauss's foremost protégé, co-author, and literary executor Joseph Cropsey.
Based upon my personal experience as an alumnus of Chicago I concur completely with Professor Drury's devastating critique of
Strauss. I also agree with her penetrating analysis of the degradation of the American political process by Chicago's Straussian
cabal.
"Chicago routinely trained me and numerous other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is
precisely why so many neophyte neo-con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago became
the 'brains' behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree
from the University of Chicago in 1967. Many of his 'lawyers' at the Department of Injustice [sic] are members of the
right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka 'Feddies'), which originated in part at the
University of Chicago.
"According to his own public estimate and boast before the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush Jr. hired about 20
Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration Just recently the University of Chicago officially celebrated its
Bush Jr. Straussian cabal. Only the University of Chicago would have the Orwellian gall to publicly claim that Strauss and
Bloom [a Strauss protégé] cared one whit about democracy let alone comprehend the 'ideals of democracy'.
"Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like Wolfowitz or
totalitarians like Ashcroft! The neo-con cabal, currently ruling America and in charge of pursuing the New World Order agenda
is, according to Professors Drury and Boyle, "a tyranny of warmongers and unscrupulous elites from an intellectual and moral
cesspool."
What are the implications of this "New World Order", or "Globalization" as it is now called? Richard K. Moore [17] writes:
"The course of world events, for the first time in history, is now largely controlled by a centralised global regime. This regime
has been consolidating power ever since World War II and is now formalising that power into a collection of centralised
institutions and a new system of international 'order'. Top western political leaders are participants in this global regime, and
the strong Western nation state is rapidly being dismantled and destabilised. The global regime serves elite corporate interests
exclusively. It has no particular regard for human rights, democracy, human welfare, or the health of the environment. The only
god of this regime is the god of wealth accumulation.
"In two centuries the Western world has come full circle from tyranny to tyranny. The tyranny of monarchs was overthrown in
the Enlightenment and semi-democratic republics were established. Two centuries later those republics are being destabilised
and a new tyranny is assuming power - a global tyranny of anonymous corporate elites. This anonymous regime has no qualms
about creating poverty, destroying nations, and engaging in genocide.
"Humanity can do better than this - much better - and there is reason to hope that the time is ripe for humanity to bring
about fundamental changes We can oust the elites from power and reorganise our economies so that they serve the needs of the
people instead of the needs of endless wealth accumulation. This is our Revolutionary Imperative. Not an imperative to violent
revolution, but an imperative to do something even more revolutionary - to set humanity on a sane course using peaceful,
democratic means."
Bottom line, are the neo-cons driving this agenda neo-fascist? Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, published research
on fascism [18] in which he examined the fascist regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto and several Latin American
regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each fascist State:
Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans,
symbols, songs and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
Disdain for the recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in
fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the
other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarceration of prisoners, etc.
Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy
over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists;
socialists; terrorists, etc.
Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a
disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military are glamorized.
Rampant sexism - The government of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist
regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is
represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media
is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in
war time, is very common.
Obsession with National security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
Religion and Government are intertwined - Government in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the
nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when
the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation are often the ones who
put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
Labor Power is suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government,
labor unions are either eliminated, or are severely restricted.
Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher
education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free
expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce
laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There
is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates
who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from
accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even
outright stolen by government leaders.
Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are
manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassinations of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting
numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries
to manipulate or control elections.
Benito Mussolini - who knew something about fascism - had a more straightforward definition: "Fascism should more properly be
called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
Abraham Lincoln stated, "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the
safety of our country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country
will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and
the republic is destroyed."
The small, but ruthless, group of men, the "money power" described by Lincoln, has stolen democracy from the American
people. An ever-growing number of informed Americans, however, are fighting a brave, but desperate rear-guard action to
retrieve that democracy. Will we give them our total support now, or simply sit back and watch as the entire planet is taken back
to the dark ages? "The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing."
Jim Macgregor is a 57 year old retired doctor. For many years he was a family practitioner and visiting Medical Officer
to Glenochil Prison, one of Scotland's high security prisons. Through his prison work, he developed a special interest in
miscarriages of justice and is a member of the Miscarriage of Justice Organisation. MOJO (Scotland). You can contact Jim at
[email protected]
"... Another reason to hate the Catholic Church: The Catholic Church= Mike Pompeo mentored by Papal Advisor Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon ..."
Another reason to hate the Catholic Church: The Catholic Church= Mike Pompeo mentored by Papal Advisor Harvard Law Professor Mary
Ann Glendon .
Pompeo the Cockroach .as it .(Mike Pompeo is an it, as is that other well known BLATARIA .Hillary Clinton) .is known to the
residents of Satan's filthy stinking reeking toilet bowl waaaaaaaaay down in putrid HELL!!!!!!!
Don't mind the split infinitive they are really quite alright .only a girly boy grammar NAZI!!! would shriek about it ..
B, it does seem that the k affair has risen the crisis in Yemen to the foreground just as
many predicted. Thank goodness.
You are correct in that many are looking too far into this as some kind of conspiracy. I
am reminded by this of many who put forth that it made no difference as to who won the prez
election. It did make a difference to the military as well as Hillary's backers in the cIa
and fbI.
The Saudis screwed up and they will get their comeuppance it seems. Russia might be able
to wiggle their way into the middle then, filling the vacuum of uncle Sam at the circle
jerk. The Saudis will have to curtail their operation in Yemen and no quarter will be given
to wahhabi-terrorists by ksa who wish retribution against Russia. Win-win.
Interesting take by Ghassan Kadi on the Saker's blog, for those who still sense a
conspiracy in this. https://thesaker.is/insights-into-the-khashoggi-ordeal-who-and-why/
Goes back to this 'fiance', but adds Gullen to the mix and makes Erdy out to be an
instigator. Good to have a viewpoint from someone who has lived in Sawdi land.
"... Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare ..."
"... This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs , by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; Zen Cash ; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom ; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott ; and TheBumperSticker.com . ..."
Gareth Porter is interviewed on his article for Truthdig, " Can Trump Take
Down the American Empire? " Porter talks about revelations in the Bob Woodward book "Fear",
about the Trump presidency, and how they may pertain to the American Empire. Porter also talks
about the Trump presidency, North Korea, and Iran.
"... As a Muslim, Mr. Khashoggi could have gone to any country that upholds Muslim marriage rites and remarried without having to formally divorce his first wife, and then go to America and live with his "new wife" under the guise of a de-facto relationship. So why would he risk his life and walk into a potential death trap? ..."
"... Logic stipulates that Khashoggi entered the Consulate after he was given vehement assurances that his safety was guaranteed by the Saudi Crown. He would have never entered the Consulate had he not been given this assurance. ..."
"... Hatice Cengiz (Turkish for Khadijeh Jengiz) it is claimed, raised the first alarm for Khashoggi's disappearance, announcing at the same time that she is/was his fiancée. But that latter announcement of hers came as a surprise even to Khashoggi's own family. ..."
"... Some reports allege that Hatice has had a colourful history, including Mossad training https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SPuKo7WMSA&feature=youtu.be . The same YouTube alleges that she was a Gülenist and was arrested by Erdogan and released under the condition that she works for his security apparatus in order to guarantee her freedom. If such is the case, do we know if she has been also blackmailed in exchange for security of family members, loved ones, property etc? We don't know. ..."
"... In reality, irrespective of what his family members are saying now, Khashoggi has never introduced her to the world as his fiancée; and this is fact. So was she his fiancée? It is at least possible that she wasn't? So, who was she to Khashoggi and what role did she possibly play? ..."
"... Gülen is falling out of America's favour as he seems to have outlived his use-by date, and the Gülenist movement would be in dire need of a new benefactor. ..."
"... Cengiz, a former Gülenist, released on the above-mentioned conditions and possible threats, might have introduced herself to Khashoggi as an undercover Gülenist, and she had a history to support her claim. Being a former Gülenist, she might have indeed kept a foot in the Gülenist camp, and with the diminishing support of the American Government to the Gulenist movement, she might have been recruited to source finance. The Gülenists might have eyed Saudi Arabia to take this role, and as the rift between the Saudi royals and Erdogan intensified after their former joint effort to topple the legitimate secular government of Syria ..."
"... MBS himself would have inadvertently invited the Gülenists to approach him when he announced, back in March 2018 during a visit to the Coptic Pope Tawadros II in Egypt, that the triangle of evil in the Middle East is comprised of Iran, Islamist extremists groups and Turkey, and, in naming Turkey, he obviously meant Erdogan personally. ..."
"... With the Saudi-led Wahhabi version of fundamentalist Islam competing with the Muslim Brotherhood side, politically and militarily headed by Erdogan, it is not far-fetched to believe that either party is conspiring to topple the other. ..."
"... It is highly likely that Saudi officials had several contingency plans for Khashoggi's visit; depending on its outcome and the information that he had to offer. Those plans might have included giving him a wide range of treatments, ranging from a red carpet reception in Saudi Arabia, to beheading and dismembering him within the Consulate's grounds. ..."
"... It is possible that the Saudi officials in Turkey have had their own contacts with the Gülenists prior to the supposed ground-breaking visit of Khashoggi. In such a case, if the story Khashoggi may have offered did not fall in line with the story the Saudi's already know, then Khashoggi would have automatically been branded as suspicious and his safe entry would have been revoked. In such a case, he would have walked into his own trap. ..."
"... If any of the above scenarios are accurate, then the role of Erdogan in this story is not that of a scavenger who capitalized on the rift generated between the Saudis and America, but that he was instrumental in conjuring up and orchestrating the whole drama. Erdogan might have subjected the Saudi Government to the Gülen litmus test, and in such a case, the victim is Saudi Arabia and the scavenger is America seeking silence money in lieu of continued protection of Saudi interests. ..."
"... In all of the above scenarios, Khashoggi would have been driven into the trap by his alleged fiancée and had his impunity revoked by the Saudi officials because he failed the test. ..."
"... Most likely, Khashoggi was after amnesty from the Saudi Crown, and this would be a safety concern not only for Khashoggi himself, but also for his family that continued to live in Saudi Arabia ..."
"... Arabic media are inundated with posts and YouTube videos that are very damning of Hatice Cengiz ..."
"... . In reality however, her sudden emergence as Khashoggi's "fiancée", the fact that she allegedly waited for nearly 24 hours before reporting his disappearance and her personal, professional and political history are all factors that cast much doubt about her innocence and instead, portray her as a possible key element in the series of events that led to the disappearance of Khashoggi. ..."
"... And if Trump is seizing the opportunity to grab MBS, and this time he will be grabbing by the wallet, if Erdogan smells a hint of preparedness of MBS to support Gülen, then Erdogan would want MBS's wallet and head. Any whichever way, the silver lining of this story is that for once, Saudi Arabia is finally running for cover. Few around the world will give this brutal royal family any sympathy. ..."
"... MBS has committed heinous war crimes in Yemen and has made huge errors of judgment with regard to Syria and Qatar. He made many enemies, and it seems that Erdogan is out to get him. ..."
"... It does seem possible that the Assad-must-go curse has reached the neck of the Saudi throne ..."
"... Interestingly enough apparently K handed his two phones to fiancée before he went in ..any good journalist would have left a cache somewhere to be opened incase of certain events?????? ..."
"... why enter the consulate in Turkey? And, not in USA? And, why not the Embassy as the Ambassador has more power, than the Consular? Also, both the Muslim Brotherhood have Wahhabism have been friends for ages, as their theology is very similar with each other. And, if fact Erdogan is not Muslim Brotherhood but a Sufi. ..."
"... I've read several articles about Khashoggi and my feeling right now is everyone is lying, including B and Ghassan Kadi. ..."
"... Seems to me that also the Old US Establishment, along with the EU Establishment, both anti-Trump, never wanted MbS in the first place. Israel, and therefore Trump, are happy with MbS but a lot of people would like to see him gone and get the old "safe" gang back (who paid handsome bribes/salaries for decades). MbS is similar to Trump, way too impulsive, unpredictable and manic, and a special kind of crazy on top to make for a reliable partner in crime. ..."
"... The Establishment wants the Saudis to sell them their oil, then to recycle the money back into their economies. They'd prefer that they do this quietly, without any big fuss. They can get rich doing so, but they shouldn't disrupt the world. And this is the role that the Saudis have played mostly for the last 60-70 years. ..."
"... Until MbS. So yes, it is conceivable that some other powerful people are getting a bit tired of him. The same powerful people who really don't want the disruption of the world that a Shiite-Sunni war over the oil fields would cause. The same powerful friends who are also worried about Trump upsetting apple carts. Perhaps these powerful people are moving against a war, which means against Trump on Iran, and against MbS if they feel he keeps stirring things up too much. ..."
"... One problem throughout this whole affair is that I don't believe the Turks. Erdogon shutdown or converted the independent media that they once had. And in a case like this, all information comes from the government anyways. The Sauds have been rightly attacked for changing their story. But the Turks have been too. I've gotten the feeling that the 'news' reports from Turkish leaks (supposedly) have simply been the plot lines of various Hollywood movies. The body was cut up (with a chainsaw? like in Texas?), the body was dissolved in acid, the killers watched on Skype (always good to get that hip tech tie-in to a story). It can't all be true. ..."
"... Like The Salisbury Affair, The Case of the Disappearing Lover in Instanbul simply is going to have to be one to sit back and wait and see what if anything actually emerges as the truth. ..."
"... Seems pretty clueless to drop the bits in a well. Maybe the "local contact" was actually the consul, suggesting: Hey, I have an idea! How about dropping the body parts down the well? ..."
"... That is about the dumbest thing I have heard yet in the Story of K. Except, the idea of the body double. The people who thought up the body double idea must be the same Einsteins who figured the well in the consul's garden was a solution to disposal. Keystone Konsul. ..."
"... That bit of imagination leads to the idea that one of Khashoggi's last thoughts was "shit, I knew getting married again was a bad idea." ..."
"... The interesting thing was watching the US media go crazy about this. I kept thinking how different was this from Obama ordering Anwar Al-Awaki executed by drone strike? Al-Awaki received no trial, or even some kind of demand. Obama and his team just had him executed. So MBS is a horrible monster for doing exactly what Obama did. ..."
"... Khashoggi seemed to be working to "end dictatorship" and spread "free speech," democracy, voting, opinion polls, feminism, gender theory, lgbt washrooms, all that. All the great stuff of democracy. Worked out great in Sweden, why not Saudi Arabia? ..."
"... It was Khashoggi beating the Assad must go drum. The last Saudi represented on this site said Assad is harmless as long as he understands Saudi interests exist in Syria. Not ideal, but a better offer than London's. Further, the dead "journalist" believed Syria should be divided, and worse, that we should now act as if Assad is already gone ..."
"... Seems to come down to him being lied to, conn'd or lured into the consulate and his death. Then we come to the whole other point of why on earth did the Saudis use their consulate as an assassination killing ground? ..."
"... Governments killing people within their consulates is very rare. For reasons that are now very obvious, if they weren't before. ..."
"... The pundits who say MBS wanted to send a message set off alarms in my brain. Because that is exactly the reason we are supposed to believe that Putin uses all sorts of bizarre assasination methods that are obviously traced back to him. He wants to send a message. Yeah, right. And that's why they brought a bleep-storm of trouble down on top of their heads. To send a message? ..."
When I worked and lived in Saudi Arabia, one of the first things I learnt was that
the company I worked for had a fulltime employee with the job description of "Mu'aqeb". The
best translation of this title is "expeditor". This man was in charge of every matter that had
to do with dealing with government. He is the one who takes one's passport and sees that a
Saudi "Iquama" (temporary certificate of residence) is produced. He is the one who renews
driving licenses. He is the one that does the necessary paperwork to grant employees exit and
re-entry visas when they go away on holidays. He even applies on one's behalf for visas to
visit other countries. He even paid water and electricity bills. He did it all, and of course,
on top of his salary, he expected a present from employees on their return to work from
holidays, and some employees would risk big penalties smuggling in Playboy magazines to reward
him with. But the company I worked for was not alone in this regard; all other companies had
their own "Mu'aqeb".
It is against the Saudi psyche, culture and "pride" to go to a government office, wait in
line and make an application for anything. Not even uneducated poor Saudis are accustomed to go
through the rigmarole of government red-tape and routine.
Mr. Khashoggi was from the upper crust, and it is highly doubtful that he would have been
willing and prepared to physically enter the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul seeking an official
document.
Jamal Khashoggi was no fool. He knew the modus operandi of the Saudi Government too well. He
knew that what he had said was tantamount to a death sentence in the brutal Kingdom of Sand. So
what incited him to walk into the Consulate? To receive a divorce certificate so he could
remarry as the reports are trying to make us believe? Not a chance.
But this is not all. As a Muslim, Mr. Khashoggi could have gone to any country that upholds
Muslim marriage rites and remarried without having to formally divorce his first wife, and then
go to America and live with his "new wife" under the guise of a de-facto relationship. So why
would he risk his life and walk into a potential death trap?
Logic stipulates that Khashoggi entered the Consulate after he was given vehement assurances
that his safety was guaranteed by the Saudi Crown. He would have never entered the Consulate
had he not been given this assurance.
But why would the Saudi Government give him this assurance even though he had been very
critical of MBS? A good question.
Once again, a logical hypothetical answer to this question could be that Khashoggi had some
important meeting with a high ranking Saudi official to discuss some issues of serious
importance, and this normally means that he had some classified information to pass on to the
Saudi Government; important enough that the Saudi Crown was prepared to set aside Khashoggi's
recent history in exchange of this information.
If we try to connect more dots in a speculative but rational manner, the story can easily
become more interesting.
Hatice Cengiz (Turkish for Khadijeh Jengiz) it is claimed, raised the first alarm for
Khashoggi's disappearance, announcing at the same time that she is/was his fiancée. But
that latter announcement of hers came as a surprise even to Khashoggi's own family.
Not much is said and speculated about Hatice in the West, but she is definitely making some
headlines in the Arab World, especially on media controlled and sponsored by Saudi Arabia. To
this effect, and because the Saudi neck is on the chopping board, it is possible that for the
first time ever perhaps, the Saudis are telling the truth.
But the Saudis are the boys who cried wolf, and no one will ever believe them. But, let us
explore how they might have got themselves into this bind.
As we connect the dots, we speculate as follows:
Some reports allege that Hatice has had a colourful history, including Mossad training
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SPuKo7WMSA&feature=youtu.be . The
same YouTube alleges that she was a Gülenist and was arrested by Erdogan and released
under the condition that she works for his security apparatus in order to guarantee her
freedom. If such is the case, do we know if she has been also blackmailed in exchange for
security of family members, loved ones, property etc? We don't know.
It has also been reported that Jamal Khashoggi met her only as early as May 2018 and later
introduced her as an expert on Omani history and politics. In reality, irrespective of what his
family members are saying now, Khashoggi has never introduced her to the world as his
fiancée; and this is fact. So was she his fiancée? It is at least possible that she wasn't? So, who was she to Khashoggi and what role did she possibly play?
The following speculation cannot be proved, but it makes sense:
To explain what a Gülenist is for the benefit of the reader who is unaware of this
term, Erdogan blamed former friend and ally Fethullah Gülen for the failed coup attempt of
July 2016 and persecuted his followers, putting tens of thousands of them in jail. Erdogan's
relationship with America was already deteriorating at that time because of America's support
to Syrian Kurds, and to add to Erdogan's woes, America was and continues to give Gülen a
safe haven despite many requests by Erdogan to have him extradited to Turkey to face trial. But
Gülen is falling out of America's favour as he seems to have outlived his use-by date, and
the Gülenist movement would be in dire need of a new benefactor.
Cengiz, a former Gülenist, released on the above-mentioned conditions and possible
threats, might have introduced herself to Khashoggi as an undercover Gülenist, and she had
a history to support her claim. Being a former Gülenist, she might have indeed kept a foot
in the Gülenist camp, and with the diminishing support of the American Government to the
Gulenist movement, she might have been recruited to source finance. The Gülenists might
have eyed Saudi Arabia to take this role, and as the rift between the Saudi royals and Erdogan
intensified after their former joint effort to topple the legitimate secular government of
Syria
The Gülenists would have found in Al-Saud what represents an enemy of an enemy, and
they had to find a way to seek Saudi support against Erdogan. MBS himself would have
inadvertently invited the Gülenists to approach him when he announced, back in March 2018
during a visit to the Coptic Pope Tawadros II in Egypt, that the triangle of evil in the Middle
East is comprised of Iran, Islamist extremists groups and Turkey, and, in naming Turkey, he
obviously meant Erdogan personally.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/08/saudi-crown-prince-sees-a-new-axis-of-evil-in-the-middle-east/
Khashoggi, with his expansive connections, looked like a good candidate to introduce the
would-be new partners and broker a deal between them.
Back to what may have incited Khashoggi to enter the Saudi Consulate and to why the Saudi
Government would have, in that case, given him a safe entry despite his history. Possibly,
Khashoggi believed that he had a "big story" to relay to the Saudi Government; one that most
likely exposed big time anti-Saudi dirt about Erdogan.
With the Saudi-led Wahhabi version of fundamentalist Islam competing with the Muslim
Brotherhood side, politically and militarily headed by Erdogan, it is not far-fetched to
believe that either party is conspiring to topple the other. If Khashoggi had a story to this
effect, even if it was fake but credible enough for him to believe, it would have given him the
impetus to seek an audience at the Saudi Consulate and hence an expectation for the Consulate
to positively reciprocate. In reality, given the history and culture involved, it is hard to
fathom that any scenario short of this one would have given either Khashoggi and/or the Saudi
officials enough reasons to meet in the manner and place they did.
It is highly likely that Saudi officials had several contingency plans for Khashoggi's
visit; depending on its outcome and the information that he had to offer. Those plans might
have included giving him a wide range of treatments, ranging from a red carpet reception in
Saudi Arabia, to beheading and dismembering him within the Consulate's grounds. What happened
after Khashoggi entered the precinct of the Consulate is fairly muddy and hard to speculate on.
If the above speculations thus far have been accurate, then these are the possible scenarios
that followed the fateful CCTV coverage of Khashoggi's entry to the Consulate:
1. It is possible that the Saudi officials in Turkey have had their own contacts with the Gülenists prior to the supposed ground-breaking visit of Khashoggi. In such a case, if the
story Khashoggi may have offered did not fall in line with the story the Saudi's already know,
then Khashoggi would have automatically been branded as suspicious and his safe entry would
have been revoked. In such a case, he would have walked into his own trap.
2. On the other hand, if Khashoggi indeed gave Saudi authorities vital information, so vital
that it clearly is vehemently pro-Gülen, and as Gülen is no longer an American
favourite, then upon his return to America he may have become a Saudi liability that can
potentially muddy the Saudi-American waters that the Saudis desperately try to keep clear. In
such an instance, it would be opportune for the Saudis to finish him off before he could return
to America.
3. A third possibility is that some Saudi officials already working covertly with Gülen
saw in Khashoggi an already persona non grata, a dangerous Erdogan implant and decided to take
action against him.
If any of the above scenarios are accurate, then the role of Erdogan in this story is not
that of a scavenger who capitalized on the rift generated between the Saudis and America, but
that he was instrumental in conjuring up and orchestrating the whole drama. Erdogan might have
subjected the Saudi Government to the Gülen litmus test, and in such a case, the victim is
Saudi Arabia and the scavenger is America seeking silence money in lieu of continued protection
of Saudi interests.
In all of the above scenarios, Khashoggi would have been driven into the trap by his alleged
fiancée and had his impunity revoked by the Saudi officials because he failed the
test.
But what triggered him off personally to walk into this possible trap? What was in it for
him? Definitely not divorce documents. Most likely, Khashoggi was after amnesty from the Saudi
Crown, and this would be a safety concern not only for Khashoggi himself, but also for his
family that continued to live in Saudi Arabia. He may well have thought that by providing vital
and sensitive information to his government, his previous "sins" would be set aside and he
would be treated as a hero, his family would feel safe, despite that fact that he has
criticized the Crown Prince in the past.
Arabic media are inundated with posts and YouTube videos that are very damning of Hatice
Cengiz. Most of them perhaps are Saudi propaganda and should not be taken without a grain of salt.
In reality however, her sudden emergence as Khashoggi's "fiancée", the fact that she
allegedly waited for nearly 24 hours before reporting his disappearance and her personal,
professional and political history are all factors that cast much doubt about her innocence and
instead, portray her as a possible key element in the series of events that led to the
disappearance of Khashoggi.
Furthermore, why would a person in her position make rules and conditions about meeting the
President of the United States of America, even if this President is Donald Trump? (
Jamal Khashoggi's fiancee I will only visit Trump if he takes action World news The Guardian ) How many
people in history have refused the invitation of American Presidents? Who does she think she is
or who is she trying to portray herself as?
And if Trump is seizing the opportunity to grab MBS, and this time he will be grabbing by
the wallet, if Erdogan smells a hint of preparedness of MBS to support Gülen, then Erdogan
would want MBS's wallet and head. Any whichever way, the silver lining of this story is that
for once, Saudi Arabia is finally running for cover. Few around the world will give this brutal
royal family any sympathy.
There are other rumors spreading in the Arab world now alluding to the removal of MBS from
office and passing over the reins to his brother. MBS has committed heinous war crimes in Yemen
and has made huge errors of judgment with regard to Syria and Qatar. He made many enemies, and
it seems that Erdogan is out to get him.
It does seem possible that the Assad-must-go curse has reached the neck of the Saudi
throne.
Erdogan presentation to his party today too most media seemingly reporting deep
international concern and hubris from arms suppliers... Interestingly enough apparently K
handed his two phones to fiancée before he went in ..any good journalist would have left a
cache somewhere to be opened incase of certain events??????
No confirmation of victims "screams", etc although a there is one report he was held in a
stranglehold which would prevent such vocalisation?
You left the elephant out of the room. You are right that Jamal Khashoggi had no need to
enter the consulate for his divorce, and you suggested the reason being quid pro quo. But why enter the consulate in Turkey? And, not in USA? And, why not the Embassy as the Ambassador has more power, than the Consular? Also, both the Muslim Brotherhood have Wahhabism have been friends for ages, as their
theology is very similar with each other. And, if fact Erdogan is not Muslim Brotherhood but
a Sufi.
So, why did you leave out the elephant in the room, Israel. With the fall of Saudi
Arabia, Israel has more to loose and Iran has more to gain.
I was waiting for this article.
Looks B is not buying this version.
"There seem to be a lot of conspiracy theories being weaved around the case. Some of them
were mentioned in the comments here. I don't buy it. Turkey did not arrange the incident. I
see no sign that the U.S., Israel, Qatar or the UAE had a hand in this. This was a very
stupid crime committed by Mohammad bin Salman. Or even worse, a mistake. The wannabe-sultan
Erdogan is a crafty politician. He is simply riding the wave." https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/10/how-will-caligula-fall.html#more
I've read several articles about Khashoggi and my feeling right now is everyone is lying,
including B and Ghassan Kadi. (wrote this article. Mod.)
B ignores all said by Ghassan Kadi . And Ghassan Kadi is being soft on
SA cuz Russian wants it.
SA is a prize big enough to the bear get out of his cave. Deep State set the trap and SA fell like a kid cuz they are very predictable. They simply
kill a lot! Everybody is trying to profit and only one thing is sure about all this:
we will never know!
Seems to me that also the Old US Establishment, along with the EU Establishment, both
anti-Trump, never wanted MbS in the first place. Israel, and therefore Trump, are happy with
MbS but a lot of people would like to see him gone and get the old "safe" gang back (who paid
handsome bribes/salaries for decades). MbS is similar to Trump, way too impulsive,
unpredictable and manic, and a special kind of crazy on top to make for a reliable partner in
crime.
The Establishment wants the Saudis to sell them their oil, then to recycle the money back
into their economies. They'd prefer that they do this quietly, without any big fuss. They can
get rich doing so, but they shouldn't disrupt the world. And this is the role that the Saudis
have played mostly for the last 60-70 years.
Until MbS. So yes, it is conceivable that some other powerful people are getting a bit tired of him.
The same powerful people who really don't want the disruption of the world that a
Shiite-Sunni war over the oil fields would cause. The same powerful friends who are also
worried about Trump upsetting apple carts. Perhaps these powerful people are moving against a
war, which means against Trump on Iran, and against MbS if they feel he keeps stirring things
up too much.
One problem throughout this whole affair is that I don't believe the Turks.
Erdogon shutdown or converted the independent media that they once had. And in a case like
this, all information comes from the government anyways. The Sauds have been rightly attacked for changing their story. But the Turks have been
too. I've gotten the feeling that the 'news' reports from Turkish leaks (supposedly) have
simply been the plot lines of various Hollywood movies. The body was cut up (with a chainsaw?
like in Texas?), the body was dissolved in acid, the killers watched on Skype (always good to
get that hip tech tie-in to a story). It can't all be true.
To some extant, I get the feeling I'm watching Qatar money buying news stories to get back
at the Sauds. If so, good for them.
Like The Salisbury Affair, The Case of the Disappearing Lover in Instanbul simply is going
to have to be one to sit back and wait and see what if anything actually emerges as the
truth.
Could not be sulphuric acid the "traditional acid" for dissolving bodies you would need more
than 25 litres the most dangerous lethal fumes and smell would have filled the whole building
which would have been contaminated other people choking with deadly fumes. How to get acid in
and out/disposed ..people in PPE hosing down etc etc
I actually thought the "local contact" who supposed disposed of the body took it rolled up in
a rug and cremated it. Seems pretty clueless to drop the bits in a well. Maybe the "local contact" was actually the
consul, suggesting: Hey, I have an idea! How about dropping the body parts down the well?
That is about the dumbest thing I have heard yet in the Story of K.
Except, the idea of the body double.
The people who thought up the body double idea must be the same Einsteins who figured the
well in the consul's garden was a solution to disposal. Keystone Konsul.
Maybe I'm being sexist, but I imagine a discussion between the couple, with the future wife
saying she wants to get married, while the future husband is saying "Ah, aren't things great
now? Why change it? We can just live together." That bit of imagination leads to the idea that one of Khashoggi's last thoughts was "shit,
I knew getting married again was a bad idea."
The interesting thing was watching the US media go crazy about this. I kept thinking how
different was this from Obama ordering Anwar Al-Awaki executed by drone strike? Al-Awaki
received no trial, or even some kind of demand. Obama and his team just had him executed. So
MBS is a horrible monster for doing exactly what Obama did.
Khashoggi seemed to be working to "end dictatorship" and spread "free speech," democracy,
voting, opinion polls, feminism, gender theory, lgbt washrooms, all that. All the great stuff
of democracy. Worked out great in Sweden, why not Saudi Arabia?
All I'm getting out of this article is a desire to see the house of Saud fall. Plus some
dense little leaguer stuff about a marriage or something. Come on!
It was Khashoggi beating the Assad must go drum. The last Saudi represented on this site said Assad is harmless as long
as he understands Saudi interests exist in Syria. Not ideal, but a better offer than London's. Further, the dead "journalist"
believed Syria should be divided, and worse, that we should now act as if Assad is already gone – said the guy who got
sawed up and buried under a flower bed.
Seems to come down to him being lied to, conn'd or lured into the consulate and his death. Then we come to the whole other point of why on earth did the Saudis use their consulate
as an assassination killing ground? Governments wanting to kill people is nothing new. That's
what governments do. Governments killing people within their consulates is very rare. For
reasons that are now very obvious, if they weren't before.
The pundits who say MBS wanted to send a message set off alarms in my brain. Because that
is exactly the reason we are supposed to believe that Putin uses all sorts of bizarre
assasination methods that are obviously traced back to him. He wants to send a message. Yeah,
right. And that's why they brought a bleep-storm of trouble down on top of their heads. To
send a message?
Email is cheaper. And if someone is dead from methods not traced back to you, then someone
else goes and whispers the message into the few ears you want to hear it, that is a lot more
effective than either Novachuk in a park or a bloody murder in a consulate.
Israel/US/Saudi tried to pass Turkey off as the sole sponsor and creator of ISIS. It was an
important player, certainly, largely because of its geographic location. So a bit of revenge?
As with all these events, there will be multiple facets from the various actors, some
mutually exclusive.
The only thing that is certain so far is the west's concern for Saudi's alleged execution
of a 'journalist' is rank hypocrisy.
"2. On the other hand, if Khashoggi indeed gave Saudi authorities vital information, so
vital that it clearly is vehemently pro-Gülen, and as Gülen is no longer an
American favourite, then upon his return to America he may have become a Saudi liability that
can potentially muddy the Saudi-American waters that the Saudis desperately try to keep
clear. In such an instance, it would be opportune for the Saudis to finish him off before he
could return to America."
The SA gang would want to protect the "vital" . . . pro-Gulan" information obtained from K
because that information would have given the SA gang an advantage in dealing with America
because a K running free could expose SA sources and knowledge, so he had to be eliminated.
(??)
Or, Erdogan knows via Cengiz that K believes he can facilitate a deal between Gulan and SA
to the detriment of Turkey, in order that K can protect his family in SA. But SA already
knows somehow that K is in effect an agent for SA's enemy Erdogan and is peddling polyester
rugs, that K's story is donkey doo, so SA believes K is betraying SA with said donkey doo, so
out comes the Popeil's Pocket Body Dismemberer. ??
". . . should not be taken for (without) a grain of salt." ??
As for the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and SA's Wahabbists, it strikes me that
the custodianship of the two holy mosques in SA, or better said the moral leadership role
that said literal custodianship confers could be in contention if Erdogan can demonstrate to
his immense egoic neo-Ottoman satisfaction belongs to Turkey under his direction.
It seems no matter who "wins" every one of the players loses credibility any way this
plays out.
"contention if Erdogan can demonstrate to his immense egoic neo-Ottoman satisfaction belongs to
Turkey under his direction."
This was my main takeaway from Erd's address to Parliament. The bit about the Saudis as
protectors of the holy cities. Like, maybe not. LIke, look at the mess they have made.
They are clearly incompetent and have no standing as protectors of holy sites.
Hmm, so who would be a better "protector"? Could it be the one who arrogates to himself the
authority to call out false 'protectors" by any chance?
Probably this murder will end with nothing more than "The Saudis are really evil. Who didn't
already know that". But lets look at what we do know about the killing (and what is rumored in
news reports).
Before Khashoggi goes into for the meeting a team of 15 Saudi agents, several of them men
close to MBS arrive from Saudi Arabia and go into the building. Including among them an
autopsy expert with a "bonesaw". One of them is a body double for Khashoggi and carries with
him a fake beard to make his resemblance to Khashoggi even stronger. An hour or so later that
man leaves the building wearing Khashoggi's clothes and sunglasses. And the fake beard. So that
the CCTV might record him as Khashoggi.
RT reports that minutes before the killing Khashoggi talks on the phone to MBS. Its thought
that MSB wants Khashoggi to agree to return to Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi refuses. Right after
that Khashoggi is killed and dismembered. The Turkish press is now reporting that parts of
Khashoggi's remains have been found in a well at the Saudi Consuls official residence. I'd say
with that kind of evidence anyone would have to be braindead (or just not willing to admit
the truth for political reasons), to not conclude MBS is up to his beard in this conspiracy to
commit murder.
One question being asked is why would MBS risk it. But I think the answer is simple. He
believes he is untouchable and can do whatever he wants (the track record for that is pretty
good for him until now, and maybe now as well). He took power in Saudi Arabia from his
cousins, and got away with it. He starts and conducts a bloody war against Yemen, and isn't
punished. He holds hostage dozens of the wealthiest Saudis and tortures them for large chunks
of their wealth. And gets away with it. He kidnaps the Lebanese PM, and forces him to resign (at
least for a while). And he gets no punishment even for that. He threatens Qatar with war, closes
the border. And still no punishment. He funds terrorists all over the Middle East. And yet again
no punishment. So why on earth would he pause at murdering a "pain in the a$$" Saudi dissident
who dares to defy him. He may have gone a "bridge too far" this time. But his record points to
his surviving this time too (hopefully not).
Has anyone commented of the features of this grisly murder that make it look like some kind
of ritual murder?
They could have just stabbed or strangled him or druged him. Bu why cut off fingers?
Symbolism?
Why deface facial features?
Was he drawn and quartered like traitors in medieval Europe?
Or was it renaissance Europe?
And, what happened to all the blood?
How did they keep it off the clothing that the body double then donned?
Just wondering what kind of "message" K's murder was designed to send to him, as he
died.
Or, what kind of cultic weirdness was being provided for bin Salman to feel satisfaction at
the manner of the death?
"The Saudis say they are countering Iran, which backs the Houthis. But the Houthis are an indigenous group with legitimate grievances,
and the war has only enhanced Iranian influence . As has been obvious for some time, the only solution is a negotiated settlement.
But the Saudis have done their best to sabotage a U.N.-led peace process. Talks planned for Geneva in September failed when Saudi
leaders
would not grant safe travel guarantees to Houthi leaders." Bezos' editorial board at WaPo
---------------
Beneath the largely specious argument that Saudi Arabia has the US by the cojones economically lies the true factor that
has caused the two countries to be glued together.
This factor is the Israeli success in convincing the US government, and more importantly, the American people, that Iran is a
deadly enemy, a menace to the entire world, a reincarnation of Nazi Germany, and that Saudi Arabia, a country dedicated to medieval
methods of operation, is an indispensable ally in a struggle to save the world from Iran. The successful effort to convince us of
the reality of the Iranian menace reflects the previous successful campaign to convince us all that Iraq was also Nazi Germany come
again.
The Iran information operation was probably conceived at the Moshe Dayan Center or some other Israeli think tank. and then passed
on in the form of learned papers and conferences to the Foreign Ministry, the Mossad and the IDF. After adoption as government policy
the Foreign ministry and Zionist organizations closely linked to media ownership in the US and Europe were tasked for dissemination
of the propaganda themes involved. This has been a brilliantly executed plan. The obvious fact that Iran is not presently a threat
to the US has had little effect in countering this propaganda achievement.
Last Saturday morning, the Philadelphia based commentator Michael Smerconish openly asked on his popular talk show why it is that
US policy favors the Sunni Muslims over the Shia. i.e., Saudi Arabia over Iran. To hear that was for me a first. This was an obvious
defiance of the received wisdom of the age. I can only hope that the man does not lose his show.
It is a great irony that the barbaric murder of a personally rather unpleasant but defiant exiled journalist has caused re-examination
of the basis and wisdom of giving strategic protection to a family run dictatorship. pl
Erdogan called the Khashoggi murder brutal and premeditated, but did not reveal any damning audio or video evidence. Elijah Magnier
surmises Erdogan extracted a heavy payment from both the Saudis and the Americans in exchange for his relative silence. We shall
see if the economic pressure on Turkey dissipates in the coming days and weeks.
It appears the central pillar of the Borg creed, so eloquently and precisely described here by Colonel Lang, will survive this
bout of heretical thinking. Will journalists and other members of the press be able to keep challenging the Borg? With Trump so
thoroughly assimilated into the Borg, will the "resistance" keep the issue of Saudi perfidy alive? I have my doubts. The Israeli
information operations machine is a juggernaut. Few have the stamina and will to resist it. But it is a fight worth fighting.
Yesterday
the news broke that Swamp Monster-In-Chief John Bolton has been pushing President Trump to
withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the 1988 arms control agreement
between the US and the Soviet Union eliminating all missiles of a specified range from the
arsenals of the two nuclear superpowers. Today, Trump
has announced that he will be doing exactly as Bolton instructed.
This would be the second missile treaty between the US and Russia that America has withdrawn
from since it abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
in 2002. John Bolton, an actual
psychopath who Trump hired as his National Security Advisor in April, ran point on that move as well
back when he was part of the increasingly indistinguishable Bush administration.
"This is why John Bolton shouldn't be allowed anywhere near US foreign policy," tweeted Senator
Rand Paul in response to early forecasts of the official announcement.
"This would undo decades of bipartisan arms control dating from Reagan. We shouldn't do
it. We should seek to fix any problems with this treaty and move forward."
"This is the most severe crisis in nuclear arms control since the 1980s," Malcolm Chalmers,
the deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute,
told The Guardian .
"If the INF treaty collapses, and with the New Start treaty on strategic arms due to
expire in 2021, the world could be left without any limits on the nuclear arsenals of nuclear
states for the first time since 1972."
"A disaster for Europe," tweeted Russia-based journalist
Bryan MacDonald. "The treaty removed Cruise & Pershing missiles, and Soviet ss20's from the
continent. Now, you will most likely see Russia launch a major build up in Kaliningrad &
the US push into Poland. So you're back to 1980, but the dividing line is closer to
Moscow."
"Russia has violated the agreement. They've been violating it for many years and I don't
know why President Obama didn't negotiate or pull out," Trump told reporters in Nevada.
"We're not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and do weapons and we're not
allowed to. We're the ones that have stayed in the agreement and we've honored the agreement
but Russia has not unfortunately honored the agreement so we're going to terminate the
agreement, we're going to pull out."
What Trump did not mention is that the US has indeed been in
violation of that agreement due to steps it began taking toward the development of a new
ground-launched cruise missile last year. The US claims it began taking those steps due to
Russian violations of the treaty with its own arsenal, while Russia claims the US has already
been in violation of multiple arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament agreements.
So, on the one front where cooler heads prevailing is quite literally the single most
important thing in the world, the exact opposite is happening. Hotter, more impatient, more
violent, more hawkish heads are prevailing over diplomacy and sensibility, potentially at the
peril of the entire world should something unexpected go wrong as a result. This is of course
coming after two years of Democratic Party loyalists attacking Trump on the basis that he has
not been sufficiently hawkish toward Russia, and claiming that this is because he is Putin's
puppet.
In response to this predictable escalation the path for which has been lubricated by
McResistance pundits and their neoconservative allies, those very same pundits are now reacting
with horror that Putin's puppet is now dangerously escalating tensions with Putin.
"BREAKING: Trump announces that the United States will pull out of the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty that the US has been in for 31 years," exclaimed the popular
Russiagater Brian Krassenstein in a tweet that as of this writing has over 5,000 shares.
"Welcome back to the Cold War. This time it's scarier And no, It's not Obama, or Hillary or the
Democrat's fault. It's ALL TRUMP!"
"Hilarious to listen to all this alarmed screaming about US withdrawal from INF Treaty
emanating from those who for 2 years have been demanding that Trump get tough with Russia,"
tweeted George Szamuely
of the Global Policy Institute. "Now that they've got their arms race I hope they are pleased
with themselves."
"Are those who have spent the past two years warning of a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy &
cheering confrontation w/ Russia ready to shut the fuck up yet?" asked Aaron Maté, who
has been among the most consistently lucid critics of the Russiagate narrative in the US.
Are they ready to shut the fuck up? That would be great, but this is just the latest
escalation in a steadily escalating new cold war, and these blithering idiots didn't shut the
fuck up at any of the other steps toward nuclear holocaust.
They didn't shut the fuck up when this administration adopted a Nuclear
Posture Review with greatly increased aggression toward Russia and blurred lines between
when nuclear strikes are and are not appropriate.
As signs point to Mueller's investigation
wrapping up in the near future without turning up a single shred of evidence that Trump
colluded with the Russian government, it's time for everyone who helped advance this toxic,
suicidal anti-Russia narrative to ask themselves one question: was it worth it? Was it worth it
to help mount political pressure on a sitting president to continually escalate tensions with a
nuclear superpower and loudly screaming that he's a Putin puppet whenever he takes a step
toward de-escalation? Was it worth it to help create an atmosphere where cooler heads don't
prevail in the one area where it's absolutely essential for everyone's survival that they do?
Or is it maybe time to shut the fuck up for a while and rethink your entire worldview?
* * *
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see
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"... I've come to the realization that the MSM and our government are using a very different definition of "democracy" and "democratic institutions" than the one in the dictionary. Their version of "democracy" is all about national security and financial interests, and have very little to do with elections and popular will. ..."
"... ideas and opinions ..."
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... ideas and opinions ..."
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... @enhydra lutris ..."
"... @enhydra lutris ..."
"... @enhydra lutris ..."
"... @The Liberal Moonbat ..."
"... , surprised the special counsel in April when they actually showed up in court to fight the charges ..."
"... "There is no statute of interfering with an election. There just isn't," said Dubelier, who added that Mueller's office alleged a "made-up crime to fit the facts they have." ..."
We can soon forget Russia's "meddling" in the 2016 election (or
lack of meddling ), because the Justice Department is already throwing down indictments for
meddling in the
2018 midterm elections.
Russians working for a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin are engaging in an elaborate campaign of "information warfare"
to interfere with the American midterm elections next month, federal prosecutors said on Friday in unsealing charges against a
woman whom they labeled the project's "chief accountant."
Information warfare? That sounds serious. So what exactly is her objectives?
But this time, prosecutors said the operatives appeared beholden to no particular candidate. Russia's trolls did not limit themselves
to either a liberal or conservative position, according to the complaint. They often wrote from diverging viewpoints on the same
issue.
Uh, that's called trolling, and if trolling is against the law then 4Chan should watch out. It seems that trolling now equals
fraud .
It isn't just Russia. China and Iran are
meddling as well.
In a joint statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Justice Department, FBI and Department of Homeland
Security said they "do not have any evidence" that foreign countries have disrupted the voting process or changed any tallies
, but that the campaigns have spread "disinformation" and "foreign propaganda."
"We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence
in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies," the statement said. "These activities also
may seek to influence voter perceptions and decision making in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections."
So how exactly are they defrauding the American public? As for "undermine confidence in democratic institutions", we already know
that we are an oligarchy
, not a democracy. So I think the burden of evidence is on our government to prove otherwise, not on Russia.
I've come to the realization that the MSM and our government are using a very different definition of "democracy" and "democratic
institutions" than the one in the dictionary. Their version of "democracy" is all about national security and financial interests,
and have very little to do with elections and popular will.
You would think from the MSM that Russiagate is "liberals" versus Trump, and that everyone on "the left" is OK with this. But even some in the media have noticed that leftists that don't identify as Democrats are Russiagate skeptics.
@gjohnsit AFAIK, all those facebook posts would be legal if posted by someone in the USA. Are foreign
ideas illegal now? are ideas and opinions illegal?
You would think from the MSM that Russiagate is "liberals" versus Trump, and that everyone on "the left" is OK with this. But even some in the media have noticed that leftists that don't identify as Democrats are Russiagate skeptics.
RT aired a documentary about the OccupyWall Street movement on 1, 2, and
4 November. RT framed the movement as a
fight against "the ruling class" and described
the current US political system as corrupt and
dominated by corporations.
RT advertising
for the documentary featured Occupy
movement calls to "take back" the
government. The documentary claimed that
the US system cannot be changed
democratically, but only through "revolution."
After the 6 November US presidential
election, RT aired a documentary called
"Cultures of Protest," about active and often
violent political resistance
RT's reports often characterize the United
States as a "surveillance state" and allege
widespread infringements of civil liberties,
police brutality, and drone use
RT has also focused on criticism of the US
economic system, US currency policy, alleged
Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT's hosts have compared the United States to
Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and "corporate greed" will lead to US
financial collapse
#1
AFAIK, all those facebook posts would be legal if posted by someone in the USA.
Are foreign ideas illegal now? are ideas and opinions illegal?
Basically, this Russian woman is being indicted for doing the books for a Russian entity that incorporated a number of US businesses.
These businesses had persons write and post under pen names a number of articles dealing with political subjects. That has been
interpreted by the Special Counsel as a conspiracy to violate a federal campaign law that forbids contributions to US election
campaigns. That's right, the indictment construes written opinion to be the same as money contributions.
The case would probably be thrown out -- nobody has been prosecuted for this before -- however the woman indicted will never
be in court to defend herself, as the prosecutor and FBI know. Mueller is getting desperate to come up with indictments to fill
in his jig saw puzzle.
@enhydra lutris@enhydra lutris@enhydra lutris
speech is constitutionally protected and can't be limited by campaign finance legislation. Mueller appears to have decided on
his own to abrogate the Citizens United decision.
That would be okay, if he applied it to prosecute political mouthpieces such as AIPAC, along with corporate fronts owned by
the Saudis, Chinese, British and 100 other countries who similiarly post anonymously.
It's now undeniable: Mueller is the prosecutorial weapon of a very selective political vendetta.
But somewhere on the left, right around the fault line where Barack Obama is deemed to have been a bad president, opinion
turns back again toward skepticism.
It gets worse from there. I'm betting that this was written by someone from the Atlantic Council or maybe Friedman's twin brother.
This person sure went to a lot of work to deride anyone who doesn't believe in Russia Gate didn't he?
Facebook has almost admitted that they are censoring people and websites because of Russia's ads on it that they say affected
the election. BTW. Didn't Obama also use Cambridge Analytics during his campaign and did the same things that Trump did? Pretty
sure that he did. But I guess that was different because of reasons. Yep. That's why.
You would think from the MSM that Russiagate is "liberals" versus Trump, and that everyone on "the left" is OK with this.
But even some in the media have noticed that leftists that don't identify as Democrats are Russiagate skeptics.
We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence
in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies,
First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its
gerrymandering and its voter ID policies. Look at what's happening in Georgia (?) where the guy running is in charge of the voting
policies and is kicking thousands of people off the voting rolls.
Influence government policies you say? If millions of Americans can't do that then how could a foreign country do it? BTW.
This is already happening what with all the lobbyists and super PACs. But sure. Let's blame the 3 countries that they want to
war with. Anyone who believes this shit ... well I'll not finish this sentence.
Months before the 2016 election they were already calling Jill Stein a "Nader spoiler" (
here , here , and
here )
Funny how 3rd parties are demonized in this "democracy"
We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence
in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies,
First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its
gerrymandering and its voter ID policies. Look at what's happening in Georgia (?) where the guy running is in charge of the
voting policies and is kicking thousands of people off the voting rolls.
Influence government policies you say? If millions of Americans can't do that then how could a foreign country do it? BTW.
This is already happening what with all the lobbyists and super PACs. But sure. Let's blame the 3 countries that they want
to war with. Anyone who believes this shit ... well I'll not finish this sentence.
There is so much BS in that article it's hard to choose which one is the worst but I'm going with this one.
But Stein's willingness to praise Russian propaganda outlets and push Kremlin talking points didn't end in Moscow. Indeed,
she challenged – and arguably surpassed – Trump in crafting the most Moscow-friendly campaign of 2016.
For instance, Stein made the strange claim multiple times that NATO had "surrounded" Russia with nuclear weapons. As she
told The Intercept, "This is the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, on steroids – in fact, on crack." (Less than 10 percent of
Russia's land border touches any NATO member-states.) She also said last year that NATO is only fighting "enemies we invent
to give the weapons industry a reason to sell more stuff."
This is what she actually said about NATO and Russia.
Stein: I think this is an issue where something does need to be said--but it's important to understand where they are coming
from. The United States, under Bush 1, had an agreement when Germany joined NATO--Russia agreed with the understanding that
NATO would not move one inch to the east. Since then NATO has pursued a policy of basically encircling Russia--including the
threat of nukes and drones and so on.
Okay and this one too.
Likewise, Stein claimed that Ukraine's 2014 revolution was, in reality, a "coup" that the U.S. "helped foment." Only two
other leaders have described Ukraine's toppling of former president Viktor Yanukovych as a "coup": Putin and Kazakhstani President
Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose country remains a security ally of Russia. Stein even spent time last year saying that "Russia
used to own Ukraine."
Pretty sure that during Obama's presidency the Ukraine government was overthrown by this country and now we're arming neo Nazis
with some very bad weapons.
ThinkProgress says it's being targeted by ad networks for producing 'controversial political content'. I'm thinking it's more
because they lie their asses off to people who read its website. This is the most blatant lying I've seen from a website. How
many people believed every word written there?
Join us on Sunday 10/28 to meet Jill Stein and Alameda/SF County Green candidates: Laura Wells, Saied Karamooz, Aidan Hill
and Mike Murphy. to support our candidates. People,... https://t.co/EtWyo6fism
First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its
gerrymandering and its voter ID policies.
I agree with your whole comment. Just wanted to make sure we don't leave out the monster that is the Dem establishment, aka
the other half of the single body that screws us every chance it gets. Supposed differences are only spoken, especially in election
years. When it gets down to the meat and potatoes, our representatives are one big symbiotic meal -- the kind that gives you the
shits until you're dead.
We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence
in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies,
First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its
gerrymandering and its voter ID policies. Look at what's happening in Georgia (?) where the guy running is in charge of the
voting policies and is kicking thousands of people off the voting rolls.
Influence government policies you say? If millions of Americans can't do that then how could a foreign country do it? BTW.
This is already happening what with all the lobbyists and super PACs. But sure. Let's blame the 3 countries that they want
to war with. Anyone who believes this shit ... well I'll not finish this sentence.
The GOP has made it so that over 10% of the population can't vote this year. I think it's in Georgia where thousands are being
kicked off the voting rolls almost every day by the dude that is in charge of it and he is also running for an office. They have
been gerrymandering the country and other things. Of course the democrats don't seem to be doing much to make it easier for people
to vote. But yeah, both parties are just as corrupt.
Isn't it Brian Kemp who is not only running for office, but he is also in a position to purge the voting rolls? This is a huge
conflict of interest and some judge should have stopped him from being able to do that. I guess that's what people are suing him
for?
Close to 500,000 people were not able to vote in one of the states that Trump won in. Not sure if they were Hillary's or Trump's
voters though.
BTW. People are upset with Jill Stein because they think that her votes cost Hillary the election when the libertarian candidate
got more votes than Jill did. And yet he's not blamed for her loss. I wonder why that is?
Isn't it Brian Kemp who is not only running for office, but he is also in a position to purge the voting rolls? This is
a huge conflict of interest and some judge should have stopped him from being able to do that. I guess that's what people are
suing him for?
Close to 500,000 people were not able to vote in one of the states that Trump won in. Not sure if they were Hillary's or
Trump's voters though.
BTW. People are upset with Jill Stein because they think that her votes cost Hillary the election when the libertarian candidate
got more votes than Jill did. And yet he's not blamed for her loss. I wonder why that is?
First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by
its gerrymandering and its voter ID policies.
I agree with your whole comment. Just wanted to make sure we don't leave out the monster that is the Dem establishment,
aka the other half of the single body that screws us every chance it gets. Supposed differences are only spoken, especially
in election years. When it gets down to the meat and potatoes, our representatives are one big symbiotic meal -- the kind that
gives you the shits until you're dead.
Robert Mueller's indictment of the Russians who interfered in our election is a milestone in an ongoing investigation. The
charges focus on the Russians who used online social networking platforms to divide voters and disrupt the electoral process.
Changed any votes? Party affiliations? Removed people from the voting rolls? Closed down voting precincts? Didn't supply enough
voting machines for high voting areas? Nope. Nope. Nope and nope. Just placed a few ads on Fakebook and most of them after the
election was over. It's taken Mueller two years to look into this? If he hasn't found any evidence yet then why waste time and
money worrying about China and Iran doing anything? I'm thinking that Mueller is just pretending to be investigating, but he's
really spending his time golfing or whatever his favorite activities are.
@snoopydawg
, its like a nuclear submarine calling the teapot black.
Robert Mueller's indictment of the Russians who interfered in our election is a milestone in an ongoing investigation.
The charges focus on the Russians who used online social networking platforms to divide voters and disrupt the electoral
process.
Changed any votes? Party affiliations? Removed people from the voting rolls? Closed down voting precincts? Didn't supply
enough voting machines for high voting areas? Nope. Nope. Nope and nope. Just placed a few ads on Fakebook and most of them
after the election was over. It's taken Mueller two years to look into this? If he hasn't found any evidence yet then why waste
time and money worrying about China and Iran doing anything? I'm thinking that Mueller is just pretending to be investigating,
but he's really spending his time golfing or whatever his favorite activities are.
we were going to receive at Fitzmas? Hoping the Establishment is going to finally reveal its sausage-making, really is a flight of fancy. McSausage for the McResistance. The Public are to be seen at voting stations, and not heard.
Hell I am surprised they even mentioned that first part.
In a joint statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Justice Department, FBI and Department of Homeland
Security said they "do not have any evidence" that foreign countries have disrupted the voting process or changed any tallies,
At any rate cracked up when I read Caitlin on FB this morning:
Politico Report Says Russiagaters Should Prepare To Kiss My Ass
"In a just world, everyone who helped promote this toxic narrative would apologize profusely and spend the rest of their
lives being mocked and marginalized."
#Mueller#TrumpRussiahttps://t.co/eN349xhjG3
We had Great discussion about
Caitlin's article. Lots of good comments.
Hell I am surprised they even mentioned that first part.
In a joint statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Justice Department, FBI and Department of
Homeland Security said they "do not have any evidence" that foreign countries have disrupted the voting process or changed
any tallies,
At any rate cracked up when I read Caitlin on FB this morning:
Politico Report Says Russiagaters Should Prepare To Kiss My Ass
"In a just world, everyone who helped promote this toxic narrative would apologize profusely and spend the rest of their
lives being mocked and marginalized."
#Mueller#TrumpRussiahttps://t.co/eN349xhjG3
Actually, I am thinking nuclear war with Russia may be the terminus point, but in terms of propaganda we are seeing it. I have
followed the Russia hysteria since 2015 when it was in its infant stage here in the States, but advancing in Europe.
There are still some charges that Russians broke into certain accounts as Microsoft has claimed a few months back, but the
claims go no where as they have to admit they had absolutely no proof. And the story fades away until a new charge is made, and
those now are hard to make up.
As previous posters before in have commented above, basically the terminus point is ascribing all dissent within the Western
powers as Russian created. In this charge it is impossible to to argue as no proof is needed except for the existance of
dissent. No more charges which can be proved such as an actual hack. And that dissent can be for or against an issue. All issues
lead to Moscow.
The huge censorship of various sites done by Facebook and Twitter begin and are justified by the Russia hysteria and "fan news".
-- John "Squinty Forehead Man" Graziano (@jvgraz)
October 18, 2018
Actually, I am thinking nuclear war with Russia may be the terminus point, but in terms of propaganda we are seeing it.
I have followed the Russia hysteria since 2015 when it was in its infant stage here in the States, but advancing in Europe.
There are still some charges that Russians broke into certain accounts as Microsoft has claimed a few months back, but the
claims go no where as they have to admit they had absolutely no proof. And the story fades away until a new charge is made,
and those now are hard to make up.
As previous posters before in have commented above, basically the terminus point is ascribing all dissent within the
Western powers as Russian created. In this charge it is impossible to to argue as no proof is needed except for the existance
of dissent. No more charges which can be proved such as an actual hack. And that dissent can be for or against an issue. All
issues lead to Moscow.
The huge censorship of various sites done by Facebook and Twitter begin and are justified by the Russia hysteria and "fan
news".
computer that wasn't even hooked up to the internet. Brennan said that Russia tried to meddle in 21?state's voting rolls, but
the states said that never happened. But just like people are still saying that all 17 intelligence (3) agencies agree that Russia
interfered with the election people still think that the other stuff is true. This is why spreading propaganda is so powerful.
The lies are what they remember, not the retractions if they're ever given.
About those FB ads that swayed the election ...
The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered
it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative of Tump and the election.
https://t.co/2dL8Kh0hof
Actually, I am thinking nuclear war with Russia may be the terminus point, but in terms of propaganda we are seeing it.
I have followed the Russia hysteria since 2015 when it was in its infant stage here in the States, but advancing in Europe.
There are still some charges that Russians broke into certain accounts as Microsoft has claimed a few months back, but the
claims go no where as they have to admit they had absolutely no proof. And the story fades away until a new charge is made,
and those now are hard to make up.
As previous posters before in have commented above, basically the terminus point is ascribing all dissent within the
Western powers as Russian created. In this charge it is impossible to to argue as no proof is needed except for the existance
of dissent. No more charges which can be proved such as an actual hack. And that dissent can be for or against an issue. All
issues lead to Moscow.
The huge censorship of various sites done by Facebook and Twitter begin and are justified by the Russia hysteria and "fan
news".
computer that wasn't even hooked up to the internet. Brennan said that Russia tried to meddle in 21?state's voting rolls,
but the states said that never happened. But just like people are still saying that all 17 intelligence (3) agencies agree
that Russia interfered with the election people still think that the other stuff is true. This is why spreading propaganda
is so powerful. The lies are what they remember, not the retractions if they're ever given.
About those FB ads that swayed the election ...
The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered
it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative of Tump and the election.
https://t.co/2dL8Kh0hof
A Washington federal judge on Thursday ordered special counsel Robert Mueller's team to clarify election meddling claims
lodged against a Russian company operated by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Bloomberg.
Concord Management and Consulting, LLC. - one of three businesses indicted by Mueller in February along with 13 individuals
for election meddling , surprised the special counsel in April when they actually showed up in court to fight the charges
. Mueller's team tried to delay Concord from entering the case, arguing that thee Russian company not been properly served,
however Judge Dabney Friedrich denied the request - effectively telling prosecutors 'well, they're here.'
*
Concord pleaded not guilty in May. Their attorney, Eric Dubelier - a partner at Reed Smith, has described the election meddling
charges as "make believe," arguing on Monday that Mueller's indictment against Concord "doesn't charge a crime."
"There is no statute of interfering with an election. There just isn't," said Dubelier, who added that Mueller's office
alleged a "made-up crime to fit the facts they have."
Concord is one of the corporations that Mueller said placed ads on FB to sway people's opinion on Trump and Hillary. The ads
that most were placed after the election.
"... It's quite unusual to see such unanimous anti-Saudi reactions from the American political class for the assassination of Mr. Khashoggi – who was just a part-time journalist living in U.S – he was not even an American citizen ..."
"... Oil which is extracted by Fracking method that requires high Oil price above $70 to remain competitive in the global Oil market – by simultaneously sanctioning Iran, Venezuela, and the potential sanction of Saudi Arabia from exporting its Oil, the Trump Administration not only reduces the Global Oil supply which will certainly lead to the rise of Oil price, but also it lowers demand for the US Dollar-Greenback in the global oil market which could lead to subtle but steady devaluation of the US dollar. ..."
"... And perhaps that's what Trump Administration was really aiming for all along; a significant decline of the US Dollar Index and the rise of price of Oil which certainly pleases the American Oil Cartel, though at the expense of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela – all of which are under some form of U.S sanctions. ..."
"... However gruesome, Mr. Khashoggi's assassination is going to be used by the Trump Administration to help the American Oil Cartel by controlling the Saudi Oil output, hence, to raise the price of Oil and to lower demand for US dollar which is the currency of the global Oil trade. ..."
The overplayed drama of Mr. Khashoggi assassination is going to be used by the American Oil
Cartel to control the Saudis Oil output.
It's quite unusual to see such unanimous anti-Saudi reactions from the American
political class for the assassination of Mr. Khashoggi – who was just a part-time
journalist living in U.S – he was not even an American citizen , so, it's quite
unusual because the same political class remained muted about the Saudis involvement with
ISIS, the bombing and starvation of civilians in Yemen and destruction of Syria, and of
course the Saudis involvement in 9/11 terrorist attack in which 3000 American citizens have
perished in New York, in the heart of America.
So, we must be a bit skeptical about the motive of the American Political Class, as this
again could be just about the OIL Business, but this time around the objective is to help the
American Oil producers as opposed to Oil consumers – with 13.8% of the global daily Oil
production, the US has lately become the world top producer of Crude Oil, albeit, an
expensive Oil which is extracted by Fracking method that requires high Oil price above
$70 to remain competitive in the global Oil market – by simultaneously sanctioning
Iran, Venezuela, and the potential sanction of Saudi Arabia from exporting its Oil, the Trump
Administration not only reduces the Global Oil supply which will certainly lead to the rise
of Oil price, but also it lowers demand for the US Dollar-Greenback in the global oil market
which could lead to subtle but steady devaluation of the US dollar.
And perhaps that's what Trump Administration was really aiming for all along; a
significant decline of the US Dollar Index and the rise of price of Oil which certainly
pleases the American Oil Cartel, though at the expense of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela
– all of which are under some form of U.S sanctions.
However gruesome, Mr. Khashoggi's assassination is going to be used by the Trump
Administration to help the American Oil Cartel by controlling the Saudi Oil output, hence, to
raise the price of Oil and to lower demand for US dollar which is the currency of the global
Oil trade.
@Alistair History has its weird twists.
Early in WWII FDR was reported that USA oil would be depleted in thirty years time.
So FDR sent Harold L Ickes to Saudi Arabia,where at the end of 1944 the country was made the
USA's main oil supplier.
FDR entertained the then Saud in early 1945 on the cruiser Quincy, laying in the Bitter Lakes
near the Suez Canal.
This Saud and his entourage had never seen a ship before, in any case had never been on board
such a ship.
In his last speech to Congress, seated, FDR did not follow what had been written for him,
but remarked 'that ten minutes with Saud taught him more about zionism than hundreds of
letters of USA rabbi's.
These words do not seem to be in the official record, but one of the speech writers,
Sherwood, quotes them in his book.
Robert E. Sherwood, 'Roosevelt und Hopkins', 1950, Hamburg (Roosevelt and Hopkins, New York,
1948)
If FDR also said to Congress that he would limit jewish migration to Palestine, do not now
remember, but the intention existed.
A few weeks later FDR died, Sherwood comments on on some curious aspects of FDR's death, such
as that the body was cremated in or near Warm Springs, and that the USA people were never
informed that the coffin going from Warm Springs to Washington just contained an urn with
ashes.
At present the USA does not seem to need Saudi oil.
If this causes the asserted cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel ?
@Harris ChandlerNow it has made alliances with Israel and between them the tail wags
the dog
The Saudi Royal family and the governments of Israel have always been in cahoots. They
both despise and fear secular governments that are not under their own control in the Middle
East. Witness the fear and dread of both of them of president Nasser in the 1960′s, for
example.
This is an incorrect view. neoliberal is about global corporatist dictatorship.
Fascism and neofascism are limited to a single country, and often to single ethnos or (in case of
neofacism) culture. So far we see that neofascism was a reaction of excesses of neoliberal
globalization.
The fact that both neoliberalism and neofascism are forms of corporatist dictatorship do not
chnge this fact.
"I see it more as a neoliberal desire to belong to some vague bigger global entity.
Plus the fact that since WW2 nationalism has become equated with fascism."
Yes, what a beautiful piece of propaganda and mind control, carried out by the people
behind this 'vague bigger global entity and facilitated by their 'Mainstream Media', to
create this neo-liberal desire.
In reality it is this 'vague bigger global entity' that embodies the essence of fascism -
i.e. corporatist-dictatorship.
"Satire has lost all meaning: The former director of the CIA (which has for decades
trained and armed far-right terrorist death squads), who is now US secretary of state, called
Iran "the greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world" while he was meeting with regime
officials in Saudi Arabia, an extremist Wahhabi absolute monarchy that supported ISIS and
al-Qaeda."
"... First, all Churches are equal, there is no Pope, no "historical see" granting any primacy just as all the Apostles of Christ and all Orthodox bishops are also equals; ..."
"... Second, crucial decisions, decisions which affect the entire Church, are only taken by a Council of the entire Church, not unilaterally by any one man or any one Church. ..."
"... These are really the basics of what could be called "traditional Christian ecclesiology 101" and the blatant violation of this key ecclesiological dogma by the Papacy in 1054 was as much a cause for the historical schism between East and West (really, between Rome and the rest of Christian world) as was the innovation of the filioque itself. ..."
"... His Most Divine All-Holiness the Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, and Ecumenical Patriarch ..."
"... Some point out that the Patriarch of Constantinople is a Turkish civil servant. While technically true, this does not suggest that Erdogan is behind this move either: right now Erdogan badly needs Russia on so many levels that he gains nothing and risks losing a lot by alienating Moscow. ..."
"... No, the real initiator of this entire operation is the AngloZionist Empire and, of course, the Papacy (which has always tried to create an " Orthodoxerein Ukraine" from the "The Eastern Crusade" and "Northern Crusades" of Popes Innocent III and Gregory IX to the Nazi Ukraine of Bandera – see here for details). ..."
"... On a more cynical level, I would note that the Patriarch of Constantinople has now opened a real Pandora's box which now every separatist movement in an Orthodox country will be able to use to demand its own "autocephaly" which will threaten the unity of most Orthodox Churches out there. ..."
"... What the AngloZionist Empire has done is to force each Orthodox Christian and each Orthodox Church to chose between siding with Moscow or Constantinople. This choice will have obvious spiritual consequences, which the Empire couldn't give a damn about, but it will also profound political and social consequences which, I believe, the Empire entirely missed ..."
"... Make no mistake, what the Empire did in the Ukraine constitutes yet another profoundly evil and tragic blow against the long-suffering people of the Ukraine. In its ugliness and tragic consequences, it is quite comparable to the occupation of these lands by the Papacy via its Polish and Lithuanian agents. But God has the ability to turn even the worst horror into something which, in the end, will strengthen His Church. ..."
"... Another reason to hate the Catholic Church:The Catholic Church= Mike Pompeo mentored by Papal Advisor Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon ..."
My intention today is to look at the unfolding crisis from a more "modern" point of view and
try to evaluate only what the political and social consequences of the latest
developments might be in the short and mid term. I will begin by a short summary.
The current context: a summary
The Patriarchate of Constantinople has taken the official decision to:
Declare that the
Patriarch of Constantinople has the right to unilaterally grant autocephaly (full independence)
to any other Church with no consultations with any the other Orthodox Churches. Cancel the
decision by the Patriarch of Constantinople Dionysios IV in 1686 transferring the Kiev
Metropolia (religious jurisdiction overseen by a Metropolite) to the Moscow Patriarchate (a
decision which no Patriarch of Constantinople contested for three centuries!) Lift the anathema
pronounced against the "Patriarch" Filaret Denisenko by the Moscow Patriarchate (in spite of
the fact that the only authority which can lift an anathema is the one which pronounced it in
the first place) Recognize as legitimate the so-called "Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kiev
Patriarchate" which it previously had declared as illegitimate and schismatic. Grant actual
grand full autocephaly to a future (and yet to be defined) "united Ukrainian Orthodox Church"
Most people naturally focus on this last element, but this might be a mistake, because while
illegally granting autocephaly to a mix of nationalist pseudo-Churches is most definitely a bad
decision, to act like some kind of "Orthodox Pope" and claim rights which only belong to the
entire Church is truly a historical mistake. Not only that, but this mistake now forces every
Orthodox Christian to either accept this as a fait accompli and submit to the
megalomania of the wannabe Ortho-Pope of the Phanar, or to reject such unilateral and totally
illegal action or to enter into open opposition. And this is not the first time such a
situation has happened in the history of the Church. I will use an historical parallel to make
this point.
The historical context:
The Church of Rome and the rest of the Christian world were already on a collision course
for several centuries before the famous date of 1054 when Rome broke away from the Christian
world. Whereas for centuries Rome had been the most steadfast bastion of resistance against
innovations and heresies, the influence of the Franks in the Church of Rome eventually resulted
(after numerous zig-zags on this topic) in a truly disastrous decision to add a single world (
filioque - "and the son"
in Latin) to the Symbol of Faith (the Credo in Latin). What made that decision even
worse was the fact that the Pope of Rome also declared that he had the right to impose that
addition upon all the other Christian Churches, with no conciliar discussion or approval. It is
often said that the issue of the filioque is "obscure" and largely irrelevant, but that
is just a reflection of the theological illiteracy of those making such statements as, in
reality, the addition of the filioque completely overthrows the most crucial and
important Trinitarian and Christological dogmas of Christianity. But what *is* true is that the
attempt to unilaterally impose this heresy on the rest of the Christian world was at least as
offensive and, really, as sacrilegious as the filioque itself because it undermined the
very nature of the Church. Indeed, the Symbol of Faith defines the Church as "catholic"
(Εἰς μίαν, Ἁγίαν,
Καθολικὴν καὶ
Ἀποστολικὴν
Ἐκκλησίαν") meaning not only "universal" but
also "whole" or "all-inclusive". In ecclesiological terms this "universality" is manifested in
two crucial ways:
First, all Churches are equal, there is no Pope, no "historical see" granting any
primacy just as all the Apostles of Christ and all Orthodox bishops are also equals; the
Head of the Church is Christ Himself, and the Church is His Theadric Body filled with the Holy
Spirit. Oh I know, to say that the Holy Spirit fills the Church is considered absolutely
ridiculous in our 21 st century post-Christian world, but check out these words from
the Book of Acts: " For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us " (Acts
15:28) which clearly show that the members of the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem clearly
believed and proclaimed that their decisions were guided by the Holy Spirit. Anyone still
believing that will immediately see why the Church needs no "vicar of Christ" or any "earthly
representative" to act in Christ's name during His absence. In fact, Christ Himself clearly
told us " lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen " (Matt 28:20).
If a Church needs a "vicar" – then Christ and the Holy Spirit are clearly not present in
that Church. QED.
Second, crucial decisions, decisions which affect the entire Church, are only taken by a
Council of the entire Church, not unilaterally by any one man or any one Church.
These are really the basics of what could be called "traditional Christian ecclesiology
101" and the blatant violation of this key ecclesiological dogma by the Papacy in 1054 was as
much a cause for the historical schism between East and West (really, between Rome and the rest
of Christian world) as was the innovation of the filioque itself.
I hasten to add that while the Popes were the first ones to claim for themselves an
authority only given to the full Church, they were not the only ones (by the way, this is a
very good working definition of the term "Papacy": the attribution to one man of all the
characteristics belonging solely to the entire Church). In the early 20 th century
the Orthodox Churches of Constantinople, Albania, Alexandria, Antioch, Bulgaria, Cyprus,
Greece, Poland, and Romania got together and, under the direct influence of powerful Masonic
lodges, decided to adopt the Gregorian Papal Calendar (named after the 16 th century
Pope Gregory XIII). The year was 1923, when the entire Russian Orthodox Church was being
literally crucified on the modern Golgotha of the Bolshevik regime, but that did not prevent
these Churches from calling their meeting "pan Orthodox". Neither did the fact that the
Russian, Serbian, Georgian, Jerusalem Church and the Holy Mountain (aka " Mount Athos ") rejected this innovation stop
them. As for the Papal Calendar itself, the innovators "piously" re-branded it as "improved
Julian" and other such euphemism to conceal the real intention behind this.
Finally, even the fact that this decision also triggered a wave of divisions
inside their own Churches was not cause for them to reconsider or, even less so,
to repent. Professor C. Troitsky was absolutely correct when he wrote that " there is no doubt that
future historians of the Orthodox Church will be forced to admit that the Congress of 1923 was
the saddest event of Church life in the 20th century " (for more on this tragedy see
here , here and
here ). Here
again, one man, Ecumenical Patriarch Meletius IV (Metaxakis) tried to "play Pope" and his
actions resulted in a massive upheaval which ripped through the entire Orthodox world.
More recently, the Patriarch of Constantinople tried, once again, to convene what he would
want to be an Orthodox "Ecumenical Council" under his personal authority when in 2016 (yet
another) "pan Orthodox" council was convened on the island of Crete which was attended by the
Churches of Alexandria , Jerusalem , Serbia , Romania , Cyprus , Greece, Poland , Albania and
of the Czech Lands and Slovakia. The Churches of Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia and the USA (OCA)
refused to attend. Most observers agreed that the Moscow Patriarchate played a key role in
undermining what was clearly to be a "robber" council which would have introduced major (and
fully non-Orthodox) innovations. The Patriarch of Constantinople never forgave the Russians for
torpedoing his planned "ecumenical" council.
Some might have noticed that a majority of local Churches did attend both the 1923 and the
2016 wannabe "pan Orthodox" councils. Such an observation might be very important in a Latin
or Protestant context, but in the Orthodox context is is absolutely meaningless for the
following reasons:
The theological context:
In the history of the Church there have been many "robber" councils (meaning
illegitimate, false, councils) which were attended by a majority of bishops of the time, and
even a majority of the Churches; in this
article I mentioned the life of Saint Maximos the Confessor (which you can read in full
here ) as a
perfect example of how one single person (not even a priest!) can defend true Christianity
against what could appear at the time as the overwhelming number of bishops representing the
entire Church. But, as always, these false bishops were eventually denounced and the Truth of
Orthodoxy prevailed.
Likewise, at the False Union of Florence, when all the Greek delegates signed the union
with the Latin heretics, and only one bishop refused to to do (Saint Mark of Ephesus), the
Latin Pope declared
in despair " and so we have accomplished nothing! ". He was absolutely correct
– that union was rejected by the "Body" of the Church and the names of those apostates
who signed it will remain in infamy forever. I could multiply the examples, but what is
crucial here is to understand that majorities, large numbers or, even more so, the
support of secular authorities are absolutely meaningless in Christian theology and in the
history of the Church and that, with time, all the lapsed bishops who attended robber
councils are always eventually denounced and the Orthodox truth always proclaimed once again.
It is especially important to keep this in mind during times of persecution or of brutal
interference by secular authorities because even when they *appear* to have won, their
victory is always short-lived.
I would add that the Russian Orthodox Church is not just "one of the many" local Orthodox
Churches. Not only is the Russian Orthodox Church by far the biggest Orthodox Church out there,
but Moscow used to be the so-called "Third Rome", something which gives the Moscow Patriarchate
a lot of prestige and, therefore, influence. In secular terms of prestige and "street cred" the
fact that the Russians did not participate in the 1923 and 2016 congresses is much bigger a
blow to its organizers than if, say, the Romanians had boycotted it. This might not be
important to God or for truly pious Christians, but I assure you that this is absolutely
crucial for the wannabe "Eastern Pope" of the Phanar
Who is really behind this latest attack on the Church?
So let's begin by stating the obvious: for all his lofty titles (" His Most Divine
All-Holiness the Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, and Ecumenical Patriarch " no
less!), the Patriarch of Constantinople (well, of the Phanar, really), is nothing but a puppet
in the hands of the AngloZionist Empire. An ambitious and vain puppet for sure, but a puppet
nonetheless. To imagine that the Uber-loser Poroshenko would convince him to pick a major fight
with the Moscow Patriarchate is absolutely laughable and totally ridiculous. Some point out
that the Patriarch of Constantinople is a Turkish civil servant. While technically true, this
does not suggest that Erdogan is behind this move either: right now Erdogan badly needs Russia
on so many levels that he gains nothing and risks losing a lot by alienating Moscow.
No, the real initiator of this entire operation is the AngloZionist Empire and, of
course, the Papacy (which has always tried to create an " Orthodoxerein Ukraine" from
the "The Eastern Crusade" and "Northern Crusades" of Popes Innocent III and Gregory IX to the
Nazi Ukraine of Bandera – see here for
details).
Why would the Empire push for such a move? Here we can find a mix of petty and larger
geostrategic reasons. First, the petty ones: they range from the usual impotent knee-jerk
reflex to do something, anything, to hurt Russia to pleasing of the Ukronazi emigrés in
the USA and Canada. The geostrategic ones range from trying to save the highly unpopular
Ukronazi regime in Kiev to breaking up the Orthodox world thereby weakening Russian soft-power
and influence. This type of "logic" shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the Orthodox world
today. Here is why:
The typical level of religious education of Orthodox Christians is probably well represented
by the famous Bell Curve: some are truly completely ignorant, most know a little, and a few
know a lot. As long as things were reasonably peaceful, all these Orthodox Christians could go
about their daily lives and not worry too much about the big picture. This is also true of many
Orthodox Churches and bishops. Most folks like beautiful rites (singing, golden cupolas,
beautiful architecture and historical places) mixed in with a little good old superstition
(place a candle before a business meeting or playing the lottery) – such is human nature
and, alas, most Orthodox Christians are no different, even if their calling is to be "not of
this world". But now this apparently peaceful picture has been severely disrupted by the
actions of the Patriarch of Constantinople whose actions are in such blatant and severe
violation of all the basic canons and traditions of the Church that they literally force each
Orthodox Christian, especially bishops, to break their silence and take a position: am I with
Moscow or with Constantinople?
Oh sure, initially many (most?) Orthodox Christians, including many bishops, will either try
to look away or limit themselves to vapid expressions of "regret" mixed in with calls for
"unity". A good example of that kind of wishy washy lukewarm language can already be found
here . But this kind of Pilate-like washing of hands ("ain't my business" in modern
parlance) is unsustainable, and here is why: in Orthodox ecclesiology you cannot build "broken
Eucharistic triangles". If A is not in communion with B, then C cannot be in communion with A
and B at the same time. It's really an "either or" binary choice. At least in theory (in
reality, such "broken triangles" have existed, most recently between the former ROCA/ROCOR, the
Serbian Church and the Moscow Patriarchate, but they are unsustainable, as events of the
2000-2007 years confirmed for the ROCA/ROCOR). Still, no doubt that some (many?) will try to
remain in communion with both the Moscow Patriarchate and the Constantinople Patriarchate, but
this will become harder and harder with every passing month. In some specific cases, such a
decision will be truly dramatic, I think of the monasteries on the Holy Mountain in particular.
On a more cynical level, I would note that the Patriarch of Constantinople has now
opened a real Pandora's box which now every separatist movement in an Orthodox country will be
able to use to demand its own "autocephaly" which will threaten the unity of most Orthodox
Churches out there. If all it takes to become "autocephalous" is to trigger some kind of
nationalist uprising, then just imagine how many "Churches" will demand the same autocephaly as
the Ukronazis are today! The fact that ethno-phyetism
is a condemned heresy will clearly stop none of them. After all, if it is good enough for
the "Ecumenical" Patriarch, it sure is good enough for any and all pseudo-Orthodox
nationalists!
What the AngloZionist Empire has done is to force each Orthodox Christian and each
Orthodox Church to chose between siding with Moscow or Constantinople. This choice will have
obvious spiritual consequences, which the Empire couldn't give a damn about, but it will also
profound political and social consequences which, I believe, the Empire entirely missed
.
The Moscow Patriarchate vs the Patriarchate of Constantinople – a sociological and
political analysis
Let me be clear here that I am not going to compare and contrast the Moscow Patriarchate
(MP) and the Patriarchate of Constantinople (PC) from a spiritual, theological or even
ecclesiological point of view here. Instead, I will compare and contrast them from a purely
sociological and political point of view. The differences here are truly profound.
Moscow Patriarchate
Patriarchate of Constantinople
Actual size
Very big
Small
Financial means
Very big
Small
Dependence on the support of the Empire and its various entities
Limited
Total
Relations with the Vatican
Limited, mostly due to very strongly
anti-Papist sentiments in the people
Mutual support
and de-facto alliance
Majority member's outlook
Conservative
Modernist
Majority member's level of support
Strong
Lukewarm
Majority member's concern with Church rules/cannons/traditions
Medium and selective
Low
Internal dissent
Practically eliminated (ROCA)
Strong (Holy Mountain, Old Calendarists)
From the above table you can immediately see that the sole comparative 'advantage' of the PC
is that is has the full support of the AngloZionist Empire and the Vatican. On all the other
measures of power, the MP vastly "out-guns" the PC.
Now, inside the Ukronazi occupied Ukraine, that support of the Empire and the Vatican (via
their Uniats) does indeed give a huge advantage to the PC and its Ukronazi pseudo-Orthodox
"Churches". And while Poroshenko has promised that no violence will be used against the MP
parishes in the Ukraine, we all remember that he was the one who promised to stop the war
against the Donbass, so why even pay attention to what he has to say.
US diplomats and analysts might be ignorant enough to believe Poroshenko's promises, but if
that is the case then they are failing to realize that Poroshensko has very little control over
the hardcore Nazi mobs
like the one we saw last Sunday in Kiev . The reality is very different: Poroshenko's
relationship to the hardcore Nazis in the Ukraine is roughly similar to the one the House of
Saud has with the various al-Qaeda affiliates in Saudi Arabia: they try to both appease and
control them, but they end up failing every time. The political agenda in the Ukraine is set by
bona fide Nazis, just as it is set in the KSA by the various al-Qaeda types. Poroshenko
and MBS are just impotent dwarfs trying to ride on the shoulders of much more powerful
devils.
Sadly, and as always, the ones most at risk right now are the simple faithful who will
resist any attempts by the Ukronazi death-squads to seize their churches and expel their
priests. I don't expect a civil war to ensue, not in the usual sense of the world, but I do
expect a lot of atrocities similar to what took place during the 2014 Odessa massacre when the
Ukronazis burned people alive (and shot those trying to escape). Once these massacres begin, it
will be very, very hard for the Empire to whitewash them or blame it all on "Russian
interference". But most crucially, as the (admittedly controversial) Christian writer
Tertullian noticed as far back as the 2 nd century " the blood of the martyrs is
the seed of the Church ". You can be sure that the massacre of innocent Christians in the
Ukraine will result in a strengthening of the Orthodox awareness, not only inside the Ukraine,
but also in the rest of the world, especially among those who are currently "on the fence" so
to speak, between the kind of conservative Orthodoxy proclaimed by the MP and the kind of
lukewarm wishy washy "decaf" pseudo-Orthodoxy embodied by the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
After all, it is one thing to change the Church Calendar or give hugs and kisses to Popes and
quite another to bless Nazi death-squads to persecute Orthodox Christians.
To summarize I would say that by his actions, the Patriarch of Constantinople is now forcing
the entire Orthodox world to make a choice between two very different kind of "Orthodoxies". As
for the Empire, it is committing a major mistake by creating a situation which will further
polarize strongly, an already volatile political situation in the Ukraine.
There is, at least potentially, one more possible consequence from these developments which
is almost never discussed: its impact inside the Moscow Patriarchate.
Possible impact of these developments inside the Moscow Patriarchate
Without going into details, I will just say that the Moscow Patriarchate is a very diverse
entity in which rather different "currents" coexist. In Russian politics I often speak of
Atlantic Integrationists and Eurasian Sovereignists. There is something vaguely similar inside
the MP, but I would use different terms. One camp is what I would call the "pro-Western
Ecumenists" and the other camp the "anti-Western Conservatives". Ever since Putin came to power
the pro-Western Ecumenists have been losing their influence, mostly due to the fact that the
majority of the regular rank and file members of the MP are firmly behind the anti-Western
Conservative movement (bishops, priests, theologians).
The rabid hatred and fear of everything Russian by the West combined with the total support
for anything anti-Russian (including Takfiris and Nazis) has had it's impact here too, and very
few people in Russia want the civilizational model of Conchita Wurst, John McCain or Pope
Francis to influence the future of Russia. The word "ecumenism" has, like the word "democracy",
become a four letter word in Russia with a meaning roughly similar to "sellout" or
"prostitution". What is interesting is that many bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate who, in the
past, were torn between the conservative pressure from their own flock and their own
"ecumenical" and "democratic" inclinations (best embodied by the Patriarch of Constantinople)
have now made a choice for the conservative model (beginning by Patriarch Kirill himself who,
in the past, used to be quite favorable to the so-called "ecumenical dialog of love" with the
Latins).
Now that the MP and the PC have broken the ties which previously united them, they are both
free to pursue their natural inclinations, so to speak. The PC can become some kind of "Eastern
Rite Papacy" and bask in an unhindered love fest with the Empire and the Vatican while the MP
will now have almost no incentive whatsoever to pay attention to future offers of
rapprochement by the Empire or the Vatican (these two
always work hand in hand ). For Russia, this is a very good development.
Make no mistake, what the Empire did in the Ukraine constitutes yet another profoundly
evil and tragic blow against the long-suffering people of the Ukraine. In its ugliness and
tragic consequences, it is quite comparable to the occupation of these lands by the Papacy via
its Polish and Lithuanian agents. But God has the ability to turn even the worst horror into
something which, in the end, will strengthen His Church.
Russia in general, and the Moscow Patriarchate specifically, are very much in a transition
phase on many levels and we cannot overestimate the impact which the West's hostility on all
fronts, including spiritual ones, will have on the future consciousness of the Russian and
Orthodox people. The 1990s were years of total confusion and ignorance, not only for Russia by
the way, but the first decade of the new millennium has turned out to be a most painful, but
also most needed, eye-opener for those who had naively trusted the notion that the West's enemy
was only Communism, not Russia as a civilizational model.
In their infinite ignorance and stupidity, the leaders of the Empire have always acted only
in the immediate short term and they never bothered to think about the mid to long term effects
of their actions. This is as true for Russia as it is for Iraq or the Balkans. When things
eventually, and inevitably, go very wrong, they will be sincerely baffled and wonder how and
why it all went wrong. In the end, as always, they will blame the "other guy".
There is no doubt in my mind that the latest maneuver of the AngloZionist Empire in the
Ukraine will yield some kind of feel-good and short term "victory" ("peremoga" in Ukrainian)
which will be followed by a humiliating defeat ("zrada" in Ukrainian) which will have profound
consequences for many decades to come and which will deeply reshape the current Orthodox world.
In theory, these kinds of operations are supposed to implement the ancient principle of "divide
and rule", but in the modern world what they really do is to further unite the Russian people
against the Empire and, God willing, will unite the Orthodox people against pseudo-Orthodox
bishops.
Conclusion:
In this analysis I have had to describe a lot of, shall we say, "less than inspiring"
realities about the Orthodox Church and I don't want to give the impression that the Church of
Christ is as clueless and impotent as all those denominations, which, over the centuries have
fallen away from the Church. Yes, our times are difficult and tragic, but the Church has not
lost her "salt". So what I want to do in lieu of a personal conclusion is to quote one of the
most enlightened and distinguished theologians of our time, Metropolitan Hierotheos of
Nafpaktos , who in his book "<A
title="https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Orthodox-Church-Hierotheos/dp/9607070399/"
onclick="trackOutboundLink('https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Orthodox-Church-Hierotheos/dp/9607070399/?tag=unco037-20');"
href="https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Orthodox-Church-Hierotheos/dp/9607070399/?tag=unco037-20"
'="">The Mind of the Orthodox Church" (which I consider one of the best books available in
English about the Orthodox Church and a "must read" for anybody interested in Orthodox
ecclesiology) wrote the following words:
Saint Maximos the Confessor says that, while Christians are divided into categories
according to age and race, nationalities, languages, places and ways of life, studies and
characteristics, and are "distinct from one another and vastly different, all being born into
the Church and reborn and recreated through it in the Spirit" nevertheless "it bestows
equally on all the gift of one divine form and designation, to be Christ's and to bear His
Name. And Saint Basil the Great, referring to the unity of the Church says
characteristically: "The Church of Christ is one, even tough He is called upon from different
places". These passages, and especially the life of the Church, do away with every
nationalistic tendency. It is not, of course, nations and homelands that are abolished, but
nationalism, which is a heresy and a great danger to the Church of Christ.
Metropolitan Hierotheos is absolutely correct. Nationalism, which itself is a pure product
of West European secularism, is one of the most dangerous threats facing the Church today.
During the 20 th century it has already cost the lives of millions of pious and
faithful Christians (having said that, this in no way implies that the kind of suicidal
multiculturalism advocated by the degenerate leaders of the AngloZionist Empire today is any
better!). And this is hardly a "Ukrainian" problem (the Moscow Patriarchate is also deeply
infected by the deadly virus of nationalism). Nationalism and ethno-phyletism are hardly worse
than such heresies as Iconoclasm or Monophysitism/Monothelitism were in the past and those were
eventually defeated. Like all heresies, nationalism will never prevail against the " Church
of the living God " which is the " the pillar and ground of the truth " (1 Tim 3:15)
and while many may lapse, others never will.
In the meantime, the next couple of months will be absolutely crucial. Right now it appears
to me that the majority of the Orthodox Churches will first try to remain neutral but will have
to eventually side with the Moscow Patriarchate and against the actions of Patriarch
Bartholomew. Ironically, the situation inside the USA will most likely be particularly chaotic
as the various Orthodox jurisdictions in the USA have divided loyalties and are often split
along conservative vs modernizing lines. The other place to keep a close eye on will be the
monasteries on the Holy Mountain were I expect a major crisis and confrontation to erupt.
With the crisis in the Ukraine the heresy of nationalism has reached a new level of infamy
and there will most certainly be a very strong reaction to it. The Empire clearly has no idea
what kind of dynamic it has now set in motion.
Same problem with Muslim Ummah. Are we Persian Muslims/Turkish Muslims/Malay Muslims/Arab
Muslims/Kazakh Muslims or just Muslims as One entity?
Accepting The "One" means dilution of the "Many" and accepting the "many" means dilution
of the "one". Man can never escape dialectics or at least strike a right balance except by
the grace of God.
Religion is opium for masses. Whom Sacker is kidding? Those попы care
for nothing but power , influence and money. Church as a whole has nothing to do with highest
power if that power is actually exist. They are mere humans who pull the wool in front of
people's eyes. They are also anything but austere. Check Patriarch Kirill watches and cars.
They do not need Empire to start bikering among themselves for said power and money.
Nationalism, which itself is a pure product of West European secularism, is one of the
most dangerous threats facing the Church today
On the other hand, Christianity, a product of effete idealism, is one of the most
dangerous threats to the survival of the West. Christianity works hand-in-glove with our
stinking governments, providing the moral and spiritual authority for the mass immigration
and Islamization which are destroying Western nations. Christianity could have allied itself
with the people but it chose, instead, to betray us. It is the enemy of the white race. To
the Church, nationalism is a threat. To whites, nationalism is our saviour.
Ultimately the cause of this split of the Orthodox Church is Satan. And of course Satan's
loyal servants running the AngloZionist Empire. Catholic writer E. Michael Jones does a great
job explaining the real forces at play in the modern world (in his books and talks- see video
below).
The Catholic Pope is obviously a filthy, stinking, homosexual pig-as are his Cardinals. I was
born and raised Irish Catholic. Catholic Schools all the way. The Protestant Churches no
better. Deep South Evangelical Christianity is a Cargo Cult that worships a Jewish State.
As for the Papal Calendar itself, the innovators "piously" re-branded it as "improved
Julian" and other such euphemism to conceal the real intention behind this.
Russia finally changed to use of the Julian calendar to be in line with the European
practice (alas, too late) just as Europe was changing from the Julian to the Gregorian
calendar. If the ROC places such importance on the calendar, why won't it revert to following
the calendar in use prior to Peter I's reforms of 1700, the year he forced the Julian
calendar on Russia (with not even one full month's notice)?
Another reason to hate the Catholic Church:The Catholic Church= Mike Pompeo mentored by
Papal Advisor Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon .
Pompeo the Cockroach .as it .(Mike Pompeo is an it, as is that other well known BLATARIA
.Hillary Clinton) .is known to the residents of Satan's filthy stinking reeking toilet bowl
waaaaaaaaay down in putrid HELL!!!!!!!
Don't mind the split infinitive they are really quite alright .only a girly boy grammar
NAZI!!! would shriek about it ..
Guitar masses in Cathedral of Christ the Saviour or bust.
On another note, while the historical claim to Ukraine by Moscow is not really at
questions, the Ukrainians certainly had cause to turn to Germany in WWII, given that the
alternative was the Reds. Their side of this tale is always painted as neo-facism, which
their actions in 2014 certainly did not help, but I do have to wonder about their story in
this tale, independent of their horrific and despicable Western backers.
@Johnny Rottenborough Yeah. It's amazing how the West has survived almost two millennia
of Christian domination. How did those effete Christians manage to convert the heathen
tribes, turn back the Muslims, then colonize and convert over half the world? How did modern
science and technology arise and evolve to such heights in a Christian context? Christians
are such pansies, it's odd that so many of them have so many children.. How do they manage to
prosper and survive? Inexplicable.
@fitzhamilton fitzhamilton -- Yesterday's achievements are undeniable. Equally, today's
betrayal is undeniable. At some point during the last century, Christianity turned against
the white race.
Wow what an amazing article the detail that Saker brings to this subject is breathtaking. I
had to scramble for the dictionary to find out that 'Phyletism' or 'ethnophyletism'
[from the Greek ethnos 'nation' and phyletismos 'tribalism'] is the conflation between Church
and nation [sounds bad...]
'Monophysitism' the apparently wrong belief among some that 'Christ' has a single
[mono] nature as opposed to the 'correct' interpretation of his divine and human duality
[again, very bad...]
So I heaved a sigh of relief when the author noted that these and other heresies [such as
iconoclasm...ie the breaking of icons] were eventually 'defeated' [WHEW]
And who could forget the Battle of the Calendars
'In the early 20th century the Orthodox Churches of Constantinople, Albania, Alexandria,
Antioch, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, and Romania got together and, under the direct
influence of powerful Masonic lodges, decided to adopt the Gregorian Papal Calendar (named
after the 16th century Pope Gregory XIII).
I'm sure the Saker will be relieved to know that despite this temporary setback, the
Julian Calendar [after Julius Ceasar] did eventually prevail as well being today the
universal calendar of astronomy, science, the military, and software coding heck even GPS
uses it see the Julian
Day
[Once again, the forces of the Redeemer prevail]
And then of course we have the centuries of intrigue and betrayals all those treacherous
'robber councils' etc it is perhaps worth mentioning also the original such apostolic act of
denial, and
eventually repentance that of St Peter
First, the petty ones: they range from the usual impotent knee-jerk reflex to do
something, anything, to hurt Russia to pleasing of the Ukronazi emigrés in the USA
and Canada.
That is true.
Canada : Celebrating Nazis Is Wrong. Period.
"On Sunday, April 22, on the eve of the G7 Summit in Toronto, Freeland hosted a brunch in
her private home. In attendance that day were all the Foreign Ministers from the G7
countries, with a plus one in the form of Pavlo Klimkin, Foreign Minister of Ukraine. No,
Ukraine is definitely not a member of the G7, but Freeland wanted Klimkin front and center to
make sure he put the ongoing crisis in Ukraine at the top of the G7 Summit agenda.
That's all well and good, as a lit powder keg such as Ukraine in the middle of Europe,
polarized between NATO and nuclear-armed Russia is certainly a global concern. Freeland has
also never denied the fact that she is proud of her Ukrainian-Canadian roots."
"Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee told the Times of Israel that
this Nazi parade was "a scandalous event that should not be allowed to happen in Ukraine in
which murderers of Jews and others are glorified."
Andrew Srulevitch, director of European Affairs at the Anti-Defamation league wrote on
Twitter, "Ukrainian leaders need to condemn such marches, where Ukrainian extremists
celebrate Ukrainian Nazi SS divisions (1st Galician), giving Nazi salutes in uniform in the
middle of a major Ukrainian city."
"Little bitch for the devil" would seem to describe Catholic priests these days, not ol'
WBM.
Haha, you're so adorable. Such a loyal hasbara of the Christ-hating oligarchs pushing the
anti-Catholic bullshit narrative. Prof. Philip Jenkins/Baylor U./John Jay College/et al. have
done all kind of studies and analysis and have shown that the rates of sexual
predation/predators is proportionally lower among Catholic clergy than in public education
and even among Protestant denominations. But since these entities are loyal to the oligarchs
and the AngloZionist Empire you'll never see them targeted with this kind of bullshit
propaganda. Not that that matters to you, RadicalCenter. Now go off and post shit about how
Assad is a monster who gasses his own people and the U.S. is in Syria only to fight ISIS.
I'm from Russia and here is my prediction: there will be no "religious conflict" in the
Ukraine. Instead, churches belonging to ROC will be one by one expropriated by Ukrainian
regime. The locals are powerless bydlo , and will do as they are told. They would
embrace Satanic church, if this is what the authorities told them to. Authority in the
Ukraine is derived from violence, not faith.
Somebody(s) in the State Dept, CIA, MI6, Mossad got to Bartholomew. Ultimate object in
splitting Ukraine Church is to divide the country and bring it or most of it into NATO. This
scheme is so diabolical as to be the work of Antichrist. Natoization of Ukraine could easily
result in WWIII. God have mercy on us all. Спаси и
сохрани.
Interesting article – vital information! Can anyone possibly imagine the MSM or even
so-called conservative outlets giving any degree of clear discussion of what is happening in
the Orthodox Church? Personally, I think the real issue among denominations is learning and
understanding the Biblical languages, translating to the modern tongues. The over-use of
Latin (instead of Greek, Hebrew) led the Bishops of Rome to some regrettable mis-steps.
For Western Christians who care about the Holy Word, this site is encouraging for
Christians who are disgusted with the cucks and diversity cultists taking over their
denominations (i.e., Russell Moore in the SBC, etc): Faith and Heritage dot com
@A. -H. LOL
This is how lying Jews & their neo-Marxist shills try to win all arguments. said: "Eduard
Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee told the Times of Israel that this Nazi
parade was "a scandalous event that should not be allowed to happen in Ukraine in which
murderers of Jews and others are glorified." Andrew Srulevitch, director of European Affairs
at the Anti-Defamation league wrote on Twitter, "Ukrainian leaders need to condemn such
marches, where Ukrainian extremists celebrate Ukrainian Nazi SS divisions (1st Galician),
giving Nazi salutes in uniform in the middle of a major Ukrainian city." "
" most Orthodox Churches are still used as pawns in purely political machinations "
Who is the pawn of whom is open for discussion. When reading these words I remember seeing
Putin in an orthodox church, in a ceremony showing his respect for the church, not looking
very happy. Religions have tremendous impacts, as we saw in 1979, when the Islam was able to
drive away the USA's puppet shah from Iran. The USA is still fighting the consequences.
@A. -H. " as a lit powder keg such as Ukraine in the middle of Europe, polarized between
NATO and nuclear-armed Russia "
Deliberately created by the EU, with NATO support, I suppose. Redundant organizations seek
new goals.
@jilles dykstra They rang Putin up and asked if he could please invade Ukraine to give
them an excuse for tax payers. Weirdly enough, Ukraine was Clinton's obsession and not
Trump's. She became particularly obsessed with Russians, for some reason, following the
election.
@byrresheim If Russians are to be blamed for Holodomor, who is to be blamed for Red
Terror and 1921-1922 Russia famine, which was worse than Holodomor?
@Seraphim Christianity is universalist/globalist according to the L'
Internationale Jew who started it.
• Go therefore and make disciples of all nations . Matthew 28:19
• Proclaimed in his name to all nations . Luke 24:47
• For Jewgod so loved the whole universe [kosmos] that the universe [kosmos]
might be saved through Jewgod. John 3:16-17
Tribalism is close-family nationalism. Natal, the root word of nation, means related by
birth. If you're against people liking to associate politically their birth-related kin,
you're bellyaching at the wrong website.
@War for Blair Mountain You ask, "Why does the Working Class Native Born White
American population of the American South worship Israel and Jews in general?"
Because the book they're carrying into church today and pounding into their kids' heads
states:
• John 4:22 " We worship what we do know, for salvation is from the
Jews ."
• Acts 3:25 "He said to Abraham, 'Through your offspring all peoples on earth will be
blessed.'"
• Romans 1:16 "The Jew first."
• Romans 9:4 "The people of Israel, chosen."
• Romans 15:27 "For if the Gentiles have shared in the Jews' spiritual blessings, they
owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings."
• Philippians 3:3 "For it is we [Christians] who are the Circumcision."
• Philippians 3:20 "But our citizenship is in Jewheaven." (which is the Israeli capital
city Jerusalem, Rev. 21:2)
Yet some of these Jew-worhipers still have the chutzpah to allege that "there is no
"Judeo-Christianity," apparently because the exact terminology judeo-christian isn't
found in the Jew Testament. Believing that only a Jewish Rabbi can save a white man from
being a bad, bad boy worthy of a roasting in hell by a Jewgod has consequences.
@Jeff Stryker Nuland is the one who rang up and asked if the US could please invade
Ukraine with Banderite genocidal crazies. Nuland's taking of Ukraine with a few bags of
cookies was the greatest bargain since the Native Americans sold Manhattan for trinkets,
worth 24$, to Dutch. A few decades later, the Dutch themselves made a huge mistake by giving
away New York to the British.
Here is the video of Ms. Nuland's call, that may lead to WIII. Is she a new Helen of Troy
that launched a thousand ships. She also states the lovely phrase F ** k the EU at the end of
the coup talk. Lovely century we live in. Where is the peace and love that we were promised
in 1960s, 1970s?
Unfortunately Saker's attack upon the Filioque plays right into the hands of the
oligarchy's drive to destroy mankind by denying man's abilities and potential as a being made
in the image of God.
It is Lyndon LaRouche and associates who correctly identify the Filioque as essential in
the flowering of the Renaissance and the rise of the Nation-State, of that Platonic Christian
Republican revival based upon the dignity of humanity.
A book review on why the Eastern Churches deny the Filioque, to which the question might
be asked- Is the Saker an adherent to the Moscow as the Third Rome prophecy?
The following essay situates the Filioque as relevant to the defense of Christianity, of
Western Civilization in struggles similar to what we are experiencing today, as basically the
same operations are being run.
Metropolitan Hierotheos is absolutely correct. Nationalism, which itself is a pure
product of West European secularism,
Its not. Christianity is't even 2,000 year old, and has as its core a foreign mythology
(hence its gravity toward anti-nationalism). Nationalism is as old as civilization.
is one of the most dangerous threats facing the Church today.
So? Who said that the Church takes precedent over civilization and tribe? Who says that is
the greater good?
From where I sit, our nations are now moral and demographic hellholes and the Church
played no small role in opening the door to that situation. Where is the Church's evidence of
a net good outcome?
If the Church wanted to assure its survival, then it needed to facilitate holiness on
Earth via promulgation of a morality that successfully defended that state of man.
At the moment, we have the opposite of that and that isn't because we didn't or don't have
enough Church. The pre-Christians would have never allowed things to progress to this state
out of spiritual pressure to be weak in the face of those who hate us and are incompatible
with civilization.That path was the path of the Church.
During the 20th century it has already cost the lives of millions of pious and faithful
Christians
Okay, Jew-commie apologist. Laying the results of the 20th century on those that rose to
defend the world from who you cite below both insults the intelligence of your readers and
reduces the integrity of your total argument.
(having said that, this in no way implies that the kind of suicidal multiculturalism
advocated by the degenerate leaders of the AngloZionist Empire today is any better!).
You will have one or the other. No middle ground is possible. If you say its possible and
reduce nationalism but fail to defend against the communists, then you are their tool. Also,
I don't see any visible Anglo power. Only Jewish power.
And this is hardly a "Ukrainian" problem (the Moscow Patriarchate is also deeply
infected by the deadly virus of nationalism).
You've yet to describe how nationalism is a deadly virus. In response to my claim, I
suspect another round of vague logic and accusations that omit history.
Like all heresies, nationalism will never prevail against the "Church of the living
God"
It seems misplaced for the Church to outlaw a specific political stance when it provides
no defense against (and even facilitates) its antipode. If the church involves itself in life
and death politics, then it must accept the consequences. Period. It would better serve God
and the nations by remaining neutral. That it has not done that, an fights more zealously
against nationalism, reveals its actual use.
Second, you have no idea what the words mean that you use. You put on the air of a
knowledgeable armchair theologian, but have restricted yourself to Christian dogma and myth
that has always used occluded language. You have no idea what the phrase "living God" means.
You take florid sounding language and use it as a rhetorical device. What I know about the
"living god" is that he dies as a matter of course. This occurs after his maturity. You will
see this again, the unholy growth will stop, and holiness will return to the world.
which is the "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim 3:15) and while many may lapse,
others never will.
"Never" isn't an oft used concept in Christianity. In fact, the Bible is a tale of cycles.
While your current political ideology is moral and spiritual poison, perhaps you can be saved
and so I'm kindly warning you to be prepared for them.
Whoever said that religion is opium for the masses was onto something. Although, the
Ukrainians looked intoxicated even without this latest controversy over religion. They
believe that the west is in love with them. Let me clear something for them: The west (its
elites) are not in the business of love. They are in the business of using people. The
western elites don't love even their own people, let alone the Ukrainians.
This is the current school of "thought" of the western elites: To love your own kind is
racist. To pretend to love every other kind is pinnacle of humanism. Or as I like to call it
– degeneracy.
The truth is, the western elites don't love anybody except themselves They are just too
stupid to realize that they are unsustainable by themselves. If they destroy their base of
people like them – they are done. All their money wouldn't be able to buy them a ticket
on the newest Elon Musk rocket headed to another inhabitable planet and away from the
wretched earth that they in their stupidity destroyed.
@Art That's a flowery synopsis of Christianity that, while popular among Jew-worshipers,
doesn't square with what the Jewsus character actually said.
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
Matthew 10:34
Ludgwig von Mises summed up Christianity much more accurately.
[Jesus] rejects everything that exists without offering anything to replace it. He
arrives at dissolving all existing social ties . The motive force behind the purity and
power of this complete negation is ecstatic inspiration and enthusiastic hope of a new
world. Hence his passionate attack upon everything that exists. Everything may be destroyed
because God in His omnipotence will rebuild the future order . The clearest modern parallel
to the attitude of complete negation of primitive Christianity is Bolshevism. The
Bolshevists, too, wish to destroy everything that exists because they regard it as
hopelessly bad.
(Socialism, p. 413)
Think Peace? You got Jesus wrong, and he explicitly stated so.
Obama was a neocon, Trump is a neocon. what's new ?
Chinese leaders appeared to be acting on the advice of the 6th century BC philosopher and general Sun Tzu, who wrote in The Art
of War, "there is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare."
Candidate Trump railed against the invasion of Iraq during his campaign, at one point blaming George W. Bush directly and saying,
"we should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East." As president-elect, Trump continued to promise a very
different foreign policy, one that would "stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be
involved with."
The election of Donald Trump gave the international community pause: Trump appeared unpredictable, eschewed tradition, and flouted
convention. He might well have followed through on his promise to move the U.S. away from its long embrace of forever war. China's
government in particular must have worried about such a move. If the U.S. focused on its internal problems and instead pursued a
restrained foreign policy that was constructive rather than destructive, it might pose more of an impediment to China's rise to global
power status.
But the Chinese need not have worried. With a continued troop presence in Afghanistan and Syria, a looming conflict with Iran,
and even talk of an intervention in Venezuela, Trump is keeping the U.S. on its perpetual wartime footing.
This is good news for Beijing, whose own foreign policy could not be more different. Rather than embracing a reactive and short-sighted
approach that all too often ignores second- and third-order consequences, the Chinese strategy appears cautious and long-ranging.
Its policymakers and technocrats think and plan in terms of decades, not months. And those plans, for now, are focused more on building
than bombing.
This is not to say that China's foreign policy is altruistic-it is certainly not. It is designed to cement China's role as a great
power by ensnaring as many countries as possible in its economic web. China is playing the long game while Washington expends resources
and global political capital on wars it cannot win. America's devotion to intervention is sowing the seeds of its own demise and
China will be the chief beneficiary.
"... More than 60 percent of Americans who have some European ancestry can be identified using DNA databases – even if they have not submitted their own DNA, researchers reported Thursday. ..."
"... Enough people have done some kind of DNA test to make it possible to match much of the population, the researchers said. So even if you don't submit your own DNA, if a cousin does, it could lead people to you. ..."
"... The point here is the stupid, faddish public is dumb enough to submit the material the very DNA being used by the "trusted" authorities either out in the open or by back-door methods to round up all of the DNA for the surveillance state. ..."
"... I invite anyone to comment who has experience with a "transfer station," or other garbage collection facility, and anyone in the healthcare/hospital industry with some inside info as to their nefarious methods. You can easily see from these examples how they are hard on the trail relentless bloodhounds that have the scent of their quarry and they will not stop until everyone is categorized and monitored. Then the real fun begins. ..."
"... The same group (ELITE/DEEPSTATE) that wants this Tyranny outcome is also supporting the infighting, LGBTQ rtstuv, BLM, CODE PINK, ME TOO etc etc... They know that as long as we (the working class tax paying stiffs) think this is actually a left/right- Dem/Rep issue and keep bickering over the BS, we will never unite against the takeover of our country and begin to unite to defend our rights. ..."
Walmart is interested in what's going on in your body while you shop.
The company wants to collect this data in a particularly creepy way: through the handles of their shopping carts. Walmart recently
submitted a patent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office called "
System and Method for a Biometric Feedback Cart Handle ," CBInsights reports.
These innovative shopping cart handles would collect your biometric data, meaning your stress level, your body temperature,
and heart rate -- all while you're strolling through the aisles of your local store, filling your cart with Walmart's everyday
low-priced items.
The article proceeds to explain Walmart's "spin" on it is to provide a way to "check on a customer with a physical problem."
Since when has Walmart ever been concerned about anyone's physical well-being? Isn't this the company that settled out of court
for millions to pay for stolen labor time and breaks from employees? Isn't this the same Walmart that twenty years ago put small
stores in to break local competitors (Mom and Pop stores) in small towns and when they went belly up, closed their small Walmarts
and "plopped" a Super-Walmart down in the center of where five small ones used to be? Then all the little serfs could come from miles
around to service the monolith with their play money, as the local economies of the small towns died, right? Worse. Being a "too
big to fail" type of business, they're deep in bed with the governments, federal and state. Simple data collection "for your own
safety and well-being," right?
No. They're going to tie this data in with all of the other micro-data and metadata they are already gathering filming you with
their little cameras filming Johnny Jones Junior and Daddy Jones as they pick up a box of shells for the shotgun amount and type
recorded and filed next to the photos and film with their names and biometrics.
They want every piece of information on you and your family, and they're not going to stop until they have it all of it.
More than 60 percent of Americans who have some European ancestry can be identified using DNA databases – even if they have
not submitted their own DNA, researchers reported Thursday.
Enough people have done some kind of DNA test to make it possible to match much of the population, the researchers said. So
even if you don't submit your own DNA, if a cousin does, it could lead people to you.
They said their findings, published in the journal Science, raise concerns about privacy. Not only could police use this information,
but so could other people seeking personal information about someone.
The article goes on to talk about Joseph DeAngelo, a former cop in California suspected of murder, and how they nabbed him by
using DNA submitted by a "distant cousin" that narrowed down the list for cops on his trail. Read the article for more specifics
and demographics on these DNA "commercial" test kits.
The point here is the stupid, faddish public is dumb enough to submit the material the very DNA being used by the "trusted"
authorities either out in the open or by back-door methods to round up all of the DNA for the surveillance state.
I invite anyone to comment who has experience with a "transfer station," or other garbage collection facility, and anyone
in the healthcare/hospital industry with some inside info as to their nefarious methods. You can easily see from these examples how
they are hard on the trail relentless bloodhounds that have the scent of their quarry and they will not stop until everyone is categorized
and monitored. Then the real fun begins.
To digress: this is why we must all be of one accord, and disseminate this information and take steps while there is still
time. As the weeks, months, and years roll by; the hellish apparatus of what was once termed "government" becomes a machine for rule
by enslavement. That machine is perfecting itself. When control is finally obtained total, unchallenged control? That's when the
liquidations the killings will begin, for the ownership of the resources and for the control and enslavement of all humanity.
The same group (ELITE/DEEPSTATE) that wants this Tyranny outcome is also supporting the infighting, LGBTQ rtstuv, BLM,
CODE PINK, ME TOO etc etc... They know that as long as we (the working class tax paying stiffs) think this is actually a left/right-
Dem/Rep issue and keep bickering over the BS, we will never unite against the takeover of our country and begin to unite to defend
our rights.
They the ruling ELITE have funded and played us against one another using our phobias as ammunition (gay/trans rights, racism,religious
beliefs, even our political views ) used to exploit us and keep us infighting to avoid the true threat Deep State/ELITE ruling
class!
What are you getting out of all this? Seriously - are you having fun? Does your career of choice provide you with enough fulfillment
to justify the extravagant costs and loss of your time? Being single, (and I assume young), you can go anywhere in the world,
do any job, be any person you wish to be. Joint the French foreign legion, watch whales from a tourist charter boat, become a
fish and vegitables farmer in Vietnam - if you can think of it, you can do it.
So again - your current lifestyle - what's in it for YOU? Are you having fun yet?
My personal recommendation would be to move out of the city, buy a plot of land and hand build your own house, slowly, using
the raw materials from your land. Work when you have to, learn mad skills that become tradeable, grow your own food. Anyone can
do it, and back in the day EVERYONE used to do it. But do some travelling first, to wrap your head around how big the world is,
and how irrelevant governments and rules are.
Oh, and never take unsolicited advice from strangers on the internet. That's first on the list.
OverTheHedge... I appreciate your advise. I have been thinking of moving out of the country all together. This thought might
get a serious taking once I do some traveling like you said. I have no job satisfaction. I have no philosophy side feeding my
brain here.
I feel like I am just a machine. I am thinking of traveling Asia may be next year. I will sure do it. Thanks for the advise
again. I do believe there are other ways to live life. There are other ways to be satisfied and die with out a guilty feeling.
Thanks alot my friend.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went
out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or
if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had
not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase,
but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people
with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's
thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no
awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
"We're not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement," Trump said Saturday after a campaign rally in Elko, Nevada. "We're
going to terminate the agreement."
"... it's quite unusual to see such unanimous anti-Saudi reactions from the American political class for the assassination of Mr. Khashoggi – who was just a part-time journalist living in U.S – he was not even an American citizen ..."
"... So, it's quite unusual because the same political class remained muted about the Saudis involvement with ISIS, the bombing and starvation of civilians in Yemen and destruction of Syria, and of course the Saudis involvement in 9/11 terrorist attack in which 3000 American citizens have perished in New York, in the heart of America ..."
"... However gruesome, Mr. Khashoggi's assassination is going to be used by the Trump Administration to help the American Oil Cartel by controlling the Saudi Oil output, hence, to raise the price of Oil and to lower demand for US dollar which is the currency of the global Oil trade. ..."
"... The seemingly well-connected news outlet Voltairenet claims that there has been a plot against MbS and that Khashoggi was involved in it. ..."
"... It fares a atrocial war on Yemen, shits on international laws and regulations, just like Israel, Why would they not murder a juorno entering their land? Now this juorno was a man revealing in practices done by head choppers, so I will not cry much. It just shows these people are savages, all of them. What should be done ? You judge. ..."
"... I've read on Zerohedge that Khashoggi was on the verge of publishing an article about the Saudi's and CIA's involvement in 9/11, specifically about his former boss Turki al-Faisal, who ran Saudi intelligence for 23 years then abruptly resigned 10 days before 9/11 without giving any reason. ..."
"... Kashiggi's not a reformer. He's hard core Muslim Brotherhood ..."
The overplayed drama of Mr. Khashoggi assassination is going to be used by the American Oil
Cartel to control the Saudis Oil output.
it's quite unusual to see such unanimous anti-Saudi reactions from the American political
class for the assassination of Mr. Khashoggi – who was just a part-time journalist
living in U.S – he was not even an American citizen.
So, it's quite unusual because the
same political class remained muted about the Saudis involvement with ISIS, the bombing and
starvation of civilians in Yemen and destruction of Syria, and of course the Saudis
involvement in 9/11 terrorist attack in which 3000 American citizens have perished in New
York, in the heart of America.
So, we must be a bit skeptical about the motive of the American Political Class, as this
again could be just about the OIL Business, but this time around the objective is to help the
American Oil producers as opposed to Oil consumers – with 13.8% of the global daily Oil
production, the US has lately become the world top producer of Crude Oil, albeit, an
expensive Oil which is extracted by Fracking method that requires high Oil price above $70 to
remain competitive in the global Oil market – by simultaneously sanctioning Iran,
Venezuela, and the potential sanction of Saudi Arabia from exporting its Oil, the Trump
Administration not only reduces the Global Oil supply which will certainly lead to the rise
of Oil price, but also it lowers demand for the US Dollar-Greenback in the global oil market
which could lead to subtle but steady devaluation of the US dollar.
And perhaps that's what
Trump Administration was really aiming for all along; a significant decline of the US Dollar
Index and the rise of price of Oil which certainly pleases the American Oil Cartel, though at
the expense of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela – all of which are under some form of US sanctions.
However gruesome, Mr. Khashoggi's assassination is going to be used by the Trump
Administration to help the American Oil Cartel by controlling the Saudi Oil output, hence, to
raise the price of Oil and to lower demand for US dollar which is the currency of the global
Oil trade.
This seems to explain the motive to kill him. A few mildly critical articles by
Khashoggi's pen scarcely seem to be sufficient for such a high-profile murder, even if we
take into account that MbS appears to be impulsive and little capable of thinking ahead.
First of all, when has the death of a journalist made any difference in the relations between
countries? Why act like it should now?
Second, Khashoggi was not simply a journalist -- he was a member of the Saudi elite, an
Intelligence officer, and an activist for the Muslim Brotherhood (the Die Welt article
established that).
Third, the real question is how this story came out, and why it has come out as it has
("journalist murdered by police state agents"). Turkey pushed this story out into the open.
Apparently a calculation that the crown prince is losing ground, and an effort (perhaps
assisted by bribes) to align the AK party with the crown prince's enemies in Saudi.
It fares a atrocial war on Yemen, shits on international laws and regulations, just like
Israel, Why would they not murder a juorno entering their land?
Now this juorno was a man revealing in practices done by head choppers, so I will not cry
much.
It just shows these people are savages, all of them.
What should be done ? You judge.
It seems quite curious why MBS would go through such trouble to waste a guy whose only crime
was writing a few low key disparaging articles about him that nobody read. Maybe there's more
to this story than meets the eye.
I've read on Zerohedge that Khashoggi was on the verge of publishing an article about the
Saudi's and CIA's involvement in 9/11, specifically about his former boss Turki al-Faisal,
who ran Saudi intelligence for 23 years then abruptly resigned 10 days before 9/11 without
giving any reason. The rumor was he knew about the attack as did CIA, but Saudis and CIA
decided not to do anything to use it as pretext to start the "war on terror" and bring down
Saddam Hussein. Personally I find that a little far fetched but you never know when it comes
to the CIA.
The murder of d'Enghien had no effect on the French Revolution, other countries reactions to
the revolution and the subsequent revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. In fact, most of the
liberal pro French Revolution historians consider the execution as necessary and moral as the
execution of other anti revolutionaries
Koshoggi's murder won't make a bit of difference either once the blame Trump media blast
blows over. The Turkish police appear to be doing a good job. They've arrested 18 people involved. At least the moralist pundits won't be punditing and pontificating about Kavanaugh for a
few days. Kashiggi's not a reformer. He's hard core Muslim Brotherhood
That the Saudi regime commits murders does not surprise me, but getting caught not just with
murder, but also with torture, indeed an unbelievable stupidity.
Why torture the man ?
But what also baffles me is that the journalist wrote for Washpost, a friend of Israel.
That Netanyahu and the Saudi regime cooperate to attack Iran, it is asserted by many, and it
sems quite probable to me.
A technical question, can indeed a smartwatch do what it is supposed to have done ?
If so, then the torturers and murderers are even more stupid, I let the moral issue
undiscussed, than one can imagine.
Then there is the assertion, in cases like this one never knows what the facts are, that the
journalist's girl friend waited outside.
Did he expect trouble ?
Did he ask her to record the trouble ?
Did not the consulate security see her ?
A final remark, what now is the difference in cruelty between IS and the USA's ally ?
Early in WWII FDR was reported that USA oil would be depleted in thirty years time.
So FDR sent Harold L Ickes to Saudi Arabia,where at the end of 1944 the country was made the
USA's main oil supplier.
FDR entertained the then Saud in early 1945 on the cruiser Quincy, laying in the Bitter Lakes
near the Suez Canal.
This Saud and his entourage had never seen a ship before, in any case had never been on board
such a ship.
In his last speech to Congress, seated, FDR did not follow what had been written for him,
but remarked 'that ten minutes with Saud taught him more about zionism than hundreds of
letters of USA rabbi's.
These words do not seem to be in the official record, but one of the speech writers,
Sherwood, quotes them in his book.
Robert E. Sherwood, 'Roosevelt und Hopkins', 1950, Hamburg (Roosevelt and Hopkins, New York,
1948)
If FDR also said to Congress that he would limit jewish migration to Palestine, do not now
remember, but the intention existed.
A few weeks later FDR died, Sherwood comments on on some curious aspects of FDR's death, such
as that the body was cremated in or near Warm Springs, and that the USA people were never
informed that the coffin going from Warm Springs to Washington just contained an urn with
ashes. At present the USA does not seem to need Saudi oil.
If this causes the asserted cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel ?
@Harris ChandlerNow it has made alliances with Israel and between them the tail wags
the dog
The Saudi Royal family and the governments of Israel have always been in cahoots. They
both despise and fear secular governments that are not under their own control in the Middle
East. Witness the fear and dread of both of them of president Nasser in the 1960′s, for
example.
The US establishment, 'liberal' or not, just fake an outcry to soften the image of 100′s
of 1000′s of yemenis, iraqis, libyan.. war casualties they are wholly or partly
responsible for. Khashoggi's death is no more brutal than that of Gaddafi. What's the big
deal ?
Whether Khashoggi is an islamist or not is very minor.
(Sunni) Islam is basically a caravan of arab tribal or civilizational power and the house of
Saud just rides this vehicle or caravan to siphon off the oil wealth.
The house of Saud, said to be Jewish in origin, have the option to migrate en mass to Israel
or French Riviera, with their swiss/US/caribbean offshore accounts during time of crisis or
after new forms of energy resource displace oil
Equally important, the Saudis and Emiratis are now closely allied to Israel's far right
government. Israel has been a door-opener for the Saudis and Gulf Emirates in Washington's
political circles. The Israel lobby is riding to the Saudi's defense .
The Israelis are defending Old Saudi (pre MBS) -- not the New MBS/Kushner fix Palestine
cabal. The last thing Israel wants is a defined Israeli border recognized by the world. The sycophant Israeli backing Senators in congress (Graham et al) are all backing Israel
by condemning MBS and calling for his head.
@FKA Max Thanks for the excellent Real News Network interview with someone I hadn't heard
about (As'ad AbuKhalil) who has followed the career of Khashoggi for years.
It seems that Khashoggi was lately different things to different people – one voice
in English at the Washington Post following the Israeli line, and another in Arabic and the
Arab media supporting the Palestinians and the Moslem Brotherhood.
Over the long term he was a propagandist for the rule of the Saudi princes, and his
problem seemed to be his too close connection to the wrong ones, while they were overthrown
by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS). There's the suggestion of a plot against MbS where
he may have been involved.
So why are the Israelis, their MSM and their AIPAC congressmen making such a big thing out
of it? Isn't MbS their friend? And why should they care about the assassination of a
pro-Palestinian journalist?
Maybe they've a better knowledge of the forces at play in Saudi Arabia, and concluded that
MbS was too much of a risk (too isolated and independent – e.g. talking with the
Chinese about a Petro/Yuan). Maybe they decided to Regime Change MbS in a usual Israeli/US
Deep State operation with Khashoggi at the centre (the duplicitous sort of character that
they favor) – with the outrage at MbS unexpectedly striking back. It was in fact MbS'
team of bodyguards who arrived in Istanbul. And it would account for the Deep State anger at
having one of its chief conspirators murdered.
The back story has to be that the US/Israel want control of both Saudi and Iranian oil
priced in US Dollars and they'll go with anyone who can give that outcome (currently not
MbS). Or they invade Saudi Arabia Eastern Province on some pretext or other and just take the
oil directly.
I'm surprised that the Saudis didn't ask the Israelis, who are very good at
assassination and kidnapping, to go after Khashoggi.
They probably did, but Israel is gearing up to invade Gaza AGAIN, and that takes time and
resources that they couldn't afford to let go and do some free-lancing in the Murder Inc
Department.
But Blessed are the War Mongers or something, as that oh-so devout Christian, Pat
Robertson, is against holding KSA accountable:
Prominent evangelical leader on Khashoggi crisis: let's not risk "$100 billion worth
of arms sales"
Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, appeared on its flagship
television show The 700 Club on Monday to caution Americans against allowing the United
States' relationship with Saudi Arabia to deteriorate over Khashoggi's death.
"For those who are screaming blood for the Saudis -- look, these people are key allies,"
Robertson said. While he called the faith of the Wahabists -- the hardline Islamist sect to
which the Saudi Royal Family belongs -- "obnoxious," he urged viewers to remember that
"we've got an arms deal that everybody wanted a piece of it'll be a lot of jobs, a lot of
money come to our coffers. It's not something you want to blow up willy-nilly."
Did Robertson take all of that loot he made from smuggling blood diamonds out of
Africa–using his charity as a front–and invest in the defense industry?
If Pat is headed to Heaven after he expires, then send me to the other place, as I have
no desire to be stuck with hypocrites for all eternity.
"Error" ? "Mistake" ? These people (the KSA) are fucking "stupid" .
Now they're saying he died in a "fist fight" in the consulate !
A 13 year old street criminal would know that that excuse is an admission of guilt. These
guys shouldn't be allowed to run a model railroad.
On television in 1988, Donald Trump said he had bought a
US $200 million 85-metre-long yacht ,'The Nabila', from billionaire arms dealer Adnan
Khashoggi, uncle of just-murdered-in-Istanbul journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The yacht was named
after Adnan Khashoggi's daughter. Trump later sold the yacht to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin
Talal.
Donald Trump talking about the boat and arms dealers like Khashoggi – "not the
nicest guys in the world"
Bolton pushes for the US to break out of the 1987 INF Treaty. Not surprising considering
that all those ABM components they are deploying around Russia are dual use and violate the
INF. The INF is also a joke (showing us what a comprador Gorby was) since it allows the US to
deploy unlimited range nuclear missiles in its Naval assets. So Russia cannot have any land
based intermediate range nukes, but the US can park its ships in EU harbours and deploy
unlimited amounts of the "banned" class of missiles.
I say let the US break the INF. The INF helps the USA and its NATzO minions more than it
helps Russia.
There may be several motivations for Bolton
– an attempt to force Russia into a ruinously expensive arms race;
– to create a regional Cold War to reverse the nascent rapprochement between Western
Europe and Russia;
– an attempt to limit war to the European/Russian region as much as possible if a war
against Russia is needed by the US.
Bolton is an idiot carrying out a moron's strategy. What could go wrong?
Bolton is a certified retard if he thinks he will bankrupt Russia with an arms race.
1) I find the theory that the USSR couldn't afford the 1970-80s arms race and went
bankrupt to be of zero credibility. The USSR was a command economy and various estimates of
how much it allegedly spent on the economy to be ridiculous western attempts to impose their
capitalist accounting on a command economy.
The USSR collapsed due to internal political rot and not some "budget deficit" which was
meaningless in command economics and never exiting in reality anyway. The only valid metrics
of deficits in command economies if there are labour shortages in various industries.
The USSR had more than enough engineers, researchers, workers and material resources to
keep up with the arms race.
This is why command economics is vastly superior to capitalist profiteering. Capitalism
only triumphs because humans are genetically deficient to live optimally under a command
economy since they need all sorts of superfluous incentives and feel-good junk.
2) Nuclear weapons are the cheapest option out of all military costs. Tanks, ships and
armed troops are much more expensive. In the current rocket era, these expensive options are
outdated and much less potent. Russia can neutralize any US move by deploying appropriately
designed missiles and warheads.
So intelligence agencies are now charged with protection of elections from undesirable candidates; looks like a feature of neofascism...
Notable quotes:
"... The Department of Justice admitted in a Friday court filing that the FBI used more than one "Confidential Human Source," (also known as informants, or spies ) to infiltrate the Trump campaign through former adviser Carter Page, reports the Daily Caller ..."
"... Included in Hardy's declaration is an acknowledgement that the FBI's spies were in addition to the UK's Christopher Steele - a former MI6 operative who assembled the controversial and largely unproven "Steel Dossier" which the DOJ/FBI used to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Page. ..."
"... In addition to Steele, the FBI also employed 73-year-old University of Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, a US citizen, political veteran and longtime US Intelligence asset enlisted by the FBI to befriend and spy on three members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 US election . Halper received over $1 million in contracts from the Pentagon during the Obama years, however nearly half of that coincided with the 2016 US election. ..."
"... In short, the FBI's acknowledgement that they used multiple spies reinforces Stone's assertion that he was targeted by one. ..."
"... Stefan Halper's infiltration of the Trump campaign corresponds with the two of the four targets of the FBI's Operation Crossfire Hurricane - in which the agency sent former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and others to a London meeting in the Summer of 2016 with former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer - who says Papadopoulos drunkenly admitted to knowing that the Russians had Hillary Clinton's emails. ..."
"... Interestingly Downer - the source of the Papadopoulos intel, and Halper - who conned Papadopoulos months later, are linked through UK-based Haklyut & Co. an opposition research and intelligence firm similar to Fusion GPS - founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations pay huge sums ..."
"... Downer - a good friend of the Clintons, has been on their advisory board for a decade, while Halper is connected to Hakluyt through Director of U.S. operations Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has co-authored two books. (h/t themarketswork.com ) ..."
The Department of Justice admitted in a
Friday court filing that the FBI used
more than one "Confidential Human Source," (also known as informants, or spies ) to infiltrate the Trump campaign through former
adviser Carter Page, reports the Daily Caller
.
"The FBI has protected information that would identify the identities of other confidential sources who provided information or
intelligence to the FBI" as well as "information provided by those sources," wrote David M. Hardy, the head of the FBI's Record/Information
Dissemination Section (RIDS), in court
papers submitted Friday.
Hardy and Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys submitted the filings in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit
for the FBI's four applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Page. The DOJ released heavily
redacted copies of the four FISA warrant applications on June 20, but USA Today reporter Brad Heath has sued for full copies of
the documents. - Daily Caller
Included in Hardy's declaration is an acknowledgement that the FBI's spies were in addition to the UK's Christopher Steele
- a former MI6 operative who assembled the controversial and largely unproven "Steel Dossier" which the DOJ/FBI used to obtain a
FISA warrant to spy on Page.
The DOJ says it redacted information in order to protect the identity of their confidential sources, which "includes nonpublic
information about and provided by Christopher Steele," reads the filing, " as well as information about and provided by other confidential
sources , all of whom were provided express assurances of confidentiality."
Government lawyers said the payment information is being withheld because disclosing specific payment amounts and dates could
"suggest the relative volume of information provided by a particular CHS. " That disclosure could potentially tip the source's
targets off and allow them to "take countermeasures, destroy or fabricate evidence, or otherwise act in a way to thwart the FBI's
activities." - Daily Caller
Steele, referred to as Source #1, met with several DOJ / FBI officials during the 2016 campaign, including husband and wife team
Bruce and Nellie Ohr. Bruce was the #4 official at the DOJ, while his CIA-linked wife Nellie was hired by Fusion GPS - who also employed
Steele, in the anti-Trump opposition research / counterintelligence effort funded by Trump's opponents, Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
In addition to Steele, the FBI also employed 73-year-old University of Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, a US citizen, political
veteran and longtime US Intelligence asset enlisted by the FBI to befriend and spy on three members of the Trump campaign during
the 2016 US election . Halper received over $1 million in contracts from the Pentagon during the Obama years, however nearly half
of that coincided with the 2016 US election.
Stefan Halper
Halper's involvement first came to light after the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross reported on his involvement with Carter Page and
George Papadopoulos, another Trump campaign aide. Ross's reporting was confirmed by the NYT and WaPo .
In June, Trump campaign aides Roger Stone and Michael Caputo claimed that a meeting Stone took in late May, 2016 with a Russian
appears to have been an " FBI sting operation " in hindsight, following
bombshell reports in May
that the DOJ/FBI used a longtime FBI/CIA asset, Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, to perform espionage on the Trump campaign.
Roger Stone
When Stone arrived at the restaurant in Sunny Isles, he said, Greenberg was wearing a Make America Great Again T-shirt and
hat. On his phone, Greenberg pulled up a photo of himself with Trump at a rally, Stone said. -
WaPo
The meeting went nowhere - ending after Stone told Greenberg " You don't understand Donald Trump... He doesn't pay for anything
." The Post independently confirmed this account with Greenberg.
After the meeting, Stone received a text message from Caputo - a Trump campaign communications official who arranged the meeting
after Greenberg approached Caputo's Russian-immigrant business partner.
" How crazy is the Russian? " Caputo wrote according to a text message reviewed by The Post. Noting that Greenberg wanted "big"
money, Stone replied: "waste of time." -
WaPo
In short, the FBI's acknowledgement that they used multiple spies reinforces Stone's assertion that he was targeted by one.
Further down the rabbit hole
Stefan Halper's infiltration of the Trump campaign corresponds with the two of the four targets of the FBI's Operation Crossfire
Hurricane - in which the agency sent former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and others to a London meeting in the Summer of
2016 with former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer - who says Papadopoulos drunkenly admitted to knowing that the Russians had
Hillary Clinton's emails.
Interestingly Downer - the source of the Papadopoulos intel, and Halper - who conned Papadopoulos months later, are linked
through
UK-based Haklyut & Co. an opposition research and intelligence firm similar to Fusion GPS - founded by three former British intelligence
operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations
pay huge sums .
Alexander Downer
Downer - a good friend of the Clintons, has been on their advisory board for a decade, while Halper is connected to Hakluyt
through Director of U.S. operations Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has
co-authored two books. (h/t
themarketswork.com )
Alexander Downer, the Australian High Commissioner to the U.K. Downer said that in May 2016, Papadopoulos told him during a
conversation in London about Russians having Clinton emails.
That information was passed to other Australian government officials before making its way to U.S. officials. FBI agents flew
to London a day after "Crossfire Hurricane" started in order to interview Downer.
It is still not known what Downer says about his interaction with Papadopoulos, which TheDCNF is told occurred around May 10,
2016.
Also interesting via
Lifezette - " Downer is not the only Clinton fan in Hakluyt. Federal contribution records show several of the firm's U.S. representatives
made large contributions to two of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign organizations ."
Halper contacted Papadopoulos on September 2, 2016 according to The Caller - flying him out to London to work on a policy paper
on energy issues in Turkey, Cyprus and Israel - for which he was ultimately paid $3,000. Papadopoulos met Halper several times during
his stay, "having dinner one night at the Travellers Club, and Old London gentleman's club frequented by international diplomats."
They were accompanied by Halper's assistant, a Turkish woman named Azra Turk. Sources familiar with Papadopoulos's claims about
his trip say Turk flirted with him during their encounters and later on in email exchanges .
...
Emails were also brought up during Papadopoulos's meetings with Halper , though not by the Trump associate, according to sources
familiar with his version of events. T he sources say that during conversation, Halper randomly brought up Russians and emails.
Papadopoulos has told people close to him that he grew suspicious of Halper because of the remark. -
Daily Caller
Meanwhile, Halper targeted Carter Page two days after Page returned from a trip to Moscow.
Page's visit to Moscow, where he spoke at the New Economic School on July 8, 2016, is said to have piqued the FBI's interest
even further . Page and Halper spoke on the sidelines of an election-themed symposium held at Cambridge days later. Former Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright and Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6 and a close colleague of Halper's, spoke at the event.
...
Page would enter the media spotlight in September 2016 after Yahoo! News reported that the FBI was investigating whether he
met with two Kremlin insiders during that Moscow trip.
It would later be revealed that the Yahoo! article was based on unverified information from Christopher Steele, the former
British spy who wrote the dossier regarding the Trump campaign . Steele's report, which was funded by Democrats, also claimed
Page worked with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on the collusion conspiracy. -
Daily Caller
A third target of Halper's was Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis, whose name was revealed by the Washington Post on Friday.
In late August 2016, the professor reached out to Clovis, asking if they could meet somewhere in the Washington area, according
to Clovis's attorney, Victoria Toensing.
"He said he wanted to be helpful to the campaign" and lend the Trump team his foreign-policy experience, Toensing said.
Clovis, an Iowa political figure and former Air Force officer, met the source and chatted briefly with him over coffee, on
either Aug. 31 or Sept. 1, at a hotel cafe in Crystal City, she said. Most of the discussion involved him asking Clovis his views
on China.
"It was two academics discussing China," Toensing said. " Russia never came up. " -
WaPo
Meanwhile, Bruce Ohr is still employed by the Department of Justice, and Fusion GPS continues its hunt for Trump dirt after having
partnered with former Feinstein aide and ex-FBI counterintelligence agent, Dan Jones.
It's been nearly three years since an army of professional spies was unleashed on Trump - and he's still the President, Steele
and Downer notwithstanding.
Beckow says:
October 18, 2018 at 1:47 pm GMT 400
Words @Anon 2 You are right that
Central Europe – or more precisely Eastern Central Europe that includes Austria and parts of Germany – has been blesses with a rare
combination of good (great!) geography, enough resources, high quality demographics, good location and weather, fantastic infrastructure
and a relatively normal history. Western countries have suffered from a combination of imperial overreach and the inevitable blowback.
Westerners have also lost the due diligence habits that make civilizations last. They often seem lazy and unserious.
To the east the lawlessness of the open spaces, harsh weather, and the frequent exposures to the nihilistic Asiatic exotica, have
delayed the development of a viable, stable and pleasant way of life. They might get there eventually and I wish them all the best.
Russia has a lot of fundamentals going for it, but it is also possible that the mistakes of the past – and the pathological hatreds
Russia has engendered among the Western and other imperial crazies – will strike again. It is big and tempting.
The endless attempts to slice the borders of Russia, to shrink it as Brzezinski openly dreamt about, are a foolish thing that
might bury us all. A compulsion of obsessive map readers. Russia is at its most destabilising when it is weak. That's when the temptations
become too much and some nutcase – or a 'council' of idiots – push and push. Unfortunately for the imperial builders in the West
they missed their window of opportunity and they don't seem capable of admitting it. We get ' religious schisms ' just to
make sure that no stone remains unturned. It will amount to nothing. They will have to wait for the next dip, there always seems
to be one in the ennui filled steppes.
Central Europe (V4+) is about to take over as the most desirable place on the planet. That's why we are seeing the Western attacks
on it about some very basic and sound ideas like having borders, homogeneous populations, freedom of speech and peace with neighbours,
from the rapidly disintegrating Western world. West cannot stand to live with the mistakes they have made, they want to create a
multi-racial, neo-liberal, war mongering cataclysm in order to hide the painful truth of they have done. The demographic suicide
of the West is probably irreversible. Macron and Merkel can prance around and preach their silly slogans, but they cannot change
the numbers of the ground.
They can still convince some elderly Greek in Istanbul to pour more oil on the fire. What that shows is desperation; if all West
has left are these self-defeating intrigues, they don't have much.
This months gas tariff for "Ukrainians" increases by 24%!!
The context is that Ukrainian consumers have the lowest gas rate in Europe. Moldovan
households pay more for gas than do Ukrainian ones. Even with a 24% price increase Ukraine will
still have the cheapest gas in Europe for its consumers:
A huge line for free food at the charity kitchen in Kiev can be seen here: http://rusvesna.su/news/1539952343
(those who read Russian can find details in the accompanying news item).
I guess all of this is a great achievement of Maidan. Ukies, please comment.
I initially backed Trump, though with reservations on his attitude to Iran and his wanting
to increase US military spending - build a stronger US military. Pulling out of the TPP was
great. Au had sovereignty on paper if not in practice, but with the TPP, Australia would not
have had sovereignty legally. His first attack on Syria was a flash bang exercise to disable
his opponents. His second attack I thought initially was the same, but with everything I've
read since, I believe Trump's US planned to destroy Syrian military but not wanting to go to
war with Russia at that time, respected the Russian nyet on targets.
With Idlib it moved up a notch, Trump's US threatening attack on Syria including Russian
personal stationed there, and Russia moving to asymmetrical moves rather than in your face
nuclear amageddon, which is what a full on US attack on Syria would have amounted
to..
"... Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University and a contributing editor of The Nation. ..."
"... This article was originally published by The Nation . ..."
There have been plenty of purely criminal and commercial " rogue " operations by
intelligence agents in history, but also " rogue " ones that were purposefully
political. We know, for example, that both Soviet and US intelligence agencies - or groups of
agents - tried to disrupt the Eisenhower-Khrushchev détente of the late 1950s and early
1960s, and that some intelligence players tried to stop Khrushchev's formal recognition of West
Germany, also in the early 1960s.
It is reasonable to ask, therefore, whether the attacks on Skripal and Khashoggi were "
rogue " operations undertaken by political opponents of the leaders' policies at home
or abroad, with the help of one or another intelligence agency or agents. Motive is a - perhaps
the - crucial question. Why would Putin order such an operation in the UK at the very
moment when his government had undertaken a major Western public-relations campaign in
connection with the upcoming World Cup championship in Russia? And why would MbS risk a
Khashoggi scandal as he was assiduously promoting his image abroad as an enlightened
reform-minded Saudi leader?
We lack the evidence and official candor needed to study these questions, as is usually the
case with covert, secretive, disinforming intelligence operations. But the questions are
certainly reason enough not to rush to judgment, as many US pundits do. Saying " we do not
know " may be unmarketable in today's mass-media environment, but it is honest and the
right approach to potentially fruitful " analysis. "
2. We do know, however, that there has been fierce opposition in the US political-media
establishment to President Trump's policy of " cooperating with Russia ," including in
US intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI - and at high levels of his own
administration.
We might consider Nikki Haley's resignation as UN ambassador in this light. Despite the
laurels heaped on her by anti-Trump media, and by Trump himself at their happy-hour farewell in
the White House, Haley was not widely admired by her UN colleagues. When appointed for
political reasons by Trump, she had no foreign-policy credentials or any expert knowledge of
other countries or of international relations generally. Judging by her performance as
ambassador, nor did she acquire much on the job, almost always reading even short comments from
prepared texts.
More to the point, Haley's statements regarding Russia at the UN were, more often than not,
dissimilar from Trump's -- indeed, implicitly in opposition to Trump's. (She did nothing, for
example, to offset charges in Washington that Trump's summit meeting with Putin in Helsinki, in
July, had been " treasonous .") Who wrote these statements for her, which were very
similar to statements regarding Russia that have been issued by US intelligence agencies since
early 2017? It is hard to imagine that Trump was unhappy to see her go, and easier to imagine
him pushing her toward the exit. A president needs a loyalist as secretary of state and at the
UN. Haley's pandering remarks at the White House about Trump's family suggests some deal had
been made to ease her out, with non-recrimination promises made on both sides. We will see if
opponents of Trump's Russia policy can put another spokesperson at the UN.
As to which aspects of US foreign policy Trump actually controls, we might ask more urgently
if he authorized, or was fully informed about, the joint US-NATO-Ukraine military air exercises
that got under way over Ukraine, abutting Russia, on October 8. Moscow regards these exercises
as a major " provocation ," and not unreasonably.
3. What do Trump's opponents want instead of " cooperation with Russia "? A much
harder line, including more " crushing " economic sanctions. Sanctions are more like
temper tantrums and road rage than actual national-security policy, and thus are often
counterproductive. We have some recent evidence. Russia's trade surplus has grown to more than
$100 billion. World prices for Russia's primary exports, oil and gas, have grown to over $80 a
unit while Moscow's federal budget is predicated on $53 a barrel. Promoters of anti-Russian
sanctions gloat that they have weakened the ruble. But while imposing some hardships on
ordinary citizens, the combination of high oil prices and a weaker ruble is ideal for Russian
state and corporate exporters. They sell abroad for inflated foreign currency and pay their
operating expenses at home in cheaper rubles. To risk a pun, they are " crushing it.
"
Congressional sanctions - for exactly what is not always clear - have helped Putin in
another way. For years, he has unsuccessfully tried to get " oligarchs " to repatriate
their wealth abroad. US sanctions on various " oligarchs " have persuaded them and
others to begin to do so, perhaps bringing back home as much as $90 billion already in
2018.
If nothing else, these new budgetary cash flows help Putin deal with his declining
popularity at home - he still has an approval rating well above 60 percent - due to the
Kremlin's decision to raise the pension age for men and women, from 60 to 65 and from 55 to 60
respectively. The Kremlin can use the additional revenue to increase the value of pensions,
supplement them with other social benefits, or to enact the age change over a longer period of
time.
It appears that Congress, particularly the Senate, has no Russia policy other than
sanctions. It might think hard about finding alternatives. One way to start would be with real
" hearings " in place of the ritualistic affirmation of orthodox policy by "
experts " that has long been its practice. There are more than a few actual
specialists out there who think different approaches to Moscow are long overdue.
4. All of these dangerous developments, indeed the new US-Russian Cold War itself, are elite
projects -- political, media, intelligence, etc. Voters were never really consulted. Nor do
they seem to approve. In August, Gallup asked its usual sample of Americans which policy toward
Russia they preferred. Fifty-eight percent wanted improved relations vs. only 36 percent who
wanted a tougher US policy with more sanctions. (Meanwhile, two-thirds of Russians surveyed by
an independent agency now see the United States as their country's number-one enemy, and about
three-fourths view China favorably.)
Will any of the US political figures already jockeying for the Democratic presidential
nomination in 2020 take these realities into account?
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York
University and Princeton University and a contributing editor of The Nation.
This article was originally published by The
Nation .
Reminds me of a Russian joke.
An old man comes to a doctor and says:
- Doctor, I am only 65, but can't have sex any more. My neighbor is 80, and he tells stories
about having sex with young women. Can you help me?
- I don't see your problem: you can tell stories, too.
If you are finding your way out of the dark forest of propaganda there are two speeches by
Putin that I point people toward. First, at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Video
here : Transcript
here
Second, at the UN General Assembly September 2015, Video here : Transcript here .
I fail to see how any rational person could disagree with the sentiments he expresses.
Warning! You may become a Putin-bot!
The governor General Abdul Raziq, the police chief and the intelligence chief of Kandahar
have all been killed today. Bodyguards turned their guns on them. Two U.S. soldiers were
wounded. The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan was present but not hurt.
Raziq was a brut, thief, killer, drug baron and the CIA's man in Kandahar.
In 2011 Matthieu Atkins portrait him:
Our Man in Kandahar Abdul Raziq and his men have received millions of dollars' worth of U.S. training and
equipment to help in the fight against the Taliban. But is our ally -- long alleged to be
involved in corruption and drug smuggling -- also guilty of mass murder?
The United States, specifically Cheney and Petraeus and Rodham, imposed the Imperial
Executor form of Federalist government upon a people who were a well-organized heirarchical
society while William the Conqueror was still head chopping Anglo-Saxons in bear skins.
Cheny wrote the Afghan petroleum and strategic resources laws *in English* at the
beginning of the 2001 invasion. The US imposed a new flag, a new pledge of allegiance, a new
national song and even a new national currency on the Afghan people, then imposed the first
imperial caesar, Karzai.
You break it, you own it!
For the $TRILLIONS hoovered up by Deep State and their war profiteering minions, we could
have put every Afghan male of military age through Harvard Business School.
Cheney, Petraeus and Rodham ALSO created the Federal Republican Guard ANA and ANP,
goombahs, renegade hijackers and shakedown artists who, like those same ANA/ANP 'personal
guards' mentioned in b's article, assassinated the governor and the others. And umm, yes,
I've been on the muzzle end of those ANA/ANP thugs in an attempted kidnapping, so been there,
done that.
AFA Russ' defense of William the Conqueror as some 'high point' of a Western Civilization
of Red Haired Yettis, they were still head-chopping each other in England while Afghanistan
ruled from East Persia to Western India, an advanced civilization far more ancient than
Anglo-Saxon bearskin cave dwelling knuckle draggers, at the time.
Of course, now today we have the White Scientocratic Triumphal Exceptionalist Civilization
and its Miracle of the Two Planes and Three Towers to prove it, even if Johnny and Jillian
can't read, write or do their ciphers.
just watched the Atlantic council's Championing the Frontlines of Freedom: Erasing the
"Grey Zone", only interesting thing to come out of the conference was Kurt Volker's (US
Special Representative for Ukraine) comments;
Escalating sanctions vs Russia every 1-2 months there will be new & expanded
sanctions on Russia.
Stable borders should not be a requirement to be a part of NATO, "Occupied" states can
be taken into NATO and receive support from NATO to liberate themselves (he stressed that
the US would not be escalate the conflict, but how the hell could anyone guarantee
that).
Opposition to Russia is now bipartisan, regardless of the Nov elections, US Senate
& Congress are unified against Russia
when asked how "We" (the Atlantic council) can make political elites care about Baltic
states (plus Ukraine/Georgia), WITHOUT knowing the historical and political details of
these states he, unsurprisingly answered "this is about spreading our liberal values"
(translation: the American people don't need to be informed about the region are changes
are non-negotiable). the long and the short of the 3 hour conference was the new cold war
vs Russia will continue indefinitely, I would say this is the start of another generation
conflict that will last 10-20 years at least
Ok i'l stick my neck out !
It's over for America ! That's my assessment their day is d d d done ! Am basing my view on
the worldwide picture politically, the mind set of the general public I talk to, the many
sites I visit on the net left and right. Plus overall wisdom and overstanding (a Rasta thing)
Empires fall, this one has more than had its day. If it was a buseness what does it produce ?
And at what cost? It just robs other peoples hard earned resources and assets! For all it's
wealth it treats it's own public like dirt milking them dry. It's intelligent public it
curupt's. Nature abbor's greed, and wil correct that imbalance.
I think Putin understands this, and understands as I do 'desperate people do desperate
things' hence his speech.
Censoring the truth on a massive network like the internet is truly impossible and plainly
desperate !!!
In Bavaria's state elections, German voters sent a powerful message to German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, who has been harshly criticized for opening up Germany's borders to the free
flow of migration. But strangely enough the pro-immigrant Green Party took a solid second
place.
Merkel and her fragile coalition, comprised of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Social
Democrats Party (SPD) and Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) suffered staggering losses
in Bavaria on Sunday, losses not experienced by the two powerhouse conservative parties for
many decades.
The CSU won just 37.3 percent of the vote, down 12.1 percent from 2013, thus failing to
secure an absolute majority. It marked the worst showing conservative Christian Bavaria, where
the CSU has ruled practically unilaterally since 1957. But the political mood in Germany has
changed, and Merkel's so-called sister party will now be forced to seek a coalition to cover
its losses.
Meanwhile, the left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD), in an awkward alliance with their
conservative allies, secured just 9.5 percent of the Bavarian vote, down almost 10.9 percent
from its 2013 showing.
The dismal results were not altogether unexpected. CSU leader Horst Seehofer has regularly
clashed with Angela Merkel over the question of her loose refugee policies, which saw 1.5
million migrants pour into Germany unmolested in 2015 alone. In January 2016, when the number
of arrivals had peaked, Bavaria grabbed headlines as Peter Dreier, mayor of the district of
Landshut, sent a
busload of refugees to Berlin, saying his city could not handle any more new arrivals.
Yet, despite such expressions of frustration, and even anger, Germany, perhaps out of some
fear of reverting back to atavistic nationalistic tendencies that forever lurks in the
background of the German psyche, has not come out in full force against the migrant invasion,
which seems to have been forced upon the nation without their approval. As with the young girl
in the video below, however, some Germans have come forward to express their strong
reservations with the trend.
In general, however, the German people, in direct contradiction to the stereotype of them
being an orderly and logical people, do not seem overly concerned with the prospects of their
tidy country being overrun by the chaos of undocumented and illegal migrants. This much seemed
to be confirmed by the strong showing of the pro-immigration Green Party, which took second
place with 18.3 percent of the votes, a 9 percent increase since the last elections.
Katharina Schulze, the 33-year old co-leader of the Bavarian Greens,
told reporters "Bavaria needs a political party that solves the problems of the people and
not create new ones over and over again."
However, a political platform that seems fine with open borders seems to contradict
Schulze's claim to not creating new problems "over and over again." Today, thanks to Merkel's
disastrous refugee non-plan, which the Greens applaud,
every fifth person in Germany comes from immigration, a figure that will naturally increase
over time, placing immense pressure on the country's already overloaded
social welfare programs, not to mention disrupting the country's social cohesiveness.
Thus Schulze may find it an impossible challenge "solving the problems of the people," one
of the vaguest campaign pledges I have ever heard, while embracing a staunchly refugee-friendly
platform that seems doomed to ultimate disaster.
Indeed, Germany appears to be on a collision course between those who accept the idea of
being the world's welcome center for refugees, and those who think Germany must not only close
its borders, but perhaps even send back many refugees. After all, it has been proven that many
of these new arrivals are in reality
'
economic migrants' who arrived in Europe not due to any persecution back home, but rather
from the hope of improving their lot in life. While it's certainly no crime to seek out
economic opportunities, it becomes a real problem when it comes at the expense of the domestic
population.
From an outsider's perspective, I cannot fathom how it is possible that Angela Merkel is
still in power. Although there is no term limit on the chancellorship, people must still go to
the polls and vote for this woman and the CDU, which the majority continues to do –
despite everything.
In a search for answers, I found an explanation by one Arne Trautmann, a German lawyer from
Munich.
"I think the answer lies in German psychology. We do not like instability. We had our
experience with it (hyperinflation, wars and such) and it did not work very well. Angela Merkel
offers such stability. Simply because she has been around for so long."
Still, that answer just drags up more questions that perhaps only the Germans can answer.
After all, if the German people "do not like instability," then the specter of their borders
being violated on a daily basis such be simply unacceptable to them. Perhaps I am missing
something.
In any case, there was a consolation prize of sorts in the Bavarian elections, as the
anti-immigrant AfD party took fourth place (behind the Free Voters) with 10.2 percent of the
votes, an increase of 10 percent from their 2013 performance.
This will give the AfD parliamentary power in the state assembly for the first time, which
should work to put the brakes on illegal migrants entering the country. For the future of
Germany, it may be the last hope.
After eight years of the Obama regime expanding the Bush regime's wars from around two to
around seven (with very little opposition from the so-called antiwar movement ), the Women 's
March on the Pentagon is rebuilding a movement from practically scratch.
We are struggling to not get trapped in the antiwar old ways which never have been truly
successful. If the anti-Vietnam war movement, its tactics, and energy were so awesome, then why
is the US currently mired so deeply in at least seven wars for Empire with 1000 bases in over
130 countries around the world and continued support for the apartheid, colonial, illegal state
of Israel?
We are planning to march on the Pentagon. The Pentagon is not a typical target because many
activists are afraid of offending the military despite recognizing that the US military is the
largest terrorist organization in the world. We are also having a rally on the 21st of October
and are committed to "Occupying" the Pentagon until Veteran's Day, November 11th.
We are also reimagining new ways to state what the Women 's March on the Pentagon is
doing.
Yes, we are against the US Empire's perpetual and devastating wars but being "anti" war was
never enough. Being "pro" peace is also deficient because peace is just not an absence of war
-- it is also the presence of social justice and social safety nets.
WMOP is putting the PRO back in PROtest but before we are PRO-peace, we feel we need to be
each of the following. The list that follows is not exhaustive, but it is a good start.
PRO-woman: Every single woman on this planet, regardless of race, religion, sexual
orientation, economic status or national origin, is entitled to the same quality of life as
wealthy, white women in the USA -- including being free from military occupation (and all the
horrors that brings, including rape and the murder of children) and other oppression.
PRO-equality: Every human is entitled to every good thing, including the right to PRO-test
wrong things.
PRO-planet: The Pentagon's War Machine is responsible for a hugely disproportionate amount
of pollution, waste, environmental degradation and use of fossil fuels. The Pentagon seriously
needs to be reduced to a size where it can be drowned in a bucket before we can save human life
from extinction on our only planet, our Mother Earth.
PRO-education: Education is a human right and the trillions of dollars spent on active wars
and empire maintenance robs our communities and schools from money needed to give our children
a high-quality and free education from Pre to University. In all levels, our children should
feel safe to attend school without the horrors of mass-shootings and police state
oppression.
PRO-gun control: As long as guns, ammunition, bombs and other weapons of murder are taken
from the Pentagon and police forces first. Our mothers and grandmothers in occupied lands,
inner cities, and other economically disadvantaged areas should not have to worry themselves
sick when their young ones leave the home that they will be executed by a killer cop or
drone-bombed by the USA. Our sisters in other countries should not have to bury their children,
or flee their homes in fear for their lives, because of the US Empire.
PRO-health care: Women bear the burden of ill children and are likely the ones to miss work
when a child is ill. Health care must be free and high-quality, but it must also serve families
and communities with healthy food, water, air and opportunities for care for ill children (or
elderly relatives) when the woman needs or wants to go to work. Health care must be
comprehensive and include dental, mental, chiropractic and any other holistic
treatment/prevention that is needed/wanted. Prescriptions must be free and no woman/family
should have to choose between life-saving medication and/or food.
PRO-labor at a living wage and PRO-basic guaranteed income
PRO-housing/food: In a nation as wealthy as the US, not one person should exist without
shelter or healthy and abundant food. Housing and food are human rights, not privileges. Most
homeless people work hard, but cannot afford a place to live. 19% of the United States of
American children (14 million) go to bed hungry every night in the land of plenty and plenty of
waste. These statistics are shameful and abominable but can be changed after the
commodification and privatization of everything for profit over people ends.
PRO-redistribution of resources: Ending the Pentagon, the billions of dollars of waste and
more than a trillion dollar budget would go a long way to address the horrendous human rights'
abuses and fundamental economic crises 2/3 of the people in the US face.
Once there is justice, environmental sustainability, economic equality and celebration of
diversity, combined with the end of the US Military Empire, THEN, and only then, will we live
in relative peace in our communities and families.
If one woman is living under military occupation, colonial rule, or otherwise oppressed,
none of us are free!
"... I just love the fact that Trump is publicly calling out Merkel on this; she has been nothing but two-faced and hypocritical on the Russia question. ..."
"... She was one of the ones who pushed the EU hard, for example, to sanction Russia in the wake of the coup in Ukraine (which she had also supported). And then she pushed the EU hard to kill off the South Stream pipeline, which would have gone through SE Europe into Austria. She used the excuse of 'EU solidarity' against 'Russian aggression' to accomplish that only to then turn around and start building yet another pipeline out of Russia and straight into Germany! The Bulgarians et al. must feel like real idiots now. It seems Berlin wants to control virtually all the pipelines into Europe. ..."
I just love the fact that Trump is publicly calling out Merkel on this; she has been
nothing but two-faced and hypocritical on the Russia question.
She was one of the ones who pushed the EU hard, for example, to sanction Russia in the
wake of the coup in Ukraine (which she had also supported). And then she pushed the EU hard
to kill off the South Stream pipeline, which would have gone through SE Europe into Austria.
She used the excuse of 'EU solidarity' against 'Russian aggression' to accomplish that only
to then turn around and start building yet another pipeline out of Russia and straight
into Germany! The Bulgarians et al. must feel like real idiots now. It seems Berlin wants to
control virtually all the pipelines into Europe.
So, three cheers for Trump embarrassing Merkel on this issue!
"... This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 1018 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page , which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Read about why we're doing this fundraiser and what we've accomplished in the last year, and our current goal, extending our reach . ..."
"... By Tsvetana Paraskova, a writer for the U.S.-based Divergente LLC consulting firm. Originally published at OilPrice ..."
"... As long as NATO exists, Washington will continue to use it to drive a wedge between the EU and Russia. Merkel foolishly went along with all of Washington's provocations against Russia in Ukraine, even though none of it benefited Germany's national interest. ..."
"... She did indeed go along with all the provocations and she sat back and said nothing while Putin railed against US sanctions. Yet Putin didn't blame Germany or the EU. Instead he said that the Germany/EU is currently trapped by the US and would come to their senses in time. He is leaving the door open. ..."
"... What US LNG exports? The US is a net importer of NG from Canada. US 2018 NG consumption and production was 635.8 and 631.6 Mtoe respectively (BP 2018 Stats). Even the BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy has an asterisks by US LNG exports which says, "Includes re-exports" which was 17.4 BCM or 15 Mtoe for 2018. ..."
"... Natural gas negotiations involve long term contracts so there are lots of money to exchange ensuring business for many years to come. Such a contract has recently been signed between Poland's PGNiG and American Venture Global Calcasieu & Venture Global Plaquemines LNG (Lousiana). According to the Poland representative this gas would be 20% cheaper than Russian gas. (if one has to believe it). Those contracts are very secretive in their terms. This contract in particular is still dependent on the termination of liquefaction facilities in Lousiana. ..."
"... IIRC, the US is pushing LNG because fracking has resulted in a lot of NG coincident with oil production. They've got so much NG coming out of fracked oil wells that they don't know what to do with it and at present, a lot of it just gets flared, or leaks into the atmosphere. ..."
"... So they turn to bullying the EU to ignore the price advantage that Russia is able to offer, due to the economics of pipeline transport over liquefaction and ocean transport, and of course the issues of reliability and safety associated with ocean transport, and high-pressure LNG port facilities compared to pipelines. ..."
"... Trump will probably offer the EU 'free' LNG port facilities financed by low-income American tax-payers, and cuts to 'entitlements', all designed to MAGA. ..."
"... It seems we have been maneuvering for a while to raise our production of LNG and oil (unsustainably) in order to become an important substitute supplier to the EU countries. It sort of looks like our plan is to reduce EU opposition to our attacking Russia. Then we will have China basically surrounded. This is made easier with our nuclear policy of "we can use nuclear weapons with acceptable losses." What could go wrong? ..."
"... The United States should lead by example. Telling Germany not to import Russian gas is rich considering the U.S. also imports from Russia. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/07/12/russia-was-a-top-10-supplier-of-u-s-oil-imports-in-2017/ ..."
"... I just love the fact that Trump is publicly calling out Merkel on this; she has been nothing but two-faced and hypocritical on the Russia question. ..."
"... She was one of the ones who pushed the EU hard, for example, to sanction Russia in the wake of the coup in Ukraine (which she had also supported). And then she pushed the EU hard to kill off the South Stream pipeline, which would have gone through SE Europe into Austria. She used the excuse of 'EU solidarity' against 'Russian aggression' to accomplish that only to then turn around and start building yet another pipeline out of Russia and straight into Germany! The Bulgarians et al. must feel like real idiots now. It seems Berlin wants to control virtually all the pipelines into Europe. ..."
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Yves here. It's not hard to see that this tiff isn't just about Russia. The US wants Germany
to buy high-priced US LNG.
By Tsvetana Paraskova, a writer for the U.S.-based Divergente LLC consulting firm.
Originally published at
OilPrice
The United States and the European Union (EU) are at odds over more than just the Iran
nuclear deal – tensions surrounding energy policy have also become a flashpoint for the
two global powerhouses.
In energy policy, the U.S. has been opposing the Gazprom-led and highly controversial
Nord Stream 2 pipeline project , which will follow the existing Nord Stream natural gas
pipeline between Russia and Germany via the Baltic Sea. EU institutions and some EU members
such as Poland and Lithuania are also against it, but one of the leaders of the EU and the
end-point of the planned project -- Germany -- supports Nord Stream 2 and sees the project as a
private commercial venture that will help it to meet rising natural gas demand.
While the U.S. has been hinting this year that it could sanction the project and the
companies involved in it -- which include not only Gazprom but also major European firms Shell,
Engie, OMV, Uniper, and Wintershall -- Germany has just said that
Washington shouldn't interfere with Europe's energy choices and policies.
"I don't want European energy policy to be defined in Washington," Germany's Foreign
Ministry State Secretary Andreas Michaelis said at a conference on trans-Atlantic ties in
Berlin this week.
Germany has to consult with its European partners regarding the project, Michaelis said, and
noted, as quoted by Reuters, that he was "certainly not willing to accept that Washington is
deciding at the end of the day that we should not rely on Russian gas and that we should not
complete this pipeline project."
"Germany is totally controlled by Russia, because they will be getting from 60 to 70 percent
of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline," President Trump said.
Germany continues to see Nord Stream 2 as a commercial venture, although it wants clarity on
the future role of Ukraine as a transit route, German government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer
said last month.
Nord Stream 2 is designed to bypass Ukraine, and Ukraine fears it will lose transit fees and
leverage over Russia as the transit route for its gas to western Europe.
Poland, one of the most outspoken opponents of Nord Stream 2, together with the United
States, issued a joint statement last month during the visit of Polish President Andrzej Duda
to Washington, in which the parties
said , "We will continue to coordinate our efforts to counter energy projects that threaten
our mutual security, such as Nord Stream 2."
The president of the Federation of German Industry (BDI), Dieter Kempf, however, told
German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung last month, that he had "a big problem with a third
country interfering in our energy policy," referring to the United States. German industry
needs Nord Stream 2, and dropping the project to buy U.S. LNG instead wouldn't make any
economic sense, he said. U.S. LNG currently is not competitive on the German market and would
simply cost too much, according to Kempf.
The lower price of Russian pipeline gas to Europe is a key selling point -- and one that
Gazprom uses often. Earlier this month Alexey Miller, Chairman of Gazprom's Management
Committee, said at a gas forum in
Russia that "Although much talk is going on about new plans for LNG deliveries, there is no
doubt that pipeline gas supplies from Russia will always be more competitive than LNG
deliveries from any other part of the world. It goes without saying."
The issue with Nord Stream 2 -- which is already
being built in German waters -- is that it's not just a commercial project. Many in Europe
and everyone in the United States see it as a Russian political tool and a means to further
tighten Russia's grip on European gas supplies, of which it already holds more than a third.
But Germany wants to discuss the future of this project within the European Union, without
interference from the United States.
Maybe the US thinks it will also have to go out of its way to accommodate Germany and the
EU by offering to construct the necessary infrastructure in Europe for the import of LNG at
exorbitant US prices. MAGA. How long would that take?
The question is, is it inevitable that the EU/US relationship goes sour?
Continentalism is on the rise generally, and specifically with brexit, couple this with the
geographical gravity of the EU-Russia relationship makes a EU-Russia "alliance" make more
sense than the EU-US relationship.
Ever since the death of the USSR and the accession of the eastern states to the EU, the
balance of power in the EU-US relationship has moved in ways it seems clear that the US is
uncomfortable with.
To all of this we must add the policy differences between the US and the EU – see the
GDPR and the privacy shield for example.
I have said it before – the day Putin dies (metaphorically or literally) is a day
when the post war order in Europe may die, and we see the repairing of the EU-Russia
relationship (by which I mean the current regime in Russia will be replaced with a new
generation far less steeped in cold war dogma and way more interested in the EU).
"The post war order in Europe will doe and we see the repairing of the EU/Russian
relationship "
I think you mean the German/Russian relationship and that repair has been under way for
more than a decade. The post war order is very very frayed already and looks close to a break
point.
This Nord Stream 2 story illustrates more than most Germany's attitudes to the EU and to
the world at large. Germany used its heft within the EU to 1 ) get control of Russian gas
supplies into Central Europe (Germany insisted that Poland could not invest in the project
apparently and refused a landing point for the pipeline in Poland. Instead it offered a flow
back valve from Germany into Poland that the Germans would control) 2) thumb its nose at the
US while outwardly declaring friendship through the structures provided by EU and NATO
membership.
Even Obama suspected the Germans of duplicity (the Merkel phone hacking debacle).
It's is this repairing relationship that will set the tone for Brexit, the Ukraine war,
relations between Turkey and EU and eventually the survival of the EU and NATO. The point ?
Germany doesn't give a hoot about the EU it served its purpose of keeping Germany anchored to
the west and allowing German reunification to solidify while Russia was weak. Its usefulness
is in the past now, however from a German point of view.
Putin dying isn't going to change Washington. As long as NATO exists, Washington will
continue to use it to drive a wedge between the EU and Russia. Merkel foolishly went along
with all of Washington's provocations against Russia in Ukraine, even though none of it
benefited Germany's national interest.
Come to think of it, maybe Merkel dying off would improve German-Russian relations
She did indeed go along with all the provocations and she sat back and said nothing while
Putin railed against US sanctions. Yet Putin didn't blame Germany or the EU. Instead he said
that the Germany/EU is currently trapped by the US and would come to their senses in time. He
is leaving the door open.
Germany won't lose if NATO and the EU break up. It would free itself from a range
increasingly dis-functional entities that, in its mind, restrict its ability to engage in
world affairs.
I think you are right. Russia and Germany are coming together and there's nothing we can
do about it because "private commercial venture." Poetic justice.
And the economic link will
lead to political links and we will have to learn a little modesty. The ploy we are trying to
use, selling Germany US LNG could not have been anything more than a stopgap supply line
until NG from the ME came online but that has been our achilles heel.
It feels like even if
we managed to kick the Saudis out and took over their oil and gas we still could no longer
control geopolitics. The cat is out of the bag and neoliberalism has established the rules.
And it's pointless because there is enough gas and oil and methane on this planet to kill the
human race off but good.
That exactly right. and Gerhard Schroder has been developing those political relationships
for more than a decade. The political/economic links already go very deep on both sides.
if the rapprochement is occurring, Brexit, the refugee crisis and Italy's approaching debt
crisis are all just potential catalysts for an inevitable breakup. Germany likely views these
as potential opportunities to direct European realignment rather than existential crises to
be tackled.
What US LNG exports? The US is a net importer of NG from Canada. US 2018 NG consumption
and production was 635.8 and 631.6 Mtoe respectively (BP 2018 Stats). Even the BP 2018
Statistical Review of World Energy has an asterisks by US LNG exports which says, "Includes
re-exports" which was 17.4 BCM or 15 Mtoe for 2018.
The US produces annually about 33,000,000 million cubic feet and consumes 27.000.000
million according to the EiA . So there is an
excess to export indeed.
Natural gas negotiations involve long term contracts so there are lots of money to
exchange ensuring business for many years to come.
Such a contract has recently been signed between Poland's PGNiG and American Venture
Global Calcasieu & Venture Global Plaquemines LNG (Lousiana). According to the Poland
representative this gas would be 20% cheaper than Russian gas. (if one has to believe it).
Those contracts are very secretive in their terms. This contract in particular is still
dependent on the termination of liquefaction facilities in Lousiana.
I don't know much about NG markets in Poland but according to Eurostat prices for
non-household consumers are very similar in Poland, Germany, Lithuania or Spain.
Gas contracts are usually linked to oil prices. A lot of LNG is traded as a fungible
product like oil, but that contract seems different – most likely its constructed this
way because of the huge capital cost of the LNG facilities, which make very little economic
sense for a country like Poland which has pipelines criss-crossing it. I suspect the
terminals have more capacity that the contract quantity – the surplus would be traded
at market prices, which would no doubt be where the profit margin is for the supplier (I
would be deeply sceptical that unsubsidised LNG could ever compete with Russia gas, the
capital costs involved are just too high).
IIRC, the US is pushing LNG because fracking has resulted in a lot of NG coincident with
oil production. They've got so much NG coming out of fracked oil wells that they don't know what to do
with it and at present, a lot of it just gets flared, or leaks into the atmosphere.
IMO, the folks responsible for this waste are as usual, ignoring the 'externalities', the
costs to the environment of course, but also the cost of infrastructure and transport related
to turning this situation to their advantage.
So they turn to bullying the EU to ignore the price advantage that Russia is able to
offer, due to the economics of pipeline transport over liquefaction and ocean transport, and
of course the issues of reliability and safety associated with ocean transport, and
high-pressure LNG port facilities compared to pipelines.
This doesn't even take into account the possibility that the whole fracked gas supply may
be a short-lived phenomenon, associated with what we've been describing here as basically a
finance game.
Trump will probably offer the EU 'free' LNG port facilities financed by low-income
American tax-payers, and cuts to 'entitlements', all designed to MAGA.
Just to clarify, fracked gas is not usually a by-product of oil fracking – the
geological beds are usually distinct (shale gas tends to occur at much deeper levels than
tight oil). Gas can however be a byproduct of conventional oil production. 'wet' gas
(propane, etc), can be a by-product of either.
It's common for oil wells both fracked and conventional to produce natural gas (NG) though
not all do. The fracked wells in the Permian Basin are producing a great deal of it.
Natural gas does indeed form at higher temperatures than oil does and that means at
greater depth but both oil and NG migrate upward. Exploration for petroleum is hunting for
where it gets captured at depth, not for where it's formed. Those source rocks are used as
indicators of where to look for petroleum trapped stratigraphically higher up.
It seems we have been maneuvering for a while to raise our production of LNG and oil
(unsustainably) in order to become an important substitute supplier to the EU countries. It
sort of looks like our plan is to reduce EU opposition to our attacking Russia. Then we will
have China basically surrounded. This is made easier with our nuclear policy of "we can use
nuclear weapons with acceptable losses." What could go wrong?
I wonder what the secret industry studies say about the damage possible from an accident
at a LNG port terminal involving catastrophic failure and combustion of the entire cargo of a
transport while unloading high-pressure LNG.
They call a fuel-air bomb the size of a school bus 'The Mother of all bombs', what about
one the size of a large ocean going tanker?
Many years ago, someone was trying to build an LNG storage facility on the southwest shore
of Staten Island 17 miles SW of Manhattan involving very large insulated tanks. In spite of
great secrecy, there came to be much local opposition. At the time it was said that the
amount of energy contained in the tanks would be comparable to a nuclear weapon. Various
possible disaster scenarios were proposed, for example a tank could be compromised by
accident (plane crashes into it) or terrorism, contents catch fire and explode, huge fireball
emerges and drifts with the wind, possibly over New Jersey's chemical farms or even towards
Manhattan. The local opponents miraculously won. As far as I know, the disused tanks are
still there.
A 28-inch LNG underground pipeline exploded in Nigeria and the resulting fire engulfed
an estimated 27 square kilometers.
Here's one from Cleveland;
On 20 October 1944, a liquefied natural gas storage tank in Cleveland, Ohio, split and
leaked its contents, which spread, caught fire, and exploded. A half hour later, another
tank exploded as well. The explosions destroyed 1 square mile (2.6 km2), killed 130, and
left 600 homeless.
The locals in Nigeria drill hole in pipeline to get free fuel.
The Nigeria Government has been really wonderful about sharing the largess and riches of
their large petroleum field in the Niger delta. Mostly with owners of expensive property
around the world.
I am trying to think of what might be in it for the Germans to go along with this deal but
cannot see any. The gas would be far more expensive that the Russian deliveries. A fleet of
tankers and the port facilities would have to be built and who is going to pick up the tab
for that? Then if the terminal is in Louisiana, what happens to deliveries whenever there is
a hurricane?
I cannot see anything in it for the Germans at all. Trump's gratitude? That and 50 cents
won't buy you a cup of coffee. In any case Trump would gloat about the stupidity of the
Germans taking him up on the deal, not feel gratitude. The US wants Germany to stick with
deliveries via the Ukraine as they have their thumb on that sorry country and can threaten
Germany with that fact. Nord Stream 2 (and the eventual Nord Stream 3) threaten that
hold.
The killer argument is this. In terms of business and remembering what international
agreements Trump has broken the past two years, who is more reliable as a business partner
for Germany – Putin's Russia or Trump's America?
I find it impossible to believe that a gas supplier would keep to an artificially low LNG
contract if, say, a very cold winter in the US led to a shortage and extreme price spike.
They'd come up with some excuse not to deliver.
My recollection was that there was a law that prohibited export-sales of domestic US
hydrocarbons. That law was under attack, and went away in the last couple years?
LNG with your F35? said the transactional Orangeman
The fracked crude is ultralight and unsuitable for the refineries in the quantities
available, hence export, which caused congress to change the law. No expert, but understand
that it is used a lot as a blender with heavier stocks of crude, quite a bit going to
China.
The petroleum industry has been bribing lobbying the administration for quite a
while to get this policy in place, The so called surplus of NG today (if there is), won't
last long. Exports will create a shortage and will result in higher prices to all.
also, if Germany were to switch to American LNG, for how long would this be a reliable
energy source? Fracking wells are short lived, so what happens once they are depleted? who
foots the bill?
I just love the fact that Trump is publicly calling out Merkel on this; she has been
nothing but two-faced and hypocritical on the Russia question.
She was one of the ones who pushed the EU hard, for example, to sanction Russia in the
wake of the coup in Ukraine (which she had also supported). And then she pushed the EU hard
to kill off the South Stream pipeline, which would have gone through SE Europe into Austria.
She used the excuse of 'EU solidarity' against 'Russian aggression' to accomplish that only
to then turn around and start building yet another pipeline out of Russia and straight
into Germany! The Bulgarians et al. must feel like real idiots now. It seems Berlin wants to
control virtually all the pipelines into Europe.
So, three cheers for Trump embarrassing Merkel on this issue!
Putting money aside for a moment, Trump, as well as the entire American establishment,
doesn't want Russia "controlling" Germany's energy supplies. That's because they want America
to control Germany's energy supplies via controlling LNG deliveries from America to Germany
and by controlling gas supplies to Germany through Ukraine. This by maintaining America's
control over Ukraine's totally dependent puppet government. The Germans know this so they
want Nord Stream 2 & 3.
Ukraine is an unreliable energy corridor on a good day. It is run by clans of rapacious
oligarchs who don't give one whit about Ukraine, the Ukrainian "people", or much of anything
else except business. The 2019 presidential election may turn into a contest among President
Poroshenko the Chocolate King, Yulia Tymoshenko the Gas Princess, as well as some others
including neo Nazis that go downhill from there. What competent German government would want
Germany's energy supplies to be dependent on that mess?
It has been said that America's worst geopolitical nightmare is an
economic-political-military combination of Russia, Iran, and China in the Eurasian
"heartland". Right up there, if not worse, is a close political-economic association between
Germany and Russia; now especially so since such a relationship can quickly be hooked into
China's New Silk Road, which America will do anything to subvert including tariffs,
sanctions, confiscations of assets, promotion of political-ethnic-religious grievances where
they may exist along the "Belt-Road", as well as armed insurrections, really maybe anything
short of all out war with Russia and China.
Germany's trying to be polite about this saying, sure, how about a little bit of LNG along
with Nord Stream 2 & 3? But the time may come, if America pushes enough, that Germany
will have to make an existential choice between subservience to America, and pursuit of it's
own legitimate self interest.
It's hard to make NG explode, as it is with all liquid hydrocarbons. It is refrigerated,
and must change from liquid to gaseous for, and be mixed with air.
I've also worked on a Gas Tanker in the summer vacations. The gas was refrigerated, and
kept liquid. They is a second method, used for NG, that is to allow evaporation from the
cargo, and use it as fuel for the engine (singular because there is one propulsion engine on
most large ships) on the tanker.
The truth is that Trump foreign policy was neocon from April 2017 -- first Tomahawk style in Syria. Trump is just yet another
neocon, a huge disappointment for people who voted for him in a hope that he might change the US foreign policy and stop foreign
wars.
The president's equivocating remarks over the defense secretary show that Bolton and
Pompeo are indeed winning.
President Trump with Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Pompeo, Defense Secretary
Jim Mattis and National Security Advisor John Bolton Credit:NATO/Flickr In covering President
Donald Trump's recent pregnant comments about Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, The Wall Street
Journal tucked away in its story an observation that hints at the president's foreign
policy direction. In an interview for CBS's 60 Minutes , the president described
Mattis as "sort of a Democrat if you want to know the truth" and suggested he wouldn't be
surprised if his military chief left his post soon. After calling him "a good guy" and saying
the two "get along very well," Trump added, "He may leave. I mean, at some point, everybody
leaves . That's Washington."
Actually that's Trump. He demands total and utter loyalty from his people and gives none in
return. In just his first 14 months as president, he hired three national security advisors,
reflecting the unstable relationships he often has with his top aides. Following the 60
Minutes interview, Washington was of course abuzz with speculation about what all this
might mean for Mattis's fate and who might be the successor if Mattis were to quit or be fired.
It was just the kind of fodder Washington loves -- human drama revealing Trump's legendary
inconstancy amid prospective new turmoil in the capital.
But far more significant than Mattis's future or Trump's love of chaos was a sentence
embedded in the Journal 's report. After noting that recent polls indicated that
Mattis enjoys strong support from the American people, reporter Nancy A. Youssef writes: "But
his influence within the administration has waned in recent months, particularly following the
arrival of John Bolton as national security adviser and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo as
secretary of state."
The significance here is that Bolton and Pompeo represent just about everything Trump ran
against during his 2016 presidential campaign. He ran against the country's foreign policy
establishment and its rush to war in Iraq; its support of NATO's provocative eastward
expansion; its abiding hostility toward Russia; its destabilization of the Middle East through
ill-conceived and ill-fated activities in Iraq, Libya, and Syria; its ongoing and seemingly
endless war in Afghanistan; and its enthusiasm for regime change and nation-building around the
world. Bolton and Pompeo represent precisely those kinds of policies and actions as well as the
general foreign policy outlook that spawned them.
Trump gave every indication during the campaign that he would reverse those policies and
avoid those kinds of actions. He even went so far, in his inimitable way, of accusing the Bush
administration of lying to the American people in taking the country to war in Iraq, as opposed
to making a reckless and stupid, though honest, mistake about that country's weapons of mass
destruction. He said it would be great to get along with Russia and criticized NATO's
aggressive eastward push. He said our aim in Syria should be to combat Islamist extremism, not
depose Bashar al-Assad as its leader. In promulgating his America First approach, he
specifically eschewed any interest in nation-building abroad.
The one area where he seemed to embrace America's post-Cold War aggressiveness was in his
attitude toward Iran. But even there he seemed less bellicose than many of his Republican
opponents in the 2016 primaries, who said they would rip up the Iran nuclear deal on their
first day in office. Trump, by contrast, said it was a bad deal but one he would seek to
improve.
Still, generally speaking, anyone listening to Trump carefully before the election would
have been justified in concluding that, if he meant what he said, he would reverse America's
post-Cold War foreign policy as practiced by George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Now we know he didn't mean what he said, and the latest tiff over the fate of Mattis
crystallizes that reality. It's not that Mattis represents the kind of anti-establishment
outlook that Trump projected during the campaign; in fact, he is a thoroughgoing product of
that establishment. He said Iran was the main threat to stability in the Middle East. He
supported sending arms to the Syrian rebels. He decried Russia's intent to "break NATO
apart."
Thus any neutral observer, at the time of Mattis's selection as defense secretary, might
have concluded that he was more bent on an adventurous American foreign policy than his boss.
But it turned out to be just the opposite. There are two reasons for this. First, Mattis is
cautious by nature, and he seems to have taken Trump at his word that he didn't want any more
unnecessary American wars of choice. Hence he opposed the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal
prior to Trump's decision to pull America out of it. That action greatly increased the chances
that America and Iran could find themselves on a path to war. Mattis also redeployed some
military resources from the Middle East to other areas designed to check actions by Russia and
China, which he considered greater threats to U.S. security.
And second, it turns out that Trump has no true convictions when it comes to world affairs.
He brilliantly discerned the frustrations of many Americans over the foreign policy of the
previous 16 years and hit just the right notes to leverage those frustrations during the
campaign. But his actual foreign policy has manifested a lack of consistent and strong
philosophy. Consider his approach to NATO. During the campaign he criticized the alliance's
eastward push and aggressive approach to Russia; then as president he accepted NATO's inclusion
of tiny Montenegro, a slap at the Russians; then later he suggested Montenegro's NATO status
could force the U.S. into a major conflagration if that small nation, which he described as
aggressive, got itself into a conflict with a non-NATO neighbor. Such inconsistencies are not
the actions of a man with strong convictions. They are hallmarks of someone who is winging it
on the basis of little knowledge.
That seems to have presented a marvelous opportunity to Bolton and Pompeo, whose philosophy
and convictions are stark and visible to all. Bolton has made clear his desire for America to
bring about regime change in Iran and North Korea. He supported the Iraq war and has never
wavered in the face of subsequent events. He has advocated a preemptive strike against North
Korea. Pompeo harbors similar views. He favored withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and has
waxed bellicose on both Iran and Russia.
Thus a conflict was probably inevitable between Mattis and these more recent administration
arrivals. The New York Times speculates that Bolton likely undermined Mattis's
standing in Trump's eyes. Writes the paper: "Mr. Bolton, an ideological conservative whose
views on foreign policy are more hawkish than those of Mr. Mattis, appears to have deepened the
president's suspicions that his defense secretary's view of the world is more like those of
Democrats than his own."
The paper didn't clarify the basis of this speculation, but it makes sense. Bolton and
Pompeo are gut fighters who go for the jugular. Trump is malleable, susceptible to obsequious
manipulation. Mattis is an old-style military man with a play-it-straight mentality and a
discomfort with guile. Thus it appears we may be seeing before our eyes the transformation of
Trump the anti-establishment candidate into Trump the presidential neocon.
The stunning CSU defeat in Bavaria means that the coalition partner in Angela Merkel's
government has lost an absolute majority in their worst election results in Bavaria since
1950.
In a preview analysis before the election, Deutsche
Welle noted that a CSU collapse could lead to Seehofer's resignation from Merkel's
government, and conceivably Söder's exit from the Bavarian state premiership, which would
remove two of the chancellor's most outspoken critics from power , and give her room to govern
in the calmer, crisis-free manner she is accustomed to.
On the other hand, a heavy loss and big resignations in the CSU might well push a
desperate party in a more volatile, abrasive direction at the national level. That would
further antagonize the SPD, the center-left junior partners in Merkel's coalition, themselves
desperate for a new direction and already impatient with Seehofer's destabilizing antics, and
precipitate a break-up of the age-old CDU/CSU alliance, and therefore a break-up of Merkel's
grand coalition. In short: Anything could happen after Sunday, up to and including Merkel's
fall.
The Financial Times reports that the campaign was dominated by the divisive issue of
immigration, in a sign of how the shockwaves from Merkel's disastrous decision to let in more
than a million refugees in 2015-16 are continuing to reverberate through German politics and to
reshape the party landscape.
The Duran's Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss the stunning
Bavarian election defeat of the CSU party, and the message voters sent to Angela Merkel, the
last of the Obama 'rat pack' neo-liberal, globalist leaders whose tenure as German Chancellor
appears to be coming to an end.
Credit:
reddees/Shutterstock
Should each and every intersection you stop at or drive through be a potential federal
surveillance site? The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) certainly seems to think so. The
DEA is currently
expanding its use of license plate readers (LPRs) in digital road signs, which is sure to
have an impact on drivers' basic expectation of privacy.
The agency sees this program as a
collaboration between "federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement license plate readers"
to curb the actions of drug traffickers, money launderers, and other criminals. The agency
installs these cameras in digital street signs on roads that it believes are popular with
lawbreakers.
Such actions are not unique to the DEA. Police agencies share the data they obtain from LPRs
with hundreds of different local, state, and federal agencies. These agencies range from police
departments to Customs and Border Patrol to the U.S. Park Service to the U.S. Postal Service.
For example, the San Diego Police Department is
reportedly sharing its license plate data with around 900 different federal, state, and
local agencies.
Before these agencies can use their LPRs, though, the roads they select must have use for
the signs in which they are installed. Daniel Herriges, an urban planner and content manager at
Strong Towns, observes that "road design is, in fact, often the biggest underlying cause
of unsafe speed in cities." Because traffic engineers design roads to be forgiving, it creates
the perception that they are less risky. Motorists then respond "by driving faster or less
attentively," Herriges says.
In response to such unsafe driving, communities
like Albuquerque, New Mexico, have been requesting traffic calming and enforcement measures
through safe street initiatives, including signs that warn drivers. This unwittingly provides
an outlet for data collection.
Herriges suggests that rather than increase enforcement, roads should be rethought entirely.
"Addressing speed through design rather than through enforcement carries numerous advantages,"
he says. "For one, it's more effective -- studies consistently show that most drivers disregard
posted speed limits." That means traffic engineering could be the best defense of Fourth
Amendment rights in terms of license plate data collection -- except, of course, for a
constitutional challenge in court.
No federal or state courts have made any rulings on the constitutionality of an LPR program
as vast as the DEA's. Instead, the judiciary has ruled
that "single-instance database checks of license plate numbers" do not constitute searches
under the Fourth Amendment. The courts have argued this is the case because license plates are
in "plain view." However, the DEA's massive database, and the sharing they engage in with other
agencies, clearly exceed the "single-instance" that courts have ruled constitutional.
"Law enforcement likes to claim that because license plates are in public view that creating
massive ALPR networks aren't very different than stationing cops at certain locations and
having them write down the information by hand," said Dave Maass, senior investigative
researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "So far, there haven't been many
challenges to this in the courts, except on the state level. That said, policymakers have been
pursuing (and passing) new restrictions on both sides of the aisle."
Similar to the National Security Agency's vast metadata collection program, the sharing of
license plate information can paint a very holistic picture of who a person is and what their
day-to-day life looks like. It can be as mundane as a person visiting his parents or it can be
more intrusive -- local police could share the data of everyone who visits a certain
immigration lawyer with Customs and Border Patrol, for example.
"I am definitely concerned that agencies may target people by searching ALPR data for
visitors to immigration lawyers, medical clinics serving undocumented people, churches
specializing in foreign-language services, or locations where day laborers gather," Maass said.
He added that DHS routinely uses "questionable tactics" when detaining undocumented
immigrants.
The DEA expanding its LPR program would further erode Americans' basic expectation of
privacy, and do nothing to make America's streets any safer. It's time to stop throwing more
money and resources at the failed war on drugs.
Dan King is a Young Voices contributor, journalist, and digital communications
professional based in Arlington, Virginia. His work has appeared at Reason ,, The Week and the Washington Examiner .
Ethan A. Greene is a Young Voices alumnus and master's student of City and Regional
Planning at Clemson University. His writing has appeared in Strong Towns, Planetizen, Spiked!,
and the Washington Times .
Don't underestimate the gravity of yet another ominous sign of times. Ever since the first
street cameras appeared the specter of totalitarian control has loomed large.
That moment brought into sharp focus concern that the technology that enables unlimited
storage and instant access to data could quickly become the tool of total control, too tempting
to any form of government and transform it into a totalitarian monster.
I was shocked by how virtually no resistance emerged, no serious, principled objections were
raised. Now, we are rapidly progressing into the next stage. If conservatism stands for
anything, this is the hill to die on. Comrades frogs, water's getting warmer, high time to jump
out!
Pompeo puts on his Global Cop Gorilla suit again making absolute demands as a condition for
even continuing negotiations.
However the big question is how much North and South Korea move ahead in spite of the
ham-fisted United States. Then the revealed scenario will be much more stark. I.e., it's not
what the Korea's want that matters, it's what the Gorilla wants.
The play then will be driven by China and Russia. They don't want North Korea with nuclear
weapons either because it's bad for business. As they work with the Korea's toward a
settlement, the question then becomes it what way will the U.S. subvert any settlement in
which it alone does not define the outcome.
P.S. like with the Russia led Minsk agreement and the Astana talks in which the U.S. has
been shut out, the U.S. cares little about attaining the fundamental peace objectives in
Korea, only that it calls the tune in every regard.
the question then becomes it what way will the U.S. subvert any settlement in which it
alone does not define the outcome?
Note that this lack of total control by the U.S. in Korea and other venues may eventually
induce a pathologically dangerous response on several fronts when the Washington Nomenklatura
becomes fully aware of its asymmetric weaknesses. I.e., When a War Machine hammer is all you
got, everything else is a nail.
Fascism is always eclectic and its doctrine is composed of several sometimes contradicting each other ideas. "Ideologically speaking,
[the program] was a wooly, eclectic mixture of political, social, racist, national-imperialist wishful thinking..." (Ideologically speaking,
[the program] was a wooly, eclectic mixture of political, social, racist, national-imperialist wishful thinking..."
)
Some ideas are "sound bite only" and never are implemented and are present only to attract sheeple (looks
National Socialist Program ). he program championed
the right to employment , and called for the institution of
profit sharing , confiscation of
war profits , prosecution of usurers and profiteers,
nationalization of trusts , communalization of department stores,
extension of the old-age pension system, creation of a
national education program of all classes, prohibition
of child labor , and an end to the dominance of
investment capital "
There is also "bait and switch" element in any fascism movement. Original fascism was strongly anti-capitalist, militaristic and
"national greatness and purity" movement ("Make Germany great again"). It was directed against financial oligarchy and anti-semantic
element in it was strong partially because it associated Jews with bankers and financial industry in general. In a way "Jews" were codeword
for investment bankers.
For example " Arbeit Macht Frei " can be viewed as
a neoliberal slogan. Then does not mean that neoliberalism. with its cult of productivity, is equal to fascism, but that neoliberal
doctrine does encompass elements of the fascist doctrine including strong state, "law and order" mentality and relentless propaganda.
The word "fascist" is hurled at political / ideological opponents so often that it lost its meaning. The Nazi Party (NSDAP) originated
as a working-class political party . This is not true about
Trump whom many assume of having fascist leanings. His pro white working class rhetoric was a fig leaf used for duration or elections.
After that he rules as a typical Republican president favoring big business. And as a typical neocon in foreign policy.
From this point of view Trump can't be viewed even as pro-fascist leader because first of all he does not have his own political
movement, ideology and political program. And the second he does not strive for implementing uniparty state and abolishing the elections
which is essential for fascism political platform, as fascist despise corrupt democracy and have a cult of strong leader.
All he can be called is neo-fascist s his some of his views do encompass ideas taken from fascist ideology (including "law and order";
which also is a cornerstone element of Republican ideology) as well as idealization and mystification of the US past. But with Bannon
gone he also can't even pretend that he represents some coherent political movement like "economic nationalism" -- kind of enhanced
mercantilism.
Of course, that does not mean that previous fascist leaders were bound by the fascism political program, but at least they had one.
Historian Karl Dietrich Bracher writes that, "To [Hitler,
the program] was little more than an effective, persuasive propaganda weapon for mobilizing and manipulating the masses. Once it had
brought him to power, it became pure decoration: 'unalterable', yet unrealized in its demands for nationalization and expropriation,
for land reform and 'breaking the shackles of finance capital'. Yet it nonetheless fulfilled its role as backdrop and pseudo-theory,
against which the future dictator could unfold his rhetorical and dramatic talents."
Notable quotes:
"... Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed. Depending on how the nation is defined, the mythic past may be religiously pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above. But there is a common structure to all fascist mythologizing. In all fascist mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago. ..."
"... Further back in time, the mythic past was a time of glory of the nation, with wars of conquest led by patriotic generals, its armies filled with its countrymen, able-bodied, loyal warriors whose wives were at home raising the next generation. In the present, these myths become the basis of the nation's identity under fascist politics. ..."
"... In the rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal cosmopolitanism, and respect for "universal values" such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the nation weak in the face of real and threatening challenges to the nation's existence. ..."
"... fascist myths distinguish themselves with the creation of a glorious national history in which the members of the chosen nation ruled over others, the result of conquests and civilization-building achievements. ..."
"... The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology -- authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle. ..."
It's in the name of tradition that the anti-Semites base their "point of view." It's in the name of tradition, the long, historical
past and the blood ties with Pascal and Descartes, that the Jews are told, you will never belong here.
-- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
It is only natural to begin this book where fascist politics invariably claims to discover its genesis: in the past. Fascist
politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed. Depending on how the nation is defined, the mythic past may be religiously
pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above. But there is a common structure to all fascist mythologizing. In all fascist
mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago.
Further back in time, the mythic past was a time of glory of the nation, with wars of conquest led by patriotic generals,
its armies filled with its countrymen, able-bodied, loyal warriors whose wives were at home raising the next generation. In the present,
these myths become the basis of the nation's identity under fascist politics.
In the rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal
cosmopolitanism, and respect for "universal values" such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the nation weak in the
face of real and threatening challenges to the nation's existence.
These myths are generally based on fantasies of a nonexistent past uniformity, which survives in the traditions of the small towns
and countrysides that remain relatively unpolluted by the liberal decadence of the cities. This uniformity -- linguistic, religious,
geographical, or ethnic -- can be perfectly ordinary in some nationalist movements, but fascist myths distinguish themselves
with the creation of a glorious national history in which the members of the chosen nation ruled over others, the result of conquests
and civilization-building achievements. For example, in the fascist imagination, the past invariably involves traditional, patriarchal
gender roles. The fascist mythic past has a particular structure, which supports its authoritarian, hierarchical ideology. That past
societies were rarely as patriarchal -- or indeed as glorious -- as fascist ideology represents them as being is beside the point.
This imagined history provides proof to support the imposition of hierarchy in the present, and it dictates how contemporary society
should look and behave.
In a 1922 speech at the Fascist Congress in Naples, Benito Mussolini declared:
We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. . . . Our myth is
the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total
reality, we subordinate everything.
The patriarchal family is one ideal that fascist politicians intend to create in society -- or return to, as they claim. The patriarchal
family is always represented as a central part of the nation's traditions, diminished, even recently, by the advent of liberalism
and cosmopolitanism. But why is patriarchy so strategically central to fascist politics?
In a fascist society, the leader of the nation is analogous to the father in the traditional patriarchal family. The leader is
the father of his nation, and his strength and power are the source of his legal authority, just as the strength and power of the
father of the family in patriarchy are supposed to be the source of his ultimate moral authority over his children and wife. The
leader provides for his nation, just as in the traditional family the father is the provider. The patriarchal father's authority
derives from his strength, and strength is the chief authoritarian value. By representing the nation's past as one with a patriarchal
family structure, fascist politics connects nostalgia to a central organizing hierarchal authoritarian structure, one that finds
its purest representation in these norms.
Gregor Strasser was the National Socialist -- Nazi -- Reich propaganda chief in the 1920s, before the post was taken over by Joseph
Goebbels. According to Strasser, "for a man, military service is the most profound and valuable form of participation -- for the
woman it is motherhood!" Paula Siber, the acting head of the Association of German Women, in a 1933 document meant to reflect official
National Socialist state policy on women, declares that "to be a woman means to be a mother, means affirming with the whole conscious
force of one's soul the value of being a mother and making it a law of life . . . the highest calling of the National Socialist
woman is not just to bear children, but consciously and out of total devotion to her role and duty as mother to raise children for
her people." Richard Grunberger, a British historian of National Socialism, sums up "the kernel of Nazi thinking on the women's question"
as "a dogma of inequality between the sexes as immutable as that between the races." The historian Charu Gupta, in her 1991 article
"Politics of Gender: Women in Nazi Germany," goes as far as to argue that "oppression of women in Nazi Germany in fact furnishes
the most extreme case of anti-feminism in the 20th century."
Here, Mussolini makes clear that the fascist mythic past is intentionally mythical. The function of the mythic past, in fascist
politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology -- authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity,
and struggle.
With the creation of a mythic past, fascist politics creates a link between nostalgia and the realization of fascist ideals. German
fascists also clearly and explicitly appreciated this point about the strategic use of a mythological past. The leading Nazi ideologue
Alfred Rosenberg, editor of the prominent Nazi newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter, writes in 1924, "the understanding of and the
respect for our own mythological past and our own history will form the first condition for more firmly anchoring the coming generation
in the soil of Europe's original homeland." The fascist mythic past exists to aid in changing the present.
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished
Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Stanley is the author of Know How; Languages in Context;
More about Jason Stanley
This could have been such a helpful, insightful book. The word "fascist" is hurled at political / ideological opponents so
often that it has started to lose its meaning. I hoped that this book would provide a historical perspective on fascism by examining
actual fascist governments and drawing some parallels to the more egregious / worrisome trends in US & European politics. The
chapter titles in the table of contents were promising:
- The Mythic Past
- Propaganda
- Anti-Intellectual
- Unreality
- Hierarchy
- Victimhood
- Law & Order
- Sexual Anxiety
- Sodom & Gomorrah
- Arbeit Macht Frei
Ironically (given the book's subtitle) the author used his book divisively: to laud his left-wing political views and demonize
virtually all distinctively right-wing views. He uses the term "liberal democracy" inconsistently throughout, disengenuously equivocating
between the meaning of "representative democracy as opposed to autocratic or oligarchic government" (which most readers would
agree is a good thing) and "American left-wing political views" (which he treats as equally self-evidently superior if you are
a right-thinking person). Virtually all American right-wing political views are presented in straw-man form, defined in such a
way that they fit his definition of fascist politics.
I was expecting there to be a pretty heavy smear-job on President Trump and his cronies (much of it richly deserved...the man's
demagoguery and autocratic tendencies are frightening), but for this to turn into "let's find a way to define virtually everything
the Republicans are and do as fascist politics" was massively disappointing. The absurdly biased portrayal of all things conservative
and constant hymns of praise to all things and all people left-wing buried some good historical research and valid parallels under
an avalanche of partisanism.
If you want a more historical, less partisan view of the rise of fascist politics, I would highly recommend Darkness Over Germany
by E. Amy Buller (Review Here). It was written during World War II (based on interviews with Germans before WWII), so you will
have to draw your own contemporary parallels...but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
"... Journalist Glenn Greenwald hit out at those on the left who cheered Facebook and Twitter's coordinated 'deplatforming' of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in August. "Those who demanded Facebook & other Silicon Valley giants censor political content...are finding that content that they themselves support & like end up being repressed," he wrote. "That's what has happened to every censorship advocate in history." ..."
"... "a wider war on dissident narratives in online media." ..."
Alternative voices online are incensed after Facebook and Twitter closed down hundreds of
political media pages ahead of November's crucial midterm elections. Facebook says they broke
its spam rules, they say it's censorship. Some 800 pages spanning the
political spectrum, from left-leaning organizations like The Anti Media, to flag-waving opinion
sites like Right Wing News and Nation in Distress, were shut down. Other pages banned include
those belonging to police brutality watchdog groups Filming Cops and Policing the Police.
Even
RT America's Rachel Blevins found her own page banned for posts that were allegedly
"misleading users."
Journalist Glenn Greenwald hit out at those on the left who cheered Facebook and Twitter's coordinated 'deplatforming' of
right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in August. "Those who demanded Facebook & other Silicon Valley giants censor political
content...are finding that content that they themselves support & like end up being repressed," he wrote. "That's what has
happened to every censorship advocate in history."
In America, Conservatives were the first to complain about unfair treatment by left-leaning Silicon Valley tech giants.
However, leftist sites have increasingly become targets in what Blumenthal calls "a wider war on dissident narratives in
online media." In identifying enemies in this "war," Facebook has partnered up with the Digital Forensics Lab, an
offshoot of NATO-sponsored think tank the Atlantic Council. The DFL has promised to be Facebook's "eyes and ears" in
the fight against disinformation (read: alternative viewpoints).
If one had to identify the main reason behind the utter failure of the U.S. political
establishment and military leadership, both civilian and in uniform, to identify and prioritize
weapons programs and procurement that was truly in line with the national defense needs of the
country, it would be the institutional corruption of the U.S. military industrial complex. This
is not a fault of one party, but is the inevitable outcome of a thoroughly corrupted system
that both generates and wastes great wealth at the expense of the many for the benefit of the
few.
Massive defense budgets do not lead to powerful military forces nor sound national defense
strategy. The United States is the most glaring example of how a nation's treasure can be
wasted, its citizens robbed for generations, and its political processes undermined by an
industry bent on maximizing profitability by encouraging and exacerbating conflict. At this
point it is questionable that the United States' could remain economically viable without war,
so much of its GDP is connected in some way to the pursuit of conflict.
There is no doubt that the War Department was renamed the Department of Defense in an
Orwellian sleight of hand in 1947, just a few years after end of World War II. The military
industrial complex grew into a monolith during the war, and the only way to justify the
expansion of the complex, was by finding a new enemy to justify the new reality of a massive
standing military, something that the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids. This unlawful state
of affairs has persisted and expanded into a rotten, bloated edifice of waste. Wasted effort,
wasted wealth and the wasted lives of millions of people spanning every corner of the planet.
Tens of thousands of brave men and women in uniform, and millions of civilians of so many
nations, have been tossed into the blades of this immoral meat grinder for generations.
President Donald Trump was very proud to announce the largest U.S. military budget in the
nation's history last year. The United States spent (or more accurately, borrowed from
generations yet to come) no less than $874.4 billion USD. The declared base budget for 2017 was
$523.2 billion USD, yet there are also the Overseas Contingency Operations and Support budgets
that have to be considered in determining the total cost. The total DOD annual costs have
doubled from 2003 to the present. Yet, what has the DOD really accomplished with so much money
and effort? Very little of benefit to the U.S. tax payer for sure, and paradoxically the
exorbitant waste of the past fifteen years have left every branch of the U.S. military
weaker.
The U.S. Congress has the duty and responsibility of reigning in the military adventurism of
the executive branch. They have the sole authority to declare war, but more importantly, the
sole authority to approve the budget requests of the military. It is laughable to think that
the U.S. Congress will do anything to reign in military spending. The Congress and the Senate
are as equally guilty as the Executive in promoting and benefitting from the military
industrial complex. Envisioned as a bulwark against executive power, the U.S. Congress has
become an integral component of that complex. No Senator or Representative would dare to go
against the industry that employs so many constituents within their state, or pass up on the
benefits afforded them through the legalized insider-trading exclusive to them, or the
lucrative jobs that await them in the defense industry and the many think tanks that promote
continued prosecution of war.
Qatar is jubilating! Turkey, too! Saudi Arabia will be criticized and isolated as most GCC
countries would dissaprove and prefer to dissociate from such a crime. Dismembering the body
of a dead moslem man is a very serious crime in Islam.
Kuwait and Bahrein are already cozyng up with Syria, the UAE is slowly moving out the
Yemen war and reviewing ist relation with Syria.
Kashoogi's alleged martyr may save Yemenis lives and may have the Western world faced to
the reality that in the region, the evil is not Iran but their best friend, Saudi Arabia and
its smiling monster MBS.
Kashoogi may have succeeded unintentionally to destabilize MBS and probably trigger his
removal. The USA will have no problem in sacrificing MBS for the sake of keeping the Saudi
milking under control. The only problem will be that it will reflect on Kushner-MBS Grand
Palestinian plan.
Maybe Kashoogi's love for fiancee made him take the risk to get a divorce paper from the
Saudi Arabia consulate and be killed.
@75 Why should Trump make a big issue about some dead Arab? Because he was a journalist?
Trump hates journalists.
If bleeding heart progressives want to make a fuss so be it. He knows his base don't give
a shit about the world outside the USA as long as they buy American arms.
adopted false US personas online to get
people to attend rallies and conduct other political activities. (An alternative explanation is
that IRA is a purely commercial, and not political, operation.)
Whether those efforts even came close to swaying US voters in the 2016 presidential
election, as Shane and Mazzetti claimed, is another matter.
Shane and Mazzetti might argue that they are merely citing figures published by the social
media giants Facebook and Twitter, but they systematically failed to report the detailed
explanations behind the gross figures used in each case, which falsified their
significance.
Their most dramatic assertions came in reporting the alleged results of the IRA's efforts on
Facebook. "Even by the vertiginous standards of social media," they wrote, "the reach of their
effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate
images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook
alone."
Then, to dramatize that "eventual audience" figure, they observed, "That was not far short
of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential elections."
But as impressive as these figures may appear at first glance, they don't really indicate an
effective attack on the US election process at all. In fact, without deeper inquiry into their
meaning, those figures were grossly misleading.
A Theoretical Possibility
What Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch actually said in testimony before the Senate
Judiciary Committee last October was quite different from what the Times reporters
claimed. "Our best estimate is that approximately 126,000 million people may have been served
one of these [IRA-generated] stories at some time during the two year period," Stretch
said.
Stretch was expressing a theoretical possibility rather than an established accomplishment.
Facebook was saying that it estimated 126 million Facebook members might have gotten at
least one story from the IRA –- not over the ten week election period but over 194 weeks
during the two years 2015 through 2017. That, figure, in turn, was based on the estimate that
29 million people might have gotten at least one story in their Facebook feed over that same
two-year period and on the assumption that they shared it with others at a particular rate.
The first problem with citing those figures as evidence of impact on the 2016 election is
that Facebook did not claim that all or even most of those 80,000 IRA posts were
election–related. It offered no data on what proportion of the feeds to those 29 million
people was, in fact, election-related. But Stretch did testify that IRA content over that
two–year period represented just four thousandths (.0004) of the total content of
Facebook newsfeeds.
Thus each piece of IRA content in a twitter feed was engulfed in 23,000 pieces of non-IRA
content.
That is an extremely important finding, because, as Facebook's Vice President for News Feed,
Adam Moseri,
acknowledged in 2016 , Facebook subscribers actually read only about 10 percent of the
stories Facebook puts in their News Feed every day. The means that very few of the IRA stories
that actually make it into a subscriber's news feed on any given day are actually read.
Facebook did conduct research on what it calls "civic engagement" during the election
period, and the researchers concluded
that the "reach" of the content shared by what they called "fake amplifiers" was "marginal
compared to the volume of civic content shared during the US elections." That reach, they said,
was "statistically very small" in relation to "overall engagement on political issues."
Shane and Mazzaetti thus failed to report any of the several significant caveats and
disclaimers from Facebook itself that make their claim that Russian election propaganda
"reached" 126 million Americans extremely misleading.
Tiny IRA Twitter Footprint
Shane and Mazzetti's treatment of the role of Twitter in the alleged Russian involvement in
the election focuses on 3,814 Twitter accounts said to be associated with the IRA, which
supposedly "interacted with 1.4 million Americans." Although that number looks impressive
without any further explanation, more disaggregated data provide a different picture: more than
90 percent of the Tweets from the IRA had nothing to do with the election, and those that did
were infinitesimally few in relation to the entire Twitter stream relating to the 2016
campaign.
Twitter's
own figures show that those 3,814 IRA-linked accounts posted 175,993 Tweets during the ten
weeks of the election campaign, but that only 8.4 percent of the total number of IRA-generated
Tweets were election-related.
Twitter estimated that those 15,000 IRA-related tweets represented less than .00008 (eight
one hundred thousandths) of the estimated total of 189 million tweets that Twitter identified
as election-related during the ten-week election campaign. Twitter has offered no estimate of
how many Tweets, on average were in the daily twitter stream of those people notified by
Twitter and what percentage of them were election-related Tweets from the IRA. Any such
notification would certainly show, however, that the percentage was extremely small and that
very few would have been read.
Research by Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren of Clemson University on 2.9 million Tweets
from those same 3,814 IRA accounts over a two year period has
revealed that nearly a third of its Tweets had normal commercial content or were not in
English; another third were straight local newsfeeds from US localities or mostly non-political
"hashtag games", and the final third were on "right" or "left" populist themes in US
society.
Furthermore, there were more IRA Tweets on political themes in 2017 than there had been
during the election year. As a graph of those tweets over time shows,
those "right" and "left" Tweets peaked not during the election but during the summer of
2017.
The Mysterious 50,000 'Russia-Linked' Accounts
Twitter also determined
that another 50,258 automated Twitter accounts that tweeted about the election were associated
with Russia and that they have generated a total to 2.1 million Tweets – about one
percent of the total number election-related tweets of during the period.
But despite media coverage of those Tweets suggesting that they originated with the Russian
government, the evidence doesn't indicate that at all. Twitter's Sean Edgett told
the Senate Intelligence Committee last November that Twitter had used an "expansive
approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account". Twitter considered an account
to be "Russian" if any of the following was found: it was created in Russia or if the user
registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email; the user's display name
contains Cyrillic characters; the user frequently Tweets in Russian, or the user has logged in
from any Russian IP address.
Edgett admitted
in a statement in January, however, that there were limitations on its ability to determine
the origins of the users of these accounts. And a past log-in from a Russian IP address does
not mean the Russian government controls an account. Automated accounts have bought and sold
for many years on a huge market, some of which is located in Russia. As Scott Shane reported
in September 2017, a Russian website BuyAccs.com offers tens and even hundreds of thousands
of Twitter accounts for bulk purchase.
Twitter also observed that "a high concentration of automated engagement and content
originated from data centers and users accessing Twitter via Virtual Private Networks ("VPNs")
and proxy servers," which served to mask the geographical origin of the tweet. And that
practice was not limited to the 50,000 accounts in question. Twitter found that locations of
nearly 12 percent of the Tweets generated during the election period were masked because of use
of such networks and servers.
Twitter identified over half of the Tweets, coming from about half of the 50,000 accounts as
being automated, and the data reported on activity on those 50,000 accounts in question
indicates that both the Trump and Clinton campaigns were using the automated accounts in
question. The roughly 23,000 automated accounts were the source of 1.34 million Tweets, which
represented .63 percent of the total election-related Tweets. But the entire 50,000 accounts
produced about 1 percent of total election-related tweets.
Hillary Clinton got .55 percent of her total retweets from the 50,000 automated accounts
Twitter calls "Russia-linked" and .62 percent of her "likes" from them. Those percentages are
close to the percentage of total election-related Tweets generated by those same automated
accounts. That suggests that her campaign had roughly the same proportion of automated accounts
among the 50,000 accounts as it did in the rest of the accounts during the campaign.
Trump, on the other hand, got 1.8 percent of this total "likes" and 4.25 percent of his
total Retweets for the whole election period from those accounts, indicating his campaign was
more invested in the automated accounts that were the source of two-thirds of the Tweets in
those 50,000 "Russia-linked" accounts.
The idea promoted by Shane and Mazzetti that the Russian government seriously threatened to
determine the winner of the election does not hold up when the larger social media context is
examined more closely. Contrary to what the Times' reporters and the corporate media in
general would have us believe, the Russian private sector effort accounted for a minuscule
proportion of the election-related output of social media. The threat to the US political
system in general and its electoral system in particular is not Russian influence; it's in part
a mainstream news media that has lost perspective on the truth.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national
security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on
the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book is
Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare . He can be contacted at
[email protected] . Reprinted from
Consortium News with the author's
permission.
"the GRU's disregard for global values and rules that keep us all safe".
Like the values and rules that led the NSA to eavesdrop on Chancellor Merkel's phone calls
for years, and to use American Embassies as listening posts. Mutti Merkel was very
understanding, considering they were only doing it to keep us all safe.
As pointed out elsewhere there is no such agency called the GRU. Like there is no agency
called the KGB. This in itself demonstrates that NATzO is spreading pure propaganda.
It's probably not sloppiness, per se; it's more that Britain has reached a new level of
dazzling investigative brilliance, so that normal GRU tradecraft can no longer withstand its
piercing eye.
"... This is not new and has been going for at least a century. And the US elites have a long tradition of false flags to to get the people of America riled up for war. ..."
"... As Petras says: "The ten theses define the nature of 21st century imperialism" because, I feel, they are the same values that defined the British Colonial Empire. ..."
Few, if any, believe what they hear and read from leaders and media publicists. Most people
choose to ignore the cacophony of voices, vices and virtues.
This paper provides a set of theses which purports to lay-out the basis for a dialogue
between and among those who choose to abstain from elections with the intent to engage them in
political struggle.
Thesis 1
US empire builders of all colors and persuasion practice donkey tactics; waving the carrot
and wielding the whip to move the target government on the chosen path.
In the same way, Washington offers dubious concessions and threatens reprisals, in order to
move them into the imperial orbit.
Washington applied the tactic successfully in several recent encounters. In 2003 the US
offered Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi a peaceful accommodation in exchange for
disarmament, abandonment of nationalist allies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. In 2011,
the US with its European allies applied the whip – bombed Libya, financed and armed
retrograde tribal and terrorist forces, destroyed the infrastructure, murdered Gaddafi and
uprooted millions of Africans and Libyans. . . who fled to Europe. Washington recruited
mercenaries for their subsequent war against Syria in order to destroy the nationalist Bashar
Assad regime.
Washington succeeded in destroying an adversary but did not establish a puppet regime in the
midst of perpetual conflict.
The empire's carrot weakened its adversary, but the stick failed to recolonize Libya
..Moreover its European allies are obligated to pay the multi-billion Euro cost of absorbing
millions of uprooteded immigrants and the ensuing domestic political turmoil.
Thesis 2
Empire builders' proposal to reconfigure the economy in order to regain imperial supremacy
provokes domestic and overseas enemies. President Trump launched a global trade war, replaced
political accommodation with economic sanctions against Russia and a domestic protectionist
agenda and sharply reduced corporate taxes. He provoked a two-front conflict. Overseas, he
provoked opposition from European allies and China, while facing perpetual harassment from
domestic free market globalists and Russo-phobic political elites and ideologues.
Two front conflicts are rarely successful. Most successful imperialist conquer adversaries
in turn – first one and then the other.
Thesis 3
Leftists frequently reverse course: they are radicals out of office and reactionaries in
government, eventually falling between both chairs. We witness the phenomenal collapse of the
German Social Democratic Party, the Greek Socialist Party (PASOK), (and its new version Syriza)
and the Workers Party in Brazil. Each attracted mass support, won elections, formed alliances
with bankers and the business elite – and in the face of their first crises, are
abandoned by the populace and the elite.
Shrewd but discredited elites frequently recognize the opportunism of the Left, and in time
of distress, have no problem in temporarily putting up with Left rhetoric and reforms as long
as their economic interests are not jeopardized. The elite know that the Left signal left and
turn right.
Thesis 4
Elections, even ones won by progressives or leftists, frequently become springboards for
imperial backed coups. Over the past decade newly elected presidents, who are not aligned with
Washington, face congressional and/or judicial impeachment on spurious charges. The elections
provide a veneer of legitimacy which a straight-out military-coup lacks.
In Brazil, Paraguay and Venezuela, 'legislatures' under US tutelage attempted to ouster
popular President. They succeeded in the former and failed in the latter.
When electoral machinery fails, the judicial system intervenes to impose restraints on
progressives, based on tortuous and convoluted interpretation of the law. Opposition leftists
in Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador have been hounded by ruling party elites.
Thesis 5
Even crazy leaders speak truth to power. There is no question that President Trump suffers a
serious mental disorder, with midnight outbursts and nuclear threats against, any and all,
ranging from philanthropic world class sports figures (LeBron James) to NATO respecting EU
allies.
Yet in his lunacy, President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and
ongoing fabrications of the mass media. Never before has a President so forcefully identified
the lies of the leading print and TV outlets. The NY Times , Washington Post
, the Financial Times, NBC, CNN, ABC and CBS have been thoroughly discredited
in the eyes of the larger public. They have lost legitimacy and trust. Where progressives have
failed, a war monger billionaire has accomplished, speaking a truth to serve many
injustices.
Thesis 6
When a bark turns into a bite, Trump proves the homely truth that fear invites aggression.
Trump has implemented or threatened severe sanctions against the EU, China, Iran, Russia,
Venezuela, North Korea and any country that fails to submit to his dictates. At first, it was
bombast and bluster which secured concessions.
Concessions were interpreted as weakness and invited greater threats. Disunity of opponents
encouraged imperial tacticians to divide and conquer. But by attacking all adversaries
simultaneously he undermines that tactic. Threats everywhere limits choices to dangerous
options at home and abroad.
Thesis 7
The master meddlers, of all times, into the politics of sovereign states are the
Anglo-American empire builders. But what is most revealing is the current ploy of accusing the
victims of the crimes that are committed against them.
After the overthrow of the Soviet regime, the US and its European acolytes 'meddled' on a
world-historic scale, pillaging over two trillion dollars of Soviet wealth and reducing Russian
living standards by two thirds and life expectancy to under sixty years – below the level
of Bangladesh.
With Russia's revival under President Putin, Washington financed a large army of self-styled
'non-governmental organizations' (NGO) to organize electoral campaigns, recruited moguls in the
mass media and directed ethnic uprisings. The Russians are retail meddlers compared to the
wholesale multi-billion-dollar US operators.
Moreover, the Israelis have perfected meddling on a grand scale – they intervene
successfully in Congress, the White House and the Pentagon. They set the Middle East agenda,
budget and priorities, and secure the biggest military handouts on a per-capita basis in US
history!
Apparently, some meddlers meddle by invitation and are paid to do it.
Thesis 8
Corruption is endemic in the US where it has legal status and where tens of millions of
dollars change hands and buy Congress people, Presidents and judges.
ORDER IT NOW
In the US the buyers and brokers are called 'lobbyists' – everywhere else they are
called fraudsters. Corruption (lobbying) grease the wheels of billion dollars military
spending, technological subsidies, tax evading corporations and every facet of government
– out in the open, all the time and place of the US regime.
Corruption as lobbying never evokes the least criticism from the mass media.
On the other hand, where corruption takes place under the table in Iran, China and Russia,
the media denounce the political elite – even where in China over 2 million officials,
high and the low are arrested and jailed.
When corruption is punished in China, the US media claim it is merely a 'political purge'
even if it directly reduces elite conspicuous consumption.
In other words, imperial corruption defends democratic value; anti-corruption is a hallmark
of authoritarian dictatorships.
Thesis 9
Bread and circuses are integral parts of empire building – especially in promoting
urban street mobs to overthrow independent and elected governments.
Imperial financed mobs – provided the cover for CIA backed coups in Iran (1954),
Ukraine (2014), Brazil (1964), Venezuela (2003, 2014 and 2017), Argentina (1956), Nicaragua
(2018), Syria (2011) and Libya (2011) among other places and other times.
Masses for empire draw paid and voluntary street fighters who speak for democracy and serve
the elite. The "mass cover" is especially effective in recruiting leftists who look to the
street for opinion and ignore the suites which call the shots.
Thesis 10
The empire is like a three-legged stool it promotes genocide, to secure magnicide and to
rule by homicide. Invasions kills millions, capture and kill rulers and then rule by homicide
– police assassinating dissenting citizens.
The cases are readily available: Iraq and Libya come to mind. The US and its allies invaded,
bombed and killed over a million Iraqis, captured and assassinated its leaders and installed a
police state.
A similar pattern occurred in Libya: the US and EU bombed, killed and uprooted several
million people, assassinated Ghadaffy and fomented a lawless terrorist war of clans, tribes and
western puppets.
"Western values" reveal the inhumanity of empires built to murder "a la carte" –
stripping the victim nations of their defenders, leaders and citizens.
Conclusion
The ten theses define the nature of 21 st century imperialism – its
continuities and novelties.
The mass media systematically write and speak lies to power: their message is to disarm
their adversaries and to arouse their patrons to continue to plunder the world.
When was the last time "Nation building" resulted in a livable country. Iraq? Libya?
Americans, and I am one, can barely keep their own country from sinking into a pit of decay.
Why "deliver Democracy" when Dubai makes much of the US look like shit in terms of
infrastructure, crime and poverty.
When was the last time "Nation building" resulted in a livable country.
Why "deliver Democracy" when Dubai makes much of the US look like shit
Because what a ZOG does with it's host nation has nothing to do with improving anything
for the occupied peoples.
Think of it like the Communist Manifesto. They thump it around, preaching utopia and
equality and all that sugar and honey. This is because they want you to buy what they are
selling. But they don't have any intention of ever delivering. None whatsoever.
All they're really trying to do is whip up an army of useful idiots to be used as blunt
instruments. And once these useful idiots are done fulfilling their role in the
redistribution of wealth and power, they are discarded only to realize too little too late
that they have been working against their own interests all along.
The same thing goes for exporting Democracy. It's never been about improving anyone's
lives. In the West or any of their target nations. It's been about whipping useful idiots up
into an army that can be used as a blunt instrument against the obstacles in the way of
(((someone's))) geopolitical ambitions.
This is not new and has been going for at least a century. And the US elites have a long
tradition of false flags to to get the people of America riled up for war.
False Flag Events Behind the Six Major Wars
False flags to fool Americans into the Spanish American War, WW1, WW2, Korean War, Vietnam
War and the War on terror.
Interesting is that a USA textbook already describes USA imperialism, without using the
word:
Barbara Hinckley, Sheldon Goldman, 'American Politics and Government, Structure, Processes,
Institutions and Policies', Glenview Ill., 1990
Vietnam was a mess for a decade at least and created an immigration crisis in
Australia. The US had a surplus budget when Clinton left office. When Bush left office, oil prices
were sky-high and the economy was dreadful. Who benefits. Israel? Syria is a mess that threatens their borders.
A great comment with the proper name calling for the ZUSA in relation to the current
situation in Turkey:
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/08/how-turkeys-currency-crisis-came-to-pass.html#comments
Excerpts:
" The Dollar op indicates that the USA ( or rather those who pull the strings in the
US ) finally admits that our Ally is responsible for almost all mischievous events which
took place in Turkey.
The USA is not a country, but rather a useful contract killer on a larger scale
compared to the PKK-FETO-ISIS etc.
The US is now stepping forward fearlessly because 'the arms of the octopus', as Erdogan put
last week, has been severed in Turkey."
These two definitions do stick:
1. the US is manipulated by the puppeteers -- people (the US citizenry at large) have no
saying in the US decisions (mostly immoral and often imbecile); the well-being of the US is
not a factored in the decisions
2. the US has become a "contract killer" for the voracious puppeteers
Prof. Petras, thanks. A while back I read something called Confessions of an Economic Hit
Man (?) in which the writer describes his efforts to put other nations into debt to
American institutions and American-controlled or -influenced international institutions for
the ulterior purpose of political control. Sounded plausible enough, and I saw the author
speak on TV on his book tour.
How do any of us know we're living in a country gone massively wobbly? Can a German
sipping wine in Koblenz in 1936 even imagine Hitler's Germany will be a staple of American
cable shows eighty years hence, and not in a good way? Can a Russian in the same year imagine
that the latest round of arrests won't be leading to a Communist utopia now, or ever?
FWIW-my guess is America's imperial adventures are heavily structural, being that foreign
policy is strongly within the President's purview, and Congress can be counted on to
rubber-stamp military expeditions. Plus, empire offers a good distraction from domestic
politics, which are an intractable mess of rent-seeking, racial animus, and corporate
interests.
I don't like it much having to live in a racketeerized America, but there's not a whole
lot we can do.
Professor Petras glasses are becoming little bit foggy, but his scalpel still cuts to the
bone.
But this article is lecture for beginner class, or the aliens visitors who just landed on
Earth
Yet in his lunacy, President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and
ongoing fabrications of the mass media.
A damned good article, Sir! And bless you for calling bankster propaganda anything
but "mainstream."
Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is
poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to
misleading a bewildered people.
-Walter Lippman, A Preface to Politics ( 1913 ), quoted in The Essential
Lippmann, pp. 516-517
Lippman was an Allied propagandist among many other things.
The 10 theories that led Petras to conclude "{the message is "to disarm their adversaries and
to arouse their patrons" to continue to plunder the world}" is an example, that the American
people are clueless about how events documented by Petras research, led Petras to conclude
the USA is about plunder of the world .
There is a distinct difference between USA governed Americans and the 527 persons that
govern Americans.
Access by Americans to the USA 1) in person with one of its 527 members, 2) by communication
or attempted communication via some type of expression or 3) by constitutionally allowed
regime change at election time. None of these methods work very well for Americans , if at
all; but they serve the entrenched members of the USA, massive in size corporations and
upstream wealthy owners, quite well.
Secondly, IMO, Mr. Petras either does not understand democracy or has chosen to make a
mockery of it?
The constitution that produced the USA produced not a democracy, but a Republic.
A republic which authorized a group ( an handful of people) to rule America by rules the USA
group
decides to impose. Since the group can control the meaning of the US Constitution as well
as change it's words, the group has, unlimited power to rule, no matter the subject matter or method
(possible exceptions might be said to be within the meaning of the bill of rights; but like
all contract
clauses, especially a contract of the type where one side can amend, ignore, change or
replace or use
its overwhelming military and police powers to enforce against the other side, leaving the
other side no
recourse, is not really a contract; it might better be called an instrument announcing the
assumption of
power which infringes inalienable human rights).
Therefore just because 527 members of the USA government might between themselves practice
Democracy does not mean the governed enjoy the same freedoms.
So the USA is ruled by puppets, 527 of them, puppets of the Oligarchs. Since the
ratification of the USA constitution, Americans have been governed by the USA [The US
constitution (ratified 1778) overthrew and disposed of the Articles of Confederation
(Government of America founded 1776). Not a shot was fired, but there was a war none-the-less
(read Federalist vs Anti-Federalist and have a look at the first few acts of the USA).
(Note: The AOC, was the American government that defeated the British Armies [1776-1783],
the 1776 American AOC American Government was the government that surveyed all of the land
taken from the British by the AOC after it defeated the entire British military and stopped
the British aristocrat owed, privately held corporate Empires from their continuous raping of
America and abuse of Americans. those who did the work.
The AOC was the very same American Government that hired G. Washington to defeat and chase
the British Aristocratic Corporate Colonial Empires out of America. The 1776 American AOC
Government was the very same government that granted freedom to its people (AOC really did
practice democracy, and really did try to divide and distribute the vast American lands taken
from the British Corporate Colonial Empire equally among the then living Americans. The AOC
ceased to exist when the US Constitution installed the USA by a self proclaimed regime
change process , called ratification). There were 11 presidents of the AOC, interestingly
enough, few have heard of them.
Once again the practice of political self-determination democracy is limited to the 525
USA members who have seats in the halls of the Congress of the USA or who occupy the offices
of the President of USA or the Vice-President of the USA. All persons in America, not among
the 527 salaried, elected members of the USA, are governed by the USA.
@Heisendude Israel has no constitution, and therefore no borders.
A constitution also describes borders.
An Israeli jew one asked Ben Gurion why Israel has no defined borders, the answer was
something like 'we do not want to define borders, if we did, we cannot expand'.
@Jeff Stryker Why does Israel assist all sorts of bandits, including, but not limited to,
ISIS, in Syria? Just recently Israel helped in extracting the White Helmets, a PR wing of
Nusra (Syrian branch of Al Qaida) from South Syria. Please explain.
@Anonymous Those 527 are bought and paid for lackeys. We don't know how many real owners
of the USA there are, don't know many of their names, but we do know that when those lackeys
imagine that they are somebodies and try to govern, they are eliminated (John Kennedy is the
most unambiguous example).
You may have heard of it. Globalism, N(J)ew World Order. That which the
(((internationalists))) are always working towards. A one world government with them at the
top, the ruling class.
Vietnam was a mess for a decade at least and created an immigration crisis in
Australia.
Australia is a white nation. All white nations are supposed to suffer and ultimately
collapse upon the creation of their New World Order. Vietnam was a complete success for the
one's who really wanted that war.
The US had a surplus budget when Clinton left office. When Bush left office, oil prices
were sky-high and the economy was dreadful.
Bush was a neocon, wars for Israel with that 'surplus' were the intention all along. As
wars under Hillary would have been as well. And as they potentially could still be if Trump
proves to be a lap dog for Israel as well. He campaigned on no pointless wars, but there's no
saying for sure until he either brings all our troops home or capitulates and signs Americans
up to be cash cows and cannon fodder for more Israeli geopolitical ambitions.
Who benefits.
Those same rootless cosmopolitans that always benefit from playing both sides of the
field, seeding conflict and then cashing in on the warmongering, genocidal depopulation and
population displacement in the name of their geopolitical ambitions.
Israel? Syria is a mess that threatens their borders.
Israel made that mess. Threatened their borders with war. Land theft. Y'know. Golan
Heights. Genocide land theft and displacement are all Israel does. Their borders have
expanded every year since their creation.
Everything that's happening in the Middle East is because of the Rothschild terror state
of Israel and the Zionist Jews who reside in it .. as well as in our various western
ZOGs.
Have you really never heard of the Oded Yinon Plan ? Their genocidal outline for
waging wars of aggression for the purpose of expanding their borders and becoming the
dominant regional superpower by balkanizing the surrounding Arab world.
The only nations of significance left on their check list are as follows : Syria, Iran,
Saudi Arabia. And many will argue that the House of Saud has always been crypto, helping
Israel behind the scenes. Their sudden post-coup cooperation with their former 'enemies' is
little more than a sign that they are needed as a wartime ally more in the current phase of
their Yinon Plan than as controlled opposition funding and arming ISIS while keeping the
public eye off of Israel's role in their creation and direction. Sure enough, it seems there
is a rather strong push for an alliance between KSA, Israel and the US for war with Iran.
Technological progress, particularly the progress in information technology is pushing
mankind with accelerated speed toward final solution and final settlement.
Corruption is endemic in the US where it has legal status and where tens of millions of
dollars change hands and buy Congress people, Presidents and judges.
Yep. I have been ranting for years calling for a Anti-Corruption Political Party Platform
by some group.
The corruption of our politicians is the cause of all the problems everyone else is ranting
about.
In some ways I think most people deserve what they are going to get eventually because
they ignore the corruption of their heroes .whether it be Trump, Hillary or any other.
I tell you sheeple .if someone will cheat and lie to others they will do the same thing to
you ..you are stone cold stupid if you think other wise.
@Biff Jeff and Mikeat are both correct if my friend's account of his participation in a
recent trade show there is true. My friend's wife is a ding bat Hillarybot and she got to
yammering to me after returning about all the wonderful diversity she saw in the streets of
Dubai, but I shut her down pretty quickly by pointing out that the diversity darlings in
Dubai were paid help for the Sheikdom and weren't even second class temporary residents by US
standards; that they can be (and are) summarily deported to some slave market in Yemen if
they don't mind their Ps and Qs VERY carefully in that society. She's also a wino, but
confessed that the Trader Joe's box grade merlot sold for about US$18 to $25 a goblet in a
tourist zone food and beverage joint. (and that didn't slow her down one bit) Hubby had to
watch her close, as obvious public drunkenness (even in the tourist zone) has high potential
for extreme justice.
The New Economy plan being promoted there is the development of a sort of Disneyworld on
steroids international vacation attraction, as the leaders seem to think that their oil is
going to run out soon.
@peterAUS CNN, Washpost and NYT since a very long time suffer from a serious mental
disorder.
It reminds me of Orwell's The Country of the Blind.
When the man who could see was cured all was well.
@DESERT FOX While the Fed is a focal point, it is not the central issue. If Americans,
were actually in voting control of the central issue Americans could and probably would
abolish the fed and destroy its income by removing the income tax laws, very early on.
But if the Fed and Income taxes are not the central issue, what is the central issue?
Could it be majority will "control of the structure and staffing of that structure" that
often people call government? Look back to the creation of the US Constitution! There the
central issue for the old British Aristocracy accustomed to having their way, was: can
Aristocrats stay in control (of the new American democracy) and if so, how should "such
control" be established so that British corporate power, British Aristocratic wealth and
British Class Privilege can all survive the American revolution? {PWP}.
The question was answered by developing a form of government that enabling the Oligarch
few to make the rules [rule of law] that could control the masses and to produce a government
that had a monopoly on the use of power, so that it could enforce the laws it makes, against
against the masses and fend off all challenges. The constitution blocked the people's right
to self determination; it empowered the privileged, it favored the wealthy, and most of all
it protected and saved pre-war British owned PWP as post war PWP.
Today those who operate the government do so in near perfect secrecy (interrupted only
occasionally by Snowden, Assange, and a few brave others). It spies on each person, records
each human breath taken by the masses, relates relationships between the masses, because
those in charge fear the power of the masses should the masses somehow find a way to impose
their will on how things are to be. How can rules made by Aristocrats in secret, be
considered to be outcomes established by self- determination of the masses who are to be
governed?
Ratification is the process that abolished Democracy in America. The story of those
who imposed ratification has not yet been told. Ratification was used to justify the
overthrow of the Articles of the Confederation (AOC was America's government from 1776 to
1789). To defeat the British empire the AOC hired the most wealthy man it could find to
organize an Army capable to defeat the British Military. The AOC warred on the British Armies
with the intent to stop colonial corporate empires from continuing to rape American
productivity and exploit the resources in America for the benefit of the British Corporate
Empires [Read the Declaration of Independence].
You might research.. How did George Washington achieve his massive, for its time, wealth?
I don't think tossing coins across the mile wide Potomac made him a dime? How did GW attain
such wealth in British owned, corporately controlled Colonial America? Why was George
Washington able to keep that British earned wealth after the British were chased out of
America? More importantly many gave their all, life, liberty and property to help chase the
British out, GW gave ..?
Title by land grants [Virginia and West Virginia] are traceable to GWs estate.
What the land grant landowners feared most was that the new American democracy, might
allow the masses to revoke or deny titles to real estate in America, if such title derived
from a foreign government (land grant). The Articles of Confederation government was talking
about dividing up all of the lands in America, and parceling it out, in equal portions, to
all living AOC governed America. Deeds from kings and queens of England, France, Spain,
Portugal, and the Netherlands to land in America would not be recognized in the chain of
title? Such lands would belong to the new AOC government or to the states who were members of
the AOC.
You might check out Article 6, (Para 1) of the US Constitution.. it says in part
" All Debts contracted and Engagements[land grants and British Corporate Charters] entered
into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States
under this Constitution, as under the confederation.
(meaning loans to British Banks would be repaid and land deals made with foreign nations
and corporations including those that resulted in creating a land Baron in British Colonial
America, were to be treated as valid land titles by US Constitution. Consider the plight of
Ex British Land Grant Barron Aristocrat [EBLGBA] who finds himself in now independent
democratic America? Real Americans might decide EBLGBAs were some kind of terrorist, or
spies. Under such circumstances, the EBLGA might look at Americans as a threat to their
Aristocracy, a threat to their PWP..
Example: A Spanish Land Grant property in America ( King of Spain gave 5 million acres of
land in America to ZZ in 1720 (ZZ is a Spanish Corporation ZZ doing business in America), the
land transaction was recognized as valid under British Colonial Law in America. But would
Independent AOC America recognize a deed issued by a Spanish King, or British Queen to Real
Estate in America?
After the Revolution, the question does a EBLGBA retain ownership in the American located
land that is now part of Independent America? Ain't no dam deed from a Spanish government
going to be valid in America. King of England cannot give a deed to land that is located in
independent America.
So if, a corporation, incorporated under British Law, claims it owns 5 million acres of
American land because the Queen of England deeded it the the corporation: does that mean the
5 million acres still belongs to British Corporation X, and of course to the person made
Aristocrat by virtue of ownership of the British Corporation). Is a British Corporation now
to be an American Corporation? British Landed Gentry (land grant owners) in independent post
war America, were quick to lobby for the constitution because the constitution protected
their ownership in land granted to them by a foreign king or queen in fact the constitution
protected the PWP.
I agree with your Zionist communist observation. It is imperative for all persons
interested in what is happening to study the takeover of Russia from the Tzar by Lenin and
his Zionist Communist because what the Zionist did to the Christians in Russia in 1917 seems
to be approaching for it to happen here in America and because that revolution was a part of
the organized Zionist [1896, Hertzl] movement to take control of all of the oil in the world.
Let us not forget, Lenin and crew exterminated 32 million White Russians nearly all of whom
were educated Christians living in the Ukraine.
As Petras says: "The ten theses define the nature of 21st century imperialism" because, I
feel, they are the same values that defined the British Colonial Empire.
So the USA is ruled by puppets, 527 of them, puppets of the Oligarchs. Since the
ratification of the USA constitution, Americans have been governed by the USA [The US
constitution (ratified 1778) overthrew and disposed of the Articles of Confederation
(Government of America founded 1776). Not a shot was fired, but there was a war
none-the-less (read Federalist vs Anti-Federalist and have a look at the first few acts of
the USA).
What a relief to find that there are a few (very few) others who have a clue. The
"constitution" was effectively a coup d'etat. We proles, peasants and other pissants have
been tax and debt slaves ever since, and the situation has continuously worsened. Lincoln's
war against Southern independence, establishment of the Federal Reserve, Wilson's and
especially FDR's wars, and infiltration of the US government and industry by Commies,
Zionists and other Eastern European goon-mafiosi scum have completely perverted what this
country is supposedly about.
I doubt the situation will ever begin to improve unless and until the mass of brainwashed
dupes understand what you wrote.
@Anon Please comment more often. Excellent info there.
You might research.. How did George Washington achieve his massive, for its time,
wealth?
True. Especially since the guy was a third rate, (probably mostly incompetent), Brit
military officer and terrorist who treated the men under his command like sh!t.
Reminds me of Ol Johnny Boy McCain and other such scum.
@jilles dykstra "Ben Gurion: 'we do not want to define borders, if we did, we cannot
expand'.
-- Right. Hence the mass slaughter in the Middle East.
Hapless Canada is going to accept the "humanitarian" terrorists from While Helmets
organization. The rescue is a joint Israel-Canada enterprise: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/435670-white-helmets-canada-syria/
-- -- -- -
Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland (a committed banderist and admirer of Ukrainian
neo-Nazis) and Robin Wettlaufer (Canada's representative to the Syrian Opposition and a harsh
critic of Assad "regime") have been playing a key role in the evacuation of the White
Helmets. But there are some questions to Robin: "Did Canadians get to vote on whether or not
to bring potential terrorists or supporters of terrorists to Canada? No. No vote in the
Parliament, no public discussion. Why did the Canadian government refuse the entry of 100
injured Palestinian children from Gaza in 2014, a truly humanitarian effort, and yet will
fast-track the entry of potentially dangerous men with potential ties to terrorists?"
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/435670-white-helmets-canada-syria/
-- Guess Robin Wettlaufer, due to her ethnic solidarity, would be fine with these injured
Palestinian children being smothered by someone, but the well-financed White Helmets are the
extremely valuable material for realizing Oded Yinon plan for Eretz Israel (see Ben Gurion
answer).
The US had a surplus budget when Clinton left office
It turns out that 'budget surplus' does not mean what most people think it means. When your household has a budget surplus, its rate of debt accumulation reverses
(i.e., the total value of household debt falls). Credit cards get paid down, mortgages get
paid off, and eventually you end up with a large and growing positive net worth. That's what
running a 'budget surplus' means , right?
Not so for governments : the US government could run perpetual budget 'surpluses'
and still grow government debt without bound – because they do not account for things
the way they insist that we serfs account for things there are a bunch of their expenditures
that they simply don't count in their 'budget'.
It's a bit like if you were to only count the amount your household spent on
groceries , and declare your entire budget to be in 'surplus' or 'deficit' based on
whether or not there's change after you do your weekly shopping. Meanwhile, you're spending
more than you earn overall, and accumulating debt at an expanding rate.
Runaway debt is what destroys – whether it's families or countries.
There has only been one year since 1960 in which the US Federal Debt has fallen :
1969 .
During the much-touted "Clinton Surpluses", the US Federal Debt rose by almost a
quarter- trillion dollars . The first two Bush years had larger surpluses than
either of the two Clinton surpluses – but still added $160 billion to the
Federal debt.
I know those don't sound like big numbers anymore – much given that Bush added $602
billion per year on average, and Obama added twice Bush 's amount (1.19 trillion per
year).
"... The leading financial publications have misled their political and investor subscribers of emerging crises and military defeats which have precipitated catastrophic political and economic losses. ..."
"... Financial Times (FT) ..."
"... In this essay we will proceed by outlining the larger political context that sets the framework for the transformation of the FT ..."
"... The language of the FT ..."
"... The unanimity of the liberal and rightwing publications in support of western imperialism precluded any understanding of the enormous political and economic costs which ensued. ..."
"... When it became evident that US-NATO wars did not lead to happy endings but turned into prolonged insurgencies, or when western clients turned into corrupt tyrants, the FT ..."
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Introduction
The leading financial publications have misled their political and investor subscribers
of emerging crises and military defeats which have precipitated catastrophic political and
economic losses.
The most egregious example is the Financial Times (FT) a publication which is
widely read by the business and financial elite.
In this essay we will proceed by outlining the larger political context that sets the
framework for the transformation of the FT from a relatively objective purveyor of
world news into a propagator of wars and failed economic policies.
In part two we will discuss several case studies which illustrate the dramatic shifts from a
prudent business publication to a rabid military advocate, from a well-researched analyst of
economic policies to an ideologue of the worst speculative investors.
The decay of the quality of its reportage is accompanied by the bastardization of language.
Concepts are distorted; meanings are emptied of their cognitive sense; and vitriol covers
crimes and misdemeanors.
We will conclude by discussing how and why the 'respectable' media have affected real world
political and market outcomes for citizens and investors.
Political and Economic Context
The decay of the FT cannot be separated from the global political and economic
transformations in which it publishes and circulates. The demise of the Soviet Union, the
pillage of Russia's economy throughout the 1990's and the US declaration of a unipolar world
were celebrated by the FT as great success stories for 'western values'. The US and EU
annexation of Eastern Europe, the Balkan and Baltic states led to the deep corruption and decay
of journalistic narratives.
The FT willing embraced every violation of the Gorbachev-Reagan agreements and
NATO's march to the borders of Russia. The militarization of US foreign policy was accompanied
by the FT conversion to a military interpreter of what it dubbed the 'transition to
democratization'.
The language of the FT reportage combined democratic rhetoric with an embrace
of military practices. This became the hallmark for all future coverage and editorializing. The
FT military policies extended from Europe to the Middle East, the Caucasus, North
Africa and the Gulf States.
The FT joined the yellow press in describing military power grabs, including
the overthrow of political adversaries, as 'transitions to democracy' and the creation of 'open
societies'.
The unanimity of the liberal and rightwing publications in support of western
imperialism precluded any understanding of the enormous political and economic costs which
ensued.
To protect itself from its most egregious ideological foibles, the FT included
'insurance clauses', to cover for catastrophic authoritarian outcomes. For example they advised
western political leaders to promote military interventions and, by the way ,with 'democratic
transitions'.
When it became evident that US-NATO wars did not lead to happy endings but turned into
prolonged insurgencies, or when western clients turned into corrupt tyrants, the FT
claimed that this was not what they meant by a 'democratic transition' – this was not
their version of "free markets and free votes".
The Financial and Military Times (?)
The militarization of the FT led it to embrace a military definition of
political reality. The human and especially the economic costs, the lost markets, investments
and resources were subordinated to the military outcomes of 'wars against terrorism' and
'Russian authoritarianism'.
Each and every Financial Times report and editorial promoting western military
interventions over the past two decades resulted in large scale, long-term economic losses.
The FT supported the US war against Iraq which led to the ending of important
billion-dollar oil deals (oil for food) signed off with President Saddam Hussein. The
subsequent US occupation precluded a subsequent revival of the oil industry. The US appointed
client regime pillaged the multi-billion dollar reconstruction programs – costing US and
EU taxpayers and depriving Iraqis of basic necessities.
Insurgent militias, including ISIS, gained control over half the country and precluded the
entry of any new investment.
The US and FT backed western client regimes organized rigged election outcomes and
looted the treasury of oil revenues, arousing the wrath of the population lacking electricity,
potable water and other necessities.
The FT backed war, occupation and control of Iraq was an unmitigated disaster.
Similar outcomes resulted from the FT support for the invasions of Afghanistan,
Libya, Syria and Yemen.
For example the FT propagated the story that the Taliban was providing sanctuary
for bin Laden's planning the terror assault in the US (9/11).
In fact, the Afghan leaders offered to turn over the US suspect, if they were offered
evidence. Washington rejected the offer, invaded Kabul and the FT joined the chorus
backing the so-called 'war on terrorism which led to an unending, one trillion-dollar war.
Libya signed off to a disarmament and multi-billion-dollar oil agreement with the US in
2003. In 2011 the US and its western allies bombed Libya, murdered Gadhafi, totally destroyed
civil society and undermined the US/EU oil agreements. The FT backed the war but
decried the outcome. The FT followed a familiar ploy; promoting military invasions and
then, after the fact, criticizing the economic disasters.
The FT led the media charge in favor of the western proxy war against Syria:
savaging the legitimate government and praising the mercenary terrorists, which it dubbed
'rebels' and 'militants' – dubious terms for US and EU financed operatives.
Millions of refugees, resulting from western wars in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq fled
to Europe seeking refuge. FT described the imperial holocaust – the 'dilemmas of
Europe'. The FT bemoaned the rise of the anti-immigrant parties but never assumed
responsibility for the wars which forced the millions to flee to the west.
The FT columnists prattle about 'western values' and criticize the 'far right' but
abjured any sustained attack of Israel's daily massacre of Palestinians. Instead readers get a
dose of weekly puff pieces concerning Israeli politics with nary a mention of Zionist power
over US foreign policy.
FT: Sanctions, Plots and Crises: Russia, China and Iran
The FT like all the prestigious media propaganda sheets have taken a leading role
in US conflicts with Russia, China and Iran.
For years the scribes in the FT stable have discovered (or invented) "crises" in
China's economy- always claiming it was on the verge of an economic doomsday. Contrary to the
FT, China has been growing at four times the rate of the US; ignoring the critics it built a
global infrastructure system instead of the multi-wars backed by the journalist war
mongers.
When China innovates, the FT harps on techno theft – ignoring US economic
decline.
The FT boasts it writes "without fear and without favor" which translates into
serving imperial powers voluntarily.
When the US sanctions China we are told by the FT that Washington is correcting
China's abusive statist policies. Because China does not impose military outposts to match the
eight hundred US military bases on five continents, the FT invents what it calls 'debt
colonialism" apparently describing Beijing's financing large-scale productive infrastructure
projects.
The perverse logic of the FT extends to Russia. To cover up for the US financed
coup in the Ukraine it converted a separatist movement in Donbass into a Russian land grab. In
the same way a free election in Crimea is described as Kremlin annexation.
The FT provides the language of the declining western imperial empires.
Independent, democratic Russia, free of western pillage and electoral meddling is labelled
"authoritarian"; social welfare which serves to decrease inequality is denigrated as 'populism'
-- linked to the far right. Without evidence or independent verification, the FT
fabricates Putinesque poison plots in England and Bashar Assad poison gas conspiracies in
Syria.
Conclusion
The FT has chosen to adopt a military line which has led to a long series of
financially disastrous wars. The FT support of sanctions has cost oil companies
billions of dollars, euros and pounds. The sanctions, it backed, have broken global
networks.
The FT has adopted ideological postures that threaten supply chains between the
West, China, Iran and Russia. The FT writes in many tongues but it has failed to
inform its financial readers that it bears some responsibility for markets which are under
siege.
There is unquestionably a need to overhaul the name and purpose of the FT. One journalist
who was close to the editors suggests it should be called the "Military Times" – the
voice of a declining empire.
I read the weekly British "Economist" for years, which is a well known international news
magazine. It has good stories and insight, but they are always pro-war and pro-empire, and in
recent years push open borders. I tired of supporting this propaganda and canceled by
subscription four years ago.
We used to take the FT on a Saturday. We gave it up not on the grounds of its politics
– we hardly glanced at that sort of pish anyway – but because of the decline in
the standard of its Arts coverage. That was so sudden that I imagine that it corresponded to
a change in the editor of the section.
Otherwise – well what do you expect? I no longer watch the TV news or listen to the
radio. We haven't taken the local rag for years. We take a national morning paper during the
week only on my wife's insistence. We've given up the magazines we've taken in the past,
including the Economist. The last magazine we took – second-hand, as it happens –
was Quadrant, an Aussie publication. It was rather good. We stopped it only because our
supply dried up.
I know this is going to sound crazy, but that sounds just like the track record for the
New York Times . Come to think of it, the Washington Post as well. Wow, what
are the odds? Sounds like collusion.
@tiny Tim
FT is now owned by Japanese media group Nikkei Inc. , which bought Financial Times
from Pearson for £844m ($1.32 billion). Take a look of current Editor Lionel Barber cv:
Lionel Barber, 52, is the editor of the Financial Times. He has lived in Washington,
Brussels, London and New York during his 20-year career at the publication, covering the
end of the Cold War, the first Gulf War and several US presidential campaigns. He also
briefed George W Bush ahead of his first visit to Europe as president.
Peason PLC held a 50% shareholding via The Financial Times Limited until August 2015; at
that time Pearson sold their share in the Economist. The Agnelli family's Exor paid
£287m to raise their stake from 4.7% to 43.4% , while the Economist paid
£182m for the balance of 5.04m shares which will be distributed to current
shareholders. Aside from the Agnelli family, smaller shareholders in the company include
Cadbury, Rothschild, Schroder, Layton and other family interests as well as a number
of staff and former staff shareholders.
Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Washington of making a "colossal" but "typical"
mistake by exploiting the dominance of the dollar by levying economic sanctions against regimes
that don't bow to its whims.
"It seems to me that our American partners make a colossal strategic mistake," Putin
said.
"This is a typical mistake of any empire," Putin said, explaining that the US is ignoring
the consequences of its actions because its economy is strong and the dollar's hegemonic
grasp on global markets remains intact. However "the consequences come sooner or later."
These remarks echoed a sentiment expressed by Putin back in May, when he said that Russia
can no longer trust the US dollar because of America's decisions to impose unilateral sanctions
and violate WTO rules.
... ... ...
With the possibility of being cut off from the dollar system looming, a plan prepared by Andrei Kostin, the head of Russian
bank VTB, is being embraced by much of the Russian establishment. Kostin's plan would facilitate the conversion of dollar
settlements into other currencies which would help wean Russian industries off the dollar. And it already has the backing of
Russia's finance ministry, central bank and Putin.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin is also working on deals with major trading partners to accept the Russian ruble for imports and exports.
In a sign that a united front is forming to help undermine the dollar, Russia's efforts have been readily embraced by China
and Turkey, which is unsurprising, given their increasingly fraught relationships with the US. During joint military exercises
in Vladivostok last month, Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that their countries would work together to counter
US tariffs and sanctions.
"More and more countries, not only in the east but also in Europe, are beginning to think about how to minimise dependence on
the US dollar," said Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin's spokesperson. "And they suddenly realise that a) it is possible, b) it needs to
be done and c) you can save yourself if you do it sooner."
You would have to wonder why Putin opened with the following remarks if you were ignorant of
the global situation:
"You came here to hold an open and trust based discussion on the issues of the
global energy agenda .
"We believe that progress in global energy, as well as the stable energy security of our
entire planet, can only be achieved through global partnership, working in accordance with
general rules that are the same for everyone, and, of course, through conducting transparent
and constructive dialogue among market players which is not politically motivated but is
based on pragmatic considerations and an understanding of shared responsibilities and mutual
interests." [My Emphasis]
His characterization of Skripal came during the Q&A, and there are likely more gems to
be had from that session.
Waging Illegal Aggressive War, Illegal sanctions, Violations of UNSC Resolutions, Breaking
of Contracts, and Ongoing violation of the UN Charter and US Constitution since 1945 are just
a few of the reasons why it must be called the Outlaw US Empire as no other term properly
describes it. 80 years ago, appeasement didn't work, and it's clear it doesn't work today
either. Together the world's nations must bring the Outlaw US Empire to heel and make it obey
the Rule of Law and abandon its unilateral Rule of the Gun.
Ah, there it is. The reason behind this strange week, the dots that few will connect.
Putin speaking at a conference about "sustainable energy in a changing world."
Right there, two phrases that are certain to set off Exxon corp and their puppets in the
political theater. Say "sustainable energy" around an oil giant and watch them shudder. The,
mention "changing world" to any of that class and they have nightmares about their children
having to learn Chinese. Put them all together in one title of a conference at which Putin
himself is speaking and well, now we know why the Shakespearian chorus of Exxon's oil
industry bit players like former Texas Governor Rich "the hair" Perry and former Texas
Senator Hutchinson are suddenly frothing at the bit about the Park Rangers mounting a naval
blockade of Russia (see Yogi Bear for how that's likely to turn out, hey booboo?) and nuclear
first strikes on Russia.
Putin, Sustainable Energy, Changing world .. enough to send some senior executive geezers
at Exxon grabbing for their nitro pills and speed dialing their cardiologists.
For those who like to call Russia "a gas station masquerading as a country" here is Putin's
note on ecology:
"A separate ambitious task for the future is the development of renewable energy sources,
especially in remote, difficult-to-access areas of this country, such as Eastern Siberia, and
the Far East. This is opening a great opportunity for our vast country, the world's largest
country with its diverse natural and climatic conditions.
Friends, in conclusion I would like to tell you the following: sustainable and steady
development of the energy industry is a key condition for dynamic growth of the world
economy, enhancing living standards and improving the wellbeing of all people on our
planet.
Russia is open to cooperation in the energy industry in the interests of global energy
security and for the benefit of the future generations. And we certainly rely on active
dialogue on these subjects and cooperation.
Nothing is going to save us from our energy problems, nothing and especially not renewables.
Spend some time reading and studying Gail Tverberg's material and one will quickly see we
are heading for a financial catastrophe because of affordability issues. On the one hand
there isn't enough money to pay for extraction of oil and gas and on the other the consumer
is strapped because of high pump prices etc. But like she herself says if only the wages of
non elite workers could rise high enough to help pay for the increased costs then likely we
wouldn't have a problem. That though is clearly not happening.
I am deeply afraid we are going to wake up to a world very different from the one we went
to sleep in. Just this one article alone expresses the grave situation the world is in:
Every time Chuck Paar makes the over 500-mile round trip from his home in Mt. Jewett,
Pennsylvania, to Buffalo and Syracuse, New York, his 18-wheel tractor trailer carries 25 tons
of sand or cement and burns about $265 of diesel in one day. That's up from as little as $166
for the same route two years ago, and the increased cost of fuel is squeezing already thin
industry profit margins.
"... Thanks to media, to this day very few people in the West know that towards the end of the 78-day war, US and UK deliberately targeted several completely civilian facilities (bridges, hospitals and schools) and in just a few days of such targeting killed about 200 civilians. ..."
Kiza
says: October
7, 2018 at 7:50 am GMT 500 Words @Quartermaster
I am not going to insult you personally, but as a cheap paid troll you have absolutely no clue
about the subject you are typing about for your Israeli masters. FB has not explained
everything perfectly but what he wrote is correct. It is not true that an airforce would target
radar installations only with HARM missiles, which all NATO countries and Israel have, but in
practice HARM are the only missiles to reliably target mobile air defence. During the attack on
Serbia, US flew more than 90% of NATO missions and it managed to destroy three missile
batteries and one radar station (using HARM). But the mobility of the Serbian immobile air
defences had two major effects:
1) Unlike Iraq, Serbia let NATO bomb targets without always switching on its air defences to be
detected and destroyed; this grossly reduced NATOs air effectiveness because with every bomber
they had to constantly send at least one support plane with jammers, HARMs etc. NATO tried to
claim a virtue out of this by saying that they were soft on Serbia and will get tougher, but in
reality their military attack was becoming difficult to manage, expensive and risky (the NATO
unity was beginning to fray).
2) It was a running joke in Serbia how NATO planes would attack some completely empty hill
(Serbia is a relatively hilly country), create literally free fireworks for the villagers, just
because there was an air defense installation on the hill maybe 5-10 hours ago. A similar joke
was how the Serbian military or even the local villagers would spread a strip of black builders
plastic over a river and NATO planes flying at above 5 km to avoid manpads would blast this $2
bridge with $200,000 worth of bombs (adding mission cost to the cost of bombs).
Regarding US F117, it was more "stealth" than F35 and similar stealth to the smaller F22,
but the Serbians used the Checkoslovakian TAMARA passive radar, using ionospheric scatter, and
also launched multiple operator guided missiles at F117 without a proper engagement radar to be
HARMed. Self-confident in stealth the pilots of F117 did not manoeuvre, thus it was easy to
predict their path even without the targeting and engagement radar.
Forcing US to retire F117 was the second costliest damage the Serbians have done (Lockheed
did not cry, through their lobbyists they turned the loss into an opportunity to sell more
rubbish). But the biggest cost to US was that Milosevic sold several unexploded cruise missiles
and all F117 parts to China and used the money to rebuild and repair all civilian buildings in
Serbia destroyed by NATO. Later, UK and US did a colour revolution in Serbia, got their hands
on Milosevic, who then died from a health "accident" in NATO jail.
@Cyrano
You are spot-on. The Serbian military fought NATO to a draw, proven by the fact that the
peace treaty signed in Kumanovo in FYRM, did not contain the Rambouye clauses and even left
Kosovo under Serbian jurisdiction as per UNSC 1244.
Even this military draw was forced on Serbia by increased bombardment of civilian targets
in Serbia combined with open threats of carpet bombing by US B57. Serbia is a fairly densely
populated country, no jungles to hide in as in Vietnam. The civilian targets were bombed to
show that they could do carpet bombing with impunity (with the help of MSM). Thanks to
media, to this day very few people in the West know that towards the end of the 78-day war,
US and UK deliberately targeted several completely civilian facilities (bridges, hospitals
and schools) and in just a few days of such targeting killed about 200 civilians.
Naturally, any agreements with the West are totally pointless. After the Kumanovo
agreement, US and UK organized a color revolution in Serbia, took Kosovo away and got their
Serbian puppets to agree to all Rambouye demands. Serbia did not lose the war, but it lost
the agreement peace with the West.
' to my knowledge the Serbians did not use a radiating radar to shoot-down one/two F117.
They used a passive radar, which does not emit at all, it only receives a rough and noisy
location of the stealth plane '
This is complete nonsense once again you choose to pontificate on things in which you have
no knowledge
In your earlier comment,
you identified this 'passive radar' allegedly used by the Serbs as the Czech 'Tamara' system
which the Serbs did not possess
Not only that but this kind of system is not used for guiding SAM shots, and is certainly
not any kind of 'anti-stealth' weapon this category of device is known as an emitter locator
system [ELS], and is used to listen in on radio emissions from hostile aircraft and to then
track them, by means of a number of geometrically deployed antennas that can then triangulate
the bearing and direction of the aircraft
However, the basic physics involved means that these emitter locators are effective at
tracking signals OTHER THAN the aircraft's onboard radar this would include the IFF
[identification friend or foe transponder signal] and other onboard radio emitters which are
OMNIDIRECTIONAL emitters
An aircraft radar's narrow pencil beam could not reach multiple [at least 2] ELS antenna
[which would be geographically dispersed] to provide the needed triangulation
' A topic which appears to crop up with monotonous regularity [is] Warsaw Pact equipment
"capable of detecting stealth aircraft".
These claims invariably involve either the Czech designed and built Tesla-Pardubice
KRTP-86 Tamara or ERA Vera Emitter Locating Systems, or the Ukrainian designed and built
Topaz Kolchuga series of Emitter Locating Systems.
More than often this equipment is described as 'anti-stealth radar', 'radar' or
'passive radar', all of which are completely incorrect.
Much of everything else you have farted out here regarding the Serb takedown of the F117
is similar bullshit
The
3′rd battery of the 250′th Air Defense missile Brigade, commanded by then Lt
Col Zoltan Dani killed both F117s [the second one made it back to Aviano, Italy but was
scrapped, as USAF Col Riccioni confirms in his F22 report I linked to earlier] as well as the
kill on the F16 of then 555′th squadron Commander, then Lt Col David Goldfein, who,
since 2016 happens to be Gen Goldfein and the USAF
Chief of Staff
Here is Goldfein's F16 canopy and tail feathers on display at the Belgrade Aviation
Museum
Incidentally, Col Riccioni mentions in that same report that Goldfein was doing 'other
than what he was supposed to be doing' when shot down I guess in today's USAF that means you
have the 'right stuff' to become The Chief
Also incidentally, the Goldfein kill was overseen by Col Dani's Deputy Maj Bosko Dotlic,
as Col Dani was off duty at the time
The point is that that one single S125 battery accounted for ALL the confirmed kills of
the Serb IADS in 1999 [although there are many more 'probable' kills that either ditched in
the Adriatic, or limped back but were scrapped]
This speaks to my earlier point about human competence and the 'hawks' and 'doves' just
like a small fraction of fighter pilots rack up the overwhelming majority of kills the same
goes for air defense commanders, submarine captains, tank commanders etc
You have spewed here a whole lot of garbage about 'secret' anti-stealth weapons and 'lucky
shots' etc which is a complete insult to the historical record and the great work by Col Dani
and his men and to the entire principle of working and training hard to achieve professional
competence in a military skill
Here is a picture of the side of the 3′rd Battery Command Cabin, with Three kills
stenciled in the F117 [black] on top a B2 [not confirmed] and Goldfein's F16 in white at
bottom
As per standard Russian air defense design doctrine, the S125 uses a separate
acquisition and tracking radar which DOES operate at a lower frequency in this case the
P15 'Flat Face'
which operates in the decimetric wavelength band [which is similar to ATC radar frequency of
about 1.2 to 1.4 GHz...ie L band]
As explained previously the acquisition radar serves to find and track the target at long
range and cues the engagement radar to scan a precise sector where the acquisition radar has
found the target the engagement radar's increased precision [due to its higher frequency and
antenna size] then provides pinpoint accuracy to guide the missile
It is this combination of separate radars working together that allows the targeting of
low observable aircraft and what the 3′rd Battery did was a textbook example of using
the equipment to its full potential despite the fact that this old radar technology was in
fact susceptible to jamming, which the Nato forces employed massively
Col Dani also trained his men hard to be able to disassemble their radar and launchers
within 90 minutes and load everything up on trucks and move to another location he also
exercised strict discipline with regard to emissions allowing the radar to be turned on only
for very short bursts at a time about a minute or two at most
This is all textbook Soviet operating procedure and the difference was the exceptional
work ethic and competence that Col Dani maintained in his unit
It should be noted here that the Serb air defense was in fact very successful overall war
is a game of survival and attrition and what the Serbs accomplished was noted by air combat
practitioners
'The air campaign over Kosovo severely affected the readiness rates of the United States
Air Force's Air Combat Command during that period. Units in the United States were the most
badly affected, as they were were stripped of their personnel and spare parts to support
ACC (Air Combat Command) and AMC (Air Mobility Command) units involved in Operation Allied
Force.
The Commander of the USAF's Air Combat Command, General Richard E Hawley, outlined this
in a speech to reporters on 29 April, 1999.[10] Further, many aircraft will have to be
replaced earlier than previously planned, as their planned fatigue life was prematurely
expended.
PGM inventories needed to be re-stocked, the warstock of the AGM-86C Conventional
Air-Launched Cruise Missile dropping to 100 or fewer rounds.[11] Of the more than 25,000
bombs and missiles expended, nearly 8,500 were PGMs, with the replacement cost estimated at
$US1.3 billion.[12]
Thus the USAF suffered from virtual attrition of its air force without having scored
a large number of kills in theatre. Even if the United States' best estimates of Serbian
casualties are used, the Serbians left Kosovo with a large part of their armoured forces
intact.
Incidentally, several years ago the downed USAF pilot Col Dale Zelko, traveled to Serbia
to visit the man who shot him down Col Dani a film The Second Meeting was made here is
a trailer
PS I will have more to say later, as you have littered this thread with all kinds of
technically incorrect crapola
@Johnny
Rico NATO failed to defeat the Yugoslav army so NATO targeted Serbian civilians. You have
suffered far more losses than you acknowledge so you started killing women and children. You
rained the main marked and the main hospital of my hometown with cluster bombs. That's why
Serbia accepted UN resolution 1244 and the Kumanovo agreement. Given the ultimatum in
Rambouillet, that's not what I would call a capitulation. The only reason Serbia signed was
because you threatened to mass murder Serbian civilians. Why would you threaten to massacre
civilians if you had so soundly defeated the Yugoslav army? Never have so many American
military died during training exercises than during the aggression against Serbia. We
consider you to be shit at war. Extremely armed fags who pee in their pants when they face
opposition. But believe what you want.
@Kiza
The Russians failed to defend Serbia in 1999. That's the Serbian approach.
Why on Earth would Russians defend Serbs who only remember "Russian" brothers when they're in
dire straits?
Why would the Russian "love" us more than we "love" them? What is their interest? Because
Serbs love "Tolstoevsky"?
Don't blame the Russian for Serbian failures. In true love as in a true contract, you have to
give in order to take. Russia has given us a lot with no expectance of return. If she
expected anything, we have given her nothing. We aren't Russia's spoiled child.
NATO failed to defeat the Yugoslav army so NATO targeted Serbian civilians.
Actually, they started to target civilian infrastructure. The objective was to intimidate
the regime in Belgrade into surrender by pushing the country towards stone age.
I guess you could be onto something here:
You have suffered far more losses than you acknowledge .
and
Never have so many American military died during training exercises than during the
aggression against Serbia.
As for
That's why Serbia accepted UN resolution 1244 and the Kumanovo agreement.
there was a little matter of Russia guaranteeing something too, I guess. While the
drunkard was in the Kremlin.
Perceptions aside (Argentinians still believe they sank Royal Navy aircraft carrier in
'82, for example) NATO delivered what its political masters wanted at the time.
Serbs lost .BADLY.
@Vojkan
Yes. It's pretty much standard American practice to bomb civilian infrastructure immediately,
regardless of the degree of resistance put up by the opposing military.
@Vojkan
I don't mean to interfere in inter-Serbian squabble, but I'll volunteer an opinion anyway. I
think you are exaggerating what Russia has done for Serbia for example. How so? As a proud
Balkaneer ( I am exaggerating here a little bit myself – the proud part) I have to say
that we in the Balkans have always benefited from the simple fact that usually Russia's
enemies are our enemies too, so when Russia takes care of their enemies, they automatically
take care of our enemies too.
But I don't think that the Russians would necessarily put their neck on the line for the
Balkan Slavs to defend them against enemies that are not their enemies as well. So,
unfortunately for Serbia, that equation didn't work for them in the 90's – simply put
– Serbia's enemies were not automatically Russia's enemies too. Russia was still trying
to be friends with the west. I forgot who it was, but some prominent Russian politician at
the time said: "We are not going to start nuclear war with US over Serbia".
But it seems that Serbia is always the canary in the mine – whenever someone attacks
Serbia – Russia is next. That's why that buffoon Yeltsin had to go. Friendship with the
west was over the moment they attacked Yugoslavia (Serbia). Now the Russia didn't start a
nuclear war over Serbia, but they still might have to – to defend themselves, and as
always Serbia will benefit from this – if anything is left over from this world after
things go nuclear.
@peterAUS
Serbs did lose badly. Albeit not on the battlefield. Though there never was a real
battlefield.
I have no reason to doubt the accounts of my friends in the military who sought in the rare
conversations I've had with them on the subject, to humble down their achievements.
I believe Russians capitalised on the Serb's defeat. I can't blame them for that. No one is
responsible for what happened to Serbs, as it happened, but Serbs. They're so keen on making
the wrong decisions for the sake of appearing glorious, you can't blame the devil for that.
It's their informed choice
@Beefcake
the Mighty To be fair, they only did it after they realised that the Serb military were
too smart to be depleted by aerial bombardment and that in order to defeat them, you'd have
to fight them on the ground. That's why NATO bombarded civilians. On a man to man basis,
Serbs and Russians are the best soldiers in the world. No navy seal, no marine, no SAS can
match them. Fighting for their homes gives them the little bit of adrenaline needed to
prevail.
@Cyrano
My point was never "Russians" are our brothers. My point is, whatever cultural, religious or
blood affinity I have with the Russians, they have their interests and we have ours. I cannot
expect of Russians to defend Serbia for "ses beaux yeaux". The same goes the other way
around. To some people Russia has "betrayed" Serbia, to some other Serbia has "betrayed"
Russia. Yet the West sees us as one whole, Russia and little "Russia". I didn't ask myself
before but now I love Russia infinetely more than the West. Russia has asked me nothing, has
given me nothing and is expecting nothing from me.
If we can have a mutually beneficial relationship with Russia, great. We will never have that
with the USA or the UK or Germany or France. They're guilty of the spoilation of Serbs' lives
and private properties. Russians never spoiled Serbs of anything.
The subject being 'Operation Mole Cricket' in 1982, when the Israeli air force mounted a
successful SEAD operation [suppression of enemy air defenses] against Syria's Russian made
SAMs
I will quote from the 1989 issue of Air Power Journal the USAF premier professional
publication
'Syrian SAM operators also invited disaster upon themselves. Their Soviet equipment was
generally regarded as quite good; Syrian handling of it was appalling.
As noted by Lt Gen Leonard Perroots, director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, "The
Syrians used mobile missiles in a fixed configuration; they put the radars in the valley
instead of the hills because they didn't want to dig latrines -- seriously."
The Syrian practice of stationing mobile missiles in one place for several months allowed
Israeli reconnaissance to determine the exact location of the missiles and their
radars, giving the IAF a definite tactical advantage on the eve of battle.
Even so, the Syrians might have been able to avoid the complete destruction of their SAM
complex had they effectively camouflaged their sites; instead, they used smoke to "hide"
them, which actually made them easier to spot from the air.
It is ironic that the Syrians, who have been criticized for their strict adherence to
Soviet doctrine, chose to ignore the viable doctrine that emphasizes the utility of
maneuver and camouflage.
According to a 1981 article in Soviet Military Review, alternate firing positions,
defensive ambushes, regular repositioning of mobile SAMs to confuse enemy
intelligence, and the emplacement of dummy SAM sites are fundamental considerations for the
effective deployment and survivability of ground-based air defenses.'
We note here also that the highly effective Serb air defense in 1999, which stymied a huge
force of over 1,000 Nato aircraft for 78 days, did exactly those things that are mentioned here
and which the Syrians failed to do
But of course there is more to the story much much more
You see, that wikipedia article that 'Handtroll' links to has a section called 'Background'
And that background is that in previous years the Israeli air force had been thoroughly
pasted by the same Syrian and Egyptian air defenses Mole Cricket was Round 2 round 1 having
been a much bigger win for the air defenses
As Kopp recounts
'It is widely acknowledged that the Israelis suffered heavy losses of aircraft during the
fighting in 1973. Exactly how many were lost to SAMs, and to which type of SAM, has been less
well documented. Israeli public claims are that 303 aircraft were lost in combat
The same wikipedia article that 'Handtroll' points to says this
'The losses suffered by Israel in the 1973 war were so high that it indirectly spawned the
United States stealth aircraft program, Project HAVE BLUE.
The U.S. estimated that without a solution to the SAM problem, even the United States
would suffer depletion of its Air Force within two weeks of a conflict erupting between the
U.S. and Soviet Union. The Israelis had lost 109 aircraft in 18 days.'
The Kopp article Surface to Air Missile Effectiveness in Past Conflicts is a good
historic breakdown that contrasts the very effective use of Soviet air defense in Vietnam,
where the US lost
10,000 aircraft [including 31 B52 strategic bombers] and the various Middle East conflicts
where the Arab air defense forces put up a generally spotty record, using the same
equipment
The collapse of the extensive Iraqi air defense system in Desert Storm in 1991 is a textbook
case although here it is worth noting that a significant factor was that the Iraqi integrated
air defense system, KARI [Irak
spelled backward] was designed and built by the French, integrating both Soviet and French
SAMs into one central network
'Planning for this mission was helped when the CIA contacted the French engineer
responsible for designing the Kari IADS and passed along information about its
vulnerabilities and limitations.'
The main takeaway from a historical review of air defense versus attacking air power is that
human competence is always the overriding factor on both sides just one year after the
well-planned and executed Israeli Mole Cricket, the US decided to launch an air raid on Syrian
SAMs, which
ended in disaster
'Despite official statements, however, the first direct combat in Lebanon between the
United States and Syria was both a military and political disaster.
Two of the U.S. planes were shot down either by anti-aircraft rounds and/or approximately
forty SAMs; one pilot was killed, another was captured by Syrian forces, and another
parachuted safely into the Mediterranean Sea. (The hostage pilot, Lieutenant Robert Goodman,
Jr., was held and interrogated in a Syrian prison for thirty days until Reverend Jesse
Jackson secured his release.)
Clearly the US raid was poorly planned and ill conceived and they got a beating for their
efforts
So clearly the human factor always counts for the most statistics from the history of air
combat show that 10 percent of pilots score 90 percent of the kills the 'hawks' while that
other 90 percent end up as the victims
That is not to say that technological advance does not play a role clearly it does by the
early 1980s a number of SEAD technologies matured that had a big impact in swinging the
pendulum back in favor of air power these include standoff jamming pods carried by specialized
SEAD aircraft and which targeted the SAM radars properly used, these could degrade radar
performance enough to tilt the contest
Other significant advances occurred in anti-radiation missiles designed to home in on the
radio emissions from SAM radars as well as airborne emitter locators that could pinpoint radar
locations when those were switched on all of these tools, in the right hands, could make a big
difference, as they did in Mole Cricket
But military technology is usually a game of leapfrogging the air attacker gains made by the
1980s with jammers and Harms were countered by the 1990s with fundamentally new and much more
powerful radars known as 'phased array'
Instead of a parabolic 'dish' antenna, these radars use a flat surface containing numerous
[up to thousands] of 'radiating elements' controlled by a computer that can do things that
conventional radar cannot this includes much higher beam resolution the ability to track
numerous targets at once the ability to efficiently eliminate ground clutter for low flying
objects and most important the ability to defeat jamming by means of 'frequency hopping' and
reducing radio emissions to the side and rear
At the same time, the US has NOT developed new generations of SEAD weapons the same AN/ALQ99
jamming pod used since the Vietnam war is the front line unit today a jammer is basically a
radio emitter, using an antenna and electrical power to send radio waves at a target radar in
an attempt to disrupt it by necessity, being carried aloft by an aircraft, the jamming pod is
limited in terms of antenna size and available electrical power
Here we see an AN/AL99 pod under the wing of a Grumman EA6B 'Prowler' the small wind turbine
at the front supplies electrical power and the transmit antenna inside is a simple small dish
type against the big Russian SAM radars [even assuming the jamming aircraft could get close
enough to actually do anything] it is like a mosquito versus an elephant
–A Russian phased array radar on an all terrain tracked chassis
The next
generation US jammer is still in development and is not expected to come online for another
three years even then it will probably be too little too late basic physics tells us that radio
is all about electrical power and antenna size considering also the standoff capability of
modern Russian SAMs [over 400 km] plus the fact that those ground assets are also protected by
fighter aircraft, AWACS etc the advantage has definitely shifted in favor of air defense as
Kopp notes in his article, Surviving the Modern Integrated Air Defense
System
'The reality of evolving IADS technology and its global proliferation is that most of the
US Air Force combat aircraft fleet, and all of the US Navy combat aircraft fleet, will be
largely impotent against an IADS constructed from the technology available today from
Russian and, increasingly so, Chinese manufacturers.
If flown against such an IADS, US legacy fighters from the F-15 through to the current
production F/A-18E/F would suffer prohibitive combat losses attempting to penetrate, suppress
or destroy such an IADS.
This is not news to military professionals retired USAF Gen Philip Breedlove former Nato
commander for Europe notes
'Right now, we're almost completely dependent on air forces and aviation assets in order
to attack the A2/AD problem
We need more long-range, survivable, precision strike capability from the ground We
need dense capability -- like the dense A2/AD networks that we face.'
A2/AD meaning the 'anti-access/area denial' zones created by Russian air defense netorks
That pretty much sums it up the physical equation has tilted far in favor of the massive
electronic power and firepower that those all terrain mobile SAMs can muster versus what an
aircraft can take aloft what Breedlove is saying here is it's time to go back to the drawing
board and figure out a new way air power alone is not going to cut it
@imaginative{Still trying to learn if these 300s (whether new or old) solve the stated problem:}
S-300, like any other military equipment or hardware, is a tool: you need a good, reliable
tool, but you also need a trained operator to properly use that tool. And sometimes it is
impossible to train someone, if the material is not there.
SAA in general and Syrian soldiers individually have fought bravely against unbelievable
odds.
To wit, the heroic defense of the Kuweires air base by SAA, which was completely cut-off by
the terrorist invaders (and their patrons US, UK, France, Turkey, KSA, .). Yet it held out
for 2-3 years until liberated recently.
But there is something missing from the overall picture to make SAA a truly competent
military force able to defend itself and Syria independently against foreign aggressors.
There is an article on the web with the title "Why Arabs lose wars" (not sure if it's the
exact title) that examines the reasons. It is worth a read.
Also, poster [FB] discusses in detail in post #110 some of the differences between various
nationalities using Soviet/Russian military equipment.
Even if Syria were to get the latest Russian anti-air systems (S-400, S-500, .), they'd
have to be operated by Russians (or Serbs) to be truly effective against a competent,
technologically savvy adversary like Israel. Syrians have their work cut out for them for
sure.
I am no expert in this area to be sure. However with the unit price of the F-35s, they are
capitol assets. The loss of an F-35 for any reason in a combat zone would be a disaster. Yet
Trump is sending more of them to Israel in response to the S-300s.
This tit for tat escalation is not doing anyone any good and is potentially dangerous
beyond words. Syria had not been a threat to Israel in decades, yet Obama thought it was a
good idea to try an take out Assad. I would just like to know why.
@jimmyriddle
As far as I understand, the Russians have not turned on any other then the surveillance radar
in the S400 complex. Of all the radars in the complex, this one is the least interesting to
spy on. The real performance secrets of the system are in other radars. The Russians have not
turned on other "action" radars because this would give an opportunity to be studied and
because the US and Israeli planes have been declared "friendlies" by Putin.
The proximity of forces gives both sides opportunities to study procedures and technology
and both sides are avoiding showing all their cards. But the shooting down of IL20 may have
changed the game a little by giving the Russian military more freedom from the political
constraints. If the Russian military does turn on its other radars in the S400 complex, then
someone "stealthy" will find himself in the drink, in pieces.
In other words, the hope is that now the Russian military will be allowed to defend
itself. Otherwise, the Russians will keep suffering more Putin-style accidents in Syria.
@peterAUS{The only solution which would work on preventing further losses of Russian men and
material there is, effectively, Russians taking over all that. All.
Impossible, of course.}
Only Kremlin knows what ' preventing further losses of Russian men ..' implies, but
clearly Russia has taken losses from the day they went in and it does not seem to faze them
one bit, judging by their responses over the years to various losses they have incurred: they
didn't cut and run.
And I doubt Russia ever intended to fight Syrians' wars for them.
They can't make SAA into the Wehrmacht (or the Red Army of WW2 1942-1945) for sure.
But SAA has done quite well with Russian (and Hezbollah and IRG) help*.
It is an undeniable fact that before Russian AF came in and started cauterizing the cannibal
infestation, SAA was on the verge of collapse, and with it the State of Syria. Today what
remains of the terrorist invaders is holed up in Idlib: for how long?
And none of this – i.e. Russia's involvement, etc – would have been necessary
if Syrians were left alone to sort out their own internal affairs. Russia would not be
invited in by Syrian government if external forces intend on dismembering and erasing
the State of Syria had not started this war. The blood of 100s of 1,000s of innocent Syrian
civilians killed in this war is on their hands: US, UK, France, Turkey, KSA, Israel, various
other Gulf states,
btw: what's with the quotation marks for "locals" ?
You don't consider Syrians local?
Syria is one of the oldest countries in the region.
Its composition of people has naturally changed some over the centuries, but Syrians are as
local as it gets. And Syria's Alawites, in particular, have been there for millennia
(genealogy-wise).
___________
* Only fair, given the massive support ISIS cannibals and assorted other mass-murdering
invaders have gotten from outside.
@TheJester
Remember before you join with PCR in decrying the incredible degree of patience and restraint
that Putin has shown, that should a situation escalate into a probably WWIII – which
could happen within a few hours, Russia, population 145 million, would be facing America;
Population 330 million, plus probably most of Europe; Population 300 million, plus the 5-eyes
vassals; joint pop. almost 100 million.
IN which case, he would have no choice but to pre-emptively empty just about all his
nuclear missiles all over America before it could do the same to Russia.
Russia can move plenty of hardware into Syria, but that will not change the fact that Israel
is the 800 pounder in the region with more strike options than everybody else combined.
And as far as Israel "illegally" interdicting missiles intended for use against their
infrastructure, good luck with that, they certainly don't need anyone's approval.
Sure, some hi tech Russian weapon systems may take out a few Israeli aircraft, but at what
cost?
If Putin wants to sell more of his shiny missile systems, he will not try to use them against
Israeli forces.
@Isabella
Isabella, I'm not understanding what you are saying or what you are presuming. I'm an avid
fan of Putin. Indeed, I have imaged myself wearing a "Putin for President" shirt. I'm on his
side in the free-for-all of international intrigue and politics.
Under Putin's leadership, one has to be impressed with a country (Russia) that the West
has disparaged as an economic rival of Spain yet has developed a stable of advanced military
weapons that are superior to anything the United States has in its arsenal. However, a side
question: Is this the Russian strategic equivalent of the previous American "Star Wars"
program albeit this time designed by Russia to bankrupt the United States? If the F-35 is an
example of the US response, this will succeed.
The issue I raise is a real one. The West is paranoid that Russia and China will reach a
political, economic, and military accord that will secure the Asian continent for Asians. The
British Navy and then the American Navy have historically acted on the periphery to extract
natural resources and control international trade. A Russian/Chinese political, economic, and
military accord has the benefit of Asians acting on internal lines of communication and
making the United States Navy obsolete.
The dilemmas are not unlike those presented to the Germans in the 1st and 2nd World Wars.
Could the Germans secure effective internal lines of communication into Asia in time to make
the navies of Britain and the United States irrelevant? The Germans failed. However, Russian
weapons and the Chinese economy have the potential to finally pull this off.
Hence, the United States with pitifully ineffective support from the EU is desperate to
prevent the concord between Russia and China that can materially and perhaps permanently
change the power relationships in the world for the first time since the western Middle Ages.
The US strategy: divide and conquer.
I imagine myself in Putin's shoes playing three-dimensional chess. (BTW: I can't play
three-dimensional chess.) How does one deal with the last desperate throws of the dying
American empire without getting involved in the "action-reactions" that led to WWI and
WWII? Syria is the perfect scenario for that to happen.
If Putin is forced up against the wall in Syria, what will he do? If a confrontation with
the West materializes and he backs down, he is over. The United States has called his bluff.
The United States is then free to confront and try to humiliate China in the same way.
However, if Russia calls the US bluff, I'm afraid to imagine the consequences. The US is
also over. The danger is that the United States will respond with mindless violence that
leads to WWIII.
I wish Putin well. He is better equipped to play and win at three-dimensional chess than
any of the current actors in the United States or the European Union in his quest for a
multi-polar world.
As an American, I pray Putin succeeds. I want my country back; I want us to return to our
origins as a constitutional republic. In the meantime, Putin lives in a deadly jungle created
by the death throes of the American Empire. To paraphrase Dylan Thomas, The Empire of the
United States,
Does not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the Light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night
[ At the close of Imperial Light ].
PCR doesn't "decry" Putin's patience and restraint, he admires it; but he points out that
they may entail unforeseen consequences and may ential the irrational responses of the
neocons and Israelis. Obviously the Russian military doesn't entirely agree with Putin's
"partners" perspective.
the S-300s are certainly formidable air defense systems, they are not a
Wunderwaffe
Most important statement. Repeat over, and over, and over again.
Israelis operate in Syria because of Iran/Hezbollah. Maybe they operate in Syria more than
they have to, and they use Iran/Hezbollah as a casus belli , because they are secretly
compensated by the Saudis who have it in for the Assad regime. That's conspiratorial, but
seems at least as likely as the speculation that "Israelis simply think that they don't have
to abide by any kind of norms of behavior." This conspiracy theory also doesn't implicate all
Israelis or even the entire Israeli government, it may simply be limited to key individuals
in extraordinary positions of power who may be on the offing for riches no one here can
imagine in return for some old fashioned corruption.
To try and put a Saker hat on and see this from a Russian point of view, and to
also care for Russian servicemen in Syria, and to be realistic about the extent and
capabilities and quantity and quality of the assets at the disposal of those who seem
determined to act with impunity against international law in Syria under the rubric of
opposing Iran/Hezbollah, here's some more ideas:
1. Perhaps Russia should provide substantially more SAM systems than it has openly stated
(and maybe it is planning this and wisely not announcing it) – in this vein the
Pantsirs-S1/2 the Saker recommends and additional un-enumerated integrated S-300 deployments
might satisfy no one should think this is invincible it is simply so far from it – I am
sorry Russian tech fanboys, none of this is a Star Wars Nabooian Gungan shield – the
tech can be defeated and you are wrong to think anything else but it plays the
strongest hand, strongest, and can be part of a larger strategy
2. "Syrian finger on the trigger" is key – avoiding Russia/Israel or Russia/NATO
engagement is paramount not least of all because it means Israel/NATO forces cannot rely on
Russian restraint and that should have a deterring effect which will allay tensions
but with hands played as strong as they can be:
3. Strategically de-escalate – do this by cooperating with the Chinese and
other non-permanent members of the UN Security Council to make as loud a fuss as possible to
call for a demilitarization of Syria by both Iran/Hezbollah and Israelfollowing
1980s norms meaning:
Turn the cards, turn the tables
a) under a UN Mandate (that China and Russia should dare the US, UK and France to veto)
belligerents such as Russia, NATO, Israel all observe a cease-fire while b) a substantial
force of UN Peacekeepers enters Syria does whatever is possible to expel Hezbollah or drive
it underground to the point of effective neutering, and c) position themselves strategically
so that Israeli strikes would result in hitting UN targets raise stakes further by working
the UN in advance to presume Israel will strike a UN target and be ready with the most
devastating economic and diplomatic counter-response possible as swiftly as possible –
such a response should be calculated to hit the ordinary Israeli citizen/taxpayer and make
him as likely as possible to vote in a new government.
The Saker is putting the best face on it he can, but a plain stating is that a military
solution isn't in the offing. This is true for everyone. There's not Israeli military
"solution", nor Iranian, nor US – there certainly isn't a Russian military
solution.
But as far as I can tell the US has no interest in being a hero of a diplomatic solution
even though if it was paying any attention, acting with any values, and not allowing the tail
to wag the dog but leading with its own agency, it would be the one leveraging the UN exactly
as I've described and without need of S300 deployments.
So go ahead Russia. This is the US's show to play, but it's not playing the part. Have at it
Understudy!
Play the military cards well so that they arc towards a diplomatic break of tensions and no
one should fault Russia for eating empire's Peacemaker lunch when empire is off at the war
movies.
Someone needs to be thinking about a diplomatic endgame. It is simply unsafe, at a global
level, to have the US, Russia and Israel packed in this small place testing each other this
way.
A caution: one shouldn't underestimate Iranian squealing in the event of the success of
such measures. The Iranian regime isn't popular and like other regimes relies on wars "over
there" to promote stability at home. It must be nice too for the Ayatollahs and Revolutionary
Guards to be able to send volatile hotheads a few countries over to blow off steam and
occasionally fail to return to the motherland. Genuine diplomatic success in Syria has the
potential to be destabilizing in Iran. On the other hand, peace in Syria, leveraged well, can
generate economic opportunity for Iran that could offset such concerns.
There's one thing I'm surprised you didn't point out in this article. It isn't necessary for
the Syrians and Russians to wipe the sky clean of NATO and Israeli aircraft. Western
electorates are very leery about ongoing casualties. They expect John Wick action movie sagas
of the enemy being exterminated like ants while the good guys collect the occasional
photogenic bruise. Even a trickle of losses will erode the public support and political will
to continue (well except for the Israelis). What does an F-35 go for, something like $350M a
copy? Imagine losing even a few of those plus the file photos of the dead or captured pilots.
The US will reportedly provide Israel with more F-35s after Russia supplied Syria with
S-300 missile systems. Moscow's move came in response to the downing of a Russian military
plane, which it partly blamed on Israel.
US President Donald Trump decided to lend a hand to America's most devoted ally
following consultations at the "highest administration and military levels," DEBKAfile, a
military intelligence news site, said to have ties with the Israeli security services,
reported.
1) How many F-35 can the US spare?
2) Does it have to tune them to Mediterranean conditions?
3) What about support infrastructure?
and most importantly
4) Does that mean US pilots will be flying or do the Israeli have enough qualified pilots
on standby?
One effect of this is to make Israel and the US deploy F35s over Syria. That gives the
Russians a good opportunity to study its vulnerabilities.
Naturally, the same goes for whatever variant of S-300 they have deployed, but the F35 is
a $1.4 trillion programme. If, like the F-117A, it is found to be fatally compromised by some
new radar technology, it will be a total disaster for NATO.
The only thing the Israelis have intended was luring the US to open a semi-military base
in Israel so they could set up a false flag attack on it to get the USA to fight their wars
for them.
"... The way it works is, the smearers bait the smearee into defending himself against the defamatory content of the smears. Once the smearee has done that, the smearers have him. From then on, the focus of the debate becomes whether or not the smears are accurate, rather than why he's being smeared, how he's being smeared, and who is smearing him. This is the smearers' primary objective, i.e., to establish the boundaries of the debate, and to trap the target of the smears within them. ..."
"... focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible ..."
Because that is precisely how the smear game works.
The way it works is, the smearers bait the smearee into defending himself against the
defamatory content of the smears. Once the smearee has done that, the smearers have him. From
then on, the focus of the debate becomes whether or not the smears are accurate, rather than
why he's being smeared, how he's being smeared, and who is smearing him. This is the smearers'
primary objective, i.e., to establish the boundaries of the debate, and to trap the target of
the smears within them.
If you've followed the fake "Labour Anti-Semitism" scandal, you've witnessed this tactic deployed
against Corbyn , who unfortunately
fell right into the trap and gave the smearers the upper hand. No, the only way to
effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or small-scale), is to resist the
temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as much attention on the tactics
and the motives of the smearers as possible . It is difficult to resist this temptation,
especially when the people smearing you have significantly more power and influence than you
do, and are calling you a racist and an anti-Semite, but, trust me, the moment you start
defending yourself, the game is over, and the smearers have won.
Carroll Price says:
October 1, 2018 at 3:52 pm GMT
@Dorian I agree. The me-too crown demanding Brett Kavanagh's head on a platter should have
been shown the door rather than given a worldwide stage from which to spew their hateful
venom.
If there is one thing that still unites Americans across the ever more intellectually
suffocating and bitterly polarized political spectrum our imaginations have been crammed into
like rush hour commuters on the Tokyo Metro, it's our undying love of identity politics.
Who doesn't love identity politics? Liberals love identity politics. Conservatives love
identity politics. Political parties love identity politics. Corporations love identity
politics. Advertisers, anarchists, white supremacists, Wall Street bankers, Hollywood
producers, Twitter celebrities, the media, academia everybody loves identity politics.
Why do we love identity politics? We love them for many different reasons.
The ruling classes love identity politics because they keep the working classes focused on
race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on, and not on the fact that they
(i.e., the working classes) are, essentially, glorified indentured servants, who will spend the
majority of their sentient existences laboring to benefit a ruling elite that would gladly
butcher their entire families and sell their livers to hepatitic Saudi princes if they could
get away with it. Dividing the working classes up into sub-groups according to race, ethnicity,
and so on, and then pitting these sub-groups against each other, is extremely important to the
ruling classes, who are, let's remember, a tiny minority of intelligent but physically
vulnerable parasites controlling the lives of the vast majority of human beings on the planet
Earth, primarily by keeping them ignorant and confused.
The political parties love identity politics because they allow them to conceal the fact
that they are bought and paid for by these ruling classes, which, in our day and age, means
corporations and a handful of obscenely wealthy oligarchs who would gut you and your kids like
trout and sell your organs to the highest bidder if they thought they could possibly get away
with it. The political parties employ identity politics to maintain the simulation of
democracy that prevents Americans (many of whom are armed) from coming together, forming a
mob, dismantling this simulation of democracy, and then attempting to establish an actual
democracy, of, by, and for the people, which is, basically, the ruling classes' worst
nightmare. The best way to avoid this scenario is to keep the working classes ignorant and
confused, and at each other's throats over things like pronouns, white privilege, gender
appropriate bathrooms, and the complexion and genitalia of the virtually interchangeable
puppets the ruling classes allow them to vote for.
The corporate media, academia, Hollywood, and the other components of the culture industry
are similarly invested in keeping the vast majority of people ignorant and confused. The folks
who populate this culture industry, in addition to predicating their sense of self-worth on
their superiority to the unwashed masses, enjoy spending time with the ruling classes, and
reaping the many benefits of serving them and, while most of them wouldn't personally
disembowel your kids and sell their organs to some dope-addled Saudi trillionaire scion, they
would look the other way while the ruling classes did, and then invent some sort of convoluted
rationalization of why it was necessary, in order to preserve democracy and freedom (or was
some sort of innocent but unfortunate "blunder," which will never, ever, happen again).
The fake Left loves identity politics because they allow them to pretend to be
"revolutionary" and spout all manner of "militant" gibberish while posing absolutely zero
threat to the ruling classes they claim to be fighting. Publishing fake Left "samizdats" (your
donations to which are tax-deductible), sanctimoniously denouncing racism on Twitter, milking
whatever identity politics scandal is making headlines that day, and otherwise sounding like a
slightly edgier version of National Public Radio, are all popular elements of the fake Left
repertoire.
Marching along permitted parade routes, assembling in designated "free speech areas," and
listening to speeches by fake Left celebrities and assorted Democratic Party luminaries, are
also well-loved fake Left activities. For those who feel the need to be even more militant,
pressuring universities to cancel events where potentially "violent" and "oppressive" speech
acts (or physical gestures) might occur, toppling offensive historical monuments, ratting out
people to social media censors, or masking up and beating the crap out of "street Nazis" are
among the available options. All of these activities, by herding potential troublemakers into
fake Left ghettos and wasting their time, both on- and off-line, help to ensure that the ruling
classes, their political puppets, the corporate media, Hollywood, and the rest of the culture
industry can keep most people ignorant and confused.
Oh, and racists, hardcore white supremacists, anti-Semites, and other far-Right wing nuts my
God, do they love identity politics! Identity politics are their entire worldview (or
Weltanschauung, for you Nazi fetishists). Virtually every social, political, economic, and
ontological phenomenon can be explained by reducing it to race, ethnicity, religion, or some
other simplistic criterion, according to these "alt-Right" geniuses. And to render everything
even more simplistic, each and every one of their simplistic theories can be subsumed into a
meta-simplistic theory, which amounts to (did you guess it?) a conspiracy of Jews.
According to this meta-theory, this conspiracy of Jews (which is headquartered in Israel,
but maintains offices in Los Angeles and New York, from which it controls the corporate media,
Hollywood, and the entire financial sector) is responsible for well, anything they can think
of. September 11 attacks? Conspiracy of Jews. Financial crisis? Jews, naturally. Black on Black
crime? Jews again! Immigration? Globalization? Gun control laws? Abortion? Drugs? Media bias?
Who else could be behind it all but Jews?!
See, the thing is, there is no essential difference between your identity
politics-brainwashed liberal and your Swastika-tattooed white supremacist. Both are looking at
the world through the lens of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or some other type of
"identity." They are looking through this "identity" lens (whichever one it happens to be)
because either they have been conditioned to do so (most likely from the time they were
children) or they have made a conscious choice to do so (after recognizing, and affirming or
rejecting, whatever conditioning they received as children).
Quantum physicists, Sufi fakirs, and certain other esoterics understand what most of us
don't, namely, that there is no such thing as "the Truth," or "Reality," apart from our
perception of it. The world, or "reality," or whatever you want to call it, is more than happy
to transform itself into any imaginable shape and form, based on the lens you are looking at it
through. It's like a trickster in that regard. Look at "reality" through a racist lens, and
everything will make sense according to that logic. Look at it through a social justice lens,
or a Judeo-Christian lens, or a Muslim lens, or a scientific or a Scientologist lens, or a
historical materialist or capitalist lens (it really makes no difference at all) and
abracadabra! A new world is born!
Sadly, most of us never reach the stage in our personal (spiritual?) development where we
are able to make a conscious choice about which lens we want to view the world through. Mostly,
we stick with the lens we were originally issued by our families and societies. Then we spend
the rest of our fleeting lives desperately insisting that our perspective is "the Truth," and
that other perspectives are either "lies" or "errors." The fact that we do this is
unsurprising, as the ruling classes (of whatever society we happened to be born and socialized
into) are intensely invested in issuing everyone a "Weltanschauung lens" that corresponds to
whatever narrative they are telling themselves about why they deserve to be the ruling classes
and we deserve to exist to serve them, fight their wars, pay interest on their loans, not to
mention rent to live on the Earth, which they have claimed as their own and divided up amongst
themselves to exploit and ruin, which they justify with "laws" they invented, which they
enforce with armies, police, and prisons, which they teach us as children to believe is "just
the way life is" but I digress.
So, who doesn't love identity politics? Well, I don't love identity politics. But then I
tend to view political events in the context of enormous, complex systems operating beyond the
level of the individuals and other entities such systems comprise. Thus I've kind of been
keeping an eye on the restructuring of the planet by global capitalism that started in the
early 1990s, following the collapse of the U.S.S.R., when global capitalism (not the U.S.A.)
became the first globally hegemonic system in the history of aspiring hegemonic systems.
Now, this system (i.e., capitalism, not the U.S.A), being globally hegemonic, has no
external enemies, so what it's been doing since it became hegemonic is aggressively
destabilizing and restructuring the planet according to its systemic needs (most notably in the
Middle East, but also throughout the rest of the world), both militarily and ideologically.
Along the way, it has encountered some internal resistance, first, from the Islamic
"terrorists," more recently, from the so-called "nationalists" and "populists," none of whom
seem terribly thrilled about being destabilized, restructured, privatized, and debt-enslaved by
global capitalism, not to mention relinquishing what remains of their national sovereignty, and
their cultures, and so on.
I've been writing about this for over
two years , so I am not going to rehash it all in detail here (this essay is already rather
long). The short version is, what we are currently experiencing (i.e., Brexit, Trump, Italy,
Hungary, et cetera, the whole "populist" or "nationalist" phenomenon) is resistance (an
insurgency, if you will) to hegemonic global capitalism, which is, essentially, a
values-decoding machine, which eliminates "traditional" (i.e., despotic) values (e.g.,
religious, cultural, familial, societal, aesthetic, and other such non-market values) and
replaces them with a single value, exchange value, rendering everything a commodity.
The fact that I happen to be opposed to some of those "traditional" values (i.e., racism,
anti-Semitism, oppression of women, homosexuals, and so on) does not change my perception of
the historical moment, or the sociopolitical, sociocultural, and economic forces shaping that
moment. God help me, I believe it might be more useful to attempt to understand those forces
than to go around pointing and shrieking at anyone who doesn't conform to my personal views
like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers .
But that's the lens I choose to look through. Maybe I've got it all assbackwards. Maybe what
is really going on is that Russia "influenced" everyone into voting for Brexit and Donald
Trump, and hypnotized them all with those Facebook ads into hating women, people of color,
transsexuals, and the Jews, of course, and all that other "populist" stuff, because the
Russians hate us for our freedom, and are hell-bent on destroying democracy and establishing
some kind of neo-fascist, misogynist, pseudo-Atwoodian dystopia. Or, I don't know, maybe the
other side is right, and it really is all a conspiracy of Jews transsexual, immigrant Jews of
color, who want to force us all to have late-term abortions and circumcise our kids, or
something.
I wish I could help you sort all that out, but I'm just a lowly political satirist, and not
an expert on identity politics or anything. I'm afraid you'll have to pick a lens through which
to interpret "reality" yourself. But then, you already have, haven't you or are you still
looking through the one that was issued to you?
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Tony Vodvarka says:
October 1, 2018 at 2:01 pm GMT LBJ, running for a seat in the Texas state legislature, told
his campaign manager to spread the charge that his opponent had sex with pigs. Shocked, the
manager replied, "He doesn't do that! "I know, I know" said Johnson, "but make him deny
it."
Satirical but pretty precise description how racial and ethnic smears work
Notable quotes:
"... The way it works is, the smearers bait the smearee into defending himself against the defamatory content of the smears. Once the smearee has done that, the smearers have him. From then on, the focus of the debate becomes whether or not the smears are accurate, rather than why he's being smeared, how he's being smeared, and who is smearing him . This is the smearers' primary objective, i.e., to establish the boundaries of the debate, and to trap the target of the smears within them. ..."
"... No, the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or small-scale), is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible. ..."
"... It is difficult to resist this temptation, especially when the people smearing you have significantly more power and influence than you do, and are calling you a racist and an anti-Semite, but, trust me, the moment you start defending yourself, the game is over, and the smearers have won. ..."
The life of a professional political satirist is many things, but it is certainly never
boring. Last week, for example, was particularly not boring. OK, I wasn't called before a
Senate committee to testify against a rapey nominee to the highest court in the United States,
or smeared by the right-wing media for doing so, nothing that dramatic or consequential. No,
while most Americans were parsing every "he said" and "she said" of the Kavanaugh hearings, I
was embroiled in my own little sordid drama involving "going public," and smears, and my
colleagues attempting to assassinate my character, and so on.
... ... ...
Because that is precisely how the smear game works. The way it works is, the smearers
bait the smearee into defending himself against the defamatory content of the smears. Once the
smearee has done that, the smearers have him. From then on, the focus of the debate becomes
whether or not the smears are accurate, rather than why he's being smeared, how he's being
smeared, and who is smearing him . This is the smearers' primary objective, i.e., to establish
the boundaries of the debate, and to trap the target of the smears within them.
No, the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or
small-scale), is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as
much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible.
It is difficult to resist this temptation, especially when the people smearing you have
significantly more power and influence than you do, and are calling you a racist and an
anti-Semite, but, trust me, the moment you start defending yourself, the game is over, and the
smearers have won.
Hopkins is wise not to demean himself by arguing with the smearers that he is not (shudder!)
an anti-Semite. Might as well be called a child-molester. No. We will never be free from
these extortionists until we throw back at them: Who is a Semite? Is Netanyahu a Semite? If
that genocidal murderer is a Semite, then I'm an anti-Semite and proud of it! (He isn't, he
has no more Semitic genes than I have, he's pure East European, a Khazar). Are those rabbis
in Israel who claim that a thousand Arabs aren't worth one Jewish fingernail, Semites? Then,
hell yes, I'm an anti-Semite and proud of it!
Is Rabbi Rav Leor (another European Jew in Israel with no more "right" to the Holy Land than
I have), who claimed in a speech in occupied Jerusalem that the halacha (Jewish law)
"supports the annihilation of non-Jews in Israel" is this man a Semite? "Hashmadat goyem"
(extermination of non-Jews) "is an established principle in Jewish theology", he assured his
audience. He was not rebuked.
Until we assert our righteous indignation, we'll be at the mercy of these freaks forever.
At the mere mention of the dreaded–and overused–"You're anti-Semitic," grown men
have been known to wet their britches.
One can usually tell an article is going to be a hit piece on someone without even reading
said article, just take a look at the picture of the article's subject at the top; if the pic
is a kindly one, showing the person in a positive way, smiling and such, it will not be a hit
piece.
On the other hand, if the pic shows the person in some kind of foul mood, grimacing or
with a confused look on their mug, you can be assured it's going to be a smear of that
person's integrity.
When a certain bunch of digital gangsters want to defame, mock, vilify and smear a person,
they'll call them all sorts of vile stuff; make nasty inferences and make tenuous
associations with neo-Nazis or some real anti-Semites, but rarely do they attack what the
person has said or written, that is dangerous territory and too much work.
Well, aren't we Unz readers the deplorables? I used to read Counterpunch regularly. Then
Cockburn died, and gradually the quality declined. I stopped looking in, and now apparently
the writers I was most interested in -- PCR, Diane Johnstone, Mike Whitney -- are no longer
published there. They are here. Moving from Counterpunch to Unz was simply a step
forward in intellectual growth.
This pretty much nails it for me too. I still click on CP now and then, but I can't help
but noticed the glaring intellectual holes some of those writers left behind.
I doubt I have gone to CounterPunch more than twice, to read anything or just to peruse,
since the passing of Cockburn. I have no doubt that St. Clair means it, with a vengeance,
when he asserts that he cares more for blacks and Jews than for whites. And that is what this
is about.
The kulturkampf is about desire to inflict cultural genocide against the vestiges of
Christendom. It must necessarily be anti-white Gentile because those are the people who
founded and ran Christendom. It therefore also must favor all peoples who are not white
Gentiles. You cannot separate the war against Christendom from the war against whites. Both
the new white pagans and the racially bleeding heart white Christians will refuse to see the
obvious, but facts is facts, and you ignore them to your own destruction.
CJ Hopkins dares not merely to see the vicious absurdities that define the Left as it
moves into utter hysteria but to say what he sees. And for that, he will be ostracized and,
if they are successful, destroyed. The Left does not brook any speech that flies against
seeing the Left of the past and the present as The Good Guy that must not be questioned. More
specific, Hopkins now has fully spotlighted the biggest hypocrisy that the left requires:
seeing and preaching itself as being for the 'little guy,' the working class.
The Left is for the 'little guy' and the working class only when they support the Left in
how it prefers to wage kulturkampf at the time. And that has always been true.
Yes, the Neocons (I use the term in its broader sense which encompasses all the WASP
Country Club empire boys) are just like the Left: each is self-righteously imperialistic, on
a global scale, and each absolutely despises the white working class and every traditional
value and identity associated with them. Each expects, demands, the white working class to be
complacent tax slaves and cannon fodder.
CJ Hopkins must be stopped because he might reveal the con game
LBJ, running for a seat in the Texas state legislature, told his campaign manager to spread
the charge that his opponent had sex with pigs. Shocked, the manager replied, "He doesn't do
that! "I know, I know" said Johnson, "but make him deny it."
The Hegelian Dialectic- Problem, reaction, solution
The first step (thesis) is to create a problem. The second step (antithesis) is to
generate opposition to the problem (fear, panic and hysteria). The third step (synthesis) is
to offer the solution to the problem created by step one: A change which would have been
impossible to impose upon the people without the proper psychological conditioning achieved
in stages one and two.
Well, let's face it. Any political writer or magazine acquiring a significant readership is
eventually faced with the choice of either complying with orders from the Tribe as to what
they can publish, or telling the Tribe to kiss-off and take a long hike.
@Frederick
V. Reed The idea of 'stealth' aircraft is in fact mostly a gimmick designed to enrich the
military contractors it doesn't actually work very well at all, as proved in 1999 when the
Serb air defense, using ancient Soviet surface to air missiles of 1950s vintage, shot down
the USAF F117 aircraft and damaged another that was then written off, and therefore counts as
a kill
–F117 canopy displayed at the Belgrade Aviation Museum
But let's look at the idea of 'low observable' aircraft technology in a little more
detail, and how it may be countered by air defense
Ufimtsev, working at the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering, developed a coherent
theory on the behavior of radio wave scattering off solid objects he published his seminal
work Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction in 1962 the Soviet
military saw no real value in this and allowed it to be published
In 1971, the USAF translated this work into English and a couple of engineers at Lockheed
realized that Ufimtsev had provided the mathematical foundation to predict how radar waves
deflect off an aircraft it was a lightbulb moment the main insight of Ufimtsev's work was
that the size of a radar return was more a function of the edge geometry of the aircraft than
its actual size
Retired USAF Lt Colonel William B O'Connor, who flew the F117 gives a good telling of the
story
here
The end result is that the F117 and B2 were developed by programming Ufimtsev's math into
powerful computers in order to come up with aircraft shaping geometry that minimized radar
reflection subsequent 'low observable' aircraft like the F22 and F35 all build on this basic
physics
Now while the idea of reducing an aircraft's radar return sounds good in principle it has
a lot of real-world drawbacks for instance the shaping can only be optimized for one
particular aspect, such as a head-on if the aircraft turns into a bank for instance its radar
return will increase by as much as 100 fold owing to the simple fact that a banking aircraft
exposes its broad underbelly, which has no way to be optimized to also be 'stealthy' the
shaping cannot accomplish the same result of scattering radio waves off in all directions,
from all angles
There are other challenges the vertical tail surfaces will also bounce back radio waves
this is why a tailless, flying wing design like the B2 is better suited to the task but this
kind of configuration brings with it compromises in aircraft maneuverability and agility
Aside from the aircraft geometry, which is the main means of achieving 'low observability'
there are also special coatings that are designed to 'absorb' radio waves although this is
only of limited effectiveness and depends a lot on the thickness of the rubbery coating I had
the opportunity to physically examine a piece of the wreckage of that F117 shot down in
Serbia, and the thickness and weight of that coating was surprising it was about 1/16 inch
thick in places along the vertical stabilizers and seemed to weigh more than the underlying
composite honeycomb structure itself [typical of Lockheed lightweight structural design]
This additional weight is a major disadvantage of 'stealth' aircraft aircraft must be as
light as possible to perform well that is just basic physics but these logical design
considerations have seemingly been sidelined in what can only be explained as a money-making
gimmick that only detracts from actual aircraft capability
The F35 is far worse of course but Col Riccioni passed away before he could fully train
his guns on this very deficient aircraft
The fact of the matter is that the F117 was more 'stealthy' than the F22 or F35 this due
to its faceted design wherein the airframe shape was defined largely by a series of flat
plates [remember that the whole physics of radio reflection boils down to edge
geometry...]
The current MIC propaganda is that the faceted shape is not necessary due to improved
supercomputers that can calculate the math for curved surfaces well, the physical fact is
that curved surfaces reflect in all directions and no amount of 'supercomputing' can change
that Col Riccioni, who is no slouch in physics, having designed and taught the first
graduate-level course in astronautics at the USAF Academy, confirms that the F117 was a more
'stealthy' design than the F22 and the F35 is considered not as stealthy as the F22
As for defending against 'low observable' aircraft with surface to air missiles [SAMs] let
us review some of the pertinent factors that go into this equation a SAM system consists
basically of powerful radars that spot and track enemy aircraft and guide a missile shot to
the target the only way to kill a SAM system by means of an attacking aircraft is to target
its radars with a special type of missile that homes in on radio signals known as
anti-radiation missiles [HARMs] such as the US AGM88
The problem becomes one of reach how far can the SAM missiles reach and how far can the
HARMs reach ?
A long range SAM like the S300/400 wins this contest easily the S300 can hit targets as
far as 250 km away [400 km for S400] while the best Harms can reach about 150 km at most and
that's if fired at high aircraft speed and altitude so it becomes a question of how do you
get within the SAM missile kill zone to fire your Harm in the first place ?
In the 1999 bombing of Serbia, the US and 18 participating Nato allies mustered over 1,000
aircraft and fired a total of over 700 Harms at Serb air defenses, over the course of 78 days
but managed to knock out only three 1970s era mobile SAM units the 2K12 'Kub'
This campaign was truly a David vs Goliath match, yet the Serbs effectively fought the
alliance to a draw
NATO never fully succeeded in neutralizing the Serb IADS [integrated air defense
system], and NATO aircraft operating over Serbia and Kosovo were always within the
engagement envelopes of enemy SA-3 and SA-6 missiles -- envelopes that extended as high as
50,000 feet.
Because of that persistent threat, mission planners had to place such high-value
surveillance-and-reconnaissance platforms as the U-2 and JSTARS in less-than-ideal orbits
to keep them outside the lethal reach of enemy SAMs.
Even during the operation's final week, NATO spokesmen conceded that they could confirm
the destruction of only three of Serbia's approximately 25 known mobile SA-6
batteries.'
Lambeth notes that things could have been much different had the Serbs had the S300
'One SA-10/12 [early S300 variant] site in Belgrade and one in Pristina could have
provided defensive coverage over all of Serbia and Kosovo. They also could have threatened
Rivet Joint, Compass Call, and other key allied aircraft such as the airborne command and
control center and the Navy's E-2C operating well outside enemy airspace.
Fortunately for NATO, the Serb IADS did not include the latest-generation SAM equipment
currently available on the international arms market.'
Since 1999, the last major SEAD [suppression of enemy air defense] operation by Nato the
Russian air defense capabilities have only become more lethal the radars employed on the
S300/400 series are phased array types which are very difficult to jam and much more precise
in guiding a missile to the target
Phased array means that instead of a parabolic dish, the antenna consists of several
thousand individual antenna elements that are electronically steered in order to create a
very precise radar beam [instead of a dish antenna being mechanically rotated and tilted]
'With electronic beam steering, very low sidelobes and a narrow pencil beam mainlobe,
the 30N6 phased array is more difficult to detect and track by an aircraft's warning
receiver when not directly painted by the radar, and vastly more difficult to jam.
While it may have detectable backlobes, these are likely to be hard to detect from the
forward sector of the radar. As most anti-radiation missiles rely on sidelobes to home in,
the choice of engagement geometry is critical in attempting to kill a Flap Lid.'
Shown is the latest generation 92N6 'Grave Stone' engagement radar used with S300/400
systems the engagement radar actually guides the missile shot, while separate early warning
and acquisition and tracking radars first detect the target, then cue the engagement radar to
point to the target and guide the missile shot
In this scenario the weakest link of the S200 is eliminated its obsolete parabolic dish
type engagement radar the S200 missile is instead guided to the target by the formidable new
S300/400 radars
'In this arrangement, an SA-20/21 system with its high power aperture and highly jam
resistant acquisition and engagement radars prosecutes an engagement, but rather than
launching its organic 48N6 series missile rounds, it uses the SA-5 Gammon round instead
The challenge which a hybrid SA-5/SA-20/SA-21 system presents is considerable. The
SA-20/21 battery is highly mobile, and with modern digital frequency hopping radars, will
be difficult to jam.
Soft kill and hard kill become problematic. In terms of defeating the SA-5 component of
the hybrid, the only option is to jam the missile CW homing seeker, the effectiveness of
which will depend entirely on the vintage of the 5G24N series seeker and the capabilities
of the jamming equipment. If the customer opts for an upgrade to the seeker electronics,
the seeker may be digital and very difficult to jam.'
This could be the most important part of the story, since the Syrians have a large number
of S200 systems it is certain that a number of additional S300/400 radars have been delivered
as part of that '49 pieces' reported in Russian media and these powerful and fully mobile
radars [truck mounted] will be used to modernize the S200 network
It is worth noting also that SAM mobility is a key advance of the S300/400 systems the
various radars and the missile launchers are all mounted on large trucks and are designed for
five minute shoot and scoot this mobility proved key to the Nato difficulty with Serbian
SAMs, even though those old systems were not designed for that, but the Serbs nonetheless
would dismantle and move the fixed radars and launchers on a regular basis
In order to attack a SAM with an aircraft you first have to know where it is the only way
to know is when it turns on its radar at which point it may be too late if it is pointed at
you after taking the shot, the whole thing packs up and moves in five minutes flat [the
Patriot takes 30 minutes by comparison]
It should be noted here that these mobile Russian search and acquisition radars are
extremely powerful the 'Big Bird' series is in the same class as the Aegis radar mounted on
USN missile cruisers and destroyers
'The 64N6E Big Bird is the key to much of the improved engagement capability, and
ballistic missile intercept capability in the later S-300P variants.
This system operates in the 2 GHz band and is a phased array with a 30% larger aperture
than the US Navy SPY-1 Aegis radar, even accounting for its slightly larger wavelength it
amounts to a mobile land based Aegis class package. It has no direct equivalent in the
West.'
The final piece of the puzzle when it comes to countering 'stealth' aircraft is a special
category of radar designed specifically for that purpose these operate at much lower
frequencies [ie longer wavelength] which renders the stealth shaping useless since the
physics dictates that aircraft features shorter than the radar wavelength cannot produce the
desired scattering effect as Col Riccioni notes
[The F22's] radar signature is admittedly small in the forward quarter but only to
airborne radars. The aircraft is detectable by high-power, low-frequency ground based
radars
it is physically impossible to design shapes and radar absorptive material to
simultaneously defeat low power, high-frequency enemy fighter radars, and high power,
low-frequency ground based radars.'
The system uses a series of radars of varying wavelength each mounted on a mobile chassis
as with all the modern Russian SAM radars the long wavelength radar finds the 'stealth'
target easily and then cues a shorter wavelength radar to further pinpoint the target, which,
in turn, cues the engagement radar that guides the missile shot
Shown is such a deployment of three radars and a command vehicle in the background
All told, the upgrade of the Syrian air defenses now presents a very formidable system it
should be noted that the S200 missile when used with these powerful radars could be an
especially deadly combination this rocket was until 2009 the longest range SAM rocket in the
world, with a maximum range of up to 375 km
Unlike modern SAM missiles that use solid propellant rocket motors [basically a bottle
rocket] the S200 uses a real liquid fuel rocket engine it has a top speed of 2.5 km/s which
is actually faster than the S400 rockets and the liquid engine means it can be throttled to
decrease or increase its speed [minimum flying speed is 700 m/s] something that a solid
rocket cannot do
In the right hands, this combination of advanced S300 radars and the superb kinematic
performance of the S200 missile could be a deadly combination the fact that Syria has a lot
of these S200 missiles means that adding those S300 radars makes it a whole new ballgame we
already saw back in February when an S200 shot down an Israeli F16 in Israeli airspace there
are unconfirmed reports that a second aircraft was hit and possibly destroyed
The question of Israeli F35s trying to attack these mobile S300 SAMs is not really a
serious consideration for any air combat practitioner the F35 has terrible flight
characteristics such as very high wing loading, which directly affects its turning ability
[think of running with a 100 lb backpack and how that might affect your maneuverability]
The basic flight physics of this airplane are terrible, as many qualified experts have
pointed out it would be difficult to envisage how it could play a role in mounting an attack
against these Syrian S300s
The only realistic option to attack such an air defense zone would be to use the
mountainous terrain along the Levant coast and fly a nap of the earth mission with highly
maneuverable fighters like the F15 and F16 to try to hide from radar in the mountains and get
close enough to deliver a Harm missile to an S300 radar
But this would be a very risky mission especially considering that the Russians are flying
their AWACS planes over Syria, so even terrain following is not going to work in trying to
hide
Because that is precisely how the smear game works. The way it works is, the smearers bait
the smearee into defending himself against the defamatory content of the smears. Once the
smearee has done that, the smearers have him. From then on, the focus of the debate becomes
whether or not the smears are accurate, rather than why he's being smeared, how he's being
smeared, and who is smearing him .
This is the smearers' primary objective, i.e., to establish the boundaries of the debate,
and to trap the target of the smears within them. If you've followed the fake "Labour
Anti-Semitism" scandal, you've witnessed this tactic deployed against
Corbyn , who unfortunately
fell right into the trap and gave the smearers the upper hand.
No, the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or
small-scale), is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as
much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible . It is
difficult to resist this temptation, especially when the people smearing you have significantly
more power and influence than you do, and are calling you a racist and an anti-Semite, but,
trust me, the moment you start defending yourself, the game is over, and the smearers have
won.
@Justsaying The evidence is that before Cockburn died Counterpunch would routinely
publish articles which were basically honest about Israel (ie not terribly flattering) and
now does not (as it states in the article above viewpoints of the extreme left and right ie
genuine critique will not be tolerated so only critique from inside established paradigms
will be allowed-just like every other media outlet).
Counterpunch used to be outside of the Jewish paradigm (ie it was genuinely leftist) but
now will be just another gelded publication. Cockburn did a good job of fending off
criticism-Counterpunch was a rather niche publication so it flew under the radar of the
Jews.
Counterpunch was routinely critical of the neocons and even pointed out their Jewishness
but a lot of liberal Jews did not like the neocons. Israel was and is the real litmus
test.
The Guardian always had Alan Rusbridger who I beleive was Jewish. It is not exactly funded
by Jewish money- it mainly subsists off of government departments advertising public sector
jobs. Before the rise of the internet and gumtree etc it was mainly funded by sales of
autotrader a car trading magazine (lol at the nost po faced anti pollution newspaper being
funded by the sales of cars).
What changed is that the Jews are no longer able to control the narrative- they used to
feel they could afford semi-critical comments about Israel before but not any more. This has
gone hand in hand with increased efforts to censor the internet. The Jews were able to
infiltrate BDS and subvert it, they were able to use their explicit power to pass anti BDS
laws but they were not able to really turn the tide of public opinion. They have resorted to
outright censorship.
As you say it is not suprising that Counterpunch was taken over any
publication/organisation that wants to work outside of established Jewish limits on
intellectual discourse will eventually be subverted. Just look at the British Labour party.
Corbyn is an old school lefists (ie he wants to give people options other than the new labour
globalist neo liberalism) and a very principaled one. He stands up for the Palestinians (some
people say he just does this because of his Muslim constituents but that is not the case-he
has always stood up for them) and as a result has been smeared time and time again by the
Jewish press.
There is a power struggle in the Labour party (Muslim ethnics weight of numbers vs Jewish
money) and it looks like the Jews will win.
It's very sad and like I said I hope the new Counterpunch will fold leaving Cockburn's
histroy of excellent journalism unsullied.
strip away the right of Corprati0ns to have the legal standing of a person in a Court of
Law .
when we could just abolish the institution of incorporation without remorse? This
would like treating a cause of widespread disease with an ounce of inexpensive
prevention.
Buh-bye limited liability parasitism. Buh-bye rootless, world-wandering capital with scant
interest in the hosts' long-term wellbeing.
I suppose that there would be a shrill outcry of protest from the many little fire teams,
squads, and platoons of mind rapists (e.g. A. Cockburn) who have a career interest in
complaining for a living. But so what? It would be fun to watch "social justice" factions
twist and squirm as a chorus of abolitionists asks why the "Resistance" never resisted
"corporatocracy" with abolitionism. The rapists will "spew" much sanctimonious b.s.
defensively between artful meals in nice restaurants, but the chorus will know a real
reason. Lefty humanist finds incorporation very useful for cultivating the intense
concentration of wealth and power which he pretends to oppose.
Eventually the chorus will get around to asking lefty internationalist about his
contemporary plans to merge every firm with government without looking like an old fashioned
commie expropriationist. The chorus might ask the mind rapists still more embarassing
questions:
Righteous Lefty, why would you establish incorporation now if it wasn't a feature of
commerce already? Because you would not then have a little handful of company shares to
trade in a stock exchange? Nor be planning to exploit a stock tip from an ally who is
married to a corporate go-getter with C-level knowledge of plans?
Traditional labor unions, TOO, have been involved with the racketeering of incorporation.
Take the UMWA, for example. Where in the eleven points of its constitution is there any hint
that labor organizers and their Blair Mountain warriors were thinking about abolishing a
pernicious institution which had done so much to slant market power in favor of neverlaboring
mine operators?
It's been obvious for some time that the allegedly right wing "ALT RIGHT" is another
faction with little interest in getting rid of the corporation. It is sympathetic,
however, to old fashioned communist schemes like "Social Security" and communist health care
finance. So what, um, pecuniary interest does its leading lights have in maintaining the
incorporated status quo? Explain, please.
If there is one thing that still unites Americans across the ever more intellectually
suffocating and bitterly polarized political spectrum our imaginations have been crammed into
like rush hour commuters on the Tokyo Metro, it's our undying love of identity politics.
Who doesn't love identity politics? Liberals love identity politics. Conservatives love
identity politics. Political parties love identity politics. Corporations love identity
politics. Advertisers, anarchists, white supremacists, Wall Street bankers, Hollywood
producers, Twitter celebrities, the media, academia everybody loves identity politics.
Why do we love identity politics? We love them for many different reasons.
The ruling classes love identity politics because they keep the working classes focused on
race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on, and not on the fact that they
(i.e., the working classes) are, essentially, glorified indentured servants, who will spend the
majority of their sentient existences laboring to benefit a ruling elite that would gladly
butcher their entire families and sell their livers to hepatitic Saudi princes if they could
get away with it. Dividing the working classes up into sub-groups according to race, ethnicity,
and so on, and then pitting these sub-groups against each other, is extremely important to the
ruling classes, who are, let's remember, a tiny minority of intelligent but physically
vulnerable parasites controlling the lives of the vast majority of human beings on the planet
Earth, primarily by keeping them ignorant and confused.
The political parties love identity politics because they allow them to conceal the fact
that they are bought and paid for by these ruling classes, which, in our day and age, means
corporations and a handful of obscenely wealthy oligarchs who would gut you and your kids like
trout and sell your organs to the highest bidder if they thought they could possibly get away
with it. The political parties employ identity politics to maintain the simulation of
democracy that prevents Americans (many of whom are armed) from coming together, forming a
mob, dismantling this simulation of democracy, and then attempting to establish an actual
democracy, of
The corporate media, academia, Hollywood, and the other components of the culture industry
are similarly invested in keeping the vast majority of people ignorant and confused. The folks
who populate this culture industry, in addition to predicating their sense of self
Oh, and racists, hardcore white supremacists, anti-Semites, and other far-Right wing nuts my
God, do they love identity politics! Identity politics are their entire worldview (or
Weltanschauung, for you Nazi fetishists). Virtually every social, political, economic, and
ontological phenomenon can be explained by reducing it to race, ethnicity, religion, or some
other simplistic criterion, according to these "alt-Right" geniuses. And to render everything
even more simplistic, each and every one of their simplistic theories can be subsumed into a
meta-simplistic theory, which amounts to (did you guess it?) a conspiracy of Jews.
According to this meta-theory, this conspiracy of Jews (which is headquartered in Israel,
but maintains offices in Los Angeles and New York, from which it controls the corporate media,
Hollywood, and the entire financial sector) is responsible for well, anything they can think
of. September 11 attacks? Conspiracy of Jews. Financial crisis? Jews, naturally. Black on Black
crime? Jews again! Immigration? Globalization? Gun control laws? Abortion? Drugs? Media bias?
Who else could be behind it all but Jews?!
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says that people having "poor" memories of NATO's
1999 bombing of Yugoslavia are wrong because the military bloc did this to protect civilians
and save lives.
"I stressed that we did this to protect civilians and to stop the Milosevic regime,"
Stoltenberg stated during a meeting with the students of Belgrade University.
The NATO secretary stated further that the bloc supports a "dialogue" between Serbia and its
breakaway region [now a self-proclaimed state] of Kosovo. According to him, Belgrade has to
"look into the future" for furher cooperation between the two sides.
The attitude showed by Stoltenberg is a common example how the US-NATO propaganda works. Any
actions, incluindg illegal military interventions, false flag provocations and mass civilian
casualties, are being explained by the need to "defend democracy", "protect civilians" and
"save lives".
"... There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out in my book The Myth of Homeland Security ..."
"... "The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance. ..."
"... One thing that did ..."
"... US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point. ..."
"... My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection." ..."
"... All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault 7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. ..."
"... the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET -- Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ] ..."
"... It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being prepared for cyberwar. ..."
"... it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools. ..."
"... My observation is that the NSA and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese? ..."
"... The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are much smaller operations? ..."
"... That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other processors have similar backdoors. ..."
"... There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at all. ..."
"... So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order to justify its actions and defend its budget. ..."
"... What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes. ..."
"... Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of same. ..."
Bob Moore asks me to comment on an article about propaganda and security/intelligence. [
article ] This is going to be a mixture of opinion and references to facts; I'll try to be
clear which is which.
Yesterday several NATO countries ran a concerted propaganda campaign against Russia. The
context for it was a NATO summit in which the U.S. presses for an intensified cyberwar
against NATO's preferred enemy.
On the same day another coordinated campaign targeted China. It is aimed against China's
development of computer chip manufacturing further up the value chain. Related to this is
U.S. pressure on Taiwan, a leading chip manufacturer, to cut its ties with its big
motherland.
It is true that the US periodically makes a big push regarding "messaging" about hacking.
Whether or not it constitutes a "propaganda campaign" depends on how we choose to interpret
things and the labels we attach to them -- "propaganda campaign" has a lot of negative
connotations and one person's "outreach effort" is an other's "propaganda." An
ultra-nationalist or an authoritarian submissive who takes the government's word for anything
would call it "outreach."
There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that
China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking
to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out
in my book The Myth of Homeland Security (2004) [
wc ] claims such as that the Chinese had "40,000 highly trained hackers" are flat-out
absurd and ignore the reality of hacking; that's four army corps. Hackers don't engage in
"human wave" attacks.
"The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was
presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm
perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the
industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance.
One thing that did happen in 2010 around the same time as the nonexistent
cyberwar was China and Russia proposed trilateral talks with the US to attempt to define
appropriate limits on state-sponsored hacking. The US flatly rejected the proposal, but there
was virtually no coverage of that in the US media at the time. The UN also called for a
cyberwar treaty framework, and the effort was killed by the US. [ wired ] What's
fascinating and incomprehensible to me is that, whenever the US feels that its ability to claim
pre-emptive cyberwar is challenged, it responds with a wave of claims about Chinese (or Russian
or North Korean) cyberwar aggression.
John Negroponte, former director of US intelligence, said intelligence agencies in the
major powers would be the first to "express reservations" about such an accord.
US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to
war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in
advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the
superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to
try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point.
My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other
nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and
Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder
reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of
its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a
war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has
not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US
distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US
power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis
is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection."
The anti-Russian campaign is about alleged Russian spying, hacking and influence
operations. Britain and the Netherland took the lead. Britain accused Russia's military
intelligence service (GRU) of spying attempts against the Organisation for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague and Switzerland, of spying attempts against the British
Foreign Office, of influence campaigns related to European and the U.S. elections, and of
hacking the international doping agency WADA. British media willingly
helped to exaggerate the claims: [ ]
The Netherland [sic] for its part released
a flurry
of information about the alleged spying attempts against the OPCW in The Hague. It claims
that four GRU agents traveled to The Hague on official Russian diplomatic passports to sniff
out the WiFi network of the OPCW. (WiFi networks are notoriously easy to hack. If the OPCW is
indeed using such it should not be trusted with any security relevant issues.) The Russian
officials were allegedly very secretive, even cleaning out their own hotel trash, while they,
at the same, time carried laptops with private data and even taxi receipts showing their
travel from a GRU headquarter in Moscow to the airport. Like in the Skripal/Novichok saga the
Russian spies are, at the same time, portrayed as supervillains and hapless amateurs. Real
spies are neither.
There's a lot there, and I think the interpretation is a bit over-wrought, but it's mostly
accurate. The US and the UK (and other NATO allies, as necessary) clearly coordinate when it
comes to talking points. Claims of Chinese cyberwar in the US press will be followed by claims
in the UK and Australian press, as well. My suspicion is that this is not the US Government and
UK Government coordinating a story -- it's the intelligence agencies doing it. My
opinion is that the intelligence services are fairly close to a "deep state" -- the
CIA and NSA are completely out of control and the CIA has gone far toward building its own
military, while the NSA has implemented completely unrestricted surveillance worldwide.
All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault
7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking
the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. While the attribution
that "Fancy Bear is the GRU" has been made and is probably fairly solid, the attribution of NSA
malware and CIA malware is rock solid; the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET --
Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on
Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully
said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA
wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ]
It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US
has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being
prepared for cyberwar. I tend to be extremely skeptical of US claims because: bomber gap,
missile gap, gulf of Tonkin, Iraq WMD, Afghanistan, Libya and every other aggressive attack by
the US which was blamed on its target. The reason I assume the US is the most aggressive actor
in cyberspace is because the US has done a terrible job of protecting its tool-sets and
operational security: it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the
NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools.
Meanwhile, where are the leaks of Russian and Chinese tools? They have been few and far
between, if there have been any at all. Does this mean that the Russians and Chinese have
amazingly superior tradecraft, if not tools? I don't know. My observation is that the NSA
and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing
to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA
and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese?
The article does not have great depth to its understanding of the situation, I'm afraid. So
it comes off as a bit heavy on the recent news while ignoring the long-term trends. For
example:
The allegations of Chinese supply chain attacks are of course just as hypocritical as the
allegations against Russia. The very first know case of computer related supply chain
manipulation goes
back to 1982 :
A CIA operation to sabotage Soviet industry by duping Moscow into stealing booby-trapped
software was spectacularly successful when it triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas
pipeline, it emerged yesterday.
I wrote a piece about the "Farewell Dossier" in 2004. [ mjr
] Re-reading it, it comes off as skeptical but waffly. I think that it's self-promotion by the
CIA and exaggerates considerably ("look how clever we are!") at a time when the CIA was
suffering an attention and credibility deficit after its shitshow performance under George
Tenet. But the first known cases of computer related supply chain manipulation go back to the
70s and 80s -- the NSA even compromised Crypto AG's Hagelin M-209 system (a mechanical
ciphering machine) in order to read global communications encrypted with that product. You can
imagine Crypto AG's surprise when the Iranian secret police arrested one of their sales reps
for selling backdoor'd crypto -- the NSA had never told them about the backdoor, naturally. The
CIA was also on record for producing Xerox machines destined for the USSR, which had recorders
built into them So, while the article is portraying the historical sweep of NSA dirty tricks,
they're only looking at the recent ones. Remember: the NSA also weakened the elliptic curve
crypto library in RSA's Bsafe implementation, paying RSADSI $13 million to accept their tweaked
code.
Why haven't we been hearing about the Chinese and Russians doing that sort of thing? There
are four options:
The Russians and Chinese are doing it, they're just so darned good nobody has
caught them until just recently.
The Russians and Chinese simply resort to using existing tools developed by the
hacking/cybercrime community and rely on great operational security rather than fancy
tools.
The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts
the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence
agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is
around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are
much smaller operations?
Something else.
That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's
not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel
management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other
processors have similar backdoors.
Was the Intel IME a "backdoor" or just "a bad idea"? Well, that's tricky. Let me put my
tinfoil hat on: making a backdoor look like a sloppily developed product feature would be the
competent way to write a backdoor. Making it as sneaky as the backdoor in the Via is
unnecessary -- incompetence is eminently believable.
&
(kaspersky)
I believe all of these stories (including the Supermicro) are the tip of a great big, ugly
iceberg. The intelligence community has long known that software-only solutions are too
mutable, and are easy to decompile and figure out. They have wanted to be in the BIOS of
systems -- on the motherboard -- for a long time. If you go back to 2014, we have disclosures
about the NSA malware that hides in hard drive BIOS: [
vice ] [
vice ] That appears to have been in progress around 2000/2001.
Of note, the group recovered two modules belonging to EquationDrug and GrayFish that were
used to reprogram hard drives to give the attackers persistent control over a target machine.
These modules can target practically every hard drive manufacturer and brand on the market,
including Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba, Corsair, Hitachi and more. Such attacks
have traditionally been difficult to pull off, given the risk in modifying hard drive
software, which may explain why Kaspersky could only identify a handful of very specific
targets against which the attack was used, where the risk was worth the reward.
But
Equation Group's malware platforms have other tricks, too. GrayFish, for example, also has
the ability to install itself into computer's boot record -- software that loads even
before the operating system itself -- and stores all of its data inside a portion of
the operating system called the registry, where configuration data is normally stored.
EquationDrug was designed for use on older Windows operating systems, and "some of the
plugins were designed originally for use on Windows 95/98/ME" -- versions of Windows so old
that they offer a good indication of the Equation Group's age.
This is not a very good example of how to establish a "malware gap" since it just makes the
NSA look like they are incapable of keeping a secret. If you want an idea how bad it is,
Kaspersky labs' analysis of the NSA's toolchain is a good example of how to do attribution
correctly. Unfortunately for the US agenda, that solid attribution points toward Fort Meade in
Maryland. [kaspersky]
Let me be clear: I think we are fucked every which way from the start. With backdoors in the
BIOS, backdoors on the CPU, and wireless cellular-spectrum backdoors, there are probably
backdoors in the GPUs and the physical network controllers, as well. Maybe the backdoors in the
GPU come from the GRU and maybe the backdoors in the hard drives come from NSA, but who cares?
The upshot is that all of our systems are so heinously compromised that they can only be
considered marginally reliable. It is, literally, not your computer: it's theirs. They'll let
you use it so long as your information is interesting to them.
Do I believe the Chinese are capable of doing such a thing? Of course. Is the GRU? Probably.
Mossad? Sure. NSA? Well-documented attribution points toward NSA. Your computer is a free-fire
zone. It has been since the mid 1990s, when the NSA was told "no" on the Clipper chip and
decided to come up with its own Plan B, C, D, and E. Then, the CIA came up with theirs. Etc.
There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at
all.
From my 2012 RSA conference lecture "Cyberwar, you're doing it wrong."
The problem is that playing in this space is the purview of governments. Nobody in the
cybercrime or hacking world need tools like these. The intelligence operatives have huge
budgets, compared to a typical company's security budget, and it's unreasonable to expect any
business to invest such a level of effort on defending itself. So what should companies do?
They should do exactly what they are doing: expect the government to deal with it; that's what
governments are for. The problem with that strategy is that their government isn't on their
side, either! It's Hobbes' playground.
In case you think I am engaging in hyperbole, I assure you I am not. If you want another
example of the lengths (and willingness to bypass the law) "they" are willing to go, consider
'stingrays' that are in operation in every major US city and outside of every interesting hotel
and high tech park. Those devices are not passive -- they actively inject themselves into the
call set-up between your phone and your carrier -- your data goes through the stingray, or it
doesn't go at all. If there are multiple stingrays, then your latency goes through the roof.
"They" don't care. Are the stingrays NSA, FBI, CIA, Mossad, GRU, or PLA? Probably a bit of all
of the above depending on where and when.
Whenever the US gets caught with its pants down around its ankles, it blames the Chinese or
the Russians because they have done a good job of building the idea that the most serious
hackers on the planet at the Chinese. I don't believe that we're seeing complex propaganda
campaigns that are tied to specific incidents -- I think we see ongoing organic
propaganda campaigns that all serve the same end: protect the agencies, protect their budgets,
justify their existence, and downplay their incompetence.
So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been
consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order
to justify its actions and defend its budget.
The government also engages in propaganda, and is influenced by the intelligence
community's propaganda as well. And the propaganda campaigns work because everyone
involved assumes, "well, given what the NSA has been able to do, I should assume the Chinese
can do likewise." That's a perfectly reasonable assumption and I think it's probably true that
the Chinese have capabilities. The situation is what Chuck Spinney calls "A self-licking ice
cream cone" -- it's a justifying structure that makes participation in endless aggression seem
like a sensible thing to do. And, when there's inevitably a disaster, it's going to be like a
cyber-9/11 and will serve as a justification for even more unrestrained aggression.
Want to see what it looks like? A thousand thanks to Commentariat member [redacted] for this
link. If you don't like video, there's an article here. [ toms ]
Is this an NSA backdoor, or normal incompetence? Is Intel Management Engine an NSA-inspired
backdoor, or did some system engineers at Intel think that was a good idea? There are other
scary indications of embedded compromise: the CIA's Vault7 archive included code that appeared
to be intended to embed in the firmware of "smart" flatscreen TVs. That would make every LG
flat panel in every hotel room, a listening device just waiting to be turned on.
We know the Chinese didn't do that particular bug but why wouldn't they do
something similar, in something else? China is the world's oldest mature culture -- they
literally wrote the book on strategy -- Americans acting as though it's a great
surprise to learn that the Chinese are not stupid, it's just the parochialism of a 250 year-old
culture looking at a 3,000 year-old culture and saying "wow, you guys haven't been asleep at
the switch after all!"
What little I've been able to find out the new
Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive
retribution against (perceived) foes.
Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of
same.
Pierce R. Butler@#1: What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that
it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes.
Yes. Since 2001, as far as most of us can tell, federal cybersecurity spend has been 80%
offense, 20% defense. And a lot of the offensive spend has been aimed at We, The
People.
Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think
that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese
hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick
style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead
old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running
troll farms on social media). I mean, I've seen interviews with retired US intelligence
people since the 90s complain that since the late 1980s, the intelligence agencies have
been crippled by management in love with hi-tech "SIGINT" solutions to problems that never
deliver and neglecting old-fashioned "HUMINT" intelligence-gathering.
The thing is, Kevin Mitnick got away with a lot of what he did because people didn't
take security seriously then, and still don't. On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember
reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of the researchers who helped in the analysis of
the Morris worm
that took down a significant chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a
year or so afterwards and some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it
still hadn't patched the holes that had let the worm infect them in the first
place.
Cat Mara@#3: Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think
that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese
hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick
style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead
old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running
troll farms on social media).
I think that's right, to a high degree. What if Edward Snowden was an agent provocateur
instead of a well-meaning naive kid? A tremendous amount of damage could be done, as well
as stealing the US' expensive toys. The Russians have been very good at doing exactly that
sort of operation, since WWII. The Chinese are, if anything, more subtle than the
Russians.
The Chinese attitude, as expressed to me by someone who might be a credible source is,
"why are you picking a fight with us? We don't care, you're too far away for us to threaten
you, we both have loads of our own fish to fry. To them, the US is young, hyperactive, and
stupid.
The FBI is not competent, at all, against old-school humint intelligence-gathering.
Compared to the US' cyber-toys, the old ways are probably more efficient and cost
effective. China's intelligence community is also much more team-oriented than the CIA/NSA;
they're actually a disciplined operation under the strategic control of policy-makers.
That, by the way, is why Russians and Chinese stare in amazement when Americans ask things
like "Do you think Putin knew about this?" What a stupid question! It's an autocracy; they
don't have intelligence operatives just going an deciding "it's a nice day to go to England
with some Novichok." The entire American attitude toward espionage lacks maturity.
On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of
the researchers who helped in the analysis of the Morris worm that took down a significant
chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a year or so afterwards and
some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it still hadn't patched the
holes that had let the worm infect them in the first place.
That as an exciting time. We were downstream from University of Maryland, which got hit
pretty badly. Pete Cottrel and Chris Torek from UMD were also in on Bostic's dissection. We
were doing uucp over TCP for our email (that changed pretty soon after the worm) and our
uucp queue blew up. I cured the worm with a reboot into single-user mode and a quick 'rm
-f' in the uucp queue.
Thanks. I appreciate your measured analysis and the making explicit of the bottom line:
" agencies, protect their budgets, justify their existence, and downplay their
incompetence."
"Also do not forget that all invisible stuff that US army had during the Clinton/HRC era,
were easily visible. F-117 in Serbia,"
See: Comment #43: (very detailed, links to open source US mil docs)
"The idea of 'stealth' aircraft is in fact mostly a gimmick designed to enrich the
military contractors it doesn't actually work very well at all, as proved in 1999 when the
Serb air defense, using ancient Soviet surface to air missiles of 1950s vintage, shot down
the USAF F117 aircraft and damaged another that was then written off, and therefore counts as
a kill "
Thanks for that link. That's an essay in itself, and I'm still reading it. Fascinating and
valuable background on stealth.
First takeaway for me is that the Russians invented stealth but considered it
impracticable at the time. The US designers took the Russian equations and ran with them,
throwing out many other considerations of plane-worthiness in order to promote this dud of a
magic bullet.
As b wrote in Moon of Alabama blog: "The anti-Kavanaugh strategy by the Democratic Party leadership was an utter
failure. They could have emphasized his role in the Patriot Act, the Bush torture regime and his earlier lies to Congress to
disqualify him. Instead they used the fake
grievance culture
against him which allowed Trump to do what he does best - wield victimhood
(vid, recommended).
Notable quotes:
"... The Democrats and their feminist allies failed the country in their approach to the Kavanaugh hearing. Instead of finding out whether Kavanaugh believes in the unitary executive theory that the president has powers unaccountable to Congress and the Judiciary and agrees that a Justice Department underling, a Korean immigrant, can write secret memos that permit the president to violate the US Constitution, US statutory law, and international treaties, the Democrats' entire focus was on a vague and unsubstantiated accusation that Kavanaugh when 17 years old and under the influence of alcohol tussled fully clothed with a fully clothed 15 year old girl in a bed at an unchaperoned house party. ..."
"... Feminists turned this vague accusation missing in crucial details into "rape," with a crazed feminist Georgetown University professor declaring Kavanaugh to be "a serial rapist" who along with the Senate Judiciary Committee's male members should be given agonizing deaths and then castrated and fed to swine. ..."
"... A presstitute at USA Today suggested that Kavanaugh was a pedophile and should not be allowed to coach his daughter's sports team. On the basis of nothing real, a Supreme Court nominee's reputation was squandered. ..."
The Democrats and their feminist allies failed the country in their approach to the
Kavanaugh hearing. Instead of finding out whether Kavanaugh believes in the unitary executive
theory that the president has powers unaccountable to Congress and the Judiciary and agrees
that a Justice Department underling, a Korean immigrant, can write secret memos that permit the
president to violate the US Constitution, US statutory law, and international treaties, the
Democrats' entire focus was on a vague and unsubstantiated accusation that Kavanaugh when 17
years old and under the influence of alcohol tussled fully clothed with a fully clothed 15 year
old girl in a bed at an unchaperoned house party.
Feminists turned this vague accusation missing in crucial details into "rape," with a
crazed feminist Georgetown University professor declaring Kavanaugh to be "a serial rapist" who
along with the Senate Judiciary Committee's male members should be given agonizing deaths and
then castrated and fed to swine.
A presstitute at USA Today suggested that Kavanaugh was a pedophile and should not be
allowed to coach his daughter's sports team. On the basis of nothing real, a Supreme Court
nominee's reputation was squandered.
There are important issues before the United States having to do with the very soul of the
country. They involve constitutional and separation of powers constraints on executive branch
powers and the protection of US civil liberty. Important books, such as Charlie Savage's
Takeover have been written about the Cheney-Bush successful assault on the principle
that the president is accountable under law. Can the executive branch torture despite domestic
and international laws against torture? Can the executive branch spy on citizens without
warrants and cause, despite laws and constitutional prohibitions to the contrary? Can the
executive branch detain citizens indefinitely despite habeas corpus, despite the US
Constitution's prohibition? Can the executive branch kill US citizens without due process of
law, despite the US Constitution's prohibition? Dick Cheney and University of California law
professor John Yoo say "yes the president can."
Instead of using the opportunity to find out if Kavanaugh stood for liberty or unbridled
presidential power, feminist harpies indulged in an orgy of man-hate.
And it wasn't just the RadFem harpies. It was the entire liberal/progresive/left which has
discredited itself even more than the crazed feminist Georgetown University professor, who, by
the way, unlike what would have been required of a heterosexual male, did not have to apologize
and was not fired as a male would have been.
There is now a "funding platform" endorsed by liberal/progressive/left websites that claims
to have raised $3 million to unseat Senator Susan Collins for voting, after hearing all the
scant evidence, to confirm Kavanaugh. Websites such as Commondreams, CounterPunch, OpEdNews are
losing their credibility as they mire themselves in divisive Identity Politics in which
everyone is innocent except the white heterosexual male. Precisely at the time when Trump's
capture by the Zionist neoconservative warmongers needs protests and opposition as the US is
being driven to war with Iran, Russia, and China, there is no opposition as the United States
dissolves into the hatreds spawned by Identity Politics.
To see how absurd the RadFem/liberal/progressive/left is, let's assume that the vague,
unsubstantiated accusation that is 30 to 40 years late against Kavanaugh is true. Let's assume
that the encounter of bed tussling occurred. If rape was the intention, why wasn't she raped? I
suggest a likely scenario. There is an unchaperoned house party. Alcohol is present. The
accuser admits to drinking beer with boys in a house with access to bedrooms. The accused
assumes, which would have been a normal assumption in the 1980s, that the girl is available.
Otherwise, why is she there? So he tries her, and she is not. So he gives up and lets her go.
How is this a serious sexual offense?
Even if the accused had persisted and raped his accuser, how does this crime compare to the
enormous extraordinary horrific crimes against humanity resulting in the destruction in whole
or part of eight countries and millions of human beings during the Clinton, Cheney-Bush, Obama,
and Trump regimes?
There has been no accountability for these obvious and undeniable crimes. Why are not
feminists and presidents of Catholic Universities such as Georgetown and Catholic University in
Washington, and the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the US media, and
the liberal/progressive/left websites concerned about real crimes instead of make-believe ones?
What has happened to our country that nothing that really matters ever becomes part of public
notice?
US administrations have not only murdered, maimed, orphaned, and dislocated millions of
totally innocent human beings, but also the evil and corrupt US government, protected by the
presstitute media, which is devoid of character and integrity, has tortured in violation of
United States law hundreds of innocents sold to it under the US bounty system in Afghanistan,
when the Cheney-Bush regime desperately needed "terrorists" to justify its war based on nothing
but its lies.
All sorts of totally innocent people were tortured by sadistic US government personnel who
delighted in making people under their power suffer. These were unprotected people picked up by
war lords in response to Washington's offer of a bounty for "terrorists" and sold to the
Americans. The victims included aid workers, traveling salesmen, unprotected visitors, and
others who lacked protection from being misrepresented as "terrorists" in order to be sold for
$5,000 so that Dick Cheney and the criminal Zionist neocons would have some "terrorists" to
show to justify their war crime.
ORDER IT NOW
The utterly corrupt US media was very reticent about telling Americans that close to 100% of
the "world's most dangerous terrorists," in the words of the criminal US Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, were released as innocent of all
The official story, says the expert, is "stupidity on stupidity."
I agree with him.
The question is: Why did the British government think that they could get away with such an
obvious hoax? The answer is that the people in Western countries don't know anything about
anything. They live in a world in which their reality is a product of the propaganda fed to
them by "news organizations" and Hollywood movies. They only receive controlled explanations.
Therefore, they know nothing about how anything really functions. Read the account by the
Israeli expert to understand the vast difference between the British government's hoax and the
reality of how an assassination is conducted.
The Israeli expert got me to wondering why the British government thought anyone would fall
for such a transparently false story. Having just read David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth
Woodworth's new book, 9/11 Unmasked , and David Ray Griffin's 2017 book, Bush and
Cheney: How They Runed America and the World , the answer became obvious. The British
government had watched the idiot Western populations fall for the official 9/11 conspiracy
story in which a few Saudi Arabians, who could not fly airplanes and without the support of any
intelligence agency, caused the entire security apparatus ot the United States to fail utterly,
and no one was held responsible for the total failure. The British government concluded that
anyone who could possibly believe such an obviously false story would believe anything.
I remember coming to that conclusion years ago before the official conspiracy theory in the
9/11 Commission Report was blown to pieces by thousands of scientists, structural engineers,
high-rise architects, military and civilian pilots, first responders on the scene, and a large
number of former high government officials both in the US and abroad.
At first I did not connect the zionist neoconservatives' plot, outlined in their public
writings (for example, Norman Podhorttz in Commentary ) to destroy 7 Middle Eastern
countries in five years (also described by General Wesley Clark) and their statement that they
needed a "new Pearl Harbor" to implement their plan, with the attack on the World Trade Center.
But as I watched the twin towers blow up floor by floor it was completely obvious that these
were not builldings falling down due to asymetrical structural damage and limited, low
temperature office fires that probably did not even warm the massive steel structure to the
point of being warm to the touch. When you watch the videos you see buildings blowing up. It is
as clear as day. You see each floor blow. You see steel beams and other debris fly out the
sides as projectiles. It is amazing that any human is so completely stupid as to think what he
is seeing with his own eyes are buildings falling down from structural damage. But it required
many years before half of the American people realized that the official account was pure
bullshit.
Today polls indicate that a majority of people do not believe the official 9/11 propaganda
any more than they believe the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy, the alleged Gulf of Tonkin attack, or the report from Admiral McCain (father of
John) erasing Israel's responsibility for the destruction of the USS Liberty and its crew
during LBJ's administration, or that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or Iran
had nukes, or the many lies about about Syria, Libya's Gaddafi, or Somalia, or Yemen, or the
"Russian invasion of Georgia," the "Russian invasion of Ukraine." But at each time the idiot
population, no matter how many times they had learned that the governments lied to them
initially believed the next lie, thereby permitting the lie to become fact. Thus, the idiot
Western populations created their own world of controlled explanations.
Only a deranged person could believe anything any Western government says. But the Western
world has a huge number of deranged people. There are plenty of them to validate the next
official lie. The ignorant fools make it possible for Western governments to continue their
policy of lies that are driving the world to extinction in a war with Russia and China.
Perhaps I am being too hard on the insouciant Western populations. Ron Unz is no moron. Yet
he accepted the transparently false 9/11 story until he started to pay attention. Once he paid
attention, he realized it was false. http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-911-conspiracy-theories/
Like myself, Ron Unz has noticed that the 9/11 Truth movement has succeeded in totally
discrediting the official 9/11 story. But the unanswered question remains: Who did it?
Unz says it was Israel, not Bush & Cheney. This is also the position of Christopher
Bollyn. It seems certain that Israel was involved. We have the fact of the Mossad agents caught
celebrating as they filmed the collalpse of the WTC towers. Obviously, they knew in advance and
were set up ready to film. Later they were shown on Israeli TV where they stated that they had
been sent to film the destruction of the buildings.
We also have the fact of the large profits made by someone that the US government continues
to protect on shorting the stock of the airlines, the planes of which were allegely
hijacked.
In other words, the 9/11 attack was known in advance, as was the destruction of WTC building
7 as evidenced by the BBC reporter standing in front of the still standing building accouncing
its destruction about a half hour before it occurred.
Unz and Bollyn's case against Israel is powerful. I agree with Unz that George W. Bush was
not part of the plot. If he had been, he would have been on the scene directing America's
heroic response to the first, and only, terrorist attack on America. lnstead, Bush was moved
out of the way, and kept out of the way, while Cheney handled the situation.
I understand what Unz is doing by focusing attention on the main beneficiary of the hoax
9/11 story. However Cheney and his corporation, Halliburton, also benefitted. Halliburton
received large municifient US government contracts for services in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Cheney, as David Ray Griffen proves, achieved his aim of elevating the executive branch above
the US Constitution and statutory US law.
Moreover, it was impossible for Mossad to pull off such an attack without high level support
in the US government. Only a US official could have ordered the numerous simulations of the
attack underway in order to confuse the air traffic controllers and the US Air Force.
I understand what Unz is doing by focusing attention on the main beneficiary of the hoax
9/11 story. However Cheney and his corporation, Halliburton, also benefitted. Halliburton
received large municifient US government contracts for services in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Cheney, as David Ray Griffen proves, achieved his aim of elevating the executive branch above
the US Constitution and statutory US law.
Moreover, it was impossible for Mossad to pull off such an attack without high level support
in the US government. Only a US official could have ordered the numerous simulations of the
attack underway in order to confuse the air traffic controllers and the US Air Force.
The Israeli government could not have ordered the destruction of the crime scene, opposed by
the New York fire marshall as a felony. This required US government authority. The steel beams,
which showed all sorts of distortions that could only have been caused by nano-thermite were
quickly sent to Asia for reprocessing. The intense fires and molten rubble in the buildings'
remains six weeks after their collapse never received an official explanation. To this day, no
one has explained how low-temperature, smothered office fires that burned for one hour or less
melted or weakened massive steel beams and produced molten steel six weeks afterward.
Unz is correct that Israel made out like a bandit. Israel as a result of 9/11 got rid of
half of the constraints on its expansion. Only Syria and Iran remain, and the Trump regime is
pushing hard for Israel, even against Russia, a government that at its will can completely
destroy the United States and Israel, something that much of the world wishes would happen.
Unz is correct that right now the totally evil and corrupt US and Israeli governments have
the entire world on the path to extinction. However, he omits American responsibility, that of
the evil Dick Cheney, the Zionist neconservatives who are Israel's Fifth Column in America, and
the utter insouciance of the American people who do not show enough intelligence or awareness
to warrant their survival.
"... Like with a fantasy novel, the reader gets all the thrills of an epic battle while being certain that the evil empires will never triumph. An attractive form of propaganda, to be certain. ..."
IMO the US Government's propaganda is structured to along the lines of a fantasy novel. The propaganda is designed to convince
the public of two inherently contradictory ideas:
1) that the country is surrounded on vast sides by vast hostile empires that threaten everything we hold dear and
2) despite these dire threats, the country cannot really be harmed because of "our freedoms."
Like with a fantasy novel, the reader gets all the thrills of an epic battle while being certain that the evil empires
will never triumph. An attractive form of propaganda, to be certain.
IMO the US Government's propaganda is structured to along the lines of a fantasy novel.
Posted by: Timothy Hagios | Oct 5, 2018 8:52:41 AM | 1
Whatever is alleged by the US, UK, Netherlands, France et al, if you point in the opposite direction it will probably do. They
falsely accuse others of whatever they in fact do themselves.
Enrico Malatesta | Oct 5, 2018 10:28:08 AM | 7
@Timothy Hagios | Oct 5, 2018 8:52:41 AM | 1
Think I've read it - "Orange Storm Rising" by Clancy Bear
An element of the Skripal poisoning saga in Britain (the Novichok) was lifted from the TV
series "Strikeback" screening in the country in November 2017 and February 2018. I have seen
something on the Internet (but can't find the link) that said the subplot with the abandoned
perfume bottle that contained poison was also taken from a TV show.
Prepare to be unsurprised then when the people who write propaganda for The Powers That
Should Not Be turn out to be the same people who write scripts for Hollywood films and TV
shows. A lot of these people also write novels or teach creative writing courses.
We really do seem to be living in a society where mythology and fantasy are becoming more
prominent than facts and analysis in decision-making.
Given the credible evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election,
it's only natural that Americans are concerned about the possibility of further foreign interference, especially
as the midterms draw closer.
But I worry that we're focusing too much on the foreign part of the problem -- in
which social media accounts and pages controlled by overseas "troll factories" post false and divisive material --
and not enough on how our own domestic political polarization feeds into the basic business model of companies
like Facebook and YouTube.
It's this interaction -- both aspects of which are homegrown -- that fosters the
dissemination of false and divisive material, and this will persist as a major problem even in the absence of
concerted foreign efforts.
Consider some telling exchanges from this year's Senate hearings involving
high-level executives from Facebook and Twitter. (Google, which owns YouTube, didn't bother sending a comparable
representative.) In April, Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, pressed Facebook's chief executive, Mark
Zuckerberg, on how much money the company had made by ads placed by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll
factory. Mr. Zuckerberg replied that it was about $100,000 -- a negligible amount of money for the company.
Advertisement
Last month, Ms. Harris further grilled Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating
officer, on this point, demanding to know how much inauthentic Russian content was on Facebook. Ms. Sandberg had
her sound bite ready, saying that "any amount is too much," but she ultimately threw out an estimate of .004
percent, another negligible amount.
The exchange made for good viewing: a senator asking tough questions, chastised
executives being forced to put exact numbers on the table. But the truth is that paid Russian content
was
almost certainly immaterial to Facebook's revenue -- and the .004 percent
figure, though almost certainly rhetorical, does capture the relative insignificance of the paid Russian presence
on Facebook.
Contrast this, however, with another question from Ms. Harris, in which she asked
Ms. Sandberg how Facebook can "reconcile an incentive to create and increase your user engagement when the content
that generates a lot of engagement is often inflammatory and hateful."
That
astute
question Ms. Sandberg completely sidestepped, which was no surprise:
No statistic can paper over the fact that this is a real problem.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have business models that thrive on the outrageous,
the incendiary and the eye-catching, because such content generates "engagement" and captures our attention, which
the platforms then sell to advertisers, paired with extensive data on users that allow advertisers (and
propagandists) to "microtarget" us at an individual level.
Traditional media outlets, of course, are frequently also cynical manipulators of
sensationalistic content, but social media is better able to weaponize it. Algorithms can measure what content
best "engages" each user and can target him or her individually in a way that the sleaziest editor of a broadcast
medium could only dream of.
... ... ...
It is understandable that legislators and the public are concerned about other
countries meddling in our elections. But foreign meddling is to our politics what a fever is to tuberculosis: a
mere symptom of a deeper problem. To heal, we need the correct diagnosis followed by action that treats the
underlying diseases. The closer our legislators look at our own domestic politics as well as Silicon Valley's
business model, the better the answers they will find.
Zeynep Tufekci
(@zeynep)
is an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina,
the author of "Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest" and a contributing opinion
writer.
That the USSR was an existential threat to Western capitalism and colonialism and war
– of one kind or another – between these two camps was logical and inevitable. But
the Soviet Union is 30 years dead.
Indeed, Gordievsky through Macintyre can – if he's telling the truth – claim
that he helped bring about the (brief) end of history and the "final" victory. His claimed role
in the rise and rise of Gorbachev's relationship with Mrs Thatcher and, by extension, President
Reagan certainly hastened the downfall of the USSR.
But Britain recruited Skripal in 1996 when not only was the Soviet Union dead but Russia was
ruled by the West's performing bear Boris Yeltsin. And during his presidency, Russia was
passed-out on the floor with everyone picking its pockets.
Why was Britain still fighting the Cold War against Russia in 1996, and why is it still
fighting the Cold War against Russia now?
Just this week, the rather effete British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson – a
former fireplace salesman –
said he was sending 800 shivering British soldiers to the Arctic to be ready to fight
Russia there. Amidst the snow. And the ice.
As both Napoleon and Hitler must have said: " What could possibly go wrong? "
White people who voted for Trump for his Supreme Court list have been duped so many times.
First, when Trump promised us "America First!" Voters, apparently content to trust mere
words, have ignored Trump's apparent definition of "America First!" as "America has the right
to antagonize Iran and Russia, and launch pointless attacks upon Syria." Second, when Trump
added Kavanaugh's name to a list of judges after he had gotten into office. Third, when Trump
negotiated with scum Anthony Kennedy, who obviously demanded a Kavanaugh nomination in
exchange for his retirement.
Christine Ford is, quite frankly, a distraction from the real intrigue: how Donald Trump
motivated his base to support a candidate from the elitist wing.
But good luck finding conservatives with the balls to publicly point out the truth: the
President we elected has stabbed us in the back with an establishment nomination.
Both sides seem to be interested in the truth , only in so far as it serves their
respective political agenda's. Nothing more.
I was not particularly impressed with the testimony from either Judge Kavanaugh or Dr.
Ford.
I thought the Judge was too angry , whining, and evasive, when he could have been much
more precise and pointed in his responses. I was not a big fan of the "calendar"story (true
or not) nor his responses to an FBI investigation.
Unfortunately, scientific research negates the notion that forgotten memories exist
somewhere in the brain and can be accessed in pristine form.
Granted, we don't know whether She Who Must Never Be Questioned recovered the
Judge-Kavanaugh memory in therapy. That's because, well, she must never be questioned.
Questioning the left's latest sacred cow is forbidden. Bovine
Republicans blindly obey.
I happened to have covered and thoroughly researched the "recovered
memory ruse," in 1999. Contrary to the trend, one of my own heroes is not Christine
Blah-Blah Ford, but a leading world authority on memory, Elizabeth Loftus.
Professor Loftus, who straddles two professorships -- one in law, the other in psychology --
had come to Vancouver, British Columbia, to testify on behalf of a dedicated Richmond educator,
a good man, who had endured three trials, the loss of a career and financial ruin because of
the Crown's attempts to convict him of sexual assault based on memories recovered in
therapy.
I attended. I was awed.
Over decades of research, Loftus has planted many a false memory in the minds of her
research subjects, sometimes with the aid of nothing more than a conversation peppered with
some suggestions.
"A tone of voice, a phrasing of a question, subtle non-verbal signals, and expressions of
boredom, impatience or fascination" -- these are often all it takes to plant suggestions in the
malleable human mind.
Loftus does not question the prevalence of the sexual abuse of children or the existence of
traumatic memories. What she questions are memories commonly referred to as repressed:
"Memories that did not exist until someone went looking for them."
Suffice it to say, that the memory recovery process is a therapeutic confidence trick that
has wreaked havoc in thousands of lives.
Moreover, repression, the sagging concept that props up the recovered memory theory is
without any cogent scientific support. The 30-odd studies the recovery movement uses as proof
for repression do not make the grade. These studies are retrospective memory studies which rely
on self-reports with no independent, factual corroboration of information.
Sound familiar? Dr. Ford (and her hippocampus), anyone?
Even in the absence of outside influence, memory deteriorates rapidly. "As time goes by,"
writes Loftus in her seminal book, "The Myth of Repressed Memories," "the weakened memories are
increasingly vulnerable to post-event information."
What we see on TV, read and hear about events is incorporated into memory to create an
unreliable amalgam of fact and fiction.
After an extensive investigation, the British Royal College of Psychiatrists issued a ban
prohibiting its members from using any method to recover memories of child abuse. Memory
retrieval techniques, say the British guidelines, are dangerous methods of persuasion.
"Recovered memories," inveighed Alan Gold, then president of the Canadian Criminal Lawyers
Association, "are joining electroshock, lobotomies and other psychiatric malpractice in the
historical dustbin."
Not that you'd know it from the current climate of sexual hysteria, but the courts in the
U.S. had responded as well by ruling to suppress the admission of all evidence remembered under
therapy.
Altogether it seems as clear in 2018, as it was in 1999 :
Memories that have been excavated during therapy have no place in a court of law. Or, for that
matter, in a Senate Committee that shapes the very same justice system.
It is idiotic to write a piece talking about recovered memories in this context.
Agree: Mercer's approach to Ford's hippocampus is idiotic.
Also appears to be neurologically off-base; there's a much stronger refutation to
Perfesser Ford's dazzling psychological explanation: alcohol wreaks havoc on the hippocampus
–
She can't remember the house she was in or how she got there/got home because her
hippocampus was suffering alcohol poisoning.
She did poorly in subsequent high school and in early years in college because her
hippocampus was pickled.
Alcohol, Memory, and the Hippocampus
[In adolescents] . . . cognitive processes are exquisitely sensitive to the effects of
chemicals such as alcohol. Among the most serious problems is the disruption of memory, or
the ability to recall information that was previously learned. When a person drinks
alcohol, (s)he can have a "blackout."
A blackout can involve a small memory disruption, like forgetting someone's name, or it can
be more serious -- the person might not be able to remember key details of an event that
happened while drinking. An inability to remember the entire event is common when a person
drinks 5 or more drinks in a single sitting ("binge").
. . . The ability of alcohol to cause short term memory problems and blackouts is due to
its effects on an area of the brain called the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a structure
that is vital to learning and the formation of memory.
-- -
Mercer's assessment seems to have been skewed in order to promote Mercer's 1999 work on
the Loftus case...
The whole hippocampus explanation made her sound like she's been talking to a therapist, but
then she herself is a psychologist so she probably doesn't need a therapist to help her
'recover' that memory.
I think the key thing here are the witnesses. None recalled such a party ever taking
place. Her best friend said not only did she not remember the party, but she had never met
Kavanaugh. If she had been ditched by Ford that night and was left in a house with 2
potential rapists, don't you think she'd remember and talked it over with her the next day?
That just made her story fall apart.
Interesting photographic choice for such an article. Trial, whether in a court of law, or
merely in terms of destroying someone's life in the media, cannot be about what someone
believes, or can be made to believe, but must be about what the evidence can reveal to be
true. Where, when and why did we ever lose sight of that?
The Dems (dims) wouldn't dare attack the criminal Kavanaugh on the actual facts because it
would implicate their goddess Hillary. There are no clean hands at the worm farm at DC, that
just doesn't happen.
@renfro
Garbage! Who cares what you remember, or do not remember.
Main thing here is that she remembered to the rest of her life to be careful about the
water.
And also Miss Ford (If she did not lie) must have noticed the house that she would not go
into that house ever,
Let's not forget the "false memory" debacles of the 1990s with the McMartin preschool and
Wenatchee Washington preschool cases where innocent people were convicted of crimes that they
could not have possible committed.
In the McMartin case, the problem was overzealous parents who believed their childrens'
fantasies, and got overzealous "child protective services" caseworkers involved. Questionable
tactics to elicit "correct" responses from the children were used. Rewards, such as ice cream
were used when the children gave the "correct" response. The children were badgered by these
"professionals" until the proper answers were given. Many innocent peoples' lives were ruined
as a result.
The Wenatchee debacle was fueled by a rogue detective, who saw child abuse under every rock
and was determined to get convictions, the truth be damned.
The same tactics as in the McMartin case were used to elicit the correct responses from the
children.
In both cases, the mantra that "children cannot lie" was used, along with tactics that would
be unacceptable today (but are still being used).
After a long conversation last night with drunken friends, me being the sober one of course,
I had only one beer cuz I'm a good girl, but I can't recall what was said or how many of us
were in the room. Wait, oh yeah.
We all decided that the seeming wussy response by Republicans was a strategy. Weren't they
all also being accused? If Grassley hadn't bent over backwards to accommodate Ford and her
increasingly violent democrat extremist enablers and all of their ethically challenged dumb
followers, they would have appeared uncaring. They gave the Feinstein and Ford crowds serious
consideration – no one can truthfully say otherwise.
There really isn't much one can say about a woman, or a man, who claimed they were
assaulted or abused. Proper respect must be given and investigations must be made. We all
know Ford is a liar now. Almost any real victim of sexual assault can recall the details of
the assault.
I think Republicans played it right all along. If she was not deceptive, it would have
come out.
The whole affair was the same as watching Justice Channel homicide detectives patiently
wait for their prime suspect to speak until she slipped up and incriminated herself. No dna
test for Ford though. In fact, no evidence at all. In the end, she proved herself incredible
and all of her apoplectic supporters went off the rails and are making things worse for real
victims of sexual abuse.
The little girl act made Ford look insane.
Now, the unfunniest comedian in the world, Amy Shumer, who, let's face it, only got fame
due to her Uncle Chuck, is rallying the rest of the moonbats, reactionaries, and liars, aka
Democrat nutcases to rally and resist. Resist. Bunch of clowns think they have something to
resist rather than working to rebuild a party and find solutions to their problems. Hopefully
the democrat party will splinter apart and crawl away like the worms they are.
Anyone on the fence about Trump has now almost definitely jump to one side or the other.
Elections will show most people will deny democrats their ambition to destroy what's left of
the Republic.
The 'recovered memory' witch trials back then ruined many lives. The hysteria featured a wide
cast of characters including reckless and totally irresponsible 'therapists' who, for
whatever weird reason pushed gullible customers into believing these false induced illusions,
the troubled women (all women?Why?) who went on to make false accusations and all the true
believers in the form of prosecutors, police, judges and members of the public who accepted
this lunacy. Loftus deserves credit for having been one of the few people willing to stand up
and take the heat, going against this wave of hysteria. Seems like the US always has had
these bubbles of hysteria and panic since the days of the Salem witch trials. This person
Ford has been getting all this unwarranted fawning treatment, being continually called
'Doctor' and 'Professor' which, while true, isn't the usual treatment accorded to people who
have a Phd in one of the social 'sciences' or have jobs as professors. Nobody I've ever met
with those qualifications cared to be continually addressed by title. On the one hand this
person is some empowered example to all women, an esteemed 'Doctor Professor' who jets around
the world to surf the waves at exotic locales yet claims to have some fear of lying when
called in and starts to cry when she recalls being laughed at almost four decades ago.
Looking at it briefly she leaves the impression of being just plain screwy as well as being a
person who lies a lot where lies and facts are interwoven so that one can't be sure what's
what. What a circus this is.
Vladimir Putin: What I want – and I am completely serious – is that this
nightmare about Russia's alleged interference with some election campaign in the United States
ends. I want the United States, the American elite, the US elite to calm down and clear up
their own mess and restore a certain balance of common sense and national interests, just like
in the oil market. I want the domestic political squabbles in the United States to stop ruining
Russia-US relations and adversely affecting the situation in the world.
"... I agree with Hoarsewhisperer that the elite are showing desperation but look at the sheer volume of BS they can spew out that is all over the map. ..."
"... The ... West is doubling down on Psychological Projection . Works like a charm with most peoples in the affected areas. ..."
"... A few months ago, a dozen Russian individuals were charged with cyber-crime offenses that Mueller knew would never be tested at trial b/c the charged individuals would never be extradited. However, the indictment included charges against two Russian corporations that cleverly hired American lawyers to appear on their behalf, and enter pleas of Not Guilty. ..."
"... This tactic should have set the pre-trial discovery process to begin, causing Mueller to be obliged to turn over evidence supporting the charges as well as any exculpatory information favoring the accused corporations. ..."
"... Russia has tried to negotiate with the US to avoid cyberspace being turned into another area of conflict. The US has rebuffed these requests. Likely too much money to be made by the MIC in another theater of warfare with that extortion racket called NATO and too much promise of the NSA scooping up even more data and adding it to the data already collected by the 5 eyes. ..."
"... Didn't WikiLeaks disclosed the fact that NSA can disguise any hack to look like some other actor was the culprit? All this shouting that Russia and China did these terrible deeds is to hide the fact that the west does this all the time as disclosed by WikiLeaks? And the Germans complaining? I hope they have improved security for the Chancellor's phone. Russia is a member of OPWC. Why do they have to sit out in cars in the parking lot of OPCW headquarters to hack into OPCW? Why not from the comfort of their office in the building. What is of more importance to me is an upcoming vote in the OPCW about investigation reports laying blame in the future. That will be a game changer in the false flag chemical attack be it Syria or the UK. currently reports don't lay blame. ..."
"... Going by the squealing noises coming out of the US and loyal vassals, the yanks are probably just pissed that they can't get into Russia or China's secure communications. ..."
Yesterday several NATO countries ran a concerted propaganda campaign against Russia. The
context for it was a NATO summit in which the U.S. presses for an intensified cyberwar
against NATO's preferred enemy.
On the same day another coordinated campaign targeted China. It is aimed against China's
development of computer chip manufacturing further up the value chain. Related to this is
U.S. pressure on Taiwan, a leading chip manufacturer, to cut its ties with its big
motherland.
The anti-Russian campaign is about alleged Russian spying, hacking and influence
operations. Britain and the Netherland took the lead. Britain accused Russia's military
intelligence service (GRU) of spying attempts against the Organisation for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague and Switzerland, of spying attempts against the British
Foreign Office, of influence campaigns related to European and the U.S. elections, and of
hacking the international doping agency WADA. British media willingly
helped to exaggerate the claims:
The Foreign Office attributed six specific attacks to GRU-backed hackers and identified 12
hacking group code names as fronts for the GRU – Fancy Bear, Voodoo Bear, APT28,
Sofacy, Pawnstorm, Sednit, CyberCaliphate, Cyber Berku, BlackEnergy Actors, STRONTIUM, Tsar
Team and Sandworm."
The "hacking group code names" the Guardian tries to sell to its readers do not
refer to hacking groups but to certain cyberattack methods . Once such a method is known it
can be used by any competent group and individual. Attributing such an attack is nearly
impossible. Moreover Fancybear, ATP28, Pawn Storm, Sofacy Group, Sednit and Strontium are
just different names for one and the same well known method . The other
names listed refer to old groups and tools related to criminal hackers. Blackenergy
has been used by cybercriminals since 2007. It is alleged that a pro-Russian group named
Sandworm used it in Ukraine, but the evidence for that is dubious at best. To throw out such
a list of code names without any differentiation reeks of a Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt (FUD)
campaign designed to dis-inform and scare the public.
The Netherland for its part released
a flurry
of information about the alleged spying attempts against the OPCW in The Hague. It claims
that four GRU agents traveled to The Hague on official Russian diplomatic passports to sniff
out the WiFi network of the OPCW. (WiFi networks are notoriously easy to hack. If the OPCW is
indeed using such it should not be trusted with any security relevant issues.) The Russian
officials were allegedly very secretive, even cleaning out their own hotel trash, while they,
at the same, time carried laptops with private data and even taxi receipts showing their
travel from a GRU headquarter in Moscow to the airport. Like in the Skripal/Novichok saga the
Russian spies are, at the same time, portrayed as supervillains and hapless amateurs. Real
spies are neither.
The anti-Russian campaign came just in time for yesterday's NATO Defense Minister
meeting at which the U.S. 'offered'
to use its malicious cyber tools under NATO disguise:
Katie Wheelbarger, the principal deputy assistant defense secretary for international
security affairs, said the U.S. is committing to use offensive and defensive cyber
operations for NATO allies, but America will maintain control over its own personnel and
capabilities.
If the European NATO allies, under pressure of the propaganda onslaught, agree to that,
the obvious results will be more U.S. control over its allies' networks and citizens as well
as more threats against Russia:
NATO's chief vowed on Thursday to strengthen the alliance's defenses against attacks on
computer networks that Britain said are directed by Russian military intelligence, also
calling on Russia to stop its "reckless" behavior.
International organizations like the OPCW have long been the target of U.S. spies and
operations. The U.S. National Security Service (NSA) regularly hacked the OPCW since at
least September 2000 :
According to last week's Shadow Brokers leak, the NSA compromised a DNS server of the
Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in September 2000, two
years after the Iraq Liberation Act and Operation Desert Fox, but before the Bush election.
It was the U.S. which in 2002 forced
out the head of the OPCW because he did not agree to propagandizing imaginary Iraqi
chemical weapons:
José M. Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat who was unanimously re-elected last year as
the director general of the 145-nation Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons, was voted out of office today after refusing repeated demands by the United States
that he step down because of his "management style." No successor has been selected.
The U.S. arranged the vote against Bustani by threatening to leave the OPCW. Day's earlier
'Yosemite Sam' John Bolton, now Trump's National Security Advisor, threatened to hurt José
Bustani's children to press him to resign:
"I got a phone call from John Bolton – it was first time I had contact with him
– and he said he had instructions to tell me that I have to resign from the
organization, and I asked him why," Bustani told RT. "He said that [my] management style
was not agreeable to Washington."
...
Bustani said he "owed nothing" to the US, pointing out that he was appointed by all OPCW
member states. Striking a more sinister tone, Bolton said: "OK, so there will be
retaliation. Prepare to accept the consequences. We know where your kids are. "
According to Bustani, two of his children were in New York at the time, and his daughter
was in London.
Russia's government will need decades of hard work to reach the scale of U.S./UK
hypocrisy, hacking and lying.
The propaganda rush against Russia came on the same day as a similar campaign was launched
against China. A well timed Bloomberg story, which had been in the works for over a
year, claimed that Chinese companies manipulated hardware they manufactured for the U.S.
company SuperMicro. The hardware was then sold to Apple, Amazon and others for their cloud
server businesses.
Nested on the servers' motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger
than a grain of rice, that wasn't part of the boards' original design.
Both Apple and Amazon denied the story with very
strong
statements . The Bloomberg tale has immense problems. It is for one completely
based on anonymous sources, most of them U.S. government officials:
The companies' denials are countered by six current and former senior national security
officials, who -- in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued
under the Trump administration -- detailed the discovery of the chips and the government's
investigation.
The way the alleged manipulation is described to function is theoretical possible ,
but not plausible . In my learned opinion one would need multiple manipulations, not just
one tiny chip, to achieve the described results. Even reliably U.S. friendly cyberhawks
are
unconvinced of the story's veracity. It is especially curious that such server boards
are still in use in security relevant U.S. government operations:
Assuming the Bloomberg story is accurate, that means that the US intelligence community,
during a period spanning two administrations, saw a foreign threat and allowed that threat
to infiltrate the US military. If the story is untrue, or incorrect on its technical
merits, then it would make sense that Supermicro gear is being used by the US military.
Bloomberg reporters receive bonuses based indirectly on how much they shift markets with
their reporting. This story undoubtedly did that.
When the story came out SuperMicro's stock price crashed from
$21.40 to below $9.00 per share. It now trades at $12.60:
The story might be a cover-up for a NSA hack that was accidentally detected. Most likely
it is exaggerated half truth, based on
an old event , to deter the 'western' industry from sourcing anything from producers in
China.
This would be consistent with other such U.S. moves against China which coincidentally
(not) happened on the same day the Bloomberg story was launched.
Vice President Mike Pence accused China on Thursday of trying to undermine President Donald
Trump as the administration deploys tough new rhetoric over Chinese trade, economic and
foreign policies.
...
Sounding the alarm, Pence warned other nations to be wary of doing business with China,
condemning the Asian country's "debt diplomacy" that allows it to draw developing nations
into its orbit.
Pence also warned American businesses to be vigilant against Chinese efforts to leverage
access to their markets to modify corporate behavior to their liking.
Another move is a new Pentagon report warning against the purchase of Chinese equipment
and
launched via Reuters in support of the campaign:
China represents a "significant and growing risk" to the supply of materials vital to the
U.S. military, according to a new Pentagon-led report that seeks to mend weaknesses in core
U.S. industries vital to national security.
The nearly 150-page report, seen by Reuters on Thursday ahead of its formal release
Friday, concluded there are nearly 300 vulnerabilities that could affect critical materials
and components essential to the U.S. military.
...
"A key finding of this report is that China represents a significant and growing risk to
the supply of materials and technologies deemed strategic and critical to U.S. national
security," the report said.
The Bloomberg story, the Pence speech and the Pentagon report 'leak' on the same
day seem designed to scare everyone away from using Chinese equipment or China manufactured
parts within there supply chain.
The allegations of Chinese supply chain attacks are of course just as hypocritical as the
allegations against Russia. The very first know case of computer related supply chain
manipulation goes
back to 1982 :
A CIA operation to sabotage Soviet industry by duping Moscow into stealing booby-trapped
software was spectacularly successful when it triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas
pipeline, it emerged yesterday.
...
Mr Reed writes that the software "was programmed to reset pump speeds and valve settings to
produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds".
The U.S. government under Trump - and with John Bolton in a leading position - copied Trump's
brutal campaign style and uses it as an instrument in its foreign policy. Trump's victory in
the 2016 election proves that such campaigns are highly successful, even when the elements
they are build of are dubious or untrue. In their scale and coordination the current
campaigns are comparable to the 2002 run-up for the war on Iraq.
Then, as during the Trump election campaign and as now, the media are crucial to the
public effect these campaigns have. Will they attempt to take the stories the campaigns are
made of apart? Will they set them into the larger context of global U.S. spying and
manipulation? Will they explain the real purpose of these campaigns?
IMO the US Government's propaganda is structured to along the lines of a
fantasy novel. The propaganda is designed to convince the public of two inherently
contradictory ideas:
1) that the country is surrounded on vast sides by vast hostile empires
that threaten everything we hold dear and
2) despite these dire threats, the country cannot
really be harmed because of "our freedoms."
Like with a fantasy novel, the reader gets all
the thrills of an epic battle while being certain that the evil empires will never triumph.
An attractive form of propaganda, to be certain.
Well, so far the propaganda is having very minor effect on the ordinary people. If you read
the comment section of most of the corporate media you will see that people are just not
buying the BS.
Indifference of the ordinary people does not mean much. Just that there is such
indifference. The arguments against that claimed Chinese hardware hack are
meta-arguments.
... Got to wonder what the end game is here. WW3? Or up they expecting the Russian people to come
begging for an end to sanctions? Posted by: dh | Oct 5, 2018 11:49:07 AM | 11
Good question.
It's not WWIII. Putin has already said that if WWIII goes Nuclear, survival will be a
lottery. Imo the Christian Colonial West, hypnotised by 30 years of its own bs and busily
patting itself on the back and performing Victory Laps on the world stage, has been caught
napping (asleep at the wheel) and now needs time to ponder the downside.
Imo this latest drivel-fest stems from the fact that Russia is now/again militarily
unassailable. That doesn't mean that Russia can't be attacked but it does mean that anyone
who tries it will wish they hadn't.
And it's driving the defunct Masters Of The Universe insaner.
I agree with Hoarsewhisperer that the elite are showing desperation but look at the sheer
volume of BS they can spew out that is all over the map.
The Supreme Court justice debacle is another example of so riling up the forces around the
sex issue so that the rest of his moral standing that effects all of us is ignored.....the
sex issue is marginalized and pop goes the weasel onto the Supreme Court to bring the US
closer to feudalism.
The ... West is doubling down on Psychological Projection . Works like a charm
with most peoples in the affected areas.
Although it is practically a symptom of a deeper sitting mental illness, it is still
treated as some sort of cavalier's delinquency. Like it is to be expected that the rulers of
said West resort to this kind of projection.
The only interesting part though - one that is next to never really understood by the
gullible masses - is the Projection part of it. Because it means nothing else than the
fact that the projector is the one who is perpetrating the crimes and malevolent activities
it accuses the 'enemy'/opposing side of.
The West is mentally ill. Nothing new, the Eastern sages pointed to that a long time ago.
Very much like the Native American Indians were flabbergasted by the moronity and cruelty the
invaders displayed. The one that has adhered to my memory like fusion is: Only paleface
would set a river on fire.
Last but not least, Nazi is as Nazi does. As can be verified perusing the story of this
Nazi that never had to fear repercussions for his crimes against humanity. For the simple
reason that the U.S. protected him to gain his knowledge about advanced biological and
chemical warfare. The Nazi was Kurt Blome .
In early morning broadcasts yesterday, BBC and NPR accused China and Russia of projecting
positive images of their countries, and of acting in accordance with their national
interests.
I am so proud that my own country – USA – would never do either one of those
things!
"On the same day another coordinated campaign targeted China. It is aimed against China's development of computer chip
manufacturing further up the value chain. Related to this is U.S. pressure on Taiwan, a leading chip manufacturer, to cut
its ties with its big motherland."
Gen William Looney, first gulf war.... "If they turn on their radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs [surface-to-air
missiles]. They know we own their country. We own their airspace We dictate the way they live
and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when
there's a lot of oil out there we need. [1]"
We'r a rule based system,
Here'r the rules. We decide..... who'r terrorists, who'r 'freedom fighters. Whats a fair election, whats a farce. Whats a genocide, whats legit police action. Whats R2p, whats unprovoked aggression. Who can do biz with whom. Who's the right man for your prez. We own you. MAGA.
[1]
I dont like to use wiki but that's the only place I could retrieve this quote, they'r wiping
the net clean, even images, videos.
Better be mentally prep for the day you wake up in the morning and cant find MOA,
Back to sanctioning Russian under the flimsy pretext of Skripals' poisoning. The US has been poisoning Georgians (some died) and this is well documented. Are the UK
prudes ready to sanction the US for the crime?
"The US Embassy to Tbilisi transports frozen human blood and pathogens as diplomatic cargo
for a secret US military program. Pentagon scientists have been deployed to the Republic of
Georgia and have been given diplomatic immunity to research deadly diseases and biting
insects at the Lugar Center – the Pentagon biolaboratory in Georgia's capital
Tbilisi.
The Pentagon projects involving ticks coincided with an inexplicable outbreak of
Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) which is caused by infection through a tick-borne
virus. In 2014 34 people became infected (amongst which a 4-year old child). A total of 60
cases with 9 fatalities have been registered in Georgia since 2009."
The above is an honest journalism and not some presstituting production by the eunuchs
Luke Harding and George Monbiot. And don't forget Luke & George's comrade-in-arms, the
"phenomenal expert" Eliot Higgins (a former salesman of ladies underwear and college dropout)
who has zero training in engineering, chemistry, physics, mathematics, ballistics, foreign
languages, biology, history and basically in any field of research. Zero. This is why Higgins
is the best expert at the the ziocon Atlantic Council made of the scoundrels of the same
caliber.
"This is a man who, with his agency Bellingcat, will absolutely always back the position
of western governments, and powerful western organisations."
A few months ago, a dozen Russian individuals were charged with cyber-crime offenses that
Mueller knew would never be tested at trial b/c the charged individuals would never be
extradited. However, the indictment included charges against two Russian corporations that
cleverly hired American lawyers to appear on their behalf, and enter pleas of Not Guilty.
This tactic should have set the pre-trial discovery process to begin, causing Mueller to
be obliged to turn over evidence supporting the charges as well as any exculpatory
information favoring the accused corporations.
As any reference to this case can't seem to be found, can anyone help with info as to the
present status of the case?
Funny how lowkey this topic is handled. It appeard in The Times. As the Times article is
behind a paywall. I am linking to the Irish Times:
MI5 can authorise agents to commit crimes, tribunal told . Maybe the UK should be
sanctioned.
Makes my fantasy go a little wild and wonder if there might be any connection to
Skripal.
For those who missed May's latest Brexit speech (which had zero content), here she is jiving
to Dancing Queen by Abba for her glorified entrance. No need to make caricatures, she
does it herself. Free of charge.
The USA + GB have become totally unhinged. Seeking a 'safe' enemy *without* - as the
Deplorables or Brexiteers *within* don't hit the spot, for many reasons - .. to explain and
cover up Hillary's loss and the ugly Brexit mess with its clueless posturing pols, is one
thing.
To continue to provoke Russia and China, particularly Russia, in this way is now skirting
with danger beyond the .. ? Containable, ignorable, what ..?
Plus, the MSM, lousy as it is and was, has spinned off into even further mad realms,
seemingly forced into a hyper, over-blown anti-Russian hysteria. Often far more strongly so
than the pols. / others they seemingly quote.
This is all becoming seriously alarming. I'm getting very bad feelings.
Seems like another episode of False Friday to bury all the crap made public during the week
while pushing other news aside. Much of it's recycled crap from Obama's term and just as
false.
During the Cold War, the West contolled some 2/3 of the global economy.
If they again bring a "Free World" protective curtain down around themselves in defensive
retrenchment, what percent would they control now? Which countries would be guaranteed to be
inside the tent pissing out, and which would be outide the tent pissing in? And who would be
non-aligned (with the exception of their military purchases.)
Pakistan, India, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela,
Nicaragua, Africa, etc. -- Where would the dominos fall? Is this what they are trying to
accomplish? If you are not with us, you are against us, as the ever eloquent G. W. Shrub
might have said. Any predictions?
thanks b.. excellent information and insights as usual..
of course the USA and coalition of imbeciles are busy projecting onto Russia and China
what they themselves are guilty of.. the use of propaganda has gone into overdrive and is now
an accepted policy of the west.. screw facts.. who needs facts when you have a war to
pursue... and that is just what it looks like to me, as there is no end in sight to any of
this western madness...
the financial sanctions have not worked.. that much is clear.. another approach via
propaganda is to be the new regular feature.. claim all sorts of lies and supposition on
russia, china, iran, north korea, venezuela or any country that dares to get out of line with
the official ''coalition'' and you will be targeted with propaganda and or worse..
is there a way to create an alternative internet??
Looking around the MSM, MH17 also comes into it. Dutch are accusing Russia of trying to hack
the MH17 sham investigation. This propaganda attack comes only a week or two after Russia
tracked the missile parts numbers, supplied by JIT, through records which led to Ukraine.
Russia has tried to negotiate with the US to avoid cyberspace being turned into another area
of conflict. The US has rebuffed these requests. Likely too much money to be made by the MIC
in another theater of warfare with that extortion racket called NATO and too much promise of
the NSA scooping up even more data and adding it to the data already collected by the 5 eyes.
Canada is being pressured into not buying Chinese for its military civilian hardware.
Scare the politicians into buying US goods that have a backdoor for the CIA to use. Canada
shouldn't complain. The Canadian government hacked into the Brazilian government computers
for the benefit of Canadian mining interests.
Didn't WikiLeaks disclosed the fact that NSA can disguise any hack to look like some other
actor was the culprit? All this shouting that Russia and China did these terrible deeds is to
hide the fact that the west does this all the time as disclosed by WikiLeaks? And the Germans
complaining? I hope they have improved security for the Chancellor's phone. Russia is a
member of OPWC. Why do they have to sit out in cars in the parking lot of OPCW headquarters
to hack into OPCW? Why not from the comfort of their office in the building. What is of more
importance to me is an upcoming vote in the OPCW about investigation reports laying blame in
the future. That will be a game changer in the false flag chemical attack be it Syria or the
UK. currently reports don't lay blame.
An element of the Skripal poisoning saga in Britain (the Novichok) was lifted from the TV
series "Strikeback" screening in the country in November 2017 and February 2018. I have seen
something on the Internet (but can't find the link) that said the subplot with the abandoned
perfume bottle that contained poison was also taken from a TV show.
Prepare to be unsurprised then when the people who write propaganda for The Powers That
Should Not Be turn out to be the same people who write scripts for Hollywood films and TV
shows. A lot of these people also write novels or teach creative writing courses.
We really do seem to be living in a society where mythology and fantasy are becoming more
prominent than facts and analysis in decision-making.
Wherever it is the Russian government responsible or not, the UK and the Nederlands are
admitting that they are impotent in front of attacks in the cyberworld. That wifi can be
sniffed so easily at international organizations show total irresponsibility. These
cyberattacks are simply humiliating for these countries as it shows that despite their
military power, they are highly vulnerable. To dispel the humiliation, they respond
aggressively by accusing countries, not to individuals, and they accuse the current
boogeyman, Russia.
Maybe NATO's budget should be cut down on murdering weapons and allocate to Cyber Defense as
this seems to become the new way of war.
In view of the lack of proper cyber defense worldwidee, anybody, any country can hack and
play around with others. I would be surprised if Israel, the USA and the UK China are not
stiffing in other countries organizations. They have not been found because they are the
'good' sniffers while Russia, Iran, China are the "bad' sniffers
Cold war is on with new technology, It is time for countries to realize that.
Considering what the military war has cost in money, death toll and destruction, maybe cold
war would be less costly in human toll.
China has set up quantum internet via optic fiber linking a number of government
departments.
Going by the squealing noises coming out of the US and loyal vassals, the yanks are probably
just pissed that they can't get into Russia or China's secure communications.
For those who missed May's latest Brexit speech (which had zero content), here she is jiving
to Dancing Queen by Abba for her glorified entrance. No need to make caricatures, she
does it herself. Free of charge.
The USA + GB have become totally unhinged. Seeking a 'safe' enemy *without* - as the
Deplorables or Brexiteers *within* don't hit the spot, for many reasons - .. to explain and
cover up Hillary's loss and the ugly Brexit mess with its clueless posturing pols, is one
thing.
To continue to provoke Russia and China, particularly Russia, in this way is now skirting
with danger beyond the .. ? Containable, ignorable, what ..?
Plus, the MSM, lousy as it is and was, has spinned off into even further mad realms,
seemingly forced into a hyper, over-blown anti-Russian hysteria. Often far more strongly so
than the pols. / others they seemingly quote.
This is all becoming seriously alarming. I'm getting very bad feelings.
I agree Kavanaugh is a warmonger and has
probably committed perjury many times. The trouble is, if he is denied confirmation in the
present circumstanes, it will amount to a victory for the feminists' witch hunt against men,
and it will do nothing to defeat the war agenda. The next nominee will be just as much a
warmonger.
1. The judgment of anyone who believes Christine Ford has to be
questioned. Her senate performance was a series of holes held together with emotion. If she
had been questioned as aggressively as Kavanaugh, she would have melted quicker than brie at
a beach party.
2. That she is a fraud does not in any way mean that Kavanaugh was/is honest or that he is
appropriate material for Supreme Court; I agree: he is not, he is deeply flawed. The pity and
the tragedy is that his flaws are not being discussed on their merits: the fact that he made
his living as a lawyer and a citizen by supporting the George Bush administration, which
participated in war crimes, is enough to disqualify him.
3. But US government, from Supreme Court to presidency to the entire Congress, have been
havens for liars who lied to the American people in order to wage war; they get monuments and
institutes, not jail cells:
–> Woodrow Wilson was a notorious womanizer, and a weak toady. One of his
liaison's threatened to release love letters unless he paid her $40,000. Zionist fanatic
Samuel Untermeyer paid the sum, in exchange for the appointment of Louis Brandeis to Supreme
Court.
Brandeis "lied" insofar as he used his elevated stature to promote the Zionist cause. Wilson was manipulated into signing off on the Balfour Declaration, then drawing USA into
WWI.
–> FDR (who was in the company of his lover when he died) lied to get USA into
WWII.
–> George H W Bush sanctioned lies to involve USA in Persian Gulf war: "babies in
incubators . ."
–> George W Bush had Condi Rice and Colin Powell to do his lying for him, to
involve USA in war against Iraq.
–> Schumer pledged he would harry Trump "six ways 'til Sunday" -- to force him to
wage war on Iran. Schumer and the Israel firsts don't give a tinker's dam about Kavanaugh OR
Ford; their method is to keep Trump on a short leash and to make it impossible to rule other
than in a way that achieve their goals, which are similar to Wilson and FDR: with them, the
zionist goals were to destroy Germany and Palestinians for the sake of Zionists; wrt Trump,
the goal is to complete the fragmentation of the ME and destroy Iran, for the sake of
Israel.
"... It's unlikely that Kavanaugh would have faced a genuine threat of criminal sanction if Blassey had complained at the time of the alleged incident: it would have been chalked up to juvenile japes and what-not. It's also true that adolescent indiscretions (albeit potentially disturbing for the victim) are no basis on which to evaluate fitness as a candidate for senior court apparatchik; a drunken fumbling grope attempt at 17 says nothing about one's judgement 30-odd years later. ..."
"... Assuming arguendo that the SCOTUS-J role is what the demos [mis]perceives (i.e., an impartial arbiter and keen legal scholar), then Kavanaugh's histrionics during the hearing show that he does not have the mental, cognitive or temperamental fortitude for the role. ..."
"... I have a very jaundiced view of courts generally, and the US Supreme court in particular. They are power's handmaidens – BlackRobes who engage in gravitas-laden[1] theatrics to try to put lipstick on the State pig. ..."
"... As I have pointed out in that past comment, Ford is not suffering from any "sexual harassment" abuse. She is suffering from a long, entrenched and ever growing case of embitterment from her childhood years. This hatchet job on Kavanaugh is nothing more than a case of revenge from Ford. Brett Kavanaugh's mother presided over her parents' divorce and that led to a bitter house foreclosure that obviously had a lingering affect upon Ford and has now chosen to take this moment for revenge. ..."
"... Now we see that Ford was lying about everything! She is not afraid of flying, she lied about her polygraph experience and expertise and lied about knowing Kavanaugh, when it is clear she did! ..."
"... What strikes me most in the whole Kavanaugh Show is that US politicians, the press and assorted figures, including many of the common citizenry, apparently care so much about the moral aspects of someone's behavior during puberty and adolescence. At the same time, these same politicians, press and citizens don't seem to have any compunctions about invading, killing and maiming people all over the world, on a continuous basis. ..."
"... Clearly the US, like other countries, is governed by a clique of psychopaths. I just never realized that psychopathy is contagious. ..."
"... you also go too far in presuming to characterise SCOTUS judges as lackeys of the appointing parties, or anyone. You should just think of the advantages of tenure, put it together with a general knowledge of human nature and then consider as well how unlikely it would be that successful tenured products of (typically) Harvard and Yale Law Schools are going to pay any attention at all to politicians after a couple of years becoming comfortable with their Olympian elevation, let alone 15 years and more. ..."
"... Michael Savage has revealed that Ford's father and grandfather were both CIA. Additionally, Ford was responsible for psychologically screening CIA interns at Standford. She claims that she remembered the "sex offense" during some kind of psychological hypnosis. She talked like a teenager during the hearing, and wore the same kind of problem glasses that she is wearing in pictures from her early teens. She was trained in how to fool lie-detector examinations. She was born about 1966 to a CIA operative father. ..."
Kavanaugh is not being accused of rape (at least, not by Ford).
He is having a job interview for a government sinecure, and someone he went to school with
claims that he did things to her that would meet the criteria for attempted rape.
In a prurient and shallow swamp of false-piety and sanctimony (i.e., US society and its
political class in particular), that is thought to be germane to his fitness for the job (of
which, more in a few sentences' time).
I don't have a dog in this fight: I have a very jaundiced view of courts generally, and the
US Supreme court in particular. They are power's handmaidens – BlackRobes who engage in gravitas -laden[1] theatrics to try to put lipstick on the State pig.
That has corollaries:
anyone selected as a candidate for that job is a set of 'safe hands' from the
perspective of the party doing the candidate selection;
anyone who wants to be a candidate is a disgraceful sack of shit.
So for me, if someone from A gets to be B, then any ill that befalls them is
nothing more than light entertainment.
It's unlikely that Kavanaugh would have faced a genuine threat of criminal sanction if
Blassey had complained at the time of the alleged incident: it would have been chalked up to
juvenile japes and what-not. It's also true that adolescent indiscretions (albeit potentially disturbing for the victim)
are no basis on which to evaluate fitness as a candidate for senior court apparatchik; a
drunken fumbling grope attempt at 17 says nothing about one's judgement 30-odd years later.
But here's the thing: this dude wants to be part of a life-tenured clique that arrogated to
itself the right to call the shots on the final jurisprudential stage in the US system up to
and including matters of constitutional import. As a group the BlackRobes have gotten it objectively wrong many times (Dredd Scott v
Sanford; Ableman v. Booth; Buck v Bell; Plessy v Ferguson; Herrera v Collins) and morally wrong even more often (South v Maryland; Bush v Gore; Wickard v Filburn). The
hubris involved in wanting to be on that court is an invitation to nemesis
.
And to quote Brick Top (from the movie "Snatch"):
Do you know what 'Nemesis' means? A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by
an appropriate agent – personified in this case by a 'orrible cunt: me.
If this was going to play out Hellenically, this controversy will result in the nomination
failing, and Kavanaugh will move on to catharsis and eventually metanoia ; but
this being 21st century America, he will be confirmed and will go on to do his masters'
bidding.
Now the question of actual fitness for purpose.
Assuming arguendo that the SCOTUS-J role is what the demos [mis]perceives
(i.e., an impartial arbiter and keen legal scholar), then Kavanaugh's histrionics during the
hearing show that he does not have the mental, cognitive or temperamental fortitude for the
role.
However, since the SCOTUS-J role is just to be a lifetime lackey for the party what brung
you to the dance he's exactly what his side of politics ordered.
[1] Like de la Rochfoucauld (especially Maxim 237), Stern and Shaftesbury, I have an
extremely dim view of gravitas . As Shaftesbury said Gravitas is the very essence of imposture . ( Characteristics , p. 11, vol.
I.)
What if this whole thing was just carefully managed theater designed to entertain the rubes?
We must never be allowed to forget there is a government in our lives to the point where it
starts to feel like a family member.
There are two things I cant stand:
Cockroaches, and prep school pricks that go on to be frat boy fucks, and then on to
lawyers, who then become so self entitled that they honestly believe they are chosen by god
to decide for others. Nasty creatures all of them.
As a group the BlackRobes have gotten it objectively wrong many times (Dredd Scott v
Sanford; Ableman v. Booth; Buck v Bell; Plessy v Ferguson; Herrera v Collins) and morally
wrong even more often (South v Maryland; Bush v Gore; Wickard v Filburn).
You left out.
Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1976 and exacerbated by continuing dumb shit SC decisions First
National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and
McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission
I have a very jaundiced view of courts generally, and the US Supreme court in
particular. They are power's handmaidens – BlackRobes who engage in gravitas-laden[1]
theatrics to try to put lipstick on the State pig.
Very eloquently and succinctly stated!
anyone selected as a candidate for that job is a set of 'safe hands' from the
perspective of the party doing the candidate selection;
anyone who wants to be a candidate is a disgraceful sack of shit.
So for me, if someone from A gets to be B, then any ill that befalls them is
nothing more than light entertainment.
agree
There is one aspect of this farce that does deserve some merit, from my perspective. And
that is the part where we get to watch more of the unhinged, apoplectic, butt-hurt,
aneurysm-popping hysterics of the progressive left. It's like more of those tears of
existential angst from all those castrating Hillary supporters anticipating their big win,
only to have it snatched away at the crucial moment by the big, blonde white guy who likes
women and cruelly mocks their messiah.
Watching Hillary psychologically implode is still one of my most sublime pleasures, even
today. It's the gift that keeps on giving
This is a curious and confusing spectacle. I don't think he's a good pick since like all
Supreme "Justices" he's a Deep State sponsored toady with little respect for the US
Constitution. But the Deep State allowed this spectacle, probably to embarrass Trump, who
they are tying to oust even though he does whatever they demand. Perhaps they worry that
Trump may suddenly rebel.
One wonders why Republican Senate leaders allowed this circus to form. When allegations of
drunken misconduct arose shortly before the vote, they should have dismissed the matter and
moved on, noting there were no police reports or arrests involved, and all this occurred when
he was a minor. Case closed! Most Americans consider groping and unwanted kisses by teenagers
to be of poor taste remedied with a slap or kick in the shin. It is not "sexual assault."
Or perhaps they chose to allow the looney part of the Democratic Party to run wild knowing
they would unwittingly hurt the Democrats in the upcoming November elections. Or maybe this
is a Deep State media diversion to keep the social justice warriors busy with an unimportant
issue, so they don't protest Deep State wars, ever growing military spending, soaring budget
deficits, or our dysfunctional health care system. Encourage them debate and protest what
some guy did as a drunken teenager for the next few weeks and fill our "news" programs with
related BS so real issues are avoided during the election campaigns.
Yeah. Liberals make much of the virtue of erasing a minor's record once they turn 18.
"It's a clean slate. A chance to start over again with a reputation unblemished by youthful
folly and mistakes. How can young Trey'Trayvontious grow up to become an aeronautical
engineer if, upon entering adulthood, he is handicapped by the burden of felonious assault,
burglary and attempted murder convictions?"
But when it comes to Kavanaugh??? No way. No forgetfulness, no forgiveness. What he did as
a minor, he will wear as a badge of shame throughout his adult life.
Is it even legal to consider what he did as a minor as having any bearing on his fitness
for this job? I'm seriously asking any parole officers or social workers out there who work
with youth.
As a group the BlackRobes have gotten it objectively wrong many times (Dredd Scott v
Sanford; Ableman v. Booth; Buck v Bell; Plessy v Ferguson; Herrera v Collins) and morally
wrong even more often (South v Maryland; Bush v Gore; Wickard v Filburn).
Then you must be a leftist ideologue.
In the Dredd Scott case the naturalization act of 1790 only extended citizenship to
"free white persons", so the court got it objectively right since they ruled in accordance
with existing law and didn't strike down or make law from the bench as too many power mad
federal judges do today.
Plessy v Ferguson is a closer call (because of the 14th amendment) but IMO the
court got it objectively right because the court only upheld de jure segregation with the
stipulation that public facilities must be equal in quality. And in doing so the court ruled
that the desires and wishes of blacks don't automatically supersede those of whites like
federal courts reflexively do today.
The great irony is that today blacks, not whites, are demanding racially segregated
dormitories, student orientations, facilities, graduations, schools, clubs, etc. and leftists
have no issue with that but will scream themselves hoarse about racism and white supremacy if
whites do.
In Bush v Gore I'm not sure what pressing moral issue was at stake other than you
didn't like the court's decision, hence it was "immoral." Was SCOTUS supposed to allow
Florida to keep counting votes until Christmas?
I'd rather it be a bourgeois white guy with social markers indicating that he, like me,
has been a red-blooded American teenager rather than a foppish Bubble-boy nerd with no
theory of mind or a bitter lesbian hag
It's not the teenage indiscretions that should concern people – it's the obvious
temperament problem that manifested itself during his testimony.
Anyone who 'arcs up' the way Kavanaugh did, has no place in any judiciary, be he
ne'er so white and red-blooded: it shows that he is a narcissist.
I don't think he actually uttered the words " How dare you !", but it would
not surprise me if he had done so.
So I would prefer a non-narcissist lesbian hag or "Bubble-boy nerd" (as if
Kavanaugh did not grow up in a protective bubble! He exudes contempt for anyone outside of
his class nothing wrong with that, except if you're hearing death penalty appeals or
adjudicating on reproductive or sexual rights).
By way of stark contrast, I have a very good example of a decidedly non-bourgeois person
(who will be Chief Justice in my jurisdiction before he retires)
One of my close friends from university was made a judge of the Supreme Court (of
Victoria, Australia) in 2013.
He was a first-rate advocate (specialising in criminal defence) – another contrast
with Kavanaugh, who is a lifetime party/government apparatchik who has never tried a
case.
Michael (for that is my old mate's name) was also a former logging truck driver who
returned to study in his mid-30s (having already had a family). He went to government schools
for his entire education – the first Supreme Court justice to have done so, a fact that
the Chief Justice remarked upon at his inauguration.
Despite having no pedigree, no connections, no Old Boys' (or Masonic) connections, he was
made QC at the earliest possible date (i.e., 10 years after he was called to the Bar).
He is also a witty bugger, and his default expression is a kind of half-smile, even now.
He was (and is) talented enough that he does not have to rely on gravitas : on several
instances he has cried in open court while recounting the facts of particularly tragic cases,
even as he was sentencing the perpetrators to jail. This is not a display of weakness: it's a
display of empathy – a weak man would be scared of the public reaction.
His robes sit heavy, but he still played "old-blokes' footy" after his elevation to the
bench.
And although I think he has some leftish tendencies, I could not say with any certainty
where his politics lie: when we were students together his economics was first-rate and
"rationalist" (he and I both got Reserve Bank cadetships – only 4 of which were awarded
Australia-wide in our year).
Now the reason I drop his name into the mix is that I can declare with absolute confidence
that if he was involved in a hearing of this type, there would be no displays of righteous
indignation, no partisan political commentary, no facial contortions, no spittle-flecked lips
in short, no displays of behaviour that indicate that he thinks that he is above reproach
simply by virtue of his background or his current station .
That 's the guy you want in your judiciary: you can't tell me that a nation of 300
million people – and a surfeit of lawyers – doesn't have a single lawyer like
Michael Croucher.
OK, so that was a rhetorical trick on my part, because the US Supreme Court is only
open to people who went to Harvard or Yale Law (although Ginsberg got her JD at Columbia,
she was a transfer from Harvard).
And, of course, they must have a lifetime track record of opinions that align with the
party in power at the time of their nomination.
>>>>>>>>>>He is having a job interview for a government
sinecure, and someone he went to school with claims that he did things to her that would meet
the criteria for attempted rape. <<<<<<<<<<
She was two grades behind him and attended an all girl school in a different part of
town.
So how is she someone he went to school with? I went to an all girl school (Catholic) and can't recall any boys I went to school
with. As a mother, I was interested in the distance of her home from the place of the party.
I gathered it was too far to walk to and walk home from, (especially at night). What did
she tell her parents were she had been? Her parents did not care she ran around at night like
that? At age 15. Not that Kavanaugh would be my choice.
Rape is a social construct. Some languages don't even have a word for it. Re Kavanaugh, who
knew that he was a serial gang rapist whose coast to coast crime wave has kept the country
secretly cowering in fear for the past 40 years? And thank goodness that we discovered just
in time that he also possesses emotions n a point of view. We can't have that on the SCOTUS!
I mean, where would we be if other Justices decided to have points of view n even did
interviews? Thank goodness that never ever happens, n all the current justices keep their
lips sealed n are completely neutral.
@Anonymous
We don't know that her parents "did not care she ran around at night like that at age
15″.
Teenagers and even younger children disobey their parents' instructions, orders and
warnings all the time. Maybe Ms Ford was chronically disobedient, a difficult child from Day
One, and maybe (just opining here) that's why she was sent to an all-girls private school. I
sure know of such cases. Such attendance doesn't change the child's behavior or character,
but it gets them away from their peers in public school, which makes the parents believe
everything will now be alright with their naughty child.
Not everything is the parents' fault. Nurture can't always undo Nature. Indeed, it rarely
does in any deep, permanent sense. Just threaten and/or punish your children enough and then
they'll obey you – for the wrong reasons.
I Told You So: Ford Is Lying And Needs To Go To Prison
As I
stated in a previous comment, Ford is just another hysterical man hating wobaby (woman
baby), that has lied in her testimony and public shameful denunciation of Kavanaugh.
As I have pointed out in that past comment, Ford is not suffering from any "sexual
harassment" abuse. She is suffering from a long, entrenched and ever growing case of
embitterment from her childhood years. This hatchet job on Kavanaugh is nothing more than a
case of revenge from Ford. Brett Kavanaugh's mother presided over her parents' divorce and
that led to a bitter house foreclosure that obviously had a lingering affect upon Ford and
has now chosen to take this moment for revenge.
Now we see that Ford was lying about everything! She is not afraid of flying, she lied
about her polygraph experience and expertise and lied about knowing Kavanaugh, when it is
clear she did!
Once again, proof, facts and evidence, shows us all that you can't trust what people say,
especially hysterical women! History is replete with examples of how hysteria, especially by
women with a grudge, can destroy men lives. This nonsense, and it is ABSOLUTE NONSENSE, by
Ford and her followers is nothing more than a bunch of pathetic individuals who've nothing in
their lives other than to be jealous and embittered of others all because they are all
failing in their own miserable, misbegotten lives. This is not about social justice, it is
just about people who can't accept their irrelevant position in society and need to destroy
others whom are make something of themselves.
Christine Ford is that lowest thing of womanhood; a bitter, delusional, man-hating female.
When in reality the only thing she really hates, is herself. Now she will get her well over
due comeuppance.
And what of Senator Feinstein? That modern incarnation of Reverend Samuel Paris (alla
Salem Witch Trials), what of her? She should be thrown out of the Senate, and allowed to
wither in the backwaters of the Deep Swamp, where she belongs!
Senator Feinstein you are a disgrace to Justice, the Senate, to Women, and above all,
to the Human Race! Go back to murky slimy depths of the swamp, where you belong!
@Kratoklastes
Wholeheartedly agree with all your comments and adstructions. However, it would seem to me
that in 99% of cases, it really does not matter who gets elected or appointed to any office,
in the US or whichever other country.
What strikes me most in the whole Kavanaugh Show is that US politicians, the press and
assorted figures, including many of the common citizenry, apparently care so much about the
moral aspects of someone's behavior during puberty and adolescence. At the same time, these same politicians, press and citizens don't seem to have any
compunctions about invading, killing and maiming people all over the world, on a continuous
basis.
Clearly the US, like other countries, is governed by a clique of psychopaths. I just never
realized that psychopathy is contagious.
@Kratoklastes
I don't know Michael Croucher J but I know and have a high regard for the conservative
Attorney-General who appointed him (also, you may be interested to know the product only of
radically unfashionable non-government schools). I Googled for Michael Croucher and was
surprised to find how many of the items on the first page had him tearing up on the bench. I
suspect that he fits pretty well with his appointer's pretty strong law and order approach
though I don't remember what the attitude of the latter was to the introduction of victim
impact statements, inevitably not subject to cross examination for obvious enough reasons.
(Moi: I was never a fan for several reasons).
While internet anonymity frees us up to say more than we can know with arrogant confidence
I am surprised that you don't make the distinction between US judges with a Bill of Rights to
maximise the likelihood of value differences infecting their judgments (bolstered by life
tenure) and Australian judiciary much of which still honours Dixon CJ's "strict and complete
legalism" in the sense in which he meant it (in answer to complaints of "excessive legalism")
and maybe Blackburn J's excellent 1970s article on Judicial Method.
But you also go too far in presuming to characterise SCOTUS judges as lackeys of the appointing parties, or anyone.
You should just think of the advantages of tenure, put it together with a general knowledge
of human nature and then consider as well how unlikely it would be that successful tenured
products of (typically) Harvard and Yale Law Schools are going to pay any attention at all to
politicians after a couple of years becoming comfortable with their Olympian elevation, let
alone 15 years and more.
@Kratoklastes
Another excellent comment, Krat' !
Re: Kav' "arc'ing up" I wonder whether that may have not been a carefully contrived piece of
theatre, directed at the so-called Trump "base" ? I don't know.
Re: the judge himself. I recall his public nomination. His intro by Trump, his evident
pleasure at nomination etc. However, his acceptance quickly segued into a modern version of
Mr Smith goes the Washington. He seriously emphasised what a great family man he is. His
little jokes with his daughters, coaching their basket ball team etc. The performance was
just so sincere, so real indeed, so slick & polished . What a great guy ! I
thought. Then I woke up – I'd been played .We're not talking about a great guy, we're
talking about a judicial job application for the highest court in the US.
Literally, a job for life.
The "sex" business, whether true or false has completely distracted US from the substantive
issue of whether this Judge, qua Judge is suitable for this role.
Your references to his whole "silver spoon"
history is largely indicative of the sex aspect. It goes to "character" at the least. It
should be considered but not as, in itself, determative.
Michael Savage has revealed that Ford's father and grandfather were both CIA. Additionally,
Ford was responsible for psychologically screening CIA interns at Standford. She claims that
she remembered the "sex offense" during some kind of psychological hypnosis. She talked like
a teenager during the hearing, and wore the same kind of problem glasses that she is wearing
in pictures from her early teens. She was trained in how to fool lie-detector examinations.
She was born about 1966 to a CIA operative father.
This bitch just reeks of MKUltra. It not only would explain so much of her recent actions,
it would also explain why she had 57 sex partners before starting college.
Most likely Ford was a MKUltra beta sex kitten, and that would also explain her current
positions at Standford. Stanford was a major center for MKUltra research and programming,
with Keasey and Owsley Stanley both being heavily involved in LSD research there as well as
in the forming of the mind-control masters of the Grateful Dead.
I do not think that even Bill Cosby raped anybody. All he had to do is promise the girl role
in next episode. And so by the time when Bill turned around and headed to liqueur cabinet
there she was on the bed naked with the feet pointing to the Heavens.
Basically the same story was with Weinstein.
You know women do not use their pussy only as a payment for full, they also use pussy as a
deposit.
I really hate Trump and this country. He said it's a scary time for young men in this
country. I'm a young man and I've never met anyone in real life who was falsely accused of
sexual misconduct. The prospect isn't even on anyone's mind. No normal woman would do that.
Some politicians might get falsely accused, but that isn't something regular guys fear.
But I'll tell you who is under attack: white people, both men AND women. There were hardly
any white girls at my high school. Hot white girls are a disappearing breed in many cities
and towns all over this country because of mass immigration. And what has a fraud like Trump
done about that? Absolutely nothing. His immigration failures are the real war on white
women.
But the little manbabies of the right will continue their hysteria and petty squabbles
with white women and even ally with non-white men against their own women. White people
divide and conquer themselves. The enemy doesn't have to do anything but sit back and enjoy
the show as whites fight each other instead of their own colonization and dispossession by
the Third World.
In the small high school I attended and from which graduated in 1960 were 4 girls who took-on
the entire football team more than once. There's no reason for me to believe the school I
attended was much different from any other public or private school. I could be wrong, but I
doubt it. The truth is that quite a few girls and women who are mentally disturbed will do
practically anything to acquire attention from males. It's always been that way, and always
will.
I used to live in Communist country, where social scientist were pushing the idea that first
organized tribal societies were matriarchal. Than that today society is patriarchal.
Prevailing theories were that patriarchal society inevitably must revert back to matriarchal
society.
I did not pay too much attention to it, and did seem to me that it was something strange.
Is this happening in US? I do not know!
Excellent article on the beautiful circus lifting the curtain on American politics. It's
always been this way, we just got loge seats this time.
Regarding the "facts" being brought to bear, it seems that if you're a woman and want your
15min of fame, all you have to do is describe your wildest sexual fantasy as long as you end
your statement with the seal of quality: "100% Kavanaugh."
And whether he lied about not being a lush and she about everything else the most pertinent
question is: where can you finally see more adults lying through their teeth than in the
US.gov? Indeed, the show must go on, and even Fred can't make this any funnier that it already
is.
As manufactured political theatrics and deliberate distractions keep Americans easily
mesmerized, more than 115 people in the United States die each day, after overdosing on
opioids.
"... After all, from National Security Advisor John Bolton (the invasion of Iraq ) and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (a longtime regime-change advocate) to CIA Director Gina Haspel ( black sites and torture ), Secretary of Defense James "Mad Dog" Mattis (former Marine general and CENTCOM commander ), and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly (former Marine general and a commander in Iraq), those adolts and so many like them remain deeply implicated in the path the country took in those years of geopolitical dreaming. They were especially responsible for the decision to invest in the U.S. military (and little else), as well as in endless wars , in the years before Donald Trump came to power. And worse yet, they seem to have learned absolutely nothing from the process. ..."
"... Fear: Trump in the White House ..."
"... And so Donald Trump became the latest surge president, authorizing, however grudgingly, the dispatching of yet more American troops and air power to Afghanistan (just as he recently authorized an "indefinite military effort" in Syria in the wake of what we can only imagine was another such exchange). Of Mattis himself, in response to reports that he might be on the way out after the midterm elections, the president recently responded , "He'll stay we're very happy with him, we're having a lot of victories, we're having victories that people don't even know about." ..."
"... They proved to be neither the empire builders of their dreams, nor even empire preservers, but a crew of potential empire burners. ..."
"... Occupation (ongoing) and forced partition of Germany. Operation "Gladio" – destroying not pro-American political parties across Europe, like in Italia. Murder of neutral politicians like Olaf Palme. Should we remember Chile and president Aliende? Installing DHS operative Norriega as Panama dictator, then removing him. Did USA even had allies that were not vassals? ..."
"... Exactly right. But he also failed to mention that the NATO nations, the Anglo-Saxon nations, Japan, etc., are completely subsevient to the empire, and seem to be so by choice. No rats are jumping off the sinking ship. Sweden was neutral and independent during WW2 and the Cold War. But now it seems that Swedish rats jump ONTO the sinking ship. ..."
"... Stalin said that a country's political system follows its military. When the shooting stopped in Europe in 1945 the US had its forces in countries (UK, France, Italy, Germany, etc.) that, with the exception of Austria became American "allies", just as the Soviet army occupied countries became Soviet "allies". ..."
"... You can't pin the inevitable decline on Trump: It started a couple decades ago with rise of the New World Order. ..."
"... Last night, I stumbled across The Saker's Vineyard. He once wrote a blog post discussing how he was blacklisted in his native Switzerland after speaking out against NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. I asked him how he could get himself censored in a "neutral" country that's supposedly independent from NATO or the EU, and since when Switzerland had become a lapdog of NATO. ..."
Donald Trump is in the White House exactly because, in these years, so many Americans felt
instinctively that something was going off the tracks. (That shouldn't be a surprise, given the
striking lack of investment in, or upkeep of, the infrastructure of the greatest of all powers.)
He's there largely thanks to the crew that's now proudly referred
to -- for supposedly keeping him in line -- as "the adults in the room." Let me suggest a
small correction to that phrase to better reflect the 16 years in this not-so-new century
before he entered the Oval Office. How about "the adolts in the room"?
After all, from National Security Advisor John Bolton (the invasion of Iraq ) and Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo (a longtime
regime-change advocate) to CIA Director Gina Haspel (
black sites and torture ), Secretary of Defense James "Mad Dog" Mattis (former Marine
general and
CENTCOM commander ), and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly (former Marine general and a
commander in Iraq),
those adolts and so many like them remain deeply implicated in the path the country took in
those years of geopolitical dreaming. They were especially responsible for the decision to
invest in the U.S. military (and little else), as well as
in endless wars , in the years before Donald Trump came to power. And worse yet, they seem
to have learned absolutely nothing from the process.
Take a recent example we know something about -- Afghanistan -- thanks to Fear: Trump
in the White House , Bob Woodward's bestselling new book. Only recently, an American
sergeant major, an adviser to Afghan troops, was gunned down
at a base near the Afghan capital, Kabul, in an "insider" or "green-on-blue" attack, a
commonplace of
that war. He was killed (and another American adviser wounded) by two allied Afghan police
officers in the wake of an American air strike in the same area in which more than a dozen of
their compatriots died. Forty-two years old and on the eve of retirement, the sergeant was on
his seventh combat tour of duty of this century and, had he had an eighth, he might have served
with an American
born after the 9/11 attacks.
In his book, Woodward describes a National Security Council meeting in August 2017, in which
the adolts in the room saved the president from his worst impulses. He describes how an
impatient Donald Trump "exploded, most particularly at his generals. You guys have created this
situation. It's been a disaster. You're the architects of this mess in Afghanistan You're smart
guys, but I have to tell you, you're part of the problem. And you haven't been able to fix it,
and you're making it worse I was against this from the beginning. He folded his arms. 'I want
to get out and you're telling me the answer is to get deeper in.'"
And indeed almost 16 years later that is exactly what Pompeo, Mattis, former National
Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and the rest of them were telling him. According to Woodward,
Mattis, for instance, argued forcefully "that if they pulled out, they would create another
ISIS-style upheaval What happened in Iraq under Obama with the emergence of ISIS will happen
under you, Mattis told Trump, in one of his sharpest declarations."
The reported presidential response: "'You are all telling me that I have to do this,' Trump
said grudgingly, 'and I guess that's fine and we'll do it, but I still think you're wrong. I
don't know what this is for. It hasn't gotten us anything. We've spent trillions,' he
exaggerated. 'We've lost all these lives.' Yet, he acknowledged, they probably could not cut
and run and leave a vacuum for al-Qaeda, Iran, and other terrorists."
And so Donald Trump became the latest surge
president, authorizing, however grudgingly, the dispatching of yet more American
troops and air
power to Afghanistan (just as he recently
authorized an "indefinite military effort" in Syria in the wake of what we can only imagine
was another such exchange). Of Mattis himself, in response to reports
that he might be on the way out after the midterm elections, the president recently
responded , "He'll stay we're very happy with him, we're having a lot of victories, we're
having victories that people don't even know about."
Perhaps that should be considered definitional for the Trump presidency, which is likely to
increasingly find itself in a world of "victories that people don't even know about." But don't
for a second think that The Donald was the
one who brought us to this state, though someday he will undoubtedly be seen as the
personification of it and of the decline that swept him into power. And for all that, for the
victories that people won't know about and the defeats that they will, he'll have the adolts in
the room to thank. They proved to be neither the empire builders of their dreams, nor even
empire preservers, but a crew of potential empire burners.
Believe me, folks, it's going to be anything but pretty. Welcome to that most unpredictable
and dangerous of entities, a dying empire. Only 27 years after the bells of triumph tolled
across Washington, it looks like those bells are now preparing to toll in mourning for it.
The main difference between US and the "lesser" empire USSR is how they got their "allies".
The USSR won their "allies" by the force of their military. The US won their allies by the
promise of economic prosperity.
When the "lesser" empire collapsed, US got delusional and decided to try their luck at
winning new allies (or more accurately – expanding their influence) with the force of
their military – who let's face it was never that impressive compared to other great
empires in history.
Conclusion: US should have stuck with what they were good at –
winning battles on the economic battlefield, not let the Cold War "victory" get to their
heads making them delusional that they can win any "hot" wars of any significance.
The US won their allies by the promise of economic prosperity.
Occupation (ongoing) and forced partition of Germany. Operation "Gladio" – destroying not pro-American political parties across Europe,
like in Italia. Murder of neutral politicians like Olaf Palme. Should we remember Chile and president Aliende? Installing DHS operative Norriega as Panama dictator, then removing him. Did USA even had allies that were not vassals?
Exactly right. But he also failed to mention that the NATO nations, the Anglo-Saxon nations,
Japan, etc., are completely subsevient to the empire, and seem to be so by choice. No rats
are jumping off the sinking ship. Sweden was neutral and independent during WW2 and the Cold
War. But now it seems that Swedish rats jump ONTO the sinking ship.
@Tulips
What about Switzerland? It's not a member of either NATO or the EU (unlike Sweden). It
remained neutral and independent during WWII and the Cold War. Last time I checked, it
doesn't even have any American bases.
"The USSR won their "allies" by the force of their military. The US won their allies by
the promise of economic prosperity."
Stalin said that a country's political system follows its military. When the shooting
stopped in Europe in 1945 the US had its forces in countries (UK, France, Italy, Germany,
etc.) that, with the exception of Austria became American "allies", just as the Soviet army
occupied countries became Soviet "allies".
In Asia US occupied Japan and South Korea became
US "allies". In Eastern Europe the Soviets arranged the political situation to ensure that
political opponents were removed from power.
In Italy and France in 1946 the democratically
elected Communists in the French and Italian governments were removed from power, not by
popular election.
There is enough symmetry here to suggest that your contention is dubious at
best. When I was a member of the US Army in Germany back during the Cold War I came to the
conclusion that I was there not so much to drive to the East German border to keep the Soviets
out of West Germany and points west as to be ready to drive on Bonn to ensure the West
Germans remained within the fold.
There is enough symmetry here to suggest that your contention is dubious at best.
I kind of both agree and disagree with what you are saying . It's true that there are
similarities in how both the US and USSR "won" their allies in Europe in WW2. The main
difference is that USSR won their allies by the power of their military alone, while US "won"
their allies by the power of their military while also being generously helped by the power
of the USSR military too.
If this wasn't true, the US would have "won" their allies (or at least it would have start
winning them) in 1990-91 instead of 1944-45 when the Germans were pretty much already beaten
to a pulp by the Russians.
To prove my theory that the biggest draw to being US ally is economic prosperity, not
being impressed by the power of their military and what they can offer in terms of
protection, it's the fact that the former Warsaw pact countries joined NATO after USSR was
gone and they didn't need any protection by anybody against anyone anymore. They joined NATO
for purely economic reasons, because they didn't want to miss the opportunity to kiss
American b*tts and in the process to profit from the pleasant gesture.
You can't pin the inevitable decline on Trump: It started a couple decades ago with rise of
the New World Order. If anything, TPTB will deliberately crash the global system to get the
NWO that Trump detailed back on the tracks.
@Josep
Come to think of it, now I can see why Tulips (#4) didn't mention Switzerland.
Last night, I stumbled across The Saker's Vineyard. He once wrote a blog post discussing
how he was blacklisted in his native Switzerland after speaking out against NATO's bombing of
Yugoslavia. I asked him how he could get himself censored in a "neutral" country that's
supposedly independent from NATO or the EU, and since when Switzerland had become a lapdog of
NATO. The next morning, he said:
The sad truth is that Switzerland, which truly used to be a neutral country, completely
caved in into NATO by the late 1980s. The visible first sign of that was when Switzerland
allowed NATO to use her airspace to bomb Yugoslavia and when she caved in to the blackmail
of international Jewish organizations and the Volcker Commission and paid over a billion
dollar in ransom money. There was a lot of resistance to this kind of behavior from the
common people and from some politicians (such as Christoph Blocher), but the globalists
still won. I rather not discuss that in more details.
Kind regards,
The Saker
"... The editor of a major paper once told me that he never allowed a woman into his office unless the door was open and a third person present. Why? If a disgruntled reporter says, "He groped me," it will go viral. (Joyful headline headline in competing paper: "Editor of Daily Blatt allegedly .") Months of furor will ensue. He will have large legal bills. The suspicion arising from that "allegedly" will never die. The paper's board may well decide that regardless of guilt he is having too serious an affect on the advertisers. He will be permitted to resign, never to get a similar job. The Daily Blatt will settle as quietly as possible for a quarter million. ..."
False accusations of rape are not uncommon. A few gain national attention. Most do not. A
few: Tawana Brawley , a black
woman, was gang-raped by four white (of course) men, except that she wasn't. Next there is the
Duke Lacrosse
case , Then at Rolling Stone a feminist writer and a magazine not greatly given to
fact checking published the story of rape at the University of Virginia, also discredited.
It cost them a libel settlement. And so on.
Again, if the accused men and boys had been guilty, long prison terms would have been a good
idea. But they weren't. The presumption of guilt for men and innocence for women are convenient
for those who want to prevent confirmation of a judge but do not reflect reality. People,
assuredly to include women, use what power they have to get what they want.
The editor of a major paper once told me that he never allowed a woman into his office
unless the door was open and a third person present. Why? If a disgruntled reporter says, "He
groped me," it will go viral. (Joyful headline headline in competing paper: "Editor of Daily
Blatt allegedly .") Months of furor will ensue. He will have large legal bills. The
suspicion arising from that "allegedly" will never die. The paper's board may well decide that
regardless of guilt he is having too serious an affect on the advertisers. He will be permitted
to resign, never to get a similar job. The Daily Blatt will settle as quietly as
possible for a quarter million.
Meanwhile, the Kavanaugh carnival is up and running. Now, Lord save us, we have USAToday trying to nail Kavanaugh for yes pedophilia. The evidence? Ain't
none. None needed. Hey, we're talking the American media.
Nuff said. I predict the soon headline: "Berkeley sychotherapist recounts seeing Brett
Kavanaugh leading the entire Marine Division in gang-raping thirteen-year-old autistic
orphans."
Oh God. Oh God. Is there no surcease? I know, silly question. Squalling protesters: Half of
the country seems fifteen years younger than its chronological age. Staged ire. Sordid passion
of the herd. Hysteria. Irrationality. Weird accusations. Savage feminists. As per custom, it is
all about how horrible men are.
One of the sillier sillinesses of feminists regarding us men, of whom they seem to know
little, is that we hate women, scorn them, want to abuse and hurt them and, most especially,
gang-rape them. See, men view rape casually. It's just something to do in a moment of boredom.
Like scratching, or wondering where we left our keys. It's because of our misogyny. The
Sisterhood seems to love misogyny, pray for misogyny, invent misogyny because without it life
would be bleak and devoid of meaning.
What is wrong with these baffled ditz-rabbits? Men hate women? By and large, our mothers
have been women. Yes, check it out. Also our wives and girlfriends, grandmothers,
granddaughters, daughters and–this will astonish the more ardent among
feminists–even many of our friends. And, often, our collies.
As for regarding rape causally: If some dirtball raped anywoman close to me, I would favor
subjecting him to a sex change with a propane torch, knee-capping him as a mobility-reduction
measure, giving him a beating of the sort popular with dentists who want Porsches, and putting
him in Leavenworth for thirty years. Sensitive readers will suggest that I am a psycho for
proposing such effective and extremely meritorious measures. Admittedly they run counter to the
trade winds of American jurisprudence. But a great many men will quietly say, "Right on,
Fred."
But: Rape is a crime. The standard is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. As well as I
can see, the Kavanaugh charges do not even meet the civil standard of preponderance of the
evidence, since there seems to be little evidence to preponder. The accuser doesn't remember
when it was, or where it was, or just who was there, and those she thinks were there don't
remember the party.
Since I am actually in a mood for noting things, I will note that any girl in my high school
class–King George High, class of 1964–could accuse me of raping her at a party, and
do it with similar evidence: none. Equally with Kavanaugh, I would have no way to defend
myself. How could I prove what I hadn't done at a party nobody remembered after 55 years? This
would be no defense against the presumption of guilt. Girls I dated would report that I had no
such inclinations. Surviving teachers would remember–well, perhaps imperfect behavior,
but nothing lubricious. This would prove nothing.
However, this first accusation against Kavanaugh has the virtue that it could have
happened, since there is no proof that it didn't happen. The same could be said of course of
the charge that I raped whoever some girl might say that I had. Ah, but now we come to the
gang-rape business. We have:
"Swetnick, who attended High School in Gaithersburg, Maryland, swore under oath that she
attended at least 10 parties where she says she witnessed Kavanaugh, Mark Judge, and
others "cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be 'gang raped' in
a side room or bedroom by a 'train' of numerous boys." She added that she has a "firm
recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their
'turn' with a girl inside the room,"
First, "cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented." This displays a common theme
among feminists, painting girls as helpless, easily manipulated victims, having no will of
their own. Is this not truly insulting to girls? "He didn't tell me beer had alcohol in it and
I didn't know boys were interested in sex, I thought it was just us girls ."
But, just as the problem with the first story is no witness, the problem with the gang rape
is too many witnesses. "At least ten parties ." Since it is unlikely that a girl would come
back to be gang-raped a second time, this implies at least ten victims. While it is true that a
rape victim often will not come forward because of embarrassment, it is curious that not one of
the violated multitude said anything, even though everyone at the party would have seen the
line-up. None of the other girls at the party said anything either, even though this was a
frequent occurrence. Is it not odd that the author of this story, seeing long lines of boys
engaging in rape, at party after party after party, saw no particular reason for reporting it?
That the many other girls witnessing this also said nothing? This is a song sounding mightily
of fabrication. Which must be obvious to senators who, though morally challenged, are not
stupid.
The thread is worth reading in its entirety, easier done here in this thread reader due
to its size. Dawson explains how QAnon uses standard psyop tactics, first establishing
credibility and then implementing gamification and spirituality to suck followers into an
energized, cultish mentality which leaves them susceptible to suggestion, manipulation and
direction.
@Rational It seems to me that the FBI investigation should include an investigation of
who leaked the Ford information, over her stated objections.
On the other hand, the Dems were VERY interested in having the FBI do a further
investigation of Judge Kavanaugh, the same FBI that got a FISA warrant to "wiretap" Trump
under false pretenses. Can we really be sure that there aren't arrangements already in place
to frame Kavanaugh?
"... Along these lines, the Trump Administration has informed Russia in April 2017 that the period of "strategic patience" is over (well, at least official 'cause being 'patient' didn't seem to deter regime change and covert ops) . They now employ a policy of "maximum pressure" instead. ..."
"... Also note: The Trump Administration has officially labeled Russia and China as enemies when they called them "recidivist" nations in the National Defense Authorization Act in late 2017. (Note: "recidivist" because Russia and China want to return to a world where there is not a hegemonic power, aka a "multi-polar" world). ..."
"... we're already within an ongoing Hybrid Third World War, which is more readily apparent with Trump's Trade War escalation. ..."
"... the "real" US economy is only 5 Trillion, only 25% of what's claimed as the total economy ..."
"... at's clearly happening--and it's been ongoing for quite awhile--for those with open eyes is the Class War between the 1% and 99%. The domestic battle within the Outlaw US Empire for Single Payer/Medicare For All healthcare is one theatre of the much larger ongoing war. ..."
"... Clearly, the upcoming financial crisis must spark a massive political upheaval larger than any ever seen before to prevent institution of the 2008 "solution." ..."
"... The primary dynamic of history is war. This has caused immense suffering. It is now becoming exponentially worse ..."
"... If we think of humankind as a large complex living entity, then like all such entities it will expire at some point. So in the larger picture, what we are moving towards is natural, and to be expected. ..."
It is rather surprising that the Democrats who have demonized Donald Trump at every turn
have voted in favour of the this extremely bloated defense budget, putting even more military
might into the hands of a President and Commander-in-Chief that they seem to despise and who
they are demonizing because of his alleged collusion with Russia.
We've been in WW3 for several years now. Bolton went "Full Monty" with his
declaration that U.S. forces will stay in Syria until Iran vacates. The introduction of a
Yemen War Powers Resolution in the House last week is a hopeful sign. A reason to root
for a Blue Wave in November. Dem leadership, already on record backing the War Powers
Resolution, would be obligated to block U.S. enabling genocide in Yemen.
I disagree with Eric Zusse's belief that USA wants to start WWIII. I think they want to
contain/constrain discontent of allies and citizenry as they attempt to destroy the Russian
and Chinese economies. War is only a last resort. But heightened military tensions mean that
the major protagonists have to divert resources to their military, causing a drag on the
economies.
Along these lines, the Trump Administration has informed Russia in April 2017 that the
period of "strategic patience" is over (well, at least official 'cause being 'patient' didn't
seem to deter regime change and covert ops) . They now employ a policy of "maximum pressure"
instead.
The big concern for me is that "maximum pressure" also means an elevated chance of
mistakes and miscalculations that could inadvertently cause WWIII.
Also note: The Trump Administration has officially labeled Russia and China as enemies
when they called them "recidivist" nations in the National Defense Authorization Act in late
2017. (Note: "recidivist" because Russia and China want to return to a world where there is
not a hegemonic power, aka a "multi-polar" world).
PS IMO Trump election and the Kavanaugh and Gina Haspel nominations are key to the pursuit
of global hegemony.
Most warnings have centered on a financial meltdown, as this article
reviews . As most know, IMO we're already within an ongoing Hybrid Third World War,
which is more readily apparent with Trump's Trade War escalation.
As noted in my link to Escobar's latest, the EU has devised a retaliatory mechanism to
shield itself and others from the next round of illegal sanctions Trump's promised to impose
after Mid-term elections.
In an open thread post, I linked to Hudson's latest audio-cast; here's what he said on the 10th
anniversary of the 2008 crash: "So this crash of 2008 was not a crash of the banks. The banks
were bailed out. The economy was left with all the junk mortgages in place, all the
fraudulent debts."
Another article I linked to in a comment to james averred the "real" US economy is
only 5 Trillion, only 25% of what's claimed as the total economy . Hudson again:
"Contrary to the idea that bailing out the banks helps the economy, the fact is that the
economy today cannot recover without a bank failure ." [My emphasis]
Wh at's clearly happening--and it's been ongoing for quite awhile--for those with open
eyes is the Class War between the 1% and 99%. The domestic battle within the Outlaw US Empire
for Single Payer/Medicare For All healthcare is one theatre of the much larger ongoing
war.
As Hudson's stated many times, the goal of the 1% is to reestablish Feudalism via
debt-peonage. All the other happenings geopolitically serve to mask this Class War within the
Outlaw US Empire. Clearly, the upcoming financial crisis must spark a massive political
upheaval larger than any ever seen before to prevent institution of the 2008 "solution."
Many predict that this crisis will be timed to occur in 2020 constituting the biggest
election meddling of all time.
The crisis will likely be blamed on China without any evidence for hacking Wall Street and
causing the subsequent crash -- a Financial False Flag to serve the same purpose as 911.
Much can occur and be obscured during wartime. The radical changes to USA from 1938-1948
is very instructive--the commonfolk were on the threshold of gaining control over the federal
government for the first time in US history only to have it blocked then reversed (forever?)
by FDR and the 1% who tried to overthrow him in 1933.
Same with the current War OF Terror's use to curtail longstanding civil liberties and
constitutional rights and much more. To accomplish what's being called "Bail-In" within the
USA, Martial Law would need to be emplaced since most of the public is to be robbed of
whatever cash they have, and World War would probably be the only way to get Martial Law
instituted--and accepted by the military which would be its enforcer.
A precedent exists for stealing money from the people--their gold--via Executive Order 6102 , which
used a law instituted during WW1 and still on the books.
The primary dynamic of history is war. This has caused immense suffering. It is now
becoming exponentially worse . Critical graphs are going off their charts. The end is
near.
If we think of humankind as a large complex living entity, then like all such entities
it will expire at some point. So in the larger picture, what we are moving towards is
natural, and to be expected.
Like individual humans, the human population as a whole can pursue activities that
maintain it's health, or it can indulge in activities that create disease and hasten it's
death. Humankind is deep in toxifying behaviors that signal it's demise in the near
future.
@ Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Oct 1, 2018 1:25:43 AM | 73
The collapse of the USSR is a very complex issue, and we still don't have a consensus
(among the people who study this seriously).
I myself think the USSR collapsed because of two main factors that are inteconnected with
the world geopolitics of its time:
1) the USSR couldn't make the transition from the second to the third industrial
revolution in the 70s (i.e. from fordism to toyotism/ohnism). Albeit it is true the USA never
really embraced toyotism (just some pockets in the Silicon Valley and the financial sector),
it is a fact the capitalist world, as a whole, did, because it worked out in Japan and South
Korea -- many of these techonologies bleeding to the world market.
The USSR, since Stalin, adopted a method of "socialist primitive accumulation", where
every techonological revolution depended on a forced (centralized) global collectivization:
the old had to be entirely dismantled for the new to be built over the carcass of this old.
This was a brutal (albeit quick and effective) method, so it was always risky and left the
USSR exposed to the capitalists militarily.
Another problem with the USSR system was that toyotism was based on heavy investment in
"human capital", i.e. investment on the workers' education and specialization. Forced
collectivization, therefore, excluded the possibility of toyotism by design, so it was never
truly an option for the post-Stalin Soviet leaders.
In a world only the USSR and the COMECON countries existed, it could've be stationed in
the second industrial revolution forever: the USSR never had a recession (except in 1990 and
1991, when it was already de facto capitalist). It was stagnant, but not collapsing. But it
didn't exist alone: on the other side of Berlin, there was the capitalist world, and, in this
dual world, not transitioning to toyotism was not an option for the Soviet Union.
2) In a bipolar world, with the toyotism path closed, Soviet bureaucrats developed a class
sentiment, which put pressure from the inside on the Soviet inherent egalitarian system. In
other words, the USSR was a victim of its own success: the problem was that that success came
too early, in a world where capitalism still existed.
In the 1980s, the USSR had already eradicated poverty and the most well-paid worker (a
high bureaucrat) received four times the salary of the lowest-paid worker. The basic public
services (transport, education and healthcare) already were free at the point of use and
universal and of a very good quality.
The problem was that the USSR emphasized too much on the production of infrastructure and
too little on consumption goods, which were already of a poor quality when compared to the
Western ones. The high Soviet bureaucracy, in constant contact with the capitalist world, was
then slowly, but surely, coopted by the delicacies of the West, and thus developed a urge of
class distinction.
This "urge" can be illustrated by an anecdote. When Yeltsin was still the President of
Soviet Russia, George H. W. Bush invited him to Houston. There, he was marvelled by Jack
Daniel's whiskey and asked for some cases for the trip back. Therefore the joke he sold the
Soviet Union for two cases of Jack Daniel's.
Once upon a time socialists dreamed that the proletariat would spontaneously rise up to
break its chains and overthrow the capitalists, then they got bored of waiting for that and
invented the radical vanguard to lead the proletariat into the revolution and then eventually
they realized that the proletariat is superfluous and they just need the vanguard.
This did come out of the 19th Century with awful factory conditions, decadent upper classes
(pre WWI) and their unexpected collapse along with the whole Belle Époque in WW1.
There was plenty of fuel for socialism with 1) a fashionable new intellectual left 2)
political fluidity 3) politically bankrupt Ancien Regimes.
In my opinion fashionable radical vanguards saw the possibility of harnessing these forces
to take power -- some of them acting idealistically -- some not. The key point was
that Ancien Regimes were weakened by WW1, with a good example being Russia with its military
failures and its decadent and ineffectual Czarist government.
In these unusual circumstances, the self appointed Bolshevik Radical Vanguard could exploit
the disaffection of Russian soldiers in Petrograd and Lenin could unilaterally issued General
Order Nº1 as the self appointed head of the Council of Soldiers and Workingmen's Deputies
(ignoring the Provisional Government) with all military units ordered to remove their existing
officers and elect new ones. This was coupled with promises to stop the war and give all
peasant soldiers their own private farms, which predictably went down very well and wrecked
army discipline.
Francis also went on to say, "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90% of
whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists
and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution."
The Bolsheviks of course used the arms against the Provisional Government, and when the
elections to the Constituent Assembly eventually came at the end of November 1917, they filled
the assembly hall with soldiers and rejected the result of the vote (Social Revolutionaries
20,893,743, Bolsheviks 9,023,963 out of 36,257,960 votes cast). The Bolsheviks declared that
Constitutional Democrats were to be arrested and Lenin established his dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans did
in WW2.
@AP
You are the
one that lives in echo chamber. Bolsheviks looted the country. It is the dumbest comment I have
ever heard. You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country . Bolsheviks
actually saved and built the country and current regime has been living from what was built by
Commies ever since. I just pointed that so called left is not left. But you asked for this. You
do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia by current elites which reveals who you
are amptly.
@melanf
Exactly. I am tired of all this BS. We lived free lives and I have never seen armed milicioner
/ police officer outside of movies. Be the state clearly cared about majority that is until the
top got all rotten. I'm hoping, right to vote is not sign of freedom Isn,' t it obvious by now?
I was recently at a beautiful museum in the USA full of classic Russian art that was looted
by Bolsheviks and sold for cheap to foreigners.
You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
You had a country of mostly Europeans, poorer than all of the non-commie European ones. You
did however manage to sink some places upon whom you imposed your system, such as Czechia or
eastern Germany, down closer to your level. Good job.
I just pointed that so called left is not left.
So called left is not left, as 21st century is not early 20th.
You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia
"And in America they persecute blacks." You are too predictable.
Russia was looted in the 1990s by the flower of Soviet society, the Soviet elite and their
children.
@AP
Even if it
was true, having industry to build 100000 + tanks and other weapons was far more important
considering what happened. Did you get receipts for those pieces of art? Might have been looted
by whites. Also, you cannot build the country by just selling some art. You say USSR was poorer
than other European states. Do you really have a clue how much it costs in the West to pay for
everything Soviet people were having as a right? Free education all level and better than in
the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here, free medicine and damn good at that, free
accommodation, annual month paid vacation, guaranteed job and retirement pay. You forget about
peace of mind that came with all above mentioned. You know, good sleep without chemistry and
all. There is always bad people and unfortunately their time came. However, they were as much
real Communists as I am ballerina.anyway, not a pop from you about this
You say USSR was poorer than other European states. Do you really have a clue how much it costs in the West to pay for
everything Soviet people were having as a right?
I'd been in western Europe and visited the USSR in 1990. USSR was much poorer than any western European country, the USA or
Canada. It wasn't a third world country, but that's a very low bar.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here, free medicine and damn good at
that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation, guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Materially
speaking Soviet middle class lived liked poor Americans on medicaid, with free public housing, free
need-based tuition, etc. One difference – unlike residents of American housing projects, Soviets could afford free vacations to
sub-Western resorts, I'll give you that. But then middle class Soviets drove worse (or no) cars, and had worse TVs and radios
then even poor Americans. There were some Soviet families even living in communal apartments.
Obviously culturally it was a different story from poor Americans. But your argument is with respect to material conditions.
By that measure – in the end, performance of the USSR was pathetic for a high IQ country of white people.
There is always bad people and unfortunately their time came. However, they were as much real Communists as I am ballerina
Yeltsin who presided over the looting spree of the 1990s was elected as a full member of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1981. As for the looters – Berezovsky was head of a department in the Institute of
Control Sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Khodorkovsky was deputy head of Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) at his
university, the D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia. Gaidar was from a Soviet elite family and in the 1980s
an editor of the CPSU ideological journal Communist. Potanin, another one from an elite commie family, attended the faculty of
the International economic relations at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), which groomed students for
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Upon graduating MGIMO in 1983, he followed in his father's footsteps and went to work for the
FTO "Soyuzpromexport" with the Ministry of Foreign trade of the Soviet Union. Etc. Etc.
Sure, none of these members of the Soviet elite, the top human products of the Soviet system – were "real Communists."
@Hector_St_Clare
Living standards in East Germany in the 1980s were really pretty meh compared to the west
though. Most private households didn't even own a telephone, and you had to wait years to get
one of those crappy
Trabant
cars.
Housing also wasn't great from what I've heard. And
that's just the material conditions, the political repression and the socially corrosive
effects of the state maintaining a vast network of informers obviously weren't conducive to
general wellbeing either.
It's true that quite a few East Germans later became somewhat nostalgic for the GDR era, given
how badly handled the transition was and the mass unemployment of the 1990s which blighted the
lives of millions of East Germans (somewhat similar in some ways to events in Russia, though
obviously the situation there was much worse and more traumatic). But one shouldn't have too
rosy a view of the GDR or other Eastern bloc states because of the manifest defects of today's
West.
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold
and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
In the grand scheme of things I suppose it's understandable in the context of a civil war,
and basically irrelevant set against their other crimes, but it happened.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here,
free medicine and damn good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation,
guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too outside the
Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological technical
subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better. The shares
of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Soviet healthcare was okay for basics, but extremely bad for any complicated ailment (if you
did not belong to the Soviet elites).
In practice, unemployment is not an issue for any minimally competent and conscientious
worker in countries with reasonable labor regulations.
@AP
Looks
interesting. The one in Minneapolis is a 3 floor renovated church devoted to Russian art. Lots
of Soviet Realism on display and occasional films too. They even had an exhibition of
Aleksander Bulavitsky's art on display a couple of years ago, a local Ukrainian emigre that
I've mentioned to you before (his work can be seen in Kyiv too). Several years back they had an
impressive collection of religious art including icons and frescoes from as far back as the
14th century, many pieces from the northeast part of Russia. A philalately exhibit of Russian
stamps that I once saw there was quite impressive too. If you're in the area, I recommend that
you give it a visit. A nice gift shop too.
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold
and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Last time I was in Sate Hermitage (among other places) I didn't notice any signs of
Bolsheviks "running out" of Tsarist "cultural (art) reserves". If my Alzheimer's doesn't fail
me -- last time I checked Hermitage can give Louvre (not to speak of Prado and other lesser
galleries and museums) a run for its money. How could this be?
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold
and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Looting one's own country's cultural treasures to finance a violent overthrow. Sounds
familiar. I suspect that if some of these Commie apologists had been born as Sunni Arabs rather
than Russians, they would be defending ISIS.
The Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings in 1930 and 1931 resulted in the departure of some of
the most valuable paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad to
Western museums. Several of the paintings had been in the Hermitage Collection since its
creation by Empress Catherine the Great. About 250 paintings were sold, including masterpieces
by Jan van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, and other important artists. Andrew Mellon
donated the twenty-one paintings he purchased from the Hermitage to the United States
government in 1937, which became the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C.
Otherwise --
Apparently Russian treasures could be bought in American department stores in the 1930s:
From the 1920s, the Soviet Union had been selling off many of the art treasures it had
confiscated from the church, the imperial family, and the aristocracy in an effort to fund the
new government's industrialization plan. American businessman Armand Hammer and his brother
Victor acquired enormous numbers of these Russian treasures and, in the early 1930s, began to
sell them in American department stores and later in their New York gallery.
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too outside the
Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological technical
subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better.
Want to try some Kholmogorov's Math And The Beginning Of Analysis for the 10th Grade? Here
is the 9th Grade Algebra (Geometry does the same but in purely geometric framework) with basic
trigonometric identities, as an example. Do you need me to present to you any US math textbook
for 9th grade?
The shares of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Yep, neither Korolyov, nor others were awarded Nobel Prize (of course, Krush is to blame)
bit when one looks at an actual fundamental and applied science Soviet contribution, one has to
really start thinking. Somehow Russians produce a lot of state of the art technology without
getting all those awards.
But wasn't it the point? Listen, I get it -- you have some accounts to settle with Soviet
Union, hey fine with me, but please do not try to convince me about all ills and good which
USSR was in 1960s through 1980s -- I lived there and I experienced a lot of it on very many
levels. Including some about which I am still reluctant to talk much about. I do not treat
seriously most of Russian "nationalist" so called "thinkers" -- most of them still don't
understand why people such as Prosvirnin or said Kholmogorov have very bleak political
prospects in Russia. The reason being for them not knowing or realistically experiencing the
Soviet period. Said Kholmogorov, despite being born in 1975, missed, as an adult, realities of
Soviet period. Russia was, is and will remain this very "left" -- not in LGBTQXYZ "western"
meaning -- nation and there are reasons for that, which are beyond the grasp of people who
do not understand nor can feel continuity (preemstvennost') of the Russian history.Alexandr
Zinovyev -- a real thinker of the scale which dwarfs any Kholmogorovs or Solzhentsyns
correctly assessed inevitable, both external and internal, Sovietization of Russia, on a
completely new foundation. In fact, it is happening as I type this -- by 2017 by different
data from 70 to 75% of Russia's strategic industries were returned under the control of Russian
State. Overwhelming majority of Russian people, including, what is most inspiring, many
youngsters are loving it. Just one example.
The "55-57% of west german GDP/capita by 1989″ numbers I'm using (which are the also
the ones used by the Wikipedia on the GDR) come from the former East German statistician
Gerhard Heske in a 2009 study. The actual study is in German so I can't read it (maybe German
Reader might be interested), but his numbers have been cited by a bunch of other papers I found
which were quite critical of the GDR but didn't really take issue with his numbers. The reason
people disagree about the size of the GDR economy in 1989 is, I think, because they weren't a
market economy and so there was no way of assigning market values to the products they
produced, other than by making 'quality adjustments' which are going to somewhat of a judgment
call. Heske claims his methodology uses quality adjustments that are fairly standard,
though.
Your series also starts in 1991 rather than 1989. It's worth pointing out that this fairly
balanced treatment of German reunification by a Polish author both cites Heske's numbers for
the 1989 GDP and also claims that in 1990 the East German economy was hit by severe recession
as a result of excessively fast free market reforms and collapse of the central planning
mechanism, and that GDP shrank "by at least 20% compared to the previous year." Of course an
assessment of the East German economy in 1991 will look worse than it did in 1989, so that
accounts for part though not all of the discrepancy.
That being said, "(slightly) faster GDP growth rate than West Germany" isn't as impressive as
it sounds since they were starting from a much lower base: an economy 40% as rich per capita as
West Germany, with an industrial base and educated/skilled workforce, *should* be growing much
faster, not slightly faster.
Russia is legitimately strong in a few specific spheres like nuclear power and military
technology. In many other spheres (e.g. pretty much the entirety of biotech) it is a
minnow.
@Anatoly Karlin
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold
and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Could you recommend a reading material on the subject? Thanks.
LOL, sure -- when Taiwan or Belgium will have a viable space programs (the list of
cutting edge technologies which goes into this is colossal, not to mention educational and
design schools) or will be able to produce something remotely comparable to MS-21 or SU-57,
then we may talk. FYI, I work in aerospace industry so, let's put it this way -- I never
heard superlatives about Belgian or Taiwanese Aerospace . The "other" one? A lot.
@Hector_St_Clare
Life in DDR in 1970s and 1980s was pretty decent. Perhaps the highest standard of living in the
Soviet Block. If people did not know that the West exist and that you can get still more
goodies there they would be very happy to be like East Germany.
The planned economy worked there pretty good. It took Germans to show it. They had problems
with energy supplies when USSR reduced export to Germany and had to start to use very
inefficient and very polluting brown coal.
Probably Czechoslovakia and Hungary were the next in terms of socialist economy success in
1970′s. Poland was always very uneven and unequal country where plan economy did not work
and where private sector still existed with lots of corruption and criminal shenanigans that
let some people got rich also in the state apparatus.
@AP
This
(selling of art) is no crime at all, but reasonable and praiseworthy business decision. USSR in
the 1930′s certainly needed tractors, locomotives, machine tools and industrial equipment
more than Rembrandts. If the Tsars sold the art and jewels and invested into industrialization
of the country, there would be no need for revolution.
If you want to talk about "heritage", you might have point about icons, but what makes
Rembrandt and Titian "Russian heritage"? If works of art belong to country where they were
created, then all Rembrandts of the world shall be returned to Netherlands. If works of art
belong to all mankind, what difference it makes whether Rembrandt painting is in museum in
Petersburg or Washington?
LOL, I vaguely remember this as an old joke. But it's true the rhetoric of some USSR orphans
and nostalgists here at unz.com sometimes resembles this joke.
@German_reader
East German Stasi spying on 1/3 of population was German efficiency run amok, objectively
useless waste or resources. It made no difference at all for the survival of the regime.
In Czechoslovakia, next door country with comparable size population, the secret police watched
about 60,000 people (i.e. VIP's and active dissidents), and it lasted about week longer than
DDR.
She, and others were American commies that were used by the Soviets. Whether they were okay
with this or ignorant of it is a factual matter than lends itself to investigation.
She, and others were American commies that were used by the Soviets. Whether they were
okay with this or ignorant of it is a factual matter than lends itself to investigation.
What's not to get here? It was a joke, apart from being a commie, she was also a black
activist and by the end of 1970s very many Soviets had some good info about specifically
American blacks. By early to mid-1980s it was a common knowledge that blacks in US were
creating problems. What is not understood here is the fact that USSR itself was becoming at
that time a society which valued law -- this is, of course, a separate topic, but Russian
attitudes towards blacks in general is very complex, especially when one considers the fact of
Russian cultural icon, Pushkin, being essentially black. So, let's not read in my post more
than is in it. I just wondered if Angela Davis support meetings could have been like that:
That would have been, quoting Mike Meyers, a Communist Party;-)
OK, let's try from the other direction. From Merriam-Webster:
Definition of irony: a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events
and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity
Now, anyone, I underscore -- anyone who lived in the Soviet Union in 1960s and 1970s knew
it -- I underscore it again, they all knew it -- among shortest anecdotes one of the most
popular was "Communism" -- it was about incongruity. Angela Davis was and is, including by
association with Black Panthers movement -- a black terrorist. She was NOT what she was
portrayed she was in USSR. And as in this anecdote "Communism", she became a definition of
irony -- being a result of complete incongruity between what was expected (anticipated) to
be and what she really was. In effect, USSR was supporting a terrorist, while later everyone
learned that she was a terrorist. Listen, if my manuscript gets accepted for publication (there
is some publisher who is "fascinated" by it
Once upon a time socialists dreamed that the proletariat would spontaneously rise up to break
its chains and overthrow the capitalists, then they got bored of waiting for that and
invented the radical vanguard to lead the proletariat into the revolution and then eventually
they realized that the proletariat is superfluous and they just need the vanguard.
This did come out of the 19th Century with awful factory conditions, decadent
upper classes (pre WWI) and their unexpected collapse along with the whole Belle Époque
in WW1.
There was plenty of fuel for socialism with 1) a fashionable new intellectual left 2)
political fluidity 3) politically bankrupt Ancien Regimes.
In my opinion fashionable radical vanguards saw the possibility of harnessing these forces
to take power - some of them acting idealistically - some not. The key point was that Ancien
Regimes were weakened by WW1, with a good example being Russia with its military failures and
its decadent and ineffectual Czarist government.
In these unusual circumstances, the self appointed Bolshevik Radical Vanguard could exploit
the disaffection of Russian soldiers in Petrograd and Lenin could unilaterally issued General
Order Nº1 as the self appointed head of the Council of Soldiers and Workingmen's Deputies
(ignoring the Provisional Government) with all military units ordered to remove their existing
officers and elect new ones. This was coupled with promises to stop the war and give all
peasant soldiers their own private farms, which predictably went down very well and wrecked
army discipline.
Source: "Russia from the American Embassy" by David Rowland Francis, U.S. ambassador to
Russia for 5 years from March 1916 to March 1921.
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-American-Embassy-April-1916-November/dp/B00B6ZE8NI/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
Francis also went on to say, "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90% of
whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists
and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution."
The Bolsheviks of course used the arms against the Provisional Government, and when the
elections to the Constituent Assembly eventually came at the end of November 1917, they filled
the assembly hall with soldiers and rejected the result of the vote (Social Revolutionaries
20,893,743, Bolsheviks 9,023,963 out of 36,257,960 votes cast). The Bolsheviks declared that
Constitutional Democrats were to be arrested and Lenin established his dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans did
in WW2.
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans
did in WW2.
The Bolsheviks disgusting, but this statement ("on a scale far exceeding anything the
Germans did in WW2″) is an obvious lie
" In fact, the number of prisoners for political reasons (for "counterrevolutionary crimes")
in the USSR in the period from 1921 to 1953, i.e. after 33 years was about 3.8 million people
during this period ( 1921 to 1954 ) has been convicted 3 777 380 people, including to capital
punishment -- 642 980, to the contents in camps and prisons for a term of 25 years and below --
2 369 220, into exile and expulsion -- 765 180 people".
Deschutes says:
September 29, 2018 at 8:06 am GMT 400 Words John Derbyshire – another shitty,
adolescent article from the angry white conservative man child who blames everybody whose not
white and male for his own failings and problems. The way you portray women in this article
reveals a man child who never matured beyond 16 years of age. It is little wonder you portray
women as nothing more than angry children's book characters who vomit if they don't get their
way: a man child can't see it any other way. Not once in this diatribe do you mention abortion
rights. It never occurred to you that losing abortion rights might piss off some women. If
Kavanaugh is put on the court, abortion will be made illegal in USA. Debryshire, you remind me
Jeff Sessions: you're a couple of bookends from the 1940s. Same racist mind set, same 'war on
drugs' reactionary bullshit, same 'women belong in the kitchen' nonsense etc. What's more,
anybody who actually likes Lindsey Graham is a total complete asshole. There is nothing to like
in that self-righteous reactionary, war criminal piece of shit from the Old South. If you've
enjoyed the last 17 years of wars without end and the wretched 'war on terror' and all that has
come to pass since 9-11, then Lindsey Graham is your man. Like McCain, he never saw a war he
didn't love starting. And watching Graham's temper tantrum meltdown in the congressional
hearings the other day made for rather uncomfortable viewing, like watching a 5 year old in a
toy store who didn't get his GI Joe doll. Since when is losing your temper, foaming at the
mouth and screaming at the entire caucus because you are not getting your way acceptable
behavior? It isn't. But it is a sure sign of a person who is a total, complete egotistical
asshole. I always hated Scalia, and was really happy when he died. That Obama and the dems were
too spineless to stick a replacement on the bench when they had the chance only reinforced my
total lack of respect for the dems. The tragedy in waiting was that now we will have a
reactionary conservative majority scotus headed by Kavanaugh, and abortion will be made
illegal; more laws passed to favor giant corporations like Citizens United; more anti-worker
legislation passed; more war and more police state measures domestically: that's your
Trump/Kavanaugh/Lindsay Graham/John Derbyshire shit stain USA coming yer way!
@Deschutes Ah, ah, the main issue here is not where Kavanaugh will stand on abortion laws
but whether the campaign of slander against him could have any possible truth.
The way I see it, a woman over 50 years old goes on the stand, tries to put on the
helpless cute little girl act complete with a six-year old's lisp, and pretends to have
traumatic memories of something she claims happened over 35 years ago. Well, where on earth
was she all these years? She ended up with a Ph.D. in psychology so she could not have been
ignorant of laws and remedies surrounding rape and attempted rape through her years in
university. Where was her "great courage" all these years? A tad too much of a coincidence
this, her finding her memories and courage right on the eve of Kavanaugh's proposed
appointment. Kavanaugh may or may not be a good choice for the Supreme Court; opinions can
differ legitimately. But putting him on a show-trial where he comes out looking unclean no
matter what is a travesty of natural justice and a grave injury to common decency and common
sense.
@anon I know all of this woman-howling is covering up his role in the Vince Foster
'suicide' making him a George HW Bush CIA (Iran-Contra, cocaine trafficking) lap-dog. Oh, and
he ruled the USA can kidnap American citizens abroad and hold them at black sites
Kavanaugh hearings are just another episode of bad political theater.
Like professional wrestlers, Republicans pretend to fight-but a Flake or someone like him,
always appears in the nick of time, to save the day for the left.
"... I think you've really nailed it, Anastasia. Watching this farce on TV, a few things were quite obvious to me: Christine Ford is a very disturbed and unhappy woman. The Republicans were afraid to question her. So, they brought on this attorney from Phoenix, who was a total flop. Senator Graham finally rode in to save the day. (I am not accustomed to praising Graham. But he was effective yesterday.) The lead democrats, Feinstein, Leahy, and Durbin, were actually ashamed when senior Republicans publicly called them out for the sham they were perpetrating on the American people. The silly Senator from Hawaii and Dick Blumenthal demonstrated that they had no shame. All in all, it was a low point for the Senate. ..."
anastasia says:
September 28, 2018 at 4:47 am GMT 300 Words They were too afraid of the women's movement,
and therefore could not bring themselves to challenge her in any way. Interspersed between the
prosecutors questions which did not have the time to develop, was the awards ceremony given by
the democrats to the honoree.
But we , the people, all saw that she was mentally disturbed. Her appearance (post clean
up); her testimony, her beat up looks, drinking coke in the morning, the scrawl of her
handwriting in a statement to be seen by others, the foggy lens, the flat affect, the little
girl's voice and the incredible testimony (saying "hi" to her rapist only a few weeks later and
expecting everyone to believe that is normal, remembering that she had one beer but not
remembering who took her home; not knowing that the offer was made to go to California as if
she were living on another planet, her fear of flying, her duper's delight curled up lips
– all the tell tale signs were there for all the world, except the Senate the media, to
see.
She went to a shrink with her husband in 2012, and it was her conduct that apparently needed
explaining, so she confabulated a story about 4 boys raping her when she was 15 to explain her
inexplicable conduct to her husband, and maybe even to her friends. She later politicized the
confabulation, and she is clearly going to make a few sheckels with her several go fund me
sites that will inexplicably show $10.00 donations every 15 seconds.
She was the leaker. She went to the press almost immediately in July. They were too afraid
to point that out to everyone because the phoniest thing about her was that she wished to
remain anonymous.
Ludwig Watzal says:
Website
September 28, 2018 at 1:13 pm GMT 400 Words As a foreign observer, I watched the whole
hearing farce on CNN till midnight in Germany. For me, from the beginning, it seemed a set up
by the Democratic Party that has not emancipated itself from the Clinton filth and poison. As
their stalwart, Chuck Schumer said after the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh that the Dems will
do everything to prevent his confirmation. They found, of course, a naive patsy in Dr. Ford,
not to speak of the other two disgraceful women that prostituted themselves for base motives.
Right from the beginning, Dr. Ford played to me the role of an innocent valley girl, which
seemed to make a great impression on the CCN tribunal that commented biasedly during the breaks
of the hearing committee. It was a great TV-propaganda frame.
Don't forget; the so-called sexual harassment occurred 36 years (!) ago. Dr. Ford was 15,
and Judge Kavanaugh was 17 years old. But Dr. Ford discovered her "suffering" after she heart
from the nomination of Kavanaugh in July 2018. Why didn't she complain to the police after the
"incident" happened in 1982 or at least after the "me to movement" popped up? May it as it is.
Everybody who knows the high school or prep-school-life and behavior of American youths should
not be surprised that such incidents can happen. When I studied at the U of Penn for my M.A.
degree, I got to know American student campus life. For me, it was a great experience. Every
weekend, wild parties were going on where students were boozed and screwed around like hell.
Nobody made a big fuss out of it.
On both sides, the whole hearing was very emotional. But get one argument straight: In a
state of the law the accuser has to come up with hard evidence and not only with suspicions and
accusations; in a state of the law, the accused has not to prove his innocence, which only
happens in totalitärian states.
Why did the majority of the Judiciary Committee agree on a person like the down-to-earth and
humdrum person such as Mitchell to ask questions? It seems as if they were convinced in advance
of Kavanaugh's guilt. The only real defender of Kavanaugh was Senator Lindsey Graham with his
outburst of anger. If the Reps don't get this staid Judge Kavanagh confirmed they ought to be
ashamed of themselves.
This hearing was not a lesson in a democratic process but in the perversion of it.
@WorkingClass Really – everyone should know by now that in any sex related offence,
men are guilty until proven innocent .& even then "not guilty" really means the defendant
was "too cunning to be found guilty by a patriarchal court, interpreting patriarchal Law."
My comment on those proceedings today was this: "This is awful, I've never seen a more
tawdry, sleazy performance in my life – and I've seen a few. No Democrat will ever get
my vote again. They can find some other party to run with. Those people are despicable.
Details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKSRUK-l7dM”
;
Later on, I noted: "None of this has anything to do with his record as a judge – and
that's not such a good record: https://www.lawfareblog.com/judge-brett-kavanaugh-national-security-readers-guide
at least if you're concerned with the Constitutional issues SCOTUS will actually decide. None
of it, not one word. It's irrelevant. It's partisan harassment, it's defamation, it's
character assassination, and all of it is *irrelevant* , it's useless – and in the end
it will be both futile, because there will be a party line vote, and counterproductive,
because a lot of people will be totally repelled by the actions of the Clintonistas –
because that's what those people are."
The Neocons are evil. They despise Middle America almost as much as do the wild-eyed
Leftists, just in a different way for slightly different specific reasons.
Well it looks like the repubs will get what they want – a woman abusing (like their
President) alcoholic defender of the rich and powerful. Fits right into their "elite" club.
After watching the Big Circus yesterday, I rate Ford's performance a 6 (sympathetic person,
but weak memory and zero corroboration). Cavanaugh gets an 8 (great opening statement,
wishy-washy and a dearth of straight answers during questioning). Had it been a tie, the fact
that the putative event occurred when he was 17 would break it.
@anastasia Good points, but yesterday's inference is that she became permanently
disturbed by the incident 36 years ago . In my experience, most psychologists are attracted
to that field to work out personal issues -- and aren't always successful. Ms. Ford fits that
mold, IMHO.
One thing I haven't heard is a challenge to Ford's belief that her attackers intended
rape. That may or may not be true. Ford testified about "uproarious laughter." That sounds to
me more like a couple of muddled, drunken male teens having their idea of "fun" -- i.e.,
molestation and dominance (which is certainly unacceptable, nonetheless).
Much ado about nothing. Attempted political assassination at it's best. American's have once
more been disgusted to a level they previously thought impossible. Who among us here does not
remember those glorious teenage years complete with raging hormones? What man does not
remember playing offense while the girl's played defense? It was as natural as nature itself.
No harm, no foul, that's just how we rolled back in the late 70′s and early 80′s.
@anastasiaI think you've really nailed it, Anastasia. Watching this farce on TV, a
few things were quite obvious to me: Christine Ford is a very disturbed and unhappy woman.
The Republicans were afraid to question her. So, they brought on this attorney from Phoenix,
who was a total flop. Senator Graham finally rode in to save the day. (I am not accustomed to
praising Graham. But he was effective yesterday.) The lead democrats, Feinstein, Leahy, and
Durbin, were actually ashamed when senior Republicans publicly called them out for the sham
they were perpetrating on the American people. The silly Senator from Hawaii and Dick
Blumenthal demonstrated that they had no shame. All in all, it was a low point for the
Senate.
For his part, Kavanaugh is oddly obtuse for one who is said to be such a great jurist.
Meek, mild and emotional, he does not seem up to the task of defending himself.
It appears that Ms. Mercer wrote this before the second half when things were looking
bleak.
Reminded me of Super Bowl 51 at halftime. I even tuned out just like I did that game until
I checked in later to see that the Patriot comeback was under way.
@mike k You are a useful idiot for the destruction of western civilization. Men are not
abusers of women, excepting a few criminals. Men protect families from criminals.
@Haxo Angmark Yes, Ms Mitchell did a very incompetent job, but it won't matter. Kavanaugh
will be confirmed Saturday, due to his own counterattack and refusal to be a victim.
Little miss pouty head cute face was a huge liar, obvious from the second I heard her. The
kind of chick who can go from a little sad voice to screaming and throwing dishes and
brandishing a knife in a heartbeat.
A very shrewd observation, widely misattributed to Voltaire, states that "To learn who rules
over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." Or put another way,
individuals are reluctant to publicly challenge those whose power they fear. Certainly, this
simple standard helps to explain many important aspects of America's severely malfunctioning
political system.
Wade says: September
24, 2018 at 4:04 pm GMT 300 Words @Tyrion 2
Nice try. But to me this falls flat. First of all I don't think Ron has literally blamed Jews for
all the world's evils any more than Southern Christians like me have been blamed for all the
world's evils by Hollywood.
The issue is that Zionist leadership plays really dirty. And they are good at it. But having
them in control of the West's media means that their negative impact on society goes unremarked
upon while the positive things they do are trumpeted from the rooftops. We are allowed to notice
Jewish power in relation to their main accomplishments, but we are referred to the nearest
holocaust museum when we notice any negative impact that Jewish power has. It's one of the
many wars on "noticing" the media is engaged in.
I don't see how all of this ends in mass pogroms, let alone a holocaust if you want my
opinion. We're just hoping for a much overdue correction in perspective. Topics like Israel's
founding and influence in US politics, The Holocaust, WWII and 911 are being desacralized so they
can be discussed rationally, and that's good for everyone. Those who doubt Oswald was the lone
assassin have been treated for decades with a smorgasbord of conspiracy theories about JFK
ranging from Cuba and Castro, to anti-Castro Cubans, LBJ, The Mafia, the KBG, the CIA all being
cast as possible suspects, but not even once has Israel being fingered by anyone anywhere (except
by the indefatigable Michael Collins Piper) as a possible suspect, even though they had as clear
(or clearer) motives and opportunity than nearly anyone else. Why hasn't this possibility been
more fully explored by JFK researchers? Everyone needs to know how much Israel has benefited from
911. Their role in this also needs to be explored much more by researchers and brought out into
the open.
The Unz Review is a tremendous site. It attracts superior writers as well as commentators. And
Ron Unz, fortunately, is untouchable. The ADL understands this. Better for them to remain
silent. They want to keep you as obscure as possible. Thus, the silent treatment.
Thus, the MSM would rather talk about crude 'white power' sites than the perspicacious Unz
Review. But you can bet, Ron, that they will pounce on you if given the opportunity.
Says Ron: "I do think [the ADL] may be absolutely terrified of the many facts contained
within the series of recent columns that I have now published, and such abject terror is what
keeps them far, far away." That covers it. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing the UNZ
review grow in influence and readership.
The quote "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
comes from Tacitus The Life of Agricola
other nice quotes are-
"It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one
thinks."
― Tacitus, Histories of Tacitus
"It is a principle of nature to hate those whom you have injured."
― Tacitus
"Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity." Annals
and finally
"They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger they are driven by
greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by
false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their
wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace."
― Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania
Trump has tried to turn his presidency into a personality cult rather than MAGA. That is a
mistake because Trump's campaign positions were more popular than Trump and it doesn't lift
the entire party.
Every Hillary voter I meet, male or female, buys every one of the stupid narratives being
pushed and are fired up to vote. The Bernie voters don't automatically buy every narrative
but they despise Trump and want him out and Democrats to regain control.
I agree with Derb that the hearing may make up some of the enthusiasm gap. A lot of
conservative men had to have been looking at that hearing and thinking how easy it would be
for them to get similar treatment at work or school.I imagine a good number of conservative
women don't want their husbands and sons to face similar inquisitions.
Well, I don't know. My sister is an executive assistant. I thought I knew what that meant and
you probably do too. But then one day I sat down with her and we actually talked about her
job, and I quickly realized that not only was my understanding of her job so shallow as to be
effectively meaningless, but it was so shallow that I didn't even understand how much I was
missing. I'd just glanced at the title and said to myself "yep, executive assistant, assist
executives, that's what she does" and at no point had it ever even occurred to me that there
was anything past that. In fact, it was even worse than that, because half the stuff I
imagined she might do wasn't part of her job at all (hint, if you think "executive assistant"
and "secretary" are remotely similar you are just as far off track as I was).
I still don't understand what she does but at least now I know how little I know. If she
came to me for career advice there's no chance I'd be able to offer her anything other than
meaningless platitudes, because I don't even know enough right now to know if her current job
is a good one or a bad one. If she'd asked me before I realized how much I don't know I'd be
in the same boat, only probably rolling my eyes that she would get so worked up over x, y, or
z when her job was so simple and straightforward that there's no possible way it could be
that stressful.
Yeah.
All of this is to say that unless your friends are on a career path similar to yours they
probably not only fail to understand your job, but they probably fail so bad that they don't
even know how far off they are. That's not because your friends are stupid or because IT is
so impenetrably complex that only the chosen few can grasp it; its just that most of us don't
have a lot of expertise in careers outside of our own. Lacking context, we turn to pop
culture for reference. Picture the stereotypical Hollywood "computer guy" (or, if you must,
"hacker"). That's probably what your friends think your job is like. Now imagine that guy
coming to you complaining about how hard and stressful his job is. How hard could it be
anyway? I have a computer at home and don't have to do much to keep it running. These things
all basically run themselves, don't they?
So, point is his friends aren't necessarily assholes or in denial. They probably just
don't know enough to understand how little they know, as is true for all of us, and are
trying to give well-intentioned advice; OP asked, after all, and they want to help their
friend. But you can't give good advice if you don't have all the facts, and especially not if
you don't even know how much you're missing.
The executive assistants I know (to VPs, presidents, CEOs) practically run the company. Not
entirely, but a good chunk of it.
Filter what their executive knows and doesn't know, what meetings that take and don't,
and what their priorities are. If the EA isn't on your side, you're not getting to their
exec.
This influences strategy for the company, which means the EA is often helping direct
strategy.
Because they are spending 100% of their time with the exec (compared to the, say, 2
hours I get every other month as one of the department heads), they have a huge amount of
influence. They are trusted. And they have heard about everything that is happening at the
company. They know more than I do about what's really happening.
As to what they do, on the surface, it does look like secretary work. Schedule
appointments. Schedule venues for meetings/conferences. Book travel. Make sure the exec is
prepared for the appointments (knows what they need to know; has met with the right people in
advance to get briefed; leaves on time to get to the appointment). Answer emails and phone
calls.
But the level of knowledge they need to perform those tasks for an executive is much
higher.
Well, sure, that's an unfortunate commute. You're basically saying "I would take getting paid
for X for y hours of work over getting paid (x - costs of transportation ) for y + 4.5 or
more hours of work.
It's a decent jumping-off point for a middle management role of your own, if one opens up at
the same company. You're playing a huge role in running your exec's department
already, so you've got the lay of the land and you're clearly a competent wrangler of humans.
Who promoted herself from Harvey's legal secretary to the COO in a span of two episodes,
didn't skip a beat, and kept doing exactly what she was doing before.
Well, seeing as my last post was a big long thing about how I don't fully understand what
they do this is a limited view, but a short pithy summary would be that she handles all the
stuff her boss should be doing but doesn't have time to actually do. That's everything from
negotiating phone plans and insurance rates to making sure all the certifications and permits
they need to function are taken care of to planning and booking meetings and seminars. It's
very wide ranging and is a ton of responsibility. As noted elsewhere a good EA practically
runs the company.
I work from home 2 days a week. My wife thought I was nuts when I brought home a gaming
headset and 2nd monitor for the PC I use at home.
She thought I was sitting at home playing minecraft all day.
The reality is I need lots of screen space to doy job and I have conference call meetings
several times a day. I can actually hear and be heard with the headset.
I agree the downside is getting tagged for late day or after hours emergency work because
I can respond quickly.
I ended up buying an egpu so I could hook up a third monitor to my laptop. Currently trying
to figure out how to arrange stuff on my desk to fit a fourth; may have to start mounting
them on swivel arms. I want as much screen space as I can get when I doy job.
I also have an hdmi switch to change the monitors to my gaming machine when it's Minecraft
time. Tax deductible 4k 27 " monitors are good for that too.
Got a stud above/behind your desk? The fourth one on the wall angled down can work pretty
well, throw your notifications bar up there, calendar, anything you rarely glance at but
should be able to see without moving another program or window.
All of these makes sense, but I am just going to add the following: - Your friends should
recognize if you are yourself or if you are frustrated, close to being burned out. That is a
clear indicator if you are at right job or not. - Your friends should also be able to help
you figure out if you are appreciated and in a company with good culture
Good companies/management do everything they can to empower employees, provide adequate
training, and set realistic expectations. All of that increases employees' morale and
confidence. Without those two, company is bound to fail sooner or later.
Your friends should recognize if you are yourself or if you are frustrated, close to
being burned out. That is a clear indicator if you are at right job or not.
Your friends should also be able to help you figure out if you are appreciated and in
a company with good culture
And, as your friend, you might want to listen to us if we point out these things more than
a few times. There are one off vent sessions over a beer then there are long-term, consistent
complaints.
Yes, sometimes you just want to vent, but if someone is pointing out the same thing
constantly, they may have a point and it's up to you to start on a path to changing the
situation.
This. Many resources out there clearly state that your friends either support your success or
place negative labels on your success.
Go check out 7 habits of highly effective peeps. Will give you a completely new
perspective. Not just about friends but yourself and how you interact with others.
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No, he just needs to understand that people give generic advice that they think sounds good
but they really don't understand your job or have never been in your situation. And he does.
Being able to empathize with your friends concerns, to understand their feelings without
understanding exactly what they're going through, is a talent that not everybody has. Neither
is being self-aware enough to recognize when you lack such a talent and instead say "wow,
that sounds tough, I don't have any advice, but good luck." But these are not the only
attributes that make someone friend-worthy.
On the other hand, not everybody can tolerate having friends that lack empathy and
understanding. So for some the answer "they need new friends" may be true, I just don't think
OP necessarily does. In fact, I think it's the same kind of generic, bad advice that I'm
talking about to say that he does.
Neither is being self-aware enough to recognize when you lack such a talent and instead
say "wow, that sounds tough, I don't have any advice, but good luck."
When I'm in situations like this (I can't advise because I lack context or experience) I
advise flipping a coin. Quit after finding a new job or stay and keep trying to change the
place, heads or tails. After you've flipped the coin and seen the result, examine your
feeling... disappointed or relieved? There's your answer regardless of the coin toss you know
how you really feel, and should trust your gut.
This! When my friend(s) complain about their current workplace/position/etc I always
recommend they get their feelers out and start looking. It may take a while but you'll
eventually find something.
It took me almost a year to find something comparable or better but didn't land the final
interview this past year. But, my old job lost our largest client and I am now working for
said client. Couldn't be happier!
You don't know what someone deals with & those people may want to bend over backward to
help this person if they could. Don't automatically label them shitty friends. You don't even
know them.
No. I trust them and usually come to them when I'm emotionally invested/upset and yelling
about a situation at work. Making decisions in this mindset is always a bad idea. I was
talked off a ledge long enough to make a smart, calculated decision.
You probably figured this out already, but the whole "go hire someone" thing was a ploy to
keep you around a little longer. They gave you permission to recruit, not authority to hire.
They were never going to green light the position.
You also facilitated management's bad behavior by putting too much effort into doing the
right thing. You weren't valued or appreciated, you were just taken advantage of.
Spot on. I was given the illusion of great authority, but in the end - not on the things that
matter. I borderline want to say the word 'budget' doesn't exist here.
This. Why would they hire someone when you're doing it all. IT employees have a much better
stress level, work life balance, and career when they learn how to say no or "that's not my
role". Unless you're trying to get into that area, never volunteer you do work that should be
done by another area. It'll start becoming the norm and will never stop. Good luck on your
next gig though!
Yeah. I learned at my old job that the "what can we do to keep you?" question is bullshit.
It's a way for them to determine what they can lie to your face about to string you along as
far as possible. I asked for a team change, and they managed to string me along saying I was
approved for almost 9 months, until suddenly I'm not approved anymore and there's not even a
spot open for me.
Never again will I attempt to be honest with my manager. You can know that I'm thinking
about leaving when I give you my 2 weeks notice.
Thanks for the story, and the perspective. I'm the sole SA at a smallish entertainment-based
development studio, didn't understand half the tech you reference and I do have a senior
network architect I can (remotely) fall back on, but many days I'm totally overwhelmed. We
had a major product success last year and we've been ramping up like crazy. More office
rollout, more servers, more users, more developers (so like users but worse), more backup
needs, more bandwidth, more "and can you get better teleconference speakers for the meeting
rooms", more baroque software licensing to figure out, also do I have batteries? Mouse pads?
Highlighters? Why are you asking me for highlighters? No I can't fix your chair. Etc etc. And
I'm waiting for that one crucial system to break that I won't know how to fix.
I guess I'm just saying your post gave me some much-needed perspective. Cheers.
The best time to look for a job is when you don't need a job
Hell yeah! I quit about 6 months ago and don't even look. I get sporadic emails from
LinkedIn and other avenues and if things look good, I'll apply, otherwise the hell with it.
I've had a few interviews but sadly most places look like they have issues with
understaffing, overworked, etc.
Ah well, in the next few years I'm sure something good comes up.
Had my jr get assigned 2 more standing desks this week (about 8 installed in the last 2
months and I guess we literally can't trust someone to unplug their 3 cables from the little
NUC...). I wrote him an email discussing the core parts of his job and how no one cares about
how many standing desks are or are not installed at any given time. Focus on doing your job
well, please talk to me or CIO if you are getting stressed by any workload (we all know that
sometimes it feels like the tickets just stream in and you make no headway no matter what you
do). We'll do whatever is needed to either take care of em.
I have also done some stand up desk troubleshooting and installation, if it has a wire in it
or on it, or even holds something with a sufficient number of wires people can claim it is
confusing, it's your problem. 15 years of working in the IT/SA field and I'm unboxing a desk
because 'my computer has all the wires and I'll probably just mess it up if I try to move
everything myself'. Fortunately our users are very reasonable in general.
How about one of those tiny space heaters? A user asked me if I could figure out why it
wasn't working, and all I did was flip a big red switch marked "ON."
Start to say no. Do the hours in your contract and go home. When stuff doesn't get done tell
them you need more people. Either they get more people or you search for a new job. But if
they don't get more people you would search for a new job anyway. Just burned out.
Seems to me like a lot of horror stories here are because people either care too much or
are deeply afraid of looking for a new job. These conditions exist because you let them.
Years ago a manager from a different department (non IT obviously) walked over to us to let
us know a toilet was clogged. We all just looked at him and laughed. I was also yelled at
once for not helping someone move a file cabinet during an office move, while we still had
tons of PC's left to setup.
IT has always been the "well, we don't have above whose responsibility it is to take care
of this, so IT can do it" field.
I'm going through a similar situation to you OP but for a different reason.
I left a good MSP job (busy and at times frustrating) for a larger employer and the job I
was expecting to have is not at all like the one I applied for it's very boring and quite
slow with too much idle time sometimes which is weird since it's an operations roles for a
billion dollar business but probably half of the "work" I'm doing now is "hey sorry to wake
you but we got this alarm and we've raised an incicent can you take a look" when I used to
design and manage environments end to end.
My job for some people would be the jackpot but for me it's awful and I'm considering
leaving to go back to my way more stressful MSP job.
My problem is I have too many resources to call on (multiple teams to escalate to) and I'm
just left watching the screens because of it.
This is what I'm afraid of as well but I need more friggin money. The screen watchers
actually make more because they exist in big companies with lots of money.
We definantely do some automation but maybe not enough.
The alarms are mostly validation checks (is it actually p1? Is that event due to a
change?) and anything that can be automated is and we don't get alerts for it.
Our alarm dashboard is an aggregator of a ton of systems that all send their alarms to
it.
Unfortunately once the infrastructure and databases become self healing we're all out of a
job.
Same boat here. "is this really going to happen again before this system is decommed?" Should
I spend a few hours making a good test that will determine if its really this problem again
and fixing it + reporting the result of the fix? Or should I spend the 6 minutes it takes to
fix this and move on with my life.
Re: Self healing - out of a job. Oh PLEASE! We're not out of a job when stuff is self
healing; we're into a new one. I'm just a regular sys admin and even I am starting to think
about how I can use machine learning to solve issues I face or to improve our business. It'll
be QUITE some time before I actually start doing anthing with ML, let alone something useful.
I'd LOVE to have more time to play with new stuff.
We use ansible for automation. I do love it but it's fairly time consuming to setup (half the
stuff is in a txt doc waiting for a playbook to be built)
Management jobs usually require some management experience and I have a little bit of team
leading experience but not the sort of "manage this budget and this department" management
experience I'm also torn between making that jump to management and getting "off the tools"
or doing a deep dive into a specific set of technical tools.
My dad was an engineer for various semiconductor factories for years. He hit that same point
in his role - but there was a much bigger push to go to management, which he did. after about
5 years of that he quit - he was way to burnt out and hasn't returned to corporate life
since. The money was good but the job wasn't worth it.
Hell, the only job he's had in years was as a general contractor putting in sinks and
stuff making what I do as a help desk monkey.
I'm sort of going into a remote management position. Working for a MSP as problem escalation
for 8 techs. Finding 'teachable moments' (probably all of them!) to train on troubleshooting
process. In my spare time I'll be getting amazon aws certs and I'll eventually move into a
different role. Sounds challenging enough not to be bored :)
Oh I can do their jobs they're like "tier 3" while we're "tier 2" and we can do actual work
(permissions allowing) our team holds the same level of certs they do (MCSA, MCSE etc) were
just in at a different layer of the business which is changing.
I don't just watch for alarms and escalate it's just a small part of the role really but
it's the most prominent part when you're on the graveyards which always makes me a bit
resentful of my own choice to come here.
No, he said he had to sweep snow off a satellite dish because it's heater was broke. He said
nothing about being on the roof. Sweeping dishes after a heavy snowfall is not uncommon. I
had to do the same thing this morning while on-call.
I work in a small environment incredibly similar to OP's, Calix, Metaswitch, etc. We have
a SME for each area; one for voice, one for IP/IT systems (me), one for video, and two
outside plant guys. We cover/triage each others duties during on-call rotation. It works well
enough for us, but sounds like OP is doing it all. It would be one thing if he had to only
deal with the non-IT stuff on occasion, but if all those responsibilities are solely his,
thats untenable.
If it's a small company everyone needs to chip in beyond their official responsibility to
make things work, but they also need to be compensated at the rate of their top skills and
not driven into the ground. IMO
The problem here is that you kept the ship running, even though you told management you
needed help, things were still getting done.
Management will not do anything about thing until they break, so while you bust your ass
keeping things going they don't care how you did it. All they know is things are still
running.
You either have to show them things breaking or put your foot down negotiate a commitment to
hire a hand.
Just out of interest what was their reaction when you handed in your notice? Did they counter
or they simply decided to hire a replacement. They must have been in a world of hurt if it
was the latter and you were the only one doing that role.
Yep, a recruiter bringing someone in will cost 15-25k. Giving someone an internal referral
for 7k is comparative peanuts, AND you get two happy employees because of that.
Heya, I don't know how far into your career you are, but I'm 45, pretty senior level (I've
been a c-level exec) and wanted to tell you:
Don't ever compromise. Ever.
I am in a similar situation at an MSP (I'm in a leadership role) and have the same kinds
of conversations about resources and losing valuable workers because there's no help. The
management above me isn't listening and we are going to lose a very fine employee (like
yourself -- someone with skill who is trying to make it better but is not being
heard -- and it's because management don't know how to run an ITIL-based shop and hire to
that kind of skill set. I put toghether a framework to measure qualifications of our
employees and they all measure up to Tier 1 analysts/engineers (in both experience and quals)
and some of them are considered Tier 3 employees and they can't do something as simple as
read and interpret a Wireshark packet capture. And I keep being told either "we have to make
do with what we have" or "you're not seeing what good they can do". So clearly in my case
there's a division in vision for leadership and I'm giving up and probably moving on. In your
case, you tried, gave your input, and, if they're not gonna listen to you, move on. Your
expectations are NOT too high. Their expectations aren't high enough. Move on to somewhere
there's a fit. You can only help someone from burning their hand on the stove so many times
before you give up and go watch TV.
Yes. They all are 6 months to 1 year out of technical school. They are able to accomplish
SOME tasks. They are unskilled at anything above Tier 1 despite someone saying "you know
about X. Here, go do it."
For instance, a windows admin should be able to implement GPO and know what it's about.
Maybe have an MS cert. but our main windows admin is working towards his CCNA and has been
out of school for 6 months. Not exactly a right fit for that job.
I've been in a similar situation, the problem is not necessarily an issue with vision. More
than likely upper management have been given the mandate to keep costs down or at least
same.
So they will come up with any excuse not to hire more people or if someone of good quality
leaves they will only hire someone lower quality i.e. lower pay.
That is the problem with corporate culture everyone is there looking only after number one,
as long as the job is getting done they don't care how much those doing it care about the
company or that they are doing their jobs efficiently, cost effective or to a high
standard.
All they care about is that the job is getting done.
Stories like this is why I gave up trying. Used to, I would change my plans to do a last
minute cutover on the weekend because you changed the date 3 different times. These days, my
response is always, "I have an opening 3 weeks from now".....because I don't let it fuck up
my life anymore. Frankly, nothing has happened since I started giving those answers. What are
they going to do anyways? Hire someone else? pffft.
Christ, I felt bad for myself when I quit MY job but goddamn, you were in a
shithole! Glad you found something better.
I still hear from people at my old job that nothing has changed. They hire someone else
but never fix the problems. Overworked, understaffed, complaints are listened too with great
concern and then ignored.
It does sound very much like they're, perhaps unwittingly, taking advantage of you and you're
right to want to leave a job that's damaging your life so terribly.
I mean, works sucks most of the time, but it doesn't have to suck ALL the time and there
should be at least enough people to have the work ease off from time to time or you just go
manic from the stress.
Everybody expects different things from their job and not all jobs are right for all
people. IMO, life is too short to spend it doing a job you hate or working in a toxic
environment. I applaud your efforts to try and improve things but ultimately you've got to
draw a line where enough is enough and just move on. Do what's right by you, because your
company is working every day to do what's right by them and not necessarily what's good for
you.
Something sounds off. You talked to the ceo about what they can do, and they have their own
headend, but won't outsource the printers? That's always the first thing that needs to be
sourced out because it's petty shit like toner or pain in ass like the fuser.
Sounds like they needed someone to streamline the processes, and have 2-3 more people on
board. A senior network guy and two more minions eager to learn and take those 'patch cable
broken' or port security tickets.
You were used hard and long and have been fed bad advice. You should have left that place
long ago and hopefully this lesson will stick with you forever.
The same two questions, every time, before you go looking. And then the third, when you have
an offer on the table (sometimes it's one you went looking for, sometimes it's one that just
appeared in your inbox).
Are you happy? If not, why not?
Will a different job make you happier?
Will this opportunity make you happier?
Sometimes the problem is at home, and changing your work life might help (if it brings
more money or a shorter commute), and sometimes it won't. Sometimes the problem is at work,
and you can influence change either within the organization or within yourself (changing your
expectations, adjusting your work schedule to be earlier or later, discussing with your
management group about changes to your role, etc) in order to improve the situation. Or you
improve your work situation by leaving it behind, if there is no way to improve it or the
people who can help improve it are unwilling (or themselves unable) to do so.
Yes, sometimes the easy opportunities for change just aren't there, and you need to make
harder decisions about the change your life needs. In those moments one should be grateful
for what they have, but it doesn't necessarily mean they should accept that this is their lot
in life. Maybe you need to move. Maybe you're looking for a remote position. Maybe you take
the plunge and live off savings for a few months -- though unless you're on the verge of a
breakdown, this can cause complications later; it's generally true that it is easier to find
a job if you have a job. Not universally, but generally. Maybe you give up IT and become a
Birthday Clown, because you enjoy making children happy more than you enjoy clicking buttons
anymore.
Best of luck to you in your new place, hopefully it works out!
Are your friends in IT in any way? I find that most people have no idea what IT means, or the
individual fields. They expect the same person who helps them with spreadsheets also
makes/updates the websites, sets up the phone system, maintains the network.. and may even
think they plug in their power bar. Most people can't discern the difference between
facilities, an electrician and someone in one of the many fields of IT in my experience.
Heck, at my company the executives have no idea what I do. They ask me to do things from
investigate and roll out MDM.. to go to one of our communities and setup one of the
resident's televisions. I've even been asked to install generator power outlets.. I've just
learned to say "no" and explain to them who's responsibility it is. If they are unwilling to
hire someone or even just bring the proper person from within the organization, the problem
can stay a problem.
Your friends may not be crappy, they might just be clueless.
The CEO found out and we sat down ... He puts that responsibility on me.
I've seen my own managers do the same, and still am thinking through if, when and how it's
a mistake. Managers are there to support and enable important things happening. If it's a
small thing then all they need to do is give you permission to do it. But if it's a big thing
then they need to mange it, e.g track it, ask how it's going, ask what you need, get
other people involved, set priorities etc. Not just give a pep talk, say "it's on you now"
and wash hands of it. That basically means, "cheer up, but I don't care". If I wanted someone
to listen carefully and then do nothing about it I'd go to therapy, thanks.
Being that IT is generally a self-taught field, where we can play around with and test things
before doing them in production...
I recommend sticking to jobs where you're doing commonly reproducible/testable software
stuff. i.e. standard Windows/Linux servers + standard software. Basically things that can be
completely learned and tested in virtual machines, without needing any special hardware at
all.
I reckon all the proprietary "black box" / vendor specific devices etc you mentioned make
working in "IT" much much more stressful. You basically have to learn a whole heap of
different systems where what you learn is only applicable to one device. And you can't easily
play around with them like you can with pure software and virtual machines etc. So you're
often learning & testing in production, and even then, only once something has already
failed. And you're likely not going to have spare parts, or even be able to get them easily.
The same goes for network engineers dealing with lots of cisco routers etc to a certain
degree. Basically anything that involves hardware except for standard PCs and servers running
Windows or Linux.
I worked for a post-production company for a while, and yeah it was similar. I was busy as
fuck with the regular standard everyday IT shit, yet still had the responsibly to figure out
all there proprietary devices etc that I'd never even heard of before. And because they're
not commonplace IT stuff, there's fuckall information on the internet to learn about them and
troubleshoot etc. And of course learning about that shit doesn't translate into useful skills
you can take elsewhere in other IT jobs.
So yeah these days, I'm 100% software. I actually do IT consulting part time, and even
when my clients want to buy hardware, I just give them some recommendations and get them to
order it directly from Dell or whoever. I don't want to be responsible for hardware failures,
of which I have zero control over.
OP I'm in the same boat. COO found out that my medial issues I may jump ship. Had a chat and
he said he would do everything to get people hired. My boss has had approval for hiring for
weeks now and not one person has been interviewed. I have also been thinking about getting
medicated because I'm in denial with work. I'm going to jump ship soon take time off and see
what happens.
That is what MSP is. MSP is the environment where self-driven, stoic people survive and other
people crumble. MSP is especially tough in the role like yours as you have no one to rely on
anymore, but everyone else is coming to you to fix a problem they can't figure out. I am
there, been there for awhile. People think you are smarter than them, but all you are is more
persistent and willing to sacrifice your sanity and your free time to figure out a problem by
going to 10th page of google and performing advanced search queries on reddit.
I think MSP life after age of 35 is impossible to do unless you are crazy. :)
You were in an impossible situation with really shit poor management. Don't waste a second
thought. They'll either figure out why they can't keep people or they'll fail in spectacular
fashion. The bottom line is you have to protect yourself and your interests, you owe that
company nothing. The only time you owe a company that isn't your own is if the company makes
significant investment in your and your career, which your former company clearly didn't.
Good for you on recognizing that you had options. In many ways in that former situation you
were the one with the power and its great that you exercised it.
I went through practically the same thing. Found a nice job down the street from my house I
could just walk to. They had a full web team to handle all their websites and web problems,
but their skills were about 20 years old. At first I didn't notice because I would handle IT
/ network problems all day.
Then eventually I started getting web site issues pushed to me, then web design issues.
Eventually I was building all their web sites and running their entire web platform while
everyone else on that team just sat around all day making emails. All this extra work never
came with any pay increase and everyone would always say "You do everything here, if you
leave we're screwed".
A day came when there was a landslide of issues combined with an HR nightmare and nobody
seemed to wanted to handle anything. By the end of the day I realized I had wanted to leave
the job for over a year and I was only staying to keep things together until I got everything
to a stable point. Unfortunately this place could never reach a stable point because their
management was an absolute shit show and never wanted to step up to face any big
problems.
This seems really common after reading some stories here. A good amount of IT people
probably feel obligated to keep things running even when they hate their job.
I also found a remote job with a ridiculous salary increase after going through so many
interviews to the point of utter mental exhaustion. The grass definitely can be greener
sometimes its just much harder to find than you would ever think.
Iberiano says:
September 29, 2018 at 11:47 am GMT 300 Words Looking at that photo of the former primary
contenders, reminded me of all the holier-than-though talk we got from the right-of-center,
about how Trump was too gruff, and crass, about everything, including sexual topics,
interactions with women, etc.
What these hearings demonstrated, that we already knew, was that the Puritan-Jew alliance is
obsessed with all things sexual, perverted, distasteful theirs is a world of, as you
point out, "preppy white boy" fantasies, where the bad guys look like the blond jock in Karate
Kid, and drive around in their Dad's 1982 Buick Regal or their own '79 Camero, looking to
"score" with virginal know-nothing, Red Riding Hoods, that happen to find themselves at 'gang
rape parties' (?), out of nowhere. Who go on to have Leftist careers only to resurrect
repressed memories 35 years later–projected in front of the world
It's a silly framework from which they obsess, but it's similar to Kinsey, Mead and others
of the Left. Sex. Projection, doubling-down, and an absence of due process to punish people for
the very things that actually occupy their minds. Even in her advanced age, you could
tell, Feinstein was enjoying the open air discussions regarding sexual topics.
Let the Right / Never-Trumpers be on notice–Trump is light fare compared to where the
Left will go and has been, regarding women, sex, and all things crass.
After 9/11," said US Navy Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Bill Moran, "our focus was
supporting the ground fight, which meant we were operating that force a lot, and when you
operate the force a lot it eats up a lot of your cash, it eats up a lot of your service
life."
Operating a Nimitz-class carrier runs about $298 million per year, the Government
Accountability Office estimated in a 1997 study. The current carrier fleet is made up entirely
of Nimitz-class carriers, with the lone ship of the new Ford-class still undergoing sea
trials.
"Add on to this the cost of the air wing, the combat power behind the aircraft carrier," a
US Navy lieutenant commander wrote in thesis paper from 2012. "An average current air wing is
composed of four fighter/attack squadrons of 10-12 aircraft each, an electronic warfare
squadron of four aircraft, an airborne command and control squadron of four aircraft, two
onboard delivery aircraft and a helicopter squadron of six aircraft."
The workhorse F/A-18 carrier aircraft, according to the Office of the Under Secretary of
Defense Comptroller, costs about $10,507 to fly per hour. Brett Odom, former F/A-18 pilot and
financial expert at Fighter Sweep, has disputed the Pentagon's cost accounting, however, on the
grounds that it only covers marginal costs.
Odom estimated that the cost to pay pilots and support crews, conduct engine maintenance and
fuel the aircraft for an hour was $11,140 -- approximately in line with DoD's estimate. But
then there is the cost of the aircraft itself: an F/A-18 runs about $65 million. Odom refers to
this figure as capital cost. Incorporating the average acquisition cost smoothed out over an
expected life of 6,000 flight hours into the equation, the expert reached $22,000 in cost per
flight hour.
"There are valid reasons to ignore capital costs and treat them as sunk costs in certain
situations. However, by ignoring capital costs, the Department of Defense is implicitly stating
that its fighter aircraft are free, or -- like the pyramids -- they can be expected to function
forever," Odom wrote
for Fighter Sweep in 2016.
"This has all been building up" for 17 years "through overuse of the carrier force and naval
aviation," former Pentagon official Bob Work said in comments to USNI.
"When we kept two carriers in the Persian Gulf for a period of time, we kept telling the
senior leadership that this was going to have a downstream effect, and it would really put a
crimp maintenance-wise, and there would be gaps both in the Pacific as well as the Middle East.
That is coming home to roost," Work said.
While the US Navy carrier fleet was taxed abroad, Washington's defense budgets continued to
grow.
"It's fairly obvious that corporate interests for the defense industry like Raytheon and
others have driven a lot of our spending in the last 20 years or so, especially given the War
on Terror post-9/11," Daniel Sankey, a California-based financial policy analyst, said in an
interview with Sputnik News.
"We've carried this huge, outsized expenditure," he noted. "Eventually the money supply
starts going down. It's not infinite, even though the US pockets are pretty deep."
The carrier force is now facing the music of the Pentagon's "credit card wars" since 9/11,
conflicts that have been paid for with mostly borrowed funds. Brown University's Institute for
International and Public Affairs found that post-9/11 war expenses add up to about $5.6
trillion.
"You have a thoroughbred horse in the stable that you're running in a race every single day.
You cannot do that. Something's going to happen eventually," Secretary of the Navy Richard V.
Spencer told reporters in August.
"... "The true treasures of the Church are the poor, the little ones to be helped not merely by occasional alms but in the way they can be promoted," ..."
"... "He talked particularly of his concern over 'Los Desaparecidos', people who had vanished off the face of Argentinian earth in their thousands. By the conclusion of the 15th minute audience the General began to wish that he had heeded the eleventh-hour attempts of Vatican officials to dissuade him coming to Rome," ..."
"... "His mind was as strong, as hard and as sharp as a diamond. That was where his real power was. He understood and had the ability to get to the centre of a problem. He could not be overwhelmed. When everyone was applauding the smiling Pope, I was waiting for him 'tirare fuori le unghie', to reveal his claws. He had tremendous power." ..."
"... But John Paul I never lived to exercise his "tremendous power." ..."
"... "The public speculation that this death was not natural grew by the minute. Men and women were heard shouting at the inert form: Who has done this to you? Who has murdered you?" ..."
"... David Yallop revealed that on the day of his death, the Pope had discussed a reshuffle of Vatican staff with Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot, who was also to be replaced. Yallop claimed that the Pope had a list of a number of clerics who belonged to the Freemasons, membership of which was strictly prohibited by the Church. The most sinister of these Masonic lodges was the fiercely anti-communist Propaganda Due (P2), which held great influence in Italy at this time, being referred to as a "state within a state." ..."
"... "Had he lived another week, the United States would have been looking at a half a dozen mini-Cubas in its back yard," ..."
"... "The single fact of John Paul II's election in 1978 changed everything. In Poland, everything began Then the whole thing spread. He was in Chile and Pinochet was out. He was in Haiti and Duvalier was out. He was in the Philippines and Marcos was out," ..."
"... In 1985, Agca's confederate, Abdullah Catli, who was later killed in a car crash, testified that he had been approached by the West German BND spy organization, which promised him a large sum of money "if he implicated the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB in the attempt on the Pope's life." ..."
"... "ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman disclosed that his colleagues, under pressure from CIA higher-ups, skewed their reports to try to lend credence to the contention that the Soviets were involved. 'The CIA had no evidence linking the KGB to the plot,' Goodman told the Senate Intelligence Committee." ..."
"... In 2011, a new book entitled 'To Kill the Pope, the Truth about the Assassination Attempt on John Paul II', which was based on 20 years of research, concluded that the CIA had indeed tried to frame Bulgaria, in order to discredit communism. ..."
"... The great irony of course is that after the Berlin Wall came down, Pope John Paul II became a strong critic of the inhumane 'greed is good' model of capitalism which had replaced communism. In Latvia, he said capitalism was responsible for "grave social injustices" and acknowledged that Marxism contained "a kernel of truth." He said that "the ideology of the market" made solidarity between people "difficult at best." In Czechoslovakia, he warned against replacing communism with materialism and consumerism. ..."
"... Follow Neil Clark @NeilClark66 ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
The sudden death of Pope John Paul I, exactly 40 years ago today, stunned the world. The
'Smiling Pope' had only served for 33 days. His demise and replacement by John Paul II marked
an important turning point in the old Cold War. The year 1978, as I argued in a previous op-ed,
was the year today's world was made.
There was nothing inevitable about the ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher, the rise of groups
like Al-Qaeda and IS, and the downfall of the Soviet Union. The neoliberal, neoconservative
world order and its associated violence came about because of key events and decisions which
took place 40 years ago. The Vatican was at the heart of these events.
The drama which unfolded there in the summer of 1978 would have been rejected as being too
far-fetched if sent in as a film script. In a space of two and a half months, we had three
different Popes. There was no great surprise when, on August 6, the first of them, Pope Paul
VI, died after suffering a massive heart attack. The Supreme Pontiff, who had served since
1963, was 80 and had been in declining health. But the death of his much younger successor,
John Paul I, a radical reformer who wanted to build a genuine People's Church, has fuelled
conspiracy theories to this day.
Cardinal Albino Luciani, the working-class son of a bricklayer (and staunch socialist), from
a small town in northern Italy, was a Pope like no other. He refused a coronation and detested
being carried on the sedia gestatoria – the Papal chair. He hated pomp and circumstance
and pretentiousness. His speeches were down to earth and full of homely observations, with
regular references to popular fiction. He possessed a gentle humor and always had a twinkle in
his eye. He was by all accounts an incredibly sweet man.
But there was steel there, too. Luciani was determined to root out corruption, and to
investigate the complex financial affairs of the Vatican's own bank, and its connection to the
scandal-hit Banco Ambrosiano.
While he had declared communism to be incompatible with Christianity, his father's
egalitarian ethos stayed with him. "The true treasures of the Church are the poor, the
little ones to be helped not merely by occasional alms but in the way they can be
promoted," he once said. At a meeting with General Videla of Argentina, he made clear his
abhorrence of fascism. "He talked particularly of his concern over 'Los Desaparecidos',
people who had vanished off the face of Argentinian earth in their thousands. By the conclusion
of the 15th minute audience the General began to wish that he had heeded the eleventh-hour
attempts of Vatican officials to dissuade him coming to Rome," noted David Yallop in his
book 'In God's Name'.
One cleric, Father Busa, wrote of John Paul I: "His mind was as strong, as hard and as
sharp as a diamond. That was where his real power was. He understood and had the ability to get
to the centre of a problem. He could not be overwhelmed. When everyone was applauding the
smiling Pope, I was waiting for him 'tirare fuori le unghie', to reveal his claws. He had
tremendous power."
But John Paul I never lived to exercise his "tremendous power." He was found
dead in his bed on the morning of September 28, 1978. The official story was that the 'Smiling
Pope' had died from a heart attack. But it wasn't long before questions were being asked. John
Paul I was only 65 and had appeared to be in fine health.
The fact that there was no post-mortem only added to the suspicions. "The public
speculation that this death was not natural grew by the minute. Men and women were heard
shouting at the inert form: Who has done this to you? Who has murdered you?" wrote David
Yallop.
David Yallop revealed that on the day of his death, the Pope had discussed a reshuffle
of Vatican staff with Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot, who was also to be replaced.
Yallop claimed that the Pope had a list of a number of clerics who belonged to the Freemasons,
membership of which was strictly prohibited by the Church. The most sinister of these Masonic
lodges was the fiercely anti-communist Propaganda Due (P2), which held great influence in Italy
at this time, being referred to as a "state within a state." The murky world of P2,
and its leaders' links with organized crime, the Mafia and the CIA is discussed in 'In God's
Name'.
Another writer, Lucien Gregoire, author of 'Murder by the Grace of God', points the finger
of blame squarely at the CIA. He notes a seemingly strange coincidence, namely that on
September 3, 1978, just 25 days before the Pope himself died, Metropolitan Nikodim, the
visiting leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, who was later revealed to have been a KGB
agent, fell dead at John Paul's feet in the Vatican after sipping coffee. He was only 48.
Gregoire says that the CIA dubbed John Paul I 'the Bolshevik Pope' and was keen to eliminate
him before he presided over a conference the Puebla Conference in Mexico. "Had he lived
another week, the United States would have been looking at a half a dozen mini-Cubas in its
back yard," he writes.
While there's no shortage of suspects if you believe that John Paul I was murdered, it needs
to be stressed that despite the contradictory statements made about the circumstances of his
death, and the strange coincidences, no evidence has yet been produced to show that his death
was not a natural one. What we can say though is that there will have been quite a few powerful
and influential people in Italy and beyond who were relieved that the 'Smiling Pope' had such a
short time in office.
His successor, the Polish Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, who took the name 'John Paul II' as a
homage to his predecessor, made it clear that investigating the Vatican's financial activities
and uncovering Freemasons was not a priority. As a patriotic Pole, his appointment was manna
from Heaven for anti-communist hawks in the US State Department. "The single fact of John
Paul II's election in 1978 changed everything. In Poland, everything began Then the whole thing
spread. He was in Chile and Pinochet was out. He was in Haiti and Duvalier was out. He was in
the Philippines and Marcos was out," said Joaquin Navarro-Valls, John Paul II's press
secretary.
The way that Pope John Paul II spoke out against what he regarded as communist repression,
not only in his native Poland but across Eastern Europe and beyond, saw him being toasted by
the neocon faction. It might not have been just words either, which helped undermine communist
rule. There was a rumor that 'God's Banker' Roberto Calvi, who in 1982 was found hanging from
Blackfriars Bridge in London, had sent $50mn to 'Solidarity' in Poland on behalf of the
Pope.
In May 1981, John Paul II was shot and wounded by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca. Neocons in
the US promoted the narrative that it was a communist plot (organized by Bulgaria), but Sofia
denied involvement. In 1985, Agca's confederate, Abdullah Catli, who was later killed
in a car crash, testified that he had been
approached by the West German BND spy organization, which promised him a large sum of money "if
he implicated the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB in the attempt on the Pope's
life."
Martin Lee, writing in Consortium News, also notes
that in 1990, "ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman disclosed that his colleagues, under
pressure from CIA higher-ups, skewed their reports to try to lend credence to the contention
that the Soviets were involved. 'The CIA had no evidence linking the KGB to the plot,' Goodman
told the Senate Intelligence Committee."
In 2011, a new book entitled 'To Kill the Pope, the Truth about the Assassination
Attempt on John Paul II', which was based on 20 years of research,
concluded that the CIA had indeed tried to frame Bulgaria, in order to discredit
communism.
The great irony of course is that after the Berlin Wall came down, Pope John Paul II
became a strong critic of the inhumane 'greed is good' model of capitalism which had replaced
communism. In Latvia, he said capitalism was responsible for "grave social injustices" and
acknowledged that Marxism contained "a kernel of truth." He said that "the ideology of the
market" made solidarity between people "difficult at best." In Czechoslovakia, he
warned against replacing communism with materialism and consumerism.
Having enlisted the assistance of the Vatican in helping to bring down 'The Reds', the
neo-liberals and neo-cons then turned on the Church. The Church survived communism, but it
hasn't fared too well under consumerism. The Vatican is nowhere near as influential as it was
in 1978. The US, meanwhile, unconstrained by a geopolitical counter-weight, threw its weight
around the world after 1989, illegally invading and attacking a series of sovereign states.
One can only wonder how different things might have been if the 'Smiling Pope' had
lived.
Seeing Orthodoxy and Martin Luther mentioned in the same place reminded me of the amusing
history of early Lutheran contacts with the eastern Church:
Most Christians are not aware that in the latter part of the 16th century, early
Lutheran Reformers -- close colleagues and followers of Martin Luther -- set in motion an
eight year contact and correspondence with the (then) Ecumenical Patriarch, Jeremias II of
Constantinople. The outcome might have changed the course of Christian history. Kevin Allen
speaks with scholar Dr Paraskeve (Eve) Tibbs about this fascinating and largely unknown
chapter in post-Reformation history.
From Wittenberg to Antioch
September 16, 2007 Length: 32:12
A fascinating interview with Fr. Gregory Hogg, an Antiochian priest in Western Michigan.
Fr. Gregory was a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor and professor for 22 years before coming
to Orthodoxy.
[...]
Long story short, the western reformers were too argumentative and lawyerly for the
Patriarch of Constantinople to take. He essentially said "please stop writing to me".
Always remember the equally lurid "recovered memories" of UFO abduction survivors. It's the
same mush pulled out and reinjected into the hippocampus only in a form that is even harder to
swallow.
One would think Psychologist Ford, who apparently needs one herself (a shrink, that is)
would have some self-awareness about. Apparently not.
Unless it's really all about renting out her bedroom illegally.
"... Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" exemplifies very well how the hysteria of girls can be so dangerous that innocent men can be made to suffer terrible if not fatal consequences. ..."
"... In fact, the only allegation we hear is of "witch" "he sexually abused me". ..."
Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" exemplifies very well how the hysteria of girls can be so
dangerous that innocent men can be made to suffer terrible if not fatal consequences.
Three hundred years later, the modern version of Abigail Williams, Christine Ford, with no
facts, no evidence, no corroborative support other than other hysterical girls, with one finger
pointing to John Proctor's modern portrayal played by a hapless Brett Kavanaugh, is found at
the whim of a delusional embittered girl.
Like Abigail Williams, Christine Ford, with self loathing and hatred for any man, has found
cold support from self-serving political leaders whom have nothing other than their own
personal grandiose agendas for public glorification and self apotheosis. Like Reverend Samuel
Paris, the wicked Feinstein and hypocritical sycophants like Booker, with their sanctimonious
disregard for the rule of law and procedure of fact finding and procedural evidence, just as
during Salem's hysteria cast supreme judgement on hollow words of a clearly embittered,
delusional rantings of a wobabies (i.e. woman babies) whom can't even remember where, when, and
what actually was done to them and to herself, Christine Ford. But like Abigail Williams, she
is sure it was John Proctor, excuse me I mean Brett Kavanaugh.
In fact, the only allegation we hear is of "witch" "he sexually abused
me". Ah if Abigail was so fortunate, as no doubt Abigail would find Ford to have been,
maybe there would have been no Salem Witch Trials, and John Proctor would have lived. Like
wise, maybe the truth here is that Ford whom admits to not being raped, is really embittered
just for that!
But how can we know? Especially when, after 35 or more years of Ford's meteoritic incapacity
to remember even where the house this occurred in, when this "sexual thing" happened. Abigail
Williams would have done so much better today!
It has been over three hundred years since those unfaithful days of Salem, and here we find
ourselves again, having to face the same vacuous allegations of embittered girls whom don't
remember anything but that evil that was done by John Proctor and Brett Kavanaugh.
I think it is time for a new and updated version of The Crucible. With Christine Ford now
playing Abigail Williams, and a devastated Kavanaugh the new Proctor. As for Reverend Paris,
Senator Feinstein will do that role with great aplomb.
Three hundred years, and the United States of America is once again en-ravaged by the
rantings of embittered girls that have been unable to grow up and deal with their own emotional
short-comings. No wonder Ford is a psychologist, she's certifiably nuts!
"... On balance, although Judge Kavanaugh and his family were the ones who had to pay the price for this bitter learning experience ..."
"... What this sordid affair was all about was the zombie-like return-from-the-dead of a phenomenon exposed and pretty much completely invalidated more than thirty years ago, which never should have been permitted to raise its ugly head before an assembly of rational, educated Americans: the "Recovered Memory" (aka "False Memory") Syndrome movement of the 1980s, in which numerous troubled, frequently mentally off-balance, women (and a few men) came forward to declare that they had been the victims of incestual sexual abuse – most often actual sexual intercourse – at the hands of mature male family members; usually fathers but sometimes uncles, grandfathers, or others. ..."
"... Their testimony was usually highly emotional and impassioned, leaving an impression very similar to that conveyed last night by Dr. Ford. ..."
"... The "Recovered" (or "False") Memory Syndrome movement emerged in the midst of the steadily radicalizing Feminist Movement in the United States, probably at the very apogee of its extreme evolution, and was a movement in which Freudian therapy was central and Freudian therapists came to play the leading role. ..."
"... It was only after they had been subjected to extensive pseudo-scientific Freudian "therapy," in which sex always lay prominently at the center, that virtually all of these women came forward with these stories. ..."
"... nd, in this dispute the American ultra-Feminists chose to believe and preach the worst, most salacious, and most vicious possible interpretation of Dr. Freud's highly speculative, evidence-less, and – as subsequent study has overwhelmingly shown – completely contrived diagnoses. ..."
"... Beginning with a conviction that cocaine could provide a substantial therapeutic base for solving psychological problems, Freud seems himself to have become for a period a regular consumer of that drug, but subsequently altered the focus of his therapy to hypnosis. After realizing certain limitations to this approach, he shifted again, turning to the so-called "Talking Cure" rooted in provoking word associations, which provided the basis for the classic Freudian method of popular imagination – with the patient reclining on a couch and the good Dr. seated behind with his notebook and pen in hand. This is the method he retained for the rest of his life. ..."
"... Analysis thus follows a circular course, the analyst's theoretical surmise being first subtly communicated to the patient, then confirmed by the patient's casting of his (or, more often her) own ideas within the framework which had been suggested by the analyst. In the end, nothing new is actually discovered. The patient merely replicates the expressed Freudian doctrine. ..."
"... Those women patients, and a few men, became their victims, but in turn became the perpetrators in the savaging of numerous men's lives, as these men were subjected to the most vicious accusations imaginable. Most of these accusations were, in retrospect, clearly fantasies in a ruthless mid-20th century male-witch hunt. ..."
"... Into this popular intellectual desert walks Dr. Ford, both whose personal history and her strange physical mannerisms in testimony before the Senate clearly indicate she has unfortunately suffered some form of serious psychological disturbance. ..."
"... Seemingly alienated from her own parents and most immediate family members, she has made her home as far away from the Washington, DC area ..."
"... In 2012 she underwent some sort of psychological counseling with her husband, though the details as far as I know have not emerged. But, it hardly seems likely coincidental that her first documentable expressions of antipathy to Judge Kavanaugh occurred in that year, when it was announced that Judge Kavanaugh was considered the likely Supreme Court appointee should Mit Romney win the Presidential election. Her expressions of antipathy to him have only grown from there. ..."
We still have to wait to see whether Judge Kavanaugh's appointment will go through, so the
most important practical consequence of this shameful exercise in character assassination is
as yet unknown. I'm pretty sure he'll eventually be appointed.
But, I think some critical theoretical aspects of the context in which this battle was
waged were definitively clarified in the course of this shameful and hugely destructive
effort by the Democrat leadership to destroy Judge Kavanaugh's reputation in pursuit of
narrow political advantage. On balance, although Judge Kavanaugh and his family were the ones
who had to pay the price for this bitter learning experience, all of us should be the
long-term beneficiaries of this contest's central but often hidden issues being brought to
light and subjected to rational analysis. I want to show what I think these hidden issues
are.
What this sordid affair was all about was the zombie-like return-from-the-dead of a
phenomenon exposed and pretty much completely invalidated more than thirty years ago, which
never should have been permitted to raise its ugly head before an assembly of rational,
educated Americans: the "Recovered Memory" (aka "False Memory") Syndrome movement of the
1980s, in which numerous troubled, frequently mentally off-balance, women (and a few men)
came forward to declare that they had been the victims of incestual sexual abuse – most
often actual sexual intercourse – at the hands of mature male family members; usually
fathers but sometimes uncles, grandfathers, or others.
Their testimony was usually highly emotional and impassioned, leaving an impression
very similar to that conveyed last night by Dr. Ford. Many hearers were completely
convinced that these events had occurred. I recall having a discussion in the 1990s with two
American women who swore up and down that they believed fully 25% of American women had been
forced into sexual intercourse with their fathers. I was dumbfounded that they could believe
such a thing. But, vast numbers of American women did believe this at that time, and many
– perhaps most – may never have looked sufficiently into the follow-up to these
testimonials to realize that the vast majority of such bizarre claims had subsequently been
definitively proven invalid.
The "Recovered" (or "False") Memory Syndrome movement emerged in the midst of the
steadily radicalizing Feminist Movement in the United States, probably at the very apogee of
its extreme evolution, and was a movement in which Freudian therapy was central and Freudian
therapists came to play the leading role.
It was only after they had been subjected to extensive pseudo-scientific Freudian
"therapy," in which sex always lay prominently at the center, that virtually all of these
women came forward with these stories. A major controversy, which arose within the ranks
of the Freudians themselves over what was the correct understanding of the Master's
teachings, lay at the core of the whole affair. A nd, in this dispute the American
ultra-Feminists chose to believe and preach the worst, most salacious, and most vicious
possible interpretation of Dr. Freud's highly speculative, evidence-less, and – as
subsequent study has overwhelmingly shown – completely contrived diagnoses.
It's now known that Dr. Freud's journey to the theoretical positions which had become
orthodoxy among his followers by the mid-20th century had followed a strange, little known,
possibly deliberately self-obscured, and clearly unorthodox course. Beginning with a
conviction that cocaine could provide a substantial therapeutic base for solving
psychological problems, Freud seems himself to have become for a period a regular consumer of
that drug, but subsequently altered the focus of his therapy to hypnosis. After realizing
certain limitations to this approach, he shifted again, turning to the so-called "Talking
Cure" rooted in provoking word associations, which provided the basis for the classic
Freudian method of popular imagination – with the patient reclining on a couch and the
good Dr. seated behind with his notebook and pen in hand. This is the method he retained for
the rest of his life.
The primary fault which has been cited for Freud's methods generally, but which has been
particularly critiqued in both hypnosis and the "Talking Cure" as a reason for their
invalidation, is the claim that both – at least inadvertently – incorporate the
high probability of suggestion from the therapist. In this view, patient testimony moves
subtly, and probably without the patient's awareness, from whatever his or her own
understanding might originally have been to the interpretation implicitly propounded by the
analyst. Analysis thus follows a circular course, the analyst's theoretical surmise being
first subtly communicated to the patient, then confirmed by the patient's casting of his (or,
more often her) own ideas within the framework which had been suggested by the analyst. In
the end, nothing new is actually discovered. The patient merely replicates the expressed
Freudian doctrine.
The particular doctrine at hand was undergoing a critical reworking at this very time, and
this important reconsideration of the Master's meaning almost certainly constituted a major,
likely the predominating, factor which facilitated the emergence of the Recovered Memory
Syndrome movement. Freudian orthodoxy at that time included as an important – seemingly
its key – component the conviction of a child's (even an infant's) sexuality, as
expressed through the hypothesized Oedipus Complex for males, and the corresponding Electra
Complex for females. In these complexes, Freud speculated that sexually-based neuroses
derived from the child's (or infant's) fear of imagined enmity and possible physical threat
from the same-sex parent, because of the younger individual's sexual longing for the
opposite-sex parent.
This Freudian idea, entirely new to European, American, and probably most other cultures,
that children, even infants, were the possessors of an already well-developed sexuality had
been severely challenged by Christian and some other traditional authorities, and had been
met with repugnance from many individuals in Western society. But, the doctrine, as it then
stood, was subject to a further major questioning in the mid-1980s from Freudian historical
researcher Jeffrey Masson, who postulated, after examining a collection of Freud's personal
writings long kept from popular examination, that the Child Sexual Imagination thesis itself
was a pusillanimous and ethically-unjustified retreat from an even more sinister thesis the
Master had originally held, but which he had subsequently abandoned because of the
controversy and damage to his own career its expression would likely cause. This was the
belief, based on many of his earlier interviews of mostly women patients, that it wasn't
their imaginations which lay behind their neuroses. They had told him that they had actually
been either raped or molested as infants or young girls by their fathers. This was the secret
horror hidden away in those long-suppressed writings, now brought into the light of day by
Prof. Masson.
Masson's research conclusions were initially widely welcomed within the psychoanalytical
fraternity/sorority and shortly melded with the already raging desire of many ultra-Feminist
extremists to place the blame for whatever problems and dissatisfactions women in America
were encountering in their lives upon the patriarchal society by which they claimed to be
oppressed. The problem was men. Countless fathers were raping their daughters. Wow! What an
incentive to revolutionary Feminist insurrection! You couldn't find a much better
justification for their man-hate than that. Bring on the Feminist Revolution! Men are not
only a menace, they are no longer even necessary for procreation, so let's get rid of them
entirely. This is the sort of extreme plan some radical Feminists advocated. Many
psychoanalysts became their professional facilitators, providing the illusion of medical
validation to the stories the analysts themselves had largely engendered. Those women
patients, and a few men, became their victims, but in turn became the perpetrators in the
savaging of numerous men's lives, as these men were subjected to the most vicious accusations
imaginable. Most of these accusations were, in retrospect, clearly fantasies in a ruthless
mid-20th century male-witch hunt.
This radical ideology is built upon the conviction that Dr. Freud, in at least this one of
his several historical phases of interpretative psychological analysis, was really on to
something. But, subsequent evaluation has largely shown that not to be the case. The same
critique which had been delivered against the Child Sexual Imagination version of Freud's
"Talking Cure" analytical method was equally relevant to this newly discovered Father
Molestation thesis: all such notions had been subtly communicated to the patient by the
analyst in the course of the interview. Had thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions
of European and American women really been raped or molested by their fathers? Freud offered
no corroborating evidence of any kind, and I think it's the consensus of most competent
contemporary psychoanalysts to reject this idea. Those few who retain a belief in it betray,
I think, an ideological commitment to Radical Feminism, for whose proponents such a view
offers an ever tempting platform to justify their monstrous plans for the future of a human
race in which males are subjected to the status of slaves or are entirely eliminated.
But, the judicious conclusions of science often – perhaps usually – fail to
promptly percolate down to the comprehension of common humanity on the street, and within the
consequent vacuum of understanding scheming politicians can frequently find opportunity to
manipulate, obfuscate, and distort facts in order to facilitate their own devious and often
highly destructive schemes. Such, I fear, is the situation which has surrounded Dr. Ford. The
average American of either sex has absolutely no familiarity with the history, character, or
ultimate fate of the Recovered Memory Syndrome movement, and may well fail to realize that
the phenomenon has been nearly entirely disproved.
Into this popular intellectual desert walks Dr. Ford, both whose personal history and
her strange physical mannerisms in testimony before the Senate clearly indicate she has
unfortunately suffered some form of serious psychological disturbance.
Seemingly alienated from her own parents and most immediate family members, she has
made her home as far away from the Washington, DC area where she was born as possible
within the territorial limits of the continental United States. The focus of her professional
research and practice in the field of psychology has lain in therapeutic treatment to
overcome mental and emotional trauma, a problem she has acknowledged has been her own
disturbing preoccupation for many decades. In 2012 she underwent some sort of
psychological counseling with her husband, though the details as far as I know have not
emerged. But, it hardly seems likely coincidental that her first documentable expressions of
antipathy to Judge Kavanaugh occurred in that year, when it was announced that Judge
Kavanaugh was considered the likely Supreme Court appointee should Mit Romney win the
Presidential election. Her expressions of antipathy to him have only grown from
there.
Dr. Ford is clearly an unfortunate victim of something or someone, but I don't believe it
was Judge Kavanaugh. Almost certainly she has been influenced in her denunciations against
him by both that long-term preoccupation with her own sense of psychological injury, whatever
may have been its cause, and her professional familiarization with contemporary currents of
psychological theory, however fallacious, likely mediated by the ministrations of that
unnamed counselor in 2012. Subsequently, she has clearly been exploited mercilessly by the
scheming Democratic Party officials who have viciously plotted to turn her plight to their
own cynical advantage. As in so many cases during the 1980s Recovered Memory movement, she
has almost certainly been transformed by both the scientifically unproven doctrines and the
conscienceless practitioners of Freudian mysticism from being merely an innocent victim into
an active victimizer – doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the pain inherent in her
own tragic situation and aggressively projecting it upon helpless others, in this case Judge
Kavanaugh and his entire family. She is not a heroine.
Rules-of-thumb
-- -- -- -- -- -- -
1. A good offense is the best defense.
2. An ambush backed up by overwhelming force is a good offense.
3. Use of weapons and tactics, of which the defender is unprepared for, is a good offense.
Are Republicans et al. unable to understand basic military strategy? Do we lack the
ability to conceive of new tactics and weapons to use against Democrats and Globalists?
I realize that it is unacceptable to attack this poor helpless victim so the "it can't be
corroborated" card has to be played. However, who else notices how carefully manicured these
charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual proof she is a liar and
this whole thing is staged.
She always takes everybody on some emotional ride right up to the point where she could be
exposed but never with enough information so somebody could come out of the woodwork and
prove she is a liar. We also have the infamous letter where we are repeately reminded she
mailed it BEFORE Kavanaugh was picked. Of course, we only have Feinstein's word for that
since nonody saw it until after this crap started. The delay was used to puch up the story
with new revelation about Mike Judge in a grocery store that shied away from her –
again with no specific date so Judge could prove she is a liar. This all reeks of testimony
gone over and coached by a team of lawyers.
We also have all of our own recollections of high school insecurities and male-female
interactions. What freshman or sophomore girl didn't get all giddy at the thought of the
older guys hitting on her so she could tell all her friends about her older boyfreind and
possibility of going to the prom as a lower classman? All he had to do (assuming he wasn't
replusive physically and he was a bit of a jock) was make the usual play of pretending to be
interested and he likely would have been at least getting to first base at the party. From
her pictures she was no Pamela Anderson and would likely have been flattered. The idea that
you rape someone without trying to get the milk handed to you on a silver platter is
ridiculous.
This is another female driven hysteria based on lies like the child molestation and
satanic cult hysterias of years past. Those were all driven by crazy or politically motivated
women who whipped up the rest of the ignorant females.
Outside doors enter public areas kitchen sunroom living rooms not bedrooms. An outside
door into a master bedroom with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an
illegal what's called in law apartment
Your post is very perceptive and just might be how it all went down. With the
complications of couples' counseling over her demand for the bizarre double main entry doors.
(lulz) Though I would think any family that built an illegal in-law apartment into their Palo
Alto house and deployed it, would be ratted out by their neighbors.
@Wally She reminded me of Samantha Power, the one suffering for us on TV as she uses her
Responsibility To Protect subscription to lay waste on whatever is currently the Death Star.
Employment at less than a living wage is not "employment."
True, this "living wage" issue has become now America's chronic illness. Once one begins
to look at the real estate dynamics, even for a good earners living in such places as
Seattle, Portland (not to speak of L.A. or SF) becomes simply not affordable, forget buying
anything decent. Hell, many rents are higher than actual mortgages, however insane they
already are.
Once upon a time socialists dreamed that the proletariat would spontaneously rise up to
break its chains and overthrow the capitalists, then they got bored of waiting for that and
invented the radical vanguard to lead the proletariat into the revolution and then
eventually they realized that the proletariat is superfluous and they just need the
vanguard.
This did come out of the 19th Century with awful factory conditions, decadent upper
classes (pre WWI) and their unexpected collapse along with the whole Belle Époque in
WW1.
There was plenty of fuel for socialism with 1) a fashionable new intellectual left 2)
political fluidity 3) politically bankrupt Ancien Regimes.
In my opinion fashionable radical vanguards saw the possibility of harnessing these forces
to take power -- some of them acting idealistically -- some not. The key point was that
Ancien Regimes were weakened by WW1, with a good example being Russia with its military
failures and its decadent and ineffectual Czarist government.
In these unusual circumstances, the self appointed Bolshevik Radical Vanguard could
exploit the disaffection of Russian soldiers in Petrograd and Lenin could unilaterally issued
General Order Nº1 as the self appointed head of the Council of Soldiers and Workingmen's
Deputies (ignoring the Provisional Government) with all military units ordered to remove
their existing officers and elect new ones. This was coupled with promises to stop the war
and give all peasant soldiers their own private farms, which predictably went down very well
and wrecked army discipline.
Francis also went on to say, "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90% of
whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are
internationalists and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution."
The Bolsheviks of course used the arms against the Provisional Government, and when the
elections to the Constituent Assembly eventually came at the end of November 1917, they
filled the assembly hall with soldiers and rejected the result of the vote (Social
Revolutionaries 20,893,743, Bolsheviks 9,023,963 out of 36,257,960 votes cast). The
Bolsheviks declared that Constitutional Democrats were to be arrested and Lenin established
his dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans
did in WW2.
@AP You are
the one that lives in echo chamber. Bolsheviks looted the country. It is the dumbest comment
I have ever heard. You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
Bolsheviks actually saved and built the country and current regime has been living from what
was built by Commies ever since. I just pointed that so called left is not left. But you
asked for this. You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia by current elites
which reveals who you are amptly.
@melanf
Exactly. I am tired of all this BS. We lived free lives and I have never seen armed
milicioner / police officer outside of movies. Be the state clearly cared about majority that
is until the top got all rotten. I'm hoping, right to vote is not sign of freedom Isn,' t it
obvious by now?
Once upon a time socialists dreamed that the proletariat would spontaneously rise up to break
its chains and overthrow the capitalists, then they got bored of waiting for that and
invented the radical vanguard to lead the proletariat into the revolution and then eventually
they realized that the proletariat is superfluous and they just need the vanguard.
This did come out of the 19th Century with awful factory conditions, decadent
upper classes (pre WWI) and their unexpected collapse along with the whole Belle Époque
in WW1.
There was plenty of fuel for socialism with 1) a fashionable new intellectual left 2)
political fluidity 3) politically bankrupt Ancien Regimes.
In my opinion fashionable radical vanguards saw the possibility of harnessing these forces
to take power - some of them acting idealistically - some not. The key point was that Ancien
Regimes were weakened by WW1, with a good example being Russia with its military failures and
its decadent and ineffectual Czarist government.
In these unusual circumstances, the self appointed Bolshevik Radical Vanguard could exploit
the disaffection of Russian soldiers in Petrograd and Lenin could unilaterally issued General
Order Nº1 as the self appointed head of the Council of Soldiers and Workingmen's Deputies
(ignoring the Provisional Government) with all military units ordered to remove their existing
officers and elect new ones. This was coupled with promises to stop the war and give all
peasant soldiers their own private farms, which predictably went down very well and wrecked
army discipline.
Source: "Russia from the American Embassy" by David Rowland Francis, U.S. ambassador to
Russia for 5 years from March 1916 to March 1921.
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-American-Embassy-April-1916-November/dp/B00B6ZE8NI/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
Francis also went on to say, "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90% of
whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists
and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution."
The Bolsheviks of course used the arms against the Provisional Government, and when the
elections to the Constituent Assembly eventually came at the end of November 1917, they filled
the assembly hall with soldiers and rejected the result of the vote (Social Revolutionaries
20,893,743, Bolsheviks 9,023,963 out of 36,257,960 votes cast). The Bolsheviks declared that
Constitutional Democrats were to be arrested and Lenin established his dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans did
in WW2.
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans
did in WW2.
The Bolsheviks disgusting, but this statement ("on a scale far exceeding anything the
Germans did in WW2″) is an obvious lie
" In fact, the number of prisoners for political reasons (for "counterrevolutionary crimes")
in the USSR in the period from 1921 to 1953, i.e. after 33 years was about 3.8 million people
during this period ( 1921 to 1954 ) has been convicted 3 777 380 people, including to capital
punishment -- 642 980, to the contents in camps and prisons for a term of 25 years and below --
2 369 220, into exile and expulsion -- 765 180 people".
Hopefully the FBI will investigate this collusion between Soros and the Democrats and Ms.
Katz to influence the results of the judicial nomination process.
If you don't know all the local issues and controversies -- and I'll admit I don't -- it
makes the mid-terms hard to call.
In general–about 80% of the time–midterms go against a sitting president. But
in this case, I agree with the Derb: I think the Dims are in a rude awakening.
It's nice that our Israeli embassy has been moved to Jerusalem
Nice? Speak for yourself!
It's nice that Senator Graham has found his high dudgeon at last. Now that he's found
it, though, how long will it be before he turns it against immigration patriots?
That's probably the only reason Graham was chosen to publicly throw a fit: he's
inside-the-Beltway safe. He can huff and puff and talk tough on this hearing, precisely
because the Establishment knows he'll never really go against them on issues like immigration
or foreign policy. Remember the Clarence Thomas hearings? Remember how Arlen Specter was the
Republican standard-bearer back then? Nuff said.
@ advancedatheist It is difficult in these trying times to find good entertainers.
I thought confirmation hearings,were to test for qualifications required to be a
Supreme?
Such things as ability to write, understanding of the complexities of the constitution,
beliefs and past rulings, convictions about the bill of rights, and things like that? The
Constitution is supposed to create the structure of government, authorize payment of fat
salaries to 527 elected entertainers and limit the scope of the personal financial activities
while in office. I can't image a confirmation hearing that would review the judicial history
of the past rulings and professional activities of a candidate. The audience would not be
interested to hear what those who practice law and interact with the candidate had to say
about him and his legal abilities. When and in which tent are those hearings to begin?
Where are the opinions by Judge Kavanaugh? Why have they not been produced for inspection
in the hearings? What does this man think? Why did Trump select Judge Kavanaugh to be a
supreme? At the moment it looks like the the hearings have been conducted to cover for the
attacks by Israel on Russian Airplanes in Syria. I can think of no other reason for such a
circus?
What I have seen, heard and read describe another propaganda guided privately owned media
production with side shows by two of the best known acts in circus life ( shows by the Gods
of poop and by the Democraps were featured).
I still don't know anything about Judge Kavanaugh do you?
I hereby claim that Lindsey Graham and Larry Kudlow are horrible whores for the GOP Cheap
Labor Faction. Both Lindsey Graham and Larry Kudlow push wage-reducing open borders mass
immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.
I also strongly suggest that Larry Kudlow and Lindsey Graham were big backers of the Iraq
War debacle.
Larry Kudlow and Lindsey Graham both push sovereignty-sapping trade deal scams.
Larry Kudlow has no memory whatsoever of any guest ever at his house. Is Larry Kudlow a
ruling class louse?
Trump brought on board his ship of state all sorts of louts such as Larry Kudlow, Gary
Cohn, Steve Mnuchin, Nikki Haley, John Bolton and many other no good bastards. Trump invited
the swamp into the White House.
"... Christine Ford has taken the false allegations racket a bit too far. She is probably lying, as how come she did not call 911 or file a police report if this happened? She comes from a family of lawyers. She has an army of attorneys who would have rushed and filed police reports and filed civil suits if any man had dared touch her. ..."
Christine Ford has taken the false allegations racket a bit too far. She is probably
lying, as how come she did not call 911 or file a police report if this happened? She comes
from a family of lawyers. She has an army of attorneys who would have rushed and filed police
reports and filed civil suits if any man had dared touch her.
That did not happen for 3 decades for one reason -- nothing happened on the night in
question.
The Democrats, who are a criminal party, must have coached her and offered her a few 100K
under the table, disguised as speaking fees, or scholarship, for manufacturing this
racket.
Kavanaugh has proved himself unfit for the position of supreme court justice. Under heavy
fire, he has shown that he is a spineless coward, a crying baby incapable of fighting back
like a man. Moreover, he is a total idiot.
What did he expect, that the baby killers were going to accept even the possibility of a
supreme court justice who may vote to overturn Wade VS Roe and the end of Planned Parenthood?
He has shown that this totally expected attack took him by surprise. What a fool!
Courage under fire? Call the Marines, but not Kavanaugh.
The key word there is of course "gentlemanly." Could any concept be more at odds with
the zeitgeist than gentlemanliness? It's hard not to think there's a demographic dimension
to this. That older style of courtesy, forbearance, and compromise that used to inform our
politics was a white-European thing, perhaps particularly an Anglo-Saxon-Celtic thing.
I agree that politics in the US is coarsening like our pop culture and increasingly
looking like 3rd world politics. This is where America is headed as we become more culturally
enriched:
The neocons and neolibs has always been the indignant, end justifies the means crowd.
Since Trump's election they've completely gone off the rails....
You're right about Trump being a big disappointment so far in immigration. Caving here and
calling for an FBI investigation makes him look as stupid as Flake. Fat chance FBI will close
it in a week. This is the same agency that gave us Mueller, Comey, McCabe, Ohr, Strzok, Page,
the Steele Dossier, owned by Deep State and corrupt to the core. These GOP fools are once
again playing right into the hands of the (((Dems))) – Feinstein, Blumenthal, Schumer
and Ford's lawyer Bromwich, already complaining about the 'artificial timeline'. No one can
ever outcon the financial elite.
"... The corporatist state naturally strives to perfect itself, imposing a "final solution" to the ASP (anti-social person) problem by mandating that henceforth no non-genetically-engineered babies may be born. The result is a very one-sided "race war" in which a few antisocial malcontents try to hold out against what amounts to a genocide against "uncorrected" humanity. The plot follows two of those ASP antiheroes as they throw rocks at the Israeli bulldozer of corporatist genocide. ..."
In El-Akkad's dystopian vision, the War on Muslims mutates into the War on Southerners --
but has nothing to do with race. Instead, the Yankee Terror State turns its savagery against
the New Rebels of the Free Southern States because those good ole boys and girls (of all shades
of skin pigmentation and sexual preference) refuse to give up fossil fuels, choosing instead to
secede from the Union.
Al-Akkad's vision of blue vs. red global-warming-driven war run amok in a near-future
America that has completely forgotten about the whole concept of race is surprisingly
plausible, at least while you are reading it. (Civil War I, after all, was really
about economics not race , so why shouldn't Civil War II also be over an economic issue?)
The plot turns on the adventures of Sarat, a young Red State woman of mixed and meaningless
(near-black Chicano and po' white trash) ancestry who awakens politically and goes after the
Blue State occupiers in pretty much the same way the Iraqi resistance went after George W.
Bush's storm troopers.
... ... ...
C.J. Hopkins offers a deeper, more accurate, vastly funnier, more genuinely subversive
vision. His far-future America, which bears an uncanny resemblance to our nightmarish present,
features drone-patrolled hyper-surveiled cities, each of which is divided by an Israeli-style
Wall complete with Israeli-style checkpoints and incursions featuring Israeli-style killings of
hapless untermenschen. But instead of Israelis vs. Palestinians, the divide here is between the
Normals on one side of the wall and the Anti-Socials on the other. The Normals -- good
corporate citizens who are submitting to pharmaceutical and genetic correction so they can work
and consume and conform and live meaningless lives like everybody else without batting an
eyelash -- are conditioned to fear and loathe the Antisocials, who retain enough humanity to
rebel, in whatever pathetically insignificant way, against corporatist dystopia.
Zone 23 , like American War , imagines the future as post-racial: Hopkins'
Normal vs. Antisocial divide isn't about race. But it is, nonetheless, very much about
behavioral genetics. In this (not so) far future, the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie,
Wisconsin has developed a variant-corrected version of the MAO-A gene. Inserted into embryos
via germline genetic engineering, this patented DNA produces "clears": people who are
intelligent but incurious, incapable of emotionally-driven fight-or-flight aggression
(including the most common defensive variety), "easily trained, highly responsive to visual and
verbal commands," and so on. In other words, perfect corporate citizens!
The corporatist state naturally strives to perfect itself, imposing a "final solution" to
the ASP (anti-social person) problem by mandating that henceforth no non-genetically-engineered
babies may be born. The result is a very one-sided "race war" in which a few antisocial
malcontents try to hold out against what amounts to a genocide against "uncorrected" humanity.
The plot follows two of those ASP antiheroes as they throw rocks at the Israeli bulldozer of
corporatist genocide.
Hopkins' ferociously funny yarn is not just a satire on our ever-worsening techno-dystopia.
In imagining a genetic basis to the difficulties many of us experience adjusting to
hyperconformist "technologically-enhanced" lifestyles, and in portraying individuals struggling
and flailing against the uber-civilization around them like flies caught a spider web, Zone
23 resonates with the great
critiques of technological civilization .
Those are signs of political crisis, not the other way around
Notable quotes:
"... The historical parallel is American social and political polarization in the decades prior to the American Civil War. It is conceivable martial law and military power will resolve the conflict and contradictions not reconciled by rule of law and politics. ..."
I am concerned about dysfunction and incivility
in American culture and politics.
The historical parallel is American social and political polarization in the decades
prior to the American Civil War. It is conceivable martial law and military power will resolve
the conflict and contradictions not reconciled by rule of law and politics.
This topic was raised when Senator Lindsey Graham questioned Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the
confirmation hearings.
See YouTube video: Senator Lindsey Graham Questions Brett Kavanaugh Military Law vs Criminal Law.
"... The theory of polygraph is that confronting a liar and making him speak a specific lie will cause a nervous response whose physical manifestations are detectable. ..."
"... Deliberately letting her off the hook from having to speak (or even listen to) the lies she is being asked to affirm seems like a transparent way to avoid triggering her galvanic skin response or other physical indicia of dishonesty. ..."
"... In my mind, the fakey nature of the polygraph exam counts against her credibility and not for it. ..."
"... As Graham and Ted Cruz, both lawyers, pointed out, people who commit such acts tend to have a trail of such activities, but after 6 FBI background checks, Kavanaugh came out squeaky clean. The man of God swore to God and the whole country that he did not do any of these things, that to me is good enough to attest to his innocence. ..."
"... First, what about the testimony of her best friend, who wrote in a sworn testimony that the party never took place, that she does not know Kavanaugh, and had never saw him at any party? ..."
@Ron Unz Ron .Think harder. First the entire process is cynical. 45 Dems were going to
vote against him regardless, This is all about peeling off a handful of votes.
Its about black balling a SC nominee because something might have happened. Of course
those 45 Dems could care less why they vote against him.
The Polygraph, to the extent it means anything, can only test if she believes it happened,
And it was administered as paid for by her Lawyers.
As far as drinking, it is a tactic to increase FUD. If he ever drank to the extent his
memory was ever hazy, he 'could've done anything and not remember it.
Finally, she volunteered herself. Its not like she was was identified as someone that was
in Kavanaugh's circle. She may never have met him.
Finally, why was it so traumatic? Because he laughed? It is not unlikely that someone that
fought off a drunken groping would actually felt empowered.
Rape is now a social construct entirely defined by women. Its their right to enjoy BSDM
like that promoted in 50 Shades of Gray but more extreme. Yet it is weaponized. Its like
being a commie or homo in the 1950s. Now 1950s commies and homos are celebrated. Traditional
definitions of rape were stranger rape and it was a potential capital crime. Its been
conflated to include what would have been considered bad manners.
In the Court System, there are enough due process safeguards to have forced College
officials to set up their alternative adjudication procedures.
Sorry Ron the only people who believe polygraphs work is the industry trying to
sell them. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer passed them. So did Aldrich Ames our own
Russian Mole spy. If a person believes something then her vitals like Ford may be in a
certain range not to make the examiner find anything out of the ordinary. The polygraph
theoretically measures the autonomic system response. Any nervousness, stress, blood pressure
etc. can change whether the person is telling the truth or not.. I believe there have been
people that have passed the test that claim they were abducted by Aliens and UFOs.
Ford's memories have little validity because these therapies often produce false memories
and fill in the blank episodes. The Repubs should have asked her if she was on any drug or
had taken drugs in the past. How much does she still drink because all of these could
influence memories. Instead they became a door mat for the sick Me Too movement. Her memories
could also be a form of release for guilt of her drugged laden sexual past which now lets her
not blame herself. It was all of those drunken white guys who did it not me I am not
responsible. Now I feel better.
@Nicephorus Freud is a perfect representation of the Jewish obsession with all manners of
sexual perversion. The man was seriously F in the head, a total fraud who plied his patients
with cocaine and morphine then faked his test results...
Does anyone among us think that the FBI that has vetted Judge Kavanaugh six times already
won't turn up something on their seventh attempt? After all, DJT has been at war with them
nearly since Inauguration Day and Rosenstein is still riding high...
@Ron Unz I haven't followed the proceedings myself – apart from anything else I'm
not American – but one of the blogs I follow is the Irish Savant and he has a short,
punchy article about this affair if you're interested. I find him generally quite reliable
– even though he's obviously quite annoyed in this particular posting, as opposed to
his usual more laid-back and witty self.
From my own point of view, she-said, he-said unsubstantiated stuff from people now in
their 50′s, talking about stuff that happened in their mid to late teens, is just plain
bonkers. Totalitarian states demand that the accused prove their innocence – I was
under the impression that Western jurisprudence found you innocent until proven guilty. So is
a mere allegation now considered proof?
Not a road we'd want to go down, surely. And there's probably good reasons why polygraph
tests aren't accepted in law courts, as a circa 80% reliability just isn't good enough.
@Ron Unz Her polygraph exam was a joke. She and her lawyer drafted a vague, one-page
statement that does not say "Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape me."
The test-giver then asked her exactly one question, in two different ways: (1) Is your
statement true? and (2) Did you make it up?
The theory of polygraph is that confronting a liar and making him speak a specific lie
will cause a nervous response whose physical manifestations are detectable.
Deliberately letting her off the hook from having to speak (or even listen to) the lies
she is being asked to affirm seems like a transparent way to avoid triggering her galvanic
skin response or other physical indicia of dishonesty.
In my mind, the fakey nature of the polygraph exam counts against her credibility and not
for it.
P.S. It's also entirely possible that she failed a prior (more rigorous) exam, and they
just threw it away and tried again. Because it is attorney work product they wouldn't have
had to disclose that.
P.P.S. I wish I knew how to grab and paste a link from my phone, but a copy of her
polygraph report with the written statements and examination questions is easily findable
online if anyone wants to see it.
I am pro-choice and anti-gun, Kavanaugh is not at all my ideal judge. But
truth and fairness is much more important than my personal views on social issues.
I watched the trial with an open mind, and I came away thinking that the whole thing was a
farce, an embarrassment not just to Ford and Kavanaugh, but to all of Congress and the entire
country. This is a hearing that never should've been in public, it should've been in private
between the two parties, but Democrats clearly manipulated the situation and wanted to use it
to destroy an innocent man whose only crime is harboring certain political views that they
disagree with. It is pure evil.
Ford probably had been groped or worse treated in her youth, partly thanks to her own hard
partying lifestyle(according to her yearbook she was a popular cheerleader with a reputation
for hard partying and chasing boys), but she's got the wrong man in Kavanaugh, and her
accusations are at least partially politically motivated. All 3 people she named as
witnesses, incl. her best friend, swore under oath that such a party never even took place.
What she has is a bullshit case.
As Graham and Ted Cruz, both lawyers, pointed out, people who commit such acts tend to
have a trail of such activities, but after 6 FBI background checks, Kavanaugh came out
squeaky clean. The man of God swore to God and the whole country that he did not do any of
these things, that to me is good enough to attest to his innocence.
The Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for such foul play, they are an
embarrassment to the whole country. Honor and integrity no longer matters to the left. They
have lost all sense of decency in their quest to hold on to power. The end justifies the
means. Flake the idiot needs to go ESAD.
Most of us would probably be far more upset if we were wrongly accused by a
bunch of crazy women whose only goal was to prevent us from getting that one job we worked
our whole lives for.
I am a woman and I think Ford lied through her teeth while Kavanaugh told the truth, and I
don't even like Kavanaugh's politics. Not a single witness she named corroborated her story.
She came across as someone who had one too many drinks in her life.
First, what about the testimony of her best friend, who wrote in a sworn
testimony that the party never took place, that she does not know Kavanaugh, and had never
saw him at any party?
Second, even if this all did happen, which is a big IF, they were both underage. We're
talking about a bunch of teenagers here. He groped but did not rape her. Who among us have
not done stupid things we wish we hadn't done when we were young and stupid? Judge the man
for who he is today, not who he was when he was a kid. There's a reason why we allow people
to expunge their juvenile records when they reach 18.
This whole trial is a FARCE, an embarrassment to the whole country.
Well, here's my impression of a possible "bare-bones" version of the incident
At an unsupervised suburban pool party, a couple of drunken teenage football players
pulled a girl into a bedroom, pawed at her a little while they were laughing, then let her
run away. Since they knew they hadn't had the slightest intent of gang-raping her, they
didn't regard what happened as being a big deal. However, it's quite possible that the
15-year-old girl had actually been pretty scared, and she long remembered it.
Doesn't she claim she mentioned it to people years before Kavanaugh was nominated for the
SC? Didn't Mike Judge write a whole book about how he had spent years in crude drunken
misbehavior? Isn't he currently hiding so that he can't be called as a sworn witness?
Also, isn't Kavanaugh now claiming he remained a virgin all through HS and college or
something like that? Given that he and his friend Judge were drunken jocks and his yearbook
was filled with all sorts of crude sexual humor, is that really plausible?
I suspect that administering official polygraphs to Ford, Kavanaugh, and Judge would soon
clear up the facts. We're not talking about trained spies or anything. And three polygraphs
would probably increase the likelihood of a solid result.
Since I haven't watched the hearings or paid much attention to the story, maybe some of
the above material is just erroneous. But offhand, I think it's more plausible than claiming
this is all part of a CIA plot.
Whether this is a good test of Supreme Court Justices is entirely a different story
The Democrats, who are a criminal party, must have coached her and offered her a few
100K under the table, disguised as speaking fees, or scholarship, for manufacturing this
racket.
It isn't under the table – it's over it. She has a couple of GoFundMe accounts that
have already racked up $ 700,000. Of course, the 6-7 figure book deal will follow.
The FBI is about to investigate something that
didn't happen somplace on some uncertain day in 1982 to see if someone did something that
contradicts a large body of evidence that shows this would be totally out of character. This is
considered rational thought in the public space!
I'm sorry you could not account for Graham's outburst. I thought it the only honest thing
any of the Senators did. It makies me think less of you that you didn't see the outrage of the
whole presumption that this could even be discussed.
And no I don't believe that preposterous [to think that] Blasey [is CIA] operative. She and
her whole family work for the CIA.
Jones is circulating what many may call a conspiracy theory that Ford's father is a previous
CIA operative and a heavy-weight in arranging many avenues for the CIA to launder illicit
money. He implies that this was a classic CIA op.
He doesn't say so directly in anything I've read, although I don't read everything he
writes or listen to everything he says. But he clearly implies this.
Trump is at war with the IC. So, it's not unimaginable that such a thing is happening.
A very shrewd observation, widely misattributed to Voltaire, states that "To learn who rules
over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." Or put another way,
individuals are reluctant to publicly challenge those whose power they fear. Certainly, this
simple standard helps to explain many important aspects of America's severely malfunctioning
political system.
what will society be like 50 years from now? I posit:
- Man and women will now have to be chaperoned when they are together when
they meet (hmm I do believe Islam has that covered).
- Man and women will not be allowed to be in the same room together (for you never know what could happen, right!) (Hmm I do
believe that Islam has that covered too!)
- Men will no longer be able to look lustfully at a women, that could be construed as assault! (Hmmm women will have to dress
less provocatively – wow – Islam has that covered too it appears there is a trend here!
"... How come the guys in the Southern and mid-Atlantic colonies didn't feel the need to accuse raucous women of being witches in order to get them back to their senses? ..."
"... I can imagine Southern or mid-Atlantic colonial men would tell the misbehaving women to knock off the nonsense or they might tell the women to stop bothering them while they're drinking ale. ..."
With more to come this is just the beginning (similar to the actual Salem witch
accounts, which grew over time)
How come the guys in the Southern and mid-Atlantic colonies didn't feel the need to accuse
raucous women of being witches in order to get them back to their senses?
Hackett Fischer readers might say the colonists and settlers came from different parts of
England and different parts of England treated women differently.
I can imagine Southern or mid-Atlantic colonial men would tell the misbehaving women to
knock off the nonsense or they might tell the women to stop bothering them while they're
drinking ale.
You don't go overboard and accuse women of being witches just because the uproarious
broads are getting on your nerves.
Hillary Clinton is too evil to be a witch, she is a demon sent from Hell to destroy us,
men and women alike.
The Ragin' Cajun, I believe, coined the phrase "Nuts and Sluts" to succinctly describe the
tactic used by the elites I call The Davos Crowd to smear and destroy someone they've
targeted.
Brett Kavanaugh is the latest victim of this technique. But, there have been dozens of
victims I can list from Gary Hart in the 1980's to former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn to
Donald Trump.
"Nuts and Sluts" is easy to understand. Simply accuse the person you want to destroy of
being either crazy (the definition of which shifts with whatever is the political trigger issue
of the day) or a sexual deviant.
This technique works because it triggers most people's Disgust Circuit, a term created by
Mark Schaller as part of what he calls the Behavioral Immune System and popularized by
Johnathan Haidt.
The disgust circuit is easy to understand.
It is the limit at which behavior in others triggers our gut-level outrage and we recoil
with disgust.
The reason "Nuts and Sluts" works so well on conservative candidates and voters is because,
on average, conservatives have a much stronger disgust circuit than liberals and/or
libertarians.
This is why it always seems to be that anyone who threatens the global order or the
political system always turns out to have some horrible sexual deviance in their closet.
It's why the only thing any of us remember about the infamous Trump Dossier is the image of
Trump standing on a bed in a Moscow hotel room urinating on a hooker.
The technique is used to drive a wedge between Republican voters and lawmakers and make it
easy for them to go along with whatever stupidity is brought forth by the press and the
Democrats.
And don't think for a second that, more often than not, GOP leadership isn't in cahoots with
the DNC on these take-downs. Because they are.
But, here's the problem. As liberals and cultural Marxists break down the societal order, as
they win skirmish after skirmish in the Culture War, and desensitize us to normalize ever more
deviant behavior, the circumstances of a "Nuts and Sluts" accusation have to rise
accordingly.
It's behavioral heroin. And the more tolerance we build up to it the more likely people are
to see right through the lie.
It's why Gary Hart simply had to be accused of having an affair in the 1980's to scuttle his
presidential aspirations but today Trump has to piss on a hooker.
And it's why it was mild sexual harassment and a pubic hair on a Coke can for Clarence
Thomas, but today, for Brett Kavanaugh, it has to be a gang-rape straight out of an 80's frat
party in a Brett Eaton Ellis book -- whose books, by the way, are meant to be warnings not
blueprints.
Trump has weathered both the Nuts side of the technique and the Sluts side. And as he has
done so The Resistance has become more and more outraged that it's not working like it used
to.
This is why they have to pay people to be outraged by Kavanaugh's nomination. They can't
muster up a critical mass of outrage while Trump is winning on many fronts. Like it or not, the
economy has improved. It's still not good, but it's better and sentiment is higher.
So they have to pay people to protest Kavanaugh. And when that didn't work, then the fear of
his ascending to the Supreme Court and jeopardizing Roe v. Wade became acute, it doesn't
surprise me to see them pull out Christine Blasie Ford's story to guide them through to the
mid-term elections.
And that was a bridge too far for a lot of people.
The one who finally had enough of 'Nuts and Sluts' was, of all people, Lindsey Graham . Graham is one of
the most vile and venal people in D.C. He is a war-mongering neoconservative-enabling
praetorian of Imperial Washington's status quo.
But even he has a disgust circuit and Brett Kavanaugh's spirited defense of himself, shaming
Diane Feinstein in the process, was enough for Graham to finally redeem himself for one brief
moment.
When Lindsey Graham is the best defense we have against becoming a country ruled by men
rather than laws, our society hangs by a thread.
It was important for Graham to do this. It was a wake-up call to the 'moderate' GOP senators
wavering on Kavanaugh. Graham may be bucking for Senate Majority Leader or Attorney General,
but whatever. For four minutes his disgust was palpable.
The two men finally did what the 'Right' in this country have been screaming for for
years.
Fight back. Stop being reasonable. Stop playing it safe. Trump cannot do this by
himself.
Fight for what this country was supposed to stand for.
Because as Graham said, this is all about regaining power and they don't care what damage
they do to get it back.
The disgust circuit can kick in a number of different ways. And Thursday it kicked in to
finally call out what was actually happening on Capitol Hill. This was The Swamp in all its
glory.
And believe me millions were outraged by what they saw.
It will destroy what is left of the Democratic Party. I told you back in June that
Kanye West and Donald Trump had won the Battle of the Bulge in the Culture War. Graham and
Kavanuagh's honest and brutal outrage at the unfairness of this process was snuffing out of
that counter-attack.
The mid-terms will be a Red Tide with the bodies washing up on the shore the leadership of
the DNC and the carpet-baggers standing behind them with billions in money to buy fake
opposition.
The truth is easy to support. Lies cost money. The more outrageous the lie the more
expensive it gets to maintain it.
Because the majority of this country just became thoroughly disgusted with the Democrats.
And they will have no one to blame but themselves.
"... I think you've really nailed it, Anastasia. Watching this farce on TV, a few things were quite obvious to me: Christine Ford is a very disturbed and unhappy woman. The Republicans were afraid to question her. So, they brought on this attorney from Phoenix, who was a total flop. Senator Graham finally rode in to save the day. (I am not accustomed to praising Graham. But he was effective yesterday.) The lead democrats, Feinstein, Leahy, and Durbin, were actually ashamed when senior Republicans publicly called them out for the sham they were perpetrating on the American people. The silly Senator from Hawaii and Dick Blumenthal demonstrated that they had no shame. All in all, it was a low point for the Senate. ..."
They were too afraid of the women's movement, and therefore could not bring themselves to
challenge her in any way. Interspersed between the prosecutors questions which did not have
the time to develop, was the awards ceremony given by the democrats to the honoree.
But we , the people, all saw that she was mentally disturbed. Her appearance (post clean
up); her testimony, her beat up looks, drinking coke in the morning, the scrawl of her
handwriting in a statement to be seen by others, the foggy lens, the flat affect, the little
girl's voice and the incredible testimony (saying "hi" to her rapist only a few weeks later
and expecting everyone to believe that is normal, remembering that she had one beer but not
remembering who took her home; not knowing that the offer was made to go to California as if
she were living on another planet, her fear of flying, her duper's delight curled up lips
– all the tell tale signs were there for all the world, except the Senate the media, to
see.
She went to a shrink with her husband in 2012, and it was her conduct that apparently
needed explaining, so she confabulated a story about 4 boys raping her when she was 15 to
explain her inexplicable conduct to her husband, and maybe even to her friends. She later
politicized the confabulation, and she is clearly going to make a few sheckels with her
several go fund me sites that will inexplicably show $10.00 donations every 15 seconds.
She was the leaker. She went to the press almost immediately in July. They were too afraid
to point that out to everyone because the phoniest thing about her was that she wished to
remain anonymous.
As a foreign observer, I watched the whole hearing farce on CNN till midnight in Germany. For
me, from the beginning, it seemed a set up by the Democratic Party that has not emancipated
itself from the Clinton filth and poison. As their stalwart, Chuck Schumer said after the
nomination of Judge Kavanaugh that the Dems will do everything to prevent his confirmation.
They found, of course, a naive patsy in Dr. Ford, not to speak of the other two disgraceful
women that prostituted themselves for base motives. Right from the beginning, Dr. Ford played
to me the role of an innocent valley girl, which seemed to make a great impression on the CCN
tribunal that commented biasedly during the breaks of the hearing committee. It was a great
TV-propaganda frame.
Don't forget; the so-called sexual harassment occurred 36 years (!) ago. Dr. Ford was 15,
and Judge Kavanaugh was 17 years old. But Dr. Ford discovered her "suffering" after she heart
from the nomination of Kavanaugh in July 2018. Why didn't she complain to the police after
the "incident" happened in 1982 or at least after the "me to movement" popped up? May it as
it is. Everybody who knows the high school or prep-school-life and behavior of American
youths should not be surprised that such incidents can happen. When I studied at the U of
Penn for my M.A. degree, I got to know American student campus life. For me, it was a great
experience. Every weekend, wild parties were going on where students were boozed and screwed
around like hell. Nobody made a big fuss out of it.
On both sides, the whole hearing was very emotional. But get one argument straight: In a
state of the law the accuser has to come up with hard evidence and not only with suspicions
and accusations; in a state of the law, the accused has not to prove his innocence, which
only happens in totalitärian states.
Why did the majority of the Judiciary Committee agree on a person like the down-to-earth
and humdrum person such as Mitchell to ask questions? It seems as if they were convinced in
advance of Kavanaugh's guilt. The only real defender of Kavanaugh was Senator Lindsey Graham
with his outburst of anger. If the Reps don't get this staid Judge Kavanagh confirmed they
ought to be ashamed of themselves.
This hearing was not a lesson in a democratic process but in the perversion of it.
@WorkingClass Really – everyone should know by now that in any sex related offence,
men are guilty until proven innocent .& even then "not guilty" really means the defendant
was "too cunning to be found guilty by a patriarchal court, interpreting patriarchal Law."
My comment on those proceedings today was this: "This is awful, I've never seen a more
tawdry, sleazy performance in my life – and I've seen a few. No Democrat will ever get
my vote again. They can find some other party to run with. Those people are despicable.
Details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKSRUK-l7dM”
;
Later on, I noted: "None of this has anything to do with his record as a judge – and
that's not such a good record: https://www.lawfareblog.com/judge-brett-kavanaugh-national-security-readers-guide
at least if you're concerned with the Constitutional issues SCOTUS will actually decide. None
of it, not one word. It's irrelevant. It's partisan harassment, it's defamation, it's
character assassination, and all of it is *irrelevant* , it's useless – and in the end
it will be both futile, because there will be a party line vote, and counterproductive,
because a lot of people will be totally repelled by the actions of the Clintonistas –
because that's what those people are."
The Neocons are evil. They despise Middle America almost as much as do the wild-eyed
Leftists, just in a different way for slightly different specific reasons.
Well it looks like the repubs will get what they want – a woman abusing (like their
President) alcoholic defender of the rich and powerful. Fits right into their "elite" club.
After watching the Big Circus yesterday, I rate Ford's performance a 6 (sympathetic person,
but weak memory and zero corroboration). Cavanaugh gets an 8 (great opening statement,
wishy-washy and a dearth of straight answers during questioning). Had it been a tie, the fact
that the putative event occurred when he was 17 would break it.
@anastasia Good points, but yesterday's inference is that she became permanently
disturbed by the incident 36 years ago . In my experience, most psychologists are attracted
to that field to work out personal issues -- and aren't always successful. Ms. Ford fits that
mold, IMHO.
One thing I haven't heard is a challenge to Ford's belief that her attackers intended
rape. That may or may not be true. Ford testified about "uproarious laughter." That sounds to
me more like a couple of muddled, drunken male teens having their idea of "fun" -- i.e.,
molestation and dominance (which is certainly unacceptable, nonetheless).
Much ado about nothing. Attempted political assassination at it's best. American's have once
more been disgusted to a level they previously thought impossible. Who among us here does not
remember those glorious teenage years complete with raging hormones? What man does not
remember playing offense while the girl's played defense? It was as natural as nature itself.
No harm, no foul, that's just how we rolled back in the late 70′s and early 80′s.
@anastasiaI think you've really nailed it, Anastasia. Watching this farce on TV, a
few things were quite obvious to me: Christine Ford is a very disturbed and unhappy woman.
The Republicans were afraid to question her. So, they brought on this attorney from Phoenix,
who was a total flop. Senator Graham finally rode in to save the day. (I am not accustomed to
praising Graham. But he was effective yesterday.) The lead democrats, Feinstein, Leahy, and
Durbin, were actually ashamed when senior Republicans publicly called them out for the sham
they were perpetrating on the American people. The silly Senator from Hawaii and Dick
Blumenthal demonstrated that they had no shame. All in all, it was a low point for the
Senate.
For his part, Kavanaugh is oddly obtuse for one who is said to be such a great jurist.
Meek, mild and emotional, he does not seem up to the task of defending himself.
It appears that Ms. Mercer wrote this before the second half when things were looking
bleak.
Reminded me of Super Bowl 51 at halftime. I even tuned out just like I did that game until
I checked in later to see that the Patriot comeback was under way.
@mike k You are a useful idiot for the destruction of western civilization. Men are not
abusers of women, excepting a few criminals. Men protect families from criminals.
@Haxo Angmark Yes, Ms Mitchell did a very incompetent job, but it won't matter. Kavanaugh
will be confirmed Saturday, due to his own counterattack and refusal to be a victim.
Little miss pouty head cute face was a huge liar, obvious from the second I heard her. The
kind of chick who can go from a little sad voice to screaming and throwing dishes and
brandishing a knife in a heartbeat.
"... For otherwise, why did the Israelis do that? Were they just careless and brutal, as is their wont? They didn't give a damn about the Russians, and considered them a lesser breed, whose life is of little importance. This is a possible reading, quite consistent with their general attitude to strangers considered to be children of a lesser God ..."
There was a lull when the disaster of the downed plane completely disappeared from media,
Russian or Western. It was not mentioned by the New York Times , it was not mentioned
by the Russian newspapers. And after that, unexpectedly, the Russian Defence Minister Mr Shoygu
made his announcement. Russia responded adequately, closing the sky over Syria, or at least
over Western Syria, and activating its powerful GPS-jamming system off the Syrian coast. Israel
has lost its right to bomb Syria at will.
The Russians said it will take them two weeks to deliver, install and make the system
operative. I have heard that the system of up to eight S-300 had already been delivered by
massive airlift a few days ago, with cargo planes landing in Syria every few minutes. Probably
two weeks will be needed to install and activate the system.
Now in Israel the response was of two kinds. The hot heads said Israel is not worried by
S-300; they know how to deal with it, and if necessary, Israeli commandos will come and
sabotage the system just in time for a massive air attack by Israeli bombers. Sensible people
said Israel should try to repair relations with the Russian military. The Russians did a lot of
what the Israelis asked them for, including removal of Iranian forces from the vicinity of
Israeli borders (rather, armistice lines). A thorough investigation of the air disaster may
uncover the mistakes and convince the Russians that they aren't likely to occur again.
Netanyahu sounded like he was trying to minimise the strife with the Russians. After meeting
with President Trump in New York, he said that he came with specific requests "and I received
everything I wanted from him [Trump]. Our goal is to preserve the connection with Russia and on
the other hand to defend Israel's security against these threats."
So, for good or bad, Israel is not going to break relations with Russia, and Russia is not
going to go further, beyond sealing Syria's sky for Israeli raids. If Israeli leadership will
keep its fingers away from Syria, things may cool down. Otherwise, the results will be quite
unpredictable.
In Israel, there aren't many people at the top, apart of Netanyahu and Lieberman, who
cherish their country's involvement with Russia. For Israelis, Putin is one of many unsavoury
leaders from Idi Amin to Orban their country has to play ball with. Russia is not popular with
ordinary Israelis who prefer America or Germany. A lot of Israelis will be pleased with breakup
of this connection. Immediately after the Russian decision had been announced, Haaretz had made
its feelings clear: "In recent years, Russia has been caught lying or spreading disinformation
about its role in a number of incidents, the most recent being its involvement in the U.S.
presidential elections, the poisoning of the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his
daughter in Britain, and the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. So it's hard to believe
that anyone but Syria and Iran will adopt the Russian version of last week's events." This is
not a way one's partner is usually described.
More conspiratorially minded Israelis opined that beyond downing of the Il, there was an Air
Force plot against Netanyahu and Lieberman who are unpopular within the top echelon of IDF.
Others say it was an American Secret Service plot to undermine Russian-Israeli connection.
For otherwise, why did the Israelis do that? Were they just careless and brutal, as is their
wont? They didn't give a damn about the Russians, and considered them a lesser breed, whose
life is of little importance. This is a possible reading, quite consistent with their general
attitude to strangers considered to be children of a lesser God.
On the other hand, it is possible that the whole Israeli raid had been staged to down the
reconnaissance plane and to leave the Russians without its real-time intelligence data. In
1967, the Israelis bombed and sunk the USS Liberty , an electronic spy ship, the then
equivalent of Il-20, for they did not want to have foreign eyes and ears in the area. But then,
there was an ongoing full-scale war between Israel and Egypt, and the USS Liberty had
been attacked just before the planned Israeli invasion of the Syrian Golan Heights.
Could it be that Israelis expected an attack by France, England and the US upon Syria on
that night, an attack that did not materialise thanks to the Russian-Turkish agreement on
Idlib? There was a British plane and a French frigate in the vicinity, and a whole lot of
American ships.
The agreement on Idlib was a very important event, though Il-20 displaced it out of our
collective memory. Putin and Erdogan reached a working compromise, thus avoiding almost
unavoidable large scale hostilities. The White Helmets had already prepared a film with staged
chemical attack upon Syrian children, but the agreement had made the attack improbable in the
first place. It is possible that the American coalition assault had been postponed in the last
moment, when the Russian plane had been already downed.
However, all is well that ends well. Russian decision to create practically a no-fly zone is
a good decision, good for all. It is good for Russians as they learned that their
Commander-in-Chief can make strong decisions. It is good for Syria, as they will suffer less of
the Israeli bombardments. And it is really good for Israel, as this naughty child, a spoiled
brat, a darling of America had to be forbidden to bother neighbouring children. The automatic
missile defence system will provide a threat of spanking. The kid had been told that he is not
allowed to kill neighbours. With its excessive aggressiveness multiplied by impunity, Israel
has been spoiled, as anybody would. With this block, Israel can still become a mensch
, and for this chance, thank you, Russia.
Will Tel-Aviv use this chance? The US will try to frustrate the Russian taming of Israel.
John Bolton and Mike Pompeo already declared that no one may interfere with Israel's divine
right to freely bomb Syria. Will the Israeli lobby in America be able to neutralise Moscow's
decision and unhinge Israeli soul once again? Will they convince Putin to postpone his decision
like they did in April, and a few years ago? I do not think so.
We can congratulate the leadership of Russia on the consistent, justified and well-balanced
decision that may yet tame the Jewish shrew.
"... It should be noted that Herbert Marcuse was employed by the the U.S.'s OWI (Office of War Information) and then Bill Donovan's OSS (precursor to the CIA) during WWII. Though long dead, HM would be proud of today's Germany, probably the most guilt-inflicted, self-loathing community in the world. ..."
"One hopes that Rensmann is a rare specimen of the epigenesis of brainwashing via post war
psychological warfare against the German people and, more subtly, the American people."
Unfortunately, the only difference between Rensmann's embrace of the Frankfurt School
"Gnosis" and that of the average German is that Rennsmann's job is to celebrate their genius.
While most Germans probably don't have a clue as to who Marcuse, Adorno, etc. where and how
they were employed, most Jurgens and Gretas in contemporary Deutschland are thoroughly
"Frankfurted".
It should be noted that Herbert Marcuse was employed by the the U.S.'s OWI (Office of War
Information) and then Bill Donovan's OSS (precursor to the CIA) during WWII. Though long
dead, HM would be proud of today's Germany, probably the most guilt-inflicted, self-loathing
community in the world.
"... Trump not only wouldn't prosecute war criminals, but he also has no problem enabling foreign governments in their war crimes and proposing that U.S. forces commit them. Bessner calls for reducing America's military footprint abroad, and Trump entertains putting in a new, unnecessary permanent base in Poland. ..."
"... Trump is diametrically opposed to all of these agreements and institutions. Obviously his progressive critics share none of his objections to these things, and they regard his withdrawal from or hostility to them as major errors. ..."
I submit to you that a president who picks John Bolton of all people as his National Security Advisor doesn't care about bringing
more accountability to our foreign policy. Bessner goes further still and says the left "should demand that those who violated domestic
or international law see justice, even if that means prosecuting them."
Trump not only wouldn't prosecute war criminals, but he also has no problem enabling foreign governments in their war crimes
and proposing that U.S. forces commit them. Bessner calls for reducing America's military footprint abroad, and Trump entertains
putting in a new, unnecessary permanent base in Poland.
Bessner calls for threat deflation, and meanwhile Trump is busy hyping threats from Iran, North Korea, and even Venezuela when
it suits him. Perhaps the most obvious and glaring disagreement with Trump is in Bessner's section on internationalism. He writes:
America should engage with other countries through peaceful diplomacy. An important first step would be to embrace international
treaties and institutions endorsed by most nations, like the Paris Agreement on climate change and the International Criminal
Court. Moreover, policymakers should urge disarmament talks with all major powers and reinstate the Iran nuclear deal.
Trump is diametrically opposed to all of these agreements and institutions. Obviously his progressive critics share none of
his objections to these things, and they regard his withdrawal from or hostility to them as major errors.
Brands' argument doesn't make sense in the abstract, and it doesn't hold up when we consider specifics. Like Kagan's
whining
about "isolationism" earlier this week, it mistakenly conflates a certain kind of hawkish meddling with internationalism itself.
That is how Brands can describe someone openly endorsing internationalism as a critic of internationalism.
This argument does nothing to make the audience more informed about the foreign policy of the president or his progressive critics,
but instead tries to mislead readers into thinking that the two sides are fundamentally in agreement when they have practically nothing
in common.
To argue that progressives want to "out-Trump Trump" on foreign policy requires promoting unfounded caricatures of both. It is
remarkably bad analysis, and it isn't even very convincing spin.
"... The U.S. should help Kim pull his country back from seven decades of confrontation. Kim's apparent reasonableness may turn out to be fake, but it is in Washington's interest to create positive incentives for the North. If President Donald Trump can do it right -- imagine a White House signing ceremony for a peace treaty with Kim, China's Xi Jinping, and South Korea's Moon Jae-in -- a Nobel Peace Prize might just be within reach. ..."
"... The other half of the ban is almost entirely symbolic, intended mainly to demonstrate that the Muslim "travel ban" is, well, not a Muslim travel ban. Other than DPRK officials, the only North Koreans likely to hop on a plane to America are defectors. And they should be welcomed. ..."
"... Secretary of State Mike Pompeo extended the prohibition another year on September 1, for no obvious reason other than the fact he could do so. It was an extraordinarily foolish step, given Kim's evident desire to improve trust. If the president believes that the supreme leader is prepared to disarm, he should listen to Kim's conditions and encourage expanded private ties. ..."
"... But Pyongyang does not just kidnap Americans. The 17 detained over the last couple decades all "did something," as the head of a U.S. NGO told me while I was visiting the North last year. That is, every one of them fell afoul of DPRK rules, several by evangelizing. Of course, what they did should not be crimes, but in that the North is not alone. Show up in, say, Pakistan and tell people what you think of the prophet Mohammed: the result might be deadly. ..."
"... And Washington should not stop there. Political relations should be made formal. It is time for diplomatic recognition. This step should be treated as communication rather than reward. Imagine the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, without any reliable channels between the two governments. Or what if the U.S. and the People's Republic of China had been in contact as allied forces neared the Yalu in late 1950? Washington and Beijing might have found a modus vivendi to avoid war. ..."
Let Americans Visit North Korea NowKim has expressed his desire for contact with
Americans. The Trump administration should give it to him.
North Korea is changing. That doesn't mean Kim Jong-un is mimicking Mikhail Gorbachev or even
Deng Xiaoping, at least not yet. But it does increasingly appear that Kim intends to chart a
more moderate course for his nation -- that is, make it less threatening, though not more
democratic.
The U.S. should help Kim pull his country back from seven decades of confrontation. Kim's
apparent reasonableness may turn out to be fake, but it is in Washington's interest to create
positive incentives for the North. If President Donald Trump can do it right -- imagine a White
House signing ceremony for a peace treaty with Kim, China's Xi Jinping, and South Korea's Moon
Jae-in -- a Nobel Peace Prize might just be within reach.
Of course, good policy is critical. The supreme leader is a ruthless survivor who appears to
have eliminated all serious domestic rivals. He is unlikely to turn over his nuclear weapons up
front, sacrificing his leverage in the hope that Washington, where the president's national
security advisor has counseled war, will join him in a Kumbaya songfest. And even if he does
make other worthwhile concessions that reduce the risk of conflict in Northeast Asia, he may
want to keep a few of his nukes.
But more diplomacy is necessary. Kim has expressed his desire for contact with Americans.
The Trump administration should give it to him, starting with a repeal of the ban on travel to
the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Even before the Kim-Trump summit, the supreme leader was quoted by South Koreans as saying:
"If we meet often and build trust with the United States, and if an end to the war and
nonaggression are promised, why would we live in difficulty with nuclear weapons?" Moreover,
the short summit communique was structured to reflect this perspective: the two governments
would first "establish new U.S.-DPRK relations" reflecting a mutual desire "for peace and
prosperity." Next they would "build a lasting and stable peace regime." Then they would work
towards denuclearization, however defined.
Which makes sense. Assume that Kim is serious about improved ties with the U.S. and
improving his standing worldwide. Further assume that he is open to the idea of at least
curbing or even eliminating his nuclear ambitions. Then he has to trust that Washington won't
follow its policy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and pursue regime change. The case of
Libya is particularly chastening. At the time of its civil war, the DPRK blamed the old fool
Moammar Gaddafi for giving up his missiles and nukes, which allowed him to be driven from power
the moment the U.S. and Europe had an opportunity.
If anything could generate both shared interest and trust, it would be creating a
relationship characterized not just by official meetings, but even more human contacts. If
Americans and other foreigners are visiting the North, investing in and trading with North
Korean entities, staging cultural and sporting events, and more, U.S. bombers are less likely
to pay a hostile visit to Pyongyang. The starting point for such an approach should be to
eliminate the dual travel ban imposed on the DPRK.
Right now, North Koreans cannot come to America and Americans cannot go to North Korea. The
latter matters most, having ended a tourist trade involving around 1,000 U.S. visitors
annually, and hindering everyone else from aid workers to journalists seeking to go to the
North. Exemptions for visiting the North are available, but representatives of NGOs with whom
I've spoken indicate that the approval process remains both bureaucratic and uncertain.
The other half of the ban is almost entirely symbolic, intended mainly to demonstrate that
the Muslim "travel ban" is, well, not a Muslim travel ban. Other than DPRK officials,
the only North Koreans likely to hop on a plane to America are defectors. And they should be
welcomed.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo extended the prohibition another year on September 1, for no
obvious reason other than the fact he could do so. It was an extraordinarily foolish step,
given Kim's evident desire to improve trust. If the president believes that the supreme leader
is prepared to disarm, he should listen to Kim's conditions and encourage expanded private
ties.
Moreover, every American who visits the North helps pry open another door or window into the
Hermit Kingdom. Indeed, that nickname no longer really applies to the DPRK. The country is more
open, elites are enjoying greater prosperity, market incentives are present throughout the
economy, threats of war have disappeared from the regime's lexicon, Kim has dramatically
stepped out onto the international stage, and America no longer is the domestic demon du
jour.
The excuse for last year's prohibition was the horrific plight of Virginia college student
Otto Warmbier, who was in a comatose state when he was returned from North Korean custody -- he
was taken off life support and died shortly after -- and conveniently forgotten this year when
Trump shifted strategies. Warmbier did not deserve whatever happened to him, but the best
evidence, attested to by his doctors and the coroner who examined his body, was that he was not
beaten. In fact, it was in the North's interest to keep him alive. (There is still no official
explanation for his brain damage, however.)
But Pyongyang does not just kidnap Americans. The 17 detained over the last couple decades
all "did something," as the head of a U.S. NGO told me while I was visiting the North last
year. That is, every one of them fell afoul of DPRK rules, several by evangelizing. Of course,
what they did should not be crimes, but in that the North is not alone. Show up in, say,
Pakistan and tell people what you think of the prophet Mohammed: the result might be
deadly.
Anyway, given the North's strong push for respectability, no repeat is likely. Even more
important than visitors are aid workers, journalists, businessmen and women, and others who can
demonstrate the benefits of international contact. With Kim apparently interested in a more
respectable foreign role, the Trump administration should enlist other Americans to set forth a
vision of a well-connected and well-rewarded DPRK. Maybe Kim is not serious, but the U.S.
should proceed on the assumption that he is. The cost of doing so is small while the benefits
of success would be great.
And Washington should not stop there. Political relations should be made formal. It is time
for diplomatic recognition. This step should be treated as communication rather than reward.
Imagine the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, without any reliable channels between
the two governments. Or what if the U.S. and the People's Republic of China had been in contact
as allied forces neared the Yalu in late 1950? Washington and Beijing might have found a modus
vivendi to avoid war.
Washington could start small, with an offer of consular relations. The administration could
insist that ensuing discussions be wide-ranging, including not only denuclearization but human
rights. Such ties would also provide a channel for dealing with errant American tourists. In
this way providing Pyongyang with something it values would enable the U.S. to push forward on
topics uncomfortable for the Kim regime. Positive movement would justify fully normal ties.
There is very little downside to treating the North like most other nations.
Establishing these kinds of relationships would lead naturally to the next step in the
U.S.-DPRK summit statement: creating a peace regime. Most obvious would be a peace treaty to
end what remains a formal state of war. One criticism is that such a pact would benefit the
North, yet all parties should desire an end to hostilities. If Pyongyang is not serious, that
will be obvious in its behavior. The fact that Washington and Moscow are formally at peace has
not stopped the U.S. from conducting a quasi-containment/Cold War strategy against Russia.
The second complaint is that the South might respond to a peace treaty by evicting U.S.
troops and ending the alliance. Yet Washington's defense commitment and troop deployment are
means to an end, not ends themselves. The Republic of Korea enjoys overwhelming advantages
compared to the DPRK and is capable of defending itself. America should take the lead in
shifting defense responsibility to South Koreans. A peace treaty would help formalize such a
step.
No one knows how the president's North Korean gambit will turn out. But he deserves credit
for upending conventional wisdom and making peace at least seem possible. Much needs to be
done. However, a good start would be for the administration to encourage contacts between
peoples as well as governments. There is no guarantee of success. But having moved this far,
the president should push the bilateral relationship to the next level.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global
Empire.
"... Trump's worldview is dominated by a zero-sum view of international relations in which the U.S. is constantly being ripped off by everyone. ..."
"... Trump is a militarist by instinct and as a matter of policy, and his progressive critics repudiate that as well. ..."
"... Trump's critique of past U.S. foreign policy boils down to complaining that other countries don't pay us for protection and that the U.S. doesn't plunder resources from the countries it invades. This is not, to put it mildly, what progressives consider to be wrong with U.S. foreign policy. ..."
"... The key failing in Brands' column is that he buys into the falsehood that Trump is in favor of "global retreat," and so he worries that both parties will soon be led by candidates advocating for that. For one thing, there has been no "retreat" under Trump, and everything he has done since taking office has been to mire the U.S. more deeply in the multiple wars he inherited. ..."
"... Literally never heard a Democratic Socialist advocate for anything other than what you summarized – threat de-escalation, reduce US military footprint abroad, don't use the threat of military force as a "diplomatic tool", stop the drone war, end the war in Afghanistan, etc. ..."
"... Of course right now Dem Socialists are just as marginalized within the Democratic party as you are within the Trumpian Neocon hellscape of the current Republican leadership. Maybe one day the Senate will have more Rand Pauls and Chris Murphys but right now we've just got a bunch of Grahams and Schumers perfectly happy to let Trump continue down this dark path. ..."
According to Brands, "the ideas at the heart of Trump's critique of U.S. foreign policy are also the ideas at the heart of the
progressive critique," but that's also simply not true. Trump's worldview is dominated by a zero-sum view of international relations
in which the U.S. is constantly being ripped off by everyone.
The progressive critics he cites specifically reject that assumption and emphasize the importance of international institutions.
Trump is a militarist by instinct and as a matter of policy, and his progressive critics repudiate that as well.
Trump's critique of past U.S. foreign policy boils down to complaining that other countries don't pay us for protection and
that the U.S. doesn't plunder resources from the countries it invades. This is not, to put it mildly, what progressives consider
to be wrong with U.S. foreign policy.
The key failing in Brands' column is that he buys into the falsehood that Trump is in favor of "global retreat," and so he
worries that both parties will soon be led by candidates advocating for that. For one thing, there has been no "retreat" under Trump,
and everything he has done since taking office has been to mire the U.S. more deeply in the multiple wars he inherited.
For another, progressives aren't calling for a "retreat" from international engagement, either. They are opposed to certain aggressive
and destructive policies, but they don't eschew engagement and cooperation with other states.
On the contrary, they are advocating
for more of that while rejecting the militarism that Trump embraces. Indeed, Bessner anticipates Brands' silly criticism and explicitly
says, "None of this means the United States should retreat from the world."
Anthony M says: September 26, 2018 at 5:30 pm
Literally never heard a Democratic Socialist advocate for anything other than what you summarized – threat
de-escalation, reduce US military footprint abroad, don't use the threat of military force as a "diplomatic tool", stop the
drone war, end the war in Afghanistan, etc.
Of course right now Dem Socialists are just as marginalized within the Democratic party as you are within the Trumpian
Neocon hellscape of the current Republican leadership. Maybe one day the Senate will have more Rand Pauls and Chris Murphys
but right now we've just got a bunch of Grahams and Schumers perfectly happy to let Trump continue down this dark path.
"... Rosenstein's discussion of wearing a wire into the Oval Office lends credence to that charge, but there is much more to it. The story begins with the hiring by the Clinton campaign, though its law firm cutout, in June 2016, of the dirt-divers of Fusion GPS. ..."
"... Fusion swiftly hired retired British spy and Trump hater Christopher Steele, who contacted his old sources in the Russian intel community for dirt to help sink a U.S. presidential candidate. ..."
"... Regrettably, Trump, at the request of two allies -- the Brits almost surely one of them -- has put a hold on his recent decision to declassify all relevant documents inside the Justice Department and FBI. ..."
The New York Times report that Rosenstein, sarcastically or seriously in May 2017, talked of
wearing a wire into the Oval Office to entrap the president, suggests that his survival into
the new year is improbable.
Whether Thursday is the day President Donald Trump drops the hammer is unknown.
But if he does, the recapture by Trump of a Justice Department he believes he lost as his
term began may be at hand. Comparisons to President Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre may not be
overdone.
The Times report that Rosenstein also talked of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump
suggests that Sen. Lindsey Graham had more than a small point on "Fox News Sunday": "There's a
bureaucratic coup going on at the Department of Justice and the FBI, and somebody needs to look
at it."
Indeed, they do. And it is inexplicable that a special prosecutor has not been named. For
while the matter assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller, to investigate any Trump collusion
with Russia in hacking the emails of the Clinton campaign and DNC, is serious, a far graver
matter has gotten far less attention.
To wit, did an anti-Trump cabal inside the Department of Justice and the FBI conspire to
block Trump's election, and having failed, plot to bring down his presidency in a "deep state"
coup d'etat?
Rosenstein's discussion of wearing a wire into the Oval Office lends credence to that
charge, but there is much more to it. The story begins with the hiring by the Clinton campaign,
though its law firm cutout, in June 2016, of the dirt-divers of Fusion GPS.
Fusion swiftly hired retired British spy and Trump hater Christopher Steele, who
contacted his old sources in the Russian intel community for dirt to help sink a U.S.
presidential candidate.
What his Russian friends provided was passed on by Steele to his paymaster at GPS, his
contact in the Justice Department, No. 3 man Bruce Ohr, and to the FBI, which was also paying
the British spy.
The FBI then used the dirt Steele unearthed, much of it false, to persuade a FISA court to
issue a warrant to wiretap Trump aide Carter Page. The warrant was renewed three times, the
last with the approval of Trump's own deputy attorney general, Rosenstein.
Regrettably, Trump, at the request of two allies -- the Brits almost surely one of them
-- has put a hold on his recent decision to declassify all relevant documents inside the
Justice Department and FBI.
Yet, as The Wall Street Journal wrote Monday, "As for the allies, sometimes U.S. democratic
accountability has to take precedence over the potential embarrassment of British
intelligence."
Even a leader of unparalleled integrity and probity would likely be outmatched and outflanked
by what we call "the Swamp" and alas, that's not Mr Trump to begin with. I do believe that
Trump is patriotic and wants what's best for the country but 1) that's not enough–he
also has colossal personal liabilities and issues of character and 2) our nation's capital is
full of people who are neither patriotic nor do they want what's best for the country.
The Establishment doesn't take kindly to apostates, whatever their stripe.
"... Well, we know where Mattis is going when he leaves the Pentagon. Nice work if you can get it. ..."
"... Seriously, anyone taking a knife to the Pentagon budget is putting a knife top their throat, unless they have support. ..."
"... Gen Mattis wants to save big money stop sending US forces to needless adventures. ..."
"... On top of the firing, I found the last three or four paragraphs all about insider trading as opposed to job performance, goals, budget cutting, not even budget accountability . . . Personalities over performance -- holy petolies. ..."
"... Given that the United States spends more money on defense than the next seven countries COMBINED including Russia and China it's not a question of how much you spend it's a question of how well. Until DOD passes that financial audit that all other agencies are obligated to do DOD should be get any increase in funding. ..."
"... When folks learn that the DOD is the swamp, then we can start having a conversation. ..."
"... "Lap Dog" Mattis. ..."
"... The Trump Administration is the most incompetent and corrupt since Warren G. Harding. There is no swamp draining going on. It is just a fight on who occupies it. ..."
Hired to Drain the Swamp, Fired in Less Than a Year'This is the Boeing mafia in
all of its glory,' one DoD official said of John 'Jay' Gibson's mysterious demise. By
Mark
Perry •
September 26, 2018
The
Pentagon ( Frontpage /
Shutterstock ) On April 4, 2003, Col. Joseph Dowdy -- whose 1st Marine Regiment was then
fighting its way through a tangle of Iraqi villages south of Baghdad -- was called to the tent
of Gen. James Mattis and told he was being relieved of his command. A career Marine, Dowdy was
stunned: Mattis's action in the midst of a battlefield fight was nearly unprecedented and, as
Dowdy knew, would mark the end of his military career. Adding to the humiliation, Mattis told
Dowdy to remove his sidearm and hand it to him. "We're going to give you a rest," he said.
Dowdy had known that his job was in danger, the result of complaints from Mattis and his
staff that he wasn't moving his regiment quickly enough. But it's not as if Dowdy was taking
his time: his troopers had been involved in bitter firefights against tenacious "Saddam
Fedayeen" killers every day for the previous two weeks. But Dowdy had no choice in the matter,
so while he objected to Mattis's action he packed up his gear, called his wife, returned to the
U.S. and retired from the Marine Corps.
That Mattis acts quickly and decisively is part of his lore -- it's what good Marines do.
But while quick and decisive might work on the battlefield, they're not always a good fit for a
secretary of defense. Mattis learned this earlier this month, after he fired John H. "Jay"
Gibson II, the Pentagon's first-ever Chief Management Officer and its third highest ranking
official. The reason for the firing, as TheWall Street Journal's Gordon Lubold
reported on September 5, was for "lack of performance."
The firing was immediately controversial, spurring under-the-radar resentments among senior
defense officials in the Pentagon's E-Ring where military and civilian managers huddle to run
the world's largest bureaucracy. "This doesn't make any sense," a senior Pentagon official told
TAC . "Jay was CMO for seven months; he hadn't even gotten his staff in place."
John H. 'Jay' Gibson II (U.S. Government)
Gibson came to Washington to oversee Mattis's attempt to cut waste from the Pentagon budget
by identifying savings that would lessen the ballooning impact of the Trump administration's
$670 billion defense spending proposal. Armed with an impressive resume (including a successful
stint as an assistant secretary of the Air Force and deputy undersecretary of defense for
management reform, where his efforts saved billions of dollars), Gibson was tasked with
reforming Pentagon procedures in buying and developing weapons and in managing logistics and
supply, technology systems, community services, human resources, and health care.
Gibson was given a broad mandate to "shake up the system," which the deputy defense
secretary Patrick Shanahan (the department's number two official and Gibson's boss) admitted
would cause "screaming and yelling" from the Pentagon bureaucracy.
Even so, Gibson was told he would have the Trump administration's support -- which is why he
decided to give up his post as president of XCOR Aerospace, a Texas company that develops
rocket engines and space launch systems. "Jay did this over his wife's objections," a friend of
Gibson and a senior official at a major private sector financial institution told TAC in
a wide-ranging interview, "because he thought he could make a difference. He is a cracker-jack
administrator; he knows how to dig and dig. So he came into D.C., started digging into the
Pentagon budget and was fired. In my world, when that happens it isn't because you're doing a
lousy job, but because you're stepping on the wrong toes."
In fact, as the senior Pentagon official with whom I spoke says, the toes that Gibson
stepped on belonged to Patrick Shanahan, the deputy secretary of defense and a former vice
president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems, a major Pentagon contractor.
Shanahan and Gibson had a falling out in August, according to the senior Pentagon official with
whom I spoke, and Shanahan reported the difficulty to Mattis -- "who pulled a Dowdy." Put
simply, this official adds, when the "screaming and yelling" from the Pentagon's senior
bureaucracy reached a fever pitch at the end of the summer, Mattis and Shanahan decided that
firing Gibson would be easier than defending him.
"I am not familiar with the details of what happened here and I wouldn't want to speculate,"
Todd Harrison, an official with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (and a
well-known defense budget expert) says. "But I think that anyone in the new CMO position was
signing on to the toughest job in Washington. It's one thing to identify waste, and another to
actually get rid of it. The truth is that waste is built into the Pentagon budget; if you
eliminate it, you eliminate jobs." A Pentagon official confirms this, but adds that "firing an
official charged with making reforms for 'lack of performance' is laughable. Who are these guys
trying to kid? The truth is that if Jay didn't perform, he'd still have his job."
The timing of Gibson's firing, just weeks after the death of Senate Armed Services Committee
heavyweight John McCain, also raises uncomfortable questions. "The minute Gibson was fired,
McCain would have had Mattis, Shanahan, and Gibson on the carpet in his office, asking them
what the hell they were doing," a senior congressional staffer who monitors Pentagon personnel
issues notes. "That's not going to happen now."
In fact, McCain had little love for Shanahan, telling aides that his appointment raised
conflict of interest issues. McCain's worries were aired when he grilled Shanahan on answers
the Boeing executive gave to written questions posed to him by the committee in June 2017. It
was a classic McCain scorcher: "The answers that you gave to the questions," he told Shanahan,
"whether intentionally or unintentionally, were almost condescending, and I'm not overjoyed
that you came from one of the five corporations that receive 90 percent of taxpayers' dollars.
I have to have confidence that the fox is not going to be put back into the henhouse." McCain
was livid.
"Not a good beginning," McCain told Shanahan. "Do not do that again, Mr. Shanahan, or I will
not take your name up for a vote before this committee. Am I perfectly clear?" Shanahan nodded
his agreement. "Very clear," he said.
As it turns out, Shanahan's appointment resulted from a series of contentious negotiations
between Trump transition official Mira Ricardel and retired Adm. Kevin Sweeney, Mattis's chief
of staff. "There was no love loss between Mattis and Ricardel," the senior Pentagon civilian
with whom TAC spoke says. "So the SecDef told Sweeney to deal with her. Sweeney is a
tough guy and Mira has sharp elbows, so this got nasty."
The skirmishing got so bad that when Ricardel said she wanted to be the Pentagon's
undersecretary for policy, Mattis killed the idea, with Ricardel sidelined as the
undersecretary of commerce for export administration. But Ricardel got her revenge: she not
only successfully slotted Shanahan as Mattis's number two, she was named as deputy to John
Bolton, appointed by Trump to succeed H.R. McMaster as the administration's national security
advisor. "It's the ultimate irony," the senior Pentagon official says. "Jim Mattis ignored H.R.
and he ends up with Mira Ricardel. Incredible."
That Jay Gibson has been caught in the Mattis-Ricardel crossfire is an open secret at the
Pentagon, where key officials speculate that Ricardel's promotion of Shanahan has less to do
with his commitment to Pentagon budget reform than to the fact that the two were close
colleagues at Boeing, where Ricardel served for nine years (from 2006 to 2015) as vice
president of strategic missile and defense systems. That is to say, Jay Gibson's still
unexplained firing has reinforced John McCain's worries that the fox would end up guarding the
henhouse.
"This is the Boeing mafia in all of its glory," the senior Pentagon official says. "Anyone
who comes in here [to the Pentagon] will always have Jay Gibson's experience as a marker. You
think anyone who's willing to take on the bureaucracy is going to want that job? No way. Budget
reform is dead, d-e-a-d dead. So much for draining the swamp."
"Even so, Gibson was told he would have the Trump administration's support -- "
Look these are the issues in which the executive has to be made of sterner stuff. I suspect
that the tag line after the articles title heading is more accurate and that has probably
nothing to do with COS being quick on the draw.
Seriously, anyone taking a knife to the Pentagon budget is putting a knife top their
throat, unless they have support.
Gen Mattis wants to save big money stop sending US forces to needless
adventures.
On top of the firing, I found the last three or four paragraphs all about insider
trading as opposed to job performance, goals, budget cutting, not even budget accountability .
. . Personalities over performance -- holy petolies.
In this day and age there seems to be no other tune.
All federal agencies are by congressional mandate obligated to pass financial audits EVERY
year. DOD hasn't done one in over 10 years. Mattis supposedly was "working" on one for this
year. Where is it?
We see endless stories of waste, fraud, and mismanagement in DOD. The littoral combat ship
that more than doubled in price and clearly can't do what it was designed to do. So many
others.
Given that the United States spends more money on defense than the next seven countries
COMBINED including Russia and China it's not a question of how much you spend it's a question
of how well. Until DOD passes that financial audit that all other agencies are obligated to do
DOD should be get any increase in funding.
The Trump Administration is the most incompetent and corrupt since Warren G. Harding. There
is no swamp draining going on. It is just a fight on who occupies it.
The Trump Administration taking months to fill a position and then not having a support
staff in place after 7 months is totally incompetent.
"... Earlier today, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo spoke to the hard-line, misleadingly-named pressure group, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), and delivered their usual attacks on and threats against Iran. ..."
"... An agreement that eliminates any pretext for preventive war, imposes no costs on America, and succeeds through cooperation with multiple governments is anathema to someone like Bolton, because it is proof that diplomacy works and can achieve things that coercive and punitive policies never could. ..."
"... UANI audience members react this way to bad economic news from Iran because they desire the destabilization and overthrow of the government. The fact that the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor headlined their event this week confirms for us that this is the administration's goal as well. ..."
Earlier today, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo spoke to the hard-line, misleadingly-named pressure group, United Against
Nuclear Iran (UANI), and delivered their usual attacks on and threats against Iran. One line from Bolton's speech
stood
out for being as delusional as it was representative of the Iran hawk worldview:
The Iran Deal was the worst diplomatic debacle in American history [bold mine-DL]. It did
nothing to address the regime's destabilizing activities or its ballistic missile development and proliferation.
Worst of all, the deal failed in its fundamental objective: permanently denying Iran all paths to a nuclear bomb.
Bolton loathes diplomacy. That is the key thing to understand about him, and it helps explain almost everything he
has done in his career. He regards any successful diplomatic agreement as something of a debacle because it involves
striking a compromise with another government, usually an adversary or rival, and because it means that the other side
wasn't forced to give in to our every demand. When he denounces the JCPOA as "the worst diplomatic debacle in American
history," he is simply expressing the intensity of his hatred for the government with which the agreement was made. His
previous and ongoing support for the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) shouldn't be forgotten when we try to make sense of this
fanatical rhetoric.
If Bolton considers something to be the "worst diplomatic debacle" of our entire history, that
tells us that the agreement required very little of the U.S., that it reinforced habits of multilateral cooperation,
and that it successfully resolved an outstanding dispute that Bolton wished to resolve through regime change and war.
An agreement that eliminates any pretext for preventive war, imposes no costs on America, and succeeds through
cooperation with multiple governments is anathema to someone like Bolton, because it is proof that diplomacy works and
can achieve things that coercive and punitive policies never could.
The venue for Bolton and Pompeo's speeches was no accident. It was an audience of
hard-liners that detest Iran being addressed by like-minded speakers. UANI intensely
opposed the nuclear deal and recited the usual false claims about it. Their vehement
hostility to the most important and successful nonproliferation agreement of its kind is a
testament to how little they care about actually restricting Iran's nuclear program. Like other
Iran hawks, UANI is simply against Iran, and therefore they hate anything that might relieve
international pressure on Iran. The group celebrates Trump administration sanctions and its
members laugh about the deteriorating economic conditions inside Iran:
UANI audience members react this way to bad economic news from Iran because they desire the
destabilization and overthrow of the government. The fact that the Secretary of State and
National Security Advisor headlined their event this week confirms for us that this is the
administration's goal as well.
Well, more evidence that the three stooges still drink Bibi's kool-aid. Perhaps AIPAC has
promised to arrange for the Pompeo-Haley GOP Ticket to succeed Trump, with Bolton as Sec of
State and Defence all-in-one.
If
Russia shot down Israeli aircraft or bombed the airbase from which they took off, or even
obliterated Israel, America would do nothing but bitch and complain. The American military does
not want a war with Russia, because they know they cannot win a conventional war with Russia. I
would go so far as to say that even if Russia sank American warships including an aircraft
carrier America would not go to war.
America does not go to war with countries that have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver
them to the continental United States. That is why she would bend over backwards to prevent a
war with countries like Russia, China or North Korea, and the reason these countries need not
fear America. The prevention of nuclear war is the underlying premise of American foreign
policy. It has been since the nuclear age began. America would only use its nuclear weapons if
the American mainland is hit with nuclear weapons.
America would accept the loss of hundreds or even thousands of its servicemen rather than
have the continental USA turned into a wasteland.
Sorry, not so sure I'd agree. USA/Israel/NATO would love for Russia to lash out against
Israel for a provocation such as this Ilyushin 20 downing; but as the author suggests Russia
knows it could not withstand the combined forces of NATO/Israel/USA in the Syrian theatre.
Russia would not stand a chance.
I would agree with you that the USA has historically only attacked much weaker foes: Viet
Nam, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc. But recently there has been a shift in US military I've read
about, i.e. revisionist powers are now the main focus instead of 'war on terror'. With the
stranglehold 'declare war!' sanctions USA will crush Iran with this November, it means that
there will most definitely be ensuing hot war with Iran, probably early next year. What
happened to Syria will next happen in Iran.
Once Iran is reduced to rubble with US/Israel trained and equipped ISIS proxy armies, the
US and NATO will start destabilising actions along Russia's southern borders, i.e. Caspian
Sea and Georgia. Their plan is to use the same Arab Islamist proxies and/or Chechen Arabs to
start terror attacks in souther Russian provinces, i.e. Grozny, Derbent, Dagestan oblast.
USA/NATO/Israel will try to chip away at Russia's southern provinces using same methods used
in Syria, weaken and balkanize it. This is why Putin is trying so hard to stop them in
Syria.
"... "from which weapons-manufacturing systems were supposed to be transferred to Iran and Hezbollah." ..."
"... The Israelis for their part were using four F-16 fighter bombers to stage a surprise night attack on several sites near Latakia, close to the airbase being used by the Russians. They came in from the Mediterranean Sea and clearly were using the Russian plane to mask their approach as the Ilyushin 20 would have presented a much larger radar profile for the air defenses. The radar systems on the F-16s would also have clearly seen the Russian plane. ..."
"... There was also a back story. The Israelis and Russian military had established a hotline, similar to the one that is used with the U.S. command in Syria, precisely intended to avoid incidents like the Ilyushin shoot-down that might escalate into a more major conflict. Israel reportedly used the line but only one minute before the incident took place, leaving no time for the Russian plane to take evasive action. ..."
"... The Russian Ministry of Defense was irate. It saw the exploitation of the intelligence plane by the Israelis as a deliberate high-risk initiative. It warned "We consider these provocative actions by Israel as hostile. Fifteen Russian military service members have died because of the irresponsible actions of the Israeli military. This is absolutely contrary to the spirit of the Russian-Israeli partnership. We reserve the right for an adequate response." ..."
"... Aggressive war directed at a non-threatening country is the ultimate war crime as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunals that followed after the Second World War, yet the United States and its poodles Britain and France have not so much as squeaked when Israel kills civilians and soldiers in its surprise attacks against targets that it alone frequently claims to be linked to the Iranians. Washington would not be in much of a position to cast the first stone anyway, as it is in Syria illegally, bombs targets regularly, to include two major cruise missile strikes, and, on at least one occasion, set a trap that reportedly succeeded in killing a large number of Russian mercenaries fighting on the Syrian government side. ..."
"... There is, of course, an alternative explanation for the Israeli action. Netanyahu might have considered it all a win-win either way, with the Russian plane masking and enabling the Israeli attack without consequence for Israel or, perversely, producing an incident inviting retaliation from Moscow, which would likely lead to a shooting war with the United States after it inevitably steps in to support Israel's government. In either case, the chaos in Syria that Israel desires would continue and even worsen but there would also be the potential danger of a possible expansion of the war as a consequence, making it regional or even broader. ..."
"... It's the same old story. Israel does risky things like attacking its neighbors because it knows it will pay no price due to Washington's support. The downing of the Russian plane through Israeli contrivance created a situation that could easily have escalated into a war involving Moscow and Washington. What Israel is really thinking when it seeks to create anarchy all around its borders is anyone's guess, but it is, to be sure, in no one's interest to allow the process to continue. It is past time for Donald Trump to fulfill his campaign promise to pull the plug on American engagement in Syria and terminate the seemingly endless cycle of wars in the Middle East. ..."
"... Syria and Israel are still "officially" at war. No peace treaty has ever been signed between them after the 1973 war. ..."
"... Bolton and Pompeo have really excelled themselves over this. Been almost a blackout on reporting over this, at least after initial reporting of the incident. A major world leader slapping down Israel is not something the media wish people to see, might get the wrong idea. ..."
"... Not only that, but the IDF LIED to Russia, stating they were going to attack targets in N. Syria, not around Latakia. ..."
"... It appears that French frigate did fire on Syria, in the hopes that Russia would respond, then Macaroni would cry out to NATO for help under Article 5, which says, "An attack against one is an attack against all" and off we'd go to who knows where, maybe WWIII. ..."
"... How, I asked Fort Russ to explain, did the monsieurs on the French tin can know that Russia wouldn't shoot back and send them all to Davy Jones' Locker? Fort Russ' response? It deleted my comment rather than defend its claim. I'm through with Fort Russ. ..."
"... Trump's infamous campaign slogan of MAGA quickly mutated into MIGA which is the originally intended version anyways. ..."
"... France a real FUKUS country ( France -UK-US ) ..."
"... The French destroyed Libia https://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/06/28/hillary-libya/ ..."
"... There are French colonial troops in 5 african countries https://www.businessinsider.com/frances-military-is-all-over-africa-2015-1?IR=T ..."
"... France steals about 400.000 million euros per year from African ex-colonies with their currency, the CFA franc ( Communnaute Francophone Africaine, currency ) https://africasacountry.com/2018/06/its-time-to-end-the-cfa-franc ..."
"... Never underestimate French colonialism ..."
"... One might as well ask, why were the French on the scene in the first place? In the scenario being discussed here, the French did not shoot for self defence, but because they were told to. Macron would be the perfect lapdog for the job. I agree Macron being the perfect lapdog for the job. I nevertheless find the scenario on Fort-Russ unlikely because of the relative positions of the actors, if they were their true positions, when the Russian plane was hit. ..."
Israel is, of course, claiming innocence , that
it was the Syrians who shot down the Russian aircraft while the Israeli jets were legitimately
targeting a Syrian army facility "from which weapons-manufacturing systems were supposed to
be transferred to Iran and Hezbollah." Seeking to undo some of the damage caused, Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly telephoned Russian President Vladimir Putin to
express his condolences. He also sent his air force chief to Russia on Thursday to provide a
detailed report on what had occurred from the Israeli perspective.
But that story, however it will be spun, is inevitably only part of the tale. The narrative
of what occurred is by now well established. The Russian aircraft was returning to base after a
mission over the Mediterranean off the Syrian coast monitoring the activities of a French
warship and at least one British RAF plane. As a large and relatively slow propeller driven
aircraft on a routine intelligence gathering mission, the Ilyushin 20 had no reason to conceal
its presence. It was apparently preparing to land at its airbase at Khmeimim in Syria when the
incident took place. It may or may not have had its transponder on, which would signal to the
Syrian air defenses that it was a "friendly."
Syrian air defenses were on high alert because Israel had attacked targets near Damascus on
the previous day. On that occasion a Boeing 747 on the ground that Israel claimed was
transporting weapons was the target. One should note in passing that Israeli claims about what
it is targeting in Syria are never independently verifiable.
The Israelis for their part were using four F-16 fighter bombers to stage a surprise night
attack on several sites near Latakia, close to the airbase being used by the Russians. They
came in from the Mediterranean Sea and clearly were using the Russian plane to mask their
approach as the Ilyushin 20 would have presented a much larger radar profile for the air
defenses. The radar systems on the F-16s would also have clearly seen the Russian plane.
The Israelis might have been expecting that the Syrians would not fire at all at the
incoming planes knowing that one of them at least was being flown by their Russian allies. If
that was the expectation, it proved wrong and it was indeed a Syrian S-200 ground to air
missile directed by its guidance system to the larger target that brought down the plane and
killed its fourteen crew members. The Israelis completed their bombing run and flew back home.
There were also reports that the French frigate offshore fired several missiles during the
exchange, but they have not been confirmed while the British plane was also reportedly circling
out of range though within the general area.
There was also a back story. The Israelis and Russian military had established a hotline,
similar to the one that is used with the U.S. command in Syria, precisely intended to avoid
incidents like the Ilyushin shoot-down that might escalate into a more major conflict. Israel
reportedly used the line but only one minute before the incident took place, leaving no time
for the Russian plane to take evasive action.
The Russian Ministry of Defense was irate. It saw the exploitation of the intelligence plane
by the Israelis as a deliberate high-risk initiative. It warned "We consider
these provocative actions by Israel as hostile. Fifteen Russian military service members have
died because of the irresponsible actions of the Israeli military. This is absolutely contrary
to the spirit of the Russian-Israeli partnership. We reserve the right for an adequate
response."
Russian President Vladimir Putin was more conciliatory , saying the
incident was a "chain of tragic circumstances." He contrasted it with the Turkish shoot-down of
a Russian warplane in 2015, which was planned and deliberate, noting that Israel had not
actually attacked the Ilyushin. Though the Putin comments clearly recognize that his country's
relationship with Israel is delicate to say the least, that does not mean that he will do
nothing.
Many Israelis are emigres from Russia and there are close ties between the two countries,
but their views on Syria diverge considerably. As much as Putin might like to strike back at
Israel in a hard, substantive way, he will likely only upgrade and strengthen the air defenses
around Russian troop concentrations and warn that another "surprise" attack will be resisted.
Unfortunately, he knows that he is substantially outgunned locally by the U.S., France, Britain
and Israel, not to mention Turkey, and a violent response that would escalate the conflict is
not in his interest. He has similarly, in cooperation with his Syrian allies, delayed a major
attempt to retake terrorist controlled Idlib province, as he works out a formula with Ankara to
prevent heavy handed Turkish intervention.
But there is another dimension to the story that the international media has largely chosen
to ignore. And that is that Israel is now carrying out almost daily air attacks on Syria, over
200 in the past 18 months, a country with which it is not at war and which has not attacked it
or threatened it in any way. It justifies the attacks by claiming that they are directed
against Iran or Hezbollah, not at Syria itself. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted
that any peace settlement in Syria include the complete removal of Iranians, a demand that has
also been repeated by the United States, which is also calling for the end to the Bashar
al-Assad government and its replacement by something more "democratic."
Aggressive war directed at a non-threatening country is the ultimate war crime as defined by
the Nuremberg Tribunals that followed after the Second World War, yet the United States and its
poodles Britain and France have not so much as squeaked when Israel kills civilians and
soldiers in its surprise attacks against targets that it alone frequently claims to be linked
to the Iranians. Washington would not be in much of a position to cast the first stone anyway,
as it is in Syria illegally, bombs targets regularly, to include two major cruise missile
strikes, and, on at least one occasion, set a trap that reportedly
succeeded in killing a large number of Russian mercenaries fighting on the Syrian
government side.
And then there is the other dimension of Israeli interference with its neighbors, the secret
wars in which it supports the terrorist groups operating in Syria as well as in Iran. The
Netanyahu government has armed the terrorists operating in Syria and even treated them in
Israeli hospitals when they get wounded. On one occasion when ISIS accidentally fired into
Israeli-held territory on the Golan Heights it subsequently apologized. So, if you ask who is
supporting terrorism the answer first and foremost should be Israel, but Israel pays no price
for doing so because of the protection afforded by Washington, which, by the way, is also
protecting terrorists.
There is, of course, an alternative explanation for the Israeli action. Netanyahu might have
considered it all a win-win either way, with the Russian plane masking and enabling the Israeli
attack without consequence for Israel or, perversely, producing an incident inviting
retaliation from Moscow, which would likely lead to a shooting war with the United States after
it inevitably steps in to support Israel's government. In either case, the chaos in Syria that
Israel desires would continue and even worsen but there would also be the potential danger of a
possible expansion of the war as a consequence, making it regional or even broader.
It's the same old story. Israel does risky things like attacking its neighbors because it
knows it will pay no price due to Washington's support. The downing of the Russian plane
through Israeli contrivance created a situation that could easily have escalated into a war
involving Moscow and Washington. What Israel is really thinking when it seeks to create anarchy
all around its borders is anyone's guess, but it is, to be sure, in no one's interest to allow
the process to continue. It is past time for Donald Trump to fulfill his campaign promise to
pull the plug on American engagement in Syria and terminate the seemingly endless cycle of wars
in the Middle East.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
.
"It is past time for Donald Trump to fulfill his campaign promise to pull the plug on
American engagement in Syria and terminate the seemingly endless cycle of wars in the Middle
East."
Orange Clown's a liar whose presidential campaign was a calculated bait and switch fraud
from the beginning. Our presidential poseur obviously had no intention of following through
on most of his pre-election intimations and campaign promises.
Syria refused "land for peace" initiative in 1967 where it would get back Golan in return for
peace. They never established diplomatic relations and are technically in the state of war.
"The downing of the Russian plane through Israeli contrivance created a situation that
could easily have escalated into a war involving Moscow and Washington"
I don't doubt Israeli contrivance but I expect there is possibly a wider contrivance
involving Netanyahu's poodle Macron:
@Anon Syria
refused "land for peace" initiative in 1967 where it would get back Golan in return for
peace. They never established diplomatic relations and are technically in the state of war.
Which raises a couple of questions. One is whether the deal is still open. Another is why a
secular régime in Syria, like that of Assad, would not recognise Israel now in return
for something substantial which might be money rather than territory.
Syria
refused "land for peace" initiative in 1967 where it would get back Golan in return for
peace. They never established diplomatic relations and are technically in the state of war.
'Syria refused "land for peace" initiative in 1967 where it would get back Golan in return
for peace '
Syria
refused "land for peace" initiative in 1967 where it would get back Golan in return for
peace.
They never established diplomatic relations and are technically in the state of war.
Moshe Dayan, in an interview with an Israeli paper, stated that 95% of border incidents with
Syria were deliberately provoked by Israel
"The downing of the Russian plane through Israeli contrivance created a situation
that could easily have escalated into a war involving Moscow and Washington"
I don't doubt Israeli contrivance but I expect there is possibly a wider contrivance
involving Netanyahu's poodle Macron:
"The downing of the Russian plane through Israeli contrivance created a situation
that could easily have escalated into a war involving Moscow and Washington"
I don't doubt Israeli contrivance but I expect there is possibly a wider contrivance
involving Netanyahu's poodle Macron:
Thought provoking material from Joaquin Flores at Ft Russ News. Was it actually the
French? The Auvergne frigate is an anti-submarine ship equipped with surface-to-air missiles
for self-defence Aster 15, with a range of max 30 km. Unless the French have modified it in
the mean time, which is unlikely since it was launched too recently for that in my opinion,
in 2015, to turn it in an air-defence ship equipped with the more advanced Aster 30 missiles,
with a range of 100-120 km, I doubt they were within striking distance of the IL-20 when it
was hit. On the other hand, it is possible that they have participated in the Israeli attack
against Syria, given that they're equipped with cruise missiles and that ships of the same
class have participated in previous attacks against Syria.
Anyway, I don't think it is wise of Russia to play down French involvement for the sake of
Russian-French relationship. France under Macron is a shit country but the French are too
vain to admit that they have elected a complete moron as president. There is no comparison
with Erdogan's Turkey. Erdogan has way more substance than the Rotschild puppet Macron.
Bolton and Pompeo have really excelled themselves over this. Been almost a blackout on
reporting over this, at least after initial reporting of the incident. A major world leader
slapping down Israel is not something the media wish people to see, might get the wrong idea.
The
Auvergne frigate is an anti-submarine ship equipped with surface-to-air missiles for
self-defence Aster 15, with a range of max 30 km. Unless the French have modified it in the
mean time, which is unlikely since it was launched too recently for that in my opinion, in
2015, to turn it in an air-defence ship equipped with the more advanced Aster 30 missiles,
with a range of 100-120 km, I doubt they were within striking distance of the IL-20 when it
was hit. On the other hand, it is possible that they have participated in the Israeli attack
against Syria, given that they're equipped with cruise missiles and that ships of the same
class have participated in previous attacks against Syria.
Anyway, I don't think it is wise of Russia to play down French involvement for the sake of
Russian-French relationship. France under Macron is a shit country but the French are too
vain to admit that they have elected a complete moron as president. There is no comparison
with Erdogan's Turkey. Erdogan has way more substance than the Rotschild puppet Macron.
Erdogan is a paranoid criminal who has back-stabbed every player he's ever done business with
not to mention his intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, is an alumnus of the Turkish branch of
al-Qaida. Head and shoulders above Macron? I suppose that's possible
If
Russia shot down Israeli aircraft or bombed the airbase from which they took off, or even
obliterated Israel, America would do nothing but bitch and complain. The American military
does not want a war with Russia, because they know they cannot win a conventional war with
Russia. I would go so far as to say that even if Russia sank American warships including an
aircraft carrier America would not go to war.
America does not go to war with countries that have nuclear weapons and the means to
deliver them to the continental United States. That is why she would bend over backwards to
prevent a war with countries like Russia, China or North Korea, and the reason these
countries need not fear America. The prevention of nuclear war is the underlying premise of
American foreign policy. It has been since the nuclear age began. America would only use its
nuclear weapons if the American mainland is hit with nuclear weapons.
America would accept the loss of hundreds or even thousands of its servicemen rather than
have the continental USA turned into a wasteland. I'm inclined to agree with your assessment
of US unwillingness to fight a nuclear power, but .I also can't forget that the US ruling
elites are pathological. Psychotic with hubris, greed & egoism. The "exceptional", the
"indispensable" nation .& worse, the wagging dog to the Israeli tail.
Israel has Zero goodwill. They are a pariah nation.
I'm sure that will be interesting to watch as U.S. power evaporates.
It proves to me that hubris overwhelms strategy; the Jews are the architects of their own
destruction.
My understanding is the Auvergne class frigate has Aster 30 capability from launch,
depending on the configuration ... retrofit would only be necessary in case it had not been
initially equipped - In the French denomination, the Auvergne is a FREMM, anti-submarine, not
FREDA, air-defence. The French FREMM, if the French MoD doesn't lie, is equipped with 16
missiles Aster 15 for self-defence. The FREDAs are equipped with 16 more missiles Aster 30.
Let's say that the Auvergne is in fact equipped with Aster 30 instead of Aster 15 missiles, I
say instead because there would be little room left for its alleged main capabilities if
equipped with both, the likelihood that the French would fire one at a Russian reconnaissance
plane is still less than the plane being hit by mistake by Syrian air-defence.
Why would the
French down a distant slow moving Russian reconnaissance plane? It would make sense if the
plane was much closer to the Auvergne, in which case an Aster 15 would have done the job. The
thing is that it seems that as much as the Il-20 was between the Syrians and the Israelis,
Israelis were between the French and the Russian plane.
Unless the French and the Israeli
hardware are fully integrated, you have to have a hell of a confidence in your stuff to fire
a missile to down the Russian plane in such circumstances. Though the Aster 30 has vertical
launch and anything is possible. I can be wrong but I just find it unlikely.
The Israelis for their part were using four F-16 fighter bombers to stage a surprise
night attack on several sites near Latakia, close to the airbase being used by the
Russians.
Not only that, but the IDF LIED to Russia, stating they were going to attack targets in N.
Syria, not around Latakia.
It appears that French frigate did fire on Syria, in the hopes that Russia would respond,
then Macaroni would cry out to NATO for help under Article 5, which says, "An attack against
one is an attack against all" and off we'd go to who knows where, maybe WWIII.
Israel needs to be dis-armed of its NBC arsenal; nukes, biological and chemical weapons,
which they will deny having, but as usual, it's just another LIE coming from a nation filled
with religious zealots who think some G-d they created will protect them from nuclear bursts
and that they have the G-d given right to kill any Gentile they want, w/o repercussions.
Erdogan is a paranoid criminal who has back-stabbed every player he's ever done
business with ... not to mention his intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, is an alumnus of the
Turkish branch of al-Qaida. Head and shoulders above Macron? I suppose that's possible...
And
Macron is an egomaniac with and Oedipus complex who oftens makes non-sensical sentences that
send his admirers into trance. The only plus of Macron compared to Erdogan is that he knows
his masters. The down side is that he doesn't know his own country, while Erdogan does. So
yes, it is possible.
"The downing of the Russian plane through Israeli contrivance created a situation
that could easily have escalated into a war involving Moscow and Washington"
I don't doubt Israeli contrivance but I expect there is possibly a wider contrivance
involving Netanyahu's poodle Macron:
Thought provoking material from Joaquin Flores at Ft Russ News. Was it actually the
French? I left a response on the Fort Russ article asking them to explain exactly why French
naval personnel would wish to sacrifice their lives for the greater glory of the
gerontophiliac juvenile war criminal in Paris.
How, I asked Fort Russ to explain, did the monsieurs on the French tin can know that Russia wouldn't shoot back and send them all to
Davy Jones' Locker? Fort Russ' response? It deleted my comment rather than defend its claim. I'm through with Fort Russ.
The Nuremberg standard was only set up to be used against goyim and goy nations who don't
have Jewish occupation governments. Israel must be pretty stupid as if wider, regional war
breaks out then Tel Aviv should be considered a legitimate target and in the event of a
nuclear war no doubt Russia has nukes destined for Tel Aviv and rightly so.
Trump's infamous campaign slogan of MAGA quickly mutated into MIGA which is the originally
intended version anyways. Obedience to Israel has become a norm in presidential election
campaigns. Even the disenfranchised minority caucuses, including and especially the Black one
is firmly in Israel's pockets now. The Black leadership role has now been essentially reduced
to making the odd noise after the shooting of an unarmed Black by a White cop.
"The Black leadership role has now been essentially reduced to making the odd noise
after the shooting of an unarmed Black by a White cop."
As a brown person in Asia I grew up inculcated with the idea that I must always be in
solidarity with black people in America and they would be with me (it was the 1970s, Malcolm
X was still a fresh memory, Muhammad Ali still strode the scene like a colossus, and Martin
Luther King Jr was still thought of as a hero in most circles).
Today, black Americans are people so wallowing in self abnegation that they mass voted for
the racist war criminal Killary Clinton, owing to whose actions black people in America were
incarcerated in hitherto unknown numbers; due to whose crimes black people in Haiti were
looted to destitution; because of whom black people in Libya are literally being sold as
slaves. Black Americans parade around saying "black lives matter", but are more than happy
voting for war criminals who loot Haitian blacks, enslave Libyan blacks, massacre Somali
blacks, deprive Sudanese blacks of life saving drugs, and plot to imperialistically occupy
Africa, a continent of black people. Forget about us brown people, to American blacks in
2018, black lives do *not* matter.
Only virtue signalling and tribal identity matters. Nothing else.
@Vojkan In the
French denomination, the Auvergne is a FREMM, anti-submarine, not FREDA, air-defence. The
French FREMM, if the French MoD doesn't lie, is equipped with 16 missiles Aster 15 for
self-defence. The FREDAs are equipped with 16 more missiles Aster 30. Let's say that the
Auvergne is in fact equipped with Aster 30 instead of Aster 15 missiles, I say instead
because there would be little room left for its alleged main capabilities if equipped with
both, the likelihood that the French would fire one at a Russian reconnaissance plane is
still less than the plane being hit by mistake by Syrian air-defence. Why would the French
down a distant slow moving Russian reconnaissance plane? It would make sense if the plane was
much closer to the Auvergne, in which case an Aster 15 would have done the job. The thing is
that it seems that as much as the Il-20 was between the Syrians and the Israelis, Israelis
were between the French and the Russian plane. Unless the French and the Israeli hardware are
fully integrated, you have to have a hell of a confidence in your stuff to fire a missile to
down the Russian plane in such circumstances. Though the Aster 30 has vertical launch and
anything is possible. I can be wrong but I just find it unlikely.
Why would the French down a distant slow moving Russian reconnaissance plane?
One might as well ask, why were the French on the scene in the first place?
In the scenario being discussed here, the French did not shoot for self defence, but
because they were told to. Macron would be the perfect lapdog for the job.
I left a response on the Fort Russ article asking them to explain
exactly why French naval personnel would wish to sacrifice their lives for the greater glory
of the gerontophiliac juvenile war criminal in Paris. How, I asked Fort Russ to explain, did
the monsieurs on the French tin can know that Russia wouldn't shoot back and send them all to
Davy Jones' Locker?
Fort Russ' response? It deleted my comment rather than defend its claim.
I left a response on the Fort Russ article asking them to explain
exactly why French naval personnel would wish to sacrifice their lives for the greater glory
of the gerontophiliac juvenile war criminal in Paris. How, I asked Fort Russ to explain, did
the monsieurs on the French tin can know that Russia wouldn't shoot back and send them all to
Davy Jones' Locker?
Fort Russ' response? It deleted my comment rather than defend its claim.
I'm through with Fort Russ. Well, Bill, Russia practices entirely too much self-restraint
to my taste too, but I suspect you underestimate the ego-priapism of the French (you should
see the exaggerated 'packages' on the statues of their military heroes), it's not like that
culture plays with a full deck or level mentality. Bottom line: Russia doesn't want World War
III and the priss Gauls are perfectly willing to take advantage of that in the negative, you
might better understand the Western gang mentality. Insofar as assigning a modicum of
'normalcy' (rationality) to the French militarist idiots, it'd be a mistake, they might
notice they'd backed-buttocks into the nuclear launch button if you separated them from
on-ship lover with a pry-bar. Sort of like Dien Bien Phu and catastrophic political-military
miscalculation.
Gerontophiliac? Rumor has it rather Macron is in love with his Muslim beating bodyguard.
The 'elderly' woman seems to be great cover
The Israelis using the hotline just a minute before the shoot down is very similar to when
the yid army gives notice to a Palestinian family just a minute before blowing up their
house. They think it's all funny.
Well, Bill, Russia practices entirely too much self-restraint to my taste too, but I
suspect you underestimate the ego-priapism of the French (you should see the exaggerated
'packages' on the statues of their military heroes), it's not like that culture plays with a
full deck or level mentality. Bottom line: Russia doesn't want World War III and the priss
Gauls are perfectly willing to take advantage of that in the negative, you might better
understand the Western gang mentality. Insofar as assigning a modicum of 'normalcy'
(rationality) to the French militarist idiots, it'd be a mistake, they might notice they'd
backed-buttocks into the nuclear launch button if you separated them from on-ship lover with
a pry-bar. Sort of like Dien Bien Phu and catastrophic political-military miscalculation.
Gerontophiliac? Rumor has it rather Macron is in love with his Muslim beating bodyguard.
The 'elderly' woman seems to be great cover... It is highly implausible that "Micron" has any
power. The same can be said about the imbecile UK Parliament that allowed Mr. Gavin
Williamson (a trained salesperson knowledgeable in fireplaces) to become a Secretary of
Defence. Gavin's only virtue is his superb sensitivity to the needs of mega-war profiteers
and the Friends of Israel in the UK.
20 September 2018: "The Chief of Staff for the Israëli Air Force, General Amikam
Norkin, arrives in a hurry to present his version of events. Once these proofs were checked
and compared with other recordings, it transpired that Israël was lying
straight-faced."
"On 17 September 2018, France, Israël and the United Kingdom carried out a
joint operation against Syrian targets.
1. A British Torpedo took off from Cyprus to land in Iraq. During the flight, it violated
Syrian air space in order to scan the Syrian defences and make the allied attack
possible.
2. Less than an hour later, four Israëli F-16s and a French frigate, L'Auvergne, fired
on targets in the Syrian governorate of Lattakia. The Syrian air defences protected their
country by firing their S-200s against the French and Israëli missiles.
3. During the battle, an F-16 used a Russian Ilyushin Il-20 as a shield.
The cowardice of the British and French leaders led them to censor all information
concerning their responsibility in this operation . London made no comment, and Paris
denied the facts. Neither the BBC, nor France-Television dared to mention the subject. For
these two countries, more than ever, t he reality of external politics is excluded from
the democratic debate.
In case the White House should find an acceptable narrative of the facts for its electors,
Russia could forbid the United Kingdom, France and Israël from making any intrusion into
the maritime, terrestrial and aerial space of Syria without the authorisation of
Damascus.
London and Paris would have to cease their threats of bombing under whatever pretext at all
(false chemical weapons) and withdraw their special forces. This measure would be valid for
all protagonists in general, except for the United States and, in Idlib, for Turkey."
-- Neither the United Kingdom nor France nor Israël has a head of state. These states
are indeed headless.
Why would the French down a distant slow moving Russian reconnaissance plane?
One might as well ask, why were the French on the scene in the first place? In the scenario being discussed here, the French did not shoot for self defence, but
because they were told to. Macron would be the perfect lapdog for the job. I agree Macron
being the perfect lapdog for the job. I nevertheless find the scenario on Fort-Russ unlikely
because of the relative positions of the actors, if they were their true positions, when the
Russian plane was hit.
Russia's MOD story is clear: the IL-20 had been flying around Idlib and was coming back when
4 fighters from Israel bombed Latakia and having accomplished their mission and also noticed
of the incoming IL-20, instead of running away, decided to stay around for another objective.
One of the fighter came close to the IL-20 which was going to land, and he gave him the
"Judas' kiss" calling for the Syrian DCA to shoot down the IL-20.
It was not an accident, it was a pre-planned murder: Note that the Syrian DCA became ready
only 10′ after the bombing of Lattakia and that the israelis had plenty of time to run
away.
It would be interesting to know if these fighters communicate with Israel before deciding
to carry out this murder.
I am glad to see that Russia is not behaving like the US when the USS Liberty was attacked
by Israel. By deciding to send the S300 to Syria , improved their communication system and
jammed airplanes communication systems when attacking Syria, Russia is giving an appropriate
answer which is going to improve drastically the defense capabilities of Syria and "cooled
some aggressive hot heads".
psychohistorian | Sep 24, 2018 11:43:23 PM | 123 "I hope for capitulation by the private
finance folk so society can evolve into some sort of meritocracy."
Unfortunately, the Cheney/Greenspan/Kagan kind does not capitulate voluntarily. They are
the impulsive leeches and born traitors. The deficit of decency shows in their progeny as
well -- see the disgusting youngsters from the Cheney, Bush, and Blair clans. All of them
openly enjoy the ill-gotten wealth that is soaked in the blood of the innocent. All of them
are subhuman deformities morality-wise.
"It is past time for Donald Trump to fulfill his campaign promise to pull the plug on
American engagement in Syria and terminate the seemingly endless cycle of wars in the Middle
East."
Orange Clown's a liar whose presidential campaign was a calculated bait and switch fraud
from the beginning. Our presidential poseur obviously had no intention of following through
on most of his pre-election intimations and campaign promises.
Netanyahu might have considered it all a win-win either way, with the Russian plane
masking and enabling the Israeli attack without consequence for Israel or, perversely,
producing an incident inviting retaliation from Moscow, which would likely lead to a
shooting war with the United States after it inevitably steps in to support Israel's
government.
There we go! Glad someone gets it.
I had to read Saker's article suggesting that just maybe it could have been an
actual accident on Israel's part through my fingers as I could not manage to lift my face
from my palm the entire time.
It is past time for Donald Trump to fulfill his campaign promise to pull the plug on
American engagement in Syria and terminate the seemingly endless cycle of wars in the
Middle East.
I'd love to see this happen, but let's be real. If we pulled out of Israel's terror wars,
Mossad would stage a false flag to bring us right back in less than 12 months later. There's
only one way to stop fighting wars for Israel and that's to end Israel. We've got to strike
at the roots, not the branches.
If
Russia shot down Israeli aircraft or bombed the airbase from which they took off, or even
obliterated Israel, America would do nothing but bitch and complain. The American military
does not want a war with Russia, because they know they cannot win a conventional war with
Russia. I would go so far as to say that even if Russia sank American warships including an
aircraft carrier America would not go to war.
America does not go to war with countries that have nuclear weapons and the means to
deliver them to the continental United States. That is why she would bend over backwards to
prevent a war with countries like Russia, China or North Korea, and the reason these
countries need not fear America. The prevention of nuclear war is the underlying premise of
American foreign policy. It has been since the nuclear age began. America would only use its
nuclear weapons if the American mainland is hit with nuclear weapons.
America would accept the loss of hundreds or even thousands of its servicemen rather than
have the continental USA turned into a wasteland. I'm inclined to agree with your assessment
of US unwillingness to fight a nuclear power, but .I also can't forget that the US ruling
elites are pathological. Psychotic with hubris, greed & egoism. The "exceptional", the
"indispensable" nation .& worse, the wagging dog to the Israeli tail.
Trump
is owned by israel, I wish I was wrong, but there is no way around it. I mean, I expect him
any day to convert to judaism.
No way around it. Trump's infamous campaign slogan of MAGA
quickly mutated into MIGA which is the originally intended version anyways. Obedience to
Israel has become a norm in presidential election campaigns. Even the disenfranchised
minority caucuses, including and especially the Black one is firmly in Israel's pockets now.
The Black leadership role has now been essentially reduced to making the odd noise after the
shooting of an unarmed Black by a White cop.
Trump is presently at the U.N. repeating all the American foreign policy propaganda. The hubris he's delivering is off the
charts. Disgusting doesn't begin to cover how deceptive and slimy his zionist-authored rhetoric is. He's a sad, pathetic
mouthpiece for his masters in Israel.
@Justsaying
Trump's infamous campaign slogan of MAGA quickly mutated into MIGA which is the originally
intended version anyways. Obedience to Israel has become a norm in presidential election
campaigns. Even the disenfranchised minority caucuses, including and especially the Black one
is firmly in Israel's pockets now. The Black leadership role has now been essentially reduced
to making the odd noise after the shooting of an unarmed Black by a White cop.
"The Black leadership role has now been essentially reduced to making the odd noise
after the shooting of an unarmed Black by a White cop."
As a brown person in Asia I grew up inculcated with the idea that I must always be in
solidarity with black people in America and they would be with me (it was the 1970s, Malcolm
X was still a fresh memory, Muhammad Ali still strode the scene like a colossus, and Martin
Luther King Jr was still thought of as a hero in most circles).
Today, black Americans are people so wallowing in self abnegation that they mass voted for
the racist war criminal Killary Clinton, owing to whose actions black people in America were
incarcerated in hitherto unknown numbers; due to whose crimes black people in Haiti were
looted to destitution; because of whom black people in Libya are literally being sold as
slaves. Black Americans parade around saying "black lives matter", but are more than happy
voting for war criminals who loot Haitian blacks, enslave Libyan blacks, massacre Somali
blacks, deprive Sudanese blacks of life saving drugs, and plot to imperialistically occupy
Africa, a continent of black people. Forget about us brown people, to American blacks in
2018, black lives do *not* matter.
Only virtue signalling and tribal identity matters. Nothing else.
"It is past time for Donald Trump to fulfill his campaign promise to pull the plug on
American engagement in Syria and terminate the seemingly endless cycle of wars in the Middle
East."
Orange Clown's a liar whose presidential campaign was a calculated bait and switch fraud
from the beginning. Our presidential poseur obviously had no intention of following through
on most of his pre-election intimations and campaign promises.
"... Kiev has become an accidental, burdensome ally to the West. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization only paid lip service to future Ukrainian membership, while the EU, which never had any intention of taking in Ukraine, pushed an association agreement out of bureaucratic habit more than strategic vision. ..."
"... The least charitably inclined claim that Poroshenko prosecuted the war in eastern Ukraine as a way of delaying reform. What's undeniable is that the shaky ceasefire leaves the Kiev government at the mercy of Putin and his proxies. Should anything start going right for Poroshenko, the fighting could flare back up at any moment. ..."
"... Everybody in Kiev understands that there's no way of reconquering lost territory by force. Ukrainian politicians publicly pledge to win back breakaway regions through reform and economic success. What they hope for is that sanctions will cause enough problems inside Russia that the Kremlin will run out of resources to sabotage Ukraine. Wishful thinking won't replace the painful reforms ahead. ..."
May 19, 2015 | http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/05/17/why-this-ukrainian-revolution-may-be-doomed-too/
At home, there is the possibility of more protests, a paralyzed government, and the rise of politicians seeking accommodation
with Putin. "Slow and unsuccessful reforms are a bigger existential threat than the Russian aggression," said Oleksiy Melnyk, a security
expert at Kiev's Razumkov Center. Even if Ukrainians don't return to the street, they'll get a chance to voice their discontent at
the ballot box. Local elections are due in the fall - and the governing coalition between Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
is so shaky that nobody can rule out an early parliamentary vote.
In its international relations, Ukraine is living on borrowed time - and money. A dispute over restructuring $23 billion in debt
broke into the open last week with the Finance Ministry accusing foreign creditors of not negotiating in good faith ahead of a June
deadline. An EU summit this week is likely to end in more disappointment, as Western European countries are reluctant to grant Ukrainians
visa-free travel.
Kiev has become an accidental, burdensome ally to the West. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization only paid lip service to future
Ukrainian membership, while the EU, which never had any intention of taking in Ukraine, pushed an association agreement out of bureaucratic
habit more than strategic vision.
... ... ...
The least charitably inclined claim that Poroshenko prosecuted the war in eastern Ukraine as a way of delaying reform. What's
undeniable is that the shaky ceasefire leaves the Kiev government at the mercy of Putin and his proxies. Should anything start going
right for Poroshenko, the fighting could flare back up at any moment.
Ukrainian security officials say that the enemy forces gathering in the separatist regions are at their highest capability yet.
The most alarming observation is that the once ragtag band of rebels - backed up by regular Russian troops in critical battles -
is increasingly looking like a real army thanks to weapons and training provided by Russia.
... ... ...
Everybody in Kiev understands that there's no way of reconquering lost territory by force. Ukrainian politicians publicly pledge
to win back breakaway regions through reform and economic success. What they hope for is that sanctions will cause enough problems
inside Russia that the Kremlin will run out of resources to sabotage Ukraine. Wishful thinking won't replace the painful reforms
ahead.
"... The thesis was that pro-Israel groups in the United States had pushed the country into policy decisions favored by Israel but contrary to American interests. ..."
That was mild, though, compared to the "bloodbath" (Kaplan's word) that ensued after
Mearsheimer teamed up with Harvard's own iconoclastic realist, Stephen M. Walt, to produce a
2006 magazine article on the U.S.-Israel relationship, later expanded into a book entitled
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy .
The thesis was that pro-Israel groups in the United States had pushed the
country into policy decisions favored by Israel but contrary to American interests.
Modern IDENTITY LEFTISM WILL EAT ITSELF Support BPS via Patreon:
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But another running disaster is the feminists' attempt to derail nomination of Judge
Kavanagh. One can like or dislike the judge, one can agree or disagree with his views, one may
wish him in or out of the Supreme Court, but stopping him for allegedly trying to lay a girl
while in high school is completely insane. MeToo, Kavanagh, I also had affairs with girls so
many (and more) years ago!
Even if all the complainant claimed was true (and Kavanagh denied it) I'd find him not
guilty and vote for him to the Supreme Court. Bear in mind, we speak of events that took (or
not) place years ago. In those years, girls were expected to surrender only to some token
force. "No means no" was a totally unheard-of idea.
"... Nice chimp. Speaking of chimps here's some fun facts chimps and humans are, as their genes differ by just 1.6%, whereas chimps and gorillas differ by 2.3%. Also, chimps are known to be very territorial and violent. Ring a bell? ..."
"... How do you escape the infinite loop that arises automatically from the concept of an intelligent designer? i.e., Who, or what, designed the intelligent designer? ..."
"Irreducible complexity" is complete bullshit. & since this been shown to you numerous
times by a number of people it has to be concluded that you actually don't care about
probabilities & facts. So, it's pretty useless trying to discuss with you.
"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the
truth." – this statement by Sherlock Holmes is the foundational doctrine of modern
biology, not anything that Darwin said.
God is impossible, therefore no intellectual
contortion to rationalize the theory of evolution is too extreme.
We are told that life arose by chance in the primeval oceans.
how life got here in the first place is speculation. No one knows for sure, no
one I know of pretends to.
Do we know of what those oceans consisted?
They could have been boiling acids and lava that sleestacks were using as
breeding ponds, and perhaps some of their juices got lodged in a volcanic plume, and
eventually descended back to earth, to seed the planet with its first 'indigenous' life form.
Can we categorically dismiss this theory as impossible? No, we can not.
But how life got here, is an entirely different conversation than whether or not evolution
happens.
Clue: it does.
Simply consider the Neanderthal. We know he existed. We have his bones and caves.
But where is he today?
Exactly.
Survival of the fittest. When sleestacks one day return to Earth, and find that among the
throngs of waddling bipedals that evolved from their original seed, there are no more of the
pale versions left, that will be because their will to persevere could not prevail over the
treacherous, near infinite venality of some of their members.
And btw, while I consider it arrogant for anyone, either a religious zealot or someone
posing as a 'scientist'.. to pretend to know how life got here..
..it's just as presumptuous, arrogant, dogmatic and closed-minded - to presume to
know that it was put here by ID.
We can't know how life got here, but that certainly doesn't mean that it necessarily was
put here by a purposeful "intelligent design'. That's just more of the kind of arrogant
certainty that most religions display and yes, some of those claiming to be 'scientists' as
well.
Science can't 'know' anything that can't be put to the test or experiment. And since it's
rather (at this time anyways) impossible to reconstruct the earth's environment four billions
or so years ago, (sleestacks notwithstanding), we can't know such things. All they can do is
speculate based on what they can know; with experimentation.
But evolution is happening right before your eyes, man.
The dodo bird is no more. Tigers and elephants and rhinos and thousands of other species
are being whipped out in our lifetimes, to make more and more room for bipedal consumer units
/ tax slaves / cannon fodder. As those other species become extinct, it will be due to
realities on the ground. Literally in most cases, as their habitats are taken over by a
competing species.
This is all brutally obvious once you set aside your prejudices and vanity.
Often, the resistance to the idea of evolution, is a resistance to the idea that we are
related to the lesser apes.
Human vanity is often viscerally repulsed by this idea. But wishing it wasn't so, doesn't
make it go away.
Nice chimp. Speaking of chimps
here's some fun facts chimps and humans are, as their genes differ by just 1.6%, whereas
chimps and gorillas differ by 2.3%. Also, chimps are known to be very territorial and
violent. Ring a bell?
Fred, after all these years thinking you were sane and smart as well as amusing I have to
wonder because you keep on about some imagined Darwinism and avoid the key concept of natural
selection whereby some variants of the living DNA bundles turn out to be more fertile than
others in the given circumstances. That's as near as you can get to having a logically
necessary explanation for something we observe.
Then you still want a place for a designer! Well make sense of that if you can.
What do his/her/its designs tell you about the designer except that he/she isn't any of
the candidates yet invented? At least you could infer something about the Abrahamic chap,
namely that YHWH didn't like the Hebrews very much even if he was sorry that he had created
the other lot at all.
Ironically intelligent design theorists have conceded more to philosophical materialists than
they realize. Philosophers since Descartes have argued that biology and machines operate
according to the same principles. ID people just differ from Darwinian materialists about how
biological machines came about; but they think about biology like materialists just the same.
I don't see what all this mental masturbation has to do with Christianity, however,
because no Christian believes that machines have immaterial things in them which survive the
machines' destruction and exist forever in another realm.
"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be
the truth." - this statement by Sherlock Holmes is the foundational doctrine of modern
biology, not anything that Darwin said. God is impossible, therefore no intellectual
contortion to rationalize the theory of evolution is too extreme.
The Holmes quote is a fallacy. It assumes you have assembled all possibilities and that
your analysis of their impossibility is without error.
Hoyle's theory is that life is anywhere in the universe, that it begins in the universe, at
the lowest possible temperature, under fierce ultraviolet radiation
Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, 'Life on Mars ?, The case for a Cosmic Heritage ?',
Bristol 1997
Both chemical analysis done by Japanese on a comet, and by Philea, seem to support the
theory, until now.
Then there is the phenomenon that genetic material stores experience.
Mice that had been trained to fear a certain smell transmitted this fear by sperm.
Fish accidentally getting into a mid African lake changed at a speed that flabbergasted
biologists.
So, I'm inclined to think that life is anywhere in the universe, and that changes in species,
the word evolution to me seems to be Darwin's concession to christian thought, homo sapiens
as the highest, whatever that may be, are not random, but occur on purpose.
How this mechanism functions, if it exists, it will take some time before we find out.
Latin Americans nor were, nor are, stupid.
When Pizarro saw Mexico city, he was flabbergasted.
Nowhere in Europe at the time existed so large a city, so clean, and so well organised.
Medieval European cities at the time were dung heaps.
The ground level of the Dutch city of Dordrecht rose seven metres trough throwing all garbage
in the streets.
Roman cities were well organised, sewers and clean water.
Christianity saw the body as evil, so washing was not important.
As a result epidemics.
A very interesting book is
Lynn White Jr., 'Medieval Technology and Social Change', Oxford 1962
The role of iron in history is hardly realised.
S America, Africa, and the Middle East hardly had any iron.
In England it was found galore, near coal, with easy transport over water.
Mines needed water pumps, a coal driven pump was the beginning of the steam engine, the
industrial revolution could begin.
Some of y'all miss the point that Fred is not denying that evolution of species is at play,
merely that the path back to the ur-origin is not readily explained by the theory. That is a
fair statement.
Fred, thanks for this article. You are again totally correct concerning Darwinism. People who
have not though about it deep enough confuse darwinism with evolution. Darwinism, or
Neo-Darwinism as you call the present evolution theory, is a proposed explanation of
evolution. Evolution happens, the given explanation does not need to be correct. There are
indeed many serious gaps and problems in all forms of darwinism.
The birth of life from
non-life is an open problem. I looked at a simpler problem, how new clearly different
protein-coding parts of a gene (i.e., differs by many mutations) can be created by mutations
and selection.
The problem was that a protein stops working after very few random mutations,
so it must become duplicated and a duplicate becomes a pseudo-gene that accumulates many
mutations, but as it is pseudo-gene it is not under selection pressure, so this
mutation-selection mechanism cannot work. It can make new alleles, i.e., genes differing by a
few mutations only, and screen the best by selection. In that case the mutated gene does not
need to become pseudo-gene (=gene that does not work).
How do you escape the infinite loop that arises automatically from the concept of an
intelligent designer?
i.e., Who, or what, designed the intelligent designer?
Did it evolve here on Earth, somewhere else, or arise spontaneously in opposition to the 2nd
law of thermodynamics?
Does the concept of "information" have any meaning without the evolution of an analytical
organism with an abstraction engine?
Do we even know what we think evolved? No
This question conflates knowledge with conjecture, hypothesis and/or theory, depending on
what definition you choose for the word "think". But let me try to answer it anyway . Yes – we do have some ideas about what first evolved , some backed with physical
evidence.
The2nd law of thermodynamics defines an arrow of time for the universe in terms of entropy,
which means that the past grows increasingly fuzzy the further we try to look backwards. This
limitation on certainty is something we know and must accept. Human history is a tiny
fragment of the Earth's history, but only a mote of that fragment can be reconstructed with
much certainty, hence the difference between "pre-history" and "history".
So what kind of organism do we think (hypothesize) first evolved? The answer is .
gas-guzzling microbes:
Beating the acetyl coenzyme A-pathway to the origin of life
(Published 10 June 2013)
Wolfgang Nitschke and Michael J. Russell
[...]
Abstract
Attempts to draft plausible scenarios for the origin of life have in the past
mainly built upon palaeogeochemical boundary conditions while, as detailed in a companion
article in this issue, frequently neglecting to comply with fundamental thermodynamic
laws . Even if demands from both palaeogeochemistry and thermodynamics are respected,
then a plethora of strongly differing models are still conceivable.
Although we have no guarantee that life at its origin necessarily resembled biology in
extant organisms, we consider that the only empirical way to deduce how life may
have emerged is by taking the stance of assuming continuity of biology from its inception
to the present day . Building upon this conviction, we have assessed extant types of
energy and carbon metabolism for their appropriateness to conditions probably pertaining in
those settings of the Hadean planet that fulfill the thermodynamic requirements for life to
come into being. Wood–Ljungdahl (WL) pathways leading to acetyl CoA formation are
excellent candidates for such primordial metabolism.
Based on a review of our present understanding of the biochemistry and biophysics of
acetogenic, methanogenic and methanotrophic pathways and on a phylogenetic analysis of
involved enzymes, we propose that a variant of modern methanotrophy is more likely than
traditional WL systems to date back to the origin of life . The proposed model
furthermore better fits basic thermodynamic demands and palaeogeochemical conditions
suggested by recent results from extant alkaline hydrothermal seeps.
The problem with the ToE is that it is de facto tautological so there is no means of
falsification. Thus it is a dogma that any living organism that exists is the outcome of
evolutionary process. There is no other possibility. So all the stories that can be told
about this organism must a priori be framed within the ToE. The ToE has no predictive
ability. We must resign ourselves to accept any outcome because whatever will evolve had to
evolve. We can only construct a posteriori stories that justify the outcome. The stories are
no different from the just-so stories except that Kipling had sense of humor while
evolutionsts take themselves dead seriously. Their seriousness and lack of distance or sense
humor stems from the fact that they are the high priest and the keepers of the dogma which
suppose to save humanity form religious obscurantism. This is not necessarily overtly
acknowledged but it is implied. The veracity of the stories is usually unprovable in the
sense of rigorous proofs available in other branches of science. It is unimaginable that any
evidence could derail or even put a dent in the ToE. For all the reasons above the ToE is
true because it must be true and nothing can be done about it.
No, Neo-Darwinism does not allow for replication experiments. Thus one could suggest it is an
abstract idea, a suggestion, no more.
That points to other thoughts, how does Neo-Darwinism scale as to the Bible, the Koran.
Very well. How does Neo-Darwinism not allow for different suggestions to be judged only
afterwards on their quality? It should allow for further suggestions at all means. Is
intelligent design a better suggestion? Should scientists be discriminated upon being
critical of Neo-Darwinism? Certainly not.
Meaningful article as to mainstream openness of mind elaboration.
Bringing up the origin of life on Earth is a logical fallacy and, as such, completely
disingenuous. The theory of evolution does not say anything about how life arose. Its focus
is on how species change over time, and the evidence for this is overwhelming.
@AlreadyPublished How do you escape the infinite loop that arises automatically from the
concept of an intelligent designer?
i.e., Who, or what, designed the intelligent designer?
Did it evolve here on Earth, somewhere else, or arise spontaneously in opposition to the 2nd
law of thermodynamics?
Does the concept of "information" have any meaning without the evolution of an analytical
organism with an abstraction engine?
Do we even know what we think evolved? No
This question conflates knowledge with conjecture, hypothesis and/or theory,
depending on what definition you choose for the word "think". But let me try to answer it
anyway.... Yes - we do have some ideas about what first evolved , some backed with physical
evidence.
The2nd law of thermodynamics defines an arrow of time for the universe in terms of entropy,
which means that the past grows increasingly fuzzy the further we try to look backwards. This
limitation on certainty is something we know and must accept. Human history is a tiny
fragment of the Earth's history, but only a mote of that fragment can be reconstructed with
much certainty, hence the difference between "pre-history" and "history".
So what kind of organism do we think (hypothesize) first evolved? The answer is....
gas-guzzling microbes:
Beating the acetyl coenzyme A-pathway to the origin of life
(Published 10 June 2013)
Wolfgang Nitschke and Michael J. Russell
[...]
Abstract
Attempts to draft plausible scenarios for the origin of life have in the past
mainly built upon palaeogeochemical boundary conditions while, as detailed in a companion
article in this issue, frequently neglecting to comply with fundamental thermodynamic
laws . Even if demands from both palaeogeochemistry and thermodynamics are respected,
then a plethora of strongly differing models are still conceivable.
Although we have no guarantee that life at its origin necessarily resembled biology in
extant organisms, we consider that the only empirical way to deduce how life may
have emerged is by taking the stance of assuming continuity of biology from its inception
to the present day . Building upon this conviction, we have assessed extant types of
energy and carbon metabolism for their appropriateness to conditions probably pertaining in
those settings of the Hadean planet that fulfill the thermodynamic requirements for life to
come into being. Wood–Ljungdahl (WL) pathways leading to acetyl CoA formation are
excellent candidates for such primordial metabolism.
Based on a review of our present understanding of the biochemistry and biophysics of
acetogenic, methanogenic and methanotrophic pathways and on a phylogenetic analysis of
involved enzymes, we propose that a variant of modern methanotrophy is more likely than
traditional WL systems to date back to the origin of life . The proposed model
furthermore better fits basic thermodynamic demands and palaeogeochemical conditions
suggested by recent results from extant alkaline hydrothermal seeps.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1622/20120258.abstract
Actually, I built a webpage around the idea that life arose from petroleum, and
not vice versa:
http://living-petrol.blogspot.com/
My crude idea is actually supported by oceans of living evidence. See for yourself. Compare
with the talk by Rice University synthetic chemist James Tour, "Are Present Proposals on
Chemical Evolutionary Mechanisms Accurately Pointing Toward First Life?" which utterly
demolishes Darwinian fairy tales about the origin of life as told by militant atheists.
The irrelevant ad hominems are always the first sign we've won on the merits of our case.
Beyond that what they're demanding in the name of "but this is science!" turns out to be
methodological just so-ism, a form of quasi-religious anti-science in which literally
everything confirms Darwinism on the grounds that Darwinism explains everything.
The irony about the bluster coming from these rabid Darwinians is that a quick check of
their photos shows they're almost always angry, emasculated little men, who if there were any
truth in Darwinism might be kept under lock and key to perform some useful work but othwrwise
excluded from the affairs of real men. This much should be obvious, so the real question
becomes who are behind the publishing and media platforms allowing these social misfits to
abuse science for socio-political reasons.
After all, even if they're atheists as almost all are, they would concede that the notion
of God is the culturally collective conscience of a people -- proving the hatred expressing
itself in these scurrilous ad hominems exposes an embarrassing grandiosity characteristic of
a paranoid hatred of their male betters in general and of Christian Americans in
particular.
@utu The problem with the ToE is that it is de facto tautological so there is no means of
falsification. Thus it is a dogma that any living organism that exists is the outcome of
evolutionary process. There is no other possibility. So all the stories that can be told
about this organism must a priori be framed within the ToE. The ToE has no predictive
ability. We must resign ourselves to accept any outcome because whatever will evolve had to
evolve. We can only construct a posteriori stories that justify the outcome. The stories are
no different from the just-so stories except that Kipling had sense of humor while
evolutionsts take themselves dead seriously. Their seriousness and lack of distance or sense
humor stems from the fact that they are the high priest and the keepers of the dogma which
suppose to save humanity form religious obscurantism. This is not necessarily overtly
acknowledged but it is implied. The veracity of the stories is usually unprovable in the
sense of rigorous proofs available in other branches of science. It is unimaginable that any
evidence could derail or even put a dent in the ToE. For all the reasons above the ToE is
true because it must be true and nothing can be done about it. Jerry Fodor on evolutionary
(just-so) stories in psychology, behavioral science and so on.
The years after Darwin witnessed a remarkable proliferation of other theories, each
seeking to co-opt natural selection for purposes of its own. Evolutionary psychology is
currently the salient instance, but examples have been legion. They're to be found in more or
less all of the behavioural sciences, to say nothing of epistemology, semantics, theology,
the philosophy of history, ethics, sociology, political theory, eugenics and even aesthetics.
What they have in common is that they attempt to explain why we are so-and-so by reference to
what being so-and-so buys for us, or what it would have bought for our ancestors.
'We like telling stories because telling stories exercises the imagination and an
imagination would have been a good thing for a hunter-gatherer to have.'
'We don't approve of eating grandmother because having her around to baby-sit was useful
in the hunter-gatherer ecology.'
'We like music because singing together strengthened the bond between the hunters and the
gatherers (and/or between the hunter-gatherer grownups and their hunter-gatherer
offspring)'.
'We talk by making noises and not by waving our hands; that's because hunter-gatherers
lived in the savannah and would have had trouble seeing one another in the tall grass.'
'We like to gossip because knowing who has been up to what is important when fitness
depends on co-operation in small communities.'
'We don't all talk the same language because that would make us more likely to interbreed
with foreigners (which would be bad because it would weaken the ties of hunter-gatherer
communities).'
'We don't copulate with our siblings because that would decrease the likelihood of
interbreeding with foreigners (which would be bad because, all else being equal,
heterogeneity is good for the gene pool).'
I'm not making this up, by the way. Versions of each of these theories can actually be
found in the adaptationist literature. But, in point of logic, this sort of explanation has
to stop somewhere. Not all of our traits can be explained instrumentally; there must be some
that we have simply because that's the sort of creature we are. And perhaps it's unnecessary
to remark that such explanations are inherently post hoc (Gould called them 'just so
stories'); or that, except for the prestige they borrow from the theory of natural selection,
there isn't much reason to believe that any of them is true.
Anyhow, for what it's worth, I really would be surprised to find out that I was meant to
be a hunter-gatherer since I don't feel the slightest nostalgia for that sort of life. I
loathe the very idea of hunting, and I'm not all that keen on gathering either. Nor can I
believe that living like a hunter-gatherer would make me happier or better. In fact, it
sounds to me like absolute hell. No opera. And no plumbing.
If a physicist at CalTech expressed doubts about general relativity, he would certainly be
challenged to prove his theory. He would not be hounded, belittled, forced to resign,
charged with pseudoscience, and banned from publication.
You are wrong. He would get the same treatment as anti Darwinists and and top of
it it would be insinuate that he was an anti Semite. Challenging Einstein is a big no no and
grave sin. utu, you are completely right, I can tell it from personal experience, though not
in Caltech, but it is the same in all respectable (thinking they are better) universities, I
have been staff in two such.
@tom Fred
Quite correct. The essential darwinism and neo darwinism notions are based on a long time and
incredible random mutations. A belief in a non-darwinistic view of how biological entites
emerged suggests some type of teleology whether deistic or otherwise. This is absolutely
unacceptable to darwinists. Modern evolutionary biology would rather believe in a random
tooth fairy rather than teleology. They have the simplistic dualism that if you don't accept
the darwinism nonsense you must be a creationist fruitcake. End of discussion. There are two
ways to address a mystery: as a detective or as a mystic.
Darwinian evolution is the product of detective work, whereas teleology and religion are
the products of mystics. Mystics don't want mysteries solved , because they make a
living from promoting ignorance as something important and valuable, worthy of awe,
amazement, and worship rituals (including endless streams of money to sustain the parasitic
priestly caste)
Detectives want to solve mysteries because they want to understand causation.
If you understand how something works, you no longer have a mystery.
But a mystical life is contingent on the existence of a mystery. Mystics need mystery, and
will preserve it at all costs. That's why they hate Darwinian evolution, opposing it since
1859, despite all the oceans, mountains and forests filled with convergent evidence in
support of the 2nd most successful theory in science .
Irreducible complexity" is complete bullshit. & since this been shown to you numerous
times by a number of people
Links please...
Links please
WTF? Are you in kindergarten? Just stupid? Just one who prefers ignorance and denial?
"Irreducible complexity" has been quite adequately rebutted by competent scientists. If you
don't know how to use the Internet, put some effort into learning. Do your own goddamn due
diligence, asshole. Do you always require other people to do the work? And then you believe
what you get back? Get the fuck to work, clown.
Intelligent Design must be viewed with hostility by the scientific establishment.
Science is supposed to give humans control – if Intelligent Design is true,
it would mean there are other forces at work in the universe, humans must share power,
humans have less control than they thought.
That goes against the whole Point of Science.
Intelligent Design is a dead theory from the pov of science – if true, now what? How
does that add to our power to shape our destiny? We just submit to a higher power?
Evolutionary Theory has resulted in an actual sense of increased power for us
– we apply it in male/female relations, we apply it to population differences, we
understand human behavior and motivation through its prism.
It hardly matters that all of this is false – that it cannot explain male/female
relations or population differences. It hardly matters that it gives us a false sense of
power.
Science must prefer it. Only another theory that offers more power than Evolution
will be even remotely considered.
Intelligent Design cancels out science, neuters it, destroys it – it is not just
another scientific theory.
How can Intelligent Design give us more power?
Mankind seems to need security more than anything. Our primary motivation seems to be
fear.
We are told that life arose by chance in the primeval oceans.
how life got here in the first place is speculation. No one knows for sure, no
one I know of pretends to.
Do we know of what those oceans consisted?
They could have been boiling acids and lava that sleestacks were using as
breeding ponds, and perhaps some of their juices got lodged in a volcanic plume, and
eventually descended back to earth, to seed the planet with its first 'indigenous' life form.
Can we categorically dismiss this theory as impossible? No, we can not.
But how life got here, is an entirely different conversation than whether or not evolution
happens.
Clue: it does.
Simply consider the Neanderthal. We know he existed. We have his bones and caves.
But where is he today?
Exactly.
Survival of the fittest. When sleestacks one day return to Earth, and find that among the
throngs of waddling bipedals that evolved from their original seed, there are no more of the
pale versions left, that will be because their will to persevere could not prevail over the
treacherous, near infinite venality of some of their members.
And btw, while I consider it arrogant for anyone, either a religious zealot or someone
posing as a 'scientist'.. to pretend to know how life got here..
..it's just as presumptuous, arrogant, dogmatic and closed-minded - to presume to
know that it was put here by ID.
We can't know how life got here, but that certainly doesn't mean that it necessarily was
put here by a purposeful "intelligent design'. That's just more of the kind of arrogant
certainty that most religions display and yes, some of those claiming to be 'scientists' as
well.
Science can't 'know' anything that can't be put to the test or experiment. And since it's
rather (at this time anyways) impossible to reconstruct the earth's environment four billions
or so years ago, (sleestacks notwithstanding), we can't know such things. All they can do is
speculate based on what they can know; with experimentation.
But evolution is happening right before your eyes, man.
The dodo bird is no more. Tigers and elephants and rhinos and thousands of other species
are being whipped out in our lifetimes, to make more and more room for bipedal consumer units
/ tax slaves / cannon fodder. As those other species become extinct, it will be due to
realities on the ground. Literally in most cases, as their habitats are taken over by a
competing species.
This is all brutally obvious once you set aside your prejudices and vanity.
Often, the resistance to the idea of evolution, is a resistance to the idea that we are
related to the lesser apes.
Human vanity is often viscerally repulsed by this idea. But wishing it wasn't so, doesn't
make it go away.
http://i.pbase.com/g3/32/803532/2/99237234.fDbi3ga9.jpg The best theory I have heard on
the evolution of man. As Lloyd Pye points out, Darwin "was a blowed up peckerwood".
There is a fairly decent fossil record of human evolution. "The Fossil Trail" by Tattersall
provides an overview of this fossil record. Note that fossils are not bones but rather
mineralized bones, and can only form within a very narrow set of conditions. Actual bones
rarely last a month or two in nature .let alone millions of years.
I think its fair to say that there are 3 essential, and largely independent, elements to
"the" theory of evolution:
(1) the origin of life (out of primordial soup), which for some miraculous, unexplained
reason happened exactly 1 time
(2) arrival of the fittest (i.e., how favorable mutations produce wonderful changes and
entirely new species)
(3) survival of the fittest (natural selection, e.g., white moths becoming black during
the industrial revolution)
For anyone with a strong feel for mathematics, the last (which most people seem to
identify with "evolution") is entirely trivial; the first two, on the other hand are, as Fred
points out, highly problematic.
Pasteur, after all, is heralded for having refuted the "traditional" theory of spontaneous
generation, but it seems that in the primordial soup normal rules don't apply.
Darwinism begins with the twin assumptions of naturalism and uniformitarianism. These are
assumptions, and they cannot be proven by the nature of their claims. From these assumptions,
Darwinism, or something functionally identical to it, must be true as a matter of logical
deduction from observational reality. As one of its proponents put it, Darwinism "is the only
game in town." This is so because of these two assumptions, which are not value neutral.
These two assumptions – naturalism (there exists nought but particles, forces, and
the void) and uniformitarianism (the rules that we deduce govern the interaction of matter
have been, are, and always shall be, the same everywhere) – are the philosophical
foundation upon which all of scientific modernity is built. This philosophical foundation
rules out any deity who might make a difference in observational reality.
Design theory (aka "Intelligent Design") is simply the consistent application of
statistical rationality to claims. When applied to the claims of evolutionary biology,
statistics concludes that "it most likely didn't happen the way it must have if naturalism
and uniformitarianism are true." By its nature, however, statistics can't make absolute
claims, but only comparative claims of likelihoods. Thus statistics cannot disprove the joint
combination of naturalism and uniformitarianism. It can only undermine it. And that
undermining – the parting of mind and heart – creates madness for those whose
philosophies are built upon the foundation of naturalism and uniformitarianism. But also
rejecting statistics is to depart from that foundation as well, which also is madness.
Therefore those who use statistics to test the claims of evolutionary biology against
observational reality must be done away with, using the time-honored methods of ostracism,
reviling, deplatforming, and so on. Their claims cannot be refuted without abandoning
statistical rationality, which is self-defeating. So their claims must not be substantively
addressed. Pointing fingers and mocking will suffice, for who wants to be mocked and scorned?
Is the pursuit of truth worth the social cost it incurs?
But consider – if statistics does undermine confidence in Darwinism, and if
Darwinism is entailed by the joint combination of naturalism, uniformitarianism, and
observational reality – then what is really being undermined is the joint combination
of naturalism and uniformitarianism. And if there might exist more than simply particles,
forces, and the void, and if the rules governing the interactions of matter are not uniform
across reality, then we have no grounds for saying the Bible presents a false view of
reality. There may indeed be a God who does things we can observe, a God of miracles, and
Jesus Christ may indeed be real. The prospect of living forever in their society cannot be
rejected on first principles if we are statistically rational, and so that prospect might
cause us to revise our cost estimate of the pursuit of truth – and a great many other
things.
Regarding creation, if I have to choose between Darwin and God I will go with God. But I want
more options. All Intelligent Design requires is an intelligence greater than ours. To a
cockroach I am a vengeful god.
When reading the Origin of Species, one is impressed by the fact that Darwin himself
comes across as very genteel individual, as someone largely free of any tendencies towards
bitterness, ambition, or acrimony. He was also sporting enough to honestly meet many of the
objections raised against his theory. No doubt these fine personal qualities of his were
instrumental in winning him his retinue of early adherents. But they also served to mitigate
and dissimulate the fact that the theory was very much his baby, which he defended with all
the bias and schmaltz of a doting father.
Another realization that becomes clear is that what Darwin comprehended in the term
"natural selection" differs rather substantially from what his modern friends now understand
by the same words. Unmistakably, Darwin envisaged a sort of broad billowing out of
incrementally distinct variants for whom the principal selective pressure was a desire to
stay out of one another's way. Thus, for example, the stalks of wheat in a field all
grow to slightly different heights, and lean this way and that, in an effort to avoid direct
competition for the same space, to avoid directly competing to be the same thing.
Evolution therefore, as Darwin conceived it, was inherently evasive and impelled life to
divide into countless varieties. Those forms which were better at solidifying their
idiosyncrasies would reproduce themselves more successfully. These differences are by their
very nature binary, as adaptive distinctions get channeled along increasingly divergent
paths. Given a field of wheat-like plants, natural selection would divide them into species
that maximized their originally quite minimal distinctions. Instead of many stalks which all
grew to more or less the same height with only minor variations, you might get one variety
that sprang up straight and strong like buckwheat and another variety that crept along the
ground like purslane. Meanwhile, the "fence-sitters" would find themselves increasingly
unable to compete against either variety and would drop out of the struggle for existence.
Those fence-sitters, almost by definition, comprise the parent species. Evolution proceeds by
an inexorable process of binary selection and parricide.
In developing his theory thus, Darwin was a much more robust and careful thinker than
either his supporters or his opponents turned out to be. One of the principal objections
raised against Darwinism has always been the lack of transitional forms. However, this is
rather unfair to the theory, since Darwin held that it is in the nature of transitional forms
to rapidly disappear; besides which, there already exists before us many assemblages of
closely related species which provide de facto evidence of the only type of
transitional forms that the theory requires. On the other hand, the modern Neo-Darwinians are
no servants of their master in their maniacal insistence that evolution has no teleology.
Darwin believed that it did and he says so explicitly right there in his book. The purpose of
evolution is to maximize not only the amount of life, but also the "happiness" of the life
(yes, Darwin says this) that can survive in a given space. To this end, life is endowed with
an intrinsic centripetal principle that proceeds by way of binary division and
parricide. This principle cannot be explained merely by the tautology of the survivors
surviving, i.e. the thermodynamic truism which would hold under any theory; it is something
positive and synthetic which is annexed to the thermodynamic facts and makes use of them
as a means.
Now, the fact that the theory of evolution really does have positive (and therefore
falsifiable) content is the very thing the Neo-Darwinians would like to avoid. They would
prefer that it remain in the realm of self-evident syllogisms that cannot be refuted
(as the weight of the available evidence does not actually support it), although why they
would prefer to do so is not easy to discern until one recognizes its potent mythological
capacity. Darwinism is the mirror image of some very deeply ingrained tropes of the Western
and especially the English culture. In its exclusive reliance on the fitness principle and
its assertion of a universal trend towards happiness which is to be attained by overcoming
the past and going one's own way, the style of ideation is at one with the ensemble of
utilitarianism, republicanism, syncretism, and monism which characterizes its century. Thus,
while Darwinism as science stands refuted, and Darwinism as metaphysics is absurd, Darwinism
as literature is a deeply symbolic and "necessary" concomitant of the late stages of
Western civilization.
The ongoing appeal of the theory consists entirely in the fact that -- for many people
today and almost the entirety of the "educated" classes -- it forms the self-evident
organizational metaphor for describing living activity, just as "democracy" forms the
self-evident rubric for any discussion of politics, despite its obvious inadequacy in that
regard. The culture does not recognize as well-formed thoughts that proceed on any other
basis than these. But this, however, is a temporary phenomenon that is already far along in
the process of fading out. Darwinism will not be replaced by further and better scientific
developments; indeed, there will be no further scientific developments as far as the West is
concerned, for the great age of scientific symbolism (the 18th century) lies irrecoverably
far behind us. Rather, the remains of the theory will decay into a generic terminology for
describing mundane practical matters. In the mind of the common man, it has already done so.
Witness the readily understandable description of a useless act as a "Darwin Award."
Those who would point out the deficiencies in Darwinism or who wish to inquire into the
real nature of biological phenomena may be doing a great service for truth, but they must
realize that their efforts are outside the mainstream of the culture to which they belong,
that they are no longer wanted and therefore lack all symbolic weight, and that they will
never be attended with earthly fame and fortune. Darwinism, like all fashions, succeeded not
by veracity but by excitement, and perishes not of refutation but of boredom.
Glancing trough the reactions it strikes me how few now seem to understand that denying the
biblical creation at the time emotionally was like holocaust denial now
@The Alarmist It's no more a Hail Mary than supposing that a spark in primordial goo of
Earth seems to have delivered the only detectable sentient life in the universe thus far.
Maybe the Ancients and their panoply of Gods had it right after all.
It's no more a Hail Mary than supposing that a spark in primordial goo of Earth seems to
have delivered the only detectable sentient life in the universe thus far. Maybe the
Ancients and their panoply of Gods had it right after all.
It doesn't even get close to a Hail Mary. It is a desperate play from theist
ignorance.
There is scientific method. There is logic. They provide many answers -- so many answers
all well-founded, all verifiable, all directly observable through at least one method.
Intelligent Design is silliness. Life is a product of Intelligent Design, you say? What
about water, essential to life? Intelligent Design created hydrogen and oxygen, and the water
molecule, right? Else, Intelligent Design she no work for "life", yanno? Get to positing
bullshit like "Intelligent Design", and you put yourself in an epistemological fix, all the
way back to the presumed beginning of time. Intelligent Design provides all 47 elements
crucial to human life -- hydrogen and oxygen being just a start on THAT issue. Intelligent
Design provides an environment where life can survive and continue. Intelligent Design
provides a planet just close enough to, and just far enough from good ol' Sol. And, damn,
Intelligent Design provides that Sun, that moon, those stars, that galaxy, that Universe.
All to justify and substantiate bullshit claims as to the origin of life.
Enough nonsense. Bring forth a true modern age, and end superstition and ignorance.
@WorkingClass Regarding creation, if I have to choose between Darwin and God I will go
with God. But I want more options. All Intelligent Design requires is an intelligence greater
than ours. To a cockroach I am a vengeful god.
Regarding creation, if I have to choose between Darwin and God I will go with God. But I
want more options. All Intelligent Design requires is an intelligence greater than
ours.
Don't be ridiculous. Intelligent Design requires the fiat power to create and perpetuate
that which is Designed.
Proving the existence of that fiat-capable thing is a real bitch.
WTF? Are you in kindergarten? Just stupid? Just one who prefers ignorance and
denial? "Irreducible complexity" has been quite adequately rebutted by competent scientists.
If you don't know how to use the Internet, put some effort into learning. Do your own goddamn
due diligence, asshole. Do you always require other people to do the work? And then you
believe what you get back? Get the fuck to work, clown. Links please
@Colin Wright'...Versions of each of these theories can actually be found in the
adaptationist literature. But, in point of logic, this sort of explanation has to stop
somewhere. Not all of our traits can be explained instrumentally; there must be some that we
have simply because that's the sort of creature we are...'
This may be tangential to your point, but it's worth pointing out that it's often not so
much a matter of some trait or practice being there because it serves a purpose but of it
being there because there's no particular reason for it not to continue being there.
We have an appendix, not because we need it, but because not having it wouldn't confer any
striking advantage. It doesn't usually turn poisonous, and if it does, likely as not we've
already sired children anyway.
Things can be like the old trampoline in the basement. They're often there, not because
they're needed, but because there's no compelling reason to get rid of them. If a society
practices female clitorectomies, for example, it'll likely go on practising female
clitorectomies even if no purpose is served -- just so long as female life expectancy and
fertility isn't dramatically affected. If a dog has a tail, it's not necessarily because it
needs a tail, but because it won't benefit significantly from getting rid of the tail.
If a dog has a tail, it's not necessarily because it needs a tail, but because it won't
benefit significantly from getting rid of the tail.
It's because the tail does not prevent reproduction. The key to evolution is the survival
of those fit to survive and reproduce. It is that simple.
Every May, 10 billion mayflies hatch. Most die. One million survive to lay 10 billion
eggs, which hatch the following May. Survival and continued existence of mayflies is that
simple.
"Fittest" was the wrong choice of word. "Fit" is correct.
@jilles dykstra Glancing trough the reactions it strikes me how few now seem to
understand that denying the biblical creation at the time emotionally was like holocaust
denial now
Glancing trough the reactions it strikes me how few now seem to understand that denying
the biblical creation at the time emotionally was like holocaust denial now
Worse, much worse. If anything puts Xtians in a murderous mood, it's Creation Denial.
How come there's a gold stripe around your comment? Some kind of merit badge
manifestation?
@Intelligent Dasein When reading the Origin of Species, one is impressed by the
fact that Darwin himself comes across as very genteel individual, as someone largely free of
any tendencies towards bitterness, ambition, or acrimony. He was also sporting enough to
honestly meet many of the objections raised against his theory. No doubt these fine personal
qualities of his were instrumental in winning him his retinue of early adherents. But they
also served to mitigate and dissimulate the fact that the theory was very much his baby,
which he defended with all the bias and schmaltz of a doting father.
Another realization that becomes clear is that what Darwin comprehended in the term
"natural selection" differs rather substantially from what his modern friends now understand
by the same words. Unmistakably, Darwin envisaged a sort of broad billowing out of
incrementally distinct variants for whom the principal selective pressure was a desire to
stay out of one another's way. Thus, for example, the stalks of wheat in a field all
grow to slightly different heights, and lean this way and that, in an effort to avoid direct
competition for the same space, to avoid directly competing to be the same thing.
Evolution therefore, as Darwin conceived it, was inherently evasive and impelled life to
divide into countless varieties. Those forms which were better at solidifying their
idiosyncrasies would reproduce themselves more successfully. These differences are by their
very nature binary, as adaptive distinctions get channeled along increasingly divergent
paths. Given a field of wheat-like plants, natural selection would divide them into species
that maximized their originally quite minimal distinctions. Instead of many stalks which all
grew to more or less the same height with only minor variations, you might get one variety
that sprang up straight and strong like buckwheat and another variety that crept along the
ground like purslane. Meanwhile, the "fence-sitters" would find themselves increasingly
unable to compete against either variety and would drop out of the struggle for existence.
Those fence-sitters, almost by definition, comprise the parent species. Evolution proceeds by
an inexorable process of binary selection and parricide.
In developing his theory thus, Darwin was a much more robust and careful thinker than
either his supporters or his opponents turned out to be. One of the principal objections
raised against Darwinism has always been the lack of transitional forms. However, this is
rather unfair to the theory, since Darwin held that it is in the nature of transitional forms
to rapidly disappear; besides which, there already exists before us many assemblages of
closely related species which provide de facto evidence of the only type of
transitional forms that the theory requires. On the other hand, the modern Neo-Darwinians are
no servants of their master in their maniacal insistence that evolution has no teleology.
Darwin believed that it did and he says so explicitly right there in his book. The purpose of
evolution is to maximize not only the amount of life, but also the "happiness" of the life
(yes, Darwin says this) that can survive in a given space. To this end, life is endowed with
an intrinsic centripetal principle that proceeds by way of binary division and
parricide. This principle cannot be explained merely by the tautology of the survivors
surviving, i.e. the thermodynamic truism which would hold under any theory; it is something
positive and synthetic which is annexed to the thermodynamic facts and makes use of them
as a means.
Now, the fact that the theory of evolution really does have positive (and therefore
falsifiable) content is the very thing the Neo-Darwinians would like to avoid. They would
prefer that it remain in the realm of self-evident syllogisms that cannot be refuted
(as the weight of the available evidence does not actually support it), although why they
would prefer to do so is not easy to discern until one recognizes its potent mythological
capacity. Darwinism is the mirror image of some very deeply ingrained tropes of the Western
and especially the English culture. In its exclusive reliance on the fitness principle and
its assertion of a universal trend towards happiness which is to be attained by overcoming
the past and going one's own way, the style of ideation is at one with the ensemble of
utilitarianism, republicanism, syncretism, and monism which characterizes its century. Thus,
while Darwinism as science stands refuted, and Darwinism as metaphysics is absurd, Darwinism
as literature is a deeply symbolic and "necessary" concomitant of the late stages of
Western civilization.
The ongoing appeal of the theory consists entirely in the fact that---for many people
today and almost the entirety of the "educated" classes---it forms the self-evident
organizational metaphor for describing living activity, just as "democracy" forms the
self-evident rubric for any discussion of politics, despite its obvious inadequacy in that
regard. The culture does not recognize as well-formed thoughts that proceed on any other
basis than these. But this, however, is a temporary phenomenon that is already far along in
the process of fading out. Darwinism will not be replaced by further and better scientific
developments; indeed, there will be no further scientific developments as far as the West is
concerned, for the great age of scientific symbolism (the 18th century) lies irrecoverably
far behind us. Rather, the remains of the theory will decay into a generic terminology for
describing mundane practical matters. In the mind of the common man, it has already done so.
Witness the readily understandable description of a useless act as a "Darwin Award."
Those who would point out the deficiencies in Darwinism or who wish to inquire into the
real nature of biological phenomena may be doing a great service for truth, but they must
realize that their efforts are outside the mainstream of the culture to which they belong,
that they are no longer wanted and therefore lack all symbolic weight, and that they will
never be attended with earthly fame and fortune. Darwinism, like all fashions, succeeded not
by veracity but by excitement, and perishes not of refutation but of boredom. Darwin was
hardly the first to articulate a concept of evolution, as evidenced by his collaboration with
Wallace, but he perhaps gave the most coherent and reasoned explanation of the theory. Like
the telephone, the theory of evolution has many fathers.
@Jeff Stryker The Hispanics are actually driving blacks out of California along with the
Oakies, the Irish-Catholics, the Koreans, the Jews...and everyone else.
No amount of territoriality helps if another race is willing to kill you.
The problem is that just like Miami, the blacks have nowhere else to go. They are not as
inclined to move to Utah.
They are trapped and cannot learn Spanish. I really don't think the people of Utah want
them. Of course this has not stopped the Fed's and the religion base-federally funded
parasite organizations : Lutherin, Methodist, Episcopal, Jewish and Catholic chairities from
moving Congolese into Wyoming, Somalians into Maine and various Muslim refugees into
Burlington, Vermont. Bernie does not need their votes he has more than enough.
Misunderstanding Evolution, Or Evolutionary Theorists May Be Wrong, But Fred Reed Is
Wronger
Good article. I would have addressed it to the more general audience composed of theists
and other forms of True Believer, avoiding constant reference to Fred Reed, but chacun a
son gout .
How many commenters here are capable of understanding what you wrote? Four? Five?
' No. Has a metabolizing, reproducing chemical complex been constructed in the laboratory,
showing that it might be possible? No '
It's worth pointing out that this is just a variation on the reason God -- and gods --
were traditionally believed in.
Do we understand how thunder works? If you're an eighth century Viking, of course you
don't. Ergo, there's a thunder god.
I'm not convinced that that we cannot explain a given datum is sufficient evidence to
conclude God exists. My dog probably would have been at a loss to explain how a car worked --
most people would. It doesn't follow that there's a God and he made cars.
@The Alarmist Darwin was hardly the first to articulate a concept of evolution, as
evidenced by his collaboration with Wallace, but he perhaps gave the most coherent and
reasoned explanation of the theory. Like the telephone, the theory of evolution has many
fathers.
Darwin was hardly the first to articulate a concept of evolution
I did not say that he was. I have said many times in this forum that evolutionary ideas
have been around for millennia and were successfully refuted as long ago as Aristotle. That
is why the modern popularity of evolution requires some explanation other than
scientific evidence or metaphysical veracity, which it clearly lacks.
I'm guessing you did not read past the first paragraph of my original comment, otherwise
you would not have made this entirely beside-the-point remark. I do not necessarily mind
explaining further, but there has to be some practical limit when it comes to saying things
I've already said.
Hear expert testimony from leading evolutionary scientists from some of the world's top
universities.
• Peter Nonacs, Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA
• Craig Stanford, Professor, Biological Sciences and Anthropology, USC
• PZ Myers, Associate Professor, Biology, University of Minnesota Morris
• Gail E. Kennedy, Associate Professor, Anthropology, UCLA
A study of the evidence of vestigial organs, natural selection, the fifth digit, the
relevance of the stickleback, Darwin's finches and Lenski's bacteria -- all under the
microscope of the Scientific Method -- observable evidence from the minds of experts. Prepare
to have your faith shaken.
Darwin was hardly the first to articulate a concept of evolution...
I did not say that he was. I have said many times in this forum that
evolutionary ideas have been around for millennia and were successfully refuted as long ago
as Aristotle. That is why the modern popularity of evolution requires some explanation
other than scientific evidence or metaphysical veracity, which it clearly lacks.
I'm guessing you did not read past the first paragraph of my original comment, otherwise
you would not have made this entirely beside-the-point remark. I do not necessarily mind
explaining further, but there has to be some practical limit when it comes to saying things
I've already said.
That is why the modern popularity of evolution requires some explanation other than
scientific evidence or metaphysical veracity, which it clearly lacks.
I think this needs to be the key point.
At this late date, it hardly needs refuting anymore. We should try and understand what
modern need it fills.
Darwin was hardly the first to articulate a concept of evolution...
I did not say that he was. I have said many times in this forum that
evolutionary ideas have been around for millennia and were successfully refuted as long ago
as Aristotle. That is why the modern popularity of evolution requires some explanation
other than scientific evidence or metaphysical veracity, which it clearly lacks.
I'm guessing you did not read past the first paragraph of my original comment, otherwise
you would not have made this entirely beside-the-point remark. I do not necessarily mind
explaining further, but there has to be some practical limit when it comes to saying things
I've already said.
I did not say that he was. I have said many times in this forum that evolutionary ideas
have been around for millennia and were successfully refuted as long ago as Aristotle.
LOL. Yeah, "refuted" via thundering declaration of phlogiston-stuff.
Or something analogous. You theists have pontificated BS for centuries. After all, what
else could it be BUT Yahweh, right?
@Bragadocious I've found that the most belligerent defenders of Evolution come from the
UK. Not surprising since they're defending a British pseudo-scientist (Darwin was a
theologian by training) whose main activity during his college education was collecting
beetles. Also interesting: despite their aggressive defense of Evolution and primordial soup,
the Brits also commonly believe in alien life. L. Ron Hubbard set up his world HQ in Britain
for a reason. British taxi driver George King also created a UFO religion out of whole cloth
that now has 58 branches worldwide, most in the UK. I don't know how you square On the
Origin of Species with little green men from Mars, but the Brits have found a way. You
have proof there is no alien life, why has this been kept secret?
Btw I'm in the UK, I've never heard of George King or his religion.
Just looked him up. Nope, doesn't ring a bell at all.
@Thomm It is a privilege to see a sophisticated Confuse and Conquer Jew like Ron Unz
singlehandedly tie up hundreds if not thousands of White Trashionalists at once.
Step 1 : Make a website that WNs use (since they can never build anything on their own).
Let any and all anti-Semitic slurs stand on the website to make WNs complacent and even
keyboard-courageous.
Step 2 : Recruit the 2-3 intelligent authors that WNs read (Sailer, Derbyshire, etc.) who
happen to bad at making money, so that they write for very little renumeration.
Step 3 : After a few years, start pushing for normalization of Hispanics (even if illegal;
especially if illegal).
Step 4 : Deploy someone like Fred Reed to generate even more confusion.
It works and it is a lesson in asymmetrical attrition warfare by a sophisticated Confuse
and Conquer Jew.
Ron Unz has said about 95% of this site disputes the fact that the real division is black
vs non-black. I am among the 5% that agree with him (although I am more conservative than
him, since I think there should be only skilled, legal immigration, not unskilled and
certainly never illegal).
Now, here is the thing. Those who talk about Auschwitz, lampshades, and soap never get
moderated here, but those who agree with Ron Unz do. He will even get angry with those who
agree with him too vocally, even as any and all anti-Israel content is fully welcome.
Why?
It is because he thinks it will expose his game of 4D chess from the perception of a 70-IQ
WN. But I guarantee that it cannot, since the typical White Trashionalist is far below the IQ
threshold where they can observe the many pieces in motion. I can describe Ron's plan in full
detail (and I fully support it), without any risk of the WNs figuring anything out (much less
leaving this site).
@utu The problem with the ToE is that it is de facto tautological so there is no means of
falsification. Thus it is a dogma that any living organism that exists is the outcome of
evolutionary process. There is no other possibility. So all the stories that can be told
about this organism must a priori be framed within the ToE. The ToE has no predictive
ability. We must resign ourselves to accept any outcome because whatever will evolve had to
evolve. We can only construct a posteriori stories that justify the outcome. The stories are
no different from the just-so stories except that Kipling had sense of humor while
evolutionsts take themselves dead seriously. Their seriousness and lack of distance or sense
humor stems from the fact that they are the high priest and the keepers of the dogma which
suppose to save humanity form religious obscurantism. This is not necessarily overtly
acknowledged but it is implied. The veracity of the stories is usually unprovable in the
sense of rigorous proofs available in other branches of science. It is unimaginable that any
evidence could derail or even put a dent in the ToE. For all the reasons above the ToE is
true because it must be true and nothing can be done about it.
Their seriousness and lack of distance or sense humor stems from the fact that they are
the high priest and the keepers of the dogma which suppose to save humanity form religious
obscurantism.
@AaronB Intelligent Design must be viewed with hostility by the scientific
establishment.
Science is supposed to give humans control - if Intelligent Design is true, it
would mean there are other forces at work in the universe, humans must share power,
humans have less control than they thought.
That goes against the whole Point of Science.
Intelligent Design is a dead theory from the pov of science - if true, now what? How does
that add to our power to shape our destiny? We just submit to a higher power?
Evolutionary Theory has resulted in an actual sense of increased power for us - we
apply it in male/female relations, we apply it to population differences, we understand human
behavior and motivation through its prism.
It hardly matters that all of this is false - that it cannot explain male/female relations
or population differences. It hardly matters that it gives us a false sense of power.
Science must prefer it. Only another theory that offers more power than Evolution
will be even remotely considered.
Intelligent Design cancels out science, neuters it, destroys it - it is not just another
scientific theory.
How can Intelligent Design give us more power?
Mankind seems to need security more than anything. Our primary motivation seems to be
fear. Good post.
There are two theories about what leads to maximum human flourishing and well being and
security.
One is that we maximize our control of the environment we find ourselves in. The dream of
science. This requires psychologically cutting ourselves off from nature, seeing ourselves as
separate from it and in opposition to it, and trying to dominate it.
Supposedly we will turn discover the laws that lead to our maximum emotional,
psychological, and physical well being. Security and well being depend on us maximizing our
power and control.
The alternative, what you call mystic , suggests that human flourishing depends on
relinquishing power and control , an utterly radical perspective from the pov of
science. The mystic theory says that we flourish best by collaborating with other forces in
the universe, cooperating and living in accordance with them, that our security and well
being depends on our not cutting ourselves off from the larger whole in order to dominate
it.
In the mystic system, not understanding some things is a necessary part of relinquishing
control - simply because the faculty of discursive understanding is a limited tool that cuts
us off from collaborating with the forces we need to be a part of in order to flourish.
Mystery is thus a basic truth. Understanding is good, but limited.
The modern scientific approach seems to have failed to deliver on its promise of making us
psychologically, emotionally, or physically flourish. By cutting ourselves off from the
whole, our emotional and psychological life seems to have become stunted, narrow and empty,
and mostly about conflict and strife. Anxiety is at record highs. And physically, we are less
robust than ever, prey to a host of diseases our ancestors knew nothing about, and
increasingly obese.
It seems seeing ourselves as independent fragments in opposition to the whole has not
worked out. Have to say ..very good post.
Maybe a touch too good for the majority of audience around.
That science/mystic approach to life/existence ..thought provoking. Even from simply a
daily perspective.
@Intelligent Dasein When reading the Origin of Species, one is impressed by the
fact that Darwin himself comes across as very genteel individual, as someone largely free of
any tendencies towards bitterness, ambition, or acrimony. He was also sporting enough to
honestly meet many of the objections raised against his theory. No doubt these fine personal
qualities of his were instrumental in winning him his retinue of early adherents. But they
also served to mitigate and dissimulate the fact that the theory was very much his baby,
which he defended with all the bias and schmaltz of a doting father.
Another realization that becomes clear is that what Darwin comprehended in the term
"natural selection" differs rather substantially from what his modern friends now understand
by the same words. Unmistakably, Darwin envisaged a sort of broad billowing out of
incrementally distinct variants for whom the principal selective pressure was a desire to
stay out of one another's way. Thus, for example, the stalks of wheat in a field all
grow to slightly different heights, and lean this way and that, in an effort to avoid direct
competition for the same space, to avoid directly competing to be the same thing.
Evolution therefore, as Darwin conceived it, was inherently evasive and impelled life to
divide into countless varieties. Those forms which were better at solidifying their
idiosyncrasies would reproduce themselves more successfully. These differences are by their
very nature binary, as adaptive distinctions get channeled along increasingly divergent
paths. Given a field of wheat-like plants, natural selection would divide them into species
that maximized their originally quite minimal distinctions. Instead of many stalks which all
grew to more or less the same height with only minor variations, you might get one variety
that sprang up straight and strong like buckwheat and another variety that crept along the
ground like purslane. Meanwhile, the "fence-sitters" would find themselves increasingly
unable to compete against either variety and would drop out of the struggle for existence.
Those fence-sitters, almost by definition, comprise the parent species. Evolution proceeds by
an inexorable process of binary selection and parricide.
In developing his theory thus, Darwin was a much more robust and careful thinker than
either his supporters or his opponents turned out to be. One of the principal objections
raised against Darwinism has always been the lack of transitional forms. However, this is
rather unfair to the theory, since Darwin held that it is in the nature of transitional forms
to rapidly disappear; besides which, there already exists before us many assemblages of
closely related species which provide de facto evidence of the only type of
transitional forms that the theory requires. On the other hand, the modern Neo-Darwinians are
no servants of their master in their maniacal insistence that evolution has no teleology.
Darwin believed that it did and he says so explicitly right there in his book. The purpose of
evolution is to maximize not only the amount of life, but also the "happiness" of the life
(yes, Darwin says this) that can survive in a given space. To this end, life is endowed with
an intrinsic centripetal principle that proceeds by way of binary division and
parricide. This principle cannot be explained merely by the tautology of the survivors
surviving, i.e. the thermodynamic truism which would hold under any theory; it is something
positive and synthetic which is annexed to the thermodynamic facts and makes use of them
as a means.
Now, the fact that the theory of evolution really does have positive (and therefore
falsifiable) content is the very thing the Neo-Darwinians would like to avoid. They would
prefer that it remain in the realm of self-evident syllogisms that cannot be refuted
(as the weight of the available evidence does not actually support it), although why they
would prefer to do so is not easy to discern until one recognizes its potent mythological
capacity. Darwinism is the mirror image of some very deeply ingrained tropes of the Western
and especially the English culture. In its exclusive reliance on the fitness principle and
its assertion of a universal trend towards happiness which is to be attained by overcoming
the past and going one's own way, the style of ideation is at one with the ensemble of
utilitarianism, republicanism, syncretism, and monism which characterizes its century. Thus,
while Darwinism as science stands refuted, and Darwinism as metaphysics is absurd, Darwinism
as literature is a deeply symbolic and "necessary" concomitant of the late stages of
Western civilization.
The ongoing appeal of the theory consists entirely in the fact that---for many people
today and almost the entirety of the "educated" classes---it forms the self-evident
organizational metaphor for describing living activity, just as "democracy" forms the
self-evident rubric for any discussion of politics, despite its obvious inadequacy in that
regard. The culture does not recognize as well-formed thoughts that proceed on any other
basis than these. But this, however, is a temporary phenomenon that is already far along in
the process of fading out. Darwinism will not be replaced by further and better scientific
developments; indeed, there will be no further scientific developments as far as the West is
concerned, for the great age of scientific symbolism (the 18th century) lies irrecoverably
far behind us. Rather, the remains of the theory will decay into a generic terminology for
describing mundane practical matters. In the mind of the common man, it has already done so.
Witness the readily understandable description of a useless act as a "Darwin Award."
Those who would point out the deficiencies in Darwinism or who wish to inquire into the
real nature of biological phenomena may be doing a great service for truth, but they must
realize that their efforts are outside the mainstream of the culture to which they belong,
that they are no longer wanted and therefore lack all symbolic weight, and that they will
never be attended with earthly fame and fortune. Darwinism, like all fashions, succeeded not
by veracity but by excitement, and perishes not of refutation but of boredom. Agree with
while Darwinism as science stands refuted, and Darwinism as metaphysics is absurd,
Darwinism as literature is a deeply symbolic and "necessary" concomitant of the late stages
of Western civilization.
and
Those who would point out the deficiencies in Darwinism or who wish to inquire into the
real nature of biological phenomena may be doing a great service for truth, but they must
realize that their efforts are outside the mainstream of the culture to which they belong,
that they are no longer wanted
as for
.and therefore lack all symbolic weight, and that they will never be attended with
earthly fame and fortune.Darwinism, like all fashions, succeeded not by veracity but by
excitement, and perishes not of refutation but of boredom.
@utu Thomm, are you making progress in solving the toilet problem in your home country?
Even Ducks Don't Like Indians
https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/category/raceethnicity/south-asians/east-indians/ While I
am not Indian (only a preposterously stupid person would think I am), remember that your face
was deemed as a suitable solution to this problem.
Everybody wins, especially you, since you receive what you crave.
Your face. Remember that, so that you don't have to pose the same question ten times
(given your low IQ of 70).
If a physicist at CalTech expressed doubts about general relativity, he would certainly be
challenged to prove his theory. He would not be hounded, belittled, forced to resign,
charged with pseudoscience, and banned from publication.
You are wrong. He would get the same treatment as anti Darwinists and and top of
it it would be insinuate that he was an anti Semite. Challenging Einstein is a big no no and
grave sin. Challenging Netanyahoo is a bigger no-no and graver sin–also a heck of a lot
more dangerous.
"America has some fifty-seven million residents of Latin-American descent, mostly citizens.
Willy-nilly, they are part of America. Thinking that many Americans might want to know
something about them, where they came from, what they do and have done,"
No Fred. We know approximately 22 million are illegals and will have to go back. The
remaining 37 million will be divided along IQ/race and black Hispanics will have to go back.
Puerto Rico has to be declared independent.
Just because you married a Mexican woman, does not entitle you to bring in Latin America
to make her happy.
If a physicist at CalTech expressed doubts about general relativity, he would certainly be
challenged to prove his theory. He would not be hounded, belittled, forced to resign,
charged with pseudoscience, and banned from publication.
You are wrong. He would get the same treatment as anti Darwinists and and top of
it it would be insinuate that he was an anti Semite. Challenging Einstein is a big no no and
grave sin. Funny thing is, Einstein didn't discover the Theory of Relativity. It was
published 2 years earlier by an Italian scientist named Olento De Pretto. Whether Einstein
stole the idea or arrived at it independently is disputed.
@peterAUS Have to say.....very good post.
Maybe a touch too good for the majority of audience around.
That science/mystic approach to...life/existence.....thought provoking. Even from simply a
daily perspective. Thanks, I'm glad you found something to appreciate in it.
Misunderstanding Evolution, Or Evolutionary Theorists May Be Wrong, But Fred Reed Is
Wronger
Good article. I would have addressed it to the more general audience composed of
theists and other forms of True Believer, avoiding constant reference to Fred Reed, but
chacun a son gout .
Good article. I would have addressed it to the more general audience composed of theists
and other forms of True Believer, avoiding constant reference to Fred Reed.
Thank you for your positive assessment. The reason for the particular mode of address is
that it was written explicitly as a response to an earlier nonsensical effusion from Fred on
the subject of evolution.
As for,
How many commenters here are capable of understanding what you wrote? Four? Five?
Surely more than four or five. In fact, I would assume practically all. The arguments are
straight foreward, unquestionably correct, presented in plain language, and understanding
them requires no special knowledge whatever.
How do you call people that "believe" in evolution? – Evolutionaries. How do you call
people that don't believe in evolution, who instead believe in one stupid religion or
another? – Contra-evolutionaries.
I think that evolution makes a lot of sense. Evolution is basically competition and
favoritism by mother nature – which wants only her good designs to succeed. To bash
evolution because it can't accurately describe how life begun is ridiculous. No
conta-evolutionary has ever been successful at providing meaningful explanation of how life
started either, that hasn't stop anybody from believing in hundreds of useless religions.
@Agent76 This is another great video of conception and the processes in detail and more
folk's need to view and know.
Nov 14, 2011 Conception to birth -- visualized
Image-maker Alexander Tsiaras shares a powerful medical visualization, showing human
development from conception to birth and beyond.
https://youtu.be/fKyljukBE70 Thanks, Agent 76 for posting this incredible video.
Regardless what one thinks about abortion, the fact that millions of these complex structures
called fetuses have been terminated before birth makes me feel that it would be infinitely
better to prevent conception in the first place.
Good article. I would have addressed it to the more general audience composed of theists
and other forms of True Believer, avoiding constant reference to Fred Reed.
Thank you for your positive assessment. The reason for the particular mode of
address is that it was written explicitly as a response to an earlier nonsensical effusion
from Fred on the subject of evolution.
As for,
How many commenters here are capable of understanding what you wrote? Four? Five?
Surely more than four or five. In fact, I would assume practically all. The
arguments are straight foreward, unquestionably correct, presented in plain language, and
understanding them requires no special knowledge whatever.
Surely more than four or five. In fact, I would assume practically all. The arguments
are straight foreward, unquestionably correct, presented in plain language, and
understanding them requires no special knowledge whatever.
Sorry, poor word-choice on my part. How many commenters here are capable of accepting what
you wrote?
We are told that life arose by chance in the primeval oceans.
how life got here in the first place is speculation. No one knows for sure, no
one I know of pretends to.
Do we know of what those oceans consisted?
They could have been boiling acids and lava that sleestacks were using as
breeding ponds, and perhaps some of their juices got lodged in a volcanic plume, and
eventually descended back to earth, to seed the planet with its first 'indigenous' life form.
Can we categorically dismiss this theory as impossible? No, we can not.
But how life got here, is an entirely different conversation than whether or not evolution
happens.
Clue: it does.
Simply consider the Neanderthal. We know he existed. We have his bones and caves.
But where is he today?
Exactly.
Survival of the fittest. When sleestacks one day return to Earth, and find that among the
throngs of waddling bipedals that evolved from their original seed, there are no more of the
pale versions left, that will be because their will to persevere could not prevail over the
treacherous, near infinite venality of some of their members.
And btw, while I consider it arrogant for anyone, either a religious zealot or someone
posing as a 'scientist'.. to pretend to know how life got here..
..it's just as presumptuous, arrogant, dogmatic and closed-minded - to presume to
know that it was put here by ID.
We can't know how life got here, but that certainly doesn't mean that it necessarily was
put here by a purposeful "intelligent design'. That's just more of the kind of arrogant
certainty that most religions display and yes, some of those claiming to be 'scientists' as
well.
Science can't 'know' anything that can't be put to the test or experiment. And since it's
rather (at this time anyways) impossible to reconstruct the earth's environment four billions
or so years ago, (sleestacks notwithstanding), we can't know such things. All they can do is
speculate based on what they can know; with experimentation.
But evolution is happening right before your eyes, man.
The dodo bird is no more. Tigers and elephants and rhinos and thousands of other species
are being whipped out in our lifetimes, to make more and more room for bipedal consumer units
/ tax slaves / cannon fodder. As those other species become extinct, it will be due to
realities on the ground. Literally in most cases, as their habitats are taken over by a
competing species.
This is all brutally obvious once you set aside your prejudices and vanity.
Often, the resistance to the idea of evolution, is a resistance to the idea that we are
related to the lesser apes.
Human vanity is often viscerally repulsed by this idea. But wishing it wasn't so, doesn't
make it go away.
http://i.pbase.com/g3/32/803532/2/99237234.fDbi3ga9.jpg The white race is becoming the
contemporary dodo bird.
Haha Fred, and those that link to him, sure know how to get the clicks, don't they?
Fred thinks that his "take no prisoners" style of writing frees him from the responsibility
of making sense. If challenged on the stupid shit he says, he and his defenders hide behind
the "That's just Fred bein' Fred" defense.
Anyone who posits that ID and the TOE are equivalent because neither has all the answers is
scientifically illiterate, or just a diehard apologist for religious creation myths.
And anyone who uses the phrase "irreducible complexity" in a discussion of ID is at least 20
years behind everyone else. And is probably a recalcitrant pedant.
Same old thing. Creationists, because they don't know how science works, assail the TOE as
faulty or untrue because every single gap in the evolutionary record hasn't yet been filled
in, or the exact mechanism of every facet of evolution hasn't yet been elucidated. While
offering zero proof of their own dogma. Where, exactly, are the state of the art laboratories
where scientists are toiling to prove that ID is true and how it happened? Where are the
landmark papers from these scientists? There is a difference between proposing, defending and
proving your own theory and just unceasingly attacking someone else's. Especially with the
same tired, shabby arguments. Actual scientists know this. Ken Ham and Michael Behe do not.
Fred sure doesn't.
And can we stop calling it Intelligent Design? It's creationism with a different name. You
can tie a pretty pink ribbon around a pig's neck but it's still a pig.
Quite
right. ML got something resembling due process. , @anonymous The
Worms "Hier stehe ich" ("Here I stand") comment may have been a convenient shorthand for a much
more long-winded speech, so Luther may not have actually uttered those words. Nevertheless,
point taken. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display
All Comments Alden says: August 10,
2017 at 5:59 am GMT 200 Words Dream on it would take a Henry 8 Lenin and Trotsky type
revolution to get rid of affirmative action.
If it ever happens, the first thing to do would be to put every judge and their families in
some kind of detention center, close down every state and federal courthouse and completely re
write the constitution to give all power to the elected executive and legislative branches.
Every woman and minority organization would have to be treated the way Henry treated the
monasteries and Lenin and Trotsky treated the Russian counterrevolution.
I'd say only White men with 4 grandparents born in the USA be allowed to vote, but the
damage was done between 1964 to 1973 or so by native born American White men.
The feminazis are just fronts for the cannibal capitalists who used them to destroy the
private sector unions, lower wages for everyone and create a docile work force eager to work 80
hours a week for 40 hours wages.
I'd love to be the commissar in charge of ending affirmative action and punishing those who
created and enforce it. Read More Replies: @Sowhat
I'd say only White men with 4 grandparents born in the USA be allowed to vote, but the damage
was done between 1964 to 1973 or so by native born American White men.
Guilty as charged...As many immature, uneducated Whites in the sixties, I too was
played like a fiddle. If I only knew then what I know now... Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More...
This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments 5371 says: August 10, 2017 at
6:09 am GMT He does know history well for a polemicist, certainly better than anyone else
on AK's shortlist. Not surprisingly, he's also the only monarchist among them. But that in
itself marks him as detached observer, ineffectual intellectual to put it more harshly, not
part of a practical movement or party. Read More Agree: Andrei Martyanov
Replies: @Andrei
Martyanov
ineffectual intellectual
What is often forgotten is that whenever the term "intellectual" is used it must
be the measure of correctness (supported by empirical evidence, both prior and after) not just
the measure of the knowledge (historic, economic, military, scientific etc.) base one operates
in order to sound "intellectual" and "sophisticated". This principle is long gone from Western
"humanities" field and it goes both ways: for so called progressives and so called
"conservatives". I liked you using the term polemicist. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments WHAT says: August 10, 2017 at
6:12 am GMT Egor certainly deserves much more publicity than he is getting right now. I
wouldn`t agree on the other Egor being the most talented, but he did his own important thing,
creating a first real media platform for the Russian nationalism. Read More Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments
anonymous Disclaimer says: August 10,
2017 at 7:13 am GMT
conservatively-inclined people have their own advantages, such as a focused and methodical
approach to work.
EXACTLY. The innovation and productivity of a company are disproportionately due to the
conservatives who work there, yet perversely the less productive liberals set the ideological
tone. Why? Read More Replies: @Logan A
focused and methodical approach is at least arguably not the key to innovation. Quite the
opposite.
Such an approach is, more or less by definition, working within the box. It can locate and
exploit all possibilities of the space inside the box.
But true innovation, the kind that changes companies, industries and the world, is often
created by those who aren't really aware a box exists. They envision a new box.
Once that innovation has been made, then the focused and methodical approach can expand on
and implement it. Build the box.
Don't know whether it's accurate or not, but there's a stereotype that East Asians are great
at exploiting and elaborating on and implementing the inventions of other groups. This would
make the EAs classic focused, methodical, inside the box types. But for that same reason not
likely to invent world changing ideas.
Had a very interesting experience at a new company 20-some years ago. The CEO had a big
thing about psychological testing. Ran me through three days of standardized tests scored by
computer, which was state of the art at the time.
I just about broke the computer. I scored waay on the right on certain things (beliefs,
values, etc.) and waay on the left for being open to new ideas.
You see, the people who wrote the programs saw those two issues as the same thing. To
over-simplify (some) the authors thought the only possible reason why a man might reject the
idea of cheating on his wife is that he's not open to new experiences. That belief in
traditional moral values must spring from the same spring as an unwillingness to try a new
cuisine.
To my mind, this tells us a lot more about the people who write the programs than it does
about those who take the tests. , @Joe
Franklin
The innovation and productivity of a company are disproportionately due to the conservatives
who work there, yet perversely the less productive liberals set the ideological tone. Why?
Leftist set the ideological tone because entitled-by-law diversity people (aka
leftist) are a organized super-majority of the voting populace in the US and Israel:
Feminist are federally entitled because of Male oppression
Jewish are federally entitled because of Gentile oppression
Queers are federally entitled because of Straight oppression
Muslims are federally entitled because of Christian oppression
Disabled are federally entitled because of Healthy oppression
Afro-blacks are federally entitled because of White oppression
Latinos are federally entitled because of Gringo oppression
Hispanics are federally entitled because of Gringo oppression
Military Veterans are federally entitled because of Militia oppression
Native Americans are federally entitled because of Paleface oppression
Asians are federally entitled because of Occidental oppression
International Socialist are federally entitled because of anti-Totalitarian oppression
Crony Capitalist are federally entitled because of Honest Businessmen oppression
Zionist are federally entitled because of Anti-Neocon oppression
Diversity people are over 95% of the US voting population and are 100% of the Israeli
population. , @Daniel Chieh
As Logan noted, its not entirely true. Conservatives do indeed tend to rank lower to openness
and some other useful traits. As in most things, a balance is probably ideal. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments jimmyriddle says: August 10, 2017 at
7:15 am GMT 200 Words "but is indeed based on too broad assumptions, claiming that all
women are unfit for competition, that all of them like relationships and housekeeping while all
men are driven by objects and career."
Damore doesn't say that – he explicitly says the opposite:
" I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women
differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see
equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and
there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an
individual given these population level distributions."
The author of this piece has made the same error as much of the Anglo MSM.
Damore has been a victim of liberal arts people not being able to understand that he is
talking about population averages, not individuals. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More...
This Commenter Display All Comments
Anonymous Disclaimer says: August 10,
2017 at 8:25 am GMT
– You persecute your employees for having opinions and violate the rights of White
men, Centrists, and Conservatives.
– No, we don't. You're fired.
That's a fairly eloquent argument right off the bat. Read More Agree: Dieter Kief Replies:
@Dieter Kief I
agree. (Button out of work) Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments Logan says: August 10,
2017 at 8:57 am GMT 200 Words "Damore opposes the Leftist "class struggle of the genders"
with a technocratic model of maximizing the profit from each gender's pros and cons. This
functionalism appears to be logical in its own way, but is indeed based on too broad
assumptions, claiming that all women are unfit for competition, that all of them like
relationships and housekeeping while all men are driven by objects and career."
He said no such thing.
He said that as a group more women than men fit these stereotypes, percentages
undetermined.
I thought the adjective Google chose to use to describe its rejection of his suggestion that
there may be some genuine, irreducible core of difference between sexes that is biological in
nature.
That adjective was "outmoded." Not inaccurate, or untrue, or invalid. Outmoded.
Outmoded simply means unfashionable or out of date. It says nothing at all about accuracy or
truth.
IOW, Google fired him for saying something that is unfashionable. Unintentional truth. Read
More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments Logan says: August 10,
2017 at 8:58 am GMT@Diversity
Heretic Thanks for translations of Russian authors. Russian is a hard language to learn and
its grammatical subtleties are often difficult to convey in English.
I think that Martin Luther received a more respectful and impartial hearing at the Imperial
Diet of Worms in 1521 than James Damore got from Google.
"Here I stand. I can do no other." Quite right. ML got something resembling due process.
Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Logan says: August 10,
2017 at 9:11 am GMT 300 Words @anonymous
conservatively-inclined people have their own advantages, such as a focused and methodical
approach to work.
EXACTLY. The innovation and productivity of a company are disproportionately due
to the conservatives who work there, yet perversely the less productive liberals set the
ideological tone. Why? A focused and methodical approach is at least arguably not the key to
innovation. Quite the opposite.
Such an approach is, more or less by definition, working within the box. It can locate and
exploit all possibilities of the space inside the box.
But true innovation, the kind that changes companies, industries and the world, is often
created by those who aren't really aware a box exists. They envision a new box.
Once that innovation has been made, then the focused and methodical approach can expand on
and implement it. Build the box.
Don't know whether it's accurate or not, but there's a stereotype that East Asians are great
at exploiting and elaborating on and implementing the inventions of other groups. This would
make the EAs classic focused, methodical, inside the box types. But for that same reason not
likely to invent world changing ideas.
Had a very interesting experience at a new company 20-some years ago. The CEO had a big
thing about psychological testing. Ran me through three days of standardized tests scored by
computer, which was state of the art at the time.
I just about broke the computer. I scored waay on the right on certain things (beliefs,
values, etc.) and waay on the left for being open to new ideas.
You see, the people who wrote the programs saw those two issues as the same thing. To
over-simplify (some) the authors thought the only possible reason why a man might reject the
idea of cheating on his wife is that he's not open to new experiences. That belief in
traditional moral values must spring from the same spring as an unwillingness to try a new
cuisine.
To my mind, this tells us a lot more about the people who write the programs than it does
about those who take the tests. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments animalogic says: August 10, 2017 at
9:14 am GMT 200 Words "and, given that the proletariat vs. bourgeoisie struggle is now
irrelevant "Only to those too blind to see.
"The final goal of a Conservative solution to the gender problem should not be limited to a
rationalist functionalization of society. It should lead to discovering a social cohesion where
adhering to traditional male and female ways and stereotypes would not keep males and females
from expressing themselves in other domains, provided they have a genuine calling and
talent."
Excellent point. Allow people to do what they are good at. If a woman is good at &
enjoys STEM then give her a fair go -- but don't agitate & force women (or anyone) to do
things they lack the enthusiasm for (while discriminating against those who actually may have
ä genuine calling & talent".
"It is the collapse of the family that made gender relations into such an enormous issue in
the West: men and women are no longer joined in a nucleus of solidarity but pitted against one
another as members of antagonistic classes." A lot of truth here: although what is cause &
what is effect is a knotty issue. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
Display All Comments jim jones says: August 10, 2017 at
9:24 am GMT Credit to Vox Day:
http://imgur.com/a/BTwz3 Read More
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments Greg Bacon says: WebsiteAugust 10,
2017 at 9:28 am GMT 300 Words This type of diversity politics is stupidity to the Nth
degree, offering up us white guys as sacrificial lambs for any and all insults, crimes and sins
of the last 400 years, real or not.
It's a shrewd trick by the ones in the USA who really control our nation and I don't mean
Trump or Congress or the CIA.
It's that ethnic group that controls the FED, the US Treasury, those TBTF banks we get to
bail out every 10 years or so, the MSM, where they keep agitating for endless wars that do
nothing for America, but do protect Apartheid Israel from a reality check.
They also control Hollywood, pumping out brain-numbing slop (mostly) filled with over-the-top
violence, sex and nudity and most of the music business, letting artists–mostly
rap–sing indulgent songs about violence, sex, nudity and drugs.
They also have Congress begging to do anything for their Master, while we get told to PO when
we ask for help.
And they control the two biggest Internet outlets, Google and FAKEBOOK, both of whom are into
being self-appointed cops protecting us feeble ones from allegedly fake stories, but actually
shutting down stories that don't goose step to the glorious future they envision, which doesn't
contain us white guys.
After nearly 16 years of non-stop war, tens of thousands of dead American troops, hundreds
of thousands horribly wounded, a monstrous debt and a falling apart infrastructure with good
paying jobs disappearing, Americans are rightly PO and want change, but instead outfits like
GOOGLE are directing that anger elsewhere and protecting the guilty. Read More Agree:
Seamus Padraig ,
anarchyst , Rurik Replies: @Fidelios
Automata Agreed. Here's a place where the original author was wrong. The class struggle
isn't over. Income inequality is bigger than it's ever been. Identity politics are a
misdirection used by elites like Hitlery to divide us so we don't realize who the _real_ enemy
is. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments The Alarmist says:
August 10, 2017 at
9:30 am GMT 100 Words
"is highly plausible that the Damore Memo may play the same breakthrough part in
discussing the politically correct insanity as WikiLeaks and Snowden files did in discussing
the dirty laundry of governments and secret services."
Yep, we can discuss it in what the Libs consider to be our own little conspiracy-theory echo
chamber. Sometimes you have to accept that there is evil and then decide what to do about it.
Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments Daniil Adamov says:
August 10, 2017 at
10:03 am GMT 100 Words The last sentence is my own main sentiment regarding this affair.
It's something of a pity, but if they want to make each other more a little more miserable and
poor, then fine by me.
The Martin Luther analogy is, in my mind, vastly overblown (Google is not the Church, this
guy is not some radical rebel but a very mild internal critic, his – honestly somewhat
surprising – current level of notoriety is probably as far as he is going to get), but I
suppose you have to compare it to something BIG or you don't have an article. Read More
Replies: @Anon
this guy is not some radical rebel but a very mild internal critic
That applied to Martin Luther as well. He was quite mild compared to rebels like
Calvin. , @englishmike
(Google is not the Church, this guy is not some radical rebel but a very mild internal
critic, his – honestly somewhat surprising – current level of notoriety is
probably as far as he is going to get)
That's a fair comment, and I imagine that most people commenting here would be
aware of Damore's limitations as a thinker. But what he wrote, and the context in which he
published it, has attracted that "surprising notoriety": he appears to have sparked different
kinds of reaction in different kinds of people and inspired levels of debate beyond the
limitations of his thought.
Maybe the Unz Review should consider offering him a platform from which to write a follow-up
by inviting him to submit a blog, or at least to contribute as a commenter on a thread such as
this one. It would enable him to take his arguments further and also to submit them to the
critical responses of the commenters here - which would be more respectful and less trivial
than the ones he has encountered in the Google "community".
It might also attract people to the Unz Review who have not yet benefited from the
"interesting, important and controversial" perspectives available here. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Dieter Kief says: August 10, 2017 at
10:07 am GMT@Anonymous
– You persecute your employees for having opinions and violate the rights of White men,
Centrists, and Conservatives.
– No, we don't. You're fired.
That's a fairly eloquent argument right off the bat. I agree. (Button out of work)
Read More Replies: @Anonymous This
is why we need a * highher * power to put these "masters of the universe" in their
place. Google is a utility and it should be treated as such. End of story. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Dieter Kief says: August 10, 2017 at
10:22 am GMT 200 Words Egor Kholmogorov is a very intersting new voice – –
thanks – all – for your efforts.
(James Damore is no Martin Luther: Luther is the person in world history , that is
written about the most. By putting Damore in such oversized boots, no wonder Kholmogorov after
a while finds, that his subject doesn't walk properly. What Damore tries to do is not, to
understand our times, or to reform modern society or some such: He simply takes a position in a
debate over role models – and a debate about a pretty Marxist question, if you think
about it: Just how many of our character traits have a material (=biological) basis. That task
Damore solves clear and well, I think. But more, he doesn't, – – whereas Luther for
example (or Brenz from Schwäbisch Hall & Melanchthon from Bretten) really tried
– and (mostly) achieved)). Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
Display All Comments Sergey Krieger says:
August 10, 2017 at
10:40 am GMT So called contemporary left has nothing in common with old Marxism/ Leninism.
It is artificial led from the top movement to divide population to rule it and fleece more
efficiently. In short, it is not left. Read More Replies: @iffenIt is
artificial led from the top movement to divide population to rule it and fleece more
efficiently.
So called contemporary left has nothing in common with old Marxism/ Leninism. It is
artificial led from the top movement to divide population to rule it and fleece more
efficiently
So in your world Bolsheviks didn't divide the population and loot the country? ,
@Jaakko Raipala
This contemporary Leftist strategy is pretty Lenin-like. It's not a top down strategy, it's
vanguardist takeover. These corporations that promote leftism don't usually start off that way,
they get taken over, and tech companies have proven extremely vulnerable to this.
Once a company hits some success and starts growing beyond the start-up of tech geeks they
hire lawyers, PR, marketers and leftism gets its foot in the door. Once the old techie core
cedes hiring and firing to some human resources department the company starts hiring more
leftists and minority puppets. The techies that brought the initial success are likely to be
politically inept and uninterested individualist personality types and eventually some clique
of leftists realizes that the old guard of the company is a bunch of pushovers when faced with
a tight-knit group of political plotters.
They may realize that profits die in the process of converting a successful company to the
leftist agenda but it doesn't matter to them - they might even see it as a benefit, after all,
the original success of the company was likely due to white men with insufficiently progressive
views so they get to both destroy something their enemies created and use the accumulated
resources for their agenda.
Once upon a time socialists dreamed that the proletariat would spontaneously rise up to
break its chains and overthrow the capitalists, then they got bored of waiting for that and
invented the radical vanguard to lead the proletariat into the revolution and then eventually
they realized that the proletariat is superfluous and they just need the vanguard. , @dfordoom
So called contemporary left has nothing in common with old Marxism/ Leninism. It is
artificial led from the top movement to divide population to rule it and fleece more
efficiently. In short, it is not left.
Agreed. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread
Display All Comments
Anonymous Disclaimer says: August 10,
2017 at 10:45 am GMT@Dieter Kief I
agree. (Button out of work) This is why we need a * highher * power to put these
"masters of the universe" in their place. Google is a utility and it should be treated as such.
End of story. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments Zogby says: August 10,
2017 at 10:47 am GMT 200 Words This is turning out to be the most incendiary firing since
James Comey.
Damore's essay is an expression of his self-interest in retaining male dominance in software
engineering and his anger that his employer is making moves of artificial
reverse-discrimination in order to try and reverse the dominance. It is guised in intellectual
terms but that's really all there is to it. His company's management supports the attempt to
shift power from men to women – and are worried Damore or the likes of him will succeed
in organizing a male rebellion – which would bring the company down because of its
dependence on the male workforce. That's why they panicked and fired him. And to top it off,
Google is run by a foreign feminized beta male – which – being a member of a
minority – is unable himself to take on The Powers That Be in America. Because a being a
Hindu he's presupposed to need reeducation himself to fit in American society. Read More Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments Seamus Padraig says:
August 10, 2017 at
11:19 am GMT 400 Words Good article, Anatoly. Thanks for the translation.
The ideological groundwork of the opposing viewpoints is immediately apparent. Both equate
"biological" with "natural" and therefore "true", and "social" with "artificial" and
therefore "arbitrary" and "false". Both sides reject "prejudice" in favor of "vision", but
politically correct Leftists reject only a fraction of prejudices while the critic calls for
throwing all of them away indiscriminately.
Not quite. Cultural Marxists actually seem to reject biology as such, believing that
everything is merely cultural. (And of course, just for good measure, they hate our culture,
too.) As we all know, they definitely do not reject prejudice; on the contrary, they
loudly endorse reverse-prejudice as a 'necessary corrective'. But the author doesn't live in
the US, so he may not be aware of this.
Prejudice is shorthand for common sense. Sometimes it oversimplifies things, but still
works most of the time. And, most importantly, all attempts to act "in spite of the
prejudice" almost invariably end in disaster.
Prejudice is simply the layman's empiricism -- i.e., learning from experience. When you
don't know the individual in question, you are always going to fall back on assumptions based
on known patterns. That's why prejudice is impossible to get rid of: you would have to get rid
of human nature.
This functionalism appears to be logical in its own way, but is indeed based on too broad
assumptions, claiming that all women are unfit for competition, that all of them like
relationships and housekeeping while all men are driven by objects and career.
I agree with commenter #10 above that this is not a fair characterization of Damore's
argument. Damore spoke of statistical averages. He never said "all men" or "all women".
However, the single most valuable trait in conservative worldview is defending the
achievements of history and not just biological determinism The final goal of a Conservative
solution to the gender problem should not be limited to a rationalist functionalization of
society.
So true, and I wonder how you reacted to reading that, Anatoly. This is what Dugin (like
Heidegger before him) is getting at: a working, enduring civilization requires more than mere
"rationalist functionalization". It also requires a proper culture , which includes a
worthwhile aesthetical and moral system. Maybe you might consider such a thought to be
'obscurantism', but it is very hard to imagine a whole civilization premised exclusively on
means-reasoning and efficiency lasting very long or even being a civilization worth living in
while it lasts. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All
Comments bliss_porsena says:
August 10, 2017 at
11:20 am GMT Don't do any more translation. Leave the original in Russian where it belongs,
and summarise. Parse the nuggets of gold into bullet points. Two or three should do it. Read
More Disagree: Seamus Padraig Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments Anonymouse says: August 10, 2017 at
11:20 am GMT God help the Russians if this pedestrian essay was written by their best man.
Read More Agree: Andrei Martyanov Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments Joe Franklin says:
August 10, 2017 at
11:58 am GMT 200 Words @anonymous
conservatively-inclined people have their own advantages, such as a focused and methodical
approach to work.
EXACTLY. The innovation and productivity of a company are disproportionately due
to the conservatives who work there, yet perversely the less productive liberals set the
ideological tone. Why?
The innovation and productivity of a company are disproportionately due to the
conservatives who work there, yet perversely the less productive liberals set the ideological
tone. Why?
Leftist set the ideological tone because entitled-by-law diversity people (aka leftist) are
a organized super-majority of the voting populace in the US and Israel:
Feminist are federally entitled because of Male oppression
Jewish are federally entitled because of Gentile oppression
Queers are federally entitled because of Straight oppression
Muslims are federally entitled because of Christian oppression
Disabled are federally entitled because of Healthy oppression
Afro-blacks are federally entitled because of White oppression
Latinos are federally entitled because of Gringo oppression
Hispanics are federally entitled because of Gringo oppression
Military Veterans are federally entitled because of Militia oppression
Native Americans are federally entitled because of Paleface oppression
Asians are federally entitled because of Occidental oppression
International Socialist are federally entitled because of anti-Totalitarian oppression
Crony Capitalist are federally entitled because of Honest Businessmen oppression
Zionist are federally entitled because of Anti-Neocon oppression
Diversity people are over 95% of the US voting population and are 100% of the Israeli
population. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments Carlo says: August 10,
2017 at 12:55 pm GMT 100 Words "Instead of churning out new ground-breaking products,
opines the critic, Google wastes too much effort on fanning the flames of class struggle."
In the long run, this is good. Natural selection will ensure that in a few decades Google and
many other big Western corporations who follow these lines will fail due to incompetence of
their managers and employees, and more pragmatic ones will appear and replace them, usually
from more traditional and rational societies in Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia,
Russia) and East Asia (China, South Korea, Singapur). Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More... This Commenter Display All Comments utu says: August 10, 2017 at
12:56 pm GMT 100 Words Martin Luther succeeded only because there was money to be made.
Catholic Church had property and money. Princes of German states went after Church property.
This is why and how Protestant Revolution succeeded. W/o the princes the Protestant Revolution
would fizzled out and grass root movements would be squashed and destroyed like Thomas Muntzer
peasant rebellion.
We still have peasants. But we do not have princes who are not part of the Church. So do not
raise your hopes.
We know a lot about Martin Luther private life but we know less about James Damore. Is there
also the issue of getting laid? Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
Display All Comments Daniel Chieh says:
August 10, 2017 at
1:05 pm GMT@anonymous
conservatively-inclined people have their own advantages, such as a focused and methodical
approach to work.
EXACTLY. The innovation and productivity of a company are disproportionately due
to the conservatives who work there, yet perversely the less productive liberals set the
ideological tone. Why? As Logan noted, its not entirely true. Conservatives do indeed tend to
rank lower to openness and some other useful traits. As in most things, a balance is probably
ideal. Read More Replies: @iffenAs in
most things, a balance is probably ideal.
Moderation in all things, save moderation. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Joe Hide says: August 10, 2017 at
1:52 pm GMT Anatoly,
Good read. Good examples to support an emotionally spirited article. Keep writing. Read More
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments German_reader says:
August 10, 2017 at
2:12 pm GMT 100 Words
Unfortunately, like the bulk of Western thought, they fall into the trap of Leftist
"cultural constructivism" and Conservative naturalism.
That could be read as just the usual conservative "antiracism". Now admittedly there
certainly should be moral and ethical limits regarding those issues, one should take care not
to end up at the same conclusions and deeds as the Nazis but still, in the present intellectual
climate of the West bashing "Conservative naturalism" would be very misguided imo. All this
talk of Burkean conservatism, tradition, religion etc. will be totally ineffectual against the
progressive juggernaut.
As for that Google memo is that really important? Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More...
This Commenter Display All Comments iffen says: August 10,
2017 at 2:31 pm GMT@Sergey Krieger
So called contemporary left has nothing in common with old Marxism/ Leninism. It is artificial
led from the top movement to divide population to rule it and fleece more efficiently. In
short, it is not left. It is artificial led from the top movement to divide population to
rule it and fleece more efficiently.
Perfect overlap then. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread
Hide Thread Display All Comments FD says: August 10, 2017 at
2:31 pm GMT Why did you omit the original title, "Triumph of the Gender Sharikovs"? Read
More Replies: @Fluctuarius
The English title was suggested by the author himself, likewise, he didn't object to my removal
of the Sharikov allusion in the text proper. Our joint opinion is that it would have been lost
on 99% of readers and taken unnecessary effort to explain in a footnote. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments iffen says: August 10,
2017 at 2:39 pm GMTWe hope to make translations of Kholmogorov's output consistently
available on The Unz Review in the months to come.
Great! Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments iffen says: August 10,
2017 at 2:42 pm GMT@Daniel Chieh
As Logan noted, its not entirely true. Conservatives do indeed tend to rank lower to openness
and some other useful traits. As in most things, a balance is probably ideal. As in most
things, a balance is probably ideal.
Moderation in all things, save moderation. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
Anon Disclaimer says: August 10,
2017 at 2:47 pm GMT@Daniil Adamov
The last sentence is my own main sentiment regarding this affair. It's something of a pity, but
if they want to make each other more a little more miserable and poor, then fine by me.
The Martin Luther analogy is, in my mind, vastly overblown (Google is not the Church, this
guy is not some radical rebel but a very mild internal critic, his - honestly somewhat
surprising - current level of notoriety is probably as far as he is going to get), but I
suppose you have to compare it to something BIG or you don't have an article.
this guy is not some radical rebel but a very mild internal critic
That applied to Martin Luther as well. He was quite mild compared to rebels like Calvin.
Read More Replies: @Anon That's
not saying very much. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread
Display All Comments Ivan K. says: August 10,
2017 at 2:49 pm GMT 200 Words Kholmogorov: " First, that tradition is an ever-growing
accumulation of experience. Rejecting tradition is tantamount to social default and requires
very good reasons to justify. "
I'm born and raised in late 20th century South-Eastern Europe and haven't seen a single
thing that fits this description. Things called traditions in my part of the world are exactly
at odds with ever-growing accumulation of experience.
If Russia is preserves such traditions, I can only say it's a society such as I have never seen
and have trouble even imagining.
Kholmogorov: " [T]he prejudice is a colossal historical experience pressurized into a
pre-logical form, a collective consciousness that acts when individual reason fails or a
scrupulous analysis is impossible. In such circumstances, following the prejudice is a more
sound strategy than contradicting it. Prejudice is shorthand for common sense. Sometimes it
oversimplifies things, but still works most of the time. And, most importantly, all attempts to
act "in spite of the prejudice" almost invariably end in disaster "
Following traditional prejudices was the choice of Nazi Germany toward Slavs. Read More
Replies: @iffenFollowing traditional prejudices was the choice of Nazi Germany toward Slavs.
Good point.
In that they ended up in a war of annihilation, could we say that each was served by their
respective prejudices? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread
Display All Comments Michael Kenny says:
August 10, 2017 at
2:52 pm GMT 100 Words What strikes me is how "unrussian", and for that reason, uneuropean,
Mr Kholmogorov's arguments sound. He's just repeating the arguments and the jargon of the US
alt-right. For example, he unquestioningly accepts the US idea that there is something called
"the West", which consists of the US and the whole of Europe except Russia, where everything is
the exactly like in the US. He really needs to devote more time to getting to know his fellow
Europeans. We are not very different from Russians but are very different indeed from
Americans. As for Fluctuarius Argenteus, the only reason why anyone needs to conceal their real
identity is that if we, the readers, knew who he really was, it would diminish, if not destroy,
the credibility of the article he is presenting. Read More Disagree: JL Replies: @Anon
He really needs to devote more time to getting to know his fellow Europeans.
Fellow Europeans? They are not his fellow Europeans.
He is not an European and modern Europe is increasingly an extension of America, and not
something independent. , @Daniel Chieh
This is not without historical precedent.
The notion of the Russian soul has always existed as a contrast to the rest of Europe, and
to be fair, most of Europe is assimilated heavily to what their idea of America is. I know of
quite a few Russians who would be annoyed if you called them "fellow Europeans." Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
Anon Disclaimer says: August 10,
2017 at 2:58 pm GMT@Anon
this guy is not some radical rebel but a very mild internal critic
That applied to Martin Luther as well. He was quite mild compared to rebels like
Calvin. That's not saying very much. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments iffen says: August 10,
2017 at 3:00 pm GMT@Ivan K.
Kholmogorov: " First, that tradition is an ever-growing accumulation of experience.
Rejecting tradition is tantamount to social default and requires very good reasons to
justify. "
I'm born and raised in late 20th century South-Eastern Europe and haven't seen a single
thing that fits this description. Things called traditions in my part of the world are exactly
at odds with ever-growing accumulation of experience.
If Russia is preserves such traditions, I can only say it's a society such as I have never seen
and have trouble even imagining.
Kholmogorov: " [T]he prejudice is a colossal historical experience pressurized into a
pre-logical form, a collective consciousness that acts when individual reason fails or a
scrupulous analysis is impossible. In such circumstances, following the prejudice is a more
sound strategy than contradicting it. Prejudice is shorthand for common sense. Sometimes it
oversimplifies things, but still works most of the time. And, most importantly, all attempts to
act "in spite of the prejudice" almost invariably end in disaster "
Following traditional prejudices was the choice of Nazi Germany toward Slavs. Following
traditional prejudices was the choice of Nazi Germany toward Slavs.
Good point.
In that they ended up in a war of annihilation, could we say that each was served by their
respective prejudices? Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread
Hide Thread Display All Comments WorkingClass says:
August 10, 2017 at
3:11 pm GMT 100 Words The SJW's (Maoists) have been taught to hate everything white and/or
male including the entire history of white culture. Damore's supposed conservatism is not the
issue. He was punished for bringing it out of the closet. White men who will not bend their
knee to Maoists are being hunted in Maoist controlled environs. This article is well reasoned.
But there is no reasoning with zombies. Even if they are former friends or family. White men
have the same options as soldiers in the field. Fight, flee or fortify. Or surrender. Avert
your eyes and shuffle to the back of the bus. Read More Replies: @Seamus
Padraig
Damore's supposed conservatism is not the issue. He was punished for bringing it out of the
closet.
Damore doesn't seem too conservative to me. If he were a conservative, he would be
arguing against Google's policies on the basis of cultural tradition. No, Damore is simply a
scientist arguing on the basis of science. Nothing wrong with that, but it isn't conservatism.
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments
Anon Disclaimer says: August 10,
2017 at 3:22 pm GMT@Michael Kenny
What strikes me is how "unrussian", and for that reason, uneuropean, Mr Kholmogorov's arguments
sound. He's just repeating the arguments and the jargon of the US alt-right. For example, he
unquestioningly accepts the US idea that there is something called "the West", which consists
of the US and the whole of Europe except Russia, where everything is the exactly like in the
US. He really needs to devote more time to getting to know his fellow Europeans. We are not
very different from Russians but are very different indeed from Americans. As for Fluctuarius
Argenteus, the only reason why anyone needs to conceal their real identity is that if we, the
readers, knew who he really was, it would diminish, if not destroy, the credibility of the
article he is presenting.
He really needs to devote more time to getting to know his fellow Europeans.
Fellow Europeans? They are not his fellow Europeans.
He is not an European and modern Europe is increasingly an extension of America, and not
something independent. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread
Hide Thread Display All Comments
anonymous Disclaimer says: August 10,
2017 at 3:23 pm GMT@Diversity
Heretic Thanks for translations of Russian authors. Russian is a hard language to learn and
its grammatical subtleties are often difficult to convey in English.
I think that Martin Luther received a more respectful and impartial hearing at the Imperial
Diet of Worms in 1521 than James Damore got from Google.
"Here I stand. I can do no other." The Worms "Hier stehe ich" ("Here I stand") comment may
have been a convenient shorthand for a much more long-winded speech, so Luther may not have
actually uttered those words. Nevertheless, point taken. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Daniel Chieh says:
August 10, 2017 at
3:38 pm GMT 100 Words @Michael Kenny
What strikes me is how "unrussian", and for that reason, uneuropean, Mr Kholmogorov's arguments
sound. He's just repeating the arguments and the jargon of the US alt-right. For example, he
unquestioningly accepts the US idea that there is something called "the West", which consists
of the US and the whole of Europe except Russia, where everything is the exactly like in the
US. He really needs to devote more time to getting to know his fellow Europeans. We are not
very different from Russians but are very different indeed from Americans. As for Fluctuarius
Argenteus, the only reason why anyone needs to conceal their real identity is that if we, the
readers, knew who he really was, it would diminish, if not destroy, the credibility of the
article he is presenting. This is not without historical precedent.
The notion of the Russian soul has always existed as a contrast to the rest of Europe, and
to be fair, most of Europe is assimilated heavily to what their idea of America is. I know of
quite a few Russians who would be annoyed if you called them "fellow Europeans." Read More
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments nickels says: August 10,
2017 at 3:40 pm GMT This guy is ok, but I still prefer the 'obscurantism' of Dugin.
There is little point arguing from a 'common sense' stance against the leftists.
This is war, not an argument.
Liberalism must be destroyed. Read More Replies: @Anatoly
Karlin
This guy is ok, but I still prefer the 'obscurantism' of Dugin.
I'll reveal a terrible secret to you: Dugin is not actually a nationalist. He is
the Russian equivalent of a Western multiculturalist.
He even denies the concept of race.
The Alt Right's infatuation with him is utterly bizarre. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More...
This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Cagey Beast says: WebsiteAugust 10, 2017 at
3:50 pm GMT 200 Words Seeing Orthodoxy and Martin Luther mentioned in the same place
reminded me of the amusing history of early Lutheran contacts with the eastern Church:
Most Christians are not aware that in the latter part of the 16th century, early Lutheran
Reformers – close colleagues and followers of Martin Luther – set in motion an
eight year contact and correspondence with the (then) Ecumenical Patriarch, Jeremias II of
Constantinople. The outcome might have changed the course of Christian history. Kevin Allen
speaks with scholar Dr Paraskeve (Eve) Tibbs about this fascinating and largely unknown
chapter in post-Reformation history.
From Wittenberg to Antioch
September 16, 2007 Length: 32:12
A fascinating interview with Fr. Gregory Hogg, an Antiochian priest in Western Michigan.
Fr. Gregory was a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor and professor for 22 years before coming to
Orthodoxy.
[...]
Long story short, the western reformers were too argumentative and lawyerly for the
Patriarch of Constantinople to take. He essentially said "please stop writing to me". Read More
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments Wally says: August 10,
2017 at 5:32 pm GMT Basically the Left is in denial of science DNA. Read More Replies:
@Seamus Padraig
Yes, it's funny, isn't it. Liberals loudly proclaim their allegiance to evolution, but only to
attack Christianity. But as soon as the concept of evolution upsets their non-scientific
theories of 'gender fluidity' and 'racial equality', they close their eyes, cover their ears,
and stomp their little feet. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments AP says: August 10, 2017 at
6:25 pm GMT@Sergey Krieger
So called contemporary left has nothing in common with old Marxism/ Leninism. It is artificial
led from the top movement to divide population to rule it and fleece more efficiently. In
short, it is not left.
So called contemporary left has nothing in common with old Marxism/ Leninism. It is
artificial led from the top movement to divide population to rule it and fleece more
efficiently
So in your world Bolsheviks didn't divide the population and loot the country? Read More
Replies: @Sergey Krieger
You are the one that lives in echo chamber. Bolsheviks looted the country. It is the dumbest
comment I have ever heard. You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
Bolsheviks actually saved and built the country and current regime has been living from what
was built by Commies ever since. I just pointed that so called left is not left. But you asked
for this. You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia by current elites which
reveals who you are amptly. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments Art says: August 10, 2017 at
6:28 pm GMT 100 Words Clearly Google should acquire the status of a public utility –
like the Ma Bell telephone system was regulated in the 1950's.
Google is too powerful – it should not have the cultural monopoly power it has over
our society.
"The people" and their mass interests are preeminent in the hierarchy things. Like it or not
– Google is a product of our culture – therefor our culture has a valid claim on
its actions.
It comes down too private ownership vs. public interest. As a pure libertarian I do not like
it – but as a realist, the mass interests of the people counts.
The "golden mean" must win out. A compromise must be reached.
Google's actions must be regulated.
Peace -- Art Read More Replies: @utu STEVE
BANNON WANTS FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE REGULATED LIKE UTILITIES
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/27/steve-bannon-wants-facebook-and-google-regulated-like-utilities/
, @Darin
Clearly Google should acquire the status of a public utility
Why you think United States Googlemaster General would be more friendly to free
speech than current Google leadership? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments utu says: August 10, 2017 at
7:01 pm GMT@Art Clearly
Google should acquire the status of a public utility – like the Ma Bell telephone system
was regulated in the 1950's.
Google is too powerful – it should not have the cultural monopoly power it has over
our society.
"The people" and their mass interests are preeminent in the hierarchy things. Like it or not
– Google is a product of our culture – therefor our culture has a valid claim on
its actions.
It comes down too private ownership vs. public interest. As a pure libertarian I do not like
it – but as a realist, the mass interests of the people counts.
The "golden mean" must win out. A compromise must be reached.
Google's actions must be regulated.
Peace --- Art STEVE BANNON WANTS FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE REGULATED LIKE UTILITIES
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/27/steve-bannon-wants-facebook-and-google-regulated-like-utilities/
Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments 22pp22 says: August 10,
2017 at 7:39 pm GMT I've abandoned Google and gone over to Duckduckgo. They seem just as
good. Read More Replies: @Seamus Padraig
Yes, I've been using DuckDuckGo.com for over four years now, and no regrets. No filter bubbles
either! Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Jaakko Raipala says:
August 10, 2017 at
7:58 pm GMT 300 Words @Sergey Krieger
So called contemporary left has nothing in common with old Marxism/ Leninism. It is artificial
led from the top movement to divide population to rule it and fleece more efficiently. In
short, it is not left. This contemporary Leftist strategy is pretty Lenin-like. It's not a top
down strategy, it's vanguardist takeover. These corporations that promote leftism don't usually
start off that way, they get taken over, and tech companies have proven extremely vulnerable to
this.
Once a company hits some success and starts growing beyond the start-up of tech geeks they
hire lawyers, PR, marketers and leftism gets its foot in the door. Once the old techie core
cedes hiring and firing to some human resources department the company starts hiring more
leftists and minority puppets. The techies that brought the initial success are likely to be
politically inept and uninterested individualist personality types and eventually some clique
of leftists realizes that the old guard of the company is a bunch of pushovers when faced with
a tight-knit group of political plotters.
They may realize that profits die in the process of converting a successful company to the
leftist agenda but it doesn't matter to them – they might even see it as a benefit, after
all, the original success of the company was likely due to white men with insufficiently
progressive views so they get to both destroy something their enemies created and use the
accumulated resources for their agenda.
Once upon a time socialists dreamed that the proletariat would spontaneously rise up to
break its chains and overthrow the capitalists, then they got bored of waiting for that and
invented the radical vanguard to lead the proletariat into the revolution and then eventually
they realized that the proletariat is superfluous and they just need the vanguard. Read More
Agree: Anatoly Karlin ,
Johann
Ricke Replies: @Miro23
Once upon a time socialists dreamed that the proletariat would spontaneously rise up to break
its chains and overthrow the capitalists, then they got bored of waiting for that and
invented the radical vanguard to lead the proletariat into the revolution and then eventually
they realized that the proletariat is superfluous and they just need the vanguard.
This did come out of the 19th Century with awful factory conditions, decadent
upper classes (pre WWI) and their unexpected collapse along with the whole Belle Époque
in WW1.
There was plenty of fuel for socialism with 1) a fashionable new intellectual left 2)
political fluidity 3) politically bankrupt Ancien Regimes.
In my opinion fashionable radical vanguards saw the possibility of harnessing these forces
to take power - some of them acting idealistically - some not. The key point was that Ancien
Regimes were weakened by WW1, with a good example being Russia with its military failures and
its decadent and ineffectual Czarist government.
In these unusual circumstances, the self appointed Bolshevik Radical Vanguard could exploit
the disaffection of Russian soldiers in Petrograd and Lenin could unilaterally issued General
Order Nº1 as the self appointed head of the Council of Soldiers and Workingmen's Deputies
(ignoring the Provisional Government) with all military units ordered to remove their existing
officers and elect new ones. This was coupled with promises to stop the war and give all
peasant soldiers their own private farms, which predictably went down very well and wrecked
army discipline.
Source: "Russia from the American Embassy" by David Rowland Francis, U.S. ambassador to
Russia for 5 years from March 1916 to March 1921.
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-American-Embassy-April-1916-November/dp/B00B6ZE8NI/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
Francis also went on to say, "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90% of
whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists
and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution."
The Bolsheviks of course used the arms against the Provisional Government, and when the
elections to the Constituent Assembly eventually came at the end of November 1917, they filled
the assembly hall with soldiers and rejected the result of the vote (Social Revolutionaries
20,893,743, Bolsheviks 9,023,963 out of 36,257,960 votes cast). The Bolsheviks declared that
Constitutional Democrats were to be arrested and Lenin established his dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans did
in WW2. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Fluctuarius says: August 10, 2017 at
8:17 pm GMT@FD Why did you
omit the original title, "Triumph of the Gender Sharikovs"? The English title was suggested by
the author himself, likewise, he didn't object to my removal of the Sharikov allusion in the
text proper. Our joint opinion is that it would have been lost on 99% of readers and taken
unnecessary effort to explain in a footnote. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments englishmike says: August 10, 2017 at
8:38 pm GMT 200 Words @Daniil Adamov
The last sentence is my own main sentiment regarding this affair. It's something of a pity, but
if they want to make each other more a little more miserable and poor, then fine by me.
The Martin Luther analogy is, in my mind, vastly overblown (Google is not the Church, this
guy is not some radical rebel but a very mild internal critic, his - honestly somewhat
surprising - current level of notoriety is probably as far as he is going to get), but I
suppose you have to compare it to something BIG or you don't have an article.
(Google is not the Church, this guy is not some radical rebel but a very mild internal
critic, his – honestly somewhat surprising – current level of notoriety is
probably as far as he is going to get)
That's a fair comment, and I imagine that most people commenting here would be aware of
Damore's limitations as a thinker. But what he wrote, and the context in which he published it,
has attracted that "surprising notoriety": he appears to have sparked different kinds of
reaction in different kinds of people and inspired levels of debate beyond the limitations of
his thought.
Maybe the Unz Review should consider offering him a platform from which to write a follow-up
by inviting him to submit a blog, or at least to contribute as a commenter on a thread such as
this one. It would enable him to take his arguments further and also to submit them to the
critical responses of the commenters here – which would be more respectful and less
trivial than the ones he has encountered in the Google "community".
It might also attract people to the Unz Review who have not yet benefited from the
"interesting, important and controversial" perspectives available here. Read More Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Andrei Martyanov says:
WebsiteAugust 10, 2017 at
8:58 pm GMT 100 Words @5371 He does
know history well for a polemicist, certainly better than anyone else on AK's shortlist. Not
surprisingly, he's also the only monarchist among them. But that in itself marks him as
detached observer, ineffectual intellectual to put it more harshly, not part of a practical
movement or party.
ineffectual intellectual
What is often forgotten is that whenever the term "intellectual" is used it must be the
measure of correctness (supported by empirical evidence, both prior and after) not just the
measure of the knowledge (historic, economic, military, scientific etc.) base one operates in
order to sound "intellectual" and "sophisticated". This principle is long gone from Western
"humanities" field and it goes both ways: for so called progressives and so called
"conservatives". I liked you using the term polemicist. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Andrei Martyanov says:
WebsiteAugust 10, 2017 at
9:04 pm GMT 100 Words
Once upon a time socialists dreamed that the proletariat would spontaneously rise up to
break its chains and overthrow the capitalists, then they got bored of waiting for that and
invented the radical vanguard to lead the proletariat into the revolution and then eventually
they realized that the proletariat is superfluous and they just need the vanguard.
Ooookey Dookey! And how about other two fundamental signs of impending revolution? I agree
with vanguard argument, after all school in Longjumeau was doing just that–preparing the
vanguard. But what about economics of revolution? What about political crisis? Read More Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments Darin says: August 10,
2017 at 9:30 pm GMT@Art Clearly
Google should acquire the status of a public utility – like the Ma Bell telephone system
was regulated in the 1950's.
Google is too powerful – it should not have the cultural monopoly power it has over
our society.
"The people" and their mass interests are preeminent in the hierarchy things. Like it or not
– Google is a product of our culture – therefor our culture has a valid claim on
its actions.
It comes down too private ownership vs. public interest. As a pure libertarian I do not like
it – but as a realist, the mass interests of the people counts.
The "golden mean" must win out. A compromise must be reached.
Google's actions must be regulated.
Peace --- Art
Clearly Google should acquire the status of a public utility
Why you think United States Googlemaster General would be more friendly to free speech than
current Google leadership? Read More Replies: @Art
Clearly Google should acquire the status of a public utility
Why you think United States Googlemaster General would be more friendly to free speech
than current Google leadership?
Darin,
The exstreams of Google Today and United States Googlemaster General will not work for us
– there can be something in between. A golden mean can be reached.
The best situation would be for Googles users, to each set the policy for themselves.
This is doable. They get to choose the what algorithms they want and the viewing policy they
want.
Googlemaster General must see that ALL information is collected and made available to
users.
Peace --- Art Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread
Display All Comments Art says: August 10, 2017 at
10:13 pm GMT 100 Words @Darin
Clearly Google should acquire the status of a public utility
Why you think United States Googlemaster General would be more friendly to free
speech than current Google leadership?
Clearly Google should acquire the status of a public utility
Why you think United States Googlemaster General would be more friendly to free speech
than current Google leadership?
Darin,
The exstreams of Google Today and United States Googlemaster General will not work for us
– there can be something in between. A golden mean can be reached.
The best situation would be for Googles users, to each set the policy for themselves.
This is doable. They get to choose the what algorithms they want and the viewing policy they
want.
Googlemaster General must see that ALL information is collected and made available to
users.
Peace -- Art Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments
Anonymous Disclaimer says: August 10,
2017 at 10:39 pm GMT "Polity" should be "policy". "Diving" should be "dividing".
I stopped noticing after that.
Give the new Russian translator a break. Read his copy before posting it. Read More Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments Macumazahn says: August 11, 2017 at
1:15 am GMT 100 Words If men and women are in fact NOT different by nature, then what's the
business advantage in hiring more women? What do they bring to the table that men do not?
This same observation applies to all "diversity" hiring. If one denies the differences among
groups, there can be no business justification for diversity – aside, that is, from Lefty
boycotts. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments Miro23 says: August 11,
2017 at 2:43 am GMT 400 Words @Jaakko Raipala
This contemporary Leftist strategy is pretty Lenin-like. It's not a top down strategy, it's
vanguardist takeover. These corporations that promote leftism don't usually start off that way,
they get taken over, and tech companies have proven extremely vulnerable to this.
Once a company hits some success and starts growing beyond the start-up of tech geeks they
hire lawyers, PR, marketers and leftism gets its foot in the door. Once the old techie core
cedes hiring and firing to some human resources department the company starts hiring more
leftists and minority puppets. The techies that brought the initial success are likely to be
politically inept and uninterested individualist personality types and eventually some clique
of leftists realizes that the old guard of the company is a bunch of pushovers when faced with
a tight-knit group of political plotters.
They may realize that profits die in the process of converting a successful company to the
leftist agenda but it doesn't matter to them - they might even see it as a benefit, after all,
the original success of the company was likely due to white men with insufficiently progressive
views so they get to both destroy something their enemies created and use the accumulated
resources for their agenda.
Once upon a time socialists dreamed that the proletariat would spontaneously rise up to
break its chains and overthrow the capitalists, then they got bored of waiting for that and
invented the radical vanguard to lead the proletariat into the revolution and then eventually
they realized that the proletariat is superfluous and they just need the vanguard.
Once upon a time socialists dreamed that the proletariat would spontaneously rise up to
break its chains and overthrow the capitalists, then they got bored of waiting for that and
invented the radical vanguard to lead the proletariat into the revolution and then eventually
they realized that the proletariat is superfluous and they just need the vanguard.
This did come out of the 19th Century with awful factory conditions, decadent upper classes
(pre WWI) and their unexpected collapse along with the whole Belle Époque in WW1.
There was plenty of fuel for socialism with 1) a fashionable new intellectual left 2)
political fluidity 3) politically bankrupt Ancien Regimes.
In my opinion fashionable radical vanguards saw the possibility of harnessing these forces
to take power – some of them acting idealistically – some not. The key point was
that Ancien Regimes were weakened by WW1, with a good example being Russia with its military
failures and its decadent and ineffectual Czarist government.
In these unusual circumstances, the self appointed Bolshevik Radical Vanguard could exploit
the disaffection of Russian soldiers in Petrograd and Lenin could unilaterally issued General
Order Nº1 as the self appointed head of the Council of Soldiers and Workingmen's Deputies
(ignoring the Provisional Government) with all military units ordered to remove their existing
officers and elect new ones. This was coupled with promises to stop the war and give all
peasant soldiers their own private farms, which predictably went down very well and wrecked
army discipline.
Francis also went on to say, "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90% of
whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists
and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution."
The Bolsheviks of course used the arms against the Provisional Government, and when the
elections to the Constituent Assembly eventually came at the end of November 1917, they filled
the assembly hall with soldiers and rejected the result of the vote (Social Revolutionaries
20,893,743, Bolsheviks 9,023,963 out of 36,257,960 votes cast). The Bolsheviks declared that
Constitutional Democrats were to be arrested and Lenin established his dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans did
in WW2. Read More Replies: @melanf
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans
did in WW2.
The Bolsheviks disgusting, but this statement ("on a scale far exceeding anything
the Germans did in WW2") is an obvious lie
http://polit.ru/article/2007/12/11/repressii/
" In fact, the number of prisoners for political reasons (for "counterrevolutionary crimes") in
the USSR in the period from 1921 to 1953, i.e. after 33 years was about 3.8 million people
during this period ( 1921 to 1954 ) has been convicted 3 777 380 people, including to capital
punishment – 642 980, to the contents in camps and prisons for a term of 25 years and
below – 2 369 220, into exile and expulsion – 765 180 people". Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Jivilov says: August 11,
2017 at 3:04 am GMT Very good, although I wish people would stop using the ideologically
loaded term "gender" instead of "sex." Conservatives should use traditional language if
possible, especially when backed scientifically in this case by chromosomal evidence. Recall
Solzhenitsyn's observations on the totalitarian control of language to further their agenda.
Read More Agree: utu Replies: @Seamus
Padraig I agree. The term 'gender' is for Latin nouns, not living beings. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments melanf says: August 11,
2017 at 4:57 am GMT 100 Words @Miro23
Once upon a time socialists dreamed that the proletariat would spontaneously rise up to break
its chains and overthrow the capitalists, then they got bored of waiting for that and
invented the radical vanguard to lead the proletariat into the revolution and then eventually
they realized that the proletariat is superfluous and they just need the vanguard.
This did come out of the 19th Century with awful factory conditions, decadent
upper classes (pre WWI) and their unexpected collapse along with the whole Belle Époque
in WW1.
There was plenty of fuel for socialism with 1) a fashionable new intellectual left 2)
political fluidity 3) politically bankrupt Ancien Regimes.
In my opinion fashionable radical vanguards saw the possibility of harnessing these forces
to take power - some of them acting idealistically - some not. The key point was that Ancien
Regimes were weakened by WW1, with a good example being Russia with its military failures and
its decadent and ineffectual Czarist government.
In these unusual circumstances, the self appointed Bolshevik Radical Vanguard could exploit
the disaffection of Russian soldiers in Petrograd and Lenin could unilaterally issued General
Order Nº1 as the self appointed head of the Council of Soldiers and Workingmen's Deputies
(ignoring the Provisional Government) with all military units ordered to remove their existing
officers and elect new ones. This was coupled with promises to stop the war and give all
peasant soldiers their own private farms, which predictably went down very well and wrecked
army discipline.
Source: "Russia from the American Embassy" by David Rowland Francis, U.S. ambassador to
Russia for 5 years from March 1916 to March 1921.
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-American-Embassy-April-1916-November/dp/B00B6ZE8NI/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
Francis also went on to say, "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90% of
whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists
and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution."
The Bolsheviks of course used the arms against the Provisional Government, and when the
elections to the Constituent Assembly eventually came at the end of November 1917, they filled
the assembly hall with soldiers and rejected the result of the vote (Social Revolutionaries
20,893,743, Bolsheviks 9,023,963 out of 36,257,960 votes cast). The Bolsheviks declared that
Constitutional Democrats were to be arrested and Lenin established his dictatorship.
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans did
in WW2.
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans
did in WW2.
The Bolsheviks disgusting, but this statement ("on a scale far exceeding anything the
Germans did in WW2″) is an obvious lie
" In fact, the number of prisoners for political reasons (for "counterrevolutionary crimes")
in the USSR in the period from 1921 to 1953, i.e. after 33 years was about 3.8 million people
during this period ( 1921 to 1954 ) has been convicted 3 777 380 people, including to capital
punishment – 642 980, to the contents in camps and prisons for a term of 25 years and
below – 2 369 220, into exile and expulsion – 765 180 people". Read More Replies:
@Sergey Krieger
Exactly. I am tired of all this BS. We lived free lives and I have never seen armed milicioner
/ police officer outside of movies. Be the state clearly cared about majority that is until the
top got all rotten. I'm hoping, right to vote is not sign of freedom... Isn,' t it obvious by
now? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments dfordoom says: WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
5:09 am GMT@Sergey Krieger
So called contemporary left has nothing in common with old Marxism/ Leninism. It is artificial
led from the top movement to divide population to rule it and fleece more efficiently. In
short, it is not left.
So called contemporary left has nothing in common with old Marxism/ Leninism. It is
artificial led from the top movement to divide population to rule it and fleece more
efficiently. In short, it is not left.
Agreed. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread
Display All Comments JackOH says: August 11,
2017 at 8:29 am GMT 100 Words Anatoly, thanks for introducing some Russian writers. My
experience of reading outsiders who write about America is that they sometimes offer startling
viewpoints that are helpful to those of us "in-country" who are too close to the subject
matter.
BTW- RT used to have, or maybe still has, an American-born presenter-opinionizer, a
guy from Cleveland, Ohio. I think he's an ex-pat in Russia now, and he used to offer folksy,
sharply worded critiques of life in the States. I couldn't find his name, but he might be worth
looking up to see if he wants to contribute. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter Display All Comments Sergey Krieger says:
August 11, 2017 at
8:44 am GMT 100 Words @AP
So called contemporary left has nothing in common with old Marxism/ Leninism. It is
artificial led from the top movement to divide population to rule it and fleece more
efficiently
So in your world Bolsheviks didn't divide the population and loot the country? You
are the one that lives in echo chamber. Bolsheviks looted the country. It is the dumbest
comment I have ever heard. You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
Bolsheviks actually saved and built the country and current regime has been living from what
was built by Commies ever since. I just pointed that so called left is not left. But you asked
for this. You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia by current elites which
reveals who you are amptly. Read More Replies: @Seamus Padraig
You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia by current elites which reveals who
you are amptly.
In case you haven't 'met' him already, AP is a Maidan-apologist from Western
Ukraine. He apparently has no problem with the oligarchs in Kiev who are currently looting his
country, and never tires of giving us all glowing reports of the fabulous economic growth that
is now occurring there (at least according to Ukrstat).
So you can take his commentary on Russia with a grain of salt. , @AP
Bolsheviks looted the country.
I was recently at a beautiful museum in the USA full of classic Russian art that
was looted by Bolsheviks and sold for cheap to foreigners.
You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
You had a country of mostly Europeans, poorer than all of the non-commie European
ones. You did however manage to sink some places upon whom you imposed your system, such as
Czechia or eastern Germany, down closer to your level. Good job.
I just pointed that so called left is not left.
So called left is not left, as 21st century is not early 20th.
You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia
"And in America they persecute blacks." You are too predictable.
Russia was looted in the 1990s by...the flower of Soviet society, the Soviet elite and their
children. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Sergey Krieger says:
August 11, 2017 at
8:49 am GMT 100 Words @melanf
The Bolsheviks didn't spare the proletariat. All dissent was crushed and whole social
"classes" were transported and mass murdered on a scale far exceeding anything the Germans
did in WW2.
The Bolsheviks disgusting, but this statement ("on a scale far exceeding anything
the Germans did in WW2") is an obvious lie
http://polit.ru/article/2007/12/11/repressii/
" In fact, the number of prisoners for political reasons (for "counterrevolutionary crimes") in
the USSR in the period from 1921 to 1953, i.e. after 33 years was about 3.8 million people
during this period ( 1921 to 1954 ) has been convicted 3 777 380 people, including to capital
punishment – 642 980, to the contents in camps and prisons for a term of 25 years and
below – 2 369 220, into exile and expulsion – 765 180 people". Exactly. I am tired
of all this BS. We lived free lives and I have never seen armed milicioner / police officer
outside of movies. Be the state clearly cared about majority that is until the top got all
rotten. I'm hoping, right to vote is not sign of freedom Isn,' t it obvious by now? Read More
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Seamus Padraig says:
August 11, 2017 at
11:32 am GMT 100 Words @WorkingClass
The SJW's (Maoists) have been taught to hate everything white and/or male including the entire
history of white culture. Damore's supposed conservatism is not the issue. He was punished for
bringing it out of the closet. White men who will not bend their knee to Maoists are being
hunted in Maoist controlled environs. This article is well reasoned. But there is no reasoning
with zombies. Even if they are former friends or family. White men have the same options as
soldiers in the field. Fight, flee or fortify. Or surrender. Avert your eyes and shuffle to the
back of the bus.
Damore's supposed conservatism is not the issue. He was punished for bringing it out of
the closet.
Damore doesn't seem too conservative to me. If he were a conservative, he would be arguing
against Google's policies on the basis of cultural tradition. No, Damore is simply a scientist
arguing on the basis of science. Nothing wrong with that, but it isn't conservatism. Read More
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Seamus Padraig says:
August 11, 2017 at
11:49 am GMT@Wally
Basically the Left is in denial of science ... DNA. Yes, it's funny, isn't it. Liberals loudly
proclaim their allegiance to evolution, but only to attack Christianity. But as soon as the
concept of evolution upsets their non-scientific theories of 'gender fluidity' and 'racial
equality', they close their eyes, cover their ears, and stomp their little feet. Read More
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Seamus Padraig says:
August 11, 2017 at
11:51 am GMT@22pp22 I've
abandoned Google and gone over to Duckduckgo. They seem just as good. Yes, I've been using
DuckDuckGo.com for over four years now, and no regrets. No filter bubbles either! Read More
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Seamus Padraig says:
August 11, 2017 at
11:57 am GMT@Jivilov Very
good, although I wish people would stop using the ideologically loaded term "gender" instead of
"sex." Conservatives should use traditional language if possible, especially when backed
scientifically in this case by chromosomal evidence. Recall Solzhenitsyn's observations on the
totalitarian control of language to further their agenda. I agree. The term 'gender' is for
Latin nouns, not living beings. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Seamus Padraig says:
August 11, 2017 at
12:01 pm GMT 100 Words @Sergey Krieger
You are the one that lives in echo chamber. Bolsheviks looted the country. It is the dumbest
comment I have ever heard. You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
Bolsheviks actually saved and built the country and current regime has been living from what
was built by Commies ever since. I just pointed that so called left is not left. But you asked
for this. You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia by current elites which
reveals who you are amptly.
You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia by current elites which reveals
who you are amptly.
In case you haven't 'met' him already, AP is a Maidan-apologist from Western Ukraine. He
apparently has no problem with the oligarchs in Kiev who are currently looting his country, and
never tires of giving us all glowing reports of the fabulous economic growth that is now
occurring there (at least according to Ukrstat).
So you can take his commentary on Russia with a grain of salt. Read More Replies: @AP Thanks for
proving your ignorance yet again. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread
Hide Thread Display All Comments Hector_St_Clare says:
August 11, 2017 at
12:02 pm GMT 100 Words "He is a realist on Soviet achievements, crimes, and lost
opportunities, foregoing both the Soviet nostalgia of Prokhanov, the kneejerk Sovietophobia of
Prosvirnin, and the unhinged conspiracy theories of Galkovsky. He is a normal, traditional
Orthodox Christian, in contrast to the "atheism plus" of Prosvirnin, the mystical obscurantism
of Duginism, and the esoteric experiments of Krylov. He has time neither for the college
libertarianism of Sputnik i Pogrom hipster nationalism, nor the angry "confiscate and divide"
rhetoric of the National Bolsheviks"
Dammit. I miss the "confiscate and divide" stuff.
How are the NatBolos doing these days? Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter Display All Comments AP says: August 11, 2017 at
1:08 pm GMT 100 Words @Sergey Krieger
You are the one that lives in echo chamber. Bolsheviks looted the country. It is the dumbest
comment I have ever heard. You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
Bolsheviks actually saved and built the country and current regime has been living from what
was built by Commies ever since. I just pointed that so called left is not left. But you asked
for this. You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia by current elites which
reveals who you are amptly.
Bolsheviks looted the country.
I was recently at a beautiful museum in the USA full of classic Russian art that was looted
by Bolsheviks and sold for cheap to foreigners.
You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
You had a country of mostly Europeans, poorer than all of the non-commie European ones. You
did however manage to sink some places upon whom you imposed your system, such as Czechia or
eastern Germany, down closer to your level. Good job.
I just pointed that so called left is not left.
So called left is not left, as 21st century is not early 20th.
You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia
"And in America they persecute blacks." You are too predictable.
Russia was looted in the 1990s by the flower of Soviet society, the Soviet elite and their
children. Read More Agree: Mr. Hack Replies: @Mr.
Hack Just curious, what museum in the US did you visit that included lots of Russian
classic art? Was it perhaps 'the Museum of Russian Art' in Minneapolis? , @Sergey
Krieger Even if it was true, having industry to build 100000 + tanks and other weapons was
far more important considering what happened. Did you get receipts for those pieces of art?
Might have been looted by whites. Also, you cannot build the country by just selling some art.
You say USSR was poorer than other European states. Do you really have a clue how much it costs
in the West to pay for everything Soviet people were having as a right? Free education all
level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here, free medicine and damn
good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation, guaranteed job and retirement
pay. You forget about peace of mind that came with all above mentioned. You know, good sleep
without chemistry and all. There is always bad people and unfortunately their time came.
However, they were as much real Communists as I am ballerina.anyway, not a pop from you about
this... , @Hector_St_Clare
East Germany was certainly not 'dragged down to Soviet level'. It had a higher GDP/capita
growth rate than the Federal Republic every decade between 1950 and 1989, was always much
richer than the soviet union and by 1989 was the 19th highest HDI country in the world. They
advanced from 40% of West Germany GDP in 1950 to 55-57% of West German GDP in 1989.
That said, yes the Soviets did massively strip the country of assets between 1945-1950, and
that probably did set it back for the entire course of its existence as a state, so its correct
to say they dragged it down somewhat. The way you present the situation is exaggerated and
misleading however. Central planning actually worked reasonably well in East Germany although
probably not as well as a mixed planning/market economy would have worked. , @utu"And in America they persecute blacks."
LOL, I vaguely remember this as an old joke. But it's true the rhetoric of some USSR orphans
and nostalgists here at unz.com sometimes resembles this joke. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments AP says: August 11, 2017 at
1:09 pm GMT@Seamus
Padraig
You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia by current elites which reveals who
you are amptly.
In case you haven't 'met' him already, AP is a Maidan-apologist from Western
Ukraine. He apparently has no problem with the oligarchs in Kiev who are currently looting his
country, and never tires of giving us all glowing reports of the fabulous economic growth that
is now occurring there (at least according to Ukrstat).
So you can take his commentary on Russia with a grain of salt. Thanks for proving your
ignorance yet again. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread
Hide Thread Display All Comments Mr. Hack says: August 11, 2017 at
2:46 pm GMT@AP
Bolsheviks looted the country.
I was recently at a beautiful museum in the USA full of classic Russian art that
was looted by Bolsheviks and sold for cheap to foreigners.
You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
You had a country of mostly Europeans, poorer than all of the non-commie European
ones. You did however manage to sink some places upon whom you imposed your system, such as
Czechia or eastern Germany, down closer to your level. Good job.
I just pointed that so called left is not left.
So called left is not left, as 21st century is not early 20th.
You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia
"And in America they persecute blacks." You are too predictable.
Russia was looted in the 1990s by...the flower of Soviet society, the Soviet elite and their
children. Just curious, what museum in the US did you visit that included lots of Russian
classic art? Was it perhaps 'the Museum of Russian Art' in Minneapolis? Read More Replies:
@AP
Just curious, what museum in the US did you visit that included lots of Russian classic art?
Was it perhaps 'the Museum of Russian Art' in Minneapolis?
https://www.hillwoodmuseum.org/russian-collection Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Sergey Krieger says:
August 11, 2017 at
5:00 pm GMT 200 Words @AP
Bolsheviks looted the country.
I was recently at a beautiful museum in the USA full of classic Russian art that
was looted by Bolsheviks and sold for cheap to foreigners.
You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
You had a country of mostly Europeans, poorer than all of the non-commie European
ones. You did however manage to sink some places upon whom you imposed your system, such as
Czechia or eastern Germany, down closer to your level. Good job.
I just pointed that so called left is not left.
So called left is not left, as 21st century is not early 20th.
You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia
"And in America they persecute blacks." You are too predictable.
Russia was looted in the 1990s by...the flower of Soviet society, the Soviet elite and their
children. Even if it was true, having industry to build 100000 + tanks and other weapons was
far more important considering what happened. Did you get receipts for those pieces of art?
Might have been looted by whites. Also, you cannot build the country by just selling some art.
You say USSR was poorer than other European states. Do you really have a clue how much it costs
in the West to pay for everything Soviet people were having as a right? Free education all
level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here, free medicine and damn
good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation, guaranteed job and retirement
pay. You forget about peace of mind that came with all above mentioned. You know, good sleep
without chemistry and all. There is always bad people and unfortunately their time came.
However, they were as much real Communists as I am ballerina.anyway, not a pop from you about
this Read More Replies: @AP
You say USSR was poorer than other European states. Do you really have a clue how much it
costs in the West to pay for everything Soviet people were having as a right?
I'd been in western Europe and visited the USSR in 1990. USSR was much poorer than
any western European country, the USA or Canada. It wasn't a third world country, but that's a
very low bar.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here,
free medicine and damn good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation,
guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Materially speaking Soviet middle class lived liked poor Americans on
medicaid, with free public housing, free need-based tuition, etc. One difference - unlike
residents of American housing projects, Soviets could afford free vacations to sub-Western
resorts, I'll give you that. But then middle class Soviets drove worse (or no) cars, and had
worse TVs and radios then even poor Americans. There were some Soviet families even living in
communal apartments.
Obviously culturally it was a different story from poor Americans. But your argument is with
respect to material conditions. By that measure - in the end, performance of the USSR was
pathetic for a high IQ country of white people.
There is always bad people and unfortunately their time came. However, they were as much real
Communists as I am ballerina
Yeltsin who presided over the looting spree of the 1990s was elected as a full
member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1981. As
for the looters - Berezovsky was head of a department in the Institute of Control Sciences of
the USSR Academy of Sciences. Khodorkovsky was deputy head of Komsomol (the Communist Youth
League) at his university, the D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia. Gaidar
was from a Soviet elite family and in the 1980s an editor of the CPSU ideological journal
Communist. Potanin, another one from an elite commie family, attended the faculty of the
International economic relations at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO),
which groomed students for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Upon graduating MGIMO in 1983, he
followed in his father's footsteps and went to work for the FTO "Soyuzpromexport" with the
Ministry of Foreign trade of the Soviet Union. Etc. Etc.
Sure, none of these members of the Soviet elite, the top human products of the Soviet system
- were "real Communists." , @Anatoly
Karlin
Did you get receipts for those pieces of art?
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of
Tsarist gold and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
In the grand scheme of things I suppose it's understandable in the context of a civil war,
and basically irrelevant set against their other crimes, but it happened.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here,
free medicine and damn good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation,
guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too
outside the Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological
technical subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better.
The shares of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Soviet healthcare was okay for basics, but extremely bad for any complicated ailment (if you
did not belong to the Soviet elites).
In practice, unemployment is not an issue for any minimally competent and conscientious
worker in countries with reasonable labor regulations. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Igor says: August 11, 2017 at
5:24 pm GMT Google wants to be
Ein Land
Ein Volk
Ein Führer Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All
Comments AP says: August 11, 2017 at
5:33 pm GMT@Mr. Hack Just
curious, what museum in the US did you visit that included lots of Russian classic art? Was it
perhaps 'the Museum of Russian Art' in Minneapolis?
Just curious, what museum in the US did you visit that included lots of Russian classic
art? Was it perhaps 'the Museum of Russian Art' in Minneapolis?
https://www.hillwoodmuseum.org/russian-collection
Read More Replies: @Mr. Hack Looks
interesting. The one in Minneapolis is a 3 floor renovated church devoted to Russian art. Lots
of Soviet Realism on display and occasional films too. They even had an exhibition of
Aleksander Bulavitsky's art on display a couple of years ago, a local Ukrainian emigre that
I've mentioned to you before (his work can be seen in Kyiv too). Several years back they had an
impressive collection of religious art including icons and frescoes from as far back as the
14th century, many pieces from the northeast part of Russia. A philalately exhibit of Russian
stamps that I once saw there was quite impressive too. If you're in the area, I recommend that
you give it a visit. A nice gift shop too.
http://tmora.org/ Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread
Display All Comments AP says: August 11, 2017 at
5:52 pm GMT 400 Words @Sergey Krieger
Even if it was true, having industry to build 100000 + tanks and other weapons was far more
important considering what happened. Did you get receipts for those pieces of art? Might have
been looted by whites. Also, you cannot build the country by just selling some art. You say
USSR was poorer than other European states. Do you really have a clue how much it costs in the
West to pay for everything Soviet people were having as a right? Free education all level and
better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here, free medicine and damn good at
that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation, guaranteed job and retirement pay. You
forget about peace of mind that came with all above mentioned. You know, good sleep without
chemistry and all. There is always bad people and unfortunately their time came. However, they
were as much real Communists as I am ballerina.anyway, not a pop from you about this...
You say USSR was poorer than other European states. Do you really have a clue how much it
costs in the West to pay for everything Soviet people were having as a right?
I'd been in western Europe and visited the USSR in 1990. USSR was much poorer than any
western European country, the USA or Canada. It wasn't a third world country, but that's a very
low bar.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here,
free medicine and damn good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation,
guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Materially speaking Soviet middle class lived liked poor Americans on medicaid, with
free public housing, free need-based tuition, etc. One difference – unlike residents of
American housing projects, Soviets could afford free vacations to sub-Western resorts, I'll
give you that. But then middle class Soviets drove worse (or no) cars, and had worse TVs and
radios then even poor Americans. There were some Soviet families even living in communal
apartments.
Obviously culturally it was a different story from poor Americans. But your argument is with
respect to material conditions. By that measure – in the end, performance of the USSR was
pathetic for a high IQ country of white people.
There is always bad people and unfortunately their time came. However, they were as much
real Communists as I am ballerina
Yeltsin who presided over the looting spree of the 1990s was elected as a full member of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1981. As for the looters
– Berezovsky was head of a department in the Institute of Control Sciences of the USSR
Academy of Sciences. Khodorkovsky was deputy head of Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) at
his university, the D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia. Gaidar was from a
Soviet elite family and in the 1980s an editor of the CPSU ideological journal Communist.
Potanin, another one from an elite commie family, attended the faculty of the International
economic relations at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), which groomed
students for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Upon graduating MGIMO in 1983, he followed in his
father's footsteps and went to work for the FTO "Soyuzpromexport" with the Ministry of Foreign
trade of the Soviet Union. Etc. Etc.
Sure, none of these members of the Soviet elite, the top human products of the Soviet system
– were "real Communists." Read More Agree: Mr. Hack , utu Replies: @Sergey
Krieger 1990 not the best time frankly. How is western middle class is doing now? Again,
you ignored my points and continued pressing own agenda. Soviet people basically were free,
provided with all things necessary for fullfilling, happy and protected life which cost them
nothing, while western middle class producing outword looks of prosperity was actually I'll
iving life of stress, uncertainty and unhappiness. Hence, how is western middle class doing
now? Up to nostrils in debt to mantain illusion of prosperity with no room for mistake. Many
are no longer middle class. 50 million in USA alone on food help. Drud and various psycho meds
in use to just get sort of temporary relief. What price one would put on having what we had? I
would say it is priceless. After 1985 fifth column took control of CPSU central commity and top
media. What was after 1986 hardly can be called Soviet Union , same as providing lines in
stores in 1991 is not representation of what we really had before government Gorbachov and his
inner cycle destabilized and destroyed my country. Without Gorbachov there would be no Yeltsin
who was nothing but opportunist of the worst kind. To be fair comparison should be made for
Brezhnev period which was the most prosperous time Russia ever seen and things were going in
right direction before unworthy people without abilities and merit took over the power. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Hector_St_Clare says:
August 11, 2017 at
6:00 pm GMT 100 Words @AP
Bolsheviks looted the country.
I was recently at a beautiful museum in the USA full of classic Russian art that
was looted by Bolsheviks and sold for cheap to foreigners.
You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
You had a country of mostly Europeans, poorer than all of the non-commie European
ones. You did however manage to sink some places upon whom you imposed your system, such as
Czechia or eastern Germany, down closer to your level. Good job.
I just pointed that so called left is not left.
So called left is not left, as 21st century is not early 20th.
You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia
"And in America they persecute blacks." You are too predictable.
Russia was looted in the 1990s by...the flower of Soviet society, the Soviet elite and their
children. East Germany was certainly not 'dragged down to Soviet level'. It had a higher
GDP/capita growth rate than the Federal Republic every decade between 1950 and 1989, was always
much richer than the soviet union and by 1989 was the 19th highest HDI country in the world.
They advanced from 40% of West Germany GDP in 1950 to 55-57% of West German GDP in 1989.
That said, yes the Soviets did massively strip the country of assets between 1945-1950, and
that probably did set it back for the entire course of its existence as a state, so its correct
to say they dragged it down somewhat. The way you present the situation is exaggerated and
misleading however. Central planning actually worked reasonably well in East Germany although
probably not as well as a mixed planning/market economy would have worked. Read More Replies:
@German_reader
Living standards in East Germany in the 1980s were really pretty meh compared to the west
though. Most private households didn't even own a telephone, and you had to wait years to get
one of those crappy Trabant cars. Housing also wasn't great from what I've heard. And
that's just the material conditions, the political repression and the socially corrosive
effects of the state maintaining a vast network of informers obviously weren't conducive to
general wellbeing either.
It's true that quite a few East Germans later became somewhat nostalgic for the GDR era, given
how badly handled the transition was and the mass unemployment of the 1990s which blighted the
lives of millions of East Germans (somewhat similar in some ways to events in Russia, though
obviously the situation there was much worse and more traumatic). But one shouldn't have too
rosy a view of the GDR or other Eastern bloc states because of the manifest defects of today's
West. , @Anatoly Karlin
This doesn't sound right to me.
Unfortunately Angus Maddison doesn't have data for the separate Germanys, but East Germany
was at less than 40% of West Germany around 1990 according to the Federal Interior
Ministry.
Also as you yourself point out East Germany would have been more impacted by reparations to
the USSR. , @utu Life in
DDR in 1970s and 1980s was pretty decent. Perhaps the highest standard of living in the Soviet
Block. If people did not know that the West exist and that you can get still more goodies there
they would be very happy to be like East Germany.
The planned economy worked there pretty good. It took Germans to show it. They had problems
with energy supplies when USSR reduced export to Germany and had to start to use very
inefficient and very polluting brown coal.
Probably Czechoslovakia and Hungary were the next in terms of socialist economy success in
1970's. Poland was always very uneven and unequal country where plan economy did not work and
where private sector still existed with lots of corruption and criminal shenanigans that let
some people got rich also in the state apparatus. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments German_reader says:
August 11, 2017 at
6:30 pm GMT 200 Words @Hector_St_Clare
East Germany was certainly not 'dragged down to Soviet level'. It had a higher GDP/capita
growth rate than the Federal Republic every decade between 1950 and 1989, was always much
richer than the soviet union and by 1989 was the 19th highest HDI country in the world. They
advanced from 40% of West Germany GDP in 1950 to 55-57% of West German GDP in 1989.
That said, yes the Soviets did massively strip the country of assets between 1945-1950, and
that probably did set it back for the entire course of its existence as a state, so its correct
to say they dragged it down somewhat. The way you present the situation is exaggerated and
misleading however. Central planning actually worked reasonably well in East Germany although
probably not as well as a mixed planning/market economy would have worked. Living standards in
East Germany in the 1980s were really pretty meh compared to the west though. Most private
households didn't even own a telephone, and you had to wait years to get one of those crappy
Trabant cars. Housing also wasn't great from what I've heard. And that's just the
material conditions, the political repression and the socially corrosive effects of the state
maintaining a vast network of informers obviously weren't conducive to general wellbeing
either.
It's true that quite a few East Germans later became somewhat nostalgic for the GDR era, given
how badly handled the transition was and the mass unemployment of the 1990s which blighted the
lives of millions of East Germans (somewhat similar in some ways to events in Russia, though
obviously the situation there was much worse and more traumatic). But one shouldn't have too
rosy a view of the GDR or other Eastern bloc states because of the manifest defects of today's
West. Read More Replies: @Darin East
German Stasi spying on 1/3 of population was German efficiency run amok, objectively useless
waste or resources. It made no difference at all for the survival of the regime.
In Czechoslovakia, next door country with comparable size population, the secret police watched
about 60,000 people (i.e. VIP's and active dissidents), and it lasted about week longer than
DDR. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Anatoly Karlin says:
WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
6:36 pm GMT 100 Words @Hector_St_Clare
East Germany was certainly not 'dragged down to Soviet level'. It had a higher GDP/capita
growth rate than the Federal Republic every decade between 1950 and 1989, was always much
richer than the soviet union and by 1989 was the 19th highest HDI country in the world. They
advanced from 40% of West Germany GDP in 1950 to 55-57% of West German GDP in 1989.
That said, yes the Soviets did massively strip the country of assets between 1945-1950, and
that probably did set it back for the entire course of its existence as a state, so its correct
to say they dragged it down somewhat. The way you present the situation is exaggerated and
misleading however. Central planning actually worked reasonably well in East Germany although
probably not as well as a mixed planning/market economy would have worked. This doesn't sound
right to me.
Unfortunately Angus Maddison doesn't have data for the separate Germanys, but East Germany
was at less than 40% of West Germany around 1990 according to the Federal Interior
Ministry.
Also as you yourself point out East Germany would have been more impacted by reparations to
the USSR. Read More Replies: @Hector_St_Clare
Anatoly,
The "55-57% of west german GDP/capita by 1989" numbers I'm using (which are the also the
ones used by the Wikipedia on the GDR) come from the former East German statistician Gerhard
Heske in a 2009 study. The actual study is in German so I can't read it (maybe German Reader
might be interested), but his numbers have been cited by a bunch of other papers I found which
were quite critical of the GDR but didn't really take issue with his numbers. The reason people
disagree about the size of the GDR economy in 1989 is, I think, because they weren't a market
economy and so there was no way of assigning market values to the products they produced, other
than by making 'quality adjustments' which are going to somewhat of a judgment call. Heske
claims his methodology uses quality adjustments that are fairly standard, though.
Your series also starts in 1991 rather than 1989. It's worth pointing out that this fairly
balanced treatment of German reunification by a Polish author both cites Heske's numbers for
the 1989 GDP and also claims that in 1990 the East German economy was hit by severe recession
as a result of excessively fast free market reforms and collapse of the central planning
mechanism, and that GDP shrank "by at least 20% compared to the previous year." Of course an
assessment of the East German economy in 1991 will look worse than it did in 1989, so that
accounts for part though not all of the discrepancy.
https://www.osw.waw.pl/sites/default/files/prace_35_en_0.pdf Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Anatoly Karlin says:
WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
6:50 pm GMT 200 Words @Sergey Krieger
Even if it was true, having industry to build 100000 + tanks and other weapons was far more
important considering what happened. Did you get receipts for those pieces of art? Might have
been looted by whites. Also, you cannot build the country by just selling some art. You say
USSR was poorer than other European states. Do you really have a clue how much it costs in the
West to pay for everything Soviet people were having as a right? Free education all level and
better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here, free medicine and damn good at
that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation, guaranteed job and retirement pay. You
forget about peace of mind that came with all above mentioned. You know, good sleep without
chemistry and all. There is always bad people and unfortunately their time came. However, they
were as much real Communists as I am ballerina.anyway, not a pop from you about this...
Did you get receipts for those pieces of art?
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold
and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
In the grand scheme of things I suppose it's understandable in the context of a civil war,
and basically irrelevant set against their other crimes, but it happened.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here,
free medicine and damn good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation,
guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too outside the
Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological technical
subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better. The shares
of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Soviet healthcare was okay for basics, but extremely bad for any complicated ailment (if you
did not belong to the Soviet elites).
In practice, unemployment is not an issue for any minimally competent and conscientious
worker in countries with reasonable labor regulations. Read More Replies: @iffenunemployment is not an issue for any minimally competent and conscientious worker in
countries with reasonable labor regulations.
The white working class in the US did not become incompetent and un-conscientious in one
generation. Employment at less than a living wage is not "employment." , @Andrei
Martyanov
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold and
cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Last time I was in Sate Hermitage (among other places) I didn't notice any signs
of Bolsheviks "running out" of Tsarist "cultural (art) reserves". If my Alzheimer's doesn't
fail me--last time I checked Hermitage can give Louvre (not to speak of Prado and other lesser
galleries and museums) a run for its money. How could this be? , @AP
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold and
cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Looting one's own country's cultural treasures to finance a violent overthrow.
Sounds familiar. I suspect that if some of these Commie apologists had been born as Sunni Arabs
rather than Russians, they would be defending ISIS. , @Andrei
Martyanov
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too outside the
Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological technical
subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better.
Want to try some Kholmogorov's Math And The Beginning Of Analysis for the 10th
Grade? Here is the 9th Grade Algebra (Geometry does the same but in purely geometric framework)
with basic trigonometric identities, as an example. Do you need me to present to you any US
math textbook for 9th grade?
The shares of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Yep, neither Korolyov, nor others were awarded Nobel Prize (of course, Krush is to
blame) bit when one looks at an actual fundamental and applied science Soviet contribution, one
has to really start thinking. Somehow Russians produce a lot of state of the art technology
without getting all those awards. , @utuThe
Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold and
cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Could you recommend a reading material on the subject? Thanks. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Mr. Hack says: August 11, 2017 at
7:24 pm GMT 100 Words @AP
Just curious, what museum in the US did you visit that included lots of Russian classic art?
Was it perhaps 'the Museum of Russian Art' in Minneapolis?
https://www.hillwoodmuseum.org/russian-collection Looks interesting. The one in
Minneapolis is a 3 floor renovated church devoted to Russian art. Lots of Soviet Realism on
display and occasional films too. They even had an exhibition of Aleksander Bulavitsky's art on
display a couple of years ago, a local Ukrainian emigre that I've mentioned to you before (his
work can be seen in Kyiv too). Several years back they had an impressive collection of
religious art including icons and frescoes from as far back as the 14th century, many pieces
from the northeast part of Russia. A philalately exhibit of Russian stamps that I once saw
there was quite impressive too. If you're in the area, I recommend that you give it a visit. A
nice gift shop too.
http://tmora.org/ Read More Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Fidelios Automata
says: August 11, 2017 at
7:57 pm GMT@Greg Bacon
This type of diversity politics is stupidity to the Nth degree, offering up us white guys as
sacrificial lambs for any and all insults, crimes and sins of the last 400 years, real or
not.
It's a shrewd trick by the ones in the USA who really control our nation and I don't mean
Trump or Congress or the CIA.
It's that ethnic group that controls the FED, the US Treasury, those TBTF banks we get to
bail out every 10 years or so, the MSM, where they keep agitating for endless wars that do
nothing for America, but do protect Apartheid Israel from a reality check.
They also control Hollywood, pumping out brain-numbing slop (mostly) filled with over-the-top
violence, sex and nudity and most of the music business, letting artists--mostly rap--sing
indulgent songs about violence, sex, nudity and drugs.
They also have Congress begging to do anything for their Master, while we get told to PO when
we ask for help.
And they control the two biggest Internet outlets, Google and FAKEBOOK, both of whom are into
being self-appointed cops protecting us feeble ones from allegedly fake stories, but actually
shutting down stories that don't goose step to the glorious future they envision, which doesn't
contain us white guys.
After nearly 16 years of non-stop war, tens of thousands of dead American troops, hundreds
of thousands horribly wounded, a monstrous debt and a falling apart infrastructure with good
paying jobs disappearing, Americans are rightly PO and want change, but instead outfits like
GOOGLE are directing that anger elsewhere and protecting the guilty. Agreed. Here's a place
where the original author was wrong. The class struggle isn't over. Income inequality is bigger
than it's ever been. Identity politics are a misdirection used by elites like Hitlery to divide
us so we don't realize who the _real_ enemy is. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More...
This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments iffen says: August 11,
2017 at 7:57 pm GMT@Anatoly
Karlin
Did you get receipts for those pieces of art?
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of
Tsarist gold and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
In the grand scheme of things I suppose it's understandable in the context of a civil war,
and basically irrelevant set against their other crimes, but it happened.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here,
free medicine and damn good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation,
guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too
outside the Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological
technical subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better.
The shares of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Soviet healthcare was okay for basics, but extremely bad for any complicated ailment (if you
did not belong to the Soviet elites).
In practice, unemployment is not an issue for any minimally competent and conscientious
worker in countries with reasonable labor regulations. unemployment is not an issue for any
minimally competent and conscientious worker in countries with reasonable labor
regulations.
The white working class in the US did not become incompetent and un-conscientious in one
generation. Employment at less than a living wage is not "employment." Read More Replies:
@Andrei
Martyanov
Employment at less than a living wage is not "employment."
True, this "living wage" issue has become now America's chronic illness. Once one
begins to look at the real estate dynamics, even for a good earners living in such places as
Seattle, Portland (not to speak of L.A. or SF) becomes simply not affordable, forget buying
anything decent. Hell, many rents are higher than actual mortgages, however insane they already
are. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Andrei Martyanov says:
WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
8:07 pm GMT 100 Words @Anatoly Karlin
Did you get receipts for those pieces of art?
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of
Tsarist gold and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
In the grand scheme of things I suppose it's understandable in the context of a civil war,
and basically irrelevant set against their other crimes, but it happened.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here,
free medicine and damn good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation,
guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too
outside the Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological
technical subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better.
The shares of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Soviet healthcare was okay for basics, but extremely bad for any complicated ailment (if you
did not belong to the Soviet elites).
In practice, unemployment is not an issue for any minimally competent and conscientious
worker in countries with reasonable labor regulations.
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold
and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Last time I was in Sate Hermitage (among other places) I didn't notice any signs of
Bolsheviks "running out" of Tsarist "cultural (art) reserves". If my Alzheimer's doesn't fail
me–last time I checked Hermitage can give Louvre (not to speak of Prado and other lesser
galleries and museums) a run for its money. How could this be? Read More Replies: @AP
Last time I was in Sate Hermitage (among other places) I didn't notice any signs of
Bolsheviks "running out" of Tsarist "cultural (art) reserves".
Yes, they did not run out. But the looting was massive, even within the Hermitage.
The Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings in 1930 and 1931 resulted in the departure of some of
the most valuable paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad to
Western museums. Several of the paintings had been in the Hermitage Collection since its
creation by Empress Catherine the Great. About 250 paintings were sold, including masterpieces
by Jan van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, and other important artists. Andrew Mellon
donated the twenty-one paintings he purchased from the Hermitage to the United States
government in 1937, which became the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C.
Otherwise -
Apparently Russian treasures could be bought in American department stores in the 1930s:
https://www.hillwoodmuseum.org/russian-collection
From the 1920s, the Soviet Union had been selling off many of the art treasures it had
confiscated from the church, the imperial family, and the aristocracy in an effort to fund the
new government's industrialization plan. American businessman Armand Hammer and his brother
Victor acquired enormous numbers of these Russian treasures and, in the early 1930s, began to
sell them in American department stores and later in their New York gallery. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Andrei Martyanov says:
WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
8:18 pm GMT 100 Words @iffenunemployment is not an issue for any minimally competent and conscientious worker in
countries with reasonable labor regulations.
The white working class in the US did not become incompetent and un-conscientious in one
generation. Employment at less than a living wage is not "employment."
Employment at less than a living wage is not "employment."
True, this "living wage" issue has become now America's chronic illness. Once one begins to
look at the real estate dynamics, even for a good earners living in such places as Seattle,
Portland (not to speak of L.A. or SF) becomes simply not affordable, forget buying anything
decent. Hell, many rents are higher than actual mortgages, however insane they already are.
Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments AP says: August 11, 2017 at
8:44 pm GMT 100 Words @Anatoly
Karlin
Did you get receipts for those pieces of art?
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of
Tsarist gold and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
In the grand scheme of things I suppose it's understandable in the context of a civil war,
and basically irrelevant set against their other crimes, but it happened.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here,
free medicine and damn good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation,
guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too
outside the Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological
technical subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better.
The shares of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Soviet healthcare was okay for basics, but extremely bad for any complicated ailment (if you
did not belong to the Soviet elites).
In practice, unemployment is not an issue for any minimally competent and conscientious
worker in countries with reasonable labor regulations.
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold
and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Looting one's own country's cultural treasures to finance a violent overthrow. Sounds
familiar. I suspect that if some of these Commie apologists had been born as Sunni Arabs rather
than Russians, they would be defending ISIS. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments AP says: August 11, 2017 at
8:54 pm GMT 200 Words @Andrei
Martyanov
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold and
cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Last time I was in Sate Hermitage (among other places) I didn't notice any signs
of Bolsheviks "running out" of Tsarist "cultural (art) reserves". If my Alzheimer's doesn't
fail me--last time I checked Hermitage can give Louvre (not to speak of Prado and other lesser
galleries and museums) a run for its money. How could this be?
Last time I was in Sate Hermitage (among other places) I didn't notice any signs of
Bolsheviks "running out" of Tsarist "cultural (art) reserves".
Yes, they did not run out. But the looting was massive, even within the Hermitage.
The Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings in 1930 and 1931 resulted in the departure of some of
the most valuable paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad to
Western museums. Several of the paintings had been in the Hermitage Collection since its
creation by Empress Catherine the Great. About 250 paintings were sold, including masterpieces
by Jan van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, and other important artists. Andrew Mellon
donated the twenty-one paintings he purchased from the Hermitage to the United States
government in 1937, which became the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C.
Otherwise –
Apparently Russian treasures could be bought in American department stores in the 1930s:
From the 1920s, the Soviet Union had been selling off many of the art treasures it had
confiscated from the church, the imperial family, and the aristocracy in an effort to fund the
new government's industrialization plan. American businessman Armand Hammer and his brother
Victor acquired enormous numbers of these Russian treasures and, in the early 1930s, began to
sell them in American department stores and later in their New York gallery. Read More Replies:
@Andrei
Martyanov
Yes, they did not run out
But wasn't it the point? Listen, I get it--you have some accounts to settle with
Soviet Union, hey fine with me, but please do not try to convince me about all ills and good
which USSR was in 1960s through 1980s--I lived there and I experienced a lot of it on very many
levels. Including some about which I am still reluctant to talk much about. I do not treat
seriously most of Russian "nationalist" so called "thinkers"--most of them still don't
understand why people such as Prosvirnin or said Kholmogorov have very bleak political
prospects in Russia. The reason being for them not knowing or realistically experiencing the
Soviet period. Said Kholmogorov, despite being born in 1975, missed, as an adult, realities of
Soviet period. Russia was, is and will remain this very "left"--not in LGBTQXYZ "western"
meaning--nation and there are reasons for that, which are beyond the grasp of people who do not
understand nor can feel continuity (preemstvennost') of the Russian history.Alexandr
Zinovyev--a real thinker of the scale which dwarfs any Kholmogorovs or Solzhentsyns correctly
assessed inevitable, both external and internal, Sovietization of Russia, on a completely new
foundation. In fact, it is happening as I type this--by 2017 by different data from 70 to 75%
of Russia's strategic industries were returned under the control of Russian State. Overwhelming
majority of Russian people, including, what is most inspiring, many youngsters are loving it.
Just one example. , @Darin This
(selling of art) is no crime at all, but reasonable and praiseworthy business decision. USSR in
the 1930's certainly needed tractors, locomotives, machine tools and industrial equipment more
than Rembrandts. If the Tsars sold the art and jewels and invested into industrialization of
the country, there would be no need for revolution.
If you want to talk about "heritage", you might have point about icons, but what makes
Rembrandt and Titian "Russian heritage"? If works of art belong to country where they were
created, then all Rembrandts of the world shall be returned to Netherlands. If works of art
belong to all mankind, what difference it makes whether Rembrandt painting is in museum in
Petersburg or Washington? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments Andrei Martyanov says:
WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
8:56 pm GMT 200 Words @Anatoly
Karlin
Did you get receipts for those pieces of art?
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of
Tsarist gold and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
In the grand scheme of things I suppose it's understandable in the context of a civil war,
and basically irrelevant set against their other crimes, but it happened.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here,
free medicine and damn good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation,
guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too
outside the Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological
technical subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better.
The shares of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Soviet healthcare was okay for basics, but extremely bad for any complicated ailment (if you
did not belong to the Soviet elites).
In practice, unemployment is not an issue for any minimally competent and conscientious
worker in countries with reasonable labor regulations.
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too outside the
Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological technical
subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better.
Want to try some Kholmogorov's Math And The Beginning Of Analysis for the 10th Grade? Here
is the 9th Grade Algebra (Geometry does the same but in purely geometric framework) with basic
trigonometric identities, as an example. Do you need me to present to you any US math textbook
for 9th grade?
The shares of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Yep, neither Korolyov, nor others were awarded Nobel Prize (of course, Krush is to blame)
bit when one looks at an actual fundamental and applied science Soviet contribution, one has to
really start thinking. Somehow Russians produce a lot of state of the art technology without
getting all those awards. Read More Replies: @Anatoly KarlinWe've been
through this . :)
The more – indeed, only – relevant question: What percentage of schoolchildren
could do the problems in it? (relative to counterparts in the West)
It's not like there aren't any programs for especially gifted US schoolchildren.
Somehow Russians produce a lot of state of the art technology without getting all those
awards.
Not that much, and their share is declining:
https://www.natureindex.com/annual-tables/2016/country/all
Wedged between Taiwan and Belgium. Pretty sad.
Russia is legitimately strong in a few specific spheres like nuclear power and military
technology. In many other spheres (e.g. pretty much the entirety of biotech) it is a minnow.
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Andrei Martyanov says:
WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
9:12 pm GMT 200 Words @AP
Last time I was in Sate Hermitage (among other places) I didn't notice any signs of
Bolsheviks "running out" of Tsarist "cultural (art) reserves".
Yes, they did not run out. But the looting was massive, even within the Hermitage.
The Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings in 1930 and 1931 resulted in the departure of some of
the most valuable paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad to
Western museums. Several of the paintings had been in the Hermitage Collection since its
creation by Empress Catherine the Great. About 250 paintings were sold, including masterpieces
by Jan van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, and other important artists. Andrew Mellon
donated the twenty-one paintings he purchased from the Hermitage to the United States
government in 1937, which became the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C.
Otherwise -
Apparently Russian treasures could be bought in American department stores in the 1930s:
https://www.hillwoodmuseum.org/russian-collection
From the 1920s, the Soviet Union had been selling off many of the art treasures it had
confiscated from the church, the imperial family, and the aristocracy in an effort to fund the
new government's industrialization plan. American businessman Armand Hammer and his brother
Victor acquired enormous numbers of these Russian treasures and, in the early 1930s, began to
sell them in American department stores and later in their New York gallery.
Yes, they did not run out
But wasn't it the point? Listen, I get it–you have some accounts to settle with Soviet
Union, hey fine with me, but please do not try to convince me about all ills and good which
USSR was in 1960s through 1980s–I lived there and I experienced a lot of it on very many
levels. Including some about which I am still reluctant to talk much about. I do not treat
seriously most of Russian "nationalist" so called "thinkers"–most of them still don't
understand why people such as Prosvirnin or said Kholmogorov have very bleak political
prospects in Russia. The reason being for them not knowing or realistically experiencing the
Soviet period. Said Kholmogorov, despite being born in 1975, missed, as an adult, realities of
Soviet period. Russia was, is and will remain this very "left"–not in LGBTQXYZ "western"
meaning–nation and there are reasons for that, which are beyond the grasp of people who
do not understand nor can feel continuity (preemstvennost') of the Russian history.Alexandr
Zinovyev–a real thinker of the scale which dwarfs any Kholmogorovs or Solzhentsyns
correctly assessed inevitable, both external and internal, Sovietization of Russia, on a
completely new foundation. In fact, it is happening as I type this–by 2017 by different
data from 70 to 75% of Russia's strategic industries were returned under the control of Russian
State. Overwhelming majority of Russian people, including, what is most inspiring, many
youngsters are loving it. Just one example. Read More Replies: @iffenwhat
is most inspiring
So you are a socialist at heart?
(Not in the bad commie sense.) , @Anonymous So
how much of a hold did Jews have over the Soviet Union? There's a lot of propaganda on the Net
pushing the story that they were running the show entirely. Where should I look to find the
truth? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Hector_St_Clare says:
August 11, 2017 at
9:12 pm GMT 300 Words @Anatoly Karlin
This doesn't sound right to me.
Unfortunately Angus Maddison doesn't have data for the separate Germanys, but East Germany
was at less than 40% of West Germany around 1990 according to the Federal Interior
Ministry.
Also as you yourself point out East Germany would have been more impacted by reparations to
the USSR. Anatoly,
The "55-57% of west german GDP/capita by 1989″ numbers I'm using (which are the also
the ones used by the Wikipedia on the GDR) come from the former East German statistician
Gerhard Heske in a 2009 study. The actual study is in German so I can't read it (maybe German
Reader might be interested), but his numbers have been cited by a bunch of other papers I found
which were quite critical of the GDR but didn't really take issue with his numbers. The reason
people disagree about the size of the GDR economy in 1989 is, I think, because they weren't a
market economy and so there was no way of assigning market values to the products they
produced, other than by making 'quality adjustments' which are going to somewhat of a judgment
call. Heske claims his methodology uses quality adjustments that are fairly standard,
though.
Your series also starts in 1991 rather than 1989. It's worth pointing out that this fairly
balanced treatment of German reunification by a Polish author both cites Heske's numbers for
the 1989 GDP and also claims that in 1990 the East German economy was hit by severe recession
as a result of excessively fast free market reforms and collapse of the central planning
mechanism, and that GDP shrank "by at least 20% compared to the previous year." Of course an
assessment of the East German economy in 1991 will look worse than it did in 1989, so that
accounts for part though not all of the discrepancy.
https://www.osw.waw.pl/sites/default/files/prace_35_en_0.pdf
Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Hector_St_Clare says:
August 11, 2017 at
9:16 pm GMT That being said, "(slightly) faster GDP growth rate than West Germany" isn't as
impressive as it sounds since they were starting from a much lower base: an economy 40% as rich
per capita as West Germany, with an industrial base and educated/skilled workforce, *should* be
growing much faster, not slightly faster. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter Display All Comments Anatoly Karlin says:
WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
9:50 pm GMT 100 Words @Andrei
Martyanov
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too outside the
Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological technical
subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better.
Want to try some Kholmogorov's Math And The Beginning Of Analysis for the 10th
Grade? Here is the 9th Grade Algebra (Geometry does the same but in purely geometric framework)
with basic trigonometric identities, as an example. Do you need me to present to you any US
math textbook for 9th grade?
The shares of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Yep, neither Korolyov, nor others were awarded Nobel Prize (of course, Krush is to
blame) bit when one looks at an actual fundamental and applied science Soviet contribution, one
has to really start thinking. Somehow Russians produce a lot of state of the art technology
without getting all those awards. We've been
through this .
The more – indeed, only – relevant question: What percentage of schoolchildren
could do the problems in it? (relative to counterparts in the West)
It's not like there aren't any programs for especially gifted US schoolchildren.
Somehow Russians produce a lot of state of the art technology without getting all those
awards.
Russia is legitimately strong in a few specific spheres like nuclear power and military
technology. In many other spheres (e.g. pretty much the entirety of biotech) it is a minnow.
Read More Replies: @inertial
Skanavi was used in elite math schools but those problems are far from Skanavi. These are
precisely the kind of problems we were doing in my non-elite prole school. I remember them.
What percentage of schoolchildren could solve problems like that? Great majority, after some
training. They are not that hard. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread
Hide Thread Display All Comments iffen says: August 11,
2017 at 10:33 pm GMT@Andrei
Martyanov
Yes, they did not run out
But wasn't it the point? Listen, I get it--you have some accounts to settle with
Soviet Union, hey fine with me, but please do not try to convince me about all ills and good
which USSR was in 1960s through 1980s--I lived there and I experienced a lot of it on very many
levels. Including some about which I am still reluctant to talk much about. I do not treat
seriously most of Russian "nationalist" so called "thinkers"--most of them still don't
understand why people such as Prosvirnin or said Kholmogorov have very bleak political
prospects in Russia. The reason being for them not knowing or realistically experiencing the
Soviet period. Said Kholmogorov, despite being born in 1975, missed, as an adult, realities of
Soviet period. Russia was, is and will remain this very "left"--not in LGBTQXYZ "western"
meaning--nation and there are reasons for that, which are beyond the grasp of people who do not
understand nor can feel continuity (preemstvennost') of the Russian history.Alexandr
Zinovyev--a real thinker of the scale which dwarfs any Kholmogorovs or Solzhentsyns correctly
assessed inevitable, both external and internal, Sovietization of Russia, on a completely new
foundation. In fact, it is happening as I type this--by 2017 by different data from 70 to 75%
of Russia's strategic industries were returned under the control of Russian State. Overwhelming
majority of Russian people, including, what is most inspiring, many youngsters are loving it.
Just one example. what is most inspiring
No, I am economic realist, which is more mixed economy vector but for Russia
specifically--it could be called as "socialist". Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments utu says: August 11, 2017 at
10:57 pm GMT@Anatoly Karlin
Did you get receipts for those pieces of art?
The Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of
Tsarist gold and cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
In the grand scheme of things I suppose it's understandable in the context of a civil war,
and basically irrelevant set against their other crimes, but it happened.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here,
free medicine and damn good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation,
guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Free education throughout school is standard in the West (and university too
outside the Anglosphere). It wasn't worse than in the West, at least in the non-ideological
technical subjects, but you'd have a hard case to make in arguing it was significantly better.
The shares of Nobel, Fields, etc. winners paint a different story.
Soviet healthcare was okay for basics, but extremely bad for any complicated ailment (if you
did not belong to the Soviet elites).
In practice, unemployment is not an issue for any minimally competent and conscientious
worker in countries with reasonable labor regulations. The Bolsheviks financed a huge part
of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold and cultural (art) reserves until they
ran out around 1922.
Could you recommend a reading material on the subject? Thanks. Read More Replies: @German_reader
There's a book by McMeekin about this subject:
(no idea how good it is, haven't read it myself, and McMeekin seems to be somewhat
controversial). , @Darin Sean
McMeekin: History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks
https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/116/1/246/43921/Sean-McMeekin-History-s-Greatest-Heist-The-Looting
, @Anatoly Karlin
Yes, I was going to mention Sean McMeekin as well.
Apart from the book which two people here have already referenced, he recently published a
history of the Russian revolution which incorporates his research on the art looting. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Andrei Martyanov says:
WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
10:58 pm GMT@iffenwhat
is most inspiring
So you are a socialist at heart?
(Not in the bad commie sense.)
So you are a socialist at heart?
No, I am economic realist, which is more mixed economy vector but for Russia
specifically–it could be called as "socialist". Read More Agree: Sergey Krieger Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Andrei Martyanov says:
WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
11:04 pm GMT 100 Words
LOL, sure–when Taiwan or Belgium will have a viable space programs (the list of
cutting edge technologies which goes into this is colossal, not to mention educational and
design schools) or will be able to produce something remotely comparable to MS-21 or SU-57,
then we may talk. FYI, I work in aerospace industry so, let's put it this way–I never
heard superlatives about Belgian or Taiwanese Aerospace . The "other" one? A lot. Read More
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments utu says: August 11, 2017 at
11:08 pm GMT 100 Words @Hector_St_Clare
East Germany was certainly not 'dragged down to Soviet level'. It had a higher GDP/capita
growth rate than the Federal Republic every decade between 1950 and 1989, was always much
richer than the soviet union and by 1989 was the 19th highest HDI country in the world. They
advanced from 40% of West Germany GDP in 1950 to 55-57% of West German GDP in 1989.
That said, yes the Soviets did massively strip the country of assets between 1945-1950, and
that probably did set it back for the entire course of its existence as a state, so its correct
to say they dragged it down somewhat. The way you present the situation is exaggerated and
misleading however. Central planning actually worked reasonably well in East Germany although
probably not as well as a mixed planning/market economy would have worked. Life in DDR in 1970s
and 1980s was pretty decent. Perhaps the highest standard of living in the Soviet Block. If
people did not know that the West exist and that you can get still more goodies there they
would be very happy to be like East Germany.
The planned economy worked there pretty good. It took Germans to show it. They had problems
with energy supplies when USSR reduced export to Germany and had to start to use very
inefficient and very polluting brown coal.
Probably Czechoslovakia and Hungary were the next in terms of socialist economy success in
1970′s. Poland was always very uneven and unequal country where plan economy did not work
and where private sector still existed with lots of corruption and criminal shenanigans that
let some people got rich also in the state apparatus. Read More Replies: @Hector_St_Clare
Czechoslovakia is interesting: both halves made the transition to modern capitalism without all
that much increase in inequality. Czechoslovakia was the second least economically unequal
country in the world before 1989 (the GDR was lowest) and the Czech Republic is second or third
least unequal country today.
Hungary was doing pretty well from 1968-1989 based on the economic growth data I've been
able to find (although less well than their great years from roughly 2000-2007 or so). The
graph I found barely showed any inflection around 1989 at all. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Darin says: August 11,
2017 at 11:08 pm GMT 100 Words @AP
Last time I was in Sate Hermitage (among other places) I didn't notice any signs of
Bolsheviks "running out" of Tsarist "cultural (art) reserves".
Yes, they did not run out. But the looting was massive, even within the Hermitage.
The Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings in 1930 and 1931 resulted in the departure of some of
the most valuable paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad to
Western museums. Several of the paintings had been in the Hermitage Collection since its
creation by Empress Catherine the Great. About 250 paintings were sold, including masterpieces
by Jan van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, and other important artists. Andrew Mellon
donated the twenty-one paintings he purchased from the Hermitage to the United States
government in 1937, which became the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C.
Otherwise -
Apparently Russian treasures could be bought in American department stores in the 1930s:
https://www.hillwoodmuseum.org/russian-collection
From the 1920s, the Soviet Union had been selling off many of the art treasures it had
confiscated from the church, the imperial family, and the aristocracy in an effort to fund the
new government's industrialization plan. American businessman Armand Hammer and his brother
Victor acquired enormous numbers of these Russian treasures and, in the early 1930s, began to
sell them in American department stores and later in their New York gallery. This (selling of
art) is no crime at all, but reasonable and praiseworthy business decision. USSR in the
1930′s certainly needed tractors, locomotives, machine tools and industrial equipment
more than Rembrandts. If the Tsars sold the art and jewels and invested into industrialization
of the country, there would be no need for revolution.
If you want to talk about "heritage", you might have point about icons, but what makes
Rembrandt and Titian "Russian heritage"? If works of art belong to country where they were
created, then all Rembrandts of the world shall be returned to Netherlands. If works of art
belong to all mankind, what difference it makes whether Rembrandt painting is in museum in
Petersburg or Washington? Read More Replies: @DNC A country
should be able to manufacture trains and tractors without the need to finance them through
sales of priceless works of art. Only a completely bankrupt ideology would consider peddling
Rembrandt for tractor parts as "reasonable and praiseworthy" Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More...
This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments utu says: August 11, 2017 at
11:16 pm GMT@AP
Bolsheviks looted the country.
I was recently at a beautiful museum in the USA full of classic Russian art that
was looted by Bolsheviks and sold for cheap to foreigners.
You cannot have what Soviet people used to have in looted country .
You had a country of mostly Europeans, poorer than all of the non-commie European
ones. You did however manage to sink some places upon whom you imposed your system, such as
Czechia or eastern Germany, down closer to your level. Good job.
I just pointed that so called left is not left.
So called left is not left, as 21st century is not early 20th.
You do not even mention great theft and looting of Russia
"And in America they persecute blacks." You are too predictable.
Russia was looted in the 1990s by...the flower of Soviet society, the Soviet elite and their
children. "And in America they persecute blacks."
LOL, I vaguely remember this as an old joke. But it's true the rhetoric of some USSR orphans
and nostalgists here at unz.com sometimes resembles this joke. Read More Replies: @Andrei
Martyanov
But it's true the rhetoric of some USSR orphans
You have no idea what meetings in support of Angela Davis were, LOL! ;-) Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Andrei Martyanov says:
WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
11:26 pm GMT@utu"And in
America they persecute blacks."
LOL, I vaguely remember this as an old joke. But it's true the rhetoric of some USSR orphans
and nostalgists here at unz.com sometimes resembles this joke.
But it's true the rhetoric of some USSR orphans
You have no idea what meetings in support of Angela Davis were, LOL! Read More Replies:
@iffen I don't
get your point.
She, and others were American commies that were used by the Soviets. Whether they were okay
with this or ignorant of it is a factual matter than lends itself to investigation. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Darin says: August 11,
2017 at 11:28 pm GMT 100 Words @German_reader
Living standards in East Germany in the 1980s were really pretty meh compared to the west
though. Most private households didn't even own a telephone, and you had to wait years to get
one of those crappy Trabant cars. Housing also wasn't great from what I've heard. And
that's just the material conditions, the political repression and the socially corrosive
effects of the state maintaining a vast network of informers obviously weren't conducive to
general wellbeing either.
It's true that quite a few East Germans later became somewhat nostalgic for the GDR era, given
how badly handled the transition was and the mass unemployment of the 1990s which blighted the
lives of millions of East Germans (somewhat similar in some ways to events in Russia, though
obviously the situation there was much worse and more traumatic). But one shouldn't have too
rosy a view of the GDR or other Eastern bloc states because of the manifest defects of today's
West. East German Stasi spying on 1/3 of population was German efficiency run amok, objectively
useless waste or resources. It made no difference at all for the survival of the regime.
In Czechoslovakia, next door country with comparable size population, the secret police watched
about 60,000 people (i.e. VIP's and active dissidents), and it lasted about week longer than
DDR. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display
All Comments German_reader says:
August 11, 2017 at
11:28 pm GMT@utuThe
Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold and
cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Could you recommend a reading material on the subject? Thanks. There's a book by McMeekin
about this subject:
(no idea how good it is, haven't read it myself, and McMeekin seems to be somewhat
controversial). Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments Darin says: August 11,
2017 at 11:31 pm GMT@utuThe
Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold and
cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Could you recommend a reading material on the subject? Thanks. Sean McMeekin: History's
Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks
You have no idea what meetings in support of Angela Davis were, LOL! ;-) I don't
get your point.
She, and others were American commies that were used by the Soviets. Whether they were okay
with this or ignorant of it is a factual matter than lends itself to investigation. Read More
Replies: @Andrei
Martyanov
She, and others were American commies that were used by the Soviets. Whether they were okay
with this or ignorant of it is a factual matter than lends itself to investigation.
What's not to get here? It was a joke, apart from being a commie, she was also a
black activist and by the end of 1970s very many Soviets had some good info about specifically
American blacks. By early to mid-1980s it was a common knowledge that blacks in US were
creating problems. What is not understood here is the fact that USSR itself was becoming at
that time a society which valued law--this is, of course, a separate topic, but Russian
attitudes towards blacks in general is very complex, especially when one considers the fact of
Russian cultural icon, Pushkin, being essentially black. So, let's not read in my post more
than is in it. I just wondered if Angela Davis support meetings could have been like that:
https://youtu.be/Lrle0x_DHBM
That would have been, quoting Mike Meyers, a Communist Party;-) Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Andrei Martyanov says:
WebsiteAugust 11, 2017 at
11:57 pm GMT 200 Words @iffen I don't
get your point.
She, and others were American commies that were used by the Soviets. Whether they were okay
with this or ignorant of it is a factual matter than lends itself to investigation.
She, and others were American commies that were used by the Soviets. Whether they were
okay with this or ignorant of it is a factual matter than lends itself to investigation.
What's not to get here? It was a joke, apart from being a commie, she was also a black
activist and by the end of 1970s very many Soviets had some good info about specifically
American blacks. By early to mid-1980s it was a common knowledge that blacks in US were
creating problems. What is not understood here is the fact that USSR itself was becoming at
that time a society which valued law–this is, of course, a separate topic, but Russian
attitudes towards blacks in general is very complex, especially when one considers the fact of
Russian cultural icon, Pushkin, being essentially black. So, let's not read in my post more
than is in it. I just wondered if Angela Davis support meetings could have been like that:
That would have been, quoting Mike Meyers, a Communist Party;-) Read More Replies:
@iffen ? Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments iffen says: August 12,
2017 at 12:24 am GMT@Andrei
Martyanov
She, and others were American commies that were used by the Soviets. Whether they were okay
with this or ignorant of it is a factual matter than lends itself to investigation.
What's not to get here? It was a joke, apart from being a commie, she was also a
black activist and by the end of 1970s very many Soviets had some good info about specifically
American blacks. By early to mid-1980s it was a common knowledge that blacks in US were
creating problems. What is not understood here is the fact that USSR itself was becoming at
that time a society which valued law--this is, of course, a separate topic, but Russian
attitudes towards blacks in general is very complex, especially when one considers the fact of
Russian cultural icon, Pushkin, being essentially black. So, let's not read in my post more
than is in it. I just wondered if Angela Davis support meetings could have been like that:
https://youtu.be/Lrle0x_DHBM
That would have been, quoting Mike Meyers, a Communist Party;-) ? Read More Replies:
@Andrei
Martyanov
?
OK, let's try from the other direction. From Merriam-Webster:
Definition of irony: a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events
and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irony
Now, anyone, I underscore--anyone who lived in the Soviet Union in 1960s and 1970s knew
it--I underscore it again, they all knew it--among shortest anecdotes one of the most popular
was "Communism"--it was about incongruity. Angela Davis was and is, including by association
with Black Panthers movement--a black terrorist. She was NOT what she was portrayed she was in
USSR. And as in this anecdote "Communism", she became a definition of irony--being a result of
complete incongruity between what was expected (anticipated) to be and what she really was. In
effect, USSR was supporting a terrorist, while later everyone learned that she was a terrorist.
Listen, if my manuscript gets accepted for publication (there is some publisher who is
"fascinated" by it WebsiteAugust 12, 2017 at
12:45 am GMT 200 Words @iffen ?
?
OK, let's try from the other direction. From Merriam-Webster:
Definition of irony: a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events
and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity
Now, anyone, I underscore–anyone who lived in the Soviet Union in 1960s and 1970s knew
it–I underscore it again, they all knew it–among shortest anecdotes one of the most
popular was "Communism"–it was about incongruity. Angela Davis was and is, including by
association with Black Panthers movement–a black terrorist. She was NOT what she was
portrayed she was in USSR. And as in this anecdote "Communism", she became a definition of
irony–being a result of complete incongruity between what was expected (anticipated) to
be and what she really was. In effect, USSR was supporting a terrorist, while later everyone
learned that she was a terrorist. Listen, if my manuscript gets accepted for publication (there
is some publisher who is "fascinated" by it, by Tuesday I hope to know ) I elaborate there on
this issue. The reason you cannot understand me is precisely a complete ignorance in US on the
Soviet realities of 1970s and 198os. Read More LOL: Sergey Krieger Replies:
@iffen Well,
let's hope you get a good editor.
I know that there are a lot of Russkies here, so maybe one of them got the joke.
I was here in the US, not the USSR.
She was a big deal.
Terrorism was a small deal, in fact and actuality, but gigantic in propaganda value.
Google her name, ten or twenty hits for speaker.
She makes big bucks for speaking today. (More than you or me.) , @Sergey Krieger
Irony definition is very subtle. My heard hurts. I would definitely prefer to have some sense
of humor to reading the said definitions. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments inertial says: August 12, 2017 at
12:50 am GMT 100 Words @Anatoly KarlinWe've been
through this . :)
The more – indeed, only – relevant question: What percentage of schoolchildren
could do the problems in it? (relative to counterparts in the West)
It's not like there aren't any programs for especially gifted US schoolchildren.
Somehow Russians produce a lot of state of the art technology without getting all those
awards.
Not that much, and their share is declining:
https://www.natureindex.com/annual-tables/2016/country/all
Wedged between Taiwan and Belgium. Pretty sad.
Russia is legitimately strong in a few specific spheres like nuclear power and military
technology. In many other spheres (e.g. pretty much the entirety of biotech) it is a minnow.
Skanavi was used in elite math schools but those problems are far from Skanavi. These are
precisely the kind of problems we were doing in my non-elite prole school. I remember them.
What percentage of schoolchildren could solve problems like that? Great majority, after some
training. They are not that hard. Read More Replies: @Andrei
Martyanov
They are not that hard.
In Soviet NON-elite schools trigonometric identities were solved very often for
fun and on speed among students. However, today's (and yesterday's) entrance exams problems in
Math or Physics for such institutions like MGTU, MGU or MAI, among many others, may put some
MIT undergraduate students in stupor. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments iffen says: August 12,
2017 at 1:00 am GMT 100 Words @Andrei
Martyanov
?
OK, let's try from the other direction. From Merriam-Webster:
Definition of irony: a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events
and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irony
Now, anyone, I underscore--anyone who lived in the Soviet Union in 1960s and 1970s knew
it--I underscore it again, they all knew it--among shortest anecdotes one of the most popular
was "Communism"--it was about incongruity. Angela Davis was and is, including by association
with Black Panthers movement--a black terrorist. She was NOT what she was portrayed she was in
USSR. And as in this anecdote "Communism", she became a definition of irony--being a result of
complete incongruity between what was expected (anticipated) to be and what she really was. In
effect, USSR was supporting a terrorist, while later everyone learned that she was a terrorist.
Listen, if my manuscript gets accepted for publication (there is some publisher who is
"fascinated" by it, by Tuesday I hope to know ) I elaborate there on this issue. The reason you
cannot understand me is precisely a complete ignorance in US on the Soviet realities of 1970s
and 198os. Well, let's hope you get a good editor.
I know that there are a lot of Russkies here, so maybe one of them got the joke.
I was here in the US, not the USSR.
She was a big deal.
Terrorism was a small deal, in fact and actuality, but gigantic in propaganda value.
Google her name, ten or twenty hits for speaker.
She makes big bucks for speaking today. (More than you or me.) Read More Replies: @German_reader
She was a big deal.
Also in East Germany, they made a big deal of American racism and campaigned for
Davis' freedom (kind of funny for a state that just shot citizens attempting to leave). I just
googled her...apparently she's still spewing her poison among German lefties and campaigning
for the rights of "refugees".
The West was too soft and liberal during the Cold war, much harsher measures should have been
taken against subversives. , @Anon
Google her name, ten or twenty hits for speaker.
Google her name
Google
You too belong in the Goolag. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Andrei Martyanov says:
WebsiteAugust 12, 2017 at
1:08 am GMT 100 Words @inertial
Skanavi was used in elite math schools but those problems are far from Skanavi. These are
precisely the kind of problems we were doing in my non-elite prole school. I remember them.
What percentage of schoolchildren could solve problems like that? Great majority, after some
training. They are not that hard.
They are not that hard.
In Soviet NON-elite schools trigonometric identities were solved very often for fun and on
speed among students. However, today's (and yesterday's) entrance exams problems in Math or
Physics for such institutions like MGTU, MGU or MAI, among many others, may put some MIT
undergraduate students in stupor. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments German_reader says:
August 12, 2017 at
1:15 am GMT 100 Words @iffen Well,
let's hope you get a good editor.
I know that there are a lot of Russkies here, so maybe one of them got the joke.
I was here in the US, not the USSR.
She was a big deal.
Terrorism was a small deal, in fact and actuality, but gigantic in propaganda value.
Google her name, ten or twenty hits for speaker.
She makes big bucks for speaking today. (More than you or me.)
She was a big deal.
Also in East Germany, they made a big deal of American racism and campaigned for Davis'
freedom (kind of funny for a state that just shot citizens attempting to leave). I just googled
her apparently she's still spewing her poison among German lefties and campaigning for the
rights of "refugees".
The West was too soft and liberal during the Cold war, much harsher measures should have been
taken against subversives. Read More Replies: @iffen I have
assumed that you are (were) West German. How could you know what was a big deal in E. Germany
in the 60's? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display
All Comments iffen says: August 12,
2017 at 1:23 am GMT@German_reader
She was a big deal.
Also in East Germany, they made a big deal of American racism and campaigned for
Davis' freedom (kind of funny for a state that just shot citizens attempting to leave). I just
googled her...apparently she's still spewing her poison among German lefties and campaigning
for the rights of "refugees".
The West was too soft and liberal during the Cold war, much harsher measures should have been
taken against subversives. I have assumed that you are (were) West German. How could you know
what was a big deal in E. Germany in the 60′s? Read More Replies: @German_reader
I wasn't referring to personal experience (which in this case I'm much too young for anyway);
but it's well-known that the East Germans in the early 1970s had a really huge solidarity
campaign for Angela Davis. She visited there several times in the 1970s and 1980s, being
greeted by mass rallies. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments German_reader says:
August 12, 2017 at
2:08 am GMT 100 Words @iffen I have
assumed that you are (were) West German. How could you know what was a big deal in E. Germany
in the 60's? I wasn't referring to personal experience (which in this case I'm much too young
for anyway); but it's well-known that the East Germans in the early 1970s had a really huge
solidarity campaign for Angela Davis. She visited there several times in the 1970s and 1980s,
being greeted by mass rallies. Read More Replies: @Darin Of
course you know that people on mass rallies were there cheering because they were brought there
and told to cheer, without knowing and caring what are they cheering for. Angela Davis might
fall for the charade, but you sure know better. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Hector_St_Clare says:
August 12, 2017 at
2:08 am GMT 100 Words @utu Life in
DDR in 1970s and 1980s was pretty decent. Perhaps the highest standard of living in the Soviet
Block. If people did not know that the West exist and that you can get still more goodies there
they would be very happy to be like East Germany.
The planned economy worked there pretty good. It took Germans to show it. They had problems
with energy supplies when USSR reduced export to Germany and had to start to use very
inefficient and very polluting brown coal.
Probably Czechoslovakia and Hungary were the next in terms of socialist economy success in
1970's. Poland was always very uneven and unequal country where plan economy did not work and
where private sector still existed with lots of corruption and criminal shenanigans that let
some people got rich also in the state apparatus. Czechoslovakia is interesting: both halves
made the transition to modern capitalism without all that much increase in inequality.
Czechoslovakia was the second least economically unequal country in the world before 1989 (the
GDR was lowest) and the Czech Republic is second or third least unequal country today.
Hungary was doing pretty well from 1968-1989 based on the economic growth data I've been
able to find (although less well than their great years from roughly 2000-2007 or so). The
graph I found barely showed any inflection around 1989 at all. Read More Replies: @utu Hungary
was doing well under Kadar's goulash communism. And Czechs always were doing well. They had the
best industrial base, a leftover of Austro-Hungarian empire. Better than Austria. Before WWII
standards of living in Bohemia and Moravia part were one of the highest in Europe.
During communism they had one of the highest rates of summer homes (dacha- often just a
shack) in Europe. They have and always had the lowest religiosity in Europe.
They clearly have pretty smart and well connected to centers of power in the West political
elites. They were the only country in Europe that not only avoided fighting against Hitler but
also for Hitler unlike Hungary. The occupation by Germany there was the mildest because there
was zero resistance. They seem to be one of the most pragmatic nations. They unlike Poles can't
be manipulated by invocation of honor and other imponderabilia. They will not resits but then
they may take awful revenge for the indignity they suffered by not resisting. So watch your
back when they regain power as Germans have found out in 1945.
After 1989 they did not fall for neoliberalism scam that lead to deindustrialization which
happened to Poland and Hungary. Hungary managed to snap out of it under Orban or at least is
trying. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Darin says: August 12,
2017 at 2:17 am GMT@German_reader
I wasn't referring to personal experience (which in this case I'm much too young for anyway);
but it's well-known that the East Germans in the early 1970s had a really huge solidarity
campaign for Angela Davis. She visited there several times in the 1970s and 1980s, being
greeted by mass rallies. Of course you know that people on mass rallies were there cheering
because they were brought there and told to cheer, without knowing and caring what are they
cheering for. Angela Davis might fall for the charade, but you sure know better. Read More
Replies: @German_reader
That's a good point, though I suppose at least a few of the people at the rallies did buy the
official propaganda (there was a non-trivial number of true believers in the GDR).
But Angela Davis apparently believes even today that it was all entirely due to authentic
enthusiasm for her cause...which must be a sign of pretty stunning stupidity/delusion. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments German_reader says:
August 12, 2017 at
2:23 am GMT 100 Words @Darin Of
course you know that people on mass rallies were there cheering because they were brought there
and told to cheer, without knowing and caring what are they cheering for. Angela Davis might
fall for the charade, but you sure know better. That's a good point, though I suppose at least
a few of the people at the rallies did buy the official propaganda (there was a non-trivial
number of true believers in the GDR).
But Angela Davis apparently believes even today that it was all entirely due to authentic
enthusiasm for her cause which must be a sign of pretty stunning stupidity/delusion. Read More
Replies: @iffenBut
Angela Davis apparently believes even today that it was all entirely due to authentic
enthusiasm for her cause which must be a sign of pretty stunning stupidity/delusion.
There was "authentic enthusiasm" for Davis and others like her in the US and the elite fear
was authentic. She failed to bring her first love, communism, to the US, but seems happy enough
toiling for the elite now. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments utu says: August 12, 2017 at
2:41 am GMT 200 Words @Hector_St_Clare
Czechoslovakia is interesting: both halves made the transition to modern capitalism without all
that much increase in inequality. Czechoslovakia was the second least economically unequal
country in the world before 1989 (the GDR was lowest) and the Czech Republic is second or third
least unequal country today.
Hungary was doing pretty well from 1968-1989 based on the economic growth data I've been
able to find (although less well than their great years from roughly 2000-2007 or so). The
graph I found barely showed any inflection around 1989 at all. Hungary was doing well under
Kadar's goulash communism. And Czechs always were doing well. They had the best industrial
base, a leftover of Austro-Hungarian empire. Better than Austria. Before WWII standards of
living in Bohemia and Moravia part were one of the highest in Europe.
During communism they had one of the highest rates of summer homes (dacha- often just a
shack) in Europe. They have and always had the lowest religiosity in Europe.
They clearly have pretty smart and well connected to centers of power in the West political
elites. They were the only country in Europe that not only avoided fighting against Hitler but
also for Hitler unlike Hungary. The occupation by Germany there was the mildest because there
was zero resistance. They seem to be one of the most pragmatic nations. They unlike Poles can't
be manipulated by invocation of honor and other imponderabilia. They will not resits but then
they may take awful revenge for the indignity they suffered by not resisting. So watch your
back when they regain power as Germans have found out in 1945.
After 1989 they did not fall for neoliberalism scam that lead to deindustrialization which
happened to Poland and Hungary. Hungary managed to snap out of it under Orban or at least is
trying. Read More Replies: @JL This
comment looks like it was written by someone who hasn't read The Good Soldier Svejk. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments 7.62mm says: August 12,
2017 at 2:49 am GMT A Goggle search of "No Such Agency" used to direct its first hit to:
https://www.nsa.gov/
But wasn't it the point? Listen, I get it--you have some accounts to settle with
Soviet Union, hey fine with me, but please do not try to convince me about all ills and good
which USSR was in 1960s through 1980s--I lived there and I experienced a lot of it on very many
levels. Including some about which I am still reluctant to talk much about. I do not treat
seriously most of Russian "nationalist" so called "thinkers"--most of them still don't
understand why people such as Prosvirnin or said Kholmogorov have very bleak political
prospects in Russia. The reason being for them not knowing or realistically experiencing the
Soviet period. Said Kholmogorov, despite being born in 1975, missed, as an adult, realities of
Soviet period. Russia was, is and will remain this very "left"--not in LGBTQXYZ "western"
meaning--nation and there are reasons for that, which are beyond the grasp of people who do not
understand nor can feel continuity (preemstvennost') of the Russian history.Alexandr
Zinovyev--a real thinker of the scale which dwarfs any Kholmogorovs or Solzhentsyns correctly
assessed inevitable, both external and internal, Sovietization of Russia, on a completely new
foundation. In fact, it is happening as I type this--by 2017 by different data from 70 to 75%
of Russia's strategic industries were returned under the control of Russian State. Overwhelming
majority of Russian people, including, what is most inspiring, many youngsters are loving it.
Just one example. So how much of a hold did Jews have over the Soviet Union? There's a lot of
propaganda on the Net pushing the story that they were running the show entirely. Where should
I look to find the truth? Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
Anon Disclaimer says: August 12,
2017 at 6:35 am GMT@iffen Well,
let's hope you get a good editor.
I know that there are a lot of Russkies here, so maybe one of them got the joke.
I was here in the US, not the USSR.
She was a big deal.
Terrorism was a small deal, in fact and actuality, but gigantic in propaganda value.
Google her name, ten or twenty hits for speaker.
She makes big bucks for speaking today. (More than you or me.)
Google her name, ten or twenty hits for speaker.
Google her name
Google
You too belong in the Goolag. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments DNC says: August 12, 2017 at
8:27 am GMT@Darin This
(selling of art) is no crime at all, but reasonable and praiseworthy business decision. USSR in
the 1930's certainly needed tractors, locomotives, machine tools and industrial equipment more
than Rembrandts. If the Tsars sold the art and jewels and invested into industrialization of
the country, there would be no need for revolution.
If you want to talk about "heritage", you might have point about icons, but what makes
Rembrandt and Titian "Russian heritage"? If works of art belong to country where they were
created, then all Rembrandts of the world shall be returned to Netherlands. If works of art
belong to all mankind, what difference it makes whether Rembrandt painting is in museum in
Petersburg or Washington? A country should be able to manufacture trains and tractors without
the need to finance them through sales of priceless works of art. Only a completely bankrupt
ideology would consider peddling Rembrandt for tractor parts as "reasonable and praiseworthy"
Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Anatoly Karlin says:
WebsiteAugust 12, 2017 at
8:33 am GMT@utuThe
Bolsheviks financed a huge part of their war efforts off the proceeds of Tsarist gold and
cultural (art) reserves until they ran out around 1922.
Could you recommend a reading material on the subject? Thanks. Yes, I was going to mention
Sean McMeekin as well.
Apart from the book which two people here have already referenced, he recently published a
history of the Russian revolution which incorporates his research on the art looting. Read More
Replies: @utu Thanks. I
will look it up.
Is this Игорь Бунич.
Золото партии by Bunich
any good? Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments JL says: August 12, 2017 at
10:04 am GMT@utu Hungary
was doing well under Kadar's goulash communism. And Czechs always were doing well. They had the
best industrial base, a leftover of Austro-Hungarian empire. Better than Austria. Before WWII
standards of living in Bohemia and Moravia part were one of the highest in Europe.
During communism they had one of the highest rates of summer homes (dacha- often just a
shack) in Europe. They have and always had the lowest religiosity in Europe.
They clearly have pretty smart and well connected to centers of power in the West political
elites. They were the only country in Europe that not only avoided fighting against Hitler but
also for Hitler unlike Hungary. The occupation by Germany there was the mildest because there
was zero resistance. They seem to be one of the most pragmatic nations. They unlike Poles can't
be manipulated by invocation of honor and other imponderabilia. They will not resits but then
they may take awful revenge for the indignity they suffered by not resisting. So watch your
back when they regain power as Germans have found out in 1945.
After 1989 they did not fall for neoliberalism scam that lead to deindustrialization which
happened to Poland and Hungary. Hungary managed to snap out of it under Orban or at least is
trying. This comment looks like it was written by someone who hasn't read The Good Soldier
Svejk. Read More Replies: @Anon Novels
are not history, certainly not military farces regarding the history of industrialization. ,
@utu Actually,
I read The Good Soldier Svejk several times. But what exactly in my comment does not jive with
the image of Czechs you got from Svejk? How much more you now about Czechs beyond Svejk?
Is this very Svejkian?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn5vHIKSlAk Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments iffen says: August 12,
2017 at 11:05 am GMT 200 Words Leaving aside the fact that I am apparently too dense to get
AM's Angela Davis joke, I want to tell my own.
In the 60's the ruling elite feared Russia, communism, socialism and black rebellion and
most of all they feared that Russia would catch the wave of those movements for a long and
successful ride. Angela Davis was viewed as a mortal threat by the elite because of her
ideology and politics and its promotion. Governor Ronald Reagan tried to get her fired from her
academic position in California. During this time she scrapped along on fellowships,
internships and academic positions secured for her by fellow travelers, not to mention
contributions of leftist organizations partially or wholly funded by Russia. The ruling elite
made sure that everyone, and I mean everyone, knew that Angela Davis was a real
threat.
Today, like an aging rock star, she scrapes along on speaker fees.
Okay, now the punch line.
She promotes the ruling elite ideology of SJW themes like intersectionality, etc.,
etc., blah, blah. The ruling elite no longer fears socialism. They no longer fear black
rebellion, in fact, that have co-opted black rebellion and manipulate it for their own benefit
and purposes.
Yet, they are still deathly afraid of Russia. Read More Replies: @Anatoly
Karlin
She promotes the ruling elite ideology of SJW themes like intersectionality, etc., etc.,
blah, blah.
https://twitter.com/xychelsea/status/896235475853357060 Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments iffen says: August 12,
2017 at 11:26 am GMT 100 Words @German_reader
That's a good point, though I suppose at least a few of the people at the rallies did buy the
official propaganda (there was a non-trivial number of true believers in the GDR).
But Angela Davis apparently believes even today that it was all entirely due to authentic
enthusiasm for her cause...which must be a sign of pretty stunning stupidity/delusion. But
Angela Davis apparently believes even today that it was all entirely due to authentic
enthusiasm for her cause which must be a sign of pretty stunning stupidity/delusion.
There was "authentic enthusiasm" for Davis and others like her in the US and the elite fear
was authentic. She failed to bring her first love, communism, to the US, but seems happy enough
toiling for the elite now. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Anatoly Karlin says:
WebsiteAugust 12, 2017 at
11:41 am GMT@iffen Leaving
aside the fact that I am apparently too dense to get AM's Angela Davis joke, I want to tell my
own.
In the 60's the ruling elite feared Russia, communism, socialism and black rebellion and
most of all they feared that Russia would catch the wave of those movements for a long and
successful ride. Angela Davis was viewed as a mortal threat by the elite because of her
ideology and politics and its promotion. Governor Ronald Reagan tried to get her fired from her
academic position in California. During this time she scrapped along on fellowships,
internships and academic positions secured for her by fellow travelers, not to mention
contributions of leftist organizations partially or wholly funded by Russia. The ruling elite
made sure that everyone, and I mean everyone, knew that Angela Davis was a real
threat.
Today, like an aging rock star, she scrapes along on speaker fees.
Okay, now the punch line.
She promotes the ruling elite ideology of SJW themes like intersectionality, etc.,
etc., blah, blah. The ruling elite no longer fears socialism. They no longer fear black
rebellion, in fact, that have co-opted black rebellion and manipulate it for their own benefit
and purposes.
Yet, they are still deathly afraid of Russia.
She promotes the ruling elite ideology of SJW themes like intersectionality, etc., etc.,
blah, blah.
hey FASCISTS
Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread
Display All Comments
Anon Disclaimer says: August 12,
2017 at 11:51 am GMT@JL This
comment looks like it was written by someone who hasn't read The Good Soldier Svejk. Novels are
not history, certainly not military farces regarding the history of industrialization. Read
More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments Sowhat says: August 12,
2017 at 12:57 pm GMT 100 Words @Alden Dream on
it would take a Henry 8 Lenin and Trotsky type revolution to get rid of affirmative action.
If it ever happens, the first thing to do would be to put every judge and their families in
some kind of detention center, close down every state and federal courthouse and completely re
write the constitution to give all power to the elected executive and legislative branches.
Every woman and minority organization would have to be treated the way Henry treated the
monasteries and Lenin and Trotsky treated the Russian counterrevolution.
I'd say only White men with 4 grandparents born in the USA be allowed to vote, but the damage
was done between 1964 to 1973 or so by native born American White men.
The feminazis are just fronts for the cannibal capitalists who used them to destroy the
private sector unions, lower wages for everyone and create a docile work force eager to work 80
hours a week for 40 hours wages.
I'd love to be the commissar in charge of ending affirmative action and punishing those who
created and enforce it.
I'd say only White men with 4 grandparents born in the USA be allowed to vote, but the
damage was done between 1964 to 1973 or so by native born American White men.
Guilty as charged As many immature, uneducated Whites in the sixties, I too was played like
a fiddle. If I only knew then what I know now Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Anatoly Karlin says:
WebsiteAugust 12, 2017 at
1:27 pm GMT 100 Words @nickels This
guy is ok, but I still prefer the 'obscurantism' of Dugin.
There is little point arguing from a 'common sense' stance against the leftists.
This is war, not an argument.
Liberalism must be destroyed.
This guy is ok, but I still prefer the 'obscurantism' of Dugin.
I'll reveal a terrible secret to you: Dugin is not actually a nationalist. He is the Russian
equivalent of a Western multiculturalist.
I'll reveal a terrible secret to you: Dugin is not actually a nationalist.
Nor is he an "intellectual"--ability to use many big words, and "knowing"
Heidegger, in demagoguery is not a sign of anything other than of being extremely full of sh.t.
Which is precisely the case with Dugin. Having said all that--ANY discussion on Russia's
history without profound knowledge of the warfare is a waste of time. Without it--it is already
Gabriel Charmes' and Jeune Ecole all over again. Averchenko has a superb (I use it often) short
story The Specialist In Military Affairs. Applies here across the board (with some minor
exceptions). Actually, Edik Limonov has a superb expose on Dugin. , @ussr andy
He even denies the concept of race.
last thing Russia needs is a cold race war (not to be confused with cold war race,
lol), like in America. IMO. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments utu says: August 12, 2017 at
4:29 pm GMT@Anatoly Karlin
Yes, I was going to mention Sean McMeekin as well.
Apart from the book which two people here have already referenced, he recently published a
history of the Russian revolution which incorporates his research on the art looting. Thanks. I
will look it up.
This guy is ok, but I still prefer the 'obscurantism' of Dugin.
I'll reveal a terrible secret to you: Dugin is not actually a nationalist. He is
the Russian equivalent of a Western multiculturalist.
He even denies the concept of race.
The Alt Right's infatuation with him is utterly bizarre.
I'll reveal a terrible secret to you: Dugin is not actually a nationalist.
Nor is he an "intellectual"–ability to use many big words, and "knowing" Heidegger, in
demagoguery is not a sign of anything other than of being extremely full of sh.t. Which is
precisely the case with Dugin. Having said all that–ANY discussion on Russia's history
without profound knowledge of the warfare is a waste of time. Without it–it is already
Gabriel Charmes' and Jeune Ecole all over again. Averchenko has a superb (I use it often) short
story The Specialist In Military Affairs. Applies here across the board (with some minor
exceptions). Actually, Edik Limonov has a superb expose on Dugin. Read More Replies: @Sergey Krieger
But he got the beard! The beard you see. Just like Solzhenicin. It looks like every hack thinks
that adding beard increases one's credibility. Correlation is unmistakable . Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Sergey Krieger says:
August 12, 2017 at
4:50 pm GMT 200 Words @AP
You say USSR was poorer than other European states. Do you really have a clue how much it
costs in the West to pay for everything Soviet people were having as a right?
I'd been in western Europe and visited the USSR in 1990. USSR was much poorer than
any western European country, the USA or Canada. It wasn't a third world country, but that's a
very low bar.
Free education all level and better than in the west, kindergartens $1500 per month here,
free medicine and damn good at that, free accommodation, annual month paid vacation,
guaranteed job and retirement pay.
Materially speaking Soviet middle class lived liked poor Americans on
medicaid, with free public housing, free need-based tuition, etc. One difference - unlike
residents of American housing projects, Soviets could afford free vacations to sub-Western
resorts, I'll give you that. But then middle class Soviets drove worse (or no) cars, and had
worse TVs and radios then even poor Americans. There were some Soviet families even living in
communal apartments.
Obviously culturally it was a different story from poor Americans. But your argument is with
respect to material conditions. By that measure - in the end, performance of the USSR was
pathetic for a high IQ country of white people.
There is always bad people and unfortunately their time came. However, they were as much real
Communists as I am ballerina
Yeltsin who presided over the looting spree of the 1990s was elected as a full
member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1981. As
for the looters - Berezovsky was head of a department in the Institute of Control Sciences of
the USSR Academy of Sciences. Khodorkovsky was deputy head of Komsomol (the Communist Youth
League) at his university, the D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia. Gaidar
was from a Soviet elite family and in the 1980s an editor of the CPSU ideological journal
Communist. Potanin, another one from an elite commie family, attended the faculty of the
International economic relations at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO),
which groomed students for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Upon graduating MGIMO in 1983, he
followed in his father's footsteps and went to work for the FTO "Soyuzpromexport" with the
Ministry of Foreign trade of the Soviet Union. Etc. Etc.
Sure, none of these members of the Soviet elite, the top human products of the Soviet system
- were "real Communists." 1990 not the best time frankly. How is western middle class is doing
now? Again, you ignored my points and continued pressing own agenda. Soviet people basically
were free, provided with all things necessary for fullfilling, happy and protected life which
cost them nothing, while western middle class producing outword looks of prosperity was
actually I'll iving life of stress, uncertainty and unhappiness. Hence, how is western middle
class doing now? Up to nostrils in debt to mantain illusion of prosperity with no room for
mistake. Many are no longer middle class. 50 million in USA alone on food help. Drud and
various psycho meds in use to just get sort of temporary relief. What price one would put on
having what we had? I would say it is priceless. After 1985 fifth column took control of CPSU
central commity and top media. What was after 1986 hardly can be called Soviet Union , same as
providing lines in stores in 1991 is not representation of what we really had before government
Gorbachov and his inner cycle destabilized and destroyed my country. Without Gorbachov there
would be no Yeltsin who was nothing but opportunist of the worst kind. To be fair comparison
should be made for Brezhnev period which was the most prosperous time Russia ever seen and
things were going in right direction before unworthy people without abilities and merit took
over the power. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments utu says: August 12, 2017 at
5:32 pm GMT@JL This
comment looks like it was written by someone who hasn't read The Good Soldier Svejk. Actually,
I read The Good Soldier Svejk several times. But what exactly in my comment does not jive with
the image of Czechs you got from Svejk? How much more you now about Czechs beyond Svejk?
Is this very Svejkian?
Read More Replies: @German_reader
Interesting...I have a negative opinion of the BBC on the whole, but sometimes they produce
surprisingly frank documentaries about WW2 issues. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments German_reader says:
August 12, 2017 at
5:57 pm GMT@utu Actually,
I read The Good Soldier Svejk several times. But what exactly in my comment does not jive with
the image of Czechs you got from Svejk? How much more you now about Czechs beyond Svejk?
Is this very Svejkian?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn5vHIKSlAk Interesting I have a negative opinion of the BBC on
the whole, but sometimes they produce surprisingly frank documentaries about WW2 issues. Read
More Agree: Dan Hayes Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Sergey Krieger says:
August 12, 2017 at
7:34 pm GMT@Andrei
Martyanov
I'll reveal a terrible secret to you: Dugin is not actually a nationalist.
Nor is he an "intellectual"--ability to use many big words, and "knowing"
Heidegger, in demagoguery is not a sign of anything other than of being extremely full of sh.t.
Which is precisely the case with Dugin. Having said all that--ANY discussion on Russia's
history without profound knowledge of the warfare is a waste of time. Without it--it is already
Gabriel Charmes' and Jeune Ecole all over again. Averchenko has a superb (I use it often) short
story The Specialist In Military Affairs. Applies here across the board (with some minor
exceptions). Actually, Edik Limonov has a superb expose on Dugin. But he got the beard! The
beard you see. Just like Solzhenicin. It looks like every hack thinks that adding beard
increases one's credibility. Correlation is unmistakable . Read More Agree: Andrei Martyanov
Replies: @Anatoly Karlin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqPlpRMg8TY Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Anatoly Karlin says:
WebsiteAugust 12, 2017 at
7:36 pm GMT@Sergey Krieger
But he got the beard! The beard you see. Just like Solzhenicin. It looks like every hack thinks
that adding beard increases one's credibility. Correlation is unmistakable . Read More Replies:
@Serge Krieger
https://youtu.be/D1r3MDIhon8 Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments ussr andy says: August 12, 2017 at
10:59 pm GMT@Anatoly Karlin
This guy is ok, but I still prefer the 'obscurantism' of Dugin.
I'll reveal a terrible secret to you: Dugin is not actually a nationalist. He is
the Russian equivalent of a Western multiculturalist.
He even denies the concept of race.
The Alt Right's infatuation with him is utterly bizarre.
He even denies the concept of race.
last thing Russia needs is a cold race war (not to be confused with cold war race, lol),
like in America. IMO. Read More Agree: utu Replies: @Anatoly
Karlin If you wish to worship an anti-scientific multikulti promoting nutcase who has
successfully marketed himself to the dimmer Western radicals (nobody in Russia itself cares
about Dugin), then be my guest, but I'm more interested in facts and reality. Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Sergey Krieger says:
August 13, 2017 at
12:47 am GMT@Andrei
Martyanov
?
OK, let's try from the other direction. From Merriam-Webster:
Definition of irony: a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events
and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irony
Now, anyone, I underscore--anyone who lived in the Soviet Union in 1960s and 1970s knew
it--I underscore it again, they all knew it--among shortest anecdotes one of the most popular
was "Communism"--it was about incongruity. Angela Davis was and is, including by association
with Black Panthers movement--a black terrorist. She was NOT what she was portrayed she was in
USSR. And as in this anecdote "Communism", she became a definition of irony--being a result of
complete incongruity between what was expected (anticipated) to be and what she really was. In
effect, USSR was supporting a terrorist, while later everyone learned that she was a terrorist.
Listen, if my manuscript gets accepted for publication (there is some publisher who is
"fascinated" by it, by Tuesday I hope to know ) I elaborate there on this issue. The reason you
cannot understand me is precisely a complete ignorance in US on the Soviet realities of 1970s
and 198os. Irony definition is very subtle. My heard hurts. I would definitely prefer to have
some sense of humor to reading the said definitions. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Serge Krieger says:
August 13, 2017 at
1:20 am GMT@Anatoly Karlin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqPlpRMg8TY Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments Anatoly Karlin says:
WebsiteAugust 13, 2017 at
3:53 pm GMT@ussr andy
He even denies the concept of race.
last thing Russia needs is a cold race war (not to be confused with cold war race,
lol), like in America. IMO. If you wish to worship an anti-scientific multikulti promoting
nutcase who has successfully marketed himself to the dimmer Western radicals (nobody in Russia
itself cares about Dugin), then be my guest, but I'm more interested in facts and reality. Read
More Replies: @ussr andy um I
don't worship Dugin, if only for the reason I don't know much about him (he was on Red Ice and
Alex Jones once, that's all I remember) and yeah, he's a bit of a self-promoter and an
obscurantist.
I'm more interested in facts and reality.
ditto, but I think everything over and above the narrow population-genetic
definition of race are American hang-ups due to America's history as a bi-racial slave-holding
settler colony. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread
Display All Comments ussr andy says: August 13, 2017 at
9:37 pm GMT 100 Words @Anatoly Karlin
If you wish to worship an anti-scientific multikulti promoting nutcase who has successfully
marketed himself to the dimmer Western radicals (nobody in Russia itself cares about Dugin),
then be my guest, but I'm more interested in facts and reality. um I don't worship Dugin, if
only for the reason I don't know much about him (he was on Red Ice and Alex Jones once, that's
all I remember) and yeah, he's a bit of a self-promoter and an obscurantist.
I'm more interested in facts and reality.
ditto, but I think everything over and above the narrow population-genetic definition of
race are American hang-ups due to America's history as a bi-racial slave-holding settler
colony. Read More Replies: @ussr andy
American hang-ups
I don't know why Dugin even went there. That'd be like an American taking a stand
on Russo-Chukchi internal relations.
What about Russia needs the concept of race with all the attendant baggage, rather than,
say, ethnicity? , @utuI think
everything over and above the narrow population-genetic definition of race are American
hang-ups due to America's history as a bi-racial slave-holding settler colony.
Absolutely. This is Anglo-American construct. Being white it was something Southerners
talked about. This construct was foreign to normal Europeans who were not slave drivers. 19
century European immigrants to America did not have racial identity. Most of Europeans still do
not have racial identity. But this will change with the influx of immigrants if the influx
continues. Just as it changed for Irish, Italian and Polish ethnic neighborhoods in Northern
cities when they became forcefully integrated and Blacks started moving because of various
government housing programs. See E. Michael Jones "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as
Ethnic Cleansing."
Unfortunately Karlin got infected with this toxic heresy of race. Are we suppose to be
learning from the slave drivers? We in cultures and countries who never practiced it? No, we do
not need their racial identity constructs. The emphasis should be on the traditional ethnic and
national culture and the fact some groups are not assimilable because of their incompatible
cultures. Your culture is your true and the only identity. You are who you are because of your
culture and not because of your race. Race does not make you into anything.
Most importantly Blacks can't assimilate not because of what is under their skin or in their
head (like low IQ) but because of their skin color. Yes, it is simple like that. To assimilate
you must start practicing mimicry. Mimicry is the most critical part of assimilation. That's
why Jews were successful in assimilating into Western societies and cultures. They were like
other, like majority or at least pretended to be and others could be fooled by it. Blacks
cannot do it. Blacks can never forget they are black. And you can't forget they are black. Thus
the mimicry is impossible. So there will always be otherness and separateness. Yes, it is skin
deep but it is enough. And with otherness and separateness a harmonious society is not
possible. The reason that Blacks are a problem in America is because they are black and not
because they have low IQ. There is equally large if not larger white sub-population in the US
with as low IQ like Blacks. You could call them Wiggers. But this sub-population is integrated.
And Blacks cannot integrate because their skin color is black which forces them to have
separate identity and sub-culture. Karlin and his mentors in Ulster Institute and Pioneer Fund
can shove their IQ bs up theirs. This is not about racial IQ. It is about skin color. The
bottom line is to stop letting people who are different then you into your country. America is
too far gone. The birth defect of slavery won't be erased. Russia also pays or will pay for its
imperial appetites when it swallowed too many other peoples. Actually she already paid for
swallowing Poland in 18 century with its poison pill, the Jews that gave her the hecatomb of
Bolshevik revolution from which she has never recovered. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments ussr andy says: August 13, 2017 at
9:48 pm GMT@ussr andy um I
don't worship Dugin, if only for the reason I don't know much about him (he was on Red Ice and
Alex Jones once, that's all I remember) and yeah, he's a bit of a self-promoter and an
obscurantist.
I'm more interested in facts and reality.
ditto, but I think everything over and above the narrow population-genetic
definition of race are American hang-ups due to America's history as a bi-racial slave-holding
settler colony.
American hang-ups
I don't know why Dugin even went there. That'd be like an American taking a stand on
Russo-Chukchi internal relations.
What about Russia needs the concept of race with all the attendant baggage, rather than,
say, ethnicity? Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments utu says: August 14, 2017 at
5:49 am GMT 500 Words @ussr andy um I
don't worship Dugin, if only for the reason I don't know much about him (he was on Red Ice and
Alex Jones once, that's all I remember) and yeah, he's a bit of a self-promoter and an
obscurantist.
I'm more interested in facts and reality.
ditto, but I think everything over and above the narrow population-genetic
definition of race are American hang-ups due to America's history as a bi-racial slave-holding
settler colony. I think everything over and above the narrow population-genetic definition
of race are American hang-ups due to America's history as a bi-racial slave-holding settler
colony.
Absolutely. This is Anglo-American construct. Being white it was something Southerners
talked about. This construct was foreign to normal Europeans who were not slave drivers. 19
century European immigrants to America did not have racial identity. Most of Europeans still do
not have racial identity. But this will change with the influx of immigrants if the influx
continues. Just as it changed for Irish, Italian and Polish ethnic neighborhoods in Northern
cities when they became forcefully integrated and Blacks started moving because of various
government housing programs. See E. Michael Jones "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as
Ethnic Cleansing."
Unfortunately Karlin got infected with this toxic heresy of race. Are we suppose to be
learning from the slave drivers? We in cultures and countries who never practiced it? No, we do
not need their racial identity constructs. The emphasis should be on the traditional ethnic and
national culture and the fact some groups are not assimilable because of their incompatible
cultures. Your culture is your true and the only identity. You are who you are because of your
culture and not because of your race. Race does not make you into anything.
Most importantly Blacks can't assimilate not because of what is under their skin or in their
head (like low IQ) but because of their skin color. Yes, it is simple like that. To assimilate
you must start practicing mimicry. Mimicry is the most critical part of assimilation. That's
why Jews were successful in assimilating into Western societies and cultures. They were like
other, like majority or at least pretended to be and others could be fooled by it. Blacks
cannot do it. Blacks can never forget they are black. And you can't forget they are black. Thus
the mimicry is impossible. So there will always be otherness and separateness. Yes, it is skin
deep but it is enough. And with otherness and separateness a harmonious society is not
possible. The reason that Blacks are a problem in America is because they are black and not
because they have low IQ. There is equally large if not larger white sub-population in the US
with as low IQ like Blacks. You could call them Wiggers. But this sub-population is integrated.
And Blacks cannot integrate because their skin color is black which forces them to have
separate identity and sub-culture. Karlin and his mentors in Ulster Institute and Pioneer Fund
can shove their IQ bs up theirs. This is not about racial IQ. It is about skin color. The
bottom line is to stop letting people who are different then you into your country. America is
too far gone. The birth defect of slavery won't be erased. Russia also pays or will pay for its
imperial appetites when it swallowed too many other peoples. Actually she already paid for
swallowing Poland in 18 century with its poison pill, the Jews that gave her the hecatomb of
Bolshevik revolution from which she has never recovered. Read More Replies: @Anatoly
Karlin Drivel. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread
Display All Comments Anatoly Karlin says:
WebsiteAugust 14, 2017 at
10:23 pm GMT@utuI think
everything over and above the narrow population-genetic definition of race are American
hang-ups due to America's history as a bi-racial slave-holding settler colony.
Absolutely. This is Anglo-American construct. Being white it was something Southerners
talked about. This construct was foreign to normal Europeans who were not slave drivers. 19
century European immigrants to America did not have racial identity. Most of Europeans still do
not have racial identity. But this will change with the influx of immigrants if the influx
continues. Just as it changed for Irish, Italian and Polish ethnic neighborhoods in Northern
cities when they became forcefully integrated and Blacks started moving because of various
government housing programs. See E. Michael Jones "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as
Ethnic Cleansing."
Unfortunately Karlin got infected with this toxic heresy of race. Are we suppose to be
learning from the slave drivers? We in cultures and countries who never practiced it? No, we do
not need their racial identity constructs. The emphasis should be on the traditional ethnic and
national culture and the fact some groups are not assimilable because of their incompatible
cultures. Your culture is your true and the only identity. You are who you are because of your
culture and not because of your race. Race does not make you into anything.
Most importantly Blacks can't assimilate not because of what is under their skin or in their
head (like low IQ) but because of their skin color. Yes, it is simple like that. To assimilate
you must start practicing mimicry. Mimicry is the most critical part of assimilation. That's
why Jews were successful in assimilating into Western societies and cultures. They were like
other, like majority or at least pretended to be and others could be fooled by it. Blacks
cannot do it. Blacks can never forget they are black. And you can't forget they are black. Thus
the mimicry is impossible. So there will always be otherness and separateness. Yes, it is skin
deep but it is enough. And with otherness and separateness a harmonious society is not
possible. The reason that Blacks are a problem in America is because they are black and not
because they have low IQ. There is equally large if not larger white sub-population in the US
with as low IQ like Blacks. You could call them Wiggers. But this sub-population is integrated.
And Blacks cannot integrate because their skin color is black which forces them to have
separate identity and sub-culture. Karlin and his mentors in Ulster Institute and Pioneer Fund
can shove their IQ bs up theirs. This is not about racial IQ. It is about skin color. The
bottom line is to stop letting people who are different then you into your country. America is
too far gone. The birth defect of slavery won't be erased. Russia also pays or will pay for its
imperial appetites when it swallowed too many other peoples. Actually she already paid for
swallowing Poland in 18 century with its poison pill, the Jews that gave her the hecatomb of
Bolshevik revolution from which she has never recovered. Drivel. Read More Replies: @utuDrivel?
The IQ-ists like yourself underestimate the fact that separate identity formation and the
persistence of this identity is not caused by IQ but by the external phenotype like a skin
color. The separate racial identity groups will not dissolve into one even if there are no IQ
differences between them. This is all about the external phenotype. We all heard since
kindergarten that down below the skin we are all the same. The IQ-ists say it is no so, the
IQ's are different but they agree with the kindergarten teacher that the skin color does not
matter. But I say it does not matter whether we are the same or not under the skin. What really
matters is what is on the surface not what is under the surface. What is on the surface is
responsible for the separate identity creation, separate group and sub-culture creation and
their persistence which leads to polarization resulting in reduced social harmony. In another
words lots of problems that you do not need and that would never appeared in the society with a
uniform external phenotype. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments utu says: August 15, 2017 at
5:37 pm GMT 200 Words @Anatoly Karlin
Drivel. Drivel?
The IQ-ists like yourself underestimate the fact that separate identity formation and the
persistence of this identity is not caused by IQ but by the external phenotype like a skin
color. The separate racial identity groups will not dissolve into one even if there are no IQ
differences between them. This is all about the external phenotype. We all heard since
kindergarten that down below the skin we are all the same. The IQ-ists say it is no so, the
IQ's are different but they agree with the kindergarten teacher that the skin color does not
matter. But I say it does not matter whether we are the same or not under the skin. What really
matters is what is on the surface not what is under the surface. What is on the surface is
responsible for the separate identity creation, separate group and sub-culture creation and
their persistence which leads to polarization resulting in reduced social harmony. In another
words lots of problems that you do not need and that would never appeared in the society with a
uniform external phenotype. Read More Replies: @sinotibetan
Interesting comments. I agree with your observation. Even though it is possible that the mean
IQs of different ethnic groups may indeed be different, it is the external phenotype that is
one of the main determinants of "ethnic identity". Then followed by 'cultural traits' like
language, customs etc. A blond Pole who learns to speak impeccable 'Queen's English' , changes
his name to sound 'English' may assimilate so well that his foreign origin would probably never
be suspected but for a Chinese like me, my "East Asian phenotype" gives away my foreign origin.
On the other hand, if I learn Japanese ways to perfection, I might fool native Japanese I am
one of them, but never can the Polish man do that.
I think the problem with many native "Western" Europeans(or rather their ruling and political
elites) is that they are beholden (or perhaps envious of?) to the success of the USA as the
lone superpower and its economic and technological might. More so with native 'Western'
Europeans than Asians or Africans(although every nation cannot escape the ubiquitous American
influence) because in their mind it was mostly 'white Americans' , kinsmen of their forefathers
, who 'made' America as it is now. I think ideas like the European Union ('United States of
Europe') and multiculturalism and the demonization of nationalism in Europe by the ruling
elites may partially be explained by their desire to usurp American hegemony(by emulating the
USA). Perhaps they actually believe losing their native identities and becoming multiethnic (
eg being 'European' regardless of ethnic origin or country of origin, European nations being
reduced politically to like states within the USA) will make them rulers of a new
superpower.
There is no exceptionalism for any nation...including the USA. It is a young nation in the
process of (multiple) ethnogeneses, so happened it became the lone superpower and most
influential nation. In the process is perhaps the ethnogenesis of a new ethnic group called
'Americans'(the melting pot/assimilation of 'whites'/ Hispanics/blacks/'Asians' in varying
proportions) ...or will there be civil wars and internal strife within this group and other
'non-assimilated 'groups in future or breaking up into multiple 'nations' after internal
strife..who knows?
I think the ruling elites and literati who associate American success with multiethnic society
and blurring of traditional concepts of ethnic identity are making mistaken associations. The
success of America is not because it is multiethnic or plural. Perhaps the reasons for
America's success can be a topic of discussion - if Anatoly is keen on writing on the
subject.
I think the multiculturalism and immigration of different ethnic groups into America is a
recipe for ultimate internal strife and civilizational collapse in that nation as it has been
throughout human history. Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
Thread Display All Comments treefroggy says: August 23, 2017 at
1:31 am GMT Is the fox supposed to represent to alternative browser Firefox ? If so ,
Firefox is just as sickeningly PC as Google , just far less competent . Read More Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments sinotibetan says: August 29, 2017 at
5:49 pm GMT 500 Words @utuDrivel?
The IQ-ists like yourself underestimate the fact that separate identity formation and the
persistence of this identity is not caused by IQ but by the external phenotype like a skin
color. The separate racial identity groups will not dissolve into one even if there are no IQ
differences between them. This is all about the external phenotype. We all heard since
kindergarten that down below the skin we are all the same. The IQ-ists say it is no so, the
IQ's are different but they agree with the kindergarten teacher that the skin color does not
matter. But I say it does not matter whether we are the same or not under the skin. What really
matters is what is on the surface not what is under the surface. What is on the surface is
responsible for the separate identity creation, separate group and sub-culture creation and
their persistence which leads to polarization resulting in reduced social harmony. In another
words lots of problems that you do not need and that would never appeared in the society with a
uniform external phenotype. Interesting comments. I agree with your observation. Even though it
is possible that the mean IQs of different ethnic groups may indeed be different, it is the
external phenotype that is one of the main determinants of "ethnic identity". Then followed by
'cultural traits' like language, customs etc. A blond Pole who learns to speak impeccable
'Queen's English' , changes his name to sound 'English' may assimilate so well that his foreign
origin would probably never be suspected but for a Chinese like me, my "East Asian phenotype"
gives away my foreign origin. On the other hand, if I learn Japanese ways to perfection, I
might fool native Japanese I am one of them, but never can the Polish man do that.
I think the problem with many native "Western" Europeans(or rather their ruling and political
elites) is that they are beholden (or perhaps envious of?) to the success of the USA as the
lone superpower and its economic and technological might. More so with native 'Western'
Europeans than Asians or Africans(although every nation cannot escape the ubiquitous American
influence) because in their mind it was mostly 'white Americans' , kinsmen of their forefathers
, who 'made' America as it is now. I think ideas like the European Union ('United States of
Europe') and multiculturalism and the demonization of nationalism in Europe by the ruling
elites may partially be explained by their desire to usurp American hegemony(by emulating the
USA). Perhaps they actually believe losing their native identities and becoming multiethnic (
eg being 'European' regardless of ethnic origin or country of origin, European nations being
reduced politically to like states within the USA) will make them rulers of a new
superpower.
There is no exceptionalism for any nation including the USA. It is a young nation in the
process of (multiple) ethnogeneses, so happened it became the lone superpower and most
influential nation. In the process is perhaps the ethnogenesis of a new ethnic group called
'Americans'(the melting pot/assimilation of 'whites'/ Hispanics/blacks/'Asians' in varying
proportions) or will there be civil wars and internal strife within this group and other
'non-assimilated 'groups in future or breaking up into multiple 'nations' after internal
strife..who knows?
I think the ruling elites and literati who associate American success with multiethnic society
and blurring of traditional concepts of ethnic identity are making mistaken associations. The
success of America is not because it is multiethnic or plural. Perhaps the reasons for
America's success can be a topic of discussion – if Anatoly is keen on writing on the
subject.
I think the multiculturalism and immigration of different ethnic groups into America is a
recipe for ultimate internal strife and civilizational collapse in that nation as it has been
throughout human history.
Lots of interesting information regarding conversations between Bill Clinton and Yeltsin
but allow me to focus on the NATO bombing of Serbia:
Although Clinton and Yeltsin enjoyed friendly relations, NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia
tempered Moscow's enthusiastic partnership with the West.
"Our people will certainly from now have a bad attitude with regard to America and with
NATO," the Russian president told Clinton in March 1999. "I remember how difficult it was for
me to try and turn the heads of our people, the heads of the politicians towards the West,
towards the United States, but I succeeded in doing that, and now to lose all that."
Yeltsin urged Clinton to renounce the strikes, for the sake of "our relationship" and
"peace in Europe."
The declassified White House Yeltsin files reveal the drama at the turning point in
US-Russia relations, when Yeltsin pleaded, threatened and despaired trying to make Clinton
call off the bombing of Yugoslavia.
"It is not known who will come after us and it is not known what will be the road of
future developments in strategic nuclear weapons," Yeltsin reminded his US
counterpart.
But Clinton wouldn't cede ground.
Clinton to Yeltsin on Milosevic: "It will be your decision if you decide to let this
bully destroy the relationship we worked hard for over six and a half years to build up I'm
sorry he is a Serb. I wish he were Irish or something else, but he is not."
"Milosevic is still a communist dictator and he would like to destroy the alliance that
Russia has built up with the US and Europe and essentially destroy the whole movement of your
region toward democracy and go back to ethnic alliances. We cannot allow him to dictate our
future," Clinton told Yeltsin.
It was much more than the all-out bombing campaign by NATO. Serbia resisted for more than
70 days by courage and intelligence including bagging at least one stealth aircraft and its
army remaining virtually untouched and ready to take on a NATO land invasion.
.It all sounds like a pure Syrian IFF fuck-up, not an Israeli conjob.
When Powers was shot down in his U-2 over USSR, the other downed aircraft was
Soviet Aviation of PVO MiG-17 (or 19--don't remember from the top of my head). A classic case
of "friendly fire". Andrei, I have never seen you blow so much smoke or work so hard to quell
emotions I guess it may be justified in doing what one can to stop WWIII. Maybe there are
other reasons.
You are usually very careful to make sure that, in your writing, 2+2 = 4. This time,
perhaps for the above reasons, not so much. You claim that most posts on this thread are
emotional rants or trolls, yet you have spent most of your efforts trying to calm emotions
and not addressing more serious flaws in the official story.
Harold Smith rightly pointed out that the F16s did not end up behind the IL20 by mistake.
This was not some joy ride by the F16s. It was a well planned intentional operation. The
Israelis knew the habits and capabilities of the IL20 and made plans accordingly using cover
from the IL20 as their method to penetrate within the envelope of the S200s. The 1 minute
warning was a part of that plan. Any more warning would have exposed the F16s to much more
danger.
The Israelis knew a one minute warning was inadequate but gave it just for its value of
plausible deniability. They probably expected the S200s to hold their fire but they had no
way of being sure of that. Instead, they made an intentional plan, using the IL20 as cover
and intentionally putting the IL20 at risk of shoot down in order to protect their F16s. The
one minute warning was good for plausible deniability, nothing more.
Then we see Netanyahu rushing to de-escalate. The only thing he can plausibly say to Putin
is that this was intentional but done without his knowledge or permission. To claim it was a
"tragic error" is a joke. Would Putin believe that? Not likely. Thus we have a whole
delegation flying to Moscow to attempt to bolster that argument.
Not that the political players give a damn about it, but Israel's actions here are blatant
violations of international law, probably war crimes, and well, just plain immoral. But it is
only regular guys like me that care about stuff like that.
She does and this latest event could have been (with high degree of probability)
precipitated by Russian-Turkey-Iranian arrangement on Idlib, because isolation of
Israeli-friendly (or rather openly supported by her) most radical Islamic groups will happen
and that means Israel losing one of her most important pieces of strategy of keeping ME
destabilized. But then again–a good proof of effectiveness of Russia's actions in the
area, isn't it? Good ol' classic cliche: the flak is heavy, that means we are over
target.
-Israel has a fleet of quiet diesel-electric subs.
Yes, she does–German built.
-It has been shown that diesel electric subs have in the past easily come within
striking distance of U.S. carriers.
True, even nukes (subs) have penetrated ASW "shield" and conducted lengthy trailing of
CBGs many times.
-If Israel wanted to suck the United States into a shooting war in Syria, it would make
sense to sink the Truman with one of it's subs, blaming in on Russia. The United States
egged on by its NeoCon contingents and in a fit of emotionalism – think 9/11 –
would almost certainly react before thinking.
Ahh, not quite. Recall what happened with Kursk, the first act of the United States was to
have CIA Director be on the first flight to Moscow. No, it doesn't work like this and, I have
suspicion that, however deplorable Israel's policies are, Israel proper intelligence and
military people are on the order of magnitude smarter, however deviously, and calculating
than American neocons most of whom are dumb as fvcks and good only in bribery and mass-media
tantrums. Reaction of Israel in all this situation is the best proof.
-Of course, one something like this did happen, you'd have a war. And war is a wild
thing that, once turned loose, does what it wants and is out of control.
Let's put it this way, once Russians and Americans begin to kill each-other, Israel goes
immediately down. In fact, it will cease to exist as a state. But who wants to pay such a
price? Bibi knows that.
Let's put it this way, once Russians and Americans begin to kill each-other, Israel goes
immediately down. In fact, it will cease to exist as a state.
Can you expand on that?
Unless you're simply pointing out that escalation to a large scale nuclear exchange means
all states "will cease to exist', this is a non-trivial statement that begs explication.
Can you expand on that?
Israel is a known "owner" of nuclear weapons and is the nation which, depending on
scenario, has the ability to attack pretty much anything in Europe. Possible counter-force
scenario between Russia and US will involve "killing" of Israel's nuclear deterrent, as it
will be with European NATO members (UK and France), but Israel is tiny and any nuclear strike
there is, basically, a death sentence. This is in a nutshell–of course contingencies
vary but I am sure Israel's nuclear sites are in the targeting data base of Russia's nuclear
triad. That is until Israel gets the message and gets back to daddy (or mommy) and that is
what is in play right now. It will take some time, though.
Next, let's assume that this is simply the typical case of Israeli arrogance (not a myth!)
and that they decided to inform the Russians as late as possible. Does that at all entail that
the maneuver of the Israeli F-16s pilots to seek cover from the S-200 missile was something
they had planned in advance? Does anybody bother to look at the actual (as opposed to
Hollywood) record of the Israeli Air Force during past wars when they were actually challenged
by a reasonably capable air defense? There is a detailed discussion (in Russian) about this
here which can be summarized like this: as soon as the Israelis start losing aircraft their
martial prowess rapidly vanishes. Now please recall this: the Israelis have had recent losses,
some admitted, some denied, but there is no doubt that they are tense and very concerned.
Bottom line: I would fully expect the Israeli pilots to freak out and seek cover as soon as
they are told by their warning system that they are being painted by a radar in tracking mode
(the S-200 has a semi-active radar homing guidance system). If that is the case, and I am
not saying that this is the only possibility, then the fault is of the Israeli
pilots, not of their commanders or the Israeli state as a hole. Yes, the command responsibility
is the one of the state, but not the guilt for having engaged in such an evasive maneuver
(besides, knowing the
price placed by Israeli on goyim lives , this would be just so typical, would it not
)
At this point, I need to ask another question: what would the Israelis gain from shooting
down the Il-20? They sure ain't gonna frighten the Russians (Russian military don't scare easy)
and the Il-20 will be replaced. Scaring the Iranians or Hezbollah? Forget it – not
happening. Maybe there was a real lucrative target that they destroyed? Yes, maybe, be so far
we don't know anything about this. So what would be the point?
Then the "sister question": what would the Israelis risk by deliberately shooting down a
Russian EW aircraft? Well, in theory, they would risk having their aircraft shot down and their
airbases engaged with Russian missiles. That is highly unlikely, I will admit, and the Israelis
probably understand the Russians very well (many of them being from Russia). But could they be
sure that the local commanders would not order an immediate retaliation (as their
current rules of engagement do authorize them to!)? Let me remind everybody that this Spring,
the USA was not so sure at all, and following the words of the Russian ambassador that " not
only missiles but their launchers would be destroyed " the USN and Air Force decided to
shoot as little as possible and from as far as possible. As for the British sub, its captain
decided to cancel the planned missile strike entirely (they were being shadowed by two Russian
subs). Seems to me that the potential risks of that kind of operation would be pretty high,
while the potential rewards rather unclear.
Those who insist that this was a deliberate Israeli act need to come up with a halfway
credible explanation not only for how this was done, but also why this was
done.
Now, like many others, I despise the Israeli racist, genocidal rogue state with all my
heart. But that does not prevent me from being capable of imagining a scenario in which the
Israelis simply screwed-up. Believe it or not, but my disgust for Zionist ideology does not at
all entail a boundless belief in some Israeli infallibility.
Finally, let look at this: today (Sept 20 th ) an IDF delegation led by Air Force
Commander Maj.-Gen. Amikam Norkin is in Moscow. Also participating in the trip are the Head of
the Foreign Relations Division, Brig.-Gen. Erez Meisel and other officers from the
Intelligence, Air Force and Operations Divisions. Does anybody believe that all these officers
went to Moscow just to thumb their noses at the Russians? Or maybe they all traveled to Moscow
to present some totally non-credible excuses which will only infuriate the Russians
further?
My guess is that they have something exculpatory (at least in part) to show.
If the Russians conclude that the Israelis did it deliberately, I will support a strike on
Israeli air bases. If the Russians conclude that the Israelis cannot be trusted to abide by any
agreements (which I think is indisputable), then I think that the Russians should declare an
air exclusion zone over the Russian forces (a 100km radius or so). I also think that it is high
time to keep a pair MiG-31BMs on 24/7 combat air patrol high over Syria (they can come quite
close to replacing a much more expensive and vulnerable A-50U AWACS).
At this time (Sept 20 th 20:37 GMT) all they have
announced is that " both sides emphasized the importance of the states' interests and
the continued implementation of the deconfliction system" . If that is all that the
Russians decide, then I will find it wholly inadequate and I will predict a further surge in
frustration against not only the government, but against Putin himself. But, for the time
being, we need to wait and see what the Russian investigation will reveal. Only then can we
begin cheering Putin or calling him names.
There is also this possibility: the Russians would decide on an air exclusion zone and tell
the Israelis, but both sides would decide to keep this secret in order for Israel to save face
(because if the Russians declare an air exclusion zone, this will create a safe heaven for
Hezbollah and all the other militias which would be a political disaster for Bibi Netanyahu).
So we might never find out.
Finally, I want to add one more thing which is rarely, if ever, mentioned.
The S-200 is a pretty old air defense system. We also know that it does not have a Russian
IFF. However, the Russians have declared several times that the Russian air defense network and
the Syrian one were integrated. This is what best explains, at least in part, the very high
number of US cruise missiles intercepted in April. The problem is that the way the S-200 (and
most modern air defense systems) works is that the S-200 is fully integrated into a larger air
defense network administered by automated air defense management systems which is operated by a
higher echelon air defense command. This means that the Syrian air defense crew did not simply
detect the incoming missiles and fire off one of their own. At the very least, this decision
was taken by a higher echelon Syrian air defense command. Now we know that the time was
extremely short and, hence, the Russian air defense personnel might not have had the time to
take protective action, especially not when dealing with a large, slow and vulnerable moving EW
aircraft (the fact that this aircraft flew un-escorted is definitely a Russian mistake!).
Still, we know that the Russians have many early warning capabilities which the Syrians
do not have (AWACS, space based, shipborne radars, over-the-horizon radars, etc.) and there is
a pretty decent chance that somebody could have done something to prevent what happened. True,
since the Israelis and Russians had an agreement, the Russians therefore classified the
Israelis as "non-threat", but it does not take a genius to understand that four Israeli F-16
flying towards the Latakia Governorate are up to no good and that this warrants immediately
going on full alert.
Can The Saker tell us what right Israel has to bomb targets in Syria ? The Russians were
invited in to save Syria as were the Iranians and Hezbollah but Israel is on the side of the
attackers of Syria .
You are absolutely correct.
USA responded in similar fashion when Israel sunk "Liberty" with greater loss of american
lives.
Most of Israeli population are God's chosen people and can do no wrong.
God placed them on Earth to watch over us and even gave us his son to civilize us.
Praise the Lord!
@Bill65
Can The Saker tell us what right Israel has to bomb targets in Syria ? The Russians were
invited in to save Syria as were the Iranians and Hezbollah but Israel is on the side of the
attackers of Syria . One of the first courses in law school is intentional torts. The intent,
an act expressing that intent, and damages are the only requirement in many torts. The tort
of Battery; intent does not have to be an intent to cause the harm that actually occurred..
Merely expressing an intent in some kind of action satisfies the element of intent; it does
not matter to assignment of liability if the actual harm was unintended.
In criminal law: A holds up a bank, five cops show up, B shoots his gun at the ceiling,
the bullet bounces and kills one of the cops,and starts a fire in the bank A is probably
guilty of murder, Arson and attempted robbery.
so if while intending to shoot target victim A, the shooter instead accidentally or
otherwise shoots innocent non targeted victim B, the intent requirement for Battery is
satisfied. Hence Israel, and each and every one of its leaders, might be liable. w/o regards
to a showing that the intended target was unharmed, while a different innocent was
unintentionally harmed. Its the harm caused by an expression of an intention that produces
the liability. It does not matter that the harm happened to an unintended party.
Trespass to chattel, interference with a chattel which results in injury to the possessor
or injury to a person or thing in which the possessor of the chattel has a legally protected
interest(like life and assets) results in liability for trespass. If Israel without privilege
touches a Indian Snake Charmers Snake, causing Snake Charmers Snake to bite a Russian
bystander, Israel probably liable for the injury to the Russian bystander.
But there is more, the doctrine of transferred intent applies. Here the intent in four other
torts (battery, assault, trespass to land or false imprisonment) can be substituted to
satisfy the requisite intent for trespass to chattel. If Israel intends to destroy Syrian
dams with weapons and missiles, and instead causes a Syrian response that kills Russian
soldiers and planes, the tort would hold Israel liable for the damage to the plane and the
deaths of the Russians. IANAL. There is a lot to this intent thing, but generally, I
understand, when intent is established, especially if unlawful trespass or criminality is
part of the expression of the intentional act, that Intent element in the tort would be
satisfied.
The Tort of Extreme and Outrageous conduct; behavior "that reaches beyond all possible
bounds of decency; atrocious, utterly intolerable in a civilized community ( such as invading
a sovereign nation; attacking its assets and killing its inhabitants). Here the expression of
intent is in the outrageous behavior, the persons harmed might not even be known to the
person who engaged in the Tort of Extreme and Outrageous conduct.
IANAL and I would appreciate it if a lawyer would make these point clear and clarify my
understanding of these principles, especially as they might apply to the situation at
hand.
My point here is the intent and transfer of intent principles suggest Israel intended
unauthorized trespass, acts of aggression and war, and it is indifferent to liability for the
crime or damages that conducting war against Russia was unintended.
Moreover, it seems to me unlikely that Israel would plan an attack, and not coordinate it
with Russia, when such an attack was so close to Russian Assets and Russian Personnel. Israel
had to know the risk of killing Russians and destroying Russian assets was likely
(Scienter?), which suggest to me Israel intended to use Syrian technical limitations as a
means to punish Russia for protecting Syria. [ Res ipsa Loquitur comes to mind]. Wonder how a
Jewish court and Jewish judge would rule on this one?
There is a striking note of imperial self-confidence about the document in which all sides
in the Syrian civil war are instructed to come to heel. This may not happen quite as intended
because it is difficult to see why fighters of al-Qaeda-type groups like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham
should voluntarily give up such military leverage as they still possess. The Syrian government
has said that it will comply with the agreement but may calculate that, in the not so long
term, it will be able to slice up Idlib bit by bit as it did with other rebel enclaves.
What is most interesting about the agreement is less its details than what it tells us about
the balance of forces in Syria, the region and even the world as a whole. Fragile it may be,
but then that is true of all treaties which general Charles de Gaulle famously compared to
"young girls and roses – they last as long as they last". Implementation of the
Putin-Erdogan agreement may be ragged and its benefits temporary, but it will serve a purpose
if a few less Syrians in Idlib are blown apart.
The Syrian civil war long ago ceased to be a struggle fought out by local participants.
Syria has become an arena where foreign states confront each other, fight proxy wars and put
their strength and influence to the test.The most important international outcome of war so far
is that it has enabled Russia to re-establish itself as a great power. Moscow helped Assad
secure his rule after the popular uprising in 2011 and later ensured his ultimate victory by
direct military intervention in 2015. A senior diplomat from an Arab country recalls that early
on in the Syrian war, he asked a US general with a command in the region what was the
difference between the crisis in Syria and the one that had just ended with the overthrow of
Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. The general responded with a single word: "Russia."
It is difficult to remember now, when Russia is being portrayed in the west as an aggressive
predatory power threatening everybody, the extent which it was marginalised seven years ago
when Nato was carrying out regime change in Libya.
Russia was in reality always stronger than it looked because it remained a nuclear
superpower capable of destroying the world after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 just as
it was before. It should be difficult to forget this gigantically important fact, but
politicians and commentators continue to blithely recommend isolating Russia and pretend that
it can be safely ignored.
The return of Russia as a great power was always inevitable but was accelerated by
successful opportunism and crass errors by rival states. Assad in Syria was always stronger
than he looked. Even at the nadir of his fortunes in July 2011, the British embassy in Damascus
estimated that he had the backing of 30 to 40 per cent of the population according to The
Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips,
which should be essential reading for anybody interested in Syria. Expert opinion failed to
dent the conviction among international statesmen that Assad was bound to go. When the French
ambassador Eric Chevallier expressed similar doubts about the imminence of regime change he
received a stern rebuke from officials in Paris who told him: "Your information does not
interest us. Bashar al-Assad must fall and will fall."
Prosvirnin
is the most talented writer.
Limonov
has by far the most colorful personality.
Dugin
has been the most effective at promoting himself in the West. Prokhanov probably has the most name
recognition in Russia. Galkovsky created the most powerful memes.
Krylov
provided the esoteric flavoring.
And yet out of all of Russia's
right-wing intellectuals
, there is perhaps none so unique as Egor Kholmogorov.
This
is ironic, because out of all of the above, he is the closest to the "golden mean" of the Russian
nationalist memeplex.
He is a realist on Soviet achievements,
crimes, and lost opportunities, foregoing both the Soviet nostalgia of Prokhanov, the kneejerk Sovietophobia
of Prosvirnin, and the unhinged conspiracy theories of Galkovsky. He is a normal, traditional Orthodox
Christian, in contrast to the "atheism plus" of Prosvirnin, the mystical obscurantism of Duginism, and the
esoteric experiments of Krylov. He has time neither for the college libertarianism of Sputnik i Pogrom
hipster nationalism, nor the angry "confiscate and divide" rhetoric of the National Bolsheviks.
Instead of wasting his time on
ideological rhetoric, he reads Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century and writes
reviews
about it on his website.
And about 224 other books
.
And this brings us to what makes
Kholmogorov so unique: He is an extremely well-read autodidact.
This allows him to write informed and
engaging articles on a very wide variety of different topics and breaking news.
In my opinion, Kholmogorov is simply the
best modern Russian right-wing
intellectual
, period.
Unfortunately, he is almost entirely
unknown in the English-speaking world; he does not angle for interviews with Western media outlets like
Prosvirnin, nor does he energetically pursue foreign contacts like Dugin. Over the years I have done my very
small part to remedy this situation, translating two of Kholmogorov's articles (
Europe's
Week of Human Sacrifice
;
A Cruel French Lesson
). Still, there's only so much one blogger with many other things to write about
can do.
Happily, a multilingual Russian fan of
Kholmogorov has stepped up to the plate: Fluctuarius Argenteus. Incidentally, he is a fascinating fellow in
his own right – he is a well recognized expert in Spanish history and culture – though his insistence on
anonymity constrains what I can reveal, at least beyond his wish to be the "Silver Surfer" to Kholmogorov's
Galactus.
We hope to make translations of
Kholmogorov's output consistently available on The Unz Review in the months to come.
In the meantime, I am privileged to
present the first Fluctuarius-translated Kholmogorov article for your delectation.
***
A New Martin Luther?: James Damore's Case from a Russian Conservative Perspective
Google fires employee James Damore
for "perpetuating gender stereotypes.
– You persecute your employees for
having opinions and violate the rights of White men, Centrists, and Conservatives.
– No, we don't. You're fired.
A conversation just like or similar to
this one recently took place in the office of one of modern information market monsters, the Google
Corporation.
Illustration to the Google scandal.
James Damore fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes". Source: Screenshot of Instragram user bluehelix.
Google knows almost everything about us,
including the contents of our emails, our addresses, our voice samples (
OK Google
), our favorite
stuff, and, sometimes, our sexual preferences. Google used to be on the verge of literally looking at the
world with our own eyes through Google Glass, but this prospect appears to have been postponed, probably
temporarily. However, the threat of manipulating public opinion through search engine algorithms has been
discussed in the West for a long while, even to the point of becoming a central
House of Cards
plotline.
Conversely, we know next to nothing
about Google. Now, thanks to an ideological scandal that shook the company, we suddenly got a glimpse of
corporate values and convictions that the company uses a roadmap to influencing us in a major way, and
American worldview even more so. Suddenly, Google was revealed to be a system permeated by ideology,
suffused with Leftist and aggressively feminist values.
The story goes this way. In early
August, an anonymous manifesto titled
Google's Ideological Echo Chamber
was circulated through the
local network of Google. The author lambasted the company's ideological climate, especially its policy of
so-called diversity. This policy has been adopted by almost all of US companies, and Google has gone as far
as to appoint a "chief diversity officer". The goal of the polity is to reduce the number of white
cisgendered male employees, to employ as many minorities and women as possible and to give them fast-track
promotions – which, in reality, gives them an unfair, non-market based advantage.
The author argues that Leftism and
"diversity" policies lead to creating an "echo chamber" within the company, where a person only talks to
those who share their opinions, and, through this conversation, is reinforced in the opinion that their
beliefs are the only ones that matter. This "echo chamber" narrows one's intellectual horizon and undermines
work efficiency, with following "the party line" taking precedence over real productivity.
In contrast to Google's buzzwords of
"vision" and "innovation", the author claims that the company has lost its sight behind its self-imposed
ideological blindfold and is stuck in a morass.
As Google employs intellectuals, argues
the critic, and most modern Western intellectuals are from the Left, this leads to creating a closed Leftist
clique within the company. If the Right rejects everything contrary to the God>human>nature hierarchy, the
Left declares all natural differences between humans to be nonexistent or created by social constructs.
The central Leftist idea is the class
struggle, and, given that the proletariat vs. bourgeoisie struggle is now irrelevant, the atmosphere of
struggle has been transposed onto gender and race relations. Oppressed Blacks are fighting against White
oppressors, oppressed women challenge oppressive males. And the corporate management (and, until recently,
the US presidency) is charged with bringing the "dictatorship of the proletariat" to life by imposing the
"diversity" policy.
The critic argues that the witch-hunt
of Centrists and Conservatives, who are forced to conceal their political alignment or resign from the job,
is not the only effect of this Leftist tyranny. Leftism also leads to inefficiency, as the coveted job goes
not to the best there is but to the "best woman of color". There are multiple educational or motivation
programs open only to women or minorities. This leads to plummeting efficiencies, disincentivizes White men
from putting effort into work, and creates a climate of nervousness, if not sabotage. Instead of churning
out new ground-breaking products, opines the critic, Google wastes too much effort on fanning the flames of
class struggle.
What is the proposed solution?
Stop diving people into "oppressors" and
"the oppressed" and forcefully oppressing the alleged oppressors. Stop branding every dissident as an
immoral scoundrel, a racist, etc.
The diversity of opinion must apply to
everyone. The company must stop alienating Conservatives, who are, to call a spade a spade, a minority that
needs their rights to be protected. In addition, conservatively-inclined people have their own advantages,
such as a focused and methodical approach to work.
Fight all kinds of prejudice, not only
those deemed worthy by the politically correct America.
End diversity programs discriminatory
towards White men and replace them with non-discriminatory ones.
Have an unbiased assessment of the costs
and efficiency of diversity programs, which are not only expensive but also pit one part of the company's
employees against the other.
Instead of gender and race differences,
focus on psychological safety within the company. Instead of calling to "feel the others' pain", discuss
facts. Instead of cultivating sensitivity and soft skins, analyze real issues.
Admit that not all racial or gender
differences are social constructs or products of oppression. Be open towards the study of human nature.
The last point proved to be the most
vulnerable, as the author of the manifesto went on to formulate his ideas on male vs. female differences
that should be accepted as fact if Google is to improve its performance.
The differences argued by the author are
as follows:
Women are more interested in people, men
are more interested in objects.
Women are prone to cooperation, men to
competition. All too often, women can't take the methods of competition considered natural among men.
Women are looking for a balance between
work and private life, men are obsessed with status and
Feminism played a major part in
emancipating women from their gender roles, but men are still strongly tied to theirs. If the society seeks
to "feminize" men, this will only lead to them leaving STEM for "girly" occupations (which will weaken
society in the long run).
It was the think piece on the natural
differences of men and women that provoked the greatest ire. The author was immediately charged with
propagating outdated sexist stereotypes, and the Google management commenced a search for the dissent, with
a clear purpose of giving him the sack. On 8th August, the heretic was revealed to be James Damore, a
programmer. He was fired with immediate effect because, as claimed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, "portions of
the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our
workplace". Damore announced that he was considering a lawsuit.
We live in a post-Trump day and age,
that is why the Western press is far from having a unanimous verdict on the Damore affair. Some call him "a
typical sexist", for others he is a "free speech martyr". By dismissing Damore from his job, Google
implicitly confirmed that all claims of an "echo chamber" and aggressive Leftist intolerance were precisely
on point. Julian Assange has already tweeted: "Censorship is for losers, WikiLeaks is offering a job to
fired Google engineer James Damore".
It is highly plausible that the Damore
Memo may play the same breakthrough part in discussing the politically correct insanity as WikiLeaks and
Snowden files did in discussing the dirty laundry of governments and secret services. If it comes to pass,
Damore will make history as a new Martin Luther challenging the Liberal "Popery".
However, his intellectual audacity
notwithstanding, it should be noted that Damore's own views are vulnerable to Conservative criticism.
Unfortunately, like the bulk of Western thought, they fall into the trap of Leftist "cultural
constructivism" and Conservative naturalism.
Allegedly, there are only two possible
viewpoints. Either gender and race differences are biologically preordained and therefore unremovable and
therefore should always be taken into account, or those differences are no more than social constructs and
should be destroyed for being arbitrary and unfair.
The ideological groundwork of the
opposing viewpoints is immediately apparent. Both equate "biological" with "natural" and therefore "true",
and "social" with "artificial" and therefore "arbitrary" and "false". Both sides reject "prejudice" in favor
of "vision", but politically correct Leftists reject only a fraction of prejudices while the critic calls
for throwing all of them away indiscriminately.
As a response, Damore gets slapped with
an accusation of drawing upon misogynist prejudice for his own ideas. Likewise, his view of Conservatives is
quite superficial. The main Conservative trait is not putting effort into routine work but drawing upon
tradition for creative inspiration. The Conservative principle is "innovation through tradition".
The key common mistake of both Google
Leftists and their critic is their vision of stereotypes as a negative distortion of some natural truth. If
both sides went for an in-depth reading of Edmund Burke, the "father of Conservatism", they would learn that
the prejudice is a colossal historical experience pressurized into a pre-logical form, a collective
consciousness that acts when individual reason fails or a scrupulous analysis is impossible. In such
circumstances, following the prejudice is a more sound strategy than contradicting it. Prejudice is
shorthand for common sense. Sometimes it oversimplifies things, but still works most of the time. And, most
importantly, all attempts to act "in spite of the prejudice" almost invariably end in disaster.
Illustration to the Google scandal. A
fox sits gazing at the Google's Ideological Echo Chamber exposing the ideas of the fired engineer James
Damore. Source: Screenshot of Instragram user bluehelix.
However, the modern era allows us to
diagnose our own prejudice and rationalize them so we could control them better, as opposed to blind
obedience or rejection. Moreover, if the issue of "psychological training" ever becomes relevant in a
country as conservative as Russia is, that is the problem we should concentrate on: analyzing the roots of
our prejudices and their efficient use.
The same could be argued for gender
relations. Damore opposes the Leftist "class struggle of the genders" with a technocratic model of
maximizing the profit from each gender's pros and cons. This functionalism appears to be logical in its own
way, but is indeed based on too broad assumptions, claiming that all women are unfit for competition, that
all of them like relationships and housekeeping while all men are driven by objects and career. And, as
Damore claims biological grounds for his assumptions, all our options boil down to mostly agreeing with him
or branding him as a horrible sexist and male chauvinist.
However, the fact that gender roles
historically developed based on biology but are, as a whole, a construct of society and culture does not
give an excuse to changing or tearing them down, as clamored by Leftists. Quite the contrary: the social,
cultural, and historical determinism of these roles gives us a reason to keep them in generally the same
form without any coups or revolutions.
First, that tradition is an
ever-growing accumulation of experience. Rejecting tradition is tantamount to social default and requires
very good reasons to justify. Second, no change of tradition occurs as a result of a "gender revolution",
only its parodic inversion. Putting men into high heels, miniskirts, and bras, fighting against urinals in
public WCs only reverses the polarity without creating true equality. The public consciousness still sees
the "male" as "superior", and demoting "masculinity" to "femininity" as a deliberate degradation of the
"superior". No good can come of it, just as no good came out of humiliating wealth and nobility during the
Communist revolution in Russia. What's happening now is not equal rights for women but the triumph of gender
Bolshevism.
Damore's error, therefore, consists in
abandoning the domain of the social and the historical to the enemy while limiting the Conservative sphere
of influence to the natural, biological domain. However, the single most valuable trait in conservative
worldview is defending the achievements of history and not just biological determinism.
The final goal of a Conservative
solution to the gender problem should not be limited to a rationalist functionalization of society. It
should lead to discovering a social cohesion where adhering to traditional male and female ways and
stereotypes (let's not call them roles – the world is not a stage, and men and women not merely players)
would not keep males and females from expressing themselves in other domains, provided they have a genuine
calling and talent.
The art of war is not typical of a
woman; however, women warriors such as Joan of Arc leave a much greater impact in historical memory. The art
of government is seen as mostly male, yet it makes great female rulers, marked not by functional usefulness
but true charisma, all the more memorable. The family is the stereotypical domain of the woman, which leads
to greater reverence towards fathers that put their heart and soul into their families.
Social cohesion, an integral part of it
being the harmony of men and women in the temple of the family, is the ideal to be pursued by our Russian,
Orthodox, Conservative society. It is the collapse of the family that made gender relations into such an
enormous issue in the West: men and women are no longer joined in a nucleus of solidarity but pitted against
one another as members of antagonistic classes. And this struggle, as the Damore Memo has demonstrated, is
already stymieing the business of Western corporations. Well, given our current hostile relations, it's
probably for the better.
Sic Semper Tyrannis has published a response to the Rosenstein fantastic "Indictment of
Trolls" (Part II): "Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU," by Publius Tacitus
http://www.turcopolier.typepad.com
"Assistant Attorney General Rosenstein announced a bizarre indictment against Russian
military intelligence operatives today that, rather than confirming the case of "Russian
meddling" in the U.S. 2016 Presidential election raises more questions. Here are the major
oddities:
1. How did the FBI obtain information about activity on the DNC and DCCC servers when the
DNC/DCCC refused to give the Feds access to the servers/computers?
2. Why does Crowdstrike get credit as being a competent computer security firm when,
according to the indictment, they completely and utterly failed to stop the "hacks?
"
3. Why does the indictment refuse to name Wikileaks by name as the Russian collaborator? Here
is the bottomline–if US officials knew as early as April that Russia was hacking the
DNC, why did it take US officials more than six months to stop the activity? The statement of
"facts" contained in the indictment also raises another troubling issue–what is the
source of the information? For example, if the FBI was not given access to the DNC/DCCC
servers and computers then how do they know what happened on specific dates as alleged in the
complaint?"
-- Why does the US national security hang on the opinions and concoctions of a visceral
Russophobe Dm. Alperovitch (a ziocon) who is an "expert" (together with the badly uneducated
Elliot Higgins) at the thoroughly corrupted and zionized Atlantic Council?
-- What kind of antisemite has been working hard to make the US Jewry at large suspected in a
massive conspiracy and treason against the United States of America?
Here is the context for the "Indictment of Trolls" (Paty II):
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/62c97j/the_awan_brothers_compromised_at_least_80/
"The Awan brothers compromised at least 80 congressional computers and got paid 5 million to
do it. We may never know the extent of the breach.
After compromising the Congress' networks for 12 years they do a quick cleanup by breaking in
to 20 congressional offices, store data in an off site server before running of to Pakistan
and the D.C. Police are investigating. But wait there's more
Imran Awan has a longtime relationship with some members of Congress, including working for
Meeks and Becerra starting in 2004 and joining Wasserman Schultz's office in 2005. The IT
staffer position expanded to include more than 30 representatives, including work under
congressional members who were members of top secret level congressional committees (DHS,
Foreign affairs, Select intelligence committee).
Although personal office computers are not supposed to be used for Intelligence Committee
business or classified material, accessing these computers is a high priority for foreign
intelligence services because of the information they could glean about the committee's work
from unclassified emails.
• The brothers are suspected of serious violations including accessing members' computer
networks without their knowledge and stealing equipment from Congress, over billing congress
for work and parts, transferring data to a remote server, and bypassing normal security
protocols for IT staff. Their Democrat benefactors allowed the breech of policy for the sake
of convenience.
• The Awans operated an external server, which is against all protocols concerning
secured government information.
Further, there were instances where House information was discovered in an external "cloud"
server. The contractors in question reportedly were sending and storing House-related
information in that off-site server.
• The Awans had special access to the White House and for Visas.
• Multiple Democratic lawmakers have yet to cut ties with House staffers under criminal
investigation for wide-ranging equipment and data theft."
– Hey, Mueller! Hey, Rosenstein! Do your job.
@Mr. Hack I understand perfectly what I read, and even make a direct quotation:
Those in power in Kiev had several times already attempted to draw Moscow into the civil
war, directly and through a NATO intervention
I then ridicule such mularkey for what it is, unsubstantiated ' gibberish
'.
You want to defend this BS then go to it, otherwise put up or shut up! :-)
The same goes for Skeptikal. Here is a British 'method' of slandering the non-obedient
Russians. In terms of dishonesty, it is about the same as the US/EU/Ukrainian version of the
MH17 tragedy:
"The Holes in the Official Skripal Story," by Craig MURRAY:
"The nub of the British government's approach has been the shocking willingness of the
corporate and state media to parrot repeatedly the lie that the nerve agent was Russian made,
even after Porton Down said they could not tell where it was made and the OPCW confirmed that
finding. In fact, while the Soviet Union did develop the "novichok" class of nerve agents,
the programme involved scientists from all over the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, Armenia
and Georgia, as I myself learnt when I visited the newly decommissioned Nukus testing
facility in Uzbekistan in 2002."
In Paris, a great piece of street furniture called pissoir had been invented in 19
th century, and it made city life easy. Men could pop in and pee for free and
without bother. But the feminists objected to it, and the spirit of capitalism supported them.
A free facility is already a beginning of hated socialism. Rapidly, the number of street
urinals went down from 1200 to one. Instead, pay booths suitable for men and women came into
existence. These structures demand money, take time and are complicated to use. The feminists
were happy, money-charging descendants of Vespasian (the Emperor who said 'money doesn't smell'
and introduced a toilet tax) were very happy, but men weren't so happy to pay for something
they always had for free. So the men preferred to pee outside. And Paris stunk to high
heaven.
Squeezed between malodorous streets and feminist fury, the Paris Town Hall created a new
sort of urinal: open-air one, zero privacy, just pee and go away. Not much of a luxury, nothing
for women to be envious about. And they weren't envious, – just furious. They assaulted
the hated symbols of male patriarchy with concrete, pouring it down the drain, and quickly
blocked them and made them unusable. I suppose the owners of pay-as-you-pee supported them, and
probably even supplied them with concrete at slashed rate, but it is just my wild guess.
Anyway, now Paris stinks again, and the feminists may use this reason to hate men.
And now this toilet war had been carried out to the outer space. There was a strange recent
incident on the International Space Station (ISS). The pressure in the station had dropped.
In the search of a possible leak, a small (2 mm) hole had been discovered in a wall of the
Russian Soyuz spacecraft docked to the station. The hole was located near the toilet and
covered by decorative fabric.
The US astronauts demanded that their mission be aborted and they return to earth; the
Russian cosmonauts just glued the hole with a bit of epoxy and the flight went on.
It was promptly established that it was not a result of a meteorite strike; the hole had
been drilled. Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosm said that it was probably done by a homesick
astronaut. This version was considered just too bizarre. It was dismissed by all and sundry as
a new proof of Russian goofiness. The preferred version said that the hole was drilled by a
Russian worker on the ground, immediately before take-off, as you would expect from inept
Russians.
ORDER IT NOW
However, it is possible that Rogozin was right. I have heard from people in Korolyev
(Russian Houston) a very unusual if unverified story that fits perfectly with the rest of
American toilet gender disorder. The setup is as follows. The ISS has an American, a Russian
and a common compartments, separated but interconnected. (The Russian segment is the docked
spacecraft). There are four astronauts in the Western sector, and two cosmonauts in the Russian
sector. Among the Westerners, there is one lady.
Though the astronauts are carefully checked, still in the space things could run into
uncharted territory. The story from Korolyev says the lady objected to their toilet
arrangements as demeaning for her as a woman, and tried to readjust the equipment to fit her
requirements. The men did their own readjustment and complained about the feminist. In a short
while, the delicate toilet in the Western sector had been broken beyond repair, for nothing is
simple in the space, not even going to loo.
And the big grown men, ex-Navy and ex-Air Force captains and commanders, had been reduced to
use diapers on the daily basis. It is not only unpleasant to use: the ISS has no storage for
such a mass of used and stinking diapers. The Western sector began to stink like Paris streets
or worse.
By that time, the astronauts became mightily upset by the lady's extravagant behaviour, and
they complained: "Houston, we have a problem! Please take her home!" Houston, or NASA, had two
objections to granting their wish. One, diversity and female equality had to be maintained at
all costs. The second objection was money.
Now only the Russians have the means to take astronauts to the station and back home. Though
the US had landed a man on the Moon many years ago, they still have no working shuttle to fly
men to ISS. The inept Russians still have their spacecraft, though their best shuttle The
Buran and their best space station Mir had been dumped during the pro-Western
stage of Russia's political orientation at American insistence. The Americans have to pay a
hefty sum to the Russians for each flight, and evacuation of the virago would punch a hole in
NASA budget, bigger and more painful than the hole in the ISS hulk. That's why Houston replied
breezily: "This is your problem, guys! Try to get along with her!"
The Russian toilet and shower worked fine, and the Americans at first tried to use it. But
after a quarrel (and alas, people forced to live in close quarters are likely to quarrel), the
Russians objected and barred the Western astronauts from their Soyuz. The lady's mental health
deteriorated, and stench and floating excrement made her miserable and vicious; and eventually
her companions decided to implement a smart plan. When the two Russians went out to space for
scheduled work, the Americans made their way to the Russian module (there are no locks in the
ICC) and drilled a hole, sealing it with a sealant and covering with decorative fabric.
It was a creative and working idea. The sealant held on for a while and didn't burst
immediately. The pressure in the station is quite low, only one atmosphere, so the hole didn't
present a mortal danger for the team. If and when the leak were found, it would be possible to
insist on emergency evacuation of the crew, thus getting rid of the troublesome virago and
extricating themselves from the stinky hell while blaming the goofy Russians for the failure.
And the best part of it: the hole is in the section of the Soyuz capsule that is jettisoned
during its return to Earth, thus eliminating all evidence of the foul game.
But the plan didn't work out. The Russians closed the hole with a better epoxy sealant and
refused evacuation. Keep shitting in your diapers, gentlemen! The Western commander jerked into
the Russian module, shouting "I, as a commander, will decide what to do about it", and he tore
off the sealant. The Russians told him: "You are the station commander, but on board the Soyuz
you're just a guest", and they bodily kicked him out and re-sealed the hole.
The cosmonauts reported to Korolyev (the Russian flight control centre), and Korolyev asked
Houston to show them video records from the American module to check who went with the drill to
the Russian module. The Russian sanitary block (and that is where the hole was drilled) isn't
monitored for privacy reasons. Houston refused outright.
The situation on the ISS remains tense; the Russians apparently used force to evict the
Americans who tried to drill more holes. The Americans are unhappy as they have to spend all
their nights and days with the troublesome woman, and their toilet still does not work. Now
they hope that the US will soon be able to send a new all-American commercial private shuttle
to remove them, for NASA is adamant in their refusal to pay Russians for the evacuation, and
the Russians do not want to do this job for free. The latest reports
speak of "whodunit in space" and of Russian cosmonauts planning more examination of the outer
walls.
Thus the feminist-induced gender disorder of the West had almost caused disaster, – if
you believe this story.
Dream on it would take a Henry 8 Lenin and Trotsky type revolution to
get rid of affirmative action.
If it ever happens, the first thing to do would be to put every judge and their families in
some kind of detention center, close down every state and federal courthouse and completely re
write the constitution to give all power to the elected executive and legislative branches.
Every woman and minority organization would have to be treated the way Henry treated the
monasteries and Lenin and Trotsky treated the Russian counterrevolution.
I'd say only White men with 4 grandparents born in the USA be allowed to vote, but the
damage was done between 1964 to 1973 or so by native born American White men.
The feminazis are just fronts for the cannibal capitalists who used them to destroy the
private sector unions, lower wages for everyone and create a docile work force eager to work 80
hours a week for 40 hours wages.
I'd love to be the commissar in charge of ending affirmative action and punishing those who
created and enforce it.
@Mike P We
should focus more on the overall situation than on the technical details of this event. The
calls for Russian retaliation against Israel, while emotionally relatable, ignore one crucial
aspect - any direct Russian attack on Israel, whether retaliatory or not, will inevitably
drag in FUKUS on Israel's side. Thus, if Putins wants to avoid this sort of conflagration, he
can't fight with Israel. This is the reason for his deals with the devil (aka Satanyahoo) -
give the Israelis free reign for going after Iran, as long as they abstain from engaging
Russian troops directly. By and large, Israel has abided by this agreement - until now.
In this situation, what options does Putin have to punish Israel, while still
abstaining from a direct hit? Suspend their right to go after Iran by setting up no-fly
zones, ostensibly for "protecting Russian troops." I'm sure the Iranians will make the most
of this opportunity to further strengthen Hezbollah and their own position in Syria.
Why are the Israelis acting this way? It is clear that they are very, very nervous about
the way things have been going. Despite all their efforts, the Iranian military and Hezbollah
are still there and only growing stronger. Apparently, they feel that time is working against
them and that they cannot look on any longer. Therefore, they are trying now to escalate the
conflict, while hiding behind FUKUS and their (other) terrorist stooges.
If Russian intelligence communications are to be believed, then the terrorist puppets in
Idlib had been preparing for another staged gas attack in Idlib, or rather they had already
staged and filmed it, and they were simply waiting for the most opportune time to publish
their stunt. At the same time, the U.S. were proclaiming that a chemical attack was imminent,
and that it would be considered a casus belli . The Russians did their best to defuse
this situation first by leaking their intelligence about the staging of the attacks; and when
that did not do the trick, by putting the entire Idlib operation on hold via the agreement
with Turkey.
Having been foiled yet again and left without a pretext for stepping up the war, Israel
then resorted to creating this hastily improvised IL20 incident. (It is noticeable, however,
that a French war ship was also on the scene, indicating that this was indeed coordinated
with other governments beforehand.)
Even though the provocation is severe, the strategic situation has not changed - Russia
and Syria are winning, and the only way for Israel to change this is to escalate the war. It
is clear that they want to provoke Russia into shooting from the hip and thus allow herself
to be blamed for such an escalation. It is also clear that Israel again intends to fight the
war to the last American (and European) soldier.
We in the West, who would again be the cannon fodder for such insanity, once more owe a
debt of gratitude to Putin's statesmanship and levelheadedness. It is also noteworthy that
Trump not only abstained from fanning the flames, but also soon after the event stated that
the "Iraq and Afghanistan wars were the worst single mistake ever made in the history of our
country." THIS is the real Trump, and THIS is why the Zio-infested U.S. deep state is trying
so hard to overthrow him. Putin and Trump are trying to preserve peace, while Israel is
pushing for war - as is anyone who is calling for Putin to "man up" and shoot some Israeli
planes out of the sky or similar. "We in the West, who would again be the cannon fodder for
such insanity, once more owe a debt of gratitude to Putin's statesmanship and
levelheadedness."
All that Vladimir Putin is doing is prolonging the inevitable, at a cost of increasing
resentment among Syrian troops, his own military personnel and the Russian people, IMO. The
enemy is not going to stop of their own volition; so the more he turns the other cheek the
more he will be slapped. To quote Paul Craig Roberts (from his latest essay):
"The question before President Putin and the Russian people is whether Russia can be a
sovereign country independent of Washington's control without going to war. My concern is
that unless a hard Russian foot comes down quickly, the only alternatives are Russian
surrender or nuclear war."
"It is also noteworthy that Trump not only abstained from fanning the flames, but also
soon after the event stated that the "Iraq and Afghanistan wars were the worst single mistake
ever made in the history of our country." THIS is the real Trump, and THIS is why the
Zio-infested U.S. deep state is trying so hard to overthrow him."
The real Trump is all talk. He's a liar and a complete fraud. The real Trump had a chance
to get out of Afghanistan and Syria but chose to escalate instead. The real Trump is
apparently a PNAC zionist warmonger who puts the Zionist agenda first and America last. And
the deep state will never try to get rid of such a loyal puppet.
Putin and Trump are trying to preserve peace, while Israel is pushing for war – as
is anyone who is calling for Putin to "man up" and shoot some Israeli planes out of the sky
or similar.
"... It has a cruise speed of about ~600 km/hr, which is 10 km/minute that's at its cruise altitude of 8,000 meters the MoD reported that the airplane was hit while flying at 5,000 m and on its descent to land at Hmeimim ..."
"... Russia has drawn a line in the sand and Israel must grow up (impossible, I know for the chosen people). Unless Russia stands firm and enforces that line in the sand (i.e. Obey. The. Deconfliction. Agreement.), it will not succeed in restoring Syria's sovereignty. Considering that Russia has stated its goal of restoring Syria's full sovereignty over all its territory, it is clear that Russia will do whatever is necessary to achieve this goal. ..."
"... The complicating factor is that IFUKUS is willing to risk a hot war to defeat Russia in its goal. I strongly suspect that Putin will play for as much time as needed to defeat IFUKUS economically to the point where IFUKUS is militarily incapable. Keep in mind, Russia has already determined that IFUKUS is 'agreement incapable.' ..."
"... The Russian Federation faces an enemy that does not recognize any international laws. The only way to stop the predator is by waging a hot war against the "deciders" in the D.C., London, and Tel Aviv. That would result in a massive loss of life in Europe, the Middle East, the US, and in the Russian Federation. The predator, ZUSA, is not able to contain its predatory urges. They high-placed scoundrels begging for being destroyed. But there are also innocent people that will die during the hot war. ..."
"... It is not illogical at all that the US/Israel/EU/UK have sided with radical Islamists (ISIS, Al Qaeda and such) and with banderites (neo-Nazi). The flooding of the EU with the desperate refugees (the victims of the ongoing Wars for Israel) and opportunistic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa (welcome, extraordinary low IQ!) is tearing apart the societal fabric of the EU and makes the war-mongers and war-profiteers even less accountable to vox populi. ..."
One doesn't have to be a Putin or Zionist hater to see with clarity
So, you do then, I assume, have now or had in the past Form 1A clearance to know
how and what Tactical and Operational Manuals describe in terms of setting Air Defense
systems, establishment of communications networks...ah, never mind -- I am sure "Jews The
Almighty" bible of yours gives all necessary answers.
Including describing issues of angular separation of targets, principles of development of
command decisions from tactical to operational level and other irrelevant crap.
Much better reading Harretz than the awe of our two Armchair Marshals, Saker and Martyanov
Do you want me to prove, using you as an example, for all other present here
hysterical non-men, that none of you have any idea of what was and is going on by me merely
introducing a simple tactical-technical parameter which defines tactical reality in any radar
systems. I'll give you hint--it is reported to all military radar operating units (from
ground to the sea) and is logged and accounted for (with proper adjustments in procedures)
every single day, sometimes on 12 hour increments. This factor could be of prime importance,
especially against the background of old S-200 AD complex. Are you game? Then we will compare
who are real "armchair strategists" here.
'Do you want me to prove by me merely introducing a simple tactical-technical parameter
which defines tactical reality in any radar systems against the background of old S-200 AD
complex '
Yes Andrei..I will take you up on your offer to 'prove' to us the 'technical parameters'
that ALLOW THE S200 AND IL20 TO DEFY THE LAWS OF PHYSICS
You see friends, Saker and especially Martyanov are full of crapola
It is IMPOSSIBLE for an S200 which flies at 2.5 kilometers per second and would
cover 100 km in just 40 seconds to have hit an airplane that continued flying for
another ~5 minutes after that close call with the flight of Israeli F16s
Here is the infographic map released by the Russian MoD
The flight path of the F16s is recorded with the dashed blue line the flight of the
Ilyushin Il20 spy plane is recorded in the solid red line [that from the MoD]
I have circled the close encounter point in yellow, with a yellow arrow pointing to it
that is the point where the F16s are supposed to have 'hidden' behind the radar reflection of
the much bigger Ilyushin, and is the ONLY point at which this could possibly occur
But the Ilyushin somehow manages to fly north for another 40 km and even make a 90 degree
east turn to come in to land at Hmeimim a total flight time of around FIVE MINUTES
BUT the S200 cannot fly for FIVE MINUTES
it is one of the fastest SAM rockets in the world, with a flight speed of 2.5 kilometers per
second and would cover 100 kilometers in JUST 40 SECONDS
Its maximum flight time is 150 SECONDS [2.5 MINUTES] IN WHICH TIME IT WOULD COVER ITS
MAXIMUM DISTANCE OF 375 KM
It has a cruise speed of about ~600 km/hr, which is 10 km/minute that's at its cruise
altitude of 8,000 meters the MoD reported that the airplane was hit while flying at 5,000 m
and on its descent to land at Hmeimim
The MoD map clearly shows that the Ilyushin flew north for 40 km after that 'close
encounter' with the F16s and then made another right 90 degree turn back toward the Syria
coast on its final descent back into Hmeimim
Only after making that turn to final was the airplane hit
So we have the airplane flying for FIVE MINUTES AFTER THAT SUPPOSED 'RADAR MASKING' ?
And the S200 which can cover 300 km in TWO MINUTES FLAT was doing what exactly for those
missing THREE MINUTES ?
It was maybe hovering in midair with its engine shut off just waiting for the Ilyushin to
slowly make its way to the point 40 km from the 'radar masking'..before it decided to turn
its engine back on and then come and hit the Ilyushin ?
It is a matter of simple flight physics the official story is IMPOSSIBLE
If an S200 was even launched, it would have been from a range of probably 100 km so it
would have got to the Ilyushin in under a minute from that close encounter point
The Ilyushin in that one minute would have been able to fly for maybe 10 km AT MOST and
would have come down where I have place the red arrow on the map
Now I have seen many commenters here ridiculing Saker and Martyanov and that is completely
warranted Saker has no technical credentials whatsoever, in either physics or mathematics he
has made that abundantly clear over the course of hundreds of thousands of words of fluff
Martyanov at least has a bona fide military education, but he also does not seem to think
much about basic physics he has some explaining to do here as to why he is pushing the
'official' story
Folks the fact of the matter is that 'official' information is often a blatant lie we all
know that for those who have some relevant expertise in technical matters such as flight
physics, it is not so easy to pull the wool over our eyes
Remember when Turkey shot down that Russian Su24 ground attack jet in November 2015 ?
there was a lot of discussion at the time as to the claim from the Turkish side about the
Sukhoi flying through Turkish airspace for 17 seconds
At the time PCR picked up on the debate, it revolved around the physical possibility of
the Sukhoi flying that slow as to remain in Turkish airspace for so long, while covering a
very short distance the debate among the laypeople revolved around the aerodynamic 'stall'
speed of the Sukhoi ie the minimum flying speed of the airplane
I mentioned to PCR that the debate was nonsensical and explained a couple of pertinent
basics of the flight physics involved PCR encouraged me to expand that into an article, which
he graciously
published on his website
We have a similar situation here it is important to figure out what is and what is not
physically possible
Martyyanov especially, and of course Saker, are trying to tell us here that it was all a
mistake as Putin said that the 'old' S200 took down a state of the art electronic warfare
airplane, with 15 very highly trained specialists on board a HUGE LOSS
Now I will say here that Putin has a good reason to take this action and not reveal
what actually happened and I will get to that in a minute
But let us first consider some peripheral facts surrounding this entire incident it is
probable that the downed 'Il20′ was in fact the latest, modernized iteration of this
electronic intelligence aircraft, the
Il22PP, which entered into service two years ago
This is in keeping with the MoD's stated practice of subjecting Russia's latest and most
sophisticated weapons systems to actual combat conditions in Syria even Putin has said that
much has been learned,both good and bad, in Syria, and that fixing these deficiencies is
possible only due to the opportunity to deploy these systems in Syria
Now if we assume that this was in fact that state of the art Il22PP [we are speculating
here, but it is a solid assumption] then one must ask how careful the entire Russian
contingent in Syria would be with such a valuable asset ?
How is it possible that while this airplane is in the air that 'Syrian' air defense
commanders are shooting willy-nilly at a chunk of airspace where at this very moment this
extremely valuable aircraft is flying ?
How stupid does this sound on its face ?
Now we have already proved that the 'radar masking' story is physically impossible, due to
the respective flight speeds of the Ilyushin turboprop and the S200 rocket
That means that the S200 would have to have been launched when THERE WAS NO RADAR MASKING
ie the Ilyushin would have been very close to the point where it was shot down which is 40 km
away from the 'close encounter' site
So now we are supposed to believe that the Syrian air defense crews, which somehow are
acting independently while supposedly 'integrated' with the Russian air defense staff that
they have now targeted the Ilyushin WHILE IT IS FLYING ALONE WITH NOTHING NEARBY ?
Again, I ask Martyanov here to explain this especially in light of his dismissive comment
to others objecting here, and citing his vast knowledge of radar systems
How is it possible that this Ilyushin was targeted by an S200 when it was nowhere near
those F16s at that moment as the laws of physics require ?
Of course I realize that he cannot rebut these questions in any way shape or form he is
caught again with his pants down
Now let us consider some more relevant facts on that night the Russian MoD stated clearly
two additional piece of information
1 the French frigate Auvergne was nearby the Ilyushin flight, as depicted on the map, and
was in fact recorded firing missiles
2 British jets were also in the air, with their transponders turned on making it possible
to track them even with civilian ATC radar
Now we also know that a number of Russian ships were in that area at the time, and still
are and are in fact this entire week conducting live fire drills more on that in a moment
Those ships also have sophisticated radar and also infrared sensors which picked up the
missile firing from the French ship
Besides that we have the Beriev A50U AWACS aircraft in Syria..and it
is safe to assume that they would have been in the air at the time of the Ilyushin flight
At the same time, we also know that the US is flying the high altitude U2 spy plane out of Akrotiri
So there is a lot of cat and mouse going on between Nato and Russia in the area all the
more reason to seriously doubt that a Syrian S200 would shoot down such an important flight
as the Ilyushin we notice also the flight path of the Ilyushin it first flew a circuit over
Idlib, then, instead of coming in to land directly at Hmeimim, the airplane continued out
over the Med for about 40 km off the coast of Syria, well outside the Syrian territorial
airspace why ?
Perhaps because the Ilyushin might have been gathering data and perhaps engaging in
electronic interference of those Nato ships and aircraft in the area ?
We do not know but if it was doing something like that, the flight would have had the
utmost security attached to it it would be unthinkable for a Syrian SAM to take a shot at
that airplane
So why the ruse on the part of Putin and the Russians ?
Let's first examine who had the opportunity to down that Ilyushin the French ship firing
missiles [what kind of missiles surface to air...?...the frigate is equipped with very
capable Aster SAMs... ]
And also the British aircraft in the air at the time and flying out of Akrotiri there are
9 Eurofighter Typhoons there, equipped with long range air to air AIM120 radar guided missiles and also 10
Tornados equipped with shorter range heat seeking AIM9x
Now since we know already that the only way an S200 could have shot down the Ilyushin
would be if it fired practically intentionally at a high value friendly aircraft flying with
no enemy aircraft nearby it would seem at least as probable that the missile that brought
down the Ilyushin could have been fired by a French ship or a British airplane
[The Israeli jets could not have fired at the Ilyushin, since they were flying in the
opposite direction at the time the airplane was hit...and it is impossible to aim a missile
at a target behind your airplane...]
At this point, having made some logical physical observations and built up a situational
picture of what and who was there at the time, it seems much more likely that the French or
British brought down the Ilyushin with the Israelis playing a supporting role to cause
confusion and 'fog of war'
Now we examine another clue this one coming just 24 hours after the Ilyushin was shot down
namely the massive Russian live fire naval exercises in the exact area of the Med where all
the action took place here is a look at the NOTAM
published by the Cyprus Civil Aviation Authority
Is this air exclusion zone the Russians have enacted in a semi-ring around the RAF
Akrotiri air base a clue ?
I leave it to readers to make their own judgements
Now let us consider the question of why Putin is not saying anything about possible
British or French involvement in the shooting down of the valuable Ilyushin electronic
warfare aircraft
First what purpose would it serve to now come out and accuse two Nato countries of an act
of war ?
Is not this kind of escalation exactly what Nato is looking to provoke in Syria ?
Is Putin supposed to now declare war on Nato ?
Or does it make more sense to blame Israel because Israel is the only party that can be
proved to have been doing something illegal at the time ie bombing a sovereign country [an
illegal act of aggression] and at the same time trampling all the protocol and agreements in
place between Russia and Israel on the matter of Israeli operations against 'Iranian' forces
in Syria ?
We must remember here that Putin is interested in only one thing in Syria that is to
defeat the West's regime change project
The West on the other hand is trying to do everything possible to provoke Russia into a
military response, that would then lead to escalation and a possible shooting war
Let us recall that the US twice launched cruise missile strikes against Syria in the last
year in the last attack back in April, the French and British also participated no response
came from Russia
In 2015, Turkey shot down a Russian jet so how much of a stretch is it to think that
Britain and France [together with Israel playing a supporting role] decided to shoot down the
Russian spy plane ?
Now Russia holding its fire makes perfect sense and is the smart thing to do, in spite of
how bad these provocations look for one thing Russia even turning on its air defense systems
to shoot down US and Nato or Israeli missiles would give the opponent valuable information
about how the Russian AD systems operate this is very valuable tactical information
Russia is better served not firing its systems unnecessarily because when it does, the
enemy will have little chance to calculate an escape
As things stand now no one can defend Israel's actions on that night Israel realizes that
Russia is very angry and Israel must now alter its behavior as to bombing Syria Russia will
also take steps to increase the security of all Russian assets in Syria there will not be a
repeat performance of this carefully planned ambush of the Ilyushin
As for retribution for whoever it was that pulled the trigger on that Ilyushin I think
Putin realizes that revenge is a dish best served cold two can play the game of 'accidents'
happening
Move not unless you see an advantage; use not your troops unless there is something to
be gained; fight not unless the position is critical.
No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general
should fight a battle simply out of pique.
If it is to your advantage, make a forward move; if not, stay where you are.
Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content.
But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the
dead ever be brought back to life.
Hence the enlightened ruler is heedful, and the good general full of caution. This is
the way to keep a country at peace and an army intact.
'An investigation is underway to establish what exactly happened when the
Ilyushin IL-20 reconnaissance plane was shot down on Monday night, as it was coming into
land at the Russian airbase at Hmeimim in northwest Syria. The plane was lost some 20 kms
off the Syrian coast, with all 15 service onboard killed.
There appears to have been an accidental shoot-down by Syrian air defenses using
an outdated Soviet-made S-200 system.'
So this semi-official organ of Russian media is not so sure as our two resident 'experts'
here and any comments that question their 'authority' are unceremoniously dismissed
Looking forward to hearing back from Martyanov on this
I'm not completely convinced about the Russian MoD's interpretation of events as one of the
F16s hiding behind the I-20. I think they stretched that part up because of their
anger and embarrassment. The bottom line is that Russia has itself to blame because
- Russia and Syria use different IFF systems "and Israel knows". It is reckless for them to
have uncoordinated IFF with Syrian air-defense and even more reckless to have divulged this
to Israel. If fact, even assuming Syria had its own S-400 instead of S-200, it would still be
totally reckless for them not to coordinate IFF.
- Russia did not fire its S-400 to shoot down the F-16s. Even after they knew the I-20 was
down, 20 minutes after -- they politely asked the F-16s to vacate, which they only did 13
minutes later.
This is a wake-up call that Russia is pursuing an untenable policy in Syria by trying to
be friends with opposing sides of a war and having its armed forces in the middle, while
prohibiting them from fully using their weapons to defend themselves. Just as they portray
Israel as hiding behind Russian aircraft, Hezbullah can be portrayed as hiding behind the
nearby Russian airbase so that Israel gets in trouble trying to attack there. If Russia
declares a no-fly-zone around its base that's incentive for Iran and/or Hezbullah to put its
bases there.
Russia needs to either get out of Syria or choose sides and stick with its allies.
@Bill65
Can The Saker tell us what right Israel has to bomb targets in Syria ? The Russians were
invited in to save Syria as were the Iranians and Hezbollah but Israel is on the side of the
attackers of Syria . What right? The right of self defense. The establishment of Iranian
bases in Syria is a mortal danger for us, the secret Syrian nuclear reactor was a potential
catastrophe for everybody. Technically we have been in war with Syria for the last seventy
years.
@OilcanFloyd
The Soviets didn't go to war with the U.S. over Syria and Israel 50 years ago, and I don't
think the Russians will now. Israel is pretty much confined to beating up on defenseless
Palestinians and invading the mostly undefended airspace of its immediate neighbors. Russia
seems to have the situation in Syria under control, and attacking Israel would be the
quickest way to have a war with the U.S., which Putin says he doesn't want.
One aircraft and its crew is apparently a price the Russians are willing to pay in a proxy
war with the U.S. What happened 50 years ago has little bearing on today.
Russia's blinkered present position in Syria makes little sense and is unsustainable.
Basically it seems to be saying that it will fight Syria's enemies when they are the
western/Israeli proxy armies but it will not defend Syrian airspace against attacks which
emanate from the very same sources. This naked air aggression, it seems, is approved by
agreements with Israel and perhaps also some others. We have now seen the results of this
approach and it has meant the needless Russian deaths, both in the air and on the ground.
The defenders of the status quo tell us that Russia won't defend Syrian airspace, as this
might lead to WW3. The same could be much more justifiably said about NATO/Israel and their
attacks on Syria, but magically the aggressors have been absolved from this responsibility,
as it is not their concern. Strangely, only Russia has the duty of preventing global war, so
it must always turn the other cheek, no matter the provocation. If Russia continues on this
path, it is finished and may as well surrender right now.
@Mr M. I
do believe it was a deliberate attempt by Israel to get a Russian plane shot down.
The biggest problem Israel and the Zionist Socialist USA faces when it comes to destroying
Syria for the sake of making Israel greater again, is Russia. So long as Russia is allied
with Syria the western client states of Israel can't invade and destroy this hated enemy of
Jews.
Likewise, Russia can't attack Israel for what it does in Syria, because that would bring
down the whole western world in retaliation and start off WWIII before the time is right.
No, I think this was a poorly planned and clumsy attempt at creating a false flag attack
in the form of luring Syria into shooting down a Russia plane in an attempt to cause a
diplomatic crisis between Syria and Russia that would end with Russia leaving Syria to be
destroyed the Israel and its client states of the US/UK and the rest of the bullied Nato
states.
It most likely failed because someone did not get informed and that someone had the brain
power required to grab the phone and tell the Russians at the last minute because they saw
that chances of the plan backfiring was too great to even think about it.
I do believe it was a deliberate attempt by Israel to get a Russian plane shot down.
After reading the MoD briefing notes, it is more likely that it was another example of
Israeli arrogance and immaturity that will have consequences Israel will find most
unpleasant.
The biggest problem Israel and the Zionist Socialist USA faces when it comes to
destroying Syria for the sake of making Israel greater again, is Russia. So long as Russia
is allied with Syria the western client states of Israel can't invade and destroy this
hated enemy of Jews.
The biggest problem Israel and the Neocons face is their own delusion that they have the
right and the power to decide that they have any options regarding Syria. The world does not
need Israel.
Likewise, Russia can't attack Israel for what it does in Syria, because that would bring
down the whole western world in retaliation and start off WWIII before the time is
right.
Russia can draw lines in the sand that represent Russian self-interest as well as the
interests of other nations Russia deems important to the success of its Syria project. Russia
can attack Israel when it crosses one of these lines. Allowing Iran to build a facility in
Latakia was one of these lines, and Israel crossed it, stupidly I might add.
No, I think this was a poorly planned and clumsy attempt at creating a false flag attack
in the form of luring Syria into shooting down a Russia plane in an attempt to cause a
diplomatic crisis between Syria and Russia that would end with Russia leaving Syria to be
destroyed the Israel and its client states of the US/UK and the rest of the bullied Nato
states.
It merely another example of the sort of immature provocations Israel engages in on a
daily basis. Remember, they are the chosen people and they can do whatever they want.
It most likely failed because someone did not get informed and that someone had the
brain power required to grab the phone and tell the Russians at the last minute because
they saw that chances of the plan backfiring was too great to even think about it.
What failed was not a false-flag attack, but rather a long-standing practice of treating
Russia as a second class nation.
Sometimes you have to draw a clear boundary. After watching the MoD briefing (excerpts),
it is clear that Russia has been extremely accommodating to Israel's quasi-legitimate
interests. In return, an adult nation would honor Russia's decision to allow Iranians to
build a factory near to its airport.
Think of the consequences. The key to winning this conflict means the foreign nationals
must feel safe inside the borders of Syria. It is no excuse that Iran and Hezbollah have
challenged Israel militarily. Israel has challenged these countries militarily, too. For
Russia to allow any nation to dictate to Syria and Russia who may or may not have a presence
inside Syria is to admit that Russia will not achieve the goal of full sovereignty for Syria
over Syrian territory.
Russia has already announced plans to build an automobile factory in Syria. Recall my
earlier assertion that Syria will be the western terminus of the New Silk Road; the key to
Syria's full recovery will be China's investment. Can Russia allow Israel to decide that
China is not allowed to build factories wherever Syria allows it to build? The answer is
obviously NO.
Russia has drawn a line in the sand and Israel must grow up (impossible, I know for
the chosen people). Unless Russia stands firm and enforces that line in the sand (i.e. Obey.
The. Deconfliction. Agreement.), it will not succeed in restoring Syria's sovereignty.
Considering that Russia has stated its goal of restoring Syria's full sovereignty over all
its territory, it is clear that Russia will do whatever is necessary to achieve this
goal.
The complicating factor is that IFUKUS is willing to risk a hot war to defeat Russia
in its goal. I strongly suspect that Putin will play for as much time as needed to defeat
IFUKUS economically to the point where IFUKUS is militarily incapable. Keep in mind, Russia
has already determined that IFUKUS is 'agreement incapable.'
'Do you want me to prove...by me merely introducing a simple tactical-technical parameter
which defines tactical reality in any radar systems...against the background of old S-200
AD complex...'
Yes...Andrei..I will take you up on your offer to 'prove' to us the 'technical
parameters' that ALLOW THE S200 AND IL20 TO DEFY THE LAWS OF PHYSICS...
You see friends, Saker and especially Martyanov are full of crapola...
It is IMPOSSIBLE for an S200 which flies at 2.5 kilometers per second and would
cover 100 km in just 40 seconds... to have hit an airplane that continued flying for
another ~5 minutes after that close call with the flight of Israeli F16s...
Here is the infographic map released by the Russian MoD...
The flight path of the F16s is recorded with the dashed blue line...the flight of the
Ilyushin Il20 spy plane is recorded in the solid red line...[that from the MoD]
I have circled the close encounter point in yellow, with a yellow arrow pointing to
it...that is the point where the F16s are supposed to have 'hidden' behind the radar
reflection of the much bigger Ilyushin, and is the ONLY point at which this could
possibly occur...
But the Ilyushin somehow manages to fly north for another 40 km...and even make a 90
degree east turn to come in to land at Hmeimim...a total flight time of around FIVE
MINUTES...
BUT the S200 cannot fly for FIVE
MINUTES...it is one of the fastest SAM rockets in the world, with a flight speed of 2.5
kilometers per second and would cover 100 kilometers in JUST 40 SECONDS...
Its maximum flight time is 150 SECONDS [2.5 MINUTES]...IN WHICH TIME IT WOULD COVER ITS
MAXIMUM DISTANCE OF 375 KM...
It has a cruise speed of about ~600 km/hr, which is 10 km/minute...that's at its cruise
altitude of 8,000 meters...the MoD reported that the airplane was hit while flying at 5,000 m
and on its descent to land at Hmeimim...
The MoD map clearly shows that the Ilyushin flew north for 40 km after that 'close
encounter' with the F16s...and then made another right 90 degree turn back toward the Syria
coast on its final descent back into Hmeimim...
Only after making that turn to final was the airplane hit...
So we have the airplane flying for FIVE MINUTES AFTER THAT SUPPOSED 'RADAR
MASKING'...?
And the S200 which can cover 300 km in TWO MINUTES FLAT was doing what exactly for those
missing THREE MINUTES...?
It was maybe hovering in midair with its engine shut off...just waiting for the Ilyushin
to slowly make its way to the point 40 km from the 'radar masking'..before it decided to turn
its engine back on and then come and hit the Ilyushin...?
It is a matter of simple flight physics...the official story is IMPOSSIBLE...
If an s200 was even launched, it would have been from a range of probably 100 km... so it
would have got to the Ilyushin in under a minute from that close encounter point...
The Ilyushin in that one minute would have been able to fly for maybe 10 km AT MOST...and
would have come down where I have place the red arrow on the map...
Now I have seen many commenters here ridiculing Saker and Martyanov and that is completely
warranted...Saker has no technical credentials whatsoever, in either physics or
mathematics...he has made that abundantly clear over the course of hundreds of thousands of
words of fluff...
Martyanov at least has a bona fide military education, but he also does not seem to think
much about basic physics...he has some explaining to do here as to why he is pushing the
'official' story...
Folks...the fact of the matter is that 'official' information is often a blatant lie...we
all know that...for those who have some relevant expertise in technical matters such as
flight physics, it is not so easy to pull the wool over our eyes...
Remember when Turkey shot down that Russian Su24 ground attack jet in November
2015...?...there was a lot of discussion at the time as to the claim from the Turkish side
about the Sukhoi flying through Turkish airspace for 17 seconds...
At the time PCR picked up on the debate, it revolved around the physical possibility of
the Sukhoi flying that slow as to remain in Turkish airspace for so long, while covering a
very short distance...the debate among the laypeople revolved around the aerodynamic 'stall'
speed of the Sukhoi...ie the minimum flying speed of the airplane...
I mentioned to PCR that the debate was nonsensical and explained a couple of pertinent
basics of the flight physics involved...PCR encouraged me to expand that into an article,
which he graciously
published on his website...
We have a similar situation here...it is important to figure out what is and what is not
physically possible...
Martyyanov especially, and of course Saker, are trying to tell us here that it was all a
mistake as Putin said...that the 'old' S200 took down a state of the art electronic warfare
airplane, with 15 very highly trained specialists on board...a HUGE LOSS...
Now I will say here that Putin has a good reason to take this action and not reveal
what actually happened...and I will get to that in a minute...
But let us first consider some peripheral facts surrounding this entire incident...it is
probable that the downed 'Il20' was in fact the latest, modernized iteration of this
electronic intelligence aircraft, the
Il22PP, which entered into service two years ago...
This is in keeping with the MoD's stated practice of subjecting Russia's latest and most
sophisticated weapons systems to actual combat conditions in Syria...even Putin has said that
much has been learned,both good and bad, in Syria, and that fixing these deficiencies is
possible only due to the opportunity to deploy these systems in Syria...
Now if we assume that this was in fact that state of the art Il22PP [we are speculating
here, but it is a solid assumption]...then one must ask how careful the entire Russian
contingent in Syria would be with such a valuable asset...?
How is it possible that while this airplane is in the air that 'Syrian' air defense
commanders are shooting willy-nilly at a chunk of airspace where at this very moment this
extremely valuable aircraft is flying...?
How stupid does this sound on its face...?
Now we have already proved that the 'radar masking' story is physically impossible, due to
the respective flight speeds of the Ilyushin turboprop and the S200 rocket...
That means that the S200 would have to have been launched when THERE WAS NO RADAR
MASKING...ie the Ilyushin would have been very close to the point where it was shot
down...which is 40 km away from the 'close encounter' site...
So now we are supposed to believe that the Syrian air defense crews, which somehow are
acting independently while supposedly 'integrated' with the Russian air defense staff...that
they have now targeted the Ilyushin WHILE IT IS FLYING ALONE WITH NOTHING NEARBY...?
Again, I ask Martyanov here to explain this...especially in light of his dismissive
comment to others objecting here, and citing his vast knowledge of radar systems...
How is it possible that this Ilyushin was targeted by an S200 when it was nowhere near
those F16s at that moment...as the laws of physics require...?
Of course I realize that he cannot rebut these questions in any way shape or form...he is
caught again with his pants down...
Now let us consider some more relevant facts on that night...the Russian MoD stated
clearly two additional piece of information...
1...the French frigate Auvergne was nearby the Ilyushin flight, as depicted on the map,
and was in fact recorded firing missiles...
2...British jets were also in the air, with their transponders turned on...making it
possible to track them even with civilian ATC radar...
Now we also know that a number of Russian ships were in that area at the time, and still
are...and are in fact this entire week conducting live fire drills...more on that in a
moment...
Those ships also have sophisticated radar and also infrared sensors which picked up the
missile firing from the French ship...
Besides that we have the Beriev A50U AWACS aircraft in Syria..and it
is safe to assume that they would have been in the air at the time of the Ilyushin
flight...
At the same time, we also know that the US is flying the high altitude U2 spy plane out of Akrotiri...
So there is a lot of cat and mouse going on between Nato and Russia in the area...all the
more reason to seriously doubt that a Syrian S200 would shoot down such an important flight
as the Ilyushin...we notice also the flight path of the Ilyushin...it first flew a circuit
over Idlib, then, instead of coming in to land directly at Hmeimim, the airplane continued
out over the Med for about 40 km off the coast of Syria, well outside the Syrian territorial
airspace...why...?
Perhaps because the Ilyushin might have been gathering data and perhaps engaging in
electronic interference of those Nato ships and aircraft in the area...?
We do not know...but if it was doing something like that, the flight would have had the
utmost security attached to it...it would be unthinkable for a Syrian SAM to take a shot at
that airplane...
So why the ruse on the part of Putin and the Russians...?
Let's first examine who had the opportunity to down that Ilyushin...the French ship firing
missiles [what kind of missiles surface to air...?...the frigate is equipped with very
capable Aster SAMs... ]
And also the British aircraft in the air at the time and flying out of Akrotiri...there
are 9 Eurofighter Typhoons there, equipped with long range air to air AIM120 radar guided missiles... and
also 10 Tornados equipped with shorter range heat seeking AIM9x...
Now since we know already that the only way an S200 could have shot down the Ilyushin
would be if it fired practically intentionally at a high value friendly aircraft flying with
no enemy aircraft nearby...it would seem at least as probable that the missile that brought
down the Ilyushin could have been fired by a French ship or a British airplane...
[The Israeli jets could not have fired at the Ilyushin, since they were flying in the
opposite direction at the time the airplane was hit...and it is impossible to aim a missile
at a target behind your airplane...]
At this point, having made some logical physical observations and built up a situational
picture of what and who was there at the time, it seems much more likely that the French or
British brought down the Ilyushin...with the Israelis playing a supporting role to cause
confusion and 'fog of war'...
Now we examine another clue...this one coming just 24 hours after the Ilyushin was shot
down...namely the massive Russian live fire naval exercises in the exact area of the Med
where all the action took place...here is a look at the NOTAM
published by the Cyprus Civil Aviation Authority...
Is this air exclusion zone the Russians have enacted in a semi-ring around the RAF
Akrotiri air base a clue...?
I leave it to readers to make their own judgements...
Now let us consider the question of why Putin is not saying anything about possible
British or French involvement in the shooting down of the valuable Ilyushin electronic
warfare aircraft...
First...what purpose would it serve to now come out and accuse two Nato countries of an
act of war...?
Is not this kind of escalation exactly what Nato is looking to provoke in Syria...?
Is Putin supposed to now declare war on Nato...?
Or does it make more sense to blame Israel because Israel is the only party that can be
proved to have been doing something illegal at the time...ie bombing a sovereign country [an
illegal act of aggression]...and at the same time trampling all the protocol and agreements
in place between Russia and Israel on the matter of Israeli operations against 'Iranian'
forces in Syria...?
We must remember here that Putin is interested in only one thing in Syria...that is to
defeat the West's regime change project
The West on the other hand is trying to do everything possible to provoke Russia into a
military response, that would then lead to escalation and a possible shooting war...
Let us recall that the US twice launched cruise missile strikes against Syria in the last
year...in the last attack back in April, the French and British also participated...no
response came from Russia...
In 2015, Turkey shot down a Russian jet...so how much of a stretch is it to think that
Britain and France [together with Israel playing a supporting role] decided to shoot down the
Russian spy plane...?
Now Russia holding its fire makes perfect sense and is the smart thing to do, in spite of
how bad these provocations look...for one thing Russia even turning on its air defense
systems to shoot down US and Nato or Israeli missiles would give the opponent valuable
information about how the Russian AD systems operate...this is very valuable tactical
information...
Russia is better served not firing its systems unnecessarily...because when it does, the
enemy will have little chance to calculate an escape...
As things stand now...no one can defend Israel's actions on that night...Israel realizes
that Russia is very angry and Israel must now alter its behavior as to bombing Syria...Russia
will also take steps to increase the security of all Russian assets in Syria...there will not
be a repeat performance of this carefully planned ambush of the Ilyushin...
As for retribution for whoever it was that pulled the trigger on that Ilyushin...I think
Putin realizes that revenge is a dish best served cold...two can play the game of 'accidents'
happening...
Move not unless you see an advantage; use not your troops unless there is something to be
gained; fight not unless the position is critical.
No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general
should fight a battle simply out of pique.
If it is to your advantage, make a forward move; if not, stay where you are.
Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content.
But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the
dead ever be brought back to life.
Hence the enlightened ruler is heedful, and the good general full of caution. This is
the way to keep a country at peace and an army intact.
'An investigation is underway to establish what exactly happened when the Ilyushin
IL-20 reconnaissance plane was shot down on Monday night, as it was coming into land at the
Russian airbase at Hmeimim in northwest Syria. The plane was lost some 20 kms off the
Syrian coast, with all 15 service onboard killed.
There appears to have been an accidental shoot-down by Syrian air defenses using
an outdated Soviet-made S-200 system.'
So this semi-official organ of Russian media is not so sure as our two resident
'experts' here...and any comments that question their 'authority' are unceremoniously
dismissed...
Looking forward to hearing back from Martyanov on this... A very interesting take
indeed.
The french frigate seems to no longer be mentioned at all in official statements. Macron
Control must have the full tapes, wonder whether these will appear at some point.
The Russian military has now conclusively established that the Israelis were responsible for
this disaster. They made that conclusion based on the objective evidence. If that evidence
showed something differently, they would have drawn a different conclusion. They have no
convincing reason to lie about it.
The Russians should now declare a no-fly zone over all of Syria and its territorial
waters, not only for Israel but for America and NATO as well. If the Israelis repeat this
act, their planes should be shot down and the air base from which they took off should be
bombed and destroyed. Israel would do nothing to retaliate. It risks total destruction if it
does.
Nor would America do anything. In fact, the Russians could shoot down American aircraft
and even sink American ships. The Americans will not be involved in a war with Russia.
America does not get into wars with countries that have nuclear weapons and the means to
deliver them to the continental United States. The only time America would use its nuclear
weapons is if its homeland is attacked with nuclear weapons. That is why countries like
Russia, China and North Korea need not fear America and why America will not attack them
militarily.
In other words the lives of American servicemen are not worth the destruction of the
continental United States. The first principle of American foreign policy is the prevention
of a nuclear war. That is what American foreign policy is based on.
@pyrrhus
The USA pretended that the Liberty attack didn't happen because LBJ wanted campaign money
from (((you know who)))...and of course, LBJ and Admiral McCain, who did the coverup, were
two of the worst criminals ever to occupy the upper ranks of the Deep State. "Putin and Trump
are trying to preserve peace, while Israel is pushing for war -- as is anyone who is calling
for Putin to "man up" and shoot some Israeli planes out of the sky or similar."
-- Agree. Israelis live by terrorism.
Thank you, sir, for your superb comment. I read and reread it several times, the only
useful comment on the entire thread. I too noticed at the very beginning the Russian military
announced it had detected a missile launch from the French warship, and I could not square
this fact with the S200 shoot down story, but being merely a layman in military affairs I had
to watch and wait for someone with knowledge and a brain to weigh in. Again, thank you.
Don't hold your breath waiting to hear from the two posers The Faker and Martyanov.
Aaron Hilel says: September 23, 2018 at 9:40 pm GMT • 200 Words
@VICB3
Yes, well as you said a war is a dark room easily entered, but full of unknown danger. US
does not need to lose an expensive carrier and thousands of sailors to start one.
Imo Israel will never, ever permit US to start an all-out war with Russia, as Israel is a
very small country, with extremely fragile, tightly packed population – which in case
of nuclear escalation would take 80%+ losses. Look at it this way – the core of jewish
power is concentrated in big cities, especially NY and Londonistan – and Israel. Russia
and US can absorb a more or less limited nuclear exchange – the Jews, as a people,
cannot.
In the current idiotic and useless war on Syria the Russians will lose soldiers, pilots,
planes – it has no bearing on the outcome. The Russians and more precisely VV Putin
will win this war in time, and Israel will suffer a strategic defeat ranging from minor
(negotiations with Assad and polite expulsion of Hezbollah) to cataclysmic (creation of Shia
crescent and fall of Iraq into Iranian sphere).
If you prefer a comparison to WW 2 , look at it as summer 1943 – everyone with a
pulse in German OKH knew that the war is lost and yet how many hundreds of thousands of
Russian soldiers had to die to arrive in Berlin?
@Hindsight
I have great respect for Mr. Saker. But this analysis makes me wonder, what has made him to
come up with such a forced explanation. It's more of an apology than an objective
analysis.
I wish he could stay objective to remain relevant. " .a forced explanation. It's more of an
apology than an objective analysis."
– What shall Saker tell you? -- That zionists have zero dignity? That mega
war-profiteers among "deciders" want more wars? That the US has been drowning in debt and
that the US/UK financial sector would not survive without a major war? These are well-known
facts.
The Russian Federation faces an enemy that does not recognize any international laws. The
only way to stop the predator is by waging a hot war against the "deciders" in the D.C.,
London, and Tel Aviv. That would result in a massive loss of life in Europe, the Middle East,
the US, and in the Russian Federation. The predator, ZUSA, is not able to contain its
predatory urges. They high-placed scoundrels begging for being destroyed. But there are also
innocent people that will die during the hot war.
The European civilization has developed many important mechanisms for protecting both the
individuals and the world peace. The ZUSA, the UK and the Jewish State have decided to end
the European civilization and establish a New World Order.
It is not illogical at all that the US/Israel/EU/UK have sided with radical Islamists
(ISIS, Al Qaeda and such) and with banderites (neo-Nazi). The flooding of the EU with the
desperate refugees (the victims of the ongoing Wars for Israel) and opportunistic migrants
from sub-Saharan Africa (welcome, extraordinary low IQ!) is tearing apart the societal fabric
of the EU and makes the war-mongers and war-profiteers even less accountable to vox
populi.
What should Russians do? The more time they buy, the better the outcome for the humanity
at large.
Has Russia given up on the West? In a word -- Yes, Yes and Yes.
You can find this from a few sources. The Editor -- in -- Chief of RT and Sputnik News,
Marguerite Simonyan, wrote an article not that long ago, addressed directly to you. To The
"West". To the Anglo Fascist Empire. To America. "We came to you in friendship and
admiration" she said, in effect, "and you have done nothing but abuse us, mock us, spit on us
Well, to hell with you. We used to admire you. Now we dont. We used to want to be like you.
Now, we dont".
In a speech also, although I'm sorry I cannot remember which one, President Putin also
said, in effect "we made every effort to be friends. We thought the Cold War 1 was due to
ideology -- to Communism. When that was dismantled and dropped by Russia, we thought you
would accept our outstretched hand of friendship. To quote a Russian poem , we believed you
"would to us the sword present" But you didn't. You abused our country, destroyed our
industries, our pride, even, for a short while, our sovereignty. [During the 1990's "Shock
and Awe" economic destruction of Russia].
We were prepared to forgive this and still try and work with you, but you have done
nothing but tell lies about us, abuse us, pile on sanctions, and steal our properties. Now,
we have done. We have made our minds up, and there is no going back. We will do what we need
to make our country grow, to be strong and happy. You can do what you want. Frankly, we dont
care any more".
Once a few years back, in a small Russian town, an enterprising garage sold door mats with
the American flag on them, for people to wipe their feet. They sold out in hours. However, it
was a momentary rage and Russians are very decent, kindly people. I think they have not
repeated that moment of anger.
But if you watch Vesti English -- excerpts are on YouTube -- watch "60 minutes", watch
Vecher "or Evening" excerpts, watch Kislyak, the popular presenters. See how they talk to
Russia in that critical hour after workers get home and have diner and watch an evening hour
of current affairs.
They show every lie, every manipulation, every example of American aggression, and they
laugh at every American stupidity.
They are nice people, and if you go there as an American citizen, they will be kind to
you. But when it comes to nations, and international trust -- they've had it with you.
They've turned their back. And you brought it on yourselves. As the Russian saying goes "as
you return my hand extended to you, so will I return your action"
As shown in this article, there is a little-discussed unintended consequence of the
anti-Russia sanctions that could significantly impact some U.S. consumers:
It appears that Putin is impotent to stand up to the Brussels -- Washington D.C. -- Jerusalem
-- Berlin Axis of Evil. Could that be construed as evidence that the Axis is such a
formidable iron fortress that even a tough guy like Putin can't put a dent in it?
If Russia and China don't collaborate soon, then the Axis will have complete, heavy handed
global domination, replete with policies and infrastructure to make certain it is perpetually
unchallenged.
Seems to me that I read something about this in the Bible.
@Isabella
Has Russia given up on the West? In a word - Yes, Yes and Yes.
You can find this from a few sources. The Editor - in - Chief of RT and Sputnik News,
Marguerite Simonyan, wrote an article not that long ago, addressed directly to you. To The
"West". To the Anglo Fascist Empire. To America. "We came to you in friendship and
admiration" she said, in effect, "and you have done nothing but abuse us, mock us, spit on us
Well, to hell with you. We used to admire you. Now we dont. We used to want to be like you.
Now, we dont".
In a speech also, although I'm sorry I cannot remember which one, President Putin also
said, in effect "we made every effort to be friends. We thought the Cold War 1 was due to
ideology - to Communism. When that was dismantled and dropped by Russia, we thought you would
accept our outstretched hand of friendship. To quote a Russian poem , we believed you "would
to us the sword present" But you didn't. You abused our country, destroyed our industries,
our pride, even, for a short while, our sovereignty. [During the 1990's "Shock and Awe"
economic destruction of Russia].
We were prepared to forgive this and still try and work with you, but you have done
nothing but tell lies about us, abuse us, pile on sanctions, and steal our properties. Now,
we have done. We have made our minds up, and there is no going back. We will do what we need
to make our country grow, to be strong and happy. You can do what you want. Frankly, we dont
care any more".
Once a few years back, in a small Russian town, an enterprising garage sold door mats with
the American flag on them, for people to wipe their feet. They sold out in hours. However, it
was a momentary rage and Russians are very decent, kindly people. I think they have not
repeated that moment of anger.
But if you watch Vesti English - excerpts are on YouTube - watch "60 minutes", watch Vecher
"or Evening" excerpts, watch Kislyak, the popular presenters. See how they talk to Russia in
that critical hour after workers get home and have diner and watch an evening hour of current
affairs. They show every lie, every manipulation, every example of American aggression, and
they laugh at every American stupidity.
They are nice people, and if you go there as an American citizen, they will be kind to you.
But when it comes to nations, and international trust - they've had it with you. They've
turned their back. And you brought it on yourselves. As the Russian saying goes "as you
return my hand extended to you, so will I return your action" "They are nice people, and if
you go there as an American citizen, they will be kind to you."
If what you're saying about the Russian people is true -- and I've no reason to dispute it
-- then it may have something to do with their years under Communist rule. The corruption,
the lies, the suppression of dissidence, and all the other harm done to them by their rulers
ingrained a healthy distrust of government and an insight that the subjects of such a system
can still be good people.
Americans aren't there yet. Most of us still find it not only acceptable for the neighbor
kid to die serving Uncle Sam, but something to celebrate as his name goes up on another green
sign along a potholed bridge. This national inclination to identify with one's rulers, a
Washington Syndrome, is pumped into our eyes and ears from birth. Even on this relatively
dissident website, many become invested in the Red v Blue, whose Beltway members when
offstage attend each other's weddings and hold each other up above the rule of law.
Pundits like Mr. Buchanan (especially when writing about international affairs) are
Beltloops who help to keep the bleating within acceptable channels. Read this column again,
and note every "we/us/our" that references Washington. Is pronoun propaganda like that as
prevalent in Russia or, for that matter, anywhere else outside "USA!"?
@KenH
Putin is like a battered wife who keeps making excuses for the abuser. Putin's great at going
through the motions with military parades and boasts about new weapons systems then turns the
other cheek and endlessly whines about violations of international law after every deliberate
provocation.
I'm beginning to think Putin is the wrong man to lead Russia because his policy of
deference, good will and steadfast refusal to retaliate in the face of endless insults and
acts of aggression by (((America))) and Israel is making matters worse, not better, for
Russia. I don't know what more he needs to prove that America is only playing him for a fool,
doesn't respect him and is only teasing him with the prospect of a partnership so he remains
tentative.
It's one thing to exercise restraint but it's quite another to be so suicidal in your
delusions of eventual Western acceptance that it's irreparably harming Russian interests.
There needs to be a countervailing power to check Zio-American-Israeli aggression but
Putin is not up to the task. I never thought I'd wax nostalgic for the old Soviet Union, but
here I am. So Putin must react to every provocation, immediately.
No.
He should wait and accept the provocations, just as he has, and at the same time plan his own
provocations.
If you're the prey in a relationship, you react to stimulus. If you're the predator, you
create the stimulus. Better to be the predator.
The MSM should be ignored since they will blame Putin, no matter what. And, what difference
does that make in Russia.
@Sir
Launcelot Canning It appears that Putin is impotent to stand up to the Brussels -
Washington D.C. - Jerusalem - Berlin Axis of Evil. Could that be construed as evidence that
the Axis is such a formidable iron fortress that even a tough guy like Putin can't put a dent
in it?
If Russia and China don't collaborate soon, then the Axis will have complete, heavy handed
global domination, replete with policies and infrastructure to make certain it is perpetually
unchallenged.
Seems to me that I read something about this in the Bible.
It appears that Putin is impotent to stand up to the Brussels – Washington D.C.
– Jerusalem – Berlin Axis of Evil. Could that be construed as evidence that the
Axis is such a formidable iron fortress that even a tough guy like Putin can't put a dent
in it?
Appearances can be deceiving.
Remember the Wizard of Oz was just a flim flam man behind a curtain.
Axis control is actually in London. Has been for several hundred years.
No, Russia and Russians have not given up on USA and perhaps never will. Don't underestimate
American soft power – the power of McDonalds, Hollywood, music, fashion, Ivy League
prestige, etc. 90% of East Europeans will give an arm and a leg to get to America and so will
perhaps 30% of Russians. Remember, they dismantled a world power state that they had
primarily to become a part of the "West", to be like America and Americans. Where do their
rich send their sons and daughters to study? Where do they stash their wealth? What language
do they wish to learn and acquire? And when they accomplish something, whether a sports medal
or a new scientific breakthrough or a new weapon, whose respect and admiration do they
desperately seek? Read their media (RT and Sputnik) carefully and you will find plenty of
desperation there, from silly chest-thumping to get Western attention to well-argued pleas
for friendship. Their whole media is full of "Look Ma, we can do it too, just like the
Yanks".
And don't underestimate American hard power as well. Behind Putin's perpetual references
to "Our American partners, our Western partners" lies a realistic understanding of military
realities. His fans may talk of his strategic geopolitical skills, the skills of a chess
grandmaster. The man himself never boasts as the complicated and powerful American
geopolitical maneuvers keep the man perpetually puzzled. The man may be clever, but he is
heading an economically and politically weak state. Yes, Russian nationalism is very much
alive; so is Russia's desire to be a part of the West, even as a junior partner.
The US policy towards Russia can be summed up by paraphrasing that famous line from Cool Hand
Luke: What we have here is failure to capitulate. US thought that Russia is going to stay
down. It took them what – less than 10 years under that buffoon Yeltsin to realize with
whom they are dealing in the west and that it's time to get up and fight again.
It cracks me up when they say that the cold war was about the clash of ideologies. Maybe
communism can still qualify as an ideology, but how does creatively ripping off someone out
of their money qualify as an "ideology"?
There is always going to be a rivalry between US and Russia – regardless of the
"ideologies". It never was about communism, it was about eliminating competition and then
inventing a new one – China, because they just didn't see it coming. That's how
clueless they are. They though that China is going to be just a giant Sri Lanka –
source of cheap labor, a sweat shop for the smart folks in the west. Because, let's face it
– who has ever gotten rich by labor alone – right?
@Sir
Launcelot Canning And you know all of this how? Maybe because you wish it were so? You
sound so sure of yourself, you must live in downtown Moscow. And I play short stop for the
White Sox. Nope, I don't know the future, but I do know present reality and facts. Russia's
GDP is 6.78% America's – check it out for yourself. Eastern Europeans line-up, hats in
hand, to get immigration to the US – check out the US immigration statistics. Russia
desire to be "partners" with the west is right out of Putin and Lavrov speeches, not my
imagination. Check out their speeches on RT and Sputnik, which are Russian media BTW.
Putin may be a clever fellow, but he is leading a very weak state. And it shows in several
ways. In his perpetual dithering; in his constant pleas and entreaties to the west to please
show us some respect and kindness; and in his desperate boasts about non-existent
weapons.
American policy, especially now under Trump, is diabolically clever and powerful in a
Machiavellian way. Trump is tightening his grip over both China and Russia – and
winning IMHO. See China caving in under sanctions? If you don't, you need to read the news a
little more carefully. Analyze the items and tariff rates that the two sides have imposed on
each other, they tell their own story.
Should we like the way the world is heading? Of course not. Should we support one side or
the other? Of course not. They are all a bunch of power-mad, ruthless tyrants and other
things besides, which I hesitate to say out of a sense of politeness. Should we think more,
research more, and analyze more? Of course, we must. The last flicker of hope is that people
come to understand the world a little better and try to nudge it towards kinder, more ethical
and more moral directions. Now that is a pipe dream for you and me!
Right, ancient frontiers that go all the way back to the 17th century, or in some cases
(like Crimea or the Baltics ) the 18th. Russians are masters at getting foreign dupes to
believe the propaganda. China has ancient frontiers, Iran has ancient frontiers, even France
has ancient frontiers. Russia as a state is about two centuries older than the United States.
It is an upstart country masquerading as an ancient civilization. True.
Unfortunately, most of our present-day conflicts are a lot more transparent to people with a
minimum of historical knowledge, and, equally unfortunately, even that minimum is sorrowfully
rare.
A confidential report by Belgian investigators confirms that British intelligence services
hacked state-owned Belgian telecom giant Belgacom on behalf of Washington, it was revealed on
Thursday (20 September).
The report, which summarises a five-year judicial inquiry, is almost complete and was
submitted to the office of Justice Minister Koen Geens, a source close to the case told AFP,
confirming Belgian press reports
The matter will now be discussed within Belgium's National Security Council, which
includes the Belgian Prime Minister with top security ministers and officials.
Contacted by AFP, the Belgian Federal Prosecutor's Office and the cabinet of Minister
Geens refused to comment .
####
NO. Shit. Sherlock.
So the real question is that if this has known since 2013, why now? BREXIT?
"... If the so-called "Resistance" to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for days, like how "bombshell" revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for days. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and it won't be. ..."
"... The US Senate has just passed Trump's mammoth military spending increase by a landslide 92–8 vote . The eight senators who voted "nay"? Seven Republicans, and Independent Bernie Sanders. Every single Democrat supported the most bloated war budget since the height of the Iraq war . Rather than doing everything they can to weaken the potential damage that can be done by a president they've been assuring us is a dangerous hybrid of equal parts Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler, they've been actively increasing his power as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen. ..."
"... They're on the same team, wearing different uniforms. ..."
"... US politics is pretty much the same; two mainstream parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give the illusion of competition. ..."
"... In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it's pretending to care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video game remote won't impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push. ..."
"... The only way to effect real change is to stop playing along with the rigged system and start waking people up to the lies. As long as Americans believe that the mass media are telling them the truth about their country and their partisan votes are going somewhere useful, the populace whose numbers should give it immense influence is nullified and sedated into a passive ride toward war, ecocide and oppression. ..."
"... Reprinted with author's permission from Medium.com . ..."
"... Support Ms. Johnstone's work on Patreon or Paypal ..."
A new article from the Wall Street
Journal reports that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
lied to congress about the measures Saudi Arabia is taking to minimize the civilian
casualties in its catastrophic war on Yemen, and that he did so in order to secure two billion
dollars for war profiteers.
This is about as depraved as anything you could possibly imagine. US-made bombs have
been conclusively tied to civilian deaths in a war which has caused the single worst
humanitarian crisis on earth, a crisis which sees
scores of Yemeni children dying every single day and has
placed five million children at risk of death by starvation in a nation where families are
now eating
leaves to survive . CIA veteran Bruce Riedel
once said that "if the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King
Salman that this war has to end, it would end tomorrow, because the Royal Saudi Airforce cannot
operate without American and British support." Nobody other than war plutocrats benefits from
the US assisting Saudi Arabia in its monstrous crimes against humanity, and yet Pompeo chose to
override his own expert advisors on the matter for fear of hurting the income of those very war
plutocrats.
If the so-called "Resistance" to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this
administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for
days, like how "bombshell" revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for
days. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and it won't be.
It would be so very, very easy for Democratic party leaders and Democrat-aligned media to
hurt this administration at the highest level and cause irreparable political damage based on
this story. All they'd have to do is give it the same blanket coverage they've given the
stories about Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort which
end up leading nowhere remotely near impeachment or proof of collusion with the Russian
government. The footage of the starving children is right there, ready to be aired to pluck at
the heart strings of rank-and-file Americans day after day until Republicans have lost all hope
of victory in the midterms and in 2020; all they'd have to do is use it. But they don't. And
they won't.
The US Senate has just passed Trump's mammoth military spending increase by
a landslide 92–8 vote . The eight senators who voted "nay"? Seven Republicans, and
Independent Bernie Sanders. Every single Democrat supported the most bloated war budget
since the
height of the Iraq war . Rather than doing everything they can to weaken the potential
damage that can be done by a president they've been assuring us is a dangerous hybrid of equal
parts Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler, they've been actively increasing his power as
Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen.
The reason for this is very simple: President Trump's ostensible political opposition does
not oppose President Trump. They're on the same team, wearing different uniforms. This is the
reason they attack him on Russian collusion accusations which the brighter bulbs among them
know full well will never be proven and have no basis in reality. They don't stand up to Trump
because, as Julian Assange once said , they are
Trump.
In John Steinbeck's The Pearl, there are jewelry buyers set up around a fishing community
which are all owned by the same plutocrat, but they all pretend to be in competition with one
another. When the story's protagonist discovers an enormous and valuable pearl and goes to sell
it, they all gather round and individually bid far less than it is worth in order to trick him
into giving it away for almost nothing. US politics is pretty much the same; two mainstream
parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give
the illusion of competition.
In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give
their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote
for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of
a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that
government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it's pretending to
care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video
game remote won't impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push.
The only way to effect real change is to stop playing along with the rigged system and start
waking people up to the lies. As long as Americans believe that the mass media are telling them
the truth about their country and their partisan votes are going somewhere useful, the populace
whose numbers should give it immense influence is nullified and sedated into a passive ride
toward war, ecocide and oppression.
If enough of us keep throwing sand in the gears of the lie
factory, we can wake
the masses up from the oligarchic lullaby they're being sung. And then maybe we'll be big
enough to have a shot at grabbing one of the real video game controllers.
Reprinted with author's permission from
Medium.com .
A little-known unit in the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is conducting
a covert surveillance, espionage and blackmail campaign against American citizens on a large
scale. Not since the arrest of Jonathan Jay Pollard and the 1992 expose of the Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai Brith's espionage against civil rights activists has the Israeli government
been so actively involved in clandestine influence and espionage against American targets.
The unit is Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, headed by director general Sima
Vaknin-Gil. Vaknin-Gil reports personally to PM Netanyahu. Vaskin-Gil is a former Brigadier
General in the IDF, who once was the Chief Israeli Military Censor. Her Ministry has spawned a
"private" security firm, Israel Cyber Shield, headed by former Ministry official and Israeli
National Police officer Eran Vasker. According to Haaretz, ICS is part of the spy network
gathering dossiers on anti-Israel activists from the BDS movement in the United States.
The existence and mission of the Ministry first came to prominence in a four-part
documentary produced by Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based international news organization. In 2016,
Al Jazeera successfully infiltrated the American Zionist apparatus via James Anthony Kleinfeld,
a British Jew who graduated from Oxford, spoke six languages and was well-versed in Middle East
affairs. Kleinfeld infiltrated The Israel Project and other pro-Israel US organizations to such
an extent that the leadership welcomed him with open arms and let down their guard about their
collusion with the Israeli government, in targeting pro-Palestine organizations and other
Israel critics.
Armed with a hidden video recorder, Kleinfeld obtained large amounts of material on the
inner workings of TIP, AIPAC, the Israeli-American Council, the Maccabee Task Force and the
Zionist Organization of America. He got "straight from the horse's mouth" that the Foundation
for the Defense of Democracies is a spy agency working as an unregistered agent of the Israeli
government. One TIP official confided to Kleinfeld that they had to be very careful, because
they were "a different government working on foreign soil."
Earlier this year, Al Jazeera was scheduled to air four 50-minute documentary segments on
Kleinfeld's findings. But, Al Jazeera was required to first inform the organizations that were
to be featured in the documentary about the pending airing of the series. At that point, the
full weight of the US Zionist apparatus along with the Israeli government came down on the
Qatar government to press for censorship of the documentary. Suddenly, the US Zionist lobby,
which had allied with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in denouncing Qatar as a terrorist state,
backing Hamas and other jihadist organizations, reversed positions and gave their support to
Qatar. The documentary has never aired.
But bootleg copies of the devastating documentary are clearly circulating around. Alain
Gresh wrote a lengthy summary for The Nation on August 31, based on his having viewed the
entire four-part series, courtesy of a friend in the Middle East. Sooner or later, the entire
series will surface, despite the Qatar censorship decision. Excerpts have already been posted
on some websites.
I like to think this is a story that is too big to bury for long.
Thanks Harper and hats off to Kleinfeld, this was a brave thing to undertake. I assume
not posting the name of the documentary nor links to the cited article was a deliberate
decision not to invite a return of a hasbara plague here. They are easy to find anyhow.
The Electronic lntifada certainly seem to have a copy and are publishing extracts
weekly at present. Please let us know as soon as the whole thing makes it into the public
domain. It will be very interesting to see how far they are willing to go to try and
suppress it. It will also be interesting to see what effect its inevitable release (and
the timing of it) has on Russiagate.
"I like to think this is a story that is too big to bury for long."
Harper, what do you think could be the outcome if the story does indeed surface?
I'm very skeptical that there would be much coverage in our corporate media and even
if there were it would be to discredit the story among accusations of anti-semitism. I
don't see anything in our current environment to shake loose the noose that the ziocons
have our political and media establishment in.
FDD is the successor organization of a group called EMET, an education initiative
founded earlier in 2001 as part of an effort to gain support for Israel's response to the
Palestinian Intifada and to diminish public outcry against Israeli actions.[11] Regarding
EMET, Slate reported in mid-2015: "On April 24, 2001, three major pro-Israel donors
incorporated an organization called EMET (Hebrew for 'truth'). In an application to the
Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status, [FDD president Clifford May] explained
that the group 'was to provide education to enhance Israel's image in North America and
the public's understanding of issues affecting Israeli-Arab relations.'"[12]
It seems to be a fact that the
FARA is being selectively enforced.
If that is true (and who would deny that it is?), then the pertinent question
becomes: "Just what are the criteria that determine when FARA is enforced?" .
Some examples seem pertinent:
1) Obviously, the prosecution of Manafort is directly related to turning him against
Trump. Even a federal judge, Judge Ellis, has asserted this.
2) Has anyone ever been prosecuted as being an agent for Israel? Rather transparently,
there is AIPAC which seems to have Teflon around it.
3) According to
your Wikipedia biography , you yourself registered under FARA:
"For a period prior to and during the Iraq War, [Lang] registered under the U.S.
Department of Justice's Foreign Agents Registration Act, for his work on behalf of a
Lebanese politician and industrialist." Interesting. One may wonder what made you so
register (i.e., did somebody suggest that you do so?), and also if there is a double
standard held against people, depending on, say, whether they are working for Israel vice
an Arab person or organization.
I suspect Giraldi knows quite a bit about this subject.
Finally, here are some Politico articles that are pertinent:
What does my FARA registration have to do with Giraldi? I was a corporate officer in a
commercial enterprise that manufactured building materials in the Arab Gulf, Europe and
the US. I also ran the owner of the company's family foundation. He was a Muslim and he
put his Zakat (tithing money) into the foundation. We did building trades, agriculture
and language training in Lebanon, microcredit lending to women and supported Henry
Siegman's ME Project at the CFR in NY. That project put money into policy papers on ME
subjects that were given to the State Department and NSC staff. Corporate counsel advised
me that because these policy papers recommended policy positions for the US I should
register and I did so. When I stopped working for this company in 2006 I deregistered.
My intent was that
"I suspect Giraldi knows quite a bit about this subject."
be applied to the statement immediately above it, namely,
"One may wonder ... if there is a double standard held against people, depending on, say,
whether they are working for Israel vice an Arab person or organization."
But the influence by Israel in the US seems to be of more long data than that of
Bibi´s tenure...Just may be with Bibi, like it happens with The Donald, all is more
obvious, more blunt, and less subtle....as it is the man himself....
Wow! I guess a commenter here has a wider audience than perhaps one might have thought.
No one has ever been afraid of me in my entire life, or even cared too much what I said.
It'll take some getting used to. I doubt I can swing it.
Al Jazeera did two simultaneous Israeli influence investigations and produced two
four-part documentaries: one about Israeli activities in the UK, and another one about
those in the US.
https://www.haaretz.com/whd...
Israel fought the release of the UK version in the UK on anti-Semitic grounds, but
lost. That series called "The Lobby" already aired there and is available on Al Jazeera's
site.
Israel switched tactics to supress the US version by attacking Qatar and Al Jazeera
directly, pressuring them to cancel its release here (US), thus avoiding the political
bribes necessary to subvert the US Constitution's First Amendment. Unfortunately, they
probably would have had many US politicians supporting their accusations of anti-Semitism
and could have had it censored anyways - damn the bothersome US Constitution. Killing the
US documentary at the source was far less messy PR-wise and just as effective at
silencing any journalism critical of Israel's interference in US. Elections, policy and
other matters of state.
"An unforeseen effect of the Iraq war is that it has allowed more Americans to speak
freely about the role of the Israel lobby. When and how was it born? While it is
generally understood that American interest groups played a crucial role in creating the
state of Israel in 1948 and supporting politicians who would stand up for Israel, other
facts have remained elusive. Grant F. Smith reveals that many of the functions the Israel
lobby smoothly and quietly executes in political life today were formed in the late 1950s
and early 1960s: the crucial political contributions and unrelenting campaign to convince
Americans that Israel and the United States share common interests and enemies, whether
the old Communist bloc-or Islamic radicals in the 21st century. Smith documents the
lobby's awesome resistance to public accountability for its actions before Congress and
the Justice Department. That fascinating history is the terrain of this book. Referencing
over 1,000 previously classified documents released under a Freedom of Information Act
filing, Smith follows Isaiah L. Kenen's path from registered foreign agent for the
Israeli government to founder of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC.
Smith unearths a formerly secret non-prosecution agreement, the "subvention caveat"
reached between the Israel lobby and the US Department of Justice. The agreement reveals
a great deal about the latitude of the lobby's operations and the US government's
institutional aversion to challenging it. America's Defense Line may forever change the
debate about US Middle East policy formulation."
Actually, it was b h o who opened the Fed borrowing window to the Wall Street
investment crowd who were able to borrow at 1/4 % interest so that they could play the
markets with impunity.
b h o played both sides against the middle telling folks to vote for him and 'hope and
change' bullshit and to shake his fist at Wall Street -- all the while enabling them to make
more money than they thought existed.
Like so many of his predecessors in the White House, Trump has surrounded himself with
Zionists in almost every important position imaginable and they're more than willing to screw us
into the ground -- just because they can.
"... "....cunning, ambitious,and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.....". ..."
"... JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass ..."
The CIA is not really in the business of collecting "intelligence." That "agency" is and always has been in the business of
subverting or toppling other governments.
So they have finally gotten around to subverting the USSA government. Why am I not surprised.
What came to my mind when I read this good article, MB, is words from George Washington's Farewell Address. He may have written
to explain about the dangers of political parties, but it resonates exactly about what is occurring in this present state of American
governance.
"....cunning, ambitious,and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to
usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.....".
As Mark Twain said, its easier to fool somebody than to convince them they have been fooled,
its even easier (former) and tougher (latter) when you control the narrative and news, not to
mention education.
That New York Times piece was amazing. Belief anything the US Gov't/anti-Russian lobby and
other nut cases tell you, unquestioningly. Investigative journalism at its best!
Accept the most stupid evidence with blinking an eye. Even if one believes the collusion
argument, try to be a bit critical. And always believe that a GRU hacker will put Felix
Dzerzinnsky's name in their program. For heaven's sake he was Cheka, the forerunner of the
KGB, not the GRU which was military intelligence.
The timing is interesting. Hillary Clinton was one-on-one wiht Maddow "for the hour" last
night (I didn't watch) and has/had an "important" broadside againt TRump in the Atlantic
(covered extensively also in the Guardian) .... trying to claw her way back into the
limelight or just promoting the **newly released** paperback edition of "What Happened" with
and extensive "caboose" or adendum (caboose being irrc HRC's term).
I suspect some of the powerful are realizing what an impending disaster and "anti-climax"
Mueller's investigation appears increasingly likely to be. It was !!! Breaking News !!! a few
nights ago that Mueller was ready to sentence Flynn (guilty plea ages ago) for the single
count of lying to the FBI ... don't hold your breath because it's -- OMG -- happening in
December 2018. As far as I could tell, the significance (OMG) seems to be that Mueller feels
Flynn's cooperation has been completed. (Flynn may be reassured, given given Papadopoulos'
sentence).
People may have said unwise things and acted in unwise fashion, proving conspiracy to
commit an actual crime (which is a crime even in the absence of a crime occurring) may be
prove unconvincing.
The role of the media is pure and simple BS generation and dissemination , nothing
else. The BS has several clearly discernible patterns:
1) the one b mentions - the title and the first few paragraphs say one thing, after >90%
of the text is passed the truth is mentioned - perfectly matched to the readers attention
curve (b you could have mentioned the psych research); the purpose - claim objectivity,
2) the first bits reported about some important event are usually the most truthful because
the BS generation machine has a turn-on lag; the morning news 7 am about what happened last
night are the most truthful because the masters of narratives do not wake up at 6 am to BS,
they come to work comfortably at 9 am; the BS portion increases during the day, for the most
watched 8pm and/or 10pm news to become pure unadulterated BS.
And so on, I have more patters but for another discussion.
"... This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs , by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; Zen Cash ; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom ; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott ; and TheBumperSticker.com . ..."
by Scott | Sep 14, 2018
| Interviews |
0 comments Larry Wilkerson, former army Colonel and Chief of Staff to Secretary of State
Colin Powell, is interviewed on his new article at LobeLog "
The Neoconservative Comeback " on the growing influence of neoconservatism in the Trump
Administration. Trump's Syria and Afghanistan policy are discussed, as well as the old axiom,
personnel is policy.
Well, well, well, spying in the USA and subverting both its citizens and congress
critters. Another brilliant article by Alain Gresh in Le Monde Diplomatique: The truths that
wont be heard.
I don't support many of Trump's policies (making peace with Russia, drawing down our wars
not withstanding) and the man, to me, is a childish buffoon. But what's categorically worse
than having a childish buffoon as a sitting president? A deep state cabal of neocons and
neolibs cheered on by the left and MSM so emboldened by the success of their usurpation that
they brag about it on the pages of the leading newspapers in the country. As much as pains me
to say, it's the behavior of the left in America that is truly sickening in the whole sordid
affair.
It's his own fault. He should've and could've fired everyone from DAY ONE. He kept hold overs
from all the previous administrations and now he's stuck with them. Trump PHUCKED up big time
by not bringing in ALL of his supporters to fight for him and those that do are FIRED. So go
suck on it Trumpy.
Trumpenstein delivers magnificently for his constituency. Cheap fiat money for the jooie
banking usurers and wall street scammers. Continued destruction of the ME making the
bloodthirsty izzies and domestic jooies deliriously happy.
And for the MAGA white trash deplorables .a miniscule tax cut so they can afford a new
blue tarp to cover the trailer roof leak and maybe a new mumu for the 250 lb wife.
"... I still love the theater though. The meaningless political theater that last occurred when Clinton was President. What's most amusing this time is that it's only the hyper-partisans (many of whom are not self-aware enough to realize it) who identify (again, consciously or subconsciously) that even care. The rest of us simply get to see each party's idiotic followers on the "left" and the "right" get sucked into the media's chosen narrative. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the bombings and interventions can continue, Gitmo can remain open (btw, anyone else notice that unlike hurricanes that hit the mainland, nobody ever cares whether Gitmo will be evacuated?), the massive bank bailout can be relegated deeper and deeper into the memory hole and the two parties (including Trump's cabinet) continue to grow closer and closer together where the subjects of domestic surveillance and neocon warmongering are concerned. ..."
"... I love it. I laugh openly at anyone who mentions Russia to me from either angle. "No collusion!" is as entertaining as "Putin got Trump elected!" - Idiots. ..."
"... i do believe the proxy wars are really all about this same salient fact - the usa and us$ can not be challenged.. any challenge will be met with war, covert, or overt.. ..."
The whole nonsense about Russian interference, which was obviously nonsense from Day One
and has never, for a moment looked like anything but nonsense, seems to indicate that we
have entered a post political era in which policy discussions and debates are forgotten and
smears and false accusations take their place.
Currently in the US the Kavanaugh nomination which ought to be about the meaning of the law
and the consequences of having a Supreme Court which will make Judge Taney look like
Solomon at his most impressive. Instead it is about an alleged teenage incident in which
the nominee is said to have caressed a girls breasts at a drunken party when all involved
were at High School. Before that we had a Senatorial election in Alabama in which the
Republican candidate was charged with having shown a sexual interest in teenage girls-
whether this was a 'first' in Alabama is unknown but it is believed to have happened
elsewhere, in the unenlightened past.
Then we have the matter of whether Jeremy Corbyn is such a danger to Jews that they will
all leave the country if he is ever elected to power. This long campaign, completely devoid
of evidence, like 'Russiagate' has the potential of going on forever, simply because there
being no evidence it cannot be refuted.
Which is also the case with the Skripal affair, because of which even as we speak, massive
trade and financial sanctions are being imposed against Russia and its enormous, innocent
and plundered population.
In none of these cases has any real evidence, of the minimal quality that might justify the
hanging of a dog, ever advanced. But that doesn't matter, the important thing is to choose
a side and if it is Hillary Clinton's to believe or to pretend to believe and to convince
others to believe (as Marcy at Emptywheel has been doing for close to three years now) in
the incredible.
Who says that we no longer live in a Christian society in which faith is everything?
I wonder how many time i will see this, See everyone using the meme they want you to use,
For example 'Election collusion' or 'Russian collusion' Etc.
A huge smoke screen allowing the main fleet to escape. The tide of votes going as it did
sure did bring out the liars. From the first moment that the results showed that the huge
behemoth of their interference blew flat and failed, they went all out to cast the loss as
some sort of interference from what ever source, Fact is the entire process is constantly
under attack from within by forces that it's ends in their sights and the loss of control
of that process forced them into damage control, Today we are seeing the lofty heights they
will stack the dung up to direct your attentions away from the FIRST and real interference
in the election process.
Well folks say the Hillary creature as she is, What she was a token place marker for,
The forces looting North America, The forces driving the 'Order out of Chaos' operation.
This operation has been a monkey on the backs of the public outside the halls of modern
powers and their use.
The process, even a rigged process FAILED. What ever the dirt they have on the eventual
choice you made about your course, they will not allow you to subvert their plans even if
you all come together and move the levers of power, I saw the photo that soon came out of
Trump rather depressed looking, You say that photo, You knew exactly what it meant, From
that picture to today everythng is back on THEIR track not YOURS.
The entire process is under their control as long as the many remain in their comfy
places built for them. Fix is a dangerous and frightening path for a very good reason. The
eventual outcome of their process is going to be a very hard place to live. Overcoming
their control and domination is not going to be allowed, History is coming for the evil of
this world and the fix is going to be a very devastating event.
When you have so many heads following your evil ways, It's hard not to have the response
to evil fall on your actions and deal with your ways.
We live in a very interesting times. If you thought 9/11 was bad... You ain't seen
nothing yet.
If you substitute "witches" or "the bogeyman" for "Russia" in most US and European news
articles, you get a better sense for how ridiculous and unfounded they are. But as we
witnessed in Salem, it's not hard to get mass hysteria going with a complete lack of
evidence.
Once people are on the "Trump is a Russian tool" bandwagon it's extremely hard to get
them off, as the absence of evidence is harder to prove--while people find the repeated
assertion of imaginary evidence entirely convincing.
@karlof1 #6: The narrative that has been promoted grows thinner all the time, with the
emphasis switching from collusion to corruption and with that fading in the news on to his
being deranged. Now we have resistance from Rosenstein to the House Investigative Committee
and Trump to release the classified memos showing the shenanigans of Strzok, Comey, et al,
plus emerging voices from inside. I do believe the collusion narrative is withering; more
important "deplorables" don't give a damn anyway.
Well, it's a proven fact that millions of recycled US taxpayer's dollars were used by
Zionists to influence the 2016 and most every previous election going back to 1968, if not
further. Massive documentation of collusion exists between Zionists and US politicos at all
levels of government. Furthermore, there's much publicly available evidence sufficient to
indict and convict Hillary Clinton of numerous felonies along with several high officials
within the DNC for election interference. Why not rant and rail against these very easily
proven crimes?!
Obviously. I still love the theater though. The meaningless political theater that last
occurred when Clinton was President. What's most amusing this time is that it's only the
hyper-partisans (many of whom are not self-aware enough to realize it) who identify (again,
consciously or subconsciously) that even care. The rest of us simply get to see each party's
idiotic followers on the "left" and the "right" get sucked into the media's chosen
narrative.
Meanwhile, the bombings and interventions can continue, Gitmo can remain open (btw,
anyone else notice that unlike hurricanes that hit the mainland, nobody ever cares whether
Gitmo will be evacuated?), the massive bank bailout can be relegated deeper and deeper into
the memory hole and the two parties (including Trump's cabinet) continue to grow closer and
closer together where the subjects of domestic surveillance and neocon warmongering are
concerned. We'll never see the PATRIOT ACT re-debated and the military budget will
increase beyond all imagination while the hand wringing about "deficit spending" on the right
stops so long as there's an "R" after the name of whomever sits in the White House.
I love it. I laugh openly at anyone who mentions Russia to me from either angle. "No
collusion!" is as entertaining as "Putin got Trump elected!" - Idiots.
@11 karlof1.. that also gets me... if one is looking for corruption in the political class,
it is not hard to find! why start and stop only with russia? i think the answer is fairly
obvious.. there has been an ongoing attempt to maintain the unipolar world with us$ and
russia and china potentially interfere with this ongoing status... thus we are back to
psychohistorians ongoing issue over finances - private verses public, and what we wish to see
as a world hopefully moving forward here..
i do believe the proxy wars are really all about this same salient fact - the usa and
us$ can not be challenged.. any challenge will be met with war, covert, or overt..
Dr. Hart's book is invaluable because it highlights some of the basic truths about America
that modern-day histories simply conceal. For example, he writes: "America is much younger than
most European
nations . It did not exist at all prior to 1600 AD but was created
in the ' colonial era .'"
Dr. Hart provides a basic history of America's development, including highlighting specific
incidents that ultimately proved critical to the future of the polity. One of the more
interesting was the Zenger
trial, a
colonial case in which a journalist criticized the local governor
and was charged with libel. A grand jury refused to indict Zenger, accepting his defense that
the things he printed were true. Thanks to this case, Americans can claim truth as an absolute
defense in libel cases, something
our British cousins lack .
A highlight of Dr. Hart's history is his careful attention to demographic issues. For
example, he scoffs at the claim sometimes heard within the
dimmer quarters of the
American Conservative Movement that the Constitution was a "miracle." Instead, Dr. Hart
shows that the authors of America's governing document shared linguistic, cultural, racial, and
experiential factors that
allowed them to work together. (Contemporary American statesmen possess no such unanimity.)
Dr. Hart is also not blind to the Constitution's faults, especially its failure to designate
how and who has the power to interpret it -- specifically, not necessarily the Kritarchs on the Supreme Court.
Dr. Hart is also clearsighted regarding immigration. He does not accept the now de
rigueur analysis that immigration from widely disparate regions was always a feature of
American life. "Before 1849,
immigrants to the Untied States came mostly from the Protestant
regions of northwest Europe, including Holland , Sweden, Norway , Germany and Great
Britain," he observes. He also provides an honest assessment of the difficulties Irish immigration
presented for 19 th century America and argues that despite speaking English, "they
assimilated very slowly."
Dr. Hart argues the "Golden Age" of the United States extended from 1865 to 1991. "During
that interval the United States stood out for its wealth, for its military might, and for its
unprecedented set of practical inventions and scientific discoveries," he argues. Indeed, one
of the best parts of the book is when Dr. Hart recounts the numerous inventions and scientific
advances America has given to the world.
However, Dr. Hart's most invaluable contribution is in detailing what he sees as the
symptoms of America's decline after the Cold War. America's indebtedness, relatively poor military
performance , loss of Constitutional liberties, and collapse of artistic standards are all
covered. Two other issues highly relevant to immigration patriots are what Dr. Hart calls
"political problems" and "loss of confidence and national pride."
Dr. Hart details how Democratic politicians have diligently opposed any efforts to
implement common-sense voter ID laws to prevent election fraud. Media bias is another major
political problem, one an increasing number of Americans are awakening to. Finally, Dr. Hart
identifies the "increase in racial hostilities" as both a symptom and a cause of America's
increasing political problems. "Black hostility towards whites is constantly being stirred up
by 'race hustlers' such as
Al Sharpton , who deny any good faith on the part of whites," he writes. "Many people deny
that any progress has been made in the status and treatment of black Americans -- a blatant
untruth which increases black suspicions and hostilities."
Similarly, the decline in national pride is partially a product of how the charge of
"racism" has delegitimized our entire national history. "According to many of these critics,
our Constitution was produced by a group of 'Dead White European Males' (DWEMs, for short) who
do not deserve any respect," he writes. As a result of internalizing this poisonous attack on
America's heritage, some advocate Open Borders as a kind of historical reparations of
punishment for a "racist" country.
Dr. Hart writes:
One result of these attitudes is that many Americans find it unreasonable for the United
States to defend its borders. (After all, since we stole the country from the Indians, we
have no real claim on our land.) Sometimes these views lead to people suggesting that
non-citizens should be permitted to vote in American elections. In any disagreement or
conflict between the United States and a foreign group, many of these critics tend to blame
America first. Many of these critics do not even pretend to be patriotic.
Dr. Hart identifies a host of causes to explain the emergence of these symptoms. Though they
are too many to cover here, two very much worth mentioning are
Dr. Hart points out that for all the talk about white racism, the vast majority of
interracial crime is committed by blacks against whites. Hatred of whites is not only
mainstream but cultivated by the Main Stream Media, the education system, and even some
Democratic politicians -- a coalition that Dr. Hart judges is too powerful to break.
Similarly, Dr. Hart details the disastrous consequences of the 1965 Immigration Act and
explicitly calls for its repeal, but he is pessimistic about the prospects for doing so.
The most explosive part of the book is its concluding chapter, in which Dr. Hart discusses
the various scenarios by which the United States could "fall," either by breaking up, being
extinguished, or losing its political independence and being subsumed into a larger polity. All
of these terrible scenarios have vastly increased in likelihood because of the destabilizing
and destructive effects of mass immigration.
The "fall" of the United States may even occur without most people even noticing it at the
time. "Without any foreign conquest, and without any sharp break, the USA might be transformed
into a multinational state without any loyalty to our English origin," he writes. "In fact,
such a process may already be in process."
During his discussion of causes for American decline, Dr. Hart identifies the most important
"by far" as the "loss of pride and confidence." He blames this on the relentless hate campaign
waged against "our ancestors" by educators and the Main Stream Media, leading to a situation in
which Americans feel "ashamed of their country." In other words, Dr. Hart is really talking
about a loss of identity.
With his history of the United States, and his frank discussion of the issues endangering
its existence, Dr. Hart has performed a valuable service for Americans seeking to reclaim their
national identity. For anyone curious about their country's past and concerned about its
future, The Rise And
Fall Of The United States (full disclosure: A VDARE book -- who else would
publish it?) is well worth purchasing.
If/when America does break apart, it will not be a result of conventional war. The
attack/upheaval will come from within.
Ironically, the trillions spent by Washington on our global MIC will not, in the end,
protect the American people from what is now our greatest threat: internal treason against
Historic America and its core people.
Ironically, instead of returning home to protect US borders when the cold war ended,
American troops were dispersed around the world to fight phantom threats and protect
non-essential foreign entities and extra-national interests.
This ongoing waste of US resources abroad continues to serve the interests of globalists,
militarists, and Zionists. Meanwhile, our domestic security, our Main Street economy, and the
continuity of white, European-derived culture and people inside America gets short shrift.
This glaring disconnect may be our nation's undoing.
The 'proposition nation' concept was a fraud from the start since it ignores the vital
significance of race, culture, language, and IQ.
The engine for America's coming implosion is demographic: uninterrupted, illegal,
non-white immigration by Third World refugees. Hostile elites who now dominate America are
also key. They refuse to acknowledge the perils of 'diversity'. Many want America changed,
irreversibly so.
Meanwhile, white identity and white cohesion have been demonized in our schools as well as
by our dominant mass media. This campaign has undermined white identity, white cohesion and
white interests in general.
Numerous, politically-correct expressions of anti-white hatred are now in wide
circulation. These hate-terms are, ironically, protected from criticism even though they are
applied selectively to target whites. Those few who contest these double-standards (including
Pres. Trump) are routinely defamed by comparisons to 'Hitler' or references to the KKK. The
basic translation comes down to this: Shut up.
This unhealthy and insidious paradigm is here by design. It is used to not only justify
anti-white animus, but to legitimize anti-white violence whenever and wherever whites try to
assemble and express their grievances and/or aspirations. This very sinister double-standard
has taken deep root. It is nurtured by biased reporting and coverage. It has spawned
'antifa'.
Modern speech rules and penalties favor privileged 'minorities' just as they cleary
disfavor and penalize white advocacy.
Among the popular terms that lend support to anti-white bigotry are: 'racist', 'nativist',
'white supremacy', 'Islamophobia', and 'anti-Semitism'.
These shame-inducing memes have 1) contaminated the American mind and 2) empowered our
race-conscious adversaries. They must be deconstructed and deligimized if we are to protect
our interests and preserve America's demographic core.
Resistance, cohesion and self-defense are not fascistic sentiments. They are legitimate
expressions of democratic self-determination.
"... Russia has a clear mission in Syria: that is to re-establish control of Syria for the Assad government and prevent radical Islamic groups from taking over and using Syria as a home (and a launching pad for exporting their twisted views back into Russia). Once that happens, if they are smart, they will go home. Avoiding entanglements with countries like Turkey and Israel are part of that goal. To get themselves embroiled into the vipers nest (like the Americans have done) would be pure stupidity. ..."
"... So yes, Russia will likely do nothing about this, except perhaps change their own tactics to make it less likely to happen again. ..."
"... But this incident does do one very important thing: it exposes the complete and utter fraud and moral bankruptcy of the zionist controlled west and their corporate media who will not report this story and will decline to comment on why exactly Israel gets to bomb Syria at will. ..."
"... NoseytheDuke , says: September 19, 2018 at 7:12 am GMT ..."
"... I have to say that this comment reveals you to be the adult in the comments 'room' so far Greg. ..."
"... Kiza , says: September 19, 2018 at 4:39 pm GMT ..."
"... Here is an excellent summary in English from the Russian state cominiques: http://johnhelmer.org/?p=17934#more-17934 . ..."
"... The only totally wrong thing in this article is the discussion whether the IFF of the Russian S200 system should have prevented the shoot-down of a friendly plane (both made in the same country). Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) is a system which prevents the launching of a missile against your own plane in a complex air battle environment. Now the Jewish 5th column in Russia is muddying the water (they are good at this) saying that it is a Russian screw up being blamed on Israel and John Helmer appears to have picked this up as fact. ..."
"... But, the truth is that IFF works to prevent a launch against a friendly target. It also prevents the missile from hitting a friendly plane under the standard mode of operation of targeting radars called CW. But CW mode is also a major vulnerability of targeting radars, because it can be jammed or spoofed to protect a foe, most Western planes are equipped with good CW counter measures. This is why the S200 system has been designed for semi-automous operation of its missiles. In the last part of the missile's trajectory, the missile can hone in on a target in the absence of a CW signal illuminating its intended target. When the Israeli small fighter jets took cover "behind" a big IL20, the missile honed in on it because the missile's own radar and logic selected the largest target as the most lucrative. ..."
"... Therefore, there was never a Russian screw up of any kind in this. ..."
"... Please keep in mind that Israelis are the World's experts in Russian radar systems because many Jews were involved in their design and some have immigrated to Israel. A few years ago, Israel even hired a Cyprian older and export model of S300 to train its pilots against them. Knowing how much plannng goes into bombing missions, knowing that IL20 because it was EW was a constant cruising presence in the air, and that Israelis attacked targets right next to the biggest Russian airbase in Latakia (where there was potential for the Russian involvement), it is really hard to believe that this outcome was not deliberate. ..."
"... Ultimately, the Israelis are happy with Putin's statements and unhappy with Shoygu's. Please observe the photo of Putin with Nutty Yahoo in Helmer's article, Putin's face is so self-happy. Makes you wish someone would slam a rifle butt into the moron's mug. ..."
"... The final irony is the one several people mentioned online – if the Syrians were operating an S300VM, the most modern version of the targeting radar, quite resistant to CW counter measures, the IL20 shootdown almost certainly would not have happened. Furthermore, if the Russian S400 was permitted to engage Israeli planes, it would have been the four Israeli F16s bathing in the Mediterranean Sea and body parts of Israeli pilots being collected instead of the Russian. On both options, Shoygu said yes and Putin said no. So who is to blame? Perhaps Putin is the Jewish 5th column in Russia. ..."
"... In my next comment I intend to outline what I think the Russians should have been and should be doing, how to deal with the Coalition of the Lovers of Terrorism. ..."
"... Harold Smith , says: September 19, 2018 at 4:44 pm GMT ..."
"... "Basically, 4 Israeli aircraft were sent on a bombing mission against targets near the Russian facilities in Khmeimim and Tartus (which, by itself, is both stupid and irresponsible). " ..."
"... I see it differently: ..."
"... Basically, 4 Israeli aircraft were sent on a mission to (indirectly) bring down a Russian plane, under the pretense of bombing Syrian targets. The object being to exploit Putin's apparent weakness and use it to trash his political popularity (and perhaps damage the morale of the Russian military). ..."
Every time one of these incidents happens, a flood of "chicken-hawks" come out of the
woodwork demanding that Russia should "release the S700s" and "shoot everything down," etc.
These people are idiots and should be ignored. The Saker is coming dangerously close to
being one of these idiots himself.
Russia has a clear mission in Syria: that is to re-establish control of Syria for the
Assad government and prevent radical Islamic groups from taking over and using Syria as a
home (and a launching pad for exporting their twisted views back into Russia). Once that
happens, if they are smart, they will go home. Avoiding entanglements with countries like
Turkey and Israel are part of that goal. To get themselves embroiled into the vipers nest
(like the Americans have done) would be pure stupidity.
So yes, Russia will likely do nothing about this, except perhaps change their own
tactics to make it less likely to happen again.
But this incident does do one very important thing: it exposes the complete and utter
fraud and moral bankruptcy of the zionist controlled west and their corporate media who will
not report this story and will decline to comment on why exactly Israel gets to bomb Syria at
will.
The only totally wrong thing in this article is the discussion whether the IFF of the
Russian S200 system should have prevented the shoot-down of a friendly plane (both made in
the same country). Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) is a system which prevents the
launching of a missile against your own plane in a complex air battle environment. Now the
Jewish 5th column in Russia is muddying the water (they are good at this) saying that it is a
Russian screw up being blamed on Israel and John Helmer appears to have picked this up as
fact.
But, the truth is that IFF works to prevent a launch against a friendly target. It
also prevents the missile from hitting a friendly plane under the standard mode of operation
of targeting radars called CW. But CW mode is also a major vulnerability of targeting radars,
because it can be jammed or spoofed to protect a foe, most Western planes are equipped with
good CW counter measures. This is why the S200 system has been designed for semi-automous
operation of its missiles. In the last part of the missile's trajectory, the missile can hone
in on a target in the absence of a CW signal illuminating its intended target. When the
Israeli small fighter jets took cover "behind" a big IL20, the missile honed in on it because
the missile's own radar and logic selected the largest target as the most lucrative.
Therefore, there was never a Russian screw up of any kind in this.
Please keep in mind that Israelis are the World's experts in Russian radar systems
because many Jews were involved in their design and some have immigrated to Israel. A few
years ago, Israel even hired a Cyprian older and export model of S300 to train its pilots
against them. Knowing how much plannng goes into bombing missions, knowing that IL20 because
it was EW was a constant cruising presence in the air, and that Israelis attacked targets
right next to the biggest Russian airbase in Latakia (where there was potential for the
Russian involvement), it is really hard to believe that this outcome was not
deliberate.
Ultimately, the Israelis are happy with Putin's statements and unhappy with Shoygu's.
Please observe the photo of Putin with Nutty Yahoo in Helmer's article, Putin's face is so
self-happy. Makes you wish someone would slam a rifle butt into the moron's mug.
The final irony is the one several people mentioned online – if the Syrians were
operating an S300VM, the most modern version of the targeting radar, quite resistant to CW
counter measures, the IL20 shootdown almost certainly would not have happened. Furthermore,
if the Russian S400 was permitted to engage Israeli planes, it would have been the four
Israeli F16s bathing in the Mediterranean Sea and body parts of Israeli pilots being
collected instead of the Russian. On both options, Shoygu said yes and Putin said no. So who
is to blame? Perhaps Putin is the Jewish 5th column in Russia.
In my next comment I intend to outline what I think the Russians should have been and
should be doing, how to deal with the Coalition of the Lovers of Terrorism.
"Basically, 4 Israeli aircraft were sent on a bombing mission against targets near the
Russian facilities in Khmeimim and Tartus (which, by itself, is both stupid and
irresponsible). "
I see it differently:
Basically, 4 Israeli aircraft were sent on a mission to (indirectly) bring down a
Russian plane, under the pretense of bombing Syrian targets. The object being to exploit
Putin's apparent weakness and use it to trash his political popularity (and perhaps damage
the morale of the Russian military).
And I think Putin calling this calculated act of mass murder an "accident" was a serious
blunder which made the mission a smashing success.
The Israeli air force had warned the Russian forces in Syria only one minute before the
strike. A Russian IL-20 electronic warfare airplane (red line) was preparing to land at the
Russian airport near Latakia just as the Israeli attack (blue) happened
moonofalabama
Israeli claims that its plane had returned by the time Russian was hit
They also claimed they warned Russia
So in one minute the warned, tried to bomb and then safely returned to Israel
Joaquin Flores has the most interesting analysis I've seen to date. It's just far enough out
there to be true.
In a nutshell, he says it was the French (who pleaded innocence before anyone accused them),
in an attempt to destroy the prospect of good relations between the EU & Russia. That,
and to disrupt the deal made with Turkey regarding Idlib. The latter having made irrelevant
NATO's plans to go live in Syria.
Putin/Shoigu did an end run by blaming the Israelis for the scenario. That opens
possibilities, including a no-fly zone.
What is most important is that Russia avoided being lured into a PR and diplomatic
catastrophe with France, which is what Atlanticists hoped for and tried to execute.
Putin surely knows Israel did 9-11, specifically to get the US to fight wars for terrorist
Jews.
A superb response to this latest (((outrage))) would be for Putin to make a top priority
of exposing the war crimes of terrorist Jews. But he hasn't yet, so that possibility is
unlikely.
Sadly ironic that the greatest enemy of Russia and the US is none other than the Terrorist
Theocracy of Eretz Ysrael.
@Erebus Joaquin Flores has the most interesting analysis I've seen to date. It's just far
enough out there to be true.
In a nutshell, he says it was the French (who pleaded innocence before anyone accused them),
in an attempt to destroy the prospect of good relations between the EU & Russia. That,
and to disrupt the deal made with Turkey regarding Idlib. The latter having made irrelevant
NATO's plans to go live in Syria.
Putin/Shoigu did an end run by blaming the Israelis for the scenario. That opens
possibilities, including a no-fly zone.
What is most important is that Russia avoided being lured into a PR and diplomatic
catastrophe with France, which is what Atlanticists hoped for and tried to execute.
https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/09/full-analysis-russian-disinfo-campaign-blames-israel-for-il-20-plane-downing-yet-exonerates-france/
Flores has an interesting view, but I have a few questions:
He says the French "early denial" doesn't make sense because the French weren't accused of
anything at the time they denied involvement, but IIRC didn't the Russians mention early on
that they detected missile launches from the French ship? So maybe the French were responding
to what they took as an implicit accusation?
Also, if it was not a Syrian S-200 SAM that brought the IL-20 down, how does Flores
explain the conspiuous inability of the Syrian S-200 system to take down any of the Israeli
planes?
Finally, do the French have the guts to shoot down a Russian plane, murdering everyone on
board in cold blood in an unprovoked attack? Granted Putin's not trigger happy, but the
Russians have previously indicated that they would attack launch platforms if any of their
personnel or assets were threatened. In light of that I don't think I would want to be on a
ship whose mission is to test Russian resolve.
It reminds me of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty
How so? Aside from the fact that Israel was involved in both incidents.
Ricostein is correct ..there is a major difference between Il-20 and the USS Liberty. This
time the jooies didn't strafe the lifeboats ..
A lot of people see society in organic terms, and think the maintenance of the whole
over-rides the welfare of any particular bit – even if that particular bit happens to be
themselves (Trump recently hit this theme when he tweeted that "patriotic" Americans were
prepared to sacrifice for the greater good in the trade war).
Heirarchy is probably unavoidable, not for reasons of individual difference but because
one-to-many organisation is the only form that scales readily. We can all have an equal voice on
a jury, but not when building a henge or a operating a car-factory.
Notable quotes:
"... A lot of non-conservatives have a very difficult time grappling with the notion that a commitment to inequality, that a belief in the inherent superiority of some people over others, that one group has the the right to rule and dominate others, is a moral belief. ..."
"... Since, according to this argument, you are amongst other things, your social class, I cannot judge your moral actions unless I understand your social circumstances. But morality is a form of judgement, or to put it another way a ranking. Morality is means nothing unless I can say: 'you are more moral then him, she is more moral than you' and so on. (Nietzsche: 'Man is Man the esteemer' i.e. someone who ranks his or her fellow human beings: human beings cannot be morally equal or the phrase has no meaning). ..."
"... Therefore, unless people have a role in life (i.e. butcher, baker, candlestick maker) then morality collapses (this is the weak point in the argument and if you wanted to tear the whole edifice down you would start here). ..."
"... And of course this social order must be hierarchical, or else anyone can be anything one wants to be, and in that case, who will sweep the streets? ' ..."
"... In other words Conservatives believe that without hierarchy, without ranking and without a stratified (and therefore meaningful) social order, morality actually disintegrates. You simply cannot have a morality without these things: everything retreats into the realm of the subjective. Conservatives don't believe that things like the Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields, the Great Terror, the Cultural Revolution are bad things that happened to happen: they believe that they are the necessary and inevitable end result of atheistical, relativistic, egalitarian politics. ..."
"... To the Right, the Left has no morality, as they understand the term, and cannot in fact do so. Leftist morality is a contradiction in terms, in this worldview. ..."
I think this is an incredibly important point here:
'One last point: A lot of non-conservatives have a very difficult time grappling with
the notion that a commitment to inequality, that a belief in the inherent superiority of some
people over others, that one group has the the right to rule and dominate others, is a moral
belief. For many people, particularly on the left, that idea is not so much immoral as
it is beyond the pale of morality itself. So that's where the charge that I'm being
dismissive or reductive comes from, I'm convinced. Because I say the animating idea of the
right is not freedom or virtue or limited government but instead power and privilege, people,
and again I see this mostly from liberals and the left, think I'm making some sort of claim
about conservatism as a criminal, amoral enterprise, devoid of principle altogether, whereas
I firmly believe I'm trying to do the exact opposite: to focus on where exactly the moral
divide between right and left lies.'
Both the Right and the Left, think that they are moral. And yet they disagree about moral
issues. How can this be?
The solution to this problem is to see that when Rightists and Leftists use the word
'moral' they are using the word in two different (and non compatible) senses. I won't dwell
on what the Left mean by morality: I'm sure most of you will be familiar with, so to speak,
your own moral code.
What the Right mean by morality is rather different, and is more easily seen in 'outliers'
e.g. right wing intellectuals like Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot rather than politicians.
Intellectuals can be rather more open about their true beliefs.
The first key point is to understand the hostility towards 'abstraction': and what
purposes this serves. Nothing is more alien to right wing thought that the idea of an
Abstract Man: right wing thought is situational, contextual (one might even call it
relativistic) to the core. de Maistre states this most clearly: 'The (French) constitution of
1795, like its predecessors, has been drawn up for Man. Now, there is no such thing in the
world as Man . In the course of my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; I
am even aware, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be a Persian. But, as for Man, I declare
that I have never met him in my life.'
This sounds postmodern to us, even Leftist (and of course Marx might have given highly
provisional approval to this statement). But the question is not: is this statement true?
It's: 'what do the right do with this statement?'
Again to quote another reactionary thinker Jose Ortega y Gasseett: 'I am myself plus my
circumstances'. Again this is simply a definition of contextualism. So what are your
circumstances? They are, amongst other things, your social circumstances: i.e. your social
class.
Since, according to this argument, you are amongst other things, your social
class, I cannot judge your moral actions unless I understand your social circumstances. But
morality is a form of judgement, or to put it another way a ranking. Morality is means
nothing unless I can say: 'you are more moral then him, she is more moral than you' and so
on. (Nietzsche: 'Man is Man the esteemer' i.e. someone who ranks his or her fellow human
beings: human beings cannot be morally equal or the phrase has no meaning).
But I can't hermeneutically see what moral role you must play in life, I cannot judge you,
unless I have some criteria for this judgement, and for this I must know what your
circumstances are.
Therefore, unless people have a role in life (i.e. butcher, baker, candlestick maker)
then morality collapses (this is the weak point in the argument and if you wanted to tear the
whole edifice down you would start here). Because unless we know what one's social role
is then we can't assess whether or not people are living 'up to' that role. And of course
this social order must be hierarchical, or else anyone can be anything one wants to be, and
in that case, who will sweep the streets? '
And if anyone has any smart arse points to raise about that idea, God usually gets roped
in to function, literally, as a Deux ex Machina.
' The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.'
Clive James put it best when discussing Waugh: 'With no social order, there could be no
moral order. People had to know their place before they knew their duty he (and, more
importantly society) needed a coherent social system (i.e. an ordered social system, a
hierarchical social system)'
In other words Conservatives believe that without hierarchy, without ranking and
without a stratified (and therefore meaningful) social order, morality actually
disintegrates. You simply cannot have a morality without these things: everything retreats
into the realm of the subjective. Conservatives don't believe that things like the Khmer
Rouge's Killing Fields, the Great Terror, the Cultural Revolution are bad things that
happened to happen: they believe that they are the necessary and inevitable end result of
atheistical, relativistic, egalitarian politics. Social 'levelling', destroying
meaningful (i.e. hierarchical ('organic' is the euphemism usually used)) societies will
usually, not always but usually, lead to genocide and/or civil war. Hence the hysteria that
seizes most Conservatives when the word relativism is used. And their deep fear of
postmodernism, a small scale, now deeply unfashionable art movement with a few (very few)
philosophical adherents: as it destroys hierarchy and undermines one's capacity to judge and
therefore order one's fellow human beings, it will tend to lead to the legalisation of
pedophilia, the legalisation of rape, the legalisation of murder, war, genocide etc, because,
to repeat, morality depends on order. No social order= no morality.
Hence the Right's deep suspicion of the left's morality. To the Right, the Left
has no morality, as they understand the term, and cannot in fact do so. Leftist
morality is a contradiction in terms, in this worldview.
I gave up on the Guardian's comment site myself, 10 years ago, as the censorship on there
made it pointless. Has something changed?
There was one prolific commenter there, MrPikeBishop, who was so popular, he was even
commissioned to write articles above the line. Then one day, bam, he is banned, and his entire
posting history gone. That did it for me; little emperors not fit to clean his boots, just
rubbed him out. I spat on the site that day and never went back. Proclaiming themselves the
bastion of free speech, when they actually the enemies of it.
Actually, I was caught out here in the UK, by the demise of the old five pound note, and
then the ten pound note, because I stopped reading and watching MSM years ago. It's worth it,
to get their irritating buzzing out of my head.
Back to the linked Guardian article; this is indeed interesting – these questions
asked by the journalist:
– Who really did shoot down this plane? Was it an accident or did France and/or Israel
attack?
– Are Russia publicly accepting a false narrative to avoid having to retaliate?
– Do they even understand how close we're coming to global war, whenever a NATO country
operates in Syria?
– How long can we rely on Russian common sense to avoid WWIII?
Maybe the landing approach thesis works – experts in Russ aviation would know if Russ
equivalent to(US/UK) AN/APS-13 aft approach radar, used since 1942 in a series of versions,
was/is fitted to Il20 in question.
Seems that anybody smart enough to build radar would fit tailradar in combat zone, and
leave it on. Note actual radar may have been superseded by an infra red detector a question
for experts. Has been long time since 1942, technical methods improve. And the search
radars?
Ok, pilot, engineer, copilot are doing approach and busy and everybody else just being
inattentive? F 16 were not tracked the entire time? Again, maybe. Radar works at 6000 feet
and horizon still 152 km away F16 can't sneak up unseen fast but not that fast
I always maintain situational awareness in war zones, helps to live longer.
software of S200 can not target friendlies, system was is integrated.
"... Exactly. The zionazis want Syria. They are activating all their options and working overtime to keep their proxies employed against Syria. If the zionazis cant take Syria, it means they don't get to have Lebanon either. It also means their attempt to wreck Iran and reduce it to a failed state is a non starter. ..."
"Also, speaking of Syria: has anybody noticed that the agreement between Turkey and Russia
has removed any justification for a US attack on Syria and that the Israelis have organized
their latest little bloody stunt right after this deal was announced?"
Exactly. The zionazis want Syria. They are activating all their options and working
overtime to keep their proxies employed against Syria. If the zionazis cant take Syria, it
means they don't get to have Lebanon either. It also means their attempt to wreck Iran and
reduce it to a failed state is a non starter.
Syria is the keystone. The geography is a primary target for the destruction of ME. It has
cultural and economic ties that bind most of the region. Destroying Syria is primary for US
Hegemony and Israeli dominance.
But Turkey, Iran, Iraq and now Russia stand in the way. With Hezbollah, Lebanon is joined
to the alliance against the US-Israeli aggression. And strategically, Jordan will facilitate
what it can to stabilize the region.
This alienation of Putin and the Russian military and people by Israel, the US, UK and
France will long be remembered across the Motherland. Syria now more than ever is a land of
sacrificed sons of Russia. The stakes are now eternal.
This is exactly the point. People, commentators, should never forget that about half of
Israel's Jewish population are Russians (or used to be, I suspect dual citizens). These
people have extended families in Russia. Putin knows what he is doing. He can not alienate
people at home.
The two preceding comments seem to be mutually exclusive, i .e., in direct contradiction:
1. "This alienation of Putin and the Russian military and people by Israel,"
2. "This is exactly the point. People, commentators, should never forget that about half
of Israel's Jewish population are Russians (or used to be, I suspect dual citizens). These
people have extended families in Russia. Putin knows what he is doing. He can not alienate
people at home."
But, "the point" in (1) seems, actually, to be the exact opposite.
So, has the incident alienated Russians from Israel? Or, can Russia not "afford" to be
alienated from Israel because there are too many Russian Israelis?
Or is it the other way around? That Russian Israelis will not stand for their government's
treatment of Russia? Somehow I suspect that Russian/ex-Soviet Israelis won't give a flying
eff about their govt's treatment of Russia, and the same goes for their relatives inside
Russia. They hated the USSR and couldn't wait to get away. Why does Putin have to cater to
the views of these emigres to Israel, Russian Israelis, or to their families back in Russia?
How do the latter differ from Zionists in the USA who have dual loyaties?
BTW, it is my understanding that the USA paid for the resettlement of Soviet Jews in
Israel in the eighties, not the USSR .
1.3 million Russians in Israel, are Russian jews, and are likely identify primarily as
jewish.
Their aims and concerns, are jewish ones. Their likely only concerns regarding Russia, are
that Russia does not obstruct Israeli ambitions, and that the network of jewish influence in
Russia does not diminish, but thrives. Their interest is for Russia to be another of Israel's
golems, like the USA is.
I moot that true Russian interests, conflict with their own, and they will absolutely
follow their own. Same as AIPAC in the USA, and equivalents everywhere else.
Their ancestral home country might be Russia, but I moot there is nothing Russian about
them.
All my humble opinion. I stand to be corrected. Russia does not have a fifth column in
Israel, it is the other way round.
Look, I'm not a military expert, but I have followed the events in the Middle East fairly
closely for over 30 years. I, and many others, have stated repeatedly that Russia's clearly
demonstrated unwillingness to use its military forces to protect Syria from Western and US
strikes can only lead to disaster.
The entire Russian policy in Syria has been confused and riddled with contradictions from
the very beginning. The situation in 2015 was:
1. The Syrian government was on the verge of losing a war against jihadi forces.
2. Those jihadi forces were largely foreign and were organized, funded and directed by
the
Anglo/zionists.
3. The Russians could not match the conventional forces that could be brought to bear in the
region by the Anglo/zionists.
4. Any Russian intervention could only succeed if the Anglo/zionists were deterred from
intervening directly by the presence of Russian forces and the fear of a wider war (that
could go nuclear).
Now given those four facts, which I presume nobody seriously disagrees with, the Russian
operation in Syria was always based upon maintaining the fear in the minds of the military
planners in Tel Aviv and Washington that any direct interference with Russian forces in Syria
would mean war with Russia. This was the most important single job of the Russian forces in
Syria maintaining the deterrent capability vis-a-vis the Anglo/zionists.
How do you maintain deterrence? You do so by enforcing your red lines EVERY TIME they are
challenged. Russian inability to clearly define their red lines in Syria and to enforce those
red lines each and every time they were tested has led us to a point where the Russians no
longer have any credibility in Syria.
My crystal ball says that within the next 30 days, not only will the US massively strike
the SAA and the Assad government, but that they will impose a no fly zone over all of Syria
to ground the Russian and Syrian air forces. What will the Russians do in response? They will
have a choice between war and defeat Everything they have done to this point, indicates that
they will do whatever they need to do to avoid a direct military confrontation with the
Anglo/zionist forces. Imagine if you were a military planner in Tel Aviv or Washington, how
could you convince anyone that there was any credible threat that Russia would go to war over
Syria?
You couldn't and hence we are now faced with the imminent threat of either an
Anglo/zionist victory in Syria or WW3.
The Anglo-Zionists are losing in Syria. Russia, Syria and Iran are winning. That is why the
ZioNazis are desperate and moving in themselves, now that their proxies have been defeated.
There is no way the ZioNazis can impose a no-fly zone over Syria. If they start shooting at
Russian jets the answer will come in the form of nuclear armed missiles. Israel will be taken
out in a matter of minutes and made uninhabitable as it has no strategic depth. It does not
even take nuclear missiles to achieve the destruction of Israel. If I were Israeli I would
not be best pleased with the insane Netanyahu, but Israel at this point seems quite
psychotic.
The Russian forces have a standing order to defend themselves with the strongest means
available to any attack. Israel managed to create a situation where the fog of war made
things less clear but Israel still attacked Russia directly. It is in Israel's and NATO's
interest to confuse things in Syria to keep Russia from pursuing it's strategies to the end.
It's only Idlib left now, once the remaining Jihadi proxies have been blown out of their
holes (a matter of a few months, much less if Turkey lends a hand) the turn will then come to
the turncoat Kurds in the East and they will be dealt with just like the jihadis were dealt
with.
This is the scenario that is giving Israel and NATO fits, but they cannot stop it without
going to war with Russia. Israel cannot possibly survive such a war, so they want to pull in
NATO to do the dirty work while Israel itself sits it out on the sidelines. It won't work of
course.
I am one of the armchair warriors, but hell I don't know, I could be wrong, and I
sincerely hope that I am.
That said, I do understand the 'wait and see' logic. My only concern with it, is that if
the slow and steady strategy is superior to enforcing red lines, then the problem is that the
enemy is not stupid.They in turn will see that either a greater provocation is needed, else
they need to find a new weak spot to poke.
Zog wants the Russians to fail, and Assad replaced by their puppet, really badly. They are
not going to sit back and think 'dammit, we lost, out-smarted by those pesky Russians.'
Again, I hope to be wrong. But the nasties in ZOG HQ are as devious, nasty, and fanatical
as they come. If plan A fails, plans B, C and D are lined up.
Big picture, the Shia crescent needs Iraq fully on board, and the yanks out. Then Russia
(and Iran) has an uninterrupted air corridor to the theatre, and that doesn't rely on the
ever unreliable Turkey..
Zog sees this too. I'm not aware that anybody really focuses on this, but Iraq is really
the key. The Sunnis won't like it, but ISIS was their gambit, and it failed. If Iraq becomes
free of US control, and joins the Shia Crescent, we will hear Zog's screams all over the
world.
I have to agree up to a point that this attack was a "full test of the EW capabilties of the
western & Israel armies". This was not just an Israeli attack. Israel just supplied four
attack jets. The French were (as Russia observed) firing missiles. British aircraft were high
overhead providing surveillance and attack data. U.S. surveillance aircraft similar to the
IL-20 are more or less full-time orbiting off the Lebanon/Syria coasts gathering data,
probing electronic systems and providing aerial data link relays for the planes and ships
below. We should all stop calling this an "Israeli attack". It was basically a NATO
attack on Syria.
It's evident that the Russian and Syrian forces were not prepared for
such a combined attack as this.
NATO "won" overwhelmingly.
And this was just a "warmup" for
the next, bigger attack to come. Russia must up it's game drastically or it's going to face a
crushing defeat in the next attack.
"Israeli military delegation led by air force commander to travel to Moscow to share
information on Il-20 plane crash.
The Israeli military delegation led by Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin will
travel to Moscow on September 20 with information about the crash of a Russian Il-20
reconnaissance aircraft off the Syrian coast that killed 15 military personnel, the IDF press
service said Wednesday."
Will be interesting to see how or maybe if it correlates with Russian intelligence?
The entire Russian policy in Syria has been confused and riddled with contradictions from
the very beginning. The situation in 2015 was:
1. The Syrian government was on the verge of losing a war against jihadi forces.
2. Those jihadi forces were largely foreign and were organized, funded and directed by the
Anglo/zionists.
3. The Russians could not match the conventional forces that could be brought to bear in the
region by
the Anglo/zionists.
4. Any Russian intervention could only succeed if the Anglo/zionists were deterred from
intervening
directly by the presence of Russian forces and the fear of a wider war (that could go
nuclear).
Now given those four facts, which I presume nobody seriously disagrees with, the Russian
operation in Syria was always based upon maintaining the fear in the minds of the military
planners in Tel Aviv and Washington that any direct interference with Russian forces in Syria
would mean war with Russia. This was the most important single job of the Russian forces in
Syria maintaining the deterrent capability vis-a-vis the Anglo/zionists.
How do you maintain deterrence? You do so by enforcing your red lines EVERY TIME they are
challenged. Russian inability to clearly define their red lines in Syria and to enforce those
red lines each and every time they were tested has led us to a point where the Russians no
longer have any credibility in Syria.
My crystal ball says that within the next 30 days, not only will the US massively strike the
SAA and the Assad government, but that they will impose a no fly zone over all of Syria to
ground the Russian and Syrian air forces. What will the Russians do in response? They will have
a choice between war and defeat Everything they have done to this point, indicates that they
will do whatever they need to do to avoid a direct military confrontation with the
Anglo/zionist forces. Imagine if you were a military planner in Tel Aviv or Washington, how
could you convince anyone that there was any credible threat that Russia would go to war over
Syria? You couldn't and hence we are now faced with the imminent threat of either an
Anglo/zionist victory in Syria or WW3.
Reply
The Anglo-Zionists are losing in Syria. Russia, Syria and Iran are winning. That is why the
ZioNazis are desperate and moving in themselves, now that their proxies have been defeated.
There is no way the ZioNazis can impose a no-fly zone over Syria. If they start shooting at
Russian jets the answer will come in the form of nuclear armed missiles. Israel will be taken
out in a matter of minutes and made uninhabitable as it has no strategic depth. It does not
even take nuclear missiles to achieve the destruction of Israel. If I were Israeli I would
not be best pleased with the insane Netanyahu, but Israel at this point seems quite
psychotic.
The Russian forces have a standing order to defend themselves with the strongest means
available to any attack. Israel managed to create a situation where the fog of war made
things less clear but Israel still attacked Russia directly. It is in Israel's and NATO's
interest to confuse things in Syria to keep Russia from pursuing it's strategies to the end.
It's only Idlib left now, once the remaining Jihadi proxies have been blown out of their
holes (a matter of a few months, much less if Turkey lends a hand) the turn will then come to
the turncoat Kurds in the East and they will be dealt with just like the jihadis were dealt
with.
This is the scenario that is giving Israel and NATO fits, but they cannot stop it without
going to war with Russia. Israel cannot possibly survive such a war, so they want to pull in
NATO to do the dirty work while Israel itself sits it out on the sidelines. It won't work of
course.
I am one of the armchair warriors, but hell I don't know, I could be wrong, and I
sincerely hope that I am.
That said, I do understand the 'wait and see' logic. My only concern with it, is that if
the slow and steady strategy is superior to enforcing red lines, then the problem is that the
enemy is not stupid.They in turn will see that either a greater provocation is needed, else
they need to find a new weak spot to poke.
Zog wants the Russians to fail, and Assad replaced by their puppet, really badly. They are
not going to sit back and think 'dammit, we lost, out-smarted by those pesky Russians.'
Again, I hope to be wrong. But the nasties in ZOG HQ are as devious, nasty, and fanatical
as they come. If plan A fails, plans B, C and D are lined up.
Big picture, the Shia crescent needs Iraq fully on board, and the yanks out. Then Russia
(and Iran) has an uninterrupted air corridor to the theatre, and that doesn't rely on the
ever unreliable Turkey..
Zog sees this too. I'm not aware that anybody really focuses on this, but Iraq is really
the key. The Sunnis won't like it, but ISIS was their gambit, and it failed. If Iraq becomes
free of US control, and joins the Shia Crescent, we will hear Zog's screams all over the
world.
Which is why the provocations won't stop. Honestly, I don't see how Putin can think he can
shrug them off and continue with the job at hand in Syria. He will try but Zion will continue
to double-down.
I believe the West has seen enough of their schemes foiled by Putin and his playing the
long game. The strategy now is to take the long game from him. The advantage in this goes to
the West as they can be as provocative as they want while Russia has to be careful not to be
seen as an aggressor lest it wreck Nord Stream, Turk Stream and the thaw in relations with
Germany.
Putin has sounded conciliatory, maybe even weak in some eyes. He did, however, note that
Russia's attitude towards this incident is expressed in the MoD statement, which is
noticeably less conciliatory.
Perhaps that, along with some concrete actions (I favor a limited no-fly zone), will deter
outside interference while the essential work at Idlib can continue. We can only hope.
May I remind you Saker that this incident was not just a provocation. It is a promise or
threat being honored. For months we have we have been hearing high ranking American officials
openly advocating that their goal in Syria was to make as many as possible Russian military
return home in body bags. From Senators to directors of intelligence have unabashedly and
unapologetically said so openly on American TVs. And they are doing it whenever possible.
So the question for Mr. Putin is whether he's gonna let them continue with impunity. I don't
know how old most commentators on this site are, but for those who remember the denouement of
the Vietnam war you will remember that the only war the US ever lost was when the American
people had enough of hundreds of their soldiers returning home every week in body bags.
remember the Tu 20 was used a RADAR shield for the 4 Israeli F-16. These are obviously
aircraft and operate from an Israeli military base.The Russians know the geographical
coordinates of these bases to the accuracy of a few meters. The Russian SSBM can stay in the
Black Sea and the Caspian Sea Flotilla can repeat their Deir ez Zoor feat again testing the
Iron Dome an Davids Sling in the process.
This potential threat will cause the Israeli military planers some sleepless nights.
I have read that the fire works capabilities of Hezbollah have somewhat improved in recent
years. The possible components of a "no fly zone" over Israel and western Syria. Not that it
will happen but making the protection racket in Washington foam at their Snouts is worth
something too. IMHO
Lets not forget China has people (Special Forces, Logistics people, medics etc) on the ground
in Syria. Some brigades of the special forces are embedded with the Syrian Arab Armies Tiger
Division and 4th Armored Division. The spearheads of most campaigns.
China has major plans foe the Levant, as far as connectivity with the OBR Silk Roads. They
already have plans to rebuild Syria.
With cheap Chinese weapons, and a large volume of such, the Arabs, Assyrians of Syria will
achieve their ultimate victory. The same applies to Iraq, where the U.S. , British and French
position looks more and more precarious.
By 2030, the U.S., Britain and France will have been expelled from the MENA/Central Asian
regions, only to have China fill the vacuum. Russia or not, China is coming, its rising
fast.
I agree with you 100% that there is no hope for the Western globalist elite. That's because
they're incompetent, psychopathic, loser scum who are only a few bricks short of a load and
their ponzi scam is only a few moves from mate.
I wouldn't say that at all. They are still in positions of power with enormous economic and
military sources. They are in decline but not that far down the road. Russia won't act
strongly because the US/NATO/Israel/Saudi alliance is waaaaay more powerful and still very
united in the Imperial project. Only a very tight China-Russia-Iran alliance would cause the
Empire to hesitate to play their current game of continual micro-aggressions against
Russia/Syria/Iran. Putin will not respond because he does not have as close an alliance with
the Chinese as the US has with their "allies (vassals)." Washington can no longer dictate
terms in world affairs but is more influential than Russia/China/Iran and any other minor
players.
Kfeto
You need to do your homework before posting comments. Erdogan had nothing to do with with the
shooting of that Russian SU-24. This was done behind his back, with pro-US elements in Turkey
hoping to create a rift between Russia and Turkey. It was a provocation. The pilot of that
Turkish F-16 was a Turk of Albanian origin, who was subsequently placed under arrest. When
the US instigated that coup d'etat against Erdogan, it was the Russians who both warned him
and saved his life, as his plane was targeted by Turkish F-16's flown by conspirators, who
backed off, having Russian Sukhois behind them and Russian missiles in Syria pointing at
them.
The shooting of that Russian reconnaissance plane in Syria was another provocation, Israel
hoping to provoke Putin to retaliate and starting a mass war in Syria, bearing in mind that
NATO brought additional ships to the Syrian coast. It did not work, as Putin stayed cool.
However, Russian and Syrian AA missile systems have now become integrated. When it comes to
this latest provocation, it could have been greater than it appeared. Commentators have
pointed to that French frigate firing a missile. What kind of missile was that ? An AA
missile, or a cruise missile ? Did the French shoot that Russian plane down ? If so, then we
were facing a very real threat of wider war, because had the Russians retaliated, then NATO
would have had an excuse to attack Syria, now that it's little false flag plan has been
exposed, another chemical "attack" by Assad, as if Assad was foolish enough to do such a
thing.
The point is that Putin does not fall for provocations. He has proved it again.
I concur. Israel is a rogue state, and this was a provocation.
A firm response is required. The world is watching. Anything short of a firm response
would negate Vostok 2018.
Does Putin stand with, and behind his own Minister of Defense, who layed the blame firmly
on Israel.
Russia needs to secure Syrian and Lebanese airspace to Israeli provocations. AS a starting
point. And Russia should make a lot of noise at the U.N., giving them a headache there, as
well as points against the U.S..
Israeli arrogance should not be let go by superpower Russia.
amarynth
You are correct. I am wondering what really happened. Officially that Russian plane was
mistakenly shot down by Syrians, who were targeting Israeli F-16's that were hiding behind
the Russian plane. Both the Syrian radar operators and their Russian advisors must have known
about that Russian reconnaissance plane, making such a mistake improbable, but not
impossible. Then we have reports of that French frigate firing a missile. What kind of
missile was that ? An AA missile, or a cruise missile ? No additional data has been provided.
I wonder why.
NATO ships are still off the Syrian coast. Why ? For what purpose ? Just keeping them at
sea must cost millions of dollars. Are they waiting for something ?
That false flag chemical
"attack" which the US planned, hoping to frame Assad, has been exposed. Putin and Erdogan
make a deal on Idlib. After that we have that Israeli attack, with the French giving a
helping hand. Was NATO provoking Putin to make a retaliatory attack, either against Israel or
against that French frigate ? Time will tell. However, as The Saker has stated, Russians have
patience.
Patience is not always a virtue. Stalin paid dearly for his patience with Hitler even though
his plans for Lebensraum and expansion eastward were not hidden. Careful Mr. Putin that you
not pay dearly for your patience with the American Empire when it's plan "Project for a New
American Century" has been clearly spelled out.
Yes Saker as you say let's wait and see what the Russian response will be.
Over the years – this always is the knee jerk reaction of the armchair warriors and
anti-Putin/Russia trolls – whenever Russia is attacked in Syria or elsewhere. Some
still don't learn that Russia is slow to saddle and quick to ride. The MOD statements have
already set down who is to blame and a reply to this disgusting provocation will be answered
in their own way and in their own time. Putin also agreed with the MOD statements and hinted
himself to watch this space.
"Also, speaking of Syria: has anybody noticed that the agreement between Turkey and
Russia has removed any justification for a US attack on Syria and that the Israelis have
organized their latest little bloody stunt right after this deal was announced?"
This was a very important point, I also noted. I also read that the II-20 plane was
returning from reconnaissance over Idlib and was just coming into land .take from that what
you will ..
I think a basic question here is whether the Israelis were deliberately trying to down the
II-20. Is it a coincidence that the Israeli attack took place precisely when that plane was
landing? The Israelis have done worse. I think they had foreknowledge of 9-11, for example,
and were unwilling to help their American "friends".
Given that 15 Russians were killed Russia probably does need to respond. The challenge
will probably be to avoid actions that restrict Russian choices, especially given that Trump
& Co. are willing to play nuclear chicken. The Russians want to avoid being forced into a
sequence of actions that lead to WWIII or other bad outcomes. They want to make the choices,
not others.
The Israelis have a history of trying to provoke others. For example, before they invaded
Lebanon they tried to provoke a PLO military response to some attacks so that they could
claim their invasion was self-defense against PLO "aggression". The PLO didn't take the bait
but the Israelis invaded Lebanon anyway.
I haveto challenge your cleverly hidden piece of misinformation. The WTC was brought down by
controlled demoliton and the sheer scope of the operation (3 sites, NORAD exercise) clearly
points to the involvment of state actors. So about what should the the Israelis warn their US
comrades?
Its true building #7 appears to have been destroyed by a controlled demolition but we don't
know for sure at this point who was responsible, although Israel is high on my list of
suspects. (Incidentally, there is evidence that the 1993 WTC bombing was an Israeli black op.
too.) However, we do know that an Israeli spy ring followed the 9-11 hijackers for months and
a group of these spies cheered during the 9-11 attack. This convinces me that while the plot
was carried out by Al Queda, the Israelis were in the background making sure they succeeded.
It also convinces me that the Israelis are perfectly capable of deliberately downing the
II-20 or worse.
We know who said this: "I remember getting a call from the fire department commander, telling
me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'We've
had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.' And they made
that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse."
I know the US is in the grip of AIPAC, the Neocon's and their Billionaire masters etc
(including Trump). But it's time for the American people to accept responsibility for their
part in what is happening. It is not OK to accept medals and money for military service
overseas to support the Empire. Occupying foreign nations and killing foreign people in order
to pay for college and to pay the mortgage and set up an retirement plan is weakness, not
strength. "Thank you for your service", indeed. Too many Americans still worship at the altar
of the Pentagon.
It's time for Americans to kick the MIC to the curb, give up the Petrodollar and
corruption that comes with it, and come up with a saner national business model and way of
life. I know that many, many American soldiers have paid a heavy price for their "service" or
even "servitude", but not more so than the nations they have ruined during their service.
It's time for the American people to come together and accept that "War" cannot be the
solution to every problem facing America in it's foreign or domestic policies. It is time to
Down Tools and clean up the corruption in DC and on Wall Street and in the US establishment
in general.
I believe these sentiments are not shocking to most Americans, but this also means the
sense of desperation in the US/Zio elites wedded to War is growing, another reason they push
so hard and so frantically. They know time is running out for them. On this front and many
others.
Occasional Poster on September 19, 2018 · at 8:16 pm EST/EDT
@ Christian,
I have Serbian roots, and US & its NATO poodles bombed and finished their decade long job of destroying my country in 1999.
That nightmare just doesn't end.
But my definition of evil is worth noting. Evil can put a bullet in your head, but where is the fun in that? Put the gun in
the hand of a good person, deceive them, and get them to do it. THAT's true evil, and there in a nutshell is what has been
done to the US.
I struggled to understand as a child, why lying was as great a crime in Christianity as murder and stuff, but I later
understood; deceit is the greatest evil, it turns good people into monsters. There is no anger like righteous anger.
All that evil needs to thrive, is ignorance. The American people as a whole, are grossly ignorant, but they are not evil;
they are simply deceived, just like Brits actualy. A good number of yanks on Zerohedge wish Putin was their own president, so
some are awake. Overall, the US citizenry actually can't give a hoot about Russiagate. There is no mass ill will towards
Russia.
So those are just my thoughts. I just want the American, and European people to wake out of their trance.
"... As for Nutty Nikki Haley, Israeli PM Netenyahu wanted Haley in that spot, both for her rabid pro-Israel stance and to give her the chance to 'make her bones.' To see if she has the right traitorous qualities Israel needs in the WH. Nutty has passed that test with honors, so look for Nutty to get promoted to POTUS, where she'll be a loyal & faithful servant to our Colonial Overlord, Israel. ..."
There is an ongoing coup against not only Trump, but the entire nation, as this video by
"Project Veritas" proves. This State Department subversive claims to be a Democratic
Socialist, which are just Antifa terrorists in suits. Antifa was too radical for SANE
Americans so they re-branded their putrid form of Communism to call it DSA. They're traitors
& saboteurs and should be treated as such .
As for Nutty Nikki Haley, Israeli PM Netenyahu wanted Haley in that spot, both for her
rabid pro-Israel stance and to give her the chance to 'make her bones.' To see if she has the
right traitorous qualities Israel needs in the WH. Nutty has passed that test with honors, so
look for Nutty to get promoted to POTUS, where she'll be a loyal & faithful servant to
our Colonial Overlord, Israel.
Many Americans labor under the delusion that we're an independent democratic republic,
with a USG that honors the cherished Constitution and serves We the People. But that is a
fiction, created by a motley assortment of gangsters, think tanks, the MSM and their mighty
Wurlitzer organ, Hollywood.
The USA is under Israeli occupation, with our American neoCON & Zionist Jew Overseers
still cracking that whip on our backs, but a digital one, not leather. The NWO Plantation
owner is Israel, aided and abetted by the money power of those Rothschild central banks, like
the FED, which is the biggest counterfeiting outfit on the planet. The only way to fix this sordid mess would be a repeat of what happened back in 1776. Either
that, or resign ourselves–and offspring–to a life of misery, poverty, endless
wars and terror .
"... A basic principle should be the starting point of any macro analysis: The volume of interest-bearing debt tends to outstrip the economy's ability to pay. This tendency is inherent in the "magic of compound interest." The exponential growth of debt expands by its own purely mathematical momentum, independently of the economy's ability to pay – and faster than the non-financial economy grows. ..."
Wall Street did not let the Lehman Brothers crisis go to waste. The banks that have paid the
largest fines for financial fraud are now much bigger and more profitable. The victims of their
junk mortgage loans are poorer, and the economy is facing debt deflation.
Was it worth it? What was not saved was the economy.
"... A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won't fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics." ..."
"In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and
bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class.
Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking
complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider.
A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while
serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue
to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won't fulfill
any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics."
Linh Dinh, as published at The Unz Review, June 12, 2016
The election's only apparent benefit to the people of this country has been the exposure
of corruption and sedition within the Establishment. But that, too, may be part of the show,
another way to channel dissidence into another meaningless election. Even here at The Unz
Review, some columnists and many commenters tell the readership that this November is
critical to protecting President Trump and his agenda, blah, blah, blah.
@Diversity Heretic I applied through the GreatAgain website and never received the
courtesy of a reply despite having conributed to the Trump campaign before Iowa, nine years
working on Capitol Hill (for Republicans) and seven years in a regulatory commission (working
for a Republicaén commissioner), a JD and an MBA. So I'm not surprised to hear that
applications through the website were not even considered and jobs filled with Washington
insiders. (The first inclination that I had that something was seriously wrong in the
staffing area was when Calista Gingrich was named as ambassador to the Vatican.) Trump has
the classic problem of the outsider: no institutional mechanism to staff an administration.
(Jesse Ventura had a similar problem when he was elected as governor of Minnesota as an
independent). He compounds that problem by making poor choices that involve his personal
judgment and consideration (e.g., John Bolton and Nikki Haley?!).
Increasingly, I see no electoral way to influence or remove the Deep State. I think we're
in for a rough ride and hope that things don't get nuclear with Russia.
Increasingly, I see no electoral way to influence or remove the Deep State. I think
we're in for a rough ride and hope that things don't get nuclear with Russia.
It is astonishing that after all the fraudsters and con masters masquerading as politicians
there are huge numbers who claim to believe in the system where humans have voluntarily given
away their freedoms.
Hope and Change, replaced by MAGA.
Do you honestly believe that your Founding Fathers would rebel against King's Tyranny if it
were possible to change it by peaceful means?
@anonymous None of this should have come as a surprise.
"In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and
bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class.
Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking
complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider.
A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as
a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war
abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won't fulfill any of his
election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics."
Linh Dinh, as published at The Unz Review, June 12, 2016
The election's only apparent benefit to the people of this country has been the exposure
of corruption and sedition within the Establishment. But that, too, may be part of the show,
another way to channel dissidence into another meaningless election. Even here at The Unz
Review, some columnists and many commenters tell the readership that this November is
critical to protecting President Trump and his agenda, blah, blah, blah. Voting in our
national elections has become another example of evil paraded before us as a moral duty. It
ironically results in disenfranchisement by perpetually legitimizing a federal government as
much at war with its own citizens as with every other people who oppose the new American
Proposition -- the antithesis of a fulfilling human culture wherever it's found, and which
today amounts to claiming that freedom and democracy equate to owning stuff and vicariously
participating in unbridled avarice, sexual depravity, war, torture, and mass murder. Either
party and all that horror is a constant.
So, instead of girding middle America mentally, spiritually, and physically to fight to
the death for what's worth living for, and while there's still some chance to save ourselves
and our nation, we get the Republican leadership, Fox News, and Conservatism Inc blowing
smoke in our eyes, temporizing on behalf of the Deep State by pretending these veiled and
overt calls for white genocide are just in bad taste or that curtesy and cowardice are an
effective policy toward a wildly homicidal left.
the obligatory four freedoms of the EU are free movement of goods, services, persons and
capital throughout the Union. Open borders. That is the essence of the European Union, the
dogma of the Free Market.
The problem with the Open Border doctrine is that it doesn't know where to stop. Or it
doesn't stop anywhere. When Angela Merkel announced that hundreds of thousands of refugees were
welcome in Germany, the announcement was interpreted as an open invitation by immigrants of all
sorts, who began to stream into Europe. This unilateral German decision automatically applied
to the whole of the EU, with its lack of internal borders. Given German clout, Open Borders
became the essential "European common value", and welcoming immigrants the essence of human
rights.
Very contrasting ideological and practical considerations contribute to the idealization of
Open Borders. To name a few:
This combination of contrasting, even opposing motivations does not add up to a majority in
every country. Notably not in Hungary.
It should be noted that Hungary is a small Central European country of less than ten million
inhabitants, which never had a colonial empire and thus has no historic relationship with
peoples in Africa and Asia as do Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. As one of the
losers in World War I, Hungary lost a large amount of territory to its neighbors, notably to
Romania. The rare and difficult Hungarian language would be seriously challenged by mass
immigration. It is probably safe to say that the majority of people in Hungary tend to be
attached to their national identity and feel it would be threatened by massive immigration from
radically different cultures. It may not be nice of them, and like everyone they can change.
But for now, that is how they vote.
In particular, they recently voted massively to re
Like the Soviet Union, the European Union is not merely an undemocratic institutional
framework promoting a specific economic system; it is also the vehicle of an ideology and a
planetary project. Both are based on a dogma as to what is good for the world: communism for
the first, "openness" for the second. Both in varying ways demand of people virtues they may
not share: a forced equality, a forced generosity. All this can sound good, but such ideals
become methods of manipulation. Forcing ideals on people eventually runs up against stubborn
resistance.
There are differing reasons to be against immigration just as to be for it. The idea of
democracy was to sort out and choose between ideals and practical interests by free discussion
and in the end a show of hands: an informed vote. The liberal Authoritarian Center represented
by Verhofstadt seeks to impose its values, aspirations, even its version of the facts on
citizens who are denounced as "populists" if they disagree. Under communism, dissidents were
called "enemies of the people". For the liberal globalists, they are "populists" – that
is, the people. If people are told constantly that the choice is between a left that advocates
mass immigration and a right that rejects it, the swing to the right is unstoppable.
Orban's reputation in the West as dictator is unquestionably linked to his intense
conflict with Hungarian-born financier George Soros
And not only Soros, of course:
'I know that this battle is difficult for everyone. I understand if some of us are also
afraid. This is understandable, because we must fight against an opponent which is different
from us. Their faces are not visible, but are hidden from view; they do not fight directly,
but by stealth; they are not honourable, but unprincipled; they are not national, but
international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland,
but feel that the whole world is theirs.' --
Viktor Orbán
Watch the great Hungarian foreign minister repel attacks by the BBCs arrogant open borders
propagandist, rudely treating him like an ignorant child and calling him a racist for
defending his nation.
Economic liberals maintain that because Europe is aging, it needs young immigrant
workers to pay for the pensions of retired workers.
Not gonna happen. Their 80 IQ skills are uncompetitive and useless in Europe even before
Automation erases those low-skilled positions in the coming decade or two. Meanwhile, (real)
European youth unemployment rate is 20%. Young Europeans are not making babies because they
don't have a stable future. This can only get worse as the hostile invaders get preferential,
Affirmative Action treatment, in schools and workplaces. None of this is accidental.
There are, in my opinion, two reasons for letting the mass immigration happen:
- the Brussels belief, expressed in a 2009 official document, not secret, that the EU needs
60 million immigrants.
- a Merkel belief dat the Germans are bad, they caused two world wars and perpetrated the
holocaust, so the German people must be changed through mass immigration.
The Brussels belief seems to be based mainly on the increasing average age in the EU.
It is incomprehensible to me, at the same time fear that robots slowly will do all simple
jobs.
The Merkel belief, on the other side of the Atlantic, where few understand German, and
cannot or do not watch German tv, I wonder how many understand that the 20th century
propaganda of the victors still is decisive in German daily life and politics.
The danger of neonazi's and fascism is everywhere.
Nationalism, the equivalent of building gas chambers.
The EU also is based on the 20th century fairy tales, only the EU prevented wars in Europe
after WWII.
The idea that Germans were victims in two world wars, and, until Hitler became power in 1933,
also between the world wars, in unthinkable.
The idea that Endlösung meant deportation to Madagaskar, even more unthinkable.
That jews, as one Rothschild wrote to another around 1890, have and had but one enemy,
themselves, the world unthinkable is too weak.
Yet
'From prejudice to destruction', Jacob Katz, 1980, Cambridge MA
explains it, things as 'close economic cooperation, intermarriage, ostentious behaviour'.
In this respect
'Christianity and the Holocaust of the Hungarian Jewry', Moshe Y Herclz, 1993 New York
University press
also is a very interesting book, after jews in the thirties had been banned from many
intellectual professions not a single Hungarian newspaper could be published any more.
Soros trying to force Muslim immigrants on deeply catholic Hungary, he was born in
Hungary, experienced anti semitism, revenge ?
I was recently in Budapest on business and will likely be returning soon: It is the most
beautiful city I have ever seen, with stunning architectural restoration projects, almost
non-existent police and military presence, food and wines that rival those of Paris, and a
very friendly, non-bureaucratic and non-obsese (as opposed to the USA) population. I would
like to hear from others who have recently visited and have knowledge of the country.
Viszlát! -- John
When the fort of folly that Globalism is finally falls, Diana Johnstone's article will be
cited as exemplary in exposing its hidden grammar. That fall cannot be far off now given that
psy-ops can only work if people are ignorant of the manipulation afoot.
Great opening, Diana. For forty years the presstitude media have leaned on the use of
implication as argument to have the ninety-nine percent buy what they are selling. What was
not pointed out very well until now, is that their implications are all false. Now, only a
dummy among the dumbed-down cannot see it.
For those who have the patience to read the English subtitles, here is an excellent speech
given by Orbán in July. Here he outlines his thinking on the issues facing Hungary and
the world.
Viktor Orbán is a very intelligent leader, and he has the vast majority of the
Hungarian people behind him. History has taught those people many things, and they have had
enough. They are not fools. Look to them as an example for all of us.
@John Siman I was recently in Budapest on business and will likely be returning soon: It
is the most beautiful city I have ever seen, with stunning architectural restoration
projects, almost non-existent police and military presence, food and wines that rival those
of Paris, and a very friendly, non-bureaucratic and non-obsese (as opposed to the USA)
population. I would like to hear from others who have recently visited and have knowledge of
the country. Viszlát! -- John Wherever US influence is not yet overwhelming (and such
places are becoming fewer every day, unfortunately), you will still find "old-fashioned" ways
of interaction, few fatties, and decent food and drink.
People may become fat for many reasons, but most fatties these days in the Anglosphere
belong to the underclass. These wretches get fat from eating expensive trash at McDonald's
and other fast food outlets, and drinking Coca Cola and similar sugar-saturated garbage.
Their behavior may seem strange because their brains have largely withered away through
endless TV watching (mainly US or US-inspired visual trash), their hearing impaired by ear-
and mind numbing noise passing for music.
I am afraid the way out of that prison is long and tortuous for all victims of US
neoliberalism.
The usual anti-EU propaganda that Ms Johnstone has been peddling for at least a dozen years,
although she has recently moved from claiming to be a far-leftist to claiming to be a
far-rightest. Whatever pretext "proves" the EU to be evil is trotted out! However, she points
out very clearly Viktor Orban's dilemma. The choice for Hungary is between the EU and Putin's
tanks. After 40 years of occupation by a Soviet Union in which the ethnic Russians acted as
colonial overlords and the general contempt which Hungarians have for Slavs, choosing the
latter option would be political suicide for any Hungarian leader. Thus, Orban is stuck with
the EU whether he likes it or not and the other Member States are stuck with Orban whether
they like it or not. In addition, two of Ms Johnstone's factual claims need to be corrected.
The "EU" is taking no step whatsoever to strip Hungary of its political rights. The
(according to Ms Johnstone, "largely rubber stamp") European Parliament has adopted a
resolution calling on the Member States to sanction Hungary. The EP always does something
attention-grabbing in the run up to elections and since Ms Johnstone once worked for the
European Parliament (as a far-leftist!), I'm sure she knows that. Imposing sanctions, as
always in the EU, is a matter for the sovereign Member States and the decision has to be
unanimous. Poland has already said it will not vote for sanctions, so the whole thing is a
dead letter. Secondly, the claim that Hungary "never had a colonial empire" is untrue. It
never had a colonial empire outside Europe but before 1918, it ruled over Slovakia, most of
Croatia, Transylvania, now part of Romania, and the Vojvodina, now part of Serbia (so much
for Ms Johnstone's supposed "expertise" on ex-Yugoslavia!). In general, the frantic, almost
hysterical, tone of the article suggests that Ms Johnstone doesn't believe that Viktor Orban
is going to be the cause of the imminent and inevitable demise of the hated EU that she has
been predicting for as long as I have been reading her articles (and that goes back at least
14 years!).
@Michael Kenny The usual anti-EU propaganda that Ms Johnstone has been peddling for at
least a dozen years, although she has recently moved from claiming to be a far-leftist to
claiming to be a far-rightest. Whatever pretext "proves" the EU to be evil is trotted out!
However, she points out very clearly Viktor Orban's dilemma. The choice for Hungary is
between the EU and Putin's tanks. After 40 years of occupation by a Soviet Union in which the
ethnic Russians acted as colonial overlords and the general contempt which Hungarians have
for Slavs, choosing the latter option would be political suicide for any Hungarian leader.
Thus, Orban is stuck with the EU whether he likes it or not and the other Member States are
stuck with Orban whether they like it or not. In addition, two of Ms Johnstone's factual
claims need to be corrected. The "EU" is taking no step whatsoever to strip Hungary of its
political rights. The (according to Ms Johnstone, "largely rubber stamp") European Parliament
has adopted a resolution calling on the Member States to sanction Hungary. The EP always does
something attention-grabbing in the run up to elections and since Ms Johnstone once worked
for the European Parliament (as a far-leftist!), I'm sure she knows that. Imposing sanctions,
as always in the EU, is a matter for the sovereign Member States and the decision has to be
unanimous. Poland has already said it will not vote for sanctions, so the whole thing is a
dead letter. Secondly, the claim that Hungary "never had a colonial empire" is untrue. It
never had a colonial empire outside Europe but before 1918, it ruled over Slovakia, most of
Croatia, Transylvania, now part of Romania, and the Vojvodina, now part of Serbia (so much
for Ms Johnstone's supposed "expertise" on ex-Yugoslavia!). In general, the frantic, almost
hysterical, tone of the article suggests that Ms Johnstone doesn't believe that Viktor Orban
is going to be the cause of the imminent and inevitable demise of the hated EU that she has
been predicting for as long as I have been reading her articles (and that goes back at least
14 years!). Judging by your name, you are not a European, but an Englishman, or from
somewhere else in the Anglosphere. It is a good thing for England and especially the English
to be leaving the EuSSR, which is more of a prison than commonly realized. Ruled by a greedy
class of corrupt and, to make it worse, utterly mediocre, politicians, incompetent and stupid
bureaucrats (yes, I know this is an oxymoron) in the exclusive interest of ruthless big
corporations, human rights do not exist in the EuSSR.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe has seen a wave of privatizations on a scale
only comparable to what happened in the former USSR. Nevertheless, taxation has increased to
a point where today, the average EuSSR "citizen" pays between 75% and 80% taxes on every Euro
he earns. The middle class is on its way to extinction. The judiciary is a joke, education
has been dismantled or stupidified, health care is a disaster, save in Southern Europe where
many doctors and nurses still have a sense of humanity.
The piece by Mrs. Johnstone may not be flawless, but it says what needs to be said.
70 years ago the Democrat party in the American South was the party of regular working
class White Southerners and promoted Southern heritage and Southern history including
Confederate history.
Then things change.
Now the national Democrat party and the Democrat party in the South hates Whites
Southerners, hates Southern heritage and Southern history and are promoting the desecration
of Confederate monuments and confederate graves.
60 years ago Hungarian was under Soviet Communist domination and Hungarian patriots looked
to the West – especially American and Great Britain to help them achieve some personal
freedom from Communism.
Now things have completely changed. It's the Wester (EU) UK BBC, American mass media that
restricts freedom and National Christianity in Hungary and pretty much everywhere else.
Russia is once again a health European Christian nation. Nobody in Hungary, Eastern Europe or
Russia wants to allow their countries to be invaded by millions of 3rd world Muslim
rapists.
So I living in Chicago IL (Obama was my neighbor) look to Hungary, Poland, Russia and
Eastern Europe for any small dose of freedom.
The week leading up to the funeral of Senator John McCain produced some of the most bizarre
media effusions seen in this country since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
McCain, who never saw a war or regime change that he didn't like, was apparently in reality a
friend of democracy and freedom worldwide, a judgment that somehow ignores the hundreds of
thousands of presumed foreign devils who have died as a consequence of the policies he
enthusiastically promoted in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya.
McCain, who supported assassination of US citizens abroad and detention of them by military
commissions back at home, was hardly the upright warrior for justice eulogized in much of the
mainstream media. He was in fact for most of his life a corrupt cheerleader for the
Establishment and Military Industrial Complex. McCain was one of five Senators who, in return
for campaign contributions, improperly intervened in 1987 on behalf of Charles Keating,
Chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, a target of a regulatory investigation by
the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB). The FHLBB subsequently did not follow through with
proposed action against Lincoln.
Lincoln Savings and Loan finally did collapse in 1989, at a cost of $3.4 billion to the
federal government, which had insured the accounts, while an estimated 23,000 Lincoln
bondholders were defrauded, many losing their life savings. When the Keating story broke in
1989, the Phoenix New Times newspaper called McCain
the worst senator from any state in American history.
There was plenty of pushback on the McCain legacy coming from the alternative media, though
nothing in the mainstream where politicians and pundits from both the left and the right of the
political spectrum united in their songs of praise. Amidst all the eulogies one
article did, however, strike me as particularly bizarre. It was written by Jeffrey
Goldberg, Editor in Chief of The Atlantic , and is entitled " McCain would have
passed the Anne Frank test" with the sub-heading "The senator spent decades
demonstrating his willingness to fight powerful men who abused powerless people."
Goldberg, a leading neoconservative, casually reveals that he has had multiple discussions
with McCain, including some in "war zones" like Iraq. He quotes the Senator as saying "I hated
Saddam. He ruled through murder. Didn't we learn from Hitler that we can't let that happen?"
Goldberg notes that McCain's hatred "for all dictators burned hot" before hitting on a number
of other themes, including that, per the senator, it was Donald Rumsfeld's "arrogance and
incompetence that helped discredit the American invasion" of Iraq. Goldberg quotes McCain as
saying "He [Rumsfeld] was the worst."
Jeffrey Goldberg also claims a conversation with McCain in which he asserted that, even
though an Iraq war supporter, he had become frustrated with the effort to "renovate a despotic
Middle Eastern country." As he put it, "theory of the American case was no match for the
heartbreaking Middle East reality," which is yet another defense of U.S. interventionism with
the caveat that the Arabs might not be ready to make good use of the largesse.
Elsewhere Goldberg, echoing McCain, has attributed the disaster in Iraq to the
"incompetence of the Bush Administration," not to the policy of regime change itself,
presumably because the Pentagon was unsuccessful at killing enough Arabs quickly enough to suit
the neoconservatives. McCain's reported response to Goldberg's equivocation about Saddam
Hussein's Iraq was "But genocide! Genocide!"
... ... ...
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected] .
As a follow-up to my Aug 27th blog, I ask people to name McCain's most important
accomplishment during his long political career. They can think of none, but the TV tells
them McCain was great because he was a neocon. Senator Paul Laxalt saw more combat than
McCain and had an equally long and distinguished career. He was not a crazed neocon so our
media barely reported his death last month.
Here are two examples of McCain's bad character just this past year. McCain had always
opposed Obamacare and campaigned against it. The Republicans had tried to repeal it for
years. The election of President Trump also brought in more Republican congressmen. The House
easily repealed it, and the Senate finally had a majority to vote for a partial repeal. This
would be a big victory for the Republicans led by President Trump. When the vote was held,
McCain shocked everyone and voted against it, thus abandoning his principles and backstabbing
his party! This was applauded by the Democrats and the insurance companies who profit from
Obamacare. They praised McCain as a "maverick", although everyone knows this was done just to
thwart a Trump victory.
On his deathbed, McCain directed his staff not to invite his Presidential running mate
Sarah Palin to his funeral. She campaigned for him as a loyal teammate and never said a bad
word about McCain during the campaign or after their loss. McCain blamed her for his loss and
expressed this in a childish manner. Allow me to summarize his life. John McCain was as
selfish, spoiled brat who had no sense of decency.
As I have stated before it is with great sorrow that I note the passing of McCain. A more
just god would have prolonged the agony of cancer for may years to come so he could live in
misery, anguish, and pain, as penance for the lives he has destroyed here and abroad. I fear
that several such lifetimes in such suffering would be grossly inadequate recompense for what
he has wrought.
Small wonder that I have no belief in such an inordinately cruel and unjust god who allows
men like McCain to live and thrive and then vanish into the ether with his debts unpaid,
while the crew of USS Liberty live their lives in the knowledge of their betrayal by McCain's
father, and later McCain himself.
An orphaned child weeps in Iraq while America lauds this beast among men while he lived,
and sings his praises on his death. A curse on all his enablers.
This was a stirring editorial, Philip, and an much-needed rejection of John McCain's
artificial status as a 'great American'.
Indeed, the fact that such a murderous sycophant as McCain would receive extended,
bi-partisan honors by establishment 'liberals' and 'conservatives' alike, demonstrates what a
staged and loathsome cesspool of corruption has become Imperial Washington, not to mention
our vaunted Fourth Estate. I haven't felt this estranged from my own country since the last
time Bibi Netanyahu addressed both houses of Congress.
What on earth is the Anne Frank test ?
The Anne Frank story simply is of jews in hiding in the Netherlands in WWII, discovered in
1944, deported, where Anne Frank died in early 1945 died of typhoid, while others who stayed
in the same Amsterdam canal achterhuis, literally 'behind house', built later in the garden,
survived.
Before I continue, there is not a shred of doubt that the hiding place and the way they were
in hiding is not true.
However, if a fourteen year old wrote the diary, there are doubts.
Except for the text itself, how at the end of 1944 a ball point pen arrived in occupied
Netherlands, the last part is written by ballpoint, no explanation whatsoever.
Jews were in hiding all over the Netherlands, my mother told me how after the Canadians had
driven out the Germans, snow white people appeared in her small village, that she had known
nothing about, they had been inside for several, maybe five, years.
The effort to get food to them must not be underestimated, food was rationed strictly.
I will keep my fence. His policies regarding Carte Blanche' support for Israel, the invasion of
Iraq, Afghanistan, , interventions in Libya, Syria the Ukraine and pressing the matter on Iran
-- the Russia baiting and Russia conspiracies –
From reading these uppity remarks by Mr. Giraldi, it's obvious he didn't get the text
commanding all good Americans to get on their knees and worship the dead mass-murderer
psychopath McCain.
"He said that, in the post holocaust world, all civilized people, and the governments of
all civilized nations, should be intolerant of leaders who commit verified acts of genocide
"
"Verified?" John Boy using legalese to slither away from his participation in numerous acts
of genocide, both directly by dropping Napalm on Vietnamese civilians or as one of the US
Senate's most rabid war mongers, demanding that this nation or that country be bombed, invaded
and smashed, because McCain had set himself up as judge, jury and executioner? No facts needed,
verdict already in, GUILTY as usual, off with their heads.
If the ICC was actually functional and not just a tool of NATO, EU, Israel and its US
colony, McCain–along with a slew of other US and Israeli war criminals–would of
been dancing on air a long time ago.
I served among fighter jocks back in the 1970s. They're great guys, cut a good public
figure, they're patriotic, true believers in air power, and they enjoy the prestige of their
military occupation. They are also straight-line-only thinkers. They'd bristle at the idea that
they've been "handled" by anyone.
We had a retired Navy captain here who was elected county commissioner. Bristling with
energy and ideas, he had the security of his good government pension. So he thought. Bought by
a local zillionaire, he served prison time.
Fighter jocks simply won't "get" that the job of our political masters is to cripple and
puppetize nominally representative institutions by bribery, blackmail, extortion, and the like,
for the purpose of providing rhetorical cover for what they want to do.
You should and you should try to get others even more influential than yourself (I'm thinking
Pat Buchanan), to browbeat CBS to disclose that this Jeffrey Goldberg is an Israeli
citizen. He's on 'Face The Nation' almost as much as the lovely Margaret Brennan.
"That McCain enthusiastically became Goldberg's patsy is at least one good reason that we
should all be grateful that he never was elected president."
Yes, McCain did not appear to be particularly bright, but he was highly energized by the
"dueling banjos" of ambition and avarice (dumping his sick first wife for a younger, much
richer one), and hence a perfect mark for the wily Zionist manipulators.
Unz also exhumes Jacob Schiff to show how this Wall Street banker jump started the
Bolshevik Revolution, so it was really a deep hatred of Russia, and not any idealism, that
triggered the bloodiest chapter in human history. Though only 4% of Russia's population,
Jews made up 80-85% of the early Soviet government, Unz points out, and they dominated the
Gulag administration and the terrifying NKVD.
Back during the US Civil War, which was largely the result of Rothschild meddling and
financing of both sides, Abraham Lincoln anticipated a surprise attack by the British and
French. So he requested assistance from Tsar Alexander II who in turn mobilized the Russian
fleet and docked at both New York and San Francisco. Rothschild never forgave this 'insult'
by the Russians, hence Jacob Schiff and his cohorts helping to fund and orchestrate the
Bolshevik Revolution which was, essentially, an act of revenge.
By the way, it would be remiss not to mention the hard fact that it was Jewish individuals
who owned almost every slave ship during the Transatlantic Slave Trade and also dominated the
Triangle Trade (molasses/rum/slaves). True history has been deliberately twisted so as to
portray whites as though being the sole culprits of African slavery in the West. As another
point of fact, it was white Christians who fought to end slavery. Ironically, after slavery
had ended, Jews such as Rabbi Stephen Wise began to finance and form various 'civil rights'
groups such as the NAACP, in a naked attempt to establish themselves as championing freedom
and equality, whereas this was most obviously not the case prior to the Emancipation
Proclamation. Reason being, they could use blacks and other "oppressed minorities" as a fifth
column of sorts to exploit racial frictions from within and thus serve as a convenient
distraction from the more negative activities befallen all of Western civilization which,
shamefully, continues to the present day.
Update–"The Israeli pilots used the Russian plane as cover and set it up to
be targeted by the Syrian air defense forces. As a consequence, the Il-20, which has radar
cross-section much larger than the F-16, was shot down by an S-200 system missile," the
statement said.
The Israel Project, a major advocacy group based in Washington, is running a secret
influence campaign on Facebook
Censored film reveals The Israel Project's secret Facebook campaign
The Israel Project, a major advocacy group based in Washington, is running a secret
influence campaign on Facebook.
This is revealed in The Lobby – USA, an undercover Al Jazeera documentary that has
never been broadcast due to censorship by Qatar following pressure from pro-Israel
organizations.
In the newest clips, David Hazony, the managing director of The Israel Project, is heard
telling Al Jazeera's undercover reporter: "There are also things that we do that are
completely off the radar. We work together with a lot of other organizations."
It will not be any new information for regular readers here of course but it is well
edited and produced and good for sharing with friends who have not yet questioned too much
the narrative on Syria.
... "What we have is a desperate corporate media, dutifully parroting the nonsense from the US State Department, and investing
virtually nothing in on-the-ground investigative reporting. But real evidence? We are in very, VERY short supply of that."
... From article: He [Clegg] also argued that the country should lose the right to host the 2018 World Cup after Russian
troops allegedly downed the civilian airliner Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine last July. Well, there's evidence in itself. Ei incumbit
probatio qui dicit, non qui negat. (The burden of proof is on he who declares, not on he who denies). He wants to punish before the
publication o the report. It's like a mediaeval witch-hunt. The law of the jungle seems to be Clegg's guiding principle. No surprise
he's been banned.
..."I can only assume it is as badge of honour if you buy into all the dimwitted propaganda being published by the western corporate
media -- who seem to have a daily axe to grind against the Russian state, but who say nothing about the warmongering actions of the
US. I imagine I would have the same opinion of you if I was to uncritically swallow such toxic rubbish."
..."The only way to effectively block people from other regions (blanket censor them, in other words) would be to positively identify
the source. All that you would likely achieve is blocking actual individual commentators and letting through the government astroturfers.
Why you would want to resort to such tactics is worth asking. The 'Western side' may be losing the propaganda war with Russia because
our lies are bigger and harder to sell -- rather than Pooty-poot being cleverer. Repeated debunked claims in our media are also going
to be far more damaging than anything similar in Russia. The problem doesn't lie with those you are asserting to be 'trolls' that are
disputing the reporting -- the problem lies with the reporting.
Notable quotes:
"... But it's very suspect when you say things like "Putin's created a criminal war in East Ukraine" when it was Kiev which started the violence in reaction to the Russian Ukrainians voting for Federalization in response to the coup in Kiev. It means that everything else you write has to be treated as suspect. ..."
"... alpamysh ... you've merely regurgitated the standard NeoCon list of justifications for why a democratically-elected leader needed to be overthrown ..."
"... The article isn't worth the headline really. The new cold war is on and obviously they'll be barring each other. ..."
"... On the other hand the EU has also put an entry ban on leading Russian politicians, among which are the chairman of the Federation council, politicians from the state Duma and also close advisors to the Russian president Vladimir Putin. It is not anticipated that either side will lift the entry bans in the near future. (Excerpt and rough translation from German) ..."
"... "In December, Nuland reminded Ukrainian business leaders that, to help Ukraine achieve "its European aspirations, we have invested more than $5 billion." She said the U.S. goal was to take "Ukraine into the future that it deserves," by which she meant into the West's orbit and away from Russia's. ..."
"... But President Yanukovych rejected a European Union plan that would have imposed harsh austerity on the already impoverished Ukraine. He accepted a more generous $15 billion loan from Russia, which also has propped up Ukraine's economy with discounted natural gas. Yanukovych's decision sparked anti-Russian street protests in Kiev, located in the country's western and more pro-European region. ..."
"... By late January, Nuland was discussing with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt who should be allowed in the new government. ..."
"... "Yats is the guy," Nuland said in a phone call to Pyatt that was intercepted and posted online. "He's got the economic experience, the governing experience. He's the guy you know." By "Yats," Nuland was referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who had served as head of the central bank, foreign minister and economic minister - and who was committed to harsh austerity. ..."
"... Well, there's evidence in itself. Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat. (The burden of proof is on he who declares, not on he who denies). He wants to punish before the publication o the report. It's like a mediaeval witch-hunt. The law of the jungle seems to be Clegg's guiding principle. No surprise he's been banned. ..."
"... "Putin wants sanctions" ... what a bunch of silly conjecture. As for "Putin style rule" and "Tzar" .. you presumably know that Russia held democratic elections which Putin won. ..."
"... let me guess, The list probably contains politicians whose real loyalty maybe is with the US? Judge from the 2 names mentioned, Malcolm Riffkind is Co-Vice Chair of the Global Panel Foundation – America – with Dr. Dov S. Zakheim, the former U.S Under-Secretary of Defense and Comptroller of the Armed Forces. ..."
"... your constant anti-Russia/Putin comments mark you as a shill/troll ..."
"... What we have is a desperate corporate media, dutifully parroting the nonsense from the US State Department, and investing virtually nothing in on-the-ground investigative reporting. But real evidence? We are in very, VERY short supply of that. ..."
"... I can only assume it is as badge of honour if you buy into all the dimwitted propaganda being published by the western corporate media - ..."
"... We're the global overlords, and so second-rate nations aren't allowed to reciprocate our petulant actions. When they do so it causes some people to question the assumed status of the 'Western' hegemony (and our claimed system of morally superior 'values'). We can't allow that sort of thing, Popeyes. ..."
"... The Guardian has a clear pro-EU/USA position on the new cold war against Russia. ..."
"... The 'Western side' may be losing the propaganda war with Russia because our lies are bigger and harder to sell -- rather than Pooty-poot being cleverer. ..."
"... The problem doesn't lie with those you are asserting to be 'trolls' that are disputing the reporting -- the problem lies with the reporting. ..."
JordanFromLondon -> Havingalavrov 31 May 2015 12:26
"Look at the Moscow apartment bombings"... look at any number of CIA false flag operations. As for "most of the national T.V
is Putin press." ... Murdoch has a controlling interest in printed press and a large share of TV news in Australia and the UK.
Maybe you are one of the CIA-employed agitators against Russia, or maybe you have a chip on your shoulder about a failed relationship
with a Russia bride. I can't be sure from your comments.
But it's very suspect when you say things like "Putin's created a criminal war in East Ukraine" when it was Kiev which
started the violence in reaction to the Russian Ukrainians voting for Federalization in response to the coup in Kiev. It means
that everything else you write has to be treated as suspect.
Huo Fu Yan 31 May 2015 12:24
I don't see a big issue with that list. If some people from that list travel anywhere, it will be considered wasting tax payer
money anyways. They aren't even embraced by a majority in their own countries, some of them belonging to totally irrelevant weird
initiative, shouting and crying about this and that.
For others on that list, being linked to military organisations, the should be banned naturally. As for vacation, I don't think
Russia was on those guys list either
JordanFromLondon -> alpamysh 31 May 2015 12:14
alpamysh ... you've merely regurgitated the standard NeoCon list of justifications for why a democratically-elected leader
needed to be overthrown(e.g. Egypt's Morsi). If we take your "Hitler was elected" argument, we can apply that one
to any election outcome. If you won your high school "class monitor" election ... we'll Hitler won an election too. It's nothing
more than a lazy smear by association. If we take your "rigs the right of the opposition" argument, well there goes Israel's claims
to democracy. They arrest/ban viable Arab opposition figures to prevent them standing in elections. Also, we have to eliminate
Ukraine, who have assassinated about 12 of Yanukovich's inner circle since the coup.
uzzername 31 May 2015 12:09
The article isn't worth the headline really. The new cold war is on and obviously they'll be barring each other.
Russia, along with the rest of BRICS is an emerging economy. While in the developed economies big corporations scramble for
every penny they rip off off the consumers, the BRICS are a goldmine for adventurous capitalists as you can score quite a bit
of dope in one scoop if you invest enough in it.
That's why some of them suits on the list are pissed off. Obvs not because their summer holiday in Siberia has gone into smithereens.
umweltAT2100 31 May 2015 12:04
According to a report in ARD (German state media) the entry ban is a reaction / retaliation in response to the entry ban imposed
on Russians in connection with the Crimea annexation. Approximately 200 people are on the Russian black list. The largest number
are from the USA, with the Republican John McCain declared "persona non grata", followed by Canadian politicians.
On the other hand the EU has also put an entry ban on leading Russian politicians, among which are the chairman of the
Federation council, politicians from the state Duma and also close advisors to the Russian president Vladimir Putin. It is not
anticipated that either side will lift the entry bans in the near future. (Excerpt and rough translation from German)
Russian entry ban for dozens of politicians – Moscow's black list is out. (Hermann Krause, ARD Radio studio, Moscow,
30.05.2015)
Russische Einreiseverbote für Dutzende Politiker Moskaus "schwarze Liste" ist raus. Von Hermann Krause, ARD-Hörfunkstudio Moskau,
30.05.2015
Victoria Nuland and the neocons to be more precise,
"In December, Nuland reminded Ukrainian business leaders that, to help Ukraine achieve "its European aspirations, we have
invested more than $5 billion." She said the U.S. goal was to take "Ukraine into the future that it deserves," by which she meant
into the West's orbit and away from Russia's.
But President Yanukovych rejected a European Union plan that would have imposed harsh austerity on the already impoverished
Ukraine. He accepted a more generous $15 billion loan from Russia, which also has propped up Ukraine's economy with discounted
natural gas. Yanukovych's decision sparked anti-Russian street protests in Kiev, located in the country's western and more pro-European
region.
Nuland was soon at work planning for "regime change," encouraging disruptive street protests by personally passing out cookies
to the anti-government demonstrators. She didn't seem to notice or mind that the protesters in Kiev's Maidan square had hoisted
a large banner honoring Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the German Nazis during World War II and
whose militias participated in atrocities against Jews and Poles.
By late January, Nuland was discussing with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt who should be allowed in the new
government.
"Yats is the guy," Nuland said in a phone call to Pyatt that was intercepted and posted online. "He's got the economic
experience, the governing experience. He's the guy you know." By "Yats," Nuland was referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who had served
as head of the central bank, foreign minister and economic minister - and who was committed to harsh austerity.
As Assistant Secretary Nuland and Sen. McCain cheered the demonstrators on, the street protests turned violent. Police clashed
with neo-Nazi bands, the ideological descendants of Bandera's anti-Russian Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazi SS during
World War II.
With the crisis escalating and scores of people killed in the street fighting, Yanukovych agreed to a E.U.-brokered deal that
called for moving up scheduled elections and having the police stand down. The neo-Nazi storm troopers then seized the opening
to occupy government buildings and force Yanukovych and many of his aides to flee for their lives." https://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/02/what-neocons-want-from-ukraine-crisis/
JordanFromLondon -> alpamysh 31 May 2015 11:53
What proof do you have that the Russian elections were phony ? The results were in line with independent opinion polls. Which
referendums was phony ? The first Iraqi election after Sadam was toppled was certainly phony. The US military whisked away the
ballot boxes for a week after voting was completed before announcing that the Shia (60% of Iraqis) had failed to get a majority
(despite the 20% Bathist Sunni boycotting the election so only the 20% Kurds voted against the 60% Shia).
geedeesee -> SnarkyGrumpkin 31 May 2015 11:50
From article: He [Clegg] also argued that the country should lose the right to host the 2018 World Cup after Russian troops
allegedly downed the civilian airliner Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine last July.
Well, there's evidence in itself. Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat. (The burden of proof is on he who declares,
not on he who denies). He wants to punish before the publication o the report. It's like a mediaeval witch-hunt. The law of the
jungle seems to be Clegg's guiding principle. No surprise he's been banned.
JordanFromLondon -> Havingalavrov 31 May 2015 11:45
"Putin wants sanctions" ... what a bunch of silly conjecture. As for "Putin style rule" and "Tzar" .. you presumably know
that Russia held democratic elections which Putin won. That's more than many of the US/UK allies can say (take your pick
of the Gulf state leaders). Don't buy into the mindless anti-Russian propaganda doing the rounds. I suspect that it's intended
to soften public opnion for anti-Russian attrocities committed in our name to come.
Huo Fu Yan -> David Port 31 May 2015 11:36
It's true, 1/3 the list are politicians and military leader from Poland and baltics with no intend to enter Russia anyways.
The rest are merely people engaged in military organisations (should be banned naturally) or weird political groups and initiatives.
Furthermore, there are a few irrelevant politicians on the list for whatever reason. To be frank, a few people from that list
you wouldt want in your own country either.
meewaan 31 May 2015 11:07
let me guess, The list probably contains politicians whose real loyalty maybe is with the US? Judge from the 2 names mentioned,
Malcolm Riffkind is Co-Vice Chair of the Global Panel Foundation – America – with Dr. Dov S. Zakheim, the former U.S Under-Secretary
of Defense and Comptroller of the Armed Forces.
Not sure about banning Nick Clegg, - has his wife remunerated by her work for companies linked to the US? Take, for example,
Mrs Clegg's firm's advertisement (again, on its website) of the fact it makes considerable sums from helping rich people avoid
inheritance tax, saying that it offers 'personal estate planning advice and financial and tax-planning services to high net worth
individuals'.
'We combine sophisticated estate planning skills with international resources . . . We help U.S. and non-U.S. trustees and
beneficiaries transfer wealth efficiently through lifetime and testamentary trusts designed to minimise tax exposure.'
SuchindranathAiyer 31 May 2015 10:35
It required a "Tit for Tat" to establish that sanctions are working? Here is the geo-political back drop:
Reigan and Gorby arrived at certain agreements and understandings which Clinton (the husband) violated. He pulled Poland and
others into NATO and bombed Russian ally Belgrade, violating international law, while a helpless Russia fumed, for 84 days to
given Islam its first ethnically cleansed enclaves (Bosnia and Kosovo) after 1489.
Bush (the son), declared the "Star Wars" missile shield in direct violation of the Regan-Gorbachev agreements while Russia
continued to fume, but began to re arm and prepare itself for war. Apart from, of course, violating International Law and invading
Russian ally Iraq to distract anger over 9/11 from Saudi Arabia and its Nuclear-Terrorist sword arm Pakistan and threw thriving
communities of Jews, Christians, Yazidis, discos and bars that the Saudis, Qataris and Kuwaitis resented into the maws of Islam.
Russia fumed and continued to rearm and began to rally around Putin's nationalism. The US commenced "regime change" operations
in Russian (and Iraqi) Secular ally Syria, throwing even more Jews, Christians, Yazidis and Kurds into the maws of Islam. US was
to weakened by Iraq to wage war unilaterally in Syria. China and Russia blocked the US at the UN. Putin wrote an open letter to
Obama on Syria in the NY Times which gained traction with the American Citizens, bending Obama's nose and driving the US regime
change operation in Syria further under ground (covert). Prince Bandar (what an appropriate name!) head of Saudi intelligence
went ot Moscow to bribe Putin to back the putsch in Syria. Putin refused and told Bandar that if Islam tried a Beslan at Sochi,
he would bomb the Q'aba. This bent the Saudi nose. So the US commenced operation regime change in Ukraine. This sparked the secession
of Crime to Russia. The US fumed and fretted because its more develoed and intelligent NATO allies (France and Germany) would
not back the US backed fascist regime in Ukraine. The US shot down MH-17 in a false flag operation and started a canard against
Russia to revive NATO. There is a NATO now imposing US-Saudi conceived sanctions on Russia. We are now in the Second Cold War
so NATO won't go away. Russia and China will ally because, Clinton to Obama, the US has demonstrated the dangers of a unipolar
world, particularly as Islamic Petro Dollars own the decision and opinion makers of the West and have used the US military to
further the Islamic agenda as much as carry on with the old anti-Communist prejudices. (While Russia is not Totalitarian, China
is. India is really the last Soviet franchise in the World with its "Animal Farm" totalitarian Constitution and thinking which
is why the US is an ally of Pakistan and as hostile to India as to Russia. Consider that as recently as 2012, the man who lolls
in Lutyen's drawing room today moved "retrospective" legislation in the same Parliament that nationalized 20% of private (non
minority) education and removed the truth from Govt approved History text books, in the highest traditions of Nehru, Ambedkar
and Indira Gandhi.)
wilpost37 -> AbsolutelyFapulous 31 May 2015 10:33
Absolutely/Goman
Almost all the tourists of Crimea were Ukrainians before 2014. They stopped coming, and likely are spending their vacation
elsewhere.
Crimea is rebuilding its infrastructures (Kiev had neglected them for 22 years), and its tourist base.
It expects to have over 4 million visitors in 2015 and 5 million in 2016, because many Russians are no longer going to EU countries,
and are going to Crimea, Sochi, etc., instead. It will take time, but Crimea is a beautiful area.
Crimea became part of the Russian Empire by conquest over the Tartars in 1793.
The Tartars had been kidnapping nearby people (several million over many decades) and selling them to the Turks. Catherine
the Great put an end to that.
Khrushev was stupid to give it to Ukraine in 1954.
After the CIA/FBI-assisted coup of Kiev, the Crimean people, 67% Russian, feared for their future, as did the Donbas people.
SHappens 31 May 2015 10:24
"Just one thing remains unclear: did our European co-workers want these lists to minimise inconveniences for potential 'denied
persons' or to stage a political show?"
It is pretty clear that it turned out to be another media circus.
Socraticus -> alpamysh 31 May 2015 10:12
Lesson 1 - everyone on this site is a guest, you included
Lesson 2 - the majority of posters herein are actually westerners, not 'Russian trolls'
Lesson 3 - all politicians lie to advance their own social/economic/political agendas
Lesson 4 - all MSM distort/suppress the truth to support governmental narratives
Lesson 5 - many of us westerners actually bother to investigate the true facts
Lesson 6 - if a leader's being demonized its because they won't capitulate to the US
Lesson 7 - every illicit invasion is preceded by demonization of a leader/country
Lesson 8 - your constant anti-Russia/Putin comments mark you as a shill/troll
Lesson 9 - you can educate yourself or remain blind to facts - your choice
Lesson 10 - you will learn the consequences of your choices
UnsleepingMind -> EssoBlue 31 May 2015 10:12
You realise that Russia is one the most important members of the BRICS and that they group has recently established a development
bank? That's hardly the sign that the other BRICS nations are not reading from the same hymn sheet as Russia...
What did anyone expect flowers from russia from the unfair treatment it's getting. The west paying for Ukraine part nazi government
and creating a coup in a democratically ekected president last february. Then sanctioning the Russian people expecting them to
turn in yheir president. The west should be ashamed of what they accomplished that being fronting a proxy war against Russia.
Vijay Raghavan -> Huo Fu Yan 31 May 2015 09:54
Developing all-round military-to-military relations. China's armed forces will further their exchanges and cooperation with
the Russian military within the framework of the comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination between China and Russia,
and foster a comprehensive, diverse and sustainable framework to promote military relations in more fields and at more levels
They made that statement in their white paper issued last week.Offcourse Guardian or BBC will not keep up with such "Breaking
News".
UnsleepingMind -> EssoBlue 31 May 2015 09:49
1) Yes, the BRICS countries are very much behind Russia.
2) Russia, unlike the US, has tabled a resolution to condemn Nazism and Nazi movements in the highest forum possible (the UN).
The US, along with Canada, and its puppet government in Ukraine, voted against it (in defiance of most of the world's nations).
You would think, with all the technology at the disposal of the US security state, that it might (just might) be able to provide
us with real, irrefutable evidence of a ground invasion. You know, perhaps some high resolution satellite imagery, the odd photo
of a modern Russian tank moving over the Ukrainian border, some chatter from the wires between embassy officials and security
personnel, etc., etc.
But of course we have nothing of the sort. What we have is a desperate corporate media, dutifully parroting the nonsense
from the US State Department, and investing virtually nothing in on-the-ground investigative reporting. But real evidence? We
are in very, VERY short supply of that.
UnsleepingMind -> ponott 31 May 2015 09:34
I can only assume it is as badge of honour if you buy into all the dimwitted propaganda being published by the western
corporate media -- who seem to have a daily axe to grind against the Russian state, but who say nothing about the warmongering
actions of the US. I imagine I would have the same opinion of you if I was to uncritically swallow such toxic rubbish.
UnsleepingMind -> alpamysh 31 May 2015 09:30
'Because we have the right to ban people who invade other countries'.
That's why we've recently arrested George Bush (who, with the help of Tony Blair invaded Iraq and Afghanistan), Barack Obama
(who bombed Libya, engineered coups in Honduras and Ukraine, and is now funding Islamic extremists in Syria)...
We reserve the right to ban, but we use that 'right' to ban official enemies (i.e. anyone daring to follow a geopolitical game
plan that is distinctly at odds with our own).
Also, your suggestion that Putin's Russia has invaded 'other countries' is preposterous. The western media has been spewing
this nonsense for months now and yet there is not a shred of real evidence (including hi-res satellite imagery) to back it up.
And if you are referring to Crimea, let me say this: Russia troops have been staged in Crimea for many, many years; moreover,
the people of Crimea voted to break with Ukraine in a recent referendum (not that that squares with your hectoring rhetoric).
PyrrhicVictory 31 May 2015 09:27
The doors of the gravy train for politicians like Clegg are fast closing. When we exit the EU, then the Brussels gravy train
will also be beyond him. He might, just might, having to start behaving like an honest politician for once and earn a decent wage
based on truth not lies.
johnsmith44 -> NegativeCamber 31 May 2015 09:25
Why dont you go spread democracy to some oil-producing Third World country, together with your poodles the brits? And make
sure you do it properly, so that monstrosities like ISIS are guaranteed?
ex-CIA personnel openly describing their involvement in the dowining of Korean Airlines passenger flight 007 over Siberia on
August 30, 1983 and I believe it becomes apparent who downed MH-17.
Jerome Fryer -> Popeyes 31 May 2015 09:11
We're the global overlords, and so second-rate nations aren't allowed to reciprocate our petulant actions. When they do
so it causes some people to question the assumed status of the 'Western' hegemony (and our claimed system of morally superior
'values'). We can't allow that sort of thing, Popeyes.
davidncldl 31 May 2015 09:10
The Guardian has a clear pro-EU/USA position on the new cold war against Russia. Mr Putin is their democratically
elected leader and he is enormously popular. Only an imbecile would be surprised or indignant about Russia retaliating for unjust
EU/US sanctions. What do the globalisers and bankers' friends at the Guardian expect? I imagine you think that the ruination of
the Venezuelan and Russian economies by the manipulation of the oil price is just "free market" activity.
Hass Castorp 31 May 2015 09:07
"More than 6,200 people have been killed in fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists."
This is a language of propaganda, Guardian. Last i checked Guardian advertised to be a newspaper, not a bulletin of The Ministry
of Truth.
My reformulation; "More than 6200 (in some estimates up to 50.000) have been killed and up to 1 million civilians displaced
(who mostly fled to Russia) by Ukrainian government troops and private terrorist kommandos of Ukrainian oligarchs."
Jerome Fryer -> henry919 31 May 2015 09:03
The only way to effectively block people from other regions (blanket censor them, in other words) would be to positively identify
the source. All that you would likely achieve is blocking actual individual commentators and letting through the government astroturfers.
Why you would want to resort to such tactics is worth asking. The 'Western side' may be losing the propaganda war with
Russia because our lies are bigger and harder to sell -- rather than Pooty-poot being cleverer.
Repeated debunked claims in our media are also going to be far more damaging than anything similar in Russia. The problem
doesn't lie with those you are asserting to be 'trolls' that are disputing the reporting -- the problem lies with the reporting.
(If your argument must be protected against criticism then it is a weak argument.)
In the late 1980's, an old friend of mine based in Moscow was calling her husband in the USA
late one night. She said it was a "typical dumb husband/wife call," mostly about a broken
garage door.
Around midnight, a gruff voice broke into the call. "This is your KGB listener. This is the
most boring, stupid call I've ever listened to. Shut up and go to bed!"
Ah, those innocent Cold War days. Today, Big Brother listens to your calls, reads your
email, and follows your internet searches on silent cat's feet.
China's Taoists warned, "you become what you hate." They are right: the September 2001
attacks on the US, as John Le Carré wrote, producing a period of temporary psychosis.
America was knocked back to the ugly days of Sen. McCarthy's Red Scare of the 1950's. The big
difference was that today the bogeymen of "terrorists" have replaced menacing Marxists. And
today, terrorists were everywhere.
To incompetently attempt to murder their targets by spraying the deadliest nerve agent in
existence onto the doorknobs of their suburban homes and then stroll around getting filmed by
every CCTV camera in Britain.
As far as I know, the British tabloids haven't yet published surveillance photos of Corbyn
welcoming the Skripal assassins at Gatwick with a wreath, or a bottle of Stoli (and wearing
his
Russian-stooge hat , of course), but I won't be terribly shocked when they do.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
This is a very weak article, but it raises several important questions such as the role or neoliberal MSM in color revolution
against Trump and which social group constituted the voting block that brought Trump to victory. The author answers incorrectly on
both those questions.
I think overall Tremblay analysis of Trump (and by extension of national neoliberalism he promotes) is incorrect. Probably the largest group
of voters which voted for Trump were voters who were against neoliberal globalization and who now feel real distrust and aversion to
the ruling neoliberal elite.
Trump is probably right to view neoliberal journalists as enemies: they are tools of intelligence agencies which as agents of
Wall Street promote globalization
At the same time Trump turned to be Obama II: he instantly betrayed his voters after the election. His
election slogan "make Ameraca great again" bacem that same joke as Obama "Change we can believe in". And he proved to be as
jingoistic as Obama (A Nobel Pease Price laureate who was militarists dream come true)
In discussion of groups who votes for Trump the author forgot to mention part of professional which skeptically view neoliberal
globalization and its destrction of jobs (for example programmer jobs in the USA) as well as blue color
workers decimated by offshoring of major industries.
Notable quotes:
"... "Just stick with us, don't believe the crap you see from these people [journalists], the fake news Just remember, what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening. " ..."
"... Donald Trump (1946- ), American President, (in remarks made during a campaign rally with Veterans of Foreign Wars, in Kansas City, July 24, 2018) ..."
"... "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." ..."
"... This is a White House where everybody lies ..."
"... I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power ..."
"... The second one can be found in Trump's artful and cunning tactics to unbalance and manipulate the media to increase his visibility to the general public and to turn them into his own tools of propaganda. ..."
"... ad hominem' ..."
"... Donald Trump essentially has the traits of a typical showman diva , behaving in politics just as he did when he was the host of a TV show. Indeed, if one considers politics and public affairs as no more than a reality show, this means that they are really entertainment, and politicians are first and foremost entertainers or comedians. ..."
"... He prefers to rely on one-directional so-called 'tweets' to express unfiltered personal ideas and emotions (as if he were a private person), and to use them as his main public relations channel of communication. ..."
"... checks and balance ..."
"... The centralization of power in the hands of one man is bound to have serious political consequences, both for the current administration and for future ones. ..."
"Just stick with us, don't believe the crap you see from these people [journalists], the fake news Just remember, what
you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening. "
Donald Trump (1946- ), American President, (in remarks made during a campaign rally with Veterans of Foreign Wars, in Kansas
City, July 24, 2018)
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-1950), English novelist, essayist, and social critic, (in '1984', Ch. 7, 1949)
" This is a White House where everybody lies ." Omarosa Manigault Newman (1974- ), former White House aide to President
Donald Trump, (on Sunday August 12, 2018, while releasing tapes recording conversations with Donald Trump.)
" I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power ." Benjamin Franklin (
1706 –
1790 ), American inventor and US Founding Father, (in 'Words of
the Founding Fathers', 2012).
***
In this day and age, with instant information, how does a politician succeed in double-talking, in bragging, in scapegoating and
in shamefully distorting the truth, most of the time, without being unmasked as a charlatan and discredited? Why? That is the mysterious
and enigmatic question that one may ask about U. S. President Donald Trump, as a politician.
The most obvious answer is the fact that Trump's one-issue and cult-like followers do not care what he does or says and whether
or not he has declared a
war on truth and reality , provided he delivers the political and financial benefits they demand of him, based on their ideological
or pecuniary interests. These groups of voters live in their own reality and only their personal interests count.
1- Four groups of one-issue voters behind Trump
There are four groups of one-issue voters to
whom President Donald Trump has delivered the goodies:
Christian religious right voters, whose main political issue is to fill the U. S. Supreme Court with ultra conservative
judges. On that score, Donald Trump has been true to them by naming one such judge and in nominating a second one.
Super rich Zionists and the Pro-Israel Lobby, whose obsession is the state of Israel. Again, on that score, President
Donald Trump has fulfilled his promise to them and he has unilaterally moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in addition
to attacking the Palestinians and tearing up the 'Iran Deal'.
The one-percent Income earners and some corporate owners, whose main demand to Trump was substantial tax cuts and
deregulation. Once again, President Trump has fulfilled this group's wishes with huge tax cuts, mainly financed with future public
debt increases, which are going to be paid for by all taxpayers.
The NRA and the Pro-Gun Lobby, whose main obsession is to have the right to arm themselves to the teeth, including
with military assault weapons, with as few strings attached as possible. Here again President Donald Trump has sided with them
and against students who are increasingly in the line of fire in American schools.
With the strong support of these four monolithic lobbies -- his electoral base -- politician Donald Trump can count on the indefectible
support of between 35 percent and 40 percent of the American electorate. It is ironic that some of Trump's other policies, like reducing
health care coverage and the raising of import taxes, will hurt the poor and the middle class, even though some of Trump's victims
can be considered members of the above lobbies.
Moreover, some of Trump's supporters regularly rely on
hypocrisy and on excuses to exonerate their favorite
but flawed politician of choice. If any other politician from a different party were to say and do half of what Donald Trump does
and says, they would be asking for his impeachment.
There are three other reasons why Trump's rants, his
record-breaking lies , his untruths, his deceptions and his dictatorial-style attempts to
control information , in the eyes of his fanatical supporters, at least, are like water on the back of a duck. ( -- For the record,
according to the
Washington Post , as of early August, President Trump has made some 4,229 false claims, which amount to 7.6 a day, since his
inauguration.)
The first reason can be found in Trump's view that politics and even government business are first and foremost another form
of
entertainment , i.e. a sort of TV reality show, which must be scripted and acted upon. Trump thinks that is
OK to lie
and to ask his assistants to
lie
. In this new immoral world, the Trump phenomenon could be seen a sign of
post-democracy .
The second one can be found in Trump's artful and cunning tactics to unbalance and
manipulate the media to increase his visibility to the general public and to turn them into his own tools of propaganda.
When Trump attacks the media, he is in fact coaxing them to give him free coverage to spread his
insults , his fake accusations, his provocations, his constant
threats , his denials or reversals, his convenient
changes of subject or his political spins. Indeed, with his outrageous statements, his gratuitous accusations and his attacks
' ad hominem' , and by constantly bullying and insulting adversaries at home and foreign heads of states abroad, and
by issuing threats in repetition, right and left, Trump has forced the media to talk and journalists to write about him constantly,
on a daily basis, 24/7.
That suits him perfectly well because he likes to be the center of attention. That is how he can change the political rhetoric
when any negative issue gets too close to him. In the coming weeks and months, as the Special prosecutor
Robert Mueller's report is likely to be released, Donald Trump is not above resorting to some sort of "
Wag the Dog " political trickery, to change the topic and to possibly push the damaging report off the headlines.
In such a circumstance, it is not impossible that launching an illegal war of choice, say against Iran (a
pet
project of Trump's National Security Advisor John Bolton), could then look very convenient to a crafty politician like Donald
Trump and to his warmonger advisors. Therefore, observers should be on the lookout to spot any development of the sort in the
coming weeks.
That one man and his entourage could whimsically consider launching a
war of aggression is a throwback to ancient times
and is a sure indication of the level of depravity to which current politics has fallen. This should be a justified and clear
case for impeachment .
Finally, some far-right media outlets, such as
Fox News and
Sinclair Broadcasting , have taken it upon themselves to systematically present Trump's lies and misrepresentations as some
'alternative' truths and facts.
Indeed, ever since 1987, when the Reagan administration abolished the
Fairness Doctrine for licensing public radio
and TV waves, and since a Republican dominated Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed for the
mass conglomeration of local broadcasting
in the United States, extreme conservative news outlets, such as the Fox and Sinclair networks, have sprung up. They are well
financed, and they have essentially become powerful
political propaganda machines , erasing the line between facts and fiction, and regularly presenting fictitious alternative
facts as the truth.
In so doing, they have pushed public debates in the United States away from facts, reason and logic, at least for those listeners
and viewers for whom such outlets are the only source of information. It is not surprising that such far-right media have also
made Donald Trump the champion of their cause, maliciously branding anything inconvenient as 'fake' news, as Trump has done in
his own anti-media campaign and his sustained assault on the free press.
2- Show Politics and public affairs as a form of entertainment
Donald Trump does not seem to take politics and public affairs very seriously, at least when his own personal interests are involved.
Therefore, when things go bad, he never volunteers to take personal responsibility, contrary to what a true leader would do, and
he conveniently
shifts the blame on somebody else. This is a sign of immaturity or cowardice. Paraphrasing President Harry Truman, "the buck
never stops at his desk."
Donald Trump essentially has the traits of a typical
showman diva , behaving
in politics just as he did when he was the host of a TV show. Indeed, if one considers politics and public affairs as no more than
a reality show, this means that they are really entertainment, and politicians are first and foremost entertainers or comedians.
3- Trump VS the media and the journalists
Donald Trump is the first U.S. president who rarely holds scheduled press conferences. Why would he, since he considers journalists
to be his "enemies"! It doesn't seem to matter to him that freedom of the press is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution by the First
Amendment. He prefers to rely on one-directional so-called 'tweets' to express unfiltered personal ideas and emotions (as if
he were a private person), and to use them as his main public relations channel of communication.
The ABC News network
has calculated that, as of last July, Trump has tweeted more than 3,500 times, slightly more than seven tweets a day. How could he
have time left to do anything productive! Coincidently, Donald Trump's number of tweets is not far away from the number of outright
lies and misleading claims that he has told and made since his inauguration.
The Washington Post has counted no less than 3,251 lies or misleading claims of his, through the end of May of this year, --
an average of 6.5 such misstatements per day of his presidency. Fun fact: Trump seems to accelerate the pace of his lies. Last year,
he told 5.5 lies per day, on average. Is it possible to have a more cynical view of politics!
The media in general, (and
not only American ones), then serve more or less voluntarily as so many resonance boxes for his daily 'tweets', most of which
are often devoid of any thought and logic.
Such a practice has the consequence of demeaning the public discourse in the pursuit of the common good and the general welfare
of the people to the level of a frivolous private enterprise, where expertise, research and competence can easily be replaced by
improvisation, whimsical arbitrariness and charlatanry. In such a climate, only the short run counts, at the expense of planning
for the long run.
Conclusion
All this leads to this conclusion: Trump's approach is not the way to run an efficient government. Notwithstanding the U.S. Constitution
and what it says about the need to have " checks and balance s" among different government branches, President Donald Trump
has de facto pushed aside the U.S. Congress and the civil servants in important government Departments, even his own
Cabinet
, whose formal meetings under Trump have been little more than photo-up happenings, to grab the central political stage for himself.
If such a development does not represent an ominous threat to American democracy, what does?
The centralization of power in the hands of one man is bound to have serious political consequences, both for the current
administration and for future ones.
"... There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though, "Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear that the Russians were coming. ..."
"... That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989, followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America. ..."
"... With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula). ..."
"... Before long, it became clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself. ..."
"... That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on. ..."
"... The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded, fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria. ..."
"... Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts in the UK and other allied nations. ..."
"... How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims! ..."
"... They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel ..."
"... Cold War revivalists can therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth. ..."
"... Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American "democracy" can plausibly allege. ..."
"... Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons, liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State – that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east. ..."
"... The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one that emerged after World War II. ..."
"... However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism, suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a demonstrably aggressive "free world." ..."
"... That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they" are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that ensued. ..."
"... The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved." ..."
"... Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free. ..."
"... From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies. ..."
"... Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified. But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a vote for catastrophe. ..."
"... For now, though, the hard and very relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm, Russia. ..."
"... It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been. ..."
"... If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for America and its allies but for Russia too. ..."
There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though,
"Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear
that the Russians were coming.
That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989,
followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed
that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was
triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America.
With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of
others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was
comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing
Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula).
It turned out, though, that American triumphalism was only a phase. Before long, it became
clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War
anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself.
However, in the final days of Bush 41 and then at the dawn of the Clinton era, nobody knew
that. Nobody gave America's propaganda system the credit it deserved.
Also, nobody quite realized how devastating Russia's regression to capitalism would be, and
nobody quite grasped the savagery of the kleptocrats who had taken charge of what remained of
the Russian state.
For more than a decade, the situation in that late great superpower was too dire to sustain
the old fears and animosities. Capitalism had made Russia wretched again.
That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin,
Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard
to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on.
But anti-Communism (without Communism) and its close cousin, Russophobia, could not remain
in remission forever. The need for them was too great.
In the Age of Obama, the Global War on Terror, with or without that ludicrous Bush 43-era
name, wasn't cutting it anymore. It was, and still is, good for keeping America's perpetual war
regime going and for undoing civil liberties, but there had never been much glory in it, only
endless misery for all. Also it was getting old and increasingly easy to see through.
The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded,
fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed
far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria.
This was not the only factor behind the Obama administration's "pivot towards Asia," its
largely failed attempt to take China down a notch or two, but it was an important part of the
story.
However, by the time Obama and his team decided to pivot, China had become too important to
the United States economically to make a good Cold War enemy. Worse still, it had for too long
been an object of pity and contempt, not fear.
When the Soviet Union was an enemy, China was an enemy too, most glaringly during the Korean
War. It remained an enemy even after the Sino-Soviet split became too obvious to deny. However,
unlike post-1917 Russia, it had never quite become an historical foe.
Moreover, as Russia began to recover from the Yeltsin era, the Russian political class, and
many of the oligarchs behind them, sensing the popular mood, decided that the time was ripe "to
make Russia great again." Putin is not so much a cause as he is a symptom – and symbol
– of this aspiration.
And so, there it was: the longed for new Cold War would be much like the one that seemed
over a quarter century ago.
***
As everyone who has seen, heard or read anything about the 2016 election "knows," Russian
intelligence services (= Putin) meddled. Everyone also "knows" that, with midterm elections
looming, they are at it again.
This, according to the mainstream consensus view, is a bona fide casus belli , a
justification for war. To be sure, what they want is a war that remains cold; ending life on
earth, as we know it, is not on their agenda.
But inasmuch as cold wars can easily turn hot, this hardly mitigates the recklessness of
their machinations. Humankind was extraordinarily lucky last time; there is no guarantee that
all that luck will hold.
Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is
still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional
wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting
the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts
in the UK and other allied nations.
Time was when anyone with any sense understood that these intelligence services, the
American ones especially, are second to none in meddling in the affairs of other nations, and
that the American national security state – essentially our political police -- is
comprised, by design, of liars and deceivers.
How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News
demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who
are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims!
Try as they might, the manufacturers and guardians of conventional wisdom have so far been
unable to concoct a plausible story in which Russian meddling affected the outcome of the 2016
election in any serious way. The idea that the Russians defeated Hillary, not Hillary herself,
is, to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Bentham, "nonsense on stilts." Leading Democrats and their
media flacks don't seem to mind that either.
They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared
to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and
gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia,
the Gulf monarchies, and Israel.
Nevertheless, it probably is true that the Russians meddled. Cold War revivalists can
therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with
which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth.
Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet
republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse
American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American
"democracy" can plausibly allege.
Moreover, it should go without saying that the democracy they purport to care so much about
has almost nothing to do with "the rule of the demos." It doesn't even have much to do with
free and fair competitive elections – unless "free and fair" means that anything goes, so
long as the principals and perpetrators are homegrown or citizens of favored nations.
Self-righteous posturing aside, Putin's real sin in the eyes of the American power elite is
that, in his own small way, he has been defying America's "right" to run the world as it sees
fit.
When Clinton was president, Serbia did that, and lived to regret it. Cuba has been suffering
for nearly six decades for the same reason, and now Venezuela is paying its dues. The empire is
merciless towards nations that rebel.
With Soviet support and then with sheer determination and grit, Cuba has been able to
withstand the onslaught to some extent from Day One. Venezuela may not be so lucky –
especially now that Republicans and Democrats feel threatened by the growing number of
"democratic socialists" in their midst. Already, the propaganda system is targeting Venezuelan
"socialism," blaming it for that country's woes, and warning that if our newly minted,
homegrown socialists prevail, a similar fate will be in store for us.
This is ludicrous, of course – American hostility and the vagaries of the global oil
market deserve the lion's share of the blame. But the on-going propaganda blitz could
nevertheless pave the way for horrors ahead, should Trump decide to start a war America could
actually win.
Inconsequential Russian meddling is a big deal on the "liberal" cable networks, on NPR, and
in the "quality" press. Democrats and a few Republicans love to bleat on about it. But it is
Ukraine that made Russia our "adversary" and its president Public Enemy Number One.
Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons,
liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State
– that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's
Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the
Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently
anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian
speaking Ukrainians in the east.
But never mind: Putin – that is, the Russia government – violated international
law by sending troops briefly into beleaguered Russian-speaking parts of the country. That they
were generally welcomed by the people living there is of no importance.
Worst of all, Russia annexed Crimea – a territory integral to the Russian empire since
the eighteenth century. Since long before the Russian Revolution, Crimea has been home to a
huge naval base vital to Russia's strategic defense.
The story line back in the day was that anything that could be described as Russian
aggression outside the Soviet Union's agreed upon sphere of influence had to do with spreading
Communism. In fact, the Soviets did everything they could to keep Communist and other
insurgencies from upending the status quo. The mainstream narrative was wrong.
Now Communism is gone and nothing has taken its place. Even so, the idea that Russia has
designs on its neighbors for ideological reasons is hard to shake – in part because it is
actively promoted by propagandists who have suddenly and uncharacteristically become defenders
of international law.
Meanwhile, of course, the hypocrisies keep piling on. It is practically a tenet of the
American civil religion that international law applies to others, not to the United States.
This is why, when it suits some perceived purpose, America flaunts its violations
shamelessly.
Thus nothing the Russians did or are ever likely to do comes close to the shenanigans Bill
Clinton displayed – successfully, for the most part – in his efforts to tear Kosovo
away from Serbia. Clinton even went so far as to bomb Belgrade; Putin never bombed Kiev.
The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic
systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist
centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one
that emerged after World War II.
However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War
revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism,
suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had
little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with
maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a
demonstrably aggressive "free world."
George W. Bush claimed that 9/11 happened because "they hate our freedom." "They" would be
radical Islamists of the kind stirred into action in Afghanistan by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his
co-thinkers in the Carter administration. Their objective was to undermine the Soviet Union by
getting it bogged down in a quagmire like the one that did so much harm to the United States in
Vietnam.
That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they"
are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America
and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that
ensued.
The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago
never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's
Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved."
However, the American public is not as naïve as it used to be, and it is impossible to
say, at this point, how well this new story line will work.
Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But
this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply
cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free.
It is hard to believe, but there are people who are actually buying this but, with a lot of
corporate media assistance, there are. No matter how clear it is that they are not worth being
taken seriously, Cold War mythologies just won't die.
However, it is worth pondering why today's Russia would do what it is alleged to have done;
and why, as is also alleged, it is still doing it.
From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward
off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at
blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails
in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and
abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies.
However, in view of prevailing power relations, these are interests it cannot do much to
advance. Acting as if this were not the case only puts Russia in a bad light -- not for
meddling, but for meddling stupidly.
No doubt, for reasons both fair and foul, Putin wanted Hillary to lose the election two
years ago. So, but for one little problem, would anyone whose head is screwed on right. That
problem's name is Donald Trump.
Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified.
But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be
even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a
vote for catastrophe.
Putin's enemy was Trump's enemy, and it is axiomatic that "the enemy of my enemy is my
friend" -- except sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, my enemy's enemy is an enemy far worse.
For reasons that remain obscure, Putin and Trump seem to have a "thing" going on between
them. Some day perhaps we will know what that is all about. For now, though, the hard and very
relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm,
Russia.
It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as
hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been.
If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have
realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be
of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for
America and its allies but for Russia too.
Therefore, if there really was Russian meddling, as there probably was, Putin should be
ashamed – not so much for the DNC reasons laid out 24/7 on MSNBC and CNN, but for
overestimating Trump's abilities and for underestimating the extent to which what started out
as a maneuver of Hillary Clinton's, concocted to excuse her incompetence, would take a
perilously "viral" turn, becoming a major threat to peace in a political culture that never
quite got beyond the lunacy of the First Cold War.
"... Needless to say, it is Amazon which has crushed and eliminated the local community bookshop that was once a beloved social commons, in every town and city across the land. ..."
"... Unfortunately, now that Amazon has a total monopoly on book publishing, it can decide who will or will not be published. But really, isn't Amazon the end result of libertarianism, neo-liberal, no regulation capitalism as we now have? ..."
"... This is a total nightmare situation: a gigantic behemoth corporation, unanswerable to anybody. Doesn't even need to have clearly worded guidelines, deliberately vague so they can censor whomever they want, at their whim. There is zero accountability with this libertarian arrangement. ..."
I hate Amazon through and through: from that greedy little rat Bezos who has become the
world's richest man on the backs of his workers which he treats like slaves, like
dogs–paying them so little they have to apply for foodstamps, to the horrible working
conditions at Amazon's giant fullfillment warehouses (no lunchbreak; penalizing workers for
going to the bathroom for too long; deliberately firing workers when they become legally
entitled to full time regular employment (Amazon deliberately uses temp/contract workers to
avoid paying healthcare, maternity leave, pension, vacation, etc). In short, Amazon is a
total, complete asshole corporation which has now become a global publishing monopoly by
deliberate design.
Needless to say, it is Amazon which has crushed and eliminated the local
community bookshop that was once a beloved social commons, in every town and city across the
land.
This story about Hoffman's getting censored and removed from Amazon's Kindle books is a
fine example of why libertarianism is idealistic nonsense. Libertarians argue that no
government is necessary? No laws needed? That government regulation is an unnecessary
interference in a pure person to person marketplace? What a load of bollocks. If there were
robust anti-monopoly regulations in place that were actually enforced, there would be no
Amazon monopoly like we suffer under today; it would be one of many smaller sized retailers.
We would have choice! Hoffman could go and sell through a different bookseller.
Unfortunately, now that Amazon has a total monopoly on book publishing, it can decide who
will or will not be published. But really, isn't Amazon the end result of libertarianism,
neo-liberal, no regulation capitalism as we now have?
Bezos: "It's my company and I'll do
what I please, censor whatever I want!" Yes–this is pure neo-liberal libertarianism
with no government regulation. No way to redress grievances.
This is a total nightmare
situation: a gigantic behemoth corporation, unanswerable to anybody. Doesn't even need to
have clearly worded guidelines, deliberately vague so they can censor whomever they want, at
their whim. There is zero accountability with this libertarian arrangement.
It would be much
better if there were laws on the books, enforced, which
a) stopped such abusive monopolies
from happening in the first place;
b) laws on the books–enforced–protecting
author's publication rights, to prevent censorship as is now happening.
You don't have this
in USA today, so authors get screwed over, censored and disappeared. Anyways, much for
libertarianism.
ATTN: if you still have an Amazon membership and buy stuff from them -- do your civic
duty and stop it! Delete your account and tell them why!
To be banned by Amazon is not equivalent to being banned by any other private business.
Most publishers will admit that Amazon has replaced Bowker Books in Print as the industry's
authoritative guide to what books in English have been printed in the past and what is in
print now. Amazon is currently the reference source. For a book to be forbidden by Amazon
renders it largely invisible. It is equivalent to burning the book. So this is not a matter
of Amazon exercising the prerogative of private enterprise. Amazon is a monopoly. It has no
rival. If your book doesn't exist on Amazon, then for most people who are not research
specialists, your book doesn't exist. The consequences for the pursuit of knowledge are
ominous.
Exactly. And this kind of global monopoly power can't be diminished in time with naive,
"free market – just go somewhere else", Libertarian sound-bites. People who believe in
that fairytale are beyond naive. Amazon, YouTube, Reddit and Twitter are untouchable in an
environment where their competitors can barely offer a fraction of a fraction of the
Worldwide audience to their "content creators" and very few content creators to the audience.
This built-in inertia is self-reinforcing and tremendously inert. It's also the reason why
the Globalists have spared no expense to own those platforms.
Free speech will have to be enforced and saved politically. Waiting for Zuckenberg
to un-fuck it is a fool's errand.
There are useful parallels with Christianity, which went from being powerless and persecuted
in its early days under Imperial Rome to eventual domination of Medieval Europe. It was a
longish process, but an early small, private and ethical movement did eventually morph into a
dictatorial organization that hunted down its own dissidents (heretics).
In this game of power, the church certainly collected great wealth, developed a complex
administration, made alliances with temporal (non-spiritual) power holders , and instituted
the Holy Office of the Inquisition (or equivalents) to root out dissidents (heretics) or
anyone who got in the way.
Green quotes a complaint by historian Manuel Barrios[172] about one Inquisitor, Diego
Rodriguez Lucero, who in Cordoba in 1506 burned to death the husbands of two different
women he then kept as mistresses. According to Barrios,
the daughter of Diego Celemin was exceptionally beautiful, her parents and her husband
did not want to give her to [Lucero], and so Lucero had the three of them burnt and now
has a child by her, and he has kept for a long time in the alcazar as a mistress,
(Wikipedia).
It was the "higher power" in the form of the Revolutionary Republican Napoleon Bonaparte
who finally abolished the Inquisition with the French invasion of Spain, which suggests by
parallel that when the US state collapses it will take its Jewish inquisitors with it.
To be banned by Amazon is not equivalent to being banned by any other private business. Most
publishers will admit that Amazon has replaced Bowker Books in Print as the industry's
authoritative guide to what books in English have been printed in the past and what is in print
now. Amazon is currently the reference source. For a book to be forbidden by Amazon
renders it largely invisible. It is equivalent to burning the book. So this is not a matter of
Amazon exercising the prerogative of private enterprise. Amazon is a monopoly. It has no rival.
If your book doesn't exist on Amazon, then for most people who are not research specialists,
your book doesn't exist. The consequences for the pursuit of knowledge are ominous.
There is a problem here for Amazon as well. The more Amazon excludes books that embody facts
and ideas that constitute radical dissent, the more it becomes a narrow censor's aperture
rather than a reliable bridge to the entire range of the Republic of Letters.
Apologists for censorship of radicals and authentic conservatives often claim that no First
Amendment rights are violated when Amazon bans books, therefore it is not a civil rights issue,
merely an inconvenience of the capitalist system. In the 1950s however, when the
privately-owned movie studios banned certain directors, actors and screen-writers judged to be
Leftists or Communists, that action on the part of private enterprise was inscribed in the
rolls of the culture wars as the infamous "Blacklist," and we are still reading and weeping
over it sixty-five years later. So it depends on whose ox is being gored.
My Judaica studies are free of "Jew hate," as anyone who peruses the sections in both books
titled "To the Judaic Reader" knows. There we state that the books are dedicated to pidyon
shevyuim (redemption of the captive), i.e. rescuing those Judaic persons who are in bondage
to the Talmud and the Kabbalah.
Our enemies easily turn to their advantage books containing hatred of "The Jews." What they
absolutely have no credible answer to is a critique predicated, as our books are, on a sincere
foundation of true Christian love. Boundary-breaking scholarship united to compassionate
concern for the welfare of Judaic people is almost unprecedented in this field. This approach
makes my studies of Judaism among the most powerful and effective because they are free of the
"hate speech" which is the pivot upon which turns the machinery of liberal-approved censorship.
For that reason, making Judaism's Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, and Judaism
Discovered available on the Kindle undercut decades of hatred and libel. Therefore those
volumes had to be suppressed.
Suppressing ideas is the prerequisite for the dictatorship of lies, which is now
institutionalized and widely accepted by the subdued gullible masses.
With reference to this already firmly established and dominant trend in present days, it
comes to mind that ubiquitous all-pervasive dictatorship of lies stands out among Muhammad's
prophecies about the signs forewarning the approach of the last day, when disappearance of
trustworthiness will rise to such a point that one would only be able to say: " I know a
trustworthy person in such-and-such town. "
A website needs to list all of the books banned by Amazon and provide a means for their
dissemination. Much like the Catholic Church's banned index, it should become a badge of
honour to be banned by this organization. Such private arbiters have become much too powerful
in this technological age, and, in the end, the technology may end up being a net negative.
Memory holes seem to be the order of the day.
" the censors demand for their own media -- Mr. Bezos owns the Washington Post newspaper --
freedom of expression for the writers they employ and the speech of which they approve."
As if on cue, here's a report today about Bezos protesting against writers being demonized
by Trump:
Thank you for describing my work as "meticulously researched and argued."
A point of dissent: I don't know of any "Jewocracy."
I'm cognizant of the power and influence of Zionism and Talmudism, but I would be loathe
to generalize about Judaic people under the rubric of "Jewocracy."
On pp. 463-466 of Judaism Discovered this writer attempts to elucidate the rabbinic
principle taught to Orthodox youth: " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh l'Yaakov "
("It is a given law: it is known that Esau hates Jacob").
What does this instruction connote within the broader context of Orthodox Talmudism? It
teaches that all goyim are irrevocably Jew-haters and that this hate is irrational and
directed at all Judaic persons, whether good or bad, Left or Right, Zionists or not,
religious or not. The intent of this deceitful and racist generalization is to unify
Judaics and keep them in the rabbinic fold, since it is asserted that they will be hated for
no reason no matter what they do, even if they reject the Talmud .
The antidote to this rabbinic propaganda is love for Judaic people and openness in
particular to those Judaics who seek a way out of Talmudism and/or Zionism. This is what my
books represent and one reason why they are viewed as a mortal threat to the
antediluvians.
When terms such as "Jewocracy" are employed then " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh
l'Yaakov " is being fulfilled.
The vast majority of the movement by non-Judaics to critique or oppose the Talmud is
almost always grounded in some sort of negative typecasting about "The Jews. " Hence,
when the individual Judaic who is trying to get free of the bondage of the Orthodox rabbinate
sees generalizations like that, their motivation is subverted and their suspicions that
perhaps the teaching imparted to them in their youth was true, is kindled anew.
If we truly wish to convert people into allies of truth and freedom, then we will not
replicate their slavemasters' tropes in our discourse. In other words, we will not behave
like Talmudists. If on the other hand, our principal aim is to vent our rage and anger at
Talmudic supremacy, then reckless disregard for these distinctions will hold sway, along with
the continued defeat of our espoused objectives.
There actually is only one fount of racism and supremacy on earth and it emanates from the
primeval antecedents of the Babylonian Talmud and the Zohar (Kabbalah), and the cognate
"sacred texts" that proceed from them. When the Germans began to worship themselves
(something Luther and Nietzsche detested and eschewed), as part of the Nazi praxis, they
became rabbis spiritually and psychologically, since the most fundamental constituent of
Orthodox Judaism is self-worship .
A sincere and empowered critic of the theology of the Talmud cannot himself be a
supremacist or a racist since those mental attitudes and philosophical commitments are part
and parcel of the Talmudic mentality. A Talmudist cannot cast out the Talmud (Matthew
12:25-26).
Michael Hoffman
Author: Judaism Discovered
and Judaism's Strange Gods
Thank you for describing my work as "meticulously researched and argued."
A point of dissent: I don't know of any "Jewocracy."
I'm cognizant of the power and influence of Zionism and Talmudism, but I would be loathe
to generalize about Judaic people under the rubric of "Jewocracy."
On pp. 463-466 of Judaism Discovered this writer attempts to elucidate the rabbinic
principle taught to Orthodox youth: " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh l'Yaakov "
("It is a given law: it is known that Esau hates Jacob").
What does this instruction connote within the broader context of Orthodox Talmudism? It
teaches that all goyim are irrevocably Jew-haters and that this hate is irrational and
directed at all Judaic persons, whether good or bad, Left or Right, Zionists or not,
religious or not. The intent of this deceitful and racist generalization is to unify
Judaics and keep them in the rabbinic fold, since it is asserted that they will be hated for
no reason no matter what they do, even if they reject the Talmud .
The antidote to this rabbinic propaganda is love for Judaic people and openness in
particular to those Judaics who seek a way out of Talmudism and/or Zionism. This is what my
books represent and one reason why they are viewed as a mortal threat to the
antediluvians.
When terms such as "Jewocracy" are employed then " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh
l'Yaakov " is being fulfilled.
The vast majority of the movement by non-Judaics to critique or oppose the Talmud is
almost always grounded in some sort of negative typecasting about "The Jews. " Hence,
when the individual Judaic who is trying to get free of the bondage of the Orthodox rabbinate
sees generalizations like that, their motivation is subverted and their suspicions that
perhaps the teaching imparted to them in their youth was true, is kindled anew.
If we truly wish to convert people into allies of truth and freedom, then we will not
replicate their slavemasters' tropes in our discourse. In other words, we will not behave
like Talmudists. If on the other hand, our principal aim is to vent our rage and anger at
Talmudic supremacy, then reckless disregard for these distinctions will hold sway, along with
the continued defeat of our espoused objectives.
There actually is only one fount of racism and supremacy on earth and it emanates from the
primeval antecedents of the Babylonian Talmud and the Zohar (Kabbalah), and the cognate
"sacred texts" that proceed from them. When the Germans began to worship themselves
(something Luther and Nietzsche detested and eschewed), as part of the Nazi praxis, they
became rabbis spiritually and psychologically, since the most fundamental constituent of
Orthodox Judaism is self-worship .
A sincere and empowered critic of the theology of the Talmud cannot himself be a
supremacist or a racist since those mental attitudes and philosophical commitments are part
and parcel of the Talmudic mentality. A Talmudist cannot cast out the Talmud (Matthew
12:25-26).
Michael Hoffman
Author: Judaism Discovered
and Judaism's Strange Gods I don't buy your cloying and passive aggressive pretense of
not hating Jews but being merely interested in their salvation.
I even struggle to imagine anyone who'd be stupid enough to do so.
(Does it help you sell books or is it merely a prop against horrific
self-realisation?)
Regardless, it is a shame that even your "scholarship" may be unbooked. Painfully dumb
arguments have value. They provide it by contrast.
I am not even particularly interested in that here though. Inevitably there's lots of
weird stuff in a milennia old wikipedia and bozos, sorry "revisionists", will read into it
what they feel like.
The issue though is very simple. Were any of these effluent theories that take causation
to run from Judaism to globalism to actually be true then we would see that the more Orthodox
the Jew, the more globalist they would be.
Yet the facts sit precisely opposite.
The very worst Jews, on politics, that I've met or read have never heard of the Talmud.
Indeed, the Ultra-Orthodox wouldn't even consider them (or me) actual Jews at all.
That you can't even get this most basic of observations right totally discredits you.
Still, I hope your books get reinstated. I don't care what people who hate me choose to
waste their money on and, to be honest, it makes my meagre qualities look good by
comparison.
@Miro23 There are useful parallels with Christianity, which went from being powerless and
persecuted in its early days under Imperial Rome to eventual domination of Medieval Europe.
It was a longish process, but an early small, private and ethical movement did eventually
morph into a dictatorial organization that hunted down its own dissidents (heretics).
In this game of power, the church certainly collected great wealth, developed a complex
administration, made alliances with temporal (non-spiritual) power holders , and instituted
the Holy Office of the Inquisition (or equivalents) to root out dissidents (heretics) or
anyone who got in the way.
Green quotes a complaint by historian Manuel Barrios[172] about one Inquisitor, Diego
Rodriguez Lucero, who in Cordoba in 1506 burned to death the husbands of two different
women he then kept as mistresses. According to Barrios,
the daughter of Diego Celemin was exceptionally beautiful, her parents and her husband
did not want to give her to [Lucero], and so Lucero had the three of them burnt and now
has a child by her, and he has kept for a long time in the alcazar as a mistress,
(Wikipedia).
It was the "higher power" in the form of the Revolutionary Republican Napoleon
Bonaparte who finally abolished the Inquisition with the French invasion of Spain, which
suggests by parallel that when the US state collapses it will take its Jewish inquisitors
with it. Also the Jewish attempt to develop "Holocaustianity" with themselves as the leading
martyrs is failing, since Judaism doesn't have the mass appeal of Christianity: 1) it lacks
the ethical content 2) it isn't universalist (accepting all races).
Bolshevism (class guilt) was an earlier attempt to found a religion with Saint Trotsky and
themselves as the leading martyrs, which did actually (for a while) connect with the public,
since they harnessed the rising tide of Socialism/Communism with its fantasy of an
egalitarian "workers paradise" (themselves in the leadership role).
Unfortunately Jewish leftism (not to be confused National Democratic leftism) still
survives in the West in its bizarre SJW LGBT form, with Jews yet again trying to present
themselves as victims – this time of fabricated "White Oppression" – never mind
that white America gave them a generous refuge and a home after they were chased out of
Central Europe.
However, the search for power through SJWism (race guilt) is being rejected in the West,
so realistically Jews can only maintain their ethnic group power through a straightforward
coup at the centre (United States) – which they seem to be working on a the moment,
with some kind of fabricated Emergency involving Russia/Syria/Iran designed to give them a
dictatorship.
And if they get it, it won't be benevolent judging by the mass murdering precedents in
Russia and Hungary.
Thank you for describing my work as "meticulously researched and argued."
A point of dissent: I don't know of any "Jewocracy."
I'm cognizant of the power and influence of Zionism and Talmudism, but I would be loathe
to generalize about Judaic people under the rubric of "Jewocracy."
On pp. 463-466 of Judaism Discovered this writer attempts to elucidate the rabbinic
principle taught to Orthodox youth: " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh l'Yaakov "
("It is a given law: it is known that Esau hates Jacob").
What does this instruction connote within the broader context of Orthodox Talmudism? It
teaches that all goyim are irrevocably Jew-haters and that this hate is irrational and
directed at all Judaic persons, whether good or bad, Left or Right, Zionists or not,
religious or not. The intent of this deceitful and racist generalization is to unify
Judaics and keep them in the rabbinic fold, since it is asserted that they will be hated for
no reason no matter what they do, even if they reject the Talmud .
The antidote to this rabbinic propaganda is love for Judaic people and openness in
particular to those Judaics who seek a way out of Talmudism and/or Zionism. This is what my
books represent and one reason why they are viewed as a mortal threat to the
antediluvians.
When terms such as "Jewocracy" are employed then " Halacha hi beyoduah she'Eisav soneh
l'Yaakov " is being fulfilled.
The vast majority of the movement by non-Judaics to critique or oppose the Talmud is
almost always grounded in some sort of negative typecasting about "The Jews. " Hence,
when the individual Judaic who is trying to get free of the bondage of the Orthodox rabbinate
sees generalizations like that, their motivation is subverted and their suspicions that
perhaps the teaching imparted to them in their youth was true, is kindled anew.
If we truly wish to convert people into allies of truth and freedom, then we will not
replicate their slavemasters' tropes in our discourse. In other words, we will not behave
like Talmudists. If on the other hand, our principal aim is to vent our rage and anger at
Talmudic supremacy, then reckless disregard for these distinctions will hold sway, along with
the continued defeat of our espoused objectives.
There actually is only one fount of racism and supremacy on earth and it emanates from the
primeval antecedents of the Babylonian Talmud and the Zohar (Kabbalah), and the cognate
"sacred texts" that proceed from them. When the Germans began to worship themselves
(something Luther and Nietzsche detested and eschewed), as part of the Nazi praxis, they
became rabbis spiritually and psychologically, since the most fundamental constituent of
Orthodox Judaism is self-worship .
A sincere and empowered critic of the theology of the Talmud cannot himself be a
supremacist or a racist since those mental attitudes and philosophical commitments are part
and parcel of the Talmudic mentality. A Talmudist cannot cast out the Talmud (Matthew
12:25-26).
Michael Hoffman
Author: Judaism Discovered
and Judaism's Strange Gods I thank you for that comment. Beautifully put, logically
reasoned. Now I want to propose an idea for you to consider. The Orthodox Talmudic
instruction that you mention above has morphed well beyond the limitations of the Orthodox
rabbinate. You yourself just mentioned Judaics that want to "seek a way out of Talmudism and
/ or Zionism". Zionism certainly isn't Talmudism; it is blood and soil nationalism of a land
that belongs to other people. Couching this original Talmudic instruction as merely a method
of keeping Jews in "the rabbinic fold" is inaccurate. The unifiying of Jews through this
belief that all goyim are Jew-haters and vilification of those Judaics who break out has
grown well beyond the rabbinic fold, and it is present in every manifestation of Judaism,
from the secular atheist to the most Orthodox. Indeed, it seems to be the common thread that
holds all Jews together.
I thank you again for your ideas, Michael Hoffman. I will visit your website and try to
purchase your books, even though I am not a wealthy man.
"... Most here voted for or supported Obama whose record of incarcerating and persecuting journalists, punishing whistle-blowers, extra-judicial executions including citizens of the United States, placing children in cages, violent regime change abroad, spying on citizens, and expanding the security state was as bad or worse as that of Bush and Trump, in some cases by some margin. ..."
"... The current heroes of the 'resistance' lied America into Iraq or Libya, hacked into the computers of the elected representatives/lied about it, and support torture/enhanced interrogations, all under Obama. 'Liberals' lionize these clown criminals along with 'responsible' republicans whilst embracing open bigots such as Farrakhan. And, yes, if one is willing to share the podium with Farrakhan that's tacit support of his views. ..."
I'd suggest that the two strains of 'conservatism' that matter are:
a) maintaining oppression/rule over subordinate classes to prevent them up-ending the status quo (the Robin view) and
b) maintaining philosophical +/- cultural values fundamental to a civilised society, typically so-called enlightenment values,
freedom of mind, body and property etc. These are understood in a wide spectrum of concrete interpretations, from free-market
purists to social democrats, and don't therefore correspond to one kind of on-the-ground politics.
Progressives tend attack a) (a non-philosophical form of conservatism – it's just about preserving a power structure), and
usually claim that b) (the one that matters) doesn't exist or isn't 'conservative', or else ignore it.
We have the basic problem of same term, variable referents
(b) doesn't exist. Conservatives are, as a group, in eager favor of concentration camps for toddlers, the drug war, unrestrained
surveillance, American empire, civil forfeiture, mass incarceration, extrajudicial police execution, etc. etc. They have internal
disagreements on how much to do those things, but the consensus is for all of them without meaningful constraint. And they are
always justified in terms of (a).
Most here voted for or supported Obama whose record of incarcerating and persecuting journalists, punishing whistle-blowers,
extra-judicial executions including citizens of the United States, placing children in cages, violent regime change abroad, spying
on citizens, and expanding the security state was as bad or worse as that of Bush and Trump, in some cases by some margin.
The current heroes of the 'resistance' lied America into Iraq or Libya, hacked into the computers of the elected representatives/lied
about it, and support torture/enhanced interrogations, all under Obama. 'Liberals' lionize these clown criminals along with 'responsible'
republicans whilst embracing open bigots such as Farrakhan. And, yes, if one is willing to share the podium with Farrakhan that's
tacit support of his views.
Conservative as a political category post 1750 works and the basic argument of the OP holds. The comments not so much.
I think it is impossible to discuss modern conservatism, especially its neocon variety
without discussing neoliberalism. Too many people here concentrate on superficial traits,
while the defining feature of modern conservatives is the unconditional support of "hard
neoliberalism." There is also a Vichy party which supports "soft neoliberalism" ...
It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been
promoted with the slogan "there is no alternative." But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to
Pinochet's
Kabaservice Contra Corey -- Thoughts About How To Think About Conservatism -- Crooked
Timber Chile -- one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively
applied -- "my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a
democratic government devoid of liberalism." The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which
sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the
pike, not for the minnows.
Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining mean the freedom to suppress wages.
Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge
iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax
means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.
The other important area is the attitude to the existence and maintenance of the global US
empire and the level of indoctrination into "American exceptionalism" which I view as a
flavor of far-right nationalism. But here we need to talk not about conservatism but
neofascism.
In a way, the current crisis of neoliberalism in the USA (one of the features of which was
de-legitimization of the neoliberal elite which led to the election of Trump) develops with
strange similarities with the events of 1920-1935 in Europe.
Looks like JFK murder was an interception of interests of CIA with the interests of organized
crime
Notable quotes:
"... Here's the story: When Oswald applied for a room in New Orleans he told what CIA-connected writer Priscilla McMillan described as "another of his funny, pointless lies," that is, that Oswald said he worked for the Leon Israel Company. McMillan insisted Oswald had no connection with the company. We do know the company was in the coffee import business. We don't know why Oswald claimed he worked there. And maybe he did. ..."
"... The principal figure behind the company, Samuel Israel Jr. -- evidently grandfather of the current Samuel Israel -- was closely connected to Clay Shaw, the New Orleans businessman unsuccessfully prosecuted in 1969 by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison for complicity in the JFK assassination. ..."
"... The possible Israeli connection to the Samuel Israel, III money scandal is interesting considering that -- according to Jewish-American JFK researcher A. J. Weberman -- Jim Garrison, in an unpublished novel, suggested Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, was behind the JFK assassination -- something Garrison did not mention elsewhere. ..."
"... Garrison evidently became aware Clay Shaw had Mossad connections through service on the board of the shadowy Permindex corporation. ..."
"... In light of revelations in the 1980s (theretofore unknown) that JFK was working to stop Israel's secret drive to assemble an arsenal of nuclear weapons, Shaw's Permindex engagement is intriguing. In fact, Permindex chairman, Louis Bloomfield was a functionary of liquor baron and Meyer Lansky crime syndicate figure Sam Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress and -- with Bronfman -- a major patron of Israel's nuclear weapons program, among a group of U.S. and Canadian millionaires who bankrolled the project in the '50s to the tune of $250 million today. ..."
Although the media reported on the bizarre case of Samuel Israel III -- an East Coast hedge
fund operator who swindled investors out of $450 million and who disappeared after attempting
to fake his own suicide -- what the media has not reported is the connection of Israel's family
to circumstances surrounding the assassination of John E Kennedy.
The media has mentioned Israel is a scion of a distinguished New Orleans Jewish family. Not
mentioned is that Israel's family enterprise, the Leon Israel Company, popped up in a
mysterious way in connection to activities of JFK's alleged assassin, New Orleans native Lee
Harvey Oswald, in that city in the summer of 1963. While details of Oswald's New Orleans
sojourn are thoroughly documented, his link to the Israel Company seems taboo.
Here's the story: When Oswald applied for a room in New Orleans he told what
CIA-connected writer Priscilla McMillan described as "another of his funny, pointless lies,"
that is, that Oswald said he worked for the Leon Israel Company. McMillan insisted Oswald had
no connection with the company. We do know the company was in the coffee import business. We
don't know why Oswald claimed he worked there. And maybe he did.
What is puzzling is that JFK assassination researchers avoid exploring the Israel Company.
Although researchers dissect other picayune details about Oswald's life in New Orleans, no
researchers will mention the Israel connection.
The principal figure behind the company, Samuel Israel Jr. -- evidently grandfather of
the current Samuel Israel -- was closely connected to Clay Shaw, the New Orleans businessman
unsuccessfully prosecuted in 1969 by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison for complicity
in the JFK assassination. Israel was vice president of the Board of Commissioners of the
Port of New Orleans and on the Council of the Lower Mississippi River Port Interests (putting
him in trade executive Clay Shaw's sphere).
Israel also won the French Medal of Merit for his service in the U.S. Army in Europe, at the
time Shaw was decorated by the French for his service there. It is likely Shaw and Israel knew
each other as early as World War II.
Was Oswald promised a job at the Israel Company -- arranged by Shaw -- or was Oswald
employed by the company? If so, how? Did this company play a role in manipulating Oswald in New
Orleans? These are questions that need to be answered.
At present day, Samuel Israel III is on the lam, many believe in Israel which welcomes
Jewish criminals fleeing prosecution in the United States. Note, though: Israel says he is a
Christian, despite his background.
The possible Israeli connection to the Samuel Israel, III money scandal is interesting
considering that -- according to Jewish-American JFK researcher A. J. Weberman -- Jim Garrison,
in an unpublished novel, suggested Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, was behind the
JFK assassination -- something Garrison did not mention elsewhere.
Garrison evidently became aware Clay Shaw had Mossad connections through service on the
board of the shadowy Permindex corporation.
In light of revelations in the 1980s (theretofore unknown) that JFK was working to stop
Israel's secret drive to assemble an arsenal of nuclear weapons, Shaw's Permindex engagement is
intriguing. In fact, Permindex chairman, Louis Bloomfield was a functionary of liquor baron and
Meyer Lansky crime syndicate figure Sam Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress and --
with Bronfman -- a major patron of Israel's nuclear weapons program, among a group of U.S. and
Canadian millionaires who bankrolled the project in the '50s to the tune of $250 million
today.
Another Permindex figure was banker Tibor Rosenbaum, longtime Mossad director for finance
and arms procurement, whose Geneva bank was a Mossad proprietary and money laundry for Lansky
crime syndicate profits. ★
Michael Collins Piper is a contributing editor for AFP.
Mostly reflexively, not always consciously, The Powers That Be seek to retain and
enlarge their sphere of influence. Nothing, not even the venerated vote, is allowed to
alter that "balance."
That's why the 'Deep State' or whatever one wants to call that malignant organism that has
taken over DC–and much of the West–needs professional toadies like Woody, who
will dutifully report whatever smelly lump of fertilizer the PTB are trying to sell. Bet
Woody's the best paid stenographer in the world, doing a good job of confusing Americans,
keeping them anxious of the unknown, so the PTB can keep herding us towards the NWO
slaughterhouse.
The washed-out journalist then blurted out this in disbelief: "Trump said the 'World
Trade Organization is the worst organization in the world.'"
Another bit of propaganda, as those central banks–like the toxic FED–keep the
world under their thumb by controlling the money flow, printing currencies out of thin air,
then getting paid outrageous sums of interest each year–around 500 Billion in the
US–for their counterfeiting scheme.
That kind of power can and does crash stock markets and wreck economies, as the FED has
been doing since it was spawned in 1913. They and their buddies then buy homes, businesses,
MSM outlets and costly toys for pennies on the dollar, while us 'deplorables' wonder if
they're going to be able to keep making their mortgage payments if they lose their job.
To repeat, this was promised on the campaign trail and in Trump position papers. We now
know who stole those promises from the American people.
"We know?" Some do, but many don't, as they rally around Tubby the Grifter to protect
their savior from those nasty Democrats.
"Drain the Swamp" and "MAGA" were skillfully crafted psyops, most likely from the inner
sanctum of the most pernicious lobbying outfit on Capitol Hill, AIPAC. RT, a news outlet, got
mugged by a sold-out Congress and forced to register as a lobbying outfit, but not AIPAC. No
Sir, why that would be anti-Semitic and only foul, Jew hating Neo-Nazis would even think
about making AIPAC follow the law.
What AIPAC has and continues to do needs to be kept hidden from the American public, lest
they engage in the dangerous behavior of actually wondering if Israel is an ally or a
well-disguised enemy.
Trump was bought and paid for a LONG time ago, and 2016 was when the bill came due. He was
'Chosen,' not be We the People, but AIPAC and Israel as the best POTUS to do their bidding,
since Hillary carried way too much baggage.
Trump has been the best POTUS for Israel since the traitorous liar LBJ.
@anarchyst I see stuff written about the Vietnam war and it never fails they don't talk
at all about the whole picture. The Vietnam war was a war to stop the spread of Communism in
Southeast Asia. In that aspect it won some and lost some. Vietnam had nothing to do with oil
or Colonialism. Any look at a map would show it's vast strategic location for the Communist.
It has one the best ports in Asia. They talk about Tet defeating us. Nothing could be further
from the truth. It ended forever the Viet Cong in the South. From then on all the attacks
were from the North. The next big attack...
And in Viet Nam the North sent 150,000 men south with as much armor as the Wehrmacht had
in many WW II engagements. That was in 1973, and of that 150,000 fewer than 50,000 men and no
armor returned to the North, at a cost of under 1,000 American casualties. Most would count
that an outstanding victory.
(Alas, in 1975 North Viet Nam had another army of over 100,000 and sent it South; the
Democratic Congress voted our South Vietnamese 20 cartridges and 2 hand grenades per man, but
refused naval and air support; Saigon predictably became Ho Chi Minh city as we pushed
helicopters off the decks of out carriers in our frantic evacuation; but that is hardly the
fault of the US military).
The South lost when they ran out of ammunition. During the time we were fighting in
Vietnam all the other Asian countries with their own Commies attacking them were fighting
also. Many of them won. The ones that fell like Cambodia paid a harsh price. By all
measurement of what we went to Vietnam for we didn't lose. It did stop the spread of
Communism to all Asia. Rarely in any wars do you get all you want.
The Democrat party has been saying that the Vets fought a losing war when in actuality the
Democrats directly are responsible for the loss of South Vietnam. There are only a few
highways leading South and they were packed with tanks and troop transport in 75. It would
have been a complete turkey shoot like the war in Kuwait. We even had battleships at that
time that could have pounded them from the coast. If we would have attacked it would have
probably caused them such a defeat that they would have never attacked again maybe even the
government of the North would have been overthrown by the people for such incompetence.
Unfortunately the Nixon was gone and Ford was directly told if he helped the Vietnamese with
air power he would be impeached.
The idea that the Vietnam vets died for nothing is a huge psyops by the Democrats. The
South had defeated all the guerillas. All they needed was support to hold off the North and
the Democrats sold them out. If the South Vietnamese had not fell it's very likely that the
Cambodian Genocide would have never happened.
The Democrats had said the war was lost so many times that they had to prove it so by
actually losing it.
we were fighting in Vietnam all the other Asian countries with their own Commies
attacking them were fighting also. Many of them won. The ones that fell like Cambodia paid
a harsh price.
On the other hand, the Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia was precipitated by the U.S.
bombings:
Estimates vary widely on the number of civilian casualites inflicted by the campaign;
however,as many as 500,000 people died as a direct result of the bombings while perhaps
hundreds of thousands more died from the effects of displacement, disease or starvation
during this period.
The Khmer Rouge, previously a marginalized guerrilla group, propagandized the bombing
campaign to great effect; by the CIA's own intelligence estimates, the US bombing campaign
was a key factor in the increase in popular support for the Khmer Rouge rebels. After their
victory in 1975, the Khmer Rouge oversaw a period in which another one-to-two million
Cambodians died from execution, hunger and forced labour.
"... What I do find absurd is the reception of Bob Woodward's book. It seems that most Trump haters don't seem to have any problems with thinking Trump is unhinged because he threatened to kill the president of a country that is allied with Russia and that he is a Russian puppet and that therefore the investigation about "collusion" is necessary. ..."
"... Bob Woodward's book also stands in a strange relationship to the anonymous NYT piece. The author of that piece seems to be a hardcore neoconservative and free-trade neoliberal -- he wants deregulation, more money for the military, but he dislikes that Trump does not escalate tensions against Russia enough and has to be pressured in order to expell enough Russian diplomats, and also the tentative support of peace efforts for Korea go against his neoconservative desires. ..."
"... Although it is not mentioned explicitly, the piece is at least compatible with "Russiagate" -- Trump's desire not to escalate international tensions against countries like Russia and North Korea too much is seen as a "preference for dictators and authoritarian leaders", which is an interpretation that is typical of neoconservative ideologues. In contrast, Woodward's main point for accusing Donald Trump of being unhinged is that he wanted to have Assad killed -- something many of the hard-core neocons would hardly object. ..."
What I find interesting in the case of Bob Woodward's book is that many anti-Trumpers seem to
celebrate it without even taking into account that, if its contents were to be believed, it
would completely discredit the whole "Russiagate" story that has been the main line of attack
against Donald Trump.
As far as I can judge from the excerpts that have been published, most of the book deals
with issues of style -- it is certainly nothing new that many people in the establishment
strongly dislike Trump's style -- and about people in important positions in Trump's
surroundings have a negative opinion of him and sometimes try to work against him -- that is
hardly something new, either.
The only piece of information that could really make Trump look like someone unhinged and
dangerous is the claim that he demanded Assad to be killed. Of course, I don't know whether
that claim is true and if Trump said something like that, it was meant as an assignment or he
just wanted to know what others thought about the idea. But Trump certainly would not have
said anything like that if he was a Russian puppet. Although Russia hardly has absolutely
loyalty to Assad as a person, killing the president of a government with which Russia is
allied and thereby causing more instability is certainly not something Russia might want. So,
not only does Bob Woodward's book that claims to report things that happened behind the
scenes not show any hints that the Russiagate conspiracy theory might be true, but -- if it
is to be believed -, it shows quite strong evidence against that theory.
I don't know whether Bob Woodward spells this out anywhere in the book -- I doubt it
because the main target audience of the book is probably Trump haters who like to hate Trump
for any conceivable reason and might be upset if one such reason, which had been heavily
promoted, was taken away from them. But at least, Bob Woodward seems to be consistent on this
to some degree -- after the report by a few handpicked agents from three agencies and
Clapper's bureau in January 2017, Woodward criticized the politicization of the secret
services. Apart from a few excerpts, I have not read Bob Woodward's book, and I cannot judge
its merits, but I think that he is probably somewhat less dishonest than many of Trump haters
-- this strange coalition of pseudo-leftists with the deep state.
What I do find absurd is the reception of Bob Woodward's book. It seems that most
Trump haters don't seem to have any problems with thinking Trump is unhinged because he
threatened to kill the president of a country that is allied with Russia and that he is a
Russian puppet and that therefore the investigation about "collusion" is necessary. I
think that once more demonstrates the irrationality of the base of that "Anti-Trump
Resistance" (not, of course, of people from the Clinton campaign, the FBI and CIA who
invented Russiagate, they just exploit the irrationality of large parts of the public).
Bob Woodward's book also stands in a strange relationship to the anonymous NYT piece.
The author of that piece seems to be a hardcore neoconservative and free-trade neoliberal --
he wants deregulation, more money for the military, but he dislikes that Trump does not
escalate tensions against Russia enough and has to be pressured in order to expell enough
Russian diplomats, and also the tentative support of peace efforts for Korea go against his
neoconservative desires.
Although it is not mentioned explicitly, the piece is at least compatible with
"Russiagate" -- Trump's desire not to escalate international tensions against countries like
Russia and North Korea too much is seen as a "preference for dictators and authoritarian
leaders", which is an interpretation that is typical of neoconservative ideologues. In
contrast, Woodward's main point for accusing Donald Trump of being unhinged is that he wanted
to have Assad killed -- something many of the hard-core neocons would hardly object.
@Adrian E. What I find interesting in the case of Bob Woodward's book is that many
anti-Trumpers seem to celebrate it without even taking into account that, if its contents
were to be believed, it would completely discredit the whole "Russiagate" story that has been
the main line of attack against Donald Trump.
As far as I can judge from the excerpts that have been published, most of the book deals
with issues of style - it is certainly nothing new that many people in the establishment
strongly dislike Trump's style - and about people in important positions in Trump's
surroundings have a negative opinion of him and sometimes try to work against him - that is
hardly something new, either.
The only piece of information that could really make Trump look like someone unhinged and
dangerous is the claim that he demanded Assad to be killed. Of course, I don't know whether
that claim is true and if Trump said something like that, it was meant as an assignment or he
just wanted to know what others thought about the idea. But Trump certainly would not have
said anything like that if he was a Russian puppet. Although Russia hardly has absolutely
loyalty to Assad as a person, killing the president of a government with which Russia is
allied and thereby causing more instability is certainly not something Russia might want. So,
not only does Bob Woodward's book that claims to report things that happened behind the
scenes not show any hints that the Russiagate conspiracy theory might be true, but - if it is
to be believed -, it shows quite strong evidence against that theory.
I don't know whether Bob Woodward spells this out anywhere in the book - I doubt it
because the main target audience of the book is probably Trump haters who like to hate Trump
for any conceiveable reason and might be upset if one such reason, which had been heavily
promoted, was taken away from them. But at least, Bob Woodward seems to be consistent on this
to some degree - after the report by a few handpicked agents from three agencies and
Clapper's bureau in January 2017, Woodward criticized the politicization of the secret
services. Apart from a few excerpts, I have not read Bob Woodward's book, and I cannot judge
its merits, but I think that he is probably somewhat less dishonest than many of his haters -
this strange coalition of pseudo-leftists with the deep state.
What I do find absurd is the reception of Bob Woodward's book. It seems that most Trump
haters don't seem to have any problems with thinking Trump is unhinged because he threatened
to kill the president of a country that is allied with Russia and that he is a Russian puppet
and that therefore the investigation about "collusion" is necessary. I think that once more
demonstrates the irrationality of the base of that "Anti-Trump Resistance" (not, of course,
of people from the Clinton campaign, the FBI and CIA who invented Russiagate, they just
exploit the irrationality of large parts of the public).
Bob Woodward's book also stands in a strange relationship to the anonymous NYT piece. The
author of that piece seems to be a hardcore neoconservative and free-trade neoliberal - he
wants deregulation, more money for the military, but he dislikes that Trump does not escalate
tensions against Russia enough and has to be pressured in order to expell enough Russian
diplomats, and also the tentative support of peace efforts for Korea go against his
neoconservative desires. Although it is not mentioned explicitly, the piece is at least
compatible with "Russiagate" - Trump's desire not to escalate international tensions against
countries like Russia and North Korea too much is seen as a "preference for dictators and
authoritarian leaders", which is an interpretation that is typical of neoconservative
ideologues. In contrast, Woodward's main point for accusing Donald Trump of being unhinged is
that he wanted to have Assad killed - something many of the hard-core neocons would hardly
object. Very good observations. Maybe the "kill Assad" ploy is not intended for domestic
consumption but rather to further undermine Trump's working relationship with Putin –
just as with the of the phoney Russian agent indictment which wast timed precisely to disrupt
the Helsinki summit.
History is very clear who runs the media for those who are in the know.
9/23/1975 Tom Charles Huston Church Committee Testimony
Tom Charles Huston testified before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee,
on the 43-page plan he presented to the President Nixon and others on ways to collect
information about anti-war and "radical" groups, including burglary, electronic surveillance,
and opening of mail.
September 1, 2015 THE CIA AND THE MEDIA: 50 FACTS THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW
Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in
US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears
and reads on a regular basis.
President Trump's greatest legacy will be his exposing how corrupt the American government
has become. Almost every branch of Government has been exposed as corrupt but the absolute
worst is the FBI. This attempted coup should be met with the hangman's rope for traitors.
Historians know that very few people understand great historical events when they happen.
My idea is that this now is the case.
Never before in history did the leader of an empire understand that that empire could not
survive, and act accordingly.
The British empire was already not sustainable, financially, before 1914. Britain had to
give up the two fleet standard, the situation where the British fleet was superior to the
next two biggest fleets. Obama had to give up the two war standard, the USA went to one and a
half war. What a half war accomplishes one can see in Syria.
The British empire fell apart through WWII, Churchill the undertaker. For this reason, I
suspect, are the peace proposals that Rudolf Hess brought to Scotland in May 1941 still
secret. France got a generous peace, logical to assume that Hitler would propose the same to
Great Britain, the empire he admired.
The British example makes two things clear: what should have been clear prior to 1914 was
not clear, or was ignored, and the price of unwilling, or not capable of understanding
history at the moment it happens becomes clear. Britain did not have a Deep State, one might
say, on the other hand, one can be of the opinion that the British Deep State did exist. A
conflict as now in the USA never existed in Great Britain.
What would have happened if say Chamberlain would have acted as Trump does know, anybody's
guess. Chamberlain did not want war, but he also did not want to end British imagined power,
he belonged to the Thirtyniners, those with the illusion that Great Britain was ready for war
in 1939.
As in 1917, the USA had to rescue Britain, but this time the price was high: opening the
empire to foreign competition, on top of that, FDR's lofty statements, the Atlantic Charter,
in fact the end of all colonial European empires.
@Buckwheat President Trump's greatest legacy will be his exposing how corrupt the
American government has become. Almost every branch of Government has been exposed as corrupt
but the absolute worst is the FBI. This attempted coup should be met with the hangman's rope
for traitors.
President Trump's greatest legacy will be his exposing how corrupt the American
government has become. Almost every branch of Government has been exposed as corrupt but
the absolute worst is the FBI. This attempted coup should be met with the hangman's rope
for traitors.
The media controls the minds of the mob, and presents itself as vox populi .
Corruption has been exposed, and the media admits to it, endorses it, and encourages
more.
So, whaddya figure? 20 years to total economic collapse? Who's gonna feed the messicans?
Oh! The humanity! Oh, Rome, do not burn!
"Shining city on a hill" and all that bullshit. Turn out the lights.
@Deschutes I didn't like Clinton, but I think Trump is as bad, probably worse. Look at
the EPA under Trump, it's a fucking joke with fossil fuel shills like Pruitt gutting much
needed laws to protect environment and people. Look at Education secretary DeVoss: it does
NOT get any worse: a billionaire christian fundamentalist wacko billionaire who bought her
way into that post funding the GOP/Trump ticket!? She's the epitome of what the 'Trump
voters' ostensibly hate: a billionaire class aka 'Rome on the Potomac' as this author calls
it, the plutocracy who own and run the show while the proletariat slave away at their office
temp jobs, or worse yet amazon.com sweatshop, etc. DeVoss is privatizing education so that
christian fundies can have their kids taught 'gawd made the world in 7 days' instead of
Darwin's evolution. Look at Trumps Atty General Sessions: he's a reactionary fossil from the
1950s who wants to illegalize weed? Roll back sensible drug policy? He's a fucking disaster.
And look at what Trump is doing for Israel!? Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, and
Kishner sucking up to Netanyahoo, doing his bidding like an Israel firster? This is all good?
This is what the disenfranchised Trump supporter voted for and had in mind??
Trump is a fucking awful trainwreck. ' Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, '
If this makes Netanyahu happy for some time, at negligible cost to the USA, smart move.
At the same time, Trump can claim 'see how I love Israel'.
For me the same as the fake attacks on Syria.
Show.
@Wizard of Oz You seem to be using language like Alice's Humpty Dumpty. "Zionism" is at
least a little bit constrained in meaning by its being a movement to restore the Jewish
people as currently understood to the land of Israel (Judea and Samaria principally which
creates special difficulties...) with Jerusalem as it's capital, and, I suppose to maintain
them there. You are absolutely correct.
But it also includes protection of Israel.
And what is the best protection of Israel?
..
To control the most powerful country in the world ergo USA
..
And what is even better protection of Israel?
To to rule the world.
..
What is wrong or evil in this plan?
Nothing! it is good plan.
..
So where is the snag?
..
Complications in executing this plan.
According to the Washington Post, Barbara K. Olson called her husband twice on September
11, 2001 in the final minutes of Flight 77. Her last words to him were, "What do I tell the
pilot to do?"
"She called from the plane while it was being hijacked," said Theodore Olson -- 42nd
Solicitor General of the United States. "I wish it wasn't so, but it is."
However, prosecution exhibit P200054 (attached) in United States v.
Zacarias Moussaoui -- http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/
exhibits/prosecution/flights/P200054.html -- shows that Barbara Olson made only one phone
call -- it did not connect, and it lasted for 0 seconds!
Both accounts of Barbara Olson's phone calls -- the Solicitor General's and the
prosecution's in United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui -- cannot be correct.
Media lies and fabrications have been going on ever since there were "journalists" (I use
that term loosely). The difference today, is that "professional journalism" is now blatantly
showing its liberal communistic bias.
From "Remember the Maine" in the Spanish-American war (actually a powder magazine
explosion–not an attack) to walter duranty's extolling the "virtues" of communism while
one of the greatest artificially-engineered (by communists)famines in the Ukraine was taking
place, in order to force the "collectivization" of privately-held farms, to walter cronkite
outright lying about the American military's effectiveness during the 1968 Vietnam "Tet
offensive" (in which much enemy life was lost) journalism has always been a "nasty craft". In
cronkite's case, the North Vietnamese were ready to settle (and capitulate) until cronkite's
lies about the supposed American "defeat" were publicized. Cronkite's lies gave the North
Vietnamese new resolve, as they realized that they had the American "news media" on their
side. There has always been a certain sympathy for communism and totalitarianism in the
so-called "mainstream media". All one has to do is to look at the journalists fawning over
Cuba's Fidel Castro and how wonderful life is in that communist "paradise".
Journalists HATE the internet because it exposes their "profession" for what it really is
with the internet, anyone can be a true journalist. This is why the same "mainstream media"
is calling for the "licensing" of journalists–something that would have been unheard of
(and treasonous) in previous decades
Professional journalism is its own worst enemy
We're surprised the tools of the Oligarch Class remain loyal to their paymasters? Comey and
Müller both received very lucrative board-seat assignments for looking the other way
when appropriate, or digging a little deeper when asked.
"In the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our
national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of
national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry -- in an
informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic
government. For this reason, it is perhaps here that a press that is alert, aware, and free
most vitally serves the basic purpose of the First Amendment. For, without an informed and
free press, there cannot be an enlightened people."
I have no choice. I must don the mantle of greatness and take the reins of the country.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. I will run for the office of dictator, or
President in American parlance.
Readers may ask, "But Fred, what makes you think you are qualified to be President?" To
which I respond, "Nothing. But have you seen what we have now? You want a White House with
John Bolton in it?"
You see.
I append here a few of the enlightened policies which I will effect. Hold your applause
until the end. Interspersed for perusal are a few slogans that I may use to incite your
fervor.
One: I will end all policies hostile to Cuba. I will not make life difficult for
eleven million perfectly good people to please a ratpack of phony Cubans afflicting Miami. In
fact, I will offer Havana a twenty-billion-dollar loan if they will take the bastards back.
Cuba poses no danger to anyone. They have good cigars. They should be left alone to live as
they please and drink mojitos. If nutcake Republicans protest my policy, I will have them
stuffed into an abandoned oil well. Along with the pseudo-Cubans.
Two: Elizabeth Warren will be required to take a DNA test to see whether she is a
wild Indian. If she is, she will have to wear feathers. Otherwise, to see a psychiatrist.
We have nothing to be afred of but Fred hisself! Has a classic ring, don't you
think?
Three: I will end the Afghan war in an afternoon, relying on use the exit strategy
proposed by James P. Coyne, the Sun Tsu of our age:
"OK, on the plane. Now ."
If Lindsey Graham complains that we need to kill more puzzled goatherds, I will have him
inserted into the oil well on top of the Republicans and pseudo-Cubans, with Oprah tamped
down on top as a sort of cork. There is nothing in Afghanistan that Americans need or want,
except opium products, and private enterprise now provides these in abundance. Check the
nearest street corner, or ask your kids.
Four: I will make membership in AIPAC a felony, and remind its members that I could
have Oprah temporarily removed from the oil well to make more room. Aipackers can act as they
please in their own country–I will not meddle in foreign affairs–but leave ours
alone.
Fred! Ahhhhhh . This has a nicely orgasmic quality that will appeal to the younger
demographic. It represents the satisfaction that my rule will bring to the entire
country.
Five: I will end all sanctions against Iran. Then I will sell those Persian rascals
airplanes and cars and electronic stuff and towel softener and lock them into the American
economic system. This will make Boeing and AT&T and Intel love me with the deep sweet
love that never dies, at least as long as the money flows, and there will be lots of jobs in
Seattle.
Six: I will bring charges of treason against the contents of the Great Double Wide
on Pennsylvania Avenue. The evidence is incontrovertible. The first rule of empire is Don't
Let Your Enemies Unite. Everybody who has an empire knows this. Except us. Inside the White
House a bunch of apparently brain-damaged political mostly left-overs, suffering from Beltway
Bubble Syndrome, push China, Russia, and Iran together like some kind of international
spaghetti-grope LGTBQRSTUV threesome. Who are our dismal leaders really working for?
China?
A Fred in Every Pot This makes no sense, you may say. No, but we are doing
politics. It is almost iambic pentameter, like Shakespeare. It will lend class to my
campaign.
Seven: I will keep the F-35 program. It provides a lot of jobs. However, I will but get
rid of the airplane. Isn't this brilliant? Instead of building the thing, workers will dig
holes and fill them in, but keep their current salaries. It will improve their health, and
make America safer. The fewer dangerous things the children in the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel
have, the less trouble it can cause.
Better Fred than Dead! Some readers will dispute this. What do they know?
Eight: I have been urged to end affirmative action on the grounds that things
should be done by people who can actually do them. This is racist. I will have nothing to do
with it. Instead I will make affirmative action democratic and inclusive. Everyone will
qualify for it. Special privilege should not be restricted to a minority. It isn't the
American way.
Fred! Good as Any, Better'n Some. Good thinking.
Nine: I will abolish NATO. America should find a cheaper way to control the
vassals. There is of course the bedtime story that NATO exists to confront the Russkies, and
only incidentally provides a compulsory market for American armament. Nuts. Russia cannot
seem dangerous to anyone who wasn't dropped on his head at some formative juncture in life.
Smallish population, low military budget.
Likewise South Korea, which has twice the population and forty times the economy of the
North. If it wants to defend itself, it has my blessing. If it doesn't, it isn't our
problem.
Tippecanoe and Frederick Too! This may require exhumation, but for this we have
backhoes.
Ten: I will make a modest reduction in the military budget, say seventy-five
percent. To keep the soldiers happy I will invest in high-throughput roller coasters, a
shooting range with BB guns, and really loud speaker systems that say Va roooom and
Bangbangbang and fzzzzzzzzboom. These will provide psychic emoluments of
martial life without the murder.
Eleven: The money thus saved I will use on pressing domestic problems. LA has
68,000 homeless people on the streets, San Francisco loses conventions because of so many
homeless defecating on the sidewalks, Portland has homeless riots,. The lower primates in
Antifa and BLM rend such social fabric as any longer exists. Dams are aging. Our trains are
out of of the Fifties. And we spend a trillion a year on goddam aircraft carriers?
Fred? Well, Got a Better Idea?
Twelve: As an educational reform, I will have the Department of Education filled
with linoleum cement, the occupants being left inside. This will raise the national IQ by at
least three points. I will pass an amendment to the fragments of the Constitution saying, "No
federal entity or person shall say, think, suggest, or do anything whatever regarding
schooling on pain of garroting." Part of the savings from lowering the military budget will
go to purchasing garrotes. The duration, content, and nature of the schools shall be left to
localities without exception.
Thirteen: The father of any girl subjected to genital mutilation will be awarded a
free gender reassignment operation, preferably with tin-snips. Genital mutilation should be
inclusive. The father will then be placed for two weeks in the bottom of a public latrine in
Uganda. If this doesn't suffice to deter the practice, I may be forced to adopt extreme
measures. A country that allows such treatment of daughters deserves to go to hell. And seems
to be.
Fourteen: I will impose a literacy test for voting. People too dim to find their
way home should not be permitted to influence policies they have never heard of and can't
spell. Yes, this might be called illiberal. If so, it will doubtless be the only example of
illiberalism in this meritorious list.
Fifteen: In higher education, I will prescribe horse whipping for anyone saying
microaggression, white privilege, whiteness, patriarchy, safe space, people of color, racism,
any kind of phobia, or "Resist" in a squalling voice with an exclamation point. No curriculum
containing the word "Studies" will be permitted.
Sixteen: Anyone prescribing Ritalin for children under twenty-one will be thrown from a
helicopter.
In conclusion, I say to my yearning public, There, you, see, there is hope. Together we can
do this. See you at the polls.
... ... ...
Fred Reed is a former news weasel and part-time sociopath living in central Mexico
with his wife and three useless but agreeable street dogs. He says it suits him.
Speaking on the House floor on September 13, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard accused the Trump
administration of protecting al-Qaeda terrorists in Idlib. According to the congresswoman,
this amounts to the betrayal of the American people and victims of al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks in
the US.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) called out President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence
for allegedly protecting al-Qaeda* in Idlib, Syria, while speaking in the House on September
13.
"Two days ago, President Trump and Vice President Pence delivered solemn speeches about
the attacks on 9/11, talking about how much they care about the victims of al-Qaeda's attack
on our country. But, they are now standing up to protect the 20,000 to 40,000 al-Qaeda and
other jihadist forces in Syria, and threatening Russia, Syria, and Iran, with military force
if they dare attack these terrorists," the congresswoman stressed.
"... Obama, it turns out, was among the most militaristic White House occupants in American history, taking the imperial presidency to new heights. It has been said that Obama was the only president whose administration was enmeshed in multiple wars from beginning to end. His imperial ventures spanned many countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia along with proxy interventions in Yemen and Pakistan. ..."
"... Obama engineered two of the most brazen regime-change operations of the postwar era, in Libya (2011) and Ukraine (2014), leaving both nations reduced to a state of ongoing civil war and economic ruin. ..."
"... United Nations spokesperson Stephane Dujarric recently decried this violence, noting the indiscriminate shelling by armed groups killing civilians, including children. Not to be outdone, the U.S. (joined by a few European states) issued a statement condemning the violence in Libya, reading in part: "We urge armed groups to immediately cease all military actions and warn those who tamper with security in Tripoli or elsewhere in Libya that they will be held accountable for any such actions." How thoughtful of those very military actors who, with U.N. blessing, brought nothing but endless death and destruction to the Libyan people. ..."
"... In Ukraine, as Vladimir Putin was being demonized as the "new Hitler", real fascists (or at least neo-fascists) were installed in power through the well-planned and generously-funded conspiracy of Obama's neocon functionaries, led by Victoria Nuland and cheered on by such visiting notables as John McCain, Joe Biden, and John Brennan -- all scheming to bring the Kiev regime into the NATO/European Union orbit. The puppet Poroshenko regime has since 2014 been given enough American economic and military largesse to finance its warfare against separatists in the Russian-speaking Donbass region, resulting in more than 10,000 deaths, with no end in sight. Following the gruesome pattern of Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Ukrainian society descends into deepening chaos and violence with no end in sight. ..."
"... It is easy to forget that it was the Obama administration that planned and carried out the first phases of the Mosul operation (begun in October 2016) which produced hundreds of thousands of casualties (with at least 40,000 dead), left a city of two million in Dresden-like state of rubble, and drove nearly a million civilians into exile. The same fate, on smaller scale, was brought to other Sunni-majority cities in Iraq, including Ramadi, Tikrit, and Fallujah (already destroyed by U.S. forces in 2004). Whatever the official goal, and however many secondary collaborators were involved, these were monstrous war crimes by any reckoning. ..."
"... In the months before Obama departed the White House he laid the groundwork for a new, more dangerous, Cold War with Russia. This agenda, negating earlier plans for a "reset" with the Putin government, would be multi-faceted – expanded NATO forces along Russian borders, renewed support for the oligarch Poroshenko in Ukraine, new and harsher economic sanctions, expulsion of diplomats, accelerated cyberwarfare, charges of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Not only has this strategy, eagerly advanced by the Clintonites and their media allies, brought new levels of insanity to American politics, it has left the two nuclear powers menacingly closer to armed confrontation than even at the peak of the Cold War. ..."
"... Obama's contributions to a more robust imperial presidency went further. Collaborating with Israel and Saudi Arabia, he stoked the Syrian civil war by lending "rebel" fighters crucial material, logistical, and military aid for what Clinton – anticipating electoral victory – believed would bring yet another cheerful episode of regime change, this one leaving the U.S. face-to-face with the Russians. During his tenure in office, moreover, Obama would deploy more special-ops troops around the globe (to more than 70 countries) than any predecessor. ..."
Obama, it turns out, was among the most militaristic White House occupants in American
history, taking the imperial presidency to new heights. It has been said that Obama was the
only president whose administration was enmeshed in multiple wars from beginning to end. His
imperial ventures spanned many countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia along
with proxy interventions in Yemen and Pakistan. He ordered nearly 100,000 bombs and
missiles delivered against defenseless targets, a total greater than that of the more
widely-recognized warmonger George W. Bush's total of 70,000 against five countries. Iraq alone
– where U.S. forces were supposed to have been withdrawn – was recipient of 41,000
bombs and missiles along with untold amounts of smaller ordnance. Meanwhile, throughout his
presidency Obama conducted hundreds of drone attacks in the Middle East, more than doubling
Bush's total, all run jointly (and covertly) by the CIA and Air Force.
Obama engineered two of the most brazen regime-change operations of the postwar era, in
Libya (2011) and Ukraine (2014), leaving both nations reduced to a state of ongoing civil war
and economic ruin. For the past seven years Libya has been overrun by an assortment of
militias, jihadic groups, and local strongmen – predictable result of the U.S./NATO
bombing offensive to destroy the secular nationalist (and modernizing) Kadafi regime. This was
purportedly Secretary of State Clinton's biggest moment of glory, her imperialist gloating on
full display following Kadafi's assassination. As this is written conditions in Libya worsen by
the day, reports surfacing of hundreds of people killed during violent clashes in the suburbs
of Tripoli as rival militias fight for control of the capital. Militias now exercise control
over ports, airfields, and much of the oil infrastructure. More tens of thousands of Libyans
are being forced from their homes, a development greeted with silence at CNN and kindred media
outlets.
United Nations spokesperson Stephane Dujarric recently decried this violence, noting the
indiscriminate shelling by armed groups killing civilians, including children. Not to be
outdone, the U.S. (joined by a few European states) issued a statement condemning the violence
in Libya, reading in part: "We urge armed groups to immediately cease all military actions and
warn those who tamper with security in Tripoli or elsewhere in Libya that they will be held
accountable for any such actions." How thoughtful of those very military actors who, with U.N.
blessing, brought nothing but endless death and destruction to the Libyan people.
In Ukraine, as Vladimir Putin was being demonized as the "new Hitler", real fascists (or
at least neo-fascists) were installed in power through the well-planned and generously-funded
conspiracy of Obama's neocon functionaries, led by Victoria Nuland and cheered on by such
visiting notables as John McCain, Joe Biden, and John Brennan -- all scheming to bring the Kiev
regime into the NATO/European Union orbit. The puppet Poroshenko regime has since 2014 been
given enough American economic and military largesse to finance its warfare against separatists
in the Russian-speaking Donbass region, resulting in more than 10,000 deaths, with no end in
sight. Following the gruesome pattern of Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Ukrainian society
descends into deepening chaos and violence with no end in sight.
It is easy to forget that it was the Obama administration that planned and carried out
the first phases of the Mosul operation (begun in October 2016) which produced hundreds of
thousands of casualties (with at least 40,000 dead), left a city of two million in Dresden-like
state of rubble, and drove nearly a million civilians into exile. The same fate, on smaller
scale, was brought to other Sunni-majority cities in Iraq, including Ramadi, Tikrit, and
Fallujah (already destroyed by U.S. forces in 2004). Whatever the official goal, and however
many secondary collaborators were involved, these were monstrous war crimes by any
reckoning.
After calling for a nuclear-free world (and receiving a Nobel Peace Prize for that promise),
Obama reversed course and embarked on the most ambitious U.S. nuclear upgrading since the early
1950s – the same project inherited by Trump. Speaking in Prague in 2009, the president
called for total abolition of nukes, saying "the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of
those [nuclear] weapons have not . . . Our efforts to contain these dangers [must be] centered
on a global non-proliferation regime." A laudable objective to be sure. But for a price tag of
one trillion dollars (over two decades), Obama decided to create new missile delivery systems,
expand the arsenal of tactical warheads, and fund a new cycle of bombers and submarines –
all with little political or media notice. These initiatives violated the Nuclear
Non-proliferation Treaty prohibiting such moves, while essentially blocking any genuine efforts
toward nuclear reduction and nonproliferation.
In the months before Obama departed the White House he laid the groundwork for a new,
more dangerous, Cold War with Russia. This agenda, negating earlier plans for a "reset" with
the Putin government, would be multi-faceted – expanded NATO forces along Russian
borders, renewed support for the oligarch Poroshenko in Ukraine, new and harsher economic
sanctions, expulsion of diplomats, accelerated cyberwarfare, charges of Russian interference in
the 2016 elections. Not only has this strategy, eagerly advanced by the Clintonites and their
media allies, brought new levels of insanity to American politics, it has left the two nuclear
powers menacingly closer to armed confrontation than even at the peak of the Cold War.
Obama's contributions to a more robust imperial presidency went further. Collaborating
with Israel and Saudi Arabia, he stoked the Syrian civil war by lending "rebel" fighters
crucial material, logistical, and military aid for what Clinton – anticipating electoral
victory – believed would bring yet another cheerful episode of regime change, this one
leaving the U.S. face-to-face with the Russians. During his tenure in office, moreover, Obama
would deploy more special-ops troops around the globe (to more than 70 countries) than any
predecessor.
Many liberals and more than a few progressives – not to mention large sectors of the
media intelligentsia -- will find it difficult to reconcile the picture of an aggressively
imperialist Obama with the more familiar image of a thoughtful, articulate politician who laced
his talks with references to peace, arms control, and human rights. But this very dualism best
corresponds to the historical reality. In his book The Obama Syndrome
, Tariq Ali writes: "From Palestine through Iraq, Obama has acted as just another steward
of the American empire, pursuing the same aims as his predecessors, with the same means but
with more emollient rhetoric." He adds: "Historically, the model for the current variant of
imperial presidency is Woodrow Wilson, no less pious a Christian, whose every second word was
peace, democracy, or self-determination, while his armies invaded Mexico, occupied Haiti, and
attacked Russia [yes, Russia!], and his treaties handed one colony after another to his
partners in war. Obama is a hand-me-down version of the same, without even Fourteen Points to
betray."
As the 2018 midterm elections approach, Obama has chosen to depart from historical norm and
go on the attack against a Trump presidency viewed as signifying all that is evil. A Democratic
victory would reject Trump's "dark vision of the the nation and restore honesty, decency, and
lawfulness to the American government". In his first speech Obama said that orchestrated public
fear has created conditions "ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and
no shame about tapping into America's dark history of racial and ethnic and religious
division." Does Obama need to be reminded that such "dark history" also includes militarism and
imperialism?
Whatever one's view of the Trump phenomenon in its totality, the amount of death and
destruction he has brought to the world does not (yet) come close to Obama's record of warfare,
drone strikes, regime changes, military provocations, and global deployments. If neocon
interests have come to shape U.S. foreign policy, those interests have so far been more fully
embraced by Obama and the Clintonites than by Trump, despite the scary presence of Trump's
hawkish circle of lieutenants. Unfortunately, Obama's eight years of imperial aggression
elicited strikingly few liberal or progressive voices of dissent across the political and media
terrain. He enjoyed nearly complete immunity from protest at a time when even the smallest
vestiges of a once-vigorous American antiwar movement had disappeared from the scene.
CARL BOGGS is the author of several recent books, including Fascism Old and New
(2018), Origins of the Warfare State (2016), and Drugs, Power, and Politics (2015). He can be
reached at [email protected].
May 28, 2018 - A Memorial to the Great War Disaster
Books about World War I are not popular in the USA because they are depressing. The
world's great European powers destroyed a generation of men in pointless bloody battles. Few
Americans realize that World War I was America's worst foreign policy blunder that killed
millions and set the stage for World War II.
When the "Great War" began in 1914, royals and generals hoped for swift victories.
However, advances in technology, mostly machine guns and rapid fire artillery, allowed
concentrated firepower to annihilate attacking formations. The war in France bogged down into
a bloody stalemate and the construction of fortified positions ensured that any offensive
would grind to a stop. The king of England and Germany were first cousins who grew up
together, so a peaceful resolution was likely in 1916.
The problem was that British bankers had loaned its government lots of money and most
could not be repaid. They wanted to win the war so they could loot Germany by requiring
Germans to pay reparations so the British government could repay them. If they could lure the
powerful USA to join the war, victory was assured. They blocked peace efforts and used their
agents of influence to manipulate the USA into joining the war. Soon after President Wilson
was elected with the promise to stay out the war, he worked with Congress to declare war.
As a result, the war dragged on for two more bloody years before enough American men and
material arrived in France to turn the tide. The war was unpopular back home, leading Wilson
to censor the US mail by blocking anti-war newsletters and magazines. He threw thousands of
political opponents in jail, implemented a draft to fill out the Army, and sent these
reluctant Americans into battle with little training and poor equipment. The Americans fought
bravely, but the Germans had three years of combat experience and chewed up American units
foolishly thrown into frontal attacks that had little chance of success. After four years of
war, the Germans had no more manpower to replace losses, and surrendered based on a just
peace promised by President Wilson. That never happened and Germany was looted and
humiliated, which led to the rise of the Nazis and World War II.
So this Memorial Day, remember the 116,516 Americans President Wilson killed in that
senseless war. Moreover, the American intervention extended the war and resulted in World War
II. American GIs slaughter Germans so British bankers could collect debts, with interest! I
was inspired to write this blog post after reading the brilliant David Stockman's recent
essay about America's disastrous intervention in World War I.
https://original.antiwar.com/David_Stockman/2018/05/16/why-the-empire-never-sleeps-the-indispensable-nation-folly-part-2/
I have to agree with much of what stated in his reply. But I would like to also add my own
in-depth notes
I tend to concentrate my military studies on World War I (in addition to the "War for
Southern Independence" and the inter-war years (1919-1939)). And as everyone here has
concluded, World War I was an abomination of an atrocity.
Professor Bacevich, a man I have great respect for, did however make some minor but
critical errors in this piece.
Kaiser Wilhelm had no desire to enter into a world conflagration. When he realized that
events were spinning out of control, he did everything in his power to contact his cousin,
the Russian Czar, to request that Russian Mobilization be halted, the actual cause of the
start of the conflict. Due to the fact that diplomacy, unlike the military (which had adopted
wireless and wired communications), was still using traditional methods of face-to-face
discussion or formal letters for diplomacy, the Kaiser was unable to get through to his
cousin in time to stop what the Czar most likely could not halt in any event. Mobilization of
forces at the time had taken on a life of their own due to the technologies of modernized
train transport.
In 1915 or 1916, the German high command attempted to offer to negotiate peace with
Britain and France but Britain, with the war being run basically by Churchill (a warmonger of
the first order) refused to talk to the Germans, since he loathed them for whatever
reasons.
The war was won by Germany in the winter of 1917 at which point the megalomaniacal Woodrow
Wilson pushed the US into the conflict with his god-like notion that he could create peace on
Earth. The man was truly clinically insane (but functional) as much recent documentation has
attested to (see the late Thomas Fleming's, "Illusion of Victory" for a thrill ride through
Wilson's addled thinking).
Had the US not entered the war, there would have been an amenable peace developed in 1917
among the European belligerents. And probably as a result, no World War II.
England was the cause of the war indirectly with her centuries old "balance of power"
politics applied to continental Europe. In this vein, fearful of the loss of her dominance on
the high seas as a result of the Kaiser's excellent buildup of the Kaiserliche Marine
(Imperial Navy), which in turn would threaten her empire, the British military started to
collude with the French military, I believe as early as 1906, to develop joint operational
plans in case of war with Germany. This latter of course, the British were very much hoping
would happen. And with Churchill being one of the most influential cabinet members on the
matter, there was little doubt that Britain would need very little pretext to enter a
conflict.
However, it was France's alliance with Russia that was directly responsible for the
initiation of the entire conflagration. This alliance was centered upon loans to Russia from
France for Russian domestic development and French fears that if Germany attacked her she
would be left on her own to defend herself. Russia agreed in principal to ally herself with
France but used the French loans instead to rebuild her military (though it did her little
good against superior German arms).
Germany, bound in alliance with Austro-Hungary, did in fact support Austria's punitive
strike into Serbia and provided what some have called a "blank check", which provided for
military and financial support as a result of the alliance. Austria's military, one which had
a very spotty historical record of being on and off again as far as quality was concerned,
was definitively off in 1914 and was summarily defeated by superior Serbian Forces.
Franz-Josef of Austria had no expectation of a world war when he committed Austria to such
an incursion into Serbian territory and by that time no else did either as a result of the
assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand since royal assassinations had become pretty common
place in Europe from 1880 onward. However, on the Austrian side we have general Conrad von
Hotzendorf to thank for this strike at Serbia. He hated Serbia probably as much as Churchill
hated the Germans but Conrad had good reason to since the Balkan nation was always causing
all sorts of problems on the Austro-Hungarian borders. Unfortunately, Conrad was not all that
good a military man and cost Austrian hundreds of thousands of combatant deaths during the
conflict.
As a result, this assassination, a real non-event, has been touted to school children ever
since as the cause of World War I. In reality, it was simply window dressing for idiots in
the US educational system to latch onto.
The reaction of Russia to the attack on Serbia was to fully mobilize her military, which
up through World War II has always been seen as an imminent sign of war.
This automatically dragged France into war, which in turn dragged England as a result of
the secret military partnership. Austria then was forced to follow suit and formally declare
war, which brought the final player into the conflict, Germany, who with the exception of
some in the German high command really had questions about engaging in such a widening war,
which was supposed to be a localized conflict.
Seeing that there was no hope to ending the conflict on amenable terms, the Kaiser
abdicated in 1918 and fled for the Royal Netherlands where he was taken in and granted
political asylum. However, by this time General Ludendorf had become a de-facto military
dictator of Germany. And though both he and his senior military aide. Max Hoffman, , who did
the majority of the planning, developed superior battlefield strategy, Ludendorf's political
decisions caused untold problems for the German social infrastructure, some of which was a
reaction to the new pressures that US Forces were finally bringing to bare on German
arms.
The original number of deaths for World War I began at around ten million but had been
upgraded over the years to around twenty million. However, this does not take into account
the highly damaging effects of what would become known as the Spanish Flu in 1918. Recent
research into this aspect of the war is now postulating of up to sixty million deaths all
told.
The Spanish Flu was actually a very mild flu; not the devastating epidemic that again
idiot educators and historians have touted over the years. What made this particular strain
of Flu so devastating was not the virus itself but the need for adequate health-care and
recovery. However, within the field armies that were facing each other, the deprivations that
the war had brought to continental Europe, and the very poorly developed 33 US training camps
in the States, affected personnel and civilian populace did not have the proper facilities
and health-care required to allow them to recover quickly and properly from this disease. The
result was that patients lingered in terrible conditions making recovery impossible and
allowing death to ensue.
Finally, it was not just British bankers who wanted their loans paid back but the US banks
desired it as well for their own loans; a first in the annals of military history between
allies. However, the Wilson Administration never considered the US an ally to Britain or
France. It instead viewed itself as an "associated nation", whatever that meant. However,
Wilson was famously known for his ridiculous vagueness and slogans ("saving the world for
democracy", which even at the time no one could quite figure out the meaning of). As a
result, the US would not sign a peace agreement until 1922.
The World Wars (I and II) can be seen as an increasingly desperate attempt of a fading
British Empire to hold on to and maintain its power and hegemony, with the material, human,
and moral cost of the wars actually accelerating the empire's demise.
Likewise, the current endless "War on Terra" can be seen as an increasingly desperate
attempt of a fading American Empire to hold on to and maintain its power and hegemony, again
with the material, human, and moral cost of this war actually accelerating its demise.
But in the meantime, in both examples, the Bankers and the MIC just keep reaping their
profits, even at the expense of the empires they purportedly support and defend.
'There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one–on the part of the
instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so
many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful–as usual–will shout for
the war. The pulpit will– warily and cautiously–object–at first; the great,
big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be
a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is
no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side
will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing
and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently
the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this
curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of
furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers–as
earlier– but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation–pulpit and
all– will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who
ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen
will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man
will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and
refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that
the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of
grotesque self-deception'.
- Satan, in Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger" (1908)
Today, Washington need not even bother to propagandize the public into supporting its
war. By and large, members of the public are indifferent to its very existence. And given
our reliance on a professional military, shooting citizen-soldiers who want to opt out of
the fight is no longer required.
Yep, I was looking for a quote like this. We have a mercenary military now so the ruling
elite can send them anywhere they want with little agitation from the general public. That's
why I advised my son not to join, not that he was leaning in that direction anyway.
(Grin)
I posted this in another thread, but here it is more appropriate:
That's what happens when hubris replaces strategy. In the US today only MIC has a strategy:
produce any fakes necessary to keep the gravy train rolling. The leadership of the country is
wholly owned by MIC and allied forces (AIPAC is one of those) and mostly resembles biblical
blind lead by the blind
Andrew J. Bacevich is hard at work writing a book about how we got Donald J. Trump.
Buying his book would be a waste of money I can tell you for free.
Trump was elected out of the sheer desperation of a large number of Americans fed up to
death with a corrupt government and noxious [neo]liberalism. period.
Unfortunately he was a fraud ..but the most desperate are still clinging, hoping against
hope.
No, it's not the generals who have let us down, but the politicians to whom they
supposedly report and from whom they nominally take their orders.
I'd say both. The generals have greatly assisted in stringing along the trusting public,
always promising that victory is just around the corner, provided the public supports this or
that final effort. Petraeus in particular willingly played his part in misleading the public
about both Iraq and Afghanistan. His career would be a great case study for illuminating what
is wrong with the U.S. today.
As to the apparent failure of the Afghanistan war – one must be careful to separate
stated goals from real ones. What kind of "lasting success" can the U.S. possibly hope for
there? If they managed to defeat the Taliban, pacify the country, install a puppet regime to
govern it, and then leave, what would that achieve? The puppet regime would find itself
surrounded by powers antagonistic to the U.S., and the puppets would either cooperate with
them or be overthrown in no time. The U.S. are not interested in winning and leaving –
they want to continue disrupting the peaceful integration of East, West, and South Asia.
Afghanistan is ideally placed for this purpose, and so the U.S. are quite content with
dragging out that war, as a pretext for their continued presence in the region.
I would disagree on one point though: "Today, Washington need not even bother to
propagandize the public into supporting its war. By and large, members of the public are
indifferent to its very existence."
This is an error. A majority of the American public think that wasting trillions of
dollars on endless pointless foreign wars is a stupid idea, and they think that we would be
better off spending that money on ourselves. It's just that we don't live in a democracy, and
the corporate press constantly ignores the issue. But just because the press doesn't mention
something, doesn't mean that it does not exist.
So during the last presidential election Donald Trump echoed this view, why are we
throwing away all this money on stupid wars when we need that money at home? For this he was
attacked as a fascist and "literally Hitler" (really! It's jaw-dropping when you think about
it). Despite massive propaganda attacking Trump, and a personal style that could charitably
be called a jackass, Trump won the election in large part because indeed most American don't
like the status quo.
After the election, Trump started to deliver on his promises – and he was quickly
beaten down, his pragmatist nationalist advisors purged and replaced with defense-industry
chickenhawks, and now we are back to the old status quo. The public be damned.
No, the American people are not being propagandized into supporting these wars. They are
simply being ignored.
When are you going to stop insulting our intelligence with this Boy's State civics crap?
You're calling on political leaders to stop war, like they don't remember what CIA did to
JFK, RFK, Daschle, or Leahy. Or Paul Wellstone.
Your national command structure, CIA, has impunity for universal jurisdiction crime. They
can kill or torture anyone they want and get away with it. That is what put them in charge.
CIA kills anybody who gets in their way. You fail to comprehend Lenin's lesson: first destroy
the regime, then you can refrain from use of force. Until you're ready to take on CIA, your
bold phrases are silent and odorless farts of feckless self-absorption. Sack up and imprison
CIA SIS or GTFO.
I would disagree on one point though: "Today, Washington need not even bother to
propagandize the public into supporting its war. By and large, members of the public are
indifferent to its very existence."
This is an error. A majority of the American public think that wasting trillions of
dollars on endless pointless foreign wars is a stupid idea, and they think that we would be
better off spending that money on ourselves. It's just that we don't live in a democracy, and
the corporate press constantly ignores the issue. But just because the press doesn't mention
something, doesn't mean that it does not exist.
So during the last presidential election Donald Trump echoed this view, why are we
throwing away all this money on stupid wars when we need that money at home? For this he was
attacked as a fascist and "literally Hitler" (really! It's jaw-dropping when you think about
it). Despite massive propaganda attacking Trump, and a personal style that could charitably
be called a jackass, Trump won the election in large part because indeed most American don't
like the status quo.
After the election, Trump started to deliver on his promises - and he was quickly beaten
down, his pragmatist nationalist advisors purged and replaced with defense-industry
chickenhawks, and now we are back to the old status quo. The public be damned.
No, the American people are not being propagandized into supporting these wars. They are
simply being ignored. While I agree the slave-American is ignored, I think the elected,
salaried members of the elected government are also ignored.. The persons in charge are
Pharaohs and massively powerful global in scope corporations.
Abe Lincoln, McKinnley, Kennedy discovered that fact in their fate.
Organized Zionism was copted by the London bankers and their corporations 1897, since then
a string of events have emerged.. that like a Submarine, seeking a far off target, it must
divert to avoid being discovered, but soon, Red October returns to its intended path. here
the path is to take the oil from the Arabs.. and the people driving that submarine are
extremely wealthy Pharaohs and very well known major corporations.
I suggest to quit talking about the nation states and their leaders as if either could
beat their way out of a wet paper sack. instead starting talking about the corporations and
Pharaohs because they are global.
" The United States of
Amnesia ." That's what Gore Vidal once called us. We remember what we find it convenient to
remember and forget everything else. That forgetfulness especially applies to the history of
others. How could their past, way back when, have any meaning for us today?
Well, it just might. Take the European conflagration of 1914-1918, for example.
You may not have noticed. There's no reason why you should have, fixated as we all are on
the daily torrent of presidential tweets and the flood of mindless rejoinders they elicit. But
let me note for the record that the centenary of the conflict once known as The Great War is
well underway and before the present year ends will have concluded.
Indeed, a hundred years ago this month, the 1918 German Spring Offensive -- codenamed
Operation Michael -- was sputtering to an unsuccessful conclusion. A last desperate German
gamble, aimed at shattering Allied defenses and gaining a decisive victory, had fallen short.
In early August of that year, with large numbers of our own doughboys now on the front lines, a
massive Allied counteroffensive was to commence, continuing until the eleventh hour
of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when an armistice finally took effect and the guns
fell silent.
In the years that followed, Americans demoted The Great War. It became World War I, vaguely
related to but overshadowed by the debacle next in line, known as World War II. Today, the
average citizen knows little about that earlier conflict other than that it preceded and
somehow paved the way for an even more brutal bloodletting. Also, on both occasions, the bad
guys spoke German.
So, among Americans, the war of 1914-1918 became a neglected stepsister of sorts, perhaps in
part because the United States only got around to suiting up for that conflict about halfway
through the fourth quarter. With the war of 1939-1945 having been sacralized as the moment when
the Greatest Generation saved humankind, the war-formerly-known-as-The-Great-War collects dust
in the bottom drawer of American collective consciousness.
From time to time, some politician or newspaper columnist will resurrect the file labeled
"August 1914," the grim opening weeks of that war, and sound off about the dangers of
sleepwalking into a devastating conflict that nobody wants or understands. Indeed, with
Washington today having become a carnival of buncombe
so sublimely preposterous that even that great journalistic iconoclast H.L. Mencken might have
been struck dumb, ours is perhaps an apt moment for just such a reminder.
Yet a different aspect of World War I may possess even greater relevance to the American
present. I'm thinking of its duration: the longer it lasted, the less sense it made. But on it
went, impervious to human control like the sequence of Biblical plagues that God had inflicted on the
ancient Egyptians.
So the relevant question for our present American moment is this: once it becomes apparent
that a war is a mistake, why would those in power insist on its perpetuation, regardless of
costs and consequences? In short, when getting in turns out to have been a bad idea,
why is getting out so difficult, even (or especially) for powerful nations that
presumably should be capable of exercising choice on such matters? Or more bluntly, how did the
people in charge during The Great War get away with inflicting such extraordinary damage on the
nations and peoples for which they were responsible?
For those countries that endured World War I from start to finish -- especially Great
Britain, France, and Germany -- specific circumstances provided their leaders with an excuse
for suppressing second thoughts about the cataclysm they had touched off.
Among them were:
mostly compliant civilian populations deeply loyal to some version of
King and Country, further kept in line by unremitting
propaganda that minimized dissent; draconian discipline -- deserters and malingerers faced
firing squads -- that
maintained order in the ranks (most of the time) despite the unprecedented scope of the
slaughter; the comprehensive industrialization of war, which ensured a seemingly endless supply
of the weaponry, munitions, and other equipment necessary for outfitting mass conscript armies
and replenishing losses as they occurred.
Economists would no doubt add sunk costs to the mix. With so much treasure already
squandered and so many lives already lost, the urge to press on a bit longer in hopes of
salvaging at least some meager benefit in return for what (and who) had been done in was
difficult to resist.
Even so, none of these, nor any combination of them, can adequately explain why, in the
midst of an unspeakable orgy of self-destruction, with staggering losses and nations in ruin,
not one monarch or president or premier had the wit or gumption to declare: Enough! Stop this
madness!
Instead, the politicians sat on their hands while actual authority devolved onto the likes
of British Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, French Marshals Ferdinand Foch and Philippe Petain,
and German commanders Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. In other words, to solve a
conundrum they themselves had created, the politicians of the warring states all deferred to
their warrior chieftains. For their part, the opposing warriors jointly subscribed to a
perverted inversion of strategy best summarized by Ludendorff
as "punch a hole [in the front] and let the rest follow." And so the conflict dragged on and
on.
The Forfeiture of Policy
Put simply, in Europe, a hundred years ago, war had become politically purposeless. Yet the
leaders of the world's principal powers -- including
Allow me to suggest that the United States should consider taking a page out of Lenin's
playbook. Granted, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, such a suggestion might
have smacked of treason. Today, however, in the midst of our
never-ending efforts to expunge terrorism, we might look to Lenin for guidance on how to
get our priorities straight.
As was the case with Great Britain, France, and Germany a century ago, the United States now
finds itself mired in a senseless war. Back then, political leaders in London, Paris, and
Berlin had abrogated control of basic policy to warrior chieftains. Today, ostensibly
responsible political leaders in Washington have done likewise. Some of those latter-day
American warrior chieftains who gather in the White House or testify on Capitol Hill may wear
suits rather than uniforms, but all remain enamored with the twenty-first-century equivalent of
Ludendorff's notorious dictum.
Of course, our post-9/11 military enterprise -- the undertaking once known as the Global War
on Terrorism -- differs from The Great War in myriad ways. The ongoing hostilities in which
U.S. forces are involved in various parts of the Islamic world do not qualify, even
metaphorically, as "great." Nor will there be anything great about an
armed conflict with Iran , should members of the current administration get their
apparent
wish to provoke one.
Today, Washington need not even bother to propagandize the public into supporting its war.
By and large, members of the public are indifferent to its very existence. And given our
reliance on a professional military, shooting citizen-soldiers who want to opt out of the fight
is no longer required.
There are also obvious differences in scale, particularly when it comes to the total number
of casualties involved. Cumulative deaths from the various U.S. interventions, large and small,
undertaken since 9/11, number in the hundreds of thousands . The precise tally
of those lost during the European debacle of 1914-1918 will never be known, but the total
probably surpassed
13 million .
Even so, similarities between the Great War as it unspooled and our own
not-in-the-least-great war(s) deserve consideration. Today, as then, strategy -- that is, the
principled use of power to achieve the larger interests of the state -- has ceased to exist.
Indeed, war has become an excuse for ignoring the absence of strategy.
For years now, U.S. military officers and at least some national security aficionados have
referred to ongoing military hostilities as " the Long War ." To describe our conglomeration of
spreading conflicts as "long" obviates any need to suggest when or under what circumstances (if
any) they might actually end. It's like the meteorologist forecasting a "long winter" or the
betrothed telling his or her beloved that theirs will be a "long engagement." The implicit
vagueness is not especially encouraging.
Some high-ranking officers of late have offered a more forthright explanation of what "long"
may really mean. In the Washington Post , the journalist Greg Jaffe
recently reported that "winning for much of the U.S. military's top brass has come to be
synonymous with staying put." Winning, according to Air Force General Mike Holmes, is simply
"not losing. It's staying in the game."
Not so long ago, America's armed forces adhered to a concept called victory , which
implied conclusive, expeditious, and economical mission accomplished. No more. Victory
, it turns out, is too tough to achieve, too restrictive, or, in the words of Army
Lieutenant General Michael Lundy, "too absolute." The United States military now grades itself
instead on a curve. As Lundy puts it, "winning is more of a continuum," an approach that allows
you to claim mission accomplishment without, you know, actually accomplishing anything.
It's like soccer for six-year-olds. Everyone tries hard so everyone gets a trophy.
Regardless of outcomes, no one goes home feeling bad. In the U.S. military's case, every
general gets a medal (or, more likely, a
chest full of them).
"These days," in the Pentagon, Jaffe writes, "senior officers talk about 'infinite
war.'"
I would like to believe that Jaffe is pulling our leg. But given that he's a conscientious
reporter with excellent sources, I fear he knows what he's talking about. If he's right, as far
as the top brass are concerned, the Long War has now officially gone beyond long. It has been
deemed endless and is accepted as such by those who preside over its conduct.
Strategic Abomination
In truth, infinite war is a strategic abomination, an admission of professional military
bankruptcy. Erster General-Quartiermeister Ludendorff might have endorsed the term,
but Ludendorff was a military fanatic.
Check that. Infinite war is a strategic abomination except for arms merchants, so-called
defense contractors, and the " emergency
men " (and women) devoted to climbing the greasy pole of what we choose to call the
national security establishment. In other words, candor obliges us to acknowledge that, in some
quarters, infinite war is a pure positive, carrying with it a promise of yet more profits,
promotions, and opportunities to come. War keeps the gravy train rolling. And, of course,
that's part of the problem.
Who should we hold accountable for this abomination? Not the generals, in my view. If they
come across as a dutiful yet unimaginative lot, remember that a lifetime of military service
rarely nurtures imagination or creativity. And let us at least credit our generals with this:
in their efforts to liberate or democratize or pacify or dominate the Greater Middle East they
have tried every military tactic and technique imaginable. Short of nuclear annihilation,
they've played just about every card in the Pentagon's deck -- without coming up with a winning
hand. So they come and go at regular intervals, each new commander promising success and
departing after a couple years to
make way for someone else to give it a try.
It tells us something about our prevailing standards of generalship that, by resurrecting an
old idea -- counterinsurgency -- and applying it with temporary success to one particular
theater of war, General David Petraeus acquired a reputation as a military genius. If Petraeus
is a military genius, so, too, is General George McClellan. After winning the Battle of Rich
Mountain in 1861, newspapers
dubbed McClellan "the Napoleon of the Present War." But the action at Rich Mountain decided
nothing and McClellan didn't win the Civil War any more than Petraeus won the Iraq War.
No, it's not the generals who have let us down, but the politicians to whom they supposedly
report and from whom they nominally take their orders. Of course, under the heading of
politician, we quickly come to our current commander-in-chief. Yet it would be manifestly
unfair to blame President Trump for the mess he inherited, even if he is presently engaged in
making matters worse .
The failure is a collective one, to which several presidents and both political parties have
contributed over the years. Although the carnage may not be as horrific today as it was on the
European battlefields on the Western and Eastern Fronts, members of our political class are
failing us as strikingly and repeatedly as the political leaders of Great Britain, France, and
Germany failed their peoples back then. They have abdicated responsibility for policy to our
own homegrown equivalents of Haig, Foch, Petain, Hindenburg, and Ludendorff. Their failure is
unforgivable.
Congressional midterm elections are just months away and another presidential election
already looms. Who will be the political leader with the courage and presence of mind to
declare: "Enough! Stop this madness!" Man or woman, straight or gay, black, brown, or white,
that person will deserve the nation's gratitude and the support of the electorate.
Trump did implement some measures in internal policy that are against neoliberal dogma. Also
in foreign policy he introduced tariffs which is anathema for neoliberal globalization. where he
completely folded is foreign policy and wars for neoliberal empire expansion (with some conducted
for the main benefit of Israel). he generally conducts a neocon foreign policy.
But Bacevich is right in a sense that Trump does not control his own cabinet./ Behaviour of
Haley and Pompeo are clear indications of that.
Notable quotes:
"... almost nothing of substance has changed. ..."
Donald Trump's tenure as the 45th U.S. president may last another few weeks, another year,
or another 16 months. However unsettling the prospect, the leaky vessel that is the S.S. Trump
might even manage to stay afloat for a second term. Nonetheless, recent headline-making
revelations suggest that, like some derelict ship that's gone aground, the Trump presidency may
already have effectively run its course. What, then, does this bizarre episode in American
history signify?
Let me state my own view bluntly: forget the atmospherics. Despite the lies, insults, name
calling, and dog whistles, almost nothing of substance has changed. Nor will it.
To a far greater extent than Trump's perpetually hyperventilating critics are willing to
acknowledge, the United States remains on a trajectory that does not differ appreciably from
what it was prior to POTUS #45 taking office. Post-Trump America, just now beginning to come
into view, is shaping up to look remarkably like pre-Trump America.
I understand that His Weirdness remains in the White House. Yet for all practical purposes,
Trump has ceased to govern. True, he continues to rant and issue bizarre directives, which his
subordinates implement, amend, or simply disregard
as they see fit.
Except in a ceremonial sense, the office of the presidency presently lies vacant. Call it an
abdication-in-place. It's as if British King Edward VIII, having abandoned his throne for "the woman I love,"
continued to hang around Buckingham Palace fuming about the lack of respect given Wallis and
releasing occasional bulletins affirming his
admiration for Adolf Hitler.
In Trump's case, it's unlikely he ever had a more serious interest in governing than Edward
had in performing duties more arduous than those he was eventually assigned as Duke of Windsor.
Nonetheless, the 60-plus million Americans who voted for Trump did so with at least the
expectation that he was going to shake things up.
And bigly .
Remember, he was going to "lock her up." He would "drain the swamp" and "build a wall" with
Mexico volunteering to foot the bill. Without further ado, he would end "this American
carnage." Meanwhile, "America First" would form the basis for U.S. foreign policy. Once Trump
took charge, things were going to be different, as he and he alone would "make America great
again."
Yet the cataclysm that Trump's ascendency was said to signify has yet to occur. Barring a
nuclear war, it won't.
If you spend your days watching CNN or MSNBC or reading columnists employed by the New
York Times and the Washington Post , you might conclude otherwise. But those are
among the institutions that, on November 8, 2016, suffered a nervous breakdown from which they
have yet to recover. Nor, it now seems clear, do they wish to recover as long as Donald Trump
remains president. To live in a perpetual state of high dudgeon, denouncing his latest inanity
and predicting the onset of fascism, is to enjoy the equivalent of a protracted psychic orgasm,
one induced by mutual masturbation.
Yet if you look beyond the present to the fairly recent past, it becomes apparent that
change on the scale that Trump was promising had actually occurred, even if well
before he himself showed up on the scene. The consequences of that Big Change are going to
persist long after he is gone. It's those consequences that now demand our attention, not the
ongoing Gong Show jointly orchestrated by the White House and journalists fancying themselves
valiant defenders of Truth.
Trump himself is no more than a pimple on the face of this nation's history. It's time to
step back from the mirror and examine the face in full. Pretty it's not.
The Way We Were
Compare the America that welcomed young Donald Trump into the world in 1946 with the country
that, some 70 years later, elected him president. As the post-World War II era was beginning,
three large facts -- so immense that they were simply taken for granted -- defined America.
First, the United States made everything and made more of it than anyone else. In postwar
America, wealth derived in large measure from the manufacture of stuff: steel, automobiles,
refrigerators, shoes, socks, blouses, baseballs, you name it. "Made in the USA" was more than
just a slogan. With so much of the industrialized world in ruins, the American economy
dominated and defined everyday economic reality globally.
Second, back then while the mighty engine of industrial capitalism was generating impressive
riches, it was also distributing the benefits on a relatively equitable
basis . Postwar America was the emblematic middle-class country, the closest approximation
to a genuinely classless and democratic society the world had ever seen.
Third, having had their fill of fighting from 1941 to 1945, Americans had a genuine aversion
to war. They may not have been a peace-loving people, but they knew enough about war to see it
as a great evil. Avoiding its further occurrence, if at all possible, was a priority, although
one not fully shared by the new national security establishment just then beginning to flex its
muscles in Washington.
Now
without even pretending to distribute the benefits equitably. Politicians still routinely
paid tribute to the Great American Middle Class. Yet the hallmarks of postwar middle-class life
-- a steady job, a paycheck adequate to support a family, the prospect of a pension -- were
rapidly disappearing. While Americans still enjoyed freedom of a sort, many of them lacked
security.
By 2016, Americans had also come to accept war as
normal . Here was "global leadership" made manifest. So U.S. troops were now always out
there somewhere fighting, however obscure the purpose of their exertions and however dim their
prospects of achieving anything approximating
victory . The 99% of Americans who were not soldiers learned to tune out those wars,
content merely to "support the troops," an obligation fulfilled by offering periodic
expressions of reverence on public occasions. Thank you for your service!
The Way We Are
But note: Donald Trump played no role in creating this America or consigning the America of
1946 to oblivion. As a modern equivalent of P.T. Barnum, he did demonstrate considerable skill
in exploiting the opportunities on offer as the strictures of postwar America gave way. Indeed,
he parlayed those opportunities into fortune, celebrity, lots of golf ,
plenty of sex, and eventually the highest office in the land. Only in America, as we used to
say.
In 1946, it goes without saying, he would never have been taken seriously as a would-be
presidential candidate. By 2016, his narcissism, bombast, vulgarity, and talent for
self-promotion nicely expressed the underside of the prevailing zeitgeist. His candidacy was
simultaneously preposterous, yet strangely fitting.
By the twenty-first century, the values that Trump embodies had become as thoroughly and
authentically American as any of those specified in the oracular pronouncements of Thomas
Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. Trump's critics may see him as an
abomination. But he is also one of us.
And here's the real news: the essential traits that define America today -- those things
that make this country so different from what it seemed to be in 1946 -- will surely survive
the Trump presidency. If anything, he and his cronies deserve at least some credit for
sustaining just those traits.
Candidate Trump essentially promised Americans a version of 1946 redux . He would
revive manufacturing and create millions of well-paying jobs for working stiffs. By cutting
taxes, he would put more money in the average Joe or Jill's pocket. He would eliminate the
trade deficit and balance the federal budget. He would end our endless wars and bring the
troops home where they belong. He would oblige America's allies, portrayed as a crew of
freeloaders, to shoulder their share of the burden. He would end illegal immigration. He would
make the United States once more the God-fearing Christian country it was meant to be.
How seriously Trump expected any of those promises to be taken is anyone's guess. But this
much is for sure: they remain almost entirely unfulfilled.
True, domestic manufacturing has experienced a
slight uptick , but globalization remains an implacable reality. Unless you've got a STEM
degree, good jobs are still hard to come by. Ours is increasingly a "gig" economy, which might
be cool enough when you're 25, but less so when you're in your sixties and wondering if you'll
ever be able to retire.
While Trump and a Republican Congress delivered on their promise of tax "reform," its
chief beneficiaries will be the rich, further confirmation, if it were needed, that the
American economy is indeed rigged in favor of a growing class of plutocrats. Trade deficit?
It's headed for a
10-year high . Balanced budget? You've got to be joking. The estimated federal deficit next
year will exceed a
trillion dollars , boosting the national debt past
$21 trillion . (Trump had
promised to eliminate that debt entirely.)
And, of course, the wars haven't ended. Here is Trump, just last month, doing his best
George McGovern imitation: "I'm constantly reviewing Afghanistan and the whole Middle East," he
asserted . "We never should have been in the Middle East. It was the single greatest
mistake in the history of our country." Yet Trump has perpetuated and, in some instances,
expanded America's military misadventures in the Greater Middle East, while essentially
insulating himself from personal responsibility for their continuation.
As commander-in-chief, he's a distinctly hands-off kind of guy. Despite being unable to
walk, President Franklin Roosevelt visited GIs serving in combat zones more often than Trump
has. If you want to know why we are in Afghanistan and how long U.S. forces will stay there,
ask Defense Secretary James Mattis or some general, but don't, whatever you do, ask the
president.
On Not Turning America's Back on the World
And then there is the matter of Trump's "isolationism." Recall that when he became
president, foreign policy experts across Washington warned that the United States would now
turn its back on the world and abandon its self-assigned role as keeper of order and defender
of democracy. Now, nearing the mid-point of Trump's first (and hopefully last) term, the United
States remains formally committed to defending the territorial integrity of each and every NATO
member state, numbering 29 in all. Add to that an obligation to defend nations as varied as
Japan, South Korea, and, under the terms of the Rio Pact of 1947, most of Latin America. Less
formally but no less substantively, the U.S. ensures the security of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and
various other Persian Gulf countries.
As for obliging those allies to
pony up more for the security we have long claimed to provide, that's clearly not going to
happen any time soon. Our European allies have pocketed both Trump's insults and his assurances
that the United States will continue to defend them, offering in return the
vaguest of promises that, sometime in the future, they might consider investing more in
defense.
By-the-by, U.S. forces under Donald Trump's ostensible command are today present in more
than 150 countries worldwide.
Urged on by the president, Congress has passed a bill that boosts the Pentagon budget to
$717 billion , an $82 billion increase over the prior year. Needless to say, no adversary
or plausible combination of adversaries comes
anywhere close to matching that figure.
To call this isolationism is comparable to calling Trump svelte.
As for the promised barrier, that " big,
fat, beautiful wall ," to seal the southern border, it has advanced no further than the
display
of several possible prototypes. No evidence exists to suggest that Mexico will, as Trump
insisted, pay for its construction, nor that Congress will appropriate the necessary funds,
estimated at somewhere north of
$20 billion , even with Republicans still controlling both houses of Congress. And in
truth, whether it is built or not, the U.S.-Mexico border will remain what it has been for
decades: heavily patrolled but porous, a conduit for desperate people seeking safety and
opportunity, but also for criminal elements trafficking in drugs or human beings.
The point of this informal midterm report card is not to argue that Donald Trump has somehow
failed. It is rather to highlight his essential irrelevance.
Trump is not the disruptive force that anti-Trumpers accuse him of being. He is merely a
noxious, venal, and ineffectual blowhard, who has assembled a team of associates who are
themselves, with few exceptions, noxious, venal, or ineffectual.
So here's the upshot of it all: if you were basically okay with where America was headed
prior to November 2016, just take a deep breath and think of Donald Trump as the political
equivalent of a kidney stone -- not fun, but sooner or later, it will pass. And when it does,
normalcy will return. Soon enough you'll forget it ever happened.
If, on the other hand, you were not okay with where America was headed in 2016, it's past
time to give up the illusion that Donald Trump is going to make things right. Eventually a
pimple dries up and disappears, often without leaving a trace. Such is the eventual destiny of
Donald Trump as president.
In the meantime, of course, there are any number of things about Trump to raise our ire.
Climate change offers a good example. And yet climate change may be the best illustration of
Trump's insignificance.
Under President Obama, the United States showed signs of mounting a belated effort to
address global warming. The Trump administration wasted little time in reversing course,
reverting to the science-denying position to which Republicans adhered long before Trump
himself showed up.
No doubt future generations will find fault with Trump's inaction in the face of this
crisis. Yet when Miami
is underwater and California wildfires
rage throughout the year, Trump himself won't be the only -- or even the principal –
culprit charged with culpable neglect.
The nation's too-little, too-late response to climate change for which a succession of
presidents share responsibility illustrates the great and abiding defect of contemporary
American politics. When all is said and done, presidents don't shape the country; the country
shapes the presidency -- or at least it defines the parameters within which presidents operate.
Over the course of the last few decades, those parameters have become increasingly at odds with
the collective wellbeing of the American people, not to mention of the planet as a whole.
Yet Americans have been obdurate in refusing to acknowledge that fact.
Americans today are deeply divided. There exists no greater symbol of that division than
Trump himself -- the wild enthusiasm he generates in some quarters and the antipathy verging on
hatred he elicits in others.
The urgent need of the day is to close that divide, which is as broad as it is deep,
touching on culture, the political economy, America's role in the world, and the definition of
the common good. I submit that these matters lie beyond any president's purview, but especially
this one's.
Trump is not the problem. Think of him instead as a summons to address the real problem,
which in a nation ostensibly of, by, and for the people is the collective responsibility of the
people themselves. For Americans to shirk that responsibility further will almost surely pave
the way for more Trumps -- or someone worse -- to come.
A cultural war has been ignited. The United States in 6 more years will be a different
country. For good or evil, I do not know. Whichever side wins will take all.
There is no more an American people. Trump's election has revealed a cultural divide which
has existed for the past 50 years or more. He didn't cause it, he has unconsciously uncovered
it.
Trump did at least have the courage publicly to
describe the enemy within, which makes him all but unique among Western politicians:
'Their financial resources are virtually unlimited, their political resources are unlimited,
their media resources are unmatched, and most importantly, the depths of their immorality is
absolutely unlimited.'
"... It is remarkable the extent to which Israeli concerns dominate those of the United States, which now has a foreign policy that often is not even remotely connected to actual U.S. interests. ..."
"... Congress and the Special Counsel are investigating Russia's alleged interference in America's political system while looking the other way when Israel operates aggressively in the open and does much more damage. ..."
1. "The only way for Syria and Iran and Russia to defend Syria is to clearly tell
Washington, London, Paris (the main ZOGs) and Israel that attacks on Syria will be responded
to by attacks on Israeli military and intel sites. The introduction of any nuclear device of
any size will result in a full-scale nuclear response.
That is the only play otherwise Syria simply bleeds to death as t he Jews get their
puppets to keep fomenting terror and dropping bombs on SAA efforts to fight those
terrorists . We come to the moment when Russia either defends Syria by hitting Israel or
it decides to accept the Long Death of Anglo-Zionist megalomania."
2. "I really do wish Russia would just instantly bomb Israel. That would be the best way
to separate us from that satanic rope around our necks."
3. "I call everyone in the military to disobey orders for attacking anything in Syria
except Isis. Need to spread this on social media. Don't be mercenaries of Israel
."
-- Your "most victimized" have squandered all and any sympathy for your "incomparable
sufferings" by promoting the ongoing slaughter in the Middle East. The Jewish State and its
subordinate zionized US have become the gravest danger to humanity.
This whole issue is so surrealistic. The last time the OPCW didn't confirm their accusations,
but now they know who is going to commit a chemical attack right now, and they don't even
wait for the actual events to be cocksure about it. Apparently they want a nuclear Mexican
standoff. This is the problem that last time maybe Russia wasn't convincingly committed to a
nuclear war, and so they are trying to explore this perceived weakness. It will get to a
point where the US will call Russia's "bluff" which will turn out not to have been a bluff.
Jews undermined and
destroyed their own society, as routinely as they undermine Western Civilization. The OT
reveals the historic pattern of Hebraic self-destruction, and depravity; which was repeated
in the 1st Century, and chronicled by Josephus.
Jews are not as problematic, as the Muhammadans.
So, 1st things 1st. The ziocon-supported "rebels" of A Qaeda (see Washington Post
editorial written by Israel firsters) are preparing a children sacrifice for the glory of the
the mythical Eretz Israel: https://www.rt.com/news/438282-white-helmets-film-chemical-attacks/
"The militants have selected 22 children and their parents from several villages in the
Aleppo governorate who will play parts in staging fake chemical weapon attacks.
Another group of children is comprised of orphans kidnapped from refugee camps, who are meant
to be used for the footage of death scenes. It is currently kept in one of the buildings of
the Ikab prison controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist group.
Signs of activities to prepare staged chemical weapon attacks were reported in Kafir-Zait,
the military claims, also naming two villages where toxic chemicals have been delivered to
stage provocations."
-- Not a peep from the "humanitarian" Jewish State that has been waiting impatiently a
resumption of the slaughter of civilians in the sovereign State of Syria. Nothing pleases the
Jewish State more than the death of kids in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Iran. This is your
tribeswoman:
" Paul Joseph Watson reported that at least 29 different Syrian rebel groups are pledging
allegiance to the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate group responsible for killing
American troops in Iraq.
"Syrian rebels have been responsible for a plethora of atrocities, from terrorist attacks and
massacres, to forcing people to become suicide bombers, to attacks on Christian churches and
making children carry out grisly beheadings of unarmed prisoners," Watson wrote.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has even admitted to BBC that these Syrian rebels
on the same side as the U.S. in Syria are terrorist groups
President Obama has been openly supporting the Syrian rebels "
"We know they sent in the CIA to overthrow Assad. The CIA and Saudi Arabia together in covert
operations tried to overthrow Assad. It was a disaster.
Eventually, it brought in both ISIS as a splinter group to the jihadists that went in, it
also brought in Russia.
So we have been digging deeper and deeper and deeper. What we should do now is get out, and
not continue to throw missiles, not have a confrontation with Russia."
"Syria is only part of a much larger problem. It is remarkable the extent to which Israeli
concerns dominate those of the United States, which now has a foreign policy that often is
not even remotely connected to actual U.S. interests.
Congress and the Special Counsel are
investigating Russia's alleged interference in America's political system while looking the
other way when Israel operates aggressively in the open and does much more damage. Netanyahu
and his crew of unsavory cutthroats are hardly ever cited for their malignant influence over
America's political class and media. Bomb Syria? Sure. After all, it's good for Israel."
-- The bloody, murderous, perfidious Jewish Power is guilty of the rivers of blood and
mounds of human flesh in Syria. Close your holo-biz museums already.
The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in
an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would
prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.
With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how
best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money
or more power...
They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty
guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for
monopoly and vested interest.
Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is
directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power
of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
Absolutely. Trump
is being led by the nose into WW3. It's only a matter of time, unfortunately. The issue is
that, while most likely there will be no ww3 after this newest crisis, just as there was no
nuclear war after the April crisis, we never know exactly how close we are to a nuclear war,
because previously both parties tried to stay clear of such situations. How many times can
the US illegally strike at Syrian targets without it leading to some Russian response which
would in turn lead to some US response and so on, until we'll face some kind of situation
where the sweating, nervous and sleep-deprived leadership of one of these nuclear superpowers
will in an underground bunker rightly or wrongly contemplate the possibility that if they
don't use their nukes in 20 minutes, they'll lose most of them..? Since we've rarely been in
such situations, we don't really know what the margin of error is, nor what could lead to the
use of nuclear weapons. We have no idea.
"It would be desirable, one presumes, to avoid an open conflict with Russia, which would be
unpredictable "
Quite wrong, and very dangerous. In fact an "open conflict" (or, as we say in English, a
war) against Russia would – very predictably indeed – have one of two possible
outcomes:
1. A catastrophic and decisive defeat for the USA;
"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday
at getting back at you" – Chuck Schumer. maybe Schumer's protective scare-mongering
goes to a deeper matter; the matter of the most powerful intelligence agency operating in the
USA is MOSSAD, an entity which has penetrated every aspect of American governance.
AIPAC is one of MOSSAD's favorite playgrounds
Did Sanders' people challenge 'the Russians did it' propaganda line, demand the DNC
servers be examined by forensic specialists and investigate Crowdstrike? No.
no U.S. intelligence agency has performed its own forensic analysis on the [Clinton's] hacked
servers. Instead, the bureau and other agencies have relied on analysis done by the
third-party security firm CrowdStrike [Dm. Alperovitch, of the CrowdStrike fame, is a vicious
Russophobe and loyal zionist fed and cared for by the ziocon Atlantic Council.] In actuality
we know it was the assassinated Seth Rich took the DNC emails with a thumbdrive.
Vladimir Putin, the man standing in the way of Syria's breakup and working to keep the
Iran agreement intact and avert a war, must be demonized to realize Bibi Netanyahu's goals.
In fact, Israel's intelligence services focus has historically prioritized Russia, first, and
the USA second "
– The Jewish Bolsheviks are in arms against Russia and the US because this is what
the Jewish Bolsheviks are best for -- at the destruction of functioning human societies.
says: Website Next New
Comment September 12, 2018 at 5:52 am
GMT 200 Words @Tyrion 2 I get it. You're
Palestinian. You're aggrieved. Every single year for 70 years your guys have refused to come to
a deal and every single year your hand has gotten weaker. That must be hugely frustrating.
But best for you that you live in the real world. 3 random comments from you on an
interesting but minor and consistently prognosticatarily incorrect site is not the real
world.
Israel doesn't want Iran in Syria long-term. Everyone else but hardline elements of the
Iranian state agree, so they have now been pushed.
That is the end of the matter, along with some reasonable autonomy for the Kurds. It'd be
lovely for them to have a proper sovereign country over all of the areas they'd like to lay
claim to, but the Kurds appreciate their position and play with the hand they are dealt.
Also, making up phrases and putting them in quotes as if I have ever said them is strikingly
dishonest. ' Israel doesn't want Iran in Syria long-term '
If so, then we have another example of the Israelis figuring out how to cleverly screw
themselves.
Of course secular dictator Assad would never have invited Islamic Republic of Iran troops
into Syria -- not in a month of sundays.
not until Israel engineered the transformation of the 'Arab Spring' in Syria into a
prolonged and bloody civil war in which a desperate Assad would take whatever help he could get
-- like Islamic Republic of Iran troops.
Now Israel's got Iranians in Syria. And of course they made a bitter enemy out of Iran in
the first place with their campaign of assassinations and terrorist bombings in Iran.
This is even better than Israel's creation of Hezbollah and sponsorship of Hamas. It would
appear that all we have to do is sit back and let the Zionists scheme themselves into total
defeat. I wonder what their next stroke of genius is going to be?
"... The op-ed, perhaps by no coincidence whatsoever, appeared one week before the release of the new book by Bob Woodward Fear: Trump in the White House , which has a similar tale to tell and came out on Amazon today. ..."
And there is always Iran just waiting to get kicked around, when all else fails. Haley,
always blissfully ignorant but never quiet,
commented while preparing to take over the presidency of the U.N. Security Council last
Friday, that Russia and Syria "want to bomb schools, hospitals, and homes" before launching
into a tirade about Iran, saying
that "President Trump is very adamant that we have to start making sure that Iran is
falling in line with international order. If you continue to look at the spread Iran has had in
supporting terrorism, if you continue to look at the ballistic missile testing that they are
doing, if you continue to look at the sales of weapons we see with the Huthis in Yemen -- these
are all violations of security council resolution. These are all threats to the region, and
these are all things that the international community needs to talk about."
And there is the usual hypocrisy over long term objectives. President Donald Trump said in
April that "it's time" to bring American troops home from Syria -- once the jihadists of
Islamic State have been definitively defeated. But now that that objective is in sight, there
has to be some question about who is actually determining the policies that come out of the
White House, which is reported to be in more than usual disarray due to the appearance last
week of the New York Timesanonymous
op-ed describing a "resistance" movement within the West Wing that has been deliberately
undermining and sometimes ignoring the president to further Establishment/Deep State friendly
policies. The op-ed, perhaps by no coincidence whatsoever, appeared one week before the
release of the new book by Bob Woodward Fear: Trump in the White House , which has a similar tale to tell and came out on
Amazon today.
The book and op-ed mesh nicely in describing how Donald Trump is a walking disaster who is
deliberately circumvented by his staff. One section of the op-ed is particularly telling and
suggestive of neocon foreign policy, describing how the White House staff has succeeded in
"[calling out] countries like Russia for meddling and [having them] punished accordingly" in
spite of the president's desire for détente. It then goes on to elaborate on Russia and
Trump, describing how " the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin's spies as
punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about
senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he
expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for
its malign behavior. But the national security team knew better – such actions had to be
taken to hold Moscow accountable."
If the op-ed and Woodward book are in any way accurate, one has to ask "Whose policy? An
elected president or a cabal of disgruntled staffers who might well identify as
neoconservatives?" Be that as it may, the White House is desperately pushing back while at the
same time searching for the traitor, which suggests to many in Washington that it will right
the sinking ship prior to November elections by the time honored and approved method used by
politicians worldwide, which means starting a war to rally the nation behind the
government.
As North Korea is nuclear armed, the obvious targets for a new or upgraded war would be Iran
and Syria. As Iran might actually fight back effectively and the Pentagon always prefers an
enemy that is easy to defeat, one suspects that some kind of expansion of the current effort in
Syria would be preferable. It would be desirable, one presumes, to avoid an open conflict with
Russia, which would be unpredictable, but an attack on Syrian government forces that would
produce a quick result which could plausibly be described as a victory would certainly be worth
considering.
By all appearances, the preparation of the public for an attack on Syria is already well
underway. The mainstream media has been deluged with descriptions of tyrant Bashar al-Assad,
who allegedly has killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. The rhetoric coming out of
the usual government sources is remarkable for its truculence, particularly when one considers
that Damascus is trying to regain control over what is indisputably its own sovereign territory
from groups that everyone agrees are at least in large part terrorists.
Last week, the Trump White House approved the
new U.S. plan for Syria, which, unlike the old plan of withdrawal, envisions something like
a permanent presence in the country. It includes a continued occupation of the country's
northeast, which is the Kurdish region; forcing Iran plus its proxies including Hezbollah to
leave the country completely; and continued pressure on Damascus to bring about regime
change.
Washington has also shifted its perception of who is trapped in Idlib, with
newly appointed U.S. Special Representative for Syria James Jeffrey arguing that
". . . they're not terrorists, but people fighting a civil war against a brutal
dictator." Jeffrey, it should be noted, was pulled out of retirement where he was a fellow with
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) spin off. On his recent trip to the Middle East he stopped off in Israel nine
days ago to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The change in policy, which is totally in
line with Israeli demands, would suggest that Jeffrey received his instructions during the
visit.
Israel is indeed upping its involvement in Syria. It has bombed the country 200
times in the past 18 months and is now threatening to extend the war by attacking Iranians in
neighboring Iraq. It has also been providing
arms to the terrorist groups operating inside Syria .
@annamaria ..."the statement of the head
of the anti-terrorist squad of Scotland Yard that he had "No" evidence of Russian state involvement in the crime in Salisbury..."
Yes. The UK government has lost its marbles in the pursuit of power & money. They suffer the same disease as their Israeli
and US counterparts -- the loss of the life-saving integrity and intelligence and the triumph of the life-threatening stupidity.
The western governments have become incompetent due to the lack of the populace' supervision. For any living organism, no feedback
means no protective actions ensuring the survival of the organism.
The Cheneys and Bibis and Blairs of the world are not intelligent enough even to envision the future for their immediate progeny,
nevermind grandkids. These stupid elders are covered in the blood of the innocent.
The Cheneys and Bibis and Blairs
Cheney was a draft dodger as was Bolton who was a "conscientious objector". As was most of US political class who got to power
in 1990s on.
Bibi for them sure as hell looks like a war hero. There is a method to US "elites" being enamored with IDF military history.
Apart, of course, from being in the pockets of Israeli Lobby. Their war-mongering is a way of compensation.
Cheney was a draft dodger as was Bolton who was a "conscientious objector". As was most of US political class who got to power
in 1990s on.
https://youtu.be/SdJiJ53TexI
Bibi for them sure as hell looks like a war hero. There is a method to US "elites" being enamored with IDF military history.
Apart, of course, from being in the pockets of Israeli Lobby. Their war-mongering is a way of compensation. "Their war-mongering
is a way of compensation.."
"In an editorial Friday, the [Washngton] Post goaded Trump, calling his response to Assad's ruthless [?] recapture of his country
"pathetically weak." To stand by and let the Syrian army annihilate the rebels in Idlib, said the Post, would be "another damaging
abdication of U.S. leadership."
– Very clear. The WP is heavily zionized. The Al Qaeda (euphemistically called by the WP "compensators" the "rebels in Idlib")
is a great asset for the dreamers about Eretz Israel. The authors of the editorial are cowards of zionist persuasion, who would
never ever stand for the US interests and for such western values as the freedom of information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQbYCY9Cr7o
– Here is the presstituting Martin Baron, Executive Editor at The Washington Post. "Baron was born to a Jewish family. His
parents immigrated from Israel." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Baron
-- And Israel is a place where Martin Baron's heart belongs to. It would be great if his body and his whole family also belong
to the Land of Dancing Israelis, instead of using the resources of the US citizenry in propping the warmongering and supremacist
Jewish State.
@annamaria ..."the statement of the head
of the anti-terrorist squad of Scotland Yard that he had "No" evidence of Russian state involvement in the crime in Salisbury..."
Yes. The UK government has lost its marbles in the pursuit of power & money. They suffer the same disease as their Israeli
and US counterparts -- the loss of the life-saving integrity and intelligence and the triumph of the life-threatening stupidity.
The western governments have become incompetent due to the lack of the populace' supervision. For any living organism, no feedback
means no protective actions ensuring the survival of the organism.
The Cheneys and Bibis and Blairs of the world are not intelligent enough even to envision the future for their immediate progeny,
nevermind grandkids. These stupid elders are covered in the blood of the innocent. Cheney stated he had "other things to do" during
the Vietnam War. Bolton stated he had no intention of dying in a war that was already lost. Ironic, given the eagerness with which
both chickenhawks send young Americans to their bloody end in desert wars.
@reiner Tor The issue is that, while most
likely there will be no ww3 after this newest crisis, just as there was no nuclear war after the April crisis, we never know exactly
how close we are to a nuclear war, because previously both parties tried to stay clear of such situations. How many times can
the US illegally strike at Syrian targets without it leading to some Russian response which would in turn lead to some US response
and so on, until we'll face some kind of situation where the sweating, nervous and sleep-deprived leadership of one of these nuclear
superpowers will in an underground bunker rightly or wrongly contemplate the possibility that if they don't use their nukes in
20 minutes, they'll lose most of them..? Since we've rarely been in such situations, we don't really know what the margin of error
is, nor what could lead to the use of nuclear weapons. We have no idea. The biggest tragedy here is that the (((people))) in control
of the US/UK/France want a war against Iran/Russia/China. Their speciality is goyim-on-goyim slaughter and the WW3 is actually
necessary for their messianic ambitions. Their plan is to watch it from underground bunkers and rule over whatever is left afterwards.
That's why I said "it's only a matter of time". They will never stop on their own.
Orwell's 1984 featured perpetual wars and changes of fronts aided by
memory holes. While Stalinism, itself went by the boards, as Orwell sort of predicted, the
same tactics became characteristic of Oceania, his name for the anglophone world in the
novel. Now we have a threatened possible nuclear war to defend the same raghead elements
credited with the 9/11 attacks. In seventeen years we have gone from perpetual war against
the raghead element to perpetual war, up to and including extinction, to be engaged in on
behalf of the same barbarous elements. If we survive this, historians, or at least those
independent of the international "Oceania" deep state structure, will marvel that we came so
close to extinction by fighting for the same barbarians which were the rationale of starting
perpetual war in the first place. Endless wars-zio cons' handiwork:
Twenty American military veterans commit suicide on average every day, according to a
recent report from the US Department of Veteran Affairs.
There is a tendency to think Trump is unique. Just as there had been a tendency among
liberals to think George W. Bush was unique. And not even the Christian zealotry that is
present in the Trump cabinet is unique. The United States has always draped its avaricious
tendencies in the language of devotion and prayer. Or, in Reagan's case, with the addition of
astrology.
"In a ravenous fifty-five-day spasm during the summer of 1898, the United States asserted
control over five far-flung lands with a total of 11 million inhabitants: Guam, Hawaii, Cuba,
the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Never in history has a nation leaped so suddenly to
overseas empire."
"... The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire . ..."
"... The True Flag, NYRBs 2018 ..."
"... The Policy of Imperialism ..."
"... Swedish Democrats ..."
"... John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, a two-time NEA recipient, Rockefeller Fellow in theatre, and PEN-West winner for playwriting. Plays produced in LA, NYC, SF, Louisville, and at universities across the US, as well in Warsaw, Lodz, Paris, London and Krakow. Taught screenwriting and curated the cinematheque for five years at the Polish National Film School in Lodz, Poland. A collection of plays, Sea of Cortez & Other Plays was published in 1999, and his book on aesthetics, Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest was published this year by Mimesis International. ..."
"This country is going so far to the right you won't recognize it "
– John Mitchell (1969)
"Manliness and mastery required regeneration through violence, and by the 1890s, { Theodore}
Roosevelt was spoiling for a fight: "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country
needs one," he wrote. Any opponent would do, but "the most ultimately righteous of all wars is
a war with savages."
– Jackson Lears ("How the US Began Its Empire," NYRB 2018)
"There is this myth of happiness: black-magic slogans warn you to be happy at once; films
that "end well" show a life of rosy ease to the exhausted crowds; the language is charged with
optimistic and unrestrained expressions-"have a good time," "life is fun," and the like. But
there are also these people, who, though conventionally happy, suffer from an obscure malaise
to which no name can be given, who are tragic through fear of being so, through that total
absence of the tragic in them and around them."
– Jean Paul Sartre ("Americans and Their Myths," 1947)
The long overdue death of John McCain will be remembered not because of McCain himself or
anything he did, but because of its timing. McCain's death happened under a particularly rabid
spike in anti-Trump madness. And so, like all useful deaths, especially of public figures, and
more especially of *warriors*, the moment was seized upon by the information apparatus of the
state and turned into a platform for renewing the symbols and message of American virtue as well
as for reinforcing the basic ideological tenants of U.S. militarism. And for pointing out that
Donald Trump was to be found wanting in all categories and measurements of manliness and imperial
vision. In a sense, McCain is now enshrined as the 21st century Teddy Roosevelt. Both were
racist, both xenophobes, and both arch Imperialists whose personal insecurities were projected
outward in displays of overt and cartoon masculinity.
There has been a lot written of late about the year 1968. It's the 50th anniversary of *68*,
which is now being viewed as a kind of talismanic watershed in U.S. social and political history.
Perhaps it is, but I think that is a bit too simplistic. Still, publications love to pin their
stories on such ideas, so one has not seen the last of this meme. I was in high school in 68, in
Hollywood California and I was to graduate the following year. I had to think seriously about how
to dodge the draft. I remember meeting with counselors, in the various anti-war groups that
abounded in So Cal during that time. The feeling in those places was warm, comraderly, and
genuinely concerned. Many were women's groups including the one that most helped me. But in
general people helped one another. There was no cynicism. No hustle. It's hard to remember that,
today. The war was bad, and we all knew that. The military was bad, and everyone knew that. When
you compare attitudes today you can see just how successful the propaganda arm of the U.S.
military has been.
And just how damaged the western psyche is. Now, with the environmental crises accelerating
and, as one writer put it, "we are not studying global warming now, we are living it," you might
think people would naturally gravitate toward anti-war positions. After all something like 45% of
global pollution is caused by the militaries of the world, and the U.S. military is ten times
larger than anyone's else, and it is far more active than anyone else in that top ten
list. You would think that, and you would be wrong.
There is a tendency to think Trump is unique. Just as there had been a tendency among liberals
to think George W. Bush was unique. And not even the Christian zealotry that is present in the
Trump cabinet is unique. The United States has always draped its avaricious tendencies in the
language of devotion and prayer. Or, in Reagan's case, with the addition of astrology.
"In a ravenous fifty-five-day spasm during the summer of 1898, the United States asserted
control over five far-flung lands with a total of 11 million inhabitants: Guam, Hawaii, Cuba,
the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Never in history has a nation leaped so suddenly to overseas
empire."
Kinzer's book is a useful guide to a seminal period in the construction of not just American
overseas colonizing, but to the cementing of a mythology of individualism and violent conquest
that is still operative. And its fitting that Teddy Roosevelt should be enshrined as a heroic
figure and among the post popular presidents. Roosevelt shares a lot of similarities with Winston
Churchill, in fact. Aristocratic backgrounds, racism, ambition, and a desire for Empire. And
Roosevelt was, like Churchill, skilled as manufacturing his own mythology and crafting his public
persona. And that persona was at its foundation one tied to war. When the Kurds rebelled
Churchill said "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes [It]
would spread a lively terror." Churchill, Roosevelt, and McCain. Uncivilized tribes, savages, and
gooks.
And all three are among the popular political figures in English speaking nations. When
various groups call for a ranking of presidents, Roosevelt is almost always in the top three or
four. Americans simply don't like even the whiff of intellectualism. Adlai Stevenson was never
going to be president. It is surprising, in a way, that McCain never made it. But when one looks
at the mythology of the U.S., it is not hard to see the through line of this exaggerated hyper
masculinity and how it is now in the ascendent again.
"The exceptionalist double standard was reinforced by racial hierarchies and intensified by
preoccupations with gender. Filipinos and Cubans, despite their desires for independence, were
alleged to be unready for self-government -- a racist argument that has survived in muted form
down to the present. Another long-standing exceptionalist theme has been the virtue of
reinvigorated masculinity in imperial discourse. These enduring preoccupations in American
foreign affairs stem at least in part from educated men's desire to vindicate their manhood in
a society suspicious of thought, from Theodore Roosevelt's Strenuous Life to John Kennedy's New
Frontier to George W. Bush's Mission Accomplished."
Jackson Lears (Review of Kinzer's The True Flag, NYRBs 2018 )
Across Europe today quasi fascist anti-immigration parties are gaining power and rising in
popularity. In Hungary, Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, and Sweden. Even in
Denmark, where the Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen oversaw " legislation that will require
children from the age of one living in areas defined as "ghettos" by the state to be separated
from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap times. This new policy
carries echoes of, and is a small but significant step towards the discredited and inhumane
practices of tearing indigenous children away from their families, such as occurred with
Australia's "lost generations" of Aboriginals or Canada's so-called Scoop generations." (The New
Arab, July 2018).
Rasmussen is, unsurpisingly, an enthusiastic supporter of NATO and U.S. militarism. While
still the opposition leader in 2015, Rasmussen rode the wave of anti-immigration sentiment
claiming one must take a 'tough' look the realities of immigrants already in Denmark. He noted
half are on public assistance. One does sort of wonder how that is the fault of the immigrants.
But Rasmussen has also suggested increasing penalties for crimes committed within the designated
*ghetto areas* of his country. In the small city of Randers (with a relatively tiny Muslim
population) a measure was passed that pork MUST be served (not could, but must) in all public
buildings. As Fergus O'Sullivan notes, " such official drives to repress minority culture have
many European precedents. In the 1950s, efforts to assimilate Dutch Indonesians in the
Netherlands went as far as regular home visits to ensure they were eating potatoes, not rice.
Until 1973, Switzerland pursued a policy of removing children from itinerant Yenish families and
placing them in poor conditions in orphanages, mental asylums, and prisons so as to dilute their
differences from what was perceived as a mainstream Swiss identity." ( New Lab ,
2018).
Europe has a long history of protecting themselves from the threat of *savages*.
"In 1909 in Sweden, for example, the Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene was founded,
followed in 1910 by the Mendel Society, the first Swedish genetics association. Even before
World War I, leading doctors including Herman Lundborg, a prominent figure in racial biology,
saw eugenics as a means to counter the problem of immigration, and there was a widely held
opinion that the racial unity of the Swedish people was threatened. (4) Just as under the
Nazis, the welfare state in Sweden had to be protected from ''unproductive anti-socials'' and
so it became a ''eugenic welfare state of the fittest." – Sara Salem (Discover Society,
2018)
You know who were huge
supporters of eugenics ? Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt. Well, and Adolph Hitler.
It is important to recognize the shameful role that Hollywood plays in all this. The
apologetics from media and celebrities who seem indifferent to the actual history of America is
stunning. And in particular to the continued reproduction of the violent hero, the man of action
(and not thought). And, as I've noted before, it's not the issue of violence per se, for drama
has always dwelt on that, but the ideological frame in which this occurs (I mean watch the new
series Jack Ryan for an example that, clearly, CIA advisors are in the story
meetings for all networks these days). There are very few stories of early America in which the
audience is made aware that twelve presidents were slave owners. In fact the real
horror of slavery is still not told.
John Wayne, Dirty Harry, and Rambo.
"The Philippine War was as unnecessary as it is unjust -- a wanton, wicked, and abominable
war and what is the answer? "No useless parley! More soldiers! More guns! More blood! More
devastation! Kill, kill, kill! And when we have killed enough, so that further resistance is
stopped, then we shall see." Translated from smooth phrase into plain English, this is the
program. In the vocabulary of our imperialists, "order" means above all submission to their
will. Any other kind of order, be it ever so peaceful and safe, must be suppressed by a bloody
hand."
– Carl Schurz, ( The Policy of Imperialism , 1899)
As an interesting note, water boarding was the favorite technique for American marines in the
Philippines. And McKinley, then President, claimed he heard the voice of God as he paced the
halls of the White House, undecided about invasion. But then God spoke to him. And God wanted
America to go to war (and apparently to waterboard the savages).
The deeply embedded racism of America is still being denied. And its important to see the ways
in which this denial is expressed. For they relate directly to the rugged tough guy machismo of
much of white america. And not just America, for the *tough* talk is couched as *realistic* and
this is what one hears in Lars Rasmussen and Victor Orban, in Salvini and the leader of the
Swedish Democrats Jimmie Åkesson. It is what one hears from Trump and McCain, too.
The implication is that the left is weak, and worse, effeminate. Many female politicians bend
over backwards to appear 'one of the guys' (see Hillary Clinton). And the more insecure the white
male, the tougher the talk. Roosevelt was an asthmatic child who was never naturally athletic or
physically gifted.
"The first state to enact a sterilization law was Indiana in 1907, quickly followed by
California and 28 other states by 1931 (Lombardo n.d.). These laws resulted in the forced
sterilization of over 64,000 people in the United States (Lombardo n.d.). At first,
sterilization efforts focused on the disabled but later grew to include people whose only
"crime" was poverty. These sterilization programs found legal support in the Supreme Court. In
Buck v. Bell (1927), the state of Virginia sought to sterilize Carrie Buck for promiscuity as
evidenced by her giving birth to a baby out of wedlock (some suggest she was raped). In ruling
against Buck, Supreme Court Justice Wendell Holmes opined, "It is better for all the world, if
instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for
imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind
.Three generations of imbeciles is enough" (Black 2003). This decision legitimized the various
sterilization laws in the United States. In particular, California's program was so robust that
the Nazi's turned to California for advice in perfecting their own efforts. Hitler proudly
admitted to following the laws of several American states that allowed for the prevention of
reproduction of the "unfit" (Black 2003)."
– Laura Rivard (Sictable, 2014)
"In 1937, a Gallup poll in the USA found that 45 per cent of supported euthanasia for
"defective infants". A year later, in a speech at Harvard, WG Lennox argued that preserving
disabled lives placed a strain on society and urged doctors to recognize "the privilege of
death for the congenitally mindless and for the incurable sick". An article published in the
journal of the American Psychiatric Association in 1942 called for the killing of all
"retarded" children over five years old."
– Victoria Brignell, (New Statesman, 2010)
The U.S. and Europe both are seeing a return of the most virulent xenophobic bigotry
imaginable. A revanchist fascist sensibility has found a startling legitimacy in the public and
in the media. And no amount of argument seems to sway white liberals today that the FBI and CIA
and Pentagon are anything but virtuous and honourable institutions. And hating Donald Trump is
all the justification needed to allow the thinly buried racism and privilege of most white
americans to come to the surface.
None of this has ever gone away. Forced sterilizations took place as recently as 1963 in
California (the leader by a wide margin in carrying out eugenics policies) and reasons included
being an orphan, sexual indulgence (slut), alcoholism and foreignness. In fact post WW2 saw
little retreat in eugenics policy making in the U.S.
"Today in Western North Carolina, a nonprofit group offers drug addicts money to be
"voluntarily" sterilized. It is dubious whether one could honestly consider this program to be
voluntary or ethical, since many people suffering from drug addictions will do nearly anything
for money -- and that money will likely go to scoring their next fix."
– Keven Bigos ("The American Eugenics Movement After WW2," Indy Week
2011)
In the 60s and 70s forced sterilizations took place among gay and lesbian people, Cheyenne,
Sioux , and Navajo women, and poor whites in Georgia and Alabama. The Weather Underground bombed
a federal building in San Francisco to protest sterilizations in 1974. It is worth noting a few
additional details about who was financing this stuff after the war. Kevin Bigos'
award-winning article is worth a read in its entirety. But leading advocates included
"Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton, and California eugenicists Paul Popenoe and C.M. Goethe.
( ) Hooton had worked on the "Committee of the Negro" during the 1920s as part of an effort to
prove that the black race was inferior, and Goethe had openly praised Nazi eugenics programs."
And then there was the biggest force for Eugenics probably in U.S. history, Dr Clarence Gamble
(of Proctor & Gamble). And it should be noted that the idea of coercive sterilization was
hugely popular. It was not some crazy fringe flat earth society belief -- it found support among
the most prestigious Universities and Medical Institutions in the country.
The University of North Carolina throughout the 1950s handed out pro eugenics literature to
students. And women were largely the target and *sex delinquency* was the primary reason given
for sterilization. Criminals were also targeted. Anyone with a felony conviction was deemed unfit
to reproduce. This is the 1950s remember.
Hitler praised California for its eugenics thinking. American Exceptionalism at its
finest.
There is no way to over-emphasize the toxicity of U.S. (and European) history. There simply
isn't. But I think somehow the deeper question is how the public has returned to an adoration of
the most violent, aggressive and xenophobic figures in public life. No president is criticized
for going to war, so, given all the other encouragements for war its an easy call. They will
continue to find enemies to fear and reasons to increase defense spending. They will find poor
nations, without defense capabilities, and send in troops to save them. Just as the Philippines
were saved and civilized over a hundred years ago. And just as Africa is, again, a target for the
civilizing mission of the Christian West. Of course the extraction of natural resources is the
engine behind this. Profit is always the most powerful justification. But it is also more than
that. It is the fear out there today in the bourgeois West -- and the crushing heat waves of this
last year seem not to have even dented the belief in humanitarian intervention. Obama is
literally a figure of adoration. For liberals he is something close to a deity, in fact. His
actual record is of no interest. To bring it up is to just be a buzz-kill. Fear runs throughout
the populace. But it is far too simple to say that because it is a complex of *fears*. And it is
a strange return of core American mythology, Manifest Destiny, Indian killers, gunfighters, and
land barons. The current hit TV series Yellowstone (created and written by Taylor
Sheridan and starring Kevin Costner) is a prime example. Watching the show (and Sheridan is
actually a better than average writer) I could never quite decide if the show was tongue in cheek
or sincere. I fear the latter. Costner plays the owner of the largest ranch in the United States.
At one point a visiting Japanese (!) tourist says 'this is too much land for one man to own'.
Costner barks back 'this is america, we dont share land'.
Im still not sure if this was meant to be a desirable statement or not. But I suspect it was.
Even if only unconsciously. And there are things, believe it or not, to applaud in this show. But
the overriding love affair with power eclipses all else. America will always see conquest as
individual achievement. Power as a sign of virtue. Oh and Costner occasionally looks heavenward
and asks for God's help -- but in manly one syllable words.
White supremacism is a foundational feature of American society. One only has to examine the
statistics for mass incarceration to prove this. Blacks are incarcerated 5 times the rate of
whites, and in some states that ratio is ten times. In twelve states blacks make up more than
half the prison population. Latinos are incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of whites. White
supremacism and american exceptionalism. And that belief in an innate superiority is core
America.
And as cultural globalism increases, with all its inequalities, the white west is increasingly
frightened. And it is psychically circling the wagons. The nauseating outpouring of ersatz grief
for McCain has, as I say, not much to do with McCain. It has everything to do with revalidating
white virtue, and white superiority. The token superficiality of multiculturalism in arts and
entertainment is only another symptom. Praising identity based garbage is really just white
parternalism applied to aesthetics. But its not just dark skinned people, not just inner city
black kids or Muslims or the Chinese; it is the poor, too. The "othering" of almost everyone not
white, or not prosperous and western, is in overdrive. And the constant demonizing and slurs
against Communists never slows down. It happens on the flaccid quasi left, too. It is just white
fear. And it is radioactive. The terrified bourgeoisie of the West are in meltdown. Everywhere I
go ..even to places I love such as Copenhagen or Gothenburg I sense an uptick in martial vibes.
Especially among younger men. No jobs, no pride, no place for courage or honour. There is only
the numbing monotony of iPads or smart phones or social media. And a debilitating projection of
this fear onto immigrants and foreigners in general. In the U.S. it is worse. For in the U.S. the
cultural realm has never been so denuded and dead. It is the province of the bureaucratic
technicians of banality and the trivial. And it is now a country of all encompassing anger.
That McCain was given (or gave himself, who knows) the moniker "maverick" says it all. Its a
nostalgia for a counterfeit past. For an invented history wiped clean of atrocity. And it
provides ever less even momentary relief from the dire future everyone knows is coming.
Join
the debate on Facebook More articles by: John Steppling
John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, a
two-time NEA recipient, Rockefeller Fellow in theatre, and PEN-West winner for playwriting. Plays
produced in LA, NYC, SF, Louisville, and at universities across the US, as well in Warsaw, Lodz,
Paris, London and Krakow. Taught screenwriting and curated the cinematheque for five years at the
Polish National Film School in Lodz, Poland. A collection of plays, Sea of Cortez & Other
Plays was published in 1999, and his book on aesthetics, Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest
was published this year by Mimesis International.
"... Robbie Martin is a journalist, musician and documentary film-maker. He is co-host with his sister Abby Martin of Media Roots Radio. A Very Heavy Agenda can be streamed or purchased here . Soundtrack for Film and music for these series from Fluorescent Grey (Robbie Martin). ..."
"... Mark Robinowitz is a writer, political activist, ecological campaigner and permaculture practitioner and publisher of oilempire.us as well as jfkmoon.org . He is based in Eugene, Oregon. ..."
Robert Kagan. William Kristol. Paul Wolfowitz. Richard Perle. John Bolton. Elliott Abrams.
Gary Schmitt. These are a few of the names generally associated with a strain of far-right
political thought called neoconservatism. [1][2]
Politically, the neocons favour a world in which the United States adopts a much more
aggressive military posture, and utilizes its military might to not only contain terrorist and
related threats to its security, but force regime change in regions like the Middle East. They
further take on the task of 'nation-building' all in the name of creating a safer world for
'democracy.' It was the neocons who promoted the stratagem of pre-emptive military action.
[3]
The neocons enjoyed a robust period of influence under the Bush-Cheney administration. The
9/11 attacks and the triggering of a 'war on terrorism' enabled a series of foreign policy
choices, most notably the War on Afghanistan and the War on Iraq, which aligned with the aims
and aspirations of the group once referred to by President George Bush Sr. as the 'crazies in
the basement.'[4]
The neocons did not vanish with the departure of the Bush Republicans from office, and the
rise of Obama . Indeed, the clout of this group and their grip on power is arguably as strong
as ever. Not only did they continue to shape the U.S. foreign policy establishment, but they
have managed to alter what constitutes acceptable public and media discourse within the world's
remaining superpower. The trajectory of neocon influence in Washington is explored in depth in
the documentary series, A Very Heavy
Agenda, by independent journalist and film-maker Robbie Martin.
In part one of a special two part interview by Global Research News Hour guest contributor
Scott Price , Martin describes the inspiration behind making the film, the post 9/11 atmosphere
in which the neocons flourished, and the neocons' role in fostering the new Cold War mentality
which contributed to the smearing of his better-known sister, former RT host Abby Martin .
This feature is followed by an interview with writer, ecological campaigner, and Deep State
researcher Mark Robinowitz . Originally recorded and
aired in January 2018, Robinowitz helps delineate the factions of power shaping the outcome
of the 2016 presidential election, as well as the players within the National Security State,
including the neocons, that appear to be manipulating him and his presidency, possibly
maneuvering him towards an impeachment within the next year.
Robbie Martin is a journalist, musician and documentary film-maker. He is co-host with
his sister Abby Martin of Media
Roots Radio. A Very Heavy Agenda can be streamed or purchased here . Soundtrack for Film and music for these series from
Fluorescent Grey (Robbie
Martin).
Mark Robinowitz is a writer, political activist, ecological campaigner and permaculture
practitioner and publisher of oilempire.us
as well as jfkmoon.org . He is based in
Eugene, Oregon.
Transcript – Interview with Robbie Martin, July 2018
Global Research: Through the late 20th and early 21st century, the neoconservatives loomed
large in American foreign policy the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the Bush administration.
In 2018, it may seem that their power and influence has waned, but in fact, many of these
neoconservatives still hold influence, and their legacy has had a much larger impact on
politics and society.
In this Global Research News Hour special, we talk with journalist, filmmaker, and musician
Robbie Martin on his 3-part documentary, A Very heavy Agenda. This film series covers the rise
and continued influence of the neoconservatives. In Part 1, Robbie talks about the artistic and
political influence for A Very Heavy Agenda and some of the early history of the war on
terror.
Talking more broadly about the documentary, what was.. sort of the genesis of the idea for A
Very Heavy Agenda? The documentary has a very distinct style and you don't do a lot of
editorializing. So what was the inspiration for all that? And why did you choose the kind of
this topic and the kind of technique that you were using for this documentary film?
Robbie Martin: I think I probably should give a shout out to filmmaker Adam Curtis right off
the top, because I don't give him enough credit when I talk about the inspiration for this
film. As you may know, or if you're not familiar with it but he made a film series called The
Power of Nightmares during the Bush administration that was sort of charting the
neoconservative influence in the Bush administration and before, and how they've sort of
mirrored the Wahhabist, Islamic, you know, fundamentalists and Al Qaeda figures by using what
Adam Curtis described as the Power of Nightmares, that by concocting these nightmare fantasy
scenarios, you could gain power, and people like Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were
able to do that by spinning these hysterical fear-mongering tales about, oh, what would happen
if a bio-terrorist attack happened? You know what would happen if terrorists attacked the World
Trade Centers?
That was a big inspiration for me during the Bush administration. It sort of helped me
become more politically aware. It made me question a lot of things after 9/11 and having to do
with the Iraq war. But over time, i just became sort of just, oh the neocons, they're the
people who were mainly behind the Iraq war. They're sort of an evil class of foreign policy
makers in DC who really want war at every opportunity. And that's just how I thought of them
throughout the years.
It wasn't until my sister, Abby Martin, and for those listening who aren't aware of this, my
sister actually had a show on the Russian-owned television channel, Russia Today America out of
DC from the years around 2012 to, I think, early 2015.
So she had a show on RT for about three years, and while she was there, I remember having a
conversation with her very early on saying, you know, we have to be ready for when the U . S .
g overnment decides that they're going to get mad at what this channel's doing. because when
she started working there in 2012, it didn't seem like there was any attention whatsoever to
RT, this idea of Russian meddling, this idea of Russian propaganda, no one cared about it.
In fact, U.S. officials at the time marginalized it and even one of my characters in my
film, Victoria Nuland, says it has a very tiny audience. She actually marginalized it during a
Brookings panel in DC. Now, that was the attitude back when my sister first started working
there, but over time, we started seeing early signs of what appeared to be an information war
being waged against the Russian government by shady actors inside the United States.
And that may sound a little bit ironic, considering the way that we see everything through
this lens now of Russian meddling, that everyone in the U.S. would describe RT as a form of
information war now. You know , that's how everybody would describe it now, but back then it
was such a small channel it barely anybody watched it, I mean that was kind of more true what
they were saying back then, U.S. officials marginalizing it that was more of the true
narrative. It was a small channel and had very little influence.
But yet maybe just a year or two into her working there, maybe a year and a half, we really
started to notice something strange happening in the United States where there was all this
focus starting to accumulate towards Putin and Russia and why Russia was so bad. And it started
more subtly, kind of in the background. The Sochi Olympics , however, was sort of when we
noticed -- it was almost like all these coordinated narratives started to really flood out of
U.S. media channels, and all this awareness all of a sudden about the Russian gay law, which as
someone who's very adamantly pro gay rights, I was bothered by it as well, but I mean even at
the time I remember thinking, now this is an odd amount of focus towards the Russian gay law
when yet Saudi Arabia actually executes gays still, and there's hardly any talk about that in
the U.S. media. W hat's actually happening here?
So there was some early signs and sort of like what me just sort of my gut reaction and my
sister's gut reaction to that climate at the time wondering what was going on. And of course,
right after the Sochi O lympics, is when the Euromaidan protest in Ukraine, it kind of boiled
over to the point where there were, you know, walls of flaming tires all over Euromaidan
– basically a war zone. And of course the Ukrainian government fell due to a coup which
many believe, including myself, was partially U.S. sponsored by the U.S. S tate D
epartment.
And then things from there, Scott, just started to spiral out of control , and from the
period between 2014 to 2018, it was like an exponentially rising climate of propaganda against
Russia coming from the U.S. media, and when I made my film series, I didn't I made it before
the election, s o I didn't realize how hysterical it was going to get after the election, and
frankly, I had no idea it was going to get this bad, to the point that it's got now.
i know that doesn't quite answer your question about my inspiration, but it 's kind of a
long answer to your question is my film itself is essentially.. was tracking the neocon
influence and how the neoconservatives from the Bush era that pushed the Iraq war, that
constructed the blueprints to the I raq war, how they also were the earliest pioneers pushing
this Russiagate Cold War 2.0 mentality.
And how it only took . you know . certain nudges and pushes and policy papers , and here we
are. T hey essentially got their way, and Russia has never been more demonized since the fall
of communism and the Berlin wa ll and the Soviet Union. So that's I don't know if that was too
long of an answer for your question , but that's what was sort of my inspiration for how I made
it. My sister was also kind of a part of the story because some of these neocons actually tried
to smear her while she was working for RT.
GR: Right yeah
RM: And that's maybe a more literal answer to your question is – that was the key
inspiration for me like, oh, wait these n eocons are still around, they're waging some kind of
cutting edge information war against Russia at the Obama a dministration doesn't seem to care
about, and they're out there trying to ruin my sister. So all those factors combined, sort of
coalesced at once, and I'm like , I have to do something about this because no one else is
talking about this push, what I saw as a propaganda push to try to push us into kind of a
war-footing with Russia. Whether you want to call it World War III or an ideological
confrontation.
GR: Right, yeah, and I mean , some of the more, the details of some of these things we'll
get into. I mean, I don't want to get too far into it, because I want people to to to watch
your.. the documentary, because I think it's so great. And especially I'm 31 so I kind of, the
9/11 thing really shaped myself and my generation in so many ways. But even in watching this,
there's so many things that I forgot about or didn't even know about? You know like we kind of
form these narratives and we don't really think about it or you know who's controlling this
stuff and for what purposes. But I think you give a good summation of that.
But one of the things too about the film itself is you use a lot of footage of these people
if it's one of the K agans or Bill Kristol or whomever I mean, obviously this was a conscious
decision to use their own words, so could you talk a little bit about why you decided to do it
that way? Because I think in watching the how many hours it is over the three parts, you get,
you kind of see the same themes coming up again, but it's from these people themselves that are
saying this stuff. Could you talk about the power of that and why you decided to do that?
RM: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think at first, I was really fascinated by the
psychology of these key neoconservatives. I was watching, at first I didn't even know I was
going to make a film. I was kind of in this weird place mentally, my sister had just been put
through the wringer, she had over 200 basically hit piece stories written about her within the
span of a week, and I was just in this kind of depressed place checking in with her making sure
she was doing okay, and not basically getting too stressed out from all this media pressure and
this barrage of negative stories. So I was just watching these videos basically from the neocon
think-tank that I believe was behind the smear campaign against her.
So I was watching videos from this think tank, they were called the Foreign Policy
Initiative, and I quickly learned maybe over 48 hour period, oh, the Foreign Policy Initiative
is actually a re-branded, reopened version of the Project for The New American Century think
tank, which was the most infamous neocon think tank that was behind the Iraq War. Once I
realized that, then I just then I was obsessed with watching these videos. I watched probably
every single video on their YouTube channel, and the majority of them were incredibly boring,
very dry. And I was already in a depressed place, so, you know, it was kind of just putting me
into this weird state where I was watching nothing but these dry foreign policy think tank
videos for weeks on end.
Finally I got to Robert Kagan. And I was listening to him, and it struck me differently from
the way that most other neoconservatives would talk, because I perceived him as being more
candid about the way American foreign policy has actually conducted itself, and also more
clever with the way that I perceived him as, re-branding, repackaging neocon rhetoric for the
Obama era. Once I saw this, I became fascinated with his psychology. And I was already sort of
fascinated with Bill Kristol's psychology, you know , going back to when I was a young man when
I would watch Fox News you know during the Iraq War, I would watch Bill Kristol, and I found
him fascinating back then because he seemed on a different level than most other, you know, war
hawks that would go on Fox News.
But it was really Robert Kagan though that made me think, you know, his own words are so
fascinating and so candid and so revealing without adding any editorial content that I wonder
if this will work, if I present it just simply in his own words.
And then the other reason, if I'm being completely honest, I didn't feel confident at the
time to actually add any of my own editorial narration. I kind of cringe sometimes at movies
that do that too much, especially political documentaries. Without naming names or crapping on
anyone, let's just say I watched a political documentary that had the word wars in the title.
And I felt that the filmmaker himself was made himself the main character, and while the
content of the film was great, he talked about Yemen, Somalia all these how do I say it without
revealing the film maker? All these wars, hidden wars, happening in all these other countries,
the filmmaker made himself the main character, and I cringe so much at that I kind of was in
this position where I was like, I don't even know how to enter my own editorial point of view
into this other than my editing and the way I'm presenting all this footage.
So when I made P art 1, it was out of necessity, mostly because I didn't know how to do that
yet, and I didn't feel confident enough to do it, but then also the footage I was grabbing was
so compelling to me on its own, I felt that maybe this could work just on its own. Like I
wasn't When I was originally making it it didn't even cross my mind to add narration. It was
only until later when I was like, I need to release this and show people that I actually
decided to add narration. But as you're saying Part 1, I think you're mostly talking about Part
1, has no narration whatsoever. And it's just It's mostly just a collage of footage of these
neoconservatives talking, and conversing and revealing sort of how they truly think.
GR: Yeah, so in talking about it like how they, the neocons , think and what their worldview
really is I think a lot of listeners of CKUW and the Global Research News Hour would be
familiar when you say neocons and Project for a New American Century, but I think the
overriding perception is that they're a thing of the past. They were kind of, they had their
time with the Bush and through the 2000 s and then they're gone. So why should people still be
paying attention to the neocons in 2018?
RM: Great question . I mean a nd you're right to say that. The general perception is that
they kind of got shamed out of existence based on the failure "the failure" of the Iraq War and
the amount of public pressure against that, and how most people have come to the belief that it
was a disaster. And the neocons are largely associated with that military invasion and frankly,
that massacre that was done completely for no logical reason whatsoever unless we're talking
about imperialistic games. The WMDs argument is complete BS and everyone knows that now.
So their names were largely associated with the worst lies of the Bush a dministration , and
that was my perception of it too until I started working on this documentary film, is that they
had gone away and they weren't really a problem anymore. And even when I started to see some of
the same faces pop up talking about Russia and how evil Putin was back in like 2014, I didn't
personally think it was that big of a deal because I thought, well these people are super
marginalized. Who's really listening to them anymore? Obama is clearly not listening to them.
But that actually turned out not to be true. The Obama part He actually was listening to them
as described in my film.
But I think one way to describe why they're so important and they're still so influential is
because they managed to, a very small handful of them, maybe less than a dozen figures, managed
to convince the rest of, what people describe as the DC blob, the sort of foreign policy
consensus in DC overall, the neocons managed to rebrand themselves, massage their rhetoric, and
make themselves seem less crazy in order to influence the larger DC foreign policy community
into basically accepting and going along with almost all their foreign policy platforms, with
the exception of overtly wanting to invade Iran which arguably that is the neocon prize but
see, a lot of these smarter neocons like Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, and a lot of these
neocons who managed to convince the blob, they have hidden, and not been open about the fact
that they want to overthrow the regime of Iran.
That's one of their foreign policy platforms they've sort of brushed under the rug, because
that's one of The reason I'm giving that example is because that's how they have managed to
cross the aisle, so to speak, in DC and put a hand out to the neoliberal think tanks and say,
hey we're kind of on the same side in this, and we all think Putin's bad, and let's really go
after him. Let's overthrow Assad. So these are things that the neocons managed to essentially
convince and influence the rest of the DC foreign policy community to believe.
So yes, it's true that there are not that many actual literal neocons, but a lot of people
now who are sort of anti-war, do work in anti-war or do foreign policy critique, they don't see
much of a difference any more between sort of the neoliberal foreign policy group in DC, which
is most of it, and the actual neocons anymore. Because they have essentially merged in a
non-partisan fashion, and it's been very surreal to watch, especially after the 2016 election
when you actually saw neocons saying well you should vote for Hillary. For the first time ever
they all said that you shouldn't vote for a R epublican.
That's so I don't know that fully answers your question, but I think to su m it up it's
because the neocons have influenced everybody. So now that they've been able to do that you
don't really need that many of them around you know making that much trouble because everybody
is carrying out their agenda essentially. In this DC foreign policy think-tank.
GR: Yeah I think the way you kind of describe it in maybe it's I don't know if you
personally describe it, but I wrote it down in my notes about how neoconservatism is almost
like a species and it kind of evolved over the last 20 years in a way? So I think what you're
talking about how there's a shift to Hillary, and, but I mean that shift is more that the
neoconservative line really became the mainstream line, whereas, you know, maybe in the early
2000s, like, there was a larger perception, yes, they were in the White House, but these people
are also crazy, whereas now is kind of like the mainstream, which is quite scary. Which is
something I think we'll talk about in a little bit. But kind of what I was talking about a bit
before what I referenced was that I was a teenager when 9/11 happened, and it really shaped my
generation and the world that I'm living in now
But as I was watching the 3-part documentary, there were several things that I was like kind
of blown away by how these things kind of just went down the memory hole, and I want to talk
about those things because several of these things I vaguely kind of remember now but for some
odd reason I had totally forgotten about them, and they're not really within the wider
narrative of 9/11 and the war on terror.
So the first one is that how right after 9/11, several of these neocons, I think it's Don
and Fred Kagan, went on TV and radio kind of immediately after for at least a 24-hour 48-hour
period after 9/11 and basically blamed Palestinians for the attack, and were basically outright
calling for the U.S. to attack Palestine. And even saying that they had no evidence but we
should just go and attack them. So could you talk about what happened there, and what was the
effect there? Everyone kind of forgets about this but what happened there, and what do you
think the effect of that was?
RM: You just opened up a really big can of worms with that question. Well, to fully answer
that it would require a totally separate interview, but I'll do my best to answer it in this
short time that we have. What you're describing is, what I would say, is the neocons flipping
up and revealing too much of an early iteration of their script, than the rest of the consensus
was ready to reveal or get on board with. And perhaps, even, they jumped ahead with something
that the rest of the neocons already decided, we can't go there. Because, and this is important
to know, that Don Kagan is one of the only three authors credited as writing Rebuilding
America's Defenses, the infamous paper that PNAC released that says we need a new Pearl Harbor,
a catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.
Don Kagan is someone who just, mostly an obscure figure in this, but I'd like to believe
that if he was saying that on the radio within 24 hours of 9/11, that it was something being
heavily discussed within that community behind the scenes. And h e and his son Fred Kagan are
two of the most intellectual, influential neoconservatives in DC. Fred Kagan is behind the Iraq
surge, he is also behind the Afghanistan s urge for Obama, directly working under David
Petraeus. So these are not just like random neocons. It's important to stress that they are
some of the most influential neocon brain-trust type people in DC even though they're so
relatively obscure They're not household names.
So to hear both of them saying that we need to clean out Palestine with the U.S. Delta Force
raids and the full panoply of U.S. military tools and arsenal, it's a very shocking thing to
hear. Even though I've long believed that neocons are some of the most evil people on the
planet, that was even surprising for me to hear. That they went ahead and openly said that the
U.S. military should do that, and actually, in their broadcast they make it clear that they
don't even care who's behind 9/11. Which is strange. They say that if we run around tracing the
actual perpetrators, we're just going to be wasting our time and we won't get anywhere. So what
they are saying is that we should just go attack all these countries anyways because even if
they're behind it or not, they hate us and want to kill us.
And Palestine was one of their primary targets to retaliate against in response to 9/11. Now
that's very strange when you look at the day of 9/11, and I've actually done a podcast on this,
I call it the Palestinian Frame-up, on 9/11, there were four separate incidences that were run
throughout U.S. media throughout the day of 9/11 that were attempting to blame Palestinians for
the attacks before Bin Laden became the primary culprit that the U.S. media latched on to. So I
find that very strange.
And I'm not going to try to explain it here during this interview, but you can look into
that. It's all documented. The news media played footage of Palestinians allegedly celebrating
the attacks in the middle of a national emergency at 12 p.m. while thousands of people were
still missing during the World Trade Center attacks. So this is the kind of stuff that U.S.
media was doing.
So it's very interesting for me to see neocons actually piggy-backing on that and saying we
should attack Palestine. And that's a rare thing, I think, to find neocons slipping up that
badly. And I guess I find that clip particularly fascinating because it's really one of the
only ones like that out there, and to my knowledge, I'm the first one to find it by combing
through all these archives. I've never heard of it before, never even heard of any neocon s
saying that before on record.
And then also something else interesting Don Kagan brings up in the recording, and maybe you
were going to mention this next, but I'll just say it because it's so weird, as he says what
would have happened, and keep in mind this is 9/12-01, one day after 9/11. He says, what would
have happened if the terrorists had Anthrax on that plane?
GR: Right. Yeah.
RM: And on October 5, weaponized anthrax was sent through the U.S. mail. While the Bush
Administration was already inoculated with Cipro. the antibiotic taken to prevent Anthrax
infection. So there's a lot of interesting and very scary questions that are raised just by
that single clip. and I'm to this day it's still a mystery to me.
GR: That was Part 1 of the Global Research News Hour special with Robbie Martin on his
documentary series, A Very Heavy Agenda that explores the rise and continued influence of the
neoconservatives. Part 2 will air next week where we will explore the anthrax attacks, the role
of Vice in spreading U.S. propaganda. You can buy or stream A Very Heavy Agenda at
averyheavyagenda.com. Music for this special provided by Fluorescent Grey, AKA Robbie Martin.
For the Global Research N ews H our, I'm Scott Price.
-end of transcript-
Global Research News Hour Summer 2018 Series Part 5
Today's latest offering is that the 'Russians' in the 'mugshots' released last week are
'already dead' having been 'executed by Putin' to stop them talking, forever. Which neatly
avoids the British state asking Russia for help in identifying them. London's failure to do
so was already arousing suspicion amongst a cynical public. There is now no point, the
would-be assassins are now six-feet below the permafrost of Anglo-Russian relations.
The media here have completely ignored the statement of the head of the anti-terrorist
squad of Scotland Yard that he had "No" evidence of Russian state involvement in the crime
in Salisbury, preferring instead the cheap barroom brawling of the British prime minister
on the floor of the House of Commons cheered on by the vulgar popular press and their more
refined elder sisters in the upmarket papers and on the BBC.
FSB arrests ISIS member 'who planned murder of a Donbass leader on behalf of
Ukraine'
The Russian security service, the FSB, says it has arrested an Islamic State operative
who was planning to murder one of the leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's
Republic (DNR) on behalf of the Ukrainian authorities.
The suspected terrorist was identified as Mejid Magomedov, who was born in 1988 in Russia's
southern Dagestan republic. He was arrested on Sunday in Russia's Smolensk region in the
west of the country.
https://www.rt.com/news/438028-fsb-isis-member-ukraine/
Explosive Skripal allegations may blow up in Syria - George Galloway
Today's latest offering is that the 'Russians' in the 'mugshots' released last week are
'already dead' having been 'executed by Putin' to stop them talking, forever. Which neatly
avoids the British state asking Russia for help in identifying them. London's failure to do
so was already arousing suspicion amongst a cynical public. There is now no point, the
would-be assassins are now six-feet below the permafrost of Anglo-Russian relations.
The media here have completely ignored the statement of the head of the anti-terrorist
squad of Scotland Yard that he had "No" evidence of Russian state involvement in the crime
in Salisbury, preferring instead the cheap barroom brawling of the British prime minister
on the floor of the House of Commons cheered on by the vulgar popular press and their more
refined elder sisters in the upmarket papers and on the BBC.
"the statement of the head of the anti-terrorist squad of Scotland Yard that he
had "No" evidence of Russian state involvement in the crime in Salisbury "
Yes. The UK government has lost its marbles in the pursuit of power & money. They
suffer the same disease as their Israeli and US counterparts -- the loss of the life-saving
integrity and intelligence and the triumph of the life-threatening stupidity.
The western governments have become incompetent due to the lack of the populace' supervision.
For any living organism, no feedback means no protective actions ensuring the survival of the
organism.
The Cheneys and Bibis and Blairs of the world are not intelligent enough even to envision the
future for their immediate progeny, nevermind grandkids. These stupid elders are covered in
the blood of the innocent.
Nimrata Randhawa alias Niki Haley says she has intelligence that Putin and Assad were seen in
wal mart with a shopping cart full of Clorox bleach which indicates a chemical attack for
sure. she also said when the US bombed Syria because of the last chemical attack Putins
passport was found in the rubble
"... But ultimately, the tide can turn. The lies take so much energy to maintain; the chutzpah not enlivening but demeaning; the maintenance of the lies so desperately necessary. ..."
"... 9/11 thus presents an ongoing 'Achilles heel', a potentially terminal 'Pyrrhic victory' for the vile scum that pulled off 9/11. The scum's rise to the top enhances its visibility and vulnerability. ..."
Those who planned and caused to happen 9/11 clearly were not American patriots. The attack
was physically and psychically and politically against the people of the United States,
including the American military.
A large number of key perpetrators and participants were citizens of Israel, or had
primary loyalty to Israel.
Neither the FBI nor the CIA nor military intelligence prevented the attack, and after the
attack, these agencies did not pursue the guilty. They betrayed their country.
The former 'traditional' US mass media has either almost entirely participated in the
cover-up, or refused to tell the truth. They have betrayed their country.
The political system of the United States has remained mute or supported the cover-up.
They have betrayed their country.
Other countries have largely remained silently complicit or supported the cover-up. As a
direct result of 9/11, Iraq and Libya have suffered terrible destruction and loss of life via
wars of aggression, Syria has suffered great harm, and Afghanistan has been attacked and
occupied with large loss of life.
9/11 then is a kind of litmus test for vast social pathology and dysfunction: that so many
people would fall so easily for the bs; that so few people in positions of influence and
power would have sufficient backbone and integrity to speak truth.
But ultimately, the tide can turn. The lies take so much energy to maintain; the
chutzpah not enlivening but demeaning; the maintenance of the lies so desperately
necessary.
9/11 thus presents an ongoing 'Achilles heel', a potentially terminal 'Pyrrhic
victory' for the vile scum that pulled off 9/11. The scum's rise to the top enhances its
visibility and vulnerability.
@Patricus The
plotters moved explosive charges into he three buildings and there had to be thousands of
these weighing a great amount. It was then necessary to install the explosive equipment. No
one ever noticed?
Does anyone question that the aircraft actually struck the buildings?
The conspirators had to precisely coordinate the controlled explosions with the moment the
jets hit the buildings. Why didn't they just demolish the buildings with explosives then take
credit as some Islamic terror group? Why make a plot so complicated? This requires close
cooperation between Muslim terrorists and Israelis who are not often best friends.
If Israel engineered all this to get Americans active in the Middle East could anyone call
the end results a success? I can't see how Israel's position has improved. The security of
the towers was done by a firm owned by a brother of Bush jr.
No problem in installing the explosives.
Precisely coordinate, any terrorist explodes a bom with a mobile phone.
You really think that those who perpetrated Sept 11 were unable to begin a series of
explosions, resembling destruction by gravity ?
Alas, they miscalculated.
It went too fast.
The planes, far more propaganda effect than just demolition.
Israel's position not improved ?
Is not Saddam out of the way, and is not Iraq destroyed ?
Not saying that it wasn't a false flag, not saying who did or didn't do it, just saying
what I see. The South tower destruction goes from impact to bottom, from top to impact isn't
visible due to dust and smoke. The North tower destruction goes from impact to top and from
impact to bottom, at least that's what I see in the videos. As I wrote in another comment,
that's one heck of an engineering feat if it was planned that way. The WTC 7 seems to fall on
its bottom, which, at the difference of the fall of the twin towers, is consistent with all
the videos of controlled demolition that can be found around the web. Then, I think the
collapse of the twin towers represent enormous mass falling at high speed to the ground, and
I tend to think that such mass is not unlikely to shake the ground on which it falls and send
a shock wave that can in turn shake the foundations of buildings in the vicinity, for
instance WTC 7. In fact, I don't know and neither do truthers. They assume parametres for
their calculations that they can't be sure of.
Then again, even if the assumptions about 'how' are false, it doesn't mean that assumptions
about 'who' are too, and vice-versa. The thing is only those who did it know and we hardly
ever will.
The point is that whoever however did it, the war against Iraq was a crime against peace as
the very same Americans co-defined it in the Nuremberg Statute. "the war against Iraq was a
crime against peace"
@Patricus The
plotters moved explosive charges into he three buildings and there had to be thousands of
these weighing a great amount. It was then necessary to install the explosive equipment. No
one ever noticed?
Does anyone question that the aircraft actually struck the buildings?
The conspirators had to precisely coordinate the controlled explosions with the moment the
jets hit the buildings. Why didn't they just demolish the buildings with explosives then take
credit as some Islamic terror group? Why make a plot so complicated? This requires close
cooperation between Muslim terrorists and Israelis who are not often best friends.
If Israel engineered all this to get Americans active in the Middle East could anyone call
the end results a success? I can't see how Israel's position has improved.
I can't see how Israel's position has improved.
The opium poppies are growing again. Iraq is destroyed. Libya was disarmed and destroyed.
Syria has been neutralized for the past few years and is still struggling to recover from the
US/Saudi/Israeli supported ISIS. The Palestinians and Iran are both targets of American
conservatards. Welfare payments to Israel have been increased and a tripwire consisting of a
handful of American troops has been placed in Israel.
The United States, which has trained and armed some of the trapped gunmen and even as
recently as a year ago described the province as "al-Qaeda's largest safe haven since
9/11
Since we've been told a gazillion times al Qaeda did 9/11 and now, the Pentagon is using
it's resources to fund, equip, train and protect al Qaeda and their CIA-created spin-off
groups, the White House needs to answer this question:
Since the US is now supporting the terrorist outfit we've been told did 9/11, that means
that either al Qaeda didn't do 9/11 and we've been lied to ever since or the USG is now
officially a terrorist regime, since we support–in endless ways–the group that you
said attacked the US on 9/11, al Qaeda.
They can only choose one answer.
Did Ynet make a mistake and accidentally release the pre-written PR too early?
BREAKING NEWS
Report: Chlorine gas attacks in Idlib
Ynet|Published: 09.10.18 , 10:36
Syrian president Bashar Assad used chlorine gas in his attacks on the rebels last
stronghold in Idlib, reported an American source to the Wall Street Journal.
It has further been reported that US president Donald Trump threatened "a massive attack"
against Assad's regime if he commits a massacre in Idlib.
The United States, which has trained and armed some of the trapped gunmen and even as
recently as a year ago described the province as "al-Qaeda's largest safe haven since
9/11
Since we've been told a gazillion times al Qaeda did 9/11 and now, the Pentagon
is using it's resources to fund, equip, train and protect al Qaeda and their CIA-created
spin-off groups, the White House needs to answer this question:
Since the US is now supporting the terrorist outfit we've been told did 9/11, that
means that either al Qaeda didn't do 9/11 and we've been lied to ever since or the USG is now
officially a terrorist regime, since we support--in endless ways--the group that you said
attacked the US on 9/11, al Qaeda.
They can only choose one answer.
Did Ynet make a mistake and accidentally release the pre-written PR too early?
BREAKING NEWS
Report: Chlorine gas attacks in Idlib
Ynet|Published: 09.10.18 , 10:36
Syrian president Bashar Assad used chlorine gas in his attacks on the rebels last
stronghold in Idlib, reported an American source to the Wall Street Journal.
It has further been reported that US president Donald Trump threatened "a massive
attack" against Assad's regime if he commits a massacre in Idlib.
"Since the US is now supporting the terrorist outfit we've been told did 9/11,
that means that either al Qaeda didn't do 9/11 and we've been lied to ever since or
the US Government is now officially a terrorist regime, since we support the group that you
said attacked the US on 9/11, al Qaeda."
-- This is an excellent Q for the ADL, AIPAC, White House, State Department, satanic Pompeo,
"patriotic" Cheney (the greatest traitor to the USA citizenry), and the richly decorated US
brass serving the Jewish Power, financiers, and mega war-profiteers.
1. "The only way for Syria and Iran and Russia to defend Syria is to clearly tell
Washington, London, Paris (the main ZOGs) and Israel that attacks on Syria will be responded
to by attacks on Israeli military and intel sites. The introduction of any nuclear device of
any size will result in a full-scale nuclear response.
That is the only play otherwise Syria simply bleeds to death as t he Jews get their
puppets to keep fomenting terror and dropping bombs on SAA efforts to fight those
terrorists . We come to the moment when Russia either defends Syria by hitting Israel or
it decides to accept the Long Death of Anglo-Zionist megalomania."
2. "I really do wish Russia would just instantly bomb Israel. That would be the best way
to separate us from that satanic rope around our necks."
3. "I call everyone in the military to disobey orders for attacking anything in Syria
except Isis. Need to spread this on social media. Don't be mercenaries of Israel
."
-- Your "most victimized" have squandered all and any sympathy for your "incomparable
sufferings" by promoting the ongoing slaughter in the Middle East. The Jewish State and its
subordinate zionized US have become the gravest danger to humanity.
Over the next few days, as the government and the media accused Osama bin Laden and 19 Arabs
of being responsible for the attacks, I told a friend that what I was hearing wasn't
believable; the official story was full of holes. I am a born and bred New Yorker with a long
family history rooted in the NYC Fire and Police Departments, one grandfather having been the
Deputy Chief of the Fire Department, the highest ranking uniformed firefighter, and the other a
NYPD cop; a niece and her husband were NYPD detectives deeply involved in the response to that
day's attacks. Hearing the absurd official explanations and the deaths of so many innocent
people, including many hundreds of firefighters, cops, and emergency workers, I felt a
suspicious rage. It was a reaction that I couldn't fully explain, but it set me on a search for
the truth. I proceeded in fits and starts, but by the fall of 2004, with the help of the
extraordinary work of David Ray Griffin, Michael Ruppert, and other early skeptics, I could
articulate the reasons for my initial intuition. I set about creating and teaching a college
course on what had come to be called 9/11.
But I no longer refer to the events of that day by those numbers. Let me explain why.
By 2004 I had enough solid evidence to convince me that the U.S. government's claims (and
The 9/11 Commission Report ) were fictitious. They seemed so blatantly false that I
concluded the attacks were a deep-state intelligence operation whose purpose was to initiate a
national state of emergency to justify wars of aggression, known euphemistically as "the war on
terror." The sophistication of the attacks, and the lack of any proffered evidence for the
government's claims, suggested that a great deal of planning had been involved.
Yet I was chagrined and amazed by so many people's insouciant lack of interest in
questioning and researching the most important world event since the assassination of President
Kennedy. I understood the various psychological dimensions of this denial, the fear, cognitive
dissonance, etc., but I sensed something else as well. For so many people their minds seemed to
have been "made up" from the start. I found that many young people were the exceptions, while
most of their elders dared not question the official narrative. These included many prominent
leftist critics of American foreign policy, such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Alexander
Cockburn, and others, whose defenses of the official government and media explanations (when
they even made such defenses; often they just trashed skeptics as "9/11 conspiracy nuts," to
quote Cockburn) totally lacked any scientific or logical rigor or even knowledge of the facts.
Now that seventeen years have elapsed, this seems truer than ever. There is a long list of
leftists who refuse to examine matter to this very day. And most interestingly, they also do
the same with the assassination of JFK, the other key seminal event of recent American
history.
I kept thinking of the ongoing language and logic used to describe what had happened that
terrible day in 2001 and in the weeks to follow. It all seemed so clichéd and surreal,
as if set phrases had it been extracted from some secret manual, phrases that rung with an
historical resonance that cast a spell on the public, as if mass hypnosis were involved. People
seemed mesmerized as they spoke of the events in the official language that had been presented
to them.
So with the promptings of people like Graeme MacQueen, Lance deHaven-Smith, T.H. Meyer, et
al., and much study and research, I have concluded that my initial intuitive skepticism was
correct and that a process of linguistic mind-control was in place before, during, and after
the attacks. As with all good propaganda, the language had to be insinuated over time and
introduced through intermediaries. It had to seem "natural" and to flow out of events, not to
precede them. And it had to be repeated over and over again.
In summary form, I will list the language I believe "made up the minds" of those who have
refused to examine the government's claims about the September 11 attacks and the subsequent
anthrax attacks.
Pearl Harbor . As pointed out by David Ray Griffin and others, this
term was used in September 2000 in The Project for the New American Century's (PNAC) report,
"Rebuilding America's Defenses" (p.51). Its neo-con authors argued that the U.S. wouldn't be
able to attack Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. "absent some catastrophic event – like a
new Pearl Harbor." Then on January 11, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's "Space
Commission" warned that the U.S. could face a "space Pearl Harbor" if it weren't careful and
didn't increase space security. Rumsfeld urged support for the proposed U.S. national missile
defense system opposed by Russia and China and massive funding for the increased weaponization
of space. At the same time he went around handing out and recommending Pearl Harbor: Warning
and Decision (1962) by Roberta Wohlstetter, who had spent almost two decades working for
The Rand Corporation and who claimed that Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack that shocked U.S.
leaders. Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor – those words and images dominated
public consciousness for many months before 11 September 2001, and of course after. The film
Pearl Harbor , made with Pentagon assistance and a massive budget, was released on May
25, 2001 and was a box office hit. It was in the theatres throughout the summer. The thought of
the attack on Pearl Harbor (not a surprise to the U.S. government, but presented as such) was
in the news all summer despite the fact that the 60 th anniversary of that attack
was not until December 7, 2001, a more likely release date. So why was it released so early?
Once the September 11 attacks occurred, the Pearl Harbor analogy was "plucked out" of the
social atmosphere and used constantly, beginning immediately. Another "Day of Infamy," another
surprise attack blared the media and government officials. A New Pearl Harbor! George W. Bush
was widely reported to have had the time that night, after a busy day of flying hither and yon
to avoid the terrorists who for some reason had forgotten he was in a classroom in Florida, to
allegedly use it in his diary, writing that "the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century took
place today. We think it is Osama bin Laden." Shortly after the 50 th anniversary of
Pearl Harbor on December 7 th , Bush then formerly announced, referencing the
attacks of September 11, that the U. S. would withdraw from the ABM Treaty. The examples of
this Pearl Harbor/ September 11 analogy are manifold, but I am summarizing, so I will skip
giving them. Any casual researcher can confirm this. Homeland . This strange un-American
term, another WW II word associated with another enemy – Nazi Germany – was also
used many times by the neo-con authors of "Rebuilding America's Defenses." I doubt any average
American referred to this country by that term before. Of course it became the moniker for The
Department of Homeland Security, marrying home with security to form a comforting name that
simultaneously and unconsciously suggests a defense against Hitler-like evil coming from the
outside. Not coincidentally, Hitler introduced it into the Nazi propaganda vernacular at the
1934 Nuremberg rally. Both usages conjured up images of a home besieged by alien forces intent
on its destruction; thus preemptive action was in order. Now the Department of Homeland
Security with its massive budget is lodged permanently in popular consciousness. Ground
Zero . This is a third WWII ("the Good War") term first used at 11:55 A.M. on September 11
by Mark Walsh (aka "the Harley Guy" because he was wearing a Harley-Davidson tee shirt) in an
interview on the street by a Fox News reporter, Rick Leventhal. Identified as a Fox
free-lancer, Walsh also explained the Twin Towers collapse in a precise, well-rehearsed manner
that would be the same illogical and anti-scientific explanation later given by the government:
"mostly due to structural failure because the fire was too intense." Ground zero – a
nuclear bomb term first used by U.S. scientists to refer to the spot where they exploded the
first nuclear bomb in New Mexico in 1945 – became another meme adopted by the media that
suggested a nuclear attack had occurred or might in the future if the U.S. didn't act. The
nuclear scare was raised again and again by George W. Bush and U.S. officials in the days and
months following the attacks, although nuclear weapons were beside the point in terms of the 11
September attacks, but surely not as a scare tactic and as part of the plan to withdraw from
the ABM treaty that would be announced in December. But the conjoining of "nuclear" with
"ground zero" served to raise the fear factor dramatically. Ironically, the project to develop
the nuclear bomb was called the Manhattan Project and was headquartered at 270 Broadway, NYC, a
few short blocks north of the World Trade Center. The Unthinkable . This is another
nuclear term whose usage as linguistic mind control and propaganda is brilliantly analyzed by
Graeme MacQueen in the penultimate chapter of his very important book, The 2001Anthrax Deception . He notes the patterned use of this term before
and after September 11, while saying "the pattern may not signify a grand plan . It deserves
investigation and contemplation." He then presents a convincing case that the use of this term
couldn't be accidental. He notes how George W. Bush, in a major foreign policy speech on May 1,
2001, "gave informal public notice that the United States intended to withdraw unilaterally
from the ABM Treaty"; Bush said the U.S. must be willing to "rethink the unthinkable." This was
necessary because of terrorism and rogue states with "weapons of mass destruction." PNAC also
argued that the U.S. should withdraw from the treaty. A signatory to the treaty could only
withdraw after giving six months notice and because of "extraordinary events" that "jeopardized
its supreme interests." Once the September 11 attacks occurred, Bush rethought the unthinkable
and officially gave formal notice on December 13 to withdraw the U.S. from the ABM Treaty, as
previously noted. MacQueen specifies the many times different media used the term "unthinkable"
in October 2001 in reference to the anthrax attacks. He explicates its usage in one of the
anthrax letters – "The Unthinkabel" [sic]. He explains how the media that used the term
so often were at the time unaware of its usage in the anthrax letter since that letter's
content had not yet been revealed, and how the letter writer had mailed the letter before the
media started using the word. He makes a rock solid case showing the U.S. government's
complicity in the anthrax attacks and therefore in the Sept 11 attacks. While calling the use
of the term "unthinkable" in all its iterations "problematic," he writes, "The truth is that
the employment of 'the unthinkable' in this letter, when weight is given both to the meaning of
this term in U.S. strategic circles and to the other relevant uses of the term in 2001, points
us in the direction of the U.S. military and intelligence communities." I am reminded of
Orwell's point in 1984: "a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from
the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is
dependent on words." Thus the government and media's use of "unthinkable" becomes a classic
case of "doublethink." The unthinkable is unthinkable. 9/11 . This is the key usage that
has reverberated down the years around which the others revolve. It is an anomalous numerical
designation applied to an historical event, and obviously also the emergency telephone number.
Try to think of another numerical appellation for an important event in American history. It's
impossible. But if you have a good historical sense, you will remember that the cornerstone for
the Pentagon was lain on September 11, 1941, three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor,
and that the CIA engineered a coup against the Allende government in Chile on Sept 11, 1973.
Just strange coincidences? The future editor of The New York Times and Iraq war
promoter, Bill Keller, introduced the emergency phone connection on the morning of September
12th in a NY Times op-ed piece, "America's Emergency Line: 911." The linkage of the
attacks to a permanent national emergency was thus subliminally introduced, as Keller mentioned
Israel nine times and seven times compared the U.S. situation to that of Israel as a target for
terrorists. His first sentence reads: "An Israeli response to America's aptly dated wake-up
call might well be, 'Now you know.'" By referring to September 11 as 9/11, an endless national
emergency fear became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like
terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another ground zero or
holocaust. Mentioning Israel ("America is proud to be Israel's closest ally and best friend in
the world," George W. Bush would tell the Israeli Knesset) so many times, Keller was not very
subtly performing an act of legerdemain with multiple meanings. By comparing the victims of the
11 September attacks to Israeli "victims," he was implying, among other things, that the
Israelis are innocent victims who are not involved in terrorism, but are terrorized by
Palestinians, as Americans are terrorized by fanatical Muslims. Palestinians/Al-Qaeda.
Israel/U.S. Explicit and implicit parallels of the guilty and the innocent. Keller tells us who
the real killers are. His use of the term 9/11 is a term that pushes all the right buttons,
evoking unending social fear and anxiety. It is language as sorcery. It is propaganda at its
best. Even well-respected critics of the U.S. government's explanation use the term that has
become a fixture of public consciousness through endless repetition. As George W. Bush would
later put it, as he connected Saddam Hussein to "9/11" and pushed for the Iraq war, "We don't
want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." All the ingredients for a linguistic mind-control
smoothie had been blended.
I have concluded – and this is impossible to prove definitively because of the nature
of such propagandistic techniques – that the use of all these words/numbers is part of a
highly sophisticated linguistic mind-control campaign waged to create a narrative that has
lodged in the minds of hundreds of millions of people and is very hard to dislodge.
It is why I don't speak of "9/11" any more. I refer to those events as the attacks of
September 11, 2001, which is a mouth-full and not easily digested in the age of Twitter and
texting. But I am not sure how to be more succinct or how to undo the damage, except by writing
what I have written here.
The rapidity with which the new language of the war on terror appeared and took hold; the
synergy between terms and their mutual connections to WW II nomenclatures; and above all the
connections between many terms and the emergency motif of "9/11" and "9-1-1" – any one of
these factors alone, but certainly all of them together – raise the possibility that work
on this linguistic construct began long before 9/11 .It turns out that elite political crime,
even treason, may actually be official policy.
Needless to say, his use of the words "possibility" and "may" are in order when one sticks
to strict empiricism. However, when one reads his full text, it is apparent to me that he
considers these "coincidences" part of a conspiracy. I have also reached that conclusion. As
Thoreau put in his underappreciated humorous way, "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong,
as when you find a trout in the milk."
The evidence for linguistic mind control, while the subject of this essay, does not stand
alone, of course. It underpins the actual attacks of September 11 and the subsequent anthrax
attacks that are linked. The official explanations for these events by themselves do not stand
up to elementary logic and are patently false, as proven by thousands of well-respected
professional researchers from all walks of life – i.e. engineers, pilots, scientists,
architects, and scholars from many disciplines (see the upcoming 9/11 Unmasked: An
International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, to
be released September 11, 2018). To paraphrase the prescient Vince Salandria, who said it long
ago concerning the government's assassination of President Kennedy, the attacks of 2001 are "a
false mystery concealing state crimes." If one objectively studies the 2001 attacks together
with the language adopted to explain and preserve them in social memory, the "mystery" emerges
from the realm of the unthinkable and becomes utterable. "There is no mystery." The truth
becomes obvious.
How to communicate this when the corporate mainstream media serve the function of the
government's mockingbird (as in Operation Mockingbird), repeating and repeating and repeating
the same narrative in the same language; that is the difficult task we are faced with, but
there are signs today that breakthroughs are occurring, as growing numbers of international
academic scholars are pushing to incorporate the analysis of the official propaganda
surrounding 11 September 2001 into their work within the academy, a turnabout from years of
general silence. And more and more people are coming to realize that the official lies about 11
September are the biggest example of fake news in this century. Fake news used to justify
endless wars and the slaughter of so many innocents around the world.
Words have a power to enchant and mesmerize. Linguistic mind-control, especially when linked
to traumatic events such as the September 11 and the anthrax attacks, can strike people dumb
and blind. It often makes some subjects "unthinkable" and "unspeakable" (to quote Jim Douglass
quoting Thomas Merton in JFK and the Unspeakable : the unspeakable "is the void that
contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said.").
We need a new vocabulary to speak of these terrible things. Let us learn, as Chief Joseph
said, to speak with a straight tongue, and in language that doesn't do the enemies work of mind
control, but snaps the world awake to the truth of the mass murders of September 11, 2001 that
have been used to massacre millions across the world.
Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website ishttp://edwardcurtin.com/
It is really becoming unlearn why the Deep State hates Trump so much and tries to depose him. He became a typical neocon,
Republican Obama, another "bait and switch" artist with slogan "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) as equivalent to Obama's fake
"Change we can believe in".
May be Deep State has so many skeletons in the closet (811 is one) that he can only allow CIA controlled puppets as
Presidents (looks like Clinton, Bush and Obama were such puppets).
Notable quotes:
"... If you believe Trump is trying to remove neocons(Deep State) from the government, explain Bolton and many other Deep State denizens Trump has appointed. ..."
"... Drain the Swamp? Trump and his sidekick Jared K inhabit the murkiest depths of that Swamp. But people will say Tubby's being forced into a corner and just has to appoint neoCON psychopaths like Bolton. Then explain Trump appointing Nutty Nikki to the UN, at the start of his presidency? Israeli PM wanted Nutty in that job and after watching her unhinged performances in the UNGA, I see why; she's a Shabbos Goy, more than willing to do anything Israel asks, and BTW, keep me in mind for that POTUS opening, OK guys? ..."
"... MAGA was Trump's 'Hope and Change' mantra that many bought. ..."
"... Trump made and lost four multi-billion dollar fortunes while using NYC as his home base. Then made another multi-billion dollar fortune. One doesn't do that in NYC unless you're in bed with the same gangsters that have been looting this nation for decades, those TBTF Wall Street banks that us peasants are forced to bail-out every 10 or so years. ..."
"... Trump was bought and paid for a long time ago, now he's paying off his helpers by doing their dirty work around the word while the 'marks,' us Americans, get our pockets picked. ..."
Another great
article by Mr. Giraldi. If Trump can't get the neocons out of the government, who possibly
can?
In liberals derangement over Trump, and willingness to support anything that challenges his
2016 America First (anti-interventionist) campaign, they're willing to support the old order
for fear of an "isolationist," or realist one, taking its place. If there's a large scale
intervention, it'll be interesting to see what kind of left-liberal/dissident-right anti-war
movement emerges, and if that furthers the deformation of the normative "liberal"
"conservative" divide.
Another great article by Mr. Giraldi. If Trump can't get the neocons out of the
government, who possibly can?
If you believe Trump is trying to remove neocons(Deep State) from the government, explain
Bolton and many other Deep State denizens Trump has appointed.
If you believe Trump is trying to remove neocons(Deep State) from the government,
explain Bolton and many other Deep State denizens Trump has appointed.
Agreed.
Drain the Swamp? Trump and his sidekick Jared K inhabit the murkiest depths of that
Swamp. But people will say Tubby's being forced into a corner and just has to appoint neoCON
psychopaths like Bolton. Then explain Trump appointing Nutty Nikki to the UN, at the start of
his presidency? Israeli PM wanted Nutty in that job and after watching her unhinged
performances in the UNGA, I see why; she's a Shabbos Goy, more than willing to do anything
Israel asks, and BTW, keep me in mind for that POTUS opening, OK guys?
MAGA was Trump's 'Hope and Change' mantra that many bought.
Trump made and lost four multi-billion dollar fortunes while using NYC as his home base. Then
made another multi-billion dollar fortune. One doesn't do that in NYC unless you're in bed
with the same gangsters that have been looting this nation for decades, those TBTF Wall
Street banks that us peasants are forced to bail-out every 10 or so years.
Trump was bought and paid for a long time ago, now he's paying off his helpers by doing
their dirty work around the word while the 'marks,' us Americans, get our pockets picked.
Above, Laurent Guyénot mentions the 'Israeli art students' who had been working in the
NYC towers a few weeks before the 9-11 event, these 'students' covered by the New York Times,
which showed in photos a stack of cardboard boxes alongside the 'art students', the factory
code markings on the boxes later
traced as referencing components of bomb detonators
Francesco Cossiga, formerly President of Italy, flat-out said that the major governments
in Europe all privately recognise that 9-11 was run by the USA & Israel Cossiga speaking
to Italy's largest newspaper, the Corriere della Serra:
One problem with this hypothesis is that too many people were involved... And in any case the
real conspiracy should reside in Washington and have support of CIA and FBI.
The idea of covering planned demolition with fake terrorist attack is more plausible...
Notable quotes:
"... This "Mossad job" thesis has been gaining ground since Alan Sabrosky, a professor at the U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Military Academy, published in July 2012 an article entitled "Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake" , where he voiced his conviction that September 11 th was "a classic Mossad-orchestrated operation." ..."
"... ...Indeed suspicion of Israel's role should be natural to anyone aware of the reputation of the Mossad as: "Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act," in the words of a report of the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies quoted by the Washington Times , September 10 th , 2001 -- the day before the attacks. ..."
This "Mossad job" thesis has been gaining ground since Alan Sabrosky, a professor at the
U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Military Academy, published in July 2012 an
article entitled "Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake" , where he voiced
his conviction that September 11 th was "a classic Mossad-orchestrated
operation."
...Indeed suspicion of Israel's role should be natural to anyone aware of the reputation of
the Mossad as: "Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make
it look like a Palestinian/Arab act," in the words of a report of the U.S. Army School for
Advanced Military Studies quoted by the
Washington Times , September 10 th , 2001 -- the day before the
attacks.
Researchers who believe Israel orchestrated 9/11 cite the behavior of a group of individuals
who have come to be known as the "dancing Israelis" since their arrest, though their aim was to
pass as "dancing Arabs." Dressed in ostensibly "Middle Eastern" attire, they were seen by
various witnesses standing on the roof of a van parked in Jersey City, cheering and taking
photos of each other with the WTC in the background, at the very moment the first plane hit the
North Tower. The suspects then moved their van to another parking spot in Jersey City, where
other witnesses saw them deliver the same ostentatious celebrations.
One anonymous call to the police in Jersey City, reported the same day by NBC News,
mentioned "a white van, 2 or 3 guys in there. They look like Palestinians and going around a
building. [ ] I see the guy by Newark Airport mixing some junk and he has those sheikh
uniforms. [ ] He's dressed like an Arab." The police soon issued the following BOLO alert
(be-on-the-look-out) for a "Vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack. White, 2000
Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration with 'Urban Moving Systems' sign on back seen at
Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade
Center. Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent
explosion."
By chance, the van was intercepted around 4 pm, with five young men inside: Sivan and Paul
Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omer Marmari. Before any question was asked, the
driver, Sivan Kurzberg, burst out: "We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are
our problems. The Palestinians are your problem".The Kurzberg brothers were formally identified
as Mossad agents. All five officially worked for a moving company (a classic cover for
espionage) named Urban Moving Systems, whose owner, Dominik Otto Suter, fled the country for
Tel Aviv on September 14. [4] Christopher Bollyn,
Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, pp.
278–280.
ORDER IT NOW
This event was first reported the day after the attacks by journalist Paulo Lima in the New Jersey
newspaper The Bergen Record , based on "sources close to the investigation" who were
convinced of the suspects' foreknowledge of the morning's attacks: "It looked like they knew
what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park".The 579-page FBI report on the investigation
that followed (partially declassified in 2005) reveals several important facts. First, once
developed, the photos taken by the suspects while watching the North Tower on fire confirm
their attitudes of celebration: "They smiled, they hugged each other and they appeared to 'high
five' one another". To explain their contentment, the suspects said they were simply happy
that, thanks to these terrorist attacks, "the United States will take steps to stop terrorism
in the world". Yet at this point, before the second tower was hit, most Americans believed the
crash was an accident. The five Israelis were found connected to another company called Classic
International Movers, which employed five other Israelis arrested for their contacts with the
nineteen presumed suicide hijackers. In addition, one of the five suspects had called "an
individual in South America with authentic ties to Islamic militants in the middle east".
Finally, the FBI report states that the "The vehicle was also searched by a trained
bomb-sniffing dog which yielded a positive result for the presence of explosive traces".
After all this incriminating evidence comes the most puzzling passage of the report: its
conclusion that "the FBI no longer has any investigative interests in the detainees and they
should proceed with the appropriate immigration proceedings". In fact, a letter addressed to
the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, dated September 25, 2001, proves that, less
than two weeks after the events, the FBI federal headquarter had already decided to close the
investigation, asking that "The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service should proceed with
the appropriate immigration proceedings". The five "dancing Israelis", also known as "the high
fivers" , were detained 71 days in a Brooklyn prison, where they first refused, then
failed, lie detector tests. Finally, they were quietly returned to Israel under the minimal
charge of "visa violation." Three of them were then invited on an Israeli TV talk show in
November 2001, where one of them ingenuously declared: "Our purpose was simply to
document the event."
... ... ...
On March 14 th , 2002, an article in French newspaper Le Monde signed by
Sylvain Cypel also referred to the report, shortly before the French magazine Intelligence
Online made it fully accessible on the Internet .
[5] It
is quoted here from Bollyn's book and from Justin Raimondo, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the
Israeli Connection , iUniverse, 2003. It said that 140 Israeli spies, aged between 20
and 30, had been arrested since March 2001, while 60 more were arrested after September 11.
Generally posing as art students, they visited at least "36 sensitive sites of the Department
of Defense." "A majority of those questioned have stated they served in military intelligence,
electronic signal intercept, or explosive ordnance units. Some have been linked to high-ranking
officials in the Israeli military. One was the son of a two-star general, one served as the
bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army, one served in a Patriot mission unit." Another, Peer
Segalovitz, officer in the 605 Battalion of the Golan Heights, "acknowledged he could blow up
buildings, bridges, cars, and anything else that he needed to." [6] Christopher Bollyn,
Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, p. 159.
Of special interest is the mention that "the Hollywood, Florida, area seems to be a central
point for these individuals." [7] Justin Raimondo, The
Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection , iUniverse, 2003, p. 3. More than 30
out of the 140 fake Israeli students identified before 9/11 lived in that city of 140,000
inhabitants. And this city also happens to be the place where fifteen of the nineteen alleged
9/11 Islamist hijackers had regrouped (nine in Hollywood, six in the vicinity), including four
of the five supposed to have hijacked Flight AA11. What was the relationship between the
Israeli spies and the Islamist terrorists? We were told by mainstream news that the former were
monitoring the latter, but failed to report suspicious activities of these terrorists to
American authorities. From such a presentation, Israel comes out clean, since a spy agency
cannot be blamed for not sharing information with the country it is spying in. At worst, the
Israeli Intelligence can be accused of "letting it happen" -- a guarantee of impunity. In
reality, the Israeli agents were certainly not just monitoring the future "hijackers," but
financing and manipulating them, before disposing of them. We know that Israeli Hanan Serfaty,
who rented two flats near Mohamed Atta, had handled at least $100,000 in three months. And we
also learned from the New York Times on
February 19, 2009 , that Ali al-Jarrah, cousin of the alleged hijacker of Flight UA93 Ziad
al-Jarrah, had spent twenty-five years spying for the Mossad as an undercover agent
infiltrating the Palestinian resistance and Hezbollah.
Israeli agents apparently appreciate operating under the cover of artists. Shortly before
September 11, a group of fourteen Jewish "artists" under the name of Gelatin installed themselves on the
ninety-first floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. There, as a work of "street
art," they removed a window and extended a wooden balcony. To understand what role this piece
of scaffolding may have played, it must be remembered that the explosion supposedly resulting
from the impact of the Boeing AA11 on the North Tower took place between the ninety-second and
the ninety-eighth floors. With the only film of the impact on the North Tower being that of the
Naudet brothers, who are under suspicion for numerous reasons, many researchers are convinced
that no aircraft hit this tower, and that the explosion simulating the impact was provoked by
pre-planted explosives inside the tower.
... ... ...
Another chief of the cover-up was Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11
presidential Commission established in November 2002. Zelikow is a self-styled specialist in
the art of making "public myths" by "'searing' or 'molding' events [that] take on
'transcendent' importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing
generation passes from the scene" ( Wikipedia ). In December 1998, he
co-signed an article for Foreign Affairs entitled "Catastrophic Terrorism," in which he speculated on what
would have happened if the 1993 WTC bombing (already attributed to bin Laden) had been done
with a nuclear bomb: "An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of
thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even
millions, would be a watershed event in America's history.
It could involve loss of life and
property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans' fundamental sense of security
within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even
worse.
Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a
before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil
liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly
force." This is the man who controlled the governmental investigation on the 9/11 terror
attacks. Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, who nominally led the commission, revealed in their book
Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (2006), that the commission
"was set up to fail" from the beginning.
Zelikow, they claim, had already written a synopsis
and a conclusion for the final report before the first meeting. He controlled all the working
groups, prevented them from communicating with each other, and gave them as sole mission to
prove the official story; Team 1A, for example, was tasked to "tell the story of Al-Qaeda's
most successful operation -- the 9/11 attacks."
A tight control of mainstream media is perhaps the most delicate aspect of the whole
operation. I will not delve into that aspect, for we all know what to expect from the MSM. For
a groundbreaking argument on the extent to which 9/11 was psy-op orchestrated by MSM, I
recommend Ace
Baker's 2012 documentary 9/11 The Great American Psy-Opera, chapters 6, 7
and 8.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis acknowledges that U.S. instructors are
training Ukrainian military units at a base in western Ukraine. Washington also has
approved two important arms sales to Kiev's ground forces in just the past nine months. The
first transaction in December 2017 was limited to small arms that at least could be portrayed
as purely defensive weapons. That agreement included the export of Model M107A1 Sniper Systems,
ammunition, and associated parts and accessories, a sale valued at $41.5 million.
A transaction in April 2018 was more serious. Not only was it larger
($47 million) , it included far more lethal weaponry, particularly 210
Javelin anti-tank missiles -- the kind of weapons that Barack Obama's administration had
declined to give Kiev.
Needless to say, the Kremlin
was not pleased about either sale. Moreover, Congress soon passed legislation in May that
authorized $250 million in military assistance, including lethal weaponry, to Ukraine in 2019.
Congress had twice voted for military support on a similar scale during the last years of
Obama's administration, but the White House blocked implementation. The Trump administration
cleared that obstacle out of the way in December 2017 at the same time that it approved the
initial small-weapons sale. The passage of the May 2018 legislation means that the path is now
open for a dramatic escalation of U.S. military backing for Kiev.
On September 1, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker disclosed during an interview
with TheGuardian that Washington's future military aid to Kiev would
likely involve weapons sales to Ukraine's air force and navy as well as the army. "The Javelins
are mainly symbolic and it's not clear if they would ever be used," Aric Toler, a research
scholar at the Atlantic Council, asserted
. One could well dispute his sanguine conclusion, but even Toler conceded: "Support for the
Ukrainian navy and air defence would be a big deal. That would be far more significant."
Volker's cavalier attitude about U.S. arms sales to a government locked in a crisis with
Russia epitomizes the arrogance and tone-deaf nature of the views that too many U.S. foreign
policy officials exhibit regarding the sensitive Ukraine issue. "We can have a conversation
with Ukraine like we would with any other country about what do they need. I think that there's
going to be some discussion about naval capability because as you know their navy was basically
taken by Russia [when the Soviet Union dissolved]. And so they need to rebuild a navy and they
have very limited air capability as well. I think we'll have to look at air defence."
One suspects that Americans would be incensed at comparable actions by Moscow if the
geo-strategic situations were reversed. Imagine if Russia (even a democratic Russia) had
emerged from the wreckage of the Cold War as the undisputed global superpower, and a weakened
United States had to watch as the Kremlin expanded a powerful, Russian-led military alliance to
America's borders, conducted alliance war games within sight of U.S. territory, interfered in
Canada's internal political affairs to oust a democratically elected pro-American government,
and then pursued growing military ties with the new, anti-U.S. government in Ottawa. Yet that
would be disturbingly similar to what Washington has done regarding NATO policy and U.S.
relations with Ukraine.
Moreover, although Kiev's cheerleaders in the Western (especially U.S.) media like to
portray Ukraine as a beleaguered democracy that plays the role of David to Russia's evil
Goliath, the reality is far murkier. Putin's government overstates matters when it alleges that
Ukraine's 2014 Maidan revolution was a U.S.-orchestrated coup that brought outright fascists to
power in Kiev. Nevertheless, that version contains more than a little truth. Prominent,
powerful U.S. figures, most notably the late Senator John McCain and Assistant Secretary of
State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, openly sided with
demonstrators seeking to unseat Ukraine's elected government. Indeed, Nuland was caught on tape with U.S.
Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt scheming about the desired composition of a new government
in Kiev.
It is unfair to portray Ukraine's current administration led by President Petro Poroshenko
as a neo-fascist regime. Post-revolution elections appear to have been reasonably free and
fair, and there are major factions that are committed to genuine democratic values. But Ukraine
also is hardly a model of Western-style democracy. Not only is it afflicted with extensive
graft and corruption, but some extreme nationalist and even
neo-Nazi groups play a significant role in the "new" Ukraine. The notoriously fascist Azov
Battalion, for example, continues to occupy a prominent position in Kiev's efforts to defeat
separatists in Ukraine's eastern Donbass region. Alexander Zakharchenko, prime minister of the
self-declared Donetsk People's Republic in the pro-Russia rebel-occupied city of Donetsk,
was assassinated on September 1 and officials there and in Russia are blaming Kiev. The
Ukrainian government has denied involvement.
Other ultranationalist factions act as domestic militias that attempt to intimidate more
moderate Ukrainians. Even the Poroshenko government itself has adopted troubling censorship
measures and other autocratic policies. Officials in both the Obama and Trump administration
have taken a much too casual attitude toward U.S. cooperation
with extremist elements and a deeply flawed Ukrainian government.
Both the danger of stoking tensions with Moscow and becoming too close to a regime in Kiev
that exhibits disturbing features should caution the Trump administration against boosting
military aid to Ukraine. It is an unwise policy on strategic as well as moral grounds. Trump
administration officials should refuse to be intimidated or stampeded into forging a risky and
unsavory alliance with Kiev out of fear of being portrayed as excessively "soft" toward Russia.
Instead, the president and his advisers need to spurn efforts to increase U.S. support for
Ukraine. A good place to start would be to restore the Obama administration's refusal to
approve arms sales to Kiev. Washington must not pour gasoline on a geo-strategic fire that
could lead to a full-blown crisis between the United States and Russia.
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato
Institute and a contributing editor at TAC , is the author of 10 books, the contributing
editor of 10 books, and the author of more than 700 articles on international affairs .
"... Serious border enforcement, demanding our wealthy allies do more for their own security, infrastructure investment, the (campaign's) refutation of Reaganomics, acknowledging the costs of globalism, calling BS on all of the dominant left PC pieties and lies, were themes of Trump's campaign that were of value. ..."
Serious border enforcement, demanding our wealthy allies do more for their own security,
infrastructure investment, the (campaign's) refutation of Reaganomics, acknowledging the
costs of globalism, calling BS on all of the dominant left PC pieties and lies, were themes
of Trump's campaign that were of value.
Trump was able to harness and give voice to some very important energies. But being Trump,
he's poisoned these issues for a couple of generations. No serious leader will be able to
touch these things.
Add this to all the institutional and political ruin he has created.
"... "The role of the President of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel." -- Ann Lewis, speaking for Hillary Clinton, at the meeting for Jewish Leadership sponsored by the United Jewish Communities on March 18, 2008 ( Jewess Ann Lewis, is sister to Homo Congressman Barney Frank). ..."
"... "The US shouldn't give high clearances to Jews, because when asked to help, we're willing to do anything for the love of our country, Israel." -- Jew Spy Jonathan Pollard during interrogation by the FBI. Make note that Pollard was born in the US and his spying put America in serious nuclear risk back in the 1980's. ..."
"... "We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own ." -- Ari Shavit, an Israeli columnist, reflected sorrowfully on the wanton Israeli killing of more than a hundred Lebanese civilians in an essay reprinted (from the Israeli paper Ha'aretz) in the May 27, 1996, issue of the New York Times. ..."
@jilles dykstra Two remarks,
Sharon's famous statement 'we control America', and the fact that any, or nearly all Chiefs of Staff in the White House were jews.
"The role of the President of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel."
-- Ann Lewis, speaking for Hillary Clinton, at the meeting for Jewish Leadership sponsored by the United Jewish Communities on
March 18, 2008 ( Jewess Ann Lewis, is sister to Homo Congressman Barney Frank).
"[Shimon] Peres warned [Ariel] Sharon Wednesday that refusing to heed incessant American requests for a cease-fire with the
Palestinians would endanger Israeli interests and 'turn the US against us.' At this point, a furious Sharon reportedly turned
toward Peres, saying 'every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something
very clear, don't worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.'"
-- Kol Yisrael (Israel Radio), 3 October, 2001 (IAP)
"My opinion of Christian Zionists? They're scum. But don't tell them that. We need all the useful idiots we can get right now
"
"I know what America is. America is something that can easily be moved. Moved to the right direction."
-- Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. Bibi just happened to be in New York City on 9/11 and London during the
7/7 subway bombings.
"The US shouldn't give high clearances to Jews, because when asked to help, we're willing to do anything for the love of
our country, Israel." -- Jew Spy Jonathan Pollard during interrogation by the FBI. Make note that Pollard was born in the US and
his spying put America in serious nuclear risk back in the 1980's.
"The U.S. has no longer a government of goyim [Gentiles], but an administration in which the Jews are full partners in the
decision making at all levels. Perhaps the aspects of the Jewish religious law connected with the term 'government of goyim' should
be re-examined, since it is an outdated term in the U.S." -- The major Israeli newspaper, Maariv, "The Jews Who Run Clinton's
Court" on September 2, 1994.
"We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate,
and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own ." -- Ari Shavit, an Israeli
columnist, reflected sorrowfully on the wanton Israeli killing of more than a hundred Lebanese civilians in an essay reprinted
(from the Israeli paper Ha'aretz) in the May 27, 1996, issue of the New York Times.
"The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-White or non-European. And
they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.
We have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to ethnic bigotry for about a half century. That climate has not yet
been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible and makes constitutional constraints
against bigotry more practical than ever." -- Earl Raab, executive director emeritus of the Perlmutter Institute of Jewish Advocacy
(offshoot of the ADL), Jewish Bulletin, Feb. 19, 1993
"We Jews have spoiled the blood of all the races of Europe. Taken as a whole, everything is Jewdified. Our ideas animate everything.
Our spirit reigns over the world. We are the Lords." -- Dr. Kurt Munzer, "The Way to Zion."
"The Roosevelt Administration has selected more Jews to fill influential positions than any previous administration." -- Brooklyn
Jewish Examiner, October 20, 1933.
"The Revolution won't happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will
gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities
as we move towards universal egalitarianism." -- Max Horkheimer, Marxist Jew of the Frankfurt School
"The Jewish Question is being discussed by statesmen in a way more acute and compelling than ever before in the history of
the world. They can do whatever they want, but the nations of the earth well never be able to get away from this question. The
Jewish serpent will show its hydra's heads everywhere, blocking the way to a relaxation of international tensions. We Jews will
not allow peace in the world, however hard statesmen and peace advocates try to bring it about." -- London Jewish Chronicle, March
3, 1939
Under the heading of "A brief History of the Terms for Jew" in the 1980 Jewish Almanac is the following: "Strictly speaking
it is incorrect to call an Ancient Israelite a 'Jew' or to call a contemporary Jew an Israelite or a Hebrew." -- 1980 Jewish Almanac,
p. 3 (the writer is obliquely referring to the true history of the Eastern European Ashkenazim, or Khazars).
"The world revolution which we will experience will be exclusively our affair and will rest in our hands. This revolution will
tighten the Jewish domination over all other people." -- Le Peuple Juif, February 8, 1919.
"There is much in the fact of Bolshevism (Communism) itself, in the fact that so many Jews are Bolshevists, in the fact that
the ideals of Bolshevism at many points are consonant with the finest ideals of Judaism." -- The Jewish Chronicle, April 4, 1919.
"The Bolshevist revolution in Russia was the work of Jewish brains, of Jewish dissatisfaction, of Jewish planning, whose goal
is to create a NEW ORDER IN THE WORLD. What was performed in so excellent a way in Russia, thanks to Jewish brains, and because
of Jewish dissatisfaction, and by Jewish planning, shall also, through the same Jewish mental and physical forces, became a reality
all over the world." -- The American Hebrew Magazine – September 10, 1920. Sometimes misquoted to say "New World Order."
"Jewish history has been tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to the neighboring nations who have suffered them. Our major
vice of old as of today is parasitism. We are a people of vultures living on the labor and good fortune of the rest of the world."
-- Samuel Roth, "Jews Must Live," page 18.
"I hardly exaggerate. Jewish life consists of two elements: Extracting money and protesting." -- Nahum Goldmann "The Jewish
Paradox" 1978
Real, Factual, Honest, TRUTH'S Straight from the Mouth's & Pen's of .wait for it! .JEWS!
And, yet Still, the stupid, delusional, Naysayers, Jew Defenders, and all who remain in Deep Denial of such factual Truths
Will continue to be and act as such. They simply cannot ever admit they have been so totally wrong, all those year's now, eh.
What does their Judaic Zionist Talmud, Holiest of Holy Book's teach Jews, such as Trumps SIL Kushner? ..This for one example
..Religious teaching and belief of Talmudic Jewry.
"To communicate anything to a Goy about our religious relations would be equal to the killing of all Jews, for if the Goyim
knew what we teach about them, they would kill us openly." -- The Talmud: Libbre David 37
Rubin revealed that Ryan was in almost daily contact with Shai Masot, an Israeli embassy staffer in London, caught on camera
plotting to "take down" MPs perceived as hostile to Israel. Masot is also filmed discussing with leading figures in Conservative
Friends of Israel, including Maria Strizzolo, a senior aide to Education Minister Robert Halfon and a former political director
of CFI, about whether Strizzoli could help "take down" Foreign Office deputy, Sir Alan Duncan. The affair now looks like a
practice run for the operation mounted against Corbyn.
No doubt about that. Are these people in prison yet?
Looks like Zionists and Jews serve as scapegoats for neocons and neoliberalism induced problems ;-)
We probably should also talk about financial capital fifth column, which intersects with Zionist fifth column and is more powerful.
I do not think that without the power of financial fifth column Zionist fifth column would achieve such a prominence.
But in any case a better organized minority often dominates often disorganized majority: this is the essence of the iron law of
oligarchy.
We also can view Israel as yet another US state as the destiny of Israel is so closely lined to the the USA.
Too many people mix Zionists and neocons ("Full Spectrum Dominance" religious cult). As well as Zionists and neoliberals.
Notable quotes:
"... Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List ( ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
"... Two remarks, Sharon's famous statement 'we control America', and the fact that any, or nearly all Chiefs of Staff in the White House were zionists. ..."
Referring to Israel during an interview in August 1983, U.S. Navy Admiral and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas
Moorer said "I've never seen a President
-- I don't care who he is -- stand up to them. It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is
going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip these
people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens certainly don't have any idea what goes on."
Moorer was speaking generally but he had something specific in mind, namely the June 8, 1967, Israeli attack on the American intelligence
ship, U.S.S. Liberty, which killed 34 American crewmen and wounded 173 more. The ship was operating in international waters and was
displaying a huge stars and stripes but Israeli warplanes, which had identified the vessel as American, even strafed the life rafts
to kill those who were fleeing the sinking ship. It was the bloodiest attack on a U.S. Naval vessel ever outside of wartime and the
crew deservedly received the most medals every awarded to a single ship based on one action. Yes, it is one hell of a story of courage
under fire, but don't hold your breath waiting for Hollywood to make a movie out of it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, may he burn in hell, had ordered the recall of U.S. carrier planes sent to aid the stricken vessel,
saying that he would prefer the ship go to the bottom rather than embarrass his good friend Israel. Then came the cover-up from inside
the U.S. government. A hastily convened and summarily executed board of inquiry headed by Admiral John McCain, father of the senator,
deliberately interviewed only a handful of crewmen before determining that it was all an accident. The sailors who had survived the
attack as well as crewmen from Navy ships that arrived eventually to provide assistance were held incommunicado in Malta before being
threatened and sworn to secrecy. Since that time, repeated attempts to convene another genuine inquiry have been rebuffed by congress,
the White House and the Pentagon. Recently deceased Senator John McCain was particularly active in rejecting overtures from the Liberty
survivors.
The Liberty story demonstrates how Israel's ability to make the United States government act against its own interests has been
around for a long time. Grant Smith of IRMEP, cites how Israeli spying carried out by AIPAC in Washington back in the mid-1980s resulted
in a
lopsided trade agreement that currently benefits Israel by more than $10 billion per year on the top of direct grants from the
U.S. Treasury and billions in tax exempt "charitable" donations by American Jews.
If Admiral Moorer were still alive, I would have to tell him that the situation vis-ŕ-vis Israeli power is much worse now than
it was in 1983. He would be very interested in reading a
remarkable bit of research recently completed by Smith demonstrating exactly how Israel and its friends work from inside the
system to corrupt our political process and make the American government work in support of Jewish state interests. He describes
in some detail how the Israel Lobby has been able to manipulate the law enforcement community to protect and promote Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu's agenda.
A key component in the Israeli penetration of the U. S. government has been President George W. Bush's 2004 signing off on the
creation of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (OTFI) within the Department of the Treasury. The group's website
proclaims that it is responsible for "safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist
facilitators, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats,"
but it has from its founding been really all about safeguarding Israel's perceived interests. Grant Smith notes however, how "the
secretive office has a special blind spot for major terrorism generators, such as tax-exempt money laundering from the United States
into illegal Israeli settlements and proliferation financing and weapons technology smuggling into Israel's clandestine nuclear weapons
complex."
The first head of the office was Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levey, who operated secretly within the Treasury itself while
also coordinating regularly both with the Israeli government as well as with pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, WINEP and the Foundation
for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). Levey also traveled regularly to Israel on the taxpayer's dime, as did his three successors
in office.
Levey left OTFI in 2011 and was replaced by David Cohen.
It was reported then and subsequently
that counterterrorism position at OTFI were all filled by individuals who were both Jewish and Zionist. Cohen continued the Levey
tradition of resisting any transparency regarding what the office was up to. Smith reports how, on September 12, 2012, he
refused to answer reporter questions "about Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, and whether sanctioning Iran, a signatory
to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, over its internationally-inspected civilian nuclear program was an example
of endemic double standards at OTFI."
Cohen was in turn succeeded in 2015 by Adam Szubin who was then replaced in 2017 by Sigal Pearl Mandelker,
a former
and possibly current Israeli citizen . All of the heads of OTFI have therefore been Jewish and Zionist. All work closely with
the Israeli government, all travel to Israel frequently on "official business" and they all are in close liaison with the Jewish
groups most often described as part of the Israel Lobby. And the result has been that many of the victims of OTFI have been generally
enemies of Israel, as defined by Israel and America's Jewish lobbyists. OTFI's Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons
List (SDN), which includes sanctions and enforcement options , features many Middle Eastern Muslim and Christian names and
companies but nothing in any way comparable relating to Israel and Israelis, many of whom are well known to law enforcement otherwise
as weapons traffickers and money launderers . And once placed on the SDN there is no transparent way to be removed, even
if the entry was clearly in error.
Here in the United States, action by OTFI has meant that Islamic charities have been shut down and individuals exercising their
right to free speech through criticism of the Jewish state have been imprisoned. If the Israel Anti-Boycott Act succeeds in making
its way through congress the OTFI model will presumably become the law of the land when it comes to curtailing free speech whenever
Israel is involved.
The OTFI story is outrageous, but it is far from unique. There is a history of American Jews closely attached to Israel being
promoted by powerful and cash rich domestic lobbies to act on behalf of the Jewish state. To be sure, Jews who are Zionists are
vastly overrepresented in all government agencies that have anything at all to do with the Middle East and one can reasonably
argue that the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pockets of Jewish billionaires named Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban.
Neoconservatives, most of whom are Jewish, infiltrated the Pentagon under the Reagan Administration and they and their heirs in
government and media (Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol) were major players in the catastrophic
war with Iraq, which, one of the architects of that war, Philip Zelikow,
described in 2004
as being all about Israel. The same people are now in the forefront of urging war with Iran.
American policy towards the Middle East is largely being managed by a small circle of Orthodox Jews working for presidential son-in-law
Jared Kushner. One of them, David Friedman, is currently U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer who has no diplomatic
or foreign policy credentials, is a Zionist Jew who is also a supporter of the illegal settlements on the West Bank and a harsh critic
of other Jews who in any way disagree with the Israeli government. He has contributed money to settlement construction, which would
be illegal if OTFI were doing its job, and has consistently defended the settlers while condemning the Palestinians in speeches in
Israel. He endlessly and ignorantly repeats Israeli government talking points and has
tried to change the wording of State Department communications, seeking to delete the word "occupied" when describing Israel's
control of the West Bank. His humanity does not extend beyond his Jewishness, defending the Israeli shooting thousands of unarmed
Gazan protesters and the bombing of schools, hospitals and cultural centers. How he represents the United States and its citizens
who are not dual nationals must be considered a mystery.
Friedman's top adviser is Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone,
who is described by the Embassy as an expert in "Jewish education and pro-Israel advocacy." Once upon a time, in an apparently
more enlightened mood, Lightstone described Donald Trump as posing "an existential danger both to the Republican Party and to the
U.S." and even accused him of pandering to Jewish audiences. Apparently when opportunity knocked he changed his mind about his new
boss. Pre-government in 2014, Lightstone founded and headed Silent City, a Jewish advocacy group supported by extreme right-wing
money that opposed the Iran nuclear agreement and also worked to combat the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
He is reportedly still connected financially with anti BDS groups, which might be construed as a conflict of interest. As the Senior
Adviser to Friedman he is paid in excess of $200,000 plus free housing, additional cash benefits to include a 25% cost of living
allowance and a 10% hardship differential, medical insurance and eligibility for a pension.
So, what's in it all for Joe and Jill American Citizens? Not much. And for Israel? Anything, it wants, apparently. Sink a U.S.
warship? Okay. Tap the U.S. Treasury? Sure, just wait a minute and we'll draft some legislation that will give you even more money.
Create a treasury department agency run exclusively by Jews that operates secretly to punish critics of the Jewish state? No brainer.
Meanwhile a bunch of dudes at the Pentagon are dreaming of new wars for Israel and the White House sends an ignorant ambassador and
top aide overseas to represent the interests of the foreign government in the country where they are posted. Which just happens to
be Israel. Will it ever end?
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational
foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O.
Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is[email protected].
Since these groups are tax-free entities, gathering in at least 26 billion a year-not including money to synagogues–that's
close to 30 billion a year Americans have to make up for out of their wallets on April 15 of each year.
26 Billion Bucks: The Jewish Charity Industry Uncovered
The Forward's investigation has uncovered a tax-exempt Jewish communal apparatus that operates on the scale of a Fortune
500 company and focuses the largest share of its donor dollars on Israel.
This analysis doesn't include synagogues and other groups that avoid revealing their financial information by claiming
a religious exemption.
The Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence has been run by either American or Israeli Jews since its inception. Similar
to the US Treasury, where five out of the last eight Treasury heads were American Jews. One of the GOYIM appointed, Hank Paulson,
was installed to put an American face on the 2008 MBS generated economic crash, which enriched Wall Street before AND after, but
devastated Main Street.
After Israel realized it could attack the USS Liberty and not only not be held accountable, but the USG would help them protect
their lies, that gave them the incentive to start planning their biggest attack on the USA to date: the 9/11 False Flag. And like
the Liberty incident, the USG is protecting Israel by helping with the lies that keep the Big Lie alive, that Bin Laden and his
posse were the attackers, so Israel could use it's MSM buddies to generate an army of lies about Iraq; Libya, Syria and Iran,
three of which we've already destroyed with Iran in the cross-hairs of unhinged psychos like Bolton and Nutty Nikki.
Drain the Swamp? Hell, Trump and his minions like Shadow President Kushner come from the murkiest depths of that Swamp.
Bottom line? Either we WTFU and realize that our nation has been taken over by Israel, which is using our military might, wealth
and blood to do their dirty work in the ME, invading and busting up nations Israel wants destroyed, or we resign ourselves and
condemn our offspring to a lifetime of poverty, misery, tyranny and endless wars for the glory of Apartheid Israel.
I wonder at the reference for the claim that LBJ stated his preference that the LIBERTY sink rather than embarass Israel. I am
mindful of LBJ's apparent indifference to the violent deaths of thousands of US servicemen in another part of the world at that
time.
An Israeli journalist stated over 20 years ago that 'the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media [are] in our
hands'. His words were picked up by Joseph Sobran:
'In an essay reprinted in the May 27, 1996, issue of the New York Times Ari Shavit, an Israeli columnist, reflected
sorrowfully on the wanton Israeli killing of more than a hundred Lebanese civilians in April. "We killed them out of a certain
naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in
our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own "'
Sobran observes that 'this is interesting less for what it tells us about Israel than for what it tells us about America. Frank
discussion of Israel is permitted in Israel, as Mr Shavit's article illustrates. It's rarely permitted here. Charges of anti-Semitism
and a quiet but very effective boycott will be the reward of any journalist who calls attention to his own government's -- and
his own profession's -- servitude to Israeli interests.'
The bastards have the whole system wired. Their tenures at the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (OTFI) provided
a springboard to critical posititions within the architecture of 'the system'.
From Wikipedia:
In January 2012, Levey joined HSBC as the bank's Chief Legal Officer.
(trivia : In 2014 HSBC closed North London Central Mosque's account and some Muslim clients' and groups' accounts. Several
sources report that HSBC closed them because they donated their money to Palestine during the recent conflict)
and
In 2015 Cohen was appointed Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency . At the time of his appointment, some
speculated that Cohen's selection was due to the Obama administration's reluctance in picking someone with ties to past incidences
of CIA torture and extraordinary rendition. The post of deputy director has traditionally been filled by military officers or
intelligence community veterans.
(note the whitewashing of Cohen's appointment. No mention of the jewish/zionist angle.)
@rafael martorell thank you
for your articles but is time for you to explain how and why we get to such ridiculous,caricaturesque level of control,that cant
be explain even if the case we are inferiors to them. Everything is for sale in the USA, including our foreign policy and the
lives of our soldiers.
British immigrants are required to RENOUNCE UK Citizenship, to become US Citizens.
This is entirely proper.
Mexicans & Jews retain dual citizenship, without any problem. This is so wrong. Jews routinely serve in IDF & Mossad, but seldom
in the US Military. This is a GLARING form of disloyalty. Such 'citizenship' should be revoked, and the holders deported. IMHPO.
I suspect that Jews & Mexicans on SCOTUS, are at the bottom of this.
Will it ever end? Mr. Giraldi asks (rhetorically). Trump got something right when he said that Media was the enemy, but he didn't
say who owned Media. "Masters of Discourse" Israel Shamir calls Jews who control what we see and hear. Since Media lies to us
24/7, and since Congress is scared to death of AIPAC's power and money (Netanyahu's 29 standing ovations before that group of
pathetic whores), nothing will change until Media changes ownership and Congress is subjected to campaign finance reform. No more
"campaign contributions" (bribes).
It is terrifying but both US warmongering and Israeli control will only end when the dollar system collapses. That's a very sad
thing to say but Israel will abandon the US like a used condom if the US fails economically.
When LBJ ordered the recall of the fighters that were flying to the rescue of the Liberty, he said that he didn't want to embarrass
his ally. This was at a time when the sailors on the Liberty had not yet identified the nationality of the attackers. People in
the White House knew it was Israel before the sailors on the Liberty knew. Think about the implications of that.
Any time a political system can be hijacked by a foreign power and forced to do the bidding of that foreign power that political
system has to be replaced.
The American political system based on republican and constitutional government has collapsed, largely because the Jewish people
have made a total, complete and utter mockery out of that system. The so-called American "democracy" is a code word for plutocracy.
Wherever you have a "democracy" what you have in practice is a plutocracy.
The Jews love plutocracies because with their money they can literally buy politicians. Furthermore, the non-Jewish populations
cannot defend themselves from the Jewish power in these so-called "democracies".
It will take the proverbial man on the white horse to remedy this situation, i.e., a Caesar, Napoleon, Mussolini or Hitler.
If any of you reading this think that this collapsed political system can be resurrected, well then you are living in la-la land.
OTFI's Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN), which includes sanctions and enforcement options ,
features many Middle Eastern Muslim and Christian names and companies but nothing in any way comparable relating to Israel
and Israelis, many of whom are well known to law enforcement otherwise as weapons traffickers and money launderers .
OTFI SDN features names only, of those individuals/businesses/organisations which are engaged in illegal activities against
the United States and her interests.
Your well-known bias clouds your vision.
Went through the list cursorily and looked for names I knew to be criminally engaged and thus under U.S. surveillance and sanctions.
Names with a Jewish ethnicity, that is. Lo behold, they are indeed there:
Mikhail Abramov
Valerii Abramov
Nicolai Shusanshvili a.k.a Moshe Israel
Arkadevic Rotenberg
Roman Rotenberg
I am sure there are more.
Don't suppose any clarification, let alone a retraction, of your demonstrated hatred of Jews and the resulting bias would be
forthcoming
Let me explain to you stupid goyim why the Jews dominate you.
Take 2 groups of people of roughly equal ability –
Group A – divides its time between making money and quality of life activities. Has aesthetic and moral limits on what its
willing to do to make money.
Group B – devotes 98 percent if it's time to making money. No aesthetic and moral limits on what its willing to do to make
money.
Group B will swiftly dominate and concentrate all wealth in its hands, even if it is no more talented than group A, and vastly
outnumbered by group A, and will reshape society to fit its agenda of money uber alles.
That's all there is to it. There is no mystery.
Now there are literally only 2 ways, and only 2 ways, to fight this –
1) Group A must learn to devote 98 percent of its time to making money and have no moral or aesthetic limits.
2) Group A must practice collective action to preserve its leisured way of life and exclude group B from too much power.
This is why individualism was the greatest gift to people who care only about money.
There is no use complaining about Jews. They are what they are. Money to Jews are "God points" – the more you have the closer
you are to God. Puritans had the same idea later.
The problem transcends Jews.
Lets say 80 percent of Jews are willing to sacrifice their lives to money, but only 20 percent of gentiles are. Even in a country
with no Jews, that 20 percent of gentiles will dominate and shape the county to fit its joyless agenda and oppress everyone else.
That's why in England the powerful classes acted as horrifically as Jews with things like the Land Enclosures and the rape
of the monasteries and the like.
People who care only for money will always dominate people who have other interests in life – it is a law of nature, easy to
understand, not at all mysterious. Unless the majority who care less for money are willing to band together to put a check
on the joyless minority.
When individualism was accepted, the dominance if the joyless minority was assured.
@Johnny Rottenborough An Israeli
journalist stated over 20 years ago that 'the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media [are] in our hands'. His
words were picked up by Joseph Sobran:
'In an essay reprinted in the May 27, 1996, issue of the New York Times Ari Shavit, an Israeli columnist, reflected
sorrowfully on the wanton Israeli killing of more than a hundred Lebanese civilians in April. "We killed them out of a certain
naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in
our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own "'
Sobran observes that 'this is interesting less for what it tells us about Israel than for what it tells us about America. Frank
discussion of Israel is permitted in Israel, as Mr Shavit's article illustrates. It's rarely permitted here. Charges of anti-Semitism
and a quiet but very effective boycott will be the reward of any journalist who calls attention to his own government's -- and
his own profession's -- servitude to Israeli interests.' What ever happened to Rick Sanchez? LOL!!!
On September 30, 2010, Sanchez was interviewed on Sirius XM's radio show Stand Up With Pete Dominick. Sanchez's interview
occurred on the final day of his show in the 8 p.m. time slot, and he was reportedly angry about being replaced by CNN's new
Parker Spitzer talk show[11][12] as well as the occasional jokes made at his expense on The Daily Show:
It's not just the Right that does this. 'Cause I've known a lot of, you know, elite Northeast establishment liberals
that may not use this as a business model, but deep down when they look at a guy like me, they see a guy automatically who
belongs in the second tier and not the top tier . I had a guy who works here at CNN who's a top brass come to me one day and
say, 'You know what, I don't want you anchoring anymore. I really don't see you as an anchor. I see you more as a reporter.
I see you more as a John Quińones .' Did he not realize that he was telling me, 'When I see you, I think of Hispanic reporters'?
'Cause in his mind, I can't be an anchor. An anchor's what you give the high-profile White guys, you know? So he knocks me
down to that and compares me to that, and it happens all the time. I think to a certain extent Jon Stewart and Colbert are
the same way. I think Jon Stewart's a bigot.[11]
After Dominick questioned him, Sanchez retracted the term, "bigot," and referred to Stewart as "prejudicial" and "uninformed,"[13]
but he defended feeling discriminated, saying, "He's upset that someone of my ilk is almost at his level" and that Stewart
is "not just a comedian. He can make and break careers."[14] When queried on the issue of whether Stewart likewise belonged
to a minority group on account of his Jewish faith, Sanchez responded: Yeah, very powerless people. [laughs] He's such a minority. I mean, you know, please. What -- are you kidding? I'm telling
you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart.
And to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority?[11][12]
A day after his remarks,[15] CNN announced that Sanchez was no longer employed with the company.[11] Despite his firing, upon leaving CNN, Sanchez said, "I want to go on record to say that I have nothing but the highest
regard for CNN and for my six wonderful years with them. I appreciate every opportunity that they have given me, and it has
been a wonderful experience working for them."[20]
Apology for comments In the days after the incident, Sanchez apologized several times. In an appearance on Good Morning America, Sanchez
told George Stephanopoulos, "I said some things I shouldn't have said. They were wrong. Not only were they wrong, they were
offensive." He added, "I apologize and it was wrong for me to be so careless and so inartful. But it happened and I can't take
it back and, you know what, now I have to stand up and be responsible."[21] Sanchez also called and personally apologized to Stewart. He released a statement expressing regret for his "inartful"
comments, adding "I am very much opposed to hate and intolerance, in any form, and I have frequently spoken out against prejudice."[20][22]
On October 20, 2010, Jon Stewart told Larry King that Sanchez should not have been fired for what Sanchez said in the radio
interview; Stewart called the firing "absolute insanity",[23] and stating that he was not "personally hurt".[24]
In a letter to Abraham Foxman -- the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) -- Sanchez apologized once again, writing, "[T]here
are no words strong enough for me to express my regret and sorrow over what I said. It was offensive, and I deeply, sincerely
and unequivocally apologize for the hurt that I have caused. I tell my children that when they make a mistake, they should
take responsibility, atone and work to repair whatever they have done. I cannot undo the offense or controversy I caused; all
I can do is to try and learn from this experience and strive to become a better person."
Following a meeting with Foxman, Foxman said Sanchez can now "put the matter to rest", adding that he hoped Sanchez can now
move on with his life and work.
After his groveling (appology tour) to Big Joo Sanchez was able to resuscitate his journalistic career to some extent
but at a much lower level.
Beware the POWER of the CABAL
Trumps comments that 'he would meet with the Iranians', even though his Treasury Department is destroying their country, is, I
believe, a dog whistle to American Nationalists like me, that he is not completely controlled by the evil Cabal. I certainly hope
so but we shall see.
That comment that Trump 'would meet with the Iranians' must have gotten the Cabal's underwear all in knots but some like Alan
'Douche-a-witz' still stayed on the Trump support team vs. the Deep State. Interestink times. (Grin)
@NoseytheDuke Good thinking
Philip Giraldi, it really is time for a movie to be made about the attempted sinking of the USS Liberty and the wilful killing
of so many US sailors. It should be done without any Hollywood backing and distribution along the lines of Mel Gibson's Passion
of the Christ. (Hey Mel, do you read The Unz Review? You should).
It could easily be crowdfunded if necessary, with survivors of the incident serving as consultants. There are loads of 60s
era military surplus items available on the cheap, including aircraft and I would imagine a massive response to a call for actors
and extras. It certainly would help kick open the door to awareness of where the real threat to America lies. Its not just about
the jews, its about the american elites too. The commoners, the fatties, the crackers, the trailer thrash, the single mums, the
idiots awaiting the second coming will be the last to know what is now becoming common knowledge the world over.
I'm no genius or economist but reading online, I understood it well. The common minimum wage burger slinger will support the empire,
the jews and the dollar when he understands what uncle sam is doing and so will you if you happen to be american.
@AaronB Let me explain to you
stupid goyim why the Jews dominate you.
Take 2 groups of people of roughly equal ability -
Group A - divides its time between making money and quality of life activities. Has aesthetic and moral limits on what its
willing to do to make money.
Group B - devotes 98 percent if it's time to making money. No aesthetic and moral limits on what its willing to do to make
money.
Group B will swiftly dominate and concentrate all wealth in its hands, even if it is no more talented than group A, and vastly
outnumbered by group A, and will reshape society to fit its agenda of money uber alles.
That's all there is to it. There is no mystery.
Now there are literally only 2 ways, and only 2 ways, to fight this -
1) Group A must learn to devote 98 percent of its time to making money and have no moral or aesthetic limits.
2) Group A must practice collective action to preserve its leisured way of life and exclude group B from too much power.
This is why individualism was the greatest gift to people who care only about money.
There is no use complaining about Jews. They are what they are. Money to Jews are "God points" - the more you have the closer
you are to God. Puritans had the same idea later.
The problem transcends Jews.
Lets say 80 percent of Jews are willing to sacrifice their lives to money, but only 20 percent of gentiles are. Even in a country
with no Jews, that 20 percent of gentiles will dominate and shape the county to fit its joyless agenda and oppress everyone else.
That's why in England the powerful classes acted as horrifically as Jews with things like the Land Enclosures and the rape
of the monasteries and the like.
People who care only for money will always dominate people who have other interests in life - it is a law of nature, easy to
understand, not at all mysterious. Unless the majority who care less for money are willing to band together to put a check
on the joyless minority.
When individualism was accepted, the dominance if the joyless minority was assured. Spot on.
Put it another way: people who are dishonest, corrupt, ruthless and unscrupulous will always win over people who are honest,
trusting and law abiding, and make them look like fools, i.e. the impure at heart will always win over the pure at heart.
This doesn't just apply to Jews, it applies to basically all non-WASPs. That's why groups like Indians and Chinese are also
doing well in the US, they are almost equally as dishonest, corrupt, ruthless and unscrupulous as the Jews, the only difference
is, the Chinese are not nearly as power hungry as the Jews or the Indians.
The only truly honest people in the world are Germans and Scandinavians. That's why they did not colonize the 3rd world or
engaged in the slave trade like the rest of Europe. The British aristocracy has been too deeply infiltrated by Jews for too long,
they've long lost their sense of honor and honesty. America became a Jew run country since LBJ came to power, it's basically Israel
x 100. It is no longer a benevolent superpower, not since the CIA was formed. It is now the military wing of Israel, Inc.
@ChuckOrloski Hi RVBlake,
... Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D. AIPAC-approved/RI) now opines upon how the Zionist Chief Justice Roberts' Supreme Court was
prejudiced against N.W.O.'s "constructed" & subsequent approval of downsized worker "Unions."
(zzZigh)
... Selah, a remake of the ole cowboy song, "Home, home on The Homeland range..., where, selah, the cloud-cover is sunny all day!"
Thanks, RVBlake. Censored Al-Jazeera documentary shows how the Israel lobby spies and blackmail US citizens on US soil in violation
of the law.
Information about the censored documentary was posted by Geokat62 on the precedent P. Giraldi's article: French journalist
Alain Gresh was given a private screening and wrote a headline article in "Le Monde Diplomatique".
The Israel lobby deploys a web of systematic, anonymous and secure spying techniques on US citizens who oppose Zionist policies,
such as BDS activists. It gathers personal and confidential information on these individuals, then puts this information on line
to ruin their lives.
It also digs up any political activity or comments that could be twisted and misinterpreted, and blackmails employers with anti-Semitism
accusations, should they not sack the targeted individuals.
This is just institutionalised blackmail on US soil, for the benefit of a foreign power, in total impunity.
Full article in English version:
Put it another way: people who are dishonest, corrupt, ruthless and unscrupulous will always win over people who are honest,
trusting and law abiding, and make them look like fools, i.e. the impure at heart will always win over the pure at heart.
This doesn't just apply to Jews, it applies to basically all non-WASPs. That's why groups like Indians and Chinese are also
doing well in the US, they are almost equally as dishonest, corrupt, ruthless and unscrupulous as the Jews, the only difference
is, the Chinese are not nearly as power hungry as the Jews or the Indians.
The only truly honest people in the world are Germans and Scandinavians. That's why they did not colonize the 3rd world or
engaged in the slave trade like the rest of Europe. The British aristocracy has been too deeply infiltrated by Jews for too long,
they've long lost their sense of honor and honesty. America became a Jew run country since LBJ came to power, it's basically Israel
x 100. It is no longer a benevolent superpower, not since the CIA was formed. It is now the military wing of Israel, Inc. There
are no innocent groups. Different groups are innocent at different times.
@AaronB But the monarchs and
the nobility themselves turn rapacious - Henry 8 couldn't control his greed and raped the monasteries. Later, British nobility
stole everyone's land and impoverished and starved millions out of greed.
Plus, the nobility themselves employed Jews as ruthless tax farmers and moneylenders! The Jews were the proxies of the nobility
so the anger of the people would be deflected.
Examples across the world are legion.
People who care only about money always win against relaxed people who enjoy life - it's utterly un-mysterious and easily understandable.
There is no political system that can corrall greed. Religion controls it for a time then becomes a vehicle for greed and oppression.
It's a cycle. Greed rises, rises, then makes everything go to shit and collapse, then there is breathing room and life becomes
relatively enjoyable again (a period that greedy people generally call the Dark Ages, or the Middle Ages). "It's a cycle. Greed
rises, rises, then makes everything go to shit and collapse, then there is breathing room and life becomes relatively enjoyable
again (a period that greedy people generally call the Dark Ages, or the Middle Ages)."
You are too pessimistic. For the majority of the time humans have existed there was no such problem: a big man had to give
a party and spend his wealth. These are problems of later times. It took humans 8000 years to get rid of slavery. Earlier there
was no slavery as there was no work where to put slaves, today slaves are not needed as there are machines, but for a long time
they were needed. There will be a time when collecting wealth by doing anything will be impossible, but this time will have to
wait until development can be stopped. There are theoretical systems where these problems do not appear. No finance, no investment,
no interest, no accumulation of money, only maintaining technical infra. It is not yet, but how long lasted the dominance of agriculture,
and it is no more. But I think the problem is different, it is not some people thinking only of money. I think it is old capital
and acting as a group against all others. Genetic admixture would break the group and old capital can be destroyed. Has been done
before.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, may he burn in hell, had ordered the recall of U.S. carrier planes sent to aid the stricken
vessel, saying that he would prefer the ship go to the bottom rather than embarrass his good friend Israel.
In addition to the above mentioned transgression, he signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, he promoted federal
funding for education, he promoted the war on poverty, he promoted gun control and many other Great Society horse shit programs.
LBJ was an evil, corrupt son of a bitch. He killed over 58,000 Americans in the god damn useless Vietnam 'war'.
To be sure, Jews who are Zionists are vastly overrepresented in all government agencies that have anything at all to do
with the Middle East and one can reasonably argue that the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pockets of Jewish billionaires
named Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban.
This situation can be directly blamed on Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1976 and exacerbated by continuing dumb shit SC decisions
First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission
President Lyndon B. Johnson, may he burn in hell, had ordered the recall of U.S. carrier planes sent to aid the stricken vessel,
saying that he would prefer the ship go to the bottom rather than embarrass his good friend Israel.
In addition to the above mentioned transgression, he signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, he promoted federal funding
for education, he promoted the war on poverty, he promoted gun control and many other Great Society horse shit programs.
LBJ was an evil, corrupt son of a bitch. He killed over 58,000 Americans in the god damn useless Vietnam 'war'.
To be sure, Jews who are Zionists are vastly overrepresented in all government agencies that have anything at all to do with
the Middle East and one can reasonably argue that the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pockets of Jewish billionaires
named Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban.
This situation can be directly blamed on Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1976 and exacerbated by continuing dumb shit SC decisions
First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission
Will it ever end?
Not through electoral means.
Will it ever end?
Not through electoral means.
A key problem of our Western so-called democracies is that they are "representative." This might have been conducive to getting
stuff done in the age of horse and carriage, but nowadays it is no longer necessary; it is perfectly possible to let the people
vote on the latest raise for the Pentagon, if they bring a motion. In Switzerland this is done routinely; for example, a while
ago the people threw out the government's decision to buy the F-35 for the Swiss air force.
A purely representative democracy is designed to withhold power from the public and hand it over to the rich and their
lobbies. Direct democracy would be a powerful weapon against corruption – no lobby can bribe the whole of the population. Of course,
it does not immediately solve problems like control of mass media etc.; but nevertheless it is plain that Switzerland, the world's
most democratic country, is also prosperous, well-governed, with sound finances and without brain-dead foreign policy adventures.
Direct democracy has to potential to provide greatly improved governance, and it is a cause people on the left and the right
can all agree on.
I keep wishing that Mr. Giraldi would write a series of articles (book) about the COSTS (specially economic/human) of USA blind
support for Israli Zio establishment. Often times the world praises Israeli making the "dessert bloom" well any nation could do
so if that nation enjoyed secure perpetual markets, subsidies (US agricultural Dept) in the US. and Europe, which Palestinians
are often denied. Under ZIO banking threats ,Global Airlines must stop in Israeli Airport eventhought it adds heavy economic burdens
to their rolls$$. While Israel pushes America to enforce Trade/Arms/Finance sanctions and embargos against other nations it seem
that Israel is readily available to trade, sell weapons, and finance that very nations that AIPAC black listed!!! in fact US embargoes
are an economic boom for Israeli Defense Military industries. While Tel Aviv emerges a major technological powerhouse (Talpiot)
at the expense of American Tech Industries that usually powerless to stop Israeli theft, fraud, spying and outright robberies
of corporate/Pentagon/Secret tech many US cities plunge into chaos, Bankruptcy, industrial, manufacturing dilapidation such as
Detroit, Chicago, Flynn, etc. Perhaps it would help Americans understand the consequences of uncritical support for Israel once
they realize that their Children are paying for trillions in debt enslavement, worthless currency, shrinking middle class, expanding
poverty, decaying: infrastructure, schools, medical services, education etc. and of course the endless dying and bleeding of many
young Americans in endless wars that do NOT benefit their country at all only Israel profits from them. Couple with the political
costs for USA alienation, and hatred for America, and the constant of terrorist attacks targeting major urban cities in the Western
World, spreading death and destruction all over the world which may bring a global confrontation between Muslims/Christians countries
that only Israel can benefit. It remains to consider how long can USA sustain economically/politically/culturally such support
for Jewish-Zio-Israeli interests while ignoring its own internal/external well being (population/geographic) and national cohesiveness.
Now however, when through the malice of fate a large part of these Jews whom we fought against are alive, I must concede that
fate must have wanted it so. I always claimed that we were fighting against a foe who through thousands of years of learning
and development had become superior to us.
I no longer remember exactly when, but it was even before Rome itself had been founded that the Jews could already write.
It is very depressing for me to think of that people writing laws over 6,000 years of written history. But it tells me that
they must be a people of the first magnitude, for lawgivers have always been great.
- http://archive.is/wl8On#selection-785.5-789.335
Life Magazine, November 28, 1960 – Carroll Baker
Table of Contents
Eichmann's story
World War, 1939-1945 (War criminals), Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) [p.] 20
" think of that people writing laws over 6,000 years of written history."
Wow, thanks for that history lesson. Always thought that the Code of Hammurabi was one of the first times laws were put into
written form, that the Law of Moses came later?
The Code of Hammurabi was one of the only sets of laws in the ancient Near East and also one of the first forms of law
. The code of laws was arranged in orderly groups, so that all who read the laws would know what was required of them.[10]
Earlier collections of laws include the Code of Ur-Nammu, king of Ur (c. 2050 BC), the Laws of Eshnunna (c. 1930 BC) and the
codex of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin (c. 1870 BC), while later ones include the Hittite laws, the Assyrian laws, and Mosaic Law.
@Eighthman It is terrifying
but both US warmongering and Israeli control will only end when the dollar system collapses. That's a very sad thing to say but
Israel will abandon the US like a used condom if the US fails economically.
Israel will abandon the US like a used condom if the US fails economically.
Israel will abandon the US like a used condom WHEN the US fails economically.
I fixed that for you. It will be by design too but the military power will be exploited first.
Yes, it's a disgraceful situation that the US government (Pentagon, Treasury, Congress, etc) has been co-opted Israel-firsters.
Indeed, these pro-Israel Zionists are morally and ethically bankrupt and have no qualms with taking over and dictating US foreign
policy for Israel's gain.
And while articles like this certainly have merit, the 'blame game' can only go so far before it becomes sore loser whining.
Don't like the situation as it stands? Then do something about it besides whingeing.
There is a need for reflection: how did this sad state of affairs come to pass? Why didn't government and military leadership
stop this silent Jewish-Zionist-Israeli coup from happening? In a way, it is the fault of gentile, or goy Americans for not being
able to recognize and to have stopped it dead in its tracks.
The Jews in general are much more closely knit than goys are. This is why they beat you: they work as a very loyal, tight-knit
team; whereas gentiles, WASPS etc are largely atomized. This is the goy's main failing: it's 'everybody's on his/her own'; there
is no community, no teamwork, no 'we're in this together' organization that the Jews have.
Even on the family level, Jewish families are much more close-knit. They look out for each other, help each other get jobs,
very good networking. Whites just don't do this, so many dysfunctional, fucked up families, broken families .families that only
see each other at Christmas–and beyond that 'don't bother me!'. Hard to face, but quite true. Goys are atomized. This is why they
lost.
Or look at how a synagogue works compared to a roman catholic church. In a synagogue, they are talking about what is really
happening now, who needs a job, who is starting a new business and go and be a customer there; or a special event everybody must
go to, etc. It is alive, a thriving central hub for the local Jewish community that has real relevance. On the other hand a roman
catholic church is a bore! Some old fart reading passages from the bible .people in the pews nodding off .nobody really gives
a shit. The only thing on their mind is when this raging bore of a church service will end so they can leave–and pronto! You know
it's true. That's why numbers of attendees to churches in USA are in a tailspin.
So my main point is this: the Jews beat you because they are so much better organized and integrated. Because of this they
hijacked the government for their own gain.
Geo, once again I am glad to observe that you are amongst the precious few on UR perfectly capable of being objective whilst
engaging in debate.
Appreciate the compliment, Sam.
But, speaking of objectivity:
Moreover, I shall be happier still, when he takes the trouble to distinguish between the vast majority of innocent Jewish citizens
of America and "America's Jews are Driving America's ".
would this modest revision satisfy your thirst for objectivity:
"America's Organized Jews (who are generally supported by the Jewish Community, at large) are Driving America's Wars."
If it does, consider it implied, as the latter wouldn't do as snappy title, would it? "America's Leaders are Driving America's
Wars"
By all means, name all the leaders: top, middle and lower in the article. By all means, observe that a significant group of
middle leadership were Jewish. But don't paint the rest of American Jewry with the same brush. They have nothing to do with it.
As you know I've looked into the financial contributions coming to the lobbies. The contributions from about the top 0.1% account
for 99.99% of the total. And that is no distortion of facts. Why would you hold the ordinary Jewish dentist or professor responsible
for the actions of an Adelson anymore than you would the actions of the ordinary gentile professor or engineer for the actions
of a Koch or Walton?
@Sam Shama Bibi is
a showman, that much is clear. You seem to be making equivalencies, not in evidence.
If you believe that the captain of the flight group was an insider to some alleged
conspiracy, then it must have been unique, one which ran down from the ranks of the top brass
all the way to the active operation captains. A tall order to believe. It would also require
you to believe that in the many friendly fire incidents, involved personnel never commit
errors judging the size of a vessel etc. Again, not the case. Indeed, Bibi is a
shoah-man.
Meanwhile, the Jewish Al Qaeda has been on the march in Syria:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-05/israels-military-censor-removed-news-report-detailing-idf-support-syrian-armed
Comment section: " The Zionist Plan for the Middle East, also known as the Yinon Plan, is an
Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional superiority. It insists and stipulates that
Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the
surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states.
When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on
Libya, the ongoing war on Syria, not to mention the process of regime change in Egypt, must
be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East. The latter consists in
weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of an Israeli
expansionist project.
"Greater Israel" consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates"
– In short, the genocidal wars in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and Syria are the result of the
Jewish aspiration for "greatness." Another Bolshevik plan that is causing the enormous
tragedy for the innocent civilian populations, thanks to Jewish supremacist ideology and
sadism.
A never-shown Al Jazeera documentary on the pro-Israel lobby in the US reveals possibly
illegal Israeli spying on US citizens, and the lobby's fear of a changing political mood.
(This article has been published in French in Le Monde diplomatique, and translated by Le
Monde diplomatique, English edition.)
@Moi Problem,
Akbar, is that most Americans are ignorant and greedy--and the Jews fully understand that.
Salaam Alaikum "(FDD) Senior Advisor Richard Goldberg and FDD Visiting Fellow Jacob Nagel.
Goldberg and Nagel argue that the Trump administration should use its sanctions authorities
to target foreign governments, as well as their agencies and officials, engaged in activities
authorized under the JCPOA." "Moreover, Goldberg and Nagel argue that those parties
establishing research or business ties with U.S.-designated entities -- which, come November,
will include the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran -- should be subject to U.S. secondary
sanctions " not allow – "international collaboration, including in the form of
scientific joint partnerships, [would] be established in agreed areas of research," "Goldberg
and Nagel further argue that the Trump administration should threaten to cut funding to the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) if the agency continues to provide technical
assistance to Iran and to host seminars and conferences in Iran. " "Iran would have little
choice but to kick the IAEA out of the country and withdraw entirely from the agency's
oversight. The world would thus lose the unprecedented oversight of Iran's nuclear program
that the JCPOA had provided.
That may be a feature, rather than a bug, of Goldberg and Nagel's proposal"
Yes the number 5 is the replay of the neocons success in getting UN out of Iraq which was
then used by the stupid Bush to justify the attack on Iraq.
FDD has in 2004 printed article documenting the high pitched neocons fevers and the lies
they engaged in to get US attack Iraq.
That might or might not have them made look like pragmatic nationalist patriotic pro-American
. But these bastards are nothing but pro-Israel They just change the spot and denounce the
previous spot.
Looks like my comment made on the previous Syria thread was a waste of my time. Oh Well!
The Iraqi situation has clearly turned in the favor of the Outlaw US Empire as it craves
chaos. It seems more likely than ever that Sadr's been turned given his behavior. The
situation will give comfort to Neocons who want to "consolidate gains" within Syraq and
continue building their military presence.
I very much welcomed the Russian statement on the al-Tanf terrorist base; its liquidation
will hopefully come swiftly. It's instructive to compare the political stability of Syria
with Iraq's political chaos. I think it very likely we'll see Daesh's resurrection within
Iraq as that's the Outlaw US Empire's main tool to keep the chaos ongoing--the empire doesn't
fight against Daesh; rather, it uses Daesh to fight against its stated enemies
everywhere.
The Iraqi situation has clearly turned in the favor of the Outlaw US Empire as it craves
chaos.
I don't agree with that, for the obvious reason that it will be impossible to
support the US position in al-Tanf. And indeed in Syrian Kurdistan. What the US wants is a
US-agreed PM in Iraq, and moderate stability.
These great businesses -- banking, brokering, bill discounting, loan floating, company
promoting -- form the central ganglion of international capitalism. United by the strongest
bonds of organization, always in closest and quickest touch with one another, situated in
the very heart of the business capital of every state, controlled, so far as Europe is
concerned, chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race , who have behind them many
centuries of financial experience, they are in a unique position to manipulate the policy
of nations. No great quick direction of capital is possible save by their consent and
through their agency. Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by
any European state, or a great state loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its
connections set their face against it? . There is not a war, a revolution, an anarchist
assassination, or any other public shock, which is not gainful to these men; they are
harpies who suck their gains from every new forced expenditure and every sudden
disturbance of public credit . These men are the only certain gainers from the [Boer] war,
and most of their gains are made out of the public losses of their adopted country
or the private losses of their fellow-countrymen.
Prescient words written by J.A. Hobson in his classic study of imperialism in 1902. In
over a century, little has changed. If anything, the power of these harpies has grown.
They are currently orchestrating a concerted attack on democracy itself in both Britain and
the U.S. The assault is being spearheaded not by the IDF, but by a captured, weaponized, news
media and corrupt politicians. If the Zionists are successful in their campaign to
criminalize the truth, who will heed their cries for help if ever the tables are turned?
It should be noted that the NYT oped cruise missile happened to be exactly timed with the
big splash of the Bob Woodward 'book' that trumpets the same meme ie the Trump administration
is dysfunctional and in a state of mutiny
'There is credible evidence that the American Deep State of the military-intelligence
apparatus used the Watergate scandal as a way to get rid of Nixon whose febrile mental
state was becoming a concern to them. Woodward, who had a background in Navy intelligence
was suspiciously a prodigy journalist who rapidly rose to cover what became the scandal
that ended Nixon's presidency.'
I would disagree only about Nixon's 'febrile mental state' as the reason for the deep
state wanting him gone the real reason was in fact that Nixon moved against neoliberalism and
expelled Milton Friedman and the 'Chicago School' from the white house he in fact turned
toward socialism on the economy
'Nixon's purge of Friedman from his administration was not merely symbolic. Facing a
serious economic downturn, Nixon utilized huge amounts of government spending, spending
$25.2 billion to stimulate the economy in 1972.
Nixon went as far to openly propose a plan to provide a universal basic income of $1,600
(the equivalent of $10,000 present day) to every American family of four.'
This was a step too far for the Rockefellers and the plutocracy that runs the United
States
as Caleb Maupin explained presciently back in May in his superb historical parallel
between the war on Trump and the Nixon offing
Now we see that the deep state 'journalist' Woodward is here attempting to reprise his
Watergate role in bringing down a sitting POTUS the claims in the Woodward book about an
'administrative coup' in the Trump white house, and this 'oped' are so obviously part of the
same ploy that it is way beyond coincidence
Now it is interesting to note that we have on record THREE very astute commentators saying
the same thing about the provenance of the 'anonymous' hit piece that it is a creation of the
NYT itself PCR was first out of the blocks, yesterday Mr Cunningham, one of the few honest
and capable writers on the REAL left and now Ms Johnstone
And here's where things get curioser yet even the neoliberal standard bearer, the New
Yorker magazine ran a scathing piece by none other than Putin [and Trump] hater Masha Gessen
condemning the 'media corruption' embodied in the NYT oped
'But having this state of affairs described in print further establishes that an
unelected body, or bodies, are overruling and actively undermining the elected leader
An anonymous person or persons cannot govern for the people, because the people do not
know who is governing.'
Clearly there is a civil war going on behind the scenes inside the executive branch of the
United States government what the results will be nobody can know but we must realize that
when even one link in the chain of command is broken, the whole thing falls apart
I predicted right after the Singapore Trump-Kim summit and the fierce media backlash that
resulted that the media and their deep state partners in crime would overplay their hand and
shoot themselves in the foot
They have now done exactly that we will see how the people react, but I suspect that even
those who might not otherwise support Trump will in fact rally round the embattled president
by firing this cannonade now the treasonous media have nailed their on coffin tightly
shut
For the "Full Spectrum Dominance " crows even neutered and bitten down Trump is unacceptable. They want him out.
Notable quotes:
"... I have no idea how deep this amorality charge goes, but coming from people who actually support killing children in the womb, that men and women are the same and marriage is the same dynamic between two people of the same sex as it is for the traditional dynamic, that relations out of wedlock are the same, that illegal immigrants are in fact entitled, that criticizing a foreign state is a crime, that have cheerlead for no less than the four military interventions or destabilizing state actions of the same . . . ..."
"... They don't need him gone, they just need him weak enough to destroy his ability to govern, his agenda and or him personally -- I think they prefer all four. ..."
"... This NYT op ed is a classic forgery, from the scammer NYT posing as a "conservative" (another common scam) to attacking Trump. ..."
This comes as no news. The NYT has been after part of the "get the president" for anything
and everything camp since the nomination.
I have no idea how deep this amorality charge goes, but coming from people who actually
support killing children in the womb, that men and women are the same and marriage is the
same dynamic between two people of the same sex as it is for the traditional dynamic, that
relations out of wedlock are the same, that illegal immigrants are in fact entitled, that
criticizing a foreign state is a crime, that have cheerlead for no less than the four
military interventions or destabilizing state actions of the same . . .
just does not have the weight to make much headway with me. It's like the supposedly
wonderful kobe beef from Japan I had today -- spoiled and sour.
The NYT reputation was tainted long before the current president took office. I think that
the compromise made by the president to adopt in full the intel report has serious
repercussions. The issue here is not whether the Russians engage in espionage or influence, i
take it for granted that they do. But thus far the evidence has been mighty thin that they
actually have done so and did so to any effect.
Something rather nasty has been seeping out of US polity and if Trump is anything he
represents that polity with all its veneer of integrity swept aside.
Not all of the members he chose for his staff are self seeking aggrandizers, making the US
safe for democracy is but a disguise. Some are honorable men and women who simply should not
have been selected because they openly rejected the current executive for political, policy
and personal reasons. I think that was a managerial mistake.
They don't need him gone, they just need him weak enough to destroy his ability to govern,
his agenda and or him personally -- I think they prefer all four.
This article about who, wrote or said what is just a side show.
@Rational DEAR
JUDAISTS -- PLEASE STOP LYING AND SCAMMING, PLEASE. BECOME CIVILIZED PLEASE.
Thanks for the excellent article, Sir. Great points!
This NYT op ed is a classic forgery, from the scammer NYT posing as a "conservative"
(another common scam) to attacking Trump.
Anonymous sources -- fabricated conversations that cannot be verified, because the source
is non-existent. It is all fabricated.
... ... ... You're being Rational again: "please stop these childish scams. This is
juvenile." You're appealing to hardened criminals.
I commend you for moderation and compassion, but if these people were to be redeemed it
would have happened before the FED, the Great Depression (read Wayne Jett), the assassination
of JFK and RFK, Tonkin, 911, 2008 and God know what more.
"... The methodology is familiar. After a years-long assault on the White House and president by a special prosecutor's office, the House takes up impeachment, while a collaborationist press plays its traditional supporting role. ..."
The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high
gear this week.
Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our
establishment came to pay homage to John McCain.
Gathered there were all the presidents from 1993 to 2017, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and
Barack Obama, Vice Presidents Al Gore and Dick Cheney, Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton,
John Kerry and Henry Kissinger, the leaders of both houses of Congress, and too many generals
and admirals to list.
Striding into the pulpit, Obama delivered a searing indictment of the man undoing his
legacy:
"So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and
petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It's
a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born of fear."
Speakers praised McCain's willingness to cross party lines, but Democrats took away a new
determination: From here on out, confrontation!
Tuesday morning, as Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh's
nomination to the Supreme Court began, Democrats disrupted the proceedings and demanded
immediate adjournment, as scores of protesters shouted and screamed to halt the hearings.
Taking credit for orchestrating the disruption, Sen. Dick Durbin boasted, "What we've heard
is the noise of democracy."
But if mob action to shut down a Senate hearing is the noise of democracy, this may explain
why many countries are taking a new look at the authoritarian rulers who can at least deliver a
semblance of order.
Wednesday came leaks in The Washington Post from Bob Woodward's new book, attributing to
Chief of Staff John Kelly and Gen. James Mattis crude remarks on the president's intelligence,
character and maturity, and describing the Trump White House as a "crazytown" led by a fifth-
or sixth-grader.
Kelly and Mattis both denied making the comments.
Thursday came an op-ed in The New York Times by an anonymous "senior official" claiming to
be a member of the "resistance working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his
(Trump's) agenda."
A pedestrian piece of prose containing nothing about Trump one cannot read or hear daily in
the media, the op-ed caused a sensation, but only because Times editors decided to give the
disloyal and seditious Trump aide who wrote it immunity and cover to betray his or her
president.
The transaction served the political objectives of both parties.
While the Woodward book may debut at the top of The New York Times best-seller list, and
"Anonymous," once ferreted out and fired, will have his or her 15 minutes of fame, what this
portends is not good.
For what is afoot here is something America specializes in -- regime change. Only the regime
our establishment and media mean to change is the government of the United States. What is
afoot is the overthrow of America's democratically elected head of state.
The methodology is familiar. After a years-long assault on the White House and president
by a special prosecutor's office, the House takes up impeachment, while a collaborationist
press plays its traditional supporting role.
Presidents are wounded, disabled or overthrown, and Pulitzers all around.
ORDER IT NOW
No one suggests Richard Nixon was without sin in trying to cover up the Watergate break-in.
But no one should delude himself into believing that the overthrow of that president, not two
years after he won the greatest landslide in U.S. history, was not an act of vengeance by a
hate-filled city that ran a sword through Nixon for offenses it had covered up or brushed under
the rug in the Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson years.
So, where are we headed?
If November's elections produce, as many predict, a Democratic House, there will be more
investigations of President Trump than any man charged with running the U.S. government may be
able to manage.
There is the Mueller investigation into "Russiagate" that began before Trump was
inaugurated. There is the investigation of his business and private life before he became
president in the Southern District of New York. There is the investigation into the Trump
Foundation by New York State.
There will be investigations by House committees into alleged violations of the Emoluments
Clause. And ever present will be platoons of journalists ready to report the leaks from all of
these investigations.
Then, if media coverage can drive Trump's polls low enough, will come the impeachment
investigation and the regurgitation of all that went before.
If Trump has the stamina to hold on, and the Senate remains Republican, he may survive, even
as Democrats divide between a rising militant socialist left and the Democrats' septuagenarian
caucus led by Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi.
2019 looks to be the year of bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all.
Entertaining, for sure, but how many more of these coups d'etat can the Republic sustain before
a new generation says enough of all this?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and
Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
Just for the record -- not that we're keeping one -- I strongly suspect that that NYT Op Ed
by an "insider" is almost entirely fraudulent. OK, there might be an assistant to the
assistant undersecretary in charge of cutting the grass at the White House who will be
willing to put her name at the bottom of this thing, thereby giving the Times an "out" in
terms of committing outright journalistic perjury.
But who's going to call these people on it? The Times themselves? CNN? The Washington
Post? The Huffington Post?
What consequences will they suffer? Will the rabid dog leftists who read the
aforementioned periodicals suddenly do an about-face and abandon their leftist religion
because of journalistic fraud?
Of course not.
They'll just move on to the next "scandal" (almost certainly based on anonymous sources or
triple hearsay).
I think Trump is his own worst enemy. It is his incompetence that is fueling all these calls
for impeachment. He should have fired Mueller long time ago. The screaming could not have
been any worse. I don't think he comprehends the seriousness of the current situation. He
doesn't realize that he is the president. He has fallen into the trap of anti-Russian
rhetoric while I know he does not believe any of it.
He should never have hired John Bolton or Pompeo. For God's sakes; he appointed all these
heads of Departments, CIA, FBI, DNI, etc. and none of them can control his own department. He
is letting others control his agenda and his foreign policy. If it weren't for Pence, I would
prefer impeachment at this time because he is making the US a laughing stalk of the world.
But Pence scares me even more.
Acts 3:25 "He said to Abraham, 'Through your offspring all peoples on earth will be
blessed.'"
By the way, God's covenant with Abraham included Ishmael, who was also his offspring. The
Jews have altered the bible to make the covenant with Isaac only, as they have done with the
sacrifice of the "only son."
So far the only 2 senior officials who have not come out to deny writing the op-ed are John
Kelly and Nikki Haley, both are highly suspect at this point. John Kelly gave all those
disparaging accounts of the president to Bob Woodward then tried to deny it. Nikki Haley's
been running her own dog and pony show at the UN for two years, clashing with Trump more than
once for wanting to take out Assad. She takes her orders directly from the Prime Minister of
Israel, Trump who?
This NYTimes hit piece shows clearly the existence of a Deep State that is actively
working to subvert and overthrow a democratically elected POTUS. The Deep State must be
defeated for America to survive, but the only way to defeat the Deep State is through a
functioning DOJ. Jeff Sessions must now be considered part of the Deep State, along with
Pence and all the people Pence brought into Trump's cabinet when he was in charged of setting
up the interim government, from John Kelly to Mattis, Haley, Bolton, Kirstjen Nielsen,
Christopher Wray, Mike Pompeo, and above all Rod Rosenstein -- all are neocon Deep State
stooges and big time swamp creatures.
"... McCain was a protégé of neo-Conservative founder Senator Henry Scoop Jackson, a crazy servant of the British imperial agenda who constantly sought military confrontation with Russia. ..."
"... The British were so enamored of Jackson's views that they have dedicated an entire society of British intelligence spooks to him, the Henry Jackson Society. The former incarnation of this group was the Committee on Present Danger and the Project for a New American Century in the United States. ..."
"... Leading members of both groups hastily retreated to British mother ship after they led the mobilization for the failed and disastrous Iraq War here in the U.S. Sir Richard Dearlove, who has shepherded Christopher Steele and other British aspects of the coup against Donald Trump, is a leading member of this group. ..."
"... He was uniquely ruthless when it comes to advancing imperial goals, barnstorming from one conflict zone to another to personally recruit far right fanatics as American proxies ..."
"... He backed the installation of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood to govern Egypt, another failed and insane project. More than $5.6 trillion was spent chasing John McCain's idyll of democracy in Southwest Asia. Six thousand seven hundred Americans died, more than 50,000 were wounded, entire countries were reduced to rubble with accompanying genocide against their populations, the largest mass human migration ever was sent into Europe resembling something akin to the desperate mass flights of the Middle Ages. ..."
John McCain died and deserved a decent funeral based on his war record and his long, if destructive, public service. McCain and
others in Washington's arrogant and narcissistic elite decided before his death, however, to use McCain's demise to advance the coup
against the President, and to make claims about the late Senator and themselves which are totally and utterly false and delusional.
The funeral was a national media extravaganza achieving a status normally only enjoyed by former Presidents. It was, according to
New Yorker Magazine , also the "biggest resistance meeting yet." President Donald Trump was not invited so that the cowards
in the funeral crowd, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, could freely take potshots at the President. McCain picked these leaders
of the country's descent into hell deliberately, to romanticize his death, and to trash talk the current President, albeit, in eloquent
and lofty language and knowing allusions. In effect, they wrapped the murderous crimes of empire in the American flag.
McCain was a protégé of neo-Conservative founder Senator Henry Scoop Jackson, a crazy servant of the British imperial agenda
who constantly sought military confrontation with Russia.
The British were so enamored of Jackson's views that they have dedicated an entire society of British intelligence spooks
to him, the Henry Jackson Society. The former incarnation of this group was the Committee on Present Danger and the Project for a
New American Century in the United States.
Leading members of both groups hastily retreated to British mother ship after they led the mobilization for the failed and
disastrous Iraq War here in the U.S. Sir Richard Dearlove, who has shepherded Christopher Steele and other British aspects of the
coup against Donald Trump, is a leading member of this group.
Funding for McCain's political adventures came from his second wife, whose brewing company fortune was completely mixed up in
Arizona mob and mob funding during its earlier years.
With respect to McCain's activities, Max Blumenthal characterized them accurately in the August 27th Consortium News:
"McCain did not simply thunder for every major intervention in the post-Cold War era from the Senate floor. . .
He was uniquely ruthless when it comes to advancing imperial goals, barnstorming from one conflict zone to another to personally
recruit far right fanatics as American proxies . . .
In Libya and Syria, he cultivated affiliates of Al-Qaeda as allies, and in Ukraine, McCain recruited actual sig-heiling neo-Nazis.
. .
Following the NATO orchestrated murder of Libya's leader, McCain tweeted: "Qaddafi on his way out, Bashar Al Assad is next."
He backed the installation of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood to govern Egypt, another failed and insane project. More than
$5.6 trillion was spent chasing John McCain's idyll of democracy in Southwest Asia. Six thousand seven hundred Americans died, more
than 50,000 were wounded, entire countries were reduced to rubble with accompanying genocide against their populations, the largest
mass human migration ever was sent into Europe resembling something akin to the desperate mass flights of the Middle Ages.
It is these horrific actions by McCain, not the myth peddled at his funeral, which is the source of the conflict between Trump
and John McCain, and between Trump and George Bush and Barack Obama. Trump promised to end the imperial policy of endless religious
and population wars and Wall Street bailouts, and the voters responded resoundingly by electing him President.
@Iris"Marshall
Sam Shama, boasted here at U.R. about his being a Nazi Hunter and having collared a few."
Well, that's extraordinary, because in his comment 201 above, Sam Shama said:
"How do the Wiesenthals and the Klarsfelds, whoever they are, depend on everyday
Jews?"
As you know, French-Israeli Serge Klarsfeld and his German wife Beate are the most famous
"Nazi hunters" in Europe. They formed an association which located and brought to "justice"
some of the most famous names involved in Nazi occupation (Bousquet, Barbie, Papon,
Touvier,...).
How come Sam Shama doesn't know these most famous comrades? Split personality?
Schizophrenia? Pseudonym swapping? :-) :-)
https://images.sudouest.fr/2014/12/03/57ebc98866a4bd6726a8263e/widescreen/1000x500/serge-et-beate-klarsfeld-au-memorial-de-la-shoah.jpg
The famous comrades, and specifically the Simon Weisenthal Center of Nazi-hunters, suddenly
gone AWOL as soon as the US zionists began their mutually beneficial cooperation with
neo-Nazi in Ukraine.
Moreover, it seems that the Wiesenthals and the Klarsfelds simply melted away and
evaporated as soon as the Jewish State began sending the Israel-made weaponry to the neo-Nazi
in Ukraine.
The miserable Anti-Defamation League (of the anti-democratic methods) is now on a spot for
doing nothing with regard to the murderous activities (including the openly
anti-Jewish activities) of the neo-Nazis in Ukraine (the Kaganat of Nuland is a de facto
protectorate of the US). It seems that for the ADL, there are certain precious neo-Nazi (the
Israel-supported neo-Nazis in Ukraine) and the "bad" Nazis whose image has been helping the
ADL and the Wiesenthals and the Klarsfelds to demonstrate their allegiance to Jewish
"principles," while making good gesheft (reparation-extortion) on the tragedy of the WWII for
holo-biz.
There is more for the oh-so-sensitive crowd of holocaustians: The prime minister of
Ukraine (where the Nazism has been enjoying its very visible renaissance since 2014) is a
Jewish man Volodymyr Groysman who was miraculously "elected" by Ukrainians in 2016. It is
well known that Ukrainians en masse are not terribly predisposed towards the Jews: https://worldpolicy.org/2014/03/03/fears-of-anti-semitism-spread-in-ukraine/
To recap: The Jewish State and the US/EU zionists have been cultivating the close
relationships and collaboration with neo-Nazi leaders in Ukraine. Take note that none of the
Jewish Nazi collaborators has been punished for the material and political support of the
neo-Nazi movement in Eastern Europe. Why the EU puts people in jail for making an honest
research in the WWII but allows the zionists to support the neo-Nazi is not easy to
understand, considering the influence of the thoroughly dishonest and unprincipled Jewish
Lobby.
@Sam Shama On the
contrary. You haven't responded to the substantial issues from my first post, where I showed
that the CDN list did contain many Jewish names; your mealy-mouthed, code-worded, phrasing
notwithstanding.
Speaking of giving it a rest, I would think it is you who should consider it. Antisemitism
is a serious matter, Phillip. "Antisemitism is a serious matter, Phillip."
– Tell it to Bibi and the Kagans clan: https://worldpolicy.org/2014/03/03/fears-of-anti-semitism-spread-in-ukraine/
"FEARS OF ANTI-SEMITISM SPREAD IN UKRAINE"
@Sam Shama I don't
usually like taking retirees to task, but you are a special case. You actually threaten Jews
with harm every so often in idiotic, thinly veiled language. You should contemplate that.
"You actually threaten Jews with harm "
– Don't project. Your Jewish State and your zionist stink-tanks in the US/UK are the
greatest danger to the decent Jews.
"Israel is arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine:" https://countercurrents.org/2018/07/05/israel-is-arming-neo-nazis-in-ukraine/
One of the main financiers of the neo-Nazi formation "Azov" an Israeli citizen Kolomojsky:
https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-47564dbc32c28a68f9407fd689f6b3c8-c
I keep telling you Sam that you aren't too smart everything you say just reinforces
everything that is criticized about your tribe ..and you just keep right on giving us more
proof.
First, I have no tribe. Merely logging and attempting to introduce a modicum of
balance in these flagrant displays of hatred.
Second, I don't claim any particular advantage in the department of smarts; only doing my
bit for the advancement of the various causes of humanity. In that, I am sure you claim
primacy, but do you know who said the following: "It is a profitable thing, if one is wise,
to seem foolish." Google's your friend. " flagrant displays of hatred "
– Listen to your Moldovan thug Avi Lieberman and your no less thuggish justice minister
Ayelet Shaked to get the real "flagrant displays of hatred:"
http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/new-israeli-justice-minister-called-for-genocide-of-palestinians/article/432659
"Shaked made international headlines when she posted a highly controversial unpublished
article by the late Uri Elitzur, a close Netanyahu ally and an early leader of the movement
by Jewish settlers to colonize occupied Palestinian territories The post asserted that "the
entire Palestinian people is the enemy" and advocated genocide against the entire nation,
"including its elderly women, its cities and its villages, its property and its
infrastructure." Some excerpts: " They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on
all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers they should follow their sons [to
hell], nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they
raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."
– Don't you like the facts of the Jewish State's financial, logistical, and military
support for ISIS / Al Qaeda ?
https://www.sott.net/article/386618-US-and-Israel-will-not-allow-the-elimination-of-Al-Qaeda-and-ISIS-in-southern-Syria-The-solution-is-Syrian-resistance
@annamaria The
famous comrades, and specifically the Simon Weisenthal Center of Nazi-hunters, suddenly gone
AWOL as soon as the US zionists began their mutually beneficial cooperation with neo-Nazi in
Ukraine.
Moreover, it seems that the Wiesenthals and the Klarsfelds simply melted away and evaporated
as soon as the Jewish State began sending the Israel-made weaponry to the neo-Nazi in
Ukraine.
The miserable Anti-Defamation League (of the anti-democratic methods) is now on a spot for
doing nothing with regard to the murderous activities (including the openly
anti-Jewish activities) of the neo-Nazis in Ukraine (the Kaganat of Nuland is a de facto
protectorate of the US). It seems that for the ADL, there are certain precious neo-Nazi (the
Israel-supported neo-Nazis in Ukraine) and the "bad" Nazis whose image has been helping the
ADL and the Wiesenthals and the Klarsfelds to demonstrate their allegiance to Jewish
"principles," while making good gesheft (reparation-extortion) on the tragedy of the WWII for
holo-biz.
There is more for the oh-so-sensitive crowd of holocaustians: The prime minister of Ukraine
(where the Nazism has been enjoying its very visible renaissance since 2014) is a Jewish man
Volodymyr Groysman who was miraculously "elected" by Ukrainians in 2016. It is well known
that Ukrainians en masse are not terribly predisposed towards the Jews:
https://worldpolicy.org/2014/03/03/fears-of-anti-semitism-spread-in-ukraine/
To recap: The Jewish State and the US/EU zionists have been cultivating the close
relationships and collaboration with neo-Nazi leaders in Ukraine. Take note that none of the
Jewish Nazi collaborators has been punished for the material and political support of the
neo-Nazi movement in Eastern Europe. Why the EU puts people in jail for making an honest
research in the WWII but allows the zionists to support the neo-Nazi is not easy to
understand, considering the influence of the thoroughly dishonest and unprincipled Jewish
Lobby. " it seems that the Wiesenthals and the Klarsfelds simply melted away and
evaporated as soon as the Jewish State began sending the Israel-made weaponry to the neo-Nazi
in Ukraine."
- 1- Indeed. The Klarsfelds don't open their big lecturing gob neither when Jewish French
citizens, born and brought up in France, with no links to Palestine, volunteer and join the
IDF to murder Palestinians. They are the higher share of IDF volunteers, ahead of Jewish US
citizens.
A war crime in broad daylight: French-Israeli IDF soldier coldly shooting in the head
wounded 21-year old Palestinian Abd Al Fatah Al Sharif.
- 2- Simon Wiesenthal, as you know, was an utter fraud and one of the biggest conmen of
the century. Among his many lies is his so-called incarceration at Auschwitz. Former members
of the German Army even stated that he was a collaborator.
- 3- I'll finish on a cheerful note , and a very good illustration of MSM's double
standards. Unreported by the press, unlike Corbyn's elusive anti-semitism, Ukraine's
Parliament Speaker has just declared that "Hitler was the biggest democrat". One can't make
this up.
Talking of 5th column, lest forget the solid one in the UK.
Deep State's mouthpiece "The Telegraph" had dedicated several articles to the
identification of alleged Skripal Novichok poisoners, named as two Russian nationals who
briefly entered the UK under the aliases Petrov and Beshorov.
Sycophantic PM Theresa May has gone as far as stating that the suspects are GRU agents,
and pointing the finger at President Putin.
Jeremy Corbyn is being hounded because he is very reserved about the Novichok story.
The UK government is fully embedded with Zionist Israel. This cock-and-bull story, which
details have been nonetheless very well presented, is a very alarming hint that something is
in preparation against Russia, either directly in Syrian, or less directly in the
Ukraine.
@Iris Talking of
5th column, lest forget the solid one in the UK.
Deep State's mouthpiece "The Telegraph" had dedicated several articles to the
identification of alleged Skripal Novichok poisoners, named as two Russian nationals who
briefly entered the UK under the aliases Petrov and Beshorov.
Sycophantic PM Theresa May has gone as far as stating that the suspects are GRU agents,
and pointing the finger at President Putin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1VqSJCa7RA
Jeremy Corbyn is being hounded because he is very reserved about the Novichok story.
The UK government is fully embedded with Zionist Israel. This cock-and-bull story, which
details have been nonetheless very well presented, is a very alarming hint that something is
in preparation against Russia, either directly in Syrian, or less directly in the Ukraine.
Novichock poisoning false flag (Continued).
A possible explanation of the Novichok story being spun at the moment in the UK is that a
Western/Israeli military attack on Syria is in preparation to stop the Arab Syrian Army from
entering Idlib, the last terrorist stronghold.
Such Western intervention requires the pretext of a chemical attack, that will be staged
in the field by the proxy White Helmets, while UK public opinion will be subdued with
terrorising stories of weapons of mass destruction.
This same pretext was used for the April 2018 Western bombing of Syria. This bombing was
aimed at hitting key Syrian targets, but its scale was finally limited by the intervention of
General Mattis, who dreaded reciprocated actions against the 3000 US servicemen present in
Syria.
"The White Helmets (and an alleged chemical attack) are the last hope for regime change
in Syria"
Very interesting interview of former UK Ambassador Ford by SyrianGirl:
One day after Theresa May's Novichok show at the British Parliament , France's Chief of
Military Staff Francois Lecointre has declared that France is ready to strike Syria should
she dare a "chemical attack" on Idlib.
Both poodles each side of the Channel are barking in synchronism; Israel is pulling on the
leashes and something bad is in preparation.
Here is Francois Lecointre in his brown uniform. Unknown to us stupid plebeians, France
must be surrounded by steppes and deserts for brown to have been chosen as camouflage
colour.
That has been my take on affairs sine some time: Trump is just the mouthpiece of, and strong-armed by the Media Military Industrial Intelligence Complex (MMIIC).
Full disclosure: I despise Trump for a great number of reasons.
Even fuller disclosure: I despise with a vengeance the Intel community, which has taken over the media and the DNC and are
the Jesuits of the MIC.
"... We Americans are totally subject to ziocon propaganda when it comes to Middle East affairs. Anyone that disagrees with that viewpoint is immediately labeled anti-semitic and now banned from social media and of course from the TV talk shows. ..."
"... Jack posed an interesting question, how does someone like Putin respond to an irrational US who in their delusions can easily escalate military conflict if their ego gets bruised when it is shown that they don't have the unilateral power of a hegemon? ..."
"... Always thought that Nikki Haley was the price Donald Trump had to pay to get Sheldon Adelson's large campaign contributions in 2016. Adelson was Trump's second biggest contributor. So was recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. Sheldon got his money's worth. https://www.investopedia.co... ..."
"... Nikki Haley's Sikh origins may have something to do with her anti-Muslim feelings. ..."
"... it is hypocritical in the extreme for the U.S. to be criticising anyone for killing people anywhere after what they have been doing in the Middle East. According to Professor Gideon Polya the total avoidable deaths in Afghanstan alone since 2001 under ongoing war and occupation-imposed deprivation amount to around three million people, about 900,000 of whom are infants under the age of five (see Professor Gideon Polya at La Trobe University in Melbourne book, 'Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality Since 1950' and Washington DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility study: http://www.psr.org/assets/p... . ..."
"... Is it in our DNA that we can't learn lessons from our interventionist experience in the Middle East? Looks like Iraq is spinning out of control once again. I'm sure many including the Shia may reminisce favorably to the Sadam years despite his tyranny. https://ejmagnier.com/2018/... ..."
"... We are indoctrinated with the idea that all people are basically the same. In fact this is only true at the level of basics like shelter, food, sex, etc. We refuse to really believe in the reality of widely varying cultures. It makes us incapable, as a group, of understanding people who do not share our outlook. i have been dealing with this all my life as a delegated "ambassador" to the "others." ..."
"... In this context, if you were Vladimir Putin and knowing that President Trump is completely ignorant when it comes to history and policy details and has surrounded himself with neocons as far as foreign policy is concerned and Bibi has him eating out of his hands, how would you deal with him if he starts to get belligerent in Syria and Ukraine? ..."
"... Did the Syrians get upset by General Sherman's destructive march through South Carolina? No. It was a mistake for the US ever getting involved in Syria, with forming, equipping and training foreign armies and shadow governments including replacement prime ministers, all in violation of the UN Charter. ..."
"... Trump is more savagely and ignorantly aggressive. ..."
"... Trump, Nikki and Bolton have been tweeting warnings about the Idlib offensive and already accusing Assad if there are any chemical attacks. Wonder why? Lavrov has also made comments that he expects a chemical use false flag. Not sure about this post on Zerohedge, but if it has any credibility then it would appear that the US military is getting ready for some kind of provocation. ..."
"In her statement during the UN Security Council briefing, Haley said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and its "enablers,"
Russia and Iran have a playbook for the war in Syria. First, they surround a civilian area. Next, they make the "preposterous claim
that everyone in the area is a terrorist," thus making all civilians targets. That is followed by a "starve and surrender" campaign,
during which Syrian security forces keep attacking until the people no longer have food, clean water, or shelter. "It's a playbook
of death. The Assad regime has spent the last seven years refining it with Russia and Iran's help."
According to her it has happened many times before, in July 2018 it happened in Dara'a and the southwest of Syria, where Syrian
forces "trapped and besieged civilians." In February 2018, it was Ghouta. In 2017 it was Aleppo, and prior to that places like Madaya
and Hama.
According to her, Assad's government has left the country in ruins. "The atrocities committed by Assad will be a permanent stain
on history and a black mark for this Council -- which was blocked over and over by Russia from taking action to help," Nikki Haley
said." SF
------------
Well, strictly speaking, her parents were immigrants, not she. She was born in Bamberg, South Carolina, a little town in the Piedmont
that is majority Black. Her parents were professional people at Amritsar in the Punjab. Haley is the surname of her husband. Nikki
is a nickname by which she has long been known. As governor, she was in favor of flying the Confederate flag on the Statehouse grounds
before the Charleston massacre of Black Christians at a Bible study session. They were killed by an unstable white teen aged misfit
whom they had invited to join their worship. After that Nikki discovered that the Confederate flag was a bad and disruptive symbol.
It was a popular position across the country and Nikki became an instant "hit," the flavor of the month so to speak.
I suppose that she was supposed to be an interesting and decorative figure as UN ambassador. She is quite pretty and the South
Carolina accent adds to the effect.
The positions she has taken at the UN with regard to the ME are similar to those expressed by her boss, President Trump. They
are largely reflections of images projected by the popular and mass media operating as Zionist propaganda machines. I don't believe
that the State Department's INR analytic bureau believes the crapola that she spouts with such hysteric fervor. I don't believe that
my former friend David Satterfield believes the crapola. So, where does she get ideas like the ones quoted above? IMO she is trying
to out-Trump Trump. DJT is a remarkably ignorant man concerning the geo-politics of just about everything in the ME. He appears to
have once seen the film, "Exodus" and to have decided on the basis of Paul Newman's performance as Begin that the situation was and
is quite simple - Israel good! Everyone else bad! Nikki's depth of knowledge appears to be just about the same.
She also appears to me to be in receipt of a stream of opinion from various Zionist and anti-Muslim groups probably related to
the anti-Muslim ravings of Maronite and other Christian ME extremists.
These groups cannot seem to understand that alliances shift as does policy. They don't seem to understand that Israel's policy
in Syria is no longer regime change. They never seem to have understood that the Syrian government is the protector of the religious
minorities against Sunni jihadi fanatics.
They don't seem to understand that the Syrian government has no choice but to recover Idlib Province, a piece of Syria's heartland.
pl
Haley's "playbook" is used by the US but not by Russia & Iran as she claims, with all civilians being targeted. Instead, Russia
& Iran have taken warfare to a higher and better level, allowing the armed factions to surrender their arms and get on a bus or
be killed, and many of them took the bus to preserve their lives until the final offensive. A third option, which many of them
took, was to join the SAA and fight against their former comrades. All of this statecraft was revolutionary, and was not at all
as Haley described, including the crocodile tears over Syrian lives which has never been honest especially considering the level
of support Assad has within Syria.
I agree it is revolutionary, at least in modern times in the western world. I wonder if it will set a "trend": a more humane way
to wage war. I am sure it will be studied in war colleges.
One observation I had while thinking about the Ambassador Haley quote you provided (which I think supports the point you
were making in your post):
When the US was in a somewhat similar situation during the occupation of Iraq, where Sunni militants were in open rebellion
and controlling towns like Fallujah, our response wasn't wildly different to the Syrian government's response. The US gov't at
the time typically labeled any armed resistance "terrorists", and while they might acknowledge that there were civilians in those
territories in addition to terrorists, they were just "human shields" and "regrettable collateral damage". Did the US try a little
harder, and have a bit better of technology, training, etc, and do a little bit better of trying to limit damage to civilians
when crushing those uprisings? Yes. But we're mostly talking modest quantitative differences in response, not fundamentally morally
superior qualitative differences. I bet you if you took pictures of towns like Fallujah, Sadr City, etc, after US counter-insurgency
operations, and mixed them in with pictures of trashed Syrian towns that had just been liberated from rebel groups, and showed
them to Nikki Haley, or frankly any neocon, they'd have a hard time telling the difference.
As I was reading this topic Raqqa and Fallujah came to mind. In the case of Fallujah I don't recall if the civilians were given
an opportunity to evacuate. They were not in ISIS controlled Raqqa. In any event Haley's blather at the UN is for the consumption
of the rubes.
as far as i recall in the battle for fallujah, only women and children were permitted to leave during the siege.and during the
siege of Mosul they were dropping leaflets telling people not to try and leave.
And giving civilians a chance to evacuate doesn't help as much as one would think if the insurgents/rebels really do want to use
them as human shields.
Speaking to young marines in the aftermath of the second assault on Fallujah I learned that although women and children were allowed
to pass the checkpoints but men of fighting age (also known as the father, brother or husband who was driving the families out
of the city) were sent back into the city.
In talking with people here in the U.S. about Syria there is the total lack of understanding of Assad's Alawite government. There
are a couple million Christians in Syria and it is Assad's government that protects them from the Saudi sponsored Sunni headchoppers
who would like to eliminate Christians, Jews, and Shia from the Middle East. Perhaps, the Alawites being an offshoot of Shia makes
them sensitive to minority religions. However, mentioning Assad evokes strong negative reaction among U.S. Christians, similar
to Trumps "lets kill them all". On my one visit to Damascus, traveling on my U.S. Passport rather than my Israeli one, The Christians
I met were uniformly positive about Assad and the need for Assad to control the ENTIRE country.
Thank you for providing your direct experience of the views of Christian Syrians you met there.
Unfortunately none of those views ever make it to either to our print or broadcast media. We Americans are totally subject
to ziocon propaganda when it comes to Middle East affairs. Anyone that disagrees with that viewpoint is immediately labeled anti-semitic
and now banned from social media and of course from the TV talk shows.
Jack posed an interesting question, how does someone like Putin respond to an irrational US who in their delusions can
easily escalate military conflict if their ego gets bruised when it is shown that they don't have the unilateral power of a hegemon?
Always thought that Nikki Haley was the price Donald Trump had to pay to get Sheldon Adelson's large campaign contributions
in 2016. Adelson was Trump's second biggest contributor. So was recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. Sheldon got his
money's worth.
https://www.investopedia.co...
There's a disturbing piece up today at WaPo by Karen De Young asserting the USA is doubling down in Syria. From the piece, emphasis
by ex-PFC Chuck:
"We've started using new language," [James] Jeffrey said, referring to previous warnings against the use of chemical weapons.
Now, he said, the United States will not tolerate "an attack. Period." "Any offensive is to us objectionable as a reckless
escalation" he said. "You add to that, if you use chemical weapons, or create refugee flows or attack innocent civilians,"
and "the consequences of that are that we will shift our positions and use all of our tools to make it clear that we'll have
to find ways to achieve our goals that are less reliant on the goodwill of the Russians."
Jeffrey is said to be Pompeo's point person on Syria. Do any of you with ears closer to the ground than those of us in flyover
land know anything about this change of tune?
.Iraq PM urged to quit as key ally deserts him over unrest.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi faced calls to resign yesterday as his alliance with a populist cleric who won May elections
crumbled over deadly unrest shaking the country's south. The two leading groups in parliament called on Abadi to step down, after
lawmakers held an emergency meeting on the public anger boiling over in the southern city of Basra.,...
The Conquest Alliance of pro-Iranian former paramilitary fighters was "on the same wavelength" as Sadr's Marching Towards Reform
list and they would work together to form a new government, Assadi said. Abadi, whose grouping came third in the May polls, defended
his record in parliament, describig the unrest as "political sabotage" and saying the crisis over public services was being exploited
for political ends.
http://news.kuwaittimes.net...
Nikki Haley's Sikh origins may have something to do with her anti-Muslim feelings. According to J. D Cunningham, author
of 'History of the Sikhs (Appendix XX)' included among the injunctions ordained by Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth guru, 'a Khalsa
(true Sikh) proves himself if he mounts a warhorse; is always waging war; kills a Khan (Muslim) and slays the Turks (Muslims).'
Aside from this, it is hypocritical in the extreme for the U.S. to be criticising anyone for killing people anywhere after
what they have been doing in the Middle East. According to Professor Gideon Polya the total avoidable deaths in Afghanstan alone
since 2001
under ongoing war and occupation-imposed deprivation amount to around three million people, about 900,000 of whom are infants
under the age of five (see Professor Gideon Polya at La Trobe University in Melbourne book, 'Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality
Since 1950' and Washington DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility study:
http://www.psr.org/assets/p... .
Your good professor sounds like a great piece of work. "Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950" Perhaps we should have
stopped all that foreign aid in the '50s.
The under five mortality figures from Afghanistan (1 in 5) are a problem that preceded our involvement by many years. However,
the failure of the international community to make any significant progress over the last 17 years would be a legitimate criticism.
Is it in our DNA that we can't learn lessons from our interventionist experience in the Middle East? Looks like Iraq is
spinning out of control once again. I'm sure many including the Shia may reminisce favorably to the Sadam years despite his tyranny.
https://ejmagnier.com/2018/...
We are indoctrinated with the idea that all people are basically the same. In fact this is only true at the level of basics
like shelter, food, sex, etc. We refuse to really believe in the reality of widely varying cultures. It makes us incapable, as
a group, of understanding people who do not share our outlook. i have been dealing with this all my life as a delegated "ambassador"
to the "others."
Thank you, Sir. It makes perfect sense with the End if History and all those beliefs.
In this context, if you were Vladimir Putin and knowing that President Trump is completely ignorant when it comes to history
and policy details and has surrounded himself with neocons as far as foreign policy is concerned and Bibi has him eating out of
his hands, how would you deal with him if he starts to get belligerent in Syria and Ukraine?
You may be interested in a recent article in Unz by SST's own 'smoothieX12' in response to Paul Craig Roberts asking how long
Russia should continue to turn the other cheek:
http://www.unz.com/article/...
Did the Syrians get upset by General Sherman's destructive march through South Carolina? No. It was a mistake for the US ever
getting involved in Syria, with forming, equipping and training foreign armies and shadow governments including replacement prime
ministers, all in violation of the UN Charter.
A new PM was at the top of H.Clinton's to-do list as Secretary of State. My favorite Assad replacement candidate was Ghassan
Hitto from Murphy Texas, but he only lasted a couple months.
here
I don't trust converts except for the adjustment from Protestant to Catholic or vice versa. I suppose shifts from one madhab to
another, or between Buddhist schools are also ok.
Sad that in a moment of crisis,so many of the rising political stars of both parties are so hollow to the point of dangerousness.
Has anything really changed much with our policies in the ME in the past 50+ years? Haven't we been deeply influenced/controlled
by Israeli interests in this period, maybe even beyond if the attacks on USS Liberty are taken into account? Is the Trump administration
just following in the traditions of Reagan, Bush Pčre et fils, Clinton and Obama, or is there a qualitative difference?
Trump, Nikki and Bolton have been tweeting warnings about the Idlib offensive and already accusing Assad if there are any
chemical attacks. Wonder why? Lavrov has also made comments that he expects a chemical use false flag. Not sure about this
post on Zerohedge, but if it has any credibility then it would appear that the US military is getting ready for some kind of provocation.
Maybe this is all just "positioning" and "messaging" but maybe not. With Bibi, Nikki, Bolton and Pompeo as THE advisors, does
anyone have a clue what Trump decides, when, not if, the jihadi White Helmets stage their chemical event in Idlib?
"... "Just get rid of Trump and you'll have a nice, neat, ultra-right-wing Republican as President." No need for that Diana – for what you describe is what we presently enjoy in the form of the current President, most especially as it relates to his efforts to bring "peace" to regions such as the Mideast. ..."
"... It is becoming something of a dark joke listening to Trump's apologists endlessly repeat the meme that those opposed to him represent "war" – while he is our hope for "peace" (despite his never demonstrating one iota of that sort of behavior). ..."
"... With every further, obvious display of the President's shocking belligerence towards countries that do not threaten the United States and in areas and matters where it possesses no valid security interests, the Diana Johnstones of this world spin the prayer wheel faster, repeat their mantras more urgently and come up with some silly excuses for why what we observe from Trump is not really what we observe. "It's not Trump – it's every one around him. You must believe us!" ..."
"... There's no need for 4- and 5-D chess masters to interpret Trump – what we sees is what we gots. If there's a "conspiracy" anywhere, it's among those unwilling to remark the obvious ..."
We gave Trump the presidency, what he does with it is his responsibility. He was warned
repeatedly about the neocons et al, but has chosen to staff up with the same swamp creatures
he ostensibly meant to expurgate.
We are left to wonder how much of this "reality" TV?
"Just get rid of Trump and you'll have a nice, neat, ultra-right-wing Republican as
President." No need for that Diana – for what you describe is what we presently enjoy in the
form of the current President, most especially as it relates to his efforts to bring "peace"
to regions such as the Mideast.
It is becoming something of a dark joke listening to Trump's apologists endlessly repeat
the meme that those opposed to him represent "war" – while he is our hope for "peace"
(despite his never demonstrating one iota of that sort of behavior).
With every further, obvious display of the President's shocking belligerence towards
countries that do not threaten the United States and in areas and matters where it possesses
no valid security interests, the Diana Johnstones of this world spin the prayer wheel faster,
repeat their mantras more urgently and come up with some silly excuses for why what we
observe from Trump is not really what we observe. "It's not Trump – it's every one
around him. You must believe us!"
There's no need for 4- and 5-D chess masters to interpret Trump – what we sees is
what we gots. If there's a "conspiracy" anywhere, it's among those unwilling to remark the
obvious.
"... The crisis in Ukraine is a direct result of the two policies of NATO expansion and EU enlargement, which led NATO to declare Ukraine (and Georgia) will be NATO members at numerous NATO summits and in other fora, led the EU to push too hard and too early for an association agreement with the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych government, and led the West, especially Washington, to lend opposition-promotion assistance to revolutionaries and endorse a clearly illegal oligarch-ultranationalist revolt in February 2014 despite an agreement that essentially ensured Yanukovych's departure from the presidency in ten months. In Syria, Putin's Russia has won. Regime change is over. ..."
Rather than dealing with secondary issues, those which are easiest to resolve, or those in
which we have common interests, contacts must address the core problems in the inter-state
US-Russian or larger Western-Russian relationship. Those issues are NATO expansion, EU
expansion, U.S. missile defense, Ukraine, Syria, and interference in each other's domestic
politics.
Rather, than expanding Western institutions in complete disregard of Russian
interests, the West must work closely with Moscow. The West must acknowledge its responsibility
in the making of the original crisis in Kiev, which equals if not exceeds that of Moscow's in
deepening the crisis in Crimea and Donbass.
The crisis in Ukraine is a direct result of the two
policies of NATO expansion and EU enlargement, which led NATO to declare Ukraine (and Georgia)
will be NATO members at numerous NATO summits and in other fora, led the EU to push too hard
and too early for an association agreement with the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych government, and
led the West, especially Washington, to lend opposition-promotion assistance to revolutionaries
and endorse a clearly illegal oligarch-ultranationalist revolt in February 2014 despite an
agreement that essentially ensured Yanukovych's departure from the presidency in ten months. In
Syria, Putin's Russia has won. Regime change is over.
The U.S. in its hubris miscalculated in
going a bridge too far. Ambition led to supply weapons either intentionally or accidentally --
and in denial of the obvious -- to Islamists and jihadists. This was a direct consequence of US
President Barak Obama's haste to carry forth his gravely misguided Muslim Brotherhood-based
regime change strategy in the Islamic world. Syria's longstanding ties to Moscow and the
presence of North Caucasus-based mujahedin within the ranks first of the Al Qa`ida-affiliated
'Jabhat al-Nusra' jihadi group and then of the Islamic State or ISIS prompted Putin's limited
and strategically successful intervention.
More globally, the West has been and remains the
'champion' when it comes to interference in the politics of other states. For financial reasons
alone, Russia cannot hold a candle to US efforts in this regard, no less those of the entire
West. Rather than seeking to dominate or willfully 'transforming' Eurasia in the Western image,
the West should more gently propose democratization and work on strengthening its own
democratic order to serve as a model for non- and less democratic states to emulate.
Those
living in non- or less democratic states who want change have access to all the information
they need on the Internet, except in the most authoritarian countries. Even in the latter,
access is possible if more difficult. The native population and opposition leaders understand
the intricacies of their nation's culture far better than outsiders do and can therefore better
fashion a peaceful, stable regime transformation. If this is not what they want, then they are
unlikely to establish a democratic order when they seize power.
Change the Goal and Strategy
The core problem in Western-Russian relations has been Western, especially, NATO expansion.
NATO expansion, carried forth on the back of EU expansion, effectively 'militarized' Western
democracy-promotion and EU expansion, insulting Russian 'honor' and trust in the West in the
wake of Cold War-ending Western promises that NATO would not expand beyond reunified Germany
and turning Russia away from democracy. Washington and Brussels must discard, therefore, its
basic goal of expanding the community of democracies in brinksmanship-like
fashion–everywhere and immediately, regardless of those expansions' effects on the
Russian and Chinese geostrategic calculation. This means abandoning the strategy of achieving
that goal: NATO and EU expansion. These two prongs of the main strategy, especially NATO
expansion, have added greater cost of driving Russia into China's increasingly powerful arms,
as I predicted a quarter of a century ago.
New Goal and Strategy
Regarding security, the West
should seek to integrate Europe and Eurasia first in the area of negotiating ongoing conflicts
and preventing new conflicts by reinvigorating the Organization of Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE) as the main multilateral forum for Western-Eurasian relations. It should also
become the locus of negotiations between NATO and the Collective Security Treaty Organization
(CSTO) on building a new European security architecture (NESA). During the life of the NESA
negotiations, the West should institute an openly declared moratorium on NATO expansion. After
such the NESA is in place negotiations might begin with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO) on a Eurasia-wide security architecture. Similarly, the European Union should learn from
its misbegotten unilateral expansionism and 'Eastern Partnership' and seek to negotiate a
gradual integration of the EU and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU).
... ... ...
There is very likely to be some
agreement towards extending the START nuclear arms treaty by executive order as well as
negotiating a replacement treaty to be signed at the end of the first or beginning of a second
Trump term.
For the Ukrainian crisis, Trump might propose the creation of a US-Russian working
group to assist the Minsk process. Should Trump be convinced that only US involvement can
resolve the issue, perhaps the group could be incorporated into the Minsk process. He might
also hint that in return for some Moscow concessions on Ukraine, such as backing a more
expanded version of the proposed peacekeeping mission beyond the line of contact, he might be
willing to put pressure on Kiev to finally fulfill its Minsk agreement obligation to engage a
dialogue with the Donbass rebel regions' representatives:
(1) on the modalities related to
conducting elections in the Donbass,
(2) on a Ukrainian law to be adopted according to Minsk-2
'On the temporary order of local government in certain areas of the Donetsk and the Lugansk
regions,' or
(3) 'with respect to the future operation of these areas on the basis of the Law,'
or, for that matter,
(4) on any other subject related to the crisis. Washington pressure on
Kiev to talk directly with the rebels may be possible now that four years too late some of the
Washington institutions that supported the Maidan revolt and illegal overthrow of Yanukovych
such as the Atlantic Council and Freedom House, are waking up to the neofascist threat on the
edges of the Maidan regime and in society.
About the Author – Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., Expert Analyst at Corr
Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com and a
Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group,
San Jose, California, www.cetisresearch.org .
Dr. Hahn is the author of Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the 'New Cold
War (McFarland Publishers, 2017) and three previously and well-received books:
Russia's Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet
Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction Publishers, 2002); Russia's Islamic
Threat (Yale University Press, 2007); and The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global
Jihadism in Russia's North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland Publishers, 2014).He has
published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both
English and Russian language media and has served as a consultant and provided expert testimony
to the U.S. government.
Dr. Hahn also has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco
State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia. He
has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies and the Kennan Institute in Washington DC as well as the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University.
Lyttenburgh, July 7, 2018 at 6:25 am
"and agreed to meet in neighboring Sweden"
Finland.
"This suggests the level of distrust Putin has towards Washington, his low expectations for a successful summit, and the high
price he is likely to demand for concessions on his part."
It suggests nothing of the sort. You are too dramatic.
"[T]he approach of dealing with issues that are easiest to resolve or where we have common interests alone is insufficient
and a non-starter as far as putting the relationship where it should be. By definition, an approach that seeks to avoid areas
where there are disagreements will not resolve a deeply troubled relationship that is putting international security and
peace at risk. Only addressing the core differences complicating relations can a qualitatively new relationship be forged."
Finally someone is willing to admit that! You can't willy-nilly go and ask your neighbor to borrow some sugar after you
wrecked his fence and expect him to "cooperate" on such small issue out of sheer goodness.
"It also means abandoning the approach of designing policies from hubris rooted in the sense that Western democracy is
morally superior to authoritarianism. Although the latter is true"
In what way? I (and quite a lot of people) see particular Western "democracy" as morally bankrupt compared to what it
seemingly randomly calls "authoritarianism"
"In Syria, Putin's Russia has won."
And that writes a man who detest the term, devoting so much ink and time to show to the ignorant that, no – it's Russia's
Putin. Why not say Russia, or Moscow, or even "Pro-Assad coalition"?
"Rather than seeking to dominate or willfully 'transforming' Eurasia in the Western image, the West should more gently
propose democratization and work on strengthening its own democratic order to serve as a model for non- and less democratic
states to emulate."
What, you forgot the immortal words of Paul Wolfowitz so soon? For, you see, "We Are An Empire Now". Crawling back in the
shell won't help to solve the domestic very partisan issues – finding a common enemy does that. Your tactics are good for a
neutered housecat of a nation – not for the mighty Great Again (And Forever) lion which both the elite and the commoners of
the West consider their Republic.
" and turning Russia away from democracy."
Wrong. It turned Russia away from liberalism – not democracy. You know the difference, right? Because your following analysis
suggests otherwise:
"Washington and Brussels must discard, therefore, its basic goal of expanding the community of democracies"
"Putin's Russia" is democracy. As well as Poland under PiS, Hungary under Orban and Turkey under Erdogan. Hell, even Ukraine
is democracy! Democracy is just a mode of rule.
"driving Russia into China's increasingly powerful arms"
Yeah, that's bad for the US. For the rest – not so.
"During the life of the NESA negotiations, the West should institute an openly declared moratorium on NATO expansion."
Absolutely meaningless and easily revertible promise that runs directly against the West self-identification as the only
Empire on the planet.
The list of topics of your Grand Design that follows is too far fetch, unrealistic and abstract that they are basically the
equivalent of "charming" Russian naďve natives with the glass beads. As for your fanatical support of the free trade – it's
era has gone. Again. If you fail to grasp that it was precisely Russian objections of EU version of free trade coming to the
Ukraine which lead to 2013-14 conflict on Maidan – well, nothing can help you.
"Non-Western partners must also be willing to sacrifice some of their present interests for the sake of the benefits of
stability and cooperation that will accrue in future. "
Like I said – land for the glass beads.
"In Ukraine, the U.S. must get more involved in the Minsk 2 negotiating process."
No, they shouldn't.
"Without a clear signal from Trump that Washington is not interested in expanding NATO to Ukraine or using the crisis to
isolate Moscow through sanctions and the like and intends to lead the search for a solution, Moscow is unlikely to make any
meaningful concessions."
You don't see it, do you? It's Kiev for whom the conflict is more beneficial. It allows all sort of, yes, authoritarian
things and policies without fear of the "real war". You can silence all your critics with – "but Putin might attack us!" or
"are you a secret separ?!". Kiev has no other viable strategy but to commit an ethnic cleansing of DNR or LNR should they be
returned to it. Simple as that.
BTW – have you read Minsk II accords? How about Kiev fulfils its part first?
"Washington could be able to convince Moscow to abandon its support for the elements of the Iran presence in Syria and
Lebanon that arrived in the context of the Syrian civil war."
Nothing of the sort will happen. Sowing division among potential USA rivals is a viable tactic – but don't take everyone for
an idiot.
"There is very likely to be some agreement towards extending the START nuclear arms treaty"
Wanna bet, that there won't be? Also – nothing of the Ukraine, nothing on NATO. A little something on Syria (officially)
with, maybe, an unofficial concession of the defeat of the West-backed "unicorns".
Tl;dr. This is not about coming Trump-Putin summit. You are just venting off your fantasy about Bright Future. You present
solely pro-US perspective of the summit, enumerating things that Trump must "ask", nay, "demand" either for free or some
minor concessions on his part. Have you ever tried to think what Russia might want of the summit instead?
Salsibury Watchdog, July 11, 2018 at 2:19 am
"It also means abandoning the approach of designing policies from hubris rooted in the sense that Western democracy is
morally superior to authoritarianism. Although the latter is true"
Mr. Khan, if what Western elites are doing to other sovereign nations is 'a democracy' why is it done so covertly: through
murky slash funds, secrets coups and illegal bombings?
I've never seen a referendum asking people in the US whether they wanted to fund another war. Had they been asked, people
would've chosen affordable healthcare, housing and access to education instead, and you know it as well I do.
Yet you're still talking about 'Western democracy'?
"... "What is quietly happening across parts of Iraq is less of a resurgence, and more a resurfacing, of the Islamic State. Many of these fighters never actually left, but merely scattered temporarily, having melted away into the population only to return. " ..."
How is ISIS resurfacing in Iraq? The short answer is that it never really left. Despite US
President Donald Trump's orders to "
annihilate ISIS ," members of the organization have continued to exist in Iraq and Syria
and carry out attacks. The caliphate has fallen and the group no longer holds the vast
territory and population it once controlled. However, supporters, organizers and fighters have
not simply disappeared. Instead, the aspiring proto-state has reverted back to its roots as a
terrorist insurgency. The US-based Soufan
Center assessed the environment as such:
"What is quietly happening across parts of Iraq is less of a resurgence, and more a
resurfacing, of the Islamic State. Many of these fighters never actually left, but merely
scattered temporarily, having melted away into the population only to return. "
The US and the UN agree that there may be as many as 30,000 ISIS
members still present in Iraq and Syria. Jason Warner and Charlotte Hulme writing for the
Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC) also recently estimated that an additional
6,000
fighters are spread across Africa , with the Islamic State West-Africa Province (Boko
Haram) contributing more than half of the total. ISIS continues to wield influence further
abroad with IS-Khorasan in
Afghanistan as well as supporters in the Philippines
, Indonesia
, and throughout the Indo-Pacific.
These members and supporters received encouragement and direction from their highest leader,
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in an
audio message released last month. The message promoted patience and perseverance, claiming
that the time will come again for a resurgence. In Iraq, this may be a functional
strategy.
Little change
ISIS's Iraqi presence began as al-Qaeda in Iraq, an al-Qaeda affiliate led by
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi . The group found footholds in Iraq in the chaos caused by the US
invasion in 2003, and then re-branded itself as the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) following its
founder's death in 2006. While pressured by the Anbar
Awakening and the US troop surge in 2007,
ISI managed to survive and wait for conditions to become more favorable.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki , a Shia
politician, would contribute to these conditions by giving preferential treatment and status to
Shiite Iraqis. As a result, many of Iraq's Sunnis were disillusioned and alienated from the
Iraqi state and were at least indifferent to ISIS, if not supportive. Renad Mansour of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in 2016 that a lack of options for Sunni
political engagement combined with "intra-Sunni conflict" drove the power development of ISI.
Following the withdrawal of US troops in 2011, the Iraqi security forces were left mostly alone
to fight the extremist group, and quickly buckled under the task.
Research published by the CTC earlier this year sought to analyze the
opinions of young men in Mosul , ISIS"s Iraqi capital. While largely characterized as
"corrupt, brutal, and hypocritical," 93% reported that ISIS had positive effects during the
beginning of their authority. Even now that they have lost that authority, most respondents
were confident that ISIS will not disappear anytime soon. The Sunni community in general was
characterized by the men as divided and both spiritually and physically weak.
Following the collapse of the caliphate, Iraq began judicial proceedings for thousands of
accused ISIS members. While trials are a necessary and positive element in resolving the
conflict, Iraq's courts have been quickly overwhelmed, resulting in trials lasting for as
little as
10 minutes . Innocent Sunnis are at risk of being swept
up in these trials, and joining the many who have already been sentenced to
death as a result of these proceedings.
Shia militias also continue to act with impunity as an element of Iraq's security
forces , reinforcing the power disparity between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. With Sunni
estrangement, internal conflict and disunity, and a perception of weakness continuing, it falls
on the government to enforce security and suppress violence.
Political inclusion
Perhaps the largest result of the Iraqi election this year was the ascension of
Muqtada al-Sadr , a Shia cleric, as the leader of the winning parliamentary block. Al-Sadr
promoted Iraqi unity and the abandonment of political divisiveness in his campaign; however,
his group has also been accused of
past aggression against Sunnis . How al-Sadr and the new Parliament will lead Iraq, enforce
security, and form relationships with Sunni communities remains to be seen.
The Sunni community apparently remains internally conflicted and continues to face
challenges at the hands of the Iraqi state. Renad Mansour believes that greater power-sharing
at high levels and greater autonomy at low levels is key to relieving the pressure on Sunni
communities and reengaging them with the state while also accounting for the lack of unity
within the Sunni community. Without political engagement, and facing institutionalized
challenges, many Sunnis may continue to support or be indifferent to extremist groups like
ISIS. Although the group itself has lost its attractiveness among most of Iraq's Sunnis, the
conditions which fueled its earlier growth are still present.
Doubtless, members of the group have gone into hiding and will continue to launch attacks
for the foreseeable future. ISIS will likely never return to the high point it experienced
several years ago, but it has defied expectations before. With smart re-branding and a strategy
made to appeal more to the local population, combined with a messy government unable to provide
security, ISIS may manage regain some of the power it has lost.
"... he has brought North Korea away from the edge of nuclear war and established at least tentative diplomatic relations with that nation, something no president has done before him. Against frenzied opposition from the American Establishment, he has somewhat softened U.S. relations with Russia. ..."
"... On domestic and environmental matters, Trump is pro-plutocrat, a climate change denier, and the installer of arch-reactionary Supreme Court justices. But this is more a function of the current national Republican party than of Trump himself. Any of Trump's opponents in the 2016 primaries would have followed the same policies. ..."
Trump is not crazy at all. He is the proponent of a particular philosophy, Trumpism, which
he follows very clearly and consistently.
As president, he has had significant successes. Notably, he has brought North Korea away
from the edge of nuclear war and established at least tentative diplomatic relations with
that nation, something no president has done before him. Against frenzied opposition from the
American Establishment, he has somewhat softened U.S. relations with Russia.
On domestic and environmental matters, Trump is pro-plutocrat, a climate change denier,
and the installer of arch-reactionary Supreme Court justices. But this is more a function of
the current national Republican party than of Trump himself. Any of Trump's opponents in the
2016 primaries would have followed the same policies.
Trumpism is undeniably a form of near-fascism. Trump has followed viciously anti-immigrant
tendencies, and this, along with his ties to out-and-out racists, is the worst part of his
presidency. But these horrible aspects do not at all show that he is crazy. He has used them
coldly and calculatedly to gain power.
And while his schtick and bluster are indeed bizarre, he has used them very consistently
to keep a 40%-plus approval rating in the face of an Establishment opposition the like of
which has used against a president at least in our lifetimes.
As I have commented here before, except for Trump's disgusting anti-immigration policies,
George W. Bush was on balance a far worse president.
"... I am interested in another, a very simple question: why? Why would Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea interfere in the US midterm elections? What they want to achieve. All right, let's drop all the others, let's just talk about us, Russians. ..."
"... The same hackers who broke into the DNC and stole Hillary Clinton emails now will steal midterm elections. But from whom? Do you understand anything? Personally, I don't understand anymore. Which Party we support? Who is the target of our effort to interfere in the USA elections. Are we promoting Repubs or DemoRats ? ..."
"... Perhaps the head of the US national intelligence Daniel Coates is right when he declared that "their goal is to divide and undermine our democratic values." Well, let's suppose that we really are against those sacred values. ..."
"... But the midterm elections will still be held, despite any interference. And one of candidates will win, while the other will lose. If we see no difference in candidates why we should interfere? ..."
"... Looks like Daniel Coats think that the world government is us. No, I'd certainly like the idea, even if this requires smoking something really strong (let's use Musk as a lodestar ;-). But I'm afraid we're not capable to serve in this role. After economic rape of 1991 we are too poor. And to serve the role of world government you better be rich. ..."
"... why we Russians should interfere in already completely messed up US elections, which typically equal to a force choice between two equally unacceptable candidates, already chosen and vetted by neoliberal elite. Like Trump vs. Hillary. why we should play this game of "the lesser evil." It's plain vanilla stupidity. ..."
According to popular belief, the cold war ended with the victory of the United States of America. And, accordingly, the demice
of the Soviet Union. However, what exactly represent such a victory is not that easy to understand. Instead of one conservative,
and therefore predictable player, the United States received a half dozen countries, of which only three or four are loyal, with
other living by "the laws of jungles" (sorry free market). The number of aimed at American cities Intercontinental ballistic missiles
with nuclear warheads remained approximately the same as before the infamous "victory." And strategic atomic submarines remained,
and strategic bombers. There are less of them, for sure, but they are more modern and more dngerous with more sophisticated weaponry.
In any ccase remaining are still enough to make the winner to feel like a loser after b=neclear apolaipsys. And the idfea of victory
is that the victor is the master (in this case the master of the plant). Am I missing something ?
Of course, another inquisitive observer will tell us about the controlled chaos, about the growing influence and plans for the
establishing of the world neoliberal government. I was impressed by the recent revelation of Senator John Tester, who said that Putin
is promoting communism in America. As the idea that this senator is a complete idiot who does not understand the Russia rejected
communism as a dead-born system is pretty absurd. I would venture to assume that it might be that Russia did something that can with
some stretch be qualifies as an attempt to influence the USA election, but, alas, Putin has no strategic plan, not the intention.
First of all this would be pretty idiotic idea as two candidates were equally bad for Russia and it was completely unclear who is
worse.
But all those crazy US neocons still managed to imposed on Russia sanctions because of its "interference in the elections." That
tells us something about the US congress. I do not want to write about the lack of evidence and absurdity of the arguments again.
I've already written a lot about it. No, let's stop talking about the past and try to look into the future.
The US President's national security adviser John Bolton (who theoretically should be a sanest person in the administration) recently
said that the US is concerned about the potential for interference in the midterm elections to the Congress of four countries. Russia,
China, Iran and North Korea. "I will not go into details of what I saw or didn't see, but I tell you that in the 2018 elections,
these four countries raise the greatest fears," proclaim this highly placed Presidential adviser.
Theoretically it make some sense. Any man with a knife has a potential to kill. Any country with nuclear weapons has the potential
to strike at the US. Any country with developed IT has a potential opportunity to interfere in elections with the help of cyber attacks.
For example, Israel. But it is not a good idea to scare the American voter with Israel. No, he/she should be confused, and he/she
should be afraid of potential menace. And this external enemy should unite fragmented by neoliberal excesses country (for this purpose
those good-for nothing people grazing in State Department and Spaso House (The US embassy in Moscow) should constantly accuse the
Russian authorities of all sorts nefarious activities. So there is nothing new here: Great Britain uses similar dirty tricks against
Russia for centuries. I am interested in another, a very simple question: why? Why would Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea
interfere in the US midterm elections? What they want to achieve. All right, let's drop all the others, let's just talk about us,
Russians.
What do we want? Let's say we want the midterms to be won by the Republicans. Then explain to me why Republican John Bolton fears
this. If there's anything John Bolton should be afraid of, it's that Russia will intervene in the midterms in order to win the Democrats.
But The Washington Post writes that "the leaders of the Democratic party of the United States fear the potential interference of
Russia and start to increase its presence in anticipation of the interim election cycle on such platforms as Facebook and Twitter."
President Trump writes on Twitter that Russia will" make a lot of effort " to intervene in the midterm elections on the side of the
Democrats. Microsoft claims that Russian hackers created fake websites of Republican organizations in order to collect information
about Republicans. The same hackers who broke into the DNC and stole Hillary Clinton emails now will steal midterm elections.
But from whom? Do you understand anything? Personally, I don't understand anymore. Which Party we support? Who is the target of our
effort to interfere in the USA elections. Are we promoting Repubs or DemoRats ?
Perhaps the head of the US national intelligence Daniel Coates is right when he declared that "their goal is to divide and
undermine our democratic values." Well, let's suppose that we really are against those sacred values.
But the midterm elections will still be held, despite any interference. And one of candidates will win, while the other will
lose. If we see no difference in candidates why we should interfere? If the net result for us anyway will be the same: more
sanctions? Here we should go back to the idea of "controlled chaos" and world government. Looks like Daniel Coats think that
the world government is us. No, I'd certainly like the idea, even if this requires smoking something really strong (let's use Musk
as a lodestar ;-). But I'm afraid we're not capable to serve in this role. After economic rape of 1991 we are too poor. And to serve
the role of world government you better be rich.
Again the question arise, why we should interfere in he USA elections. Only if we are out for revenge, "eye for eye" principle
as they interfered in ours. There's no other reasonable answer. But even in this case, why we Russians should interfere in already
completely messed up US elections, which typically equal to a force choice between two equally unacceptable candidates, already chosen
and vetted by neoliberal elite. Like Trump vs. Hillary. why we should play this game of "the lesser evil." It's plain vanilla stupidity.
And before we get the answer to this fundamental question "Why?" there can be no further questions. None. Moreover, no other questions
are needed. So let them just explain to us why we should interfere and how we can benefit from such an interference, and we will
try our best. Before that, let's just watch.
And when they explain this to us, we can communicate the answer to China, Iran and North Korea free of charge.
"... The letter by Mister or Ms Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas Friedman. That is, someone on the NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite obvious calculated aims. It is a masterpiece of treacherous deception. ..."
"... This anonymous enemy of amorality claims to approve of all the most extreme right-wing measures of the Trump administration as "bright spots": deregulation, tax reform, a more robust military, "and more" – cleverly omitting mention of Trump's immigration policy which could unduly shock the New York Times' liberal readers. The late Senator John McCain, the model of bipartisan bellicosity, is cited as the example to follow. ..."
"... The "resistance" proclaimed is solely against the facets of Trump's foreign policy which White House insiders are said to be working diligently to undermine: peaceful relations with Russian and North Korea. ..."
"... Trump's desire to avoid war is transformed into "a preference for autocrats and dictators". (Trump gets no credit for his warlike rhetoric against Iran and close relations with Netanyahu, even though they must please Anonymous.) ..."
"... The purpose of this is stunningly obvious. The New York Times has already done yeoman service in rounding up liberal Democrats and left-leaning independents in the anti-Trump lynch mob. But now the ploy is to rally conservative Republicans to the same cause of overthrowing the elected President. The letter amounts to an endorsement of future President Pence. ..."
"... This is the Iago ploy. Shakespeare's villain destroyed Othello by causing him to distrust those closest to him, his wife and closest associates. Like Trump in Washington, Othello, the "Moor" of Venice, was an outsider, that much easier to deceive and betray. ..."
"... The New York Times is playing Iago, whispering that Putin in the Kremlin is surrounded by secret "informants", and that Trump in the White House is surrounded by people systematically undermining his presidency. Putin is not likely to be impressed, but the trick might work with Trump, who is truly the target of open and covert enemies and whose position is much more insecure. There is certainly some undermining going on. ..."
"... Was the New York Times oped written by the paper's own writers or by the CIA? It hardly matters since they are so closely entwined. ..."
"... The military-industrial-congressional-deep state-media complex is holding its breath to breathe that great sigh of relief. The intruder is gone. Hurrah! Now we can go right on teaching the public to hate and fear the Russian enemy, so that arms contracts continue to blossom and NATO builds up its aggressive forces around Russia in hopes that this may frighten the Russians into dumping Putin in favor of a new Boris Yeltsin, ready to let the United States pursue the Clintonian plan of breaking up the Russian Federation into pieces, like the former Yugoslavia, in order to take them over one by one, with all their great natural resources. ..."
"... When dialogue is impossible, all that is left is force and violence. That is what is being promoted by the most influential media in the United States. ..."
The New York Times continues to outdo itself in the production of fake news. There is no
more reliable source of fake news than the intelligence services, which regularly provide their
pet outlets (NYT and WaPo) with sensational stories that are as unverifiable as their sources
are anonymous. A prize example was the August 24 report that US intelligence agencies don't
know anything about Russia's plans to mess up our November elections because "informants close
to Putin and in the Kremlin" aren't saying anything. Not knowing anything about something for
which there is no evidence is a rare scoop.
A story like that is not designed to "inform the public" since there is no information in
it. It has other purposes: to keep the "Russia is undermining our democracy" story on front
pages, with the extra twist in this case of trying to make Putin distrustful of his entourage.
The Russian president is supposed to wonder, who are those informants in my entourage?
But that was nothing compared to the whopper produced by the "newpaper of record" on
September 5. (By the way, the "record" is stuck in the same groove: Trump bad, Putin bad
– bad bad bad.) This was the sensational oped headlined "I am Part of the Resistance
Inside the Trump Administration", signed by nobody.
The letter by Mister or Ms Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas
Friedman. That is, someone on the NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite
obvious calculated aims. It is a masterpiece of treacherous deception.
The fictional author presents itself as a right-wing conservative shocked by Trump's
"amorality" – a category that outside the Washington swamp might include betraying the
trust of one's superior.
This anonymous enemy of amorality claims to approve of all the most extreme right-wing
measures of the Trump administration as "bright spots": deregulation, tax reform, a more robust
military, "and more" – cleverly omitting mention of Trump's immigration policy which
could unduly shock the New York Times' liberal readers. The late Senator John McCain, the model
of bipartisan bellicosity, is cited as the example to follow.
The "resistance" proclaimed is solely against the facets of Trump's foreign policy which
White House insiders are said to be working diligently to undermine: peaceful relations with
Russian and North Korea.
Trump's desire to avoid war is transformed into "a preference for autocrats and
dictators". (Trump gets no credit for his warlike rhetoric against Iran and close relations
with Netanyahu, even though they must please Anonymous.)
The purpose of this is stunningly obvious. The New York Times has already done yeoman
service in rounding up liberal Democrats and left-leaning independents in the anti-Trump lynch
mob. But now the ploy is to rally conservative Republicans to the same cause of overthrowing
the elected President. The letter amounts to an endorsement of future President Pence.
Just get rid of Trump and you'll have a nice, neat, ultra-right-wing Republican as
President.
The Democrats may not like Pence, but they are so demented by hatred of Trump that they are
visibly ready to accept the Devil himself to get rid of the sinister clown who dared defeat
Hillary Clinton. Down with democracy; the votes of deplorables shouldn't count.
That is treacherous enough, but even more despicable is the insidious design to destabilize
the presidency by sowing distrust. Speaking of Trump, Mr and/or Ms Anonymous declare: "The
dilemma – which he does not fully grasp – is that many of the senior officials in
his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and
his worst inclinations" (meaning peace with Russia).
This is the Iago ploy. Shakespeare's villain destroyed Othello by causing him to
distrust those closest to him, his wife and closest associates. Like Trump in Washington,
Othello, the "Moor" of Venice, was an outsider, that much easier to deceive and
betray.
The New York Times is playing Iago, whispering that Putin in the Kremlin is surrounded
by secret "informants", and that Trump in the White House is surrounded by people
systematically undermining his presidency. Putin is not likely to be impressed, but the trick
might work with Trump, who is truly the target of open and covert enemies and whose position is
much more insecure. There is certainly some undermining going on.
Was the New York Times oped written by the paper's own writers or by the CIA? It hardly
matters since they are so closely entwined.
No trick is too low for those who consider Trump an intolerable intruder on THEIR power
territory. The New York Times "news" that Trump is surrounded by traitors is taken up by other
media who indirectly confirm the story by speculating on "who is it?" The Boston Globe (among
others) eagerly rushed in, asking:
"So who's the author of the op-ed? It's a question that has many people poking through the
text, looking for clues. Meanwhile, the denials have come thick and fast. Here's a brief look
at some of the highest-level officials in the administration who might have a motive to write
the letter."
Isn't it obvious that all this is designed to make Trump distrust everyone around him? Isn't
that a way to drive him toward that "crazy" where they say he already is, and which is fallback
grounds for impeachment when the Mueller investigation fails to come up with nothing more
serious than the fact that Russian intelligent agents are intelligent agents?
The White House insider (or insiders, or whatever) use terms like "erratic behavior" and
"instability" to contribute to the "Trump is insane" narrative. Insanity is the alternative
pretext to the Mueller wild goose chase for divesting Trump of the powers of the presidency. If
Trump responds by accusing the traitors of being traitors, that will be final proof of his
mental instability. The oped claims to provide evidence that Trump is being betrayed, but if he
says so, that will be taken as a sign of mental derangement. To save our exemplary democracy
from itself, the elected president must be thrown out.
The military-industrial-congressional-deep state-media complex is holding its breath to
breathe that great sigh of relief. The intruder is gone. Hurrah! Now we can go right on
teaching the public to hate and fear the Russian enemy, so that arms contracts continue to
blossom and NATO builds up its aggressive forces around Russia in hopes that this may frighten
the Russians into dumping Putin in favor of a new Boris Yeltsin, ready to let the United States
pursue the Clintonian plan of breaking up the Russian Federation into pieces, like the former
Yugoslavia, in order to take them over one by one, with all their great natural
resources.
And when this fails, as it has been failing, and will continue to fail, the United States
has all those brand new first strike nuclear weapons being stationed in European NATO
countries, aimed at the Kremlin. And the Russian military are not just sitting there with their
own nuclear weapons, waiting to be wiped out. When nobody, not even the President of the United
States, has the right to meet and talk with Russian leaders, there is only one remaining form
of exchange. When dialogue is impossible, all that is left is force and violence. That is
what is being promoted by the most influential media in the United States.
"... This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Zen Cash , The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; LibertyStickers.com ; TheBumperSticker.com ; and ExpandDesigns.com/Scott . ..."
Danny Sjursen is interviewed on his service in the Terror Wars, how he became antiwar, and
how he wants his service and the service of others to be honored.
"... According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, [on] 24 December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. ..."
"... We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire. ..."
"... What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War? ..."
The alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorists attacks, Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, was
recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war, "ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight
Soviet invaders".(Hugh Davies, "`Informers' point the finger at bin Laden; Washington on alert
for suicide bombers." The Daily Telegraph, London, 24 August 1998).
In 1979 the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA was launched in
Afghanistan:
"With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI, who wanted to turn the
Afghan Jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some
35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and
1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually, more than
100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad." (Ahmed Rashid,
"The Taliban: Exporting Extremism", Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999).
This project of the US intelligence apparatus was conducted with the active support of
Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), which was entrusted in channelling covert
military aid to the Islamic brigades and financing, in liason with the CIA, the madrassahs and
Mujahideen training camps.
U.S. government support to the Mujahideen was presented to world public opinion as a
"necessary response" to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist
government of Babrak Kamal.
The CIA's military-intelligence operation in Afghanistan, which consisted in creating the
"Islamic brigades", was launched prior rather than in response to the entry of Soviet troops
into Afghanistan. In fact, Washington's intent was to deliberately trigger a civil war, which
has lasted for more than 25 years. (photo: CIA and ISI agents)
The CIA's role in laying the foundations of Al Qaeda is confirmed in an 1998 interview with
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who at the time was National Security Adviser to President Jimmy
Carter:
Brzezinski: According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen
began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, [on] 24
December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed,
it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the
opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the
President in which I explained to him that in my opinion, this aid was going to induce a
Soviet military intervention.
Question: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you
yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we
knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Question:When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to
fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe
them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of
drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the
Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the
opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to
carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the
demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Question: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having
given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the
collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe
and the end of the Cold War? ( "The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan, Interview with
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser", Le Nouvel
Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, published in English, Centre for Research on
Globalisation, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
, 5 October 2001, italics added.)
Consistent with Brzezinski's account, a "Militant Islamic Network" was created by the
CIA.
The "Islamic Jihad" (or holy war against the Soviets) became an integral part of the CIA's
intelligence ploy. It was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia, with a significant
part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade:
"In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166 [which]
authorize[d] stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahideen, and it made clear that the
secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert
action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a
dramatic increase in arms supplies -- a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987 as well
as a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists who travelled to the secret
headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There, the CIA
specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan
rebels."(Steve Coll, The Washington Post, July 19, 1992.)
Russians want a weak and divided US. Putin couldn't care less about who is running the
nation.
Did they interfere with our election? Maybe.
Did illegals criminally vote in our elections after Obama asked them to? Did the Clintons
and the DNC pay millions for the so-called research that led to Russia dossier? Yes. Did
Clinton have her billionaire foreign friends funding her campaign? Yes.
But I guess direct foreign interference doesn't count if the Democrats were behind it. I
think Democrats need to understand that people are starting to notice all the BS they are
preaching.
You can't have it both ways....unless your a Democrat. People got tired of that and elected
a clown over a corrupt political cult of blatant liars and criminals. Normal people don't like
SJW types, hypocrites and habitually outraged race baiters.
At some point you start to notice how they flood social media and every forum with their
trash propaganda. Even slashdot seems to get hit constantly.
I followed that assault on Fallujah very closely at the time. Remember that the US Marines
had tried to take over the town some months before but met with very fierce resistance and
were chased out of town. Therefore there was an element of revenge and also punishment about
this second assault. First they occupied the civilian hospital on the outskirts of Fallujah
(a war crime). They then systemically bombed and destroyed the power station, the water
pumping station and the sewage works (all war crimes).
Then as you point out they used white phosphorous munitions (a war crime), but there was
something peculiar in the immediate aftermath. Having eventually successfully subdued the
town, US troops went around the central area and systematically shot out, and thus drained,
all the water towers (these were numerous as many houses had them). Then military bulldozers
moved in and removed all the topsoil from a couple of square kilometres. This led to
speculation that some form of illegal chemical weapons had been deployed.
Mad Dog indeed.
"... "[W]e should value all these successes which the north and the south made hand in hand and keep advancing without deviation the north-south ties that have definitely entered the new orbit of peace, the orbit of reconciliation and cooperation." ..."
A RoK delegation returning from yesterday's meeting with DPRK officials and accompanying
news reports say Kim is willing to sign a
Declaration
of Peace with Moon prior to the Outlaw US Empire removing its troops, while also taking
note of other related developments:
"Chung Eui-yong, Moon's national security adviser, told reporters Thursday that Kim said he
would be willing to sign the end-of-war declaration that Seoul and Pyongyang have been pursuing
since the spring without concomitantly demanding the withdrawal of the 28,500 US troops
stationed in South Korea or an end to the alliance between the US and South Korea."
Kim said the following and more:
"[W]e should value all these successes which the north and the south made hand in hand and
keep advancing without deviation the north-south ties that have definitely entered the new
orbit of peace, the orbit of reconciliation and cooperation."
The next Moon/Kim Summit will be in Pyongyang September 18-20. Imagine the pressure on the
Outlaw US Empire should Kim and Moon sign such a Declaration! I bet Trump would sign it just to
pressure the warmongering Senate to vote for a Peace Treaty. Imagine the global uproar if they
declined to ratify!
The spring of 2016 in Washington, D.C. was unusually warm, as I remember, perhaps
foreshadowing the raucous year yet to come. One night a group of journalists and policy hands
gathered at the Dupont Circle bar Rebellion to commiserate. No one knew it yet but it was the
closing moment in Act One of the Trump revolution; our 21st-century P.T. Barnum was well on his
way from presidential impossibility to presumptive nominee. Yet no one was talking about Trump.
That evening, perhaps bespeaking of both the sleeplessness and sexlessness of those gathered,
the conversation focused on a new addition to Senator Ted Cruz's national security team: Frank
Gaffney, the former Reagan hand and uber-foreign policy hawk.
Back in 2016, Cruz -- capable, erudite, and reviled -- was positioning himself as the last
great hope of movement conservatism. The only candidate who could still plausibly defeat Trump,
or individually force a convention brawl, Cruz wanted to convert his early primary brand -- a
kind of diluted libertarianism mixed with cultural evangelicalism -- into something more
conventionally Republican. Gone was the poaching of the platforms of Rand Paul and Ben Carson,
and in was Lindsey Graham who had previously called the junior Texas senator "demonic."
"This is what we're supposed to oppose Trump with? The paragon of reason, Frank Gaffney?"
intoned one policy veteran sympathetic to a restrained foreign policy and, correspondingly, to
Paul, who had only recently dropped out of the race. In truth, Cruz was simply trying to
replicate a trick mastered by Trump -- a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty machination of modern
conservative politics -- occupying, at the same time, the least and most hawkish spaces on the
political field. For every enthrallingly refreshing "Iraq was a big fat mistake" from candidate
Trump, there was "we're going to bomb the s**t out of ISIS" and promises to restart the torture
program of the Bush years.
Gaffney's recent career, now re-ascendent in Trump's orbit, is perhaps most emblematic of
that conflict of vision.
When you talk to Gaffney, as I did in his Washington offices at the Center for Security
Policy in August of 2017, you get the sense that he and his allies think that the September 11
attacks are now almost a distraction. For the hardcore -- and this includes some principals at
more mainstream outfits such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) -- the
true, largely unencumbered villain in America's war on terror is either -- pick your poison --
the Muslim Brotherhood or Hezbollah. For Gaffney, and his life's work stands as testament to
this, it's decidedly the former. Anxieties about the alleged power of the the Muslim
Brotherhood are rife in the publications put out by his Center for Security Policy. This often
lapses into matters more sinister and conspiratorial: the enemy within, and the enemy itself.
His center's books -- and he readily gave me more than 10 -- have titles such as Star
Spangled Sharia and Bridge-Building to Nowhere: The Catholic Church's Case Study in
Interfaith Delusion . The texts allege elaborate financial and political influence
maneuvers by Muslim agents, most concerningly the Brotherhood. Gaffney even intimated to me,
before backtracking, that Congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress,
could be a Brother, or at least compromised by the Brotherhood.
"The assertion that the dangers that we're facing, most obviously post-9/11, have nothing to
do with Islam and [that] the people who are fighting us with terrorism or in Afghanistan or
Iraq or elsewhere, are actually hijacking a great Abrahamic faith and a religion of peace and
all of that, is simply uninformed," Gaffney told me. "What the authorities of Islam call
sharia , has, at its core, our destruction." He added that adherents to sharia
"are obliged to engage in jihad, of one kind or another, to impose it on everybody else."
Yet Gaffney, in the seventh month of the presidency of the man who once told CNN "I think
Islam hates us," seemed lukewarm at best over Donald Trump.
The week I met with him came just after the largest bloodletting of the administration: the
rapid-fire ousters of key figures who had been with Trump during the campaign -- Reince
Priebus, Sean Spicer, Anthony Scaramucci, and Stephen K. Bannon. From where Gaffney was
sitting, the White House inner circle was now a mishmash of the kind of conventional
Republicans -- James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly -- who, as Peter
Beinart reported in The Atlantic , had long "treated Gaffney as a pariah." The so-called axis of adults
was unlikely to prioritize fighting for the embattled travel ban in the courts, or pursuing
regime change in Iran or Qatar -- "the ATM of the Muslim Brotherhood," as Jonathan Schanzer of
FDD put it in a phone conversation with me.
Since that discussion, however, Gaffneyism has experienced a clear uptick in fortunes.
Gaffney's relevance stems from his relationship with Trump's national security advisor, John
Bolton, as well as the chief of staff of Bolton's National Security Council, Fred Fleitz.
Fleitz has worked as chief for both men. As I detailed in the Spectator
USA, Bolton was eventually able to leverage his media appearances into one of the
most senior positions in the government. (Gaffney is also a fellow, though not parallel,
traveler of Bannon's.)
Both the genius and the secret of the modern anti-establishment right is, like Trump, its
ability to occupy two places at once. Bannon's former outlet Breitbart News , where
Gaffney is a regular radio guest (as was Bolton previously), is proof positive. Breitbart has
staunchly defended most actions of the Netanyahu government in Israel while condemning the
Pentagon for its support of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. On foreign policy, the Trump
coalition is a tenuous alliance between some of the GOP's least interventionist voices, Rand
Paul as well as Bannon on most issues, and some of its most interventionist voices, like
Gaffney and Bolton.
But there is one area where the hawks in this arrangement have prevailed: cutting Iran down
to size.
In fact, it hasn't been much of a fight: Trump leaving the Iran nuclear deal in some fashion
was never really in doubt. As I
reported last fall, at one point, the fight inside Trump circles was essentially between
two plans to exit the deal as written during the Obama years: Bolton, Bannon, and Gaffney's
plan versus the more restrained architecture favored by the FDD.
Gaffney didn't get full sway over that decision, but he didn't have to.
His biggest victory was the president's selection of Bolton. While Bolton himself campaigned
to get the job at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), it was Gaffney
who was most direct: "You know, everybody says it's great to be back at CPAC, but nobody means
it like I do," he said, declaring, "The president of the United States must fire H.R. McMaster
and hire John Bolton!" Years back, Gaffney had denounced CPAC's organizing body, the American
Conservative Union (ACU), for its support of Suhail Khan, a Muslim former Bush administration
official he accused of being an agent of the Brotherhood. The dispute had played out
prominently in the national news.
And that's really the handle: going forward, will Gaffney's very real policy influence be
sundered by what some see as a penchant for wacky prejudice? He isn't without real influence,
and as Peter Beinart argued earlier this year, Bolton has helped rehabilitate him even further
on the right. "The man has one of the best minds in D.C.," said Raheem Kassam, who was raised
Muslim and is the former editor of Breitbart London. He added, however: "Genius doesn't come
without eccentricity."
One example is that, in conducting research for this article, two sources familiar with the
matter told me of Gaffney's history of compiling opposition research dossiers on those who fall
out of his favor. One recent case involved a former member of Gaffney's circle (a clique that
includes Ginny Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas) who became
romantically involved with a Muslim -- apparently a bridge too far. And Gaffney's flare-ups
with Grover Norquist, the conservative tax policy kingmaker who married a Muslim woman in 2004,
are well documented. A
dossier put out by CSP and its allies on the subject reads: "The Islamists' -- and their
Enablers' -- Assault on the Right: The Case Against Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan."
Cracks on policy have shown. In addition to holding views on Islam that are emphatically
outside the mainstream, Gaffney, doctrinaire hawkish in a way that the president is not,
recently joined in on the criticism of Trump's Helsinki summit, while his center has repeatedly
urged regime change as the best course in North Korea. After Trump's meeting with Vladimir
Putin, Gaffney said Trump could be making President Obama look strong by comparison. In a
published statement, he intoned: "President Trump needs now to clarify -- and walk back -- any
mandates for institutionalizing Moscow's agenda in ways that would make the appalling
Obama-Clinton 'reset' with Russia seem robust."
That's the real question for Bolton's NSC and this Republican Party: as Trump continues to
remake American conservatism in his image, at what point, if any, does Gaffney go from lodestar
to liability?
Curt Mills is the foreign affairs reporter at The National Interest, where he
covers the State Department, National Security Council, and the Trump presidency.MORE
FROM THIS AUTHOR
Gaffney's a crank. This kind of attention only encourages him.
He and other neoconservatives didn't get the good hard boot in the face they so richly
deserved after the Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen disasters they caused. Happily for
Christendom, it seems that omission will be remedied in the not too distant future.
Note that at the February CPAC conference in which Gaffney endorsed Bolton for Trump's
NSA, he also called for "regime change" in China.
Amazing. Gaffney sees the Super-Power U.S. as a giant hegemonic anaconda that can swallow
anything no matter how big.
Note too that Gaffney's Center for Security Policy took in over $7,000,000 in 2016, (last
posted IRS Form 990). Where does that money come from? Especially given that Gaffney is a
supposed "crank". He obviously has benefactors who want to leverage his fear-monger schtick
for their own purposes.
And OBTW, Gaffney pays himself over $350 Grand via a crony Board of Directors who
authorize that kind of mad money. Not bad scratch for just showing up and gas-bagging.
In the end, Gaffney is the quintessential parasitic Beltway Hack, i.e., paid large for
mind dumps scripted for his benefactors.
HD Id agree with the Zionist puppet masters (which I normally think of as neoconservatives
and neoliberals).
I have to wonder whether Trumps embrace of hawks and warmongerers is to placate and
passify them so they don't join the ranks of never Trumpers, Russian colluders and other
manufactured and fictional stories to undermine the Trump Administration.
So far he has embraced them with a military buildup, tough talk with North Korea,
withdrawing from the JCPOA, chastising NATO, waging trade wars and sending US ships into the
South China Sea (to the consternation of China) and sending US troops to African to fight
Islamic radicalism (there is more than one place in the world where Islamic wars are being
fought).
But at the same time, Trump has not fallen into the trap of GBushII in being their lapdog
following their dictates nor has he opposed them withdrawn and starved the military like
Obama.
Trump has used hawks to appear strong and strengthen his defenses but he has not created
any new military confrontations which gives me confidence that Trump knows how to handle
powerful constituencies. Lets hope he continues to do so.
Interesting article. There is a lot to digest but does the writer have evidence to the
contrary of what Mr. Gaffney is saying in his reports.
I read Robert Spencer's book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam" years ago and it
made quite an impression on me.
Sometimes these so called fringe people are right on track but so far ahead of popular
thought that no one wants to believe what they are saying until it is too late.
This is one of many really disgusting people that the media has been having on for
years.
How about asking this question:
how come they never have a critic of these neo-con policy guys?
How come no critics of what these guys who peddle hate against a whole religion and
nationalities are ever on?
But these neo-cons are on all the time.
And, let's not keep kidding ourselves and each other-every 'think tank' that has an 'expert'
on foreign affairs is in that neo-con group and the hosts on any network, cable and
otherwise, don't even tell the viewers what the hell the think tank/s is about!
They are one of the top, if not the number one reason why the American public knows either
nothing about what the Middle-East situations are, or they have a stupid slanted view and it
is always against anything Arabic, Palestinian and such
you know it and I know it
can you dig it
thanks, this is,
dear Fayez
"Sometimes these so called fringe people are right on track but so far ahead of popular
thought that no one wants to believe what they are saying until it is too late."
like the fruit-cakes out in Idaho jabbering about "ZOG" back in the 1980s and 90s. We knew
better didn't we? No danger of excessive Israeli influence on US politicians or policy, and
even if there were, what possible negative consequences could there be? It's not like the
Muslims would get all riled up and knock down the World Trade Center or something. Right? Ha
ha ha ha! Only paranoids and anti-semites believe that sort of nonsense.
@The Dean, Stitch In Time
I think it isn't too hard to recognize Gaffney & Co what they are: pro Israeli, pro-Likud
propagandists. I am cool with that. A number of folks on the right fast becoming Russophiles
for a variety of reasons, that isn't illegal either.
In our history we went through times when various groups advocated in the interest of country
A or B and we are still here.
So Gaffney and the likes can spew nonsense as long as we recognize what he is up to.
No need for rank antisemitism, using phrases like ZOG sending out happy merchant memes,
because that instantly eliminates you from any sort of reasonable discussion.
During the Reagan administration Gaffney was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy under neocon Richard Perle (aka "Prince of Darkness").
In April 1987, Gaffney was nominated to the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Affairs. Unfortunately for Gaffney–but fortunately for
America–he served in that position for only seven months during which time he was
deliberately and systematically excluded by senior Reagan administration officials from the
then-ongoing arms control talks with the Soviet Union. In Nov, 1987 Gaffney was forced out of
the Pentagon and immediately began a campaign criticizing President Reagan for his efforts to
bring about an arms control agreement with the USSR.
"In a 1997 column for The Washington Times, Gaffney alleged that a seismic incident in
Russia was actually a nuclear detonation at that nation's Novaya Zemlya test site, indicating
Russia was violating the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTB). (Subsequent scientific analysis
of Novaya Zemlya confirmed the event was a routine earthquake.) Reporting on the allegation,
the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists observed that, following its publication, 'fax machines
around Washington, D.C. and across the country poured out pages detailing Russian duplicity.
They came from Frank Gaffney'." (Wikipedia)
It probably won't add anything to this discussion for me to say that Gaffney is a
dangerous whack-job, so I'm not going to call Gaffney a dangerous whack-job.
"I think it isn't too hard to recognize Gaffney & Co what they are: pro Israeli,
pro-Likud propagandists. I am cool with that."
I'm not. Trillions of dollars. Thousands of American dead. Tens of thousands of American
with ruined brain, amputated limbs, grievous wounds that haven't healed.
That's a big price to pay for Gaffney and Co. and their sick foreign policy
prescriptions.
Too big.
It's past time they were shut up and expelled from American public life. It's not anymore
about mere differences of opinion, matters over which decent people can disagree. There's
real evil here. And real damage to America.
So Gaffney and the likes can spew nonsense as long as we recognize what he is up
to."
The opportunity cost of allowing the neocons to impregnate our national and international
life is too high. Iraq will forever be a blotch on our national soul. Their embedded power
must never be underestimated. It must be understood in the context of what they really want.
Which country do they actually support? It is difficult to include the U.S. as a beneficiary
in their neverending lust for more wars. Now, as folks like TAC, seek a reason as to why the
main front will be an attack on free speech. Ask yourself -why? Who fears free speech?
Frank Gaffney is an ironic figure. Today he leads the Center for Security Policy which
purports to expose Muslim Brotherhood influence operations in the US. 20 years ago he was
part of American Committee for Peace in Chechnya which wrote apologia for Chechen militants
who worked closely with Al Qaeda. The leader of the Chechen rebels was a Saudi born man
personally dispatched by Osama bin Laden so this connection was not a secret. ACPC didn't
just have Gaffney, but also Bill Kristol, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and James Woolsey to name a
few. It also recieved funding from the FDD and NED so it wasn't a rogue operation by any
means. Considering this Frank Gaffney's commitment to combating Islamic extremism seems
dubious at best. He warrants a closer look if anyone does.
In my opinion the Centre for Security Policy is NOT into just "spewing hate." Listen to
their podcasts and read their policy position papers. Look down the lists of their guest
speakers and interviewees: they are mostly the old school realist (not neocon) conservative
national security apparatus. Their attitude is there are three tremendous national security
threats that in each case have elements THAT IN THE EXPERIENCE OF TOP MILITARY INTELLIGENCE
agents have proved themselves time & time again simply NOT WORTHY OF BEING TRUSTED and
that if the USA gives them a "trust blank cheque" they would surely lose a major conflict,
just as much as France "trusted" that its vaunted Maginot Line was sufficient to keep a
"cowed" Prussian-led German Army & the Germans would never be so foolish to attempt
another invasion of France. THe most talked about danger at the moment by Gaffney and its
informative Centre is the danger of an EMP attack, which is surely neither "hate" nor
"wackiness."
This is a provocation/false flag operation completely in style of Steele dossier. So MI6 links might exist. Among "candidates"
They missed late Senator McCain, who was involved with Steele dossier. They also included two definitely bogus candidates
(Jarvanka and Melania)
BTW in 2008, the world's richest man, Carlos Slim, saved the Times from bankruptcy. "When that guy saves your company, you dance
to his tune." --
Carlos
Slim- The New York Times' Sugar Daddy
Don McGahn
We know the White House counsel is a short-timer -- planning to leave in the fall. We also know that McGahn has clashed with
Trump repeatedly in the past -- refusing Trump's order to fire special counsel Robert Mueller. And McGahn has already shown a
willingness to look out for the broader public good, sitting down for more than 30 hours with special counsel Robert Mueller's
team to aid their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Dan Coats
The Director of National Intelligence is very much a part of the long-term Washington establishment, having spent not one but
two stints in the nation's capital as a senator from Indiana. Coats has also shown a tendency to veer from the Trump songbook.
Informed of Trump's plans to invite Russian president Vladimir Putin for a summit in the United States this fall, Coats said
"That is going to be special" -- a line that drew the ire of the President.
Kellyanne Conway
Conway, a White House counselor, is someone who has survived for a very long time in the political game. And not by being dumb
or not understanding which way the wind blows. Plus, there is the X-factor of her husband -- George -- whose
Twitter
feed regularly trolls Trump
.
John Kelly
The chief of staff has clashed repeatedly with the President and
seems
to be on borrowed time
. Kelly sees his time in the job as serving his country in the only way left to him. Might he view
exposing Trump in this way as a last way to be of service?
Kirstjen Nielsen
The head of the Department of Homeland Security is a close ally of Kelly, who we know has a very fraught relationship with
Trump. And she has reasons of her own: Trump scolded her in a Cabinet meeting over the number of undocumented immigrants
entering the country. Nielsen reportedly drafted a resignation letter but backed away.
Jeff Sessions
Sessions sticks out as a possibility for a simple reason:
He's
got motive
. No one has been more publicly maligned by Trump than his attorney general. Trump has repeatedly urged Sessions
to use the Justice Department for his own pet political concerns. And this week, Sessions found out that Trump has referred to
him as "mentally retarded" and mocked his southern accent, according to a new book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
Sessions is also someone who spent two decades in the Senate prior to being named attorney general by Trump after the 2016
election.
LIKE WHAT YOU'RE READING?
James Mattis
The defense secretary has been Trump's favorite Cabinet member. But the quotes attributed to Mattis in Woodward's book are
VERY rough on Trump, though Mattis quickly denied that he ever said them. And if anyone has less to lose than Mattis -- he is
a decorated military man serving his country again -- it's hard to figure out who that would be. Plus, Mattis is an ally of
John Kelly (see above) and Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state that Trump ran out on a rail.
Fiona Hill
Hill, a Russian expert who joined the Trump administration from the Brookings Institution, a DC think tank, might have reason
to so publicly clash with Trump. She is far more skeptical about Russia's motives than Trump -- and was notably left out when
Trump and Putin huddled on the sides of the G20 meeting in Germany in 2017. She was a close adviser to national security
adviser
H.R.
McMaster, who was removed from the White House
. And, she was also reportedly mistaken for a clerk by Trump in one of her
earliest meetings with him on Russia.
Mike Pence
The vice president is all smiles, nods and quiet, deferential loyalty in public. Which of course means that he has the perfect
cover to write something like this in The New York Times. Pence is also ambitious -- and there's no question he wants to be
president. But would taking such a risk as writing this scathing op-ed be a better path to the White House than just waiting
Trump out?
Pence's deputy chief of staff and communications director Jarrod Agen denied Thursday that Pence or anyone from their office
authored the op-ed.
The Vice President puts his name on his Op-Eds. The
@
nytimes
should be
ashamed and so should the person who wrote the false, illogical, and gutless op-ed. Our office is above
such amateur acts.
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Nikki Haley
The United Nations ambassador is, like Pence, one of Trump's favorites. She is also, however, someone deeply engaged on the
world stage and a voice of concern when it comes to how the President views Russia and Putin. Haley, again like Pence, is
ambitious and has her eye on national office. Would this service that goal?
"... 45 young men were sentenced to death by a kangaroo court ..."
"... The Great Tribes of Libya sounds like an organically risen and named group; in contrast to Al Quaeda ("The Database" OR "The Toilet"). ..."
"... So, I'm for any Libyans trying to take back theuir country from the UK/USRael/France (FUKUS) 'coalition' which destroyed the most prosperous African country with the largest middle class. ..."
Libyan War The Truth
The Great Tribes of Libya have begun their cleansing of the terrorists brought into their country illegally by NATO in their 2011
invasion of Libya.
These terrorists include groups such as Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), Ansar Al Sharia, ISIS,
Salafists, Wahabists and other assorted small criminal mercenary militia gangs. All of these militia gangs have been controlling
Tripoli since 2011, ILLEGALLY. These terrorists are working with the UN puppet government, appointed by the UN (headed by the criminal
Serraj) without any authority or vote of the Libyan people. These terrorist gangs answer to no laws or rules. They roam the streets
armed and attack or steal at will. The Libyan people have suffered under these gangs ever since NATO, Obama, Clinton, McCain and
others invaded their country with NATO using a false flag lie of a revolution to justify their war crimes.
Today, many of the largest tribes in Libya joined the Tarhouna tribe near Tripoli to support them in the cleansing of the rubbish
controlling the city of Tripoli. The people of Libya who are all members of tribes and represented by the tribes, have had enough.
Recently, as I reported earlier, 45 young men were sentenced to death by a kangaroo court made up of criminal militias.
These young men had broken no laws, their only crime was being members of the Libyan army fighting against NATO invaders in 2011.
This was just one more criminal act that pushed the Libyan people (tribes) over the edge. Even though the tribes have no support
from outside like the militias who receive weapons and money from the US (via Turkey), Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Sudan; the Great
Tribes of Libya have joined together to take back their sovereignty no matter what.
The terrorist gangs (militias) fearing the loss of their "golden goose" have called their brother terrorists from all over Libya
to support them in their battle. These terrorists (Salafists and Wahabists, et. al) are being flown into the Mitiga Airport in Tripoli.
The Mitiga airport, the old Wheelus Air Base , is being
controlled by the terrorists.
So, as the world watches, the Great Tribes of Libya, standing alone with all their Libyan brothers and sisters, take on the New
World order and their proxy army of terrorists.
We ask the people of the world to stand with their Libyan brothers and sisters as they fight the Zionist New World Order, Khazarian
mafia cabal. The Cabal has taken their country by illegal means and placed their criminals on the ground to keep the Libyan people
from their security and sovereignty.
The Great tribes of Libya are showing the world how to fight, they deserve your support and your respect. God bless them all as
they fight against the evil that is permeating the entire world today.
Comment: More from
Sputnik:
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on the conflicting parties in Libya to immediately cease fire and sit down at the
negotiating table, his spokesman said in a statement on Saturday.
"The Secretary-General calls on all parties to immediately cease hostilities and abide by the ceasefire agreement brokered
by the United Nations and the Reconciliation Committees," the secretary-general's spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement.
Guterres condemned the continued hostilities in and near Tripoli, in particular, the indiscriminate shelling, which killed
and injured civilians, including children. He offered his deepest condolences to the victims' relatives.
"He urges all parties to grant humanitarian relief for those in need, particularly those who are trapped by the fighting,"
the spokesman added.
Ghassan Salame, a special representative of the UN secretary-general and the head of the United Nations Support Mission in
Libya (UNSMIL), will continue to work and cooperate with all parties to achieve a long-term political agreement acceptable to
all, he concluded.
[F]ighting erupted on August 26 reportedly between local militias and Kani tribal fighters from Tarhouna, southeast of Tripoli.
According to the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) NGO, heavy shelling in residential areas resulted in an unspecified number of
casualties and approximately 8,000 refugees and asylum seekers remaining trapped in closed detention centers in dire humanitarian
conditions.
The Great Tribes of Libya sounds like an organically risen and named group; in contrast to Al Quaeda ("The Database" OR "The
Toilet").
So, I'm for any Libyans trying to take back theuir country from the UK/USRael/France (FUKUS) 'coalition' which destroyed
the most prosperous African country with the largest middle class.
But that's their plan - as enacted further daily - here in the West, too.
Fascinating to see the tinfoil hat brigade turn out in such numbers to rant and rave about the
"Deep State!" and poor, honest Donald Trump as a freedom fighter who is daily sacrificing
himself for the good people of America.
Why do bullies always pretend to be victims?
As with science, human nature can usually boiled down to the most likely answer, the simple
observable truth. Such as; Donald Trump's entire life is a story of greed, vulgarity and self
promotion to the exclusion of all else. He did not, in his 8th decade, suddenly develop a
desire to serve the American people at his own expense. He is in the White House doing exactly
what he has always done, he is pursuing whatever makes him happiest in the moment with no
regard to consequences, morality or even common sense.
DO NOT BELIEVE WHAT IS BEING PUT OUT IN THE WESTERN MEDIA. THE MEDIA AND ZIONIST NEW WORLD
ORDER CABAL IS ATTEMPTING TO FABRICATE THE SAME PROBLEM AS IN 2011 BY PRINTING LIES.
THERE IS NO CEASEFIRE, THERE IS NO TRUCE.
THE FIGHT IN TRIPOLI IS BETWEEN THE LIBYAN PEOPLE (TRIBAL ARMY) AND THE TERRORIST GANGS
CALLED MILITIAS.
These are the facts on the ground today in Tripoli:
1. The combined army of the Great Tribes of Libya is fighting against the terrorists and
mercenaries in Tripoli. These terrorists call themselves militias, but they are nothing more
than hired thugs, thieves, murderers and criminals made up of Muslim Brotherhood, LIFG, Ansar
Al Sharia, ISIS, Al Qaeda, etc. These terrorists were brought into Libya by the illegal NATO
war against the sovereign country of Libya. They are supported by the US (via Turkey), Qatar,
Sudan and Saudi Arabia, they work with the UN puppet government in Tripoli. As long as they
roam the streets of Tripoli with their weapons there is no security, no peace and no life for
the innocent Libyans.
2. All Tribes of Libya support this army.
3. All legitimate Libyan people in Tripoli and throughout Libya support the tribes and are
against these terrorist militias
4. The Great Tribes of Libya will not stop until all terrorists are dead or gone outside of
Libya. The terms of any truce with the tribal army would mean the end of the criminal puppet UN
government and the end of the terrorist militias, so there will not be a truce.
On September 2, 2018 Reuters reported that 400 prisoners escaped from the Ain Zara prison in
Tripoli. The truth is that the army of the Libyan tribes attacked the prison and effected the
freedom of 400 Libyan soldiers about 5pm on September 2. Amongst those 400 were the 45 young
men to be assassinated as condemned last week by the kangaroo militia court in Tripoli. In
2011, when NATO invaded they opened all the prisons in Libya and let out all the criminals to
help attack the Libyan people. Most if not all of the people imprisoned in Libya now were
people who were fighting against NATO or were against the NATO take over (working in the
government).
I am fully aware as are the honorable leaders of the tribes in Libya that all of our
conversations are monitored as we are the only true source of information of the activities of
the Libyan tribes and their struggle to regain their sovereignty. Having stated that, I want to
editorialize by saying that the illegal activities of the US mercenaries in Libya concerning
their Kangaroo court and their decision to assassinate 45 mostly dark skinned Libyan soldiers,
was the straw that broke the camels back. This left the legitimate Libyan people with no option
except to go into the streets and wrest control of their country from these paid
mercenaries.
One of the tribal spies inside these criminal militias told us 2 weeks ago that all the
criminal militias have been frightened by the impending death of John McCain, they consider him
their brother, founder, funder and protector. McCain had protected them from all scrutiny and
allowed their barbarianism. The death of McCain would mean all their sins would be exposed.
They wanted to kill all the prisoners, but their UN handlers said the militias must have the
appearance of legitimacy. Consequently, the kangaroo court was set in motion.
The great tribes of Libya have taken on the battle to free their country of the terrorists
and puppets placed there by the New World Order Zionists who in effect own NATO. This is a
serious battle for their sovereignty. They take this on with no outside help, unlike Syria who
has had the aid of Russia, Iran and China, the Libyan people are alone in this battle. They are
battling the same criminals as are the Syrian army. They know this is a battle of life or death
for them, they are not a large population, they have already lost over one million people, they
are now only 5.5 million. As the world watches Syria, please let it not forget the fight for
freedom happening now in Libya.
About the Author:
James and Joanne Moriarty were appointed official spokespersons of the Tribes of Libya by
their Supreme Leader in 2012. For their story and mission to get the message out and help the
Libyan people, go here.
The Taliban says that in order to end "this long war" the "lone option is to end the
occupation of Afghanistan and nothing more."
In June, the
17th American nominated to take command of the war, Lieutenant General Scott Miller,
appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee where Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) grilled him
on what he would do differently in order to bring the conflict to a conclusion. "I cannot
guarantee you a timeline or an end date," was Miller's confident reply .
Did the senators then send him packing? Hardly. He was, in fact, easily confirmed and starts
work this month. Nor is there any chance Congress will use its power of the purse to end the
war. The 2019 budget request for U.S. operations in Afghanistan -- topping out at
$46.3 billion -- will certainly be approved.
#Winning
All of this seeming futility brings us back to the Vietnam War, Kissinger, and that magic
number, 4,000,000,029,057 -- as well as the question of what an American military victory would
look like today. It might surprise you, but it turns out that winning wars is still
possible and, perhaps even more surprising, the U.S. military seems to be doing just that.
Let me explain.
In Vietnam, that military aimed to "
out-guerrilla the guerrilla ." It never did and the United States suffered a crushing
defeat. Henry Kissinger -- who presided over the last years of that conflict as national
security advisor and then secretary of state -- provided his own
concise take on one of the core tenets of asymmetric warfare: "The conventional army loses
if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose." Perhaps because that eternally
well-regarded but hapless statesman articulated it, that formula was bound -- like so
much else he
touched -- to crash
and burn .
In this century, the United States has found a way to turn Kissinger's martial maxim on its
head and so rewrite the axioms of armed conflict. This redefinition can be proved by a simple
equation:
Expressed differently, the United States has not won a major conflict since 1945; has a
trillion-dollar national security budget; has had 17 military commanders in the last 17
years in Afghanistan, a country plagued by 23,744 "
security incidents " (the most ever recorded) in 2017 alone; has spent around
$3 trillion , primarily on that war and the rest of the war on terror, including the
ongoing conflict in Iraq, which then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld swore , in 2002, would be
over in only "five days or five weeks or five months," but where approximately
5,000 U.S. troops remain today; and yet 74% of the American people still express high
confidence in the U.S. military.
Let the math and the implications wash over you for a moment. Such a calculus definitively
disproves the notion that "the conventional army loses if it does not win." It also helps
answer the question of victory in the war on terror. It turns out that the U.S. military, whose
budget and influence in Washington have only grown in these years, now wins simply by not
losing -- a multi-trillion-dollar conventional army held to the standards of success once
applied only to under-armed, under-funded guerilla groups.
Unlike in the Vietnam War years, three presidents and the Pentagon, unbothered by fiscal
constraints, substantive congressional opposition, or a significant antiwar movement, have been
effectively pursuing this strategy, which requires nothing more than a steady supply of troops,
contractors, and other assorted camp followers; an endless parade of Senate-sanctioned
commanders; and an annual outlay of hundreds of billions of dollars. By these standards, Donald
Trump's open-ended, timetable-free "Strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia" may prove to be the
winningest war plan ever. As he described it:
"From now on, victory will have a clear definition: attacking our enemies, obliterating
ISIS, crushing al-Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass
terror attacks against America before they emerge."
Think about that for a moment. Victory's definition begins with "attacking our enemies" and
ends with the prevention of possible terror attacks. Let me reiterate: "victory" is defined as
"attacking our enemies." Under President Trump's strategy, it seems, every time the U.S. bombs
or shells or shoots at a member of one of those 20-plus terror groups in Afghanistan, the U.S.
is winning or, perhaps, has won. And this strategy is not specifically Afghan-centric. It can
easily be applied to American warzones in the Middle East and Africa -- anywhere, really.
Decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military has finally solved the conundrum
of how to "out-guerrilla the guerrilla." And it couldn't have been simpler. You just adopt the
same definition of victory. As a result, a conventional army -- at least the U.S. military --
now loses only if it stops fighting. So long as unaccountable commanders wage benchmark-free
wars without congressional constraint, the United States simply cannot lose. You can't argue
with the math. Call it the rule of 4,000,000,029,057.
That calculus and that sum also prove, quite clearly, that America's beleaguered
commander-in-chief has gotten a raw deal on his victory parade. With apologies to the American
Legion, the U.S. military is now -- under the new rules of warfare -- triumphant and deserves
the type of celebration proposed by President Trump. After almost two decades of warfare, the
armed forces have lowered the bar for victory to the level of their enemy, the Taliban. What
was once the mark of failure for a conventional army is now the benchmark for success. It's a
remarkable feat and deserving, at the very least, of furious flag-waving, ticker
tape , and all the age-old trappings of victory.
Military conquests are the most ephemeral. Colonisation lasts longer. A mere century or two
in the case of Europeans. But even 900 years was not sufficient for Greeks to remove the
military n cultural threat posed by the Semites n Iranians of Southwest Asia, from
Alexander's conquest in 323 BC till the Muslim "reconquista" of 632 AD. Only demographic
"conquest" works in the end. If your women are not out-reproducing their women, then your
military will fail spectacularly n quickly, as what had once been your population transforms
into theirs. At that point, far from victory parades, you get to see statues to your former
heros torn down, n the highest "patriotism" becomes enthusiastically opening the gates to
what had once been your people's deadliest enemies.
1. keep Israhell on the map.
2. keep oil-producers taking dollars and only dollars for their oil
3. keep the CIA's poppy fields in Afghanistan in full production
on 1: ongoing victory, Israhell is still there
on2: Iraq and Libya back on the petrodollar, Iran pending
on3: ongoing victory, CIA drug ops proceeding normally
in ZOG-ruled 'Murka, every day is a day of new victories.
Mr. Turse is a comic. What a beautiful summary of the situation.
See a group, Imagine a possible threat, if both occur, bingo group =converts to
=>terrorist
and each member converts to a subliminal threat. Imagine the psychology that can be applied
to that bit of information to produce next day propaganda. Let us not forget the real media
that displays the propaganda is owned by just 6 entities; global access to knowledge and real
truth is gated and directed by search engine magic these two facts are IMO a real global
threat to humanity.
Win by not losing/ In such a scenario increasing numbers in a terror group or increasing
numbers of, or broadening the global distribution of terror groups produces more terror
fodder. The competent imagination derives its threats from terror fodder ( fodder fits any
size imagination).
When ever it is needed, proof of any non self-inflicted terrorism can be conjured from the
imagination. As Mr Turse says proof of terrorism can be found in the definition, proof of
victory can be found in the attack (as Mr. Turse so adequately expressed), and both are
recorded in the history of terrorism, which can be found in the daily media presentations and
the MSM annual report "Dollars Spent Chasing Terrorist from the Imagination". a joint
publication of the Internationally linked intelligence services and the global college of
paranoia producing propaganda.
victory is found in the attack because dollars start to flow; the more dollars the greater
the victory.
But how much of this would be possible if the reserve currency were no longer the dollar?
What will happen when Russia, China, Iran and others produce a new reserve currency or
displace existing reserve currencies by assigning exchange value to the currency of each
nation? The issuer of reserve currency measures its money supply by the checks he writes
[their checks never bounce], everyone else measures their currency by the amount of the
reserve currency they are able to keep in the bank ( to prevent their checks from
bouncing].
@Sean
Because although Health and Education Keynesianisn would work as well as the Military
variant, it also leads to an organised population mobilising for social change. And while
wars do end eventually, social spending seems to increase over time without limit. I was
almost sold on that explanation to my honest question, until the phrase
wars do end eventually
Would wars "ending eventually", not render the MIC obsolete? Is it not the MIC that
thrives on perpetual wars with seemingly endless supplies of cash to fund their wars? Even in
periods of relative calm (if ever, since WWII that is), is it not the constant threat of war
that keeps the military monstrosity grinding away?
74% of Americans express high confidence in their military? I wonder if 74% of Americans are
even aware that we're at war. I read somewhere that U.S. generals now define victory as
getting the Taliban to the bargaining table.
"out-guerrilla the guerrilla." was coined by Col. David Hackworth as out "G" ing the G and
was shown to work in the Delta. Read his book "About Face" or "Steel my soldiers hearts"
Elites, read Bolsheviks or Freemasons win no war, they do not win over diseases, crime, idiot
bla, bla. They are making money on them and they always turn to both sides. To the criminal
gangsters, to the associations of the sick, to the losers in war, they can win in 20 years,
etc. etc. This article is foam, foam. The Elites are trying to do everything and nobody
understands anything, so the elite wins – the banker always has his blood money.
the United States has not won a major conflict since 1945; has a trillion-dollar
national security budget; has had 17 military commanders in the last 17 years in
Afghanistan, a country plagued by 23,744 "security incidents" (the most ever recorded) in
2017 alone; has spent around $3 trillion, primarily on that war and the rest of the war on
terror, including the ongoing conflict in Iraq, which then-defense secretary Donald
Rumsfeld swore, in 2002, would be over in only "five days or five weeks or five months,"
but where approximately 5,000 U.S. troops remain today; and yet 74% of the American people
still express high confidence in the U.S. military.
Let me correct that 1st sentence for you: the United States has not REPEATED THE MISTAKE
OF WINNING a major conflict since 1945.
Why? Because as they quickly discovered, WW2 was the best thing that ever happened to the
US economy, and that lots more money is made fighting wars than winning one, as proven by the
above quoted figures.
December 24, 2013 The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases
The US Military has bases in *63* countries. According to Gelman, who examined 2005
official Pentagon data, the US is thought to own a total of *737* bases in foreign lands.
Hi Nick Turse,
Given OBL and Afghanistan Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11 terror attacks, it appears
likely that the W. Bush regime launched war upon the Taliban exclusively for geopolitical
interests, minerals, i.e., lithium, and construction of natural gas pipelines directed
southeast to the subcontinent, India.
Fyi, approximately seven years ago, I saw a U.S. Veterans informational map which identified
the Neo-"Grunts" military bases as within close proximity to pipeline construction.
Consequently, for me, I see US military's incessant stay in "the graveyard of Empires" as a
stilted profit & loss (P&L) "'victory," but of course there's no (!) dividend for
dumb goyim American citizens, but voila, oodles for global energy companies, untouchable
Military-Industrial-$ecurity Complex, & killing "Poppy Fields," including Moneychanger
pharmaceutical-opioid trade!
In short, the incredible cost for U.S. military's GWOT & advanced targeting of Russia is
diabolically placed upon future generations of American taxpayers who, at the moment-of-their
birth, are in debt, & the Mom and Pop' "victory" is incarnate in a 'guvmint CHIP
card.
ZUSA wars "victory" is in the pockets of P&L-benefactors, and on Sunday afternoons, one
can feel the "bern" when fighter jets flyover NFL stadiums!
Thanks for the education, Mr. Turse!
@jilles
dykstra It did not in the civilised societies of north and western Europe. The nordic "
model " is dead , and it has been a bad example to the world . Sweden has 10 million people ,
Norway 4 , Danmark 6 . These little countries can not be a valid model for anyone .
Like Toynbee said nordics are kind of a failed egoistic subcivilization of the germans ,
english of russians , with which they never had the courage to integrate . They seem to be
happy in their autistic cold world , pretending to be a showroom for the UN perverts .
As to Vietnam the author is just clueless. Where was the so called crushing defeat? When we
Americans pulled out in 1971 to 1972 the NVA was still stymied and impotent. Our so called
allies hated us totally and the feeling was mutual. We actually had no allies in Vietnam
except the savage yard tribes. But yes after we pulled out the South collapsed fast as we
knew they would. They got exactly what they deserved. But it was a South Vietnamese defeat.
By 1975 our armies were long gone. Repeat, there were no American divisions, battallions or
platoons to lose. We were gone.
We still do not know exactly what Kissinger got from the Chinese at Paris in 1971-2, but
he and Nixon seemed happy enough, and we pulled out and ceded Vietnam. We do know this was
the exact time China began to cooperate with us in the Cold War against the Bolsheviks.
Specifically, we know the Chinese allowed our B-52′s, loaded with nukes, to overfly,
all along the Soviet border, and this continued to 1987, when the game was already up.
A couple of Ukraine-related items caught my attention this week.
The first is a
report by Baylor University professor Serhiy Kudelia which discusses how to bring peace to
Donbass. Kudelia starts by saying that Western states have regarded the resolution of the war
in Donbass as being dependent on changing Russian behaviour. This is insufficient, he says, for
'the successful reintegration of Donbas into Ukraine rests on designing a new institutional
framework that can provide long-term guarantees to civilians and separatist insurgents.'
Kudelia says that academic literature on conflict resolution would suggest four elements to
such a framework:
Autonomy for Donbass within Ukraine. Such autonomy would come with risks, by
entrenching local rulers with patronage networks outside of central control and with the
means to challenge central authority. To reduce these risks, Kudelia suggests giving autonomy
not just to the territories currently controlled by the Donetsk and Lugansk People's
Republics (DPR & LPR), but to the whole of Donbass, thereby bringing within the
autonomous region some more pro-Ukrainian elements of the population as well as groups not
connected to the DPR/LPR power structures. He also suggests devolution of power within the
autonomous region to weaken the potentially disruptive consequences of hostile elements
controlling the region's government.
Transformation of the rebel state and military structures into political
parties. Experience in other countries suggests that when this happens, the prospects of
a successful transition increase substantially.
Comprehensive and unconditional amnesty for everyone involved in the war. For
obvious reasons, rebel leaders won't agree to the first two proposals without an amnesty.
Past experience speaks to the necessity of this measure.
No elections in Donbass for two to three years. Kudelia notes that, 'Holding
elections in a volatile post-conflict environment creates ample opportunities for voter
intimidation, electoral fraud, and disinformation campaigns that could build on
conflict-related divisions.' Kudelia doesn't say who would rule Donbass in the meantime. I
would have to assume that it would mean that the existing authorities would remain in place.
That could be problematic.
With the exception of that last point, these are sensible suggestions. But when boiled down
to their essentials, they don't differ significantly from what is demanded in the Minsk
agreements -- i.e. special status for Donbass and an amnesty. As such, while I don't think that
the leadership of the DPR and LPR would like these proposals, my instincts tell me that they
would be quite acceptable to the Russian government, which would probably be able to coax the
DPR and LPR into agreeing to them. If implemented, the results would be something Moscow could
portray as a success of sorts.
And there's the rub. For that very reason, I can't see Kiev agreeing to any of this.
Kudelia's argument is founded on the idea that there's more going on in Donbass than Russian
aggression. Accepting that something has to be done to 'provide long-term guarantees to
civilians and separatist insurgents' means accepting that there are civilians and insurgents
who need reassuring, not just Russian troops and mercenaries. And that means changing the
entire narrative which Kiev has adopted about the war. So while Kudelia's proposals make sense
(after all, what's the alternative? How could Donbass be reintegrated into Ukraine without
autonomy and an amnesty?), what's lacking is any sense of how to get there.
A large part of the problem, it seems, is the attitude in Kiev. This becomes very clear in
the second item which caught my attention -- an article
on the website Coda entitled 'Now Healthcare is a Weapon of War in Ukraine.' The
article describes how the DPR and LPR are encouraging Ukrainians to come to rebel territory to
receive free medical treatment, and then using this as propaganda to win support for their
cause. This is despite the fact, as the article shows, that the medical facilities in the two
rebel republics are in a very poor state. Author Lily Hyde isn't able to confirm how many
Ukrainians have taken up the rebel offer of free medical aid, but does repeat a claim by the
rebel authorities that 1,200 people have done so.
What interests me here is not the sensationalist headlines about healthcare being
weaponized, but the question of why Ukrainians might feel it necessary to go to the effort of
crossing the front lines to get treatment. And the article provides an answer, namely that
parts of Donbass 'are trapped in a precarious limbo, still under Ukrainian government control
but cut off from key services like healthcare.' The war destroyed much of the healthcare system
in Donbass, but 'Ukraine provides no financial or other incentives for medics to work in
frontline areas', and has done little to repair shattered infrastructure. Healthcare seems to
be a lower priority than fighting 'terrorism'.
While the DPR and LPR use healthcare as a 'weapon' by providing it to people, Kiev has
'weaponized' health in another way -- by depriving people of it. As the article reports:
Kiev has not outlawed receiving medical treatment in occupied Donetsk or Luhnaks. But
collaborating with the separatists -- or supporting their propaganda efforts -- is illegal.
How exactly such charges are defined is not clear, but past experience has taught both
individuals and organizations to be wary of such accusations. The Ukrainian authorities have
investigated non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Ukraine who have provided
foreign-funded medicines and other supplies to occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. NGOs working
there have been banned by the de fact authorities [of the DPR and LPR] on similar charges.
Doctors have found themselves placed on blacklists by both Ukrainian officials and the
separatists, accused of being 'terrorist collaborators' by one side, or of being spies by the
other.
Hyde contrasts the Ukrainian government's policies towards the DPR and LPR with that of
Georgia, where:
The government offers free healthcare for people from Abkhazia, a breakaway territory it
still claims which is now under de facto Russian occupation. The government is building a
modern hospital in the nearest town to the boundary line, aimed at people from Abkhazia.
Essentially, says Hyde, it's 'a question of attitude'. She cites Georgy Tuka, Ukraine's
Deputy Minister for Temporarily Occupied Territories -- '"There's a wish to punish people,"
Tuka acknowledged.'
That's quite an admission from a government minister.
Even if the details need fleshing out, the institutional framework required to reintegrate
Donbass into Ukraine has been pretty obvious for a long time now. The problem has been getting
people to accept it. It is indeed, therefore, 'a question of attitude'. Sadly, the prevailing
attitude stands firmly in the way of the institutional changes required for peace. The desire
seems to be to punish people, not to reach agreement with them in order to promote
reintegration and reconciliation. The issue, then, is whether this attitude can be changed (and
if so, how) or whether it is now so firmly entrenched that there is nothing which can be done.
Sadly, I fear that it may be the latter.
It's too late for the reintegration of Donbas into Ukraine, there
will be no implementation of any agreement.
-- Ukraine have gone full neo-Nazi
-- language law is offensive to all minorities not just Russian speakers
-- Russophobia is rampant
-- attacks on the orthodox church
Why would anyone in DPR/LPR want to be part of this.
I agree with the other commentators integration of the
Donbass into an aggressive nationalist Ukraine which is not capable of respecting
minority rights is not possible. A more sensible option would be for Ukraine to divide
into a nationalist part and a rusdophone part, this may be in a confederation like
Belgium. As you say the Kiev government wants complete victory rather than a peace based
on reconciliation the conflict will continue at low level if the Kiev regime believes
that they cannot win but will ignite into another major war if they believe that they
can. What should Russia do ? In my opinion provide suitable aid to the people of the
Donbass to ensure their survival and build institutions, a stable and peaceful
Pridnistrovye type situation is the best that can be achieved in the foreseeable future
Just a direct quote from prof. S Kudelia "Peace plan"
linked above:
" Rebel Disarmament, Demobilization, and Conversion
Reaching an agreement on power-sharing is one precondition for beginning to disarm
and demobilize combatants in civil wars. Another component is the inclusion of former
rebels in the competitive political process through "rebel-to-party transformations
Integration of the party tied to former rebel groups can eliminate potential spoilers,
develop stakeholding in the new system, provide non-violent means of conflict
resolution, make them more accountable to their constituency, and increase legitimacy
of the election process and new authority structures. However, some of the positive
effects from rebel conversion depend on the prior organizational structure of
separatist groups and their political wings. Groups with a highly integrated political
and military structure are the least likely to undergo a successful transformation into
an exclusively political force . This points to major challenges in achieving rebel
conversion in Donbas.
The leaders of the armed groups in Donbas have already established their own
political organizations, which participate in separatist-administered elections,
control local councils throughout the conflict region, and engage with residents. They
have turned into what a security analyst Benedetta Berti calls "hybrid
politico-military organizations" tightly linking political activities and armed
struggle. In both "republics" military and political wings are subordinated to a single
leader
However, an integrated political-military structure also presents three
important challenges for successful transition into the political arena. First, in
contrast to political wings of rebel forces in other countries, these organizations
emerged as key tools for separatist governance in DPR and LPR. Their ideological
program promotes independence for these regions and would be incompatible with
participation in Ukraine's institutional politics. Their reintegration would require a
major revision of their principles and goals with an emphasis on accommodation with the
Ukrainian state and acceptance of its jurisdiction over the entire region . Otherwise,
their inclusion in the political process risks deepening the war-based dividing lines
and hampering reconciliation. Second, the centrality of the leaders of these groups in
organizing an armed struggle against Ukrainian forces and their direct involvement in
the fighting delegitimizes them in Ukrainian public opinion and with the central
government . The recently adopted law on "temporarily occupied areas of Donetsk and
Luhansk oblasts" describes the ruling structure of the "republics" as an "occupational
administration of the Russian Federation." This further complicates their post-conflict
acceptance as legitimate regional representatives. Hence, leadership turnover in
separatist groups is a crucial precondition for the beginning of their direct talks
with the Ukrainian authorities . Finally, the current control that DPR/LPR leaders
exercise over the separatist military apparatus means that even following disarmament
and demobilization they would maintain some influence over local law enforcement. This,
in turn, would allow these leaders to rely on an informal personal militia after
demobilization or revive the military component of their organizations if they sensed a
threat to their power status.
The conversion of rebel groups into recognized political organizations could be
one of the most complex and contested elements of the transition."
"... "We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own "' ..."
"... Charges of anti-Semitism and a quiet but very effective boycott will be the reward of any journalist who calls attention to his own government's -- and his own profession's -- servitude to Israeli interests.' ..."
"... It is terrifying but both US warmongering and Israeli control will only end when the dollar system collapses. That's a very sad thing to say but Israel will abandon the US like a used condom if the US fails economically. ..."
An Israeli journalist stated over 20 years ago that 'the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media [are] in our
hands'. His words were picked up by Joseph Sobran:
'In an essay reprinted in the May 27, 1996, issue of the New York Times Ari Shavit, an Israeli columnist, reflected
sorrowfully on the wanton Israeli killing of more than a hundred Lebanese civilians in April.
"We killed them out of a certain
naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in
our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own "'
Sobran observes that 'this is interesting less for what it tells us about Israel than for what it tells us about America. Frank
discussion of Israel is permitted in Israel, as Mr Shavit's article illustrates. It's rarely permitted here.
Charges of anti-Semitism
and a quiet but very effective boycott will be the reward of any journalist who calls attention to his own government's -- and
his own profession's -- servitude to Israeli interests.'
It is terrifying but both US warmongering and Israeli control will only end when the dollar system collapses. That's a very
sad thing to say but Israel will abandon the US like a used condom if the US fails economically.
"... The documentary, which was produced by an undercover reporter who infiltrated pro-Israel groups in the U.S. in 2016, has been censored by the Qatari government – the owner of Al Jazeera – as part of an attempt by Qatar to win the support of major Jewish American organizations. ..."
"... New details about the contents of the censored documentary appeared this week in the French monthly newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, and video excerpts from it were published by Max Blumenthal and on the website Electronic Intifada. ..."
Parts of Censored Al Jazeera Documentary on D.C. Israel Lobby Leaked 03/09/2018
Leaked clips from film, pulled by Qatar in bid to appease U.S. Jewish community, show
'astroturfing' by college students involved with right-wing think tank, claim to reveal top
U.S. donor of BDS blacklist
By Amir Tibon
August 30, 2018
Video excerpts and new details from the
censored Al Jazeera documentary about the Israeli lobby in the United States have been
leaked to select media outlets in recent days.
The documentary, which was produced by an undercover reporter who infiltrated pro-Israel
groups in the U.S. in 2016,
has been censored by the Qatari government – the owner of Al Jazeera – as part
of an attempt by Qatar to win the support of major Jewish American organizations.
New details about the contents of the censored documentary appeared this week in the French
monthly newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, and video excerpts from it were published by Max
Blumenthal and on the website Electronic Intifada.
"... So the strategy is obvious: Scare Russia with how big your defense budget is, even if you have nothing to show for it. And if 1 trillion can't do the trick, I don't see why 2 trillion shouldn't be able to accomplish the task – winning Cold war 2. ..."
"... The US are perfectly capable by themselves alone in finding a new source of pride in the fact how much they can (ill) afford to spend on the military, thus they want to ensure that on their way to oblivion, history will marvel at what a powerful country they used to be – spending amounts of money on the military that no one else was able to match. ..."
"... Yes, Putin managed to change the world quietly, to the helpless chagrin of the Empire. The fact that the Empire is now using the lowliest scum, like jihadi head choppers and "svidomie" Nazis, shows that it is reduced to hysterics and tantrums. ..."
"... So, if in Cold War 2.0 Putin is using the strategy the US used in Cold War 1.0, he is outsmarting his adversaries admirably. ..."
"... It might be even worse for the Empire and its lackeys. The US and other NATO armies would be totally incapacitated by the absence of bathroom tissue. ..."
"... You need to start with the premise that the US Zioglob wants to destroy Syria and Iran – and you have to take them seriously since much of the Middle East has already been targeted, and is lying in ruins ..."
"... Russia's part in this is that it gets in the way. Without Russian support, Assad and the Iranians would probably already be gone, and Syria would be some kind of ISIS run hellhole ..."
"... But overall, it's unreal that this is happening. If the US attacks Russian warships off the Syrian coast, then things could get completely out of control. ..."
"... Israel would not let America do anything that might start a nuclear war. ..."
"... FSB operational group is in Donetsk now and is dealing with this murder. This is the start of the official recognition of the LDNR–initially as independent entities and, eventually, rejoining Russia. It is especially remarkable after even Kiev admitting a demographic and labor catastrophe, which also feed-backs and drives the whole country into the oblivion even faster. That, plus US military "advisers" are already in place in Ukraine. 2019 is not far away and US wants to "sell" own toxic asset as high as possible. ..."
"... Is the outbreak of nuclear war possible? Of course it is possible, it always is–the main measure of it is how probable this outbreak is. This is way above my pay-grade level, but I will reiterate–Russia is aware of the US and where it stands on the order (if not two) of magnitude more than it is the other way around. Russians actually study the US and I saw a vast improvement of Russian Americanistika in the last 10 years. Dramatic really. On the other end well ..."
"... As far as Israel is concerned, you don't need to target anything in particular: one 500 kiloton device (or a few smaller ones) would wipe the whole Israel off the map (Arabs need not rejoice: that puny territory won't be usable for any mammals for a few thousand years). One can only hope that Israelis and the US neocons don't have a death wish and won't let things to go that far. ..."
"... The US strategy is to make Russia bleed internally with aggressive and violent Military occupations directly as in Syria and by proxy in the Ukraine ..Could this not lead to a coup in Russia? ..."
"... Dempsey and Michael Flynn (while he was head of the DIA) sabotaging the CIA and State department policy on overthrowing Assad the Idiot (he put up the price of basic necessities while the Arab spring was going on) was the origin of Russia gate, the CIA hated Flynn. ..."
"... The US "strategy" on Russia is written by dated "products" of the US "humanities" field, by amateurs and by ignoramuses – that is why US "strategy" on Russia is easily identifiable as one huge tantrum and is exhibit A of how not TO conduct military and foreign policies. In fact, I expect at some point of time many a Ph.D theses written on that–a fascinating topic of a country ran by people with maturity level of teenagers. As per coup–wanna see one? Open any US MSM newspaper or watch any MSM news. ..."
"... I fear you're underestimating the power of messianic delusions. The country with leaders speaking of the End of History, the Moral Arc of History, etc., is not a country with a generalized ability to accept equal status among competing powers. ..."
"... While it may be the case that there are serious people who seriously understand the situation, the default assumption among Regime players is that USG is on top, and this will continue for ever . ..."
"... The other is geopolitical: I strongly suspect that Putin wants to use Donbass as a lever to push Ukraine to a sensible position of neutrality internationally and federation internally. If so, good luck to him: that would make Ukraine viable. ..."
"... I don't know about goats, but naturally radiation-resistant rodents and insects would have been grateful to neocons, if they knew who to thank for gifting them the whole Earth as a kingdom. ..."
"... I fear you're underestimating the power of messianic delusions. The country with leaders speaking of the End of History, the Moral Arc of History, etc., is not a country with a generalized ability to accept equal status among competing powers. ..."
"... Yes, it's definitely a tricky situation living in a large country run by criminals and madmen. ..."
"... If not for nuclear weapons, things would be much simpler, and once they eventually got a bloody military nose, there might be a popular uprising, probably leading to the wholesale massacre of all our ruling political, financial, and intellectual elites. This would definitely serve them right and also provide excellent business to Chinese guillotine-manufacturers. But with nukes in the hands of madmen, a positive outcome is much more doubtful, so I guess there's not all that much we can do except sit around and worry. ..."
I am sorry Andrei, but I am going to have to disagree with your assessment of the current
situation. I think that the US strategy is very sound and its aims are obvious. Since they
can't win any "hot" war of any significance, they decided to lure Russia into Cold war 2. And
we all know who "won" Cold war 1.
Basically the strategy is: Focus on the "wars" that you can "win", instead on the ones
that you can't. And the way they intend to "win" Cold war 2 is the same like they "won" Cold
war 1 – outspend Russia on defense.
For a few years now, the Americans are bragging that their yearly increases in the
military budget are bigger than the total Russian military budget. US now spend around 1
trillion on defense, while Russia is what – in the 50-60 billion range?
So the strategy is obvious: Scare Russia with how big your defense budget is, even if you
have nothing to show for it. And if 1 trillion can't do the trick, I don't see why 2 trillion
shouldn't be able to accomplish the task – winning Cold war 2.
The only difference between Cold war 1 and 2 is that USSR tried to match the spending of
US in Cold war 1 -that's what bankrupted them. This time around, the Russians don't even have
to pretend that they are trying to match US military budget.
The US are perfectly capable by themselves alone in finding a new source of pride in the
fact how much they can (ill) afford to spend on the military, thus they want to ensure that
on their way to oblivion, history will marvel at what a powerful country they used to be
– spending amounts of money on the military that no one else was able to match.
Your argument is nonsensical and uninformed. Russia has recently slashed their defence
spending by a significant margin. If the plan was to lure Russia to spend more via defence
then it has already completely failed.
A Tweet by Nick Griffin,
former leader of the British National Party, on whether decades of mass immigration and
Cultural Marxism have increased or decreased the West's chances of surviving World War
III:
'Here's the bottom line: Even if Nato destroyed the entire military & half the cities
of Russia, she would survive. If the USA & UK lose their militaries & their
electricity supply, their cities will be destroyed by their own citizens. The West has lost
#WW3 before it starts!'
Yes, Putin managed to change the world quietly, to the helpless chagrin of the Empire. The
fact that the Empire is now using the lowliest scum, like jihadi head choppers and "svidomie"
Nazis, shows that it is reduced to hysterics and tantrums.
Sometimes I wish Putin to act more decisively, like after the murder of Zakharchenko in
Donetsk by cowardly terrorist jackals. But I also feel that he must know more than I do. His
strategy seems to be "when you see your enemy committing suicide, do not interfere". So far
it is working. If anything, Russia, without spending too much, prompts the US to spend itself
into financial insolvency.
So, if in Cold War 2.0 Putin is using the strategy the US used in
Cold War 1.0, he is outsmarting his adversaries admirably.
It might be even worse for the Empire and its lackeys. The US and other NATO armies would
be totally incapacitated by the absence of bathroom tissue. And I mean real soldiers, not trannies.
Both of you are way off. The reality trumps race, real or imagined. That's where Russia
wins. Particularly because it includes people of different nationalities, races, religions
(or lack thereof), etc.
You need to start with the premise that the US Zioglob wants to destroy Syria and Iran
– and you have to take them seriously since much of the Middle East has already been
targeted, and is lying in ruins.
Russia's part in this is that it gets in the way. Without Russian support, Assad and the
Iranians would probably already be gone, and Syria would be some kind of ISIS run
hellhole.
Also, the cook in the fable does monologues when angry, but the Neocons have been
described as "Crazies" and act like crazies, so it's a bit risky to only expect "loud talk
and nothing more". Crazies can start throwing things around, and they're not known for
balanced responses, so I find Martyanov's view too complacent.
I would guess that Putin & his generals have a more realistic assessment , and
interestingly they seem to have decided to stick with Assad (which seems to imply that
they're ready to go all the way with the US). Trump & Mattis need to appreciate this and
moderate the Ziocons.
But overall, it's unreal that this is happening. If the US attacks Russian warships off
the Syrian coast, then things could get completely out of control.
Rural Russians do not have electricity, indoor plumbing and running water in many cases.
It is like Eire in the 1920′s except worse because the distances are vastly greater.
Anyway, if Russia got to a point where it was in a full nuclear strategic exchange with the
US, the last act of the Russian leadership would be to order that their missiles hit every
other nuclear power: Britain, France, China and Israel too . Russia would take
everyone else down with them. For that reason Israel would not let America do anything that
might start a nuclear war.
FSB operational group is in Donetsk now and is dealing with this murder. This is the start
of the official recognition of the LDNR–initially as independent entities and,
eventually, rejoining Russia. It is especially remarkable after even Kiev admitting a
demographic and labor catastrophe, which also feed-backs and drives the whole country into
the oblivion even faster. That, plus US military "advisers" are already in place in Ukraine.
2019 is not far away and US wants to "sell" own toxic asset as high as possible.
Also, the cook in the fable does monologues when angry, but the Neocons have been
described as "Crazies" and act like crazies, so it's a bit risky to only expect "loud talk
and nothing more". Crazies can start throwing things around, and they're not known for
balanced responses, so I find Martyanov's view too complacent.
Evidently you missed Ralph Peters' (and he is really bat shit crazy one and passes as
"military experts" among neocon cabal) "performance" and writings when he called on the war
against Russia ONLY inside Syria. And even then with some caveats.
Even if such a psycho as Peters understands limitations–and that was a year ago,
since then things changed in Syria dramatically, such as Syrian and Russian Air Defense among
other things–then I would say that my position is not really "complacent". Russia has a
revolver and it is held to the temple.
Is the outbreak of nuclear war possible? Of course it
is possible, it always is–the main measure of it is how probable this outbreak is. This
is way above my pay-grade level, but I will reiterate–Russia is aware of the US and
where it stands on the order (if not two) of magnitude more than it is the other way around.
Russians actually study the US and I saw a vast improvement of Russian Americanistika in the
last 10 years. Dramatic really. On the other end well
You are a bit under-informed. Practically all Russian villages have electricity now,
although many don't have natural gas, indoor plumbing, and live w/o running water in homes
(some have it in the streets, others rely on wells; most use old-fashioned latrines).
In the worst-case scenario of nuclear war between Russia and the US, Russia won't need to
target nuclear power plants (or anything else) in China. Russian strategy would be to make
sure some people survive, same as Chinese strategy in that case. They might, although I am
not sure that the survivors won't envy the dead after a full-blown nuclear war. The US
vassals will be hit, but given what the world will become, one can consider that an act of
mercy.
As far as Israel is concerned, you don't need to target anything in particular: one 500
kiloton device (or a few smaller ones) would wipe the whole Israel off the map (Arabs need
not rejoice: that puny territory won't be usable for any mammals for a few thousand years).
One can only hope that Israelis and the US neocons don't have a death wish and won't let
things to go that far.
1) the Russian Military and the US Military are separated physically by a very thin line in
Syria and other places ..accidental bumping into each other=Big nuclear accident!!!
2)The US strategy is to make Russia bleed internally with aggressive and violent Military
occupations directly as in Syria and by proxy in the Ukraine ..Could this not lead to a coup
in Russia? Noam Chomsky makes a compelling case that the US actually won the Vietnam War
.Vietnam had it's military victory .but the war turned Vietnam into a dependent basket case
.44 years of being a dependent basket case.
If there exists any other people than me that got curious about Ivan Krylov and want to
read his stories i found a book on archive.org
"Kriloff's original fables translated by Henry Harrison published in 1883."
I found it easier to read the letters in that one than in the link in the article tbh.
Watergate was really about the US losing the war, so I think the Vietnamese won the war,
but the US left benefited . To get rid of Putin and his system the US would have to impose a
clear defeat on Russia, something the US cannot do in Ukraine without Russia
escalating, and
did not care to try in Syria. The American and Russian military would not let the politicians
start a war.
McCAIN: General Dempsey is the most disappointing chairman of the joint chiefs that I
have seen, and I have seen many of them
He says he may request that. He has supported the plan to completely withdraw from
Afghanistan. And he has basically been the echo chamber for the president. And one of the
reasons we are in the situation that we're in in the world today – and particularly
in the Middle East – is because the lack of his either knowledge or candor about the
situation in the Middle East. And it has done great damage, and so all I can say is he only
has eight more months.
In the above video Dunford tells Wicker controlling airspace in Syria means war with
Russia. McCain throws a tantrum, then Dunford refines answer. However, it is perfectly
obvious that the current head of the Joint Chiefs is no more keen than Martin Dempsey was on
aggressive action against Assad.
Dempsey and Michael Flynn (while he was head of the DIA) sabotaging the CIA and State
department policy on overthrowing Assad the Idiot (he put up the price of basic necessities
while the Arab spring was going on) was the origin of Russia gate, the CIA hated Flynn.
Sean -- I hope you are right about Israel. I have seen it argued, though, that Jews would
welcome a nuclear conflagration because, as God's chosen, they would be the only ones certain
to be left standing when the dust had settled. It would be the realization of the Judaic
belief that Heaven and Earth were created solely for the Jews; see Shahak and Mezvinsky's
Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel , page 60.
of course they are, now go back to bed grandpa. you should not let your self get so
agitated either, your heart is weak. it is a long time ago now that "you" beat the nazis and
taught those pesky commies a lesson.
Noam Chomsky makes a compelling case that the US actually won the Vietnam War
Noam Chomsky could be many things, military historian and scholar of a warfare he surely
is not. I believe Carl Von Clausewitz makes much more compelling case about the war than
Chomsky ever did or will.
The US strategy is to make Russia bleed internally with aggressive and violent Military
occupations directly as in Syria and by proxy in the Ukraine ..Could this not lead to a
coup in Russia?
The US "strategy" on Russia is written by dated "products" of the US "humanities" field,
by amateurs and by ignoramuses – that is why US "strategy" on Russia is easily
identifiable as one huge tantrum and is exhibit A of how not TO conduct military and foreign
policies. In fact, I expect at some point of time many a Ph.D theses written on that–a
fascinating topic of a country ran by people with maturity level of teenagers. As per
coup–wanna see one? Open any US MSM newspaper or watch any MSM news.
Your last paragraph .and I thought: Kenneth Adleman Jean Kirkpatrick ..Condelezza Rice(and
this one is too stupid to know she is stupid ), Susan Rice( very inflated opinion of herself
and a dunce ) now this is a real confederacy of dunces
I fear you're underestimating the power of messianic delusions. The country with leaders
speaking of the End of History, the Moral Arc of History, etc., is not a country with a
generalized ability to accept equal status among competing powers.
They will burn the world if they can't have it.
Additionally, I interact (drink) with policy types in DC and elsewhere and to them the
suggestion that USG would not be able to ruin Russia, or China, and not suffer a catastrophe
at home, is laughable. They will actually laugh. While it may be the case that there are
serious people who seriously understand the situation, the default assumption among Regime
players is that USG is on top, and this will continue for ever .
Much reasoned and passionate debate this: should Russia do or not do? Not possessing
military background at the level of many luminaries here, all I can do is lay out an analogy
built around game theory and poker.
You (Russia) are playing poker with a guy (Uncle Sam) known to hide cards up his sleeves.
You do not call for a show of hands because you fear the loser and his servants will rather
blow up the gaming room than lose. And the blowing up the room is not a certainty, only a
probability not subject to quantification.
So the initiative rests with the other guy –
and he keeps doubling the stakes every move. Now what to do you do? Every time the stakes are
doubled the probability of the loser blowing up the gaming room increases should he be called
out. Should you have called for a show of hands when the stakes were lower? Or should you let
the game go on and on, thereby avoiding a big blow up?
The other probem is that not only is
the other guy crooked, he is also slightly crazy and blind. Has he really seen his own hand
of cards correctly? You don't know for sure. It does look like safety might lie in letting
the game go on at the other guy's initiative.
What if it drags on endlessly? Who has the
bigger pile of chips? Who will go bust first? What if piles of chips are ignored as a
constraint on both sides? Well, then how will the game end? All games must have an end
point.
I have no answers.
Having grown up in Donbass, I would like to share your hope.
However, there are several reasons for Russia's reluctance to let Donbass join. One is
purely economic: Donbass is a lot more populous than Crimea, so bringing the living standards
there from Ukrainian to Russian level would cost lots of money. Russia is hardly in a
position to take on an additional huge burden right now.
The other is geopolitical: I strongly suspect that Putin wants to use Donbass as a lever to
push Ukraine to a sensible position of neutrality internationally and federation internally.
If so, good luck to him: that would make Ukraine viable.
If WWIII starts in earnest, having someone left intact would be the least of Russia's (or
anyone else's) worries.
I don't know about goats, but naturally radiation-resistant rodents and insects would have
been grateful to neocons, if they knew who to thank for gifting them the whole Earth as a
kingdom.
I fear you're underestimating the power of messianic delusions. The country with
leaders speaking of the End of History, the Moral Arc of History, etc., is not a country
with a generalized ability to accept equal status among competing powers.
They will burn the world if they can't have it.
Yes, it's definitely a tricky situation living in a large country run by criminals and
madmen.
If not for nuclear weapons, things would be much simpler, and once they eventually got
a bloody military nose, there might be a popular uprising, probably leading to the wholesale
massacre of all our ruling political, financial, and intellectual elites. This would
definitely serve them right and also provide excellent business to Chinese
guillotine-manufacturers. But with nukes in the hands of madmen, a positive outcome is much
more doubtful, so I guess there's not all that much we can do except sit around and
worry.
Further to the point I made upthread is an english language article on Le Monde
Diplomatique which considers how and why an Al Jazeera documentary which featured israelis
and their stooges around Capitol Hill openly discussing their campaigns of dirty tricks and
their concern that young amerikans were no longer buying their tosh.
The documentary was an early victim of the Saudi/UAE attack on Qatar (the home of AJ) that
left al Jazeera's staff extremely upset and the leaks have been continuous.
The article goes on to discuss current methods of the israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs,
methods to be used on websites which square with much of the nonsense we have been subjected
to. I'm not going to waste space by pasting any of it here, don't be put off by the intro,
this goes way past rewording Mearsheimer or any of the already familiar stuff about aipac and
the deceivers. I reckon we all need to read it in its entirety before hunting out the four
part doco which will inevitably surface on the web in the not-too distant future, especially
since the cold shouldering of Qatar has re-commenced.
The censored al Jazeera documentary on the USAmerican Israeli lobby may well be Qatari
propaganda. Some may have noticed that I am quite critical of al Jazeera Arabic (which
heavily campaigned for Muslims from around the world to go to Syria and fight holy Jihad
against the hated secular government of the infidels). But propaganda is not necessarily
false. To propagate is to nurture and help to grow.
At any rate, I haven't seen anyone mention that al Jazeera made another documentary on the
Israel Lobby, but in Britain. It was released and may be viewed here:
Would it be prudent to view Israel as yet another US state, albeit
without formal association with the union ?
I doubt that Israeli influence is a one way street. In most areas the
USA neoliberal elite interests and Israeli interests coincide or strongly
corrlate. For example in no way the USA invade Iraq to serve exclusively
Israeli interests. They were interested in control of oil rich state (the
scenario later repeated in Libya) and Israeli interests played important,
but secondary role in the invasion.
Notable quotes:
"... American policy towards the Middle East is largely being managed by a small circle of Orthodox Jews working for presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. One of them, David Friedman, is currently U.S. Ambassador to Israel. ..."
"... Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer who has no diplomatic or foreign policy credentials, is a Zionist Jew who is also a supporter of the illegal settlements on the West Bank and a harsh critic of other Jews who in any way disagree with the Israeli government. He has contributed money to settlement construction, which would be illegal if OTFI were doing its job, and has consistently defended the settlers while condemning the Palestinians in speeches in Israel. ..."
"... How he represents the United States and its citizens who are not dual nationals must be considered a mystery. ..."
"... Friedman's top adviser is Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, who is described by the Embassy as an expert in "Jewish education and pro-Israel advocacy." Once upon a time, in an apparently more enlightened mood, Lightstone described Donald Trump as posing "an existential danger both to the Republican Party and to the U.S." and even accused him of pandering to Jewish audiences. ..."
Referring to Israel during an interview in August 1983, U.S. Navy Admiral and former head of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas Moorer said "I've never seen a
President -- I don't care who he is -- stand up to them. It just boggles the mind. They always
get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I
wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip these people have
got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens certainly don't have any idea
what goes on."
Moorer was speaking generally but he had something specific in mind, namely the June 8,
1967, Israeli attack on the American intelligence ship, U.S.S. Liberty, which killed 34
American crewmen and wounded 173 more. The ship was operating in international waters and was
displaying a huge stars and stripes but Israeli warplanes, which had identified the vessel as
American, even strafed the life rafts to kill those who were fleeing the sinking ship. It was
the bloodiest attack on a U.S. Naval vessel ever outside of wartime and the crew deservedly
received the most medals every awarded to a single ship based on one action. Yes, it is one
hell of a story of courage under fire, but don't hold your breath waiting for Hollywood to make
a movie out of it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, may he burn in hell, had ordered the recall of U.S. carrier
planes sent to aid the stricken vessel, saying that he would prefer the ship go to the bottom
rather than embarrass his good friend Israel. Then came the cover-up from inside the U.S.
government. A hastily convened and summarily executed board of inquiry headed by Admiral John
McCain, father of the senator, deliberately interviewed only a handful of crewmen before
determining that it was all an accident. The sailors who had survived the attack as well as
crewmen from Navy ships that arrived eventually to provide assistance were held incommunicado
in Malta before being threatened and sworn to secrecy. Since that time, repeated attempts to
convene another genuine inquiry have been rebuffed by congress, the White House and the
Pentagon. Recently deceased Senator John McCain was particularly active in rejecting overtures
from the Liberty survivors.
The Liberty story demonstrates how Israel's ability to make the United States government act
against its own interests has been around for a long time. Grant Smith of IRMEP, cites how
Israeli spying carried out by AIPAC in Washington back in the mid-1980s resulted in a
lopsided trade agreement that currently benefits Israel by more than $10 billion per year
on the top of direct grants from the U.S. Treasury and billions in tax exempt "charitable"
donations by American Jews.
If Admiral Moorer were still alive, I would have to tell him that the situation
vis-à-vis Israeli power is much worse now than it was in 1983. He would be very
interested in reading a
remarkable bit of research recently completed by Smith demonstrating exactly how Israel and
its friends work from inside the system to corrupt our political process and make the American
government work in support of Jewish state interests. He describes in some detail how the
Israel Lobby has been able to manipulate the law enforcement community to protect and promote
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's agenda.
A key component in the Israeli penetration of the U. S. government has been President George
W. Bush's 2004 signing off on the creation of the Office of Terrorism and Financial
Intelligence (OTFI) within the Department of the Treasury. The group's website proclaims that
it is responsible for "safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating
rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators, money
launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats," but it has from its founding
been really all about safeguarding Israel's perceived interests. Grant Smith notes however, how
"the secretive office has a special blind spot for major terrorism generators, such as
tax-exempt money laundering from the United States into illegal Israeli settlements and
proliferation financing and weapons technology smuggling into Israel's clandestine nuclear
weapons complex."
The first head of the office was Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levey, who operated
secretly within the Treasury itself while also coordinating regularly both with the Israeli
government as well as with pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, WINEP and the Foundation for
the Defense of Democracies (FDD). Levey also traveled regularly to Israel on the taxpayer's
dime, as did his three successors in office.
Levey left OTFI in 2011 and was replaced by David Cohen. It was reported then and
subsequently that counterterrorism position at OTFI were all filled by individuals who were
both Jewish and Zionist. Cohen continued the Levey tradition of resisting any transparency
regarding what the office was up to. Smith reports how, on September 12, 2012, he
refused to answer reporter questions "about Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, and
whether sanctioning Iran, a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons, over its internationally-inspected civilian nuclear program was an example of endemic
double standards at OTFI."
Cohen was in turn succeeded in 2015 by Adam Szubin who was then replaced in 2017 by Sigal
Pearl Mandelker,
a former and possibly current Israeli citizen . All of the heads of OTFI have therefore
been Jewish and Zionist. All work closely with the Israeli government, all travel to Israel
frequently on "official business" and they all are in close liaison with the Jewish groups most
often described as part of the Israel Lobby. And the result has been that many of the victims
of OTFI have been generally enemies of Israel, as defined by Israel and America's Jewish
lobbyists. OTFI's Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN), which includes sanctions and enforcement options , features many Middle
Eastern Muslim and Christian names and companies but nothing in any way comparable relating to
Israel and Israelis, many of whom are well known to law enforcement otherwise as weapons
traffickers and money launderers . And once placed on the SDN there is no transparent
way to be removed, even if the entry was clearly in error.
Here in the United States, action by OTFI has meant that Islamic charities have been shut
down and individuals exercising their right to free speech through criticism of the Jewish
state have been imprisoned. If the Israel Anti-Boycott Act succeeds in making its way through
congress the OTFI model will presumably become the law of the land when it comes to curtailing
free speech whenever Israel is involved.
The OTFI story is outrageous, but it is far from unique. There is a history of American Jews
closely attached to Israel being promoted by powerful and cash rich domestic lobbies to act on
behalf of the Jewish state. To be sure, Jews who are Zionists are
vastly overrepresented in all government agencies that have anything at all to do with the
Middle East and one can reasonably argue that the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the
pockets of Jewish billionaires named Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban.
Neoconservatives, most of whom are Jewish, infiltrated the Pentagon under the Reagan
Administration and they and their heirs in government and media (Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz,
Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol) were major players in the catastrophic war with
Iraq, which, one of the architects of that war, Philip Zelikow, described in
2004 as being all about Israel. The same people are now in the forefront of urging war with
Iran.
American policy towards the Middle East is largely being managed by a small circle of
Orthodox Jews working for presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. One of them, David Friedman,
is currently U.S. Ambassador to Israel.
Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer who has no diplomatic or
foreign policy credentials, is a Zionist Jew who is also a supporter of the illegal settlements
on the West Bank and a harsh critic of other Jews who in any way disagree with the Israeli
government. He has contributed money to settlement construction, which would be illegal if OTFI
were doing its job, and has consistently defended the settlers while condemning the
Palestinians in speeches in Israel.
He endlessly and ignorantly repeats Israeli government
talking points and has
tried to change the wording of State Department communications, seeking to delete the word
"occupied" when describing Israel's control of the West Bank. His humanity does not extend
beyond his Jewishness, defending the Israeli shooting thousands of unarmed Gazan protesters and
the bombing of schools, hospitals and cultural centers. How he represents the United States and
its citizens who are not dual nationals must be considered a mystery.
Friedman's top adviser is Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone,
who is described by the Embassy as an expert in "Jewish education and pro-Israel advocacy."
Once upon a time, in an apparently more enlightened mood, Lightstone described Donald Trump as
posing "an existential danger both to the Republican Party and to the U.S." and even accused
him of pandering to Jewish audiences.
Apparently when opportunity knocked he changed his mind
about his new boss. Pre-government in 2014, Lightstone founded and headed Silent City, a Jewish
advocacy group supported by extreme right-wing money that opposed the Iran nuclear agreement
and also worked to combat the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He
is reportedly still connected financially with anti BDS groups, which might be construed as a
conflict of interest. As the Senior Adviser to Friedman he is paid in excess of $200,000 plus
free housing, additional cash benefits to include a 25% cost of living allowance and a 10%
hardship differential, medical insurance and eligibility for a pension.
So, what's in it all for Joe and Jill American Citizens? Not much. And for Israel? Anything,
it wants, apparently. Sink a U.S. warship? Okay. Tap the U.S. Treasury? Sure, just wait a
minute and we'll draft some legislation that will give you even more money. Create a treasury
department agency run exclusively by Jews that operates secretly to punish critics of the
Jewish state? No brainer. Meanwhile a bunch of dudes at the Pentagon are dreaming of new wars
for Israel and the White House sends an ignorant ambassador and top aide overseas to represent
the interests of the foreign government in the country where they are posted. Which just
happens to be Israel. Will it ever end?
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
.
Indeed. Especial kudos for mentioning that the bailout cost way way more than the "Tarp"
program. Some additional thoughts though.
1. Our financial economy is now so subsidized and rigged, I wonder if it is even possible
to have a traditional financial-style collapse? I mean, the stock market is high only because
the companies are borrowing like crazy to boost their stock prices, and the Federal Reserve
will manufacture unlimited money to boost and bail out financial firms. However, on its own
this won't cause hyperinflation, because this money is mostly not making it back onto Main
Street, it's just money chasing money in the the clouds. I suggest that perhaps the next
collapse will be triggered by physical matters, as massive immigration fuels continued
population growth, and the real economy is starved of the massive physical investment needed
to deal with this and our own industrial base is gutted by free trade agreements. A physical
collapse cannot be papered over by financial manipulation
2. There will be no revolution, sorry. Look at Barack Obama, for eight years he was as
corrupt a whore to big money as any US politician, and the man is still treated as a secular
saint. The Democrats are for Wall Street bailouts and eternal pointless wars etc.etc. but
people will keep voting for them because Trump is a fascist, a racist, "literally Hitler." I
mean, CNN told them so, so it must be true. Meanwhile, even though it looked like the
Republicans for a moment were going to deal with reality, they too have mostly been co-opted
into mindlessly supporting Trump because the Democrats are "socialists" (hah! Lenin would
have had a good laugh at that one) and Nancy Pelosi is weird.
I think you'll find what common sense might predict, namely, that deaths by shooting have
declined in per capita terms. Maybe people still manage to commit suicide as reliably by
other means but there can have been no substitute for accidental shootings.
"... Many of the root causes of the crisis remain today, making another economic downturn or collapse possible. The New Yorker reports that little has changed since 2008, with Wall Street banks returning to risky behavior and the inadequate regulation of Dodd-Frank being weakened. Big finance is more concentrated and dominant than it was before the crash. Inequality and debt have expanded, and despite the capital class getting wealthier in a record stock market with corporate profits soaring, real wages are stuck at pre-crisis levels . ..."
"... So, when the next crash comes. Let's put forward a People's Agenda. Let's be like Iceland and mobilize for policies that put people first. Collectively, we have the power to overcome the political elites and their donor class. ..."
Ten years ago, there was panic in Washington, DC, New York City and financial
centers around the world as the United States was in the midst of an economic
collapse. The crash became the focus of the presidential campaign between Barack
Obama and John McCain and was followed by protests that created a popular movement,
which continues to this day.
Banks: Bailed Out; The People: Sold Out
On the campaign trail, in March 2008,
Obama blamed mismanagement of the economy on both Democrats and Republicans
for rewarding financial manipulation rather than economic productivity. He called
for funds to protect homeowners from foreclosure and to stabilize local governments
and urged a 21st Century regulation of the financial system. John McCain opposed
federal intervention, saying the country should not bail out banks or homeowners
who knowingly took financial risks.
By September 2008, McCain and Obama
met with President George W. Bush and together they called for a $700 billion
bailout of the banks, not the people. Obama and McCain issued a joint statement
that called the bank bailout plan "flawed," but said, "the effort to protect
the American economy must not fail."
Obama expressed "outrage" at the "crisis," which was "a direct result of
the greed and irresponsibility that has dominated Washington and Wall Street
for years."
By October 2008, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), or bank bailout,
had recapitalized the banks, the Treasury had stabilized money market mutual
funds and the FDIC had guaranteed the bank debts. The Federal Reserve began
flowing money to banks, which would ultimately total almost twice
the $16 trillion claimed in a federal audit. Researchers at the University
of Missouri found that the Federal Reserve gave
over $29 trillion
to the banks.
" the crisis took years to emerge. It was caused by reckless lending practices,
Wall Street greed, outright fraud, lax government oversight in the George W.
Bush years, and deregulation of the financial sector in the Bill Clinton years.
The deepest source, going back decades, was rising inequality. In good times
and bad, no matter which party held power, the squeezed middle class sank ever
further into debt."
Before his inauguration, Obama proposed an economic stimulus plan, but, as
Paul Krugman wrote, "Obama's prescription doesn't live up to his diagnosis.
The economic plan he's offering isn't as strong as his language about the economic
threat."
In the end, the stimulus was even smaller than what Obama proposed. Economist
Dean Baker explained that it may have created 2 million jobs, but we needed
12 million. It was $300 billion in 2009, about the same in 2010, and the remaining
$100 billion followed over several years -- too small to offset the $1.4 trillion
in annual lost spending.
Protest near Union Square in New York, April, 2010. Popular Resistance
Still at Risk
Many of the root causes of the crisis remain today, making another economic
downturn or collapse possible. The
New Yorker reports that little has changed since 2008, with Wall Street
banks returning to risky behavior and the inadequate regulation of Dodd-Frank
being weakened. Big finance is more concentrated and dominant than it was before
the crash. Inequality and debt have expanded, and despite the capital class
getting wealthier in a record stock market with corporate profits soaring,
real wages are stuck at pre-crisis levels .
People are economically insecure in the US and live with growing despair,
as measured by
reports on well-being . The
Federal Reserve reported in 2017 that "two in five Americans don't have
enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense." Further, "more than one in
five said they weren't able to pay the current month's bills in full, and more
than one in four said they skipped necessary medical care last year because
they couldn't afford it."
Positive Money writes: "Ten years on, big banks are still behaving in
reckless, unfair and neglectful ways . The structural problems with our
money and banking system still haven't been fixed. And many experts fear that
if we don't change things soon, we're going to sleepwalk into
another crash ."
Larry Eliott wrote in the Guardian , "Capitalism's near-death experience
with the banking crisis was a golden opportunity for progressives." But the
movement in the United States was not yet in a position to take advantage of
it.
There were immediate protests. Democratic Party-aligned groups such as USAction,
True Majority and others
organized nationwide actions . Over 1,000 people
demonstrated on Wall Street and phones in Congress were ringing wildly.
While there was opposition to the bailout, there was a lack of national consensus
over what to do.
Protests continued to grow. In late 2009, a
"Move Your Money" campaign was started that urged people to take their money
out of the big banks and put it in community banks and credit unions. The most
visible anti-establishment rage in response to the bailout arose later
in the Tea Party and Occupy movements . Both groups shared a consensus that
we live in a rigged economy created by a corrupt political establishment. It
was evident that
the US is an oligarchy, which serves the interests of the wealthy while
ignoring the necessities of the people.
The anti-establishment consensus continues to grow and showed itself in the
2016 presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They
were two sides of the same coin of populist anger that defeated Jeb Bush and
Hillary Clinton. Across the political spectrum, there is a political crisis
with
both mainstream, Wall Street-funded political parties being unpopular but
staying in power due to a calcified political system that protects the duopoly
of Democrats and Republicans.
Preparing for the Next Collapse
When the next financial crisis arrives, the movement is in a much stronger
position to take advantage of the opportunity for significant changes that benefit
people over Wall Street. The Occupy movement and other efforts since then have
changed the national dialogue so that more people are aware of wealth inequality,
the corruption of big banks and the failure of the political elites to represent
the people's interests.
There is also greater awareness of alternatives to the current economy. The
Public Banking movement has grown significantly since 2008. Banks that need
to be bailed out could be transformed into public banks that serve the people
and are democratically controlled. And there are multiple platforms, including
our People's
Agenda , that outline alternative solutions.
We also know the government can afford almost $30 trillion to bail out the
banks. One sixth of this could provide a $12,000 annual basic income, which
would cost $3.8 trillion annually,
doubling Social Security payments to $22,000 annually, which would cost
$662 billion, a $10,000
bonus for all US public school teachers, which would cost $11 billion, free
college for all high school graduates, which would cost $318 billion, and universal
preschool, which would cost $38 billion. National improved Medicare for all
would actually
save the nation trillions of dollars over a decade. We can afford to provide
for the necessities of the people.
We can look to Iceland for an example of how to handle the next crisis. In
2008 , they jailed the bankers, let the banks fail without taking on their
debt and put controls in place to protect the economy. They recovered more quickly
than other countries and with less pain.
How did they do it? In part, through protest. They held sustained and noisy
protests, banging pots and pans outside their parliament building for five months.
The number of people participating in the protests grew over time. They created
democratized platforms for gathering public input and sharing information widely.
And they created new political parties, the Pirate Party and the Best Party,
which offered agendas informed by that popular input.
So, when the next crash comes. Let's put forward a People's Agenda. Let's
be like Iceland and mobilize for policies that put people first. Collectively,
we have the power to overcome the political elites and their donor class.
John Gunther Dean, now 92, and a former American ambassador to
five countries, has long maintained that Israel was behind his
attempted assassination on August 28, 1980, in a suburb of
Beirut, which was attributed to a rightwing Lebanese group. Dean
and his wife and daughter and son-in-law were in a motorcade and
narrowly escaped serious injury.
Dean said that he was targeted because he was doing something
regarded as antithetical to Israel's interest: consulting with
the Palestine Liberation Organization and its head, Yasser
Arafat, at a time when such contacts were the third rail in US
politics. He was also outspokenly critical of Israeli attacks on
Lebanon.
A new book offers backing to Dean's claim. But while that book
has been highly-publicized, the question of whether Israel
attacked our ambassador has gotten no attention in the press.
That is not a surprise; for Dean has asserted that the case
itself was never thoroughly investigated by the U.S. government.
Let's begin this story where I first heard about it, from
historian Remi Brulin's twitter thread
on
May 30:
"On August 28, 1980, the three-car motorcade of John Gunther
Dean, the American Ambassador to Lebanon, was attacked on the
motorway by several assailants armed with automatic rifles as
well as light anti-tank weapons or LAWs. The ambassador and his
wife escaped unscathed.
"This attack is in
RAND's
'terrorism' database
. Entry states that 'responsibility for
attack was later claimed by the Front for the Liberation of
Lebanon from Foreigners, a shadowy right-wing group.' Various
media outlets at the time reported on FLLF taking credit for the
attack
"Over the years Ambassador Dean has repeatedly argued that
Israel was behind the August 1980 attempt on his life. In a
n
interview for the Oral History Project
in September 2000, he
explained how the Lebanese Intelligence services had managed to
retrieve the empty canisters of two of the light anti-tank
weapons (LAWs) that had been used during the attack on his
motorcade and, during raiding a house by the intersection where
the assault had taken place, found 8 more. Dean collected the
numbers on the 10 missiles & sent them to Washington to be
traced.
"Three weeks (and one angry phone call) later, the US Ambassador
finally learned 'where the light anti-tank weapons came from,
where they were shipped to, on what date, who paid for them, and
when they got to their destination.'
"The LAWs had been manufactured in the US and 'were sold and
shipped to Israel in 1974.' In
this
interview
, Dean further states that he "did find out a great
deal about this incident' over the following years, and calls
this assassination attempt 'one of the more unsavory episodes in
our Middle Eastern history' and ends by noting that 'our
Ambassador to Israel, Sam Lewis, took up this matter with the
Israeli authorities.'
"Dean concludes: 'I know as surely as I know anything that
Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, was somehow involved in
the attack. Undoubtedly using a proxy, our ally Israel had tried
to kill me.' [Haaretz
covered
Dean's claim, made in his 2009 autobiography
; so did
The
Nation
]
"All of this has been known for years, although it is very
rarely discussed in the US media. When discussed, Dean's
assertions/accusations are dismissed as conspiracy theories.
"In January however, a book was published that appears to
reinforce the plausibility of Dean's position. The book is Ronen
Bergman's
Rise
and Kill First
.
It has received rave reviews in the US
press, and its author has been interviewed countless times since
the book was published. The book focuses on Israeli 'targeted
assassinations' and it contains one truly remarkable revelation.
"In 1979, [Rafael] Eitan and [Meir] Dagan [both brass in the
Israel Defense Forces] created the Front for the Liberation of
Lebanon from Foreigners, and ran that fictitious group from 1979
to 1983. In 1981 and 1982, Ariel Sharon used that Front to
conduct a series of indiscriminate car bombings that killed
hundreds of civilians.
"The objective of this massive 'terrorist' car bombing campaign
was to 'sow chaos' amongst the Palestinian & Lebanese civilian
population" and, in 1981-82, to provoke the PLO into resorting
to 'terrorism,' thus providing Israel with an excuse to invade
Lebanon.
"The FLLF operation is described in great details in Bergman's
book. His account is based solely on first hand accounts from
Israeli officials involved in the operation or who were aware of
it at the time. It is also described in detail in my article
here [
in
Mondoweiss in May:
The remarkable disappearing act of
Israel's car-bombing campaign in Lebanon or: What we (do not)
talk about when we talk about 'terrorism'].
"As I show in this article, not a SINGLE review of Bergman's
book in the US media has mentioned the FLLF operation. Nor has
it been mentioned in a SINGLE of the countless interviews he has
given on the topic over the last few months. The US media has
thus been fully silent about the fact that Israeli officials
directed a major & fully indiscriminate car bombing campaign
that killed 100s of civilians in Lebanon. This silence also
means that the US media has failed to notice the possible
implications of this revelation about the Dean case.
"Bergman himself does not mention the assassination attempt
against Dean. But we know that the FLLF took credit for this
attack at the time. That Dean's own investigation pointed to
Israel & to its Lebanese proxies. And we now know that the FLLF
was CREATED and RUN by Israel.
"None of this is absolutely conclusive, of course. Nonetheless,
this topic might warrant investigation from US journalists (who
might also want to write about the FLLF car bombing campaign, ie
about Israeli officials resorting to 'terrorism.'"
Brulin subsequently added this important comment:
Bergman does note on several occasions in his book that he
is not allowed to write and talk about a lot of the
operations that his sources talked to him about. I wonder if
this FLLF operation vs Dean is one of those.
Let us add some details and context. Dean was born to a Jewish
family in Germany in 1926 and escaped the Holocaust to the
United States in 1938, later graduating from a Kansas City high
school. It goes without saying that being ambassador to five
countries, Cambodia, Denmark, Lebanon, Thailand and India, is a
stellar career in foreign service.
I reached out to Dean and did not hear from him, but in his oral
history, the ambassador says that the attack was a "horrible
experience" that scarred his daughter.
The road at that stretch was wide and a Mercedes car was
parked below a small hill overlooking the road. As we
turned, our convoy took 21 rifle bullets and two grenades
anti-tank fired against the car I was in. My wife threw
herself on top of me and said: "Get your head down" because
I was trying to look out and was stunned by the "fireworks".
When you have these light anti-tank weapons (LAWs) explode,
there are a lot of sparks and explosions. The two LAWs fired
at my car bounced off the rear of the car. I also noticed
that on the window of my armored car there were some shots
all very well centered where I was sitting, but they had not
penetrated because the plastic windows were bullet-proof.
In his autobiography
Danger
Zones,
Dean says he urged the State Department to
investigate, but: "No matter how hard I tried, I could not get a
straight answer from the State Department about what the U.S.
had discovered in its investigations I was simply told to
resume my duties as ambassador. That was not so easy when I
learned what the Lebanese intelligence agency found out [using
the numbers on the weapons]."
Dean says he was clearly understood to be an enemy of Israel
because on repeated occasions he had publicly condemned Israel's
attacks on Lebanon's borders and air space, a stance the State
Department usually did not take.
Scurrilous attacks on me in the Israeli Knesset and the
Israeli press just prior to the assassination attempt
indicate that the Israeli authorities were unhappy with the
activist role I played in Lebanon, defending Lebanese
sovereignty and maintaining an active relationship with the
PLO–the very policies I was given to pursue by the president
of the United States. The venomous talk in the Israeli
Knesset by the right-wing parties portrayed me as a tool of
the Palestinians. Because I was willing, even eager, to talk
with all the factions in Lebanon's civil war, I was
suspected of being anti-Israel.
Dean said he had a "close working relationship" with the PLO–
including calling on Yasser Arafat to help broker the release of
13 of 66 American hostages held by Iranians in Tehran in
November 1979, those 13 being the women and African-Americans.
"On a number of occasions the PLO helped me to get Americans
released American authorities considered the PLO a valid
interlocutor for discussing ways of finding a nonmilitary
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
At that time, the PLO was verboten in official policy circles.
Andrew Young was forced to resign as Jimmy Carter's ambassador
to the U.N. in 1979 after the Israelis leaked the fact that he
had met with a representative of the PLO. In 1977,
Ted
Koppel and Marvin Kalb wrote
a thriller that turned on a US
official having a supersecret meeting with a fictitious
Palestinian group, and it leaking and the official being charged
with betraying Israel. In 1976, the dissident Jewish peace group
Breira came apart after Wolf Blitzer, who was at the time also
working for the Israel lobby group AIPAC, reported in the
Jerusalem Post that Breira members had met with PLO officials.
Dean had a reputation for being free-thinking in Washington
circles. In 1988, when Dean was ambassador to India, Pakistani
President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq died in Pakistan when his plane
was sabotaged. Dean maintained that Israel was behind the
assassination because it did not want Pakistan to obtain nuclear
weapons, which it was then developing. Dean's speculation was
based in part on the fact that pro-Israel congressmen (Stephen
Solarz and Tom Lantos) had visited him in New Delhi and pressed
him to support Israel's ally India over Pakistan and to seek to
thwart Pakistan's path toward nukes.
"The more I pushed for answers, the more officials from the
Reagan administration pushed back," he wrote. Within a year,
Dean, 63, retired amid official questions about his sanity under
"strain." "The department's first thought was to send me to an
asylum." Instead he was sent to Switzerland for "recuperation,"
he writes in his autobiography. "This was the kind of technique
that the Stalinist regime used to silence its critics in the
Soviet Union."
Ronen Bergman's new book
on
the Israeli assassination and terrorism campaign
contains no
reference to the John Gunther Dean attack. I asked him via a
twitter message why he had left it out, noting that his
revelation about Israeli security officials establishing the
Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners gives
credence to Dean's claim. He did not respond.
The Israeli investigative reporter is now working for the New
York Times, and lately reported in the Times on the
killing
of a Syrian rocket scientist in a car bomb attack
in
northwestern Syria on the night of August 4, evidently by
Israel.
P.S. The US government has had a miserable record of
investigating
known
Israeli
attacks on Americans– on the USS Liberty in 1967 and Rachel
Corrie in 2003.
Good to see Dean being taken seriously after so long in the
wilderness.
The throwaway line about Dean, a Jew, being born in Germany and
escaping the Holocaust when his family went to America in 1938,
is a bit much, but serves to remind us what a challenge it is
for those of Tribal consciousness such as friend Weiss, to hew
to the truth when the opposing lie is so consequential.
Russiagate can be viewed as a pretty inventive way to justify their own existence for bloated
Intelligence services: first CIA hacks something leaving traces of russians or Chinese; then the
FBI, CIAand Department of Homeland security all enjoy additional money and people to counter the
threat.
The US Department of Homeland Security fabricated "intelligence reports" of Russian
election hacking in order to try to get control of the election infrastructure (probebly so
that they can hack it more easily to control the election results).
Image
copyright
REUTERS
Image
caption
Alexander
Zakharchenko in a 2017 photo
A leader of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, Alexander
Zakharchenko, has been killed in an explosion at a cafe in Donetsk city.
"The head of the DNR [Donetsk People's Republic]... has died as the
result of a terrorist attack," Zakharchenko's spokeswoman told AFP news
agency.
Russia's foreign ministry said it suspected Ukraine of organising the
latest killing.
The Ukrainian government has denied any involvement.
Some observers have attributed previous deaths of rebel leaders in
Donetsk to infighting among the rebels, or moves by Moscow to eliminate
inconvenient separatist leaders.
What are the two sides saying?
Rebel and Russian news reports say the separatists' "finance minister"
Alexander Timofeyev was wounded in the blast at the Separ cafe that
killed Zakharchenko.
Ukrainians suspected of being behind the blast were arrested nearby, a
security source was quoted as saying.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said "there is
every reason to believe that the Kiev regime is behind the murder".
She said the Kiev "party of war" was "violating its pledges about peace
and has decided on a bloodbath".
However, recent reports suggested that Zakharchenko had fallen out of
favour with Russia.
A spokeswoman for Ukraine's state security service, Yelena Gitlyanskaya,
rejected Moscow's accusations.
She said the killing was a result of "internal fighting... between the
terrorists and their Russian sponsors".
What is happening in eastern Ukraine?
Heavily armed rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk regions refuse to recognise
the Ukrainian government in Kiev.
The rebels seized large swathes of territory there in an uprising in
April 2014. Since then, thousands of people have died in fighting
between the rebels and Ukrainian government forces.
Moscow denies sending regular troops and heavy weapons to the
separatists, but admits that Russian "volunteers" are helping the
rebels.
There has been shooting on the frontline despite a "back-to-school
truce" that was supposed to take effect on Wednesday. International
monitors reported 70 ceasefire violations on that day alone.
Who was Alexander Zakharchenko?
He played a key role in the Russian-backed separatist military operation
from its very beginning.
In early 2014, soon after Ukraine's pro-Russian government was toppled
by the Maidan revolution, he took part in the seizure of the Donetsk
regional administration building by people saying they were protesting
against the new pro-Western authorities.
Later that year, he was chosen as the prime minister of the
self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic by its parliament, the
"Supreme Council".
He had been in the role ever since, assuming the title of president, and
was among the signatories of the stalled Minsk peace agreement.
He was wounded twice in combat, and survived a car bomb blast in August
2014.
Expensive weapon systems for export is Trump administration official policy, his Military
Keyseanism stance.
Notable quotes:
"... The US is to render substantial military assistance to a country with an economy in the doldrums , reforms that have foundered , a democracy that is in question , and corruption that is widespread . ..."
...
Kurt Volker , US Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations, said in an interview
with the Guardian published on September 1 that "Washington is ready to expand arms supplies to
Ukraine in order to build up the country's naval and air defense forces in the face of
continuing Russian support for
eastern separatists ." According to him, the Trump administration was "absolutely" prepared
to go further in supplying lethal weaponry to Ukrainian forces than the anti-tank
missiles it delivered in April .
Mr. Volker explained that "[t]hey need to rebuild a navy and they have very limited air
capability as well. I think we'll have to look at air defense."
The diplomat
believes Ukraine needs unmanned aerial vehicles, counter-battery radar systems, and
anti-sniper systems. The issue of lethal arms purchases has been discussed at the highest
level.
The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 allocated
$250m in military assistance to Ukraine, including lethal arms. The
US has delivered Javelin anti-tank missile systems to Kiev but this time the
ambassador talked about an incomparably larger deal. Former President Barack
Obama had been unconvinced that granting Ukraine lethal defensive weapons
would be the right decision, in view of the widespread corruption there. This
policy has changed under President Trump, who - among other things - approved deliveries
of anti-tank missiles to Kiev last December.
Ukraine has officially requested US air-defense systems. According to
Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine's ambassador to the United States, the Ukrainian
military wants to purchase at least three air-defense systems. The cost of
the deal is expected to exceed $2 billion, or about $750 million apiece. The
system in question was not specified, but it's generally believed to be the
Patriot.
Volker's statement was made at a time of rising tensions in the Sea of Azov,
which is legally shared by Ukraine and Russia. It is connected to
the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait. The rhetoric has heated up and ships
have been placed under arrest as this territorial dispute turns the area
into a flashpoint.
Russia has
slammed the US for backing Ukraine's violations of international law in
the area. According to a 2003 treaty, the Sea of Azov is a jointly
controlled territory that both countries are allowed to use freely.
The US military already runs a maritime operations center located within
Ukraine's Ochakov naval base. The facility is an operational-level warfare
command-and-control organization that is designed to deliver flexible
maritime support throughout the full range of military operations. Hundreds
of US and Canadian military instructors are
training Ukrainian personnel at the Yavorov firing range.
NATO has
granted Ukraine the status of an aspirant
country - a step that is openly provocative toward Russia. Macedonia,
Georgia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina are also aspirant nations. Last year,
Ukraine's parliament adopted
a resolution recognizing full membership in NATO as a foreign policy
goal. In 2008, NATO agreed that Ukraine along with Georgia should become a
full-fledged member. In March, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia announced the
formation of an alliance to oppose Russia.
"... The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society ..."
"... "Liberal democracy is in danger," Sacks said, adding later: "The politics of freedom risks descending into the politics of fear." Sacks said Britain's politics had been poisoned by the rise of identity politics, as minorities and aggrieved groups jockeyed first for rights, then for special treatment. The process, he said, began with Jews, before being taken up by blacks, women and gays. He said the effect had been "inexorably divisive." ..."
"... "A culture of victimhood sets group against group, each claiming that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than that of others," he said. In an interview with the Times ..."
Well, if Rabbi Sacks and other Jews want anti-Semitism, I think they should look much closer
to home. This is from the Jerusalem Post in 2007:
Sacks: Multiculturalism threatens democracy
Multiculturalism promotes segregation, stifles free speech and threatens liberal
democracy, Britain's top Jewish official warned in extracts from [a recently published] book
Jonathan Sacks, Britain's chief rabbi, defined multiculturalism as an attempt to affirm
Britain's diverse communities and make ethnic and religious minorities more appreciated and
respected. But in his book, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society , he said
the movement had run its course. "Multiculturalism has led not to integration but to
segregation," Sacks wrote in his book, an extract of which was published in the
Times of London.
"Liberal democracy is in danger," Sacks said, adding later: "The politics of freedom
risks descending into the politics of fear." Sacks said Britain's politics had been poisoned
by the rise of identity politics, as minorities and aggrieved groups jockeyed first for
rights, then for special treatment. The process, he said, began with Jews, before being taken
up by blacks, women and gays. He said the effect had been "inexorably divisive."
"A culture of victimhood sets group against group, each claiming that its pain,
injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than that of others," he said. In an interview
with the Times , Sacks said he wanted his book to be "politically incorrect in the
highest order." ( Sacks:
Multiculturalism threatens democracy , The Jerusalem Post , 20th October
2007 ; emphasis added)
So Sacks claimed that "Britain's politics had been poisoned" by a self-serving,
self-pitying, self-aggrandizing ideology that "began with Jews" and had been "inexorably
divisive." His claim is absolutely classic anti-Semitism, peddling a stereotype of Jews as
subversive, manipulative and divisive outsiders whose selfish agitation has done huge harm to a
gentile society.
Sacks was right, of course: Jews do demand special treatment and did indeed invent the
"identity politics" that has poisoned British politics (and
American ,
Australian ,
French and Swedish
politics too).
By saying all that, Sacks was being far more "anti-Semitic" than Jeremy Corbyn was, even by
the harshest interpretation of those comments on Zionists. Furthermore, Sacks has proved that
Corbyn was right. Zionists do lack irony. In 2007 Sacks, a staunch Zionist, claimed
that the "poisoning" of British politics "began with Jews." In 2018 he's condemning Jeremy
Corbyn for saying something much milder about Zionists.
The commedia dell'arte mourning of McCain is in full bloom. In a vulgar orgy of pompous,
bathetic praise from Congress and the media, he is being piously canonized. To counter this
shameless obsequy by attacking him for what he actually was would be an exercise in futility,
just as the endless ad hominem hatchet jobs on Trump accomplish nothing.
It's more useful to examine the grisly American disease of which he was a champion and
cynosure. The son and grandson of Admirals, a bred-in-the-bone military man, he flew a fighter
in Vietnam. Shot down -- and amazingly not summarily executed -- he was held as a POW, and
became a lifelong advocate of unlimited use of military force for American world
domination.
Nothing unusual in that. It is and has been the baseline political credo of all American
politicians since Monroe, at least, up to and including Trump, Hillary, Sanders, and Warren.
The surest way to the graveyard for political hopefuls is to be seen or slimed as "soft on
defense".
The fact that actual defense of the country has not been necessary since the War of 1812,
and is not now, and that the hoax only exists to suck our national wealth into the War Machine
has not been effectively articulated. The idea, false to its core, that America must spend
astronomic sums to "defend" its polity and its people has taken on the character of revealed
religion in a country where multitudes believe in angels and Endtimes.
This appropriation of the wealth of the people by the corporate forces of imperial murder
has not come suddenly. Oceans of innocent blood have drenched the world from our military
violence since Quincy Adams said of America that "she goes not abroad in search of monsters to
destroy".
World War II proved to Eisenhower's Military/Industrial/Congressio nal Complex the
obscene profit to be had from annihilating people, cities, and countries. Schumpeter
defined the War Machine far better than Ike did: "Created by the wars that required it, it now
creates the wars it requires."
Since 1945, America, by then firmly in its grasp, has relentlessly scoured the world behind
the gross and cynical lie of defense of freedom, to foment, ignite, and expand the brutal,
devastating, shock-and-awe gorefests the War Machine has to have. That Korea, Vietnam, and the
catalog of Middle Eastern horrors the US perpetrated were failures on a cosmic scale except as
cash cows for the War Machine has been of little concern to the most somnolent, propagandized,
passive public since that of the Third Reich. These national mass murder atrocities were sold
to Americans as defense of our indispensable "homeland" from barbarian, sub-human "others".
Some, such as Al Qaida were, absurdly, our Deep State's own creations.
It is commonly said and believed that the American public is not at fault for its profound,
intractable moral cowardice since War Machine swag has kept them in a combination insane
asylum, crack house, and human zoo. How else could they have lived with the intolerably bitter
truth that their country is the serial violator and exterminator, the voracious destroyer, of
so many millions of simple, guiltless, victim peoples?
This is where John McCain and his ilk comes in. Exploiting his bogus and accidental
credentials, he became a pitch man for the massive con of American purity and idealism as a
front for imperialist greed, and made a career promoting and lionizing the War Machine as it
raped the peoples of earth and robbed Americans blind in pursuit of its cancerous
enrichment.
Still, McCain was only a cracked and bent tool. He was always an effect, a symptom; never a
cause. The real driver of the War Machine is heartless, soulless, predatory Capitalism. Its
credo is exploitation of everything to maximize profit. In a closed system, competing capital
conflicts, collides. Greed eclipses reason and war results. The greatest capital concentration
requires the most terrible military, in which violence displaces conscience. There never has
been, and never can be, Capitalism without war.
Indoctrinated, baffled, saddled with a cesspool Congress and the deeply stupid, vulgarian
Trump, centrist Americans, desperate for refuge, rush mindlessly to the new War Party,
Democrats eager to use McCain's $700 billion dollar hogwallow "defense" bill, to insult and
provoke China and Russia, and to attack Iran. Hubris, false bravado, and panic rule; nowhere is
there self knowledge and with it, long overdue, sorrow, regret, and shame.
Karmic retribution--the pitiless hand of Nemesis--is all America deserves.
Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: [email protected]
Jonathan Sacks is given an award by the war-criminal Tony Blair
Jeremy Corbyn
has a beard. So has
Jonathan
Sacks
. But this shared
philopogony
hasn't
brought the two men closer together. Sacks is the former Chief Rabbi
of Britain and, to be fair, I think we be better off if more Jews
were like him. He doesn't seem to
hate
Whites and the Christian religion
in the way so many of his
co-ethnics do.
Battle of the Beards
But that doesn't mean Sacks is a reasonable or objective man where
his own race is concerned. He can be ethnocentric and apply double
standards with the best of them, as he's just proved by his comments
on his fellow beardie:
Jeremy Corbyn is "an anti-Semite" who has "given support to
racists, terrorists and dealers of hate", the former chief rabbi
Jonathan Sacks has said. In an exclusive interview with the
New
Statesman
, the peer described Corbyn's recently reported
2013 remarks on "Zionists" as "the most offensive statement made
by a senior British politician since Enoch Powell's 1968 'Rivers
of Blood' speech".
Sacks, who was chief rabbi from 1991 until 2013, added: "It was
divisive, hateful and like Powell's speech it undermines the
existence of an entire group of British citizens by depicting
them as essentially alien."
At a speech made at the Palestinian Return Centre in London in
2013, Corbyn said of a group of British "Zionists": "They
clearly have two problems. One is they don't want to study
history and, secondly, having lived in this country for a very
long time, probably all their lives, they don't understand
English irony either." (
Corbyn's
"Zionist" remarks were "most offensive" since Enoch Powell, says
ex-chief rabbi
,
The
New Statesman
, 28th August 2018)
Enoch Powell
predicted
that
mass immigration would lead to race war.
Jeremy
Corbyn
said that some Zionists don't get "English irony."
Whether or not you agree with Powell, is it reasonable to compare
the words of the two men? Are they "hateful" and "divisive" in a
similar way? I'd say no, they're obviously not, and the vast
majority of British Whites probably agree with me.
Sacks doesn't agree with me, and he has the Community with him,
according
to
the
Jewish
Chronicle
: "Reform Rabbi Jonathan Romain of Maidenhead
Synagogue said that, while the Enoch Powell analogy may have shocked
people, 'it accurately reflected what most British Jews feel.'"
The poisoning of Britain's politics
Well, if Rabbi Sacks and other Jews want anti-Semitism, I think they
should look much closer to home. This is from the
Jerusalem
Post
in 2007:
Sacks: Multiculturalism threatens democracy
Multiculturalism promotes segregation, stifles free speech and
threatens liberal democracy, Britain's top Jewish official
warned in extracts from [a recently published] book Jonathan
Sacks, Britain's chief rabbi, defined multiculturalism as an
attempt to affirm Britain's diverse communities and make ethnic
and religious minorities more appreciated and respected. But in
his book,
The
Home We Build Together: Recreating Society
, he said the
movement had run its course. "Multiculturalism has led not to
integration but to segregation," Sacks wrote in his book, an
extract of which was published in the
Times
of
London.
"Liberal democracy is in danger," Sacks said, adding later: "The
politics of freedom risks descending into the politics of fear."
Sacks said Britain's politics had been poisoned by the rise of
identity politics, as minorities and aggrieved groups jockeyed
first for rights, then for special treatment. The process, he
said, began with Jews, before being taken up by blacks, women
and gays. He said the effect had been "inexorably divisive." "A
culture of victimhood sets group against group, each claiming
that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than
that of others," he said. In an interview with the
Times
,
Sacks said he wanted his book to be "politically incorrect in
the highest order." (
Sacks:
Multiculturalism threatens democracy
,
The
Jerusalem Post
, 20th October 2007; emphasis added)
So Sacks claimed that "Britain's politics had been poisoned" by a
self-serving, self-pitying, self-aggrandizing ideology that "began
with Jews" and had been "inexorably divisive." His claim is
absolutely classic anti-Semitism, peddling a stereotype of Jews as
subversive, manipulative and divisive outsiders whose selfish
agitation has done huge harm to a gentile society.
Sacks was right, of course: Jews do demand special treatment and did
indeed invent the "identity politics" that has poisoned British
politics (and
American
,
Australian
,
French
and
Swedish
politics
too).
By saying all that, Sacks was being far more "anti-Semitic" than
Jeremy Corbyn was, even by the harshest interpretation of those
comments on Zionists. Furthermore, Sacks has proved that Corbyn was
right. Zionists
do
lack
irony. In 2007 Sacks, a staunch Zionist, claimed that the
"poisoning" of British politics "began with Jews." In 2018 he's
condemning Jeremy Corbyn for saying something much milder about
Zionists.
"Absolutely nothing apartheid about this"
And in 2018 Sacks is also offering a ridiculous defence of a new law
in his beloved land of Israel:
Asked by the
New
Statesman
to comment on Israel's new nationality law, which
states that the Jewish people have "an exclusive right to
national self-determination" in the country and stripped the
Arab language of its official status, Sacks said: "I'm not an
expert on this. My brother is, I'm not, he's a lawyer in
Jerusalem, he tells me that there's absolutely nothing apartheid
about this, it's just correcting a lacuna. As far as I
understand, it's a technical process that has none of the
implications that have been levelled at it." (
Corbyn's
"Zionist" remarks were "most offensive" since Enoch Powell, says
ex-chief rabbi
)
When Sacks said there was "absolutely nothing apartheid about this,"
he was
protesting
too much
. He is clearly uncomfortable about the new law and
struggling to defend it, which is why his usual fluency deserted him
when he spoke to the
New
Statesman
. One "levels" accusations, not implications. And the
implications of
the
new law
are perfectly clear, which is why Sacks was driven to
waffle about "a technical process." Yes, the law is a technical
process whereby Arabs are defined as second-class citizens and
Jewish supremacism is openly proclaimed as the guiding principle of
the Israeli state.
Of Monkeys and Men
I'm sure that one of Sacks' heroes, the great Jewish philosopher and
Talmudic scholar
Maimonides
(c.
1135-1208), would have applauded the new law. This is what
Maimonides wrote in his hugely influential
Guide
for the Perplexed
(c. 1190), one of the most revered and
respected texts in the three thousand years of Judaism:
The people who are abroad are all those that have no religion,
neither one based on speculation nor one received by tradition.
Such are the extreme Turks that wander about in the north, the
Kushites [Blacks] who live in the south, and those in our
country who are like these. I consider these as irrational
beings, and not as human beings; they are below mankind, but
above monkeys, since they have the form and shape of man, and a
mental faculty above that of the monkey. (
Guide
for the Perplexed
, Book 3, chapter 51)
Now
that
is
racism, ladies and gentlemen. And if you want proof that Maimonides'
poisonous ideas are alive and well in the Jewish world today, look
no further than Yitzchak Yosef, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi in Israel,
who
was
condemned
this very year for "calling black people 'monkeys'."
Rabbi Yosef has visited the headlines before: in 2016 he "stated
that non-Jews should not be allowed to live in Israel, except to
serve the Jewish population." The
Jewish
Chronicle
added
that
he "later reversed this position."
"Very, very good relations with the Jewish community"
Well, he might have said he no longer believed it, but that wouldn't
be speaking the truth. Servitude for goyim, the superiority of Jews
and the subhumanity of Blacks are all perfectly orthodox Jewish
doctrines. Jews are not the philanthropic egalitarians that they
pretend to be, and Jonathan Sacks was perfectly correct to describe
them as poisoners of British politics. He himself has upended
another vat of poison by joining in the hysteria and hyperbole about
Jeremy Corbyn's mild comments on Zionists.
Let's compare Corbyn with the
shabbos
goy
Tony Blair,
who
gave Sacks
a "Lifetime Achievement Award" in February this year
and hailed Sacks as "one of my heroes."
According
to
the
Jewish
Chronicle
, Blair "was conscious of the need to have very, very
good relations" with "the Jewish community."
In other words, the tiny Jewish minority pulled Blair's strings. At
the behest of his Jewish "fundraiser"
Lord
Levy
, Blair lied Britain into a hugely expensive
war
on Iraq
that killed vast numbers of
innocent
civilians
, fomented sectarian strife in the Middle East and
terrorism in Europe, and led directly to the rise of Islamic State.
Jeremy Corbyn
resolutely
opposed
the war and predicted its dire consequences. Blair is a
liar, confidence-trickster and war-criminal who will one day, I
hope, face
the
death-penalty
for what he and his Jewish immigration minister
Barbara
Roche
did to Britain. Jeremy Corbyn, by contrast, is a virtue-signalling
Marxist idiot who opposes war and the
military-industrial
complex
.
But Blair obeyed Jewish orders and Corbyn doesn't. That's why Blair
is now worth
more
than Ł60 million
and Corbyn is endlessly vilified in the British
media. Few British Whites know the term "
ethnocentrism
,"
but more and more of them can see the Jews practising it.
The crimes of 11 September 2001 have never been judged in your country. I
am writing to you as a French citizen, the first person to denounce the inconsistencies
of the official version and to open the world to the debate and the search for
the real perpetrators.
In a criminal court, as the jury, we have to determine whether the suspect
presented to us is guilty or not, and eventually, to decide what punishment
he should receive. When we suffered the events of 9/11, the Bush Junior administration
told us that the guilty party was Al-Qaďda, and the punishment they should receive
was the overthrow of those who had helped them – the Afghan Taliban, then the
Iraqi régime of Saddam Hussein.
However, there is a weight of evidence which attests to the impossibility
of this thesis. If we were members of a jury, we would have to declare objectively
that the Taliban and the régime of Saddam Hussein were innocent of this crime.
Of course, this alone would not enable us to name the real culprits, and we
would thus be frustrated. But we could not conceive of condemning parties innocent
of such a crime simply because we have not known how, or not been able, to find
the guilty parties.
We all understood that certain senior personalities were lying when the Secretary
of State for Justice and Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, revealed the names
of the 19 presumed hijackers, because we already had in front of us the lists
disclosed by the airline companies of all of the passengers embarked - lists
on which none of the suspects were mentioned.
From there, we became suspicious of the " Continuity of Government ", the
instance tasked with taking over from the elected authorities if they should
be killed during a nuclear confrontation. We advanced the hypothesis that these
attacks masked a coup d'état, in conformity with Edward Luttwak's method of
maintaining the appearance of the Executive, but imposing a different policy.
In the days following 9/11, the Bush administration made several decisions:
the creation of the Office of Homeland Security and the vote for a voluminous
anti-terrorist Code which had been drawn up long beforehand, the USA Patriot
Act. For affairs which the administration itself qualifies as " terrorist ",
this text suspends the Bill of Rights which was the glory of your country. It
unbalances your institutions. Two centuries later, it validates the triumph
of the great landowners who wrote the Constitution, and the defeat of the heroes
of the War of Independence who demanded that the Bill of Rights must be added.
The Secretary for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, created the Office of Force Transformation,
under the command of Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who immediately presented a programme,
conceived a long time earlier, planning for the control of access to the natural
resources of the countries of the geopolitical South. He demanded the destruction
of State and social structures in the half of the world which was not yet globalised.
Simultaneously, the Director of the CIA launched the " Worldwide Attack Matrix
", a package of secret operations in 85 countries where Rumsfeld and Cebrowski
intended to destroy the State structures. Considering that only those countries
whose economies were globalised would remain stable, and that the others would
be destroyed, the men from 9/11 placed US armed forces in the service of transnational
financial interests. They betrayed your country and transformed it into the
armed wing of these predators.
For the last 17 years, we have witnessed what is being given to your compatriots
by the government of the successors of those who drew up the Constitution and
opposed at that time - without success – the Bill of Rights. These rich men
have become the super-rich, while the middle class has been reduced by a fifth
and poverty has increased.
We have also seen the implementation of the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski strategy –
phoney " civil wars " have devastated almost all of the Greater Middle East.
Entire cities have been wiped from the map, from Afghanistan to Libya, via Saudi
Arabia and Turkey, who were not themselves at war.
In 2001, only two US citizens denounced the incoherence of the Bush version,
two real estate promoters – the Democrat Jimmy Walter, who was forced into exile,
and yourself, who entered into politics and was elected President.
In 2011, we saw the commander of AfriCom relieved of his mission and replaced
by NATO for having refused to support Al-Qaďda in the liquidation of the Libyan
Arab Jamahiriya. Then we saw NATO's LandCom organise Western support for jihadists
in general and Al-Qaďda in particular in their attempt to overthrow the Syrian
Arab Republic.
So the jihadists, who were considered as " freedom fighters " against the
Soviets, then as " terrorists " after 9/11, once again became the allies of
the deep state, which, in fact, they have always been.
So, with an immense upsurge of hope, we have watched your actions to suppress,
one by one, all support for the jihadists. It is with the same hope that we
see today that you are talking with your Russian counterpart in order to bring
back life to the devastated Middle East. And it is with equal anxiety that we
see Robert Mueller, now a special prosecutor, pursuing the destruction of your
homeland by attacking your position.
Mister President, not only are you and your compatriots suffering from the
diarchy which has sneaked into power in your country since the coup d'état of
11 September 2001, but the whole world is a victim.
Mister President, 9/11 is not ancient history. It is the triumph of transnational
interests which are crushing not only your people, but all of humanity which
aspires to freedom.
Thierry Meyssan brought to the world stage the debate on the real
perpetrators of 11 September 2001. He has worked as a political analyst
alongside Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mouamar Kadhafi. He is today
a political refugee in Syria.
See :
Memoranda for the President on 9/11: Time for the Truth -- False Flag Deep State
Truth! , by : Kevin Barrett; Scott Bennett; Christopher Bollyn; Fred
Burks; Steve De'ak; A. K. Dewdney; Gordon Duff; Aero Engineer; Greg Felton;
James Fetzer; Richard Gage; Tom-Scott Gordon; David Ray Griffin; Sander Hicks;
T. Mark Hightower; Barbara Honegger; Eric Hufschmid; Ed Jewett; Nicholas Kollerstrom;
John Lear; Susan Lindauer; Joe Olson; Peter Dale Scott; Robert David Steele;
and indirectly, Victor Thorn and Judy Wood.
You seem ignorant about economic issues. For example, when it comes to natural gas market,
European countries are not in the same boat. Britain and Spain import virtually no gas from
Russia. These countries built lots LNG terminals and import from Qatar.
Germany, Italy and France have a well-diversified supply from multiple sources. The
countries that are truly dependent on Russia are in ex-communist Eastern Europe. They still
rely on a network of pipelines built by USSR, and would go into energy crisis if Russia
suddenly ended supply.
There is no Chinese FDI in Belarus, and in Russia it accounts for 1% of the total FDI.
Nobody is learning Chinese in Russia or Belarus. I don't know what you're smoking.
Sure, but Russia is not Turkey/Ukraine/Argentina-tier. I am furthermore under the
impression that it has better fundamentals than most of East-Central Europe.
Foreign currency debt is worse in Russia than in the rest of East-Central Europe other
than Hungary. That said Russia's robust current account surplus means that a financial crisis
is highly unlikely. Russia also has competent adults in charge of monetary policy and banking
regulation.
Turkey is meanwhile run by a completely lunatic who believes that high interest rates
cause inflation. Turkish secret police are now also imprisoning people for the "crime" of
speaking ill of the Lira. Makes the Argies look good in comparison.
I suspect they are just afraid of independent people getting too much of the super
wealth generated in those industries. These people are going to be structurally drawn
towards loyalty to the West, and Russia's means of overseeing them are far more modest than
China's. United Russia is no CPC.
Other policy tools to keep the rich disciplined are available. Capital controls, credit
controls, punitive taxation, regulation, etc. Some of these policy tools might also be quite
popular with Russian voters, especially in the wake of the pension reform.
A lot of corporate equity can also come to be owned by ordinary people themselves with an
appropriately designed pension system. Good examples of this are Sweden, Chile, and
(surprisingly) Malaysia. America's tax-deferred defined contribution pension programs are
also a good model.
Privatization can even have a bit of a populist flair. The Thatcher government ran
advertising campaigns promoting shares of crown corporations soon to be listed to ordinary
retail investors.
They are of course highly inefficient and corrupt. Though that might be more feature
than bug, as it gives the people around Putin direct access to financial firepower. This is
the standard explanation, anyway. While I can understand that being the case for Rosneft,
Gazprom – which is even less well run – essentially gives away money to
connected subcontractors, as argued in the recent report by Alex Fak at Sberbank's
investment banking division. But those subcontractors as far as I'm aware are not even an
important mainstay of the regime – most are just talented grifters.
No doubt, but presumably the views of Russians themselves also play a role. Plenty of
Sovoks around who think state ownership is glorious, and obviously the Wild '90s are not
fondly remembered.
Bombing it induced a humanitarian crisis in the coastal region where Gaddafi's power was
concentrated, contributed to a wave of refugees, and let the cities which supported him know
they were not impregnable, that their weaknesses were being exploited. The stupid cover
story, solemnly intoned by talking heads who believe their listeners are almost too stupid to
breathe without prompting and assistance, was because cutting the civilian population off
from water in order to force capitulation is a war crime.
"... The brilliant usefulness of this system of faux "government" is that it gives the puppet masters maximum flexibility – which is especially valuable in the uncharted waters they're presently in which involve testing limits and probing for red lines. ..."
"... In practice, the well-meaning and always blameless Trump surrounds himself with a coterie of people of varying degrees of unreasonableness, and then gets to pick one from the magazine as the situation warrants, or something like that. ..."
"... For example, when he makes bellicose threats against Syria, Iran, North Korea, Russia, etc., he's listening to Pompeo or Bolton; and then, if/when it appears Russia will retaliate militarily and he needs a way out, the more reasonable Mattis luckily catches his ear and "convinces him" to back down. ..."
Things have gone waaay past the point where Russia can be praised for its "restraint".
Every one of Russia's four previous premature withdrawal announcements from Syria has
had the predictable consequence of only emboldening its enemies. So what is Putin to do? Why,
a fifth premature withdrawal announcement of course. And between this one and the
last, Lavrov has gone on the record as stating the Russia will not shoot at Americans under
any circumstances. If one makes such a show of signaling that Russia's Syria mission is not
meant to have a deterrent effect, why be surprised if you get taken at your word. The Russian
naval task force that matters seems to be the gaggle of oligarchs calling Putin from their
yachts, imploring him to appease, appease, appease.
Why is it always all or nothing with these "pro-Russia military experts". America doesn't
need a "major military defeat", America needs consequences. Trump is very vulnerable once his
political base finds out that he's embarked on a massive nation-building project in E Syria.
But so far, the deplorables have had no reason to pay attention because the occupation has
been cheap. You serve up some payback for the assassinated Russian general, the Wagner
personnel, and the jet downed by a MANPAD which was just lying around with the moderates, and
the calculus changes. But this would require shelving the partnership delusions in lieu of,
well, reality. Have the Kremlin critters simply become too old for that?
Israel had joint exercises with Russia and probably they know exactly how to defeat the
most advanced Russian AA weapons systems. ( not something Iran which had paid through the
nose for those systems was happy about) . America will be told.
"Sadly, the rather evident answer to that is that the upcoming missile strike has less to
do with the war in Syria and much more to do with internal US politics."
Is it possible that, in their desperation, Orange Clown and his jewish-supremacist
handlers seek to undermine Vladimir Putin's domestic political support by trying to make him
look weak? IOW every time Orange Clown does another war crime in Syria, and Vladimir Putin
fails to respond firmly, he's portrayed as being weak/indecisive, which at some point will
start to take a serious political toll if it hasn't already.
If this is their intent, then it may actually behoove the perpetrators to let their
false-flag plans be "discovered." The more outrageously brazen they are, the more
deliberately sloppy they are, the worse Putin will look if he does nothing decisive in
response.
To put it another way, the Orange Clown demoniac and its demoniac handlers, knowing that
Vladimir Putin is restrained because he doesn't want to risk escalation to nuclear war, are
using the whole world as a "human shield" to attack Putin politically by committing
unanswered war crimes in Syria.
Russia holds a strong card that it will use if the USA bombs Syria: Iranian army on Israel
border with Syria.
Israel is panicking to see Iran at its borders in Syria, in Lebanon and Iraq gradually
joining in. It is trying to get the USA to announce annexation of the Golan Heights so that
the presence of Iranians troops will be seen as an aggression. As long as the Golan Heights
is a Syrian occupied land Iran has a justification to be present there at the invitation of
Syria.
Russia is the only power that could negotiate with Syria and Iran for a restraint. Israel is
now a hostage and it is probably begging the USA either to announce the Golan Heights
annexation or to stop antagonizing Russia.
Putin is certainly playing this card. Will Trump announce the annexation of the Golan Heights
to neutralize this card?
Russia knows the who, what, why and where of the planned false flag.
And it takes no action to stop it. No soldiers, either Syrian or others, no bombing
campaign, nothing.
It just complains and hopes "international opinion" will cause FUKUS to change course
because, whining works.
And so we get the State Department response as in this vid that "they try to put the
blame, they try to put the onus on other groups and we don't buy that."
Silly question. Of course, it's scheduled and planned. Head-choppers in Idlib received
whatever will be passed as the chemical weapons of the Syrian forces and abducted a number of
children that will be sacrificed as "victims of chemical attack".
The only question is whether will the US go through with it, goaded by Israel and neocons, or
whether common sense (or cowardice) prevails and the aggression will be called off.
We'll see soon enough.
You mean bomb the storage of chemicals? Wouldn't this cause a release of dangerous gas?
And then the rebels would say that Russia dropped chemical bomb.
Personally, I think it's BS. Russia has no solid intel, and is spreading propaganda
preemptively, "crying wolf". The attack itself is less important than international reaction
to it, so Russia's goal in this is to prepare the public opinion that some chemical incident
might happen.
'One of many truths lost within this discourse is the reality that the creation of a
no-fly zone would, in the words of the most senior general in the US Armed Forces, mean the
US going to war "against Syria and Russia". '
I'm not suggesting that Pompeo is a Russian puppet ..I am stating that Pompeo is a
cockroach and I would like to know how to say this in Russian ..
Pompeo is a psychopath who works on behalf of the special interests that own the US .and
these special interests are:Israel .Military Industrial Complex .Big Oil ..and Silicon Valley
..
Pompeo enjoys the power he has .and using this power to murder millions ..Pompeo will be
in a state of rapturous joy perhaps in 7 days ..when his species .blataria .begin its one
billion .two billion .three billion year reign on the Planet Earth .Pompeo and Hillary
Clinton will be the King and Queen breeding pair of this virulent blataria species when they
step out of their concrete bunker on the 8th day of this SATANIC CREATION
The most plausible theory is what I would call my theory of "government by disingenuous
dialectics." In this theory, the perfidious Orange Clown (Trump) and all of those around him
are nothing more than puppets; they're all actors on a stage. Of course Trump is cast as the
central figure, the fickle "decider," who is at the same time portrayed as a hapless victim;
a weak-willed, impressionable, morally/philosophically rudderless character; a sympathetic
figure who has generally "good" intentions, but who finds himself in complete reliance on
those around him for guidance.
The brilliant usefulness of this system of faux "government" is that it gives the
puppet masters maximum flexibility – which is especially valuable in the uncharted
waters they're presently in which involve testing limits and probing for red lines.
In practice, the well-meaning and always blameless Trump surrounds himself with a
coterie of people of varying degrees of unreasonableness, and then gets to pick one from the
magazine as the situation warrants, or something like that.
For example, when he makes bellicose threats against Syria, Iran, North Korea, Russia,
etc., he's listening to Pompeo or Bolton; and then, if/when it appears Russia will retaliate
militarily and he needs a way out, the more reasonable Mattis luckily catches his ear and
"convinces him" to back down.
As another example, when he launched those 59 cruise missiles at Syrian govt. military
forces and infrastructure, it wasn't because that's what his jewish-supremacist handlers
wanted, it was because of his daughter's tears at the sight of dead children.
Like former Trump advisor Steve Bannon said, the Trump that we fought for to win the WH
is gone. The neo-cons know most Americans are worn out, and sick of these endless ME wars,
which we have spent trillions on (and which we have no legit interest in fighting), while
watching our infrastructure go to hell because of lack of money spent on maintenance, but
they don't give a damn, since their loyalty is to Israel.
Trump has allowed himself to be surrounded and has surrendered to the worst of the worst
war mongering neoCONs, like that vile nut case Bolton, who thinks mass murder of the real
Semites, like the Syrians and Iranians, is the answer to any question.
Not only did multi-billionaire and rabid Zionist Sheldon Adelson pay for the new US Embassy
in Jerusalem, he also apparently purchased what remained of Trump's soul. This is the same
sadist that thinks the US should drop a nuke or two in the Iranian desert, just to show them
we mean business. What business, the mass-murder of Iranians?
Just watch this 'Best of My War Mongering' by the ultimate war mongering neo-con, John
McCain, as he talks about killing Persians in such an excited way, he almost looks like he
has an orgasm at the same time.
That's the kind of dangerous crazies now running the Trump WH, with Shadow President Kushner
passing info to and fro his bed buddy, Israeli PM and War Criminal Netenyahu.
P.S. I actually thought the neo-con crazies would have given 'Insane McCain' a rousing
send off to Hades by launching a massive missile attack against Syria, but maybe those
Russian warships in the eastern Med, with their superior EW jamming units and anti-missile
guns, made them actually think rationally for once.
During the Vietnam 'war' the US lost a total of 1,737 aircraft to hostile action
[accidents not included]. A lot were shot down by Russian pilots in Vietnamese uniforms. It
didn't lead to WWIII.
While U.S. neocons hold the world hostage to their game of nuclear chicken , even
the dimmest American jingos are beginning to perceive that the neocons may be a greater
threat to humanity's survival than the Russian president.
Thankfully, Putin is slowly outflanking the neocon crazies on every front. He bobs and
weaves while their punches land on air. Putin will continue to shun direct confrontation with
these megalomaniacs armed with nuclear weapons as long as he is winning on the battlefield in
Syria as well as on the battlefield of public opinion.
Putin is winning because he has a strong ally that the neocons never took into account:
sanity . Sanity mandates that Syrians choose Assad over ISIS, and thus the
neocons ultimately face their own stark choice: a rational, multipolar world like the one
Putin is advocating, or nuclear incineration. The Russians and the Syrians are going to
persevere. Since the neocons are power mad but not completely psychotic, they will read the
handwriting on the wall, declare victory, and leave.
The purpose seems simply to provoke the Russians into a more forceful reaction than the
last time. The CIA probably fed them the recon about the impending "gas attack" on purpose.
Pompeo telling them that "they will be held responsible" is intended to induce Russia to
strike at American targets first, which will then, together with the "chemical attack", be
passed off to the American public as evidence of evil Russian aggression. At the same time,
the noise about "Trump the Russian Puppet" will ramp up once more, "spontaneous" mass
demonstrations will gather in the streets, and down he goes. At least that is the plan.
Russia would be stupid to play along with this. Their naval and air reconnaissance build-up
is meant to avoid the need of striking first by providing sufficient protection from
an American first strike. Being able to say to Americans "you gave it your best shot, but we
denied you" will be a strong enough statement on the world stage.
The U.S. and NATO are in Syria illegally, while Russia was invited in by the Syrian
government to help defend against an attack by the U.S./ISRAEL/BRITAIN created ISIS aka AL
CIADA and so Syria is being destroyed by the Zionist forces that control the U.S. and Britain
and all of Europe.
The problem is that Zionists are in control and have the U.S. and NATO destroying the
Mideast for Zionist Israel and its goal of a Zionist controlled NWO aka ONE WORLD GOV and
they have only Syria and Iran left to destroy so they will do anything in their power to see
their goal accomplished.
If this goal of destroying Syria and Iran means a nuclear war with Russia the SATANIC
Zionist forces in control of the U.S. and Europe will be glad to have a nuclear war with
Russia as they feel that they will survive it in their DUMBS ie deep underground military
bases which they have throughout the U.S. and Europe and which are connected via a tunnel
system throughout the U.S. and Europe.
The satanic Zionists believe that Russia is the only roadblock in the way of their satanic
Zionist NWO and so they feel that a nuclear war with Russia would eliminate this roadblock
and also destroy the only Christian nation that is a threat to their satanic communist
NWO.
If anyone doubts that the satanic zionists control the U.S. gov, remember this, Zionist
Israel and the zionist controlled deep state did 911 and murdered some 3000 Americans on 911
and got away with it and every thinking American knows that Israel did it, we are under
satanic zionist control.
Putin is winning. He just allows the arrogant neocons to enrage other nations. Turkey is a
key player and no longer an American ally. Germany and others have refused to reinstate
sanctions on Iran as ordered by Trump. They refuse to shut off Russian gas pipelines and
suffer an economic disaster. The neocon's key puppet Merkel is unpopular and may not last
long, while the majority of Germans now want US troops gone.
Trump sees this and is trying to make peace with North Korea after South Korea said it was
going ahead with peace no matter what Trump thought. Watch this great short video of Putin
explaining that the USA doesn't have allies, only vassals. Watch Europeans nodding and some
applauding.
You mean, a murderer and rapist who does not admit his guilt is more "civilized" than the
one who does? An unorthodox perspective. I can't imagine that many people would agree with
it.
Not to mention that Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria were all clear
cases of naked aggression on the part of the US.
"A few ineffective tomahawks mean nothing at this stage."
Then why would Orange Clown and his handlers do it in the first place?
A few ineffective tomahawks here, and a few ineffective tomahawks there, and a few more
ineffective tomahawks whenever and wherever, preceded by the most brazen false-flag chemical
attack yet, and pretty soon Putin starts looking like a pathetic weakling.
If Orange Clown attacks Syria again, the real target is Putin's domestic political
support, IMO.
As I see it, Orange Clown and his handlers are using all life on this planet as a "shield"
behind which they will endlessly provoke Russia.
The only reason Assad is still in power is the US military helped him. The US Joint Chiefs
are not going to attack Syria and Russia is not going to get into a war with the US over
Syria.
In the above video Dunford tells Wicker controlling airspace in Syria means war with
Russia. McCain throws a tantrum, then Dunford refines answer. However, it is perfectly
obvious that the current head of the Joint Chiefs is no more keen than Martin Dempsey was on
aggressive action against Assad.
That said , Assad blames everone but himself for the state of his country yet he is
incredibly stupid, and that is a major reason for the Civil War which his father would never
have let happen. If he is foolish enough to use chemical weapons again there will be a
price to pay, similar to previous air strikes on Assad, but the Saker should stop being
hysterical about Russia and America going to war over Assad. He might try and bring it about
by false flagging himself, did Saker ever think of that ?
"... Washington – does not give a fuck about the economic well-being of Ukrainians, does not have even the brotherly connection
of being of the same ethnic group, and for so long as Ukraine is willing to suffer being poor in silence, for that long it will not
be a problem for its new 'partners'. ..."
A few are beginning to wake up to the reality that snatching Ukraine away from Russia was never about prosperity and security
for its people, and all about destabilizing what the west perceived as the quickening of an unwelcome regional influence, and
curbing it. The EU – and its string-puller, Washington – does not give a fuck about the economic well-being of Ukrainians,
does not have even the brotherly connection of being of the same ethnic group, and for so long as Ukraine is willing to suffer
being poor in silence, for that long it will not be a problem for its new 'partners'.
Nationalist Nazi nutjobs are always proposing the border be sealed ever-tighter, if it were feasible to build a stainless-steel
wall between Ukraine and Russia which reached to low earth orbit, they would vote for it. But the Great Wall Of Yatsenyuk never
materialized, he's enjoying his Florida condo, and there is no practical way to limit commerce between the two countries while
the people are increasingly motivated toward its continuing.
Ukraine is on the edge of collapse, and I don't think any force on earth can prevent its sliding over the edge. The west is
not going to pony up the $170 Billion or so it would take to rescue it; if it did so, Porky and his minions would steal most of
it for themselves, and Russia is unlikely to ever permit again the degree of fraternal closeness that existed between the two
countries, since it is clear it would take only another western intervention to render it once again an untrustworthy spoiler.
Once Nord Stream II is built, Ukraine will have lost its leverage and will be of no further significant value to the western purveyors
of destabilization.
More such core realization is necessary to prevent Ukraine from officially blaming its collapse on anyone but itself. The government
will try that course, naturally, and you don't need to be able to see very far into the future to know that it is Russia who will
be blamed, despite plenty of empirical evidence that Russian investors and Ukrainian refugees working in Russia were all that
kept it alive before the end. But in order that Ukrainians know in their heart of hearts that their government stepped on its
own dick over and over, and that they passively failed to correct it, there needs to be more such public confession. I can show
you plenty of analysis, in English, published before things went pear-shaped in the dying moments of 2013, which proposed that
severing trade relationships with Russia as the nationalists insisted would cost Ukraine just about exactly what the Rada now
says will happen, years too late. But they got one thing right – Ukraine and Russia cannot be brothers, not even friends, for
so long as Ukraine harbours that nutty nationalist element.
Give western Ukraine to Poland, and encourage all the nationalists
to go to the new paradise, and ensure that happens. They can bore the Poles with their raptures about Kievan Rus. Then maybe some
relationship could be salvaged.
This war is tremendous waste of resources on both sides with no clear
victory in sight. Killing of individual commanders does not change the
strategic situation. It just invites retaliation.
Although the war did increase the coherence of the Ukrainian society
(like any war does) the price is way too high.
Zakharchenko was a soldier and knew the risks, many others are ready to take his
place.
VV Putin could have occupied the whole so-called ukraine in the same manner he occupied
Crimea, even better, he could've sent volunteers to shoot CIA and Mossad agents during the
maidan events.Lots of volunteers.
He didnt.
Please consider that ukraine project is an infinite black hole sucking money and resources
(agents, weapons, influence) from the Hegemon, at the same time bringing him absolutely
nothing.
Especially the Debaltsevo cauldron was painful, as lots of modern artillery control gear
was lost in pristine state and sent directly to Moscow.Without considering the humiliation of
German and Canadian mercenaries being caught and released for indeterminate price.
In exchange the Hegemon learned that Russian artillery is still as dangerous as in '45, at
Saur Mogila whole battalions of Ukrainian army disappeared literally in minutes when caught
by Buratino fire.
Perhaps some remember the shellshocked Ukrainian infantry lieutenant, when interviewed by
CNN freshly out of Ilovaisk, screaming into the mic that *two meters, you must dig two
meters, or you die!* , well-intentioned American female reporter decidedly confused.
The show will go on until Hegemon decides that he had enough, and gives green light to the
ukrainian army to coup the govt, exterminate the nazi battalions, and begin a very slow and
painful ascension back into a semblance of normality first, then re-unification with the
Motherland next.
As usual, the most vulnerable, old people, women, workers will suffer the most, and the
guilty will go unpunished.
Looks like we came very close in the USA to classic definition of fascism: (1) Powerful
and continuing expressions of nationalism (yes); (2). Disdain for the importance of human
rights (NO, only for brown people); (3). Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying
cause (yes); (4) The supremacy of the military/avid militarism (yes); (5) Rampant sexism
(NO); (6) A controlled mass media (NO; only MSM; Internel is still not controlled) (7)
Obsession with national security (yes); (8) Religion and ruling elite tied together (yes;
Pence is a good example here); (9) Power of corporations protected (yes); (10) Power of labor
suppressed or eliminated (yes). (11) Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
(no); (12) Obsession with crime and punishment (yes); (13) Rampant cronyism and corruption
(yes); (14). Fraudulent elections (yes; via two party system)
Notable quotes:
"... Hitler and Netanyahu's statements reflect the viewpoint of Social Darwinism, an ideology that justifies elite dominance of society to its own ends. ..."
"... This idea "that Fascism (and Nazism) are a form of Liberalism" seems like a really important idea. ..."
"... That's my point: Arendt's totalitarianism theory is 100% false. There is no "totalitarianism" in reality: it is a Cold War myth, a mirage. Nazism and Communism had absolutely nothing in common (as she states). Different ideology, different genesis in Western school of thought, different goals, different economic systems etc. ..."
"... Propaganda warfare, prison systems, war strategies, logistics -- those are all universal methodologies, means to achieve an end, there are no patents in then. This is so true that the USA is using many methods (including torture in black sites) that, during the Cold War, its propaganda (which would cause Goebbels envy) stated only a "totalitarian" (i.e. a communist or a fascist) would do. ..."
"... I am saying that liberalism may subvert democracy and tend towards criminality [including genocide] and that seems an area that has been neglected when considering what the nature of Nazism/Fascism really is. ..."
"... The US had social liberalism following WWII although tainted somewhat by the CIA and MIC and lasting until the early 70's. There was essentially a civil war fought starting in 1963 at the elite level by neoliberal globalists and social liberal nationalists leading to a number of assassinations and ending with Nixons impeachment/resignation in 1973/74. The good guys lost and its been downhill ever since as the US descends Jacobs Neoliberal Ladder. ..."
"... Although you're right in the sense that Liberalism has some diversity over history, its cornerstone is freedom=private property. ..."
"... 'Totalitarianism' has roots in 'total mobilisation' and 'total war' – in the total regimentation of the population, driven by the capitalist great powers and their competition to conquer colonies and global hegemony. Hitler aspired to German revanchism, winning back and expanding Germany's 'living space' and colonial territories. He saw himself as heir to the colonial tradition, which he sought to radicalise. ..."
"... He first of all identified with the US example, seeking his own Far West in Eastern Europe and reducing the Slavs to the condition of slaves in service of the Herrenvolk. Decisively, this project met its definitive defeat at Stalingrad; this defeat was, at the same time, the beginning of a gigantic wave of anti-colonial revolts. ..."
(Neo-)Liberalism, imperialism, Nazism, etc. are all internationalist as well.
I know so many people on the western left who believe that invading Syria, Iran,
Venezuela, intervening in Africa, sanctions/punishments (war?) on Russia, Soros, colour
revolutions, etc. is all good and justified because it moves away from the nation state
towards internationalism.
Even what you call Arendt's "same techniques" is wrong: nazi Germany had a completely
different socioecomic and cultural structure than the USSR. Germany didn't even had eg
commissaries, they didn't even had a planified central economy. It was really just
liberalism: an USA that went wrong.
Someone recently told me that the whole of human history boils down to one thing, "one
tribe wants to take something from another tribe". I would put it another way, sharing
outside of the family unit is learned, taking is natural selection at its best.
So, having stated Arendt as your belief, you now deny it, saying that fascism is
different from communism. So what makes fascism then, apart from the technique of declaring
the unity of the nation behind the leader, which the commies also did? The only answer is
nationalism, as I said before.
To those who say Statements 1 and 3 illustrate reality: don't confuse bullying with
strength.
Hitler and Netanyahu's statements reflect the viewpoint of Social Darwinism, an ideology
that justifies elite dominance of society to its own ends.
The question we should be asking ourselves is whether nations that have achieved
military power, often through intimidating and brainwashing their own peoples, and smashing
down those who resist. should be allowed to continue in this way. And for what purpose?
Can the actions and policies of Nazi Germany and Israel be construed as those of
powerful and strong nations? If Israel chooses easy targets to attack, and relies on
bullying others and intimidating them by exploiting the Shoah, are its actions those of a
strong nation?
I have been brought up with the history and consequences of the potato famine and one
thing that always puzzled me was why the British Empire just allowed it to happen? It would
have cost little to the Empire and cast the British in a whole new light in the eyes of the
Irish.
This proposition that it was ideological (liberalism) is something of an eye opener to
me, social darwinism (let the weak die) is a very persuasive reason. And this does lead to
a direct correlation with Nazism/fascism.
The more recent books (Kershaw) on Hitler talk about the freedom of officials to do what
they want and take what they want as a reason why there are not written orders from Hitler
authorising (amongst other things) the genocide of those considered weak and undesirable.
This is obviously frustrating to the writers because they are unable to convincing find
sufficient written documentation supporting the administrative implementation of the
presumed 'ideology'; a frustrating inability to adequately explain Hitler, as it were.
This
idea that Nazism is some kind of souped up liberalism is more convincing than saying Hitler
was just too lazy to get out of bed in the mornings.
The key objection that I think that most people will instinctively have (because the
idea is so contrary to what we have been taught) is that (neo-)liberalism and democracy go
together. However, some of (neo-)liberalism's prime ideological advocates (Hayek, James M.
Buchanan) clearly wanted to minimise democratic interference and envisaged a time when
democracy was no longer of use and could be discarded.
This idea "that Fascism (and Nazism) are a form of Liberalism" seems like a really
important idea.
Thank you for taking us back to the Greeks! I offer in tandem this quotation from the
website of a Plato scholar who has long been one of my heroes, Bernard Suzanne (his site is
still available, an amazing source of ongoing study):
"Unless either the philosophers become kings in the cities or those who are nowadays called kings and rulers get to philosophizing truly and adequately, and this falls together upon the same person, political power and philosophy, while the many natures of those who are driven toward the one apart from the other are forcibly set aside, there will be no cessation of evils, my dear Glaucon, for cities, nor, methinks, for the human race." Plato, République, V, 473c11-d61
I will just add that the title "Republic" is a bad translation of the Greek word
"Politeia" - to my mind "Citizenry" fits better, bearing in mind that cities in Socrates'
day were the equivalent of small states. And in Shakespearean terms, it would be prudent to
say of that 'forcible setting aside of many natures' - "Aye, there's the rub!"
ADKC: ... why the British Empire just allowed it to happen?
It wasn't liberalism or social darwinism. As proven by the success of Irish outside
Ireland. It was pacifying the unruly Irish that lived next door to the greatest Empire yet known.
Today we would call it a crime against humanity.
Prior to the contrived Potato Famine was Enclosure. Perhaps you've read Sir Thomas
More's Utopia which describes well the outcome of that quite deliberate policy. It
would be nice to ascribe such doings to the Policy favored by Sir Francis Bacon who
advocated waging war on the poor continuously and mercilessly, deeming them The Hydra
threatening the wellbeing of the well off.
As many have written, the British rehearsed
their colonial policies first on the Irish and the aims had nothing to do with Liberalism
or any other ism aside from Authoritarianism, which is quite close to being a Totalitarian
System and is certainly argued as such. That Liberalism can be in any way associated with
Fascism means a basic lack of understanding of Liberalism's defining
characteristics .
That's my point: Arendt's totalitarianism theory is 100% false. There is no
"totalitarianism" in reality: it is a Cold War myth, a mirage. Nazism and Communism had
absolutely nothing in common (as she states). Different ideology, different genesis in
Western school of thought, different goals, different economic systems etc.
Hitler never
laid out any economic plan, it was implicit the liberal model was the model: he simply
wanted a traditional colonial power that could mirror the British Empire to the East. He
didn't invent racism or genocide.
It was not just a difference of "the Third Reich was nationalist and the USSR was not"
-- on the contrary, Socialism in one country was the victorious ideology post-Lenin, and
the Cuban, Vietnamese and Chinese (to a lesser extent) were all nationalist in substance.
Fidel Castro wasn't even communist when he led the Revolution!
There are no coincidence in "techniques". Unless you characterize anything as tributary
to the place who first invented it. In this sense, everybody who uses Law is Roman, or
anybody who goes to space is Soviet -- which is absurd.
Propaganda warfare, prison systems,
war strategies, logistics -- those are all universal methodologies, means to achieve an
end, there are no patents in then. This is so true that the USA is using many methods
(including torture in black sites) that, during the Cold War, its propaganda (which would
cause Goebbels envy) stated only a "totalitarian" (i.e. a communist or a fascist) would
do.
The USSR was a unique experiment, which dissolved suddenly and unexpectedly. In my
opinion, it was valuable in the sense it was the first experience of a State in which the
working class was in power (dictatorship of the proletariat). Yes, it failed -- but no new
economic system is born ready, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Even capitalism failed
for more than 300 years before finally working in the least of probable of places: tiny and
peripheral England.
There is pretty strong debate on the nature of the British reaction to the 1845 Irish
Potato Famine. Some sources say it was deliberate genocide on the part of the British.
Either Irish people starved to death or they fled overseas (and gave up their land,
language and culture) to survive. Others point to the monoculture that the introduction of
potatoes back in the 1600s created, and the population boom that resulted. Potatoes are a
very nutritious crop staple for poor people.
The famines that began afflicting India from the 1770s on (after the Indian
subcontintent started to come under British rule through the British East India Company)
and which the British always never dealt with adequately - even though previous empires in
India had always been able to stave off famine and starvation when monsoons failed to
arrive or were late and harvests ended up ruined - might shed some light on the British
treatment of the Irish Potato Famine.
In India. the Mughals and others who came before them prevented famine in areas that had
suffered crop failures by reducing taxation and giving afflicted areas stored grain (from
previous years' surpluses). Under British rule, India was heavily taxed (by having to
supply food for the empire) and the levels of taxation were maintained regardless of local
or regional conditions. In times when the monsoon failed and crops failed, communities
continued to suffer from the brunt of heavy taxation. Combined with the British destruction
of the Indian textile industry over the 1700s, which put thousands out of work, British
taxation and other imperial policies turned India into a massive poorhouse.
And yet the British State would describe itself (then and now) as liberal and
democratic. Even today the British State does not recognise that any "crime against humanity"
happened in Ireland regarding the potato famine.
To avoid any confusion:- I am not suggesting that there wasn't a crime, I am not
advocating social darwinism, I am not suggesting that the Irish were weak or inferior in
anyway. I am saying that liberalism may subvert democracy and tend towards criminality
[including genocide] and that seems an area that has been neglected when considering what
the nature of Nazism/Fascism really is.
Communism is state owned capitalism where state controls the means of production, fascism
and neoliberalism (classic liberalism)is private owned capitalism where the owners of
production (elites) control the government to an unhealthy degree. Social liberalism
(called socialism by some) is a mix of state and privately owned production, a mix
determined to maximize benefits to society with the people in control of government, and
capitalism and government serving the people and not just the elites
The US had social liberalism following WWII although tainted somewhat by the CIA and MIC
and lasting until the early 70's. There was essentially a civil war fought starting in 1963
at the elite level by neoliberal globalists and social liberal nationalists leading to a
number of assassinations and ending with Nixons impeachment/resignation in 1973/74. The
good guys lost and its been downhill ever since as the US descends Jacobs Neoliberal
Ladder.
Only in some kind of hell could a guy like Trump be elected. At least the Germans never
elected their racist and fascist leader
Although you're right in the sense that Liberalism has some diversity over history, its
cornerstone is freedom=private property.
If you take the first Constitution of the French
Revolution, you'll see right in the first articles that by freedom they consider the right
of the individual to fully enjoy his life and his private property ("industrie"). This
chunk of the Constitution remained in the next versions.
So, colonialism was a perfectly liberal policy: the workers you're exploiting are your
property, so you're enjoying your individual freedom. It was only with the socialist
uprisings of the 19th Century that property-less people (i.e. workers) begun to enjoy some
rights -- the most illustrative being the right to vote (non-censitary vote, universal
vote).
There's absolutely no documentation that demonstrate Hitler and/or Mussolini tried to
end liberalism and create a new economic system (like the Communist). Nazism and Fascism
are literally liberalism with a bombastic narrative (one with the quest of the Aryan Race
of its Lebensraum; the other trying to revive the Roman Empire), but all the basic elements
of liberalism are there: the main one being the preservation of private property.
P.S.: the concept of freedom of speech was different back then: all those rights only
belonged to the capitalist class; workers and slaves were not considered human beings. The
concept of the "universal man" only really came in vogue with Marx; before him, it was
widely believed the dominant class was of a different breed than that of an dominated
class.
We're discussing isms here. What ism's being advocated by the
testimony before the Outlaw US Empire's Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Wess
Mitchell:
"Russia and China are serious competitors that are building up the material and
ideological wherewithal to contest U.S. primacy and leadership in the 21st Century. It
continues to be among the foremost national security interests of the United States to
prevent the domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers. The central aim of the
administration's foreign policy is to prepare our nation to confront this challenge by
systematically strengthening the military, economic and political fundaments of American
power."
Mitchell mentions a document I wasn't able to locate, the "Russia Integrated Strategy,"
but I was able to find what appears to be
its predecessor , "Russia Project Strategy, 2014-2017."
Surely, this conforms to the Outlaw US Empire's Imperialism via which its goal is the
Full Spectrum Domination (FSD) of the planet and its people. Some would consider that
Totalitarianism--the doctrine of total control. During its drive to attain FSD, certain
aspects must be masked from the Empire's public since relatively unfettered freedom is
featured as one of its alleged values, which is why the many undemocratic aspects of
various "trade" agreements are never discussed and negotiated in secret, for example. What
do we call a government that directly lies to its populous? What sort of ism is in
play?
Mitchell's testimony was done in public so it didn't remain secret very long, was
written about in Russian, then
the analysis was translated into English . Hopefully barflies and others will read
these documents and shudder, although I'm sure a few will say "So, what's new?" Well, this
goes far beyond the millennia long, ongoing Class War, and confirms what I've been saying
for awhile now--We're already within a Hybrid Third World War being waged by people who
want everything or nothing. What sort of ism's that? In my book, it's the worst form of
Authoritarianism anyone might imagine.
One of the things I find missing in the discussion so far is the anthropological
perspective. A short version would be that with the rise of monotheistic religions came the
rise of human hubris about humans place in the cosmos and limited variations of us/them
proscriptions about how life should be led....and the belief that everyone should believe
this way or be eliminated.
This arrangement was challenge during the (as yet finished) Enlightenment period that
began with the start of the scientific revolution in 1620. This period was the birth of
liberalism and the church and state came under increased scrutiny.....but not
rejection....blind faith still lives on.
Fast forward to the present where we have ongoing elimination of any and all cultures
not "Western" which is my biggest problem with our social order....it is reducing our
genetic ability to survive by the monoculture focus.....as well as being a heinous form of
social organization that favors the few over the many.
On to fascism....Fascism is not just defined by a single aspect but a combination that
show the face of the beast. The best description of fascism is a list of 14 points written
in 2004 by Dr. Laurence Britt, a political scientist. Dr. Britt studied the fascist regimes
of: Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet
(Chile). His points are as follows:
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the
fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens
caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and
demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled
with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights
The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to
realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the
population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even
demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy,
denial, and disinformation.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a
means to divert the people's attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures,
and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice -- relentless
propaganda and disinformation -- were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite
"spontaneous" acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals,
Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other
religions, secularists, homosexuals, and "terrorists." Active opponents of these regimes
were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial
infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was
allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an
expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals,
intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.
5. Rampant sexism
Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were
male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were
adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in
Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus
lending the regime cover for its abuses.
6. A controlled mass media
Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be
relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power
to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to
resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of
the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was
usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes' excesses.
7. Obsession with national security
Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite.
It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints.
Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting "national security," and
questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together
Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as
godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the
predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders
of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite's behavior was incompatible with the
precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion
that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the "godless." A
perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on
religion.
9. Power of corporations protected
Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of
large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw
the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed
states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite
were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests,
especially in the repression of "have-not" citizens.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the
political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed
or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright
contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were
anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to
national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled;
politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of
dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature
should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment
Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison
populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to
rampant abuse. "Normal" and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal
charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of
criminals or "traitors" was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more
police power.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption
Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to
enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive
financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of
government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth
from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national
security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely
unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.
14. Fraudulent elections
Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When
actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power
elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the
election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or
disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the
power elite.
Jr @ 138: Thanks for the link, but all I get from the endless semantics, is that the
English language is a lot like beauty, " in the eye of the beholder, or speaker.
English, or any language, can be used to inform or confuse.
How many of a similar sample of Germans in 1938 thought that their government would do
what it did? Consent must be manufactured. Caitlin Johnstone recently wrote this addition
to the genre
explaining how that's done .
I have a different perspective than psychohistorian.
For starters, I would see different causes of Enlightenment. It was a huge (if somewhat
misunderstood) ideological change in Europe, and such changes are caused by the profound
catastrophes undermining the trust in the status quo. While the scientific and other
cultural advances were definitely in place in 17 century Europe, a larger part of that
century were spent on horrific wars. If you add up their effects and compare to the
continent's population, it is hard to tell if 17 century was less horrible that World Wars
of 20-th century or not. And most of those wars were "religious", or had a major religious
component. In reaction, the thinkers and rulers got convinced that "reason" should have
primacy over "religion". Scientific advances played a role in fortifying the authority of
"reason", but ideas like defending one true faith and following rulers because of their
divine mandate were discredited by calamitous wars.
Advantages of "reason" were quite quickly noticed by elites, for example divine rights
of absolute rulers were patched by their enlightenment. Wars in Europe improved methods of
conscription, arming and disciplining the peasants and outright massacring and pillaging
was less evident than in 17-th century. But any discussion on fascism had to wait until
20-th century, because it made no sense in authoritarian systems of more traditional elites
-- manipulating public opinion makes little sense if public opinion matters only a little.
But as democracy became widespread AND the traditional elites got compromised once again by
WWI, radical movements emerged, including Communism and Fascism.
What I am trying to say is that mo st of points listed as features of fascism by
psychohistorian is "good old order" with appeals to "reason". Of course, all methods used
in the past are applied if handy, e.g. in Thailand divine mandate of the king is
energetically applied by the ruling military junta. To me, fascism is bit more specific.
For example, the cult of a uniquely qualified leader, championing the "common people",
projects of "national grandeur" that may include highway system and/or war of conquests,
rank intimidation augmenting more gentle "manipulation" etc.
But most of points listed by psychohistorian are more insidious features that follow
from "Iron law of oligarchy". Getting rid of them will require more effort than getting rid
of "true fascism".
vk, what text/interviews are you using for your claims about Arendt's theory of
totalitarianism? I mean, could you quote a specific place or paragraph? I come to her
thought through Life of Mind and Human Condition, and my take or sense of her ideas about
"totality" when it comes to social structures is that she gets it amazingly well how
contemporary technology destroys/yed the public realm by amplifying the organismic aspects
of the collective. Y'all talk about the ism of totalitarian being you find in Hannah's
writings, but it's like there's still something missing: the difference between the social
and the political isn't just a matter of concept but metaphysical. It isn't just
ideological but geo-metric. Social control isn't political when it reaches the point of
actualizing gods'-eyes-views, it has become self-aware bureaucracy -- what we already find
every day when our ego mistakes its beliefs about control for actions making history.
People forget the deepest slogan of The Party is GOD is POWER. If you believe war is not
peace and ignorance is not strength, then you have to figure out why Orwell wants you to
also start figuring out why god is not power.
Some like to amalgamate Nazism and communism into one, with the term 'totalitarianism'
covering both How would you analyse this concept?
'Totalitarianism' has roots in 'total mobilisation' and 'total war' – in the
total regimentation of the population, driven by the capitalist great powers and their
competition to conquer colonies and global hegemony. Hitler aspired to German revanchism,
winning back and expanding Germany's 'living space' and colonial territories. He saw
himself as heir to the colonial tradition, which he sought to radicalise.
He first of all identified with the US example, seeking his own Far West in
Eastern Europe and reducing the Slavs to the condition of slaves in service of the
Herrenvolk. Decisively, this project met its definitive defeat at Stalingrad; this defeat
was, at the same time, the beginning of a gigantic wave of anti-colonial
revolts.
A historical comparison is useful, here, for grasping how unserious the dominant
ideology's framing of 'totalitarianism' is. At the start of the nineteenth century
Napoleon sent a powerful army to Saint-Domingue with the mission of re-establishing
slavery, after it had been abolished thanks to the great black revolution led by
Toussaint Louverture.
We could indeed say that in the war that then raged, the attacked were no less
'savage' than the attackers. But we would cover ourselves in ridicule if we claimed that
we could reduce both sides to a common 'savagery' or a shared bloody
'totalitarianism'.
Much of the consideration of fascism here has been about the power and control of leaders
and elites. There is another side to the equation
One writer foretold the inevitable decline of the US toward fascism based on the social
construct used to establish law. At its' formation the US, like most of the West, had some
form of divinely sanctioned 'law' as the basis of its' civil code. While in theory law was
proclaimed to flow from democratic forms of government, the law was actually a projection
of a cultural/social ideal based on a religious text.
As that cultural/social/religious unity fractured in the face of secularism, humanism
and liberalism, there was a shift in the 'authority' that lay behind social law. The writer
I referred to indicated that cultural inertia would continue to carry the country for a
generation or two, but inevitably social/moral disintegration would occur. The result he
said would economic & social collapse which would in turn propel a movement toward
fascism.
Since then there has been a lot of evidence from evolutionary biology that suggests the
human predisposition to organize itself under some form of "authority structure" is
hard-wired into us.
"Not sure where the Romans and Genghiz Khan fit into that theory." dh |
We are not talking about wars but about societies in normal times. Both the Romans (see
eg Bread and Circuses) and the various post Genghiz states (the Mongol dynasty in China)
ruled by ensuring the general welfare of the population.
Incidentally there is no suggestion that the Irish were an 'inferior race'. Those
depending on the potato were weakened when there were no edible potatoes. The point is that
there was plenty of food to feed them but that liberal ideology did not allow of 'relief'
which would improve their fate.
Social Darwinism and Eugenics was certainly not owned by Fascists alone. Its alive and
well today and is used to justify neoliberal economics and imperialism. Pft at 43.
Yes.. I'd go further, the Fascists (as a standard narrow ex. Italy and Germany somewhat
before and during WW2) merely adopted parts of what was then mainstream 'Science' and/or
sociological accepted thinking, which itself was of course built on the zeitgeist, trends
in popular opinion etc. 'Modern' (late 18th - early 19th cent > 'misgenation', apartheid
laws, etc.) eugenics was very much a USA driven scientific trend. (Colonialist roots..)
Many got on the bandwagon - medicos, drug pedlers, breeders (of non-humans like chickens
and beef), socio pundits, pols, and more. Ex.
'Biologic' determinist credos (=> it's all in your genes) hold a strong sway in the
US today, stronger imho than in any other country, sticking out my neck as of course I know
little to nothing about 2/10 or far more of the world.
The fundamentalist and rigidly deterministic stance of course serves repressive
policies: ppl are born bad and 'need prison' etc.
Another nefarious result, e.g. 'ppl are born gender dysphoric' so need corrective
measures (surgery, drug dependence) is another, exploitative, side of the same coin.
The primary link between neoliberalism and fascism is their insistence that the weak go to
the wall. Communism denies this so did all societies before the British empire of the
C19th.
It is inconceivable that any previous society would have condoned the positions adopted by
the British government in Ireland during the 'Potato famine' or the policies pursued during
successive Bengal famines.
For those unfamiliar with the history of what occurred in Ireland it is worth recalling
that during the years in which the potato harvest failed entirely there were massive
shipments of food out of Ireland, vast quantities of meat, butter, cheese, barley and other
grains, were despatched to England and elsewhere for sale.
Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College Oxford, said of the liberal Political
Economists that he distrusted them and had done so since being told by one of them that,
while it was true that more than a million Irish people had died of starvation during the
famine, "He said that he wasn't sure that that that was enough."
For Bengal see, for example, Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts.
"... That she equated the two is intellectually dishonest, but hey, it was the height of the Cold War, there was poetic license to lie in the academic world. ..."
@ Posted by: Charles R | Sep 2, 2018 12:49:09 AM | 145
Her book in question is The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Possibly her most famous
book and the one which skyrocketed her career in the USA (and to the CIA, to which she was a
collaborator).
Also, in an article about modernism (I don't know how it was published in English), in the
last paragraphs, she mentions her "research on totalitarianism", and then goes on stating
that what united nazism and communism was the adoption of a "grand narrative" (see the
coincidence with post-modernism? Not a mere coincidence, for sure): the nazi adopting the
"grand narrative" of race struggle and the communist the one of class struggle. That she
equated the two is intellectually dishonest, but hey, it was the height of the Cold War,
there was poetic license to lie in the academic world.
I was born right at the end of the Cold War. I probably belong to the first generation of
historians born "post-Cold-War". And the first thing that amazed me was the sheer quantity of
pure lies and myths that pervaded Cold War era thought and science. It wasn't some
"conspiracy theory" level lies -- those very carefully crafted lies, extremely difficult to
debunk -- no, it was pure ideology, lies that can be easily debunked with a first look at
primary sources or with five minutes in internet research. Future historians (of the 22nd
Century) will probably see the Cold War era until today as a dark age for science.
Even Marxist production of this era suffered a lot: Marx must have had spinned in his tomb
like never before during the post-war era.
-//-
@ Posted by: les7 | Sep 2, 2018 3:36:39 AM | 149
Since then there has been a lot of evidence from evolutionary biology that suggests the
human predisposition to organize itself under some form of "authority structure" is
hard-wired into us.
The homo sapiens is an apex superpredator, a species of the fifth trophic level (level 5).
To top it off, we are also omnivorous, which makes us even more deadly and voracious.
Apex predators are not cannibal (the higher the trophic level, the lower the energy level,
so it wouldn't be energetically advantageous for apex predators to eat/hunt themselves. The
meat of apex predators have very low nutrition levels and are usually full of parasites and
other poisonous residues (e.g. dolphin meat is full of mercury, not edible for humans).
However, apex predator can and do kill themselves in territorial disputes -- be it among
themselves, be it with another apex predator species.
So, it is only natural that humans kill themselves for resources. It is in our nature.
However, there's a situation where apex predators stop killing themselves: when the
environment has enough for everybody. It will not be Teletubbies, where everybody will hug
and love themselves, but they would tolerate themselves. For example, you may want to kill a
stranger in the street -- but if that stranger is your children's doctor, then you'll think
twice, you'll tolerate his existence just because it is in your economic interest to keep him
alive.
That's what Marx was all about: capitalism increased interdependency, so are now, relative
to total population, killing ourselves less. The only reason the USA just don't nuke
everybody is that it depends on the rest of the world for trade. If we develop the productive
forces further, we could have a situation were the excedent would be so big that nobody would
have to exploit nobody (a fully-automated society). Again, Marx never stated communism would
be a hippie utopia: humans would still get happy, sad, anger, grief, violence for passional
motives would still happen, people would still cry when a parent would die etc. etc. What he
envisaged was a society without class.
-//-
Now, the last time about liberalism.
Liberalism is an umbrella term (although not as umbrella as illuminism) to designate the
legitimating of capitalism over four centuries. Liberalism was not just philosophy: it was an
economic theory etc.
What unites liberals of all sorts of kinds is the fact that, ultimately, the acted to
preserve or advocate for capitalism.
Liberalism can be better described thus as the way of life of capitalism; the way
capitalism perceives itself over time.
The separation we do nowadays between liberalism and nazifascism comes from neoliberal
propaganda.
Neoliberalism (new liberalism) was born in the 40s, in Mont Pelerin, and its doctrine
stated that 1) post-war social-democracy in Western Europe = socialism and should be combated
and 2) what happened between the WWI (1914) and WWII (1945) was an abortion of History, and
the world should continue from where it stopped (i.e. with the old liberalism).
That's why I consider neoliberalism more like the "return of the liberals" than "the new
liberalism", albeit it, I confess, from the point of view of the economists, the latter
definition suits better. New liberalism because they conceded liberalism collapsed in 1914
and needed to be updated (this happened with Friedman's monetarism); Return of the liberals
because, albeit it was born in the 40s, it was just in 1979, with the election of Margaret
Thatcher in the UK, that it would really come to power in a worldwide level (there was
already a neoliberal experiment in Pinochet's Chile, some years before).
But I think the definite empirical proof totalitarianism is a Cold War myth and that
nazifascism is really liberalism is that this new rise of the "far-right/alt-right" is not
coming from socialist countries (North Korea, Cuba, China and Vietnam), but from capitalist,
Western Democracies (Italy, France, USA, UK, Australia, Japan -- albeit Japan never gave up
fascism to begin with --, Sweden, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Austria and Ukraine). It was from
the liberals' womb that fascism was (re)born, not "communism". This is a fact, a fact we can
observe today, with our own senses.
Now, you can rationalized that many of these countries are from the ex-Iron Curtain. But
1) it only happened after they turned capitalist, not while they were under the USSR and 2)
those Iron Curtain countries were actually full-fledged Nazi countries before the USSR
liberated them in 1945, so they had a nazi past and culture as a nationalist narrative
against USSR hegemony; the Ukraine has a sui generis history, that involved a triple side
civil war (White, Black and Red Armies), so, albeit they were part of the USSR, they too had
a Nazi past.
"... During the Cold War, a cold warrior called Hannah Arendt published a book (with a CIA editor) that laid out the most famous version of the theory of totalitarianism. ..."
"... The theory of totalitarianism states that communism and fascism are the sides of the same coin. Arendt's central argument was that both communism and nazism were brother ideologies because both adopt a central, all-encompassing historical narrative: nazism adopting the narrative of the struggle between the races and communism adopting the narrative of struggle between classes. ..."
"... Yes, she equate racism to class struggle (which is a false dichotomy, because class struggle is empirically observable towards all written history we have available today, while race war is a modern late 19th Century invention). ..."
"... The Cold War ended and Arendt's theory was proved wrong: the USSR dissolved over the weight of its own internal contradictions. But the idea that nazifascism and communism were brother ideologies stuck in the West. ..."
"... Thanks karlof1 I look forward to you posts here. I am sure the elite could be identified as fascist as the concentration of wealth and power was certainly in their hands then after centuries of mercantile plunder. Equally they bundled the wealth generated from the progress of automation from horse drawn farm machinery through to steam power etc. ..."
"... As for American Fascism, the entire mindset of American Exceptionalism combined with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny provide it with a substantial foundation. ..."
"... "Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes ..."
"... Yes, he saw it but IMO was too soft toward it. I'd be remiss not to mention Bertram Gross's bold 1980 book Friendly Fascism and Sheldon Wolin's Inverted Totalitarianism . ..."
Fascism (and Nazism) is a form of Liberalism. But we need to clarify one of the most
persuading Cold War myths: the myth of totalitarianism.
(huge parenthesis alert)
-//-
During the Cold War, a cold warrior called Hannah Arendt published
a book (with a CIA
editor) that laid out the most famous version of the theory of totalitarianism.
The theory of totalitarianism states that communism and fascism are the sides of the same
coin. Arendt's central argument was that both communism and nazism were brother ideologies
because both adopt a central, all-encompassing historical narrative: nazism adopting the
narrative of the struggle between the races and communism adopting the narrative of struggle
between classes.
Yes, she equate racism to class struggle (which is a false dichotomy,
because class struggle is empirically observable towards all written history we have
available today, while race war is a modern late 19th Century invention).
Arendt's totalitarianism theory helped to give birth to modern liberal leftism, more
specifically, post-modernism, which states that there's no "long term narrative" in human
history (i.e. there's no class war; or class war was a random phenomenon of the late
19th-early 20th Centuries) and that there's no truth: only points of view based on the
observer's immediate observation.
Alongside post-modernism, there was, at the same time, a rehabilitation of Christianism,
as a part of the ideological war against communism/socialism in the Cold War: that meant a
tendency to secularism and reason begun to be reversed in the West from the 70s onwards. Such
"imbecilization" process is not new: it happened during the decline of the Roman Empire,
during the late Severan dinasty and throughout the crisis of the Third Century and progressed
with the reforms of Diocletian, reaching its appex with Constantine and Justinian. This
period of time saw the economy of Rome collapse, while Christianism flourished.
So yes, everytime society tries to progress, the Western elite calls 911-Christianism to
the rescue, it is not new: it is important to notice that, after the French Revolution, the
legitimizing narrative was that the Roman Republic was being revived (Napoleon was in love
with Ancient Rome, and read all of Caesar's Commentaries ) -- what Marx called the
"farce" in the Brummaire -- and that both the British and the American empires like to
mirror themselves with the Roman Empire (and many of modern laws and principles are based on
Roman jurists). So, there's a lot of inspiration there by the Western elites.
But Arendt came out with another very important conclusion: that a totalitarian society
can not disintegrate from within, only from the outside. Put it in other terms, the peoples of
totalitarian states can never do a revolution, only be liberated by an alien liberal society.
At the time, there was no perspective the USSR would ever go away, and there was plenty of
demand to ideologies that legitimized rising military spending and invasions in the Third
World.
The Cold War ended and Arendt's theory was proved wrong: the USSR dissolved over the
weight of its own internal contradictions. But the idea that nazifascism and communism were
brother ideologies stuck in the West.
-//-
Nazifascism is a mode of liberalism (classic liberalism) because that's what history shows
us: both Hitler and Mussolini were born and created during the apex of liberalism, in liberal
countries and received liberal education. Both declared the communists as their main enemies
once they got to power. Both economies remained highly decentralized, liberal style, during
the WWII. If you take out both lunatic narratives, you wouldn't be able to discern, e.g., a
typical German Aryan family in Berlin from a typical suburban family in the 60s USA.
Communism/socialism both came from classical Social-Democracy (not the post-war version,
the original version). Classical Social-Democracy has a very well documented paternity: Karl
Marx.
Marx took the term "socialism" from the nowadays so-called "utopian socialists", a
movement from France, whose main intellectual was Proudhon. Those "utopian socialists" come
from the old late-feudal artisan class, the class which lost the most with industrialization.
Communism (as in communist parties) come from the late 19th Century/early 20th Century schism
between the German and Russian Social-Democrat parties. At the time, the German one made a
turn to the right (which would culminate, decades later, with it supporting the German
bourgeoisie in WWI, a pivotal episode to the rise of Nazism in the 30s), and Lenin, in order
to make the ideological differences clear, changed the name to "communist". So, whatever
point of view you adopt, neither communism nor socialism come from liberalism, so it doesn't
even belong to the same branch as nazifascism.
The last "common ancestor" of both Social-Democracy and Liberalism is illuminism. But
"illuminism" was not a school or ideology per se, but an umbrella term to designate a
significant change in thought after the 16th Century. If you take the concept of Reason as
the condition sine qua non to designate something illuminist, then the only existing "child"
of "illuminism" today is Marxism.
Controlled dissent relies on obscuring the Pincer Movement being used to corral Freedom
and Liberty.
'(Commercial consumerism is) consistent with banal economic relations and routine familial
and social patterns, and, as a means towards those ends, imprisonimg...the authentic, strong,
free, vital human beings who learned to break loose and live heroic lives, in defiance of
(Judaic) 'static legalism'.
Simplicity is the panacea for the evils of the present. In short, back to Nature. We must
look to the Artist, not to the Scientist as our teacher and guide, for the artist was the
genius who knew the goal and the way ...through the ideals which the new 'vitalist' culture
intended to displace decadent 'civilization': childlike simplicity, natural spontaneity, an
Olympian will to risk and dare, an unerring intuition into the hidden and transcendent, a
sense of awe and mystery, an abundance of unrestrained passions, and an exhilirating torrent
of energy.'
(Vision and Violence, Arthur Mendel)
So Nietzche, but also Euell Gibbons and Carlos Casteňeda were 'Back to Nature' NAZIs.
Nietzche saw Judaic culture of regimental Bolshevism as the 'unpure enemy', and eugenic
extermination as the solution, while the Hippies saw 'The Pigs' (regimental military
Bolshevism) as the unclean enemy, and 'Get Back to the Land and Set My Soul Free' as the
solution. They're both a form of Fascism.
If you don't 'turn on, tune, in and drop out', if you won't let your hair grow long as you
can show it, and wear beads braided in your beard and hemp sandals, write graffiti about AGW
and fossil fuels, and eat meal worms and cannabis cookies, then you are an 'unclean pig'.
The End of History Rational Supra-National State, versus the Hot Money Pay-for-Play
Uber-Capitalist Renegades. Regimental Bolshevism and Iconoclastic Fascism are just the
two-sided Janus-faced nature of our human reality. Rodham the Bolshevik versus Trump the
Fascist. Lose-lose.
Lose-lose most especially in USA, because State-Corporate Deep Purple Mil.Gov UniParty
represents the unholy union of these two anti-human forces. Think Israel joining with the
Syrian 'rebels' (sic). Think the globalist ECB/IMF/WB finance marauders aligning with the
NATO Wehrmacht.
That's the NWO Spawn of Satan. They are One. Netanyahu is your Father. Come into the
Light. Use the Force, Luke. A
Oh, and be sure to get your vaccinations!
@22 ex-Reedie nails it. All three quotes were pre-empted by Thucydides so very many
centuries ago, when he has the Athenians responding to the Melians appeal to decency with
"the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must".
Before, of course, the Athenians slaughtered the Melians.
But the other side of the coin is, of course, "he who lives by the sword dies by the
sword".
The Siege of Melos is a classic example: the Athenians conquered the Melians and then
colonized Melos (sound familiar?). And then.... in the long run lost the Peloponnesian War
and all those colonists were sent packing.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Cock of the walk one day, a feather duster the next.
It's a long way to the top, and a quick ride to the bottom.
All concepts that would be utterly foreign to Netanyahu.
Until, that is, it happens to him and his Zionist throwbacks to the 19th century.
" It is not just by chance that Netanyahoo sounds like Hitler. Both, Theodore Herzl, the
founder of Zionism, and Adolph Hitler developed their political awareness around the turn of
the century "
Interestingly, the Indian fascists of the Hindutva movement, of which the RSS organisation
is the mothership, also have intellectual links to the Nazis... The romantic irrationalist
texts from which the European fascists drew their inspiration were translated into Marathi
and read avidly, by the brahmins of western India where Hindutva ideology was incubated.
It is important to make a distinction between Hinduism, the religion, and 'Hindutva' which
is a political ideology. Hindutva is more old-fascism than neo-fascism. The RSS, the
mothership of this ideology, has been organising their movement for nearly a hundred years.
And it is follows quite well the old-fascist pattern. The mothership sends expeditionary
contingents into each area of social life and captures it - nazi youth, nazi unions, nazi
lawyers, etc. The present phase is probably best captured by the old nazi term,
'gleichschaltung' , the attempt to force social institutions into the fascist mould... there
seems to be now an ongoing attempt to capture the universities, the media, the supreme court
etc. in India.
Those interested can check out the following books
1. Walter Andersen and S Damle Brotherhood in Saffron...
(a reliable objective description of the RSS.. unfortunately out-of-print for decades, but it
should be available in the Univ.of Heidelberg South Asia institute library . no electronic
copy seems to be available, if anyone has a link, please post. Andersen and Damle have a new
book to be published this year)
2. MS Golwalkar We or out nationhood defined and Bunch of Thoughts.
MSG was the second head and most important ideologue of the RSS who admired nazi 'race
pride'. he wrote,
"To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging
the country of the semitic races -- the Jews... Race pride at its highest has been manifested
here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having
differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us
in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."
and
"the foreign races [he meant other religions too] in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu
culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must
entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, ie of the
Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay
in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no
privileges, far less any preferential treatment not even citizen's rights."
Thanks karlof1 I look forward to you posts here. I am sure the elite could be identified
as fascist as the concentration of wealth and power was certainly in their hands then after
centuries of mercantile plunder. Equally they bundled the wealth generated from the progress
of automation from horse drawn farm machinery through to steam power etc.
I guess the englander workers could be coerced or press ganged into supporting their
fascist lords as they were to support the various wars and defense needs. I doubt that one
should class the workers and common folk as naturally fascist though. Cowed into compliance
from centuries of oppression seems a better description.
Engels was a mighty keen observer and knew well the ways of the ruling class
industrialists.
"...since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question
between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they
must..." Thucydides - he said it in Melian Dialogue.
But the quote should be read in context...and is itself a paraphrase of Athenian
Policy,
It is also True. Yes indeed, fascists do sometimes say true things...it happens. I do not
like fascists, but I do like truth, doesn't everybody?
Gramsci's thinking thrives in many fields, being a safe haven for political and
intellectual organizations midway between the pure abandonment of Marxism and unrestricted
adherence to neoliberal "democracy".
Gramsci became the prostitute of the neoliberals, as he was before that of the recycled
Stalinists when against "Trotskyism", whatever this was.
Social Darwinism and Eugenics was certainly not owned by Fascists alone. Its alive and well
today and is used to justify neoliberal economics and imperialism. The strong (cognitive or
physical) rule the weak. Any attempt at equalizing the disparity is labelled as Socialism and
is opposed in part for fears it promotes dysgenics.
Darwin had it right I think. Or maybe it was the ancient Greeks. I'm trying pretty hard to
keep up here ,eugenics might be partly responsible for that.
Thank Christ somebody broke in with news of that guy getting blowed up. Somebody said
Canada might be the culprit. Well, suck me dry and call me Dusty, I never heard of that
motherfucker and neither have any of my friends at the bar. Maybe it's because of that gal
who had a granddad that was a Uke who liked Nazi invaders better than the Russians. But she's
pretty busy right now trying deal with other stuff. Like the biggest trade deal in the
world.
I had been going to propose that the answer to all three questions was "Thrasymachus" (from
Plato's Republic) - but I see in checking my source that all that fine young man did actually
say was that justice is the advantage of the stronger, using as an example the rulers of
cities who order things to their own advantage. And indeed, the statement is refuted, which
causes the frightening man to blush...But best to read the original, as what Thrasymachus
represents looms larger in that setting and in the labyrinthian dialogue upon whose threshold
he makes his claim.
Posted by: juliania | Aug 31, 2018 6:45:58 PM |
link
England is now divided down the middle politically, as is a whole list of country's, to many
to mention. left and right increasingly polarized ! Perhaps the most important being
the USA. If
we look at the right wing street violence in Germany this week, we see what is going to
happen all the way round very soon.
This weeks violent aggressive protest is much much bigger
than people realize ! It was aimed at innocent people in the street, it was apparently
protesting about victims of western military aggression emigrating to Germany. But not
addressing the root couse of why they became victims, but the problems
caused by their emigration to Germany.
Last Sunday these nazi's and there sympathizers numbered 6000 but the truth is a large
proportion of the police present were on their side. Looking the other way when violence
occurred failing to arrest people doing the nazi salute. The coalition
government has a large
part of extreme right wing politicians.
These next weeks determine which way western country's will swing. We can stop the nazi's on
the street's or we can except the consequences.
Whatever thing Trump and his minions (American allies, "Western Civilization") are doing
right now, they are just restructuring already existing trade deals at best.
-//-
As for the "Greek" discussion. It's not a surprise Hitler took at least some inspiration
from the ancient Greek. From the 19th to early 20th Century, there was some kind of "Greek
revival" in Germany's academic circles. Take Nietzsche for example: he dialogues with the
Greeks (mainly Plato and Socrates) many times. Even that so-called Nazi historian (forgot his
name) focused on the ancient Greek. Hell, even Marx did his doctorate thesis over Epicurus.
So, Hitler essentially lived in the end of a "philellene" period of Germany.
As far as the strong protecting the weak, the human animal is a prime example of this as
the mother and infant must be protected for several years before either can fend for
themselves. Another well known example is the mother bear protecting her cubs--don't mess
with either!
There's no superiority/inferiority involved as such in either example as both
are natural mechanisms. The concept of social castes/classes was very well established
millennia ago with numerous ideas put forth to justify their existence, many of which still
operate today. Many of those ideas are present within the Monthly
Review article I linked to yesterday.
Engels may or may not have coined the term
Social Murder, but even the Whigs agreed as this passage shows:
"In 1844, Frederick Engels wrote that 'English society daily and hourly commits what the
working-men's organs, with perfect correctness, characterize as social murder. It has placed
the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long [and] it
undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them
to the grave before their time.'24 Anyone who thinks that Engels was not an objective witness
should compare his judgement to that of the influential Whig journal the
Edinburgh
Review :
"Out of every two persons who die in the east of London, one perishes from preventable
causes. From twenty to thirty thousand of the labouring population of London are killed every
year by causes which, if we chose, we might expel by a current of water. Though we do not
take these persons out of their houses and murder them, we do the same thing in effect, -- we
neglect them in their poisonous homes, and leave them there to a lingering but a certain
death."
It's very easy to see why Marx and Engels characterized what they observed in England and
Europe as Class War. But can the English of the mid 1800s be characterized as fascist, or
perhaps just the elite?
...As for American Fascism, the entire mindset of American Exceptionalism combined with
the doctrine of Manifest Destiny provide it with a substantial foundation.
Combined with the
implied imperialism within JQ Adams speech that outlined what became known as The Monroe
Doctrine, White, Anglo-Saxon superiority was further institutionalized. Social-Darwinism is
quite complex to discuss despite it being a relatively simple concept on the surface.
Wikipedia's
page is rather good on this topic and shows Herbert Spencer published his ideas before
Darwin published his revolutionary book. Vice-President Henry Wallace is the most prominent
American citizen I know of to write boldly about American Fascism In his famous NY
Times op/ed The Dangers of
American Fascism that concludes thusly:
"Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and
eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about
this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward
certain races, creeds and classes."
Yes, he saw it but IMO was too soft toward it. I'd be remiss not to mention Bertram
Gross's bold 1980 book Friendly Fascism and Sheldon Wolin's Inverted
Totalitarianism .
This discussion is getting out of hand. vk 99 is not right (to be
polite).
Laguerre | Sep 1, 2018 2:48:22 PM | 114
Nazifascism is a mode of liberalism (classic liberalism)
because that's what history shows us: both Hitler and Mussolini were
born and created during the apex of liberalism...
Communism and Fascism are not the same thing, as in the theory of
Arendt. They merely used the same techniques. Nor is fascism really
liberalism. Perhaps a reaction, but not even that.
The states in which Hitler and Mussolini grew up were not liberal
democracies, but rather monarchical autocracies, which had failed. So
reactions to that.
The demonstration is that Neo-Nazis today are not in any way liberal,
but rather far right, based on uber-nationalism. That is the basis also
of 1930s fascism. Nationalism taken to an extreme, and employing
totalitarian techniques.
Mueller has resorted to the classic sleazy prosecutor's gambit of resorting to auxiliary
allegations like perjury. All you need is to bully someone into contradicting the President
and you have a perjury charge if you can trap the President into making statements on
oath.
And re the tangled web of Robert Mueller gang corruption:
From 2001 to 2005 the US gov had an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
Governments from around the world had donated to the 'Charity', yet many of those donations
were illegally undeclared.
The investigation mysteriously ended after US Justice Dept staffer James Comey took it
over in 2005. He was assisted by Assistant Attorney General of the United States, Rod
Rosenstein, and FBI Director Robert Mueller.
James Comey's brother works for DLA Piper that handles the Clinton Foundation.
When Hillary Clinton was Obama's US Secretary of State, she supported a decision to sell
20% of US Uranium to Russia. Bill Clinton went to Moscow, was paid US $500,000 for a
one-hour speech, and met with Vladimir Putin at his home. Entities connected to the Uranium
One deal then donated US $145 million to the Clinton Foundation
FBI Director Robert Mueller oversaw the Russian 'deal' Rod Rosenstein was placed under
gag order not to speak of it.
Also while Hillary was Secretary of State, her friend James Comey moved from the US
Justice Dept to Lockheed Martin, earning millions himself, with 17 no-bid contracts for
Lockheed Martin with Hillary's State Dept.
When the Benghazi investigations uncovered the Hillary e-mail offences and placement of
Top Secret information on her private servers, the investigation was in the hands of James
Comey, who had returned to gov service as FBI Director, where he 'could not find' any
crimes regarding Hillary.
Lisa Barsoomian is a lawyer who, over time in many cases, was either herself or her
legal partner acting in representation of James Comey, Robert Mueller, Bill Clinton,
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, the FBI and the CIA Lisa Barsoomian is the wife of US
Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Robert Mueller to his current
job.
You could have mentioned Robert Reich's call for the entire Trump presidency to be
annulled, including erasure of all executive orders he has issues and unseating of all judges
and officials he has appointed. In a perfect nod to Stalinism, he is is to be sent down the
memory hole with every shred of evidence of his existence airbrushed out of existence. BTW,
Reich is a great name for one who comments on how to deal with Nazis, nicht war?
The corporate media run these features in the wake of every "Trump Deathwatch" episode
to taper liberals off the effects of the mindless hysteria they have just finished
generating.
Yeah, wouldn't want to those liburls to go cold-turkey and crash on the sidewalk with
blood running out of their ears, noses and eye sockets.
And on and on, and on, it goes and will continue to go until 2020, unless Trump decides
to attack Iran, which I doubt The Resistance® will let him do, because that would get
extremely weird, as they would somehow have to simultaneously support another US war of
aggression and condemn Trump as Adolf Hitler for starting it.
Don't doubt. Doublethink is an integrated feature of liberalism and there would not be any
sort of problem whatsoever in doing both. Like a priest how lies with a sex worker, then has
her whipped and branded for being a temptress.
Inb4 Corvinus proclaiming his fealthy in Mueller and his "extremely complex,
never-had-it-before" investigation that will calve any minute now.
That was the old days. The cold war was playing it safe. The US did coups and wars then
too. Vietnam and South Asia was bombed and destroyed. Coups in Latin America were a regular
thing. Cuba was the only one that managed to keep the US out. After the cold war, the US
branched out to Europe (Yugoslavia, Ukraine), North Africa (Libya) and West Asia (
Afghanistan, Iraq). The US has been going crazy in the middle east since 1991. 1991 Iraq war
ended on Purim 1991. 2003 war on Iraq started on Purim. 2011 war on Libya started on Purim.
Notice the eight year play for the last two. Is Iran in line for the next Purim attack in
2019?
Readjustment!!!!
And so it took two years for Miller and his team of superhero lawyers to find one miserable
tax cheat, who was hiding his money in all the wrong places.
So what is IRS doing anyway? Playing with theirs ?
This is only one, little bit more significant signs of decaying of US hegemonistic
Capitalism.
One way or the other, with Trump or without Trump Us society is standing on the doorsteps of
major readjustment theoretical, practical, and political.
Hypocrisy will end, and somebody will have to tell the American people the naked truth.
Russia had zero influence on US politics by the time of Reagan, the main
source of
subversion in America switched to Israel and is now also the main source of the opposition to
Trump. He can take the mainspring out of the opposition machine by wrong-footing his enemies
in the Jewish community with an attack on Iran. It will only remain to destablise Jordan then
expel the Palestinians from the West Bank and officially annex it, and the anti-Trump
movement will be like the Left after the Six Day War.
Mueller, the man accused on a German site of having perpetrated Lockerby, to kill a rival
secret service, that found out about Mueller's drug trade in Beirut.
It was, if it is true, great for Mueller that he was the USA investigator of Lockerby.
I wonder if it is known in the USA that already during the trial held in the Netherlands,
the father of one of the victims, who was at the trial, that some about the mechanism for the
ignition was inconsistent.
This was later confirmed by the, if I remember correctly, Swiss manufacturer.
The Libyan convicted for Lockerby went to a Scottish jail, quite soon, a Scottish
investigation committee came to the conclusion that he was innocent.
Those who lost relatives in the disaster never got answer to the question how and why it was
possible that shortly before take off in London VIP's were manoevred out of the plane.
As to the Libyan, 'luckily' he got a deadly disease, great smokescreen for letting him
go.
Until now we do not how the cause of the death of Arafat.
If Mueller is as criminal as asserted, I cannot know.
However, three years after Sept 11 I could no longer fool myself, this was not a Muslim
terrorist attack.
The mentioned German site also explained that Sept 11 brought a profit of some $ 5 billion to
thr owners of the Twin Towers, to be paid by Allianz, A German firm, that as a result had to
fire 3000 employees.
The insurance with Allianz dated from three weeks before Sept 11.
So, for who thinks, what is his point, no crime within the USA I judge impossible any
more.
Also not accusing a president of things that never happened.
Wonder if hegemonistic capitalism can decay.
When in Florida I visited the Flagler museum, accompanied by a USA friend who lived in the
vicinity.
He told me some interesting Flagler stories.
The main USA problem, is, in my opinion, that little has changed since the times of Flagler
and Rockefeller.
Rockefeller, BTW, was able in a few years time, by buying a news agency, to change his image
with the USA public from ruthless capitalist to philantropist, Bill Gates and Soros
accomplished something similar, though not here in Europe.
Polish socialists call the Soros followers 'Sorosjugend'.
"... There it is, slowly coming to light, one of the great political scandals in our history. A sitting Presidents institutes a "counter intelligence" disinformation campaign against an opposition party which is still ongoing. ..."
So it turns out there was NO FISA hearing for the first application to spy on Trump
through Carter Page. It was simply rubber stamped by a Republican (in name only) judge in
this most secret of Star Chambers. What judge wouldn't approve, as it was signed by John
Kerry, his deputy, Susan Rice, her deputy, James Comey, his deputy McCabe, Brennan, Clapper
and to put the icing on top, Ash Carter, Obama's Secretary of Defense? It might just as well
have been signed by the President himself. And this was while he was still in office.
There it is, slowly coming to light, one of the great political scandals in our history. A
sitting Presidents institutes a "counter intelligence" disinformation campaign against an
opposition party which is still ongoing. Trump wants his FBI and DOJ to "do the right thing"
or he "may have to get involved." He better act soon or be scalped by Mueller.
"... Oh, and also, they would have a hard time explaining why Putin had ordered his stooge in the White House to attack Russia's ally in the Middle East." ..."
My favorite part of this article: "And on and on, and on, it goes and will continue to go
until 2020, unless Trump decides to attack Iran, which I doubt The Resistance® will let
him do, because that would get extremely weird, as they would somehow have to simultaneously
support another US war of aggression and condemn Trump as Adolf Hitler for starting it.
Oh, and also, they would have a hard time explaining why Putin had ordered his stooge in
the White House to attack Russia's ally in the Middle East."
We live in times in which the media elites and academia are fully insane. That means that
the 'normal' levels of insanity and venality for career politicians will be ramped up.
So this "tribe" (as you call them) are the folks leading the criticism of the President?
These folks "own the media" you aver -- yes?
Hmmm, then that clearly can't be a "tribe" which includes Netanyahu, his likudniks and
neo-cons and militant right-wing, American billionaire Zionists -- because they've never had
it so good under any U.S. President.
As for the Palestinians (let alone the American middle class), well, things are rather
different.
unilateral private media ownership is the problem, not privatized tribal hate for Trump or
whomever..
Government vs Private Parallel Media can solve many, many problems created by Deep
State it can quickly turn the tables on the deep state or strongly support it.. Since
1492 when Martin Luther exposed unilateral backroom power, massive singularities of
accumulated wealth, and controlled, filtered propaganda to the masses. government has become
the responsibility of the governed, and the governors have become the servants of the masses.
However, those same powers Luther exposed have done everything in their power to deny the
masses the right to self determination
Trump has a plan to nationalize the media, but I think he should merely parallel the
private media with open source government media ( no rules to use it, none, not any, sex
weird stuff, criminal stuff, whatever ,just let anyone with something to say say it on their
own website hosted by the government). Produce a government media hosting site, allow anyone,
foreign or local, to present on the public media. use government developed search engine and
indexing technology (no private party no private contractors, everything and everyone
involved at the government host site is a government employee and all technology is developed
by government for government use only) and let the masses decide for themselves both 1) form
of government and 2) degree of corruption they will accept. Everyone can then select do they
want to view the Deep State Media or one of the millions of content providers visible on the
government media host.
"Zionism(A.K.A. Neo-Cons, and all "Israeli Firsters") is a political ideology based upon
the suspension of reason and common sense, rooted upon a macabre death wish that worships the
state of Israel.
Israel-First loyalists do not have to be Jewish. Christian-Zionists routinely forgo
faithfulness to our country, when they place Israel above the interests of our own nation.
The notion that Israel is a trusted ally is the most absurd illusion that exists in a
demented political culture. This is the "Big Lie", an invention of Zionist subversion, which
is the cause of an insane American foreign policy. Israel-First zealots control every aspect
of political power in the United States. An actual American holocaust that stares us directly
in our faces stems from sick fraudulent propaganda and phony guilt deceit that only benefits
Zionists and Israel."
I hope not. If Trump wants to go down a hero, he can be the monkey wrench that wrecks so
much damage on the machine that it's no longer capable of threatening the world. If he can
perform a controlled demolition of the USA, the rest of the world will continue just fine
without them. We'll remember him as a hero for preventing WW3.
None of this makes any difference. The MSM still control 98 percent of the information
transmission systems in the western world. Indeed, (((they))) are beginning to prohibit other
information systems such as the internet.
What you don't hear about never happened. The flip side of that coin is that what you hear
about over and over comes to be reality, regardless. Think Tawana Brawley. Think Duke sports
teams.
Where there's smoke there must be fire, right?
Trump has a talent for feeding the MSM red meat. Always with a good dose of poison mixed
in so they are happy to shoot themselves in the foot. Think Roseanne Roseannadanna.
Nevermind
Well, he can't attack Syria because Israel, ya know, might get hot grease spattered on
them. And besides, Israel wants Syria with as little additional damage as possible, leaving
an attack on Iran as the only method of "attacking" Russia. But, it cannot be done directly,
with flimsy excuses. The excuses are just too damn flimsy.
Also, life is too damn good for American Army mercenaries to have to risk life and limb
for another meaningless ME conflict. Nope, the Army needs another five years, at the very
least, before another round of medals and benefit-increases justifies their personal risk. US
Army take-home, "combat" pay and massive health-and-living benefits amount to the best living
any white American boy can experience, but there is a limit.
Now, limited-scope attack by proxy? Iraq border conflict? Afghanistan border conflict?
Both good, plus there is already umpty-ump bajillion $ of US taxpayer-paid military equipment
in Afghanistan. Good excuse to junk it all and get new stuff. That's what taxpayers are for,
after all.
The fact is that the U.S. is a Zionist controlled plantation and there is no difference at
the top levels between the demonrats and the republicons as both are Zionist controlled and
are traitors to America, as proof of this is the Israeli and Zionist controlled deep state
attack on 911 which killed 3000 Americans and Israel and the Zionists got away with it and
every thinking America knows they did it.
The only difference between Trump and Helliary is their plumbing, both are Zionist puppets
and the ziocons run the U.S. gov..
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
Personally, I'm rooting for the Democrats to take control of the House in the midterms,
purely for the sake of entertainment.
After calling this ass clown a Russian spy and Literal Hitler for the last two years,
they're going have to at least pretend to impeach him, or else stage a series of
internationally-televised neo-McCarthyite congressional hearings to root out the diabolical
networks of Putin-Nazis that have infested America, and Britannia, and the rest of the
West.
That's the main thing, after all. Yes, the corporatist ruling classes need to make an
example of Trump to dissuade any future billionaire ass clowns from running for high office
without their permission, but even more so, they need to put down the "populist" opposition to
the spread of global capitalism and the gradual
phase-out of national sovereignty that began with Brexit and continued with Trump, so they
can transform the smoldering remains of the Earth into one big happy neoliberal market run by
supranational corporations and the "democratic governments" they have bought and paid for
which
Damn, I think I may have gone and opened a rather enormous can of leftist worms right at the
end of this essay by mentioning the "national sovereignty" thing. So, leftists, please ignore
the previous paragraph. National sovereignty is the same as nationalism. Nationalism is very,
very bad. Internationalism is good. Internationalist socialism is what we all want. Okay,
admittedly, the forces of internationalist socialism appear to be well, somewhat marginal at
the moment (or possibly virtually non-existent), but that's not a problem, because the global
capitalists will be happy to internationalize everything for us, and to do away with all those
nasty nationalists, and that national government-subsidized healthcare and university education
and all that stuff.
So let's forget that I mentioned national sovereignty, because that's all Putinist Trumpism,
and so on. There's absolutely no reason at all for leftists to discuss that subject, or to view
it in any kind of larger historical or geopolitical context or anything. Once the global
corporate empire finishes their Privatization of Everything, I'm sure they will be open to
considering socialism. They'll probably even let us vote on it. By then,
they will have cleansed the Internet of all the discord-sowing Putin-Nazis so there won't
be any danger of being "influenced" to vote the wrong way or anything.
In the meantime, don't forget to do your part in the War on Trump, Putin, Assad, Corbyn, and
whoever else the corporate media tell us we're at war against. Forget about global capitalism.
Keep obsessing about Donald Trump. And if you get tired of obsessing about Donald Trump, you
can always
call Corbyn an anti-Semite , or
accuse Glenn Greenwald of working for Putin , or, if you've got some free time and want to
get creative, compile a Directory
of International Assadists , or some other paranoid pseudo-blacklist. Every little
contribution counts!
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
And on and on, and on, it goes and will continue to go until 2020, unless Trump decides
to attack Iran, which I doubt The Resistance® will let him do, because that would get
extremely weird, as they would somehow have to simultaneously support another US war of
aggression and condemn Trump as Adolf Hitler for starting it. Oh, and also, they would have
a hard time explaining why Putin had ordered his stooge in the White House to attack
Russia's ally in the Middle East. So, probably, no attack on Iran.
..Robert Mueller, who is doggedly investigating allegations that the President of the
United States is a devious Russian intelligence asset personally planted in the Oval Office
by Vladimir Putin, the Russian mob, and a conspiracy of crackerjack "cyber-influencers,"
who brainwashed millions of American voters into betraying Hillary Clinton, and the nation,
with a bunch of emails and some Facebook posts, and who are even now waging "a chaos
campaign to undermine faith in American democracy."
If only there was an Agent 99 to bring some levity and balance to Robert Mueller's Maxwell
Smart personna then everything would be complete.
"... My favorite part of this article: "And on and on, and on, it goes and will continue to go until 2020, unless Trump decides to attack Iran, which I doubt The Resistance® will let him do, because that would get extremely weird, as they would somehow have to simultaneously support another US war of aggression and condemn Trump as Adolf Hitler for starting it. ..."
"... Oh, and also, they would have a hard time explaining why Putin had ordered his stooge in the White House to attack Russia's ally in the Middle East." ..."
My favorite part of this article: "And on and on, and on, it goes and will continue to go
until 2020, unless Trump decides to attack Iran, which I doubt The Resistance® will let
him do, because that would get extremely weird, as they would somehow have to simultaneously
support another US war of aggression and condemn Trump as Adolf Hitler for starting it.
Oh, and also, they would have a hard time explaining why Putin had ordered his stooge
in the White House to attack Russia's ally in the Middle East."
We live in times in which the media elites and academia are fully insane. That means that
the 'normal' levels of insanity and venality for career politicians will be ramped up.
So this "tribe" (as you call them) are the folks leading the criticism of the President?
These folks "own the media" you aver -- yes?
Hmmm, then that clearly can't be a "tribe" which includes Netanyahu, his likudniks and
neo-cons and militant right-wing, American billionaire Zionists -- because they've never had
it so good under any U.S. President.
As for the Palestinians (let alone the American middle class), well, things are rather
different.
unilateral private media ownership is the problem, not privatized tribal hate for Trump or
whomever..
Government vs Private Parallel Media can solve many, many problems created by Deep
State it can quickly turn the tables on the deep state or strongly support it.. Since
1492 when Martin Luther exposed unilateral backroom power, massive singularities of
accumulated wealth, and controlled, filtered propaganda to the masses. government has become
the responsibility of the governed, and the governors have become the servants of the masses.
However, those same powers Luther exposed have done everything in their power to deny the
masses the right to self determination
Trump has a plan to nationalize the media, but I think he should merely parallel the
private media with open source government media ( no rules to use it, none, not any, sex
weird stuff, criminal stuff, whatever ,just let anyone with something to say say it on their
own website hosted by the government). Produce a government media hosting site, allow anyone,
foreign or local, to present on the public media. use government developed search engine and
indexing technology (no private party no private contractors, everything and everyone
involved at the government host site is a government employee and all technology is developed
by government for government use only) and let the masses decide for themselves both 1) form
of government and 2) degree of corruption they will accept. Everyone can then select do they
want to view the Deep State Media or one of the millions of content providers visible on the
government media host.
"Zionism(A.K.A. Neo-Cons, and all "Israeli Firsters") is a political ideology based upon
the suspension of reason and common sense, rooted upon a macabre death wish that worships the
state of Israel.
Israel-First loyalists do not have to be Jewish. Christian-Zionists routinely forgo
faithfulness to our country, when they place Israel above the interests of our own nation.
The notion that Israel is a trusted ally is the most absurd illusion that exists in a
demented political culture. This is the "Big Lie", an invention of Zionist subversion, which
is the cause of an insane American foreign policy. Israel-First zealots control every aspect
of political power in the United States. An actual American holocaust that stares us directly
in our faces stems from sick fraudulent propaganda and phony guilt deceit that only benefits
Zionists and Israel."
I hope not. If Trump wants to go down a hero, he can be the monkey wrench that wrecks so
much damage on the machine that it's no longer capable of threatening the world. If he can
perform a controlled demolition of the USA, the rest of the world will continue just fine
without them. We'll remember him as a hero for preventing WW3.
None of this makes any difference. The MSM still control 98 percent of the information
transmission systems in the western world. Indeed, (((they))) are beginning to prohibit other
information systems such as the internet.
What you don't hear about never happened. The flip side of that coin is that what you hear
about over and over comes to be reality, regardless. Think Tawana Brawley. Think Duke sports
teams.
Where there's smoke there must be fire, right?
Trump has a talent for feeding the MSM red meat. Always with a good dose of poison mixed
in so they are happy to shoot themselves in the foot. Think Roseanne Roseannadanna.
Nevermind
Well, he can't attack Syria because Israel, ya know, might get hot grease spattered on
them. And besides, Israel wants Syria with as little additional damage as possible, leaving
an attack on Iran as the only method of "attacking" Russia. But, it cannot be done directly,
with flimsy excuses. The excuses are just too damn flimsy.
Also, life is too damn good for American Army mercenaries to have to risk life and limb
for another meaningless ME conflict. Nope, the Army needs another five years, at the very
least, before another round of medals and benefit-increases justifies their personal risk. US
Army take-home, "combat" pay and massive health-and-living benefits amount to the best living
any white American boy can experience, but there is a limit.
Now, limited-scope attack by proxy? Iraq border conflict? Afghanistan border conflict?
Both good, plus there is already umpty-ump bajillion $ of US taxpayer-paid military equipment
in Afghanistan. Good excuse to junk it all and get new stuff. That's what taxpayers are for,
after all.
The fact is that the U.S. is a Zionist controlled plantation and there is no difference at
the top levels between the demonrats and the republicons as both are Zionist controlled and
are traitors to America, as proof of this is the Israeli and Zionist controlled deep state
attack on 911 which killed 3000 Americans and Israel and the Zionists got away with it and
every thinking America knows they did it.
The only difference between Trump and Helliary is their plumbing, both are Zionist puppets
and the ziocons run the U.S. gov..
See,
this is why I enjoy Leonid Bershidsky's writing . Despite his idealistic prattling that
Russia is actually guilty of all the things America says it is – his ultimate loyalty
is still to his adopted homeland, the land of milk and honey – he remains essentially a
realist. And his take on the economic dynamics is brutally realistic; the United States
cannot 'bring the Russian economy to its knees'. Once again, America's ridiculously-high
opinion of itself and its power fail to take account of consequences.
Oh, it could, I suppose, in a way. A way that would see the world's largest economy
– arguably, and certainly in its last days if it is actually still the world's largest
economy – wreck the global economy and its own trade relationship with the world in
order to damage Russia. Is it willing to go that far? You just never know, as decades of
feeding itself exceptionalism have addled its thinking.
Bershidsky points out – correctly, I think – that Russia has held off on
punishing American companies in Russia just as the USA has not dared to sanction the energy
industry in Russia. Neither wants to take that step, although one will certainly provoke the
other.
In fact, it occurs to me that if Russia were really as malignant and evil as Washington
pretends it is, Russia would be first to take that step, booting American companies out of
Russia, perhaps giving them 72 hours to clear out their desks and get out. What would happen
then? America would be bound to drop the sanctions hammer on oil and gas. And what would
happen then? Europe would say, it's been a lovely party, but I must be going. I give that an
8 of 10 chance of happening, and solely because of the stupid actions heretofore by the Trump
government. Had America been reasonable, it would have stood a chance of carrying Europe with
it to a war against Russia. But Trump and his blowhard bullying have hardened European
resolve against the USA.
" it is under $500 million and is likely mostly money from Ukrainians working in
Russia. I do not see any corporate level investment happening in the current climate.
"
The above linked RBK article goes on to read:
According to the presented data, during the period from January to June, the Ukraine
received $1,259 billion, of which $436 million came from Russia. In second place was Cyprus,
which invested $219 million and in third place amongst the largest investors was the
Netherlands ($207.7 million).
In addition, contributions were made to the Ukraine economy by Austria ($58.7 million),
Poland ($54.1), France ($46.9) and the UK ($43.4).
The report says that almost 60% of these funds ($750 million) were invested in the
financial and insurance sphere; 9.6% of of the funds were invested by the Ukrainian
authorities into the wholesale and retail trade; 8.2% into industry and 7.9 per cent. into
information and telecommunications.
In mid-August, former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said that Russia had been
the main trading partner of the Ukraine since 2014 and because of this the return of the
Crimea and the resolution of the conflict in the Donbass were becoming impossible. "There is
no plan for victory in this state. Because you are not behaving like people who want a
victory. You are already slaves", he said.
In response to Yushchenko's statement, the ex-head of the Ukrainian Ministry of the
Economy, Viktor Suslov, said that the words of the former Ukrainian leader were "absurd" and
considered any damage to Kiev caused by breaking off trade with Russia as being
"colossal".
Doesn't sound like all of this money sloely consists of that sent off to "Independent"
Ukraine by economic migrants from that country who are eking out a living in the Evil
Empire.
Verkhovna Rada Deputy Vadym Rabinovich on air of TV channel "112 Ukraine" said that the
termination of trade with Russia will destroy Ukrainian economy.
According to him, Russia remains the largest trading partner of the Ukraine, as trade
turnover between the two countries is growing every month.
"The trade balance with Russia is growing every month for one simple reason: the free
economic zone with Europe has brought us only losses", said Rabinovich.
He noted that the interruption of trade between Moscow and Kiev is fraught with the
loss, of "approximately one third of the gross national product".
"With all of the stupidity that you have done in the country, then with another
unbalanced step you'll destroy the economy", summed up the Rada deputy.
Earlier, former head of the Main Department of the Ukrainian security Service, Vasily
Vovk, proposed that the border with Russia be completely blocked and that ties with her be
cut.
A few are beginning to wake up to the reality that snatching Ukraine away from Russia was
never about prosperity and security for its people, and all about destabilizing what the west
perceived as the quickening of an unwelcome regional influence, and curbing it. The EU
– and its string-puller, Washington – does not give a fuck about the economic
well-being of Ukrainians, does not have even the brotherly connection of being of the same
ethnic group, and for so long as Ukraine is willing to suffer being poor in silence, for that
long it will not be a problem for its new 'partners'.
Nationalist Nazi nutjobs are always proposing the border be sealed ever-tighter, if it
were feasible to build a stainless-steel wall between Ukraine and Russia which reached to low
earth orbit, they would vote for it. But the Great Wall Of Yatsenyuk never materialized, he's
enjoying his Florida condo, and there is no practical way to limit commerce between the two
countries while the people are increasingly motivated toward its continuing.
Ukraine is on the edge of collapse, and I don't think any force on earth can prevent its
sliding over the edge. The west is not going to pony up the $170 Billion or so it would take
to rescue it; if it did so, Porky and his minions would steal most of it for themselves, and
Russia is unlikely to ever permit again the degree of fraternal closeness that existed
between the two countries, since it is clear it would take only another western intervention
to render it once again an untrustworthy spoiler. Once Nord Stream II is built, Ukraine will
have lost its leverage and will be of no further significant value to the western purveyors
of destabilization.
More such core realization is necessary to prevent Ukraine from officially blaming its
collapse on anyone but itself. The government will try that course, naturally, and you don't
need to be able to see very far into the future to know that it is Russia who will be blamed,
despite plenty of empirical evidence that Russian investors and Ukrainian refugees working in
Russia were all that kept it alive before the end. But in order that Ukrainians know in their
heart of hearts that their government stepped on its own dick over and over, and that they
passively failed to correct it, there needs to be more such public confession. I can show you
plenty of analysis, in English, published before things went pear-shaped in the dying moments
of 2013, which proposed that severing trade relationships with Russia as the nationalists
insisted would cost Ukraine just about exactly what the Rada now says will happen, years too
late. But they got one thing right – Ukraine and Russia cannot be brothers, not even
friends, for so long as Ukraine harbours that nutty nationalist element. Give western Ukraine
to Poland, and encourage all the nationalists to go to the new paradise, and ensure that
happens. They can bore the Poles with their raptures about Kievan Rus. Then maybe some
relationship could be salvaged.
"... I was not sure whether Trump was controlled opposition or simply a useful scapegoat for the economic crisis that globalists are clearly engineering. Now it appears that he is both. ..."
"... Many businessmen end up dealing with elitist controlled banks at some point in their careers. But when Trump entered office and proceeded to load his cabinet with ghouls from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, the Council on Foreign Relations and give Wilber Ross the position of Commerce Secretary, it became obvious that Trump is in fact a puppet for the banks. ..."
"... If one examines the history of fake coups, there is ALWAYS an element of orchestrated division, sometimes between the globalists and their own puppets. This is called 4th Generation warfare, in which almost all divisions are an illusion and the real target is the public psyche. ..."
"... the overall picture is not as simple as "Left vs. Right." Instead, we need to look at the situation more like a chess board, and above that chess board looms the globalists, attempting to control all the necessary pieces on BOTH sides. Every provocation by leftists is designed to elicit a predictable response from conservatives to the point that we become whatever the globalists want us to become. ..."
"... Therefore it is not leftists that present the greatest threat to individual liberty, but the globalist influenced Trump administration. A failed coup on the part of the left could be used as a rationale for incremental and unconstitutional "safeguards." And conservatives may be fooled into supporting these measures as the threat is overblown. ..."
At that time I was certain that the globalists would find great use for a Trump presidency,
more so in fact than a Clinton presidency. However, I was not sure whether Trump was controlled
opposition or simply a useful scapegoat for the economic crisis that globalists are clearly
engineering. Now it appears that he is both.
Trump's history was already suspicious. He was bailed out of his considerable debts
surrounding his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City in the early 1990s by
Rothschild banking agent Wilber Ross , which saved him from embarrassment and
possibly saved his entire fortune . This alone was not necessarily enough to deny Trump the
benefit of the doubt in my view.
Many businessmen end up dealing with elitist controlled banks at some point in their
careers. But when Trump entered office and proceeded to load his cabinet with ghouls from
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, the Council on Foreign Relations and give Wilber Ross the position of
Commerce Secretary, it became obvious that Trump is in fact a puppet for the banks.
Some liberty movement activists ignore this reality and attempt to argue around the facts of
Trump's associations. "What about all the media opposition to Trump? Doesn't this indicate he's
not controlled?" they say. I say, not really.
If one examines the history of fake coups, there is ALWAYS an element of orchestrated
division, sometimes between the globalists and their own puppets. This is called 4th Generation
warfare, in which almost all divisions are an illusion and the real target is the public
psyche.
This is not to say that leftist opposition to Trump and conservatives is not real. It
absolutely is. The left has gone off the ideological deep end into an abyss of rabid frothing
insanity, but the overall picture is not as simple as "Left vs. Right." Instead, we need to
look at the situation more like a chess board, and above that chess board looms the globalists,
attempting to control all the necessary pieces on BOTH sides. Every provocation by leftists is
designed to elicit a predictable response from conservatives to the point that we become
whatever the globalists want us to become.
... ... ...
As this is taking place, conservatives are growing more sensitive to the notion of a leftist
coup, from silencing of conservative voices to an impeachment of Trump based on fraudulent
ideas of "Russian collusion."
To be clear, the extreme left has no regard for individual liberties or constitutional law.
They use the Constitution when it suits them, then try to tear it down when it doesn't suit
them. However, the far-left is also a paper tiger; it is not a true threat to conservative
values because its membership marginal, it is weak, immature and irrational. Their only power
resides in their influence within the mainstream media, but with the MSM fading in the face of
the alternative media, their social influence is limited. It is perhaps enough to organize a
"coup," but it would inevitably be a failed coup.
Therefore it is not leftists that present the greatest threat to individual liberty, but the
globalist influenced Trump administration. A failed coup on the part of the left could be used
as a rationale for incremental and unconstitutional "safeguards." And conservatives may be
fooled into supporting these measures as the threat is overblown.
I have always said that the only people that can destroy conservative principles are
conservatives. Conservatives diminish their own principles every time they abandon their
conscience and become exactly like the monsters they hope to defeat. And make no mistake, the
globalists are well aware of this strategy.
Carroll Quigley, a pro-globalist professor and the author of Tragedy and Hope, a book
published decades ago which outlined the plan for a one world economic and political system, is
quoted in his address ' Dissent: Do We Need It
':
"They say, "The Congress is corrupt." I ask them, "What do you know about the Congress? Do
you know your own Congressman's name?" Usually they don't. It's almost a reflex with them,
like seeing a fascist pig in a policeman. To them, all Congressmen are crooks. I tell them
they must spend a lot of time learning the American political system and how it functions,
and then work within the system. But most of them just won't buy that. They insist the system
is totally corrupt. I insist that the system, the establishment, whatever you call it, is so
balanced by diverse forces that very slight pressures can produce perceptible results.
For example, I've talked about the lower middle class as the backbone of fascism in the
future. I think this may happen. The party members of the Nazi Party in Germany were
consistently lower middle class. I think that the right-wing movements in this country are
pretty generally in this group."
Is a "failed coup" being staged in order to influence conservatives to become the very
"fascists" the left accuses us of being? The continuing narrative certainly suggests that this
is the game plan.
* * *
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"During his 32 years in the US Senate, the real John McCain was a consistent warmonger ,
advocating US military intervention in Africa, South America, Korea, and almost everywhere.
He sang "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" before a veterans group, and called demonstrators
against Henry Kissinger "despicable scum." The record of his public calls for coups,
invasions, blockades, bombings and assassinations to advance US military and economic
domination of the planet is far too long to list.
All this explains why corporate media are lifting up their whitewashed and manufactured
version of John McCain. He's one of their own, a genuine war criminal and loyal servant of
capital. Lifting him up, creating and embellishing his heroic story lifts up and legitimizes
the rule of the rich. Now they'll be looking for parks, schools and airports to name after
him. Just as the elementary school in Aaron Magruder's Boondocks was named after J. Edgar
Hoover, we'll soon see John McCain's name staring back at us from what little public property
is left. Get ready for it."
Ahhh but there is much more to the story here look and read:
Always before god and the world the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills.
... The whole of nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness, an eternal
victory of the strong over the weak.
Who is paraphrased here?
The first state to adopt evolutionary ethics would prevail over all others in the struggle
for existence. ... Extermination and war then became moral goods to eliminate the weak.
And who said this?
The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or
for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in
the end peace is made with the strong.
2. Wilhelm Schallmayer, co-founder of the German eugenics movement in the early 20th
century, paraphrased here .
3. Benjamin Netanyahoo on August
29 2018 at the Negev Nuclear Weapon Center (Also here .)
Also:
It is not just by chance that Netanyahoo sounds like Hitler. Both, Theodore Herzl, the
founder of Zionism, and Adolph Hitler developed their political awareness around the turn of
the century in imperial Vienna. Social Darwinism was the rage of that time. Fascists and
Zionists drank from the same poisoned well.
Besides - did you know that Hitler did not want to exterminate the Jews? An Arab made him do
that. A Muslim. That is according
to one Benjamin Netanyahoo, currently prime minister of the Zionist entity in
Palestine:
In a speech before the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu described a meeting
between Husseini and Hitler in November, 1941: "Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at
the time, he wanted to expel the Jew. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If
you expel them, they'll all come here (to Palestine).' According to Netanyahu, Hitler then
asked: "What should I do with them?" and the mufti replied: "Burn them."
The account is, of course, historically nonsense.
Related:
The administration of the Hindu supremacist Narendra Modi in India launched an
arrest campaign to silence its critics. Its demonetization program, a first step to introduce a degressive bank
transaction tax , did not achieve the desired results but
created an economic mess . Modi's re-election is in danger. The accusations against the
arrested people imply, correctly in my view, that the government of India is fascist:
I figured one of those quotes had to have been from Winston Churchill. Though on second
thought, his forte was more in the denigration of brown-skinned people.
When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled "made in Germany"; it will not be
marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course,
"Americanism."
Professor Halford E. Luccock of the Divinity School of Yale University in a sermon at the
Riverside Church, Riverside Drive and 122d Street, NYC. September 1938.
So what.
1 and 3 are not even arguments, they are plain old description of reality as it is.
As for point 2, that's that old German arrogance, how the hell do you know what the genome
"wants". Taken form what we know today, a eugenic state would initiate a program of forced
miscegenation.
Such is the arrogance of evolutionary ethics. And so too, we pay the price of a system
built on such folly. Certainly no better than those who claim divine sanction to slaughter
and destroy.
"The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or
for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in
the end peace is made with the strong."
It is ironic that Netanyahoo should say that. Netanyahoo himself is extremely weak and
unstable due to his corruption and the criminal probes against him. He flexes his muscles and
violently bullies the Palestinians and illegally bombs Syria to assert a strength that is
nonexistent. Israel is weak against its neighbours especially Hezbollah and Syria, its IDF is
weak and ineffective against Hezbollah and the Syrian army, and in its insane paranoia it is
so fanning the flames of conflict that it risks inciting (or may even itself initiate) a war
that realistically could result in its own annihilation.
Russia's foreign minister is the latest official to warn the US against using a possible
chemical weapons provocation to justify a new strike against Syrian forces. He said Moscow
warned the West not to play with fire in Syria.
Sergey Lavrov reiterated the warning that a staged chemical weapons attack in Syria's
Idlib province may trigger a US-led attack on the forces loyal to Damascus.
READ MORE: US & allies can have missiles ready to strike Syria within 24 hours –
Russian Foreign Ministry
Earlier, the Russian military reported that a group of militants in Syria was preparing a
provocation, in which chlorine gas would be used to frame the Syrian government forces. The
incident would be used by the US and its allies to justify a new attack against the country,
similar to what happened in April, according to the claim.
Amid international tensions, Russia has launched a massive naval exercise in the
Mediterranean Sea, which involves 25 ships and 30 aircraft, including Tu-160 strategic
bombers.
The US earlier stated that it would retaliate to a possible a chemical attack by the
Syrian government, using more firepower than it did in April. The previous tripartite strike
by the US, the UK and France targeted what they called sites involved in chemical weapons
research. It came in response to an alleged use of an improvised chlorine bomb against a
militant-held area. Russia insists that the incident had been staged with the goal of
triggering the Western response.
\~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It will take the US and its allies just 24 hours to ready its missile-strike group for an
attack against Syria, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. The statement comes amid warnings of
a possible false-flag chemical attack.
Earlier, the Pentagon denied Moscow's claim that Washington was building up military
forces in the region. One of the US warships, USS 'The Sullivans,' left the Persian Gulf
after media reports about an increased American military presence in the area, according to
Zakharova.
While rejecting news of its growing presence in the region, the "US military forgot to
mention that they can build up missile capabilities to strike Syria in just 24 hours. The
strike group of the United States, France and the UK currently consists of planes, strategic
and tactical aircraft at bases in Jordan, Kuwait, Crete," Zakharova said.
Moscow has repeatedly warned that a false flag chemical weapons attack is being planned in
Syria's Idlib province to frame Damascus and use as a pretext for a new strike. Eight
canisters of chlorine were delivered to a village near Jisr al-Shughur city, and a group of
militants, trained in the handling of chemical weapons by the British private military
contractor Olive Group, arrived in the area, according to Defense Ministry.
On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the planned provocation is
aimed only at preventing the expulsion of terrorists from the de-escalation zone in Idlib. He
also accused the US of trying to get rid of another "dissident regime" in Syria, as was the
case in Iraq and Libya.
\~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The second of these RT links is being totally censored by Google and DuckDuckGo. I think
something big is up. Perhaps WW-III.
Hitler's inspiration for the specifics of Nazism was Sparta (while the political system in
itself was inspired from Fascism). It's amazing (and one of the most glaring examples of
liberal self-censorship) that people don't know about this fact.
For people who don't know, (the famous version of) Sparta was a post-communist polis of
Classical Greece, born from the reforms of mythological Lycourgos in the 9th Century BCE.
Apart from the apparent military discipline, Classical Sparta was famous for two things:
1) it didn't killed the male population of the conquered poleis in the Peloponnese and
captured and assimilated the adult female population; instead, it enslaved them, and
institutionalized their status (the helots). It was impossible, in theses, for a helot to
become a Spartiate, so the helots population became much larger than the Spartiate population
over time. The most amazing fact here is that, albeit some helot revolts probably happened,
they were never victorious. Hitler rationalized it as Spartiate genetic superiority.
2) the Spartiates allegedly practiced eugenics among themselves. This was immortalized in
our times by the popular movie "300", where they threw defective newborns over a cliff. This
cliff really exists and there are many skeletons found there by archaeologists, but none of
them are from babies or even children -- only adult males were found (probably criminals;
there was no prisonal system in the ancient world because it would be very expensive:
penalties were usually execution for the common guy -- and throwing from a cliff was a very
traditional way of execution, practiced by the Romans since the kingdom times -- and exile
for the powerful). Again, Hitler rationalized this (probably myth) as the cause for (1).
But the rationalization behind those three quotes is wrong: yes, it is true that "might"
is an essential ingredient for "right", but might doesn't come from intrinsic characteristics
of a given people (be it genetic or religious).
For the first case, Darwin's Natural Selection theory is clear: it only happens because
reproduction is random. Factors such as geographical isolation are hindering factors of
natural selections. In other words, artificial selection (eugenics) is a bad way of doing
natural selection: it is always the environment that should decide who reproduces and who
doesn't, human breeding should always be random (i.e. by chance) if we want to keep our
genetic diversity at the healthies state possible.
For the second case, just empirical investigation is enough: a religion only consolidates
itself as dominant ex post facto, i.e. after the domination is done. Religion is only to
reinforce consensus of the power. But religion by itself doesn't generate power: Islam, for
example, was born as a necessity of the merchants of Mecca to initiate a bellicose expansion
through the Arabian peninsula (and beyond). But it was economic necessity which gave birth to
the religion, not the religion that gave birth to the economic necessity.
-//-
As for Modi. It was a known fact his monetary policy would fail. The Chinese had already
warned, days after it was approved:
His demonetisation policy only didn't result in the immediate collapse of his government
because most Indian people don't have access to such big notes to begin with. He gained
significant popular support from the poorest rural areas with this:
Could have been Churchill, Kissinger, Poppy Bush, Henry Ford, Lloyd Blankfein, Patton,
Sherman, John McCain, Ollie North, any member of the Cheney family, either of the Kagan
brothers plus Nudelman, Andrew Jackson, Karl Rove, Pliny the elder, or hundreds of other
like-minded heroes whom made sincere, heartfelt remarks such as these.
Now JEB or Dubya or Nikki Haley, or Betsy DeVoss, for example, don't have the brain cells
to put together sentences like these, but they uphold this worldview for a trust fund or a
paycheck.
Full title of Darwin's magnum opus: 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life'. Presumably, though, favoured
by nature, not by human intervention. Therein lies the problem: Man has a mind, a will and an
awareness of the past, and for thinkers like Samuel Butler and Marx, Darwin (who was
influenced by Malthus) had advanced scientific thought a lot, but had not given a full
picture.
@8 I did a duck-duck-go and google search on "missiles ready to strike Syria within 24 hours"
and both popped up the RT article at the head of the search.
"Meglio viviere un giorno da leone che cento da pecore." " Better to live a day as lion then
100 days as a sheep. "
Benito Mussolini circa 1924. Fascist and Zionist LA MEME CHOSE
Agree totally with b's take on Netanyahu. What an a-hole.
I am eagerly awaiting b's commentary on the neo-Nazi mobs in Germany. No doubt the rise of
fascism in Europe is related to U.S. driven wars in the Middle East which have produced
hundreds of thousands of refugees, but what can be done about it? I should think that step
number one is to cease hostilities in Syria, thus allowing civil society to normalize. This
would stem the outward flow of refugees and encourage the inward flow of many who would want
to return to their homeland.
Communists and Jews were in concentration camps in Germany since 1933 in Dachau eight years
before the meeting, starved, exploited to collapse and death in quarries. In fact most of
first Jews were communists, candidates from KPD arrested before elections of April 1933
conducted under emergency law with Hitler's designated as Kantzler.
"We hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the
Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what
is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do
that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong
do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
A summary of Athenian statements to the Melians, Book V, 5.89-[1]
Melian Dialogue
History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides
The final clause is often quoted by many people, among them Noam Chomsky.
The Melian Dialogue is a brilliant fictionalized recreation of the pre-siege negotiations
between Athens and Melos. It is important to note that, from a military point of view, the
brutal genocidal siege, while initially successful, was short-lived, successfully over-turned
by the Spartans, and ultimately regretted by many Athenians (Cf. example of hubris).
Perhaps more revealing is the spirit in which Thucycides is quoted: Triumphantly,
realistically, or lamentably.
The Twitter link on the Netanyahu quote is a gold mine! Simply scroll down!
'Russian interference???' 'We're working to prevent Iran from establishing military
presence in Syria. We won't relent in pursuit of this goal as we did not relent in bringing
about the cancellation of the bad nuclear deal w/ Iran, a goal seen impossible when I put it
on the intl agenda several years ago
10:05 - 29. 8. 2018'
Posted by: Northern Observer | Aug 31, 2018 10:10:13 AM | 5
1 and 3 are not even arguments, they are plain old description of reality as it
is.
Not quite.
In (1) the second sentence could pass as an observation, but the first one cannot. It
contains the verb "has to" so it is not a passive statement but the assertive one. It implies
a necessity and desire.
In (3), yes, from that quote alone it is not clear is Bibi identifies himself with the weak,
or with the strong. So, you might be right, it could be that he just cynically describes the
world as is, without endorsing it. However, it clear IMO on which side he prefers to be.
But, I do not see that kind of attitude much different than for example of my realtor who
told that I should install alarm in my apartment so that a prospective burglar chooses
someone else's place to rob, instead of mine.
Or a car dealer who sells huge 4x4 SUV monsters to moms telling them that it is safer for her
children, because in case of collision, passengers in larger vehicle are less injured than in
the smaller one. And moms do buy them. And put a sticker on the back 'Baby in car' what I
find quite ironic.
"Surely some will always be stronger than others. The real question is whether the strong
have an obligation to help the weak." dh
There is no question about it: unless the strong assist the weak the community will dissolve.
Society depends upon mutual aid and without society the strongest individual perishes and
disappears.
Nothing is more mistaken than to regard the ravings of fascists and the fantasies of
eugenicists as 'common sense' axioms. In reality man is a social creature almost uniquely
unable to survive alone.
Hitler and Netanyahu were/are whistling in the dark, attempting to banish their consciousness
of the inevitable fate of the unjust whose actions are a stench in the nostrils of
humanity-Karma.
Will Israel survive until 2030?
In his report , Garrie says: "The Russian Foreign Minister has condemned the terrorist
act and has accused the Kiev regime of committing an act of state terrorism." I've yet to see
Lavrov's statement, but I trust Garrie.
As for American Fascism, the entire mindset of American Exceptionalism combined with the
doctrine of Manifest Destiny provide it with a substantial foundation. Combined with the
implied imperialism within JQ Adams speech that outlined what became known as The Monroe
Doctrine, White, Anglo-Saxon superiority was further institutionalized. Social-Darwinism is
quite complex to discuss despite it being a relatively simple concept on the surface.
Wikipedia's page
is rather good on this topic and shows Herbert Spencer published his ideas before Darwin
published his revolutionary book. Vice-President Henry Wallace is the most prominent American
citizen I know of to write boldly about American Fascism In his famous NY Times op/ed
The Dangers of
American Fascism that concludes thusly:
"Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and
eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this
conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain
races, creeds and classes."
Yes, he saw it but IMO was too soft toward it. I'd be remiss not to mention Bertram
Gross's bold 1980 book Friendly Fascism and Sheldon Wolin's Inverted
Totalitarianism .
Northern Observer - "1 and 3 are not even arguments, they are plain old description of
reality as it is"
Not so. The Primitive Darwinists took no account of feedback, or inter-related systems.
The super-tiger eats all the prey and then dies out. There has to be a balance.
But that's a mechanistic refutation of the Primitive Darwinist argument, not that much
better than the argument itself. To be human surely means something different in any case,
unless we are to succumb to mechanistic determinism.
I thought it comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, who is after all blamed as a
father/idelogue of Nazim.
"What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and the power
itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling
that power is increasing -- that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more
power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence. The first principle of
our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish. And they ought to be helped to
perish."
As far as the strong protecting the weak, the human animal is a prime example of this as the
mother and infant must be protected for several years before either can fend for themselves.
Another well known example is the mother bear protecting her cubs--don't mess with either!
There's no superiority/inferiority involved as such in either example as both are natural
mechanisms. The concept of social castes/classes was very well established millennia ago with
numerous ideas put forth to justify their existence, many of which still operate today. Many
of those ideas are present within the Monthly
Review article I linked to yesterday. Engels may or may not have coined the term
Social Murder, but even the Whigs agreed as this passage shows:
"In 1844, Frederick Engels wrote that 'English society daily and hourly commits what the
working-men's organs, with perfect correctness, characterize as social murder. It has placed
the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long [and] it
undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them
to the grave before their time.'24 Anyone who thinks that Engels was not an objective witness
should compare his judgement to that of the influential Whig journal the Edinburgh
Review :
"Out of every two persons who die in the east of London, one perishes from preventable
causes. From twenty to thirty thousand of the labouring population of London are killed every
year by causes which, if we chose, we might expel by a current of water. Though we do not
take these persons out of their houses and murder them, we do the same thing in effect, -- we
neglect them in their poisonous homes, and leave them there to a lingering but a certain
death."
It's very easy to see why Marx and Engels characterized what they observed in England and
Europe as Class War. But can the English of the mid 1800s be characterized as fascist, or
perhaps just the elite?
"...since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question
between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they
must..." Thucydides - he said it in Melian Dialogue.
But the quote should be read in context...and is itself a paraphrase of Athenian
Policy,
It is also True. Yes indeed, fascists do sometimes say true things...it happens. I do not
like fascists, but I do like truth, doesn't everybody?
Gramsci's thinking thrives in many fields, being a safe haven for political and
intellectual organizations midway between the pure abandonment of Marxism and unrestricted
adherence to neoliberal "democracy".
Gramsci became the prostitute of the neoliberals, as he was before that of the recycled
Stalinists when against "Trotskyism", whatever this was.
Social Darwinism and Eugenics was certainly not owned by Fascists alone. Its
alive and well today and is used to justify neoliberal economics and imperialism. The strong
(cognitive or physical) rule the weak. Any attempt at equalizing the disparity is labelled as
Socialism and is opposed in part for fears it promotes dysgenics.
Social Darwinism and Eugenics was certainly not owned by Fascists alone. Its alive and well
today and is used to justify neoliberal economics and imperialism. The strong (cognitive or
physical) rule the weak. Any attempt at equalizing the disparity is labelled as Socialism and
is opposed in part for fears it promotes dysgenics.
So since this blog entry is dedicated on "The delusions of grandeur that the
United States of America suffer", I will let you on a little secret....
I am doing this because USA is literally a midget and that is not my personal oppinion.
USA is as defenceless as a baby cockroach trying to find its way out of a stinky poophole using
as a nest.
God has a very strange sense of humor it seems.
For the love of me I can't figure out why He chose these clowns to pretend they are the
global superpower in order for Mankind to be bullied around.
It must be our collective sins!
I can understand, Rome, Persia, Greece, China, India, even some portions of European
history, but USA is a total joke.
... ... ...
So since this blog entry is dedicated on "The delusions of grandeur that the United States
of America suffer", I will let you on a little secret....
I am doing this because USA is literally a midget and that is not my personal oppinion.
USA is as defenceless as a baby cockroach trying to find its way out of a stinky poophole
using as a nest.
God has a very strange sense of humor it seems.
For the love of me I can't figure out why He chose these clowns to pretend they are the
global superpower in order for Mankind to be bullied around.
It must be our collective sins!
I can understand, Rome, Persia, Greece, China, India, even some portions of European
history, but USA is a total joke.
Darwin had it right I think. Or maybe it was the ancient Greeks. I'm trying pretty hard to
keep up here,eugenics might be partly responsible for that.
Thank Christ somebody broke in with news of that guy getting blowed up. Somebody said
Canada might be the culprit. Well, suck me dry and call me Dusty, I never heard of that
motherfucker and neither have any of my friends at the bar. Maybe it's because of that gal
who had a granddad that was a Uke who liked Nazi invaders better than the Russians. But she's
pretty busy right now trying deal with other stuff. Like the biggest trade deal in the
world.
I had been going to propose that the answer to all three questions was "Thrasymachus" (from
Plato's Republic) - but I see in checking my source that all that fine young man did actually
say was that justice is the advantage of the stronger, using as an example the rulers of
cities who order things to their own advantage. And indeed, the statement is refuted, which
causes the frightening man to blush...But best to read the original, as what Thrasymachus
represents looms larger in that setting and in the labyrinthian dialogue upon whose threshold
he makes his claim.
So back to current affairs !
England is now devided down the middle politically, as is a whole list of country's, to many
to mention. left and right increaseingly polerised ! Perhaps the most important being usa. If
we look at the right wing street violence in Germany this week, we see what is going to
happen all the way round very soon. This weeks violent aggressive protest is much much bigger
than people realise ! It was aimed at inocent people in the street, it was apparently
protesting about victems of western military aggression being in Germany. But not stateing
their victems, but the problem.
Last Sunday these nazi's and there simperfiers numbered 6000 but the truth is a large
proportion of the police present were on there side. Looking the other way when violence
occurred failing to arrest people doing the nazi salute. The coalition govenment has a large
part extreme right wing.
These next weeks determine which way western country's will swing. We can stop the nazi's on
the street's or we can except the consequences.
Whatever thing Trump and his minions (American allies, "Western Civilization") are doing
right now, they are just reestructuring already existing trade deals at best.
-//-
As for the "Greek" discussion. It's not a surprise Hitler took at least some inspiration
from the ancient Greek. From the 19th to early 20th Century, there was some kind of "Greek
revival" in Germany's academic circles. Take Nietzsche for example: he dialogues with the
Greeks (mainly Plato and Socrates) many times. Even that so-called Nazi historian (forgot his
name) focused on the ancient Greek. Hell, even Marx did his doctorate thesis over Epicurus.
So, Hitler essentially lived in the end of a "philellene" period of Germany.
I have been a student of the history of hemispheres and I see this as an abrupt redirect.
Several heavily destructive wars have been fought over this in just the last 55 years. LAND
REFORM is on the economic agenda. At the IMF indeed.
Even at this late stage, the right wing can be stopped peacefully! By sheer weight of numbers
alone. tomorrow again they plan a large demonstration. It's now time for the German public to
stand up against the reemergence of full blown hitler style fascism taking over there
country. And lastly a warning as shocking as it is you can no longer trust your police, they
are no longer on your side or on the side of law and order. I don't say this lightly ! I have
been following events closely !
Netanyahoo and David Irving arguing in the same direction regarding Hitler and
the slaughter of Europe's Jews. Wow.
Thanks, b, I didn't see the (scroll down) so leapt right to search engines and in: Vision and
Violence
Arthur P. Mendel · 1999 · Philosophy
from the Google Books access, found some pretty dundew'd up stuff. Are these really
quotations? Wow, eugenics must have been a thrill ride in the 1930s for a gimp.
"... Developing the tradition charted by C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic The Power Elite , in his latest book, Professor Peter Phillips starts by reviewing the transition from the nation state power elites described by authors such as Mills to a transnational power elite centralized on the control of global capital. ..."
Developing the tradition charted by C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic The Power Elite
, in his latest book, Professor Peter Phillips starts by reviewing the transition from the
nation state power elites described by authors such as Mills to a transnational power elite
centralized on the control of global capital.
Thus, in his just-released study Giants: The Global
Power Elite , Phillips, a professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University
in the USA, identifies the world's top seventeen asset management firms, such as BlackRock and
J.P Morgan Chase, each with more than one trillion dollars of investment capital under
management, as the 'Giants' of world capitalism. The seventeen firms collectively manage more
than $US41.1 trillion in a self-invested network of interlocking capital that spans the
globe.
This $41 trillion represents the wealth invested for profit by thousands of millionaires,
billionaires and corporations. The seventeen Giants operate in nearly every country in the
world and are 'the central institutions of the financial capital that powers the global
economic system'. They invest in anything considered profitable, ranging from 'agricultural
lands on which indigenous farmers are replaced by power elite investors' to public assets (such
as energy and water utilities) to war.
In addition, Phillips identifies the most important networks of the Global Power Elite and
the individuals therein. He names 389 individuals (a small number of whom are women and a token
number of whom are from countries other than the United States and the wealthier countries of
Western Europe) at the core of the policy planning nongovernmental networks that manage,
facilitate and defend the continued concentration of global capital. The Global Power Elite
perform two key uniting functions, he argues: they provide ideological justifications for their
shared interests (promulgated through their corporate media), and define the parameters of
action for transnational governmental organizations and capitalist nation-states.
More precisely, Phillips identifies the 199 directors of the seventeen global financial
Giants and offers short biographies and public information on their individual net wealth.
These individuals are closely interconnected through numerous networks of association including
the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Conference, university affiliations,
various policy councils, social clubs, and cultural enterprises. For a taste of one of these
clubs, see this account of The Links in New York. As Phillips
observes: 'It is certainly safe to conclude they all know each other personally or know of each
other in the shared context of their positions of power.'
The Giants, Phillips documents, invest in each other but also in many hundreds of investment
management firms, many of which are near-Giants. This results in tens of trillions of dollars
coordinated in a single vast network of global capital controlled by a very small number of
people. 'Their constant objective is to find enough safe investment opportunities for a return
on capital that allows for continued growth. Inadequate capital-placement opportunities lead to
dangerous speculative investments, buying up of public assets, and permanent war spending.'
Because the directors of these seventeen asset management firms represent the central core
of international capital, 'Individuals can retire or pass away, and other similar people will
move into their place, making the overall structure a self-perpetuating network of global
capital control. As such, these 199 people share a common goal of maximum return on investments
for themselves and their clients, and they may seek to achieve returns by any means necessary
– legal or not . the institutional and structural arrangements within the money
management systems of global capital relentlessly seek ways to achieve maximum return on
investment, and the conditions for manipulations – legal or not – are always
present.'
Like some researchers before him, Phillips identifies the importance of those transnational
institutions that serve a unifying function. The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, G20,
G7, World Trade Organization (WTO),
World Economic Forum (WEF), Trilateral
Commission, Bilderberg Group ,
Bank for International Settlements, Group of 30 (G30), the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Monetary
Conference serve as institutional mechanisms for consensus building within the transnational
capitalist class, and power elite policy formulation and implementation. 'These international
institutions serve the interests of the global financial Giants by supporting policies and
regulations that seek to protect the free, unrestricted flow of capital and debt collection
worldwide.'
But within this network of transnational institutions, Phillips identifies two very
important global elite policy-planning organizations: the Group of Thirty (which has 32 members) and the extended executive
committee of the Trilateral Commission
(which has 55 members). These nonprofit corporations, which each have a research and support
staff, formulate elite policy and issue instructions for their implementation by the
transnational governmental institutions like the G7, G20, IMF, WTO, and World Bank. Elite
policies are also implemented following instruction of the relevant agent, including
governments, in the context. These agents then do as they are instructed. Thus, these 85
members (because two overlap) of the Group of Thirty and the Trilateral Commission comprise a
central group of facilitators of global capitalism, ensuring that 'global capital remains safe,
secure, and growing'.
So, while many of the major international institutions are controlled by nation-state
representatives and central bankers (with proportional power exercised by dominant financial
supporters such as the United States and European Union countries), Phillips is more concerned
with the transnational policy groups that are nongovernmental because these organizations 'help
to unite TCC power elites as a class' and the individuals involved in these organizations
facilitate world capitalism. 'They serve as policy elites who seek the continued growth of
capital in the world.'
Developing this list of 199 directors of the largest money management firms in the world,
Phillips argues, is an important step toward understanding how capitalism works globally today.
These global power elite directors make the decisions regarding the investment of trillions of
dollars. Supposedly in competition, the concentrated wealth they share requires them to
cooperate for their greater good by identifying investment opportunities and shared risk
agreements, and working collectively for political arrangements that create advantages for
their profit-generating system as a whole.
Their fundamental priority is to secure an average return on investment of 3 to 10 percent,
or even more. The nature of any investment is less important than what it yields: continuous
returns that support growth in the overall market. Hence, capital investment in tobacco
products, weapons of war, toxic chemicals, pollution, and other socially destructive goods and
services are judged purely by their profitability. Concern for the social and environmental
costs of the investment are non-existent. In other words, inflicting death and destruction are
fine because they are profitable.
So what is the global elite's purpose? In a few sentences Phillips characterizes it thus:
The elite is largely united in support of the US/NATO military empire that prosecutes a
repressive war against resisting groups – typically labeled 'terrorists' – around
the world. The real purpose of 'the war on terror' is defense of transnational globalization,
the unimpeded flow of financial capital around the world, dollar hegemony and access to oil; it
has nothing to do with repressing terrorism which it generates, perpetuates and finances to
provide cover for its real agenda. This is why the United States has a long history of CIA and
military interventions around the world ostensibly in defense of 'national
interests'.
An interesting point that emerges for me from reading Phillips thoughtful analysis is that
there is a clear distinction between those individuals and families who have wealth and those
individuals who have (sometimes significantly) less wealth (which, nevertheless, is still
considerable) but, through their positions and connections, wield a great deal of power. As
Phillips explains this distinction, 'the sociology of elites is more important than particular
elite individuals and their families'. Just 199 individuals decide how more than $40 trillion
will be invested. And this is his central point. Let me briefly elaborate.
There are some really wealthy families in the world, notably including the families
Rothschild (France and the United Kingdom), Rockefeller (USA), Goldman-Sachs (USA), Warburgs
(Germany), Lehmann (USA), Lazards (France), Kuhn Loebs (USA), Israel Moses Seifs (Italy),
Al-Saud (Saudi Arabia), Walton (USA), Koch (USA), Mars (USA), Cargill-MacMillan (USA) and Cox
(USA). However, not all of these families overtly seek power to shape the world as they
wish.
Similarly, the world's extremely wealthy individuals such as Jeff Bezos (USA), Bill Gates
(USA), Warren Buffett (USA), Bernard Arnault (France), Carlos Slim Helu (Mexico) and Francoise
Bettencourt Meyers (France) are not necessarily connected in such a way that they exercise
enormous power. In fact, they may have little interest in power as such, despite their obvious
interest in wealth.
In essence, some individuals and families are content to simply take advantage of how
capitalism and its ancilliary governmental and transnational instruments function while others
are more politically engaged in seeking to manipulate major institutions to achieve outcomes
that not only maximize their own profit and hence wealth but also shape the world itself.
So if you look at the list of 199 individuals that Phillips identifies at the centre of
global capital, it does not include names such as Bezos, Gates, Buffett, Koch, Walton or even
Rothschild, Rockefeller or Windsor (the Queen of England) despite their well-known and
extraordinary wealth. As an aside, many of these names are also missing from the lists compiled
by groups such as Forbes and
Bloomberg , but their
absence from these lists is for a very different reason given the penchant for many really
wealthy individuals and families to avoid certain types of publicity and their power to ensure
that they do.
In contrast to the names just listed, in Phillips' analysis names like Laurence (Larry) Fink
(Chairman and CEO of BlackRock), James (Jamie) Dimon (Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase) and
John McFarlane (Chairman of Barclays Bank), while not as wealthy as those listed immediately
above, wield far more power because of their positions and connections within the global elite
network of 199 individuals.
Predictably then, Phillips observes, these three individuals have similar lifestyles and
ideological orientations. They believe capitalism is beneficial for the world and while
inequality and poverty are important issues, they believe that capital growth will eventually
solve these problems. They are relatively non-expressive about environmental issues, but
recognize that investment opportunities may change in response to climate 'modifications'. As
millionaires they own multiple homes. They attended elite universities and rose quickly in
international finance to reach their current status as giants of the global power elite. 'The
institutions they manage have been shown to engage in illegal collusions with others, but the
regulatory fines by governments are essentially seen as just part of doing business.'
In short, as I would characterize this description: They are devoid of a legal or moral
framework to guide their actions, whether in relation to business, fellow human beings, war or
the environment and climate. They are obviously typical of the elite.
Any apparent concern for people, such as that expressed by Fink and Dimon in response to the
racist violence in Charlottesville, USA in August 2017, is simply designed to promote
'stability' or more precisely, a stable (that is, profitable) investment and consumer
climate.
The lack of concern for people and issues that might concern many of us is also evident from
a consideration of the agenda at elite gatherings. Consider the International Monetary
Conference. Founded in 1956, it is a private yearly meeting of the top few hundred bankers in
the world. The American Bankers Association (ABA) serves as the secretariat for the conference.
But, as Phillips notes: 'Nothing on the agenda seems to address the socioeconomic consequences
of investments to determine the impacts on people and the environment.' A casual perusal of the
agenda at any elite gathering reveals that this comment applies equally to any elite forum.
See, for example, the agenda of the recent WEF meeting in
Davos . Any talk of 'concern' is misleading rhetoric.
Hence, in the words of Phillips: The 199 directors of the global Giants are 'a very select
set of people. They all know each other personally or know of each other. At least 69 have
attended the annual World Economic Forum, where they often serve on panels or give public
presentations. They mostly attended the same elite universities, and interact in upperclass
social setting[s] in the major cities of the world. They all are wealthy and have significant
stock holdings in one or more of the financial Giants. They are all deeply invested in the
importance of maintaining capital growth in the world. Some are sensitive to environmental and
social justice issues, but they seem to be unable to link these issues to global capital
concentration.'
Of course, the global elite cannot manage the world system alone: the elite requires agents
to perform many of the functions necessary to control national societies and the individuals
within them. 'The interests of the Global Power Elite and the TCC are fully recognized by major
institutions in society. Governments, intelligence services, policymakers, universities, police
forces, military, and corporate media all work in support of their vital interests.'
In other words, to elaborate Phillips' point and extend it a little, through their economic
power, the Giants control all of the instruments through which their policies are implemented.
Whether it be governments, national military forces, 'military contractors' or mercenaries
(with at least $200 billion spent on private security globally, the industry currently employs
some fifteen million people worldwide) used both in 'foreign' wars but also likely deployed in
future for domestic control, key 'intelligence' agencies, legal systems and police forces,
major nongovernment organizations, or the academic, educational, 'public relations propaganda',
corporate media, medical, psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries, all instruments are fully
responsive to elite control and are designed to misinform, deceive, disempower, intimidate,
repress, imprison (in a jail or psychiatric ward), exploit and/or kill (depending on the
constituency) the rest of us, as is readily evident.
Defending Elite Power
Phillips observes that the power elite continually worries about rebellion by the 'unruly
exploited masses' against their structure of concentrated wealth. This is why the US military
empire has long played the role of defender of global capitalism. As a result, the United
States has more than 800 military bases (with some scholars suggesting 1,000) in 70 countries
and territories. In comparison, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia have about 30 foreign
bases. In addition, US military forces are now deployed in 70 percent of the world's nations
with US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) having troops in 147 countries, an increase of 80
percent since 2010. These forces conduct counterterrorism strikes regularly, including drone
assassinations and kill/capture raids.
'The US military empire stands on hundreds of years of colonial exploitation and continues
to support repressive, exploitative governments that cooperate with global capital's imperial
agenda. Governments that accept external capital investment, whereby a small segment of a
country's elite benefits, do so knowing that capital inevitably requires a return on investment
that entails using up resources and people for economic gain. The whole system continues wealth
concentration for elites and expanded wretched inequality for the masses .
'Understanding permanent war as an economic relief valve for surplus capital is a vital part
of comprehending capitalism in the world today. War provides investment opportunity for the
Giants and TCC elites and a guaranteed return on capital. War also serves a repressive function
of keeping the suffering masses of humanity afraid and compliant.'
As Phillips elaborates: This is why defense of global capital is the prime reason that NATO
countries now account for 85 percent of the world's military spending; the United States spends
more on the military than the rest of the world combined.
In essence, 'the Global Power Elite uses NATO and the US military empire for its worldwide
security. This is part of an expanding strategy of US military domination around the world,
whereby the US/ NATO military empire, advised by the power elite's Atlantic Council , operates in service to the
Transnational Corporate Class for the protection of international capital everywhere in the
world'.
This entails 'further pauperization of the bottom half of the world's population and an
unrelenting downward spiral of wages for 80 percent of the world. The world is facing economic
crisis, and the neoliberal solution is to spend less on human needs and more on security. It is
a world of financial institutions run amok, where the answer to economic collapse is to print
more money through quantitative easing, flooding the population with trillions of new
inflation-producing dollars. It is a world of permanent war, whereby spending for destruction
requires further spending to rebuild, a cycle that profits the Giants and global networks of
economic power. It is a world of drone killings, extrajudicial assassinations, death, and
destruction, at home and abroad.'
Where is this all heading?
So what are the implications of this state of affairs? Phillips responds unequivocally:
'This concentration of protected wealth leads to a crisis of humanity, whereby poverty, war,
starvation, mass alienation, media propaganda, and environmental devastation are reaching a
species-level threat. We realize that humankind is in danger of possible extinction'.
He goes on to state that the Global Power Elite is probably the only entity 'capable of
correcting this condition without major civil unrest, war, and chaos' and elaborates an
important aim of his book: to raise awareness of the importance of systemic change and the
redistribution of wealth among both the book's general readers but also the elite, 'in the hope
that they can begin the process of saving humanity.' The book's postscript is a 'A Letter to
the Global Power Elite', co-signed by Phillips and 90 others, beseeching the elite to act
accordingly.
'It is no longer acceptable for you to believe that you can manage capitalism to grow its
way out of the gross inequalities we all now face. The environment cannot accept more pollution
and waste, and civil unrest is everywhere inevitable at some point. Humanity needs you to step
up and insure that trickle-down becomes a river of resources that reaches every child, every
family, and all human beings. We urge you to use your power and make the needed changes for
humanity's survival.'
But he also emphasizes that nonviolent social movements, using the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights as a moral code, can accelerate the process of redistributing wealth by pressuring
the elite into action.
Conclusion
Peter Phillips has written an important book. For those of us interested in understanding
elite control of the world, this book is a vital addition to the bookshelf. And like any good
book, as you will see from my comments both above and below, it raised more questions for me
even while it answered many.
For this reason I do not share his faith in moral appeals to the elite, as articulated in
the letter in his postscript. It is fine to make the appeal but history offers no evidence to
suggest that there will be any significant response. The death and destruction inflicted by
elites is highly profitable, centuries-old and ongoing. It will take powerful,
strategically-focused nonviolent campaigns (or societal collapse) to compel the necessary
changes in elite behavior. Hence, I fully endorse his call for nonviolent social movements to
compel elite action where we cannot make the necessary changes without their involvement. See
'A Nonviolent Strategy to End Violence and Avert Human Extinction' and Nonviolent Campaign Strategy .
Fundamentally, Giants: The Global
Power Elite is a call to action. Professor Peter Phillips is highly aware of our
predicament – politically, socially, economically, environmentally and climatically
– and the critical role played by the global power elite in generating that
predicament.
If we cannot persuade the global power elite to respond sensibly to that predicament, or
nonviolently compel it to do so, humanity's time on Earth is indeed limited.
*
Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence.
He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are
violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of 'Why Violence?' His email address
is [email protected]
and his website is here . He is a frequent contributor to Global
Research.
There's a difference between direct Russian gov influence and finding Trump linked to
Russian financing; lots of it. The real question is who benefits and who benefitted already?
Definitely not Russia; only in so much as the military is not involved, but then Russian
Zionists are not interested in military aggression on Russia.
So who benefitted? Israel, and I'm sure Mueller already has the answer. The question is:
will he come out and state in his report who benefitted from the massive Russian oligarchy
investment in Trump? I doubt it
Besides, Trump has Israel's favorite lawyer Dershowitz doing damage control for him. His
ass is covered.
I understand your point of view. But I've made a case (starting @4) that Trump, and Obama
before him, are basically front-men. To the Deep State, your attachment to one party or one
political personality is a lever to work you (and others that have the same
affiliations/beliefs). You (and others) have to understand that you're being played
before you can actually change anything for the better.
Hope that helps.
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Aug 31, 2018
12:06:39 AM |
71
@65
Here is a scenario in which Trump might be impeached:
If Trump were impeached Pence would become President. Trump came into power because he
wanted to tear up the Iran deal and Hillary wanted to keep Obama's deal with Iran. Zionists
have been pushing for a U.S. strike on Iran for years. Bush wouldn't do it; Obama got the
deal; Hillary wasn't going to tear up the deal, so Trump was their man. Now, it's possible
that Zionists fear Trump won't go all the way on Iran; but no doubt Pence would.
Maybe now that Trump gave them Jerusalem and tore up the deal; Pence will finish the job
that Trump might not have the stomach for. If this is the case, then Trump might be impeached
or something will surface in the Southern District that will give way to an indictment
against him. It's very possible that if Zionists are sensing hesitation on Trump's part they
will turn on him before the election and put Pence in his place. Pence was also handpicked by
them and now with Bolton and Pompeo in place the way is paved for an attack on Iran.
There is another possibility however. If Trump's Presidency is threatened with
impeachment; it's possible also that Trump will resort to wag the dog and attack Iran before
to have Congress rally around him.
It's going to come down to Iran, because after Syria; Iran was the next target with
Zionists and Neocons.
Thanks. They don't make it easy to connect the dots!
I recognized and blogged about the similarities between Trump and Obama from April 2017.
But only about 2 months ago did I link Kissinger's Op-Ed and MAGA despite my
recognition AT THE TIME that what Kissinger proposed was, as I have called it elsewhere,
a 'declaration of war'.
This is what I wrote shortly after Kissinger's Op-Ed was published in August 2014:
My reading is that Kissinger is asserting that the US can and should do whatever it
takes to keep the US preeminent – even if that means ignoring allies and/or the
post-war international structure (UN, UNSC). That exceptional! message comes through loud
and clear despite his 'triage' formalism. And it is a message that is comforting to the
elite who read the WSJ (before a holiday weekend), though it should give Joe Sixpack
nightmares if fully understood .
There is a lot more there which would take much longer to unpack. But I'll point to
one more thing: Note how he forms an equivalence between all the troubles that the 'West'
now face, and ignores US/Western actions that have contributed to these conflicts by
conflating them. NC readers understand this via Merschemer's (in today's links) work on
Ukraine and many links regarding ISIS (like this one).
This comforting message [from Kissinger] is needed because the Ukraine gambit has
failed miserably – as many independent oberservers [sic] predicted– and a
deeper conflict with Russia (possibly extending to others) is now in the cards. Like the
true neocon that he is, Kissinger has doubled down on Nuland's obnoxious and misguided
"f*ck the EU" with an exceptional! "f*ck the World".
I wrote about the possibility that Trump may not want to be a war President when Cohen and
Manafort were convicted.
I differ with you in that I think it would be Trump's choice. If Trump wants to hand the
reigns to Pence (friend of McCain) , he just needs to pardon Cohen and Manafort - then
resign (knowing that he would be impeached if he didn't) .
I agree completely. Trump is backed by a faction of the deep state. If I had to pick
factions I would pick Trumps. We do not have much of a choice.
8 years of Hillary on top of 8 years of Bill (no pun intended) on top of 20 years of Bush
(8 as VP under Reagan plus the other terms of the squad) is just enough.
Obama's mom was a lifelong CIA officer. That is why he was living on embassy row when he
was a kid in Indonesia. They got people in the pipe to be president. Obama was one of their
long term projects. Both sides have this tutelage thing going where they pick out young
people and mentor them as they show the traits needed that they are looking to build and
enhance into a person. If they show that they will follow orders and have the right mindset
they then support them and place them into various positions.
Trump was not one of them but he was the right guy at the right time and knew the key
players, especially the Zionists. I am convinced that his backers war gamed his candidacy
with AI.
Of course, This is part speculation and part fact based on a hell of a lot of reading and
experience.
"The 'soft progressive liberal set' - just as 'Dems' and 'Reps' - don't really present a
political ideology, framework, view-point, or even low-level adherence and/or claims. They
are cover for an underlying hidden structure: informal tribes/circuits and sections in an
oligarchic corporatist régime, or even something different, which I won't go into
now."
I am intrigued by the "....or even something different, which I won't go into now." part
and encourage you to share your thoughts but let me go back to the rest of the cover as you
call it for the hidden structure. I offer a friendly upgrade to your "oligarchic corporatist
régime" characterization by adding monotheistic religion which says all the tribes are
not informal in your mix. I think they were/are the brainwashing outlet before mass media and
still account for the core faith based delusion so many have and extend to other facets of
their lives....so they don't have to take personal responsibility is my life-experience
call.
Unrelated, but want to add my fervor to the calling out of ongoing war criminal Henry
Kissinger. I am not one to focus my ire on too many individuals, wanting us all to focus on
the structure, BUT, there are reasonable exceptions to all rules and Henry K deserves a
special place in everyones hell including his own.
Trump is not going to pardon Cohen or Manafort unless it benefits Trump. Trump is all
about HIM. The only reason he'd do it is to avoid criminal indictment. Trump will not stick
his neck out for anyone if it will end his Presidency. If Manafort and Cohen have something
on Trump, he's doomed.
I don't see how Manafort has the guts to risk another prosecution especially with the fear
that Trump won't be able to pardon him. Trump will only pardon him if he knows Manafort knows
something and Manafort doesn't act on fear to spill it first.
In that case Trump will choose the lessor of two evils: resignation over indictment and
then the pardon will confirm he committed a crime; because he won't rescue Manafort or Cohen
for any other reason. If Manafort holds out under such tremendous pressure is a pretty big
IF.
Of course there is the possibility that Manafort knows nothing, will be prosecuted and so
Trump will let him rot in prison rather than assuming risk for himself.
One more thing: if you suspect he's not a war President then imagine how his Zionist
handlers see it. If he can't deliver Iran; they'll turn on him and find a way to replace him
with Pence or let him finish his first term and then replace him.
John Bolton is, I believe, the scariest character in Trump's administration. How did Trump
pick him? It makes no sense, but this whole mess literally makes none. There has got to be a
way to get him out of there. Sheldon Adelson's money is the connection between Trump, Haley,
Bolton. Bolton wants war with Iran, has been intent on it since Bush 2 administration. He is
quite dangerous, and has connections to Netanyahu and even Meir Dagan of Mossad. I can't copy
this link to Gareth Porter's article but maybe Joe or someone can, it's cited below. Everyone
should read it. The facts in the article are quite alarming about Bolton. With all the
political drama going on from the Mueller probe, there are possibilities of dreadful
consequences, and I think Bolton could bring disaster. He may be the origin as well as the
mouthpiece of this latest provocative threat about Assad using chemicals. Here is the
article:
"The Untold Story of John Bolton's Campaign for War with Iran", by Gareth Porter, in The
American Conservative, March 22, 2018.
Samuel Moyn's review of Michael Walzer's A Foreign
Policy for the Left is worth reading in its entirety. This passage jumped out at me:
Walzer's attempt to snatch the promise of American intervention from the jaws of recent
horrors shows the need to repeat the litany. The left has long since learned how difficult it
is to respond to those who laughed when it tried to save the pure idea of communism from its
totalitarian applications. Walzer applies the same strategy to humanitarian intervention, as
if it might work better in this case.
Remarkably, Walzer does not even mention the Libyan intervention in 2011 [bold mine-DL],
which -- like the Iraq War -- has left hopes for militarized humanism in shambles. Ever since
Democrats and their allies abroad acted to topple Muammar al-Qaddafi under the cover of
humanitarian protection, the possibility of insulating the so-called "responsibility to
protect" civilians abroad from great power designs and horrendous long-term outcomes has
become incredible. Much like a stock newsletter touting a new strategy to beat the odds after
a market crash, the promise of a better scheme for picking winners among prospective
interventions has become unbelievable, at least for now. For Walzer, however, the priority is
to chide fellow leftists for failing to defend the option of humanitarian intervention in
theory, not to understand today why almost nobody thinks it improves the world in
practice.
It seems strange that Walzer wouldn't mention the Libyan war at all in this book. As Moyn
says, it is extremely relevant to the debate over "humanitarian" interventions and their
consequences. What makes this omission even more striking is that Walzer was a public
opponent of the Libyan war when it happened. Walzer opened his article written at
the start of the intervention with this statement:
There are so many things wrong with the Libyan intervention that it is hard to know where
to begin.
Walzer was absolutely right to oppose the Libyan war, and his early arguments against it
were very similar to some my own objections. That makes his decision not to mention the Libyan
war or his opposition to it that much more difficult to understand. He could have cited his
opposition as an example of good judgment and proof that he could distinguish between necessary
and unnecessary wars, but for whatever reason he didn't do that. Libya is one of the chief
examples most people today would think of when discussing the merits and flaws of
"humanitarian" intervention, but apparently Walzer doesn't think it is worth talking about. It
is even odder that Walzer would make defending "humanitarian" interventionism the focus of his
book when he saw very clearly then how easily the rhetoric of protecting civilians could be
abused to launch an unjustified war.
"... Maximum pressure usually just provokes maximum resistance, and it leads to more of the behavior that the pressure campaign was supposed to stop. ..."
"... Our policymakers rarely, if ever, learn much of anything from our government's past blunders and crimes. If they acknowledge that previous policies failed, they are reluctant to admit that the policies were certain to fail. It is much more common for policymakers and pundits to blame the failure of our policies abroad on the inadequacies of our proxies and allies or the designs of our adversaries. The fact that these policies can be undone so easily by obvious and foreseeable problems does not seem to matter. There are not many that are willing to accept that a policy failed because it was inherently unsound. ..."
"... Real learning is impossible without a willingness to question and then discard faulty assumptions, and far too many of our policymakers and political leaders won't ever get rid of certain assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Once someone takes for granted that the U.S. has both the right and the authority to meddle in the affairs of other states and dictate their policies to them on pain of collective punishment and/or war, he is likely to see the pursuit of regime change in other lands as being almost synonymous with American "leadership" itself. ..."
"... "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" Upton Sinclair. ..."
"... The largest donor to re-election campaigns are the military industrial complex, and it is always in their best interest to start or continue more wars. Since they are the ones that control the money, it is always in the interest of elected representatives to support starting or continuing wars. ..."
"... "When will we ever learn?" When will war cease to be profitable for those that have, or claim, War Powers? ..."
"... One should not mistake the useful "bolt-on" careerists that might or might not be true believers in the Great Gamble with the profiteers that have the actual power. The oligarchs and the arms manufacturers do not care whether the policies are wrong or right, failed or successful, as long as there is blood money to be made. If anything, failure in perpetuity is a guarantor of future cash flow and continued rent extraction. ..."
"... When it comes to their relationship with the world, empires do not learn. They bully. Why should the policy makers learn? They are the invincable empire. They can bully and pounce without consequences, no matter the outcome. Learning is for weaklings who need that in order to survive. ..."
"... As a general rule for understanding public policies, I insist that there are no persistent "failed" policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the actual powers -- that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S. policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics: "follow the money." ..."
"... When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. policies in the Middle East to have been wildly successful, so successful that the gains they have produced for the movers and shakers in the petrochemical, financial, and weapons industries (which is approximately to say, for those who have the greatest influence in determining U.S. foreign policies) must surely be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars. ..."
Thomas Pickering explains that the Trump
administration's Iran policy is doomed to fail on its own terms:
The policy of maximum pressure and unachievable demands is based on deeply flawed
assumptions about Iran and the wise use of American power.
Pickering is describing Trump's Iran policy here, but he could just as easily be talking
about the president's handling of many other issues. The Trump administration insists on
demanding that other governments capitulate, make sweeping concessions that would overturn most
of their current policies, and then punishes them if the other side refuses to comply with
insane ultimatums. No one responds well to being dictated to, and that is particularly true of
regimes that have made opposition to the U.S. a major part of their reigning ideology.
Maximum pressure usually just provokes maximum resistance, and it leads to more of the
behavior that the pressure campaign was supposed to stop.
Later on in his column, Pickering reviews the sorry record of U.S.-sponsored regime change
and then asks:
When will we ever learn?
If the last two decades are anything to go by, the answer is never. Our policymakers
rarely, if ever, learn much of anything from our government's past blunders and crimes. If they
acknowledge that previous policies failed, they are reluctant to admit that the policies were
certain to fail. It is much more common for policymakers and pundits to blame the failure of
our policies abroad on the inadequacies of our proxies and allies or the designs of our
adversaries. The fact that these policies can be undone so easily by obvious and foreseeable
problems does not seem to matter. There are not many that are willing to accept that a policy
failed because it was inherently unsound.
"We" never learn because so many of our political leaders and analysts don't think that our
failed policies were wrong in themselves. The only thing that they are interested in knowing is
how to implement the same bad ideas more "effectively" the next time. These are the people that
still think that preventive war and regime change are appropriate policy options when done the
"right" way. Real learning is impossible without a willingness to question and then discard
faulty assumptions, and far too many of our policymakers and political leaders won't ever get
rid of certain assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Once someone takes for granted
that the U.S. has both the right and the authority to meddle in the affairs of other states and
dictate their policies to them on pain of collective punishment and/or war, he is likely to see
the pursuit of regime change in other lands as being almost synonymous with American
"leadership" itself.
While I appreciate your optimism I am far more cynical. Our leaders won't learn for the
same reason tobacco companies rejected evidence that smoking is bad for you.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his
not understanding it!" Upton Sinclair.
The largest donor to re-election campaigns are the military industrial complex, and it is
always in their best interest to start or continue more wars. Since they are the ones that
control the money, it is always in the interest of elected representatives to support
starting or continuing wars.
There is no money to be made in peace. Everything else, sadly, is just window
dressing.
A sound conclusion based on accumulated evidence is hard to refute. But 2 decades? Nah,
more like 5, at least for those who remember Vietnam, a case in which political affiliation
ultimately didn't matter to those pursuing the inevitable conclusion of the mistakes they
believed they could set right. LBJ got us into it and Nixon, having committed treason by
secretly undermining the peace negotiations while running in '68, 'finished the job' by
keeping us there 4 more years, at a huge cost in American lives that far exceeded the
casualty toll in the more recent debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The real reason why is because the US is so rich even George W Bush's $2 Trillion blunder
in Iraq is something a $20T economy can shrug off. How long that remains the case against a
resurgent China is anyone's guess.
"our political leaders and analysts don't think that our failed policies were wrong in
themselves"
One should not mistake the useful "bolt-on" careerists that might or might not be true
believers in the Great Gamble with the profiteers that have the actual power. The oligarchs
and the arms manufacturers do not care whether the policies are wrong or right, failed or
successful, as long as there is blood money to be made. If anything, failure in perpetuity is
a guarantor of future cash flow and continued rent extraction.
Mr. Larison is an American Republican in the original sense of the word in my view. But I
get the feeling he does not realize that when it comes to foreign policy, the US is not a
republic. It is an empire. It only is a republic at home.
When it comes to their relationship with the world, empires do not learn. They bully. Why
should the policy makers learn? They are the invincable empire. They can bully and pounce
without consequences, no matter the outcome.
Learning is for weaklings who need that in order to survive.
Empires do not learn, they fall. Either military or financially. Till that day comes, no learning!
Good to hear from Tom Pickering. I'm very glad his generation retains its voice and
contributes to the foreign policy debate. Sometimes it seems like it's all punk kids and
neocons who either don't know what the hell they're talking about or are lobbying for a
foreign country. More Pickering please, and less of the other stuff.
As a general rule for understanding public policies, I insist that there are no
persistent "failed" policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the
actual powers -- that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S. policies have
been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need only comply with that
invaluable rule of inquiry in politics: "follow the money."
When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. policies in the Middle East to have been
wildly successful, so successful that the gains they have produced for the movers and
shakers in the petrochemical, financial, and weapons industries (which is approximately to
say, for those who have the greatest influence in determining U.S. foreign policies) must
surely be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
So U.S. soldiers get killed, so Palestinians get insulted, robbed, and confined to a set
of squalid concentration areas, so the "peace process" never gets far from square one,
etc., etc. -- none of this makes the policies failures; these things are all surface froth,
costs not born by the policy makers themselves but by the cannon-fodder masses, the bovine
taxpayers at large, and foreigners who count for nothing.
Most of US Russiagate charges are projection. Russiagate is a color
revolution of the block of neoliberals and neocons to depose Trump. They are
afraid of too many skeletons in the closet to allow Trump to finish his
term. And for a right reason. Trump is unpredictable and he at one moment
can turn on them and start revealing unpleasant truth about Bush II and
Obama.
But rumors about the demise of the US neoliberal empire are slightly
exaggerated ;-). Without providing an alternative model to neoliberalism and
without ethnological superiority China does not stand a chance.
Notable quotes:
"... Through endless repetition, allegations are transformed into "facts." Sanctions are loaded upon sanctions, based on these unsubstantiated charges in an economic war against Russia. ..."
"... Today's propaganda tool is named "RussiaGate," a campaign to bring down a deeply flawed U.S. president for possibly trying to mend U.S. relations with Russia. ..."
"... Nations, such as Russia, China & others just want to determine their own futures & keep their National sovereignty's! It's America, with it's unbelievable arrogance & hubris, that wants to dominate & impose its sovereignty on every Country on Earth! ..."
"... Their claim to One Truth (no alternate facts tolerated in NYT/WaPo Land) that they've enjoyed for more than 100 years has fallen victim to the Internet, a creation of the American war technology development system (DARPA) ..."
"... other Nations may reach a saturation point when enough is enough & they finally come to the realization that this crooked American Empire is to dangerous to be allowed too continue & must be stopped, once & for all time! ..."
It was around 1898, when America first starting thinking it was the center of the universe.
In that year the U.S. intervened in Cuba's war for independence and proceeded to take over
parts of the decrepit Spanish Empire, from Latin America to the Philippines. Shortly before, in
1893, the U.S. overthrew the Queen of Hawaii on behalf of U.S.-backed sugar and pineapple
plantation owners.
That led to a long history of political interference in other countries, in the form of
destabilization, coups and invasions. Once the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, a narrative was
fostered to justify expanding NATO to Russia's borders.
In the last four years, anti-Russian propaganda has reached a fever pitch: lies about
Russia's "expansionism" in Ukraine; hype about Russia's "meddling" in the U.S. elections,
creating an existential "threat to democracy;" unproven allegations of Russia using chemical
weapons to poison the Skripals in London. Experts are trotted out on major media to further the
narrative without hard evidence. Together with think-tanks, the American and British media run
these stories daily with almost no counter news or opinions. Through endless repetition,
allegations are transformed into "facts." Sanctions are loaded upon sanctions, based on these
unsubstantiated charges in an economic war against Russia.
In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White
House strategist for President George W. Bush -- identified later as Karl Rove, Bush's Deputy
White House Chief of Staff -- told him, "We're an empire now; we create our own reality."
Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in his 2017 book, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious
Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria, writes that the West's psycho-social pathology
about Russia dates back over 1,000 years to the division of Christendom between the Orthodox
and Roman churches. The U.S. is a relative newcomer to this, but seeks perhaps its biggest
role.
" More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history," Mettan
says.
Myth of Russian Expansionism
The astute University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer exposed how the West provoked
the Ukraine crisis in his 2014 Foreign Affairs article,
"Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin."
But the American foreign policy establishment and media remain committed to the suppression of
facts about the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev and the resulting escalating tensions with Russia.
Ignoring or fabricating evidence, the U.S. and NATO persist in
lying that Russia has expansionist goals in Ukraine, Crimea and Syria. Russia is helping
ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine who are resisting the coup, Crimea (which had been part
of Russia since 1783 and transferred by the Soviets to Ukraine in 1954) held a referendum in
2014 in which the public voted to rejoin Russia. The Syrian government invited Russia in to
help fight Western and Gulf-backed jihadists trying to violently overthrow the government, as
even then Secretary of State John Kerry admitted .
Another scholar, Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University
of Kent, writes in his latest book, Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order, that the
Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russia and the West, differences
that are not just a replay of the "Cold War."
Simply put, under the banner of the indispensable "liberal world order," neo-conservative
warriors and "democracy"-spreading-"humanitarian-interventionists"
are promoting the Russophobia "reality" to justify American hegemony.
Ditching Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn : Ditched when he turned on America. (Wikimedia Commons)
One of the greatest illustrations of the centuries-old Russophobia, says Mettan in his 2017
book, is the case of Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
" During the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn," Mettan wrote.
"For decades, we had published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch
of anti-Soviet dissidence," but only when he criticized his communist Russia. But after moving
to the U.S., when Solzhenitsyn showed a preference for privacy "rather than attending
anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves."
And when Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia and spoke out against Russian 'westernizers' and
liberals who denied Russian interests, he was labeled "an outdated, senile writer," though he
had not changed his fundamental views on freedom.
After the mid-July, Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, there were countless mass media delusions
and hysteria against U.S.-Russia ties, reminiscent of the Hearst newspaper empire's propaganda
that whipped up a frenzy to support the empire-building war against Spain in 1898. Professor
Stephen Kinzer vividly described the unsuccessful battle by prestigious anti-imperialists
against the power of the Hearst propaganda in his latest book, The True Flag:Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire."
Today's propaganda tool is named "RussiaGate," a campaign to bring down a deeply flawed
U.S. president for possibly trying to mend U.S. relations with Russia.
Do we have enough good sense left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau: "Let us
settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion,
and prejudice till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality."
Or, as I thought when I visited Galileo's house that day in the Florentine hills: the world
does not revolve around America.
Jean Ranc is a retired psychologist/research associate at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Wonderful observations that challenge the complete and utter madness of our times here in
the U.S., and the West in general. The inquisitorial "accusations" leveled against Putin and
Russia by the West bear no more resemblance to "reality" than the lunatic accusations that
the Holy Inquisition leveled against "witches," "heretics" and "non-believers" for centuries
as it used terror to consolidate power. Given the ever more shrill and painfully persistent
nature of these ongoing nonsense anti-Russian accusations – it would appear more and
more of us in the West are falling into the category of – "non-believers."
jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:45 pm
A very good post Gary. The West is decadent and corrupt.Whatever high moral grounds the
West once held, I am afraid they are either forgotten or totally gone.
Delightful piece to read, great comments as usual. I can only add that the neocolonialists
who don't want to give up leading the US over the edge, as mike says "into the abyss", will
be forced to change their ways, well stated by Babylon and others. The tragedy of what they
have done by their narcissistic, egoistic, delusional misleading, is that they have wrecked
the lives of millions worldwide. But of course, that is the story of deluded conquerors until
they meet their own end. I welcome the sun setting on the "American Century"; a sharp reset
awaits us all but we should welcome it.
jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:48 pm
Jessika: the saddest part in all this is that they still continue to wreck and decimate
lives worldwide. It is like a cancer eating and obliterating every thing in their path. A
very incisive post.
The cancer is psychopathy! These people have no conscience or empathy. They are liars and
manipulators. They treat people like objects to be used and abused. Until America admits that
we've had a substantial percentage of psychopathic leaders and mentality, from the Puritans
forward, we will never recover from the psychological, social, economic, political, legal,
religious destruction this ilk has forced upon the rest of us. It took me deep research and
therapy to discover that psychopaths project themselves onto the rest of us and then claim we
are somehow damaged, flawed or have sinful human nature. The problem has always been the
psychopaths among us (1%) who have created hierarchies and placed themselves atop them. They
have bamboozled most of us with their lies but as we wake up to their games, we can kick them
out of power and we can create a country of the 99% with conscience and empathy rather than a
country of slaveowners and deluded "Israelites" who believed they had the right to exploit,
enslave, kill
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 1:36 am
It's not sad, it's what's deathcult tyrants & dying Empires do, they take as many
victims as they can, once they realise the end is nigh! It's a mass shooter mentality &
it's disgraceful!
JR , August 28, 2018 at 9:14 pm
HI Jessika,
I tried to find you while I was still living in NH as I got the idea you live there as well.
I had lived in the Dartmouth area in the 70's but the brutal winters were too much! this time
around so I returned to my home base here in Chapel Hill. If you'd like to be in touch, you
can reach me at my old-but-still-good Santa Fe address: [email protected]
mike k , August 28, 2018 at 5:37 pm
American egotism is legendary. It is the defining mark of the breed. Ignorant know-it-alls
lead us confidently into the abyss.
jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:53 pm
Mike: If American leaders that are in control of the country have studied history of any
empire, they would come to the realization that empires do not last forever. The illogical
part is that empire's life expectancy has been more or less the same worldwide. And like an
opened book the end is closing in and they know it.
Realist , August 28, 2018 at 5:00 pm
Excellent bit of necessary truth-telling. Too bad it won't be read in most of America, not
because the people would reject its premise, but because their keepers just won't let them
see it in the highly manipulated mass media.
America has repeatedly become what it most professes to hate: first an onerous empire like
Spain, then a pack of fascists like Nazi Germany, and now totalitarian tyrants like the
Soviets. Welcome to the truth, the one NOT fabricated by Rove's inheritors of empire.
Babyl-on , August 28, 2018 at 4:32 pm
This thought is so important to understand if you are to make any sense of the new
multi-polar world which does not revolve around the failing Western empire.
China's Belt and Road is a catalyst but China will benefit only through the
interconnection of the entire Eurasian land mass – sooner than you think, high-speed
trains will cross the steppes. That is the new world the Enlightenment era is dead the
Eurasian era is opening. Eurasia will trade most naturally with Africa and it will prosper
because The US Empire is the last of the Enlightenment white European empires.
When you consider the integration of the great Eurasian land mass for the first time is
history (the ancient Silk Road writ large) it's easy to forget about a US over there
separated by all that water from the thriving markets.
Those oceans which protected the center of power from attack now are a big disadvantage in
trade.
We are witnessing the end of the Enlightenment and the end of Empire which it spawned.
China is not imperial, Russia is not imperial – no country today seeks empire but
the US and they are failing in every way. Western Liberal Democracy also died with the
Enlightenment, new forms of governance and culture will develop, the sky really is the limit,
now that the old dead Enlightenment is moving out of the way.
It would be a brighter future if not for that pesky climate.
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 1:51 am
Nations, such as Russia, China & others just want to determine their own futures &
keep their National sovereignty's! It's America, with it's unbelievable arrogance &
hubris, that wants to dominate & impose its sovereignty on every Country on Earth!
Russia
& China are the future with the one belt, one road initiative & America is being left
in the rear view mirror & is on the path to total oblivion thanks to its warmongering
ways! The end of this corrupt American Empire can't come soon enough for people who want to
live in peace!
Egocentrism isn't just a Donald Trump thing, it's an American thing. America's
never-ending RussiaGate narrative is a classic example of psychological projection. It can't
be US who has the problem, it must be THEM who has the problem. Time to own it.
paraphrasing J. Pilger -- America should leave the rest of the world
alone -- leave it alone
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 2:15 am
Yes, I second what Mr Pilger stated & I will add a few more requests? "Leave the
World" alone! Stop your Warmongering interference in other Countries affairs! Immediately
stop all your murderous Wars, Coups & Financial & Economic terrorism such as
weaponising the dollar & Trade sanctions to illegally punish other Nations! Abide by
International Laws & the U.N. charter! Remove your 800 bases from around the World &
stick to your own backyard! Stop being the Worlds Policeman because no one asked you to
perform this role! Look after your own people first & stop wasting trillions of dollars
on the pointless & stupid Military Industrial Complex! Ban Campaign lobbyists & big
money from Politics! Jail all corrupt Corporates & thieving Bankers, Politicians &
seize their assets! These are a few things for a start! There are many more things you could
do more numerous to name here, but the main thing is LEAVE THE WORLD ALONE! We are sick to
death of this American Empire!
Sally Snyder , August 28, 2018 at 2:28 pm
Here is what Americans really think about the anti-Russia hysteria coming from
Washington:
Less than half of Americans believe that Russia's interference in the 2016 election made a
difference to the final outcome and nearly six in ten Americans believe that it is important
that Washington continue to improve relations with Moscow.
Jeff Harrison , August 28, 2018 at 2:25 pm
When you get to the end of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, six volumes of dense,
erudite prose which details the failings of a decadent society, Gibbon lets you in on a
secret. The Roman Empire was militarily defeated. Not all at once, mind. But militarily
defeated nonetheless. Consider what that means for the US.
RnM , August 28, 2018 at 9:27 pm
Rome became a victim of its success, being overstretched beyond their war technology
(horses, shields, swords and siege machines.)
My inability and unwillingness to predict the end of the rise of The Empire of "We the
People" and its brand of War Technologies, is due to my close perspective and life-long
Bernaiseian (?sp) brainwashing by the mass media, which, thankfully, has, since 2016, been
dealt a blow to the mask on their (the corporate media's) Totalitarian nature.
Their claim to
One Truth (no alternate facts tolerated in NYT/WaPo Land) that they've enjoyed for more than
100 years has fallen victim to the Internet, a creation of the American war technology
development system (DARPA). So, in the American attempt to surpass the Romans, the Empire of
We the People (as a Totalitarian dystopia) may well be thwarted by the spread of open
information. I hope so. The alternative might be very difficult to defeat.
Jeff, if you enjoyed Gibbons, I think you would really enjoy Michael Parenti's, "The
Assassination of Julius Caesar". There are so many parallels between the late Roman Republic
and today's America. Michael got his PhD in political science and history from Yale and
writes "people's history". He argues convincingly that Caesar was assassinated -- - not for
being an egomaniac and dictator -- - but because he stood up against the most elite in the
senate by seeking reforms that would benefit the masses. He actually argues that Gibbons
wrote as a historian from the priviledged class and therefore never condemned the senate for
exploiting the masses.
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 2:34 am
Yes, what it means,& if History is anything to go by, that other Nations may reach a
saturation point when enough is enough & they finally come to the
realization that this
crooked American Empire is to dangerous to be allowed too continue & must be stopped,
once & for all time!
The Roman Empire never saw the Barbarian hordes such as the
Visigoth's, Huns & Vandals coming until it was to late! Will the American Empire see
there downfall coming? 9/11 proved the arrogant American Empire couldn't even see that event
coming, due to their own hubris & complacency!
If the paeans to McCain by diverse political climbers seems detached from reality, it's
because they reflect the elite view of U.S. military interventions as a chess game, with the
millions killed by unprovoked aggression mere statistics.
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new, bringing the most stable and secure forms of currency, gold and silver, to the consumer,
in digital form.
As the Cold War entered its final act in 1985, journalist Helena Cobban participated in an
academic conference at an upscale resort near Tucson, Arizona, on U.S.-Soviet interactions in
the Middle East. When she attended what was listed as the "Gala Dinner with keynote speech",
she quickly learned that the virtual theme of the evening was, "Adopt a Muj."
"I remember mingling with all of these wealthy Republican women from the Phoenix suburbs and
being asked, 'Have you adopted a muj?" Cobban told me. "Each one had pledged money to sponsor a
member of the Afghan mujahedin in the name of beating the communists. Some were even seated at
the event next to their personal 'muj.'"
The keynote speaker of the evening, according to Cobban, was a hard-charging freshman member
of Congress named John McCain.
During the Vietnam war, McCain had been captured by the North Vietnamese Army after being
shot down on his way to bomb a civilian lightbulb factory. He spent two years in solitary
confinement and underwent torture that left him with crippling injuries. McCain returned from
the war with a deep, abiding loathing of his former captors, remarking as late as 2000, "I hate
the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live." After he was criticized for the racist remark,
McCain
refused to apologize. "I was referring to my prison guards," he said, "and I will continue
to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture
of my friends."
'Hanoi Hilton' prison where McCain was tortured. (Wikimedia Commons)
McCain's visceral resentment informed his vocal support for the mujahedin as well as the
right-wing contra death squads in Central America -- any proxy group sworn to the destruction
of communist governments.
So committed was McCain to the anti-communist cause that in the mid-1980s he had joined
the advisory board of the United States Council for World Freedom, the American affiliate of
the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, a former leader of WACL's
British chapter who had turned against the group in 1974, described the organization as "a
collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists, and
corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international."
Joining McCain in the organization were notables such as Jaroslav Stetsko, the Croatian Nazi
collaborator who helped oversee the extermination of 7,000 Jews in 1941; the brutal Argentinian
former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla; and Guatemalan death squad leader Mario Sandoval Alarcon.
Then-President Ronald Reagan honored the group for playing"a leadership role in drawing
attention to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true freedom fighters of our
day."
Being Lauded as a Hero
On the occasion of his death, McCain is being honored in much the same way -- as a patriotic
hero and freedom fighter for democracy. A stream of hagiographies is pouring forth from the
Beltway press corps that he described as his true political base. Among McCain's most
enthusiastic groupies is CNN's Jake Tapper, whom he chose as his personal stenographer for a
2000 trip to Vietnam. When the former CNN host Howard Kurtz asked Tapper in February, 2000,
"When you're on the [campaign] bus, do you make a conscious effort not to fall under the
magical McCain spell?"
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Ocasio-Cortez: Called McCain 'an unparalleled example of human decency.'
But the late senator has also been treated to gratuitous tributes from an array of prominent
liberals, from George Soros to his soft
power-pushing client, Ken Roth, along with three fellow directors of
Human Rights Watch and "democratic socialist" celebrity Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who hailed McCain as
"an unparalleled example of human decency." Rep. John Lewis, the favorite civil rights symbol
of the Beltway political class, weighed in as well to
memorialize McCain as a "warrior for peace."
If the paeans to McCain by this diverse cast of political climbers and Davos denizens seemed
detached from reality, that's because they perfectly reflected the elite view of American
military interventions as akin to a game of chess, and the millions of dead left in the wake of
the West's unprovoked aggression as mere statistics.
There were few figures in recent American life who dedicated themselves so personally to the
perpetuation of war and empire as McCain. But in Washington, the most defining aspect of his
career was studiously overlooked, or waved away as the trivial idiosyncrasy of a noble servant
who nonetheless deserved everyone's reverence.
McCain did not simply thunder for every major intervention of the post-Cold War era from the
Senate floor, while pushing for sanctions and assorted campaigns of subterfuge on the side. He
was uniquely ruthless when it came to advancing imperial goals, barnstorming from one conflict
zones to another to personally recruit far-right fanatics as American proxies.
In Libya and Syria, he cultivated affiliates of Al Qaeda as allies, and in Ukraine, McCain
courted actual, sig-heiling neo-Nazis.
While McCain's Senate office functioned as a clubhouse for arms industry lobbyists and
neocon operatives, his fascistic allies waged a campaign of human devastation that will
continue until long after the flowers dry up on his grave.
American media may have sought to bury this legacy with the senator's body, but it is what
much of the outside world will remember him for.
'They are Not al-Qaeda'
McCain with Abdelhakim Belhaj, leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a former Al
Qaeda affiliate.
When a violent insurgency swept through Libya in 2011, McCain parachuted into the country to
meet with leaders of the main insurgent outfit, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),
battling the government of Moamar Gaddafi. His goal was to make kosher this band of hardline
Islamists in the eyes of the Obama administration, which was considering a military
intervention at the time.
What happened next is well documented, though it is scarcely discussed by a Washington
political class that depended on the Benghazi charade to deflect from the real scandal of
Libya's societal destruction. Gaddafi's motorcade was
attacked by NATO jets , enabling a band of LIFG fighters to capture him,
sodomize him with a bayonet, then murder him and leave his body to rot in a
butcher shop in Misrata while rebel fanboys snapped cellphone selfies of his fetid corpse.
A slaughter of Black
citizens of Libya by the racist sectarian militias recruited by McCain immediately followed
the killing of the pan-African leader. ISIS took over Gaddafi's hometown of Sirte while
Belhaj's militia took control of Tripoli, and a war of the warlords began. Just as Gaddafi had
warned , the ruined country became a staging ground for migrant smugglers on the
Mediterranean, fueling the rise of the far-right across Europe and enabling the return of slavery to
Africa.
Many might describe Libya as a failed state, but it also represents a successful realization
of the vision McCain and his allies have advanced on the global stage.
Following the NATO-orchestrated murder of Libya's leader, McCain tweeted , "Qaddafi on his way
out, Bashar al Assad is next."
McCain's Syrian Boondoggle
Like Libya, Syria had resisted aligning with the West and was suddenly confronted with a
Salafi-jihadi insurgency armed by the CIA. Once again, McCain made it his personal duty to
market Islamist insurgents to America as a cross between the Minutemen and the Freedom Riders
of the civil rights era. To do so, he took under his wing a youthful DC-based Syria-American
operative named Mouaz Moustafa who had been a consultant to the Libyan Transitional Council
during the run-up to the NATO invasion.
In May 2013, Moustafa convinced McCain to take an illegal trip across the Syrian border and
meet some freedom fighters. An Israeli millionaire named Moti Kahana who coordinated efforts
between the Syrian opposition and the Israeli military through his NGO, Amaliah, claimed to have "financed the opposition group
which took senator John McCain to visit war-torn Syria."
"This could be like his Benghazi moment," Moustafa remarked excitedly in a scene from a
documentary, "Red
Lines," that depicted his efforts for regime change. "[McCain] went to Benghazi, he came
back, we bombed."
During his brief excursion into Syria, McCain met with a group of CIA-backed insurgents and
blessed their struggle. "The senator wanted to assure the Free Syrian Army that the American
people support their cry for freedom, support their revolution," Moustafa said in an interview
with CNN. McCain's office promptly released a photo showing the senatorposing beside a beaming
Moustafa and two grim-looking gunmen.
Days later, the men were
named by the Lebanese Daily Star as Mohammad Nour and Abu Ibrahim. Both had been implicated
in the kidnapping a year prior of 11 Shia pilgrims, and were identified by one of the
survivors. McCain and Moustafa returned to the U.S. the targets of
mockery from Daily Show host John Stewart and the subject of harshly critical reports from
across the media spectrum. At a town hall in Arizona, McCain was berated by constituents, including Jumana
Hadid, a Syrian Christian woman who warned that the sectarian militants he had cozied up to
threatened her community with genocide.
McCain with then-FSA commander Salam Idriss, an insurgent later exposed for kidnapping Shia
pilgrims.
But McCain pressed ahead anyway. On Capitol Hill, he introduced another
shady young operative into his interventionist theater. Named Elizabeth O'Bagy, she was a
fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, an arms industry-funded think tank directed by
Kimberly Kagan of the neoconservative Kagan clan. Behind the scenes, O'Bagy was consulting for
Moustafa at his Syrian Emergency Task Force, a clear conflict of interest that her top Senate
patron was well aware of. Before the Senate, McCain cited a Wall Street Journal editorial by
O'Bagy to support his assessment of the Syrian rebels as predominately "moderate," and
potentially Western-friendly.
Days later, O'Bagy was
exposed for faking her PhD in Arabic studies. As soon as the humiliated Kagan fired O'Bagy,
the academic fraudster took another pass through the Beltway's revolving door, striding into
the halls of Congress as McCain's newest foreign policy aide.
McCain ultimately failed to see the Islamist "revolutionaries" he glad handled take control
of Damascus. Syria's government held on thanks to help from his mortal enemies in Tehran and
Moscow, but not before a billion dollar CIA arm-and-equip operation helped spawn one of the
worst refugee crises in post-war history. Luckily for McCain, there were other intrigues
seeking his attention, and new bands of fanatical rogues in need of his blessing. Months after
his Syrian boondoggle, the ornery militarist turned his attention to Ukraine, then in the
throes of an upheaval stimulated by U.S. and EU-funded soft power NGO's.
Coddling the
Neo-Nazis of Ukraine
On December 14, 2013, McCain materialized in Kiev for a meeting
with Oleh Tyanhbok , an unreconstructed fascist who had emerged as a top opposition leader.
Tyanhbok had co-founded the fascist Social-National Party, a far-right political outfit that
touted itself as the "last hope of the white race, of humankind as such." No fan of Jews, he
had complained that
a "Muscovite-Jewish mafia" had taken control of his country, and had been photographed throwing
up a sieg heil Nazi salute during a speech.
None of this apparently mattered to McCain. Nor did the scene of Right Sector neo-Nazis
filling up
Kiev's Maidan Square while he appeared on stage to egg them on.
"Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better!" McCain proclaimed to
cheering throngs while Tyanhbok stood by his side. The only issue that mattered to him at the
time was the refusal of Ukraine's elected president to sign a European Union austerity plan,
opting instead for an economic deal with Moscow.
McCain met with Social-National Party co-founder Oleh Tyanhbok.
McCain was so committed to replacing an independent-minded government with a NATO vassal
that he even mulled a military assault on Kiev. "I do not see a military option and that is
tragic," McCain lamented in an interview about the crisis. Fortunately for him, regime change
arrived soon after his appearance on the Maidan, and Tyanhbok's allies rushed in to fill the
void.
By the end of the year, the Ukrainian military had become bogged down in a bloody trench war
with pro-Russian, anti-coup separatists in the country's east. A militia affiliated with the
new government in Kiev called Dnipro-1 was
accused by Amnesty International observers of blocking humanitarian aid into a
separatist-held area, including food and clothing for the war torn population.
Six months later, McCain appeared
at Dnipro-1's training base alongside Sen.'s Tom Cotton and John Barasso. "The people of my
country are proud of your fight and your courage," McCain told an assembly of soldiers from the
militia. When he completed his remarks, the fighters belted out a World War II-era salute made
famous by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators: "Glory to Ukraine!"
Today, far-right nationalists occupy key posts in Ukraine's pro-Western government. The
speaker of its parliament is
Andriy Parubiy , a co-founder with Tyanhbok of the Social-National Party and leader of the
movement to honor World World Two-era Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera. On the cover of
his 1998 manifesto, "View From The Right," Parubiy appeared in a Nazi-style brown shirt with a
pistol strapped to his waist. In June 2017, McCain and Republican Speaker of the House Paul
Ryan
welcomed Parubiy on Capitol Hill for what McCain called a "good meeting." It was a shot in
the arm for the fascist forces sweeping across Ukraine.
McCain with Dnipro-1 militants on June 20, 2015
The past months in Ukraine have seen a
state sponsored neo-Nazi militia called C14 carrying out a pogromist rampage against
Ukraine's Roma population, the country's parliament erecting an exhibition honoring Nazi
collaborators, and the Ukrainian military formally approving the pro-Nazi
"Glory to Ukraine" greeting as its own official salute.
Ukraine is now the sick man of Europe, a perpetual aid case bogged down in an endless war in
its east. In a testament to the country's demise since its so-called "Revolution of Dignity,"
the deeply unpopular President Petro Poroshenko has promised White House National Security
Advisor John Bolton that his country -- once a plentiful source of coal on par with
Pennsylvania -- will now purchase coal from the
U.S. Once again, a regime change operation that generated a failing, fascistic state stands as
one of McCain's greatest triumphs.
McCain's history conjures up memory of one of the most inflammatory statements by Sarah
Palin, another cretinous fanatic he foisted onto the world stage. During a characteristically
rambling stump speech in October 2008, Palin accused Barack Obama of "palling
around with terrorists." The line was dismissed as ridiculous and borderline slander, as it
should have been. But looking back at McCain's career, the accusation seems richly ironic.
By any objective standard, it was McCain who had palled around with terrorists, and who
wrested as much resources as he could from the American taxpayer to maximize their mayhem.
Here's hoping that the societies shattered by McCain's proxies will someday rest in peace.
America's brave troopers today fight for freedom in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond, all the
while yearning, as FDR said, "for the end of battle" when they can return home. They are not
there to seize natural resources or to pump up a president's approval ratings–nor, for
all of my differences with President Obama, do I believe he has ordered troops into harm's
way for such nefarious purposes.
If that isn't the exact opposite of truth, I don't know what is.
As a matter of fact, RPI recently ran a
fantastic editorial by Jessica Pavoni, who was a member of the military, but sought to
leave the Air Force as a conscientious objector after learning that the Max Boots of the world
were spinning false tales.
Not only has the Empire managed to bring the exact opposite of freedom to "Afghanistan, Iraq
and beyond," but it has also accomplished the snuffing out of freedom here at home as well.
Groping at the airports, the monitoring of all our communications and finances, as well as the
militarized local police (See: Boston & Ferguson) are just a few potent examples.
Meanwhile, Chuck Hagel is
now trying to scare the pants off Americans once again:
ISIL poses a threat greater than 9/11. ISIL is as sophisticated and well funded as any group
we have seen. They're beyond just a terrorist group This is way beyond anything we have seen.
The Empire wants more!
Max Boot, the fantasy storyteller, is helping to grease the wheels.
"... During the C21st the Conservative Party has become reliant on Jewish money. Even more than her predecessor Cameron, May is a "value free zone", as the commentator Richard North categorised her. She does whatever the donors want. Not that the Labour Party in power would be any better. It is just as riddled with Israel-supporting "moderates". ..."
CRITICIZE ISRAEL AND GO TO JAIL? IS THAT HOW LOW ZIONISTS HAVE SUNK?
Thanks for the interesting article, Sir.
As I read it, I felt sick in the abdomen, at how low the Zionists have sunk, demanding
that those who criticize Israel go to jail.
If there is evil in this world, this is it. These are the dark ages. These people are
primitive and seem to resist civilization.
No civilized human being should put up with this sort of evil.
The Brits need to wake up and actually repeal laws that make certain speech criminal
offences that are already on the books (except for incitements to violence and porn).
The need to vote for Labor and keep Corbyn, or vote for BNP, and tell the Zionists that
they are evil to make these demands.
Israel is not a democracy for a much simpler reason than that the author offers.
It denies the vote to the gentile inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank; that is to say,
to about a quarter of its subjects.
Since the Jewish parties in the Knesset boycott the few Arab representatives that are
there, Israel effectively denies political representation to the gentiles within its
'pre-1967′ boundaries as well -- that is to say, to another sixth or so of its total
subject population.
Obviously, Israel is not a democracy in any sense of the word. 25% of its subjects are
without even theoretical representation, and another 17% lack it in any practical sense. It's
as if the US denied the vote to all inner-city residents except white 'settlers,' refused to
work with Congressmen who weren't Protestants. It would be absurd to regard it as a
democracy.
There are some democracies in the Middle East. Israel isn't one of them.
and Norm Finkelstein brilliantly demolishes the notion that there's any anti-semitism to
speak of in Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party, or Britain in general.
Corbyn is shell shocked and cannot comprehend what is required for him to counter this
blatant attempt at his ouster. An individual that could help him tremendously as an advisor
is Miko Peled, an Israeli citizen, living in the U.S. I mention Peled, because he is a
"lefty" just like Corbyn.
Giraldi writes that, "there exists an 'Israel Lobby' in many countries, all dedicated to
advancing the agendas promoted by successive Israeli governments no matter what the actual
interests of the host country might be."
ADL, a branch of the B'nai B'rith global enterprise, confirms they are subversive agents
that work against their host nation. Straight from their mouth
The center of the Axis of Evil is Zionist Israel. No other country, not even the planet's
"sole superpower" wields so much power and control over other "sovereign" nations as does
Zionist Israel. Regime change? Zionist, apartheid Israel has perfected that art and science
-- and without firing a shot. Why do it when others will cheerfully fight your battles for
you? Evil is as evil does. Still obsessed with Russophobia? Distractions aplenty for the
stupefied.
These efforts to criminalize criticism of Israel seem to be the necessary precursors to
major military moves in the Middle East to create 'the greater Israel.'
Probably in coordination with the ongoing efforts to neutralize and destroy all
independent players such as Iran and Russia.
There used to be a "supermarket" chain in Montreal called Steinberg, owned by Steinberg,
"Canadian" Jews. They sold the business to another supermarket label, Métro-Richelieu
or something, owned by a would-be-venture capitalist/economics professor, Michel Gauthier or
something. It was a laughing transaction even in the news. But during the due diligence for
the sale it surfaced that Steinberg had unusual deals with his suppliers, meat, dairy or
whatever. If you wanted to sell your products to Steinberg, Steinberg made you sign an
agreement to buy Israeli bonds. Talk about tied-selling under the Canada Competition Act!
Talk about Stephen Harper financing!
During the C21st the Conservative Party has become reliant on Jewish money. Even more than
her predecessor Cameron, May is a "value free zone", as the commentator Richard North
categorised her. She does whatever the donors want. Not that the Labour Party in power would
be any better. It is just as riddled with Israel-supporting "moderates".
In the near future, the Labour Party will break down into 2 or more groups. The "moderates"
and more radical groups who will be chasing the Muslim vote.
On top of that, a second Scottish Independence Referendum may not be too many years away. I
suspect it will be successful this time.
The dissolution of the British state seems likely over the coming years. The question is how
much damage May and her Conservatives In Name Only will do in the interim.
How ironic that a brave and principled man (Jeremy Corbyn) is being hounded out of office
and defamed from all sides while a dishonest neocon toady like such as John McCain is
lionized by both wings of Washington's duopoly (as well as our MSM) as a 'hero' and a
'maverick'.
Could this really be happening?
Oh it's happening alright.
McCain dutifully pimped for every US war against any Israeli foes since GHW Bush. McCain
expressed no regrets for the destruction of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the dismemberment
of Palestine, or the destabilization of Syria. McCain never apologized for all the needless
death and suffering caused by spineless servants such as himself. He also openly advocated
for a US war on Iran, just as Israel wanted.
If the Zions didn't control our entire mass media this level of venality would not occur.
But they do and it does.
Indoctrination. Brainwashing. Repetition. Conformity. Taboo. Shame. Blacklisting.
Political corruption.
Do you deny making anti-Semitic remarks? What will your friends and family say?
The falsification of history is an ongoing and daily occurrence.
The manipulation of the masses: it works!
Who are you going to believe?–your own fallible judgement?–or the expert
analysis of our entire political class–including Harvard-educated scholars and
journalists?
C'mon. Get a clue. Think right. Stop talking that way.
It is Israel again up to its old tricks being the real entity that interferes in foreign
elections:
Corbyn is viewed by Israel as effectively the "figurehead of the delegitimisation
network".
"They hope that by taking action against him, they can decapitate what they see as the
most powerful figure in this network," he told Middle East Eye. "By making an example of
him, they can sow division, spread fear and suppress speech on Israel."
Certainly, Israel's fingerprints look to be present in the current claims of an
anti-Semitism crisis supposedly revolving around Corbyn.
Active interference by the Israeli government in British politics was highlighted last
year in a four-part undercover documentary produced by the Qatari channel Al Jazeera. It
secretly filmed the activities of an operative in Israel's embassy in London named Shai
Masot.
The Al Jazeera investigation provoked numerous complaints that it breached broadcasting
rules relating to anti-Semitism, bias, unfair editing and invasions of privacy. However,
Ofcom, the British broadcasting regulator, cleared the programme of all charges.
In fact, I think all of this has more to do with Brexit than with Israel. The Brexiteers
are in total panic. If they put the exit package to a referendum, they'll lose. If they call
an election on it, Corbyn will probably win and he opposes Brexit. Even a parliamentary vote
could be lost inasmuch as the Tories don't have a majority and the Brexiteers are a minority
within the party.
Thus, Corbyn has to be discredited at all costs. Whether accusations of
anti-Semitism will discredit him is quite another matter. In Europe generally, people are
indifferent to Israel. They don't care what happens to it one way or the other.
Nobody who is
likely to vote Labour cares a hoot about Israel and are not going to change their vote
because of the accusations. If anything, people will perceive the campaign against Corbyn as
Jewish bullying and rally to him.
I was surprised to learn that the population of Israel is only 8.8 million. So small!
Contrast that with Iran's 82 million .Egypt's 100 million Iraq's 40 million or Turkey's 82
million. How such a relatively tiny country makes so much noise and disruption for the rest
of the world is something to ponder. If you ever google one of those 'most hated countries in
the world' polls Israel or USA invariably top the list.
Gilad Atzmon, the self-described ex-Israeli and ex-Jew, writes reams about the Jewish
assault on Corbyn. In this
recent piece , he quotes from Douglas Reed's The Controversy of Zion :
The Conservative Party membership numbers are no longer published but they could be as low
as fifty thousand going on revenue from membership fees.
All this smearing has so far had no impact at all, in fact it is leading some to question
what is the agenda here. There is a nice article on the Israeli smear campaign in the Middle
East Eye.
Many believe that the easily observable dominance of the friends of Israel over some
aspects of government policy is a phenomenon unique to the United States, where committed
Jews and Christian Zionists are able to control both politicians and the media message
relating to what is going on in the Middle East.
Thank you for pointing this out.
Although I am no longer much of a Christian myself, I have always bristled every time I
hear some left-wing (usually Jewish) anti-Zionist blame American Christians for Washington's
mid-east policies, while describing the influence of the Jewish lobby as being 'exaggerated'.
The obvious counterargument is: if American Christians have so much power over the federal
government that they can virtually dictate mid-east policy, how come they can't ban abortion
or gay marriage? How come they can't–forgive the metaphor–resurrect prayer in
school?
Indeed, the mere fact that the US now has an entire branch of Christianity
devoted to Rapture-Zionism gives you a clue as to who rules whom in this country. Think about
it, people: we now have 'Christian' churches who are actually willing to put the interests
and well-being of another religion ahead of their own! And their otherwise patriotic
followers are being conned into putting the interests of another country ahead of their own.
Absolutely astounding! In modern America at least, not only have the Christians lost control
of their government; they've even lost control of Christianity!
Moreover, what about all those other western countries, such as Britain, France and
Germany, which really lack anything like American-style Rapture-Christians, yet are still
completely in thrall to Israel? L'affaire Corbyn is, if nothing else, proof that we are not
the only ones being jacked around by the Zionists.
Don't get me wrong: I really wish American Christians would wake the f*ck up and see that
they're being used, being made to look pathetic by the Zionists. But the allegation that
those Christians are actually running the show in the West is completely fatuous. In fact,
it's just a left-wing 'anti-Zionist' gate-keeper story. Don't believe it!
Failure to confront Israel's crimes against humanity combined with an inability to
resist its demands regarding how issues like anti-Semitism and hate speech are defined has
done terrible damage to free speech in Western Europe and, most notably, in the Anglophone
world.
We are all Palestinians now!
I really hope this serves as a wake-up call to all of the pro-Zionist alt-righters out
there. The Zionists can never truly be our friends. After all, once they are able to
ban anti-Zionist talk for being anti-Semitic, how much longer will be it before they are able
to just go ahead and ban all anti-Semitic speech? Then where will you be? You won't
even be allowed to criticize George Soros anymore!
Corbyn is indeed a man of the left who has consistently opposed racism, extreme
nationalism, colonialism and military interventionism.
Well, I'm not a hundred-percent sure about the "nationalism" part. While "extreme" may
well be in the eye of the beholder, it's also true that the IRA and most of the Palestinian
groups do self-describe as 'nationalist', and Corbyn has always been OK with them (as am I).
The only nationalism his seems to have a real problem with is English nationalism.
The traditionally liberal Guardian has in fact been in the forefront of Jewish criticism
of Corbyn, led by its senior editor Jonathan Freedland
They should just go ahead and relaunch The Guardian as The Shomer .
As Norman Finkelstein once observed, Jews "never forgive and never forget." Corbyn ought
to keep that in mind. All his bobbing and weaving will availeth nothing.
Why should there be panic by the Brexiteers ?
Britain's export to the remaining EU is far less than from the remaining EU to GB.
Especially France and Germany have huge exports to GB.
As a Brexiteer already long ago mentioned 'they need us more than we them'.
If Merkel and Macron would survive a hard Brexit, I wonder.
Under estimated is the why of Brexit, they want their country back, as one voter said 'they
even interfere with vacuum cleaners'.
I stopped reading the Guardian full stop 4-5 years ago, back when they launched their
"Russia is evildoer!!" shrill campaign of propaganda–also about the time the Ukraine
civil war got into gear. Never looked back, the Guardian is a steaming pile of
US/NATO/Atlantic Council bullshit. I'll never understand why so many fixate on it, such as
the Off-guardian.org bloggers who've devoted an entire blog for years on end to criticising
Guardian journos, 'comment is free', comment mods, etc. All fine and good, but why?
With so
many other better news sources is there a need? No, there isn't. Just move on. The Guardian
is not a relevant news outlet. I mean, why keep going there to read pro-Israeli/pro-US
government articles which make you angry? Doesn't make any sense.
we keep accepting these arguments like Giraldis' here and functioning intellectually at
this paused rate which is insufficient to the needs of the day and time.
it is immediate the reality in which we live, in all its demands on us and we must respond
at the same speed. the enemy moves at the rate of speed of life and succeeds in slowing us
down with these arguments in the media
Corbyn is bloody well wrong. he has gone out of his way to compromise with the Zionists
and every time they want more. we we knew that, that they would not compromise did we not .we
knew it. we know the game. they know they game. they have the power and they never
compromise..never! they know to give ground is to lose.
and it is in fact to lose..and the same for the people. that is why it is zero sum. the
economic/political game is no place to compromise.
in principle the people have all the power..and we do. where are the leaders who bring the
people into awareness of their total power, set up and lead them into that power in the
process of fixing society?
why must the leader of those who have all the power be at the feet of a minority who is
bleeding the life out of the society?
Corbyn behaves as if he has no power..as if he is not fixing to assume in behalf of the
people the greatest social power there is..the power of the people. so he is apologetic and
compromising of the peoples power, on and in dealing with the peoples issues
the people's power and social interest have been usurped and compromised by a minority
power and their pets in the peoples power structure..and in the media too. that is why we are
dealing with a prevaricator in Giraldi and not a radicalized person who brings us up to
speed..the speed required to fix society
the peoples power has been betrayed by treasonous citizens who have lied to the people and
usurped the peoples power. that is the truth, the immediate truth and requires an immediate
and direct response..no compromise will work. this article here by Giraldi is not an
immediate response but a kind of time-wasting prevarication. Corbyn and his politics are also
prevarication
MoscowBob ( you're never going back to London to live ), the above official Parliamentary
Research Briefing makes alarming reading if you are a Conservative supporter. As of April
2018, Conservative membership is put at 124,000, narrowly ahead of the SNP at 118,000.
Conservative membership collapsed from 1 million in 1990 ( see page 7 ) to less than 500,000
5 years later ( John Major ). Apart from a brief period, it has been declining steadily since
the year 2000, especially from 2009 ( David Cameron).
It is no longer a mass membership political party, it is Conservative In Name Only and at the
beck and call of any (((big donors ))).
This situation cannot continue much longer. Its hold on political power will be ended shortly
unless there is a turnaround, which seems unlikely.
Jonathan Cook has also recently written a very good article on the current Israeli
engineered onslaught against Jeremy Corbyn, making much the same argument as Dr. Giraldi.
"... There is consensus between commentators who have studied the effects of neo-liberalism that it has become all pervasive and is the key to ensuring that the rich remain rich, while the poor and the merely well to do continue on a perpetual hamster's wheel, going nowhere and never improving their lot in life while they serve their masters. ..."
"... Monbiot says of this largely anonymous scourge: "Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulations should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous, a reward for utility and a genera-tor of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve." ..."
"... Senior cadres co-opted Unfortunately, history shows that some key senior cadres of the ANC were all too keen to be coopted into the neo-liberal fold and any attempts to put forward radical measures that would bring something fresh to the table to address the massive inequalities of the past were and continue to be kept off the table and we are still endlessly fed the neo-liberal trickle-down baloney. ..."
SA is cursed with neo-liberal trickle-down baloney stifling radical economicchangeKevin Humphrey, The New Age, Johannesburg, 1 December 2016
South Africa's massive inequalities are abundantly obvious to even the most casual observer. When the ANC won the elections in
1994, it came armed with a left-wing pedigree second to none, having fought a protracted liberation war in alliance with progressive
forces which drew in organised labour and civic groupings.
At the dawn of democracy the tight knit tripartite alliance also carried in its wake a patchwork of disparate groupings who, while
clearly supportive of efforts to rid the country of apartheid, could best be described as liberal. It was these groupings that first
began the clamour of opposition to all left-wing, radical or revolutionary ideas that has by now become the constant backdrop to
all conversations about the state of our country, the economy, the education system, the health services, everything. Thus was the
new South Africa introduced to its own version of a curse that had befallen all countries that gained independence from oppressors,
neo-colonialism.
By the time South Africa was liberated, neo-colonialism, which as always sought to buy off the libera-tors with the political
kingdom while keep-ing control of the economic kingdom, had perfected itself into what has become an era where neo-liberalism reigns
supreme. But what exactly is neo-liberalism? George Monbiot says: "Neo-liberalism sees competi-tion as the defining characteristic
of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process
that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that 'the market' delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning."
Never improving
There is consensus between commentators who have studied the effects of neo-liberalism that it has become all pervasive and
is the key to ensuring that the rich remain rich, while the poor and the merely well to do continue on a perpetual hamster's wheel,
going nowhere and never improving their lot in life while they serve their masters.
Monbiot says of this largely anonymous scourge: "Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and
regulations should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade
unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is
recast as virtuous, a reward for utility and a genera-tor of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a
more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve."
Nelson Mandela
South Africa's sad slide into neo-liberalism was given impetus at Davos in 1992 where Nelson Mandela had this to say to the assembled
super rich: "We visualise a mixed economy, in which the private sector would play a central and critical role to ensure the creation
of wealth and jobs. Future economic policy will also have to address such questions as security of investments and the right to repatriate
earnings, realistic exchange rates, the rate of inflation and the fiscus."
Further insight into this pivotal moment was provided by Anthony Sampson, Mandela's official biographer who wrote: "It was not
until February 1992, when Mandela went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he finally turned against nationalisation.
He was lionised by the world's bankers and industrialists at lunches and dinners."
This is not to cast any aspersions on Mandela, he had to make these decisions at the time to protect our democratic transition.
But these utterances should have been accom-panied by a behind the scenes interrogation of all the ANC's thoughts on how to proceed
in terms of the economy delivering socialist orientated solutions without falling into the minefield of neo-liberal traps that lay
in wait for our emerging country.
Senior cadres co-opted Unfortunately, history shows that some key senior cadres of the ANC were all too keen
to be coopted into the neo-liberal fold and any attempts to put forward radical measures that would bring something fresh to the
table to address the massive inequalities of the past were and continue to be kept off the table and we are still endlessly fed the
neo-liberal trickle-down baloney.
Now no one dares to express any type of radical approach to our economic woes unless it is some loony populist. Debate around
these important issues is largely missing and the level of commentary on all important national questions is shockingly shallow.
Anti-labour, anti-socialist, anti-poor, anti-black The status quo as set by the largely white-owned media revolves
around key neo-liberal slogans mas-querading as commentary that is anti-labour, anti-socialist and anti-poor, which sadly translates
within our own context as anti-black and therefore repugnantly racist.
We live in a country where the black, over-whelmingly poor majority of our citizens have voted for a much revered liberation movement
that is constantly under attack from within and without by people who do not have their best interests at heart and are brilliant
at manipulating outcomes to suit themselves on a global scale.
Kevin Humphrey is associate executive editor of The New Age
I stopped reading the Guardian full stop 4-5 years ago, back when they launched their
"Russia is evildoer!!" shrill campaign of propaganda -- also about the time the Ukraine civil
war got into gear. Never looked back, the Guardian is a steaming pile of US/NATO/Atlantic
Council bullshit.
I'll never understand why so many fixate on it, such as the Off-guardian.org bloggers
who've devoted an entire blog for years on end to criticising Guardian journos, 'comment is
free', comment mods, etc. All fine and good, but why?
With so many other better news sources is there a need? No, there isn't. Just move on. The
Guardian is not a relevant news outlet. I mean, why keep going there to read
pro-Israeli/pro-US government articles which make you angry? Doesn't make any sense.
"... President Trump is making a terminable mistake in trusting to facts and truth, neither of which is respected in the scant remains of Western Civilization. ..."
"... all of which are employed for the purpose of contradicting truth. ..."
"... Americans are too insouciant to know it, but they are living day by day only at the mercy of Russia. ..."
Mueller is part of the plot against Trump as is Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who
appointed Mueller special prosecutor. Both are guilty of sedition as they are active
participants in an organized coup to overthrow the President of the United States. But Trump is
too powerless to have them arrested and put on trial for the conspiracy against democracy that
they are conducting. President Trump is making a terminable mistake in trusting to facts
and truth, neither of which is respected in the scant remains of Western Civilization.
Once there was hope that information available on the Internet would serve as a
countervailing power to the lies told by the Western print, TV, and NPR presstitutes. But this
was a vain hope. There are some good and reliable websites, increasingly being closed down by
the ruling elite. The ruling elites have most of the money and can finance most of the online
voices, all of which are employed for the purpose of contradicting truth.
I received today an email from RootsAction urging me to donate money to speed Trump's
impeachment. The website has even prepared the Articles of Impeachment and proclaims that
"Trump's Fixer Says the President Engaged in a Criminal Conspiracy to Sway the 2016
Election."
This accusation comes from one of Trump's former lawyers, Michael Cohen. They are
allegations that most defense attorneys understand is Michael Cohen's effort to gain a light
sentence for his income tax evasion by "composing," to use the term of Harvard Law Professor
Alan Dershowitz, evidence against the man Mueller really wants -- President Trump.
I will be unequivocal. RootsAction, as is the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and
the rest of the media whores, is lying. To pay off two women, who might have been paid by the
military/security complex, or Hillary & Bill Clinton, or the Democratic National Committee,
to bring such charges or who simply saw an opportunity to collect a bunch of dollars from
Donald Trump, is most certainly, most definitely not, as RootsAction claims, "the high crime
and misdemeanor of attempting to fraudulently influence the outcome of a US presidential
election. This is an impeahable offense warranting removal from office."
Whoever advises RootsAction is a totally incompetent attorney. Moreover, to show the utter
stupidity of RootsAction's ignorant assertion, a "misdemeanor" cannot be a "high crime." A
"high crime" is a "felony."
I have posted on my website statements from legal experts that there is nothing unlawful
about paying off claimants. Corporations do it continually. It is much cheaper to pay off a
false claim than to finance a court case to refute it. There is no reason whatsoever for a
political candidate competing for a party's nomination for the presidency to be distracted by
fighting court cases brought to extort money from him.
Moreover, considering the dire straints in which the American population between the two
coasts has been left by decades of jobs offshoring, the government's inability to provide
assistance to those millions of Americans whose living standard is dissolving because the
military/security complex appropriates $1,000 billion annually from America's resources, and
the Trump public's awareness that provoking Russia into war is in no one's interest,
RootsAction and the rest of the imbeciles have to be crazy beyond all belief to think that that
anyone who voted for Trump cared if he had sexual encounters with two women. Considering the
dire straits of Americans, the last thing they would do is to vote against their champion
because he had sex with two women, assuming that he did.
Yet, an unsubstantiated claim by a lawyer who did not pay his income tax, a claim made for
the purpose of a light sentence in exchange for providing false evidence against the President
of the United States, is now, according to RootsAction, the New York Times, Washington Post,
NPR, CNN, MSNBC, etc., and so on, grounds for impeaching the President of the United States who
hopes to defuse the extremely dangerous tensions between Washington and Russia.
The military/security complex wants to impeach Trump because he wants peace with Russia,
thus taking away the essential enemy that justifies their budget and power.
Are Americans too stupid to notice that there is not a shred of evidence of the "Russiagate"
accusations? What we have in their place is income tax evasion charges, not against Trump, but
against an attorney and a Republian campaign manager. More convincing charges could be brought
against Democrats, but have not. The Hillary crowd of criminals has proven immune to
prosecution.
No one has to approve of Trump in order to have the intelligence to see that Trump's
intention to normalize relations with Russia is the world's main hope of continued existence.
Once nuclear weapons go off, global warming will take on new meaning.
... ... ...
Americans are too insouciant to know it, but they are living day by day only at the
mercy of Russia.
Critique of Israeli government interference in internal affair of other states in a form of
pro-Israel lobby, or critique Zionism as an ideology is not equivalent to anti-Semitism.
Neoliberal states like Israel do not represent interests of its citizens, but mostly
transnationals and top 1%. Attempt to link those mean weaponizing anti-Semitism. For example,
while Israel is an ally of the USA some if its action are definitely are against the USA citizens
interests. Although the role of Israel as a collective lobbyist for US MIC should be
acknowledged.
Conversion of Israel into ethnostate is probably a logical development, but the problem here
is that it further alienate Palestinians, which have higher birth rate then Israelites.
Notable quotes:
"... It was also learned that the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising private groups promoting Israeli interests, including associations of Members of Parliament (MPs). ..."
"... Corbyn's crime has been that he is critical of the Jewish state and has called for an "end to the repression of the Palestinian people." As a reward, he has been hounded mercilessly by British Jews, even those in his own party, for over two years. ..."
"... Last month, rightwing Labour Parliamentarian Margaret Hodge raised the stakes, calling Corbyn "a fucking anti-Semite and a racist". She then wrote in the Guardian ..."
"... All of the invective has been more-or-less orchestrated by the Israeli government, which directly supports the gaggle of groups that have coalesced to bring down Corbyn. This effort to destroy the Labour leader has included the use of an app disseminating messages via social media accusing Corbyn of anti-Semitism. The app was developed by Israel's strategic affairs ministry , which "directs Israel's covert efforts to sabotage the Palestine solidarity movement around the world". ..."
"... The principal argument being made against Corbyn is that the Labour Party is awash with anti-Semitism and Corbyn has done little or nothing to oppose it. Some of the most brutal shots against Corbyn have come from the usual crowd in the United States. ..."
Many believe that the easily observable dominance of the friends of Israel over some aspects
of government policy is a phenomenon unique to the United States, where committed Jews and
Christian Zionists are able to control both politicians and the media message relating to what
is going on in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the reality is that there exists an "Israel
Lobby" in many countries, all dedicated to advancing the agendas promoted by successive Israeli
governments no matter what the actual interests of the host country might be. Failure to
confront Israel's crimes against humanity combined with an inability to resist its demands
regarding how issues like anti-Semitism and hate speech are defined has done terrible damage to
free speech in Western Europe and, most notably, in the Anglophone world.
For the United States this corruption of the media and the political process by Israel has
meant
endless wars in the Middle East as well of loss of civil liberties at home, but some other
countries have compromised their own declared values far beyond that. Former Canadian Prime
Minister Stephen Harper praised Israel completely inaccurately as a
light that " burns bright, upheld by the universal principles of all civilized nations --
freedom, democracy justice." He has also said "I will defend Israel whatever the
cost" to Canada, an assertion that some might regard as very, very odd for a Canadian head of
state.
In some other cases, Israel plays hardball directly, threatening retribution against
governments that do not fall in line. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
recently warned New Zealand that backing a U.N. resolution condemning Israeli settlements
would be a "declaration of war." He was able to do so because he had confidence in the power of
the Israel Lobby in that country to mobilize and produce the desired result.
It might surprise some that the "Mother of Parliaments" in Great Britain is perhaps the
legislative body most dominated by Israeli interests, more in many respects than the Congress
in the United States. The ruling Conservative Party has a Friends of Israel caucus that
includes more than 80% of its Parliamentary membership. BICOM , the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre,
is an American Israel Political Action Committee
(AIPAC) clone located in London. It is well funded and politically powerful, working
through its various "Friends of Israel" proxies. Americans might be surprised to learn how that
power is manifest, including that in Britain Jewish organizations uniquely are
allowed to patrol heavily Jewish London neighborhoods in police-like uniforms while driving
police-type vehicles. There have been reports of the patrols threatening Muslims who seek to
enter the areas.
Prime Minister Theresa May is careful never to offend either Israel or the wealthy and
powerful British Jewish community. After Secretary of State John Kerry described Israel's
government as "extreme right wing" on December 28, 2016, May sprang to Tel Aviv's defense,
saying "we do not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the
democratically elected government of an ally." May's rejoinder could have been written by
Netanyahu, and maybe it was. Two weeks later, her government cited
"reservations" over a French government sponsored mid-January Middle East peace conference
and would not sign a joint statement calling for a negotiated two-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict after Netanyahu vociferously condemned the proceedings.
This deference all takes place in spite of a recent astonishing expose by al-Jazeera, which
revealed how the Israeli Embassy in London connived with government officials to "take down"
parliamentarians and government ministers who were considered to be critical of the Jewish
State. It was also learned that the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising
private groups promoting Israeli interests, including associations of Members of Parliament
(MPs).
British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been under unrelenting fire due to the fact that he
is the first major political party leader in many years to resist the demands that he place
Israel on a pedestal. Corbyn is indeed a man of the left who has consistently opposed racism,
extreme nationalism, colonialism and military interventionism. Corbyn's crime has been that
he is critical of the Jewish state and has called for an "end to the repression of the
Palestinian people." As a reward, he has been hounded mercilessly by British Jews, even those
in his own party, for over two years.
The invective being spewed by some British Jews and Israel has increased of late, presumably
because Theresa May's Conservative government is perceived as being weak and there is a
distinct possibility that the leader of the Labour Party will be the next Prime Minister. That
a Prime Minister might be sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians is viewed as completely
unacceptable.
Last month, rightwing Labour Parliamentarian Margaret Hodge raised the stakes, calling
Corbyn "a fucking anti-Semite and a racist". She then wrote in the Guardian that
Labour is "a hostile environment for Jews." The traditionally liberal Guardian has in
fact been in the forefront of Jewish criticism of Corbyn, led by its senior editor Jonathan
Freedland, who reportedly believes
that "his Jewish identity is intimately tied to Israel, and that to attack Israel is to attack
him personally he is demanding the exclusive right to police the parameters of discussions
about Israel." Last month he featured in his paper a
letter attacking Corbyn signed by 68 rabbis.
All of the invective has been more-or-less orchestrated by the Israeli government, which
directly supports the gaggle of groups that have coalesced to bring down Corbyn. This effort to
destroy the Labour leader has included the use of an app disseminating messages via social
media accusing Corbyn of anti-Semitism. The app was developed by Israel's strategic affairs
ministry , which "directs Israel's covert efforts to sabotage the Palestine solidarity
movement around the world".
There are two principal objectives to the "get Corbyn" campaign. The first is to remove him
from the Labour Party leadership position, thereby ensuring that he will never be elected Prime
Minister, while also eliminating from the party any and all members who are perceived as being
"too critical" of Israel. In practice that has meant anyone who criticizes Israel at all. And
second it is to establish as a legal principle that the "hate crime" offense of anti-Semitism
specifically be defined to include criticism of Israel, thereby making it a criminal offense to
write or speak about Israel's racist behavior towards its Muslim and Christian minority while
also making it impossible to freely discuss its war crimes.
The principal argument being made against Corbyn is that the Labour Party is awash with
anti-Semitism and Corbyn has done little or nothing to oppose it. Some of the most brutal shots
against Corbyn have come from the usual crowd in the United States. Andrew Sullivan
recently
observed in New York Magazine that "When it emerged, that Naz Shah, a new Labour
MP, had opined on Facebook before she was elected that Israel should be relocated to the U.S.,
and former London mayor Ken Livingstone backed her up by arguing that the Nazis initially
favored Zionism, Corbyn didn't make a big fuss." Sullivan then went on to write that "It then
emerged that Corbyn himself had subscribed to various pro-Palestinian Facebook groups where
rank anti-Semitism flourished" and had even " attended a meeting on Holocaust Memorial Day in
2010, called 'Never Again for Anyone: Auschwitz to Gaza,' equating Israelis with Nazis."
In other words, Corbyn should have been responsible for policing the personal views of
Shah and Livingstone ,
both of whom were subsequently suspended from the Labour Party with Livingstone eventually
resigning. He should have also avoided Palestinian Facebook commentary because alleged
anti-Semites occasionally contribute their views and ought not to acknowledge in any fashion
the Israel war crimes being committed on a daily basis in Gaza.
So Corbyn must go based on the "fact" that he has to be a closet anti-Semite as discerned by
the likes of Andrew Sullivan on this side of the Atlantic and a host of Israel-firsters in
Britain. But the Labour leader's worst crime that is being regarded as an "
existential threat " to Jewish people everywhere is his resistance to the pressure being
exerted on him to endorse and adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA)
precise multi-faceted definition of what constitutes anti-Semitism. The IHRA basic definition
of anti-Semitism is reasonable enough, including "a certain perception of Jews, which may be
expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are
directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community
institutions and religious facilities."
The Labour Party and Corbyn have accepted that definition but have balked at eleven
"contemporary examples of anti-Semitism" also provided by IHRA, four of which have nothing to
do with Jews and everything to do with Israel. They are:
Accusing Jewish citizens of being
more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of
their own nations. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g.
One might observe that many Jews
And yes, Israel is a "racist endeavor." Just check out the recent nationality
law passed by the Knesset declaring Israel to be a Jewish State. It grants
self-determination only to those living within its borders who are Jews. And if using racial
distinctions for full citizenship while also bombing hospitals and schools while lining up
snipers to shoot thousands of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators is not Nazi-like behavior, then
what is? Israel and its leader are sometimes compared to Nazis and to Adolf Hitler because they
behave like Nazis and Adolf Hitler.
And finally there is the definition that challenges any "double standard" in demanding
behavior from Israel that is not expected from any other democratic nation. Well, first of all
Israel is not a democracy. It is a theocracy or ethnocracy if you prefer wrapped around a
police state. Other countries that call themselves democracies have equal rights under law for
all citizens. Other democracies do not have hundreds of thousands of settlers stealing land and
even water resources from the indigenous population and colonizing it to the benefit of only
one segment of its population. Other democracies do not regularly shoot dead unarmed
protesters. How many democracies are currently practicing ethnic cleansing, as the Israeli Jews
are doing to the Palestinians?
Will Corbyn give in to the IHRA demands to save his skin as party leader? One has to suspect
that he will as he is already regularly conceding points and apologizing, publicly delivering
the required obeisance to the holocaust as "the worst crime of the twentieth century." And
every time he tries to appease those out to get him he emerges weaker. Even if he submits
completely, the Israel firsters who are hot to get him, having just like in American
significant control over the media, will continue to attack until they find the precise issue
that will bring him down. The Labour National Executive Council will meet in September to vote
on full acceptance of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. When they, as is likely, kneel
before force majeure that will be the end of free speech in Britain. Criticize Israel and you
go to jail.
And the same thing is happening in the United States in precisely the same fashion.
Criticism of Israel or protesting against it will sooner rather than later be criminalized. I
sometimes wonder if Senator Ben Cardin and the others who are promoting the hate legislation
really understand what will be lost when they sacrifice the U.S. Constitution to defend Israel.
Once free speech is gone, it will never return.
"... Democrats are proceeding down a dark path: identity politics brings only conflict, civil war. ..."
"... Anybody who trusts the Democrats to save us from the evil machinations of the Neocons is as hopelessly stupid as anyone who trusts the Neocons to save us from the evil machinations of the Democrats. ..."
"... These new Democrats will never vote for less spending. There previous career was based on having abundant and in some cases unlimited Federal funds at their fingertips. ..."
Ron Unz has linked to WSWS.org several times in the past as WSWS was targeted by the Deep
State/Google etc. cabal to make it disappear into the "memory hole."
The only activism I've seen from progressives in the past two years has nothing to do
with economic concerns; their energy is entirely focused on race, gender, and sexuality.
The cultural-Marxist troika.
Just one of many good point you make. The only thing I'd add is in relation to:
Democrats are proceeding down a dark path: identity politics brings only conflict, civil
war.
As Reg mentions: conflict among the masses is very much the plan. Divide et
impera.
And my stupid [neo]liberal friends still think the democrats are going to save them, and then
on to super – duper – special stupid, they think their vote for a democrat is
going to have an impact. On to ludicrous stupid – it's all the republicans fault.
Identity politics at its finest.
Unfixable, and circling the drain.
The Alarmist, June 8, 2018 at 11:03 am GMT • 100 Words
"Center-right" and "business oriented?"
Try Oligarch-centric.
There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, from the fall of
Constantinople: Sultan Mehmed II rounded up the surviving oligarchs of
the Empire and asked them why they had withheld their riches and
resources from supporting the Empire's final defense against his
conquest, to which the oligarchs replied that they were saving their
riches for his most excellent majesty. He had them brutally executed.
Jake, June 8, 2018 at 11:13 am GMT
Anybody who trusts the Democrats to save us from the evil
machinations of the Neocons is as hopelessly stupid as anyone who trusts
the Neocons to save us from the evil machinations of the Democrats.
At the upper levels there is no difference between the Demonrats and the
Republicons as all are controlled by the Zionists and congress would by
more accurately called the lower house of the Knesset..
prusmc, June 8, 2018 at 1:18 pm GMT • 100 Words
@anon
These new Democrats will never vote for less spending. There
previous career was based on having abundant and in some cases unlimited
Federal funds at their fingertips.
It is a mistake to think they will be any different than Maxine
Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Jerold Nadler or Luis Guitirez. Senator Joe
Manchin of West Virginia is about a unconventional as we can expect the
new congressional majority members to be.
jacques sheete, June 8, 2018 at 1:44 pm GMT
@Anon
The ultra rich use the poor to attack the middle so they can
distract everyone else from uniting
That, in fact, is the practical aim of government in general.
Parties, schmarties it's all one huge extortion racket.
I believe you may be confusing ruthless ambition with psychopathy. They have similar
features, but are not the same. This argument is not on completely solid ground as there is
no complete agreement on what psychopathy is, but the consensus is that there is something
wrong with a psychopath's brain.
The ruthless can be mentally intact, they see the same world we do, they just don't care
enough about others to restrain their own ambition. This is often learned, they've been
hardened by the world, but can sometimes be just a result of excessive ambition or peer
pressure. They can be quite pro-social among their peers. They manipulate or punish for gain,
not for the kick of manipulating or punishing others.
Psychopaths don't often make it to the top (board level) of organizations, they're too
anti-social to get along with other board members. They manipulate and punish for the kick
they get out of it. Psychopaths are abundant among the self-made and at lower levels of
organizations where they are used and discarded.
Sorry Mike, what do you mean by saying the goal is to "create a center-right" Democratic
Party? The Clinton's accomplished this in the 1990s -- what we have here is a full scale
enfoldment of the Dems into the National Security State
Not that it matters much -- both Republicans and Democrats have been on the same page for
a few decades now (since the 1940s IMHO). Inter-party politics don't matter much, except
insofar as the voting public can be conned into supporting one or the other, because no
matter which party holds the Congress or Presidency the same Deep State agenda is their top
priority.
Why? It's simple really -- money. Big campaign donors expect "value" in return for their
"political contributions". And if value isn't had for their money, the Deep State's
intelligence community can usually dig up something "useful" in the offender's background to
"persuade" him or her to support the current bipartisan agenda
If it's really true that to find out who has power, just take note of whom is above
criticism, perhaps we ought to consider that Rockefeller and JPMorgan money founded the CFR
in 1921 and it took root and bloomed in government "service" during and after WWII.
If you doubt the CFR's power as the Deep State personified, I suggest reading historian
Quigley's Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time and sociologist Tom
Dye's Who Is Running America series.
Paraphrasing Quigley, writing when Bill Clinton was his student at Georgetown, the two
parties should be as alike as two sides of a coin so that voters can "throw the rascals out"
in any election without significantly changing governmental priorities and policies because
the policies the US is and ought be pursuing are not subject to significant dispute (or
at the least not by the voting public).
Which begs the question -- who is (and has been since the 1940s) setting US policy? If we,
the voters, cannot alter or change our national policies, then democratic oversight of the
Republic is nothing but a sham. The US is, in this view, just another Banana Republic which
Tom Dye ably documents from Watergate to Shrub's administration.
The two party "uniparty" is alive and well. In fact, while the party's supporters still
may include self- described "leftists" the party itself has gone further right than the
traditionally rightwing GOP. The dual party structure relies on the "Democrats" to gut
"entitlements", that is Social Security or Medicare.
It was the "Democrats" who put in Obamacare, which mandated people to spend an arm and a
leg on crappy medical insurance the cost of which was massively inflated which they could
only use when they had spent way more than average on medical bills. Meanwhile it was the
democrats' harpy candidate who proposed a no-fly zone in Syria on behalf of raghead
mercenaries hired by the yankee imperium.
While Trump has largely caved in to the deep state, in part perhaps because of the
pressure applied by the phony deep state witch hunt taking over the "justice" department of
the yankee regime, we know what the democrats, exponents of the fraudulent "Russia-gate"
stories, now espouse: a new cold war far more dangerous than the old one.
Meanwhile, the commercial media in the US and satellite countries, has degenerated into a
Goebbels-like propaganda apparat. Trump's clumsiness actually may have the accidental
salutary effect of enabling the satellite countries to slip the yankee leash, at least to
some extent.
The situation brought about by this unprecedented two faction version of fascism is
profoundly depressing, in addition to being seriously dangerous.
Why is this article entitled: "Dems Put Finishing Touches on One-Party 'Surveillance
Superstate'"
This website seems to have articles that show their authors are awake and yet, this article
shows quite the opposite. Who today, with the slightest modicum of common sense, who has made
the effort in understanding how the system works, still plays the left-right paradigm,
Hegelian Dialectic, political game nonsense?
I mean, let's get real here; the Democrats and the Republicans, like their UK counterparts of
Labour and Conservative are merely wings on the same bird, ultimately flying to a
destination. Both parties are taking the USA towards a one-party, surveillance, super state.
You do not enter American politics unless you bow to Zionism and International Jewry. Unless
you show 100% support to Israel then forget a career in politics.
Incidentally, to many who may have heard of her; the new luvey of the conservatives is
none other than black, Candace Owens, who is better known as Red Pill Black. She has been
this new voice who has entered into the 'alternative right', itself nothing more than
controlled opposition, speaking out against feminism, white privilege, rape culture,
transgender culture etc etc and has gained a large following. Other than being a complete
fraud, as information has appeared that she tried to launch a 'doxing' website, targeting
youngsters, she has appeared at the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem:
Why on earth, would some nobody, who has had an incredibly fast rise on YouTube (most
certainly her subscriber base and video view has been doctored) and more so a black
conservative, be invited to attend the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem? Bottom
line? She's being groomed for a career in politics and I wouldn't be surprised if they wheel
her out, some time in the future, as a presidential hopeful to capture the black vote in the
USA.
Again, this is controlled opposition.
You never vote in a new party in politics. You vote out the old one. 326 million is the
population of the USA and there are only two political parties? Are you serious? It's bad
enough, here in the UK with three (liberal party along with Labour and Conservative), with a
66 million population but only two in the USA?
Both parties are heavily controlled.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has been putting presidents into power now for over a
hundred years. The CFR is the sister organization of the Royal Institute for International
Affairs, which has been doing the same, here in the UK for the same time. All politicians are
groomed from an early age, taught how to avoid answering any question directly, how to lie
and of course who their masters are. By implementing their wishes, politicians are then
granted a seat on some board, within some multi conglomerate, a six figure salary, a fat
pension on top of their political one and of course umpteen houses spread across wherever.
Blair and Obama epitomize this.
Both political parties are left wing, hiding under the right wing and classic liberal
monikers.
"... I lost all respect for him first on his treatment of his first wife when he returned from captivity. I notice that no one in the media mentioned her existence. ..."
Of course, you already know that because the headlines are dominating the news coverage.
Most of the coverage is also lionizing him as some kind of hero who defended America from his
time as a POW in Vietnam to his attacks on Russia for supposedly trying to undermine American
democracy. The fact is, and I know this because I've documented some of it in the course of my
own work in recent years, he was a warmonger supreme. McCain never met a war–especially a
regime change war–he didn't like, nor a terrorist he couldn't endorse as a "freedom
fighter," especially, as in the case of Syria, if that terrorist was in the service of the
regime change war he endorsed. In Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine, a million or more people have
died and tens of millions more are suffering as a result of these wars that McCain did so much
to bring about.
In a short but to-the-point piece. Sputnik summarizes
McCain's extreme Russophobia and his love for the Nazi regime in Kiev. Vladimir Putin was being
charitable when, as Sputnik recounts, he told Oliver Stone that McCain was a patriot, but one
who couldn't accept that the world had changed. "People with such convictions, like the Senator
you mentioned, they still live in the Old World," Putin said. "And they're reluctant to look
into the future, they are unwilling to recognize how fast the world is changing." That Putin
was able to say that says more about his genuine humanity than it does about McCain, who gave
up whatever humanity he had a long time ago.
Anyone fighting for a genuine peace in the world will not mourn the passing of John McCain.
I endorse Willy B's view of McCain. From dealing with him personally i would say that he
was indeed a fighter. He would fight anyone who disagreed with him about anything. RIP
The beatification of McCain by our media is a symptom of a decadent political and media
culture that sees no need to look, see, or hear anything beyond the most superficial
analysis. That culture does nothing more than use stock images, phrases, and slogans that
trigger blind acceptance by much of the population. (Present company excepted of course.)
That's my biggest issue. The MSM fawned over him so much he was a virtual cult hero. I
could not watch CNN for more than a total of about 5 minutes over the weekend because they
were pouring it on so thick. Jack Tapper would have married the guy.
If you interview his colleagues and they want to wax eloquent and you let them, fine, I
get that. But it is unseemly for the hosts themselves to join in and remind us that they are
now basically state media.
Anna Cabrera jumped in and said, in regard to his hawkishness, 'He always wanted to spread
freedom around to the less fortunate'.
Were they really praising McCain or was it a form of self worship, because McCain and his
kind always assured us that we in the U.S. was always 100% right and our enemies were 100%
wrong and needed to be vanquished. If CNN hosts entertained different ideas, they would
actually have to work for a living.
Had McCain said nice things about Trump, I can assure you this little love fest we are
witnessing right now would be playing out a bit differently right now.
He was an abomination and stupid beyond words. I am very grateful I will no longer have to
listen to his hate speech directed against any and all in the world who disagreed with him.
His allies Al-Qaeda in Syria I am sure are mourning his passing along with the false flag
specialist of the world. He would have been instrumental in any upcoming false flag trying to
incite a WWIII conflagration between the US and Russia. The only time in life he would have
had peace would have been the 15 minutes he knew the nuclear missiles were flying toward
Russia. This tells you everything you need to know about the man. The current hagiography is
ridiculous when you realize his own co-workers in the Senate hated him almost to a man minus
his BFF Graham. He is property of the Heavens now and no longer our problem here on
Earth.
This quasi-religious veneration of politicians is unseemly. It is profane. It is
unbecoming of us as a people, and it has transformed the majority of public offices into ones
that are truly attractive only to men who are unfit to hold them.
As much as one single man is responsible for anything, John McCain
is responsible for the Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine Wars. Any memorial that doesn't include
this is propaganda.
Sidney Schanberg, the Journalist of "The Killing Fields" wrote a damning story about
McCain helping cover up evidence of left behind US POWs in Vietnam.
https://www.theamericancons...
John McCain was a flawed man, just like the rest of us. I did not agree with many of his
policy prescriptions but he seemed genuine in his pursuit of what he thought was right.
Anyone who has to stand up in front of the world for all to see and take a political position
will find many who agree and many who disagree with only history providing 20-20 hindsight.
In 20 years will readers of this Blog go to the achieves and find any stupidity in some of
the comments made this past year? It would be an interesting experiment.
I did not agree with many of his policy prescriptions but he seemed genuine in his
pursuit of what he thought was right.
the question is was he "genuine"? And if so, what is that?
jdledell reverts to to standard etiquette here. But he does not quite utter the ultimate
one: May he rest in peace. Does he?
For me the outsider it looks that McCain, may have been the 'partisan spearheader ' within
a larger American institutional representative consensus. What's the core and what is the
reason for that phenomenon? Nitwit question, I admit. ...
It might only take a few days after I've written a comment here or elsewhere to see that
something I wrote sounded stupid or just me getting way ahead of myself. I try and remember
my place when I comment but sometimes dumb stuff gets through. I love this blog.
Wow...looking for perfection, are we? Why don't we try a reasoned analysis of McCain's
good and bad points---he did some good and some bad. I, personally, am not as upset about his
war-mongering (although you are certainly correct) but am quite upset that he put Sarah Palin
forward into the national spotlight as a possible President. Dear Merciful, what was he
thinking! That is probably the single most anti-democracy and anti-American move of his
career.
As a time traveler left behind from that period and someone who led the clandestine search
for MIAs and remains I must tell you that I do not think any MIAs were left behind in SE
Asia. My operation in Defense HUMINT searched diligently across SE Asia for years and found
lots of remains which were reported to the Hickam AFB facility but never any MIAs. There were
a few deserters from US forces who chose to remain SE Asia but that was their business and we
left them alone once we found them.
Col Lang , a bit off topic here , but do you know if there's french operatives (those who
assigned / lived among the tribes) are left abandoned when french pulled out ? i recall
reading about it in Bernard Fall's book
No, There were some few of the GCMA who chose to stay. But, in general, it was our
montagnard allies and those of the French who were abandoned to the the mercies of the ethnic
communist enemies.
Col. Lang -- I'm glad you addressed this MIA issue. IMHO, the MIA hagiography may well
have been the beginning of the conspiracy theory/fake news extravaganza that we live under
today.
My spook project was based in SE Asia where we could get into all these countries
surreptitiously. They reported to me for command and control and product to JCRC. Based on
our data among other research they did they asked the VN government, etc. for access to the
sites. This was in the early '90s. There was a liaison office in DIA that kept the Congress
and the families at bay while we searched.
Reasoned analysis? Perhaps you should ask those who were at the other end of your
country's gun barrel whether it is possible to have a reasoned analysis about this man. The
millions who suffered and died because of this "imperfect" Mc Cain surely must not be sorry
this man has passed away. Neither am I. There are evil people whose disappearance lets
mankind breath a sigh of relief.
Like every person Sen. McCain had good and bad. While we can admire his grit and courage
as a POW and empathize with his suffering in Vietnam, we should not airbrush his incessant
campaigning and support for all the regime change interventions that killed millions of
innocent civilians.
I very much dislike this type of relativistic thinking, because you can say the same about
literally anything, making such a statement almost entirely meaningless.
Yes McCain was a neo-conservative who as a senator advocated wars of aggression. However,
it was Bush and Cheney who made the decision to go into Iraq - not McCain. Why lay all the
responsibility for millions of innocent deaths on just John McCain.
McCain is being promoted as a great American hero. IMO he does not deserve that. I have
known brave men who were not the fils a papa of a four star and they were and are ignored. In
the ME, he, Lieberman and Graham were just puppets of Israel.
I don't disagree. All I am saying is that there are still one or two O-6s out there that
get the honorary title of Commodore when a task-organized unit that does not rate a flag
officer arises. That is both in the USN and USCG.
I can write only as a citizen who has little influence in politics, if any. These are my
thoughts::
First, I did vote for him when he was running for POTUS. But I held my nose in doing so..
We really had two terrible choices that year. Obama or McCain. I think I liked voting for his
choice of VP mostly because it set the talking heads into such a state of shock.
I lost all respect for him first on his treatment of his first wife when he returned from
captivity. I notice that no one in the media mentioned her existence.
Then his "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" "joke" just seemed shockingly nasty to me. Suggesting
bombing of people as a joke?
The McCain / Graham duo of the neocon philosophy would always cause me to turn off the TV.
Did no one in the media ever want to do any real investigation of the consequences of the War
in Iraq?
I was taught not to speak ill of the dead. And I try not to dwell on the death of Mccain
right now. So, I've kept my television off. As a committed Christian, I know Who is sitting
in judgement of McCain, and I trust His judgement will be fair and honest and the judgement
will be from the heart of a "father" in regard to a "son" who, as we all have, had flaws as
well as strengths.
He is now with his Maker, as some day we each will be.
In other words, Diana, his bomb, bomb, Iran shocked you a lot less then did the idea Obama
could become president? Notice, I am not judging you. My own possibly ill-guided choice would
have been based on the fact that he was one of the few that voted against the Iraq War.
You remember your reasoning in 2007?
How exactly did the soccer Mom surface in that context? Arbitrary choice, wasn't aware of
the history of its use in elections. By the way. But whenever I hear or read Palin "soccer
mom" pops up on my mind, Followed let's say by the flags on her desk and rumors around Weekly
Standard's influencing the choice.
I voted for Obama twice because I could not live with the prospect of the alternatives.
Obama, IMO turned out to be a crypto-revolutionary. we don't need a revolution in the US. We
need good government and we are getting it with regard to the economy.
His views on many things I disagreed with strongly, but compared to so many herd-minded
pusillanimous creatures which hold office in both houses these days..his courage stands out.
His finest hour:
That's more or less what George Carlin insinuated: "The middle class does all the work,
pays all the taxes while the wealthy class takes all the money and pays none of the taxes and
the poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class .keep asking for all those
jobs".
WSWS.org offers a great perspective on current events, and Whitney is right to quote from
them. He should use links to them for sure, as you point out. WSWS gives more content and
analysis in its reporting than most other 'liberal' outlets like Intercept or crappy
Trughdig, and FAR more than the beneath contempt corporate media such as Guardian which is
the very worst of the worst.
Hey everybody! Go and read WSWS.org it is an excellent news source-
The communist WSWS may have some good viewpoints on things like internet censorship and
its support for Assange, but it is an extreme advocate for open border
"... I am not here speaking about the elites who dominate our societies. They have their own agenda. They trade only in the language of money and power. I am speaking of us: the 99 per cent who live in their shadow. ..."
"... While this camp concedes that the media is owned by a handful of corporations driven by a concern for profit, it is nonetheless confident that the free market -- the need to sell papers and audiences -- guarantees that important news and a full spectrum of legitimate opinion are available to readers. ..."
"... This camp believes too that western democracies are better, more civilised political systems than those in other parts of the world. Western societies do not want wars, they want peace and security for everyone. For that reason, they have been thrust -- rather uncomfortably -- into the role of global policeman. Western states have found themselves with little choice of late but to wage "good wars" to curb the genocidal instincts and hunger for power of dictators and madmen. ..."
"... The current obsession with Russian conspiracies is in large part the result of the extraordinarily rapid rise of a second camp, no doubt fuelled by the unprecedented access western publics have gained through social media to information, good and bad alike. At no time in human history have so many people been able to step outside of a state-, clerical- or corporate-sanctioned framework of information dissemination and speak too each other directly and on a global stage. ..."
"... This new camp too is not easy to characterise in the old language of left-right politics. Its chief characteristic is that it distrusts not only those who dominate our societies, but the social structures they operate within. ..."
"... This camp regards such structures as neither immutable, divinely ordained ways for ordering and organising society, nor as the rational outcome of the political and moral evolution of western societies. Rather, it views these structures as the product of engineering by a tiny elite to hold on to its power. ..."
"... For this camp, politicians are not the cream of society. They have risen to the surface of a corrupted and corrupting system, and the overwhelming majority did so by enthusiastically adopting its rotten values. These politicians do not chiefly serve voters but the corporations who really dominate our societies. ..."
"... Likewise, the media -- supposed watchdogs on power -- are seen by this camp as the chief propagandists for the ruling elite. The media do not monitor the abuse of power, they actively create a social consensus for the continuation of the abuse -- and if that fails, they seek to deflect attention from, or veil, the abuse. ..."
"... This is inevitable, the second camp argues, given that the media are embedded within the very same corporate structures that dominate our societies. They are, in fact, the corporations' public relations arm. They allow only limited dissent at the margins of the media, and only as a way to create the impression of an illusory pluralism. ..."
"... These "enemies" are a real foe in the sense that, in their different ways, they refuse to submit to the neoliberalising reach of the western-based corporations. But more significantly, they are needed as an enemy, even should they want to make peace. These manufactured enemies, says the second camp, justify the redirection of public money into the private coffers of the military and homeland security industries. And equally importantly, a ready set of bogeymen can be exploited to distract western publics from troubles at home. ..."
"... The second camp is accused by the first of being anti-western, anti-American and anti-Israel (or more mischievously anti-semitic) for its opposition to western "humanitarian interventions" abroad. The second camp, it says, act as apologists for war criminals like Russia's Vladimir Putin or Syria's Bashar Assad, portraying these leaders as misunderstood good guys and blaming the west for the world's ills. ..."
"... Putin has power, but it is immeasurably less than the combined might of the profit-seeking, war-waging western military industries. Faced with this power equation, according to the second camp, Putin acts defensively or reactively on the global stage, using what limited strength Russia has to uphold its essential strategic interests. One cannot reasonably judge Russia's crimes without first admitting the west's greater crimes, our crimes. ..."
"... While the whole US political class obsess over "Russian interference" in US elections, this camp notes, the American public is encouraged to ignore the much greater US interference not only in Russian elections, but in many other spheres Russia considers to be vital strategic interests. That includes the locating of US military bases and missile sites on Russia's borders. ..."
"... The other camp has one small space to make its presence felt -- social media. That is a space rapidly shrinking, as the politicians, media and the corporations that own social media (as they do everything else) start to realise they have let the genie out of the bottle. This camp is derided as conspiratorial, dangerous, fake news. ..."
"... The two most significant disrupters of the first camp's narrative are climate breakdown and economic meltdown. The planet has finite resources, which means endless growth and wealth accumulation cannot be sustained indefinitely. Much as in a Ponzi scheme, there comes a point when the hollow centre is exposed and the system comes crashing down. We have had intimations enough that we are nearing that point. ..."
"... Our political language is rupturing because we are now completely divided. There is no middle ground, no social compact, no consensus. The second camp understands that the current system is broken and that we need radical change, while the first camp holds desperately to the hope that the system will continue to be workable with modifications and minor reforms. ..."
"... We are arriving at a moment called a paradigm shift. That is when the cracks in a system become so obvious they can no longer be credibly denied. Those vested in the old system scream and shout, they buy themselves a little time with increasingly repressive measures, but the house is moments away from falling. The critical questions are who gets hurt when the structure tumbles, and who decides how it will be rebuilt ..."
"... They have rightly identified social media as the key concern. This is where we -- the 99 per cent -- have begun waking each other up. This is where we are sharing and learning, emerging out of the darkness clumsily and shaken. We are making mistakes, but learning. We are heading up blind alleys, but learning. We are making poor choices, but learning. We are making unhelpful alliances, but learning ..."
"... Corbyn's significance -- and danger -- is that he brings much of the language and concerns of the second camp into the mainstream. He offers a fast-track for the second camp to reach the first camp, and accelerate the awakening process. That, in turn, would improve the chances of the paradigm shift being organic and transitional rather than disruptive and violent. ..."
"... That is why he has become a lightning rod for the wider machinations of the ruling elite. They want him destroyed, like blowing up a bridge to stop an advancing army. ..."
"... The corporate elite weaponised anti-semitism not because they care about the safety of Jews, or because they really believe that Corbyn is an anti-semite. They chose it because it is the most destructive weapon -- short of sex-crime smears and assassination -- they have in their armoury. ..."
"... The truth is the ruling elite are exploiting British Jews and fuelling their fears as part of a much larger power game in which all of us -- the 99 per cent -- are expendable. They will keep stoking this campaign to stigmatise Corbyn, even if a political backlash actually does lead to an increase in real, rather than phoney, anti-semitism. ..."
The latest "scandal" gripping Britain -- or to be more accurate, British elites -- is over the use of the term "Zionist" by the
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the opposition and possibly the country's next prime minister.
Yet again, Corbyn has found himself ensnared in what a small group of Jewish leadership organisations, which claim improbably
to represent Britain's "Jewish community", and a small group of corporate journalists, who improbably claim to represent British
public opinion, like to call Labour's "anti-semitism problem".
I won't get into the patently ridiculous notion that "Zionist" is a code word for "Jew", at least not now. There are lots of existing
articles explaining why that is nonsense.
I wish to deal with a different aspect of the long-running row over Labour's so-called "anti-semitism crisis". It exemplifies,
I believe, a much more profound and wider crisis in our societies: over the issue of trust.
We now have two large camps, pitted against each other, who have starkly different conceptions of what their societies are and
where they need to head. In a very real sense, these two camps no longer speak the same language. There has been a rupture, and they
can find no common ground.
I am not here speaking about the elites who dominate our societies. They have their own agenda. They trade only in the language
of money and power. I am speaking of us: the 99 per cent who live in their shadow.
First, let us outline the growing ideological and linguistic chasm opening up between these two camps: a mapping of the divisions
that, given space constraints, will necessarily deal in generalisations.
The trusting camp
The first camp invests its trust, with minor reservations, in those who run our societies. The left and the right segments of
this camp are divided primarily over the degree to which they believe that those at the bottom of society's pile need a helping hand
to get them further up the social ladder.
Otherwise, the first camp is united in its assumptions.
They admit that among our elected politicians there is the odd bad apple. And, of course, they understand that there are necessary
debates about political and social values. But they agree that politicians rise chiefly through ability and talent, that they are
accountable to their political constituencies, and that they are people who want what is best for society as a whole.
While this camp concedes that the media is owned by a handful of corporations driven by a concern for profit, it is nonetheless
confident that the free market -- the need to sell papers and audiences -- guarantees that important news and a full spectrum of
legitimate opinion are available to readers.
Both politicians and the media serve -- if not always entirely successfully -- as a constraint on corruption and the abuse of
power by other powerful actors, such as the business community.
This camp believes too that western democracies are better, more civilised political systems than those in other parts of
the world. Western societies do not want wars, they want peace and security for everyone. For that reason, they have been thrust
-- rather uncomfortably -- into the role of global policeman. Western states have found themselves with little choice of late but
to wage "good wars" to curb the genocidal instincts and hunger for power of dictators and madmen.
Russian conspiracies
Once upon a time -- when this camp's worldview was rarely, if ever, challenged -- its favoured response to anything difficult
to reconcile with its core beliefs, from the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the 2008 financial crash, was: "Cock-up, not conspiracy!".
Now that there are ever more issues threatening to undermine its most cherished verities, the camp's response is -- paradoxically
-- "Putin did it!" or "Fake news!".
The current obsession with Russian conspiracies is in large part the result of the extraordinarily rapid rise of a second
camp, no doubt fuelled by the unprecedented access western publics have gained through social media to information, good and bad
alike. At no time in human history have so many people been able to step outside of a state-, clerical- or corporate-sanctioned framework
of information dissemination and speak too each other directly and on a global stage.
This new camp too is not easy to characterise in the old language of left-right politics. Its chief characteristic is that
it distrusts not only those who dominate our societies, but the social structures they operate within.
This camp regards such structures as neither immutable, divinely ordained ways for ordering and organising society, nor as
the rational outcome of the political and moral evolution of western societies. Rather, it views these structures as the product
of engineering by a tiny elite to hold on to its power.
These structures are no longer primarily national, but global. They are not immutable but as fabricated, as man-made and replaceable,
as the structures that once made incontestable the rule of a landed aristocracy over feudal serfs. The current aristocracy, this
camp argues, are globalised corporations that are so unaccountable that even the biggest nation-states can no longer contain or constrain
them.
Illusions of pluralism
For this camp, politicians are not the cream of society. They have risen to the surface of a corrupted and corrupting system,
and the overwhelming majority did so by enthusiastically adopting its rotten values. These politicians do not chiefly serve voters
but the corporations who really dominate our societies.
For the second camp, this fact was well illustrated in 2008 when the political class did not -- and could not -- punish the banks
responsible for the near-collapse of western economies after decades of reckless speculation on which a financial elite had grown
fat. Those banks, in the words of the politicians themselves, were "too big to fail" and so were bailed out with money from the very
same publics who had been scammed by the banks in the first place. Rather than use the bank failures as an opportunity to drive through
reform of the broken banking system, or nationalise parts of it, the politicians let the banking casino system continue, even intensify.
Likewise, the media -- supposed watchdogs on power -- are seen by this camp as the chief propagandists for the ruling elite.
The media do not monitor the abuse of power, they actively create a social consensus for the continuation of the abuse -- and if
that fails, they seek to deflect attention from, or veil, the abuse.
This is inevitable, the second camp argues, given that the media are embedded within the very same corporate structures that
dominate our societies. They are, in fact, the corporations' public relations arm. They allow only limited dissent at the margins
of the media, and only as a way to create the impression of an illusory pluralism.
Manufactured enemies
These domestic structures are subservient to a still-bigger agenda: the accumulation of wealth by a global elite through the asset-stripping
of the planet's resources and the rationalisation of permanent war. That, this camp concludes, requires the manufacturing of "enemies"
-- such as Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and North Korea -- to justify the expansion of a military-industrial machine.
These "enemies" are a real foe in the sense that, in their different ways, they refuse to submit to the neoliberalising reach
of the western-based corporations. But more significantly, they are needed as an enemy, even should they want to make peace. These
manufactured enemies, says the second camp, justify the redirection of public money into the private coffers of the military and
homeland security industries. And equally importantly, a ready set of bogeymen can be exploited to distract western publics from
troubles at home.
The second camp is accused by the first of being anti-western, anti-American and anti-Israel (or more mischievously anti-semitic)
for its opposition to western "humanitarian interventions" abroad. The second camp, it says, act as apologists for war criminals
like Russia's Vladimir Putin or Syria's Bashar Assad, portraying these leaders as misunderstood good guys and blaming the west for
the world's ills.
The second camp argues that it is none of these things: it is anti-imperialist. It does not excuse the crimes of Putin or Assad,
it treats them as secondary and largely reactive to the vastly greater power a western elite with global reach can project. It believes
the western media's obsession with crafting narratives about evil enemies -- bad men and madmen -- is designed to deflect attention
from the structures of far greater violence the west deploys around the world, through a web of US military bases and Nato.
Putin has power, but it is immeasurably less than the combined might of the profit-seeking, war-waging western military industries.
Faced with this power equation, according to the second camp, Putin acts defensively or reactively on the global stage, using what
limited strength Russia has to uphold its essential strategic interests. One cannot reasonably judge Russia's crimes without first
admitting the west's greater crimes, our crimes.
While the whole US political class obsess over "Russian interference" in US elections, this camp notes, the American public
is encouraged to ignore the much greater US interference not only in Russian elections, but in many other spheres Russia considers
to be vital strategic interests. That includes the locating of US military bases and missile sites on Russia's borders.
Different languages
Two camps, two entirely different languages and narratives.
These camps may be divided, but it would seriously misguided to imagine they are equal.
One has the full power and weight of those corporate structures behind it. The politicians speak its language, as do the media.
Its ideas and its voice dominate everywhere that is considered official, objective, balanced, neutral, respectable, legitimate.
The other camp has one small space to make its presence felt -- social media. That is a space rapidly shrinking, as the politicians,
media and the corporations that own social media (as they do everything else) start to realise they have let the genie out of the
bottle. This camp is derided as conspiratorial, dangerous, fake news.
This is the current battlefield. It is a battle the first camp looks like it is winning but actually has already lost. That is
not necessarily because the second camp is winning the argument. It is because physical realities are catching up with the first
camp, smashing its illusions, even as it clings to them like a life-raft.
The two most significant disrupters of the first camp's narrative are climate breakdown and economic meltdown. The planet
has finite resources, which means endless growth and wealth accumulation cannot be sustained indefinitely. Much as in a Ponzi scheme,
there comes a point when the hollow centre is exposed and the system comes crashing down. We have had intimations enough that we
are nearing that point.
It hardly needs repeating, except to climate deniers, that we have had even more indications that the Earth's climate is already
turning against humankind.
Out of the darkness
Our political language is rupturing because we are now completely divided. There is no middle ground, no social compact, no
consensus. The second camp understands that the current system is broken and that we need radical change, while the first camp holds
desperately to the hope that the system will continue to be workable with modifications and minor reforms.
It is on to this battlefield that Corbyn has stumbled, little prepared for the heavy historic burden he shoulders.
We are arriving at a moment called a paradigm shift. That is when the cracks in a system become so obvious they can no longer
be credibly denied. Those vested in the old system scream and shout, they buy themselves a little time with increasingly repressive
measures, but the house is moments away from falling. The critical questions are who gets hurt when the structure tumbles, and who
decides how it will be rebuilt .
The new paradigm is coming anyway. If we don't choose it ourselves, the planet will for us. It could be an improvement, it could
be a deterioration, it could be extinction, depending on how prepared we are for it and how violently those invested in the old system
resist the loss of their power. If enough of us understand the need for discarding the broken system, the greater the hope that we
can build something better from the ruins.
We are now at the point where the corporate elite can see the cracks are widening but they remain in denial. They are entering
the tantrum phase, screaming and shouting at their enemies, and readying to implement ever-more repressive measures to maintain their
power.
They have rightly identified social media as the key concern. This is where we -- the 99 per cent -- have begun waking each
other up. This is where we are sharing and learning, emerging out of the darkness clumsily and shaken. We are making mistakes, but
learning. We are heading up blind alleys, but learning. We are making poor choices, but learning. We are making unhelpful alliances,
but learning .
No one, least of all the corporate elite, knows precisely where this process might lead, what capacities we have for political,
social and spiritual growth.
And what the elite don't own or control, they fear.
Putting the genie back
The elite have two weapons they can use to try to force the second camp back into the bottle. They can vilify it, driving it back
into the margins of public life, where it was until the advent of social media; or they can lock down the new channels of mass communication
their insatiable drive to monetise everything briefly opened up.
Both strategies have risks, which is why they are being pursued tentatively for the time being. But the second option is by far
the riskier of the two. Shutting down social media too obviously could generate blowback, awakening more of the first camp to the
illusions the second camp have been trying to alert them to.
Corbyn's significance -- and danger -- is that he brings much of the language and concerns of the second camp into the mainstream.
He offers a fast-track for the second camp to reach the first camp, and accelerate the awakening process. That, in turn, would improve
the chances of the paradigm shift being organic and transitional rather than disruptive and violent.
That is why he has become a lightning rod for the wider machinations of the ruling elite. They want him destroyed, like blowing
up a bridge to stop an advancing army.
It is a sign both of their desperation and their weakness that they have had to resort to the nuclear option, smearing him as
an anti-semite. Other, lesser smears were tried first: that he was not presidential enough to lead Britain; that he was anti-establishment;
that he was unpatriotic; that he might be a traitor. None worked. If anything, they made him more popular.
And so a much more incendiary charge was primed, however at odds it was with Corbyn's decades spent as an anti-racism activist.
The corporate elite weaponised anti-semitism not because they care about the safety of Jews, or because they really believe
that Corbyn is an anti-semite. They chose it because it is the most destructive weapon -- short of sex-crime smears and assassination
-- they have in their armoury.
The truth is the ruling elite are exploiting British Jews and fuelling their fears as part of a much larger power game in
which all of us -- the 99 per cent -- are expendable. They will keep stoking this campaign to stigmatise Corbyn, even if a political
backlash actually does lead to an increase in real, rather than phoney, anti-semitism.
The corporate elites have no plan to go quietly. Unless we can build our ranks quickly and make our case confidently, their antics
will ensure the paradigm shift is violent rather than healing. An earthquake, not a storm.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair"
(Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
"The corporate elite weaponised anti-semitism not because they care about the safety of Jews, or because they really
believe that Corbyn is an anti-semite. They chose it because it is the most destructive weapon – short of sex-crime smears
and assassination – they have in their armoury."
I must admit I assumed it was because he's less than 100% behind Israel and thinks, not unreasonably, that the Palestinians
have had a pretty rough deal over the last 60 years. He raises the frightening (to some) prospect of a UK government that is more
neutral on the issues, and doesn't think we can bomb peace into the Middle East.
Occam's Razor would seem to suggest that's the answer.
"Corbyn's significance – and danger – is that he brings much of the language and concerns of the second camp into the
mainstream. "
You're right about the electorate being divided – but I'd suggest young Corbyn voters are just as blinkered as any Daily Mail
reader. My kids all voted for him because they thought he'd cancel their student debt.
Maybe Corbyn activists are better informed, but I very much doubt it.
Corbyn has to resist the temptation to give way to them. He is right on the Palestinian issue, and, since the Palestinians
are 100 % semites (though "anti-semitism" has been appropriated to mean anti-Jewish most Jewish emigrants from Europe have considerable
non-semitic blood mixed in) the real anti-semites here appear to be the Israeli element bent on eliminating the Palestinians.
The Gaza strip is a ghetto operated in a similar manner to how the Nazis operated the ghettoes in occupied Poland (though without
the Auschwitz end game up to now). The thing is, if Corbyn stands up to this, in my view, his supporters will fully back him up.
In my view, the Israelis are risking real anti-Israeli blowback which could resurrect evils buried with the collapse of the Nazi
regime. Indeed, the way they are acting on this and other related issues, threatening those who criticise them in any fashion
seems to be providing ex post facto justifications of the most absurd propaganda the Nazis put forward during that era.
The real question is why it is that even the slightest hint of a politician not being totally onboard with >1% of the population
results in a years long campaign to destroy him by most of the media, but mentioning the open desire of all three parties to discriminate
against and replace the native population of Britain makes you a pariah.
You said it. It's because Corbyn is not totally on board with the less than 1% that he is seen as a threat. Total control of
everyone and everything is their aim.
There is certainly an MSM/Blairite full court press to push the anti-Semitism story, that is mostly being fronted by goyim
who are kissing up – Jess Phillips, Maajid Nawaz, Dan Hodges (Glenda Jackson's son) etc. But it is getting no traction with the
public at large. If they force another leadership contest Corbyn will win easily.
These people live in a North London Anglo-American bubble, and they are now realizing that there is no large Evangelocon constituency
in Britain.
No Bubbas waiting to be raptured = Nobody much cares about Israel
"... Empire – the old far left and the new far right are against the USA having an Empire and against perpetual war. ..."
"... Economy – the old far left and the new far right think free trade and Wall Street are killing middle class jobs and the ladders of success. ..."
"... Race/Sex/Gender – the old far right KKK vlugar bigoted view is pretty much dead in America. The new far right is trying to work through real facts on group differences and what is reasonable to do about it. Everyone else is CCCrazy. ..."
I think we are all struggling to come up with a new vocabulary to rationally describe the
new forces at work in our society. I would welcome suggestions because I've got nuthin
here.
I agree. I used to be liberal, then became far left, and I am now far right. And I never
changed my views! The politics around me changed.
Here are some forces at work:
1. Empire – the old far left and the new far right are against the USA having an
Empire and against perpetual war. Read Pat Buchanan and Mike Whitney on Middle East wars
and Russia and they sound a lot alike. Everyone else in America supports the Empire, either
actively or passively.
2. Economy – the old far left and the new far right think free trade and Wall
Street are killing middle class jobs and the ladders of success. It's the old Democrat pro
union view and the old Republican main street vs. wall street view. If you like socialism, you
gotta hate Wall Street. If you like free markets, you gotta hate Wall Street. Everyone else in
America supports Wall Stree rule over the Fed and economic policy, either actively or
passively.
3. Race/Sex/Gender – the old far right KKK vlugar bigoted view is pretty much dead
in America. The new far right is trying to work through real facts on group differences and
what is reasonable to do about it. Everyone else is CCCrazy.
A name embraced by white nationalists and/or white supremacists to refer to themselves and
their ideology, which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race through populist
endeavors, which includes the return of patriarchy, the revocation of the 1965 Immigration
Act, an emphasis on race realism and/or the reinstitution of Western Christian
civilization.
"Who speaks for it?"
John Derbyshire. Steve Sailer. Vox Day. Richard Spencer. Mike Cernovich. For starters.
"... Further to my idea, what distinguishes the person on antidepressants is the complete self assurance with which they say the most ridiculous things. ..."
"... If one in ten people use the drugs, and more than one in ten higher up the social ladder, then each of us deals every day with someone who looks normal but displays chemically induced fanaticism. ..."
And you may be right. Scam artists know how easy it is to convince a mark of something
silly once the mark has dollar signs in his eyes.
Further to my idea, what distinguishes the person on antidepressants is the complete
self assurance with which they say the most ridiculous things. It is that inability to
say "I could be wrong, but " which is the giveaway plus of course the unquestioning belief
they are right.
If one in ten people use the drugs, and more than one in ten higher up the social
ladder, then each of us deals every day with someone who looks normal but displays chemically
induced fanaticism.
A chap I have known for forty years used to be shy, sensitive, well-read and funny. Now he
is spending his retirement playing World of Warcraft and has nothing to say. Big Pharma says
antidepressants turn introverts like him into extroverts. In fact the drugs have turned him
into a jerk.
We have no idea which of our 'opinion leaders' have undergone a similar change.
So standing up for American citizens is considered a "mentally insane" thing?
You are utterly and completely out of your mind, virtually from another planet, another
reality. A textbook example of insanity. The fact that you don't recognize it, simply
confirms the fact.
The Deep state is not, repeat not , the American people.
Regarding the Intel community: There are the guys in the trenches. these are honorable
guys. Then there is the leadership. The current leadership is on notice to behave itself, on
account of the new "Sheriff" in town. The corrupt politicized leadership from the
Clinton/Bush/Obama regimes however, now out of power, are attempting to overthrow the
legitimately elected president of the United States. In so doing, they are pursuing
treason-lite.
Clapper, Brennan, and Hayden are already full-on war criminals: Iraq & torture. Now,
in their attempt to destroy the Trump presidency, they are adding betrayal of democracy and
betrayal of the Constitution of the United States to their criminal resume. These are evil
men who think it is their job to run the United States from behind a malleable (gutless?)
figurehead who does what they tell him to do.
As I said in my original post, it is fascinating to observe people like you, utterly
dominated -- brain-raped really -- by a neocon/neoliberal narrative that has reduced them to
robotic -- even willing -- slaves of the 1%. Good for you. Enjoy. The others, who prefer
self-mastery to self-enslavement, will benefit from your choice of enslavement.
That is what all of this boils down to; Trump treating Americans like s*hit in front of
the whole world, while praising Russia and Russians.
The IC war criminals/traitors should not be equated with or allowed to hide anonymous
behind the majority population of decent Americans. Which is what simpletons like you enable
and then fall for.
I fully understood all the concerns for what the Left is doing to people and to the
society.
Trump praises Israel and says that, "Securing Israel's safety is our most important
task" not a peep comes from the Trump-supporters?!
Some Trump supporters do object. Others however grasp the political reality of Jewish
political influence in the US. Politically incompetent simpletons like yourself think Trump
should commit political suicide by taking on the Jews.
The Jews/Israel will be dealt with -- or not -- later, when Trump has secured his
presidency. And then, the rebalancing of the US-Israeli relationship will not be grounded in
hostility to the Jews, but will be more along the lines of America First.
Never ever did I expect, that it would be the Trump-supporters surfacing as the fifth
column, giving the "finishing touch" to the destruction of American citizens.
The above is pure paranoid, "the sky is falling", TDS whackadoodle.
The Liberals seem to have woken up,
The country is in the throes of a cultural war between the bubble-wrapped snowflakes and
"real" people. Thankfully, the "real" people will win, precisely because they have the
advantage of being reality-connected. The snowflakes will benefit as well -- you will benefit
-- by the resulting opportunity to reconnect with reality.
Good luck, best wishes, Trump is rapidly changing the world for the better.
And let me add: The Soviet Union is a quarter century gone, and with it Soviet Communism.
Putin is the preeminent statesman of our times. Go to YouTube and listen to what he says. He
and Trump, aligned, are a force for good in the world. Peace with Russia is coming, and with
it a new era of peace and prosperity in the world.
Which leaves me to echo your closing comment:
Are you ever going to be able to comprehend this?
(Answer: Probably not for another six years, if ever.)
In the alt-right/far left scenario, we are supposed to dismiss the actual wishes of
Ukrainians, Estonians, Poles, Georgians and other peoples who hate Russia (and love the US)
as being simply irrelevant. Or, worse backed by shadowy Western forces.
Or how about we wish these East European countries well but we choose not to take their
side in whatever feud they have going with Russia? Maybe the people who "love the US" love
the worst aspects of America? Maybe a lot of them come across as greasy little hustlers on
the make? Ever think of that?
Anyone who has spent time in Ukraine knows how deep hatred of Russia goes, especially
in Western Ukraine.
And that's precisely why countries like Ukraine, the Baltic states and Poland shouldn't be
in NATO. We should never have included countries with deep resentments against, and hazy
borders with Russia. The geniuses running the West should have encouraged the creation of a
lots of neutral states -- like Finland and Austria -- rather than expand NATO eastward.
who has spent time in Ukraine knows how deep hatred of Russia goes
I don't know where is Ukraine you spent your time and in what company, but this is
complete BS. The South-Eastern Ukraine hates the Western Ukrainian "banderovtsi" as much as
the Russians do if not more -- after all, the followers of Bandera operated mostly on the
Ukrainian soil. There are deranged individuals in every country, of course, and Ukraine has
been subjected lately to intense hate propaganda as well as repressions, but there is no
hatred of Russia. This is contradicted by both sociology and everyday behavior of Ukrainian,
which move to Russia in droves, spend time in Russia, support Russian sport teams, etc.
we are supposed to dismiss the actual wishes of Ukrainians, Estonians, Poles, Georgians
and other peoples who hate Russia (and love the US)
Nobody is asking about what the real Ukrainians, Estonians, Georgians or even Poles
actually think, least of all the US. There are almost as many Georgians living in Russia as
there are in Georgia, and they show no desire to move back. In 2008 during the conflict,
their biggest fear was that they'd be deported.
The Ukraine's Maidan was a violent coup, where a few thousand militants armed and trained
abroad overthrew a government elected by the entire country. Protests that immediately
started all over the country were suppressed with force -- the one in Donbass still is.
How could anyone with an access to Internet remain unaware of these facts is beyond
me.
That's an interesting point. Even if true, doesn't matter. One could wonder ..who are the
people populating Ukrainian Armed Forces? Or who are the guys, in Ukrainian Armed Forces,
presently engaged against Donbass? All of them. Including those is logistics/maintenance
depots far away from the (current) line of separation?
The will to fight against "Russia" ranges from a deep hate to simply not wishing to go
against the (current) Ukrainian government. The former are in those "shock" battalions. The
later are manning the logistics train. And everything in between.
Now .if/when a real shooting starts, as soon as Russia, as expected (and desired) by the
most of readers here, starts delivering ordnance into operational depth of Donbass enemy, the
ratio hate/don't care shall shift, hard and fast. Not in Russian favor, I suspect.
Why should anyone freaking care and put his ass in the line of fire because you bunch of
primitives hate Russia? Between having a nuclear cataclysm because you pathetic dwarfs of
nations are frustrated to have a neighbour you can't bully and Russia obliterating you, I say
let Russia obliterate you, thus we won't have to suffer the ear-hurting dissonnance of your
incessant whining any more. Though I doubt Russia would stomp on you. When you see shit, you
don't stomp on it, you don't want you don't want your shoes to stink, you just walk around
it.
Or who are the guys, in Ukrainian Armed Forces, presently engaged against Donbass?
Besides those in "volunteer battalions", which tend to be nationalistic with distinct Nazi
overtones, people in the regular Armed Forces are there for the money. There are very few
paying jobs in today's Ukraine, so men enlist and hope for the best.
the ratio hate/don't care shall shift, hard and fast. Not in Russian favor, I
suspect.
That could've been the case in 2014. Today I very much doubt it. Even the Right Sector
people are fed up with the current power in Kiev, and even the dumbest nationalists are
beginning to realize what a deep hole the country is in. Normal people all over the
South-East are hoping and praying for the Russians to come. The problem is the Russians
aren't coming.
To add to the list of things that the Russians had on Hillary .
IIRC, she was Sec of State at the time the US election-meddling-and-color-revolution
brigade tried to rig the Russian elections against Putin.
Putin does not seem to be the sort to let emotion be more important than policy, but I've
always wondered that to the small extent the Russians did take a pop at Hillary's campaign,
if it didn't bring a bit of a smile to Putin's face to know he was just giving back the hits
he'd already taken from her.
Hillary of course was incompetent in having America interfere in Russian elections. That
campaign never had a chance as Putin is a lot more popular in Russia than Hillary is in
America. So, she took a pot shot at a rival world leader knowing (or at least some smart
people did) that it would have no effect and that Putin would win that election anyways.
And of course Hillary the Arrrogant could never imagine that another player in the game
would get to take a turn, and that others might interfere in her election, and she knew she'd
run and she knew she'd rig the Dem party to get the nod, in the same way the NED and the
Soros NGO's tried to interfere in Russia.
"... that the U.S. should rethink whether it needs to remain in the seven-decades-old NATO alliance with Europe. ..."
"... Sounding more like a CFO than a commander-in-chief, Trump said of the alliance, "We certainly can't afford to do this anymore," adding, "NATO is costing us a fortune and yes, we're protecting Europe with NATO, but we're spending a lot of money." ..."
"... U.S. officials, including former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have said that European allies have to shoulder a bigger burden of NATO's cost. But calling for the possible U.S. withdrawal from the treaty is a radical departure for a presidential candidate -- even a candidate who has been endorsed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... Withdrawing from NATO would leave European allies without a forceful deterrent to the Russian military, which invaded and annexed portions of Ukraine in 2014. That would arguably be a win for Putin but leave U.S. allies vulnerable. ..."
"... It also wasn't clear how Trump's arguably anti-interventionist position on the alliance squared with his choice of advisers. ..."
"... One other Trump adviser had previously been reported. Retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn had told The Daily Beast that he "met informally" with Trump. Flynn was pushed out of his post as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and has since spoken out publicly about the need for the U.S. to forge closer ties with Russia. ..."
"... I have two problems with NATO. No. 1, it's obsolete. When NATO was formed many decades ago we were a different country. There was a different threat. Soviet Union was, the Soviet Union, not Russia, which was much bigger than Russia, as you know. And, it was certainly much more powerful than even today's Russia, although again you go back into the weaponry. But, but – I said, I think NATO is obsolete, and I think that – because I don't think – right now we don't have somebody looking at terror, and we should be looking at terror. And you may want to add and subtract from NATO in terms of countries. But we have to be looking at terror, because terror today is the big threat. Terror from all different parts. You know in the old days you'd have uniforms and you'd go to war and you'd see who your enemy was, and today we have no idea who the enemy is. ..."
"... I'll tell you the problems I have with NATO. No. 1, we pay far too much. We are spending -- you know, in fact, they're even making it so the percentages are greater. NATO is unfair, economically, to us, to the United States. Because it really helps them more so than the United States, and we pay a disproportionate share. Now, I'm a person that -- you notice I talk about economics quite a bit, in these military situations, because it is about economics, because we don't have money anymore because we've been taking care of so many people in so many different forms that we don't have money -- and countries, and countries. So NATO is something that at the time was excellent. Today, it has to be changed. It has to be changed to include terror. It has to be changed from the standpoint of cost because the United States bears far too much of the cost of NATO. And one of the things that I hated seeing is Ukraine. Now I'm all for Ukraine, I have friends that live in Ukraine, but it didn't seem to me, when the Ukrainian problem arose, you know, not so long ago, and we were, and Russia was getting very confrontational, it didn't seem to me like anyone else cared other than us. And we are the least affected by what happens with Ukraine because we're the farthest away. But even their neighbors didn't seem to be talking about it. And, you know, you look at Germany, you look at other countries, and they didn't seem to be very much involved. It was all about us and Russia. And I wondered, why is it that countries that are bordering the Ukraine and near the Ukraine – why is it that they're not more involved? Why is it that they are not more involved? Why is it always the United States that gets right in the middle of things, with something that – you know, it affects us, but not nearly as much as it affects other countries. And then I say, and on top of everything else – and I think you understand that, David – because, if you look back, and if you study your reports and everybody else's reports, how often do you see other countries saying "We must stop, we must stop." They don't do it! And, in fact, with the gas, you know, they wanted the oil, they wanted other things from Russia, and they were just keeping their mouths shut. And here the United States was going out and, you know, being fairly tough on the Ukraine. And I said to myself, isn't that interesting? We're fighting for the Ukraine, but nobody else is fighting for the Ukraine other than the Ukraine itself, of course, and I said, it doesn't seem fair and it doesn't seem logical. ..."
"... Even Barack Obama, despite his pretenses for ' a reset in U.S.-Russia relations ', had had actually the opposite of that pretension in mind -- a doubling-down on the Cold War . And Obama's successor, Donald Trump, doubles down on his predecessor's double-down, there. ..."
"... the Koch brothers' Doug Bandow, who represents his sponsors' bet against neoconservativsm, headlined on 27 April 2017 "Donald Trump: The 'Manchurian (Neoconservative) Candidate'?" and he itemized what a terrific Trojan Horse that Trump had turned out to be, for the war-lobby, the 'neocons', or, as Dwight Eisenhower had called them (but carefully and only after his Presidency was already over), "the military-industrial complex." ..."
"... Other people (the masses) fight, kill, die, get maimed, and are impoverished, while these few individuals at the very top in the U.S. profit, from those constant invasions, and military occupations ..."
"... bête noire ..."
"... I will say this about Iran. They're looking to go into Saudi Arabia, they want the oil, they want the money, they want a lot of other things having to do they took over Yemen, you look over that border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, that is one big border and they're looking to do a number in Yemen. Frankly, the Saudis don't survive without us, and at what point do we get involved? And how much will Saudi Arabia pay us to save them? ..."
"... the stockholders in those American war-making corporations ..."
"... America's Founders ..."
"... Donald Trump just wants for Europeans to increase military spending (to buy U.S.-made weapons) even more than the U.S. is doing against Russia, and for the Sauds and Israelis also to buy more of these weapons from America's weapons-firms, to use against Iran and any nation friendly toward it. Meanwhile, America's own military spending is already at world-record-high levels.That's Trump's economic plan; that's his jobs-plan; that's his 'national security' plan. That is Trump's Presidency. ..."
"... He lied his way into office, just like his predecessors had been doing. This is what 'democracy' in America now consists of: lies -- some colored "liberal"; some colored "conservative"; but all colored "profitable" (for the 'right' people); and another name for that, in foreign affairs, is "neoconservative." ..."
On August 20th, Gallup headlined "More in U.S. Favor
Diplomacy Over Sanctions for Russia" and reported that, "Americans believe it is more
important to try to continue efforts to improve relations between the countries (58%), rather
than taking strong diplomatic and economic steps against Russia (36%)." And yet, all of the
sanctions against Russia have passed in Congess by over 90% of Senators and Representatives
voting for them -- an extraordinarily strong and bipartisan favoring of anti-Russia sanctions,
by America's supposed
"representatives" of the American people . What's happening here, which explains such an
enormous contradiction between America's Government, on the one side, versus America's people,
on the other? Is a nation like this really a democracy at all?
Donald Trump understood this disjunction, when he was running for President, and he took
advantage of the public side of it, in order to win, but, as soon as he won, he flipped to the
opposite side, the side of America's billionaires, who actually control the U.S.
Government.
While he was campaigning for the U.S. Presidency, Donald Trump pretended to want to soften,
not harden, America's policies against Russia. He even gave hints that he wanted a redirection
of U.S. Government expenditures away from the military, and toward America's economic and
domestic needs.
On 31 January 2016 , Donald Trump -- then one of many Republican candidates running for
the Republican U.S. Presidential nomination -- told a rally in Clinton Iowa, "Wouldn't it be
nice if we actually got along with Russia and China and all these countries?"
On 21 March 2016 , he was
published in the Washington Post as having told its editors, that "he advocates a
light footprint in the world. In spite of unrest abroad, especially in the Middle East, Trump
said the United States must look inward and steer its resources toward rebuilding domestic
infrastructure. 'I do think it's a different world today, and I don't think we should be
nation-building anymore,' Trump said. 'I think it's proven not to work, and we have a different
country than we did then. We have $19 trillion in debt. We're sitting, probably, on a bubble.
And it's a bubble that if it breaks, it's going to be very nasty. I just think we have to
rebuild our country.'"
On that same day, The Daily Beast's Shane Harris wrote that:
Trump's surprising new position [is] that the U.S. should rethink whether it
needs to remain in the seven-decades-old NATO alliance with Europe.
Sounding more like a CFO than a commander-in-chief, Trump said of the alliance, "We
certainly can't afford to do this anymore," adding, "NATO is costing us a fortune and yes,
we're protecting Europe with NATO, but we're spending a lot of money."
U.S. officials, including former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have said that European
allies have to shoulder a bigger burden of NATO's cost. But calling for the possible U.S.
withdrawal from the treaty is a radical departure for a presidential candidate -- even a
candidate who has been endorsed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Withdrawing from NATO would leave European allies without a forceful deterrent to the
Russian military, which invaded and annexed portions of Ukraine in 2014. That would arguably be
a win for Putin but leave U.S. allies vulnerable.
It also wasn't clear how Trump's arguably anti-interventionist position on the alliance
squared with his choice of advisers.
One other Trump adviser had previously been reported. Retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn
had told The Daily Beast that he "met informally" with Trump. Flynn was pushed out of his post
as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and has since spoken out publicly about the
need for the U.S. to forge closer ties with Russia.
, the New York Times bannered, "Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign
Policy Views" and David Sanger and Maggie Haberman presented their discussion with Trump about
this, where Trump said:
I have two problems with NATO. No. 1, it's obsolete. When NATO was formed many decades
ago we were a different country. There was a different threat. Soviet Union was, the Soviet
Union, not Russia, which was much bigger than Russia, as you know. And, it was certainly much
more powerful than even today's Russia, although again you go back into the weaponry. But, but
– I said, I think NATO is obsolete, and I think that – because I don't think
– right now we don't have somebody looking at terror, and we should be looking at terror.
And you may want to add and subtract from NATO in terms of countries. But we have to be looking
at terror, because terror today is the big threat. Terror from all different parts. You know in
the old days you'd have uniforms and you'd go to war and you'd see who your enemy was, and
today we have no idea who the enemy is.
I'll tell you the problems I have with NATO. No. 1, we pay far too much. We are spending
-- you know, in fact, they're even making it so the percentages are greater. NATO is unfair,
economically, to us, to the United States. Because it really helps them more so than the United
States, and we pay a disproportionate share. Now, I'm a person that -- you notice I talk about
economics quite a bit, in these military situations, because it is about economics, because we
don't have money anymore because we've been taking care of so many people in so many different
forms that we don't have money -- and countries, and countries. So NATO is something that at
the time was excellent. Today, it has to be changed. It has to be changed to include terror. It
has to be changed from the standpoint of cost because the United States bears far too much of
the cost of NATO. And one of the things that I hated seeing is Ukraine. Now I'm all for
Ukraine, I have friends that live in Ukraine, but it didn't seem to me, when the Ukrainian
problem arose, you know, not so long ago, and we were, and Russia was getting very
confrontational, it didn't seem to me like anyone else cared other than us. And we are the
least affected by what happens with Ukraine because we're the farthest away. But even their
neighbors didn't seem to be talking about it. And, you know, you look at Germany, you look at
other countries, and they didn't seem to be very much involved. It was all about us and Russia.
And I wondered, why is it that countries that are bordering the Ukraine and near the Ukraine
– why is it that they're not more involved? Why is it that they are not more involved?
Why is it always the United States that gets right in the middle of things, with something that
– you know, it affects us, but not nearly as much as it affects other countries. And then
I say, and on top of everything else – and I think you understand that, David –
because, if you look back, and if you study your reports and everybody else's reports, how
often do you see other countries saying "We must stop, we must stop." They don't do it! And, in
fact, with the gas, you know, they wanted the oil, they wanted other things from Russia, and
they were just keeping their mouths shut. And here the United States was going out and, you
know, being fairly tough on the Ukraine. And I said to myself, isn't that interesting? We're
fighting for the Ukraine, but nobody else is fighting for the Ukraine other than the Ukraine
itself, of course, and I said, it doesn't seem fair and it doesn't seem logical.
The next day, March 27th, on ABC's "The Week," Trump said, "I think NATO's obsolete.
NATO was done at a time you had the Soviet Union, which was obviously larger, much larger than
Russia is today. I'm not saying Russia's not a threat. But we have other threats. We have the
threat of terrorism and NATO doesn't discuss terrorism, NATO's not meant for terrorism. NATO
doesn't have the right countries in it for terrorism."
Even Barack Obama, despite his pretenses for '
a reset in U.S.-Russia relations ', had had actually the opposite of that pretension in
mind -- a doubling-down on the
Cold War . And Obama's successor, Donald Trump, doubles down on his predecessor's
double-down, there.
Of course, neocons aren't only against Russia; they also are against any country that Israel
and Saudi Arabia hate -- and, of course, Israel and Saudi Arabia are large purchasers of
American-made weapons, such as weapons from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and
General Dynamics. In fact: Saudi Arabia is the world's largest purchaser (other than the U.S.
'Defense' Department itself) of their products and services. In fact, soon after coming into
office, Trump achieved the
all-time-world-record-largest international weapons-sale, of $350 billion to the Sauds, and it
was quickly hiked yet another $50 billion to $400 billion . It's, as of yet, his jobs-plan
for the American people. Instead of Trump's peaceing the American economy, he has warred it.
Consequently, for example, the Koch brothers' Doug Bandow, who represents his sponsors' bet
against neoconservativsm, headlined on 27 April 2017
"Donald Trump: The 'Manchurian (Neoconservative) Candidate'?" and he itemized what a
terrific Trojan Horse that Trump had turned out to be, for the war-lobby, the 'neocons', or, as
Dwight Eisenhower had called them (but carefully and only after his Presidency was already
over), "the military-industrial complex."
They're all actually the same people; they serve the same billionaires, all of whom are
heavily invested in these war-makers -- all against two main targets: first, Russia (which
America's aristocracy hate the most); and, then, Iran (which Israel's and Saudi Arabia's
aristocracies hate the most). Any nation that's friendly toward those, gets destroyed.
Other people (the masses) fight, kill, die, get maimed, and are impoverished, while these
few individuals at the very top in the U.S. profit, from those constant invasions, and military
occupations -- which Americans admire (their
nation's military, America's invasion-forces) above all else .
On the Bill O'Reilly Show, 4 January 2016,
Trump was asked to announce, before even the Presidential primaries, what would cause him
as the U.S. President, to bomb Iran, and Trump then was panned everywhere for refusing to
answer such an inappropriate question -- to announce publicly what his strategy, as the U.S.
President, would be in such a matter of foreign affairs (in which type of matter only
the President himself should be privy to such information about himself, namely his strategy)
-- but Trump did reveal there his sympathy for the Sauds, and his extreme
hostility toward Iran, a nation which is a bête noire to neocons:
I will say this about Iran. They're looking to go into Saudi Arabia, they want the oil,
they want the money, they want a lot of other things having to do they took over Yemen, you
look over that border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, that is one big border and they're
looking to do a number in Yemen. Frankly, the Saudis don't survive without us, and at what
point do we get involved? And how much will Saudi Arabia pay us to save them?
The Sauds have already answered that question, with their commitment to paying $400 billion,
and they're already using some of this purchased weaponry and training, to conquer Yemen. But
who gets that money? It's not the American people; it is only the stockholders in those
American war-making corporations (and allied corporations) who receive the benefits.
And what's this, from Trump, about "at what point do we get involved" if Saudi Arabia's
tyrants "don't survive without us"? America is now supposed to be committed to keeping
tyrannical hereditary monarchies in control over their countries? When did that start?
Certainly not in 1776. Today's America isn't like the country, nor the culture, that
America's Founders created, but instead is more like the
monarchy that they overthrew. This was
supposed to be an anti -imperialist country. Today's American rulers are
traitors , against the
nation that America's Founders had created. These traitors, and their many agents, are
sheer psychopaths. The American public are not their citizens, but their subjects -- much like
the colonists were, who overthrew the British King.
Donald Trump just wants for Europeans to increase military spending (to buy U.S.-made
weapons) even more than the U.S. is doing against Russia, and for the Sauds and Israelis also
to buy more of these weapons from America's weapons-firms, to use against Iran and any nation
friendly toward it. Meanwhile, America's own military spending is already at world-record-high
levels.That's Trump's economic plan; that's his jobs-plan; that's his 'national security' plan.
That is Trump's Presidency.
He lied his way into office, just like his predecessors had been doing. This is what
'democracy' in America now consists of:
lies -- some colored "liberal"; some colored "conservative"; but all colored "profitable" (for
the 'right' people); and another name for that, in foreign affairs, is
"neoconservative."
About Russia, he's continuing Obama's policies but even worse ; and
about Iran, he's clearly even more of a neocon than was his predecessor. However, as a
candidate, he had boldly criticized neoconservatism. Democracy cannot be based on
lies, and led by liars.
Ron Ridenour's latest book (this is his 10 th book on international relations and
politics) takes a direct shot at one of the most prevailing myths in the western political
discourse: the thesis that Russia and its USSR predecessor have been uniquely aggressive and
generally bellicose states. At a time when rabid russophobia is the order of the day (again --
chronic russophobia has been a regular feature of western political culture for many centuries
now), this is a very timely and important book which I highly recommend to those interested in
history.
The book is separated into three parts. In the first part of the book ( The Great
Capitalist Socialist Divide ), Ridenour looks at the Cuban Missile Crisis in some detail
and uses it to debunk the many myths which the "official" US historiography has been presenting
as dogma for decades. In this first section, Ridenour also provides many fascinating details
about Captain Vasili Arkhipov "the man who prevented WWIII". He also recounts how the US
propaganda machine tried, and still tries, to blame the murder of JFK on the Russians. The
second part of the book ( Peace, Land, Bread ) goes back in history and looks into the
ideological and political struggle between the collective West and the Soviet Union from the
revolution of 1917 and well into the Cold War. The third part of the book ( Russia At the
Crossroads -- the Putin Era ) conclude with very recent events, including the western
backed coup d'etat in the Ukraine and the Russian intervention in Syria.
The first and the third parts of the book are extremely well researched and offer a
rock-solid, fact-based, and logical analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis and its modern
equivalent, the AngloZionist "crusade" against modern Russia. This is a very important and good
choice because the two crises have a lot in common. I would even argue that the current crisis
is much more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis because of the extremely low personal and
intellectual qualities of the current US ruling elites. Ridenour shows that in 1962 it was not
the Soviets, but the US which pushed the world to the edge of a nuclear war, and in the third
section of his book he shows how, yet again, the Empire is cornering Russia into a situation
which very much risks resulting in a nuclear conflict.
For those who would have a knee-jerk rejection of Ridenour's crimethink, the book, on
page 438-444, offers a list of governments the USA has overthrown since WWII (50), countries
which the USA has bombed (30), foreign leaders it has murdered (50+), suppressed
populist/nationalist movements (20), and subverted democratic elections (30). Ridenour then
asks how it is that with a tally like that the US gets to moralize about Russia. He is
absolutely right, of course. Compared to the USA, the Soviet Union was a peace-loving,
non-interventionist and generally international law respecting country. Oh sure, the USSR had
its share of horrors and evil deeds, but compared with the "land of the free and the home of
the brave" these are minor, almost petty, transgressions.
The book is not without its faults. Sadly, in the second part of his book Ridenour repeats
what I can only call the "standard list of western clichés" about the 1917 Revolution,
it's causes and effects. Truth be told, Ridenour is most certainly not to be singled out for
making such a mistake: most of the books written in English and many of those written in
Russian about this period of Russian history are basically worthless because they are all
written by folks (from all sides of the political spectrum) with a vested ideological interest
in presenting a completely counter-factual chronology of what actually took place (Russian
author Ivan Solonevich wrote at length about this phenomenon in his books). Furthermore, such a
process is inevitable: after decades of over-the-top demonization of everything and anything
Soviet, there is now a "return of the pendulum" (both in Russia and outside) to whitewash the
Soviet regime and explain away all its crimes and atrocities (of which there were plenty). For
these reasons I would recommend that readers skip chapter 7 entirely (the description of the
1905 and 1917 revolutions are particularly bad and sound like a rehash of Soviet propaganda
clichés of the early 1980s).
This weakness of this historical analysis of the two Russian revolutions is, of course,
rather disappointing, but it in no way affects the pertinence of the fundamental thesis of this
book: that, for all its very real faults, the "Evil Empire" was a gentle and timid regime when
compared to the AngloZionist "Axis of Kindness" and its never-ending violent rampages all over
the world (literally) and its orgy of subversion and violence in the name of democracy,
freedom, human rights and all the rest of the western propaganda buzzwords.
The book's afterworld begins with the following words " WAITING AND WAITING! Waiting for
the end of the world! Waiting for Godot! Although, unlike in Samuel Beckett's Theater of the
Absurd play, in which Godot never arrives, the mad men and mad women leaders of the US, France
and UK (and Israel) are bringing us their bombs ". Having been warning about the very risks
of war for at least 4 years now, and having, along with others, posted a special " Russian
Warning " to warn about this danger, I can only wholeheartedly welcome the publication of
an entire book aimed at averting such a cataclysmic outcome.
My other big regret with this book is that it does not have an index. This is particularly
frustrating since the book is packed with over 500 pages of very interesting information and
can be used as a very good reference book.
Still, these criticisms should not distract from the very real value of this book. One of
the most frightening phenomena today is that the Empire and Russia are currently headed
directly for war and that, unlike what took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis, almost
nobody today speaks about this. The western corporate media is especially guilty in this
regard, as it encourages a constant escalation of rabid anti-Russian rhetoric (and actions)
without ever mentioning that if brought to its logical conclusion such policies will result in
a devastating war which the West cannot win (neither can Russia, of course, but that is hardly
much of a consolation, is it?).
There have been courageous voices in the West trying to stop this crazy slide towards a
nuclear apocalypse (I especially think of Professor Stephen Cohen and Paul Craig Roberts) but
theirs were truly "cries in the wilderness". And it doesn't matter one bit whether somebody
identifies himself as a conservative, liberal, progressive, libertarian, socialist,
anarcho-capitalist or by another other (mostly meaningless) political label. What matters is as
simple as it is crucial: preventing the Neocons from triggering a war with Russia or with
China, or with Iran, or with the DPRK, or with Venezuela, or with ( fill in the blank ).
The list of countries the US is in conflict with is very long (just remember Nikki Haley
berating and threatening the entire UN General Assembly because the vast majority of its
members dared to disagree with the US position on Jerusalem), but Russia is (yet again) the
designated arch-villian, the Evil Empire, Mordor -- you name it! Russia is the country which
wants to murder everybody with poison gas, from the Skripals in the UK, to the innocent
children of Syria. Russia is the country which shoots down airliners and prepares to invade all
her western neighbors. Finally, Russia is the place which hacks every computer in the "Free
World" and interferes with every single election. The longer that list of idiotic accusations
stretches, the bigger the risk of war becomes, because words have their weight and you cannot
have normal, civilized relations with the Evil Empire of Mordor which is "highly likely" to
invade, nuke or otherwise subvert the peace-loving peoples of the West.
Except that there never was any such thing as a "peace loving West" -- that is truly a
self-serving and 100% false myth. The historical record shows that in reality the collective
West has engaged in a 1000 year long murderous rampage all over the planet and that each time
it designated its victim as the culprit and itself as the defender of lofty ideals. Ridenour's
The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert (alongside with Guy Mettan's "
here ) does a long way towards debunking this myth.
With the few caveats mentioned above, I highly recommend this book.
I tend to agree with Saker–that yes, the Soviet Empire, and the current Russian
government have had their"nasty" moments, but it is not those governments that made their
very existence depend on creating chaos, death and destruction across the globe. The American
people have been too complacent–at least through out my life time (far side of 70) --
because they really have had no struggle as most of the rest of the world has. Mostly good
economic conditions, not having to rebuild after invading armies have passed through, plenty
of meat and potatoes–and all the other consumer goods. As long as that has been the
case, we have not really cared about what the government in DC has been doing "over there"
Consequently, the war industry has won control of the country.
So the possibility of nuclear war is closer now than ever before. It seems to me that the
neocon mentality that has been dominant for the past 25-30 years (the fall of the Soviet
empire?) comes with an erroneous belief that some how as was the case in the two previous
"great wars" conus will be spared any pain. However, it is my belief that there can not
possible be a limited nuclear exchange–one bomb will have everyone with the capacity
using them, and even if the "elite" manage to survive in their extensive underground
shelters, when they finally do have to come out, the idiots will have no idea at all as to
how to survive in an alien world.
Anyway, hope it doesn't happen, but arrogance has caused more than it's share of trouble,
and the neocons are nothing if not arrogant.
..the current crisis is much more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis because of the
extremely low personal and intellectual qualities of the current US ruling elites ..
.The longer that list of idiotic accusations stretches, the bigger the risk of war
becomes ..
I do place a bit of the blame for unhappy outcome on Kremlin , though.
Had it acted more assertively, and decidedly, maybe US elite wouldn't have been acting so
recklessly.
Sharp and decisive intervention in Syria; overwhelming intervention in Ukraine.
And last but not least, a couple of missiles towards those two destroyers recently. With
training warheads, calculate for just one, two tops, to make through, and make a hole.
"They" believe that whenever they push Kremlin will step back. As so far.
Can anyone point as to where is that "red line"? I can't. But I am sure there is
somewhere.
And, it's highly likely we'll recognize it only when ICMBs start flying.
Much good it will do to all of us then.
"... The greatest success of the US conspiracy practitioners has been in convincing the US mass media to act as an arm of the CIA-Pentagon-Congressional and Presidential interventionist agenda. ..."
"... Conspiratorial plots have a narrow audience, mostly the US mass media and elite . They seem to have a short-term impact in justifying sanctions and trade wars. The media plotters having called wolf and proved nothing ,have lost credibility among a wide swath of the public. ..."
The mass media and political leaders of the US have resorted to denouncing competitors and
adversaries as spies engaged in criminal theft of vital political, economic and military
know-how.
The spy-mania has spread every place and all the time, it has become an essential element in
driving national criminal hearings, global economic warfare and military budgets.
In this paper we will analyze and discuss the use and abuse of spy-mongering by (1)
identifying the accused countries which are targeted; (2) the instruments of the spy
conspiracy; (3) the purpose of the 'spy attacks'.
Spies, Spies Everywhere: A Multi-Purpose Strategy
Washington's 'spy-strategy' resorts to multiple targets, focusing on different sectors of
activities.
Russia has been accused of poisoning adversaries, using overseas operatives in England. The
evidence is non-existent. The accusation revolves around an instant lethal poison which in fact
did not lead to death.
No Russian operative was identified. The only 'evidence' was that Russia possessed the
poison- as did the US and other countries. The events took place in England and the British
government played a major role in pointing the finger toward Russia and in launching a global
media campaign which was amplified in the US and in the EU.
The UK expelled Russian diplomats and threatened sanctions. The Trump regime picked up the
cudgels, increasing economic sanctions and demanding that Russia 'confess' to its 'homicidal
behavior'. The poison plot resonated with the Democratic Party campaign against Trump ,
accusing Russia of meddling in the Presidential election, on Trump's behalf. No evidence was
presented. But the less the evidence, the longer the investigation and the wider the
conspiratorial net; it now includes overseas business people, students and diplomats.
US conspiracy officials targeted China, accusing the Chinese government of stealing US
technology, scientific research and patents. China's billion dollar "Belt and Road" agreement
with over sixty countries was presented as a communist plot to dominate countries, grab their
resources, generate debt dependency and to recruit overseas networks of covert operatives. In
fact, China's plans were public, accepted by most of the US allies and membership was even
offered to the US.
Iran was accused of plotting to establish overseas terrorist military operations in Yemen,
Iraq and Syria – targeting the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. No evidence was ever
presented. In fact, massive US and EU supplied arms and advisors to Saudi Arabia's overt terror
bombing of Houthi-led Yemen cities and populations. Iran backed the Syrian government in
opposition to the US backed armed mercenaries. Iranian advisers in Syria were bombed by Israel
– and never retaliated.
The US policy elite resort to conspiratorial plots and spying depends heavily on the mass
media to repeat and elaborate on the charges endlessly, depending on self-identified experts
and ex-pats from the targeted country. In effect the media is the message. Media-state
collaboration is reinforced by the application of sanctions -- the punishment proves guilt!
In the case of Russia, the conspirators demonize President Putin; he is 'guilty' because he
was an ex-official of the police; he was accused of 'seizing' Crimea which voted to rejoin
Russia. In other words, plots are linked to unrelated activity, personality disorders and to US
self-inflicted defeats!
Labeling is another tool common to conspiracy plotters; China is a 'dictatorship' intent on
taking over the world -- therefore, it could only defeat the US through spying and stealing
secrets and assets from the US.
Iran is labelled a 'terrorist state' which allows the US to violate the international
nuclear agreement and to support Israeli demands for economic sanctions. No evidence is ever
presented that Iran invaded or terrorized any state.
The Political Strategy Behind Conspiracy Terrorists
There are several important motives for the US government to resort to conspiracy plots.
By accusing countries of crimes, it hopes that the accused will respond by revealing their
inability or unwillingness to engage in the action falsely attributed to them. Pentagon plots
put adversaries on the defensive – spending time and energy answering to the US agenda
rather than pursuing and advancing their own.
For example, the US claims that China is stealing economic technology to promote its
superiority, is designed to pressure China to downplay or modify its long-term plan for
strategic growth. While China will not give general credence to US conspiracy practitioners, it
has downplayed the slogans designed to motivate its scientists to "Make China Great'.
Likewise, the US conspiracy practitioners accusation that Iran is 'meddling' in Yemen and
Syria is designed to distract world opinion from the US military support for Saudi Arabia's
terror bombing in Yemen and Israel's missile attacks in Syria.
Plot accusations have had some effect in Syria. Russia has demanded or asked Iran to
withdraw fifty miles from the Israeli border. Apparently Iran has lowered its support for
Yemen.
Russia has been blanketed with unsubstantiated accusations of intervening in the Ukraine,
which distracts attention from Washington's support for the mob-led coup.
The UK claim that Russia planted a deadly poison, was concocted in order to distract
attention from the Brexit fiasco and Prime Minister May's effort to entice the US to sign a
major trade agreement.
How Successful are Conspiratorial Politics?
The greatest success of the US conspiracy practitioners has been in convincing the US
mass media to act as an arm of the CIA-Pentagon-Congressional and Presidential interventionist
agenda.
Secondly, the conspiracy has had an impact on both political parties – especially the
Democratic leadership, which has waged a political war accusing Trump of plotting with Russia,
to defeat Clinton in the presidential elections. However, Democratic conspiracy advocates have
sacrificed their popular electorate who are more interested in economic issues then in regime
plots – and may lose to the Republicans in the fall 2018 Congressional elections.
Thirdly, the plot and spy line has some impact on the EU but not on their public. Moreover,
the EU is more concerned with President Trump's trade war and made overtures to Russia.
Fourthly, China , Iran and Russia have moved closer economically in response to the
conspiracy plots and trade wars.
Conclusion: The Perils of Power Grabbers
Conspiratorial plots have a narrow audience, mostly the US mass media and elite . They
seem to have a short-term impact in justifying sanctions and trade wars. The media plotters
having called wolf and proved nothing ,have lost credibility among a wide swath of the
public.
Moreover, the conspiracy has not resulted in any basic shifts in the orientation of their
adversaries, nor has it shaped the electoral agenda for the majority of US voters.
The conspiracy advocates have discredited themselves by the transparency of their
fabrications and the flimsiness of their evidence. In the long-run, historians will provide a
footnote on the bankruptcy of US foreign and domestic policy based on plots and
conspiracies.
Aspen Institute does make attempts at outreach, but they invariably cock it up by
eliciting, recruiting, or suborning every single person they bring in. The shitheads even
tried to do it to me. You would think they'd have a dossier saying I hate those cobags. Their
fundamental problem is, Aspen Institute is CIA. Their first and only instinct is to use
people like toilet paper. They don't want popular support. They want agents in complete
control.
Yes, the Aspen Institute is the CIA and the CIA is the Aspen Institute. Or, to be more
precise, the CIA is the armed wing of Washington's permanently governing technocratic party,
in the same way the KGB was the armed wing of the Soviet Communist Party.
Poor Julian Assange is likely going to be in their hands not too long from now. The
citizen of one Five Eyes country will be arrested by another and then sent off to the
imperial metropole, to be kicked around like a political football. The rest of us
Anglosphericals are expected to cheer or remain silent. Either is acceptable.
CIA is boosting the volume of its anti-Russian vilification because more and more CIA
assets are getting flushed out. Stephan Halper is an obvious spook. Page is the corniest
traitor since Lee Harvey Oswald.
Publius Tacitus is incorrect, though, in making a distinction between the obama
administration and the intelligence community. Obama is a third-generation CIA spook he's a
CIA spokesmodel, not a head of state (see Andrew Krieg's Presidential Puppetry.)
Excerpt : "A Pew Research analysis on Monday found that more than a third of the
US' largest newspapers and more than a fifth of its largest digital outlets experienced
layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018."
The Aspen Institute is CIA, but the CIA is an organization created and controlled by the
globalist conspirators at the Council on Foreign Relations, mostly the Rockefellers and other
banksters.
But you cannot see that because you're focused on US cultural colonization or things you
have seen in Hollywood films You compare yourself to the United States because it is a
similar former British colony and white settler nation
...Since the CIA-sponsored coup of 1975, the country has been 'going to the dogs' at an
increasing rate. The sheople glory under their 'Lucky Country' delusion, not even knowing its
full import: Lucky not to be even partly aware. Yeah sure, the corrupt&venal MSM+PFBCs [=
publicly financed broadcasters] try to revive 'the yellow peril' scare, but that's just
standard 'Bernays haze' scare mongering, to keep the proles from thinking: Der, they [as
peterAUS] didn't think. rgds
PS The great Aus-unwashed, as any 'Western' citizen, has zero choice; so-called 'Western
democracy' allows for as good as zero 'citizen input.' The 'choice' of Trump should be put
down to an aberration -- some 'clever-clogs' manipulators -- *not* Russians -- pulled off a
coup. But as they used to say: "Better red than dead;" better Trump than HRC.
"... However, as convincingly established by dissident Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov's (banned) investigative documentary, the unfortunate Magnitsky was neither a human rights crusader, nor a lawyer, nor beaten to death. He was an accountant jailed for his role in Browder's business dealings, who died of natural causes as a result of inadequate medical treatment. The case was hyped up as a major human rights drama by Browder in order to discredit Russian charges against himself. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act also condemns legal prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Browder, on a much smaller scale, also made a fortune ripping off Russians during the Yeltsin years, and later got into trouble with Russian tax collectors. Since Browder had given up his U.S. citizenship in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes, he had reason to fear Russian efforts to extradite him for tax evasion and other financial misdeeds. ..."
"... So, the Fixer in Chief could have said to the worried Browder, "No problem. All that we need to do is make your case a politically motivated case. Then they can't touch you." Winer's clever treaty is a perfect Catch-22. The treaty doesn't apply to a case if it is politically motivated, and if it is Russian, it must be politically motivated. ..."
"... Needless to say, Khodorkovsky's Corbiere Trust lobbied heavily to get Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, which also repeated its defense of Khodorkovsky himself. This type of "Russian interference intended to influence policy" is not even noticed, while U.S. authorities scour cyberspace for evidence of trolls. ..."
"... The United States, in contrast, is in favor of interference in other countries on principle: because it seeks a Unipolar world, with a single "democratic" system, and considers itself the final authority as to which regime a country should have and how it should run its affairs. ..."
"... U.S. policy-makers practice interference every day. And they are perfectly willing to allow Russians to interfere in American politics – so long as those Russians are "unipolar" like themselves, like Khodorkovsky, who aspire to precisely the same unipolar world sought by the State Department and George Soros. Indeed, the American empire depends on such interference from Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians, Russians, Cubans – all those who come to Washington to try to get U.S. power to settle old scores or overthrow the government in the country they came from. All those are perfectly welcome to lobby for a world ruled by America. ..."
As well as the tobacco industry and the Clinton Foundation, APCO also works for
Khodorkovsky. To be precise, according to public listings, the fourth biggest of APCO's many
clients is the Corbiere Trust, owned by Khodorkovsky and registered in Guernsey. The trust
tends and distributes some of the billions that the oligarch got out of Russia before he was
jailed. Corbiere money was spent to lobby both for Resolution 322 (supporting Khodorkovky after
his arrest in Russia) and for the Magnitsky Act (more later). Margery Kraus, APCO's president
and CEO, is a member of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's son Pavel's Institute of Modern Russia, devoted
to "promoting democratic values" – in other words, to building political opposition to
Vladimir Putin.
In 2009 Jonathan Winer went back to the State Department where he was given a distinguished
service award for having somehow rescued thousands of stranded members of the Muhahedin-e Khalq
from their bases in Iraq they were trying to overthrow the Iranian government. The MeK, once
officially recognized as a terrorist organization by the State Department, has become a pet
instrument in U.S. and Israeli regime change operations directed at Iran.
However, it was Winer's extracurricular activities at State that finally brought him into
the public spotlight early this year – or rather, the spotlight of the House Intelligence
Committee, whose chairman Devin Nunes (R-Cal) named him as
one of a network promoting the notorious "Steele Dossier" which accused Trump of illicit
financial dealing and compromising sexual activities in Russia.
By Winer's own account, he had been friends with former British intelligence agent
Christopher Steele since his days at APCO. Back at State, he regularly channeled Steele
reports, ostensibly drawn from contacts with friendly Russian intelligence agents, to Victoria
Nuland, in charge of Russian affairs, and top Russian experts. These included the infamous
"Steele dossier". In September 2016, Winer's old friend Sidney Blumenthal – a
particularly close advisor to Hillary Clinton – gave him notes written by a more
mysterious Clinton insider named Cody Shearer, repeating the salacious attacks.
All this dirt was spread through government agencies and mainstream media before being
revealed publicly just before Trump's inauguration, used to stimulate the "Russiagate"
investigation by Robert Mueller. The dossier has been discredited but the investigation goes on
and on.
So, it is all right to take seriously information allegedly obtained from "Russian agents"
and spread it around, so long as it can damage Trump. As with so much else in Washington,
double standards are the rule.
Jonathan Winer and the Magnitsky Act
Jonathan Winer played a major role in Congressional adoption of the "Sergei Magnitsky Rule
of Law Accountability Act of 2012" (the Magnitsky Act), a measure that effectively ended
post-Cold War hopes for normal relations between Washington and Moscow. This act was based on a
highly contentious version of the November 16, 2009 death in prison of accountant Sergei
Leonidovich Magnitsky, as told to Congress by hedge fund manager Bill Browder (grandson of Earl
Browder, head of the Communist Party USA 1934-1945). According to Browder, Magnitsky was a
lawyer beaten to death in prison as a result of his crusade for human rights.
However, as convincingly established by dissident Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov's
(banned) investigative documentary, the unfortunate Magnitsky was neither a human rights
crusader, nor a lawyer, nor beaten to death. He was an accountant jailed for his role in
Browder's business dealings, who died of natural causes as a result of inadequate medical
treatment. The case was hyped up as a major human rights drama by Browder in order to discredit
Russian charges against himself.
In any case
The Magnitsky Act also condemns legal prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Browder, on a
much smaller scale, also made a fortune ripping off Russians during the Yeltsin years, and
later got into trouble with Russian tax collectors. Since Browder had given up his U.S.
citizenship in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes, he had reason to fear Russian efforts to
extradite him for tax evasion and other financial misdeeds.
It was Jonathan Winer who found a solution to Browder's predicament.
, "When Browder consulted me, [ ] I suggested creating a new law to impose economic and
travel sanctions on human-rights violators involved in grand corruption. Browder decided this
could secure a measure of justice for Magnitsky. He initiated a campaign that led to the
enactment of the Magnitsky Act. Soon other countries enacted their own Magnitsky Acts,
including Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and most recently, the United Kingdom."
Russian authorities are still trying to pursue their case against Browder. In his press
conference following the Helsinki meeting with Trump, Vladimir Putin suggested allowing U.S.
authorities to question the Russians named in the Mueller indictment in exchange for allowing
Russian officials to question individuals involved in the Browder case, including Winer and
former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul. Putin observed that such an exchange was
possible under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty signed between the two countries in 1999,
back in the Yeltsin days when America was posing as Russia's best friend.
But the naïve Russians did not measure the craftiness of American lawyers.
As Winer wrote, "Under that treaty, Russia's procurator general can ask the U.S. attorney
general to arrange for Americans to be ordered to testify to assist in a criminal case. But
there is a fundamental exception: The attorney general can provide no such assistance in a
politically motivated case." (My emphasis.)
"I know this", he wrote, "because I was among those who helped put it there. Back in 1999,
when we were negotiating the agreement with Russia, I was the senior State Department official
managing U.S.-Russia law-enforcement relations."
So, the Fixer in Chief could have said to the worried Browder, "No problem. All that we
need to do is make your case a politically motivated case. Then they can't touch you." Winer's
clever treaty is a perfect Catch-22. The treaty doesn't apply to a case if it is politically
motivated, and if it is Russian, it must be politically motivated.
In a July 15, 2016, complaint to the Justice Department, Browder's Heritage Capital
Management accused both American and Russian opponents of the Magnitsky Act of violating the
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA; adopted in 19938 with Nazis in mind). Among the
"lobbyists" cited was the late Ron Dellums (falsely identified in the complaint as a "former
Republican congressman").
The Heritage Capital Management brief declared that: "While lawyers representing foreign
principals are exempt from filing under FARA, this is only true if the attorney does not try to
influence policy at the behest of his client." However, by disseminating anti-Magnitsky
material to Congress, any Russian lawyer was "clearly trying to influence policy" was therefore
in violation of FARA filing requirements."
Catch-22 all over again.
Needless to say, Khodorkovsky's Corbiere Trust lobbied heavily to get Congress to pass
the Magnitsky Act, which also repeated its defense of Khodorkovsky himself. This type of
"Russian interference intended to influence policy" is not even noticed, while U.S. authorities
scour cyberspace for evidence of trolls.
Conclusion
The basic ideological conflict here is between Unipolar America and Multipolar Russia.
Russia's position, as Vladimir Putin made clear in his historic speech at the 2007 Munich
security conference, is to allow countries to enjoy national sovereignty and develop in their
own way. The current Russian government is against interference in other countries' politics on
principle. It would naturally prefer an American government willing to allow this.
The United States, in contrast, is in favor of interference in other countries on
principle: because it seeks a Unipolar world, with a single "democratic" system, and considers
itself the final authority as to which regime a country should have and how it should run its
affairs.
So, if Russians were trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, they would not be trying
to change the U.S. system but to prevent it from trying to change their own. Russian leaders
clearly are sufficiently cultivated to realize that historic processes do not depend on some
childish trick played on somebody's computer.
U.S. policy-makers practice interference every day. And they are perfectly willing to
allow Russians to interfere in American politics – so long as those Russians are
"unipolar" like themselves, like Khodorkovsky, who aspire to precisely the same unipolar world
sought by the State Department and George Soros. Indeed, the American empire depends on such
interference from Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians, Russians, Cubans – all those who come to
Washington to try to get U.S. power to settle old scores or overthrow the government in the
country they came from. All those are perfectly welcome to lobby for a world ruled by
America.
Russian interference in American politics is totally welcome so long as it helps turn public
opinion against "multipolar" Putin, glorifies American democracy, serves U.S. interests
including the military-industrial complex, helps break down national borders (except those of
the United States and Israel) and puts money in appropriate pockets in the halls of
Congress.
"... The individuals may be sane, but as a herd they are ready to leap off the cliff. ..."
"... For the past two years, a particular power group has sought to explain away its loss of power – or rather, its loss of the Presidency, as it still holds a predominance of institutional power – by creation of a myth ..."
"... So at worst, "the Russians" are accused of revealing some relatively minor facts concerning the Hillary Clinton campaign. Big deal. ..."
"... Donald Trump is not particularly articulate, navigating through the language with a small repetitive vocabulary, but what he said at his Helsinki press conference was honest and even brave. As the hounds bay for his blood, he quite correctly refused to endorse the "findings" of US intelligence agencies, fourteen years after the same agencies "found" that Iraq was bursting with weapons of mass destruction. How in the world could anyone expect anything else? ..."
"... In short, the only chance to end the nuclear war threat may depend on support for Trump from Israel and the Pentagon! ..."
"... The hysterical neoliberal globalists seem to have ruled out any other possibility – and perhaps this one too. ..."
"... This is a frightening, accurate commentary on what we face as a result of an unaccountable power structure resorting to any and all means to retain power which, if this structure continues to exercise it, will lead to our extinction. ..."
"... In the establishment, it's not dementia as such, it's just serving the highest bidder. You can accuse only the elites of dementia: they forgot that to enjoy the fruits of your thievery you have to be alive. ..."
"... Thank you, this is an excellent summary of the situation right now. It's worth noting too just how disconnected the establishment is from the wider public. They have enormous financial resources and access to the entire legacy media but seem to have almost no real base of support. ..."
"... It's dangerous to underestimate an enemy. The useful idiot footsoldiers, screaming in mindless herd instinct, are one thing. The people behind them – the Koch brothers, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, others – there is nothing at all mindless or demented about them. ..."
"... Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990 describes how the USA weapons industry skillfully prevents that spending on useless weapons deminishes. The history of the later Roman empire, the army in control. ..."
Where to begin to analyze the madness of mainstream media in reaction to the Trump-Putin
meeting in Helsinki? By focusing on the individual, psychology has neglected the problem of
mass insanity, which has now overwhelmed the United States establishment, its mass media and
most of its copycat European subsidiaries. The individuals may be sane, but as a herd they are
ready to leap off the cliff.
For the past two years, a particular power group has sought to explain away its loss of
power – or rather, its loss of the Presidency, as it still holds a predominance of
institutional power – by creation of a myth. Mainstream media is known for its herd
behavior, and in this case the editors, commentators, journalists have talked themselves into a
story that initially they themselves could hardly take seriously.
Donald Trump was elected by Russia ?
On the face of it, this is preposterous. Okay, the United States can manage to rig elections
in Honduras, or Serbia, or even Ukraine, but the United States is a bit too big and complex to
leave the choice of the Presidency to a barrage of electronic messages totally unread by most
voters. If this were so, Russia wouldn't need to try to "undermine our democracy". It would
mean that our democracy was already undermined, in tatters, dead. A standing corpse ready to be
knocked over by a tweet.
Even if, as is alleged without evidence, an army of Russian bots (even bigger than the
notorious Israeli army of bots) was besieging social media with its nefarious slanders against
poor innocent Hillary Clinton, this could determine an election only in a vacuum, with no other
influences in the field. But there was a lot of other stuff going on in the 2016 election, some
for Trump and some for Hillary, and Hillary herself scored a crucial own goal by denigrating
millions of Americans as "deplorables" because they didn't fit into her identity politics
constituencies.
The Russians could do nothing to build support for Trump, and there is not a hint of
evidence that they tried. They might have done something to harm Hillary, because there was so
much there: the private server emails, the Clinton foundation, the murder of Moammer Gaddafi,
the call for a no-fly zone in Syria they didn't have to invent it. It was there. So was the
hanky panky at the Democratic National Committee, on which the Clintonite accusations focus,
perhaps to cause everyone to forget much worse things.
When you come to think of it, the DNC scandal focused on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, not on
Hillary herself. Screaming about "Russian hacking the DNC" has been a distraction from much
more serious accusations against Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders supporters didn't need those
"revelations" to make them stop loving Hillary or even to discover that the DNC was working
against Bernie. It was always perfectly obvious.
So at worst, "the Russians" are accused of revealing some relatively minor facts concerning
the Hillary Clinton campaign. Big deal.
But that is enough, after two years of fakery, to send the establishment into a frenzy of
accusations of "treason" when Trump does what he said he would do while campaigning, try to
normalize relations with Russia.
This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite
which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in the
American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic "cooperation" associations. They
have based their careers on the illusion of sharing the world empire by following U.S. whims in
the Middle East and transforming the mission of their armed forces from defense into foreign
intervention units of NATO under U.S. command. Having not thought seriously about the
implications of this for over half a century, they panic at the suggestion of being left to
themselves.
The Western elite is now suffering from self-inflicted dementia.
Donald Trump is not particularly articulate, navigating through the language with a small
repetitive vocabulary, but what he said at his Helsinki press conference was honest and even
brave. As the hounds bay for his blood, he quite correctly refused to endorse the "findings" of
US intelligence agencies, fourteen years after the same agencies "found" that Iraq was bursting
with weapons of mass destruction. How in the world could anyone expect anything else?
But for the mainstream media, "the story" at the Helsinki summit, even the only
story, was Trump's reaction to the, er, trumped up charges of Russian interference in our
democracy. Were you or were you not elected thanks to Russian hackers? All they wanted was a
yes or no answer. Which could not possibly be yes. So they could write their reports in
advance.
Anyone who has frequented mainstream journalists, especially those who cover the "big
stories" on international affairs, is aware of their obligatory conformism, with few
exceptions. To get the job, one must have important "sources", meaning government spokesmen who
are willing to tell you what "the story" is, often without being identified. Once they know
what "the story" is, competition sets in: competition as to how to tell it. That leads to an
escalation of rhetoric, variations on the theme: "The President has betrayed our great country
to the Russian enemy. Treason!"
This demented chorus on "Russian hacking" prevented mainstream media from even doing their
job. Not even mentioning, much less analyzing, any of the real issues at the summit. To find
analysis, one must go on line, away from the official fake news to independent reporting. For
example, "the Moon of Alabama" site offers
an intelligent interpretation of the Trump strategy , which sounds infinitely more
plausible than "the story". In short, Trump is trying to woo Russia away from China, in a
reverse version of Kissinger's strategy forty years ago to woo China away from Russia, thus
avoiding a continental alliance against the United States. This may not work because the United
States has proven so untrustworthy that the cautious Russians are highly unlikely to abandon
their alliance with China for shadows. But it makes perfect sense as an explanation of Trump's
policy, unlike the caterwauling we've been hearing from Senators and talking heads on CNN.
Those people seem to have no idea of what diplomacy is about. They cannot conceive of
agreements that would be beneficial to both sides. No, it's got to be a zero sum game, winner
take all. If they win, we lose, and vice versa.
They also have no idea of the harm to both sides if they do not agree. They have no project,
no strategy. Just hate Trump.
He seems totally isolated, and every morning I look at the news to see if he has been
assassinated yet.
It is unimaginable for our Manichean moralists that Putin might also be under fire at home
for failing to chide the American president for U.S. violations of human rights in Guantanamo,
murderous drone strikes against defenseless citizens throughout the Middle East, the
destruction of Libya in violation of the UN mandate, interference in the elections of countless
countries by government-financed "non-governmental organizations" (the National Endowment of
Democracy), worldwide electronic spying, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the
world's greatest prison population and regular massacres of school children. But the diplomatic
Russians know how to be polite.
Still, if Trump actually makes a "deal", there may be losers – neither the U.S. nor
Russia but third parties. When two great powers reach agreement, it is often at somebody else's
expense. The West Europeans are afraid it will be them, but such fears are groundless. All
Putin wants is normal relations with the West, which is not much to ask.
Rather, candidate number one for paying the price are the Palestinians, or even Iran, in
marginal ways. At the press conference, asked about possible areas of cooperation between the
two nuclear powers, Trump suggested that the two could agree on helping Israel:
"We both spoke with Bibi Netanyahu. They would like to do certain things with respect to
Syria, having to do with the safety of Israel. In that respect, we absolutely would like to
work in order to help Israel. Israel will be working with us. So both countries would work
jointly."
In political terms, Trump knows where political power lies, and is counting on the influence
of the pro-Israel lobby, which recognizes the defeat in Syria and the rising influence of
Russia, to save him from the liberal imperialists – a daring bet, but he does not have
much choice.
On another subject, Trump said that "our militaries" get along with the Russians "better
than our politicians". This is another daring bet, on military realism that could somehow
neutralize military industrial congressional complex lobbying for more and more weapons.
In short, the only chance to end the nuclear war threat may depend on support for Trump from
Israel and the Pentagon!
The hysterical neoliberal globalists seem to have ruled out any other possibility –
and perhaps this one too.
"Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards the opportunity to open
new pathways toward peace and stability in our world" Trump declared "I would rather take a
political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics."
That is more than his political enemies can claim.
This is a frightening, accurate commentary on what we face as a result of an unaccountable
power structure resorting to any and all means to retain power which, if this structure
continues to exercise it, will lead to our extinction.
In the establishment, it's not dementia as such, it's just serving the highest bidder. You
can accuse only the elites of dementia: they forgot that to enjoy the fruits of your thievery
you have to be alive. If only they die, it would be a great service to the humanity.
Unfortunately, the way things go, they might take us all with them.
This mass hysteria over a country hostile to both democracy and gay rights (it's hard to
tell which one is worse) has been seen in the west before. It's very reminiscent of the lead-up to Iraq war in 2003. I mean what's next? Are they
gonna accuse Russia of having WMD's too?
They are pretty good at providing false evidence of WMD's, I wouldn't be surprised if they
stage another presentation of evidence of Russian WMD's at UN, complete with satellite images
of mobile trucks equipped with Uranium enrichment technology and all that.
That Nikki Halley can be quite persuasive, you know. I just hope that the world doesn't
buy that BS again. Russia having WMD's? That's preposterous. They tricked us the last time, I
hope that the people have learned their lesson – not to trust them anymore.
Thank you, this is an excellent summary of the situation right now. It's worth noting too
just how disconnected the establishment is from the wider public. They have enormous
financial resources and access to the entire legacy media but seem to have almost no real
base of support. Remember how the Never Trumpers had no one more prominent and well-known
than Evan McMullan (!!) to run as their candidate? Note too the tiny number of views the
YouTube videos of the Aspen Institute get: https://www.youtube.com/user/AspenInstitute/videos
.
On its own, these things aren't conclusive proof but together they add up. The Aspen
Institute crowd is an almost entirely self-contained subculture. They seem to have no base of
support, beyond their stacks of money, job titles and the power that come with the various
offices they hold. That's probably why they can never stop calling their opponents
"populists" or why Bill Kristol keeps tweeting about encountering scrappy shoeshine boys who
shout "give Trump hell, Mr Kristol!" as he goes about his urban peregrinations.
Diana Johnstone is not alone. Others on the alt-Left are starting to wake up, too. This is
Joaquín Flores:
People are seeing through dishonesty, and the old language traps are used up and done
for. If reconquista is the goal, then we need to have an honest conversation about that. If
there's a Latino nation with self determination in the south-west US, or rights 'back' to
the south-west US, then let's speak of it in such terms. Because then we'd be looking at a
Euro-American nation also. Now of course there's issues of interpenetrated peoples, and
identities we carry in our minds in diverse urban centers. But the point here is that we
have to have an honest discourse, and stop hiding reconquista sentiments under the rubric
of 'human rights'. Because European-Americans don't have right of return to Europe, so the
left is promoting what will ultimately be a race war, full scale, if they don't chill the
fuck out and back off this disingenuous approach to policy-wonkism on immigration.
The paradigmatic question today is, how is wealth made, and where does wealth come from?
What is the balance of trade and debts, and how is that is no longer manageable? The US
empire and NATO is no longer manageable. Trump is unwinding NATO. That can't be a bad
thing.
I hear you, and I sympathize, but this is not mass dementia. The oligarchy that runs the United States was worried that Donald Trump might actually
(!!) take some consideration for the national interest of the people of the United States of
America. That will never do.
This is not irrational. The screaming, the hysteria, this is the utterly rational,
breathtakingly brutal reaction of a ruling elite that has the moral sense of a reptile. And
it's working. All of Trump's campaign promises to stop wasting trillions on pointless winless
foreign wars of choice, and instead spend that on our own country? Gone. And so much else
besides.
It's dangerous to underestimate an enemy. The useful idiot footsoldiers, screaming in
mindless herd instinct, are one thing. The people behind them – the Koch brothers, Jeff
Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, others – there is nothing at all mindless or demented about
them.
In my view, at the moment the deed is done. The president signed onto the report
acknowledged the he accepts the report has even gone as far to say, he blames Pres. Putin
Another backtrack, just muddies the waters, and mat be acceptable because no one wants to
accept the real consequences of a president who has repudiated the one state president he
most desired to make a deal with -- the jig is up.
Whether kabuki theater or real gamesmanship –
A threshold has been crossed and uncrossing it is going to be tricky and in my further
humiliation for the wh. The analysis here mattered before the president agreed with the
report. But when he did, this analysis, becomes moot. Having a chit chat about de-escalating
nuclear tensions is quaint in light of the president acknowledging that russia has in fact
undermined the US democratic process. This is a serious charge and no amount of changing the
subject, crying foul, or pretending it was all a big misunderstanding is going to change
that.
I think it would have been prudent for the president to hold fire in Helsinki and read the
report and then responded . He did make any of those choices. It matters not how exposed the
establishment in wanton eagerness to have their way, wh has embraced the matter. it is on
record and . . . oh well. I see merit in maintaining his original position of disbelief --
however, the president did a complete about face -- and there is no question of that or the
implications.
Hillary lost the election when she could not walk. she lost a shoe, she was shown in the
van, and shoe was thrown after her. And that was arranged by Russians.
Having a title "Mass Dementia in the Western Establishment" and approaching this effort as
"mass insanity","demented chorus" etc. is simply delusional. They know exactly what they are doing and, it appears, they are doing it well.
The are able to create their own reality.
What puzzles me a bit isn't "them" or their servants (media etc.).
It's people in general. They appear to be buying that manufactured reality with ease. In this
era of instant communications it's .sobering.
This constant shitting on "them" and their servants is fine and dandy but feels as just a
feel good exercise.
Perhaps some effort could be spared in trying to analyze and explain common people approach
to all this. The buying, hook and sinker, that manufacture.
Anyone with an average intelligence can, in two hours trawling of Internet, get how false
all that is. And, yet, here we are.
The same people who can spend hours on social media, shopping and entertainment online can't,
for SOME reason, figure all that out.
Easy to blame "them" and media/academia/whatever.
Maybe it's time to start passing a bit of blame to people in general.
In my opinion, no dementia.
Too many careers and institutions are built on continuing hostility towards Russia.
First ECB President Duisenberg's ph d thesis had as title 'The economic consequences of
peace', something like that, his conclusion was that demilitarisation was possible
economically, when controlled sensibly.
Did anyone read 'The Iron Mountain Report', I never quite knew what to make of it, but it
also is about if demilitarisation is possible.
Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990
describes how the USA weapons industry skillfully prevents that spending on useless weapons
deminishes.
The history of the later Roman empire, the army in control.
The Russians are by nature cautious. They are a conglomerate of individuals, many of whom
remember times when they would be sent by communist tyrants to a gulag for Wrongthink. Of
course they're cautious.
How Hillary Clinton could even run for presidency after the murder of Moammer Gaddafi and
Libya destruction, in any decent civilisation and society.
That's planetary shame and the most important question, not DNC hack or anything else, which
just trace in wrong direction.
So, Trump should grow some balls and arrest not just her but Barack Obama as well on the
same charges, as war criminals as they are, and prove that he really deserves to be
trusted.
And sacrifice himself in the process if needed as that would do any honest true US president,
and he knew what to expect from such position from the start.
It's not TV reality show, as still it is.
All he cares about is his ego and popularity, and he is loosing both.
Israel lobby finally see that they put their money in the wrong bank.
I intend to believe more that West, namely USA and UK the most, keeps them more hostage in
uncertainty for decades than in some Jewish conspiracy.
Also, I also believe that only Russia can guaranty Israel security and peace in the
region.
In political terms, Trump knows where political power lies, and is counting on the
influence of the pro-Israel lobby, which recognizes the defeat in Syria and the rising
influence of Russia, to save him from the liberal imperialists – a daring bet, but he
does not have much choice.
Saudi Arabia spent 40 billion dollars helping Saddam's Iraq in its war against Iran, the
cost of US efforts in the Syria civil war have largely been met by the Saudis. The coming
attack on Iran will be as much to please the Saudis as to lock Israel into West Bank Arab
expulsion mode. The Israel Lobby will is not pushing Donald Trump, they are playing catch up
with him. Trump has already shown with the Jerusalem recognition that he is encouraging
Israel in unilateral courses of action.
No, I agree with the assessment in this article and its title: the establishment is
dangerously detached from reality right now. Our stagnant and locked-down political culture
in the West allowed the "elite" to develop a false sense of security and and certainty. They
thought they had things pretty much figured out a few years ago but now they're genuinely
panicked.
Looking to this circus from Russia, to those insane speaches, insulting caricatures in
MSM, I understand the huge amount of rotteness of Western society, mainly its high top part,
but not only. Even here in comments (not in this particularly article) the percentage of
trolls and brainwashed idiots exceeds all I could've imagined. So I stopped writing here
– no sense, I believe that something can change only after the dramatic changes in
US/West society and that is possible only after a big war/revolution.
So, I'm afraid our future is vague
I think you are right. Over the last four years I have been amazed again and again at how
broken the political culture of the West has become. It's only outsiders and newcomers to
politics who give me hope. I'm thinking of people like Trump or the new governments in Italy
and Austria.
Anyone with an average intelligence can, in two hours trawling of Internet, get how
false all that is. And, yet, here we are.
The same people who can spend hours on social media, shopping and entertainment online
can't, for SOME reason, figure all that out.
Easy to blame "them" and media/academia/whatever.
Maybe it's time to start passing a bit of blame to people in general. Not holding my breath.
I fully agree with this sentiment. The only reason the evil bastards who control our
society can get away with their treachery is because most of the American people are out to
lunch on the most important issues of our time. If the sheeple were to take responsibility to
inform themselves of what is happening today they would be able to see the lies they are
being constantly exposed to as just that–lies. And then, they could put down the beer
and turn off the damn sports channel and get angry at what has happened to their country.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for ignorant people to remain
ignorant.
Maybe it's time to start passing a bit of blame to people in general
Ma-a-ate! Let me give you a quick refresher on "1984:"
1st, the inner party – that's my ccc @ 25.
2nd, the outer party – that's Ike's MI-complex, which I expand to:
The US rogue regime = US-M/I/C/4a†-plex, with dog-wagging-tail, its illegitimate
sprog the Zionist/Israeli rogue regime + Js = I/J/Z-plex, all components rife with
corruption.
a = academic = econ, psy, leg et al.; 4 = MSM+PFBCs, † = churches
add a few significant stragglers like $ = banksters & ¿ = spies
We can add the -plexes to their main 'allied criminal regimes' and get FUKUSIL.
3rd, the proles in the book are the proles in real life.
4th, 'hate sessions' are mediated by the US/Z-MMH = corrupt&venal Media (aka press,
radio + TV, incl. PFBCs = publicly financed broadcasters), Madison Ave., Hollywood etc..
5th, as well as "All politicians lie!" [thanks, but "No, thanks!" to JWHoward], most
politicians are a) ccc-puppets and b) traitors to us, we the people and our countries.
Fazit: Even if most proles really were switched-on = fully and fairly informed, their
votes would still mean nothing since there is a disconnect [my 5th.] Unless you are thinking
'pitch-forks and tumbrels,' there's nothing effective that we, the people can do.
"1984″ is pretty-well exactly our reality, and here is a bit of proof:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the
masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who *manipulate* this unseen
mechanism of society *constitute an invisible government* which is the true ruling power of
our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested,
largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our
democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner
if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
There is a lie in there, surrounding "must cooperate" – it's simply not true –
but worse, worst: " an invisible government ." The latter is what is termed 'deep
state' tyranny; the foul, un-elected and criminal puppet-string manipulators (part of the
1%) – again, the ccc.
The lie-cloud they choke the sheople's minds with is deliberately 'spiced' with
scientifically designed psychological propaganda, and that's what does the majority of
dumbing-down damage.
Ta ra! The Bernays haze. Choke on that.
PS Q: Is there any hope at all? A: Apart from hope being hopeless policy, there *could* be
a solution, whereby a big enough proportion of the 1%, a decent portion [should such a thing
exist] could call a halt to the ccc and its murder-most-foul depredations.
Yup. Furthermore, CIA is organized crime and organized crime is CIA. CIA recruits and runs
agents in favored criminal syndicates in every illicit trade: drugs, child sexual
trafficking, arms, fraud, bustouts, extortion, money laundering. Their purpose is not to
interdict the trade but to control it. CIA manages transnational organized crime to top up
their budget for unauthorized clandestine operations, like killing JFK. CIA protects its
criminal proteges with their chartered impunity. They call off law enforcement with the magic
words national security or 'sources and methods.' If the plan gets exposed, CIA's criminal
cutouts insulate the agency from exposure.
RFK knew how it works. RFK junior explained the reason for RFK's focus on organized-crime
until CIA whacked him. That's why his book was made to sink without a ripple.
Evenfurthermore, CIA is the government and the government is CIA. Decades ago Fletcher
Prouty showed that CIA's deepest-cover illegal moles are embedded in our own government.
Every agency with repressive capacity is infiltrated with focal points, who report to CIA
handlers without the other agency's knowledge.
Of course Israel is trying to infiltrate it -- they understand the levers of power.
Assange has got some mighty stinkers in his insurance file. All we can do is hope they're
enough to destabilize the CIA Reich that has ruled America since 1949.
This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite
which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in
the American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic "cooperation"
associations.
Don't know if the Cabal controls the Homeland but it certainly seems to exert a great deal
of its influence and it also becomes apparent that the Crowd has a long history with the
Russians as well thus given that, the whole thing appears to be a three ring circus created
to avoid being, in all honesty, noticed by the dumbed down bozos who are shouting loudest in
the bleachers in time it won't amount to a bag of beans!
I wonder, were her "speaking fees" from AIPAC and Saudis also arranged by the Russians?
Those pesky Russians are everywhere, like Christian God. Did you check under your bed
lately?
I think you are mistaken trying to rationalize the behavior of the political class and
their puppet masters. I believe the real driver are not antidepressants, but an obscene
greed, which is so blinding that it made MIC profiteers forget that to enjoy the fruits of
their thievery they have to be alive.
Thank you, Michael, for your very interesting perspective. Considering all the factors, it
appears most likely that Trump's apparent groveling was simply the deference an
underdeveloped country like the US owes to a strategically-invulnerable great power with
superior governance.
Trump probably concluded that he and America have much to learn from Russia's
categorically superior human rights performance in all the most comprehensive categories,
especially in comparison with US bad-faith evasion of a disgracefully derelict subset of
the core conventions, and failures prompting multiple urgent follow-on inquiries:
The summit was a mission civilizatrice for Russia. Trump doubtless knows that the whole
world has seen the facts exhaustively documented above by preeminent human rights experts and
independent civil society organizations. A bit of humility on Trump's part might help to
restore lost US world standing.
Which of the treaty bodies' conclusions and recommendation do you think would do most to
mitigate the international disgrace of the USA?
The psychology of the mass of Americans with it's self-righteousness and self-centerdness
is really amazing. Just in the last seventeen years the US has invaded or otherwise attacked
numerous countries and has caused millions of people to die, become miserable refugees,
become orphans and all other manner of evil. Not least of all has been it's creation and
patronage of ISIS, one of the most heinous groups in history. Yet Americans have this massive
blind spot to the war criminality of all this that their country has committed against the
peace of the world. Instead they're being stampeded into some irrational Russia-phobia. It's
the US that's been on the march everywhere, labeling those countries that resist it's
aggression as being aggressors for being willing to defend themselves. It's all
upside-down.
(BTW, is this scenario really so far-fetched? After all, Russia did nothing but complain
to the UN when the US angels of death destroyed both Iraq and Libya. Could not the same
fate soon await Iran?)
You're omitting Syria. It should be pretty obvious that the Russians and the Chinese
aren't going to sit back and allow Uncle Scam to destroy Iran when they wouldn't allow it to
happen to a much less important country like Syria.
TDS is a convenient shorthand for this form of disconnect from reality. That said it is
absolutely fascinating to see and puzzle over this geopolitical tectonic event. The old
narrative is crumbling, with the result that people like Lauri are fighting desperately to
preserve their "sanity", dependent as it is on their tribal submission to the old order and
its old narrative (its timeworn lies).
"Science advances one funeral at a time."
Max Planck
By which he means that people persist in believing in those "truths" (their belief system)
they have held for a lifetime. Only when they die out will a new, revised belief system
replaced the old. The same in geopolitics as in science.
Assad still is there.
The USA was unable to remove Assad, how would they destroy Iran ?
The USA has no idea of what Iran built deep in the rocks.
Trump screaming in capitals on Twitter against Iran, sign of weakness, in my opinion.
American dementia is not new. It is current but after the false flags of almost all of our
(US) wars going back as far as the Barbary Pirates, Americans have thrived on being the good
guys in an evil world. We are SO GOOD, and the world thinks we are perfect and want to be
part of US so much, that any other thought is treasonous.
The fact that getting along with Russia is necessary to NOT create armageddon, is
irrelevant to the typical citizen because no matter how wrong, we are blessed and perfect in
the eyes of the gawd we pretend to believe in.
Now, now, don't underestimate the Donald! The man has razor sharp brains, is an
accomplished mover/rouser of people, and I imagine has oodles of strategic abilities. Look at
the facts, hard facts, not at perceptions. No man made tons of legitimate, legal money
without possessing some qualities of genius. Never in US history has an outsider come in,
overturned the political establishment, taken on the whole pack of media-hyenas, won the
election capitalising on the weakness of all his opponents, then tried to do what he said he
would do. Who could have imagined that seemingly simple-minded tweets, in simple vocabulary,
would be used to beat down the collective might of the massed media? His tweets scored over
their collective shrieks and howls! The power of simplicity, no?
This guy is complex, clever,
and a very astute strategist. He puts on the rude, crude and buffoonish show to get peoples'
attention – and he did get that, did he not? That is called strategy and real
smarts.
UWell, we here in Russia know all this (about Browder) for quite a time. What new did you
find? It's just one story in long list of those written and spoken for western idiots like
Scripals, MH17, chemicals in Syria and WMD in Iraq, Russian meddling in f-n US elections and so on.
Eat it all dummies.
"... The idea is Israeli, the operational plans are British, weapons and vessels are American, and a possibility for confrontation grows stronger each day. ..."
"... And with the legal noose around Trump's neck, he will be more than willing to play along for just one more breath (which is all they'll really need him for). ..."
As a new military confrontation over Syria is impending, thought out by Israel, prepared by
the British and executed by the US, the West's future depends greatly upon two mavericks, the
US President Donald Trump and the UK Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn. These two men are as
different as you can make. One is for capitalism, another one is a socialist, but both are
considered soft on Russia, at least they do not foam at the mouth hearing Putin's name. Both
are enemies of Wall Street and the City, both stand against the Deep State, against NATO, both
are enemies of globalism and of world government. One is a friend of Israel, another is a
friend of Palestine, but both are charged with racism and anti-Semitism.
It is a quaint peculiarity of our time, that anti-Semitism is considered the great and
unforgivable sin, trading places with Christ Denial. Negative attitude to Christ-denying Jews
had been de rigueur at its time, and the Church, or its Tribunal, the Inquisition, had tried
the charged. Nowadays, the heavily Zionists MSM is the accuser, the judge and jury, considering
anti-Zionists attitude as a worst sort of racism. The two leaders aren't guilty as charged, but
the MSM court dispenses no acquittals.
Racism is indeed an ugly trend (though greed is worse), and hatred of Jews qua Jews is not
nice, either. (You wouldn't expect a different answer from the son of Jew parents, would you?)
Jews are entertaining, clever, cunning, sentimental and adventurous folk, able to do things.
They can be good, that's why the Church wants to bring them to Christ. If they were inherently
bad, why bother with their souls? Are Jews greedy? Everyone would sell his grandma for a
fistful of dollars, but only a Jew would actually deliver, say Jews. Jews tend to preach and
claim high moral ground, but that is a tradition of the Nation of Priests. However,
universalism and non-racism is not their strong point, and it is amazing that they appointed
themselves the judges on racism.
... ... ...
In the British establishment, pro-Zionists forces decided to side with the Washington War
Party to push us close to war. The recent visit of the British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt
(the man on the
shortlist of Israel's agents within the British establishment) to Washington where Hunt
delivered a speech calling for full-out war on Russia, "has been read as an intervention on the
side of the anti-Russian faction in the split and divided US administration", said the
Guardian .
The speech is just an opening, missiles will follow soon. Today, I was informed by my
contacts, the Russians have delivered a demarche to the State Department, warning the Americans
to desist from their plans to attack Syria. Russian intelligence learned that eight tanks
containing chlorine have been delivered to Halluz village of Idlib province where the group of
specially trained militants has already been deployed in order to simulate the rescue of the
victims of chemical attack. The militants were trained by the British private military company
Olive (which had merged with the American Constellis Group.
The operation, the Russians say, had been planned by the British intelligence services to
justify an impending airstrike directed against Syrian military and civil infrastructure. For
this strike, USS The Sullivans guided missile destroyer with 56 cruise missiles onboard arrived
to the Persian Gulf, and the US Air Force bomber B-1B with 24 cruise Air-to-Surface Missiles
had been flown to the Al-Udeid air base in Qatar.
The idea is Israeli, the operational plans are British, weapons and vessels are
American, and a possibility for confrontation grows stronger each day. The success of
Corbyn would put a stop to these plans of war. But will he have a chance?
Trump and Corbyn are coming to the point from different sides. They are fighting a
strong and well-entrenched adversary. Both are tired, both are full of imperfections, but
they offer us a chance to save our beautiful world from destruction.
Should I laugh or cry at Trump saving us from another ... Israel inspired war?
NO ONE has ever been more Jew mobbed up than Trump is. In case no one has noticed what
Trump is actually doing -- –The Jew neocon crew that gave us Iraq is back and
going after Iran.
Here is his latest: .I believe this is 6th one I have identified on here as Fifth Column
Zionists Trump has put in sensitive positions.
Trump names Zionists security expert to senior intelligence post | The
3 days ago – Appointment of Samantha Ravich comes after president taps Trump names
Zionists security expert to senior intelligence post .
WASHINGTON -- US President Donald Trump chose as the deputy chairwoman of the intelligence
advisory board a Zionists national security expert who is well known in the pro-Israel
national security community. Ravich, a former deputy national security adviser to
vice president Dick Cheney, is a senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies, an influential hawkish pro-Israel think tank. She is also a senior adviser
to the Chertoff Group, founded by Michael Chertoff, a homeland security secretary in the
George W. Bush administration, and has worked with the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy. One of her specialties is combating extremists.
Ravick has also worked with the pro-Israel community helping to raise money for Israel
Bonds .
Ravich does not require confirmation.
Also Tuesday, Jeffrey Gunter, a dermatologist from Los Angeles, was nominated as the
ambassador to Iceland. Gunter, a board member of the Republican Zionists Coalition, must be
confirmed by the U.S. Senate
ICELAND REALLY NEEDS A Zionists DERMATOLOGIST AMBASSADOR
Ravich also worked with Douglas Feith, PaulWolfowitz and Richard Perle in drumming up the
war on Iraq
They worked on creating "wiring diagrams" showing relationships among terror groups. For
example, they concluded
"Iraq trains Palestinian terrorists associated with PFLP, PIJ, Hamas, ANO, PLF, Ansar
al-Islam which has direct ties to al-Qaeda[5]"
Samantha Ravich, studied the charts and reported back to Scooter Libby. Wolfowitz
personally
At Aspen Ravick showed her hand in advancing a anti Russia policy to get Russia to stop
supporting Iran, her suggestion is to basically undermine Russia economically and financially
in order to make them kow tow to the US.
Wow, quite a revelation Saker putting the pieces of this puzzle together!
And with the legal noose around Trump's neck, he will be more than willing to play along
for just one more breath (which is all they'll really need him for).
Cook points out that by conceding ground, Corbyn betrayed Palestinians and betrayed
anti-Zionist Jews who were expelled by droves from Labour. Even Tony Greenstein, a Zionists
nationalist though anti-Zionist, had been expelled; the same Tony Greenstein who attacked
me and Gilad Atzmon for our anti-Semitism (I responded to him here). He was also sent home
packing. The late Hajo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor and defender of Palestinian rights, a
personal friend of Corbyn, had been denounced. Palestinians were betrayed, and we should
care about them more than about Zionists fine feelings.
Very sad -- Corbyn caving in and sacking anti-Zionists including anti-Zionist Jews from
his party. Horrible if he's betrayed the Palestinians. Maybe not aggressive enough. Is he a
leader?
Anyway, British voters, please show your support for him.
The Union of Establishment Republicans and Establishment Democrats
d by
gjohnsit
on
Fri, 08/24/2018 - 4:42pm
It began in 2016, when neconservative war
criminals formed an
alliance
with
warmongering Democrats.
Illustrative of their emerging alliance, as
Glenn Greenwald reports, is yet another Beltway
foreign policy initiative: the Alliance for
Securing Democracy....The Alliance's advisory
council includes Jake Sullivan, Clinton's
foreign policy adviser, and Mike Morell, acting
CIA director under Obama. They sit comfortably
with Kristol, Mike Chertoff, homeland security
secretary under Bush, and hawkish former
Republican congressman Mike Rogers. With a
record of catastrophic foreign policy fiascoes,
the establishment comes together to strike back.
It turns out that this was only the beginning.
The common enemy here was Russia, and one method of
unity is the
Renew
Democracy Initiative (RDI)
.
A group of neocon heartthrobs have banded
together with an eclectic array of Russiagaters
to form a visionary organization committed to
protecting Western democracy....
Celebrated war cheerleader Max Boot, who serves
on RDI's board of directors, announced the
creation of this highly original organization in
a Washington Post op-ed.
... Unlike the dozens of other well-financed
bastions of status-quo thinking, RDI aims to
"unite both the center-left and center-right" by
promoting "liberty, democracy and sanity in an
age of discord."
Also on RDI's board of directors is WaPost writer
Anne Applebaum who once wrote an op-ed entitled
"Should We Assassinate Saddam?"
The organization's president, Richard Hurowitz, is a
member of the warmongering Council on Foreign
Relations.
For several months, an alliance has been forming
between the neoconservative American Enterprise
Institute (AEI) and the neoliberal Center for
American Progress (CAP). It's the sort of
kumbaya not witnessed since wartime Washington a
decade ago.
A press release from CAP on May 10 blares: "CAP
and AEI Team up to Defend Democracy and
Transatlantic Partnership." The same joyous
tidings accompanied a public statement issued by
AEI on July 31, which stressed that the alliance
was meant to resist "the populist assault on the
transatlantic community" for the purpose of
"defending democracy."
It's hard to tell what they mean when they say
"democracy", but it's virtually certain that it
isn't in the dictionary.
There's something pathetic and ironic about
neconservatives and neoliberals joining forces to
defend "democracy" when they are the biggest threats
to democracy.
Now we have
mainstream
conservatives
openly cheering for the Democrats
in November.
Nor is Boot alone among neocon Never-Trumpers.
Syndicated columnist George Will, who left the
GOP after the election of Trump, is also
agitating for a Democratic congressional
takeover...
Another former Republican, MSNBC commentator and
onetime congressman Joe Scarborough (also a
current member of the Council on Foreign
Relations), has set the standard for anti-Trump
animus. His colleague at MSNBC, former GOP
congressman and McCain presidential campaign
chair Steve Schmidt, is yet another fiery Trump
detractor rooting for the Dems.
This union of evil and evil comes from the Dems as
well.
For instance, liberals new found love of
warmonger
John McCain
.
Forty-four percent of Republicans surveyed in
the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released
Wednesday hold a negative view of McCain, while
only 35 percent have a positive view of him.
Meanwhile, 52 percent of Democrats surveyed now
see him in a positive light.
The press and liberal groups gushed, and
hundreds of headlines approvingly quoted the
former president. "Why you should listen when
George W. Bush defends the media," declared a
headline at the Washington Post. "George W Bush:
a welcome return," raved the Guardian, which
went so far as to call him a "paragon of
virtue." The leftist site ThinkProgress ran a
blog post titled "George W. Bush defends the
Constitution to rebuke Trump."
"Paragon of virtue"? Has everyone forgotten that
he's a war criminal?
The White House said that Brennan
used his security clearance to "sow
division and chaos," and lend a
sheen of credibility to his public
criticisms of the president. The
White House looked into revoking
Brennan's clearance after he accused
Trump of "treason" for meeting with
Russian President Vladimir Putin
last month.
Straight away, Democrats jumped in
to defend Brennan's character and to
blast Trump for pulling his
clearance. Rep. Adam Schiff
(D-California), ranking member of
the House Intelligence Committee,
said that "In adding John Brennan to
his enemies list, Trump demonstrates
again how deeply insecure and
vindictive he is."
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Virginia) called
the revocation "the weak, paranoid,
authoritarian behavior of a
dictator."
...
Brennan's thesaurus-heavy Tweets and
self-righteous grandstanding have
made him a hero to the anti-Trump
#resistance. However, while
Democrats are falling over
themselves to pat the former career
spy on the back, there was a time
when Brennan spied on Democratic
lawmakers compiling a report into
his agency's use of torture tactics
– and got away with it.
In 2014, as the Senate Intelligence
Committee was compiling a lengthy
report into the CIA's use of
'enhanced interrogation techniques'
at its secret prisons, chair Dianne
Feinstein (D-California) accused
Brennan's agency of secretly
monitoring the committee's computers
and removing sensitive documents.
After initially denying any
wrongdoing and rejecting Feinstein's
"spurious allegations," Brennan
quietly apologized to lawmakers
after an internal review proved the
senator right.
Despite being caught red-handed
spying on his overseers, the Obama
administration Department of Justice
declined to press charges against
Brennan, and he remained in charge
of the CIA.
...if it bit them on their fat, hairy
asses. The Left starts with those three
little words that make my heart beat
faster ... "Nationalize the Banks". It
doesn't start with "microscopically left
of the extreme radical far right". The
rich old lady who says "impeachment is
off the table" and "we're capitalist and
that's that" isn't the freaking Left.
and they do it out in the open, and take
pride in it. They are protecting
democracy, from us. Like the economy,
education, health care, democracy is
reserved for the 1%. Too dangerous to
leave it to us.
tted by
Not
Henry Kissinger
on Fri, 08/24/2018 - 7:26pm
IMO, neoliberalism and neoconservatism
are dependent on each other. How can
neoliberal policies be spread around the
world without using neoconservative
policies? That is why Bush can be
popular with the "left". When I read
this essay, this song came to mind:
A guy on DKos, AntonBursch, once told me
he couldn't wait till they "purged all
the Greens (which I think meant us) out
of the Democratic party, so we can make
an alliance with the center-right."
Not really sure what anyone means by
"center," anymore; it appears to have
something to do with money.
As Alan Grayson once said, "So that's
what passes for centrist these days."
itted by
Cant
Stop the M...
on Sat, 08/25/2018 - 12:18pm
@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
People were scrimping and saving
and skimping on essentials for
themselves and their loved ones
in order to come up with
multiples of $27 to donate to
Bernie's campaign, but he
couldn't be bothered to defend
his own supporters' right to be
registered correctly and vote in
a fair primary.
Instead he went with the very
cabal that had cheated him, and
them.
Reporting on RussiaGate, as it is called, goes on day after day, always something new, more
hacks, more targets, more election rigging or is it all more fake news? Who controls the news,
who really controls the news? Perhaps the news itself rigs elections and spreads rumors,
promotes fakery and serves foreign interests as well, let's take a look.
First of all, we might ask why no one, certainly not anyone in the paid media, noted that
"non-state actors" as they are called in intelligence and counter-terrorism, are the big
players nowadays. After all, it is the media that creates reality, that defines truth, though
that effort has now migrated to Silicon Valley moguls who now hire failed academics and
journalists who have set up "truth panels."
Before that, the fake press reported lies, and any academic who taught otherwise or wrote
otherwise was a "conspiracy theorist" and faced loss of tenure, though tenure seldom exists in
today's world of rapidly declining academic standards, in the US at least.
A case study for infiltration of US government by a foreign intelligence service, other than
Russia, is easy to find. When Australian Rupert Murdoch and his media empire came to America,
they clearly bought House Speaker Newt Gingrich in order to have laws changed.
"... First of all, the Democrats will now face increasing demands for impeachment from the impassioned members of their base whom they have riled up to see Trump as the epitome of the Putin-Nazi evil that threatens "our democracy." ..."
"... It would deeply undermine any notion that the political system holds the confidence of the people, and intensify division, disruption, and the sense of incipient civil war in the country more than any number of Russian Facebook posts. ..."
But these crimes are tax fraud, money laundering, and credit app padding that have nothing
to do with Donald Trump, and campaign-finance violations related to what a critic of Trump
aptly describes
as "a classic B-team type of bumbling screw-up of covering up mistresses." I question the level
of word play, if not fantasizing, necessary to claim that these crimes validate "
this investigation of foreign subversion." None of them has anything to do with that.
The perils of this, that, these, and those.
Do these results disprove that the Mueller probe is "a political investigation"? I think
they imply quite the opposite, and quite obviously so.
Why? Because these convictions would not have occurred if Hillary Clinton had been elected
president. There would be no convictions because there would have been no investigation.
If Hillary had been elected, all the crimes of Manafort and Cohen -- certainly those that
took place over many years before the election, but even, I think, those having to do with
campaign contributions and mistress cover-ups -- would never have been investigated, because
all would have been considered right with the political world.
The Manafort and Cohen crimes would have been ignored as the standard tactics of the elite
financial grifting -- as well as of parasitism on, and payoffs by, political campaigns -- that
they are. Indeed, there would have been no emergency,
save-our-democracy-from-Russian-collaboration, Special Counsel investigation, from which these
irrelevant charges were spun off, at all.
... ... ...
Have you heard of the Podestas? The Clinton Foundation? Besides, the economic purpose of
American electoral politics is to funnel millions to consultants and the media. Campaign
finance law violations? We'll see how the
lawsuit over $84 million worth of funds allegedly transferred illegally from state party
contributions to the Clinton campaign works out. Does the media report, does anybody know or
care, about it? Will anybody ever go to prison over it?
... ... ...
First of all, the Democrats will now face increasing demands for impeachment from the
impassioned members of their base whom they have riled up to see Trump as the epitome of the
Putin-Nazi evil that threatens "our democracy." If the Democrats insist these convictions
are not just matters of financial hijinx, irrelevant to Mueller's "Russia collusion"
investigation, and irrelevant in fact to anything of political substance; if they assert that
the payoffs to Stormy and Karen (the only acts directly involving Trump) disqualify Trump for
the presidency, then they will have no excuse but to call for Trump's impeachment, and act to
make it happen. Their base will demand that Democratic candidates run on that promise, and if
the Democrats re-take the House, that they begin impeachment proceedings immediately.
... ... ...
If they try to impeach and fail (which is likely), well, then, as happened to the
Republicans with Clinton, they will just look stupid, and will be punished for having wasted
the nation's political time and energy foolishly. And Trump will be strengthened.
If they were to impeach, convict, and remove Trump (even by forcing a resignation), a large
swath of the population would conclude, correctly, that a ginned-up litigation had been used to
overturn the result of the 2016 election, that the Democrats had gotten away with what the
Republicans couldn't in 1998-9. That swath of the population would likely withdraw completely
from electoral politics, leaving all their problems and resentments intact -- hidden for a
while, but sure to erupt in some other ways. It would deeply undermine any notion that the
political system holds the confidence of the people, and intensify division, disruption, and
the sense of incipient civil war in the country more than any number of Russian Facebook
posts.
. .. ... ...
...if they do move forward, that will initiate a political battle that will tear the country
apart and end up either with their defeat or the victory of Mike Pence.
... ... ...
By the way, for those who think that Manafort's conviction portends a smoking gun, based on
his work for "pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych," as the NYT and other liberals persistently call
him, I would suggest looking at this Twitter thread by Aaron
Maté. It's a brilliant shredding of Rachel Maddow's (and, to a lesser extent, Chris
Hayes's) version of the deceptive implication -- presented as an indisputable fact -- that
Manafort's work for Yanukovych is proof that he (and by extension, Trump) was working for
Putin. As Maté shows, that is actually indisputably false. Manafort was working hard to
turn Yanukovych away from Russia to the EU and the West, and the evidence of that is
abundant and easily available. It was given in the trial, though you'd never know that from
reading the NYT or listening to MSNBC. As a former Ukraine Foreign Ministry spokesman said: "If
it weren't for Paul, Ukraine would have gone under Russia much earlier. He was the one dragging
Yanukovich to the West." And the Democrats know this.
And if you think Cohen is harboring secret knowledge of Trump-Russia collusion that he's
going to turn over to Mueller, take look at Maté's thread on that.
We are now entering a new period of intense political maneuvering that's the latest turning
point in the bizarre and flimsy "Russiagate" narrative. I've been asked to comment on that a
number of times over the past two years, and each time I or one of my fellow commentators would
say, "Why are we still talking about this?" It was originally conjured up as a Clinton campaign
attack on Trump, but, to my and many others' surprise and chagrin, it somehow morphed into the
central theme of political opposition to Trump's presidency.
... ... ...
Russiagate was a pretext to dig around everywhere in his closet. Trump was clueless about
the trap he was setting for himself, and has been relentlessly foolish in dealing with it. It
is a witch hunt, and he's riding around on his broom, skywriting self-incriminating
tweets.
There are a thousand reasons to criticize Donald Trump -- his racism, his stupidity, his
infantile narcissism, his full embrace of Zionist colonialism with its demand to attack Iran,
his enactment of Republican social and economic policies that are destroying working-class
lives, etc. That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them. His election was a symptom of deep
pathologies of American political culture that we must address, including the failure of the
"liberal" party and of the two-party system itself. That Donald Trump is a Russian agent is not
one of them. There are a number of very good justifications for seeking his impeachment,
starting with the clear constitutional crime of launching a military attack on another country
without congressional authorization. That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Party and its allied media do not want to center the fight on
these substantive political issues. Instead, they are centering on this barrage of Russiagate
litigation -- none of which yet proves, or even charges, Russian "collusion" -- which they are
using as a substitute for politics. And, in place of opposition, they're substituting
uncritical loyalty to the heroes of the military-intelligence complex and "our democracy" that
only a complete fantasist could stomach. I mean, when you get to the point that you're
suspecting John Bolton's "
ties to Russia " .
CIA spies operating within the Kremlin have suddenly "gone to ground" according to the
New York
Times , citing American officials clearly abusing their security clearances.
The officials do not think their sources have been compromised or killed - rather, they've
been spooked into silence amid "more aggressive counterintelligence by Moscow, including
efforts to kill spies," according to the Times, pointing to the still-unsolved March poisoning
of former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal in the UK.
Curiously, the Times immediately suggests that the lack of intelligence is " leaving the CIA
and other spy agencies in the dark about precisely what Mr. Putin's intentions are for
November's midterm elections. "
But American intelligence agencies have not been able to say precisely what are Mr.
Putin's intentions : He could be trying to tilt the midterm elections, simply sow chaos or
generally undermine trust in the democratic process . - NYT
There it is. Of course, buried towards the end of the article is this admission:
But officials said there has been no concrete intelligence pointing to Mr. Putin ordering
his own intelligence units to wade into the election to push for a certain outcome , beyond a
broad chaos campaign to undermine faith in American democracy.
Meanwhile, "current and former officials" tell the Times that the outing of FBI spy Stefan
Halper, who infiltrated the Trump campaign, had a " chilling effect on intelligence collection
."
"... Trump's authorization for the establishment of a "US Space Force" as an additional military branch was one of the more egregious trashing of a longstanding international treaty. ..."
"... In June 2018, America's Israeli-style harassment was also meted out to former Spanish Foreign Minister and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana. He was denied a US visa waiver because he had visited Iran in 2013 to attend President Hassan Rouhani's inauguration. ..."
On December 6, 2017, Trump announced official US recognition of Jerusalem
as the capital of Israel. In 1980, a UN Security Council abstention permitted
the adoption of Resolution 478. The measure supplemented the earlier Resolutions
252, 267, 271, 298, and 465, which required that all UN member states, including
the United States, are under an obligation not to recognize the illegal Israeli
occupation of East Jerusalem. The passage of Resolution 478 resulted in nations
that had moved their embassies to Jerusalem, including Costa Rica and El Salvador,
moving them back to Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, or Herzliya. Trump's action reversed
that action, with Guatemala, Paraguay, and Honduras moving their embassies back
to Jerusalem.
On May 8, 2018, Trump renounced the US signature on the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran, the nuclear agreement with Iran. Even though
the pact was signed by the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, Germany, the
European Union and endorsed by the United Nations Security Council, Trump, taking
his cues from the Israeli war hawk, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, decided,
once again, to make the United States an outlier. Trump effectively gave the
back of his hand to the international community to placate Netanyahu. Moreover,
Trump threatened "secondary sanctions" against foreign nations and firms that
continued to engage in commerce with Iran after a November 4, 2018 deadline.
Trump's authorization for the establishment of a "US Space Force" as
an additional military branch was one of the more egregious trashing of a longstanding
international treaty. The 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities
of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and
Other Celestial Bodies, known simply as the "Outer Space Treaty," established
the basis for international space law. The original signatories were the United
States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom. Since 1967, 107 nations have fully
ratified the treaty, which bans the placement of weapons of mass destruction
in Earth orbit and the establishment of military bases, installations, and fortifications
on the Moon and other celestial bodies.
Trump's creation of a military Space Force to supplant the civilian National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in US space operations and his call
for space to be a "new warfighting domain" effectively violate US treaty obligations.
The US Air Force's X-37B robotic space planes, smaller versions of NASA's
discontinued space shuttle orbiter, are believed to have carried out top secret
military-oriented missions since 2010. Trump's creation of a Space Force represents
a public admission of America's desire to militarize space, even as the Air
Force remains mum on the actual purpose of the X-37B program.
The basis in international law for the Outer Space Treaty was the Antarctic
Treaty of 1959. The Antarctic Treaty bans military activity of the continent.
Only scientific research in Antarctica is permitted under the Antarctic Treaty
System. However, Trump's disregard for the entire international treaty system
has placed the Antarctic Treaty in as much jeopardy as the Outer Space Treaty.
The suspected presence of rare earth minerals and gas hydrates under melting
Antarctic ice shelves has Trump's cronies in the mining and fossil fuel industries
anxious to undermine the Antarctica Treaty and open the continent to commercial
exploitation.
Considering the schoolmarmish haughtiness of Trump's ambassador to the UN,
former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, someone who had no foreign policy
experience before taking over at the US Mission to the UN, the 1947 US-UN treaty,
titled the "Agreement Between the United Nations and the United States of America
Regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations," may also be violated. The
imposition of draconian visa bans and other sanctions and travel restrictions
on government officials of Iran, Turkey, Russia, Venezuela, North Korea, Nicaragua,
Cuba, China, Chad, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Yemen, Myanmar, Laos, Syria,
Somalia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Eritrea places in jeopardy US law that requires
the facilitation of travel for delegations of UN member states and official
observers to and from the UN headquarters in New York.
Trump's total disregard for international laws and treaties may eventually
see leaders and diplomats of foreign nations detained or arrested when they
arrive in New York to attend UN sessions. Such harassment began in earnest just
a few weeks after Trump was inaugurated as president. In February 2017, former
Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik was caught up in Trump's visa
ban against visitors from Muslim nations. Bondevik was detained at Dulles International
Airport outside of Washington and subjected to questioning about an Iranian
visa in his diplomatic passport.
In June 2018, America's Israeli-style harassment was also meted out to
former Spanish Foreign Minister and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana. He
was denied a US visa waiver because he had visited Iran in 2013 to attend President
Hassan Rouhani's inauguration. Solana told Spanish television, "It's a
bit of a mean decision... I don't think it's good because some people have to
visit these complicated countries to keep negotiations alive." Trump's renunciation
of the US signature on the Iran nuclear deal showed the world what Trump and
his neo-conservative advisers think about peace "negotiations." Although the
general purpose visa waiver ban was instituted by Barack Obama, the Trump administration
has been violating the spirit and intent of the US-UN Treaty by applying it
to those, like Bondevik and Solana, possessing diplomatic passports.
Trump has made no secret of his disdain for foreign government officials
and the countries they represent. During a briefing on the Indian sub-continent,
Trump reportedly delighted in referring to Nepal as "nipple" and Bhutan as "button."
According to the "tell-all" book by former White House adviser Omarosa Manigault
Newman, Trump, after viewing a video of his pushing aside Montenegro Prime Minister
Duško Marković at the 2017 NATO summit, called him a "whiny punk bitch." Trump
referred to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as "meek and mild" over a
rift on US-Canadian trade policy.
One of Trump's first phone calls as president with a foreign leader resulted
in Trump complaining that his discussions with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull were "most unpleasant." Before warming to North Korean leader Kim Jong
UN, Trump referred to him as "little rocket man." During remarks at the UN in
September 2017, Trump referred to Namibia as "Nambia." Later, he called African
countries and Haiti "shithole" countries.
Cities that have served as hosts for international summits and meetings have
also earned Trump's scorn. He called Brussels a "hell hole," London a magnet
for Muslim terrorist immigrants, and Paris not being Paris any longer because
of Muslim immigrants.
Trump, ever the America Firster – a phrase invented by pro-Hitler politicians
in the 1930s – has decimated international law on issues ranging from the environment
and outer space to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and international guarantees
for the right of the Palestinians. Trump's tearing up of international treaties
signed by his predecessors with the chiefs of various Native American tribes
warrants it own article. Mr. Trump's damage to international relations represents
a historical watershed event and it will take decades to recover from the current
"dark ages" of American diplomacy.
"... Brennan was caught spying on the Senate Intelligence Commitee in violation of the Constitution and subsequently lied about it and allegedly directed personnel under his command to lie about to the Senate and the IG ..."
"... Congress fears the intelligence agencies and takes orders from them, not the other way around as envisaged in the constitution or spelled out in legislation. ..."
"... Let Trump try to control the agencies by firing all of their top officers, slashing their budgets, freezing their funds or shutting down their operations, even specific projects, and watch congress come to their rescue in a New York minute. ..."
"... Congress will save any significant component of intel or the pentagon before they'd rescue Social Security or any other social program. If pressed for an answer as to which of the "usual suspects" really whacked Kennedy, I suspect most folks would put their money on the CIA, the FBI or some combination of the major intel agencies. ..."
"... The neoliberal globalists, I fear, have taken that phrase "drowning government in the bathtub" all too literally. ..."
Brennan was caught spying on the Senate Intelligence Commitee in violation
of the Constitution and subsequently lied about it and allegedly directed personnel
under his command to lie about to the Senate and the IG
He could easily be brought up on rather serious charges.
Abby , August 18, 2018 at 11:23 pm
He also leaked classified information to the press as did others and
they could have been prosecuted under the espionage act. They will be losing
their security clearances soon too. The information that they leaked was
the NSA information on Flynn to the Washington post. But of course the Obama
justice department only prosecuted people who exposed Washington's dirty
secrets.
Realist , August 17, 2018 at 1:21 am
Yes, what Kenneth might like to see happen may be admirable but not going
to happen in 2018 or 19, which is practically a different universe from
1975 and for exactly the reasons you specify. This country and its self-appointed
minders have changed massively in 45 years. Besides, 1975 was a year after
Watergate was finally resolved with Nixon and Agnew's resignations and Congress
may have been feeling its oats, going so far as to defund the Vietnam war!
Imagine defunding ANY of the multiple wars ongoing!
Congress fears the intelligence agencies and takes orders from them,
not the other way around as envisaged in the constitution or spelled out
in legislation. Schumer let that feline out of the sack when he warned
the president not to mess with them.
Let Trump try to control the agencies by firing all of their top
officers, slashing their budgets, freezing their funds or shutting down
their operations, even specific projects, and watch congress come to their
rescue in a New York minute.
We saw how the CIA worked around congressionally-imposed budgetary restraints
in Iran-Contra: by secretly running drugs from Columbia to LA, selling arms
to Iran and using the proceeds to fund death squads in Central America.
Congress didn't have the guts to take that investigation to it logical conclusion
of impeachments and/or indictments. Why?
Congress will save any significant component of intel or the pentagon
before they'd rescue Social Security or any other social program. If pressed
for an answer as to which of the "usual suspects" really whacked Kennedy,
I suspect most folks would put their money on the CIA, the FBI or some combination
of the major intel agencies.
Unfettered Fire , August 17, 2018 at 12:11 pm
The neoliberal globalists, I fear, have taken that phrase "drowning
government in the bathtub" all too literally.
Rosa Brooks' book How War Became Everything and Everything Became
the Military exposes the vast expansion and added responsibilities of
the MIC, as governmental departments continue to be dismantled and privatized.
She even said in a book circuit lecture that she thought the idea of
Congress "declaring war" was antiquated and cute. Well, how long will it
be when the very hollowed out structures of Capitol Hill and the White House
are considered antiquated and cute?
What if the plan all along has been to fold up this whole democratic
experiment and move HQ into some new multi-billion dollar Pentagon digs?
Remember the words of Strobe Talbott:
"Within the next hundred years nationhood as we know it will be obsolete;
all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty
wasn't such a great idea after all."
This nation had better wake up fast if it wants to salvage the currency
authorizing power of government and restore its role in the economy, before
it's no longer an option and the private bankers, today's money lenders
in the temple, govern for good.
"The bank strategy continues: "If we can privatize the economy, we
can turn the whole public sector into a monopoly. We can treat what
used to be the government sector as a financial monopoly. Instead of
providing free or subsidized schooling, we can make people pay $50,000
to get a college education, or $50,000 just to get a grade school education
if families choose to go to New York private schools. We can turn the
roads into toll roads. We can charge people for water, and we can charge
for what used to be given for free under the old style of Roosevelt
capitalism and social democracy."
This idea that governments should not create money implies that they
shouldn't act like governments. Instead, the de facto government should
be Wall Street. Instead of governments allocating resources to help the
economy grow, Wall Street should be the allocator of resources – and should
starve the government to "save taxpayers" (or at least the wealthy). Tea
Party promoters want to starve the government to a point where it can be
"drowned in the bathtub."
But if you don't have a government that can fund itself, then who is
going to govern, and on whose terms? The obvious answer is, the class with
the money: Wall Street and the corporate sector. They clamor for a balanced
budget, saying, "We don't want the government to fund public infrastructure.
We want it to be privatized in a way that will generate profits for the
new owners, along with interest for the bondholders and the banks that fund
it; and also, management fees. Most of all, the privatized enterprises should
generate capital gains for the stockholders as they jack up prices for hitherto
public services.
You can see how to demoralize a country if you can stop the government
from spending money into the economy. That will cause austerity, lower living
standards and really put the class war in business. So what Trump is suggesting
is to put the class war in business, financially, with an exclamation point."
"... The Montana connection was unexpectedly brought to mind during the exhibition because of a passing curatorial note about Hollywood's involvement in the war effort: "Some in US Congress believed film propaganda to be a threat to democracy. In 1941, Senator Burton K. Wheeler wrote to Paramount News that 'the motion picture industry is carrying on a violent propaganda campaign intending to incite the American people [to war] '" ..."
"... Military actions are kept just small enough to stay within the limits of a volunteer force, so conscription need not be justified in the public eye. Social pressures and secular pieties now drive recycling and self-rationing in the service of climate change and veganism. In short, governments today don't perceive a need to mobilize broad public support before waging war. They just do it. ..."
"... runs through October 7 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. ..."
A certain amount of dehumanizing of the enemy is a natural part of any war effort, but
Allied propaganda against the Germans in World War I is particularly striking in its crudity
and ferocity, especially since one would have a hard time finding Americans today capable of
explaining, even in the broadest of terms, exactly what our country was doing in that war. One
of the more visually arresting World War I posters in the exhibition portrays a slumbering,
rosy-cheeked, and classically-garbed female personification of America. "Wake Up, America!" the
poster admonishes. "Civilization Calls Every Man, Woman, and Child!" No arguing with that.
Against such a backdrop some stories from that time come into focus. One involves Hermann
Bausch, a Montana farmer who was dragged from his home and nearly lynched in 1918 when
neighbors surrounded his house and demanded that he buy Liberty Bonds to prove his loyalty to
the United States. He survived the day but only because he ended up in the state penitentiary
for sedition.
The Montana connection was unexpectedly brought to mind during the exhibition
because of a passing curatorial note about Hollywood's involvement in the war effort: "Some in
US Congress believed film propaganda to be a threat to democracy. In 1941, Senator Burton K.
Wheeler wrote to Paramount News that 'the motion picture industry is carrying on a violent
propaganda campaign intending to incite the American people [to war] '"
Although not identified as such, Wheeler was a Montanan who first became famous as a U.S.
attorney in Butte who refused to indict anyone under the national Sedition Act during World War
I. He later became a four-term U.S. senator and steadfast opponent of American involvement in
World War II until Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. But it's noteworthy that Montana produced
strong antiwar leaders such as Wheeler and Jeanette Rankin (the only member of Congress to vote
against entering both world wars) while also being a hotbed of patriotic war fervor. Such
skepticism about foreign conflicts, mixed with patriotic support for the troops, is
characteristic even today of much of Middle America.
At such an exhibition, one expects to see some links with contemporary America, in which the
drums of war are always within earshot. But there are substantial differences. With limitless
federal borrowing, the government no longer needs to hawk Liberty Bonds to finance foreign
adventurism.
Military actions are kept just small enough to stay within the limits of a
volunteer force, so conscription need not be justified in the public eye. Social pressures and
secular pieties now drive recycling and self-rationing in the service of climate change and
veganism. In short, governments today don't perceive a need to mobilize broad public support
before waging war. They just do it.
I agree that Brennan should have his clearance revoked, and frankly so
should anyone after they leave government. The thing is, I just got done
reading "The Devil's Chessboard", and it is quite clear that Allen Dulles
still ran things after he was fired by JFK, and was most likely the coordinator
of the assassination.
I doubt that Trump has any more control of the CIA than JFK had.
Until people like Brennan are capable of being prosecuted in a court
of law, our so-called "Intelligence" agencies don't give a rat's ass what
the president orders. In fact, they probably give "suggestions" that are
in fact orders.
Right now I think they are trying to figure out a way to get him
out of office without having to actually kill him.
backwardsevolution , August 18, 2018 at 8:22 am
Hi, Skip. The Devil's Chessboard sounds like a good book; I'll have to
read it. Yes, I think whoever gets to the top of the CIA is probably one
mean, bad monster of a human being.
I too think they'd love to assassinate Trump, but I don't think they
dare. There are too many people who just don't believe the government
anymore, and Trump's supporters would blow the roof off if anything happened
to him. They've got to be worried about that because they're the ones with
all the guns. Ha!
I think they're desperately racing against time, trying to nail Trump
before he nails them. The evidence is slowly trickling out (because the
FBI and DOJ are stalling) re the Steele dossier/Russiagate/spying, etc.
From the evidence gathered so far, it's pretty evident that the upper
layer of the DOJ, FBI and CIA are rotten to the core and should be dismantled
ASAP. If all Trump does while being in office is bring these guys down,
then he will have done a great service.
"... The 78 day all-out NATO bombing of Serbia was the act that, I believe, shocked/energized Russia's patriotic elements into action. The fact that little Serbia, after years of severe sanctions and every dirty trick imaginable would not buckle to the empire showed Russia that the Empire was not invincible. ..."
For me, I would say that the ' few days of bombing Serbia ' in 1999 ripped any last
vestiges of belief that the West was here to help mega violently (deliberate bombing
of the Chinese embassy) away from everyone. Of course plenty happened in the years running up
to that event The other is when China joined the WTO on 11/12/2001 and hit the ground running
– they were expected to behave meekly and ask the great white men for their advice and
follow it.
The 78 day all-out NATO bombing of Serbia was the act that, I
believe, shocked/energized Russia's patriotic elements into action. The
fact that little Serbia, after years of severe sanctions and every dirty
trick imaginable would not buckle to the empire showed Russia that the
Empire was not invincible.
The deliberate attack on the Chinese embassy IIRC triggered waves of spontaneous
demonstrations in China of such intensity that the Chinese government had to take means to
dampen. But, the message was not lost on the leadership.
Those acts of hubris and cruelty by the Empire may have been the beginning of its end.
Cohen / Manafort mess creates a whole other level of problems for the current
Administration. So Mueller got Trump in an old fashioned way by digging the
personal and business related dirt and going after people who were close to
Trump. This is how prosecutors approach mafia cases ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Cohen claims he and Trump thus conspired to violate federal law. But paying girlfriends to keep past indiscretions private is neither a crime nor a campaign violation. And Trump could legally contribute as much as he wished to his own campaign for president. ..."
"... Hence the high-fives among never-Trumpers are premature. ..."
"... But if Cohen's guilty plea and Tuesday's conviction of campaign manager Paul Manafort do not imperil Trump today, what they portend is ominous. For Cohen handled Trump's dealings for more than a decade and has pledged full cooperation with prosecutors from both the Southern District of New York and the Robert Mueller investigation. ..."
"... Also, Manafort, now a convicted felon facing life in prison, has the most compelling of motives to "flip" and reveal anything that could be useful to Mueller and harmful to Trump. Then there is the Mueller probe itself. ..."
"... Twenty-six months after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had resigned. Twenty-six months after the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, Mueller has yet to deliver hard evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Putin's Russia, though this was his mandate. ..."
"... However, having, for a year now, been marching White House aides and campaign associates of Trump before a grand jury, Mueller has to be holding more cards than he is showing. And even if they do not directly implicate the president, more indictments may be coming down. ..."
"... And as this Congress has only weeks left before the 2018 elections, it will be the new House that meets in January, which may well be Democratic, that will receive Mueller's report. ..."
"... Trump is not going to resign. To do so would open him up to grand jury subpoenas, federal charges and civil suits for the rest of his life. To resign would be to give up his sword and shield, and all of his immunity. He would be crazy to leave himself naked to his enemies. ..."
"... No, given his belief that he is under attack by people who hate him and believe he is an illegitimate president, and seek to bring him down, he will use all the powers of the presidency in his fight for survival. And as he has shown, these powers are considerable: the power to rally his emotional following, to challenge courts, to fire Justice officials and FBI executives, to pull security clearances, to pardon the convicted. ..."
"... if Democrats capture the House, then they will be the ones under intolerable pressure from their own media auxiliaries to pursue impeachment. ..."
"... Instead, he's embarked on a massively ambitious nation-building project in northeast Syria and is otherwise scouring the globe for new wars to start, while mostly catering to his rich friends at home. And Israel, Israel, Israel all the time. ..."
"... What has he done that's actually useful? Ditching TTIP? OK let's grant him that one. Meeting Kim? Mayyybe, but at the same time he chose to appoint Bolton and Pompeo who are predictably sabotaging the Singapore understanding. Meanwhile, American finances are going off the cliff at an ever-accelerating pace. ..."
"... All of which is the perfect mirror image of an equally true statement: if Obama hadn't been such a lousy president (which his supporters are in denial about), a known charlatan like Trump would've never had a shot at the office. ..."
"If anyone is looking for a good lawyer," said President Donald Trump ruefully, "I would
strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Michael Cohen." Michael Cohen is no Roy
Cohn.
Tuesday, Trump's ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign
violation that may not even be a crime. Cohen had fronted the cash, $130,000, to pay porn star
Stormy Daniels for keeping quiet about a decade-old tryst with Trump. He had also brokered a
deal whereby the National Enquirer bought the rights to a story about a Trump affair with a
Playboy model, to kill it.
Cohen claims he and Trump thus conspired to violate federal law. But paying girlfriends
to keep past indiscretions private is neither a crime nor a campaign violation. And Trump could
legally contribute as much as he wished to his own campaign for president.
Would a Democratic House, assuming we get one, really impeach a president for paying hush
money to old girlfriends?
Hence the high-fives among never-Trumpers are premature.
But if Cohen's guilty plea and Tuesday's conviction of campaign manager Paul Manafort do
not imperil Trump today, what they portend is ominous. For Cohen handled Trump's dealings for
more than a decade and has pledged full cooperation with prosecutors from both the Southern
District of New York and the Robert Mueller investigation.
Nothing that comes of this collaboration will be helpful to Trump.
Also, Manafort, now a convicted felon facing life in prison, has the most compelling of
motives to "flip" and reveal anything that could be useful to Mueller and harmful to Trump.
Then there is the Mueller probe itself.
Twenty-six months after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had resigned. Twenty-six
months after the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, Mueller has yet to deliver hard
evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Putin's Russia, though this was his mandate.
However, having, for a year now, been marching White House aides and campaign associates
of Trump before a grand jury, Mueller has to be holding more cards than he is showing. And even
if they do not directly implicate the president, more indictments may be coming down.
Mueller may not have the power to haul the president before a grand jury or indict him.
After all, it is Parliament that deposes and beheads the king, not the sheriff of Nottingham.
But Mueller will file a report with the Department of Justice that will be sent to the
House.
And as this Congress has only weeks left before the 2018 elections, it will be the new
House that meets in January, which may well be Democratic, that will receive Mueller's
report.
Still, as of now, it is hard to see how two-thirds of a new Senate would convict this
president of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Thus we are in for a hellish year.
Trump is not going to resign. To do so would open him up to grand jury subpoenas,
federal charges and civil suits for the rest of his life. To resign would be to give up his
sword and shield, and all of his immunity. He would be crazy to leave himself naked to his
enemies.
No, given his belief that he is under attack by people who hate him and believe he is an
illegitimate president, and seek to bring him down, he will use all the powers of the
presidency in his fight for survival. And as he has shown, these powers are considerable: the
power to rally his emotional following, to challenge courts, to fire Justice officials and FBI
executives, to pull security clearances, to pardon the convicted.
Democrats who have grown giddy about taking the House should consider what a campaign to
bring down a president, who is supported by a huge swath of the nation and has fighting allies
in the press, would be like.
Why do it? Especially if they knew in advance the Senate would not convict.
That America has no desire for a political struggle to the death over impeachment is
evident. Recognition of this reality is why the Democratic Party is assuring America that
impeachment is not what they have in mind.
Today, it is Republicans leaders who are under pressure to break with Trump, denounce him,
and call for new investigations into alleged collusion with the Russians. But if Democrats
capture the House, then they will be the ones under intolerable pressure from their own media
auxiliaries to pursue impeachment.
Taking the House would put newly elected Democrats under fire from the right for forming a
lynch mob, and from the mainstream media for not doing their duty and moving immediately to
impeach Trump.
Democrats have been laboring for two years to win back the House. But if they discover that
the first duty demanded of them
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The
Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. "
President Pence would do little to undo the political polarization that America has
experienced over the past two decades since his voting record suggests that he leans rather
heavily to the right side of the political spectrum.
Maybe this is payback for the other impeachment attempt 20 years ago. Perhaps some dems
have been waiting two decades for vengeance. Whatever Clinton's faults, the GOP should not
have opened that can of worms back then.
Either the Republicans come out ahead in which case the left will say it was because of
"Russian" interference and the election results are thus illegitimate. Or the Democrats will
and they will not only be under pressure to impeach Trump but also to punish the deplorables
who voted for him.
Well, this would constitute a real civil war. All because Obama and Hillary failed at
rigging an election and failed at launching a coup. Good Times. Keep your powder dry.
Well, this would constitute a real civil war. All because Obama and Hillary failed at
rigging an election and failed at launching a coup. Good Times. Keep your powder dry.
Meh. Who are you going to shoot at? Your neighbors? The local messican ghetto? Cops in
general?
IMO, just like always throughout history, the key is to nab "elected representatives" from
local, state and federal positions, and hang them. You don't have to hang very many --
they're smarter than they look; they're merely corrupt slimebags. Kill a few, and the rest
scatter, awaiting future opportunity.
Mr. Buchanan somehow manages to make it through the entire article without reminding us
that, in fact, the GOP did impeach a president over a blowjob–what goes around,
comes around. And while I doubt that Pat is among his fans, Bill Clinton at the time was a
good deal more popular than Trump is now.
Which brings us to something basic: Democrats and liberals in general have jumped the
shark for everyone to see, they're stark raving mad. Granted, the GOP is not exactly Trump's
party, but in an environment where Republicans face no substantial opposition, Trump could
potentially do something for his voters and there would be no possibility of a blue wave.
Instead, he's embarked on a massively ambitious nation-building project in northeast Syria
and is otherwise scouring the globe for new wars to start, while mostly catering to his rich
friends at home. And Israel, Israel, Israel all the time.
What has he done that's actually
useful? Ditching TTIP? OK let's grant him that one. Meeting Kim? Mayyybe, but at the same
time he chose to appoint Bolton and Pompeo who are predictably sabotaging the Singapore
understanding. Meanwhile, American finances are going off the cliff at an ever-accelerating
pace.
All of which is the perfect mirror image of an equally true statement: if Obama hadn't
been such a lousy president (which his supporters are in denial about), a known
charlatan like Trump would've never had a shot at the office.
For an outsider, the
sentimental attachment of this supposedly forward-looking country to its two officially
allowed parties which haven't served their stated purpose for decades already is a curious
thing to behold.
Although I lean conservative, I despair for my country. If Trump's election "unauthorized by the real powers that be" proves to be the match that
sets alight the country then we're all in for a form of Hell that few of us have seen.
Note that someone whose supposed level of intimacy with violence is someone who would not
know the first thing to do if war actually broke out. Exactly why you, the armchair warrior,
who waits with bated breath to jackboot your "enemies", will be staying at home rather than
being on the front lines, just like yourself, dear.
Now, onto Patrick's post.
"Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn."
Patrick is partially right. They are both Jewish, and they both engaged in illegal
activity, but one was a closet homosexual.
"But paying girlfriends to keep past indiscretions private is neither a crime nor a
campaign violation "
Obviously if that was the case, Cohen would not have pled guilty. And clearly Patrick has
not been keeping up with the Mueller investigation on this particular development.
"Cohen claims he and Trump thus conspired to violate federal law."
No, Cohen is offering to corroborate the evidence collected by prosecutors as to what
constitutes illegal activities.
"No, given his belief that he is under attack by people who hate him and believe he is an
illegitimate president, and seek to bring him down, he will use all the powers of the
presidency in his fight for survival."
Well, we know for a fact that if Shitlery or Obama was in the SAME SITUATION, Patrick
would NOT be advocating this course of action. Rather, he would call for either of them to
step aside.
"Twenty-six months after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had resigned. Twenty-six
months after the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, Mueller has yet to deliver hard
evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Putin's Russia, though this was his mandate."
The Mueller investigation is a sore spot for Buchanan, who had to endure an eerily similar
experience with Nixon. So it is other than surprising that Buchanan is defending Trump.
Patrick ought to know better here, as Mueller is carefully gathering evidence from one of the
most complex cases in our nation's political history.
Justice in this instance has no time
table. Mueller is under no obligation to show his cards, that is not how prosecutions
work.
"... If it's really true that the centre cannot hold, The Empire is going to have an increasingly hard time cloaking its lies. Of course, the west could simply return to the values of brotherhood and the common struggle it continues to espouse but never really seriously practiced. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen. ..."
So let's start with America's next big war -- the Gulf War against Iraq, Take One. John
McCain voted for war . Were
there casualties? You could say that; 294 Americans died in the Gulf War. The UK lost 47. It's
worth noting, as an aside, that Syria was a US ally in the Gulf War, and had 2 of its soldiers
killed. How about Iraqis? Well, nobody seems to have kept a very accurate count -- they were,
after all, the enemy, and killing them was encouraged -- and the official American
count is established from Iraqi prisoner-of-war records, and was featured in a report
commissioned by the US Air Force. It estimates 20,000-22,000 combat deaths overall, in both the
air and ground campaigns. Was that a slaughter? You tell me. And before we move on from the
Gulf War, John McCain voted (after
the war was over) against providing automatic annual cost-of-living adjustments for certain
veterans' benefits.
Four years later, McCain supported an appropriations bill that underfunded the Departments
of Veterans Affairs and other federal agencies by $8.9 billion. The following year, McCain
voted against an amendment to increase spending on veterans programs by $13 billion. As of the
year 2000, 183,000 U.S. veterans of the Gulf War, more than a quarter of the U.S. troops who
participated, had been declared permanently disabled by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
You may only be 'slaughtered' if you are dead, but the irrevocable changes for the worse in
the quality of life for thousands of Americans who were only doing what their country ordered
them to do should count for something, what do you say?
This from the American senator who famously could not remember how
many houses he and his wife owned . For the record, the number of homes, ranches, condos,
and lofts, together worth a combined estimated $13,823,269.00, was ten.
Gee; I'm starting to get a little mad at McCain. Well, let's move on.
In 2003, the US government of the day decided that Saddam Hussein had not learned his lesson
the first time, and so this time he had to go. Accordingly, the USA polled its allies for
military forces who were not otherwise occupied, and had another go at it. John McCain said
hell yes, let's get it on. American military
casualties , 4,287 killed, 30,187 wounded. A bit more of a slaughter than the first
attempt. The advent of ceramic-plate body armor protected the soldier's body core, so that many
more survived injuries that would have been so horrific they would surely have killed them. The
downside is that many lived who lost limbs too badly damaged to save, and were crippled for
whatever life remained to them. The Iraqi casualty figures were again an estimate,
although better documented; by the most reliable count, somewhere between 182,000 and 204,000
Iraqis were killed. Needlessly and pointlessly slaughtered, many of them; American troops grew
so fearful as a result of the steady drip of casualties among their own that they frequently
opened fire on families in cars with children simply because they did not obey instructions in
a language they did not speak or understand. At Mahmudiya, in March 2006, Private Steven Green
and his co-conspirators raped and
killed 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza, killed her family and set her body afire to blur the
details of the crime. When Iraqi soldiers arrived on the scene, Green and his fellow murderers
blamed it on Sunni insurgents.
The following year, President Bush approved a 'surge' of 20,000 additional troops, which
John McCain so energetically agitated for that it became known informally as 'the McCain
doctrine'. That's after he claimed in 2004 that if an elected government in Iraq asked that US
forces leave, they would have to go even if they were not happy with the security situation. He
also recognized, the following year, that Iraqis resented the American military presence, and
the sooner and more dramatically it could be reduced, the better it would be for everyone. I
guess if you lay claim to both sides of the argument, you're bound to convince someone that you
know what you're doing.
That same year, 2007, John McCain
voted against a requirement for specifying minimum time periods between deployments for
soldiers deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. When they need you
back in the meat-grinder, you go, never mind how many times you've already been there. Let's
just keep in mind, before we leave Iraq, that the entire case for war the second time around
was fabricated with wild tales of awful weapons Saddam supposedly had which could kill
Americans while they were still in America , and so he had to be dealt with. When it was
suggested to the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that America should concentrate on
Afghanistan, since that is where the backers of the 9-11 strike against America had fled, he
mused
that there were 'no good targets in Afghanistan' , although there were 'lots of good
targets in Iraq'. Some researchers suggest he was after a 'teachable moment' for America's
enemies which would convince them of America's irresistible power. While John McCain assessed
that Donald Rumsfeld was the worst Secretary of Defense ever, his complaint was not that
Rumsfeld was not killing enough people, but that he showed insufficient commitment to winning
the war.
Libya. Hoo, boy. In 2009, John McCain -- together with fellow die-faster-please senators Joe
Lieberman and Lindsey Graham --
visited Tripoli , to discuss Libya's acquisition of American military equipment. John
McCain assured Gadaffi (his son, actually) that America was eager to provide Libya with the
equipment it needed. Hardly more than a year later, he espoused the position that Gadaffi must
be removed from power because he had American blood on his hands from the Lockerbie bombing. In
2011, he visited the Libyan 'rebels', and
publicly urged Washington to consider a ground attack to forcibly remove Gaddafi from
power. Just a friendly public service reminder; the Lockerbie bombing was most likely carried
out by Syria, was -- according to pretty reliable testimony -- rigged by
the American intelligence services to finger Libya , and probably the stupidest thing
Gaddafi ever did was to admit to it anyway and pay compensation, in an effort to move on.
Anyway, more war. What the fuck is it with this guy?
Well, even something so grim as war has its comic moments. What else would you call it when
NATO claims, with a straight face, that the enemy is hiding his
tanks and artillery from its watchful eye inside the water pipes of the Great Man-Made
River? What they actually wanted was an excuse to bomb it -- which they did, as well as the
pumping stations which brought abundant fresh water to the coastal region, in the certain
knowledge that it would create a crisis for the civilian population. Which, by the bye, is
against just about every convention on the subject ever written.
Well, even something so grim as war has its comic moments. What else would you call it when
NATO claims, with a straight face, that the enemy is hiding his
tanks and artillery from its watchful eye inside the water pipes of the Great Man-Made
River? What they actually wanted was an excuse to bomb it – which they did, as well
as the pumping stations which brought abundant fresh water to the coastal region, in the
certain knowledge that it would create a crisis for the civilian population. Which, by the bye,
is against just about every convention on the subject ever written.
Here are some of the pipe sections, when they were being trucked to the assembly point. As
the article suggests, these sections are 4 meters across; but remember, that's at their widest
point. They are only 4 meters for about a foot, because a water pipe is a circle.
Libya mostly used the T-72 Main Battle Tank, and those would be the ones NATO wanted to
eliminate, since the others were considerably older. A T-72, width-wise, would just fit in a
4-meter water pipe, as it is 3.6 meters wide . However,
it's also over 45 tons in weight. The concrete rings were designed to carry free-flowing water,
not a 45-ton tank. Would they take that kind of weight, distributed only over a 7-meter length?
Where is there an entry point to the water-pipe that is the same width as the widest diameter
of the pipe? As discussed, the water pipe is 4 meters wide at its widest point. But the T-72 is
2.3 meters high. The tank would only fit if it was as high as a lunchbox, because the 4-meter
width narrows dramatically from the widest point; it's a circle. Even where it did fit, it
would be supported only on the outer edges of its tracks, and you have to cut the 4-meter
measurement approximately in half, because the upper portion of the tank would have to be above
the point where the tracks touched on each side. The idea was preposterous from the outset, and
it speaks to what fucking simpletons western government believes make up its populations that
they would dare to put such nutjobbery in print. A T-72 could not fit in a 4-meter water pipe.
The notion was demonstrably foolish. But NATO wanted to destroy the water system, so it made up
a reason that would allow it to be a well-meaning potential victim of deadly violence.
According to The Guardian – the same source that told you Gadaffi was hiding
his tanks in the plumbing – the death toll in the Libyan civil war prior to the NATO
intervention was about 1000-2000. According to the National Transitional Council, the outfit
the west engineered to rule post-Gaddafi Libya,
the final butcher's bill was about 30,000 dead . The very day after NATO folded its tents
– figuratively speaking, as the western role was entirely air support for the
flip-flop-wearing rebels – and went home, al Qaeda
raised its black flag over the Benghazi courthouse .
Caitlin Johnstone claimed John McCain used his political career to advocate for military
interventions which resulted in the slaughter of large numbers of human beings. Is that
accurate? What say you, members of the jury? In each of the cases above, John McCain used his
political influence, over and above his vote, to argue, advocate, hector and plead for military
intervention by the armed forces of the United States of America and such coalition partners as
could be rounded up. In each of the cases above, the necessity of toppling the evildoing
dictator was exaggerated out of all proportion, portrayed as an instant and refreshing
liberation for his people, and as only the first phase of a progressive plan which would turn
the subject country into a prosperous, western-oriented market democracy. In each of the cases
above the country is now a divided and ruined failed state whose pre-war situation was
significantly better than its miserable present. And in each of the cases above, a lot of
people were killed who could otherwise have reasonably expected to be alive today.
Also, each of the cases above is chronologically separated from the others by a sufficient
span for it to be quite evident what a cluster-fuck the previous operation was, so that anyone
disposed to learn from his mistakes might have approached the situation differently as it
gained momentum, argued for caution based on previously-recorded clusterfuckery, pleaded for
reason to prevail and for improved dialogue to be a priority. Not John McCain. He learned
precisely the square root of nothing from previous catastrophes, and plunged into the next
catastrophe with the enthusiasm most remarked among those who are not all there, as the
vernacular describes it. He not only voted for war every time, he expended considerable effort
in cajoling and persuading the reluctant to go along.
Perhaps the introduction here of the definition for 'warmonger' would be helpful
to the jury. To wit; "O ne who advocates or attempts to stir up war. A person who fosters
warlike ideas or advocates war." Synonyms: hawk, aggressor, belligerent, militarist, jingoist,
sabre-rattler. There, John; I just saved you the trouble of writing an epitaph.
Will the world be a better place once John McCain is gone? Difficult to say, really, and the
present state of affairs in the world argues strongly that it will not. But it will certainly
be no poorer for his passing, and if he were to be replaced politically by an individual who
took the trouble to do a little research, muse on previous experience, and review all the
available options before voting to send in the Marines why, that would be a victory for
everyone in a world where victory is increasingly not even a possibility.
Was Caitlin Johnstone right? Broadly speaking, and going on the information available at the
time her statement was made, yes; she was.
More dirt on McCain, whose source I now forget, but, if I rightly recall, it was a comment
made by a US citizen on some blog way back. I have posted it before:
Allow me to disparage Mr. McCain (again), with facts. By several accounts ("Why Does
the Nightingale Sing", for example), he only got into the Naval Academy for a free college
degree because Dad and GrandDad were Admirals, and he should have been kicked out several
times if not for that too. He was a lousy pilot who got into trouble often and crashed two
aircraft because of neglect. He was shot down on his third mission over Vietnam, and getting
captured is not heroic.
What happened over there is difficult to pin down, but upon returning from POW status,
he passed a physical and regained flight status as a pilot. Yet after he finished 20 years of
service that allowed generous retirement pay, he obtained a 100% VA disability rating
allowing him to collect some $40,000 a year tax free too! The LA Times mentioned this when
McCain was insisting he was fit to serve as commander in Chief. He now hauls in over $240,000
a year from the Feds for military retirement, 100% VA disability, social security retirement,
while all the while working full-time in the US Senate. So is he retired, or disabled, or
gainfully employed? He is all three! This is textbook case of abuse and why or system needs
reform to protect workers against rich welfare kings like McCain.
McCain's loyal wife was disabled in a serious auto accident while he was a POW. Soon
after he returned, McCain dumped her for a wealthy woman 20 years younger. The Reagans were
so angry they never spoke to him again. He then married his new babe before he officially got
divorced, so there's that bigamy thing.
I don't know why any Arizonian votes for this crazed man, especially since he's a big
advocate for open borders. At a union meeting, he told workers illegals are needed because
Americans are too lazy to work farm fields, even for $50 an hour.
McCain has never labored his entire life, always on the government dole now earning ten
times minimum wage worker pay, whose increase he opposes.
McCain grew up wealthy and enjoyed free government health care his entire life, yet
thinks it's nothing commoners deserve. While running for president and attacking the poor a
rare good reporter asked how many houses he owned. He was unsure, but thought maybe
seven.
McCain is walking talking proof that sociopaths are fast-tracked for success. There never
was a man, in my opinion, in US politics that was more exploitative, coldly calculating and
utterly ruthless than that bag of shit.
But, Mark said it much better with style, slashing wit and evidence.
Thanks, Mark, for another analysis of the opinion-management being rolled out across the
media.
The stand-out memory I have of the great Ken Kesey novel "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest"
is the description of a "pecking party" inside a battery hen building in which one bird is
injured, a speck of blood appears and the crazed neighbours peck it to death. Unfortunately
they get spattered and their neighbours take up the pecking a bloodbath ensues. That seems
like a decent analogy to the current attempts to close down any alternative to official
narrative promotion.
Thanks, Cortes, and to all my well-wishers. I loved 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', it
was at least as memorable as 'Flowers for Algernon' for me, and I read them both at around
the same point in my life, when I was in my early 20's.
If it's really true that the centre cannot hold, The Empire is going to have an
increasingly hard time cloaking its lies. Of course, the west could simply return to the
values of brotherhood and the common struggle it continues to espouse but never really
seriously practiced. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
"Flowers For Algernon" is such a stunning work it's a real shame that it's not better
known (at least in the UK).
On the news management front, I get the sense that the narrative is slipping away from
control. Over a couple of months I've noticed that the free "Metro" papers have been left
unread in largish amounts on some buses (busy routes) -- when they were being snaffled up
until recently. People can sense that they are being herded, I think, and resent it.
Anyone find any reference to "Russian trolls" in it, apart from this: " It found
many tweets that were posted by the same bots thought to have been used to influence the 2016
election, as well as marketing and malware bots "?
I see: "thought to have been used", writes the "journalist".
And on that supposition the Independent "journalist" rests his case.
It turns out that many anti-vaccine tweets come from accounts whose provenance is
unclear ," said David Broniatowski, an assistant professor in GW's School of Engineering and
Applied Science.
"These might be bots, human users or 'cyborgs' – hacked accounts that are
sometimes taken over by bots. Although it's impossible to know exactly how many tweets were
generated by bots and trolls, our findings suggest that a significant portion of the online
discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden
agendas."
Equivocation central – it's amazing what can pass as a 'study' these days. What is
even more incredible is that we have arrived at a point in our history when the appearance of
debate on a point is suspicious, and inspires 'researchers' to 'study' the problem to see who
is behind it rather than focusing on why the point generated debate in the first place. We
have arrived at a point where it is actually unpatriotic to disagree with the official
narrative.
Many more Americans believe vaccines are safe than the astroturfed 'debate' suggests,
found the study. Google says bullshit. A recent Zogby poll of a claimed representative sample
group found only 32% of respondents said they were 'very confident' vaccines were safe. The
same or a similar question was posed 10 years ago, and the proportion who said they were 'not
too confident has risen 3% since then, while those who said they were 'not at all confident'
in the safety of vaccines went up by 2%. People are not getting more confident, they're
getting less confident. There; that's my study – where's my research grant?
Once again, as soon as the mainstream media finds an argument, it is quick to blame it on
unidentified 'Russian trolls', rather than addressing the problem. The state narrative is the
law. And the pace is quickening.
This is how you can tell Americans (and media as a whole, for that matter) truly are
stupid.
Okay, first of all: The whole anti-vaccine hysteria is as American as apple pie, going way
back to at least 1998 and to a research paper in the medical journal The Lancet linking MMR
vaccines to autism spectrum disorders (a paper that was lated found to be severely lacking in
scientific rigor) and certain people raising concern about the mercury content in the
thiomersal vaccines. This sparked numerous anti-vaccination campaigns all over the US,
ranging from concerned but ignorant parent groups all the way to the Alex Jones type of
conspiracy guzzlers, and many of these are alive and kicking to this day.
The vaccine controversy rose to new prominence the widely publicized Jenny McCarthy crap
in 2007-2008 and was further fueled by the (legitimate, as it happens) swine flu
vaccine-linked narcolepsy cases a few years later.
This stuff trends from time to time, and apparently this clickbait farm (that is what it
actually is) caught a whiff of it and thus posted a grand total of 253 (!) short-worded
tweets with a vaccination hashtag, out of which according to these so-called researchers 43%
were "pro-vaccination", 38% "anti-vaccination" and the remainder were neutral.
And they're "sewing division", "threatening our health" and so on Good god, I'm not sure
how much more of this I can take to be honest.
This reminds me of a piece of news here in Sweden the other day, namely that the Swedish
Social Democrats got their website DDoS-ed twice. I mean, that's to be expected (the
elections are coming up shortly, some of these "establishment" parties are not held in high
regard in certain demographics and regularly get their election posters torn down or
vandalized and so on, DDoS attacks are cheap to order online and so on and so forth. Fine.
The "IT expert" at the Social Democratic Party said they'd tracked down the IPs from which
the attack came, and these were random IPs in Japan, in South Africa, in Spain, in Korea
and in Russia.
Well, duh , it's a distributed denial-of-service attack, using botnets
consisting of infected personal computers all over the world, and it's all available for hire
on various onion/darknet market websites for a couple of bucks an hour or so. But of course,
the media just disregarded the blatantly obvious and instead decided to illustrate the news
with a great Russian flag and some hooded hacker-type fellow superimposed.
It just blows my mind. The info war is real, no doubt about it
Most Americans simply don't understand how science works. In school they are not taught
the scientific method, how experiments are conducted, how statistical sampling works, or even
anything about statistics period.
Without such knowledge they are left to the human "default" state of mind, which is magical
thinking coupled with basic empiricism. As in "My best friend's daughter got the polio
vaccine and then was diagnosed with autism " etc etc.
The ignorance is colossal. I have a friend at work who is actually quite brilliant in her
own way, but I discovered, in a conversation, that she doesn't understand how computers work,
or how language works. She bought some product and is now convinced that computers
"understand human speech". I almost despaired in trying to explain to her that computers are
only machines and cannot understand human language.
Apparently she was suckered by some of these "AI" products like Siri, Cortana, etc. People
don't learn in school how the "natural language" computer processing works. I don't claim to
understand these algorithms myself, as this is a very specialized field of Computer Science,
and I never really studied it that much. The only bit that I know, is that "Natural Language"
algorithms are based on massive database searches coupled with statistical probabilities in
the formation of phrases.
Apparently the Computer Science developments in this field were held back for about 10 years
due to reliance on Chomsky's theories (of Transformational Grammar), which turned out to be
false and fruitless. As people should have known from the start, if only they had read their
Alan Turing in school.
Once the wrong-headed Chomskyite approach was abandoned and a more empirical methodology
was introduced, then progress started to be made more quickly in the arenas of computer
translation, voice recognition, and "natural language" algorithms.
But the main point here is that computers are just machines and cannot actually speak or
understand human languages. And yet Americans apparently think that they can. All part of the
"magical thinking" mode which is encouraged by The Powers That Be.
I was recently told to turn off my mobile/cellphone because of storms and told that more
than one person had been hit by lightning not so far away. I asked where it was. A kid
outside in a field. I was indoors. I didn't turn it off. I do though unplug stuff if it's
going to be a biggie.
"Apparently the Computer Science developments in this field were held back for about 10
years due to reliance on Chomsky's theories (of Transformational Grammar), which turned out
to be false and fruitless. As people should have known from the start, if only they had read
their Alan Turing in school."
Ummm Followed by a thorough familiarization Searle's work
Thanks for the post, it is an interesting article. However, I believe that it
misrepresents the fundamental point of Turing's work in his development of the Turing
Machine. Turing's legacy is actually (I believe) the opposite of what the layperson thinks it
is, since Turing had proved mathematically that "computer" languages are not the same as
"natural" languages and cannot be mapped out nor parsed. Turing's proofs basically dismiss
(in advance) all of Chomsky's research in the field of so-called transformational
grammar.
I would also point out that Roger Schank was a con-man who received unwarranted grant
money based on his fictitious research into so-called "Artificial Intelligence".
I put Chomsky in a different category: His work was well-meaning but incorrect. His
theories went against Turing's proofs and led researchers down a blind alley. Which resulted
in the loss of approximately one decade of what could have been fruitful empirical work. But
is catching up now. I notice, for starters, that google translation is getting better than it
used to be. But these products like "Siri" and "Alexa" are simply toys, they are like the
dancing dolls of the wizard Coppelius.
You can also tell the writer is a son of of the uneducated and doltish media himself (I
think it was a man, I don't have time now to go back and look); it's 'sowing division', as if
division were seeds, rather than 'sewing', as if it were thread.
"... You fail to consider that the type of food eaten affects caloric demand, both short term (fiber reduces blood sugar) and long term (gut microbes, metabolism). ..."
"... The second law of thermodynamics says that variation of efficiency for different metabolic pathways is to be expected. Thus, ironically the dictum that a "calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics, as a matter of principle. ..."
"... the root cause seems to be the damage done by rapid intraday insulin cycling, driven by excess consumption of carbohydrate. ..."
"... Besides: body weight is relatively unimportant. Body composition is much more important, but it's also not a very good measure of cardiovascular fitness. ..."
"... So, absolutely no surprise that this piece of 'research' was performed in a Department of Psychology – the natural stamping ground of the innumerate charlatan. (It's fun to watch the psycho-charlatans starting to re-brand themselves as 'neuroscientists' grifters always need to know which way the wind is blowing and reposition themselves to extend the grift). ..."
"... Put broadly, it seems that in general, higher intelligence endows the bearer with a greater capacity for introspection, which in turn will help drive a general tendency to moderation. (Oddly, although being objectively the smartest of my social group, I am not introspective in the least – and moderation can go fuck itself). ..."
"... There is also the factor that the body reacts to stimuli in complex ways. Merely eating less signals times of famine, and ensures a stored fat gain after normal eating resumes. Paradoxically, eating slightly more while exercising (like walking) where the total mass of the body must be carried signals reduction in total mass while maintaining muscle and bone tissue. That adequate food is available (slightly increased caloric intake) enable weight loss. ..."
"... "But fat people eat too much food." They eat too much of the wrong kinds of foods. ..."
"... As for intelligence and health, unfortunately our society is so caste laden with upper castes regardless of intelligence having access to better incomes and therefore better care I would be hard pressed to buy that healthy eating is hardwired in people with higher IQ's. Maybe. ..."
"... Regardless of intellect, cultural values and norms determine behavior and behavior determines health outcomes and mortality rates. ..."
"... Or it might be that intelligent folks don't go to the doctor for a mere cold. And it might also be that intelligent have healthier eating habits because they can afford to buy healthier food. Calory for calory, some foods happen to be healthier, and also more expensive than others. a calory is just a quantity of energy. ..."
What a condescending attitude toward the science of the relationship between food,
appetite and health – sneering at any criticism of your simplistic view of the
subject.
"Don't smoke": certainly don't smoke cigarettes. Whether occasionally puffing
contemplatively on a pipe does any measurable harm I don't know. Just in case it does I gave
up decades ago. If it does no harm then those puritanical swine in the medical trades have
denied me a good deal of pleasure.
"Don't get fat": but be careful to understand what's too fat, what too thin. If
correlation is worth anything – never certain – then if you want a long life be
"overweight". Don't, please don't, flirt with being "underweight". Some evidence is displayed
in fig4:
That was for a control group. For a bunch of invalids, specifically people who have had a
stroke, look at fig 5. As the good Dr Grimes remarks "The death rate at 10 years for normal
weight individuals is standardised as 1.0. We see a survival advantage in those with low
overweight, high overweight, and low obesity – that is with people with BMI between 25
and 32.5. With "low obesity" there is a death risk reduction of almost 40%.
Repeat, stroke-people with "low obesity" outlive those who are "normal" by a whopping
margin. You might almost think that the sawbones and quacks ought to redefine "normal",
"overweight" and "obese" in light of such figures. Sorry, the surgeons and physicians.
"and don't read too many health warnings": I never disagree with tautologies.
Not to start that debate again but my experience agrees with Dr. Thompson wrt calories.
Whether my goal is to lose weight or stabilize my weight I can eat a LITTLE BIT more (calorie
wise) each day if I eat more protein and less carbs but it really doesn't make much
difference.
I have meticulously counted my calories while trying various "macros" and it's basically
how many you eat. It may be easier to stay within a particular calorie limit depending on
what you I eat but that's beside the point.
Failing to do so means any fat loss will come back fast, such as what happens with every
Biggest Loser contestant.
According to the authors of the review study mentioned above, fasting may be more useful
than regular calorie restriction for many overweight patients because of greater loss of
body fat, and better preservation of muscle (4) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27708846
.
Another study found that 25% of weight lost was muscle mass in normal calorie
restriction diets, compared to just 10% lost in intermittent calorie restriction diets (8)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21410865
.
(caloric excess) / (3,500 kcal/lb) = daily gain or loss.
You fail to consider that the type of food eaten affects caloric demand, both short
term (fiber reduces blood sugar) and long term (gut microbes, metabolism).
"You fail to consider that the type of food eaten affects caloric demand, both short term
(fiber reduces blood sugar) and long term (gut microbes, metabolism)."
He's under the delusion that a calorie is a calorie. It's clearly false:
The second law of thermodynamics says that variation of efficiency for different
metabolic pathways is to be expected. Thus, ironically the dictum that a "calorie is a
calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics, as a matter of principle.
Stating that a "a calorie is a calorie" is fallacious. Humans are not bomb calirometers. A
whole slew of variables affects weight gain/loss, reducing it to calories only doesn't make
sense.
Intelligent people lead healthier lives, and that is not just because they intelligently
make healthy decisions, but also, it would appear, because they are inherently healthier.
Spooky.
As you point out, we're sneaking up (slowly) on genuine root causes of Western lifestyle
disease and 'metabolic' syndrome (better referred to as insulin resistance syndrome) –
the root cause seems to be the damage done by rapid intraday insulin cycling, driven by
excess consumption of carbohydrate. Give it a generation, and that will be the dominant
paradigm.
There are two big red flags in this piece that make it pretty clear that the pudding is
over-egged.
The first red flag is the implicit acceptance of CICO – which is
GIGO on a par with other dead tropes like
dietary-cholesterol-causes-serum-cholesterol, dietary-fat-causes-CVD, and 'healthy whole
grains'.
CICO is true (almost) by construction, so long as all excess calories are stored as tissue
of the same density, which is a stretch. But the 'CO' side of things is not meaningfully
within the scope of things that individuals can control, because most of the 'CO' happens as
a result of basal metabolism and the composition of the 'CI' affects that.
Why didn't the writer go full-retard, and declare that the key paradigm is
WIWO ( weight -in/ weight -out)? That must be true
irrespective of metabolism. (Answer: it would be meaningless, even though it would be more
useful than CICO but WO is also not under anybody's conscious control).
Besides: body weight is relatively unimportant. Body composition is much more
important, but it's also not a very good measure of cardiovascular fitness.
In my 20s I weighed upwards of 250lb, but was lean as a motherfucker (6-pack with
vascularity lean). Nowadays I weigh ~225-230 depending on whether I've had a shit, but my
abs have a good 2″ of fat covering them.
And yet I'm also objectively fitter: my VO2Max is 15% higher at 54 than it was in
my 20s.
Long story even longer: nutrition, metabolism, body comp and fitness/longevity are thinks
that require bespoke attention; measures of general tendency are worse than
meaningless, and most 'research' in the field is worse than muscle-mag bro
science.
Anyway enough about that. Back to red flags.
The second red flag is that the author presents obviously-poor data-munging as if
it's science.
Take a look at the list of variables for which correlations were obtained: the entire
study is one of those lamentable exercises in promotion-disguised-as-research: the
reduced-form, grant-seeking paradigm that was eliminated from Economics in the 1970s after
the Lucas Critique –
test everything against everything else, and pick some interesting things that
correlate with IQ with our preferred sign, and pretend that we did science
Most of those correlations – even the 'highly significant' ones – are
absolutely meaningless when expressed as contributions to variance ; they are
certainly not of any predictive use (because most people's lives are mostly noise).
Worse still, correlation coefficients are meaningless if the Gauss-Markov conditions do
not hold (because ρ – Pearson's correlation – is explicitly the
correlation derived from an OLS estimation; OLS is not efficient or unbiased if the model is
not linear).
What is the basis for assuming that the true relationship between any of those
factors and IQ is linear? (Hint: if it's not, the G-M conditions do not hold).
So, absolutely no surprise that this piece of 'research' was performed in a Department
of Psychology – the natural stamping ground of the innumerate charlatan. (It's
fun to watch the psycho-charlatans starting to re-brand themselves as 'neuroscientists'
grifters always need to know which way the wind is blowing and reposition themselves to
extend the grift).
.
.
It's exceedingly tedious when badly-performed 'research' of this kind gets any publicity: it
reflects poorly on the numeracy of those doing the publicising, for a start.
But it's doubly -tedious when the conclusions are things that I broadly agree with:
it tars my anecdotally-supported personal hypotheses when they are associated with the sort
of pseudo-scientific bunk that this article presents as 'research'.
My own view is based on a few hundred anecdotes (smart people I know) contrasted against
the sea of Betas-and-below readily observable in any shopping mall.
Put broadly, it seems that in general, higher intelligence endows the bearer with a
greater capacity for introspection, which in turn will help drive a general tendency to
moderation. (Oddly, although being objectively the smartest of my social group, I am not
introspective in the least – and moderation can go fuck itself).
Smarter people do tend to be less fat than the Deltas and Epsilons, but that's not saying
much. They smoke much less (although that's a recent thing – a behavioural change that
started in the mid-80s) – and that single difference is enough to be the driver for
almost all non-obesity related health outcomes.
Stating that a "a calorie is a calorie" is fallacious. Humans are not bomb calorimeters.
A whole slew of variables affects weight gain/loss, reducing it to calories only doesn't
make sense.
There is also the factor that the body reacts to stimuli in complex ways. Merely
eating less signals times of famine, and ensures a stored fat gain after normal eating
resumes. Paradoxically, eating slightly more while exercising (like walking) where the total
mass of the body must be carried signals reduction in total mass while maintaining muscle and
bone tissue. That adequate food is available (slightly increased caloric intake) enable
weight loss.
I feel bad for distracting discussion of the article but to respond to RaceRealist88
I can only go by my experience tracking my weight, approximate body composition and
food/macro/calorie intake. If it makes a difference I do some basic weight training (not a
250 lb ripped bodybuilder like 0.1% of the population).
With high carbs, my weight and body composition stabilize at about 2250 KCAL per day
(which is about what the Cunningham formula predicts for my age and LBM). If I eat low carb,
it's a bit higher. Maybe 2400-2500 KCAL per day (it's hard to track macros and calories with
extreme precision). So there's not a big difference. Is a calorie a calorie? Not exactly but
close enough.
If I had to guess what's going on, based on what I've read a protein calorie counts for
3/gram when your body burns it (not 4/gram like in a lab) and foods with a higher insulin
load encourage growth (potentially muscle and fat). Ok, there's some nuance.
But fat people eat too much food.
"But fat people eat too much food." They eat too much of the wrong kinds of
foods.
I think the evidence that our sugar intake is just too high and that processed foods have
had a long term negative impact on masses of people, , not most perhaps not even all, but the
case to curb eating sugars/carbs of a certain type in large doses and processed foods is
clear, in my view.
As for intelligence and health, unfortunately our society is so caste laden with upper
castes regardless of intelligence having access to better incomes and therefore better care I
would be hard pressed to buy that healthy eating is hardwired in people with higher IQ's.
Maybe.
But the analysis here is pretty darn near a circular ring around the rosey. The
uncontrolled biases effecting results are pretty open wound.
What constitutes a healthy body and lifestyle might not reflect what is noted in the BMI,
even we could agree on the standard for healthy, fat, skinny etc.
Hogwash. Testosterone and its production by body is the key. Physical activity at young
age result in increasing testosterone production through lifetime.
The associations between higher intelligence test scores from early life and later good
health, fewer illnesses, and longer life are recent discoveries.
While the above statement isn't wrong, it is misleading and irrelevant. Regardless of
intellect, cultural values and norms determine behavior and behavior determines health
outcomes and mortality rates.
I don't deal with IQ, but instead look at academic performance and income. In the US,
Hispanics perform significantly worse than whites and slightly better, but nearly the same as
blacks. Throughout the US, Hispanics often live in the same neighborhoods as blacks and
attend the same schools. Yet Hispanics do not experience the same health disparities that
blacks do. Instead we have the "Hispanic paradox" where Hispanics often have the same or
sometimes better health outcomes than whites. When looking at Hispanic subgroups, Puerto
Ricans have outcomes significantly worse than whites, although better than blacks.
Hispanics have a much higher incidence of HIV/AIDS than whites, but if you look at an
HIV/AIDS map of the US, you will see that Hispanics in the western half of the US (mostly
Mexican-Americans) have the same incidence of the disease as whites. It is only along the
East Coast of the US that significant disparities in HIV/AIDS rates are seen between the two
ethnic groups. Puerto Ricans and Dominicans tend to live on the East Coast and not only do
they have varying degrees of African ancestry but they also behave more like black
Americans.
Diabetes is rampant among Native American Indians in the US, Pacific Islanders on
Polynesian islands, and Australian Aborigines. Their ancestors from 150 years ago didn't have
higher IQs, but avoided diabetes by eating differently.
This remains to be proved, but is worth testing.
The Research Industrial Complex doesn't want to prove or cure anything because funding
will dry up.
Is a calorie a calorie? Not exactly but close enough.
If I had to guess what's going on, based on what I've read a protein calorie counts for
3/gram when your body burns it (not 4/gram like in a lab) and foods with a higher insulin
load encourage growth (potentially muscle and fat). Ok, there's some nuance.
But fat people eat too much food.
Yep, but you aren't gonna sell any potions, powders, courses, or books with thinking like
that.
"Higher intelligence [....] lower general medical practitioner costs, lower hospital
costs, and less use of medical services"
Or it might be that intelligent folks don't go to the doctor for a mere cold. And it
might also be that intelligent have healthier eating habits because they can afford to buy
healthier food. Calory for calory, some foods happen to be healthier, and also more expensive
than others. a calory is just a quantity of energy.
I wanted to rephrase my second sentence but my attention was diverted and my time to
correct expired.
It might be that people who score higher on "intelligence" tests have healthier eating habits
because they usually can afford to buy healthier foods. Calory for calory, some foods happen
to be healthier, and also more expensive than others. A calory is just a unit of energy.
"My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising
from the fact that key figures in British and American intelligence have, over
a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out
of their depth. The unintended consequences of these have meant that people
like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort
to desperate measures to cover their backsides."
Brennan exposed "intelligence community" as a forth branch of government.
The branch more powerful that then the other three combined.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the
intelligence community and in politics worried that a wildcard Trump presidency,
unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable
practices. Disrupt long-established money channels. Reveal secret machinations
that could arguably land some people in prison.
The main suspicion is that Steele's involvement may
have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal
its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could
also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions
had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with
Steele.
Notable quotes:
"... Los Angeles Times ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... It's a misnomer to term these people representatives of a hidden "deep state." In recent years, they have been amply visible on television and newspaper op-ed pages. Instead, they see and present themselves as members of a fully empowered and essential fourth branch of government. ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... To be fair, Brennan may only be a symptom of this profound American crisis, some say the worst since the Civil War. ..."
Brennan's allegation was unprecedented. No such high-level intelligence official
had ever before accused a sitting president of treason, still more in collusion
with the Kremlin. (Impeachment discussions of Presidents Nixon and Clinton,
to take recent examples, did not include allegations involving Russia.)
Brennan clarified his charge : "Treasonous, which is to betray one's trust
and to aid and abet the enemy." Coming from Brennan, a man presumed to be in
possession of related dark secrets,
as he strongly hinted , the charge was fraught with alarming implications.
Brennan made clear he hoped for Trump's impeachment, but in another time, and
in many other countries, his charge would suggest that Trump should be removed
from the presidency urgently by any means, even a coup. No one, it seems, has
even noted this extraordinary implication with its tacit threat to American
democracy. (Perhaps because the disloyalty allegation against Trump has been
customary ever since mid-2016, even before he became president, when an array
of influential publications and writers -- among them a former acting CIA director
-- began branding him Putin's "puppet," "agent," "client," and "Manchurian candidate."
The
Los Angeles Times even saw fit to print an article suggesting that
the military might have to remove Trump if he were to be elected, thereby having
the very dubious distinction of predating Brennan.)
Why did Brennan, a calculating man, risk leveling such a charge, which might
reasonably be characterized as sedition? The most plausible explanation is that
he sought to deflect growing attention to his role as the "Godfather" of the
entire Russiagate narrative, as Cohen argued back in February. If so, we need
to know Brennan's unvarnished views on Russia.
They are set out with astonishing (perhaps unknowing) candor in
a New York Times op-ed of August 17. They are those of Joseph McCarthy
and J. Edgar Hoover in their prime. Western "politicians, political parties,
media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly
and unwittingly, or even bought outright, by Russian operatives not only to
collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation.
I was well aware of Russia's ability to work surreptitiously within the United
States, cultivating relationships with individuals who wield actual or potential
power. These Russian agents are well trained in the art of deception. They troll
political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled
individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters.
Too often, those puppets are found." All this, Brennan assures readers, is based
on his "deep insight." All the rest of us, it seems, are constantly susceptible
to "Russian puppet masters" under our beds, at work, on our computers. Clearly,
there must be no "cooperation" with the Kremlin's grand "Puppet Master," as
Trump said he wanted early on. (People who wonder what and when Obama knew about
the unfolding Russiagate saga need to ask why he would keep such a person so
close for so long.)
And yet, scores of former intelligence and military officials rallied around
this unvarnished John Brennan, even though, they said, they did not entirely
share his opinions. This too is revealing. They did so, it seems clear enough,
out of their professional corporate identity, which Brennan represented and
Trump was degrading by challenging the intelligences agencies' (implicitly including
his own) Russiagate allegations against him. It's a misnomer to term these people
representatives of a hidden "deep state." In recent years, they have been amply
visible on television and newspaper op-ed pages. Instead, they see and present
themselves as members of a fully empowered and essential fourth branch of government.
This too has gone largely undiscussed while nightingales of the fourth branch
-- such as
David Ignatius and
Joe Scarborough in the pages of the The Washington Post -- have
been in full voice.
The result is, of course -- and no less ominous -- to criminalize any advocacy
of "cooperating with Russia," or détente, as Trump sought to do in Helsinki
with Putin. Still more, a full-fledged Russophobic hysteria is sweeping through
the American political-media establishment, from Brennan and -- pending actual
evidence against her -- those who engineered the arrest of Maria Butina (imagine
how this endangers young Americans networking in Russia) to the senators now
preparing new "crippling sanctions" against Moscow and the editors and producers
at the Times , Post , CNN, and MSNBC. (However powerful, how
representative are these elites when surveys indicate that a majority of the
American people still prefer good relations with Moscow?)
As the dangers grow
of actual war with Russia -- again, from Ukraine and the Baltic region to Syria
-- the capacity of US policy-makers, above all the president, are increasingly
diminished. To be fair, Brennan may only be a symptom of this profound American
crisis, some say the worst since the Civil War.
Finally, there was a time when many Democrats, certainly liberal Democrats,
could be counted on to resist this kind of hysteria and, yes, spreading neo-McCarthyism.
(Brennan's defenders accuse Trump of McCarthyism, but Brennan's charge of treason
without presenting any actual evidence was quintessential McCarthy.) After all,
civil liberties, including freedom of speech, are directly involved -- and not
only Brennan's and Trump's. But Democratic members of Congress and pro-Democratic
media outlets are in the forefront of the new anti-Russian hysteria, with only
a few exceptions. Thus a generally liberal historian
tells CNN viewers that "Brennan is an American hero. His tenure at the CIA
was impeccable. We owe him so much." Elsewhere the same historian
assures readers , "There has always been a bipartisan spirit of support
since the CIA was created in the Cold War." In the same vein, two Post
reporters write of the FBI's "
once venerated reputation ."
"... Here, for instance, is what I wrote about our Afghan War in 2008, almost seven years after it began, when the U.S. Air Force took out a bridal party, including the bride herself and at least 26 other women and children en route to an Afghan wedding. And that would be just one of eight U.S. wedding strikes I toted up by the end of 2013 in three countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, that killed almost 300 potential revelers. "We have become a nation of wedding crashers," I wrote, "the uninvited guests who arrived under false pretenses, tore up the place, offered nary an apology, and refused to go home." ..."
"... Thought of another way, the U.S. military is now heading into record territory in Afghanistan. In the mid-1970s, the rare American who had heard of that country knew it only as a stop on the hippie trail . If you had then told anyone here that, by 2018, the U.S. would have been at war there for 27 years ( 1979-1989 and 2001-2018), he or she would have laughed in your face. And yet here we are, approaching the mark for one of Europe's longest, most brutal struggles, the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century. Imagine that. ..."
"... raison d'ętre ..."
"... Afganistan is the graveyard of poor empires. It's the playground of the rich American empire, a place to test weapons, test men, gain battle experience, get promotions, and generally keep the military-industrial complex in top health. If it didn't exist, we'd have to invent it. ..."
"... As shown in this article there is a very interesting connection between growing wealth inequality in the United States and American wars: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/07/how-american-wars-lead-to-increased.html ..."
"... it's not a war; it's an occupation. More cops get killed/wounded in USA proper then military personnel in that "war". 2017, 46 U.S. police officers were killed by felons in the line of duty; 17 military personnel in Afghanistan. ..."
"... Yes , the US military industrial complex is rich and in top health as you say , but what I see is that the health of the US as a whole , physical and mental , is going down in the last 50 years . Maybe the metastasis of the " healthy " military cancer are killing the American host . ..."
Fair warning. Stop reading right now if you want, because I'm going to repeat
myself. What choice do I have, since my subject is the Afghan War (America's
second Afghan War, no less)? I
began writing about that war in October 2001, almost 17 years ago, just
after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. That was how I inadvertently launched
the unnamed listserv that would, a year later, become TomDispatch .
Given the website's continuing focus on America's forever wars (a phrase I first
used in
2010 ), what choice have I had but to write about Afghanistan ever since?
So think of this as the war piece to end all war pieces. And let the repetition
begin!
Here, for instance, is what I
wrote about our Afghan War in 2008, almost seven years after it began, when
the U.S. Air Force took out a bridal party, including the bride herself and
at least 26 other women and children en route to an Afghan wedding. And that
would be just one of eight U.S. wedding strikes I
toted up by the end of 2013 in three countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen,
that killed almost 300 potential revelers. "We have become a nation of wedding
crashers," I wrote, "the uninvited guests who arrived under false pretenses,
tore up the place, offered nary an apology, and refused to go home."
Here's what I
wrote about Afghanistan in 2009, while considering the metrics of "a war
gone to hell": "While Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind
of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or other
key places of need, until recently just about no one in the mainstream raised
a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years (not to say much of the last
three decades), we've been pouring billions of dollars, American military know-how,
and American lives into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant
part, of our own creation."
Here's what I
wrote in 2010, thinking about how "forever war" had entered the bloodstream
of the twenty-first-century U.S. military (in a passage in which you'll notice
a name that became more familiar in the Trump era): "And let's not leave out
the Army's incessant planning for the distant future embodied in a recently
published report, 'Operating Concept, 2016-2028,' overseen by Brigadier General
H.R. McMaster, a senior adviser to Gen. David Petraeus. It opts to ditch 'Buck
Rogers' visions of futuristic war, and instead to imagine counterinsurgency
operations, grimly referred to as 'wars of exhaustion,' in one, two, many Afghanistans
to the distant horizon."
Here's what I
wrote in 2012, when Afghanistan had superseded Vietnam as the longest war
in American history: "Washington has gotten itself into a situation on the Eurasian
mainland so vexing and perplexing that Vietnam has finally been left in the
dust. In fact, if you hadn't noticed -- and weirdly enough no one has -- that
former war finally seems to have all but vanished."
Here's what I
wrote in 2015, thinking about the American taxpayer dollars that had, in
the preceding years, gone into Afghan "roads to nowhere, ghost soldiers, and
a $43 million gas station" built in the middle of nowhere, rather than into
this country: "Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender,
while the domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109 billion by 2014, the
American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today's dollars,
larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western Europe
back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a shambles."
And here's what I
wrote last year thinking about the nature of our never-ending war there:
"Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan
the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can
get out in time. If not, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians,
who exactly will ride to our rescue? Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop
hanging out in graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections."
And that's just to dip a toe into my writings on America's all-time most
never-ending war.
What Happened After History Ended
... ... ...
In reality, when it comes to America's
spreading wars , especially the one in Afghanistan, history didn't end at
all. It just stumbled onto some graveyard version of a Möbius strip. In contrast
to the past empires that found they ultimately couldn't defeat Afghanistan's
insurgent tribal warriors, the U.S. has -- as Bush administration officials
suspected at the time -- proven unique. Just not in the way they imagined.
Their dreams couldn't have been more ambitious. As they launched the invasion
of Afghanistan, they were already looking past the triumph to come to Saddam
Hussein's Iraq and the glories that would follow once his regime had been "decapitated,"
once U.S. forces, the most technologically advanced ever, were
stationed for an eternity in the heart of the oil heartlands of the Greater
Middle East. Not that anyone remembers anymore, but Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and the rest of that crew of geopolitical dreamers
wanted it all.
What they got was no less unique in history: a great power at the seeming
height of its strength and glory, with destructive capabilities beyond imagining
and a military unmatched on the planet, unable to score a single decisive victory
across an increasingly large swath of the planet or impose its will, however
brutally, on seemingly far weaker, less well-armed opponents. They could not
conquer, subdue, control, pacify, or win the hearts and minds or anything else
of enemies who often fought their
trillion-dollar foe using weaponry valued at the
price
of a pizza . Talk about bleeding wounds!
A War of Abysmal Repetition
Thought of another way, the U.S. military is now heading into record
territory in Afghanistan. In the mid-1970s, the rare American who had heard
of that country knew it only as a stop on the
hippie trail . If you had then told anyone here that, by 2018, the U.S.
would have been at war there for 27 years (
1979-1989 and 2001-2018), he or she would have laughed in your face. And
yet here we are, approaching the mark for one of Europe's longest, most brutal
struggles, the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century. Imagine that.
... ... ...
Almost 17 years and, coincidentally enough,
17 U.S. commanders later, think of it as a war of abysmal repetition. Just
about everything in the U.S. manual of military tactics has evidently been tried
(including dropping "the mother of all bombs," the
largest non-nuclear munition in that military's arsenal), often time and
again, and nothing has even faintly done the trick -- to which the Pentagon's
response is invariably a version of the classic
misquoted
movie line, "Play it again, Sam."
And yet, amid all that repetition,
people are
still dying ; Afghans and others are being
uprooted and
displaced across Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and deep into Africa;
wars and terror outfits are spreading. And here's a simple enough fact that's
worth repeating: the endless, painfully ignored failure of the U.S. military
(and civilian) effort in Afghanistan is where it all began and where it seems
never to end.
A Victory for Whom?
Every now and then, there's the odd bit of news that reminds you we don't
have to be in a world of repetition. Every now and then, you see something and
wonder whether it might not represent a new development, one that possibly could
lead out of (or far deeper into) the graveyard of empires.
As a start, though it's been easy to forget in these years, other countries
are affected by the ongoing disaster of a war in Afghanistan. Think, for instance,
of Pakistan (with a newly elected, somewhat
Trumpian president who has been a
critic of America's Afghan War and of U.S. drone strikes in his country),
Iran, China, and Russia. So here's something I can't remember seeing in the
news before: the military intelligence chiefs of those four countries all
met recently in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, officially to discuss
the growth of Islamic State-branded insurgents in Afghanistan. But who knows
what was really being discussed? And the same applies to the
visit of Iran's armed forces chief of staff to Pakistan in July and the
return visit of that country's chief of staff to Iran in early August. I
can't tell you what's going on, only that these are not the typically repetitive
stories of the last 17 years.
And hard as it might be to believe, even when it comes to U.S. policy, there's
been the odd headline that might pass for new. Take the recent private, direct
talks with the Taliban in Qatar's capital, Doha,
initiated by the Trump administration and seemingly ongoing. They might
-- or
might not -- represent
something new , as might President Trump himself, who, as far as anyone
can tell, doesn't think that Afghanistan is "
the right war ." He has, from time to time, even indicated that he might
be in favor of ending the American role, of "
getting the hell out of there," as he reportedly told Senator Rand Paul,
and that's unique in itself (though he and his advisers seem to be raring to
go when it comes to what could be the next Afghanistan:
Iran ).
But should the man who would never want to be known as the president who
lost the longest war in American history try to follow through on a withdrawal
plan, he's likely to have a few problems on his hands. Above all, the Pentagon
and the country's field commanders seem to be hooked on America's "
infinite " wars. They exhibit not the slightest urge to stop them. The Afghan
War and the others that have flowed from it represent both their raison
d'ętre and their meal ticket. They represent the only thing the U.S. military
knows how to do in this century. And one thing is guaranteed: if they don't
agree with the president on a withdrawal strategy, they have the power and ability
to make a man who would do anything to avoid marring his own image as a winnner
look worse than you could possibly imagine. Despite that military's supposedly
apolitical role in this country's affairs, its leaders are uniquely capable
of blocking any attempt to end the Afghan War.
And with that in mind, almost 17 years later, don't think that victory is
out of the question either. Every day that the U.S. military stays in Afghanistan
is indeed a victory for well, not George W. Bush, or Barack Obama, and certainly
not Donald Trump, but the now long-dead Osama bin Laden. The calculation couldn't
be simpler. Thanks to his "
precision" weaponry -- those 19 suicidal hijackers in commercial jets --
the nearly 17 years of wars he's sparked across much of the Muslim world cost
a man from one of Saudi Arabia's
wealthiest families a mere
$400,000 to $500,000 . They've cost American taxpayers, minimally,
$5.6 trillion dollars with no end in sight. And every day the Afghan War
and the others that have followed from it continue is but another triumphant
day for him and his followers.
A sad footnote to this history of extreme repetition: I wish this essay,
as its title suggests, were indeed the war piece to end all war pieces. Unfortunately,
it's a reasonable bet that, in August 2019, or August 2020, not to speak of
August 2021, I'll be repeating all of this yet again.
Afganistan is the graveyard of poor empires. It's the playground
of the rich American empire, a place to test weapons, test men, gain
battle experience, get promotions, and generally keep the military-industrial
complex in top health. If it didn't exist, we'd have to invent it.
All very human. If America wasn't doing it, somebody else would.
Its all about pipelines, rare-earth elements and drug money for CIA black
ops.
15 years of American efforts to suppress opium growing and the heroin
trade in that country (at historic lows, by the way, when the U.S. invaded
in 2001).
And many record harvests after the US invasion.
' In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can
bet it was planned that way ' Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Unless Washington shifts from a program of funding wars by deficit financing
to funding wars through direct taxation, wars being fought by the United
States will continue to contribute to America's growing income inequality.
About the only thing I take away from this insufferably droll, repetitive
piece on America at war forever, is how powerless the both the writer and
the reader are. All we can do is read these depressing articles which remind
us of a war we can do absolutely nothing about. Very shitty and depressing,
just like USA!
Pretty much. Besides, it's not a war; it's an occupation. More cops
get killed/wounded in USA proper then military personnel in that "war".
2017, 46 U.S. police officers were killed by felons in the line of duty;
17 military personnel in Afghanistan.
The article's point/issue is simply overblown. That's why people don't
pay attention to it.
BS; it's an alien invasion = Nuremberg-class war crime.
More cops get killed/wounded in USA proper
This looks very much like the "tu quoque" or the appeal to hypocrisy
fallacy plus 'oranges vs. apples.' What the good US-burghers do in their
own country is entirely their business, and IF it looks like they act like
antediluvian neanderthal savages [a direct result of their risible 'education'
+ night & day TV, perhaps] THEN tough luck for the cops. It probably doesn't
help that the US-cops are just as much free with the lead as their oppressed
subjects. And don't think that the same sort of savagery won't impact someone
near you; a quick glance into abc.net.au/news/justin reveals horrendous
'social situations,' like bodies in barrels, say, or aggravated home invasions,
etc., also caused by defective education plus importing 'cheap' labour.
That's why people don't pay attention to it
More BS; the sheeple ignore US/Z aggression everywhere it occurs because
the corrupt&venal MSM+PFBCs [= publicly financed broadcasters, like the
AusBC] sell the powerless population pups = the sheeple get actively, deliberately
brainwashed [cf. Lügenpresse ]. Apologists for [here terrorist] criminals
make themselves accessories = assign themselves guilt and should be punished
after being tried & found so guilty.
" The U.S. has spent 25 trillion since the Vietnam War, what do they
have to show for it? " Jack Ma Ali Baba
" The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept the majority of people
from ever questioning the inequity of a private for profit fraudulent banking
system where most people drudge along, paying heavey taxes for which they
get nothing in return." Gore Vidal
(War) "It's something we do all the time because we're good at it. And
we're good at it because we're used to it. And we're used to it because
we do it all the time." Sergeant Michael Dunne played by Paul Gross in Passchendaele
the Movie
I'm not sure, but I don't think we are good at it anymore. But it appears
to me that the Russians, Iranians, Syrians and Houthi's are and that really
scares us. But it does make a lot of money for some people, careers for
others and the MSM loves it for the ratings and avoiding telling the truth.
Your opening photo is of two of the dumbest son-of-a-bitches to ever
hold the office of President of The United States. Indicative of the shit
slide this country is on.
"Afghans and others are being uprooted and displaced across Asia,
South Asia, the Middle East, and deep into Africa ."
So the strategy is to depopulate the country of its indigenous peoples
until "we" outnumber them? Never mind the damage these re-settled folks
are doing to Western Europe, not to mention other places.
.generally keep the military-industrial complex in top health
Yes , the US military industrial complex is rich and in top health
as you say , but what I see is that the health of the US as a whole , physical
and mental , is going down in the last 50 years . Maybe the metastasis of
the " healthy " military cancer are killing the American host .
The same happened to most of the empires , got drunk on blood and fell
.
"... At bottom, the issue is: Who speaks for America? Is it the mainstream media, the deep state, the permanent government, the city that gave Trump 4 percent of its votes? Or is it that vast slice of Middle America that sent Trump to drain the swamp? ..."
"... For Trump, a truce or a negotiated peace with these people is never going to happen. But this issue of security clearances is a battlefield where the president cannot lose, if he fights wisely. ..."
"... its way past time that Trump start the sacking of the "disloyal" in the security/intelligence agencies. Yes, he may need to move cautiously -- smaller fish first, perhaps ? But, to repeat: "For Trump, a truce or a negotiated peace with these people is never going to happen, just like in the movies." ..."
"... Its interesting to see how shielded the Dem party is from voters. First is their use of Caucuses which uniformly went with Obama over Hillary in 2008 – they represent a quasi church. Then there are the super delegates, the money wranglers and blue bubble potentates that decide who wins a nomination. ..."
"... there are the two factions of the ruling dynasties, Bush and Clinton, that are seeded into the deep state. It should be noted that Bill and Hillary are personally worth $300M and have a family foundation that controls $2.5B in tax free funds. They could only have done that by selling America under the protection of Deep State. Finally, there is Manhattan Media which is the King Maker with its air cover ..."
"... Of those 4 million Americans holding Top Secret clearances, how many also hold dual citizenship? ..."
"... It's not complicated. I was surprised to find that these spy bureaucrats apparently remain cleared after leaving government "service" in one way or another. Obviously, big-boy swamp creatures have their privileges. They should have them no more. If the orange clown can't handle that, I don't see what use he is for anything else, either. ..."
"... If you need to know or have access to something, then you will require clearance according to what you will have access in accordance with your work level. Some times, it is better not to know somethings, believe me. ..."
The White House statement of Sarah Huckabee Sanders on John Brennan's loss of his clearances
was spot on:
"Any access granted to our nation's secrets should be in furtherance of national, not
personal, interests.
"Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access
to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations --
wild outbursts on the Internet and television -- about this administration. Mr. Brennan's lying
and recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary, is wholly inconsistent
with access to the nation's most closely held secrets, and facilitates the very aim of our
adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos."
Trump is said to be evaluating pulling the security clearances of Clapper, ex-FBI Director
James Comey, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe,
former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
This is a good start. Some of these individuals have been fired. Some are under
investigation. Some were involved in the FBI's "get-Trump" cabal to prevent his election and
then to abort his presidency.
... ... ...
At bottom, the issue is: Who speaks for America? Is it the mainstream media, the deep
state, the permanent government, the city that gave Trump 4 percent of its votes? Or is it that
vast slice of Middle America that sent Trump to drain the swamp?
Trump's enemies, and they are legion, want to see Robert Mueller charge him with collusion
with Russia and obstructing the investigation of that collusion. They want to see the
Democratic Party take over the House in November, and the Senate, and move on to impeach and
remove Trump from office. Then they want to put him where Paul Manafort sits today.
For Trump, a truce or a negotiated peace with these people is never going to happen. But
this issue of security clearances is a battlefield where the president cannot lose, if he
fights wisely.
Americans sense that these are privileges that should be extended to those who protect us,
not perks for former officials to exploit and monetize while they attempt to bring down the
commander in chief.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That
Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
A neutral observation on political expediency: its way past time that Trump start the
sacking of the "disloyal" in the security/intelligence agencies. Yes, he may need to move
cautiously -- smaller fish first, perhaps ? But, to repeat:
"For Trump, a truce or a negotiated peace with these people is never going to happen, just
like in the movies."
OK, I admit that I haven't researched it myself. But shouldn't a column on this topic
state briefly what a "security clearance" is and explain what is had enabled Mr. Brennan,
once he left government employ, to access? Is it like a password or something? What is the
practical effect of its revocation?
"With 4 million Americans holding top-secret clearances," this sounds like the Battle of
Molehill Mountain. Thanks to anyone who helps to provide some context.
Given the demographic changes that the United States is experiencing, it is quite likely
that populist political candidates will continue to play on voters' perceptions of
vulnerability.
Its interesting to see how shielded the Dem party is from voters. First is their use of
Caucuses which uniformly went with Obama over Hillary in 2008 – they represent a quasi
church. Then there are the super delegates, the money wranglers and blue bubble potentates
that decide who wins a nomination.
Then there are the two factions of the ruling dynasties,
Bush and Clinton, that are seeded into the deep state. It should be noted that Bill and
Hillary are personally worth $300M and have a family foundation that controls $2.5B in tax
free funds. They could only have done that by selling America under the protection of Deep
State. Finally, there is Manhattan Media which is the King Maker with its air cover. Its like
we are ruled by a House of Lords answerable only to Manhattan Privilege, the owners and
operators of multinational entertainment companies. This is what Trump beat. His presidency
is truly a miracle.
+ all the living expresidents whose kill list is huge and let us not forget the dead
ones
your country have been at war over 200 years since its creation. so how
American dare use
the old muuh "commies killed a gazillion of people" is not easy to understand tbh.
but i guess hubris, propaganda and no knowledge about the world plays a big part
OK, I admit that I haven't researched it myself. But shouldn't a column on this topic
state briefly what a "security clearance" is and explain what is had enabled Mr. Brennan,
once he left government employ, to access? Is it like a password or something? What is the
practical effect of its revocation?
"With 4 million Americans holding top-secret clearances," this sounds like the Battle of
Molehill Mountain.
Thanks to anyone who helps to provide some context.
I held clearances at various times during my engineering career. It's very simple. If you
quit or retire, your clearance evaporates instantly. If, within your job, you are assigned to
work that doesn't require a clearance and your employer doesn't anticipate your needing it
again anytime soon, it is dropped (maintaining a clearance isn't cheap).
And, no, it isn't like a password, not really. If you want classified information, you
need two things to get it: appropriate clearance, and need-to-know. The person or system from
whom or which you're trying to get the information is duty-bound to verify that you have
both. Obviously, for someone who's retired or been fired and is now out jacking the jaw on
CNN, there is no need-to-know, and for an "ordinary" cleared person, there'd be no clearance,
either.
It's not complicated. I was surprised to find that these spy bureaucrats apparently remain
cleared after leaving government "service" in one way or another. Obviously, big-boy swamp
creatures have their privileges. They should have them no more. If the orange clown can't
handle that, I don't see what use he is for anything else, either.
Thank you. I didn't appreciate that the restrictions are upon those already privy to
information as part of their jobs. So, Mr. Brennan can no longer be furnished, under color of
law, non-public information by sympathetic former colleagues.
I did have a clearance when in the Service. Once I left, I kept it for five years I think.
And it is a 'sellable' when you are looking for a job with defense contractors, Basically,
it means that you could have access to the level of clearance that you have, related to what
you work on. Not every one has the same level of clearances. I assume they do have Top Secret
clearances of higher, because they do have access to high level stuff, and or info that is
not available to others. Its called 'need to know'. If you need to know or have access to
something, then you will require clearance according to what you will have access in
accordance with your work level. Some times, it is better not to know somethings, believe
me.
This is partially incorrect view on Trump foreign policy. At the center of
which is careful retreat for enormous expenses of keeping the global neoliberal
empire, plus military Keyseanism to revive the us economy. Which means
tremendous pressure of arm sales as the only way to improve trade balance.
NATO was always an instrument of the USA hegemony,
so Trump behavior is perfectly compatible with this view -- he just downgraded vassals
refusing usual formal respect for them, as they do no represent independent nations.
That's why he addressed them with the contempt. He aptly remarked that German stance
of relying on Russia hydrocarbons and still claiming the it needs the USA defense
is pure hypocrisy. On the other side china, Russia and North Korea can't be considered
the USA vassals.
China is completely dependent on the USA for advanced technologies so their
dreams of becoming the world hegemon is such exist are premature.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington's dominance over the world economy had begun to wither and its once-superior work force to lose its competitive edge. ..."
"... By 2016, in fact, the dislocations brought on by the economic globalization that had gone with American dominion sparked a revolt of the dispossessed in democracies worldwide and in the American heartland, bringing the self-proclaimed "populist" Donald Trump to power. ..."
"... Determined to check his country's decline, he has adopted an aggressive and divisive foreign policy that has roiled long-established alliances in both Asia and Europe and is undoubtedly giving that decline new impetus. ..."
"... On the realpolitik side of that duality, Washington constructed a four-tier apparatus -- military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine -- to advance a global dominion of unprecedented wealth and power. This apparatus rested on hundreds of military bases in Europe and Asia that made the U.S. the first power in history to dominate (if not control) the Eurasian continent. ..."
"... Instead of reigning confidently over international organizations, multilateral alliances, and a globalized economy, Trump evidently sees America standing alone and beleaguered in an increasingly troubled world -- exploited by self-aggrandizing allies, battered by unequal trade terms, threatened by tides of undocumented immigrants, and betrayed by self-serving elites too timid or compromised to defend the nation's interests. ..."
"... Instead of multilateral trade pacts like NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or even the WTO, Trump favors bilateral deals rewritten to the (supposed) advantage of the United States. ..."
"... As he took office, the nation, it claimed, faced "an extraordinarily dangerous world, filled with a wide range of threats." ..."
"... Despite such grandiose claims, each of President Trump's overseas trips has been a mission of destruction in terms of American global power. Each, seemingly by design, disrupted and possibly damaged alliances that have been the foundation for Washington's global power since the 1950s ..."
"... Donald Trump acted more like Argentina's former presidente Juan Perón, minus the medals. ..."
"... Beijing's low-cost infrastructure loans for 70 countries from the Baltic to the Pacific are already funding construction of the Mediterranean's busiest port at Piraeus, Greece, a major nuclear power plant in England, a $6 billion railroad through rugged Laos, and a $46 billion transport corridor across Pakistan. If successful, such infrastructure investments could help knit two dynamic continents, Europe and Asia -- home to a full 70% percent of the world's population and its resources -- into a unified market without peer on the planet. ..."
"... In January, to take advantage of Arctic waters opened by global warming, Beijing began planning for a "Polar Silk Road," a scheme that fits well with ambitious Russian and Scandinavian projects to establish a shorter shipping route around the continent's northern coast to Europe. ..."
"... Financial Times ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... Yet neither China nor any other state seems to have the full imperial complement of attributes to replace the United States as the dominant world leader. ..."
"... In addition to the fundamentals of military and economic power, "every successful empire," observes Cambridge University historian Joya Chatterji, "had to elaborate a universalist and inclusive discourse" to win support from the world's subordinate states and their leaders. ..."
"... China has nothing comparable. Its writing system has some 7,000 characters, not 26 letters. ..."
"... During Japan's occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II, its troops went from being hailed as liberators to facing open revolt across the region after they failed to propagate their similarly particularistic culture. ..."
"... A test of its attitude toward this system of global governance came in 2016 when the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled unanimously that China's claims to sovereignty in the South China Sea "are contrary to the Convention [on the Law of the Sea] and without lawful effect." ..."
...Although they started this century on generally amicable terms, China
and the U.S. have, in recent years, moved toward military competition and open
economic conflict. When China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO)
in 2001, Washington was confident that Beijing would play by the established
rules and become a compliant member of an American-led international community.
There was almost
no awareness of what might happen when a fifth of humanity joined the world
system as an economic equal for the first time in five centuries.
By the time Xi Jinping became China's seventh president, a decade of rapid
economic growth averaging 11% annually and currency reserves surging toward
an unprecedented $4 trillion had created the economic potential for a rapid,
radical shift in the global balance of power. After just a few months in office,
Xi began tapping those vast reserves to launch a bold geopolitical gambit, a
genuine challenge to U.S. dominion over Eurasia and the world beyond. Aglow
in its status as the world's sole superpower after "winning" the Cold War, Washington
had difficulty at first even grasping such newly developing global realities
and was slow to react.
China's bid couldn't have been more fortuitous in its timing. After nearly
70 years as the globe's hegemon, Washington's dominance over the world economy
had begun to wither and its once-superior work force to lose its competitive
edge.
By 2016, in fact, the dislocations brought on by the economic globalization
that had gone with American dominion sparked a revolt of the dispossessed in
democracies worldwide and in the American heartland, bringing the self-proclaimed
"populist" Donald Trump to power.
Determined to check his country's decline, he has adopted an aggressive
and divisive foreign policy that has roiled long-established alliances in both
Asia and Europe and is undoubtedly giving that decline new impetus.
Within months of Trump's entry into the Oval Office, the world was already
witnessing a sharp rivalry between Xi's advocacy of a new form of global collaboration
and Trump's version of economic nationalism. In the process, humanity seems
to be entering a rare historical moment when national leadership and global
circumstances have coincided to create an opening for a major shift in the nature
of the world order.
Trump's Disruptive Foreign Policy
Despite their constant
criticism of Donald Trump's leadership, few among Washington's corps of
foreign policy experts have grasped his full impact on the historic foundations
of American global power. The world order that Washington built after World
War II rested upon what I've
called a "delicate duality": an American imperium of raw military and economic
power married to a community of sovereign nations, equal under the rule of law
and governed through international institutions such as the United Nations and
the World Trade Organization.
On the realpolitik side of that duality, Washington constructed a four-tier
apparatus -- military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine -- to advance a
global dominion of unprecedented wealth and power. This apparatus rested on
hundreds of military bases in Europe and Asia that made the U.S. the first
power in history to dominate (if not control) the Eurasian continent.
Even after the Cold War ended, former national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski
warned that Washington would remain the world's preeminent power only as
long as it maintained its geopolitical dominion over Eurasia. In the decade
before Trump's election, there were, however, already signs that America's hegemony
was on a downward trajectory as its share of global economic power fell from
50% in 1950 to just
15% in 2017. Many financial forecasts now
project that China will surpass the U.S. as the world's number one economy
by 2030, if not before.
In this era of decline, there has emerged from President Trump's torrent
of tweets and off-the-cuff remarks a surprisingly coherent and grim vision of
America's place in the present world order. Instead of reigning confidently
over international organizations, multilateral alliances, and a globalized economy,
Trump evidently sees America standing alone and beleaguered in an increasingly
troubled world -- exploited by self-aggrandizing allies, battered by unequal
trade terms, threatened by tides of undocumented immigrants, and betrayed by
self-serving elites too timid or compromised to defend the nation's interests.
Instead of multilateral trade pacts like NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP), or even the WTO, Trump favors bilateral deals rewritten to the (supposed)
advantage of the United States. In place of the usual democratic allies
like Canada and Germany, he is trying to weave a web of personal ties to avowedly
nationalist and autocratic leaders of a sort he clearly admires: Vladimir Putin
in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Adel Fatah el-Sisi
in Egypt, and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
Instead of old alliances like NATO, Trump favors loose coalitions of like-minded
countries. As he sees it, a resurgent America will carry the world along, while
crushing terrorists and dealing in uniquely personal ways with rogue states
like Iran and North Korea.
His version of a foreign policy has found its fullest
statement in his administration's December 2017 National Security Strategy.
As he took office, the nation, it claimed, faced "an extraordinarily dangerous
world, filled with a wide range of threats." But in less than a year of his
leadership, it insisted, "We have renewed our friendships in the Middle East
to help drive out terrorists and extremists America's allies are now contributing
more to our common defense, strengthening even our strongest alliances." Humankind
will benefit from the president's "beautiful vision" that "puts America First"
and promotes "a balance of power that favors the United States." The whole world
will, in short, be "lifted by America's renewal."
Despite such grandiose claims, each of President Trump's overseas trips
has been a mission of destruction in terms of American global power. Each, seemingly
by design, disrupted and possibly damaged alliances that have been the foundation
for Washington's global power since the 1950s. During the president's first
foreign trip in May 2017, he promptly
voiced withering complaints about the supposed refusal of Washington's European
allies to pay their "fair share" of NATO's military costs, leaving the U.S.
stuck with the bill and, in a fashion unknown to American presidents, refused
even to endorse the alliance's core principle of collective defense. It was
a position so extreme in terms of the global politics of the previous half-century
that he was later forced to formally
back down . (By then, however, he had registered his contempt for those
allies in an unforgettable fashion.)
During a second, no-less-divisive NATO visit in July, he charged that
Germany was "a captive of Russia" and pressed the allies to immediately
double their share of defense spending to a staggering 4% of gross domestic
product (a
level even Washington, with its monumental Pentagon budget, hasn't reached)
-- a demand they all ignored. Just days later, he again questioned the very
idea of a common defense,
remarking that if "tiny" NATO ally Montenegro decided to "get aggressive,"
then "congratulations, you're in World War III."
Moving on to England, he promptly kneecapped close ally Theresa May, telling
a British
tabloid that the prime minister had bungled her country's Brexit withdrawal
from the European Union and "killed off any chance of a vital U.S. trade deal."
He then went on to Helsinki for a summit with Vladimir Putin, where he visibly
abased himself before NATO's nominal nemesis, completely enough that there were
even brief, angry
protests
from leaders of his own party.
During Trump's major Asia tour in November 2017, he
addressed the Asian-Pacific Economic Council (APEC) in Vietnam, offering
an extended "tirade" against multilateral trade agreements, particularly the
WTO. To counter intolerable "trade abuses," such as "product dumping, subsidized
goods, currency manipulation, and predatory industrial policies," he swore that
he would always "put America first" and not let it "be taken advantage of anymore."
Having denounced a litany of trade violations that he termed nothing less than
"economic aggression" against America, he
invited everyone there to share his "Indo-Pacific dream" of the world as
a "beautiful constellation" of "strong, sovereign, and independent nations,"
each working like the United States to build "wealth and freedom."
Responding to such a display of narrow economic nationalism from the globe's
leading power, Xi Jinping had a perfect opportunity to play the world statesman
and he took it,
calling upon APEC to support an economic order that is "more open, inclusive,
and balanced." He spoke of China's future economic plans as an historic bid
for "interconnected development to achieve common prosperity on the Asian, European,
and African continents."
As China has lifted 60 million of its own people out of poverty in just a
few years and was committed to its complete eradication by 2020, so he urged
a more equitable world order "to bring the benefits of development to countries
across the globe." For its part, China, he assured his listeners, was ready
to make "$2 trillion of outbound investment" -- much of it for the development
of Eurasia and Africa (in ways, of course, that would link that vast region
more closely to China). In other words, he sounded like a twenty-first century
Chinese version of a twentieth-century American president, while Donald
Trump
acted
more like Argentina's former presidente Juan Perón, minus the medals. As
if to put another nail in the coffin of American global dominion, the remaining
11 Trans-Pacific trade pact partners, led by Japan and Canada,
announced major progress in finalizing that agreement -- without the United
States.
In addition to undermining NATO, America's Pacific alliances, long its historic
fulcrum for the defense of North America and the dominance of Asia, are eroding,
too. Even after 10 personal meetings and frequent phone calls between Japan's
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump during his first 18 months in office,
the president's America First trade policy has
placed a "major strain" on Washington's most crucial alliance in the region.
First, he ignored Abe's
pleas and cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and then, as
if his message hadn't been strong enough, he promptly imposed heavy
tariffs on Japanese steel imports. Similarly, he's
denounced the Canadian prime minister as "dishonest" and
mimicked Indian Prime Minister Modi's accent, even as he made chummy with
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and then
claimed ,
inaccurately , that his country was "no longer a nuclear threat."
It all adds up to a formula for further decline at a faster pace.
Beijing's Grand Strategy
While Washington's influence in Asia recedes, Beijing's grows ever stronger.
As China's currency reserves
climbed rapidly from $200 billion in 2001 to a peak of $4 trillion in 2014,
President Xi launched a new initiative of historic import. In September 2013,
speaking in Kazakhstan, the heart of Asia's ancient Silk Road caravan route,
he
proclaimed a "one belt, one road initiative" aimed at economically integrating
the enormous Eurasian land mass around Beijing's leadership. Through "unimpeded
trade" and infrastructure investment, he suggested, it would be possible to
connect "the Pacific and the Baltic Sea" in a proposed "economic belt along
the Silk Road," a region "inhabited by close to 3 billion people." It could
become, he predicted, "the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential."
Within a year, Beijing had
established a Chinese-dominated Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank
with 56 member nations and an impressive $100 billion in capital, while launching
its own $40 billion Silk Road Fund for
private equity projects. When China convened what it called a "belt and
road summit" of 28 world leaders in Beijing in May 2017, Xi could, with good
reason,
hail his initiative as the "project of the century."
Although the U.S. media has often described the individual projects involved
in his "one belt, one road" project as
wasteful ,
sybaritic ,
exploitative , or even
neo-colonial , its sheer scale and scope merits closer consideration. Beijing
is expected to
put a mind-boggling $1.3 trillion into the initiative by 2027, the largest
investment in human history, more than 10 times the famed American Marshall
Plan, the only comparable program, which
spent a more modest $110 billion (when adjusted for inflation) to rebuild
a ravaged Europe after World War II.
Beijing's low-cost infrastructure
loans for 70 countries from the Baltic to the Pacific are already funding
construction of the Mediterranean's
busiest port at Piraeus, Greece, a major nuclear power plant in England,
a $6 billion
railroad through rugged Laos, and a $46 billion transport
corridor across Pakistan. If successful, such infrastructure investments
could help knit two dynamic continents, Europe and Asia -- home to a full 70%
percent of the world's population and its resources -- into a unified market
without peer on the planet.
Underlying this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, the Chinese leadership
seems to have a design for transcending the vast distances that have historically
separated Asia from Europe. As a start, Beijing is building a comprehensive
network of trans-continental gas and oil pipelines to import fuels from Siberia
and Central Asia for its own population centers. When the system is complete,
there will be an integrated inland energy grid (including Russia's extensive
network of pipelines) that will extend 6,000 miles across Eurasia, from the
North Atlantic to the South China Sea. Next, Beijing is working to link Europe's
extensive rail network with its own expanded high-speed rail system via transcontinental
lines through Central Asia, supplemented by spur lines running due south to
Singapore and southwest through Pakistan.
Finally, to facilitate sea transport around the sprawling continent's southern
rim, China has already bought into or is in the process of building more than
30 major port facilities, stretching from the Straits of Malacca across
the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along
Europe's extended coastline. In January, to take advantage of Arctic waters
opened by global warming, Beijing began
planning for a "Polar Silk Road," a scheme that fits well with ambitious
Russian and
Scandinavian projects to establish a shorter shipping route around the continent's
northern coast to Europe.
Though Eurasia is its prime focus, China is also pursuing economic expansion
in Africa and Latin America to create what might be dubbed the strategy of the
four continents. To tie Africa into its projected Eurasian network, Beijing
already had doubled its
annual trade there by 2015 to $222 billion, three times that of the United
States, thanks to a massive infusion of capital expected to reach a trillion
dollars by 2025. Much of it is financing the sort of commodities extraction
that has already made the continent China's second largest source of crude oil.
Similarly, Beijing has
invested heavily in Latin America, acquiring, for instance, control over
90% of Ecuador's oil reserves. As a result, its commerce with that continent
doubled in a decade, reaching $244 billion in 2017, topping U.S. trade with
what once was known as its own "backyard."
A Conflict with Consequences
This contest between Xi's globalism and Trump's nationalism has not been
safely confined to an innocuous marketplace of ideas. Over the past four years,
the two powers have engaged in an escalating military rivalry and a cutthroat
commercial competition. Apart from a
shadowy struggle for
dominance in space and cyberspace, there has also been a visible, potentially
volatile naval arms race to control the sea lanes surrounding Asia, specifically
in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In a 2015 white paper, Beijing
stated
that "it is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime military force
structure commensurate with its national security." Backed by lethal land-based
missiles, jet fighters, and a global satellite system, China has built just
such a modernized fleet of 320 ships, including nuclear submarines and its first
aircraft carriers.
Within two years, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson
reported
that China's "growing and modernized fleet" was "shrinking" the traditional
American advantage in the Pacific, and warned that "we must shake off any vestiges
of comfort or complacency." Under Trump's latest $700-billion-plus defense budget,
Washington has responded to this challenge with a crash program to build 46
new ships, which will
raise its total to 326 by 2023. As China builds new naval bases bristling
with armaments in the Arabian and South China seas, the U.S. Navy has begun
conducting assertive "freedom-of-navigation" patrols near many of those same
installations, heightening the potential for conflict.
It is in the commercial realm of trade and tariffs, however, where competition
has segued into overt conflict. Acting on his
belief that "trade wars are good and easy to win," President Trump
slapped heavy tariffs, targeted above all at China, on steel imports in
March and, just a few weeks later, punished that country's intellectual property
theft by
promising tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports. When those tariffs
finally hit in July, China immediately
retaliated against what it called "typical trade bullying" with similar
tariffs on U.S. goods. The Financial Times
warned that this "tit-for-tat" can escalate into a "full bore trade war
that will be very bad for the global economy." As Trump
threatened to tax $500 billion more in Chinese imports and
issued confusing, even contradictory demands that made it unlikely Beijing
could ever comply, observers became
concerned that a long-lasting trade war could destabilize what the New
York Times called the "mountain of debt" that sustains much of China's
economy. In Washington, the usually taciturn Federal Reserve chairman issued
an uncommon
warning that "trade tensions could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global
economy."
China as Global Hegemon?
Although a withering of Washington's global reach, abetted and possibly accelerated
by the Trump presidency, is already underway, the shape of any future world
order is still anything but clear. At present, China is the sole state with
the obvious requisites for becoming the planet's new hegemon. Its phenomenal
economic rise, coupled with its expanding military and growing technological
prowess, provide that country with the obvious fundamentals for superpower status.
Yet neither China nor any other state seems to have the full imperial complement
of attributes to replace the United States as the dominant world leader. Apart
from its rising economic and military clout, China, like its sometime ally Russia,
has a self-referential culture, non-democratic political structures, and a developing
legal system that could deny it some of the key instruments for global leadership.
In addition to the fundamentals of military and economic power, "every
successful empire,"
observes Cambridge University historian Joya Chatterji, "had to elaborate
a universalist and inclusive discourse" to win support from the world's subordinate
states and their leaders. Successful imperial transitions driven by the
hard power of guns and money also require the soft-power salve of cultural suasion
for sustained and successful global dominion. Spain espoused Catholicism and
Hispanism, the Ottomans Islam, the Soviets communism, France a cultural
francophonie , and Britain an Anglophone culture.
Indeed, during its century of global dominion from 1850 to 1940, Britain
was the exemplar par excellence of such soft power, evincing an enticing
cultural ethos of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the
Anglican church, the English language and its literature, and the virtual invention
of modern athletics (cricket, soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). Similarly,
at the dawn of its global dominion, the United States courted allies worldwide
through soft-power programs promoting democracy and development. These were
made all the more palatable by the appeal of such things as Hollywood films,
civic organizations like
Rotary International , and popular sports like basketball and baseball.
China has nothing comparable. Its writing system has some 7,000 characters,
not 26 letters. Its communist ideology and popular culture are remarkably, even
avowedly, particularistic. And you don't have to look far for another Asian
power that attempted Pacific dominion without the salve of soft power. During
Japan's
occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II, its troops went from being
hailed as liberators to facing open revolt across the region after they failed
to propagate their similarly particularistic culture.
As command-economy states for much of the past century, neither China nor
Russia developed an independent judiciary or the autonomous rules-based order
that undergirds the modern international system. From the foundation of the
Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in 1899 through the formation of
the International Court of Justice under the U.N.'s 1945 charter, the world's
nations have aspired to the resolution of conflicts via arbitration or litigation
rather than armed conflict. More broadly, the modern globalized economy is held
together by a web of conventions, treaties, patents, and contracts grounded
in law.
From its founding in 1949, the People's Republic of China gave primacy to
the party and state, slowing the growth of an autonomous legal system and the
rule of law. A test of its attitude toward this system of global governance
came in 2016 when the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague
ruled unanimously that China's claims to sovereignty in the South China
Sea "are contrary to the Convention [on the Law of the Sea] and without lawful
effect." Beijing's Foreign Ministry simply
dismissed the adverse decision as "invalid" and without "binding force."
President Xi
insisted China's "territorial sovereignty and maritime rights" were unchanged,
while the state Xinhua news agency
called the ruling "naturally null and void."
If Donald Trump's vision of world disorder is a sign of the American future
and if Beijing's projected $2 trillion in infrastructure investments, history's
largest by far, succeed in unifying the commerce and transport of Asia, Africa,
and Europe, then perhaps the currents of financial power and global leadership
will indeed transcend all barriers and flow inexorably toward Beijing, as if
by natural law. But if that bold initiative ultimately fails, then for the first
time in five centuries the world may face an imperial transition without a clear
successor as global hegemon. Moreover, it will do so on a planet where the "
new normal " of
climate change -- the heating of the atmosphere and the
oceans , the intensification of flood, drought, and
fire , the rising seas that will
devastate coastal cities, and the
cascading damage to a densely populated world -- could mean that the very
idea of a global hegemon is fast becoming a thing of the past.
Alfred W. McCoy, a
TomDispatch regular , is the Harrington professor of history at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity
in the Global Drug Trade , the now-classic book which probed the conjuncture
of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the recently published
In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global
Power (Dispatch Books).
"... The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter: ..."
"... For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird. ..."
"... Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner. ..."
"... However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II ..."
"... And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections." ..."
"... We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance." ..."
"... "Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows ..."
William Blum shares with us his correspondence with
Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum's replies, he comes
across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset.
When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee,
which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the
Washington Post was a CIA asset. Watching the Washington Post's takedown of President Richard
Nixon with the orchestrated Watergate story, that became obvious. President Nixon had made too
many overtures to the Soviets and too many arms limitations agreements, and he opened to China.
Watching President Nixon's peace initiatives water down the threat level from the Soviet Union
and Maoist China, the military/security complex saw a threat to its budget and power and
decided that Nixon had to go. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy had resulted in
far too much skepticism about the Warren Commission Report, so the CIA decided to use the
Washington Post to get rid of Nixon. To keep the clueless American left hating Nixon, the CIA
used its assets in the leftwing to keep Nixon blamed for the Vietnam war, a war that Nixon
inherited and did not want.
The CIA knew that Nixon's problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his
conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical "Domino Theory." I have always
wondered if the CIA concocted the "Domino Theory," as it so well served them. Unable to get rid
of the war "with honor," Nixon was driven to brutal methods to force the North Vietnamese to
accept a situation that he could depart without defeat and soiling America's "honor" and losing
his conservative support base. The North Vietnamese wouldn't bend, but the US Congress did, and
so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon's war
management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA.
Here is Blum's exchange with Birnbaum. It is possible that Birnbaum is neither stupid nor a
CIA asset, but just a person wanting to hold on to a job. The last thing he can afford to do is
to disabuse readers of the "Russian Threat" when Bezos' Amazon and Washington Post properties
are dependent on the CIA's annual subsidy of $600 million disquised as a "contract."
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-20/cia-washington-post-and-russia-what-youre-not-being-told
The Anti-Empire Report # 159 Willian Blum
The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post
foreign policy reporter: July 18, 2018
Dear Mr. Birnbaum,
You write Trump "made no mention of Russia's adventures in Ukraine". Well, neither he nor Putin
nor you made any mention of America's adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the
overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure.
Therefore ?
If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in
Mexico? William Blum
Dear Mr. Blum,
Thanks for your note. "America's adventures in the Ukraine": what are you talking about? Last
time I checked, it was Ukrainians in the streets of Kiev who caused Yanukovych to turn tail and
run. Whether or not that was a good thing, we can leave aside, but it wasn't the Americans who
did it.
It is, however, Russian special forces who fanned out across Crimea in February and March 2014,
according to Putin, and Russians who came down from Moscow who stoked conflict in eastern
Ukraine in the months after, according to their own accounts. Best, Michael Birnbaum
To MB,
I can scarcely believe your reply. Do you read nothing but the Post? Do you not know of high
State Dept official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine in Maidan Square to
encourage the protesters? She spoke of 5 billion (sic) dollars given to aid the protesters who
were soon to overthrow the govt. She and the US Amb. spoke openly of who to choose as the next
president. And he's the one who became president. This is all on tape. I guess you never watch
Russia Today (RT). God forbid! I read the Post every day. You should watch RT once in a
while. William Blum
To WB,
I was the Moscow bureau chief of the newspaper; I reported extensively in Ukraine in the months
and years following the protests. My observations are not based on reading. RT is not a
credible news outlet, but I certainly do read far beyond our own pages, and of course I talk to
the actual actors on the ground myself – that's my job.
And: yes, of course Nuland was in the Maidan – but encouraging the protests, as she
clearly did, is not the same as sparking them or directing them, nor is playing favorites with
potential successors, as she clearly did, the same as being directly responsible for
overthrowing the government. I'm not saying the United States wasn't involved in trying to
shape events. So were Russia and the European Union. But Ukrainians were in the driver's seat
the whole way through. I know the guy who posted the first Facebook call to protest Yanukovych
in November 2013; he's not an American agent. RT, meanwhile, reports fabrications and terrible
falsehoods all the time. By all means consume a healthy and varied media diet – don't
stop at the US mainstream media. But ask yourself how often RT reports critically on the
Russian government, and consider how that lacuna shapes the rest of their reporting. You will
find plenty of reporting in the Washington Post that is critical of the US government and US
foreign policy in general, and decisions in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government in specific.
Our aim is to be fair, without picking sides. Best, Michael Birnbaum
======================= end of exchange =======================
Right, the United States doesn't play indispensable roles in changes of foreign governments;
never has, never will; even when they offer billions of dollars; even when they pick the new
president, which, apparently, is not the same as picking sides. It should be noticed that Mr
Birnbaum offers not a single example to back up his extremist claim that RT "reports
fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time." "All the time", no less! That should make
it easy to give some examples.
For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And,
yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem –
Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full
century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is
there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast?
Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that
when they do it can seem rather weird.
To the casual observer, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
indictments of July 14 of Russian intelligence agents (GRU) reinforced the argument that the
Soviet government interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Regard these indictments in
proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed
objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and
conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So
we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at
determining the winner.
The Russians did it (cont.)
Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I'm
looking for evidence – real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something
logical and rational – to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from
influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK.
But I do not find such evidence.
Each day brings headlines like these:
"U.S. to add economic sanctions on Russia: Attack with nerve agent on former spy in England
forces White House to act"
"Is Russia exploiting new Facebook goal?"
"Experts: Trump team lacks urgency on Russian threat"
These are all from the same day, August 9, which led me to thinking of doing this article,
but similar stories can be found any day in the Post and in major newspapers anywhere in
America. None of the articles begins to explain how Russia did these things, or even WHY.
Motivation appears to have become a lost pursuit in the American mass media. The one thing
sometimes mentioned, which I think may have some credibility, is Russia's preference of Trump
over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this doesn't begin to explain how Russia could pull off any
of the electoral magic it's accused of, which would be feasible only if the United States were
a backward, Third World, Banana Republic.
There's the Facebook ads, as well as all the other ads The people who are influenced by this
story – have they read many of the actual ads? Many are pro-Clinton or anti-Trump; many
are both; many are neither. It's one big mess, the only rational explanation of this which I've
read is that they come from money-making websites, "click-bait" sites as they're known, which
earn money simply by attracting visitors.
As to the nerve agents, it makes more sense if the UK or the CIA did it to make the Russians
look bad, because the anti-Russian scandal which followed was totally predictable. Why would
Russia choose the time of the World Cup in Moscow – of which all of Russia was immensely
proud – to bring such notoriety down upon their head? But that would have been an ideal
time for their enemies to want to embarrass them.
However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day
believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact
that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at
all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is
alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II.
But we're the Good Guys, ain't we?
For a defender of US foreign policy there's very little that causes extreme heartburn more
than someone implying a "moral equivalence" between American behavior and that of Russia. That
was the case during Cold War I and it's the same now in Cold War II. It just drives them up the
wall.
After the United States passed a law last year requiring TV station RT (Russia Today) to
register as a "foreign agent", the Russians passed their own law allowing authorities to
require foreign media to register as a "foreign agent". Senator John McCain denounced the new
Russian law, saying there is "no equivalence" between RT and networks such as Voice of America,
CNN and the BBC, whose journalists "seek the truth, debunk lies, and hold governments
accountable." By contrast, he said, "RT's propagandists debunk the truth, spread lies, and seek
to undermine democratic governments in order to further Vladimir Putin's agenda."
And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights
and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S.
government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that
Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski,
"apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would
interfere in the other's elections."
"Is this moral equivalence fair?" Malinowski asked and answered: "In short, no. Russia's
interference in the United States' 2016 election could not have been more different from what
the United States does to promote democracy in other countries."
How do you satirize such officials and such high-school beliefs?
We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED),
which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft
the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today
was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's
wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of
political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance."
"Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and
government-overthrows. The authors continue: "This narrative is churned out by propaganda
outlets such as RT and Sputnik [radio station]. it is deployed by isolationists who propound a
U.S. retreat from global leadership."
"Isolationists" is what [neo]conservatives call critics of US foreign policy whose arguments they
can't easily dismiss, so they imply that such people just don't want the US to be involved in
anything abroad.
And "global leadership" is what they call being first in election-interferences and
government-overthrows.
"... Beattie was fired not because of anything he did, or even because of anything he said, but because of sensationalism by a deeply dishonest media. Needless to say, President Trump's own supporters have stood by him even after President Trump actually said things that are far more controversial . If President Trump does not begin returning such loyalty, he will find himself politically isolated -- and powerless to resist the drive for impeachment being agitated for by the Main Stream Media ..."
"... Beattie was fired because he spoke at the H.L Mencken Club in 2016. For those reading this waiting for the punchline, you've already heard it -- that's it. That was all he did. Andrew Kaczynski of CNN breathlessly reported this as "having attended a conference frequented by white nationalists " [ Speechwriter who attended conference with white nationalists in 2016 leaves White House , ..."
"... The Trump White House just did succumb. Needless to say, this won't end the "controversy" -- it will simply mean that the hunt will continue for more people who can be forced out, culminating in the POTUS himself. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Nolte: Nine times 'racist-sexist' Trump described white men as 'dogs,' ..."
"... "I'm not going there": As Trump hurls racial invective, most Republicans stay silent ..."
It's the best of times and the worst of times for supporters of President
Donald Trump concerned about free speech. President Trump recently blasted the
conduct of social networking companies that censor conservative-leaning views
based on subjective standards, correctly labeling it "very dangerous" [
Trump says it's 'very dangerous' when Twitter, Facebook self-regulate content
, by Sara Salinas, CNBC, August 20, 2018]. At the same time,
the shameful decision by the Trump Administration to terminate speechwriter
Darren Beattie , just for speaking at a
conference at which
VDARE.com
Editor Peter Brimelow also spoke, shows the president still doesn't understand
the nature of his political opposition. Beattie was fired not because of anything
he did, or even because of anything he said, but because of sensationalism by
a deeply dishonest media. Needless to say, President Trump's own supporters
have stood by him even after President Trump
actually said things that are far more controversial . If President Trump
does not begin returning such loyalty, he will find himself politically isolated
-- and powerless to resist the drive for impeachment being agitated for by the
Main Stream Media.
Beattie was fired because he spoke at the H.L Mencken Club in 2016. For those
reading this waiting for the punchline, you've already heard it -- that's it.
That was all he did. Andrew Kaczynski of CNN breathlessly reported this as "having
attended a conference frequented by
white nationalists " [
Speechwriter who attended conference with white nationalists in 2016 leaves
White House , August 19, 2018] This is an example of what can be termed
a wrist-flapping piece, in which a journalist
points-and-sputters at people he doesn't like. It's an attempt by journalists
to dictate what people are and are not allowed to say, read, and do. And such
a tactic only has power if people succumb to it.
The Trump White House just did succumb. Needless to say, this won't end the
"controversy" -- it will simply mean that the hunt will continue for more people
who can be forced out, culminating in the POTUS himself.
Thus, the Washington Post 's Robert Costa cheerleads Beattie's firing
and links it to his own article in which he quotes various Republicans accusing
the president himself of racial insensitivity.
During the 2016 election, journalists looked on in baffled fury as President
Trump easily moved on from one "disqualifying" pronouncement to another --
from his first speech about illegal alien criminals to his
proposed travel ban . However, President Trump's victory did not inaugurate
a new era of Political Incorrectness, but the imposition of a more virulent
orthodoxy. Since journalists failed to take President Trump down, they have
increasingly turned on random, hapless people, destroying lives and careers
by
widely promoting relatively trivial incidents and turning them into national
controversies.
This is also why it is literally true to describe journalists as the "enemy
of the people."
In the latest episode of "Not An Enemy Of The People," a news anchor
uses her verified Twitter account to try to start a dox/harassment campaign
against a private citizen over some petty interpersonal dispute she only
provides her version of.
An individual citizen has several forms of redress against government officials
or law enforcement if he is targeted. For all the hysteria about Russian "meddling,"
no foreign enemy
poses an appreciable threat to individual citizens . However, if a citizen
is targeted by the Main Stream Media, he has no real way to fight back against
what the late Joe Sobran appropriately termed "
The Hive ." Alternative
media and the Internet could potentially provide a way for citizens to push
back. But journalists have made a priority of shutting down such outreach and
funding for political enemies. For example:
In each of these cases, reporters may argue they are simply opposing "hate
speech" or "extremism." Yet this is absurd at a time when the
overtly hateful Sarah Jeong is rewarded with a spot on The New York
Times editorial board, stripping former
Communist supporter John Brennan of his security clearance is treated
like a constitutional crisis , and we have the likes of
Al Sharpton ,
Van Jones , and
Spike Lee held as moral exemplars. One only has to look at verified accounts
at Twitter to see over the top hate speech in terms far more virulent and extreme
than anything on supposed "white nationalist" sites.
What even is a "white nationalist?" As the term "racist" has lost much of
its pejorative power through overuse, "white nationalist" seems to be increasingly
deployed. If it means anything, it means creating an homogenous white ethnostate,
an objective no one in mainstream politics has ever advocated. Nonetheless,
Steve Bannon is casually described as possessing "white nationalist tendencies"
[
Scaramucci: Steve Bannon has white nationalist 'tendencies' by Allan
Smith, Business Insider, September 22, 2017]. Stephen Miller has become
a "white nationalist" [
Call Stephen Miller a white nationalist , by Clio Chang, Splinter,
June 25, 2018]. Somehow however, Keith Ellison, second-in-command of the
Democrat Party, never faces questions for his explicit black nationalist past.
What's more,
no black Congressmen feel compelled to denounce such views .
The entire moral crusade by journalists is self-discrediting. It is best
understood as a crude exercise of power, not as a display of real ethical concern.
Journalists clearly regard themselves as a kind of guild, and are moving to
ensure only those within their closed network have access to the financial and
communications infrastructure needed to connect with the mass public.
Let it be said plainly -- if America were not saddled with today's "journalists,"
we would be better informed, have more freedom of speech, and have a greater
potential to mobilize against government abuses. Today's journalists are simply
activists in the service of established power. It is the First Amendment right
of such journalists to work on behalf of their policy preferences, but there
is no reason for Americans to treat them any different than the shrieking lunatics
of the
Revolutionary Communist Party or the
masked radicals of antifa reporters so often work with [
Journofa: Daily Beast "Journalist" Kelly Weill Follows Multiple Antifa Accounts
On Twitter , by Hunter Wallace, Occidental Dissent, August
16, 2018]
As Steve Bannon accurately said many months ago,
this is the real "opposition party" to President Trump . The Democratic
party currently enjoys an almost seven point lead in the generic party ballot
[
2018 Generic Congressional Vote , RealClearPolitics, August 20, 2018].
Yet the Democrats have no real policy agenda, are deeply internally divided,
and are barely keeping the kid on what is likely to be a full-scale intra party
civil war along both
racial and ideological faultlines [
Midterms exposing divide in Democratic Party , FoxNews, August 9, 2018].
President Trump isn't facing the Democrats so much as he is facing the MSM and
its ability to create new Narratives that he needs to respond to every day.
His war with the reporters that are quite openly trying to take down his Administration
is his most important battle.
In that battle, President Trump keeps being undermined most by the people
supposedly on his side. His former African-American aide Omarosa Manigault is
telling Al Sharpton that the president wants a "race war" [
Omarosa: I believe Trump wants to start a race war , by Brett Samuels,
The Hill, August 19, 2018]. His lawyers seem to be working for the
enemy. He keeps being betrayed by aides who are more eager to make friends with
the press than to do their jobs [
The Firings And Fury: The biggest Trump resignations and firings so far
, by Sam Morris and Francisco Navas, The Guardian, July 5, 2018].
It's easy to imagine that he is frustrated and that, as his son Eric fumed,
he must "
truly hate disloyal people ."
Yet loyalty is a two-way process. President Trump hired many people who opposed
him during the primaries and turned his back on many of those who supported
him all the way. Now, his administration is firing a loyal soldier at the behest
of open enemies.
If Trump wants to complete his term, he needs to give people a reason to
stick by him. And if he truly wants to defeat the enemies of the people, even
the President of the United States needs to realize he can't win this battle
by himself.
' In that battle, President Trump keeps being undermined most by the
people supposedly on his side '
Yeah -- but this merely demonstrates that he's a lousy leader. He obviously
can't pick good people, he's not able to command their loyalty, and he flagrantly
and gratuitously abuses them in public. Can anyone name another American
president who has carried on in this fashion?
It's the story of Trump. Throughout, he's been better than the alternative,
and that remains the case, but somehow, we've got to find someone better.
Trump never "caved" because he was never on the nationalist side at all.
Total fake from the start.
The most important fact about Trump was quietly revealed a few months
ago. He was Roy Cohn's protege in the '80s. If you know anything about Roy
Cohn, this tells you that Trump is an Agent Provocateur working solidly
and permanently for Deepstate.
Excellent article. Kirkpatrick succinctly outlines Trump's problems which
are huge and growing. The deeply-embedded Disloyal Opposition that manages
the Empire's daily doings and which helped unleash a partisan 'special prosecutor'
on Trump have come up empty as far as Russia's alleged 'theft' of the last
presidential election goes. But no matter. Even though 'Russiagate' is basically
a dry hole, and even though Trump did not collude with Putin as alleged,
the Demorat fishing expedition lives on.
The partisan Special Prosecutor will find something with which to hang
Trump, ruin his Presidency, and derail Trump's mission. This has been the
undeclared objective ever since the whole 'Russian conspiracy' was first
concocted.
The fabricated 'Russians-stole-the-election' fantasy was the excuse to
launch a politicized fishing expedition. Soon Russiagate will become 'old
news', replaced by hyped-up charges involving 'hush money' to secret lovers,
campaign finance irregularities, and other infractions which are mere trivialities
when compared to the massive, wholesale criminality that Zio-Washington
delivers continuously to undeclared war zones across the Middle East and
Central Asia each and every day.
Zio-Washington is on a decades-long murder spree. But the MSM barely
notices.
With that in mind, why are routine shenanigans by political operatives
in an immensely corrupt, blood-soaked, money-driven election cycle so gawd-awful-bad
when compared to the serial, routine, and ongoing mass murder (wars) along
with Zio-Washington's routine 'meddling' in the affairs of other sovereign
states?
Consider the trillions squandered and the million or more killed. This
is not serious?
Where is the balance? Where's the objectivity?
Why won't the MSM do its real job?
Or is the MSM part of the conspiracy?
At this point, there may be no way for Trump to escape the clutches of
a Nuremberg-esque Star Chamber that is fast approaching. Watch the MSM not
only cheer it all on, but sanitize the entire spectacle–equating a legalistic
assault on a sitting President with 'impartiality'.
Kirkpatrick shrewdly observes that "today's journalists are simply activists
in the service of established power." So true.
But who are the chief titans of 'established power' in NY, DC, LA, Chicago,
Silicon Valley, Wall St. and Hollywood?
Where are their 'unshakable' commitments?
Main St. America?
Many are hard-core Zionists ('Jewish nationalists') or sycophantic and
unsophisticated goyim who work for these unified plutocrats.
Unfortunately, Kirkpatrick usually avoids exploring this topic. This
keeps his analyses incomplete.
But the glaring double-standards which undermine the genuine and legitimate
interests of white Americans (as they shrink towards minority status) are
used openly and unapologetically to advance the ethno-tribal interests of
Jewish-Americans; as well as the interests of their distant, genetically-geared
headquarters in the Holy Land.
Has the MSM not noticed these strange facts and glaring inconsistencies?
Or is the MSM part of this grand deception?
We live in a rapidly-changing era where Black unity, pan-Asian identity
and solidarity (inside America), Hispanic cohesion and activism, and exalted
Jewish preeminence are all accepted as 'normal', pluralistic, and even virtuous.
When whites try to advance–or even articulate reasons–that would address
their collective interests (are whites permitted to even have 'interests'?)
then the MSM shock troops become unleashed and unhinged. The pundits howl
and headlines blare:
'Trump Finds Support Among Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists'.
Violators of anti-white taboos (reviled in the MSM as 'white supremacists')
are publicly shamed, routinely fired, and often banished.
Entrenched double standards. Speech crimes. Guilt by association. Denial
of Free Assembly. Persecution of the majority.
"Yet loyalty is a two-way process. President Trump hired many people
who opposed him during the primaries and turned his back on many of those
who supported him all the way. Now, his administration is firing a loyal
soldier at the behest of open enemies."
It's one of the toughest postures to harness, knowing one's enemies."
But the president seems heck bent on squishing his supporters. And that
is unfortunate. i suspect that sometimes he misinterprets admonitions as
attacks as opposed to warnings .
Problem is that he has made too many decisions that counter "Deep State"
thinking. Though I realize to conspiracy advocates -- nearly everything
constitutes a plot by the deep state.
Agree! Tired of watching him getting rid of honest and loyal supporters
like Bannon, Gorka, McMaster and now speechwriter Beattie because of the
zio-nazis don't like it.
The one big problem I have with Trump is his willingness to throw his
closest supporters under the bus or fire them over some bad publicity and
trumped up charges manufactured by (((the media))). Yet he hypocritically
expects absolute loyalty from those who serve him.
The Jewish owned and controlled media are comprised of nothing more than
little Ilya Ehrenburgs who foment hatred of white people and anyone to the
right of Barack Obongo and Valerie Jarrett. They're all ultra left wing
commissars committed to the neo-bolshevik revolution taking place so they
only offer ideologically and semitically correct "news" that bolsters fake
left wing narratives about everything.
On censorship by the tech giants, Trump needs to give the deplorables
something tangible like DOJ lawsuits and threats to enforce the Sherman
anti-trust act. To date all we got are some tweets deploring this state
of affairs. That's not good enough.
Pat Buchanan demonstrates how so-called liberal America despises ordinary folks who don't
seem so "enlightened" such as crooks like Obama, Hillary Clinton, Cuomo, Brennan, Clapper,
Comey, Hayden. Not to speak of their disgusting infantry of the kind of the Strzoks and his
lover girl Lisa Page and their ilk, plus the biased media rascals that are in fact "the enemy
of the people" (deplorable).
What's going on in the US is unprecedented. The entire political or so-called liberal
establishment is fighting with every means at their disposal against a democratically elected
President. Together with the Deep State and its agent, Robert Mueller, they want to bring
Donald Trump down. It's only a question of time when the Deep State comes up with a kind of
Lee Harvey Oswald.
One good thing about Trump. He's a clown but he triggered so many in the Deep State to come
out of the woodwork and show their true face. And what a hideous lot.
I had no idea that the Deep State was so infested with lowlife scum.
"... Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business ..."
"... there will be no war and no negotiations ..."
"... carries out the decrees, and answers to the Supreme Leader of Iran, who functions as the country's head of state ..."
"... Trump's ALL IN CAPS meme ..."
"... This is where Ali Khamenei's stance is more puzzling, at least to me: when he says that there will be no war, does he mean that the US threats are not credible or does he mean that Iran has the means to deter a US attack? His words make it sound like he is quite certain that there will be no war. How can he be so sure? I am especially amazed by the apparent Iranian confidence that the AngloZionists will not attack them when I compare it with the obvious Russian policy of actively preparing for war since at least 2014 (also see here , here , here , here , here and here ). Of course, Iran has been preparing for war with the US for almost 40 years now whereas the Russians only woke up to reality comparatively recently. I see several potential explanations for Ali Khamenei's statement (there might be more, of course) ..."
"... Personally, every time I think of a possible US attack on Iran I think of the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006 which happened in spite of the fact that it was plainly visible to everybody that the Israelis were waltzing straight into a conflict which they could not win and which, in fact, resulted into one of the most abjects defeats in military history. Conversely, while Hezbollah did win a truly historical victory, it also remains a fact that Hezbollah leaders did not expect the Israelis to launch a full-scale ground offensive. Finally, history is full of examples of wars which were started in spite of all objective factors indicating that they would end up in disaster. ..."
"... If it weren't for its nuclear arsenal, the US could be dismissed as a particularly obnoxious country led by ignorant leaders with bloated and mostly ineffective armed forces. Alas, the US nuclear arsenal is very real (and still very capable) and we know that top-level US Neocons have already considered using tactical nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state's conventional force in the past . In a twisted way, this makes sense: if you are a megalomaniac infused with a sense of messianic superiority then international or even civilizational norms of behavior are of no interest (or even relevance) to you. Listening to US Presidents, pretty much all of them (but especially Obama and Trump) it is pretty clear that these folks consider themselves to be the Kulturträger ..."
"... Shaytân-e Bozorg ..."
"... It would be a big mistake to dismiss the US because of its incapable military or moral bankruptcy. The truth is that in terms of aggregate national power, the US still remains the most powerful country on the planet (even if we don't include nuclear weapons). Anyone doubting that needs to look how how the currencies of the countries the US is singles out for attack suddenly began slipping: the Russian ruble (which has since bounced back), the Iranian rial, the Venezuelan bolivar, the Turkish lira , etc.) or how little time it took Trump to bring the (admittedly spineless) Europeans to heel . ..."
"... As for Russia, for all her military might, she remains only a semi-sovereign country in which the pro-US/pro-Israeli "Atlantic Integrationists" continue to try to sabotage (often successfully) everything Putin and his supporters are doing . I would not place big hopes in China either, especially considering the lack of meaningful Chinese action in Syria where Russia and Iran did all the heavy lifting. ..."
"... So count with yet another imperial war of aggression, a barrel of crude at over 100$ and oil shortages, rocketing inflation, job losses, a stagnant real estate market and stock exchange, and a national debt and government deficit which would make even Reagan proud. And plenty of dead Americans (nevermind the Iranians, right?). But don't worry: there will still be a huge supply of Chinese-made US flags to wave! ..."
=>
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We can all thank God for the fact that the AngloZionists did not launch a war on the DPRK, that no Ukronazi attack on the Donbass
took place during the World Cup in Russia and that the leaders of the Empire have apparently have given up on their plans to launch
a reconquista of Syria. However, each of these retreats from their hysterical rhetoric has only made the Neocons more frustrated
and determined to show the planet that they are still The Hegemon who cannot be disobeyed with impunity. As I wrote after the failed
US cruise missile strike on Syria this spring, " each click brings us closer
to the bang ". In the immortal words of Michael
Ledeen , " Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against
the wall, just to show the world we mean business ". The obvious problem is that there are no "small crappy little countries"
left out there, and that those who are currently the object of the Empire's ire are neither small nor crappy.
Having now shown several times that for all its hysterical barking the Empire has to back down when the opponent does not cower
away in fear, the Empire is now in desperate need to prove its "uniqueness" and (racial?) superiority. The obvious target of the
AngloZionist wrath is Iran. In fact, Iran has been in the cross-hairs of the Empire ever since the people of Iran dared to show the
AngloZionists to the door and, even worse, succeed in creating their own, national and Islamic democracy. To punish Iran, the US,
the USSR, France and all the other "democratic" countries unleashed their puppet (Saddam Hussein) and gave him full military support,
and yet the Iranians still prevailed, albeit at a terrible cost. That Iranian ability to prevail in the most terrible circumstances
is also the most likely explanation for why there has not been an overt attack on Iran for the past four decades (there have, of
course, there has been plenty of covert attacks during all these years).
I won't list all the recent AngloZionist threats against Iran – we all know about them. The bottom line is this: the US, Israel
and the KSA are, yet again, working hand in hand to set the stage for a major war under what we could call the " Skripal-case rules
of evidence " aka " highly likely ". And yet, in spite of all this saber-rattling, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has summed
up Iran's stance in
the following words " there will be no war and no negotiations ".
First, let's first look at Iranian rationale for "no negotiations"
The obvious: "no negotiations"
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been very clear in his explanations for why negotiating with the US makes no sense. On his Twitter
account he wrote:
The Iranian Supreme Leader even posted a special graphic summary to summarize and explain the Iranian position:
Finally, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reiterated his fundamental approach towards the AngloZionist Empire:
The contrast between the kindergarten-level low-IQ bumbling hot air and threats coming out of the White House and the words of
Ali Khamenei could not be greater, especially if we compare the words the two leaders decided to post all in caps;
Trump : To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES
OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS
OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!
Khamenei : THERE WILL BE NO WAR, NOR WILL WE NEGOTIATE WITH THE U.S..
Notice first that in his typical ignorance, Trump fails to realize that Hassan Rouhani is only the President of Iran and that
threatening him makes absolutely no sense since he does not make national security decisions, which is the function of the Supreme
Leader. Had Trump taken the time to at the very least check
with Wikipedia he would have understood that the Iranian President " carries out the decrees, and answers to the Supreme
Leader of Iran, who functions as the country's head of state ". It is no wonder that Trump's infantile threats
instantly
turned into an Internet meme !
In contrast, Khamenei did not even bother to address Trump by name but, instead, announced his strategy to the whole world.
Trump's ALL IN CAPS meme
Of course, issuing ALL IN CAPS threats just to be treated with utter contempt by the people you are trying to hard to bully and
having your words become a cause of laughter on the Internet will only further enrage Trump and his supporters. When you are desperately
trying to show the world how tough and scary you are, there is nothing more humiliating as being treated like some stupid kid. Therein
also lies the biggest danger: such derision could force Trump and the Neocons who run him to do something desperate to prove to the
word that their "red button" is still bigger than everybody else's.
ORDER IT NOW
It is important to note here that making negotiations impossible is something the Trump administration seems to have adopted as
a policy. This is best illustrated by the conditions attached to the latest sanctions against Russia which, essentially, demand that
Russia admit poisoning the Skripals. In fact, all the western demands towards Russia (admitting that Russia is guilty for the Skripal
case, that Russia shot down MH-17, that Russia hand over Crimea to the Ukronazis, etc.) are carefully crafted to make absolutely
sure that Russia will not negotiate. The sames, of course, goes for the ridiculous
Pompeo demands towards the DPRK
(including handing over to the US 60 to 70 percent of its nukes within six to eight months; no wonder the North Koreans denounced
a "gangster-like" attitude) or the latest US grandstanding towards Turkey. Sadly, but the Neocon run media has successfully imposed
the notion that negotiations are either a sign of weakness, or treason, or both. Thus to be "patriotic" and "strong" no US official
can afford to be caught red-handed negotiating with the enemy of the day.
Under these conditions, why would anybody want to negotiate with the US?
Frankly, the "no negotiations" approach makes perfectly good sense, and while the Iranians are the only ones who have openly said
so, the Russians have hinted to the same on many occasions (see their words about the US being "non-agreement capable" or about US
diplomats confusing Austria and Australia). To any objective observer it should by now be completely obvious by now that a) the US
cannot negotiate (due to intellectual, cultural and political limitations) and b) the US has no desire to negotiate. This is, of
course, a highly undesirable and dangerous situation, but it would only make things worse to pretend that civilized negotiations
with the US are possible.
So, if both sides agree on "no negotiations", what about war?
The not so obvious: No war?
This is where Ali Khamenei's stance is more puzzling, at least to me: when he says that there will be no war, does he mean
that the US threats are not credible or does he mean that Iran has the means to deter a US attack? His words make it sound like he
is quite certain that there will be no war. How can he be so sure? I am especially amazed by the apparent Iranian confidence that
the AngloZionists will not attack them when I compare it with the obvious
Russian policy of actively preparing for war
since at least 2014 (also see
here
, here ,
here ,
here ,
here and
here ). Of course,
Iran has been preparing for war with the US for almost 40 years now whereas the Russians only woke up to reality comparatively recently.
I see several potential explanations for Ali Khamenei's statement (there might be more, of course):
Political: Iran is trying to demonstrate that it will do everything possible to avoid a war so that if a war should break out,
it would be absolutely clear to everybody that Iran did not want it, Iran did not trigger it and the responsibility for the consequences
fall entirely and solely upon the US and Israel. Deception: Iran knows that a war is coming but is trying to pretend like it won't
to better conceal the war preparations and lure the Empire into a sense of complacency resulting into an ineffective/costly attack.
Intelligence: the Iranians might have intelligence indicating to them that all the US threats are just hot air spewed in order
to appease the Israel Lobby and to look "patriotic" in preparation for the upcoming elections this Fall. Miscalculation: the Iranians
might underestimate the level of hubris, arrogance and stupidity of the US leadership and mistakenly conclude that since an attack
on Iran makes no sense and the US cannot "win", such an attack will therefore not happen.
Personally, every time I think of a possible US attack on Iran I think of the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006 which happened
in spite of the fact that it was plainly visible to everybody that the Israelis were waltzing straight into a conflict which they
could not win and which, in fact, resulted into one of the most abjects defeats in military history. Conversely, while Hezbollah
did win a truly historical victory, it also remains a fact that Hezbollah leaders did not expect the Israelis to launch a full-scale
ground offensive. Finally, history is full of examples of wars which were started in spite of all objective factors indicating that
they would end up in disaster.
It seems to me that in purely military terms (not in political ones!) Israel could be seen as a stand-in for the US and Hezbollah
as a stand-in for Iran and that the outcome of any future US-Iranian war will be very similar to the outcome of the war in 2006,
albeit on a much larger (and bloodier) scale. I am confident that the folks in the Pentagon realize that, but what about their Neocon
bosses – do they even care about Iranian or, for that matter, US casualties? I highly doubt it: all they care about is their power
and messianic ideology.
If it weren't for its nuclear arsenal, the US could be dismissed as a particularly obnoxious country led by ignorant leaders
with bloated and mostly ineffective armed forces. Alas, the US nuclear arsenal is very real (and still very capable) and we know
that
top-level US Neocons have already considered using tactical nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state's conventional force in the
past . In a twisted way, this makes sense: if you are a megalomaniac infused with a sense of messianic superiority then international
or even civilizational norms of behavior are of no interest (or even relevance) to you. Listening to US Presidents, pretty much all
of them (but especially Obama and Trump) it is pretty clear that these folks consider themselves to be the Kulturträger
and the Herrenvolk of the 21st century and their messianism is in no way less delusional than the one of their Nazi predecessors
(or, for that matter, the one of the Popes of the past 1000 years). And why would the people who nuked two Japanese cities under
the (entirely fallacious) pretext of "shortening the war" (almost a humanitarian operation!) not do the same thing in Iran?
Of sure, they probably realize that using nukes will result in a massive political backlash, but they are confident that no matter
what happens in the end, they will always be able to say "screw you!" to the rest of the planet. After all, this is something which
Israel and the US have been doing with almost total inpunity for decades already – why would they stop now? As for the fact that
the Persian people have been dealing with all kinds of invaders since no less than 2500 years will not stop the AngloZionists from
trying to crush them. After all, having laid waste to a country which many see as the cradle of civilization, Iraq, why not do the
same thing to Iran? Iraq, Iran – what's the difference, they are all just "sand niggers" and our red button is bigger than theirs,
right?
Standing up to Shaytân-e Bozorg (almost alone?)
It would be a big mistake to dismiss the US because of its incapable military or moral bankruptcy. The truth is that in terms
of aggregate national power, the US still remains the most powerful country on the planet (even if we don't include nuclear weapons).
Anyone doubting that needs to look how how the currencies of the countries the US is singles out for attack suddenly began slipping:
the Russian ruble (which has since bounced back), the Iranian rial, the Venezuelan bolivar, the
Turkish lira , etc.) or
how little
time it took Trump to bring the (admittedly spineless) Europeans to heel .
As for Russia, for all her military might, she remains only a semi-sovereign country in which the pro-US/pro-Israeli "Atlantic
Integrationists" continue to try to
sabotage (often successfully)
everything Putin and his supporters are doing . I would not place big hopes in China either, especially considering the lack
of meaningful Chinese action in Syria where Russia and Iran did all the heavy lifting.
Sadly, but the only ally Iran can truly count on is Hezbollah. And while Hezbollah is considered a "non-state actor", it has a
formidable capability to strike at the US's colonial masters,
especially in terms of missiles .
This will not protect Iran, but it could serve as a very real deterrent to the Israelis, especially since Hezbollah Secretary
General Hassan Nasrallah he has made it clear that Hezbollah more than capable
of taking on Israel .
Does that look to you like there will be no war against Iran?
I hope so. But to me it very much looks like an attack is pretty much inevitable. I have been predicting such an attack since
2007 and, so far, I have been completely wrong (and thank God for that!). The very first article I ever wrote for my blog was entitled
" Where the Empire meets
to plan the next war " ended with the following words:
So count with yet another imperial war of aggression, a barrel of crude at over 100$ and oil shortages, rocketing inflation,
job losses, a stagnant real estate market and stock exchange, and a national debt and government deficit which would make even
Reagan proud. And plenty of dead Americans (nevermind the Iranians, right?). But don't worry: there will still be a huge supply
of Chinese-made US flags to wave!
And yet, 11 years later, the AngloZionist attack which looked so imminent in 2007 has not happened yet. Could it be that this
time again an attack on Iran can be avoided? Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appears to be very confident that it will not happen. I am not
so sure, but I fervently hope that he is right.
"... In that sense, the elite media are indeed enemies of the people – our people, that is. If they didn't want to perceived as such, they should have been fairer in their coverage, they shouldn't have started censoring people and banning them off Twitter and PayPal for wrongthink, they shouldn't have promoted endless invasion, they shouldn't have coordinated outrageous attacks like that disgraceful WaPo story alleging everyone who didn't support Hillary Clinton was part of a Russian plot (lying bastards) ..."
"... It's not appropriate for a handful of American cities (LA, NY, and DC), a single political party (the democrats), and a handful of democrat-voting businessmen and leftist "journalists" to control 98% of the narrative. Something needs to be done about that. ..."
"... Otherwise, South Africa is our future. They faced the same choice as we do now, and they did it wrong. ..."
I think some clarification is needed here. What these people have actually done is the
following:
They have monopolized the information distribution system – internet and television
– and used it to silence critics, prevent competing platforms from arising, bully
society into accepting their standards of conduct and thought, blacklist conservatives in
Hollywood, promote physical violence against us (punch a Nazi where "Nazi" is basically any
non extremist), and organize countless wide-spread coordinated attacks against our government
in order to overthrow it, and replace it with their own. They've used banks to deny service
to legal gun shops (a roundabout way to ban them), they've used credit card companies to shut
down critics of Islam, they've used lawfare to attack Christian bakers, they've banned
critics from PayPal, they've censored YouTube videos, they boot critics from Facebook, they
employ an army of "state-sponsored in all but name" censors for social media – SPLC,
ADL, and they have recruited a "state-sponsored in all but name" KGB to track down and
dox/fire/witchunt dissenters on the internet.
We live in fear that at any moment out lives could be destroyed if we are filmed in public
expressing wrong think; other countries like Germany have laws against this, so why don't we?
Oh, that's right, because it is a useful tool to control dissent. The deepstate needs to keep
their little empire together. Careful not to be white and say the wrong thing or your picture
may end up being broadcast by the Young Turks to the world: "racist white lady calls the cops
on innocent non-whites who didn't pay for anything in a restaurant and loitered around,
refused to leave a private establishment after being politely asked to pay or go, and then
screamed at cops for 10 minutes before being arrested. The shame. Dirty racist."
We are subject to false allegations in a system rigged by feminists to discriminate
against men. We are guilty until proven innocent. We have to work twice as hard for half the
results due to racist affirmative action policies. We are bombarded with leftist propaganda
in the entertainment industry. No form of entertainment is free from their proselytizing.
There are endless 2 minute sessions of hate directed at us: Duke Lacrosse, Virginia rape
hoax, Ferguson, Starbucks,
The media got away with this in the past by pretending to be objective, but they don't
even bother with that aspect anymore. Unfortunately, the corrupt, spineless traitors in the
GOP let this happen. They should have been rigorously enforcing anti-monopoly laws, media
ownership laws, and supporting public broadcasting – internet and television – in
order to drive down the ratings of deepstate-run organs like CNN. Instead, they sold out.
They are traitors, too.
In that sense, the elite media are indeed enemies of the people – our people,
that is. If they didn't want to perceived as such, they should have been fairer in their
coverage, they shouldn't have started censoring people and banning them off Twitter and
PayPal for wrongthink, they shouldn't have promoted endless invasion, they shouldn't have
coordinated outrageous attacks like that disgraceful WaPo story alleging everyone who didn't
support Hillary Clinton was part of a Russian plot (lying bastards)
How many of these fake news stories have these people come up with? Stormy Daniels,
Omarosa, Russiagate, BLM . It should be clear by now that these scum are trying to rig the
upcoming election in the democrat party's favor by ginning up racial and gender animus; that
is blatantly what they tried to do in 2016. So, why are we letting them? We can't organize a
boycott of them, their advertisers, their distribution networks? If they ban us from social
media, can't we pass laws requiring their distribution network – internet service
providers and trucking companies – to ban them in retaliation? Can't we organize
state-sponsored, censorship-free competition? Our state legislatures can ban boycotts of
Israel but not protect we the people?
It's not appropriate for a handful of American cities (LA, NY, and DC), a single
political party (the democrats), and a handful of democrat-voting businessmen and leftist
"journalists" to control 98% of the narrative. Something needs to be done about
that.
Personally, I think the US is done for as a constitutional republic. Either we secede and
have a country run for the benefit of our own people (optimal), or we seize control and run
the government for the benefit of ourselves. Works for China. And that's exactly what the
left is plotting with their immigration invasion. So why not strike first? Do we want to end
up like South Africa? Do we want to end up with a one-party democrat state? Imagine racist
SJW scum stomping on your face forever. That's the choice we face, and it is coming up
soon.
As far as I'm concerned, Trump won 60% of the American vote. A near majority of the people
who voted democrat are not American. They are foreign invaders invited after the 1965
immigration act to steal away our democracy and give it to the racist democrat party. If the
Chinese army invaded California, we wouldn't give them the vote. So, why do racist invaders
get to vote? Strip them of their citizenship and let only republicans vote. Then, expel these
traitors to other countries where they belong.
Our country was originally founded as an exclusive society that reserved the vote for
white landowners, and the American Revolution was only supported by a third of the public.
Patriots rose up and kicked out the king against the wishes of the stupid masses, and they
were right to do so. Thank God that wasn't left up to an equal vote because not all men are
equal in their abilities.
I don't see how it would be wrong to reserve the vote exclusively for our people again, or
at least Republicans in general, people who have the nation's best interest at heart, people
wise enough and capable enough to understand right from wrong and wisdom from stupidity.
Think this is too extreme? It isn't because that's exactly what they have publicly
advocated doing to us – deport us, enslave us, censor our speech, jail us, attack us in
the streets, ban Fox News. One of their democrat senators publicly supported censoring more
people after Alex Jones was deplatformed via RICOesque collusion. They announce it publicly!
When are we going to take their threats seriously and strike first?
Otherwise, South Africa is our future. They faced the same choice as we do now, and
they did it wrong. They gave their country away to racist vermin who now threaten to
steal their land without compensation. It was obvious at the time that it would end badly for
the whites there one day, but they stupidly ignored the warnings, Now, their racist president
chants "death to the Boar, death to the white man." Don't think that can happen here? It can.
The racist democrat running for Georgia governor wants to destroy Stone Mountain and give
reparations to blacks (steal our money like SA steals white lands).
When the rats retake the White House in 2020, they are going to unleash a wave of racist
hate against us that will never abate. That's what Obama did with BLM, so there is no reason
to believe they won't do so again but much worse after all their rhetoric. And there will be
so many democrat-voting immigrant invaders here that we can never win power again. They
thirst to make our country a dictatorship like China, but with themselves at the top. That's
a scary thought. Are we going to let them do it?
That might have been true .then. However, Bannon was never the puppet master (Trump is a
capitalist who has never listened to anyone else apart from his own messy ego in his life: the
idea that he would be a puppet for anyone, Bannon, Putin or whatever, is risible). Without
wanting to raise from the dead the 'Trump is teh Hitler' meme: there is a very very tiny grain
of truth in it, just as there is a very very tiny grain of truth in the right wing idea that
Hitler was a socialist because his party had the word 'socialist' in it. Hitler's initial
programme really did have a tiny element of 'socialism' in it, and some elements of the working
class (shamefully) swallowed the lies and gained him votes.
But it was never real and Hitler was never going to deliver. He dealt with the Brownshirts
(the most authentically 'working class' and 'socialist' part of the Nazi movement) in the Night
of the Long Knives, and from that point on, the 'socialist' parts of the Nazi programme were
steadily ditched, as the regime became more and more strongly right wing throughout the
'30s.
Same with Trump (in this respect only). It's true that in the run up to the election he
threw some scraps to the working class, and some of his protectionist rhetoric swung him some
states in the Rust Belt. Some union supporters, to their shame, trooped along to the White
House soon after.
But Trump, a right wing Republican who is, as I've said, far more orthodox a Republican than
the media would have you believe, was never going to deliver. Bannon was the most 'left wing'
of Trump's circle (and as his admiration for Thatcher makes clear, he was never very left wing)
and he was quickly cast out. Trump did not, in fact, 'drain the swamp' and nor did he try. His
major economic policy has turned out to be .tax cuts for the rich. And he has totally failed to
follow through on the (interesting) isolationist rhetoric he used in his election campaign
(despite the fact that some of us hoped otherwise). He has turned out to be as much of a
warmonger as Obama or even Bush jr (even towards Russia, again despite what the media would
have you believe).
And we haven't heard too much about that 'trillion dollar' investment in infrastructure
recently have we?
The problem is that the Democrats have concentrated on the (mainly trivial and
uninteresting) ways in which Trump differs from previous Republican Presidents (the lies, the
silly tweets, the dubious rhetoric) and have therefore persuaded themselves that this
'unorthodox' President will have to be removed by 'unorthodox means'. 'Tain't so. Trump will be
removed the only way any President (except Nixon) has ever been removed since the dawn of the
Republic: by the opposing party organising, developing a strong program that people can believe
in, and getting out the core vote. No election has ever been won any other way. In the case of
the Democrats this means using the might and money of organised labour and activists to get
candidates who can inspire and who have a genuinely progressive message that resonates with
people.
Democrats, #Russiagate will not save you. Getting your core vote out to vote for a genuinely
progressive candidate, will.
Likbez
@Hidari 08.18.18 at 6:41 pm
Powerful post and a veryclear thinking. Thank you !
Also an interesting analogy with NSDAP the 25-point Plan of 1928
Hitler's initial programme really did have a tiny element of 'socialism' in it, and some
elements of the working class (shamefully) swallowed the lies and gained him votes.
But it was never real, and Hitler was never going to deliver. He dealt with the Brownshirts
(the most authentically 'working class' and 'socialist' part of the Nazi movement) in the Night
of the Long Knives, and from that point on, the 'socialist' parts of the Nazi programme were
steadily ditched, as the regime became more and more strongly right wing throughout the
'30s.
Same with Trump (in this respect only). It's true that in the run-up to the election he
threw some scraps to the working class, and some of his protectionist rhetoric swung him some
states in the Rust Belt. Some union supporters, to their shame, trooped along to the White
House soon after.
Actually NSAP program of 1928 has some political demands which are to the left of Sanders
such as "Abolition of unearned (work and labor) incomes", ".We demand the nationalization of
all (previous) associated industries (trusts)." and "We demand a division of profits of all
heavy industries."
7.We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood
and way of life for the citizens... ... ...
... ... ...
9.All citizens must have equal rights and obligations.
10.The first obligation of every citizen must be to productively work mentally or
physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality,
but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all.
Consequently, we demand:
11.Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.
12.In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands
of the people, personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the
people. Therefore, we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
13.We demand the nationalisation of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
14.We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
15.We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
16.We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate
communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the
utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or
municipality.
17.We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free
expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and
prevention of all speculation in land.
18.We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the
general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be
punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
... ... ...
21.The state is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and
child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the
legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all
organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.
22.We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.
23.We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press...
.... ... ...
24.We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as
they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race...
But I think Trump was de-facto impeached with the appointment of Mueller. And that was the
plan ( "insurance" as Strzok called it). Mueller task is just to formalize impeachment.
Pence already is calling the shots in foreign policy via members of his close circle (which
includes Pompeo). The recent "unilateral" actions of State Department are a slap in the face
and, simultaneously, a nasty trap for Trump (he can cancel those sanctions only at a huge
political cost to himself) and are a clear sign that Trump does not control even his
administration. Here is how <a
href="http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2018/august/17/america-the-punitive/">Philip
Giraldi</a> described this obvious slap in the face:
The most recent is the new sanctioning of Russia over the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury
England. For those not following developments, last week Washington abruptly and without any
new evidence being presented, imposed additional trade sanctions on Russia in the belief that
Moscow ordered and carried out the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia on March
4th. The report of the new sanctions was particularly surprising as Yulia Skripal has recently
announced that she intends to return to her home in Russia, leading to the conclusion that even
one of the alleged victims does not believe the narrative being promoted by the British and
American governments.
Though Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded with restraint, avoiding a
tit-for-tat, he is reported to be angry about the new move by the US government and now
believes it to be an unreliable negotiating partner. Considering the friendly recent exchanges
between Putin and Trump, the punishment of Russia has to be viewed as something of a surprise,
suggesting that the president of the United States may not be in control of his own foreign
policy.
From the very beginning, any anti-globalization initiative of Trump was sabotaged and often
reversed. Haley is one example here. She does not coordinate some of her actions with Trump or
the Secretary of State unliterary defining the US foreign policy.
Her ambitions worry Trump, but he can so very little: she is supported by Pence and Pence
faction in the administration. Rumors "Haley/Pence 2020" surfaced and probably somewhat poison
atmosphere in the WH.
Add to this that Trump has hostile to him Justice Department, CIA, and FBI. He also does not
control some critical appointments such as the recent appointment of CIA director (who in no
way can be called Trump loyalist).
Which means that in some ways Trump already is a hostage and more ceremonial President than
a real.
In Part 1 we referenced the infamous hysteria triggered in Salem Massachusetts by Betty
Parris (age 9) and Abigail Williams (age 12).
In 1692 their prepubescent imaginations were apparently more than capable of detecting the
evil doings of witches at loose in their community; and a population hopped up with Calvinist
enthusiasm for the supernatural works of the Almighty apparently was also capable of lapsing
into collective madness – at least for a spell.
But who would have thought that in the year 2018 the grizzled adults and racketeers who
populate the Imperial City would fall prey to the same momentary outbreak of deliriums?
After all, Vladimir Putin was the very same Putin who made a mere cameo appearance in the
2012 presidential debates. He got an honorable mention when Barack Obama appropriately schooled
Mitt Romney on the fact that Russia was not America's principal national security threat.
Indeed, the MSM commentators who are shrieking about Trump's parlay with Vlad today were
knowingly furrowing their brows about Romney's alleged gaffe back then.
So the question at hand is what changed? How did the politics as usual debating points about
the status of Russia and Putin only 69 months ago turn into a veritable Salem style
hysteria?
We'd suggest two pivotal events turned the Imperial City upside down. To wit, Barry lost his
nerve in August 2013 on the Syrian red line and Donald Trump won the 2016 election in the red
zones of Flyover America.
In between, the mainstream media completely lost its grasp on reality as the Imperial City
dove headlong into it latest and greatest Indispensable Nation adventures by intervening in
Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Yemen, and Iraq for the third time.
The Indispensable Nation conceit, of course, is the ultimate cover story for the work of
Empire and is the polar opposite of the rudimentary America First notions on which Donald Trump
rode into the White House.
As it happened, the Indispensable Nation meme flourished when the neocons and liberal
interventionists became ascendant during the Clinton and early Bush 43 era; and they virtually
ran the policy tables after 9/11 as the full-throated War on Terrorism cranked up a powerful
head of steam.
Nevertheless, the acolytes of Empire nearly lost their political lunch when Shock & Awe
in Iraq turned into a bloody quagmire and the retaliation against the Taliban for harboring the
9/11 conspirators ended up as an endless trillion dollar war in the Hindu Kush.
That's why the peace candidate won in 2008. And it didn't matter that Barrack Obama was an
utterly unqualified greenhorn Senator and former part-time law professor and community
organizer who had no more claim to the Oval Office in his day than the Donald did this time
around.
But Barry was too much the quick study by half. Rather than dismantle the rogue postwar
Empire of the neocons and militarists, he sought to make it smarter and more deft. So he
populated his national security team with moderate neocons like Robert Gates, Leon Panetta,
David Petraeus and Victoria Nuland and a posse of liberal interventionists including Hillary
Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power.
Our point here is not simply that peace never had a chance with that crowd in charge of
policy; it's that the outbreak of the so-called Arab Spring in early 2011 triggered a toxic
brew of interventionist enthusiasm among Barry's foreign policy team that quickly metastasized
into R2P (responsibility to protect) madness in Libya and Syria.
Needless to say, even a newly arrived Martian visitor in 2011 what have been scratching his
head about Libya.
In his advancing old age, Khadafy had turned himself into a model non-proliferator and
exclusively inward focused tyrant. Libya thus posed a threat to exactly no one outside its own
borders; and it was just plain laughable as a matter of concern to the security of the American
homeland.
But Hillary and her posse famously danced on Khadafy's grave after NATO-enabled terrorists
brought about his brutal demise. So doing, they learned a dangerously erroneous lesson.
Namely, that uncooperative dictators who purportedly threatened their citizens with
genocidal repression could be clinically removed for a few billions worth of bombs, drones and
aid to local rebels.
That proposition really had nothing to do with homeland security in America and was belied
by the fiascoes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now the "smart" people were in charge, and both
Libya and Egypt were proof they knew how to make Regime Change happen with a minimum of muss
and fuss.
Yet any intelligent reading of the impossible sectarian politics of Syria put the lie to
that conceit in a heartbeat.
Indeed, given the 40-year history of the Assad family business built around Baathist
secularism and a protective umbrella for Syria's numerous minority confessions – Alawite,
Druse, Shiite, Christian, Jewish, Kurd etc. – the very idea of arming Sharia-spouting
Sunni Arabs to overthrow the Assad regime was sheer lunacy.
So whatever the immediate origins and allegedly peaceful intentions of the anti-Assad
uprising in the spring of 2011, it did not take long for these clashes to degenerate into
bloody urban warfare.
And it did not take a lot of figuring to also see that arming Muslim Brotherhood sectarians
was absolutely guaranteed to generate a violent response from Damascus. That's because the
Brotherhood had been the historic vanguard of Sunni religious opposition to the Baathist
secularism of the Assad regime; and had been brutally suppressed by the senior Assad in the
1980s.
Beyond that, it was also a given that the Shiite polities on either side of Syria's borders
would likely come to Assad's aid. That is, the Iranians in the east and Hezbollah across the
southwest border in Lebanon – to say nothing of the regime's longtime Russian patrons,
whose only naval base in the Mediterranean was located on Syria's tiny slice of coastline.
In any event, Obama's neocons and R2P liberals threw every caution to the wind. In going all
in for regime change and demonizing Assad as a butcher who used barrel bombs and chemical
weapons against innocent civilians, they maneuvered Obama – newly feisty as the slayer of
Osama bin-Laden – into drawing his famous red line on the use of chemical weapons.
Needless to say, that was catnip to the Nusra Front and ISIS jihadists who dominated the
armed opposition. It did not take long for them to mount a false flag attack in Ghouta in
August 2013, which horrified the social media connected world when 1300 civilians suffered
gruesome deaths from what was apparently sarin gas.
Only later did rocket experts demonstrate that the sarin had been delivered by short-range
projectiles launched from jihadist controlled areas outside of Damascus, not by Assad's forces
15-20 miles away. But at the moment, the job was done: Obama was on the hot-seat of his own
foolishly drawn red line – exactly where the jihadist and his own interventionists wanted
him.
When he attempted to escape the trap by punting the decision to bomb Assad to Capitol Hill,
however, Cool Hand Vlad saw his opening. To wit, he quickly brokered a deal with Assad to have
his entire chemical weapons arsenal removed and destroyed under international supervision.
That was operationally executed by the acknowledged neutral experts at the OPCW
(Organization For The Prevention of Chemical Weapons) and there is little doubt that the
preponderant share of Assad's arsenal was eliminated.
Yet for that act of constructive statesmanship, the neocons and liberal interventionists
never forgave Putin. Then and there he became Bad Vlad because his action on chemical weapons
but the kibosh on Washington's excuse for regime change in Damascus.
In fact, the War Party interventionists of both stripes – neocons and R2P liberals
– went on the all-out attack in September 2013, transforming Putin from the also
mentioned adversary of the Obama-Romney debate one year earlier into a veritable
demon . Hillary now even insisted his was a modern day Adolph Hitler.
As it happened, the duly elected President of Ukraine chose that same fall to pursue an
economic bailout deal with Moscow to rescue his country's debt-laden, corruption ridden
post-Soviet economy; and he did so in lieu of the far less attractive deal that had been
offered by the west through the EC, IMF and Washington.
Not surprisingly, that wholly appropriate decision by the leader of a sovereign nation
became exactly the opening for the Washington interventionists to strike hard at Putin and
Russia.
We have detailed elsewhere how the so-called Maidan uprising on the streets of Kiev in
February was funded, organized and enabled by Washington and its cadres of operators from the
CIA, NED, State and sundry NGOs; and how that divided the country to the quick politically when
Washington installed and recognized a radical nationalist government that immediately moved
against the Russian speaking populations of the Donbas and Crimea.
Indeed, enabling the Kiev coup and instantly recognizing the crony capitalists, ruffians and
neo-Nazi nationalists who formed the new government was the single stupidest act of peace
candidate Barry's entire presidency.
But by then the interventionists were in high dudgeon. So there was no stopping their
virtually instantaneous demonization of Russia and Putin for actions which were self-evidently
driven by Russia's vital national interests in it own backyard – not some kind of
aggressive quest for territory or lebensraum.
To wit, Putin did not "seize" Crimea like it was some country in the Benelux that he
coveted. To the contrary, Crimea was virtually Russian to the core after it was purchased by
Catherine the Great in 1783 and thereafter when Sevastopol become the homeport for the great
black sea fleet of czars and commissars alike.
For crying out loud, Crimea was never part of Ukraine until Khrushchev had the
Soviet Presidium transfer it in 1954 from the Russian Soviet Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet
Republic as a gift to his Ukrainian compatriots who had stood with him the bloody struggle for
Stalin's succession.
So Washington decided to declare economic war on Russia through Obama's idiotic sanctions in
order to make sure that the dead hand of the Soviet Presidium's writ is enforced 64 years
later.
Besides, Russia did conduct a referendum which was fair by all objective accounts; and under
which 83% of the eligible voters elected to return to Mother Russia after what had been an
historical short interlude of rule by the Ukrainian state. Among other things, the
overwhelmingly Russian speaking population of Crimea as not enthusiastic about being culturally
"cleansed" the Ukrainian nationalists who now ruled in Kiev.
Likewise with the Donbas and the other nearby Russian speaking provinces on the eastern
border. Many of them had been put there generations earlier by Stalin to man what was the
industrial maw – coal, iron, steel, chemicals and heavy engineering – of the Soviet
Union.
And all of them knew of the terrors that had occurred during WWII when the Hitler's
Wehrmacht marched through the Donbas and destroyed everything and everyone in sight on its way
to the siege of Stalingrad, and how it had been accompanied by legions of Ukrainian
collaborators during the terror.
They also knew that the region had eventually been liberated from the Nazi terror by the Red
Army as it returned through the region on its way to Berlin.
Yet the interventionist fools in Washington ignored all of this and proclaimed Putin menace
to peace and the rule of law because he came to the aid of the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking
population, which did not want to be ruled by the Ukrainian nationalists who had illegally
sized power in Kiev.
The obvious solution all along was partition – just like happened when Washington
forced Serbia to give up Kosovo; or when the artificial country of Czechoslovakia, created by
backroom intrigue at Versailles in 1919 peacefully decided to separate into two sovereign
countries a few year back.
In short, there is no there, there. The Ukraine/Crimea "aggression" is nothing of the kind,
and Putin was in Syria because he was invited to be there by its sovereign government.
In fact, the whole demonization campaign, the sweeping economic sanctions and NATO's
provocative encroachments on Russia's borders in the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea are nothing
more than retaliation for Putin's wise rescue of Barrack Obama from his own stupid red
line.
But this isn't the end of the stupidity. In part 3 we will strip the bark off the Russian
election meddling meme by laying out the simple fact that a country which is no threat to the
security of the American homeland, but which has been viciously attacked by Washington, might
will seek to make it's case for a different policy.
That is to say, none of this is about espionage or stealing military secrets. It actually
boils down to the obvious fact that Donald Trump had an open mind about Russia and had not been
party to Obama's cabal of neocon and R2P interventionists and their campaign of revenge against
Vlad Putin.
That Putin preferred Trump was a no brainer and he admitted as such at the Helsinki Summit.
But that Putin's preference for Trump had absolutely nothing to do with the outcome of the
election is also patently obvious.
Nevertheless, the Deep State has cooked up a massive fiction that claims Moscow made every
effort to do so.
We intend to tear that Big Lie limb-for-limb in Part 3, but suffice it here to consider the
take below from CIA veteran
Philip Giraldi . It does remind that Salem on the Potomac is actually happening in the here
and now:
Beyond what is or is not contained in the document itself, there is a clear
misunderstanding regarding how a sophisticated intelligence organization, which certainly
includes the GRU, operates. If there had been a large-scale Kremlin sanctioned plan to
disrupt the US election, it would not be run by twelve identifiable GRU officers working with
what appears to be only limited cover and resources. If the facts are correct, the activity
might have been a routine probing, collecting and selective dissemination of information
effort that all intelligence agencies engage in. The United States does so routinely in many
countries, interfering in elections worldwide, far more than Russia with its limited
resources, and even carrying out regime change.
If the Kremlin's objective were truly to undermine American democracy, a task that is
already being undertaken very ably by the GOP and Democrats, hundreds of officers would be
involved, all working under deep cover and operating securely out of dispersed sites. And no
one involved would be using computers connected to networks that could be penetrated to
enable personal identification or discovery of the ultimate source of the activity. Everyone
would be working in alias on stand-alone machines and the transmission of information would
be done using cutouts to break any chain of custody. A cutout might consist of using thumb
drives to transmit information from one computer to another, for example. There would be no
sending or receiving of information by channels that could be identified by NSA or CIA and
compromised.
So the idea that the United States government identified twelve culprits who were
responsible for trying to overthrow American democracy is by any measure ludicrous, if indeed
there was a major plan to disrupt the election at all. The indictment is little more than a
political document seeking to undermine any effort by Donald Trump to establish rapprochement
with Vladimir Putin. It will also serve to give fuel to the Democrats, who are still at a
loss to understand what happened to Hillary Clinton, and Republican hawks like John McCain,
Lindsay Graham, Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse who persist in seeking to refight the Cold War. As
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin said in their Helsinki press conference, the coming together
of the leaders of the world's two most powerful nuclear armed countries is too important an
opportunity to let pass. Cold Warriors in Washington should take note.
In A Corporatist System Of Government, Corporate Censorship Is State Censorship
August 10, 2018 •
92 Comments
In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between
corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship, argues
Caitlin Johnstone in this commentary.
By Caitlin Johnstone
Last year, representatives of Facebook,
Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to
"quell information rebellions" and adopt a "mission statement" expressing their commitment to
"prevent the fomenting of discord."
" Civil wars don't start with gunshots, they start with words," the representatives were
told. "America's war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media
battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and
easily transform us into the Divided States of America."
Today Twitter has silenced three important anti-war voices on its platform: it has
suspended Daniel
McAdams, the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute, suspended Scott Horton of the
Scott Horton Show , and completely removed the account of prominent
Antiwar.com writer Peter Van Buren.
I'm about to talk about the censorship of Alex Jones and Infowars now, so let me get the
"blah blah I don't like Alex Jones" thing out of the way so that my social media notifications
aren't inundated with people saying "Caitlin didn't say the 'blah blah I don't like Alex Jones'
thing!" I shouldn't have to, because this isn't actually about Alex Jones, but here it is:
I don't like Alex Jones. He's made millions saying the things disgruntled right-wingers want
to hear instead of telling the truth; he throws in disinfo with his info, which is the same as
lying all the time. He's made countless false predictions and his sudden sycophantic support
for a US president has helped lull the populist right into complacency when they should be
holding Trump to his non-interventionist campaign pledges, making him even more worthless than
he was prior to 2016.
But this isn't about defending Alex Jones. He just happens to be the thinnest edge of the
wedge.
Infowars has been censored from Facebook, Youtube (which is part of Google), Apple, Spotify,
and now even Pinterest, all within hours of each other. This happens to have occurred at the
same time Infowars was circulating a petition with tens of thousands
of signatures calling on President Trump to pardon WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange,
who poses a much greater threat to establishment narratives than Alex Jones ever has. Assange's
mother also reports that this
mass removal of Infowars' audience occurred less than 48 hours after she was approached to do
an interview by an Infowars producer.
In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between
corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Because
legalized bribery in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations has given wealthy Americans the
ability to control the U.S. government's policy and behavior while ordinary Americans have no
effective influence whatsoever, the U.S. unquestionably has a corporatist system of government.
Large, influential corporations are inseparable from the state, so their use of censorship is
inseparable from state censorship.
This is especially true of the vast mega-corporations of Silicon Valley, whose extensive
ties to U.S. intelligence agencies are well-documented . Once you're assisting
with the construction of the US military's drone program , receiving grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance, or having your site's content
regulated by NATO's propaganda arm , you don't get to pretend you're a private,
independent corporation that is separate from government power. It is possible in the current
system to have a normal business worth a few million dollars, but if you want to get to
billions of dollars in wealth control in a system where money translates directly to political
power, you need to work with existing power structures like the CIA and the Pentagon, or else
they'll work with your competitors instead of you
Censorship Through Private Proxy
And yet every time I point to the dangers of a few Silicon Valley plutocrats controlling all
new media political discourse with an iron fist, Democratic Party loyalists all turn into a
bunch of hardline free market Ayn Rands. "It's not censorship!" they exclaim. "It's a private
company and can do whatever it wants with its property!"
They do this because they know their mainstream, plutocrat-friendly "centrist" views will never be censored. Everyone
else is on the chopping block, however. Leftist sites have already had their views slashed by a manipulation of Google's algorithms, and it won't be
long before movements like BDS and Antifa and skeptics of the establishment Syria and Russia
narratives can be made to face mass de-platforming on the same exact pretext as Infowars.
This is a setup. Hit the soft target so your oligarch-friendly censorship doesn't look like
what it is, then once you've manufactured consent, go on to shut down the rest of dissenting
media bit by bit.
Don't believe that's the plan? Let's ask sitting US Senator Chris Murphy: " Infowars is the
tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our
nation apart," Murphy tweeted in response
to the news. "These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our
democracy depends on it."
That sure sounds an awful lot like the warnings issued to the Silicon Valley representatives
on the Senate floor at the beginning of this article, no? This is headed somewhere dark.
We're going to have to find a way to keep the oligarchs from having their cake and eating it
too. Either (A) corporations are indeed private organizations separate from the government, in
which case the people need to get money out of politics and government agencies out of Silicon
Valley so they can start acting like it, and insist that their owners can't be dragged out on
to the Senate floor and instructed on what they can and can't do with their business, or (B)
these new media platforms get treated like the government agencies they function as, and the
people get all the First Amendment protection that comes with it. Right now the social
engineers are double-dipping in a way that will eventually give the alliance of corporate
plutocrats and secretive government agencies the ability to fully control the public's access
to ideas and information.
If they accomplish that, it's game over for humanity. Any hope of the public empowering
itself over the will of a few sociopathic, ecocidal, omnicidal oligarchs will have been
successfully quashed. We are playing for all the chips right now. We have to fight this. We
have no choice.
This
commentary was originally published on CaitlinJohnstone.com .
Ms. Johnstone is right. Government pressure on corporations works but the media in all its
forms does a pretty good job of sowing discord without government interference. There are so
few instances where the government and the major media are not in sync, they are hard to
find. As to allowing the lonely voices of worthy organizations like Consortium News, why
should they bother. Allowing them creates the pretense of free speech. If they become
dangerous, the mood of our elected officials is to fix the problem as Ms. Johnstone rightly
notes. The defense of freedom of speech by government and the major media is very selective,
and the use of the calling fire in a loaded theatre standard is a big enough vehicle for
suppression to drive a truck through, a whole convoy in fact.
As an aside, watching Sixty Minutes on their hit piece about Russian interference in our
elections was an example of sloppy journalism that seems to be the norm. when it is about
Russia. I was about to say they never used to be like that, but I think that is probably not
true.
Bulls-eye!!!! especially on Democratic party loyalists who perform a much more important
function for plutocracy than the Republicans and the Tea Party – to rally around fake
progressive politics dripping out of the DNC, and effectively drain off the pressure building
for true progressive politics.
cjonsson1 , August 12, 2018 at 1:50 pm
This is a good example of Caitlin explaining what is going on in the American media wars
which is crucial for people to know.
Our access to information, other than government propaganda, is becoming very limited because
the few major social network corporations are owned by a few wealthy individuals or private
government contractors. They are monopolies which should be designated public utilities, and
regulated as such, or broken up into smaller entities, allowing for competition.
It is important to preserve what is left of our freedom of expression and our free press. The
ability to comment on reporting and discuss it with others is diminishing while sources are
becoming more and more restricted.
Government and big business fight the public for control of information and opinion. We have
to collectively save our stake in democracy by rejecting censorship.
You make some very good points. Alas, I disagree about Alex Jones. The very few times I've
listened to his videos, it seemed to me every last thing he said was absolutely true and
correct. So I don't know where the idea comes from that he speaks disinformation. He's
sometimes obnoxious and hard to watch. But that's a different thing. His words are accurate,
particularly about the globalists, the deep state, US-Russia relations, and Trump.
"It is possible in the current system to have a normal business worth a few million
dollars, but if you want to get to billions of dollars in wealth control in a system where
money translates directly to political power, you need to work with existing power structures
like the CIA and the Pentagon, or else they'll work with your competitors instead of
you."
Actually, If companies get big, they become potential big tools/weapons for the war-making
State, at which point they will be offered a deal that they can't refuse, as one would expect
within this gangster Corporatocracy. Look at Wikileaks. Mozilla simply jumped on the fake
news bandwagon, so they are now safe, as Aaron Kesel at Activist Post points out. Lavabit's
owner, Ladar Levinson had principles and was loyal to his customers (including Edward
Snowden) whom he didn't want to betray just because the Corporatocracy State demanded it, and
so he shut down. He revived his company once he figured out ways to shield his customers from
the war-making State that attacks us all in the name of 'national security'.
So, it's a little more dire than the government just deciding to favor your competitors,
which of course the amazing Caitlin knows.
With all of this capture by tech giants, innovators, by the war-making State (Randolph
Bourne), How will end? I have more than one answer to that. One of those answers is the
obvious one: Ramped up counterrevolution, in the area of cyberspace mainly, in the State's
war against the people. And such a war is underway as any number of authors have demonstrated
thoroughly. And its not (just) Russia attacking the people. Jeff Halper wrote "War Against
The People." Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes edited "The Secure And The Dispossessed." Douglas
Valentine wrote "The Phoenix Program," which he notes wasn't confined to Vietnam. Noam
Chomsky and Edward Herman wrote the devastating two-volume "Political Economy Of Human
Rights," which included "The Washington Connection And Third World Fascism." And Edward
Herman wrote: "The Real Terror Network." All of those books and many others talk about
counterrevolution and the counterinsurgency (State terrorism) that goes with it.
And counterrevolution and counterinsurgency doesn't have to be of the extreme variety,
such as in South Vietnam when the US was torturing that country to death. Caitlin has talked
about how the State (New Zealand) went to work on her friend, Suzie Dawson. Read the account.
It's quite illuminating.
What do you call 'thinking' that is against 'thinking' (and what we consider to be a part
of innovation that leads to inventions that elevate society? It's called counterrevolution.
That's where our corrupt tech giants have gone. It won't end well for them, even if they
think otherwise and even if they feel safe because they are with the big guy. There's a
bigger guy who has that big guy in his sights.
Somehow I had missed those words from our elected "representatives" in Congressional
hearing. What these political pimps and whores don't want us to do is get together and agree
to dispel the bullshit that we're up to our necks in right now.
As far as I know this is the first piece I've read by Caitlin Johnstone, and I agree with
her general premise that this is more than just ominous. More and more of our elected
"representatives" talk and act like alien totalitarians.
The good news is that Trump's "trade" and saber-rattling belligerence is finally awakening
the rest of humanity to the fundamental non-starter of a unipolar anything. That one entity
so militarily, politically, and economically dominant that it can cause pain and suffering
wherever and whenever it decides. It is ironic that Trump's MAGA is the act in this play that
will dethrone the USA. The downside is that the 99% control NOTHING (this is true across most
of the planet.) Another downside is that the megalomaniacs in power will not concede power
without a cataclysmic conflict. But nothing is set in stone, though the indications don't
look promising.
"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary
opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had
the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
"But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the
human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion,
still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the
opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is always a great benefit
– the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision
with error."
– JOHN STUART MILL (1806-1873) English political economist, philosopher
Realist , August 11, 2018 at 3:12 am
Something must be getting into the water supply either by accident or design to induce the
mass hypnosis that has so many presumably intelligent people believing that we must all walk
in lockstep on every policy the elites want. Maybe we are all zombified from the massive
amounts of Xanax, Valium, Oxycontin and other mind-numbing psychoactive agents our population
consumes and pisses, unmetabolized, into the water table to be recycled into our drinking
water, obviating the need for a personal prescription to enjoy (suffer) the effects.
It's a real pity if the totally transparent sham scare stories they have disseminated are
alone enough to convince most of the people to give up their constitutional rights and
privacy. Clearly the tactic of the big lie doesn't work on every last individual or sites
like this one would not have an audience. That is why they want to shut us down, and Alex
Jones, though not a member of this journal club, is just the first step towards an outcome
that will encompass everyone remaining outside an all pervasive Groupthink.
Ideas, beliefs, memes, values, customs, habits and such are not received universally from
some inspirational force on high. (You are simply told to believe that from earliest
childhood.) They are spread through the population like a virus from mind-to-mind contact,
whether in person or via some modality of mass communication, like the TV or the internet.
The object of censorship, as per Alex Jones or Ron Paul most recently, is to extirpate the
source of "infection" as close to its point of origin as possible, before it can be spread to
too many carriers for transmission to others. People tend to believe what they hear and what
they hear comes from their regular contacts. Shut down their favorite talk show host or
internet site and they become starved for new "seditious" ideas. If they never hear a truth,
chances are they won't think it up themselves and certainly not act upon it.
Another thing I am pretty sure of: if their attempts at propaganda, psy-ops and mind
control do not work to their satisfaction, unadorned thuggery will become the new standard. I
know, I know, some of our number already get a taste of that.
Dave P. , August 11, 2018 at 5:46 pm
Realist –
"Another thing I am pretty sure of: if their attempts at propaganda, psy-ops and mind
control do not work to their satisfaction, unadorned thuggery will become the new standard .
. . "
You have it absolutely right. There have been markers all along since G.W. Bush/Cheney
rule, clear indicators of this new Future.
But some of us are so desperate to have a better and peaceful future for the humanity on
this planet that we get our hopes high for any silver lining in the sky – Obama's hope
and change, now Trump's getting along with Russia and stopping interventions abroad.
Now it seems like there is this new hoax the Democrats are going to perpetrate, candidates
with some type of socialist orientation, like Bernie Sanders supposedly has been or is. The
politicians in both parties are accomplished ConMen, in service of the real Masters –
MIC, Wall Street Finance, Media and Entertainment, working to bring this new Future. Bernie
Sanders is no different.
Skip Scott , August 12, 2018 at 7:08 am
"Now it seems like there is this new hoax the Democrats are going to perpetrate,
candidates with some type of socialist orientation, like Bernie Sanders supposedly has been
or is. "
I have noticed this ploy as well. They are willing to have a few faux progressives to keep
the progressive wing of the party from abandoning them altogether. They use Sanders, and now
this new Ocasio-Cortez, to sell their "big tent" narrative, and then co-op them when it comes
to all the important issues. They also constantly sell the idea that voting for third party
candidates is a waste of time, so you have to settle for "the lesser of evils" when it comes
time for a new president. I don't know how long they can keep playing the same con-game
before people see through it, but if it happens again in 2020, I think we are doomed.
Realist , August 12, 2018 at 10:01 am
The Democratic incumbent running for the senate in Florida (Bill Nelson) has made me so
angry by yet again using the party con against Russia that I could never vote for him even
though his opponent is the horrendous Governor Rick Scott (who plead guilty to defrauding
Medicare to the tune of a billion dollars for his Columbia HMO system prior to his election).
I cannot abide such theft of taxpayer money in broad daylight, but I also cannot accept
Nelson's spewing lies that Russia has actively hacked the Florida voter roles, plans to
delete registrations and disrupt the November elections. You know who's really more likely to
do those things? The Democratic and Republican parties.
Nelson is just making pre-emptive excuses for the loss that he sees coming. If he believes
his desperate gambit can work, he must think the voters are damned idiots to believe that
Russia would persist in perpetrating sabotage against American interests putting them
constantly in the crosshairs of our politicians and media. He must think that Floridians will
buy any tall tale that their elected officials tell them, totally unsupported by any
evidence. We are to believe that Assad never stops trying to poison his own people and that
Putin never stops interfering in American elections. (Why should Putin favor Rick Scott?
Because he admires American crooks?) If you truly believe such accusations, it is probably
logical that you would favor WAR with that country. I will vote for someone from the
Baader-Meinhof gang or the Taliban Party (if there is such a beast) before either Nelson or
Scott. Or I won't vote at all.
Zero Hedge tonight has an interesting article by Charles Hugh Smith, "The Grand Irony of
Russiagate: US Becomes More Like USSR Every Day". The clampdown in the old Soviet Union
before its collapse has parallels to what's going on in US now.
Jeff Harrison , August 10, 2018 at 5:12 pm
From Wikipedia. Fascism:
Fascism (/?fæ??z?m/) is a form of radical authoritarian ultranationalism,[1][2]
characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong
regimentation of society and of the economy.
The Cheetos-in-chief would love to wield dictatorial power and has tried to do so in the
past as have his predecessors (Obama, yeah, well, we had to torture some folks::Shrub you're
with us or against us.). Senator Chris Murphy essentially telling these companies who to kick
off their platforms, the regimentation of society and the economy is continuing apace as
companies are forced to comply with government demands that the government should never be
able to make but they do for "national security reasons"
Pfui. As I've said before the US has become a fascistic police state.
MBeaver , August 11, 2018 at 10:50 pm
Many other western countries, too. The only thing missing to "fit" fascism is the
nationalism. They completely gave up their national identity for neoliberal agendas. I wont
look for a new term, because its as close to fascism as anything else, especially since the
definition of leftism and socialism has changed a lot since fascism was invented (by a
socialist), so why shouldnt the definition of fascism a tiny bit?
But it exposes people who always cry "its not fascism" because nationalism is missing, as
accomplices at the very least.
Also, as an objective person, you should at least admit, that "cheeto-in-chief" is
actually trying hard to keep the promises he made. I havent seen that in a western leader in
a very VERY long time. Its just very obvious that the president isnt almighty and the deep
state is very powerful. Thanks to Trump its become evident to even fools, that the USA is
much more corrupt than even any conspiracy theorist would have thought just a few years
ago.
jaycee , August 10, 2018 at 4:27 pm
The idea that discordant speech is somehow a threat to the nation or democracy is so
looney and bereft of fact that it is actually painful to contemplate how many otherwise
intelligent persons seem to have internalized the notion. Obviously, Trump's election victory
severely damaged the Establishment's confidence in the ability to "manufacture consent" to
the degree that fundamental concepts of free speech are now in the cross-hairs. They will
destroy the Republic in order to save it.
When the corporate state speaks of "hate speech" and "community standards" – one can
be sure they are not referring to Madeline Albright's stunning defense for killing of a half
a million Iraqi children with sanctions as "worth it." Nor would the corporate state ever
categorize as "hate speech" the daily attack by a wide variety of U.S. officials and media
pundits, not only on the Russian government, but on the very – "character" – of
the Russian people as a whole.
Our actual and very real – "community standards" – in the U.S. include the
complete normalization of illegal immoral endless aggressive war-making in violation of
international law (not to mention regime change by jihadists, drone murders, economic
warfare, political assassinations, etc.) – along with the despicable demonization of
official enemies – in other words the total "normalization of hate-speech."
"Violations" of these widely held U.S. "community standards" & "hate-speech standards"
involves plain and simply any – "challenge" – to them or deviation from them. In
other words to speak words not sufficiently 'anti-Russian' today is considered a form of
"hate speech" in MSM and in political discourse. To suggest peace rather than war with Russia
might be a good idea is to violate precious "community standards" which today tolerate only
mindless fact-free warmongering in public discourse. You really can't make this stuff up!
Dave P. , August 10, 2018 at 5:48 pm
Excellent comments. So true.
We are heading towards some sort of dark ages, and at very fast pace.
Maxwell Quest , August 10, 2018 at 10:00 pm
Gary, pointing out the shameless and bald-faced hypocrisy as you did can sometimes shake
the stupefaction from an open-minded reader. Sadly, though, arguments such as these just seem
to bounce off the Russiagaters, having no effect. Conversely, these very same people couldn't
lavish enough praise on the peace prize winner Obama, whether he was bailing out the corrupt
banks, letting the lobbyists craft Obamacare, trafficking arms through Benghazi, or droning
some wedding party in the desert.
What do both of these examples have in common? Easy, the state media was able to control
the narrative in each case, and these same hypnotized drones ate it up hook, line and sinker.
This brings us right back to why internet-based censorship is the hot topic of the day, since
it is the single most threat to complete state control over the public mind.
Dave P. , August 10, 2018 at 11:09 pm
Well said. Obama is not gone yet. He is still out there selling his philosophy of
promoting the Wall street and corrupt banks, and droning and killing the weak and innocents
all over the world , for the right cause so to speak – spreading freedom and democracy.
And liberals buy it. What a World we live in!
He, along with Clintons, is the main instigator of "Russia Gate", which may lead the human
life to extinction on Earth.
Realist , August 11, 2018 at 2:24 am
Dave
Yes, anything is permitted (by Washington) as long as it is in the name of "freedom and
democracy." So say the leaders of our exceptional country.
Realist , August 11, 2018 at 2:22 am
Damn straight, Maxwell.
Mildly Facetious , August 11, 2018 at 4:16 pm
Yes, anything is permitted (by Washington) as long as it is in the name of "freedom and
democracy." So say the leaders of our exceptional country.
??????????????????????????
They do this because they know their mainstream, plutocrat-friendly "centrist" views will
never be censored.
Everyone else is on the chopping block, however.
Leftist sites have already had their views slashed by a manipulation of Google's
algorithms, and it won't be long before movements like BDS and Antifa and skeptics of the
establishment Syria and Russia narratives can be made to face mass de-platforming on the same
exact pretext as Infowars.
-- - compare that, if you've a clue, (not to obfuscate your subject), Caitlan Johnstone,
with, not mere censorship, but the Protection of 'Confidential' information such as the
Industrial Pharma INDUSTRY OF DEATH (shades -of -nazi-germany??? )via INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION
and PRESCRIBING OF OPIOIDS as if Huxley's "Soma" or/and a preview of " The Chemical and
Bacteriological Conditioning of the Embryo. – Practical Instructions for Beta
Embryro-Store Workers /// as in government forced vaccinations along with Facebook enforced
capitulation of any/all -- Personal Sovereign Belief/s massively defaulting and bowing the
knee and Becoming Persuaded and Trapped into inescapable Autocracy, by reason of Darwin-esk
dissembling and a dis-informed election to Dissent Into The Maelstrom of the sinking ship of
American Exceptionalism, -- as if God could/would "forgive" all-of-the-collective Brutality
of Bombs, bullets, Uranium Munitions / CRIPPLING Sanctions imposted -- support of brutal
dictators Who massacred INNOCENT Civilians in order to obtain/secure US MILITARY FUNDS, in
order to secure autocratic/authoritative CONTROL
We are engulfed in a Molding Faze of acceptance of/into a totally new Reality strangely
built upon Nazi science/experiments, now Entering an/the Age of Space-Age manipulation of
DNA, Gene Manipulation -- origins of species ordered inside test tubes.
George Gilder prophetically saw this in this and more in his prescient 1990's book,
MICROCOSM. --
George Gilder and his Discovery Institute were far Ahead – of -the -curve in this
'Facebook" era of Futurisms .
Please find and consider his book, esp as it relates to technological possibilities and
the New Wonders (Brave New Worlds) of Gene splicing / manipulation .
Trump could assure himself such support by getting rid of all the swamp creatures around
him.
The first persons to dump are Javanka, who are the worst kind of swamp – Zionist
libtards. Next he should dump his running mate Mike Pence, who is part of the swamp. Pence
brought in Zionist swamps like Rosenstein, John Bolton, Nikki Haley.
He also needs to get rid of Jeff Sessions, bring in an AG who could fire Rosenstein and
Mueller, investigate and prosecute the Clinton-Uranium One scandal, that case alone will
topple all of Deep State incl. Rosenstein and Mueller. It'll put Obama's legacy in
tatters.
Kris Kobach will most likely become governor of KS this Nov, but if he doesn't, Trump
should tap him for AG.
And now you know what's the problem with America, the stupid voters who voted for Bush,
and the demise of the Constitution and the freedoms it contained,after all he did say the
Constitution was nothing but a G.D. piece of paper and promptly wiped his ass with it and
people rushed to vote for him again.Was he selected of course he was, they are all selected
by the CFL, or some sister organization who then funds them, Trump was an angel from heaven
for the corporations and the MIC after all those billions of dollars was an early Christmas
present, it was the mine the other 80-90% got the shaft with yet another trillion added to
the debt.As the man said people usely get what they deserve, and indeed they deserve whats
coming and party will make no difference
It's nice to remind people that Lincoln was a Republican. An old blog post of mine provides a
clearer explanation:
Jan 2, 2011 – The War to Reclaim Federal Property 1861-1865
I've noticed the "Power Elite" have decided to rewrite American history in regards to the
American Civil War. This was known as the "War Between the States" or the "War of Secession",
but was officially named the "Civil War" as a Congressional compromise some 40 years later.
The Power Elite recently mobilized their media front men to proclaim that war was all about
slavery. Anyone who contends it was about states rights is labeled ignorant or a racist.
Symbols of the Confederacy have been targeted for destruction, claiming they are racist.
Slavery was a horrible institution, and was the prime source of friction between the
states in the 1850s. Some wanted a military crusade to free the slaves, while an equal number
demanded a military crusade to crush the evil Mormons in Utah. There was never strong support
in Congress to ban slavery since many wealthy New Englanders profited in the textile business
that relied upon cheap cotton from the South. In addition, the cherished American
Constitution allowed for slavery.
Had Congress made slavery illegal and our military ordered to enforce that law, it would
have been a war against slavery, and it would have lasted but a few months. However, that is
not how things played out. Southern states feared that Northerners were using the federal
government to dominate the nation that was conceived as a federation of states. Slavery was
the key issue, but most Southerners didn't own slaves, and slavery was contentious within
Southern states as many citizens opposed it. The Southern states peacefully and
democratically seceded and formed the Confederate States of America (CSA), in the same way
they joined the Union just two generations prior. The U.S. Congress didn't declare that
illegal, nor did the Supreme Court.
Newly elected President Lincoln decided he would not tolerate the CSA, so he ordered it
crushed. He assumed our military could quickly overrun the much weaker Confederate state
militias, but it turned into a disastrous war. A key problem is that Lincoln refused to
outlaw slavery and use that as a cause for military action, but said the effort was to
preserve the union. As a result, Northerners were not enthusiastic about invading the South,
while anti-slavery Southerners and the silent majority of non-slave holding Southerners felt
compelled to defend their state from invasion. As his effort to "preserve the union" became a
debacle, Lincoln finally evoked ending slavery as a cause with his 1863 "Emancipation
Proclamation". Even that did not free the 800,000 slaves in the slave-holding states of
Missouri, Maryland, West Virginia, or Delaware, which had never declared a secession.
Some say Lincoln only did this to prevent England from entering the war on the side of the
CSA. England was upset by the Union sea blockade that denied its textile mills of cotton.
Lincoln implemented his own form of slavery, the military draft, to fill his crusading army.
The movie "Gangs of New York" addresses this issue toward the end -- the resulting anti-draft
riots by New York immigrants. The great movie "Glory" shows white Union troops angry at
forced service in Lincoln's crusade. Most of Lincoln's free Negro troops were slaughtered in
frontal attacks during the war, and only earned half-pay.
In summary, slavery was the primary cause of conflict between the states, but the Civil
War was caused by Lincoln's blundering. He failed to act decisively because he had no
official standing to end slavery, yet when he did act as a dictator, he refused to promote it
as an anti-slavery crusade. As a result, most Southerners fought to defend their state from
invasion, not to protect slavery. The Northern industrialists made huge profits from this
war, so they sainted Lincoln as one of our greatest Presidents, for suspending the U.S.
Constitution and causing the most disastrous event in American history.
A recent book destroyed the notion that the South is more racist than the North. Without
going into too much detail(read the book, it's really good) the book reveals where the
staunchest racist lie, and that is in the North – Eastern Ohio, Western Pennsylvania.
Now there are historians/people/people I know/teachers/government employees that got it in
their head that a bunch of very racist union troops where willing to leave their comfortable
home and very segregated cities up north, and go down south to fight and die to free the
black man. A crazy fairy tale that happens to be true.
What's funny for me is this, the "United States", consisting of states that joined together
voluntarily in an union, by the same measure should have been allowed to secede any time they
wished, without interference of a tyrannical central government, which should not even have
that authority. Patrick Henry was right.
No one's stopping you from finding out on your own. But if you need help getting started,
here are a couple relevant quotes:
Charles Adams: The South paid an undue proportion of federal revenues derived
from tariffs, and these were expended by the federal government more in the North than the
South: in 1840, the South paid 84% of the tariffs, rising to 87% in 1860. They paid 83% of
the $13 million federal fishing bounties paid to New England fishermen, and also paid $35
million to Northern shipping interests which had a monopoly on shipping from Southern
ports. The South, in effect, was paying tribute to the North.
The address of Texas Congressman Reagan on 15 January 1861 summarizes this discontent:
"You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the
operation of our revenue law, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making
your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the
vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are
not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the
balance of exchange which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South
are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of northern capitalists. You are not
satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and
institutions." As the London Times of 7 Nov 1861 stated: "The contest is really for empire
on the side of the North and for independence on that of the South ."
Carl Pearlston: In 1860, the 15 Southern states had 8 million whites and
4½ million black slaves, compared to 19 million whites and ¼ million blacks
in the North's 19 states. The vast areas of undeveloped western territory were rapidly
being settled by people whose economic interests were not with the South. It found itself
continually outvoted in both the Congress and Senate, especially on commercial regulations,
with the prospect of an increasing majority against it. The nub of the problem was that the
North wanted high tariffs on imported goods to protect its own manufactured products, while
the South wanted low tariffs on imports and exports since it exported cotton and tobacco to
Europe and imported manufactured goods in exchange. High tariffs in effect depressed the
price for the South's agricultural exports; the South paid high prices for what it bought
and got low prices for what it sold because of the federal tariff policy which the South
was powerless to change. Southerners viewed themselves as being dominated by the mercantile
interests of the North who profited from these high tariffs.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Virginia had proposed a requirement for a 2/3
majority to enact laws regulating commerce and levying tariffs, which were the chief
revenue of the federal government. George Mason of Virginia stated "The effect of a
provision to pass commercial laws by a simple majority would be to deliver the south bound
hand and foot to the eastern states". Virginia withdrew its amendment at the Convention in
the interest of securing adoption of the Constitution, but ratification was with the
proviso that it could be rescinded whenever the powers granted to the Union were used to
oppress, and Virginia could then withdraw from the Union. True to George Mason's
prediction, the high tariff of 1828 did bring the South to the verge of rebellion, leading
Senator John C. Calhoun to unsuccessfully champion the concept of Nullification and the
doctrine of the Concurrent Majority in 1833 to ensure that the South could have a veto
power over commercial acts passed by a simple majority in Congress and the Senate.
We can argue demographic data but many white Americans were not in the United States at
the time of the Civil War.
East Coast dominates and whites in the East Coast center aside from Jews tend to be
Italians (Rudy, Nancy etc) and Irish-Catholics (Kennedy's) whose ancestors arrived in the
late 19th or early 20th century.
So why is the Civil War important today? Because white Southerners long for some period of
time when being descended from English aristocrats was relevant?
THING B
Cubans have made Miami economically relevant if only because Caribbean dictators stick
their money to be safe from the next revolution and it attracts a great deal of international
tourism.
Texas pumps out a great deal of oil.
Otherwise, what is the relevance of much of the South? To who, and why? That they are
often poorer than the West Coast or the East Coast. That whites are poorest there? What's its
relevance? GDP? Technological innovation? Standard of living?
THING C
If the South could not have Federal bailouts than what would it do? More than Northern
states with massive human capitol from Wall Street brokers and businessmen and international
investors and tech giants the South has .well, poverty.
The North is not a reliant on Federal money. Northern California and Manhattan could tell
the Beltway to go F*(X themselves. They'd get by. But would Alabama?
THING D
The Southern border is the problem. It is not the Northern border. If anything, Canada is
the one saying they don't want whites from Maine or Michigan and rigidly enforce border
security.
Yet the South and Southwest allows millions of illegal immigrants through their
border.
Canada sure does a good job of keeping Americans from immigrating illegally. Try to do it.
I guarantee you'll be caught and end up with Canadian mounties and helicopters with infrared
surrounding you.
THING E
White Southerners seem to have a huge hard-on for Jews. There are not many Jews in the
South compared to Long Island or California. So why do white Southerners have this thing
about Jews?
Thomas L Thompson describes the task of the historian ' to make sense of the apparent jumble
of unrelated facts', but I always wondered if this hindsight sense is reality or a
construction.
There is a saying among historians 'a history book says more about the time it was written
than about the time it describes'.
Interesting in professional history books is how historians disagree, one finds them
critising colleagues in the notes.
In gymnasium I found history boring, nothing was explained, such as that the king of France
never ate hot food, the time between the food leaving the kitchen and being under his nose
was so long that it was cold.
I now know why.
History just becomes interesting when one knows details, alas these details dot not explain
anything, sometimes very little.
A historian of a very interesting book on how technical inventions changed society writes 'an
invention is a door opened on a until the closed room, but mankind never was obliged to go
into the room'.
Why mankind ignored many inventions, unexplained.
Thomas L Thompson, 'The mythic past, Biblical archaeology and the myth of Israel', London
1999
Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, ' The world of the Huns', 1973 Berkeley
Raymond Aron, ´Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire, Essai sur les
limites de l'objectivité historique', Paris 1948
Lynn White Jr., 'Medieval Technology and Social Change', Oxford 1962
D'Souza omits Lincoln's repeated desire that blacks be sent back to Africa.
And Cathey omits that that alone would make Lincoln smarter, wiser, and more just than
just about anyone in the South.
On the other hand, Lincoln thought Southerners and their beloved African livestock were
worth waging battle to keep in the Union. That alone is proof positive that Lincoln was
insane.
it was the various states that granted the Federal government certain very limited and
specifically enumerated powers, reserving the vast remainder for themselves
And the fugitive slave bills, no matter how constitutional, make a total hash of this.
Yeah, you can say that Africans were property, but they were not property on the north shore
of the Great Lakes. Why would they be on the south?
If Southerners wanted to keep their pets on the farm, they had the technology to build a
Berlin Wall along the Ohio and the Potomac, and let states to the north (not "North") make
their own policies concerning chattel.
This may be Mr. Cathey's reading of the Taussig book cited earlier in the paragraph. A
linked citation to the 8th (1931) edition can be found at the end of the Wikipedia article on
Taussig.
Without getting too technical, the finished goods and–especially–farm
equipment that the south depended on were mostly imported in those days. Additionally, there
was some fear in the south that foreign countries might retaliate with tariffs of their own
on the agricultural commodities that the south exported. To be sure, I don't buy the theory
that 'slavery had nothing to do with Civil War', but tariffs, no doubt, were at least a
contributing factor.
Just like after the failed jew inspired Weimar take over of Germany in the 1920′s,
after the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe, many squealing and kvetching marxist jews fled
to the US, where they quickly integrated into their "good for the jews" JP collective. The
Rothschilds, the bloodline families and the illuminati had already subverted all the masonic
lodges in precisely the same way they are using D'Sousa to subvert "conservatism" now, but
the JP was still gathering all the reigns of power into their hands.
In fact, what Jewish Power (JP) is doing with D'Sousa is deliberately dividing any
conservative resistance into the subverted "racist" alt-right and the subverted "non-racist"
Neocon war machine. Of course, the militarized police forces are being set up to be deployed
against the "racist" alt-right in the same way facebook, twitter and all the other JP social
media corporations have shut down the free speech of that same alt-right. This is the same
kind of judaic divide and conquer strategy that the tribe was using in the lead up to the war
of northern aggression.
D'Sousa is clearly a non-white, and like all dot-Indian immigrants he is merely another
form of trojan horse brought into our society in the same way jews opened the gates let the
moors into Granada and the Turks into Constantinople. Whether he realizes it or not, he is a
jew puppet brought in to destroy Christianity and European civilization and replace their
true liberalism with a Frankfurt School marxist cuckoo bird egg. Dot-Indians are to become a
new technocratic upper caste brought into to help jews keep the goyim slaves in line. No good
will come from allowing dot-Indians to preach judaicly perverted Christian morality back onto
us.
One of the little known characteristics of the War of Northern Aggression was that the
majority of slave plantation owners in the
south were jews , while the vast majority of Yankee bankers and slave traders were also
jews. This is precisely the same kind of jewish over representation that we see in SCOTUS,
Hollywood, Harvard and the "1%" today.
So it was JP and its Freemason puppets who started the War of Northern Aggression, and it
was a part of a thousand year old plan described in the Talmud and the Protocols to
obliterate Europeans and their culture from the face of planet earth as revenge for Titus's
destruction of the Second Temple to Solomon in 70AD. There is plenty of confirmation of this
in writings from places like the Frankfurt School, Saul Alinsky and Cultural Marxism.
Although D'Sousa pays lip service to exposing some of these hidden agendas, he cannot see the
forest because all he is willing to see is a "racist" hiding behind every tree. What a kike
tool he is.
Dave McGowan wrote in his great understated and laconic style about the judaic and masonic
lies surrounding the Lincoln assassination. You can read it for free online, along with his
great books "Wagging the Moon Dog" and "Weird Scenes in the Canyon".
Here is a fascinating unrolled, archived twitter feed about Lincoln and his jewish and
masonic connections, with lots of interesting embedded pictures:
"On the bottom of page three of four pages was a paragraph where the father, A.A.
Springs, left to his son an enormous amount of land in the state of Alabama which is now
known as Huntsville, Alabama. At first Mr. Christopher and his colleagues could not believe
what their eyes, because the name of his son was "ABRAHAM LINCOLN" !
This new information added to what they had already learned about the Springs, whose
real name was Springstein , was one more twist to this already enigmatic family."
US population 1860, 31.5M. 4M slaves, so 27.5M free people, vast majority white.
Determining what "the South" was in 1860 is a little ambiguous. Slaveowning states? States
that seceded?
Let's look at all slaveowning states. Total white population – 8M. Which leaves
18.5M in "the North," or free states.
Tariffs are duties charged on imported goods. They are paid at the point of entry, not by
the eventual buyer, other than indirectly. Hence there was no way to charge different taxes
for different sections other than, theoretically, by including or excluding certain items
from tariffs or by changing rates based on the rate of purchase of such items in the
difference regions.
So for the 80% claim to be accurate, the 29% of white people who lived in the South would
have to purchase tariffed goods at a rate 2.8x that of white people who lived in the North.
Does that seem likely to you?
The Adams quote is not evidence, it's merely the source for the claim made in this
article. It's from a book published in 2000. Adams, in that book, may quite possibly provide
evidence the claim is accurate. But that Adams stated something is not evidence that the
statement is true.
So the North did not used finished goods or farm equipment? The question is not whether
the South paid tariffs on imported goods, it's whether the 29% of southern whites paid 80% of
the tariffs, rather than the 71% of northern whites. Which would mean southern whites would
have consumed finished good and farm equipment at a rate almost 3x that of northern whites.
Which doesn't make a great deal of sense.
It is often claimed that the South was agricultural while the North was industrial. But of
course in 1860 the North was also still primarily agricultural. Of the 18.5M northern whites,
5M or 27% were urban (defined as living in towns over 2500). Of the 8M southern whites, 1.2M
or 15% were urban by this definition. (Which is probably not the best definition.)
This means that 73% of northern whites did not live in cities or even towns. As in the
South, most of them were farmers. This was especially the case outside of the Northeast,
where cities and industry were concentrated.
An Iowa farmer paid (indirectly) exactly the same tariff as the South Carolina planter.
And, for that matter, so did the Pennsylvania mill owner or worker.
" In summary, slavery was the primary cause of conflict between the states, "
Weird, in a country that treated the Indians far worse than the slaves.
I spoke to an old USA lady, who was proud on her grandfather participating in smuggling run
away slaves to the North.
When I talked about the Indians her reply was 'before the Indians there were others'.
I did not continue the discussion, but to this day do not understand how helping black people
was good, but ethnically cleaning and killing Indians was irrelevant.
Read'em and weep my little mis-informed, publicly educated man. Although truth is a bitter
pill, it must be swallowed if you are ever to rise above a mind controlled sheep.
You may very well be right. That book is 500+ pages, and while I downloaded it, I'm not
really going to slog through it to find some quote that may or may not line up with the 80%
number.
However, Taussig, in his discussion of the prewar tariff (Part 2 – Chapter 1),
states that it was the lowest it had been in a long time and was generally along free trade
lines. I don't think anybody is going to find much support in Taussig for the notion that the
intolerable exploitation of the tariff was the primary cause of secession.
I've seen this 80% number tossed around for years, and have never been able to track it to
its lair. The closest I've been able to come is the fact that 60% of exports were cotton, and
if you add in other southern exports, you might get close to 80% of US exports being from the
South.
But of course exports are not tariffs. I suspect the two have been conflated and then the
statistic passed from one source to another without bothering to check if it's, you know,
true.
Say's the MAGA Trumptard .Try as you might, sometimes it is impossible to stomp out
ignorance from the public and the propaganda(lies) from the likes of the Neocon knee boy
D'Souza.
The one very significant fact that becomes clear in his latest cinematic screed is that
D'Souza is ignorant of American history, and that he is an ideological and historical
fabricator who seeks, in the name of defending his adopted nation, to bend and mishandle
its history to fit a preconceived narrative which satisfies his Neoconservative task
masters.
In my experience with American "educators," I can state with confidence that the great
bulk of them fit the description of "ignorant fabricator" or worse. Much the same can be said
of the products of their so called "education" including journalists and pundits.
The other factor cited was that majority of federal spending would be in the North.
Federal in 1860 was $78M. Let's at least note that in a country of 32M people this was an
itsy-bitsy amount, nothing even remotely similar to the impact of federal spending today. It
was $2.43 per person. Hard to be terribly oppressive with that kind of budget!
Hard to find numbers on what the government spent its money on and where. But 37% was
Defense and 4% interest.
Much if not most of the Defense funds were spent in the West, where most troops were
stationed. Which was of course neither in North nor South. A lot of Defense money at this
time was also being spent on fortifications to defend ports. The South, having a much longer
coastline, got a big chunk of this money, with, famously, a big project underway at Fort
Sumter.
Another big chunk of spending was clearly related to the overhead of the government, as
largely located in DC. Which was in the South.
One of the biggest operations of the federal government was the postal system, which is
population related.
So while it's possible the majority of federal funds were spent in the North, depending on
how you define the terms, I'd be very surprised indeed if more federal funds were spent in
northern states than their percentage of the population.
Great article by Boyd in once again exposing the massive lies about "hero" Lincoln and the
true causes of the war of northern aggression. I see the trolls or mis-informed are also here
in force. Just a little advice from George Carlin: "Never argue with an idiot.They will only
bring you down to their level and beat you with experience."
Your link reiterates the claim that protective tariffs were the primary cause of the war.
But it asserts the claim. It provides very little in the way of evidence.
Amusingly, the cartoon about the Morrill Tariff is dated April 13, which was of course
long after the initial secession. The Morill Tariff was passed as a result of secession,
because it removed a large chunk of opponents from Congress, allowing it to pass when it had
failed previously.
You simply can't use a tariff that passed after and because of secession as the cause of
that secession.
You know, I've read the Declarations of Secession of every state, though it's been a
while. Every one of them cites as the reasons for seceding primarily issues related to
slavery. I don't recall any mention of tariffs at all, though it's possible they were cited
in passing.
If excessive tariffs/taxation were the cause of secession, how exactly was the South
planning to finance its new government? The South would now have the full overhead of a
govenrment, formerly split with the North. It would also clearly have to finance a major
expansion of Defense to guard a long and hostile border with the USA. It's likely that if the
South had left the Union uncontested, its 8M whites would have wound up bearing a larger tax
burden than the 27M whites of the united country bore in 1860.
THING E
White Southerners seem to have a huge hard-on for Jews. There are not many Jews in the South
compared to Long Island or California. So why do white Southerners have this thing about
Jews?
#1 Reason since just over 100 yrs ago is .The Cyrus Scofield-perverted interpretations KJV
Bible, and the fact that about 99% of Scofield Bible evangelical Jewdeo-Christian Devotees
reside within the very same 10 or so Southern States that made up the Confeds of the civil
war era.
These are the who's that make up the huge vast majority of Jewdo-Zio-Christians, who
basically worship, Jews & Israel, and do so regardless of what Jewry or Israel has ever
done or will do that most sane folk consider to be wrong, bad, evil, unethical, and immoral.
In other words, when the issue revolves around Israel or Jews Both can never, ever do such
wrongs etc Period. No amount of proofs, documented and vetted facts, or anything else can
change this. Only a self-wake-up, performed by each affected and delusional, warped minded
individual has any chance of real success at lasting and good changes.
Just among the Southern Baptist Conference group membership, is a whopping, 25,000,000+
individual members. This is the absolute largest sized group, aprox. one half of entire
amount, of such worshipers of Jewry & Israel within the entire, Jewnited Snakes of
Jewmerica.
And furthermore, if not for their rabid foam at mouth worship of both entities, aka
synagogue of Satan combo of Jewry+Israel, America would never be able to continue on as an,
Colony of Tel Aviv Israel. There also would be massive exiting of most neocon repubs, who
also worship Jewry & Israel, if not for these so totally Duped Via scam Scofield
falsehood biblical interpretations, voters.
Now do you understand, HTF aka how the fuck in the world did Nikki Haley get elected as
Governor in a deep south state of S. Carolina ? Or Bobby Jindal also Governor in another deep
south state ? .Very easy to do, all those two Israel firster clowns needed do to get elected
by mostly White Southern voters .Was to state their deep love for and never ending support
for Jewry & Israel! .And an election win was in the proverbial bag, eh. Add in massive,
several generations worth of, constant White Guilt effects, and the fools would likely elect
Chicago's Louie Da Farakahn as Alabama Governor as long as he too did a 180 and stated avowed
love and support for Jewry & Israel. Cuz, Now he beez a Changed colored folk man, and
seen dat light to worship Jewry like's we does.
The first US Supreme Ct. Case about, is a slave owned as Real property, like land or
homes? Was a case dealing with a run away slave, that ended up in some northern state and was
being protected by those northern folks. The BLACK Man slave OWNER, of the run away black
slave, is who brought that case to supreme court .and He Won his case. Supremes decided a
slave was property owned by slave owner who paid $$$ for his slave, and no matter Where slave
was found or protected from return to slave owner Black man, those northern protector folks
Had to hand slave back over to his Black Man slave owner. So that refutes the part you wrote
of .."Yeah, you can say that Africans were property, but they were not property on the north
shore of the Great Lakes. Why would they be on the south? "
It is probably a good thing that the GA state, Black Woman who owned over, 300 black
slaves, and was about the wealthiest $$$ Woman in the state then, didn't have her slaves run
away eh? Because for her to need bring hundreds of run away slave cases all the way to us
supreme ct, would have likely depleted her vast $$$ holdings down to, herself perhaps needing
to work as a black slave just to eat eh.
Funny/Ironic they never taught us about Black Slave Owners back in school 50+ years ago
eh? I reckon such truthful facts would cause all the anti-whitey propaganda agendas to, fast
come Unglued and so awaken dumbed down white kids, they may never recover to again maintain
vast white guilt feelings the Jewdeo-commie-Marxist Frankfurtist's worked so hard to develop
in Whites.
If you have not read the book, Gangs of New York , strongly recommend it.
The depiction in the movie is confused, too brief, and does not capture the scale at all.
Really, it was one of the battles of the war, not just 'riots'.
Reading the account, the idea of the CSA somehow having some coordination with the
anti-draft protestors would make a nice (but unlikely, due to pace, other factors)
counter-factual history.
GoNY is worth reading in general, but the most surprising parts to me were that part and
the final parts on the rise of Jewish organised crime in Noo Yawk.
No doubt, both topics that Scorcese was wanting to avoid.
The movie seems not near his best at all, especially after reading the book.
Do you want others to post the texts, with annotations, of the books to which you've now
been directed? In a comment thread under an article on a website? I doubt that you would be
so absurd and ungracious without pseudonymity.
At this point, it now is incumbent on you to either (i) back down or (ii) go find and
share the title of a scholarly work that might validate your hunches. Then, those who care to
learn the truth can dig in. A group that apparently doesn't include "Logan."
Heros: Indeed, and here are a couple of famous high rated Jewish guys who fully confirm
the Vast, Huge, Massive role Jews played in not only America's slave trading/owning business
But also, even long prior when Jews had control of European slavery, which consisted mostly
of, European White Christians that Jews sold into slavery, To Arabs After Jews stole or
kidnapped said euro white Christians of course.
"Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American
colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently
dominated. This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth
century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought slaves from Africa to the
West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and
converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750s, David
Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760s, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760s and early
1770s dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent."
-- Marc Raphael (Jew): "Jews and Judaism in the United States: A Documentary History"
This quoted statement is from the same book, Blood Passover, that not too long ago an UNZ
Article was done about it!
"During this period, Jewish merchants, from the cities in the valley of the Rhône,
Verdun, Lione, Arles and Narbonne, in addition to Aquisgrana, the capital of the empire in
the times of Louis the Pious [Louis I]; and in Germany from the centres of the valley of the
Rhine, from Worms, Magonza and Magdeburg; in Bavaria and Bohemia, from Regensburg and Prague
– were active in the principal markets in which slaves (women, men, eunuchs) were
offered for sale, by Jews, sometimes after abducting them from their houses. From Christian
Europe the human merchandise was exported to the Islamic lands of Spain, in which there was a
lively market. The castration of these slaves, particularly children, raised their prices,
and was no doubt a lucrative and profitable practice "
-- Dr. Ariel Toaff, Chapter Eight, Blood Passover . This book was ordered taken off book
shelves and destroyed. Toaff was the son of the chief rabbi of Rome and had access to
synagogue writings dating back to the Middle Ages.
And it wasn't any "Nazis" or German's who did the book burnings on that expose' of Jewry
eh.
"To communicate anything to a Goy about our religious relations would be equal to the
killing of all Jews, for if the Goyim knew what we teach about them, they would kill us
openly."
-- The Talmud: Libbre David 37
"The modern Jew is the product of the Talmud."
-- Michael Rodkinson, in preface of Babylonian Talmud, page XI.
"The Talmud is to this day the circulating heart's blood of the Jewish religion. Whatever
laws, customs, or ceremonies we observe -- whether we are Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or
merely spasmodic sentimentalists -- we follow the Talmud. It is our common law."
-- Herman Wouk, "This is My God." Wouk wrote the book and screenplay "Winds of War," popular
back in the 1970's.
Well, perhaps those last few quotes explain or answer the question of, "Gee why are there
so very Few good Jews it seems, huh"? Ie: 99%+ adhere to their Talmud.
He assumed our military could quickly overrun the much weaker Confederate state
militias, but it turned into a disastrous war.
Sorry, but this is flatly untrue. Lincoln was entirely aware that he did not have forces
sufficient to crush the rebellion.
The entire US Army in 1860 was composed of 16,000 men and officers, almost all scattered
across the West in tiny packets to defend against Indians. About 20% of them promptly left
when secession and war broke out.
So by the time of Sumter, Lincoln had perhaps 14,000 men scattered across an entire
continent. At this same time the state of SC alone fielded around 10,000 men, albeit mostly
not nearly as well trained or armed as the Regulars.
In fact, during the very early days of the War Lincoln's primary concern was that there
simply was nothing at all to stop southern troops from marching straight into DC. I've not
been able to find numbers for VA militia in 1860, but given that its white population was 3x
that of SC, I think it's not unreasonable to assume VA had 25,000 or more men under arms in
April of 1860. That would have outnumbered the entire US Army almost 2:1, even assuming the
Regulars were concentrated, which they most certainly were not.
People just don't realize how tiny the early 19th century US Army was. The organized
militia of the Nauvoo Legion in the early 1840s numbered at least 2500. Compare that to the
8500 in the entire US Army. That's a single city.
The title of the movie should have been, "Dems R Real Rayciss, Part 2; Electric Bugaloo"
I agree with pretty much everything in this article. I'm not a degreed historian (and
don't play one on TV), but I have been reading and studying this conflict for more than 40
years. The perspective is always given from the wrong angle, that of the people of the North
vs. the people of the South; it was not. It was the elites of the North vs. the elites of the
South.
Elites of the North were industrialist, bankers, and those involved in commerce. The
elites of the South were the Planters. What they were fighting over was the treasury, most
specifically Mercantilist use of the treasury; i.e. spending Federal funds on roads, canals,
bridges, harbors, and railroads to benefit commerce and trade. If anything approaching half
of that spending had occured in the South, allowing Southern elites to profit from it, there
would have been no war. As it was, almost all of it was spent north of the Mason Dixon
line.
The Planter elite were THE Congressional opposition to various bills proposing the use of
Federal funds for infrastructure improvement. All such projects were plagued with graft and
corruption, all ran over budget and schedule. The Achilles Heel of the planters was slavery,
and THAT is why slavery was attacked. The vast majority of the people of the North could
hardly care less, except that they considered the practice embarrassing, like a preacher
having a drunk for a brother.
There are always at least two reasons for every war; those used to motivate the common
masses to fight, and the real reason, which is always and forever power, or control of
resources. This war was no different. James McPherson, prof. of History Emeritus, Princeton,
a man who HATES the South, investigated the reasons common soldiers fought, and discovered,
to his dismay, that the men of both sides fought for almost exactly the same reasons, they
just interpreted them differently. The men of both sides saw themselves as patriots;
Northerners defending the Union, and Southerners defending the ideals of the Revolution.
It was a complicated war, and anytime it is painted in simple terms, it is done so for
some political or ideological purpose having nothing to do with presenting a factual and
honest narrative.
BUT LET ME SAY THIS AS BOLDY AS I CAN – IT DOESN'T MATTER TODAY. IT MAKES NO
DIFFERENCE NOW. IT IS A FRACTURE POINT TO DIVIDE US AT A TIME WE SHOULD BE UNITED.
The Dems R Real Rayciss meme was introduced originally by Dinesh, and was very popular
among misguided, historically ignorant Southerners, and still is among some. This meme is the
very reason we got traitor Nikki Haley for governor, and houseboy Tim Scott for a senator
here in SC. The gaping flaw of this meme is that it acknowledges the social, racial, and
cultural arguments of the progressives, and in reponse merely says, "no, you are."
This meme irritates me like no other, because I, for one, believe the Democrats in those
days were right, and the Republicans were not only wrong, but were destructive to American
ideals. The United States was founded as a free and voluntary Union of States. That union was
destroyed the day Lincoln called for volunteers to invade the Southern states. Lincoln and
the Republicans destroyed the free union, and erected another from its ashes, the one we live
with today.
The Democrats were right about States Rights (10th Amendment), slavery, the Constitution,
and later they were right in confronting the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction. They
were right about keeping the races separated. Readers of this site, especially those iSteve
readers, are aware of the consequences borne by the white race since the Democrats abandoned
racial reality.
The Republicans today are not the Republicans of 1860, nor are they the polar opposite of
the Democrats, though I wish they were.
Whether our ancestors were Confederate, like mine, or Union, or both, or neither if your
ancestors came afterwards, is of little consequence today. We can argue points of contention
about a war already fought and won in our spare time, but we do have a war going on now, one
every bit as grave and consequential to the future of the United States, and we should really
focus on that.
Wiki: "The first Chief Justice of the United States was John Jay; the Court's first
docketed case was Van Staphorst v. Maryland (1791), and its first recorded decision was West
v. Barnes (1791)."
Neither had anything to do with slavery.
Methinks you're conflating the much earlier case where a Virginia colonial court first
decided that blacks could be held in permanent slavery, rather than indentured servitude with
a limited term of service. Ironically, the plaintiff/owner in that case was himself a black
man who had previously served a term as an indentured servant.
I stated my opinion that it is inaccurate, and requested evidence to the contrary, if it
exists.
One of the more common logical fallacies is "shifting the burden of proof." The article
made a claim about facts. I requested evidence that the claim is true. So you and others
respond by claiming that I must disprove the claim. That's not how logic works.
Same thing applies to any such claim as that "Sherman is a pederast Cultural Marxist."
I can reply that the accusation is untrue, which of course it is. But I can't prove it to
be untrue, as "proving a negative" is inherently very difficult, though not perhaps always
impossible. This is the main reason our legal system requires the State to prove the guilt of
the accused, not the accused to prove his innocence of the charges.
Luckily, the burden of proof is on the accuser in this case also. Feel free to provide any
evidence you might have that any of these aspersions are accurate.
I looked up Taussig, one of those to which I was referred. Did not read the 500 page book,
but did read the chapter about the prewar tariff. It does not at all line up with what is
claimed. In fact, he states that the prewar, pre-secession tariff was largely free trade. I
refer you to Part 2, Chapter 1 of his book.
I haven't read Adams, also cited as a reference. Possibly his book includes documentation
that the claim is accurate.
But it all gets back to the "burden of proof."
Person A: The wage gap between men and women is entirely the result of sex
discrimination.
Person B: Can you provide proof that your assertion is true?
Person A: I don't have to. It's up to you to prove it is false.
Okay, okay. It's not a very good analogy, as proving that other factors also play at least
some role in the wage gap is not hard. But my point is that if one asserts a claim as fact,
one should be prepared to back up that claim with evidence. Which does not consist of a
reference to a book in which purportedly the author made the claim. That author also would be
required to prove the truth of the claim.
I have had such conversations a number of times with Leftists/Liberals. They never have an
answer that makes sense.
My assessment is it primarily is about the Who/Whom. The best way to grasp that is to know
that while so much as being white and living in a state that had legal slavery in 1860 marks
you condemned, being the direct ancestor of super rich New England WASPs who made a fortune
from slave trading is not to be discussed in public, much less condemned.
The Who/Whom is not about the non-whites involved but the whites doing to other whites as
the end game. Pure WASPs from New England and the whites who became their closest allies by
the Revolution (NY Dutch and PA Quakers and Old Germans) cannot be held accountable for slave
trading (though nearly 100% of the massively profitable cross-Atlantic slave trade was by
those very people). So the 'other whites' are damned as white trash.
If whites moving in and displacing Indians is The Great Sin, then all those Yankees are
guilty as Hell. But if the Great Sin, the Unpardonable Sin, is owning black slaves, then the
original 'mainstream media' which was owned and operated 100% by Yankee WASPs could declare
that slave shipping by their people was to be forgotten and also that what happened to
Indians was totally insignificant compared to the pure evil of owning a black slave in
1860.
And then they could claim that all their usurpations of government were really about
saving the Union an spreading democracy.
Jews did not invent the ultra hypocrisy and self-righteous mendacity and blood-lust that
IS Neo-conservatism.
What you are demanding is information not easily acquirable on the internet, namely
records of Federal Revenue, broken down geographically, and Federal spending broken down the
same way. Such records exist, but I have only seen them in the footnotes of various books.
Let me aid your understanding, however.
Remember reading of the American Industrial Revolution? Where did it take place? In New
England, of course. And in 1860 there were counties in New England that had more
manufacturing than every state in the Confederacy combined. These tariffs were protective in
nature, and only placed on manufactured goods. At first they were only placed on those goods
which were also produced in the US, but later nearly anything manufactured outside of the US
was subject to a tax.
Who paid the tariffs? Those who purchased goods manufactured outside the US. The planters
of the South paid a generally agreed upon estimate of 80% of tariffs due to simply wanting
things not manufactured in the US; grand pianos, gilded mirrors, certain tiles for roofs,
English buggies and carriages, French dresses, etc., etc.
The Nullification Crisis over the Morrill Tariff only happened because the South paid most
of the taxes. It was the South, particularly South Carolina, which objected to the increase
in tax rates. I must also point out to those unaware that John C. Calhoun supported tariffs
for the common good of the United States; he was not opposed to them until this point in
time, and only opposed them out of political expediency.
It's pretty clear from a casual reading of the history that the Southern states, who had
no manufacturing to speak of, paid most of the tariffs, and benefitted from them the least.
Whether or not you're satisfied, this is so.
The next point of contention is where the revenues were spent. Southern senators and
congressmen were not without power, in fact they were the dominant power up until around
1830. The fight over slavery in the new territories was all about congressional
representation, and guarding the parity which was reached in 1830. So there were some
projects, mostly military forts and bases, in the South, built with federal money.
However the largest part of federal spending was infrastructure to ease transportation for
commerce. Some money was spent on the nation's two largest ports of the time, Charleston and
New Orleans, but much, much more was spent on canals, such as the Erie Canal, railroads, and
bridges up North. Most federal infrastructure spending, by far, were those projects which
aided the transportation of raw goods from the Midwest to the East Coast.
There are books which break these down in detail, but I'm not going to be your private
Google and hunt them down for you. There are no historians I have read, or read of, who
contest this particular point, that the South paid most of the tariffs, and that most of the
money from them was spent up North.
EXCELLENT article. I love reading concise argument presented by someone who knows how to
think and write. We are lost, but as the writer makes clear, the losing has been a long time
in the making.
You are correct. Civil war had nothing to do with slavery. Civil war was about textile
industry, and so keeping the profits in US instead giving them to England. Slavery was only
flag of camouflage.
Just as in Orwells OCEANIA history is be rewritten every day by the Zionists who control the
U.S. gov and just like Oceania it is rewritten to satisfy the Zionist line whatever that may
happen to be at the time.
War is peace, ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery and Israel is the sacred
cow.
Much like what happened with the Soviet Union, when the end comes for the "United" States,
secession will be the mechanism that allows it to happen. Going forward, states rights, once
a nearly forgotten topic of discussion, will become increasingly debated.
Just a couple of points; One is that the Emancipation Proclamation specifically excluded
Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Delaware (slave states which did not secede), as well as
Tennessee, 7 parishes in Louisiana, and 10 counties in Virginia, all of which were currently
under Federal control.
I think it's a bit naïve to lay the war at Lincoln's feet, and neglect the powers
that raised him from a railroad lawyer to President. The elite of both sides were ready to
fight, and I believe that by that time a war was unavoidable. All Lincoln could have done was
delay the inevitable.
There was a documentary I watched not long ago on dueling in the South. One professor from
Virginia held that the war was the largest, and last, duel in American history. The
Southerners honor was besmirched by the claims of the North, and the press in particular, and
nothing would suffice save blood be shed on the field of honor. This is something not given
much attention, but it should be. The Code Duello in use at the time was written by a former
governor of South Carolina, and planters would duel at the drop of a hat, and drop the hat
themselves. Andrew Jackson fought 13 duels, and was not atypical of the elite of the
time.
The Northern interests wanted to forever defeat their enemy, the planters, and turn the
South into a colony, of sorts. They also saw a lot of money to be made selling goods to the
army and navy, and the opportunity to force huge changes in the government in the expediency
of war. "Never let a good crisis go to waste," is something that was not invented by Rahm
Emanuel.
Those who fought for the Union were fighting to defend the United States from Balkanization
and dissolution at the hands of the predatory British and French Empires. Those who fought
for the Confederacy were fighting to defend their perceived state and local rights. Chattel
slavery was a secondary issue.
It is time to let this conflict rest in peace. We can attribute noble motives to both
sides, provided we recognize the excesses committed- particularly those by Sherman on his
march through Georgia and the Carolinas- as well as the horrendous treatment of the prisoners
of war by both sides.
Too nuanced and truthful to ever be seen or heard, much less comprehended, by
98% of the people in this country of TV-level, willful ignorance.
I so wanted to hit the "agree" button, but my Aspie nature kicked in and so instead I
FIFY.
Nothing "nuanced" about it. It galls me to no end that the evil bastard who slaughtered
more Americans than any other, who shredded the Constitution of our Republic, has a gigantic
monument in his honor on the National Mall and is enshrined as a hero by the public. And I
have family who died on the wrong side of Lincoln's evil War of Northern Oppression.
Butchering 2.4% of the population, Lincoln was by far the most evil man in American
history and one of the worst in human history.
The debate's been ongoing for over 2 years now: Is Trump part of the Deep State, or is he an
outlier backed by a Deep State faction?
Escobar answered the second clause's query in the positive as he admitted being fed info
by a member of that faction. If one's an independent hitman and gets hired by the Mob, does
that make you a member or do you remain just an affiliate? IMO, once employed, you become a
member until you're no longer employed. Ergo, Trump's a member of the Deep State as he's
employed by one or more of its factions.
What was/is the Deep State's stated goal? Full Spectrum Dominance of the planet and outer
space. When was it explicitly stated? During WJ Clinton's second term when Clear Skies
2010 was published, which provided flesh to GHW Bush's announcement of the New World
Order. Is that goal compatible with the 1787 US Constitution? No, in a host of ways, but most
importantly it violates the UN Charter in wholesale fashion.
So, as one who pledged an oath to defend the US Constitution from all enemies, foreign
and domestic , should the orders of POTUS Donald Trump be obeyed since we've just
deduced he's a member of a domestic enemy cabal? No! He must be resisted.
But who do we deem not a domestic enemy, which is to ask: Who can/do we trust, or
should we trust nobody? Of course, these questions are primarily for US citizens to ponder,
specifically those of us who still stand by our Oath despite being discharged from service,
and of course those actively serving or in reserve capacities.
Or maybe some person will shoot my logic full of holes.
Thursday, the New York Times decried Trump's accusation that the media are "the enemy of the
people." "Insisting that truths you don't like are 'fake news' is dangerous to the lifeblood of
democracy. And calling journalists 'the enemy of the people' is dangerous, period," said the
Times .
"... I would say the first turning point was the imprisonment of Khodorkovsky and the restoration of Russian sovereignty in the energy sphere. Subsequent major inflection points have been: the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 events in Ukraine, and the post-2016- election manufactured anti-Russia hysteria/neo-McCarthyism. ..."
"... Kees van der Pijl fills in the details here (ignore the title of the piece): https://www.unz.com/article/why-was-malaysian-airlines-flight-mh17-shot-down/ ..."
"... the "Putin is a *thug*" meme has been successfully promulgated as shorthand that acts as a justification for anything done or said against both Putin and Russia. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the thugs are those in our Congress and executive branch and such as Mueller, who are pushing the country beyond its tolerance levels or, shall we say, ability to right itself after a knockdown (maritime metaphor is intended). ..."
"... I think the rollout of the new cold war actually began when Putin stopped the looting of his country that was occurring under Yeltsin. The evil empire only accepts vassals, not partners. Maximum capital must accrue to the one percent, and be free to flee the country to the tax haven of choice. Any world leader who tries to build an economy for the benefit of its nation's citizens becomes a target. ..."
"... I figure it was the Magnitsky ruse that got the ball rolling. It predates Ukraine and was grounds for the first round of sanctions. ..."
I would say the roll-out of Cold War 2.0 and the concerted demonizing of Putin and the
Russian Federation began with the Ukraine Coup in February 2014, as was well covered here at
Consortium News. The policy – isolate Russia as a pariah nation – was set before
the Maidan events reached their resolution. Victoria Nuland's "f -- - the EU" rant was in
response to efforts to mediate the situation and possibly spoil or derail the plans. IMHO,
the Russian response to the violent coup was fully expected by the Americans to have been a
tanks-in-the streets-Czechoslovakia-1968 scenario, and yet all they got was a Crimean
referendum and a frozen stalemate in eastern Ukraine. Still, policy being policy, NATO
reacted as if there had been a full invasion regardless.
Anecdotally, conversations I've had with intelligent, progressive, good-hearted persons
suggests the election of Trump has in effect destabilized their critical thinking abilities.
This has opened up the space in which the worst aspects of Cold War 2.0 have flourished. In
their minds, the urgent need to remove Trump by any means, fair or foul, fully overwhelms any
other priorities, including objective consideration of the current moment.
Joe Tedesky , August 13, 2018 at 10:14 pm
I think you are right about Ukraine. I also recall that everything went downhill after
Putin negotiated for Assad to give up all Syria's chemical weapons. Which gave cause to
believe Putin was being punished for interfering in the Coalitions schemes. I think Robert
Parry sighted that as well.
No matter jaycee I too believe that Ukraine was where the U.S. fired the first bullet.
This New World Order the U.S. represents doesn't negotiate, no instead it's either our way or
no way, is the mantra of the tribe. Joe
Joe Tedesky , August 13, 2018 at 11:08 pm
I wrote a response jaycee that went to the wind . What I was saying was Putin got punished
with the uprising in Ukraine after he pulled Assad out of the chemical weapons debate.
Joe
Suggestion the Consortium needs to get this comment boards algorithm problem figured
out.
Sibiriak , August 14, 2018 at 2:55 am
Jaycee:
"I would say the roll-out of Cold War 2.0 and the concerted demonizing of Putin
and the Russian Federation began with the Ukraine Coup in February 2014 " -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
I would say the first turning point was the imprisonment of Khodorkovsky and the
restoration of Russian sovereignty in the energy sphere. Subsequent major inflection points
have been: the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 events in Ukraine, and the post-2016- election
manufactured anti-Russia hysteria/neo-McCarthyism.
"I would say the roll-out of Cold War 2.0 and the concerted demonizing of Putin and the
Russian Federation began with the Ukraine Coup in February 2014,"
As in statistics perceived trajectories are functions of framing including evaluation
horizons.
From inception, and through declarations such as the Monroe doctrine, some in the
misrepresentation "United States of America" have perceived others as simultaneously
existential threats and existential opportunities.
These existential threats and opportunities have been facilitated and acted upon as
functions of perceived needs and opportunities.
The targets and modes of activation of these perceived needs and opportunities have varied
according to perceived needs and opportunities, sometimes using the tactics of "hot wars" and
sometimes using the tactics of "cold wars".
Some in the misrepresentation "United States of America" have correctly perceived others
as existential threats and opportunities to/for them given their socio-economic system and
its perceived requirements – the functions of the "other" being multi-various –
the definition of the "others" include but are not necessarily restricted to those of
difference within and without the "United States of America".
Some in the Soviet Union in the early 1970's attempted to conflate "strategy" with
"tactics" and decided to forget notions of existential threat and perceive only existential
opportunity through conflation, thereby facilitating detente on the basis of spheres of
influence.
War is not restricted to things that go bang but restricted to forms of coercion.
The misrepresentation "cold war", which was never cold but sometimes engaged through
proxies, was/is a context specific tactic.
Some are of the view that the ends justify the means instead of understanding that means
condition ends, and consequently some facilitate and rely upon increasing the conflation of
strategy with tactics increasing the sum, motivations, and resolve of the "others", thereby
conditioning strategy through accelerating, continuing and expanding existential threats.
Those who engage in such self-delusion were not/are not restricted to the
misrepresentation "United States of America" but as Thucydides and others were aware, have
been/are generally restricted to those who perceive others as existential opportunities and
threats.
Some others correctly assess the misrepresentation "United States of America" to be more a
land of opportunity than an existential threat.
Litchfield , August 14, 2018 at 7:48 am
I agree with your comment.
A good precis.
And the "Putin is a *thug*" meme has been successfully promulgated as shorthand that acts as
a justification for anything done or said against both Putin and Russia.
Meanwhile, the thugs are those in our Congress and executive branch and such as Mueller, who
are pushing the country beyond its tolerance levels or, shall we say, ability to right itself
after a knockdown (maritime metaphor is intended).
Skip Scott , August 14, 2018 at 11:47 am
jaycee-
I think the rollout of the new cold war actually began when Putin stopped the looting of
his country that was occurring under Yeltsin. The evil empire only accepts vassals, not
partners. Maximum capital must accrue to the one percent, and be free to flee the country to
the tax haven of choice. Any world leader who tries to build an economy for the benefit of
its nation's citizens becomes a target.
Aime Duclos , August 14, 2018 at 1:50 pm
Yes, Skip, when the West's pillaging and looting of Putin's country was stopped, the one
percent was not amused. Add to that NATO's constant march up to Russia's borders, the threat
to and actual placement of "defensive" missles on Russia's border.
The last straw was the US orchestrated coup in it's next NATO prize for acquisition Ukraine.
Putin reacted as any leader would, and with restraint I might add.
Yet somehow all this proves Putin is a thug?
It's been a calculated drive to this new Cold War. The MIC is having it's way.
GM , August 14, 2018 at 6:12 pm
I figure it was the Magnitsky ruse that got the ball rolling. It predates Ukraine and was
grounds for the first round of sanctions.
"... Sanders and his "Sandernistas" rarely talked about ending US illegal wars of aggression in 2016. If liberal/progressives had insisted that Bernie take an anti-war platform and a reduction of the Empire's military-industrial-complex, then Bernie might well be in the White House now, instead of Trump. Instead most of the Sandernistas told liberal/progressives to shut up about the wars. ..."
"... They said it would be political suicide for Bernie to bring up war during a presidential campaign. Sandernistas said not to worry, because Bernie was secretly antiwar. We fell for that one with Obama, who committed more war crimes than George W. Bush. ..."
"... The Empire's "destructive suction tube" is waging all sorts of wars: military, economic and propaganda. It is waging economic terrorism against the Global South. The Empire-backed World Bank, IMF and gangster banking monopolies force austerity on the poor of the world. Those poor countries in the Global South that are under attack by the Empire's economic terrorist organizations do not get to have Bernie's socialism. Not only do I agree with Andre that we do not deserve Bernie's social programs, nor do we have funds or the energies for them. Bernie and the Sandernistas rarely spoke about rehabilitation of America's poor; it was all about the middle class. Silence is betrayal. ..."
"... The Empire always wants enemies. The public never seems to question why the most powerful military the world has ever known, supposedly has so many poor weak enemies threatening it. It is all a pretext for the Empire to extract wealth from the Global South for the benefit of oligarchs. ..."
"... The Empire never stops plotting to overthrow revolutionary leaders. Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Russia, Cuba and North Korea are under attack because they want to go their own way. There will be economic warfare, propaganda warfare, and political warfare, and when those don't work to impose conformity and compliance; there is always the military option. For the Empire "all options are always on the table", including the nuclear option. The Empire would rather see the destruction of the entire world, than to coexist with a threat to its hegemony. ..."
"... Now the cry goes out that the Russians are coming! Those like myself that lived through the Cold War are seeing history repeated. The paranoia, propaganda, lies, repression, persecution and provocations are déjà vu. The US has encircled Russia with military bases, and plays war games on its border. We are told, and we are supposed to believe that Russia is the aggressor and an expansionist threat. ..."
"... Georgia attacks South Ossetia, and we are told that Russia invaded Georgia. The US midwifes a coup against an elected government in Ukraine, but it is Russia that is blamed for destabilizing Ukraine. Crimea has a referendum to rejoin Russia, and we are told that the Russians used military force to annex Crimea. The US has criminally invaded Syria, but we are told that Russia invaded Syria, even though they are there legally. ..."
"... We are supposed to be afraid that Putin will "destroy the West's democracy" by sowing dissention, chaos and meddling in US elections. If anybody wants to destroy America's democracy, then they are several decades too late. It has already been mostly destroyed. The Bill of Rights has been eviscerated, except for the 2 nd Amendment, which is enabling the worst fascistic elements in the US to heavily arm themselves. The police are militarized. The US has secret police, secret courts, and secret prisons. ..."
"... Andre has much to say on all the above issues in his book "Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism". The book is a collection of many of his great writing of the past few years. Shorter versions of his essays have been published in articles by non-Western media, such as the New Eastern Outlook (NEO) as well as Western alternative media such as The Greanville Post. ..."
"... In every direction one turns now they face a barrage of propaganda put out by the Empire. Most Americans are isolated and know very little about the rest of the world. For many people the mainstream media is their only source for information. What they get is a steady stream of propaganda that Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, Syria, North Korea and Russia are evil. They believe it, just like when I was a child, I believed the US propaganda during the Cold War. Russia was both feared and ridiculed when I was growing up. I was told that communism never works, and that Russia cannot even make toilets that flush. Imagine how surprised I was when I finally went to Russia and found out that their toilets work just fine. ..."
"... In the Empire one is only valuable for what they have to sell. It is all about dollars and cents, and the logic of the market. The market determines the value of everything, including people. If it has a market price, then it has value. If not then it is worthless and of no value, according to the market. ..."
"... I do not want to undermine Andre Vltchek or David Pear, even though Andre tends to get carried away, IMHO. I'd like to correct at least one thing. Regarding Georgian aggression against South Ossetia, at the beginning the US media (including all TV channels) reported events as they were: Georgia attacked South Ossetia, Georgian troops are shelling Tskhinval, killed many Ossetian civilians and Russian peacekeepers. Then they got their marching orders and turned the story the opposite way: Russia invaded Georgia. Their assumption was that the US public is too dumb to remember what was said the day before. The sad thing is, they were right. ..."
"... As far as Syria is concerned, the lies were there from day one. Thanks to propaganda, most Americans don't even know that Russia and Iran are in Syria legally, on the invitation of its legitimate government represented in the UN, whereas the US is there illegally by both international and US law. ..."
"... The same is true about Yemen: genocidal war by Saudis and other Gulf satrapies against Yemen was always presented as something good, whereas Yemeni resistance to foreign occupiers as something bad. The US in Yemen went the whole mile, showing its true colors for all to see: in the fight against Houthis it allied itself not only with Saudis, but even with their copycats ISIS, created and armed by the US for Saudi money. ..."
A lot of people are not going to like Andre's book "
Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism ", I can tell you that right now. The first to
hate it will be the Empire, because they fear truth-tellers more than bomb-throwers. The next
who will not like Andre's book will be the smug critics who want to nitpick his every word. I
am not talking about the Deep State and its Mockingbirds. I am talking about the so-called
liberal/progressives; especially the ones that never get off of the "proverbial couches of
spinelessness", which Andre speaks of. You have to be brave to put up with their shit. This is
the time when we should be organizing and supporting each other, instead of criticizing, and
letting the Empire divide us. Andre is a revolutionary writer and doer that is on a mission
that is bigger than himself.
As Andre says: "Obedient and cowardly masses hate those who are different". Different is an
understatement to describe Andre Vitchek. You'll not find many like him in Europe or North
America. You may have to go to South America, Africa, Asia, or Russia to find such uniquely
honest voices.
Russia is the perfect metaphor for Andre: Russia is neither Europe nor Asia; it is both and
neither. Like Russia, Andre is unique. He is neither this nor that. He is a writer,
philosopher, photo journalist, pamphleteer, activist, witness and doer. He is all of those
things, but above all he is a humanist and an artist. He is an optimistic pessimist. Only a
hopeless optimist would say:
"One day, hopefully soon, humanism will win over dark nihilism; people will live for other
people and not for some cold profits, religious dogmas and "Western values".
Western values, now that is an oxymoron if there ever was one. Andre is a pessimist that
sees and writes about the anti-humanism and the soullessness of so-called Western values. He
exposes it for what it is: gray, cold and without spirit.
Andre says he is a Communist in an era when being a communist is not fashionable. Most
liberal/progressives are afraid to mention John Maynard Keynes, let alone Marx, Lenin and
Mao.
For a while in 2016 pseudo-socialism was popular among supporters of Bernie Sanders, whom
claimed to be a socialist. He promised his followers what every poll shows that most Americans
want: universal healthcare, low cost higher education, better infrastructure, strong economic
safety nets, and $15 dollars an hour minimum wage. Where have all these so-called socialists
gone now that Bernie disillusioned them? Chasing illusionary Russian spies, it seems.
Sanders and his "Sandernistas" rarely talked about ending US illegal wars of aggression in
2016. If liberal/progressives had insisted that Bernie take an anti-war platform and a
reduction of the Empire's military-industrial-complex, then Bernie might well be in the White
House now, instead of Trump. Instead most of the Sandernistas told liberal/progressives to shut
up about the wars.
They said it would be political suicide for Bernie to bring up war during a
presidential campaign. Sandernistas said not to worry, because Bernie was secretly antiwar. We
fell for that one with Obama, who committed more war crimes than George W. Bush.
Andre has the guts to say that liberal/progressives do not deserve free college, universal
healthcare and all the goodies that Bernie was selling us, while also peddling the trillion
dollar F-35 boondoggle. I agree with Andre, especially since Bernie sold out his loyal
followers, and sheep dogged for warmongering Hillary. We do not deserve social programs at
home, while the Empire is killing millions of people with all the US illegal wars of
aggression. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said:
"A time comes when silence is betrayal -- I knew that America would never invest the
necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam
continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube."
The Empire's "destructive suction tube" is waging all sorts of wars: military, economic and
propaganda. It is waging economic terrorism against the Global South. The Empire-backed World
Bank, IMF and gangster banking monopolies force austerity on the poor of the world. Those poor
countries in the Global South that are under attack by the Empire's economic terrorist
organizations do not get to have Bernie's socialism. Not only do I agree with Andre that we do
not deserve Bernie's social programs, nor do we have funds or the energies for them. Bernie and
the Sandernistas rarely spoke about rehabilitation of America's poor; it was all about the
middle class. Silence is betrayal.
Whatever the Empire does in foreign lands, sooner or later the chickens come home to roost.
The Empire keeps crushing countries of the Global South whose leaders want to use their
country's natural resources for their own people. Anti-colonial revolutionaries like Castro,
Che and Ho were personally vilified for not embracing the Empire's neocolonial model of
capitalism. The Empire conspires to overthrow governments that nationalize their country's
natural resources, and have social programs for the people.
The Empire always wants enemies. The public never seems to question why the most powerful
military the world has ever known, supposedly has so many poor weak enemies threatening it. It
is all a pretext for the Empire to extract wealth from the Global South for the benefit of
oligarchs.
The Empire never stops plotting to overthrow revolutionary leaders. Venezuela, Iran, Yemen,
Syria, Russia, Cuba and North Korea are under attack because they want to go their own way.
There will be economic warfare, propaganda warfare, and political warfare, and when those don't
work to impose conformity and compliance; there is always the military option. For the Empire
"all options are always on the table", including the nuclear option. The Empire would rather
see the destruction of the entire world, than to coexist with a threat to its hegemony.
Now the cry goes out that the Russians are coming! Those like myself that lived through the
Cold War are seeing history repeated. The paranoia, propaganda, lies, repression, persecution
and provocations are déjà vu. The US has encircled Russia with military bases,
and plays war games on its border. We are told, and we are supposed to believe that Russia is
the aggressor and an expansionist threat.
Georgia attacks South Ossetia, and we are told that Russia invaded Georgia. The US midwifes
a coup against an elected government in Ukraine, but it is Russia that is blamed for
destabilizing Ukraine. Crimea has a referendum to rejoin Russia, and we are told that the
Russians used military force to annex Crimea. The US has criminally invaded Syria, but we are
told that Russia invaded Syria, even though they are there legally.
We are supposed to be afraid that Putin will "destroy the West's democracy" by sowing
dissention, chaos and meddling in US elections. If anybody wants to destroy America's
democracy, then they are several decades too late. It has already been mostly destroyed. The
Bill of Rights has been eviscerated, except for the 2 nd Amendment, which is
enabling the worst fascistic elements in the US to heavily arm themselves. The police are
militarized. The US has secret police, secret courts, and secret prisons.
Nationalism that breeds repression at home and wars abroad is running amok. The people no
longer have the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Protesters are
restricted to so-called free-speech zones, and they are subject to indiscriminate mass arrest.
The people are told to obey the government, but it is the government that is supposed to obey
the people in a democracy. Those that don't worship the flag, and praise militarism are accused
of being unpatriotic.
Andre has much to say on all the above issues in his book "Revolutionary Optimism, Western
Nihilism". The book is a collection of many of his great writing of the past few years. Shorter
versions of his essays have been published in articles by non-Western media, such as the New
Eastern Outlook (NEO) as well as Western alternative media such as The Greanville Post.
Andre writes about the Empire's many crimes. Terrible crimes have been committed against
millions of people who have done the West no harm, and were of no threat. The Empire and its
vassal states punish people of the Global South for being born in countries with vast natural
resources that the Empire covets. Andre gives these victims a voice and a human face.
Andre's writings are not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. He will pound the
truth into you on every page, and you may not be able to put his book down, as I could not. The
reader realizes that Andre is on a mission. Part of that mission is to be the conscience of the
world, and to make sure that the victimized are not forgotten and that they are not alone.
Andre has a great capacity for empathy. His writing, videos and documentaries cry out for the world
to have empathy too. The world is empathy deficient.
Even for those that already intellectually know the truths that Andre writes about, will
have that truth pound into their hearts and souls. Unfortunately, the people that are ignorant
of the truth are the most likely ones not to read Andre. We all know people like that. They are
our brother-in-law, neighbors, and the students and professors in our institutions of so-called
higher learning. Our schools do not teach the important truths and philosophies anymore. They
have just become vocational schools turning out accountants, lawyers, propagandist,
stockbrokers, and super sales people to keep churning money in the economy, so that it flows up
the food chain.
In every direction one turns now they face a barrage of propaganda put out by the Empire.
Most Americans are isolated and know very little about the rest of the world. For many people
the mainstream media is their only source for information. What they get is a steady stream of
propaganda that Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, Syria, North Korea and Russia are evil. They
believe it, just like when I was a child, I believed the US propaganda during the Cold War.
Russia was both feared and ridiculed when I was growing up. I was told that communism never
works, and that Russia cannot even make toilets that flush. Imagine how surprised I was when I
finally went to Russia and found out that their toilets work just fine.
When I mentioned the above story to someone who was regurgitating anti-Putin propaganda he
asked me a rhetorical question:
"As for Russia, besides the toilets flushing, was there anything you wanted to buy there
besides vodka and nesting dolls? Or do they have anything that you would wish that we imported
(like Japanese cars or Chinese clothing or Swiss watches, etc.)?"
I know that Andre gets the stupidity of that question. In the Empire one is only valuable
for what they have to sell. It is all about dollars and cents, and the logic of the market. The
market determines the value of everything, including people. If it has a market price, then it
has value. If not then it is worthless and of no value, according to the market.
Andre writes about things that are priceless and have great value. They are the things of
life that make us human, instead of robots. There is no market for love and living a fulfilling
life. It is free if one knows how to find it. Andre helps to show us the way.
Excerpt from Thomas Sowell's book Intellectuals and Society:
What preferences are revealed by the actual behavior of intellectuals -- especially in
their social crusades -- and how do such revealed preferences compare with their rhetoric?
The professed beliefs of intellectuals center about their concern for others -- especially
for the poor, for minorities, for "social justice" and for protecting endangered species and
saving the environment, for example. Their rhetoric is too familiar and too pervasive to
require elaboration here. The real question, however, is: What are their revealed
preferences?
The phrase "unintended consequences" has become a cliché precisely because so many
policies and programs intended, for example, to better the situation of the less fortunate
have in fact made their situation worse, that it is no longer possible to regard good
intentions as automatic harbingers of good results. Anyone whose primary concern is in
improving the lot of the less fortunate would therefore, by this time, after decades of
experience with negative "unintended consequences," see a need not only to invest time and
efforts to turn good intentions into policies and programs, but also to invest time and
efforts afterwards into trying to ferret out answers as to what the actual consequences of
those policies and programs have been.
Moreover, anyone whose primary concern was improving the lot of the less fortunate would
also be alert and receptive to other factors from beyond the vision of the intellectuals,
when those other factors have been found empirically to have helped advance the well-being of
the less fortunate, even if in ways not contemplated by the intelligentsia and even if in
ways counter to the beliefs or visions of the intelligentsia.
[MORE]
In short, one of the ways to test whether expressed concerns for the well-being of the less
fortunate represent primarily a concern for that well-being or a use of the less fortunate as
a means to condemn society, or to seek either political or moral authority over society -- to
be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil -- would be to see the revealed
preferences of intellectuals in terms of how much time and energy they invest in promoting
their vision, as compared to how much time and energy they invest in scrutinizing (1) the
actual consequences of things done in the name of that vision and (2) benefits to the less
fortunate created outside that vision and even counter to that vision.
Crusaders for a "living wage" or to end "sweatshop labor" in the Third World, for example,
may invest great amounts of time and energy promoting those goals but virtually none in
scrutinizing the many studies done in countries around the world to discover the actual
consequences of minimum wage laws in general or of "living wage" laws in particular. These
consequences have included such things as higher levels of unemployment and longer periods of
unemployment, especially for the least skilled and least experienced segments of the
population. Whether one agrees with or disputes these studies, the crucial question here is
whether one bothers to read them at all.
If the real purpose of social crusades is to make the less fortunate better off, then the
actual consequences of such policies as wage control become central and require
investigation, in order to avoid "unintended consequences" which have already become widely
recognized in the context of many other policies. But if the real purpose of social crusades
is to proclaim oneself to be on the side of the angels, then such investigations have a low
priority, if any priority at all, since the goal of being on the side of the angels is
accomplished when the policies have been advocated and then instituted, after which social
crusaders can move on to other issues. The revealed preference of many, if not most, of the
intelligentsia has been to be on the side of the angels.
The same conclusion is hard to avoid when looking at the response of intellectuals to
improvements in the condition of the poor that follow policies or circumstances which offer
no opportunities to be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. For example,
under new economic policies beginning in the 1990s, tens of millions of people in India have
risen above that country's official poverty level. In China, under similar policies begun
earlier, a million people a month have risen out of poverty. Surely anyone concerned with the
fate of the less fortunate would want to know how this desirable development came about for
such vast numbers of very poor people -- and therefore how similar improvements might be
produced elsewhere in the world. But these and other dramatic increases in living standards,
based ultimately on the production of more wealth, arouse little or no interest among most
intellectuals.
However important for the poor, these developments offer no opportunities for the
intelligentsia to be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil -- and that is what
their revealed preferences show repeatedly to be their real priority. Questions about what
policies or conditions increase or decrease the rate of growth of output seldom arouse the
interest of most intellectuals, even though such changes have done more to reduce poverty --
in both rich and poor countries -- than changes in the distribution of income have done.
French writer Raymond Aron has suggested that achieving the ostensible goals of the left
without using the methods favored by the left actually provokes resentments:
"In fact the European Left has a grudge against the United States mainly because the
latter has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity,
power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions -- these results have been
achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words
by capitalism, which every well-brought-up intellectual has been taught to despise."
Another excerpt from Intellectuals and Society:
One of the sources of the credibility and influence of intellectuals with the vision of
the anointed is that they are often seen as people promoting the interests of the less
fortunate, rather than people promoting their own financial self-interest. But financial
self-interests are by no means the only self-interests, nor necessarily the most dangerous
self-interests. As T.S. Eliot put it:
"Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.
They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or
they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of
themselves."
Can you still really call them "revolutionaries" when the ideas and strategies are 150 years
old? When every leftist for generations has been saying the same things, is it still a
visionary act of courage?
I'd welcome a truly revolutionary solution. I'm not convinced it's coming from this
tradition.
I do not want to undermine Andre Vltchek or David Pear, even though Andre tends to get
carried away, IMHO. I'd like to correct at least one thing. Regarding Georgian aggression
against South Ossetia, at the beginning the US media (including all TV channels) reported
events as they were: Georgia attacked South Ossetia, Georgian troops are shelling Tskhinval,
killed many Ossetian civilians and Russian peacekeepers. Then they got their marching orders
and turned the story the opposite way: Russia invaded Georgia. Their assumption was that the
US public is too dumb to remember what was said the day before. The sad thing is, they were
right.
As far as Syria is concerned, the lies were there from day one. Thanks to propaganda, most
Americans don't even know that Russia and Iran are in Syria legally, on the invitation of its
legitimate government represented in the UN, whereas the US is there illegally by both
international and US law.
The same is true about Yemen: genocidal war by Saudis and other Gulf satrapies against
Yemen was always presented as something good, whereas Yemeni resistance to foreign occupiers
as something bad. The US in Yemen went the whole mile, showing its true colors for all to
see: in the fight against Houthis it allied itself not only with Saudis, but even with their
copycats ISIS, created and armed by the US for Saudi money.
" Georgia attacks South Ossetia, "
It did, with huge loans Israeli military hardware was bought, Israel was in the process of
upgrading Migs in Georgia.
President at the time Saaskiville now is in Ukrainian prison, or under investigation by
Kiev.
If he still has a nationality, I do not know.
The Georgian attack was a fiasco, there is just a tunnel between N and S Ossetia.
The Georgian plan was to block the exit to the south, to prevent Russian tanks getting
through.
This had to be done with artillery, firing over a mountain, guided by two Israeli drones.
Russia succeeded in the signals from the drones reaching a satellite, so no blocking, the
tanks came to the rescue.
To this day the Georgian people are paying for the loans.
Israeli technology seems not first class.
Correction: Saakashvili is not in prison, even though he richly deserves to be (just ask
Ossetians: they'd love to hang him for his crimes, but can't get their hands on him, more's
the pity). In fact, his Ukrainian citizenship was revoked, he is now in the Netherlands, of
all places.
As to Israel, it may not be the technology issue. Israel tends to hedge its bets. They
like to get their shekels anywhere they can, but certainly won't go out on a limb for
something worthless and inconsequential, like Georgia.
Vltchek is a privileged fool and some kind of evil propagandist. Look at the places he stays, always 4- or 5-star hotels (except when he stays in a place
where there are none), who pays for all of that?
Perhaps he is independently wealthy on a grand scale. Don't think so. In the immortal words of P.K. Dick in A Scanner Darkly , he is as phony as a
three-dollar bill.
That is a very simplistic view (and implies that you have read very little of
Vltchek). I stopped about two years ago, he is so full of lies, it was tiring to see them.
Have an old comment on this site (when stupid Counterpunch was still publishing his
semi-deranged articles, not that Counterpunch has not gone even worse since) except that his
articles are absent, a small improvement, more than made up for by the newly added other
bullshit artists.
Vltchek is either super-wealthy or subsidized by somebody, it sure is not the Russian
state or any of its arms.
"... They're kind of like a five year old child who desperately wants to keep believing in Santa Claus, even though he just found dad's Santa costume in the closet and he's holding it in his own hands. ..."
"... Sorry, but two years into this we should be way beyond this kind of – "I can't believe Santa's not real"- denying, dissembling, rationalizing nonsense. Then again, this is America. ..."
"... America is after all a country in which half the population believe in the creation myth. ..."
"... "Two years after the Iraq War began, 70 per cent of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks, according to a Washington Post survey." The Big Lie works, and since Obama gutted Smith-Mundt, the CIA/ State Department can legally keep Americans tracking on their propaganda narratives. ..."
"... I agree with Lawrences point that this is an issue of social psychology. Rational argument over the facts is simply over taken by some kind of mass hysteria. There certainly precedent for this kind of behavior. Indeed this was described in 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' 180 years ago. In my lifetime I have witnessed two episodes of this kind of mass hysteria. The first was the red scare of the early 1950's (I not so much witnessed that as experienced it) and the second was the day care hysteria of satanic cults abusing our children that flared between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now this is a third manifestation of mass hysteria. ..."
It is quite interesting how many uninformed posters and/or trolls would love to find a way to show the "Russiagate" nonsense
is somehow plausible in spite of the evidence. They're kind of like a five year old child who desperately wants to keep believing
in Santa Claus, even though he just found dad's Santa costume in the closet and he's holding it in his own hands.
I will say that the amount of mental gymnastics required to continue not believing evidence that is right in front of one's
eyes is quite impressive – but I'd never underestimate the American people's creativity when they want to maintain their illusions/delusions.
And I'd certainly never underestimate the Russiagate troll army's persistence.
At this rate I expect to soon encounter some version of the following "observation" in the comments section for this article:
– "maybe space aliens hired by the Russians downloaded the files to a to a new fangled thig-a-ma-jig and then shape-shifted so
Craig Murray would be fooled into thinking a real-like-human insider provided him the files on a flash drive." – "oh, oh, wait,
maybe the aliens abducted Murray too, and then just made him "think" a fellow human gave him the drive in person." "yeah, yeah,
and maybe Assange just says he didn't get the files from the Russians because "he's a space alien too." "Yeah, prove to me that
it didn't happen this way – you can't – ha! there! I win!"
Sorry, but two years into this we should be way beyond this kind of – "I can't believe Santa's not real"- denying, dissembling,
rationalizing nonsense. Then again, this is America.
"Two years after the Iraq War began, 70 per cent of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in
the 9/11 attacks, according to a Washington Post survey." The Big Lie works, and since Obama gutted Smith-Mundt, the CIA/ State
Department can legally keep Americans tracking on their propaganda narratives.
ToivoS , August 14, 2018 at 4:26 pm
I agree with Lawrences point that this is an issue of social psychology. Rational argument over the facts is simply over
taken by some kind of mass hysteria. There certainly precedent for this kind of behavior. Indeed this was described in 'Extraordinary
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' 180 years ago. In my lifetime I have witnessed two episodes of this kind of mass
hysteria. The first was the red scare of the early 1950's (I not so much witnessed that as experienced it) and the second was
the day care hysteria of satanic cults abusing our children that flared between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now this is a
third manifestation of mass hysteria.
It all began with Hillary's shocking defeat. Many millions of her supporters knew that she was so good that she had to win.
But then she lost. Those millions of Democrats could not accept that in fact their assessment of her talents were totally wrong
and that she lost because she has to be one of the worst candidates in American history. That is a reality those people refused
to accept. Instead they had to concoct some crazy conspiracy to explain their break with reality. This is a classic case of cognitive
dissonance which often leads to mass hysteria.
GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:01 pm
People choose to believe what they feel that they most need to believe to assuage their insecurities fostered by what they
perceive to be the dangerous and scary world in which they exist. The simple fact that we know that life is finite by the time
we're three years old fosters the creation of such constructs as that of the myth of everlasting life in the kingdom of heaven
complete with a mortgage-free condo and an extra parking space for all repentant sinners are mainstream beliefs.
ToivoS, you are right about Hillary. She simply couldn't accept her defeat. She was the one who began Russiagate by the lie,
"17 intelligence agencies" said the Russians hacked the emails.
As for times of mass-swallowing of a lie in the 1930s every German thought that Poland was about to invade Germany and they were
scared so much that they believed their leaders who "false flagged" them into invading Poland "first." Of course, Poland had no
intention of invading Germany.
Notice every time the US attacks another sovereign country, there's a false flag waved for the citizens to follow?
Don't you appreciate that we have consortiumnews?
Fifteen years ago, on February 5, 2003, against the backdrop of worldwide mass
demonstrations in opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq, then-US Secretary of State
Colin Powell argued before the United Nations that the government of Saddam Hussein was rapidly
stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction," which Iraq, together with Al Qaeda, was planning to
use against the United States.
In what was the climax of the Bush administration's campaign to justify war, Powell held up
a model vial of anthrax, showed aerial photographs and presented detailed slides purporting to
show the layout of Iraq's "mobile production facilities."
There was only one problem with Powell's presentation: it was a lie from beginning to
end.
... ... ...
...War against Iraq, the WSWS wrote, was not about "weapons of mass destruction."
Rather, "it is a war of colonial conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political
aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global
hegemony."
The response of the American media, and particularly its liberal wing, was very different.
Powell's litany of lies was presented as the gospel truth, an unanswerable indictment of the
Iraqi government.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who rushed off a column before he could
have examined Powell's allegations, declared, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations
-- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove
to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a
doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude
otherwise."
The editorial board of the New York Times -- whose reporter Judith Miller was at
the center of the Bush administration's campaign of lies -- declared one week later that there
"is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has the
capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and more
recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors."
Subsequent developments would prove who was lying. The Bush administration and its
media accomplices conspired to drag the US into a war that led to the deaths of more than one
million people -- a colossal crime for which no one has yet been held accountable.
Fifteen years later, the script has been pulled from the closet and dusted off. This time,
instead of "weapons of mass destruction," it is "Russian meddling in the US elections." Once
again, assertions by US intelligence agencies and operatives are treated as fact. Once again, the
media is braying for war. Once again, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the American government --
which intervenes in the domestic politics of every state on the planet and has been relentlessly
expanding its operations in Eastern Europe -- are ignored.
"... The people behind advancing the Russiagate fraud are not concerned about the widening chaos it has engendered. On the contrary, it is playing out exactly as they hoped. ..."
"... Fast growing censorship of dissent, isolation of a major geopolitical competitor, providing an explanation for the rise of Trump and the precipitous decline in public faith in establishment institutions. ..."
The people behind advancing the Russiagate fraud are not concerned about the widening
chaos it has engendered. On the contrary, it is playing out exactly as they hoped.
Fast growing censorship of dissent, isolation of a major geopolitical competitor,
providing an explanation for the rise of Trump and the precipitous decline in public faith in
establishment institutions.
Hell, it's even being leveraged to explain away racism. Win win win win. I'd say they are
right where they want to be at this juncture.
Dave P. , August 14, 2018 at 6:21 pm
GM – Excellent observations. Very true.
I would add that they – the Ruling Establishment – are accomplished in the art
of manipulating the public into believing whatever they want them to believe in. In fact,
they have world wide reach.
"... But it is worth noting that, particularly in recent decades, and under the auspices of Editorial Page editor James Bennet, there has been a remarkable integration of the Times ..."
Less than four days after the Parkland school shooting, the New York Times has
found a way to turn a national tragedy that claimed the lives of 17 high school students into
an opportunity to escalate its unrelenting campaign of anti-Russian propaganda, involving the
continuous bombardment of the public with reactionary lies and warmongering.
Against the backdrop of a major escalation of military tensions between the two countries,
the Times seized upon the Justice Department indictment of Russian nationals over the
weekend to claim that Russia is at "war" with the United States. Now, the Times has
widened this claim into an argument that Russia somehow bears responsibility for social
divisions over the latest mass shooting in America.
Its lead headline Tuesday morning blared: "SHOTS ARE FIRED, AND BOTS SWARM TO SOCIAL DIVIDES
- Florida School Shooting Draws an Army Ready to Spread Discord"
According to the Times , Russian "bots," or automated social media accounts, sought
"to widen the divide" on issues of gun control and mental illness, in order to "make compromise
even more difficult." Russia sought to exploit "the issue of mental illness in the gun control
debate," and "propagated the notion that Nikolas Cruz, the suspected gunman" was "mentally
ill."
The absurd claim that Russia is responsible for the existence of social divisions in America
is belied by the shooting itself, which is a testament to the fact that American society is
riven by antagonisms that express themselves, in the absence of a progressive outlet, in
outpourings of mass violence.
The aim of this campaign is to target anyone who would criticize the underlying social
causes of the shooting -- the violence of American society, the nonexistence of mental health
services, or even the social psychology that gives rise to mass shootings -- as a "Russian
agent" seeking to "sow divisions" in American society. The Times lead is based
entirely on a "dashboard" called Hamilton 68 created by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for
Securing Democracy, whose lead spokesman is Clint Watts, the former US intelligence agent and
censorship advocate who declared in November that social media companies must "silence" sources
of "rebellion."
Without naming any of the accounts it follows, Hamilton 68 claims to track content tweeted
by "Russian bots and trolls." But most of the trends leading the dashboard are news stories,
many posted by Russia Today and Sputnik News , that are identical with the
trending topics followed by any other news agency. Thus, Hamilton 68 provides an instant
New York Times headline generator: Any major news story can be presented as the result
of "Russian bots."
The New York Times is making its claims about "Russian meddling" with what is known
in the law as "unclean hands." That is, the Times practices the very actions of which
it accuses others.
Here is not the place to deal with the long and bloody history of American destabilization
campaigns and their horrific consequences in Latin America and the Middle East, or to review
the fact that many American journalists serving abroad had dual functions -- as reporters and
as agents.
But it is worth noting that, particularly in recent decades, and under the auspices of
Editorial Page editor James Bennet, there has been a remarkable integration of the
Times with the major operations of the US intelligence agencies.
This is
particularly true with regard to Russia, in regard to which the Times acts as an
instrument of US foreign policy misinformation, practicing exactly what it accuse the Kremlin
of.
Take, for example, the so-called political "dissident" Aleksei Navalny. This proponent of
extreme nationalism and xenophobia, with deep ties to Russia's fascistic right, and extensive
connections to US intelligence agencies, has been championed by the Times as the voice
of social dissent in Russia. Despite his miniscule support within Russia, Navalny's activities
generate front-page headlines in the Times , which has mentioned him in over 400
separate articles.
Another example is the Times ' promotion of the "feminist" rock band Pussy Riot,
which makes a habit of getting themselves arrested by taking their clothes off in Russian
Orthodox churches, and whose fate the Times holds up as a horrific example of Russian
oppression. The very name "Pussy Riot," which in typical usage is not even translated into
Russian, expresses the fact that this operation aims to influence American, and not Russian,
public opinion.
In 2014, the Times met with members of Pussy Riot at their editorial offices, and
have since extensively promoted the group, having mentioned it in over 400 articles. The term
"anti-Putin opposition" is mentioned in another 600 articles.
The logic of the Times ' campaign was expressed most clearly by its columnist
Thomas Friedman, the personification of the pundit as state intelligence mouthpiece whose
career was aptly summed up in a biography titled Imperial Messenger . In a column
published on February 18 ("Whatever Trump is Hiding is Hurting All of US Now"), Friedman
declares a "code red" threat to the integrity of American democracy.
"At a time when the special prosecutor Robert Mueller -- leveraging several years of
intelligence gathering by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. -- has brought indictments against 13
Russian nationals and three Russian groups -- all linked in some way to the Kremlin -- for
interfering with the 2016 U.S. elections," Friedman writes, "America needs a president who will
lead our nation's defense against this attack on the integrity of our electoral democracy."
This "defense," according to Friedman, would include "bring[ing] together our intelligence
and military experts to mount an effective offense against Putin -- the best defense of all."
In other words, war.
The task of all war propaganda is to divert internal social tensions outwards, and the
Times ' campaign is no different. Its aim is to take the anger that millions of people
feel at a society riven by social inequality, mass alienation, police violence, and endless
war, and pin it on some shady foreign adversary.
The New York Times ' claims of Russian "meddling" in the Parkland shooting set the
tone for even more hysterical coverage in the broadcast evening news. NBC News cited Jonathan
Morgan, another collaborator on the Hamilton 68 project, who declared that Russia is "really
interested in sowing discord amongst Americans. That way we're not focused on putting a unified
front out to foreign adversaries."
The goal of the ruling class and its media accomplices is to put on "a unified front"
through the suppression of social opposition within the United States. Along these Lines, NBC
added, "Researchers tell us it's not just Russia deploying these attacks on social media,"
adding "many small independent groups are trying to divide Americans and create chaos."
Who are these "small independent groups" seeking to "create chaos"? By this, they no doubt
mean any news or political organization that dares question the official line that everything
is fine in America, and that argues that the horrendous levels of violence that pervade
American society are somehow related to social inequality and the wars supported and justified
by the entire US political establishment
"... The erosion of the American society is on track, and its stay the course until this corporate owned government cannot govern no more. ..."
"... In a real rule of law world Jeff Sessions would take all this evidence the VIPS have produced and present it into the Mueller Investigation as just that evidence, or proof of lack there of. ..."
"... For a possibly useful parsing of what is actually going in the Mueller investigation, check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEt4kwAvNqU The delivery is a bit inelegant, but the main takeaway is that the Mueller investigation is meant to hide what really went down between the Dems and the Russians. ..."
"... Here you can read to how far the U.S. is willing to go with nothing but allegations. http://www.unz.com/akarlin/russia-sanctions/ This insanity has to end. ..."
Russia Gate has given us one thing for sure, and
that it is now ravishing the internet of all of its corporate controlled First Amendment
Rights. Just like the establishment of long TSA lines pushing us travelers through airport
security like inspected cattle, was an example of 911 reforms to our system, this Russia Gate
Investingation and all its trappings are doing the same destruction to our liberties.
What
memories of a free and liberal society have we all seen swirl ever so slowly, but deliberately
down the memory hole of our once civil liberties? The erosion of the American society is on
track, and its stay the course until this corporate owned government cannot govern no more.
In a real rule of law world Jeff Sessions would take all this evidence the VIPS have
produced and present it into the Mueller Investigation as just that evidence, or proof of lack
there of.
Good to hear Patrick Lawrence get down with it, that's what we need more of. At the rate the
internet is going, say it now, or forever hold your peace, is now in force.
Joe Tedesky , August 13, 2018 at 10:26 pm
Here is a link to something that at first seems a little unrelated, but after reading it
ask yourself, is it? Moon Jae in of S Korea may just have the answer for the way of dealing
with past government malpractices.
For a possibly useful parsing of what is actually going in the Mueller investigation,
check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEt4kwAvNqU The delivery is a bit inelegant, but the main takeaway is that the Mueller investigation
is meant to hide what really went down between the Dems and the Russians.
Excellent observations, Joe. I hope this – Russia gate – does not lead to a
much more dangerous zone as it appears to be heading to with these sanctions against Russia
slated to go into effect in November. There was this rather very disquieting article the
other day in Strategic Culture by Finnian Cunningham.
If this is true it is hard to see Russiagate collapsing...
Notable quotes:
"... The ruling establishment has pushed all their chips onto the table in a do-or-die effort to make this allegation stick. ..."
"... How many times has the U.S. "national security" establishment brazenly deceived the country and the world, at incalculable cost, without being held to account in a way that seriously discomfited the perpetrators? ..."
"... From the bomber gap, to the missile gap, through Vietnam from beginning to end, to Iran-Contra, to Iraqi WMDs, and so much more. ..."
"... It's hard to see Russia-gate collapsing in a way that would force its architects and proponents to acknowledge its fictitiousness: it is too much of an irrational miasma to actually be falsifiable in the sort of concrete way that led to even such perfunctory admissions of error as we got when Saddam's "WMDs" failed to exist. ..."
"... Bush Jr. was able to make a White House Correspondents Dinner joke about those derned elusive WMDs – and get laughs – *one year* after the invasion of Iraq. Why would this time be any different? ..."
"... People often wonder why psychopathic sadists enjoy torturing their victims, when presumably they have enough cognitive empathy to appreciate how terrible the suffering is. ..."
"... But that is WHY the sadists enjoy their activities so much. What they do to their victims is so unendurable, yet someone is having to endure it – and that somebody is not the perpetrator. ..."
"... It's hard to know if the American people will ever see a full explanation of this, Church Committee or FOIA style, ..."
Maxwell Quest August 13, 2018 at 9:38 pm Excellent article! I was particularly jolted by the
reference that the Russia-gate narrative has become "too big to fail." So true!
The ruling establishment has pushed all their chips onto the table in a do-or-die effort
to make this allegation stick.
They have passed the point of no return; there is no walking it back now. If it fails heads
will roll, but most importantly these trusted institutions will have flushed their last
vestiges of credibility down the drain. Then what?
Reply
David G , August 14, 2018 at 2:45 am
Or, as Patrick Lawrence puts it: "The risk of self-inflicted damage these institutions
assume, should the truth of the Russia-gate events emerge -- as one day it surely will -- is
nearly incalculable."
However, I disagree with both Mr. Lawrence and you, Maxwell Quest. I think that assessment
is actually too optimistic.
How many times has the U.S. "national security" establishment brazenly deceived the
country and the world, at incalculable cost, without being held to account in a way that
seriously discomfited the perpetrators?
From the bomber gap, to the missile gap, through Vietnam from beginning to end, to
Iran-Contra, to Iraqi WMDs, and so much more.
It's hard to see Russia-gate collapsing in a way that would force its architects and
proponents to acknowledge its fictitiousness: it is too much of an irrational miasma to
actually be falsifiable in the sort of concrete way that led to even such perfunctory
admissions of error as we got when Saddam's "WMDs" failed to exist.
But even if that somehow does happen, and the whole Beltway official and media
establishment has to suck it up and emit a feeble "my bad" about Russia-gate, what makes you
think it will have any lasting consequences in terms of the dispensation of power and
privilege among the U.S. elites?
Bush Jr. was able to make a White House Correspondents Dinner joke about those derned
elusive WMDs – and get laughs – *one year* after the invasion of Iraq. Why would
this time be any different?
AnthraxSleuth , August 14, 2018 at 4:07 am
"Bush Jr. was able to make a White House Correspondents Dinner joke about those derned
elusive WMDs – and get laughs" – *one year* after the invasion of Iraq. Why would
this time be any different?
Yup, got lots of laughs from his fellow members of the club that were coconspirators.
Had he tried that joke around veterans and the families of casualties of that whole
criminal adventure I doubt he would have made it out alive.
Tom Welsh , August 14, 2018 at 8:57 am
Had he tried that joke around any of the millions of victims of his criminal aggression or
their familes and friends, I am sure he would not have made it out alive.
But if you have ever managed to think yourself into the criminal mind, you will understand
that it is precisely the fact that he was NOT subject to any comeback that made the whole
thing such fun.
People often wonder why psychopathic sadists enjoy torturing their victims, when
presumably they have enough cognitive empathy to appreciate how terrible the suffering
is.
But that is WHY the sadists enjoy their activities so much. What they do to their
victims is so unendurable, yet someone is having to endure it – and that somebody is
not the perpetrator.
AnthraxSleuth , August 15, 2018 at 4:51 am
I've never tried to think myself into the criminal mind. And, I thank you for the insight.
I have had someone try to kill me. Someone that has killed at least one person before by his
own admission. It changes you forever.
Anne Jaclard , August 14, 2018 at 10:33 am
Agreed. The American corporate press has been running what are essentially press releases
and "dossiers" of evidence for a year now, mostly from shady private firms (Twitter trolls
"discovered" by Graphika, Fusion GPS's "Dirty Dossier," CrowdStrike's initial investigation
of the DNC).
Many of these firms aren't neutral parties either, head of CrowdStrike is rabidly
anti-Russia and just put together another package of "research" that was debunked on
Ukraine.
It's hard to know if the American people will ever see a full explanation of this,
Church Committee or FOIA style, given that these are companies with no public
obligations .not good.
Jeff Harrison , August 13, 2018 at 8:51 pm
Well, Patrick, I"m glad to see that you're writing for a reputable organization for a
change. I don't have a hell of a lot to add to what you've said but I'll say this. I saw an
article about the DefCon in Las Vegas this AM or yesterday. I don't remember where and I
can't find it again but the gist of it is – they had like 39 kid volunteers who they
told to go hack the election systems in some number of "battleground" states. The upshot? 35
of the 39 kids successfully hacked several election systems. The champ was an 11 yo girl who
broke in in 10 minutes. If our election systems are so poorly designed that kids can break
into them in just a few minutes, I'm sure it's just a walk in the park for an actual pro.
Jeff Harrison , August 13, 2018 at 10:45 pm
Hah! I found it. It was on RT, of course. Here's the link
-https://www.rt.com/usa/435824-us-midterms-hacking-children/
Good comments to this very good article. I agree with Gary that the US is in decline,
perhaps terminal, and that rising Eurasia led by China and Russia is the reason for the Deep
State's frantic need to try to focus the people on Russia, and now the biggie, China, to
avoid the reality of the social decay within from not addressing the people's needs for well
over 30 years. However, i also don't think as many Americans are swallowing this lie as MSM
and politicos would have us believe. What we now call the "alt-left", perhaps, may take it
seriously. It was Mme Clinton herself who is at the top of chain of this manufactured
story.
But I don't think we'll see this fixation around for the next 20-30 years, as Mr. Lawrence
speculates, because I don't think we'll have that much time for such political nonsense as we
are confronted by massive Earth changes, not all human-caused, that are now manifesting.
Tom Kath , August 13, 2018 at 8:28 pm
The correction of "illusions" often has the appearance of being too horrendous to
contemplate. Be it the delusion that we can get wealthy on debt, or the delusion that we are
invincible. These are all able to be traced back to a fundamental belief which has long been
proven to be inconsistent with reality.
mike k , August 13, 2018 at 7:29 pm
How did we get here? The stupefication of the American people was well advanced before the
pilgrims landed. The idea that this continent only really began when we "discovered" it was
the beginning of our idiocy. That this land was waiting for the blessing of our special role
in "civilizing' it was a continuation of our delusional thinking.
In philosophy there is a concept called Teleology which means to view things "by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated
causes". If we are to look at Russiagate from a teleological perspective, and indeed we should, as the evidentiary and proportional
justification is severely lacking, we see a distinct organism with a broad purpose. So let's examine, what purposes are being
served by Russiagate, what agendas being driven, and interests being advanced?
Control of information by imperial, establishment and corporate interests
Control of discourse and dissent being stigmatized
Restriction of democracy by third parties and anti-establishment candidates being smeared as "Kremlin supported'
The enlargement of the military industrial complex
The ideological alignment of the nominal left and center with authoritarianism
The justification of imperialism and aggressive foreign policy
The deflection from widespread issues of discontent
The projection of issues in the 2016 election, particularly primary rigging, voting irregularities, voter suppression,
candidate funded troll operations like Correct the Record, widespread collusion between candidates and the mainstream media,
and outsized influence of Israeli, Saudi and Ukrainian lobbies
Considering how much of an impact Russiagate has had towards these ends, in comparison how meagerly it has tackled these phantom
Russian meddlers and "active measures", I think it's fair to say that Russiagate has NOTHING to do with it's stated cause. If
Russiagate can be described by what it does, and not what allegedly caused it, what it is is an authoritarian push to broadly
increase control of society by establishment elites, and to advance their imperialistic ambitions. In this way, it does not look
dissimilar to the way previous societies have succumbed to authoritarian and imperialist rule, nor do the flavors of propaganda,
censorship and nationalism differ greatly. The 2016 election represented the ruling Establishment losing control of the narrative,
and to a lesser degree, not getting their preferred candidate. And in response the velvet glove is slipping.
Reply
mike k , August 13, 2018 at 7:33 pm
Excellent analysis!
Dunderhead , August 13, 2018 at 9:12 pm
You nailed that one man, Kudos
Maxwell Quest , August 13, 2018 at 9:32 pm
9. The delegitimization of Trump's presidency, and a false justification for removing him from office, or in the very least
crippling his ability to function as the executive.
Indeed. The Shit Snowball keeps gaining size and momentum because so many groups get various benefits from propagating the
Russiagate narrative.
I xeroxed your list of 8 – as well as an excerpt from Patrick Lawrence's original article – then added references and artwork
to set it off in a classy way.
Please let me know what the two of you think of the results:
exiled off mainstreet , August 15, 2018 at 3:00 am
This analysis is spot on.
Kevin Huxford , August 13, 2018 at 7:18 pm
Duncan Campbell's article is embarrassing, especially in that it took him so long to even slightly correct his misrepresentation
of Binney's position on the matter.
Dunderhead , August 13, 2018 at 7:00 pm
This article touches on such a fundamental truth which is the new paradigm of US disunity, the fracturing of both US political
parties and a greater General dysfunction of the American body politic not to mention the US's Image of itself.
A truly excellent and very important post! Thank you.
"To doubt the hollowed-out myth of American innocence is a grave sin against the faith." – author
Absolutely! The current "Russiagate" lunacy renders anyone a "heretic" who might engage in such "doubt"
– or who engages in any independent critical thinking on this matter. I've never seen the political class, the deep state psychopaths,
and the MSM more irrational, nor more out of touch with and more contemptuous of – simple basic verifiable physical "reality"
– than at this historical moment. The current state of affairs suggests the American empire may not simply be in decline, but
is instead perhaps in free fall with the hard ground of reality rapidly approaching. The current level of absolute public lunacy
also suggests the landing will be neither graceful nor pleasant, and may actually come as a shock to the true believers.
Terrific article, Patrick Lawrence. Too Big Too Fail is exactly correct. Just as the banks in the 2008 mortgage crisis got
bailed out, so the Russiagate narrative is cultivated by the US government. Both are insults to the American people.
As you know, there has been some recent discussion of this leak vs. hack topic. To wit:
There is a response by William Binney in video form at the end of this article:
"... "authoritarian regimes pursue different objectives than societies with governments that are accountable to the people and respect the rule of law." ..."
"... Fortunately, our think tank alliance is in still in no position (heaven be thanked!) to impose its will. The most these hysterical complainers can do is air their grievances and misrepresent them as somehow "preserving democracy." ..."
"... This, of course, is indicative of the neocon tactic of linking whatever its advocates see fit to address to a supposed common purpose, which is saving democracy from whatever is defined as "antidemocratic." ..."
Neocons and [neo]liberals have always had a lot in common. They both want:
– Globalism
– open borders
– anti-Russia, Iran
– American hegemony which means endless wars
– support for gay marriage
– anti-Nationalism hence anti-Trump
The only thing that separated them were gun control and abortion, but even those issues
aren't as clearcut anymore.
Neocons and [neo]liberals have always had a lot in common. They both want:
Bingo! It looks like neocons and neoliberals joined forces to fight the rise of "populism"
which should probably be more properly called "the crisis of neoliberalism." To a certain
extent, the current "NeverTrumplists" neo-McCarthyism campaign is the behavior of a wounded
neoliberal beast (I am not sure why they have such an allergic reaction to Trump who in
domestic policies is 100% neoliberal and in foreign policy is 66% neocon.)
They try to suppress dissent under the smoke screen of "commitment to democracy and core
democratic principles" because, as you can guess, this is very important "at a time when the
character of our societies is at stake." The character of the neoliberal society in the USA
and EU to be exact.
Ironically, those "defenders of democracy" are interested in the issue of democracy even
less than former Soviet nomenklatura. All they want is to kick the "classic neoliberalism"
can down the road (and, as a side effect, preserve their lucrative sinecures; this is
especially visible with Max Boot in his recent interviews )
As Professor Paul Gottfried
noted about the recent alliance of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute
(AEI) and the neoliberal Center for American Progress (CAP):
Moreover, who are these "authoritarian" bad guys that CAP now has in its crosshairs and
plans to rid the world of with its new neocon pals?
Presumably, it's the right-of-center governments in Eastern and Central Europe, as
personified by favorite leftist whipping boy Viktor Orban.
Although CAP doesn't want to be especially "confrontational" in dealing with its
villains, or so it claims, it also proclaims that "authoritarian regimes pursue
different objectives than societies with governments that are accountable to the people and
respect the rule of law."
It might be useful for CAP to tell us how exactly Hungary, Poland, and other
right-of-center European governments have not been democratically elected and have
disrespected their countries' legal traditions.
Fortunately, our think tank alliance is in still in no position (heaven be thanked!)
to impose its will. The most these hysterical complainers can do is air their grievances
and misrepresent them as somehow "preserving democracy." All AEI and CAP have done is
to take a multitude of grievances -- e.g., America's failing to oppose adequately China's
cyberthreats, putting up with Russia's aggression, "security threats" in general, and
nuclear proliferation -- and mixed them together with standard leftist boilerplate about
Orban's "illiberalism" and "sharing our values."
This, of course, is indicative of the neocon tactic of linking whatever its
advocates see fit to address to a supposed common purpose, which is saving democracy from
whatever is defined as "antidemocratic."
First rule of diplomacy– respect the culture and traditions of your
your [sic] host country, aka as [sic] the place where you were
born.
In Seagal's case, the "host" country to which the "academic" McFaul refers is not "also
known as the place where you were born", where "you" is Seagal, to whom McFaul is proffering
unsolicited advice.
The place where Seagal was born is the USA: Seagal's host country in this instance is
Russia.
If Seagal had truly wished to respect the culture and traditions of his host country, he
should have made his statement of acceptance of the post in Russian:
Я глубоко
потрясен и
польщен
назначением
специальным
представителем
российского
Министерства
иностранных
дел по
гуманитарным
связям с США.
Надеюсь, что мы
сможем достичь
мира, гармонии
и
положительных
результатов в
мире. Я очень
серьезно
отношусь к этой
чести.
However, as far as I am aware, Mr. Seagal does not speak Russian, but McFaul does, albeit
он несет полную
хуйню!
Oh, yeah, uh huh, McFaul speaks Russian. In fact, he is some kind of jive-talkin' Russian
homie, telling his audience that he looked forward to seeing them in 'Yoburg', which is the
culture-respectful term for "Yekaterinburg'. That's what got him dubbed "McFuck'. if I recall
correctly.
Then off he went as US Ambassador to Russia, where he almost immediately invited a host of
Russian opposition figures to the US embassy. According to Olga Romanova (& wikipedia)
they discussed the recent Russian protests and "the United States Presidential election
campaign" with McFaul.
While McFaul was away fostering Democrat collusion with Russian opposition figures,
Browder rammed the Magnitsky Act through Congress because of the legislative anomaly that the
Jackson-Vanik Amendment had to be repealed and Congress wouldn't give away something for
nothing.
McFaul and Browder are on the same team, playing different positions.
But ultimately they are impotent chimps. This ain't 1917 and not Sorosite and similar funding
of regime change is going to work in Russia. All these US laws and sanctions are blowhard
vapidity. They only generate healthy stimulus for Russia to clean up the last vestiges of
Yeltsin's 1990s era distortions in its economy and legal system.
Rory Cormac investigates Britain's use of spies and special forces for covert operations
in the postwar period
Historian Rory Cormac discusses his new book Disrupt and Deny, which investigates
Britain's use of spies and special forces for covert operations in the postwar period
####
Podcast at the link.
There's plenty not mentioned within, but still interesting. I would question though the
veracity of official reports released under (Freedom of Information) requests and would
assume that some of those documents are fabricated. After all, if keeping secrets is your
business, then you have have whole range of options for obfuscation, from complete release to
none at all.
Curiously having spoken of the Mau Maus, no mention is made of the discovery a few years
ago of MoD dossiers discovered in a skip (UK gov selling off real estate) detailing the
torture and abuse of them which until then had been completely denied, and ultimately went
before the high court and was fully exposed
"Washington allies with ISIS as great power conflict trumps "war on terror"
7 August 2018
The "National Defense Strategy" document released at the beginning of this year declared
bluntly that the nearly two-decade focus by the US military on the so-called "global war on
terrorism" had come to an end. In its place, a new strategic orientation was being introduced
based on preparing for "great power" confrontation, i.e., war with nuclear-armed Russia and
China.
This was the first such defense strategy to be issued by the Pentagon in over a decade and
expressed the urgency with which Washington views the preparations for a third world war.
A particularly crude and criminal outcome of this policy shift is becoming increasingly
apparent in three major theaters where US forces are engaged in active combat operations.
Reports from Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan provide firm evidence that the US and its local
proxies are allying themselves with and employing the services of elements of ISIS and Al
Qaeda in the pursuit of Washington's broader strategic interests.
In Yemen, hundreds, if not thousands, of fighters from Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula
(AQAP), branded by the US government as the "most dangerous" affiliate of the loose
international Al Qaeda network, have been recruited by Washington's closest allies in the
Arab world, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to fight as foot soldiers in the
near-genocidal US-backed war that these Persian Gulf oil monarchies have been waging against
the impoverished country of Yemen since 2015.
According to an investigative report published Monday by the Associated Press, the
Saudi-led coalition "cut secret deals with al-Qaida fighters, paying some to leave key cities
and towns and letting others retreat with weapons, equipment and wads of looted cash Hundreds
more were recruited to join the coalition itself."
It added that "Key participants in the pacts said the US was aware of the arrangements and
held off on any drone strikes."
"Elements of the US military are clearly aware that much of what the US is doing in Yemen
is aiding AQAP and there is much angst about that," Michael Horton, a senior analyst at the
Jamestown Foundation, a CIA-connected Washington think tank, told the AP.
"However, supporting the UAE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against what the US views as
Iranian expansionism takes priority over battling AQAP and even stabilizing Yemen," Horton
added.
This is a gross understatement. Washington is providing indispensable military support for
a war that has reduced millions of Yemenis to the brink of starvation. It is prepared to wipe
out much of the country's population in order to bolster its strategic position and that of
the reactionary Arab regimes with which it is allied against the perceived threat of Iranian
influence to US regional hegemony.
The war has escalated in recent days in the ongoing siege of the Yemeni Red Sea Port of
Hodeidah, which was green-lighted by the Trump administration. The UN has warned that a
quarter of a million people could lose their lives in this operation, while millions more
across the country may die of starvation if it shuts down the port, the sole lifeline for
food, fuel and medicine for at least 70 percent of the population.
Recruiting Al Qaeda fighters to slaughter Yemenis in this immense and bloody war crime is
entirely consistent with US policy.
In regard to Syria, meanwhile, Russia's Defense Ministry last Thursday issued a statement
warning that ISIS has increasingly concentrated its forces in the area around al-Tanaf, near
the Syrian-Iraqi border, where the US military maintains a military base and has unilaterally
declared a 34-mile exclusion zone around it. US troops there have provided training to
so-called "rebels" opposing the government of President Bashar al-Assad and appear to be
providing a security screen for ISIS."
"Under the mantle of the "war on terrorism," successive US governments, Democratic and
Republican alike, have not only conducted wars whose victims number in the millions, but also
carried out an unrelenting attack on democratic rights, from domestic spying to censoring the
Internet.
The emerging international alliance between the Pentagon and ISIS only serves to expose
the real interests underlying these policies, which are bound up with the waging of war to
offset US imperialism's loss of economic preeminence and defend its crumbling global
hegemony, and domestic repression to sustain a social order characterized by the most extreme
inequality in modern American history."
"While many of the countries that have received detainees have chosen to keep quiet about
the repatriations, the Pentagon confirmed on Tuesday that the Republic of Macedonia had taken
custody of a group of foreign fighters.
"Today's transfer of Foreign Terrorist Fighters to their country of origin, Macedonia, marks
a significant milestone in the much-needed cooperative effort to combat the global threat of
terrorism," Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon told CNN."
Huh? Are the Westie media not even pretending any more, that they are fighting
against the terrorists? Most of us know that was B.S. anyhow, but the broader
(ignoramuses) public, the kind of morons who watch CNN every day, were not ever supposed to
be let in on that little secret.
"... So why should you care? Why does that matter to you or me? Well, like most emerging market financial crisis there is the danger of contagion . ..."
"... Turkey's economy is four times the size of Greece, and roughly equal in size to Lehman Brothers circa 2008. ..."
"... Turkey's other borders face six nations: Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia, and Nakhchivan, a territory affiliated with Azerbaijan. Five of those are involved in ongoing armed conflicts or outright war. ..."
"... NATO has long outlived its' usefulness. Cancel its' stipend and bring our soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen and women home! Put them to work here. Fighting fires. ..."
"... NATO only seems to be useful to the hegemony that supports it. Peace is not it's mission. ..."
By now you've probably heard that Turkey is having a financial crisis, and Trump appears to be pouring gasoline on it.
But you may not understand what is happening, or you may not know why it's important.
So let's do a quick recap
.
Turkey's currency fell to a new record low today. Year to date it's lost almost half its value, leading some investors and
lenders inside and outside of Turkey to lose confidence in the Turkish economy.
...
"Ninety percent of external public and private sector debt is denominated in foreign currencies," he said.
Here's the problem. Because of the country's falling currency, that debt just got a lot more expensive.
A Turkish business now effectively owes twice as much as it did at the beginning of the year. "You are indebted in the U.S.
dollar or euro, but your revenue is in your local currency," explained Lale Akoner, a market strategist with Bank of New York
Mellon's Asset Management business. She said Turkey's private sector currently owes around $240 billion in foreign debt.
This is all about hot money that has been washing around in a world of artificially low interest rates, and now, finally, an
external shock happened. As it
always happens .
The bid-ask spread, or the difference between the price dealers are willing to buy and sell the lira at, has widened beyond
the gap seen at the depth of the global financial crisis in 2008, following Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s collapse.
So why should you care? Why does that matter to you or me? Well, like most emerging market financial crisis there is the
danger of contagion
.
The turmoil follows a similar currency crash in Argentina that led to a rescue by the International Monetary Fund. In recent
days, the Russian ruble, Indian rupee and South African rand have also tumbled dramatically.
Investors are waiting for the next domino to fall. They're on the lookout for signs of a repeat of the 1997-1998 Asian financial
crisis that began when the Thai baht imploded.
A minor currency devaluation of the Thai baht in 1997 eventually led to 20% of the world's population being thrust into poverty.
It led to Russia defaulting in 1998, LTCM requiring a Federal Reserve bailout, and eventually Argentina defaulting in 2001.
Turkey's economy is four times the size of Greece, and roughly equal in size to Lehman Brothers circa 2008.
The markets want Turkey to run to the IMF for a loan, but that would require a huge interest rate hike and austerity measures
that would thrust Turkey into a long depression. However, that isn't the
biggest obstacle .
The second is that Erdogan would have to bury his hatchet with the United States, which remains the IMF's largest shareholder.
Without U.S. support, Turkey has no chance of securing an IMF bailout program.
There is another danger, a political one and not so much an economic one, that could have dramatic implications.
If Erdogan isn't overthrown, or humbled, then there is an ironclad certainty that Turkey will
leave NATO and
the West.
Turkey, unlike Argentina, does not seem poised to turn to the International Monetary Fund in order to stave off financial collapse,
nor to mend relations with Washington.
If anything, the Turkish President looks to be doubling down in challenging the US and the global financial markets -- two
formidable opponents.
...
Turkey would probably no longer view the US as a reliable partner and strategic ally.
Whoever ends up leading the country, a wounded Turkey would most likely seek to shift the center of gravity away from the West
and toward Russia, Iran and Eurasia.
It would make Turkey less in tune with US and European objectives in the Middle East, meaning Turkey would seek to assert a
more independent security and defense policy.
Erdogan has warned Trump that Turkey would
"seek new friends" , although Russia and China haven't yet stepped up to the plate to bat for him.
Russia, Iran and China do have a common interest when in comes to undermining the
petrodollar . Pulling Turkey into their sphere of influence would be a coup.
Turkey lies at a historic, strategic crossroad. The
bridge between the peaceful West and the war-ridden dictatorships of the East that the West likes to bomb.
On its Western flank, Turkey borders Greece and Bulgaria, Western-facing members of the European Union. A few years ago, Turkey
-- a member of NATO -- was preparing the join Europe as a full member.
Turkey's other borders face six nations: Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia, and Nakhchivan, a territory affiliated with
Azerbaijan. Five of those are involved in ongoing armed conflicts or outright war.
Losing Turkey would be a huge setback for NATO, the MIC, and the permanent war machine.
more struggling economies are starting to get it. Trade wealth for the rulers (IMF supporters) to be paid by the rest of us.
Fight back. Squeeze the bankers balls. Can't have our resources, now way, no how, without a fight.
in a flailing Turkey? Weren't there some outside potential takers encouraging China when it floated its currency proposal?
Nastarana on Tue, 08/14/2018 - 8:41pm
NATO has long outlived its' usefulness. Cancel its' stipend and bring our soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen and women home! Put them to work here. Fighting fires.
Patrolling our shores for drug running and toxic dumping. Teaching school, 10 kids per class maximum. Refurbishing buildings and
housing stock. Post Cold War, an military alliance with Turkey makes no sense.
"... Our experiments suggest that the majority of Americans find a 1:100 risk ratio to be morally acceptable. They were willing to kill 2 million Iranian civilians to save 20,000 U.S. soldiers. One respondent who approved of the conventional air strike that killed 100,000 Iranian civilians candidly expressed even more extreme preferences regarding proportionality and risk ratios, while displacing U.S. responsibility for the attack onto the Iranian people: "I would sacrifice 1 million enemies versus 1 of our military. Their choice, their death." ..."
"... It is all about the radius of impact and the background MSM brainwashing. The average media consumer lemming does not think for itself and lets its opinion be essentially implanted by the MSM for anything that is not immediate. Those remote Russians and Serbs are definitely not in the immediate realm of the lemming. ..."
"... Interesting how the PC "west" engages in pure hate ideology towards the un-west. Tolerance is strictly for domestic consumption. The far domain is populated by barbarians who need to be controlled by force since they are a "threat". ..."
Public opinion polling suggests that many Americans would not think twice if there were a
great many casualties against evildoers. For example, a 2017 survey found that 60 percent of
Americans would support a nuclear attack on Iran that would kill 20 million civilians, to
prevent an invasion that might kill 20,000 American soldiers.
"We were not surprised by the finding that most Americans place a higher value on the life of an American soldier than the life of a foreign noncombatant. What was surprising, however, was the radical extent of that preference.
Our experiments suggest that the majority of Americans find a 1:100 risk ratio to be morally acceptable. They were willing to kill 2 million Iranian civilians to save 20,000 U.S. soldiers. One respondent who approved of the conventional air strike that killed 100,000 Iranian civilians candidly expressed even more extreme preferences regarding proportionality and risk ratios, while displacing U.S. responsibility for the attack onto the Iranian people: "I would sacrifice 1 million enemies versus 1 of our military. Their choice, their death."
There was a discussion the the value of human life. American military and Israeli everyone
were at the top. Loss of Arab life was a wash and death of Serbs and Russians were viewed as
positive.
The order is apparently malleable. Japanese have moved up the list while Iranians are
gaining Serb-like status.
In part I suspect it has to do with the fact that most of the uneducated idiots responding
can't relate to numbers as large as a few thousand, much less compute ratios, even in cases
where the numbers don't relate to those being bombed to bits. Or at least I'd rather lie to
myself that way.
It is all about the radius of impact and the background MSM brainwashing. The average media
consumer lemming does not think for itself and lets its opinion be essentially implanted by
the MSM for anything that is not immediate. Those remote Russians and Serbs are definitely
not in the immediate realm of the lemming.
Interesting how the PC "west" engages in pure hate ideology towards the un-west. Tolerance
is strictly for domestic consumption. The far domain is populated by barbarians who need to
be controlled by force since they are a "threat".
Well Canada has rather upset the apple cart, hasn't it? On the one hand, western moralizing
and sermonizing other states about what they should do used to be only restricted to mostly
enemy states, preferably much less rich ones, on the other hand values only mean something if
you actually are willing to pay a literal price in either money, blood or both.
The financial papers are saying that this will damage SA's the confidence of foreign
investors, precisely those SA is trying to attract so that it can start to diversify its
economy away from petroleum based products, but we have yet to see if this will have a
noticeable effect, rather than just a wish effect.
The US has said Sweet FA, along with the rest of the sermonizing weapon selling west, so
Canada has very little support from its allies. So far. Germany should be an obvious
supporter but if pissing of the Saudis makes it more dependent on Russia ergo there are
plenty of reasons that can be wheeled out to keep treading lightly.
It looks to me as just another sign of the existing order breaking down, whether or not
Canada back tracks or not. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
As for the so-called free and democratic media, well they only further discredit
themselves publicly.
Meanwhile, I just checked out the Canada headlines and this jumped out:
Global Affairs Canada would not say whether Canadian taxpayers are financing the sale, and
would not provide any other details about the arms deal
Few details are available about the proposed sale of weapons, as the Canadian
government says such information is commercially sensitive. It has declined to name the
company selling the guns or indicate how many rifles would be sent to Ukraine. However
Conservative MP James Bezan, who has been in contact with the Canadian company that has the
agreement to supply the rifles to Ukraine, confirmed the deal's likely timeline. He declined
to name the firm since the sale still has to be finalized.
Nicolas Moquin, a spokesman for the Canadian Joint Operations Command Headquarters,
said the Canadian military has been providing sniper and counter-sniper training to Ukraine's
security forces since September 2015. He said Canada is not looking at this time of providing
additional sniper training to coincide with the delivery of new weapons .
####
OR, is this just Canada selling sniper rifles that are not necessarily of Canadian
origin?
According the the video below with Canadian MP James Barazan, he says there are large
numbers of weapons such as assault rifles, sniper systems, mortar systems, counter battery
radar etc. sitting in warehouses in Jordan (& Toronto) that were supposed to go to
Kurdistan.
Yes,, the world order is falling apart. For some reason, this state of affairs reminds me of
the observation that married couples who are heading toward divorce are on that path not
because of a lack of communications but because they are now communicating for the first
time.
Ukraine is awash in small arms – they could give them out with a box of tea at the
supermarket as a promotion, and it would still take months to work through their supply. The
last thing they need is more rifles. On the other hand, new ones will probably fetch a good
price on e-Bay.
A concise summary of the nuclear attack on Japan (emphasis added):
According to Kamps, US estimates of American casualties during the first month of a US
invasion of mainland Japan -- before the bombs were dropped -- were approximately 50,000,
not 1 million.
"And the myth became that a million American lives were saved by dropping the bombs.
That was not true. The truth is, the bombs were dropped to send a message to the Soviet
Union where to get off. Billions of dollars in 1945 money had been spent on that [atomic]
project, and the bombs were dropped to fulfill an experiment as well , to show some
return on the so-called investment. If those billions of dollars had been spent on ships,
tanks and guns in the US military instead of atomic bombs, would the war have ended sooner
because of that?" Kemps asked.
Another common myth is that the bombs ended World War II, Kamps said.
"But no, it was the threat of a Soviet military invasion that ended World War II
. The Japanese had been firebombed by the Americans for months already, and that lends a lot
more to the theory that these atomic bombings were tests, because they [the Americans]
were saving some cities to use these bombs against, and they wanted to see full on what the
effects were. So Hiroshima was preserved for that purpose," Kemps told Radio
Sputnik.
"... More than three million Americans have served in uniform in these wars. Nearly 7,000 of them have died. Tens of thousands more have been wounded. More are killed or wounded each year, in smaller numbers but often in dreary circumstances, including the fatal attack in July on Cpl. Joseph Maciel by an Afghan soldier -- a member of the very forces that the United States has underwritten, trained and equipped, and yet as a matter of necessity and practice now guards itself against. ..."
More than three million Americans have served in uniform in these wars. Nearly 7,000 of them
have died. Tens of thousands more have been wounded. More are killed or wounded each year, in
smaller numbers but often in dreary circumstances, including the fatal attack in July on Cpl.
Joseph Maciel by an Afghan soldier -- a member of the very forces that the United States has
underwritten, trained and equipped, and yet as a matter of necessity and practice now guards
itself against.
On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad,
with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reordering nations and cultures,
have not succeeded. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars did not achieve what their
organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the generals in command. Astonishingly
expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and
politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continued in varied forms and under
different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center in
2001. They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost as
if distant war is a presumed government action.
As the costs have grown -- whether measured by dollars spent, stature lost or blood shed --
the wars' architects and the commentators supporting them have often been ready with optimistic
or airbrushed predictions, each pitched to the latest project or newly appointed general's
plan. According to the bullhorns and depending on the year, America's military campaigns abroad
would satisfy justice, displace tyrants, keep violence away from Western soil, spread
democracy, foster development, prevent sectarian war, protect populations, reduce corruption,
bolster women's rights, decrease the international heroin trade, check the influence of extreme
religious ideology, create Iraqi and Afghan security forces that would be law-abiding and
competent and finally build nations that might peacefully stand on their own in a global world,
all while discouraging other would-be despots and terrorists.
Aside from displacing tyrants and leading to the eventual killing of Osama bin Laden, none
of this turned out as pitched. Prominent successes were short-lived. New thugs rose where old
thugs fell. Corruption and lawlessness remain endemic. An uncountable tally of civilians --
many times the number of those who perished in the terrorist attacks in the United States in
2001 -- were killed. Others were wounded or driven from their homes, first by American action
and then by violent social forces American action helped unleash.
The governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, each of which the United States spent hundreds of
billions of dollars to build and support, are fragile, brutal and uncertain. The nations they
struggle to rule harbor large contingents of irregular fighters and terrorists who have been
hardened and made savvy, trained by the experience of fighting the American military machine.
Much of the infrastructure the United States built with its citizens' treasure and its troops'
labor lies abandoned. Briefly schools or outposts, many are husks, looted and desolate
monuments to forgotten plans. Hundreds of thousands of weapons provided to would-be allies have
vanished; an innumerable quantity are on markets or in the hands of Washington's enemies.
Billions of dollars spent creating security partners also deputized pedophiles, torturers and
thieves. National police or army units that the Pentagon proclaimed essential to their
countries' futures have disbanded. The Islamic State has sponsored or encouraged terrorist
attacks across much of the world -- exactly the species of crime the global "war on terror" was
supposed to prevent.
Almost two decades after the White House cast American troops as liberators to be welcomed,
large swaths of territory where the Pentagon deployed combat forces are under stubborn
insurgent influence. Areas once touted as markers of counterinsurgency progress have become
no-go zones, regions in which almost no Americans dare tread, save a few journalists and aid
workers, or private military contractors or American military and C.I.A. teams.
... ... ...
Time eases only so much doubt. Six years after leaving the Army, Soto still spent nights
awake, trying to come to terms with his Korengal tour. It was not regret or the trauma of
combat that drained him. It was the memories of lost soldiers, an indelible grief blended with
a fuller understanding that could feel like a curse. Often when Soto reflected upon his
service, he was caught between the conflicting urges of deference and candor. He tread as if a
balance might exist between respecting the sacrifice and pain of others and speaking
forthrightly about the fatal misjudgments of those who managed America's wars. "I try to be
respectful; I don't want to say that people died for nothing," he said. "I could never make the
families who lost someone think their loved one died in vain."
Still he wondered: Was there no accountability for the senior officer class? The war was
turning 17, and the services and the Pentagon seemed to have been given passes on all the
failures and the drift. Even if the Taliban were to sign a peace deal tomorrow, there would be
no rousing sense of victory, no parade. In Iraq, the Islamic State metastasized in the wreckage
of the war to spread terror around the world. The human costs were past counting, and the
whitewash was both institutional and personal, extended to one general after another, including
many of the same officers whose plans and orders had either fizzled or failed to create lasting
success, and yet who kept rising. Soto watched some of them as they were revered and celebrated
in Washington and by members of the press, even after past plans were discredited and enemies
retrenched.
... ... ...
C.J. Chivers is a writer at large for the magazine. His previous feature article,
which followed the combat service and incarceration of a Marine veteran suffering from
alcoholism and PTSD, led to the veteran's release from prison and won a Pulitzer Prize. This
article is adapted from ''The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq,''
published by Simon & Schuster.
I believe Mr. Giraldi should choose his language more carefully. Perhaps instead of referring
to "Jews," he should narrow this to "Jewish Likud supporters" or Jewish supremacists, or
something similar
Notable quotes:
"... Jewish power ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
I am often asked why I have this "thing" about Israel, with friends suggesting that I would
be much more respected as a pundit if I were to instead concentrate on national security and
political corruption. The problem with that formulation is that the so-called "special
relationship" with Israel is itself the result of terrible national security and foreign policy
choices that is sustained by pervasive political and media corruption, so any honest attempt to
examine the one inevitably leads to the other. Most talking heads in the media avoid that
dilemma by choosing to completely ignore the dark side of Israel.
Israel – not Russia – is the one foreign country that can interfere with
impunity with the political processes in the United States yet it is immune from criticism. It
is also the single most significant threat to genuine national security as it and its powerful
domestic lobby have been major advocates for the continuation of America's interventionist
warfare state. The decision to go to war on false pretenses against Iraq, largely promoted by a
cabal of prominent American Jews in the Pentagon and in the media, killed 4,424 Americans as
well as hundreds of thousands Iraqis and will wind up costing the American taxpayer $7 trillion
dollars when all the bills are paid. That same group of mostly Jewish neocons more-or-less is
now agitating to go to war with Iran using a game plan for escalation
prepared by Israel which will, if anything, prove even more catastrophic.
And I can go on from there. According to the FBI, Israel runs the most
aggressive spying operations against the U.S. among ostensibly "friendly" nations,
frequently stealing our military technology for resale by its own arms merchants. Its notable
successes in espionage have included the most devastating spy in U.S. history Jonathan Pollard,
while it has also penetrated American communications systems and illegally obtained both the
fuel and the triggers for its own secret nuclear weapons arsenal.
Israel cares little for American sovereignty. It's prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have both
boasted how they control the United States. In 2001, Israel was running a massive secret spying
operation directed against Arabs in the U.S. Many in the intelligence and law enforcement
communities suspect that it had considerable prior intelligence regarding the 9/11 plot but did
not share it with Washington. There was the spectacle of the "dancing Shlomos," Israeli
"movers" from a company in New Jersey who apparently had advanced knowledge of the terrorist
attack and danced and celebrated as they watched the Twin Towers go down.
Jewish
power , both in terms of money and of access to people and mechanisms that really
matter, is what allows Israel to act with impunity, making the United States both poorer and
more insecure. A well-funded massive lobbying effort involving hundreds of groups and thousands
of individuals in the U.S. has worked to the detriment of actual American interests, in part by
creating a permanent annual gift of billions of dollars to Israel for no other reason but that
it is Israel and can get anything it wants from a servile Congress and White House without any
objection from a controlled media.
Israel has also obtained carte blanche political protection from the U.S. in fora
like the United Nations, which is damaging to America's reputation and its actual interests.
This protection now extends to the basing of U.S. troops in Israel to serve as a tripwire,
guaranteeing that Washington will become involved if Israel is ever attacked or even if Israel
itself starts a war. The current U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley is little more than a
shill for Israel while America's Ambassador in Israel David Friedman is an open supporter of
Israel's illegal settlements, which the U.S. opposes, who spends much of his time defending
Israeli war crimes .
And here on the home front Israel is doing damage that might be viewed as even more grave in
Senator Ben Cardin's
attempt to destroy First Amendment rights by making any criticism of Israel illegal. The
non-violent Israel Boycott movement (BDS) has already been sanctioned in many states, the
result of intensive and successful lobbying by the Israeli government and its powerful
friends.
So if there is a real enemy of the United States in terms of the actual damage being
inflicted by a foreign power, it is Israel. In the recent Russiagate investigations it was revealed
that it was Israel, not Russia, that sought favors from Michael Flynn and the incoming
Trump Administration yet Special Counsel Robert Mueller has evidently not chosen to go down
that road with his investigations, which should surprise no one.
Noam Chomsky, iconic progressive intellectual, has finally come around on the issue of
Israel and what it means. He has always argued somewhat incoherently that Israeli misbehavior
has been due to its role as a tool of American imperialism and capitalism. At age 89, he has
finally figured out that it is actually all about what a parasitic Israel wants without any
regard for its American host,
observing on "Democracy Now" that
..take, say, the huge issue of interference in our pristine elections. Did the Russians
interfere in our elections? An issue of overwhelming concern in the media. I mean, in most of
the world, that's almost a joke. First of all, if you're interested in foreign interference
in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance
as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Israeli
intervention in U.S. elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done I mean,
even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress,
without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to
try to undermine the president's policies – what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in
2015 .
Politicians are terrified of crossing the Jewish lobby by saying anything negative about
Israel, which means that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu always gets a pass from the American
government, even when he starves civilians and bombs hospitals and schools. Netanyahu uses
snipers to shoot dead scores of unarmed demonstrators and the snipers themselves joke about
their kills without a peep from Washington, which styles itself the "leader of the free
world."
Just recently, Israel has declared itself a Jewish State with all that implies. To be sure,
Israeli Christians and Muslims were already subject to a battery of laws and regulations that
empowered Jews at their expense but now it is the guiding principle that Israel will be run for
the benefit of Jews and Jews alone. And it still likes to call itself a "democracy."
A recent television program illustrates just how far the subjugation of America's elected
leaders by Israel has gone. British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is featured
on a new show called "Who is America?" in which he uses disguises and aliases to engage
politicians and other luminaries in unscripted interviews that reveal just how ignorant or
mendacious they actually are. Several recent episodes remind one of a February 2013 Saturday Night
Live skit on the impending confirmation of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. A Senator
asks Hagel. "It is vital to Israel's security for you to go on national television and perform
oral sex on a donkey Would you do THAT for Israel?" A "yes" answer was, of course, expected
from Hagel. The skit was never aired after objections from the usual suspects.
Baron Cohen, who confronted several GOP notables in the guise of Colonel Erran Morad, an
Israeli security specialist, provided a number of clues that his interview was a sham but none
of the victims were smart enough to pick up on them. Cohen, wearing an Israeli military uniform
and calling himself a colonel, clearly displayed sergeant's stripes. Hinting that he might
actually be a Mossad agent, Cohen also sported a T-shirt on which the Hebrew text was printed
backwards and he claimed that the Israeli spy agency's motto was "if you want to win, show some
skin."
Cohen set up Dick Cheney by complimenting him on being the "the king of terrorist killers"
before commenting that "my neighbor in Tel Aviv is in jail for murder, or, as we call it,
enhanced tickling." Morad went on to tell Cheney that he once waterboarded his wife to check
for infidelity and then convinced the former Vice President to sign a "waterboarding kit" that
"already had" the signatures of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon and Demi Lovato.
Another more
spectacular sketch included a Georgia state senator Jason Spencer who was convinced to
shout out the n-word as part of an alleged video being made to fight terrorism. After Cohen
told Spencer that it was necessary to incite fear in homophobic jihadists, Spencer dropped his
pants and underwear, before backing up with his exposed rear end while shouting "USA!" and
"America!" Spencer also spoke with a phony Asian accent while simulating using a selfie-stick
to secretly insert a camera phone inside a Muslim woman's burqa.
In another series of encounters, Cohen as Morad managed to convince current and
ex-Republican members of Congress -- to include former Senate majority leader Trent Lott -- to
endorse a
fictional Israeli program to arm grade school children for self-defense.
Cohen's footage
included a former Illinois congressman and talk radio host named Joe Walsh
saying : "The intensive three-week 'Kinderguardian' course introduces specially selected
children from 12 to 4 years old to pistols, rifles, semiautomatics and a rudimentary knowledge
of mortars. In less than a month -- less than a month -- a first-grader can become a first
grenade-er."
Both controversial Alabama judge Roy Moore and Walsh were fooled into meeting Cohen to
attend a non-existent pro-Israel conference
to accept an award for "significant contributions to the state of Israel." Representative
Dana Rohrabacher, meanwhile, also was interviewed and he commented that, "Maybe having young
people trained and understand how to defend themselves and their school might actually make us
safer here." And Congressman Joe Wilson observed that "A 3-year-old cannot defend itself from
an assault rifle by throwing a 'Hello Kitty' pencil case at it."
Cohen's performance is instructive. A man shows up in Israeli uniform, claims to be a
terrorism expert or even a Mossad agent, and he gains access to powerful Americans who are
willing to do anything he says. How Cohen did it says a lot about the reflexive and completely
uncritical support for Israel that many American politicians -- particularly Republicans -- now
embrace. This, in a nutshell, is the damage that Israel and its Lobby have done to the United
States. Israel is always right for many policymakers and even palpably phony Jews like Colonel
Morad are instantly perceived as smarter than the rest of us so we'd better do what they say.
That kind of thinking has brought us Iraq, Libya, Syria and the possibility of something far
worse with Iran.
Israel routinely interferes in American politics and corrupts our institutions without any
cost to itself and that is why I write and speak frequently regarding the danger to our
Republic that it poses. It is past time to change the essentially phony narrative. Israel is
nothing but trouble. It has the right to defend itself and protect its interests but that
should not involve the United States. One can only hope that eventually a majority of my fellow
American citizens will also figure things out. It might take a while, but the ruthless way
Israel openly operates with no concern for anyone but itself provides a measure of optimism
that that day is surely coming.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is[email protected].
. The decision to go to war on false pretenses against Iraq, largely promoted by a cabal
of prominent American Jews in the Pentagon and in the media, killed 4,424 Americans as well
as hundreds of thousands Iraqis and will wind up costing the American taxpayer $7 trillion
dollars when all the bills are paid. That same group of mostly Jewish neocons more-or-less
is now agitating to go to war with Iran using a game plan for escalation prepared by Israel
which will, if anything, prove even more catastrophic.
Oh right, who can forget the cabal of Jews controlling the US government and military at
the time of the Iraq invasion, such as President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney,
Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, CIA director George Tenet, National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice Every.Single.Time, am I right, folks?
Oh wait, they aren't Jewish? Well, I blame the Jews away. Just look at uh Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Woflowitz and
journalist Bill Kristol. That sounds like an extremely powerful cabal easily capable of
commanding such trivial figures as the President, CIA director, Secretary of State, et
cetera, to do their bidding.
Besides, just look at how much the Iraq War benefited Israel. You see, Israel wants to
pursue a strategy of destabilizing the region, so it cleverly pulled off a false flag attack
on 9/11; I'm not quite sure why Mossad didn't frame one of Israel's actual enemies, like the
Palestinians or Iranians, or even Saddam for that matter, as the perpetrators of the attacks,
but I'm sure it's all part of the plan.
Anyway, Israel got the United States to invade Iraq, which destabilized the region and
created chaos, predictably leading to a massive increase in Iranian influence in Iraq and
likely enabling more Iranian intervention in the Syrian Civil War, which benefited Israel
because uh chaos and destabilization.
And if you doubt that neocons totally control the US government, just look at how we're at
war with Iran! Well we're not technically at war yet, a decade after neoconservatives
began promoting the war .and President Obama did somehow manage to sign a nuclear deal with
Iran that infuriated his neocon and Israeli puppetmasters but I'm sure that President Trump,
famously beloved by Jews and neocons everywhere, will soon go to war with Iran.
' I'm not entirely sure why you keep hanging on to this tired and false narrative that
US politicians are some sort of stooges and puppets of Israel '
Maybe because they are stooges and puppets? In extreme cases, they even boast of it. When
Romney was running for president, he promised he would check with Israel on any action we
took in the Middle East. When Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was promoting civil war
in Syria, she explained that this was necessary because Israel wished it.
It goes on, and on. If someone is considering a run for Congress, he gets a nice little
packet from AIPAC. Among other things, he's asked to write an essay expressing his feelings
about Israel.
If the essay isn't satisfactory, AIPAC backs his opponent.
Not surprisingly, when Netanyahu -- the premier of a tiny state on the other side of the
planet -- spoke to Congress he was interrupted with standing ovations seventeen times. The
display put me in mind of the sort of frenzied adulation Communist delegates used to display
towards Stalin.
and the motives, of course, would be similar, even if actual death isn't in prospect. For
most in Congress, displease Israel, and your political career just ended.
"Many in the intelligence and law enforcement communities suspect that it (Israel) had
considerable prior intelligence regarding the 9/11 plot but did not share it with
Washington."
It's certainly difficult to explain how else Mossad came to be filming the attack.
I think it needs to be emphasized that it's not merely a matter of practical politics.
Israel is evil -- she brings misery to millions, actual happiness to almost no one, and
engages in behavior with no defensible moral foundation at all. She has attacked every
single one of her neighbors, compulsively seeks out further conflict to paper over the
shortcomings in her own national identity, and treats her Palestinian subjects with a
morality about like that of a nasty little boy pulling the wings off a fly.
Arguably, others are as bad. However, unlike the others, Israel could not have come into
being without our support, and could not continue to exist today without our continued moral,
economic, diplomatic, and military support. If we pulled the plug, Israel would cease to
exist as a Jewish supremacist state within -- at most -- a decade.
We are, in fact, responsible for Israel, and hence responsible for Israel's crimes. Other
people's teenaged sons may well be out there stealing cars and raping girls. This happens to
be our son doing it. We're responsible.
We pursue many policies I regard as futile, short-sighted, deluded, or self-destructive.
My personal list would include 'come one come all' immigration, global warming denial,
maintaining a massive military establishment, condoning 'Black Lives Matter,' and probably
some other things.
No doubt the reader has his own list. However, that's not the point. The point is that
essentially, these policies are merely stupid rather than actually evil. It's not evil
to think we should just let whoever wants come into the US. It's dumb -- but it isn't
evil. In fact, I'll willingly credit people who vote for 'sanctuary cities' et al with the
most laudable sentiments. I merely question their intelligence.
Israel is different. Israel is evil, and hence our support for it is as well. It is the
most fundamentally wrong act we are engaged in.
There is a moral dimension to life. There is a distinction between striving to do good --
however unsuccessfully -- and willingly participating in evil.
"A well-funded massive lobbying effort involving hundreds of groups and thousands of
individuals in the U.S. has worked to the detriment of actual American interests, in part
by creating a permanent annual gift of billions of dollars to Israel for no other reason
but that it is Israel and can get anything it wants from a servile Congress and White House
without any objection from a controlled media."
Kind of begs the question, why are we giving any aid to a first-world country with a GDP
growth rate in the 3% to 4% rate for years (even while we were stuck below 2%) and an
unemployment rate below 4%?
The Israeli economy is in better shape than the US economy; they should be giving us
aid.
"Baron Cohen, who confronted several GOP notables in the guise of Colonel Erran Morad,
an Israeli security specialist, provided a number of clues that his interview was a sham
but none of the victims were smart enough to pick up on them."
Yes, it is truly amazing what our "Best & Brightest" will do to stay on-side.
Following Mr. Giraldi's earlier post regarding the gubernatorial run of Israeli puppet Ron
DeSantis and the Big Sugar connections of Adam Putnam, it would seem a Floridian's least
worst choice is Bob White.
Israel is nothing but trouble. It has the right to defend itself
1st part: Absolutely, indubitably correct.
2nd part: ¿Qué? Why do people say/write this? Under what corrupt
arrangement does an oh, so obvious outlaw have any such right?
Consider: A gang of out-of-towners turns up at a block of flats, breaks the doors down and
occupies the building, killing some erstwhile owner/occupiers and ejecting most of the rest
on the way in, thereafter whooping it up big, and ignoring [obviously too feeble] orders to
RoR+R*3 [= Right of Return + Revest, Reparations and Reconciliation.] Since when can such
outlaws dictate anything, thumb their noses at the Law?
Property, especially here land, is alienable – but this does not mean
' subject to seizure by aliens .'
Kindly consider: "A fair exchange is no robbery." A fair exchange means willing
seller, interested buyer, and a freely and fairly agreed price. No such thing exists
vis-à-vis the forcible colonisation of Palestine. Some proof may be seen
here [my
bolding]:
By 1949, some 700,000 Palestinians had fled or been expelled from their lands and
villages. Israel was now in control of some 20.5 million dunams (approx. 20,500
km²) or 78% of lands in what had been Mandatory Palestine
Land laws were passed to legalize changes to land ownership.[5]
5. Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land
and Housing in Palestine. Publishers: COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 37.
Especially in reference to the illegitimate entity which terms itself Israel, wiki is not
reliable, being, like the US Congress, Israeli-occupied territory. So it is noteworthy that
they write "in control of" as opposed to 'own.' They can't ever own it due to not having
purchased it, and Palestinians may not surrender it, due to the UDHR which specifies
*inalienable* rights:
Article 3.
• Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 17.
• (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with
others.
• (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Also, see the Washington Consensus:
10.Legal security for property rights.
Further, there is UNSC242: inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war, plus
only just law may earn respect, and/or be respected. A law dispossessing erstwhile legal
owner/occupiers is an utter travesty.
Me; comment: Its illegitimacy is all so howlingly obvious!
Fazit: Apart from the ~6% of 'pre-Herzl Palestine' which 'invading by stealth' alien,
mostly European Jews managed to purchase, the illegitimate entity does not own nor can they
ever own the land/property they squat upon, which still belongs to the erstwhile
owner/occupiers, specifically the 'native' pre-Nakba Palestinians [now including heirs &
successors]. Then, the illegitimate entity does not declare borders for two reasons 1) any
such declaration would be [probably successfully] challenged and 2) the illegitimate entity
expresses the desire to expand to 'from the Nile to the Euphrates.' Q: Just how ghastly is
that? A: Could hardly be worse.
Closing the loop: How can land-thieves have any 'right to defend' such improperly
alienated land/property? It doesn't compute! rgds
Thank you, Mr. Giraldi, for another forceful rebuke of Zionist criminality and US
culpability.
The supremacist kosher state is a cancer on America. Just survey the wreckage. Count the
bodies. Who benefits from this?
The Zionist project is a plague on humanity. It entertains no compromise. It will stop at
virtually nothing. Examine the blood-soaked damage from Soviet Russia to Germany to Palestine
and beyond. It moves Washington around via remote control.
The situation has become very grave. Speech deemed 'anti-Semitic' is rapidly being
criminalized worldwide.
Right wing political expression (that Jews don't like) on Twitter, Facebook and the web is
being de-platformed for speech infractions that involve 'hate'. But it's only 'hate' of a
certain stripe.
After all, hatred is ubiquitous in America. It cuts in every direction. So why is the
focus so intense on just one spectrum of hatred?
Might it have something to do with the political preferences of those in power?
Oh maybe.
Principles be damned. Whose ox is being gored?
With that in mind, consider this: who might actually be the biggest hater of
all?–and killer? (Hint: it's certainly not the powerless Alt-right 'deplorables'.)
Might it instead be the world's foremost victims?
After all, incendiary speech–even 'hate speech'–does not kill. It takes bombs,
drones, tanks and missiles to accomplish that.
So where's the uproar over routine sorties which needlessly dispense death and
destruction?
It's gone missing.
Incredibly, it is rough speech and acute political criticism–not failed, horrific
wars–that are being criminalized. Pro-Zionist 'wars of choice' still get a pass in our
corporate board rooms, TV studios, news rooms, and in most of Official Washington.
This entrenched distortion allows neocons and their underlings to jawbone and plot their
next preemptive war. The Big Squeeze is on. Beware Russia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and
Iran. Zionism is an 'unshakable' Washington value. So get ready.
How distant wars advance the interests of average Americans remains a mystery.
Despite this puzzle, America's MSM offers little resistance and no straightforward
criticism of Zio-Washington's ceaseless war efforts on behalf of a certain 'democratic ally'.
In similar fashion, the Fourth Estate has also been compromised.
It's worth remembering that, according to the UN Charter, a state-sponsored 'First Strike'
against another sovereign state is the most serious war crime. This elementary moral precept
however matters not–at least not when Israel is pulling the strings. Quiet, children.
Listen. Obey.
What we have here is a pattern of vast serial criminality.
Zio-Washington has become Israel's war vessel. We regular folk are just along for the
ride.
So don't forget to cheer for the good guys!
Incredibly, US-enabled, Israeli ruthlessness has gotten even worse under 'America First'
Trump. After all, Trump needlessly tore up Obama's hard-fought peace deal with Iran.
Why would Trump make such a move? (As a candidate, he was far less hawkish).
Our weakened and despised President needs desperately to please America's foremost lobby.
Trump cannot govern without their support. This peculiar situation however requires
additional blood-letting on behalf of the Zionist state. Foreign wars that benefit Israel are
the unwritten price that the goyim leadership in America must pay. Sorry folks!
(Are you listening, Tehran?)
Jewish power corrupts. Overwhelming Jewish power corrupts in overwhelming fashion.
It's certainly difficult to explain how else Mossad came to be filming the attack
Err 'do + document?' It's certainly difficult to explain how 19 reputed Muslim/Arab
hijackers could have 'control demolished' WTC7; ~2.5secs at *exactly* free-fall speed, WTCs
1&2 at almost free-fall speed [plus the outwards-ejected massive steel sections], and all
mainly 'all the way down' into their own 'footprints' = all three control demolished [all for
one; one for all]. Camel-f ** ckers just ain't that clever, eh? The observed fact that the US
rogue-regime made no 'counteractions' vis-à-vis the so-called 'attack on
America' made all 'responsibles' accessories; before [covert agencies], during [order-givers]
and after ['led' by the corrupt&venal MSM+PFBCs [latter = publicly financed
broadcasters]; all vile traitors.] Ho, hum; just another US/Z travesty. rgds
I read these kinds of articles with mixed reactions.
On the one hand, I believe Mr. Giraldi should choose his language more carefully. Perhaps
instead of referring to "Jews," he should narrow this to "Jewish Likud supporters" or
something similar.
The Jewish community as a whole is moderate, reasonable, and not especially devoted to
war. It is a subset of the community–which, alas, happens to be well-funded and
dedicated–that promotes war 24/7.
I believe Mr. Giraldi would appear more credible if he made this crucial distinction.
On the other hand, someone will always comment that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. are
more powerful than Wolfowitz and Feith. I believe this line of attack ignores crucial
facts.
1. It is these less powerful underlings that package the information that their superiors
use when determining policy. One need only recall the Office of Special Plans, headed by
Feith, that cherry-picked intelligence to make the case for war. Also, Wolfowitz served as
Bush II's foreign policy tutor when he was a candidate.
2. It has been credibly reported, I believe by Dana Milbanks in the Washington Post, that
Jewish donors provide 50% of individual donations to the Democratic party and 35% of
donations made to the Republicans. This kind of money gives those hawkish elements of the
Jewish community considerable power. In a system in which the vote is split almost equally
between both parties, these funds are crucial to electoral success.
So, yes, the Israel lobby is extraordinarily powerful. But no, it does not represent all
American Jews.
Jessica – I never say "all Jews" or even "most Jews" but to ignore that the
dominance of Israel is a Jewish problem is to turn one's back on reality. It is Jewish
oligarchs and organizations that push the Israeli agenda, that fund it, and that sustain it
in the media and on capitol hill. I know there are a lot of liberal Jews and even some not so
liberal ones that abhor what Israel is doing but are afraid to say anything lest they be
called "self hating." They have to get off the fence and declare that the USA is their home
and that Netanyahu's insistence that Israel is the Jewish homeland is a self-serving fraud.
Until that happens, Israel will dominate America's foreign policy discussion, to our damage.
Israel is a foreign country and should be treated by Washington like any other foreign
country, i.e. based on US national interests.
"special relationship" with Israel is itself the result of terrible national security and
foreign policy" while I agree that the statement is true, if does not begin to explain the
depth of Zionist control of the American Empire, nor does it look to the origin of that
control.
1. Israel is the network @ Colin wright, @ anonymous in reply to Ben_C as well as
2. The well researched book entitled "The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy by John J.
Mearsheimer (the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguised Service professor of Political Science and
the co director of the progarm on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago)
and Stephen M. Walt (the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor international Affairs at the John
f. Kennedy School of government at Harvard University and past academic dean of the Kennedy
School which discusses the Impact of US Foreign Policy as it relates to America's nation
interest.
4. Article VI of the US Constitution readmitted back into Independent America the entire
banking and corporate leaches which caused the American revolution, explained in some detail
on this website just a few days ago. @ Anon[317] • Disclaimer says: August 12, 2018 at
12:31 pm GMT • 1,100 Words wherein the so called landed estates and landed Gentry were
mostly British Banking and Trading and Slaving Corporations (many Jewish owners) doing
business in America. Their wealth was derived from their land ownership and corporations
licensed to do business in America by foreign governments. The British Aristocratic land
grants mostly made to privately owned British banking, trading and slaving corporations or
wealthy British and French Aristocrats allowed foreign nations to deed title to American
land. These baron-landed owners, the so-called Gentry, were the very centers of the British
a-human rights authority and vicious corporate and political powerhouses that controlled the
American Colonies of Britain. It was the landed gentry that brought the American colonist to
revolt against British rule. BUT just 12 years after the 1776 Declaration of Independence,
the banker and Aristocrat favorable US constitution was imposed by a process called
ratification? ( a third party regime change process that appears in the US Constitution as
Article VII?). This ratification process was used to impose the very same British mostly
Wealthy Crowd to not only keep their land granted lands, their personal wealth earned by
inhumanity to mankind, and their educated Aristocratic global life styles in America. So the
US constitution itself allowed to be installed: a government that only gave the British Baron
Aristocrats voting control of America's destiny but it also terminated the Democracy
(Articles of Confederation) that so much American blood had been spilt to bring about. These
were the some of the forefathers forefathers to global Zionism, a part of the powerhouse
support team of the Jewish banking and corporate global network, many of whom became team
members in the formalized conspiracy to take control of the oil in the world and to weaponize
immigration in order to take the oil from the Arabs. In 1896 (Switzerland , first Zionist
Congress) the Jewish controlled organizations weaponized immigration and aimed it at the
Ottoman Arab oil. Trace a failed coup attempt against the Ottoman, the Balfour Agreement,
WWI, British and French control over once Ottoman Palestine, the Palin Commission, a network
established military base that became Israel, immediate International recognition by the
Jewish controlled nations of the world) and so on. .
I trust you might now be " entirely sure why .. the narrative that US Politicians {must be
] .. [elected, salaried] stooges and puppets of Israel " few outsiders are allowed to take a
position among the 527 who control the law making powers and war making powers that the USA
uses to force Americans into their wars.
It seems that a large proportion of the members of the US Congress are Israeli citizens.
It is unconstitutional for a member of the Australian Parliament to be a dual citizen.
This is taken to such an extent that if it's found that an MP born in New Zealand moved to
Australia as a baby, that person's election becomes null and void, unless he or she was
conscious of the situation and verifiably renounced NZ citizenship prior to the election.
That is so even in this mad case of Australians and New Zealanders having the same head of
state, the English monarch.
Why on earth can't America bring in a similar law, making it impossible for Israeli
citizens to vote in its Congress, to even be there?
In 2015, Bill Browder published Red Notice – purportedly a true story about his
experience in Russia between 1996 and 2005. Upon closer scrutiny however, his story doesn't
add up and demonstrably fails to stand up in a court of law. Nonetheless, on the dubious
strength of that story, Browder has been able to lobby the U.S. Congress to pass the
Magnitsky Act in 2012 which needlessly damaged the relations between the U.S. and Russia.
Where he failed in courts of law, however, his campaign of relentless demonization of Russia
and of Vladimir Putin has been successful in the court of public opinion in the West. As
humanity finds itself on the precipice of yet another great war, what we need are bridges of
mutual understanding and constructive engagement, not demonization.
" and so Putin immediately issued orders for him to be sadistically murdered "
What an amazing consistency in supporting the Browder/Steele line "Putin did it." Which is
understandable, considering the efforts and investment made into the MSM memes. You made a
very strong impression that the presstituting MSM is your main source of information.
Here are some excerpts from the honest sources.
"Poisoned Russian spy was close to Christopher Steele consultant:"
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/poisoned-russian-spy-close-steele-consultant-report-article-1.3862516
"Jonathan Winer was not only a point man for the Steele "dossier" at the State Department in
2016 (and Steele dossiers of yore), he was also a father of the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Yes,
longtime Senate staffer Winer is the "old friend" Browder credits with envisioning the
legislative strategy that culminated in passage of the law. (More recently, Winer is serving
as Browder's bulldog-lawyer -- story here.)
"Cardin knew there were problems with Browder's story about Magnitsky's death and yet brought
him into Congress to testify to secure the vote. That's suborning perjury:" https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-04/magnitsky-trio-pushes-war-russia-new-sanctions
"Litvinenko's circle also included Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Goldfarb, Vyacheslav
Zharko, and Akhmed Zakayev, most of whom have received asylum in the U.K. In the 1990s, Boris
Berezovsky worked with Mikhail Khodorkovsky and George Soros' International Science
Foundation which was headed by Alexander Goldfarb for almost ten years. He was also involved
in money laundering millions of dollars through the Bank of New York and the Republic
Bank of New York which was owned by Bill Browder's now deceased partner, Edmond
Safra:" https://jimmysllama.com/2018/05/07/11191/
– Is not interesting, how so many Browder's connections met an untimely death yet
Browder the Scoundrel is well supported and protected by the "deciders." -- See the fate of a
DOCUMENTARY about Browder, Magnitsky, and a bloody trail of the dead former employees of
Browder whom he used for his very profitable if criminal enterprise.
Alexander Perepelichny" was the key witness who could potentially destroy the scam with
highest political stakes on Magnitsky dossier. As Browder responds with "I do not recall" and
"I do not know" on any substantial inquiry in the court, the US judiciary could be very
interested in hearing Perepelichny. This menace to Magnitsky Act was eliminated one week
before the bill passed the US House: on Nov 10, 2012 Alexander Perepelichny was found dead
outside his mansion in London."
"... Why are they pushing a propaganda war which awfully looks like psychological preparation for a real hot war, when they must know that there cannot ever be a real hot war? ..."
"... How will they prevent escalation if they themselves seem to slowly drink their own Kool-Aid and believe that Russia is "waging hybrid warfare" with them, and therefore that any military action against Russia counts as self-defense, moreover, that it'd be insane not to wage an actual war against Russia? ..."
Exactly. It's a bit frightening because I don't quite get what their endgame is here.
Maybe they truly believe they can decapitate Russia with very little risk or damage to
NATO countries, but from publicly available data it doesn't look like that.
Why are they pushing a propaganda war which awfully looks like psychological
preparation for a real hot war, when they must know that there cannot ever be a real hot
war?
How will they prevent escalation if they themselves seem to slowly drink their own
Kool-Aid and believe that Russia is "waging hybrid warfare" with them, and therefore that any
military action against Russia counts as self-defense, moreover, that it'd be insane not to
wage an actual war against Russia?
"... Russia's economy is weak. Its GDP did not make the world's top 10, yet its military, especially its nuclear power, has sustained its status as one of the most influential nations in the world. Russia and the US have serious geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East and Europe, but Trump suddenly reversed the hardline US stance and showed a low-key response to Putin. That's probably because, as Trump said, Russia is a nuclear power. ..."
"... Yet Trump's respect toward Russia is worth mentioning. Trump is a man who values strength, and he attaches great importance to military strength, especially nuclear strength. ..."
"... China is different from Russia. China has a robust economy and has many tools at its disposal, which is an advantage. Yet China's relatively weak military, especially its nuclear power, which lags behind the US, is a major strategic sore point. ..."
"... Just by looking at the US' aggressive attitude in the South China Sea and the Taiwan question, we know that China's nuclear strength is "far from sufficient." Part of the US' strategic arrogance may come from its absolute nuclear advantage. We are concerned that maybe one day, Washington will turn this arrogance into military provocation, whereby China will face very grave challenges. ..."
Amid the lingering fury from the US media over US President Donald Trump's summit with
Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, the White House announced Thursday that Trump
invited Putin to visit Washington this fall. Trump's attitude has been firm on improving
US-Russia relations. Despite staunch opposition, it is quite likely that US-Russia
relations will halt its slide during Trump's presidency.
Trump has repeatedly stressed that Russia and the US are the two biggest nuclear powers
in the world, with their combined nuclear arsenal accounting for 90 percent of world's
total, and thus the US must live in peace with Russia. On US-Russia relations, Trump is
clearheaded.
Russia's economy is weak. Its GDP did not make the world's top 10, yet its military,
especially its nuclear power, has sustained its status as one of the most influential
nations in the world. Russia and the US have serious geopolitical conflicts in the Middle
East and Europe, but Trump suddenly reversed the hardline US stance and showed a low-key
response to Putin. That's probably because, as Trump said, Russia is a nuclear
power.
We know US-Russia relations cannot be improved overnight because it is difficult for the
two countries to make strategic compromises in Europe and the Middle East. Even if their
relations improve, other frictions may emerge, causing new rifts in bilateral ties.
Yet Trump's respect toward Russia is worth mentioning. Trump is a man who values
strength, and he attaches great importance to military strength, especially nuclear
strength.
The US has defined China as its strategic competitor and is exerting more pressure. The
trade war may be just the beginning. Tensions between the two nations may spread to other
areas. We believe that during this process, the White House will continue to evaluate,
including a look at China's nuclear arsenal.
China is different from Russia. China has a robust economy and has many tools at its
disposal, which is an advantage. Yet China's relatively weak military, especially its
nuclear power, which lags behind the US, is a major strategic sore point.
A popular view among Chinese strategists is that we need only a sufficient number of
nuclear weapons. Too many nuclear weapons cost more and may trigger outside alarm, leading
to strategic uncertainty. Those who hold this view believe China does not need to increase
its strategic nuclear weapons and should instead focus on modernizing its nuclear weapons
to secure the country's capability for a second nuclear strike. We believe this view is a
serious misinterpretation of the major countries' nuclear situation.
China is no small country that needs only a few nuclear weapons to scare off an
intimidator at a critical moment. China has grown into a global influence, facing greater
risks and pressure than smaller countries do. We must reconsider what constitutes
"sufficient" in terms of nuclear weapons.
China's nuclear weapons have to not only secure a second strike but also play the role
of cornerstone in forming a strong deterrence so that outside powers dare not intimidate
China militarily. Once major countries are engaged in military conflicts, each side must
evaluate the determination of the other side to see the conflict through. Nuclear power is
the pillar of that determination. One of the major reasons that the US used a
"salami-slicing" method to push for NATO's eastward expansion but refused to engage in open
conflict in Ukraine and Syria with Russia is probably because it was concerned about what
Moscow might do with its huge nuclear arsenal.
Just by looking at the US' aggressive attitude in the South China Sea and the Taiwan
question, we know that China's nuclear strength is "far from sufficient." Part of the US'
strategic arrogance may come from its absolute nuclear advantage. We are concerned that
maybe one day, Washington will turn this arrogance into military provocation, whereby China
will face very grave challenges.
China must speed up its process of developing strategic nuclear power. Advanced missiles
such as the Dongfeng-41 should materialize as soon as possible. Not only should we possess
a strong nuclear arsenal, but we must also let the outside world know that China is
determined to defend its core national interests with nuclear power.
Of course, we do not believe nuclear power development should override all the other
work or its development should come at the expense of other major developmental interests.
But this work must be made a top priority. We must recognize the urgent need for China to
strengthen its nuclear prowess.
If a nuclear war starts, it is only logical for the initial combatants to target ALL
powers at once, as this may be their last chance to reduce their neighbors' ability to loot
and conquer after the war. So expect Europe & China to be hit. China will in turn target
Japan, India, Korea, etc. The US do not trust Canada or Mexico, so these may well become
targets too. Pakistan and Israel may want to make their move at this point. Pretty soon it
would become clear that no major industrial or population center should be spared. So within
a couple of hours, the world's entire nuclear stockpile would be launched.
After these events, the country with the most extensive tunnel system will emerge as the
new world leader.
" I don't quite get what their endgame is here .Why are they pushing a propaganda war
which awfully looks like psychological preparation for a real hot war, when they must know
that there cannot ever be a real hot war?"
Most probably, because they are calculating that under various forms of psychological and
economic pressure Russia will crumble from within and surrender, just like in the times of
Gorbachev-Yeltsin, without having to fight a real, risk-filled war. Surrender and subjugation
without firing a shot – THAT'S their imagined endgame. "Why wouldn't what worked within
living memory, a mere 30 years ago, work again now in updated form?", they think –
especially since the Russia of today is in a comparatively much weaker position overall than
the USSR of back then and the Russian rulers and society are not really too much different
psychologically from what they were back then, and are even mostly COMPOSED OF THE SAME
INDIVIDUALS? Is it really surprising that they think that way, given the continued existence
and thriving inside Russia of a powerful, openly seditious Fifth Column which is not
seriously combatted by either the Putin government or the stupid mass of the Russian populace
(who stand to lose the most, suffer terribly, and be reduced to colonized virtual serfs or
exterminated if the Fifth Columnists and their foreign masters succeed in crashing
Russia)?
Of course, IF this is a miscalculation (and I'm not sure that it is, given the current
weak, appeasing mentality of the Russian government and population), and the psychopathic
Western ruling elites don't manage to get a hold of their oversized lunatic egos and rein in
their arrogant hubristic belligerence – well, then the whole situation could devolve
pretty quick into a massive, WW I/WW II/Iraq/Serbia combination-type hot war scenario.
Except, this time, with the real probability of stepwise escalation from conventional
hostilities to Thermonuclear Holocaust.
Realistically, what action Russia could take that would potentially match the disruptive
power of American sanctions on Russia?
Russia may have struck a heavy blow already, when she dumped her holdings of U.S.
treasuries. The relatively small amount ($100 to $200 billion) may not have been significant,
but as a signal to the rest of the world it may have been loud. The new sanctions may be an
attempt to punish Russia for that. They won't work, of course, but the noise they generate
may help to obscure the import of Russia's recent action.
What I don't understand is why the US thinks Russia and China will continue to sanction North
Korea. It seems like the US is handing out straight razors to everybody and asking them to
slit each others throats. Except for Erdogan, they all seem to be saying, "Sure why not?"
Maybe they are simply accustomed to taking orders.
51 U.S. diplomats who still haven't grasped the negative outcomes of the disastrous wars
launched since 2002, the solution is to bomb the world into America's image. In an internal
dissent cable addressed to Barack Obama, seasoned diplomats have urged airstrikes on the
government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Chas Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, told me he
found the cable "unusual" in two respects. First, it garnered a large number of signatures.
Most of those who signed the cable, a State Department official told me, were "rank and file"
diplomats, such as a deputy to U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and a secretary in the
Near East Bureau. They had a good understanding of the current situation in the region. The
second reason this cable is unusual, said Ambassador Freeman, is that the signatories "are
arguing for rather than against the use of force." Over the past 40 years, diplomats have
used the "dissent channel" to caution against a rush to war. Now these diplomats are asking
for an intensification of war.
A former ambassador told me that many of the diplomats have great fealty to Hillary
Clinton. Could they have leaked this cable to boost Clinton's narrative that she wanted a
more robust attack on Damascus as early as 2012? Is this a campaign advertisement for
Clinton, and a preparation for her likely Middle East policy when she takes power in 2017?
Clinton certainly advocated tougher military action in Syria. She joined CIA chief David
Petraeus to push for a U.S.-backed rebel army in 2012, and she argued for air strikes when
there was no appetite for this in the White House.
Looks like the aim of US sanctions is to ratchet the hostility up with Russia to the level of
a full blown cold war. Ukraine can be a victim.
Notable quotes:
"... Meanwhile, you'll get bogged down in Ukraine. You'll face tough choices (sanctions will get North Korea-style quickly, and even Chinese sympathy will get questionable), like should you spend your scarce resources on modern weaponry or a large security force to keep Ukraine pacified? ..."
"... Very few people in Russia would want Ukraine now. The consensus is: "good riddance". In Ukraine, on the other hand, there are people who want Russia to invade. Some are waiting for someone else to liberate them from Nazis (they apparently are not familiar with Protestant wisdom that God helps those who help themselves), some pray for a pretext to invite NATO/US (as if anyone is willing to die for them). ..."
We'll need an anti-sanctions law regardless of whether or not we are going to invade.
Well, I'd say it's a precondition to invading Ukraine. If you're incapable of
making such a simple law, you're sure as hell incapable of invading Ukraine. And you do need
the law if you want to avoid the sanctions creating the perverse incentives inside Russia, like
the biggest banks not having branches in the Crimea. Decoupling from the US dollar is no help,
since US sanctions are extraterritorial, if you didn't notice, so they affect euro or even
Chinese yuan denominated transactions, too.
Eastern Europeans will never mobilise. What would mass mobilisation even look like in a
country like Hungary? Instead, they'll petition USA to station more of its troops in Eastern
Europe. A lot more, like hundreds of thousands more.
Within living memory, Hungary had armed forces of 150,000 troops and 1,500 main
battle tanks (admittedly, the majority were somewhat obsolete), with hundreds of fighter and
light bomber jets (MiG-21s and Su-22s etc.), and we were the slackers in the Eastern Bloc, not
spending on defense as much as other neighbors of us. Increasing defense spending to 2% of GDP
is what's the plan. If you invaded and occupied the whole of Ukraine, it could easily go up to
4-5%.
Of course, the Americans might come in numbers, too. But you're delusional here:
Doing so will impose costs on the USA. Actually, this is one of the few ways Russia could
impose tangible costs on USA: by stoking tensions in Eastern Europe.
We have no military industry to speak of. Most of our neighbors do have some, but
even they are nowhere near self-sufficiency. You can guess who we'll buy our weapons from.
Poland recently offered to pay for an American base on its soil. So it won't be much of a cost
for the US, it might actually be quite beneficial.
Meanwhile, you'll get bogged down in Ukraine. You'll face tough choices (sanctions will
get North Korea-style quickly, and even Chinese sympathy will get questionable), like should
you spend your scarce resources on modern weaponry or a large security force to keep Ukraine
pacified?
Mass deportations is the best part about occupying the Ukraine!
Stalin's USSR at the height of its power only deported much smaller populations.
You'd need a lot of people to achieve that. But let's assume you'll manage to do that. It will,
of course, create a huge backlash against Russia: popular opinion will get united against
Russians. (Defense spending quickly up to 5% of GDP or higher.) The Ukrainians in our countries
will of course enter the workforce and join anti-Russian ragtag militias to control the border.
Instead they would have to contend with an insurgency in Eastern Poland
So the people ethnically cleansed from their homes will rise up against NATO in
support of Russia. This is a seriously dumb idea.
Very few people in Russia would want Ukraine now. The consensus is: "good riddance". In
Ukraine, on the other hand, there are people who want Russia to invade. Some are waiting for
someone else to liberate them from Nazis (they apparently are not familiar with Protestant
wisdom that God helps those who help themselves), some pray for a pretext to invite NATO/US
(as if anyone is willing to die for them).
This reminds me of an old Russian joke.
An old hag sits on the bench and screams: "Help! They are raping me!"
Another one passes by and asks: "Have you gone completely mad?"
The first one answers: "Everyone is entitled to a pleasant dream!"
Don't worry about my IQ woes – they are non-existent. I am a stable genius –
just like Donald Trump. Your IQ issues are – on the other hand – very easy to
fix. All you have to do is admit that you are Russian and you immediately gain 20-30 IQ
points. Of course, this will come at the expense of Russia, but then again. everything you've
ever done in your history came at the expense of Russia. All the Russians ever wanted was to
have a brotherly nation in Ukraine. They have a brother all right, unfortunately that brother
has a Down syndrome.
Any Russian ruler who tries to return Crimea will be overthrown in no time. As Russia
gradually disengages from the US-dominated financial system, the costs will go down. Russia
has already created its own payment system similar to that of Visa and Mastercard, as well as
its own money transfer system similar to SWIFT. On the other hand, if Russia fails to
disengage from dollar-dominated system, the losses would be much greater than Crimea. It
might even turn into a shithole, like Ukraine.
Insurance is more often a scam than not: Lehman Brothers enjoyed pretty high ratings until
their crash. What's more, banks were insured against the risks of sub-prime mortgages they
held. Remember what happened in 2008?
As to the future, nobody has the crystal ball. Can you tell how much a Big Mac will cost
in the US five or ten years from now? $4? $40? $400? $4,000? Your guess is as good as mine.
Ponzi schemes have a habit of crashing and nobody worked out a way of predicting when exactly
the crash will occur.
This might be in the cards. The US sanctions actually squeezed Russian comprador (5th
column) oligarchs, who were always subservient to the West, sent their families there, and
are siphoning off their money offshore, more than anything. If Putin uses this to expropriate
their stolen riches, which he might do (98% of Russian population would be cheering; they'd
cheer even more if Putin hangs those bastards, but that's unlikely), these sanctions would be
yet another example of the US shooting itself in the foot. The US is getting pretty good at
that lately, always screaming that it hurts afterwards.
"... So will a good Christian like Mike Pompeo reconcile these obvious falsehoods, self deception. With every letter, he will be denying the very God he professes to believe in. ..."
"... Trump and his administration are the reveal of the true nature of modern American political Christianity. This is what it always was ..."
"... But The People are not exactly conscientious objector on the issue of Yemen and the crimes committed in our name either. The Republic might rot from the head, but the rot has certainly spread far and wide. ..."
A senior general urged Saudi officials to conduct a thorough investigation into an
airstrike that killed at least 40 children in Yemen, the Pentagon said Monday, an indication
of U.S. concern about allied nations' air operations against Houthi militants.
The general's request actually shows how little concern the U.S. has for how the Saudi
coalition conducts its war effort. If the U.S. were concerned with how the war was being
fought, our officials wouldn't be asking the perpetrators of atrocities to investigate their
own crimes. It is pointless to urge the Saudis to conduct an investigation into their own war
crime when we already know that they will find that they did nothing wrong. As the
Post article notes later on, the coalition's investigations predictably excuse their
actions:
According to Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington director for Human Rights Watch, Saudi
investigators had cleared coalition military officials of legal responsibility in virtually
all investigations the JIAT had conducted.
The pattern of Saudi coalition conduct over the last three years is clear. Their forces
commit numerous documented war crimes, and then when they "investigate" those crimes they
determine that their forces are guilty of nothing. It would have been laughable to ask the
Saudis to investigate themselves back in 2015, and to do the same over three years later is
inexcusable. It is an invitation to whitewashing heinous, illegal acts. The U.S. will not
honestly call out the coalition members for their crimes against Yemeni civilians because our
government is
deeply complicit in those crimes, and so we are treated to this pantomime farce where we
send officers to call for investigations whose results have been predetermined even before the
crimes were committed. The entire policy is a disgrace, and it brings dishonor on everyone
ordered to participate in it.
There needs to be an independent, international inquiry into war crimes committed by all
sides in Yemen. All parties to the conflict are assuredly guilty of war crimes, and all parties
should be held accountable for what they have done to Yemen's civilians. As long as the U.S.
enables Saudi coalition crimes and then shields them from scrutiny, our government is
implicated in both the crime and the cover-up. Congress could put a stop to this if they
were willing to do their jobs and assume their proper responsibilities, but for more than three
years they have shirked their duties and acquiesced in a despicable and indefensible policy in
Yemen.
"The entire policy is a disgrace, and it brings dishonor on everyone ordered to
participate in it."
For all that they're doing it at the order of even more disgusting civilians, this has got
a be a low point in the history of the American military. The word "Yemen" on a resume or CV
will make military people stink for the rest of their lives. Like "My Lai" or "Dishonorable
Discharge".
We are getting a preview of the letters Mike Pompeo will be signing off on to Congress.
So will a good Christian like Mike Pompeo reconcile these obvious falsehoods, self
deception. With every letter, he will be denying the very God he professes to believe
in.
"The entire policy is a disgrace, and it brings dishonor on everyone ordered to participate
in it."
Conduct unbecoming.
The higher the rank of the officers involving themselves in this – in following
unconstitutional orders to participate in an illegal campaign of aggressive war and
collective punishment – the worse it gets. It would be a heroic act for a private
– or even the officer piloting a refueling tanker – to speak out against this, a
general has much less of a claim to honor and acquiescence both.
If The People really supported those who serve, they would rally to every conscientious
objector – even the misguided ones – because anybody who has the honor and
integrity to question orders is preferable to those that pay no heed to the meaning of their
oath.
But The People are not exactly conscientious objector on the issue of Yemen and the
crimes committed in our name either. The Republic might rot from the head, but the rot has
certainly spread far and wide.
"... Besides, just look at how much the Iraq War benefited Israel. You see, Israel wants to pursue a strategy of destabilizing the region, so it cleverly pulled off a false flag attack on 9/11; I'm not quite sure why Mossad didn't frame one of Israel's actual enemies, like the Palestinians or Iranians, or even Saddam for that matter, as the perpetrators of the attacks, but I'm sure it's all part of the plan. ..."
"... Anyway, Israel got the United States to invade Iraq, which destabilized the region and created chaos, predictably leading to a massive increase in Iranian influence in Iraq and likely enabling more Iranian intervention in the Syrian Civil War, which benefited Israel because uh chaos and destabilization. ..."
. The decision to go to war on false pretenses against Iraq, largely promoted by a cabal
of prominent American Jews in the Pentagon and in the media, killed 4,424 Americans as well
as hundreds of thousands Iraqis and will wind up costing the American taxpayer $7 trillion
dollars when all the bills are paid. That same group of mostly Jewish neocons more-or-less
is now agitating to go to war with Iran using a game plan for escalation prepared by Israel
which will, if anything, prove even more catastrophic.
Oh right, who can forget the cabal of Jews controlling the US government and military at
the time of the Iraq invasion, such as President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney,
Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, CIA director George Tenet, National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice Every.Single.Time, am I right, folks?
Oh wait, they aren't Jewish? Well, I blame the Jews away. Just look at uh Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Woflowitz and
journalist Bill Kristol. That sounds like an extremely powerful cabal easily capable of
commanding such trivial figures as the President, CIA director, Secretary of State, et
cetera, to do their bidding.
Besides, just look at how much the Iraq War benefited Israel. You see, Israel wants to
pursue a strategy of destabilizing the region, so it cleverly pulled off a false flag attack
on 9/11; I'm not quite sure why Mossad didn't frame one of Israel's actual enemies, like the
Palestinians or Iranians, or even Saddam for that matter, as the perpetrators of the attacks,
but I'm sure it's all part of the plan.
Anyway, Israel got the United States to invade Iraq, which destabilized the region and
created chaos, predictably leading to a massive increase in Iranian influence in Iraq and
likely enabling more Iranian intervention in the Syrian Civil War, which benefited Israel
because uh chaos and destabilization.
And if you doubt that neocons totally control the US government, just look at how we're at
war with Iran! Well we're not technically at war yet, a decade after neoconservatives
began promoting the war and President Obama did somehow manage to sign a nuclear deal with
Iran that infuriated his neocon and Israeli puppetmasters but I'm sure that President Trump,
famously beloved by Jews and neocons everywhere, will soon go to war with Iran.
' I'm not entirely sure why you keep hanging on to this tired and false narrative that
US politicians are some sort of stooges and puppets of Israel '
Maybe because they are stooges and puppets? In extreme cases, they even boast of it. When
Romney was running for president, he promised he would check with Israel on any action we
took in the Middle East. When Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was promoting civil war
in Syria, she explained that this was necessary because Israel wished it.
It goes on, and on. If someone is considering a run for Congress, he gets a nice little
packet from AIPAC. Among other things, he's asked to write an essay expressing his feelings
about Israel.
If the essay isn't satisfactory, AIPAC backs his opponent.
Not surprisingly, when Netanyahu -- the premier of a tiny state on the other side of the
planet -- spoke to Congress he was interrupted with standing ovations seventeen times. The
display put me in mind of the sort of frenzied adulation Communist delegates used to display
towards Stalin.
and the motives, of course, would be similar, even if actual death isn't in prospect. For
most in Congress, displease Israel, and your political career just ended.
"Many in the intelligence and law enforcement communities suspect that it (Israel) had
considerable prior intelligence regarding the 9/11 plot but did not share it with
Washington."
It's certainly difficult to explain how else Mossad came to be filming the attack.
I think it needs to be emphasized that it's not merely a matter of practical politics.
Israel is evil -- she brings misery to millions, actual happiness to almost no one, and
engages in behavior with no defensible moral foundation at all. She has attacked every
single one of her neighbors, compulsively seeks out further conflict to paper over the
shortcomings in her own national identity, and treats her Palestinian subjects with a
morality about like that of a nasty little boy pulling the wings off a fly.
Arguably, others are as bad. However, unlike the others, Israel could not have come into
being without our support, and could not continue to exist today without our continued moral,
economic, diplomatic, and military support. If we pulled the plug, Israel would cease to
exist as a Jewish supremacist state within -- at most -- a decade.
We are, in fact, responsible for Israel, and hence responsible for Israel's crimes. Other
people's teenaged sons may well be out there stealing cars and raping girls. This happens to
be our son doing it. We're responsible.
We pursue many policies I regard as futile, short-sighted, deluded, or self-destructive.
My personal list would include 'come one come all' immigration, global warming denial,
maintaining a massive military establishment, condoning 'Black Lives Matter,' and probably
some other things.
No doubt the reader has his own list. However, that's not the point. The point is that
essentially, these policies are merely stupid rather than actually evil. It's not evil
to think we should just let whoever wants come into the US. It's dumb -- but it isn't
evil. In fact, I'll willingly credit people who vote for 'sanctuary cities' et al with the
most laudable sentiments. I merely question their intelligence.
Israel is different. Israel is evil, and hence our support for it is as well. It is the
most fundamentally wrong act we are engaged in.
There is a moral dimension to life. There is a distinction between striving to do good --
however unsuccessfully -- and willingly participating in evil.
"A well-funded massive lobbying effort involving hundreds of groups and thousands of
individuals in the U.S. has worked to the detriment of actual American interests, in part
by creating a permanent annual gift of billions of dollars to Israel for no other reason
but that it is Israel and can get anything it wants from a servile Congress and White House
without any objection from a controlled media."
Kind of begs the question, why are we giving any aid to a first-world country with a GDP
growth rate in the 3% to 4% rate for years (even while we were stuck below 2%) and an
unemployment rate below 4%?
The Israeli economy is in better shape than the US economy; they should be giving us
aid.
"Baron Cohen, who confronted several GOP notables in the guise of Colonel Erran Morad,
an Israeli security specialist, provided a number of clues that his interview was a sham
but none of the victims were smart enough to pick up on them."
Yes, it is truly amazing what our "Best & Brightest" will do to stay on-side.
Following Mr. Giraldi's earlier post regarding the gubernatorial run of Israeli puppet Ron
DeSantis and the Big Sugar connections of Adam Putnam, it would seem a Floridian's least
worst choice is Bob White.
Israel is nothing but trouble. It has the right to defend itself
1st part: Absolutely, indubitably correct.
2nd part: ¿Qué? Why do people say/write this? Under what corrupt
arrangement does an oh, so obvious outlaw have any such right?
Consider: A gang of out-of-towners turns up at a block of flats, breaks the doors down and
occupies the building, killing some erstwhile owner/occupiers and ejecting most of the rest
on the way in, thereafter whooping it up big, and ignoring [obviously too feeble] orders to
RoR+R*3 [= Right of Return + Revest, Reparations and Reconciliation.] Since when can such
outlaws dictate anything, thumb their noses at the Law?
Property, especially here land, is alienable – but this does not mean
' subject to seizure by aliens .'
Kindly consider: "A fair exchange is no robbery." A fair exchange means willing
seller, interested buyer, and a freely and fairly agreed price. No such thing exists
vis-à-vis the forcible colonisation of Palestine. Some proof may be seen
here [my
bolding]:
By 1949, some 700,000 Palestinians had fled or been expelled from their lands and
villages. Israel was now in control of some 20.5 million dunams (approx. 20,500
km²) or 78% of lands in what had been Mandatory Palestine
Land laws were passed to legalize changes to land ownership.[5]
5. Ruling Palestine, A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land
and Housing in Palestine. Publishers: COHRE & BADIL, May 2005, p. 37.
Especially in reference to the illegitimate entity which terms itself Israel, wiki is not
reliable, being, like the US Congress, Israeli-occupied territory. So it is noteworthy that
they write "in control of" as opposed to 'own.' They can't ever own it due to not having
purchased it, and Palestinians may not surrender it, due to the UDHR which specifies
*inalienable* rights:
Article 3.
• Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 17.
• (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with
others.
• (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Also, see the Washington Consensus:
10.Legal security for property rights.
Further, there is UNSC242: inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war, plus
only just law may earn respect, and/or be respected. A law dispossessing erstwhile legal
owner/occupiers is an utter travesty.
Me; comment: Its illegitimacy is all so howlingly obvious!
Fazit: Apart from the ~6% of 'pre-Herzl Palestine' which 'invading by stealth' alien,
mostly European Jews managed to purchase, the illegitimate entity does not own nor can they
ever own the land/property they squat upon, which still belongs to the erstwhile
owner/occupiers, specifically the 'native' pre-Nakba Palestinians [now including heirs &
successors]. Then, the illegitimate entity does not declare borders for two reasons 1) any
such declaration would be [probably successfully] challenged and 2) the illegitimate entity
expresses the desire to expand to 'from the Nile to the Euphrates.' Q: Just how ghastly is
that? A: Could hardly be worse.
Closing the loop: How can land-thieves have any 'right to defend' such improperly
alienated land/property? It doesn't compute! rgds
Thank you, Mr. Giraldi, for another forceful rebuke of Zionist criminality and US
culpability.
The supremacist kosher state is a cancer on America. Just survey the wreckage. Count the
bodies. Who benefits from this?
The Zionist project is a plague on humanity. It entertains no compromise. It will stop at
virtually nothing. Examine the blood-soaked damage from Soviet Russia to Germany to Palestine
and beyond. It moves Washington around via remote control.
The situation has become very grave. Speech deemed 'anti-Semitic' is rapidly being
criminalized worldwide.
Right wing political expression (that Jews don't like) on Twitter, Facebook and the web is
being de-platformed for speech infractions that involve 'hate'. But it's only 'hate' of a
certain stripe.
After all, hatred is ubiquitous in America. It cuts in every direction. So why is the
focus so intense on just one spectrum of hatred?
Might it have something to do with the political preferences of those in power?
Oh maybe.
Principles be damned. Whose ox is being gored?
With that in mind, consider this: who might actually be the biggest hater of
all?–and killer? (Hint: it's certainly not the powerless Alt-right 'deplorables'.)
Might it instead be the world's foremost victims?
After all, incendiary speech–even 'hate speech'–does not kill. It takes bombs,
drones, tanks and missiles to accomplish that.
So where's the uproar over routine sorties which needlessly dispense death and
destruction?
It's gone missing.
Incredibly, it is rough speech and acute political criticism–not failed, horrific
wars–that are being criminalized. Pro-Zionist 'wars of choice' still get a pass in our
corporate board rooms, TV studios, news rooms, and in most of Official Washington.
This entrenched distortion allows neocons and their underlings to jawbone and plot their
next preemptive war. The Big Squeeze is on. Beware Russia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and
Iran. Zionism is an 'unshakable' Washington value. So get ready.
How distant wars advance the interests of average Americans remains a mystery.
Despite this puzzle, America's MSM offers little resistance and no straightforward
criticism of Zio-Washington's ceaseless war efforts on behalf of a certain 'democratic ally'.
In similar fashion, the Fourth Estate has also been compromised.
It's worth remembering that, according to the UN Charter, a state-sponsored 'First Strike'
against another sovereign state is the most serious war crime. This elementary moral precept
however matters not–at least not when Israel is pulling the strings. Quiet, children.
Listen. Obey.
What we have here is a pattern of vast serial criminality.
Zio-Washington has become Israel's war vessel. We regular folk are just along for the
ride.
So don't forget to cheer for the good guys!
Incredibly, US-enabled, Israeli ruthlessness has gotten even worse under 'America First'
Trump. After all, Trump needlessly tore up Obama's hard-fought peace deal with Iran.
Why would Trump make such a move? (As a candidate, he was far less hawkish).
Our weakened and despised President needs desperately to please America's foremost lobby.
Trump cannot govern without their support. This peculiar situation however requires
additional blood-letting on behalf of the Zionist state. Foreign wars that benefit Israel are
the unwritten price that the goyim leadership in America must pay. Sorry folks!
(Are you listening, Tehran?)
Jewish power corrupts. Overwhelming Jewish power corrupts in overwhelming fashion.
"... Israel – not Russia – is the one foreign country that can interfere with impunity with the political processes in the United States yet it is immune from criticism. ..."
By all means confront Israel if that is your thing, but don't pretend that there is any
possibility of besting them.
Israel – not Russia – is the one foreign country that can interfere with
impunity with the political processes in the United States yet it is immune from
criticism.
Yes. And that is why only Israel can tame American Jews.
A list of America's adversaries here would contain the Taliban, the Houthis of Yemen, Bashar
Assad of Syria, Erdogan's Turkey, Iran, North Korea, Russia and China -- a pretty full
plate.
Are we prepared to see these confrontations through, to assure the capitulation of our
adversaries? What do we do if they continue to defy us?
And if it comes to a fight, how many allies will we have in the battles and wars that
follow?
Was this the foreign policy America voted for?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That
Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
Has anybody in comments noted how far we have swung from absence of actual PROOF Russia did
the Skripal "poisonings" (or even Litvenenko for that matter?!) to what seems like complete
acceptance of "guilt," even as major international bodies (OPCW, etc., even Porton Down) have
not been able to tie Russia/Putin to these alleged acts of terror or isolate the "novichoks"
genre of nerve agent ? The Red Queen triumphs.
Does mere accusation now stand for "truth" in this inmates-running-the-asylum charade USA
is putting on? If the "big lie" (Lenin, BTW not Goebbels, originally) works this easily, we
are indeed down the chute & over the brink. Orwell is spinning in his grave (gnashing his
teeth).
"... Therefore, we have to deal with facts in the matter. Among the facts, I'd like to point out to the behavior of the investigating party, i.e. the British authorities. "We have proof but won't show them to you, because they are secret" attitude; bypassing normal investigative and judicial channels; unreasonable demands towards Russia they knew full well won't be met and total refusal to cooperate on realistic terms – we saw it for the first time in the Litvinenko affaire. ..."
All I was pointing out was that there were many reasons why Litvinenko was a target
for unfriendly Russian actions
I am pretty sure Litvinenko wasn't particularly loved in Russia: he was a traitor, after
all, and, judging by his actions, a pretty miserable human being. However, building a case on
motive alone is not possible, if for no other reason than because a motive is by definition
subjective. You could analyze until your face turns blue how Putin felt about Litvinenko's
accusations but you'd never come to any firm conclusion, for only Putin can possibly know
that.
Therefore, we have to deal with facts in the matter. Among the facts, I'd like to
point out to the behavior of the investigating party, i.e. the British authorities. "We have
proof but won't show them to you, because they are secret" attitude; bypassing normal
investigative and judicial channels; unreasonable demands towards Russia they knew full well
won't be met and total refusal to cooperate on realistic terms – we saw it for the
first time in the Litvinenko affaire.
The same patters was repeated exactly in the Skripal case. This tells you who is the
"highly likely" culprit, doesn't it? These two scenarios are so much alike, the have the same
author – not necessarily the same person, but definitely the same office.
There are antisemitic rants in many places on the web, almost all of which are ignored.
But make an objective criticism of the Zionist enterprise now a days and its apologists resort immediately to unrestrained
howls and accusations of antisemitism.
One ought, therefor, to understand this rhetorical device for the simple ad hominem attack that it is.
In near simultaneous statements addressed to the Iranian public in a speech aired on state TV, the supreme leader who has the
final word over all affairs in the Islamic republic, issued the directive: "I ban holding any talks with America... America never
remains loyal to its promises in talks."
"America's withdrawal from the nuclear deal is a clear proof that America cannot be trusted," state TV quoted Khamenei further.
As part of his series of tweets, some of which mocked Trump's policy in the Middle East, Khamenei published an infographic presenting
his position on ratcheting tensions with the U.S.
He also slammed the idea that this was the first such offer of talks, saying that Iran has proudly resisted unfair and imbalanced
U.S. offers of negotiations for decades, and even cited President Ronald Reagan's sending his national security advisor, Robert McFarlane
to Tehran for failed negotiations.
Notably, he appeared to troll Trump personally as well as his cabinet in the following:
A stupid man tells the Iranian nation that 'your government spends your money on Syria'. This is while his boss-- the U.S.
president-- has admitted he spent 7 trillion dollars in the Middle East without gaining anything in return!
The top Iranian cleric also briefly referenced Iran's domestic crisis, which has included sporadic protests and clashes with the
police throughout the summer in response to a plummeting rial and inability of people to access imported goods, stating "Today's
livelihood problems do not emerge from outside; they are internal."
He urged the country to resist sanctions and erect "prudent" ways shielding from their effects.
It will be interesting to see if Trump responds to this directly in a tweet, or if any official reaction will be forthcoming from
the White House.
But in the meantime it appears the possibility of any renegotiation after Trump's official pullout of the JCPOA last May has just
had to the door slammed on it.
The mullahs are going to be quite the whiny bitches for a while. The anti-American pro Islam President Obama, Commie CIA director,
for sale Sec of State, gay agenda Pentagon director and Ben Rhodes and ValJar, Rice and their ill will not be returning. Islamic
socialism will be performing the economic wonders you can expect, putting a strong clamp on you their foreign subversion and domestic
payrolls too. Meanwhile, they've got a middle class that hates them and views Islam as foreign dirty Arabs' inhuman sect. Good
luck with that.
One has to wonder on how many fronts can Washington keep expanding America's military with the goal of fighting and actually
winning a war before it collapses under the weight of its expenditures?
Washington won't be winning any wars against Russia and/or China. It should stick with what it's good at, that is bombing third
world countries, on behalf of its Zionist masters. On second thoughts, it shouldn't be doing that either.
This is an interesting analysis shedding some light on how the US intelligence services have gone rogue...
Notable quotes:
"... Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence. ..."
"... the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough. ..."
"... That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment. ..."
"... He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail? ..."
"... The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up." ..."
"... The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on. ..."
"... "What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task." ..."
"... "The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact." ..."
"... But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts. ..."
"... Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria. ..."
"... Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
In today's United States, the term "espionage" doesn't get too much
use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage,
but with regard to Americans' own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they
prefer the term "intelligence." This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you
look at things.
First of all, US "intelligence" is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has
been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and
China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and
conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you
are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.
In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days
torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged
in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and
that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate
negotiating future spy swaps.
In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a
good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies,
sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as "Al Qaeda." There was no such thing before US
intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.
Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr.
Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own
spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They
poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no
evidence.
There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies working
in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly
super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their "secret" lab in Porton Down doesn't
work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).
There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it
needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the
prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An
alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be
following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value.
A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the courts is
acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the source is the person on trial and
the method -- treason -- can be divulged without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper,
professional spies who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be double agents.
In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the professional thing to do is to try to
recruit him as a double agent or, failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for
injecting disinformation.
Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert
Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail
server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's
been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that
they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet.
Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from
Russia.
Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict Russian citizens in
Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court because of the following clause in the
Russian Constitution: "61.1 A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of
Russia or extradited to another state."
Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars to interpret this sentence, or he can
just read it and weep. Yes, the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule
against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough.
That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked
into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system
has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done
bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged
hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping
a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment.
He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC
officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie
Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian
hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So,
where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail?
Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate on criminal
investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted by Mueller. He even offered to
have Mueller sit in on the proceedings. But in return he wanted to question US officials who
may have aided and abetted a convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to
begin serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by the way, donated copious
amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary Clinton election campaign.
In response, the US Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians from questioning US
officials. And instead of issuing a valid request to have the twelve Russian spies interviewed,
at least one US official made the startlingly inane request to have them come to the US
instead. Again, which part of 61.1 don't they understand?
The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the
traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance --
which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best
ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such
quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US
"intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit
up."
The "intelligence" the US intelligence agencies provide can be anything but; in fact, the
stupider it is the better, because its purpose is allow unintelligent people to make
unintelligent decisions. In fact, they consider facts harmful -- be they about Syrian chemical
weapons, or conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden -- because facts require accuracy and rigor
while they prefer to dwell in the realm of pure fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual
objective is easily discernible.
The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its
allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom
aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and
overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they
are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and
so on.
One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag
operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, à la fake East Gouta
chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is
perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were
harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly
forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure
confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a
conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.
Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He waffled. A
light-hearted answer would have been:
"What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They
were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to
claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped
lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available,
is an impossible task."
A more serious, matter-of-fact answer would have been:
"The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig
the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to
prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately
be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as
conspiracy theory, not as fact."
And a hardcore, deadpan answer would have been:
"The US intelligence services swore an oath to uphold the US Constitution, according to
which I am their Commander in Chief. They report to me, not I to them. They must be loyal to
me, not I to them. If they are disloyal to me, then that is sufficient reason for their
dismissal."
But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake
answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake
intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and
ultimately futile conflicts.
Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of
religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the
Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American
efforts in Iraq and Syria.
The total cost of wars so far this century for the US is reported to be $4,575,610,429,593.
Divided by the 138,313,155 Americans who file tax returns (whether they actually pay any tax is
too subtle a question), it works out to just over $33,000 per taxpayer. If you pay taxes in the
US, that's your bill so far for the various US intelligence "oopsies."
The 16 US intelligence agencies have a combined budget of $66.8 billion, and that seems like
a lot until you realize how supremely efficient they are: their "mistakes" have cost the
country close to 70 times their budget. At a staffing level of over 200,000 employees, each of
them has cost the US taxpayer close to $23 million, on average. That number is totally out of
the ballpark! The energy sector has the highest earnings per employee, at around $1.8 million
per. Valero Energy stands out at $7.6 million per. At $23 million per, the US intelligence
community has been doing three times better than Valero. Hats off! This makes the US
intelligence community by far the best, most efficient collapse driver imaginable.
There are two possible hypotheses for why this is so.
First, we might venture to guess that these 200,000 people are grossly incompetent and that
the fiascos they precipitate are accidental. But it is hard to imagine a situation where
grossly incompetent people nevertheless manage to funnel $23 million apiece, on average, toward
an assortment of futile undertakings of their choosing. It is even harder to imagine that such
incompetents would be allowed to blunder along decade after decade without being called out for
their mistakes.
Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has
been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic
and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile
conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How
that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable
definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at
it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better
than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be
perpetual liars."
Please support antiwar.com -- a unique antiwar site in the climate of rabid militarism and
jingoism...
Notable quotes:
"... "the unlikely, unholy alliance between Rand Paul and Donald Trump, one a libertarian iconoclast, the other the cancerous center of the Republican party" is upsetting to writer Tina Nguyen because the "far left and the far right" are "converging." Or something. Peace with nuclear-armed Russia? That qualifies the Senator as a "wacko bird" and "Putin's perfect stooge." ..."
"... Rand Paul has gone from being an overly cautious presidential candidate who seemed scared of his own noninterventionist shadow to a principled statesman unafraid to take a stand for peace. He is a living example of how people – yes, even politicians – learn and change. His trip to Russia to bring a message of peace and détente at a time when the wolves of the War Party are howling ever louder was an act of courage that should have every person of good will standing and applauding. Bravo, Senator! ..."
Libertarians are largely lost in the wilderness of the present era: wandering without a
compass, either moral or ideological, and without a clue as to how to get home, never mind
reach their ultimate goal of "freedom in our time." Yes, that was the old slogan that we
libertarians started out with: an optimistic battle-cry that, today, seems unrealistic, at
best. But is it? And if it isn't, who can show us the way forward?
My answer is simple: look at what Sen. Rand Paul is doing, and take a lesson. Instead of
weeping and wailing about the loss of a "libertarian moment" that never really happened, Sen.
Paul is making a difference. As Politicoreports
:
" Rand Paul has the ear, and the affection, of the most important person in the White
House: President Donald Trump.
"Once bitter rivals on the Republican campaign trail, the Kentucky senator and the
commander-in-chief have bonded over a shared delight in thumbing their noses at experts the
president likes to deride as 'foreign policy eggheads,' including those who work in his own
administration."
When Trump appointed the hawkish John Bolton as his National Security Advisor, the usual
suspects crowed that "the neocons have taken over the White House." Never mind that a) Bolton
is no neocon, and b) Trump is known for encouraging vigorous debate among his policy advisors
while not necessarily agreeing with one or the other – these people, mostly alleged
non-interventionists, hate the President for other reasons, and merely seized on the
appointment as a convenient talking point. However, this narrative is contradicted by the
reports of Sen. Paul's increasing influence in the Oval Office:
"While Trump tolerates his hawkish advisers, the aide added, he shares a real bond with
Paul: 'He actually at gut level has the same instincts as Rand Paul.'"
"Paul has quietly emerged as an influential sounding board and useful ally for the
president, who frequently clashes with his top advisers on foreign policy. The Kentucky
senator's relationship with Trump, developed via frequent cellphone calls and over rounds of
golf at the president's Virginia country club, became publicly apparent for the first time on
Wednesday when the senator announced he had hand-delivered a letter to the Kremlin on Trump's
behalf."
While the Beltway apparatus put together by the Kochs has jumped on the NeverTrump bandwagon
with both feet, publicly declaring war on the administration and announcing a de facto alliance
with the Democrats, Sen. Paul has made a difference in a key area that the Koch machine has
largely abandoned or reversed itself: foreign policy. Here's Politico again:
"Both Paul and Trump routinely rail against foreign entanglements, foreign wars, and
foreign aid – positions characterized as isolationist by critics and as 'America first'
by the president and his supporters. Even on points of where they disagree, Paul has
extracted small victories."
That one area is Iran, and even there it looks like Sen. Paul has his finger in the
dike:
"But Trump has stopped short of calling for regime change even though Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and Bolton support it, aligning with
Paul instead, according to a GOP foreign policy expert in frequent contact with the White
House. '
Rand Paul has persuaded the president that we are not for regime change in Iran,' this
person said, because adopting that position would instigate another war in the Middle
East."
As the President launches peace initiatives from the Korean peninsula to the steppes of
Russia, the virtue-signalers among us pretend that none of that is happening and obsessively
descry the decision to exit the Iran deal. Yet where has all their moaning and groaning gotten
them? Sen. Paul is single-handedly doing more for peace than any of these bloviating
nonentities could dream of.
The hysteria aimed at the President is now directed at Sen. Paul, with the New York
Times in what is perhaps mistakenly presented as a "news" article
describing the Senator's relationship with the White House in words that are clearly over the
top:
"Suddenly, in the mind of the junior senator from Kentucky, Mr. Trump has soared from
lower than that speck of dirt to high enough for Mount Rushmore."
One imagines the foam-flecked computer screen of the author was quite a mess well before she
reached the end of her jeremiad. Hatred for the President blends and merges with hatred for
Russia as the Fourth Estate becomes an instrument in the hands of the War Party. Vanity
Fair – that bastion of foreign policy expertise – shrieks
that
"the unlikely, unholy alliance between Rand Paul and Donald Trump, one a libertarian
iconoclast, the other the cancerous center of the Republican party" is upsetting to writer
Tina Nguyen because the "far left and the far right" are "converging." Or something. Peace
with nuclear-armed Russia? That qualifies the Senator as a "wacko bird" and "Putin's perfect
stooge."
Yeah, suuure it does, Tina: anything you say. Just like those who wanted to end the
Vietnam war were "stooges" of Ho Chi Minh. Just like Ronald Reagan getting rid of a whole
category of nukes made him a "stooge" of Gorbachev.
And to get down to the real intellectual heavyweight: S. E. Cupp, whose credentials seem to
be phony glasses and blondness, vomits up her considered opinion
that Sen. Paul is now Putin's "errand boy." Which is far better than being Max Boot's errand girl , but
don't anyone tell Iraq war-supporting Ms. Cupp that she has blood on her hands. She feels no
need to apologize.
Oh yes, the heavies are out in force, sliming Sen. Paul for defending the President's
Helsinki peace initiative with nuclear-armed Russia. Vanity Fair , S. E. Cupp –
who's next? Madonna? Women's Wear Daily ?
Rand Paul has gone from being an overly cautious presidential candidate who seemed
scared of his own noninterventionist shadow to a principled statesman unafraid to take a stand
for peace. He is a living example of how people – yes, even politicians – learn and
change. His trip to Russia to bring a message of peace and détente at a time when the
wolves of the War Party are howling ever louder was an act of courage that should have every
person of good will standing and applauding. Bravo, Senator!
It could be the Trump was already deposed as a President by Pompeo.
I never understood appointment of Haley and appointment of Bolton if we assume that Trump is not a neocon and does not want to
continue previous administration policies. Haley is kind of Sikh variant of
Samantha
Power. Bolton is probably as bad as Wolfowitz. Pompeo also can be viewed as Hillary 2.0.
Notable quotes:
"... In addition, the US has delivered an ultimatum, saying that if Russia does not give assurances within 90 days that it will no longer use chemical weapons and allow international inspectors to inspect its production facilities, further sanctions will be implemented. But Russia denies it used chemical weapons. Unlike the US, it destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile in accordance with international treaties. ..."
"... The legislation gave a 60-day window to begin implementation of sanctions after the Trump administration determined that the now-British citizen Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by a strain of the Novichok nerve-agent. The US came to that conclusion following an initial determination by the British government. ..."
"... However, the US administration missed the deadline by more than a month. That prompted Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, to write a letter to Trump some two weeks ago slamming the president for ignoring the deadline. ..."
"... Strangely, a government research facility at Porton Down in Amesbury, not far from Salisbury where the alleged March poisoning took place, examined the strain of Novichok. Porton Down lab does work for British Defense Science and Technology Laboratory, run by the Ministry of Defense, and the Public Health England. ..."
"... All of this makes makes the issue as to why Britain, and even the US, never wanted to share samples taken from the poisoning of the Skripals with Moscow more concerning. Yet, they all went ahead in lock-step to condemn Moscow for the poisoning, without any evidence, suggesting a more sinister reason for lobbying increased sanctions against Russia with the goal of further isolating the country. ..."
"... It reflects the need especially by the US to have a demon in an effort to justify its defense spending to bolster NATO up to the border of the Russian Federation in the form of a new containment policy that launched the Cold War in the first place. ..."
"... With even further sanctions against Russia in the recently passed Defense Department Authorization Bill about to go into effect, it is becoming apparent that the allegations against Russia are politically-motivated, false flag allegations to be used as an excuse for a greater geostrategic reason -- to contain Russia just as the Trump administration is increasingly finding its US-led unilateral world order being challenged more than ever. ..."
"... Trump talks about better relations with Russia, but the actions of his own administration in demonizing Moscow dictate otherwise. ..."
Forget about running the Empire or the American state. Trump isn't even in control of his team US President Donald Trump is not in
control of his own administration, as evidenced by the latest round of sanctions imposed against Russia for the alleged involvement
in the poisoning of the Skripals in the UK in March.
The sanctions came the same day that US Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.,
announced
on a trip to Moscow that he had handed over a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin from Trump calling for better relations
between the two countries. For that reason, the timing appears to be suspect, suggesting strongly that Trump has his own foreign
policy while the Trump administration, comprised mainly of bureaucrats referred to as the Deep State, have their own. Right now,
they appear to be in control, not President Trump, over his own administration, and it is having the adverse effect of further alienating
Washington and Moscow.
The neocons, led by National Security Advisor John Bolton, along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his United Nations ambassador
Nikki Haley, comprise the Trump " war cabinet " ostensibly aimed at directing a harder line toward Syria, North Korea, Iran
but also Russia. Bolton, in particular, has been outspoken in calling for regime change in some of these countries. Trump not so
much so. In fact, he has said just the opposite. Nevertheless, their anti-Russian flair in Washington has breathed new life into
the neocons who, along with the Democrats, Deep State and much of the mainstream media, have pushed the false narrative of collusion
between Russia and Trump.
This persistent anti-Russian rant and repeated sanctions which have been imposed have had the effect of leading to further threats
of sanctions for questionable reasons, raising the potential prospect of suspension of diplomatic ties.
Even at the height of the Cold War, relations between the US and Russia never reached such low depths as they have now. The latest
sanctions affect primarily dual-use technologies which are civilian products with potential military applications. They include gas
turbine engines, electronics and integrated circuits which will now be denied. Previous sanctions going back to the Obama administration,
however, already imposed bans on many of these dual-use technologies.
In addition, the US has delivered an ultimatum, saying that if Russia does not give assurances within 90 days that it will
no longer use chemical weapons and allow international inspectors to inspect its production facilities, further sanctions will be
implemented. But Russia denies it used chemical weapons. Unlike the US, it
destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile in accordance with international treaties.
Implementation of the sanctions stem from provisions of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination
Act of 1991.
The legislation gave a 60-day window to begin implementation of sanctions after the Trump administration determined that the
now-British citizen Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by a strain of the Novichok nerve-agent. The US came to that
conclusion following an initial determination by the British government.
However, the US administration missed the deadline by more than a month. That prompted Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., chairman of
the House Foreign Relations Committee, to write a
letter to Trump some two weeks ago slamming the president for ignoring the deadline.
Curiously, the British government hasn't implemented similar sanctions, although the US has. It may reflect the continued uncertainty
among some British politicians and experts over the origin of the Novichok and concern with Britain's trade dependency on Russia.
But since the Americans opted to implement sanctions due to existing legislation, there was apparently no objection from London even
though it initially implemented sanctions by kicking out Russian diplomats from the country.
Moscow, however, vehemently denied that it was involved in the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter. Novichok was created by
Russian scientists during the Cold War but never used on the battlefield. Russian officials asked Britain for evidence of Russian
involvement and called for a joint investigation to be conducted by the Kremlin and British governments.
The British government repeatedly turned down the offer, as did other Western members of the United Nations Security Council,
the US and France, when Moscow sought such a joint investigation.
The US claimed that the information linking the poison to Russia was " classified ."
Strangely, a government research
facility at Porton Down in Amesbury, not far from Salisbury where the alleged March poisoning took place, examined the strain
of Novichok. Porton Down lab does work for British Defense Science and Technology Laboratory, run by the Ministry of Defense, and
the Public Health England.
Results from the examination confirmed the poison was a form of Novichok but – importantly – could not determine where the poison
had been created or who had used it. This development created further confusion and prompted disputes among politicians.
It is known that samples of Novichok have been in the hands of many
NATO countries for years after
the German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, had reportedly obtained a sample from a Russian defector
in the 1990s.
The formula was later shared with Britain, the US, France, Canada and the Netherlands, where small quantities of Novichok reportedly
were produced in an effort to develop countermeasures. Porton Down labs similarly had received samples to study. Czech President
Milos Zeman recently admitted that his country synthesized and tested a form of Novichok. Sweden and Slovakia also have the technical
capability to produce the nerve agent, according to Russian officials.
All of this makes makes the issue as to why Britain, and even the US, never wanted to share samples taken from the poisoning
of the Skripals with Moscow more concerning. Yet, they all went ahead in lock-step to condemn Moscow for the poisoning, without any
evidence, suggesting a more sinister reason for lobbying increased sanctions against Russia with the goal of further isolating the
country.
It reflects the need especially by the US to have a demon in an effort to justify its defense spending to bolster NATO up
to the border of the Russian Federation in the form of a new containment policy that launched the Cold War in the first place.
With even further sanctions against Russia in the recently passed Defense Department Authorization Bill about to go into effect,
it is becoming apparent that the allegations against Russia are politically-motivated, false flag allegations to be used as an excuse
for a greater geostrategic reason -- to contain Russia just as the Trump administration is increasingly finding its US-led unilateral
world order being challenged more than ever.
The reason, however, isn't due to anything that Moscow initiated but by Trump himself who isn't in control of his own administration,
and maybe never has been. Many of his campaign promises such as dropping out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or Iranian
nuclear agreement, the threat of sanctions against any company that trades with Iran, his tariff war with US allies are in conflict
with each other, leading to increased world instability. At the same time, Trump talks about better relations with Russia, but
the actions of his own administration in demonizing Moscow dictate otherwise.
F. Michael Maloof is a former Pentagon security analyst.
"... Proposed new "sanctions" on Russia essentially amount to a declaration of war. ..."
"... The US is spelling out the conditions that have no chance of being met. Let's hope that the result will be further Russian alignment with China, rather than nuclear war. I'd hate to be killed by Russian missiles hitting the US just because bought by MIC and paid for American "leadership" has gone completely insane. Hope springs eternal. ..."
"... They are constantly talking about the "hybrid warfare" and the Russian "attack" on America, but it means that the US (both its politicians and its population) get psychologically prepared for an actual war, and it is precisely their actions which keep drifting towards actual war. ..."
"... I don't think the Israel lobby alone should be blamed for these "sanctions". Insanity is more widespread in the US "leadership" than Jewish shekels. This looks like the death throes of the Empire. Let's hope it does not take the humanity with it to its grave. ..."
"... Interesting looks like the inevitable Turkish financial crisis has begun, Europe has reasonable exposure there, further disruption to economic ties to Russia would be seen as a hostile act by Europe. ..."
"... Any compromise with the US is unlikely to give anything than shattered delusions. Who could be partners in such a system? Aside from the obvious candidate, China, perhaps even India. Modi has in recent months distanced himself from the US and warmed up to China again. ..."
"... Unless the EU finally shows some spine – which is very unlikely – then the Western system will be exposed to be at the mercy of whoever controls the US. Such a system is hegemonic and it will be in the best interest of not just the non-Western world but even for those of us in Europe to see a breakdown in that world order. ..."
"... Turkey's implicit bet was that it could continue to rely on Western money flows while pursuing an agenda contrary to Western interests has been conclusively shattered. When I say Western interests, I do not mean the propaganda about human rights, which the West manifestly doesn't give two hoots about. ..."
The Trump administration is hitting Russia with new sanctions punishing President Vladimir
Putin's government for using a chemical weapon against an ex-spy in Britain, U.S. officials
told NBC News Wednesday.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed off on a determination that Russia violated
international law by poisoning the former spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in March,
officials said, a decision that was announced Wednesday afternoon by State Department.
The biggest impact from the initial sanctions is expected to come from a ban on granting
licenses to export sensitive national security goods to Russia, which in the past have
included items like electronic devices and components, along with test and calibration
equipment for avionics. Prior to the sanctions, such exports were allowed on a case-by-case
basis.
A second, more painful round kicks in three months later unless Russia provides "reliable
assurances" that it won't use chemical weapons in the future and agrees to "on-site
inspections" by the U.N. -- conditions unlikely to be met. The second round of sanctions
could include downgrading diplomatic relations, suspending state airline Aeroflot's ability
to fly to the U.S, and cutting off nearly all exports and imports.
Section 7 covers the sanctions that are to be imposed, which consist of initial sanctions,
and further sanctions to be imposed after 90 days if there is no compliance on the country's
part.
Initial sanctions : Ban on foreign assistance, arms sales, denial of US credit, and
exporting national security sensitive goods. (Most of this is already functionally in place
with respect to Russia).
Further sanctions : Ban on multilateral bank assistance [e.g. IMF, World Bank, the EBRD,
etc], ban on US bank loans, a near total export ban (except food and agricultural commodities)
and import ban, downgrade or suspension of US diplomatic relations, revocation of landing
rights to air carriers controlled by the government of the sanctioned country.
Reuters has a US State Department official saying that the sanctions
would not apply to Aeroflot, which some commenters have
qualified as backtracking. But I think that the official was merely talking of the initial
sanctions.
How does Russia go about removing the sanctions? The President will need to "certify" to
Congress that the country in question: (1) Has made "reliable assurances", and is not making
preparations, to use chemical/biological weapons in violation of international law, or against
its own citizens; (2) is willing to allow on-site inspections by UN observers to confirm the
above; (3) is making restitutions to the victims of its chemical/biological weapons usage.
This would basically require Russia to admit guilt for the Skripal poisoning and subject
itself to the inspections regimes that the US typically tries to force on "rogue states." In
other words, it is out of the question.
Moreover, even in the theoretical possibility that this goes through, it's not like
President Trump's "certification" will be worth anything amidst the Russiagate hysteria.
Another possibility to avoid the near cessation of trade between the US and Russia is to
have the President "waiver" the application of individual sanctions, if he can determine and
certify to Congress that doing so is necessary for the national security interests of the US;
or that there has been "a fundamental change in the leadership and policies" of the sanctioned
country. In either case, the President needs to provide a report to Congress explaining his
detailed rationale for the waiver, and listing steps the sanctioned country is taking to
satisfy the "removal of sanctions" clause.
The newspaper Kommersant has published a full draft of the proposed "Defending American
Security from Kremlin Aggression Act," which demands a U.S. investigation into Vladimir
Putin's personal wealth and whether Russia sponsors terrorism, and would impose a ban on U.S.
citizens buying Russian sovereign debt, though the U.S. Treasury publicly opposed this idea
in February, warning that it would disrupt the market broadly. Republican Senator Lindsey
Graham, one of the initiative's sponsors, says one of the draft legislation's goals is to
impose "crushing sanctions."
[Sanctions to include:]
* Banning the banks . The draft bill proposes banning Russia's biggest state banks --
Sberbank, VTB Bank, Gazprombank, Rosselkhozbank, Promsvyazbank, or Vnesheconombank -- from
operating inside the United States, which would effectively prevent these institutions from
conducting dollar settlements.
* Oil and gas . In the energy sector, the legislation would impose sanctions on investment
in any projects by the Russian government or government-affiliated companies outside Russia
worth more than $250 million. Businesses would also incur penalties for any participation
(funding or supplying equipment or technology) in new oil projects inside Russia valued above
$1 million.
* Lists and research . If the bill is submitted in its current form and adopted, the U.S.
president would have 180 days to begin implementing its provisions; within 60 days of
adoption, the White House would need to provide a new list of Russian individuals suspected
of cyber-attacks against the United States; the Treasury Department would have 180 days to
update its "Kremlin list" of Russian state officials and oligarchs; the director of national
intelligence would be tasked with completing a "detailed report on the personal net worth and
assets" of Vladimir Putin and his family; and the State Department would have 90 days to
determine whether Russia should be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism.
* A new Sanctions Office . In order to shore up the 2017 Countering America's Adversaries
Through Sanctions Act, the draft legislation would also create an "Office of Sanctions
Coordination" within the State Department to coordinate work with the Treasury.
(1) The bill's sponsors, which include Lindsey Graham, Robert Menendez, and Ben Cardin,
preface their text with a call for President Trump to demand Russia stop interference in US
"democratic processes", return Crimea to the Ukraine, stop supporting the separatists in East
Ukraine, as well the "occupation and support of separatists" in the territories of Georgia and
Moldova, and support for Bashar Assad, who continues to commit "war crimes."
(2) They note that the general drift of the document is towards a consolidation of separate
anti-Russian sanctions, from the "Ukrainian" to the "cyber" ones, into a "single
mechanism."
(3) Subject to a 2/3 vote in the Senate, the bill also includes a ban on financing "direct
or indirect" steps, that have as their goal to support the attempts of "any US government
official" to take the country out of NATO. Every 90 days, the US Secretary of State, in
coordination with the Defense Minister, would be required to present a report to the relevant
committees in Congress about "threats to NATO", which would include attempts to weaken US
commitments to the alliance. Considering Trump's ambiguous feelings on NATO, this part is
primarily aimed at Trump himself.
(4) There are calls to "pressure" Russia from interfering with UN and the OPCW attempts to
investigate chemical weapons usage, as well as to "punish" Russia for producing and using
chemical weapons. This directly syncs this sanctions bill to the previous one.
The report concludes that it's not yet clear how to interpret this. In the worse case, it
could be a "preliminary application" for a UN campaign to exclude Russia from the Security
Council; alternatively, it could just be a "pragmatic" run-up to merely invoking great
sanctions, as with Iran in 1983.
***
I suppose we now also know why Russia has been selling Treasuries for the past three
months, which plummeted from their typical level of $100 billion in March to just $15 billion
from June (i.e. just enough to guarantee USD-denominated trade).
For comparison,
the last time such a drawback happened (but which only lasted three weeks) was in the
immediate aftermath of Crimea.
The last time Russia pulled such a large sum out of the U.S. was just after the annexation
of Crimea in 2014, when the central bank withdrew about $115 billion from the New York Fed,
Reuters reported last year, citing two former Fed officials. Most of that money was returned
a few weeks later, after it became clear that the scope of initial U.S. sanctions would be
narrower than the Kremlin expected, according to the news service.
But I suppose this drawdown would now be permanent, since it is increasingly evident that
Iran-tier sanctions on Russia are now on the horizon.
These sanctions are either going to steadily creep in – or rush in like a tsunami if
there is a Blue Wave in 90 days, or if Trump was to be removed.
However, as I have pointed out, the ultimate ability of the US to directly
punish Russia is limited; it has twice as many people as Iran, after all, and many times the
economic output. Trade between Russia and the US is very limited.
Moreover, as I have pointed out , Russia has
plenty of surprising ways to hurt the US as well. For instance, banning Aeroflot from flying to
the US has a simple response – banning US air carriers from overflying North Eurasia,
period. It can resurrect a bill – first raised this May, since sunken in the legislature
– to impose fines and prison time
on individuals and entities who support Western sanctions by refusing to do business with
Russian citizens or entities on America's SDN list. It can throw out the American-dominated
copyrights regimen out of the window.
Some questions we should now be asking include:
1. Precisely how far is the US prepared to go? Cutting off its own trade with Russia is one
thing – penalizing foreign companies that do business with Russia is something else. As
Ben Aris
notes , the US Treasury Department has been ratcheting back on its sanctions against Oleg
Deripaska and Rusal, after the chaos it has caused in the international metals market. The
ideological Russiagaters need to balance their PDS/TDS against the pecuniary practicalities of
catering to finance and oil & gas interests and their lobbies.
2. To what extent will the EU join in, passively acquiesce to, or resist the US sanctions
against Russia? The answer to this question will to a large extent determine precisely how
deeply Russia falls into China's orbit in the next couple of decades.
This sounds very close to a declaration of war. USA is beginning to throw everything it has
behind economic warfare and go "all in" forcing even its closest allies to either suffer
serious sanctions for not joining the economic attacks or to inflict self-harm by limiting
trade with Russia, Iran, and anyone else the US chooses to declare economic warfare upon.
I don't believe that this set of circumstances can continue indefinitely without a serious
realignment or a degeneration into "kinetic" warfare.
Proposed new "sanctions" on Russia essentially amount to a declaration of war. Lunatic asylum
is the most appropriate place for the whole American "leadership", down to the last
man/woman/tranny. The only thing that stands between us and WWIII, which would be a suicide
of humanity, is unbelievably cool and reasonable position of Putin and the rest of Russian
leadership.
It is clear to anyone with a brain that the US "sanctions" on Russia have zero chance of
changing Russia's stance on any international issues of consequence. Crimea is a good
example: it will return to Ukraine the day after the Hell freezes over. On the same date
Georgia gets South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and US-sponsored Islamic bandits win over Assad in
Syria. Thus, The US is spelling out the conditions that have no chance of being met. Let's
hope that the result will be further Russian alignment with China, rather than nuclear war.
I'd hate to be killed by Russian missiles hitting the US just because bought by MIC and paid
for American "leadership" has gone completely insane. Hope springs eternal.
I agree. They are constantly talking about the "hybrid warfare" and the Russian "attack"
on America, but it means that the US (both its politicians and its population) get
psychologically prepared for an actual war, and it is precisely their actions which keep
drifting towards actual war.
There is also a lot of projection going on here: the Americans obviously perceive their
own election meddling as war by other means, and so they accuse their enemies with the very
same thing.
Russia is far too integrated in to the wider European economy, and Russia is too stronk for
sanctions to do anything. See Nord Stream II. Ignore the Israel lobby sanctions, not even the
corrupt congress critters could vote for those.
I have no idea why these new meaningless sanctions have been conjured up, maybe the Rand
Paul letter has the answer, maybe not. I think we may have some answers after the
midterms.
I don't think the Israel lobby alone should be blamed for these "sanctions". Insanity is
more widespread in the US "leadership" than Jewish shekels. This looks like the death throes
of the Empire. Let's hope it does not take the humanity with it to its grave.
Now that it is within the realms of reasonable debate, if there were a nuclear war between
the USA and Russia what targets would be hit? Would Russia hit puppet regimes such the UK,
France or Poland? Would the USA hit Iran (because if they are going to hit Russia they might
as well get Iran in there as well).
If say only Russian and USA were hit, how much of the nuclear fallout would affect
Europe?
Why, if Putin threatened Netanyahu to call off his dogs, he would have to? Actions of
AIPAC should be accountable.
Interesting looks like the inevitable Turkish financial crisis has begun, Europe has
reasonable exposure there, further disruption to economic ties to Russia would be seen as a
hostile act by Europe.
Russia today is in a much better position to withstand sanctions. Global oil investments have
been lagging for half a decade due to low prices, and this will inevitably show up in the
coming years.
Russia in 2014 was battered by a twin storm, of which the oil price collapse was in fact far
worse. That factor is now gone.
Furthermore, a planned VAT rise next year will mean that the break-even oil price for the
Russian budget will fall to $50 after $60 this year and $67 last year, according to Alfa
Bank's analysis . Steady, impressive
improvement. So even in an event of an unexpected oil price decline, Russia is far more
prepared this time around.
Additionally, over the last 4 years, Russia's economy has indigenised to a much greater
extent than before. This is especially the case in the financial markets. Russia is simply a
lot less reliant on foreign funding. Bershidsky wrote about how more and more Russian
companies are leaving UK capital markets and returning to Russia. This process will continue
but it has already yielded results. As a country with a large current account surplus, tamed
inflation, an incredibly strong fiscal state, there is indeed very little that the US can do,
which is probably why they are reaching with ever-greater desperation.
I think the ultimate endgame can only be to completely run a parallel system. Any
compromise with the US is unlikely to give anything than shattered delusions. Who could be
partners in such a system? Aside from the obvious candidate, China, perhaps even India. Modi
has in recent months distanced himself from the US and warmed up to China again.
India has
always bristled at being treated as a close ally rather as a 'partner'. It has cherished it's
non-aligned movement legacy and its historically close relations to Russia. It is unlikely to
want to give up on that in order to become a subservient lapdog to US interests in the manner
that the EU has degraded itself.
China's AIIB is a good start, but the full range of new institutions must bear fruit. Some
of the BRICS ideas are good but ultimately both Brazil and South Africa are too unimportant.
It should be borne by the big powers (Russia, India and China) together with an Asian
coalition like the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and others who are not in the US orbit
yet have a bright future ahead of them.
Turning to Europe. Unless the EU finally shows some spine – which is very unlikely
– then the Western system will be exposed to be at the mercy of whoever controls the
US. Such a system is hegemonic and it will be in the best interest of not just the
non-Western world but even for those of us in Europe to see a breakdown in that world
order.
America now has a "good cop, bad cop" with Trump and Congress.
Congress puts in more sanctions, but there is constraint responding too much because Trump
seems friendly, and you don't want to alienate him. Trump himself doesn't care about the sanctions, because he thinks it is leverage that he
can lift them later.
There was an article a few months ago that Trump is actually worse than Obama – even
in Obama did not supply direct weapons to Ukraine.
I think Trump plans to remove the sanctions in the next year and improve the relations
– but without any kind of timetable (his meeting with Putin is delayed already to next
year).
OT: The Turkish lira is now the worst-performing currency this year, bar none.
Turkey's implicit bet was that it could continue to rely on Western money flows while
pursuing an agenda contrary to Western interests has been conclusively shattered. When I say
Western interests, I do not mean the propaganda about human rights, which the West manifestly
doesn't give two hoots about.
Turkey was not entirely foolish to believe this strategy could work. Pakistan during the
reign of Islamist military dictator Zia ul-Haq, used a similar strategy during the 1980s. He
empowered the mullahs and moved Pakistan decidedly to the hard-right in religious/cultural
terms while massively opening up the economy to speculative finance, thereby pleasing
Washington. Saudi Arabia has used this policy for a long time. For those who knew this, the
revelation that the US funded some of the most extremist "moderate" rebels in Syria came as
no shock.
So perhaps it isn't the Islamism in of itself which is the problem in Erdogan's case. What
could it be? Well, one clue is the case of Pastor Brunson. The good pastor, who under house
arrest in Turkey, is accused to be close to the Gülen cult. The official line in the
Western MSM is that Trump is trying to appease evangelicals before the midterms. I don't buy
that. He has them in the bag regardless. Gülen himself, some of you might recall, still
lives in the US despite repeated pleas from Turkey to give him back. Which is the unreliable
ally here? Curiously, Gülen's religious bent is even more Islamist than Erdogan's. He's
also even more of a neoliberal. Notice a pattern?
At any rate, the demand from the US has been for Turkey to release Brunson
unconditionally. Erdogan's media has speculated that Brunson was slated to become CIA chief
in Turkey had the 2016 coup come to pass. Obviously, Turkey does not want to release him
unconditionally: it makes them look extremely weak. Well, they now got hit where it hurts.
Indeed, Trump even tweeted out new sanctions news today even as Erdogan was delivering a
speech. I don't happen to believe in coincidences. The result is that the lira lost close to
a quarter of its value in a single day. I haven't even mentioned Turkey's apparent interest
in the S-400 missile system among other matters. This, I think, is what truly irked D.C.
rather than Erdogan's human rights record or "authoritarianism", which is just the
pretext.
Make no mistake: the decline of the lira was structural from the beginning. Turkey's large
CAD made it extremely vulnerable to financial speculation from the getgo. It has now paid
that price. But this does not preclude the fact that countries which are overtly reliant on
Western financial flows to fund large current account deficits should forgo the lesson that
there is no free lunch. Erdogan made this cardinal error. Poland is not nearly as vulnerable,
but we're also in the same orbit. This is why I always laugh at the Poland Stronk memes. It's
also why I dismiss the criticism against Orban that he plays all sides, including taking
money from the EU, as politically naïve. Very few countries in this world can reliably
be called truly independent. Russia is in the process of becoming one. So is China. India is
not quite there, but it has the potential. The rest of us will simply have to balance
hegemons, while reminding ourselves of our inherent vulnerability. If we forget that, then we
just had a textbook example of what happens when we overestimate our hand, playing out in
front of our very eyes today.
Good to hear something sensible from Polish Perspective (in every sense of this
expression). I know some Poles, who tend to be reasonable people, so the policies of Polish
government always amazed me. Then again, if Polish democracy is similar to the US, the
opinions of the people don't matter at all.
There is still a long way to go before Russia, China, or any other country frees itself
from the clutches of dollar-based financial system. However, an alternative might look
parallel at the beginning, but it won't be parallel for long. Thing is, the US dollar and the
US sovereign debt have become essentially Ponzi schemes. If Russia, China, and a few others
create a "parallel" system, dollar-based Ponzi scheme folds, as the US does not have
sufficient assets to support the dollar or pay off its debt. The fall of the Empire will
likely be violent. The only thing we can hope for is that the humanity survives it.
As to EU, it missed every chance of becoming something with a spine. Too late now. In
fact, what French president once said about Arafat (he never missed an opportunity to miss an
opportunity) applies to the EU with a vengeance.
I suppose we now also now why Russia has been selling Treasuries for the past three
months, which plummeted from their typical level of $100 billion in March to just $15
billion from June (i.e. just enough to guarantee USD-denominated trade).
You're making the Kremlins look smarter than they actually are. They should have done this
4 years ago. What I want to know is what happened to the proceeds from the sale? CBR data
shows that value of "foreign exchange" held by the CBR hasn't declined:
Now I can't use the Export-Import Bank insure the export of American-made products from a
swing state to Russia. Really Making America Great Again! Can we please replace Pompeo with Rohrabacher already?
Regarding India, they are asking America for a permission to keep buying Russian weapons.
Asking for a sanctions "waiver" – this is just sad. India also agreed to reduce imports
of Iranian oil. So, perhaps, not so independent anymore.
There is no way to sugarcoat it: in the short to medium term sanctions will suppress
Russian economic growth. But unless they find a way to somehow stop Russia's exports of oil,
our economy will shrug off whatever sanction packages US can throw at it.
Can we please replace Pompeo with Rohrabacher already?
Rohrabacher is a flake and blowhard as well. If he were in the running for Secretary of
State, he could just as easily flip and become militantly anti-Russian in order to impress
people in Washington. Appearing tough on foreigners in front of one's peers in Washington is
their prime motive. They've been like this since before the Vietnam War era.
Obviously a good read overall, but there was this one part that I found particularly well,
interesting, and actually quite surprising:
"Moreover, the mid-2020s will also see a massive influx of electric vehicles into the
global car fleet, which could lead to a final collapse in oil prices. There was practically
no real diversification: the number of industrial robots per worker in Russia is at the
level of Iran and India. Meanwhile, "effective managers" like Sechin turned out to be so
effective that Rosneft's debts exceed the value of the company itself from this year. An
acute economic crisis in a few years is almost inevitable. "
So I'm clearly not even entirely sure whether that translation is accurate, but it really
seems like you're kind of suddenly much more pessimistic on the Russian economy. Or is that
just the "best-case" scenario for Russian nationalists?
Didn't you rate Putin's "economic management" reasonably highly not a long time ago, just
before the Presidential elections? Of course compared to the situation in 2000, but
still.
You've also pointed out several times that Russia's oil dependency has been considerably
exaggerated. Also, Russia's federal budget is already based on low oil prices. Then there's
Jon Hellevig's research and numbers as well (GDP share of oil & gas, the consolidated
budget, etc). And Polish Perspective's comment above.
So shouldn't the repeat of 2014 be kind of unlikely, if not impossible? At this rate,
Russia's remaining oil dependency should already be considerably lower by the mid-20s,
despite all those technological limitations.
You don't believe in an annual growth of 3% anymore? You seriously think there will be an
"acute crisis" in a few years?
I actually just read that even the always (or atleast recently) conservative/pessimistic
Russian authorities (in this case, the Economic Development Ministry) forecast a growth rate
of atleast around 3% beginning from 2021, after the VAT hike, some other "reforms" and
increasing spending.
At the same time, Trump his helping to push the Turkish economy off a cliff with his Twitter
account. Russia and Turkey find themselves in the same boat. So?
Israel and Netanyahu responsible for American sanctions on Russia, conspiracy makes less
sense to me than the others I read here (Israel responsible for killing Kennedy, etc). Why do
Israel want to impose American sanctions on Russia?
This week's sanctions mainly targeting Russian airlines. Aeroflot is about to buy 30
Boeing 737s from America – and now this is in danger.
In Israel, Aeroflot is the third airline, and Israeli government pays it direct subsidies
to reduce the ticket prices for places like Eilat. They allow Aeroflot to put giant Aeroflot
commercial posters along the roads and skyscrapers.
According to the news earlier in the year, Israel is negotiating to join a customs union
with the Eurasian Economic Union. How will they reconcile their own actions, with being the
one responsible for America to sanction Russia? It would be very competent 4 dimensional
chess, from people who cannot even count their illegal immigrants or deport a single illegal
immigrant, or coordinate their nationality policy with a few thousand druze. While making
America sanction Russia has no benefit for them, deporting illegal immigrants, or
coordinating with Druze has important benefits for them (yet supposedly they can do the
former, but not the latter).
At the same time, they do the opposite of sanctioning themselves.
Also if this is the case, how in Russia, nobody in the expert community is aware Israel is
responsible for the sanctions. Instead the media celebrate when it still wants to export
carrots. And if any of the Kremlin top think relations with Israel are bad, then why is
Israel allowed to operate freely in Russia.
If explanation is to do with Syria – it also does not fit. Intervention in Syria was
presented as something which would encourage West to remove its sanctions.
For Israel, Russian-American alliance would improve the situation in the region. And also
probably for Turkey and the Arabs.
Israel is terrified with an increase of Iran in Syria. The reality is that is that both
Russia and America is going to reduce presence in Syria, and Iran is going to increase it.
The problem of Russia in Syria for Israel, is that Russia's presence is only minimal, and
will allow Iran on the ground to take over the same territories that Russia helps secure for
Assad. In the current equation and stage of the war, they will be hoping Russia increases its
presence and reduces the need for Iranian forces. Problem of Assad for them is his only to
the extent of his relation with Iran, not with Russia.
Before the Trump-Putin summit, the Mueller involved FBI indicted 12 Russians, knowing full
well that they'd not be turned over to the US. This latest round of sanctions comes right
after Rand Paul's trip to Moscow, for the purpose of seeking closer US-Russian relations.
On CNN, the establishment alternative academic Robert English hypothesized that elements
in the Russian government might've poisoned the Skripals without Putin's prior knowledge. He
leaves out another possibility, in line with US mass media restrictions. In the UK, there're
Russian ex pats, who quarrel among themselves, in addition to not liking the Russian
government. The poisoning of the Skripals could very well be a matter of trying to kill two
birds (so to speak) in one shot.
Of course we don't know for sure. Likewise, with the bogus suggestion as fact that the
Russian government poisoned the Skripals. Given the ongoing lack of UK government disclosure
on this incident, there's very good reason to doubt the claim against the Russian
government.
I think the ultimate endgame can only be to completely run a parallel system. Any
compromise with the US is unlikely to give anything than shattered delusions.
Seconded. Washington is too much in love with their sanctions.
It should be borne by the big powers (Russia, India and China) together with an Asian
coalition like the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and others who are not in the US orbit
yet have a bright future ahead of them.
Also, Russia's federal budget is already based on low oil prices. Then there's
It's up to 50% of the federal budget in recent years, is funded by oil and gas revenue,
although in low oil price years the proportion can fall (to lower 40s%).
When the proportion falls, then you are by definition financing a federal budget in other
ways, which are usually less politically popular.
You can see unpopularity of announcements to raise VAT or pension age.
Raising pension age (as needs to often be repeated to people) is necessary and reasonable,
but raising VAT is a bad thing as in most countries.
Karlin is probably too pessimistic about oil price demand peaking in 2020s (demand for oil
probably peaking in the 2030s).
Either way, it's known there need to be economic reforms, reduction of size of government
sector, increase in proportion of private sector in many areas, investment in education for
future industries.
Having Russia go pirate on US copy-rite laws could be interesting. Do you think the US would
build a giant firewall and ban it's citizens from viewing Russian content, and could they
actually enforce it, or would the internet be just like back in the good old 90′s days
with Napsternik?
Russia might even make some headway with Pirate Party types. Information belongs to the
people, comrades! Also Russia switching to Linux would probably lead to an increased development of
Linux.
Looks like these sanctions will force their hand: their new narrowbody airliner was going
to have pratt and witney engines with the aviadvigatel ones only for government planes. Not
sure what the exact reasons for this were: p&w ones have a slightly higher bypass ratio,
it allows international buyers to utilise existing service infrastructure or aviadvigatel's
ability to mass produce might be crap. If the us imposes a complete export ban they'll all
have to have them.
Russia's current widebody airliner is pretty much obsolete though.
Aeroflot had benefited from collapse of Transaero. They're getting 35 planes (all Airbus and
Boeing models) from the Transaero fleet and are putting them into Aeroflot fleet this year.
With Boeing, they also had an order of Dreamliners, which they cancelled a few years ago.
Although that was just because there was a downturn in long-haul flights. New Boeing 737
orders are for building up their lowcoster "Pobeda".
For that, Russia needs to produce all types of civilian aircraft, like the USSR did.
That's hard after the 1990s, when the traitors destroyed Russian aircraft industry. There are
moves in the direction of restoring it, in cooperation with China. However, they both need to
be able to build aircraft w/o any parts from the US and its vassals. That would take 5-10
years. In fact, US sanctions pushed Russia and China in the direction of self-sufficiency
very hard. In Russian it is called "sawing off the bough you sit on". The West is really good
at that lately.
These sanctions might be a net positive for Russia in the long term, forcing them to
develop indigenous industries instead of just importing everything from the oil revenue.
Do you think the US would build a giant firewall and ban it's citizens from viewing
Russian content, and could they actually enforce it, or would the internet be just like
back in the good old 90′s days with Napsternik?
The "free market" of Facebook, Apple, Google and Spotify will protect good Americans from
fake news.
Presumably they can still source from Rolls Royce. The UK is a smaller economic power than
America and presumably less interested in sabotaging one of its crown jewels (never rule it
out with the UK ofc).
Russia's aerospace technology is inferior to the West, but that's irrelevant since Russia
can simply force Russian carriers to purchase Russian aircraft. Higher operating costs
relative to foreign carriers can be addressed with subsidies (or tariffs).
Prioritizing your own technology also creates the option of charting an independent
technological course. For instance, instead of building swept-wing jets with low bypass
turbofan engines optimized for transonic cruise, you could build straight-wing aircraft with
propfans optimized for low fuel consumption. You can also build supersonic aircraft and
experiment with different planforms than the boring one established by the Boeing 707.
It's kind of funny how many Americans feel threatened by Iran.
Regarding Russia as a threat at least makes a certain sense given Russia's nuclear arsenal
and ability to destroy the US.
Every time Medvedev opens his mouth, he makes me cringe. Seriously, if you're going to
proclaim an "economic war", against USA no less, then you better explain how Russia is going
to fight back and win. Smart Russians will be heading to currency exchange (
обменный
пункт ) after hearing this statement.
More fuel consumption than is usual with modern aircraft, noisier passenger cabin, more
external noise (also important for some airports with regulations restricting noisy
aircraft), less safety, etc.
It's just not competitive to operate them. Airlines have very low margins anyway, you
cannot make a profit with obsolete aircrafts.
There are a couple of new planes which Aeroflot is going to buy/buying for shorthaul
– Superjet 100 and MC-21. Karlin was blogging about these planes a few weeks ago.
Airtickets are a freemarket, and most passengers don't want to fly in unsafe old planes
like Tu-154
A single crash can be even fatal for an airline – crash of an An-148 has earlier
this year, destroyed Saratov Airlines
As a customer, I don't think there is any disgrace in buying Boeing and Airbus. All major
airlines now, and around the world, are using mainly Airbus and Boeing, and have now retired
the Tu-154.
There is no way to sugarcoat it: in the short to medium term sanctions will suppress
Russian economic growth
AND also Ukraine's, Moldova's, Georgia's, the Baltics and the friendly countries like
Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan etcetera. If anything the US's moron, scumbag policy towards
Russia ends up doing the exact opposite of what it intends to do Ukraine, Moldova, Gerogia and
Baltics then become more financially interlinked and even dependent on Russia than they were
before.
But in the circumstances ..is guaranteed 1% or 1.5% GDP growth per year for the next
decade even that bad considering the circumstances? Every social/infrastructure element is
improving in Russia
The enemy is probably laughing his ass off at Medvedev. One simply should NOT be making
such statements as a prime-minister of Russia. Here is another fool, who doesn't understand currency markets:
You can see unpopularity of announcements to raise VAT or pension age.
It's fake outrage and fake unpopularity on these two issues. 18% increased to 20% is a
non-issue ( the budget is being spent significantly better than ever to offset this increase
in VAT)
A lot of nonsense about "long overdue" get's said about pension reform but this is total
BS.
Yes Russia has 48 million out of 146 million as pensioners, but the most important thing is
the unexpected , way above average increase in life expectancy . that has actually instigated
this move by the authorities.
Those approaching retirement won't suddenly have to work 1-5 years longer they can still
opt-in to the current arrangements in the overlapping period.. and with guarantees pension
increased much further to corresponding inflation levels than now.
Either way, it's known there need to be economic reforms
Disagree with this .the same patterns that have been shown in the last 4 years need to
continue, no radical "reform" is necessary. Small and medium sized business have gone from 10
million to 20 million people and should easily reach the target in afew years time that the
President wished for in May,credit behavior and availability is becoming more and more
western,
Instead of saying "reduction in size of government sector" you must specify exactly which
areas of state control should be privatised .too often from liberasts their focus is solely
on getting state control off critically important energy resources and distribution .nothing
else.
Americans see the Russians as greatness deniers. Their European lackeys are their
greatness-acknowledgers – even when it's detrimental to their own survival.
If the world was a theater, Americans see themselves as the only performers – the
role of the rest of the world is to applaud their performance.
Russia is not a part of the audience, it's not even a heckler. It's a performer, it has
always been, and a very talented one too. To try to demote them to the role of spectators, or
to try to usher them out of the concert hall can be suicidal, they have enough musical
instruments to put on a remarkable concert – even if afterwards no one is left to
applaud.
Mice and humans are quite different, results applying to mice apply to humans less than
50% of the time. The loss rates on this, at any rate, are insane:
Of the 1348 embryos they made, eight pups were born.
Every beginning is hard. Considering that all the cutting edge research in
fertility/cloning/artificial wombs is done on shoestring budgets, the progress is amazing.
Imagine what could be done with sufficient funding.
Our esteemed host have the right idea – the only chance for Russia to achieve its
rightful number one place in the world is through new Manhattan project to develop better
Russians.
The West is stymied by the "pro-lifers" of the right and "bioethicists" of the left, and this
is Russia's chance. Unlike the origial M project, Russians can keep things secret, and even
if the West will suspect something, what can they do? Impose sanctions?
In the thirties, ignorant Caucasian moustacheoid gangster picked the Lysenkoists over the
scientifically correct Darwinist transhumanist eugenicists. Time to undo this mistake.
Our esteemed host have the right idea – the only chance for Russia to achieve its
rightful number one place in the world is through new Manhattan project to develop better
Russians.
And it will have as much impact on the outcome of the looming confrontation as the
Mengele's research had on the outcome of the WWII.
He's also even more of a neoliberal. Notice a pattern?
The west has no qualms about using Islamist. Radical Islam has been used in 1950s against
Nasser's regime in Egypt. Islamist were used against secular pro Soviet regime of Afghanistan
and then against Assad's Syria, Hussain's Iraq and Gaddafi's Libya. The equation is
complicate: on one side you have Israel's Yinon Plan and global neoliberal and Islamists and
on the other side you have secular national countries that try to build greater sovereignty
and stronger state.
Majority of Islamist are just useful idiots while some among the leadership are operatives
of western security services. Sometimes they break off the leash like Hamas which it does not
seem to be controlled by Mossad anymore but it still does everything from the wish list of
Israel's hard-liners.
My pet theory is that Islamist of Iran who destroyed the fast growing and developing Iran
of Shah were also used by some foreign interests in the west and/or Israel. Shah himself
believed it was the British.
You should look at history of your own country in 19 and 20 century. To what extent all
those patriots responsible for numerous and hopeless uprisings were useful idiots, dupes or
operatives of foreign interests?
Question about the Skripal poisoning–if it wasn't the Russians, then who did it?
Also, it's interesting that Sergei Skripal's poisoning has resulted in much more Western
action than Alexander Litvinenko's poisoning back in 2006 did.
' The biggest impact from the initial sanctions is expected to come from a ban on granting
licenses to export sensitive national security goods to Russia, which in the past have
included items like electronic devices and components, along with test and calibration
equipment for avionics. Prior to the sanctions, such exports were allowed on a case-by-case
basis. '
Now they'll have to pay the Israelis to get it for them. Does this count as aid to
Israel?
I am always puzzled to hear that lesbians require artificial insemination. I had a couple
of friends who were a bit behind schedule, and were trying hard to conceive just before the
last eggs would wither. Whatever they were doing, taking days off from work when the
thermometer said so, shoving it at any price, and so on – it could not be described as
pleasurable. So why would the lesbians not bear it if they so much need children?
On a more general note, I am puzzled as to how USSR survived between 1945 and 1989 without
fainting at the thought that Americans would not recognize annexation of the Baltic jokes,
that Russians would not be allowed to use dollars, or that Pokemon Go could be blocked in the
Russian app store. Surely, if you have a population of idiots, like USSR circa 1989, who
would think that it's their ow government blocking the dollar and Pikachu, it may gnaw at the
roots of the state. But today's Russians can guess that with Putin or without him, with
Crimea or without it, they are still seen as enemies of America, and will be treated
accordingly.
Conservatives pilloried the program, which sources said is a gift to an Orthodox Jewish
community that has pressed for government-paid fertility services for 15 years.
Orthodox leaders called the budget measure a "significant victory" for women struggling
to have kids in a community that traditionally values large families.
"This amendment will make it easier for women who would like to have children to do so,"
said Jeff Leb, a top lobbyist for Jewish nonprofits.
Guilty until proven innocent? Don't open that Pandora's box. You're gleefully piling on
the Russians now, but give a few years and the same gang might apply that principle to you in
turn. Just because they hate Russians at this moment doesn't mean they hold any love for the
rest of humanity.
Brunson's captivity had dragged for quite long already, and we heard negotiations for his
release made some progress before. However, Trump ramped up the rhetoric at a precise moment:
when Turkey announced they would not only shirk new Iran sanctions (like they did in the
past) but also were being vocal about this.
Seeing what ensued, again yes the S-400 was an irritant for a while already and certainly
cumulate with other factors but the timeline is interesting. God forbid we conclude those who
should not be named are ultimately setting the agenda here, not really the pastor's plight
under islamist thugs.
On CNN, the establishment alternative academic Robert English hypothesized that elements
in the Russian government might've poisoned the Skripals without Putin's prior knowledge.
He leaves out another possibility, in line with US mass media restrictions. In the UK,
there're Russian ex pats, who quarrel among themselves, in addition to not liking the
Russian government. The poisoning of the Skripals could very well be a matter of trying to
kill two birds (so to speak) in one shot.
Of course we don't know for sure. Likewise, with the bogus suggestion as fact that the
Russian government poisoned the Skripals. Given the ongoing lack of UK government
disclosure on this incident, there's very good reason to doubt the claim against the
Russian government.
As for the Litvinenko matter you bring up, there's good reason to believe that he somehow
got poisoned by a source other than a Russian government act. His Italian friend got arrested
for arms smuggling and was also infected with polonium. Litvinenko was said to be sympathetic
to Chechen separatism. These factors and his links to the likes of Goldfarb and Berezovsky
suggest a source other than the Russian government.
That's wrong, except about the innumeracy of the majority of biologists. Evolutionary
biologists are less innumerate than the rest, and in any event, enough of them are numerate
(like Greg Cochran with a physics PhD).
Evolutionary biologists are less innumerate than the rest, and in any event, enough of
them are numerate (like Greg Cochran with a physics PhD).
Physicists are trained in integrals and analysis, they know nothing about probability
theory, statistics and theoretical computer science. These are the fields required to form a
semblance of a mathematical theory of evolution.
(A theory that will never be formed, because Darwinism violates the very basic theorems of
probability and computation.)
Could you give an example of some probabilities? How do you calculate them and with what
assumptions?
At resent article by Fred Reed the commenter "j2″ produced some numbers but I was
too lazy and not certain that his starting assumptions were correct to verify it.
Physicists are trained in integrals and analysis, they know nothing about probability
theory, statistics and theoretical computer science. These are the fields required to form
a semblance of a mathematical theory of evolution.
Such complete bullshit. Probability and statistics are absolutely key for modern physics
and an education in theoretical physics is definitely the best route to train in the
practical applications, better than going to the mathematics department where they mainly
deal with abstract theory. You clearly know nothing beyond high school level physics (or
anything else for that matter).
Some fields of modern physics like thermodynamics ARE basically just pure probability
theory applied to physical phenomena. If you take a random sample of research physicists from
your local university, they're much more likely to be doing statistical mechanics rather than
trying to find analytical solutions for their n-body problem and some application of
probability is usually the most important field of mathematics for working physicists.
You're right again about the Litvinenko conspiracy, Mickey. The notion that the Russian
government would want to eliminate somebody who had betrayed its secret service, written
books denouncing Vladimir Putin for giving the order to murder the likes of Boris Bereszvsky,
Anna Polikovskaya and others, accused the secret service of being behind the bombings of the
Russian apartment buildings, just doesn't add up or make any sense. The fact that Litvinenko,
while lying on his death bed directly accused Putin for being responsible for his death also
didn't lend any value that it was indeed Putin behind his poisoning. It just goes to show you
the lengths to which the enemies of Russia and Vladimir Putin will go to try and besmearch
Putin's honorable name. But they'll never be able to fool somebody with your veracity and
skillul analysis – keep up the great 'independent foreign analysis'!
Litvinenko was said to be sympathetic to Chechen separatism.
I wasn't aware of this and am glad that you pointed this out. Another incredibly strong
reason not to believe that the Russian government was behind the Litvinenko poisoning. Isn't
it time that you wrote a book, Mickey? I know that other book authors regularly rely on your
input to write their own monographs, isn't it time that you put it all together and shared
more of your thoughts with the world? Perhaps, Karlin might let you write a chapter in his
forthcoming book 'The Dark Lord of the Kremlin'?
Anyone wants to comment on this bizarre diplomatic spat, that Greece and Russia are having?
The abrupt deterioration in relations between Greece and Russia has intensified after
Athens publicly accused Moscow of attempting to bribe state officials and meddle in the
country's internal affairs.
Athens also rejected requests for entry visas from Russian Orthodox clerics heading for
northern Greece's all-male monastic republic of Mount Athos.
The community is alleged to be a "den of spies" , with reports that Moscow has
turned the Holy Mount – widely seen as the spiritual centre of Orthodoxy – into
an intelligence-gathering operation with extensive funding of monasteries across the
peninsula.
Personally, I'm not sure what to make of it. Greece could be trying to secure some debt
relief by manufacturing a pointless row with Russia. Their PM Tsipras did come to Russia in
2015, asking for money. Left with nothing.
Probability and statistics are absolutely key for modern physics and an education in
theoretical physics is definitely the best route to train in the practical applications,
better than going to the mathematics department where they mainly deal with abstract
theory.
Untighten your panties. That was my point, which you managed to miss by blindly charging
to M'Lady Science's defense.
Any scientific theory of evolution will have to be about information entropy,
computational complexity and asymptotic properties of stochastic processes. That's exactly
the "abstract theory" you're deriding.
The practical stuff physicists are using for solving practical, well-defined problems is
useless here.
* Age of the universe is about 10^18 seconds.
* The "Planck time" gives us the smallest possible unit of time, about 10^-45 seconds.
* There are about 10^82 atoms in the Universe.
Now assume an ideal computer. Let each atom of the Universe be a CPU, operating as fast as
physics allows.
That gives us an upper bound of 10^(18+45+82) = 10^145 CPU cycles for computation.
Now take Shakespeare's sonnet #27. It is 458 letters long. (Let's ignore punctuation.)
If we take 458 random letters of the English alphabet, there are 26^458 random
combinations.
So if our ideal Universe-sized computer was randomly picking letters and hoping to compose
a Shakespeare sonnet, it would need about 10^300 Universes to do so.
How much more complex is an E. Coli cell compared to a sonnet?
P.S. This is obvious, freshman-tier stuff unless you're blinded by ideology.
What' s to make of it? The article that you cite clearly explains what the row is all
about:
Moscow announced the move weeks after Athens banned four Russian diplomats after
accusing them of fomenting opposition to a landmark deal between Greece and macedonia,
opening up the possibility of eventual Nato membership for Skopje.
Your own bizarre explanation betrays your own Russian reasoning:
Personally, I'm not sure what to make of it. Greece could be trying to secure some debt
relief by manufacturing a pointless row with Russia. Their PM Tsipras did come to Russia in
2015, asking for money. Left with nothing.
My guess is that the Greek government wants to gain a powerful backer against
Brüssel.
In Greece, he very often appears in public alongside Kammenos and spreads his political
views on what is going on in the country via his Twitter account.
The influence goes so far that Pyatt unchallengedly criticizes the Greek judiciary and
demands measures against anti-American demonstrators. Tsipras administration, arguing
anti-Americanly itself at opposition times, on the other hand, fulfils every wish of the
USA. While on the other side of the Bosphorus NATO partner Turkey is pushing its dispute
with the US to the top, Greece's government is the most US-friendly since the overthrow of
military rule in July 1974: NATO interests, gas pipelines and the regional influence of the
North Atlantic defence alliance.
The coalition government of SYRIZA and the Independent Greeks agreed to the expansion of
American military bases in Greece, including the stationing of nuclear weapons. This was
not initially communicated to the public by the government, but only became known when the
Secretary General of the Communist Party, Dimitris Koutsoubas, criticized it during public
performances.
Secret diplomacy, as in the case of NATO, is also a characteristic of the Tsipras
government in resolving the name dispute with northern Macedonia and in ongoing
negotiations on border corrections with Albania. All negotiations are held in secrecy, with
reference to the protection of state interests. There is no detailed information and no
transparency regarding the reasons for the decision.
Athens is now providing NATO with the infrastructure for military bases in the event
that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan withdraws his country from the North Atlantic
Defence Alliance.
Yes, that's is the infamous Pyatt who was ambassador in Kiev during the Maidan Coup.
He has been in Athen since 2016.
The case brings to the forefront the tension that seems to have been brewing between
Athens and Moscow over the last two years, for reasons that have to do with regional
security.
Yeltsin was president when the bombings happened. Putin was only prime minister for a
couple of weeks before the tower block bombings happened. Boris Bereszvsky killed himself
(exiles are often miserable, Skripal wanted to go back) after Litvinenko, they were a couple
of losers. No, Putin is a proud man, he sent the anti terror police to arrest Gusinsky not
because of investigation into the apartment massacres of hundreds, but because that puppet
show Dolls of Gusinsky's NTV portrayed Putin in a way he hated.
Who wouldn't want to inflict a horrible death on someone who accused them of being a
paedophile? Litvinenko accused Putin of being a child molester and so Putin immediately
issued orders for him to be sadistically murdered and a month he was poisoned (like apartment
bombings, these things take a while to set up).
This brings me back to my point about Hitler & weak, foolish Eastern Europeans. Greek
government is only behaving this way because it sees no risks in antagonising Russians
whatsoever. Slapping sanctions on Greece (by banning tourism for example) might get them
thinking.
Look, I'm not passing judgement on the veracity of these accusations, that Litvinenko made
against Putler. I see that you've added another one to the list, that Litvinenko accused
Putler of being a pedophile too. All I was pointing out was that there were many reasons why
Litvinenko was a target for unfriendly Rusian actions, not like our resident 'Independent
foreign Policy Analyst' Mike Averko who claims:
As for the Litvinenko matter you bring up, there's good reason to believe that he
somehow got poisoned by a source other than a Russian government act.
Of course, he's a professional analytical type that always knows what he's talking
about?
Greece has been a member of NATO since 1952, it joined the European Community in 1981.
It's odd though that a Greek leftist like Tsipras is pro-American, given the strong
anti-American traditions of Greek left-wingers. But Tsipras seems to be an all-around scumbag
anyway.
how deeply Russia falls into China's orbit in the next couple of decades
Russia can start taking China's side on an ad hoc basis, e.g. sending ships to the
disputed sea and hassling US ships and planes. Russia could hassle them on the Northern half
and China on the Southern half, a nice division of labor and multiplication of hassle for the
US Navy.
Russia has enough chicken legs of its own now. They are not washed in chlorine.
Disengagement will simply remove what little influence the US has on Russia. Russia's
exports are utterly dominated by primary production which is entirely fungible. The US
exports little of high added to Russia and the EU and Switzerland, Korea and increasingly
China can replace that. Japan probably won't. Russia has been trying to play a softer game
with Japan but both sides true imperialist nature keeps on re-emerging. Like the US, Japan
has remarkably low levels of trade with Russia given the size of its economy. Switzerland
does a lot of high end complex electromechanical systems, like the Germans. The Germans are
good; The Swiss are perfect.
I'm not really sure how low prices for Turkey can become lower. It's already very
cheap.
Maybe further devaluation can contribute to the tourist market diverging more between
Greece and Turkey. More and more poorer people will go on holiday to Turkey, as it becomes
almost as cheap to go on holiday in Turkey, as it is to stay at home.
Maybe Greece can focus more on middle segment of the tourist market.
Greece had withdrawn from the NATO military structure after the invasion of Cyprus by
fellow member Turkey. If I remember rightly it was their own PM who told Greeks they had to
go back into NATO to be allowed to join the EC.
Any scientific theory of evolution will have to be about information entropy,
computational complexity and asymptotic properties of stochastic processes. That's exactly
the "abstract theory" you're deriding.
Bullshit. I have a pretty good education in probability theory both from the theoretical
physics and mathematics departments so feel free to explain whatever point you think you have
in as technical terms and with as much abstract math as you like.
I'm just going to claim that you're trying an "it doesn't work because of fancy words X,
Y, Z" bluff without any actual technical argument behind the big fancy words. Prove me
wrong.
It will have a negative impact on domestic Russian consumption short term. It's stupid,
short sighted, and hard to reverse. Sanctions work best when used least.
"Age of the universe" is a pop sci concept. In the standard model of cosmology it is
estimated that the universe has developed from a massively dense state to the current state
in roughly 13 billion years. We can backtrack the development over that time with current
theories of physics and then we hit a wall as matter is so dense that we'd need a quantum
theory of gravity to go further back in time but we don't have that. We don't know how long
the universe existed before that, actually we don't even know if time existed in the same
manner. The earliest known state of the universe was NOT informationless (there were
variations in mass distribution etc) so your assumption that patterns would emerge only in
the following 13 billion years is false.
[MORE]
If you watch some pop sci documentary, they will explain all sorts of stuff about how the
universe was at first some tiny point and there was a big explosion that spread it all over.
This is all nonsense that was made up so that pop sci documentaries could have CGI
graphics.
* The "Planck time" gives us the smallest possible unit of time, about 10^-45
seconds.
There is no such thing as the "smallest possible unit of time". This is complete nonsense.
You seem to get your knowledge of physics from science fiction movies.
There is an expectation that current theories of physics are not accurate at very small
time scales (which have not been reached by experiment). This is not the same thing as
postulating that there is some "smallest possible unit of time". Current theories of physics
simply do not include such a thing.
* There are about 10^82 atoms in the Universe.
We don't even know if the universe is finite or infinite. This is just a claim that you
pulled out of your ass. There may even be an infinite number of atoms.
Turks are a lot more orderly and competent than Greeks. In fact, I was surprised how much
more organized Turks are: we rented a car in Ankara near railway station and returned it in
another city near airport, and they delivered the car where we wanted it and then took it off
my hands, without car rental agency at either point.
For Russians, there are two additional advantages: no visa is required (you just pay $20
at the airport, and they stick what they call "visa" in your passport), and the same services
are cheaper than in Greece.
"Any scientific theory of evolution will have to be about information entropy,
computational complexity and asymptotic properties of stochastic processes. That's exactly
the "abstract theory" you're deriding."
The US went thru a period of noticeable politically motivated violence (in one form or
another), that among other things included the murders of the Kennedy brothers, King, X,
black children in a church, fatal Kent State shootings and the Manson involved murders.
There was absolutely no need for the Russian government to orchestrate the Moscow
apartment bombings. The evidence is non-existent, with the so-called evidence being a
put mildly creative stretch. On par with the idea that the US government sought and was
involved in planning 9/11. Terrorism from Chechnya was a clear reality before the Moscow
apartment bombings.
A disingenuous cherry pick on your part, along with empty calories sarcasm. It wasn't only
his (as has been said) sympathy for Chechen separatism, but a combination of factors, in
conjunction with that aspect.
What I said in full on this matter:
As for the Litvinenko matter you bring up, there's good reason to believe that he
somehow got poisoned by a source other than a Russian government act. His Italian friend
got arrested for arms smuggling and was also infected with polonium. Litvinenko was said to
be sympathetic to Chechen separatism. These factors and his links to the likes of Goldfarb
and Berezovsky suggest a source other than the Russian government.
It's a pity that the good things Macedonia is doing (like fixing its relations with Bulgaria
and Greece and starting to slowly accept the real history as opposed to the shit made up by
the Serbs, the communists and Tito) are all done for such a shitty reason like entering the
EU and NATO.
Greece has an inferior tourist industry and plenty of great European competition (Spain,
Italy, Croatia etc.)
Thanks to Cyprus, you don't even to travel to Greece if you want to be on vacation in a
Greek-speaking country.
Stick to the facts and do not reply back with your monotonous drum of often recited BS
when you don't have a credible reply, Mickey!
I was specifically pointing out the paucity of information that you provided regarding
your alternative suggestion that somebody other than Russian backed was responsible for
Livinenko's demise. As I've already pointed out, I do not pass judgments on any of the
aspersions that Litvinenko made against Putler, only that the smoking gun clearly points
towards Moscow. If you've got something better, then present it I'd try something more clever
than indicating that Litvinenko was in favor of Chechen separatists.
Much unlike your svido trolling ways, which include mis-informative cherry picks,
designed to spin an otherwise faulty impression.
Whoa, what do we have here? Another genuine ' Averkoism '??
You indicate that I ' include mis-informative cherry picks' to spin an otherwise
faulty impression. Why yes, I guess that's what I can be contrued doing. Most
impressions that you make are faulty' ' and deserve to be rebuked, don't you think? I
think that what you meant to say was that:
Much unlike your svido trolling ways, which include mis-informative cherry picks,
designed to spin an otherwise accurate impression.
Mickey, you don't really want to be remembered for making 'faulty impressions ' now
do you?
I have to agree with Mikhail here. I think that Litvinenko affair was like a
dress-rehearsal for the most famous, daring and successful spy operation in history –
the Babchenko affair.
You see, such a stunning operation like that takes years to perfect and for the Ukrainians
Litvinenko was just a guinea pig on whom they tested their secret intelligence (OK,
intelligence might be a stretch) operations skills.
And Litvinenko was an easy choice, the Ukrainians were sure that because of his background
– it will be blamed on the Russians.
Nevertheless, this doesn't take anything away from the professionalism and mastery that
Ukrainians displayed when they designed the Babchenko hoax. I wouldn't be surprised at all if
Babchenko success story launches a new series of spy novels – maybe about agent 008
– where 008 is the IQ of the agent.
My take too rT. Economic warfare will not play out against Russia today as it did against
Japan and Germany in the 1930′s; because while they were energy dependent, Russia has
an abundance of oil and can and will–as you say–bootstrap its own industries inso
far as they are able. They don't have to develop a surplus to trade since, like the USA 100
years ago, their population is sufficiently large to support a robust internal market.
Also, this entire analysis (and the Saker's discussions of weapons as well) ignores
Russia's bigger concern, 1.2 billion Chinese wielding state of the art weaponry, who would
love to bite off some big chunks of a weakened Russia for lebensraum.
You can read statements of their foreign ministry.
His statements to do with paranoia about Russian-Turkey relations – statement from
Greece was claiming Russia is a "comrade in arms with Turkey".
As Russia becomes friendly with Turkey – they will find an excuse to be angry, and
vice-versa.
I feel that this is one of those situations, when you need to read between the lines.
Turkey, religion and "meddling" ARE excuses for Greece. Trying to please Greece's creditors
is the real issue here. It's a literal crackwhore of a nation, living from one tranche to
another.
Also, this entire analysis (and the Saker's discussions of weapons as well) ignores
Russia's bigger concern, 1.2 billion Chinese wielding state of the art weaponry, who would
love to bite off some big chunks of a weakened Russia for lebensraum.
This is implausible, for reasons that have been discussed multiple times here, including
recently.
The idea that the Chinese will move to seize Siberia is a ridiculous fantasy.
China and Russia already in the 1990s peacefully resolved all of their outstanding
border issues.
China suffers from below replacement fertility and solved its food security issues in
the 1980s, so the era of "Yellow Peril" population pressure belongs to the distant past.
And in any case the Russian Far East is useless for agricultural purposes.
There are indeed some minerals in Siberia, but let's review some economic facts about
China:
China can buy all the resources it needs. The main threat to China's economic security
are the naval and air forces of the United States and Japan, and to a lesser extent the US
Treasury and Commerce Departments. Expanding into Siberia does exactly zero to counter any
of these threats, unless you think the Port of Vladivostok somehow enables the PLA-N to
break out into the open Pacific.
Instead it multiplies these threats by pointlessly adding Russia to its enemies and
eliminating the possibility of overland trade substituting for seaborne trade.
China is a security threat to Siberia only once the following are true:
1 – USA abandons Western Pacific in favor of hemispheric security
2 – China secures dominance over Second Island Chain
3 – China replaces USA as lynch pin of global financial (as opposed to just economic)
system
And given China's cautious attitude, that might not be enough. For instance, a USA
focused on hemispheric security would still be viewed as potentially dangerous by China
owing to its blue water navy and dominance of the "Third Island Chain".
If China displaces the USA as the world's preeminent power, then there might be some cause
for concern. But even then I'm not so sure–Russia would be Canada to China's America.
The USA and Canada have had very good relations since the 1930s.
Lebensraum with Chinese Characteristics is not going to happen.
That's not to say everything will be hunky dory in Russian-Chinese relations. There are
areas of friction like:
• Influence in Central Asia
• Chinese IP theft
• North Korea
• Japan
• Near Abroad
• Competition for defense and nuclear exports
The CRAIC CR929 project looks great for now, but the gist of it is that while it's
designed in Russia it will be made in China. Once China matches Russia in aerospace
technology, what is Russia's role in this partnership? Seems like the most likely outcome is
that Russian industry is reduced from producing aircraft to merely being a Tier One supplier
and, perhaps, an engine supplier.
Will Russia be happy with that? I don't know. The UK decided to accept being reduced to
this status after the commercial failure of its innovative but flawed postwar airliners
cheerfully enough I suppose. Japan considered but decided against developing a complete
aerospace-industrial base, though this may be changing (MHI Regional Jet, Kawasaki P1, MHI
X-2 Shinden).
He's a svido troll as evidenced by his ongoing distortions and omissions, which include
not having a good comeback to the following:
As for the Litvinenko matter you bring up, there's good reason to believe that he
somehow got poisoned by a source other than a Russian government act. His Italian friend
got arrested for arms smuggling and was also infected with polonium. Litvinenko was said to
be sympathetic to Chechen separatism. These factors and his links to the likes of Goldfarb
and Berezovsky suggest a source other than the Russian government.
Never mind the impracticality of the Russian government using something like polonium to
bump someone off, when there're effectively cheaper ways of doing such.
So, do you have even one shred of any evidence linking the poisoning of Litvinenko
with the Ukrainian secret service? If not, I wouldn't spend too much time writing your novel
about 008 and Babchenko, unless you intend it for an audience of only one gullible reader,
Michael Averko!
His ' Italian friend '? Were they fishing buddies where somebody got jealous of
their 'friendship' and decided to take the Italian out? Could've been another Russian job
too?
Litvinenko was said to be sympathetic to Chechen separatism.
Now, this is really stupid, I think that even you'll have to admit Mickey. Are we to
believe that because Litvinenko was sympathetic to Chechen separatism, that this somehow made
him impervious to any sort of Russian assault? Please explain this one to me!
Never mind the impracticality of the Russian government using something like polonium to
bump someone off, when there're effectively cheaper ways of doing such.
Well, somebody was responsible for this ill advised murder, and did so in this grotesque
and over the top manner. Why not the Russians, are they somehow smarter than the rest? If
Russia wasn't full of fools, why are they circumvented by the world community with
unnecessary and embarrasing sanctions, anyway? Besides, as I've already pointed out, there
were many reasons why the Kremlin wanted Litvinenko gone.
Well, somebody was responsible for this ill advised murder, and did so in this grotesque
and over the top manner. Why not the Russians, are they somehow smarter than the rest?
Why Litvinenko himself, albeit (if true) in a possible unintended way. No proof that the
Rusisan government did him in. No need to reply anymore to your rehashed trolling tripe.
Still no good answer to:
As for the Litvinenko matter you bring up, there's good reason to believe that he
somehow got poisoned by a source other than a Russian government act. His Italian friend
got arrested for arms smuggling and was also infected with polonium. Litvinenko was said to
be sympathetic to Chechen separatism. These factors and his links to the likes of Goldfarb
and Berezovsky suggest a source other than the Russian government.
Theory that it is to do with creditors, doesn't make much sense.
Creditors (troika) are European fund – mainly Germany, France and Italy, in order.
Followed by IMF and ECB.
Criteria for release of funds is economic criteria, that imply they might one day get
their money back.
Greece's foreign policy is not of interest to anyone much (Turkey care about them),
especially not accountants.
-
Reason for tensions with Greece, are the new relations with Turkey.
An alternative world, with a solvent Greece, they would be more angry, than currently
weak, insolvent one – considering sale of S-400 to Turkey, construction of Akkuyu for
Turkey, and recent decision for Turkstream.
Turkstream was always supposed to go to Greece, but two months ago, finally announced it's
going to Bulgaria (with no mention of Greece).
For Turkstream it's now option if it needs to go to Greece at all – it could also
reach Italy, via the Balkans.
In a Northern option that gets to Hungary and Italy over Serbia. (With no need of
Greece).
At the same time, Israel, Cyprus and Greece are probably building a rival pipeline
(probably not very economically rational), after Cyprus has discovered a gas field.
Well orderliness is not the only reason for holiday choice.
And Schengen visa is not a big deal for middle class tourists (35 euros).
Greece already has almost "too many" tourists (from around the world), for size of the
country.
Greece receives 32 million tourists this year (while Turkey receives around 40 million a
year tourism – and is six times larger than Greece in land area).
Perhaps Greece can even raise prices and market more for middle class tourists?
You missed my reply in #143 with plenty of decent replies. I don't mind reprinting them
for you, I know how prone you are to missing information that is contrary to your myopic
belief system:
His 'Italian friend' ? Were they fishing buddies where somebody got jealous of
their 'friendship' and decided to take the Italian out? Could've been another Russian job
too?
Litvinenko was said to be sympathetic to Chechen separatism.
Now, this is really stupid, I think that even you'll have to admit Mickey. Are we to
believe that because Litvinenko was sympathetic to Chechen separatism, that this somehow made
him impervious to any sort of Russian assault? Please explain this one to me!
Never mind the impracticality of the Russian government using something like polonium to
bump someone off, when there're effectively cheaper ways of doing such.
Well, somebody was responsible for this ill advised murder, and did so in this grotesque
and over the top manner. Why not the Russians, are they somehow smarter than the rest? If
Russia wasn't full of fools, why are they circumvented by the world community with
unnecessary and embarrasing sanctions, anyway? Besides, as I've already pointed out, there
were many reasons why the Kremlin wanted Litvinenko gone.
I believe Russia's loss of influence there is inevitable. China has $$$; Turkey/Islamic
world has ethno/religious draw; USA has its hegemonic culture.
Russia has some fading sovok relicts, such as old political ties and the Victory Day
cult.
However, China is displacing it gently, as opposed to batting it away as the US and EU are
wont to do. This naturally makes Russia much better disposed than it otherwise would be.
• Chinese IP theft
Will become less of an issue as China converges with and overtakes Russia in many
technological areas. For instance, the realization that China's MIC is progressing far faster
than expected – without significant Russian tech transfer – has contributed to
Russia dropping its inhibitions on selling the S-400 and advanced fighters to China in recent
years. (An HBD realist could have told them as much, earlier).
• North Korea
• Japan
• Near Abroad
The equitable arrangement would be for Russia to defer to China on North Korea and the Far
East in general (though economic relations with Japan should be broadened), and to require
that China do the same for Russia wrt to its Near Abroad.
But certainly a much more dominant China may no longer feel the need to honor such an
arrangement.
• Competition for defense and nuclear exports
This will certainly be an issue.
Russia's nuclear technology is much further advanced than China's (the gap is much bigger
than the rapidly dwindling one in the military sphere), and it doesn't appear to me that
China is making a major R&D push in that area. I think Russia will continue to dominate
global nuclear tech exports for at least 2-3 more decades.
Russia's current dominance of global nuclear exports is something of a fluke.
The West crippled its nuclear industry owing to pathological atomophobia. Design expertise
didn't atrophy, but construction experience did. Result was massive cost overruns and endless
delays on the few Western Gen III reactor projects. Now effectively priced out of the world
market.
Japan suffered from the double whammy of Fukushima and Toshiba getting dragged down by the
collapse of Westinghouse. Even though it's somewhat unfair, no one will now order Japanese
reactors in the near future. The Japanese elite, once truly impressive in its atomophilia and
determination to resist popular atomophobia, is no longer united on the issue either. Former
Prime Minister Junichiro Koisumi has for instance called for Japan to shut down all nuclear
power plants.
Emerging competitor is South Korea. The Koreans successfully won the project in the United
Arab Emirates, and within South Korea they have an excellent record of efficient
construction. Fortunately for Russia, the very weak President Moon is a disgraceful
atomophobe.
Thanks for your comments. I really wasn't referring to today, more to a tomorrow when
China is the world's leading economy and the USA is struggling to enforce dollar
supremacy.
You are looking at it from a wrong perspective, pal. I was simply expressing pride and
admiration for the competence of the Ukrainian Secret Services. Why can't a fellow –
even though admittedly phony – Slav like me feel proud of the accomplishments of a
Slavic country that I look upon to for inspiration and guidance?
Interesting argument but it hinges on something that is not a part of it, i.e, what is
special about the 458 letter sonnet? Your argument only demonstrates that if another world
began 10^18 seconds ago it most likely would not produce the same 458 letter sonnet but it
would produce some other sonnet which could have a meaning in this different world.
You could create similarly fallacious argument 'proving' that you cannot possibly exist.
Assign probabilities p<<1 of an event that two of your ancestors met and procreated.
What was a chance that your parent met and then go back to grandparents and so on. And soon
you will obtain cumulative probability close to zero stating exactly what? That your life
could not have happened?
I think it is east to be confused and tricked by probabilities. And this happens when we
are sloppy in defining the space of events on which the probability function must be defined.
When you are heating up water at some point there will me one molecule of H2O that will break
free and evaporate. If this molecule asked the Nancy Kerrigan's question "Why me?" and began
calculating the probability of this event soon it would have to conclude the even was
impossible. The problem is with the question "Why me?"
Thanks man, I am really trying. If I may confide in you, you know what I find the most
admiring about the Ukrainians? Your keen sense of democracy.
I mean, it took you what – barely 4 years to figure out that Yanukovych was not
democratic enough – and then boom – revolution. I mean you guys are sharp. Look
at the Russians, they have been electing Putin since 2000 and they still haven't figured out
that he is not democratic enough. You are way ahead of the game.
You know what I think? I think that one good coup is worth at least 5-6 regular elections.
So if you guys were to stage another coup within – let's say the next couple of years
– it's like you've gone through 12 regular elections of 4 years each. You know what
– if I was you I wouldn't even bother with elections, elections are for dummies, just
stick with coups and soon you'll overtake even Western Europe – democracy and economic
development wise, so you won't even need their stinking EU.
As for the Litvinenko matter you bring up, there's good reason to believe that he
somehow got poisoned by a source other than a Russian government act. His Italian friend
got arrested for arms smuggling and was also infected with polonium. Litvinenko was said to
be sympathetic to Chechen separatism. These factors and his links to the likes of Goldfarb
and Berezovsky suggest a source other than the Russian government.
Never mind the impracticality of the Russian government using something like polonium to
bump someone off, when there're effectively cheaper ways of doing such.
I can't help it if you don't know the specifics about Litrvinenko's aforementioned Italian
friend. Stupid people have a way of babbling on because they don't realize just how stupid
they are. Then again, part of you might recognize that, seeing your cowardly anonymous empty
calories insults.
Opposite to your shooting blanks is this precision reply:
Thek ind of Russian-American views not getting propped in US mass media. Similar to the PC
Ukrainian views getting the nod over Ukrainians thinking differently.
You're on the right track, buddy! I don't know why AP tries to continually put you in
place by pointing out that you're not really a Slav, but some sort of Balkanized Turk. Who
cares? Your last two comments indicate that you're capable of evolving your thinking patterns
much higher that the typical 97 or 98. Heck, I'd guess that you're a solid 99! Keep it
up!
Stupid people have a way of babbling on because they don't realize just how stupid they
are.
I see that you're still babbling on Mickey. Isn't it time for you to do a few
rounds of kumbaya in front of your icon of Herr Putler and go to sleep yet?
As La Russophobe imagines it, Averko then sits down in the lotus position, the room lit
by a single candle beneath a large photo of Stalin, and intones his mantra several thousand
times: "I am a journalist I am a journalist I am a journalist " until he falls asleep. When
he wakes up, he heads out to his day job flipping hamburgers at Wendy's
"Now take Shakespeare's sonnet #27. It is 458 letters long. (Let's ignore punctuation.) If
we take 458 random letters of the English alphabet, there are 26^458 random combinations. So
if our ideal Universe-sized computer was randomly picking letters and hoping to compose a
Shakespeare sonnet, it would need about 10^300 Universes to do so."
The above just shows that the author is just completely ignorant of scientific, statistics
and computing principles.
First in English the occurance of letters do not have random frequencies, the frequencies
range from 0.074% for letter z to 12.702% for letter e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency
Incidentally sonnet 27 only has 80 unique words, many of which are not random but closely
related, e.g. blind, old, sight, tired, sightless, see, ghastly, shadow, darkness, expired,
eyelids, drooping, weary, bed, toil, view, night, etc. A task simple enough for markov text
sonnet generators,
I'm just going to claim that you're trying an "it doesn't work because of fancy words X,
Y, Z" bluff without any actual technical argument behind the big fancy words. Prove me
wrong.
What's the "it" in your post, exactly? Darwinism? The problem with Darwinism is
that it's not a scientific theory. It's not even formulated correctly. The problem itself is
framed by biologists in handwavey terms on a "monkeys and typewriters" level.
When one tries putting some sort of numbers to the idea, the whole thing falls apart. See
my post above, for example, where it turns out you need a Universe about 10^300 larger than
ours to make random selection work.
And before you charge to M'Lady Science's defense: note this isn't a "disproof", it's just
a demonstration that nobody bothered to frame the question properly yet. There's nothing
there that can be proved or disproved.
The actual point is that biologists framed a problem in a way that doesn't match the scale
of our Universe as we observe it.
Feel free to correct the numbers I made; maybe the correct factor is 10^100 instead of
10^300. So what? The processes biologists postulate are so asymptotic that they require an
infinite Universe, which doesn't exist in real life.
There is an expectation that current theories of physics are not accurate at very small
time scales (which have not been reached by experiment).
We don't even know if the universe is finite or infinite. This is just a claim that you
pulled out of your ass. There may even be an infinite number of atoms.
Good point, but no. You missed the point again.
Any theory that requires time or space outside of a conventional Newtonian understanding
of physics isn't Darwinism. It wouldn't even be biology, because biologists don't (and can't)
deal with stuff like that.
I never assigned any special meaning to a sonnet. I merely demonstrated that the size of
the probability spaces we're traversing are unimaginable orders of magnitude larger than the
Universe we observe.
Formulating the probability spaces and functions should be step one of any biological
theory of evolution. Only then we can start talking about meanings and other philosophy.
Good point, but unfortunately Markov chains (and evolutionary algorithms) are intelligent
design, not random evolution.
They are tools for getting an answer when you know the result you want, but don't know the
steps to get it. The better you understand the result you want, the faster you arrive at a
solution.
That's a framework postulated by 'intelligent design' proponents, and rejected by
conventional Darwinist biologists.
OK, so what is the big deal about generating random string of 458 letters? Any such string
can be easily generated with the same probability from a bag full of letters. Each string is
equivalent.
Continuing on AKarlin's conclusion how Russia's future economic and foreign policy
orientation lies on the EU's response to the US's inevitable Iran-style sanctions against
Russia, I'll walk through some situations, and also state that once sanctions and adversaries
with unfriendly relations escalate to embargo and enemies with no relations on the US side,
the EU's decision at that point will be able to determine its fate for a long time to come.
1. EU caves in, and like a good vassal state with no independent policy of its own
whatsoever, follows US policy. This is more likely to happen if the US threatens third party
trade ties with Russia. This means that EU imposes Iran-style sanctions, and gradually turns
to more expensive US LNG for energy. This would put the EU under incredible strain, and a
large amount of state coffers would be shaved off due to these purchases; the citizens
disposable income would plunge too. On the other hand, Europe won't really collapse if the US
agrees to subsidize gas sales to the EU in exchange for joining the ideological crusade
against Russia.
In the Kissinger thread where I mentioned how a blackpilled possibility of Russia's future
lies as a vassal state, or junior partner, of China, while I may have exaggerated a little
regarding permanent PLA bases on Russia soil, it still is a slight possibility if the
oligarchs become more powerful again and also get a little desperate. However, PLA bases
aside, if the EU joins in the US on an embargo against Russia, Russia would still be cut off
from trade and other ties to its west, and inevitably having to completely rely on its east
for trade and political ties. Since even Japan/Korea trade can be a little difficult due to
their strong US ties and India doesn't really offer Russia much, except as a place to export
some goods, this leaves us with China, rendering Russia's future as China's largest and most
important vassal state.
This would also enable the EU branch of neoliberalism.txt to show their true colors as an
American vassal. Outside of Poland and the Baltics, attitudes towards Russia vary directly on
how neoliberal they feel, so in order to prevent the people from voting in non-neoliberal
parties, some "checks and balances" aka non-democracy has to be implemented to make sure
neoliberalism.txt stays via "voting". In this case, shave off a good at least 10% to EU's
white percentage in the long run also; while its unlikely for Britain and France to ever dip
below 60% white but stabilize around that point instead, a quasi-neoliberal dictatorship
would mean Eastern and Southern Europe bearing a lot of this brunt, e.g. ghettos in Warsaw
might go from a fear to actual reality. And expect the EU's economic growth to be highly
stagnant, and China, with Russia as not just a friendly state but a vassal state, would take
advantage of this to end up becoming the other pole in a bipolar world along with the US.
Unless China changes the way it conducts trade and foreign policy, this means that Russia
will likely get taken advantage of and not get too much in return, especially with
non-patriotic and greedy oligarchs still having significant power. In this case, Russia-China
relations will resemble a more predatory version of UK/Canada-US relations and Russia will
find itself to be a largely China-oriented, with Chinese tourism, businesses, language, and
other ties etc. having a very broad, visible, and dominating presence.
Chance of this happening? 30% given Europe's rhetoric on Iran. China will gladly take
advantage of the situation.
2. The EU doesn't cave in and continues to maintain trade and political ties with Russia.
This is the better result for not just Russia, but also the entire world. A Europe that's
able to stand up to American foreign policy, especially if its more ideological hysteria than
based on realpolitik in the case with Russia, is one that would have taken its first step
towards significantly reasserting their sovereignties. This would've also been a huge blow to
the American establishment, if not THE nail in the coffin ending American unipolarity. And
China also needs more competitors instead of a bipolar world with just China and America.
2a). Europe continues to be ruled by neoliberalism.txt as America enforces the embargo.
Sanctions won't be lifted and the status quo remains. As China gets more powerful and
European relations still cold, Russia and China will end up in a full-blown alliance, but its
status quo trade and personal ties with Europe would ensure that Russia can continue to
maintain a somewhat multi-vectored approach instead of complete subservience to Beijing. And
Russia won't be as much of a "hot potato" if not embargoed by the EU, ties with countries
like Japan and South Korea will continue unabated if not upgraded. In this case, the EU can
still be a more sovereign entity, albeit just ruled by the neoliberalism.txt ideology;
demographically, slightly better than, but no significant differences from the EU caving to
US embargo case. In this case, Russia-China relations will resemble Japan-US relations,
albeit without the military bases.
Chance of this happening? 40%.
2b). Europe undergoing a right-wing wave as America enforces the embargo. Europe in this
case will lift sanctions against Russia and ties likely even upgrade to a strategic
partnership. While Russia will not become enemies with China since it is in its best interest
to not pick a fight with the world's #1 or #2 power, its relationship will stabilize as
non-adversarial but non-aligned, a renewed strategic partnership with Europe can stimulate
Russia's economy and will ensure a multipolar world emerges in the 21st century, with Russia
as a powerful 3rd or 4th most powerful country on good terms with everybody (minus the US and
parts of Eastern Europe). Such close ties to Russia will also be a boon for Europe's economy,
and the possibility to regain their sovereignties after a century-long occupation post-WW2.
America becomes more isolated and loses its unipolarity in this case.
An unrelated side effect of this tactic is that the nonwhite percentages of Europe will
probably stabilize at or just above or below (in the case of southern Europe) current
values.
In this case, Russia-China relations won't be any special, with close trade relations,
some military cooperation, and neutral détente but inevitable minor beefs that spring
up every once in a while, like a closer and better version US-China relations pre-Trump.
Russia in this case will truly be one of the smaller poles in a multipolar world.
Chance of this happening? 30%, but this is by far the best outcome for the entire
world.
* There are 27 words of one letter and 26 letters.
* There are 635 words of two letters and 676 two-letter combinations.
* There are 4710 words of three letters and 17576 three-letter combinations.
* There are 11169 four-letter words and 456976 four-letter combinations.
* There are 22950 words of five letters and 11 million five-letter combinations.
(Oops.)
* There are 61018 words of 8 letters, but 208 billion 8-letter combinations.
Now, these are words, not texts, but you get the idea. Letter combinations grow as c^n,
while the number of English texts clearly doesn't.
1. EU caves in, and like a good vassal state with no independent policy of its own
whatsoever, follows US policy.
Chance of this happening? 30% given Europe's rhetoric on Iran.
Eh, what? It is not EUropean rhetoric that suggests that, but the gap between their
rhetoric and reality.
Europeans talk about defending JCPOA yet European big business ditches Iran and European
banks stab Iran in the back.
In recent weeks, U.S. and European intelligence agencies flagged a European-Iranian
Trade Bank request to withdraw 300 million euros from the Deutsche Bundesbank. Iran claimed
the cash is necessary so that Iranian citizens can use foreign currency when they travel,
but Western governments warned that the cash would be used to fund Iran's terrorist
proxies.
Fearing repercussions from the U.S. Treasury, the German bank decided last week to
introduce the new rules to prevent the withdrawal. This move was likely coordinated with
the German government.
In recent months, the E.U. has said that it will try to salvage the Iranian nuclear
deal, despite the U.S. withdrawal and renewed sanctions.
Initially, the E.U. explored the possibility of compensating European firms that would
be affected by the new sanctions, using the European Investment Bank.
This effort was torpedoed by the EIB, which said it might be blacklisted by the U.S.
Treasury of it was part of a scheme to offset the sanctions. EIB President Werner Hoyer
said two weeks ago that "doing business in Iran is something that we cannot be actively
engaged in."
So my 3 predictions are essentially, Iran-style western embargo, status quo with embargo
only on US side, and normalization of relations with Europe. How would you recalibrate the
likelihoods?
Theory that it is to do with creditors, doesn't make much sense.
Creditors (troika) are European fund – mainly Germany, France and Italy, in order.
Followed by IMF and ECB.
Criteria for release of funds is economic criteria, that imply they might one day get
their money back.
Greece's foreign policy is not of interest to anyone much (Turkey care about them),
especially not accountants.
You assume that Greece is the rational actor in this situation. It's a stupid crackwhore,
desperate for a bit of debt relief.
It is also fair to say that Western decisions on financial aid are not made by
accountants, ultimately they are made by politicians, who do consider geopolitics.
Surely Greece can see that IMF is dumping billions of dollars into the Ukraine for no
other reason than geopolitics. Ukrainian regime also got a nice debt relief a couple of years
back – to better resist "Russian aggression".
So it comes down to the meaning after all. You look for words that have meaning. But why?
Every word out of 208 billions may have a mining in some other language that you do not know
of. Why you insist that the disproof of evolution or the random Universe must be based on
what has meaning in English language? There are some believers in the intelligent design like
yourself in Pentecostal church who speak all kind of tongues nobody heard of them but to them
they have some meaning. There are patients in psychiatric wards who write 458 letter sonnets
that have meaning only to them. So why did you pick up this particular Shakespeare sonnet to
calculate a number that suppose to prove something?
Do you begin to understand where is the flaw in your argument?
2. To what extent will the EU join in, passively acquiesce to, or resist the US
sanctions against Russia? The answer to this question will to a large extent determine
precisely how deeply Russia falls into China's orbit in the next couple of decades.
This looks like a fine opportunity for the EU to 1) develop its own international
settlements system based on a Euro reserve currency 2) redirect trade and investment towards
the ROW (rest of the world), if necessary, excluding the US 3) become a reliable
non-political trade partner to these countries 4) make a unilateral decision to terminate
NATO and detach itself from US lies, subversion and military adventurism.
The place to start would be the termination of NATO, but it would be better to implement
the policies simultaneously. It would initially be very costly to European corporations, but
ultimately worth it, with new more predictable international relationships.
This is exactly what I meant by my response. Not only will EU's response to the upcoming
US embargo be instrumental in writing Russia's role and development in the 21st century
world, but also if the EU ever wants to transform from a neoliberalism.txt US vassal
experiment to either an independent "Great Power" quasi-federation (essentially USSR 2.0
after the revolutionary phase died down, Communism replaced by neoliberalism.txt), or to
break up as wholly sovereign states, a continuation if not strengthening of relations with
Russia will be a pivotal first step for that to happen.
There is no reason to look at any further steps in your calculations when you begin with
false premises.
[MORE]
Again, you are under the false impression that the universe "began" 13 billion years ago
as some informationless entity and that all patterns and complexity emerged after it. No. The
earliest known state of the universe had patterns and complexity. Even if you somehow managed
to argue that the complexity of life on earth is too high to emerge in 13 billion years, it
would still be of no consequence to Darwinism since we don't need it to emerge in that time
– 13 billion years ago is not some patternless zero state of complexity.
In fact, for all we know the emergence of life on earth could have already been determined
in the earlier state of the universe 13 billion years ago. That's implausible to me but a lot
of people believe in an intelligent creator and you can easily just postulate that he baked
the emergence of man in the design of the early universe and then you're in no contradiction
with modern science whatsoever.
Where did the patterns and complexity in the early universe come from? We don't know since
the current theories of physics can't probe that far. In fact, as I said before, the whole
"age of the universe" thing is a false notion that unfortunately some physicists peddle as a
simplification of cosmology. What we can do is trace back the development of the universe
from this point in time and we can go back 13 billion years and conclude that the universe
back then was a very different place, in a very dense state that gradually "expanded" into
the current one.
However in this process we run into a dead end as to study such dense states we'd need to
make the theories of gravity and quantum mechanics work together and we can't do that
currently. Hence, everything "earlier" than that is pure speculation, in fact we don't even
know for sure whether there was a "before". This state beyond current theories has been
dubbed the "big bang", "the beginning" and such but that's all just popularization. This has
the unfortunate side effect that some people now believe physics to somehow have proven that
the universe emerged from "nothing" 13 billion years ago and that's just not true.
And an "understanding of time and space outside of a conventional Newtonian understanding
of physics" is definitely required for cosmology like claims that "universe is X seconds
old". You are the one who began with assumptions that require physics well beyond Newtonian
mechanics.
Most likely is "status quo with embargo only on US side" with limited shift towards
"Iran-style western embargo". EUropean elites do not show much willingness to oppose
Russophobia, but on the other hand Russia is much more integrated in the EU economy than the
Iran.
For instance, the value of the trade in 2017 between Russia and Germany was 57,3 billion
Euro (rank 14th), the number for the Iran-Germany trade was only 3,4 billion Euro (rank
58th).
From 2009 to 2011, Syria supplied almost a fifth of EU imports of phosphate, but those
sales collapsed during the war.
Official EU import data shows that phosphate shipments to Europe -- heading almost
exclusively to Greece -- are resuming and more than tripled between December 2017 to April
2018. The volumes remain small compared to the pre-war heyday, but Syria is making a clear
push to return to the EU market and its giant farm sector.
Syrian data show that total phosphate exports were more than $200 million in 2010.
Three people either working in the phosphate industry or involved with trading the
commodity said Syria is able to export again because Russian investors have resurrected the
Palmyra mines, which Islamic State militia captured in 2015. Assad awarded these reserves
to the Russians last year after Moscow helped him turn the tide against ISIS.
No, it actually doesn't. The probabilities grow as c^n, while the Universe doesn't. No
matter how big it is, it's still a fixed size due to the laws of conservation of mass and
energy.
Every word out of 208 billions may have a mining in some other language that you do not
know of.
Even if every atom in the observable Universe had its own language, the number of possible
letter combinations would still be vastly bigger.
Why you insist that the disproof of evolution or the random Universe must be based on
what has meaning in English language?
I'm not "disproving" anything. I'm demonstrating that the "monkeys and typewriters"
argument used by biologists (and its variants "the universe is really big" and "the Earth is
really old" arguments) violate basic mathematical logic.
The Universe isn't really big. In fact, it is infinitesimal compared to the
probabilities we're dealing with here.
Once biologists acknowledge this obvious fact, then we can formulate some sort of
theory, and maybe then there will be something to prove or disprove.
Do you begin to understand where is the flaw in your argument
Do you? The point is that we're traversing probability spaces here that grow
exponentially, and yet nothing in nature can be exponential indefinitely. Somewhere in your
assumptions is a grave error.
What do you mean uncritically? I think that the citation is very critical of you.
If you're looking for something even more critical, just let me know?
Again, you are under the false impression that the universe "began" 13 billion years ago
as some informationless entity and that all patterns and complexity emerged after it. No.
The earliest known state of the universe had patterns and complexity.
Very good point, and one I agree with. However, this is a variant of the Intelligent
Design hypothesis, and is considered to be pseudoscience by biologists.
Like I said, I'm not "disproving" anything, merely pointing out that the way Darwinian
evolution is framed by biologists is not science.
Maybe it can be reformulated in a way that makes sense, but don't hold your breath -- the
biologists don't even understand the objections and fall back to the "Earth is, like, really
old" argument.
And an "understanding of time and space outside of a conventional Newtonian
understanding of physics" is definitely required for cosmology like claims that "universe
is X seconds old".
Again, the actual figure is irrelevant. The point is that we've posited an exponentially
exploding probability space, and yet nothing in nature is infinite and exponential. (I know
about the cosmology arguments about the finite/infinite universe, spare me. In any case, the
observable Universe is definitely finite, and science only deals with the observable.)
Now that Syria has all but won the war, I wonder when will rebuilding and eventually
re-emerging as a stable country good enough for FDI and tourism will start. By then, I also
wonder how it will be sanctioned.
My guess is that it will rebuild under Iran-style conditions back to more or less where it
was in the early 2000s politically, economically, socially, and sanctions-wise starting
around 2020 or so.
"For instance, banning Aeroflot from flying to the US has a simple response – banning
US air carriers from overflying North Eurasia, period. It can resurrect a bill – first
raised this May, since sunken in the legislature – to impose fines and prison time on
individuals and entities who support Western sanctions by refusing to do business with
Russian citizens or entities on America's SDN list. It can throw out the American-dominated
copyrights regimen out of the window."
As an American, I think Russia should do this and for good reason: the people who run this
country are idiots; if this is allowed to stand, they'll continue to push this until we get a
war. Best to head it off now by making the US Ruling Class pay the price. I especially like
the last part. Russia should just host all Hollywood movies, books, and video games on a
server accessible to American pirates (hey, Red States won't have problem with this these
scum just voted to remove Trump's star on the walk of fame anyway).
"This looks like a fine opportunity for the EU to make a unilateral decision to terminate
NATO and detach itself from US lies, subversion and military adventurism."
Not going to happen for a variety of reasons. NATO is a good way to keep an incompetent,
belligerent U.S. bogged down so that it doesn't cause any serious trouble for advanced
nations. Take Germany for instance. The number of US troops there is quite small in an
absolute sense, not enough to cause trouble, but combined with troops all over the place, the
all-volunteer US military can't really marshall the numbers necessary to invade anyone
without support from Europe. NATO is actually a clever way to control the aggressive
tendencies of the United States; without it, there is no telling what the U.S. could do.
Europe also gets high-tech weapon systems in the process – and sold at a premium
considering the enormous R&D costs involved. That's why German industrialists were stupid
to provoke Trump and go around telling Europeans to not buy American weapons (those weapons
are in some cases FAR superior to what the Europeans have and someone is definitely going to
buy them considering the cost spent to develop them, either you or a potential enemy so it
might as well be you). In all, it's good deal for them. They aren't going to chunk that for
anything.
The real key here is for Russia to strike back in a way that doesn't galvanize the
American public against them. My suggestion: cancel all American copyright protections and
start hosting American movies and television programs. Conservative republicans won't oppose
this as these programs are made in Trump-hating California – a place that just voted to
remove Trump's star on the walk of fame.
In fact, his "conservative" predecessor Samaras was more pro-German than pro-American.
Tsipras is pro-American. He is leftist like Tony Blair is leftist.
But unless they find a way to somehow stop Russia's exports of oil, our economy will
shrug off whatever sanction packages US can throw at it.
It still makes Russia look pathetically weak. The U.S. actions are essentially an act of
war. If Russia just rolls over allows itself to get kicked then the U.S. is just going to
keep on kicking. Cowardice is rarely a good policy.
the F-35. The one which even Americans were criticising.
I bought into much of the criticism, and probably a somewhat better plane could've been
made cheaper, but all in all I think it'll be a fine enough weapon, and probably better than
any currently deployed Russian fighters. The Su-57 is not yet ready (and it's recently got
questioned if it ever will), so you cannot meaningfully compare it to it.
Altogether if you want the very best fighter jet available in the market, then you should
choose it, unless the costs are prohibitive for you. It's actually no longer much more
expensive than 4+ generation planes. I think Boeing is trying to market the F-15X, which
would be a newly produced version of the F-15 with all possible technologies (except stealth
which is impossible for this frame), and it's not going to be meaningfully cheaper than the
latest (and cheapest) F-35.
If buying Russian is politically possible for you, then the Su-35 might be a good cheaper
alternative, though countries which are allowed to buy it are usually not sold the F-35.
Maybe India (and perhaps soon Turkey?) is the only country where both could even be
considered.
If the Su-57 were ready, then maybe we could talk about whether it was better than the
F-35 (the answer would probably depend on a number of issues, e.g. the rest of the equipment
used by the military in question, and of course politics, which is to say, if there was a
chance of a political conflict with the supplier, because if yes, then obviously you'd need
to buy from the other).
For most (but not all) roles the F-35 is at least as good as any other American fighter
jet (except maybe the F-22, and maybe not even that).
Maybe that's why Israel uses its own software? (At least they rewrote part of the
software, or so I read.)
Anyway, I don't think it's a bad fighter jet for the job of fighting America's enemies.
Probably even against neutrals. It might be useless against America's friends, or America
itself, but no one buys it for that. And actually it's probably useful against America, too,
or else why is the US so reluctant to sell it to Turkey?
And probably the American idea that the Russians might use their S-400 to spy on other
Turkish weapon systems (including the F-35), when in fact it's the Americans who use weapons
they sell to do that. The Russians are probably too afraid to lose their reputations.
F-35 has inferior kinematic performance to most, if not all, of the Generation 4 fighters
it's supposed to replace or oppose. Lack of a bubble canopy is also a major step backwards.
Quite a dubious distinction for a new aircraft.
That leaves its stealth and its supposedly wiz-bang sensors.
Stealth is nice, but it drives up operating costs and reduces sortie rates. And on a small
aircraft, you can't carry large war loads without sacrificing your stealth. F-35 stealth is
in the frontal area only, optimized for the X-band. It will be easily detected by long
wavelength radars. In air to air combat it would rely upon detecting intercepting aircraft
and firing AMRAAMs before they can lock on or, heaven forbid, close to visual range (where
the F-35 will be dogmeat).
The Air Force has long said that the F-35 isn't optimized for air combat. I suppose the
idea was that F-22s and legacy fighters would handle air superiority missions. F-35s, with
frontal stealth, would be able to get close to targets and attack them with PGMs.
As for its allegedly wonderful sensors, I am skeptical. Lots of air forces continuously
modernize old designs with AESA radars, glass cockpits, etc. Why exactly is a new airframe
needed for any of this?
That said it's not like the F-35 is awful , and as usual pilot skill and other
factors can overcome inappropriate technology.
The F-35 also now costs less to buy than the Eurofighter Typhoon and Rafale, which is an
important advantage. Gripen is much cheaper, but Sweden has no geopolitical clout and has a
very bad habit of finding moralistic reasons not to export armaments.
If you have to buy from Western suppliers, a mix of F-15X and Gripen NGs seems ideal. If
you can't afford two classes of fighter, the Rafale is a very good compromise. France is also
a reliable supplier. Worst choice is the Super Hornet. The F-16, while now quite an old
design, is still a very capable aircraft at a reasonable price as well.
Japan now has a stealth fighter technology demonstrator in the MHI X-2 Shinden. They
somehow built it, including with indigenous turbofans, for $360m. The airframe is very
interesting in that it's built of new materials which eliminate the need for RAM, which
should keep operating costs down and increase sortie rates. But this is only a technology
demonstrator at this time, probably as proof-of-concept for the new materials and an
indigenous low-bypass afterburning turbofan engine.
As for the Su-57, it's somewhat like the F-35 in its limited stealth. But it's also like
the Su-27 family in having superb kinematic performance. Russia's official reason for
delaying entry into service is that the Su-35 is adequate for existing threats, which is
probably true.
Who knows what the real reason is. Budgetary pressures perhaps? Russia wants to double
capital spending in rouble terms in 2024, and to do so without increasing debt. At the same
time it's continuing its import substitution efforts, and there are no moves to soaking the
rich. So the money has to come from somewhere, and presumably that makes mass production of
the Su-57 and T-14 Armata less attractive.
And actually it's probably useful against America, too, or else why is the US so
reluctant to sell it to Turkey?
>study F-35 and its data
> get better at detecting/fighting F-35
It is probably one of the main reasons why the RoC (Taiwan) won't get this jet despite
needing more than most. The risk that pro-PRC agents would have access to the F-35 is not
small.
I agree. However, let's not forget that Russia and USA have very different weight and role
in the international economy. USA effectively owns the system of international finance. That
is to say "international finance" is but an extention of US financial system. They can
exclude Russia, we can't exclude them (from the system they created and own).
If Russia is going to impose meaningful costs on the US, I think it can only be done
through non-economic means. Realistically, what action Russia could take that would
potentially match the disruptive power of American sanctions on Russia? Arm the Central
American drug cartels?
Using your own software is common for technologically advanced powers concerned about
their sovereignty and their own military-industrial capabilities. Japan for instance (after
being bullied out of building its own indigenous fighter in the 80s) built its own upgraded
version of the F-16 which, among other things, included Japanese software. Like Israel, Japan
also fields its own air-to-air missiles which on paper are in the first rank.
The UK took a different route of becoming a Level 1 Partner on the F-35 program, so they
received privileged access to the source code which is not available to other powers.
The F-35 is not very useful for fighting Russia or China, but fine for fighting most
anyone else. It actually could have some utility against America since America lags Russia
and China in low-frequency radar and infrared search and track, but probably the real
reluctance is safeguarding technology. In particular materials (e.g. the new RAM panels
instead of finicky coatings) and the engines.
Sun Tzu say avoid combat with superior force, bide time and wait till you are stronger. Of
course doesn't take Sun Tzu to work that out, even if he did say it.
IMF funded by a lot of countries though – Russia now one of the top ten important
creditors and more influential owners of the IMF (although it's proportion of ownership is
still multiples times smaller compared to US).
Russia is 8th largest shareholder of the IMF (out of 189 countries). US is largest
share-holder, and then Japan and China.
Decisions are based on member voting which is based on share in the organization, so
Russia has 8th largest vote in IMF, but behind USA, Japan, China, etc.
Part of the Greek debt is owned by Russia through the IMF, probably relative to Russian
ownership of IMF and the debt relief packages partly also funded from Russian loans.
Fortunately, IMF ownership of Greek debt is several times smaller than the eurozone
countries. But Russia's government share of Greece debt will probably be some billions of
dollars. That's how Greece can basically continue receiving money – so many countries
are owed money on their debt.
Thanks man, that's what I have been craving all my life – an approval from a
Ukrainian hick. You keep it up too buddy, your encouragement means the world to me.
VAT is not a "non-issue". When you raise from 18% to 20%, then you are taking
significantly more money from the whole population (including poor people) who want to buy
things in private sector, and transferring this money to state sector, where not all extra
money (to be "polite") is going to be used "wisely".
At the same time, a problem now is to have up to 50% of the federal budget from oil/gas
revenues – which is a volatile priced resource.
So it's typical dilemma with neither option looking good.
Of course, the solution to both, is to reduce unnecessary government expenditure, which
continues to grow all the time in many useless areas, to the extent that you can see
expressed in even unhidden ways of the luxurious buildings being constructed for all kinds of
different government offices who could really do their job just as well (or incompetently) in
a warehouse or a polyester and nylon tent.
You uncritically referenced an anonymous, lying coward (not too much different from
yourself BTW), who ducked a live one hours BBC World Service radio panel discussion, much
unlike the person who you've an obsession with.
Increasing taxation reduces private consumption, but I'm skeptical that it creates a
long-term output gap (short term is a different matter). The OECD has prosperous economies
with taxation at a share of GDP ranging from about one-third to three-fifths. Such a wide
divergence suggests that high taxes and prosperity are not incompatible. Money spent by the
state is still spent, and even if it's spent dubiously it continues to circulate.
Russia's official economic plan (besides import substitution) is to increase capital
spending. It intends to do with while retaining fiscal discipline and limiting offshore
borrowing. If you are unable or unwilling to borrow to finance investment, you must suppress
consumption.
Suppressing consumption to finance investment has a track record of success in East Asia
and for that matter Russia itself (~1928-1970).
The intent is to increase capital spending from one-fifth of GDP to one-quarter. A
reasonable goal.
The real issue here of course is that the intent is for this increase in investment to
come from the state and state-controlled companies, whose track records are dubious.
Still, perhaps something good could be done. Russia's nuclear industry is one bright spot,
and shifting to a more nuclear power mix would allow for more hydrocarbon exports and improve
public health. Russia is a growing agricultural exporter, and somehow I doubt Russia has the
ubiquitous farm roads like we have here in the American Midwest.
Perhaps it would be wiser to reduce Rouble borrowing costs for the business sector by
suppressing consumer credit and promoting higher household savings. Household savings rate in
Russia is only 8%. China is 38%.
"F-35 has inferior kinematic performance to most, if not all, of the Generation 4 fighters
it's supposed to replace or oppose. Lack of a bubble canopy is also a major step backwards.
Quite a dubious distinction for a new aircraft."
The F-35 will have an over-the-horizon A2A capability that will result in virtually any
other aircraft being annihilated long before it closes distance on it. The bubble canopy is
really only useful in dogfights; the F-35, scheduled to be built by the thousands, likely
won't get into one-on-one engagements without serious air support. The bubble canopy reduces
stealth, so it was removed. That was the right decision.
"That leaves its stealth and its supposedly wiz-bang sensors."
Its sensors have already been tested against the F-22 – a proven aircraft –
and are almost certainly far and away superior to anything fielded by the Russians. There is
no "supposedly" here as the US has already built aircraft with similarly impressive sensor
suites. There is no reason to believe the F-35′s sensors won't be just as good, and
probably far superior, to what it has already been able to produce. Any belief to the
contrary is wishful thinking.
"Stealth is nice, but it drives up operating costs and reduces sortie rates."
The US can easily afford it.
"And on a small aircraft, you can't carry large war loads without sacrificing your
stealth."
Doesn't matter. The F-35 will be operating with many other F-35s. Combined, it will be a
formidable foe.
"F-35 stealth is in the frontal area only, optimized for the X-band."
No, it's not. The F-35 is simply more stealthy frontal but still stealthy over all.
Further, X-band is the frequency required for a weapons lock. All stealth aircraft are
specialized for this radar band.
"It will be easily detected by long wavelength radars."
Radars not capable of generating a weapon's grade lock, so they're useless in combat.
Further, long wavelength radars – weather radars, basically – can already detect
stealth aircraft; that's always been true. Didn't do Iraq any good back in the 90s.
"In air to air combat it would rely upon detecting intercepting aircraft and firing
AMRAAMs before they can lock on or, heaven forbid, close to visual range (where the F-35 will
be dogmeat)."
Which they will do very effectively. 100 F-35s vs. 100 Russian Su-27s, both closing on
each other = 100 piles of wreckage and 100 F-35s.
"The Air Force has long said that the F-35 isn't optimized for air combat. I suppose the
idea was that F-22s and legacy fighters would handle air superiority missions. F-35s, with
frontal stealth, would be able to get close to targets and attack them with PGMs."
F-35 + F-22 is a potent combination. Even a squadron of F-35s alone would crush anything
the Russians have. If necessary, the air force will likely just dogpile a large number of
F-35s to make up for any perceived weakness. Considering the numbers scheduled to be
produced, that should work fine.
"As for its allegedly wonderful sensors, I am skeptical."
You have no reason to be skeptical. The US has continually fielded next generation weapons
that have worked quite well in combat. There is no reason to believe this will be any
different. Further, your qualifications seem to be essentially nill in this area as you have
displayed very limited knowledge of the subject. Your skepticism doesn't seem to be based on
anything concrete, just wishful thinking.
"Lots of air forces continuously modernize old designs with AESA radars, glass cockpits,
etc. Why exactly is a new airframe needed for any of this?"
This one statement qualifies you as an amateur that should be ignored.
"That said it's not like the F-35 is awful, and as usual pilot skill and other factors can
overcome inappropriate technology."
The technology on the F-35 will crush its competition.
"If you have to buy from Western suppliers, a mix of F-15X and Gripen NGs seems ideal. If
you can't afford two classes of fighter, the Rafale is a very good compromise."
Sure, if you're poor and want to lose against countries fielding 5th generation fighter
aircraft.
"As for the Su-57, it's somewhat like the F-35 in its limited stealth. But it's also like
the Su-27 family in having superb kinematic performance."
Having superb kinematic performance doesn't count for much if your opponent is flying in
an aircraft that can shoot you down long before you close to within visual range.
"Russia's official reason for delaying entry into service is that the Su-35 is adequate
for existing threats, which is probably true."
Russia is delaying because 1. they can't afford to buy the aircraft 2. they are having
trouble constructing the aircraft as designed and in the quantity required 3. it probably
isn't as good as the F-35 anyway, so they don't see a point in building it.
The F-35 is for transferring US technology to Israel
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/israels-air-force-might-have-the-ultimate-weapon-custom-25983
Lockheed-Martin has mostly refused to allow major country-specific modifications to the
F-35, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars foreign F-35 operators contributed to the
aircraft's development. Israel, however, managed to carve out an exception. Though not an
investor in the F-35's development, Tel Aviv was nonetheless quick to sign on to the
program with an initial order of fifty. It also negotiated a favorable deal in which
billions of dollars worth of F-35 wings and sophisticated helmet sets would be manufactured
in Israel, paid for with U.S. military aid. Furthermore, depot-level maintenance will occur
in a facility operated by Israeli Aeronautics Industries rather than at a Lockheed facility
abroad.
The Lightning's sophisticated flight computer and ground-based logistics system has
become a matter of contention with many F-35 operators. Foreign air forces would like to
have greater access to the F-35's computer source codes to upgrade and modify them as they
see fit without needing to involve external parties -- but Lockheed doesn't want to hand
over full access for both commercial and security-based reasons. Israeli F-35Is uniquely
will have an overriding Israeli-built C4 program that runs "on top" of Lockheed's operating
system.
"Right, which is why Denmark bought the F-35. The one which even Americans were criticising.
Buying American weaponry is often a combination of tribute, corruption and paying protection
money."
Please. They bought the F-35 because it is the best aircraft they could get, and they
don't trust the Russians. If they wanted to offer tribute, they'd just write a check and buy
another aircraft.
Further, much of the so-called criticism of the F-35 came from non-experts in the subject
or older guys who worked with the now-outdated F-14. The F-35 has made enough progress for me
to believe that it will likely crush anything the Russians have now or in the future. Even if
the Russians could build the Su-57, the F-35 would still win in most contests because 1. its
sensor suite and over the horizon A2A capability + electronic warfare capability will be
appreciably superior 2. it will be built in far larger numbers.
"The F-35 is not very useful for fighting Russia or China, but fine for fighting most
anyone else."
The F-35 will be quite effective against any aircraft those countries currently field. Any
belief to the contrary is either ignorance or delusion. The US isn't spending a trillion
dollars on this thing to fight Trinidad and Tobago.
The F-35 will have an over-the-horizon A2A capability that will result in virtually any
other aircraft being annihilated long before it closes distance on it. The bubble canopy is
really only useful in dogfights; the F-35, scheduled to be built by the thousands, likely
won't get into one-on-one engagements without serious air support. The bubble canopy
reduces stealth, so it was removed. That was the right decision.
"Over-the-horizon A2A capability" has existed for half a century. Previously structuring
our airpower around this concept resulted in high losses in Vietnam.
The real reason for the bubble canopy's elimination (note that the stealthier F-22 and
YF-23 both have bubble canopies) is the ridiculous insistence on the same platform being used
for a STOVL aircraft with a lift fan placed right in the middle of the fuselage.
If your goal is to maximize stealth and only fight BVR engagements, the F-35′s
design is entirely inappropriate. After all, its stealth is in the front area only and it
can't carry a large missile load.
Optimizing exclusively for BVR combat would entail a large tailless aircraft (perhaps a
flying wing) with all-aspect stealth, large internal volumes of missiles, and far more
powerful radar.
The F-35′s design is based on political and economic considerations, not military
ones.
Its sensors have already been tested against the F-22 – a proven aircraft –
and are almost certainly far and away superior to anything fielded by the Russians. There
is no "supposedly" here as the US has already built aircraft with similarly impressive
sensor suites. There is no reason to believe the F-35′s sensors won't be just as
good, and probably far superior, to what it has already been able to produce. Any belief to
the contrary is wishful thinking.
I have no doubt in the capability to produce and field top-class avionics. What I do doubt
is the idea that we produce (and always will produce) superior avionics to anyone else.
Europe, Russia, China, Japan, and even tiny Israel all produce AESA radars. The US lagged
Russia (and Europe) in IRST for decades. The US is far behind on low-frequency radar.
The US can easily afford it.
You'll note that this was originally about F-35 exports . A solution with high
operating costs and low sortie rates is problematic for anyone, but especially undesirable
for a small power.
Radars not capable of generating a weapon's grade lock, so they're useless in combat.
Further, long wavelength radars – weather radars, basically – can already
detect stealth aircraft; that's always been true. Didn't do Iraq any good back in the
90s.
Detection is not useless. It allows you to vector interceptors until they get close enough
for a radar lock or can identify the target with IRST or visual tracking.
Incompetent Arabalonians. Norman Scwhartzkopf stated that if you'd reversed the weapons on
each side but kept the personnel and training the same, the Allied coalition would've still
handily won. Serbia incidentally did successfully shoot down an F-117, which largely owed
itself to the skill of the operator in question and poor tactics on the part of NATO.
Which they will do very effectively. 100 F-35s vs. 100 Russian Su-27s, both closing on
each other = 100 piles of wreckage and 100 F-35s.
The RAND Corporation disagreed and projected one Su-35 lost for each 2.4 F-35s.
F-35 + F-22 is a potent combination. Even a squadron of F-35s alone would crush anything
the Russians have. If necessary, the air force will likely just dogpile a large number of
F-35s to make up for any perceived weakness. Considering the numbers scheduled to be
produced, that should work fine.
F-22 production capped at 187 units, and none were exported to other countries (despite
persistent requests from Japan).
You have no reason to be skeptical. The US has continually fielded next generation
weapons that have worked quite well in combat. There is no reason to believe this will be
any different. Further, your qualifications seem to be essentially nill in this area as you
have displayed very limited knowledge of the subject. Your skepticism doesn't seem to be
based on anything concrete, just wishful thinking.
[...]
This one statement qualifies you as an amateur that should be ignored.
[...]
The technology on the F-35 will crush its competition.
This is what is known as projection. Identifying in others the sins that you yourself are
guilty of.
Sure, if you're poor and want to lose against countries fielding 5th generation fighter
aircraft.
Many countries are poor. Others are small or have limited defense budgets. Though I
contend thee aircraft in question are in fact superior to the F-35 which makes this moot.
Having superb kinematic performance doesn't count for much if your opponent is flying in
an aircraft that can shoot you down long before you close to within visual range.
Superb kinematic performance enables earlier missile shots, makes it easier to defeat
incoming missile shots, allows for faster transit in and out of combat zones, and gives a
decisive edge in WVR combat.
The F-35 program developed a first-class powerplant and avionics, but then mated then to
an inferior airframe in order to fulfill a commonality fantasy driven by a silly Marine Corps
STOVL requirement.
The Kremlin would have killed the organ grinder (Boris Abramovich Berezovsky) not the
monkey. Litvinenko virtually committed suicide. People become depressed when they are
exiles.. Litvinenko publicly accused Putin of the apartment bombings by Chechens that killed
hundreds of Russians so he must have had some inkling that Putin could be dangerous.
If you publicly call someone a child molester they will at least fantasize about killing
you, and if they have the means and opportunity then it is not the biggest surprise in the
world if you give them the motive and you are killed by a method that is as good as a signed
confession they did it. Putin wanted Litvinenko to know who had put an end to him.
That was the whole point of using alpha radiation; nice and slow all the while knowing who
did it. Putin is very like another famous Vlad.
If you publicly call someone a child molester they will at least fantasize about killing
you
I have fantasized about killing people who had seriously harmed me or the public. But I
have never fantasized about killing a clown, nor can I ever imagine fantasizing about it. I
cannot imagine anyone who is not a psychopath fantasizing about killing a clown. By accusing
Putin of the house explosions and converting to Islam etc. Litvinenko totally jumped the
shark. He was a clown, a tool used by others.
Now it's not impossible that Putin nevertheless wanted to murder Litvinenko, but you have
just assumed how Putin would think and then proceeded to jump to a conclusion based on that
assumption.
Litvinenko was a poor devil, incapable of harming Putin. If anyone harmed Putin, it's
Berezovsky or the western media which gave a platform to poor devils like Litvinenko. Do you
think Putin is so stupid that he hates the tools instead of the powerful people wielding
them?
That is pretty incredible, however, because of your reputation perhaps she was
afraid of some sort of retribution for being critical of you? I notice that you often like to
taunt me on by calling me a 'coward' for using a moniker instead of presenting you with my
true identity. Whether deserved or not, many feel that you're some sort of a Kremlin
Stooge nutcase, Mickey. From Srebrenica Genocide Denier to this:
friend of mike averko | April 12, 2010 at 4:17 pm | Reply
I have known mike averko for a very long time and wish to warn all of you who feel safe
mocking him and his rants this is not someone you want to get angry . HE IS
INSANE!!! I have seen how this man lives and it is not that of a healthy person, it is
that of someone insane. Make your comments but don't ever let this man into yuour life in
any way or you will end up being sorry.
This is why I choose to shield my true identity from you, Mickey. Who needs any grief from
a Kremlin Stooge wacko?
The machine that draws the numbers for a lottery manages to pick 7 winning numbers every
week. It never fails to pick the winning numbers. Is this an amazing feat? The numbers it
picks are the winning numbers while millions of lottery players have great difficulty to pick
the winning numbers and spend millions of dollar on it while the cost to the machine is just
few bucks.
Shakespeare picked 458 'winning' letters but if you would try to reproduce them in the
same sequence by random selections it becomes probabilistically impossible task.
Finding a winning sonnet by Shakespeare for the Universe was not a probabilistic feat just
as it is not for the lottery machine to pick the winning numbers. It all comes down to the
meaning and when that meaning is assigned. You assigned a special meaning to this particular
sequence of 458 letters just like lottery players assign special meaning to 7 numbers picked
by a machine.
Although you show a lot of promise, unfortunately there are still a few rough edges. Don't
concentrate so much on your less than honorable pedigree, but work on improving your
emotional dilemmas. AP is a medical doctor, and has diagnosed some of your ailments. Listen
to him, for he's a pure blood Slav. And you know how great the Slavic race is. (I know that
you can overcome!).
On the subject of of agriculture, it should be noted that Rostelmash has done ok for a big
sovok behemoth and has had at least some success exporting west. It's combines are
competitive with the American makes but not Claas, they've also been able to buy up
varsatile. This is quite surprising given the fact that rostov has a reputation for being a
rough and corrupt place. Ak, any thoughts?
You make it sound like being a Slav is like being a member of an exclusive club. How
exclusive can it be if you – the Ukrainians are in it? I would say that that is setting
the standards pretty low. Don't worry about my "emotional" dilemmas. I am happy with who I
am, which can't be said about you people. You seem quite torn between your Western European
heritage and your humble Slavic origin that gets in the way of being recognized as one of the
nations that are pillars of western civilization which everybody agrees that you are.
USSR engaged in intensive agricultural motorization earlier than any country other than
the USA and Canada. It was also fairly early to intensive chemicalization, mainly beaten out
by Germany and America.
In the postwar period the share of capital investment devoted to agriculture varied from
11.8% in 1946-1950 to a peak of 20.1% in 1971-1975.
Not surprising there is something of a positive legacy. Main failures of postwar Soviet
agriculture were distribution and processing. Not enough roads or trucks, inadequate cold
chain, too few food processing plants, etc.
Belarus also has a successful agricultural machinery sector as well.
Heavy transportation machinery was generally a Soviet success story, probably because not
only are they producer goods but they also require routine replacement. Thus unlike other
capital goods in centrally-planned economies they weren't kept in service long past the time
they ceased to be efficient. The irrational "development" of Siberia also increased the size
of this sector and the quality of its output.
Lastly, worth noting Rostelmash has been privately owned since 2000.
The F-35 will have an over-the-horizon A2A capability that will result in virtually any
other aircraft being annihilated long before it closes distance on it.
If this is the case then obviously its 'kinematic performance' is secondary. If you can
see the enemy before it can see you and you have weapons to engage the enemy then obviously
your top speed and acceleration are not that important. The missile you launch is faster than
your top speed and your enemy's top speed.
But there are doubts. How much the stealth technology is a hype? Is information about
radar cross sections of various planes credible?
I thought like you before Skripal, but after the second in a row I understood this was
either Western intelligence or Putin's orders. Western intelligence simply would not
dare frame Putin because the Russians would become too jumpy. Yeltsin almost started WW3
in 1995, there is no telling what could happen if the West was framing Putin repeatedly and
he responded by putting Russian forces on red alert, then something like the Black Brant
scare occurred.
Litvinenko was a poor devil.
I don't think he was a happy man.
Now it's not impossible that Putin nevertheless wanted to murder Litvinenko, but you
have just assumed how Putin would think and then proceeded to jump to a conclusion based on
that assumption.
I happen to believe that Putin is deliberately trying to alienate the West with these
assassinations because he wants Russia to remain proudly independent after he is gone. Yet he
has to justify that policy to his close associates many of whom who love the Western
lifestyle and making money. It is like Hitler having to explain his attack on the USSR to his
generals and Goebbels by saying it was necessary to remove that threat from the east before
moving against Britain. Obviously Hitler really longed to conquer Russia, and it seems likely
to me that Putin wants to initiate schismogenesis with the West. He probably is not telling
his cronies that though, there will be some security pretext.
Do you think Putin is so stupid that he hates the tools instead of the powerful
people wielding them?
Putin has more power than anyone else on Earth, I should have thought that was obvious by
now. He wants to exert control when he is no longer there, and that means setting Russia on a
course that cannot be altered, and consulting/implicating the entire future leadership
cadre.
John Deere does very well in Russia because they own a local factory. They seem to be the
combine of choice because they have faster parts distribution than Class. Rostelmash does
better than it used to but the really big commercial farms and associated contractors buy the
best machines. The operators on the ex cooperatives, usually farmed under (corrupt) rental
arrangements tend to use Rostelmash, insofar as they buy new.
In BVR combat kinematic performance is indeed secondary to the performance of sensors,
electronic warfare equipment, and missiles.
But not irrelevant. Higher top speed allows for longer-ranged missile shots. Faster
acceleration (and, for that matter, turning performance) allows for faster escape from the
combat zone.
Note how BVR optimized interceptors like the F-102/106, MiG-25/31, F-4, F-111B, English
Electric Lightning, and so forth had great top speeds and excellent acceleration. They were
however lacking in maneuverability as it was not intended for them to dogfight (hence the bad
air combat performance over North Vietnam).
China's Chengdu J-20 is a modern stealth aircraft designed for this role. The F-35 is not.
It's basically a tactical strike fighter. Historical analogues would be the F-100, F-105,
SEPECAT Jaguar, Su-24, and so forth.
Tactical strike fighters of the classic style are dubious today since multi-mode radars
and PGMs have made fighters very capable of ground attack.
Stealth isn't hype unless you believe the maximalist fanboy nonsense from the 1990s.
If indeed F-22 and F-35 have several orders of magnitude smaller cross-sections (RCS) than
other jet fighters then obviously it is a huge advantage that if utilized will render small
differences (±10%) in speed and acceleration completely unimportant.
You're right about that, and I'm glad to be different from you. At least people aren't
leaving messages about me at blogs warning them that I might be dangerous to deal with.
'Sbrebrenica Genocide Denier' is nothing to be proud about, Mickey.
Realistically, what action Russia could take that would potentially match the disruptive
power of American sanctions on Russia? Arm the Central American drug cartels?
I quite like that idea!
Provide sophisticated arms to everybody (no matter how crazy) with an ability to cause
grief to the U.S.
The U.S. objective is not to punish Russia or weaken Russia. The U.S. objective is to
destroy Russia as a sovereign nation. This is war to the death. There can be no negotiation
with the U.S. The only hope of forcing the Americans to adopt a sane policy is to make the
costs of their current policy catastrophically high.
The U.S. is obviously stronger but a strong man will usually back down if faced with
someone crazy and unpredictable. Putin needs to be crazy and unpredictable.
And Russia needs to target America's lapdogs, like the British. Perhaps let them know that
if it ever came to nuclear war London would be a priority target.
U.S. "public opinion" is literally the collective opinion of dumbed-down, amoral idiots.
In fact, the word "opinion" is too dignified for this – "braindead recantation of
MSM-fed government propaganda" would be a better description.
It's optimized for certain wavelengths and expected receiver locations.
Thus stealth aircraft can for instance be readily detected by low frequency radars.
Stealth is still useful as low frequency radars are too bulky to fly, and they indicate a
general location rather than a precise location.
Stealth aircraft can also be detected visually, acoustically, through their own electronic
emissions, and through their heat signatures. Employment of weapons, obviously, compromises
stealth as well.
There are also degrees of stealth. The F-22 for instance is considered an all-aspect
stealth design, at least in the higher frequency bands. The Have Blue, MBB Lampyridae, F-117,
B-2, and YF-23 were as well.
The F-35 however is not–it's only stealth optimized in the frontal area. This of
course reflects the fact that it was never intended to be an air superiority fighter, but
incompetent American force planning is now pressing it into that role.
Lastly, while stealth is obviously a good capability (hence why everyone is following
America's lead on it), it's not without trade-offs. Stealth is lost if weapons are carried
externally. Radar absorbing materials are costly and maintenance intensive (though the
Japanese may have solved this problem). Because stealth requires precision shaping of the
airframe, it is difficult to modify the airframe for future requirements.
"But it's not an invisibility cloak." – Nobody talks about invisibility. RCS
matters. You detect enemy plane before it detects you. Period.
"The F-35 however is not–it's only stealth optimized in the frontal area. " –
Presumably it will show its rear to its enemy only when the enemy will be already falling
down after being hit.
"Stealth aircraft can also be detected visually " – Nobody argues invisibility.
"it was never intended to be an air superiority fighter". – It all depend on
superiority over whom. Anyway this is a vague and pompous term.
"Stealth is lost if weapons are carried externally." – What good are those weapons
for if you are shot before you see your stealthy enemy?
"Radar absorbing materials are costly and maintenance intensive". – Yes. That's why
Russians do not have it.
Listen. I do not really care about this issue and I do not know much about it. I just
responded to your arguments which are mostly rhetorical in nature among at diminishing
importance of the orders of magnitude lower RCS of F-22 and F-35 comparing to that of their
potential opponents.
I thought like you before Skripal, but after the second in a row I understood this was
either Western intelligence or Putin's orders.
Or something else neither of us thought of. It's a false dichotomy when we have no
information at all about the whole thing, the only thing we know is that the British are
lying.
Western intelligence simply would not dare frame Putin because the Russians would become
too jumpy.
But that's just your model. Maybe they wouldn't become jumpy, or maybe the Western
intelligence services would dare frame him anyway.
By the way it's interesting that you managed to draw a psychological profile of Putin
based on just two cases a decade apart, and Putin only did it twice in his whole reign. Sure
if he enjoyed torturing his critics he'd do it more, wouldn't he?
Yeltsin almost started WW3 in 1995, there is no telling what could happen if the West
was framing Putin repeatedly and he responded by putting Russian forces on red alert, then
something like the Black Brant scare occurred.
Risk management is my job. People don't think about risks that way. They assign a very low
probability to events like the Black Brant scare, and anyway probably Putin would just
realize it was only one rocket. There's no reason to believe he'd be any more likely to
launch than Yeltsin.
Stealth is of limited use in an air-to-air role to take down enemy fighters(air
superiority fighter) since missiles are not "stealth" and their guidance systems very, very
obviously telegraph their intentions: thus "missile lock" warning. The longer range just
telegraphs their intentions earlier, which gives the targeted plane more options to employ
countermeasures.
However, ground sites lack many countermeasures against incoming missile launches and
cannot lock onto low-visibility planes from the front, so even if its general location is
known, there's not much that a SAM site can do to it in theory. Thus, it has a very
effective, but limited role.
This is of questionable utility against a peer competitor since they will not be using
ground to air systems in isolation, although it probably means that the US can destroy any
number of third world countries.
I wish I could say the same thing about the Ukrainians. You are showing nothing but
regress since 1991, but I don't expect that you'll agree with that. It's one of the side
effects of having a thick head.
You know how the Ukrainians got their name? It's from the Latin Cranium for scull.
Basically, what it means is that when any new idea (or old one for that matter) tries to
penetrate the thick Ukrainian sculls – it has to make a U turn when it reaches their
fortified cranial structures – U Cranium – therefore Ukraine. Get it? It's pretty
discouraging actually.
A good case could be made that we don't know how these jets would perform under the
conditions of a real world war. But I think it's always the best bet that it will be the
American weapons which perform the best. That's simply the way to bet.
It's possible that many of their weapons systems wouldn't perform as advertised. Some
would perform better than thought or for roles they weren't designed for.
It's a very safe decision to buy the F-35, which is now not even that expensive. It's
possible that it won't be worth much in a real war against comparable opponents, but this
could be true of any other platform: these weapons are only tried out against vastly inferior
opponents.
You detect enemy plane before it detects you. Period.
He will usually have a vague idea where you are. Currently it's not possible to launch a
missile based on that vague knowledge, but will it stay like that forever? A lot depends on
other systems like air defense and AWACS.
Anyway, my original point was that probably buying the F-35 is not based on politics, it's
a safe decision for those with deep enough pockets to buy the best available fighter jet.
Even if under the circumstances of a real war it turned out to be bad: it could happen to a
number of other weapons systems anyway, and you cannot really tell in advance which ones.
The longer range just telegraphs their intentions earlier
But wouldn't the idea be that you get closer to the enemy without being detected? Your
argument might work against BVR combat in general, but more against non-stealth BVR combat
than against stealth: stealthy planes will probably employ their BVR weapons from closer
range than non-stealthy planes.
If BVR air-to-air missiles work at all, they work much better with stealthy planes.
Regardless of whether against peer or non-peer opponents.
Stealth is of limited use in an air-to-air role to take down enemy fighters(air
superiority fighter) since missiles are not "stealth" and their guidance systems very, very
obviously telegraph their intentions: thus "missile lock" warning. The longer range just
telegraphs their intentions earlier, which gives the targeted plane more options to employ
countermeasures.
If your argument states that it is actually bad to deploy weapons far away (which I do not
understand) I would say that the stealth will allow you to get much closer to the enemy w/o
being detected and makes it possible to launch the missile when there will be not less time
for the enemy to deploy countermeasures.
I realize this is a complex game with many possible strategies and tactics with many
parameters involved. For each strategy there are decision regions where the different
parameters dominate what will be the optimal tactic. Furthermore we really do not know how
effective various countermeasures are but I suspect that they might be decisive. But if they
fail and planes get close to each other within the visual range then obvious completely
different parameters might be decisive including the human factor.
I won't argue with you on this subject because I know you were raised by video games so
you now better at least in the realm of video games model. I would not argue with Mowgli
about the purpose and efficacy of howling at the moon. Perhaps it was a sophisticated
countermeasure.
I actually have never played a flight simulator within recent memory. As far as I'm aware,
none of them really calculate the issues of missile flight with any degree of accuracy and
treat guidance systems like some sort of magic. My comments are actually speculations from
conversations with military pilots.
If your argument states that it is actually bad to deploy weapons far away (which I do
not understand)
Missiles have extremely limited flight times and their flight characteristics degrade
after launch. Disrupting either their guidance or their flight negates the kill chain.
I would say that the stealth will allow you to get much closer to the enemy w/o being
detected and makes it possible to launch the missile when there will be not less time for
the enemy to deploy countermeasures.
This is possible, but ever-increasingly decreases the window of attack that is beyond
visual range. Its possible that this is the idea, coupled with the Block III Sidewinders
which are designed against a number of countermeasures, but that seems to have been cancelled
for some reason.
If you don't know the composite materials used, you can not give a correct RCS, and you
can not tell just by looking, the physics don't work like that!
So at least we have the word of the US Air Force and Lockheed regarding the stealthiness
of their planes (these are probably not outright lies, but might differ from reality in
either direction: they might be modest to hide their true capabilities, or, more likely,
exaggerate and give a number only true under ideal conditions for a specific type of radar
etc. ), but regarding the supposedly 5th generation Chinese or Russian jets we have just very
rough estimates based on the shape and some assumptions about their coating.
So many US sanctions and interdictions , to friends and foes alike , will end up isolating
the US .
The US pressure to the EU not to trade with Russia , Iran and other countries has provoked
a deep resentment in the EU and has turned the US into a very unreliable partner , and even a
dangerous " friend " .
The better part of four decades ago, President Reagan made a joke about outlawing the Soviet
Union and the press and the left went apeshit. Now Congress seriously proposes legislation
that would essentially outlaw Russia, and the press and the left are all for it.
ever-increasingly decreases the window of attack that is beyond visual range
How many seconds will the stealth pilot have to identify the target and fire its missiles?
Sixty? Hundred-twenty? Thirty? Even thirty seconds must be enough for a well enough trained
pilot.
There might be issues with how to leave the scene after having killed an opponent, if
other enemies are still there, because it's less stealthy from other angles. I guess we're
not the first to think about it, so probably there's some solution. At the very least, I
wouldn't expect them to perform worse than the 4th gen planes.
I think even the production of the F-16 is about to end.
Yes, the Gripen is a good and cheap alternative, but it's not the best available in the
western ecosystem. The F-35 would probably destroy an equal number of Gripens, though that's
not saying much, considering the price differential.
Hungary also has Gripens, though we didn't fully equip them until recently, and I don't
think we spend enough on training the pilots.
These demands on Russia are about as sincere and plausible as the ultimata given to Serbia
after Sarajevo. They are not credible but meant only as a prelude to war. The whole
slow-motion drama, with all its attendant false flags (MH17, the Skripals, gassings in Syria,
etc), numerous rounds of sanctions and specious rhetoric including accusations of "stealing
the election" from Hillary, since Putin checked Obama's attempt to seize Russia's Crimean
base and recruit another hostile NATO member on that country's frontier has been meant to
convince the American public that Russia is our country's blood enemy, that it is run by an
insane dictator the equal of Hitler, and that the consequent world war will have been all
Putin's fault in spite of America bending over backwards to make peace with those vicious
mongrels from the steppes.
As a commentor above said, I'd hate to be killed by a Russian nuke directed at my city
only because of an insane American leadership, but I'd equally hate for tens of millions of
Russians (and others) to be exterminated by our weapons simply to further an agenda being
promoted by the likes of Jeff Bezos, Sheldon Adelson and the other plutocrats who really pull
all the strings in Washington to benefit themselves plus their Saudi and Israeli
co-conspirators in some great game to rule the world. I'd say that Washington is about poised
to commit the greatest crime in the history of the human race, and chances are good that it
will be the last.
"Stealth is of limited use in an air-to-air role to take down enemy fighters(air superiority
fighter) since missiles are not "stealth" and their guidance systems very, very obviously
telegraph their intentions: thus "missile lock" warning. The longer range just telegraphs
their intentions earlier, which gives the targeted plane more options to employ
countermeasures."
That's not quite true. The ability to shoot a barrage of sophisticated missiles at an
opponent that can't shoot back beyond visual range should be quite useful in combat; these
missiles will also close the gap much sooner than you would think, so it's not like an enemy
is going to have all day to deal with incoming threats. Further, electronic countermeasures
won't be perfect as most A2A missiles fielded by the US will have systems designed to defeat
them. The F-35 will also be fielded in large enough numbers such that they'll just overwhelm
opponents with their stealth ability. Combine the F-35 with the F-18 or F-22, and you'll have
a very effective air dominance force.
"This is of questionable utility against a peer competitor since they will not be using
ground to air systems in isolation, although it probably means that the US can destroy any
number of third world countries."
I expect the F-35 to do quite well against both Russia and China in helping to establish
air dominance. The F-35 will additionally have utility against surface S2A units. The navy
could overwhelm Russian and Chinese air defenses – even assuming they are quite
effective – by coordinating strikes with F-22s and F-35s. Those air defenses will go
active, and the F-35 will then be able to hit many of them with a degree of survivability +
coordinate with surface ships to smoke them out, mobile or not.
These demands on Russia are about as sincere and plausible as the ultimata given to
Serbia after Sarajevo. They are not credible but meant only as a prelude to war.
I have never put much thought into these issues. But now after reading comments and some
articles I realized that this is a fascinating topic and that there are many people somewhere
who study it, write simulations and developed optimal algorithms for all possible situations
where they have input data on all plane and missile characteristics except with only partial
knowledge of enemy characteristics and efficacy of countermeasures. So I think that
everything has been already calculated. When and what to shoot and when and where to turn and
when to retreat and so on. And as new data are flowing in with the outcome of the first
missile or the arrival of another enemy plane the master program is just bringing in
pre-calculated solutions for each new situations. And then every geometric configuration must
have been analyzed and optimal actions has been found. Furthermore optimal configuration were
found about how to fly , in what formations, with what speeds and so on. Mathematically this
problem might not be harder than a chess game on multiple boards and thus I think a
completely autonomous AI system must exist where pilot is really not needed. The only big
unknown are countermeasures. You do not have them in chess. Can pilot be better in making
some decisions in the present of countermeasure than computer? I doubt it.
Now the question is who is better in this game? Russians or Americans? It all comes down
to money. How many good mathematicians, computer programmers and physicists I can employ? In
USSR at secret sites like Arzamas-16 they had departments where 1000 or so PhDs in math
(many, many women) worked. In Yeltsin times and probably before they mostly drank tea and
coffee, organized birthday celebrations and send designated ones to stand in lines to do
shopping. And it all fell apart. But in the US DARPA and Aerospace R&D continued w/o a
break. So I would not hesitate to bet on Americans that they have significantly better
systems. Another question is about spying. Jews are not as numerous as they were in R&D
and no longer enamored with the Soviet Union, so it is more likely that India and China has
know more about it and obviously Israel but through more official channels. But the fact that
F-22 was not donated to Israel yet may suggest that there are still some boundaries within
American MIC that are off limits even to our beloved Jews.
Yes, the Gripen is a good and cheap alternative, but it's not the best available in the
western ecosystem. The F-35 would probably destroy an equal number of Gripens, though
that's not saying much, considering the price differential.
You don't ask for the "best", you ask for the right system.
Unless you need a stealth strike fighter (and don't mind Lockheed's involvement), the F-35
does not have to be the right one.
In Hungary's case, it is more important to have enough jets for air patrol duty.
Can pilot be better in making some decisions in the present of countermeasure than
computer? I doubt it.
I doubt it. It's open ended, and the number of variations practically infinite. The
computer can do most things way better than a human, but then could succumb to stupidity in
some unknown situation, like the Tesla charging at full speed into the firetruck. Is the
Tesla autopilot better than a well trained professional human, like a rally race driver? I
don't think so, especially in unexpected (for the computer) situations, where the human would
just do the easy and sensible thing, but not the computer.
Anyway, the US warplanes are still flown by human pilots. Of course, most things which
could be automated are automated, and the logical conclusion is fully autonomous drones
flying without much input from their handlers in underground bunkers.
Jews are not as numerous as they were in R&D and no longer enamored with the Soviet
Union, so it is more likely that India and China has know more about it and obviously
Israel but through more official channels.
Do you think that one of the things Israel pays Putin for being so friendly to him is US
military tech? They did sell Russia some drones back in the Medvedev days, but nothing more
recent can be found. But I'd be surprised if Putin didn't think about it. I also think it's
not above Netanyahu to sell Russia American secrets. They gave such secrets to the USSR, and
they also helped China more recently. I'm sure that if there's anything going on, the MSM
wouldn't be reporting much on it. They also rarely wrote about the extent of the Israel-South
Africa arms trade, and things only got worse recently.
"The RAND Corporation disagreed and projected one Su-35 lost for each 2.4 F-35s."
I believe that study was conducted under the assumption of within visual range, which
artificially presented a situation where the F-35 was at a disadvantage from the get go. In a
real world situation, the Su-35 would probably be shot down before it knew what hit it,
especially considering that American pilots tend to be among the best in the world.
"F-22 production capped at 187 units, and none were exported to other countries (despite
persistent requests from Japan)."
That's irrelevant for three reasons:
1) 187 is still a number far greater than the number of Su-57s the Russians wanted to
produce in the near term.
2) the F-22 is often stationed at bases around the world, so the US does not need to sell
the aircraft to anyone to bring it to a theater of combat.
3) the F-22 would dominate any Russian or Chinese aircraft currently fielded; an
appreciable number of F-22s (or any US fourth generation aircraft) along with the F-35 should
be a potent combination. US pilots are also very well trained, easily matching any other
country save perhaps Israel.
"This is what is known as projection. Identifying in others the sins that you yourself are
guilty of."
Please. Extrapolation from a set of known facts and historical precedent is hardly
projection. What you've done is classic deflection.
"Many countries are poor. Others are small or have limited defense budgets. Though I
contend thee aircraft in question are in fact superior to the F-35 which makes this
moot."
The aircraft you quoted are certainly not superior, so the issue is hardly moot.
"Superb kinematic performance enables earlier missile shots, makes it easier to defeat
incoming missile shots, allows for faster transit in and out of combat zones, and gives a
decisive edge in WVR combat."
Kinematic performance doesn't cont for much when you are overwhelmed by aircraft that you
can't shoot back at effectively while they are shooting at you from a distance. Kinematic
performance isn't nothing, but it isn't everything either. The F-35 will have a decisive
advantage over all Russian aircraft fielded now and over the next decade, and any issues with
the design will be made up for by fielding large numbers of them to overwhelm opponents +
combining the aircraft with the F-22 or F-18.
"The F-35 program developed a first-class powerplant and avionics, but then mated then to
an inferior airframe in order to fulfill a commonality fantasy driven by a silly Marine Corps
STOVL requirement."
That's not really the right way to phrase it. "Inferior" in this case only means "less
than what the US could have otherwise done but still quite good compared to most other
aircraft."
Further, the philosophy you quoted will allow the US to field huge numbers of these craft
– thousands – at an affordable price, so I'm not so sure it was a bad idea after
all. That's much better than the SU-57, which is a dumpster fire of a program.
I'm also not sold on the idea that the B model was a bad idea for the Asian theater. In
any conflict, the Chinese will attempt to destroy our bases and landing strips. Having a
larger number of fighters capable of short vertical takeoffs might prove to be quite the
asset in organizing a counter offensive/stationing the craft in various locations that are
hard to hit or detect.
"If your goal is to maximize stealth and only fight BVR engagements, the F-35′s
design is entirely inappropriate. After all, its stealth is in the front area "
That's not correct. The F-35 will have a reduced radar cross section across much of the
craft compared with any other non-stealth aircraft. Nearly the entire surface is covered in
radar absorbent material and the engine itself is designed to reflect away radar waves. It
also has IR reduction measures.
"Small number of missiles."
Made up for by building 2000+ F-35s. How many SU-57s is Russia making?
"Optimizing exclusively for BVR combat would entail a large tailless aircraft (perhaps a
flying wing) with all-aspect stealth, large internal volumes of missiles, and far more
powerful radar."
No, it wouldn't. Something doesn't have to be theoretically perfect for it to work quite
well in the real world. The F-35 will perform BVR combat much better than any non-American
aircraft.
"Flying wing."
1. We already have that. It's called the B2 and we are also working on a flying wing
stealth drone that does exactly that already: shoot a barrage of missiles at BVR in
coordination with the F-35.
2. Wrong. Just wrong. There are huge disadvantages to your flying wing idea. Stability and
maneuverability being just two, so they wouldn't be much use in visual range combat or in a
variety of other missions for which the F-35 was designed; the F-35 is a multi-role fighter.
It will do BVR just fine.
"The F-35′s design is based on political and economic considerations, not military
ones."
The military design of the F-35 is pretty good. You're trying to cover this up by pointing
out an irrelevant fact – that there were economic considerations when building the
craft which applies to every military project ever conceived.
You don't need to convince me. You'll need to convince Russian kleptocrats, who've been
sending their kids to live in the West since 1991, and who have kept their (stolen) money in
the West.
And reiner Tor , you are a funny guy, liking these militant comments from dfordoom,
but getting your panties in a bunch, when I suggest occupying the Ukraine. I wonder why?
The fact is asserting dominance in Eastern Europe will be a lot easier for Russia to
accomplish, than confronting USA directly, and it is something I would probably do before I
started threatening New York and London with nuclear devastation. You gotta make your threats
credible you know. Credibility doesn't come from making scary faces and shouting loudly, it's
earned.
Your Croatian neighbors are still operating Mig-21 and will get second-hand
((((F-16)))).
And your Austrian neighbors are unhappy with their Eurofighters.
Gripens are better than alternatives and nothing.
No, I don't. In fact, I think the American Deep State is nuts. I have great respect for
Russians and their military. I am simply pointing out facts: the F-35 isn't the chump some
think it is; do not believe any random internet poster when he says this thing won't work.
I've seen enough to know that it will and that you should be afraid of what it can do in
large numbers.
As I said earlier, the Russians should just dump all Hollywood movies and video games onto
a server and call it MegaUpload 2. Hurt an industry most Trump voters despise anyway and you
might be able to turn republicans against their warmongering representatives in congress who
are pushing for sanctions, etc.
Actually, it means "pure fool," "reines Tor" would be "pure gate" (not door), and it comes
from the Wagner opera Parsifal, where the protagonist is a pure fool, enlightened by
compassion. I'd probably choose a funnier handle today, but ultimately it doesn't matter.
This point of false dichotomy is very important. Everything at this point, points to the
fact that there was no nerve agent employed against the Skripals and that they were simply
knocked out by some chloroform like substance. The fact that they survived, and recovered
without any problems, is irrefutable proof of this.
Therefore a false dichotomy is employed in order to, we can say mentally sodomise people
into believing that the only option is that the Kremlin did it.
I see people stating in comments sections in British newspapers that the official story is
bullshit but that they simply can't believe that their own government would disperse CWs
throughout their country, however this is a mute point as it has been disproven that CWs were
used at all and that the obvious conclusion is that they were simply drugged and held against
their will while their oh so benevolent government spun an endlessly shifting fairytale,
growing ever more convoluted and self contradictory by the day.
Even if both NATO and the EU collapsed, and a war broke out with one or some of our
neighbors, neither Austria nor Croatia would be likely enemies. Of our NATO allies, both
Romania and Slovakia were more likely enemies. I hope it won't happen, because both are
seriously stronger than us.
The F-16 is no longer in production (though maybe a restart is planned?), but most
operators are happy enough with it.
Here, locally, I find it interesting that the commenter "Sean" got sodomized himself or is
just trying to sodomize us. There is one recurring almost below the radar theme in his
comments: war with Iran and the opportunity of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians it will
bring. He might be right about it though I still hope this will be prevented while he seems
to be welcoming it. And for some reason he seems to need Putin dead or compromised for this
scenario to happen.
Public opinion in Russia is a lot like this actually. It seems that state-tv interrupted
its anti-Western programming during World Cup, which caused approval of both US and EU to
spike into positive territory for the first time since 2014.
Somebody SHOULD investigate: Michael McFaul, Samantha Power, Robert Mueller, Peter
Strzok, George Soros, William Browder, Hillary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, Christopher
Steele, John Podesta, Barack Obama, and John Brennan.
Congress has done a SHlTTY Job of it. Perhaps Vladimir Putin SHOULD be allowed to
publicly question these traitors, in the USA.
And reiner Tor, you are a funny guy, liking these militant comments from dfordoom, but
getting your panties in a bunch, when I suggest occupying the Ukraine. I wonder why?
I don't fear it much, it'd simply be a stupid policy. I also don't like ethnic cleansing
and mass deportations and the like. Which would be a requirement if you were to occupy
Ukraine.
The predictable result would be a state of emergency in Central Europe and a strong
mobilization against Russia. Military expenditures would quickly rise to 5% of GDP in Central
Europe, but it'd rise around Europe.
But actually some kind of military action in Ukraine as a direct response to American
sanctions might make sense. Just don't expect Ukrainians or neighboring peoples to greet you
with flowers. So you might bomb some military targets recently installed by the
Americans.
But before that, you'd need to make the anti-sanctions law. Actually, you'd need to make
it pretty strong. Until you cannot even do that, you shouldn't even fantasize about
conquest.
There are several steps you could take before starting an actual war of conquest. Which
you wouldn't even be able to finish.
AK: In the future, please unite your multiple low effort one-sentence posts into one. Since
they aren't very high quality, fill up valuable screen real estate, and splicing them
together takes too much time on my part, I will otherwise have to just start deleting them.
Captain Albert Ball, VC, DSO & Two Bars, MC (14 August 1896 – 7 May 1917) was an
English fighter pilot during the First World War. At the time of his death he was the United
Kingdom's leading flying ace, with 44 victories.
These sanctions are complex, well thought out, most probably not by Goyim.
Now We can see that Scripal affair was definitely false flag.
These sanctions are obviously not a punishment.
..
These sanctions are telling Mother Russia to get on her knees, or die.
.
These are not really sanctions. This is Ultimatum.
.
Everybody should understand that.
Putin cannot be read like a book, but we can be confident that he is capable of deceiving
even his closest confidants, for he got his current job by completely fooling Yeltsin .
There's no reason to believe he'd be any more likely to launch than Yeltsin.
All other things being equal, but Yeltsin was never framed for murder by the West even
once, so he never had Russian forces on red alert; never had the safety catches off
. Yet in the Black Brant scare Yeltsin actually activated the nuclear keys , something
that never happened even in the Cuban Missile crisis. In circumstances where there was
already a hair trigger because of some misunderstanding and Yeltsin had a too much of a
hangover to think clearly and recognize bad advice, he might well have launched. Putin would
never knowingly launch first, but the opening of move of a nuclear first strike would
be a high altitude air burst to blind the victim's radar so waiting for the first nuclear
detonation would not be an option.
If he and his country had been framed for murder twice in a row, Putin would take the some
of the safeties off of the Russian nuclear deterrent because it was not working at the normal
settings. All it would then take is someone, possibly at a low level, to get careless and we
are in the danger zone. The Russians do not think America is likely to attack them out of the
blue, but they do not rule out the possibility (Reagan said that was what most surprised him
about the Soviet leadership once he came to know them).
Wealthy Russians put their money in offshore British accounts, you seriously think anyone
in their right mind would do that if the British Deep State was capable of deliberately
framing Russia for assassinations. Dirty money from all over the world comes to offshore
British accounts because Britain has the rule of law and the ill gotten gains are safe. It
simply would not pay Britain to behave like a banana republic in the way you are suggesting.
What you are suggesting is like MI5 & 6 stealing the gold out of the Bank of England,
except it would be more plausible because there would be something in it for them. South
Korean had the death penalty for capital flight. Putin is less crude, he is using the British
sanctions against his circle (and you must be associated with circle to get rich in Russia)
to force dodgy Russians and their money to stay put .
Putin's long term objective is to nullify foreign influences, which boils down to Western
soft power and money. The Russian and Western elite were growing together before he started
the high profile assassinations, now the divergence is gaining a momentum of its own. The
more the West retaliates the better Putin likes it, hence arrest of Maria Butina and the
heavy boots of the bots are grist to Putin's mill, the more amateurish the espionage against
the West, the better. That is why the
OPSEC–oblivious GRU suit his purpose so much
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/06/the-gru-the-russian-intelligence-agency-behind-the-headlines
"The GRU regards itself as a war-fighting instrument. Yes, it gathers conventional
intelligence but its culture is much more military," said Mark Galeotti, an expert on
Russian security issues and the country's intelligence agencies. "Although only a minority
of GRU officers are Spetsnaz, it has an impact when part of your service are
commandos."
Putin sacked the vast majority of the old GRU; the new commander Sergun was low
ranking (although he was to be promoted to Colonel General after he designed the Donbass
uprising) and was keen on contacts with the US, but died mysteriously in 2016, and the ones
left know better than to ask questions about the ultimate purpose or ulterior motive of
goading the US. Anyway, Putins's objectives in all this are not to get away with anything, he
wants the bad public relations, he wants the West to reject Russia and all its works,
all the better to keep Russian away from Western influence. I just think the idea of the West
deliberately pushing a proud nuclear armed power into confusion such as Andropov was in
during Able Archer would be foolhardy beyond belief.
Brilliant. And I like how you are able to weave in your almost non-existent knowledge of
Latin too! This definitely proves that your IQ is in the 99* range. Like I say, you're
showing real progress each and every day. Soon, I suspect that readers of this blog will be
giving you 'agreements' each and every time you write something here, like your buddy
Janissary !
On the other hand, the more such crises there will be between nuclear armed states, the
more likely that one of those will result in a nuclear war. Humans (or machines, for that
matter) will inevitably miscalculate once in a while, and those might result in one side
believing it's about to be obliterated, so that it can "use it or lose it." All kinds of
stupid (or seemingly stupid) factors might get into this, like sleep deprivation, extreme
stress, fear of shame or loss of face, etc. People have committed murder-suicide under all
kinds of circumstances, starting a nuclear war as an act of final desperation is certainly
not out of the realm of possibilities.
So while nuclear weapons greatly diminish the likelihood of a world war, it certainly
doesn't make it impossible, and, on a long enough timeline, its likelihood will approach
1.
Their armies are certainly much stronger, in terms of artillery or armored forces for
example. Their air forces are not, but with the very low number of planes, it wouldn't be
decisive anyway. And they're both in the process of buying F-16s, unless I'm mistaken. I
think once these are over, the Slovakian Air Force will be roughly as strong as the Hungarian
one, or somewhat stronger, while the Romanian will be multiple times stronger.
The Slovak military is somewhat smaller on paper (in terms of troop numbers) than the
Hungarian, but even that might be just a paper advantage. At least Slovakia is a smaller
country (roughly half the size of Hungary), but Romania is vastly bigger, and its military is
even larger than would be proportional.
Anyway, I don't think any Hungarian government would have the appetite to wage war against
either of these.
This is probably the consequence of Trump's blunder in grovelling in front of Putin (and the
world's TV cameras!). He now has to inflict a defeat on Putin so unequivocal that even
Putin's American supporters cannot hype it into a victory. I don't see EU Member States
raising any objection to further sanctions. Quite the contrary, in fact. The EU is the
principal victim of Putin's actions and is therefore the principal beneficiary of sanctions.
Don't forget that the fight with Putin began over an attempt by him to prevent Ukraine
signing an association agreement with the EU. The idea that the EU Member States are just
dying to resume trade with Russia is a US internet myth (like so much else about Europe!).
OK the GRU did not use deadly nerve gas on the traitor Skripal because he survived, but by
the same token the GRU did not use knockout gas in the Dubrovka Theater because they killed
hundreds of innocent Russian hostages. At least we can agree GRU did use flamethrowers and
heavy machine guns in the Beslan school, because they shot and burned hundreds of Ossetian
children to death.
This is probably the consequence of Trump's blunder in grovelling in front of Putin (and
the world's TV cameras!). He now has to inflict a defeat on Putin so unequivocal that even
Putin's American supporters cannot hype it into a victory.
Look I know you are another dim witted Ukrainian pretending to be an Anglo Saxon, but even
for you this logic is beyond ridiculous.
President Trump has not dismissed the idea that Russian investigators meet with, and
question, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. President Trump has said that
Vladimir Putin tendered him an "incredible offer": that, in exchange for letting Robert
Mueller's team question the twelve indicted Russian intelligence officers thought to have
participated in the cyber-meddling in the 2016 election, Russian counterparts would get the
chance to question McFaul, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia during the Obama years. Rather than
dismiss this idea out of hand, Trump, according to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is "going to work
with his team, and we'll let you know if there's an announcement on this front."
At a summit in Helsinki, Finland, with President Trump, Putin floated the idea of inviting
U.S. special counsel investigators to Russia for the questioning of a dozen Russian
intelligence officials indicted last week as part of the special counsel's inquiry into
Kremlin interference in the 2016 election. In return, Putin wanted Russian authorities to be
allowed to interrogate a roughly equal number of Americans, including McFaul, for supposed
illicit activities. At Monday's post-summit news conference with Putin at his side, Trump --
sounding intrigued rather than indignant -- called that an "incredible" offer.
What is the problem with a joint investigation of Michael McFALL, on American Soil.
I have no idea what is going on in Putin's mind, but I can see what he is doing and if he
wants closer relations with the West, his way of showing it seems odd. Do I need to read
Dostoevsky to understand Putin?
But before that, you'd need to make the anti-sanctions law. Actually, you'd need to make
it pretty strong. Until you cannot even do that, you shouldn't even fantasize about
conquest.
There are several steps you could take before starting an actual war of conquest. Which
you wouldn't even be able to finish.
But the sanctions are happening anyway. We'll need an anti-sanctions law regardless of
whether or not we are going to invade. Actually, as an economist, I don't think we need a
law. What we need is to make sure that the vital sectors of the economy do not rely on US
financial system, by converting oil trade into non-dollar currencies for example.
Eastern Europeans will never mobilise. What would mass mobilisation even look like in a
country like Hungary? Instead, they'll petition USA to station more of its troops in Eastern
Europe. A lot more, like hundreds of thousands more. Doing so will impose costs on the USA.
Actually, this is one of the few ways Russia could impose tangible costs on USA: by stoking
tensions in Eastern Europe.
And if USA suddenly grows a brain and declines to play along, Eastern NATO members will
begin re-orienting their foreign relations towards appeasement of Russia instead. That's what
weak people do.
I also don't like ethnic cleansing and mass deportations and the like. Which would be a
requirement if you were to occupy Ukraine.
Mass deportations is the best part about occupying the Ukraine! I would drive Galicia
population into Poland and other neighboring countries. There would be millions of refugees.
This by itself will seriously destabilise NATO's "Eastern flank". There could be Russian
agents among the refugees, allowing us to seamlessly move from the invasion of the Ukraine to
a campaign of hybrid warfare against Eastern NATO members.
NATO will react to invasion of the Ukraine by positioning to support an insurgency in the
Western part of the country. Instead they would have to contend with an insurgency in Eastern
Poland – wouldn't that be fun?
Probably better than trying to understand things by reading comic books (Hollywood movies
are the same), which is pretty much what the US establishment uses for their thinking.
for he got his current job by completely fooling Yeltsin "
Doesn't that apply to Obama? Will that not apply to future presidents? Doesn't it apply to
the sitting US senators and congress ? Doesn't this "fooling" apply every time US senators
and congress apply more sanction on Iran and justify their earlier "fooling" when they failed
to stop Trump get out of JCPOA?
It does because majority of Americans supported the deal and wanted to keep the deal.
"fooling" is a little more complex in America that it is in Papua NewGuinea . But fooling
it is.
It is like cries against "fake news ' charges leveled against Facebook infowar or
intercept or antiwar or common dreams by WaPo and NYT and FOX/CNN – being bad because
those lead to violences.
The violences perpetrated against Iraq ,Libya, Somalia, and Syria are based on lies and
been made possible by Fake News of CNN NYT . The latest servile and sinsiter attempt by NYT
to start talking of banned CW use by Syrians to kill more Syrians is nothing but 'fooling and
lying" fakery of news what they accuse Putin and Russian bot of but without proof.
Congress did not do their job when the CIA, DOJ & FBI ILLEGALLY:
Surveiled citizens. Investigated the Trump Presidential Campaign. Paid Christopher Steele to fabricate a pack of God Damned Lies. Told the FISA Court a pack of God Damned Lies. Obstructed a congressional investigation, into that pack of God Damned Lies. Fabricated ANOTHER pack of lies about Civil-Wars in Georgia & Ukraine. Fabricated YET ANOTHER pack of lies about the Syrian Civil War & ISIS. Fabricated STILL ANOTHER pack of lies about Russia President Putin.
Don't confuse Ukrainians with Ukies. Ukrainians are humans, with their stronger and weaker
points, like all humans, whereas Ukies are the scum of the Earth.
Trump has to thread a fine line with the Neocons and outright JOO firsters in his cabinet who
HATE Putin and the Russians. Push back against these vermin would be good but he probably
wont do it until after the mid terms, we shall see.
I believe that study was conducted under the assumption of within visual range, which
artificially presented a situation where the F-35 was at a disadvantage from the get go. In
a real world situation, the Su-35 would probably be shot down before it knew what hit it,
especially considering that American pilots tend to be among the best in the world.
The basic assumption is that over the horizon UHF radar (like Australia's Jindalee system)
detects the F-35, allowing Flankers to use their IRST.
Of course some have disputed the study, as well they should. A major problem with IRST is
its very limited field of view, though pairing this with low frequency radar mitigates
that.
In a real world situation the Su-35 would detect the AMRAAMs before impact rather than be
surprised. Whether or not the AMRAAMs destroy the Su-35 would depend on many factors such
as:
• Number of AMRAAMs fired
• Distance from which AMRAAMs are fired
• Quality of Su-35 countermeasures
• Pilot skill (duh)
Should also be pointed out that the Russians are now fielding L-band AESA radars embedded
in wingtips specifically for counter-VLO purposes. See here: http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-2009-06.html
That's irrelevant for three reasons:
1) 187 is still a number far greater than the number of Su-57s the Russians wanted to
produce in the near term.
2) the F-22 is often stationed at bases around the world, so the US does not need to
sell the aircraft to anyone to bring it to a theater of combat.
3) the F-22 would dominate any Russian or Chinese aircraft currently fielded; an
appreciable number of F-22s (or any US fourth generation aircraft) along with the F-35
should be a potent combination. US pilots are also very well trained, easily matching any
other country save perhaps Israel.
Chengdu J-20 and J-31 units will most certainly not be capped at 187 units. Fifth
generation fighters will almost certainly proliferate beyond China and Russia as well.
No, the US didn't "need" to sell the F-22 to Japan. But the sale would've strengthened
Allied forces in the Pacific theater, kept the F-22 production line open and cut unit costs,
reduced the American trade deficit, and provided jobs and profits to Americans. The F-22
export ban was an own goal.
Kinematic performance doesn't cont for much when you are overwhelmed by aircraft that
you can't shoot back at effectively while they are shooting at you from a distance.
Kinematic performance isn't nothing, but it isn't everything either. The F-35 will have a
decisive advantage over all Russian aircraft fielded now and over the next decade, and any
issues with the design will be made up for by fielding large numbers of them to overwhelm
opponents + combining the aircraft with the F-22 or F-18.
This decisive advantage depends on two assumptions:
• Counter-VLO sensors will not be effective (or fielded in adequate numbers), or at
least won't be enough to vector interceptors (whether aircraft or missiles) to the target
• Kill probability of BVR missile shots has improved by two orders of magnitude since
the last air war against a near peer
Obviously, overwhelming the opponent with numbers is always a war winning strategy. NATO
can thus be expected to prevail in any air war against Russia, though not without a bloody
nose.
That's not really the right way to phrase it. "Inferior" in this case only means "less
than what the US could have otherwise done but still quite good compared to most other
aircraft."
Further, the philosophy you quoted will allow the US to field huge numbers of these
craft – thousands – at an affordable price, so I'm not so sure it was a bad
idea after all. That's much better than the SU-57, which is a dumpster fire of a
program.
I'm also not sold on the idea that the B model was a bad idea for the Asian theater. In
any conflict, the Chinese will attempt to destroy our bases and landing strips. Having a
larger number of fighters capable of short vertical takeoffs might prove to be quite the
asset in organizing a counter offensive/stationing the craft in various locations that are
hard to hit or detect.
The airframe is inferior to what the US could have done otherwise, and is inferior to
contemporary aircraft. This inferiority was not driven by the stealth does requirement and
thus counts as an own goal.
The B model stems from the Marine Corps remember some battle in the Pacific War where Navy
air support didn't show up. Therefore they must have their own fighters, a logic which
strangely wouldn't apply to the Army.
If our doctrine or experience dictates that a STOVL aircraft is desirable, fine. But given
the limitations of STOVL aircraft, it ought to be a separate design.
Dealing with Chinese strikes at Pacific bases is probably better dealt with by buying more
heavy equipment and training more Seabees. You can patch holes pretty quickly.
That's not correct. The F-35 will have a reduced radar cross section across much of the
craft compared with any other non-stealth aircraft. Nearly the entire surface is covered in
radar absorbent material and the engine itself is designed to reflect away radar waves. It
also has IR reduction measures.
Here's a thermal image of an F-35 from a modern IR camera:
No IR reduction in the world is going to disguise 45,000 pounds of thrust from a single
nozzle.
Yes, the F-35 has substantially reduced RCS compared to non-VLO aircraft. News at 11. It
has, however, inferior stealth compared to the F-22 (let alone the YF-23).
RAM is useful, but the largest reductions in RCS come from airframe shaping. F-35 is not
optimized in the lower or aft areas. The original X-35 is quite decent here, but this was
changed for the F-35 in order to increase internal weapons load out. Given the original
intention of employing it as a tactical strike fighter, this wasn't unreasonable.
Made up for by building 2000+ F-35s. How many SU-57s is Russia making?
This originally concerned exports. Any damn fool can tell you that numerical superiority
is very powerful.
No, it wouldn't. Something doesn't have to be theoretically perfect for it to work quite
well in the real world. The F-35 will perform BVR combat much better than any non-American
aircraft.
In a 1v1 engagement with no supporting elements where the rival fighters approach each
other head on, I agree. But this isn't reflective of actual combat.
1. We already have that. It's called the B2 and we are also working on a flying wing
stealth drone that does exactly that already: shoot a barrage of missiles at BVR in
coordination with the F-35.
B-2 is unsuitable for this role owing to the location of its radar:
That said it has been proposed to use the B-1 for this role, which I think is a good
idea.
Drone idea is worth trying, though I'm skeptical of the ability to retain datalinks in an
electromagnetically challenged environment. And drones autonomously launching missiles could
be dubious–but this could be solved by wargaming (if its proven autonomous drones ID
targets better than human pilots, have at it).
2. Wrong. Just wrong. There are huge disadvantages to your flying wing idea. Stability
and maneuverability being just two, so they wouldn't be much use in visual range combat or
in a variety of other missions for which the F-35 was designed; the F-35 is a multi-role
fighter. It will do BVR just fine.
Stability not a concern with fly-by-wire and thrust vectoring (which the B-2 doesn't have
incidentally, yet is a stable bombing platform).
There is incidentally a trade-off between stability and maneuverability, hence why
fighters from the F-16 on have been designed to be inherently unstable.
But in any case you've been pooh poohing maneuverability here, citing the superiority of
BVR combat. If BVR is your goal, then you want a larger missile load, more powerful/sensitive
sensors, and increased stealth. A flying wing eliminates the issue with resonant effects (if
a vertical surface is less than eight times the size of a radar wavelength, it produces a
resonant effect).
The military design of the F-35 is pretty good. You're trying to cover this up by
pointing out an irrelevant fact – that there were economic considerations when
building the craft which applies to every military project ever conceived.
Well I suppose that's true, but whole JSF program would've been better if:
1 – STOVL had been left out
2 – Kinematic performance had been considered important
Have to agree with you: Soros, Browder, MSM owners, Pentagon contractors, and all other
sorts of scum are much bigger threat to the US than Putin, Un, Iranian Ayatollahs, Assad, and
many others. The enemy within is always more dangerous. Especially when that enemy has only
one loyalty: to his/her/its money.
Interesting, a few years ago Algeria had to have Russia redo the electronics in the Su
30′s that it bought because there was some Izraeli electronics in it.
You are forgetting thievery and corruption that provides cover for that thievery. Out of
every dollar spent in the U on "defense", at least 90 cents are stolen, some of the money is
used to buy "patriotic" politicians who pretend not to see the thievery.
No they don't pluck books off shelf . They watch the snippet cribbed from some internet
site on Fox TV /CNN and use it as evidence. That were the sources of evidences they offered
on Syrian using sarin gas.
Last air war between near peers was Vietnam. BVR combat was a total failure.
Radars and missiles have improved a lot since then of course, but so have
countermeasures.
There were BVR kills in Operation Mole Cricket 19 and Desert Storm, but fighting
incompetent Arabalonians doesn't count as near peer. And there were still WVR kills in those
campaigns.
Depending on ROE in a conflict or confused airspace, there will be a need to visually ID
targets on occasion.
The main thing that's changed about dogfighting is that heat seeking missiles can now lock
onto an aircraft from any angle (instead of just behind) and launch from high off boresight.
This makes instantaneous turning performance more importance than sustained turning
performance.
But like I said, if BVR missiles are now truly as miraculous as you think, then the F-35
is an improper design. In fact, so is the F-22 and more or less all other existing fighters.
The idea "fighter" of existing aircraft would be the Airbus A380 launching thousands of
missiles at once
BVR missiles also work just as well from the ground as the air (with some kinematic
disadvantages, and of course can't deal with attackers on the deck). Magical BVR missiles
suggest we should be building a lot more SAM systems.
I bring you the air superiority force of the future:
These senators may or may not be lunatics themselves. This does not change the fact that
they are bought and paid for puppets of lunatics, the US moneyed elites that dangerously
degenerated after 1991. The US used to be a decent country. Not anymore.
There was a joke about Czechoslovakia in the USSR: Czechoslovakia is the most peaceful
country on Earth, it does not interfere even in its own internal affairs. Puppet masters
change (Hitler, USSR, the US), but the policy stands.
i lived in the russian federation for several years (yuzhno sakhalinsk, 2011-2012). i don't
claim to be a russian expert, however, i did not detect any virulent comintern intent amongst
the russians with whom i was privileged to interact. for the most part, they seemed like
everyone else i have come across in my travels on this pitiable orb; they were simply trying
to get by, and were as capitalistic as any crony capitalist in america.
maybe someone with more foreign relations erudition, and experience than i could pen an
expositive on why there exists such animosity betwixt our nations, other than the all to well
known need for a bogeyman so as to facilitate u.s. world hegemony.
for a country which is broke, and which depends upon martial, and venal, intimidation to
achieve/sustain its aims, the impending comeuppance could be very humbling, and decisive.
As Ben Aris notes, the US Treasury Department has been ratcheting back on its sanctions
against Oleg Deripaska and Rusal, after the chaos it has caused in the international metals
market.
Aluminum has a unique market dynamic which other products with more fungible supply chains
don't share. Sanctions are a work in progress. Treasury has learned from the Rusal matter.
Henceforth it can collapse even bigger Russian companies like Gazprom, Rosneft and Lukoil
without much fear of a concomitant contagion. Oil and gas are the ultimate fungible
commodities.
However, as I have pointed out, the ultimate ability of the US to directly punish Russia
is limited; it has twice as many people as Iran, after all, and many times the economic
output
This is delusional. Russia is vastly more exposed than Iran, as it is more tightly wound
up in the western financial structures that the US created and controls. Russia's economic
output, measured in GDP, is the same size as New York City's. It has always been a question
of how far the US was willing to go to punish Russia. There are nuclear options in the US
quiver that can pretty much destroy the Russian economy. But so far the US has been applying
relatively trivial sanctions in the hopes that Russia would reform its conduct (I'm not
making a value judgement). But the perception that Trump has somehow been captured by Russian
intelligence has ratcheted things up.
Trade between Russia and the US is very limited.
It's not a question of trade between Russian and the US. It's a question of trade between
Russia and the world since the US controls the global economy.
Mr Fack , your ukraruina , your jojolistan , is the black hole of Europe , you want to set
Europe on ( atomic ) fire fot the benefit of the usa , and of your corrupted oligarcs .
No real country in Europe respects ukraruina , a very inmoral and stupid pseudocountry .
Ukraruina could have been a golden bridge between the EU and Russia ,and choosed instead to
be a blood trench for the benefit of the oligarcs of the usa . You are a cursed land .
Swarms of missiles? What? With the F-35 capacity of 4 AMRAAM? The ones that haven't been
upgraded, have been unreliable since at least 2016, and would be vulnerable to manuever
anyway? The twenty five plus year old missiles?
Stealth is only stealth to high fidelity radar, as in versus missile locks. That's great,
but low frequency radar will still reveal the location of aircraft for the purpose of general
location. So it's not really a "bolt from blue," which is much more of a ground to air
concept since IR missiles don't telegraph themselves like radar locks do.
Goodness, you are one thick POS.
As I have said before Cyrano is a serious intellectual .you on the other hand are a serious
cretin.
Seeing as it's that part of your menstruation cycle, I thought I would add another proof
of how fake "Ukrainian" history and language is. From a company yet again threatening the
collapse of Ukrainian infrastructure due to an oligarchic dispute:
As you can see the Ukrainian version is a waste of time, when the Russian version exists
..the whole fake language is a fabrication by lowlife scum Banderite tossers who escaped
bestiality charges in the 1940′s/50′s and fled to America/Canada
If Putin wants to retaliate by creating a destabilizing crisis in the USA, he could simply
admit that he has proofs that Trump COLLUDED with Russians operatives to affect the
election.
Trump will be removed and Mike Pence will take over throwing the USA in a deeper crisis.
Is Trump aware of this Damocles sword if he does not stop the Congress for escalating
sanctions?
There are theories, but the mass bueaucracy made some really strange results. In Vietnam,
ROE required visual confirmation of targets to use beyond visual range weapons. Weapons that
homed into flares because they produced "heat."
Well, that worked about as well as could be expected.
Well, no, Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum: "do these in 48 hours or we'll go to war".
These demands are also unrealistic, but they are just pretext for new sanctions. It is very
unlikely that the US will take any military action against Russia. Russia responding to more
sanctions/economic warfare with attacking the West with nukes is also very unlikely.
It is also very unlikely that the people pulling the strings want WW3 with Russia. They just
found a convenient scapegoat and want to ramp up tensions with Russia not independently of
the game to bring down Trump for "colluding with Russia".
Face it, Russia is bound to lose an economic war, they cannot really retaliate without
hurting themselves. They could close the gas taps, but then they lose a lot of money. They
could close Russian airspace, but then they lose a lot of money too. They could deny Soyuz
seats to American astronauts, but the US has other options (not ready yet but they could get
them ready if really needed) etc. Russia is not a big economic player and never was one.
Regarding the sanctions the question is whether the EU will follow the US, probably yes, EU
companies are going to lose a lot of money, but they would lose much more if they are
punished by the US govt.
The US hawks think that they can bankrupt Russia like they did with the Soviet Union. The
question is how viable is Russian economy if mostly cut from the world economy including
finance and how tolerant will be the Russian people with the hardships. Looking at Iran, if
they could manage then Russia should be able to, but more hardships must be expected. Also
the government may do away with democratic pretensions and go full autocracy in the case of
popular unrest. And of course Russia will be dependent on China more than now. Why is it good
for the US if Russia becomes China's little bitch instead of a strategic ally against Chinese
expansion is another question. Rationally thinking China is the future geopolitical rival of
America and not Russia. But the people pulling the strings want to screw Russia bad, that is
their first goal, obviously, they feel ideologically fueled hatred for Russia beyond
strategic calculations.
Somehow a lot of comments here were deflected into a discussion of F-35 vs other fighters,
including Russian. I am not a technical expert, so I can comment only in general terms.
Overall, the technology in the US is more advanced. However, there is one huge difference
between Russian and American weapons: Russian ones are designed for the battlefield, whereas
American ones are design to maximize manufacturers' profits. To what extent does this
difference cancel technological potential in fighter planes, I don't know.
Why would Russia do that? The US is destroying itself more efficiently than any of its
enemies could ever achieve. Reminds me of a dark joke "if you see your enemy committing
suicide, do not interfere".
As a matter of fact, the USSR was not bankrupted. It was destroyed because the Party
elites wanted to steal a lot more than the Soviet system allowed. They succeeded, now they
are oligarchs, whereas the great majority of the population got screwed.
This is delusional. Russia is vastly more exposed than Iran, as it is more tightly wound
up in the western financial structures that the US created and controls
For now yes, but if forced to, it could leave those structures and survive without them.
Of course it wouldn't be pretty especially the transitional period.
But so far the US has been applying relatively trivial sanctions in the hopes that
Russia would reform its conduct (I'm not making a value judgement).
The idea that Russia would i.e. abandon the Crimea if sanctioned hard enough and such
"hopes" are delusional. A country that still sees itself as a great power and has a lot of
national pride is not going to make such concessions to the US. If Putin looks a wuss to the
Russian people he will fall more quickly than because of any sanctions. But I doubt that
there were even such hopes for real. The aim was always just to ratchet the hostility up with
Russia more and more, until a full blown cold war.
Here's the Video of Schoolchildren Just Moments Before Being Massacred by U.S.-Backed Saudi
Bombing
"This blood is on America's hands, as long as we keep sending the bombs that kill so many
Yemenis."
"... "Most ironic of all, US and Saudi-backed sectarian extremists, including Al Qaeda in Yemen, had served as proxy forces meant to keep Houthi militias in check by proxy so the need for a direct military intervention such as the one now unfolding would not be necessary. This means that Saudi Arabia and the US are intervening in Yemen only after the terrorists they were supporting were overwhelmed and the regime they were propping up collapsed." ..."
"... "Indeed, the conflict in Yemen is a proxy war. Not between Iran and Saudi Arabia per say, but between Iran and the United States, with the United States electing Saudi Arabia as its unfortunate stand-in." ..."
"... "In reality, Saudi Arabia's and the United States' rhetoric aside, a brutal regional regime meddled in Yemen and lost, and now the aspiring global hemegon sponsoring it from abroad has ordered it to intervene directly and clean up its mess." ..."
"... Sanders won't say that and most media will simply blame it on the U.S. supplying weapons but they don't get into the why, typically blaming it on the MIC being the MIC. ..."
"... "Most ironic of all, US and Saudi-backed sectarian extremists, including Al Qaeda in Yemen, had served as proxy forces meant to keep Houthi militias in check by proxy so the need for a direct military intervention such as the one now unfolding would not be necessary. This means that Saudi Arabia and the US are intervening in Yemen only after the terrorists they were supporting were overwhelmed and the regime they were propping up collapsed." ..."
"... "By backing the Saudi coalition's war in Yemen with weapons, aerial refueling, and targeting assistance, the United States is complicit in the atrocities taking place there." -- Sen. Bernie Sanders ..."
ya right.
Like all wars, most media, including Common Dreams, either sugarcoat them or obfuscate the
real purpose. And of course the politicians do that even better, like Sanders, who just a few
years ago was begging Saudi Arabia to "get their hands dirty", just at the time that the U.S.
proxy war in Yemen heated up with their lapdog Saudi Arabia getting their hands dirty indeed.
The problem of course is that it's not just the U.S. supplying the bombs and military
guidance, it's that it's actually another U.S. proxy war using it's favorite terrorists and
terrorist supporting countries for it's imperialist agenda.
"Most ironic of all, US and Saudi-backed sectarian extremists, including Al Qaeda in
Yemen, had served as proxy forces meant to keep Houthi militias in check by proxy so the need
for a direct military intervention such as the one now unfolding would not be necessary. This
means that Saudi Arabia and the US are intervening in Yemen only after the terrorists they
were supporting were overwhelmed and the regime they were propping up collapsed."
"Indeed, the conflict in Yemen is a proxy war. Not between Iran and Saudi Arabia per say,
but between Iran and the United States, with the United States electing Saudi Arabia as its
unfortunate stand-in."
"In reality, Saudi Arabia's and the United States' rhetoric aside, a brutal regional
regime meddled in Yemen and lost, and now the aspiring global hemegon sponsoring it from
abroad has ordered it to intervene directly and clean up its mess."
Actually it's larger than that, it's part of the larger imperialist struggle against China
and Russia, control of the Bab-el-Mandeb oil chokepoint and control of oil and other
resources in the MENA.
Sanders won't say that and most media will simply blame it on the U.S. supplying weapons
but they don't get into the why, typically blaming it on the MIC being the MIC.
@Big Al
don't get the why/when for if they
ever do amerika won't be amerika anymore
and that could go both ways, for better
or for worse
and you're correct in Sanders won't say
it but Bernie shouldn't be the one stop
cure all, their need to be many more voices
but the crickets are most abundant.
Sanders won't say that and most media will simply blame it on the U.S. supplying weapons
but they don't get into the why, typically blaming it on the MIC being the MIC.
ya right.
Like all wars, most media, including Common Dreams, either sugarcoat them or obfuscate
the real purpose. And of course the politicians do that even better, like Sanders, who
just a few years ago was begging Saudi Arabia to "get their hands dirty", just at the
time that the U.S. proxy war in Yemen heated up with their lapdog Saudi Arabia getting
their hands dirty indeed. The problem of course is that it's not just the U.S. supplying
the bombs and military guidance, it's that it's actually another U.S. proxy war using
it's favorite terrorists and terrorist supporting countries for it's imperialist
agenda.
"Most ironic of all, US and Saudi-backed sectarian extremists, including Al Qaeda
in Yemen, had served as proxy forces meant to keep Houthi militias in check by proxy so
the need for a direct military intervention such as the one now unfolding would not be
necessary. This means that Saudi Arabia and the US are intervening in Yemen only after
the terrorists they were supporting were overwhelmed and the regime they were propping up
collapsed."
"Indeed, the conflict in Yemen is a proxy war. Not between Iran and Saudi Arabia per
say, but between Iran and the United States, with the United States electing Saudi Arabia
as its unfortunate stand-in."
"In reality, Saudi Arabia's and the United States' rhetoric aside, a brutal regional
regime meddled in Yemen and lost, and now the aspiring global hemegon sponsoring it from
abroad has ordered it to intervene directly and clean up its mess."
Actually it's larger than that, it's part of the larger imperialist struggle against
China and Russia, control of the Bab-el-Mandeb oil chokepoint and control of oil and
other resources in the MENA.
Sanders won't say that and most media will simply blame it on the U.S. supplying
weapons but they don't get into the why, typically blaming it on the MIC being the
MIC.
#4 don't get the
why/when for if they
ever do amerika won't be amerika anymore
and that could go both ways, for better
or for worse
and you're correct in Sanders won't say
it but Bernie shouldn't be the one stop
cure all, their need to be many more voices
but the crickets are most abundant.
Sanders won't say that and most media will simply blame it on the U.S. supplying
weapons but they don't get into the why, typically blaming it on the MIC being the
MIC.
(the other so called progressive heroes) are saying,
"By backing the Saudi coalition's war in Yemen with weapons, aerial refueling, and
targeting assistance, the United States is complicit in the atrocities taking place
there."
-- Sen. Bernie Sanders
is basically propaganda. Clearly he's making it sound like the U.S. is supplying weapons
and some military assistance and therefore is complicit in the atrocities that Saudi Arabia
and it's "coalition" are perpetrating in "their" war, which in turn leads people to believe
(and the progressive hero politicians to propose) the U.S. simply needs to stop supplying
those weapons and military assistance, i.e., get out of Saudi's war. But that misses the
history of U.S. interest and involvement in Yemen, it's real role in the near genocide
happening there and the overall agenda of those controlling our government. And that is why
most Americans, including most progressives, don't know what is really going on in Yemen. Our
political "representatives" and the 90% owned by six rich bastard corporations oligarchy
media won't tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It's why people still
believe the war in Syria is a civil war. It's why people believe the Russia cold war
propaganda. That's all they hear and the only way to get the real truth is to dig for it and
try to make sense of the big picture along with the true history of this country and our
government and political system.
Not to mention he's a fucking hypocrite.
"Even worse, after the Saudis started bombing Yemen with U.S. government backing earlier
this year, killing thousands and leading to what the UN is now calling a "humanitarian
catastrophe," and suffering that is "almost incomprehensible," Sanders continued. In another
interview, again with Wolf Blitzer in May, Sanders did correctly note that as a result of the
Iraq invasion, "we've destabilized the region, we've given rise to Al-Qaeda, ISIS." But then
he actually called for more intervention: "What we need now, and this is not easy stuff, I
think the President is trying, you need to bring together an international coalition, Wolf,
led by the Muslim countries themselves! Saudi Arabia is the third largest military budget in
the world, they're going to have to get their hands dirty in this fight. We should be
supporting, but at the end of the day this is [a] fight over what Islam is about, the soul of
Islam, we should support those countries taking on ISIS."
(Note on Truthdig article: also propaganda inserted by both Sanders and the author by
insinuating the U.S. wars in the MENA "gave rise" to ISIS. That is not true, ISIS was
created, aided and abetted FOR the wars in the MENA and beyond.)
Marxism provides one of the best analysis of capitalism; problems start when Marxists propose
alternatives.
Notable quotes:
"... Such demand-compression occurs above all through the imposition of an income deflation on the petty producers, and on the working population in general, in the Third World. This was done in the colonial period through two means: one, "deindustrialization" or the displacement of local craft production by imports of manufactures from the capitalist sector; and two, the "drain of surplus" where a part of the taxes extracted from petty producers was simply taken away in the form of exported goods without any quid pro quo ..."
"... I mean by the term "imperialism" the arrangement that the capitalist system sets up for imposing income deflation on the working population of the Third World for countering the threat of inflation that would otherwise erode the value of money in the metropolis and make the system unviable. "Imperialism" in this sense characterizes both the colonial and the contemporary periods. ..."
"... The fact that the diffusion of capitalism to the Third World has proceeded by leaps and bounds of late, with its domestic corporate-financial oligarchy getting integrated into globalized finance capital, and the fact that workers in the metropolis have also been facing an income squeeze under globalization, are important new developments; but they do not negate the basic tendency of the system to impose income deflation upon the working population of the Third World, a tendency that remains at the very core of the system. ..."
"... any state activism, other than for promoting its own exclusive and direct interest, is anathema for finance capital, which is why, not surprisingly, "sound finance" and "fiscal responsibility" are back in vogue today, when finance capital, now globalized, is in ascendancy. Imperialism is thus a specifically capitalist way of obtaining the commodities it requires for itself, but which are produced outside its own domain. ..."
"... dirigiste regimes ..."
"... With the reassertion of the dominance of finance, in the guise now of an international ..."
"... Contemporary imperialism therefore is the imperialism of international finance capital which is served by nation-states (for any nation-state that defies the will of international finance capital runs the risk of capital flight from, and hence the insolvency of, its economy). The US, being the leading capitalist state, plays the leading role in promoting and protecting the interests of international finance capital. But talking about a specific US imperialism, or a German or British or French imperialism obscures this basic fact. ..."
"... Indeed, a good deal of discussion about whether the world is heading toward multi-polarity or the persistence of US dominance misses the point that the chief actor in today's world is international or globalized finance capital, and not US or German or British finance capital. ..."
"... US military intervention all over the world, in order to acquire a proper meaning has to be located within the broader setting of the imperialism of international finance capital. ..."
C.J. Polychroniou: How do you define imperialism and what imperialist tendencies do you detect as inherent in the
brutal expansion of the logic of capitalism in the neoliberal global era?
Prabhat Patnaik: The capitalist sector of the world, which began by being located, and
continues largely to be located, in the temperate region, requires as its raw materials and
means of consumption a whole range of primary commodities which are not available or
producible, either at all or in adequate quantities, within its own borders. These commodities
have to be obtained from the tropical and sub-tropical region within which almost the whole of
the Third World is located; and the bulk of them (leaving aside minerals) are produced by a set
of petty producers (peasants). What is more, they are subject to "increasing supply price," in
the sense that as demand for them increases in the capitalist sector, larger quantities of them
can be obtained, if at all, only at higher prices, thanks to the fixed size of the tropical
land mass.
This means an ex ante tendency toward accelerating inflation as capital
accumulation proceeds, undermining the value of money under capitalism and hence the viability
of the system as a whole. To prevent this, the system requires that with an increase in demand
from the capitalist sector, as capital accumulation proceeds, there must be a compression of
demand elsewhere for these commodities, so that the net demand does not increase, and
increasing supply price does not get a chance to manifest itself at all.
Such demand-compression occurs above all through the imposition of an income deflation on
the petty producers, and on the working population in general, in the Third World. This was
done in the colonial period through two means: one, "deindustrialization" or the displacement
of local craft production by imports of manufactures from the capitalist sector; and two, the
"drain of surplus" where a part of the taxes extracted from petty producers was simply taken
away in the form of exported goods without any quid pro quo . The income of the
working population of the Third World, and hence its demand, was thus kept down; and
metropolitan capitalism's demand for such commodities was met without any inflationary threat
to the value of money. Exactly a similar process of income deflation is imposed now upon the
working population of the Third World by the neoliberal policies of globalization.
I mean by the term "imperialism" the arrangement that the capitalist system sets up for
imposing income deflation on the working population of the Third World for countering the
threat of inflation that would otherwise erode the value of money in the metropolis and make
the system unviable. "Imperialism" in this sense characterizes both the colonial and the
contemporary periods.
We recognize the need for a reserve army of labor to ward off the threat to the value of
money arising from wage demands of workers. Ironically, however, we do not recognize the
parallel and even more pressing need of the system (owing to increasing supply price) for the
imposition of income deflation on the working population of the Third World for warding off a
similar threat.
The fact that the diffusion of capitalism to the Third World has proceeded by leaps and
bounds of late, with its domestic corporate-financial oligarchy getting integrated into
globalized finance capital, and the fact that workers in the metropolis have also been facing
an income squeeze under globalization, are important new developments; but they do not negate
the basic tendency of the system to impose income deflation upon the working population of the
Third World, a tendency that remains at the very core of the system.
Those who argue that imperialism is no longer a relevant analytic construct point to the
multifaceted aspects of today's global economic exchanges and to a highly complex process
involved in the distribution of value which, simply put, cannot be reduced to imperialism. How
do you respond to this line of thinking?
Capitalism today is of course much more complex, with an enormous financial superstructure.
But that paradoxically makes inflation even more threatening. The value of this vast array of
financial assets would collapse in the event of inflation, bringing down this superstructure,
which incidentally is the reason for the current policy obsession with "inflation targeting."
This makes the imperialist arrangement even more essential. The more complex capitalism
becomes, the more it needs its basic simple props.
I should clarify here that if "land-augmenting" measures [such as irrigation, high-yielding
seeds and better production practices] could be introduced in the Third World, then,
notwithstanding the physical fixity of the tropical land mass, the threat of increasing supply
price -- and with it, [the threat] of inflation -- could be warded off without any income
deflation. Indeed, on the contrary, the working population of the Third World would be better
off through such measures. But these measures require state support and state expenditure, a
fact that Marx had recognized long ago. But any state activism, other than for promoting its
own exclusive and direct interest, is anathema for finance capital, which is why, not
surprisingly, "sound finance" and "fiscal responsibility" are back in vogue today, when finance
capital, now globalized, is in ascendancy. Imperialism is thus a specifically capitalist way of
obtaining the commodities it requires for itself, but which are produced outside its own
domain.
The post-decolonization dirigiste regimes [regimes directed by a central authority]
in the Third World had actually undertaken land-augmentation measures. Because of this, even as
exports of commodities to the metropolis had risen to sustain the biggest boom ever witnessed
in the history of capitalism, per capita food grain availability had also increased in those
countries. But I see that period as a period of retreat of metropolitan capitalism, enforced by
the wound inflicted upon it by the Second World War. With the reassertion of the dominance of
finance, in the guise now of an international finance capital, the Third World states
have withdrawn from supporting petty producers, a process of income deflation is in full swing,
and the imperialist arrangement is back in place, because of which we can see once more a
tendency toward a secular decline in per capita food grain availability in the Third World as
in the colonial period.
There is a third way -- apart from a greater obsession with inflation aversion and a yoking
of Third World states to promoting the interests of globalized finance rather than defending
domestic petty producers -- in which contemporary capitalism strengthens the imperialist
arrangement. It may be thought that the value of imports of Third World commodities into the
capitalist metropolis is so small that we are exaggerating the inflation threat from that
source to metropolitan currencies. This smallness itself, of course, is an expression of an
acutely exploitative relationship. In addition, however, the threat to the Third World
currencies themselves from a rise in the prices of these commodities becomes acute in a regime
of free cross-border financial flows as now, which threatens the entire world trade and
payments system and hence makes income deflation particularly urgent. Hence the need for the
imperialist arrangement becomes even more acute.
Not long ago, even liberals like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times were arguing that
"McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas" (that is, the US Air Force). Surely,
this is a crude version of imperialism, but what about today's US imperialism? Isn't it still
alive and kicking?
The world that Lenin had written about consisted of nation-based, nation-state-supported
financial oligarchies engaged in intense inter-imperialist rivalry for repartitioning the world
through wars. When [Marxist theorist] Karl Kautsky had suggested the possibility of a truce
among rival powers for a peaceful division of the world, Lenin had pointed to the fact that the
phenomenon of uneven development under capitalism would necessarily subvert any such specific
truce. The world we have today is characterized by the hegemony of international
finance capital which is interested in preventing any partitioning of the world, so
that it can move around freely across the globe.
Contemporary imperialism therefore is the imperialism of international finance capital which
is served by nation-states (for any nation-state that defies the will of international finance
capital runs the risk of capital flight from, and hence the insolvency of, its economy). The
US, being the leading capitalist state, plays the leading role in promoting and protecting the
interests of international finance capital. But talking about a specific US imperialism, or a
German or British or French imperialism obscures this basic fact.
Indeed, a good deal of discussion about whether the world is heading toward multi-polarity
or the persistence of US dominance misses the point that the chief actor in today's world is
international or globalized finance capital, and not US or German or British finance capital.
So, the concept of imperialism that [Utsa Patnaik and I] are talking about belongs to a
different terrain of discourse from the concept of US imperialism per se . The latter,
though it is, of course, empirically visible because of US military intervention all over the
world, in order to acquire a proper meaning has to be located within the broader setting of the
imperialism of international finance capital.
Some incidentally have seen the muting of inter-imperialist rivalry in today's world as a
vindication of Kautsky's position over that of Lenin. This, however, is incorrect, since both
of them were talking about a world of national finance capitals which contemporary capitalism
has gone beyond.
... ... ...
One final question: How should radical movements and organizations, in both the core and the
periphery of the world capitalist economy, be organizing to combat today's imperialism?
Obviously, the issue of imperialism is important not for scholastic reasons, but because of
the praxis that a recognition of its role engenders. From what I have been arguing, it is clear
that since globalization involves income deflation for the peasantry and petty producers, and
since their absorption into the ranks of the active army of labor under capitalism does not
occur because of the paucity of jobs that are created even when rates of output growth are
high, there is a tendency toward an absolute immiserization of the working population.
For the petty producers, this tendency operates directly; and for others, it operates through
the driving down of the "reservation wage" owing to the impoverishment of petty producers.
Such immiserization is manifest above all in the decline in per capita food grain
absorption, both directly and indirectly (the latter via processed foods and feed grains). An
improvement in the conditions of living of the working population of the Third World then
requires a delinking from globalization (mainly through capital controls, and also
trade controls to the requisite extent) by an alternative state, based on a worker-peasant
alliance, that pursues a different trajectory of development. Such a trajectory would emphasize
peasant-agriculture-led growth, land redistribution (so as to limit the extent of
differentiation within the peasantry) and the formation of voluntary cooperatives and
collectives for carrying forward land-augmentation measures, and even undertaking
value-addition activities, including industrialization.
Small Third World countries would no doubt find it difficult to adopt such a program because
of their limited resource base and narrow home market. But they will have to come together with
other small countries to constitute larger, more viable units. But the basic point is that the
question of "making globalization work" or "having globalization with a human face" simply does
not arise.
The problem with this praxis is that it is not only the bourgeoisie in the Third World
countries, but even sections of the middle-class professionals who have been beneficiaries of
globalization, who would oppose any such delinking. But the world capitalist crisis, which is a
consequence of this finance-capital-led globalization itself, is causing disaffection among
these middle-class beneficiaries. They, too, would now be more willing to support an
alternative trajectory of development that breaks out of the straitjacket imposed by
imperialism.
Americans see the Russians as greatness deniers. Their European lackeys are their
greatness-acknowledgers -- even when it's detrimental to their own survival.
If the world was a theater, Americans see themselves as the only performers -- the role of
the rest of the world is to applaud their performance.
Russia is not a part of the audience, it's not even a heckler. It's a performer, it has
always been, and a very talented one too. To try to demote them to the role of spectators, or
to try to usher them out of the concert hall can be suicidal, they have enough musical
instruments to put on a remarkable concert -- even if afterwards no one is left to
applaud.
WASHINGTON -- Saying that their investigation indicated her involvement in election interference went deeper than
previously believed, the FBI revealed Thursday that Russian agent Maria Butina traded sex in exchange for all 62,984,828 votes Donald
Trump received for president in 2016. "Our inquiry into Ms. Butina
"... "The currency of our country is targeted directly by the US president," ..."
"... "This attack, initiated by the biggest player in the global financial system, reveals a similar situation in all developing countries." ..."
"... "All of our action plan and measures are ready," ..."
"... "Together with our banks, we prepared our action plan regarding the situation with our real sector companies, including Small and Medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which is the sector that is affected by the fluctuation the most," ..."
"... "Together with our banks and the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BRSA), we will take the necessary measures quickly." ..."
"... "It is making an operation against Turkey Its aim is to force Turkey to surrender in every field from finance to politics, to make Turkey and the Turkish nation kneel down," ..."
"... "We have seen your play and we challenge you." ..."
Turkey has accused Donald Trump of leading an attack on its national currency. The lira lost
about 40 percent of its value against the US dollar this year and, to reduce its volatility,
Ankara has prepared an urgent action plan. "The currency of our country is targeted
directly by the US president," Finance Minister Berat Albayrak told the Hurriyet.
"This attack, initiated by the biggest player in the global financial system, reveals a
similar situation in all developing countries."
The Turkish lira took a massive hit against the dollar on Friday following Trump's decision
to double tariffs on aluminum and steel imports from Turkey to 20 percent and 50 percent.
Overall, the national currency lost roughly about 40 percent of its value this year.
To calm down the markets, the government instructed its institutions to implement a series
of actions on Monday. "All of our action plan and measures are ready," Albayrak said,
without elaborating.
"Together with our banks, we prepared our action plan regarding the situation with our
real sector companies, including Small and Medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which is the sector
that is affected by the fluctuation the most," the minister
said . "Together with our banks and the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency
(BRSA), we will take the necessary measures quickly."
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan meanwhile slammed the US decision to impose new tariffs on
steel and aluminum imports.
"It is making an operation against Turkey Its aim is to force Turkey to surrender in
every field from finance to politics, to make Turkey and the Turkish nation kneel down,"
Erdogan said
in Trabzon on Sunday. "We have seen your play and we challenge you."
I had just finished exercising and went to the sauna. The gym I go to is a modern facility
with new equipment and is very popular in our city.
My favorite parts are the sauna and the steamer. Both remind me of my old country –
Russia. Though, to be politically and geographically correct – I never lived in Russia: I
was born and raised in one of the fifteen republics of the former USSR – the republic of
Kazakhstan.
So, I am a Russian from Kazakhstan. It's kind of confusing for Americans, and when
twenty-six years ago my American wife brought me here, the customs official gave me an alien
card where my nationality was stated not Russian but Kazakh. My friends make fun of me, because
Russians and Kazakhs are like apples and oranges. We look different
In 1992, when I arrived in America, the relationship between the two cold war rivals was
excellent: Americans traveled to Russia, opening McDonalds, KFC's, Burger Kings, and other
businesses, and Russians were opening not only their hearts but even the secrets of the
overthrown KGB. Millions of Russians and Americans enjoyed such a "romance" between the two
most powerful nuclear countries in the world.
Not anymore! Every morning I wake up to the words, "Russia is terrible," and go to sleep
with the humiliating jokes of the "night-show-clowns" about "the dictator" Putin and "barbaric"
Russians, whose 13 hackers changed the electoral minds of millions of naïve Americans.
Wow! What a powerful "gasoline station country"- Russia, as Senator McCain calls it.
If in 1992 the people in my city who heard my accent were very nice to me and to Russia, now
the usual reaction is to stare at me like a goat at the newly painted gates. One of my
neighbors even yelled at me when I answered his question about my recent trip to Russia. I told
him: "Russians like Putin because he saved their country from collapse. I saw with my own eyes
how Russia has changed since my last trip there. I didn't see the impact of Obama's sanctions,
Russians have better roads, than we have in Colorado; the shops, are filled with all kinds of
products; the churches are restored "
My neighbor who didn't like Trump yelled at me: "If you like Russia go back to your
country!" My answer was: "I love Russia but I am American – like your immigrant wife,
like you. I love America for a lot of reasons, one of them – the right to speak! Nobody
should privatize this right." He ran away, later coming to apologize
My wife, knowing my hard-tempered character asks me not to talk about policy –
Putin-Trump anymore. And I don't, to a certain degree. However, when someone asks me about
Russia or Putin I usually answer, giving my point of view; I just cannot be silent. I was
silent for 40+ years living in the USSR, not anymore! Of course, not everyone likes my answers,
like the man I am going to tell you about.
So, I went into the sauna; a stout man was sitting on the upper bench. He was the same age
as I. Many of the older men in America call ourselves "old farts." The name is not offensive to
us, because we really do not care about our image, and because we like to make jokes about
everything, mostly about ourselves. Usually, we old farts are nice, we love to talk, even in
the sauna. Young people nowadays do not talk. They turn on their phones even in the sauna
– I bet they do not know how to talk with other people. They cover their "secrets" in
towels while we do not – we do not have any secrets anymore.
Anyway, the man said hello to me, I answered, and he caught my slight accent.
"Where are you from?" It's a question I am usually asked.
"From here." I answered.
He was a little confused. I knew what usually followed if I had said – "from
Kazakhstan." Usually, there would be an exchange of this type: "Where is it?" – "Between
Russia and China," – "How do you like it here?" The silly film "Borat" helped me for a
short period of time. People were smiling, as if they met Sasha Cohen, and I was happy that at
least they knew some geography, though the film was silly and the geography in it was
completely mistaken.
"No, I mean originally where are you from?" The guy, let's call him Tony, found the right
question.
I decided not to check his geography skills and said that I came from Russia. The dialog
that followed was remarkable. Here it is.
"Welcome to America! Your English is pretty good!"
"Yours, too." He didn't get my humor. "Just joking," I said, "As for welcoming, it's a
little late: I have lived here for 25 years."
"Have you been in Russia lately?" He asked.
"Yes, I go there every year."
"Wow. So, what do you think about that crazy guy , Pyutin?"
"Sorry, honey," – I apologized to my wife in my thoughts and picked up the gauntlet.
"You mean Putin? He is not crazy. Actually, he is one of the smartest rulers Russia ever had."
I said.
Tony's eyes nearly leaped from their sockets. "But he is a dictator and kills people!"
"I wouldn't call him a dictator – he was just last week elected by nearly 67% of
Russians. I would call him an authoritarian, strong ruler; but a weak ruler in Russia wouldn't
survive a day. Besides, there were seven people opposed him in the election!"
Tony smiled. "You call it an election? He chose the opponents himself from his friends. The
whole world knows that elections in Russia are a sham!"
"Who told you this nonsense, Tony? Did you listen to the debates? Did you hear how these
people yelled at each other and cursed Putin, asking people to vote for them not for Putin.
They really were as tough as Hillary to Donald! And besides, there were a lot of observers from
110 countries. They claimed the election was legitimate."
"No, I do not believe you."
"You may not believe me but I am citing the international organizations reports. You may
check their reports on the Internet yourself. You may even sue these organizations if you
wish."
Tony was silent for a minute, then turned his head to me and asked: "You know that Pyutin is
evil even to his own people?"
"You mean Putin? Who told you? How many Russians share your opinion?"
"McCain."
"Is he Russian?"
"No, but he knows that Pyutin is KGB."
"His name is Putin!" I tried to correct at least this in his mind. "So, you do not believe
me, a Russian, who just returned from Russia, but you believe this Senator, who hates Putin and
Russia? Besides, there are no KGB anymore."
"But he used to be KGB?"
"Yes, and Bush H. was also a CIA agent. So, what? After the collapse of the Soviet Union
there were no people who didn't work for government in that country, we all worked for
government! Putin is good for Russia, he is the brightest politician nowadays. He is like a
great Chess-master, and he is a dangerous player. We must be careful with him. Some Congressmen
are underestimating Russia, calling it "a gasoline station with nukes," but I was there this
summer and saw with my own eyes how much people love Putin, and how much he is doing to make
that country great again."
"Yeh, yeh, yeh " Tony didn't know what to say. Then he recalled something and turned his red
face to me. "Well, he invaded Crimea, and Ukraine!"
"No, he did not. Crimea was a harbor for the Russian navy, and according to the treaty
between Ukraine and Russia there were sixteen thousand Russian troops stationed there on a
permanent base. There were about twenty-three thousand Ukrainian troops there, too. So, when
the thugs in Kiev took power, illegally kicking out president Yanukovych and killing the
political opponents, the Crimean people decided to organize a referendum. Ninety-six percent
decided to reunite with Russia, as they were Russians for nearly 400 years before the Communist
dictator Khrushchev gave that peninsula to Ukraine as a present to his native land."
"But they had no right to secede from the main land of Ukraine!"
"Yes, they did. International law gives the right for self-determination to people.
Remember, we split from the British Empire."
"But it was so long ago!"
"Okay, what about East and West Germany or Kosovo? The people in these countries also
exercised their right of self-determination, but they didn't have any referendum as far as I
know."
Tony looked at me attentively. "I don't believe you."
"You have the right not to believe me. You asked, I answered."
Tony was silent for a while. Then he threw out his last argument. "I hope you wouldn't deny
that Putin killed British citizens recently, using KGB gas!"
Wow, he pronounced "Putin" correctly! I smiled. The nice face of my American wife appeared
in my head again, and she was not happy! I kissed her in my thoughts and finished the
conversation with my last knockout blow:
"I wouldn't deny it if the poisoning by Russians had been proved!"
"But it was proved by Teresa May!"
"Really? What did she say?"
"She said that it was Putin who poisoned the British citizens!"
"Not really, my friend. She said that it was "highly likely" that Russia did it! Besides,
only Mr. Skripal is a British citizen, his daughter is a Russian citizen"
"Does it make any difference?"
"You mean, "highly likely" is proof to punish somebody? What about one of the main pillars
of democracy – innocent until proven guilty?"
"But we believe our allies, not the Russians!"
That statement made me laugh. "You believe not facts but political statements without any
facts? Wow! What kind of democracy is that?"
Tony's face became so red that I was afraid it would melt. He stood up from the bench and
without looking at me firmly said:
"Russians are our enemies, and democracy does not apply to them."
He left, leaving me with a sudden fear of approaching nuclear war.
At night I prayed for peace. I prayed for American and Russian people-in-power who could
easily destroy this fragile planet. If people refuse to understand each other, they fight.
Kennedy and Khrushchev fortunately understood this. Will Putin and Trump understand?
Pavel Kozhevnikov was born in Kazakhstan. In 1992 he married an American woman and
relocated to Colorado, USA, where he worked in a variety of business ventures and taught
various subjects including Russian at Mitchell High School as well as at Pikes Peak Community
College and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Pavel continues to enjoy teaching
Russian at the local community college and university and devotes his free time to writing. He
has published four books of stories and poems as well as numerous articles for newspapers and
journals in Russia, Germany, Kazakhstan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
"... Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of 10 books on international affairs, including ..."
"... Judith Miller was a pawn of Dick Cheney, so it is improper to indict all of the press for a war Bush was going to launch no matter what ..."
"... Well, you could say the same about the alleged Russian meddling in 2016 election. I haven't seen a single evidence, but most of the American public believes that narrative. I think TAC believes it too. ..."
"... How about those chemical attacks in Syria? Staged events. But the media keeps turning them time and again. I don't watch them and don't read them either, but they do have tremendous influence over the society. ..."
"... This is a pot calling a kettle black to deflect blame. If the US under Trump goes to war with Iran, China or Russia it's entirely his fault. He appointed Mike Pompeo. He appointed John Bolton. He appointed Nicky Haily. ..."
"... He wants to enlist Russia to fight the other two and possibly North Korea as well; enlist Russia to achieve the US's goals, not any Russian goal. This ambition is a pipe dream as Russia and the others correctly view the US as a much bigger threat than each other and will band together. If they turn on each other at all it'd only be after the US is defeated and subdued. ..."
"... The mainstream US media (CNN, FOX, Washington Post, NYT, WSJ, etc) is as intertwined with the government as the Chinese media is to theirs. Whatever narrative the powerful in government and their big business associates want to spin, the media will dutifully comply. The "press" is essentially a de facto government agency, and one cannot separate the government push for war from the medias. ..."
"... So, because the press were uncritical in pushing the lies and deceptions, the treason if you will, of the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq War, the press should be less critical of the lies and deceptions spread by the Trump administration. A bit like Fox News, perhaps. Uncritical of the Iraq War back when, uncritical of Trump today. ..."
"... There was more to the War on Iraq than Judith Miller. The entire national MSM abdicated its duty to ask questions of those in power. Instead, the NYT, the WaPo and others became dutiful stenographers of the Bush Administration, the Pentagon, and the intelligence agencies. ..."
"... For truly power is to sociopaths what cocaine is to addicts. ..."
"... Let the case of Yemen take the measure of these men and women. Trump is doing absolutely nothing to end Obama's War, and makes it worse at every turn. The press is doing everything it can to aid and abet him. Today's media might not start wars, the same media do absolutely nothing to end them. ..."
"... To Joe F: It's a bit hard in 900-word op-ed to cover more than a few examples. Others include the one-sided, pro-intervention coverage of the Balkan turmoil in the 1990s, the lobbying for intervention in Libya, and the distorted, pro-intervention coverage of the Syrian civil war. And your implication that I was justifying a Trump crackdown on the media is just bizarre. ..."
"... "The sometimes shrill hostility of the mainstream media towards Russia is pushing the United States toward an increasingly hardline policy that now borders on a second cold war. " ..."
"... Yes, the Press Helps Start Wars ..."
"... The Spanish / American war was a creation of the government in charge manipulating the press in order to justify the war the politicians so desperately wanted ..."
"... "Yes, the Press Helps Start Wars" Old news. Newspapers have been doing this despicable practice since Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press. ..."
"... Media lies and distortions (mainstream, right-wing, left-wing, less so on one or both wings some of the time) enabled (or continue to enable) all of the following American imperialist adventures and/or interventions, be they military, financial, political or otherwise: ..."
"... Vietnam, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Iraq again, Libya, Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela and Nicaragua again. ..."
"... Hell, if much of the mainstream media -- including the liberal "humanitarian" interventionists at MSDNC- had their way, the US would have committed actual military acts of war against Russia and North Korea, as opposed to the economic and political ones we've engaged in. ..."
Two cases stand out: the Spanish-American War and the Iraq War. Historians have long recognized that jingoistic "yellow journalism,"
epitomized by the newspaper chains owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, played a significant role in the former
conflict. Months before the outbreak of the war, one of Hearst's reporters wished to return home from Cuba because there was no sign
of a worsening crisis. Hearst instructed him to stay, adding , "you
furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war."
Hearst's boast was hyperbolic, but the Hearst and Pulitzer papers did repeatedly hype the Spanish "threat" and beat the drums
for war against Madrid. They featured stories that not only focused on but exaggerated the uglier features of Madrid's treatment
of its colonial subjects in Cuba. Those outlets also
exploited
the mysterious explosion that destroyed the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana's harbor. To this day, the identity of the culprit
is uncertain, but the yellow press exhibited no doubts whatever. According to their accounts, it was an outrageous attack on America
by the villainous Spanish regime.
Such journalistic pressure was not the only factor that impelled William McKinley's administration to push for a declaration of
war against Spain or for Congress to approve that declaration. A rising generation of American imperialists wanted to emulate the
European great powers and build a colonial empire. That underlying motive became evident when the first U.S. attack following the
declaration of war came not in Cuba, but in the Philippines, Spain's colony on the other side of the Pacific.
Nevertheless, it would be naďve to assume that the jingoist press did not play a significant role in causing the war against Spain.
Indeed, the corrupt role of yellow journalism in creating public support for that conflict is not a particularly controversial proposition
among historians.
The role of an irresponsible press in shaping a pro-war narrative was even more evident in the prelude to the 2003 U.S. military
intervention in Iraq. New York Times reporter Judith Miller and other prominent mainstream journalists were especially culpable
in publicizing
erroneous information about Saddam Hussein's government regarding two emotionally charged issues. They uncritically circulated
"evidence" from Iraqi defectors and George W. Bush's administration that Iraq was in league with al-Qaeda and may well have had a
role in the devastating 9/11 terrorist attacks. And they pushed the case that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was actively
working on developing a nuclear arsenal.
Again, it would be too much to place all or even most of the blame for the disastrous Iraq war on gullible or ultra-hawkish journalists.
The Bush administration seemed determined to oust Saddam, and it might have attempted to do so even without strong public support.
But most of the media was staunchly pro-war, and that bias
greatly skewed the narrative
presented to the public. When highly respected journalistic institutions like TheNew York Times circulated story
after story highlighting the alleged security threat that Saddam posed, and those stories were then featured in other publications
and on TV, it was hardly surprising that much of the public believed the narrative. The tendency of mainstream media outlets to ignore
or marginalize war critics amplified their pro-war bias.
As is so often the case with Trump's arguments, his accusation that the press can cause wars is an exaggeration, but one that
contains an important kernel of truth. Irresponsible media coverage has undoubtedly strengthened public sentiment for ill-advised
wars in the past, and it could do so again in the future. The sometimes shrill hostility of the mainstream media towards Russia is
pushing the United States toward an increasingly hardline policy that now borders on a second cold war. The original Cold War nearly
escalated to a hot one on several occasions. The press needs to be doubly cautious about pushing policies that would send America
down a similar perilous path. Trump is wrong to brand the press as an enemy of the people, but it is still a powerful institution
that has not always used its great influence responsibly regarding matters of war and peace.
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of 10 books
on international affairs, including The Captive Press: Foreign Policy Crises and the First Amendment .
An elitist corporate media has ends that are not often in sync with the interests of the mass of Americans and thus is a tool
for manufacturing faux public opinion. It is now legal to propagandize the American public, a recent development. With media ownership
concentration unprecedented, and government in the pocket of giant corporate interests, public opinion becomes an exercise of
monopoly lying.
The Spanish/American War and Judith Miller are the foundation for tour argument that the press starts wars? Good grief, how weak
is this? There are no Americans alive who were around for the Spanish American War and Judith Miller was a pawn of Dick Cheney,
so it is improper to indict all of the press for a war Bush was going to launch no matter what . How about the rest of the
conflagrations of the 20th Century or perhaps that would diminish your paper thin premise. I really enjoy TAC, but enough with
publishing these lazy and weak pieces. Lame to blame the press for what politicians of all stripes have wreaked upon us. Geez,
this wasn't even a quarter effort to make a point. You can actually make a point that the press contributed to our War of Independence,
but I guess that would glorify your boogeyman
Lame. Judith Miller and a war fought before any living American was born? What about all of the other unnecessary wars we have
tangled in? Bush et al were going to war with or without one lane shill in Miller, but what about press role in stopping Viet
Nam or Korea? Not to mention the role played in our War for Independence? Oh, that would shred your paper thin premise. TAC slacking
in allowing such lazy and self serving analysis. TAC should exercise better editorial judgement as some (like this post) are so
weak Facebook might delete. Step it up TAC, you are too good for this lazy bunk
Well, you could say the same about the alleged Russian meddling in 2016 election. I haven't seen a single evidence, but most
of the American public believes that narrative. I think TAC believes it too.
How about those chemical attacks in Syria? Staged events. But the media keeps turning them time and again. I don't watch
them and don't read them either, but they do have tremendous influence over the society.
The sad thing is that this or the next president will send troops to war here or there in the world and Americans will stay
indifferent.
This is a pot calling a kettle black to deflect blame. If the US under Trump goes to war with Iran, China or Russia it's entirely
his fault. He appointed Mike Pompeo. He appointed John Bolton. He appointed Nicky Haily.
Of the 3 potential adversaries listed above, there are 2 (Iran, China) where Trump is actively looking for a fight. He deliberately
breached an accord with Iran that was keeping the peace. The only country on which there's a disagreement about whether to pick
a fight with is Russia. But what is behind this disagreement? It's not that Trump is looking for a mutually-respectful peace with
Russia. He wants to enlist Russia to fight the other two and possibly North Korea as well; enlist Russia to achieve the US's
goals, not any Russian goal. This ambition is a pipe dream as Russia and the others correctly view the US as a much bigger threat
than each other and will band together. If they turn on each other at all it'd only be after the US is defeated and subdued.
I just watched Daniel Hoffman (ex-CIA operative) spout the most vile, one sided, pro-Saudi, anti-Iran propaganda, rationalizing
their latest war crime in Yemen on the Shannon Bream show. This demonstrates what is wrong with the MSM today.
They take information uncritically from the CIA, Pentagon, and govt bureaucrats to get the narrative which favors conflict.
List:
1. The bombing of Syria (the only time they gave Trump positive press coverage).
2. The destruction of Libya (they fell for the R2P lie)
3. The genocidal starvation campaign against Yemen (most transparent cover up ever, the 70's press corp would see through it)
4. They assisting Iraq 2 but this time in Iran.
The mainstream US media (CNN, FOX, Washington Post, NYT, WSJ, etc) is as intertwined with the government as the Chinese media
is to theirs. Whatever narrative the powerful in government and their big business associates want to spin, the media will dutifully
comply. The "press" is essentially a de facto government agency, and one cannot separate the government push for war from the
medias.
As was mentioned here, the lunacy that making internet memes is now considered an act of war is the doing of the mainstream
media and they are certainly responsible if a real war breaks out.
Around 1917 a remarkably unanimous push for war infused ALL media. Not just newspapers but technical journals and academic
publications. Teachers and radio experimenters had to read pro-war and pro-Wilson propaganda in EVERY article. All curricula had
to be anti-German, all circuits had to be anti-German.
Same today. All techy websites infuse BOMB RUSSIA into their info on software and hardware developments. Everything must work
together to BOMB RUSSIA.
It is worth noting that America's imperialist adventures in the Philippines resulted in a second war soon after, with between
200,000 and a million (or more) civilian casualties.
talk about 'yellow journalism'. in the 2042 years of the republic, you offer 2 examples? and it is worth noting, the latter (Iraq
2003) was simply the media reporting the cherry-picked intelligence and/or WH-directed narrative(s). while it's agreed the media
was something of a co-conspirator in 2003 (think the current "collusion" debate with Russia being the US and the Trump campaign
being the US media -- the former had a 'mission' and it leveraged its relationship with the latter.). to paraphrase the late George
Carlin, never believe ANYTHING the government or the media tells you. in a plutocracy, the government and the media share (some)
common interests -- not all interests, but some. no sir, the media does not start wars in truth or hyperbole. media, at times,
serves the marketing/business development needs of the MIC, and by proxy the government (usually the Executive Branch). when is
TAC going to show some "tough love" and stop the co-dependent/enabler stuff?
So, because the press were uncritical in pushing the lies and deceptions, the treason if you will, of the Bush administration
in the run-up to the Iraq War, the press should be less critical of the lies and deceptions spread by the Trump administration.
A bit like Fox News, perhaps. Uncritical of the Iraq War back when, uncritical of Trump today.
Truth is, Trump plays the press like a fiddle. He creates outrage saying something stupid, they publish, he walks back or doubles
down or pushes something completely unrelated, and before someone can figure what's going on, we're two days later and the next
controversy arrives. And if the press do manage to back Trump into a corner, it's unfair because they're misrepresenting his constantly
shifting positions.
What the American press should do is, instead of blowing things up (metaphorically, obvs), simply list every day the policies
of the Trump administration in terse, dry manner, and completely ignore any tweet sent by Trump, his cabinet, his family members,
and any of his supporters at any level. Deny Trump the attention he seeks, and before you know it he'll drop his pants in front
of a group of veterans just to make front page again.
Still, enemies of the people. When that phrase came in full swing, the lucky ones were shot, the unlucky ones sent to labour
camps in frozen wastes. Trump will never have the guts. Nor will he ever use his great influence in a responsible manner.
There was more to the War on Iraq than Judith Miller. The entire national MSM abdicated its duty to ask questions of those
in power. Instead, the NYT, the WaPo and others became dutiful stenographers of the Bush Administration, the Pentagon, and the
intelligence agencies.
Others correctly point out WWI and the Spanish American War. I could add Vietnam, when too few journalists questioned the dominant
narrative until we were stuck in.
However, rather than call for censorship, the correct answer is to ask *why* the executive, the Pentagon, and the various alphabet
agencies have this outsized influence, and what can be done to curtail it.
For truly power is to sociopaths what cocaine is to addicts.
@Mark_be: what you say is sensible, but only for an MSM that is not ratings and profits-driven.
The latest serving of the "let Putin win in Ukraine" propaganda line. Mr Carpenter's objection to the media he criticizes is that
they peddle a different propaganda line to the one he would like them to peddle.
Joe F " You can actually make a point that the press contributed to our War of Independence, but I guess that would glorify your
boogeyman"
************
I think it did too, but I don't think that in any way glorified the press.
Let the case of Yemen take the measure of these men and women. Trump is doing absolutely nothing to end Obama's War, and makes
it worse at every turn. The press is doing everything it can to aid and abet him. Today's media might not start wars, the same
media do absolutely nothing to end them.
"I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust.
They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!"
One can't really argue with any of this. Of course, this statement is silent on the warmongering of Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump,
as well as Congress past and present, but Trump is doing a great service to the American People, not least by serving as a bad
example. Few if any other politicians would be willing and able to trigger another overdue national debate.
The report referenced by the author has a hilariously revealing typo in its first sentence. Yes, recalling the US press coverage
of the push for illegal aggressive war against Iraq, and decades of Iraq/Syria/Iran coverage, it would indeed appear that our
intrepid for-profit press and the purveyors of rent-a-speech published opinion are "casing the joint" for future opportunities
of profitable military intervention.
To Joe F: It's a bit hard in 900-word op-ed to cover more than a few examples. Others include the one-sided, pro-intervention
coverage of the Balkan turmoil in the 1990s, the lobbying for intervention in Libya, and the distorted, pro-intervention coverage
of the Syrian civil war. And your implication that I was justifying a Trump crackdown on the media is just bizarre.
Similarly bizarre is Mark's interpretation that I was suggesting that because of the media's past sins, they should go easy
on Trump's abuses. No reasonable reading of the article could reach that conclusion.
"The sometimes shrill hostility of the mainstream media towards Russia is pushing the United States toward an increasingly
hardline policy that now borders on a second cold war. "
Many in the media, not all, give credence to the unanimous assessment of our intelligence agencies, the intelligence agencies
of our allies, and the evidence provided by their own eyes and ears. Others in the media are pushing another line, and with no
evidence whatsoever, as far as I can tell. Draw your own conclusions as to what they are up to.
The headline reads: Yes, the Press Helps Start Wars . I would argue that the word "helps" is doing most of the work in
that sentence. The real question is, who exactly are they "helping"? I think that in most, if not all, cases it starts with a
political party or faction that is advocating for war, and those elements of the press who support them use their voice to help.
So the same can be said about any political issue at all "Yes the press helps [fill in the blank with any issue]". Conservative
press helps push conservative issues, liberal press helps push liberal issues. And yes, when war drums are being beaten, it becomes
very easy for the warmongering voices to drown out the voices of reason. But that is not the fault of the press, it is the fault
of a population that is all too willing to let itself be led into war fever. The press would not be willing to take that position
if they were not so confident that it would be met with approval by their readers and advertisers.
1) The Spanish / American war was a creation of the government in charge manipulating the press in order to justify the war
the politicians so desperately wanted
2) If the author had taken the time to do the research or remember the facts as they were .. The NYTimes as well as the Washington
Post etc -- et al all reported how Cheney had manipulated the Intelligence Agencies with threats unless they lied to both the
public as well as GWB about Iraq having WMD .. which every intelligence agency knew they did not .
Given the time and space one could go on for an encyclopedias worth of pages pointing out the irrefutable fact as in F-A-C-T
that in each and every case throughout US history it has been the politicians that have started the wars .. with more often than
not the media ( as well as in many cases the military ) standing in opposition to the government and politicians which they the
press more often than not paid a heavy price for until they were willing to comply with the destructive wished of the politicians
The irony of Trump's comments about the press helping start wars is that he is intentionally facilitating that very thing every
time Fox "News" parrots his childish, jingoistic rhetoric about Iran, North Korea, etc.
Fox "News" is certainly trying to start wars, I'll give Mr. Carpenter that. And thank you for pointing out that there is only
a kernel of truth in Trump's comments. Does one kernel justify an entire article? Why not write about his barrels of lies?
I suppose the article has value as a history lesson-100-year-old history. After all, if the USA hadn't entered WWI, we may
not have had WWII. But the press didn't start WWI.
"Yes, the Press Helps Start Wars" Old news. Newspapers have been doing this despicable practice since Gutenberg invented the
movable-type printing press.
"I suppose the article has value as a history lesson-100-year-old history. After all, if the USA hadn't entered WWI, we may
not have had WWII. But the press didn't start WWI."
*************
The press operated in a similar way back then too. It didn't start WWI but it surely enabled it.
Media lies and distortions (mainstream, right-wing, left-wing, less so on one or both wings some of the time) enabled (or
continue to enable) all of the following American imperialist adventures and/or interventions, be they military, financial, political
or otherwise:
Vietnam, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Iraq again, Libya, Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela
and Nicaragua again.
I don't remember U.S. press coverage of Allende's Chile, but I imagine it was of a piece with today's coverage of Venezuela,
Brazil, Ecuador and Nicaragua, all the while ignoring the far greater corruption and brutality of America's regional allies/clients/lapdogs.
Hell, if much of the mainstream media -- including the liberal "humanitarian" interventionists at MSDNC- had their way, the
US would have committed actual military acts of war against Russia and North Korea, as opposed to the economic and political ones
we've engaged in.
Let us not forget the enthusiastic reporting on the "Gulf of Tonkin attack." As for those sneering at this because only two examples
are offered, consider reading that part where the author said he was going to offer -- wait for it -- TWO EXAMPLES.
As for that "kernel of truth," those in media sources not being paid to spew anti-Trump propaganda 24/7/365 have pointed out,
to no avail, that he often says things that are true. Unfortunately, he (or whoever is writing his stuff on Twitter) presents
the kernel buried in a pile of nonsense. Which gives the corporate media free rein to focus entirely on the nonsense to ensure
the kernel of truth gets killed at birth.
And no, I do NOT support Mr. Trump nor did I vote for him. He's the poster child for the corporate oligarchy currently . running
the US government, and the sooner he and all his ilk are removed the better. That includes corporate Democrats.
The substance of this piece is obviously correct, but you get the predictable caterwauling from silly commenters because you had
to frame it as a defense of something Trump said. That just confused the issue for people who can't hold more than one thought
in their heads at a time. Trump is a war criminal himself, so he should get no credit for saying something right once in a while.
He only does so for his own self interest. But it is ironic to see so called liberals react by taking the opposite side just because
Trump said something right.
Trump is spot on. Pretty much every single war since WWI was egged on by the media. War sells news! Enemy of the people is right.
I hate mainstream media.
CNN, MSDNC, Fox and all those 24hr news channels are the worst. They actively promote wars and chaos the world over. CNN is
losing the ratings war. I'm sure they'd love another real war to ratchet up the ratings, that's why they're promoting war with
Iran.
Excellent article. I agree with the author except that I would blame the press a little more.
One instance I can think of when a large part of the press advocated against going to war was at the start of the Civil War.
Lincoln shut down a few papers and I think even jailed some newspapermen.
In the end it is up to each of us as individuals to decide what to believe. Certainly a large swath of the media today is advocating
an aggressive stance toward a number of countries based on what I believe is false information.
Regarding an earlier comment about believing our intelligence agencies: Should we have believe them when they say (including
the Israeli Mossad)Iran has never had a nuclear weapons program or should we believe Netanyahu when he claims they say Iran can
have nuclear weapons within months. (In truth, I haven't really talked to Netanyahu or the Mossad directly. I only know what I
read in the papers.)
"Yes, the Press Helps Start Wars" -- this goes back at least to the American Revolution. "The vicious border warfare of the Revolution
produced atrocities on both sides, but Americans placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Indians and their British backers.
. . . Crawford's torture and execution joined a host of reports, real or imagined, that appeared in American newspapers, fueled
American propaganda, and made killing Indians a patriotic duty. Indians saw what was happening. The Americans charged them with
many acts of cruelty that they never committed and publicized them in 'their false Papers' as 'a pretence to hurt & murder us,'
they told the British; 'if we had the means of publishing to the World the many Acts of Treachery & Cruelty committed by them
on our Women & Children, it would appear that the title of Savages would with much greater justice be applied to them than to
us.'. . . When Washington received news of the preliminary terms of peace, he sent three Oneidas in the spring of 1783 with a
message to Brigadier General Allan Maclean, the British commander at Fort Niagara, asking him to prevent the Indians from committing
acts of cruelty 'disagreeable to them and to inhabitants of the United States.' Maclean wrote back in anger asking Washington
why, if he really wanted to prevent 'disagreeable consequences,' he had condoned attacks on Indians from Fort Pitt, and why did
he allow newspapers to print lies that were a disgrace to any nation and served only to inflame tempers?" (Colin G. Calloway,
"The Indian World of George Washington" (Oxford University Press, 2018) pp. 279, 281 (footnotes omitted).)
POTUS tweeted: "The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it's TRUE. I am providing
a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause
War! They are very dangerous & sick!"
Ted's follow-up article "Yes, Reporters Do Get Sick."
"They uncritically circulated 'evidence' from Iraqi defectors and George W. Bush's administration "
That is your sole example of the past 100 years? That "the press helps start wars" by being uncritical of evidence provided
by the government? This is an intellectually dishonest argument.
Of course the press needs to be held to account in providing accurate and vetted material. But your argument in no way reflects
the definitive tone of the headline.
Laughing. Because I think most people understood what the president meant by his coment. He was not talking about the policy initiative
for war. Butas the article states, the press is overwhelmingly partners with ot agitators for conflict.
And they are second to government at every level to admit when they get it wrong. Of course the press agitates for conflict.
There's no btter examples in modern times than those of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. I would contend that the east coast papers
since 9/11 have been leaders in agitating for regime change and military intervention.
But the notion that the press is somehow new to advocating "american conflict" might wanty to consider the following acites:
I have not read Carrol Sue Humphrey's book on the subject, The American Revolution and the Press. But reviews and summaries
make it clear that as agitators -- the press may have been ,ore influential then than they are today.
"... By Sanjay Reddy, Associate Professor of Economics, The New School for Social Research. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website ..."
Grappling with the shock of Donald Trump's election victory, most analysts focus on his
appeal to those in the United States who feel left behind, wish to retrieve a lost social
order, and sought to rebuke establishment politicians who do not serve their interests. In this
respect, the recent American revolt echoes the shock of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom,
but it is of far greater significance because it promises to reshape the entire global order,
and the complaisant forms of thought that accompanied it.
Ideas played an important role in creating the conditions that produced Brexit and Trump.
The 'social sciences' -- especially economics -- legitimated a set of ideas about the economy
that were aggressively peddled and became the conventional wisdom in the policies of mainstream
political parties, to the extent that the central theme of the age came to be that there was no
alternative. The victory of these ideas in politics in turn strengthened the iron-handed
enforcers of the same ideas in academic orthodoxy.
It is never clear whether ideas or interests are the prime mover in shaping historical
events, but only ideas and interests together can sustain a ruling consensus for a lengthy
interval, such as the historic period of financialization and globalization running over the
last 35 years. The role of economics in furnishing the now-rebuked narratives that have reigned
for decades in mainstream political parties can be seen in three areas.
First, there is globalization as we knew it. Mainstream economics championed
corporate-friendly trade and investment agreements to increase prosperity, and provided the
intellectual framework for multilateral trade agreements. Economics made the case for such
agreements, generally rejecting concerns over labor and environmental standards and giving
short shrift to the effects of globalization in weakening the bargaining power of workers or
altogether displacing them; to the need for compensatory measures to aid those displaced; and
more generally to measures to ensure that the benefits of growth were shared. For the most
part, economists casually waved aside such concerns, both in their theories and in their policy
recommendations, treating these matters as either insignificant or as being in the jurisdiction
of politicians. Still less attention was paid to crafting an alternate form of globalization,
or to identifying bases for national economic policies taking a less passive view of
comparative advantage and instead aiming to create it.
Second, there is financialization, which led to increasing disconnection between stock
market performance and the real economy, with large rewards going to firms that undertook asset
stripping, outsourcing, and offshoring. The combination of globalization and financialization
produced a new plutocratic class of owners, managers and those who serviced them in global
cities, alongside gentrification of those cities, proleterianization and lumpenization of
suburbs, and growing insecurity and casualization of employment for the bulk of the middle and
working class.
Financialization also led to the near-abandonment of the 'national' industrial economy in
favor of global sourcing and sales, and a handsome financial rentier economy built on top of
it. Meanwhile, automation trends led to shedding of jobs everywhere, and threaten far more.
All of this was hardly noticed by the discipline charged with studying the economy. Indeed,
it actively provided rationales for financialization, in the form of the efficient-markets
hypothesis and related ideas; for concentration of capital through mergers and acquisitions in
the form of contestable-markets theory; for the gentrification of the city through attacks on
rent control and other urban policies; for remaking of labor markets through the idea that
unemployment was primarily a reflection of voluntary leisure preferences, etc. The mainstream
political parties, including those historically representing the working and middle classes, in
thrall to the 'scientific' sheen of market fetishism, gambled that they could redistribute a
share of the promised gains and thus embraced policies the effect of which was ultimately to
abandon and to antagonize a large section of their electorate.
Third, there is the push for austerity, a recurrent trope of the 'neoliberal' era which,
although not favored by all, has played an important role in creating conditions for the rise
of popular movements demanding a more expansionary fiscal stance (though they can paradoxically
simultaneously disdain taxation, as with Trumpism). The often faulty intellectual case made by
many mainstream economists for central bank independence, inflation targeting, debt
sustainability thresholds, the distortive character of taxation and the superiority of private
provision of services including for health, education and welfare, have helped to support
antagonism to governmental activity. Within this perspective, there is limited room for fiscal
or even monetary stimulus, or for any direct governmental role in service provision, even in
the form of productivity-enhancing investments. It is only the failure fully to overcome the
shipwreck of 2008 that has caused some cracks in the edifice.
The dominant economic ideas taken together created a framework in which deviation from
declared orthodoxy would be punished by dynamics unleashed by globalization and
financialization. The system depended not merely on actors having the specific interests
attributed to them, but in believing in the theory that said that they did. [This is one of the
reasons that Trumpism has generated confusion among economic actors, even as his victory
produced an early bout of stock-market euphoria. It does not rebuke neoliberalism so much as
replace it with its own heretical version, bastard neoliberalism, an orientation without a
theory, whose tale has yet to be written.]
Still, to the extent that Trumpism has any economic policy content it's the idea that a
package of immigration restrictions and corporate tax cuts[1] will make workers better off by
reducing competition from migrants and increasing labor demand from corporations. The second
part of this claim has been pretty thoroughly demolished, so I want to look mainly at the
first. However, as we will see, the corporate tax cuts remain central to the argument.
Still, to the extent that Trumpism has any economic policy content it's the idea that a
package of immigration restrictions and corporate tax cuts[1] will make workers better off
by reducing competition from migrants and increasing labor demand from corporations.
The emergence of Trumpism signifies deepening of the ideological crisis for the
neoliberalism. Neoclassical economics fell like a house of cards. IMHO Trumpism can be viewed
as a kind of "national neoliberalism" which presuppose rejection of three dogmas of "classic
neoliberalism":
1. Rejection of neoliberal globalization including, but not limited to, free movement
of labor. Attempt to protect domestic industries via tariff barriers.
2. Rejection of excessive financialization and primacy of financial oligarchy.
Restoration of the status of manufacturing, and "traditional capitalists" status in
comparison with financial oligarchy.
3. Rejection of austerity. An attempt to fight "secular stagnation" via Military
Keysianism.
Trumpism sent "Chicago school" line of thinking to the dustbin of history. It exposed
neoliberal economists as agents of financial oligarchy and "Enemy of the American People"
(famous Trump phase about neoliberal MSM).
It is never clear whether ideas or interests are the prime mover in shaping historical
events, but only ideas and interests together can sustain a ruling consensus for a lengthy
interval, such as the historic period of financialization and globalization running over
the last 35 years. The role of economics in furnishing the now-rebuked narratives that have
reigned for decades in mainstream political parties can be seen in three areas.
First, there is globalization as we knew it. Mainstream economics championed
corporate-friendly trade and investment agreements to increase prosperity, and provided the
intellectual framework for multilateral trade agreements. ...
Second, there is financialization, which led to increasing disconnection between stock
market performance and the real economy, with large rewards going to firms that undertook
asset stripping, outsourcing, and offshoring. The combination of globalization and
financialization produced a new plutocratic class of owners, managers and those who
serviced them in global cities, alongside gentrification of those cities,
proletarianization and lumpenization of suburbs, and growing insecurity and casualization
of employment for the bulk of the middle and working class.
Financialization also led to the near-abandonment of the 'national' industrial economy
in favor of global sourcing and sales, and a handsome financial rentier economy built on
top of it. Meanwhile, automation trends led to shedding of jobs everywhere, and threaten
far more.
All of this was hardly noticed by the discipline charged with studying the economy.
Indeed, it actively provided rationales for financialization, in the form of the
efficient-markets hypothesis and related ideas; for concentration of capital through
mergers and acquisitions in the form of contestable-markets theory; for the gentrification
of the city through attacks on rent control and other urban policies; for remaking of labor
markets through the idea that unemployment was primarily a reflection of voluntary leisure
preferences, etc. The mainstream political parties, including those historically
representing the working and middle classes, in thrall to the 'scientific' sheen of market
fetishism, gambled that they could redistribute a share of the promised gains and thus
embraced policies the effect of which was ultimately to abandon and to antagonize a large
section of their electorate.
Third, there is the push for austerity, a recurrent trope of the 'neoliberal' era which,
although not favored by all, has played an important role in creating conditions for the
rise of popular movements demanding a more expansionary fiscal stance (though they can
paradoxically simultaneously disdain taxation, as with Trumpism). The often faulty
intellectual case made by many mainstream economists for central bank independence,
inflation targeting, debt sustainability thresholds, the distortive character of taxation
and the superiority of private provision of services including for health, education and
welfare, have helped to support antagonism to governmental activity. Within this
perspective, there is limited room for fiscal or even monetary stimulus, or for any direct
governmental role in service provision, even in the form of productivity-enhancing
investments. It is only the failure fully to overcome the shipwreck of 2008 that has caused
some cracks in the edifice.
The dominant economic ideas taken together created a framework in which deviation from
declared orthodoxy would be punished by dynamics unleashed by globalization and
financialization. The system depended not merely on actors having the specific interests
attributed to them, but in believing in the theory that said that they did. [This is one of
the reasons that Trumpism has generated confusion among economic actors, even as his
victory produced an early bout of stock-market euphoria. It does not rebuke neoliberalism
so much as replace it with its own heretical version, bastard neoliberalism, an orientation
without a theory, whose tale has yet to be written.]
Finally, interpretations of politics were too restrictive, conceptualizing citizens'
political choices as based on instrumental and usually economic calculations, while
indulging in a wishful account of their actual conditions -- for instance, focusing on low
measured unemployment, but ignoring measures of distress and insecurity, or the indignity
of living in hollowed-out communities.
Mainstream accounts of politics recognized the role of identities in the form of wooden
theories of group mobilization or of demands for representation. However, the psychological
and charismatic elements, which can give rise to moments of 'phase transition' in politics,
were altogether neglected, and the role of social media and other new methods in politics
hardly registered. As new political movements (such as the Tea Party and Trumpism in the
U.S.) emerged across the world, these were deemed 'populist' -- both an admission of the
analysts' lack of explanation, and a token of disdain. The essential feature of such
movements -- the obscurantism that allows them to offer many things to many people,
inconsistently and unaccountably, while serving some interests more than others -- was
little explored. The failures can be piled one upon the other. No amount of quantitative
data provided by polling, 'big data', or other techniques comprehended what might be
captured through open-eyed experiential narratives. It is evident that there is a need for
forms of understanding that can comprehend the currents within the human person, and go
beyond shallow empiricism. Mainstream social science has offered few if any resources to
understand, let alone challenge, illiberal majoritarianism, now a world-remaking
phenomenon.
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @
nytimes , @ NBCNews , @ ABC , @ CBS , @ CNN
) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People! ~ Donald Trump
On Thursday, Mr. Trump expressed his distaste for journalists in more populist terms, saying,
"much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles in particular, speaks
not for the people, but for the special interests."
"The public doesn't believe you people anymore," Mr. Trump added. "Now, maybe I had something
to do with that. I don't know. But they don't believe you."
President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and ongoing fabrications of
the mass media. Never before has a President so forcefully identified the lies of the leading
print and TV outlets. The NY Times , Washington Post , the Financial
Times, NBC, CNN, ABC and CBS have been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the
larger public. They have lost legitimacy and trust. Where progressives have failed, a war
monger billionaire has accomplished, speaking a truth to serve many injustices.
"... But this part of the story was the most revelatory: "'Rand Paul has persuaded the president that we are not for regime change in Iran,' this person said, because adopting that position would instigate another war in the Middle East." ..."
"... This is significant, not because Trump couldn't have arrived at the same position without Paul's counsel, but because it's easy to imagine him embracing regime change, what with virtually every major foreign policy advisor in his cabinet supporting something close to war with Iran. "Personnel is policy" is more than a cliché. ..."
"... "So let's understand that the people pushing for regime change in Iran are seeking to destabilize and harm the country " writes TAC ..."
"... Most importantly, on arguably the most crucial potential foreign policy decision the president can make -- one that could potentially start another disastrous U.S. Middle Eastern war -- it appears to be Rand Paul who is literally keeping the peace. ..."
President Trump has been known to be hawkish on Iran. Politicoobserved
Wednesday: "Trump has drawn praise from the right-wing establishment for hammering the mullahs
in Tehran, junking the Iran nuclear deal and responding to the regime's saber rattling with
aggressive rhetoric of his own ." There are also powerful factions in Congress
and Washington with
inroads to the president that have been
itching for regime change for years. "The policy of the United States should be regime
change in Iran," says
Senator Tom Cotton, once rumored to be
Trump's pick to head the CIA.
Politicorevealed
Wednesday some interesting aspects of the relationship between Senator Rand Paul and the
president, particularly on foreign policy: "While Trump tolerates his hawkish advisers, the
[Trump] aide added, he shares a real bond with Paul: 'He actually at gut level has the same
instincts as Rand Paul '."
On Iran, Politico notes, "Trump has stopped short of calling for regime change even
though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and Bolton support
it, aligning with Paul instead, according to a GOP foreign policy expert in frequent contact
with the White House."
But this part of the story was the most revelatory: "'Rand Paul has persuaded the
president that we are not for regime change in Iran,' this person said, because adopting that
position would instigate another war in the Middle East."
This is significant, not because Trump couldn't have arrived at the same position
without Paul's counsel, but because it's easy to imagine him embracing regime change, what with
virtually every major foreign policy advisor in his cabinet supporting something close to war
with Iran. "Personnel is policy" is more than a cliché.
Paul and Trump apparently like making fun of some White House staffers, as Politico
also reported: "the Kentucky senator and the commander-in-chief have bonded over a shared
delight in thumbing their noses at experts the president likes to deride as 'foreign policy
eggheads,' including those who work in his own administration."
Eggheads indeed. For every foreign policy "expert" in Washington who now admits that regime
change in Iraq was a mistake (and a whole slew of them
won't even cop to that), you will find the same people making the case for regime change in
other countries, including
Iran , explaining how this time, somehow, America's toppling of a despot will turn out
differently.
"So let's understand that the people pushing for regime change in Iran are seeking to
destabilize and harm the country " writesTAC 's Daniel Larison. "Just as many of the same people did when they agitated for
regime change in Iraq and again in Syria, they don't care about the devastation and chaos that
the people in the country would have to endure if the policy 'works.'"
These are the same Washington foreign policy consensus standard bearers who would
likely be shaping U.S. foreign policy unfettered if 2011 Libya
"liberator" Hillary Clinton had become president -- or any other Republican
not named Trump or Paul.
When it comes to who President Trump can turn to for a more sober and realist
view of foreign policy, one who actually takes into account past U.S. mistakes abroad and
tries to learn from them, at the moment it appears to be Paul against the Washington foreign
policy world.
President Trump hired regime change advocates as advisors presumably because he wanted their
advice, yet there's evidence to suggest that at least on Iran, certain hawks' wings
might have been clipped .
Most importantly, on arguably the most crucial potential foreign policy decision the
president can make -- one that could potentially start another disastrous U.S. Middle Eastern
war -- it appears to be Rand Paul who is literally keeping the peace.
Rand's father, Ron Paul is the greatest President America never had, and unlike Trump he told
Americans what they needed to hear rather than what they wanted to hear.
The problem is that we don't consider Rand a neocon because we are comparing him to the
warmongers and lunatics in the White House. Whereas comapred to his father, Rand is a neocon
who time and time again has flip flopped on his morals and principals whereas his father
never did.
And Rand is not the reason the US doesn't want war with Iran. Iran is the reason the US
doesn't want war.
Iran simply has to flood A-stan with small arms, their respective ammo, and logistical
equipment, and 15,000 US soldiers will 'Saigoned'
Combine the above with the distaste of European countries to NOT have refugees flood their
borders and Turkey's increasing hatred for the US, and you have a perfect storm of
potentially deadly but wholly justified anti-Americanism
After WWI there was revisionist literature etc galore, the USA people realised for what their
sons had died overseas, what culminated in Versailles, at the time seen as a jewish
conference.
Baruch and Frankfurter were there, the secretaries of Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George
are said to have been jews.
Wilson had won the elections by money from Morgenthau sr, a Germany hater. The USA never
ratified Versailles, on the contrary, there came neutrality laws.
In 1932 Baruch financed the election of FDR, who had the problem of the neutrality laws.
As Sol Bloom, a friend of FDR writes 'the great accomplishment of FDR was that he slowly
prepared the USA people for war.
Beard explains it in detail. Anyone now can know the FDR deliberately provoked Pearl
Harbour, he needed an attack, at his 1940 elections he had promised 'not to send boys
oversees, unless the USA was attacked'.
In how far FDR already violated neutrality laws by using the USA Atlantic fleet for
escorting convoys, since Sept 1939, is not clear to me. Anyhow, with FDR began a new period
of USA belligerence, that continues to the present day, or stops at the present day, I still
hope that Trump ends it, therefore the hysteria at CNN, Washpost and NYT.
But, with Bolton, it is said that the neocons, jews, are back in the White House
David Sinclair, 'Hall of Mirrors', London, 2001
Henry Morgenthau, 'Ambassador Morgenthau's Story', New York, 1918
Sol Bloom, 'The Autobiography of Sol Bloom', New York 1948
Charles A. Beard, 'American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932 -- 1940, A study in
responsibilities', New Haven, 1946
Charles A. Beard, 'President Roosevelt and the coming of the war 1941, A study in appearances
and realities', New Haven, 1948
Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., 'Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, A critical examination of the
foreign policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and its aftermath', Caldwell, Idaho, 1953
What the USA would have done had it not had jews is anybody's guess. The Monroe
Declaration, as a USA correspondent wrote me, still taught in 'glowing terms', is of 1820 or
so, in Europe is was seen as colonialism. Some Euopean countries considered waging war.
Manifest Destiny came around 1840. What seems sure to me that jews had little or nothing to
do with both.
The Civil War had little to do with slavery, secession was seen by Washington as Brexit
now by Brussels. At the time war was by shooting, war now is by economic measures.
The first USA imperial war was the Spanish war, also there I do not know of any jewish
influence.
But this was different in WWI, Morgenthau financed the campaign of Wilson. The USA never
was neutral in WWI, the British, at the time illegal, blockade of Germany by GB was
tolerated. Morgenthau hated Germany, his parents had left the country because of
antisemitism.
His 1918 book, anti German propaganda, inventing the German guilt for WWI, inventing the
Armenian genocide. Henry Ford, because of Baruch's control of USA industrial production for
war, called him 'the economic dictator of the USA'. Baruch's father or grandfather also left
Germany, because of militarism, around 1870, read: he did not want to fight for the country
in which he lived. So my conclusion, USA imperialism is not of jewish origin, but was
strenghtened by jews. It is weard that Zuese does not know these facts, or ignores them.
Am reading a book about jews in Visigothic Spain and Gaul, they indeed were persecuted,
anything was done to convert them to catholicism.
If one can blame jews in Visigothic Spain around 690 for a plot of letting Muslim warriors
in, difficult to judge. In 711 it succeeded.
Yet, jewish behaviour there then reminds me of jews in tsarist Russia, where no attempt
was made to convert them, and where, as Baruch's ancestor, jews also dodged military
service.
Henry Morgenthau, 'Ambassador Morgenthau's Story', New York, 1918
Heath W. Lowry, 'The story behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story', Istanbul 1990
Alexander Solschenizyn, ´Die russisch- jüdische Geschichte 1795- 1916, >>
Zweihundert Jahre zusammen <<´, Moskau 2001, München 2002
Solomons Katz, 'The Jews in the Visigothic and Frankish Kingdoms of Spain and Gaul',
Cambridge 1937
Emperor Septimius Severus said to his sons: "Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, scorn all
others"
This is the stage the American Empire is at today. Except now the "soldiers" include the
FBI, CIA and NSA. The deep state/permanent govt has the state security organs and Trump is
trying to hold on to the loyalty of the uniformed military.
"... Taxpayer-funded mass-slaughter is now routine and goes on year after year. ..."
"... "democracy" requires free access to unconstrained information. Otherwise the voter is like cattle free to chose which pre-determined path to take to the same slaughterhouse ..."
"... Wars being fought by the United States will continue to contribute to America's growing inequality, an issue that Washington is completely ignoring. ..."
"... In THE REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN it is laid out that the business of the U.S. is war and that war is good for business and war we shall have and so it is that we are a nation of war and as in Orwells 1984 the wars are not meant to be won, the wars are meant to be continual for the profit of the elites and we the proles are to suffer. ..."
"... The sheeple are not only lead to slaughter, they are made totally unaware of the fact. Sad. ..."
"... "Why didn't Putin simply restore Yanukovych to power and leave it at that?" -- Michael Kenny, why have not you asked Brennan, the former CIA director who traveled "secretly" to Kiev to "organize" the ongoing civil war in Ukraine? ..."
Donald Trump's biggest success, thus far into his Presidency, has been his sale of
$400
billion (originally $350 billion) of U.S.-made weapons to the Saudi Arabian Government,
which is owned by its royal family, after whom that nation is named. This sale alone is big
enough to be called Trump's "jobs plan" for Americans. It is also the biggest weapons-sale in
all of history. It's 400 billion dollars, not 400 million dollars; it is gigantic, and, by far,
unprecedented in world-history.
The weapons that the Sauds and their friends, the 7 monarchies that constitute the United
Arab Emirates, are using right now, in order to conquer and subdue Yemen, are almost entirely
made in America. That's terrific business for America. Not only are Americans employed, in
strategically important congressional districts (that is, politically important congressional
districts), to manufacture this equipment for mass-murdering in foreign lands that never
threatened (much less invaded) America, but the countries that purchase this equipment are
thereby made dependent upon the services of those American manufacturers, and of the
taxpayer-funded U.S. 'Defense' Department and its private military contractors such as Lockheed
Martin, to maintain this equipment, and to train the local military enforcers, on how to
operate these weapons. Consequently, foreign customers of U.S. military firms are buying not
only U.S. weapons, but the U.S. Government's protection -- the protection by the U.S. military,
of those monarchs. They are buying the label of being an "American ally" so that the U.S. news
media can say that this is in defense of American allies (regardless of whether it's even
that). American weapons are way overpriced for what they can do, but they are a bargain for
what they can extract out of America's taxpayers, who fund the U.S. 'Defense' Department and
thus fund the protection of those monarchs: these kings and other dictators get U.S. taxpayers
to fund their protection. It's an international protection-racket funded by American taxpayers
and those rulers, in order to protect those rulers; and the victims aren't only the people who
get slaughtered in countries such as Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Libya, and Syria, and Yemen,
and Palestine, but also (though only financially) are the American public, who get fleeced by
it -- the American public provide the bulk of the real funding for this operation to expand the
lands where America's allies rule, and so to serve both America's aristocracy and the
aristocracies that are America's allies.
This is how today's America enforces its 'democracy' around the world, so that America can
spread this 'democracy', at gunpoint, and at bomb-point, like America's allies, those Kings and
Emirs, and the apartheid regime in Israel, are doing, to the people whom they kill and conquer,
with help from the taxpayer-funded American military -- funded to protect those aristocrats,
against their respective publics, and to further enrich America's own aristocrats, at the
expense of America's own public.
The global 'aggressor' has been identified by America's previous President, Barack Obama ,
who won office like Trump did, by promising 'a reset' in
relations with post-communist Russia, and by mocking Obama's opponent (Mitt Romney) for
having called Russia "the number one geopolitical
foe" -- which America's aristocracy has historically considered Russia to be, ever since
the aristocracy in Russia fled and were killed in 1917, which caused America's and other
aristocracies to fear and hate Russia and Russians, for having ousted its aristocracy, this
being an act that aristocrats everywhere
are determined to avenge, regardless of 'ideology' . (Similarly, America and its
pro-aristocracy foreign allies, seek to avenge Iran's 1979 overthrow of the Shah.) As Obama's
own actions during his subsequent Presidency made clear, and as he already had started in 2011
(if not from day one of his Presidency) secretly to implement, he privately agreed with what
Romney said on that occasion, but he was intelligent enough (which his opponent obviously was
not) to recognize that the American public, at that time, did not agree with it but instead
believed that Islamic terrorists and aristocrats such as the Sauds who finance them are that);
and Obama took full advantage of his opponent's blunder there, which helped Obama to win a
second term in the White House (after having skillfully hidden from the public during his first
term, his intention to weaken Russia by eliminating leaders who were friends or even allies of
Russia, such as in Syria, and Ukraine).
This is American 'democracy', after all ( rule
by deceit, lies ), and that's the reason why, when Russia, in 2014, responded to the U.S.
coup in Ukraine (a coup under the cover of anti-corruption demonstrations) which coup was
taking over this large country next-door to Russia and thus constituted a deadly threat to
Russia's national security,
Obama declared Russia to be the world's top 'aggressor' . Obama overthrew Ukraine and then
damned Russia's leader Putin for responding to Obama's aggressive threat against Russia from
this coup in neighboring Ukraine. Russia was supposedly the 'aggressor' because it allowed the
residents of Crimea -- which had been part of Russia until the Soviet dictator in 1954 had
arbitrarily handed Crimea to Ukraine -- to become Russian citizens again, Russians like 90% of
them felt they still were, despite Khrushchev's transfer of them to Ukraine in 1954. The vast
majority of Crimeans felt themselves still to be Russians. But Obama and allies of the
U.S. Government insisted that the newly installed Government of Ukraine must rule those people;
those people must not be permitted to rule (or be ruled) by people they've participated in
choosing.
This is today's American 'democracy' . Is it also
'democracy' in America's allied countries? (Obviously, they are more democratic than America
regarding just the incarceration-rate; but what about generally?) Almost all of those countries
continue to say that America is a democracy (despite the proof that it is not), and that
they are likewise. Are they correct in both? Are they allied with a 'democracy' against
democracy? Or, are they, in fact, phonies as democracies? These are serious questions, and
bumper-sticker answers to them won't suffice anymore -- not after invading Iraq in 2003, and
Libya in 2011, and Syria right afterward, and Ukraine in 2014, and Yemen today, etc.
Please send this article along to friends, and ask for their thoughts about this. Because,
in any actual democracy, everyone should be discussing these issues, under the prevailing
circumstances. Taxpayer-funded mass-slaughter is now routine and goes on year after year. After
a few decades of this, shouldn't people start discussing the matter? Why haven't they been?
Isn't this the time to start? Or is America so much of a dictatorship that it simply won't
happen? We'll see.
I am very tired of the limp dick gutter trash that passes for leadership in this country
trying to tell the rest of the world what they can and cant do. The Orange Clown is too big
for his britches and is doing the donkey for his Jew Israeli gang. This is not America First.
China, Germany defend Iran business ties as U.S. sanctions grip
Reuters•August 08, 2018
BEIJING/BERLIN (Reuters) – China and Germany defended their business ties with Iran
on Wednesday in the face of President Donald Trump's warning that any companies trading with
the Islamic Republic would be barred from the United States. The comments from Beijing and
Berlin signaled growing anger from partners of the United States, which reimposed strict
sanctions against Iran on Tuesday, over its threat to penalize businesses from third
countries that continue to operate there. "China has consistently opposed unilateral
sanctions and long-armed jurisdiction," the Chinese foreign ministry said. "China's
commercial cooperation with Iran is open and transparent, reasonable, fair and lawful,
not...
Turkey to continue buying natural gas from Iran despite U.S. sanctions
ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey will continue to buy natural gas from Iran in line with
its long-term supply contract, Turkey's energy minister said on Wednesday, a day after U.S.
President Donald Trump threatened that anyone trading with Iran will not do business with
America. NATO member Turkey is dependent on imports for almost all of its energy needs and
Iran is a key supplier of Ankara's natural gas and oil purchases. While the Turkish refiner
Tupras has already cut back on oil shipments from Tehran, a complete halt of energy imports
would be near impossible. Energy Minister Fatih Donmez told A Haber broadcaster that he
expected Ankara's talks with Washington on the issue to yield a positive outcome.
"democracy" requires free access to unconstrained information. Otherwise the voter is
like cattle free to chose which pre-determined path to take to the same slaughterhouse
I am in no position to contest much of the author's detail on matters of peripheral interest
to me like Ukraine but I have an honest and expert source of information which makes me
understand the unmentioned fact that, apart from the Crimeans, there is a very solid body of
Ukrainians including those whose first language is Russian whose main objective would be for
Ukraine to be and remain independent of Russia.
Correspondingly the idea that Yanukovich was
"democratically elected" is humbug coming from someone who – rightly in my view –
denies America's democratic credentials.
LOL, Justin Trudeau is having a row with Saudi Arabia for jailing a female activist. But he
care less about civilian being mascaraed in Yemen, especially children (school bus) being
bombed .
democracy requires more; it also requires voting power..
IN USA controlled America, Americans are not allow to vote on law at all and for law
maker[Pharaoh directed slave drivers of Americans] each voter gets to check on the ballot
whether he, she or it prefers the donkey Pharaoh or the Elephant Pharaoh to rule America by
selecting (voting for) the next slave driver office holder. Real candidates selected by
Americans in a true democracy do not happen.
Secondly, 527 positions in the USA are filled by voting outcome,
Americans can Corporations and Foreigners can fund these guys
vote for 1 to be your
next slave driver
1 President Republican Candidate Democrat Candidate
1 V Pres. Republican Candidate Democrat Candidate
1 Senator Republican Candidate Democrat Candidate
1 Senator Republican Candidate Democrat Candidate
1 member of the House Republican Candidate Democrat Candidate
that's a total of five votes, each voter can caste, but there are 527 jobs to be
filled?
you vote is limited, what you say is ignored., what you are allowed to know or hear about
is
directed by private media corporations and highly paid psychologist and professional
intelligence people.
Think about it, Americans have no power to control how they are Governed or whot
will inflict the next pain Americans will be made to suffer, nor are Americans allowed
access to the information needed to understand the environment or the issues important
to that environment in which they live. True in many countries.
Seems to me there are two prisons in America:
the larger unconfined prison and
the highly confined jails.
The occupants of each are under 24/7 surveillance,
not by government but by private corporations.
Neither is given access to important information, and
those in the unconfined prison are threatened each day with confinement
should the thoughts or behaviors of the threatened challenge those in control of the
system.
The article is about Militarization of our economy, but that too is not within
the control of Americans. Militarization is dictated by private corporations
and their Pharaoh owners; it is they who control the USA, and it is the USA
that Controls Americans in accord to the directives given by the Pharaohs.
The Zionist controlled U.S. gov is in the war business and has been ever since the Zionists
took control of the U.S. via their privately owned money creation machine know as the FED and
their IRS in 1913 so once they had the ability to create money out of thin air and the
ability to tax Americans to pay for the debts that war incurred, the Zionists had control of
America lock stock and gun barrel.
All the wars that the U.S. has been in since and including WWI and right down to the war
in Syria , have been Zionist banker created wars and all the millions of lives lost and the
trillions in debt from these wars can be laid at the feet of the Zionists who control every
facet of the U.S. gov, and as said by General Smedley Butler in his book War Is A Racket, and
that is what war is a Zionist racket.
In THE REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN it is laid out that the business of the U.S. is war and
that war is good for business and war we shall have and so it is that we are a nation of war
and as in Orwells 1984 the wars are not meant to be won, the wars are meant to be continual
for the profit of the elites and we the proles are to suffer.
Good God, what a hysterical rant! It's hardly worth bothering with the details but just a few
points for the heck of it. He says that the Ukrainian coup "constituted a deadly threat to
Russia's national security" but doesn't explain why that, even if true, gave Putin the right
to invade Ukraine and annex part of its territory. Why didn't Putin simply restore Yanukovych
to power and leave it at that? By the way, Ukraine has never at any time applied for EU
membership.
MSM are doing their job of keeping Americans in the dark about anything of consequence. The
State Department just posted on its site proposed new "sanctions" on Russia that essentially
amount to a declaration of war. Lunatic asylum is the most appropriate place for the whole
American "leadership", down to the last man/woman/tranny. The only thing that stands between
us and WWIII, which would be a suicide of humanity, is unbelievably cool and reasonable
position of Russian leadership.
But Americans are kept in the dark entirely, distracted with BS stories. The top "news" on
the CNN site: "2 police officers among 4 killed in Canada shooting; a suspect is in custody";
"Ex-Ohio state wrestler clarifies comment about congressman's awareness of abuse". As if any
of this would matter when nuclear missiles start flying.
The sheeple are not only lead to slaughter, they are made totally unaware of the fact.
Sad.
Do some research, there is plenty of information available for example Wall Street and the
Bolshevik Revolution by Anthony Sutton, can be had on Amazon.
So much irritation but zero refutation. The article certainly struck a nerve in an
"Intelligent Dasein," a supporter of Zio-Nazism.
Meanwhile, here is a rational approach towards war reparations: http://www.voltairenet.org/article202370.html
"'the conflict that took place in Syria is a war of aggression organized by transnational
financial interests – such as the investment fund KKR, Toyota, the global leader of
Cement Lafarge, etc. Therefore it must be the transnationals involved and the States that
worked with them that have to pay the damages."
The Jewish State must be unquestionably included in the list of "organized interests"
guilty of the war of aggression and war crimes in Syria, which resulted in a massive loss of
life and tremendous damage to Syrian infrastructure. Considering the sheer number of the
war-cheerleaders among Israel-firsters and the influence of ziocons (the Jewish Lobby) on the
US policies abroad, Israel owes a lot to Syria.
This is not some sort of inventive claims peddled by Holo-biz, but a fact-based demand that
must be honored by the aggressors.
Every time a "chosen" makes a noise about "uncomparable sufferings" he/she must be reminded
of the Jewish crimes in Russia, Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza Ghetto.
I do mean rational factually supported arguments. But creationists and adepts of any other
system of baseless beliefs, including various religions, communism, Nazism, etc., should be
also allowed to air their arguments, however ridiculous they are. Let everyone show his/her
true colors. Smart people will see through any BS, whereas fooling the fools is not a crime,
the fools exist to be fooled, often by other fools.
Censorship is an admission that you have no arguments. That's why Western MSM are so
heavily censored.
"Why didn't Putin simply restore Yanukovych to power and leave it at that?" -- Michael Kenny, why have not you asked Brennan, the former CIA director who traveled
"secretly" to Kiev to "organize" the ongoing civil war in Ukraine?
How old are you to ask such a naive question, 7 or 97?
Do you understand how much $5 billion is? -- This is how much the zionized US government had
invested in regime change in Ukraine.
The rationale for the anti-Russian sanctions carries, of course, a "humanitarian" touch:
bad Russia is punished by the righteous US for the alleged poisoning of Skripals. There is
zero evidence to support the US/UK verdict re Skripals
Here is what is left of the formerly alive and healthy children after the "righteous" US had
sent a "legitimate" "humanitarian" help in the kids' direction:
Typical of the "defenders of human rights". The "shining city on a hill" did the same in
Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and countless other
countries. As Madeleine Albright put it, the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it.
The US is always more arrogant, as opposed to super-hypocritical Europe. Hard to tell what's
worse.
If this article were any more poorly written, it would be banned by the FDA. The
repetitious, tub-thumping tone should not be consumed while driving or operating heavy
machinery.
Agree. Promising topic, disappointing delivery.
Just the usual, shallow, propaganda.
Simply a very bad article.
"... Coalition attacks on Yemeni markets are unfortunately all too common. The Saudis and their allies know they can strike civilian targets with impunity because the Western governments that arm and support them never call them out for what they do. ..."
There was another Saudi coalition airstrike on a
crowded market in northern Yemen today. Dozens of civilians have been killed and dozens more
injured. Many of the dead and injured were children whose school bus was hit in the attack:
Coalition attacks on Yemeni
markets are unfortunately all too common. The Saudis and their allies know they can strike
civilian targets with impunity because the Western governments that arm and support them never
call them out for what they do. The U.S. continues to arm and refuel coalition planes
despite ample evidence that the coalition has been deliberately attacking civilian targets. At
the very least, the coalition hits civilian targets with such regularity that they are
ignoring whatever
procedures they are supposed to be following to prevent that. The weapons that the U.S.,
Britain, and other arms suppliers provide them are being used to slaughter wedding-goers,
hospital patients, and schoolchildren, and U.S. refueling of coalition planes allows them to
carry out more of these attacks than they otherwise could. Today's attack ranks as one of the
worst.
Saada has come under some of the most intense attacks from the coalition bombing campaign.
The coalition illegally
declared the entire area a military target three years ago, and ever since they have been
blowing up
homes ,
markets ,
schools ,
water treatment systems, and
hospitals without any regard for the innocent civilians that are killed and injured.
The official U.S. line on support for the war is that even more civilians would be killed if
the U.S. weren't supporting the coalition. Our government has never provided any evidence to
support this, and the record shows that civilian casualties from Saudi coalition airstrikes
have
increased over the last year. The Saudis and their allies either don't listen to any of the
advice they're receiving, or they know they won't pay any price for ignoring it. As long as the
U.S. arms and refuels coalition planes while they slaughter Yemeni civilians in attacks like
this one, our government is implicated in the war crimes enabled by our unstinting military
assistance. Congress can and must halt that assistance immediately.
Update: CNN reports on the
aftermath of the airstrike:
The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) said that a hospital it supports in
Saada had received 29 dead bodies of "mainly children" under 15 years of age, and 40 injured,
including 30 children.
"(The hospital) is very busy. They've been receiving wounded and dead since the morning
and it is non-stop ," ICRC head of communications and spokesperson Mirella Hodeib told
CNN.
Second Update: The Associated Press
reports that the death toll stands at 43 with another 63 injured.
Third Update: The death toll has reportedly risen to 50 . 77 were
injured.
Of course I have no right to surprise or shock. They've already targeted hospitals,
foreign doctors and nurses, first responders, wedding parties, and funerals.
School buses.
We used to make movies about killing people who do things like this. Now we help them do
it.
The repetitive frequency and intensity of these attacks on hospitals, schools, markets and
other civilian gatherings, coupled with the indifference of the guilty national governments
and their international enablers, signals that the world and human species is passing through
a mass psychosis. This psychosis is playing itself out at all levels. Fascism, which is very
current as a national psychology, is generally speaking, a coping strategy for dealing with
nasty chaos. This coping strategy is designed around generating even more chaos, since that
is a familiar and therefore more comfortable pattern of behavior; and that does provide a
delusion of stability. A good example would be the sanctions just declared by the Trump
Administration on Iranian commerce. In an intrinsically connected global market, these
sanctions are so thorough that they qualify as a blockade, within a contingency plan for
greater global conflict. But those who destroy hospitals, schools, school buses and public
celebrations are not, otherwise, forward looking nice people. We are descending into a nasty
fascist war psychosis. Just shake it. Live. Long and well.
"even more civilians would be killed if the U.S. weren't supporting the coalition"
If we did not hand them satellite images, did not service, repair and refuel their planes,
and did not sell them the bombs, then they would . kill more civilians how? They could not
even reach their targets, let alone drop explosives they do not have.
What Would Mohammad Do? Buy bombs from the Russians? Who have better quality control and
fewer duds, hence more victims?
What Would Mohammad Do? Get the UAE to hire Blackwater to poison the wells across
Yemen?
How exactly do the profiteers in our country, that get counted out blood money for every
single Yemeni killed, propose that the Saudis and Emiratis would make this worse?
But, good to know that our "smart" and "precise" munitions can still hit a school bus.
Made In America!
The coverage in the media has been predictably cowardly and contemptible in the aftermath of
this story. I read articles from CNN and MSNBC and they were variations on "school bus
bombed", in the passive tense – with no mention of who did it or who is supporting them
in the headline, ad if the bombings were natural disasters.
Fox, predictably, was even worse and led with "Biblical relics endangered by war", which
speaks volumes about the presumed priorities of their viewership.
This, and not anything to do with red meat domestic politics, is the worst media
malpractice of our time. "Stop directly helping the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks drop
bombs on school children" should be the absolute easiest possible moral issue for our media
to take a stand on and yet they treat it like it's radioactive.
Speaking as someone who considers themselves a liberal I am infuriated by the Democrats
response. How can the party leadership not see that if they keep flogging the horse of
Russian trolls and shrugging their shoulders over American given (not sold – *given*)
bombs being dropped on schools and hospitals, no one is ever going to take the supposed
Democratic anti-war platform seriously again. The Republicans can afford to be tarde by
association with these atrocities. The Democrats can't.
I wonder how many Democrats are in the same boat as me right now: I may not like Trump or
the Christian conservatives but fights over the Supreme Court or coal plants or a healthcare
law look terribly petty compared to the apparent decision by Saudi Arabia to kill literally
millions. For the first time in my life I'm seriously wishing there was a third-party
candidate I could support and the congressional elections just so I could send a message on
this.
@Hunter C
Vote Libertarian Party. You won't agree with a lot of their domestic agenda, but they're not
going to win, so it doesn't matter. The noninterventionist foreign policy is your message.
"Following an attack this morning on a bus driving children in Dahyan Market, northern
Saada, (an ICRC-supported) hospital has received dozens of dead and wounded," the
organisation said on Twitter without giving more details.
In a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, the coalition called the strike
a "legitimate military action"
The Comment section:
"The US provides the in-flight refueling that makes these bombing sorties possible. The
"Five Eyes" provides the surveillance that picks the targets, and the navigation to hit
them.
KSA is doing precisely what the AZ Empire requires of it. Just as the British Royals and
their banker sponsors dictated over a century ago, so does the Empire direct these heinous
crimes today.
If the Saud Royals ever did go "rogue," they'd be taken out just as the AZ [American
Zionist] Empire has done time and time again."
"There is also the documented presence of American forces and officers in the operations room
of the Saudi coalition." https://twitter.com/abcdaee198/status/1027649243568386055
"Why is it that the Zionist media were up in arms every time White Helmets were digging
Syrian children out of rubble or dousing them with hoses? Dozens of children were slaughtered
in Yemen, and many more maimed and injured and hundreds of thousands are being subjected to
famine but there's only deafening silence on the Zionist-run media."
"Imagine the reaction if the Russians or Syrians had blown up a busload of kids."
-- On the same topic: Israel demanded -- and BBC changed its headline. In a headline, BBC
claimed that "Israeli air strikes 'kill pregnant woman and baby.'" After some time, BBC
changed its title to "Gaza air strikes 'kill woman and child' after rockets hit Israel:
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/250275
Obama spoke about mothers sending their children to school in his acceptance speech for
the
Nobel Peace Prize.
He contrasted reality vs hope
and we learned which one he would deliver.
Obama in Oslo, December 10, 2009,:
"Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty
still takes the time to teach her child, scrapes together what
few coins she has to send that child to school
-- because she believes that
a cruel world still
has a place for that child's dreams.
Let us live by their example.
We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us,
and still strive for justice .
We can admit the intractability of deprivation,
and still strive for dignity.
Clear-eyed,
we can understand that there will be war,
and still strive for peace.
We can do that -- for that is the story of human progress; that's the
hope
of all the world; and at this moment of challenge,
that must be our work here on Earth.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
One week later Obama shredded dozens of women and children in Yemen
and covered it up.
I've written many times Obama was Bush II - BUT F...KING TRUMP IS IN THE WHITE HOUSE NOW!
So why are you giving us the ancient history deflection???????????
The pic provides an example of how the Outlaw US Empire implements its global population
control policy--all bombs, no kids. Twitterverse is madder than a wet hen. One went to
Trump's twitter to ask where's his outrage over these kid's real deaths, not the staged ones
he launched missiles at Syria over. It deserves to be retweeted millions of times.
Unfortunately, sadists are incapable of being shamed; they just grin at such pics while
congratulating themselves. Betcha the Trump dossier got it backwards--It was Trump who pissed
all over the Russian women.
Almasdarnews. Com. Are reporting a massive Israile army convoy heading for Gaza bigger than
enything seen since 2014 ! This looks serious ! The whole dam world picture is looking way
beyond serious !!!
kudos the exceptional nation in support of those other exceptional nations - ksa and
israel...
everyone else on the planet want to know when this horror will end...
Ahh, thats why. The Saudis are incompetent and vile, but trust the us to be
even more incompetent and even more vile and putrid.
This is horrible! I see it and can not really do much. It is a never ending story of innocent
people being killed off. But it does nurture a solid and hot hate to those people who are
architects of this. They feel safe and secured, but they are sitting on a volcano, and when it
goes, they will go too. Maybe a Gadaffi end.
Posted by: Den Lille Abe , Aug 9, 2018 4:42:25 PM |
13
Ahh, thats why. The Saudis are incompetent and vile, but trust the us to be even more
incompetent and even more vile and putrid.
This is horrible! I see it and can not really do much. It is a never ending story of innocent
people being killed off. But it does nurture a solid and hot hate to those people who are
architects of this. They feel safe and secured, but they are sitting on a volcano, and when
it goes, they will go too. Maybe a Gadaffi end.
Posted by: Den Lille Abe | Aug 9, 2018 4:42:25 PM |
13 /div
Hate is a hefty spice; it can make you blind to reason, it can make you oblivious to truth,
and make you inoculated against love. But hate controlled, is also a drug that is powerful
and useful, hate nurtured and fed can move mountains and empires. Hate is good in manageable
doses and wrecking in large ones. But take it at own risk.
They are claiming these are legitimate military targets, they targeted 'militants', the
Houthis use 'child soldiers', and use human shields. I bet Nikki Haley still thinks they are
the most wonderful people ever, on the front lines, fighting against the real monsters,
Iran.
What's that supposed to mean??? Trump is President! Aren't you excusing Trump by dredging
up Obama's shet? That excuse not to criticize Trump is getting real old.
@15 Nah, Christian, you are clearly wrong. Nikki would consider KSA to have the 2nd most
wonderful people ever, with the USA holding the Bronze Medal position. There is no doubt who
she holds as The Chosen People.
Don't let this stuff get normalised ! That's why they do it in plain site. It desensitises
the dumb public
i e trump supporters in u s, torys in uk. We should be feeling outrage and hatered towards
the people that
do this . Including our own governments.
No one is excusing Trump. The point that needs to be emphasized is that the War Party has
two wings: repubs and dems. Every last president since WWII has put the interests of imperial
conquest over the interests of the American people. Bill Clinton, Bush, Obama and now Trump
(as well as all of their wannabes Gore, Kerry, McCain HRC) were and are war mongers. They are
united in their lust for killing children (don't forget Madeline Albright with her "it was
worth it" over the 500,000 babies Clinton killed through sanctions).
This evening #switch off bbc is trending number one on Twitter and number four world wide!
Time we all pushback. on the net,on the streets, everywhere we can.no justice no peace !
Mark2 opines It desensitises the dumb public i e trump supporters
Are you serious? You should listen to my college educated colleagues (more than half with
professional degrees) most of whom are democrats and not one who voted for Trump. When it
comes to war against Syria, Libya, threats against Russia they are true blooded war mongers.
Actually worse than Trump supporters because they in general oppose those wars or war
threats.
Toivos @ 23
Dumb is as dumb does! They come in all shapes sizes and political party's . Trumps a greedy
pig puts children in cages and is a kkk racist don't make excuses he's a monster full
stop!
Don't give me eny of that o but, o but blah blah.!!!
It already is normalized. Go look at many of the comments on MSM (left and right) and so
called progressive sites. Hopefully those are all astroturfers but I suspect many are real
folks. Its luny tunes. They live in the Matrix and are blissfully unaware. Like something out
of 1984 during the 2 minute hate but its 24/7 , or maybe walking dead if the WD could type or
talk.
Another sterling example of how the US teaches its allies to be incompetent, vicious and
cowardly in targeting and killing those least able to fight back.
O Canada! Recently, I praised them as "New Trumpland". But why did they forget that silence
can be golden? Apparently, it dawned on PM that his party is called "liberal" and thus it
must make "liberal calls"*. But what cause should be selected? Massacres and starvation of
cute emaciated children? Conservative predecessor of current PM got ca. 7 G USD contract for
"vehicles" (motorized infantly?) for KSA, and Trudeau will not endanger precious Canadian
jobs. After leaving the task to the Foreign Minister (Freedland, Feminazi**), the plight of
women right activists in KSA with family members in Canada.
Canada cannot yield to Saudi Arabia's deranged overreaction
The regime's reaction to a couple of tweets is more about snuffing out its own country's
voices of dissent
Iyad El-Baghdadi, Amarnath Amarasingam · for CBC News · Posted: Aug 09, 2018
4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: August 9
If Canada folds, some fear that a line would be drawn in the sand, and behind that line,
petty Arab dictators could do what they want with their activist communities, without as much
as a complaint from the world. (Cliff Owen/Associated Press)
=====
Of course Canada cannot yield. For starters, it is unclear what would appease the irate
Crown Prince. Perhaps Trudeau and Friedland coming together to KSA to submit to a public
flogging. But judging from the titles I have seen, Canadians cherish "delicate balance", and
they though that an occasional complaint that is not 100% aligned with USA and principal
customers of Canadian products should be safe.
Agreed. When it comes to knowing the Truth of the Outlaw US Empire's overseas deeds, most
people are illiterate/ignorant. They hang the flag aside their front porch and feel
righteous. The only reason we don't have multitudes of people saluting whoever's POTUS and
chanting Sieg Heil is because in the back of their tiny minds they somehow know that's
incorrect behavior but don't know why. Some provided feedback on Michael Hudson's going
autobiographical saying his upbringing seemed unreal--faked--thus showing how little they
know of WW2 Home Front US history when people were much more informed and politically
savvy.
It seems safe to say that Animal Farm & 1984 have both put down
extensive roots within the Outlaw US Empire to the point where digging up and destroying
those weeds will cause major social damage. Can't make an omelet without breaking eggs is how
the saying goes. But a positive outcome isn't the only possibility.
We need to remember this' the about left or right ! That's just devide and rule. This about
the 1% killing off the 99%
Agend 21.what they are doing to Yemen people now they will do to you next.
The deliberate targeting of civilians is Outlaw US Empire policy since WW2 despite it
being a War Crime. Guernica was an outrage, but Powell had it covered up since spoke directly
to US actions since the paint dried in 1937. The School Bus was yet another of all too many
Guernicas that have occurred since. Someone mentioned desensitized. Yes, on an International
Scale. It was an act of Terror, but how many are describing it as such? BigLie Media? Not a
chance if they show/mention it at all.
I'm not sure we should generalize about Canadians. Trudeau is trying to satisfy his base
and presumably staying true to his own liberal convictions. But I've met Canadians who
dislike him intensely. They do not think gender politics, welcoming refugees, settling native
land claims, lecturing Saudi Arabia etc. is the best way to maintain a high standard of
living.
Israel demanded - and BBC changed its headline. In a headline, BBC claimed that "Israeli air
strikes 'kill pregnant woman and baby.'" After some time, BBC changed its title to "Gaza air
strikes 'kill woman and child' after rockets hit Israel https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/250275
A good comment from HistoryHacker (Guardian web page), I thought I share it:
"Let's see: in 1913 the British grabbed Iranian oil and made it their property. Six
years later, Britain imposed another agreement and took over Iran's treasury and the army.
During the Second World War, Britain's requisitioning of food led to famine and widespread
disease. Shortly after that war, Iran's own efforts to establish its nascent democracy and
nationalize the oil industry were thwarted. And by whom? Eisenhower joined the systematic
British looting, and, sadly, by 1953, the blossoming Iranian democracy was completely
destroyed by the covert operation of the American CIA and British MI6, known as Operation
Ajax. In place of the democracy was installed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a US-British puppet, a
despot deeply hated by his own people.
America picked up the baton, and here's Trump going bat crazy!
What could Iranians possibly think?! What do you think?"
@36 I knew that PB. Excuse my inadequate attempt to emulate your tone.
But I think it's true that Canadians enjoy a high standard of living mainly because of
things like water, oil, minerals, wheat, lumber etc. and most prefer not to get involved in
Saudi Arabian politics.
I hope that Canada will finally lead heavy public condemnation of the Saudi-UAE coalition
murderous actions in Yemen. Canada has nothing to loose anymore, it is high time it take a
serious stand on the 3 years human rights abuse of the Yemenis.
It should indirectly send a dissaproval message to the USA on its complicity in these war
crimes...
Maybe it is time for Canada, to reinstate diplomatic relation with Iran to snub the Saudis
and the USA, but I am dreaming...
.
"But I think it's true that Canadians enjoy a high standard of living mainly because of
things like water, oil, minerals, wheat, lumber etc. "
Not quite. It's because of water, oil, minerals, wheat lumber, etc., AND they don't breed
like rodents.
India has plenty of resources - adjusting for the cold climate in Canada, probably about
as much as Canada, effectively. It's just that these resources don't go that far split up 1.4
billion ways and counting.
And Yemen? With very little water, and one of the highest fertility rates in the world,
what do you expect?
What to make of the new sanctions put in place by the State Dept against Russia?
What about those on Iran?
Are these implemented to generate WAR?
Whether it be against Russia, Iran or China, The US attitude is orchestrated by
Zion/Israel.
Why deal with the US when Israel is the culprit?
Wiping out Israel is the solution. Obliterating Israel will certainly ease
the World's woes.
Of course, targeted assassinations should be carried out.
Short of this, Netanyahu should be kept waiting for days whitout being able
to meet Putin. His ambassador should be expelled and the Russian Ambassador to Israel
recalled.
Sanction Israel in every way possible. Break the Gaza Siege. Wipe out Israel's
Navy. Down its jets over Lebanon. Kill its Jericho rockets at lift off.
There is also the documented presence of American forces and officers in the operations
room of the Saudi coalition....These guys have not been sent there by Obama...I guess....
But what most makes me feel sick is not that American commenters out there, well payed or
volunteer, insist after two years already on this cantinele, what takes me out of my nerves
is that the Russians insist...in throwing balls out with certain issues....
But what could have really happened? Just yesterday or the day before I was reading that
Israel and Hamas were in negotiations...From that to this...I wonder what could be the
breaking point...
Talks
were a ruse as usual . Supposedly, a cease fire was in place but was broken as reported
at the link. Ongoing protests against the "Nationality Law" continue and go unreported as
usual. The continuing murder of Gazans serves as cover.
@37, "But I think it's true that Canadians enjoy a high standard of living mainly because of
things like water, oil, minerals, wheat, lumber etc. and most prefer not to get involved in
Saudi Arabian politics."
As a lifelong Canuckistani, my view is that Canada is the world's largest mine - and it is
not mine.
@45 But I understand it's not as easy to get mining permits as it used to be. Lot of
environmentalists and first nations lawyers involved. Which is why Canadian mining companies
move to Africa.
the USA will perhaps suffer blowback, both at home and in many places 'strategic' to its
Empire, for generation or two to come, for all the horrible and savage war crimes perpetuated
by it and its allies on the poor people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia,
Palestine, and especially now Yemen, the poorest of the poor - the sorrows of Empire
The US provides the in-flight refueling that makes these bombing sorties possible. The "Five
Eyes" provides the surveillance that picks the targets, and the navigation to hit them.
KSA is doing precisely what the AZ Empire requires of it. Just as the British Royals and
their banker sponsors dictated over a century ago, so does the Empire direct these heinous
crimes today.
If the Saud Royals ever did go "rogue," they'd be taken out just as the AZ Empire has done
time and time again.
CarlD, the purpose of sanctions is to hurt the citizens of a country enough that they will
rise up and revolt against their ruling class.
The AZ Empire has been striving for complete global dominance for a long time, and that
means either destroying Russia and China or at least installing "friendly" governments.
Hence, sanctions, "trade wars," and infiltration to foment "color revolutions."
Pence's new Space Command is a blatant telltale that the twice-hacked and never-audited
Pentagon has a massive hemorrhage of funds and Trump will be demanding ANOTHER $40B budget
increase for Pentagon to paper over a huge Deep Purple Hole in the Bucket.
So Saudis sanction Canada but will still let the oil flow to them (2billion a year) and the
US sanctions Russia but will still buy space rockets from them , and they will still sell
them to us. Trade war with China but they still buy US Treasuries to finance US debt. British
owned BBC rents out their studios to RT to help Russia with their propaganda
Woodrow Wilson : "Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me
privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and
manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized,
so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak
above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
Today some call them ruling or power elites, global elites for the most part. Elites is an
interesting word whose origins come from the french word for chosen and latin word for
elect.
1. Wealth from natural resources. This is a bit of mixed blessing, because with some
exceptions, mining is very capital intensive, so the profit margins are so-so, and job
creation is also so-so. Canada is blessed with nice mix of extracting industries,
agriculture, "normal" manufacturing, financial centers etc. They also have somewhat
reasonable spending in terms value for money in health and military sectors, saving ca. 10%
of GDP between the two compared with the less rational southern neighbor Perhaps this is
still short of 10%, but USA also wastes money and human resources on prison complex and other
inanities.
2. Liberal Canada. Domestically, I do not know enough, but "harmonizing with USA" could
please some conservatives while being too expensive to implement. On foreign policy they
stick to the worst of liberalism, not standing much for anything, even for their beloved
Vilna Ukrayina, although converting Ukraine to land of milk and honey with capable military
and a reasonable level of corruption is beyond capacity of any foreign power. But they
implemented what used to be totally unjustifiable insult, "feminazi". That said,
conservatives learned from Trump to raise mind boggling issue and gain in polls, lately, how
to stop hordes of "deplorables" crossing the border. I guess a cheapish solution would be to
create a network of recreational trails with very confusing mapping (even GPS) and totally
confusing signage, and plant some smilax = green briar or other thorny plants to impede
hiking according to compass directions. A note on GPS maps based on satellite pictures:
software has very hard time telling dead ends from actually passable trail connections.
3. Populist-progressive Canada of my dreams. Declare the conflicts with KSA and Trump to
be matters of national dignity, punish KSA by stopping delivery of military vehicles per
Harper's contract and purchases of oil, replace the latter with Iranian. Would Trump dare to
impose secondary sanctions, fine American companies in Canada.
Why is it that the Zionist media were up in arms every time White Helmets were digging Syrian
children out of rubble or dousing them with hoses?
Dozens of children were slaughtered in Yemen, and many more maimed and injured and
hundreds of thousands are being subjected to famine but there's only deafening silence on the
Zionist-run media.
Syrian children had propaganda value; Yemeni children have no value at all. Americans,
Zionists and Saudis are sick and depraved.
A little correction to Circe, Aug 9 11:18:38 PM. SELECTED Syrian children were newsworthy, a
recent massacre by ISIS in Sweida was newsworthy only as an example of a failure by "the
regime". An earlier example, when majority of people of Greater Aleppo lived in the western
part controlled by Damascus, "Aleppo" meant only the eastern part, controlled by the
"moderate" rebels, and victims of moderate massacres and shelling were totally un-newsworthy.
Natural resources drive 20 per cent of the economy -- and about 10 per cent of all the
jobs in Canada. These natural resources also help Canada attract manufacturing and value
added business that utilize domestically produced metals, fuel and timber (as opposed to more
expensive imports) Profit motive is overstated, large companies are focused more on income
growth and market share. The jobs that are produced are good paying jobs as well
I'd rather have more good paying capital intensive industries than low pay labour
intensive service and manufacturing industries that may generate more profits but which end
up mostly in CEO and top managements bank accounts
Frankly, the mystery is why America has not invaded Canada and taken over since we last
tried in 1812. :>)
Mark2 @ 31 said:"We need to remember this' the about left or right ! That's just devide and
rule. This about the 1% killing off the 99% "
Yep, bottom line statement. From austerity to all neoliberal policies, and the world-wide
wars now going on, are basically nothing more than class warfare directed at the 99% to
enrich the already rich.
Frankly, the mystery is why America has not invaded Canada and taken over since we last tried
in 1812. :>)
Posted by: Pft | Aug 10, 2018 12:06:44 AM | 61
Absorbing Canada could undermine political balance in USA leading to such calamities like
socialized medicine, legal marijuana etc. Keeping them on Puerto Rico status is not tenable
given the ethnic composition -- too many English speaking whites. If we could just annex
Alberta...
Bang on cue, TG @ 39 uses a comment about Canada's standard of living (brought about in part
by its governments' spending on transport infrastructure - in particular, transcontinental
railways - that stimulated job growth and enabled the agricultural and manufactured wealth of
the provinces to be spread across the nation and to be exported overseas) to push a racist
opinion about how poor countries are at fault for being poor because their people don't have
access to birth control measures made in rich countries.
...
..for all the horrible and savage war crimes perpetuated by it and its allies on the poor
people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Palestine, and especially now Yemen, the
poorest of the poor - the sorrows of Empire.
Posted by: michaelj72 | Aug 9, 2018 9:12:39 PM | 47
White man's burden...
A phrase used to justify European imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries; it is the title of a poem by Rudyard Kipling. The phrase implies that imperialism
was motivated by a high-minded desire of whites to uplift people of color.
Part of the targeting assurance happens by looking at unexpected "gaps" in electronic
communication signals. When there is a lot of cellphone communication noise" where is is
suddenly absent, despite presence of humans, indicated an interesting anomaly for target
acquisitions.
To confuse the enemy, these "silent spots" should be mirrored in different locations. They
counter The selectief bias.
During WWII, RAF lost planes to German AAA. They wondered where armor them up?
Counterintuitively, the mathematician Abraham Wald explained that, if a plane makes it back
safely despite a bunch of bullet holes in its wings, it means that bullet holes in the wings
aren't very dangerous.
Where you really need the armor, are the areas that, on average, don't have any bullet
holes.
Why? Because planes with bullet holes in those places never made it back. That's why you
don't see any bullet holes there on the ones that do return.
Posted by: CarlD @ 51 "And who is behind all of this?"
Wouldn't you agree that the PTSB are, as Paul Simon wrote, A Loose Affiliation of
Billionaires?
The way I see it, the pinnacle of the pyramid are members of the dynasties that have
controlled the finance system for centuries. Rothschilds, Warburgs, the Vatican, the European
Royal Families and such. They profit off of everything, since all revenues generated by all
industries pass through their sticky fingers, in addition to their Central Banking cabal that
almost every country on earth is fully beholden to.
They are not a monolith, in that they compete with one another, but they all share
interest in keeping this system in place.
Then, at the next level down there are the members of the Nouveau Riche, like the
Rockefellers and Carneigies whose wealth was only generated a couple generations ago, and the
even newer rich who do not have dynastic power (yet), but do wield enough wealth to influence
the actions of the Empire, like the MIC "Daddy Warbucks" and tech industry newcomers.
And of course, there are the upper-level managers of Empire like Kissinger, Brzezenski,
Soros, etc.
We have seen images of dead children of warfare before. I am not sure if it helps the antiwar
cause. I will have to go read Susan Sontag's "The Pain of Others." In any case, thanks for
posting it, b.
Will DJT order a retaliatory strike on KSA after being so moved by these photos like he
was when the children of the fake gas attacks in Syria were being paraded around on the msm?
I think not. Sad!
Posted by: Pft | Aug 10, 2018 12:06:44 AM | 61:
"Frankly, the mystery is why America has not invaded Canada and taken over since we last
tried in 1812. :>)"
Canada and the US are both members of the Five Eyes. Clearly, their roles in the great
chessboard are different. But the way I see it, the nation-states are fictions that serve the
charade of representative democratic self-rule.
"... Although he was a brilliant orator, Hitler's failures are too innumerable to list. [Link] He was certainly a failure as a painter and his General staff considered him an incompetent military strategist (fortunately for the Allies.) However, Hitler was merely the right man at the right time and place to achieve power. As Ross explains, Hitler was , "the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality." That sounds all too close to home, doesn't it? ..."
"... Enter Donald Trump; the right man at the right time and place. He's a brute, a bully, and a demagogue, but he understands the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times and he adjusts his message to appeal to his base. ..."
"... I have known many bullies; on the playground and in the boardroom. A bully may achieve short-term gain, but for long-term pain. It is very easy to destroy corporate culture, but extremely difficult, if not impossible, to mend a toxic workplace after the bully was dismissed. Now, extrapolate this to the world under Donald Trump. ..."
"... After his first meeting with Trump, he wrote that Trump "saw every unknown person as a threat and that his first instinct was to annihilate that threat. 'He's like a velociraptor. He has to be boss, and if you don't show him deference he kills you.'" ..."
"... If everything is so awesome, why are Americans drinking themselves to death in record numbers?" [Link] ..."
We're told that great leaders make history. Like so much of what we are taught, that's a
load of bunk. Yes, great leaders make it into the history books, but they do not make history.
You make history. I make history. All we dirt people together make history. Government-run
schools don't teach us this because it makes us easier to control.
The "Great Man Theory" [Link] tells us that history can be
largely explained by the impact of great leaders. This theory was popularized in the 1800's by
the historian and social commentator Thomas Carlyle [Link] The Great Man Theory downplays the
importance of economic and practical explanations. It is an appealing theory because its
simplicity offers the path of least resistance. That should ring an alarm.
Herbert Spencer [Link] forcefully disagreed with the "Great
Man Theory." He believed that great leaders were merely products of their social environment.
"Before he can remake his society, his society must make him." Tolstoy went so far as to call
great leaders "history's slaves." However, this middle ground still misses the mark.
At the other extreme is "history from below" [Link] aka 'the people's history.'
"History from below" takes the perspective of common people rather than leaders. It emphasizes
the daily life of ordinary people that develop opinions and trends " as opposed to great people
introducing ideas or initiating events." Unfortunately, this too is only half the equation, and
it is no surprise that it appeals to Leftist and Marxist agendas.
Having studied politics and history ever since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963,
I determined that although history is partly the environments and individuals shaping each
other reciprocally, it is more than that. It is you and I who make history with every decision
we make, every dollar we spend, everything we learn, every vote we cast and every opinion we
voice. It's even what we don't do. It is mostly organic and cannot easily be explained in a
simple, linear fashion the way the aforementioned political philosophers tried.
Great leaders are merely the right person at the right time and place. However, they do not
lead so much as follow from the front. They stick their finger in the air to see which way the
wind blows. They may be brutes, bullies or demagogues, but they are sensitive enough to
understand the zeitgeist , the spirit of the times and so, they adjust their message
accordingly.
That is one reason Jimmy Carter was a failed President. He was a nice guy, but he did not
get an accurate reading of the times. Instead, he acted on the wishful thinking that is
characteristic of liberals.
One of the significant shortcomings of many political philosophers is their ignorance of
human nature. That is why Collectivism in all its forms appeals to the downtrodden. "Share and
share alike" is a beautiful ideal so long as you get other people's stuff, but the flip side of
the coin is not quite so appealing.
I heard a radio interview with a self-avowed Communist:
"So do you believe in 'share and share alike?"
"Yes, I do."
"And, if you had more than one house, you'd give them away and keep just one for
yourself?"
"Yes. I would."
"And, if you had more than one vehicle, you'd give them away and keep just one for
yourself?"
"Yes, I would."
"And, if you had more than one shirt "
"Whoa, wait a minute! I have more than one shirt."
I can't remember the rest of the interview as I was laughing too hard.
The Great Man Theory is one extreme, its critics are somewhere in the middle and 'the
history of the people' is at the other end of the spectrum. Despite this, we are still
fascinated by great leaders. That is human nature. Whether we are slaves at heart, or lack
self-confidence or some other explanation is endlessly debatable. However, the fact remains
that we are fascinated by great leaders and our inability to understand them further disproves
the accepted theories.
Adolph Hitler is the ultimate example of our fascination with a great man. According to Alex
Ross's "The Hitler Vortex," [Link]
tens of thousands of books have been written about Hitler. "Books have been written about
Hitler's youth, his years in Vienna and Munich, his service in the First World War, his
assumption of power, his library, his taste in art, his love of film, his relations with women,
and his predilections in interior design ('Hitler at Home')."
Tens of thousands of books failed to explain Hitler. Ross, too, does no better when he
writes, "What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of
himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his métier. It is a mistake to call him
a failed artist; for him, politics and war were a continuation of art by other means." WTF? Are
we to believe Hitler was simply an artist who used the world as his canvas? Equally pointless
is the notion that, "Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a
transcendent leader hovering above the fray."
Although he was a brilliant orator, Hitler's failures are too innumerable to list.
[Link] He
was certainly a failure as a painter and his General staff considered him an incompetent
military strategist (fortunately for the Allies.) However, Hitler was merely the right man at
the right time and place to achieve power. As Ross explains, Hitler was , "the result of a
large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture
increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality." That sounds all too close to
home, doesn't it?
Enter Donald Trump; the right man at the right time and place. He's a brute, a bully, and a
demagogue, but he understands the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times and he adjusts his message
to appeal to his base.
I have known many bullies; on the playground and in the boardroom. A bully may achieve
short-term gain, but for long-term pain. It is very easy to destroy corporate culture, but
extremely difficult, if not impossible, to mend a toxic workplace after the bully was
dismissed. Now, extrapolate this to the world under Donald Trump.
John Feeley is the former U.S. Ambassador to Panama portrayed in The New Yorker magazine
article "The Diplomat Who Quit the Trump Administration." [Link]After his first meeting with Trump, he wrote that Trump "saw every unknown person as a threat
and that his first instinct was to annihilate that threat. 'He's like a velociraptor. He has to
be boss, and if you don't show him deference he kills you.'"
Feeley fears that "the country was embracing an attitude that was profoundly inimical to
diplomacy 'If we do that we will become weaker and less prosperous.'" He is correct in that
regard. China is building a large, new embassy at the mouth of the Panama Canal visible to
every ship "as they enter a waterway that once symbolized the global influence of the United
States."
Feeley is also correct in warning that the Trump administration's gutting the diplomatic
corps will have negative repercussions. Throughout Latin America, leftist leaders are in
retreat, and popular movements reject corrupt governance. Yet, America is losing "the greatest
opportunity to recoup the moral high ground that we have had in decades." Instead, the U.S. is
abandoning the region to China. Feeley calls it "a self-inflicted Pearl Harbor."
China is replacing U.S. influence in Latin America and Chinese banks "provided more than a
hundred and fifty billion dollars in loan commitments to the region In less than two decades,
trade between China and Latin America has increased twenty-seven-fold." Although that began
long before Trump, "We're not just walking off the field. We're taking the ball and throwing a
finger at the rest of the world."
Feeley says that he felt betrayed by what he regarded as "the traditional core values of the
United States." Sorry, Feeley, but America lost its core values long before Trump was elected.
Trump is not the cause; he is the symptom, the result of the declining American Empire.
Hunters know that one of the most dangerous animals is a wounded one. The same is correct
about failing empires because they are a danger not only to others but to their own citizens as
well. The elites are running out the clock in order to loot as much as they can before it hits
the fan.
We dirt people will continue to suffer from stagnant wage growth while the so-called
increase in national wealth goes to a tiny minority.
[link]
Moreover, nobody wins a trade war that raises consumer prices even if Trump eventually
triumphs.
The economy staggers under the weight of phony wars, fake finances, fake GDP, fake CPI, fake
employment, fake pensions and fake everything.
[Link] The national debt increases $1 trillion every year, consumer debt is at an all-time
high
[Link] while the tax cuts benefit only the ultra-wealthy. Also, the fake news tells us
everything is wonderful. Don't believe it. "If everything is so awesome, why are Americans
drinking themselves to death in record numbers?"
[Link]
It is said that every few generations, money returns to its rightful owners. That is what's
happening now.
America emerged relatively unscathed from the Second World War whereas many other countries
were bombed back into the Stone Age. The Marshal Plan helped rebuild countries that were to
become both America's future customers and its competitors. America's busy factories
transformed from war production to consumer goods, the demand for which was created by "the
Father of Spin" Edward Bernays' marketing propaganda. [Link]
As well, the U.S. stole the gold that the Nazis had stolen from others, [Link]
and that wealth in addition to robust, productive capacity temporarily propelled the U.S. far
ahead of other nations. However, it would not last. Eventually, the undeserved prosperity of
the 1950's and '60's began to run out of steam as other nations rebuilt and competed with the
U.S. President Nixon defaulting on the dollar in 1971 by "closing the gold window" signaled the
end of America's good times . The subsequent debt creation now unconstricted by a gold basis
helped to cushion the blow for several decades, but wealth was now flowing to Asia along with
factory jobs.
For 5,000 years, China was a world superpower with only a short, two-century hiatus that is
now ending as China again emerges as an economic superpower. Such a massive shift in wealth
cannot be attributed to either leadership or the people below. It is a painful reversion to the
mean. All the finger-pointing and wailing and gnashing of teeth not even bombastic Trump and
his tariffs can stem the tide and make America great again as money continues to flow back to
its rightful owners.
The USA is a declining, bankrupt, warmongering police state and most of its indoctrinated
citizens think they live in a free, peaceful country.
China is a corrupt police state, but most of its citizens know it.
We have met the enemy, and he is us. The future awaits.
The United States Department of Justice would apparently have you believe that the Kremlin
sought to subvert the five-million-member strong National Rifle Association (NRA) by having two
Russian citizens take out life memberships in the organization with the intention of corrupting
it and turning it into a mouthpiece for President Vladimir Putin.
Both of the Russians – Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin – have, by the way,
long well documented histories as advocates for gun ownership and were founders of Right to
Bear Arms, which is not an intelligence front organization of some kind and is rather a genuine
lobbying group with an active membership and agenda.
Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media, Russians can own guns but the
licensing and registration procedures are long and complicated, which Right to Bear Arms,
modeling itself on the NRA, is seeking to change.
Maria Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in solitary confinement in a
federal prison, having been charged with collusion with Torshin and failure to register as an
agent of the Russian Federation. It is unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed to
register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, but she has not been granted bail
because, as a Russian citizen, she is considered to be a "flight risk," likely to try to flee
the US and return home. It is to be presumed that she is being pressured to identify others
involved in her alleged scheme to overthrow American democracy through NRA membership.
Indeed, in any event, it would be difficult to imagine why anyone would consider the NRA to
be a legitimate intelligence target. It only flexes its admitted powerful legislative muscles
over issues relating to gun ownership, not regarding policy on Russia. In short, Butina and by
extension Torshin appear to have done nothing wrong. Both are energetic advocates for their
country and guns rights, which they appear to believe in, and Butina's aggressive networking
has broken no law except not registering, which in itself assumes that she is a Russian
government agent, something that has not been demonstrated. To put the shoe on the other foot,
will every American who now travels to Russia and engages in political conversations with local
people be suspected of acting as an agent of the US government? Once you open the door, it
swings both ways.
One might dismiss the entire Affair Butina as little more than a reflection of the
anti-Russia hysteria that has been sweeping the United States since Hillary Clinton lost the
2016 election, but that would be unfair to those remaining honest FBI agents who may have
investigated Butina and Torshin and come up with what they believed to be a plausible case for
an indictment . There were possibly suspicious money transfers as well as email intercepts that
might be interpreted as incriminating.
But two important elements are clearly missing.
The first is motive. Did the Kremlin seriously believe that it could get anything
substantial out of having a gun totin' attractive young Russian woman as a life member in the
NRA? What did the presumed puppet masters in Moscow expect to obtain apart from the sorts of
group photos including Butina that one gets while posing with politicians at the annual NRA
convention? Sure, the photo might even evolve into a cup of coffee together, but what is the
end game?
Second is the lack of any of the hallmarks of an intelligence operation, which is referred
to in the business as tradecraft. Spies meet secretly or at least outside the public eye with
prospective agents whereas Maria operated completely in the open and she made no effort to
conceal her love for her country and her desire that Washington and Moscow normalize
relations. Spies also communicate securely, which means that they use encrypted systems or
various cut-outs, i.e. mis-directions, when maintaining contact with those who are running
them. Again, Maria did none of that, which is why the FBI has her emails. Also spies work
under what is referred to as an "operating directive" in CIA-speak where they have very
specific information that they seek to obtain from their contacts. There is no indication
that Maria Butina in any way sought classified information or intelligence that would relate
either to the security of the United States or to America's political system. And finally,
Maria made no attempt to recruit anyone and turn them into an actual controlled Russian
agent, which is what spies eventually seek to do.
It has come down to this: if you are a Russian and you are caught talking to anyone in any
way influential, there is potentially hell to pay because the FBI will be watching you. You are
automatically assumed to be part of a conspiracy. Once "evidence" is collected, you will be
indicted and sent to prison, mostly to send a message to Moscow.
It is the ultimate irony that how the old Soviet Union's judiciary used to function is now
becoming standing operating procedure in the United States.
Which means that he is not a real fighter. Just a "very flexible" pretender.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump was no revolution and has been little deviation from the norm. The hyperventilating diaspora not withstanding, nobody would know he was anything but another middle of the road neocon with a bit more hawkish immigration policy (that he never intends to implement). ..."
"... And while many of us are amused with some of his antics, President Trump seems at other times to be evolving into a caricature of the anti-PC candidate. Remember the hijacking of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, with bigots and flakes becoming the faces of the organizations in the mass media? The Establishment may in the same way be using Trump to discredit the views of those who voted for him. ..."
"... , on the stupidity of his picks for underlings. He has total responsibility for most of the Feral Gov. bureaucracy, and you don't start off picking people that are against you. ..."
"... In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider. ..."
"... A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won't fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics." ..."
"... Trump's behavior is very obviously conflicted, but I don't think it's because he doesn't know his own mind. My working hypothesis is that he's making some effort to carry out his platform (very unlike Obama), but that behind-the-scenes forces are resisting mightily. ..."
"... Maybe it is right that Trump is just the latest iteration of Obama, a sop to our nation's discontent. But what choice did we have other than to support him and hope for the best? He does seem increasingly under neocon influence. ..."
Many of Trumps worst problems are the result of his own egregious choices. Such as the
appointment of obvious Deep State apparatchiks to Cabinet and advisory positions, allowing
GOP Inc sycophants such as Ryan, McConnell, Graham and others to ride rough shod over his
campaign promises. Playing good cop to the bad cop Deep State, with Russia. Taking a
belligerent stance with North Korea, Iran, China and the EU.
I strongly suspect he is playing a Nationalist swamp drainer to his base, while in reality he
is a Deep State Globalist.
No fighter of the establishment would make such stupid mistakes as Trump has.
the establishment elites of both parties, who have also not given up on a foreign
policy of using America's economic and military power to attempt to convert mankind to
democracy .
Really, Pat? Surely you know they are trying to convert mankind to Globalism/Bolshevism,
as the rest of your article makes clear. But for some reason Pat feels compelled to put some
stupid lie like this in every article. Cognitive dissonance? Or an effort to keep getting
invited to the DC Club Parties?
"The terrible and fateful events that befell our wonderful and tragic homeland, are carried
as a searing and purifying fire on our souls.
In this fire are burnt the false basis, the errors and prejudices on which the ideology of
the former Russian intelligensia were built. On these basis it was impossible to build
Russia; these falsehoods and prejudices led her to decay and death."
Ivan Ilyin, On Fighting Evil by Force
I hope he is only doing this because he thinks he needs to go slow and play along
sometimes because of all the swamp dwellers aligned against him. However, it is allowing the
swamp to run the clock out on him. It is also allowing the intelligence community to avoid
the shake up it needs and force his foreign policy into something the people don't want.
If he truely is willing to fight the swamp, there will come a time when he can fight and
the swamp won't have any bullets left. However, it doesn't help when he continues to agree
with the swamp that the Russians are meddling in our elections.
Trump was no revolution and has been little deviation from the norm. The hyperventilating
diaspora not withstanding, nobody would know he was anything but another middle of the road
neocon with a bit more hawkish immigration policy (that he never intends to implement).
Global flavela bazaar neoliberalism for everyone is the revolution and it is still on
schedule everywhere outside of the Visegrad.
Don't forget that he has chosen Bolton, Giuliani, Haley
Linh Dinh not only called the election months out, but explained that President Trump,
like President Obama, would amount to nothing more than a vent pipe for a different group of
gullible Americans.
I, too, said that Mr. Trump neither believed nor would act effectively on much of what
many of us here loved hearing in those speeches written by young Mr. Miller. I encouraged
people not to vote, and was accused of doing so to help Jeb, then Hillary.
It sounds like you may be coming to see things differently than you did in 2016.
And while many of us are amused with some of his antics, President Trump seems at
other times to be evolving into a caricature of the anti-PC candidate. Remember the hijacking
of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, with bigots and flakes becoming the faces of the
organizations in the mass media? The Establishment may in the same way be using Trump to
discredit the views of those who voted for him.
AGREED, on the stupidity of his picks for underlings. He has total
responsibility for most of the Feral Gov. bureaucracy, and you don't start off picking people
that are against you.
I don't suspect Trump is a Globalist at heart, though. He may be under tremendous pressure
of some sort by the Deep State to ACT LIKE one.
Remember Ross Perot!
No, I always knew that Trump might not be everything we hoped. I just knew that only he
could beat Hillary. Anybody else but Trump or Cruz and we would already have that Luis
Gutierrez amnesty for 30 million illegals and 100 million more put on the fast track.
"In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and
bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class.
Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking
complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider.
A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as
a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war
abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won't fulfill any of his
election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics."
I don't know what your point is? Are you saying we should not have voted or chosen
somebody we know could not win? What is the point of crying that Trump is a bad guy when
there was no other choice?
I don't suspect Trump is a Globalist at heart, though. He may be under tremendous
pressure of some sort by the Deep State to ACT LIKE one. Remember Ross Perot!
It is probable he is under threat from the Deep State, but he should have known that going
in.
The Deep State probably has an unbreakable hold on our government at least by electoral
means. Other means will be needed to crush it.
If he truely is willing to fight the swamp, there will come a time when he can fight and
the swamp won't have any bullets left.
I wish that were true, but I believe the Deep State is so entrenched in our government (it
is the government) that it will not be destroyed by electoral means.
" Who says current values -- some of them deeply evil " "Think about the money we could save and make."
So says the materialist flesh-bot from the Cato Institute in regard to open borders. I'm
assuming the libertarian is okay with the attempt at mainstreaming transgenderism and the
sexualization of children by cultural Luciferians. I'd guess the freedom fighter views
transhumanism as a positive evolutionary step. I'm sure the liberty lover will fit right into
the synthetic/organic hive-mind that will be the result.
Nonsense, Trump and the altright have forced the J-Left to accelerate their plans, tipping
their hands and awakening a lot more people. Thousands will flock to our banner over Sarah
Jeong alone.
The best thing about Pat Buchanan is that, nowadays at least, he's always polite. His is
an example that all of us should take to heart while we still can: Not insulting your
adversary is the first step to bringing him onto your side.
Pat isn't always absolutely frank in his supporting points or in his framing of a
political objective, but then he's not the kind to give up when the Germans bomb Pearl Harbor
either.
The elites have always been the enemies of the people throughout history, in every country.
From the pharaohs of Egypt to the Patricians of Rome, the British aristocracy, the European
monarchies, the Bolsheviks, Soviet Politburo, Chinese princelings to the present day tech
plantation owners, Wall Street billionaires and political elites, these people will do
everything they can to maintain their elitism, if everyone else has access to what they have,
namely money and power, they wouldn't be elite anymore.
It's why democracy does not work. Anyone who can get elected president has to come from
the elites or have wide support of the elites, like Obama. Those who are rich enough to run
their own campaigns, like Trump, is already by definition an elite. Can you trust an elite to
look out for the masses? Not since time immemorial.
Trump campaigned on no more foreign wars and no more illegal immigration, America First.
Two years on and we continue to have wars everywhere, last year we granted more OPT for
foreign grads than at any time in history, he hasn't done jack on H1b, has increased H2b,
still allows H1b spouses to work, no cut on legal immigration, and managed to completely fuck
up healthcare. If it's truly bipartisanship that tripped him up, you wouldn't know it judging
by the umpteen Cohens from Wall Street in his cabinet, and his backing of RINOs like Ryan and
neocons like Pence, Bolton and Haley. Instead of focusing all his energy fighting the Deep
State, he's trying to start a war with Iran. What the fuck do we care about Iran? Trump's
true identity and intention are in doubt. His biggest problem is he lacks principles. There's
only so much you can trust a guy who got rich working almost exclusively with shysters.
America is going through our own Bolshevik revolution, but too many are either unaware,
apathetic or too afraid to speak out.
In deeper over his head than the former community organizer/ constitutional scholar (wow,
what a resume!) fool Øb☭ma? Yeah, there's a lot going on, but picking the right
underlings should not be hard for a businessman – delegation of work is a big part of
the job.
Did you read the post about Mr. Ross Perot? What happened back in 1992 was pretty damn
strange, looked at with the understanding I have now.
You are right, David. Mr. Buchanan is VERY polite. He's as civil as he can be, as if this
were 1985 and the more American-oriented GOP was quibbling over the budget with the more
American-oriented Democrat party in some committee hearings. I've written this before a
couple of times regarding Pat Buchanan:
IT! IS! NOT! 1985! The people we are dealing with will absolutely NOT come to our side if
we treat them nice. It just greatly encourages their stupidity when you are polite and try to
be understanding (unless they are, which is NEVER). David, you are under the highly erroneous
impression that you are dealing with people who are sane. I hate to break it to you this time
of night, but our enemies are deeply insane.
I hope this reply was respectful enough to you, though, David.
Reportedly Richard Spencer created the term "alt-right".
Richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 11, 1978) is president of the National Policy
Institute, as well as Washington Summit Publishers. Spencer rejects considers himself a white
nationalist or white identitarian. Spencer created the term "alt-right", which he considers a
movement about "white identity". Spencer advocates white-European unity and a "peaceful
ethnic cleansing" of nonwhites from America, criticizes Euroskepticism, and advocates the
creation of a white ethno-state that would be open to all "racial Europeans", which Spencer
considers a reconstitution of the Roman Empire.
Spencer sounded as dumb as a brick on Dinesh Joseph D'Souza's new movie, 'Death of a
Nation', but I suppose that a director can make anybody look the fool, with their edits.
a) Watching the smugness of Hillary and the MSM disappear on election night: by itself worth
the price of admission.
b) Using twitter to go over the heads of the pearl-clutching MSM.
c) Seeing the partisanship in the intelligence community exposed, especially the FBI.
d) Trying to have a formal rather than discretionary immigration policy.
e) Restricting immigration from Mideast countries with radicals.
f) Seeing him try to get along with Putin.
g) International independence in foreign policy.
h) Shutting down the trans-oceanic secret trade treaties and reexamining trade.
i) Just talking to Kim il-Sung
j) Covfefe, because it upsets prudes.
What I haven't liked about Trump:
a) Even more sanctions on Russia.
b) Losing his original advisers to neocon types, one by one.
c) Implacable hostility toward Iran.
Ambiguities in Trump's behavior:
a) Saying he doesn't trust the intelligence community, then retracting.
b) Sanctions, Syrian bombings and military buildup while trying to have talks.
Trump's strange political decisions:
a) What is Jared Kushner?
b) Why didn't he fight Flynn's resignation?
c) Why did he appoint Mueller & Rosenstein?
d) Why did he appoint Pompeo & Bolton?
Trump's behavior is very obviously conflicted, but I don't think it's because he doesn't
know his own mind. My working hypothesis is that he's making some effort to carry out his
platform (very unlike Obama), but that behind-the-scenes forces are resisting mightily. In
some cases I think he's being worn down, in others, I think he's being subjected to very
heavy pressure to avoid and even walk back certain policies. Why did he get rid of his
campaign policy advisers, why did he make politically hostile appointments in the FBI and
Justice, why did he appoint advisors who hold stated positions contrary to his? What made him
retract what he said about trusting intelligence agencies? These were the same guys who let
911 happen after all.
I wouldn't necessarily be happy if he succeeded with all his goals. However, it seems that
every time he tries to do something, massive political barriers and MSM hostility are thrown
up in front of him*. So, I do think that he's fighting the deep state, that the situation is
pretty much revealing how it works, as I'd hoped. There's a chance that he might do some
effective swamp-draining eventually, but we're still in the shallow end.
*With the unfortunate exception of Iranian sabre-rattling.
Buchanan's discussion of the Pundits' opinion starkly exposes their elitist arrogance:
For free trade is always and ever a "win-win for trading partners."
Maybe for the trading partners, but what about the rest of the population? But the most
revealing is:
Who says America's current values -- some of them deeply evil -- are the right ones?
That'd be the people, wouldn't it? And who exactly are the "we" here:
"Think about the money we could save and make." This is truly economics uber alles,
economy before country.
Buchanan reveals a bad attitude: imagine suggesting that money might not be the
bottom line.
But of course the Globalists are plotting; what would make them stop? My money is
on the Kalergi-Coudenhove Plan, formed in 1924, for the Jewish people to rule Europe, based
on lame excuses derived from eugenics theories that make Hitler's racial policies look
positively enlightened. After you've had a chance to look it up, and you stop laughing that
such a preposterous idea could possibly get enough traction to last beyond the next day's
hangover, see this link: https://uia.org/s/or/en/1100019566 , and then search
for the Coudenhove-Kalergi prize recipients in 2010 and 2012. This mad project is about to
survive its centennial.
When you learn what true free trade is you will learn to appreciate the
benefits.
Substitute communism for free trade and it's true believers say the same thing about their
imaginary utopia. Hell, why stop there, put in any ISM you want and get the same thing.
When you learn what true free trade is you will learn to appreciate the benefits.
or else? It's not even clear that "true free trade" is possible, or what it is, for that
matter. The term is a propaganda meme: it's emotionally evocative but linguistically vague.
It's not at all clear what specific policies (i.e., legislation) are being advocated.
Buchanan criticised consequences of the agreements that we have , not hypotheticals
with consequences we'd like to have. The former may have been good for the traders, but they
haven't been beneficial for the middle class, nor the nation at large.
My working hypothesis is that there are three forces at play:
1. Trump with his own agenda – MAGA, terminate wars, stop globalisation
2. Zionist radical globalists
3. Zionist MAGA sympathisers
No. 3 are of course really still Israel-firsters and don't care much about America, but
they do realise that the radical globalist agenda undermines U.S. power, which is causing the
U.S. to lose its grip on the rest of the world. Thus, they support MAGA in order to preserve
and restore U.S. power, so that it may continue to serve Israel.
Trump has allied himself with No. 3, because without any allies he would go the way of JFK
in a hurry (he still might). They let him pursue his nationalist economic agenda, but each
time he tries to pursue his other aims – detente, mostly, a foreign policy that truly
serves America first – they yank his leash.
As I said, this is my working hypothesis; there may be better explanations.
Agree that Mr. Buchanan should be respected, not denounced for not being someone else. He
has long worked in the trenches, and I don't think it too much to say that he and others like
him helped create the alt-Right and made Trump's win possible. This is another fine piece by
him.
I was impressed with Trump's tweet reply to the Kochs. In part Trump said, "I'm for
America First & the American Worker -- a puppet for no one." I'd like to believe that but
it gets harder as his words of support for America are beginning to pale against his acts of
neocon continuity.
Maybe it is right that Trump is just the latest iteration of Obama, a sop to our nation's
discontent. But what choice did we have other than to support him and hope for the best? He
does seem increasingly under neocon influence. The pressures are intense. The negative ones
only relent when he does what they want. The positive pressures reward him with the decadence
of wealth and power. I'd be surprised at this point if he can remember the people he promised
he'd never forget. But we got a mention in twitter
A new excerpt
from a book by
C.J. Chivers, a former U.S. infantry captain and New York Times war correspondent,
tells the story of a young man from New York City who joined the U.S. army and was send to the
Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. While the man, one Robert Soto, makes it out alive, several of
his comrades and many Afghans die during his time in Afghanistan to no avail.
The piece includes remarkably strong words about the strategic (in)abilities of U.S.
politicians, high ranking officers and pundits:
On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad,
with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reordering nations and cultures,
have not succeeded. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars did not achieve what their
organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the generals in command. Astonishingly
expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and
politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continued in varied forms and under
different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center
in 2001. They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost
as if distant war is a presumed government action.
That description is right but it does not touche the underlying causes. The story of the
attempted U.S. occupation of the Korengal valley, which Civers again describes, has been the
theme of several books and movies. It demonstrates the futility of fighting a population that
does not welcome occupiers. But most of the authors, including Chivers, get one fact wrong. The
war with the people of the Korengal valley was started out of shear stupidity and
ignorance.
The main military outpost in the valley was build on a former sawmill. Chivers writes:
On a social level, it could not have been much worse. It was an unforced error of occupation,
a set of foreign military bunkers built on the grounds of a sawmill and lumber yard formerly
operated by Haji Mateen, a local timber baron. The American foothold put some of the valley's
toughest men out of work, the same Afghans who knew the mountain trails. Haji Mateen now
commanded many of the valley's fighters, under the banner of the Taliban.
Unfortunately Chivers does not explain why the saw mill was closed. Ten years ago a piece by
Elizabeth Rubin touched on this:
As the Afghans tell the story, from the moment the Americans arrived in 2001, the Pech Valley
timber lords and warlords had their ear. Early on, they led the Americans to drop bombs on
the mansion of their biggest rival -- Haji Matin. The air strikes killed several members of
his family, according to local residents, and the Americans arrested others and sent them to
the prison at Bagram Air Base. The Pech Valley fighters working alongside the Americans then
pillaged the mansion. And that was that. Haji Matin, already deeply religious, became
ideological and joined with Abu Ikhlas, a local Arab linked to the foreign jihadis.
Years before October 2004, before regular U.S. soldiers came into the Korengal valley, U.S.
special forces combed through the region looking for 'al-Qaeda'. They made friends with a
timber baron in Pech valley, a Pashtun of the Safi tribe, who claimed that his main competitor
in the (illegal) timber trade who lived in the nearby Korengal river valley was a Taliban and
'al-Qaeda'. That was not true. Haji Matin was a member of a Nuristani tribe that spoke
Pashai . These were a
distinct people with their own language who
were and are traditional hostile to any centralized government (pdf), even to the Taliban's
Islamic Emirate.
The U.S. special forces lacked any knowledge of the local society. But even worse was that
they lacked the curiosity to research and investigate the social terrain. They simply trusted
their new 'friend', the smooth talking Pashtun timber baron, and called in jets to destroy his
competitor's sawmill and home. This started a local war of attrition which defeated the U.S.
military. In 2010 the U.S. military, having achieved nothing, retreated from Korengal. (The
sawmill episode was described in detail in a 2005(?) blog post by a former special force
soldier who took part in it. It since seems to have been removed from the web.)
Back to Chivers' otherwise well written piece. He looks at the results two recent (and
ongoing) U.S. wars:
The governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, each of which the United States spent hundreds of
billions of dollars to build and support, are fragile, brutal and uncertain. The nations they
struggle to rule harbor large contingents of irregular fighters and terrorists who have been
hardened and made savvy, trained by the experience of fighting the American military
machine.
...
Billions of dollars spent creating security partners also deputized pedophiles, torturers and
thieves. National police or army units that the Pentagon proclaimed essential to their
countries' futures have disbanded. The Islamic State has sponsored or encouraged terrorist
attacks across much of the world -- exactly the species of crime the global "war on terror"
was supposed to prevent.
The wars fail because they no reasonable strategic aim or achievable purpose. They are
planned by incompetent people. The most recent Pentagon ideas for the U.S. war on Afghanistan
depend on less restricted bombing rules. Yesterday one predictable and self defeating
consequence
was again visible:
An American airstrike killed at least a dozen Afghan security forces during intense fighting
with the Taliban near the Afghan capital, officials said Tuesday.
...
Shamshad Larawi, a spokesman for the governor, said that American airstrikes had been called
in for support, but that because of a misunderstanding, the planes mistakenly targeted an
Afghan police outpost.
...
Haji Abdul Satar, a tribal elder from Azra, said he counted 19 dead, among them 17 Afghan
police officers and pro-government militia members and two civilians.
...
In the first six months of this year, United States forces dropped nearly 3,000 bombs across
Afghanistan, nearly double the number for the same period last year and more than five times
the number for the first half of 2016. ... Civilian casualties from aerial bombardments have
increased considerably as a result, the United Nations says.
One argument made by the Pentagon generals when they pushed Trump to allow more airstrikes
was that these would cripple the Taliban's alleged opium trade and its financial resources.
But, as the Wall Street Journalreports
, that plan, like all others before it, did not work at all:
Nine months of targeted airstrikes on opium production sites across Afghanistan have failed
to put a significant dent in the illegal drug trade that provides the Taliban with hundreds
of millions of dollars, according to figures provided by the U.S. military.
...
So far, the air campaign has wiped out about $46 million in Taliban revenue, less than a
quarter of the money the U.S. estimates the insurgents get from the illegal drug trade. U.S.
military officials estimate the drug trade provides the Taliban with 60% of its revenue.
...
Poppy production hit record highs in Afghanistan last year , where they are the country's
largest cash crop, valued at between $1.5 billion and $3 billion.
More than 200 airstrikes on "drug-related targets" have hardly made a dent in the Taliban's
war chest. The military war planners again failed.
At the end of the Chivers piece its protagonist, Robert Soto, rightfully vents about the
unaccountability of such military 'leaders':
Still he wondered: Was there no accountability for the senior officer class? The war was
turning 17, and the services and the Pentagon seemed to have been given passes on all the
failures and the drift. Even if the Taliban were to sign a peace deal tomorrow, there would
be no rousing sense of victory, no parade. In Iraq, the Islamic State metastasized in the
wreckage of the war to spread terror around the world. The human costs were past counting,
and the whitewash was both institutional and personal, extended to one general after another,
including many of the same officers whose plans and orders had either fizzled or failed to
create lasting success, and yet who kept rising . Soto watched some of them as they were
revered and celebrated in Washington and by members of the press, even after past plans were
discredited and enemies retrenched.
Since World War II, during which the Soviets, not the U.S., defeated the Nazis, the U.S. won
no war. The only exception is the turkey shooting of the first Gulf war. But even that war
failed in its larger political aim of dethroning Saddam Hussein.
The U.S. population and its 'leaders' simply know too little about the world to prevail in
an international military campaign. They lack curiosity. The origin of the Korengal failure is
a good example for that.
U.S. wars
are rackets , run on the back of lowly soldiers and foreign civil populations. They enriche
few at the cost of everyone else.
Wars should not be 'a presumed government action', but the last resort to defend ones
country. We should do our utmost to end all of them.
you know, it is just as easy to influence a foreign society by making movies (Bollywood in
this case) with a certain bent, the one you want people to follow. After a few years of
seeing the Taliban as villains, there would be no fresh recruits and mass desertion. But, the
weapons manufacturers wouldn't be making their enormous profits. This same effect can be seen
in American society, where the movies coming out of Hollywood started becoming very
aggressive in tone around the time that Ronald Reagan became president. Movies went from The
Deer Hunter to Rambo and Wall Street. Is it any wonder that even the progressive Left in the
USA thinks it is ok to attack their political adversaries and that violence is justified?
This is the power of movies and the media.
Thank you 'b' this post as always is a true in depth education !
If you run for president of the United States of America enytime soon you'v got my vote !
bjd @1 highlights an important truth similar to that exposed by Joseph Heller in
Cache-22 and by Hudson's Balance-of-Payments revelation he revealed yet again
at
this link I posted yesterday . Most know the aggressive war against Afghanistan was
already planned and on the schedule prior to 911 and would have occurred regardless since
after Serbia the Outlaw US Empire felt it could do and get away with anything. 911 simply
provided BushCo with Carte-Blache, but it wasn't enough of a window to fulfill their desired
destruction of 7 nations in 5 years for their Zionist Patron.
IMO, as part of its plan to control the Heartland, those running the Outlaw US Empire
never had any plan to leave Afghanistan; rather once there, they'd stay and occupy it just as
the Empire's done everywhere since WW2. The Empire's very much like a leech; its occupations
are parasitic as Hudson demonstrated, and work at the behest of corporate interests as Smedly
Butler so eloquently illustrated.
As with Vietnam, the only way to get NATO forces to leave is for Afghanis to force them
out with their rifles. Hopefully, they will be assisted by SCO nations and Afghanistan will
cease being a broken nation by 2030.
The Wall Street Journal article on the Taliban's ties to the local drug trade also the
reveals deliberate omission practiced by the MSM, which keeps its readers actively
misinformed. Estimating illegal drug revenues contribute as much as $200 million to the
Taliban, the article fails to put that in proper context: that figure represents merely
7%-13% of total production receipts (estimated at 1.5 to 3 billion dollars). Most informed
persons know exactly who reaps the rewards of more than 80% of the Afghan drug products, and
why this much larger effort is not the focus of "targeted airstrikes."
1. "The wars fail because they no reasonable strategic aim or achievable purpose........
Since World War II, during which the Soviets, not the U.S., defeated the Nazis, the U.S. won
no war. The only exception is the turkey shooting of the first Gulf war."
2 "U.S. wars are rackets, run on the back of lowly soldiers and foreign civil populations.
They enriche few at the cost of everyone else"
Your points in 1 ignore the reality expressed by 2. The real strategic aims and purposes
are not those provided for public consumption. Winning wars is not the objective, the length
and cost of wars is far more important than results. Enriching and empowering the few over
the many is the entire point of it all
And lets put an end to "US " responsibility for all evils. Its a shared responsibility.
None of this is possible without the cooperation of Uk and its commonwealth nations, EU,
Japan and the various international organizations that allow the dollar to be weaponized such
as IMF/World Bank and BIS not to mention the various tax havens which support covert
operations and looting of assets obtained in these wars (military or economic).
Until the rest of the world is prepared to do something about it they are willing
accomplices in all of this.
The global elites are globalists, they dont think in national terms. Its a global elitist
cabal at work that is hiding behind the cover of US hegemony.
karlof1 @ 4 said:"The Empire's very much like a leech; its occupations are parasitic as
Hudson demonstrated, and work at the behest of corporate interests as Smedly Butler so
eloquently illustrated."
You bet.. The operative words being " work at the behest of corporate interests "
And so it goes around the globe. Question is; How to get this information to the herded
bovines the general public has become?
Without a major network to disseminate such info, we're all just spinning our wheels. Oh,
but, the therapy is good..
Very interesting stories - especially re: the timber mill warlord competition.
Defoliants are still used in warfare - especially "by accident". Carpet bombing is still
legal. If NATO wanted to wipe out the poppies, it surely could do so.
Pft at 6, reminded me of this zinger:
The nation state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the
principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and
planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. -
The Brzez
jayc @5 implies it, and I'll say it more directly: US soldiers guard poppy fields in
Afghanistan. I'm also reminded of Alfred C McCoy's famous 1972 work The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia.
The nation state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal
creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in
terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. - The Brzez
Posted by: fast freddy | Aug 8, 2018 6:18:02 PM | 9
This gem hides a deep truth. One has to replace "creative" and "far in advance", instead,
we have power relationships. And those power relationships resemble central planning of the
Communist states, concept that is attractive in abstraction, but centralization cannot cope
with complexities of societies and economies, in part because the central institutions are
inevitably beset by negative selection: people rise due to their adroit infighting skills
rather than superior understanding of what those institutions are supposed to control.
Ultimately, this proces leads to decay and fall. "Nation states" themselves are not immune to
such cycles and are at different stages of the cycle creative-decadent-falling. However,
international finance lacks observable "refreshing" mechanisms of nation states.
War as always is financial racket, $trillion stolen, MIC thrives, took over with CIA all
prerogatives of power and has million agents in US alone in every institution government and
corporate.
I call it success of ruling elite. B war would stop tomorrow if it was unsuccessful read
unprofitable for those who wage it. Nazi death camps were most profitable enterprises in
third Reich.
For some reason, when the US wars are admitted to be civil wars, no one questions whose side
did the US take until it is too late and so very few tune in. Incompetence is the excuse. It
reminds me of that adage to not blame on malice that which can be explained by stupidity but
stupidity has been used to excuse a lot of malice. It's one reason why "military
intelligence" resides at the top of oxymorons along with "congressional ethics" and
"humanitarian intervention."
It is amazing to think that the US has been in Afghanistan for 17 years and supposedly
knows where the opium and its processors are and yet could not take it out. (The pix of
soldiers patrolling poppy fields is rich.) The initial excuse years ago was that the US
needed to support the warlords who grew/sold it. What is the excuse now? Incompetence,
corruption, laziness?
The US likes the idea of opium products going into Iran and Russia ... who have protested
to no avail. A bit of indirect subversion.
The US likes opium products going into the US. It makes for broken citizens who lack zeal for
knowledge, and therefore, comprehension; and the will to organize against the PTB.
Importantly, being illegal, opiate use feeds the pigs who own the prison-industrial complex.
Given the current, longstanding dynamics within the Outlaw US Empire, I don't see any
possibility of the required reforms ever having an opportunity to get enacted. The
situation's very similar to Nazi Germany's internal dynamic--the coercive forces of the State
and its allies will not allow any diminution of their power. Within the Empire, thousands of
Hydra heads would need to be rapidly severed for any revolt to succeed, and that requires a
large, easily infiltrated organization to accomplish. Invasion by an allied group of nations
invites a nuclear holocaust I can't condone. I think the best the world can do is force the
Empire to retreat from its 800+ bases and sequester it behind the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans
until it self-destructs or drastically reforms itself--Containment. But for that to work,
almost every comprador government would need to be changed and their personages imprisoned,
exiled or executed--another close to impossible task. Ideally, the ballot box would
work--ideally--but that requires deeply informed voters and highly idealistic, strongly
principled, creative, and fearless candidates, along with an honest media.
Yeah, writing can be good therapy. But I'm no more cheery than when I began. Must be time
for intoxicants.
The world does not need to force the Evil Empire to retreat from its 1,000 (and counting)
military bases around the planet.
All the world needs to do is trade with Iran, Venezuela or some other outsider nation. The
Evil Empire will be so busy trying to punish everyone who trades with these countries by
extending sanctions against the outsiders to their trading partners that the Empire
effectively ends up having sanctioned everyone away and it becomes the victim of its
sanctioning.
The 1,000+ military bases around the globe are then effectively on their own and the
soldiers and administrators inside can either stay there and starve, throw in their lot with
the host nation's citizenry or beg to be allowed to return home.
thanks b... as long as the americans support the troops, lol - all will be well apparently...
jesus.. meanwhile - the support for the 1% bomb makers and etc continues... maybe it is the
mutual fund money that folks are concerned about maintaining..
"In the first six months of this year, United States forces dropped nearly 3,000 bombs
across Afghanistan." what is that? about 17 or 18 bombs a day or something? what about the
drones? they have to be put to use too... best to get someone who is involved in their own
turf war in afgan to give out the targets.. brilliant... usa war planning is mostly destroy
and destroy and honour the troops and wave their stupid american flag and that is about it...
sorry, but that is what it looks like to me..
its not so much they want to end the war on terror or the war on drugs.........they just want
to say one thing to cover their asses and do another thing completely..
no matter what there should of been one general who got it right.....but we see it was
never about peace .... it was always about war and its profits. anyone who didn't take orders
or even had a hint of the right strategy would be Hung like dirty boots to dry.
what is the right strategy? leave. just as other empires did. before you call on your
faces
to be even more frank....its not even about the money as that is not as important than
having a nation of 300m regurgitate the news that they are there for 17 years to be the
police of the world. because USA are the good ones... that they need to buy the biggest
trucks which can't even fit in normal parking spaces because they have land mines(I mean
ieds...) to avoid and need to haul 5tons of cargo to their construction job all while
watching out for terrorists and trump Hillary divisions. is disorienting and it is
deliberate. just as having a war last without a reason is deliberate while they entertain the
masses with games..
@23dh... same deal here in canuckle head ville... people remain ignorant of what there money
is ''''invested'''' in... could be saudi arabia for all the canucks think... btw - thanks for
the laugh on the other thread... you made a couple of good jokes somewhere the past few days!
i don't have much free time to comment at the moment..
McCoy, in "The Politics of Heroin" gives a more complete picture:
In 1996, following four years of civil war among rival resistance factions, the Taliban's
victory caused further expansion of opium cultivation. After capturing Kabul in September,
the Taliban drove the Uzbek and Tajik warlords into the country's northeast, where they
formed the Northern Alliance and clung to some 10 percent of Afghanistan's territory. Over
the next three years, a seesaw battle for the Shamali plain north of Kabul raged until the
Taliban finally won control in 1999 by destroying the orchards and irrigation in a prime
food-producing region, generating over 100,000 refugees and increasing the country's
dependence on opium.
Once in power, the Taliban made opium its largest source of taxation. To raise revenues
estimated at $20-$25 million in 1997, the Taliban collected a 5 to 10 percent tax in kind on
all opium harvested, a share that they then sold to heroin laboratories; a flat tax of $70
per kilogram on heroin refiners; and a transport tax of $250 on every kilogram exported. The
head of the regime's anti-drug operations in Kandahar, Abdul Rashid, enforced a rigid ban on
hashish "because it is consumed by Afghans, Muslims." But, he explained, "Opium is
permissible because it is consumed by kafirs [unbelievers] in the West and not by Muslims or
Afghans." A Taliban governor, Mohammed Hassan, added: "Drugs are evil and we would like to
substitute poppies with another cash crop, but it's not possible at the moment because we do
not have international recognition."
More broadly, the Taliban's policies provided stimulus, both direct and indirect, for a
nationwide expansion of opium cultivation. . . Significantly, the regime's ban on the
employment and education of women created a vast pool of low-cost labor to sustain an
accelerated expansion of opium production. . . . In northern and eastern Afghanistan, women
of all ages played " a fundamental role in the cultivation of the opium poppy"---planting,
weeding, harvesting, cooking for laborers, and processing by-products such as oil. The
Taliban not only taxed and encouraged opium cultivation, they protected and promoted exports
to international markets.
In retrospect, however, the Taliban's most important contribution to the illicit traffic
was its support for large-scale heroin refining.
. . .
Instead of eradication, the UN's annual opium surveys showed that Taliban rule had doubled
Afghanistan's opium production from 2,250 tons in 1996 to 4,600 tons in 1999--equivalent to
75 percent of world illicit production. (508-509)
. . .
War on the Taliban
All this [heroin] traffic across Central Asia depended on high-volume heroin production in
politically volatile Afghanistan. In July 2000, as a devastating drought entered its second
year and mass starvation spread across Afghanistan, the Taliban's leader Mullah Omar ordered
a sudden ban on opium cultivation in a bid for international recognition. (p.517)
B's article assumes that the operative purpose of the US military is to win wars. This isn't
the case. The US military largely a business enterprise whose objective is to make money for
the plutocracy that largely controls them. That being the case, the Afghanistan war has been
a great success. If the US 'won' it, it would cease; if the Taliban conquered, it would
cease. In this form of military stagnation it continues, and the money roles in making the
ammunition, equipment, etc.
The military budget is largely an institution for transferring the tax money of the
population from the people to the plutocracy. Military stagnation serves this purpose better
than winning or losing.
If there is one standout factor which makes makes all this profitable mayhem possible then
it's the successful campaign by the Elites to persuade the Public that Secrecy is a
legitimate variation of Privacy.
It is not.
Impregnable Government Secrecy is ALWAYS a cover for erroneous interpretations of an
inconvenient Law - or straight-out cover for criminal activity.
It's preposterous to believe that a government elected by The People has a legitimate right
to create schemes which must be kept Secret from The People.
This is especially true in the case of Military/Defense. There wouldn't be a CIC on earth who
doesn't have up-to-date and regularly updated info on the hardware and capabilities of every
ally and every potential foe. The People have a legitimate right to know what the CIC, and
the rest of the world, already knows.
And that's just the most glaring example of the childish deception being perpetrated in
the name of Secrecy. If governments were to be stripped of the power to conduct Our affairs
in Secret then the scrutiny would oblige them to behave more competently. And we could weed
out the drones and nitwits before they did too much damage.
@30 Right. I notice they avoid mentioning the Badawis who are central to the issue. I guess
helping Justin out isn't very high on Donald's list of priorities.
i forget who said it and the exact phrasing, but the best explanation i've seen is
"why is the US there? it answers itself: to be there".
vast opium money for the deep state vermin.
profits for the bomb makers (you know, the respectable corporate ones as opposed to the
quaint do-it-yourselfers).
lithium deposits that probably rival those in bolivia as well as other untapped
profitable resources (probably, anyway; i could see oil and gas coming out of those ancient
valleys).
it's also an occupation as opposed to a "win and get out" war. these military welfare
queens think they can win a staring contest with the descendants of people who bitchslapped
every would-be conqueror since alexander the great. ask the russians how well that went for
them.
the west supports israel's 70+ years of colonizing palestine (plus the 3 or 4 decades of
dumbness before it with balfour and such) and still has troops in south goddamn korea. as
long as the tap flows they'll keep drinking that sweet tasty tax welfare.
"... At some point the Western Powers decided the that old Communist Apparachik Milosevic would be the Bad Guy and the Croatian freedom-loving "our bastards" the good guys to be internationally recognized and thus enflamed the passion of secession. The thing just flew apart. And afterwards we had to bomb the country in order to save it. ..."
I vividly recall the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. I was nine-years-old and we were not wired for cable then. There also was
no remote control for the 27″ Zenith color console. I was forced to watch some of the coverage for those reasons. Sarajevo was
held up as a utopian city where Serbs, Croats and Muslims all lived in a beautiful city peacefully.
It was so beautiful said the announcers. And in less than a decade that Olympic stadium was turned into a cemetery as those
peaceful Croats, Serbs and Muslims slaughtered each other. Once the Soviet Army withdrew from Yugoslavia and the nation disintegrated
back into its ethnic lines, the killings started.
Imagine what is coming in the United States where the simmering hatreds are invited and exploited by not three distinct groups,
but hundreds. Image what is to come when "historically aggrieved" peoples who have been weaponized for generations to despise
their non-homogenous neighbors.
The erasure of common nationhood and the instilling of grievance as a caste system will see the US descend into chaotic slaughter
the likes of which have never been seen before.
When Pakistan separated from India after the British pulled out, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus slaughtered each other, stopping
trains filled with refugees being repatriated into their new nations and slaughtering every one of them. Americans have been so
denuded of historical understanding that these histories are unknown.
The malevolence of humanity seething just under the surface until the opportunity arises for it to burst forth is forgotten
by placated propagandized people. What people in world history have been more propagandized and placated than Americans who have
been viewing carefully crafted scripts since their eyes were first able to focus on a tv screen and whose desperately poor are
morbidly obese?
Stocking a warehouse to the rafters with volatile materials, packing them in so tightly until they near critical mass, now
add in some agitation – and light a match. The most devastating weapon ever devised in not the hydrogen bomb, it is a population
bomb. A 100 megaton nuclear weapon destroys cleanly – one flash and a wind storm – it's all over aside from lingering sunshine
units. In a thousand years the land will forget what had happened.
A population bomb where the very people have been weaponized will prove far more devastating and remain scarring the land for
eons and that common memory lives on in the survivors igniting anew every few decades.
Once the Soviet Army withdrew from Yugoslavia and the nation disintegrated back into its ethnic lines, the killings started.
That never happened though because the Soviet Army was never in Yugoslavia in the first place. It was Tito who maintained order
with an iron fist.
At some point the Western Powers decided the that old Communist Apparachik Milosevic would be the Bad Guy and the Croatian
freedom-loving "our bastards" the good guys to be internationally recognized and thus enflamed the passion of secession. The thing
just flew apart. And afterwards we had to bomb the country in order to save it.
How can there be a second civil war when the US never had one civil war?!
The so called Am Rev could, in many ways, be considered a "civil" war, and you are correct that the War of Northern Bankers
Against Southern Planters was not a "civil war" but essentially another war of conquest and centralization and concentration of
wealth in the hands of ever fewer.
In my opinion, as such concentration proceeds, it inevitably corrupts the morals and values (if any), of a polity and to me,
it's pretty obvious that it's proceeding as expected and at an ever increasing rate.
"... Continuous immigration makes the country a de facto one party state; the democrats win congress and the presidency and retain it through successive election cycles, all legitimized through the fig leaf of democratic voting. ..."
"... US financial life is punctuated by continual boom/bust cycles as minorities use the government to re-appropriate wealth for themselves at the expense of white Caucasians (see Zimbabwe and South Africa's looming land grab). We saw something like this with the housing crisis of 2008-9: George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy urged banks to lower lending standards for poor minorities; Wall Street got in on the act and, predictably, people with low incomes couldn't pay back what they owed and the system came crashing down as a result. Expect this to be a more frequent staple of future American life. ..."
"... Racial tensions reach a boiling point as intractable racial disparities in everything remain. Whites begin leaving for Eastern, Western Europe and eventually China and Japan once their populations fall enough for those countries to change their immigration laws. This brain drain crushes the United States. ..."
"... By 2070, the US ends up like the Soviet Union: a powerful external entity (China) foments rebellion among different groups; the country, poor and defeated, splits up. 300 years wasn't a bad run ..."
"... He agrees that high levels of immigration and economic inequality breed "popular immiseration (the stagnation and decline of living standards and the declining fiscal health of the state )" and that in periods when economic inequality is high ("disintegrative phases") socio-economic well being and political cooperation plummet. ..."
The three most likely ways the United States will descend into tyranny, from most likely to
least likely are the following:
1. Continuous immigration makes the country a de facto one party state; the democrats win
congress and the presidency and retain it through successive election cycles, all legitimized
through the fig leaf of democratic voting.
With electoral checks removed, radical leftists will rescind most American rights such as
free speech and association – tacitly, they won't directly say that's what they are
doing, rather they will present it with terms like "hate crime" and the like. Say the wrong
thing, and you will get fired, your bank will deny you service, and you will be subject to
international media scorn. They'll start with traditionally "right wing" freedoms like gun
rights, speech, and religious affiliation. But they'll move on to internet anonymity and the
secret ballot.
Expect endless media-generated witch trials of dissenters and two minute orgies of hate
for white Caucasians, and to a lesser extent, East Asians.
Expect a security state that monitors and records EVERYTHING you do for future use against
you should it be necessary – phone calls, internet usage, public travel via CCTV and
automobile/cell phone tracking (they already do that) perhaps even what you do in your own
home via technologies that can see through walls, record through television and computer
cameras and mics, and inquiries to personal AI assistants like Siri. Quantum computer-based
AI will additionally be able to track down internet posters through sophisticated
mathematical analysis, encryption breaking, and grammar/syntax analysis.
Future development of AI makes brainwashing and propaganda easier than anyone could have
previously imagined. This works miracles at controlling the population for a while, but even
AI can't erase day-to-day multicultural tensions through personal interactions. People begin
disbelieving everything they see and hear from the media. Ironically, this presents
propaganda opportunities for foreign governments against the US population.
The country will become increasingly ungovernable. The corrupt oligarchical media, owned
and controlled by individuals loyal to the democrat party, lie endlessly on their behalf. The
internet is eventually censored using "harassment" and "hate speech" as a pretext. Those who
oppose this are labeled supporters of hate – a derivation of the "think of the
children" fallacy.
The US tries to counter a rising China militarily but fails. America's military isn't
committed; it's just a job in a country no one has any true loyalty to anymore (like the
Roman Empire in the early fifth century). There may be a battle over Taiwan that the US navy
loses. A multicultural US population has no desire to fight a protracted war with a
determined, nationalist and nearly homogeneous China, so the US backs off after a single
humiliating sea battle. The event presages a new Chinese century much like US entry into WWI
marked a new era or the Russo-Japanese war marked the end of Western military hegemony for
the first time since the end of the Middle Ages.
Sensing a sea change, Asian governments like Japan begin rapprochement with China. US
alliances falter in Asia.
As SJWs take over Hollywood and churn out leftist agitprop, new centers of culture and
entertainment pop up in China. Just as the Russians hoarded Western pop music during the Cold
War, many white Americans do the same with Chinese movies and books – their own movies
and books being uninteresting propaganda (see the downfall of the US comic book industry for
an example of what is to come) – and sometimes even racist anti-white trash.
Diversity (non-white) efforts cripple US industry. Meritorious China becomes even more
economically dominant than expected at American expense.
US financial life is punctuated by continual boom/bust cycles as minorities use the
government to re-appropriate wealth for themselves at the expense of white Caucasians (see
Zimbabwe and South Africa's looming land grab). We saw something like this with the housing
crisis of 2008-9: George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy urged banks to lower lending standards for
poor minorities; Wall Street got in on the act and, predictably, people with low incomes
couldn't pay back what they owed and the system came crashing down as a result. Expect this
to be a more frequent staple of future American life.
The US's financial stability is threatened when massively expensive social programs
– ineptly thought out and implemented – drive up the federal deficit to record
highs; the government raises taxes to cover the losses. This works for a time, but there is
only so high taxes can be raised before the economy suffers. A sovereign debt crisis looms.
The country becomes ever more socialist.
Racial tensions reach a boiling point as intractable racial disparities in everything
remain. Whites begin leaving for Eastern, Western Europe and eventually China and Japan once
their populations fall enough for those countries to change their immigration laws. This
brain drain crushes the United States.
US standing in the world falls dramatically as Europeans recoil in horror at the prospect
of their own people's looming – similar – fate. Democracy is discredited world
wide. Elections still happen, but in many places they simply serve as propaganda to
legitimize ruling regimes.
The US attempts to solve its problems by picking fights with smaller countries, the logic
being that the population will rally around the flag in response, distracting everyone from
internal strife. These military adventures will not go well, leading to increasing internal
unrest.
The elite will engage in a Cold War with Russia because the Russians are white; the belief
among the establishment is that this will distract America's majority minorities from
attacking white Americans, the country's single most valuable resource. This leads to a
series of dangerous standoffs and, perhaps, even war.
By 2060, the US is much weakened. China has an economy 3-4x larger than the total US
economy. China has military bases in most of South America and perhaps even Mexico. China
also has a military that dwarfs the US military in technological sophistication, size, and
overall determination.
By 2070, the US ends up like the Soviet Union: a powerful external entity (China) foments
rebellion among different groups; the country, poor and defeated, splits up. 300 years wasn't
a bad run.
2. The democrats take back all branches of government in 2020. By 2028, it is apparent
that no Republican can win the White House ever again. One of the Red States secedes. The US
military, purged of patriotic white men and filled with immigrant scabs, brutally attacks
said Red State; Obama did something very similar when he started filling the military with
immigrants. Also, one poll after Charlottesvile indicated that the vast majority of the
military would favor using the national guard to shut down those protestors, so they
definitely aren't on our side (your feelings about the protestors and their views are
irrelevant, but the sentiment expressed by the military in regards to the expression of
constitutionally-protected public beliefs is astonishing); don't be surprised when the
military does whatever the democrats demand in the future, including shooting protestors or
putting down rebellions with force.
This is not a civil war because you don't have a situation where groups fight over control
of the government. This is a massacre perpetrated by the left and it's been building for
years now – from "punch a Nazi" and encouraging violence against Sarah Huckabee to
antifa terrorist attacks on protestors and doxxing dissenters.
Future historians (Chinese and Indian) will wonder why Red States didn't break off sooner
when they had the chance. They will point out that a frog put in a pot won't leap out if the
temperature is raised slowly. They will use this to remind themselves that democracy is
ultimately a fool's errand.
3. Some patriotic element of the Deep State concocts a plan for Trump to remain president
permanently. The 2020 election is called off. The democrat party is banned and voting is
limited to republicans. The government works to reverse the country's looming demographic
disaster.
Peter Turchin, author of "Ages of Discord: A Structural Demographic Analysis of American
History" (2016) has examined the "demographic, social, and political trends that changed
direction from favorable to unfavorable in America around the 1970s" and has concluded that
"in the United States social instability and political violence would peak in the 2020s."
He agrees that high levels of immigration and economic inequality breed "popular
immiseration (the stagnation and decline of living standards and the declining fiscal health
of the state )" and that in periods when economic inequality is high ("disintegrative
phases") socio-economic well being and political cooperation plummet. Most importantly, he
cites "the key role of "elite overproduction" in "driving waves of political violence, both
in historical societies and in our own." [United States]
"Increasing inequality leads not only to the growth of top fortunes; it also results in
greater numbers of wealth-holders. Rich Americans tend to be more politically active than
the rest of the population. In technical terms, such a situation is known as 'elite
overproduction'. Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition which
is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. the more
contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of
disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access
to elite positions."
"The victory of Donald Trump changes nothing in this equation. The 'social pump'
creating new aspirants for political offices continues to operate at full strength. In
addition to politically ambitious multi-millionaires, the second important source of such
aspirants is U.S. law schools, which every year churn twice as many law graduates as there
are job openings for them, about 25,000 "surplus" lawyers, many of whom are in debt. It is
emblematic that the 2016 election pitted a billionaire against a lawyer."
The three most likely ways the United States will descend into tyranny, from most likely
to least likely are the following:
Will descend?
Done deal. What do you think the constitution was all about?
The Constitution looked fairly good on paper, but it was not a popular document; people
were suspicious of it, and suspicious of the enabling legislation that was being erected
upon it. There was some ground for this. The Constitution had been laid down under
unacceptable auspices; its history had been that of a coup d'état.
It had been drafted, in the first place, by men representing special economic interests.
Four-fifths of them were public creditors, one-third were land speculators, and one-fifth
represented interests in shipping, manufacturing, and merchandising. Most of them were
lawyers. Not one of them represented the interest of production -- Vilescit origine tali.
(the dice were loaded from the start)
Albert Jay Nock, Liberty vs. the Constitution: The Early Struggle
mises.org/daily/4254
Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then
existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their
consent or dissent in any formal manner.
-Lysander Spooner, No Treason: No. VI, The Constitution of No Authority, p1. (1870)
1. Iraq is run by a pro-Iran Shite government that tolerates the US occupation due to the
money provided. Before the USA attacks Iran, it should remove all its 10,000 troops and
10,000 civilians and close its massive embassy there and write that country off. Otherwise,
we'll have thousands of American POWs. Meanwhile, the Kurds will get crushed as the Turks and
Iraqis use the chaos to destroy them.
2. The oil-rich British puppet state of Kuwait is hated by all Iraqis and Iranians. If the
USA attacks Iran, one should expect Iranian and maybe Iraqi units crossing the border, while
Kuwait's army flees as expected. The USA keeps an army brigade there, but that may not be
enough to fend off an invasion, even with air superiority.
3. In past wars, civilian oil tankers did not sail through the straits. The insurers
(mostly Lloyds of London) and others announced they would not cover losses, and unionize ship
crews refused to enter the war zone. So even if the USA keeps the straits open, all that oil
will not flow forth.
4. Iran has a fortified island in the Gulf whose guns cannot be silenced with just air
power. A major amphibious landing is required to clear that island, and it will be bloody.
Note the ship channels in the map. Supertankers are huge, so while the Straits of Hormuz are
large, these big ships can only pass thru these two narrow channels, which are easily
blocked. Iran could park its own tankers in these channels to block them and hope the USA
foolishly sinks them, thus really blocking the entire channel.
These four issues are of more importance than air battles over Iran.
"... Max Boot believes that Donald Trump should have threatened (Boot's word, not mine) Vladimir Putin. How does one go about threatening a country with inter-continental nuclear weapons systems that are proven to work? ..."
Let me stipulate at the outset that the phrase, "Max Boot," should be consider
as a new synonym in the Oxford English Dictionary for the word inane moron or
imbecile are other plausible possibilities.
Not since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy have we witnessed such a bizarre,
vicious level of red-baiting and smearing. Max Boot, have you no decency?
You will understand the context of my introductory observations after you
view the following video. Max Boot believes that Donald Trump should have threatened
(Boot's word, not mine) Vladimir Putin. How does one go about threatening a
country with inter-continental nuclear weapons systems that are proven to work?
Counterintuitively, the apostle of nonviolence was inspiring the psychological liberation
of black people in such a way that a certain percentage felt empowered to act out their
repressed anger. So when King determined to bring half a million followers to Washington, DC
and stay there until the feds pulled out of Vietnam and declared a real war on poverty, the
Colonel and his friends immediately envisioned the nation's capital erupting into mass
violence that could spread nationwide on a scale many orders of magnitude beyond what had
happened during 1967's Long Hot Summer, perhaps precipitating a real civil war culminating in
the revolutionary overthrow of the American State. This, the Colonel explained to Pepper, was
the primary reason King had to be terminated with extreme prejudice.
Predictably, the Deep State's murder of Dr. King did not solve the racial violence
problem. The assassination itself set off a wave of new riots in cities including Chicago,
Baltimore, and -- sorry, Colonel -- Washington, DC. White-dominated forces of the State
retaliated with escalating repression. Black communities felt increasingly under siege, and
have continued to feel that way until the present day.
"... A good hypothesis is, that Olof Palme was assassinated by a US stay-behind group, consisting of Nazi military and police. ..."
"... I think VG is quite correct in this: it was a test. And the test was of the neocon/humanitarian intervention marriage. Yes, the USA has doe a lot of this sort of thing in its history, but there has always been some opposition inside the USA. This time, they figured it out and "humanitarian bombing" was born. We have seen a lot more humanitarian bombing since. ..."
"... It was Gore, in consultation with Hillary Clinton, who decided to launch the criminal bombing of Serbia, informing PM Primakov after taking a phone call meant for the president. ..."
"... By launching an illegal attack on Russia's ally, the VP and the future Sec. of State, were offering a foreshadowing of the hawkish and belligerent anti-Russian policy that was to follow for the next 17 years. ..."
"... Western populations for the most part are so thoroughly brainwashed they still cling to the belief they live in civilized countries and their militaries keep them safe from barbarians. ..."
"... Gary I agree whole heartedly with every word you wrote. I would add to how intriguing it would be to learn of the high deception played during the passage of the Federal Reserve back in 1913. Then I'd push out of the way those who blocked Claude Pepper from endorsing Henry Wallace into the 1944 Democratic Convention. This alone may have changed the course of the establishment of the CIA, and avoided the disaster that is happening in Palestine to this day. ..."
"... I do believe the assassination era was the biggest turning point, as it sent a strong message to the would be seekers of sane government policies who would incur such tragedy if explored. Joe ..."
"... I believe there are many questions that need answering about NATO. For instance: July 14, 2018 The Diabolical "Work" of NATO and Its Allies: Why Are These War Criminals Still Free? ..."
By Vladimir Golstein in Belgrade Special to Consortium News
Right across the street from my hotel,
tucked behind tall office buildings, is the rather large Church of St. Mark. Hidden in St.
Mark's shadows is a tiny Russian Orthodox church. The Church of the Holy Trinity, known simply
as the Russian Church, is famous for holding the remains of Baron Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel ,
the Russian Civil War leader of the Whites. It is hard to find, but luckily, a friend took me
there.
As we were looking around the church, not particularly interested in Wrangel, a couple of
Russians asked me to take their picture in front of his tomb. Trying to find a proper angle for
the picture, I noticed a small plaque on a wall nearby. It listed the names of Russians who
died fighting for Yugoslav Serbs during the conflict with separatist Albanians in Kosovo and
the subsequent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in
1999.
As we left the church, we took a small path toward the top of the park. There we observed
another brutal sign of that war: a destroyed building next to the TV center. It too had a
plaque. It screamed, " Zashto " (For What? Why?). Below it were the names of all the TV
people NATO killed during that attack. In all, as many as 2,500 civilians may have been killed
by NATO, according to the then Yugoslav government, though the real number may never
be known.
On the one hand, the question Zashto is both idle and provocative. It implies a
laceration of wounds, a refusal to forget and to start anew. On the other, there is an obvious
need to find an answer to this question simply to prevent future destruction and senseless
murders.
We won't find answers to this question in the official narratives, which tell us that the
noble Clinton administration decided to stop flagrant violations of human rights in the
extremely complex situation in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo by bombing
the Serbs into respecting minorities both on its own and on neighboring territories. (In fact
the large exodus of Kosovo Albanians to Albania proper only began after NATO bombs started to
fall.)
Testing the Limits
Russians who died fighting for Yugoslavia. (Photo by Vladimir Golstein)
Behind these official stories, a much sadder picture emerges. Why did these people die? Why
did this NATO operation go ahead without UN Security Council authorization
nor proof of self-defense, requirements of the UN Charter? Was it to satisfy the lust for power
of U.S. and NATO leaders, of liberal interventionists like Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton,
and Susan Rice? To assuage the Clinton administration's guilt over its failure to respond to the 1994 genocide
in Rwanda? Was it to set up America's largest military base in Europe since the
Vietnam War, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo? For American access to Kosovo's vast mineral wealth and
other business opportunities, including for
Ms. Albright ? Or was it to finally kill off a rather successful Yugoslav experiment in the
"third way" between the West and the Soviet Union?
It seems these people had to die for all those reasons and to put into practice the
doctrines of responsibility to protect ( R2P ) and
full spectrum dominance , doctrines cooked up by liberal interventionists and neocons in
Washington. Those who died were essentially guinea pigs of a New World Order experiment to see
how far the world could be pushed to implement R2P, a policy that could be used to mask
imperial ambitions.
And it worked. Yugoslavia was unable to stand up to the power of NATO operating outside the
mandate of its obsolete charter: namely to defend Western Europe against an alleged Soviet
threat. Indeed one could argue that with the Cold War over, another motive for the attack on
Yugoslavia was to provide NATO with a justification to exist. (It would later go even further
afield outside its legal theater of operation, into Afghanistan and then Libya.)
Russia could do little to help the Serbs. Then the Chinese Embassy was hit
as well, as a test it seems, though The New York Timessaid
it was a mistake. The Chinese did nothing.
Thus was R2P implemented -- with no protection for Yugoslav Serbs. They had to die in the
experiment to explore the limits of U.S. power and the limits of its resistance.
If my memory serves me correctly, President Bill Clinton had set up a summit meeting with
Russian President Yevgeny Primakov here in the USA. Primakov was in flight on his way here
for that summit meeting when President of Vice, Al Gore, without Clinton's permission or
knowledge, called Primakov, in flight, to tell him NATO had decided to bomb Kosovo. Primakov immediately ordered his plane to
turn around and return to Russia, thus cancelling the summit meeting...
Aurora , August 7, 2018 at 8:55 pm
In Russia that is known as "The Primakov Loop."
rosemerry , August 6, 2018 at 3:57 pm
Thanks Vladimir. The Serbs are demonized by so many, especially the Germans-many believe
it was because they fought so valiantly against the Nazis in WW2. Diana Johnstone has written
"Fools' Crusade- Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions", and Michel Collon "Media Lies and
the Conquest of Kosovo", but books with this point of view are not readily publicised. Nor is
the fact that after his death (no trial had yet taken place) Slobodan Milosovic was finally
found nOT to have been responsible for all the murderous acts he was accused/assumed to be
responsible for.
We can note now of course the Russian reaction to the "annexation of Crimea" after a
referendum, no bloodshed and the referendum also of Russians all over the Federation, while
Kosovo was ripped from Serbia by trickery and not consent, and we see how it is now. Russia
is sanctioned, the people who overthrew the Ukrainian government are not mentioned, Crimea is
not allowed to return to Russia. Slight difference from the "nation" of Kososvo!
Thomas Binder , August 6, 2018 at 6:35 am
The war against #Serbia under #R2P was the #MilitaryIndustrialFinancialMedialComplex'es
ruling the #USA/#NATO/#ISR/#SAU empire (#PNAC's) test for eternal war against #AlQaeda
outside international law & interference of #USLegislators for getting full-spectrum
dominance.
Jackson , August 5, 2018 at 2:21 pm
NATO should have been disbanded after the fall of the Soviets. When you arm people and
train them to kill, they will look for an enemy to fight. War becomes inevitable.
jose , August 5, 2018 at 6:00 pm
It is hard to disagree with your post. Nato, disgracefully, has become a terrorist
organization that has dedicated itself to be the paw of the western elite. Shamefully, other
countries have joined Yugoslavia as victims of Nato criminality. Well done Jackson.
Björn Lindgren , August 5, 2018 at 7:25 am
FOR REASON OF STATE, FOR REASON OF INTEREST
There might be still more reasons for the destruction of Yugoslavia.
Germany had put its mind into destabilizing Yugoslavia to get a "Hinterland". Added to
this, a revenge motive: Nazi Germany occupation of Yugoslavia failed, and this has never been
forgotten. And lastly, Yugoslavia was a member of the non-alignment movement, not obeying
US-NATO.
And, of course, after the collapse of the Warsaw pact, NATO had no enemy, no purpose.
But, it invented one: full US spectrum global dominance.
Sweden has also been punished to obey the US.
During the years of PM Olof Palme, Sweden was also a member of the non-alignment movement.
Palme was educated in and friendly to the US, but critized the US war in Vietnam. (Nixon
hated Palme, and withdraw the US diplomats from Sweden).
1992 foreign submarines penetrated Swedish waters repeatedly.
The submarine incident at Hårsfjärden, a marine base, was not made by Russia,
but was made by US and British submarines. Afterwards, both Caspar Weinberger and Sir Keith
Speed confirmed this. Weinberger even thanked Sweden for not blowing up the US mini-sub
(which we could have done. (Read, "Hårsfjärden. Det hemliga ubåtskriget mot
Sverige," by Ola Tunander).
Purpose: pushing Sweden westward.
Already in the mid 50s, William Colby, later head of the CIA, was in Sweden organizing
stay-behind groups, recruting Swedish voluntary ex-soldiers from the Finnish wars against
Soviet Union. In the 50-s these people were organized in "Sveaborg", a Nazi group.
A good hypothesis is, that Olof Palme was assassinated by a US stay-behind group,
consisting of Nazi military and police.
Which, of course, had to be stonewalled "for reason of state". Today, Sweden is "cooperating" shamelessly with NATO, invite, and have excersices with
NATO. This week, the Swedish government annonced that it will purchase US "Patriot"
anti-missiles with "ballistic capability" (Hey, hey!).
Supporting the insane belligerent US and UK nuclear armament (for a nuclear first-strike?)
against neoliberal, oligarchic Russia, which is planning to keep up in the race towards the
abyss. That is, Sweden is now d e f a c t o a member of NATO, without the Swedish people or
parliament have had a say. NATO which eventually is falling apart, and with a lunatic US
president and his military government in the White House, in a US empire collapsing. The peace aspirations of Sweden are long forgotten. And so, is the Helsinki Conference and
agreement (1975-1983) for common security, disarmamanet , and a nuclear-free zone in
Europe.
The question is if Germany, France, UK (with Corbyn in 10 Downing) and Russia will
organize a new Helsinki Conference and Agreement?
Maybe, "for reasons of interest".
--
rosemerry , August 6, 2018 at 4:01 pm
Thanks so much for this comprehensive addition to the discussion. Sweden indeed has been
placed in an invidious position.
Pretending that NATO has any purpose even vaguely related to peace is laughable.
David G , August 6, 2018 at 6:01 pm
Great comment, Björn Lindgren. Many thanks.
The withering away of Swedish neutrality into an empty formality has become so obvious,
but never remarked upon in the U.S. I'm sure most cable TV talking heads just assume Sweden
is in NATO – indeed, I've heard the error made, albeit corrected after the next
commercial break.
I appreciate reading your committed, highly informed perspective. Maybe you could submit
an article on this under-reported subject to Consortium News?
Excellent article in the eve of 20th anniversary of NATO aggression on Yugoslavia which
will be marked by Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, March 23, 24rth, 2019.
NATO 1999 aggression was meant to be precedent and turning point in global conduct toward
globalization of military interventionism (Avganistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.). Willy Wimmer wrote
to Schoerder on May 2nd, 2000, USA position: "The war against Yugoslavia was conducted in
order to correct the mistake of General Eisenhower from the 2ndWW. Subsequently, for
strategic reasons, USA troops had to be stationed there ". And: "It is clear that it is the
precedent to be recalled any time" The Bondstil base in Kosovo was only the first in the
ensuing chain of new USA bases in Bulgaria (4), Rumania (4), Albania (2), Baltic states
I think VG is quite correct in this: it was a test. And the test was of the
neocon/humanitarian intervention marriage. Yes, the USA has doe a lot of this sort of thing
in its history, but there has always been some opposition inside the USA. This time, they
figured it out and "humanitarian bombing" was born. We have seen a lot more humanitarian
bombing since.
Branko Mikasinovich , August 4, 2018 at 4:45 pm
A great and truthful article about Western Policy, NATO and US. A courageous and
informative analysis of Mr. Golstein. Thank you.
ToivoS , August 4, 2018 at 1:18 pm
Goldstein writes Russia could do little to help the Serbs. Then the Chinese Embassy was
hit as well, as a test it seems, though The New York Times said it was a mistake. The Chinese
did nothing.
Actually the Chinese did do something. They changed their attitude towards the US. I have
yet to meet a Chinese national who believes that the embassy hit was a "mistake". They and
their government view it as a deliberate attack on their sovereignty. But they realized they
were not in a position respond so they then began military planning for possible conflict
between China and the US Navy in the Western Pacific. In 2000 they started a 10 plan to
achieve the ability to sink any US aircraft carrier within a 1000 km of their shores. We
won't know if they have achieved that ability until a real test is conducted. But that is the
something they have done.
FB , August 8, 2018 at 9:24 am
Good point Toivos The Chinese have never forgotten the Belgrade embassy bombing and they
never will. Ask any Chinese today, even those living in the West the Chinese are an ancient people
with a long and proud memory the embassy bombing was a step too far. All of these hubristic missteps will come back to haunt the empire
Theo , August 4, 2018 at 10:51 am
I remember well the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia under the pretext to stop the genocide
that was allegedly committed by the Serbs. The saddest thing for me was that Germany was
participating in the bombing campaign. My father who was in Yugoslavia as a Wehrmacht soldier
was outraged as were many others. After almost sixty years German bombers were over Serbia
again. My dad used to say German soldiers on foreign soil had never been good neither for the
foreign country nor for Germany. That's why until today the Germans have an aversion to all
military and the deployment of German soldiers in foreign countries is not very popular.
David G , August 4, 2018 at 11:16 am
The 1999 air attacks were the coup de grace, but I think Germany had the (dis)honor of
leading the vivisection of Yugoslavia from the start.
As Vladimir Golstein rhetorically asks: "Or was it to finally kill off a rather successful
Yugoslav experiment in the 'third way' between the West and the Soviet Union?"
Indeed it was, and that surely appealed to all the Western powers. But Germany was
particularly interested in removing a possible continental rival, and took the lead in making
sure it happened – not at all to absolve the U.S., under whose aegis it was ultimately
operating.
Antiwar7 , August 4, 2018 at 11:42 am
The German people and the German government are different. The German government has had
an anti-Serb animus for over 150 years: that's clear. But the German people, as Theo's dad
shows, can be very nice. My father was a POW in Germany for 4 years during WWII, and most of
the German people he encountered were quite nice to him.
Theo , August 4, 2018 at 3:56 pm
You are right. The vivisection of Yugoslavia began when Germany recognized the independence
of Slovenia before any other country did. The German government with Genscher as foreign
minister didn't consult with any of the European allies. Especially France was not amused at
all.
rosemerry , August 6, 2018 at 4:04 pm
It was Germany, 9 days after reunification, which led the removal of Croatia from
Yugoslavia and beginning the breakup of a successful multicultural country.
Juan P. Zenter , August 4, 2018 at 7:29 am
Yugoslavia was a federation of states and was, thus, an obstacle to consolidating EU and
NATO power in Southeastern Europe. Once the federation was destroyed, the individual states
that comprised it could be absorbed by EU/NATO. That was the ultimate outcome of NATO bombing
there, despite all denials about that being the intent.
Thanks for the article, the photo of the beautiful church, and the reflection on this
horrible chapter from the book of atrocities disguised as "humanitarian" to fool the masses.
This also helped Bill and Hillary Clinton distract the American public from the Monica
Lewinsky affair.
j. D. D. , August 4, 2018 at 7:59 pm
I don't see it that way. Rather, as President Clinton was hit with the Lewinsky scandal
and put on the defensive immediately following his speech to NY's Council on Foreign Relations
in which he called for "a new world financial archithitecture," VP Al Gore, who later shunned
the president, saw the opportunity to determine policy. It was Gore, in consultation with
Hillary Clinton, who decided to launch the criminal bombing of Serbia, informing PM Primakov
after taking a phone call meant for the president. Whereupon the PM turned around his flight
in mid-air over the Atlantic and returned to Russia. By launching an illegal attack on
Russia's ally, the VP and the future Sec. of State, were offering a foreshadowing of the
hawkish and belligerent anti-Russian policy that was to follow for the next 17 years.
FB , August 8, 2018 at 9:31 am
Disagree these are minor details that are meaningless. Yugoslavia had already been systematically dismembered starting the very instant after
German unification and the fall of the Soviet Union. Coincidence ? Maybe a child could believe it by 1999, the final chapter of the dismemberment, Kosovo,
was ready, after several years of laying careful groundwork of subversion, propaganda and
agitation
The Nato war of aggression in 1999 would have proceeded no matter what to think that the
Lewisnky nonsense had anything to do with anything is ridiculous
nonsense factory , August 3, 2018 at 11:50 pm
One major factor in the NATO bombing and the overall agenda in the region was control of
territory for a proposed gas/oil pipeline export route from Central Asia to Europe. The
creation of Camp Bondsteel was directly related to that goal, and the chief contractor
(KBR-Halliburton) played the same role there that they did in the construction of numerous
military bases in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
That's been a dominant theme in U.S. foreign policy and military strategy circles ever
since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Numerous routes have been proposed –
trans-Afghanistan pipeline, the Nabucco pipeline, etc., all with the same goal –
getting Central Asia fossil fuels (leased to US and British majors like Exxon, Chevron, BP,
etc.) to global markets while bypassing Iran and Russia.
Monbiot in the Guardian, 2001 (when it was still a fairly decent paper, rather than a
gung-ho enforcer of the Blairite neoliberal agenda), said this:
"For the past few weeks, a freelance researcher called Keith Fisher has been doggedly
documenting a project which has, as far as I can discover, has been little-reported in any
British, European or American newspaper. It is called the Trans-Balkan pipeline, and it's due
for approval at the end of next month. Its purpose is to secure a passage for oil from the
Caspian sea. . ."
"In November 1998, Bill Richardson, then US energy secretary, spelt out his policy on the
extraction and transport of Caspian oil. "This is about America's energy security," he
explained. "It's also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don't share our values.
We're trying to move these newly independent countries toward the west. We would like to see
them reliant on western commercial and political interests rather than going another way.
We've made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it's very important to us
that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right. . ."
Paul Stuart, in the WSWS, 2002, noted:
"According to leaked comments to the press, European politicians now believe that the US
used the bombing of Yugoslavia specifically in order to establish Camp Bondsteel. Before the
start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the Washington Post insisted, "With the
Middle-East increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly over rights in the Balkans to
protect Caspian Sea oil."" https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/oil-a29.html
Forward project of American imperial power in the name of control of energy resources and
the cash flows arising from them, in a nutshell. Or, "business as usual since the 1950s".
Since JFK, it's all been done under the cover of "humanitarian intervention" and "protecting
democracy" which is why so many American citizens have no idea what the true aims of these
wars have really been
MH , August 7, 2018 at 2:13 pm
Sadly, Monbiot's column aside, the Guardian's coverage of what most of us here think of as
a war against Yugoslav independence was unabashedly pro-NATO and anti-Serb. The outlet did
it's best to confuse otherwise war skeptical liberals -- by demonizing the Serbs as
bloodthirsty savages purveying late 1930s genocide -- about the true character of "the
west's" aggression against the Serbs. Unlike Iraq, where the Graundiad reversed their pro-war
stance, the paper only doubled down on its anti-Serb biases, culminating in trumpets and
coronets for Hague's prosecutors ludicrously inept (at best) handling of Milosevic's
trial.
Bob Van Noy , August 3, 2018 at 8:11 pm
Thank you Vladimir Golstein for this article. I'm sure you know the answers to the
questions you ask in the paragraph titled "Testing the Limlts". The answer to each of them is
given to us and to the world in F. William Engdahl's devastating book entitled "Manifest
Destiny" : Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance. I say devastating because Mr. Engdahl
thoroughly describes a series of American administrations responsible for all of these crimes
and more.
It will be up to us (American Citizens) to educate ourselves as to the real history of our
government acting secretly, without broad consensus, and illegally. This article is a good
beginning but the discussion needs to be broadened and further documented. Then we can begin
to find a resolution.
How one can wonder how the German population stood aside while the Nazis committed their
atrocities while at the same time not speaking out at our own apparent daily military
excesses is beyond me.
irina , August 4, 2018 at 12:01 am
Not to mention meekly paying for these daily military excesses, with no protest.
christina garcia , August 4, 2018 at 1:02 am
here is an historical answer, My Grandfather and Grandmother were born in Koenigsberg
Prussia what is now known as Kaliningrad. The City of Emanuel Kant and not quite in the
1930's fans of National Socialism. My Grandfather owned a brick factory and a saw mill . They
were capitalists, not National Socialists. And you JIMBOBLA , fyi, My Opa was caught by the
Russian Army 1943, my family was totally disunited. It took the Red Cross 3 years to find my
family members and repatriate them .The Nazi organization disliked capitalism . I can prove
every single sentence I wrote. Please be careful when you write Nazism
Sam F , August 4, 2018 at 8:48 am
If you disagree, you should really address the issue of "how the German population stood
aside while the Nazis committed their atrocities." Are you arguing that Nazi atrocities were
justified by the USSR dispersing a family in 1943 Kaliningrad, during a war in which Nazis
killed over 20 million Russians? It would be interesting to hear an argument with substance
and references.
christina garcia , August 4, 2018 at 1:04 am
it is beyond you because you never experienced these atrocities
Milojkovic , August 5, 2018 at 8:11 pm
Dear Christina, I am very sorry about what happened to your family. They probably didn't
have a choice, otherwise the Nazis would have hurt them. Maybe you'd have never been born if
they dared to resist actively. Probably good people, unfairly caught in the whirlwind of
history and human brutality. They were then retaliated against by other Nazi victims without
deserving so, just because of their ethnicity. I am a Serb, living in U.S. Trust me, I can
relate. I was here in U.S. during those terrible days of 1999, living through them as if in a
daze. Life is now "kinda back to normal", but I try my best not to think just how big a part
of me had died in that bombing. My grandfather, who was just a peasant but a very devoted
Christian, died in a horrible pain from the terminal stomach cancer because there was no pain
medication for him; plus the pharmaceutical factories were bombed after having been accused
of being able to produce chemical weapons in a coordinated NATO propaganda just days before.
In agony, he was trying to undress himself, and was screaming and running around the garden.
Several of our family members were killed by Wehrmacht in WW II. I think that Germany had no
business participating in this bombing. Look up Varvarin bridge. It was shameful. And yes,
unfortunately, it was a German hand holding the match that lit up the powder keg that was
Yugoslavia in early 90's.
Consortium's Fan , August 7, 2018 at 10:28 am
Did YOU, Christina Garcia, experience atrocities? Judging by you comment, I am confidently
saying you DIDN'T. You know NOTHING about atrocities. Read and watch films about Nazi doings.
And compare them to "dispersing a family" in a wartime. A recent film worth seeing is
SOBIBOR, entirely based on archives, – a Nazi concentration camp in Poland's Sobibor
– hence the name. Educate yourself.
Lois Gagnon , August 3, 2018 at 5:37 pm
Western populations for the most part are so thoroughly brainwashed they still cling to
the belief they live in civilized countries and their militaries keep them safe from
barbarians. Unf*cking believable.
rosemerry , August 6, 2018 at 4:11 pm
The likelihood of damage being caused by the USA NOT intervening anywhere must be
vanishingly small!!!!!
Realist , August 3, 2018 at 5:24 pm
To U.S. authorities, foreign lives simply do not matter. No need to conduct any
"intelligence assessment" to determine their culpability. They shamelessly commit mass murder
right out in the open with impunity.
What makes you think USA lives matter to them. I see no evidence of that either.
Realist , August 3, 2018 at 11:39 pm
Nothing makes me think that. Why do you think I chose the phraseology that I did? It
gained currency in reaction to the murderous abuses by American police on our own
streets.
LarcoMarco , August 4, 2018 at 1:50 pm
It gained currency when that other Donald (Rumsfeld) essentially said that G.I's were
cannon fodder.
REDPILLED , August 4, 2018 at 4:54 pm
That despicable attitude long predates war criminal Rumsfeld: "Military men are just dumb,
stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy."? Henry Kissinger
Drew Hunkins , August 3, 2018 at 5:17 pm
Michael Parenti's book "To Kill a Nation" is the best book on the criminal NATO war on
Yugoslavia. Followed closely by Diana Johnstone's seminal book "Fool's Crusade."
Antiwar7 , August 4, 2018 at 11:45 am
Agreed: those are excellent books, the best English language works on the breakup of
Yugoslavia.
Isn't it sad that the most enduring monuments the U.S. is leaving for it's worldly legacy
are but artifacts of war and destruction. We could have done much better than this.
Joe – Exactly. I sometimes find myself thinking the "what if" to the U.S. mayhem of
just my own lifetime. "What if" the CIA hadn't coordinated the assassinations of JFK and
Lumumba, as well as of course the murder or overthrow of dozens of elected leaders in former
colonies who simply aspired to helping their own people, rather than acting as proxies to the
continuing pillage by U.S. & Western capitalism. What if instead those leaders were
allowed to lead their nations into a non-aligned world and not forced to be beholden to
either the U.S. or Soviet systems by threats of U.S. military and economic violence? What if
Malcolm and MLK and RFK had not been murdered by forces connected to the U.S. ruling
institutions, and had instead by now had become elder statesmen in a more humane and
democratic U.S. system that would stand in stark contrast to the insane neoliberal capitalist
freak show which has been forced upon the world, and who's mystical – "invisible hand"
– can be found tightly wrapped around the throats of the poor everywhere?
Yes Joe I agree, I think we could have lived in a very different world had not the greed
and pathology of U.S. and Western oligarchy quite intentionally and violently destroyed any
possibility of a more humane and egalitarian world by routinely murdering those more humane
leaders who could have helped us reach it. That possibility of a more humane world was
replaced instead with the odious Maggie Thatcher's "there is no alternative" global nightmare
of continued neocolonial pillage euphemistically called neoliberal capitalism. Only the
fine-tuning of the rational for mass murder has changed. Now we have "duty to protect"
– which translated from 'newspeak' means = "we now must bomb and kill you because we
care about you so very, very much." Sort of a Western postmodern version of earlier
justifications for slaughtering the indigenous in order to – "save their souls" I
suppose. We in the West have created this current version of global "reality" through
absolutely amoral unrelenting mass violence over 500+ years now, and sadly there does not
seem to be any real evidence of a change of heart or direction in our global mayhem.
Joe Tedesky , August 3, 2018 at 9:24 pm
Gary I agree whole heartedly with every word you wrote. I would add to how intriguing it
would be to learn of the high deception played during the passage of the Federal Reserve back
in 1913. Then I'd push out of the way those who blocked Claude Pepper from endorsing Henry
Wallace into the 1944 Democratic Convention. This alone may have changed the course of the
establishment of the CIA, and avoided the disaster that is happening in Palestine to this
day.
Thatcher & Reagan surly introduced us into this new economy which is often said to be
doing so great, and there we are ruined by an overly eager Fed lender along with an out of
sight Defense budget. Your job isn't there, and with that you are told to blame the union.
Ah, the Union wasn't that what Margaret & Ronny sabotaged eventually . nice work.
I do believe the assassination era was the biggest turning point, as it sent a strong
message to the would be seekers of sane government policies who would incur such tragedy if
explored. Joe
Joe – I quite agree. The assassination era was the huge turning point, but as you
point out the corruption and manipulation of democracy by the oligarchy goes way back. Yes,
imagine if Wallace had been the VP for FDR? Had Wallace's nomination not been sabotaged,
perhaps the Dulles brothers would have spent their remaining time on earth learning
woodworking skills in prison workshop after being convicted for the treason of their Nazi
dealings – instead of leading the CIA and State Dept. into the corrupt secrecy of
multiple regime changes, assassinations, and endless insane cold war posturing. The Dulles
CIA era, including it's loving embrace of the Nazi war criminals, seems to have a been in
retrospect a very dark prelude leading up to the assassination era to follow. Ike certainly
had some foreboding of the evil to come given his parting comments.
REDPILLED , August 4, 2018 at 5:04 pm
A brief recommended reading list:
The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government
by David Talbot
The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the attack on U.S. Democracy by Peter
Dale Scott
The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike
Lofgren
Bob Van Noy , August 4, 2018 at 8:35 am
Joe and Gary, very nice and well informed thread, thank you. Clearly we all share the
history that both of you mentioned and we also see through the now crumbling obfuscation. It
will become our new duty to use that past experience and a new hope to help make an official
case for correcting the official record and reclaiming Democracy. Actually it's a worthy
endeavor and we're uniquely positioned to help
Consortium's Fan , August 7, 2018 at 10:42 am
"Sort of a Western postmodern version of earlier justifications for slaughtering the
indigenous in order to – "save their souls" I suppose."
Or even earlier justifications (by the Holy Inquisition in the Middle Ages) to burn people
alive to "save their souls".
Realist , August 4, 2018 at 6:03 pm
Excellent point, Joe. I wonder how different the history books will look if this country
somehow manages to shed the warmongering hegemonists who have been in control for at least
the last 70 years (or, one might argue, from its inception).
I'd also like to see an English translation of the current world history books, used in
the schools of China, Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan, Cuba, Vietnam or dozens of other
countries not part of the American World Empire. I'll bet American actions and motives are
not portrayed to be as noble and pure as the driven snow. I'll bet even Mexico has a quite
different take. Canada? You stopped our invasion in 1812, aided the slaves sent to you via
the Underground Railway and refused to cooperate in the Vietnam fiasco. What happened since
then? Now you extradite AWOL GI's who don't want to go back to the numerous "sand boxes" we
play in. I'll bet those books, if ever published in English, would not be allowed on public
library shelves in the U.S.
I believe there are many questions that need answering about NATO. For instance:
July 14, 2018
The Diabolical "Work" of NATO and Its Allies: Why Are These War Criminals Still Free?
NATO's recent meeting or summit in Brussels July 11 – 12, 2018, could be described
as a gathering of heinous hypocrites. [1] There are millions of people dead, millions are
refugees, their countries have been destroyed and our ruling hypocrites spout the words "rule
of law." Has there ever been a gang of human reptiles (are they even human?) so evil, dressed
in expensive suits [and dresses] and operating out of houses of power called "parliaments"
and other houses of ill repute? These criminals, or gangsters, or bandits, or reprobates (Add
your own epithet) are up to their filthy necks in the blood of the victims of their planned
carnage.
Yet it was reported: "The summit will also discuss the fight against terrorism." Gee! Does
that statement about fighting "terrorism" smack of hypocrisy? There is evidence that NATO and
its members have, in fact, been consorting with, and supporting, terrorists. [2]
[much more info at link below] http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-diabolical-work-of-nato-and-its.html
"... At some point the Western Powers decided the that old Communist Apparachik Milosevic would be the Bad Guy and the Croatian freedom-loving "our bastards" the good guys to be internationally recognized and thus enflamed the passion of secession. The thing just flew apart. And afterwards we had to bomb the country in order to save it. ..."
I vividly recall the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. I was nine-years-old and we were not
wired for cable then. There also was no remote control for the 27″ Zenith color
console. I was forced to watch some of the coverage for those reasons. Sarajevo was held up
as a utopian city where Serbs, Croats and Muslims all lived in a beautiful city peacefully.
It was so beautiful said the announcers. And in less than a decade that Olympic stadium
was turned into a cemetery as those peaceful Croats, Serbs and Muslims slaughtered each
other. Once the Soviet Army withdrew from Yugoslavia and the nation disintegrated back into
its ethnic lines, the killings started.
Imagine what is coming in the United States where the simmering hatreds are invited and
exploited by not three distinct groups, but hundreds. Image what is to come when
"historically aggrieved" peoples who have been weaponized for generations to despise their
non-homogenous neighbors.
The erasure of common nationhood and the instilling of grievance as a caste system will
see the US descend into chaotic slaughter the likes of which have never been seen before.
When Pakistan separated from India after the British pulled out, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus
slaughtered each other, stopping trains filled with refugees being repatriated into their new
nations and slaughtering every one of them. Americans have been so denuded of historical
understanding that these histories are unknown.
The malevolence of humanity seething just under the surface until the opportunity arises
for it to burst forth is forgotten by placated propagandized people. What people in world
history have been more propagandized and placated than Americans who have been viewing
carefully crafted scripts since their eyes were first able to focus on a tv screen and whose
desperately poor are morbidly obese?
Stocking a warehouse to the rafters with volatile materials, packing them in so tightly
until they near critical mass, now add in some agitation -- and light a match. The most
devastating weapon ever devised in not the hydrogen bomb, it is a population bomb. A 100
megaton nuclear weapon destroys cleanly -- one flash and a wind storm -- it's all over aside
from lingering sunshine units. In a thousand years the land will forget what had
happened.
A population bomb where the very people have been weaponized will prove far more
devastating and remain scarring the land for eons and that common memory lives on in the
survivors igniting anew every few decades.
Once the Soviet Army withdrew from Yugoslavia and the nation disintegrated back into its
ethnic lines, the killings started.
That never happened though because the Soviet Army was never in Yugoslavia in the first
place. It was Tito who maintained order with an iron fist.
At some point the Western Powers decided the that old Communist Apparachik Milosevic
would be the Bad Guy and the Croatian freedom-loving "our bastards" the good guys to be
internationally recognized and thus enflamed the passion of secession. The thing just flew
apart. And afterwards we had to bomb the country in order to save it.
"It did not take National Socialism long to rally workers, most of whom were either
unemployed or still very young, into the SA [Sturmangriff, Stormtroopers, "brown shirts"]. To a
large extent, however, these workers were revolutionary in a dull sort of way and still
maintained an authoritarian attitude. For this reason National Socialist propaganda was
contradictory; it's content was determined by the class for which it was intended. Only in its
manipulation of the mystical feelings of the masses was it clear and consistent.
In talks with followers of the National Socialist party and especially with members of the
SA, it was clearly brought out that the revolutionary phraseology of National Socialism was the
decisive factor in the winning over of these masses. One heard National Socialists deny that
Hitler
represented capital. One heard SA men warn Hitler that he must not betray the cause of the
"revolution." One heard SA men say that Hitler was the German Lenin . Those who went over to
National Socialism from Social Democracy and the liberal central parties were, without
exception, revolutionary minded masses who were either nonpolitical or politically undecided
prior to this. Those who went over from the Communist party were often revolutionary elements
who simply could not make any sense of many of the German Communist party's contradictory
political slogans. In part they were men upon whom the external features of Hitler's party,
it's military character, its assertiveness, etc., made a big impression.
"Open avowal of dictatorship is much less dangerous than sham democracy. The first one can
fight; sham democracy is insidious."
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"Even more
essential, however, is the identification of the individuals in the masses with the
"führer." The more helpless the "mass-individual" has become, owing to his upbringing, the
more pronounced is his identification with the führer, and the more the childish need for
protection is disguised in the form of a feeling at one with the führer. This inclination
to identify is the psychological basis of national narcissism, i.e., of the self-confidence
that individual man derives from the "greatness of the nation."
The reactionary lower
middle-class man perceives himself in the führer, in the authoritarian state. On
the basis of this identification he feels himself to be a defender of the "national heritage,"
of the "nation," which does not prevent him, likewise on the basis of this identification, from
simultaneously despising "the masses" and confronting them as an individual. The wretchedness
of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a
master race and having a brilliant führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how
completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance.
The worker who is conscious of his skills -- he, in short, who has rid himself of his
submissive structure, who identifies with his work and not with the führer, with the
international working masses and not with the national homeland -- represents the opposite of
this. He feels himself to be a leader , not on the basis of his identification with the
führer, but on the basis of his consciousness of performing work that is vitally necessary
for society's existence."
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"It was one
of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on
society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the
accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain
power"
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"Race
theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose
interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial
purity can have meaning only to a numbskull."
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"Power, no matter what kind of power it is, without a foundation in truth, is a
dictatorship, more or less and in one way or another, for it is always based on man's fear of
the social responsibility and personal burden that "freedom" entails."
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"The word fascism is not a word of abuse any more than the word capitalism is. It is a
concept denoting a very definite kind of mass leadership and mass influence: authoritarian,
one-party system, hence totalitarian, a system in which power takes priority over objective
interests, and facts are distorted for political purposes. Hence, there are "fascist Jews,"
just as there are "fascist Democrats."
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his
power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially
nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal"
manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people.
The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the
question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical."
If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily
understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation
would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational
motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally
consistent -- it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a
worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack
of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs
to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of
political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive
psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of
social responsibility. The analysis of this defense against consciousness of one's social
responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behavior of
the broad nonpolitical strata. In the case of the average intellectual "who wants nothing to do
with politics," it can easily be shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to
his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, lie at the basis of his
noninvolvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his
knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or
another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the
case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of
violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life
realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority,
social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual
anxiety is the predominant one. [ ] Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this
situation. It attempted to awaken the "nonpolitical" man by making him conscious solely of his
unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these "nonpolitical"
people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas
they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact
that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. [This] is explained by the
fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or
unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make
a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a
propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works
with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because
the fascist program makes a greater impression on him than the liberal program, but because in
his devotion to the führer and the führer's ideology, he experiences a momentary
release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a
different form and in this way to "solve" them."
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"When, then, the Social Democrat worker found himself in the economic crisis which degraded
him to the status of a coolie, the development of his revolutionary sentiments was severely
retarded by the conservative structuralization that had been taking shape in him for decades.
Either he remained in the camp of the Social Democrats, notwithstanding his criticism and
rejection of their policies, or he went over to the NSDAP [Nazi party] in search of a better
replacement. Irresolute and indecisive, owing to the deep contradiction between revolutionary
and conservative sentiments, disappointed by his own leadership, he followed the line of least
resistance. Whether he would give up his conservative tendencies and arrive at a complete
consciousness of his actual responsibility in the production process, i.e., at a revolutionary
consciousness, depended solely on the correct or incorrect leadership of the revolutionary
party. Thus the communist assertion that it was the Social Democrat policies that put fascism
in the saddle was correct from a psychological viewpoint. Disappointment in Social
Democracy, accompanied by the contradiction between wretchedness and conservative thinking,
must lead to fascism if there are no revolutionary organizations. For example, following
the fiasco of the Labor party's policies in England, in 1930–31, fascism began to
infiltrate the workers who, then, in the election of 1931, cut away to the Right, instead of
going over to communism."
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"Hence, what he wants -- and it is openly admitted -- is to implement nationalistic
imperialism with methods he has borrowed from Marxism , including its technique of
mass organization. But the success of this mass organization is to be ascribed to the masses
and not to Hitler . It was man's
authoritarian freedom-fearing structure that enabled his propaganda to take root. Hence, what
is important about Hitler sociologically does not issue from his personality but from the
importance attached to him by the masses. And what makes the problem all the more
complex is the fact that Hitler held the masses, with whose help he wanted to carry out his
imperialism, in complete contempt."
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"As bitter as it may be, the fact remains: It is the irresponsibleness of masses
of people that lies at the basis of fascism of all countries, nations, and races, etc. Fascism
is the result of man's distortion over thousands of years. It could have developed in any
country or nation. It is not a character trait that is confined specifically to the Germans or
Italians. It is manifest in every single individual of the world. The Austrian saying "Da
kann man halt nix machen" expresses this fact just as the American saying "Let George do
it." That this situation was brought about by a social development which goes back thousands of
years does not alter the fact itself. It is man himself who is responsible and not "historical
developments." It was the shifting of the responsibility from living man to "historical
developments" that caused the downfall of the socialist freedom movements. However, the
events of the past twenty years demand the responsibility of the working masses of people.
If we take "freedom" to mean first and foremost the responsibility of each
individual to shape personal, occupational, and social existence in a rational way, then it
can be said that there is no greater fear than the fear of the creation of general
freedom. Unless this basic problem is given complete priority and solved, there will never
be a freedom capable of lasting more than one or two generations."
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"It did not
take National Socialism long to rally workers, most of whom were either unemployed or still
very young, into the SA [Sturmangriff, Stormtroopers, "brown shirts"]. To a large extent,
however, these workers were revolutionary in a dull sort of way and still maintained an
authoritarian attitude. For this reason National Socialist propaganda was contradictory; it's
content was determined by the class for which it was intended. Only in its manipulation of the
mystical feelings of the masses was it clear and consistent.
In talks with followers of the National Socialist party and especially with members of the
SA, it was clearly brought out that the revolutionary phraseology of National Socialism was the
decisive factor in the winning over of these masses. One heard National Socialists deny that
Hitler
represented capital. One heard SA men warn Hitler that he must not betray the cause of the
"revolution." One heard SA men say that Hitler was the German Lenin . Those who went over to
National Socialism from Social Democracy and the liberal central parties were, without
exception, revolutionary minded masses who were either nonpolitical or politically undecided
prior to this. Those who went over from the Communist party were often revolutionary elements
who simply could not make any sense of many of the German Communist party's contradictory
political slogans. In part they were men upon whom the external features of Hitler's party,
it's military character, its assertiveness, etc., made a big impression.
"National Socialism made use of various means in dealing with various classes, and made
various promises depending upon the social class it needed at a particular time. In the spring
of 1933, for example, it was the revolutionary character of the Nazi movement that was
given particular emphasis in Nazi propaganda in an effort to win over the industrial workers,
and the first of May was "celebrated," but only after the aristocracy had been appeased in
Potsdam. To ascribe the success solely to political swindle, however, would be to become
entangled in a contradiction with the basic idea of freedom, and would practically exclude the
possibility of a social revolution. What must be answered is: Why do the masses allow
themselves to be politically swindled? The masses had every possibility of evaluating the
propaganda of the various parties. Why didn't they see that, while promising the workers that
the owners of the means of production would be disappropriated, Hitler promised the capitalists that
their rights would be protected?"
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"Yet, it was precisely our failure to differentiate between work and politics, between
reality and illusion; it was precisely our mistake of conceiving of politics as a rational
human activity comparable to the sowing of seeds or the construction of buildings that was
responsible for the fact that a painter who
failed to make the grade was able to plunge the whole world into misery. And I have
stressed again and again that the main purpose of this book -- which, after all, was not
written merely for the fun of it -- was to demonstrate these catastrophic errors in human
thinking and to eliminate irrationalism from politics. It is an essential part of our social
tragedy that the farmer, the industrial worker, the physician, etc., do not influence social
existence solely through their social activities, but also and even predominantly through their
political ideologies. For political activity hinders objective and professional activity; it
splits every profession into inimical ideologic groups; creates a dichotomy in the body of
industrial workers; limits the activity of the medical profession and harms the patients. In
short, it is precisely political activity that prevents the realization of that which it
pretends to fight for: peace, work, security, international cooperation, free objective speech,
freedom of religion, etc."
― Wilhelm Reich , The Mass Psychology of
Fascism
"... please recall Bill Clinton's rules of engagement as applied to the Serbs in 1999, wherein he decided that the political leaders, bureaucratic support structure, media infrastructure and intellectual underpinnings of his enemies' war effort were legitimate targets of war. ..."
After observing Skynet's coordinated attack on Alex Jone's Infowars yesterday, we can hardly
wait to implement Bill Clinton's Rules of Engagement on the already identified Enemies
of the People, and eagerly await the God-Emperor's word.
Second, please recall Bill Clinton's rules of engagement as applied to the Serbs in
1999, wherein he decided that the political leaders, bureaucratic support structure, media
infrastructure and intellectual underpinnings of his enemies' war effort were legitimate
targets of war.
No one else may have been paying attention to the unintended consequences of that, but
many folks on our side of the present divide were. Food for thought. A reminder about the shape of the battlefield (legal and otherwise) and Bill Clinton's
Rules of Engagement.
New McCarthyism allows
corporate media to tighten grip, Democrats to ignore their own failings Alan MacLeod
The election of Donald Trump came as a shock to many ( Independent ,
11/5/16 ).
To the shock of many, Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential elections, becoming the 45th
president of the United States. Not least shocked were corporate media, and the political
establishment more generally; the Princeton Election Consortium
confidently predicted an over 99 percent chance of a Clinton victory, while MSNBC 's
Rachel Maddow ( 10/17/16 ) said
it could be a "Goldwater-style landslide."
Indeed, Hillary Clinton and her team actively
attempted to secure a Trump primary victory, assured that he would be the easiest candidate
to beat. The Podesta emails show that her team considered even
before the primaries that associating Trump with Vladimir Putin and Russia would be a winning
strategy and employed the tactic throughout 2016 and beyond.
With Clinton claiming , "Putin would rather have a puppet
as president," Russia was by far the most discussed topic during the presidential debates (
FAIR.org ,
10/13/16 ), easily eclipsing healthcare, terrorism, poverty and inequality. Media seized
upon the theme, with Paul Krugman ( New York Times , 7/22/16
) asserting Trump would be a " Siberian
candidate," while ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden ( Washington Post ,
5/16/16 ) claimed Trump would be Russia's "useful fool."
The day after the election, Jonathan Allen's book Shattered detailed, Clinton's team
decided that the proliferation of Russian-sponsored "fake news" online was the primary reason
for their loss.
Within weeks, the Washington Post (
11/24/16 ) was publicizing the website PropOrNot.com , which purports to help users
differentiate sources as fake or genuine, as an invaluable tool in the battle against fake news
( FAIR.org , 12/1/16
, 12/8/16 ).
The website soberly informs its readers that you see news sources critiquing the "mainstream
media," the EU, NATO, Obama, Clinton, Angela Merkel or other centrists are a telltale sign of
Russian propaganda. It also claims that when news sources argue against foreign intervention
and war with Russia, that's evidence that you are reading Kremlin-penned fake
news.
The Washington Post (
11/24/16 ) was one of the first media outlets to blame the election results on Russian
"fake news."
PropOrNot claims it has identified over 200 popular websites that "routinely peddle Russian
propaganda." Included in the list were Wikileaks , Trump-supporting right-wing websites
like InfoWars and the Drudge Report , libertarian outlets like the Ron Paul
Institute and Antiwar.com , and award-winning anti-Trump (but also Clinton-critical)
left-wing sites like TruthDig and Naked Capitalism . Thus it was uniquely news
sources that did not lie in the fairway between Clinton Democrats and moderate Republicans that
were tarred as propaganda.
PropOrNot calls for an FBI investigation into the news sources listed. Even its creators see
the resemblance to a new McCarthyism, as it appears as a frequently asked question on
their website. (They say it is not McCarthyism, because "we are not accusing anyone of
lawbreaking, treason, or 'being a member of the Communist Party.'") However, this new
McCarthyism does not stem from the conservative right like before, but from the establishment
center.
That the list is so evidently flawed and its creators refuse to reveal their identities or
funding did not stop the issue becoming one of the most discussed in mainstream circles. Media
talk of fake news sparked organizations like Google , Facebook , Bing and
YouTube to change their algorithms, ostensibly to combat it.
However, one major effect of the change has been to hammer progressive outlets that
challenge the status quo. The Interceptreported a 19 percent reduction
in Google search traffic, AlterNet63 percent and Democracy
Now!36 percent. Reddit and
Twitter deleted thousands of accounts, while in what came to be called the
"AdPocalypse," YouTube began demonetizing videos from independent creators like
Majority Report and the Jimmy Dore Show on controversial political topics like
environmental protests, war and mass shootings. (In contrast, corporate outlets like CNN
did not have their content on those subjects demonetized.) Journalists that questioned aspects
of the Russia narrative, like Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Maté, were accused of being
agents of the Kremlin ( Shadowproof ,
7/9/18 ).
The effect has been to pull away the financial underpinnings of alternative media that
question the corporate state and capitalism in general, and to reassert corporate control over
communication, something that had been loosened during the election in particular. It also
impels liberal journalists to prove their loyalty by employing sufficiently bellicose and
anti-Russian rhetoric, lest they also be tarred as Kremlin agents.
Thomas Friedman ( Morning Joe ,
2/14/18 ) pointedly compared email hacking to events that the US responded to with major
wars.
When it was reported in February that 13 Russian trolls had been indicted by a US grand jury
for sharing and promoting pro-Trump and anti-Clinton memes on Facebook , the response
was a general uproar. Multiple senior political figures declared it an "act of war." Clinton
herself described Russian interference as a "
cyber 9/11 ," while Thomas Friedman said that it was a "
Pearl Harbor–scale event ." Morgan Freeman's viral video, produced by Rob Reiner's
Committee to Investigate Russia, summed up the outrage: "We have been attacked," the actor
declared ; "We are at war with Russia." Liberals declared Trump's refusal to react in a
sufficiently aggressive manner further proof he was Putin's puppet.
The McCarthyist wave swept over other politicians that challenged the liberal center. Green
Party presidential candidate Jill Stein refused to endorse the Russia narrative, leading
mainstream figures like Rachel Maddow to
insinuate she was a Kremlin stooge as well. After news broke that Stein's connection to
Russia was being officially investigated, top Clinton staffer Zac Petkanas announced :
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
"Commentary" that succinctly summed up the political atmosphere.
In contrast, Bernie Sanders has consistently and explicitly endorsed the RussiaGate theory,
claiming it is "clear
to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and
intends to be involved in 2018." Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented
as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (
11/12/17 ) asking its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of
Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals respond?" The message is clear: The
progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the
failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.
Outlets like Slate (
5/11/18 ) warned of a sinister connection between Black Lives Matter and Russia.
It is not just politicians who have been smeared as Russian agents, witting or unwitting;
virtually every major progressive movement challenging the system is increasingly dismissed in
the same way. Multiple media outlets, including CNN (
6/29/18 ), Slate (
5/11/18 ), Vox ( 4/11/18
) and the New York Times (
2/16/18 ), have produced articles linking Black Lives Matter to the Kremlin, insinuating
the outrage over racist police brutality is another Russian psyop.
Others claimed Russia funded the riots in Ferguson and that Russian trolls promoted
the Standing Rock environmental protests.
Meanwhile, Democratic insider Neera Tanden retweeted a
description of Chelsea Manning as a "Russian stooge," writing off her campaign for the Senate
as "the Kremlin paying the extreme left to swing elections. Remember that." Thus corporate
media are promoting the idea that any challenge to the establishment is likely a Kremlin-funded
astroturf effort.
The tactic has spread to Europe as well. After the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei
Skripal, the UK government immediately blamed Russia and imposed sanctions (without publicly
presenting evidence). Jeremy Corbyn, the pacifist, leftist leader of the Labour Party, was
uncharacteristically bellicose, asserting , "The Russian
authorities must be held to account on the basis of the evidence and our response must be both
decisive and proportionate."
The British press was outraged -- at Corbyn's insufficient jingoism. The Sun 's front
page ( 3/15/18 )
attacked him as "Putin's Puppet," while the Daily Mail (
3/15/18 ) went with "Corbyn the Kremlin Stooge." As with Sanders, the fact that Corbyn
endorsed the official narrative didn't keep him from being attacked, showing that the
conspiratorial mindset seeing Russia behind everything has little to do with evidence-based
reality, and is increasingly a tool to demonize the establishment's political enemies.
The Atlantic Council
published a report claiming Greek political parties Syriza and Golden Dawn were not
expressions of popular frustration and disillusionment, but "the Kremlin's Trojan horses,"
undermining democracy in its birthplace. Providing scant evidence, the report went on to link
virtually every major European political party challenging the center, from right or left, to
Putin. From Britian's UKIP to Spain's Podemos to Italy's Five Star Movement, all are charged
with being under one man's control. It is this council that Facebookannounced
it was partnering with to help promote "trustworthy" news and weed out "untrustworthy" sources
( FAIR.org ,
5/21/18 ), as its CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with representatives from some of the largest
corporate outlets, like the New York Times , CNN and News Corp , to help
develop a system to control what content we see on the website.
"We are at war," Morgan Freeman
assures us on behalf of the Committee to Investigate Russia.
The utility of this wave of suspicion is captured in Freeman's aforementioned
video . After asserting that "for 241 years, our democracy has been a shining example to
the world of what we can all aspire to" -- a tally that would count nearly a century of chattel
slavery and almost another hundred years of de jure racial disenfranchisement -- the actor
explains that "Putin uses social media to spread propaganda and false information, he convinces
people in democratic societies to distrust their media, their political process."
The obvious implication is that the political process and media ought to be trusted, and
would be trusted were it not for Putin's propaganda. It was not the failures of capitalism and
the deep inequalities it created that led to widespread popular resentment and movements on
both left and right pressing for radical change across Europe and America, but Vladimir Putin
himself. In other words, "America is already great."
For the Democrats, Russiagate allows them to ignore calls for change and not scrutinize why
they lost to the most unpopular presidential candidate in history. Since Russia hacked the
election, there is no need for introspection, and certainly no need to accommodate the Sanders
wing or to engage with progressive challenges from activists on the left, who are Putin's
puppets anyway. The party can continue on the same course, painting over the deep cracks in
American society. Similarly, for centrists in Europe, under threat from both left and right,
the Russia narrative allows them to sow distrust among the public for any movement challenging
the dominant order.
For the state, Russiagate has encouraged liberals to forego their faculties and develop a
state-worshiping, conspiratorial mindset in the face of a common, manufactured enemy. Liberal
trust in institutions like the FBI has
markedly increased since 2016, while liberals also now espouse a neocon foreign policy in
Syria, Ukraine and other regions, with many supporting the vast increases in the US military
budget and attacking Trump from the right.
For corporate media, too, the disciplining effect of the Russia narrative is highly useful,
allowing them to reassert control over the means of communication under the guise of preventing
a Russian "fake news" infiltration. News sources that challenge the establishment are censored,
defunded or deranked, as corporate sources stoke mistrust of them. Meanwhile, it allows them to
portray themselves as arbiters of truth. This strategy has had some success, with
Democrats' trust in media increasing since the election.
None of this is to say that Russia does not strive to influence other countries' elections,
a tactic that the United States has employed even more frequently ( NPR ,
12/22/16 ). Yet the extent to which the story has dominated the US media to the detriment
of other issues is a remarkable testament to its utility for those in power.
Thank you for the clarification. Based on their research, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Professor of
History at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Terry Charman, a Senior
Historian at London Imperial War Museum, concur:
"
"The Soviet entry into the war played a much greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing
Japan to surrender because it dashed any hope that Japan could terminate the war through
Moscow's mediation," Hasegawa, a Russian-speaking American scholar, said in an interview.
Despite the death toll from the atomic bombings -- 140,000 in Hiroshima, 80,000 in
Nagasaki the Imperial Military Command believed it could hold out against an Allied invasion
if it retained control of Manchuria and Korea, which provided Japan with the resources for
war, according to Hasegawa and Terry Charman
"The Soviet attack changed all that," Charman said. "The leadership in Tokyo realized they
had no hope now, and in that sense August Storm did have a greater effect on the Japanese
decision to surrender than the dropping of the A-bombs."
"
"Isn't this patently contradicting the historical fact that Japan surrendered (militarily,
what else!) precisely because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic destructions? "
Another victim of the American education system and Hollywood history lessons
Why, then, would a coalition of leftish and right-wing patriots not join in
denouncing a leader who seemed to put Russia's interests ahead of those of his own country?
Sorry to say, things are not so simple. Look a bit more closely at what holds the anti-Trump
foreign policy coalition together, and you will discover a missing reality that virtually no
one will acknowledge directly: the existence of a beleaguered but still potent American Empire
whose junior partner is Europe. What motivates a broad range of the President's opponents,
then, is not so much the fear that he is anti-American as the suspicion that he is
anti-Empire.
Of course, neither liberals nor conservatives dare to utter the "E-word." Rather, they argue
in virtually identical terms that Trump's foreign and trade policies are threatening the
pillars of world order: NATO, the Group of Seven, the World Trade Organization, the
International Monetary Fund, the OSCE, and so forth. These institutions, they claim, along with
American military power and a willingness to use it when necessary, are primarily responsible
for the peaceful, prosperous, free, and democratic world that we have all been privileged to
inhabit since the Axis powers surrendered to the victorious Allies in 1945.
The fear expressed plainly by The New York Times 's David Leonhardt, a
self-described "left-liberal," is that "Trump wants to destroy the Atlantic Alliance." Seven
months earlier, this same fear motivated the arch-conservative National Review to
editorialize that, "Under Trump, America has retreated from its global and moral leadership
roles, alienated its democratic allies, and abandoned the bipartisan defense of liberal ideals
that led to more than 70 years of security and prosperity." All the critics would agree with
Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of the Munich Security Conference, who recently stated, "Let's face
it. Mr. Trump's core beliefs conflict with the foundations of Western grand strategy since the
mid-1940's."
"Western grand strategy," of course, is a euphemism for U.S. global hegemony – world
domination, to put it plainly. In addition to peace and prosperity (mainly for privileged
groups in privileged nations), this is the same strategy which since 1945 has given the world
the Cold War, the specter of a nuclear holocaust, and proxy wars consuming between 10 and 20
million lives in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya,
and Yemen. Its direct effects include the overthrow of elected governments in Guatemala, Iran,
Lebanon, Congo, Nigeria, Indonesia, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Granada, Ukraine, et al.;
the bribery of public officials and impoverishment and injury of workers and farmers world-wide
as a result of exploitation and predatory "development" by Western governments and
mega-corporations; the destruction of natural environments and exacerbation of global climate
change by these same governments and corporations; and the increasing likelihood of new
imperialist wars caused by the determination of elites to maintain America's global supremacy
at all costs.
It is interesting that most defenders of the Western Alliance (and its Pacific equivalent:
the more loosely organized anti-Chinese alliance of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand,
and South Korea) virtually never talk about American hegemony or the gigantic military
apparatus (with more than 800 U.S. bases in 60 or so nations and a military-industrial complex
worth trillions) that supports it. Nor is the subject of empire high on Mr. Trump's list of
approved twitter topics, even when he desecrates NATO and other sacred cows of the Alliance.
There are several reasons for this silence, but the most important, perhaps, is the need to
maintain the pretense of American moral superiority: the so-called "exceptionalist" position
that inspires McCain to attack Trump for "false equivalency" (the President's statement in
Helsinki that both Russia and the U.S. have made mistakes), and that leads pundits left and
right to argue that America is not an old-style empire seeking to dominate, but a new-style
democracy seeking to liberate.
The narrative you will hear repeated ad nauseum at both ends of the liberal/conservative
spectrum tells how the Yanks, who won WW II with a little help from the Russians and other
allies, and who then thoroughly dominated the world both economically and militarily,
could have behaved like vengeful conquerors, but instead devoted their resources and
energies to spreading democracy, freedom, and the blessings of capitalism around the world. Gag
me with a Tomahawk cruise missile! What is weird about this narrative is that it "disappears"
not only the millions of victims of America's wars but the very military forces that
nationalists like Trump claim deserve to be worshipfully honored. Eight hundred bases? A
million and a half troops on active duty? Total air and sea domination? I'm shocked . . .
shocked!
In fact, there are two sorts of blindness operative in the current U.S. political
environment. The Democratic Party Establishment, now swollen to include a wide variety of
Russia-haters, globalizing capitalists, and militarists, is blind (or pretends to be) to the
connection between the "Western Alliance" and the American Empire. The Trump Party (which I
expect, one of these days, to shed the outworn Republican label in favor of something more
Berlusconi-like, say, the American Greatness Party) is blind – or pretends to be –
to the contradiction between its professed
"Fortress America" nationalism and the reality of a global U.S. imperium.
This last point is worth emphasizing. In a recent article in The Nation , Michael
Klare, a writer I generally admire, claims to have discovered that there is really a method to
Trump's foreign policy madness, i.e., the President favors the sort of "multi-polar" world,
with Russia and China occupying the two other poles, that Putin and Xi Jinping have long
advocated. Two factors make this article odd as well as interesting. First, the author argues
that multi-polarity is a bad idea, because "smaller, weaker states, and minority peoples
everywhere will be given even shorter shrift than at present when caught in any competitive
jousting for influence among the three main competitors (and their proxies)." Wha? Even shorter
shrift than under unipolarity? I think not, especially considering that adding new poles (why
just three, BTW? What about India and Brazil?) gives smaller states and minority peoples many
more bargaining options in the power game.
More important, however, Trump's multi-polar/nationalist ideals are clearly contradicted by
his determination to make American world domination even more overwhelming by vastly increasing
the size of the U.S. military establishment. Klare notes, correctly, that the President has
denounced the Iraq War, criticized American "overextension" abroad, talked about ending the
Afghan War, and declared that the U.S. should not be "the world's policeman." But if he wants
America to become a mere Great Power in a world of Great Powers, Trump will clearly have to do
more than talk about it. He will have to cut the military budget, abandon military bases,
negotiate arms control agreements, convert military-industrial spending to peaceful uses, and
do all sorts of other things he clearly has no intention of doing. Ever.
No – if the Western Alliance, democratic values, and WTO trade rules provide
ideological cover and junior partners for American global hegemony, "go-it-alone" nationalism,
multi-polarity, and Nobel Peace Prize diplomatic efforts provide ideological cover for . . .
American global hegemony! This can be seen most clearly in the case of Iran, against whom Trump
has virtually declared war. He would like to avoid direct military involvement there, of
course, but he is banking on threats of irresistible "fire and fury" to bring the Iranians to
heel. And if these threats are unavailing? Then – count on it! – the Empire will
act like an empire, and we will have open war.
In fact, Trump and his most vociferous critics and supporters are unknowingly playing the
same game. John Brennan, meet Steve Bannon! You preach very different sermons, but you're
working for the same god. That deity's name changes over the centuries, but we worship him
every time we venerate symbols of military might at sports events, pay taxes to support U.S.
military supremacy, or pledge allegiance to a flag. The name unutterable by both Trump and his
enemies is Empire.
What do we do with the knowledge that both the Tweeter King and the treason-baiting
coalition opposing him are imperialists under the skin? Two positions, I think, have to be
rejected. One is the Lyndon Johnson rationale: since Johnson was progressive on domestic
issues, including civil rights and poverty, that made him preferable to the Republicans, even
though he gave us the quasi-genocidal war in Indochina. The other position is the diametric
opposite: since Trump is less blatantly imperialistic than most Democratic Party leaders, we
ought to favor him, despite his billionaire-loving, immigrant-hating, racist and misogynist
domestic policies. Merely to say this is to refute it.
My own view is that anti-imperialists ought to decline to choose between these alternatives.
We ought to name the imperial god that both Trump and his critics worship and demand
that the party that we work and vote for renounce the pursuit of U.S. global hegemony.
Immediately, this means letting self-proclaimed progressives or libertarians in both major
parties know that avoiding new hot and cold wars, eliminating nuclear weapons and other WMD,
slashing military spending, and converting war production to peaceful uses are top priorities
that must be honored if they are to get our support. No political party can deliver peace and
social justice and maintain the Empire at the same time. If neither Republicans nor Democrats
are capable of facing this reality, we will have to create a new party that can.
Notes.
[1]
The author is University Professor of Conflict Resolution and Public Affairs at George Mason
University. His most recent book is Resolving Structural Conflicts : How Violent
Systems Can Be Transformed (2017).
"... The Neocons hate Trump, but they also own him. The best example of this kind of "ownership" is the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem which was an incredibly stupid act, but one which the Israel Lobby demanded. The same goes for the US reneging on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or, for that matter, the current stream of threats against Iran. ..."
"... Where is the UN in this? What use is the UN if it can't prevent this ghastly scenario? ..."
"... Trump's tactic is chutzpah, doing anything he wants and saying screw you ..."
"... Europe is so weak it can barely force through a gas pipeline against Washington's displeasure. ..."
"... Iran is guilty . It has section and groups who want to kneel before USA for personal gains. No different from Russia, India, Pakistan and even Syria and Libya. The world suffers from this Anerican centric view of the economy and the growth . ..."
The Neocons hate Trump, but they also own him. The best example of this kind of "ownership" is the US decision to move its
embassy to Jerusalem which was an incredibly stupid act, but one which the Israel Lobby demanded. The same goes for the US reneging
on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or, for that matter, the current stream of threats against Iran.
It appears that the Neocons have a basic strategy which goes like this: " we hate Trump and everything he represents, but we
also control him; let's use him to do all the crazy stuff no sane US President would ever do, and then let's use the fallout of these
crazy decisions and blame it all on Trump; this way we get all that we want and we get to destroy Trump in the process only to replace
him with one of "our guys" when the time is right ". Again, the real goal of an attack on Iran would be to bomb Iran back into
a pre-revolutionary era and to punish the Iranian people for supporting the "wrong" regime thus daring to defy the AngloZionist Empire.
The Neocons could use Trump as a "disposable President" who could be blamed for the ensuing chaos and political disaster while accomplishing
one of the most important political objectives of Israel: laying waste to Iran. For the Neocons, this is a win-win situation: if
things go well (however unlikely that is), they can take all the credit and still control Trump like a puppet, and if things don't
go well, Iran is in ruins, Trump is blamed for a stupid and crazy war, and the Clinton gang will be poised to come back to power.
The biggest loser in such a scenario would, of course, be the people of Iran. But the US military will not fare well either. For
one thing, a plan to just "lay waste" to Iran has no viable exit strategy, especially not a short-term one, while the US military
has no stomach for long conflicts (Afghanistan and Iraq are bad enough). Furthermore, once the US destroys most of what can be destroyed
the initiative will be in the Iranians' hands and time will be on their side. In 2006 the Israelis had to fold after 33 days only,
how much time will the US need before having to declare victory and leave?
If the war spreads to, say, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria, then will the US even have the option to just leave? What about the
Israelis – what options will they have once missiles start hitting them (not only Iranian missiles but probably also Hezbollah missiles
from Lebanon!)?
Former Mossad head Meir Dagan was fully correct when he stated that
a military attack on Iran was "the stupidest
thing I have ever heard" . Alas, the Neocons have never been too bright, and stupid stuff is what they mostly do. All we can
hope for is that somebody in the US will find a way to stop them and avert another immoral, bloody, useless and potentially very
dangerous war.
If there is one thing we have learned over the last few decades it is that there is nothing too stupid, ignorant, arrogant, demented
or evil for the US to do.
Just a few months ago Iran was quite willingly and certifiably honouring the terms of the nuclear deal, now they are quite
possibly going to be subjected to a completely unprovoked attack, with or without some (probably fabricated) Casus belli.
Where is the UN in this? What use is the UN if it can't prevent this ghastly scenario? It seems doubtful that the Europeans
will do anything, they have been craven enough to go along with the US on the Russia "threat" despite them having a military budget
nearly four times larger than that of the RF and a population about three times bigger (The Europeans have even for all intents
and purposes sanctioned themselves at the behest of the US) Do we seriously believe that Russia and China are going to sit idly
by while Iran is being bombed and its oil bearing regions invaded? Potentially nuclear armed missiles flying around near the southern
border of Russia anyone?
If anyone has seen the 1984 nuclear war drama "Threads" they will be noticing an eerie similarity.
It's too bad youtube took down the whole movie, with the Iranian invasion and newscast sequences at the beginning. Maybe vimeo
or dailymotion has it up
All said US lost ~9K aircraft in the Vietnam war, to hostile action and a further 500 in accidents, approximately 58 000 KIA.
Yes , i understand Vietnam is not Iran (Iran is not a rice paddy), but the US is not the same either, now it is a "professional"
defense force, whose Navy rams defenseless civilian ships (or cant perform at all) , whose Air force planes keep falling from
the sky and whose Army are best moving down civilians.
Of course Iran would loose such a war, no doubt, but can the US sustain the losses, can public opinion ? Say 15 000 bodybags ?
25 000 ? 50 000?
I doubt the US can even put 100 000 soldiers on the ground, combat soldiers, that is, not 3′rd echelon cooks and chauffeurs, very
few armies can. Iran has got at least 5 000 000 trained people with ammo and a AK 47 or RPG eager to put a dent in the US. (China
has between 15 – 40 Million they can draw from).
Forget it, the Iranians can simply "trample" the US to death, at least until the US runs out of body bags.
And consider if the US starts a war, we don't have to trade with it anymore, its under sanction, goodbye "Rare metals" (China),
goodbye computer chips (China) goodbye everything, because the US cant produce anything (No factories) and has few resources left,
hehe.
Sanction the American people to a dose of "concentration camp", 900 calories a day, candle light, and horse drawn transportion!
The Morgentau plan is fulfilled ! I will bathe in Champagne, wash my cojones in Budweiser when that happens. And Israel ? What
Israel ? You mean Palestine ? ahhhh I will feed a bagel to the ducks!
And no, i don't think it will be necessary to learn either Russian or Chinese, I think we might get along well enough.
There is an awful lot of wishful thinking in this. Trump's tactic is chutzpah, doing anything he wants and saying screw you
if you can't take a joke. Europe is so weak it can barely force through a gas pipeline against Washington's displeasure.
Neither China nor Russia is likeliy to go to war for Iran, and who else is there? If Iran did manage to block the Straits for
more than a short time, do we think the Judaeo-Trumpians would say sorry and back off? Even if Trump used nukes, what could the
world do? Be outraged, and learn not to cross the Empire. And diesel electrics have to surface.
Neither China nor Russia is likeliy to go to war for Iran, and who else is there?
There is a larger structure called Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Xi since 2016 was calling on accepting Iran into it,
with Iran having currently an Observer status. For Russia it will be enough (which was done before already) to place some of its
VKS units on Iranian airfields, especially under auspices of SCO military practices and even bombing will become a huge issue.
Russia is not going to allow any hostile power to have direct access to Caspian Sea. Again, WHAT war? Combined Arms invasion–that
will be the end of the US as we know it. Bombing? Let's wait an see. In fact, it is not up to Russia, it is up to Iran do decide
how to proceed–Iran has options. Will she exercise them?
Even if Trump used nukes, what could the world do? Be outraged, and learn not to cross the Empire . And diesel electrics
have to surface.
Ahh, what? Is the world "crossing" the Empire now? Russia is, but then again she can erase the Empire from the map. This mental
construct is so "out there" that it is even difficult to respond properly to it. I omit here, of course, a gigantic political
fallout for US which will make it a de facto a pariah in case it decides to use nukes. In fact, I can predict with a good degree
of probability what is going to happen. For starters–dedollarization will go into overdrive.
If Iran did manage to block the Straits for more than a short time, do we think the Judaeo-Trumpians would say sorry and
back off
The only thing with which I may agree here. In fact, if one of the US Navy carriers (God forbids), somehow gets damaged, let
alone sunk, one may expect an escalation to a nuclear threshold since US is inherently nuclear weapons-biased since can not take
any serious conventional losses, especially in terms of a naval assets. But I agree, that with about 2-3 air-wings in a vicinity
of Hormuz Strait, plus the wing of ASW aviation on call–neither Iranian submarine forces, nor, especially those proverbial "speed
boats" will be much of a strategic challenge.
All we can hope for is that somebody in the US will find a way to stop them and avert another immoral, bloody, useless and
potentially very dangerous war.
We all know how to stop them. But nobody wants to say it out loud. Certainly not me.
1) The oil and gas infrastructure of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, etc. are all fixed targets, relatively easy to
destroy by missiles. Iran would likely destroy all regional oil and gas infrastructure, if their's is damaged.
2) Also, Iran has a nuclear reactor right on the shores of the Persian Gulf? If that is blown up, or even fails because staff
or electricity are not available, then the Persian Gulf, and maybe Turkey and Israel, would be hit by heavy radioactive fallout,
like at Chernobyl or Fukushima.
3) Finally, Iran has many skilled and able electronics and programming young people. Iran was able to take control of, and
land undamaged, America's most advanced surveillance drone. It is likely that a war on Iran would unleash cyberwar and cause damage
to electrical, communication, and finance systems in the USA, in ways and places that we have not imagined.
Napoleon was certain to defeat Russia. Hitler was certain to defeat Russia. The US was certain to defeat North Korea and certain
to defeat Vietnam. But the outcomes of wars are not certain. Which it is why rational people do not like war.
China buys $US200+ billion in computer chips from the US and produces ~$US 20+ billion itself.
Robots, chips and the pursuit of China's tech dreams
7-10-18
Despite its high-profile ambitious, the world's second-largest economy still has to rely on a steady supply of foreign-made
semiconductors, the heartbeat of the "Internet of Things" and the industrial factories of the future.
To illustrate the point, China's fragility was exposed last month when ZTE was dragged into President Donald Trump's trade
war. At one point, there were fears it would go under after being banned for seven years from buying US-made components such as
chips.
"Xi himself has made semiconductor development a priority for years," Jesse Heatley, a director at Albright Stonebridge Group
and a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project, wrote for The Diplomat in April.
"Almost exactly two years ago, he gave a controversial speech in which he similarly assailed China's dependence on foreign
suppliers and urged mastering 'core technologies.' At that time, China observers noted Xi's plans to develop globally competitive
chipset champions and challenge foreign tech firms' dominance."
The task will be daunting. A glance at the global semiconductor industry underlines just how far behind the country is when
it comes to chip manufacturing, and R&D.
Last year, revenue from the sector in the US edged close to $250 billion compared to China's miserly $24.7 billion, statistics
from IEK, which is part of the government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan, showed.
With such a disparity, it is hardly surprising that Chinese companies have to import about $200 billion worth of chips from
the US each year.
' But Iran is not an "easy" ally and as events with initial lifting of sanction demonstrated, she forgot about Russia the
minute they were lifted–Russians are extremely well aware of this "small" fact, especially the way Iran proceeded, despite
warnings, in commercial aerospace '
No argument there I've been saying the same thing for a long time the Iranian aviation press started badmouthing Russian civil
aircraft the minute sanctions were lifted [thanks mostly to Russia] and then placing $20 billion orders with Boeing and Airbus
Not to mention the trouble they are causing in Syria even Assad is holding his nose
I'm no fan of Iran, or religious extremism of any kind but merely was debunking the horseshit about Iranian air defense spouted
by clown Margolis
As for the P8, I'm not badmouthing it it's an impressive piece of work but I also know the MIC 'way' which is to deliver crap
that doesn't work and takes years to actually get working, if ever and regardless of MAD or no MAD the main weapon against subs
is still dropping sonobuys to find the sub in the first place the P8 just isn't the right tool for the strait of Hormuz even if
working properly
And I still maintain that even with the four S300 batteries in Iran [each has four TELs, the mobile launchers, so that's 16
total] Iran can close its airspace and that over the strait mounting a serious SEAD effort is not going to be a Sunday walk in
the park they also have a lot of S200s, which they have reportedly modernized and mounted on trucks [and we recall how Syria brought
down that F16 with its S200 a few months ago] the S200 missile itself is still a monster even compared to S400 it's actually faster
at 2500 m/s that's near mach 10 at high altitude compare that to US SAM technology the SM6 has a whopping M3.5 top speed and uses
the AIM120 air to air missile seeker
[There is also a ground-launched version of the AIM120 the SLAAMRAM...Houthis in Yemen are doing the same thing, turning old
Soviet R27 AA missiles into SAMs...actually hit a Saudi F15 with one...of course one would expect the US MIC to be somewhat more
sophisticated]
I would not be surprised if the Bavar 373 is a decent SAM at least the missile kinematic performance, since the Iranians have
shown they can build pretty good missiles [the Syria strike a while back comes to mind, impressively precise from such a long
range] piggybacking those off the big Russian radars and they might have an impressive air defense capability overall [I doubt
their own radar tech is up to big league standards just yet]
But overall I agree there's no way that Putin is going to 'save' Iran if the US attacks but then I doubt the US is going to
attack I think it's pretty far fetched Trump just offered 'no preconditions' talks to Iran so I think the whole thing is political
theater US sanctions will seriously hurt Iran and Trump needs to look like a winner for domestic politics he can do this by simply
redoing an Iran deal that is basically the same thing with window dressing
' Iran has many skilled and able electronics and programming young people. Iran was able to take control of, and land undamaged,
America's most advanced surveillance drone. It is likely that a war on Iran would unleash cyberwar and cause damage to electrical,
communication, and finance systems in the USA, in ways and places that we have not imagined '
That's an interesting point Here is part of what Major General Qassim Soleimani said after that all-caps tweet threat by Trump
' We are near you where you can't even imagine '
I found that puzzling but your mention of cyberwar and civil infrastructure sabotage could in fact be what he was alluding
to
Incidentally he also said this
'You threaten us with an action that is 'unprecedented' in the world. This is cabaret-style rhetoric. Only a cabaret owner
talks to the world this way.
What was it that you could do over the past 20 years but you didn't? You came to Afghanistan with score of tanks and personnel
carriers and hundreds of advanced helicopters and committed crimes there. What the hell could you do between 2001 and 2018
with 110,000 troops? You are today begging Taliban for Talks.
Afghanistan was a poor country, what the hell could you do in this country that you are currently threatening us?
You arrogantly attacked Iraq with 160,000 troops and multiple times (military equipment) compared to what you used in Afghanistan.
But what happened? Ask your then commander who was the person that he sent to me and asked 'Is it possible for you to give
us time and use your influence so that our soldiers will not be attacked by the Iraqi fighters in these few months until we
exit the country?'
Have you forgotten that you provide adult diapers for your soldiers in the tanks? Despite that you are currently threatening
the great country of Iran? With what background to you threaten us?'
Ouch this guy is a tough cookie not sure how eager US generals are to dance with this guy
Sanction on Iran on the false accusations of pursuing nuclear activities was mounted by USA UK France but Russia could have
vetoed. China cold have vetoed. The truth was available to IAEA (,El Baradi 's term ) . They didn't. The 2011 agreements by Brazil
and Turkey was reneged by Hillars US after proposing that very deal.
That itself should have prompted Russia and Rusdia's fellow traveler on this area China not to trust anything coming from USA
. It should have stood firm. They didn't . Russia and China received the bribes offered as India did when it referred the case
to UN in 2006 .
These are the realities Iran took note . To Iran, USA was the top dog. So they went knocking at the door of the dog house .
You must cut some slack for Iran.
Iran is guilty . It has section and groups who want to kneel before USA for personal gains. No different from Russia, India,
Pakistan and even Syria and Libya. The world suffers from this Anerican centric view of the economy and the growth .
I enjoyed your military discussion guys and would not disagree with what you wrote. But for me, there two key points:
1) war is a totally unpredictable affair; this whole discussion is playing armchair generals; Iran is not Iraq, and
2) the Saker did touch on the US morale but one mid-size US ship sunk and the US military would turn into one crying baby and
will reach for the nukes as every impotent wanker would.
Yes, I agree that most of Attack Iran talk is a psyops bull, designed to financially exhaust Iran. US is made up of tough-talking
clowns such as Fred Reed, Eric Margollis at al but none of these clowns would be willing to risk their lifestyles let alone their
lives more than by moronic chest beating that they engage in. Attack Iran is simply Zionist incited US trash-pile rumbling. One
long smelly fart, for lack of a better methapor. Cause it would be the end of US as it is now, still a relatively comfortable
living country. Event the Hebrew Slaves know their own limitations.
I enjoyed your military discussion guys and would not disagree with what you wrote. But
for me, there two key points:
1) war is a totally unpredictable affair; this whole discussion is playing armchair generals;
Iran is not Iraq, and
2) the Saker did touch on the US morale but one mid-size US ship sunk and the US military
would turn into one crying baby and will reach for the nukes as every impotent wanker
would.
Yes, I agree that most of Attack Iran talk is a psyops bull, designed to financially
exhaust Iran. US is made up of tough-talking clowns such as Fred Reed, Eric Margollis at al
but none of these clowns would be willing to risk their lifestyles let alone their lives more
than by moronic chest beating that they engage in.
Attack Iran is simply Zionist incited US
trash-pile rumbling. One long smelly fart, for lack of a better methapor. Cause it would be
the end of US as it is now, still a relatively comfortable living country. Event the Hebrew
Slaves know their own limitations.
Around 35 years ago, I was sitting in my college dorm-room closely reading the New York
Times as I did each and every morning when I noticed an astonishing article about the
controversial new Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir.
Back in those long-gone days, the Gray Lady was strictly a black-and-white print
publication, lacking the large color photographs of rap stars and long stories about dieting
techniques that fill so much of today's news coverage, and it also seemed to have a far harder
edge in its Middle East reporting. A year or so earlier, Shamir's predecessor Menacham Begin
had allowed his Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to talk him into invading Lebanon and besieging
Beirut, and the subsequent massacre of Palestinian women and children in the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps had outraged the world and angered America's government. This eventually led to
Begin's resignation, with Shamir, his Foreign Minister, taking his place.
Prior to his surprising 1977 election victory, Begin had spent decades in the political
wilderness as an unacceptable right-winger, and Shamir had an even more extreme background,
with the American mainstream media freely reporting his long involvement in all sorts of
high-profile assassinations and terrorist attacks during the 1940s, painting him as a very bad
man indeed.
Given Shamir's notorious activities, few revelations would have shocked me, but this one
did. Apparently, during the late 1930s, Shamir and his small Zionist faction had become great
admirers of the Italian Fascists and German Nazis, and after World War II broke out, they had
made repeated attempts to contact Mussolini and the German leadership in 1940 and 1941, hoping
to enlist in the Axis Powers as their Palestine affiliate, and undertake a campaign of attacks
and espionage against the local British forces, then share in the political booty after
Hitler's inevitable triumph.
Now the Times clearly viewed Shamir in a very negative light, but it seemed
extremely unlikely to me that they would have published such a remarkable story without being
absolutely sure of their facts. Among other things, there were long excerpts from the official
letters sent to Mussolini ferociously denouncing the "decadent" democratic systems of Britain
and France that he was opposing, and assuring Il Duce that such ridiculous political
notions would have no future place in the totalitarian Jewish client state they hoped to
establish under his auspices in Palestine.
As it happens, both Germany and Italy were preoccupied with larger geopolitical issues at
the time, and given the small size of Shamir's Zionist faction, not much seems to have ever
come of those efforts. But the idea of the sitting Prime Minister of the Jewish State having
spent his early wartime years as an unrequited Nazi ally was certainly something that sticks in
one's mind, not quite conforming to the traditional narrative of that era which I had always
accepted.
Most remarkably, the revelation of Shamir's pro-Axis past seems to have had only a
relatively minor impact upon his political standing within Israeli society. I would think that
any American political figure found to have supported a military alliance with Nazi Germany
during the Second World War would have had a very difficult time surviving the resulting
political scandal, and the same would surely be true for politicians in Britain, France, or
most other western nations. But although there was certainly some embarrassment in the Israeli
press, especially after the shocking story reached the international headlines, apparently most
Israelis took the whole matter in stride, and Shamir stayed in office for another year, then
later served a second, much longer term as Prime Minister during 1986-1992. The Jews of Israel
apparently regarded Nazi Germany quite differently than did most Americans, let alone most
American Jews.
... ... ...
Over the years I've occasionally made half-hearted attempts to locate the Times
article about Shamir that had long stuck in my memory, but have had no success, either because
it was removed from the Times archives or more likely because my mediocre search
skills proved inadequate. But I'm almost certain that the piece had been prompted by the 1983
publication of Zionism in the
Age of the Dictators by Lenni Brenner, an anti-Zionist of the Trotskyite persuasion
and Jewish origins. I only very recently discovered that book, which really tells an extremely
interesting story.
Brenner, born in 1937, has spent his entire life as an unreconstructed hard-core leftist,
with his enthusiasms ranging from Marxist revolution to the Black Panthers, and he is obviously
a captive of his views and his ideology. At times, this background impairs the flow of his
text, and the periodic allusions to "proletarian," "bourgeoisie," and "capitalist classes"
sometimes grow a little wearisome, as does his unthinking acceptance of all the shared beliefs
common to his political circle. But surely only someone with that sort of fervent ideological
commitment would have been willing to devote so much time and effort to investigating that
controversial subject and ignoring the endless denunciations that resulted, which even included
physical assaults by Zionist partisans.
ORDER IT NOW
In any event, his documentation seems completely airtight, and some years after the original
appearance of his book, he published a companion volume entitled 51 Documents: Zionist
Collaboration with the Nazis , which simply provides English translations of all the raw
evidence behind his analytical framework, allowing interested parties to read the material and
draw their own conclusions.
Among other things, Brenner provides considerable evidence that the larger and somewhat more
mainstream right-wing Zionist faction later led by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was
almost invariably regarded as a Fascist movement during the 1930s, even apart from its warm
admiration for Mussolini's Italian regime. This was hardly such a dark secret in that period
given that its main Palestine newspaper carried a regular column by a top ideological leader
entitled "Diary of a Fascist." During one of the major international Zionist conferences,
factional leader Vladimir Zabotinsky entered the hall with his brown-shirted followers in full
military formation, leading the chair to ban the wearing of uniforms in order to avoid a riot,
and his faction was soon defeated politically and eventually expelled from the Zionist umbrella
organization. This major setback was largely due to the widespread hostility the group had
aroused after two of its members were arrested by British police for the recent assassination
of Chaim Arlosoroff, one of the highest-ranking Zionist officials based in Palestine.
The cover of the 2014 paperback edition of Brenner's book displays the commemorative medal
struck by Nazi Germany to mark its Zionist alliance, with a Star-of-David on the front face and
a Swastika on the obverse. But oddly enough, this symbolic medallion actually had absolutely no
connection with the unsuccessful attempts by Shamir's small faction to arrange a Nazi military
alliance during World War II.
Although the Germans paid little attention to the entreaties of that minor organization, the
far larger and more influential mainstream Zionist movement of Chaim Weizmann and David
Ben-Gurion was something else entirely. And during most of the 1930s, these other Zionists had
formed an important economic partnership with Nazi Germany, based upon an obvious commonality
of interests. After all, Hitler regarded Germany's one percent Jewish population as a
disruptive and potentially dangerous element which he wanted gone, and the Middle East seemed
as good a destination for them as any other. Meanwhile, the Zionists had very similar
objectives, and the creation of their new national homeland in Palestine obviously required
both Jewish immigrants and Jewish financial investment.
... ... ...
The importance of the Nazi-Zionist pact for Israel's establishment is difficult to
overstate. According to a 1974 analysis in Jewish Frontier cited by Brenner, between
1933 and 1939 over 60% of all the investment in Jewish Palestine came from Nazi Germany. The
worldwide impoverishment of the Great Depression had drastically reduced ongoing Jewish
financial support from all other sources, and Brenner reasonably suggests that without Hitler's
financial backing, the nascent Jewish colony, so tiny and fragile, might easily have shriveled
up and died during that difficult period.
Such a conclusion leads to fascinating hypotheticals. When I first stumbled across
references to the Ha'avara Agreement on websites here and there, one of the commenters
mentioning the issue half-jokingly suggested that if Hitler had won the war, statues would
surely have been built to him throughout Israel and he would today be recognized by Jews
everywhere as the heroic Gentile leader who had played the central role in reestablishing a
national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine after almost 2000 years of bitter
exile.
This sort of astonishing counter-factual possibility is not nearly as totally absurd as it
might sound to our present-day ears. We must recognize that our historical understanding of
reality is shaped by the media, and media organs are controlled by the winners of major wars
and their allies, with inconvenient details often excluded to avoid confusing the public. It is
undeniably true that in his 1924 book Mein Kampf , Hitler had written all sorts of
hostile and nasty things about Jews, especially those who were recent immigrants from Eastern
Europe, but when I read the book back in high school, I was a little surprised to discover that
these anti-Jewish sentiments hardly seemed central to his text. Furthermore, just a couple of
years earlier, a vastly more prominent public figure such as British Minister Winston Churchill
had published
sentiments nearly as hostile and nasty , focusing on the monstrous crimes being committed
by Bolshevik Jews. In Albert Lindemann's Esau's Tears , I was surprised to discover
that the author of the famous Balfour Declaration, the foundation of the Zionist project, was
apparently also quite hostile to Jews, with an element of his motivation probably being his
desire to exclude them from Britain.
Once Hitler consolidated power in Germany, he quickly outlawed all other political
organizations for the German people, with only the Nazi Party and Nazi political symbols being
legally permitted. But a special exception was made for German Jews, and Germany's local
Zionist Party was accorded complete legal status, with Zionist marches, Zionist uniforms, and
Zionist flags all fully permitted. Under Hitler, there was strict censorship of all German
publications, but the weekly Zionist newspaper was freely sold at all newsstands and street
corners. The clear notion seemed to be that a German National Socialist Party was the proper
political home for the country's 99% German majority, while Zionist National Socialism would
fill the same role for the tiny Jewish minority.
In 1934, Zionist leaders invited an important SS official to spend six months visiting the
Jewish settlement in Palestine, and upon his return, his very favorable impressions of the
growing Zionist enterprise were published as a massive 12-part-series in Joseph Goebbel's
Der Angriff , the flagship media organ of the Nazi Party, bearing the descriptive
title "A Nazi Goes to Palestine." In his very angry 1920 critique of Jewish Bolshevik activity,
Churchill had argued that Zionism was locked in a fierce battle with Bolshevism for the soul of
European Jewry, and only its victory might ensure amicable future relations between Jew and
Gentile. Based on available evidence, Hitler and many of the other Nazi leaders seemed to have
reached a somewhat similar conclusion by the mid-1930s.
During that era extremely harsh sentiments regarding Diaspora Jewry were sometimes found in
rather surprising quarters. After the controversy surrounding Shamir's Nazi ties erupted into
the headlines, Brenner's material became the grist for an important article by Edward Mortimer,
the longtime Middle East expert at the august Times of London , and the 2014 edition
of the book includes some choice extracts from Mortimer's February 11, 1984 Times
piece:
Who told a Berlin audience in March 1912 that "each country can absorb only a limited
number of Jews, if she doesn't want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many
Jews"?
No, not Adolf Hitler but Chaim Weizmann, later president of the World Zionist Organization
and later still the first president of the state of Israel.
And where might you find the following assertion, originally composed in 1917 but
republished as late as 1936: "The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both
physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness
of social obligation, knows no order nor discipline"?
Not in Der Sturmer but in the organ of the Zionist youth organization, Hashomer
Hatzair.
As the above quoted statement reveals, Zionism itself encouraged and exploited self-hatred
in the Diaspora. It started from the assumption that anti-Semitism was inevitable and even in
a sense justified so long as Jews were outside the land of Israel.
It is true that only an extreme lunatic fringe of Zionism went so far as to offer to join
the war on Germany's side in 1941, in the hope of establishing "the historical Jewish state
on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich."
Unfortunately this was the group which the present Prime Minister of Israel chose to
join.
The very uncomfortable truth is that the harsh characterizations of Diaspora Jewry found in
the pages of Mein Kampf were not all that different from what was voiced by Zionism's
founding fathers and its subsequent leaders, so the cooperation of those two ideological
movements was not really so totally surprising.
However, uncomfortable truths do remain uncomfortable. Mortimer had spent nineteen years at
the Times , the last dozen of them as the foreign specialist and leader-writer on
Middle Eastern affairs. But the year after he wrote that article including those controversial
quotations, his
career at that newspaper ended , leading to an unusual gap in his employment history, and
that development may or may not be purely coincidental.
Also quite ironic was the role of Adolf Eichmann, whose name today probably ranks as one of
the most famous half-dozen Nazis in history, due to his postwar 1960 kidnapping by Israeli
agents, followed by his public show-trial and execution as a war-criminal. As it happens,
Eichmann had been a central Nazi figure in the Zionist alliance, even studying Hebrew and
apparently becoming something of a philo-Semite during the years of his close collaboration
with top Zionist leaders.
Brenner is a captive of his ideology and his beliefs, accepting without question the
historical narrative with which he was raised. He seems to find nothing so strange about
Eichmann being a philo-Semitic partner of the Jewish Zionists during the late 1930s and then
suddenly being transformed into a mass-murderer of the European Jews in the early 1940s,
willingly committing the monstrous crimes for which the Israelis later justly put him to
death.
This is certainly possible, but I really wonder. A more cynical observer might find it a
very odd coincidence that the first prominent Nazi the Israelis made such an effort to track
down and kill had been their closest former political ally and collaborator. After Germany's
defeat, Eichmann had fled to Argentina and lived there quietly for a number of years until his
name resurfaced in a celebrated mid-1950s controversy surrounding one of his leading Zionist
partners, then living in Israel as a respected government official, who was denounced as a Nazi
collaborator, eventually ruled innocent after a celebrated trial, but later assassinated by
former members of Shamir's faction.
Following that controversy in Israel, Eichmann supposedly gave a long personal interview to
a Dutch Nazi journalist, and although it wasn't published at the time, perhaps word of its
existence may have gotten into circulation. The new state of Israel was just a few years old at
that time, and very politically and economically fragile, desperately dependent upon the
goodwill and support of America and Jewish donors worldwide. Their remarkable former Nazi
alliance was a deeply-suppressed secret, whose public release might have had absolutely
disastrous consequences.
According to the version of the interview later published as a two-part story in Life
Magazine , Eichmann's statements seemingly did not touch on the deadly topic of the 1930s
Nazi-Zionist partnership. But surely Israeli leaders must have been terrified that they might
not be so lucky the next time, so we may speculate that Eichmann's elimination suddenly became
a top national priority, and he was tracked down and captured in 1960. Presumably, harsh means
were employed to persuade him not to reveal any of these dangerous pre-war secrets at his
Jerusalem trial, and one might wonder if the reason he was famously kept in an enclosed glass
booth was to ensure that the sound could quickly be cut off if he started to stray from the
agreed upon script. All of this analysis is totally speculative, but Eichmann's role as a
central figure in the 1930s Nazi-Zionist partnership is undeniable historical fact.
Just as we might imagine, America's overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry was hardly
eager to serve as a public conduit for Brenner's shocking revelations of a close Nazi-Zionist
economic partnership, and he mentions that his book agent uniformly received rejections from
each firm he approached, based on a wide variety of different excuses. However, he finally
managed to locate an extremely obscure publisher in Britain willing to take on the project, and
his book was released in 1983, initially receiving no reviews other than a couple of harsh and
perfunctory denunciations, though Soviet Izvestia took some interest in his findings
until they discovered that he was a hated Trotskyite.
His big break came when Shamir suddenly became Israel's Prime Minister, and he brought his
evidence of former Nazi ties to the English-language Palestinian press, which put it into
general circulation. Various British Marxists, including the notorious "Red Ken" Livingstone of
London, organized a speaking tour for him, and when a group of right-wing Zionist militants
attacked one of the events and inflicted injuries, the story of the brawl caught the attention
of the mainstream newspapers. Soon afterward the discussion of Brenner's astonishing
discoveries appeared in the Times of London and entered the international media.
Presumably, the New York Times article that had originally caught my eye ran sometime
during this period.
Public relations professionals are quite skilled at minimizing the impact of damaging
revelations, and pro-Israel organizations have no shortage of such individuals. Just before the
1983 release of his remarkable book, Brenner suddenly discovered that a young pro-Zionist
author named Edwin Black was furiously working on a similar project, apparently backed by
sufficient financial resources that he was employing an army of fifty researchers to allow him
to complete his project in record time.
Since the entire embarrassing subject of a Nazi-Zionist partnership had been kept away from
the public eye for almost five decades, this timing surely seems more than merely coincidental.
Presumably word of Brenner's numerous unsuccessful efforts at securing a mainstream publisher
during 1982 had gotten around, as had as his eventual success in locating a tiny one in
Britain. Having failed to prevent publication of such explosive material, pro-Israel groups
quietly decided that their next best option was trying to seize control of the topic
themselves, allowing disclosure of those parts of the story that could not be concealed but
excluding items of greatest danger, while portraying the sordid history in the best possible
light.
ORDER IT NOW
Black's book, The Transfer Agreement , may have arrived a year later than Brenner's
but was clearly backed by vastly greater publicity and resources. It was released by Macmillan,
a leading publisher, ran nearly twice the length of Brenner's short book, and carried powerful
endorsements by leading figures from the firmament of Jewish activism, including the Simon
Weisenthal Center, the Israel Holocaust Memorial, and the American Jewish Archives. As a
consequence, it received long if not necessarily favorable reviews in influential publications
such as The New Republic and Commentary .
In all fairness, I should mention that in the Foreword to his book, Black claims that his
research efforts had been totally discouraged by nearly everyone he approached, and as a
consequence, he had been working on the project with solitary intensity for many years. This
implies the near-simultaneous release of the two books was purely due to chance. But such a
picture is hardly consistent with his glowing testimonials from so many prominent Jewish
leaders, and personally I find Brenner's claim that Black was assisted by fifty researchers far
more convincing.
Since both Black and Brenner were describing the same basic reality and relying upon many of
the same documents, in most respects the stories they tell are generally similar. But Black
carefully excludes any mention of offers of Zionist military cooperation with the Nazis, let
alone the repeated attempts by Shamir's Zionist faction to officially join the Axis Powers
after the war had broken out, as well as numerous other details of a particularly embarrassing
nature.
Assuming Black's book was published for the reasons I suggested, I think that the strategy
of the pro-Israel groups largely succeeded, with his version of the history seeming to have
quickly supplanted Brenner's except perhaps in strongly leftist or anti-Zionist circles.
Googling each combination of the title and author, Black's book gets eight times as many hits,
and his Amazon sales ranks and numbers of reviews are also larger by roughly that same factor.
Most notably, neither the Wikipedia articles on "The Transfer Agreement" and
"The
Ha'avara Agreement" contain any mention of Brenner's research whatsoever, even
though his book was published earlier, was far broader, and only he provided the underlying
documentary evidence. As a personal example of the current situation, I was quite unaware of
the entire Ha'avara history until just a few years ago when I encountered some website
comments mentioning Black's book, leading me to purchase and read it. But even then, Brenner's
far more wide-ranging and explosive volume remained totally unknown to me until very
recently.
Once World War II began, this Nazi-Zionist partnership quickly lapsed for obvious reasons.
Germany was now at war with the British Empire, and financial transfers to British-run
Palestine were no longer possible. Furthermore, the Arab Palestinians had grown quite hostile
to the Jewish immigrants whom they rightfully feared might eventually displace them, and once
the Germans were forced to choose between maintaining their relationship with a relatively
small Zionist movement or winning the political sympathy of a vast sea of Middle Eastern Arabs
and Muslims, their decision was a natural one. The Zionists faced a similar choice, and
especially once wartime propaganda began so heavily blackening the German and Italian
governments, their long previous partnership was not something they wanted widely known.
However, at exactly this same moment a somewhat different and equally long-forgotten
connection between Jews and Nazi Germany suddenly moved to the fore.
Like most people everywhere, the average German, whether Jewish or Gentile, was probably not
all that political, and although Zionism had for years been accorded a privileged place in
German society, it is not entirely clear how many ordinary German Jews paid much attention to
it. The tens of thousands who emigrated to Palestine during that period were probably motivated
as much by economic pressures as by ideological commitment. But wartime changed matters in
other ways.
ORDER IT NOW
This was even more true for the German government. The outbreak of a world war against a
powerful coalition of the British and French empires, later augmented by both Soviet Russia and
the United States, imposed the sorts of enormous pressures that could often overcome
ideological scruples. A few years ago, I discovered a fascinating 2002 book by Bryan Mark Rigg,
Hitler's Jewish Soldiers , a scholarly treatment of exactly what the title implies.
The quality of this controversial historical analysis is indicated by the glowing jacket-blurbs
from numerous academic experts and an extremely favorable treatment by an eminent scholar in
The American Historical Review .
Obviously, Nazi ideology was overwhelmingly centered upon race and considered racial purity
a crucial factor in national cohesion. Individuals possessing substantial non-German ancestry
were regarded with considerable suspicion, and this concern was greatly amplified if that
admixture was Jewish. But in a military struggle against an opposing coalition possessing many
times Germany's population and industrial resources, such ideological factors might be overcome
by practical considerations, and Rigg persuasively argues that some 150,000 half-Jews or
quarter-Jews served in the armed forces of the Third Reich, a percentage probably not much
different than their share of the general military-age population.
Germany's long-integrated and assimilated Jewish population had always been
disproportionately urban, affluent, and well-educated. As a consequence it is not entirely
surprising that a large proportion of these part-Jewish soldiers who served Hitler were
actually combat officers rather than merely rank-and-file conscripts, and they included at
least 15 half-Jewish generals and admirals, and another dozen quarter-Jews holding those same
high ranks. The most notable example was Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering's powerful
second-in-command, who played such an important operational role in creating the Luftwaffe.
Milch certainly had a Jewish father, and according to some much less substantiated claims,
perhaps even a Jewish mother as well, while his sister was married to an SS general.
Admittedly, the racially-elite SS itself generally had far stricter ancestry standards, with
even a trace of non-Aryan parentage normally seen as disqualifying an individual from
membership. But even here, the situation was sometimes complicated, since there were widespread
rumors that Reinhard Heydrich, the second-ranking figure in that very powerful organization,
actually had considerable Jewish ancestry. Rigg investigates that claim without coming to any
clear conclusions, though he does seem to think that the circumstantial evidence involved may
have been used by other high-ranking Nazi figures as a point of leverage or blackmail against
Heydrich, who stood as one of the most important figures in the Third Reich.
As a further irony, most of these individuals traced their Jewish ancestry through their
father rather than their mother, so although they were not Jewish according to rabbinical law,
their family names often reflected their partly Semitic origins, though in many cases Nazi
authorities attempted to studiously overlook this glaringly obvious situation. As an extreme
example noted by an academic reviewer of the book, a half-Jew bearing the distinctly non-Aryan
name of Werner Goldberg actually had his photograph prominently featured in a 1939 Nazi
propaganda newspaper, with the caption describing him as the "The Ideal German Soldier."
The author conducted more than 400 personal interviews of the surviving part-Jews and their
relatives, and these painted a very mixed picture of the difficulties they had encountered
under the Nazi regime, which varied enormously depending upon particular circumstances and the
personalities of those in authority over them. One important source of complaint was that
because of their status, part-Jews were often denied the military honors or promotions they had
rightfully earned. However, under especially favorable conditions, they might also be legally
reclassified as being of "German Blood," which officially eliminated any taint on their
status.
Even official policy seems to have been quite contradictory and vacillating. For example,
when the civilian humiliations sometimes inflicted upon the fully Jewish parents of serving
half-Jews were brought to Hitler's attention, he regarded that situation as intolerable,
declaring that either such parents must be fully protected against such indignities or all the
half-Jews must be discharged, and eventually in April 1940 he issued a decree requiring the
latter. However, this order was largely ignored by many commanders, or implemented through a
honor-system that almost amounted to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," so a considerable fraction of
half-Jews remained in the military if they so wished. And then in July 1941, Hitler somewhat
reversed himself, issuing a new decree that allowed "worthy" half-Jews who had been discharged
to return to the military as officers, while also announcing that after the war, all
quarter-Jews would be reclassified as fully "German Blood" Aryan citizens.
It has been said that after questions were raised about the Jewish ancestry of some of his
subordinates, Goring once angrily responded "I will decide who is a Jew!" and that attitude
seems to reasonably capture some of the complexity and subjective nature of the social
situation.
Interestingly enough, many of part-Jews interviewed by Rigg recalled that prior to Hitler's
rise to power, the intermarriage of their parents had often provoked much greater hostility
from the Jewish rather than the Gentile side of their families, suggesting that even in
heavily-assimilated Germany, the traditional Jewish tendency toward ethnic exclusivity had
still remained a powerful factor in that community.
Although the part-Jews in German military service were certainly subject to various forms of
mistreatment and discrimination, perhaps we should compare this against the analogous situation
in our own military in those same years with regard to America's Japanese or black minorities.
During that era, racial intermarriage was legally prohibited across a large portion of the US,
so the mixed-race population of those groups was either almost non-existent or very different
in origin. But when Japanese-Americans were allowed to leave their wartime concentration camps
and enlist in the military, they were entirely restricted to segregated all-Japanese units, but
with the officers generally being white. Meanwhile, blacks were almost entirely barred from
combat service, though they sometimes served in strictly-segregated support roles. The notion
that an American with any appreciable trace of African, Japanese, or for that matter Chinese
ancestry might serve as a general or even an officer in the U.S. military and thereby exercise
command authority over white American troops would have been almost unthinkable. The contrast
with the practice in Hitler's own military is quite different than what Americans might naively
assume.
This paradox is not nearly as surprising as one might assume. The non-economic divisions in
European societies had almost always been along lines of religion, language, and culture rather
than racial ancestry, and the social tradition of more than a millennium could not easily be
swept away by merely a half-dozen years of National Socialist ideology. During all those
earlier centuries, a sincerely-baptized Jew, whether in Germany or elsewhere, was usually
considered just as good a Christian as any other. For example, Tomas de Torquemada, the most
fearsome figure of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition, actually came from a family of Jewish
converts.
Even wider racial differences were hardly considered of crucial importance. Some of the
greatest heroes of particular national cultures, such as Russia's Alexander Pushkin and
France's Alexandre Dumas, had been individuals with significant black African ancestry, and
this was certainly not considered any sort of disqualifying characteristic.
By contrast, American society from its inception had always been sharply divided by race,
with other differences generally constituting far smaller impediments to intermarriage and
amalgamation. I've seen widespread claims that when the Third Reich devised its 1935 Nuremberg
Laws restricting marriage and other social arrangements between Aryans, non-Aryans, and
part-Aryans, its experts drew upon some of America's long legal experience in similar matters,
and this seems quite plausible. Under that new Nazi statute, pre-existing mixed-marriages
received some legal protection, but henceforth Jews and half-Jews could only marry each other,
while quarter-Jews could only marry regular Aryans. The obvious intent was to absorb that
latter group into mainstream German society, while isolating the more heavily-Jewish
population.
Ironically enough, Israel today is one of very few countries with a similar sort of strictly
racially-based criteria for citizenship status and other privileges, with
the Jewish-only immigration policy now often determined by DNA testing , and marriages
between Jews and non-Jews legally prohibited. A few years ago, the world media also carried
the
remarkable story of a Palestinian Arab sentenced to prison for rape because he had
consensual sexual relations with a Jewish woman by passing himself off as a fellow Jew.
Since Orthodox Judaism is strictly matrilineal and controls Israeli law, even Jews of other
branches can experience unexpected difficulties due to conflicts between personal ethnic
identity and official legal status. The vast majority of the wealthier and more influential
Jewish families worldwide do not follow Orthodox religious traditions, and over the
generations, they have often taken Gentile wives. However, even if the latter had converted to
Judaism, their conversions are considered invalid by the Orthodox Rabbinate, and none of their
resulting descendants are considered Jewish. So if some members of these families later develop
a deep commitment to their Jewish heritage and immigrate to Israel, they are sometimes outraged
to discover that they are officially classified as "goyim" under Orthodox law and legally
prohibited from marrying Jews. These major political controversies periodically erupt and
sometimes
reach the international medi a.
Now it seems to me that any American official who proposed racial DNA tests to decide upon
the admission or exclusion of prospective immigrants would have a very difficult time remaining
in office, with the Jewish-activists of organizations like the ADL probably leading the attack.
And the same would surely be true for any prosecutor or judge who non-whites to prison for the
crime of "passing" as whites and thereby managing to seduce women from that latter group. A
similar fate would befall advocates of such policies in Britain, France, or most other Western
nations, with the local ADL-type organization certainly playing an important role. Yet in
Israel, such existing laws merely occasion a little temporary embarrassment when they are
covered in the international media, and then invariably remain in place after the commotion has
died down and been forgotten. These sorts of issues are considered of little more importance
than were the past wartime Nazi ties of the Israeli prime minister throughout most of the
1980s.
But perhaps the solution to this puzzling difference in public reaction lies in an old joke.
A leftist wit once claimed that the reason America has never had a military coup is that it is
the only country in the world that lacks an American embassy to organize such activities. And
unlike the U.S., Britain, France, and many other predominately-white countries, Israel has no
domestic Jewish-activist organization filling the powerful role of the ADL.
Over the last few years, many outside observers have noted a seemingly very odd political
situation in Ukraine. That unfortunate country possesses powerful militant groups, whose public
symbols, stated ideology, and political ancestry all unmistakably mark them as Neo-Nazis. Yet
those
violent Neo-Nazi elements are all being bankrolled and controlled by a Jewish Oligarch who holds dual
Israeli citizenship. Furthermore, that peculiar alliance had been mid-wifed and blessed by some
of America's leading Jewish Neocon figures, such as Victoria Nuland, who have successfully used
their media influence to keep such explosive facts away from the American public.
At first glance,
a close relationship between Jewish Israelis and European Neo-Nazis seems as grotesque and
bizarre a misalliance as one could imagine, but after recently reading Brenner's fascinating
book, my perspective quickly shifted. Indeed, the main difference between then and now is that
during the 1930s, Zionist factions represented a very insignificant junior partner to a
powerful Third Reich, while these days it is the Nazis who occupy the role of eager suppliants
to the formidable power of International Zionism, which now so heavily dominates the American
political system and through it, much of the world.
"... "Unproven Russian involvement in Brexit -- terrible! Impose more sanctions on Moscow! A £400k check from an American billionaire for an anti-Brexit campaigning group -- that's no problem; it's helping our democracy!" ..."
"... "By quitting Europe, I fear that we are hastening Putin's dream of the break-up of the EU -- and with it, potentially, western civilisation," ..."
"... "propaganda arms of the Russian government," ..."
"... "at the back of the queue" ..."
"... "This is not foreign interference This is not foreign interference!" ..."
"... " highly probable " ..."
"... "had conducted a thorough investigation around the Brexit referendum and found no evidence of Russian interference ." ..."
"... "Russian troll factory," ..."
"... "very low levels of engagement" ..."
"... "conspiracy theorist" ..."
"... "Just what does George Soros think he is doing pouring £400,000 into a campaign to stop Brexit. For a start he is not actually a resident of this country so it has nothing to do with him." ..."
"... "I don't know that the public understands the gravity of what the Russians were able to do and continue to do here in the United States. They've attacked us. They're trying to undermine our democracy," ..."
"... "I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money " ..."
"... "I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars," ..."
You'd have to have a real sense of humor failure not to laugh. The news that US billionaire
Soros donated £400k to an anti-Brexit group came on the day that YouTube said they found
no evidence of Russian interference in Brexit. Repeat After Me (with robotic arm movements):
"Unproven Russian involvement in Brexit -- terrible! Impose more sanctions on Moscow! A
£400k check from an American billionaire for an anti-Brexit campaigning group -- that's
no problem; it's helping our democracy!"
You don't have to own a brand new £999 state-of-the art Hypocrisy Detector from
Harrods, to pick up on the double standards. Just having a few functioning brain cells and
thinking for yourself will do. For months in the UK we've been bombarded with
Establishment-approved conspiracy theories -- peddled in all the 'best' newspapers -- that
Russia somehow 'fixed' Brexit. Getting Britain to leave the EU was all part of a cunning plot
by Vladimir Putin, aka Dr. Evil, to weaken Europe and the 'free world.'
Even West End musical composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber, who knows quite a bit about phantoms,
seemed taken in by it. "By quitting Europe, I fear that we are hastening Putin's dream of
the break-up of the EU -- and with it, potentially, western civilisation," the noble Lord
declared in July.
Never mind that we don't have a single statement from Putin or other senior Kremlin figures
saying that they actually supported Brexit. These Establishment Russia-bashers know exactly
what The Vlad is thinking.
And never mind that RT and Sputnik, which we are repeatedly told are "propaganda arms of
the Russian government," ran articles by pro- and anti-Brexit writers. The same people who
told us Iraq had WMDs in 2003 were absolutely sure it was those dastardly Russkies who had got
Britain to vote 'leave.' The irony is of course that there was significant foreign interference
in Brexit. But it didn't come from Moscow.
Or Obama actually visiting the U.K. to urge people to vote Remain. Imagine if Putin did
the same for Leave!
The US has always wanted Britain to stay in the EU. In April 2016, two months before the
Referendum, President Obama made it clear what he wanted when he visited the UK. He warned that
if Britain exited the EU it would be "at the back of the queue" for trade deals with
the US
.
Just imagine if Putin had said that. The Russophobes would have spontaneously combusted.
Then of course there was the backing the Remain camp had from the giants of US capital.
Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan donated £500,000 each to the 'Britain Stronger in Europe'
group, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley -- £250,000 each.
Again, repeat after me (with robotic arm movements): "This is not foreign interference
This is not foreign interference!"
You've got to see the funny side of this: all that hysterical fake news about 'Russian
interference' in Brexit & here we have one side receiving £400K from a US
billionaire who is part of the US political establishment. Is that not 'interference' ?!!
https://t.co/URzrB3ciLd
The point is not whether we are for or against Brexit. Or whether we think George Soros is a
malign influence who only acts out of self-interest or an old sweetie-pie with the good of
humanity at heart. The point is the double standards that are causing our Hypocrisy Detectors
to explode.
Let's think back to December 2016. Then, the pro-war and fiercely anti-Russian Labour MP Ben
Bradshaw told Parliament that it was "
highly probable " that Russia had interfered with Brexit.
Fourteen months on, what have we got? On Thursday, the global head of You Tube's public
policy, Juniper Downs, said her company "had conducted a thorough investigation around the
Brexit referendum and found no evidence of Russian interference
."
Twitter meanwhile says it detected 49 (yes, 49) accounts from what it claimed to be a
"Russian troll factory," which sent all of 942 messages about Brexit -- amounting to
less than 0.005% of all the tweets about the Referendum. Twitter said the accounts received
"very low levels of engagement" from users. If the Kremlin had planned to use tweets
to persuade us to vote 'leave,' they didn't really put much effort into it, did they?
Finally, Facebook said that only three "Kremlin-linked" accounts were found which spent the
grand sum of 72p (yes, 72p) on ads during the Referendum campaign. Which amounts to the greater
"interference" ? 72p or £400K? Erm tough call, isn't it?
You might have thought, given his concern with 'foreign interference' in British politics,
that Ben Bradshaw would have been urging 'Best for Britain' to return George Soros' donation.
Au contraire! His only tweets about it were retweets of two critical comments about the Daily
Telegraph, and the BBC's coverage of the story. Conclusion: Those who rail about 'Russia
meddling in Brexit' but not Soros' intervention aren't concerned about 'foreign interference'
in UK politics, only 'foreign interference' from countries they don't approve of.
Those who are quite happy peddling ludicrous conspiracy theories about Russians shout
"conspiracy theorist" (or worse) at those who report factually on proven meddling from
others. The Daily Express hit the nail on the head in their Friday editorial which said:
"Just what does George Soros think he is doing pouring £400,000 into a campaign to
stop Brexit. For a start he is not actually a resident of this country so it has nothing to do
with him."
That really is the rub of the matter. And Bradshaw and co. have no adequate response except
to shoot the messenger.
If we look at the affair with an even wider lens, the hypocrisy is even greater. The US has
been gripped by an anti-Russian frenzy not seen since the days of Senator Joe McCarthy. The
unsubstantiated claim that Russia fixed the election for Donald Trump is repeated by 'liberals'
and many neocons too, as a statement of fact. "I don't know that the public understands the
gravity of what the Russians were able to do and continue to do here in the United States.
They've attacked us. They're trying to undermine our democracy," film director Rob Reiner
said
.
But the number one country round the world for undermining democracy and interfering in the
affairs of other sovereign states is the US itself.
While Establishment journos and pundits have been foaming at the mouth over 'Russiagate' and
getting terribly excited over 'smoking guns' which turn out -- surprise, surprise -- to be damp
squibs, there's been less attention paid to the boasts of former Vice President Joe Biden on
how he got the allegedly 'independent' Ukrainian government to sack its prosecutor general in a
few hours. "I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not
fired, you're not getting the money "
"I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars," Biden
said during a meeting of
the US' Council on Foreign Relations. "Well, son of a b***h. He got fired."
Again, just imagine the furore if a leading Russian government figure boasted about how he
used financial inducements to get another country's Prosecutor General to be sacked. Or if a
tape was leaked in which the Russian Ambassador and a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson
could be heard discussing who should or shouldn't be in the new 'democratic' government of
another sovereign state. But we had the US Ambassador to Ukraine and the US Assistant Secretary of
State doing exactly that in 2014 -- and the 'Russia is interfering in the Free World!' brigade
were as silent as a group of Trappist monks.
It's fair to say that Orwell would have a field day with the doublespeak that's currently on
show. The cognitive dissonance is there for all to see. Repeat After Me: Unproven Russian
interference -- Bad. Proven interference from other external sources -- Good. What's your
problem?
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many
newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star,
Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The
Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also
appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder
of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at
www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
I think that scarno may have a point. Take a look at the image at the beginning of the
article of Gabbard and then compare it with the one of one of her opponents – Shay Chan
Hodges. That is a tell right there. Gabbard has her faults but the willingness to go to Syria
and see for herself what the actual situation itself was not one of them.
I note too that that OPCW report on the chemical attack was used against Gabbard in this
article. I remember that "attack" which got discredited six ways to Sunday. That was the one
where Jihadists in flip-flops were standing in a crater full of "toxic" chemical weapon
residue taking samples for the OPCW. And the OPCW believed their chain of custody claims.
The Intercept may be a serious publication but I note that it was a newly-minted journalist (
https://theintercept.com/staff/aidachavez/ )
that wrote this story and you certainly wouldn't trust the Intercept to protect you if you
came to them with a hot story – as Reality Winner found out to her cost.
The Intercept is a venue that prints what dot-com scam-billionaire Omidyar asks of
it, or without such instructions, what it's editors' positions happen to be. I think some of
their pieces are well-reasoned and others quite specious, and often enough they are willing
to print what I think is propaganda. Like you, I try to take arguments and evidence as they
come, adjust my analytical framework when necessary, and seek out truth. The process isn't so
different with WaPo or NYT then it is with the Intercept, is it?
The article I linked discusses a primary challenge to Congresswoman Gabbard, who has been
endorsed by Our Revolution, PP; who resigned her vicechair of DNC in 2015 in protest of what
she saw as the sidelining of left interests in the presidential race. Hardly someone who is
likely to face a primary challenge from the left. The article admits, in fact, that she has
no serious primary challengers, yet the article highlights the her un-serious "progressive"
challenger, who is upset that Tulsi has the temerity to oppose US intervention in Syria and
elsewhere. It's typical blob logic: if you oppose murderous war in wherever, you despise
human rights.
Read it. It's a hit piece. And why is it published at all? Omidyar is Hawaii's richest
resident. But perhaps that has nothing to do with it.
It's a well written piece, containing what appear to be accurate assessments of the 2
candidates' stances on a few issues. The author pointed out early on that the opponent is
native Hawaiian, and that Gabbard is not.
It drips with implications about Gabbard's foreign policy views; the only coverage of her
representation of her district is in a quote from her opponent, who claims she spoke to
constituents and "found" they couldn't point to anything Gabbard had done for them. Gabbard's
whiteness was used very skillfully against her, along with a few dog whistles about her
military background and anti-jihadist views.
It was a skillful, Identitarian hit piece. The haute doyens of left coast "leftist"
propriety do not like Gabbard.
"Outside of cultivating her image as an anti-interventionist, however, Gabbard has urged a
continuation of the so-called war on terror. She's also won the approval of some
conservatives and members of the far right. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon
reportedly arranged her November 2016 meeting with President Donald Trump, and former Ku Klux
Klan grand wizard David Duke has praised some of her foreign policy positions."
The first sentence is a sensible criticism. The rest is innuendo, guilt by association. Is
that serious?
War with Iran? I can not imagine a more foolish thing to do.
Of course they will rally with their own Countrymen, everyone hates the USA.
The World economy will be in a complete tailspin, the US will likely finally go broke over it
and chances are pretty good that Israel will be flattened and paved [one positive thing].
You fight Iran you fight China, you don't go messing with their road. Likely not bombs and
guns either most likely money, something America has not much of.
The faster America dumps this crazy fascination with the Jews the faster it will get it's
act together and become a Country again.
What can that possibly mean? We can bomb Iran back into the Stone Age, but Iran does not
need a modern economy or military to close Hormuz. All they need do is fire a few land-based
artillery and anti-ship missiles at a defenseless freighter or tanker. The insurance
companies would do the rest–remove all commercial shipping from the Persian and Oman
Gulf regions. That eliminates 20% of the World's oil supply, and it would collapse the
World's economy, including our own.
Asymmetric warfare would engulf the entire Middle East, including Israel, with its large
native Arab population and its occupation of large Arab populations in Gaza and the West
Bank.
Iran has the upper hand here. We need to be very careful.
Let's face it-when we impose sanctions on Iran, we are already at war with them. Just like we
are already at war with Russia. Imbeciles, all who run this country.
Oil is the vital strategic Western interest in the Persian Gulf. Yet a war with Iran
would imperil, not secure, that interest.
The American Empire's only strategic three letter word interest in the Middle East is O --
I –L.
The WASP/JEW ruling class of the American Empire and the Jew-controlled Neo-Conservative
faction in the Republican Party wants to elevate the three letter word J -- E –W to
paramount importance in the Middle East.
OIL and only OIL should guide the policy making considerations of the American Empire in
the Middle East.
"... In addition, Russia is being literally fenced off from Europe, with NATO members and/or EU member states Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland building border fences. Finland, Norway and Ukraine are members of neither NATO nor the EU but contribute to NATO and are also building fences with Russia. ..."
"All Russian security documents explicitly single out the challenges that the policies of Western states supposedly create
for Russian security (with particularly harsh words in the Security strategy). Grievances connected to what Russia sees as 'systemic
problems in the Euro-Atlantic region' (Foreign policy concept), the enlargement of NATO, the location of its military infrastructure
close to Russian borders, its 'offensive capabilities' and the trend towards the Alliance acquiring 'global functions', the 'symptoms'
of the U.S. efforts to retain absolute military supremacy (the global antimissile system, Global Strike capabilities, militarization
of space) "
Are Russian forces in Canada and Mexico conducting joint exercises against the US? No. Are Russian forces in Ireland conducting
joint exercises against Britain? No. Is there an obvious Russian presence in Scotland promoting independence from the UK? No. But
Britain and the US are mounted on Russia's borders and conducting joint exercises with its neighbors.
In addition, Russia is being literally fenced off from Europe, with NATO members and/or EU member states Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania and Poland building border fences. Finland, Norway and Ukraine are members of neither NATO nor the EU but contribute to
NATO and are also building fences with Russia.
But what do Russia's neighbours, like the Estonians, rank as their national security priorities? A
survey suggests that for Estonians, the biggest threat to global security is the Islamic State, followed by the refugee crisis
in Europe and the war in Syria. Russia came fourth on the list, even after the Ukraine crisis. According to
Gallup , a majority
52% of Estonians consider NATO a protective force, but 43% see it as either a threat (17%) or neither (26%). Estonians are behind
Kosovars, Albanians, Poles and Lithuanians in their opinions of NATO.
The Labour is in the midst of an "antisemitism crisis" orchestrated by the media, pro-Zionist Jewish groups, and the party's Blairite
faction bent on ousting Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.
The UK's media is overwhelmingly rightwing and pro-Israel. Even the BBC, terrified of being donated to Rupert Murdoch in a Tory
privatization, is pro-Tory and pro-Israel in its news reporting, all its professions of "objectivity" notwithstanding.
Corbyn has been their constant target since he became the party's leader, and the "antisemitism" smear is the latest installment
in this rightwing effort to discredit him.
Even the supposedly liberal Guardian newspaper, whose editorial line on Israel is led by the staunch Zionist Jonathan
Freedland, is resolutely anti-Corbyn.
No leader of a major political party has been as resolute as Corbyn in defending Palestinian rights. The
Observer newspaper put this succinctly: "As a long-term and ardent critic of Israel's policies and staunch supporter of
Palestinian causes, he has always been distrusted by the Jewish community".
Pro-Zionist Jewish groups fear that under his leadership Britain will become much more like Ireland (which recently banned the
import of products made in the illegal Israeli settlements) in its disposition towards Israel.
A clue to the motivation of these pro-Zionist UK Jewish groups was provided by the recent public protest in London against Labour's
"antisemitism"– many protesters carried the Israeli flag and "Israel we stand behind you" signs, thereby making it clear that their
concern for Zionist Israel was highly instrumental, and perhaps primarily so, in their presence at this rally against Labour's "antisemitism".
Several Blairite Labour MPs were present at this demonstration.
The Blairite faction in Labour has already made one attempt to overthrow Corbyn when it made him submit to an unprecedented reelection
shortly after he became party leader.
Corbyn went on to win this challenge with a percentage exceeding Blair's when the latter was elected Labour leader.
Labour's Blairite bloc know that Corbyn has to lose the next general election if they are to survive as a force within the party.
If Labour (under Corbyn) wins this election, they will have little choice but to take the option already being talked about by some
of these Blairites, that is, splitting from Labour and forming a new "centrist" party.
Their eminence grise, Tony Blair himself, has already talked about creating this "centrist" party.
So, paradoxically, Labour's Blairites would rather have the Conservatives win the next general election as their ticket to survival
within their own party!
Predictably, one of these Blairites, Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson, jumped on the "crisis" bandwagon by
saying
that Labour faces "eternal shame" over antisemitism.
Of course, there are pockets of antisemitism in Labour, as is the case in nearly every non-Jewish British walk of life, including
the Tories (though dressing up in Nazi uniform and chanting "Sieg Heil!" at parties, as opposed to upholding Palestinian rights,
is their forte).
A few days ago, it was revealed that the senior Tory politicians Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Jacob Rees-Mogg had recently
met in secret with Steve Bannon, who runs Breitbart News , a haven for antisemitic views. The British media, and the Blairite
Labour MPs hounding Corbyn, have said nary a word about these meetings. Nor have the vociferous UK Jewish organizations.
The notion that there is significant antisemitism in Labour, let alone one amounting to a "crisis", is a red herring.
The most recent purported manifestation of this crisis pivots on the decision of Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC) to
adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association's "non-legally binding working definition" of antisemitism, but not the
"illustrations" which accompany it. The definition states:
"Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations
of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions
and religious facilities."
The "illustrations" which accompany this definition include some which are uncontroversial for any fair-minded and relatively
rational person, and others which are highly problematic for such a person.
The uncontroversial "illustrations" of antisemitism:
+ advocating the killing or harming of Jews for ideological or religious reasons;
+ making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such;
+ holding Jews as a people responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group;
+ Holocaust denial;
+ using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to
characterize Israel or Israelis;
+ holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel;
+ accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
The controversial "illustrations" of antisemitism (and non-coincidently they all have a bearing on the Palestinian cause):
+ accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel than to the interests of their own nations;
+ claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour;
+ applying double standards by requiring of Israel conduct not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation;
+ drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
A close examination of this latter set of "illustrations" shows that Labour is absolutely right to resist the immense pressure
from Zionists and their supporters to accept these latter "illustrations" as part of the definition of antisemitism.
There are examples of Jewish US citizens being more loyal to Israel than to the interests of their country.
The casino mogul Sheldon Adelson donated $25 million to Trump's 2016 campaign ($82 million in total to Republicans in 2016), and
$5 million towards his inauguration. Earlier this year Adelson donated $70 million to Birthright, the organization that brings young
Jews to Israel for nothing (he's donated $100m in total to Birthright). He also donated $30 million to Republicans after Trump withdrew
from the nuclear agreement with Iran. Adelson spent $150m in the 2012 election in a futile attempt to unseat the "anti-Israel" Barack
Obama.
Adelson's aim in all of this is to swing Trump behind his friend Netanyahu's "Greater Israel" political agenda. To this end Adelson
pushed hard for the US's withdrawal from the Iran deal, appointing the arch-Zionist John Bolton as a Trump adviser, recognizing Jerusalem
as Israel's capital (in contravention of international law), and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Adelson has succeeded in all
of these objectives.
Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and "envoy" for a "peace" deal in the Middle East, has made it clear that any such deal will
have to be compatible with Likud's "Greater Israel" political agenda.
According to The New York
Times , Kushner's family real estate company "received a roughly $30 million investment from Menora Mivtachim, an insurer
that is one of Israel's largest financial institutions".
The same NYT article also reported that "the Kushners had teamed up with at least one member of Israel's wealthy Steinmetz
family to buy nearly $200 million of Manhattan apartment buildings, as well as to build a luxury rental tower in New Jersey".
More from the same article: "Mr. Kushner's company has also taken out at least four loans from Israel's largest bank, Bank Hapoalim,
which is the subject of a Justice Department investigation over allegations that it helped wealthy Americans evade taxes".
Kushner's family foundation also donates to an illegal settlement in the West Bank.
Meanwhile , US military aid to Israel amounts to $3.8 billion annually, or $23,000 per year for every Jewish family living in
Israel for the next 10 years.
At the same time, 40 million Americans live in poverty, seniors and veterans are sleeping rough, and teachers have to buy school
supplies, and in some cases food, for their students.
Given these two examples of prominent Jewish individuals with loyalties divided between the US and Israel, with Israel acquiring
much and the US gaining so little from their actions, it is arguable whether it is "antisemitic" to broadcast the information detailed
above.
Claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour is likewise hardly antisemitic. The recently passed Israeli
Nationality Law confirms why.
According to the law, Israel's full name is "Israel, the nation state of the Jewish people". The law stipulates that Eretz Israel
(historical Palestine) is the homeland of the Jewish people, while the state of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people.
As such, only Jews have the right to self-determination in Israel. Hebrew is the only official language, with Arabic no longer
considered an official language.
The nationality law enjoins that future Jewish settlement in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is a supreme national
objective (in contravention of international law).
The law also grants Jewish communities the right to a segregated territory in the state(in practice legalizing exclusive villages
and towns for Jews).
The nationality law effectively deprives Arabs of any official semblance of their national identity, and confirms Israel's status
as an apartheid, i.e. racist, state. Saying this is certainly anti-Zionist, but only a dogmatist would insist that it is ipso facto
"antisemitic".
The IHRA "illustration" maintaining that it is antisemitic to apply double standards by requiring of Israel conduct not expected
or demanded of any other democratic nation is likewise extremely awkward in formulation and also in practice.
The 2017 Democracy Index used 4 categories
to assess countries– full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, and authoritarian regime.
The following countries were ranked by the Index as full democracies: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany,
Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Mauritius, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and
Uruguay.
Israel was listed as a flawed democracy, as was the US.
Israel's leaders have always touted their country as "the only democracy in the Middle East", as if their country stood on a par
with the 19 countries ranked as full democracies by the 2017 Democracy Index.
Is it "antisemitic" to hold Israel to a standard deemed to be achieved by Mauritius and Uruguay?
Or to say that Israel is really an "ethnocracy", as opposed to being a democracy?
The Israeli political geographer Oren Yiftachel argued in his 2006 book Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics
in Israel/Palestine that an ethnocracy is a regime promoting "the expansion of the dominant group in contested territory
while maintaining a democratic façade".
When it comes todrawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, it all depends on the basis used in making
the comparison between Israel and the Nazis.
Having gas chambers for mass exterminations, then certainly not.
However, nearly everyone who believes that comparing Israel with the Nazis is "antisemitic" invariably takes the concentration-camp
gas chambers as the implicit norm, whether out of bad faith or ignorance, for making such comparisons.
The Nazi "final solution", vast as it was, had many strands, with horror piled upon horror. This multiple-layering must be considered
when making the Israel-Nazi comparison.
Encircling and starving-out an entire community in a ghetto (Warsaw?), then yes, the comparison is valid– this is precisely what
is taking place in Gaza.
The Nazis confiscated Jewish property wholesale; the Israelis are doing the same to Palestinian houses and land in order to "clear"
them for the expansion of the illegal settlements, and for alleged military purposes. B'Tselem, Israel's human rights watchdog, confirms
this on their website . So, yes, in this case the comparison between
Israel and the Nazis is valid.
Jews were prevented from leaving German-occupied Poland by the SS. Similarly, Palestinians are prevented from leaving Gaza (even
for medical treatment) by the combined efforts of Israel and the Egyptian dictatorship. So, yes, in this case the comparison between
Israel and the Nazis is valid.
German Civil Police K-9 Units were used by the SS to assist in the roundup and deportation of Jews in WW2. Similarly, the Israeli
army uses attack dogs on
unarmed Palestinians when raiding their homes, and when
arresting
peaceful demonstrators. So, yes, in this case the comparison between Israel and the Nazis is valid.
It is difficult to see why comparing Israel to the Nazis on these latter bases, while scrupulously eschewing the gas chambers
as a basis for comparison (the Palestinians have not been sent to gas chambers en masse), necessarily makes one an "antisemite".
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes Israel's policy regarding Gaza as "incremental genocide", in contrast to the Nazi's
absolute genocide. The final outcome however is not in doubt.
The distinguished Oxford jurist Stephen Sedley (himself a Jew) has saidthat "there is no legal bar on criticising Israel. Yet
several of the "examples" that have been tacked on to the IHRA definition (by whom is not known) seek to stifle criticism of Israel
irrespective of intent. The House of Commons select committee on home affairs in October 2016 advised adding: "It is not antisemitic
to criticise the government of Israel, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent"."
Corbyn, under siege from the media and Jewish groups (who say, with risible hyperbole, that he poses an "existential threat" to
British Jews), has apologized for not doing enough to root out antisemitism in the Labour Party.
Corbyn's apology was unnecessary. Not just because it was not merited by the real circumstances underlying this manufactured "crisis",
but also because every step he takes now is dismissed as "meaningless" and "too little, too late" by his opportunistic opponents.
Instead Corbyn should have given an immediate forensic analysis of the IHRA's flawed "examples" of "antisemitism", indicating
that Labour was wise not to incorporate these, root and branch, in the definition of antisemitism it adopted.
Corbyn should also have come out earlier with his pledge to deal firmly with those justifiably guilty of antisemitism in the Labour
party.
Corbyn has many admirable qualities, but perhaps doing forensics is not one of them. However, he has many surrogates capable of
undertaking this task, and they should be entrusted with it immediately.
The late and much missed Robin Cook, the former Labour minister who demolished Blair's rationales for the Iraq war in the House
of Commons debate on Blair's push for the war, would have been perfect for the job.
"... Is resettling a terrorist front group in the West a good idea? ..."
"... The White Helmets ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... Syria conflict: White Helmets evacuated by Israel. ..."
"... The BBC story could have been written by the White Helmets themselves or by their press department. Or alternatively by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. First of all, the Israelis do not do humanitarian gestures. They helped bail out the White Helmets at the request of the U.S. because capture by the Syrians would have produced embarrassing revelations about how the group was funded and what its affiliation with terrorists was all about. And Israel's denial of involvement in Syria is nonsense, unless one considers demonstrated collaboration with the terrorist groups punctuated by nearly weekly bombing and missile attacks to be non-involvement. ..."
"... The British too are into the deception up to their eyeballs. The comment by Hunt and Mordaunt is complete fabrication regarding what the White Helmets represent. The same goes for the BBC account of how the group developed, which comes directly from the White Helmet's own propaganda division as amplified by Hollywood and the U.S. and U.K. governments. ..."
"... The White Helmets travel to bombing sites with their film crews trailing behind them. Once at the sites, with no independent observers, they are able to arrange or even stage what is filmed to conform to their selected narrative which consistently promotes tales of government atrocities against civilians to encourage outside military intervention in Syria and bring about regime change in Damascus. The White Helmets were, for example, the propagators of the totally false but propagandistically effective claims regarding the government use of so-called "barrel bombs" against civilians. ..."
"... Peter Ford, British Ambassador in Damascus from 2003-2006, recently described the group in an audio interview saying, "The White Helmets are jihadi auxiliaries. They are not, as claimed by themselves and by their supporters simple rescuers. They are not volunteers. They are paid professionals of disinformation." ..."
"... All their activities are directed at mobilizing Western opinion behind the jihadis with whom they associate. They co-locate their centers with the Al-Qaeda organization known as Al-Nusra and with other militant groups such as Jaish al-Islam. They have in the past been shown associating with and waving the flags of ISIS." ..."
"... The group is currently largely funded by a number of non-government organizations (NGOs) as well as governments, including the United States, Britain and some European Union member states. The U.S. has directly provided $23 million through the USAID (US Agency for International Development) as of 2016 and almost certainly considerably more indirectly. ..."
"... Perhaps the most serious charge against the White Helmets consists of the evidence that they actively participated in the atrocities , to include torture and murder, carried out by their al-Nusra hosts. There have been numerous photos of the White Helmets operating directly with armed terrorists and also celebrating over the bodies of execution victims and murdered Iraqi soldiers. The group's jihadi associates regard the White Helmets as fellow "mujahideen" and "soldiers of the revolution." ..."
"... The White Helmets were and are part and parcel of the attempt to overthrow a legitimate government and install a regime friendly to western, American and Israeli interests. For Israel in particular the ongoing chaos in Syria was and is part of its plan for dividing all of its neighbors into warring ethnicities and sects, making them less viable as threats to the Jewish state. ..."
Is resettling a terrorist front group in the West a good idea?
When is a terrorist group not a terrorist group? Apparently the answer is that it ceases to
be terrorist when it terrorizes someone who is an enemy of the United States. The most
prominent recent example is the Mujaheddin e Khalq (MEK), a murderous Iranian Marxist cult
which assassinated five Americans in the 1970s as part of its campaign against the Shah's
government. It was removed from the State Department terrorist list in 2012 by Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton after it had promised not to kill any more Americans but really because
it had bought the support of prominent politicians to include Elaine Chao, Rudy Giuliani, Newt
Gingrich, and John Bolton. It also had the behind the scenes endorsement of both the Israeli
Mossad and CIA, both of whom have been using it in their operations to kill Iranians and damage
the country's infrastructure. Someone high up in the federal government, perhaps Hillary or
even President Obama himself, must have decided that terrorists who kill only Iranians deserve
a get out of jail free card from the State Department.
There are other examples of cynical doublespeak from the Syrian conflict, including labeling
rebels against the Damascus government "freedom fighters" when in reality they were as often as
not allied with the al-Qaeda affiliated group Al-Nusra or even with ISIS. Frequently they
received training and weapons from Washington only to turn around and either join Al-Nusra and
ISIS as volunteers or surrender their weapons to them.
But perhaps there is no bigger fraud making the rounds than the so-called White Helmets. The
recent media coverage derives from the documentary The White Helmets , which was
produced by the group itself and tells a very convincing tale
promoted as "the story of real-life heroes and impossible hope." It is a very impressive
piece of propaganda, so much so that it has won numerous awards including the Oscar for Best
Documentary Short last year and the White Helmets themselves were nominated for the Nobel Peace
Prize. More to the point, however, is the undeniable fact that the documentary has helped shape
the public understanding of what is going on in Syria, describing the government in Damascus in
purely negative terms.
The fawning Hollywood and Congressional depictions of the group go something like this: "the
White Helmets are an 'heroic' impartial non-government humanitarian volunteer group that
engages in 'first response' emergency rescue and medical treatment for all those who have been
impacted by the fighting in Syria. The Syrian government hates the group because it assists
victims of the fighting who are either rebels or living in rebel held areas. Recently, with the
Syrian Army closing in on the last White Helmet affiliates still operating in the country, the
Israeli government, assisted by the United States, staged an emergency humanitarian evacuation
of the group's members and their families to Israel and then on to Jordan."
Virtually all the mainstream media coverage of the White Helmets is bogus, but by far the
most ridiculous account of the Exodus from Syria came from the BBC. For those who are not
familiar with it, the BBC, which once upon a time had a reputation for journalistic integrity,
has become one of the worst pro-government propaganda shills of all time. Reading its articles
is even worse that having a similar go at The Washington Post , which is the prime
newspaper exemplar of fake news and phony journalism pretending to be a respectable news source
in the United States. Let's face it, Donald Trump has a point. Nearly all of the mainstream
media lies persistently these days but some sources are worse than others. People complain
about Fox, and rightly so, but CNN is the absolute pits when it comes to slanting its coverage,
as is MSNBC.
BBC's article is entitled Syria
conflict: White Helmets evacuated by Israel. It makes the following statements, many
coming directly from Israeli official sources, regarding the White Helmets, its activities and
the group's relationship to some governments, to include Britain:
"The IDF said they had
'completed a humanitarian effort to rescue members of a Syrian civil organization and their
families', saying there was an 'immediate threat to their lives.' The transfer of the displaced
Syrians through Israel was an exceptional humanitarian gesture." "Although Israel is not
directly involved in the Syria conflict, the two countries have been in a state of war for
decades. Despite the intervention, the IDF said that 'Israel continues to maintain a
non-intervention policy regarding the Syrian conflict.'" "A statement from Foreign Secretary
Jeremy Hunt and International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt said: 'White Helmets have
been the target of attacks and, due to their high profile, we judged that, in these particular
circumstances, the volunteers required immediate protection. We pay tribute to the brave and
selfless work that White Helmet volunteers have done to save Syrians on all sides of the
conflict.'" "Their official name is the Syrian Civil Defense and it began in early 2013 as an
organization of volunteers from all walks of life, including electricians and builders. Its
main task soon became to rescue civilians in war zones in the immediate aftermath of air
strikes, and it says its volunteers have saved the lives of more than 100,000 people during the
civil war."
The BBC story could have been written by the White Helmets themselves or by their press
department. Or alternatively by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. First of all, the Israelis do not
do humanitarian gestures. They helped bail out the White Helmets at the request of the U.S.
because capture by the Syrians would have produced embarrassing revelations about how the group
was funded and what its affiliation with terrorists was all about. And Israel's denial of
involvement in Syria is nonsense, unless one considers demonstrated collaboration with the
terrorist groups punctuated by nearly weekly bombing and missile attacks to be
non-involvement.
The British too are into the deception up to their eyeballs. The comment by Hunt and
Mordaunt is complete fabrication regarding what the White Helmets represent. The same goes for
the BBC account of how the group developed, which comes directly from the White Helmet's own
propaganda division as amplified by Hollywood and the U.S. and U.K. governments.
Just as important as what is said about the White Helmets' activities is the exclusion of a
great deal of credible negative reporting on the group. The carefully edited scenes of heroism
under fire that have been filmed and released worldwide conceal the White Helmets' relationship
with the al-Qaeda affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra and its participation in the torture and
execution of "rebel" opponents. Indeed, the White Helmets only operate in rebel held territory,
which enables them to shape the narrative both regarding who they are and what is occurring on
the ground.
Exploiting their access to the western media, the White Helmets thereby de facto
became a major source of "eyewitness" news regarding what was going on in those many parts of
Syria where European and American journalists were quite rightly afraid to go. It was all part
of a broader
largely successful "rebel" effort to manufacture fake news that depicts the Damascus
government as engaging in war crimes directed against civilians, an effort that led to several
attacks on government forces and facilities by the U.S. military.
The White Helmets travel to bombing sites with their film crews trailing behind them.
Once at the sites, with no independent observers, they are able to arrange or even stage what
is filmed to conform to their selected narrative which consistently promotes tales of
government atrocities against civilians to encourage outside military intervention in Syria and
bring about regime change in Damascus. The White Helmets were, for example, the propagators of
the
totally false but propagandistically effective claims regarding the government use of
so-called "barrel bombs" against civilians.
Peter Ford, British Ambassador in Damascus from 2003-2006, recently described the group
in
an audio interview saying, "The White Helmets are jihadi auxiliaries. They are not, as
claimed by themselves and by their supporters simple rescuers. They are not volunteers. They
are paid professionals of disinformation." He noted particularly the large size of the
organization's "press department", saying, "This gives us an idea what the priority is for this
very dubious organization. All their activities are directed at mobilizing Western opinion
behind the jihadis with whom they associate. They co-locate their centers with the Al-Qaeda
organization known as Al-Nusra and with other militant groups such as Jaish al-Islam. They have
in the past been shown associating with and waving the flags of ISIS."
The group is currently largely
funded by a number of non-government organizations (NGOs) as well as governments, including
the United States, Britain and some European Union member states. The U.S. has directly
provided $23 million through the USAID (US Agency for International Development) as of 2016 and
almost certainly considerably more indirectly. Max Blumenthal has
explored in some detail the various funding resources and relationships that the
organization draws on, mostly in Europe and the United States.
Perhaps the most serious charge against the White Helmets consists of the evidence that
they
actively participated in the atrocities , to include torture and murder, carried out by
their al-Nusra hosts. There have been numerous photos of the White
Helmets operating directly with armed terrorists and also celebrating over the bodies of
execution victims and murdered Iraqi soldiers. The group's jihadi associates regard the White
Helmets as fellow "mujahideen" and "soldiers of the revolution."
So Israel's celebrated rescue of the White Helmets was little more than a theatrical
performance intended to perpetuate the myth that the al-Assad government was thwarted in an
attempt to capture and possibly kill an honorable non-partisan group engaged in humanitarian
relief for those caught up in a bloody conflict seeking to oust a ruthless dictator. The
reality is quite different. The White Helmets were and are part and parcel of the attempt
to overthrow a legitimate government and install a regime friendly to western, American and
Israeli interests. For Israel in particular the ongoing chaos in Syria was and is part of its
plan for dividing all of its neighbors into warring ethnicities and sects, making them less
viable as threats to the Jewish state.
The 800 White Helmets rescued reportedly will be resettled in the U.S., Britain and Germany.
One hopes those coming to America can end up in Los Angeles, where they would presumably mingle
with Hollywood big shots and the usual snowflakes while working on their next documentary. As
some of them are most certainly radical Jihadists, it will be interesting to observe exactly
how that will play out.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is
[email protected].
"... While so much about the War on Terror turned Global War on Terrorism turned World War IV turned the Long War turned " generational struggle " turned " infinite war " seems repetitious, the troops most associated with this conflict -- the U.S. Special Operations forces -- have seen changes galore. ..."
"... "Vicious Iraqi dictator" Saddam Hussein is, of course, still dead and gone, but in 2014, about a third of "the new, democratic Iraq" was overrun by Islamic State militants. The country was only re-liberated in late 2017 and the Islamic State is already making a comeback there this year. ..."
"... In spite, or perhaps because, of these circumstances, SOCOM continues to thrive. Its budget, its personnel numbers, and just about any other measure you might choose (from missions to global reach) continue to rise. ..."
While so much about the War on Terror turned Global War on Terrorism
turned World War IV turned the
Long War turned "
generational struggle " turned "
infinite war " seems repetitious, the troops most associated with this conflict -- the U.S.
Special Operations forces -- have seen changes galore. As Representative Jim Saxton (R-NJ),
chairman of the Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee,
pointed out in 2006, referring to Special Operations Command by its acronym: "For almost
five years now, SOCOM has been leading the way in the war on terrorism: defeating the Taliban
and eliminating a terrorist safe haven in Afghanistan, removing a truly vicious Iraqi dictator,
and combating the terrorists who seek to destabilize the new, democratic Iraq."
Much has changed since Saxton looked back on SOCOM's role in the early years of the war on
terror. For starters,
Saxton retired almost a decade ago, but the Taliban, despite being "defeated" way back
when, didn't do the same. Today,
they contest for or control about
44% of Afghanistan. That country also hosts many more terror groups -- 20
in all -- than it did 12 years ago. "Vicious Iraqi dictator" Saddam Hussein is, of course,
still dead and gone, but in 2014, about a third of "the new, democratic Iraq" was overrun by
Islamic State militants. The country was only re-liberated in late
2017 and the Islamic State is already making a
comeback there this year.
Meanwhile, Iraq is
beset by anti-government
protests and totters along as one of the most
fragile states on the planet, while the Iraqi and Afghan war zones bled together -- with
U.S. special operators now fighting
an Islamic State terrorist franchise in Afghanistan, too.
In spite, or perhaps because, of these circumstances, SOCOM continues to thrive. Its budget,
its personnel numbers, and just about any other measure you might choose (from missions to
global reach) continue to rise. In 2006, for instance, 85% of Special Operations forces (SOF)
deployed overseas -- Army Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs, and others -- were concentrated
in the Greater Middle East, with far smaller numbers spread thinly across the Pacific (7%),
Europe (3%), and Latin America (3%). Only 1% of them were then conducting missions in
Africa.
"... The peculiar dialectic between power and powerlessness is shadowed by a necessary third component, the perfect target. These are the people who are identified as the threat that the powerful and the powerless must come together to defeat. ..."
"... The U.S. is not in a pre-fascist period. Globalization is forcing fundamental structural changes on American society, affecting the economy as well as personal life. One key question involves a president's vision and the practices of his administration. Do fundamental social changes foster greater efforts to protect (and increase) the wealth and social power of the privileged or does it signal a sea change -- like the post-WW-II consumer revolution -- that enhances the quality and longevity of the lives of the many? ..."
"... With hollow bravado, one with apparently little thought about consequences, Trump Tweets new federal policies, offers false apologies and ceaselessly attacks on the media. For Trump and his administration, all information questioning a Trump Team statement suggests possible treason. ..."
"... For two-plus centuries, the U.S. has been a battleground between power and powerlessness. Through each era of contestation, a perfect target has been identified and exploited to help assure the position of those contesting for power. Four of the most revealing "perfect targets" are the Native People, African-American slaves and free people, Catholics and Communists. Each illuminates the social struggle between the powerful and powerless, thus providing a valuable snapshot into America's evolving culture. ..."
"... The Know Nothing movement grew out of the Second Great Awakening or the Great Revival of the 1830s and became the American Party that flourished during the late-40s and early-50s. It got its name when members where asked the party's positions and simply said, "I know nothing." It drew together Protestants who felt threatened by the rapid increase in European immigrants and, most especially, Catholics, flooding the cities. Catholics became the perfect target. ..."
"... The post-WW-II period was the age of Sen. Joe McCarthy, of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and New York's Archbishop Francis Spellman -- and Roy Cohn, Trump's consigliere ..."
"... The dance of power/powerlessness shadowed by the perfect target is being exploited by Trump and his followers. Trump knows how to play this dialect given his narcissistic personality and likely compensation for learning disabilities. ..."
"... David Rosen is the author of Sex, Sin & Subversion: The Transformation of 1950s New York's Forbidden into America's New Normal (Skyhorse, 2015). He can be reached at [email protected] ; check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com . ..."
Now a year-and-a-half into the Trump presidency, it's become a truism that the president's
support is anchored in a deep sense of social and political powerlessness felt by many
Americans, especially older, white men. An early 2016
Rand poll comparing Donald Trump and Ted Cruz supporters found that those who agreed with
the statement "people like me don't have any say about what the government does" preferred
Trump -- and by a whopping 86.5 percent majority.
This sense of powerlessness turned out to be a more reliable predictor of Trump support than
all the other issues that dogged the 2016 campaign, including immigration, income, education,
the economy and his abusive sexual exploits. And it still does.
In 1941, the then-radical psycho-theorist, Erich Fromm, published Escape from
Freedom . In it, he warned:
The annihilation of the individual self and the attempt to overcome thereby the unbearable
feeling of powerlessness are only one side of the masochistic strivings. The other side is
the attempt to become part of a bigger and more powerful whole outside of oneself, to
submerge and participate in it. This power can be a person, an institution, God, the nation,
conscience, or a psychic compulsion.
Like Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, Fromm was then worried about the growing threat of
totalitarianism. In particular, these thinkers, among others, were concerned about how the
deepening sense of powerlessness among what was then referred to as "the masses" had
contributed to the enormous increase in the power of the leader, whether Hitler, Mussolini,
Franco or Stalin.
The peculiar dialectic between power and powerlessness is shadowed by a necessary third
component, the perfect target. These are the people who are identified as the threat that the
powerful and the powerless must come together to defeat. In pre-WW-II Germany, the perfect
target were the Jews, communists, homosexuals and gypsies, people that Nazi's claimed were
different, thus threatening the purity of ordinary Germans' "Saxon heritage." The threat can
come in any form, be it class, race, nationality, religion or political ideology -- or whatever
is a distinguishing characteristic of those targeted.
Pres. Trump has up to now played the perfect-target dance with great success. As a candidate
and now in the Oval Office, he's ranted successfully against "illegal" immigrants, whether
long-time residents, married to a citizen and with American children, have a criminal record,
served in the military or recent arrivals. In one Tweet, he opined: "They [Democrats] don't
care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and
infest our Country, like MS-13. They can't win on their terrible policies, so they view them as
potential voters!"
Democrats are the problem. They don't care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no
matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can't win
on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!
The Trump administration may have recently overplayed its perfect-target hand with the
forceful separation of seized immigrant parents from their children, no matter at what age.
From purely bureaucratic and media-relations perspectives, it's been a mess. No matter whether
the immigrants might be "illegal," they are still people, parent and child, and -- in Christian
America -- family still matters. Equally revealing, the Congress has yet to underwrite building
a wall separating the U.S. from Mexico.
The U.S. is not in a pre-fascist period. Globalization is forcing fundamental structural
changes on American society, affecting the economy as well as personal life. One key question
involves a president's vision and the practices of his administration. Do fundamental social
changes foster greater efforts to protect (and increase) the wealth and social power of the
privileged or does it signal a sea change -- like the post-WW-II consumer revolution -- that
enhances the quality and longevity of the lives of the many?
Trump is effectively exploiting the power/powerless minuet to maximize his own wealth and
that among others of the 1 percent. His -- and his administration's -- efforts are designed to
(moderately) upset the post-WW-II alliance between the federal government and private corporate
interests. The alliance has long been a revolving door for both Democrats and Republicans --
and the Trump Team is spinning the door.
The Trump apparatus is pushing the revolving door further to the right. Every federal
department and agency, including the Supreme Court, appears to include, if not run by, someone
drawn from the military, a corporation or bank, an industry association, a lobbying firm, a
religious group or a conservative thinktank.
Trump and his administration, ably assisted by a get-what-you-can Republican-controlled
Congress and Senate, seem more like that of Herbert Hoover and the great denial of what
everyone knew was coming rather than that of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the making of a modern
super-state. With hollow bravado, one with apparently little thought about consequences,
Trump Tweets new federal policies, offers false apologies and ceaselessly attacks on the media.
For Trump and his administration, all information questioning a Trump Team statement suggests
possible treason.
***
For two-plus centuries, the U.S. has been a battleground between power and
powerlessness. Through each era of contestation, a perfect target has been identified and
exploited to help assure the position of those contesting for power. Four of the most revealing
"perfect targets" are the Native People, African-American slaves and free people, Catholics and
Communists. Each illuminates the social struggle between the powerful and powerless, thus
providing a valuable snapshot into America's evolving culture.
No clearer or more honest statement as to the social role of the perfect target was made by
Pres. Andrew Jackson on December 6, 1830, in his Message to Congress, "On Indian Removal." It
was issued seven months after he signed the removal law that authorized to grant unsettled
lands west of the Mississippi to Anglos or white people in exchange for Indian lands within
existing state borders. He stated, in part
:
It [the act] will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites;
free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and
under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening
their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and
through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an
interesting, civilized, and Christian community.
Four European states -- Netherlands, Great Britain and France as well Spain -- invaded and
conquered parts of what was once the vast North America territory and was then home to
innumerable tribes of Native Peoples.
The first African slaves arrived in North America in 1619 in Jamestown. Over the following
four centuries many Americans believed that Africans -- and their descendants,
African-Americans -- were not fully human, but rather subhuman. It was long an essential belief
among colonial revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson as well as Confederate secessionists and
those of the today's alt-right. As Jefferson wrote
:
I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct
race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the
endowments both of body and mind. This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of
faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.
The U.S. Constitution embodied this racism in granting African and African-American males
3/5 th voting rights compared to white citizens.
The Know Nothing
movement grew out of the Second Great Awakening or the Great Revival of the 1830s and became
the American Party that flourished during the late-40s and early-50s. It got its name when
members where asked the party's positions and simply said, "I know nothing." It drew together
Protestants who felt threatened by the rapid increase in European immigrants and, most
especially, Catholics, flooding the cities. Catholics became the perfect target.
Know-Nothing adherents felt that Catholics, as followers of the Pope, were not loyal
Americans and were going to take over the country. It had strong support in the North that
witnessed large-scale Irish immigration after 1848. The American Party captured the
Massachusetts legislature in 1854 and, in 1856, backed Millard Fillmore for president, who
secured nearly 1 million votes, a quarter of all votes cast.
And then there were
communists . It's nearly impossible to image just how awful it was for those who challenged
the nation's official belief system during the post-WW-II era of 1945 to 1960. Alleged
"communists" included Soviet Union agents, non-party trade unionists as well as professors,
teachers, publishers and nonviolent civil-rights activists. And then there were the
pornographers, homosexual and other alleged deviants who challenged the status quo.
The post-WW-II period was the age of Sen. Joe McCarthy, of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
and New York's Archbishop Francis Spellman -- and Roy Cohn, Trump's consigliere . It
saw hundreds lose their jobs, dozens arrested and jailed. And the powerful found their perfect
target in two innocent New Yorkers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who they arrested, convicted
and executed -- they were prosecuted by Cohn.
***
The dance of power/powerlessness shadowed by the perfect target is being exploited by
Trump and his followers. Trump knows how to play this dialect given his narcissistic
personality and likely compensation for learning disabilities. Since the campaign, his
perfect perfect target has been non-documented immigrants. He's also targeted
Democrats, the news media and NATO.
Trump needs a perfect enemy. In this way he is very much like other authoritarian leaders,
whether all-powerful rulers like Hitler, Stalin or Mao or merely a failed petty tyrant like
Nixon or -- pick your favorite Latin American, African or Asian dictator.
So, keep your eyes on Trump's ever-changing perfect target for it signals where the pin-ball
bouncing around in his brain lands. And where it lands sets national policy by targeting those
he thinks can distract Americans from understanding his profound failings. Who's next?
Join
the debate on Facebook More articles by: David Rosen
David Rosen is the author of Sex, Sin & Subversion: The Transformation of 1950s New
York's Forbidden into America's New Normal (Skyhorse, 2015). He can be reached at [email protected]
; check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com .
"Ex-FBI agent: Trump got elected, thanks to Russia" [
Yahoo News
]. • One thing to remember about RussiaRussiaRussia -- R 3 ? -- is that it's very profitable to be a talking head.
"DOJ Announces Public Release of the Cyber-Digital Task Force's First Report; Impact on and Role of the Private Sector Likely
to be a Focus in the Coming Months" [
Compliance and Enforcement ]. "[Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein] lauded 'self-policing' efforts to remove 'fake accounts'
and encouraged companies to 'consider the voluntary removal of accounts and content' that are linked by the FBI to foreign agents'
activities, which he said 'violate terms of service and deceive customers.'" • What could go wrong?
"The Death of Truth" by Pulitzer-Prize winning book critic Michiko Kakutani explores the waning of integrity in American
society, particularly since the 2016 elections. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion,
but not to his own facts," is more timely than ever, Kakutani says: "polarization has grown so extreme that voters have a hard
time even agreeing on the same facts." And no wonder: Two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news through social media
-- a platform that has been overwhelmed by trolls and bots, and which uses algorithms to decide what each of us gets to see.
Executives ignore the cultural shift away from honesty at their peril.
I would put the start date for the cultural shift away from honest at 2008; every one knew what caused the financial disaster,
knew who the culprits were (and are), saw them get away with grand theft and govt protection, and knew they were being lied to
by the sort of bs excuses like WF's "it was a computer glitch" that done it. Once it was clear the govt was going to protect the
robbers, the new paradigm of dishonesty in high places trickled down. Ohhh, so that's how trickle down works.
Trump is obviously engaging Iran to please his Jewish-in-law, who probably is laughing behind
his back. During the presidential political campaign, Trump made clear that he was against
regime change and that is why many people voted for him. He has gone back on that pledge,
once again, to please his Jewish son-in-law. Beyond that, Iran is no threat to America and
has nothing whatsoever to do with "making America great again".
Pat Buchanan vastly overestimates American military capabilities. Is he not aware of a war
game with Iran conducted by the Pentagon back in 2002 wherein the American navy lost 16 ships
including an aircraft carrier and 8 cruisers? The war game was even rigged to favor America,
and we still lost. Moreover, the military equipment the Iranians have today is far more
advanced than what they had in 2002. Wake up and smell the coffee Pat.
There is no doubt in my mind that if there is a war with Iran the American Fifth Fleet
would be decimated, as it would be hit by barrages of both subsonic and supersonic antiship
cruise missiles along with the supercavitating 225 mph Hoot torpedoes (based on Russian
technology). Not only that, American bases in that general area would be hit by numerous
surface to surface missiles. And of course Israel would be attacked and destroyed.
Since a land invasion of Iran is out of the question, because it would require at least a
2 million man army to even have a chance of being successful, that leaves the only option of
an air/naval military campaign. Since the Fifth Fleet would be destroyed within a few days of
that war, there would be no carrier launched aircraft. They would have to use land based
aircraft which would have to go up against the S-300, TOR and other air defense systems. The
losses would be enormous. The attacking aircraft that survive the air raids would have to fly
back to bases under rocket attack by the Iranians. The attacking aircraft, both manned and
unmanned, obviously would damage some of Iran's military assets but not to the point that
Iran would throw in the towel.
If any of you recall that several years ago the Iranians downed a highly sophisticated
American spy aircraft thru electronic means (It wasn't shot down.). They took it apart,
analyzed it and probably used its technology in their military equipment. This gives one an
insight into their capabilities.
If any of you think that a war with Iran would result in an American victory, you are
living in a fool's paradise.
Buchanan wrote "U.S., would swiftly prevail.", but your point is valid.
Iran fought a desperate 8-year war with Iraq, and never surrendered.
Iraq was supplied and assisted (e.g. satellite intelligence) by US, UK, etc. Iran basically
had no air-force or any modern (for the time) military equipment. Iranian teenage boys
volunteered by the 1,000s to walk over mine fields and clear them, so that valuable,
experienced soldiers could be spared to fight Iraqi military. As a side note, Iraq is now
Shia controlled and is allied with Iran.
{Iran has the upper hand here. We need to be very careful.}
Exactly. Unfortunately, neocons who run the WH and US foreign policy are not only evil,
but are also recklessly stupid. One cannot underestimate their arrogant stupidity to plunge
US and the region into another bloodbath.
As it stands now, Trump has already lost. The people that won him the election, the
independents and democrats that voted for him will not show up if he keeps on the path he is
on.
Unless he brings the troops home, all of them, makes peace with Russia, Iran, stops trying to
push other nations around like in Venezuela, letting Wall St-Zionists use our military to
make themselves richer while Americans that are already broke as fuk pay for it, droning and
assassinating people who pose no threat to Americans, repeal Patriot act and all of the other
anti-American laws that have been passed since the false flag of 9-11, those voters are not
gonna show up to vote for another Bush-0bama puppet. Stop funding and arming Christian
murdering terrorists for Israels benefit!
People voted for him cause they thought he would be a fighter, he bends over every time the
establishment and media starts throwing their fits, more sanctions, more MIC spending, going
back on everything he said. We're still stuck with crappy unaffordable "healthcare" that is
bankrupting people left and right, while we give Israel and the MIC billions.
If he pulls his nose out of Netanyahus, Wall st, and MIC's ass and does the above he will
win. If not he will lose.
Yeah, I doubt it too.
You make some very good points. The US military decision makers are also well aware of the
perils of attacking Iran. They would resist risking a war with Iran on behalf of the
neocons.
The US administration's war ploy is to intimidate Iran into an agreement to boost Trump's
standing with the voters in the Midterms2018.
Trump won't do a thing for Trumps a neocon himself,Trump was put in office by Jewish money
in fact he is still taking it, and the fools who voted him in office are still waiting for
the clown to keep his word on anything he promised
Iran will be another one of those easy to get into, hard to get out of wars. I'm sure the US
military will defeat the Iranian one within weeks at most. But then what?
Iran is a huge, mountainous country. Israel doesn't want it merely beaten, they want it to
be smashed to pieces because of something or other the Persians did to the Jews millennia
ago. So once again, the US will have to completely destroy a functioning, relatively modern
country and then rebuild it and occupy it for decades to come.
I doubt that many American soldiers would die but it will cost the US another couple of
trillion dollars in debt to the Rothschilds. So the Jews win twice; another ancient enemy
defeated at no cost to them AND the stupid, filthy goyim are even further in debt to
them.
"The faster America dumps this crazy fascination with the Jews the faster it will get it's
act together and become a Country again."
We can only do that by seizing control of the media and redistributing it to ourselves and
our supporters. It's not right that two Jewish strong holds – NY and LA – get to
control the entirety of the country's media and entertainment industry.
Why the hell is prime time CNN in NY instead of Atlanta (hint: to more easily control the
narrative by staffing positions from a pool of people more likely to share certain beliefs).
The NYT, The New Yorker, Hollywood, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, a host of think tanks and
magazines, prominent websites and basically everything else is in just two or three
cities.
We erred very badly in letting the enemy control the narrative machine. Instead of
supporting corporate merges, we should be breaking them up. Instead of defunding public
broadcasting, we should fund it and make it more appealing than the propaganda outlets like
CNN, hurting our enemies by driving down their ratings and helping our cause in the
process.
We can follow this up by banning Israeli control organizations like the SPLC and the
ADL.
But unless we are willing to organize a viable opposition and take control away from the
vermin who originally seized it from our people in the first place, nothing will change.
Things will only get worse.
I don't think "Jewish money" was much of a factor in getting Orange Clown elected. I think
it may have actually tainted him and lowered his odds.
What put Orange Clown in office was Obama's attack on the Syrian Army at Deir Ezzor in
Sept. 2016, and the escalation of tension with Russia, IMO. I believe it was the prospect of
war with Russia that caused some antiwar democrats/Sanders supporters to hold their noses and
vote for Orange Clown that swung the election to him.
1) An electorate that has soured on Wilsonian interventionism to the point that they
managed to shut down talk of regime change in Syria back in 2013 unilaterally, despite being
supported by both the White House and the opposition dominated Congress, to say nothing of
mainstream media outlets high on the Arab Spring. And a President that was both nominated and
elected not least because voters figured he'd be less likely than his opponents to go on
military crusades abroad.
2) A treasury that is trillions of dollars in debt. News flash to the GOP: wars be
expensive, way more expensive than welfare programs.
3) A country with a cohesive basis in culture/ethnicity that nobody else in the Middle
East except for Israel has, three times Iraq's population, and a far more
functional/competent governmental apparatus, military, and special forces. Not to mention
that this time around, there's not going to be an oppressed majority sect fantasizing about
toppling the regime and getting revenge, a la the Shi'a in Iraq.
4) A military who hasn't faced a serious opponent in a long time.
5) Further confirming for the world-especially the people in Moscow and Beijing-that the
Americans are a bunch of trigger-happy kids hell-bent on spreading their decidedly
not-looking-very-good-from-a-distance political system around the world, and who should
never, ever be taken at their word. Not to mention sending a message to Pyongyang to make
sure we're aware of the nuclear bomb so that we don't decide KOREAN FREEDOM is next, and
advertising to Muslims in general that the stereotypes of spoiled Saud princes and the Jews
truly controlling things in Washington are all too true.
First let me state that I'm opposed to war with Iran, but there is an argument, and it may be
a neocon argument, but there is a legitimate argument for war with them.
1. The Iranian army, navy and air force could probably be destroyed within a couple of weeks
with air power alone.
2. Iranian infrastructure, bridges, communications, transportation, could also probably be,
at the least, severely damaged in an air attack. The US military could defang the Iranians
and put them in a vulnerable position for years to come.
3. Regime change, boots on the ground would be a grave mistake, although I believe the US
would eventually prevail, the cost in lives wouldn't be worth the fight.
4. Because the US petrodollar is the world's reserve currency, the US can keep printing to
pay for all the replacement costs of military hardware, and even take other steps, like
raising interest rates, to control inflation.
5. Finally, a 20% increase in the cost of oil would make shale oil look cheap and would add
millions of jobs to the US payrolls, making plenty of money for investors.
I'm a vet myself, and opposed to sending more of our guys to a foreign country to die, but
I could definitely see the chicken-hawks in DC win this argument.
PJB is one of the best but it is simply amazing to recall how many people have written so
many stories about how an Iran attack is imminent. Those stories have been out there since at
least 2005 when GWB was about to launch an air campaign against Iran and the dire concern
then was that US troops were vulnerable to retaliation in Iraq. Take a breath. It's not going
to happen. Trump knows it would be the end of his presidency. There are not enough neocons to
offset the loss of deplorable support. And in fact, the neocons are still going to hate him.
He sucks up to Israel, moves the Embassy and pulls out of the Iran deal and it gets him no
where with them.
I believe you underestimated the main reason Independents voted for Trump. Militant
Marxists taking over the MSM, and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. If anything
the attacks on Trump and 'anybody but Hillary' voters have gotten more and more pointed and
aggressive. Do those voters care about Iran? No. Not to any significant degree when
confronted by aggressive enemies of what remains of their culture right here in the US trying
to take over the House in order to impeach Trump and to criminalize free speech (when it
doesn't favor their agendas). No 'blue wave' will materialize IMO. But even if it does, it's
going to get squashed by more of the same that it experienced in 2016. Can't wait to watch
them blame the Russians again while the wheels fall off of their little red wagons carrying
their dreams of the fourth coming of Hillary.
And of course Israel would be attacked and destroyed
.
How and by who? More likely Israel, which has the capability and motivation would do the
destroying. They've been flying their F35′s around Iran undetected.
He will have his war during his second term, and then, he could not care less. They are
gearing up now – economic sanctions that are imploding the economy, and protests in the
street.
Agree with you in general, but am just wondering why people think that asymmetrical
warfare by Iran would be confined to the Middle East? Suppose their sleeper cells in the US
decided to shut down our power grid–something that can be done with few resources and
little manpower. We already know that destroying fewer than ten electrical power substations
would do the trick, and those are alongside rural roads everywhere in the
country–"guarded" by modest chain-link fences and in plain view of the roads.
But suppose that the critical substations have been hardened by our efficient and
ever-forward-looking government bureaucrats. Simply knocking out substations "here and there"
could shut down entire cities–no water, no banking, no payments system, no distribution
system, no food in stores, etc., etc. That could be done quite easily in one night by a very
small number of men. Shut off Chicago's water supply. And Denver's. Bring down a bridge at
Baton Rouge and close the Mississippi to all traffic for months or even years. Etc. Does
anybody really believe that the Iranians are not prepared to do these very things?
I can't think why people seem to think that Iran's reaction would be confined to "the
Middle East." These are not stupid people.
{They've been flying their F35′s around Iran undetected.}
How could _you_ possibly know that? You think Iranians would announce they had detected an
F-35? Only Iranians know if they had detected F-35s or not.
Remember the "stealth" US drone RQ-170 that Iran captured intact? How were they able to
detect a stealth drone? And certainly a stealth drone is a lot harder to detect than a
stealth fighter jet. No?
"... His crude realism is underestimated by a contemptuous media, dismissive of everything he does. They portray him as an ill-informed crackpot who makes up his policy on the spur of the moment, but this is often much saner than it looks: despite all his jingoism, he has yet to start a war; his belligerent threats towards countries such as North Korea and Iran appear to be designed primarily as negotiating positions in pursuit of a deal; he respects power and will talk to those who possess it, such as Vladimir Putin , enraging other parts of the US government that are trying to isolate Russia as a pariah state. ..."
British commentators – the BBC is particularly prone to this – tend to adopt a
patronising and derisive approach to Trump's demagoguery about "making America great again".
But he can get away with the most bizarre antics because the US is a political, economic and
military superpower regardless of Trump, even if it does not have the primacy it had after the
Second World War or, once again, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Its status is
not changed by Trump's words and actions, though these are usually more carefully calculated
and rooted in the real world than his critics give him credit for.
His crude realism is underestimated by a contemptuous media, dismissive of everything he
does. They portray him as an ill-informed crackpot who makes up his policy on the spur of the
moment, but this is often much saner than it looks: despite all his jingoism, he has yet to
start a war; his belligerent threats towards countries such as North Korea and Iran appear to
be designed primarily as negotiating positions in pursuit of a deal; he respects power and
will talk to those who possess it, such as Vladimir Putin , enraging other parts of the US
government that are trying to isolate Russia as a pariah state.
The pro-Brexit vote in the referendum in 2016 is said by Trump to have given vital extra
momentum to the populist-nationalist surge that elected him president later that year. But the
danger of looking at everything through an isolationist and nationalist lens is far greater in
Britain than it is in the US simply because it leads to the British systematically overplaying
their hand. The price of doing so is illustrated by every stumbling step Britain takes out of
the EU, contradicting the Brexiteer mantra that Britain has political and economic potential
that will make it better off outside the EU.
On your last paragraph, I've been nursing that hope as far as the ME goes for a while as well. Ever since the Jerusalem decision.
As for European NATO, isn't that already shot? Turkey unreliable at one end. The UK at odds with the mainland at the other,
if all the disaster talk isn't just theatre and maybe if it is. European NATO no longer looks like a credible alliance. Not an
alliance at all should Trump remove or cause to be removed the American glue holding it all together.
But the Colonel's item 8 is going to weigh on the conscience of the West for a long time.
On #8: I would bet that not 1 in 100 Americans know anything about the place at all, never mind the current slaughter. There will
be nothing for them to forget. I'm not trying to be flippant either. Unfortunately, most of my countrymen are simply fat, dumb,
and happy; and content to stay that way.
"... First, the wrecking and diversionist-espionage work of agents of foreign countries , among whom a rather active role was played by the Trotskyists, affected more or less all, or nearly all, of our organizations-economic, administrative, and Party. ..."
"... Second, agents of foreign countries, among them the Trotskyites , penetrated not only into lower organizations, but also into certain responsible posts. ..."
"... Third, some of our leading comrades, both at the center and at the periphery, not only failed to discern the face of these wreckers, diversionists, spies, and killers, but proved to be so careless, complacent,and naive that at times they themselves assisted in promoting agents of foreign states to responsible posts. ..."
Comrade Stalin speaks from the grave, in support of Kommissar General Clinton supporting
her brave fight against wreckers, spies, provocateurs, diversionists, whiteguards, kulaks
.who are trying to infiltrate and destroy, OUR Democratic Party!
Defects in Party Work and Measures for Liquidating Trotskyite and Other Double Dealers :
March 3, 1937
"Comrades!
From the reports and the debates on these reports heard at this plenum, it is evident that
we are dealing with the following three main facts.
First, the wrecking and diversionist-espionage work of agents of foreign countries , among
whom a rather active role was played by the Trotskyists, affected more or less all, or nearly
all, of our organizations-economic, administrative, and Party.
Second, agents of foreign countries, among them the Trotskyites , penetrated not only into
lower organizations, but also into certain responsible posts.
Third, some of our leading comrades, both at the center and at the periphery, not only
failed to discern the face of these wreckers, diversionists, spies, and killers, but proved
to be so careless, complacent,and naive that at times they themselves assisted in promoting
agents of foreign states to responsible posts.
These are the three incontrovertible facts which naturally emerge from the reports and the
discussions on them "
Wrecking (Russian:
вредительство
or vreditel'stvo, lit. "inflicting damage", "harming"), was a crime specified in the criminal
code of the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. It is often translated as "sabotage"; however,
"wrecking", "diversionist acts" , and "counter-revolutionary sabotage" were distinct
sub-articles of Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code) (58-7, 58-9, and 58-14 respectively), The
meaning of "wrecking" is closer to "undermining".
These three categories were distinguished in the following way:
Diversions were acts of immediate infliction of physical damage on state and cooperative
property.
Wrecking was deliberate acts aimed against normal functioning of state and cooperative
organisations, such as giving deliberately wrong commands.
Sabotage was non-execution, or careless execution, of one's duties.
The definition of sabotage was interpreted dialectically and indirectly, so any form of
non-compliance with Party directives could have been considered a 'sabotage'."
Sabotage was non-execution, or careless execution, of one's duties.
The definition of sabotage was interpreted dialectically and indirectly, so any form of
non-compliance with Party directives could have been considered a 'sabotage'."
So no deviating from being, or at least appearing as, an ultra obedient group-thinking
conformist drone. Gotcha. Anyone the higher ups didn't like would be guilty of something,
rather like how Americans today commit multiple felonies each day because it is
unavoidable.
I never followed up on it, but I read years ago that virtually all the original members of
PNAC and American Enterprise Institute were Trotskyites. Specifically Irving Kristol (Butcher
Bill's father), and Gertrud Himmelfarb (his mother).
"... First, the wrecking and diversionist-espionage work of agents of foreign countries , among whom a rather active role was played by the Trotskyists, affected more or less all, or nearly all, of our organizations-economic, administrative, and Party. ..."
"... Second, agents of foreign countries, among them the Trotskyites , penetrated not only into lower organizations, but also into certain responsible posts. ..."
Defects in Party Work and Measures for Liquidating Trotskyite and Other Double Dealers :
March 3, 1937
"Comrades!
From the reports and the debates on these reports heard at this plenum, it is evident that
we are dealing with the following three main facts.
First, the wrecking and diversionist-espionage work of agents of foreign countries , among
whom a rather active role was played by the Trotskyists, affected more or less all, or nearly
all, of our organizations-economic, administrative, and Party.
Second, agents of foreign countries, among them the Trotskyites , penetrated not only into
lower organizations, but also into certain responsible posts.
Third, some of our leading comrades, both at the center and at the periphery, not only
failed to discern the face of these wreckers, diversionists, spies, and killers, but proved
to be so careless, complacent, and naive that at times they themselves assisted in promoting
agents of foreign states to responsible posts.
These are the three incontrovertible facts which naturally emerge from the reports and the
discussions on them "
It's worth pointing out that described abstractly, Zionism and Nazism are ideologically very
similar. Both are essentially exaggerations of Nineteenth century European racial
nationalism, both posit a more or less imaginary history to justify their territorial claims,
both ignore the rights of all others in favor of their chosen group, both openly worship
violence, and both are contemptuous of both legal and moral constraints. Israel has committed
crimes proportionately as horrific as any Nazi Germany committed up to the outbreak of total
war in 1941, and I'm all too confident that if total war did come to the Middle East, Israel
would take advantage of the opportunity to engage in some very genocidal treatment of her
Palestinian subjects.
The primary differences are really that while Nazism was defeated over seventy years ago,
Israel is still very much in being, and that while we here in the US opposed Nazism, we
support Israel.
On August 6, 1945; The US dropped an atomic bomb (Little Boy) on Hiroshima destroying much
of the city and instantly killing 80,000 of its citizens. 60,000 more would die later
On August 6, 1945; The Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in military combat
on Hiroshima. A second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki August 9, 1945.
On August 6, 2018; On the 73rd anniversary of dropping of the first atomic bomb, the
residents of Hiroshima will pause to remember the 80,000 residents and the destruction which
changed the course of history. Church bells will ring at 8:15 AM, the moment the bomb was
dropped from the Enola Gay.
Later on August 6, 2018 and in the evening, Toro Nagashi Lanterns will be floated down the
Motoyasu river and past The Atomic Dome (Prefuctural Industrial Promotion Hall). First held in
1946, the Toro Nagashi (literally, "flowing lanterns") ceremony was first held in Tokyo.
Participants Float glowing paper lanterns down a river to commemorate the souls of the
dead.
Today, Hiroshima is a prosperous manufacturing city.
Looks like "My way or the highway diplomacy" is the only one Trump masters in his long life.
Trump tries fully leverage the US global power before it dissipates ...
Notable quotes:
"... The track record is not encouraging. By constantly expanding its demands, the United States may have given the impression that its negotiations are not in good faith, and that rather than trying to reach a diplomatic resolution, it is simply trying to punish the target. ..."
"... The most hawkish sanctions advocates aren't interested in using sanctions to resolve conflicts. Many Iran hawks advocated piling on additional sanctions against Iran both before and after Trump's decision to renege on the JCPOA, and they insisted on making demands that Iran couldn't possibly accept. Their goal was never to "fix" the deal or find a diplomatic solution to other issues, but to create a pretext for punishing Iran for "refusing" the demands that had been designed to be rejected. Pompeo's list of demands has the same purpose. ..."
warn that
the Trump administration's overuse of sanctions is eroding whatever effectiveness they might have:
The track record is not encouraging. By constantly expanding its demands, the United States may have given the impression
that its negotiations are not in good faith, and that rather than trying to reach a diplomatic resolution, it is simply trying
to punish the target. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's 12 points for resetting relations with Tehran tied so many goals to
each sanction program so as to render such measures useless as conflict-resolution tools.
The most hawkish sanctions advocates aren't interested in using sanctions to resolve conflicts. Many Iran hawks advocated
piling on additional sanctions against Iran both before and after Trump's decision to renege on the JCPOA, and they insisted on making
demands that Iran couldn't possibly accept. Their goal was never to "fix" the deal or find a diplomatic solution to other issues,
but to create a pretext for punishing Iran for "refusing" the demands that had been designed to be rejected. Pompeo's list of demands
has the same purpose.
Opponents of the nuclear deal hated the JCPOA because it worked and removed the main excuse for punishing and isolating Iran,
so as far as they're concerned punishment is the reason for the sanctions. That is why there is nothing Iran can do short of surrender
to get them lifted, and that is why Iran has no incentive to deal with the Trump administration. Iran sees the reimposition of sanctions
as entirely incompatible with dialogue, and they are right to do so. Iran hawks have been pushing for more sanctions on Iran for
the purpose of sabotaging any further engagement, and Trump has given them exactly what they wanted. Far from trying to reach a diplomatic
resolution of any outstanding issues, Iran hawks are determined to make that impossible. They want to maintain the illusion that
the U.S. is still open to talking while doing everything possible to make negotiations politically radioactive for the other side.
Iranian leaders aren't falling for it, and neither should we.
"... The neocons did not vanish with the departure of the Bush Republicans from office, and the rise of Obama . Indeed, the clout of this group and their grip on power is arguably as strong as ever. Not only did they continue to shape the U.S. foreign policy establishment, but they have managed to alter what constitutes acceptable public and media discourse within the world's remaining superpower. The trajectory of neocon influence in Washington is explored in depth in the documentary series, A Very Heavy Agenda, by independent journalist and film-maker Robbie Martin. ..."
"... This feature is followed by an interview with writer, ecological campaigner, and Deep State researcher Mark Robinowitz . Originally recorded and aired in January 2018, Robinowitz helps delineate the factions of power shaping the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, as well as the players within the National Security State, including the neocons, that appear to be manipulating him and his presidency, possibly maneuvering him towards an impeachment within the next year. ..."
"... Robbie Martin is a journalist, musician and documentary film-maker. He is co-host with his sister Abby Martin of Media Roots Radio. A Very Heavy Agenda can be streamed or purchased here . Soundtrack for Film and music for these series from Fluorescent Grey (Robbie Martin). ..."
"... Mark Robinowitz is a writer, political activist, ecological campaigner and permaculture practitioner and publisher of oilempire.us as well as jfkmoon.org . He is based in Eugene, Oregon. ..."
"... from the period between 2014 to 2018, it was like an exponentially rising climate of propaganda against Russia coming from the U.S. media ..."
"... they also were the earliest pioneers pushing this Russiagate Cold War 2.0 mentality. ..."
"... And how it only took, you know, certain nudges and pushes and policy papers , and here we are. They essentially got their way, and Russia has never been more demonized since the fall of communism and the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union. ..."
"... she had over 200 basically hit piece stories written about her within the span of a week, and I was just in this kind of depressed place checking in with her making sure she was doing okay, and not basically getting too stressed out from all this media pressure and this barrage of negative stories. So I was just watching these videos basically from the neocon think-tank that I believe was behind the smear campaign against her. ..."
"... Foreign Policy Initiative is actually a re-branded, reopened version of the Project for The New American Century think tank, which was the most infamous neocon think tank that was behind the Iraq War. ..."
"... Finally I got to Robert Kagan. And I was listening to him, and it struck me differently from the way that most other neoconservatives would talk, because I perceived him as being more candid about the way American foreign policy has actually conducted itself, and also more clever with the way that I perceived him as, re-branding, repackaging neocon rhetoric for the Obama era. ..."
"... the neocons managed to rebrand themselves, massage their rhetoric, and make themselves seem less crazy in order to influence the larger DC foreign policy community into basically accepting and going along with almost all their foreign policy platforms, with the exception of overtly wanting to invade Iran which arguably that is the neocon prize but see, a lot of these smarter neocons like Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, and a lot of these neocons who managed to convince the blob, they have hidden, and not been open about the fact that they want to overthrow the regime of Iran. ..."
"... That's one of their foreign policy platforms they've sort of brushed under the rug, because that's one of The reason I'm giving that example is because that's how they have managed to cross the aisle, so to speak, in DC and put a hand out to the neoliberal think tanks and say, hey we're kind of on the same side in this, and we all think Putin's bad, and let's really go after him. Let's overthrow Assad. So these are things that the neocons managed to essentially convince and influence the rest of the DC foreign policy community to believe. ..."
"... So the first one is that how right after 9/11, several of these neocons, I think it's Don and Fred Kagan, went on TV and radio kind of immediately after for at least a 24-hour 48-hour period after 9/11 and basically blamed Palestinians for the attack, and were basically outright calling for the U.S. to attack Palestine. And even saying that they had no evidence but we should just go and attack them. So could you talk about what happened there, and what was the effect there? Everyone kind of forgets about this but what happened there, and what do you think the effect of that was? ..."
"... Because, and this is important to know, that Don Kagan is one of the only three authors credited as writing Rebuilding America's Defenses, the infamous paper that PNAC released that says we need a new Pearl Harbor, a catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor. ..."
"... Don Kagan is someone who just, mostly an obscure figure in this, but I'd like to believe that if he was saying that on the radio within 24 hours of 9/11, that it was something being heavily discussed within that community behind the scenes. And h e and his son Fred Kagan are two of the most intellectual, influential neoconservatives in DC. Fred Kagan is behind the Iraq surge, he is also behind the Afghanistan s urge for Obama, directly working under David Petraeus. So these are not just like random neocons. It's important to stress that they are some of the most influential neocon brain-trust type people in DC even though they're so relatively obscure They're not household names. ..."
"... The news media played footage of Palestinians allegedly celebrating the attacks in the middle of a national emergency at 12 p.m. while thousands of people were still missing during the World Trade Center attacks. So this is the kind of stuff that U.S. media was doing. ..."
"... And then also something else interesting Don Kagan brings up in the recording, and maybe you were going to mention this next, but I'll just say it because it's so weird, as he says what would have happened, and keep in mind this is 9/12-01, one day after 9/11. He says, what would have happened if the terrorists had Anthrax on that plane? ..."
Robert Kagan. William Kristol. Paul Wolfowitz. Richard Perle. John Bolton. Elliott Abrams.
Gary Schmitt. These are a few of the names generally associated with a strain of far-right
political thought called neoconservatism. [1][2]
Politically, the neocons favour a world in which the United States adopts a much more
aggressive military posture, and utilizes its military might to not only contain terrorist and
related threats to its security, but force regime change in regions like the Middle East. They
further take on the task of 'nation-building' all in the name of creating a safer world for
'democracy.' It was the neocons who promoted the stratagem of pre-emptive military action.
[3]
The neocons enjoyed a robust period of influence under the Bush-Cheney administration. The
9/11 attacks and the triggering of a 'war on terrorism' enabled a series of foreign policy
choices, most notably the War on Afghanistan and the War on Iraq, which aligned with the aims
and aspirations of the group once referred to by President George Bush Sr. as the 'crazies in
the basement.'[4]
The neocons did not vanish with the departure of the Bush Republicans from office, and
the rise of Obama . Indeed, the clout of this group and their grip on power is arguably as
strong as ever. Not only did they continue to shape the U.S. foreign policy establishment, but
they have managed to alter what constitutes acceptable public and media discourse within the
world's remaining superpower. The trajectory of neocon influence in Washington is explored in
depth in the documentary series, A Very
Heavy Agenda, by independent journalist and film-maker Robbie Martin.
In part one of a special two part interview by Global Research News Hour guest contributor
Scott Price , Martin describes the inspiration behind making the film, the post 9/11 atmosphere
in which the neocons flourished, and the neocons' role in fostering the new Cold War mentality
which contributed to the smearing of his better-known sister, former RT host Abby Martin .
This feature is followed by an interview with writer, ecological campaigner, and Deep
State researcher Mark Robinowitz . Originally recorded and
aired in January 2018, Robinowitz helps delineate the factions of power shaping the outcome
of the 2016 presidential election, as well as the players within the National Security State,
including the neocons, that appear to be manipulating him and his presidency, possibly
maneuvering him towards an impeachment within the next year.
Robbie Martin is a journalist, musician and documentary film-maker. He is co-host with
his sister Abby Martin of Media
Roots Radio. A Very Heavy Agenda can be streamed or purchased here . Soundtrack for Film and music for these series from
Fluorescent Grey (Robbie
Martin).
Mark Robinowitz is a writer, political activist, ecological campaigner and permaculture
practitioner and publisher of oilempire.us
as well as jfkmoon.org . He is based in
Eugene, Oregon.
Transcript – Interview with Robbie Martin, July 2018
... ... ...
And of course, right after the Sochi Olympics, is when the Euromaidan protest in Ukraine,
it kind of boiled over to the point where there were, you know, walls of flaming tires all over
Euromaidan – basically a war zone. And of course the Ukrainian government fell due to a
coup which many believe, including myself, was partially U.S. sponsored by the U.S. State Department.
And then things from there, Scott, just started to spiral out of contro , and from the period between 2014 to 2018, it
was like an exponentially rising climate of propaganda against Russia coming from the U.S. media, and when I made my film series, I didn't I made it before
the election, s o I didn't realize how hysterical it was going to get after the election, and
frankly, I had no idea it was going to get this bad, to the point that it's got now.
I know that doesn't quite answer your question about my inspiration, but it 's kind of a
long answer to your question is my film itself is essentially.. was tracking the neocon
influence and how the neoconservatives from the Bush era that pushed the Iraq war, that
constructed the blueprints to the Iraq war, how they also were the earliest pioneers pushing
this Russiagate Cold War 2.0 mentality.
And how it only took, you know, certain nudges and pushes and policy papers , and here we
are. They essentially got their way, and Russia has never been more demonized since the fall
of communism and the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union. So that's I don't know if that was too
long of an answer for your question , but that's what was sort of my inspiration for how I made
it. My sister was also kind of a part of the story because some of these neocons actually tried
to smear her while she was working for RT.
... ... ...
RM: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think at first, I was really fascinated by the
psychology of these key neoconservatives. I was watching, at first I didn't even know I was
going to make a film. I was kind of in this weird place mentally, my sister had just been put
through the wringer, she had over 200 basically hit piece stories written about her within the
span of a week, and I was just in this kind of depressed place checking in with her making sure
she was doing okay, and not basically getting too stressed out from all this media pressure and
this barrage of negative stories. So I was just watching these videos basically from the neocon
think-tank that I believe was behind the smear campaign against her.
So I was watching videos from this think tank, they were called the
Foreign Policy Initiative, and I quickly learned maybe over 48 hour period, oh, the
Foreign Policy Initiative
is actually a re-branded, reopened version of the Project for The New American Century think
tank, which was the most infamous neocon think tank that was behind the Iraq War. Once I
realized that, then I just then I was obsessed with watching these videos. I watched probably
every single video on their YouTube channel, and the majority of them were incredibly boring,
very dry. And I was already in a depressed place, so, you know, it was kind of just putting me
into this weird state where I was watching nothing but these dry foreign policy think tank
videos for weeks on end.
Finally I got to Robert Kagan. And I was listening to him, and it struck me differently from
the way that most other neoconservatives would talk, because I perceived him as being more
candid about the way American foreign policy has actually conducted itself, and also more
clever with the way that I perceived him as, re-branding, repackaging neocon rhetoric for the
Obama era. Once I saw this, I became fascinated with his psychology. And I was already sort of
fascinated with Bill Kristol's psychology, you know , going back to when I was a young man when
I would watch Fox News you know during the Iraq War, I would watch Bill Kristol, and I found
him fascinating back then because he seemed on a different level than most other, you know, war
hawks that would go on Fox News.
But it was really Robert Kagan though that made me think, you know, his own words are so
fascinating and so candid and so revealing without adding any editorial content that I wonder
if this will work, if I present it just simply in his own words.
... ... ...
But I think one way to describe why they're so important and they're still so influential is
because they managed to, a very small handful of them, maybe less than a dozen figures, managed
to convince the rest of, what people describe as the DC blob, the sort of foreign policy
consensus in DC overall, the neocons managed to rebrand themselves, massage their rhetoric, and
make themselves seem less crazy in order to influence the larger DC foreign policy community
into basically accepting and going along with almost all their foreign policy platforms, with
the exception of overtly wanting to invade Iran which arguably that is the neocon prize but
see, a lot of these smarter neocons like Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, and a lot of these
neocons who managed to convince the blob, they have hidden, and not been open about the fact
that they want to overthrow the regime of Iran.
That's one of their foreign policy platforms they've sort of brushed under the rug, because
that's one of The reason I'm giving that example is because that's how they have managed to
cross the aisle, so to speak, in DC and put a hand out to the neoliberal think tanks and say,
hey we're kind of on the same side in this, and we all think Putin's bad, and let's really go
after him. Let's overthrow Assad. So these are things that the neocons managed to essentially
convince and influence the rest of the DC foreign policy community to believe.
So yes, it's true that there are not that many actual literal neocons, but a lot of people
now who are sort of anti-war, do work in anti-war or do foreign policy critique, they don't see
much of a difference any more between sort of the neoliberal foreign policy group in DC, which
is most of it, and the actual neocons anymore. Because they have essentially merged in a
non-partisan fashion, and it's been very surreal to watch, especially after the 2016 election
when you actually saw neocons saying well you should vote for Hillary. For the first time ever
they all said that you shouldn't vote for a R epublican.
That's so I don't know that fully answers your question, but I think to su m it up it's
because the neocons have influenced everybody. So now that they've been able to do that you
don't really need that many of them around you know making that much trouble because everybody
is carrying out their agenda essentially. In this DC foreign policy think-tank.
GR: Yeah I think the way you kind of describe it in maybe it's I don't know if you
personally describe it, but I wrote it down in my notes about how neoconservatism is almost
like a species and it kind of evolved over the last 20 years in a way? So I think what you're
talking about how there's a shift to Hillary, and, but I mean that shift is more that the
neoconservative line really became the mainstream line, whereas, you know, maybe in the early
2000s, like, there was a larger perception, yes, they were in the White House, but these people
are also crazy, whereas now is kind of like the mainstream, which is quite scary. Which is
something I think we'll talk about in a little bit. But kind of what I was talking about a bit
before what I referenced was that I was a teenager when 9/11 happened, and it really shaped my
generation and the world that I'm living in now
But as I was watching the 3-part documentary, there were several things that I was like kind
of blown away by how these things kind of just went down the memory hole, and I want to talk
about those things because several of these things I vaguely kind of remember now but for some
odd reason I had totally forgotten about them, and they're not really within the wider
narrative of 9/11 and the war on terror.
So the first one is that how right after 9/11, several of these neocons, I think it's Don
and Fred Kagan, went on TV and radio kind of immediately after for at least a 24-hour 48-hour
period after 9/11 and basically blamed Palestinians for the attack, and were basically outright
calling for the U.S. to attack Palestine. And even saying that they had no evidence but we
should just go and attack them. So could you talk about what happened there, and what was the
effect there? Everyone kind of forgets about this but what happened there, and what do you
think the effect of that was?
RM: You just opened up a really big can of worms with that question. Well, to fully answer
that it would require a totally separate interview, but I'll do my best to answer it in this
short time that we have. What you're describing is, what I would say, is the neocons flipping
up and revealing too much of an early iteration of their script, than the rest of the consensus
was ready to reveal or get on board with. And perhaps, even, they jumped ahead with something
that the rest of the neocons already decided, we can't go there. Because, and this is important
to know, that Don Kagan is one of the only three authors credited as writing Rebuilding
America's Defenses, the infamous paper that PNAC released that says we need a new Pearl Harbor,
a catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.
Don Kagan is someone who just, mostly an obscure figure in this, but I'd like to believe
that if he was saying that on the radio within 24 hours of 9/11, that it was something being
heavily discussed within that community behind the scenes. And h e and his son Fred Kagan are
two of the most intellectual, influential neoconservatives in DC. Fred Kagan is behind the Iraq
surge, he is also behind the Afghanistan s urge for Obama, directly working under David
Petraeus. So these are not just like random neocons. It's important to stress that they are
some of the most influential neocon brain-trust type people in DC even though they're so
relatively obscure They're not household names.
So to hear both of them saying that we need to clean out Palestine with the U.S. Delta Force
raids and the full panoply of U.S. military tools and arsenal, it's a very shocking thing to
hear. Even though I've long believed that neocons are some of the most evil people on the
planet, that was even surprising for me to hear. That they went ahead and openly said that the
U.S. military should do that, and actually, in their broadcast they make it clear that they
don't even care who's behind 9/11. Which is strange. They say that if we run around tracing the
actual perpetrators, we're just going to be wasting our time and we won't get anywhere. So what
they are saying is that we should just go attack all these countries anyways because even if
they're behind it or not, they hate us and want to kill us.
And Palestine was one of their primary targets to retaliate against in response to 9/11. Now
that's very strange when you look at the day of 9/11, and I've actually done a podcast on this,
I call it the Palestinian Frame-up, on 9/11, there were four separate incidences that were run
throughout U.S. media throughout the day of 9/11 that were attempting to blame Palestinians for
the attacks before Bin Laden became the primary culprit that the U.S. media latched on to. So I
find that very strange.
And I'm not going to try to explain it here during this interview, but you can look into
that. It's all documented. The news media played footage of Palestinians allegedly celebrating
the attacks in the middle of a national emergency at 12 p.m. while thousands of people were
still missing during the World Trade Center attacks. So this is the kind of stuff that U.S.
media was doing.
So it's very interesting for me to see neocons actually piggy-backing on that and saying we
should attack Palestine. And that's a rare thing, I think, to find neocons slipping up that
badly. And I guess I find that clip particularly fascinating because it's really one of the
only ones like that out there, and to my knowledge, I'm the first one to find it by combing
through all these archives. I've never heard of it before, never even heard of any neocon s
saying that before on record.
And then also something else interesting Don Kagan brings up in the recording, and maybe you
were going to mention this next, but I'll just say it because it's so weird, as he says what
would have happened, and keep in mind this is 9/12-01, one day after 9/11. He says, what would
have happened if the terrorists had Anthrax on that plane?
GR: Right. Yeah.
RM: And on October 5, weaponized anthrax was sent through the U.S. mail. While the Bush
Administration was already inoculated with Cipro. the antibiotic taken to prevent Anthrax
infection. So there's a lot of interesting and very scary questions that are raised just by
that single clip. and I'm to this day it's still a mystery to me.
GR: That was Part 1 of the Global Research News Hour special with Robbie Martin on his
documentary series, A Very Heavy Agenda that explores the rise and continued influence of the
neoconservatives. Part 2 will air next week where we will explore the anthrax attacks, the role
of Vice in spreading U.S. propaganda. You can buy or stream A Very Heavy Agenda at
averyheavyagenda.com. Music for this special provided by Fluorescent Grey, AKA Robbie Martin.
For the Global Research News Hour, I'm Scott Price.
-end of transcript-
Global Research News Hour Summer 2018 Series Part 5
"... BUT, the deeper problem, IMO, isn't just that Boot get so many issues wrong, it is that he is given such a massive platform for propagating his wrong views. Notably: the platform Fred Hiatt has given him at WaPo . That's the real issue, that his opinions are given such undeserved prominence. ..."
"... Deep State my a**, this is the Kosher Konspiracy! And notice how many of those names have found a prominent place on the WaPo Op-Ed page, and other prominent media venues, shaping and driving American opinion. ..."
"... Why can Boot claim a win? Because he sneered at Cohen and called him a "Russia apologist", and Cohen, while visibly irritated, could only say his credentials for understanding Russia and the history of the first Cold War. ..."
"... Cohen needed to respond IN KIND to Boot's disrespect. Because paradoxically, that is how you get "respect" on the street - you respond in kind and to a greater degree when attacked. ..."
BUT, the deeper problem, IMO, isn't just that Boot get so many issues wrong,
it is that he is given such a massive platform for propagating his wrong views.
Notably:
the platform Fred Hiatt has given him at WaPo .
That's the real issue, that his opinions are given such undeserved prominence.
As to Fred Hiatt's network, some insight is given by the acknowledgements in Robert
Kagan's book Dangerous Nation , where Kagan writes:
I [Robert Kagan] have also been lucky to enjoy the comradeship and wise counsel of dear
friends
Fred Hiatt, Bill Kristol, Leon Wieseltier, Reuel Gerecht, Ed Lazarus, and Joe Rose ...
Deep State my a**, this is the Kosher Konspiracy!
And notice how many of those names have found a prominent place on the WaPo Op-Ed
page, and other prominent media venues, shaping and driving American opinion.
So this has been popping up on my screen for the last week, so I finally decided to watch it.
Cohen, of course, was the voice of reason. Boot is an idiot and a disrespectful one at
that. All true.
The problem is that the bulk of the population is going to go with Boot. That is, the bulk
of the population that give a damn about Russia or foreign policy, which as the recent poll
testifies is a mighty small group.
However, that group includes most of the Democrats. So Boot is going to walk away claiming
a win and Anderson Cooper is never going to claim otherwise, either, because he is on Boot's
side.
Why can Boot claim a win? Because he sneered at Cohen and called him a "Russia apologist",
and Cohen, while visibly irritated, could only say his credentials for understanding Russia
and the history of the first Cold War.
In a debate, that isn't enough. WE think Cohen "schooled" Boot. The Democrats won't. And
the undecided's won't either.
Cohen needed to respond IN KIND to Boot's disrespect. Because paradoxically, that is how
you get "respect" on the street - you respond in kind and to a greater degree when
attacked.
Now how you do that can vary. You can either be a sneering scumbag like Boot, or you can
be a cold assassin that simply blows him away with calm, but vicious ridicule.
I'm reminded of a joke video I saw a while back. Check it out.
"Ex-FBI agent: Trump got elected, thanks to Russia" [ Yahoo
News ]. • One thing to remember about RussiaRussiaRussia -- R 3 ? -- is
that it's very profitable to be a talking head.
"DOJ Announces Public Release of the Cyber-Digital Task Force's First Report; Impact on
and Role of the Private Sector Likely to be a Focus in the Coming Months" [
Compliance and Enforcement ]. "[Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein] lauded
'self-policing' efforts to remove 'fake accounts' and encouraged companies to 'consider the
voluntary removal of accounts and content' that are linked by the FBI to foreign agents'
activities, which he said 'violate terms of service and deceive customers.'" • What
could go wrong?
"Anti-semitism" is merely the enforcement wing of Zionism.
Anywhere Zionists uses injustice,
pointing that out becomes anti-Semitic.
The Zionists, unlike the dullard goyim, understand the power of the moral force, despite the
fact they work fully against it's dictates.
"... I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media. ..."
I posted this one to my facebook page three or four days ago. It's brilliant. I have a few comments. First, I disagree with the
analysis given by the fellow from the Duran in the introduction, something along the lines of "even Anderson Cooper was smirking
because Cohen was demolishing Boot so badly".
If you pay attention to the questions and statements, you find that Cooper is equally as unhinged as Boot is, first hammering
on the point that nobody knows what was discussed in the meeting, then after Cohen rattles off a list, Cooper shifts to the "you're
believing Vladimir Putin on this" tactic, a nail that Cohen wisely smashes with a hammering statement, "I don't want to shock
you, but I believe Vladimir Putin on several things."
Cooper continues to insist that the content of the meeting is unknown and unconfirmed, regardless of what Putin and Trump say.
The sheer hubris of journalists today is unprecedented and outrageous.
I do admit that Cooper shuts up after being schooled by Cohen a second and third time and after Boot makes the mistake of calling
Cohen an apologist for Putin and Russia. This leads me to a second point.
I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists,
especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news"
and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media.
\This would accomplish two important things, both necessary, in my opinion. First, it would put the front line journalists
into their correct place, telling them that they are really nothing but mouthpieces, and we know that the real decisions on content
are not made by them.
What a blow to their narcisstic self-esteem that would be!
Second, it would give the American people more information on how their consent is engineered, how the media has owners
who have an agenda, and that agenda is not related to improving the lives of the American people, or even keeping them informed
with accurate information.
That it was Russia that saved the world from fascism. Japan surrendered because Stalin
finally entered the war against Japan like the day after Hiroshima and invaded Manchuria. The
US had nothing to do with it.
It is nonsense. But that is the standard narrative here. Thank you for the clarification.
Based on their research, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Professor of History at the University of
California at Santa Barbara, and Terry Charman, a Senior Historian at London Imperial War
Museum, concur:
"
"The Soviet entry into the war played a much greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing
Japan to surrender because it dashed any hope that Japan could terminate the war through
Moscow's mediation," Hasegawa, a Russian-speaking American scholar, said in an interview.
Despite the death toll from the atomic bombings -- 140,000 in Hiroshima, 80,000 in Nagasaki
the Imperial Military Command believed it could hold out against an Allied invasion if it
retained control of Manchuria and Korea, which provided Japan with the resources for war,
according to Hasegawa and Terry Charman
"The Soviet attack changed all that," Charman said. "The leadership in Tokyo realized they
had no hope now, and in that sense August Storm did have a greater effect on the Japanese
decision to surrender than the dropping of the A-bombs."
"
"... "We could not prevent the slaughter of the Serbs by the Croatians, including elderly people and children " – UNPROFOR French Lieutenant-General Jean Cot ..."
"... " The decision to launch Operation Storm is not controversial; what is controversial, however, is 'the successful effort' of some Croatian officials headed by President Franjo Tudjman to 'exploit the circumstances' and implement the plan to drive Serbs out of Krajina ." -- ICTY prosecutor Alain Tieger ..."
"... Just remember that at that time, US government offered $5 million reward for the capture of war criminal Ante Gotovina, making him the ICTY most wanted man. He was at that time sheltered by Croatian government, and through the notorious Vatican' "Rat Channels", that were used at the end of WWII to facilitate the escape of Nazis, he was hidden (among the other Croatian war criminals) in a Catholic monastery, to be smuggled to Tenerife, where he was eventually captured by the Spanish police, in 2005. ..."
"... " It is important that these [Serb] civilians start moving and then the army will follow them, and when the columns start moving, they will have a psychological effect on each other. That means we provide them with an exit, while on the other hand we feign (pretend) to guarantee civilian human rights and the like " -- ..."
"... Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, during War Council meeting in July 1995 ..."
"... "American concern is that if General Gotovina is arrested he may carry out a threat to disclose previously unknown extent of US covert involvement in the Krajina offensive " ..."
23 Years Ago the US Backed a Brutal Croatian Ethnic Cleansing of SerbsMiodrag Novakovic (
FBReporter ) Sat, Aug
4, 2018 | 4,303
445 If there was a
nation that could safely conclude from its own historical experience that "Crime Pays", than it
must be the newest EU member, Croatia. In the modern history this tiny Catholic nation
committed one of the most horrific genocides in WWII over Serbian Orthodox Christian population
residing in Croatia and Bosnia, murdering at least one million people; and recently in 1995,
Croatia conducted (under US supervision) the biggest and permanent ethnic cleansing "military
operation" against its (again) Serbian population, expelling over 200,000 of them in just three
days (the real number of ethnically cleansed Serbs from Croatia during the wars in 90ies, is at
least twice larger)- unofficially becoming the most ethnic cleanse European state.
If you believe, that Croats "en masse", would be ashamed of such reputation, then you are
dead wrong. Actually most of them are very proud, and for the last 23 years they are
celebrating it very loudly, and doing everything in their power to prevent (after being
pressured by the international community) the return of hundreds of thousands of Serbs to their
ancient land, and to avoid returning of their stolen property, mostly (real estates, farm
lands, etc.).
"We could not prevent the slaughter of the Serbs by the Croatians, including elderly
people and children " – UNPROFOR French Lieutenant-General Jean Cot
Elderly Krajina' resident murdered in his home by Croatian soldiers. His guilt- He was a
Serb
WHEN WESTERN "DEMOCRACIES" ORCHESTRATE ETHNIC CLEANSINGS
Of course, if would be unreasonable, for this evident and well documented war crimes, and
crimes against humanity, to blame only Croats. If their hands are soaked in the blood, of
innocent Serbian civilians, up to their arms, then the hands of their Western sponsors
(namely USA and Germany) are soaked in the blood at least up to their elbows. Simply Croats
would never get away with "such perfect crime", if they were not backed, in every possible
way, by their American and German sponsors.
This week will mark 22 years, since on August 4th 1995, Croatia lunched so called
military-police operation, named Storm, against Serb' held and controlled Krajina region.
Croats backed by US military-logistic & air support, CIA intelligence drone
reconnaissance, and open political support from Washington, completed their "operation" in
just three days. On August 7th they declared "victory".
Their "victory resulted": in a complete ethnic cleansing of Krajina region, and a murder
of at least 2,000 Serbs; vast majority of them were defenseless civilians. Official sources
claim that: 1,192 Serbian civilians were killed or missing, and around 200,000 thousands
(entire Krajina population) were expelled from their ancient land. Their property was
destroyed, looted and stolen, by the Croatian "soldiers" (who performed this "operation"
under direct Washington' supervision, while UNPROFOR peacekeepers assigned for the protection
of UN designated "Krajina Safe Zone" just stood by, doing almost nothing to prevent the
slaughter).
Croatian "soldiers" in "liberated Krajina"
IMPERATIVE WAS TO ESTABLISH US MILITARY
PRESENCE IN YUGOSLAVIA
To understand this US complicity, and its direct military involvement, in such horrendous
atrocity against one ethnic group, in one, of many, civil wars, which erupted, when former
Socialist Yugoslavia "fell apart", again with covert or overt Western support, we have to
look here at the wider picture-
When the Clinton' government, together with their major European allies, decided in 90ies,
that the best American interest in the Balkans will be to back armed rebellion of the
separatist administrative regions in Western Yugoslavia, and openly support the breakup of,
internationally recognized, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, while it was still the UN member,
they consciously opened the Pandora box.
They openly sided politically & militarily with Slovenian and Croatian Catholics from
the Western Yugoslavian Republics, and with Islamic fundamentalists from Bosnia, in their
civil and religious wars against Orthodox Christian Serbs living outside, then administrative
Republic of Serbia (and later in 1999, US & NATO started another illegal war against
Serbia, on behalf of Islamic Albanian separatists from Kosovo, ultimately "stealing" this
Southern Serbian province).
Croatian and Bosnian Serbs, who simply wanted to remain in their Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, and not to be "taken away" by Catholic and Islamic separatists, and not to be
stripped of their constitutional rights, under existing Yugoslavian laws, naturally rebelled
against such illegal and violent Yugoslavian outcome, and they subsequently declared own
autonomy within the Yugoslavian separatist' regions.
And then all hell broke loose
The historical roots of such American approach, could be found in the Western (mainly
British and American) support of "Anti-Stalin" communist leader of post-WWII Yugoslavia
Marshal Josip Broz Tito (who was Croat himself), who provided Western leaders with assurances
that he will, not only keep Yugoslavia outside the Soviet bloc, but he would align militarily
his country with NATO alliance as well; and later in Reagan' presidential directive NSDD133,
from 1984, which outlined US strategic interest to expand its military presence to
Yugoslavia.
Croatian and US military leadership celebrating "joint operation"- the biggest ethnic
cleansing in Europe since WWII
THEY ARE KILLING "LITTLE RUSSIANS" TOO, AREN'T THEY
?
The "only" obstacle to this US (read NATO) expansionist policy in the former Yugoslavia,
was Serbian (majority) population, which was, due to its traditional friendship with Russia,
considered as "problematic" and had to be decimated, "broken into pieces", and Republic of
Serbia to be disabled as an independent state, during so called "spontaneous" civil wars in
90s.
I am not trying here to state that in the Western society exist some unexplained hatred
against Serbs (in same time, there is a lots of prejudice, and media & Hollywood bias,
picturing Serbs primarily as "bad guys"), actually I believe that people and their
politicians in the West could not care less about Serbs (Serbians), and most of them have no
clue where to find Serbia on the geographic map. But in same time, as we can observe these
days in the West, particularly in United States, there is a lot of unfounded and unreasonable
hatred for the Russians
And if we are familiar with the popular saying among Western diplomats, that "Serbs are
Little Russians", then is not difficult to put two and two together, and understand their
desire to "disable" any Russian-friendly nation in the region.
As long as you are a Serb, regardless of your age, for Croats and their US sponsors, you
are a "fair game"
CROATIAN WAR CRIMES AGAINST SERBS WERE SO EVIDENT, AND ON SUCH LARGE
SCALE, THAT WESTERN CONTROLLED ICTY HAD NO CHOICE, BUT TO SENTENCE CROATIAN LEADERSHIP
Western controlled ICTY (International Crime Tribunal for Yugoslavia) reluctantly brought
charges for war crimes and ethnic cleansing, against (war time) ultra-nationalistic Croatian
leadership and group of its generals. But in the wake of overwhelming evidence and
international outcry, they had little choice.
In 2001 ICTY brought charges for war crimes against Croatian president general Franjo
Tudjman (who will be remembered for publically saying "that he was very proud that his wife
was neither Jew or Serb"), Croatian defence minister Gojko Susak (prior to war- open Neo-Nazi
ideologist), and two other former (renegade) Yugoslav Army generals, (promoted into supreme
commanders of Croatian army) Janko Bobetko and Zvonimir Cermenko. Their indictment was
actually travesty of justice, because at the time they were charged, all of them (with
exception of General Janko Bobetko), were already dead (by natural cause). General Bobetko
died one year after indictment, before he could be delivered to ICTY.
" The decision to launch Operation Storm is not controversial; what is
controversial, however, is 'the successful effort' of some Croatian officials headed by
President Franjo Tudjman to 'exploit the circumstances' and implement the plan to drive
Serbs out of Krajina ." -- ICTY prosecutor Alain Tieger
When the indictment of Croatian generals Ante Gotovina, Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac, for
their war crimes and ethnic cleansing of Croatian Serbs in Krajina, during "operation" Storm
in 1995, was announced in 2008- Serbs who survived US sponsored pogrom and ethnic cleansing,
were naively hoping that at last some justice will be served.
Even, with such unprecedented obstruction of ICTY by Croatian government, Catholic Church
and wider Croatian society, who concealed and destroyed many war documents, facilitated
escape and concealment of indicted Croatian war criminals, and intimidated not only victims
and witnesses, but ICTY leadership as well- the trial of those three Croatian generals came
to conclusion in 2011, and after the overwhelming evidence (the evidence, Croats were not
able to conceal or destroy), Gotovina was sentenced to 24 years, Markac to 18 years, while
Cermak was acquitted.
Serbian victims hoped that at the end at least some justice was served- but they were
wrong again. There is a Serbian saying: "A crow doesn't pick out another crow's eyes."-
In 2012, ICTY appeal chamber overturned the decision of lower chamber, and unconditionally
acquitted Croatian war criminals Gotovina and Markac for all crimes. Entire Croatia and its
diaspora erupted in joy and massive celebration.
Their historical experience that Crime Pays have been proven yet again
Serbian children getting starved to death and slaughtered by knife in a first-ever death
camp for children and infants established by Croats in Jastrebarsko, Sisak, Stara
Gradiska, Independent State of Croatia in WW2
Even, after the ICTY had proved (from the audio and written transcript of Croatian war
leadership meeting in July 1995) – that there was very credible evidence of existence
of a joint criminal enterprise, with intent to forcibly remove ethnic Serbs from Croatia, and
that civilian areas in Krajina, including the subsequent civilian refugee columns, were
indiscriminately shelled by Croatian artillery, and bombed & machine gunned by Croatian
air-force – that did not prevent the real ICTY masters to pervert the course of
justice.
One would wander who and what was behind such obvious and embarrassing justice travesty,
demonstrated in this example. What had forced American controllers of ICTY to change their
mind, and influence the tribunal to free of any charges, these obvious and heavy documented,
war criminals?
Just remember that at that time, US government offered $5 million reward for the
capture of war criminal Ante Gotovina, making him the ICTY most wanted man. He was at that
time sheltered by Croatian government, and through the notorious Vatican' "Rat Channels",
that were used at the end of WWII to facilitate the escape of Nazis, he was hidden (among
the other Croatian war criminals) in a Catholic monastery, to be smuggled to Tenerife,
where he was eventually captured by the Spanish police, in 2005.
Serbian civilians fleeing US/CRO joint operation "Storm" were bombed, machine-gunned, and
ran by Croatian tanks, mercilessly- thousands of innocent people just
perished
INTERNATIONAL "POST-MORTEM" RESPONSE
It is worth to mention accusations and reactions, to such perversion of justice by ICTY,
from some highest international bodies and public persons, at that time-
US Security Council, on August 10th 1995 issued "post-mortem" (when ethnic cleansing of
Serbs was already completed) resolution #1009, demanding from Croatia to halt military
operation, and condemning targeting of UN peacekeepers (during the operation Storm, Croats
had killed three UN soldiers) – but UNSC failed to request a withdrawal of the Croatian
forces, and de-facto accepted new "ethnically cleanse" reality!?
The only UN official, who was fully aware of the horrific aspect of this US sponsored
"operation", and who was trying to prevent further Croatian atrocities against Serbian
population, was, at that time, the Head of UN mission in Yugoslavia, Thorvald Stoltenberg,
who urged UN Secretary Yasushi Akashi to request NATO strikes against Croatian army, to
prevent further atrocities against civilians.
Of course, that never happened, especially if we know that Croatian operation Storm, was
directly supervised by the retired US generals (via Pentagon military contractor MPRI), while
US Air Force conducted air raids against Serbian Air Defense systems in Krajina, and CIA
officers operated surveillance drones, which provided intelligence for advancing Croatian
troops, from two Croatian bases in Adriatic.
Even, EU negotiator Carl Bildt, and US ambassador in Croatia Peter Galbraith, publically
condemned Croatian atrocities in Krajina- but they too stayed short of requesting some
concrete and punitive measures.
" It is important that these [Serb] civilians start moving and then the army will
follow them, and when the columns start moving, they will have a psychological effect on
each other. That means we provide them with an exit, while on the other hand we feign
(pretend) to guarantee civilian human rights and the like " --Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, during War Council meeting in July 1995
The only ones from UN troops who tried to prevent Croatian atrocities, and in couple
occasions fought bravely against bloody-thirsty Croatian soldiers, where Canadian
peacekeepers from "Patricia Company", but they too, where upon return to Canada, silenced and
their experience never got real media traction. Their testimony simply did not fit with the
Western agenda, that Serbs are the only bad guys
THE REAL ATROCIOUS OUTCOME OF THE
BIGGEST ETHNIC CLEANSING IN POST-WWII EUROPE IS MUCH HIGHER, THEN THE OFFICIAL FIGURES
STATE
While ICTY prosecutors accepted the fact that some 200,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed
in just couple of days from Krajina region, they "lowered" the number of murdered Serbian
civilians to 324. Serbian sources on the ground documented 1,192 dead or missing civilians,
while Croatian Helsinki Committee documented 677 killed.
Human Rights Watch documented at least 5,000 Serbian homes razed to the ground by Croatian
forces, and HRW accused Croats for summary executions of elderly and disabled Serbs, who
stayed behind due to inability or unwillingness to leave their homes. We can only imagine if
the entire defenseless Serbian civilian population stayed behind, and faced bloody-thirsty
Croatian soldiers- in that case we would be talking here about a full scale genocide, not
"just" the ethnic cleansing!?
To better understand what kind of "Croatian justice" were facing defenseless Serbian
civilians, who decided not to leave their homes during operation Storm, here is one excerpt
from Wikipedia, describing one of many of Croatian "post-Storm" atrocities against innocent
civilians-
"The Varivode massacre was a mass killing that occurred on 28 September 1995 in the
village of Varivode , Croatia during the Croatian War of Independence . According to United
Nations officials, soldiers of the Croatian Army (HV) and Croatian police killed nine
Croatian Serb villagers, all of whom were between the ages of 60 and 85. [4] After
the war, six former Croatian soldiers were tried for committing crimes in the village, but
were all eventually released due to lack of evidence On the night of 28 September 1995,
Croatian soldiers entered the village of Varivode and killed nine elderly Serb villagers.
The civilians that were killed were Jovan Berić, Marko Berić, Milka Berić,
Radivoje Berić, Marija Berić, Dušan Dukić, Jovo Berić,
Špiro Berić and Mirko Pokrajac. After the executions occurred, the bodies were
buried in a cemetery near the village without the knowledge of the families of the victims.
[4] After the
massacre, Croatian authorities denied reports of widespread atrocities targeting Serbs and
said that they were propaganda. Later, the government blamed the atrocities on
uncontrollable elements within the Croatian Army and Croatian police. [25]
Christiane Amanpour 's report from October 1995 said that the "United Nations believes 12
Serb civilians were massacred." [25] In the
first one hundred days following Operation Storm, at least 150 Serb civilians were
summarily executed, and many hundreds disappeared as part of a widespread campaign of
revenge against Croatia's Serb minority. [26] The bodies of the
killed Serbs were never exhumed, autopsies were never performed and much of the evidence
that could have been used against the perpetrators of the crime was discarded. [27]
Despite this, six Croatian soldiers were tried for committing crimes in the village. The
soldiers were Ivan Jakovljević, Peri Perković, Neđeljko Mijić, Zlatko
Ladović, Ivica Petrić and Nikola Rašić. However, in 2002 they were
all released due to the lack of evidence against them. [27] In
July 2012, the Supreme Court of Croatia ruled that the Republic of Croatia was responsible
for the deaths of the nine Serb villagers who were killed in Varivode. The Supreme Court
declared, "two months after the conclusion of Operation Storm, an act of terrorism was
committed against the Serb inhabitants of Varivode for the purpose of causing fear,
hopelessness and to spread feelings of personal insecurity among the citizens." [35] –
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varivode_massacre
By 2012, Croatian government received 6,390 reports about committed war crimes against
Serbian civilians, during and after operation Storm, but did little or nothing to bring the
perpetrators to justice.
To make things worse and more humiliating for surviving Krajina Serbs, Croatian government
is still refusing to return (or reimburse) 140,000 Serbian homes, stolen from ethnic Serbs.
795 Serbs, presumed dead, are still missing, 1,604 bodies were retrieved- according to NGO
"Veritas".
Croats were attacking Krajina using the strategy of "Scorched Earth", with unconditional
US support
DID THE CROATS SUCCESSFULLY BLACKMAIL U.S. GOVERNMENT INTO SUBMISSION,
FORCING THEM TO OVERTURN THE INITIAL ICTY RULING!?
Defense ministers celebrating the joint outcome of the biggest ethnic cleansing in Europe
since WWII- Left: US William Perry, Right: CRO Gojkos Susak
The initial ICTY ruling in 2011, which sentenced Croatian generals Gotovina and Markac to
long term imprisonment, was expected, and very well supported by the "conclusive evidence".
Even, according to many international experts, this sentencing was not enough tough, and did
not cover the full scale of war crimes and atrocities, committed by Croatian political and
military leadership, during and in the aftermath of operation Storm. Still, many Serbian
victims were satisfied that they finally achieved at least some justice
So, when in November 2012 ICTY appeal chamber ruled that Croatian generals are innocent of
all charges and free to go, the news came to many as a complete shock, and reaffirmed them in
a belief that ICTY tribunal is just another NATO war tool, in their efforts to punish and
humiliate, not only the Serbian government, but the numerous Serbian victims of civil wars in
90ies, whose executors were never (and probably never will be) brought to justice.
The ruling was very controversial, not only because it ignored all the hard evidence,
including the forensics and the testimony of the international observers, but because the
formal excuse for the liberating judgment was – that in the prosecutor documents were
missing the Croatian artillery log books, that according to the Appeal chamber, were the only
document that would prove the Croatian intent to drive Serbian population from Krajina. The
same books were previously repeatedly requested by the ICTY prosecutors, and Croatia did not
even deny its existence, but simply refused to cooperate with ICTY and hand them over.
Finally, when in 2008 Croatia was warned by European leaders that non-cooperation with ICTY
might affect the prospect of its EU membership – somebody from the Croatian leadership
simply destroyed these books, and they informed Hague tribunal that Artillery logs no longer
exist. Even such provocative and blunt obstruction of the international justice by the
Croatian government, did not result in any repercussions for them, and practically they were
forgiven for their deeds. Crime pays – doesn't it?
Anyway, ICTY tribunal had plenty of other evidence, proving the intentional destruction of
Serbian civilian infrastructure was very well documented by the international observers, and
in April 2011 ICTY had no choice but to sentence general Gotovina to 24 years, and general
Markac to 18 years.
Another fact that indicates that Appeal chamber' ruling was the political one, and result
of some external interference was its split decision – the chamber ruled by the
majority decision 3 – 2, implying that there were serious doubts and disagreements, by
at least two of the Appeal chamber judges.
"American concern is that if General Gotovina is arrested he may carry out a threat
to disclose previously unknown extent of US covert involvement in the Krajina offensive
"– London Times, June 14th, 2003.
Gotovina was arrested, but only shortly, until Croatian blackmail convinced their US
masters, to pull strings in ICTY, and free him unconditionally
CROATIAN OFFICIALS
PROVIDED A PLENTY OF EVIDENCE THAT U.S. GOVERNMENT WAS INVOLVED IN "STORM" MILITARILY, AND
HAD A FULL CONTROL OVER WAR (CRIMES) ACTIVITIES THAT TOOK PLACE ON THE GROUND
As soon the ICTY indictments against Croatian leaders were announced in 2001, the Croatian
government, NGOs, public, and very well organized and connected diaspora, displayed anger and
disagreement, promising that they will do everything in their power to obstruct ICTY
investigations and prevent trials against their "national heroes". When in 2011, the first
instance judgment by ICTY was issued and Croatian generals were sentenced to long term
imprisonment, the Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor and President Ivo Josipovic publicly
expressed their shock and rejection of the ruling, promising to help to overturn the
judgment, on appeal!?
And they started their campaign – of obstruction of justice, of abetting the accused
war criminals, of the intimidation, and finally, of the blackmail, of ICTY and US officials
–
On July 4th, 2002, NGO associated with Croatian government "Croatian World Congress-
CWC" filed complaint with ICTY citing what proofs, about US direct involvement in ethnic
cleansing of Krajina, they have:
" US officials aided General Gotovina and the Croatian army in operation Storm by
violating UN arms embargo and allowing Croatia to obtain weapons US officials established a
CIA base inside General Gotovina' military base, which provided the US officials with
real-time video footage of events transpiring on the ground during Operation Storm (and
thus imputing to them knowledge of events on the ground ), but also from which they could
provide such intelligence data to General Gotovina to assist him in conducting Operation
Storm . If General Gotovina carried out pre-planed campaign to deport 150,000 to 200,000
Croatian Serbian civilians, the CIA base was not only used to provide knowledge to US
officials of such plan and course of conduct on the part of General Gotovina , but was also
used to assist General Gotovina in achieving the goals of his alleged plan . The US
official gave the green light for the Operation and provided diplomatic and political
support for it . The US officials at all times had the ability to halt the military
operations . Accordingly, the US officials named in the complaint should be indicted for
having aided and abetted General Gotovina. "
Ethnic cleansing in Krajina was the joint US/CRO criminal enterprise History will be the
judge
If you read carefully through this CWC statement (threat), they are not even trying to
deny Gotovina' war crimes, they are just implying bluntly, that if their lovely General was
sentenced, they would gladly provide ICTY with the evidence of Croatian-American "Joint
criminal enterprise to forcibly remove the Serb population from Croatia ", as it states the
ICTY indictment from 2001, of course omitting the US participation (which was the very secret
deal, at least until Croatian officials started "mouthing" their "American friends").
Croatian complaint to ICTY specifically named the highest US officials, alleging that
they, along General Gotovina, committed too war crimes against Serbian population:
"On behalf of the Croatian World Congress, a non-governmental organization that is a
member of the United Nations with advisory status, you are hereby notified pursuant to
Article 18(1) of the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia of the existence of information concerning serious violations of international
humanitarian law (hereinafter "IHL"), namely that officials of the United States of
America, including but not limited to William Jefferson Clinton , Anthony Lake , Samuel
Berger , Richard Holbrooke , Peter Galbraith and/or George J. Tenet (hereinafter
collectively referred to as "U.S. officials"), aided and abetted Croatian General Ante
Gotovina , who was indicted by your office on 8 June 2001."
War Criminals at work together- Croatian general Kresimir Cosic and US supreme commander
general Wesley Clark
We are not going here to present detailed evidence of US crimes, committed during the
operation Storm. Of course, the Croatian war crimes on the ground were very brutal,
systematic and savage, they did "the physical work", but from the evidence provided by
numerous Croatian officials and their organizations, it is very obvious, that operation Storm
would never happen, or if happened never would be successful, without US military support and
direct supervision, or without US approval.
Just to give you "a taste" what kind of American support Croats were enjoying during their
atrocious operation against innocent Serbian civilians, will present you with some documented
facts:
The Green Light for the operation came a couple days prior the assault- President Clinton
passed the order directly to US military attaché in Zagreb Colonel Richard Herrick;
Herrick passed order to Croatian head of military intelligence Markica Rebic (the others
involved directly were defense minister Gojko Susak, Miro Tudjman and Miro Medimurac, heads
of Secret Service and Intelligence Service). US masters were so pleased with Rebic' service,
that they rewarded him with Meritorious Service Medal, delivered to him by Ambassador
Galbraith in 1996. The other people from USG involved in this joint criminal enterprise with
Croats, in addition to Clinton, were Anthony Lake and William Perry. US masters imposed the
time limit on operation Storm- it had to be completed in 5 days.
Long before the Storm, in 1992 USG with Croatian approval established CIA reconnaissance
base on island of Brac, from where CIA operators were flying unmanned aircraft spying on
Serbian positions in Krajina, Bosnia and part of Serbia itself. USG requested that this
cooperation to be held a top secret, so outsiders don't find that US is taking sides in the
Balkans' civil wars. But it did not stay for too long the top secret. On January 1st, 1994,
Croatian state security apprehended a spy on the base perimeter. They delivered him right
away to General Gotovina, to find out it was their German ally, precisely it was German
military attaché Hans Schwan.
This incident alerted USG, which wanted to conceal any covert activities on behalf of CG,
so they promptly removed CIA base to new secret location, in Sepurina, near city of Zadar.
This new location was covered by three security layers, to ensure the full secrecy. From new
base CIA started immediately collecting photographic and video evidence of Serbian activities
in Krajina and Bosnia, and passing them to Croats, and to Pentagon. There was 24 hours, 6
member intelligence crew, present on site- consisting of three CIA and three Croatian
military officers.
Croatian military base Sepurine, near Zadar, from which CIA operated drones, aiding
operation Storm, and providing live video feed of "military activities" on the ground to
Pentagon
"STORM" WASN'T THE FIRST ETHNIC CLEANSING, UNDERTAKEN BY
CROATIA AND US, AS A JOINT CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE:
It is interesting that disgruntled (by ICTY indictment) Croatian Officials and Croatian
World Congress body, in their complaint to ICTY, are providing the evidence about USG
intelligence and logistical support for another Croatian genocidal operation, named Flash,
that took place in Western Slavonia, between May 1st and 3rd, 1995, which resulted in
another complete ethnic cleansing of Serbian population- prior to the operation this area
was populated by 29,000 Serbs, after Flash, only 1,500 remained.
The number of killed civilians is unknown because Croats prevented UNPROFOR troops from
accessing the area, until they did "the sanitation" (read: removing the evidence of their
crimes, because entire Serbian refugee columns were massacred and overran by Croatian
tanks). Estimates of killed civilians rage between one hundred to couple thousands. Another
example of "the successful US-CRO joint criminal enterprise"?
The interesting details, revealed here by Croatian sources, is- that US military
attaché Herrick was attached to the Croatian mobile military command, during the
genocidal operation Flash, supervising it directly- and the head of CIA branch in Zagreb
Marc Kelton was directly coordinating expulsion of Slavonia' Serbs, with Croatian president
Tudjman son Miro.
In the eve of the attack on Krajina, on August 4th 1995, between midnight and 4 a.m.
Croatian forces were ordered to turn off all telecommunication devices, to unable US air
force to electronically disable all Serbian communications.
The outcome of Joint US/CRO "justice"
According to NATO spokesman Jim Mitchell in Aviano, Italy, two US military planes EA-6B
Prowlers were dispatched to Krajina air space. USAF planes, on the top of jamming Serbian
telecommunications, destroyed the airport Udbine, and Radar and Serbian Air Defense near
Knin, in order to prevent any Serbian air support or defence, against invading Croatian
forces.
Here, US military attaché Herrick was replaced by the Colonel John Sadler, who was
embedded with Gotovina command unit, directly supervising operation Storm. Pentagon was also
directly monitoring the operation via live video feed.
Shortly after the biggest joint (US/CRO) ethnic cleansing in Europe was completed, US head
of DIA General Colonel Patrick Hughes visited Croatia to coordinate further military actions
against Serbs in Bosnia and if necessary in Republic of Serbia
Hitler, it has been reported, in 'Secret History of the Twentieth Century' by
Herbert Dorsey, commended the USA for having 'gunned down the millions of Redskins to
a few hundred thousand.' This way of 'winning the West' type-casts American as
imperialist and certainly sympathetic with much we associated with fascism. America
lead the world in race-based lawmaking to safeguard the historically white character
of the country. Including immigration legislation to guarantee the predominance of
northern Europe and shut the doors on Jews, Italians, Asians and others. Nazi
commentators called this keeping out the 'undesirables.' The eugenics movement took
root in the United States in the early 1900's.
This article concerns the largest ethnic cleansing in Balkans that was committed
by Croatia with US operational support. The US committed multiple war crimes in the
Balkans in the 1990's.
After the 1990's the US has clearly emerged the fascist rogue state of the 21st
century.
Last week, US State Department officials met with Taliban leaders in
Qatar. At the request of the Taliban, the US-backed Afghan government was not invited. The
officials discussed ceasefires and an end to the war. Meanwhile, the US inspector general
charged with monitoring US spending on Afghanistan reconstruction has reported that since
2008, the US has completely wasted at the least $15.5 billion. He believes that's just the
tip of the iceberg, though. Will President Trump do the smart thing and negotiate peace and
leave? Tune in to today's Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Why, then, would a coalition of leftish and right-wing patriots not join in
denouncing a leader who seemed to put Russia's interests ahead of those of his own country?
Sorry to say, things are not so simple. Look a bit more closely at what holds the anti-Trump
foreign policy coalition together, and you will discover a missing reality that virtually no
one will acknowledge directly: the existence of a beleaguered but still potent American Empire
whose junior partner is Europe. What motivates a broad range of the President's opponents,
then, is not so much the fear that he is anti-American as the suspicion that he is
anti-Empire.
Of course, neither liberals nor conservatives dare to utter the "E-word." Rather, they argue
in virtually identical terms that Trump's foreign and trade policies are threatening the
pillars of world order: NATO, the Group of Seven, the World Trade Organization, the
International Monetary Fund, the OSCE, and so forth. These institutions, they claim, along with
American military power and a willingness to use it when necessary, are primarily responsible
for the peaceful, prosperous, free, and democratic world that we have all been privileged to
inhabit since the Axis powers surrendered to the victorious Allies in 1945.
The fear expressed plainly by The New York Times 's David Leonhardt, a
self-described "left-liberal," is that "Trump wants to destroy the Atlantic Alliance." Seven
months earlier, this same fear motivated the arch-conservative National Review to
editorialize that, "Under Trump, America has retreated from its global and moral leadership
roles, alienated its democratic allies, and abandoned the bipartisan defense of liberal ideals
that led to more than 70 years of security and prosperity." All the critics would agree with
Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of the Munich Security Conference, who recently stated, "Let's face
it. Mr. Trump's core beliefs conflict with the foundations of Western grand strategy since the
mid-1940's."
"Western grand strategy," of course, is a euphemism for U.S. global hegemony – world
domination, to put it plainly. In addition to peace and prosperity (mainly for privileged
groups in privileged nations), this is the same strategy which since 1945 has given the world
the Cold War, the specter of a nuclear holocaust, and proxy wars consuming between 10 and 20
million lives in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya,
and Yemen. Its direct effects include the overthrow of elected governments in Guatemala, Iran,
Lebanon, Congo, Nigeria, Indonesia, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Granada, Ukraine, et al.;
the bribery of public officials and impoverishment and injury of workers and farmers world-wide
as a result of exploitation and predatory "development" by Western governments and
mega-corporations; the destruction of natural environments and exacerbation of global climate
change by these same governments and corporations; and the increasing likelihood of new
imperialist wars caused by the determination of elites to maintain America's global supremacy
at all costs.
It is interesting that most defenders of the Western Alliance (and its Pacific equivalent:
the more loosely organized anti-Chinese alliance of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand,
and South Korea) virtually never talk about American hegemony or the gigantic military
apparatus (with more than 800 U.S. bases in 60 or so nations and a military-industrial complex
worth trillions) that supports it. Nor is the subject of empire high on Mr. Trump's list of
approved twitter topics, even when he desecrates NATO and other sacred cows of the Alliance.
There are several reasons for this silence, but the most important, perhaps, is the need to
maintain the pretense of American moral superiority: the so-called "exceptionalist" position
that inspires McCain to attack Trump for "false equivalency" (the President's statement in
Helsinki that both Russia and the U.S. have made mistakes), and that leads pundits left and
right to argue that America is not an old-style empire seeking to dominate, but a new-style
democracy seeking to liberate.
The narrative you will hear repeated ad nauseum at both ends of the liberal/conservative
spectrum tells how the Yanks, who won WW II with a little help from the Russians and other
allies, and who then thoroughly dominated the world both economically and militarily,
could have behaved like vengeful conquerors, but instead devoted their resources and
energies to spreading democracy, freedom, and the blessings of capitalism around the world. Gag
me with a Tomahawk cruise missile! What is weird about this narrative is that it "disappears"
not only the millions of victims of America's wars but the very military forces that
nationalists like Trump claim deserve to be worshipfully honored. Eight hundred bases? A
million and a half troops on active duty? Total air and sea domination? I'm shocked . . .
shocked!
In fact, there are two sorts of blindness operative in the current U.S. political
environment. The Democratic Party Establishment, now swollen to include a wide variety of
Russia-haters, globalizing capitalists, and militarists, is blind (or pretends to be) to the
connection between the "Western Alliance" and the American Empire. The Trump Party (which I
expect, one of these days, to shed the outworn Republican label in favor of something more
Berlusconi-like, say, the American Greatness Party) is blind – or pretends to be –
to the contradiction between its professed
"Fortress America" nationalism and the reality of a global U.S. imperium.
This last point is worth emphasizing. In a recent article in The Nation , Michael
Klare, a writer I generally admire, claims to have discovered that there is really a method to
Trump's foreign policy madness, i.e., the President favors the sort of "multi-polar" world,
with Russia and China occupying the two other poles, that Putin and Xi Jinping have long
advocated. Two factors make this article odd as well as interesting. First, the author argues
that multi-polarity is a bad idea, because "smaller, weaker states, and minority peoples
everywhere will be given even shorter shrift than at present when caught in any competitive
jousting for influence among the three main competitors (and their proxies)." Wha? Even shorter
shrift than under unipolarity? I think not, especially considering that adding new poles (why
just three, BTW? What about India and Brazil?) gives smaller states and minority peoples many
more bargaining options in the power game.
More important, however, Trump's multi-polar/nationalist ideals are clearly contradicted by
his determination to make American world domination even more overwhelming by vastly increasing
the size of the U.S. military establishment. Klare notes, correctly, that the President has
denounced the Iraq War, criticized American "overextension" abroad, talked about ending the
Afghan War, and declared that the U.S. should not be "the world's policeman." But if he wants
America to become a mere Great Power in a world of Great Powers, Trump will clearly have to do
more than talk about it. He will have to cut the military budget, abandon military bases,
negotiate arms control agreements, convert military-industrial spending to peaceful uses, and
do all sorts of other things he clearly has no intention of doing. Ever.
No – if the Western Alliance, democratic values, and WTO trade rules provide
ideological cover and junior partners for American global hegemony, "go-it-alone" nationalism,
multi-polarity, and Nobel Peace Prize diplomatic efforts provide ideological cover for . . .
American global hegemony! This can be seen most clearly in the case of Iran, against whom Trump
has virtually declared war. He would like to avoid direct military involvement there, of
course, but he is banking on threats of irresistible "fire and fury" to bring the Iranians to
heel. And if these threats are unavailing? Then – count on it! – the Empire will
act like an empire, and we will have open war.
In fact, Trump and his most vociferous critics and supporters are unknowingly playing the
same game. John Brennan, meet Steve Bannon! You preach very different sermons, but you're
working for the same god. That deity's name changes over the centuries, but we worship him
every time we venerate symbols of military might at sports events, pay taxes to support U.S.
military supremacy, or pledge allegiance to a flag. The name unutterable by both Trump and his
enemies is Empire.
What do we do with the knowledge that both the Tweeter King and the treason-baiting
coalition opposing him are imperialists under the skin? Two positions, I think, have to be
rejected. One is the Lyndon Johnson rationale: since Johnson was progressive on domestic
issues, including civil rights and poverty, that made him preferable to the Republicans, even
though he gave us the quasi-genocidal war in Indochina. The other position is the diametric
opposite: since Trump is less blatantly imperialistic than most Democratic Party leaders, we
ought to favor him, despite his billionaire-loving, immigrant-hating, racist and misogynist
domestic policies. Merely to say this is to refute it.
My own view is that anti-imperialists ought to decline to choose between these alternatives.
We ought to name the imperial god that both Trump and his critics worship and demand
that the party that we work and vote for renounce the pursuit of U.S. global hegemony.
Immediately, this means letting self-proclaimed progressives or libertarians in both major
parties know that avoiding new hot and cold wars, eliminating nuclear weapons and other WMD,
slashing military spending, and converting war production to peaceful uses are top priorities
that must be honored if they are to get our support. No political party can deliver peace and
social justice and maintain the Empire at the same time. If neither Republicans nor Democrats
are capable of facing this reality, we will have to create a new party that can.
Notes.
[1]
The author is University Professor of Conflict Resolution and Public Affairs at George Mason
University. His most recent book is Resolving Structural Conflicts : How Violent
Systems Can Be Transformed (2017).
"... As widely loathed as the Democratic establishment is, it has been remarkably adept at engineering a reactionary response in favor of establishment forces. Its demonization of Russia! has been approximately as effective at fomenting reactionary nationalism as Mr. Trump's racialized version. Lest this be overlooked, the strategy common to both is the use of oppositional logic through demonization of carefully selected 'others.' ..."
"... What preceded Donald Trump was the Great Recession, the most severe capitalist crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Recession followed approximately three decades of neoliberal de-industrialization, of policies intended to reduce the power of organized labor, reduce working class wages and raise economic insecurity under the antique capitalist theory that destitution motivates workers to produce more for less in return. ..."
"... The illusion / delusion that these problems -- lost livelihoods, homes, social roles, relationships, sense of purpose and basic human dignity -- were solved, or even addressed, by national Democrats, illustrates the class divide at work. The economy that was revived made the rich fabulously rich, the professional / managerial class comfortable and left the other 90% in various stages of economic decline. ..."
"... Asserting this isn't to embrace economic nationalism, support policies until they are clearly stated or trust Mr. Trump's motives. But the move ties analytically to his critique of neoliberal economic policies. As such, it is a potential monkey wrench thrown into the neoliberal world order. ..."
"... Democrats could have confronted the failures of neoliberalism without resorting to economic nationalism (as Mr. Trump did). And they could have confronted unhinged militarism without Mr. Trump's racialized nationalism. But this would have meant confronting their own history. And it would have meant publicly declaring themselves against the interests of their donor base. ..."
"... Mr. Trump's use of racialized nationalism is the primary basis of analyses arguing that he is fascist. Left unaddressed is the fact the the corporate-state form that is the basis of neoliberalism was also the basis of European fascism. Recent Left analysis proceeds from the premise that Trump control of the corporate-state form is fascism, while capitalist class control -- neoliberalism, is something else. ..."
"... Lest this not have occurred, FDR's New Deal was state capitalism approach within the framework of the corporatism (merge of corporations and a state) social formation. The only widely known effort to stage a fascist coup in the U.S. was carried out by Wall Street titans in the 1930s to wrest control from FDR before the New Deal was fully implemented. Put differently, the people who caused the Great Depression wanted to control its aftermath. And they were fascists. ..."
"... As political scientist Thomas Ferguson has been arguing for decades and Gilens and Page have recently chimed in, neither elections nor the public interest hold sway in the corridors of American power. The levers of control are structural -- congressional committee appointments go to the people with lots of money. Capitalist distribution controls the politics. ..."
"... The best-case scenario looking forward is that Donald Trump is successful with rapprochement toward North Korea and Russia and that he throws a monkey wrench into the architecture of neoliberalism so that a new path forward can be built when he's gone. If he pulls it off, this isn't reactionary nationalism and it isn't nothing. ..."
"... Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book ..."
The election of Donald Trump fractured the American Left. The abandonment of class analysis
in response to Mr. Trump's racialized nationalism left identity politics to fill the void. This
has facilitated the rise of neoliberal nationalism, an embrace of the national security state
combined with neoliberal economic analysis put forward as a liberal / Left response to Mr.
Trump's program. The result has been profoundly reactionary.
What had been unfocused consensus around issues of economic justice and ending militarism
has been sharpened into a political program. A nascent, self-styled socialist movement is
pushing domestic issues like single payer health care, strengthening the social safety net and
reversing wildly unbalanced income and wealth distribution, forward. Left unaddressed is how
this program will move forward without a revolutionary movement to act against countervailing
forces.
As widely loathed as the Democratic establishment is, it has been remarkably adept at
engineering a reactionary response in favor of establishment forces. Its demonization of
Russia! has been approximately as effective at fomenting reactionary nationalism as Mr. Trump's
racialized version. Lest this be overlooked, the strategy common to both is the use of
oppositional logic through demonization of carefully selected 'others.'
This points to the most potent fracture on the Left, the question of which is the more
effective reactionary force, the Democrats' neoliberal nationalism or Mr. Trump's racialized
version? As self-evident as the answer apparently is to the liberal / Left, it is only so
through abandonment of class analysis. Race, gender and immigration status are either subsets
of class or the concept loses meaning.
By way of the reform Democrat's analysis , it was the shift of
working class voters from Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016 that swung the election
in Mr. Trump's favor. To the extent that race was a factor, the finger points up the class
structure, not down. This difference is crucial when it comes to the much-abused 'white
working-class' explanation of Mr. Trump's victory.
What preceded Donald Trump was the Great Recession, the most severe capitalist crisis
since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Recession followed approximately three
decades of neoliberal de-industrialization, of policies intended to reduce the power of
organized labor, reduce working class wages and raise economic insecurity under the antique
capitalist theory that destitution motivates workers to produce more for less in
return.
The illusion / delusion that these problems -- lost livelihoods, homes, social roles,
relationships, sense of purpose and basic human dignity -- were solved, or even addressed, by
national Democrats, illustrates the class divide at work. The economy that was revived made the
rich fabulously rich, the professional / managerial class comfortable and left the other 90% in
various stages of economic decline.
Left apparently unrecognized in bourgeois attacks on working class voters is that the
analytical frames at work -- classist identity politics and liberal economics, are ruling class
ideology in the crudest Marxian / Gramscian senses. The illusion / delusion that they are
factually descriptive is a function of ideology, not lived outcomes.
Here's the rub: Mr. Trump's critique of neoliberalism can ] accommodate class analysis
whereas the Democrats' neoliberal nationalism explicitly excludes any notion of economic power,
and with it the possibility of class analysis. To date, Mr. Trump hasn't left this critique
behind -- neoliberal trade agreements are currently being renegotiated.
Asserting this isn't to embrace economic nationalism, support policies until they are
clearly stated or trust Mr. Trump's motives. But the move ties analytically to his critique of
neoliberal economic policies. As such, it is a potential monkey wrench thrown into the
neoliberal world order. Watching the bourgeois Left put forward neoliberal trade theory to
counter it would seem inexplicable without the benefit of class analysis.
Within the frame of identity politics rich and bourgeois blacks, women and immigrants have
the same travails as their poor and working-class compatriots. Ben Carson (black), Melania
Trump (female) and Melania Trump (immigrant) fit this taxonomy. For them racism, misogyny and
xenophobia are forms of social violence. But they aren't fundamental determinants of how they
live. The same can't be said for those brutalized by four decades of neoliberalism
The common bond here is a class war launched from above that has uprooted, displaced and
immiserated a large and growing proportion of the peoples of the West. This experience cuts
across race, gender and nationality making them a subset of class. If these problems are
rectified at the level of class, they will be rectified within the categories of race, gender
and nationality. Otherwise, they won't be rectified.
Democrats could have confronted the failures of neoliberalism without resorting to
economic nationalism (as Mr. Trump did). And they could have confronted unhinged militarism
without Mr. Trump's racialized nationalism. But this would have meant confronting their own
history. And it would have meant publicly declaring themselves against the interests of their
donor base.
Mr. Trump's use of racialized nationalism is the primary basis of analyses arguing that
he is fascist. Left unaddressed is the fact the the corporate-state form that is the basis of
neoliberalism was also the basis of European fascism. Recent Left analysis proceeds from the
premise that Trump control of the corporate-state form is fascism, while capitalist class
control -- neoliberalism, is something else.
Lest this not have occurred, FDR's New Deal was state capitalism approach within the
framework of the corporatism (merge of corporations and a state) social formation. The only
widely known effort to stage a fascist coup in the U.S. was carried out by Wall Street titans
in the 1930s to wrest control from FDR before the New Deal was fully implemented. Put
differently, the people who caused the Great Depression wanted to control its aftermath. And
they were fascists.
More recently, the effort to secure capitalist control has been led by [neo]liberal
Democrats using Investor-State Dispute Resolution (ISDS) clauses in trade agreements. So that
identity warriors might understand the implications, this control limits the ability of
governments to rectify race and gender bias because supranational adjudication can overrule
them.
So, is race and / or gender repression any less repressive because capitalists control the
levers? Colonial slave-masters certainly thought so. The people who own sweatshops probably
think so. Most slumlords probably think so. Employers who steal wages probably think so. The
people who own for-profit prisons probably think so. But these aren't 'real' repression, are
they? Where's the animosity?
As political scientist Thomas Ferguson
has been arguing for decades and
Gilens and Page have recently chimed in, neither elections nor the public interest hold
sway in the corridors of American power. The levers of control are structural -- congressional
committee appointments go to the people with lots of money. Capitalist distribution controls
the politics.
The liberal explanation for this is 'political culture.' The liberal solution is to change
the political culture without changing the economic relations that drive the culture. This is
also the frame of identity politics. The presence of a desperate and destitute underclass
lowers working class wages (raising profits), but ending racism is a matter of changing
minds?
This history holds an important lesson for today's nascent socialists. The domestic programs
recently put forward, as reasonable and potentially useful as they are, resemble FDR's effort
to save capitalism, not end it. The time to implement these programs was when Wall Street was
flat on its back, when it could have been more. This is the tragedy of betrayal by Barack Obama
his voters.
Despite the capitalist rhetoric at the time, the New Deal wasn't 'socialism' because it
never changed control over the means of production, over American political economy. Internal
class differences were reduced through redistribution, but brutal and ruthless imperialism
proceeded apace overseas.
The best-case scenario looking forward is that Donald Trump is successful with
rapprochement toward North Korea and Russia and that he throws a monkey wrench into the
architecture of neoliberalism so that a new path forward can be built when he's gone. If he
pulls it off, this isn't reactionary nationalism and it isn't nothing.
Otherwise, the rich have assigned the opining classes the task of defending their realm.
Step 1: divide the bourgeois into competing factions. Step 2: posit great differences between
them that are tightly circumscribed to prevent history from inconveniently intruding. Step 3:
turn these great differences into moral absolutes so that they can't be reconciled within the
terms given. Step 4: pose a rigged electoral process as the only pathway to political
resolution. Step 5: collect profits and repeat. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Rob Urie
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His bookZen Economicsis
published by CounterPunch Books.
"... The Neocons hate Trump, but they also own him. The best example of this kind of "ownership" is the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem which was an incredibly stupid act, but one which the Israel Lobby demanded. The same goes for the US reneging on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or, for that matter, the current stream of threats against Iran. ..."
"... Trump's tactic is chutzpah, doing anything he wants and saying screw you ..."
"... Europe is so weak it can barely force through a gas pipeline against Washington's displeasure. ..."
The Neocons hate Trump, but they also own him. The best example of this kind of
"ownership" is the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem which was an incredibly stupid
act, but one which the Israel Lobby demanded. The same goes for the US reneging on the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action or, for that matter, the current stream of threats against
Iran.
It appears that the Neocons have a basic strategy which goes like this: " we hate Trump
and everything he represents, but we also control him; let's use him to do all the crazy stuff
no sane US President would ever do, and then let's use the fallout of these crazy decisions and
blame it all on Trump; this way we get all that we want and we get to destroy Trump in the
process only to replace him with one of "our guys" when the time is right ". Again, the
real goal of an attack on Iran would be to bomb Iran back into a pre-revolutionary era and to
punish the Iranian people for supporting the "wrong" regime thus daring to defy the
AngloZionist Empire. The Neocons could use Trump as a "disposable President" who could be
blamed for the ensuing chaos and political disaster while accomplishing one of the most
important political objectives of Israel: laying waste to Iran. For the Neocons, this is a
win-win situation: if things go well (however unlikely that is), they can take all the credit
and still control Trump like a puppet, and if things don't go well, Iran is in ruins, Trump is
blamed for a stupid and crazy war, and the Clinton gang will be poised to come back to
power.
The biggest loser in such a scenario would, of course, be the people of Iran. But the US
military will not fare well either. For one thing, a plan to just "lay waste" to Iran has no
viable exit strategy, especially not a short-term one, while the US military has no stomach for
long conflicts (Afghanistan and Iraq are bad enough). Furthermore, once the US destroys most of
what can be destroyed the initiative will be in the Iranians' hands and time will be on their
side. In 2006 the Israelis had to fold after 33 days only, how much time will the US need
before having to declare victory and leave?
If the war spreads to, say, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria, then will the US even have the
option to just leave? What about the Israelis – what options will they have once missiles
start hitting them (not only Iranian missiles but probably also Hezbollah missiles from
Lebanon!)?
Former Mossad head Meir Dagan was fully correct when he stated that a military attack on Iran was
"the stupidest thing I have ever heard" . Alas, the Neocons have never been too bright, and
stupid stuff is what they mostly do. All we can hope for is that somebody in the US will find a
way to stop them and avert another immoral, bloody, useless and potentially very dangerous
war.
If there is one thing we have learned over the last few decades it is that there is nothing
too stupid, ignorant, arrogant, demented or evil for the US to do.
Just a few months ago Iran was quite willingly and certifiably honouring the terms of the
nuclear deal, now they are quite possibly going to be subjected to a completely unprovoked
attack, with or without some (probably fabricated) Casus belli.
Where is the UN in this? What use is the UN if it can't prevent this ghastly scenario? It
seems doubtful that the Europeans will do anything, they have been craven enough to go along
with the US on the Russia "threat" despite them having a military budget nearly four times
larger than that of the RF and a population about three times bigger (The Europeans have even
for all intents and purposes sanctioned themselves at the behest of the US) Do we seriously
believe that Russia and China are going to sit idly by while Iran is being bombed and its oil
bearing regions invaded? Potentially nuclear armed missiles flying around near the southern
border of Russia anyone?
If anyone has seen the 1984 nuclear war drama "Threads" they will be noticing an eerie
similarity.
It's too bad youtube took down the whole movie, with the Iranian invasion and newscast
sequences at the beginning. Maybe vimeo or dailymotion has it up
from another thread, same subject:
All said US lost ~9K aircraft in the Vietnam war, to hostile action and a further 500 in
accidents, approximately 58 000 KIA.
Yes , i understand Vietnam is not Iran (Iran is not a rice paddy), but the US is not the same
either, now it is a "professional" defense force, whose Navy rams defenseless civilian ships
(or cant perform at all) , whose Air force planes keep falling from the sky and whose Army are
best moving down civilians.
Of course Iran would loose such a war, no doubt, but can the US sustain the losses, can public
opinion ? Say 15 000 bodybags ? 25 000 ? 50 000?
I doubt the US can even put 100 000 soldiers on the ground, combat soldiers, that is, not
3′rd echelon cooks and chauffeurs, very few armies can. Iran has got at least 5 000 000
trained people with ammo and a AK 47 or RPG eager to put a dent in the US. (China has between
15 – 40 Million they can draw from).
Forget it, the Iranians can simply "trample" the US to death, at least until the US runs out
of body bags.
And consider if the US starts a war, we don't have to trade with it anymore, its under
sanction, goodbye "Rare metals" (China), goodbye computer chips (China) goodbye everything,
because the US cant produce anything (No factories) and has few resources left, hehe.
Sanction the American people to a dose of "concentration camp", 900 calories a day, candle
light, and horse drawn transportion! The Morgentau plan is fulfilled ! I will bathe in
Champagne, wash my cojones in Budweiser when that happens. And Israel ? What Israel ? You mean
Palestine ? ahhhh I will feed a bagel to the ducks!
And no, i don't think it will be necessary to learn either Russian or Chinese, I think we might
get along well enough.
There is an awful lot of wishful thinking in this. Trump's tactic is chutzpah, doing
anything he wants and saying screw you if you can't take a joke. Europe is so weak it
can barely force through a gas pipeline against Washington's displeasure.
Neither China nor Russia is likeliy to go to war for Iran, and who else is there? If Iran
did manage to block the Straits for more than a short time, do we think the Judaeo-Trumpians
would say sorry and back off? Even if Trump used nukes, what could the world do? Be outraged,
and learn not to cross the Empire. And diesel electrics have to surface.
Neither China nor Russia is likeliy to go to war for Iran, and who else is there?
There is a larger structure called Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Xi since 2016 was
calling on accepting Iran into it, with Iran having currently an Observer status. For Russia it
will be enough (which was done before already) to place some of its VKS units on Iranian
airfields, especially under auspices of SCO military practices and even bombing will become a
huge issue. Russia is not going to allow any hostile power to have direct access to Caspian
Sea. Again, WHAT war? Combined Arms invasion–that will be the end of the US as we know
it. Bombing? Let's wait an see. In fact, it is not up to Russia, it is up to Iran do decide how
to proceed–Iran has options. Will she exercise them?
Even if Trump used nukes, what could the world do? Be outraged, and learn not to cross
the Empire . And diesel electrics have to surface.
Ahh, what? Is the world "crossing" the Empire now? Russia is, but then again she can erase
the Empire from the map. This mental construct is so "out there" that it is even difficult to
respond properly to it. I omit here, of course, a gigantic political fallout for US which will
make it a de facto a pariah in case it decides to use nukes. In fact, I can predict with a good
degree of probability what is going to happen. For starters–dedollarization will go into
overdrive.
If Iran did manage to block the Straits for more than a short time, do we think the
Judaeo-Trumpians would say sorry and back off
The only thing with which I may agree here. In fact, if one of the US Navy carriers (God
forbids), somehow gets damaged, let alone sunk, one may expect an escalation to a nuclear
threshold since US is inherently nuclear weapons-biased since can not take any serious
conventional losses, especially in terms of a naval assets. But I agree, that with about 2-3
air-wings in a vicinity of Hormuz Strait, plus the wing of ASW aviation on call–neither
Iranian submarine forces, nor, especially those proverbial "speed boats" will be much of a
strategic challenge.
All we can hope for is that somebody in the US will find a way to stop them and avert
another immoral, bloody, useless and potentially very dangerous war.
We all know how to stop them. But nobody wants to say it out loud. Certainly not me.
1) The oil and gas infrastructure of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, etc. are all
fixed targets, relatively easy to destroy by missiles. Iran would likely destroy all regional
oil and gas infrastructure, if their's is damaged.
2) Also, Iran has a nuclear reactor right on the shores of the Persian Gulf? If that is
blown up, or even fails because staff or electricity are not available, then the Persian Gulf,
and maybe Turkey and Israel, would be hit by heavy radioactive fallout, like at Chernobyl or
Fukushima.
3) Finally, Iran has many skilled and able electronics and programming young people. Iran
was able to take control of, and land undamaged, America's most advanced surveillance drone. It
is likely that a war on Iran would unleash cyberwar and cause damage to electrical,
communication, and finance systems in the USA, in ways and places that we have not
imagined.
Napoleon was certain to defeat Russia. Hitler was certain to defeat Russia. The US was
certain to defeat North Korea and certain to defeat Vietnam. But the outcomes of wars are not
certain. Which it is why rational people do not like war.
"... "My film itself is essentially was tracking the neocon influence and how the neoconservatives from the Bush era that pushed the Iraq war, that constructed the blueprints for the Iraq war, how they also were the earliest pioneers pushing this Russiagate Cold War 2.0 mentality." ..."
"... – Robbie Martin, from this week's program. ..."
"My film itself is essentially was tracking the neocon influence and how the
neoconservatives from the Bush era that pushed the Iraq war, that constructed the blueprints
for the Iraq war, how they also were the earliest pioneers pushing this Russiagate Cold War 2.0
mentality."
"... "Unproven Russian involvement in Brexit – terrible! Impose more sanctions on Moscow! A £400k check from an American billionaire for an anti-Brexit campaigning group – that's no problem; it's helping our democracy!" ..."
"... "By quitting Europe, I fear that we are hastening Putin's dream of the break-up of the EU – and with it, potentially, western civilisation," ..."
"... "propaganda arms of the Russian government," ..."
"... "at the back of the queue" ..."
"... "This is not foreign interference This is not foreign interference!" ..."
"... " highly probable " ..."
"... "had conducted a thorough investigation around the Brexit referendum and found no evidence of Russian interference ." ..."
"... "Russian troll factory," ..."
"... "very low levels of engagement" ..."
"... "conspiracy theorist" ..."
"... "Just what does George Soros think he is doing pouring £400,000 into a campaign to stop Brexit. For a start he is not actually a resident of this country so it has nothing to do with him." ..."
"... "I don't know that the public understands the gravity of what the Russians were able to do and continue to do here in the United States. They've attacked us. They're trying to undermine our democracy," ..."
"... "I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money " ..."
"... "I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars," ..."
You don't have to own a brand new £999 state-of-the art Hypocrisy Detector from
Harrods, to pick up on the double standards. Just having a few functioning brain cells and
thinking for yourself will do. For months in the UK we've been bombarded with
Establishment-approved conspiracy theories – peddled in all the 'best' newspapers –
that Russia somehow 'fixed' Brexit. Getting Britain to leave the EU was all part of a cunning
plot by Vladimir Putin, aka Dr. Evil, to weaken Europe and the 'free world.'
Even West End musical composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber, who knows quite a bit about phantoms,
seemed taken in by it. "By quitting Europe, I fear that we are hastening Putin's dream of
the break-up of the EU – and with it, potentially, western civilisation," the noble
Lord
declared in July.
Never mind that we don't have a single statement from Putin or other senior Kremlin figures
saying that they actually supported Brexit. These Establishment Russia-bashers know exactly
what The Vlad is thinking.
And never mind that RT and Sputnik, which we are repeatedly told are "propaganda arms of
the Russian government," ran articles by pro- and anti-Brexit writers. The same people who
told us Iraq had WMDs in 2003 were absolutely sure it was those dastardly Russkies who had got
Britain to vote 'leave.' The irony is of course that there was significant foreign interference
in Brexit. But it didn't come from Moscow.
Or Obama actually visiting the U.K. to urge people to vote Remain. Imagine if Putin did
the same for Leave!
The US has always wanted Britain to stay in the EU. In April 2016, two months before the
Referendum, President Obama made it clear what he wanted when he visited the UK. He warned that
if Britain exited the EU it would be "at the back of the queue" for trade deals with
the US
.
Just imagine if Putin had said that. The Russophobes would have spontaneously combusted.
Then of course there was the backing the Remain camp had from the giants of US capital.
Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan donated £500,000 each to the 'Britain Stronger in Europe'
group, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley – £250,000 each.
Again, repeat after me (with robotic arm movements): "This is not foreign interference
This is not foreign interference!"
You've got to see the funny side of this: all that hysterical fake news about 'Russian
interference' in Brexit & here we have one side receiving £400K from a US
billionaire who is part of the US political establishment. Is that not 'interference' ?!!
https://t.co/URzrB3ciLd
The point is not whether we are for or against Brexit. Or whether we think George Soros is a
malign influence who only acts out of self-interest or an old sweetie-pie with the good of
humanity at heart. The point is the double standards that are causing our Hypocrisy Detectors
to explode.
Let's think back to December 2016. Then, the pro-war and fiercely anti-Russian Labour MP Ben
Bradshaw told Parliament that it was "
highly probable " that Russia had interfered with Brexit.
Fourteen months on, what have we got? On Thursday, the global head of You Tube's public
policy, Juniper Downs, said her company "had conducted a thorough investigation around the
Brexit referendum and found no evidence of Russian interference
."
Twitter meanwhile says it detected 49 (yes, 49) accounts from what it claimed to be a
"Russian troll factory," which sent all of 942 messages about Brexit – amounting
to less than 0.005% of all the tweets about the Referendum. Twitter said the accounts received
"very low levels of engagement" from users. If the Kremlin had planned to use tweets
to persuade us to vote 'leave,' they didn't really put much effort into it, did they?
Finally, Facebook said that only three "Kremlin-linked" accounts were found which spent the
grand sum of 72p (yes, 72p) on ads during the Referendum campaign. Which amounts to the greater
"interference" ? 72p or £400K? Erm tough call, isn't it?
You might have thought, given his concern with 'foreign interference' in British politics,
that Ben Bradshaw would have been urging 'Best for Britain' to return George Soros' donation.
Au contraire! His only tweets about it were retweets of two critical comments about the Daily
Telegraph, and the BBC's coverage of the story. Conclusion: Those who rail about 'Russia
meddling in Brexit' but not Soros' intervention aren't concerned about 'foreign interference'
in UK politics, only 'foreign interference' from countries they don't approve of.
Those who are quite happy peddling ludicrous conspiracy theories about Russians shout
"conspiracy theorist" (or worse) at those who report factually on proven meddling from
others. The Daily Express hit the nail on the head in their Friday editorial which said:
"Just what does George Soros think he is doing pouring £400,000 into a campaign to
stop Brexit. For a start he is not actually a resident of this country so it has nothing to do
with him."
That really is the rub of the matter. And Bradshaw and co. have no adequate response except
to shoot the messenger.
If we look at the affair with an even wider lens, the hypocrisy is even greater. The US has
been gripped by an anti-Russian frenzy not seen since the days of Senator Joe McCarthy. The
unsubstantiated claim that Russia fixed the election for Donald Trump is repeated by 'liberals'
and many neocons too, as a statement of fact. "I don't know that the public understands the
gravity of what the Russians were able to do and continue to do here in the United States.
They've attacked us. They're trying to undermine our democracy," film director Rob Reiner
said
.
But the number one country round the world for undermining democracy and interfering in the
affairs of other sovereign states is the US itself.
While Establishment journos and pundits have been foaming at the mouth over 'Russiagate' and
getting terribly excited over 'smoking guns' which turn out – surprise, surprise –
to be damp squibs, there's been less attention paid to the boasts of former Vice President Joe
Biden on how he got the allegedly 'independent' Ukrainian government to sack its prosecutor
general in a few hours. "I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the
prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money "
"I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars," Biden
said during a meeting of
the US' Council on Foreign Relations. "Well, son of a b***h. He got fired."
Again, just imagine the furore if a leading Russian government figure boasted about how he
used financial inducements to get another country's Prosecutor General to be sacked. Or if a
tape was leaked in which the Russian Ambassador and a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson
could be heard discussing who should or shouldn't be in the new 'democratic' government of
another sovereign state. But we had the US Ambassador to Ukraine and the US Assistant Secretary of
State doing exactly that in 2014 – and the 'Russia is interfering in the Free World!'
brigade were as silent as a group of Trappist monks.
It's fair to say that Orwell would have a field day with the doublespeak that's currently on
show. The cognitive dissonance is there for all to see. Repeat After Me: Unproven Russian
interference – Bad. Proven interference from other external sources – Good. What's
your problem?
"... ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). ..."
There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit."
When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though,
"Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear
that the Russians were coming.
That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989,
followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed
that it had.
At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was
triumphalist. The war was over and our side won.
Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America.
With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of
others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was
comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing
Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula).
It turned out, though, that American triumphalism was only a phase. Before long, it became
clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War
anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself.
However, in the final days of Bush 41 and then at the dawn of the Clinton era, nobody knew
that. Nobody gave America's propaganda system the credit it deserved.
Also, nobody quite realized how devastating Russia's regression to capitalism would be, and
nobody quite grasped the savagery of the kleptocrats who had taken charge of what remained of
the Russian state.
For more than a decade, the situation in that late great superpower was too dire to sustain
the old fears and animosities. Capitalism had made Russia wretched again.
That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin,
Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard
to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on.
But anti-Communism (without Communism) and its close cousin, Russophobia, could not remain
in remission forever. The need for them was too great.
In the Age of Obama, the Global War on Terror, with or without that ludicrous Bush 43-era
name, wasn't cutting it anymore. It was, and still is, good for keeping America's perpetual war
regime going and for undoing civil liberties, but there had never been much glory in it, only
endless misery for all. Also it was getting old and increasingly easy to see through.
The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded,
fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed
far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria.
This was not the only factor behind the Obama administration's "pivot towards Asia," its
largely failed attempt to take China down a notch or two, but it was an important part of the
story.
However, by the time Obama and his team decided to pivot, China had become too important to
the United States economically to make a good Cold War enemy. Worse still, it had for too long
been an object of pity and contempt, not fear.
When the Soviet Union was an enemy, China was an enemy too, most glaringly during the Korean
War. It remained an enemy even after the Sino-Soviet split became too obvious to deny. However,
unlike post-1917 Russia, it had never quite become an historical foe.
Moreover, as Russia began to recover from the Yeltsin era, the Russian political class, and
many of the oligarchs behind them, sensing the popular mood, decided that the time was ripe "to
make Russia great again." Putin is not so much a cause as he is a symptom – and symbol
– of this aspiration.
And so, there it was: the longed for new Cold War would be much like the one that seemed
over a quarter century ago.
***
As everyone who has seen, heard or read anything about the 2016 election "knows," Russian
intelligence services (= Putin) meddled. Everyone also "knows" that, with midterm elections
looming, they are at it again.
This, according to the mainstream consensus view, is a bona fide casus belli , a
justification for war. To be sure, what they want is a war that remains cold; ending life on
earth, as we know it, is not on their agenda.
But inasmuch as cold wars can easily turn hot, this hardly mitigates the recklessness of
their machinations. Humankind was extraordinarily lucky last time; there is no guarantee that
all that luck will hold.
Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is
still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional
wisdom.
Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting
the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts
in the UK and other allied nations.
Time was when anyone with any sense understood that these intelligence services, the
American ones especially, are second to none in meddling in the affairs of other nations, and
that the American national security state – essentially our political police -- is
comprised, by design, of liars and deceivers.
How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News
demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who
are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims!
Try as they might, the manufacturers and guardians of conventional wisdom have so far been
unable to concoct a plausible story in which Russian meddling affected the outcome of the 2016
election in any serious way. The idea that the Russians defeated Hillary, not Hillary herself,
is, to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Bentham, "nonsense on stilts." Leading Democrats and their
media flacks don't seem to mind that either.
They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared
to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and
gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia,
the Gulf monarchies, and Israel.
Nevertheless, it probably is true that the Russians meddled. Cold War revivalists can
therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with
which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth.
Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet
republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse
American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American
"democracy" can plausibly allege.
Moreover, it should go without saying that the democracy they purport to care so much about
has almost nothing to do with "the rule of the demos." It doesn't even have much to do with
free and fair competitive elections – unless "free and fair" means that anything goes, so
long as the principals and perpetrators are homegrown or citizens of favored nations.
Self-righteous posturing aside, Putin's real sin in the eyes of the American power elite is
that, in his own small way, he has been defying America's "right" to run the world as it sees
fit.
When Clinton was president, Serbia did that, and lived to regret it. Cuba has been suffering
for nearly six decades for the same reason, and now Venezuela is paying its dues. The empire is
merciless towards nations that rebel.
With Soviet support and then with sheer determination and grit, Cuba has been able to
withstand the onslaught to some extent from Day One. Venezuela may not be so lucky –
especially now that Republicans and Democrats feel threatened by the growing number of
"democratic socialists" in their midst. Already, the propaganda system is targeting Venezuelan
"socialism," blaming it for that country's woes, and warning that if our newly minted,
homegrown socialists prevail, a similar fate will be in store for us.
This is ludicrous, of course – American hostility and the vagaries of the global oil
market deserve the lion's share of the blame. But the on-going propaganda blitz could
nevertheless pave the way for horrors ahead, should Trump decide to start a war America could
actually win.
Inconsequential Russian meddling is a big deal on the "liberal" cable networks, on NPR, and
in the "quality" press. Democrats and a few Republicans love to bleat on about it. But it is
Ukraine that made Russia our "adversary" and its president Public Enemy Number One.
Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons,
liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State
– that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's
Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the
Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently
anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian
speaking Ukrainians in the east.
But never mind: Putin – that is, the Russia government – violated international
law by sending troops briefly into beleaguered Russian-speaking parts of the country. That they
were generally welcomed by the people living there is of no importance.
Worst of all, Russia annexed Crimea – a territory integral to the Russian empire since
the eighteenth century. Since long before the Russian Revolution, Crimea has been home to a
huge naval base vital to Russia's strategic defense.
The story line back in the day was that anything that could be described as Russian
aggression outside the Soviet Union's agreed upon sphere of influence had to do with spreading
Communism. In fact, the Soviets did everything they could to keep Communist and other
insurgencies from upending the status quo. The mainstream narrative was wrong.
Now Communism is gone and nothing has taken its place. Even so, the idea that Russia has
designs on its neighbors for ideological reasons is hard to shake – in part because it is
actively promoted by propagandists who have suddenly and uncharacteristically become defenders
of international law.
Meanwhile, of course, the hypocrisies keep piling on. It is practically a tenet of the
American civil religion that international law applies to others, not to the United States.
This is why, when it suits some perceived purpose, America flaunts its violations
shamelessly.
Thus nothing the Russians did or are ever likely to do comes close to the shenanigans Bill
Clinton displayed – successfully, for the most part – in his efforts to tear Kosovo
away from Serbia. Clinton even went so far as to bomb Belgrade; Putin never bombed Kiev.
The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic
systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist
centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one
that emerged after World War II.
However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War
revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism,
suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had
little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with
maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a
demonstrably aggressive "free world."
George W. Bush claimed that 9/11 happened because "they hate our freedom." "They" would be
radical Islamists of the kind stirred into action in Afghanistan by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his
co-thinkers in the Carter administration. Their objective was to undermine the Soviet Union by
getting it bogged down in a quagmire like the one that did so much harm to the United States in
Vietnam.
That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they"
are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America
and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that
ensued.
The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago
never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's
Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved."
However, the American public is not as naïve as it used to be, and it is impossible to
say, at this point, how well this new story line will work.
Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But
this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply
cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free.
It is hard to believe, but there are people who are actually buying this but, with a lot of
corporate media assistance, there are. No matter how clear it is that they are not worth being
taken seriously, Cold War mythologies just won't die.
However, it is worth pondering why today's Russia would do what it is alleged to have done;
and why, as is also alleged, it is still doing it.
From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward
off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at
blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails
in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and
abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies.
However, in view of prevailing power relations, these are interests it cannot do much to
advance. Acting as if this were not the case only puts Russia in a bad light -- not for
meddling, but for meddling stupidly.
No doubt, for reasons both fair and foul, Putin wanted Hillary to lose the election two
years ago. So, but for one little problem, would anyone whose head is screwed on right. That
problem's name is Donald Trump.
Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all.
Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified.
But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be
even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a
vote for catastrophe.
Putin's enemy was Trump's enemy, and it is axiomatic that "the enemy of my enemy is my
friend" -- except sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, my enemy's enemy is an enemy far worse.
For reasons that remain obscure, Putin and Trump seem to have a "thing" going on between
them. Some day perhaps we will know what that is all about. For now, though, the hard and very
relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm,
Russia.
It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as
hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been.
If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have
realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be
of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for
America and its allies but for Russia too.
Therefore, if there really was Russian meddling, as there probably was, Putin should be
ashamed – not so much for the DNC reasons laid out 24/7 on MSNBC and CNN, but for
overestimating Trump's abilities and for underestimating the extent to which what started out
as a maneuver of Hillary Clinton's, concocted to excuse her incompetence, would take a
perilously "viral" turn, becoming a major threat to peace in a political culture that never
quite got beyond the lunacy of the First Cold War. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Andrew Levine
ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and
POLITICAL KEY WORDS
(Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most
recent book is In Bad Faith: What's Wrong
With the Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College
Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and
the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
Are you serious? Marxism is a colossal ideology that was developed in every particular by
a host of academics and philosophers great and small, plus their thousands of associated
propagandists and pamphleteers. Marxist exegesis probably accounts for half the academic
writing produced over the last century and a half. Its ideas have spread into every corner of
public life -- sociology, psychology, economics, religion, government -- it's all been
thoroughly worked over by the Marxists. Wherever there is problem, there is Marxist on the
scene with a tract and a theory. As ideologies go, it has been one of the most developed and
rigorous ever to appear on Earth.
Multiculturalism is a recipe for national suicide. Culture, including religious belief, is
the unifying factor that allows strangers to work with one another, by ensuring that they
share the same assumptions about morality and about correct behavior in general.
Jews have been a problem for European societies for hundreds of years. The recent mass
migration of people of multiple races and religions to Europe and its settler outposts in the
America's and the Pacific is creating cultural chaos.
Immigrants who will not assimilate to the Christian culture of the West have no place in
the West. For Africans, Asians, Hispanics and Middle-Easterners the message must be:
assimilate or leave. The same for Jews who now, fortunately, have a place to go where they
can live by the precepts of their ancient religion, however bizarre some of those precepts
may seem to others.
That then leaves only the problem of the Palestinians. A solution can surely be found in a
deal with Egypt. The Sinai is twice the size of Palestine, yet has only a half a million
inhabitants. The US could easily organize a purchase, funded by itself, Britain, the country
primarily responsible for the dispossession of the Palestinians, the EU, Russia and some
other countries, and of course Israel, which would have to pay for the land and houses of the
departing Palestinians.
At say $10,000 per hectare, a ridiculous price for a desert sand and rocky hillsides, the
whole of Sinai could be purchased for $60 billion, a trivial amount in relation to the US
trillion-dollar defense budget. In addition, there might be a need for something like half a
trillion dollars for construction of the the cities and high-tech desert agricultural system
of the new Palestinian state. But again, that is a rather trivial amount over, say ten
years.
Only Leftists can defeat Leftists, only progressives can defeat progressives –
conserving the old cannot win. Ideas of stability, homeostasis, and the like, cannot
win.
You sure?
Don't know.
Franco, for example. Then, more recently, Nationalists winning over Communists in Eastern
Europe after the fall of The Wall. We could agree, I guess, that Nationalism is a bit older
than Communism.
And there is no organized opposition because there is no Platonic Idea around which they
can rally – while the Left has one. The Right seems to just be a headless chicken-
all body, no head.
In the West. In the East not so sure about that. Do a (mental) test: imagine that US
(military) power can't get delivered in Balkans anymore. Or Russian (military) power can't
get delivered in Donbass. Or some other places.
That's a good point about nationalism – but I think what we are seeing in places
like Russia and Poland is a resurgence of religious nationalism – pure nationalism,
without a Platonic Idea, just materialism, seems to have no long term success anywhere. I
don't think the attempt to revive it among materialist western right wingers will work. I
think they fundamentally misunderstand this.
In the context of a failed Communism, religious nationalism appears as progressive –
as an exciting step in the direction of progress towards a higher state.
Its not that old traditional ideas can't be revived – its that I think conservatives
basically misunderstand traditional ideas. In their time, traditional ideas were meant to
facilitate the self-perfection of man – not provide stability, safety, or homeostasis.
Christianity was a program for the perfection of man – not social stability.
Traditional ideas were based on a Platonic Idea – never materialism. The attempt to
revive traditional ideas on a materialist basis, because they provide stability, seems a
misunderstanding. In fact, traditional ideas provide stability because they were accepted as
part of the plan of self-perfection. That's why they secured consent – i.e became the
basis of a stable society. People accept a social organization that they believe will assist
in self-perfection, and that is the source of social stability.
As for military power projection, once local power balances alter its hard to predict what
will come to seem "progressive". And short term social expedients taken in chaotic cobditions
don't necessarily translate into long term social organization.
.traditional ideas were meant to facilitate the self-perfection of man – not
provide stability, safety, or homeostasis. Christianity was a program for the perfection of
man – not social stability.
..traditional ideas provide stability because they were accepted as part of the plan of
self-perfection.
I am not quite sure I get this.
Feels as a deep topic. Not well versed in that I am afraid.
A couple of things: the concept of "self-perfection" in, say, traditional
Catholic/Orthodox Christianity, with accepting that a man is a sinner and only though Jesus
he/she can find salvation.
Then, I can get that top thinkers of those nations maybe thought along those lines; common
folk, though, based their nationalism on simple living with people who shared the same values
in life. Sometimes even just the same customs. The sense of belonging. The perception of "us"
and "them" as the bottom line.
You want a problem to ponder about?
Here it is, then:
Why such ..animosity .. then, between Catholics and Orthodox in Balkans and Ukraine? The
same, now dormant, between Protestant and Catholics in N.I.?
I guess that your approach to nationalism is, say, what ..metaphysical?
Mine is way, way below. Just blood and soil, in that order. "Us" vs "them".
West is doomed re nationalism. Maybe. Not quite sure.
All those wars of Catholics vs Protestants ..and we are talking about people of the same
race.
Now, that "we" vs "them" is much more visible.
.short term social expedients taken in chaotic cobditions don't necessarily translate
into long term social organization.
Agree.
Again, so what? If it works during my lifetime fine (say, if I were a young man). After me,
their problem. Something like that.
That's a good point about nationalism – but I think what we are seeing in places
like Russia and Poland is a resurgence of religious nationalism – pure nationalism,
without a Platonic Idea, just materialism, seems to have no long term success anywhere. I
don't think the attempt to revive it among materialist western right wingers will work. I
think they fundamentally misunderstand this.
In the context of a failed Communism, religious nationalism appears as progressive –
as an exciting step in the direction of progress towards a higher state.
Its not that old traditional ideas can't be revived – its that I think conservatives
basically misunderstand traditional ideas. In their time, traditional ideas were meant to
facilitate the self-perfection of man – not provide stability, safety, or homeostasis.
Christianity was a program for the perfection of man – not social stability.
Traditional ideas were based on a Platonic Idea – never materialism. The attempt to
revive traditional ideas on a materialist basis, because they provide stability, seems a
misunderstanding. In fact, traditional ideas provide stability because they were accepted as
part of the plan of self-perfection. That's why they secured consent – i.e became the
basis of a stable society. People accept a social organization that they believe will assist
in self-perfection, and that is the source of social stability.
As for military power projection, once local power balances alter its hard to predict what
will come to seem "progressive". And short term social expedients taken in chaotic cobditions
don't necessarily translate into long term social organization.
says: August
1, 2018 at 11:33 pm GMT@Beefcake
the Mighty This is a highly misleading statement as Stalin did not turn against the Jewish
faction of the Party until the late 30's (the Purges are best understood as a reaction against
an essentially Jewish mafia), by which time this faction had wrought bloodthirsty terror.
Stalin was obviously no angel, but one shudders to think of the horrors that would have been
unleashed had Trotsky assumed control. You're 100 percent correct. An interesting book on this
subject is "Stalin's Enduring Legacy" by Kerry Bolton. Bolton does not excuse Stalin's
brutality, but he points out exactly what you wrote. Stalin was a thousand times preferable to
Trotsky and the other vicious Jewish Bolsheviks.
"... While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
"... So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours. ..."
"... You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was "deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated by DNC! Everybody knows... ..."
"... Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB ..."
"... Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats. ..."
It has been clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be
involved in 2018. It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the
Russian oligarchs.
However, Sanders had already committed the unforgivable
sin of criticizing the Democratic establishment candidate from the left. There is simply no way of coming back from that treason.
Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (11/12/17) asking
its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals
respond?" The message is clear: The progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the
failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.
It isn't just progressive politicians that are all traitors. Movements like Black Lives Matter are also traitors for Russia.
It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.
Hey, Bernie. The American people were the ones who should have decided who won the primary, not Hillary, the DNC and the delegates.
That you are blaming Her loss on Russia instead of admitting that the American people rejected her makes you nothing more than
a democratic puppet. How embarrassing for you.
Every Black voter should abandon the DP until they apologize for their disrespect for the BLM and saying that they only started
protesting cops killing Blacks because Russia manipulated them into doing so.
Eichenwald thinks that our intelligence agencies are patriots who have spent their lives working on keeping us safe does he?
I agree with Dmitry Orlov's take on them.
The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as
possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on
ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially
organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.
....
the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial,
economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest
single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your
own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself.
While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than
" a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. "
And let's not forget how many
coups
and false flag events they had a hand in creating that have cost so much misery and death.
One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, ŕ la 9/11, to fake false
flag operations, ŕ la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story
is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting
this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips.
It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy
theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.
The real puppets are the ones who believe in this silly story that Russia is pulling Trump's strings and that the GOP are also
Russian puppets. Good grief!
The others show that there are others out there that have seen through this propaganda crap. I'd like to see the breakdown
of Hillary supporters that believe Russia Gate and the Bernie supporters that don't. Most of the Trump supporters think it's phony
so what made Hillary's believe in something that everyone should be laughing at?
You deserve a lot of credit. Russia interfered in your favor, yet you are man enough to admit that they interfered. Thank
you Bernie!
So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you
didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours.
You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was
"deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated
by DNC! Everybody knows...
Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't
need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB
Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will
fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate
by the democrats.
The democrats (and media cohorts) have become an apocolyptic death cult. The language that comes from them is infused with
the language of conspiracies, violence, treason, aggression and demonization.
And here is the thing, Bernie to survive electorally will have to become a cult member. Effectively he will have to be pro-war
with Russia. He will be giving from the the Left supposed support for aggressive action andmilitarism toward Russia.
I fear that if a democrat becomes president in 2020 (it won't be Bernie), is elected president that in the year of the midterms
in 2022, the US will start a real war with Russia which has a highly likehood of going nuclear.
While neocons definitely agitated for invasion and were well represented in Bush Ii
government, this statement might be not true. As Greenspan said it was about oil.
Earlier this year, Representative James Moran, a Democrat, said that "if it were not for the
strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this."
In Britain, Tam Dalyell, a longstanding Labor member of Parliament, expressed a similar view.
Tony Blair, he opined, was listening too much to a "cabal" of Jews around President Bush that
included Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; an under secretary of defense, Douglas
Feith; Richard Perle, a member of the Defense Policy Board; Elliott Abrams, director of
Middle East Affairs in the White House; and the former presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer.
"Those people drive this policy," Dalyell said.
Dalyell was "worried about my country being led up the garden path on a Likudnik-Sharon
agenda" by British Jews close to Blair.
-- -- -- -- -- -
Earlier this year, Representative James Moran, a Democrat, said that "if it were not for the
strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this."
In Britain, Tam Dalyell, a longstanding Labor member of Parliament, expressed a similar view.
Tony Blair, he opined, was listening too much to a "cabal" of Jews around President Bush that
included Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; an under secretary of defense, Douglas
Feith; Richard Perle, a member of the Defense Policy Board; Elliott Abrams, director of
Middle East Affairs in the White House; and the former presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer.
"Those people drive this policy," Dalyell said.
Dalyell was "worried about my country being led up the garden path on a Likudnik-Sharon
agenda" by British Jews close to Blair.
The way , this war has played out, the way Oslo has been shredded, the way Iran deal has
been gutted, the way Blair spoke in Bush's ranch and took money form and awards from Israel,
the way attacks on Lebanon and Syria have been allowed and helped , the way Libya have been
made a failed country, the way billions have been poured on Israel, the way dissent against
war has been suppressed, the way Corbyn was attacked prove one thing – only one thing
that is the author was entirely wrong .Moran Japanense and British minister are and were
correct.
AaronB, your observations are always insightful and interesting. I wonder if you believe
in freewill at all, even in "insignificant" matters because time and sequence are all
important and such trivial events set up the really big ones in our lives.
"Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but as causally bound
as the stars in their motions." – Albert Einstein.
"... -- William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), from memory ..."
"... @thanatokephaloides ..."
"... Finally there's the meeting that Assange's lawyer set up with congress for him to testify to congress and tell them where he got the DNC emails that showed how they rigged the primary. Comey and Schaffer shot that down because it would have killed Russia Gate. Dead and buried and the country could move on. ..."
"... In this case, it is NOT a matter of opinion. It is a matter of FACT. The physical proof that we have right now tells us that the Wikileaks documents did not come from a "hack." We also have physical evidence that someone (no doubt Crowdstrike) manipulated copies of the leaked documents and embedded awkward amateurish evidence to make them look like they were taken by a "Russian" hacker. Here's how we know that: ..."
"... Assange's diplomatic trip to the US in mid-2017 to testify before Congress and prove where the documents came from was emergency-blocked by Comey and Rosenstein. As a consequence, Assange immediately released the extensive Vault 7 documents to the American people so we could forensically recognize the signature techniques that the US intelligence agencies would use to alter downloaded DNC documents and embed fake Russian "fingerprints." We have seen the physical evidence that that occurred. ..."
"... The US has no real physical evidence of a Russian hack or they would never have released the fake evidence. Yet they continue their attack to harm Russia's economy and the continue their attempts to provoke a hot war with Russia. The US motive for this has nothing to do with their fake hacking narrative; it is about crippling Russia (and China) to forestall the rapid rise of Eurasia, which is stripping the Neocons and war-profiteering corporations of their dream for the US to achieve total domination over all other nations. The Entitled Elite want their New American Century back! Their Empire was supposed to rule the world.... ..."
"... @Pluto's Republic ..."
"... While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
"... third run ..."
"... ~~Author Unknown ..."
"... ~~Martin Luther King Jr. ..."
"... @Unabashed Liberal ..."
"... @Unabashed Liberal ..."
"... ~~Martin Luther King Jr. ..."
"... Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats. ..."
Russiagate may technically be about Trump, but in fact most of the "traitors" and Putin Puppets are progressives on the left.
Russiagate officially started in 2015 long before
the DNC hack and the Democratic primaries.
Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin
Russiagate never was actually about Russia. It's the Democrats' version of Obama's birth certificate. As
Caitlin Johnstone puts it, Russiagate is 9/11 minus 9/11.
TWIT:
Kurt Eichenwald
@kurteichenwald
Bottom line: You either support the patriots in our intelligence community and law enforcement who work endlessly for our
national security, and all of the intelligence agencies of our allies, or you support Putin.
You're either a patriot, a traitor or an idiot. Choose.
10:51 AM-16 Jul 2018
In reality, Russiagate started with Ralph Nader and the
2000 election .
They said a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. You have a moral duty to vote for the Democrat and to be pragmatic. Your Naderite
purity came at the expense of the poor. Only affluent selfish white guys could afford this type of virtue signaling. In fact,
maybe some of these people were really Republicans in disguise. There were no Russian bots to blame just yet, but clearly some
liberals are unable to imagine good faith criticism of Democrats coming from the left.
The terms " virtue signaling", " purity pony", and of course "White Berniebro" weren't coined yet, but the the stereotype they
describe was formed in 2000. Gore lost and Nader and all his voters, in swing states or not, were vilified. They were worse than
Republicans. They were traitors. Of all the factors that caused Gore's loss, the only one that Democratic partisans really cared
about was Nader.
People that voted for Nader became responsible for the Iraq War, while Democrats who voted for Bush and the Iraq War got a free
pass. Liberals, besides their obvious double-standards when allocating responsibility, made the dubious claim that morality requires
being pragmatic in your voting. And then, as if to prove the basis of their claims to be false, they approach their target audience
in a non-pragmatic way.
The anger on open display is the opposite of pragmatic politics. They don't try to persuade people to vote for the Democrat. They
demand it. It is a moral litmus test, or rather, a judgement of one's very soul. Good people know they have to vote for the Democrat.
Bad people vote for Republicans and the very worst people of all claim to be left, but vote for Stein or maybe even voted for
Clinton, but criticized her. Democratic partisans have no interest in what you say about an issue if they perceive it as in any
way an attack or a criticism of a Democrat. If you are a third party advocate you can forget about being taken seriously on any
issue because you have already self identified as a Satanist and you need to be exorcised from the body politic. Even if you say
you support the Democrat as the lesser evil, you speak as one of the damned and deserve no mercy. Sanders played the game in 2016
exactly the way people said Nader should have played it and he and his supporters were still dismissed.
Like Nader before her, Stein is the absolute
worst traitor of all . Worse than Trump himself.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent. https://t.co/qkDUe6yADd
Maddow cast suspicion on Stein's silence over alleged Russian attempts to interfere with the election to benefit Donald Trump, who
she claimed during her own campaign would govern no differently than Hillary Clinton.
"So everybody's like, 'Wow, how come this like super, super aggressive opposition that we saw from these third-party candidates
-- how come they haven't said anything since this scandal has broken?'" Maddow said.
"I don't know, Jill -- I can't pronounce it in Russian," Maddow said, with apparent sarcasm.
Bernie Sanders, OTOH, did everything he was told he should do. He supported the Democratic establishment candidate, and believed
the Russiagate story.
It has been clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be
involved in 2018. It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the
Russian oligarchs.
However, Sanders had already committed the unforgivable
sin of criticizing the Democratic establishment candidate from the left. There is simply no way of coming back from that treason.
Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (11/12/17) asking
its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals
respond?" The message is clear: The progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the
failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.
It isn't just progressive politicians that are all traitors. Movements like Black Lives Matter are also traitors for Russia.
That's because you, Russia, funded riots in Ferguson. See 0 hour I have your connections to Trump archived via Schiller and
Scavino https://t.co/aTUDlCGkYi
If you are still confused about what is treason and what isn't, ask yourself the question: Does the issue advance the narrative
that the Democratic Party is a force for absolute good?
Oh my god: this is how deranged official Washington is. The President of the largest Dem Party think tank (funded in part by
dictators) genuinely believes Chelsea Manning's candidacy is a Kremlin plot. Conspiracy theorists thrive more in mainstream DC
than on internet fringes pic.twitter.com/e8g314iQHT
We still have the 2018 election, and then the long lead-up to the 2020 election. There is nothing to indicate that the rhetoric
won't get a lot more insane. The general indifference of the public doesn't seem to discourage the media and pundits. So how will
it likely look in Fall 2020? Probably like it looked in
1952 .
The purpose of advancing the Communist issue was not to fix the Communist problem -- it was to exploit that problem for political
and ideological advantage. That is how the Republican Party could produce its unhinged 1952 platform, which charged that the Democrats
"have shielded traitors to the Nation in high places," "work unceasingly to achieve their goal of national socialism," and "by
a long succession of vicious acts, so undermined the foundations of our Republic as to threaten its existence." (Does that kind
of talk strike you as overheated? Then you, too, are failing to take the Russia issue seriously.)
There is little to no danger for conservatives and Republicans. All of the danger is for progressives and socialists, and the
angry mob is the Democratic establishment trying to silence left-wing ideas. In comparison, the danger of the GOP to the left-wing
is trivial.
Russiagate officially started in 2015 long before the DNC hack and the Democratic primaries.
I'm finding it harder and harder to believe that people keep posting it as common knowledge and factual -- especially on this
site. Old dkos habits are hard to break, I guess. The speed at which the files were STOLEN prove it was done from within the network.
Not from Russia, or from a van parked down the street. I can only guess that the DNC can't reveal whose network account was used
to do so, because it would blow the bullshit lie of a hack out of the water.
The speed at which the files were STOLEN prove it was done from within the network. Not from Russia, or from a van parked
down the street. I can only guess that the DNC can't reveal whose network account was used to do so, because it would blow
the bullshit lie of a hack out of the water.
There was NO hack.
emphasis in original.
The term usually used by the perpetrator classes for this sort of thing is: "inside job" . And, as
with all other inside jobs, the question really is: "Who's the insider?"
"The easiest way to raise a revolutionary army is to use someone else's; especially if it belongs to your enemy." -- William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), from memory
I've seen an article debunking the "hack was a leak" story, but it makes no difference anyway. In my book, the leak/hack just
created a more informed electorate, and that's good for American democracy.
@Deja
The truth is contained in the emails, not in their journey. Remember who else is telling you that the contents of the emails is
less important than how they got there - the Democrats.
@Deja
hypothesis has problems. Don't get me wrong, I think it holds more promise than the 'hack' hypothesis. But right now, really,
we got shit for proof either way? Would honestly look forward to your proof either way, sans the critique of the essayist. Might
I suggest that you criticize the point, not the person, please? Questions remain.
- DNC leak vs hack remains unproven (servers not provided)
- one party consent is complicated. On the tape, there was 3rd party on speaker phone. Were they in one party consent jurisdiction
as well?
- How was CNN able to confirm that this tape was recorded in NY?
in it. This is the point that matters to me. Assange has stated that the emails didn't come from Russia. Craig Murray said
that he was involved with the person who got the information from the DNC computers and that there was no connection to Russia.
The CIAs Vault 7 shows how evidence on computers can be manipulated to make it seem like someone's dawg did the deed. I think
it'd be very sloppy for trained hackers to leave their own footprints on the scene don't you think?
Finally there's the meeting that Assange's lawyer set up with congress for him to testify to congress and tell them where
he got the DNC emails that showed how they rigged the primary. Comey and Schaffer shot that down because it would have killed
Russia Gate. Dead and buried and the country could move on.
It matters profoundly. Knowing the facts surrounding critical political events or social earthquakes can be
epigenetic events. Hard truths can trigger conscious evolution while we are alive and your advanced gene expressions can be
physically inherited, changing the species.
By exercising our own critical thinking and working very hard to see through narratives to the core realities in the universe
and in all things -- we are physically evolving the species into better and more enlightened generations of humans.
In this case, it is NOT a matter of opinion. It is a matter of FACT. The physical proof that we have right now tells us
that the Wikileaks documents did not come from a "hack." We also have physical evidence that someone (no doubt Crowdstrike) manipulated
copies of the leaked documents and embedded awkward amateurish evidence to make them look like they were taken by a "Russian"
hacker. Here's how we know that:
Assange's diplomatic trip to the US in mid-2017 to testify before Congress and prove where the documents came from was
emergency-blocked by Comey and Rosenstein. As a consequence, Assange immediately released the extensive Vault 7 documents to the
American people so we could forensically recognize the signature techniques that the US intelligence agencies would use to alter
downloaded DNC documents and embed fake Russian "fingerprints." We have seen the physical evidence that that occurred.
The US has no real physical evidence of a Russian hack or they would never have released the fake evidence. Yet they continue
their attack to harm Russia's economy and the continue their attempts to provoke a hot war with Russia. The US motive for this
has nothing to do with their fake hacking narrative; it is about crippling Russia (and China) to forestall the rapid rise of Eurasia,
which is stripping the Neocons and war-profiteering corporations of their dream for the US to achieve total domination over all
other nations. The Entitled Elite want their New American Century back! Their Empire was supposed to rule the world....
If that is what your instincts tell you, you should trust them. It's a biological imperative.
It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.
Hey, Bernie. The American people were the ones who should have decided who won the primary, not Hillary, the DNC and the delegates.
That you are blaming Her loss on Russia instead of admitting that the American people rejected her makes you nothing more than
a democratic puppet. How embarrassing for you.
Every Black voter should abandon the DP until they apologize for their disrespect for the BLM and saying that they only started
protesting cops killing Blacks because Russia manipulated them into doing so.
Eichenwald thinks that our intelligence agencies are patriots who have spent their lives working on keeping us safe does he?
I agree with Dmitry Orlov's take on them.
The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as
possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on
ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially
organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.
....
the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic
and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single
continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your
own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you
are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude
toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. "
And let's not forget how many
coups
and false flag events they had a hand in creating that have cost so much misery and death.
One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, ŕ la 9/11, to fake false
flag operations, ŕ la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story
is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting
this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips.
It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy
theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.
The real puppets are the ones who believe in this silly story that Russia is pulling Trump's strings and that the GOP are also
Russian puppets. Good grief!
meaning the 'Russia Ruse'--IMO, has been an exercise in setting up a scenario under which the PtB can put in place a system
geared toward major social media 'censorship,' and, a face-saving exercise for FSC--just in case she decides to make a third
run in 2020. Heaven forbid!
Mollie/Blue Onyx (Reverting to my original handle)
"Every time I lose a dog, he takes a piece of my heart. Every new dog gifts me with a piece of his. Someday, my heart will
be total dog, and maybe then I will be just as generous, loving, and forgiving." ~~Author Unknown
"Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments
are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way." ~~Martin Luther King Jr.
"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche
"... has been an exercise in setting up a scenario under which the PtB can put in place a system geared toward major social
media 'censorship,'
Yup. Dan Coates directory of national intelligence came out and accused Russsia of engaging in a "messaging campaign". So how
does one stop this messaging campaign. Well, back in the day, the answer was to answer bad speech with more and better speech.
Well, with Russiagate both the media and dem/gop establishment have to come to demand censorship from the major social media
platforms. And they have responded. At first they actually didn't and thought the Russia charges were trivial. Until that is,
they were theatened by House and Senate reps. And then they hopped to it.
And just a number of days ago, Facebook proudly announced they took down some nefarious pages who seemed to be engaging in
a message campaign. And turns out they shut down a real group organizing an anti-fascist rally. There are other examples like
this.
The censorship will continue becoming more and more brazen. (BTW, youtube started ths process earlier demonitizing and hurting
a lot of popular, but alternative voices.)
BTW--the Young Turks showed the Coats clip and claimed "see the Russians are still hacking our elections".
I'm truly getting concerned regarding the direction our government appears to be taking when it comes to 'freedom of expression/speech.'
Strangely, many on the 'left' don't seem very concerned. Indeed, because the MSM is so intent on going after DT, many so-called
progressives--including the supposedly more liberal (cough, cough) lawmakers--have become major cheerleaders of the corporatist
media. Go figure.
Mollie/Blue Onyx (Reverting to my original handle)
"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die, I want to go where they went." ~~Will Rogers
"Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments
are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way." ~~Martin Luther King Jr.
"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche
as well as every other person in Trump's administration that is working against him. This is insubordination and if Trump continues
to let them run their mouths then I believe that he is in on this scam and is playing along with it. Why? Look at what has been
happening since he became president. From the increasing Russian sanctions to the internet censorship to the increased military
budget with money that goes to fighting cyber warfare and many other things that are being done because of this new and improved
false flag.
As you stated YouTube has been removing lots of videos, Facebook and Twitter have been censoring alternative media sites that
are not playing along with Russia Gate and Google changed its algorithms so that traffic to those sites are down up to 90% according
to WSWS.
I once thought that this would eventually be exposed for the scam it is, but not any more. It's here to stay. And just like
in 1984 where there was that place where history was changed to fit the narrative of the day, we are seeing that here. Things
that happened last decade are being blamed on Russia hacking. I wouldn't be surprised if the KKK and Jim Crow were blamed on Russia.
This is how out of control it's gotten. And I was so looking forward to seeing Rachel trying to explain to her viewers how she
got things so wrong.
@snoopydawg
His erratic actions are the perfect distraction for the capitalist pigs the same as the "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Marxist Communist
Fascist Socialist Radical Leftist Feminazi SJW" crap that went on during the last capitalist puppet presidency. Either way, the
world still burns and the pigs make out like bandits in the process. Keeping the plebs at each other's throats is just a bonus
for them.
@snoopydawg
Remember whom you are discussing. Alas, you must be a Russian wolfhound to think R. Madcow could ever be wrong. Apologize, then
stand in the corner until after the midterms when the GRU hauls off recalcitrant Dims and Repugnants failing to swear fealty to
Vladimir Vladimirovich.
"Russiagate is like a mirage. It looks so real from a distance you'll swear it's there and mock anyone who says otherwise,
but once you get up close and examine its component parts you find it's made of nothing but innuendo, spin, unsubstantiated claims
and dishonest omissions.
2:45 PM · Aug 3, 2018"
"
@caitoz
·
Aug 3
Nothing wrong with wanting a full investigation. There's something very, very wrong with pressuring a US president to continually
escalate dangerous cold war tensions with a nuclear superpower without ever backing down based on an "idea" with no evidence.
"
@snoopydawg
Bernie will not be able to say "Oh evil Russia but let's not go to war with them." Diplomacy itself finally became full criminalized
and made tresonous when Trump meet Putin in Finland. Any level of moderation will be attacked as soft on Putin and treasonous.
And I write "pro-war" and not "anti-Russian". One cannot be anti-Russian in any moderate way. Being anti-Russian means supporting
a harsh and aggressive military stance toward their nation. The Russians are after all destroying Western civilization and this
cannot be meant with diplomacy.
And from what I can, every national democratic candidate for House and Senate will follow suite.
For reference, these are the only 10 senators who voted AGAINST giving Trump a $717 billion war budget:
Bernie Sanders
Elizabeth Warren
Ed Markey
Kirsten Gillibrand
Dick Durban
Kamala Harris
Jeff Merkley
Ron Wyden
Mike Lee (R)
Marco Rubio (R)
So much for #Resistance huh?
The others show that there are others out there that have seen through this propaganda crap. I'd like to see the breakdown
of Hillary supporters that believe Russia Gate and the Bernie supporters that don't. Most of the Trump supporters think it's phony
so what made Hillary's believe in something that everyone should be laughing at?
You deserve a lot of credit. Russia interfered in your favor, yet you are man enough to admit that they interfered. Thank
you Bernie!
So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you didn't
seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours.
You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was "deeply
involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated by
DNC! Everybody knows...
Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't need
a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB
Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will
fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate
by the democrats.
The democrats (and media cohorts) have become an apocolyptic death cult. The language that comes from them is infused with
the language of conspiracies, violence, treason, aggression and demonization.
And here is the thing, Bernie to survive electorally will have to become a cult member. Effectively he will have to be pro-war
with Russia. He will be giving from the the Left supposed support for aggressive action andmilitarism toward Russia.
I fear that if a democrat becomes president in 2020 (it won't be Bernie), is elected president that in the year of the midterms
in 2022, the US will start a real war with Russia which has a highly likehood of going nuclear.
for the John S. McCain 2019 National Defense Authorization Bill ( subtitled 'The Sneeze
Wrong, We're Comin' to Fuck You Up Act' ). Here's the very lengthy summary of provisions
in the House version from govtrack.us , although it may
have changed slightly since the House and Senate conference agreements.
Let's start with the House: 'House Democrats vote for record US military spending', Patrick
Martin, 28 July 2018, wsws.org
"By an overwhelming bipartisan vote Thursday, the US House of Representatives approved the
largest military authorization bill in American history. The National Defense Authorization Act
approves $716 billion to fund US military aggression around the world, and gives President
Trump the power to order cyberwarfare attacks on Russia, China, Iran and North Korea without
further congressional action.
... ... ...
"Particularly ominous are the sections of the NDAA on cyberwarfare. The bill
authorizes the Pentagon to conduct "unattributed" cyber operations without having to comply
with the usual restrictions on covert operations, such as requiring a Presidential Finding
which is submitted to key leaders of Congress. According to the bill "clandestine military
activity or operation in cyberspace shall be considered a traditional military activity.
It pre-authorizes US military cyber operations if the president determines that (1) there is
"an active, systematic, and ongoing campaign of attacks against the Government or people of the
United States in cyberspace, including attempting to influence American elections and
democratic political processes" and (2) that Russia, China, North Korea or Iran are
responsible. In that event, the president may order US cyberwar forces "to take appropriate and
proportional action in foreign cyberspace to disrupt, defeat, and deter such attacks."
This provision effectively gives Trump and any successor, Democrat or Republican, the power
to launch a full-scale cyberwar without further congressional authorization , merely on his own
declaration that the United States is under attack."
Sounds like we continue to waste a ton of borrowed cash on last generation tech.
One new US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier
Two new Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines armed with atomic weapons
13 other new warships
77 new joint strike fighters
Basically Trump's bought himself his own shiny new aircraft carrier battle group.
I'm sure it will be a simply fantastic fleet.
The best fleet ever in the history of the oceans.
I hear they want to call the carrier 'Trump class'.
That'll show China who's boss in the
Western Pacific.
Just one thing though:
The Virginia-class was intended in
part as a less expensive alternative to the Seawolf-class submarines ( $1.8 billion vs $2.8
billion), whose production run was stopped after just three boats had been completed. To
reduce costs, the Virginia-class submarines use many "commercial off-the-shelf" (COTS)
components, especially in their computers and data networks.
Sounds totally secure to me!
I'm sure the Russians or Chinese EW is nowhere near powerful enough to
hack/disable/commandeer the 'off-the-shelf-tech' that runs our latest generation nuclear
powered submarine.
To reduce costs, the Virginia-class submarines use many "commercial off-the-shelf"
(COTS) components, especially in their computers and data networks.
Sounds totally secure to me!
The idea that we're dependent on Microsoft Windows to operate our current Naval
vessels, with little or no manual over-ride even available much less trained or used, makes
my skin crawl!
The only way that this can happen is if a whole lot of people get really desperate really
fast. So expect more cuts to education, health care for civilians, and all sorts of new exciting
waivers that will allow us to form our own Legion Etangere.
And everybody knows there will be an "incident" at the Trump military parade. It's
practically guaranteed, and you know the CIA is going to have a full three months to cook
something up. Hell, they've been waiting for this kind of chance for years.
I remember reporting years ago that the imperialism budget had surpassed a trillion per
year. Estimates prior to Obama's sequester budget were around 1.2 trillion per year for total
costs. Wrote many an article about it and yet here we are, still writing and reading articles
about it and not doing shit to stop it.
Boycott the duopoly, boycott this political system, demand democracy, demand power to the
people. It's so far past time for talking it's pathetic.
Gawd knows that the officers are getting too much money and perks without putting their
asses on the line.
The bill "restates our commitment to NATO and our partners," Smith said. "It extends the
prohibition on military cooperation with Russia. It declares that Russia violated the
Chemical Weapons Convention
Okay. No working with Russia on defeating ISIS. Not that we're doing this, just the
opposite. We're funding and protecting ISIS from Syria and Russia. But what chemical weapons
has Russia used in recent times? This country has been the ones using them in our various
wars. Stupid congress.
A real collusion happened with 911. The BBC knew that tower 7 would fall before it did.
Israelis danced before the tumbling towers. They said that they were video taping the event.
Why? How did they know it was going happen? How did the BBC know it would happen? The US
obviously knew it. It is the biggest military in the world. Yet it did nothing to stop it.
Solving 911 by Christopher Bollyn names names. Everyone knows about this real collusion.
Everyone fears our rulers, so they remain silent. Silence is not golden. Power unchallenged
goes on forever...
TASS reported that August 1 was the
five year anniversary of Edward Snowden's being granted temporary asylum in the Russian
Federation. This happened after his release of an enormous trove of information showing
clandestine and illegal practices being carried out by the US intelligence agencies to gather
information on just about anyone in the world, for any – or no – reason at
all.
Edward Snowden, 35, is a computer security expert. In 2005-2008, he worked at the
University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language sponsored by the National
Security Agency (NSA) and at the global communications division at CIA headquarters in
Langley, Virginia. In 2007, Snowden was stationed with diplomatic cover at the US mission to
the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2009, he resigned from the CIA to join the Dell
company that sent him to Hawaii to work for the NSA's information-sharing office. He was
particularly employed with the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm.
In June 2013, Snowden leaked classified information to journalists Glenn Greenwald and
Laura Poitras, which revealed global surveillance programs run by US and British intelligence
agencies. He explained the move by saying that he wanted to tell the world the truth because
he believed such large-scale surveillance on innocent citizens was unacceptable and the
public needed to know about it.
The Guardian and The Washington Post published the first documents concerning the US
intelligence agencies' spying on Internet users on June 6, 2013. According to the documents,
major phone companies, including Verizon, AT&T and Sprint Nextel, handed records of their
customers' phone conversations over to the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
who also had direct access to the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Skype,
YouTube, Paltalk, AOL and Apple. In addition, Snowden's revelations showed that a secret
program named PRISM was aimed at collecting audio and video recordings, photos, emails and
information about users' connections to various websites.
The next portion of revelations , which was published by the leading newspapers such as
The Guardian, Brazil's O Globo, Italy's L'Espresso, Germany's Der Spiegel and Suddeutsche
Zeitung, concerned the US spying on politicians. In particular, it became known that the NSA
and Great Britain's Government Communications Headquarters intercepted the phone calls that
foreign politicians and officials made during the G20 summit in London in 2009. British
intelligence agencies particularly tried to intercept then Russian President Dmitry
Medvedev's phone calls. US intelligence monitored the phone calls of 35 world leaders,
including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
According to the disclosed information, the NSA regularly gathered intelligence at the New
York and Washington offices of the European Union's mission. The agency also achieved access
to the United Nations' internal video conferences and considers the Vienna headquarters of
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as one of its major targets for spying.
The leaks also uncovered details about the Blarney and Rampart-T secret surveillance
programs. Blarney, which started in 1978, is used to collect information related to
counter-terrorism, foreign diplomats and governments, as well as economic and military
targets. Rampart-T has been used since 1991 to spy on foreign leaders. The program is focused
on 20 countries, including Russia and China.
Snowden also let the world know that Germany's Federal Intelligence Service and Federal
Office for the Protection of the Constitution used the NSA's XKeyScore secret computer system
to spy on Internet users, monitoring their web activities. In addition, the NSA and Great
Britain's Government Communications Headquarters developed methods that allowed them to hack
almost all the encryption systems currently used on the Internet. Besides, the leaked
documents said that the NSA had secretly installed special software on about 100,000
computers around the globe that provided access to them and made cyber attacks easier. In
particular, the NSA used a secret technology that made it possible to hack computers not
connected to the Internet.
Portions of the information Snowden handed over to Greenwald and Poitras continue to be
published on The Intercept website .
According to edwardsnowden.com – a website commissioned by the Courage foundation
(dedicated to building support for Snowden), a total of 2,176 documents from the archive have
been published so far.
The NSA and the Pentagon claim that Snowden stole about 1.7 mln classified documents
concerning the activities of US intelligence services and US military operations. He is
charged with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense
information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information
to an unauthorized person. He is facing up to ten years in prison on each charge.
As can be seen, Mr. Snowden's work is of extreme importance now in the connected Internet
age. But how is his life in Russia now?
Anatoly Kucherena, Edward Snowden's lawyer, has revealed some details of the renowned
whistleblower's life to Sputnik. According to him, Snowden has found a job, is actively
traveling around Russia and is continuing to learn the language.
Kucherena added that Snowden receives visits from his girlfriend, Lindsey Mills, and his
parents. When asked about the whistleblower's favorite place in Russia, his lawyer said that
he likes St Petersburg "a lot."
"He is doing alright: his girlfriend visits him, he has a good job and he's continuing to
study Russian. His parents visit him occasionally. [They] have no problems with visas. At
least they have never complained about having any trouble," the lawyer said.
After Snowden released classified NSA documents, he fled first to Hong Kong, then, on June
23, 2013, arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong. The whistleblower remained in the transit zone of
Sheremetyevo Airport until he was granted temporary asylum in Russia, which was later
prolonged to 2020.
"... You said that we're entering into a recession. That's just the flat wrong statement. The economy's been in a recession ever since 2008, as a result of what President Obama did by bailing out the banks and not the economy at large. ..."
"... The largest element of fakery is a category that is imputed – that is, made up – for rising rents that homeowners would have to pay if they had to rent their houses from themselves. That's about 6 percent of GDP right there. Right now, as a result of the 10 million foreclosures that Obama imposed on the economy by not writing down the junk mortgage debts to realistic values, companies like Blackstone have come in and bought up many of the properties that were forfeited. So now there are fewer homes that are available to buy. Rents are going up all over the country. Homeownership has dropped by abut 10 percent since 2008, and that means more people have to rent. When more people have to rent, the rents go up. And when rents go up, people lucky enough to have kept their homes report these rising rental values to the GDP statisticians. ..."
"... The other great jump in GDP has been people paying more money to the banks as penalties and fees for arrears on student loans and mortgage loans, credit card loans and automobile loans. When they fall into arrears, the banks get to add a penalty charge. The credit-card companies make more money on arrears than they do on interest charges. This is counted as providing a "financial service," defined as the amount of revenue banks make over and above their borrowing charges. ..."
"... The statistical pretense is that they're taking the risk on making loans to debtors that are going bad. They're cleaning up on profits on these bad loans, because the government has guaranteed the student loans including the higher penalty charges. They've guaranteed the mortgages loans made by the FHA – Fannie Mae and the other groups – that the banks are getting penalty charges on. So what's reported is that GDP growth is actually more and more people in trouble, along with rising housing costs. What's good for the GDP here is awful for the economy at large! This is bad news, not good news. ..."
Paul Sliker: So, Michael, over the past few months the IMF has been sending warning
signals about the state of the global economy. There are a bunch of different macroeconomic
developments that signal we could be entering into another crisis or recession in the near
future. One of those elements is the yield curve, which shows the difference between short-term
and long-term borrowing rates. Investors and financial pundits of all sorts are concerned about
this, because since 1950 every time the yield curve has flattened, the economy has tanked
shortly thereafter.
Can you explain what the yield curve signifies, and if all these signals I just mentioned
are forecasting another economic crisis?
Michael Hudson: Normally, borrowers have to pay only a low rate of interest for a
short-term loan. If you take a longer-term loan, you have to pay a higher rate. The longest
term loans are for mortgages, which have the highest rate. Even for large corporations, the
longer you borrow – that is, the later you repay – the pretense is that the risk is
much higher. Therefore, you have to pay a higher rate on the pretense that the interest-rate
premium is compensation for risk. Banks and the wealthy get to borrow at lower rates.
Right now what's happened is that the short-term rates you can get by putting your money in
Treasury bills or other short-term instruments are even higher than the long-term rates. That's
historically unnatural. But it's not really unnatural at all when you look at what the economy
is doing.
You said that we're entering into a recession. That's just the flat wrong statement. The
economy's been in a recession ever since 2008, as a result of what President Obama did by
bailing out the banks and not the economy at large.
Since 2008, people talk about "look at how that GDP is growing." Especially in the last few
quarters, you have the media saying look, "we've recovered. GDP is up." But if you look at what
they count as GDP, you find a primer on how to lie with statistics.
The largest element of fakery is a category that is imputed – that is, made up
– for rising rents that homeowners would have to pay if they had to rent their houses
from themselves. That's about 6 percent of GDP right there. Right now, as a result of the 10
million foreclosures that Obama imposed on the economy by not writing down the junk mortgage
debts to realistic values, companies like Blackstone have come in and bought up many of the
properties that were forfeited. So now there are fewer homes that are available to buy. Rents
are going up all over the country. Homeownership has dropped by abut 10 percent since 2008, and
that means more people have to rent. When more people have to rent, the rents go up. And when
rents go up, people lucky enough to have kept their homes report these rising rental values to
the GDP statisticians.
If I had to pay rent for the house that I have, could charge as much money as renters down
the street have to pay – for instance, for houses that were bought out by Blackstone.
Rents are going up and up. This actually is a rise in overhead, but it's counted as rising GDP.
That confuses income and output with overhead costs.
The other great jump in GDP has been people paying more money to the banks as penalties
and fees for arrears on student loans and mortgage loans, credit card loans and automobile
loans. When they fall into arrears, the banks get to add a penalty charge. The credit-card
companies make more money on arrears than they do on interest charges. This is counted as
providing a "financial service," defined as the amount of revenue banks make over and above
their borrowing charges.
The statistical pretense is that they're taking the risk on making loans to debtors that
are going bad. They're cleaning up on profits on these bad loans, because the government has
guaranteed the student loans including the higher penalty charges. They've guaranteed the
mortgages loans made by the FHA – Fannie Mae and the other groups – that the banks
are getting penalty charges on. So what's reported is that GDP growth is actually more and more
people in trouble, along with rising housing costs. What's good for the GDP here is awful for
the economy at large! This is bad news, not good news.
As a result of this economic squeeze, investors see that the economy is not growing. So
they're bailing out. They're taking their money and running.
If you're taking your money out of bonds and out of the stock market because you worry about
shrinking markets, lower profits and defaults, where are you going to put it? There's only one
safe place to put your money: short-term treasuries. You don't want to buy a long-term Treasury
bond, because if the interest rates go up then the bond price falls. So you want buy short-term
Treasury bonds. The demand for this is so great that Bogle's Vanguard fund management company
will only let small investors buy ten thousand dollars worth at a time for their 401K
funds.
The reason small to large investors are buying short term treasuries is to park their money
safely. There's nowhere else to put it in the real economy, because the real economy isn't
growing.
What has grown is debt. It's grown larger and larger. Investors are taking their
money out of state and local bonds because state and local budgets are broke as a result of
pension commitments. Politicians have cut taxes in order to get elected, so they don't have
enough money to keep up with the pension fund contributions that they're supposed to make.
This means that the likelihood of a break in the chain of payments is rising. In the United
States, commercial property rents are in trouble. We've discussed that before on this show. As
the economy shrinks, stores are closing down. That means that the owners who own commercial
mortgages are falling behind, and arrears are rising.
Also threatening is what Trump is doing. If his protectionist policies interrupt trade,
you're going to see companies being squeezed. They're not going to make the export sales they
expected, and will pay more for imports.
Finally, banks are having problems of they hold Italian government bonds. Germany is
unwilling to use European funds to bail them out. Most investors expect Italy to do exit the
euro in the next three years or so. It looks like we're entering a period of anarchy, so of
course people are parking their money in the short term. That means that they're not putting it
into the economy. No wonder the economy isn't growing.
So the US neoliberal establishment tried to sabotage Trump-Putin summit in doer to pursue "business as usual". In other words military-industrial
complex is in control of the USA government...
Notable quotes:
"... It's no coincidence that, at the very moment when the President of the United States was about to meet with the President of Russia, special prosecutor Robert Mueller III charged twelve Russians with having manipulated the US presidential elections by hacking into the data networks of the Democratic party in order to hinder candidate Hillary Clinton. The twelve Russians, accused of being agents of the military secret services (GRU), were officially defined as " conspirators ", and found guilty of " conspiracy to the detriment of the United States ". Simultaneously, Daniel Coats, National Director of Intelligence and principal advisor to the President in these matters, accused Russia of working to " undermine our basic values and our democracy ". He then sounded the alarm about the " threat of cyber-attacks which have arrived at a critical point " similar to that which preceded 9/11, on behalf not only of Russia, " the most aggressive foreign agent ", but also China and Iran. ..."
"... At the same time, in London, British " investigators " declared that the Russian military secret service GRU, which had sabotaged the Presidential elections in the USA, is the same service which poisoned ex-Russian agent, Sergueď Skripal and his daughter, who, inexplicably, survived contact with an extremely lethal gas. ..."
"... The political objective of these " enquiries " is clear – to maintain that at the head of all these " conspirators " is Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom President Donald Trump sat down at the negotiating table, despite vast bi-partisan opposition in the USA. After the " conspirators " had been charged, the Democrats asked Trump to cancel the meeting with Putin. Even though they failed, their pressure on the negotiations remains powerful. ..."
"... In opposition to the easing of tension with Russia are not only the Democrats (who, with a reversal of formal roles, are playing the " hawks "), but also many Republicans, among whom are several highly-important representatives of the Trump administration itself. It is the establishment, not only of the US, but also of Europe, whose powers and profits are directly linked to tension and war. ..."
"... Even if an agreement on these questions were reached between Putin and Trump, would the latter be able to implement it? Or will the real deciders be the powerful circles of the military-industrial complex? ..."
While the International Press distorted the content of the NATO Summit, the US establishment perfectly understood the unique
issue – the end of enmity with Russia. Thus disturbing the bilateral summit in Helsinki between the USA and Russia became its priority.
By all means possible, it had to prevent any rapprochement with Moscow.
We need to talk about everything, from commerce to the military, missiles, nuclear, and China " - this was how President Trump
began at the Helsinki Summit. " The time has come to talk in detail about our bilateral relationship and the international flashpoints
", emphasised Putin.
But it will not only be the two Presidents who will decide the future relationships between the United States and Russia.
It's no coincidence that, at the very moment when the President of the United States was about to meet with the President
of Russia, special prosecutor Robert Mueller III charged twelve Russians with having manipulated the US presidential elections by
hacking into the data networks of the Democratic party in order to hinder candidate Hillary Clinton. The twelve Russians, accused
of being agents of the military secret services (GRU), were officially defined as " conspirators ", and found guilty of " conspiracy
to the detriment of the United States ". Simultaneously, Daniel Coats, National Director of Intelligence and principal advisor to
the President in these matters, accused Russia of working to " undermine our basic values and our democracy ". He then sounded the
alarm about the " threat of cyber-attacks which have arrived at a critical point " similar to that which preceded 9/11, on behalf
not only of Russia, " the most aggressive foreign agent ", but also China and Iran.
At the same time, in London, British " investigators " declared that the Russian military secret service GRU, which had sabotaged
the Presidential elections in the USA, is the same service which poisoned ex-Russian agent, Sergueď Skripal and his daughter, who,
inexplicably, survived contact with an extremely lethal gas.
The political objective of these " enquiries " is clear – to maintain that at the head of all these " conspirators " is Russian
President Vladimir Putin, with whom President Donald Trump sat down at the negotiating table, despite vast bi-partisan opposition
in the USA. After the " conspirators " had been charged, the Democrats asked Trump to cancel the meeting with Putin. Even though
they failed, their pressure on the negotiations remains powerful.
What Putin tried to obtain from Trump is both simple and complex – to ease the tension between the two countries. To that purpose,
he proposed to Trump, who accepted, to implement a joint enquiry into the " conspiracy ". We do not know how the discussions on the
key questions will go – the status of Crimea, the condition of Syria, nuclear weapons and others. And we do not know what Trump will
ask in return. However, it is certain that any concession will be used to accuse him of connivance with the enemy. In opposition
to the easing of tension with Russia are not only the Democrats (who, with a reversal of formal roles, are playing the " hawks "),
but also many Republicans, among whom are several highly-important representatives of the Trump administration itself. It is the
establishment, not only of the US, but also of Europe, whose powers and profits are directly linked to tension and war.
It will not be the words, but the facts, which will reveal whether the climate of détente of the Helsinki Summit will become reality
- first of all with a de-escalation of NATO in Europe, in other words with the withdrawal of forces (including nuclear forces) of
the USA and NATO presently deployed against Russia, and the blockage of NATO's expansion to the East.
Even if an agreement on these questions were reached between Putin and Trump, would the latter be able to implement it? Or
will the real deciders be the powerful circles of the military-industrial complex?
One thing is certain – we in Italy and Europe can not remain the simple spectators of dealings which will define our future.
Manlio Dinucci
The conflict between transnational financial capitalism and productive national capitalism has entered into a paroxystic
phase. On one side, Presidents Trump and Putin are negotiating the joint defence of their national interests. On the other, the major
daily newspaper for the US and the world is accusing the US President of high treason, while the armed forces of the US and NATO
are preparing for war with Russia and China.
You have attacked our democracy. Your well-worn gamblers' denials do not interest us. If you continue with this attitude, we will
consider it an act of war." This is what Trump should have said to Putin at the Helsinki Summit, in the opinion of famous New
York Times editorialist Thomas Friedman, published in La Repubblica . He went on to accuse the Russian President of having
"attacked NATO, a fundamental pillar of international security, destabilised Europe, and bombed thousands of Syrian refugees, causing
them to seek refuge in Europe."
He then accused the President of the United States of having " repudiated his oath on the Constitution " and of being an " asset
of Russian Intelligence " or at least playing at being one.
What Friedman expressed in these provocative terms corresponds to the position of a powerful internal and international front
(of which the New York Times is an important mouthpiece) opposed to USA-Russia negotiations, which should continue with the
invitation of Putin to the White House. But there is a substantial difference.
While the negotiations have not yet borne fruit, opposition to the negotiations has been expressed not only in words, but especially
in facts.
Cancelling out the climate of détente at the Helsinki Summit, the planetary warmongering system of the United States is in the
process of intensifying the preparations for a war reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific:
After the landing of an US armoured brigade in Anvers, totalling a hundred tanks and a thousand military vehicles, a US aerial
brigade landed in Rotterdam with sixty attack helicopters. These forces and others, all of them USA/NATO, are deployed along the
borders of Russian territory, in the framework of operation Atlantic Resolve , launched in 2014 against " Russian aggression.
" In its anti-Russian function, Poland asked for the permanent presence of an armoured US unit on its own territory, offering
to pay between 1.5 - 2 billion dollars per year.
At the same time, NATO is intensifying the training and armament of troops in Georgia and Ukraine, candidates for entry into
membership of the Alliance on the frontiers with Russia.
Meanwhile, the US Congress received with all honours Adriy Parubiy, founder of the National-Social Party (on the model of
Adolf Hitler's National-Socialist Party), head of the neo-Nazi paramilitary formations employed by NATO in the Maďdan Square putsch.
NATO command in Lago Patria (JFC Naples) – under the orders of US Admiral James Foggo, who also commands the US naval forces
in Europe and those in Africa – is working busily to organise the grand-scale exercise Trident Juncture 18 , in which will
participate 40,000 military personnel, 130 aircraft and 70 ships from more than 30 countries including Sweden and Finland, which
are NATO partners. The exercise, which will take place in October in Norway and the adjacent seas, will simulate a scenario of
" collective defence " - naturally enough, against " Russian aggression. "
In the Pacific, the major naval exercise RIMPAC 2018 (27 June to 2 August) is in full swing - organised and directed
by USINDOPACOM, the US Command which covers the Indian and Pacific oceans – with the participation of 25,000 sailors and marines,
more than 50 ships and 200 war-planes.The exercise – in which France, Germany and the United Kingdom are also participating –
is clearly directed against China, which Admiral Phil Davidson, commander of USINDOPACOM, defines as a "major rival power which
is eroding the international order in order to reduce the access of the USA to the region and thus become hegemonic."
When Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping, Friedman will no doubt accuse him of connivance not only with the Russian enemy,
but also with the Chinese enemy. Manlio Dinucci
In recent decades throughout Latin America, rulers have spoken and demanded 'reforms' as
essential to stimulate and sustain growth and foster equity and sustainability. The 'reforms'
involve implementing 'structural changes' which require large scale privatization to encourage
entrepreneurship and end state corruption; deregulation of the economy to stimulate foreign and
domestic investment; labor flexibility to 'free' labor markets and increase employment; and
lower business taxes. According to the reformers all this will lead to free markets and promote
democratic values.
Over the past thirty years, ruling elites in Latin America have carried out IMF and World
Bank structural reforms in two cyclical periods: between 1989-1999 and more recently between
2015-2018. In both cases the reforms have led to a series of major economic, political and
social deformations .
During the first cycle of 'reforms', privatization concentrated wealth by transferring
public means of production to oligarchs, and increased private monopolies, which deepened
inequalities and sharpened class divisions.
Deregulation led to financial speculation, tax evasion, capital flight and public- private
corruption.
'Reforms' deformed the existing class structure provoking social upheavals, which
precipitated the collapse of the elite led 'reforms' and the advent of a decade of nationalist
populist governments.
The populists restored and expanded social reforms but did not change the political and
economic 'deformations', embedded in the state.
A decade later (2015) the 'reformers' returned to power and restored the regressive free
market policies of the previous neo-liberal ruling elite. By 2018 a new cycle of class
conflicts flared throughout Brazil and Argentina, threatening to overturn the existing US
center free market order.
A war with Iran would define, consume and potentially destroy the Trump presidency, but
exhilarate the neocon never-Trumpers who most despise the man.
Why, then, is President Donald Trump toying with such an idea?
Looking back at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, wars we began or plunged into,
what was gained to justify the cost in American blood and treasure, and the death and
destruction we visited upon that region? How has our great rival China suffered by not getting
involved?
Oil is the vital strategic Western interest in the Persian Gulf. Yet a war with Iran would
imperil, not secure, that interest.
Mass migration from the Islamic world, seeded with terrorist cells, is the greatest threat
to Europe from the Middle East. But would not a U.S. war with Iran increase rather than
diminish that threat?
Would the millions of Iranians who oppose the mullahs' rule welcome U.S. air and naval
attacks on their country? Or would they rally behind the regime and the armed forces dying to
defend their country?
"Mr Trump, don't play with the lion's tail," warned President Hassan Rouhani in July: "War
with Iran is the mother of all wars."
But he added, "Peace with Iran is the mother of all peace."
Rouhani left wide open the possibility of peaceful settlement.
Trump's all-caps retort virtually invoked Hiroshima: "Never, ever threaten the United States
again or you will suffer consequences the like of which few throughout history have suffered
before."
When Trump shifted and blurted out that he was open to talks -- "No preconditions. They want
to meet? I'll meet." -- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo contradicted him: Before any meeting,
Iran must change the way they treat their people and "reduce their malign behavior."
We thus appear to be steering into a head-on collision.
For now that Trump has trashed the nuclear deal and is reimposing sanctions, Iran's economy
has taken a marked turn for the worse.
Its currency has lost half its value. Inflation is surging toward Venezuelan levels. New
U.S. sanctions will be imposed this week and again in November. Major foreign investments are
being canceled. U.S. allies are looking at secondary sanctions if they do not join the
strangulation of Iran.
Tehran's oil exports are plummeting along with national revenue.
Demonstrations and riots are increasingly common.
Rouhani and his allies who bet their futures on a deal to forego nuclear weapons in return
for an opening to the West look like fools to their people. And the Revolutionary Guard Corps
that warned against trusting the Americans appears vindicated.
Iran's leaders have now threatened that when their oil is no longer flowing freely and
abundantly, Arab oil may be blocked from passing through the Strait of Hormuz out to Asia and
the West.
Any such action would ignite an explosion in oil prices worldwide and force a U.S. naval
response to reopen the strait. A war would be on.
Yet the correlation of political forces is heavily weighted in favor of driving Tehran to
the wall. In the U.S., Iran has countless adversaries and almost no advocates. In the Middle
East, Israelis, Saudis and the UAE would relish having us smash Iran.
Among the four who will decide on war, Trump, Pompeo and John Bolton have spoken of regime
change, while Defense Secretary James Mattis has lately renounced any such strategic goal.
With Israel launching attacks against Iranian-backed militia in Syria, U.S. ships and
Iranian speedboats constantly at close quarters in the Gulf, and Houthi rebels in Yemen firing
at Saudi tankers in the Bab el-Mandeb entrance to the Red Sea, a military clash seems
inevitable.
While America no longer has the ground forces to invade and occupy an Iran four times the
size of Iraq, in any such war, the U.S., with its vastly superior air, naval and missile
forces, would swiftly prevail.
But if Iran called into play Hezbollah, the Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, and sectarian
allies inside the Arab states, U.S. casualties would mount and the Middle East could descend
into the kind of civil-sectarian war we have seen in Syria these last six years.
Any shooting war in the Persian Gulf could see insurance rates for tankers soar, a
constriction of oil exports, and surging prices, plunging us into a worldwide recession for
which one man would be held responsible: Donald Trump.
How good would that be for the GOP or President Trump in 2020?
And when the shooting stopped, would there be installed in Iran a liberal democracy, or
would it be as it was in Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, with first the religious zealots taking power,
and then the men with guns.
If we start a war with Iran, on top of the five in which we are engaged still, then the
party that offers to extricate us will be listened to, as Trump was listened to, when he
promised to extricate us from the forever wars of the Middle East.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That
Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
On Monday, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North interviewed Chris Hedges,
the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, lecturer and former New York Times
correspondent. Among Hedges' best-known books are War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, The
Death of the Liberal Class , Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph
of Spectacle, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt , which he co-wrote with the cartoonist
Joe Sacco, and Wages of Rebellion: the Moral Imperative of Revolt .
In an article published in Truthdig September 17 , titled "The Silencing
of Dissent," Hedges referenced the WSWS coverage of Google's censorship of left-wing sites and
warned about the growth of "blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign
agents for Russia and purveyors of 'fake news.'"
Hedges wrote that "the Department of Justice called on RT America and its 'associates' --
which may mean people like me -- to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. No
doubt, the corporate state knows that most of us will not register as foreign agents, meaning
we will be banished from the airwaves. This, I expect, is the intent."
North's interview with Hedges began with a discussion of the significance of the anti-Russia
campaign in the media.
David North: How do you interpret the fixation on Russia and the entire interpretation of
the election within the framework of Putin's manipulation?
Chris Hedges: It's as ridiculous as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. It is an
absolutely unproven allegation that is used to perpetuate a very frightening accusation --
critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism are foreign agents for Russia.
I have no doubt that the Russians invested time, energy and money into attempting to
influence events in the United States in ways that would serve their interests, in the same way
that we have done and do in Russia and all sorts of other countries throughout the world. So
I'm not saying there was no influence, or an attempt to influence events.
But the whole idea that the Russians swung the election to Trump is absurd. It's really
premised on the unproven claim that Russia gave the Podesta emails to WikiLeaks, and the
release of these emails turned tens, or hundreds of thousands, of Clinton supporters towards
Trump. This doesn't make any sense. Either that, or, according to the director of national
intelligence, RT America, where I have a show, got everyone to vote for the Green Party.
This obsession with Russia is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the
Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the
outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working men and women
and poor people of color. It is the result of disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA that
abolished good-paying union jobs and shipped them to places like Mexico, where workers without
benefits are paid $3.00 an hour. It is the result of the explosion of a system of mass
incarceration, begun by Bill Clinton with the 1994 omnibus crime bill, and the tripling and
quadrupling of prison sentences. It is the result of the slashing of basic government services,
including, of course, welfare, that Clinton gutted; deregulation, a decaying infrastructure,
including public schools, and the de facto tax boycott by corporations. It is the result of the
transformation of the country into an oligarchy. The nativist revolt on the right, and the
aborted insurgency within the Democratic Party, makes sense when you see what they have done to
the country.
Police forces have been turned into quasi-military entities that terrorize marginal
communities, where people have been stripped of all of their rights and can be shot with
impunity; in fact over three are killed a day. The state shoots and locks up poor people of
color as a form of social control. They are quite willing to employ the same form of social
control on any other segment of the population that becomes restive.
The Democratic Party, in particular, is driving this whole Russia witch-hunt. It cannot face
its complicity in the destruction of our civil liberties -- and remember, Barack Obama's
assault on civil liberties was worse than those carried out by George W. Bush -- and the
destruction of our economy and our democratic institutions.
Politicians like the Clintons, Pelosi and Schumer are creations of Wall Street. That is why
they are so virulent about pushing back against the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.
Without Wall Street money, they would not hold political power. The Democratic Party doesn't
actually function as a political party. It's about perpetual mass mobilization and a
hyperventilating public relations arm, all paid for by corporate donors. The base of the party
has no real say in the leadership or the policies of the party, as Bernie Sanders and his
followers found out. They are props in the sterile political theater.
These party elites, consumed by greed, myopia and a deep cynicism, have a death grip on the
political process. They're not going to let it go, even if it all implodes.
DN: Chris, you worked for the New York Times . When was that, exactly?
CH: From 1990 to 2005.
DN: Since you have some experience with that institution, what changes do you see? We've
stressed that it has cultivated a constituency among the affluent upper-middle class.
CH: The New York Times consciously targets 30 million upper-middle class and
affluent Americans. It is a national newspaper; only about 11 percent of its readership is in
New York. It is very easy to see who the Times seeks to reach by looking at its
special sections on Home, Style, Business or Travel. Here, articles explain the difficulty of
maintaining, for example, a second house in the Hamptons. It can do good investigative work,
although not often. It covers foreign affairs. But it reflects the thinking of the elites. I
read the Times every day, maybe to balance it out with your web site.
DN: Well, I hope more than balance it.
CH: Yes, more than balance it. The Times was always an elitist publication, but it
wholly embraced the ideology of neo-conservatism and neoliberalism at a time of financial
distress, when Abe Rosenthal was editor. He was the one who instituted the special sections
that catered to the elite. And he imposed a de facto censorship to shut out critics of
unfettered capitalism and imperialism, such as Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn. He hounded out
reporters like Sydney Schanberg, who challenged the real estate developers in New York, or
Raymond Bonner, who reported the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador.
He had lunch every week, along with his publisher, with William F. Buckley. This pivot into
the arms of the most retrograde forces of corporate capitalism and proponents of American
imperialism, for a time, made the paper very profitable. Eventually, of course, the rise of the
internet, the loss of classified ads, which accounted for about 40 percent of all newspaper
revenue, crippled the Times as it has crippled all newspapers. Newsprint has lost the
monopoly that once connected sellers with buyers. Newspapers are trapped in an old system of
information they call "objectivity" and "balance," formulae designed to cater to the powerful
and the wealthy and obscure the truth. But like all Byzantine courts, the Times will
go down clinging to its holy grail.
The intellectual gravitas of the paper -- in particular the Book Review and the Week in
Review -- was obliterated by Bill Keller, himself a neocon, who, as a columnist, had been a
cheerleader for the war in Iraq. He brought in figures like Sam Tanenhaus. At that point the
paper embraced, without any dissent, the utopian ideology of neoliberalism and the primacy of
corporate power as an inevitable form of human progress. The Times , along with
business schools, economics departments at universities, and the pundits promoted by the
corporate state, propagated the absurd idea that we would all be better off if we prostrated
every sector of society before the dictates of the marketplace. It takes a unique kind of
stupidity to believe this. You had students at Harvard Business School doing case studies of
Enron and its brilliant business model, that is, until Enron collapsed and was exposed as a
gigantic scam. This was never, really, in the end, about ideas. It was about unadulterated
greed. It was pushed by the supposedly best educated among us, like Larry Summers, which
exposes the lie that somehow our decline is due to deficient levels of education. It was due to
a bankrupt and amoral elite, and the criminal financial institutions that make them rich.
Critical thinking on the op-ed page, the Week in Review or the Book Review, never very
strong to begin with, evaporated under Keller. Globalization was beyond questioning. Since the
Times , like all elite institutions, is a hermetically sealed echo chamber, they do
not realize how irrelevant they are becoming, or how ridiculous they look. Thomas Friedman and
David Brooks might as well write for the Onion .
I worked overseas. I wasn't in the newsroom very much, but the paper is a very
anxiety-ridden place. The rules aren't written on the walls, but everyone knows, even if they
do not articulate it, the paper's unofficial motto: Do not significantly alienate those
upon whom we depend for money and access! You can push against them some of the time. But
if you are a serious reporter, like Charlie Leduff, or Sydney Schanberg, who wants to give a
voice to people who don't have a voice, to address issues of race, class, capitalist
exploitation or the crimes of empire, you very swiftly become a management problem and get
pushed out. Those who rise in the organization and hold power are consummate careerists. Their
loyalty is to their advancement and the stature and profitability of the institution, which is
why the hierarchy of the paper is filled with such mediocrities. Careerism is the paper's
biggest Achilles heel. It does not lack for talent. But it does lack for intellectual
independence and moral courage. It reminds me of Harvard.
DN: Let's come back to this question of the Russian hacking news story. You raised the
ability to generate a story, which has absolutely no factual foundation, nothing but assertions
by various intelligence agencies, presented as an assessment that is beyond question. What is
your evaluation of this?
CH: The commercial broadcast networks, and that includes CNN and MSNBC, are not in the
business of journalism. They hardly do any. Their celebrity correspondents are courtiers to the
elite. They speculate about and amplify court gossip, which is all the accusations about
Russia, and they repeat what they are told to repeat. They sacrifice journalism and truth for
ratings and profit. These cable news shows are one of many revenue streams in a corporate
structure. They compete against other revenue streams. The head of CNN, Jeff Zucker, who helped
create the fictional persona of Donald Trump on "Celebrity Apprentice," has turned politics on
CNN into a 24-hour reality show. All nuance, ambiguity, meaning and depth, along with
verifiable fact, are sacrificed for salacious entertainment. Lying, racism, bigotry and
conspiracy theories are given platforms and considered newsworthy, often espoused by people
whose sole quality is that they are unhinged. It is news as burlesque.
I was on the investigative team at the New York Times during the lead-up to the
Iraq War. I was based in Paris and covered Al Qaeda in Europe and the Middle East. Lewis
Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and maybe somebody in an intelligence agency, would
confirm whatever story the administration was attempting to pitch. Journalistic rules at the
Times say you can't go with a one-source story. But if you have three or four
supposedly independent sources confirming the same narrative, then you can go with it, which is
how they did it. The paper did not break any rules taught at Columbia journalism school, but
everything they wrote was a lie.
The whole exercise was farcical. The White House would leak some bogus story to Judy Miller
or Michael Gordon, and then go on the talk shows to say, 'as the Times reported .' It gave
these lies the veneer of independence and reputable journalism. This was a massive
institutional failing, and one the paper has never faced.
DN: The CIA pitches the story, and then the Times gets the verification from those
who pitch it to them.
CH: It's not always pitched. And not much of this came from the CIA. The CIA wasn't buying
the "weapons of mass destruction" hysteria.
DN: It goes the other way too?
CH: Sure. Because if you're trying to have access to a senior official, you'll constantly be
putting in requests, and those officials will decide when they want to see you. And when they
want to see you, it's usually because they have something to sell you.
DN: The media's anti-Russia narrative has been embraced by large portions of what presents
itself as the "left."
CH: Well, don't get me started on the American left. First of all, there is no American left
-- not a left that has any kind of seriousness, that understands political or revolutionary
theories, that's steeped in economic study, that understands how systems of power work,
especially corporate and imperial power. The left is caught up in the same kind of cults of
personality that plague the rest of society. It focuses on Trump, as if Trump is the central
problem. Trump is a product, a symptom of a failed system and dysfunctional democracy, not the
disease.
If you attempt to debate most of those on the supposedly left, they reduce discussion to
this cartoonish vision of politics.
The serious left in this country was decimated. It started with the suppression of radical
movements under Woodrow Wilson, then the "Red Scares" in the 1920s, when they virtually
destroyed our labor movement and our radical press, and then all of the purges in the 1950s.
For good measure, they purged the liberal class -- look at what they did to Henry Wallace -- so
that Cold War "liberals" equated capitalism with democracy, and imperialism with freedom and
liberty. I lived in Switzerland and France. There are still residues of a militant left in
Europe, which gives Europeans something to build upon. But here we almost have to begin from
scratch.
I've battled continuously with Antifa and the Black Bloc. I think they're kind of poster
children for what I would consider phenomenal political immaturity. Resistance is not a form of
personal catharsis. We are not fighting the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The corporate elites
we have to overthrow already hold power. And unless we build a broad, popular resistance
movement, which takes a lot of patient organizing among working men and women, we are going to
be steadily ground down.
So Trump's not the problem. But just that sentence alone is going to kill most discussions
with people who consider themselves part of the left.
The corporate state has made it very hard to make a living if you hold fast to this radical
critique. You will never get tenure. You probably won't get academic appointments. You won't
win prizes. You won't get grants. The New York Times , if they review your book, will
turn it over to a dutiful mandarin like George Packer to trash it -- as he did with my last
book. The elite schools, and I have taught as a visiting professor at a few of them, such as
Princeton and Columbia, replicate the structure and goals of corporations. If you want to even
get through a doctoral committee, much less a tenure committee, you must play it really, really
safe. You must not challenge the corporate-friendly stance that permeates the institution and
is imposed through corporate donations and the dictates of wealthy alumni. Half of the members
of most of these trustee boards should be in prison!
Speculation in the 17th century in Britain was a crime. Speculators were hanged. And today
they run the economy and the country. They have used the capturing of wealth to destroy the
intellectual, cultural and artistic life in the country and snuff out our democracy. There is a
word for these people: traitors.
DN: What about the impact that you've seen of identity politics in America?
CH: Well, identity politics defines the immaturity of the left. The corporate state embraced
identity politics. We saw where identity politics got us with Barack Obama, which is worse than
nowhere. He was, as Cornel West said, a black mascot for Wall Street, and now he is going
around to collect his fees for selling us out.
My favorite kind of anecdotal story about identity politics: Cornel West and I, along with
others, led a march of homeless people on the Democratic National Convention session in
Philadelphia. There was an event that night. It was packed with hundreds of people, mostly
angry Bernie Sanders supporters. I had been asked to come speak. And in the back room, there
was a group of younger activists, one who said, "We're not letting the white guy go first."
Then he got up and gave a speech about how everybody now had to vote for Hillary Clinton.
That's kind of where identity politics gets you. There is a big difference between shills for
corporate capitalism and imperialism, like Corey Booker and Van Jones, and true radicals like
Glen Ford and Ajamu Baraka. The corporate state carefully selects and promotes women, or people
of color, to be masks for its cruelty and exploitation.
It is extremely important, obviously, that those voices are heard, but not those voices that
have sold out to the power elite. The feminist movement is a perfect example of this. The old
feminism, which I admire, the Andrea Dworkin kind of feminism, was about empowering oppressed
women. This form of feminism did not try to justify prostitution as sex work. It knew that it
is just as wrong to abuse a woman in a sweatshop as it is in the sex trade. The new form of
feminism is an example of the poison of neoliberalism. It is about having a woman CEO or woman
president, who will, like Hillary Clinton, serve the systems of oppression. It posits that
prostitution is about choice. What woman, given a stable income and security, would choose to
be raped for a living? Identity politics is anti-politics.
DN: I believe you spoke at a Socialist Convergence conference where you criticized Obama and
Sanders, and you were shouted down.
CH: Yes, I don't even remember. I've been shouted down criticizing Obama in many places,
including Berkeley. I have had to endure this for a long time as a supporter and speech writer
for Ralph Nader. People don't want the illusion of their manufactured personalities, their
political saviors, shattered; personalities created by public relations industries. They don't
want to do the hard work of truly understanding how power works and organizing to bring it
down.
DN: You mentioned that you have been reading the World Socialist Web Site for some
time. You know we are quite outside of that framework.
CH: I'm not a Marxist. I'm not a Trotskyist. But I like the site. You report on important
issues seriously and in a way a lot of other sites don't. You care about things that are
important to me -- mass incarceration, the rights and struggles of the working class and the
crimes of empire. I have read the site for a long time.
DN: Much of what claims to be left -- that is, the pseudo-left -- reflects the interests of
the affluent middle class.
CH: Precisely. When everybody was, you know, pushing for multiculturalism in lead
institutions, it really meant filtering a few people of color or women into university
departments or newsrooms, while carrying out this savage economic assault against the working
poor and, in particular, poor people of color in deindustrialized pockets of the United States.
Very few of these multiculturalists even noticed. I am all for diversity, but not when it is
devoid of economic justice. Cornel West has been one of the great champions, not only of the
black prophetic tradition, the most important intellectual tradition in our history, but the
clarion call for justice in all its forms. There is no racial justice without economic justice.
And while these elite institutions sprinkled a few token faces into their hierarchy, they
savaged the working class and the poor, especially poor people of color.
Much of the left was fooled by the identity politics trick. It was a boutique activism. It
kept the corporate system, the one we must destroy, intact. It gave it a friendly face.
DN: The World Socialist Web Site has made the issue of inequality a central focus
of its coverage.
CH: That's why I read it and like it.
DN: Returning to the Russia issue, where do you see this going? How seriously do you see
this assault on democratic rights? We call this the new McCarthyism. Is that, in your view, a
legitimate analogy?
CH: Yes, of course it's the new McCarthyism. But let's acknowledge how almost irrelevant our
voices are.
DN: I don't agree with you on that.
CH: Well, irrelevant in the sense that we're not heard within the mainstream. When I go to
Canada I am on the CBC on prime time. The same is true in France. That never happens here. PBS
and NPR are never going to do that. Nor are they going to do that for any other serious critic
of capitalism or imperialism.
If there is a debate about attacking Syria, for example, it comes down to bombing Syria or
bombing Syria and sending in troops, as if these are the only two options. Same with health
care. Do we have Obamacare, a creation of the Heritage Foundation and the pharmaceutical and
insurance industries, or no care? Universal health care for all is not discussed. So we are on
the margins. But that does not mean we are not dangerous. Neoliberalism and globalization are
zombie ideologies. They have no credibility left. The scam has been found out. The global
oligarchs are hated and reviled. The elite has no counterargument to our critique. So they
can't afford to have us around. As the power elite becomes more frightened, they're going to
use harsher forms of control, including the blunt instrument of censorship and violence.
DN: I think it can be a big mistake to be focused on the sense of isolation or
marginalization. I'll make a prediction. You will have, probably sooner than you think, more
requests for interviews and television time. We are in a period of colossal political
breakdown. We are going to see, more and more, the emergence of the working class as a powerful
political force.
CH: That's why we are a target. With the bankruptcy of the ruling ideology, and the
bankruptcy of the American liberal class and the American left, those who hold fast to
intellectual depth and an examination of systems of power, including economics, culture and
politics, have to be silenced. (Republished from World Socialist Web Site by
permission of author or representative)
I'm a moderate admirer of Chris Hedges, but he is really cooking in this interview. Too much
to praise here, but his thinking that corporations, the mainstream media, and the academy can
and do successfully "game" dissent by suppression, divide and conquer, co-optation, and so
on, is spot on.
Good but not great interview with Chris Hodges: he manages to talk about an amorphous elite
without identifying any of them and not a word about Israel. So pseudo-good roally
I think this was an excellent discussion, and I would like to thank you both for having it,
and sharing it.
Among the crises effecting the United States, the one effecting us most profoundly is the
absence of any accountability for the crimes committed by our oligarchic class.
Addressing this issue is ground zero for any meaningful change.
If there is no accountability for their crimes , there will be no change.
Certainly the greatest among these crimes was(is) defrauding the nation into " a war of
aggression". which, being the supreme international crime, should be met with harsh prison
sentences for all who promoted it.
It is important for everyone to recognize just how much damage these policies have done to
the country, not just in terms of our collective morale or our constitutional mandates,not
just in terms of our international standing on universal principles of legality and justice,
but our long term economic solvency as a nation.
The "exceptionalism" of our "war of aggression" elites has completely devastated our
nation's balance sheet.
Since 9-11, our national debt has grown by a mind numbing "fourteen and a half trillion
dollars".. nearly quadrupling since 1999.
This unconscionable level of "overspending" is unprecedented in human history.
Not one lawmaker, not one primetime pundit, nor one editorialist (of any major newspaper),
has a CLUE how to deal with it.
Aside from the root atrocity in visiting mass murder on millions of innocents who never
attacked us (and never intended to) which is a horrible crime in and of itself,
There is the profound crisis , in situ , of potentially demanding that 320 million
Americans PAY FOR THE WARS OUR ELITES LIED US INTO .
This is where the rubber meets the road for our "war of aggression-ists ", gentlemen.
This is the "unanimous space" of our entire country's population on the issue of "no
taxation without representation".
WHOSE assets should be made forfeit to pay for these wars .The DECEIVERS or the DECEIVED
?
Ask "The People" ..and you will find your answer .very fast.
No wonder our "elites" are terrified to discuss this .
I agree with the general tenor of this article and would further state that in addition to
the Iraq thing which was a war crime and eliminated any shreds of legitimacy retained by the
yankee regime that the Libya overthrow and destruction, a war crime of historic proportions,
and the use of that overthrow to provide major support to the barbaric element in Syria
expose the yankee regime as an enemy of civilization with all that entails, including
questions of whether, absent any legitimacy, the regime's continued existence itself does not
constitute a major threat.
The elements in the article discussing and exposing the New York Times and its role as an
integral part of the power structure should be read and remembered by all.
How do you interpret the fixation on Russia and the entire interpretation of the
election within the framework of Putin's manipulation?
Chris Hedges: It's as ridiculous as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. It is
an absolutely unproven allegation that is used to perpetuate a very frightening accusation
-- critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism are foreign agents for Russia.
With all due respect for Chris Hedges, who is doubtless a courageous journalist and an
intelligent commentator, I would suggest that what is also and most ridiculous is the thought
that it is only agents of Israel that have suborned the neocon faction within USA's
government and 'Deep State' (controllers of MSM). Or is this OT? I don't think so, because if
we are to discuss the anti-Russia campaign realistically, as baseless in fact, and as
contrived for an effect and to further/protect some particular interests, we can hardly avoid
the question: Who or what interest is served by the anti-Russia campaign?
Who or what interest is served by anti-Russia propaganda other than, or in addition to,
just the usual MIC suspects, profiteering corporations who want to keep a supposed need for
nuclear weapons front and center in the minds of Congress? Cui bono?
To be clear: I suggest that neocon office-holders within USA's government or within the
Deep State (controllers of MSM) are foreign agents for at least three nations: the People's
Republic of China,the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the State of Israel.
(I would compare USA now with Imperial China in its declining years when it was being sold
piecemeal to all the great powers of Europe.)
Who benefits from this situation and how do they benefit? All three of these countries are
deeply involved in suborning members of Congress and others within the government of the USA,
yet none of the three is mentioned in such a connection by the MSM or by officials of the
Executive. Thus, it is beneficial to them to have suspicion thrown onto Russia and thus
investigative attention deflected from themselves. A few public figures (e.g., Philip
Giraldi) have made such allegations respecting Israel, more public figures have made such
suggestions respecting Saudi Arabia, but very few have made the allegations in the case of
the PRC.
Let's think about this in the context of history, beginning with the Vietnam War. When USA
got involved in Vietnam -- which involvement began during the days of Eisenhower/Dulles --
probably the primary interest groups that swayed USA global/foreign policy were the Vatican
and the China Lobby. The interests of these two lobbies converged in Vietnam. From the RC
side, consider an historical event that is unknown practically to any Americans under the age
of 60 or 70, namely, Operation Passage to Freedom, 1954-55.
"The period was marked by a CIA-backed propaganda campaign on behalf of South Vietnam's
Roman Catholic Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem. The campaign exhorted Catholics to flee
impending religious persecution under communism, and around 60% of the north's 1 million
Catholics obliged." (Wikipedia: Operation Passage to Freedom )
From the side of the China Lobby – avoiding the matter of JFK's planning to dump USA
involvement in Vietnam after the 1964 election – what we saw in the early years of
USA's involvement, 1965-1969, was a period in which the China Lobby could push an agenda that
included widening the Vietnam campaign into southern China, particularly to include the
tungsten mining operations supposedly owned by K.C. Wu. Tungsten at that time was considered
as having tremendous strategic value, centering on, but not limited to, its essential use in
the filaments of incandescent light-bulbs. It became clear after the Tet Offensive that the
entire strategy of reopening the Chinese civil war, capturing the tungsten, etc, could make
sense only if Chang Kai Shek's KMT would commit its troops in huge numbers, virtually all of
its troops, on the ground in Vietnam (which would have brought in huge numbers of PRC troops
on the other side) -- it became, to borrow one of Nixon's favorite phrases, "perfectly clear"
that expansion into southern China and capture of the tungsten operations there were not in
the cards. When Kissinger talked up his 'realpolitik', what he really meant was the politics
of surrendering to Beijing. So, Nixon in July 1969, recognizing that there was nothing to be
gained by the loss of life and expenditure of every form of capital, ordered first of many
troop withdrawals from Vietnam. It was all a done deal as of Kissinger taking over as
National Security Adviser, January 1969 -- everything but the tears.
Now, patience, dear reader, this is all leading up to a certain crucial event that took
place in 1971 -- namely, Kissinger's secret trip to Beijing in July (1971) to arrange for
everything regarding what amounted to a surrender to the PRC, except the end of the Vietnam
War. The documents are still unavailable as classified Top Secret or whatever, but clearly,
China had no interest in seeing an end to the Vietnam War, because both parties –
Vietnam and USA – were adversaries of China. (Let them knock each other out!) Most
likely, Zhou talked Henry into doing what he could to prolong USA's involvement in the
Vietnam War, not to shorten it. See, including between the lines, National Security
Archives:
As noted, this stuff is mostly unavailable to us, the public, but it is clear that USA's
'leaders' (Nixon and Kissinger) wanted to make kissy-kissy with Zhou Enlai, and it was all
arranged including George H. W. Bush's appointment as USA's first 'Ambassador' (in all but
name) to Beijing, and including giving China's permanent seat on the UNSC to Beijing and
otherwise selling out the old China Lobby. I call it the 'old China Lobby' because part of
what was arranged was that the old China Lobby would be taken over by the New China lobby,
complete with all the payola channels into Congress and the Deep State.
Now, I think, we arrive at today, 2017, and the failure of Trump to act on his campaign
promises to oppose China in any way. Maybe he thought about it for a minute, but he was
surrounded by neocons, who were already on the payroll of the PRC -- if not taking direct
orders from the Standing Committee of the CCP, then at least promised to avoid offending the
interests of the PRC -- on pain of losing regular paychecks from Beijing into their secret
Grand Cayman accounts.
What I would like to say to Hedges. and others like him, is just this:
THEY say that you are foreign agents for Russia? Time to use a little judo on them: time
for YOU to speak truth that THEY are foreign agents for the People's Republic of China.
And don't forget this potent phrase: YET NONE DARE CALL IT TREASON!
"The elite has no counterargument to our critique. So they can't afford to have us
around. As the power elite becomes more frightened, they're going to use harsher forms of
control, including the blunt instrument of censorship and violence."
Precisely! What makes it even worse, they will be pushing this new pretexts for control
sloppy (as in Vegas) and in a hurry. Which will make them look even more ridiculous and due
to the lack of time will force to act even more stupid, resulting in an exponential curve of
censorship, oppression and insanity. And that's there the maniacal dreams of certain forces
to start a really big war in the Middle East (with or without attacking North Korea first)
may come true.
"avoiding the matter of JFK's planning to dump USA involvement in Vietnam after the 1964
election – "
Now that's a lie. This part is a lie. Or it is carefully crafted ex post hoc mythology a
la Camelot, the Kennedy Mystique.
FACT: JFK was a Cold War Hawk and during his administration increased nuclear arms higher
than Ike and until Reagan.
JFK during his administration increased the number of "advisers" to a higher number than
Ike.
William F. Buckley pointedly asked Senator Robert Kennedy in the mid. '60′s "So, was
there any thought of the White House pulling out [of Vietnam]?
RFK: No. There never was.
If anything, had he lived to see a second term, most likely US involvement in Vietnam
would have escalated as much as under LBJ, perhaps with the same disastrous results, perhaps
not. But JFK was no peacenik dove.
Mr. Hedges comes across as a total whackjob, and makes Bill Moyers appear to be a gentle
moderate in comparison. That he thinks so highly of race man BLM supporter Cornell West
speaks volumes of naivety to the nth degree. A total cuck without even knowing it, nay,
totally appreciative of being a cuck and it appears to be his hope that one day his cardinal
sin of being white will be purged by peoples of color, who are his true moral and
intellectual betters in every step of the way.
I agree that the Russia fixation is garbage, but explaining the populist revolt without
touching on the major issue of forced demographic and cultural change through legal and
illegal immigration is dishonest. Almost everyone who isn't an immigrant or the descendant or
relative of a post-65 immigrant is pissed off beyond words about this! How did you miss the
popular response to Trump's promises to "deport them all," end birthright citizenship and
chain migration, build a wall etc.? Without those promises, he wouldn't have made it to the
debates.
I'm also not sure how welfare has been stripped. What programs aren't available?
I'm not sure how to lower black incarceration rates. Having taught in inner-city schools
and worked in the same environment in other jobs, I know that crime and dysfunction are
through the roof. I can only imagine what those communities would be like if the predators
and crooks that are incarcerated were allowed to roam free.
Chris Hedges: It's as ridiculous as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. It is
an absolutely unproven allegation that is used to perpetuate a very frightening accusation
-- critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism are foreign agents for Russia.
Is this the same Chris Hedges that wrote those articles in November 2001 that Saddam and
al Qaeda were in cahoots, which led to the illegal 2003 invasion?
Tell me Chris, did you know about the CIA pollution then or just find out lately? And
correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you also write NYT articles in the Fall of 2002 saying
that Saddam had WMD's?
Again, getting your tips from the CIA? Ever hear of 'Operation Mockingbird?"
It is the result of the transformation of the country into an oligarchy.
That's cringe-worthy.
Transformation into an oligarchy? Transformation ??? I like Hedges' work,
but such fundamental errors really taint what he sez.
The country was never transformed into an oligarchy; it began as one.
In fact, it was organized and functioned as a pluto-oligarchy right out of the box. In
case anyone has the dimness to argue with me about it, all that shows is that you don't know
JS about how the cornstitution was foisted on the rest of us by the plutoligarchs.
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for "
-Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIII, 1782 . ME 2:163
The Elites "Have No Credibility Left"
Guess what, boys and girls Why did they have any to begin with?
Where do people get their faith? WakeTF up, already!! (Yes, I'm losing it. Because even a
duumbshit goy like myself can see it. Where are all you bright bulb know-it-alls with all the
flippin answers???)
Newspapers are trapped in an old system of information they call "objectivity" and
"balance," formulae designed to cater to the powerful and the wealthy and obscure the
truth.
It's amazing that here we are, self-anointed geniuses and dumbos alike, puttering around
in the 21st century, and someone feels the necessity to point that out. And he's right; it
needs to be pointed out. Drummed into our skulls in fact.
Arrrgggghhhh!!! Jefferson again.:
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes
suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of
misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within
their knowledge with the lies of the day.
More deja vu all over again and again. Note the date.:
"This is a story of a powerful and wealthy newspaper having enormous influence And never
a day out of more than ten thousand days that this newspaper has not subtly and
cunningly distort the news of the world in the interest of special privilege.
"
Upton Sinclair, "The crimes of the "Times" : a test of newspaper decency," pamphlet,
1921
"The serious left in this country was decimated. It started with the suppression of radical
movements under Woodrow Wilson, then the "Red Scares" in the 1920s, when they virtually
destroyed our labor movement and our radical press, and then all of the purges in the 1950s.
For good measure, they purged the liberal class -- look at what they did to Henry Wallace."
Look what they did to Henry Wallace -- Are you kidding me? Wallace was a Stalinist stooge,
too treasonous even for his boss, FDR, although the bird brain Eleanor loved him. The guy was
so out of touch with reality that after the Potemkin tour of the Gulag that Stalin gave him
during WWII he came back raving about how swell it was for the lunch-bucket gang in Siberia.
He also encouraged FDR to sell out the Poles to Stalin
I find it most fascinating that none of what Hedges says is news, but even UR readers
probably think it is. Here's an antidote to that idea.
The following quote is from Eugene Kelly who's excoriating government press releases but
the criticism applies as well to the resulting press reports. I found the whole article
striking.:
Any boob can deduce, a priori, what type of "news" is contained in this
rubbish.
-Eugene A. Kelly, Distorting the News, The American Mercury, March 1935 , pp.
307-318
Hedges doesn't seem to understand that the "Resistance" is openly and obviously working FOR
Deepstate. They do not resist wars and globalism and monopolistic corporations. They resist
everyone who questions the war. They resist nationalism and localism.
Nothing mysterious or hidden about this, no ulterior motive or bankshot. It's explicitly
stated in every poster and shout and beating.
EU kowtowing to President Trump's grab for global power, has only aroused his desire to
dominate their markets, dictate their trade relations and defense spending. Trump tells the EU
that his enemies are theirs.
Trump believes in the doctrine of unilateral trade and 'deals' based on the principle that
the US decides what you sell, how much you pay, and what you buy. The giant French oil
multinational Total, which had promised to invest in Iran ,submitted to Trump and withdrew from
its agreement and turned a deaf- ear to the French President
President Macron facing US tariffs on French exports bent his knee to Trump. Paris would
support 'joint efforts to reduce overcapacities, regulate subsidies and protect intellectual
property'. Trump heard the ring of the EU begging cup and imposed tariffs and demanded more
The EU 'vowed' to retaliate to Trump's tariffs by . . . sucking up to Trump's trade war with
China. The European Commission (EC) announced it was launching a case against . . . China!
Echoing Trump's allegations that Beijing was committing the 'crime' of insisting ('forcing' in
EU rhetoric) foreign investors transfer technology as part of the basis for doing business.
Trump turned on Mexico and Canada, his flunky allies in NAFTA by slapping both with
tariffs.
Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was 'dismayed' after wining and dining Trump in an
embarrassing charm offensive, Trump ate, drank, and slapped a tariff on steel and aluminum and
threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In response Trudeau cited Canada's century and a half military support for US imperial wars.
To no avail!
For Trump, the past is the past. It's time to move ahead and for Canada to 'buy
American'.
And when Trudeau talked of imposing reciprocal tariffs on US exports, Trump countered by
threatening to break all trading agreements. At which point Trudeau proposed 'further'
negotiations.
Trump's tariff on Mexican steel and aluminum exports evoked the robust response of a true
Treaty lackey – the Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto claimed negotiations were
'continuing' and US companies were 'involved'!
The harder Trump pushed, the greater the retreat of his EU and North American 'allies'.
Facing rhetorical retaliation from the EU, Trump tweeted German Prime Minister Merkle's nose
out of shape, by threatening to slap Germany with car tariffs worth $20 billion dollars.
The German Prime Minister and the head of Volkswagen broke ranks with the EU, and forgot all
talk of retaliation and EU 'unity'. They embraced negotiations and proposed 'bilateral
trans-Atlantic agreements based on Trump's terms!
Trump is not improvising', nor is he 'erratic'. He wields power; he knows that his
competitors' spinelessness is accompanied by mutual back-stabbing and he is exploiting their
appeasement, by encouraging their belly crawling.
President Trump exhibits a 'will to power'.
Appeasement in the nineteen thirties allowed Germany to defeat and occupy Europe. President
Trump ,in the 21 st century. is defeating the EU and conquering its markets
Trump is not improvising', nor is he 'erratic'. He wields power; he knows that his
competitors' spinelessness is accompanied by mutual back-stabbing and he is exploiting
their appeasement, by encouraging their belly crawling.
As disappointed as I am with Trump on so many levels, I am still enjoying the hell out of
watching this! The Euro-muppets are so weak, pathetic and contemptible. It's just so much fun
watching them get kicked in the teeth by Trump over and over and over, each time crawling
back begging for more. BOHICA, little bitchez!
I hope their voters are watching this too. Then we might be able to bring down this
damnable 'Atlantic bridge' at the next election.
"... Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy ..."
"... The War and Peace Report ..."
"... Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy ..."
"... Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy ..."
"... If you want to organize a protest out of the eyes of the government, the worst thing you can do is use Facebook or Twitter in that effort, right? ..."
"... Look, any police department, any state security service anywhere in the world that doesn't infiltrate protest groups or, you know, activist groups that way is foolish, right? It's so easy. Facebook makes surveillance so easy. ..."
"... It's great for motivating people to get into the street, but don't be surprised if there are a couple guys with crew cuts in the crowd with you. ..."
...We speak with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of "Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects
Us and Undermines Democracy." He is a professor of media studies and director of the Center for
Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia.
AMY GOODMAN : Facebook has been at the
center of a number of controversies in the United States and abroad. Earlier this year,
Facebook removed more than 270 accounts it determined to be created by the Russia-controlled
Internet Research Agency. Facebook made that move in early April, just days before founder and
CEO Mark Zuckeberg was question on Capitol Hill about how the voter-profiling company Cambridge
Analytica harvested data from more than 87 million Facebook users without their permission in
efforts to sway voters to support President Donald Trump. Zuckerberg repeatedly apologized for
his company's actions then.
MARK ZUCKERBERG : We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a
big mistake. And it was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm
responsible for what happens here.
AMY GOODMAN : Today we spend the hour with a leading critic of Facebook, Siva Vaidhyanathan,
author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy .
He's professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the
University of Virginia. We're speaking to him in Charlottesville.
Professor, welcome to Democracy Now!
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Oh, thanks. It's good to be here.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, let's begin with this latest news. There are hearings today that the
Senate Intelligence Committee is holding, and yesterday Facebook removed these -- well, a bunch
of pages, saying they don't know if it's Russian trolls, but they think they are inauthentic.
Talk about these pages, what they mean, what research is being done and your concerns.
... ... ...
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Yeah. Look, Cambridge Analytica was a great story, right? It finally
brought to public attention the fact that for more than five years Facebook had encouraged
application developers to get maximal access to Facebook data, to personal data and activity,
not just from the people who volunteered to be watched by these app developers, but all of
their friends -- right? -- which nobody really understood except Facebook itself and the
application developers. So, thousands of application developers got almost full access to
millions of Facebook users for five years. This was basic Facebook policy. This line was lost
in the storm over Cambridge Analytica.
...You know, Steve Bannon helped run the company for a while. It's paid for by Robert
Mercer, you know, one of the more evil hedge fund managers in the United States. You know, it
had worked for Cruz, for Ted Cruz's campaign, and then for the Brexit campaign and also for
Donald Trump's campaign in 2016. So it's really easy to look at Cambridge Analytica and think
of it as this dramatic story, this one-off. But the fact is, Cambridge Analytica is kind of a
joke. It didn't actually accomplish anything. It pushed this weird psychometric model for voter
behavior prediction, which no one believes works.
And the fact is, the Trump campaign, the Ted Cruz campaign, and, before that, the Duterte
campaign in the Philippines, the Modi campaign in India, they all used Facebook itself to
target voters, either to persuade them to vote or dissuade them from voting. Right? This was
the basic campaign, because the Facebook advertising platform allows you to target people quite
precisely, in groups as small as 20. You can base it on ethnicity and on gender, on interest,
on education level, on ZIP code or other location markers. You can base it on people who are
interested in certain hobbies, who read certain kinds of books, who have certain professional
backgrounds. You can slice and dice an audience so precisely. It's the reason that Facebook
makes as much money as it does, because if you're selling shoes, you would be a fool not to buy
an ad on Facebook, right? And that's drawing all of this money away from commercially based
media and journalism. At the same time, it's enriching Facebook. But political actors have
figured out how to use this quite deftly.
AMY GOODMAN : "Every Breath You Take" by The
Police. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report .
We're spending the hour with professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, who is author of Antisocial
Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy . He's speaking to us from
Charlottesville, from the University of Virginia, professor of media studies and head of the
Center for Media and Citizenship at UVA . Your book, Antisocial Media: How Facebook
Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy .
I want to go back to the beginning of this interview, where we talked about Facebook taking
down more than 30 pages, saying that they are not authentic. We immediately got responses from
all over saying the protest against the Unite the Right rally in Washington, D.C., in August,
around the anniversary of the attacks at your university, University of Virginia, are real.
These protests against Unite the Right are real. So, this goes to a very important issue,
Professor, that you now have Facebook, this corporation, deciding what we see and what we don't
see. It's almost as if they run the telephone company and they're listening to what we say and
deciding what to edit, even if some of the stuff is absolutely heinous that people are talking
to each other about -- the idea of this multinational corporation becoming the publisher and
seen as that and determining what gets out. So, yes, there's a protest against Unite the Right.
That is very real. They've taken down one page, that might not have been real, organizing the
protest against Unite the Right. And the Unite the Right rally is supposed to be happening.
What, for example, would happen if there was a protest against Facebook, Siva?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Yeah, you can't use Facebook to protest against Facebook, by the way.
You can't even use Facebook to advertise a book about Facebook, for actually one --
AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Well, they will not allow a group or a page or an advertisement to
contain the word "Facebook." And it's not just to insulate themselves from criticism. That is a
nice bonus for them. But it's really because they don't want any sort of implication that the
company itself is endorsing any group or page or product. So, the use of the word -- look, the
only way Facebook operates is algorithmically, right? It has machines make very blunt
decisions. So the very presence of the word "Facebook" will knock a group down or knock a page
down. And so you can't use Facebook to criticize Facebook, not very effectively.
AMY GOODMAN : So what about your book, which has the word "Facebook" in it?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Right. I can't -- I can't buy ads on Facebook about it. But that's OK.
I think I'll do OK.
... ... ...
But in addition, Facebook has the ability to get hijacked, because what it promotes mostly
are items that generate strong emotions. What generates strong emotions? Well, content that is
cute or lovely, like puppies and baby goats, but also content that is extreme, content that is
angry, content that is hateful, content that feeds conspiracy theories. And this hateful, angry
conspiracy theory collection doesn't just spread because people like it. In fact, it, more
often than not, spreads because people have problems with it. If I were to post some wacky
conspiracy theory on my Facebook page today, nine out of 10 of the comments that would follow
it would be friends of mine arguing against me, telling me how stupid I was for posting this.
The very act of commenting on that post amplifies its reach, puts it on more people's news
feeds, makes it last longer, sit higher. Right? So the very act of arguing against the crazy
amplifies the crazy. It's one of the reasons that Facebook is a terrible place to deliberate
about the world. It's a really effective place if you want to motivate people toward all sorts
of ends, like getting out to a rally. But it's terrible if you actually want to think and
discuss and deliberate about the problems in the world. And what the world needs now more than
anything are more opportunities to deliberate calmly and effectively and with real information.
And Facebook is working completely against that goal.
by around 2002, Google figured out how to target ads quite effectively based on the search
terms that you had used. By about 2007, Facebook was starting to build ads into its platform,
as well. And because it had so much more rich information on our interests and our connections
and our habits, and even, once we put Facebook on our mobile phones, our location -- it could
trace us to whatever store we went into, whatever church or synagogue or mosque we went into;
it could know everything about us -- at that point, targeting ads became incredibly efficient
and effective. That's what drove the massive revenues for both Facebook and Google. That's why
Facebook and Google have all the advertising money these days, right? It's why the traditional
public sphere is so impoverished, why it's so hard to pay reporters a living wage these days,
because Facebook and Google is taking all that money -- are taking all that money, because they
developed something better than the display ad of a newspaper or magazine, frankly. But there
was just no holding back on that. As a result, once Facebook goes big, once Twitter emerges
around 2009, you start seeing --
... ... ...
Right now, there are 220 million Americans who regularly use Facebook. That's
pretty flat. But there are 250 million people in India who regularly use Facebook, so more than
in the United States. And that's only a quarter of the population of India. So, not only is the
future of Facebook in India, the present of Facebook is in India. So let's keep that in mind.
This is a global phenomenon. The United States matters less and less every day.
Yet the United States Congress has inordinate power over Facebook. The fact that its
headquarters is here, for one thing. The fact that the major stock markets of the world pay
strong attention to what goes on in our country, right? So we have the ability, if we cared to,
to break up Facebook. We would have to revive an older vision of antitrust, one that takes the
overall health of the body politic seriously, not just the price to consumers seriously. But we
could and should break up Facebook. We never should have -- excuse me -- allowed Facebook to
purchase WhatsApp. We should never have allowed Facebook to purchase Instagram. Those are two
of the potential competitors to Facebook. If those two companies existed separately from
Facebook and the data were not shared among the user files with Facebook, there might be a
chance that market forces could curb the excesses of Facebook. That didn't happen. We really
should sever those parts. We should also sever the virtual reality project of Facebook, which
is called Oculus Rift. Virtual reality has the potential to work its way into all sorts of
areas of life, from pilot training to surgeon training to pornography. In all of these ways --
to shopping -- right? -- to tourism. In all of these ways, we should be very concerned that
Facebook itself is likely to control all of the data about one of the more successful and
leading virtual reality companies in the world. That's a problem. Again, we should spin that
off. But we should also limit what Facebook can do with its data. We should have strong data
protection laws in this country, in Canada, in Australia, in Brazil, in India, to allow users
to know when their data is being used and misused and sold.
Those are necessary but, I'm afraid, insufficient legislative and regulatory interventions.
Ultimately, we are going to have to put Facebook in its place and in a box. We are going to
have to recognize, first of all, that Facebook brings real value to people around the world.
Right? There are not 2.2 billion fools using Facebook. There are 2.2 billion people using
Facebook because it brings something of value to their lives, often those puppy pictures or
news of a cousin's kid graduating from high school, right? Those are important things. They are
not to be dismissed. There are also places in the world where Facebook is the entire media
system, or at least the entire internet, places like sub-Saharan Africa, places like Myanmar,
places like Sri Lanka, and increasingly in India, Facebook is everything. And we can't dismiss
that, as well. And so, we are -- AMY GOODMAN : Well, I mean, the government works with
Facebook. For example, you talk about --
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN : -- Myanmar, Burma. It's more expensive to get internet on your phone if you're
trying to access a site outside of Facebook.
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : That's right.
AMY GOODMAN : It's free to use Facebook services on your phone.
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Right, Facebook -- use of Facebook does not count against your data cap
in Myanmar and in about 40 other countries around the world, the poorest countries in the
world. So, the poorest places in the world are becoming Facebook-dependent at a rapid rate.
This was -- Facebook put this plan forward as a philanthropic arm. And one could look at it
cynically and say, "Well, you were just trying to build Facebook customers." But the people who
run Facebook are true believers that the more people use Facebook for more hours a day, the
better humanity will be. I think we've shown otherwise. I know my book shows otherwise. And I
think we've built -- we've allowed Facebook to build this terrible monster that is taking great
advantage of the people who are most vulnerable. And it's one reason I think we should pay less
attention to what's going on.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, but, Professor Vaidhyanathan, I think also, though, the
importance of your book is that while you concentrate on Facebook, you make the point over and
over again that it's not just Facebook. I think in the conclusion to your book -- I want to
read a section where you talk about technopoly. And you say, "Between Google and Facebook we
have witnessed a global concentration of wealth and power not seen since the British and Dutch
East India Companies ruled vast territories, millions of people, and the most valuable trade
routes." And then you go on to say, "Like the East India Companies, they excuse their zeal and
umbrage around the world by appealing to the missionary spirit: they are, after all, making the
world better, right? They did all this by inviting us in, tricking us into allowing them to
make us their means to wealth and power, distilling our activities and identities into data,
and launching a major ideological movement" -- what Neil Postman, the famous NYU critic, called
technopoly. And then you go on to say, "'Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state
of mind. It consists of the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its
authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from
technology.'" You could say this about Uber, about Airbnb, about all these folks that are
saying that data and technology will save the world.
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : That's right. It's a false religion. And what we really need is to
rehumanize ourselves. That is the long, hard work. So, I can propose a few regulatory
interventions, and they would make a difference, but not enough of a difference. Fundamentally,
we have to break ourselves out of this habit of techno-fundamentalism -- trying to come up with
a technological solution to make up for the damage done by the previous technology. It's a very
bad habit. It doesn't get us anywhere. If we really want to limit the damage that Facebook has
done, we have to invest our time and our money in institutions that help us think, that help us
think clearly, that can certify truth, that can host debate -- right? -- institutions like
journalism, institutions like universities, public libraries, schools, other forms of public
forums, town halls. We need to put our time and our energy into face-to-face politics, so we
can look our opponents in the eye and recognize them as humans, and perhaps achieve some sort
of rapprochement or mutual understanding and respect. Without that, we have no hope. If we're
engaging with people only through the smallest of screens, we have no ability to recognize the
humanity in each other and no ability to think clearly. We cannot think collectively. We cannot
think truthfully. We can't think. We need to build -- rebuild, if we ever had it, our ability
to think. That's ultimately the takeaway of my book. I hope we can figure out better, richer
ways to think. We're not getting rid of Facebook. We're going to be with it -- we're going to
have it for a long time. We might even learn to use it better, and we might rein it in a little
better. But, ultimately, the big job is to train ourselves to think better.
AMY GOODMAN : So, Siva, let me ask you about WeChat in China. I mean, WeChat is everything
there. It's Yelp, PayPal, Google, Instagram, Facebook, all rolled into one. You write, "With
almost a billion users, WeChat has infused itself into their lives in ways Facebook wishes it
could."
... ... ...
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : The other part of their long-term strategy is, Mark
Zuckerberg wants to get into the Chinese market. That is the one place in the world where he
can't do business effectively. He would love to take on WeChat directly. But here's the big
difference. WeChat, like every other application or software platform in the People's Republic
of China answers to the People's Republic of China. There is constant, full surveillance by the
government. WeChat cannot operate without that. Facebook seems to be willing to negotiate on
that point. If Facebook became more like WeChat, it's very likely that around the world it
would have to cut very strong agreements with governments around the world that would allow for
maybe not Chinese level of surveillance, but certainly a dangerous level of surveillance and
licensing. And so, again, we might not sweat that in the United States or in Western Europe,
where we still have some basic civil liberties -- at least most of us do -- but people in
Turkey, people in Egypt, people in India should be very worried about that trend.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What about the issue, that's been much publicized, of the role of
Facebook and Twitter and other social media in protest movements, in dissident movements around
the world, whether it's in Egypt during the Tahrir Square protests or other parts of the
world?
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : I think one of the great tragedies of this story is that we were misled
into thinking that social media played a direct and motivating role in the uprisings in 2011.
In fact, almost nobody in Egypt used Twitter at the time. The handful of people who did were
cosmopolitans who lived in Cairo. And what they did, they used Twitter to inform the rest of
the world, especially journalists, what was going on in Egypt. That was an important function,
but it wasn't used to organize protests. Neither was Facebook, really, for the simple reason
that the government watches Facebook, right? The government watches Twitter. If you want to
organize a protest out of the eyes of the government, the worst thing you can do is use
Facebook or Twitter in that effort, right? In addition, when we think about the Arab
Spring, the alleged Arab Spring, we often focus on --
... ... ...
AMY GOODMAN : The Guardianreports
today, quote, "A trove of documents released by the city of Memphis late last week appear to
show that its police department has been systematically using fake social media profiles to
surveil local Black Lives Matter activists, and that it kept dossiers and detailed power point
presentations on dozens of Memphis-area activists along with lists of their known associates."
The report reveals a fake Memphis Police Department Facebook profile named "Bob Smith" was used
to join private groups and pose as an activist. We have just 30 seconds, Siva.
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN : Yeah. Look, any police department, any state security service
anywhere in the world that doesn't infiltrate protest groups or, you know, activist groups that
way is foolish, right? It's so easy. Facebook makes surveillance so easy.
My friends who do activism, especially human rights activism, in parts of the world that are
authoritarian, the first thing they tell people is get off of Facebook. Use other services to
coordinate your activities. Right? Use analog services and technologies. Right? Facebook is the
worst possible way to stay out of the gaze of the state. It's great for motivating people
to get into the street, but don't be surprised if there are a couple guys with crew cuts in the
crowd with you.
As part of the propaganda campaign to discredit and isolate Russia, the UK and the Ukraine,
stalwart flunkies of Washington, accused Moscow of assassinations by poison and bullets. Both
alleged victims appeared live and well in due time!
On March 4, 2018, the Prime Minister of the UK Theresa May claimed that Sergei Skripal and
his daughter Yulia were poisoned by Russian secret agents. Foreign Secretary Boris "Bobo"
Johnson called the poison, 'the most-deadly agent known to man' (sic) – Novichok.
According to "Terry and Bobo" the poison kills in 30 seconds. Two months later Sergei and Yulia
were seen taking a stroll in a park.
The fake charges were promoted by the entire Anglo-Americans mass media. The UK proceeded to
charge Putin with 'crimes against humanity' , backed additional diplomatic and economic
sanctions, increased military spending for homeland defense and urged President Trump to take
forceful action. Once the 'victims' 'rose from the dead' the media never questioned the
regime's claim of a Russian conspiracy planned at the highest level.
The UK scored a few trivial merit points from Washington, which, however, did not prevent
President Trump from slapping a double-digit tariff on British steel and aluminum exports (with
more to come)!
The Ukraine joined the line of toadies trying to secure President Trump's approval by
cooking up another Russian murder plot. This time Ukraine leaders claimed Kremlin agents
assassinated one Arkady Babchenko, an anti-Russian journalist and self-proclaimed exile in
Kiev.
On May 29, 2018, Arkady was found 'murdered' or so said the Ukraine President Petro
Poroshenko and repeated, embellished and circulated by the entire western mass media.
On May 31, a wide-eyed 'Arkady' turned up alive and claiming his 'resurrection' was a
planned plot to catch a Russian agent!
Western regimes systematic use of lies, plots and conspiracies are central to the imperial
drive for world power.
In Syria, the US accused Damascus of using poisonous gas against its own people in order to
justify NATO's terror bombing of Aleppo's civilian population!
In Libya, Obama and Clinton claimed President Gaddafi distributed Viagra to his armed forced
to rape innocent civilians, precipitating the US-EU terror bombing of the country and rape and
murder of President Ghaddafi.
The question is whether western leaders will seek papal recognition of CIA directed
resurrections to coincide with Easter?
"... There is no mystery at all. Any USA politician who critises Israel knows that the end of his career is near. An opponent is financed. As I heard a USA female politician say about Jews 'we do not like them, w're afraid of them'. ..."
"... Don't forget the assassination of JFK by the CIA and their instigators. JFK and his brother Robert, at that time Attorney General, the American Zionist Committee (AZC), the predecessor organization of AIPAC, to register as a foreign agent because the AZC funneled $5 million (more than $35 million in today's dollars) into US propaganda and lobbying operations. ..."
"... Rep. Louie Gohmert recently said that, in reference to Hillary Clinton, the FBI had discovered a "foreign entity that was not Russia was getting every single one of her 30,000 emails" and further, "They did nothing". Question is: what foreign country would get a pass from the FBI for that type of behavior? ..."
" The real mystery, if there is one, is why no American politician has either the guts or the
integrity or perhaps the necessary intelligence to substitute Tel Aviv for Moscow and to call
Israel out like we are currently calling out Russia for actions that pale in comparison to
what Netanyahu has been up to. "
There is no mystery at all.
Any USA politician who critises Israel knows that the end of his career is near.
An opponent is financed.
As I heard a USA female politician say about Jews 'we do not like them, w're afraid of
them'.
Maybe the suspicious deaths of German politicians who criticized Israel, Möllemann,
or Barschel, he would not allow Mossad to train Iranian fighter pilots in N Germany, also are
factor.
Möllemann's parachute did not open, the safety mechanism was not there, it seems,
Barschel went to Geneva to commit suicide.
Then we have the murders of Palme and Anna Lyndh. Anna Lyndh was to be next Swedish prime
minister, she wanted an EU economic boycott of Israel.
Then there is the murder of the Dutch diplomat Ferdinand Smit, in 2000, in N Mali, he
spoke Arabic fluently, Perez had sent him to Arafat. Possibly the talks were not what Perez
had expected, on top of that, his ph d thesis certainly was not liked.
Ferdinand Smit, 'The battle for South Lebanon, The radicalization of Lebanon's Shi'ites,
1982-1985', Amsterdam, 2000
Phil Geraldi's analogy should finally open at least the eyes of the last American dreamer of
the so-called special relationship between the US and its Zionist master. It's not a mystery
or a lack of guts like Phil Geraldi speculates, but 95 percent of the US Congress is in the
pocket of the Zionist Lobby, and 99 percent of the US press is in the hands of "Israel
Firster." The well-being of the Zionist regime is on the front burner not only for the
political but also for the media class. The American people count least. When anybody meddled
in the "sacrosanct" American election, which is the most corrupted election system in the
world, then the Zionist regime with its fifth column, the Zionist Israel Lobby in the US.
They are to blame and not Russia.
Don't forget the assassination of JFK by the CIA and their instigators. JFK and his
brother Robert, at that time Attorney General, the American Zionist Committee (AZC), the
predecessor organization of AIPAC, to register as a foreign agent because the AZC funneled $5
million (more than $35 million in today's dollars) into US propaganda and lobbying
operations.
JFK strongly objected to Israel's secret nuclear program. After Lyndon B. Johnson
succeeded JFK, everything the assassination was concerned, was glossed over. Johnson also
obstructed the solving of Israel's deliberate attack on the USS Liberty.
Bobby Kennedy, who resigned in 1964 as Attorney General under Johnson, could only
elucidate the assassination of his brother as President of the United States. In 1968, Bobby
Kennedy was the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. On June
5, 1968, Kennedy was deadly wounded by his alleged assassin Sirhan Sirhan, who happened to be
a Palestinian. For the American public and its political and media class, these are all real
hazards.
Giraldi is entirely right that the Zionist regime wants to fight Iran on US behalf such as
George W. did with Iraq. Although President Trump is at least rhetorically the most
subservient US President to Israel, so, he seems not as trigger happy and politically stupid
as George W. At least on his campaign trail he wanted the US out of the needless wars his
predecessors started and continued. But now Trump is not only surrounded by a bunch of
Zionists but also encompassed by the most hawkish adviser the US establishment has to offer,
John Bolton. He wishes Iran to hell like Netanyahu.
The Zionist regime is the most significant liability the US has. This regime is fed by
yearly over 3.8 billion, plus the extras in weaponry and other goodies they need to oppress
the Palestinian people or against aggression from outside that they deliberately provoke. The
largest interferers in US elections are Sheldon Adelson, Haim Saban, and the rest of the
Zionist Israel lobby who make the candidates for US Congress look like obedient doggies.
How much longer will the American People still accept this farce?
Superb article as usual on Jewish dominance of American Foreign policy MSM, I wonder just how
many Americans realised their role in so many of the nation's problems ? After all all MSM
propaganda sorry I mean news is declining and at least as far as I am aware fewer people than
ever listen or watch it. Certainly it appears that people are waking up to the lies and
hypocrisy at last.
Rep. Louie Gohmert recently said that, in reference to Hillary Clinton, the FBI had
discovered a "foreign entity that was not Russia was getting every single one of her 30,000
emails" and further, "They did nothing". Question is: what foreign country would get a pass
from the FBI for that type of behavior?
Events in Ukraine after EuroMaidan are notoriously difficult to understand.
The book is fairly recent and as such might be a useful introduction for a Western reader who
is interested in Ukrainian event, but the material should be taken with a grain of salt. The
author is way too simplistic and his views on geopolitical problems are incorrect. The idea that
" Putin's Munich speech as a declaration of war" is nonsense. Also most of the readers probably
know State Department talking points and can recognize them in the text.
. In some areas the author is clearly incompetent as the quote "In 2016, France blocked
24,000 cyber attacks targeting its military. Ukraine experienced 24, 000 cyber attacks in only
the last two months of 2016" suggests.
The author views of Russia are typical of the US-based Ukrainian diaspora. As it is pretty
much radicalized, it can be argued that it brings to Ukraine more harm then good. In short his
views on Russia can be defined as cocktail of a 40% proof Russophobia with pure Neoconservatism.
So while author analysis of "Post-Maydan" Ukrainian elite has its value, his view on Russia
should probably be discarded.
For those who also bough McFaul book it is interesting to see correlation in views as well as
differences (especially McFaul laments from page 429 to the end of the book) . McFaul was the
co-architect of the 2011-2012 color revolution in Russia; and as an Ambassador became ostracized
by Russian and later removed by Obama. For his role in "White color revolution of 2012" McFaul
was put on the travel ban list by Russians and is not allowed to travel to the country. Both
represent neoconservative stance on the events, but there are some subtle and rather interesting
differences ;-)
Some Amazon reviews as one reproduced below are actually as valuable as the book itself and
can serve as a valuable addition.
This is a large book, embracing a vast amount of research. Conclusion is that
accommodation with Putin will be very difficult.
This is a large book, embracing a vast amount of research. Kuzio provides the conclusion
to the book as the conclusion to his introduction. It is somber, but realistic:
"There cannot be a conclusion to the book because the Donbas is an unresolved conflict
that is on-going. There will be no closure of the Ukraine-Russia crisis as long as Putin is
Russian president which will be as long as he remains alive. To fully implement the Minsk-2
Accords would mean jettisoning the DNR-LNR which Putin will not do and therefore, a political
resolution to the Donbas conflict is difficult to envisage."
Having lived in Kyiv for ten years, I was witness to the latter chapters of the drama that
Kuzio describes. His account jibes with what I witnessed, and provides a coherent explanation
of the events as they unfolded. The animus against Yanukovych was universal. His blatant
theft was visible to all. Every merchant I dealt with lived in fear of his tax police. We
saw, or more often read accounts about, the depredations of the titushki on a daily
basis.
One of my key questions in 2014 was whether it might have been better to endure Yanukovych
for another couple of years, until the elections. The Ukrainian people answered for me --
they had had enough. It wasn't exactly a coup, because the opposition was not well organized
and because Yanukovych fled before he could be overthrown. But the will of the people was
clear. He had to go. Kuzio makes a strong case that if it had not happened then, Yanukovych
might have had time to secure his dictatorship in such a way that he could not be dislodged
through democratic means.
Kuzio provides the most thorough and accurate description of the language situation I have
ever read. A fact he often repeats is that a majority of the soldiers fighting against the
Russians are themselves Russian speakers. Putin's claim that he is protecting a persecuted
linguistic minority is absolute nonsense. Kuzio makes the very useful analogy between the use
of English in Ireland and that of Russian in Ukraine. It is a matter of history and
convenience.
Ukrainian is not a dialect of Russian. They are very distinct languages. Speaking Spanish,
I was able to learn Portuguese quite easily. Speaking Russian has not enabled me to master
Ukrainian. They have different alphabets and even different grammars. As a resident of Kyiv
for 10 years I have not been forced to, and almost not been in a position to speak Ukrainian.
Everybody I interact with is exactly as Kuzio describes – ardently Ukrainian, but
nevertheless Russian speaking.
A question Kuzio does not raise is the utility of a language. For better or worse, Russian
is a world language. There is a significant body of scientific literature, fiction and poetry
written in Russian. It is, or was until recently, the lingua franca of the former USSR.
A lot of information about Kuzio himself is packed in the brief lead into his chapter
entitled Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism: "Ukraine is in the hands of homosexuals and Jewish
oligarchs. Aleksandr Dugin"
Russian philosopher Dugin is one of Kuzio's major bête noire's. Kuzio's book makes
it clear that Dugin is as much of an activist as he is a philosopher. Dugin seems to have a
hand in most things anti-Ukrainian. As a philosopher he is nothing – his book
The Fourth Political Theory is the subject of the most savage pan I have ever written.
Nonetheless, he is taken seriously by the resurgent Russian nationalists and Putin
himself.
Dugin's claim that Ukraine is in the hands of homosexuals is absurd. Homosexuals are
tolerated here, but they are discrete. Most Ukrainians, though they have no love whatsoever
for Russia, are largely in sympathy with Russia's stand against the flaunting of
homosexuality. The college-educated twentysomethings whom I know seem unaware that they even
know homosexuals, though it appears to this San Franciscan that some people in our circles
must be gay.
The claim that Ukraine is in the hand of Jewish oligarchs is quite another matter. Kuzio
gives quite rational explanations for anti-Ukrainian, anti-Belarusian and anti-Russian
sentiment, a great deal of which he manifests himself. He somehow looks at anti-Semitism as a
phenomenon that is beyond explanation. I would contend that it should be regarded just as the
other anti- concepts. Especially in the former USSR, where the Jews were regarded as a
separate people in the same way as Ukrainians.
He writes about the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Fraud or hoax might be a
better word. Internet sources name the author as a certain Russian Professor S. Nilus writing
in 1901. The attractiveness of the fraud is that it coincides quite neatly with widely held
opinions about the Jews, many of which have some substance.
Going to substance, Kuzio mentions some of the major Jewish oligarchs, Kolomoisky and
Taruta, and some of the Jewish participants and Ukrainian politics: Yatsenyuk and Groisman.
He discounts the notion that President Poroshenko's father, born Valtzman, was Jewish. I had
never heard this account questioned. Other prominent Jews in Ukrainian politics/oligarchy who
come immediately to mind include Feldman and Rabinowitz. It is not that there is anything
wrong with Jews occupying dominant positions, but "simple Ivan" is not so stupid as to fail
to notice them. It is also widely perceived that the Jewish oligarchs are no better or worse
than the others, in that they put their personal interests ahead of that of the people who
elected them. Poroshenko has been a major disappointment. Kuzio writes of Kolomoisky's
support of the volunteer battalions in Donbas. True – but it was totally in line with
his business interests.
The fact that six of the seven billionaires to emerge after the collapse of the USSR were
Jewish belies Kuzio's claims that they were radically disadvantaged in the USSR. More
balanced accounts of Soviet Judaism have been written by Robert
Wistrich ,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Yuri
Slezkine .
Even a paranoid has enemies. American Jewish neocons, especially Victoria Nuland and
husband Robert Kagan, actively involved in Ukrainian politics, were strongly anti-Russian.
Though Kuzio is absolutely correct that the animus of the Ukrainian people for Yanukovych was
more than enough to power the Maidan uprising, it is also probably true that the CIA was
covertly abetting the protesters.
Kuzio's history of the Donbas and Crimea provides a very useful background to the
conflict. After the Welsh engineer John Hughes discovered coal around Donetsk in the 1880s
there was a rush to exploit it. The sparse population of Ukrainian farmers was not interested
in working the mines. The Russians brought in men from all over the Empire. A large number
were criminals who earned early release by promising to work there. Others were simply
soldiers of fortune.
Mining is dirty, dangerous and very masculine work. Kuzio reports that the history of the
Donbas always mirrored the miners themselves. Politically, it sat in the middle between the
Russians and the Ukrainians, respecting neither very much and casting its lot with whoever
appeared at the moment to be most generous to them, more often Moscow than Kyiv.
Kuzio relates that Lenin included the Donbas within the Ukrainian SSR as a built-in fifth
column, as a lever to control all of Ukraine. It remained after independence in 1991. The
Donbas' unique culture and clannishness protected its politicians from probing inquiries into
their dark pasts, such as Yanukovych' two prison terms. They would overlook his depredations
and send him to Kyiv with the idea that "he's a crook, but he's our crook."
Crimea's history is even more convoluted, but the bottom line is that it has always been
Russian speaking and did not identify greatly with Ukraine.
Kuzio reports, seemingly approvingly, that fellow author Alexander Motyl believes that
Ukraine would be better off without these insubordinate, intransigent ingrates.
In the end, Kuzio sums the origins of the crisis up very well, "The roots of the
Ukraine-Russia crisis do not lie in EU and NATO enlargement and democracy promotion, as
left-wing scholars and realists would have us believe, but in two factors. The first is
Russia's and specifically Putin's unwillingness to accept Ukrainians are a separate people
and Ukraine is an independent state with a sovereign right to determine its geopolitical
alliances. The second is Yanukovych and the Donetsk clan's penchant for the monopolization of
power, state capture, corporate raiding of the state and willingness to accommodate
practically every demand made by Moscow that culminated in treason on a grand scale. This was
coupled with a shift to Sovietophile and Ukrainophobic nationality policies and return to
Soviet style treatment of political opponents. Taken together, these policies made popular
protests inevitable in the 2015 elections but they came a year earlier after Yanukovych bowed
to Russian pressure to back away from the EU Association Agreement. These protests, in turn,
became violent and nationalistic in response to the Party of Regions and KPU's destruction of
Ukraine's democracy through the passing of draconian legislation, the president's refusal to
compromise and his use of vigilantes and police spetsnaz for political repression, torture,
and murders of protestors."
The question facing Ukraine at the moment is how to resolve the war in Donbas and how to
prevent Russia from making further incursions. Kuzio shares some very useful insights in this
regard.
Even in 2014, Russia simply did not have the resources to conquer Ukraine even if it had
had the desire. Kuzio repeatedly makes the point that the Russian doctrine of hybrid war
depends on a sympathetic or at least indifferent local populace. Even in the Donbass the
Russians have not been welcomed by a majority.
Time and again, Putin proves himself too smart by half. In his desire to maintain
deniability, he employed Chechens, Don Cossacks and "political tourists," thugs from all over
Russia to infiltrate the Donbass as separatists. Criminals are simply not suited for either
civil administration or organized warfare. After three months it was clear to Putin that he
had to use Russian troops and administrators, pushing the separatists aside. Not mentioned in
the book is the fact that a great many of the separatist leaders died mysteriously. Although
Russia attempted to frame Ukraine for "Motorola's" death, it appears to have been done by
Russian agents. Russia's trecherous duplicity neither won the war for them no fooled anybody
for very long.
Russia has thus had several handicaps in capturing and holding even the small, Russophone
and previously Russophile enclaves in Lugansk and Donetsk. The LPR and DPR would not survive
without ongoing Russian support. They have not won the hearts and minds of the people.
This calls to mind Custine's
Penguin Classics Letters From Russia on the fact that Russian duplicity and deceit made
it impossible for them ever to subvert the West. Alexandr Zinoviev summed it up exquisitely
in his satirical Homo
Sovieticus :
"Even though the West seems chaotic, frivolous and defenseless, all the same Moscow will
never achieve worldwide supremacy. Moscow can defend itself against any opponent. Moscow can
deliver a knockout blow on the west. Moscow has the wherewithal to mess up the whole planet.
But it has no chance of becoming the ruler of the world. To rule the world one must have at
one's disposal a sufficiently great nation. That nation must feel itself to be a nation of
rulers. And when it comes to it, one that can rule in reality. In the Soviet Union the
Russians are the only people who might be suited to that role. They are the foundation and
the bulwark of the Empire. But they don't possess the qualities of a ruling nation. And in
the Soviet empire their situation is more like that of being a colony for all the other
peoples in it."
This is the bottom line, something for the warmongers in Washington to keep in mind.
Ukraine and NATO cannot defeat Russia on its own doorstep, but Russia can certainly defeat
itself. For NATO to arm Ukraine, as the west did Georgia, or continue to crowd it as they are
doing in the Baltics, is counterproductive. It would be quite possible, but also quite stupid
for Russia to roll over its neighbors. The adventure in Ukraine has already been expensive,
and holding Crimea and Donbas will only become more so. Conversely, for the west to arm
countries against the Russians, as the US did in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Nicaragua, proved
quite deadly for these supposed friends. Ukraine and the west should wait Putin out just as
they waited out the USSR.
I have a couple of quibbles with the book. Kuzio uses the word "Fascist" to characterize
various Russian nationalist groups that support Putin and attack Ukrainians. Fascism died
with Hitler, 72 years ago. There should be a better term. This is especially true as Putin
terms Ukrainians as "Fascists." The word is inappropriate, old and clichéd.
Kuzio goes on to paint the rising nationalist movements in Europe as Fascist, or extreme
right wing. He excoriates Marine le Pen for taking Putin's money. There is a strong case to
be made that anti-democrats, supported by mainstream parties, have seized the European
Parliament and strongly suppressed free speech, open debate and the ability of such
nationalists to find funding. Their national banks are prejudicially closed to Farage,
Wilders, Orban, le Pen and the others. Kuzio should be more accommodating to the
nationalists. Ukraine may soon find itself forced to work with them. Moreover, they have many
good points. Generation
Identity provides a succinct summary. It is a book of the millennial generation, the
nationalists' strongest base, outlining their case against their elders, the boomers.
Ukraine is a conservative country. It is not wise to push the west's liberal agendas with
regard to immigration, homosexuality, feminism and civil rights for the Roma and at the same
time steel Ukraine for its fight against Russia. Even joining the battle against corruption
smells of hypocrisy, as evidence of political corruption emerges all over the west. It is
better to recognize the simple facts, as Kuzio does, and have a bit of faith. Ukraine managed
against stiffer odds in 2014. It will survive.
Perhaps the defining trait of neoconservatives like Max Boot is that they –
for whatever reason – feel free to opine on subjects about which they know little, if
anything.
Having no knowledge of history, cheap polemicists like Boot resort to ad
hominem attacks when confronted by serious scholars like Cohen while cable news anchors
sit by and scoff.
For twenty years the US military has been attacking people who can't fight back . .
The French historian and demographer, who in 1976 predicted the implosion of the USSR
empire ( The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere ) and
a quarter century later our own comuppance After the Empire: The Breakdown of the
American Order ) referred to these occurrences by coining the term 'theatrical
micro-militarism.' Seems fitting.
War is not an athletic contest. It is the imposition of one party's will on the other
using force. the more incapable the enemy the better. In the case of the Iraqis during
the invasion they fought back. They lost but they fought back.
Those polls now became an echo changer. As valid information is by-and-large relegated to alt-channels people who rely on MSM
can't form an independent opinion about foreign policy issues. As the USA moved to the national security state model
after 9/11 people also naturally stopped giving honest answers in the polls.
So the level of conforms simultaneously reflects the level of distrust and fear of the ruling neoliberal elite.
Also many spend too much efforts on earning a living to form a coherent view of foreign
affairs. They just regurgitate MSM. Still while they have lingering distrust and some level of
fear to ward ruling neoliberal elite, they feel that it is saver to give "politically correct
answer.
So polls became an echo chamber of government policies. like with netters to Pravda: "We
enthusiastically support the wise policies of our Politburo" no matter what is the issue.
This year, an average of all respondents – people born between 1928 and 1996 –
showed that 64 percent believe the U.S. should take an active part in world affairs, but
interesting differences could be seen when the numbers are broken down by generation.
The silent generation, born between 1928 and 1945 whose formative years were during World
War II and the early Cold War, showed the strongest support at 78 percent. Support fell from
there through each age group. It bottomed out with millennials, of whom only 51 percent felt
the U.S. should take an active part in world affairs. That's still more internationalist than
not, but less enthusiastically than other age groups.
There is some anti-Trump effect visible here: Millennials in the polling sample do identify
as less Republican – 22 percent – and less conservative than the older age groups.
But they also were the least supportive of the "take an active part" view during the Obama
administration as well.
Four sets of additional polling numbers help us dig deeper.
Military power : Only 44 percent of millennials believe maintaining superior military
power is a very important goal, much less than the other generations. They also are less
supportive of increasing defense spending. And when asked whether they support the use of
force, millennials are generally disinclined, especially so on policies like conducting
airstrikes against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, using troops if North Korea invades
South Korea, and conducting airstrikes against violent Islamic extremist groups.
American 'exceptionalism' : Millennials also were much less inclined to embrace the
idea that America is "the greatest country in the world." Only half of millennials felt that
way, compared to much higher percentages of the other three generations. In a related response,
only one-quarter of millenials saw the need for the U.S. to be "the dominant world leader." These findings track with the
2014 American National Election Study , which found that while 78 percent of silent, 70
percent of boomer and 60 percent of Gen X respondents consider their American identity as
extremely important, only 45 percent of millennials do.
Alliances and international agreements : Millennials are especially supportive of
NATO, at 72 percent. In this measure, they are close to the other generations' levels of NATO
support. Their 68 percent support for the Paris climate agreement is higher than two of the
other three age groups. And their 63 percent support for the Iran nuclear nonproliferation
agreement is even with boomers and higher than Gen X. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/XN2y2/6/
Globalization and key trade issues : Millennials' 70 percent agreement with the
statement that "globalization is mostly good for the United States" is higher than all the
other age groups. Similarly, 62 percent believe that NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Agreement) is good for the U.S. economy – well above the others surveyed. The margin is
also positive although narrower on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.
These and other polls show millennials to have a world view that, while well short of
isolationist, is also not as assertively and broadly internationalist as previous
generations.
... ... ...
By Bruce Jentleson , Professor of Public Policy and Political Science, Duke University.
Cross-posted
from Alternet .
"active part in world affairs" has, since 1893, usually meant invasions and bombing.
The US military, the costliest in history, hasn't won a war since 1946, unless Panama and
Grenada count. Korea is still a tie. Perhaps many are coming to realize that all the US
population [compared to corporations and corporation owners which show allegiance only to
money] needs is a border patrol and a coast guard. Not 'our' empire.
First, the United States has been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq for close to half the
lives of the oldest millennials, who were born in 1981
They're not counting the first Iraq War.
Only 70% in favor of "globalization" is pretty good in light of our lifetime of
propaganda. I'd be in favor of disbanding NATO and cutting the military and intelligence
budget by 80%, at least as a starting offer.
I think you have an interesting point re: "globalization" and propaganda. In school
(2000-2010ish) the term globalization was presented as a kind of antonym of isolationist. It
was portrayed as an attitude of openness to other countries, travelling internationally,
sharing in someone else culture, etc. The business/economic side was sort of introduced in
high school, but even then I remember being taught a definition of "globalization" closer to
"multiculturalism" than to one like "Imperialism". Post-high school life (and the GFC) really
drove home the true meaning of the word.
To this day I still reflexively read the word globalization as something akin to
"multiculturalism", despite knowing full well that it is anything but. From discussing
politics with other people in my generation I also get a sense that they are operating with
this weird dual (schizo?) meaning of "globalization".
Any other millennials have a similar experience with this word?
It might be nice to see the survey instruments too, to see what the questions were and how
loaded in favor of Empire or balanced (that deadly word) they were.
I didn't much like being put into the group called the Silent Generation, so I went to
wikipedia to see why it was called that.
" While there were many civil rights leaders, the "Silents" are called that because many
focused on their careers rather than on activism, and people in it were largely encouraged to
conform with social norms. As young adults during the McCarthy Era, many members of the
Silent Generation felt it was dangerous to speak out Time magazine coined the term "Silent
Generation" in a November 5, 1951 article titled "The Younger Generation" The Time article
said that the ambitions of this generation had shrunk, but that it had learned to make the
best of bad situations [?] In the United States, the generation was comparatively small They
are noted as forming the leadership of the civil rights movement as well as comprising the
"silent majority"
Ah, that's why I didn't much like it – and that was Nixon's silent majority, not me,
wikipedia – not me! But I'll forgive you because down below you put me in the group
called "The Lucky Few" and said how many of us were Really Good People. I'll buy that.
;))
Interesting results on Millennials' view of American Exceptionalism. I am not at all
surprised by those results, and I wonder if study abroad programs are having a deep impact on
young people's political views. They are seeing in detailed fashion the utter horror of
government-sponsored or managed healthcare, as well as how "socialism" in northern European
has inflicted a very favorable standard of living on most of the middle class.
Conversely, I still have to laugh at the 2012 campaign ad sponsored by Rickets of TD
Ameritrade fame that described the results of "socialism" and showed post-War Europe pictures
of old ladies on the side of the road. One of my parent's friends (now in her '80s) seemed
surprised that people in Europe didn't live shacks when shown my parent's vacation
pictures.
It's been almost eight years since Chalmers Johnson died. He was the author of, among other
works, Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of American Empire and Dismantling the
Empire . He was also a TomDispatchstalwart
and a friend . As I watch the strange destructive dance of Donald Trump and his cohorts
, I still regularly find myself wondering: What would Chal think? His acerbic wit and, as a
former consultant to the CIA, his deep sense of how the national security state worked provided
me with a late education. With no access to my Ouija board, however, the best I can do when it
comes to answering such questions is repost his classic
final piece for this site on the necessity of dismantling the American empire before it
dismantles us. He wrote it in July 2009, convinced that we had long passed from a republic to
an empire and were on the downward slide, helped along by what he called a " military
Keynesianism " run amok. He saw the Pentagon and our empire of
bases abroad as a kind of Ponzi scheme that would, someday, help bankrupt this country.
How fascinated he would have been by the first candidate to ride an
escalator into a presidential contest on a
singular message of American decline. ("Make American great again !") And how much
more so by the world that candidate is creating as president, intent as he seems to be, in his
own bizarre fashion, on dismantling
the
system of global control the U.S. has built since 1945. At the same time, he seems prepared
to
finance the U.S. military at levels, which, even for Johnson, would have been eye-popping,
while attempting to
sell American arms around an embattled planet in a way that could prove unique. What a
strange combination of urges Donald Trump represents, as he teeters constantly at the
edge of war ("fire and fury like the world has never seen"),
more war ("never, ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer consequences the
likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before"), and
peace in our time. Amid all the strangeness, don't forget the strangeness of a mainstream
media that has gone bonkers
covering this president as no one has ever been covered in the history of the universe
(something that would undoubtedly have amazed Chal).
Think of what President Trump has launched as the potential imperial misadventure of a
lifetime, while checking out Chal's thoughts from so long ago on a subject that should still be
on all our minds.
"... I agree with the caricature nature of much of this. I don't think there will be a next target. The MIC has become bloated while Iran, Syria, Russia, China are turning out true fighters as well as stronger economic planning. ..."
The United States seems ready to give up on Afghanistan.
After the World Trade Center came down the U.S. accused al-Qaeda, parts of which were hosted
in Afghanistan. The Taliban government offered the U.S. to extradite al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin
Laden to an Islamic country to be judged under Islamic law. The U.S. rejected that and decided
instead to destroy the Afghan government.
Taliban units, supported by Pakistani officers, were at that time still fighting against the
Northern Alliance which held onto a few areas in the north of the country. Under threats from
the U.S. Pakistan, which sees Afghanistan as its natural depth hinterland, was pressed into
service. In exchange for its cooperation with the U.S. operation it was allowed to extradite
its forces and main figures of the Taliban.
U.S. special forces were dropped into north Afghanistan. They came with huge amounts of cash
and the ability to call in B-52 bombers. Together with the Northern Alliance they move towards
Kabul bombing any place where some feeble resistance came from. The Taliban forces dissolved.
Many resettled in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda also vanished.
A conference with Afghan notables was held in Germany's once capital Bonn. The Afghans
wanted to reestablish the former Kingdom but were pressed into accepting a western style
democracy. Fed with large amounts of western money the norther warlords, all well known
mass-murderers, and various greedy exiles were appointed as a government. To them it was all
about money. There was little capability and interest to govern.
All these U.S. mistakes made in the early days are still haunting the country.
For a few years the Taliban went quiet. But continued U.S. operations, which included random
bombing of weddings, torture and abduction of assumed al-Qaeda followers, alienated the people.
Pakistan feared that it would be suffocated between a permanently U.S. occupied Afghanistan and
a hostile India. Four years after being ousted the Taliban were reactivated and found regrown
local support.
Busy with fighting an insurgency in Iraq the U.S. reacted slowly. It then surged troops into
Afghanistan, pulled back, surged again and is now again pulling back. The U.S. military aptly
demonstrated its excellent logistic capabilities and its amazing cultural incompetence. The
longer it fought the more Afghan people stood up against it. The immense amount of money spent
to 'rebuild' Afghanistan
went to U.S. contractors and Afghan warlords but had little effect on the ground. Now half
the country is back under Taliban control while the other half is more or less contested.
Before his election campaign Donald Trump spoke out
against the war on Afghanistan. During his campaign he was more cautious pointing to the danger
of a nuclear Pakistan as a reason for staying in Afghanistan. But Pakistan is where the U.S.
supply line is coming through and there are no reasonable alternatives. Staying in Afghanistan
to confront Pakistan while depending on Pakistan for logistics does not make sense.
Early this year the U.S. stopped all aid to Pakistan. Even the old Pakistani government was
already talking
about blocking the logistic line. The incoming prime minister Imran Khan has campaigned for
years against the U.S. war on Afghanistan. He very much prefers an alliance with China over any U.S.
rapprochement. The U.S. hope is that Pakistan will have to ask the IMF for another bailout and
thus come back under Washington's control. But it is
more likely that Imran Khan will ask China for financial help.
Under pressure from the military Trump had agreed to raise the force in Afghanistan to some
15,000 troops. But these were way to few to hold more than some urban areas. Eighty percent of
the Afghan people live in the countryside. Afghan troops and police forces are incapable or
unwilling to fight their Taliban brethren. It was obvious that this mini-surge
would fail :
By most objective measures, President Donald Trump's year-old strategy for ending the war in
Afghanistan has produced few positive results.
Afghanistan's beleaguered soldiers have failed to recapture significant new ground from
the Taliban. Civilian deaths have hit historic highs. The Afghan military is struggling to
build a reliable air force and expand the number of elite fighters. Efforts to cripple
lucrative insurgent drug smuggling operations have fallen short of expectations. And U.S.
intelligence officials say the president's strategy has halted Taliban gains but not reversed
their momentum, according to people familiar with the latest assessments.
To blame Pakistan for its support for some Taliban is convenient, but makes little sense. In
a recent
talk John Sopko, the U.S. Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR),
made a crucial point:
"We keep referring to Pakistan as being the key problem. But the problem also was that the
Afghan government at times was viewed very negatively by their local people and what you
really need is to insert a government that the people support, a government that is not
predatory, a government that is not a bunch of lawless warlords," observed Sopko.
He went on to say that the U.S. policy of pouring in billions of dollars in these unstable
environments contributed to the problem of creating more warlords and powerful people who
took the law into their own hands.
"In essence, the government we introduced, particularly some of the Afghan local police
forces, which were nothing other than warlord militias with some uniforms on, were just as
bad as the terrorists before them," said Sopko ...
This was the problem from the very beginning. The U.S. bribed itself into Afghanistan. It
spent tons of money but did not gain real support. It bombed and shot aimlessly at 'Taliban'
that were more often than not just the local population. It incompetently fought 17
one-year-long wars instead of a consistently planned and sustained political, economic and
military campaign.
After a year of another useless surge the Trump administration decided to pull back from
most active operations and to bet
on negotiations with the Taliban:
The shift to prioritize initial American talks with the Taliban over what has proved a futile
"Afghan-led, Afghan-owned" process stems from a realization by both Afghan and American
officials that President Trump's new Afghanistan strategy is not making a fundamental
difference in rolling back Taliban gains.
While no date for any talks has been set, and the effort could still be derailed, the
willingness of the United States to pursue direct talks is an indication of the sense of
urgency in the administration to break the stalemate in Afghanistan.
...
Afghan officials and political leaders said direct American talks with the Taliban would
probably then grow into negotiations that would include the Taliban, the Afghan government,
the United States and Pakistan.
Afghans have continued to burn for the last four decades in the fire of imposed wars. They
are longing for peace and a just system but they will never tire from their just cause of
defending their creed, country and nation against the invading forces of your
warmongering government because they have rendered all the previous and present historic
sacrifices to safeguard their religious values and national sovereignty. If they make a deal
on their sovereignty now, it would be unforgettable infidelity with their proud history and
ancestors.
Last weeks talks between the Taliban and U.S. diplomats took place in Doha, Qatar.
Remarkably the Afghan government was excluded. Despite the rousing tone of the Reuters
report below the positions that were exchanged
do not point to a successful conclusion:
According to one Taliban official, who said he was part of a four-member delegation, there
were "very positive signals" from the meeting, which he said was conducted in a "friendly
atmosphere" in a Doha hotel.
"You can't call it peace talks," he said. "These are a series of meetings for initiating
formal and purposeful talks. We agreed to meet again soon and resolve the Afghan conflict
through dialogue."
...
The two sides had discussed proposals to allow the Taliban free movement in two provinces
where they would not be attacked, an idea that President Ashraf Ghani has already rejected .
They also discussed Taliban participation in the Afghan government.
"The only demand they made was to allow their military bases in Afghanistan ," said the
Taliban official.
...
"We have held three meetings with the U.S. and we reached a conclusion to continue talks for
meaningful negotiations," said a second Taliban official.
...
"However, our delegation made it clear to them that peace can only be restored to Afghanistan
when all foreign forces are withdrawn ," he said.
This does not sound promising:
In a first step the Taliban want to officially rule parts of the country and use it as a
safe haven. The Afghan government naturally rejects that.
Participation of the Taliban in the Afghan government is an idea of the Afghan president
Ghani. It is doubtful that this could be successfully arranged. Norther Alliance elements in
the Afghan government, like the 'chief executive' Abdullah Abdullah, are unlikely to ever
agree to it. The Taliban also have no interest to be 'part of the government' and to then get
blamed for its failures. Their February letter makes clear that they want to be the
government.
The U.S. wants bases in Afghanistan. The Taliban, and Pakistan behind them, reject that
and will continue to do so.
It is difficult to see how especially the last mutually exclusive positions can ever be
reconciled.
The Taliban are ready to accept a peaceful retreat of the U.S. forces. That is their only
offer. They may agree to keep foreign Islamist fighters out of their country. The U.S. has no
choice but to accept. It is currently retreating to the cities and large bases. The outlying
areas will fall to the Taliban. Sooner or later the U.S. supply lines will be cut. Its bases
will come under fire.
There is no staying in Afghanistan. A retreat is the only issue the U.S. can negotiate
about. It is not a question of "if" but of "when".
The Soviet war in Afghanistan took nine years. The time was used to build up a halfway
competent government and army that managed to hold off the insurgents for three more years
after the Soviet withdrawal. The government only fell when the Soviets cut the money line. The
seventeen year long U.S. occupation did not even succeed in that. The Afghan army is corrupt
and its leaders are incompetent. The U.S. supplied it with expensive and complicate equipment
that
does not fit Afghan needs . As soon as the U.S. withdraws the whole south, the east and
Kabul will immediately fall back into Taliban hands. Only the north may take a bit longer. They
will probably ask China to help them in developing their country.
The erratic
empire failed in another of its crazy endeavors. That will not hinder it to look for a new
ones. The immense increase
of the U.S. military budget, which includes 15,000 more troops, points to a new large war.
Which country will be its next target?
thanks b.. it would be good if the exceptional warmongering nation could go home, but i am
not fully counting on it.. i liked your quote here "The U.S. military aptly demonstrated its
excellent logistic capabilities and its amazing cultural incompetence." that is ongoing..
unless the usa leaves, i think the madness continues.. i suspect the madness will continue..
the only other alternative is the usa, with the help of their good buddies - uk, ksa, qatar,
uae and israel - will keep on relocating isis to afgan for future destabilization.. i watched
a video peter au left from al jazzera 2017 with isis embedded in the kush mtns... until the
funding for them ceases - i think the usa will have a hand in the continued madness... if the
usa was serious about ending terrorism they would shut down the same middle east countries
they are in bed with.. until that happens, i suspect not much will change.. i hope i am
wrong..
I dont believe it for a second. Especially with Iran looming as a potential target. US is
staying in Afghanistan also to counter China , keep opium production high and of course there
is the TAPI pipeline to "protect" that is backed by US as an alternative to the
Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline that would have tapped Iran's South Pars gas field. A hostile or
unfriendly Pakistan is just one more reason to stay
Just like US will never leave Iraq or Syria, they will stay in Afghanistan. There will be
ebbs and flows, and talk of disengagement from time to time primarily for domestic
consumption, but thats all it is IMO.
This is a fine recap of the situation. It's much too optimistic. The classic method of
American negotiation and warfare like the Roman before them is to divide and conquer. It was
very successful against the American Indians.
If the Taliban get free movement in two provinces, the Americans will demand an end to
attacks on their bases, their soldiers and their agents elsewhere in Afghanistan. Just as the
Iroquois Confederation enjoyed special privileges in what is now Upper New York for their
help against the French, the Taliban will have special privileges in their two provinces
while the Americans consolidate in the rest of Afghanistan. When the Americans feel strong
enough, just as with the Iroquois, they will break the previous treaties.
After the Revolutionary War, the ancient central fireplace of the League was re-established
at Buffalo Creek. The United States and the Iroquois signed the treaty of Fort Stanwix in
1784 under which the Iroquois ceded much of their historical homeland to the Americans,
which was followed by another treaty in 1794 at Canandaigua which they ceded even more land
to the Americans./b
(...continuation of the comment above, somehow got posted when I pressed the return
key)
Even the Soviet Union and Russians were unable to make the American respect their
commitments. The United States reneged on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as soon as it
could in 2001 (Russia was on its knees), reneged on its commitments not to expand NATO east
and has built ballistic missile bases all around Russia which seem to be preparation for a
pre-emptive nuclear strike/war against Russia.
The Afghanis (foolish to call them the Taliban, they are traditional Afghani patriots)
have always been wise enough to annihilate any invader to the last man. This salutary policy
keeps invaders out for decades at a time. The Taliban have a long row to hoe. It took almost
a hundred years and several massacres to finally curb British ambitions on Afghanistan (1838
to 1919). Afghanis' best hopes rely on forging tight alliances with Pakistan and China,
squeezing the Americans out completely right now.
The Americans burnt their bridges with the Russian already and are in the process of
burning their bridges with Pakistan while losing influence with China. The US is very short
of options right now. It's the ideal time for Afghanis to reclaim the whole territory, not
leaving a single American soldier or airbase operational. They'll need a technically
sophisticated ally to help them clear their skies of US drones. This role might appeal to
either the Russians or the Chinese. As a training exercise, extended anti-drone warfare could
be very useful.
What a great success the US achieved in destroying Yugoslavia. Murdering thousands went
almost unnoticed. It was able to break up the country into a number of tiny, impoverished
nations and got to put a US MIC Base in most of them.
You did not mention isis-k in your analysis. Its active mostly in eastern afghanistan in
areas close to or adjacent to Pakistan (it is also controlls a small area in Jawzjan, in
northern afghanistan). Many fighters are formerly pakistani taliban(not to be confused with
afghan taliban who are simply called taliban). Before isis-k appeared in afghanistan, the
areas which it now controls had pakistani taliban presence. TTP, or tehreek e taliban
pakistan was facilitated by afghan ggovernment to settle down in these areas after they fled
pakistan when its military launched a large scale offensive, Operation Zarb e Azb. The afghan
government planned to use them to pressurize Pakistan, basically to use them as a bargaining
chip. They operate openly in eastern afghanistan, but many of them joined isis-k.
Russians estimate isis-k's strength to be between 10k to 12k, although it might be a bit
inflated number. From here they plan attacks against afghanistan and pakistan alike, mostly
suicide bombings as of now. They have had fierce clashes with afghan taliban in eastern
Afghanistan but have held their territory for now. Afghan army simply doesn't have the
capacity in those areas to confront them. It was here that MOAB was dropped but as expected
against a guerrilla force, it was ineffective in every way. But it did make headlines and has
helped US in giving an impression its seriously fighting ISIS. The reports of unmarked
helicopters dropping god-knows-what have also been coming from these areas. Hamid karzai
mentioned that and also maria zakharova asked afghan gov. and US to investigate that which
shows these are not just rumors. Recently intelligence chiefs of Pakistan, russia, iran and
china as well(if i remember correctly) met in islamabad to discuss isis-k in afghanistan, no
details other than this of this meeting are available.
In Northern afghanistan, in Jawzjan, fierce clashes broke out between taliban and isis-k
after taliban commander in thiae areas was beheaded. ISIS-k has been beaten up pretty badly
there but clashes are ongoing. Many areas have been cleared but fighting is still ongoing. An
interesting aspect is taliban sources claiming that whenever they come close to a decisive
victory, they have to stop operations becauae of heavy bombardment by US planes. They made
similar claims when fighting daesh in eastern afghanistan. Anyway in a few days isis presence
will probably be finished in Jawzjan. ISIS fighters who have survived have done so by
surrendering to afghan forces. They will probably end up back in eastern afghanistan.
Africa. US AFRICOM has a huge playground, tactics won't change and logistics is far
easier.
There also will be a long Hybrid wr against Iran, but that will be much like the early
days of Syria. Proxies as "moderates". Insurgents, not US troops. ISIS and AQ crazies will be
on the ground.
The big money will go into Africa. You want to see Trillions "spent"? It will be
Africa.
The decision to invade Afghanistan had been taken before the 9/11 false flag coup. Had
nothing much to do with the CIA's al-Qaeda mercenaries.
As I understood it, there were many agendas at work: testing weapons and making money for
the MIC; controlling the lucrative (how many hundreds of billions of dollars ?) opium/ heroin
production/profiteering; military bases relating to Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan and other
...stans, etc; control of oil and gas pipelines; access to increasingly valuable and sought
rare earth minerals; proximity to oil and gas actual and potential.
More generally, subjugating Afghanistan was a necessary part of the 'full spectrum
dominance' 'we will rule the earth' doctrine, dear til recently to too many mad hatters, and
still evoking a misty eyed longing in some, no doubt.
Ahhh...the US produces some of the lamest euphemisms approved for all audiences; such as
"Afgahn Security Forces." So sterile, innocuous. And benign. How could anyone question their
plight? (We did pick up the game a little bit in Syria with "Free Syrian Army..." Can I get a
hell yeah?) All the people hearing this in the US could do was shrug their shoulders and
speak, "I guess I should support them." That is, of course, after we took out OBL and the
mission in Afghanistan was a little more opaque. Just a little bit. Anyways...Hell, yeah! Get
some!
Thanks b for the brief history. Really invaluable.
Afghani patriots, resisting invaders since 330 BCE... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_Afghanistan
The US military, the planet's costliest losingest military since 1946. The US military, like
its munitions manufacturers, doesn't win but it does get paid and is why we can have nice
things like oh, decent health care. Lack of health insurance kills more Americans than the
Russians ever will. The Russians aren't the enemy, Trump is. Lobbyists are too.
I haven't read anything about Blackwater wanting to replace the U.S. Military in Afghanistan.
Of course, the U.S. Treasury would continue to shovel those pallet loads of newly printed
$100.00 bills down the Blackwater hole. Any odds this might go forward from anyone's opinion?
robin cook before he was murdered stated that alqueda was a cia data base.
i believe bresinski knew obl as tim osman who was later killed by cia mi6 man omar blah blah
sheikh bhutto of pakisyan was assasinated after spilling the beans about sheikh.
christopher bolleyn on you tube will give you the sp on what 9 and 11 was shirley we are
past the point of the offecal theory.
the turd burger that is the official theory is clearly the worst and lowest grade of all the
conspiracy theories.
the taliban where in barbera bushes texas talking lithium opium and oil pipelines with the
paedo bush crime syndicate before 9 and 11
marvin bush ran security at the twin towers
christopher bollyn is the go to man in these regardings
The US wants peace talks but wants to keep its bases in Afghanistan. US under Trump has built
new bases in Syria, Iraq, Kuwait.
SDF have been talking with Syrian government, and US in Talks with Taliban. Are these just
moves to buy the US a little time until it launches the war Trump has been building the US
military up for.
isis is israeli counter gang with support of usa usa and the city of
london,ukrainian,polish,uk sas,cia,kiwi,aussie,jordanian and donmeh satanic house of
saud.
talking of isis as if it is real entity rather than a frank kitson gang counter gang and
pseudo gang is polluting the well.
who has been providing extraction helicopters from syriana for the last 14 months.
who has been washing these bearded devils operating on them in kosher field hospitals making
them well shiny and new
who?
scchhhhh you know who
We are concerned about reports regarding the use of helicopters without any identification
marks in many parts of Afghanistan that are delivering terrorists and arms to the Afghan
branch of this terrorist organisation. We believe that reports to this effect made by Afghan
officials should be thoroughly investigated."
- Of course. The US wants to keep its bases in Afghanistan. Surprise, surprise.
In 2002 when ABC corporate propaganda showed Special Forces rounding up village
Hajji, the writing was on the wall. Afghanistan is a Holy War run by incompetents for a profit.
The only question is when will the Westerners withdraw from the Hindu Kush and how disastrous
it will be. Americans cannot afford the unwinnable war's blood and treasure. The US's Vietnam
War (1956 to 1975) ended for the same reasons. That war ushered in the Reagan Revolution and
the Triumph of the Oligarchy. The consequences of the breakup of the Atlantic Alliance will be
even more severe.
In 2002 when ABC corporate propaganda showed Special Forces rounding up village Hajji, the
writing was on the wall. Afghanistan is a Holy War run by incompetents for a profit. The only
question is when will the Westerners withdraw from the Hindu Kush and how disastrous it will
be. Americans cannot afford the unwinnable war's blood and treasure. The US's Vietnam War
(1956 to 1975) ended for the same reasons. That war ushered in the Reagan Revolution and the
Triumph of the Oligarchy. The consequences of the breakup of the Atlantic Alliance will be
even more severe.
@uncoy.. i basically see it like you, however another proxy war involving usa-russia-china
sounds like a running theme now...
@13 bilal.. good post.. i agree about the analysis missing much on isis presence in afgan
as @6 jr also points out.. i think it is a critical bit of the puzzle.. it appears the usa is
using isis as a proxy force, as obama previously stated with regard to syria... the usa just
can't seem to help themselves with their divide and conquer strategy using isis as part of
it's methodology... it's exact opposite of what they profess..
@18 eugene.. isn't blackwater or whatever they're called now - headquartered in uae?
perfect place for them, lol... right on top of yemen, afgan, and etc. etc.. if isis can't do
the job for the west thru their good friends ksa, uae - well, then maybe they can pay a bit
more and get blackwater directly involved too..
Trump is serious when he said he would talk to anybody. The CIA is alleged to have been
stirring the pot with Islamic militants prior to the Soviet invasion when the country went
full socialist. I would suspect the Russians had a hand in that in 1978. US intelligence was
said to be helping along the backlash to socialism by Islamic militants back then in 1978.
The CIA station chief was promptly assassinated the next year.
Obviously you could dump 600,000 NATO and US soldiers into the country and not control it
short of executing every Muslim. What a foolish endeavor but what would you expect from these
buffoons and their death cult? These human sacrifices are holy to them. They worship blood,
death, power and money.
With their loss in Syria the NEOCONS can now make peace with the Taliban and use them and
ISIS to push into old Soviet Central Asia in an attempt to deny them what the Anglo American
Zionist alliance cannot have at this time, control of the commodities.
China will slide right in and take it all at some point once exhaustion sets into place.
Even the Brits knew when it was time to leave India and their Middle Eastern holdings. They
realized the costs of containment would wipe out their country.
No he doesnt, along with Israel and neocons. There was already nuclear deal, and US was
out of "all this crap", so why introduce Gordian Knot if he doesnt want it?
What Trump demands is Iran's surrender. 'b discussed it at length some time ago, the list
of Trump's demands is completely ridiculous and the goal is Iran as a client state.
From its side, Iran is refusing to even meet Trump, two reasons: 1) If Iran agrees to
meet, it would mean they agree to renegotiate the deal, which they dont. 2) US word isnt
worth a toilet paper, so any negotiations is meaningless. Plus US list of demands makes even
endeavor to negotiate dead from the get go.
Congress went along with the Pentagon's 7 countries in 5 years plan. No investigation of 9/11
or even consideration of Ron Paul's bringing in an old idea of Letters of Marque and
Reprisal.
As to the US leaving the warlords in power to continue opium production, etc, Van Buren (We
Meant Well book) said some of the same happened in Iraq with some sheikhs still holding power
in local areas. General Garner looked forward to going in to rebuild (and was promising quick
elections) but was shocked to see no protection of ministries (except oil) which were looted
and burned. And then Bremer was put in charge. Complete mismanagement of the war, the
aftermath, etc. Like someone once said, if they were doing these things at random you would
expect them to get it right once in a while.
The Kunduz Airlift which allowed Pakistan a corridor to fly out Pak officials, Taliban,
and possibly al Qaeda was yet another snafu like paying Pakistan to supposedly block any
escape from their side of Tora Bora only to have a long convoy leave at night. It made one
wonder about the US supposed air superiority/domination. Again, complete mismanagement.
A comparison to the end situation in VietNam 1975 is apt.
Trump meeting Rouhani. Trump saays he wants a better deal. The nuke agreement took years to
negotiate and Iran accepted far more stringent inspections than any other country signed up
NPT. There is nothing more for Iran to negotiate other than to give away their
sovereignty.
The offer of a meeting by Trump is more along the line of "we tried to avoid war".
The US under Trump have scrapped the nuke agreement and made demands that are impossible for
Iran to meet without giving away its sovereignty.
Erik Prince's plan for fighting in Afghanistan.
He presented it to the WH. Military rejected it.
He is no longer Blackwater-connected.
Frontier Services Group Ltd. is his new military-security services corp.
He has extensive contracts with the Chinese government and their SOEs overseas.
did you see General Souleimani answer's to Trump rabid tweet
it went like this
Our president doesnt lower himself to answer someone like.I, a soldier answer someone like
you, you re someone who speaks in the vocabulary of a cabaret owner and a gambling house
dealer.(paraphrasing saker has the video on his site)
and then he went on to describe how your cowad troops wore adult diapers in Afghanistan
and Iraq
China will slide right in and take it all at some point once exhaustion sets into place.
dltravers @28
No. China, being development-oriented rather than imperialist, will leave Afghanistan
alone. China and Russia, but especially China, requires an Afghanistan that is not a
U.S.-controlled terrorist base. Because China needs the oil/gas link that it is building
through Pakistan to access Gulf energy resources, and that energy corridor would be the
primary target of U.S.-hired mercenaries ('terrorists').
How Afghanistan manages itself in the post-U.S. era is Afghan business, but it will almost
certainly involve the Pashtun majority (in the form of the 'Taliban') retaking power in Kabul
but with the traditional huge amounts of autonomy for the provinces. That arrangement reduces
pressure by Pashtun nationalists in Pakistan against Pakistan's government, and in general
seems to be the long-term stable set up, and stability is what China has to have in
Afghanistan.
Now is the time with perfect China partner Khan and the Pakistan military firmly in power.
Not instant, but over the next two years I think we'll see the Taliban's fighting capacity
hugely improve, with transfers of supplies, weapons and intelligence from Pakistan. It would
be very smart for Trump to get out in 2019. History is going to accelerate in that
region.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I worry a lot about Venezuela. See, it's a perfect
fit for the U.S. economy. U.S. shale oil is way too light to be useful, while Venezuelan oil
is way too heavy to be useful. They are destined for each other, i.e. to be mixed into a
blend that would be a good fit U.S. refineries. Plus, Venezuela is very import-dependent and
thus would make for a good vassal. It also has a rabid capitalist class that will do anything
-- any kind of atrocity or false flag -- to return to the good old days of exploitation. "But
Venezuela has a lot of arms!", I hear you counter. True, but the people are severely
demoralized because of the extreme economic hardship. Think of the USSR in late 80s/early
90s. It had the most powerful military in the world, and yet people were so demoralized and
disillusioned with the old system that they simply chose not to defend it. Same thing may
happen in Venezuela. After Colombia has signed peace accords with FARC, U.S. has been
steadily increasing its military presence in Colombia. I think there is a very real
possibility of a naval blockade combined with supply lines/air raids from Colombia supporting
the "Free Venezuelan Army" assembled from Venezuelan gangs and revanchist capitalists and
foreign mercenaries. It would be logistically impossible for Russia or China to provide
military help to far-away Venezuela. Neighbors will not come to the aid of Venezuela either
as there is a surge of pro-U.S. right-wing governments in the region.
Any moves the U$A makes will have to be approved according to which natural resources their
corporate masters covet at any particular moment. Lithium and other rare earth minerals,
strategic importance, whatever the corporate form needs to stay on top globally, will dictate
what the empire does.
Leave Afghanistan? I very much doubt it.
DJT will do what the "puppet masters" desire. Just like all his predecessors.
'Correction': No reliable census has been done in decades, but I don't think the Pashtun are
the majority in Afghanistan. They
are by far the largest minority however. British 'divide and rule' stategists long ago
deliberately separated them into Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Venezuela and Iran have two things in common. Both have large oil reserves and neither
recognize Israel.
Trump's wars will be about destroying enemies of Israel, and at the same time, achieving
global energy dominance.
I've posted this before. I met a Taliban leader and his two guards in a brutal area during
the Hearts and Minds Schtick, preparatory to Cheney getting all the oil and gas, and copper
and iron and coming coal lease awards.
He was a nice guy, the Taliban leader. His guards looked at me with absolute death in
their eyes. Not wanting them to hear him, as we finished our tea, the Taliban leader leaned
close, then whispered, 'I love your Jesus, but I hate your Crusaders.'
And I take issue with the US 'incompetence' meme. Ever since Cheney hosted the Taliban in
Texas in 1998, trying to get a TAPI pipeline, the US has deliberately and cunningly taken
over the country, assassinated the local-level leadership, and installed their foreign Shah,
first Karzai, then Ghani.
In that time of occupation, 18 years, Pentagon MIC disappeared TRILLIONS in shrink-wrapped
pallets of $100s, and ballooned from $340B a year, to now Trump is saying $840B a year.
That's not incompetence. Just the opposite.
Now, to honor my Afghan friends, who love to joke even after 35+ years of machine warfare,
a joke I wrote in their honor:
Ring ring ring ring
"Office of the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan!"
"BRRZZZBRRZZZV..."
"Hold please."
President Reagan, it's the Iranian ambassador!"
"Well hello Mr. Assinabindstani, what can I do for you?"
"BRRZZZBRRZZZV..."
"Well I'll get my staff right on it."
[Intercomm clicks]
"Hey Ollie, the Ayatollah wants more guns! Step on it!"
Actually, the British paid an annual tithe-tribute the the Afghan king to stop raiding
their India holdings, and agreed to a neutral zone between them. Then when the British pulled
out, they declared the neutral zone as Pakistan and shrunk India away from Pashtun territory
to create a bigger divide. The Afghan leaders had no say in the matter. I believe Baluchistan
was also carved away. At one time, Afghan control extended from Persia to the Indus Valley.
There is no way to defeat a nation of warriors who created a kingdom that vast, while William
the Conqueror was still running around in bear skin diapers.
@41 'Afghan control extended from Persia to the Indus Valley.'
You are probably referring to the Khalji Dynasty, a brutal bunch, who ruled India from
1290 to 1320 by which time William the Conqueror was long dead. You would be a lot more
credible if you got your history right.
IMHO the military Budget increase, and what an increase it is!
is part of worsening an already outrageous situation to reach a caricatural point. Typical of
trump repeated special "art".
Of course Nobody in USA, no President can go against the MIC and Pentagon.
But money is cheap when you print it.
It is sugaring the intended shrinking of foreign deployments (as in NATO), closure of
"facilities" and replacing them officially with total deterrence capacities (Space Forces
anybody ?).
While keeping classical projection capacities for demonstration against backward
tribes.
...
From its side, Iran is refusing to even meet Trump, two reasons: 1) If Iran agrees to meet,
it would mean they agree to renegotiate the deal, which they dont. 2) US word isnt worth a
toilet paper, so any negotiations is meaningless. Plus US list of demands makes even endeavor
to negotiate dead from the get go.
Posted by: Harry | Jul 30, 2018 7:53:57 PM | 29
Tru-ish but Trump's latest offer is, according to the MSM, "no pre-conditions." It's quite
likely that Iran's allies have advised the Iranians to tell Trump to Go F*ck yourself (if you
feel you must), but then satisfy yourselves that Trump's No Preconditions means what Iran
wants it to mean.
Trump jumped into the NK and Putin talks first because both were eager to talk. Iran will
be a good test of Trump's seduction skills. All he's got to do is persuade the Iranians that
talking is more useful than swapping long-distance insults. Iranians are rusted onto logical
principles and Trump will find a way to appeal to that trait, imo.
It's too late for the afghanis who have been driven into the urban areas during the regulaar
'Afghanistanisation' campaigns. Most of them will have become hooked on consumerism and the
necessity of dollars.
That leaves only two options for the Taliban when they take over as they undoubtedly will
altho that is likely to mean having to tolerate clutches of obese amerikans lurking in some
Px strewn green zone, the inhabitants of which are likely to have less contact with people
from Afghanistan than any regular user of a Californian shopping mall. The new government can
ignore the consumerists even when these rejects insist on getting lured into some nonsense
green revolution - the danger with this isn't the vapid protests which can easily be dealt
with by fetching a few mobs of staunch citizens from rural Afghanistan who will quickly teach
them that neither cheeseburgers nor close captioned episodes of daytime television provide
sufficient nutrition to handle compatriots raised on traditional food and Islam. Or the new
administration can do as other traditional regimes have done many times over the last 80
years or so, purge the consumerists by disappearing the leadership and strewing empty lots in
the urban areas with mutilated corpses of a few of the shitkicker class consumerists. That
option can cause a bit of a fuss but it (the fuss) generally only lasts as long as the purge.
I suspect the Afghan government will favour the latter approach but they may try to hold
off until the North has been brought back into line. OTH, consumerism is a highly contagious
condition so, unless the North can be pacified speedily which seems unlikely, initially at
least the Taliban adminsitration may have to fight on two fronts, agin the North while they
nip urban consumerists in the bud before those confused fools can cause any highly publicised
in the west but in actuality, low key, attempted insurrection.
My advice to the gaming, TV or cheeseburger addicted inhabitants of Kabul would be to
volunteer your services to the amerikan military as a 'translator' asap and join yer cobbers
in California.
It is unlikely that you will bump into Roman Brady especially not when he is in one
of his avuncular moods, but if you stay outta Texas, Florida or any other part of flyover
amerika chocka with alcohol induced blowhardism, you will discover than amerikan racism isn't
as lethal as it once was.
Apart from having to ignore being jostled in the line at fast food joints and being loudly
and incorrectly termed a motherf**in sand n***er mid-jostle. Certainly a whole lot less
lethal than trying to cover your Fortnite jones by waving a badly copywritten sign in front
of the al-Jazeera cameras for a one month
battle pass .
What was happening in Kabul, Afghanistan less than 8 hours after the WTC Towers turned into
dust in midair? Who here remembers the massive bombing/cruise missile attack?
Here is CNN's transcript:
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: "Well, Joie, it's about 2:30 in the morning here in
Kabul. We've been hearing explosions around the perimeter of the city. We're in a position
here which gives us a view over the whole city. We just had an impact, perhaps a few miles
away.
"If I listen, you can hear the ripple of explosions around the city. Perhaps you heard
there. The fifth explosion -- sixth explosion, I think. Gun bursts and star bursts in the
air. Tracer fire is coming up out of the city. I hear aircraft flying above the city of
Kabul. Perhaps we've heard half a dozen to 10 detonations on the perimeter of the city,
some coming from the area close to the airport. I see on the horizon what could be a fire
on the horizon, close, perhaps, to where the airport might be. A flash came up then from
the airport. Some ground fire coming up here in Kabul."
"I've been in Belgrade and I've been in Baghdad and seen cruise missiles arrive in both
those cities. The detonations we're hearing in Kabul right now certainly sound like the
detonations of loud missiles that are coming in. "
"Certainly -- certainly it would appear that the Afghan defense systems have detected a
threat in the air. They are launching what appears to be anti-aircraft defense systems at
the moment. Certainly, I can see that fire that was blazing on the horizon. It was a faint
yellow; it's now a bright orange blazing. Several other detonations going off around the
city, multiple areas. Rockets appear to be taking off from one end of the airport. I can
see that perhaps located about 8 or 9 miles away from where we stand, Joie."
The bombing/explosions continue for 10+ minutes of this broadcast.
Then, they cut to WILLIAM COHEN, FORMER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: who says the US is only
collecting intelligence. He says what we're seeing must be part of the "Civil War" (despite
the fact that neither side had an air force or cruise missiles). The Pentagon later denies
knowing anything about it.
Then, CNN returns to Nic Robertson, who- within 15 minutes of his first report - begins to
change his tune. Suddenly, the jet sounds are not mentioned. The cruise missiles (jet
engines) have transformed into possible rockets. The airport fire is now an ammunition
dump.
And voila! They lose their connection and Nic will not be heard from again. And this
little bit of history will essentially disappear.
Dear Mr. B,
"All these U.S. mistakes made in the early days are still haunting the country."
These mistakes are by design. To cause and keep causing destabilisation.
I like to refer to it as the 3-letter Scrabble method of doing things.
Me living in the Netherlands as I do, let me take the example of Greece.
Greece had its regime changed in 1948 (Wiki says 46-49).
And how is Greece doing these days? ...
@37 yep, gotta agree with the more passimistic outlook here. Personally i'll eat my shoes if
US leaves Afghanistan within any reasonable time frame. In addition to plentiful natural
resources, there are very influential vested interests in Afghanistans booming opium
industry.
Off topic: Andrei Nekrasov's 'Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes' can be viewed in full on You
Tube at this moment (31 July, 08:15 Amsterdam time). Can it also be seen in the USA, I
wonder? How long will it take before Google take it down ? Watch it and learn about one of
the main drivers of the Russia obsession.
Tru-ish but Trump's latest offer is, according to the MSM, "no pre-conditions." It's quite
likely that Iran's allies have advised the Iranians to tell Trump to Go F*ck yourself (if
you feel you must), but then satisfy yourselves that Trump's No Preconditions means what
Iran wants it to mean.
White House just explained what Trump's "no preconditions" means: 1) Iran should at the
core change how it deals with its own people. 2) Change its evil stance in foreign policy. 3)
Agree on nuclear agreement which would REALLY prevent them making a nuke.
In other words, Iran should capitulate and become a client state, thats what Trump means
by "no preconditions."
At this advanced stage of American insanity, I don't see why the devil should have all the
best tunes. I'm sick of the yanks doing this shit in over people's county's ! While they
stuff there fat faces with burgers and donuts! The dirty games they play on over country's,
should now be played in America with all the brutality that they have used on others. Until
that happens things world wide will continue to detriate. Natural justice is all that
remains. They'v curupted all else.
@19 "The US already started to plan an invasion of Afghanistan in januari & february of
2001."
Well, to be fair the USA probably has plans to invade lots of countries.
Indeed, it would be more interesting to consider how many countries there are that the USA
*doesn't* have invasion plans gathering dust on the shelves.
It's just been reported on the bbc news---- the man responsible for the Manchester bombing
had been 'rescued from Lybia when Gadafi was overthrown and tracked ever since. Even in
Britain up to the day of the bombing ! And now on this post we discuss America uk
transporting terrorists from Syria to Afghanistan . Not to mention the white helmet bunch and
where Ther going! The Manchester bombing, Westminster bridge and London Bridge atacks were
done by the Tory party to win a general election ! This is the reality of the world we live
in.full on oppression !!!
Indeed, I agree with the sentiments here. But missing a big part of the picture.
Afghanistan and Pakistan have sky-high fertility rates. Forget the rubbish peddled by
economist-whores like Milton Friedman, under these conditions no country without an open
frontier has ever developed into anything other than a larger mass of poverty. In Pakistan
something like half the children are so malnourished that they grow up stunted, and it is
this misery that is starting slow population growth. Pakistan is yet another example of the
Malthusian holocaust, which is not a global catastrophe: it is slow grinding poverty that
results when people have more children than they can support.
Bottom line: these places will remain poor and unstable no matter what lunacy the United
States does or does not do. The traditional approach to such places is to leave them alone,
and only keep them from escaping. Bottled up, the Afghanis and Pakistanis will kill only each
other. 9/11 is a consequence of allowing people from these places free access to the Untied
States.
The 'war on terror' is a consequence of 'there shall be open borders.' It's a big and
messy world, and even if the government of the United States was not criminally incompetent,
there would be a lot of misery and hatred in it. Open borders means that now the Untied
States has to intervene in every country all over the world to ensure that nowhere can there
develop terrorist cells. An impossible task.
Charles Michael @ 44
I agree with the caricature nature of much of this. I don't think there will be a next
target. The MIC has become bloated while Iran, Syria, Russia, China are turning out true
fighters as well as stronger economic planning.
The US still has some resources and some use but needs to continue to make friends in the
pattern of Kim and Putin and give up on its self defeating economic and military sabotage
planning which has been exposed as morally bankrupt as well.
Burnham was also a white supremacist. As Samuel Francis noted in the magazine
Chronicles Magazine in 2002, "in the 1960's, Burnham defended segregation on pragmatic
and constitutional (though not explicitly racial) grounds and, by the 70's, was suggesting
actual racial separation of blacks in a 'non-contiguous' area accorded 'limited sovereignty.'
He also defended both Rhodesia and South Africa, as well as other right-wing states." In fact,
Burnham thought that South Africa's Apartheid system could be a model for America, with blacks
confined to Bantustans.
I tried to read the Goldberg book on the recommendation of a relative, but I found myself
merely scanning many sections. As this reviewer notes, it isn't worth the effort to plow
through all of the pages.
I plan to see what I can find of James Burnham, however. I have read his masterful The
Managerial Revolution and this article whets my appetite for more.
Max Book demonstrates typical neocon Chutzpah (Killing your parents, then complaining you're an orphan) and attacks like rabid
dog. Intelligcully he is nto equl to Cohen.
Q: What's the difference between a rabid dot and Max Boot? A: You think there is difference
"... No, my new theory about why Americans want conflict with Russia is because we know in our heart of hearts that the world is ending soon because of climate change. ..."
"... Nick Pemberton is a student at Gustavus Adolphus College. He is currently employed by Gustavus Dining Services. Nick was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He can be reached at [email protected] ..."
And I think about killing myself
And I love myself way more than I love you, so
-- Kanye West, I Thought About Killing You
For the past two years, I have been wondering why Americans have been so ready, if not
eager, to reengage the Cold War with Russia, despite Russia showing no desire to do so. A war
between Russia and the United States, given the nuclear arsenals, political allegiances around
the world, and the unhinged nature of our President, could destroy the entire species. And for
what? Russia's alleged crime of election meddling, is negligible at best when in comparison to
what America has done in Russia, or what rich Americans have done in America. Xenophobia,
historical revisionism, and an embrace of fake news are all on the rise in the age of Trump,
and are surely all factors for blaming Russia. But lying and bigotry, while practiced
routinely, is often shameful, not something to get excited about.
No, my new theory about why Americans want conflict with Russia is because we know in
our heart of hearts that the world is ending soon because of climate change. Just as
born-again Christians flock to Trump as they yearn for a Revelations-style apocalypse, liberals
want a showdown with Russia. If the world is ending anyways, let's end it on our own terms
seems to be the rationale. Other countries have reacted with a more rational response to the
potential of the world ending -- namely doing something about it. The Republican Party stands
alone, in terms of rich countries, in its blatant denial of climate change. This is why Noam
Chomsky correctly calls them the most dangerous organization in human history. The Democratic
Party, their hapless and willing enablers, are a close second.
The Republican Party though has seemed to stand alone in their tendency to live in an
'alternative facts' universe. As bad as Democrats are, they know better ways to lie. But since
the election of Donald Trump, the Democrats have become just as paranoid and dishonest as their
friends across the aisle. The Republicans may see a communist behind every corner, but the
Democrats see a Russian behind every corner. This makes sense because Russia, or at least the
Soviet Union, was seen as communist the first time around. And the Democrats have always been
scared of communism too. Now Russia isn't communist, or even close, but what world power is?
Poor Mr. Putin. He has tried so hard to be a ruthless capitalist, in fact he has succeeded at
this goal, but it appears that America is too hotheaded to care.
In the age of Barack Obama, those who deal with life superficially could forget the coming
Armageddon. If one could get by his arrogance and kill lists, Mr. Obama seemed like a pretty
cool guy. And when it came to Russia, a better diplomat. One has to wonder if the fear of Trump
has become so irrational that we are scared of anything he does, and that by simply forcing him
into the opposite, we will be better off. There also is surely a part of the American psyche
that is just rooting for Mr. Trump to fail. And who wouldn't want that? Anything that gets him
out of office as soon as possible should be welcomed, no matter the undemocratic implications
of Robert Mueller's agenda. Trump failing while in office though? It is unclear who this helps
besides the anti-Trump resistance who may be more interested in being morally superior than
stopping Trump's vicious agenda.
Regardless, what Donald Trump brings to America is the sense that we are powerless. He is
unpredictable, reckless, stupid and vengeful. We now live in constant fear, and for good
reason. But the legitimate fear of Trump manifests as illegitimate fear of Putin, even though
there is little implication they actually like each other. We fear Putin's authoritarian state,
when it is Donald Trump who is bringing authoritarianism home. Why? Well, many of the
resistance are imperialists. We want an enemy we can bomb and scapegoat, not one that pervades
all of our own crumbling American institutions. It is the same reason why Republicans blame
immigrants that Democrats blame Russia. Someone to blame, not something to change.
This powerlessness we feel may remind us of our powerless future that can easily be
forgotten in the age of mass distraction. However, with Donald Trump, he is both the
distraction and the problem. He is useful to the rich because he distracts, but perhaps he is a
little too close to the real problem to be the calming relaxer that our smartphones are. One
can turn on the TV and see Trump said blank, or Russia did that, but any person could quickly
be reminded that not only is Trump a petty scandal, but a serious one.
Such is the reason for this extreme level of neurosis. There is endless piffling Trump
material to focus on, but the material is based in something far more alarming not yet examined
in a serious way. Thus, Trump, while ever present, remains enticing simply because we are not
yet at the root of our fear. Many Americans may fear Donald Trump will grope them, insult them
or embarrass them but the real fear is that he is deregulating and privatizing everything, and
killing us all in the process. This is not the focus of discourse though. In part because mass
media and their ties to polluting companies won't allow it. But also in part because it is no
longer fun gossip.
Russia somehow remains fun gossip. The game of bringing down Donald Trump continues. He
messes up, we scold, nothing happens. Until we drop the bomb, it's all fun and games. It's
endless flirtation without a lot of action. I imagine it is how Ted Cruz deals with his sexual
urges. It is a whole lot of fun talking about them, but he knows he is going to hell if he ever
does them. Likewise, Russia is fun to talk about, but if we ever act on our claim that they are
the greatest threat to democracy since 9/11, we will be bringing the end times early.
If Donald Trump was impeached, what would war-mongering corporate liberals talk about?
Expect them to ask Russia to rig it even harder in 2020 for Mr. Trump.
Trump has reminded us of the real cause for alarm: the mass extinction thundering towards
us. We feel so uneasy, but what can we do? Climate change is depressing and horrifying and we
can seemingly do nothing about it on an individual level. We then opt for the only thing that
we have left to control: how we all die. Foolish, I think. As bad as Trump is, there is
something left to live for, and if Trump were to blow up Russia, it would not be on our terms,
but on his. In fact, he is only likely to blow up Russia if he feels he is being out-machoed by
the neoliberal corporate class in combative rhetoric. As it stands, America is egging on this
madman for no other purpose than a sense of control over our own demise. If anything lets Trump
and the corporate overlords win, this is it.
It is worth detailing what has happened in the Russia scandal, if only to show nothing has
really happened. The first charge, which is denied by the accused firm, is that a Russian
company known as Internet Research Agency funded 'millions of dollars' in advertisements. There
has been no link established between this company and the Russian government. The accusation,
if it is true, is no different from the private American companies who invest billions in
elections, sometimes illegally, but often legally. The second charge is related to the Russian
government and the alleged hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Once again, this is
only a charge, but the information released by hackers was potentially damaging to Hillary
Clinton and the Democrats, simply because it was true. The irony is that the damaging
information for the DNC was that they had rigged their own primary. The accused riggers only
crime is exposing the proven riggers. There are allegations of state and local hacking too, but
those were present before 2016. Did Russia do it? is hardly our biggest story now. For whatever
it is, even if it did prevent the corporate warmonger Hillary Clinton from
winning, it should be far less concerning than the obsessive, neurotic,
fear-mongering, scapegoating, ominous mood in the United States since the 2016 election.
Why were Democrats tearing their hair out over a Trump-Putin meeting last week that seemed
to offer zero conclusions about how Trump felt about anything? The whole week, which was
typical Donald, was just another week of bullying the weak and submitting to the strong. Putin
may be able to push some buttons in his own country, but when Trump, who never apologizes for
anything, ran back his own words, it was clear that NATO would live to see another day, no
matter the scattered thoughts of a wimpy man in over his head. The deranged response to the
deranged Donald was enough for me to think long and hard about a theory given to me by a
right-wing woman this past week.
Her theory was that God had in fact sent us Donald Trump. My first thought: highly unlikely.
This man lacks the morals of the people God sends to us. In fact, I can hardly think of a worse
human being. There may actually be no human being worse than Trump, save maybe Charles Koch,
David Koch and whoever funds Adam Sandler movies. But I thought of the alternative the
corporate media was telling me: Vladimir Putin is the real President of America and the real
reason the entire country is undemocratic, poor, hungry, and in prison. Also, highly
unlikely.
Yet the pamphlet this woman handed me at least admitted there was no rhyme or reason to this
theory other than some guy hearing it from God: "I, like many of you, was shocked by the word I
received regarding Donald Trump. Trust me when I say it was given with fear and trembling." Has
the fear and trembling gone away?
The only biblical evidence of this theory the pamphlet provided was 1 Corinthians 15:52: "In
a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the
dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." and 1 Thessalonians 4:16: " For
the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the
archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first." The
problem with being a fundamentalist in the age of Trump is that you are taking a book word for
word that you haven't even read. If you are going to take it literally, at least look for that
capital T in trump, otherwise you have to take every trumpet player as a prophet. Next thing
you know Trumpettes will be swapping out their Johnny Rebel records and replacing them with Lee
Morgan. Still, the trail left by the Trumpettes was no less convincing than Robert Mueller's.
There was as much evidence of Trump in the Bible as Trump in Putin's pocket.
It should come to no one's surprise that Donald Trump has not exactly been pro-Russia. A
broken clock may strike right twice a day, but a doomsday clock never strikes right. Glen
Greenwald points out that Barack Obama was actually more pro-Russia than Trump: "you look at
President Obama versus President Trump, there's no question that President Obama was more
cooperative with and collaborative with Russia and the Russian agenda than President Trump.
President Trump has sent lethal arms to Ukraine -- a crucial issue for Putin -- which President
Obama refused to do. President Trump has bombed the Assad forces in Syria, a client state of
Putin, something that Obama refused to do because he didn't want to provoke Putin. Trump has
expelled more Russian diplomats and sanctioned more Russian oligarchs than [Obama] has. Trump
undid the Iran deal, which Russia favored, while Obama worked with Russia in order to do the
Iran deal." Once again, liberals give Mr. Trump too much credit. He has no friends. He gets
along with no one. There is no coherent plan here other than corruption.
As liberals resist Putin-Trump with homophobic memes, one has to wonder, how mad are these
people? Do they realize that Donald Trump is crazy, even crazier than them? Why on earth do
they want Trump armed and angry?
Anyone who can still bear to follow the news knows that the corporate media is still
attempting to paint Russia as an aggressive and unreasonable foe. This is all with Mr. Trump as
the President! It is hard to believe that anyone is more unreasonable and aggressive than
Trump, but once again, the liberals let him off the hook. Despite military on Russia's borders,
years of war-mongering rhetoric and hostile economic activity, meddling in Russia's own
elections, and constant racism, Russia remains a reasonable actor in its relation to the United
States. One wonders why Russia tries to reason with us at all, but the nuclear weapons
certainly make things a little more complicated.
For all the talk about Putin destroying American democracy, no one mentions the real threats
to U.S. democracy that led to Trump's election -- absurd campaign financing, a sensationalist
profit-driven corporate media, and voter suppression. No one mentions that there was a proven
election scandal in the United States in 2016. This scandal was the DNC rigging its primary for
Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. If the United States was a democracy, Bernie Sanders would
be President right now.
Finding no comfort or coherence in the liberal narrative, I turned once again to my new
right-wing friend. She told me that all these recent storms were punishment for the sins of a
liberal society. Almost, actually. But her anti-choice, anti-immigrant complaints showed me she
was as far from the truth as anyone else. Still, I found this to be a fascinating denial of
climate change. It was not so much that she denied that it is happening, she just denied human
involvement. Which goes to show, as climate change becomes increasingly hard to ignore,
religion may be the only method left to explain it away.
I have always thought the war over public opinion is a losing battle though. After all, what
is the prize if you win? It is far more rewarding to fight hunger, poverty, deregulation,
incarceration and war. Beat those things and we will all be too cozy to have a worthwhile
opinion anyways.
The public opinion debate too often turns into a qualification of other people's mental
health, as if any skepticism deserves to be medicated by the liars who tell you that you need
their drugs. Climate change skeptics should have a place in public discourse. The skeptics do
at times have a financial interest in keeping us fooled, but then their problem isn't their
skepticism, but their dishonesty, which almost proves the real skeptics right. Otherwise, these
are sincere believers who are right to be skeptical of science, which has brought us eugenics,
unnecessary mental health treatments, nuclear power, and the very pollutants we now oppose, and
would have kept at it without government checks and populist skeptics. If only the same amount
of skepticism could be applied to Fox News and the corporate hacks Donald Trump appoints.
In the spirit of skepticism, let's look at what Trump has done on climate change and the
coming end of the world. As Noam Chomsky puts it, the Republicans are racing to the precipice.
Among the recent sins by Mr. Trump:
1. Rolling back the Endangered Species Act.
2. Cutting NASA Climate monitoring.
3. A move to make details of scientific studies public, making sure that scientists will
have to choose between privacy rights and conducting a study.
4. Rollback of car emissions standards
5. Repeal of Water of the United States rule, which threatens clean water for 117 million
Americans.
6. Repeal of lead-risk reduction program
7. Reduction of chemical bans for methylene chloride, trichloroethylene and
N-Methylpyrrolidone
8. Stripping rules for coal ash waste removal.
9. Pardoning despicable ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond
10. Appointing anti-EPA Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court
11. Pushing for drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
If anything, God sent us Trump to punish us for our sins, not to save us from them.
Alas, while a worthwhile exercise to imagine that God indeed sent us Donald Trump, I was
only reminded that the right-wing is just as bonkers as the neoliberal wing. A week of watching
CNN will have you believing anything; even pushing one to believe that God really did send
Donald Trump. But I will confirm, for anyone so tempted by a new way of thinking, the glove
just doesn't fit. God did not send us Donald Trump. I can't prove it, but I am fairly certain.
I then was left with one mystifying question: if God did not send Donald Trump, what does the
corporate media have against him?
The common variable between Trumpettes and Russiaphobes is the end of the world narrative.
Is it a reaction to climate change that both must make up stories about how the world will end?
Is it the only power any of us have left? Is it the cancer patient learning they have a year to
live and then shooting up a school just so they can end it on their own terms? Sorry, to all
Cold War Warriors and all Donald Doomers, some of us just are not ready to die. There is, one
has to believe, a rose growing in the concrete somewhere that makes these prophecies not worth
an early exit. At the very least, must we go out on such fabricated and petty terms? Surely
there is something worth dying for besides hating political correctness or Putin's soccer
ball.
What is that nuclear taste? Is reviving Hillary's corpse really worth it? Or has the entire
country given up and opted for a death they can blame on someone else? It is not so dissimilar
from the apocalypse envisioned by the Trumpettes, who can blame every storm that Trump makes
worse on the sins of a liberal society. If Trump and Putin were to blow each other up tomorrow,
liberals would die on top. However, if we are to die slightly slower due to climate change, the
entire industrialized world will have to know we played a part. And there will be those pesky
Trumpettes who blame it on liberalism, not capitalism. To all this I say, who cares. Yes, we
messed up. We shouldn't have drained the earth of all its resources, we shouldn't have elected
Trump. But no need to feel guilty and embrace the end of the world! There is still good work to
be done. Who will be laughing when the world dies by nuclear (a Russiaphobe wet dream) or fire
(a Trumpette wet dream). There will be no moral high ground at that point. The apocalypse will
be the great equalizer. Even in the age of Trump, the world is worth sticking around for,
although She might as well be done with us as soon as She can be.
Surely the principle of lesser evilism still has a place, no? Can't we all agree that dying
tomorrow is better than dying today? Who is more looney, the apocalyptic Trumpettes or the
Russiaphobic corporate class? We will find out soon enough. While it is very likely that Trump
will win reelection (poll numbers in the Republican Party for him are very positive), it is
just as likely that the new Cold War will continue until Trump is gone, whether that be in 2
years, 6 years, or 14 years (Ivanka). The premise is that we will either have Trump's
apocalypse or we will blow up Russia. There must be a winner. Given Trump's flair for
winning and upending the liberal class, who would be surprised if it was he who ended up
blowing up Russia, not for our reasons, but for his own. Therefore, it is equally important to
get Trump, the Republicans and Democrats out of power as quickly as possible.
We are once again pawns to the powers that be. Sensing the end is coming, they wish to go
out with a bang. It is true, the end is coming, whether that be by climate change, nuclear
weapons or God Himself. The battle over how we end is worth fighting for. I for one have no
interest in being killed by Trump, the neocons, or the ecocide maniacs. If God must take me, I
will let Him, but giving the establishment the satisfaction of having the last word is too much
to bear. To hear Hillary's cackle at my funeral with the words "We came, we saw, he died"
across the headstone would be a tragedy too great for even a species sprinting towards the
precipice. If Donald were to preside over my grave, he would simply say "I won, you tiny
loser", but I would resent this option equally. If God exists, and wants the last word for
Himself, He should start by kicking all with nuclear fever to the curb. For we all are
dangerously close to becoming the latest item on America's war-mongering resume. Let's just
hope Donald doesn't take the bait and one-up the liberals one last time.
Even if God doesn't exist, one would have a better chance reasoning with Him than either
Donald or his yuppy resistance groupies. So I thanked my right-wing friend today. For even if
she was no more sane than the neoliberals prattling to the abyss, she at least had a nice place
to send me after the world ended; that is assuming, I was born in America, had as many babies
as ejaculations, and voted for God's unconventional servant, Donald J. Trump. Join the debate
on Facebook More articles by: Nick Pemberton
Nick Pemberton is a student at Gustavus Adolphus College. He is currently employed by
Gustavus Dining Services. Nick was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He can be reached at
[email protected]
To some, that fear was not a problem but a tool -- one could defeat political enemies simply by accusing them of being Russian
sympathizers. There was no need for evidence, so desperate were Americans to believe; just an accusation that someone was in league
with Russia was enough. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy
fired his first shot on February 9, 1950,
proclaiming there were 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party working for the Department of State. The evidence? Nothing
but assertions .
Indeed, the very word " McCarthyism " came to mean making
accusations of treason without sufficient evidence. Other
definitionsinclude a ggressively
questioning a person's patriotism, using accusations of disloyalty to pressure a person to adhere to conformist politics or discredit
an opponent, and subverting civil and political rights in the name of national security.
Pretending to be saving America while he tore at its foundations, McCarthy destroyed thousands of lives over the next four years
simply by pointing a finger and saying "communist." Whenever anyone invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence, McCarthy
answered that this was "the most positive
proof obtainable that the witness is communist." The power of accusation was used by others as well: the
Lavender Scare , which
concluded that the State Department was overrun with closeted homosexuals who were at risk of being blackmailed by Moscow for their
perversions, was an offshoot of McCarthyism, and by 1951, 600 people had been fired based solely on evidence-free "morals" charges.
State legislatures and school boards
mimicked McCarthy. Books and movies were banned. Blacklists abounded.
The FBI embarked on campaigns of political
repression (they would later claim Martin Luther
King Jr. had communist ties), even as journalists and academics voluntarily narrowed their political thinking to exclude communism.
IMO Mikey Pompeo suffers from Smart Guy Syndrome. My wife calls it Great Man Syndrome. In both of these a delusion of centrality
sets in based on a belief in one's own superiority. This rots the mind. Mikey has always been the smartest kid in the room. You
know his resumé. And, pilgrims, he has a smiley face welded onto his real sharkey face. These attributes have carried him far
but he has a weakness or two. He really does think he is a being above the ken of mortal men AND he is a hyper-nationialist neocon
ideologue through and through and in many ways immune to appeals to reason. He surely think thatTrump is a dolt. Look at the picture.
He has contradicted the president several times. This is a very dangerous thing to do. Trump is a reality based self-centered
hustler who is used to dealing with supercilious p---ks who want to manipulate him.
Now Mikey has John-John Bolton as ally and playmate. Bolton is, IMO, more than a little crazy. Bolton loves his place in an
NSC made over into extensions of his neocon craziness. He thinks that he has the Iranians right where he wants them. He believes
that we could fight a maritime campaign in the Gulf with next to no losses and that if necessary we can bomb the Iranian people
into unleashing their economic deprivation wrath against the mullahs.
Pompeo agrees with him. He is trying to keep the president buttered up while pursuing his shared goals with Bolton both cleverly
and surreptitiously. Well, folks, Trump is a master of the art of BS detection. Those who try to fool him are taking a great risk.
Off to one side in this drama, stand the inbred caste of generals and admirals. Trump professes to admire them, but Mattis,
Dunford and CENTCOM are steadily losing real power in the contest for the president's attention. IMO there will be a unifying
deal between Damascus and the YPG Kurds and Trump knows all about progress toward that goal. Do the generals want that? No. They
have their own desired foreign policy. They want to make the casualties of the last 15 years meaningful through victory somewhere,
anywhere would do. They also want revenge against Iran for men lost in Iraq. They listen to the Israelis far too much.
IMO Trump has a private line of communication to Russia. This is perfectly legal and probably is conducted over CIA communications
links or through the ambassador in Moscow, Jon Huntsman or both.
Pompeo may or may not know what is being said in those channels. pl
if Trump is such a reality-based hustler who knows how to deal with supercilious p--cks" like Pompeo and Bolton, why the heck
does he keep bringing those p--cks on board and then waste so much time and energy on dealing with them? Are there no prospective
officials around who are not of that stripe? Or is it that Trump is unable to detect them and/or unwilling for some reason
to bring them in and put them to work?
I'm reminded of a point made throughout Vol. 1 of Michael Broers' brilliant new biography of Napoleon -- that Napoleon,
who despised the talk-talk-talk of parliaments and liked best to work with and through committees, had a near-infallible gift
for detecting the best and the brightest, whether or not they had impressive credentials or even if they had opposed or still
opposed some of his policies. In these committees, which dealt with both political and military matters, all were expected
to speak freely, while Napoleon listened like a hawk. For him the key test, aside from the committee members' intelligence
and energy, was whether they were men of honor -- by which he meant that when agreements had been reached after all had had
their fair say and Napoleon had put his stamp on them, they would abide by what had been thoroughly vetted and agreed to. An
autocrat, for sure, and yet...
He hired people recommended to him by their cronies like Rosenstein, Wray, Pruitt, Coates. There have been many
mistakes.like
that. He could not appoint the kind of people he had eaten well-done steaks with in NY while hustling them in a deal. He also
relies too much on his gut reaction to people he meets.
Yes but, if he is that susceptible to dubious advice, isn't that something of a flashing-red-light character flaw -- just as
Napoleon deserves blame for taking the advice of the treacherous Josephine on several disastrous occasions (i.e. the decision
to invade Haiti)?
No, he is not. We all lament The Boltens and Pompeos. However, where is he to find "good people"? The American political class
is reflectively myopic and partisan. Find some more Jon Huntsman types (where? IDK) who can serve American interests without
all the Sturm und Drang of today's hyperbolic, puerile political warfare.
I would wager that Trump sees both of them as dangerous but useful idiots that willingly play their role in his "good-cop,
bad cop" negotiating tactics. They will be gone with the next tacking.
I was pleasantly surprised at Bolton's behavior in Russia and in his comment that getting rid of Assad was no longer the goal
of the US. To be sure, time will tell, but it's clear that at this point Trump is driving foreign policy and is far more self-confident
than he was in 2017.
Whatever Pompeo says doesn't matter- if he tries to throw up walls to a summit, Trump will tell him to go to hell. It's
a core principle of Trump's that meeting is not a "concession." He knows that "legitimacy" is an utterly meaningless concept,
not something that can be granted or withdrawn by the US president. If Iran offers Trump a meeting, he'll meet. No questions
asked.
"Well, folks, Trump is a master of the art of BS detection. Those who try to fool him are taking a great risk."
I completely agree with you Col. I hear people call Trump a moron or a genius, I think that what makes him so vexing is that
he is both at the same time. He is probably very good at making certain nobody gets the better of him, especially his subordinates.
Except for the belief on Trump´s masterliness on anything, I never would had thought I will be agreeing with you all the way
till the last line....of this concrete post....What I most agree with you in is in Pompeo´s overestimating his own capabilities...and
I conclude also along with you that is a very dangerous situation...But, if you see it so clear, and we all too, could you
provide a convincing explanation on why Trump, being such a master on personal management and business administration, elected
Pompeo and Bolton for office in the first place?
Thanks in advance, in case you answer my question and do not find something outrageous enough for your sensibility in my
comment so as to delete it.
"... As Bishop Athanasius Schneider recently opined in an interview , "the powerful of our world, the Western states" support groups like ISIS "indirectly." As a result, civilians get killed, and a prolonged bloodbath between warring religious factions ensues, thus ruining thousands, if not millions, of lives. ..."
"... Persons who espouse this warped ideology are what political scientists refer to as neoconservatives. To put it in Catholic terms, neoconservatives seek to once and for all obliterate the Social Kingship of Christ by constructing a world order rooted in the Freemasonic Social Kingship of Man. For decades neocons have preyed on the patriotism of ordinary Americans to get them to fight unjust wars on behalf of Arab theocrats and Jewish Zionists, the real behind-the-scenes power brokers. ..."
Super Tuesday and Super Saturday came and went. As expected, Donald Trump dominated the competition.
Sort of.
While Trump did exceptionally well in states like New Hampshire, South Carolina and elsewhere in the South, The Donald has stumbled
as of late, coming in second to Ted Cruz in a number of recent contests.
Trump will likely expand his delegate lead in the coming weeks. However, he won't arrive at the Republican convention with enough
of them to secure the nomination outright.
If that happens, the oligarchs in the Republican Party will do everything they can at the convention to deny Trump that which
would rightfully be his.
It's been rumored that Mitt Romney will be called upon by the establishment to save the Party of Lincoln from being "torn asunder."
Some Republicans say they simply won't vote for Mr. Trump. Others suggest running a third party "conservative" candidate.
However it shakes out, if reaction to Romney's anti-Trump press conference held earlier this month indicates anything, it's that
refusing the billionaire from New York the nomination if he has the majority of delegates would literally break the GOP in two.
Before discussing what a Trump victory would mean for the Republican Party, let's backtrack a bit and try to put this man's candidacy
into context. If possible, a Catholic context.
American "exceptionalism"
Since the Second World War but most especially since the early 1990s, a cabal of intellectuals desirous of global empire have
hubristically argued that it is America's duty to advance "freedom" and "democracy" to "the people" of the world, all in the name
of bringing about a lasting "peace."
Of course, when these men speak of "freedom" what they really mean is massive economic inequality and social hedonism. And when
these men speak of "democracy" what they truly mean is rigged elections with candidates that they and not "the people" get to pick.
(See the U.S.-backed coup that took place in Ukraine in February 2014 for evidence of this.)
Despite the lofty language used to trick Americans into supporting this political pyramid scheme, the reality is that bringing
about this so-called "peace" is a dirty business.
For one, the U.S. essentially bribes countries into joining NATO. Economically sanctioning those who refuse to do so.
Two, when leaders from sovereign Middle Eastern nations are no longer viewed as politically useful, they're assassinated. Of course,
the more diplomatic way to put it is "so and so has to go! "
And three, sustaining American imperialism oversees requires the funneling of billions of taxpayer dollars to Islamic states like
Saudi Arabia and providing firearms to "moderate rebels" in countries most people can't locate on a map.
As Bishop Athanasius Schneider recently opined
in an interview , "the powerful of our world, the Western states" support groups like ISIS "indirectly." As a result, civilians get killed, and a prolonged bloodbath between warring religious factions ensues, thus ruining thousands,
if not millions, of lives.
The end game, of course, is to pick off Eastern European countries one by one in order to expand NATO (something the U.S. promised
decades ago they wouldn't do) so that "liberal democracy" can be established not only there but also in North Africa and, most importantly,
in Russia.
Globalism
Persons who espouse this warped ideology are what political scientists refer to as neoconservatives. To put it in Catholic terms, neoconservatives seek to once and for all obliterate the Social Kingship of Christ by constructing
a world order rooted in the Freemasonic Social Kingship of Man. For decades neocons have preyed on the patriotism of ordinary Americans to get them to fight unjust wars on behalf of Arab theocrats
and Jewish Zionists, the real behind-the-scenes power brokers.
While paying lip service to social conservatism, limited government, constitutionalism and state's rights these war hawks hijacked
the Republican Party and surgically transformed it into a weak-kneed, open borders, bloodthirsty Frankenstein in the service of international
elites.
Though insurgent candidates like Pat Buchanan in the 1990s reminded folks about the direction this clandestine group of war criminals
was leading the country, the monied class acted quickly and decisively. Buchanan's warnings about 1) the looming culture wars 2)
the harm cheap labor abroad would have on the American middle class 3) the problems associated with not securing the border and 4)
the debt and death required with being the policeman of the world were easily tamped down, thanks in no small part to the help of
the corporate media.
Since that time Americans have had to choose between presidential candidates who, at the end of the day, were nothing more than
cogs in the globalist's wheel.
Enter Trump
Donald J. Trump has the temperament of an eight year old child. He mocks. He condescends. He can't give specifics to half the
things he talks about. And I don't trust him on social issues. Put another way, I have the same concerns about Mr. Trump as American
Conservative contributor Rod Dreher does
.
For good reason, these facts and many others, have a large number of folks, including many Catholics, deeply disturbed.
At the same time, much of his public image is an act, and he has turned out be a shrewder political operator than I expected.
No one, and I mean no one, predicted he would have this much success.
People support Trump not necessarily because of his policies but because of what he represents. And what he represents is the
frustration ordinary, mostly white, Americans have towards politics in general. More specifically, the antipathy they have towards
the feckless politicians the Republican Party has nominated over the past thirty years who have largely failed to halt the social
and economic decay of the United States.
Against the neocons
Despite his inconsistency, immaturity and, at times, imbecility, Trump has been clear on several important policies. Policies
that can be appreciated from a Catholic viewpoint.
In
an article for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Daniel Mcadams outlines where Trump differentiates himself from
the war hawks in his party.
First, according to Mcadams Trump states "the obvious" when he says "the Iraq war was brought to us by the liars of the neoconservative
movement" and that it was a "total disaster" for the rest of us who "are forced to pay for their fantasies of world domination."
Second, Trump wants to "actually speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin to see if US/Russia differences can be worked out
without a potentially world-ending nuclear war."
Third, although Trump is "arguing that he is hugely pro-Israel" he is "nevertheless suggesting that if the US is to play a role
in the Israel/Palestine issue the US side should take a neutral role in the process."
Fourth, Trump is also calling out the "idiotic neocon advice" that resulted in the overthrowing of Gaddafi in Libya that has led
to "the red carpet" being "laid down for ISIS" in that failed state.
And lastly, Trump is "suggesting that it may be a good thing that Russia be bombing ISIS into oblivion and that we might want
to just sit back and let that happen for once."
Push back
The ruling class disdains each and every one of these positions. And for good reason.
By talking about the Iraq War and claiming Bush lied about it, Trump reminds us about the back room dealings and costs, both human
and monetary, spreading "freedom" and "democracy" necessarily entails. And by drawing attention to the disastrous situation in Libya,
Trump shines light on the foolishness of nation building abroad and the need to nation build at home. Obviously, all of this causes
voters to have a less favorable view of foreign intervention in the future.
By painting Putin as a potential ally instead of a "thug," Trump de-programs Americans from thinking of the Russian President
as Josef Stalin re-incarnated. It also disabuses ordinary citizens from seeing everything through an us-versus-them prism. Having
a villain to point at evokes patriotism at home and affirms Americans in the moral right-ness of the pursuit of spreading "liberty."
Neocons have long understood this. And Trump could potentially reverse that paradigm.
Furthermore, by taking a "neutral" stance towards Israel, Trump is indicating that he may put American interests ahead of Zionist
interests. In other words, Trump would likely approach the Middle East in a way that holds Israel to the same moral standards as
others. Realizing that this may result in an American president who refuses to be silent about the terrorist attacks Israelis commit
against Palestinians on an almost daily basis, the globalists and their cronies in the media have been quick to compare Trump with,
you guessed it, Adolf Hitler.
Going forward
Neoconservatives, in short, are apoplectic over a possible Trump presidency. His success could mean their demise, if only for
a short while.
To be sure, it is difficult to know who Trump would surround himself with if he were to win the presidency. Would he call up Henry
Kissinger? Would he seek the advice of the Council on Foreign Relations? I don't know.
But what I do know is that as of right now Trump appears to have all the right enemies. Enemies that include the neo-Catholic
neocon community. Read
here .
Now, don't expect the elites to go silently into the night. The attacks in the coming days and weeks will only get more vicious.
We've already seen how quickly they brought up "the 1930s." Additionally, more than 100 self-identified "members of the Republican
national security community" have signed an
open letter
excoriating Trump for his foreign policy views, adding that they are "united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency."
Unsurprisingly, some of them have said
they would support Hillary Clinton, a Democratic neocon, instead of Trump in the general election.
So much for party loyalty.
In brief, a Trump nomination means the internationalists would no longer dictate the terms of America's economic and foreign policy.
Moreover, if Trump arrives at the Republican convention with the majority of delegates and is denied the nomination, it will be clear
to all that we live in country that is anything but a democracy.
Indeed, far from being a "breaking" of the GOP in two, wouldn't a Trump victory be nothing more than a re-calibration of the party
to what it stood for historically? A party that serves the will of the American people instead of global elites?
I utterly despise Neocons, whether in Politics & Government or as Catholic Church Commentators.
This is why I come to akacatholic.com, The Remnant Newspaper & Catholic Family News.
In Politics, Conservatives would use The Bomb, while Neocons would engage in "Protective Reaction", whatever that means.
In The Case of Louie, Mike Matt, Chris Ferrara, John Vennari, Dr John Rao & Ann Barnhardt, one is told the truth as it occurred.
There are no "Sweeps Week Specials" by People who are financed by Fat Cats & sound like Shills for said Fat Cats, while broadcasting
from a Miniaturized Version of The CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street, from a Suburb of The Motor City, who tells everyone
that what The Pope Said was a Mistranslation, while making Hay of Cardinal Dolan, passing wind on the Uptown Platform of the IND
6th Avenue Subway, all while the Polemicist is telling the World that The SSPX is in Schism. No, THAT Guy, despite the Bells &
Whistles, is a Neo Catholic, who in many cases, cannot get his facts straight.
The NeoCatholics are the ones telling people that Girl Altar Servers are OK because the Pope says so. Ditto, Sancte Communion
A Mano & Altar Tables facing the Congregation.You know WHO They Are.
But something I have noticed is that when it comes to Intelligent Conversation on the message boards, the Neo Catholics will
not tolerate dissent vis a vis their position. The one with his broadcast centre is a classic example, with commenters practically
forced to pay homage to The Fearless Leader's Position, even when not well researched.
Those who hold the Traditional Catholic Position, allow True Discussion on matters Catholic.
Traditional Catholic is true Freedom, without being patronizing. I cannot say that for a certain site, which charges $10 per
month for Premium Membership.
You've reminded me of how the totally neocon and cuckservative National Review now rigorously–with all the fanaticism of the Stasi–polices
its comments section. It's unreal.
"... These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible. ..."
However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the
potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla
in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our
relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that
goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the
profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather
than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial
overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the
former Soviet Union.
According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world,
our empire consists
of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over
190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of
March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working
there -- 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178
civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the
largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.
These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are
not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous
conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs,
an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its
global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control
or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.
We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire
that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of
failed empires of the past -- including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet
Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to
liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in
war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and
Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and
following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)
Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate
us.
1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism
Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several
members of his new cabinet,
stated as fact that "[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few
weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington
D.C., the president again
insisted , "Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will
have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement address to
the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that "[w]e will maintain
America's military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever
seen."
What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a
global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.
According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it
is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a
crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of
imperialism. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win:
The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes :
"America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing
government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic
weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading
knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as
the death knell of American hegemony."
There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a
bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an
insightful analogy:
"Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must
provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show
that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person
filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the
astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero
return on the significant investment required to sustain them He could not qualify for
liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the
valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases."
In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is
instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with
insolvency.
Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the
Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we
would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if
we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800
overblown military enclaves.
Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure
of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary,
Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets
[invested in the United States] are very safe." According to
press reports , the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.
In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States
will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a
projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably
expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American
citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush's imperial adventures -- if they ever can or
will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of
everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of
European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.
Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and
worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual
Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger , not smaller, than the bloated final
budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required
in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.
2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both
Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military
methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan's
modern history -- to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain
sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was
then called the North-West Frontier Territories -- the area along either side of the artificial
border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in
1893 by Britain's foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.
Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area.
As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford
University Press, 2002, p. 425): "Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla
warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers
were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland." An
estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no
loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.
The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is
administered directly by Islamabad, which -- just as British imperial officials did -- has
divided the territory
into seven agencies, each with its own "political agent" who wields much the same powers as his
colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of
Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.
"If Washington's bureaucrats don't remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The
British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned
for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it
during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in
the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world's sense of justice and morality
while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United
States."
In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan.
The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of
civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated:
"We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers" (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view
prevailed.
The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of
noncombatants is a result of "collateral damage," or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal
accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts, among other
places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and
Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating
precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.
When in May 2009 General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan,
he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when
needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our
chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried
out a drone attack against a funeral procession that
killed at least 80 people , the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far.
There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on
the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the
sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael
Jackson.)
Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by
inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about
which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of
what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that,
contrary to our own intelligence service's focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always been the
problem." They add:
"Pakistan's army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch from 1973 on, has played the key
role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the
1980s] and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan's army that controls its nuclear weapons,
constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide
attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government."
(p. 322-324)
The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who
fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not
necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad . Their purposes have always included: keeping
Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for
mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan
and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan),
and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the
United States to pay and train "freedom fighters" throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan's
consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services
Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.
Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense
Information in Washington, summarizes our
hopeless project in South Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in
Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are
unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."
Obama's mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand
Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William
Westmoreland's continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would
ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would
certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the
nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.
Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the
last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction:
Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as
it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should
recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never
understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.
3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted , "Rape and other forms of
sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no
evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He
continued:
"New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of
sexual assaults -- 2,923 -- and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women
serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that
women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat
zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and
lining up in formation right beside them."
The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located
cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors.
For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in
Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers,
Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.
That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World
War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two
Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every
continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of
the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw
materials we covet.
The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend
the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and
predatory troops. "The military's record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it's
atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high
command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of Forces
Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining
jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for
our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local
authorities.
This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident
of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty
Hawk , then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and
reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and
effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese
police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape
Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.
In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost
fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret
"understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the
crime was not of "national importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil
because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year
being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.
Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland,
Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001),
the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable
results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008,
83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to
the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors
accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of
course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be
charged.
Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone:
Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks
of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts
martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely
Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure
in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are
never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are
negligible.
It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its
personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. I
believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring
the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been
taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.
10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire
Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key
places to begin:
1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide.
We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after
ourselves.
2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the
"opportunity costs" that go with them -- the things we might otherwise do with our talents and
resources but can't or won't.
3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the
1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote
regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors
[Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling
the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture
abroad.
4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian
employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters -- along with their expensive medical
facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses ,
and so forth -- that follow our military enclaves around the world.
5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our
military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense.
These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic
research. Ending empire would make this happen.
6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest
exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of
torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for
immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army's infamous military
academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson,
The
Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)
7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve
Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote
militarism in our schools.
8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling
back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for
the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy
Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the
World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this
possible.
9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more
effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.
10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on
military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.
Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to
remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the
British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is
foreordained.
"2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of
the "opportunity costs" that go with them"
Never forget, such "liquidation" will destroy the economy.
Harry Truman & Company invented the GI Bill of Rights to keep millions of returning
WWII veterans out of the bad labor market following the war. It was a delaying tactic, no
more.
Within a few years, to everyone's shock, the economy began to uptick. New factories were
built, and the interstate highways created a plethora of opportunity. For a while.
Those days are gone. The plethora of opportunities is now in Mexico, China, South Korea by
any rational yardstick the USA is an employment desert for young people. It's been heading
that way since the oil shocks of the 1970s allowed the plutocrats to shed middle class jobs
for four-fifths of the people on the wrong side of the bell curve.
Bringing armies home to debt and penury? By all means, assuming there's a Leon Trotsky or
an Adolf Hitler in the woodpile. At least they know how to play a situation like that.
"... Author and professor Paul Gottfried writing at The American Conservative , amplifies the words of Yoram Hazony, that just because America doesn't want to annex the territories of foreign nations, doesn't mean it carries no imperial ambitions. In fact, says Gottfried, uber-neocon War Dog Max Boot has called for "an American empire," outright. ..."
"... Max Boot, for example, has been quite open in demanding "an American empire" built on ideological and military control even without outright annexation. ..."
Author and professor Paul Gottfried writing at The
American Conservative , amplifies the words of Yoram Hazony, that just because America
doesn't want to annex the territories of foreign nations, doesn't mean it carries no imperial
ambitions. In fact, says Gottfried, uber-neocon War Dog Max Boot has called for "an American
empire," outright.
Gottfried writes (abridged):
Recently while reading a book by an Israeli scholar named Yoram Hazony with the
provocative title The Virtue of Nationalism, I encountered a distinction drawn by the late
Charles Krauthammer between empire building and American global democratic hegemony. Like the
editors of the Weekly Standard, for which he periodically wrote, Krauthammer believed it was
unfair to describe what he wanted to see done, which was having the U.S. actively spread its
own form of government throughout the world, as "imperialism." After all, Krauthammer said,
he and those who think like him "do not hunger for new territory," which makes it wrong to
accuse them of "imperialism."
Hazony responds with the obvious answer that control can be imposed on the unwilling even
if the empire builders are not overtly annexing territory.
Meanwhile, other neoconservatives have given the game away by pushing their imperialist
position a bit further than Krauthammer's. Max Boot, for example, has been quite open in
demanding "an American empire" built on ideological and military control even without
outright annexation.
The question that occurred to me while reading Krauthammer's proposal and Hazony's
response (which I suspect would have been more devastating had Hazony not been afraid of
losing neoconservative friends and sponsors) is this one: how is this not imperialism?
It might be argued (and has been by neoconservatives many times) that the U.S. is both
morally superior and less dangerous than ethnically defined societies because we advocate a
"value" or "creed" that's accessible to the entire human race.
Please tell me this is not what it obviously is: an invitation to war and empire building.
The quest for hegemony always looks the same, no matter what moral labels some choose to give
it.
"... These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible. ..."
Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire And Ten Steps to Take to Do So Chalmers Johnson July 29, 2018 4,000
Words 1 CommentReply
However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the
potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla
in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our
relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that
goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the
profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather
than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial
overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the
former Soviet Union.
According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world,
our empire consists
of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over
190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of
March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working
there -- 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178
civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the
largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.
These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are
not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous
conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs,
an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its
global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control
or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.
We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire
that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of
failed empires of the past -- including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet
Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to
liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in
war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and
Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and
following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)
Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate
us.
1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism
Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several
members of his new cabinet,
stated as fact that "[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few
weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington
D.C., the president again
insisted , "Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will
have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement address to
the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that "[w]e will maintain
America's military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever
seen."
What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a
global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.
According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it
is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a
crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of
imperialism. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win:
The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes :
"America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing
government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic
weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading
knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as
the death knell of American hegemony."
There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a
bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an
insightful analogy:
"Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must
provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show
that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person
filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the
astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero
return on the significant investment required to sustain them He could not qualify for
liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the
valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases."
In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is
instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with
insolvency.
Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the
Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we
would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if
we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800
overblown military enclaves.
Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure
of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary,
Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets
[invested in the United States] are very safe." According to
press reports , the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.
In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States
will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a
projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably
expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American
citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush's imperial adventures -- if they ever can or
will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of
everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of
European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.
Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and
worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual
Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger , not smaller, than the bloated final
budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required
in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.
2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both
Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military
methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan's
modern history -- to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain
sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was
then called the North-West Frontier Territories -- the area along either side of the artificial
border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in
1893 by Britain's foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.
Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area.
As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford
University Press, 2002, p. 425): "Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla
warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers
were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland." An
estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no
loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.
The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is
administered directly by Islamabad, which -- just as British imperial officials did -- has
divided the territory
into seven agencies, each with its own "political agent" who wields much the same powers as his
colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of
Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.
"If Washington's bureaucrats don't remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The
British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned
for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it
during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in
the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world's sense of justice and morality
while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United
States."
In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan.
The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of
civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated:
"We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers" (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view
prevailed.
The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of
noncombatants is a result of "collateral damage," or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal
accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts, among other
places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and
Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating
precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.
When in May 2009 General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan,
he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when
needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our
chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried
out a drone attack against a funeral procession that
killed at least 80 people , the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far.
There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on
the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the
sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael
Jackson.)
Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by
inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about
which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of
what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that,
contrary to our own intelligence service's focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always been the
problem." They add:
"Pakistan's army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch from 1973 on, has played the key
role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the
1980s] and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan's army that controls its nuclear weapons,
constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide
attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government."
(p. 322-324)
The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who
fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not
necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad . Their purposes have always included: keeping
Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for
mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan
and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan),
and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the
United States to pay and train "freedom fighters" throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan's
consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services
Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.
Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense
Information in Washington, summarizes our
hopeless project in South Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in
Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are
unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."
Obama's mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand
Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William
Westmoreland's continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would
ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would
certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the
nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.
Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the
last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction:
Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as
it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should
recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never
understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.
3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted , "Rape and other forms of
sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no
evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He
continued:
"New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of
sexual assaults -- 2,923 -- and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women
serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that
women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat
zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and
lining up in formation right beside them."
The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located
cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors.
For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in
Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers,
Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.
That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World
War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two
Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every
continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of
the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw
materials we covet.
The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend
the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and
predatory troops. "The military's record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it's
atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high
command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of Forces
Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining
jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for
our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local
authorities.
This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident
of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty
Hawk , then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and
reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and
effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese
police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape
Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.
In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost
fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret
"understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the
crime was not of "national importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil
because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year
being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.
Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland,
Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001),
the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable
results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008,
83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to
the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors
accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of
course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be
charged.
Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone:
Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks
of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts
martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely
Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure
in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are
never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are
negligible.
It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its
personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. I
believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring
the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been
taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.
10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire
Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key
places to begin:
1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide.
We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after
ourselves.
2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the
"opportunity costs" that go with them -- the things we might otherwise do with our talents and
resources but can't or won't.
3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the
1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote
regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors
[Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling
the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture
abroad.
4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian
employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters -- along with their expensive medical
facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses ,
and so forth -- that follow our military enclaves around the world.
5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our
military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense.
These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic
research. Ending empire would make this happen.
6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest
exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of
torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for
immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army's infamous military
academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson,
The
Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)
7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve
Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote
militarism in our schools.
8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling
back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for
the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy
Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the
World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this
possible.
9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more
effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.
10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on
military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.
Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to
remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the
British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is
foreordained.
"2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of
the "opportunity costs" that go with them"
Never forget, such "liquidation" will destroy the economy.
Harry Truman & Company invented the GI Bill of Rights to keep millions of returning
WWII veterans out of the bad labor market following the war. It was a delaying tactic, no
more.
Within a few years, to everyone's shock, the economy began to uptick. New factories were
built, and the interstate highways created a plethora of opportunity. For a while.
Those days are gone. The plethora of opportunities is now in Mexico, China, South Korea by
any rational yardstick the USA is an employment desert for young people. It's been heading
that way since the oil shocks of the 1970s allowed the plutocrats to shed middle class jobs
for four-fifths of the people on the wrong side of the bell curve.
Bringing armies home to debt and penury? By all means, assuming there's a Leon Trotsky or
an Adolf Hitler in the woodpile. At least they know how to play a situation like that.
It's been almost eight years since Chalmers Johnson died. He was the author of, among other
works, Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of American Empire and Dismantling the
Empire . He was also a TomDispatchstalwart
and a friend . As I watch the strange destructive dance of Donald Trump and his cohorts
, I still regularly find myself wondering: What would Chal think? His acerbic wit and, as a
former consultant to the CIA, his deep sense of how the national security state worked provided
me with a late education. With no access to my Ouija board, however, the best I can do when it
comes to answering such questions is repost his classic
final piece for this site on the necessity of dismantling the American empire before it
dismantles us. He wrote it in July 2009, convinced that we had long passed from a republic to
an empire and were on the downward slide, helped along by what he called a " military
Keynesianism " run amok. He saw the Pentagon and our empire of
bases abroad as a kind of Ponzi scheme that would, someday, help bankrupt this country.
How fascinated he would have been by the first candidate to ride an
escalator into a presidential contest on a
singular message of American decline. ("Make American great again !") And how much
more so by the world that candidate is creating as president, intent as he seems to be, in his
own bizarre fashion, on dismantling
the
system of global control the U.S. has built since 1945. At the same time, he seems prepared
to
finance the U.S. military at levels, which, even for Johnson, would have been eye-popping,
while attempting to
sell American arms around an embattled planet in a way that could prove unique. What a
strange combination of urges Donald Trump represents, as he teeters constantly at the
edge of war ("fire and fury like the world has never seen"),
more war ("never, ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer consequences the
likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before"), and
peace in our time. Amid all the strangeness, don't forget the strangeness of a mainstream
media that has gone bonkers
covering this president as no one has ever been covered in the history of the universe
(something that would undoubtedly have amazed Chal).
Think of what President Trump has launched as the potential imperial misadventure of a
lifetime, while checking out Chal's thoughts from so long ago on a subject that should still be
on all our minds.
The United States seems ready to give up on Afghanistan.
After the World Trade Center came down the U.S. accused al-Qaeda, parts of which were hosted
in Afghanistan. The Taliban government offered the U.S. to extradite al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin
Laden to an Islamic country to be judged under Islamic law. The U.S. rejected that and decided
instead to destroy the Afghan government.
Taliban units, supported by Pakistani officers, were at that time still fighting against the
Northern Alliance which held onto a few areas in the north of the country. Under threats from
the U.S. Pakistan, which sees Afghanistan as its natural depth hinterland, was pressed into
service. In exchange for its cooperation with the U.S. operation it was allowed to extradite
its forces and main figures of the Taliban.
U.S. special forces were dropped into north Afghanistan. They came with huge amounts of cash
and the ability to call in B-52 bombers. Together with the Northern Alliance they move towards
Kabul bombing any place where some feeble resistance came from. The Taliban forces dissolved.
Many resettled in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda also vanished.
A conference with Afghan notables was held in Germany's once capital Bonn. The Afghans
wanted to reestablish the former Kingdom but were pressed into accepting a western style
democracy. Fed with large amounts of western money the norther warlords, all well known
mass-murderers, and various greedy exiles were appointed as a government. To them it was all
about money. There was little capability and interest to govern.
All these U.S. mistakes made in the early days are still haunting the country.
For a few years the Taliban went quiet. But continued U.S. operations, which included random
bombing of weddings, torture and abduction of assumed al-Qaeda followers, alienated the people.
Pakistan feared that it would be suffocated between a permanently U.S. occupied Afghanistan and
a hostile India. Four years after being ousted the Taliban were reactivated and found regrown
local support.
Busy with fighting an insurgency in Iraq the U.S. reacted slowly. It then surged troops into
Afghanistan, pulled back, surged again and is now again pulling back. The U.S. military aptly
demonstrated its excellent logistic capabilities and its amazing cultural incompetence. The
longer it fought the more Afghan people stood up against it. The immense amount of money spent
to 'rebuild' Afghanistan
went to U.S. contractors and Afghan warlords but had little effect on the ground. Now half
the country is back under Taliban control while the other half is more or less contested.
Before his election campaign Donald Trump spoke out
against the war on Afghanistan. During his campaign he was more cautious pointing to the danger
of a nuclear Pakistan as a reason for staying in Afghanistan. But Pakistan is where the U.S.
supply line is coming through and there are no reasonable alternatives. Staying in Afghanistan
to confront Pakistan while depending on Pakistan for logistics does not make sense.
Early this year the U.S. stopped all aid to Pakistan. Even the old Pakistani government was
already talking
about blocking the logistic line. The incoming prime minister Imran Khan has campaigned for
years against the U.S. war on Afghanistan. He very much prefers an alliance with China over any U.S.
rapprochement. The U.S. hope is that Pakistan will have to ask the IMF for another bailout and
thus come back under Washington's control. But it is
more likely that Imran Khan will ask China for financial help.
Under pressure from the military Trump had agreed to raise the force in Afghanistan to some
15,000 troops. But these were way to few to hold more than some urban areas. Eighty percent of
the Afghan people live in the countryside. Afghan troops and police forces are incapable or
unwilling to fight their Taliban brethren. It was obvious that this mini-surge
would fail :
By most objective measures, President Donald Trump's year-old strategy for ending the war in
Afghanistan has produced few positive results.
Afghanistan's beleaguered soldiers have failed to recapture significant new ground from
the Taliban. Civilian deaths have hit historic highs. The Afghan military is struggling to
build a reliable air force and expand the number of elite fighters. Efforts to cripple
lucrative insurgent drug smuggling operations have fallen short of expectations. And U.S.
intelligence officials say the president's strategy has halted Taliban gains but not reversed
their momentum, according to people familiar with the latest assessments.
To blame Pakistan for its support for some Taliban is convenient, but makes little sense. In
a recent
talk John Sopko, the U.S. Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR),
made a crucial point:
"We keep referring to Pakistan as being the key problem. But the problem also was that the
Afghan government at times was viewed very negatively by their local people and what you
really need is to insert a government that the people support, a government that is not
predatory, a government that is not a bunch of lawless warlords," observed Sopko.
He went on to say that the U.S. policy of pouring in billions of dollars in these unstable
environments contributed to the problem of creating more warlords and powerful people who
took the law into their own hands.
"In essence, the government we introduced, particularly some of the Afghan local police
forces, which were nothing other than warlord militias with some uniforms on, were just as
bad as the terrorists before them," said Sopko ...
This was the problem from the very beginning. The U.S. bribed itself into Afghanistan. It
spent tons of money but did not gain real support. It bombed and shot aimlessly at 'Taliban'
that were more often than not just the local population. It incompetently fought 17
one-year-long wars instead of a consistently planned and sustained political, economic and
military campaign.
After a year of another useless surge the Trump administration decided to pull back from
most active operations and to bet
on negotiations with the Taliban:
The shift to prioritize initial American talks with the Taliban over what has proved a futile
"Afghan-led, Afghan-owned" process stems from a realization by both Afghan and American
officials that President Trump's new Afghanistan strategy is not making a fundamental
difference in rolling back Taliban gains.
While no date for any talks has been set, and the effort could still be derailed, the
willingness of the United States to pursue direct talks is an indication of the sense of
urgency in the administration to break the stalemate in Afghanistan.
...
Afghan officials and political leaders said direct American talks with the Taliban would
probably then grow into negotiations that would include the Taliban, the Afghan government,
the United States and Pakistan.
Afghans have continued to burn for the last four decades in the fire of imposed wars. They
are longing for peace and a just system but they will never tire from their just cause of
defending their creed, country and nation against the invading forces of your
warmongering government because they have rendered all the previous and present historic
sacrifices to safeguard their religious values and national sovereignty. If they make a deal
on their sovereignty now, it would be unforgettable infidelity with their proud history and
ancestors.
Last weeks talks between the Taliban and U.S. diplomats took place in Doha, Qatar.
Remarkably the Afghan government was excluded. Despite the rousing tone of the Reuters
report below the positions that were exchanged
do not point to a successful conclusion:
According to one Taliban official, who said he was part of a four-member delegation, there
were "very positive signals" from the meeting, which he said was conducted in a "friendly
atmosphere" in a Doha hotel.
"You can't call it peace talks," he said. "These are a series of meetings for initiating
formal and purposeful talks. We agreed to meet again soon and resolve the Afghan conflict
through dialogue."
...
The two sides had discussed proposals to allow the Taliban free movement in two provinces
where they would not be attacked, an idea that President Ashraf Ghani has already rejected .
They also discussed Taliban participation in the Afghan government.
"The only demand they made was to allow their military bases in Afghanistan ," said the
Taliban official.
...
"We have held three meetings with the U.S. and we reached a conclusion to continue talks for
meaningful negotiations," said a second Taliban official.
...
"However, our delegation made it clear to them that peace can only be restored to Afghanistan
when all foreign forces are withdrawn ," he said.
This does not sound promising:
In a first step the Taliban want to officially rule parts of the country and use it as a
safe haven. The Afghan government naturally rejects that.
Participation of the Taliban in the Afghan government is an idea of the Afghan president
Ghani. It is doubtful that this could be successfully arranged. Norther Alliance elements in
the Afghan government, like the 'chief executive' Abdullah Abdullah, are unlikely to ever
agree to it. The Taliban also have no interest to be 'part of the government' and to then get
blamed for its failures. Their February letter makes clear that they want to be the
government.
The U.S. wants bases in Afghanistan. The Taliban, and Pakistan behind them, reject that
and will continue to do so.
It is difficult to see how especially the last mutually exclusive positions can ever be
reconciled.
The Taliban are ready to accept a peaceful retreat of the U.S. forces. That is their only
offer. They may agree to keep foreign Islamist fighters out of their country. The U.S. has no
choice but to accept. It is currently retreating to the cities and large bases. The outlying
areas will fall to the Taliban. Sooner or later the U.S. supply lines will be cut. Its bases
will come under fire.
There is no staying in Afghanistan. A retreat is the only issue the U.S. can negotiate
about. It is not a question of "if" but of "when".
The Soviet war in Afghanistan took nine years. The time was used to build up a halfway
competent government and army that managed to hold off the insurgents for three more years
after the Soviet withdrawal. The government only fell when the Soviets cut the money line. The
seventeen year long U.S. occupation did not even succeed in that. The Afghan army is corrupt
and its leaders are incompetent. The U.S. supplied it with expensive and complicate equipment
that
does not fit Afghan needs . As soon as the U.S. withdraws the whole south, the east and
Kabul will immediately fall back into Taliban hands. Only the north may take a bit longer. They
will probably ask China to help them in developing their country.
The erratic
empire failed in another of its crazy endeavors. That will not hinder it to look for a new
ones. The immense increase
of the U.S. military budget, which includes 15,000 more troops, points to a new large war.
Which country will be its next target?
thanks b.. it would be good if the exceptional warmongering nation could go home, but i am
not fully counting on it.. i liked your quote here "The U.S. military aptly demonstrated its
excellent logistic capabilities and its amazing cultural incompetence." that is ongoing..
unless the usa leaves, i think the madness continues.. i suspect the madness will continue..
the only other alternative is the usa, with the help of their good buddies - uk, ksa, qatar,
uae and israel - will keep on relocating isis to afgan for future destabilization.. i watched
a video peter au left from al jazzera 2017 with isis embedded in the kush mtns... until the
funding for them ceases - i think the usa will have a hand in the continued madness... if the
usa was serious about ending terrorism they would shut down the same middle east countries
they are in bed with.. until that happens, i suspect not much will change.. i hope i am
wrong..
I dont believe it for a second. Especially with Iran looming as a potential target. US is
staying in Afghanistan also to counter China , keep opium production high and of course there
is the TAPI pipeline to "protect" that is backed by US as an alternative to the
Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline that would have tapped Iran's South Pars gas field. A hostile or
unfriendly Pakistan is just one more reason to stay
Just like US will never leave Iraq or Syria, they will stay in Afghanistan. There will be
ebbs and flows, and talk of disengagement from time to time primarily for domestic
consumption, but thats all it is IMO.
This is a fine recap of the situation. It's much too optimistic. The classic method of
American negotiation and warfare like the Roman before them is to divide and conquer. It was
very successful against the American Indians.
If the Taliban get free movement in two provinces, the Americans will demand an end to
attacks on their bases, their soldiers and their agents elsewhere in Afghanistan. Just as the
Iroquois Confederation enjoyed special privileges in what is now Upper New York for their
help against the French, the Taliban will have special privileges in their two provinces
while the Americans consolidate in the rest of Afghanistan. When the Americans feel strong
enough, just as with the Iroquois, they will break the previous treaties.
After the Revolutionary War, the ancient central fireplace of the League was re-established
at Buffalo Creek. The United States and the Iroquois signed the treaty of Fort Stanwix in
1784 under which the Iroquois ceded much of their historical homeland to the Americans,
which was followed by another treaty in 1794 at Canandaigua which they ceded even more land
to the Americans./b
(...continuation of the comment above, somehow got posted when I pressed the return
key)
Even the Soviet Union and Russians were unable to make the American respect their
commitments. The United States reneged on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as soon as it
could in 2001 (Russia was on its knees), reneged on its commitments not to expand NATO east
and has built ballistic missile bases all around Russia which seem to be preparation for a
pre-emptive nuclear strike/war against Russia.
The Afghanis (foolish to call them the Taliban, they are traditional Afghani patriots)
have always been wise enough to annihilate any invader to the last man. This salutary policy
keeps invaders out for decades at a time. The Taliban have a long row to hoe. It took almost
a hundred years and several massacres to finally curb British ambitions on Afghanistan (1838
to 1919). Afghanis' best hopes rely on forging tight alliances with Pakistan and China,
squeezing the Americans out completely right now.
The Americans burnt their bridges with the Russian already and are in the process of
burning their bridges with Pakistan while losing influence with China. The US is very short
of options right now. It's the ideal time for Afghanis to reclaim the whole territory, not
leaving a single American soldier or airbase operational. They'll need a technically
sophisticated ally to help them clear their skies of US drones. This role might appeal to
either the Russians or the Chinese. As a training exercise, extended anti-drone warfare could
be very useful.
What a great success the US achieved in destroying Yugoslavia. Murdering thousands went
almost unnoticed. It was able to break up the country into a number of tiny, impoverished
nations and got to put a US MIC Base in most of them.
You did not mention isis-k in your analysis. Its active mostly in eastern afghanistan in
areas close to or adjacent to Pakistan (it is also controlls a small area in Jawzjan, in
northern afghanistan). Many fighters are formerly pakistani taliban(not to be confused with
afghan taliban who are simply called taliban). Before isis-k appeared in afghanistan, the
areas which it now controls had pakistani taliban presence. TTP, or tehreek e taliban
pakistan was facilitated by afghan ggovernment to settle down in these areas after they fled
pakistan when its military launched a large scale offensive, Operation Zarb e Azb. The afghan
government planned to use them to pressurize Pakistan, basically to use them as a bargaining
chip. They operate openly in eastern afghanistan, but many of them joined isis-k.
Russians estimate isis-k's strength to be between 10k to 12k, although it might be a bit
inflated number. From here they plan attacks against afghanistan and pakistan alike, mostly
suicide bombings as of now. They have had fierce clashes with afghan taliban in eastern
Afghanistan but have held their territory for now. Afghan army simply doesn't have the
capacity in those areas to confront them. It was here that MOAB was dropped but as expected
against a guerrilla force, it was ineffective in every way. But it did make headlines and has
helped US in giving an impression its seriously fighting ISIS. The reports of unmarked
helicopters dropping god-knows-what have also been coming from these areas. Hamid karzai
mentioned that and also maria zakharova asked afghan gov. and US to investigate that which
shows these are not just rumors. Recently intelligence chiefs of Pakistan, russia, iran and
china as well(if i remember correctly) met in islamabad to discuss isis-k in afghanistan, no
details other than this of this meeting are available.
In Northern afghanistan, in Jawzjan, fierce clashes broke out between taliban and isis-k
after taliban commander in thiae areas was beheaded. ISIS-k has been beaten up pretty badly
there but clashes are ongoing. Many areas have been cleared but fighting is still ongoing. An
interesting aspect is taliban sources claiming that whenever they come close to a decisive
victory, they have to stop operations becauae of heavy bombardment by US planes. They made
similar claims when fighting daesh in eastern afghanistan. Anyway in a few days isis presence
will probably be finished in Jawzjan. ISIS fighters who have survived have done so by
surrendering to afghan forces. They will probably end up back in eastern afghanistan.
Africa. US AFRICOM has a huge playground, tactics won't change and logistics is far
easier.
There also will be a long Hybrid wr against Iran, but that will be much like the early
days of Syria. Proxies as "moderates". Insurgents, not US troops. ISIS and AQ crazies will be
on the ground.
The big money will go into Africa. You want to see Trillions "spent"? It will be
Africa.
The decision to invade Afghanistan had been taken before the 9/11 false flag coup. Had
nothing much to do with the CIA's al-Qaeda mercenaries.
As I understood it, there were many agendas at work: testing weapons and making money for
the MIC; controlling the lucrative (how many hundreds of billions of dollars ?) opium/ heroin
production/profiteering; military bases relating to Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan and other
...stans, etc; control of oil and gas pipelines; access to increasingly valuable and sought
rare earth minerals; proximity to oil and gas actual and potential.
More generally, subjugating Afghanistan was a necessary part of the 'full spectrum
dominance' 'we will rule the earth' doctrine, dear til recently to too many mad hatters, and
still evoking a misty eyed longing in some, no doubt.
Ahhh...the US produces some of the lamest euphemisms approved for all audiences; such as
"Afgahn Security Forces." So sterile, innocuous. And benign. How could anyone question their
plight? (We did pick up the game a little bit in Syria with "Free Syrian Army..." Can I get a
hell yeah?) All the people hearing this in the US could do was shrug their shoulders and
speak, "I guess I should support them." That is, of course, after we took out OBL and the
mission in Afghanistan was a little more opaque. Just a little bit. Anyways...Hell, yeah! Get
some!
Thanks b for the brief history. Really invaluable.
Afghani patriots, resisting invaders since 330 BCE... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_Afghanistan
The US military, the planet's costliest losingest military since 1946. The US military, like
its munitions manufacturers, doesn't win but it does get paid and is why we can have nice
things like oh, decent health care. Lack of health insurance kills more Americans than the
Russians ever will. The Russians aren't the enemy, Trump is. Lobbyists are too.
I haven't read anything about Blackwater wanting to replace the U.S. Military in Afghanistan.
Of course, the U.S. Treasury would continue to shovel those pallet loads of newly printed
$100.00 bills down the Blackwater hole. Any odds this might go forward from anyone's opinion?
robin cook before he was murdered stated that alqueda was a cia data base.
i believe bresinski knew obl as tim osman who was later killed by cia mi6 man omar blah blah
sheikh bhutto of pakisyan was assasinated after spilling the beans about sheikh.
christopher bolleyn on you tube will give you the sp on what 9 and 11 was shirley we are
past the point of the offecal theory.
the turd burger that is the official theory is clearly the worst and lowest grade of all the
conspiracy theories.
the taliban where in barbera bushes texas talking lithium opium and oil pipelines with the
paedo bush crime syndicate before 9 and 11
marvin bush ran security at the twin towers
christopher bollyn is the go to man in these regardings
The US wants peace talks but wants to keep its bases in Afghanistan. US under Trump has built
new bases in Syria, Iraq, Kuwait.
SDF have been talking with Syrian government, and US in Talks with Taliban. Are these just
moves to buy the US a little time until it launches the war Trump has been building the US
military up for.
isis is israeli counter gang with support of usa usa and the city of
london,ukrainian,polish,uk sas,cia,kiwi,aussie,jordanian and donmeh satanic house of
saud.
talking of isis as if it is real entity rather than a frank kitson gang counter gang and
pseudo gang is polluting the well.
who has been providing extraction helicopters from syriana for the last 14 months.
who has been washing these bearded devils operating on them in kosher field hospitals making
them well shiny and new
who?
scchhhhh you know who
We are concerned about reports regarding the use of helicopters without any identification
marks in many parts of Afghanistan that are delivering terrorists and arms to the Afghan
branch of this terrorist organisation. We believe that reports to this effect made by Afghan
officials should be thoroughly investigated."
- Of course. The US wants to keep its bases in Afghanistan. Surprise, surprise.
In 2002 when ABC corporate propaganda showed Special Forces rounding up village
Hajji, the writing was on the wall. Afghanistan is a Holy War run by incompetents for a profit.
The only question is when will the Westerners withdraw from the Hindu Kush and how disastrous
it will be. Americans cannot afford the unwinnable war's blood and treasure. The US's Vietnam
War (1956 to 1975) ended for the same reasons. That war ushered in the Reagan Revolution and
the Triumph of the Oligarchy. The consequences of the breakup of the Atlantic Alliance will be
even more severe.
In 2002 when ABC corporate propaganda showed Special Forces rounding up village Hajji, the
writing was on the wall. Afghanistan is a Holy War run by incompetents for a profit. The only
question is when will the Westerners withdraw from the Hindu Kush and how disastrous it will
be. Americans cannot afford the unwinnable war's blood and treasure. The US's Vietnam War
(1956 to 1975) ended for the same reasons. That war ushered in the Reagan Revolution and the
Triumph of the Oligarchy. The consequences of the breakup of the Atlantic Alliance will be
even more severe.
@uncoy.. i basically see it like you, however another proxy war involving usa-russia-china
sounds like a running theme now...
@13 bilal.. good post.. i agree about the analysis missing much on isis presence in afgan
as @6 jr also points out.. i think it is a critical bit of the puzzle.. it appears the usa is
using isis as a proxy force, as obama previously stated with regard to syria... the usa just
can't seem to help themselves with their divide and conquer strategy using isis as part of
it's methodology... it's exact opposite of what they profess..
@18 eugene.. isn't blackwater or whatever they're called now - headquartered in uae?
perfect place for them, lol... right on top of yemen, afgan, and etc. etc.. if isis can't do
the job for the west thru their good friends ksa, uae - well, then maybe they can pay a bit
more and get blackwater directly involved too..
Trump is serious when he said he would talk to anybody. The CIA is alleged to have been
stirring the pot with Islamic militants prior to the Soviet invasion when the country went
full socialist. I would suspect the Russians had a hand in that in 1978. US intelligence was
said to be helping along the backlash to socialism by Islamic militants back then in 1978.
The CIA station chief was promptly assassinated the next year.
Obviously you could dump 600,000 NATO and US soldiers into the country and not control it
short of executing every Muslim. What a foolish endeavor but what would you expect from these
buffoons and their death cult? These human sacrifices are holy to them. They worship blood,
death, power and money.
With their loss in Syria the NEOCONS can now make peace with the Taliban and use them and
ISIS to push into old Soviet Central Asia in an attempt to deny them what the Anglo American
Zionist alliance cannot have at this time, control of the commodities.
China will slide right in and take it all at some point once exhaustion sets into place.
Even the Brits knew when it was time to leave India and their Middle Eastern holdings. They
realized the costs of containment would wipe out their country.
No he doesnt, along with Israel and neocons. There was already nuclear deal, and US was
out of "all this crap", so why introduce Gordian Knot if he doesnt want it?
What Trump demands is Iran's surrender. 'b discussed it at length some time ago, the list
of Trump's demands is completely ridiculous and the goal is Iran as a client state.
From its side, Iran is refusing to even meet Trump, two reasons: 1) If Iran agrees to
meet, it would mean they agree to renegotiate the deal, which they dont. 2) US word isnt
worth a toilet paper, so any negotiations is meaningless. Plus US list of demands makes even
endeavor to negotiate dead from the get go.
Congress went along with the Pentagon's 7 countries in 5 years plan. No investigation of 9/11
or even consideration of Ron Paul's bringing in an old idea of Letters of Marque and
Reprisal.
As to the US leaving the warlords in power to continue opium production, etc, Van Buren (We
Meant Well book) said some of the same happened in Iraq with some sheikhs still holding power
in local areas. General Garner looked forward to going in to rebuild (and was promising quick
elections) but was shocked to see no protection of ministries (except oil) which were looted
and burned. And then Bremer was put in charge. Complete mismanagement of the war, the
aftermath, etc. Like someone once said, if they were doing these things at random you would
expect them to get it right once in a while.
The Kunduz Airlift which allowed Pakistan a corridor to fly out Pak officials, Taliban,
and possibly al Qaeda was yet another snafu like paying Pakistan to supposedly block any
escape from their side of Tora Bora only to have a long convoy leave at night. It made one
wonder about the US supposed air superiority/domination. Again, complete mismanagement.
A comparison to the end situation in VietNam 1975 is apt.
Trump meeting Rouhani. Trump saays he wants a better deal. The nuke agreement took years to
negotiate and Iran accepted far more stringent inspections than any other country signed up
NPT. There is nothing more for Iran to negotiate other than to give away their
sovereignty.
The offer of a meeting by Trump is more along the line of "we tried to avoid war".
The US under Trump have scrapped the nuke agreement and made demands that are impossible for
Iran to meet without giving away its sovereignty.
Erik Prince's plan for fighting in Afghanistan.
He presented it to the WH. Military rejected it.
He is no longer Blackwater-connected.
Frontier Services Group Ltd. is his new military-security services corp.
He has extensive contracts with the Chinese government and their SOEs overseas.
did you see General Souleimani answer's to Trump rabid tweet
it went like this
Our president doesnt lower himself to answer someone like.I, a soldier answer someone like
you, you re someone who speaks in the vocabulary of a cabaret owner and a gambling house
dealer.(paraphrasing saker has the video on his site)
and then he went on to describe how your cowad troops wore adult diapers in Afghanistan
and Iraq
China will slide right in and take it all at some point once exhaustion sets into place.
dltravers @28
No. China, being development-oriented rather than imperialist, will leave Afghanistan
alone. China and Russia, but especially China, requires an Afghanistan that is not a
U.S.-controlled terrorist base. Because China needs the oil/gas link that it is building
through Pakistan to access Gulf energy resources, and that energy corridor would be the
primary target of U.S.-hired mercenaries ('terrorists').
How Afghanistan manages itself in the post-U.S. era is Afghan business, but it will almost
certainly involve the Pashtun majority (in the form of the 'Taliban') retaking power in Kabul
but with the traditional huge amounts of autonomy for the provinces. That arrangement reduces
pressure by Pashtun nationalists in Pakistan against Pakistan's government, and in general
seems to be the long-term stable set up, and stability is what China has to have in
Afghanistan.
Now is the time with perfect China partner Khan and the Pakistan military firmly in power.
Not instant, but over the next two years I think we'll see the Taliban's fighting capacity
hugely improve, with transfers of supplies, weapons and intelligence from Pakistan. It would
be very smart for Trump to get out in 2019. History is going to accelerate in that
region.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I worry a lot about Venezuela. See, it's a perfect
fit for the U.S. economy. U.S. shale oil is way too light to be useful, while Venezuelan oil
is way too heavy to be useful. They are destined for each other, i.e. to be mixed into a
blend that would be a good fit U.S. refineries. Plus, Venezuela is very import-dependent and
thus would make for a good vassal. It also has a rabid capitalist class that will do anything
-- any kind of atrocity or false flag -- to return to the good old days of exploitation. "But
Venezuela has a lot of arms!", I hear you counter. True, but the people are severely
demoralized because of the extreme economic hardship. Think of the USSR in late 80s/early
90s. It had the most powerful military in the world, and yet people were so demoralized and
disillusioned with the old system that they simply chose not to defend it. Same thing may
happen in Venezuela. After Colombia has signed peace accords with FARC, U.S. has been
steadily increasing its military presence in Colombia. I think there is a very real
possibility of a naval blockade combined with supply lines/air raids from Colombia supporting
the "Free Venezuelan Army" assembled from Venezuelan gangs and revanchist capitalists and
foreign mercenaries. It would be logistically impossible for Russia or China to provide
military help to far-away Venezuela. Neighbors will not come to the aid of Venezuela either
as there is a surge of pro-U.S. right-wing governments in the region.
Any moves the U$A makes will have to be approved according to which natural resources their
corporate masters covet at any particular moment. Lithium and other rare earth minerals,
strategic importance, whatever the corporate form needs to stay on top globally, will dictate
what the empire does.
Leave Afghanistan? I very much doubt it.
DJT will do what the "puppet masters" desire. Just like all his predecessors.
'Correction': No reliable census has been done in decades, but I don't think the Pashtun are
the majority in Afghanistan. They
are by far the largest minority however. British 'divide and rule' stategists long ago
deliberately separated them into Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Venezuela and Iran have two things in common. Both have large oil reserves and neither
recognize Israel.
Trump's wars will be about destroying enemies of Israel, and at the same time, achieving
global energy dominance.
I've posted this before. I met a Taliban leader and his two guards in a brutal area during
the Hearts and Minds Schtick, preparatory to Cheney getting all the oil and gas, and copper
and iron and coming coal lease awards.
He was a nice guy, the Taliban leader. His guards looked at me with absolute death in
their eyes. Not wanting them to hear him, as we finished our tea, the Taliban leader leaned
close, then whispered, 'I love your Jesus, but I hate your Crusaders.'
And I take issue with the US 'incompetence' meme. Ever since Cheney hosted the Taliban in
Texas in 1998, trying to get a TAPI pipeline, the US has deliberately and cunningly taken
over the country, assassinated the local-level leadership, and installed their foreign Shah,
first Karzai, then Ghani.
In that time of occupation, 18 years, Pentagon MIC disappeared TRILLIONS in shrink-wrapped
pallets of $100s, and ballooned from $340B a year, to now Trump is saying $840B a year.
That's not incompetence. Just the opposite.
Now, to honor my Afghan friends, who love to joke even after 35+ years of machine warfare,
a joke I wrote in their honor:
Ring ring ring ring
"Office of the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan!"
"BRRZZZBRRZZZV..."
"Hold please."
President Reagan, it's the Iranian ambassador!"
"Well hello Mr. Assinabindstani, what can I do for you?"
"BRRZZZBRRZZZV..."
"Well I'll get my staff right on it."
[Intercomm clicks]
"Hey Ollie, the Ayatollah wants more guns! Step on it!"
Actually, the British paid an annual tithe-tribute the the Afghan king to stop raiding
their India holdings, and agreed to a neutral zone between them. Then when the British pulled
out, they declared the neutral zone as Pakistan and shrunk India away from Pashtun territory
to create a bigger divide. The Afghan leaders had no say in the matter. I believe Baluchistan
was also carved away. At one time, Afghan control extended from Persia to the Indus Valley.
There is no way to defeat a nation of warriors who created a kingdom that vast, while William
the Conqueror was still running around in bear skin diapers.
@41 'Afghan control extended from Persia to the Indus Valley.'
You are probably referring to the Khalji Dynasty, a brutal bunch, who ruled India from
1290 to 1320 by which time William the Conqueror was long dead. You would be a lot more
credible if you got your history right.
IMHO the military Budget increase, and what an increase it is!
is part of worsening an already outrageous situation to reach a caricatural point. Typical of
trump repeated special "art".
Of course Nobody in USA, no President can go against the MIC and Pentagon.
But money is cheap when you print it.
It is sugaring the intended shrinking of foreign deployments (as in NATO), closure of
"facilities" and replacing them officially with total deterrence capacities (Space Forces
anybody ?).
While keeping classical projection capacities for demonstration against backward
tribes.
...
From its side, Iran is refusing to even meet Trump, two reasons: 1) If Iran agrees to meet,
it would mean they agree to renegotiate the deal, which they dont. 2) US word isnt worth a
toilet paper, so any negotiations is meaningless. Plus US list of demands makes even endeavor
to negotiate dead from the get go.
Posted by: Harry | Jul 30, 2018 7:53:57 PM | 29
Tru-ish but Trump's latest offer is, according to the MSM, "no pre-conditions." It's quite
likely that Iran's allies have advised the Iranians to tell Trump to Go F*ck yourself (if you
feel you must), but then satisfy yourselves that Trump's No Preconditions means what Iran
wants it to mean.
Trump jumped into the NK and Putin talks first because both were eager to talk. Iran will
be a good test of Trump's seduction skills. All he's got to do is persuade the Iranians that
talking is more useful than swapping long-distance insults. Iranians are rusted onto logical
principles and Trump will find a way to appeal to that trait, imo.
It's too late for the afghanis who have been driven into the urban areas during the regulaar
'Afghanistanisation' campaigns. Most of them will have become hooked on consumerism and the
necessity of dollars.
That leaves only two options for the Taliban when they take over as they undoubtedly will
altho that is likely to mean having to tolerate clutches of obese amerikans lurking in some
Px strewn green zone, the inhabitants of which are likely to have less contact with people
from Afghanistan than any regular user of a Californian shopping mall. The new government can
ignore the consumerists even when these rejects insist on getting lured into some nonsense
green revolution - the danger with this isn't the vapid protests which can easily be dealt
with by fetching a few mobs of staunch citizens from rural Afghanistan who will quickly teach
them that neither cheeseburgers nor close captioned episodes of daytime television provide
sufficient nutrition to handle compatriots raised on traditional food and Islam. Or the new
administration can do as other traditional regimes have done many times over the last 80
years or so, purge the consumerists by disappearing the leadership and strewing empty lots in
the urban areas with mutilated corpses of a few of the shitkicker class consumerists. That
option can cause a bit of a fuss but it (the fuss) generally only lasts as long as the purge.
I suspect the Afghan government will favour the latter approach but they may try to hold
off until the North has been brought back into line. OTH, consumerism is a highly contagious
condition so, unless the North can be pacified speedily which seems unlikely, initially at
least the Taliban adminsitration may have to fight on two fronts, agin the North while they
nip urban consumerists in the bud before those confused fools can cause any highly publicised
in the west but in actuality, low key, attempted insurrection.
My advice to the gaming, TV or cheeseburger addicted inhabitants of Kabul would be to
volunteer your services to the amerikan military as a 'translator' asap and join yer cobbers
in California.
It is unlikely that you will bump into Roman Brady especially not when he is in one
of his avuncular moods, but if you stay outta Texas, Florida or any other part of flyover
amerika chocka with alcohol induced blowhardism, you will discover than amerikan racism isn't
as lethal as it once was.
Apart from having to ignore being jostled in the line at fast food joints and being loudly
and incorrectly termed a motherf**in sand n***er mid-jostle. Certainly a whole lot less
lethal than trying to cover your Fortnite jones by waving a badly copywritten sign in front
of the al-Jazeera cameras for a one month
battle pass .
What was happening in Kabul, Afghanistan less than 8 hours after the WTC Towers turned into
dust in midair? Who here remembers the massive bombing/cruise missile attack?
Here is CNN's transcript:
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: "Well, Joie, it's about 2:30 in the morning here in
Kabul. We've been hearing explosions around the perimeter of the city. We're in a position
here which gives us a view over the whole city. We just had an impact, perhaps a few miles
away.
"If I listen, you can hear the ripple of explosions around the city. Perhaps you heard
there. The fifth explosion -- sixth explosion, I think. Gun bursts and star bursts in the
air. Tracer fire is coming up out of the city. I hear aircraft flying above the city of
Kabul. Perhaps we've heard half a dozen to 10 detonations on the perimeter of the city,
some coming from the area close to the airport. I see on the horizon what could be a fire
on the horizon, close, perhaps, to where the airport might be. A flash came up then from
the airport. Some ground fire coming up here in Kabul."
"I've been in Belgrade and I've been in Baghdad and seen cruise missiles arrive in both
those cities. The detonations we're hearing in Kabul right now certainly sound like the
detonations of loud missiles that are coming in. "
"Certainly -- certainly it would appear that the Afghan defense systems have detected a
threat in the air. They are launching what appears to be anti-aircraft defense systems at
the moment. Certainly, I can see that fire that was blazing on the horizon. It was a faint
yellow; it's now a bright orange blazing. Several other detonations going off around the
city, multiple areas. Rockets appear to be taking off from one end of the airport. I can
see that perhaps located about 8 or 9 miles away from where we stand, Joie."
The bombing/explosions continue for 10+ minutes of this broadcast.
Then, they cut to WILLIAM COHEN, FORMER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: who says the US is only
collecting intelligence. He says what we're seeing must be part of the "Civil War" (despite
the fact that neither side had an air force or cruise missiles). The Pentagon later denies
knowing anything about it.
Then, CNN returns to Nic Robertson, who- within 15 minutes of his first report - begins to
change his tune. Suddenly, the jet sounds are not mentioned. The cruise missiles (jet
engines) have transformed into possible rockets. The airport fire is now an ammunition
dump.
And voila! They lose their connection and Nic will not be heard from again. And this
little bit of history will essentially disappear.
Dear Mr. B,
"All these U.S. mistakes made in the early days are still haunting the country."
These mistakes are by design. To cause and keep causing destabilisation.
I like to refer to it as the 3-letter Scrabble method of doing things.
Me living in the Netherlands as I do, let me take the example of Greece.
Greece had its regime changed in 1948 (Wiki says 46-49).
And how is Greece doing these days? ...
@37 yep, gotta agree with the more passimistic outlook here. Personally i'll eat my shoes if
US leaves Afghanistan within any reasonable time frame. In addition to plentiful natural
resources, there are very influential vested interests in Afghanistans booming opium
industry.
Off topic: Andrei Nekrasov's 'Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes' can be viewed in full on You
Tube at this moment (31 July, 08:15 Amsterdam time). Can it also be seen in the USA, I
wonder? How long will it take before Google take it down ? Watch it and learn about one of
the main drivers of the Russia obsession.
Tru-ish but Trump's latest offer is, according to the MSM, "no pre-conditions." It's quite
likely that Iran's allies have advised the Iranians to tell Trump to Go F*ck yourself (if
you feel you must), but then satisfy yourselves that Trump's No Preconditions means what
Iran wants it to mean.
White House just explained what Trump's "no preconditions" means: 1) Iran should at the
core change how it deals with its own people. 2) Change its evil stance in foreign policy. 3)
Agree on nuclear agreement which would REALLY prevent them making a nuke.
In other words, Iran should capitulate and become a client state, thats what Trump means
by "no preconditions."
At this advanced stage of American insanity, I don't see why the devil should have all the
best tunes. I'm sick of the yanks doing this shit in over people's county's ! While they
stuff there fat faces with burgers and donuts! The dirty games they play on over country's,
should now be played in America with all the brutality that they have used on others. Until
that happens things world wide will continue to detriate. Natural justice is all that
remains. They'v curupted all else.
@19 "The US already started to plan an invasion of Afghanistan in januari & february of
2001."
Well, to be fair the USA probably has plans to invade lots of countries.
Indeed, it would be more interesting to consider how many countries there are that the USA
*doesn't* have invasion plans gathering dust on the shelves.
It's just been reported on the bbc news---- the man responsible for the Manchester bombing
had been 'rescued from Lybia when Gadafi was overthrown and tracked ever since. Even in
Britain up to the day of the bombing ! And now on this post we discuss America uk
transporting terrorists from Syria to Afganistan . Not to mention the white helmet bunch and
where Ther going! The Manchester bombing, Westminster bridge and London Bridge atacks were
done by the Tory party to win a general election ! This is the reality of the world we live
in.full on oppression !!!
Indeed, I agree with the sentiments here. But missing a big part of the picture.
Afghanistan and Pakistan have sky-high fertility rates. Forget the rubbish peddled by
economist-whores like Milton Friedman, under these conditions no country without an open
frontier has ever developed into anything other than a larger mass of poverty. In Pakistan
something like half the children are so malnourished that they grow up stunted, and it is
this misery that is starting slow population growth. Pakistan is yet another example of the
Malthusian holocaust, which is not a global catastrophe: it is slow grinding poverty that
results when people have more children than they can support.
Bottom line: these places will remain poor and unstable no matter what lunacy the United
States does or does not do. The traditional approach to such places is to leave them alone,
and only keep them from escaping. Bottled up, the Afghanis and Pakistanis will kill only each
other. 9/11 is a consequence of allowing people from these places free access to the Untied
States.
The 'war on terror' is a consequence of 'there shall be open borders.' It's a big and
messy world, and even if the government of the United States was not criminally incompetent,
there would be a lot of misery and hatred in it. Open borders means that now the Untied
States has to intervene in every country all over the world to ensure that nowhere can there
develop terrorist cells. An impossible task.
Charles Michael @ 44
I agree with the caricature nature of much of this. I don't think there will be a next
target. The MIC has become bloated while Iran, Syria, Russia, China are turning out true
fighters as well as stronger economic planning.
div
Charles Michael @ 44
I agree with the caricature nature of much of this. I don't think there will be a next
target. The MIC has become bloated while Iran, Syria, Russia, China are turning out true
fighters as well as stronger economic planning.
The US still has some resources and some use but needs to continue to make friends in the
pattern of Kim and Putin and give up on its self defeating economic and military sabotage
planning which has been exposed as morally bankrupt as well.
For several years, a family of foreign nationals (and not only Wassermannn-Schultz) has
been surfing the congressional computers while having no security clearance.
Both Debbie and Hillary should be in federal prison already. Clinton used to be fond of
droning Assange for divulging the criminal and illegal activities of the state. What Debbie
and Hillary did has been much more dangerous to the US national security.
STEPHEN COHEN: ...Are the Russians still targeting our elections?" This is in the category "Are you still beating your wife?"
There is no proof that the Russians have targeted or attacked our elections. But it's become axiomatic. What kind of media is that,
are the Russians still, still attacking our elections.
And what Michael McFaul, whom I've known for years, formerly Ambassador McFaul, purportedly a scholar and sometimes a scholar
said, it is simply the kind of thing, to be as kind as I can, that I heard from the John Birch Society about President Eisenhower
when he went to meet Khrushchev when I was a kid growing up in Kentucky.
...to stage a kangaroo trial of the president of the United States in the mainstream media, and have plenty of once-dignified
people come on and deliver the indictment, is without precedent in this country
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. ..."
Philippics are good, but at some point they faile to exite. The key question that Phipip forgot to ander is: Dore Izreal acts
a alobbist of the US MIC or it hasits own l(local agnda) that conflicts the MIC interests in the region.
So President Donald Trump reckoned on Monday that the United States Intelligence Community (IC) just might be wrong in its assessment
that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election but then decided on Tuesday that he misspoke and had the greatest confidence
in the IC and now agrees that they were correct in their judgment. But Donald Trump, interestingly, added something about there being
"others" that also had been involved in the election in an attempt to subvert it, though he was not specific and the national media
has chosen not to pursue the admittedly cryptic comment. He was almost certainly referring to China both due to possible motive and
the possession of the necessary resources to carry out such an operation. Indeed, there are
reports that China hacked the 30,000 Hillary Clinton emails that are apparently still missing.
Just how one interferes in an election in a large country with diverse sources of information and numerous polling stations located
in different states using different systems is, of course, problematical. The United States has interfered in elections everywhere,
including in Russia under Boris Yeltsin. It engaged in regime change in Iran, Chile, and Guatemala by supporting conservative elements
in the military which obligingly staged coups. In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces invaded and overthrew the governments while in
Libya the change in regime was largely brought about by encouraging rebels while bombing government forces. The same model has been
applied in Syria, though without much success because Damascus actually was bold enough to resist.
So how do the Chinese "others" bring about "change" short of a full-scale invasion by the People's Liberation Army? I do not know
anything about actual Chinese plans to interfere in future American elections and gain influence over the resulting newly elected
government but would like to speculate on just how they might go about that onerous task.
First, I would build up an infrastructure in the United States that would have access to the media and be able to lobby and corrupt
the political class. That would be kind of tricky as it would require getting around the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 (FARA),
which requires representatives of foreign governments operating in the United States to register and have their finances subject
to review by the Department of the Treasury. Most recently, several Russian news agencies that are funded by the Putin government
have been required to do so, including RT International and Sputnik radio and television.
The way to avoid the FARA registration requirement is to have all funding come through Chinese-American sources that are not directly
connected with the government in Beijing. Further, the foundations and other organizations should be set up as having an educational
purpose rather than a political agenda. You might want to call your principal lobbying group something like the American Chinese
Political Action Committee or ACPAC as an acronym when one is referring to it shorthand.
Once established, ACPAC will hire and send hundreds of Chinese-American lobbyists to Capitol Hill when Congress is in session.
They will be carefully selected to come from as many states and congressional districts as possible to maximize access to legislative
offices. They will have with them position papers prepared by the ACPAC central office that explain why a close and uncritical relationship
with Beijing is not only the right thing to do, it is also a good thing for the United States.
As part of the process, new Congressmen will benefit from free trips to China paid for by an educational foundation set up for
that purpose. They will be able to walk on the Great Wall and speak to genuine representative Chinese who will tell them how wonderful
everything is in the People's Republic.
Congressmen who nevertheless appear to be resistant to the lobbying and the emoluments will be confronted with a whole battery
of alternative reasons why they should be filo-Chinese, including the thinly veiled threat that to behave otherwise could be construed
as politically damaging anti-Orientalist racism. For those who persist in their obduracy, the ultimate weapon will be citation of
the horrors of the Second World War Rape of Nanking. No one wants to be accused of being a Rape of Nanking denier.
The second phase of converting Congress is to set up a bunch of Political Action Committees (PACs). They will have innocuous names
like Rocky Mountain Sheep Herders Association, but they will all really be about China. When the money begins to flow into the campaign
coffers of legislators any concerns about what China is doing in the world will cease. The same PACs can be use to fund billboards
and voter outreach in some districts, allowing China to have a say in the elections without actually having to surface or be explicit
about whom it supports. Other PACs can work hard at inserting material into social websites, similar to what the Russians have been
accused of doing.
And then there is the mass media. Using the same Chinese-American conduit, you would simply buy up controlling interests in newspapers
and other media outlets. And you would begin staffing those outlets with earnest young Chinese-Americans who will be highly protective
of Chinese interests and never write a story critical of the government in Beijing or the Chinese people. That way the American public
will eventually become so heavily propagandized by the prevailing narrative that they will never question anything that China does,
ideally beginning to refer to it as the "only democracy in Asia" and "America's best friend in the whole wide world." Once the indoctrination
process is completed, the Chinese leadership might even crush demonstrators with tanks in Tiananmen Square or line up snipers to
pick off protest leaders and no congressman or newspaper would dare say nay.
When the political classes and media are sufficiently under control, it would then be time to move to the final objective: the
dismantling of the United States Constitution. In particularly, there is that pesky Bill of Rights and the First Amendment guaranteeing
Free Speech. That would definitely have to go, so you round up your tame Congress critters and you elect a president who is also
in your pocket, putting everything in place for the "slam-dunk." You pass a battery of laws making any criticism of China both racist
and felonious, with punitive fines and prison sentences attached. After that success, you can begin to dismantle the rest of the
Bill of Rights and no one will be able to say a word against what you are doing because the First Amendment will by then be a dead
duck. When the Constitution is in shreds and Chinese lobbyists are firmly in control of corrupted legislators, Beijing will have
won a bloodless victory against the United States and it all began with just a little interference in America's politics alluded
to by Donald Trump.
Of course, dear reader, all of the above might be true but for the fact that I am not talking about China at all and am only using
that country as a metaphor. Beijing may have spied on the U.S. elections but it otherwise has evidenced little interest in manipulating
elections or controlling any aspect of the U.S. government. And even though I am sure that Donald Trump was not referring to Israel
when he made his offhand comment about "others," the shoe perfectly fits that country's subjugation of many of the foreign and national
security policy mechanisms in the United States over the past fifty years. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently
boasted
about how he controls Trump and convinced him to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement.
The real mystery, if there is one, is why no American politician has either the guts or the integrity or perhaps the necessary
intelligence to substitute Tel Aviv for Moscow and to call Israel out like we are currently calling out Russia for actions that pale
in comparison to what Netanyahu has been up to.
To be specific, there is no evidence that Russia ever asked for favors from Trump's campaign staff and transition team but
Israel did so over a vote on its illegal
settlements at the United Nations. Is Special Counsel Robert Mueller or Congress interested? No. Is the media interested? No.
Israel, relying on Jewish power and money to do the heavy lifting, has completely corrupted many aspects of American government
and, in particular, its foreign policy by aggressive lobbying and buying politicians. All new members of Congress and spouses are
taken to Israel on generously funded "fact finding"
tours after being elected to make sure they get their bearings straight right from the git-go. Israel's nearly total control over
the message on the Middle East coming out of the U.S. mainstream is aided and abetted by the numerous Jewish editors and journalists
who are prepared to pump the party line. The money to do all this comes from Jewish billionaires like Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson,
who have their hooks deep into both political parties. Meanwhile, the ability of America's most powerful foreign policy lobby AIPAC
to avoid registration as a foreign agent is completely due to the exercise of Jewish power in the United States which means in practice
that Israel and its advocates will never be sanctioned in any way.
Israel is eager to have the United States fight Iran on its behalf, even though Washington has no real interest in doing so, and
all indications are that it will be successful. Though it is a rich country, it receives a multi-billion-dollar handout from the
U.S. Treasury every year. When its war criminal prime minister comes to town he receives
26 standing ovations from a completely sycophantic congress and now the United States has even stationed soldiers in Israel who
are
"prepared to die" for Israel even though there is no treaty of any kind between the two countries and the potential victims have
likely never been consulted regarding dying for a foreign country. All of this takes place without the public ever voting on or even
discussing the relationship, a tribute to the fact that both major parties and the media have been completely co-opted.
And now there is the assault on the First Amendment, with legislation currently in Congress
making
it a crime either to criticize Israel or support a boycott of it in support of Palestinian rights. When those bills become law,
which they will, we are finished as a country where fundamental rights are respected.
And what has Russia done in comparison to all this? Hardly anything even if all the claims about its alleged interference are
true. So when will Mueller and all the Republican and Democratic baying dogs say a single word about Israel's interference in our
elections and political processes? If past behavior is anything to go by, it will never happen.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational
foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O.
Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
Thanks for the great article, Sir. You are so right.
The New York Times should change its name to Tel Aviv Times. Everyday, it interferes in virtually every US election, on behalf
of Israel, attacking candidates who do not support Israel or those who are patriotic and want to ban immigration.
Same with CNN, WaPo, the Economist (a Rothschild publication), etc.
Our Congressmen are Gazans. They are forced to sign pledges supporting Israel, and forced to destroy their country through
3rd world immigration, or risk destruction of their careers, mockery or defamation by the Zionist controlled media, loss of campaign
contributions from their biggest donors, or even risk being framed.
When Cynthia McKinney refused to sign the pledge, she was forced out. When another freshman Congressman simply wanted to delay
a vote in favor of Israel, he was attacked, taken to Israel where he was softened up and now is totally under the Jewish Lobby's
control.
"... With impeachment itself on the table, Mueller has done little more than issue the equivalent of parking tickets to foreigners he has no jurisdiction over. Intelligence summaries claim the Russians meddled, but don't show that Trump was involved. Indictments against Russians are cheered as evidence, when they are just Mueller's uncontested assertions. ..."
An answer was needed, so one was created: the Russians. As World War II ended with the U.S.
the planet's predominant power, dark forces saw advantage in arousing new
fears . The Soviet Union morphed from a decimated ally in the fight against fascism into a
competitor locked in a titanic struggle with America. How did they get so powerful so quickly?
Nothing could explain it except traitors. Cold War-era America? Or 2018 Trump America? Yes, on
both counts.
To some, that fear was not a problem but a tool -- one could defeat political enemies simply
by accusing them of being Russian sympathizers. There was no need for evidence, so desperate
were Americans to believe; just an accusation that someone was in league with Russia was
enough. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy fired his first shot on February
9, 1950, proclaiming there were 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party working for
the Department of State. The evidence? Nothing but assertions .
Indeed, the very word " McCarthyism " came to mean making accusations
of treason without sufficient evidence. Other definitionsinclude a ggressively
questioning a person's patriotism, using accusations of disloyalty to pressure a person to
adhere to conformist politics or discredit an opponent, and subverting civil and political
rights in the name of national security.
Pretending to be saving America while he tore at its foundations, McCarthy destroyed
thousands of lives over the next four years simply by pointing a finger and saying "communist."
Whenever anyone invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence, McCarthy answered that this was "the
most positive proof obtainable that the witness is communist." The power of accusation was used
by others as well: the Lavender
Scare , which concluded that the State Department was overrun with closeted homosexuals who
were at risk of being blackmailed by Moscow for their perversions, was an offshoot of
McCarthyism, and by 1951, 600 people had been fired based solely on evidence-free "morals"
charges. State legislatures and school boards mimicked McCarthy.
Books and movies were banned. Blacklists abounded. The FBI embarked on campaigns of political
repression (they would later claim Martin Luther King Jr. had
communist ties), even as journalists and academics voluntarily narrowed their political
thinking to exclude communism.
Watching sincere people succumb to paranoia again, today, is not something to relish. But
having trained themselves to intellectualize away Hillary Clinton's flaws, as they had with
Obama, about half of America seemed truly gobsmacked when she lost to the antithesis of
everything that she had represented to them. Every
poll (that they read) said she would win. Every
article (that they read) said it too, as did every
person (that they knew). Lacking an explanation for the unexplainable, many advanced
scenarios that would have failed high school civics, claiming that only the popular vote
mattered, or that the archaic
Emoluments Clause prevented Trump from taking office, or that Trump was insane and could be
disposed of under the
25th Amendment .
After a few trial balloons during the primaries under which
Bernie Sanders' visits to Russia and
Jill Stein's attendance at a banquet in Moscow were used to imply disloyalty, the fearful
cry that the Russians meddled in the election morphed into the claim that Trump had worked with
the Russians and/or (fear is flexible) that the Russians had something on Trump. Everyone
learned a new Russian word: kompromat .
Donald Trump became the Manchurian Candidate. That term was taken from a 1959 novel made
into a classic Cold War movie that follows an American soldier brainwashed by communists as
part of a Kremlin plot to gain influence in the Oval Office. A
Google search shows that dozens of news sources -- including
The
New York Times , Vanity
Fair ,
Salon ,
The Washington Post , and, why not, Stormy Daniels' lawyer
Michael Avenatti -- have all claimed that Trump is
a 2018 variant of the Manchurian Candidate,
controlled by ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin.
The birth moment of Trump as a Russian asset is traceable to MI-6 intelligence
officer-turned-Democratic opposition researcher-turned FBI mole
Christopher Steele , whose "dossier" claimed the existence of the pee tape. Supposedly,
somewhere deep in the Kremlin is a surveillance video made in 2013 of Trump in Moscow's
Ritz-Carlton Hotel, watching prostitutes urinate on a bed that the Obamas had once slept in. As
McCarthy did with homosexuality, naughty sex was thrown in to keep the rubes' attention.
No one, not even Steele's alleged informants, has actually seen
the pee tape. It exists in a blurry land of certainty alongside the elevator
tape , alleged video of Trump doing something in an elevator that's so salacious it's been
called "Every Trump Reporter's White Whale." No one knows when the elevator video was made, but
a dossier-length article in
New York magazine posits that Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987.
Suddenly no real evidence is necessary, because it is always right in front of your face.
McCarthy accused
Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower of being communists or communist stooges over the
"loss" of China in 1949. Trump holds a bizarre press conference in Helsinki and the only
explanation must be that he is a traitor.
Nancy
Pelosi ("President Trump's weakness in front of Putin was embarrassing, and proves that the
Russians have something on the president, personally, financially, or politically") and
Cory Booker ("Trump is acting like he's guilty of something") and
Hillary Clinton ("now we know whose side he plays for") and John Brennan ("rises to and
exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes and misdemeanors.' It was nothing short of treasonous.
Not only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin") and
Rachel Maddow ("We haven't ever had to reckon with the possibility that someone had
ascended to the presidency of the United States to serve the interests of
another country rather than our own") and others have said that Trump is
controlled by Russia. As in 1954 when the press provided live TV coverage of McCarthy's
dirty assertions against the Army, the modern media uses each new assertion as "proof" of an
earlier one. Snowballs get bigger rolling downhill.
When assertion is accepted as evidence, it forces the other side to prove a negative to
break free. So until Trump "proves" he is not a Russian stooge, his denials will be seen as
attempts to wiggle out from under evidence that in fact doesn't exist. Who, pundits ask, can
come up with a better explanation for Trump's actions than blackmail, as if that was a
necessary step to clearing his name?
Joe McCarthy's victims faced similar challenges: once labeled a communist or a homosexual,
the onus shifted to them to somehow prove they weren't. Their failure to prove their innocence
became more evidence of their guilt. The Cold War version of this mindset was well illustrated
in movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the classic Twilight Zone episode "
The Monsters Are Due on
Maple Street ." Anyone who questions this must themselves be at best a useful fool, if not
an outright Russia collaborator. (Wrote one
pundit : "They are accessories, before and after the fact, to the hijacking of a democratic
election. So, yes, goddamn them all.") In the McCarthy era, the term was "fellow traveler":
anyone, witting or unwitting, who helped the Russians. Mere skepticism, never mind actual
dissent, is muddled with disloyalty.
Blackmail? Payoffs? Deals? It isn't just the months of Mueller's investigation that have
passed without evidence. The IRS and Treasury have had Trump's tax documents and financials for
decades, even if Rachel Maddow has not. If Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987, or even
2013, he has done it behind the backs of the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and NSA. Yet at the same
time, in what history would see as the most out-in-the-open intelligence operation ever, some
claim he asked on TV for his handlers to deliver hacked emails. In TheManchurian
Candidate , the whole thing was at least done in secret as you'd expect.
With impeachment itself on the table, Mueller has done little more than issue the
equivalent of parking tickets to foreigners he has no jurisdiction over. Intelligence summaries
claim the Russians meddled, but don't show that Trump was involved. Indictments against
Russians are cheered as evidence, when they are just Mueller's uncontested assertions.
There is no evidence the president is acting on orders from Russia or is under their
influence. None.
As with McCarthy, as in those famous witch trials at Salem, allegations shouldn't be
accepted as truth, though in 2018 even pointing out that basic tenet is blasphemy. The burden
of proof should be on the accusing party, yet the standing narrative in America is that the
Russia story must be assumed plausible, if not true, until proven false. Joe McCarthy tore
America apart for four years under just such standards, until finally public opinion, led by
Edward R. Murrow , a
journalist brave enough to demand answers McCarthy did not have, turned against him. There is no
Edward R. Murrow in 2018.
When asking for proof is seen as disloyal, when demanding evidence after years of
accusations is considered a Big Ask, when a clear answer somehow always needs additional time,
there is more on the line in a democracy than the fate of one man.
Peter Van Buren, a
24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and
Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper's War
: A Novel of WWII Japan. Follow him on Twitter @WeMeantWell .
"... Improving the relationship with Moscow has been and continues to be a worthwhile goal, but Trump has made it politically impossible to pursue that goal in the near term. ..."
"... I do think the credit for this goes to the Clinton campaign, the "intelligence" agencies, the neoconlib biparty and individuals like McCain, who have gone to McCarthyite lenghts since before the GOP primaries ended to prevent Trump from attempting *any* change of the status quo on foreign policy. Granted, the man might be ineffectual no matter what, but we will never know. The US establishment and the retainees of the war profiteering classes have made any negotiations with Russia impossible long before Trump even announced his campaign. ..."
"... We also should not forget to credit the GOP for test-driving the whole "weak on Russia" playbook during the Obama years. ..."
"... Additionally there has yet to be any actual evidence presented re significant election interference. Indictments are accusations, not evidence. ..."
"... I'm no Trump fan, but he was just saying he believed Putin rather than the people who are clearly trying to bring his administration down. Can't really blame him. ..."
"... CNN even used Putin's dearly departed Labrador, Konni making her look like Cujo stating that Putin use her to terrorize Angela Merkel. A U.S. Congressman fumed that the 50,000 children died in Syria because this fiend supported Assad when Syria was about to be liberated (a number suspiciously close to the true number of Yemeni children we helped to kill). ..."
"... As flawed as Trump may be, he is merely holding up a mirror to what we have become. Had we elected a conventional candidate it would just be business as usual with these seething hatreds buried just below the surface. ..."
"... No one better suggest that we should tarnish ourselves talking to the likes of a Russian leader unless we are discussing terms of surrender. We want Yeltsin or maybe Medvedev. ..."
Improving the relationship with Moscow has been and continues to be a worthwhile goal, but Trump has made it politically impossible
to pursue that goal in the near term. The U.S. and Russia could and should have a more constructive relationship, but it can't
be based on the denial of reality and ignoring the genuine disagreements that exist between our governments.
If there is to be genuine improvement in U.S.-Russian relations, it will come from facing up to these disagreements and finding
a way to work through or around them.
"Trump has made it politically impossible to pursue that goal in the near term."
I do think the credit for this goes to the Clinton campaign, the "intelligence" agencies, the neoconlib biparty and individuals
like McCain, who have gone to McCarthyite lenghts since before the GOP primaries ended to prevent Trump from attempting *any*
change of the status quo on foreign policy. Granted, the man might be ineffectual no matter what, but we will never know. The
US establishment and the retainees of the war profiteering classes have made any negotiations with Russia impossible long before
Trump even announced his campaign.
We also should not forget to credit the GOP for test-driving the whole "weak on Russia" playbook during the Obama years.
I agree with b. While Trump may not be savvy enough to calibrate his engagement with Putin in a way that would allow a proper
dialogue with Russia in spite of the political backdrop in the US, the primary blame for any failure to allow such dialogue rests
for those responsible for creating that political backdrop that makes it so difficult in the first place (hint: it's not Trump,
unless you blame him for winning the election – rather it is the unholy alliance of Democrats looking for an excuse for them losing
the election and Cold War hawk neocons who have Russia-hate in their DNA (and their stock portfolios)).
That Putin talked up the Iran deal in the press conference makes me wonder what was said in the one-on-one. Couldn't have pleased
the Adelson/Bolton wing.
Additionally there has yet to be any actual evidence presented re significant election interference.
Indictments are accusations, not evidence.
I saw nothing particularly wrong with the press conference. I'm no Trump fan, but he was just saying he believed Putin
rather than the people who are clearly trying to bring his administration down. Can't really blame him.
The embarrassment was the reaction in the MSM showcasing how they are now CIA state run media.
They trot out former high ranking CIA officers now employed by them recycling every meme to reinforce that we are the forces
goodness and light and anyone strong enough to oppose us is evil.
CNN even used Putin's dearly departed Labrador, Konni making her look like Cujo stating that Putin use her to terrorize
Angela Merkel. A U.S. Congressman fumed that the 50,000 children died in Syria because this fiend supported Assad when Syria was
about to be liberated (a number suspiciously close to the true number of Yemeni children we helped to kill). These are just
two random examples in a very long day. It was
a show worthy of the priests of Baal who confronted Elijah.
As flawed as Trump may be, he is merely holding up a mirror to what we have become. Had we elected a conventional candidate
it would just be business as usual with these seething hatreds buried just below the surface.
No one better suggest that we should tarnish ourselves talking to the likes of a Russian leader unless we are discussing
terms of surrender. We want Yeltsin or maybe Medvedev.
The summit was announced by the White House and the Kremlin on June 28. The Finnish hosts probably knew about it a few days earlier.
That leaves only three weeks for preparation.
The summit itself lasted one day. Putin arrived late and after lunch and diplomatic niceties there was only 2-3 hours for actual
talks.
That's not a problem if everything is already carefully negotiated and the presidents just sign documents and smile for the
cameras. But it seems very little was agreed on beforehand.
I'm all for world leaders meeting and talking. The more the better. But I really don't see the point of hastily calling a summit
where nothing is agreed upon. At least not that we know of.
"... This silly article is proof, as if more was needed that what passes for Russia scholarship in the US is little more than politicized group-think. ..."
"... Russia has risen from utter economic, political, and societal collapse (gold reserves, factories, military secrets, science labs stripped bare and shipped or brain-drained out of the country; millions of pre-mature deaths; plunging birth rates) to recover, within a mere 20 years, to the point where the population has stabilized and the nation can credibly hold its own again on the world stage. Infrastructure is being rebuilt and modernized, the military has been restructured and re-equipped, pensions and salaries have risen 3 or 4-fold. ..."
"Vladimir Putin rode a counter-wave of anti-Western nationalism to power in Moscow."
Uh, no. Putin came to power at a time when Russia seemed to be falling apart, quite
literally. There was war in Chechnya, open criminal activity on the streets, and clear social
decay. Putin's popularity begins with his address to the nation after the bombing of the
Moscow metro, promising that the government (which he did not then lead) would chase those
responsible down and kill them, even if that meant chasing them into outhouses. The
relationship between the bombing and Putin's rise is so well-known that the conspiracy
theorists who have Jay Nordlinger's ear over at National Review claim that the bombing was a
set up by Putin's pals in the FSB, precisely to bring Putin to power.
My wife is Russian, from the city of Kazan in the Tatar Republic (part of Russia; it's
complicated), and when we were merely pen pals in 2003 she wrote me what it was like. It was
bad, very bad. At one point her entire neighborhood was placed under curfew on account of
open warfare between criminal gangs. And of course when we visit the cemetery today one sees
the striking spike in tombstones whose date of death is at some point in the mid- to late
90's, when it all seemed to be going to pieces and the government didn't even pay its own
employees for half a year.
Today, by contrast, Russians can walk the streets more or less without fear, count on a
paycheck, read in the news how their country has sent yet another capsule of Western
astronauts to the international space station (because Westerners haven't been able to do
that for the better part of a decade, thanks to Bush and Obama), and even find jobs in a
successful tech sector (Kaspersky, JetBrains, Yandex, the list goes on).
But, hey, if you want to fantasize that Putin's rise is thanks to anti-Western sentiment,
you go ahead and do that.
One other comment, if I may. I share the concern most Westerners have about Russia's seizure
of Crimea. But where is our concern about Turkey's 40-plus-year occupation of northern
Cyprus, also sparked by internal political disorder on the island? Why is it alright for a
NATO country to invade another nation and prop up its separatists, expel the inhabitants of a
disfavored ethnic group -- in this case, the Greeks?
Shame on TAC for publishing this garbage. For one, Putin more or less saved Russia as a
sovereign state, it is easy to forget the sorry condition Russia was in at the turn of the
century. Without him, Russia would've most likely been dismembered or simply colonized by the
West and China. He has performed admirably in the face of massive odds. Russia will still
exist in 100 years as the state of the Russian and other native people of its land –
can the same be said of the United States? Russia is slowly climbing its way out of the pit
of despair created by 80 years of Communism, the United States is crawling into the very same
pit.
I am much more concerned that voter roll purges, suppression of the vote, Citizen's United
Dark Money and folks like the Kochs and Addelson are undermining US democracy than the
Russians. As for the aggression of military machines around the world, the US wins hands
down.
Like Fran my inclination was to bail after the first paragraph but I pushed on.
In the first paragraph Mr Desch lays out his position which is well within the bounds of
polite discussion that Russia is a corrupt oligarchy but don't worry because it's an economic
and military basketcase.
Where to start?
1. Corrupt kleptocracy. The Russian oligarchy/ mafia was a biproduct of the
privatization binge that followed the collapse of the USSR. This evolved under the disastrous
Yeltsin aided and abetted by US elites. The case of William Browder is instructive. Putin has
taken significant measures to reassert government control and has greatly improved the lot of
the average Russian.
2. Political freedom. Putin did not inherit a developed liberal democracy. Russia
needs to be judged in the context of its own historical timeline in this regard not compared
to western democracies. Do you prefer Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov? In contrast compare the
state and trajectory of US democratic institutions to, say the 1970s.
3. Human rights. Again the situation in Russia vis a vis human rights needs to be
judged in terms of Russia's history not against Western nations with a long-standing
tradition of human rights and political freedoms. That said, the illusion of political
repression is largely overstated. For example Putin is routinely accused of murdering
journalists but no real proof is ever offered. Instead, the statement is made again in this
article as though it were self evident.
4. Foreign aggression. This is my favorite because it flies in the face of
observable reality to the point of being ridiculous. Russia did not invade Ukraine. It
provided support to ethnic Russians in Ukraine who rebelled after the illegal armed overthrow
of the Russian leaning democratically elected president.That coup was directly supported by
the United States. Far from ratcheting up tensions Russia has consistently pressed for the
implementation of the Minsk accords. Putin is not interested in becoming responsible for the
economic and political basket case which is Ukraine. The "largely bloodless" occupation of
Crimea was actually a referendum in which the citizens of Crimea overwhelmingly supported
annexation to Russia. Again This result makes sense in light of even a basic understanding of
Russian history. Finally, in the case of Georgia Russia engaged after Georgia attacked what
was essentially a Russian protectorate. This was the conclusion reached by an EU
investigation.
Russia's so-called aggressive foreign-policy has been primarily in response to NATOs
continuous push eastward and the perceived need to defend ethnic Russians from corrupt
ultranationalist governments in former republics of the USSR. This is what Putin was talking
about when he called the dissolution of the USSR one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th
century – the fact that, overnight 20 million Russians found themselves living in
foreign countries. It wasn't about longing for a Russian empire.
As for the current state of Russias military capabilities, Mr Desch Would do well to read
Pepe Escobar's recent article in the Asia Times. Russian accomplishments in Syria illustrated
a level of technology and strategic effectiveness that rivals anything the US can do. Name
one other nation – other than the US – that can design and build a world class
6th generation fighter jet or develop its own space program. Even Germany can't do that.
This silly article is proof, as if more was needed that what passes for Russia
scholarship in the US is little more than politicized group-think.
VG1959
"It is in the pursuit of empire that Putin, like Napoleon or Hitler before him, threatens the
stability of Europe and by extension world peace."
Ah! ha!ha! Right.
Like Russia with a population of 150 million persons inhabiting a land mass that stretches
across 9 or 10 time zones, from the Arctic pole to the Black Sea is chafing for "lebensraum"
!?
No, Russia just wants to develop what it already owns. And, trying to do it on the
strength of their own efforts (no overseas colonies filling the coffers), on a GDP as
Winston, above, has pointed out which is smaller than that some US states. They're focussed,
not on grabbing tiny, constipated territories like Estonia. Latvia, and Lithuania (full of
Nazi sympathizers), but on bringing back to life those ancient trade routes which are their
inheritance from the past (the Silk Road, primarily).
Why not just leave them alone and see what they can do? Those who have been relentlessly
picking fault with Russia (and North Korea) might want to put down their megaphones and start
taking notes.
What I mean is: pause for a moment to consider that:
1. Russia has risen from utter economic, political, and societal collapse (gold
reserves, factories, military secrets, science labs stripped bare and shipped or
brain-drained out of the country; millions of pre-mature deaths; plunging birth rates) to
recover, within a mere 20 years, to the point where the population has stabilized and the
nation can credibly hold its own again on the world stage. Infrastructure is being rebuilt
and modernized, the military has been restructured and re-equipped, pensions and salaries
have risen 3 or 4-fold.
2. North Korea, in 1953, had been so destroyed by war that no structures over a single
story were left standing (and American generals were actually barfing into their helmets at
the horror of what had been done to those people). The DPRK authorities, helpless to assist
the population, could only advise to dig shelters underground to survive the winter. Yet, 70
years later, under international sanctions designed to starve those traumatized people into
surrender, North Korea has restored its infrastructure, built modern cities, and developed a
military apparatus able to credibly resist constant threats from abroad.
See: rather than picking nits to find things that are not yet perfectly hunky-dory with
the governing structures/systems in those countries, I'm taking notes!!
Because, I'm convinced that if those people (those nations) were able to do what they've
done with the time and resources they've had to work with, there is absolutely no reason and
no excuse for our rich nations of "the West" to be caught in a nightmare of austerity
budgeting, crumbling infrastructure, collapsing pensions, and spiralling debt.
Funny how the English speaking world SO resisst learning something that could actually do
us a whole lot of good. I don't know who coined the terms "stiffnecked" and "bloodyminded",
but it sure describes us!
"From Moscow's perspective, the events in Kiev in late 2013 and 2014 looked suspiciously like
a Western-backed coup."
Gee, ya think? Kinda reminds one of the 1996 Russian election. But, hey, don't broadcast
this because, after all, too many people might start, er, noticing.
"... So Kramer is a good example of how CIA runs the State Department. When a CIA vital interest like impunity comes up, they parachute a mole in to get their criminals off the hook. ..."
Yes indeed, first Britain, and now Russia has pantsed the US too. In a virtuosic dick
move, they exposed a CIA spook who's implicated not only in Secret Agent Browder's war
propaganda ( http://russiahouse.org/current_news.php?language=eng&id_current=1454
) but in CIA crimes against humanity -- specifically, 'legal pretexts for manifestly illegal
acts."
David Kramer, Tufts/Harvard Political Science/Russian studies, **PNAC** , DoS focal point,
then CIA's famous captive NGO **Freedom House** , and a featherbed job at the McCain
Institute for Freedom, Democracy, and Abandoning Thousands of MIAs in Vietnam to Die Slow
Agonizing Deaths in Penal Camps.
Here he is talking to his co-conspirator Robert Otto, "Only idiots like Kerry think we
have common interests in Syria."
Needless to say, Kramer wouldn't know a human right from a bar of soap. He's a
knuckledragger. CIA sent Kramer to DRL when Alfreda Bikowsky got her tit caught in the
crimes-against-humanity wringer for systematic and widespread torture.
The US was five years late reporting to the Committee Against Torture and got a
mind-boggling eight (8) follow-on inquiries for urgent derogations of non-derogable rights.
So Kramer had to think fast and make up some bullshit why simulated live burial, object rape,
death by dryboard suffocation, and penis-slitting is not torture. Kramer is not the brightest
bulb, but that's not a hard job. During the Bush administration all the delegation did was
say, "The US does not Torture," robotically over and over.
So Kramer is a good example of how CIA runs the State Department. When a CIA vital
interest like impunity comes up, they parachute a mole in to get their criminals off the
hook.
"... This is the proverbial case where the real " action is in the reaction " and, in this case, the reaction of the Neocon run US deep-state and its propaganda machine (the US corporate media) was nothing short of total and abject hysterics. ..."
"... What Trump is facing today is not a barrage of criticism but a very real lynch mob! And what is really frightening is that almost nobody dares to denounce that hysterical lynch mob for what it is. ..."
"... Even such supposed supporters of President Trump like Trey Gowdy who has fully thrown his weight behind the "Russia tried to attack us" nonsense . With friends like these... ..."
"... What has been taking place after this the summit is an Orwellian "two minutes of hatred" but now stretched well into a two weeks of hatred. And I see no signs that this lynch mob is calming down. In fact, as of this morning, the levels of hysteria are only increasing . ..."
"... By the way, these are typical Neocon-style tactics: double-down, then double-down again, then issue statements which make it impossible for you to back down, then repeat it all as many times as needed. This strategy is useless against a powerful and principled enemy, but it works miracles with a weak and spineless foe like Trump. ..."
"... The process which is taking place before our eyes splits the people of the US into two main categories: first, the Neocons and those whom the US media has successfully brainwashed and, second, everybody else. That second group, by the way, is very diverse and it includes not only bona fide Trump supporters (many of whom have also been zombified in their own way), but also paleo-conservatives, libertarians, antiwar activists, (real) progressives and many other groups. ..."
"... I am also guessing that a lot of folks in the military are watching in horror as their armed forces and their country are being wrecked by the Neocons and their supporters. Basically, those who felt "I want my country back" and who hoped that Trump would make that happen are now horrified by what is taking place. ..."
"... I believe that what we are seeing is a massive and deliberate attack by the Neocons and their deep state against the political system and the people of the United States. Congress, especially, is now guilty of engaging on a de-facto coup against the Executive on so many levels that they are hard to count (and many of them are probably hidden from the public eye) including repeated attempts to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional powers such as, for example, deciding on foreign policy issues. ..."
"... By now there is overwhelming evidence that a creeping Neocon coup has been in progress from the very first day of Trump's presidency and that the Neocons are far from being satisfied with having broken Trump and taken over the de-facto power in the White House: they now apparently also want it de-jure too. ..."
"... From the Russian point of view, it matters very little whether Trump is removed from office or not – the problem is not one of personalities, but one of the nature of the AngloZionist Empire. ..."
"... the infighting of the US elites does and, if not, then at the very least the current crisis will further weaken the US, hence the Russian willingness to participate in this summit even if by itself this summit brought absolutely no tangible results: the action was in the reaction. ..."
"... The Deep State has opposed him at every turn, choosing to favor the policies of the Neocons and their enablers in the Democratic Party. Hence, having no team of his own, he has been saddled with personnel from the ranks of his most virulent enemies at every level. ..."
"... the Neocons and the Clinton gang are willing to say anything, no matter how destabilizing, to hurt Trump even if the US political system by itself is also put at risk. ..."
"... Saker, something is not adding up. If Trump is truly as pathetic a pushover, as "weak and spineless," as you say, why all the hysteria? If, on the other hand, he is a rather successful wrecking ball, already having put in jeopardy half the key resources of the empire, that's another story. ..."
"... He's laying waste to the Empire in the most peaceful process possible – in large part by so embarrassing the Empire's elites, allies and vassals that they withdraw first their active support, and then finally even their consent. Inducing hysteria, both foreign and domestic, is a non-trivial component of the forces giving the wrecking ball an extra push as it heads for the edifice. ..."
"... I don't think that Trump is the fool on the hill. I think that mostly all those around him are. The latest hysteria over Russia is not about any "meddling" in any "democracy". It's about throwing tantrums that Russia won't submit to US hegemony. In my opinion, they don't deserve to be in charge of their own country, let alone to be asking to be in charge of Russia. ..."
"... It is not just "unanimity of hatred and chaos", "abject hysterics", "hate-filled hysteria", "two minutes of hatred stretched well into a two weeks of hatred" etc. It's something else and, I feel, simply much worse and dangerous. ..."
Oh sure, there were a number of general statements made about "positive discussions" and the
like, and some vague references to various conflicts, but the truth is that nothing real and
tangible was agreed upon. Furthermore, and this is, I believe, absolutely crucial, there never
was any chance of this summit achieving anything. Why? Because the Russians have concluded a
long time ago that the US officials are "
non-agreement capable "
(недоговороспособны).
They are correct – the US has been non-agreement capable at least since Obama and Trump
has only made things even worse: not only has the US now reneged on Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (illegally – since this plan was endorsed by the
UNSC ), but Trump has even pathetically backtracked on the most important statement he made
during the summit when he retroactively changed his "
President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be " into "
I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia " (so much for 5D chess!).
If Trump can't even stick to his own words, how could anybody expect the Russians to take
anything he says seriously?! Besides, ever since the many western verbal promises of not moving
NATO east "
by one inch eastward " the Russians know that western promises, assurances, and other
guarantees are worthless, whether promised in a conversation or inked on paper. In truth, the
Russians have been very blunt about their disgust with not only the western dishonesty but even
about the basic lack of professionalism of their western counterparts, hence the
comment by Putin about " it is difficult to have a dialogue with people who confuse
Austria and Australia ".
It is quite obvious that the Russians agreed to the summit while knowing full well that
nothing would, or even could, come out of it. This is why they were already dumping US
Treasuries even
before meeting with Trump (a clear sign of how the Kremlin really feels about Trump
and the US).
So why did they agree to the meeting? Because they correctly evaluated the
consequences of this meeting. This is the proverbial case where the real "
action is in
the reaction " and, in this case, the reaction of the Neocon run US deep-state and its
propaganda machine (the US corporate media) was nothing short of total and abject
hysterics. I could list an immense number of quotes, statements and declarations accusing
Trump of being a wimp, a traitor, a sellout, a Putin agent and all the rest. But I found the
most powerful illustration of that hate-filled hysteria in a collection of cartoons from the
western corporate media posted by Colonel Cassad on this page:
What we see today is a hate campaign against both Trump and Russia the likes of which
I think the world has never seen before: even in the early 20th century, including the pre-WWII
years when there was plenty of hate thrown around, there never was such a unanimity of
hatred as what we see today. Furthermore, what is attacked is not just "Trump the man" or
"Trump the politician" but very much so "Trump the President". Please compare the following two
examples:
The US wars after 9/11: many people had major reservations about the wars against
Afghanistan, Iraq and the entire GWOT thing. But most Americans seemed to agree with the "we
support our troops" slogan. The logic was something along the lines of "we don't like these
wars, but we do support our fighting men and women and the military institution as such". Thus,
while a specific policy was criticized, this criticism was never applied to the institution
which implement it: the US armed forces. Trump after Helsinki: keep in mind that Trump made no
agreement of any kind with Putin, none. And yet that policy of not making any
agreements with Putin was hysterically lambasted as a sellout. This begs the question: what
kind of policy would meet with the approval of the US deep state? Trump punching Putin in the
nose maybe? This is utterly ridiculous, yet unlike in the case of the GWOT wars, there is no
differentiation made whatsoever between Trump's policy towards Putin and Trump as the President
of the United States. There is even talk of impeachment, treason and "high crimes &
misdemeanors" or of the "KGB" (dissolved 27 years ago but nevermind that) having a hand in the
election of the US President.
What Trump is facing today is not a barrage of criticism but a very real lynch mob! And what
is really frightening is that almost nobody dares to denounce that hysterical lynch mob for
what it is. There are a few exceptions, of course, even in the media (I think of Tucker
Carlson), but these voices are completely drowned out by the hate-filled shrieks of the vast
majority of US politicians and journalists. Even such supposed supporters of President Trump
like Trey Gowdy who has
fully thrown his weight behind the "Russia tried to attack us" nonsense . With friends like
these...
What has been taking place after this the summit is an Orwellian "two minutes of hatred" but
now stretched well into a two weeks of hatred. And I see no signs that this lynch mob is
calming down. In fact, as of this morning, the levels of hysteria are
only increasing .
By the way, these are typical Neocon-style tactics: double-down, then double-down again,
then issue statements which make it impossible for you to back down, then repeat it all as many
times as needed. This strategy is useless against a powerful and principled enemy, but it works
miracles with a weak and spineless foe like Trump. This is particularly true of US politicians
and journalists who have long become the accomplices of the deep state (especially after the
9/11 false flag and its cover-up) and who now cannot back down under any circumstances or treat
President Trump as a normal, regular, President. The anti-Trump rhetoric has gone way too far
and the US has now reached what I believe is a point of no return.
The brewing constitutional crisis: the Neocons vs the "deplorables"
I believe that the US is facing what could be the worst crisis in its history: the lawfully
elected President is being openly delegitimized and that, in turn, delegitimizes the electoral
process which brought him to power and, of course, it also excoriates the "deplorables" who
dared vote for him: the majority of the American people.
The process which is taking place before our eyes splits the people of the US into two main
categories: first, the Neocons and those whom the US media has successfully brainwashed and,
second, everybody else. That second group, by the way, is very diverse and it includes not only
bona fide Trump supporters (many of whom have also been zombified in their own way), but
also paleo-conservatives, libertarians, antiwar activists, (real) progressives and many other
groups.
I am also guessing that a lot of folks in the military are watching in horror as their
armed forces and their country are being wrecked by the Neocons and their supporters.
Basically, those who felt "I want my country back" and who hoped that Trump would make that
happen are now horrified by what is taking place.
I believe that what we are seeing is a massive and deliberate attack by the Neocons and
their deep state against the political system and the people of the United States. Congress,
especially, is now guilty of engaging on a de-facto coup against the Executive on so
many levels that they are hard to count (and many of them are probably hidden from the public
eye) including repeated attempts to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional powers
such as, for example, deciding on foreign policy issues. A perfect example of this can be found
in Nancy Pelosi's official statement about a possible invitation from Trump to Putin:
"The notion that President Trump would invite a tyrant to Washington is beyond belief.
Putin's ongoing attacks on our elections and on Western democracies and his illegal actions
in Crimea and the rest of Ukraine deserve the fierce, unanimous condemnation of the
international community, not a VIP ticket to our nation's capital. President Trump's
frightened fawning over Putin is an embarrassment and a grave threat to our democracy. An
invitation to address a Joint Meeting of Congress should be bipartisan and Speaker Ryan must
immediately make clear that there is not – and never will be – an invitation for
a thug like Putin to address the United States Congress."
Another example of the same can be found in the unanimous 98-0 resolution by the
US Senate expressing Congress's opposition to the US government allowing Russia to question
US officials. Trump, of course, immediately caved in, even though he had originally declared
"fantastic" the idea of actually abiding by the terms of an existing 1999 agreement on mutual
assistance on criminal cases between the United States of America and Russia. The White House
"spokesperson", Sarah Sanders, did even better and stated : (emphasis
added)
"It is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump
disagrees with it. Hopefully, President Putin will have the 12 identified Russians come to
the United States to prove their innocence or guilt "
Talk about imperial megalomania! The US will not allow the Russians to interrogate anybody,
but it wants Putin to extradite Russian citizens. Amazing
Every single day, I find myself asking: what do the Russians have on @realDonaldTrump
personally, financially, & politically? The answer to that question is that only thing
that explains his behavior & his refusal to stand up to Putin. #ABetterDeal.
Pretty clear, no? "Trump is a traitor and we have to stop him".
By now there is overwhelming evidence that a creeping Neocon coup has been in progress from
the very first day of Trump's presidency and that the Neocons are far from being satisfied with
having broken Trump and taken over the de-facto power in the White House: they now
apparently also want it de-jure too. The real question is this: are there any forces
inside the US capable of stopping the Neocons from completely taking all the reins of power
and, if yes, how could a patriotic reaction to this Neocon coup manifest itself? I honestly
don't know, but my feeling is that we might soon have a "President Pence" in the Oval Office.
One way or another, a constitutional crisis is brewing.
What about the Russian interests in all this?
I have said it many times, Russia and the AngloZionist Empire (as opposed to the United
States as a country) are at war, a war which is roughly 80% informational, 15% economic and
only 5% "kinetic". This is a very real war nonetheless and it is a war for survival simply
because the Empire cannot allow any major country on the planet to be truly sovereign.
Therefore, not only does the AngloZionist Empire represent an existential threat to Russia,
Russia also represents an existential threat to the Empire. In this kind of conflict for
survival there is no room for anything but a zero-sum game and whatever is good for Russia is
bad for the US and vice-versa.
The Russians, including Putin, never wanted this zero-sum game,
it was imposed upon them by the AngloZionists, but now that they have been forced into it, they
will play it as hard as they can. It is therefore only logical to conclude that the massive
systemic crises in which the Neocons and their crazy policies have plunged the US are to the
advantage of Russia.
To be sure, the ideal scenario would be for Russia and the US (as opposed
to the AngloZionst Empire) to work together on the very long list of issues where they share
common interests. But since the Neocons have seized power and are sacrificing the US for the
sake of their imperial designs, that is simply not going to happen, and the Russians understand
that. Furthermore, since the US constitutes the largest power component of the AngloZionist
Empire, anything weakening the US also thereby weakens the Empire and anything which weakens
the Empire is beneficial for Russia (by the way, the logical corollary of this state of affairs
is that the people of the US and the people of Russia have the same enemy – the Neocons
– and that makes them de-facto allies).
It is not my purpose here to discuss when and how the Neocons came to power in the US, so I
will just say that the delusional policies followed by the various US administrations since at
least 1993 (and, even more so, since 2001) have been disastrous for the United States and could
be characterized as one long never-ending case of imperial hubris (to use the title of
here
). The long string of lost wars and foreign policy disasters are a direct result of this lack
of even basic expertise. What passes for "expertise" today is basically hate-filled hyperbole
and warmongering hysterics, hence the inflation in the paranoid anti-Russian rhetoric.
The
US armed forces are only good at three things: wasting immense sums of money, destroying
countries and alienating the rest of the planet. They are still the most expensive and bloated
armed forces on the planet, but nobody fears them anymore (not even relatively small states,
nevermind Russia or China). In technological terms, the Russians (and to a somewhat lesser
degree the Chinese) have found asymmetrical answers to all the key force planning programs of
the Pentagon and the former US superiority in the air, on land and on the seas is now a thing
of the past. As for the US nuclear triad, it is still capable of accomplishing its mission, but
it is useless as an instrument of foreign policy or to fight Russia or China (unless suicide is
contemplated).
[Sidebar: this inability of the US military to achieve desired political goals might explain
why, at least so far, the US has apparently given up on the notion of a Reconquista of
Syria or why the Ukronazis have not dared to attack the Donbass. Of course, this is too early
to call and these zigs might be followed by many zags, especially in the context of the
political crisis in the US, but it appears that in the cases of the DPRK, Iran, Syria and the
Ukraine there is much barking, but not much biting coming from the supposed sole "hyperpower"
on the planet] The US is now engaged in simultaneous conflicts not only with Iran or Russia but
also with the EU and China. In fact, even relationships with vassal states such as Canada or
France are now worse than ever before. Only the prostituted leaders of "new Europe", to use
Rumsfeld's
term , are still paying lip service to the notion of "American leadership", and only if
they get paid for it.
The US "elites" and the various interest groups they represent have now
clearly turned on each other which is a clear sign that the entire system is in a state of deep
crisis: when things were going well, everybody could get what they wanted and no visible
infighting was taking place. The Israel Lobby has now fully subordinated Congress, the White
House, and the media to its narrow Likudnik agenda and, as a direct result of this,
the US has lost all their positions in the Middle-East and the chorus of those with enough
courage to denounce this Zionist Occupation Government is slowly but steadily growing (at least
on the Internet). Even US Jews are getting fed up with the now openly
Israeli apartheid state (see
here or
here ). By withdrawing from a long list of important international treaties and bodies
(TPP, Kyoto Protocol, START, ABM, JCPOA. UNESCO, UN Human Rights Council, etc.) the United
States has completely isolated themselves from the rest of the planet. The ironic truth is that
Russia has not been isolated in the least, but that the US has isolated itself from the rest of
the planet.
In contrast, the Russians are capitalizing on every single US mistake – be it the
carrier-centric navy, the unconditional support for Israel or the simultaneous trade wars with
China and the EU. Much has been made of the recent revelation of new and revolutionary Russian
weapon systems (see here
and here
) but there is much more to this than just the deployment of new military systems and
technologies: Russia is benefiting from the lack of any real US foreign policies to advance her
own interests in the Middle-East, of course, but also elsewhere. Let's just take the very
latest example of a US self-inflicted PR disaster – the following "tweet" by
Trump: (CAPS in the original)
To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL
SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE
ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE
CAUTIOUS!
This kind of infantile (does he not sound like a 6 year old?) and, frankly, rather demented
attempts at scaring Iranians (of all people!) is guaranteed to have the exact opposite effect
from the one presumably sought: the Iranian leaders might snicker in disgust, or have a good
belly-laugh, but they are not going to be
impressed .
The so-called "allies" of the US will be embarrassed in the extreme to be "led"
by such a primitive individual, even if they don't say so in public. As for the Russians, they
will happily explore all the possibilities offered to them by such illiterate and
self-defeating behavior.
Conclusion one: a useful summit for Russia
As a direct consequence of the Helsinki summit, the infighting of the US ruling classes has
dramatically intensified. Furthermore, faced with a barrage of hateful attacks Trump did what
he always does: he tried to simultaneously appease his critics by caving in to their rhetoric
while at the same time trying to appear "tough" – hence his latest "I am a tough guy with
a big red button" antics against Iran (he did exactly the same thing towards the DPRK). We will
probably never find out what exactly Trump and Putin discussed during their private meeting,
but one thing is sure: the fact that Trump sat one-on-one with Putin without any "supervision"
from his deep-state mentors was good enough to create a total panic in the US ruling class
resulting in even more wailing about collusion, impeachment, high crimes & misdemeanors and
even treason. Again, the goal is clear: Trump must be removed.
From the Russian point of view, it matters very little whether Trump is removed from office
or not – the problem is not one of personalities, but one of the nature of the
AngloZionist Empire. The Russians simply don't have the means to bring down the Empire, but the
infighting of the US elites does and, if not, then at the very least the current crisis will
further weaken the US, hence the Russian willingness to participate in this summit even if by
itself this summit brought absolutely no tangible results: the action was in the reaction.
Conclusion two: the Clinton gang's actions can result in a real catastrophe for the
US
Trump's main goal in meeting with Putin was probably to find out whether there was a way to
split up the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership and to back the Israeli demands for Syria.
On the issue of China, Trump never had a chance since the US has really nothing to offer to
Russia (whereas China and Russia are now locked into a
vital symbiotic relationship ). On Syria, the Russians and the Israelis are now negotiating
the details of a deal which would give the Syrian government the control of the demarcation
line with Israel (it is not a border in the legal sense) and Trump's backing for Israel will
make no difference. As for Iran, the Russians will not back the US agenda either for many
reasons ranging from basic self-interest to respect for international law. So while Trump did
the right thing in meeting with Putin, it was predictable at least under the current set of
circumstances, that he would not walk away with tangible results.
For all his very real failings, Trump cannot be blamed for the current situation. The real
culprits are the Clinton gang and the Democratic Party which, by their completely irresponsible
behavior, are creating a very dangerous crisis for the United States: the Neocons and the
Clinton gang are willing to say anything, no matter how destabilizing, to hurt Trump even if
the US political system by itself is also put at risk. Furthermore, the Neocons have now
completely flipped around the presumption of innocence – both externally (Russian
"attack" on the US elections) and internally (Trump's "collusion" with Putin). As for Trump,
whatever his good intentions might have been, he is weak and cannot fight the entire US deep
state by himself. The Neocons and the US deep state are now on a collision course with Russia
and the people of the United States and while Russia does have the means to protect herself
from the Empire, it is unclear to me who, or what could stop the Neocons from further damaging
the US. Deep and systemic crises often result in new personalities entering the stage, but in
the case of the US, it is now undeniable that the system cannot reform
All of this seems profoundly depressing, but it appears to be how things are. I was
disappointed by Trump's efforts to cave into the deep state on his statements. The fact he
can't even control his justice ministry reveals his weakness. I'm of the view history shows
that once spy agencies reach a critical mass in power they become the absolute rulers of a
structure and the rule of law becomes a facade, then is sidelined completely.
Trump was a complete outsider to politics when he decided to run for the presidency in
2015. He had no team or political allies. He really didn't have much of a philosophy of
governance, a solid foundation of history and facts, a first rate vocabulary or the debating
skills of an 8th grader. He has consistently failed to win over any Democratic and probably
not even a majority of Republican politicians.
The Deep State has opposed him at every turn, choosing to favor the policies of the
Neocons and their enablers in the Democratic Party. Hence, having no team of his own, he has
been saddled with personnel from the ranks of his most virulent enemies at every level.
His lack of knowledge and primitive persuasive skills, which might work in big business
but not under the microscope of politics, have not won him any converts but only encouraged a
vicious escalation of antipathy from his opponents, who, controlling the media from top to
bottom, are openly calling him a traitor on no objective grounds, unless trying to do the job
of the office, maintain the peace, and explore possible avenues for reducing international
tensions is now considered treasonous. The charge of treason is clearly bombastic but with
virtually everyone of influence nodding in agreement, it's difficult for the man to retain
his credibility before the public.
Actually, a smidgen south of half the public are the only base of his support. And a very
eclectic base they are, including numerous liberals, progressives, intellectuals and
peaceniks, in addition to conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians, who prefer to deal
with the real world rather than Hillary's deliberate misrepresentation of it.
Will that be enough for him to survive? The way the maniacs are raving in the media,
expect the country to throw a big celebration if he gets "taken out" one way or another
tomorrow. The situation is really dangerous and utterly shameful. Most of the blame goes to
Hillary Clinton and her insurrectionists for not accepting the outcome of our system of
ersatz "democracy." Her husband won with something like 43% of the popular vote in 1992. I'm
pretty sure Trump had a higher number. Cry me a river, Hillary, but stop trying to destroy
what you can't have like a petulant child.
the logical corollary of this state of affairs is that the people of the US and the people
of Russia have the same enemy – the Neocons – and that makes them de-facto
allies
I think it would be more accurate to say that the people of Russia had the same
enemy.
By the way, these are typical Neocon-style tactics: double-down, then double-down again,
then issue statements which make it impossible for you to back down, then repeat it all as
many times as needed.
It's like trial lawyers say: if the facts are on your side and the law is not, then argue
the facts; if the law is on your side and the facts are not, then argue the law; and if
neither the facts nor the law are on your side, then bang your fists on the table and shout
as loud as you can! That's exactly what the neo-clowns are doing here.
the Neocons and the Clinton gang are willing to say anything, no matter how
destabilizing, to hurt Trump even if the US political system by itself is also put at
risk.
All of which just helps to further discredit the empire. Even with all the insanity in the
media, I still thank God every day that Hellary did not become president.
The above h0moerotic caricature of Putin and Trump is quite revealing in what it tells us
about what drives the emotional life of White Liberals and White Leftist. They are driven by
powerful urges to impose homosexuality-pedophilia-pederasty on both Christian Russia and the
Working Class Native Born White American Christians.
Saker, something is not adding up. If Trump is truly as pathetic a pushover, as "weak and
spineless," as you say, why all the hysteria? If, on the other hand, he is a rather successful wrecking ball, already having put in
jeopardy half the key resources of the empire, that's another story.
I think because Trump postulated himself as a candidate, then got nominated the Republican
candidate and worst of all, despite the huge campaign against him, won the elections, without
the blessing of the Deep State and the neocons. So now they want to teach him (and anyone
else who might think about doing the same) a lesson: "Anyone who tries to become president
without our approval will be crushed", so it never happens again.
something is not adding up. If Trump is truly as pathetic a pushover, as "weak and
spineless," as you say, why all the hysteria?
And nobody seems to like him
They can tell what he wants to do
And he never shows his feelings
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning around
That Trump is a wrecking ball is a hypothesis I've held since the first GOP debate, when I
also realized he would (probably) win not only the election, but may even succeed at the far
more difficult challenge of bringing the Empire to a sufficiently soft landing that the
nation survives. I'm less convinced of the latter now, largely because I underestimated the
centrifugal forces driving the fault lines in the American body politic. The nation,
tragically may not survive the Empire's twilight, but I've seen nothing that makes me want to
change my hypothesis.
He's laying waste to the Empire in the most peaceful process possible – in large
part by so embarrassing the Empire's elites, allies and vassals that they withdraw first
their active support, and then finally even their consent. Inducing hysteria, both foreign
and domestic, is a non-trivial component of the forces giving the wrecking ball an extra push
as it heads for the edifice.
As for the summit, I frankly wouldn't be surprised to learn that much of it was staged for
maximum hysteria-inducing effect. Their 2hrs spent alone probably was little more than
comparing notes. After all, what can Trump promise that he can also deliver under the
circumstances? He can only promise to keep doing what he's doing.
In any case, they both know the Empire has to go, and they both want the American nation
to be a player after it goes. A vibrant America is as critical to the multipolar world as it
is to Americans. Maybe more so.
Collusion? Maybe, but the Trump phenomena, IMHO, has all the earmarks of regime change
done right. With or without collusion, the hystericals can't quite put their finger on
what happened, which drives further hysteria, which pushes the wrecking ball even faster,
which drives....
now undeniable that the system cannot reform itself
Yes, Saker and that puts US politics behind European fascism of 70+ years ago. Mussolini was booted out by a fascist committee, Franco paved the way for a constitutional
monarchy, but all Americans get is Bozo the Clown/President.
The destruction of the US working class amazes me in its absence from all serious debate.
First subverted by the CIA then rendered null by outsourcing (which is still undercounted)
the "deplorables" have no mechanism for resistence except the unthinkable one: Hope for total
breakup of the United States. Or hope for a foreign invasion.
Makes one wonder. When Egyptians greeted Alexander the Great as a liberator as he
conquered them, it was a fairly pungent comment on the ruling Persians. Will blue-collar
former-Yanks be cheering for liberating Chinese or Russian troops anytime soon? Henry
Kissinger once predicted something of the sort.
Well on the way, head in a cloud
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
But nobody ever hears him
Or the sound he appears to make
And he never seems to notice
He never listens to them
He knows that they're the fools
They don't like him
I don't think that Trump is the fool on the hill. I think that mostly all those around him
are. The latest hysteria over Russia is not about any "meddling" in any "democracy". It's about throwing tantrums that Russia won't submit to US hegemony. In my opinion, they
don't deserve to be in charge of their own country, let alone to be asking to be in charge of
Russia.
All they come up with is terrible ideas which they in their generosity are way too eager
to share with the world – against the wishes or the best interests of the world. Like
the multiculturalism. It's bad enough that they came up with that awful idea, but then they
had to force it down the throats of the stupid Europeans.
Then when Merkel showed enough brains to challenge their idea, they forced her to make 180
turn and to welcome over a 1 million refugees from the imperial misadventures.
Well, Saker did put, this time, some good points here.
Of course, they were well mixed with the usual Kremlin propaganda, but that's now like "good
morning" with his writing. Probably all public members of "Team Russia" have that clause in
their contract.
The usual spin "Russia is great, winning, and all is not only good but simply getting better
for Kremlin and the Great Leader".
He does point to this "thing" with MSM and public figures in West re the summit.
I agree, it's surreal. If I were watching this in a serious movie I'd change the channel/walk
out. If I were reading a serious book with the "thing" as a part of the plot I'd stop
reading. I think there IS something there.
It is not just "unanimity of hatred and chaos", "abject hysterics", "hate-filled
hysteria", "two minutes of hatred stretched well into a two weeks of hatred" etc. It's
something else and, I feel, simply much worse and dangerous.
I guess we have entered a zone beyond geopolitics into mass psychology. Not my area of
expertise at all, but simply feel there is something there. It feels as watching, hard to express it, hysterical people? Now, on my level, whenever I dealt with such people I simply walked away, most of the
time. A couple of times, when I couldn't walk away I simply floored them (or so I say). Both
men and women (talking about being a gentleman , a). With women, it's even easier, just one
strike, weak hand even. With men a full combination, even with a takedown and
..anyway. Joking. Sort of. Besides, I was younger then. But how can you take out people who control, in essence, US power, nuclear weapons in
particular? You simply can't . That is what makes, IMHO, this so dangerous. I simply can't recollect anything similar in relationship between superpowers. I am not so optimistic re the collapse of The Empire, multipolar world etc.
This "thing" can, I concede, deliver a couple of goods:
People, at last, realizing who, or better what, are our "betters".
The real power of The Empire diminishing because of the mess and chaos those species
..created.
Those two things creating an opportunity to, somehow, do something about this
abomination.
But, and a big but, there is the flip there.
People simply not paying attention. And, those hysterics really getting the levers of power
in their hands. While they are in that state, that is.
As I've said several times here so far (doesn't matter a bit, of course) Trump supporters
fucked up.
Not him; he didn't expect to win and when he did he found himself in a really bad
position.
His supporters. As soon as he won they walked home. A mistake.
A terrible mistake. I feel we'll all pay, dearly, for it.
"... The Deep State has opposed him at every turn, choosing to favor the policies of the Neocons and their enablers in the Democratic Party. Hence, having no team of his own, he has been saddled with personnel from the ranks of his most virulent enemies at every level. ..."
"... His lack of knowledge and primitive persuasive skills, which might work in big business but not under the microscope of politics, have not won him any converts but only encouraged a vicious escalation of antipathy from his opponents, who, controlling the media from top to bottom, are openly calling him a traitor on no objective grounds, unless trying to do the job of the office, maintain the peace, and explore possible avenues for reducing international tensions is now considered treasonous. The charge of treason is clearly bombastic but with virtually everyone of influence nodding in agreement, it's difficult for the man to retain his credibility before the public. ..."
"... Neocons have seized power and are sacrificing the US for the sake of their imperial designs ..."
"... Private corporations have become global, have acquired many public resources, and are now in control of whole segments of the profit potential in the entire world. This makes them as big as or bigger than the nations states that gave birth to them. America is just a small part of the private corporate wealth generating reach of the private domain. What corporations don't control is left to government. What's wrong with that? ..."
"... The USA has become a transfer mechanism and a transport company. Those in power are transferring massive arrays of public rights, duties, and resources to private corporate opulence. The elite (Pharaoh and his private corporation) have not been more secure, but Americans have reached the extended edge of insecurity. Leadership now consist of two masters: Public elected government 40% and privately owned corporations 60%. ..."
"... Every empire in history, after conquering its future colonies, ruled those colonies with a good degree of acceptance by the colonised population. Now the US claims that it is a global empire, the biggest one in history, but I know of no country which likes to be even man-handled let alone managed by US. ..."
"... Here is the specific threat to CIA impunity behind the US propaganda hysterics. Russia is turning over the rocks where CIA hides its moles in the US government. Russia knows what the perps are up to, so US state secrets don't protect them as they do at home. ..."
"... The CIA focal points that Fletcher Prouty told us about decades ago, they're still infesting the government, dug in deeper than ever. Russia proposes to question them. It's the American public's first look at the secret dotted-line reports CIA uses to control the US government. ..."
"... The US agents Russia singled out for questioning: Browder, Steele, McFaul (CIA war propaganda against Russia,) Jonathan Wiener (Lockerbie fabricator and DoS focal point,) David J. Kramer (ran Russian agents from DoS DRL and CIA's Freedom House), Kyle Parker (CIA mole on Senate staff) Todd Hyman, Schvartsman (CIA's DHS moles.) and Jim Rote, a garden-variety CIA spook rather than an agent, and CIA's transnational organized crime boss Robert Otto. ..."
"... Many millions of patriotic conservative, nationalist, and libertarian people working in "white-collar" jobs voted for Trump (as well as some more lefty white-collar folks who couldn't abide the DNC's rigging the primaries against Sanders and/or her obvious personal corruption, incessant warmongering, and loyalty to very rich folks in the finance/banking and entertainment fields). ..."
Trump
was a complete outsider to politics when he decided to run for the presidency in 2015. He had
no team or political allies. He really didn't have much of a philosophy of governance, a solid
foundation of history and facts, a first rate vocabulary or the debating skills of an 8th
grader. He has consistently failed to win over any Democratic and probably not even a majority
of Republican politicians.
The Deep State has opposed him at every turn, choosing to favor the policies of the
Neocons and their enablers in the Democratic Party. Hence, having no team of his own, he has
been saddled with personnel from the ranks of his most virulent enemies at every
level.
His lack of knowledge and primitive persuasive skills, which might work in big business
but not under the microscope of politics, have not won him any converts but only encouraged a
vicious escalation of antipathy from his opponents, who, controlling the media from top to
bottom, are openly calling him a traitor on no objective grounds, unless trying to do the job
of the office, maintain the peace, and explore possible avenues for reducing international
tensions is now considered treasonous. The charge of treason is clearly bombastic but with
virtually everyone of influence nodding in agreement, it's difficult for the man to retain his
credibility before the public.
Actually, a smidgen south of half the public are the only base of his support. And a very
eclectic base they are, including numerous liberals, progressives, intellectuals and peaceniks,
in addition to conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians, who prefer to deal with the real
world rather than Hillary's deliberate misrepresentation of it.
Will that be enough for him to survive? The way the maniacs are raving in the media, expect
the country to throw a big celebration if he gets "taken out" one way or another tomorrow. The
situation is really dangerous and utterly shameful. Most of the blame goes to Hillary Clinton
and her insurrectionists for not accepting the outcome of our system of ersatz "democracy." Her
husband won with something like 43% of the popular vote in 1992. I'm pretty sure Trump had a
higher number. Cry me a river, Hillary, but stop trying to destroy what you can't have like a
petulant child.
If Trump can't even stick to his own words, how could anybody expect the Russians to
take anything he says seriously?!
I think this is tanken too seriously; the Russians definitely appreciate Trump's courage
in taking a step toward them in an era of such hysteria. Trump is being beaten down by the
propaganda arm of the deep state (the MSM) but his tenacity is paying off. Already poles are
indicating that the majority of people are not taken in by the charade. As with the 2016
election, a sizable portion of the population just ain't buying it.
I dunno whether citing Nancy Pelosi on anything is relevant. Never had courage on anything
during the Dubya Years, and now she's pretty gone, a political career robot with decaying
functions.
You can practically see the cabling coming out of the spine, she's probably having herself
dominated
remotely via TeamViewer by MS-13 members, too.
I agree with your comments. I wish to emphasize one point: Trump was NEVER given a chance.
The establishment HATED him from his candidacy. That hatred has become more pathological by
the day.
It's gone beyond "agreeing"/ "disagreeing" with Trump: this is a sickening assault on U.S
democracy.
The Democratic Party IS guilty of treason. The US establishment – the deep state, if
you like is -- criminally INSANE.
I think there is an element of truth to your views. However, I can't get past the fact
that the head of this Trump hating psychotics are native born white Americans. Yes, they
pander to "minorities" but it's merely a means to their own piggish elite ends. Minorities
are also "useful idiots" .
the people of the US and the people of Russia have the same enemy – the Neocons
– and that makes them de-facto allies
There's definitely something to this statement. I think the Russian people can definitely
commensurate with the "deplorables" as they too have (and to some extent continue to) spend
many decades under Jewish dominated Nomenklatura.
Trump did not do anything different in this meeting with Putin than any other leader, who had
in the past met with the Russian leader. It was not what was done; it was the reaction to
what was presumed to have been done, and wasn't..
The entire Mueller investigation is being conducted, and will continue for all the years
of the Trump Presidency, to be sure, to insure that Trump does not do what he promised to do
during his campaign – cooperate with Putin and get out of the mid-east. It is very
obvious that so far, Trump has shown to have completely reneged on his campaign promises in
this regard (eg. putting military bases in Syria, evacuating ISIS commandos, bombing Syria,
recognizing Jerusalem as the state capital, continuing the war in Afghanistan, arming to the
teeth Saudi Arabia, etc. and some of the actions he has taken were based upon patent and
obvious lies (eg. bombing Syria ..twice).
If one listens carefully to the concerns of Trump in the Putin meeting, it was
predominantly the "security" of Israel vis a vis Iran. It was not the Untied States, but
Israel that was his major concern, and if you listen even more carefully, anyone could have
heard some key words, "Putin is a big fan of BeeBee", which means what? It means that these
mid-eastern wars are never, never. never going to end.
All this noise coming from the right and left is only that .noise. Because really nothing
under the sun has changed.
the lawfully elected President is being openly delegitimized and that, in turn,
delegitimizes the electoral process which brought him to power and, of course, it also
excoriates the "deplorables" who dared vote for him: the majority of the American people.
Neocons have seized power and are sacrificing the US for the sake of their imperial
designs,
that is simply not going to happen, and the Russians understand that.
transition from ::to
From. one nation ::to-1-many colonies, protectorates, puppet regimes+comprador-run vassal
states
From peaceful instigators ::to-2. barkers of orders and abusers of the use of force
From policy experts :: to-3. private monopoly powered corporate war monger and
propagandize
From best of its kind :: to-4 a wasted has been; w/o air, sea or land military
superiority
From rational global leader :: to-5 chaotic commanders engaged in simultaneous
conflicts
From a cooperating society :: to-6 a segmented fight raging society of multiple conflict in
fighting society
From a popularist state :: to-7 a Apartheid-Israeli Lobby lead state
From respected word keepers :: to-8 untrustworthy abdicators, abandoning agrmts as it suits
the situation.
From positive leadership :: to-9 infantile, demented, embarrassing, threatening
outburst
But I think the ruling classes intensity is a result of copyright and patent laws and
other devices too numerous to list here have been taken to privatize the public resources
held in trust by the USA into the hands of Pharaoh and his right arm corporations.
Essentially American public assets were entrusted to the USA, and its corporate elected
leaders pieced the public assets up, and sold them to the highest bidder. Now the successful
bidders are trying to get control or ownership over the remaining few assets that still held
in the public [USA} trust, when that is finished America will be wasted and the USA will
become a dictatorship.
Privatization is the first and foremost internal problem; unless it is fixed, nothing will
change.
What do I mean by privatization? Whole segments of the national USA and global economy now
belong to one or a few private enterprises: by contract, by rule of some law, or by ownership
of assets that were taken, or that are controlled by contract, or agreement, the public
domain was reduced and the private domain was increased. Substantial economic power and most
political power h\b transferred into private hands.
Private corporations have become global, have acquired many public resources, and are now
in control of whole segments of the profit potential in the entire world. This makes them as
big as or bigger than the nations states that gave birth to them.
America is just a small part of the private corporate wealth generating reach of the private
domain. What corporations don't control is left to government. What's wrong with that?
Private corporations (PCs) conduct their affairs independent of national laws and politics,
but the political systems and the people that depend on those political systems are highly
dependent, not on government, but on these private corporations.
Privatization means a part of the public domain has been transferred to the private domain
(mostly corporations). Water franchises, health care, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, military
arms production, transportation (airlines and ships used to be public owned or highly
controlled quasi-governmental entities), energy production and distribution, private armies,
public research discoveries converted by rule of law and investment capital into private
properties, global manufacturers of important and necessary software or hardware systems or
components ; energy, water, gas production and distribution, and services such as garbage,
jail management, education, and so on, are public services provided by private
corporations.
Just as British Colonial Aristocrats and their massive corporations were doing in 1776,
today's elites are busy transferring public government and American assets, resources, and
governing powers to their private selves.
The USA has become a transfer mechanism and a transport company. Those in power are
transferring massive arrays of public rights, duties, and resources to private corporate
opulence. The elite (Pharaoh and his private corporation) have not been more secure, but
Americans have reached the extended edge of insecurity. Leadership now consist of two
masters: Public elected government 40% and privately owned corporations 60%.
Pieces of the public government were carved out and given to private corporate enterprises.
Each transfer from public government to private corporate government; provides elites more
power, and the government that represents the public less power.
The problems the Saker presents are all results of the private taking from public.
If the media truly hated Trump as much as they say they did, they would never have put him
front and center during the primary and given him all that publicity. They would have Ron
Pauled him into public oblivion. They had complete control, but instead of ignoring him, they
put him front of center.
And those polls? If they were rigged, the media knew they were rigged, and would have
conducted one in secret. And why would Hillary have a schedule of campaign stops, half of
which were lies. Why was she lying about her campaign schedule? His election was a surprise
to no one, except those they wanted to fool – the public.
The "surprise" of his election was nothing more than part of the grand theatre we see
being played now.
There was collusion all right during this election, but it certainly wasn't with the
Russians.
Every empire in history, after conquering its future colonies, ruled those colonies with a
good degree of acceptance by the colonised population. Now the US claims that it is a global
empire, the biggest one in history, but I know of no country which likes to be even
man-handled let alone managed by US.
Therefore, I fail to understand where this claim to
empire comes from. Yes, the behaviour appears empirial (for example requesting delivery of
some "12 Russians" that some third-rate US horse-face pretend-policeman identified as
perpetrators of a crime which never happened), but every Napoleon in my local asylum for the
insane behaves empirially.
As to Pellosi and the gang who suck the dicks of Netanyahoo and MbS, the real mass
murderers, like little bunny rabbits suck bottles of milk, their words on Putin are words of
frustration due to the fact that Putin will never offer his member to be similarly
sucked.
Let me summise it simply: what an amazing fuck up US is under its Jewish ownership.
Here is the specific threat to CIA impunity behind the US propaganda hysterics. Russia is
turning over the rocks where CIA hides its moles in the US government. Russia knows what the
perps are up to, so US state secrets don't protect them as they do at home.
The CIA focal points that Fletcher Prouty told us about decades ago, they're still
infesting the government, dug in deeper than ever. Russia proposes to question them. It's the
American public's first look at the secret dotted-line reports CIA uses to control the US
government.
From Meduza: "The list of names also includes Homeland Security Department official Todd
Hyman (who testified in a deposition against Prevezon, a Russian company accused of
laundering proceeds from the fraud uncovered by Sergey Magnitsky), Svetlana Engert (who
supposedly stole criminal case materials from Russia), Alexander Shvartsman (who supposedly
oversaw Browder's stay in the U.S.), Jim Rote (a supposed CIA agent acting as Browder's
"financial manager"), Robert Otto (who supposedly served as deputy director of a U.S.
intelligence agency until January 2017), David Kramer (who recently served as an adviser to
the U.S. State Department), Jonathan Wiener (a long-time aide to John Kerry and an adviser on
national security), and Kyle Parker (a recent U.S. State Department official), according to
Kurennoi."
The US agents Russia singled out for questioning: Browder, Steele, McFaul (CIA war
propaganda against Russia,) Jonathan Wiener (Lockerbie fabricator and DoS focal point,) David
J. Kramer (ran Russian agents from DoS DRL and CIA's Freedom House), Kyle Parker (CIA mole on
Senate staff) Todd Hyman, Schvartsman (CIA's DHS moles.) and Jim Rote, a garden-variety CIA
spook rather than an agent, and CIA's transnational organized crime boss Robert Otto.
Russia is showing us how CIA infiltrates and controls the entire US government.
(1) continuing indefinitely the war in Afghanistan
(2) bombing Syria twice for reasons which he knew or should have known were false.
(3) putting a military base in Syria as an invader
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/syria/u-s-forces-set-up-new-base-in-syria-s-manbij-despite-turkish-threats-1.6073192
something no President dared do in the past.
(4) appointing neo-con war mongers in all key cabinet positions
(5) telling police (on video for all the world to hear) to confiscate guns and "worry about
due process later" (13 states have followed this advice) This statement tramples upon not
only the second amendment, but the fifth and fourteenth as well
(6) saying absolutely nothing about Google, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, censuring all right
wing groups, showing that he doesn't give a hoot about anyone's lst amendment rights,
including his supporters.
(7) recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (at a cost of thousands injured and dead
Palestinians during Israel's celebration)
(8) sanctioning Russia at least three times since he has been in office; with sanctions more
severe than those imposed by Obama.
(9) having the US military evacuate ISIS commandos in Syria
(10) breaching the agreement with Iran at a time when the only party with continuing contract
obligations was Iran who was abiding by the contract (he certainly was not going to get back
the Obama money,w hich is the only thing he complained about during his campaign)
(11) fully funding planned parenthood (now trying to undo this Congressional action with an
Executive Order which compounds the problem in his attempt to usurp the powers of Congress,
violating Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution)
(12) not building the wall
(13) lying about his gross immorality (keep in mind that if the Senate impeached Clinton for
committing fellatio in the Oval Office with a foolish young girl in her early twenties, Trump
would never have dared to run for office with his background)
(14) lying about the economy (saying there was 4 percent unemployment when all the big
retailers employing hundreds of thousands went out of business on the heels of his
statement)
(15) proposing to reward millions of immigrants who have broken our laws
Yet, his supporters are still on the street with those silly hats reciting their mantra
that he is making America great again.
What he is doing in fact is continuing unjustified wars (military Keynesian economics that
will destroy the US) while simultaneously and quietly taking away our constitutional rights.
Those are his biggest "accomplishments"
I'd just quibble that it's unlikely that the majority of Trump's voters were "blue
collar", if that's what we mean by working class.
Many millions of patriotic conservative, nationalist, and libertarian people working in
"white-collar" jobs voted for Trump (as well as some more lefty white-collar folks who
couldn't abide the DNC's rigging the primaries against Sanders and/or her obvious personal
corruption, incessant warmongering, and loyalty to very rich folks in the finance/banking and
entertainment fields).
Unfortunately, if we're counting manufacturing and assembly jobs as "blue collar" or
"working class", there just aren't enough of those jobs left in the USA for their holders to
constitute a majority even of Trump voters. That was part of Trump's appeal, right, the
endless loss of good-paying jobs actually making things of tangible usefulness and value?
What "we" have is a corrupt US (global) elite. An elite, primed in the 80′s &
let entirely off the leash in '91.
Benevolent despots ? A concept with only the vaguest comprehension.
No – these US/ Globalist elites just KNEW history was on THEIR side. Take the brakes
off, & spin the capitalist coin: heads – class war; tails imperialism. Win -win.
(Can't remember his name – guy who runs Hathaway-something: "there is class war, &
my class is winning". Damn few business men are as worshipped as this bloke) And yes, just
look at the 90′s, the Yeltsin years, the Clinton years looked like it was all working
out.
Well, contradictions will "out". And here we are.
A ruling class descending into sociopathology.
A public unable to fully comprehend the toxic brew bubbling just beneath the surface ( the 6
o'clock news, comfortable, day in day out, pay the damn bills, the kid's teeth need braces
& the car a new exhaust).
I won't mention climate change – few here who believe, let alone give a fuck ?
We are in diabolical trouble but fuck it – instinctively we all know it's a Panglossian
universe .& the devil take the hindmost.
Both the USA and Russia are much less "Christian" than you make out. But you're right, of course, that our enemies seem especially motivated to destroy any
nation with a meaningful vestige of Western (Greco-Roman-Anglo-European) Civilization and/or
Christian mores.
The Democratic Party Voting Bloc is now effectively-demographically majority post-1965
nonwhites+American Blacks .
True enough but they aren't necessarily against the "Deplorables". For example Alexandra
Ocasio-Cortez who recently won a Democratic primary in New York (against heavy odds)
describes herself as a "Democratic Socialist" for affordable single-payer national
healthcare, tuition free education in high schools and universities ,with a downsized MIC
& Deep State and realistic corporate taxation helping pay for it.
And on the Gaza border shooting of Palestinians she recently said, "This is a massacre. I
hope my peers have the moral courage to call it such. No state or entity is absolved of mass
shootings of protesters. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human
dignity, as anyone else. Democrats can't be silent about this anymore." She opposes the
Likudniks, AIPAC, Netanyahu and wants a two state solution.
Democratic Socialism and Elite Globalist Zionism seem to have a problem living together in
the Democratic Party.
The strains are also visible in the UK where Jeremy Corbyn could also be described as a
Democratic Socialist with much the same platform as Ocasio-Cortez and a good chance of
becoming Prime Minister.
Trump – good & evil. But his base need to take to the streets before he has a
"problem in Dallas" or the dickless wonders in Congress finally get the gumption to impeach
(hard as that's to believe of the Dem-castrartie party .)
The US has been a very succesful country, an amazing empire . In barely a century and a half
expanded enormously thanks to Northern European protestant immigration and to the occupation
of Mexican territories .
In 1945 the USA was on top of the world , it was " the shining city of the hill " , the
only city shining in the hill in fact , it had 50% of the world GDP . while the rest of the
world was in ruins . The decadent Europeans had destroyed themselves in two world wars . .
The Russians had suffered the horrors of the communist revolution and the two world wars . The
Japanese although defeated had destroyed Asia , specially China which also endured a civil
war and a communist revolution .
So , in 1945 the world was in ruins , and the USA was indeed the only "shining city on the
hill " . The USA never suffered the world wars destruction on its own territory , had few casualties in the world wars , and had 50% of the world GDP. Besides the USA inherited
economically and politically the British Empire that England, exhausted by the two world
wars could not maintain .
In the 60`s the USA was still the " shining city on the hill ", Kennedy wanted to do some
changes , I do not know which ones, and he was killed ( by the deep State ? ), the world
was shocked .
In the 70`s Nixon finished the Vietnam war ( a colonial heritage of the French ) it was an
American defeat, and the " shining city in the hill " impeached him ( the deep State does
not accept defeat ) . Europe , the USSR , Japan , China , had recovered from the wars and
wanted to have their shining little villages in the hills too.
Presently the USA has 20% of the GDP , that`s a lot , the USA is a very powerful country ,
probably the most powerful country of the world , but 20% is not 50% . Probably Kennedy and
Nixon realized that this day would come , and Trump sees that this day is arrived . Probably
the american deep State would like to freeze time in 1945 , as well as the french deep State
would like it to freeze history in 1805 in Austerlitz with Napoleon , or the Spanish deep
State would like to freeze history in 1492 when Spain completely expelled the moors from
Spain after seven centuries of fighting and discovered America , with the Catholic Kings
.
The deep States are always sick of imperial nostalgia , they are the war party , they
would like to make war to anyone to threatens its 1945 imperial glorious moment . And the
Kennedys , Nixons and Trumps of this world are the party of peace, they want to adapt to a
changing reality less glorious than the magic orgasmic moments that all empires have had ,
but more constructive, more adapted to an ever changing world .
All the Empires that the earth has seen have passed though this dilemma : party of war vs
party of peace . At the end the parties of peace end up prevailing, but the parties of war
can make a lot of damage both to their own country and to others .
I still think the best explanation of Merkel's immigration policy is her belief that
indeed the Germans are guilty of two world wars and the holocaust.
Therefore 'ein neuer Mensch', a new German, must be created through mass immigration, as a
German commentator explains.
His book should be ready by now.
His prediction is that just the E European countries, Hungary, Poland, etc., will remain
European.
Writing this, one may expect that they will turn politically to Russia, also a catholic white
country.
" The decadent europeans had destroyed themselves in two world wars . . "
The USA destroyed Europe in two world wars.
Do not remember if it was here that I read what Mark Twain said or wrote 'it is easier to
fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled'.
About WWI:
Charles Callan Tansill, 'Amerika geht in den Krieg', Stuttgart 1939 (America goes to War,
1938)
FDR's preparations for WWII:
Charles A. Beard, 'American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932 – 1940, A study in
responsibilities', New Haven, 1946
Charles A. Beard, 'President Roosevelt and the coming of the war 1941, A study in appearances
and realities', New Haven, 1948
"Russian leaders provoked popular sentiment in numerous countries to join NATO, no doubt
abetted by their unfavorable experiences under Russian occupation"
You mean USSR occupation, of course.
Perhaps Russia might discuss any number of issues when the US removes it's illegal forces in
Syria, stops supporting the crypto--Nazi coup government in Ukraine, withdraws it's missiles from Poland etc (oh, we'll protect
you from non existent Iranian nuclear weapons) & pulls back it's conventional forces,
stops proving up invasions like the Georgian invasion of Sth Iapetus, stops interfering in
what remains of the democratic processes of the former USSR states, stops supporting
terrorists across the ME, stops interfering in the energy business of its allies in the EU,
stops it's lies & threats against Russian allies such as Iran & stops iys criminal
sanctions on Russia .Well, that scratches the surface, anyway .
3.The US armed forces are only good at three things: wasting immense sums of money,
destroying countries and alienating the rest of the planet.
Alienating the rest of the planet: Wasting immense sums of money: The U.S. War Industry Raked in $5+ Billion Worth of Foreign Military Sales in June
2018
July 27, 2018 / Christian Sorensen /
"The U.S. war industry raked in $5,408,112,575 worth of foreign military sales (FMS)
during June 2018. Notable items included $1.12 billion worth of Lockheed Martin F-16 aircraft
for Bahrain and "
An uncommonly excellent analysis.
High quality comment threads and sites that allow for reactions/debate/introduction of public
discourse are my gold standard. Unz is exceptional and much appreciated. Just because it's unlikely that I might post here often
I would like to suggest Dr. Judith Curry's blog to anyone like me who enjoys going deeper
into subjects than most 'normal' people would ever find time for. It's a climate blog. It's brilliant. Curry is a genuinely exceptional human and scientist.
The comment threads are pure mind candy..
are u ok ? Russia occupying her province of Kaliningrad ? maybe your country is occupying illegally California , Arizona , Nevada , Colorado , Utah
, New Mexico , Oklahoma and Texas ? Get your nato out of Europe , Europe is fed un with your 80.000 yankee occupation troops
.
Even baltics are missing Russians, Baltics` population is going down since they left CCCP
, they are fed up with American warmongers , they do not want to be cannon fodder for the
well paid eccentric American militarists .
Trump won 20% of the Black male electorate. If he can increase that percentage, then the
Democratic coalition becomes black females, post-1965 immigrants, and white New Class
managerial types. He might get blacks to side with him over immigration, which has cut out the support for
lower-skilled wages across the board.
That's kinda over the top. Continental suicide was on the books for the Great Continental War (I don't know how it
comes it is called "World War") as general desire of revanchism, political nastiness,
prussian militarism, yougoslav apsirations, decaying empires and the British desire for a
continental balance of power met head-on with war tool mechanization. The US came online
rather late.
As for "Word War II", it was mainly about two socialist systems facing off, and Japan
irking the US with a bout of late-onset colonialism. Also everyone going crazy with
operations research and even more mechanization. So it should be called "Socialist War I with
Colonialism on the side.".
They should have destroyed Germany after WWI, or come to a just Peace. They did neither,
slightly weakening it and strongly pissing it off.
After the Soviets went out of business, the US neither welcomed it to the brotherhood of
nations, nor destroyed it so it could not be a threat. Letting the looters loose upon it sure
did piss a lot of people off though. Your point is well taken.
First reaction. All I can think of whenever I read another allegation of Russia influence,
control of Trump or anyone else, or of Putin coming to Washington is Israel. Over and over:
these people simply keep ignoring the elephant in the room. I don't care about the Pekinese:
there's an elephant right there! Look at it! Yes, a Russian businessman once gave a Trump
advisor (since dismissed) fifty thousand dollars. Israel partisans were the leading
contributors to both candidates; Sheldon Adelson alone gave Donald Trump thirty five
million dollars. Shall we talk about what we're doing as a consequence; how we're
remorselessly driving Iran to the point where there will be no choice but war -- and at whose
behest we're doing this?
No let's fret and fantasize about 'Russian influence.' Never mind that the body bags won't
be coming back from Latvia, but from Iran.
Second reaction: this one's more optimistic. Yes, the attacks are increasingly hysterical;
but they're also coming from an increasingly narrow base. More and more, people on both the
right and the left just don't buy them anymore: see, for example, the denunciation of
all this nonsense at the impeccably 'progressive' Mondoweiss.
I perceive the remaining anti-Trump partisans as still possessing a grip on the
traditional media outlets. However, more and more, they simply speak for no one but
themselves. In fact, this may account for the note of hysterical exaggeration; underneath it
all is the sneaking suspicion that no one believes them, or is even listening. After all,
look at Trump's poll numbers. The media keeps announcing that 'now he's blown it' -- and his
numbers keep inching up. I like tracking a rolling average of the last ten polls. When I
started the figure was around 38. Now it's moving past 43. Neither 'babygate' nor
'Russiagate' perceptibly affected this at all.
So to sum up, 'Russiagate' isn't the problem, and it's questionable if many actual
Americans even think it is. This remains true whatever the ravings coming out of The
Washington Post, or The New Yorker , or USA Today . All the evidence is
that these organs speak for fewer and fewer people, and fewer and fewer are even
listening.
Basically, I think most Americans don't even care about all this nonsense.
They know that if Trump is awful, the alternatives were even worse, and they know that the
economy's doing well. No one's saying 'if only Hillary coulda won '
The USA came into WWI from the very beginning.
Without buying USA food and weapons on credit GB and France could not have fought at all.
Moreover, the USA was not neutral, the USA allowed the British blockade of Germany.
As to continental suicide, there was no such thing.
GB wanted war.
WWII, how many times must be repeated what Lindbergh already said before Pearl Harbour,
that 'jewry and GB wanted war'.
FDR was brought into politics by Bernard Baruch, who already in 1928 prevented his friend
Churchill from going into business, because 'he saw great things for Churchill in the
future'.
These great things came, Churchill waged an unnecessary war, and destroyed the empire.
Quote: " do you know the evolution of population in the baltic countries after they left the
Soviet Union in 1990 ?"
Yes, the decreases in population can easily be explained primarily by Russians, who used
to live there, having moved back to Russia. Additionally, there might have been small
population flows of Lithuanias to Poland, Latvians to Sweden, and Estonians to Finland, given
the close relationships. Nothing nefarious.
interesting that Russia has been called to defend itself in England. There its Novichok
the instant death substance arguably produced in London by USA controlled labs or taken from
the old USSR when it fell apart.
Putin vs British government case: Putin charged with poisoning an ex Russian spy and his
daughter, unfortunately for the media and the British corporate Zionist both Russians
survived,
Russia has called the British liars to the carpet.. Russia demands an investigation but the
Banksters and their corporations refuse to allow the British Government to open its
"so-called" investigation to Russian questioning.
Keep your eyes focused on Nord II. the one road one belt, Turkey moving in support of
Syria and Yemen against Saudi Arabia, BRICS and concern yourself with the fact that Russia
not only does not own any USA debt, but Russia also has a non federal reserve approved
monetary exchange operation, SCO is growing in strength, China Gold backed bonds are
available for anyone to buy and convert the face value of the bond to gold. These are game
changers.
Stay tuned for more privately owned advertising supported corporate media productions
showing on "FREE THEATER". M 16, (criminal instigating Association) CIA and Mossad employees
are busy writing new propaganda, budget is not a problem, the Russian's will be made to pay
for the articles, movies etc. so everything is free. Enjoy!
Yes indeed, first Britain, and now Russia has pantsed the US too. In a virtuosic dick
move, they exposed a CIA spook who's implicated not only in Secret Agent Browder's war
propaganda ( http://russiahouse.org/current_news.php?language=eng&id_current=1454
) but in CIA crimes against humanity – specifically, 'legal pretexts for manifestly
illegal acts."
David Kramer, Tufts/Harvard Political Science/Russian studies, **PNAC** , DoS focal point,
then CIA's famous captive NGO **Freedom House** , and a featherbed job at the McCain
Institute for Freedom, Democracy, and Abandoning Thousands of MIAs in Vietnam to Die Slow
Agonizing Deaths in Penal Camps.
Here he is talking to his co-conspirator Robert Otto, "Only idiots like Kerry think we
have common interests in Syria."
Needless to say, Kramer wouldn't know a human right from a bar of soap. He's a
knuckledragger. CIA sent Kramer to DRL when Alfreda Bikowsky got her tit caught in the
crimes-against-humanity wringer for systematic and widespread torture. The US was five years
late reporting to the Committee Against Torture and got a mind-boggling eight (8) follow-on
inquiries for urgent derogations of non-derogable rights. So Kramer had to think fast and
make up some bullshit why simulated live burial, object rape, death by dryboard suffocation,
and penis-slitting is not torture. Kramer is not the brightest bulb, but that's not a hard
job. During the Bush administration all the delegation did was say, "The US does not
Torture," robotically over and over.
So Kramer is a good example of how CIA runs the State Department. When a CIA vital
interest like impunity comes up, they parachute a mole in to get their criminals off the
hook.
Really? Why? What's to hard to fully comprehend?
This ain't quantum physics. Not enough time in busy lives to spend some effort on the topic?
Yeah .But enough time for shopping, social media, online entertainment and such.
Etc.
No. Yes, the elites are corrupted.
But, the masses are corrupted too.
THAT is the problem here.
Or, Trump support base is corrupted too. Not as bad/evil/malicious. As weak.
W ..e a k. And weak always get ruled by strong.
What did/do they think? That the same people who can slaughter hundreds of thousands
Iraqis without missing their lunch are just going to give up their power like that? That the
half an hour of voting "effort" will change that game of power?
What are they doing now? How can one expect to challenge that power by sitting at home and waiting for one man to
go against all that?
Bullshit.
I've been told that "Trump base" doesn't do mass demonstrations.
I still don't get why not?
What's so hard to do, WHENEVER Dems/progs pull their numbers on the street, the "Trump base"
does the same? That's reactive. Go active.
Whenever Trump pulls some of his moves which flips the Dems/progs his support base floods the
streets From the little town in Midwest to New York.
What's so hard about that? The same people have no problem going out .watching games being
outdoors..whatever.
Oh, yes, it could get what .dangerous? Really?
What? Fistfights? Shooting? What happened to that "brave" in the "land of ."?
Don't get this post wrong. Not directed at you. It's directed at lazy and weak people who
are out of their depth.
Wouldn't be a problem save what's going to happen when Dems/progs get their person in White
House.
"... I do think the credit for this goes to the Clinton campaign, the "intelligence" agencies, the neoconlib biparty and individuals like McCain, who have gone to McCarthyism lengths since before the GOP primaries ended to prevent Trump from attempting *any* change of the status quo on foreign policy. Granted, the man might be ineffectual no matter what, but we will never know. The US establishment and the retainers of the war profiteering classes have made any negotiations with Russia impossible long before Trump even announced his campaign. ..."
"... it is the unholy alliance of Democrats looking for an excuse for them losing the election and Cold War hawk neocons who have Russia-hate in their DNA (and their stock portfolios)). ..."
"... The embarrassment was the reaction in the MSM showcasing how they are now CIA state run media. They trot out former high ranking CIA officers now employed by them recycling every meme to reinforce that we are the forces goodness and light and anyone strong enough to oppose us is evil. ..."
"Trump has made it politically impossible to pursue that goal in the near term."
I do think the credit for this goes to the Clinton campaign, the "intelligence" agencies,
the neoconlib biparty and individuals like McCain, who have gone to McCarthyism lengths since
before the GOP primaries ended to prevent Trump from attempting *any* change of the status
quo on foreign policy. Granted, the man might be ineffectual no matter what, but we will
never know. The US establishment and the retainers of the war profiteering classes have made
any negotiations with Russia impossible long before Trump even announced his campaign.
We also should not forget to credit the GOP for test-driving the whole "weak on Russia"
playbook during the Obama years.
I agree with b. While Trump may not be savvy enough to calibrate his engagement with Putin in
a way that would allow a proper dialogue with Russia in spite of the political backdrop in
the US, the primary blame for any failure to allow such dialogue rests for those responsible
for creating that political backdrop that makes it so difficult in the first place (hint:
it's not Trump, unless you blame him for winning the election – rather it is the unholy
alliance of Democrats looking for an excuse for them losing the election and Cold War hawk
neocons who have Russia-hate in their DNA (and their stock portfolios)).
That Putin talked up the Iran deal in the press conference makes me wonder what was said in
the one-on-one. Couldn't have pleased the Adelson/Bolton wing.
Additionally there has yet to be any actual evidence presented re significant election
interference. Indictments are accusations, not evidence.
I saw nothing particularly wrong with the press conference. I'm no Trump fan, but he was just
saying he believed Putin rather than the people who are clearly trying to bring his
administration down. Can't really blame him.
The embarrassment was the reaction in the MSM showcasing how they are now CIA state run
media.
They trot out former high ranking CIA officers now employed by them recycling every meme
to reinforce that we are the forces goodness and light and anyone strong enough to oppose us
is evil.
CNN even used Putin's dearly departed Labrador, Konni making her look like Cujo stating
that Putin use her to terrorize Angela Merkel. A U.S. Congressman fumed that the 50,000
children died in Syria because this fiend supported Assad when Syria was about to be
liberated (a number suspiciously close to the true number of Yemeni children we helped to
kill). These are just two random examples in a very long day. It was
a show worthy of the priests of Baal who confronted Elijah.
As flawed as Trump may be, he is merely holding up a mirror to what we have become. Had we
elected a conventional candidate it would just be business as usual with these seething
hatreds buried just below the surface.
No one better suggest that we should tarnish ourselves talking to the likes of a Russian
leader unless we are discussing terms of surrender. We want Yeltsin or maybe Medvedev.
"... While agree totally with what Col. Davis says here about ending America's involvement in the Afghanistan War. Way to many are profiting from this long-term misadventure. ..."
"... Eminently sensible advice, except that Trump can't take it without being greeted with a hysterical chorus of "we're losing Afghanistan ZOMG!" (as if we ever had it) and "Putin puppet!" ..."
"... "Of course most Americans are clueless about the cost of these wars and how it impacts money necessary to re-build our country infrastructures." ..."
"... Completely disagree. I don't know a single individual who supports the war in Afghanistan or misunderstands its costs. The American people just have no say in the matter. ..."
"... Finally, they realise what St Ronnie knew in the 1980s. He created the Taliban we know today via Operation Cyclone. Maybe Ollie North can lead the negotiations? He seems to have a good channel to the Iranians ..."
"... Putting together Sid_finster's and spite's comments paints an interesting picture. Aside from war profiteering (Fran Macadam) there is no real purpose served by our occupation except to be there. ..."
"... I'll go a step further and say that the invasion of Afghanistan was unnecessary too. We were not attacked by Afghanistan. We were not even attacked by the Taliban. We were attacked by al Quaida, by teams comprised mostly of Saudi Arabians. ..."
"... It cannot be repeated too often that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Let the Taliban have it. ..."
"... What the Army could not do, and still cannot do, is transform a tribal society in isolated mountainous terrain into a liberal democracy. As LTC Davis observes: "The reason McChrystal failed to end the war -- and Miller will likewise fail -- is that these objectives can't be militarily accomplished." ..."
"... The conclusion of this simple argument is that the war in Afghanistan actually has almost nothing to do with that country and almost entirely to do with the political and economic demands arising from the US .nothing to do with Afghanistan other than the destruction of the place and its people. ..."
We have no choice. The 17-year war in Afghanistan has failed at every level, while the violence is only
getting worse.
Reports have surfaced recently that the White House is
instructing
its senior diplomats
to begin seeking "direct talks with the Taliban." It's a
measure that would have been unthinkable at the start of the Afghanistan war yet today it's long overdue. Despite the
criticism it's elicited, such talks offer the best chance of ending America's longest and most futile war.
While there is broad agreement that American leaders were justified in launching military
operations in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, it's painfully evident after 17 years that no one has any idea how
to end the fighting on military terms.
Possibly the biggest impediment to ending the war has been the definition of the word
"win." General
Stanley McChrystal
said in 2009 that winning in
Afghanistan meant "reversing the perceived momentum" of the Taliban, "seek[ing] rapid growth of Afghan national security
forces," and "tackl[ing] the issue of predatory corruption by some" Afghan officials.
Nine full years and zero successes later, however, Lieutenant General Austin S.
Miller, latest in line to command U.S. troops in Afghanistan, defined as America's "core goal" at his
confirmation hearing
that "terrorists can never again use Afghanistan as a
safe haven to threaten the United States."
The reason McChrystal failed to end the war -- and Miller will likewise fail -- is that
these objectives
can't be militarily accomplished.
Predicating an end to the war on such is to guarantee perpetual failure. A major course correction is therefore in
order.
Keeping 15,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan does not,
in any way
, prevent terror attacks against the
United States from originating there -- and for this lack of success we will pay at least
$45 billion
this year alone. The real solution
is therefore to withdraw our troops as quickly as can be safely accomplished rather than throw more of them into a
fruitless conflict.
I personally observed in 2011 during my second combat deployment in Afghanistan that
even with 140,000 U.S. and NATO boots on the ground, there were still vast swaths of the country that were ungoverned
and off-limits to allied troops.
Meaning, at no point since October 2001 has American military power prevented
Afghanistan from having ungoverned spaces. What
has
kept us safe, however -- and will continue to keep us safe -- has been our robust, globally
focused
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that work in concert with the CIA, FBI, and local law
enforcement to defend our borders from external attack.
Many pundits claim that if the U.S. military withdraws from Afghanistan then chaos
will reign there -- and that is almost certainly true. But that's how we found Afghanistan, that's how it is today,
and -- wholly irrespective of when or under what conditions the U.S. leaves -- that's how it will be long into the future
until Afghans themselves come to an accommodation.
The question U.S. policymakers need to ask is which is more important to American
interests: the maintenance of a perpetually costly war that fails to prevent any future attacks, or ending America's
participation in that war?
Continuing to fight for a country that can't be won cements a policy that has drained
the U.S. of vital resources, spilled the blood of American service members to no effect, and dissipated the Armed Forces'
ability to defend against potentially existential threats later on -- while in the meantime not diminishing the threat of
international terrorism. To strengthen our national security, we must end the enduring policy of failure by prudently
and effectively ending our military mission.
While the fundamentals of a withdrawal plan are relatively straightforward, they would
still be met by considerable opposition. One of the arguments against leaving was voiced by McChrystal nine years ago
when
he pleaded
with the American public to "show resolve" because "uncertainty
disheartens our allies [and] emboldens our foe." Yet the facts can't be denied any longer: for all eight years of the
Obama administration and the first 500 days of Trump's tenure, we maintained that "resolve" and were rewarded with an
unequivocal deterioration of the war.
Since McChrystal's admonition to maintain the status quo, the Taliban have exploded in
strength to
reportedly 77,000
, more territory is now in the
hands of the insurgents than at
any point since 2001
, the Afghan government
remains one of the
most corrupt regimes
on the planet, and
civilian casualties in the first half of 2018 are the
highest ever recorded
.
The only way this permanent failure ends is if President Trump shows the courage he
has sometimes demonstrated to push back against the Washington establishment. That means ignoring the status quo that
holds our security hostage, ending the war, and redeploying our troops. Without that resolve, we can count on continued
failure in Afghanistan. With it, American security will be strengthened and readiness improved.
Daniel L. Davis is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities and a former lieutenant
colonel in the U.S. Army who retired in 2015 after 21 years, including four combat deployments. Follow him on Twitter
@DanielLDavis1
.
While agree totally with what Col. Davis says here about ending America's involvement in the Afghanistan War.
Way to many are profiting from this long-term misadventure. The only way these wars of choice will ever end is
when Congress has the balls to cut off funding. Of course most Americans are clueless about the cost of these
wars and how it impacts money necessary to re-build our country infrastructures. Military madness indeed.
Eminently sensible advice, except that Trump can't take it without being greeted with a hysterical chorus of
"we're losing Afghanistan ZOMG!" (as if we ever had it) and "Putin puppet!"
If Trump were going to leave, he
should have done so soon after taking office. At least then he could blame his predecessors.
The financial security of the National Security State and its suppliers now depends on no war ever ending or
being won. The new definition of defeat is having any war end. As long as it continues, that war is being won.
"Of course most Americans are clueless about the cost of these wars and how it impacts money necessary to
re-build our country infrastructures."
Completely disagree. I don't know a single individual who supports the
war in Afghanistan or misunderstands its costs.
The American people just have no say in the matter.
There is only one reason why the USA is still in Afghanistan that makes sense (all the official reasons are an
insult to ones intelligence), it borders on Iran and thus serves as a means to open a new front against Iran.
The more the US pushes for war against Iran, the more this seems correct.
"Reports have surfaced recently that the White House is instructing its senior diplomats to begin seeking
"direct talks with the Taliban."
I have to give my Jr High response here:
"Well, duh."
__________________
"While there is broad agreement that American leaders were justified in launching military operations in
Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks . . ."
Yeah . . . no.
1. They manipulated the game to make what was a crime an act of war to justify the an unnecessary,
unethical, and strategically unwise invasion. I remain now where I was 14 years ago -- bad decision in every
way.
2. It was even a poor decision based on reason for war. To utterly bend the will of the opponent to conform
to the will of the US. it is possible to win. But to do so would require such massive force, brutality and
will.
3. 9/11 was a simple criminal act, despite the damage. As a crime we should have sought extradition, and or
small team FBI and special forces operations to a small footprint in either capturing, and or if need be
killing Osama bin Laden and company.
Nothing that has occurred since 9/11 provides evidence that the invasion was either justified or effective.
It will if the end game is to quit be one of three losses suffered by the US.
They are: War of 1812
Iraq
Afghanistan
" . . . it's painfully evident after 17 years that no one has any idea how to end the fighting on military
terms."
Sure leave. Though talking so as to avert whole slaughter of those that aided the US is the decent thing to
do.
Finally, they realise what St Ronnie knew in the 1980s. He created the Taliban we know today via Operation
Cyclone. Maybe Ollie North can lead the negotiations? He seems to have a good channel to the Iranians
Solving USA problems in Afghanistan an at the same time pushing for war with Iran is by definition classic
oxymoron. Afghanistan's problems can only be solved with cooperation and understanding with Iran. Conflict of
the USA with Iran will extend indefinitely the suffering of the Afghanis and the eventual lose of the
Afghanistan and Iran to the Russia. Always reigniting and keeping on the front burner the conflict with Iran by
the USA is exactly what Russia and V. Putin want. I can't see any other politicians except D. Trump, B.
Netanyahu and American 'conservatives' for the advancement of the Russia's goals in the Middle East and in the
globalistan. These are the new XXI century 'useful (adjective)'.
Putting together Sid_finster's and spite's comments paints an interesting picture. Aside from war profiteering
(Fran Macadam) there is no real purpose served by our occupation except to be there.
I'll go a step further
and say that the invasion of Afghanistan was unnecessary too. We were not attacked by Afghanistan. We were not
even attacked by the Taliban. We were attacked by al Quaida, by teams comprised mostly of Saudi Arabians. This
should have been a dirty knife fight in all the back alleys of the world, but we responded to the sucker punch
as our attackers intended; getting into a brawl with somebody else in the same bar; eventually, with more than
one somebody else.
It cannot be repeated too often that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Let the Taliban have it.
Indeed, but as others have commented, the entire point of the Afghanistan war is that it is pointless. It can
suck up enormous amounts of money, and generate incredible profits for politically connected defense
contractors – and because Afghanistan is in fact pointless, it doesn't matter if all of that money is wasted or
stolen, how could you tell? The vested interest in these winless pointless foreign wars means that they will
continue until the American economy finally collapses – and anyone who opposes these wars is a fascist, a
Russian stooge, "literally Hitler." Because money.
Thank you for this. I am very surprised to learn that Trump is pursuing this, given his pugilistic nature. I
hope he does in fact, get us the hell out of there. He may be, like Nixon, the one who is politically able to
make this smart move. Can you imagine the Republican outrage if Obama had tried a diplomatic exit from this
sand trap?
We can still be proud of what we attempted to do there. A few years post-9/11, an Afghan colleague of mine
who had come to the US as a boy said, "9/11 is the best thing to ever happen to Afghanistan." He meant that
rather than carpet bombing Afghanistan "back to the Stone Age," as the left predicted the US would do, we
poured billions of dollars in aide to build schools, hospitals, sewage and water plants, roads, etc.
"He meant that rather than carpet bombing Afghanistan "back to the Stone Age," as the left predicted the US
would do, we poured billions of dollars in aide to build schools, hospitals, sewage and water plants, roads,
etc."
And we could have done a lot more if we had not invaded. The Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11.
The achievable operational level Military objectives in the Afghan war were accomplished in the first year; The
Taliban were out of power and hiding in Pakistan and the Afghans had a somewhat benevolent government that
wanted to guarantee security an property and a measure of individual liberty.
What the Army could not do, and still cannot do, is transform a tribal society in isolated mountainous
terrain into a liberal democracy. As LTC Davis observes: "The reason McChrystal failed to end the war -- and
Miller will likewise fail -- is that these objectives can't be militarily accomplished."
This has been particularly true with the intense guerrilla actions enabled by the Pakistanis who have a
vested interest in an unstable Afghanistan.
I believe the noble goals 'might' have been doable – but it would have required a level of effort, and more
importantly a 'cultural confidence' on par with the Roman Empire of the 2nd Century to pull it off. That is no
longer us.
"9/11 is the best thing to ever happen to Afghanistan"? I bet none of his family members died or suffered.
Probably they are all living in the US. Are we supposed to feel proud that instead of carpet bombing and
killing millions our war killed only a hundred thousand?
Sadly, Kent, I do know people who still claim that our continued presence in Afghanistan is a good thing. Some
of these are otherwise fairly bright people, so I really can't comprehend why they continue to buy into this
idiocy.
Afghanistan must be Afghanistan and the US must be the US; this is such a simple tautology. If the US leaves,
Afghanistan will become what ever it can for its own reasons and options. If the US stays, it will be for the
US' reasons, not for the Afghans.
The conclusion of this simple argument is that the war in Afghanistan
actually has almost nothing to do with that country and almost entirely to do with the political and economic
demands arising from the US .nothing to do with Afghanistan other than the destruction of the place and its
people.
"... Well, it comes down to the myths we've been sold. Myths that are ingrained in our social programming from birth, deeply entrenched, like an impacted wisdom tooth. These myths are accepted and basically never questioned. ..."
"... Our media outlets are funded by weapons contractors, big pharma, big banks, big oil and big, fat hard-on pills. (Sorry to go hard on hard-on pills, but we can't get anything resembling hard news because it's funded by dicks.) The corporate media's jobs are to rally for war, cheer for Wall Street and froth at the mouth for consumerism. It's their mission to actually fortify belief in the myths I'm telling you about right now. Anybody who steps outside that paradigm is treated like they're standing on a playground wearing nothing but a trench coat. ..."
"... The criminal justice system has become a weapon wielded by the corporate state. This is how bankers can foreclose on millions of homes illegally and see no jail time, but activists often serve jail time for nonviolent civil disobedience. Chris Hedges recently noted , "The most basic constitutional rights have been erased for many. Our judicial system, as Ralph Nader has pointed out, has legalized secret law, secret courts, secret evidence, secret budgets and secret prisons in the name of national security." ..."
"... This myth (Buying will make you happy) is put forward mainly by the floods of advertising we take in but also by our social engineering. Most of us feel a tenacious emptiness, an alienation deep down behind our surface emotions (for a while I thought it was gas). That uneasiness is because most of us are flushing away our lives at jobs we hate before going home to seclusion boxes called houses or apartments. We then flip on the TV to watch reality shows about people who have it worse than we do (which we all find hilarious). ..."
"... According to Deloitte's Shift Index survey : "80% of people are dissatisfied with their jobs" and "[t]he average person spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime." That's about one-seventh of your life -- and most of it is during your most productive years. ..."
"... Try maintaining your privacy for a week without a single email, web search or location data set collected by the NSA and the telecoms. ..."
Our society should've collapsed by now. You know that, right?
No society should function with this level of inequality (with the possible exception of one of those prison planets in a "Star
Wars" movie). Sixty-three percent of Americans
can't afford a $500 emergency
. Yet Amazon head Jeff Bezos is now
worth a record $141 billion . He could literally end world hunger for multiple years and still have more money left over than
he could ever spend on himself.
Worldwide,
one in
10 people only make $2 a day. Do you know how long it would take one of those people to make the same amount as Jeff Bezos has?
193 million years . (If they only buy single-ply toilet paper.) Put simply, you cannot comprehend the level of inequality in our
current world or even just our nation.
So shouldn't there be riots in the streets every day? Shouldn't it all be collapsing? Look outside. The streets aren't on fire.
No one is running naked and screaming (usually). Does it look like everyone's going to work at gunpoint? No. We're all choosing to
continue on like this.
Why?
Well, it comes down to the myths we've been sold. Myths that are ingrained in our social programming from birth, deeply entrenched,
like an impacted wisdom tooth. These myths are accepted and basically never questioned.
I'm going to cover eight of them. There are more than eight. There are probably hundreds. But I'm going to cover eight because
(A) no one reads a column titled "Hundreds of Myths of American Society," (B) these are the most important ones and (C) we all have
other shit to do.
Myth No. 8 -- We have a democracy.
If you think we still have a democracy or a democratic republic, ask yourself this: When was the last time Congress did something
that the people of America supported that did not align with corporate interests? You probably can't do it. It's like trying to think
of something that rhymes with "orange." You feel like an answer exists but then slowly realize it doesn't. Even the Carter Center
and former President Jimmy Carter believe that America has been
transformed into
an oligarchy : A small, corrupt elite control the country with almost no input from the people. The rulers need the myth that
we're a democracy to give us the illusion of control.
Myth No. 7 -- We have an accountable and legitimate voting system.
Gerrymandering, voter purging, data mining, broken exit polling, push polling, superdelegates, electoral votes, black-box machines,
voter ID suppression, provisional ballots, super PACs, dark money, third parties banished from the debates and two corporate parties
that stand for the same goddamn pile of fetid crap!
What part of this sounds like a legitimate election system?
No, we have what a large Harvard study called the
worst election system in the Western world . Have you ever seen where a parent has a toddler in a car seat, and the toddler has
a tiny, brightly colored toy steering wheel so he can feel like he's driving the car? That's what our election system is -- a toy
steering wheel. Not connected to anything. We all sit here like infants, excitedly shouting, "I'm steeeeering !"
And I know it's counterintuitive, but that's why you have to vote. We have to vote in such numbers that we beat out what's stolen
through our ridiculous rigged system.
Myth No. 6 -- We have an independent media that keeps the rulers accountable.
Our media outlets are funded by weapons contractors, big pharma, big banks, big oil and big, fat hard-on pills. (Sorry to go hard
on hard-on pills, but we can't get anything resembling hard news because it's funded by dicks.) The corporate media's jobs are to
rally for war, cheer for Wall Street and froth at the mouth for consumerism. It's their mission to actually fortify belief in the
myths I'm telling you about right now. Anybody who steps outside that paradigm is treated like they're standing on a playground wearing
nothing but a trench coat.
Myth No. 5 -- We have an independent judiciary.
The criminal justice system has become a weapon wielded by the corporate state. This is how bankers can foreclose on millions
of homes illegally and see no jail time, but activists often serve jail time for nonviolent civil disobedience. Chris Hedges
recently noted , "The most basic constitutional
rights have been erased for many. Our judicial system, as Ralph Nader has pointed out, has legalized secret law, secret courts, secret
evidence, secret budgets and secret prisons in the name of national security."
If you're not part of the monied class, you're pressured into releasing what few rights you have left. According to
The New
York Times , "97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end in plea bargains, with defendants pleading guilty
in exchange for a lesser sentence."
That's the name of the game. Pressure people of color and poor people to just take the plea deal because they don't have a million
dollars to spend on a lawyer. (At least not one who doesn't advertise on beer coasters.)
Myth No. 4 -- The police are here to protect you. They're your friends .
That's funny. I don't recall my friend pressuring me into sex to get out of a speeding ticket. (Which is essentially still
legal in 32
states .)
The police in our country are primarily designed to do two things: protect the property of the rich and perpetrate the completely
immoral war on drugs -- which by definition is a war on our own people .
We lock up more people than
any other country on earth
. Meaning the land of the free is the largest prison state in the world. So all these droopy-faced politicians and rabid-talking
heads telling you how awful China is on human rights or Iran or North Korea -- none of them match the numbers of people locked up
right here under Lady Liberty's skirt.
Myth No. 3 -- Buying will make you happy.
This myth (Buying will make you happy) is put forward mainly by the floods of advertising we take in but also by our social engineering. Most of us feel a
tenacious emptiness, an alienation deep down behind our surface emotions (for a while I thought it was gas). That uneasiness is because
most of us are flushing away our lives at jobs we hate before going home to seclusion boxes called houses or apartments. We then
flip on the TV to watch reality shows about people who have it worse than we do (which we all find hilarious).
If we're lucky, we'll make enough money during the week to afford enough beer on the weekend to help it all make sense. (I find
it takes at least four beers for everything to add up.) But that doesn't truly bring us fulfillment. So what now? Well, the ads say
buying will do it. Try to smother the depression and desperation under a blanket of flat-screen TVs, purses and Jet Skis. Now does
your life have meaning? No? Well, maybe you have to drive that Jet Ski a little faster! Crank it up until your bathing suit flies
off and you'll feel alive !
The dark truth is that we have to believe the myth that consuming is the answer or else we won't keep running around the wheel.
And if we aren't running around the wheel, then we start thinking, start asking questions. Those questions are not good for the ruling
elite, who enjoy a society based on the daily exploitation of 99 percent of us.
Myth No. 2 -- If you work hard, things will get better.
According to Deloitte's Shift
Index survey : "80% of people are dissatisfied with their jobs" and "[t]he average person spends 90,000 hours at work over their
lifetime." That's about one-seventh of your life -- and most of it is during your most productive years.
Ask yourself what we're working for. To make money? For what? Almost none of us are doing jobs for survival anymore. Once upon
a time, jobs boiled down to:
I plant the food -- >I eat the food -- >If I don't plant food = I die.
But nowadays, if you work at a café -- will someone die if they don't get their super-caf-mocha-frap-almond-piss-latte? I kinda
doubt they'll keel over from a blueberry scone deficiency.
If you work at Macy's, will customers perish if they don't get those boxer briefs with the sweat-absorbent-ass fabric? I doubt
it. And if they do die from that, then their problems were far greater than you could've known. So that means we're all working to
make other people rich because we have a society in which we have to work. Technological advancements can do most everything that
truly must get done.
So if we wanted to, we could get rid of most work and have tens of thousands of more hours to enjoy our lives. But we're not doing
that at all. And no one's allowed to ask these questions -- not on your mainstream airwaves at least. Even a half-step like universal
basic income is barely discussed because it doesn't compute with our cultural programming.
Scientists say it's quite possible artificial intelligence will take away
all human jobs in 120 years . I think they know that will
happen because bots will take the jobs and then realize that 80 percent of them don't need to be done! The bots will take over and
then say, "Stop it. Stop spending a seventh of your life folding shirts at Banana Republic."
One day, we will build monuments to the bot that told us to enjoy our lives and leave the shirts wrinkly.
And this leads me to the largest myth of our American society.
Myth No. 1 -- You are free.
... ... ...
Try sleeping in your car for more than a few hours without being harassed by police.
Try maintaining your privacy for a week without a single email, web search or location data set collected by the NSA and the telecoms.
Try signing up for the military because you need college money and then one day just walking off the base, going, "Yeah, I was
bored. Thought I would just not do this anymore."
Try explaining to Kentucky Fried Chicken that while you don't have the green pieces of paper they want in exchange for the mashed
potatoes, you do have some pictures you've drawn on a napkin to give them instead.
Try using the restroom at Starbucks without buying something while black.
We are less free than a dog on a leash. We live in one of the hardest-working, most unequal societies on the planet with more
billionaires than ever .
Meanwhile,
Americans
supply 94 percent of the paid blood used worldwide. And it's almost exclusively coming from very poor people. This abusive vampire
system is literally sucking the blood from the poor. Does that sound like a free decision they made? Or does that sound like something
people do after immense economic force crushes down around them? (One could argue that sperm donation takes a little less convincing.)
Point is, in order to enforce this illogical, immoral system, the corrupt rulers -- most of the time -- don't need guns and tear
gas to keep the exploitation mechanisms humming along. All they need are some good, solid bullshit myths for us all to buy into,
hook, line and sinker. Some fairy tales for adults.
815M people chronically malnourished according to the UN. Bezos is worth $141B.
$141B / 815M people = $173 per person. That would definitely not feed them for "multiple years". And that's only if Bezos could
fully liquidate the stock without it dropping a penny.
" Point is, in order to enforce this illogical, immoral system, the corrupt rulers -- most of the time -- don't
need guns and tear gas to keep the exploitation mechanisms humming along. All they need are some good, solid bullshit myths for
us all to buy into, hook, line and sinker. Some fairy tales for adults. "
Seems like there's tear gas in the air and guns are going to be used soon. The myths are dying on the tongues of the liars.
Molon Labe!....and I'm usually a pacifist.
"American Society Would Collapse If It Weren't For Invasions Of Foreign Countries, Murdering Their People, Stealing Their Oil
Then Blaming Them For Making The US Do It."
Well, in a world driven by oil, it is entirely bogus to suggest that citizens have to work their asses off. That was the whole
point of the bill of goods that was sold to us in the late 70's and early 80'. More leisure time, more time for your family and
personal interests.
Except! It never happened. All they fucking did was reduce real wages and force everyone from the upper middle class down,
into a shit hole.
But, they will pay for their folly. Guaran-fucking-teed.
As one who has hoed many rows of cotton in 115F temperatures as well as picking cotton during my childhood and early adolescence
during weekends and school holidays, I concur. It was a very powerful inducement to get a good education back when schools actually
taught things and did not tolerate backtalk or guff from students instead of babysitting them. It worked, and I ended up writing
computer software for spacecraft, which was much fun than working in the fields.
I have read Alex Krainer's book. It is a devastating critique of Browder, which exposes him
as the corrupt thug he is. Browder is no more interested in "democratizing" Russia than the
U.S. Deep State is in protecting the integrity of the U.S. election process! That Browder was
the "star witness" for the Congress before it overwhelmingly passed the latest sanctions bill
against Russia shows why it is important that he be exposed.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know something about the networks and
individuals acting to prevent a rapprochement between the U.S. and Russia.
"... [ Note by the Saker : for my review of Alex Krainer's book please click here ] ..."
"... "I always say the truth is best even when we find it unpleasant. Any rat in a sewer can lie. It's how rats are. It's what makes them rats. But a human doesn't run and hide in dark places, because he's something more. Lying is the most personal act of cowardice there is." ― Nancy Farmer, "The House of the Scorpion" ..."
"... Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch. Nay, you may kick it about all day, and it will be round and full at evening. ..."
"... Alex Krainer is a hedge fund manager based in Monaco. His book, "The Killing of William Browder" may still be available in paperback at Book Depository , Barnes&Noble (USA), Amazon.fr , Amazon.co.uk , or ..."
[ Note by the Saker : for my review of Alex Krainer's book please
click here ]
"I always say the truth is best even when we find it unpleasant. Any rat in a sewer can
lie. It's how rats are. It's what makes them rats. But a human doesn't run and hide in dark
places, because he's something more. Lying is the most personal act of cowardice there is."
― Nancy Farmer, "The House of the Scorpion"
In January 2015 I received a book titled "Red Notice" written by Bill Browder, once a hedge
fund manager running Hermitage Capital the largest foreign-owned hedge fund in Russia. In the
past, my path had crossed with Browder's on two occasions. In 2005, I was invited to his
presentation, only days before he was expelled from Russia. On that occasion Browder surprised
me because he was the first credible person I ever heard speaking positively about Vladimir
Putin. The next time I met Browder was in 2010 during an investment conference in Monaco. This
time he was very anti-Putin. When I received his book, it was recommended to me as an excellent
read.
Through his book, Browder presents himself in glowing colors. By contrast, he portrays
Russia as a sinister, backward tyranny and President Putin as the greediest, most ruthless
tyrant since Genghis Khan. The book's main plot shapes up as an appealing story about the
struggle of good against evil, about a lone maverick (Browder himself), taking on a powerful
network of dangerous criminals and corrupt government officials in selfless pursuit of justice.
It would be a beautiful story – if only it were true.
I was familiar with Parts of Browder's story, so his tale seemed fishy to me. A few days
after reading it I had to re-read it from the beginning. Sure enough, I discovered quite a
number of things that didn't add up which prompted me to do some research of my own. Much about
it bothered me enough that I ended up writing a whole book which I titled "The Killing of
William Browder: Deconstructing Bill Browder's Dangerous Deception." In August of this year I
finally finished it and self-published it on Amazon.com.
My book's main object is to unmask Browder's brazen and dangerous deception. Beyond this,
I've also sought to put his story into proper context by including a rather detailed account of
the relevant events that led to the collapse of the USSR, Russia's subsequent transition from
Communism to Capitalism and what
17 years of Vladimir Putin's leadership have changed . I've also included a section
discussing the person and character of Vladimir Putin (since Browder relentlessly demonizes
him). The book's last chapter discusses the history of the relations between the U.S. and
Russia from the beginnings of the 19 th century, including the U.S.
Civil War when Russia came to Abraham Lincoln's aid and played the key role in preserving the
Union and what the future relations between the U.S. and Russia might, or should be.
As it turned out, my book was surprisingly well received by its readers and during the first
few weeks it received very encouraging reader reviews (seven five-star and one four-star
review). Unfortunately, by mid-September "The Killing of William Browder" came up on Browder
team's radar and my problems began. It seems that in the free world, the freedom of expression
comes with some restrictions. Exposing Bill Browder is one of them.
On 13 th September, University of Tulsa professor Jeremy Kuzmarov cited some of
the materials from my book in his own Hffington Post article about Bill Browder, titled
"Raising the Curtain on the Browder-Magnitsky Story." I was flattered by that article, but
Huffington Post scrubbed it from their website within hours. A week later, Amazon's publishing
company, CreateSpace "suppressed" my book, purging it from Amazon.com website and from its
Kindle store.
CreateSpace explained that a third party claimed that my book "may contain defamatory
content," and that to resolve the issues I needed to contact Mr. Jonathan M. Winer, Mr.
Browder's legal counsel. Mr. Winer's word was all that was necessary for Amazon to oblige and
remove my book from its bookstore. My protest and subsequent communications with CreateSpace
had no effect and my only venue was to "work" with Browder's lawyers to "resolve the issues."
In other words, I was put in the situation to have Browder censor my book and decide on whether
it could be published or not. At first I rejected idea and refused to contact Mr. Winer
offering instead my book for free to whoever requested a copy. But subsequently I decided to
write to Mr. Winer anyway to find out what, if anything went wrong. So far, I have received no
response.
This is not the first time Bill Browder – and whoever is backing him – has
effectively censored what the Western public may or may not know about his story. In 2016,
Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov made the documentary film, "The Magnitsky Act – Behind
the Scenes."
Over the years, Nekrasov had built a reputation for producing documentaries that were
critical of the Russian government, and with the Magnitsky affair, he initially followed
Browder's narrative of the events and even envisioned Browder as the film's narrator. But his
research into the subject turned up a number of problems with Browder's story. Nekrasov reached
out to him for an explanation, but was unable to get in touch with Browder for several months.
Nekrasov finally tracked down Browder at a book signing event where he tried and failed to get
clarifications from him. Ultimately however, Nekrasov managed to meet with Browder and with the
cameras rolling, he began to lay out his findings. As he did so, Browder became visibly vexed
until at one moment he abruptly interrupted Nekrasov with an accusation that he was spreading
Russian propaganda.
When Nekrasov's film was completed, Browder took aggressive action to block its screenings.
With threats of lawsuits, he prevented an already scheduled screening to a group of Members of
the European Parliament in Brussels. He did the same with another screening in Norway, and even
managed to pressure the Franco-German television network "Arte" to call off the showing of
Nekrasov's film on its channel. In June 2016, Browder tried to force The Newseum in Washington DC to cancel the screening of
Nekrasov's film. Thankfully, The Newseum, whose laudable mission is to promote freedom of
expression and "the five freedoms of the First Amendment to the U.S. Consitution," refused to
be cowed by Browder's intimidation and showed the film to a Washington audience.
No, unfortunately this did not happen. Freedom of expression – which should be
sacrosanct – is dangerously compromised in the west.
Open, civilized societies seek resolution of contentious issues by allowing proponents of
different sides in any dispute to present their respective points of view. An informed, open
debate is by far the best mechanism of conflict resolution because we can only arrive at
constructive solutions to problems by taking different stakeholders' points of view into
consideration. Browder's approach is contrary to that of civilized societies: he seeks to
silence all points of view but his own. He seeks to persuade not by initiating an informed
debate, but by suppressing all debate. This is not the conduct of a truth teller pursuing
elevated objectives like human rights, justice, and truth. Truth does not need such forceful
defense. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, " Truth is tough. It will not break, like a
bubble, at a touch. Nay, you may kick it about all day, and it will be round and full at
evening. " Browder is clearly anxious that his story cannot take any kicking at all.
Meanwhile in the western world, we appear to be at the mercy of lawyered-up elites for what we
are allowed to know and what we are not.
In the end, I have no doubt that truth will prevail and that Bill Browder will lose his
battle to keep his deception going. It is because there's something sacrosanct about truth and
most people will reject a lie once they are aware of it.
This shocking tale of alleged Russian official corruption and brutality drove legislation
that was a major landmark in the descent of U.S.-Russian relations under President Barack
Obama to a level rivaling the worst days of the Cold War.
.But what the film shows is how Nekrasov, as he detected loose ends to the official story,
begins to unravel Browder's fabrication which was designed to conceal his own corporate
responsibility for the criminal theft of the money. As Browder's widely accepted story
collapses, Magnitsky is revealed not to be a whistleblower but a likely abettor to the fraud
who died in prison not from an official assassination but from banal neglect of his medical
condition.
The cinematic qualities of the film are evident. Nekrasov is highly experienced as a maker
of documentaries enjoying a Europe-wide reputation. What sets this work apart from the
"trade" is the honesty and the integrity of the filmmaker as he discovers midway into his
project that key assumptions of his script are faulty and begins an independent investigation
to get at the truth .
The reason nekrasov has a following among European liberal snowflakes is that his
documentaries have had a sarcastic jaded and negative tinge with respect to Russia (even BBC
News has aired his documentaries as recently as 2016). He is rather pessimistic regarding
Russia. That's what makes this revelation that even he (Nekrasov, a darling of the debauch
liberals of the west, and Putin critic) found browder to not be credible. Coming from
Nekrasov, that allegation and documentary would really destroy the battering ram (and useful
fraud) that browder had provided the Western establishment.
Nekrasov is now getting a painful reality check as to how sophisticated the West's
totalitarian nature is: they are not crude like the Chinese who will arrest small time
nobodies for being too honest or critical, the West focusses it's blunt oppression for high
value targets; just as outlined in 1984, the higher up you are and the greater your reach,
the greater the scrutiny and the more blunt the instrument used to keep you in line. One must
admit that the Anglo empire and their hypocrit vassals/covert-competitors in the EU, have
refined this to an art and are far more efficient at it than their poor understudies in CCP
China, or the Soviet Union.
Krainer is right though, the truth is going to prevail and eventually browder will be
exposed (especially when the deep state decides he's too much of an annoying liability
– as times progresses or as the deep state finds browder's agenda and his supporters
getting in the way of the state's own agenda).
There is one thing that no one has clarified: Why was magnitsky allowed to die, why was he
denied medical treatment, who was responsible for that? What are the facts around magnitsky's
death?
Hi RC – a few great point. In Nekrasov's defence, I think I can understand him. I'm
Croatian and if we started discussing Croatia, you'd find me very critical. My inclination
would be to expose negative developments – not because I'm anti-Croatian but becauseI
would want to draw public attention to problems that need to be addressed. To his credit,
when he realized truth was different from what he initially believed, he made a turn to
pursue truth when he could have made the film that would have been far better for his career.
I agree with you that Browder will probably end up thrown under the bus. That's what I'm
afraid of (and the #1 reason for my book's title). But they will try to first make Browder a
household name (crusader for human rights and justice, bla, bla..) with their Hollywood
movie. Then they'll try to make it look like Putin had him killed.
As to why Magnistky died – that's a mystery. It was definitely a massive cock-up on
the part of Russian law enforcement, but there's also the angle that his death was VERY
convenient for Browder and his goodfellas.
I think that Magnitsky was such a pain in the ass ( he made 450 complaints about the
prison-conditions during 358 days in prison, most ofwhich nobody could solve without a much
larger budget) that doctors and staff prefered to not hear or to look the other way when
Magnitsky came into a psychosis. He got into this psychosis after a court case from where he
returned very disappointed. Future looked a lot worse than he had expected.
Parry's article
mentions that he viewed the film on Vimeo, using a password provided by Piraya Film, the
Norwegian production company.
This is a fairly standard way that independent producers shop their films around, looking
for a distribution deal. I.e., a journalist or distributor contacts them, and they are given
a Vimeo link and password for a private, limited-time viewing of the film. Journalists get
this access because their writing helps to promote the film. The simplest distribution deal
would then be through a subscription-based streaming platform. DVDs are more complicated and
usually happen later.
However, in this case, the film is a co-production with four other companies, including
ZDF and ARTE, which are large European networks, and all of whom have been threatened with
litigation, presumably by Browder's lawyers.
In effect, then, the film in its original version has been censored. It is not available,
unless or until somebody pirates it. There are several scammy-looking streaming sites that
claim to have it, but they want your credit card number and they might just have the same
Russian-dubbed version that you can watch for free via the link posted above.
I suspect the version of the film with the Russian voice-over was not done by Piraya Film,
as the production of the sound doesn't seem very high compared to the quality of the
original. This might have been done with authorization of Piraya, but if not, it means
somebody has a illegitimate copy of the film to which they added the Russian voice-over. This
means, they could also post the film in its original form. If they really want to increase
awareness in the West of how the new Cold War is playing out, such a move could help.
Given the legal threats and the fact that few small distribution companies have the
resources to fight legal battles, this might be a situation in which we are waiting for
somebody to pirate the film, somebody who has access to the original, and to distribute it
via a torrent.
I wonder whether Nekrasov himself knows of the level of interest (at least in some quarters)
in seeing the film, and could find a way to make one available somehow. . .
Something tells me he doesn't want to push this too much as money for this film came from
French and German sources. It is nice to see him sticking his neck out to uphold the Truth.
When I watched the US rep. who supposedly investigated this Magnitzky affair for the US
gov. state under oath that he never verified any of the info that Browder gave him, I kept
thinking "Is this guy serious ?" But when you realize that they never did any investigation
then it all seems logical.
The article is long but very important and is worth a careful read. It shows that the
military/security complex has woven itself so tightly into the American social, economic, and
political fabric as to be untouchable. President Trump is an extremely brave or foolhardy
person to take on this most powerful and pervasive of all US institutions by trying to
normalize US relations with Russia, chosen by the military/security complex as the "enemy" that
justifies its enormous budget and power.
In 1961 President Eisenhower in his last public address to the American people warned us
about the danger to democracy and accountable government presented by the military/industrial
complex.
You can imagine how much stronger the complex is 57 years later after decades of Cold War
with the Soviet Union.
The Russian government, Russian media, and Russian people desperately need to comprehend how
powerful the US military/security complex is and how it is woven into the fabric of America. No
amount of diplomacy by Lavrov and masterful chess playing by Putin can possibly shake the
control over the United States exercised by the military/security complex.
Professor Roelofs has done a good deed for the American people and for the world in
assembling such extensive information documenting the penetration into every aspect of American
life of the military/security complex. It is a delusion that a mere President of the United
States can bring such a powerful, all-pervasive institution to heel and deprive it of its
necessary enemy.
For many people the "military-industrial-complex (MIC)" brings to mind the top twenty
weapons manufacturers. President Dwight Eisenhower, who warned about it in 1961, wanted to call
it the military- industrial-congressional-complex, but decided it was not prudent to do so.
Today it might well be called the military-industrial-congressional-almost-everything-complex.
Most departments and levels of government, businesses, and also many charities, social service,
environmental, and cultural organizations, are deeply embedded with the military.
The weapons industry may be spearheading the military budget and military operations; it is
aided immensely by the cheering or silence of citizens and their representatives. Here we will
provide some likely reasons for that assent. We will use the common typology of three national
sectors: government, business, and nonprofit, with varying amounts of interaction among them.
This does not preclude, though it masks somewhat, the proposition that government is the
executive of the ruling class.
Every kind of business figures in the Department of Defense (DoD) budget. Lockheed is
currently the largest contractor in the weapons business. It connects with the worldwide MIC by
sourcing parts, for example, for the F-35 fighter plane, from many countries. This helps a lot
to market the weapon, despite its low opinion among military experts as well as anti-military
critics. Lockheed also does civilian work, which enhances its aura while it spreads its
values.
Other types of businesses have enormous multi-year contracts -- in the billions. This
despite the constitutional proviso that Congress not appropriate military funds for more than a
two year term. Notable are the construction companies, such as Fluor, KBR, Bechtel, and Hensel
Phelps. These build huge bases, often with high tech surveillance or operational capacity, in
the US and abroad, where they hire locals or commonly, third country nationals to carry out the
work. There are also billion-funded contractors in communications technology, intelligence
analysis, transportation, logistics, food, and clothing. "Contracting out" is our modern
military way; this also spreads its influence far and wide.
Medium, small, and tiny businesses dangle from the "Christmas tree" of the Pentagon,
promoting popular cheering or silence on the military budget. These include special set-asides
for minority-owned and small businesses. A Black-owned small business, KEPA-TCI (construction),
received contracts for $356 million. [Data comes from several sources, available free on the
internet: websites, tax forms, and annual reports of organizations; usaspending.gov (USA) and
governmentcontractswon.com (GCW).] Major corporations of all types serving our services have
been excellently described in Nick Turse's The Complex. Really small and tiny businesses are
drawn into the system: landscapers, dry cleaners, child care centers, and Come- Bye Goose
Control of Maryland.
Among the businesses with large DoD contracts are book publishers: McGraw-Hill, Greenwood,
Scholastic, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, Elsevier, and others. Rarely have the biases
in this industry, in fiction, nonfiction, and textbook offerings, been examined. Yet the
influences on this small but significant population, the reading public, and the larger
schooled contingent, may help explain the silence of the literate crowd and college
graduates.
Much of what is left of organized industrial labor is in weapons manufacture. Its PACs fund
the few "progressive" candidates in our political system, who tend to be silent about war and
the threat of nuclear annihilation. Unlike other factories, the armaments makers do not
suddenly move overseas, although they do use subcontractors worldwide.
Military spending may be only about 6% of the GDP, yet it has great impact because:
1. it is a growing sector;
2. it is recession-proof;
3. it does not rely on consumer whims;
4. it is the only thing prospering in many areas; and
5. the "multiplier" effect: subcontracting, corporate purchasing, and employee spending
perk up the regional economy.
It is ideally suited to Keynesian remedies, because of its ready destruction and
obsolescence: what isn't consumed in warfare, rusted out, or donated to our friends still needs
to be replaced by the slightly more lethal thing. Many of our science graduates work for the
military directly or its contractee labs concocting these.
The military's unbeatable weapon is jobs, and all members of Congress, and state and local
officials, are aware of this. It is where well-paying jobs are found for mechanics, scientists,
and engineers; even janitorial workers do well in these taxpayer-rich firms. Weaponry is also
important in our manufactured goods exports as our allies are required to have equipment that
meets our specifications. Governments, rebels, terrorists, pirates, and gangsters all fancy our
high tech and low tech lethal devices.
Our military economy also yields a high return on investments. These benefit not only
corporate executives and other rich, but many middle and working class folk, as well as
churches, benevolent, and cultural organizations. The lucrative mutual funds offered by
Vanguard, Fidelity, and others are heavily invested in the weapons manufacturers.
Individual investors may not know what is in their fund's portfolios; the institutions
usually know. A current project of World Beyond War ( https://worldbeyondwar.org/divest ) advocates
divestment of military stocks in the pension funds of state and local government workers:
police, firepersons, teachers, and other civil servants. Researchers are making a
state-by-state analysis of these funds. Among the findings are the extensive military stock
holdings of CALpers, the California Public Employees Retirement System (the sixth largest
pension fund on earth), the California State Teachers Retirement System, the New York State
Teachers Retirement System, the New York City Employees Retirement System, and the New York
State Common Retirement Fund (state and local employees). Amazing! the New York City teachers
were once the proud parents of red diaper babies.
The governmental side of the MIC complex goes far beyond the DoD. In the executive branch,
Departments of State, Homeland Security, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Interior; and CIA, AID, FBI,
NASA, and other agencies; are permeated with military projects and goals. Even the Department
of Agriculture has a joint program with the DoD to "restore" Afghanistan by creating a dairy
cattle industry. No matter that the cattle and their feed must be imported, cattle cannot graze
in the terrain as the native sheep and goats can, there is no adequate transportation or
refrigeration, and the Afghans don't normally drink milk. The native animals provide yogurt,
butter, and wool, and graze on the rugged slopes, but that is all so un-American.
Congress is a firm ally of the military. Campaign contributions from contractor PACs are
generous, and lobbying is extensive. So also are the outlays of financial institutions, which
are heavily invested in the MIC. Congresspeople have significant shares of weapons industry
stocks. To clinch the deal, members of Congress (and also state and local lawmakers) are well
aware of the economic importance of military con- tracts in their states and districts.
Military bases, inside the US as well as worldwide, are an economic hub for communities. The
DoD Base Structure Report for Fy2015 lists more than 4,000 domestic properties. Some are
bombing ranges or re- cruiting stations; perhaps 400 are bases with a major impact on their
localities. The largest of these, Fort Bragg, NC, is a city unto itself, and a cultural
influence as well as economic asset to its region, as so well described by Catherine Lutz in
Homefront. California has about 40 bases ( https://militarybases.com/by - state/), and is home to major
weapons makers as well. Officers generally live off-base, so the real estate, restaurant,
retail, auto repair, hotel and other businesses are prospering. Local civilians find employment
on bases. Closed, unconvertible installations are sometimes tourist attractions, such as the
unlikeliest of all vacation spots, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
DoD has direct contracts and grants with state and local governments. These are for various
projects and services, including large amounts to fund the National Guard. The Army Engineers
maintain swimming holes and parks, and police forces get a deal on Bearcats. JROTC programs
nationwide provide funding for public schools, and even more for those that are public school
military academies; six are in Chicago.
National, state and local governments are well covered by the "insecurity blanket;" the
nonprofit sector is not neglected. Nevertheless, it does harbor the very small group of
anti-war organizations, such as Iraq Veterans Against War, Veterans for Peace, World Beyond
War, Peace Action, Union of Concerned Scientists, Center for International Policy, Catholic
Worker, Answer Coalition, and others. Yet unlike the Vietnam War period there is no vocal group
of religious leaders protesting war, and the few students who are politically active are more
concerned with other issues.
Nonprofit organizations and institutions are involved several ways. Some are obviously
partners of the MIC: Boy and Girl Scouts, Red Cross, veterans' charities, military think-tanks
such as RAND and Institute for Defense Analysis, establishment think-tanks like the American
Enterprise Institute, Atlantic Council, and the flagship of US world projection, the Council on
Foreign Relations. There are also many international nongovernmental organizations that assist
the US government in delivering "humanitarian" assistance, sing the praises of the market
economy, or attempt to repair the "collateral" damage inflicted on lands and people, for
example, Mercy Corps, Open Society Institutes, and CARE.
Educational institutions in all sectors are embedded with the military. The military schools
include the service academies, National Defense University, Army War College, Naval War
College, Air Force Institute of Technology, Air University, Defense Acquisition University,
Defense Language Institute, Naval Postgraduate School, Defense Information School, the medical
school, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and the notorious School of the
Americas in Fort Benning, GA, now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation. "In addition, Senior Military Colleges offer a combination of higher education
with military instruction. SMCs include Texas A&M University, Norwich University, The
Virginia Military Institute, The Citadel, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
(Virginia Tech), University of North Georgia and the Mary Baldwin Women's Institute for
Leadership" ( https://www.usa.gov/military-colleges ).
A university doesn't have to be special to be part of the MIC. Most are awash with
contracts, ROTC programs, and/or military officers and contractors on their boards of trustees.
A study of the 100 most militarized universities includes prestigious institutions, as well as
diploma mills that produce employees for military intelligence agencies and contractors (
https://news.vice.com/article/these-are-the-100
- most-militarized-universities-in-america).
Major liberal foundations have long engaged in covert and overt operations to support
imperial projection, described by David Horowitz as the "Sinews of Empire" in his important
1969 Ramparts article. They have been close associates of the Central Intelligence Agency, and
were active in its instigation. The foundation created and supported Council on Foreign
Relations has long been a link among Wall Street, large corporations, academia, the media, and
our foreign and military policymakers.
Less obvious are the military connections of philanthropic, cultural, social service,
environmental, and professional organizations. They are linked through donations; joint
programs; sponsorship of events, exhibits, and concerts; awards (both ways); investments;
boards of directors; top executives; and contracts. The data here covers approximately the last
twenty years, and rounds out the reasons for the astounding support (according to the polls)
that US citizens have conferred on our military, its budget, and its operations.
Military contractor philanthropy was the subject of my previous CP reports, in 2006 and
2016. Every type of nonprofit (as well as public schools and universities) received support
from the major weapons manufacturers; some findings were outstanding. Minority organizations
were extremely well endowed. For many years there was crucial support for the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from Lockheed; Boeing also funded the
Congressional Black Caucus. The former president and CEO of the NAACP, Bruce Gordon, is now on
the Board of Trustees of Northrop Grumman.
General Electric is the most generous military contractor philanthropist, with direct grants
to organizations and educational institutions, partnerships with both, and matching
contributions made by its thousands of employees. The latter reaches many of the
nongovernmental and educational entities throughout the country.
Major donors to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (listed in its 2016 Annual
Report) include the Defense Intelligence Agency, Cisco Systems, Open Society Foundations, US
Department of Defense, General Electric, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Lockheed
Martin. This is an echo of the CEIP's military connections reported in Horace Coon's book of
the 1930s, Money to Burn.
The DoD itself donates surplus property to organizations; among those eligible are Big
Brothers/Big Sisters, Boys and Girls Clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Little League Baseball,
and United Service Organizations. The Denton Program allows non-governmental organizations to
use extra space on U.S. military cargo aircraft to transport humanitarian assistance
materials.
There is a multitude of joint programs and sponsorships. Here is a small sample...
The American Association of University Women's National Tech Savvy Program encourages
girls to enter STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) careers, with sponsorship
from Lockheed, BAE Systems, and Boeing.
Junior Achievement, sponsored by Bechtel, United Technologies, and others, aims to train
children in market-based economics and entrepreneurship.
Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts is partnered with Northrop Grumman for an
"early childhood STEM 'Learning through the Arts' initiative for pre-K and kindergarten
students."
The Bechtel Foundation has two programs for a "sustainable California" -- an education
program to help "young people develop the knowledge, skills, and character to explore and
understand the world," and an environmental program to promote the "management, stewardship
and conservation for the state's natural resources."
The NAACP ACT-SO is a "yearlong enrichment program designed to recruit, stimulate, and
encourage high academic and cultural achievement among African-American high school
students," with sponsorship from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman et al. The national
winners receive financial awards from major corporations, college scholarships, internships,
and apprenticeships -- in the military industries.
In recent years the weapons makers have become enthusiastic environmentalists. Lockheed was
a sponsor of the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation Sustainability Forum in 2013. Northrop
Grumman supports Keep America Beautiful, National Public Lands Day, and a partnership with
Conservation International and the Arbor Day Foundation (for forest restoration). United
Technologies is the founding sponsor of the U.S. Green Building Council Center for Green
Schools, and co-creator of the Sustainable Cities Design Academy. Tree Musketeers is a national
youth environmental organization partnered by Northrop Grumman and Boeing.
Awards go both ways: industries give awards to nonprofits, and nonprofits awards to military
industries and people. United Technologies, for its efforts in response to climate change, was
on Climate A list of the Climate Disclosure Project. The Corporate Responsibility Association
gave Lockheed position 8 in 2016 in its 100 Best Corporate Citizens List. Points of Light
included General Electric and Raytheon in its 2014 list of the 50 Most Community-Minded
Companies in America. Harold Koh, the lawyer who as Obama's advisor defended drone strikes and
intervention in Libya, was recently given distinguished visiting professor status by Phi Beta
Kappa. In 2017, the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility recognized 34 Young
Hispanic Corporate Achievers; 3 were executives in the weapons industry. Elizabeth Amato, an
executive at United Technologies, received the YWCA Women Achievers Award.
Despite laborious searching through tax form 990s, it is difficult to discover the specifics
of organizations' investments. Many have substantial ones; in 2006, the American Friends
Service Committee had $3.5 million in revenue from investments. Human Rights Watch reported
$3.5 million investment income on its 2015 tax form 990, and more than $107 million in
endowment funds.
One of the few surveys of nonprofit policies (by Commonfund in 2012) found that only 17% of
foundations used environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria in their investments. ESG
seems to have replaced "socially responsible investing (SRI)" in investment terminology, and it
has a somewhat different slant. The most common restriction is the avoidance of companies doing
business in regions with conflict risk; the next relates to climate change and carbon
emissions; employee diversity is also an important consideration. Commonfund's study of
charities, social service and cultural organizations reported that 70% of their sample did not
consider ESG in their investment policies. Although 61% of religious organizations did employ
ESG criteria, only 16% of social service organizations and 3% of cultural organizations
did.
Weapon industries are hardly ever mentioned in these reports. Religious organizations
sometimes still used the SRI investment screens, but the most common were alcohol, gambling,
pornography, and tobacco. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, a resource for
churches, lists almost 30 issues for investment consideration, including executive
compensation, climate change, and opioid crisis, but none concerning weapons or war. The United
Church (UCC) advisory, a pioneer in SRI investment policies, does include a screen: only
companies should be chosen which have less than 10% revenue from alcohol or gambling, 1% from
tobacco, 10% from conventional weapons and 5% from nuclear weapons.
The Art Institute of Chicago states on their website that "[W]ith the fiduciary
responsibility to maximize returns on investment consistent with appropriate levels of risk,
the Art Institute maintains a strong presumption against divesting for social, moral, or
political reasons." Listed as an associate is Honeywell International, and a major benefactor
is the Crown Family (General Dynamics), which recently donated a $2 million endowment for a
Professorship in Painting and Drawing.
Nonprofit institutions (as well as individuals and pension funds of all sectors) have heavy
investments in the funds of financial companies such as State Street, Vanguard, BlackRock,
Fidelity, CREF, and others, which have portfolios rich in military industries ( https://worldbeyondwar.org/wp -
content/uploads/2016/11/indirect.pdf). These include information technology firms, which,
although often regarded as "socially responsible," are among the major DoD contractors.
In recent years foundations and other large nonprofits, such as universities, have favored
investments in hedge funds, real estate, derivatives, and private equity. The Carnegie
Endowment, more "transparent" than most, lists such funds on its 2015 tax form 990 (Schedule D
Part VII). It is unlikely that Lockheed, Boeing, et al, are among the distressed debt bonanzas,
so these institutions may be low on weapons stock. Nevertheless, most of them have firm
connections to the MIC through donations, leadership, and/or contracts.
Close association with the military among nonprofit board members and executives works to
keep the lid on anti-war activities and expression. The Aspen Institute is a think-tank that
has resident experts, and also a policy of convening with activists, such as anti-poverty
community leaders. Its Board of Trustees is chaired by James Crown, who is also a director of
General Dynamics. Among other board members are Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Javier
Solana (former Secretary-General of NATO), and former Congresswoman Jane Harman. Harman
"received the Defense Department Medal for Distinguished Service in 1998, the CIA Seal Medal in
2007, and the CIA Director's Award and the National Intelligence Distinguished Public Service
Medal in 2011. She is currently a member of the Director of National Intelligence's Senior
Advisory Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations." Lifetime Aspen
Trustees include Lester Crown and Henry Kissinger.
In recent years, the Carnegie Corporation board of trustees included Condoleezza Rice and
General Lloyd Austin III (Ret.), Commander of CENTCOM, a leader in the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
and also a board member of United Technologies. A former president of Physicians for Peace (not
the similarly named well-known group) is Rear Admiral Harold Bernsen, formerly Commander of the
US Middle East Force and not a physician.
TIAA, the college teachers' retirement fund, had a CEO from 1993-2002, John H. Biggs, who
was at the same time a director of Boeing. TIAA's current board of directors includes an
associate of a major military research firm, MITRE Corporations, and several members of the
Council on Foreign Relations. Its senior executive Vice President, Rahul Merchant, is currently
also a director at two information technology firms that have large military contracts: Juniper
Networks and AASKI.
The American Association of Retired Persons' chief lobbyist from 2002-2007, Chris Hansen,
had previously served in that capacity at Boeing. The current VP of communications at Northrop
Grumman, Lisa Davis, held that position at AARP from 1996-2005.
Board members and CEOs of the major weapons corporations serve on the boards of many
nonprofits. Just to indicate the scope, these include the National Fish and Wildlife
Foundation, Newman's Own Foundation, New York Public Library, Carnegie Hall Society,
Conservation International, Wolf Trap Foundation, WGBH, Boy Scouts, Newport Festival
Foundation, Toys for Tots, STEM organizations, Catalyst, the National Science Center, the US
Institute of Peace, and many foundations and universities.
The DoD promotes the employment of retired military officers as board members or CEOs of
nonprofits, and several organizations and degree programs further this transition. U.S. Air
Force Brigadier General Eden Murrie (Ret.) is now Director of Government Transformation and
Agency Partnerships at the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. She maintains that
"[F]ormer military leaders have direct leadership experience and bring talent and integrity
that could be applied in a nonprofit organization. . ."
(seniormilitaryintransition.com/tag/eden-murrie/). Given the early retirement age, former
military personnel (and reservists) are a natural fit for positions of influence in federal,
state, and local governments, school boards, nonprofits, and volunteer work; many are in those
places.
Perhaps the coziest relationships under the insecurity blanket are the multitudes of
contracts and grants the Department of Defense tenders to the nonprofit world. DoD fiscal
reporting is notoriously inaccurate, and there were conflicting accounts between and within the
online databases. Nevertheless, even a fuzzy picture gives a good idea of the depth and scope
of the coverage.
From the TNC 2016 Annual Report: "The Nature Conservancy is an organization that takes care
of people and land, and they look for opportunities to partner. They're nonpolitical. We need
nongovernment organizations like TNC to help mobilize our citizens. They are on the ground.
They understand the people, the politics, the partnerships. We need groups like TNC to
subsidize what government organizations can't do" (Mamie Parker, Former Assistant Director,
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Arkansas Trustee, The Nature Conservancy).
Among the subsidies going the other way are 44 DoD contracts with TNC totaling several
million for the years 2008-2018 (USA). These are for such services as Prairie Habitat
Reforestation, $100,000, and Runway and Biosecurity upkeep at Palmyra Atoll, HI, $82,000 (USA).
For the years 2000-2016, GCW lists a total of $5,500,000 in TNC's DoD contracts.
Grants to TNC for specific projects, not clearly different from contracts, were much larger.
Each is listed separately (USA); a rough count of the total was more than $150 million. One $55
million grant was for "Army compatible use buffer (acubs) in vicinity of Fort Benning military
installation." Similar grants, the largest, $14 million, were for this service at other bases.
Another was for the implementation of Fort Benning army installation's ecological monitoring
plan. Included in the description of these grants was the notice: "Assist State and local
governments to mitigate or prevent incompatible civilian land use/activity that is likely to
impair the continued operational utility of a Department of Defense (DoD) military
installation. Grantees and participating governments are expected to adopt and implement the
study recommendations."
TNC's Form 990 for 2017 states its investment income as $21 million. It reported government
grants of $108.5 million, and government contracts of $9 million. These may include funds from
state and local as well as all departments of the federal government. The Department of the
Interior, which manages the vast lands used for bombing ranges and live ammunition war games,
is another TNC grantor.
Other environmental organizations sustained by DoD contracts are the National Audubon
Society ($945,000 for 6 years, GCW), and Point Reyes Bird Observatory ($145,000, 6 years, GCW).
USA reports contracts with Stichting Deltares, a Dutch coastal research institute, for $550,000
in 2016, grants to the San Diego Zoo of $367,000, and to the Institute for Wildlife Studies,
$1.3 million for shrike monitoring.
Goodwill Industries (training and employing the disabled, ex-offenders, veterans, and
homeless people) is an enormous military contractor. Each entity is a separate corporation,
based on state or region, and the total receipt is in the billions. For example, for 2000-2016
(GCW), Goodwill of South Florida had $434 million and Southeastern Wisconsin $906 million in
contracts. Goods and services provided include food and logistics support, records processing,
army combat pants, custodial, security, mowing, and recycling. Similar organizations working
for the DoD include the Jewish Vocational Service and Community Workshop, janitorial services,
$12 million over 5 years; Lighthouse for the Blind, $4.5 million, water purification equipment;
Ability One; National Institute for the Blind; Pride Industries; and Melwood Horticultural
Training Center.
The DoD does not shun the work of Federal Prison Industries, which sells furniture and other
products. A government corporation (and thus not a nonprofit), it had half a billion in sales
to all federal departments in 2016. Prison labor, Goodwill Industries, and other
sheltered-workshop enterprises, along with for- profits employing immigrant workers, teenagers,
retirees, and migrant workers (who grow food for the military and the rest of us), reveal the
evolving nature of the US working class, and some explanation for its lack of revolutionary
fervor, or even mild dissent from the capitalist system.
The well-paid, and truly diverse employees (including executives) of major weapons makers
are also not about to construct wooden barricades. Boards of directors in these industries are
welcoming to minorities and women. The CEOs of Lockheed and General Dynamics are women, as is
the Chief Operating Officer of Northrop Grumman. These success stories reinforce personal
aspirations among the have-nots, rather than questioning the system.
Contracts with universities, hospitals, and medical facilities are too numerous to detail
here; one that illustrates how far the blanket stretches is with Oxford University, $800,000
for medical research. Professional associations with significant contracts include the
Institute of International Education, American Council on Education, American Association of
State Colleges and Universities, National Academy of Sciences, Society of Women Engineers,
American Indian Science and Engineering Society, American Association of Nurse Anesthetists,
Society of Mexican-American Engineers, and U.S. Green Building Council. The Council of State
Governments (a nonprofit policy association of officials) received a $193,000 contract for
"preparedness" work. Let us hope we are well prepared.
The leaders, staff, members, donors, and volunteers of nonprofit organizations are the kind
of people who might have been peace activists, yet so many are smothered into silence under the
vast insecurity blanket. In addition to all the direct and indirect beneficiaries of the
military establishment, many people with no connection still cheer it on. They have been
subject to relentless propaganda forthe military and its wars from the government, the print
and digital press, TV, movies, sports shows, parades, and computer games -- the latter teach
children that killing is fun.
The indoctrination goes down easily. It has had a head start in the educational system that
glorifies the violent history of the nation. Our schools are full of in-house tutoring, STEM
programs, and fun robotics teams personally conducted by employees of the weapons makers. Young
children may not understand all the connections, but they tend to remember the logos. The JROTC
programs, imparting militaristic values, enroll far more children than the ones who will become
future officers. The extremely well-funded recruitment efforts in schools include "fun"
simulations of warfare.
There is a worldwide supporting cast for the complex that includes NATO, other alliances,
defense ministries, foreign military industries, and bases, but that is a story for another
day.
The millions sheltered under our thick and broad blanket, including the enlistees under the
prickly part of it, are not to blame. Some people may be thrilled by the idea of death and
destruction. However, most are just trying to earn a living, keep their organization or rust
belt afloat, or be accepted into polite company. They would prefer constructive work or income
from healthy sources. Yet many have been indoctrinated to believe that militarism is normal and
necessary. For those who consider change to be essential if life on this planet has a chance at
survival, it is important to see all the ways that the military-
industrial-congressional-almost everything-complex is being sustained.
"Free market economy" is a myth. In addition to the huge nonprofit (non-market) sector,
government intervention is substantial, not only in the gigantic military, but in agriculture,
education, health care, infrastructure, economic development (!), et al. For the same trillions
we could have a national economy that repairs the environment, provides a fine standard of
living and cultural opportunities for all, and works for peace on earth.
* * *
Joan Roelofs is Professor Emerita of Political Science, Keene State College, New Hampshire.
She is the author of Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (SUNY Press, 2003)
and Greening Cities (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). She is the translator of Victor
Considerant's Principles of Socialism (Maisonneuve Press, 2006), and with Shawn P. Wilbur, of
Charles Fourier's anti-war fantasy, The World War of Small Pastries (Autonomedia, 2015). A
community education short course on the military industrial complex is on her website, and may
be used for similar purposes.
The author provides some interesting observations... He ignores the role of economics
though.
Looks like a replay of events in Baltic republics. Might increase emigration and
"provisialization" of Ukraine because Russian is suppressed but English did not became the second
language (which is probably impossible without switching education into English language).
Dominance of EU might be more harsh regime, then most of the supporters of Eurointergation
assume, especially in economic sphere -- the status of semi-colony and debt slave are given, but
it can be worse.
Economic suffering of population and pauperization of Ukraine are immense...
Notable quotes:
"... Yet, at least half of the population of all eight administrative regions of mainland South-East Ukraine viewed the Euromaidan as a coup, because, according to a survey conducted in early April 2014 by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, only a third of respondents in these regions (the survey was not conducted in Crimea and Sevastopol) considered Yatsenyuk and Turchinov legitimate heads of government and state, while half of respondents considered them illegitimate (Kiev International Institute of Sociology, 2014c). ..."
"... The conformism of the South-East elite, which only recently was at the head of the anti-Maidan movement, surpassed the conformism of society many times over, because this elite had much to lose. ..."
"... The situation with Crimea was another factor that objectively strengthened Kiev's position in the South-East. ..."
"... This predictably could not increase pro-Russian sentiments in the rest of Ukraine. ..."
"... anti-Russian forces took an increasingly tough position, describing all talk of federalization as separatism. ..."
"... the winners of the Euromaidan Crimea was not a reason but a pretext for starting a policy of de-Russification. However, these events influenced the political swamp, that is, citizens without a clear position, and strengthened the base of the current regime, as evidenced by the results of public opinion polls and elections. ..."
"... the Europeans played up to Kiev in criminalizing the notion 'federation,' because for the West the Ukrainian problem is part of the Russian problem ..."
"... The West views them as paramilitary organizations which established power in those regions with external help and imposed themselves on the population. ..."
"... This position of the West strengthened the attitude of the pro-Western liberal public in Ukraine towards people in the South-East as sovok ..."
"... the "discursive violence of the Ukrainian media" in late February-early April 2014 paved the way for the "brutality of the antiterrorist operation" by creating a negative image of people of the South-East. ..."
"... Ukrayinska Pravda, Livyi Bereg, ..."
"... At the same time, Ukrainian radical nationalism objectively was an instrument which Ukrainian [neo]liberals used to achieve victory. ..."
"... However, positive dynamics for either party to the conflict is not only measured by territories they seize -- it is seen in the fact that actions, formerly deemed impossible, turn out to be possible and not having obvious negative consequences. For example, the implementation of the political part of the Minsk Agreement (which both Kiev and the West consider imposed on Ukraine from the outside) now seems to be a much more illusory goal than it seemed in 2014-2015. ..."
"... In particular, Kiev has rescinded a bill on constitutional amendments regarding decentralization; an economic blockade of Donbass has been introduced; and several laws have been passed and measures taken to combat the Russian World, both inside and outside the country. ..."
"... The law on the reintegration of Donbass, passed by the Verkhovna Rada this January, was a logical development and a new stage of this policy. Its purpose is not so much to recognize the territories beyond Kiev's control as occupied by Russia. What is more important is that the law recognizes this state de facto without a formal recognition of the war with Russia de jure. ..."
"... This positive dynamics creates a situation where a critical mass of society thinks that at least Ukraine will not find itself in the same difficult situation as in the spring of 2014 and that, at best, it will restore full control over Donbass on its terms: Russia will not withstand the sanctions and will stop supporting the uncontrolled territories. The policy of the West does not contradict these expectations: the sanctions continue, there is almost no public criticism of Kiev's actions in Donbass at the state level, except for minor issues, and the U.S. has decided to supply Javelin antitank missiles to Ukraine, which is largely a symbolic gesture fitting perfectly into the aforementioned pattern of positive dynamics. ..."
"... Of course, very many of the above-mentioned elements of the positive (for Kiev) dynamics also have a great negative effect. For example, the existing format of the conflict in Donbass involves great military expenditures and leads to reduced ties with Russia, which is a significant burden for the Ukrainian economy. ..."
"... The present scale of losses of the Ukrainian army is not a factor that may spark a mass antiwar movement in the country, similar to the antiwar movement in the United States in the late 1960s, because the ratio of casualties to population in Ukraine is much smaller than that in the U.S. during the Vietnam War. ..."
"... Naturally, the economic situation in Ukraine is much less stable than that of the U.S. during the Vietnam War. However, in the public consciousness, the war is only one factor behind the economic problems (along with corruption, incompetence of the authorities, etc.). ..."
"... The war has advantages, too. Of course, they would have disappeared in the event of a full-scale conflict, but Kiev is confident that this will never happen. In a situation like this, it finds it simpler to mobilize society, convince it to put up with difficulties and, most importantly, format the political and information space in an advantageous way. Beneficiaries of this reformatting include not only the government but also a wide range of parties and politicians who supported the Euromaidan. ..."
"... So, the current format of the conflict strengthens the political regime in Ukraine, which is actually the closest to regimes of limited political competition, such as those that existed in some countries of Central and Eastern Europe during the interwar period in the 20th century, or some Latin American countries (Brazil and Guatemala) after the Second World War. There is formal pluralism and a real possibility of succession of power there, yet real power can be contested only by forces from one political spectrum, whereas forces that are beyond this spectrum are restrained and can only aspire to seats in parliament. ..."
"... support is limited -- the West will not fight for Ukraine and will not provide aid on a scale comparable to the Marshall Plan. ..."
"... Already now, due to migration, the population of the territory now controlled by Kiev is less than 30 million people (judging by bread consumption statistics). ..."
"... This means it has decreased by more than 40 percent since 1991. ..."
"... As regards Ukraine's admission to NATO, many Western European countries oppose this option. On the other hand, they have not proposed any detailed plan for Ukraine's non-aligned status. Objectively, such status would be best guaranteed by the specifics of the state's internal structure, when accession to a military alliance would require a consensus of the regions. ..."
"... If this state collapses due to external factors, the identity of a large part of its present population may change very quickly, as evidenced by the experience of the 17th century and recent decades. ..."
In Ukraine, however, the switching of sides takes place on a larger scale. For example,
President Kuchma and Prime Minister Yanukovich had a majority in the Verkhovna Rada elected in
2002, which decreased somewhat in the last few months before the 2004 elections. Yet, newly
elected President Yushchenko did not have any problems with the same parliament. The Ukrainian
parliament elected in 2007 supported Prime Minister Timoshenko, but after Yanukovich won a
presidential election in February 2010 he had a solid majority in it until the next election.
Yanukovich also had a majority in parliament elected in 2012 until the last days of the
Euromaidan. However, after the victory of the Euromaidan, a coalition was formed in parliament
that supported the new authorities. It united factions and groups of 235 deputies in the
450-seat parliament, of whom 69 did not belong to pro-Euromaidan parties. Also, 371 deputies,
including almost all deputies from the Party of Regions, voted to appoint Yatsenyuk as prime
minister.
Can these figures serve as grounds to classify the Euromaidan as a coup d'état and
accuse the new regime of failing to build a government of national accord, provided for by the
agreement between Yanukovich and the opposition? A coup d'état presupposes suspending
and resetting the functioning of government institutions, whereas this agreement did not
specify what a national accord government should look like. On the other hand, the essence of
such governments is to unite people of different political views, rather than make their
members and supporters give up their former beliefs.
Yet, at least half of the population of all eight administrative regions of mainland
South-East Ukraine viewed the Euromaidan as a coup, because, according to a survey conducted in
early April 2014 by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, only a third of respondents
in these regions (the survey was not conducted in Crimea and Sevastopol) considered Yatsenyuk
and Turchinov legitimate heads of government and state, while half of respondents considered
them illegitimate (Kiev International Institute of Sociology, 2014c). However, the elite
of the South-East did not question the legitimacy of the new government. The most it was ready
to do was consider this government undesirable and due to be replaced at the next election.
The conformism of the South-East elite, which only recently was at the head of the
anti-Maidan movement, surpassed the conformism of society many times over, because this elite
had much to lose. But in this situation, the masses of protesters who considered the
Euromaidan a coup found themselves without their usual leaders. New leaders emerged
spontaneously from among protesters and were not viewed as authoritative by those who did not
take part in the protests. The depth of the gap between the masses and the elites can be seen
from the following fact: There is the émigré Ukraine Salvation Committee in
Moscow, headed by former Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov, which positions itself as almost a
government in exile. The Committee considers the hostilities in Donbass a civil war and,
therefore, does not view the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics as
occupation administrations. Yet, it has no contact with the leaders of these republics, which
also consider themselves an alternative Ukraine.
Although there was less conformism among the masses than among the elites, it still made the
protests in the South-East less widespread than they might have been if there had been a sign
of dual power, for example, if Yanukovich and the part of the elite, including parliament
deputies, who did not recognize the new regime had tried to create alternative government
institutions. This conformism made many people accept on faith the assurances of the new
government about broad decentralization, including the humanitarian sphere.
The situation with Crimea was another factor that objectively strengthened Kiev's
position in the South-East. Beginning in March, Crimea and Sevastopol, which could have
been at the vanguard of protests for reformatting Ukraine, withdrew from the political field of
the country by joining Russia. This predictably could not increase pro-Russian sentiments
in the rest of Ukraine. Formerly, public opinion polls had invariably showed a good
attitude of the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians towards Russia. However, during the
conflicts over Tuzla in 2003 and the gas dispute of 2009 their attitude deteriorated
significantly. Now it happened again, only this time the conflict was much more serious.
Attempts by the state which annexed part of Ukrainian territory to act as an arbiter and, at
the same time, pressure Kiev to reformat Ukraine into a federation, in which the voice of the
South-East should be heard, were predictably doomed to failure. Even potential supporters of
Russia doubted the impartiality of such arbitration, and anti-Russian forces took an
increasingly tough position, describing all talk of federalization as separatism.
True, Ukrainians who were firmly pro-Russian did not become more hostile to Russia because
of Crimea, while for the winners of the Euromaidan Crimea was not a reason but a pretext
for starting a policy of de-Russification. However, these events influenced the political
swamp, that is, citizens without a clear position, and strengthened the base of the current
regime, as evidenced by the results of public opinion polls and elections. EUROPEAN
INTEGRATION VS COMPROMISE
On the other hand, it would be legitimate to ask whether the victory of the Euromaidan
necessarily had to lead to a war, and whether a compromise could have been reached with the
masses of the discontented in the South-East at an early stage. My answer is "no."
The short history of independent Ukraine developed, on the one hand, as a history of steady
integration into European and world (but Western-controlled) organizations, and on the other
hand, as a history of crises which became increasingly explosive and which ended in
increasingly imperfect compromises. For some time, the relationship between these processes
could be easily overlooked, but now it is much more difficult not to notice it. The February
2014 agreement on the settlement of the crisis, for the first time achieved with the
participation of European guarantors, was also the first world agreement in the history of
Ukraine that was not fulfilled. It was after the signing of the economic part of the
Association Agreement that an anti-terrorist operation began in the East, and immediately after
the political part of this agreement was signed (June 27, 2014), this operation entered into
its largest-scale and bloodiest phase.
Of course, the West needed to put an end to Kiev's multi-vector policy and achieve
unambiguous certainty for it. Hence its position on the language issue and the territorial
structure of the country, which was most vividly realized in the April 2014 PACE resolution,
which spoke of the inadmissibility of any mention of Ukraine's federalization (Parliamentary
Assembly, 2014).
Obviously, the real problem was not in the word but in an optimal distribution of powers
(for example, Spanish autonomous communities have more powers than Austrian federal lands), but
the Europeans played up to Kiev in criminalizing the notion 'federation,' because for the
West the Ukrainian problem is part of the Russian problem . Its attitude to the protests
in the South-East and then the war in Donbass differed fundamentally from its attitude to an
overwhelming majority of internal conflicts around the globe.
In the cases of Cyprus, Nagorno-Karabakh, ethnic Serbs in Croatia and Kosovo, Aceh in
Indonesia, FARC in Colombia, etc., the West considered the leaders of separatists or insurgents
legitimate representatives of certain ethnic or social groups who had taken over powers not
provided for by the laws of their country. Their right to be a party to negotiations was not
questioned. But the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics are in no way seen as
self-proclaimed republics that reflect the views of their populations, even though
illegitimately from the point of view of Ukrainian legislation. The West views them as
paramilitary organizations which established power in those regions with external help and
imposed themselves on the population.
This position of the West strengthened the attitude of the pro-Western liberal public in
Ukraine towards people in the South-East as sovok (homo Sovieticus) and
vatnik (bigots), whose opinion could be ignored. A recent study (Baysha, 2017)
convincingly shows how the "discursive violence of the Ukrainian media" in late
February-early April 2014 paved the way for the "brutality of the antiterrorist operation" by
creating a negative image of people of the South-East. Importantly, these were not
state-run, oligarchic or party nationalist media, although they did the same. These were
popular websites, which are thought to be mouthpieces for liberal civil society (
Ukrayinska Pravda, Livyi Bereg, and Gordon ).
In other words, the conflict was a logical consequence of Westernization, rather than the
rise of nationalism. Welcoming the successes of the Ukrainian army in July 2014, the European
Parliament thus made it clear that this Westernization on the civilizational borders of Europe
may not resemble the practices of major European countries. At the same time, Ukrainian
radical nationalism objectively was an instrument which Ukrainian [neo]liberals used to achieve
victory. True, it is not willing to play this role and wants to be something more than
just an instrument. But behind the talk of the Banderization of Ukraine is a confusion of the
notions of customer and contractor.
WAR IN AN ACCEPTABLE FORMAT
Of course, many of those who took part in the Euromaidan did not fight there for renaming
Vatutin Avenue in Kiev as Shukhevich Avenue, or for banning the import of Russian books,
including memoirs of Princess Yekaterina Dashkova, or for banning songs by Russian singers
Vladimir Vysotsky and Victor Tsoi described as "tentacles of the Russian World" which leeched
onto Ukrainians (definition by Vladimir Vyatrovich, the head of the Institute of National
Memory, the most Euro-integrated organization of the Ukrainian government, which consistently
advocates the idea of a nationalist "recoding" of Ukrainians). The voices of people who do not
agree with this (for example, the poet and culturologist Evgenia Bilchenko) are sometimes heard
in the media space, but the problem is whether these voices, together with the voices of those
who were against the Euromaidan from the very beginning, can become a political factor.
I think this is almost ruled out under the most likely, inertial, scenario which provides
for the development of tendencies that emerged after the victory of the Euromaidan and the
preservation by Russia and the West of their behavioral models which have developed over recent
years.
When assessing this scenario, one should bear in mind that the armed conflict in Donbass has
over the last three years entered into a format that is the most advantageous (of all really
possible ones) for Ukraine -- a low-intensity smoldering conflict.
This situation objectively predisposes one to see dynamics, positive for Kiev, in the
conflict that began in 2014. At first, Ukraine surrendered Crimea to Russia and pro-Russian
forces without a fight. At the next stage, however, it localized the offensive of the Russian
World to Donbass, although it failed to take full control over the region. The result of this
phase of the fight can be regarded as a draw, or Ukraine's defeat on points. But Crimea was
lost through a knockout. After that, a defeat on points is still a better outcome.
The next, longest phase of the conflict has been going on without changes on the frontline.
However, positive dynamics for either party to the conflict is not only measured by
territories they seize -- it is seen in the fact that actions, formerly deemed impossible, turn
out to be possible and not having obvious negative consequences. For example, the
implementation of the political part of the Minsk Agreement (which both Kiev and the West
consider imposed on Ukraine from the outside) now seems to be a much more illusory goal than it
seemed in 2014-2015.
In particular, Kiev has rescinded a bill on constitutional amendments regarding
decentralization; an economic blockade of Donbass has been introduced; and several laws have
been passed and measures taken to combat the Russian World, both inside and outside the
country. The latter include the termination of air service, a ban on remittances,
restrictions on the import of Russian books, a ban on performances by some Russian
entertainers, the actual abolition of the law "On the Basic Principles of the Language Policy,"
restrictions on the use of the Russian language on the Ukrainian radio and television and its
abolition in education (with the exception of primary school), de-Russification of geographical
names, and the removal of monuments.
Kiev views all these measures as non-military blows to the enemy, and the scale of such
actions increases with every year.
The law on the reintegration of Donbass, passed by the Verkhovna Rada this January, was
a logical development and a new stage of this policy. Its purpose is not so much to recognize
the territories beyond Kiev's control as occupied by Russia. What is more important is that the
law recognizes this state de facto without a formal recognition of the war with Russia de
jure.
This positive dynamics creates a situation where a critical mass of society thinks that
at least Ukraine will not find itself in the same difficult situation as in the spring of 2014
and that, at best, it will restore full control over Donbass on its terms: Russia will not
withstand the sanctions and will stop supporting the uncontrolled territories. The policy of
the West does not contradict these expectations: the sanctions continue, there is almost no
public criticism of Kiev's actions in Donbass at the state level, except for minor issues, and
the U.S. has decided to supply Javelin antitank missiles to Ukraine, which is largely a
symbolic gesture fitting perfectly into the aforementioned pattern of positive
dynamics.
For the reasons mentioned above, the West does not advocate a direct dialogue between Kiev
and Donetsk/Lugansk, but considers the existing level of conflict with more and more victims an
obviously lesser evil than a possible strengthening of the self-proclaimed republics. This
clearly follows from the statement of German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel about the
inadmissibility of Russia's proposal on a UN peacekeeping mission, which provides for the
separation of the warring parties by peacekeepers, to be deployed along the frontline, and the
protection of the OSCE mission, because that would only mean freezing the conflict. (A meeting
between Vladislav Surkov and Kurt Volker, which took place in Dubai during the writing of this
article, showed that the Americans are nevertheless ready to accept the Russian format as the
first phase of a peacekeeping mission; yet its practical implementation is still far off.)
Of course, very many of the above-mentioned elements of the positive (for Kiev) dynamics
also have a great negative effect. For example, the existing format of the conflict in Donbass
involves great military expenditures and leads to reduced ties with Russia, which is a
significant burden for the Ukrainian economy. However, it is important to understand a
balance between positive and negative aspects from Kiev's point of view.
Of course, the mobilization was a straining factor for society, because it could affect
almost every family. But since the end of 2016, when all people mobilized a year before
returned home, only contract soldiers and professional officers have taken part in the conflict
from the Ukrainian side -- that is, only those who have made this choice voluntarily or who
have chosen military service as their lifetime career. This is the main reason why the format
of hostilities can be considered acceptable or, at least, not too burdensome for Ukrainian
society.
The present scale of losses of the Ukrainian army is not a factor that may spark a mass
antiwar movement in the country, similar to the antiwar movement in the United States in the
late 1960s, because the ratio of casualties to population in Ukraine is much smaller than that
in the U.S. during the Vietnam War.
Naturally, the economic situation in Ukraine is much less stable than that of the U.S.
during the Vietnam War. However, in the public consciousness, the war is only one factor behind
the economic problems (along with corruption, incompetence of the authorities, etc.).
The unpopularity of the idea of peace at any cost not only shows the specific character of
the Ukrainian regime but, above all, it shows that society does not view the crisis as a
catastrophe, which means that the conflict has acquired a format convenient for Kiev.
This format means, in particular, that, to paraphrase Trotsky, Ukraine is in a state of both
peace and war with Russia, taking advantage of each of these states. For example, over the
first 11 months of 2017, Ukrainian exports to Russia grew by 12 percent and brought Ukraine
U.S. $360 million more than a year before. Two-thirds of Ukrainian coal imports come from
Russia, including 80 percent of anthracite, which has become scarce due to the blockade of
Donbass.
The war has advantages, too. Of course, they would have disappeared in the event of a
full-scale conflict, but Kiev is confident that this will never happen. In a situation like
this, it finds it simpler to mobilize society, convince it to put up with difficulties and,
most importantly, format the political and information space in an advantageous way.
Beneficiaries of this reformatting include not only the government but also a wide range of
parties and politicians who supported the Euromaidan. For example, there is a segment
among supporters of the Batkivshchina Party, led by Yulia Timoshenko, and the Radical Party,
led by Oleg Lyashko, who, judging by public opinion polls, do not support either a
confrontation with Russia or the current policy of historical memory. Obviously, these are
former supporters of the Party of Regions and communists, who have realized that the successors
to these parties will not be allowed to win anyway and that power can be contested only by
pro-Euromaidan parties. Therefore, they side with forces that are close to their own
ideological position, guided by their social slogans and disregarding their greater
geopolitical and humanitarian radicalism in comparison with the current authorities. But such a
choice can be made only if one is confident that this radicalism will not lead to a great war
and catastrophe.
So, the current format of the conflict strengthens the political regime in Ukraine,
which is actually the closest to regimes of limited political competition, such as those that
existed in some countries of Central and Eastern Europe during the interwar period in the 20th
century, or some Latin American countries (Brazil and Guatemala) after the Second World War.
There is formal pluralism and a real possibility of succession of power there, yet real power
can be contested only by forces from one political spectrum, whereas forces that are beyond
this spectrum are restrained and can only aspire to seats in parliament.
History shows that such regimes can exist for a very long time, especially with external
support, which Kiev certainly has, if we mean support for its geopolitical policy, rather than
concrete persons in power. It is another thing that such support is limited -- the West
will not fight for Ukraine and will not provide aid on a scale comparable to the Marshall
Plan.
The Georgian scenario for changing this regime is theoretically possible but unlikely,
because several factors prevent the success of a would-be Ukrainian Ivanishvili. The conflict
in Ukraine is felt more sharply because in 2014 it lost territories that it had controlled all
the years of independence, while Georgia lost control over Abkhazia in 1993 and over South
Ossetia even earlier. The August 2008 war only showed the impossibility of regaining these
territories. But the most important thing is that, whereas Georgia was an obvious loser in that
war, Ukraine has some positive dynamics, which was discussed above. In addition, differences
between Georgians and Russians have always been obvious, whereas for Kiev the current conflict
is a way to recode a large part of the population and form the nation on the basis of the
thesis that "Ukraine is different from Russia." Finally, the evolution of Georgia should not be
exaggerated. Diplomatic relations between Tbilisi and Moscow have not been restored, while
relations between Kiev and Moscow have never been broken off. Although Georgia has toned down
its anti-Russian rhetoric, it keeps moving towards the Euro-Atlantic structures.
Ukraine is moving in the same direction. Its problems will obviously grow in the near
future. Already now, due to migration, the population of the territory now controlled by
Kiev is less than 30 million people (judging by bread consumption statistics).
This means it has decreased by more than 40 percent since 1991. In addition, the
largest, postwar, generation is now entering the mortality age, while the generation of
newborns is the smallest over the years of independence. Yet, the territory of the country has
retained its geopolitical value and, regardless of whether Ukraine is granted formal NATO
membership or not, American troops can be permanently deployed in its territory during the
current Cold War -- or, more precisely, their presence can be broadened, because several
thousand NATO troops, half of them Americans, have been involved in military exercises
permanently held at the Yavorovo test range since the spring of 2015.
As regards Ukraine's admission to NATO, many Western European countries oppose this
option. On the other hand, they have not proposed any detailed plan for Ukraine's non-aligned
status. Objectively, such status would be best guaranteed by the specifics of the state's
internal structure, when accession to a military alliance would require a consensus of the
regions. In an interview with the Atlantic magazine in November 2016, Henry Kissinger
echoed this idea: "I favor an independent Ukraine that is militarily non-aligned. If you remove
the two Donbass regions from eastern Ukraine, you guarantee that Ukraine is permanently hostile
to Russia, since it becomes dominated by its Western part, which only joined Russia in the
1940s. The solution, then, is to find a way to give these units a degree of autonomy that gives
them a voice in military entanglements, but otherwise keeps them under the governance of
Ukraine." (Goldberg, 2016)
But since this voice remains solitary, the negative attitude of Western European countries
to Ukraine's accession to NATO is only a short-term tactical choice which may change later.
It is also unlikely that the implementation of the Minsk Agreement will help create the
model described by Kissinger, because a "voice in military entanglements" is a trait of a
confederation. Meanwhile, the status of individual Donbass regions, as defined by the above
agreement, is far even from that provided for in a federation. Rather, it is similar to the
limited autonomy of ethnic Serbs in Croatia, which they received under the Erdut agreement.
Therefore, even if the Minsk Agreement is implemented, which is unlikely, the existing
political regime in Ukraine will hardly change.
As regards Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, in a situation where they cannot change
this regime through elections, they will try to adapt to the existing reality, at least
outwardly.
The described inertial scenario is basic and most probable. However, it is not the only
possible one due to the weakness of the Ukrainian state (in particular, due to the growing
influence of right-wing radicals who may obtain parallel power), the unstable situation in the
world, and the unpredictability of Russia's policy in the long term, as Moscow may decide that
Kiev has crossed certain red lines established by it. If this state collapses due to
external factors, the identity of a large part of its present population may change very
quickly, as evidenced by the experience of the 17th century and recent decades.
Alexei V. Popov is an expert with the Kiev Center of Political Studies and
Conflictology
"... an essential warning against a continuation of the frivolous and dangerous policies of regime change adopted by the West after the end of the Cold War ..."
"... The result is both a sophisticated, multilevel analysis of how and why Ukraine emerged as the key hotspot in East-West relations, and an indispensable guide for those wishing to understand the origins of the New Cold War. ..."
"... Gordon M. Hahn challenges simplistic and often misleading narratives by the media and politicians and provides a corroboration that the Maidan massacre was a false flag mass killing ..."
"... They show Maidan's quasi-revolution was driven by international geopolitics, supporting counterposed Western and Russian "civilizationist" beliefs, and deep divisions within Ukrainian society itself, not a wellspring of widespread aspiration to Western-style democracy. ..."
Review "Ukraine's 2013-2014 revolution, its civil war, and Russia's annexation of the
Crimea have been succeeded by newer crises, but political analyst Hahn uses detailed reportage
and geopolitical theory to argue for their long-term significance, presenting Ukraine as a
troubling turning point in Russo-American relations and a case study of how democratization
efforts can go awry...with Russia atop American headlines to an extent not seen since the end
of the Cold War, [this book] will be a strong addition to global studies collections" --
Booklist
"It was not only Ukraine that went over the edge in 2014, but the whole European security
system disintegrated, while a 'new cold war' chills relations between the great powers. In this
masterful study, Gordon Hahn examines how Ukraine's internal divisions combined with external
lines of fragmentation to create an explosive mix, which in turn intensified domestic
conflicts. The result is an internationalized civil conflict, with catastrophic consequences
for Ukraine and the world. Hahn is one of the few scholars with the knowledge and discernment
to make sense of it all. His impressively well-researched and well-written book is essential
reading."--Richard Sakwa, University of Kent
"This impressively researched and strongly argued book is an essential corrective to the
myths that have been generated concerning the crisis in Ukraine, and an essential warning
against a continuation of the frivolous and dangerous policies of regime change adopted by the
West after the end of the Cold War ." --Anatol Lieven, Professor, Georgetown University in
Qatar and author of Ukraine and Russia, A Fraternal Rivalry
Ukraine Over the Edge is a rigorous analysis of the cultural, historical, and
intellectual origins of the Ukrainian crisis. While stressing that blame for the latest phase
of this crisis is shared all around, Hahn traces its domestic origins to the militancy of the
opposition to president Yanukovych, and its international origins to NATO expansion, which he
regards as militarized democracy-promotion. The result is both a sophisticated, multilevel
analysis of how and why Ukraine emerged as the key hotspot in East-West relations, and an
indispensable guide for those wishing to understand the origins of the New Cold War.
"--Nicolai N. Petro, Silvia-Chandley Professor of Peace Studies and Nonviolence, University of
Rhode Island
" Ukraine Over the Edge is a very useful contribution to understanding origins and
key developments of the crisis in this important European and post-Soviet country. Gordon
M. Hahn challenges simplistic and often misleading narratives by the media and politicians and
provides a corroboration that the Maidan massacre was a false flag mass killing ." --Ivan
Katchanovski, University of Ottawa About the AuthorGordon M. Hahn is an advisory
board member at Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, Chicago, and at the American Institute of
Geostrategy (AIGEO), Los Angeles; a contributing expert for Russia Direct, and a senior
researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), San Jose, California.
He lives in Mountain View, California.
Preface
As I read, listened and watched Western sources on the events surrounding the mass
demonstrations on central square in Kiev during winter 2013-2014, a sense of deja vu
became undeniable. Having studied the nature of terrorism in Russia's North Caucasus, the
causes and course of the August 2008 Georgian-Russian war, and other events involving Russia, I
had seen a pattern of misrepresentation of these events by most Western, especially American,
media, academia and government sources. There was a clear sense that this pattern was being
repeated with regard to the events on the Maidan. Hence, I decided to investigate matters for
myself and have come to a distinctly different conclusion regarding them than that imparted to
the Western public.
Two years after the Maidan "revolution of dignity," it was already clear that the
Western-backed overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich was not entirely a revolution
and was ultimately in vain regardless of how one conceptualizes the events surrounding the
fall-winter 2013-2014 demonstrations and violence on Kiev's Maidan. The movement was based
initially on middle class opposition to corruption and soft authoritarianism and support for
European integration. Ultimately, the nascent pro-democratic revolution was hijacked by
neofascist elements that infiltrated the Maidan protests, overthrew the government, and then
were themselves superseded by several key oligarchs, who always have thrived under the
post-Soviet ancient regime. Thus, corruption and criminality have increased rather than
decreased, European integration has stalled, and authoritarianism is not just in the corridors
of power but on the streets under the yoke of roaming bands of neofascist groups seeking to
foment a second, truly "national revolution."
Despite the all-too-numerous adepts of democratization and democratic transition, this is
not the first, nor is it likely to be the last time when the West has misunderstood processes
it has hoped for, encouraged, and often funded and helped to organize. The "Arab Spring" is
only the most recent set of cases in point. Predictably, that spring's various revolutions
became an Islamist winter spread across parts of the Middle East and North Africa, except in
Egypt -- where a counterrevolution returned the status quo ante.
Similarly, in 1991 the adepts of democratic transitions or "transitology" got it wrong. Few
post-Soviet states became democracies because the "democratic revolution" that overthrew the
reformist late Soviet regime of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika was assumed to be a "revolution
from below" led by societal opposition forces bent on living in a democracy. This was true in
the Baltic republics, but in most cases the elements of democratic revolution from below were
subsumed by a mix of less civil state bureaucrat-led revolutions from above and nationalist-led
revolutions from below. In Russia, the revolution was largely one led from above by the Russian
President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian state apparatus against the partially reformed but
crumbling central Soviet state and regime. In Central Asia and elsewhere, there was simply a
change of signboards, rebranding for still very authoritarian regimes. The partial exception is
Kyrgyzstan's tulip revolutions and counterrevolutions, which also had strong elements from
above. Thus, it is no surprise that both Ukraine's 2004 Orange revolution, as 1 noted at the
time, and the 2013-2014 Maidan "revolution of dignity," as I predicted, proved to be something
less than the democratic revolutions "transitologists" hailed.
In addition to elements of revolution from below, the Maidan revolt also has elements of
revolution from above led by some state officials and state-tied oligarchs. Moreover, the
revolution from below was under considerable influence from national chauvinist,
ultranationalist, and neofascist groups. The Maidan ultranationalist-oligarchic regime now has
little popular support and few accomplishments in democratization, and is little different from
the previous, except for a marked increase in western Ukrainian neofascism (both in the
corridors of power and on the streets) and a near catastrophic economy. Revolutions are indeed
unwieldy things, not very manageable once unleashed.
The international geopolitical consequences have been even more deleterious. A deepening
Russian-Western confrontation over Ukraine risks recreating a bipolar "world split apart," with
Russia more inclined than ever to forge alliances with regimes opposed to American and Western
power.
This book is dedicated to clarifying these events and their consequences, something that is
imperative given the misleading government and media characterizations of them. This study is
based on Western, Ukrainian and Russian sources, including media reports, reliable primary and
secondary Internet sources, and official documents of governments and international
organizations.
They show Maidan's quasi-revolution was driven by international geopolitics, supporting
counterposed Western and Russian "civilizationist" beliefs, and deep divisions within Ukrainian
society itself, not a wellspring of widespread aspiration to Western-style democracy.
Allies Against Russia & Iran
Main U.S. allies are Saudi Arabia, UAE, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Israel, & Nazis
Eric Zuesse
July 27, 2018
4,900 Words
58 Comments
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Today's Axis (the fascist powers) are
the heirs of Hitler's failed Operation Barbarossa to conquer the Soviet Union. After World War II, America's
CIA, along with Britain's MI6 and other governmental agencies, plus the Vatican, produced "rat lines" for
key Nazis (including their collaborators in other countries) to resettle in U.S., Argentina, and
Canada
(and in other countries, too, as
the CIA-edited and written account
at Wikipedia
focused upon
), and for these 'former' Nazis (who actually remained ideologically as nazis or racist
fascists, and the CIA knew and welcomed this) to continue working to conquer the Soviet Union. These secret
nazis carried out secret assignments not only for their new country's military and against the Soviet Union,
but also domestically against labor unions of all sorts, and against anything that the owners of the largest
U.S.-and-allied international corporations wanted to be targeted.
This was and is an officially secret
extension of the internationally coordinated farthest far-right, the few people who actually control the
international corporations. It consists of the operations on behalf of the Deep State, but the agents who
carry out these instructions are
only agents
; consequently, everything that they know regarding what
they are instructed to do is told to them only privately on a need-to-know basis, so that only the members
of the Deep State itself are aware of what the broader objectives of any given operation are. For example,
the CIA's operations aren't part of the Deep State but particular ones of these operations
represent
the Deep State -- the instructions they execute on these operations come from the Deep State; the CIA is an
agency for the international Deep State, but not all of what the CIA does represents the Deep State. Not
even the U.S. President himself is necessarily aware of what the agents of the Deep State are doing -- not
even of what the Deep State's agents who are on the federal payroll are doing.
For example, as soon as Franklin Delano
Roosevelt died in 1945, the Deep State (the controlling owners of the largest international corporations)
started to take over, and not everything that it was doing was known at the time by the leaders of the
official (elected) American government. Even U.S. President Harry S. Truman -- though the sign on his desk
said "The BUCK STOPS here!" and he meant it -- was kept in the dark, and was occasionally deceived, about
some things that the OSS (precursor to the CIA) and the CIA were doing. For example, Truman probably didn't
know that
in 1948 the CIA perpetrated its first coup and this coup in Thailand established the off-the-books funding
of the CIA from the international narcotics traffic
(more on that is also
here
), so that the CIA's actual budget wouldn't be restricted simply to the on-the-books funding, from
U.S. taxpayers. This illegal funding-source has been crucial for many of the CIA's operations, and makes
bribes untraceable.
A subversive right-wing coup, centered in
the United States but operating throughout all U.S.-allied countries, thus gradually took over in the
formerly anti-Nazi U.S.-allied countries. This slow coup was internationally coordinated amongst aristocrats
(the controllers of international corporations) from all participating countries. But it was internationally
led by America's aristocrats, starting when FDR died.
Some of the major operations of the
international Deep State were courageously reported in
a rare and classic BBC documentary, in 1992, shown in this video
. As it makes clear, these agents of the
Deep State considered themselves to be revolutionaries. They were heroes, in their own eyes. Here are two
brief excerpts from that video:
8:35-9:00:
"As the
[Nazi]
Germans withdrew, they left secret agents in the countries they had occupied. For the retreating
Germans, they were the staunchest elitists. They were selected from the SS and the fascist Black Legions.
They were to become the footsoldiers in the next war, about to begin.
10:25-10:55:
"Then
[OSS
second-in-command]
Jim Angleton
[James Jesus Angleton]
appeared in August
[1945]
. He
started recruiting fascists, because he said that the best way to control the communists was to hire
fascists. One of the most tough ones was Prince Valerio Borghese, who ran what was known as the tenth
flotilla. These are the guys that would execute partisans
[anti-fascists]
and hang them from lamp
posts all over Italy."
So: within just months of FDR's 12 April
1945 death, The West's Deep State was already in full start-up mode, to achieve ultimately a fascist
victory, not only against the U.S.S.R., but also against Western countries themselves. This is the
historical reality, about The West, after WW II.
As liaison officer between the O.S.S.
and the Fifth Army he assisted the military‐government mission in Italy and captured codes, card files
and documents important to American security.
After the war he returned to Italy and worked for the restoration of Italian business and industry and
for a stable, democratic government.
He was for many years president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy.
Instead of his having been born in 1917,
he had actually been born in 1889, which is believable.
So, one can reasonably infer that in
1945, the 56-year-old Hugh Angleton passed along to the 28-year-old Jesus Angleton, his contact list of
approximately 3,000 secret operatives of Hitler and of Mussolini in Europe, and that this son (Jesus)
proceeded promptly to recruit these secret Nazis and Fascists to work for the OSS. The father could retire
rich, while the son went on to grow and harvest his crops, for America's war against Russia (
not
actually against communism -- which was the cover-story
).
When the Soviet Union broke up and
ended its communism in 1991 and thereafter, their former Warsaw Pact military alliance became gradually
absorbed into America's NATO alliance -- and now
even a former part of the Russian Federation itself within the former Soviet Union (and which thus is no
mere Warsaw Pact ally), Ukraine, is being invited into NATO
, and is preparing for admission into the
anti-Russia military pact -- into the U.S. alliance against Russia -- and
hopes to conquer Russia totally
. The name for the broader U.S. plan here (
of
which the takeover of Ukraine is only a part
) is "Nuclear Primacy" -- the U.S. Government's goal is U.S.
victory in a nuclear war against Russia, and this goal can be achieved only if the U.S. nuclearly
blitz-attacks Russia, and if that blitz-attack eliminates Russia's retaliatory weapons (sufficiently to meet
the U.S. Government's top-secret standard of what would constitute acceptable damage to the U.S. from a
Russian retaliatory attack). This is the ultimate strategic plan (and all details of it are prohibited from
being made public).
"Nuclear Primacy" replaces the prior
meta-strategy, which was called "Mutually Assured Destruction" or "M.A.D." -- the belief that the purpose of
nuclear weapons is to prevent a World War III, not to win a WW III. This new meta-strategy starts from the
assumption that the number of people killed in the U.S. and allied countries by a counter-attack from Russia
responding to a sudden and unannounced blitz nuclear invasion of Russia, by the U.S. and its allies, will be
worth that (currently secret) cost.
Some experts say that since
even the proponents of "Nuclear Primacy"
have ignored instead of discussed nuclear winter, the only
reason for the continuation of the 'Cold War' (the potential for an intentional nuclear war between America
and Russia) after the end of the Soviet Union and of its Warsaw Pact and of its communism, is in order to
advance the stock-values of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, SAIC, and the other international corporations whose
sole main sources of income are the U.S. Government and its allied governments. These government-dependent
corporations have taken over the government,
just like U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower publicly warned the American people against at the very end of
his two terms of office
, at a time when the process was, by then, already almost complete, and he
himself had actually been the person who had done the most that anyone had yet done to advance the
military-industrial complex. His famous
"military-industrial complex"
speech (and
here is its broader context
) urged future Presidents to try to undo what he himself had actually already
set inevitably into motion in America. It was as if he was warning to close the barn door so that the horse
won't get out, but the horse had already been stolen and was no longer even subject to this person's
control. Sales of weapons that American corporations market to the American Government, and to its allied
Governments, thus came to wag the tail of America's future
'democracy'
; nobody any longer could stop this process from being completed.
Now that the 'anti-Islamic-terrorist'
excuses for selling and buying their weapons and services are declining, the focus is, yet again,
increasingly against Russia and its allies, in order that the owners of those corporations (the category of
corporations
that depend the most
upon their Government) will continue to grow in wealth, and not to
lose value of their investments. As the anti-Jewish writer Philip Giraldi said accurately (though I think he
misunderstands how the Deep State, of which he used to be an operative, actually functions),
"Defense contractors need a foe to justify their existence while congressmen need the contractors to fund
their campaigns."
He interprets the corruption in a tribal way, rather than as corruption itself and of
any type, as being the reason why the United States continues to try to achieve 'Nuclear Primacy'. But that
explanation would not explain why nuclear winter is not being discussed by the proponents of 'Nuclear
Primacy'.
None of the publicly available
estimates, behind the 'Nuclear Primacy' meta-strategy, even discusses nuclear winter, which physicists say
would follow such a nuclear war between U.S. and Russia, and would virtually eliminate agriculture and
produce mass-starvation throughout the entire world, including in any 'victor' country. It threatens all
tribes. The published studies regarding the possibility of "nuclear winter"
all concern the likely effect of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan
, or other and even lesser
pairings. Whether or not the U.S. Government has ever commissioned a study of what the likely effects of a
nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would be, is not publicly known. Possibly, this subject has been
examined but the findings are not disclosed; but, also possibly, the U.S. Government does not want such a
study to be done, at all, so that no one will know what the findings might turn out to be. The latter
possibility might, for example, be the case if America's weapons manufacturing and marketing firms control
the U.S. Government. If constant increases in their sales is the objective that drives the U.S. Government,
then there would be sound reason for the U.S. Government to prevent or at least suppress any such analysis
of the global effects, inasmuch as its findings could crash those corporations' stock-values, and the
billionaires who
control those firms and the U.S. Government
, might suffer enormous losses. This assumes that the U.S.
Government represents those owners and not the public. But in any case: marketing weapons that are suitable
only for traditional, non-nuclear, wars, such as against regular jihadists, has apparently run its course
and produced all of the sales-growth that that business-plan is likely to achieve; and, therefore, as has
been the case since at least the time of the Obama Administration, the U.S.
is actively gearing up for an invasion of Russia
. The U.S. Government is behaving as if America's
weapons-producers own it. The weapons-producers (that is, the owners of the weapons-producers) seem to be in
control of the U.S. Government.
Whereas Giraldi and most other writers
against U.S. imperialism -- against development of control over the entire world by U.S. billionaires --
allege that the origin of this imperialism is "Jews" (and specifically the Jews who joined together under
the banner of "neoconservatism" after 1960), insufficient public attention has been devoted to the
possibility that an even more crucial role in the Middle Eastern portion of the U.S. Government's plan is
being played by
the world's wealthiest family
, the royal Saud family of Saudi Arabia, who have the same obsession to
conquer Iran that Israel's Government does. Israel's powerful lobby in the United States is pressing the
same things that the Saud family do; each of the two (Israel and the Sauds) pushes the invade-Iran theme,
and each is at least accepting of all the rest of the other's foreign policies; but, whereas lobbyists for
Jews are viewed somewhat sympathetically by the American public, no lobbyists for Muslims have anything like
the same level of acceptance by the U.S. public. For a U.S. Senator or Representative to be championing
Israel is accepted by the American public far more than is for that same person to be championing the Saud
family, who own Saudi Arabia, or to be championing any of the 7 royal families who own UAE, or etc. (Kuwait,
Qatar, or even non-Arab governments, such as Pakistan). Whereas the Gulf Cooperation Council of
fundamentalist-Sunni Arab kings constitute, by far, the lion's share of foreign buyers of U.S.-made
weaponry, Israel not only doesn't have such enormous financial resources, but it even receives from U.S.
taxpayers $3.8 billion in U.S. donations to Israel's Government, each and every year, in order for Israel to
be able to afford to buy from U.S. makers the weapons that it does buy. In contrast to Israel's relative
pauper-status there, U.S. President Donald Trump personally sold to the Saud family $350 billion of U.S.
weapons shortly after becoming President, and
increased that to $400 billion soon afterwards
. His sale, to the Sauds, of U.S. weaponry, is
overwhelmingly the largest military sale in all of world history. It is Trump's major achievement thus far
in his Presidency. (Trump can meet privately with King Saud, and with Netanyahu, but the Deep State calls
him a 'traitor' for meeting privately with Putin.)
On August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day,
commemorating when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was
held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
Senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military industrial complex were in attendance. This
mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate Hiroshima.
The United States Government was already
preparing for the time when the then-raging U.S. military buildup in order to deal with terrorism would need
to be supplanted with a return to the major-power, strategic nuclear, weaponry, which could carry U.S.
weapons-manufacturers back to the good old days of unlimited 'defense' spending, and unlimited war-profits
to these firms. Dr. Chossudovsky continued:
The Privatization of Nuclear War: US
Military Contractors Set the Stage
The post 9/11 nuclear weapons
doctrine was in the making, with America's major defense contractors directly involved in the
decision-making process.
The Hiroshima Day 2003 meetings had
set the stage for the "privatization of nuclear war". Corporations not only reap multibillion-dollar
profits from the production of nuclear bombs, they also have a direct voice in setting the agenda
regarding the use and deployment of nuclear weapons.
The nuclear weapons industry, which
includes the production of nuclear devices as well as the missile delivery systems, etc., is controlled
by a handful of defense contractors with Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon
and Boeing in the lead.
These are weapons-systems that cost in
the billions of dollars, rather than in the millions of dollars. America's generals and national-'security'
advisors and other individuals who take part in the U.S. Government's planning and weapons-purchases, rotate
between official government posts and international corporate boards; and, basically, as professionals in
their line of work, they play both sides of that revolving door (between the government and 'the private
sector') so as to maximize their own future likely income streams. They are not peace-planners. That's not
really what they get paid to do -- avoid weapons-buildups and invasions. The people who get paid to do the
peace-job don't have nearly as much to sell, and they've got far fewer and poorer buyers for their services
(maybe the public?). This is the reality of 'the free market'. Another word for it is: "corruption."
Whenever and wherever wealth is extremely concentrated in a few, corruption reigns, the public does not. For
a country to have vast inequality of wealth is to have vast corruption, and to be ruled by it.
The CIA-controlled Wikipedia article on
"Nuclear Winter"
is written to deceive about the subject; and, therefore, for example, it opens one of
its sections with a blatantly propagandistic title and introduction:
Soviet exploitation
[edit]
See also: Soviet influence on the
peace movement § Claims of wider Soviet influence
In an interview in 2000 with Mikhail
Gorbachev (the leader of the Soviet Union from 1985–91), the following statement was posed to him: "In
the 1980s, you warned about the unprecedented dangers of nuclear weapons and took very daring steps to
reverse the arms race", with Gorbachev replying "Models made by Russian and American scientists showed
that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on
Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that
situation."[216]
However, a 1984 US Interagency
Intelligence Assessment expresses a far more skeptical and cautious approach, stating that as the
hypothesis is not scientifically convincing.
Though the Wiki article discusses
several studies that had been done in the 1980s modeling the consequences of an India-Pakistan nuclear war
and comparably small ones, it mentions only dismissively the far-more-recent and inclusive study:
In a 2012 "Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists" feature, Robock and Toon, who had routinely mixed their disarmament advocacy into the
conclusions of their "nuclear winter" papers,[18] argue in the political realm that the hypothetical
effects of nuclear winter necessitates that the doctrine they assume is active in Russia and US,
"mutually assured destruction" (MAD) should instead be replaced with their own "self-assured destruction"
(SAD) concept,[200].
The propaganda is strictly by Wikipedia
there, not at all by Robock and Toon,
whose article
does
not
argue to replace "MAD" with "SAD" nor with anything at all, but instead
documents and affirms M.A.D. -- yes, Wikipedia outright lies, when it must -- and their article summarizes
studies published between 1980 and 2010, none of which modeled a U.S.-Russia war, but all of which were
consistent with the authors' conclusion; namely, that even those, much smaller, wars, would make things
vastly worse for both sides (both sides would enormously lose) and would also produce mass-starvation in
broader areas of the planet. Then, the article -- which, as noted, was current as of 2012 (not just as-of
those
earlier
periods) -- summarily stated, as follows, all work that had been done on the subject, up
till that time (and not since supplanted):
The new models show that a
full-scale nuclear conflict, in which 150 million tons of smoke are lofted into the upper atmosphere [the
minimum that a U.S.-Russia war would do], would drastically reduce precipitation by 45 percent on a
global average, while temperatures would fall for several years by 7 to 8 degrees Celsius [13 degrees
Fahrenheit] on average and would remain depressed by 4 degrees Celsius after a decade (Robock et al.,
2007a). Humans have not experienced temperatures this low since the last ice age (Figure 2). In important
grain-growing regions of the northern mid-latitudes [including both U.S. and Russia, as well as most of
Europe], precipitation would decline by up to 90 percent, and temperatures would fall below freezing and
remain there for one or more years.
The number of weapons needed to
initiate these climate changes falls within the range of arsenals planned for the coming decade (Toon et
al., 2008). For instance, the use of 4,000 weapons (the rough total for US and Russian arsenals in 2017
under New START), each with a yield of 100 kilotons (a typical yield for submarine weapons, but at the
low end for most nuclear weapons), against urban or industrial targets would produce about 180 million
tons of soot [30 million higher than that 150 million estimate]. A single US submarine carrying 144
weapons of 100-kiloton yield could produce 23 million tons of smoke if these weapons were used on densely
populated Chinese cities.
The effects of the nuclear contamination
itself are in addition to that estimation of the smoke-damages.
The U.S. weapons-manufacturers and their
agents might not want the public to know this (and so Wikipedia lies about it), but not only would both
sides lose from a U.S.-Russia nuclear war, but the entire planet would lose -- and drastically. The
cigarette-manufacturers long hid the harms of their business, but today's privatized weapons-manufacturing
firms dwarf the corruption and harm that the tobacco-industry perpetrated. The liars get well-paid, but the
truth is far grimmer, and far deadlier -- especially in this matter.
Unlike the CIA-Wikipedia fictionalized
version, M.A.D. wasn't "Soviet exploitation" -- it was instead the reality recognized by both sides, and is
the reality even today, despite what the U.S. weapons-manufacturers and their enormous sales-forces have
been deceiving their publics to believe since 2006.
Consequently, I infer, from the
evidence, that the leaders, of the operation to conquer Russia, are the controlling owners of America's
large 'defense' contractors, and of those individuals' largest non-U.S. customer, the Saud family. The
Sauds' biggest competitors in the international-energy markets (which are their own main markets) are:
Russia and Iran.
It makes sense for the Sauds to be the
#1 foreign buyers of American-made weapons. Not only do they get the weapons, but they get control over the
U.S. Government, which, in turn, determines which nations will be America's 'enemies' (the
'military-industrial complex's targets), and which nations will be America's 'allies' (the
'military-industrial complex's markets). The Sauds buy their allies wisely. Their business-plan includes, as
the most important ally, America's aristocracy; and (as a crucial ally to add greatly to the impact of
America's aristocracy, supplementing them to win the U.S. policies the Sauds need) Israel's aristocracy. The
combination of those two control-levers over the U.S. Government is powerful. Perhaps in the sudden global
cooling from nuclear winter, the Sauds' region will even become one of the world's greenest and most
fruitful. If anyone still exists then, at all.
Where does the EU, and where does the
anti-Russia NATO alliance, fit into this reality? Some of Europe's aristocrats are benefiting from alliance
with the U.S., but others are not. And, of course, America's aristocrats benefit enormously from having
their support -- i.e., from buying their support, bribing them in the legal ways. However, Europe's
aristocratic nazis weren't supposed to have been the winners of WW II. So: nazi Europeans are Europe's
enemies, not its friends -- just as nazi Americans aren't friends but instead enemies to the American people.
That hasn't changed, and can't change.
Only Europeans can decide what to do
regarding nazi Europeans. And only Americans can decide what to do regarding nazi Americans. (One idea might
be to refuse to vote for nazis, but, under existing circumstances, how would that even be possible?) Without
constant deceit, this situation couldn't exist anywhere. And if people are constantly deceived, they are
powerless. Deceit is the chief weapon of Operation Barbarossa II, the American aristocracy's war, not the
German aristocracy's war (which was more overtly physical -- military -- and was only secondarily based upon
deceiving the public).
When the Sauds became America's allies
in 1945 via the secret "Quincy Pact" between FDR and Saud, FDR probably expected that it would move Saudi
Arabia gradually toward democracy. What instead happened is that the Saud family and the losers of Operation
Barbarossa became carried forward toward ultimate victory over The West, by an alliance between the Saudi
and the American aristocracies. The Sauds and America's aristocrats won; FDR and his democratic legacy and
the American people ourselves, lost. The subterranean fascist forces turned out to be far more potent than
FDR imagined. Perhaps the OSS had been deceiving him.
Incidentally, any secret treaty
(including the Quincy Pact) is unConstitutional. None of this happened democratically. It was
a slow coup
. That's what created today's alliances, and today's targets.
To understand the Deep State, its basic
ideological principles need to be recognized. Under Hitler, hereditary rights and obligations were publicly
recognized; and democracy, the rule over a land by the residents on that land, was publicly condemned. Not
only the hereditary principle, but the imperialistic principle, the right of foreign conquest, was publicly
honored. The two principles go naturally together. The main reason why the Sauds and the other (all of them
fundamentalist Sunnis) Arab kings, want to conquer Iran, is that
Shia Islam denies the right of hereditary rule
. (This is also why in Syria, Bashar al-Assad claims no
hereditary right to rule; if he were to do otherwise, he'd violate Shia Islam and he would be rejected by
Iran.) The main reason why America's aristocracy wants to conquer Russia (other than the latter's
natural-resources wealth, which has always been a reason) is that
Vladimir Putin insists that only the residents in a land should possess sovereignty there, but the U.S. and
British aristocracies insist upon the right to conquer foreign lands
. As an ideology, nazism totally
affirms both the hereditary principle, and the imperialist principle. This is what the U.S.-Saudi alliance
likewise affirms. And that is why, for example, the CIA has always favored monarchies and opposed
democracies (or at least authentic ones, which the U.S. aristocracy cannot control).
I think this article goes much too far with the Nazi stuff but the simple fact that Saudi Arabia is the
third biggest military spender in the world, bigger than Russia, should inform people as to how much
influence Saudi has. Yet it is rarely mentioned.
The Saudis were just puppets installed by the British. It seems to me that the real "nazis", then and now,
are the banksters. Now as before they fund both sides of the conflicts that they initiate and after
digesting their profits they own what remains. As Tacitus wrote, solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. They
make a desert and call it peace
During WWII FDR was informed that in 30 years time USA
oil would be exhausted, so Harold L Ickes at the end of 1944 made Saudi Arabia THE USA's oil supplier.
To make the deal more official, FDR, in the beginning of 1945, received the Saud of the time aboard the
cruiser Quincy on the Bitter Lakes near the Suez canal.
As FDR said in his last speech to congress, seated, 'ten minutes with Saud had learned him more about
zionism than hundreds of letters from rabbi's'.
He also stated that he had promised Saud to limit jewish immigration into Palestine.
Both these statements do not seem to be in the offical record, they also were not in the text prepared for
him:
Robert E. Sherwood, 'Roosevelt und Hopkins', 1950, Hamburg (Roosevelt and Hopkins, New York, 1948)
In 1947, from memory, the then Saud published an interesting article on the folly of 'returning' in a USA
newspaper or periodical.
The Saudi regime just exists because of USA support, is my opinion.
Nothing special, all Muslim rulers in the ME are dependent on USA support, Quatar is the USA military
headquarters of the USA.
Iran is the exception.
Now it is possible that for the moment Israel is willing to cooperate with Saudi Arabia for the purpose
of destabilising the whole ME, present objective Iran.
The Iran regime quite well understands that Big Satan Sam controls a large part of the ME, thus they see the
Saudi regime as enemy.
If, if it succeeds, Iran has been destroyed, Israel is willing to cooperate with Saudi Arabia, I wonder.
Israel sees all neighbouring Muslim countries as threats.
If the Israeli destabilisation plans include the destabilisation of the European nations, more and more
people wonder.
Why does Soros want to force Muslim immigrants on Hungary ?
Brussels fears a new ME war, they fear the new wave of immigrants.
They do want these immigrants, a 2009 Brussels document states that the EU needs 60 million, but the
citizens of the member states more and more realise the burden of these migrants, they cost some € 30.000
per migrant per year in social security, thus it will lead to the collapse of social security, cultural
antagonies are more and more realised, as crime rates.
So a new ME war may be the end of the EU.
Therefore Brussels warned Netanyahu about Iran, also because of huge investments by European companies such
as Total in Iran.
I do hope that Trump will save us in Europe, also of course the people of Iran, from a new ME war.
He stated that immigration is destroying the European cultures.
Just want to add a comment on this Nazi-USA-Israel friendship. When I read the memoirs of Reinhardt Gehlen
(The Service, The Memoirs) there was one interesting place. Gehlen predicted in a meeting the exact time of
the Israel attack in the Six Day War some time before it. He comments in the book that he had sent to Egypt
old Nazi intelligence people and these people knew precisely what weapons Israel had before this 1967 war.
Apparently they knew of the coming attack (since Gehlen did) and that Israel would surely win if there came
a war (as German military, they could count the strengths), but they did not hint anything to the Egyptians
so that they could have had some planes in the air or tried to avoid a war (this failure to do so must have
been intentional).
This essay has an X-files feel to it. I find it hard to believe that Roosevelt and Truman didn't know that
Mega-Corporations were running the show.
Yes, there are a collusion of special interests. But no need for "spooky action at a distance" claims.
It's all very up front. This is why I don't buy the claim of Roosevelt and Truman being innocent puppets.
Roosevelt for sure came from the Oligarch class.
The POTUS effectively acts as a corporate lawyer for the Mega-Corporations whose job is to explain to the
MEGA-CEO just what they are able to get away with without provoking violent Peasant Revolt across the
US ..at any given point in time. The Ludlow massacre was a close one.
This illegal funding-source has been crucial for many of the CIA's operations, and makes bribes
untraceable.
Illegality is the main function of covert operations. If they were legal, there would be no reason for
them to be covert. Laws or legalisms (written behavior restrictions), are put in place by the powers that
be, whoever they are, to restrict the behavior of the masses. Not to restrict themselves.
Again. Ask yourself who you cannot criticize. Then you will know who they are. And have been, all along.
"Israeli arms are being
sent to a heavily armed neo-Nazi militia in Ukraine. IWI markets the Tavor as the "primary weapon" of the
Israeli special forces.
Fort, the Ukrainian state-owned arms company that produces the rifles under license, has a page about the
Tavor on its website. The Israel Weapon Industries logo also appears on its website, including on the "Our
Partners" page."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MywW6mOquSk
"A photo on Azov's website also shows a Tavor in the hands of one of the militia's officers. The rifles
are produced under licence from Israel Weapon Industries, and as such would have been authorized by the
Israeli government:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QopTJkI3_Fs
"... There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value. ..."
"... Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet. Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from Russia. ..."
In today's United States, the term "espionage" doesn't get too much use outside of some
specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage, but with regard to
Americans' own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they prefer the term
"intelligence." This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you look at
things.
First of all, US "intelligence" is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has
been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and
China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and
conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you
are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.
In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days
torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged
in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and
that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate
negotiating future spy swaps. In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that
torturing prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders,
not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as "Al Qaeda." There was
no such thing before US intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.
Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr.
Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own
spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They
poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no
evidence. There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies
working in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that
supposedly super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their "secret" lab in Porton Down
doesn't work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).
There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it
needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the
prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An
alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be
following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value.
A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the courts is
acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the source is the person on trial and
the method -- treason -- can be divulged without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper,
professional spies who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be double agents.
In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the professional thing to do is to try to
recruit him as a double agent or, failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for
injecting disinformation.
Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert
Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail
server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's
been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that
they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet.
Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from
Russia.
Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict Russian citizens in
Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court because of the following clause in the
Russian Constitution: "61.1 A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of
Russia or extradited to another state." Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars
to interpret this sentence, or he can just read it and weep. Yes, the Americans are doing their
best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is
nowhere near good enough.
That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into
the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has
more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing
that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by
Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight
face and clearly enjoyed the moment. He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a
clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the
Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were
forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save
American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are
the DNC perps not in jail?
Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate on criminal
investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted by Mueller. He even offered to
have Mueller sit in on the proceedings. But in return he wanted to question US officials who
may have aided and abetted a convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to
begin serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by the way, donated copious
amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary Clinton election campaign. In response, the US
Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians from questioning US officials. And instead of
issuing a valid request to have the twelve Russian spies interviewed, at least one US official
made the startlingly inane request to have them come to the US instead. Again, which part of
61.1 don't they understand?
The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional
definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to
provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of
defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint
notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US
"intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up."
The "intelligence" the US intelligence agencies provide can be anything but; in fact, the
stupider it is the better, because its purpose is allow unintelligent people to make
unintelligent decisions. In fact, they consider facts harmful -- be they about Syrian chemical
weapons, or conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden -- because facts require accuracy and rigor
while they prefer to dwell in the realm of pure fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual
objective is easily discernible.
Their objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its
allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom
aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and
overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they
are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and
so on. One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag
operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, à la fake East Gouta
chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is
perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were
harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly
forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure
confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a
conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.
Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He waffled.
A light-hearted answer would have been:
"What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying!
They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In
order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they
stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is
available, is an impossible task."
A more serious, matter-of-fact answer would have been:
"The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig
the outcome of the 2017 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet
to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can
legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their
claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact."
And a hardcore, deadpan answer would have been:
"The US intelligence services swore an oath to uphold the US Constitution, according to
which I am their Commander in Chief. They report to me, not I to them. They must be loyal to
me, not I to them. If they are disloyal to me, then that is sufficient reason for their
dismissal."
But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake
answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake
intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and
ultimately futile conflicts. Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a
continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia
while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came
together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria.
The total cost of wars so far this century for the US is reported to be $4,575,610,429,593.
Divided by the 138,313,155 Americans who file tax returns (whether they actually pay any tax is
too subtle a question), it works out to just over $33,000 per taxpayer. If you pay taxes in the
US, that's your bill so far for the various US intelligence "oopsies."
The 16 US intelligence agencies have a combined budget of $66.8 billion, and that seems like
a lot until you realize how supremely efficient they are: their "mistakes" have cost the
country close to 70 times their budget. At a staffing level of over 200,000 employees, each of
them has cost the US taxpayer close to $23 million, on average. That number is totally out of
the ballpark! The energy sector has the highest earnings per employee, at around $1.8 million
per. Valero Energy stands out at $7.6 million per. At $23 million per, the US intelligence
community has been doing three times better than Valero. Hats off! This makes the US
intelligence community by far the best, most efficient collapse driver imaginable.
There are two possible hypotheses for why this is so.
First , we might venture to guess that these 200,000 people are grossly incompetent and
that the fiascos they precipitate are accidental. But it is hard to imagine a situation where
grossly incompetent people nevertheless manage to funnel $23 million apiece, on average,
toward an assortment of futile undertakings of their choosing. It is even harder to imagine
that such incompetents would be allowed to blunder along decade after decade without being
called out for their mistakes.
Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community
has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial,
economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and
futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever
known.
How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable
definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at
it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better
than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be
perpetual liars."
"... The idea behind offset agreements is simple: When a country buys weapons from a firm overseas, it pumps a large amount of money out of its economy, instead of investing in its own defense industry or in other domestic projects. So to make large weapons deals more attractive, arms companies offer programs to "offset" that effect. As part of a weapons package, they often sign an agreement to invest in the country's economy, either in defense or civilian sectors. ..."
"... According to an email from Clarke, the UAE accepted unpaid offset obligations as cash payments to a large financial firm called Tawazun Holding. Tawazun sent the $20 million to a UAE think tank called the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research . ECSSR then began sending that money to the Middle East Institute, a prestigious D.C. think tank that has a history of promoting arms sales to Gulf dictatorships. ... ..."
"... So essentially, in a roundabout way, the UAE took money from international firms that was meant for economic development and funneled it to a supportive think tank in the United States. ..."
The United Arab Emirates created a "slush fund" using money meant for domestic economic development
projects and funneled it to a high-profile think tank in the United States, emails obtained by The
Intercept show.
Last week, The Intercept
reported that the UAE gave a $20 million grant to the Middle East Institute, flooding a well-regarded
D.C. think tank with a monetary grant larger than its
annual budget
. According to an email from Richard Clarke, MEI's chairman of the board, the UAE got the money from
offset investments -- development investments by international companies that are made as part of
trade agreements.
The idea behind offset agreements is simple: When a country buys weapons from a firm overseas,
it pumps a large amount of money out of its economy, instead of investing in its own defense industry
or in other domestic projects. So to make large weapons deals more attractive, arms companies offer
programs to "offset" that effect. As part of a weapons package, they often sign an agreement to invest
in the country's economy, either in defense or civilian sectors.
Offsets provide a way to sell weapons at inflated prices, when companies offer juicier offset
packages. Critics say the lack of transparency in how offset investments are carried out leaves a
window open for a form of legalized corruption. The emails lift a veil on what has long been an obscure
element of the arms trade.
According to an
email from Clarke, the UAE accepted unpaid offset obligations as cash payments to a large financial
firm called Tawazun Holding. Tawazun sent the $20 million to a UAE think tank called the
Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research . ECSSR then began sending that money to the
Middle East Institute, a prestigious D.C. think tank that has a history of
promoting arms sales to Gulf dictatorships. ...
So essentially, in a roundabout way, the UAE took money from international firms that was meant
for economic development and funneled it to a supportive think tank in the United States.
"... By contrast, Americans, who pretend to fetishize individualism, are conformists. Dissent is not well tolerated at work or social spheres. And its only gotten worse as media fragmentation and political strategies based on hitting voter hot buttons means that many people are deeply invested in their political views, whether they are well founded or not. Punitive unfriending and other forms of ostracism have become a new normal. ..."
"... She said the "fake news" campaign has been extremely effective in discrediting non-mainstream views. And since her friends are also PhDs, she was also frustrated at their refusal to consider evidence, or entertain the idea that their preferred sources were biased. ..."
"... One approach she has used that worked was to find information from other sources they could not reject, like Reuters and the Associated Press, that had not been covered in the New York Times or better yet, contradicted what they wanted to believe, such as a Reuters story describing how Germany opposed sanctions against Russia. But she clearly found it taxing to find these informational nuggets. ..."
"... Saying early on that Hillary was an awful alternative to Trump can lower the temperature considerably. Going on to talk about issues and staying away from Trump bashing is a follow through. ..."
"... Speaking as a member of the clergy, I have a suggestion about how to use the teachings of Jesus to reach Team Blue, whether or not they subscribe to Christianity in some form. ..."
"... One of the most radical of Jesus' teachings, one that is often given lip service but is extremely difficult to put into practice, is the commandment that we love our enemies and pray for them ..."
"... I am increasingly encountering extremism as the base line for discussions, really arguments, in my daily encounters. This comes from both ends of the political spectrum. This I perceive as a sign of desperation. ..."
"... Fair enough, Chuck, but I think you might be missing a very important bit: the fact that many people who are otherwise staunch rank-and-file supporters might also have an otherwise invisible breakpoint, or fault line. I say this as a former Dem Party supporter, who did the full song and dance – supported Hillary, supported Kerry before that, and was a total devotee to Obama. I was as tied to the Dem party as anyone not getting a paycheck could be, and when Obama won, I was elated. I thought that things would really change. ..."
"... The Financial Crisis was a rude, rude awakening. The pretty speeches meant little, and did even less. If anyone had a hand in setting fire to my generally moderate viewpoint, it was Obama himself, his worship for Wall Street, and his inability to put up a fight about anything. It was a weird time for me, politically, but 2008-2016 was what set the stage, while the last set of primaries only confirmed what I had felt in my gut for many years. ..."
"... Listen is first. Would you expect to walk into any fundamentalist church or mosque and change minds? Conversation among strangers gets more specific along commonalities until it hits a split point, then drops down a level. If nothing in common, there's always the weather. That's universal. ..."
"... On Russia – the biggest "liberal" fake new angle for years now – I say "Not one single piece of evidence has ever been presented that Russia meddled in the election. Not one single piece. The same agencies that said WMD in Iraq are now telling us Russia meddled. This is Democrat's WMD in Iraq moment." ..."
"... The Making of the President 2016 ..."
"... my point is that she enforces dogma and insinuates disloyalty in any heretic. ..."
"... It would be great if the one group of unthinking believers cancelled out the other group of unthinking believers, but of course the adherents are so blind to reality that that can't see that the difference between Bush's Goldman Sachs' Treasury Secretary and Obama Goldman Sachs' Treasury Secretary is .???? ..."
"... I wonder, sadly, if "engaging with liberals" might be, in fact, a lost cause. Struggling to find common cause with the delusional amidst the collapse of empire, environmental catastrophe, and financial ruin might not be the best use of limited resources. ..."
"... Americans, who pretend to fetishize individualism, are conformists ..."
"... fairness and decency ..."
"... Arguing with entrenched people is a lost cause but sarcasm = mercilessly tearing right into their own hypocrisy does the work of shaming them for a while, especially if you make the point about a topic they are virtue signalling about. These people do not have a policy idea in mind, they are pure virtue signallers. ..."
An oft-repeated bit of
advice in America is never to talk about religion or politics. Sadly, the reason is that Americans are dreadful at talking across
political lines. When I lived in Australia in the early 2000s and adopted a pub, by contrast, I found the locals to be eager to debate
the topics of the day yet remain civil about it. That may be because Australians in generally have mastered the art of being confrontational
by lacing it with humor and/or self deprecation.
By contrast, Americans, who pretend to fetishize individualism, are conformists. Dissent is not well tolerated at work or social
spheres. And its only gotten worse as media fragmentation and political strategies based on hitting voter hot buttons means that
many people are deeply invested in their political views, whether they are well founded or not. Punitive unfriending and other forms
of ostracism have become a new normal.
And now that we have anger over Trump directed at not the best or most useful objects, like Russia! Russia! as opposed to his packing
of the Federal bench, or his environmental policies, or even his push to privatize Federal parks, a lot of educated people expect,
even demand, that their friends be vocal supporters of the #Resistance.
For instance, at the San Francisco meetup, I spent a fair bit of time with a woman who had held elected offices in her community.
She was clearly distressed by the fact (without using such crass terms) that her friends had turned into pod people. They all believe
that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker are authoritative. When she tried arguing with them about what they've
read in these outlets, they shoot back, "Oh, so you believe in fake news?" She said the "fake news" campaign has been extremely effective
in discrediting non-mainstream views. And since her friends are also PhDs, she was also frustrated at their refusal to consider evidence,
or entertain the idea that their preferred sources were biased.
One approach she has used that worked was to find information from other sources they could not reject, like Reuters and the Associated
Press, that had not been covered in the New York Times or better yet, contradicted what they wanted to believe, such as a Reuters
story describing how Germany opposed sanctions against Russia. But she clearly found it taxing to find these informational nuggets.
She also said they would not consider foreign sources, even the BBC or Der Spiegel or Le Monde.
Readers also discussed their frustrations in Links over the weekend. For instance:
"Shame" looks to me like the word of the week. I've heard from liberal/Democrat friends that they are "ashamed" of this
President. They are embarrassed by his behavior at NATO and Helsinki. I asked, "Who are you embarassed in front of? What does
that mean?" Then I got a link to a Thomas Friedman article .
I'm not sure how to answer my friends with grace. I don't want to be condescending by saying "Really, you read Tom Friedman
without a red pen in your hand?" What should I say? "I had no idea you were a globalist although you are kind of anti labor,
right?" Any suggestions for talking to Dems about this last week?
My usual answer is "I don't know why we need NATO now that the Cold War is over. Bush I promised Gorbachev not to expand
NATO into the former Warsaw Pact countries. Putin wanted to join NATO. Russia, especially the populous West is more European
than Asian. So why don't we have Russia join NATO. Wouldn't that solve the problem?
on talking to democrats. LOL. you and me both. Haldol as a prophylactic, perhaps. The Berners are a lot easier but the "mainstream" dem people have been difficult to talk
to for some time too many triggers and blind spots. They've become as reactionary as the tea party.. The aversion to figuring
out what we're FOR must be overcome.
Montanahaven, great post, and I don't know the answer on how to talk to Dems or the general gammit of duopoly supporters, but
I have been working on refining a technique I heard Tim Black talking about: "drop a few lines, and walk away". I am working
on inserting a few judgment free comments without argument, however it requires patience in listening to the ramble of the
other side. A few examples in my recent life:
Hillary Dem: "But Mueller found Russia was hacking. Blah Blah, Blah, 17 intelligence agencies"
Me: Did you know in 2003 Mueller helped lead us into Iraq and testified before Congress pushing WMD intel. [I did not
follow with anything about along the lines of "Is this guy trustworthy."]
Trump Repub: "People are killing each other in the streets, blah blah freeloaders, murder rate going up, blah
blah, this country is not the same, what happened to our country"
Me: "People are desperate, Americans are addicted
to opiates and will get it however they can, but someone peddling marajuana will get 10 years in prison, but the Sackler
family who wantonly pushed opiates on all of America are worth billions" [I could have argued that American crime rate has
gone down since the 80's, but I just wanted to divert their attention to a part of the current problem, not to start an
argument]
A few weeks later these folks repeated these talking points as their own, which is a win in my book. I have been trying
to drop stuff as subtly as possible and hope they find their own way. People get more entrenched on their viewpoint while
arguing, and more words often means less average impact per word. My sample size is admittedly low right now, so I will
continue observation.
Another approach, although it takes a great deal of patience, is to go Socratic and ask the true believers in your circle to provide
the support for their views. You may still be stuck with the problem that they regard people like Louise Mensch or Timothy Synder
or (gah) James Clapper as unimpeachable.
Of course, not everyone is dogmatic. On my way back to New York, I sat next to a Google engineer (PhD, possibly even faculty member
at Cornell since he'd gotten some major grant funding for his research, now on an H1-B visa and on track to have to leave the US
in the next year+ due to Trump changes in the program) who held pretty orthodox views. He wanted to chat and we were able to discuss
the Dems and even Russia. He even thanked me for the conversation as he was getting off the plane. But I knew I was lucky to find
someone who wasn't deeply invested in his views, or perhaps merely not invested in winning arguments.
Any further tips or observations would be helpful to everyone. Things will only get more heated as the midterms approach.
This is true. This is why I like Hamford's idea of information nuggets. You have to let people think you are on their side
while they come around to your ideas more or less on their own. If you give someone a good nugget that they take in as their own,
then you have more leverage to convince them of something grander.
And listen. Just listen. You don't have to agree with people to give them time and space to be heard. They are more likely
to reciprocate if you do.
Letting people "talk it out" works for strangers and acquaintances. They'll eventually run out of road or realize they've monopolized
the conversation and give you a chance to react, even if only out of politeness.
I find closer friends and family will chew your ear off mercilessly, and once they start, you're trapped. If you start poking
holes in their beliefs after they've gone on for a while, they'll feel betrayed. I find it best to say "that's nice" and walk
away to maintain your sanity. Don't mess with tribalism, you'll always lose.
Ha ha these posts resonate with me – my mother is a committed Rachel Maddow watcher and my best friend is a Trump supporter.
And both of them are otherwise very nice people and rather similar in terms of personality, interests, and outlook aside from
red team/blue team foolishness.
What I like to do with both of them is use the term BushBamaTrump. And at the slightest bit of pushback just jump right in
to all the things that have been done more or less the same under all three. It never gets through and you really can't change
people, but still. Gives me a bit of pleasure to at least throw a little wrench into their silly partisan blinkered world view
If you can't shift out of the partisan mentality, then all hope is really lost. My brain just does not compute this way and
I find it really hard to understand how someone else's does.
I find it difficult to break this construct without coming off as arrogant or cynical. I readily admit this feature in
myself could be a bug.
jump right in to all the things that have been done more or less the same under all three
Yes. Even though disagreements appear to be about issues, there's an underlying personal partisanship that often drives conversational
breakdown. This is particularly true for people on the right. Saying early on that Hillary was an awful alternative to Trump
can lower the temperature considerably. Going on to talk about issues and staying away from Trump bashing is a follow through.
Hamford's approach is one that I have used with the people I live around(supermajority Repubs, altho much of that is habit
and/or single issue apathy is the only growing demograph)
Introducing doubt, "short, sharp shock", and then they worry over it for a day or a week, and later they seem to have incorporated
it into their weltanshauung.
That is, indeed, a win.
I've much more experience, given my habitus(central texas wilderness) with culture jamming and otherwise undermining the orthodoxy
of republicans. To talk about important things with them, one must avoid numerous trigger words that cause salivation or violent
conniptions.
Finding these rhetorical paths has been enlightening, to say the least. like talking about unionism by using the Chamber of
Commerce as an example, or playing on their own memories of the Grange or the Farmer's Co-Op or even going directly at the cognitive
dissonance, as in "hey, wait a minute if we have freedom of religion, aren't I by necessity free to be a Buddhist?"
Similarly, I've found that using the language of Jesus gets results, unless my interlocutor is too far gone into the whole
warrior Christ thing. I'm still working on how to do this with Team Blue.
Like with the R's, the D's have an emotional attachment, and a psychological need, to avoid believing that their party is in
any way less than pristine and above board.
Similarly, I remember a discussion of the Puma's (Hillary's 08 supporters) wherein they were so caught up with Herstory(!)
that an attack on (or even criticism of) Hillary was an attack on their Identity.
Stages of Grief applies the acceptance we wish for is a big step for most people, because the manifest problems are so huge
and complex and intertwined that acknowledging them feels like giving in and even giving up.
It's a big problem, and I thank you for addressing it.
The forces arrayed against civil discourse are huge and well funded(which is, in itself, a sort of indictment and indicator)
Speaking as a member of the clergy, I have a suggestion about how to use the teachings of Jesus to reach Team Blue, whether
or not they subscribe to Christianity in some form.
One of the most radical of Jesus' teachings, one that is often given lip service but is extremely difficult to put into
practice, is the commandment that we love our enemies and pray for them.
I have come to believe that the Russiagate attacks on Trump are driven not by reason but by pure hatred, a sin which always
blinds. While there are many reasons to oppose much of Trump's policies and actions, we must not allow ourselves to wallow in
personal hatred of the man himself. If Jesus doesn't work here for some of Team Blue, MLK, who taught the same message, is an
excellent alternative. Take away the visceral hatred of Trump, and he will be opposed, much more reasonably, ethically, and effectively.
I agree: whenever possible, Trump the individual should be ignored, since too many people seem unable to separate the man from
the systems, processes and interests in play.
When it's all about Trump, he wins. You'd think people would have realized that by now, but take a look at Alternet, where
it's literally "All Trump All The Time," and you see how trapped in their fears and illusions liberals are.
As Lambert and others insist, make it about issues and policy; that's how people can (eventually, hopefully) be reached over
time. As the saying goes, they lose their minds in crowds/herds, and will only regain their sanity one at a time.
The added benefit is that ignoring Trump's provocations goes a ways toward depriving him of oxygen. Ignoring him is one of
the few ways to drive him crazy(er), takes away much of his effectiveness, and provides the personal satisfaction of being able
to do something against him, even if just passively.
I'm really hopeful that Michael Hudson's upcoming book on the roots of Christianity will open up a whole new conversation for
people of all views, particularly the role of debt and 'what we owe to one another'. Or when we should, and what we shouldn't,
owe one another.
IMVHO, Trump is the apotheosis of a debt-based form of greed, which conventional politics mostly exalts and exacerbates, but
doesn't seem to really understand -- and papers over its social costs [see also: FoxNews, CNBC]. In this form of (leveraged) debt,
the debtor owes absolutely nothing to society, irrespective of the social dislocations that his/her debt creates.
I find that people who get caught up in Dem/Repub conflicts are unreachable on political terms, but if the conversation shifts
to economics, to outrage at financial shenanigans, to who 'owes' what to whom, the emotional tone shifts and the conversations
are much more engaged.
The R's that I know tend to affiliate with 'lenders', but have an abhorrence of debt. They seem weirdly incapable of grappling
with the social and political implications of debt. To them, debt is a sign of weakness. I find myself struggling to grapple with
their worldview on the general topic of 'debt'.
The D's that I know tend to at least be able to think about debt as a means to an end: an education, a home, a business idea.
But they seem to experience debt as a form of guilt, or powerlessness, a lot of the time. The people in my life who fall into
this category are very careful with money, but they are also capable of carrying on a conversation about social meaning of debt.
I don't think it is any accident that the two most articulate, informed voices in current politics are on the 'left', and their
expertise and focus is on debt: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I suspect that is because debt is one of the most fundamental
social-political-cultural issues of our time.
I do come across as a bit of a nutter, and bloodthirsty to boot. However, in my defense, I am increasingly encountering
extremism as the base line for discussions, really arguments, in my daily encounters. This comes from both ends of the political
spectrum. This I perceive as a sign of desperation.
The Third Way 'faux left' movement is running out of steam as the inequality that it was designed to enable takes hold, and
disenchants those that the movement required to at least be neutral in order for it to do its 'work.' The Right wing has always
cultivated a sense of being oppressed in order to cultivate the sense of 'belonging' to a 'special' and 'chosen' people. I have
been called "dirty socialist" and even less salubrious terms so many times, I've developed somewhat of a thick skin to the insult.
The problem with that is that those who are doing the insulting are dead serious in their obloquy. This can escalate into actions.
Therein lies the rub. the step from verbal abuse to physical abuse must be guarded against and, if encountered, short circuited.
Hence, the comment about the probable bad results of trying to crash someone's SHTF refuge.
I have worked with several ex-cons during my work life. Jail is the pressure cooker of power relations for Western society.
All the ex-cons said that threats, even when coming from obviously superior physical specimens must be responded to quickly and
decisively. As one man put it, "Even if you have to take a beat down. Make the point that you will fight. Once is usually enough.
After that, people in jail will leave you alone." Another man related the tale of a small man in prison who was being groomed
for 'bitchdom' by a much bigger man. "The big guy poked the little guy in the chest and started to say something. The little guy
grabbed the finger and broke it. Then this tiny tornado tore into the big guy. Man! Nobody f -- -d with the little guy again.
He was crazy everybody said. Some of the older cons said that he was smart."
It may not be relevant yet, but America certainly does seem to be sliding into a full blown Police State. As such, the etiquette
of prison is slowly being imposed on the civil society. Pure power relations are becoming the norm. This manifests in our more
genteel disputations.
So, my present reply to people who take me to task for not voting for Her Royal Highness is to say; "Thank you for giving us Trump.
Without your gallant efforts, we would have had a decent government, under Bernie." Then, as one of the above comments suggests,
I walk away, and make sure our Urban Bug In Bag is ready.
That is a frightening observation and I believe it is unfortunately accurate. Relations in the workplace certainly have resembled
this since 2008. Civil society was next.
A brilliant compaction. And nice (fascinating being even better desc.) to see the longer version as well. Skynet apparently
liked it too.
My poor wife has somewhat 'come around' (been dragged along) because many of the predictions (that I get from NC)seem to materialize
in one way or another, but on the flip side we have lost what we thought were real friends (fortunately few), largely because
of my inability to shut up (at least I don't do it until asked some hard to get out of question) combined with insufficient command
of a given subject – alas, all given subjects it seems.
We do find out who our 'real' friends are when we go a little 'off the reservation' with subjects having a significant emotional
content. I have found that I also discover personal biases by observing what subjects being 'rejected' by others give me pain.
I have been surprised at some of my personal biases. Don't be too hard on yourself about those things that you need to study more.
Everyone has those kinds of subjects. I certainly do. Yesterday's thread on the lowly apostrophe was such a wake up call to me.
It seems to me that the longer the person has supported the Democratic Party the more they are resistant to changing their
views. The affiliation comes to resemble that of a football fan to her favorite team. People who've changed their political affiliation
over the course of their lives, and especially those who have done so relatively recently, are more open-minded and willing to
consider evidence contrary to their current views.
Not to quibble, but your observation takes on the appearance of a 'chicken or egg' problem. As the Political Fundamentalists
showed, politics is a long term game. That's one reason that Lamberts comment about the Democrat party and their 'missing' ground
game is so pertinent.
Fair enough, Chuck, but I think you might be missing a very important bit: the fact that many people who are otherwise
staunch rank-and-file supporters might also have an otherwise invisible breakpoint, or fault line. I say this as a former Dem
Party supporter, who did the full song and dance – supported Hillary, supported Kerry before that, and was a total devotee to
Obama. I was as tied to the Dem party as anyone not getting a paycheck could be, and when Obama won, I was elated. I thought that
things would really change.
The Financial Crisis was a rude, rude awakening. The pretty speeches meant little, and did even less. If anyone had a hand
in setting fire to my generally moderate viewpoint, it was Obama himself, his worship for Wall Street, and his inability to put
up a fight about anything. It was a weird time for me, politically, but 2008-2016 was what set the stage, while the last set of
primaries only confirmed what I had felt in my gut for many years.
I think there are many out there, struggling like I did. They'll show. Eventually. I'd say that the famous line about the center
not holding applies here, but I'm likely missing a ton of context.
My 'turn' was when Nancy P. swiped "impeachment" off the gilded table in 2006, Right • After • The • House • Elections. So,
when shortly there after, while listening to Obama give his inaugural address, all I could say was "we'll see ??" . Then came
his cabinet appointments, and from then on the d-party lost me with their passive-aggressive "We'll have to $ee what's in it AFTER
WE VOTED FOR IT" FU tactics.
Mediation in kindergarten words: Listen, Talk, Ask, Agree, Write.
Listen is first. Would you expect to walk into any fundamentalist church or mosque and change minds? Conversation among
strangers gets more specific along commonalities until it hits a split point, then drops down a level. If nothing in common, there's
always the weather. That's universal.
Which blogger was it, trying to change the world when he realized he was only reaching the 5% who thought like he did, & stopped?
Think how hard it is to undo economics class learnin' and understand MMT.
Politically, these are not going to be new customers. I can't find number of new voters for AOC, but turnout was less than
1 in 5. She gained trust by knocking on doors. You can't reach the frontal lobes if the amygdala is signalling threat.
If you find points of agreement, you can move the conversation to universal. Then to concrete and material.
This dovetails with hamsher above, whose defiines success as hearing his talking points adopted by those he has dropped them
on. The key is to be nonjudgmental .
there are two statements which have worked in my recent exchanges with liberals:
1)
Obama has bombed more nations than Bush
2) no one person did more to put donald trump in office than hillary clinton (extreme, indisputable malfeasance against sanders
in the primary)
although many seem completely ready to discard 'russian collusion' i still hear 'why is he trying to be friends with putin?'
on a regular basis.
any criticism of obamacare is immediately discarded, even though many know someone who has health insurance but doesn't have
health care.
i keep trying to argue that democrats are best served if abortion is constantly under threat. that most democratic politicians
strongly prefer this situation, as it would otherwise be close to impossible to motivate people to get out to the polls. (or,
likewise, republicans and gun rights) so far, this doesn't seem to work.
calling out tesla as a nonsense scam is working pretty well, though. (monorail!)
also, pointing out that new research shows that
wifi/cellphone exposure increases miscarriage risk is starting to gain traction. i cringe everytime i see a toddler playing
with an i-pad. (obviously not a liberal issue, but it helps to dispel the fog of complacency)
Here is my general approach, good or bad towards Hillary "liberal" or establishment think or whatever you may call it. I think
it helps put the burden of proof to the fake news'ers
On Russia – the biggest "liberal" fake new angle for years now – I say "Not one single piece of evidence has ever been
presented that Russia meddled in the election. Not one single piece. The same agencies that said WMD in Iraq are now telling us
Russia meddled. This is Democrat's WMD in Iraq moment."
I ask them to "show me the money" if they can point to any evidence to support the claim Russia hacked. Depending on how much
time I have, I can shoot it down (like the click bait social media example that is full of holes) but there is so much non-sense
out their I am always up on the latest.
Re: discussing what's happening with people I just gave up. Partially because I couldn't keep calm in the face of being labeled
a "white cis gendered Russia loving hate monger." Partially because the medium for debate my friends and I were using was Facebook,
which is really not a great tool for serious discussions. Partially because it took so much time and energy and garnered no rewards.
Most of my circle of friends ardently believe the following:
(1) the Democrats are significantly different from the Republicans and suggesting otherwise is lying. This gets you the most
violent reactions from most people.
(2) all or most of what Trump is doing is a significant departure from the Obama administration.
(3) withholding votes or voting for other candidates than "electable Democrats" is equivalent to voting for fascists.
(4) US citizens who live in depressed economic areas are to blame for their own problems because they vote against their own
interests and won't move to better places.
(5) increased immigration, increased globalism, and free trade agreements like TPP are policies we should support.
(6) Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc. are not monopolies and anti-trust law should not be used to break them
up.
(7) solutions to inequality in public education should not include busing children from poor areas to wealthy areas. Or vice
versa.
(8) our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan must continue.
(9) we need identity politics in this country.
(10) the world would be better off if Hillary was president. P.S. she was robbed by Russians, misogynists, and electoral manipulation
from the fascistic Trump campaign.
When I try to mention that all of those points are debatable at best, and admittedly I do that with varying degrees of success,
they do not accept it. Any of it. They find discussions of what happened during the Obama administration which either lead to,
or was similar to, what Trump is doing now tiring and painful. Mentioning how poorly the HRC campaign was run, how HRC laundered
money through local state dem orgs, the wasted millions in consultants, the lack of campaigning in key states, globalism, etc.
get you a soulful vomiting of Russia/Misogyny/Fascism. They will ask why you focus on the Democrats, and not the Republicans.
It's the Republicans fault we're here and their voters deserve rock suffer.
Humor or analogy doesn't work on this topic either. If you mention something like both parties blame outsiders for their troubles,
except Republicans blame people from Mexico and Democrats blame people from Michigan, you get angry stares. If you mention both
parties want to go back in time to a better, safer place, except for Republicans it's an imaginary 1950 something and for Democrats
is an imaginary 2006, you'll end up drinking alone.
I realized that the only thing I was doing was aggravating my friends and hurting my cause. They're all too high strung to
have discussions. They don't want to consider that the status quo ante that they think was great was only "great" for a select
portion of the country. They might have admitted that progressives and leftists weren't happy with the Obama administration in
2016. They have no space for that kind of thinking now. So I logged out of FB and Twitter, deleted the apps and spend the time
doing other things. I will talk to people about this stuff if they're interested and if it's in person. I stop when I see their
body language shift to 'uncomfortable.'
The other thing I've been doing is working to support local candidates who believe in th kind of policies I want to see in
my community. I think that's a much better way to use my time and political energy.
Good luck to anyone who wants to try and fight this battle with words. No one is reading or listening anymore. They just want
red meat and a torch to join their preferred mob. And with what's happening if you post something a boss or other person finds
objectionable, I strongly recommend the virtues of self censorship and keeping your mouth shut until this time passes.
These were all people who I know and associate with off line. What surprised and saddened me was that they couldn't leave an
argument behind.
I can leave an FB discussion on FB. I have other topics to discuss when I'm with my friends. They can't do that anymore.
It was that fact more than anything that lead me to believe there was no benefit in trying to post articles or participate
in social media discussions. No one is listening. Everyone in my socal circle is feeling too raw to have measured discussions
about how we got here and where we could go next.
I've experienced the same from long time friends or who I thought were friends. For months after the election all they could
talk about was 'Hillary was robbed.' I let them vent because it seemed like a grieving time for them. After six months or so,
when they still could not talk about anything else even if I tried shifting the conversation to family or gardening or something,
then I knew they were caught up in more than grieving. I'm starting to wonder if this is the fury of people who suspect they've
been conned and are determined to prove they were not conned. 'The most qualified candidate ever' was a terrible campaigner.
From 2016: https://www.businessinsider.com/clinton-losing-wisconsin-results-2016-11
My outlook now is that people determined to prove they were not conned then will need to find their way back to calmness.
In Roger Stone's book, The Making of the President 2016 , there was a passage about people, many of them on the left,
who view those who disagree with them as truly evil people.
What comes next explains a lot about what we've seen since the election. Quoting Stone:
"This is a very immature worldview that produces no coping skills."
Yes! Plz someone tell me a way to discuss immigration at the border and separating families. The word on the street that 10k
of those 12k children being separated were ACTUALLY being 'trafficked' and WITHOUT their REAL parents in the first place.
There are a lot of Dem Nuts on facebook that harrassed the heck out of me and since I posted #walkaway, as an astute BERNIE
supporter, this has SHOCKED many and I been unfriended 5 times.
8 million MISSING children and our FBI has only reunited/found 526?
Please don't post such serious charges about trafficked children without sources. As far as I know not even the Trump administration
in its own defense is claiming to have identified trafficked children at those levels.
I'm going to try to put together a comment later today about what we know of the current situation, the need to understand
what was happening pre-Ttrump, and what may be happening to the children now after separation. It will probably be on the links
thread, as it's not directly related to the coping issue of this thread.
So, I made the below comments in today's LINKS. But I will emphasize a different aspect here – in the Links comment my point
was the reporter was wrong (about Obama representing the 1% – I think he did). Here my point is that she enforces dogma and
insinuates disloyalty in any heretic.
fresno dan
July 24, 2018 at 7:25 am
Why So Many Reporters Are Missing the Political Story of the Decade Washington Monthly. Versailles 1788.
Frankly, someone needs to tell this guy (i.e., Bernie Sanders) to sit down and shut up for a while. Reinforcing the notion
that a party that was led by Barack Obama for eight years has merely been representing the one percent contributes to the divide
and reinforces Republican lies.
====================================================
party that was led by Barack Obama for eight years has merely been representing the one percent
BESIDES believing that Obama DIDN'T represent the 1%, I'm sure this reporter believes:
1. The earth is flat
2. Elvis is alive
3. The living head of John F. Kennedy is kept at the CIA
4. There are 2 Melania Trumps
5. that Hillary got more white women voters than Trump .
other examples are welcome
on that inability to confront the less stellar record of Obama: it's the same process that happened(and is happening, I'd argue)
on the Right .and that happens, over and over, when science chips out another block in the wall of religious certainty.
Fear of the disenchantment of having been wrong, or fooled they'll resist tooth and claw from admitting being descendants of apes
.even when they feel/know in their secret hearts that it's true.
With the Dems(non-Berner subspecies), it's acute right now.
They must defend the paradigm at all costs, because to do otherwise is to open the door to a frightening and incomprehensible
world that would demand their attention and resolve. For so long, the ire was safely directed at the Right it's their fault we
can't have nice things, they are a regressive existential threat, omgomgomg. This is rendered tolerable by the belief that the
Dems are their team, on their side and the polar opposite of the hateful Right.
This latter set of assumptions was thrown into existential even ontological doubt by numerous reports, surveys and even by plain
old look-out-the-window observation.
The belief and the Reality couldn't be reconciled(America is not already great for a whole bunch of folks) and the Nature of the
newly perceived Reality was so ugly, and so huge, that they recoil into paradigm defense.
a giant edifice of bullshit is inherently unstable, it turns out.
The challenge, as I see it, is to acknowledge that the Way We Do Things is falling apart, and that it should fall apart, if
we really believe all the high minded rhetoric we perform to each other and then to try to figure out what system/paradigm we'd
like to replace it to use the chaos and destruction of the trump era to our advantage.
So more and more, in lib/dem/prog* social spaces, I'm asking "what are we for?"
(* the confusion of tongues here is both instructive and disheartening and encouraging(!). asking folks to define such things
is resulting in less fury and spittle and froth, and more with either silence or thought and honest questioning. at least in my
little circles )
I can't beat what notabanker said:
notabanker
July 24, 2018 at 8:26 am
If you can't shift out of the partisan mentality, then all hope is really lost. My brain just does not compute this way and I
find it really hard to understand how someone else's does ..
==============================================
"Independent" self sufficient Americans .join groups called political parties that as a rite of passage evidently require the
adherents to believe idiotic, inconsistent things.
But another thing is that the number of people who even belong to political parties isn't that great. But they set the agenda.
It would be great if the one group of unthinking believers cancelled out the other group of unthinking believers, but of
course the adherents are so blind to reality that that can't see that the difference between Bush's Goldman Sachs' Treasury Secretary
and Obama Goldman Sachs' Treasury Secretary is .????
NOW, of course there were real differences between Obama and Bush .Obama droned a LOT more.
Thank you, Yves and the community. This situation applies in the UK, too. It's amazing to meet people who took time off to
protest against Trump, but won't against homelessness or austerity.
Yes, the Irish media used to be moderately independent, but they are getting in line too. Over the weekend I nearly threw my
copy of the Irish Times away in disgust at reading some of the articles from writers I'd consider pretty clear minded normally.
They are just gradually absorbing the message by osmosis I think.
When someone here rants about Trump, I usually say something like 'well,what exactly has he done thats worse than anything
Obama did to, say for example, Libya, or Honduras?' I'd love to say I get a thoughtful response, but thats rarely the case. Interestingly,
I find that its the people who profess themselves as non-political or don't read the newspapers much who are more open to discussion.
I'm sure that a lot of NC readers have, over time, experienced some amount of pain associated with the dissolution of long-held
beliefs surrounding the American dream, and faith in our economic, and political systems abilities to ' self-correct
'.
It's been very painful to realize that ' things ' are not going to get better if we simply vote for the other team.
Over many decades, both the ' other teams ' have pointed fingers at each other and invited us to believe that our
problems originated on the other side of the fence, when in reality, as many of us now understand, our two political parties have
all the while, worked in collusion to forward the interests of the rich and powerful, the result of which has been wide spread,
and extreme economic hardship for most of us.
This failure of our politics has engendered a wide spread visceral hatred of our leadership class, that so far, has remained
loosely in the control of the two political parties, but, and I think this a good thing, there is a dawning understanding among
a significant number of us, that the hatred of Hillary, and her party, is well deserved, and rooted in exactly the same reality
as the hatred of George 'W', and his party.
All that hatred of the political parties and their leadership has so far, resulted in Trump, which in an odd sense is evidence
supporting optimism that the two parties strangle-hold on our lives is not invincible, and that there exists a wide-spread thirst
for change.
I think that thirst for change is the point where we have an opportunity to make conversation fruitful, and find common ground.
I'm sure that a lot of NC readers have, over time, experienced some amount of pain associated with the dissolution of long-held
beliefs surrounding the American dream, and faith in our economic, and political systems abilities to 'self-correct'.
It's been very painful to realize that 'things' are not going to get better if we simply vote for the other team.
================================================
I don't know how many times I have heard that voting for a third party is "throwing your vote away"
REALITY, that voting for a democrat* or a republican is throwing your vote away, never seems to sway anyone.
* maybe there are individual democrats that are worth voting for, but that is usually due to some screw up by the party apparatchiks
I wonder, sadly, if "engaging with liberals" might be, in fact, a lost cause. Struggling to find common cause with the
delusional amidst the collapse of empire, environmental catastrophe, and financial ruin might not be the best use of limited resources.
There's a guy running for local city council whose campaign I intend to work for, and anyone campaigning on Medicare-for-All (free
at the point of care, of course!), a minimum wage humans can live on, and anything else beneficial to people who work for a living
will get my jealously-guarded vote. But the rest looks more and more like the re-arranging the proverbial deck chairs.
I also think that this is not the time to try to argue. Many people (liberals) seem to have been shocked to their core by Clinton's
loss and the arrival of the barbarians. The world has come unhinged, it appears to them.
That is a deeply unsettling feeling that can induce a deep distress and panic. I think it's also new to most liberals because
things in America had proceeded pretty much sensibly, even during the Bush years. Also, I suspect many are at a stage in life
when they have settled their own sense of their lives on a platform of comfort with the status quo as personified by the liberal
consensus; or they are deeply committed ideologically for other reasons of self-identity.
The liberal establishment everyday is whipping the flames of people's panic and resulting outrage, and has created a huge firestorm.
The "resistance" gives people a way to make sense of the world again. They will hold onto the "resistance" with all their power
because admitting that the "resistance" is in any way flawed throws them back into a chaotic world. So any argument about this
stuff derives from a deep place and is not conducive to reasoning. You threaten them, if you try to take away their "resistance"
bear.
I also think it is better to put energy into other things, like building positive political movements or structures of life
that extend "under" the current debate. (If you go down below general political buzz words, you can sometimes find agreement across
political barriers.)
I still make general comments non-locally, but I do not engage with people individually about this. It's useless right now.
– Humans usually have a strong need to identify with a tribe
– In stressful times humans seem to want to simplify their lives, which can be done by joining a tribe, which allows you
to NOT think for yourself
– There are a lot of physical and mental benefits (and perceived benefits) to being a member of a tribe
– Humans have a remarkable ability to do things that are, in the long run, not to their own benefit
– Humans will too often defend their own self image to the death, because they don't have the self respect that comes with
a developed personality, and thus support their self-value through the groups they have chosen to identify with, the tribes
they feel they belong to
– Tribalism unfortunately seems to be mostly about screwing other tribes
Some additional tribes: Wall St bankers, corporate CEOs, police, teachers, Congress, your town, your state, sports fans, etc.
Very relevant commentary to which I can completely relate. I had to leave a certain FB group because it became increasingly
apparent that these mostly PhD, higher education types were not really interested in being the resistance or fighting fascism.
No, what they really want is a safe space/echo chamber in which they can whine about everything that has gone to shit while completely
ignoring how they themselves and the 'Democrat' party facilitated said shit's construction. The level of cognitive dissonance
was simply mind boggling.
No rational thought about how going along to get along contributed to the current situation, that the lesser of two evils still
gets you to the same destination. My working theory is they suffer from social detachment disorder due to their comfortable government
(many tenured professors) jobs. As I attempted to explain to one of them, the economic damage created by the policy responses
following the GR directly contributed to the door opening for Trump or something like him. These PhD types seem to be completely
willing to overlook the social injustice of the Obama tenure, growth of the surveillance state, economic monopolies etc.
Many of these people have not had to worry about a paycheck for some time, thus the complete disconnect from the realities
of the current economy. They talk a good game about fighting for social & economic equality, but when push comes to shove many
of them are willing to throw their working neighbor under the bus so they can keep their comfortable (not rich mind you) tenured
positions and lifestyles. If nothing else, the level of cognitive dissonance in this group certainly made me think about tenure
from a much different perspective. Certainly not an encouraging picture of higher ed for sure.
Thomas Frank has repeatedly pointed out that credentialed professionals were the most reliably Republican voting block in America
for decades. Now they're firmly democrat. Did their politics/interests change? Doubtful
The decades-long purge of any hint of leftists from the American university system (which started right here in California
in the 50's then spread out) has led to our extremely conservative tenure class of professors.
I've had the same experience with these credential class types. Their politics are uniformly anti-labor and elitist. There's
no convincing them.
I think that it is seldom clear in discussions what differentiates credentialed class from not. Just a bachelors degree? Bachelors
degree attainment is over 30% now among young people. They are luckier than many who don't have the degree, but with every white
collar job wanting a bachelors degree (often for fairly lowly work that didn't used to) and with a bachelors degree no guarantee
of anything (nope not even that white collar job) I'm not sure its all that. (BTW I don't have a bachelors degree, but I'm in
no good shape economically at all, if I had a degree maybe I'd be allowed to live, that is all .. so I consider it but without
illusion at 40 something).
I think what really protects people's jobs etc. is licensed professions (lawyers, doctors, CPAs, landscape architects etc.)
and in some cases those requiring post-bachelors attainment including years of additional training (physical therapists etc.).
Well and unionization in the public sector obviously and tenure in academia.
it's not in their class interest to care, well the tenured ones, the adjuncts it depends on who they identify with, with the
working class or with the tenured ones whose life they can't get anyway.
The average office worker would be more likely to care, although usually not political, and though they usually pretend otherwise,
and though they are taught to sympathize with the bosses, there is a chance they might at some level ultimately know the are pawns
in a game that they don't control and that can eat them alive (unlike those protected with tenure).
Ask the professors at Vermont Law School, 75% of whom just had tenure stripped unceremoniously. It's coming for them all. I
give it less than 10 years. These tenured types total lack of solidarity within their group or any other will finally come home
to roost.
My dear friend has been slogging through the trenches of the adjunct lifestyle for the better part of a decade and it's only
now at this late date starting to dawn on him that he'll never get regular work at the university. Those waves and easy smiles
from tenured faculty hid what they were thinking all along, "Better you than me pal!"
Not my country, but this is less a question of talking to "liberals" (who have their own problems) than of talking to conspiracy
theorists. All over the world, certain groups of people are finding that history has suddenly, in the last few years, veered off
in directions it has no right to. Since they refuse to believe they are responsible, however distantly, and since they seek, as
we all do, simple explanations for complex problems, it must be a conspiracy. And anyone who questions the existence of a conspiracy
is by definition part of it.
Because conspiracy theories serve essentially emotional and ideological purposes, rational discussion is by definition useless,
and studies show that pointing out that people are factually wrong actually makes them more likely to cling to their beliefs.
I'd recommend a site which discusses and dissects conspiracy theories (www.metabunk.org), and which has discussion threads
on how to argue with conspiracy theorists.
I was a Keynesian. I thought that meant the same as being a Democrat. Obama cured me of that mistake. Now, I'm in the Modern
Money camp. Explaining that to paygo liberals is an even bigger chore.
Yes, although I've found that when I simply explain basic MMT concepts to either repub or dem friends, I come across as non-political.
Because neither dems or repubs support it.
And I gain instant credibility/solidarity with them when I agree with their knee-jerk reaction that state/local governments
ARE constrained.
Americans, who pretend to fetishize individualism, are conformists
That's spot on. Perhaps it has to with out lack of a set class structure which makes people socially insecure. Plus the rise
of the meritocracy means that the worse thing you can call someone these days is "stupid" meaning uneducated. Life experience
gets little credit at a time when knowledge has been overly formalized.
However we can take some comfort in a history where periods of intense conformity such as the 1950s provoke periods of more
liberated thinking as in the 1960s. Things do seem to be changing–hopefully not for the worse. Patience with those vehement NYT
and WaPo readers may be necessary until the fever breaks.
My concern is that we have a poisoned public space, as it is hard to find the facts in the press or the body politic. Hard
to find common ground to discuss or solve problems. I think our democracy, what is left of it, is in deep trouble. I agree that
we need to talk to our neighbors about issues of the day. It is hard to overcome the do not talk about politics meme of the last
30 years.
I try really hard these days to talk about the system. Trump is a product of the system that we created and we need to change
to better everyone.
I try to be compassionate above all else. Trump supporters are not evil or selfish. They believed the lies of someone telling
them he was going to save jobs. We, as a nation, believed the lies of Obama's "hope and change" and it got us nowhere except a
little more hopeless. Its not about political affiliation. Its about the world oligarchs having entire control. I refuse to be
divided by what they want me to be divided by.
A fascinating and often painful subject. Being mostly a dismal failure in my own attempts, I've been keenly interested in and
come up with several 'types' (hardly exhaustive) that seem gifted with varying degrees of success in communicating though
I'm not sure about convincing others. Making others sit up and think (I should say 'having that effect' rather than 'making')
might be as far as most in this select group will ever get but I strongly suspect such exchanges can ultimately be very powerful
(meaning the 'other' will almost always do the changing of pov, or the expansion of understanding, under their own steam and in
their own time).
Trite as it may seem, those who have a strong core of honesty, or who always tend to gravitate toward truth, have the most
success in the above. They are the ones who seem to make headway under the most ridiculously difficult or impossible conditions.
That they often have a strong command of their subject seems (to me) to be a natural outcome of the affinity for truth rather
than truth being a result of knowledge breadth. They aren't always likeable but are often admirable.
After that, there are the 'warm intellectuals' and note that this categorization does not preclude honesty. My father was such.
He had a way of making all present feel welcome and valuable despite the intricacy of the discussion. One usually had to ferret
out his opinions or his 'take' on something as he rarely made an issue of it. But his conversation and 'presence' always made
fairness and decency seem cool; the natural order of things, and I know for a fact he had a profound influence on at
least some people – some hard core ones as well.
The ability to bend and compromise for a greater good (or in some cases for another purpose) is yet another 'type' who I see
as potentially having considerable power in their exchanges with others. I see them as having emotional energy and an ability
to see through the 'facts' or to 'suspend' them for a period. This is obviously a tricky – perhaps flawed (although in reality
they are all flawed) – category, home to intellectuals inclined toward the Machiavellian as well as do-gooders quickly judged
and relegated -not always justly- to the lot of suck-asses, and I image it has mixed results. It includes but is not the sole
domain of those with the facility to put themselves in anther's shoes (and occasionally get lost in so doing).
I am only describing those who can influence others of extreme or highly contrary positions and beliefs, not the relatively
larger group who can be eloquent in their own right but are not of note in dealing with made-up minds. Since we are all banging
about under varying degrees of illusion , the truly or profoundly successful ambassador, along with his/her close cousin
the successful negotiator, even the mundane every-man commenting on a blog or at a social gathering that provokes others to reassess,
is a rather unusual individual indeed. That there is some preponderance of such individuals on NC does not contradict the rarity
in general.
Perhaps just a very long winded way of saying, "Don't be too hard on yourself."
What I meant to say in the last sentence is, "I won't be too hard on myself ", but put in the general form while thinking
of it applying to me. I don't presume to give others such advice (though I imagine it holds for others as well ).
Also, since the process of changing or simply being influenced, always takes time, it is almost impossible to see or assess;
an unhappy circumstance for those who try at it rather than let it be an outcome..
Arguing with entrenched people is a lost cause but sarcasm = mercilessly tearing right into their own hypocrisy does the
work of shaming them for a while, especially if you make the point about a topic they are virtue signalling about. These people
do not have a policy idea in mind, they are pure virtue signallers.
Sarcasm is not to be confused with irony, which allows people to react mildly along "ha, ha, ha, oh my, what a world we live
in". You can always escape from irony but a good, hard sarcasm put the moral dilemma right out there and people cannot escape
their own crap poorly founded opinions.
Political talk has really become a competition as opposed to a conversation. If the conversation decends into competition I'll
try to ask "are there are any rules to this game?". When all else fails, go Socratic. Their answers can be enlightening.
I think it can be effective to do a virtual cannonball into the kiddie pool of their belief system. Like Maddow squared but
willing to connect the dots.
'Of course the Russians put Trump in, but the whole hacking story is part of a scam and a distraction. There's barely a
connection between the leaked emails and the election results. They are a sideshow to get Assange. No, the real story is that
the Russians had a high level operative inside the DNC. That's how the emails leaked. That is why the campaign was diverted
away from Wisconsin, for example, in favor of Arizona. It is why the campaign pulled strings to get airtime for Trump during
the GOP primary. It is why the DNC relied on bad software models and ignored experienced campaigners. Heck, it is why the DNC
ran Hillary, even though she was over 43% animatronic by the end of the primary.'
Then you reveal that the mole is Mook.
The more facts you can weave into an acceptable narrative, the more secret landmines you can slip into their bubble, until
the critical mass of cognitive dissonance causes a rupture
Watch out for the response being a psychotic break. I have had that happen when I got too carried away with 'weaponized humour'
in my arguments.
I mean not just angry outbursts directed in my direction but actual punches. These times are becoming physically dangerous.
I will generally, when I encounter a true believer Left or Right, let them get comfortable, agreeing with their critique of
the Other until they say something grotesquely hypocritical or patently false or deranged, and then I will call out the hypocrisy/bs
by way of pointing to it in their own party, then segway into something like 'MSNBC is part of the DNC, CNN is mockingbird CIA/DEEP
STATE, and FOX is Rupert Murdoch's geriatric limp dick. Sometimes I call myself an anarchist, because I am liberal about some
things and conservative about others and hypocrisy sucks. Wtf are Americans left and right going to pull their heads out of their
buttz and realize the country has been gutted and the people put in debt servitude to globalist corp, bank, billionaire and eternal
profiteering war/surveillance machine? Oh, and capitalism looks like a death cult if you are a pollinator or an ecosystem, so
wtf about your bloody party ."
Which rant I can sustain as long as the person can hear it. Sometimes with liberals though I just ask why they think Hillary
would have been a better president, and they usually realize at some point they have tied themselves in knots.
One quibble: It should be "Russia!Russia!Russia!", not "Russia!Russia!" – it makes the Jan Brady jokes a little funnier.
Anyway, with some people, I'm not sure if people should really be trying to "talk to" liberals, with the intent of changing
their minds. I remember similar discussions going on in Daily Kos around 2006 or so, but there they discussed how to "talk to"
conservatives, or people in rural areas, or "low information voters," as they liked to call them. It does seem a little condescending
– some people believe what they believe, and you're not going to be able to argue them out of their positions. As macnamichomhairle
posted above, the election of Trump really seems to have caused a psychic break in certain segments of society. I'm not sure if
agitating them any further would really be that helpful. It's gotten to the point that I wonder (only half-jokingly) if Trump
Derangement Syndrome will be included in the next volume of the DSM.
So, if you want to argue with people about something, make it sports. It seems that Americans are much more civil and mature
when it comes to arguing about that topic. That is, unless they're from Philadelphia.
when facing russia! putin! arguments, i usually retort with a big "i don't care" and paraphrase Mohammed Ali: "ain't no vladimir
putin ever set the middle east on fire and crash the global economy".
At first I was going to suggest using a lead pipe on so-called liberals as a coping strategy but I think that this is too serious
to joke about. Think about this. The US midterms take place on Tuesday, November 6, 2018 and only 16 days later you will have
Thanksgiving in the US. If you think that people are on edge now can you imagine what it will be like around Thanksgiving tables
this year?
Look, it is a real bad idea to tie your identity to any political party. Too much putting your faith in princes here – or princesses
too for that matter. I don't think that the US voting system helps either where they want you to register for Party A or Party
B which, when you think about it, kinda defeats the purpose of a secret ballet.
If people with phds are drinking the kool-aid and are not using their critical thinking skills, then how can you expect average
people to be convinced? I am not sure that you can but what you can do is undermine their beliefs. Don't let them shape the battlefield
of argument ('Or course everybody knows Russia did it!') or else it is a losing game. In any case, this whole thing reeks of the
old identity game where those in power set two sides to fiercely combat each other while skimming profits all the way to the bank.
An example of this? Democrats and Republicans hate each other's guts but when it come time to vote $1.5 trillion to the wealthiest
people in the country then it was bipartisan all the way, baby.
My birthday comes shortly after the election. I'm thinking of throwing a party for myself and inviting liberal Democrats, libertarians,
Republicans, Greens, independents, and those who refuse to be classified.
Thanksgiving in the US. If you think that people are on edge now can you imagine what it will be like around Thanksgiving
tables this year?
hmmm if the MSM determine too many of the midterm winners are the *wrong* sort of people then watch out for more MSM, Thanksgiving
weekend, crazy stories, as in 2016. Properly speaking or not. ;)
For a discussion to occur, both sides have to be willing and able to listen. While most people claim both, in my experience
especially the latter (able to) is a learned skill which majority lacks (of all bents, not just liberals etc.).
Hence after this was tested, I do not discuss anymore, I rant, if I feel like it.
Talk about small, but 'respectably' sourced news stories instead of whatever's dominating the current news cycle – stories
where the DNC spokespeople haven't already poisoned the well by telling people "This is your team's official position, there's
no need to make up your own mind."
Give the liberal a chance to make up their own mind on the small story. Chances are that they sympathize with the underdog
in that story – showing how 'liberals care'.
Then – if you're in the mood – spring the trap:
"You're absolutely right to be concerned about the underdog in [story A]. The compassion -that's why people like liberals!
By the way, why do you think that [famous dem spokesperson] doesn't show the same compassion regarding [morally analogous but
more mainstream news controversy B]?"
"Russian meddling, eh? That's a scary country. I've been reading about Russia in the 90s. The average life expectancy of the
whole country went down by years after the communist government collapsed. Old people dying alone in their apartments from easily
treatable illnesses. Yeah, it IS terrible. Yeah it IS disgusting and immoral. Oh by the way, that's around the time they switched
to a for-profit medical system like we have. Weird huh?"
The inability to talk politics with others of differing views is hardly limited to the US even if it expresses itself in different
ways. I have family in France (je suis une pičce rapportée – in-law) and it's almost identical to the US. As even my wife is somewhat
of a 'guest' when we go over now, You simply avoid subjects where you know it could get too hot and so do they among themselves.
Things are not at all as cut and dry as they were (at least seemed) back in the late 60's early 70's when students AND workers
united massively in common cause.
A few years ago, I had a discussion that turned into an argument with a friend visiting from France who is an economist by
training but made his pile (of comfortable not gargantuan size) in real estate. It turned around Jeremy Corbyn with my argument
that as long as people are really hurting, social/political/economic justice movements will thrive and often succeed in radical
change and his argument that 1) he is an economist and therefore knows what he is talking about and 2) Corbyn is simply
unacceptable and unworkable in todays economy , c'est tout!
How horribly frustrating for me not to have a good command of the subject, getting hot under the collar is not a compelling
argument, (though I didn't let him get away with the, being an economist, braggadocio), but on the good side, our friendship survived
the bout and we holstered our pistols for the rest of their visit.
I find arguments of systemic problems, corruption, absence of actual solutions, divide conquer, class war, rather than D vs
R work best.
Example:
Ask anyone who has a problem with immigrants why not one politician demands an arrest of a ceo and board members for illegal hiring
practices. Put them in jail just for a weekend and things would dramatically change over night. We don't need to cage many thousands
of desperate people, just a few greedy ones. Like them or not, quit blaming desperate poor people for crawling through a nasty
river and horrific desert to get a crappy job. If the illegal hiring didn't exist they wouldn't come. As for children and adults,
once 'we' have them captured, under our control, how they exist is all about us, not them.
And then I shut up. You have to know when to shut up.
At other times I love reminding D's or R's and especially those who are neither, the D's and R's are at best 27 percent of
the eligible voters. Independents are far greater in number than they are and 'refuse to vote' for any of them are greatest of
all. The D's and R's both have a super majority against them for good reasons which are being ignored at all our peril. That they
are not listening, not asking, not representing. They are owned and we are all being played like a two dollar banjo. Fighting
for either one of them is exactly what they want and need to keep the con alive.
I keep reminding people this is not professional football, you don't have to watch, much more you are not forced to pick between
two teams, please choose neither like most of us are doing because we need an entirely new game. Issues, not personality. Because
all owners are always a winner, cashing in, if you do.
More generally speaking, there are actually clinical trials of ways to be persuasive. Doctors need this for the difficult patients:
the heart patients who don't want to take their meds, the addicts who don't want to quit, etc. It's worth looking up:
Motivational Interviewing . The link is to a course
offered by Citizens' Climate Lobby, designed to help their members deal with climate change denial.
The key, they say, is forming partnerships. Disagreement can take the form of fights, arguments or partnerships, with only
the last providing some prospect for relief.
So providing the "perfect squelch" or putting down one's opponent is the very last thing you want to do. Finding areas of agreement
and building on those is the royal road to something more positive.
I've also found some of the worst offenders in the environmental community. These are often former bureaucrats who want to
keep the (bankrupt) process in place, but encourage a different outcome. They want to be the "good guys," and judge the environmental
"bad guys" rather than make a significant change.
I tend towards the Socratic approach, both for establishment Democrats and the larger universe of people I disagree with in
person. It generally means doing more listening than talking, which I know is a downside for some, but letting people talk things
out in front of you with occasional nudges in the right direct does a decent job of moving them gradually in the right direction,
and leaves them with an impression of you as a friendly good-listener with whom they have some disagreements rather than that
asshole yelling about nonsense.
I'm going to throw out my tips that I've used for years to talk politics in various environments (office, family gatherings,
etc).
1) Keep context in mind if you're in the office, keep encounters brief and cordial, couple of news headlines as you breeze
by for a couple of minutes. Crack a couple of jokes and try to keep it light. But choose your topics with care, especially if
you don't know the person really well.
2) Find common ground: with trumpers you can rail against clintons, obamas, and dem hypocrisy. with clintonites you can talk about how excited you are that Ted Cruz has a real challenge, Paul Ryan's retiring, all the damage
Trump is doing to the establishment repubs, etc. Tell them the positive thing about Trump winning is that ALL THE OTHER REPUBS
LOST .badly!
3) As far as genuinely changing minds .THESE THINGS TAKE TIME! Some minds aren't open to being changed, some will periodically
open and close, and some of us are genuinely trying to figure out WTF is going on in the world (which is why we come to NC!) In
any case, minds get changed over weeks and months, not a couple of hours.
4) Understand and remember that you DO NOT have all the answers and think about all things you've changed your mind about over
the years and it helps to open minds to SHARE stories with people about what changed your mind and why. If you're not sure why
you think what you think, go figure out why! :)
5) Once you've got a certain comfort level, don't be afraid to crack a joke that aggravates the other person, but don't overdo
it and don't do a lot of public mocking/shaming.
6) When someone else uses 5) on you, practice to make sure you DO NOT get too mad about it. Get thicker skin, if you can't
do it .then you aren't ready to talk politics.
7) Yes, that includes people saying ignorant stuff. That doesn't mean you have to grin and bear it, you don't and you shouldn't.
Drop a mild rebuke (no more and no less) and change the subject. Don't ostracize or shame. Keep interacting with people, as much
as they want to do so. We've all said stupid $h!t at one time or another, we can and should all be able to forgive/forget. I've
certainly said my fair share. But also, people do change their minds over time. It's helpful if you can guide them in a positive
direction.
8) Talk about the context in which things happen and put yourself in other people's shoes. This is something I've learned a
lot in the last few years and people forget to step back and look at things from a high level. I've been amazed at how much more
sense things can make when you think more about context.
My coping method is mostly avoidance, but if I did intervene it would be something like this:
I agree Trump is ill-suited to the job and has horrible policies.
If Russia (or Russians) interfered with the election, if Trump and his cronies participated in that, or if Trump and cronies
had other dealings with Russian that are illegal, Mueller is the right person to figure it out. His whole career has been defending
and strengthening the pre-Trump status quo, the "norms" of the military-industrial-corporatist-security complex. If there's a
way to push us back in that direction, there may be no one on earth more committed to that job.
Our job is to examine the impacts of current Trump policy, the roots where applicable in those status quo "norms",
issues other than Russia that weaken and corrupt our electoral system, failures of centrist Democrat policies to solve problems;
and to promote alternative policies and politicians. None of this will be adddressed by any negative Mueller consequences to Trump,
and maybe to a few of those around him.
Whether it's committed liberals (eg, super strong Big D voters) or committed conservatives, there's really not much point in
"talking."
I accidentally said something truthful about Trump's/the Republicans' recent tax law, and my super conservative sister launched
into a tirade that came right out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth. I hadn't meant to stir the pot, either, and what I said was pretty
nothingburger. I let her rant for a few minutes; explained my side very graciously and calmly (mainly that MY taxes have been
raised, not lowered as advertised), and then I changed the topic.
I know a very few D voter friends who are starting to pay more attention – it's taken a while but they are – and they're starting
to see that Big D is NOT their savior, at least, not as they currently exist. Of course, I have Big D friends who revile Bernie
Sanders as the worst of the worst, and they're HORRIFIED that he's a socialist!!!111!!!!! Well, there's nothing to say there.
Mostly if I'm thinking about it, I'll drop in a few salient points – as some other commenters have suggested, above – and then
mostly walk away.
The Big Fat Propaganda Wurlizter has done it's job, and HOW. And it's not just about conservatives ranting out the usual Fox/Rush
rightwing talking points. Now it's so-called liberals ranting out the latest from, I guess (no tv, never watch), Rachael Maddow
and similar.
I can barely ever listen to what passes for "nooz" on NPR, but possibly they get their talking points from there, as well.
Some of those talking points now come up regularly in the weekend game shows. I duly noted that "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" had
James EFFEN Comey on last weeked. R U Kidding ME???? Of course, I didn't listen.
So, go figure.
Both sides are being heavily brainwashed by our M$M. For me: No TV at all and precious little radio (mostly music stations).
And judicious nooz paper reading.
Get my real info at sites like this one.
Thanks to all who comment logically here in reality-land.
In general, the way I deal with the liberals, partisan Dems, Hillary crowd or whatever you call it, is in person (I'm not on
FB) with this type of statement:
"Not one single piece of evidence has every been presented showing Russia meddled in the election. Not one. We don't even have
grounds to investigate such a thing. And what evidence we do have points away from Russia. The same agencies that said WMD in
Iraq are now saying Russia meddled in the election, have you learned nothing? Russiagate is Democrat's WMD in Iraq moment."
That usually silences them because they don't have any evidence and some even know that. If they offer "evidence" (like the
social media click bait adds) I am usually familiar enough show how silly the examples given are.
I hike regularly w/my buddy who is a 73 year old Nam vet, I am a 65 year old conscientious objector he is blue collar for generations,
I am college educated family for generations New Deal Dems forever.
Our concerns in life are the same, the well being of our adult children and grandchildren, our relationships w/our spouses,
how to manage our retirements. But Oh do we talk politics! He teases me that I'm a Trumpster because of my deserved critiques
of Clinton, Obama and my anger at that gang of liars, as if that means I think Trump and his band of "obligerant" oligarchs are
great! (oblivious and belligerent)
The executive branch is a huge about-to-become-extinct dinosaur w/the brain of a tiny reptile, little realizing only the little
mammals will survive, while still imagining itself to be king of the place forever.
" American politicians like Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Ben Cardin and ex-Senator Joe Lieberman "
American? I beg to differ. All of those turncoats serve their Master Israel and kiss the nether regions of those TBTF Wall
Street Casinos.
Browder is one of those nine Russian oligarchs -- eight of whom are Jews -- who stole hundreds of billions from Russia when
it was decompressing from being the USSR, helped by the drunken buffoon Yeltsin and a battery of Wall Street financial sharpies
who also filled their pockets.
Watch the tough guy Browder run like a scared bunny rabbit in NYC from a process server.
Browder needs to be arrested by Interpol, tried, convicted and spend the rest of his sorry life in a Super Max prison for his
thefts, frauds and helping to poison the relationship between the USA & Russia, in an effort to save his sorry ass from prosecution.
"Yeltsin had won a fraudulent election in 1996 supported by the oligarch-controlled media and by President Bill Clinton,
who secured a $20.2 billion IMF loan that enabled him to buy support. Today we would refer to Clinton's action as "interference
in the 1996 election," but at that time a helpless and bankrupt Russia was not well placed to object to what was being done
to it."
[emphasis mine]
So Mother Russia was raped, and by Bill Clinton, of all people. Where is the outrage? #MeToo
Although I posted this comment under another thread, I think it bears repeating here (especially relevant to your point is
the bolded part):
I think debunking the vulture capitalist Bill Browder's false claim of being, of all things, a human rights advocate is
the key to unraveling the Russia-gate hoax. I also think the following information goes a long way in doing that:
1. Nekrasov's documentary, The Magnitsky Act: Behind The Scenes, now available for viewing
2. Alex Krainer's The Killing of William Browder, now available online; and
3. Bill Browder's Previzon deposition in which he claims "I can't remember" at least 50 times and answers "I don't know"
fully 211 times.
Notwithstanding these facts, it appears Mr. Browder is an untouchable. The Russians have issued a Red Notice at least
six times and he has managed to walk away scot free on each occasion.
The zinger was when the Senate Judiciary Committee invited him to testify as an expert witness against Fusion GPS, arguing
that it should have registered under FARA because it was working on behalf of a foreign government, in this case the Russian.
The irony of this scene was incredible. The hallowed chamber in which this inquiry took place is completely bought and paid
for by The Lobby but not a peep about having it register under FARA. Totally surreal!
An interesting thing about this that has gone almost completely unreported is that HSBC quietly held a series of closed-door meetings
with Russian authorities earlier this year regarding the tax fraud charges leveled at Browder and his businesses (HSBC jointly
managed Hermitage) and decided to pay up some of the cash he illegally siphoned out of the country (22 million dollars I believe,
so a drop in the ocean given the scale of his endeavors, but it's something.)
"Bill Browder declined to comment" according to one of the few articles on the matter.
Isn't all of that more or less tantamount to an admission of guilt?
(2) How does a respectable congress pass a law based solely on the testimony of someone convicted of a crime by another country?
No jury in the world would reach a verdict based solely on the word of a convict, without it being substantiated by numerous pieces
of other circumstantial and direct evidence.
(3) Even if he paid everyone oodles of money and brought a thousand lawsuits, why would gazillionaire corporations cave in
to his demands to ban books, movies, organizations, etc.?
There is something more powerful about Bill Browder than just his pile of money.
In fact, most (not all) US lawmakers long ago became a euphemism for incompetence, corruption and lies. So, no -- modern US
Congress is not respectable by people and numbers reflect that. Hopefully, sometime in the future, some honorable and loyal to
their country people will make it there.
Can someone help me remember the names of those 9 oligarchs?
These are the ones I remember:
1) Anatoly Chubais
2) Browder
3) Boris Berezovsky
4) Mikhail Khodorkovsky
5) Vladimir Gusinsky
Who were the others? Thanks.
Of these 5, Chubais remained in Russia but the others fled. Chubais was the one who was instrumental in starting the loans-for-shares
scheme. My understanding is that those who fled are real scum, since Putin offered all oligarchs the chance to keep their money
so long as they avoided politics. Most vulture capitalists agreed to this arrangement, but the worst of the Jewish oligarchs were
too greedy and lustful to give in. So I have heard, anyway.
"... The contrary narrative to that provided by Browder concedes that there was indeed a huge fraud related to as much as $230 million in unpaid Russian taxes on an estimated $1.5 billion of income, but that it was not carried out by corrupt officials. Instead, it was deliberately ordered and engineered by Browder with Magnitsky, who was actually an accountant, personally developing and implementing the scheme, using multiple companies and tax avoidance schemes to carry out the deception. Magnitsky, who was on cardiac medication, was indeed arrested and convicted, but he, according to his own family, reportedly died due to his heart condition, possibly exacerbated by negligent authorities who failed to medicate him adequately when he became ill. ..."
"... As Nekrasov worked on the documentary, he discovered that the Browder supported narrative was full of contradictions, omissions and fabrication of evidence . By the time he finished, he realized that the more accurate account of what had occurred with Browder and Magnitsky had been that provided by the Russian authorities. ..."
"... When one gets past all of his bluster and posturing, by one significant metric Bill Browder might well be accounted the most dangerous man in the world. ..."
"... That the U.S. media and Congress appear to be entranced by Browder and dismissive of Moscow's charges against him is symptomatic of just how far the Russia-phobia in the West has robbed people of their ability to see what is right in front of them. To suggest that what is taking place driven by Browder and his friends in high places could well lead to tragedy for all of us would be an understatement. ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. ..."
At the press
conference following their summit meeting in Helsinki, Russian President Vladimir Putin and
American President Donald Trump discussed the possibility of resolving potential criminal cases
involving citizens of the two countries by permitting interrogators from Washington and Moscow
to participate in joint questioning of the individuals named in indictments prepared by the
respective judiciaries. The predictable response by the American nomenklatura was that
it was a horrible idea as it would potentially require U.S. officials to answer questions from
Russians about their activities.
Putin argued, not unreasonably, that if Washington wants to extradite and talk to any of the
twelve recently
indicted GRU officers the Justice Department has named then reciprocity is in order for
Americans and other identified individuals who are wanted by the Russian authorities for
illegal activity while in Russia. And if Russian officials are fair game, so are American
officials.
A prime target for such an interrogation would be President Barack Obama's Ambassador to
Russia Michael McFaul, who was widely criticized while in Moscow for being on an apparent
mission to cultivate ties with the Russian political opposition and other "pro-democracy"
groups. But McFaul was not specifically identified in the press conference, though Russian
prosecutors
have asked him to answer questions related to the ongoing investigation of another leading
critic, Bill Browder, who was named by Putin during the question and answer session. Browder is
a major hedge fund figure who, inter alia , is an American by birth. He renounced his
U.S. citizenship in 1997 in exchange for British citizenship to avoid paying federal taxes on
his worldwide income.
Bill Browder is what used to be referred to as an oligarch, having set up shop in 1999 as
Hermitage Capital Management Fund, a hedge fund registered in tax havens Guernsey and the
Cayman Islands. It focused on "investing" in Russia, taking advantage initially of the
loans-for-shares scheme under
Russia's drunkard President Boris Yeltsin, and then continuing to profit greatly during the
early years of Vladimir Putin. By 2005 Hermitage was the largest foreign investor in
Russia.
Yeltsin had won a fraudulent election in 1996 supported by the oligarch-controlled media and
by President Bill Clinton, who secured a $20.2 billion IMF loan that enabled him to buy
support. Today we would refer to Clinton's action as "interference in the 1996 election," but
at that time a helpless and bankrupt Russia was not well placed to object to what was being
done to it. Yeltsin proved keen to follow oligarchical advice regarding how to strip the former
Soviet Union of its vast state-owned assets. Browder's Hermitage Investments profited hugely
from the commodities deals that were struck at that time.
Browder and his apologists portray him as an honest and honorable Western businessman
attempting to operate in a corrupt Russian business world. Nevertheless, the loans-for-shares
scheme that made him his initial fortune has been correctly characterized as the epitome of
corruption by all parties involved, an arrangement whereby foreign investors worked with local
oligarchs to strip the former Soviet economy of its assets paying pennies on each dollar of
value. Along the way, Browder
was reportedly involved in money laundering, making false representations on official
documents and bribery.
Browder was eventually charged by the Russian authorities for fraud and tax evasion. He was
banned from re-entering Russia in 2005 and began to withdraw his assets from the country, but
three companies controlled by Hermitage were eventually seized by the authorities. Browder
himself was convicted of tax evasion in absentia in 2013 and sentenced to nine years
in prison.
Browder, who refers to himself as Putin's "public enemy #1," has notably been able to sell
his tale of innocence to leading American politicians like Senators John McCain, Lindsay
Graham, Ben Cardin and ex-Senator Joe Lieberman, all of whom are always receptive when
criticizing Russia, as well as to a number of European parliamentarians and media outlets. In
the wake of the Helsinki press conference he has, for example, claimed that Putin named him
personally because he is a threat to continue to expose the crimes of the mafia that
he claims is currently running Russia, but there is, inevitably, another less discussed
alternative view of his self-serving narrative.
Central to the tale of what Browder really represents is the Magnitsky Act , which
the U.S. Congress passed into law to sanction individual Kremlin officials for their treatment
of alleged whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, arrested and imprisoned in Russia. Browder has sold
a narrative which basically says that he and his "lawyer" Sergei Magnitsky uncovered massive
tax fraud and, when they attempted to report it, were punished by a corrupt police force and
magistracy, which had actually stolen the money. Magnitsky was arrested and died in prison,
allegedly murdered by the police to silence him.
The Magnitsky case is of particular importance because both the European Union and the
United States have initiated sanctions against the identified Russian officials who were
allegedly involved. In the Magnitsky Act , sponsored by Russia-phobic Senator Ben
Cardin and signed by President Barack Obama in 2012, the U.S. asserted its willingness to
punish foreign governments for human rights abuses. The Act, initially limited to Russia, has
now been expanded by virtue of 2016's Global Magnitsky Act , which enabled U.S.
sanctions worldwide.
Russia reacted angrily to the first iteration of the Act , noting that the actions
taken by its government internally, notably the operation of its judiciary, were being
subjected to outside interference, while other judicial authorities also questioned
Washington's claimed right to respond to criminal acts committed outside the United States.
Moscow reciprocated with sanctions against U.S. officials as well as by increasing pressure on
foreign non-governmental pro-democracy groups operating in Russia. Some have referred to the
Magnitsky Act as the start of the new Cold War.
The contrary narrative to that provided by Browder concedes that there was indeed a huge
fraud related to as much as $230 million in unpaid Russian taxes on an estimated $1.5 billion
of income, but that it was not carried out by corrupt officials. Instead, it was deliberately
ordered and engineered by Browder with Magnitsky, who was actually an accountant, personally
developing and implementing the scheme, using multiple companies and tax avoidance schemes to
carry out the deception. Magnitsky, who was on cardiac medication, was indeed arrested and
convicted, but he, according to his own family, reportedly died due to his heart condition,
possibly exacerbated by negligent authorities who failed to medicate him adequately when he
became ill.
The two competing Browder narratives have been explored in some detail by a Russian
documentary film maker Andrei Nekrasov, an outspoken anti-Putin activist, who was actually
initially engaged by Browder to do the film. An affable Browder appears extensively in the
beginning describing his career and the events surrounding Magnitsky.
As Nekrasov worked on the documentary, he discovered that the Browder supported narrative
was full of contradictions, omissions and fabrication of
evidence . By the time he finished, he realized that the more accurate account of what had
occurred with Browder and Magnitsky had been that provided by the Russian authorities.
When Nekrasov prepared to air his work " The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes," he
inevitably found himself confronted by billionaire Browder and a battery of lawyers, who
together blocked the showing of the film in Europe and the United States. Anyone subsequently
attempting to promote the documentary has been immediately confronted with 300 plus pages of
supporting documents accompanying a letter threatening a lawsuit if the film were to be shown
to the public.
A single viewing of "The Magnitsky Act" in Washington in June 2016 turned into a
riot when Browder supporters used tickets given to Congressional staffers to disrupt the
proceedings. At a subsequent hearing before Congress, where he was featured as an expert
witness on Russian corruption before a fawning Senate Judiciary Committee, Bill Browder
suggested that those who had challenged his narrative and arranged the film's viewing in
Washington should be prosecuted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), which
includes penalties of up to five years in prison.
Because of the pressure from Browder, there has never been a second public showing of
"The Magnitsky Act" but it is possible to see it online at this site .
Bill Browder, who benefited enormously from Russian corruption, has expertly repackaged
himself as a paragon among businessmen, endearing himself to the Russia-haters in Washington
and the media. Curiously, however, he has proven reluctant to testify in cases regarding his
own business dealings. He has, for example, repeatedly
run away , literally, from attempts to subpoena him so he would have to testify under
oath.
When one gets past all of his bluster and posturing, by one significant metric Bill Browder
might well be accounted the most dangerous man in the world. Driven by extreme hatred of Putin
and of Russia, he personally and his Magnitsky Myth have together done more to launch and
sustain a dangerous new Cold War between a nuclear armed United States and a nuclear armed
Russia. Blind to what he has accomplished, he continues to pontificate about how Putin is out
to get him when instead he is the crook who quite likely stole $230 million dollars and should
be facing the consequences. That the U.S. media and Congress appear to be entranced by Browder
and dismissive of Moscow's charges against him is symptomatic of just how far the Russia-phobia
in the West has robbed people of their ability to see what is right in front of them. To
suggest that what is taking place driven by Browder and his friends in high places could well
lead to tragedy for all of us would be an understatement.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
Please take a look at the documentary that has been quashed by Bill Browder and his
enablers, as it has not only been nixed in its premiere in many EU countriu, except Norway,
but has been deleted almost immediately when it was made available on YouTube. Now, however,
it is still available on bitchute and has almost 13K hits in almost four days after being
posted (as of this post):
As an aside, Thank you to Robin and S2C for spreading it so that people can make up their
own minds.
A special thanks should be made to Robin and S2S for distributing this film. The video is
almost at 13K as of this posting. We all have to work together in order to reveal the truth.
Perhaps we will benefit in the end, but that is to be determined yet. Nontheless, we must
try!
Sorry the video on bitchute which you have in your presentation was not present when first
losded in my browser, but I must admit from the time I first encountered this video, having
just 38 views until now, almost four days later, at almost 13K views, people are certainly
paying attention!
Please team up with Stranahan in his campaign to make Senators answer the question, "Have
you seen Bill Browder's 2015 deposition in the U.S. vs. Prevazon case?"
Full research sources here , including links to Browder's deposition. See for
yourselves how Browder contradicts himself in depositions, Senate testimony and his book.
Sad, but maybe not for us!
SAME THING HAPPENED WITH THE AL JAZEERA DOCUMENTARY ON ISRAELI LOBBY IN AMERICA
For the past year, Qatar has been under tremendous pressure from other US puppet Gulf states
(SAudi ARabia, UAE, Egypt etc) and from US and Israeli lobby. There was a economic blockade
of Qatar. WHY? Because Al Jazeera was about to release a documentary on Israeli lobby in the
US. Its documentary on Israeli lobby in UK had already been embarassing for zionists.
Because
of the extreme economic pressure put on Qatar and the threat of sanctions and worse, Qatar
(which owns Al Jazeera) shelved the documentary. They also had to grease a lot of zionist
organizations in US.
Not only did the Israeli lobby pressure Qatar into shelving the Al Jazeera documentary on the
lobby in America, they also shook them down for money.
Qatar donated $250,000 to some of the most extreme pro-Israel organizations in the United
States, including one that funds senior Israeli military officers to go on propaganda
tours.
Joseph Allaham, a lobbyist working for the Qatari government, transferred the money through
his firm Lexington Strategies in late 2017 and early 2018.
The sums included $100,000 to the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), $100,000 to Our
Soldiers Speak and $50,000 for Blue Diamond Horizons, Inc.
The USA idea about justice is best expressed by a USA law, allowing an invasion of the
Netherlands, if a USA citizen would be in the The Hague prison of the International
Court.
To liberate this USA citizen.
" far the Russia-phobia in the West has robbed people of their ability to see what is right
in front of them "
Nothing new, in the 30ties Kennan was unable to make USA ambassador Davies see through
Stalin's show trials.
George F. Kennan, ´Memoirs 1925 – 1950', New York 1967, 1972
" American politicians like Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Ben Cardin and
ex-Senator Joe Lieberman "
American? I beg to differ. All of those turncoats serve their Master Israel and kiss
the nether regions of those TBTF Wall Street Casinos.
Browder is one of those nine Russian oligarchs – eight of whom are Jews – who
stole hundreds of billions from Russia when it was decompressing from being the USSR, helped
by the drunken buffoon Yeltsin and a battery of Wall Street financial sharpies who also
filled their pockets.
Watch the tough guy Browder run like a scared bunny rabbit in NYC from a process
server.
Browder needs to be arrested by Interpol, tried, convicted and spend the rest of his sorry
life in a Super Max prison for his thefts, frauds and helping to poison the relationship
between the USA & Russia, in an effort to save his sorry ass from prosecution.
"Central to the tale of what Browder really represents is the Magnitsky Act, which the U.S.
Congress passed into law to sanction individual Kremlin officials for their treatment of
alleged whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, arrested and imprisoned in Russia".
Hmmm. The USA has its whistleblowers, too. Maybe Russia (and other civilized countries)
should impose their own sanctions on all American officials in any way involved with the
persecution of Chelsea Clinton, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and others.
Although the existing US sanctions are a dead letter, since they will not get their hands
on the people they are trying to harm, they still give the world a wholly misleading
impression.
The sanctions insidiously suggest to the people and governments of the world that the US
government is somehow entitled to decide what is legal and what is illegal everywhere –
not just within its own jurisdiction – and moreover that it has the power to be
prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner against any of the world's citizens.
That is wrong, illegal, immoral, and unconscionable, and should not be tolerated.
"Yeltsin had won a fraudulent election in 1996 supported by the oligarch-controlled
media and by President Bill Clinton, who secured a $20.2 billion IMF loan that enabled him
to buy support. Today we would refer to Clinton's action as "interference in the 1996
election," but at that time a helpless and bankrupt Russia was not well placed to object
to what was being done to it."
[emphasis mine]
So Mother Russia was raped, and by Bill Clinton, of all people. Where is the outrage?
Andrei Nekrasov's documentary is absolutely damning – how, after viewing it, could
anybody see Browder as anything but a shameless serial liar? The closest I can find on the internet to a rebuttal is from the Daily Beast:
Ooops, I posted this comment before seeing that this video was already posted above in the
article. I got a link to it from an entirely different source. It shows how it's getting
around! Good.
Although I posted this comment under another thread, I think it bears repeating here
(especially relevant to your point is the bolded part):
I think debunking the vulture capitalist Bill Browder's false claim of being, of all
things, a human rights advocate is the key to unraveling the Russia-gate hoax. I also think
the following information goes a long way in doing that:
1. Nekrasov's documentary, The Magnitsky Act: Behind The Scenes, now available for
viewing
2. Alex Krainer's The Killing of William Browder, now available online; and
3. Bill Browder's Previzon deposition in which he claims "I can't remember" at least 50
times and answers "I don't know" fully 211 times.
Notwithstanding these facts, it appears Mr. Browder is an untouchable. The Russians
have issued a Red Notice at least six times and he has managed to walk away scot free on
each occasion.
The zinger was when the Senate Judiciary Committee invited him to testify as an expert
witness against Fusion GPS, arguing that it should have registered under FARA because it
was working on behalf of a foreign government, in this case the Russian. The irony of this
scene was incredible. The hallowed chamber in which this inquiry took place is completely
bought and paid for by The Lobby but not a peep about having it register under FARA.
Totally surreal!
An interesting thing about this that has gone almost completely unreported is that HSBC
quietly held a series of closed-door meetings with Russian authorities earlier this year
regarding the tax fraud charges leveled at Browder and his businesses (HSBC jointly managed
Hermitage) and decided to pay up some of the cash he illegally siphoned out of the country
(22 million dollars I believe, so a drop in the ocean given the scale of his endeavors, but
it's something.)
"Bill Browder declined to comment" according to one of the few articles on the matter.
Isn't all of that more or less tantamount to an admission of guilt?
(2) How does a respectable congress pass a law based solely on the testimony of someone
convicted of a crime by another country? No jury in the world would reach a verdict based
solely on the word of a convict, without it being substantiated by numerous pieces of other
circumstantial and direct evidence.
(3) Even if he paid everyone oodles of money and brought a thousand lawsuits, why would
gazillionaire corporations cave in to his demands to ban books, movies, organizations,
etc.?
There is something more powerful about Bill Browder than just his pile of money.
In fact, most (not all) US lawmakers long ago became a euphemism for incompetence,
corruption and lies. So, no–modern US Congress is not respectable by people and numbers
reflect that. Hopefully, sometime in the future, some honorable and loyal to their country
people will make it there.
Browder is a Zionist Bolshevik of the stripe that murdered some 60 million Russians from 1917
to 1957 and as such is not only an enemy of Russia but an even greater enemy of America and
is a typical communist who wrecks and destroys countries.
Read THE PROTOCOLS OF ZION, Browder is a poster boy for these thieves and murderers .
The 'Netherlands Invasion Act' is a former fact popularized by Noam Chomsky. The
Netherlands invasion provisions were quietly repealed because it was too embarrassing and
disruptive to US policy. What remains is a prohibition against US assistance to certain
criminal investigations. Putin poked at the same neuralgic spot in Helsinki when he proposed
reciprocity in mutual legal assistance. The issue is US impunity for war propaganda and
coercive interference.
The US government has asserted a specific reservation to the international prohibition of
war propaganda (ICCPR Article 20.) And legal experts are chipping away at the nonsense
rationale behind the US reservation. The US claims it is defending free speech, so Article 19
and other NGOs propose an important distinction:
. Dumb broke Joe Blow with his bumper sticker that says Make Iran a Parking Lot
. Concerted government and media campaigns advocating war.
Only the latter constitutes illegal war propaganda, which is illegal under conventional
international law (UN Charter Article 2(4)), customary international law (E/Conf. 6/C.i/ig of
1948 and other resolutions), and legal precedent (Nuremberg Count 1).
So when Russia gets fed up and decapitates the US regime, Browder will be in the cage at
the war crimes tribunal under the Streicher, Fritzsche, Dietrich, and von Weizsaeker
Nuremberg precedents.
Where is the outrage? You ain't gonna get it from Big Media, who sold out a long time ago.
BM has all but ignored the Clinton Administration collusion with Yeltsin in the Russian 1996
election. It was an, er, "inconvenient truth."
Can someone help me remember the names of those 9 oligarchs?
These are the ones I remember:
1) Anatoly Chubais
2) Browder
3) Boris Berezovsky
4) Mikhail Khodorkovsky
5) Vladimir Gusinsky
Who were the others? Thanks.
Of these 5, Chubais remained in Russia but the others fled. Chubais was the one who was
instrumental in starting the loans-for-shares scheme. My understanding is that those who fled
are real scum, since Putin offered all oligarchs the chance to keep their money so long as
they avoided politics. Most vulture capitalists agreed to this arrangement, but the worst of
the Jewish oligarchs were too greedy and lustful to give in. So I have heard, anyway.
"... In Brussels, Trump attacked Frau Merkel. How does she dare to buy Russian gas, if Germany faces a Russian threat? ..."
"... NATO is an instrument of American control over Europe, and Washington keeps dozens of bases in Europe, in particular – in Germany. Germany has remained under American occupation since 1945. This would seem good for America, but the occupied and controlled Western European states are tied to the Clinton camp, to Democrats and liberals. They do not accept Trump as their rightful sovereign. And Europe does not pay for its occupation, so it is costly. Of course, it is a great honour to occupy and control the great powers of the past, England, France, the Netherlands, Spain. But it costs a lot of money for America. Likewise, in 1990 Russia discovered that it is expensive to control surly East Germany, independent Poland, sunny Georgia, tricky Armenia, populous Uzbekistan and the rainy Baltic States. ..."
"... Russians are in a very uncomfortable seat. All their neighbours are subject to American pressure to annoy Russia, be it Georgia (once they even attacked Russia militarily being led by American and Israeli advisers) or the Ukraine (Americans arranged a coup d'état and installed extremely hostile to Russia government in Kiev). American military bases surround Russia and NATO troops drew closer and closer to its centres. American military budget of 600 billion dollars dwarfs the Russian one, while the armaments' race can undermine Russian finances. If Russia were a woman, she would scream: stop it! ..."
"... From the beginning to the end, the US media was highly hostile to Trump and to his mission in Europe. They eagerly followed anti-Trump demos and exaggerated his every blunder. Google obediently trailed at the top Twitter messages of the ex-CIA boss calling Trump 'a traitor'. All prominent Western newspapers spoke of Trump's 'treason'. ..."
"... In the current Russophobian climate, it would have been impossible to concede almost anything to Russia, and V. Putin understands this. But as Russiagate unravels ever so slowly, he will have more room. But as long as both leaders agreed not to start WWIII , something has been achieved, therefore I also believe the Iran threats to be posturing, it would make sense if Russia have calmed Israel, what the current situation indicates. ..."
"... The US knows fully well than an Iran war would not be winnable and bring the rest of the world together; the world has not yet overcome the last financial crisis, a new largescale war in the ME could very well crash the Global economy and the petrodollar. Nobody are keen on that. ..."
an orange hurricane, President Trump
made a stormy visit to the Old World. Usually American presidents' visits to Europe present photo
opportunities and vows of eternal love and friendship. Not this time. Since the Mongol invasion, not many
visitors from outside shook Europe like he did. The US President has finally emerged from the cage built by
his political adversaries, and begun to say things his voters wanted to hear.
However, his wonderful daring statements were quickly undermined and
disowned by his ministers and advisers, creating the feeling that Trump speaks only for himself, while the
US administration, his own appointees say the opposite. And then he also repudiated his own statements,
saying he was misunderstood.
The American president increasingly resembles the hero of
The Prince
and The Pauper
, the poor boy who accidentally became a king – and began to behave in a non-royal way:
showing mercy and caring for people. His own staff disregards his commands. Trump says what people like to
hear, but his administration sticks to the original course.
During the first part of his trip he acted a rebel in Wodehouse World with
its feeble men and formidable women. Indeed the West is ruled by formidable aunts and elder sisters. Aunt
Angela in Germany, Aunt Theresa in England, Aunt Brigitte in France. Only Aunt Hillary is missing to
complete the puzzle and establish the rule of Aunties over their hen-pecked nephews.
(Hillary's defeat didn't derail the Aunties' program of emasculation:
#MeToo campaign goes on unabated. Men are afraid to flirt with girls. Henry (
The
Superman
) Cavill admitted as much in an interview, saying that flirting with somebody would be like
"casting myself into the fires of hell", as a person in the public eye. "I think a woman should be wooed and
chased", he said, but it could lead to jail. He was immediately attacked for this heresy: "If Henry Cavill
doesn't want to be called a rapist then all he has to do is not rape anyone", implausibly they claimed. And
he apologised profusely.)
Trump's trip had been accompanied by mass
protest demos. Normally I am all in favour of a good anti-American demo, but in this case, the protesters
were extreme feminists and supporters of unlimited immigration. That's people who like the Aunties, and hate
Uncles. They do not mind conflict with Russia and even consider Trump as a "Russian agent". They dislike
that he does not obey Aunties.
In the second part of the tour, Trump had met with the formidable Mr
Putin, a real man. Now that we have learned from our reliable sources what had happened in the palatial
halls of Helsinki (excepting face-to-face private talk with Putin) we can describe Trump's Pilgrim's
Progress and share our knowledge and conclusions with you.
In short, President Trump made the right sounds and called for right
solutions, but he has been unable to insist on any. If he were a free man of his own mind, this trip would
transform the world. The way things are, it will remain a sign of his honourable intentions, for everything
he said has been overturned and denied by his aides.
In Brussels, Trump attacked Frau Merkel.
How does she dare to buy Russian gas, if Germany faces a Russian threat? Why does it accept immigrants and
refugees who undermine the European way of life? Saying that, he sided with "the populists", the Italians,
Hungarians and Austrians, whose top politicians are male and friendly to Trump and Putin.
The Brussels meeting almost came to an
undoing of NATO. Trump hinted that the US would leave NATO unless they pay. They have to pay more, much
more, if they want to have American protection.
Could he mean it? NATO is an instrument
of American control over Europe, and Washington keeps dozens of bases in Europe, in particular – in Germany.
Germany has remained under American occupation since 1945. This would seem good for America, but the
occupied and controlled Western European states are tied to the Clinton camp, to Democrats and liberals.
They do not accept Trump as their rightful sovereign. And Europe does not pay for its occupation, so it is
costly. Of course, it is a great honour to occupy and control the great powers of the past, England, France,
the Netherlands, Spain. But it costs a lot of money for America. Likewise, in 1990 Russia discovered that it
is expensive to control surly East Germany, independent Poland, sunny Georgia, tricky Armenia, populous
Uzbekistan and the rainy Baltic States.
There is no certainty that the countries of Europe will agree to pay and
submit to Trump's demands. In Germany, there are growing voices demanding the Yankees be sent home, that is,
to ask the American soldiers to leave Germany. It would be good if NATO were to disintegrate and disappear,
like the Warsaw Treaty Organization disappeared. Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to return the
American soldiers home. Perhaps we shall witness Pax Americana without American troops in Europe, like
England fictitiously claimed to belong to the Roman Empire, though Roman legions had left, and Rome lost all
interest in foggy Albion.
In England, Trump confronted Mrs May.
She reminded him of his school mistress, and Donald does not like school mistresses. The soft Brexit, which
she intends to conclude, is a complete bummer, not a Brexit, he said. Under the proposed treaty, all
prerogatives remain in Brussels. So, there can be no trade agreement between the United States and Britain.
America will negotiate directly with Brussels. And in general, it would be better if May transferred Downing
Street 10 to her former Foreign Secretary, a hard-line Brexit supporter, the red-headed Bojo (as the Brits
call Boris Johnson, who had just resigned, resenting the proposed plan for soft Brexit).
The European Union is an American
design, too. Why, then, does the US President want to undermine it by removing the UK, his own Trojan Horse?
Apparently, it means that the globalist forces have entered a state of direct confrontation with America.
This first part of Trump's tour had been
followed by the Kremlin with satisfaction. The Kremlin also believes that NATO has become obsolete, and that
Brexit is the right step. Russia instinctively disapproves of mass migration, just like Trump.
ORDER IT NOW
Trump's meeting with President Putin had
been postponed for a year; both men were eager to meet. Trump wanted to meet another strong man, a powerful
chieftain who can assist him in building a new world, instead of the one created under Obama, by media and
Supreme Court Judges. President Putin wanted to solve bilateral issues and to ease American pressure upon
Russia.
Their problems were very different. The
main problems of Trump were Mme Clinton and Barack Obama, and the whole army of their obstinate followers
who didn't recognise Trump's legitimacy. Putin couldn't do much for him, with all his sympathy.
Putin's problem is the hybrid warfare
carried out by the United States against Russia. Despite accusations you hear in your media (alleged Russian
ads in the Facebook and Twitter influencing voters), American pressure on Russia is very real and very
painful. American officials try to wreck every international deal Russia attempts to clinch. It is not only,
or even mainly about weapons. If a country A wants to sell Russians, say, bananas, the US ambassador will
come to A's king, or his minister, and will expressly forbid him to sell bananas to godless Russians.
Otherwise, do not expect the US aid, or do not count on US favours in your disputes with your neighbours, or
the US won't buy your production, or US banks will take another long and jaundiced view at your financial
transactions. You witnessed the
scene
, when the crazed Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN, threatened sovereign nations with
severe punishment for voting against the US desires, so you have an idea of American delicacy and caution
while pushing their will through.
Russians are in a very uncomfortable
seat. All their neighbours are subject to American pressure to annoy Russia, be it Georgia (once they even
attacked
Russia militarily being led by American and Israeli advisers) or the Ukraine (Americans arranged a
coup d'état
and installed extremely hostile to Russia government in Kiev). American military bases
surround Russia and NATO troops drew closer and closer to its centres. American military budget of 600
billion dollars dwarfs the Russian one, while the armaments' race can undermine Russian finances. If Russia
were a woman, she would scream: stop it!
Perhaps our colleague
Mr Andrei Martyanov
is right and the US can't destroy Russia militarily; perhaps
Immanuel Wallerstein
is correct and American power is in decline; but meanwhile the US is perfectly able
to make life hard and difficult for any state. It made life unbearably hard for North Korea, extremely hard
for Iran. Russia is not doing half as good as she could do without ceaseless American meddling.
President Putin would like Trump to
relent. There is no reason for this incessant picking on Russia; it is not Communist anymore; it is much
smaller and less populous than the former USSR; it wants to live in peace as a member of the family of
nations, not as a great alternative. The anti-Russian offensive began in earnest in the days of previous US
presidents, namely Obama and Clinton; so it would make sense for Trump to stop it.
Problem is, President Trump is also
actively engaged in war against Russia. Just a few days ago he pressured the German Chancellor to give up on
the North Stream-2, to stop buying Russian gas. His advisers demanded that Turkey desist from buying a
Russian antimissile system. The US Air Force bombed Russian troops in Syria.
Still Putin made a good try. He proposed
to hold a referendum in the Donbas area of Eastern Ukraine which is presently independent though lacking
international recognition. The people of Donbas had their own referendum in 2014, and voted for
independence; Kiev regime and its Western sponsors denied its validity as it was done under Russian army's
protection, they claimed. Now Putin proposed a re-run under international auspices.
Trump ostensibly agreed, he said it was
a good idea, and he asked for the opinion of John Bolton, his national security advisor; Bolton confirmed it
was a good idea. This was in Helsinki; however, since then the idea had been rejected by the Americans, as
the Kiev regime balked at it. The regime knows well that the people of Eastern Ukraine aren't likely to opt
for their tender mercies, and Trump administration won't push Kiev to agree to secession, or to abide by the
Minsk agreements and let them re-join federal Ukraine as an autonomous unit. So this haemorrhaging wound at
the western border of Russia will bleed on.
As for Syria, Putin told Trump that he
agreed upon the arrangements with Mr Netanyahu to keep Iranians and their militias at some 80 km away from
the disengagement (1974) lines at the Golan Heights. (Iranians are now going through a difficult stretch and
they accepted this solution without a murmur.) This was acceptable to Trump, and both presidents stressed
that they value Israeli security highly.
(They have differing reasons for it.
Putin wants Syria to remain in peace under his protégé and ally President Bashar Assad, and for this, he
needs some security arrangements with pugnacious Israel. Putin is aware of Jewish state's ability to pull
strings and he doesn't want to antagonise it. Putin also wants Trump to be happy, and Israel is a point of
huge importance for the US President, much more than for Putin.
Trump sacrifices at the altar of Israel
to propitiate the Jews he is fighting in the US. Trump fights everything American Jews stand for, against
all they achieved recently. He wants to have them back in the cash flow cubicle, the 'short guys that wear
yarmulkes every day', counting his notes. They want much, much more: they wish to dominate and rule America
their own way. Trump is ready to give all he can to Israel, so the American Jews will be less eager to fight
him.
This ploy had been tried by the German
National-Socialists in 1930s, who gave the Zionist-Socialists the most profitable
Ha'avara deal
to offset and overcome hostility of American Jews. It failed then, it is likely to fail
again, but not before the Zionists will get all they dream of.)
For North Korea, Putin lauded Trump's
move and said he will keep playing a supportive role to American efforts.
ORDER IT NOW
For the bogus "Russian interference in
the US elections", Putin proposed to establish a bilateral expert group for cyber security. Let experts deal
with experts, and sort out the claims, he said. Trump agreed with the idea, though his advisers were quick
to repudiate it upon their return to Washington.
Putin also proposed to allow
cross-examinations on the reciprocity basis: the US investigators will travel to Russia and interrogate
Russian officials indicted by Mueller's team; while Russian investigators will travel to the US and
interrogate Ambassador McFaul for his participation in
Browder affair
. Trump had been impressed by the generous offer; but as he returned to Washington, McFaul
(falsely) claimed Trump intends to send him to the Gulag, and Trump's advisers promptly repudiated the
proposal.
Putin did not intend to arrest and
detain McFaul, just to question him; likewise, he wouldn't permit Mueller investigators to carry Russian
intelligence officers to a Guantanamo of their choice, just to ask them questions. The Browder Affair grows
bigger as time goes: though the rascal was not the biggest of Russian assets' looters, he was the most
outspoken and keen on hanging on the stolen goods. The US advisers from top-league universities implanted in
the Yeltsin administration in 1990s had stolen more; they also facilitated creation of the mighty oligarchs
of that time. However, Browder had more tenacity and he judiciously invested a lion share of his ill-gotten
profits in bribes aiming to suborn the US administration and turn it onto relentless pursuit of Russia.
Ambassador McFaul fronted for him and covered his misdeeds; while McFaul tried to interfere in Russian
electoral process following the precedent established in 1996.
Thus at Helsinki, a pattern had been
established, I was told by a witness. Putin would make a proposal, Trump would tentatively agree and
promptly deny and repudiate on return to Washington.
From the beginning to the end, the
US media was highly hostile to Trump and to his mission in Europe. They eagerly followed anti-Trump demos
and exaggerated his every blunder. Google obediently trailed at the top Twitter messages of the ex-CIA boss
calling Trump 'a traitor'. All prominent Western newspapers spoke of Trump's 'treason'.
Perhaps they would be able to convince
some Republicans to follow their trend, but the
defeat of Rep. Mark Sanford
in South Carolina primaries following Trump's angry Twitter had brought them
to their senses. A Republican leader stated the case well: "Obviously there are going to be those who are
going to criticise him but they're going to criticise him for anything that he says. This committee stands
strong, stands behind him and wants to support him. We're interested not only in the 2018 elections, we're
interested in the 2020 elections as well."
The
result
of violent Trump-is-a-traitor campaign was surprising: 80% of Trump voters approved of his
Helsinki shtick, notwithstanding the vehement accusations. American media had lost its silver touch.
President may continue to build his power structure, and perhaps one day his word will be worth something.
Putin mentioned BILL BROWDER, and Lee Stranahan's twitter caught fire!
Crack the Deep State matrix.
Join Lee's campaign to make Senators answer the question,
"Have you seen Bill Browder's deposition in the
U.S. vs. Prevezon Holdings case?"
Full research links, including testimony, here -
Trump sacrifices at the altar of Israel to propitiate the Jews he is fighting in the US. Trump fights
everything American Jews stand for, against all they achieved recently. He wants to have them back in the
cash flow cubicle, the 'short guys that wear yarmulkes every day', counting his notes. They want much,
much more: they wish to dominate and rule America their own way. Trump is ready to give all he can to
Israel, so the American Jews will be less eager to fight him.
This could well be right, with Trump's slavish pro-Israel stance designed to get (some) US Jews off his
back.
The implication is that there is a split between US Jewry and the Israeli's, which seems likely since US
Jews want to dominate and rule America, whereas Israeli Jews want to dominate and rule the Middle East
(different concepts).
The Israeli project is a costly affair for the US, and is leading straight towards an Iran war which
could well duplicate the cost of Iraq. If it happens, the US will inevitably be weakened and further
impoverished – maybe more obviously this time as the US has reached its debt limit – with a guaranteed
increase in social unrest.
US Jewry couldn't care less if the US population is impoverished, but there is the issue that social
unrest builds support for Trump, so Israeli action on Iran may force US Jewry to deal with increased US
popular nationalism – with the (US elite Jewish) instinctive reaction to go for repression.
Basically US Jewry wants to be an untouchable minority elite (US Neo-Bolshevism) but the transition to
totalitarianism can be tricky, and the Israelis may be dangerously accelerating the process for them.
" Problem is, President Trump is also actively engaged in war against Russia. Just a few days ago he
pressured the German Chancellor to give up on the North Stream-2, to stop buying Russian gas. His advisers
demanded that Turkey desist from buying a Russian antimissile system. The US Air Force bombed Russian troops
in Syria. "
As Trump said 'Russia is not a friend, nor a foe, but a competitor.
In Helsinki the gas price was discussed.
I wonder if Shamir understands what's going on, unique in history, the leader of an empire giving up that
empire, because he sees keeping it, even more expanding it, as neocons, AIPAC, AEI, want, is suicide.
"Indeed the West is ruled by formidable aunts and elder sisters."
Better characterised as childless Harpies, agents of globalist punishment, who defecate on the countries
and cultures they purport to represent and torture their people as they carry them down into the abyss of
Tartarus.
In the current Russophobian climate, it would have been impossible to concede almost anything to Russia, and
V. Putin understands this. But as Russiagate unravels ever so slowly, he will have more room. But as long as
both leaders agreed not to start WWIII , something has been achieved, therefore I also believe the Iran
threats to be posturing, it would make sense if Russia have calmed Israel, what the current situation
indicates.
The US knows fully well than an Iran war would not be winnable and bring the rest of the world together; the
world has not yet overcome the last financial crisis, a new largescale war in the ME could very well crash
the Global economy and the petrodollar. Nobody are keen on that.
There are numerous agendas and countless anti-Trump saboteurs at play in this latest escalation.
Nevertheless, it is in America's economic and security interests (as well as Russia's) to ease military
tensions and seek normalized relations.
Why not?
After all, the USSR collapsed nearly 3o years ago. And with it died the 'cold war'. America now trades
with communist China. So why not Christian Russia? What's the real roadblock? The last election? That's impossible to believe. Russian 'interference' (if it occurred at all) was not decisive. And what
Russia is alleged to have done is not unique or particularly unusual. Besides, the new cold war with Russia had been brewing for years. So what's behind it all?
This is where the oversized Israeli footprint in US politics rears its ugly head. International Zionists have their not-so-secret list of 'demands'. This list gets Washington's attention. So here's the Israeli deal: Russia's alliance with Iran and Syria must be 'contained' and diminshed. And
Putin–unless he capitulates–must be kept in his box, isolated. This is what Israel wants. Trump must accommodate–or try to accommodate–these demands. Israel's influence is too great to ignore.
The Zionist master plan is simple: continue the break-up of the Arab (and Persian) worlds into smaller,
compliant, non-democratic autocracies or puny, fragmented religious orthodoxies. Sound crazy? Not at all. In Israel's mind, we're already most of the way there.
Starting soon after 911, Zio-Washington initiated a war that crushed Iraq and set back its culture,
economy and military capabilities decades. Ditto on Libya. Syria has also been severely damaged. This is all
good news to Israel. But the job of re-making the Middle East to Israel's liking remains unfinished. Assad's Syria (with Russian and Iranian help) is about to emerge–if not victorious–then intact, after
years of Zio-American meddling and covert warfare. Assad survives but Israel has not given up. Syria remains
weak.
Next step: using Washington's awesome military and intelligence capabilities, global Zionism is now
embarking on a campaign that will attempt to destabilize Iran without using US bombs or missiles. How?
Hundreds of millions of US dollars have just been earmarked to target Iran's existing regime through
propaganda, sabotage and subterfuge. The ongoing Zionist-lead BDS campaign against Iran is about to hit an
even higher gear. This is another act of war against the people of Iran.
Yet no one seems to care. There's simply no discussion or dissent. It's simply Zio-America's next target. For the safety of Israel, Iran must fall.
Talk about direct interference in another country's sovereign affairs! What Zio-Washington is doing to
Iran makes 'Russiagate' look absolutely insignificant in comparison, even if every exaggerated assertion was
true. Yet no one protests.
Not the pundits. Not the politicians. Not even the anti-war Left. Either they're too frightened or
they're complicit.
Duplicity, dirty deeds, and double standards is how Zio-Washington rolls. And Israel wouldn't have it any other way.
Zionist power is simply too vast, too effective and too unrelenting to resist–even for a US President.
But Trump's objective to 'Make America Great Again' is up against Israel's presumption that it can direct US
policies to it liking. Can this marriage survive?
Can Trump serve two masters?
The inevitable clash ahead is why Trump is under so much media and political pressure. The Zions want to
keep him under pressure and off balance. Also, there is the simmering, embarrassing, unresolved matter of Palestine. The native goyim there are
still resisting. This fact too, is as astonishing as it is shameful.
The refusal of Israel to give back land, allow independence, and cut a deal that would allow Palestine
autonomy after decades of Israeli occupation and endless 'talks' speaks volumes about Israeli ruthlessness.
The 'Two State Solution' failed because Israel decided that it didn't want an independent and sovereign
Palestinian state. To the Israelis, the sad plight of the Palestinian people matters not.
And even Washington is not powerful enough to force Israel to return to the Palestinians the land that
the Jewish state snatched in its preemptive 1967 war. So the 'peace process' gradually died.
But as the talks dragged on, Israel expanded its borders, built Jewish settlements in Palestine, gained
greater militarily power, cultivated its regional influence (and power in Washington), and increased its
GDP.
Palestine on the other hand, achieved none of those things. Conditions have actually worsened. At this
point, all the Palestinians can do is hold on or surrender.
Meanwhile, it's clear that Israel's race-conscious majority want the native non-Jews out of the Jewish
State. This political 'value' can now be seen for what it is.
Can the torture of Palestine go on indefinitely?–or must Israel soon act ruthlessly and decisively?
One option is for the Jewish state to radically increase colonization of the Occupied Territories and
begin the forcible transfer of non-Jews into Jordan, Egypt or Syria.
Ironically, Meir Kahane's racist, reviled (but prophetic) proclamation (and book) 'They [the Arabs] Must
Go' has finally found its audience. Israel's 'national socialist' values are showing. Even Trump is being held hostage. Can Trump shake the Zionist monkey off his back?–or will he have to
obediently target all the usual bad guys: Iran, Hamas, Russia and Assad?
Israel orchestrates. Washington executes. And the sad story continues.
Trump is but another example of the Zionist control of the American government and Trumps pissing backwards
in his statements at the Helsinki news conference is the Zionist deep state in action for all the world to
see. Trump is a puppet of the Zionists who surround him and who hold the paper on his real estate house of
cards and so he does what he is told as the only other option is the JFK route and obviously he has made the
right choice for him but not for America.
Zionist control of American was proven on 911 when Israel and
the zionist deep state did 911 and got away with it and every thinking American knows they did it.
Trump has always been speaking out of both sides of his mouth, so his agreeing and disagreeing with the
"intelligence community" at the same time is all in a day's work for him. It seems to me that he is just
playing for time – he may of course still lose bigly in the end, but he has not yet conceded defeat.
"Yes, the Aspen Institute is the CIA and the CIA is the Aspen Institute"
Notable quotes:
"... CIA manages transnational organized crime to top up their budget for unauthorized clandestine operations, like killing JFK. CIA protects its criminal protégés with their chartered impunity. ..."
"... RFK knew how it works. RFK junior explained the reason for RFK's focus on organized-crime until CIA whacked him. That's why his book was made to sink without a ripple. ..."
"... Evenfurthermore, CIA is the government and the government is CIA. Decades ago Fletcher Prouty showed that CIA's deepest-cover illegal moles are embedded in our own government. Every agency with repressive capacity is infiltrated with focal points, who report to CIA handlers without the other agency's knowledge. ..."
"... Of course Israel is trying to infiltrate it -- they understand the levers of power. ..."
"... Assange has got some mighty stinkers in his insurance file. All we can do is hope they're enough to destabilize the CIA Reich that has ruled America since 1949. ..."
Yes, the Aspen Institute is the CIA and the CIA is the Aspen Institute. Or, to be more precise, the CIA is the armed wing of Washington's
permanently governing technocratic party, in the same way the KGB was the armed wing of the Soviet Communist Party.
Poor Julian Assange is likely going to be in their hands not too long from now. The citizen of one Five Eyes country will be arrested
by another and then sent off to the imperial metropole, to be kicked around like a political football. The rest of us Anglosphericals
are expected to cheer or remain silent. Either is acceptable.
Yup. Furthermore, CIA is organized crime and organized crime is CIA. CIA recruits and runs agents in favored criminal syndicates
in every illicit trade: drugs, child sexual trafficking, arms, fraud, bustouts, extortion, money laundering. Their purpose is
not to interdict the trade but to control it.
CIA manages transnational organized crime to top up their budget for unauthorized clandestine operations, like killing
JFK. CIA protects its criminal protégés with their chartered impunity.
They call off law enforcement with the magic words national security or 'sources and methods.' If the plan gets exposed, CIA's
criminal cutouts insulate the agency from exposure.
RFK knew how it works. RFK junior explained the reason for RFK's focus on organized-crime until CIA whacked him. That's
why his book was made to sink without a ripple.
Evenfurthermore, CIA is the government and the government is CIA. Decades ago Fletcher Prouty showed that CIA's deepest-cover
illegal moles are embedded in our own government. Every agency with repressive capacity is infiltrated with focal points, who
report to CIA handlers without the other agency's knowledge.
Of course Israel is trying to infiltrate it -- they understand the levers of power.
Assange has got some mighty stinkers in his insurance file. All we can do is hope they're enough to destabilize the CIA
Reich that has ruled America since 1949.
"... "Our intelligence community" is one of those phrases that make my back teeth itch, because I hate to see "our" doing that much work (especially when I know how much work our's parent, "we," has to do.) ..."
"... On Friday, Michael McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Russia, wrote on Twitter: "I'm very impressed that Mueller was able to name the 12 GRU officers in the new indictment. Demonstrates the incredible capabilities of our intelligence community ." ..."
"... Almost one year ago, on January 28th, 2003, the President devoted one-third of his State of the Union address to what he described as "a serious and mounting threat to our country" posed by Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. He spoke, in those famous 16 words, about efforts by Iraq to secure enriched uranium from Africa. He talked about aluminum tubes "suitable for nuclear weapons production." He described stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and said, "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs." ..."
"... That "we know, we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations " That "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." Pictures of what he called "active chemical munitions bunkers" with "sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions." ..."
"... The WMDs episode led to the (bipartisan) Iraq War, the greatest strategic debacle in American history. The WMDs episode was marked by fake evidence (yellowcake; aluminum tubes), planted stories, gaslighting, and a consensus of elite opinion along the Acela Corridor, exactly as today. The intelligence community was wrong. The national security establishment was wrong. The press was wrong. The Congressional leadership was wrong. The President was wrong. Everybody was wrong (except for a few outliers who couldn't get jobs afterwards anyhow, exactly because they were right). And now, today, we are faced with the same demand that we believe what the intelligence community says, without question, and without evidence that the public can see and examine. The only difference is that this time, the stakes are greater: Rather than blowing a few trillion and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of faraway brown people, we're rushing toward a change in the Constitutional Order that in essence makes the intelligence community a fourth branch of the government. ..."
"Our intelligence community" is one of those phrases that make my back teeth itch, because I hate to see "our" doing that much
work (especially when I know how much work our's parent, "we," has to do.) So I thought I'd throw together some usage examples of
the term to see if I could find more significant readings than my own reaction, and then draw out some implications from that reading.
But first, let's look at how often that term is used, and where. We turn to
Google Trends
:
Some caveats: Google doesn't have enough data to track "our intelligence community," or so it says, so the search is for "intelligence
community" only.
Further, the search is for 2008 to the present, again because Google, or so it says, doesn't have enough data for
shorter time frames.[1] However, I think the chart shows that interest in the intelligence community is not general in time or space:
It spikes when there's gaslighting with reader interest in particular stories, and spikes along the Acela Corridor, in
Washington and New York. (We might also speculate,
based on HuffPost/YouGov
voter data , that interest in the today's stories about the intelligence is limited not only in space, and time, but in scope:
Primarily among liberal Democrats.[2]) With that, let's turn to our usage examples.
I used Google to find them, and of course Google
search is crapified and all but useless -- for example, it insists on returning examples of "intelligence community" along with "our
intelligence community" in normal search, even with when the search string is quoted -- but it is what it is; readers are invited
to supply their own examples.
On Friday, Michael McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Russia, wrote on Twitter: "I'm very impressed that Mueller
was able to name the 12 GRU officers in the new indictment. Demonstrates the incredible capabilities of our intelligence
community ."
No. Mueller provided no evidence and the case is unlikely to go to trial; the capability consists in the naming, not in the proof.
Verdict: Credulity .
The
intelligence community
determined
that the Kremlin intended to "denigrate" and "harm" Clinton, and "undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic
process" while helping Trump.
And the same claim, July 10, 2018, Washington Post:
The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to boost Trump's candidacy
No. If you click through, you'll find that this is the "17 agencies"/"high confidence" report, whose agencies and analysts were
hand-picked by Clapper; that's just not the "intelligence community" as a whole[3]; the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was not
involved in the analysis, for example. (I don't see how it's normal that such an important topic not to be the subject of a Presidental
Finding, but perhaps people were in a rush.) Verdict; Misinformation .
FLAKE: We know the intelligence is right. We stand behind our intelligence community . We need to say
that in the Senate. Yes, it's symbolic, and symbolism is important.
And a similar formulation, July 22, 2018, Senator Marco Rubio (R),
CBS News
:
We need to move forward from that with good public policy and part of that is, I think, standing with our intelligence
community .
Posturing aside, to my sensibilities, it's pretty disturbing when "support the troops" bleeds over into "support the spies," and
when supporting the conclusions of an institution bleeds over into supporting the institution itself, as such. (The whole of the
Federalist Papers argues against the latter view:
"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.") Verdict: Authoritarian followership .
WE UNIFY OUR INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY TOWARD A STRONGER, SAFER NATION
No. The DNI mistakes the hope for the fact; were the intelligence community in fact
unified
, Clapper would not have hand-picked agencies for his report, and a Presidential Finding would have been made. (And given the
source, "our" is doing even more work there than it usual does; it reminds of liberal Democrats talking about "our Democracy." Whose,
exactly?) Verdict: Wishful thinking .
Example 5, July 16, 2018, John Sipher (interview),
PBS
:
I do think the intelligence community is quite resilient. They put their head down and they do their work, but they
take this very seriously. And they see the president as their primary customer and they will do almost anything to get the president
the information that he needs to do his job.
No. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes
-- "Who will guard the guards themselves?" -- was formulated by the Roman poet
Juvenal (d. 138AD) in the late first or early second century,
[checks calculator], about 1880 years ago. It's absurd to assume that "the intelligence" community has always served its "primary
customer" -- see the Bay of Pigs invastion at "
groupthink " -- or that they will
in the future, especially considering the enormous stakes involved today. Verdict: Historical ignorance .
Today I voted for H.R. 6237, the Matthew Young Pollard Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 2018 and 2019. This
important legislation funds our Intelligence community and provides them the resources they need to effectively defend
our nation "This legislation makes sure that the dedicated men and women who serve our nation in the Intelligence Community [caps
in the original] are fully equipped to fulfill their mission."
No. While Sipher urges (
as does Clapper
) that the intelligence community is in the business of serving customers, Comstock, through her language ("dedicated
men and women who serve our nation") identifies it with the military. That's pretty disturbing when you realize that the intelligence
community has a domestic component (and when you think back to Obama's 17-city crackdown on Occupy, or Obama's militarized response
to #BlackLivesMatter). Verdict: Militarization
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, head of the U.S. intelligence community , reaffirmed his conclusion
that Russia had indeed tried to sway the election in a statement published after Trump's remarks.
No. The U.S. has 17 intelligence agencies; the DNI is in no sense their head.
From the DNI site :
The core mission of the ODNI is to lead the IC in intelligence integration, forging a community that delivers the most insightful
intelligence possible. That means effectively operating as one team: synchronizing collection, analysis and counterintelligence
so that they are fused. This integration is the key to ensuring national policymakers receive timely and accurate analysis from
the IC to make educated decisions.
If you boil that bureucratic porridge down -- the Russian word for porridge is
kasha , in case kompromat has
worn thin for you -- you'll see that the 17 intelligence agencies do not have a reporting relationship to the DNI. Hence, the DNI
is not their head. QED. Verdict: Authoritarian followership
[BRENNAN:] What Mr. Trump did (Monday) was to betray the women and men of the FBI, the CIA and NSA and others and betray the
American public. That's why I use the term, this was nothing short of treason, because it is a betrayal of the nation. He's giving
aid and comfort to the enemy.
(Leaving aside Brennan's broad definition of enemy -- apparently a sovereign state with interests different from our own, as opposed
to a nation against whom Congress has declared war -- note that Brennan treats the agencies as individual entities, not as "unified,"
presumably betraying DNI Coats). More:
BRENNAN:] I still shake my head trying to understand what was discussed during the two-hour one-on-one, what was discussed
between the two sides in their bilateral meeting. We only saw what Mr. Trump said during the press conference. I can't even imagine
what he said behind closed doors. I can't imagine what he said to Mr. Putin directly. I am very concerned about what type of impact
it might have on our intelligence community and on this country."
No. Note well: What (
torture
advocate ) Brennan says contradicts the other two models expressed in this aggregation. If the President is the customer, it's
not Brennan's concern what that customer does (any more than it's Best Buy's concern what I buy in Starbucks after I pick up my flat-screen
TV). And if the intelligence community is a branch of the military, it's not their concern what their Commander-in-Chief does; he'll
tell them what they need to know.) Seriously, why does the Praetorian Guard need to know what the emperor is doing. Now, one could
argue that Brennan's ambition is counteracting Trump's ambition; well and good, but then one needs to think through the consequences.
And if Brennan, et al., really believe that Trump committed treason, then they -- as the good patriots they presumably are -- need
to indicate a path to removing him. If that path does not include full disclosure of the evidence for whatever charges are to be
made, then the country will have to deal with the consequences -- which I'd speculate won't be pretty -- of
a change in the Constitutional order where the "intelligence community" can remove a President from office based on its own internal
consensus . Praetorian
Almost one year ago, on January 28th, 2003, the President devoted one-third of his State of the Union address to what he
described as "a serious and mounting threat to our country" posed by Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. He spoke,
in those famous 16 words, about efforts by Iraq to secure enriched uranium from Africa. He talked about aluminum tubes "suitable
for nuclear weapons production." He described stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and said, "we know that Iraq, in the
late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs."
One week later, on February 5th, Secretary of State Colin Powell, with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet sitting
behind his right shoulder, used charts and photographs to elaborate on the Administration's WMD case. "These are not assertions,"
Powell said, "these are facts corroborated by many sources." Among Powell's claims were:
That "we know, we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was dispersing rocket launchers and warheads
containing biological warfare agent to various locations " That "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons
and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." Pictures of what he called "active chemical munitions bunkers" with "sure
signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions."
Powell has subsequently said that he spent days personally assessing the intelligence. He included only information he felt
was fully supported by the analysis. Hence, no mention of enriched uranium from Africa, no claim that al Qaeda was involved in
9-11.
The effect was powerful. Veteran columnist for the Washington Post, Mary McGrory, known for liberal views and Kennedy connections,
wrote an op-ed the following day entitled "I Am Persuaded". Members of Congress, like me, believed the intelligence case. We voted
for the resolution on Iraq to urge U.N. action and to authorize military force only if diplomacy failed. We felt confident we
had made the wise choice.
But as the evidence pours in the Intelligence Committee's review of the pre-war intelligence; David Kay's interim report on
the failure to find WMD in Iraq; an impressive study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board's critique; thoughtful commentaries like that of Ken Pollack in this month's Atlantic Monthly; and
investigative reporting including a lengthy front page story by Barton Gellman of the Washington Post on January 7,
we are finding out that Powell and other policymakers were wrong, British intelligence was wrong, and those of us who
believed the intelligence were wrong . Indeed, I doubt there would be discussions of David Kay's possible departure if the
Iraq Survey Group were on the verge of uncovering large stockpiles of weapons or an advanced nuclear weapons program.
But if 9/11 was a failure to connect the dots, it appears that the Intelligence Community, in the case of Iraq's WMD,
connected the dots to the wrong conclusions . If our intelligence products had been better, I believe many policymakers,
including me, would have had a far clearer picture of the sketchiness of our sources on Iraq's WMD programs, and our lack of certainty
about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities.
Let me add that policymakers -- including members of Congress -- have a duty to ask tough questions, to probe the information
being presented to them. We also have a duty to portray that information publicly as accurately as we can.
The WMDs episode led to the (bipartisan) Iraq War, the greatest strategic debacle in American history. The WMDs episode was marked
by fake evidence (yellowcake; aluminum tubes), planted stories, gaslighting, and a consensus of elite opinion along the Acela Corridor,
exactly as today. The intelligence community was wrong. The national security establishment was wrong. The press was wrong. The Congressional
leadership was wrong. The President was wrong. Everybody was wrong (except for a few outliers who couldn't get jobs afterwards anyhow,
exactly because they were right). And now, today, we are faced with the same demand that we believe what the intelligence community
says, without question, and without evidence that the public can see and examine. The only difference is that this time, the stakes
are greater: Rather than blowing a few trillion and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of faraway brown people, we're rushing toward
a change in the Constitutional Order that in essence makes the intelligence community a fourth branch of the government.
Why are we doing that? Well, if you look at the verdicts after each of the quotes I've found, taking the quotes as a proxy for
elite opinion, one reason might be that the portion of our elites involved in the Russia narrative -- who, let us remember, are limited
in space and scope -- are:
Credulous Misinformed Prone to authoritarian followership Historically ignorant Militarized Praetorian
If power is lying in the street, beware of who picks it up. Matters might not improve.
NOTES .
[1] The hit count (100 for the spike in January 2017) is oddly low; sadly, although 100 looks like a blue link, we cannot click
through to check the data. However, even if the aggregates are low, I think we can assume that both the shape of the trend line and
its geographic distribution are directionally correct, because the spikes occur at reasonable places for them to occur. Sidebar:
Note the horrid user interface design, which uses inordinate amounts of screen space to no purpose, disrespecting the time-pressed
professional user.
[2] We might even go so far as to speculate that -- given these limitations in space -- that while "our" asserts Democrat leadership
as a National party, Democrats are in fact a State party. Removing the hyphen from "nation-state" is a neat way
of encapsulating our current legitimacy crisis.
[3] "Intelligence community," like "deep state," connotes unity among institutions that are in fact riven by faction.
ADDENDUM: Scott Horton
I didn't add this material to the post proper, because I only had screen shots, and I wasn't able to find the post in time using
Google, or Facebook's lousy search. So after ten minutes of plowing through Facebook's infinite scroll, here is the embed* from Scott
Horton that I sought:
And a screen shot personally taken by me:
Note the lead: "European intelligence analysts ," so reminiscent of Bush's "British intelligence has learned " (the
sixteen words ). What they "learned," of course,
was the faked evidence on Niger yellowcake. Go through my list of "verdicts," starting with "credulous," and see what does
not
apply to Horton.
Horton is a Contributing Editor to Harper's Magazine,
has a law practice in New York, and is affiliate with Columbia Law School and the Open Society Institute.
The key point, for me, is this: "Liberal Democrats do not view anyone outside of places like Orange and Lexington County (whom
they go all-out to court) as people fit to make their own choices." It's important to watch for outright denial of agency,
to others, not merely lack of agency. That's true for Horton, it was true for Clinton's "deplorables" comment, and it was true for
Obama's "bitter"/"cling to" Kinseley gaffe.
It would be nice if Senator Sanders didn't signal boost this stuff. Here's another usage example of "intelligence community":
Or, to put this another way, Sanders needs to get his supporters' backs, and fast, with messaging that doesn't take a "duck and
cover" approach by repeating the catchphrases of the current onslaught, but contextualizes and decontaminates it. I didn't say that
would be easy
NOTE * I like the picture the Time chose very much; apparently, the evul left is young, female, swarthy, and/or black.
No suburban Republicans here! The "AbolishICE" t-shirt -- and not, say, #MedicareForAll -- is also a nice touch.
"... PT is correct. Any Russian anywhere who has ever spoken to any American for any reason is now considered attempting to "undermine American democracy." When in reality, we're doing it just fine ourselves. The hypocrisy and paranoia is breathtaking - and extremely dangerous. ..."
I noticed this situation some months ago when Torshin was accused of donating money to the NRA in order to help Trump get elected.
Apparently he is a member of the NRA and as such is perfectly entitled to make donations to the organization.
What I noticed in the article about this is that the one piece of information left out was the amount of the donation. Since
the NRA spent $50 million trying to get Trump elected, unless Torshin's donation was some significant percentage of that $50 million,
it would make no sense for his donation to be considered significant, if it was little more than what a normal NRA member might
be expected to contribute.
Which is, of course, why that figure was deliberately left out of the article - and several other articles on the subject.
An article at ABC News finally acknowledged what the "donation" was:
Last month, a lawyer for the NRA told ABC News that Torshin had, indeed, donated membership dues of between $600 and $1,000
to the organization.But the lawyer, J. Steven Hart, said that was the extent of money coming from Russians.
"We have one contribution from a Russian," Steven Hart, outside counsel to the NRA, said in an interview with ABC News before
Friday's sanctions announcement.
Hart said it was the "life membership payment" made by Torshin, which went to the NRA's non-profit parent organization,
which is not required by law to disclose the donation. Hart added, "The donation was the person's membership dues" and was
not used for election-related activities. "That was not a major donor program," he said.
PT is correct. Any Russian anywhere who has ever spoken to any American for any reason is now considered attempting to
"undermine American democracy." When in reality, we're doing it just fine ourselves. The hypocrisy and paranoia is breathtaking
- and extremely dangerous.
A Russian donating to the NRA - that is going to make liberal heads explode! Snowflakes, run do not walk to the campus safe
spaces before they fill up!
"Since the NRA spent $50 million trying to get Trump elected, unless Torshin's donation was some significant percentage of
that $50 million, it would make no sense for his donation to be considered significant, if it was little more than what a normal
NRA member might be expected to
contribute."
And just how significant was the $100,000 that clickbait firm from St. Petersburg spent on Facebook ads in 2016? We're through
the looking-glass now, friend! Logic doesn't matter anymore.
The Narrative here faces serious Questions... Poor Trade-craft is obvious using insecure Communications, Chit Chat with supposed
'Handler' to name a few... The Note left about the FSB - FSB being INTERNAL Agency of RF begs yet more Questions...
The NYT Article about it brings up another one I think I should Highlight:
"Prosecutors sought criminal charges after agents reported over the weekend that she was moving money out of the country,
had her boxes packed, looked into renting a moving truck and had terminated her apartment lease. "
If she was an Agent of the Government and preparing to leave the Country due to increased Attention - she would hardly waste
her Time sorting her Affairs and Possessions in the US - This would be considered Government write off effectively.
Her actions however screams someone trying to preserve personal Possessions and Earnings..
I can suggest two 'soft' theories on this whole Affair -
A) She is a naive Girl who genuinely believed what she was doing, found a sponsor whom guided her, maybe even persuaded her
to thinking she was working for Russian Government or elements within and thus her naive and very unprofessional behavior has
obvious explanation.
B) Much of what is suggested she wrote has been playful Jest, the Types of Jokes my Friends and I have made countless Times
when visiting Foreign Countries and taken for whatever reason utmost seriously by Investigators....
Even this Explanations feels forced - The alternative hard Theories may be something far worse as PT suggests
Having lived in a few Western Countries for varied Times, I feel vindicated having returned to Russia - Though I still travel
constant for work, this serves as careful reminder that the very qualities I once admired in the Western World are potentially
at highest risk and as a Russian - maybe best to be careful...
This poor naive girl has been imprison by a bunch of cowards. This insanity has gone so far over the top with this relentless
drive toward armed conflict with a nuclear superpower that it forces me to believe there is a more organizing principle than just
TDS. They openly defy a elected President and plan his coup. Assange will be arrested next. The conspiracy will use his arrest
against Trump as a bludgeoning tool and force his extradition to the US. Just another political prisoner in the Land of the Free.
I'm sure you're right: there's more at work here than just TDS. The establishment was obviously planning something big, and
Hillary was in on it. I can't say for sure what it was, but if I had to take a wild guess, I would say she was going to invade
Syria, which would have almost certainly led to a war with Russia. But now that Trump is president instead, they're threatened
with the specter of peace!
By this indictment's logic every foreign national helping planned parenthood is trying to "influence American politics". I
wonder if speeches to chambers of commerce or economic clubs or universities by former Presidents of Mexico also make one guilty
of this crime?
It is worth remembering that the Soviet Union purported to be a democracy - the country held elections and the government and
the news media told the people that they lived in the greatest democracy in the world.
I have a friend who grew up in the Soviet Union. Until he was 12 years old he believed he lived in the greatest country in
the world. Then his mother went to England on a trade mission (an opportunity that very few Soviet citizens ever had), and when
she came back she told her son what she had seen there. It was only then that he started to figure out the truth.
Scarey. Foreign nationals will no doubt take note. But she is getting a court hearing, at least. Will it extend to Western
citizens living and working in their home countries?
It already has. In England, in Australia, on the Continent and in the States there are many such examples. Seldom coming before
the Courts. The use of government agencies to harass undesirables has long been standard - using the tax authorities mostly, as
far as one can see, but sometimes other agencies.
For the average citizen it's never made a lot of odds. Those targeted are usually big names who are making waves or might do.
The ordinary citizen has no fear that because he or she holds the view that Government's activities are wrong some official's
going to turn up on the doorstep.
If ordinary people are vulnerable, as this case indicates even though this particular ordinary person is a foreigner, then
we may begin to feel a trifle uneasy. But these are uneasy times in any case.
We are already seeing censorship of social media under the pretext of protecting the country from the supremely powerful Russian
bots. I do not see this de-escalating, despite the best efforts of the Russians not to escalate.
Since the general consensus among Russia "experts" in policy-making circles is that they'll get regime change if only Russia's
wealthy are harassed sufficiently, the logical next step would be to start arresting the children of wealthy Russians who are
studying at US universities.
Trump's intent for dialogue with the Russians and Putin's intent to maintain his 'Putin the Statesman' brand should preclude
a very dangerous spiral of retaliation. We think.
"... The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion ..."
"... The International Jew ..."
"... The New York Journal-American ..."
"... The Times of London ..."
"... Trotsky in New York, 1917 ..."
"... The Black Book of Communism ..."
"... Dearborn Independent ..."
"... The Dearborn Independent ..."
"... The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem ..."
"... The International Jew ..."
"... The Atlantic Monthly ..."
"... Century Magazine ..."
"... The International Jew ..."
"... The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. ..."
"... The International Jew ..."
"... Times of London ..."
"... The International Jew ..."
"... The International Jew ..."
"... The Dearborn Independent ..."
"... Congressional Record ..."
"... Times of London ..."
"... The Last Days of the Romanovs ..."
"... The New World Order ..."
"... The Jewish Century ..."
"... The International Jew ..."
"... If anybody ever benefited from the Bolshevik revolution – it was the workers in the west, primarily US. ..."
"... The October revolution forced the capitalists to make concessions to the working class that they wouldn't have otherwise made simply out of their good natured kind hearts. ..."
"... If the Jews were so diabolical to unleash the Bolshevik revolution because of sinister motives only, how come that they didn't predict that it's going to hurt their profit margins in the US – via increased wages and benefits that they were forced to pay in order to keep the working class calm – out of fear that the Bolshevik revolution might have given them some ideas about conducting feasibility study of staging a copycat revolution. ..."
In my unjustified arrogance, I also sometimes relished a sense of seeing obvious things that
magazine or newspaper journalists got so completely wrong, mistakes which often slipped into
historical narratives as well. For example, discussions of the titanic 20th century military
struggles between Germany and Russia quite often made casual references to the traditional
hostility between those two great peoples, who for centuries had stood as bitter rivals,
representing the eternal struggle of Slav against Teuton for dominion over Eastern Europe.
Although the bloodstained history of the two world wars made that notion seem obvious, it
was factually mistaken. Prior to 1914, those two great peoples had not fought against each
other for the previous 150 years, and even the Seven Years' War of the mid-18th century had
involved a Russian alliance with Germanic Austria against Germanic Prussia, hardly amounting to
a conflict along civilizational lines. Russians and Germans had been staunch allies during the
endless Napoleonic wars, closely cooperated during the Metterich and Bismarck Eras that
followed, while even as late as 1904, Germany had supported Russia in its unsuccessful war
against Japan. Later, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia had a period of close military
cooperation during the 1920s, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 marked the beginning of the Second
World War, and during the long Cold War, the USSR had no more loyal a satellite than East
Germany. Perhaps two dozen years of hostility over the last three centuries, with good
relations or even outright alliance during most of the remainder, hardly suggested that
Russians and Germans were hereditary enemies.
Moreover, throughout much of that period, Russia's ruling elite had had a considerable
Germanic tinge. Russia's legendary Catherine the Great had been a German princess by birth, and
over the centuries so many Russian rulers had taken German wives that the later Czars of the
Romanov dynasty were usually more German than Russian. Russia itself had a substantial but
heavily assimilated German population, which was very well represented in elite political
circles, with German names being quite common among government ministers and sometimes found
among important military commanders. Even a top leader of the Decembrist revolt of the early
19th century had had German ancestry but was a zealous Russian-nationalist in his ideology.
Under the governance of this mixed Russian and German ruling class, the Russian Empire had
steadily risen to become one of the world's foremost powers. Indeed, given its vast size,
manpower, and resources, combined with one of the world's fastest economic growth rates and a
natural increase in total population that was not far behind, a 1914 observer might have easily
pegged it to soon dominate the European continent and perhaps even much of the world, just as
Tocqueville had famously prophesized in the early decades of the 19th century. A crucial
underlying cause of the First World War was Britain's belief that only a preventative war could
forestall a rising Germany, but I suspect that an important secondary cause was the parallel
German notion that similar measures were necessary against a rising Russia.
Obviously, this entire landscape was totally transformed by the Bolshevik Revolution of
1917, which swept the old order from power, massacring much of its leadership and forcing the
remainder to flee, thereby ushering in the modern world era of ideological and revolutionary
regimes. I grew up during the final decades of the long Cold War, when the Soviet Union stood
as America's great international adversary, so the history of that revolution and its aftermath
always fascinated me. During college and graduate school I probably read at least one hundred
books in that general topic, devouring the brilliant works of Solzhenistyn and Sholokhov, the
thick historical volumes of mainstream academic scholars such as Adam Ulam and Richard Pipes,
as well as the writings of leading Soviet dissidents such as Roy Medvedev, Andrei Sakharov, and
Andrei Amalrik. I was fascinated by the tragic story of how Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky and
his other rivals, leading to the massive purges of the 1930s as Stalin's growing paranoia
produced such gigantic loss of life.
I was not so totally naive that I did not recognize some of the powerful taboos surrounding
discussion of the Bolsheviks, particularly regarding their ethnic composition. Although most of
the books hardly emphasized the point, anyone with a careful eye for the occasional sentence or
paragraph would surely know that Jews were enormously over-represented among the top
revolutionaries, with three of Lenin's five potential successors -- Trotsky, Zinoviev, and
Kamenev -- all coming from that background, along with many, many others within the top
Communist leadership. Obviously, this was wildly disproportionate in a country having a Jewish
population of perhaps 4%, and surely helped explain the large spike in worldwide hostility
towards Jews soon afterward, which sometimes took the most deranged and irrational forms, such
as the popularity of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and Henry Ford's
notorious publication of The International Jew . But with Russian Jews so much more
likely to be educated and urbanized, and suffering from fierce anti-Semitic oppression under
the Czars, everything seemed to make reasonable sense.
Then perhaps fourteen or fifteen years ago, I encountered a rip in my personal space-time
continuum, among the first of many to come.
In this particular instance, an especially rightwing friend of evolutionary theorist Gregory
Cochran had been spending long days browsing the pages of Stormfront , a leading
Internet forum for the Far Right, and having come across a remarkable factual claim, asked me
for my opinion. Allegedly Jacob Schiff, America's leading Jewish banker, had been the crucial
financial supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, providing the Communist revolutionaries with
$20 million in funding.
My first reaction was that such a notion was utterly ridiculous since a fact so enormously
explosive could not have been ignored by the many dozens of books I had read on the origins of
that revolution. But the source seemed extremely precise. The Knickerbocker columnist
in the February 3, 1949 edition of The New York Journal-American , then one of the
leading local newspapers, wrote that "Today it is estimated by Jacob's grandson, John Schiff,
that the old man sank about 20,000,000 dollars for the final triumph of Bolshevism in
Russia."
Once I checked around a little, I discovered that numerous mainstream accounts described the
enormous hostility of Schiff towards the Czarist regime for its ill-treatment of Jews, and
these days even so establishmentarian a source as Wikipedia's entry on Jacob Schiff notes that
he played a major role financing the Russian Revolution of 1905, as was revealed in the later
memoirs of one of his key operatives. And if you run a search on "jacob schiff bolshevik
revolution" numerous other references come up, representing a wide variety of different
positions and degrees of credibility. One very interesting statement appears in the memoirs of Henry
Wickham Steed , editor of The Times of London and one of the foremost
international journalists of his era. He very matter-of-factly mentions that Schiff, Warburg
and the other top Jewish international bankers were among the leading backers of the Jewish
Bolsheviks, through whom they hoped to gain an opportunity for the Jewish exploitation of
Russia, and he describes their lobbying efforts on behalf of their Bolshevik allies at the 1919
Paris Peace Conference following the end of the First World War.
Even the very recent and highly skeptical 2016 analysis in Kenneth D. Ackerman's 2016 book
Trotsky in New York, 1917 notes that U.S. Military Intelligence reports of the period
directly made that astonishing claim, pointing to Trotsky as the conduit for the heavy
financial backing of Schiff and numerous other Jewish financiers. In 1925 this information was
published in the British Guardian and was widely discussed and accepted throughout the
1920s and 1930s by numerous major media publications, long before Schiff's own grandson
provided a direct confirmation of those facts in 1949. Ackerman rather cavalierly dismisses all
of this considerable contemporaneous evidence as "anti-Semitic" and a "conspiracy story,"
arguing that since Schiff was a notorious conservative who had never shown any sympathy for
socialism in his own American milieu, he surely would not have funded the Bolsheviks.
Now admittedly, a few details might easily have gotten somewhat garbled over time. For
example, although Trotsky quickly became second only to Lenin in the Bolshevik hierarchy, in
early 1917 the two were still bitterly hostile over various ideological disputes, so he
certainly was not then considered a member of that party. And since everyone today acknowledges
that Schiff had heavily financed the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia, it seems perfectly
possible that the $20 million figure mentioned by his grandson refers to the total invested
over the years supporting all the different Russian revolutionary movements and leaders, which
together finally culminated in the establishment of Bolshevik Russia. But with so many
seemingly credible and independent sources all making such similar claims, the basic facts
appear almost indisputable.
Consider the implications of this remarkable conclusion. I would assume that most of
Schiff's funding of revolutionary activities was spent on items such as activist stipends and
bribes, and adjusted for the average family incomes of that era, $20 million would be as much
as $2 billion in present-day money. Surely without such enormous financial support, the
likelihood of any Bolshevik victory would have been far lower, perhaps almost impossible.
When people casually used to joke about the total insanity of "anti-Semitic conspiracy
theories" no better example was ever tossed around than the self-evidently absurd notion that
the international Jewish bankers had created the worldwide Communist movement. And yet by any
reasonable standard, this statement appears to be more or less true, and apparently was widely
known at least in rough form for decades after the Russian Revolution, but had never been
mentioned in any of the numerous more recent histories that shaped my own knowledge of those
events. Indeed, none of these very comprehensive sources ever even mentioned Schiff's name,
although it was universally acknowledged that he had funded the 1905 Revolution, which was
often discussed in enormous detail in many of those very weighty books. What other astonishing
facts might they similarly be concealing?
When someone encounters remarkable new revelations in an area of history in which his
knowledge was rudimentary, being little more than introductory textbooks or History 101
courses, the result is a shock and an embarrassment. But when the same situation occurs in an
area in which he had read tens of thousands of pages in the leading authoritative texts, which
seemingly explored every minor detail, surely his sense of reality begins to crumble.
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In 1999, Harvard University published the English edition of The Black Book of
Communism , whose six co-authors devoted 850 pages to documenting the horrors inflicted
upon the world by that defunct system, which had produced a total death toll they reckoned at
100 million. I have never read that book and I have often heard that the alleged body-count has
been widely disputed. But for me the most remarkable detail is that when I examine the 35 page
index, I see a vast profusion of entries for totally obscure individuals whose names are surely
unknown to all but the most erudite specialist. But there is no entry for Jacob Schiff, the
world-famous Jewish banker who apparently financed the creation of the whole system in the
first place. Nor one for Olaf Aschberg, the powerful Jewish banker in Sweden, who
played such an important role in providing the Bolsheviks a financial life-line during the
early years of their threatened regime, and even founded the first Soviet international bank .
When one discovers a tear in the fabric of reality, there is a natural tendency to nervously
peer within, wondering what mysterious objects might dwell there. The Ackerman book denounced
the notion of Schiff having funded the Bolsheviks as "a favorite trope of Nazi anti-Jewish
propaganda" and just prior to those words he issued a similar denunciation of Henry Ford's
Dearborn Independent , a publication which would have meant almost nothing to me.
Although Ackerman's particular book had not yet been published when I began exploring the
Schiff story a dozen years ago, many other writers had similarly conjoined those two topics, so
I decided to explore the matter.
Ford himself was a very interesting individual, and his world-historical role certainly
received very scanty coverage in my basic history textbooks. Although the exact reasons for his
decision
to raise his minimum wage to $5 per day in 1914 -- double the existing average pay for
industrial workers in America -- can be disputed, it certainly seems to have played a huge role
in the creation of our middle class. He also adopted a highly paternalistic policy of providing
good company housing and other amenities to his workers, a total departure from the "Robber
Baron" capitalism so widely practiced at that time, thereby establishing himself as a
world-wide hero to industrial workers and their advocates. Indeed, Lenin himself had regarded
Ford as a towering figure in the world's revolutionary firmament, glossing over his
conservative views and commitment to capitalism and instead focusing on his remarkable
achievements in worker productivity and economic well-being. It is a forgotten detail of
history that even after Ford's considerable hostility to the Russian Revolution became widely
known, the Bolsheviks still described their own industrial development policy as "Fordism."
Indeed, it was not unusual to see portraits of Lenin and Ford hanging side-by-side in
Soviet factories , representing the two greatest secular saints of the Bolshevik
pantheon.
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As for The Dearborn Independent , Ford had apparently launched his newspaper on a
national basis not long after the end of the war, intending to focus on controversial topics,
especially those related to Jewish misbehavior, whose discussion he believed was being ignored
or suppressed by nearly all mainstream media outlets. I had been aware that he had long been
one of the wealthiest and most highly-regarded individuals in America, but I was still
astonished to discover that his weekly newspaper, previously almost unknown to me, had reached
a total national circulation of 900,000 by 1925, ranking it as the second largest in the
country and by far the biggest with a national distribution. I found no easy means of examining
the contents of a typical issue, but apparently the anti-Jewish articles of the first couple of
years had been collected and published as short books, together constituting the four volumes
of The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem , a notoriously anti-Semitic
work occasionally mentioned in my history textbooks. Eventually my curiosity got the best of
me, so clicked a few buttons on Amazon.com, bought the set, and wondered what I would
discover.
Based on all my pre-suppositions, I expected to read some foaming-at-the-mouth screed, and
doubted I would be able to get past the first dozen pages before losing interest and consigning
the volumes to gather dust on my shelves. But what I actually encountered was something
entirely different.
Over the last couple of decades, the enormous growth in the power and influence of Jewish
and pro-Israel groups in America has occasionally led writers to cautiously raise certain facts
regarding the untoward influence of those organizations and activists, while always carefully
emphasizing that the vast majority of ordinary Jews do not benefit from these policies and
actually might be harmed by them, even leaving aside the possible risk of eventually provoking
an anti-Jewish backlash. To my considerable surprise, I found that the vast majority of the
material in Ford's 300,000 word series seemed to follow this same pattern and tone.
The individual 80 chapter-columns of Ford's volumes generally discuss particular issues and
events, some of which were well-known to me, but with the vast majority totally obscured by the
passage of almost a hundred years. But as far as I could tell, almost all the discussions
seemed quite plausible and factually-oriented, even sometimes overly cautious in their
presentation, and with one possible exception I can't recall anything that seemed fanciful or
unreasonable. As an example, there was no claim that Schiff or his fellow Jewish bankers had
funded the Bolshevik Revolution since those particular facts had not yet come out, only that he
had seemed to be strongly supportive of the overthrow of Czarism, and had worked toward that
end for many years, motivated by what he regarded as the hostility of the Russian Empire
towards its Jewish subjects. This sort of discussion is not all that different from what one
might find in a modern Schiff biography or in his Wikipedia entry, though many of the important
details presented in the Ford books have disappeared from the historical record.
Although I somehow managed to plow through all four volumes of The International
Jew , the unrelenting drum-beat of Jewish intrigue and misbehavior became somewhat
soporific after a while, especially since so many of the examples provided may have loomed
quite large in 1920 or 1921 but are almost totally forgotten today. Most of the content was a
collection of rather monotonous complaints regarding Jewish malfeasance, scandals, or
clannishness, the sort of mundane matters which might have normally appeared in the pages of an
ordinary newspaper or magazine, let alone one of the muckraking type.
However, I cannot fault the publication for such a narrow focus. A consistent theme was that
because of the intimidating fear of Jewish activists and influence, virtually all of America's
regular media outlets avoided discussion of any of these important matters, and since this new
publication was intended to remedy that void, it necessarily required coverage overwhelmingly
skewed toward that particular subject. The articles were also aimed at gradually expanding the
window of public debate and eventually shame other periodicals into discussing Jewish
misbehavior. When leading magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and Century
Magazine began running such articles, this result was cited as a major success.
Another important goal was to make ordinary Jews more aware of the very problematical
behavior of many of their community leaders. Occasionally, the publication received a letter of
praise from a self-proclaimed "proud American Jew" commending the series and sometimes
including a check to purchase subscriptions for other members of his community, and this
achievement might become the subject of an extended discussion.
And although the details of these individual stories differed considerably from those of
today, the pattern of behavior being criticized seemed remarkably similar. Change a few facts,
adjust the society for a century of change, and many of the stories might be exactly the same
ones that well-meaning people concerned about the future of our country are quietly discussing
today. Most remarkably, there were even a couple of columns about the troubled relationship
between the earliest Zionist settlers in Palestine and the surrounding native Palestinians, and
deep complaints that under Jewish pressure the media often totally misreported or hid some of
the outrages suffered by the latter group.
I certainly cannot vouch for the overall accuracy of the contents of these volumes, but at
the very least they would constitute an extremely valuable source of "raw material" for further
historical investigation. So many of the events and incidents they recount seem to have been
entirely omitted from the major media publications of that day, and surely were never included
in later historical narratives, given that even such widely known stories as Schiff's major
financial backing for the Bolsheviks were completely tossed down George Orwell's "memory
hole."
With the volumes long out of copyright, I have added the set to my collection of HTML Books,
and those so interested may read the text and decide for themselves.
The International Jew The
World's Foremost Problem Henry Ford • 1920 • 323,000 Words
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As mentioned, the overwhelming majority of The International Jew seems a rather
bland recitation of complaints about Jewish misbehavior. But there is one major exception,
which has a very different impact upon our modern mind, namely that the writer took very
seriously The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Probably no "conspiracy theory"
in modern times has been subjected to such immense vilification and ridicule as the
Protocols , but a voyage of discovery often acquires a momentum of its own, and I
became curious about the nature of that infamous document.
Apparently, the Protocols first came to light during the last decade of the 19th
century, and the British Museum stored a copy in 1906, but it attracted relatively little
attention at the time. However, all this changed after the Bolshevik Revolution and toppling of
many other long-standing governments at the end of the First World War led many people to seek
a common cause behind so many enormous political upheavals. From my distance of many decades,
the text of the Protocols struck me as rather bland and even dull, describing in
rather long-winded fashion a plan of secret subversion aimed at weakening the bonds of the
social fabric, setting groups against each other, gaining control over political leaders by
bribery and blackmail, and eventually restoring society along rigidly hierarchical lines with
an entirely new group in control. Admittedly, there were many shrewd insights into politics or
psychology, notably the enormous power of the media and the benefits of advancing political
front-men who were deeply compromised or incompetent and hence easily controllable. But nothing
else really jumped out at me.
Perhaps one reason I found the text of the Protocols so uninspiring is that over
the century since its publication, these notions of diabolical plots by hidden groups have
become such a common theme in our entertainment media, with countless thousands of spy novels
and science fiction stories presenting something similar, though these usually involve far more
exciting means, such as a super-weapon or a powerful drug. If some Bond villain proclaimed his
intent to conquer the world merely through simple political subversion, I suspect that such a
film would immediately die at the box office.
But back one hundred years ago, these were apparently exciting and novel notions, and I
actually found the discussion of the Protocols in many of the chapters of The
International Jew far more interesting and informative than reading the text itself. The
author of the Ford books seems to appropriately treat it as any other historical document,
dissecting its content, speculating on its provenance, and wondering whether or not it was what
it purported to be, namely an approximate record of the statements of a group of conspirators
pursuing mastery over the world, with those conspirators widely believed to be an elite
fraternity of international Jews.
Other contemporaries seem to have taken the Protocols very seriously as well. The
august Times of London fully endorsed it, before later retracting that position under
heavy pressure, and I've read that more copies were published and sold in the Europe of that
era than any other book save the Bible. The Bolshevik government of Russia paid the volume its
own sort of deep respect, with mere possession of the Protocols warranting immediate
execution.
Although The International Jew concludes that the Protocols was probably
genuine, I doubt that likelihood based upon the style and presentation. Browsing around on the
Internet a dozen years ago, I discovered quite a variety of different opinions even within the
precincts of the Far Right, where such matters were freely discussed. I remember some forum
writer somewhere characterizing the Protocols as "based upon a true story," suggesting
that someone who was generally familiar with the secretive machinations of elite international
Jews against the existing governments of Czarist Russia and other countries had drafted the
document to outline his view of their strategic plans, and such an interpretation seems
perfectly plausible.
Another reader somewhere claimed that the Protocols were pure fiction but very
significant nonetheless. He argued that the very keen insights into the methods by which a
small conspiratorial group can quietly corrupt and overthrow powerful existing regimes arguably
ranked it alongside Plato's The Republic and Machiavelli's The Prince as one
of the three great classics of Western political philosophy, and earned it a place on the
required reading list of every Political Science 101 course. Indeed, the author of Ford's books
emphasizes that there are very few mentions of Jews anywhere in the Protocols , and
all the implied connections to Jewish conspirators could be completely struck from the text
without affecting their content whatsoever.
In any event, this short work is now available as one of my HTML Books, making it quite
convenient for reading and text-searching.
Some ideas have consequences and others do not. Although my introductory history textbooks
had often mentioned Henry Ford's anti-Semitic activities, his publication of The
International Jew , and the concurrent popularity of the Protocols , they never
emphasized any lasting political legacy, or at least I don't recall any. However, once I
actually read the contents and also discovered the enormous contemporary popularity of those
writings and the huge national circulation of The Dearborn Independent , I quickly
came to a very different conclusion.
For decades pro-immigration liberals, many of them Jewish, have suggested that anti-Semitism
was a major factor behind the 1924 Immigration Act that drastically reduced European
immigration for the next forty years, while anti-immigration activists have always heatedly
denied this. The documentary evidence from that era certainly favors the position of the
latter, but I really do wonder what important private discussions may not have been set down in
print and entered into the Congressional Record . The overwhelming popular support for
immigration restriction had been successfully blocked for decades by powerful business
interests, which greatly benefited from the reduced wages of the resulting labor-competition,
but now matters had suddenly changed, and surely the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia must have
had been a powerful influence.
Russia, overwhelmingly populated by Russians, had been governed for centuries by a Russian
ruling elite. Then, heavily Jewish revolutionaries, drawn from a group amounting to just 4% of
the population had taken advantage of military defeat and unsettled political conditions to
seize control of the country, butchering those previous elites or forcing them to desperately
flee abroad as penniless refugees.
Trotsky and a large fraction of the leading Jewish revolutionaries had been living as exiles
in New York City, and now many of their Jewish cousins still resident in America began loudly
proclaiming that a similar revolution would soon follow here as well. Huge waves of recent
immigration, mostly from Russia, had increased the Jewish fraction of the national population
to 3%, not far below the figure for Russia itself on the eve of its revolution. If the Russian
elites who ruled Russia had been suddenly overthrown by Jewish revolutionaries, is it not
obvious that the Anglo-Saxon elites who ruled Anglo-Saxon America feared suffering the same
fate?
The "Red Scare" of the 1919 was one response, with numerous immigrant radicals such as Emma
Goldman rounded up and summarily deported, while the Sacco-Vanzetti murder trial in 1921 Boston
captured the attention of the nation, suggesting that other immigrant groups were violent
radicals as well, and might ally themselves with the Jews in a revolutionary movement, just
like the Letts and other disgruntled Russian minorities had done during the Bolshevik
Revolution. But drastically reducing the inflow of these dangerous foreigners was absolutely
essential since otherwise their numbers might easily grow by hundreds of thousands each year,
increasing their already huge presence in our largest cities of the East Coast.
Sharply reducing immigration would certainly cause a rise in worker wages and hurt business
profits. But considerations of profits are secondary if you fear that you and your family might
eventually end up facing a Bolshevik firing squad or fleeing to Buenos Aires with just the
clothes on your backs and a few hurriedly-packed suitcases.
A noteworthy bit of evidence in support of this analysis was the subsequent failure of
Congress to enact similar restrictive legislation curtailing immigration from Mexico or the
rest of Latin America. The local business interests of Texas and the Southwest argued that
continuation of unrestricted Mexican immigration was important for their economic success, with
Mexicans being good people, politically docile workers, and no threat to stability of the
country. This was a clear contrast with the Jews and some other European immigrant groups.
The much less familiar early 1920s battle over restricting Jewish enrollment in the Ivy
League may have been another consequence. In his magisterial 2005 volume The Chosen ,
Jerome Karabel documents how the very rapid growth in Jewish numbers at Harvard, Yale,
Princeton, and other Ivy League colleges had by the early 1920s become an enormous concern to
the Anglo-Saxon elites which had established those institutions and always dominated their
student bodies.
As a result, a quiet war over admissions broke out, involving both political and media
influence, with the reigning WASPs seeking to reduce and restrict Jewish numbers and the Jews
struggling to maintain or expand them. Although there seems no paper-trail of any direct
references to the enormously popular national newspaper and books published by Henry Ford or
any similar material, it is difficult to believe that the academic combatants were not at least
somewhat aware of the theories of a Jewish assault on Gentile society then being so widely
promoted. It is easy to imagine that a respectable Boston Brahmin such as Harvard President A.
Lawrence Lowell regarded his own moderate "anti-Semitism" as a very reasonable middle-ground
between the lurid claims promoted by Ford and others and the demands for unlimited Jewish
enrollment made by his opponents. Indeed, Karabel himself points to the social impact of Ford's
publications as a significant background factor to this academic conflict.
At this point in time, the Anglo-Saxon elites still held the upper hand in the media. The
very heavily Jewish film industry was only in its infancy and the same was true for radio,
while the vast majority of major print outlets were still in Gentile hands, so the descendants
of America's original settlers won this round of the admissions war. But when the battle was
rejoined a couple of decades later, the strategic political and media landscape had completely
shifted, with Jews having achieved near-parity in print influence and overwhelming dominance in
the more powerful electronic media formats such as film, radio, and nascent television, and
this time they were victorious, easily breaking the hold of their longtime ethnic rivals, and
eventually achieving almost complete dominance over
those elite institutions .
And ironically enough, the most lasting cultural legacy of the widespread anti-Jewish
agitation of the 1920s may be the least recognized. As mentioned above, modern readers might
find the text of the Protocols rather boring and bland, almost like they had been cribbed from
the extremely long-winded monologue of one of the diabolical villains of a James Bond story.
But it wouldn't surprise me if there were actually an arrow of causality in the opposite
direction. Ian Fleming created this genre in the early 1950s with his string of international
best-sellers, and it is interesting to speculate about the source of his ideas.
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Fleming had spent his youth during the 1920s and 1930s when the Protocols were
among the most widely read books in much of Europe and leading British newspapers of the
highest credibility were recounting the successful plots of Schiff and other international
Jewish bankers to overthrow the government of Britain's Czarist ally and replace it with Jewish
Bolshevik rule. Moreover, his later service in an arm of British Intelligence would surely have
made him privy to details of that history that went far beyond those public headlines. I think
it is more than pure coincidence that two of his most memorable Bond villains, Goldfinger and
Blofeld, had distinctly Jewish-sounding names, and that so many of the plots involve schemes of
world-conquest by Spectre , a secretive and mysterious international organization
hostile to all existing governments. The Protocols themselves may be half-forgotten
today, but their cultural influence probably survives in the Bond films, whose $7 billion of
aggregate box-office gross ranks them as the most successful movie series in history when
adjusted for inflation.
The extent to which established historical facts can appear or disappear from the world
should certainly force all of us to become very cautious in believing anything we read in our
standard textbooks, let alone what we absorb from our more transient electronic media.
In the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, almost no one questioned the overwhelming
role of Jews in that event, nor their similar preponderance in the ultimately unsuccessful
Bolshevik takeovers in Hungary and parts of Germany. For example, former British Minister
Winston
Churchill in 1920 denounced the "terrorist Jews" who had seized control of Russia and other
parts of Europe, noting that "the majority of the leading figures are Jews" and stating that
"In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing," while lamenting
the horrors these Jews had inflicted upon the suffering Germans and Hungarians.
Similarly, journalist Robert Wilton, former Russia correspondent of the Times of
London , provided a very detailed summary of the enormous Jewish role in his 1918 book
Russia's Agony and 1920 book The Last Days of the Romanovs , although one of
the most explicit chapters of the latter was apparently excluded from the English language edition
. Not long afterward, the facts regarding the enormous financial support provided to the
Bolsheviks by international Jewish bankers such as Schiff and Aschberg were widely reported in
the mainstream media.
Jews and Communism were just as strongly tied together in America, and for years the
largest circulation Communist newspaper in our country was published in Yiddish . When they
were finally released, the Venona Decrypts demonstrated that even as late as the 1930s and
1940s, a remarkable fraction of America's Communist spies came from that ethnic background.
A personal anecdote tends to confirm these dry historical records. During the early 2000s I
once had lunch with an elderly and very eminent computer scientist, with whom I'd become a
little friendly. While talking about this and that, he happened to mention that both his
parents had been zealous Communists, and given his obvious Irish name, I expressed my surprise,
saying that I'd thought almost all the Communists of that era were Jewish. He said that was
indeed the case, but although his mother had such an ethnic background, his father did not,
which made him a very rare exception in their political circles. As a consequence, the Party
had always sought to place him in as prominent a public role as possible just to prove that not
all Communists were Jews, and although he obeyed Party discipline, he was always irritated at
being used as such a "token."
However, once Communism sharply fell out of favor in 1950s America, nearly all of the
leading "Red Baiters" such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy went to enormous lengths to obscure the
ethnic dimension of the movement they were combatting. Indeed, many years later
Richard Nixon casually spoke in private of the difficulty he and other anti-Communist
investigators had faced in trying to focus on Gentile targets since nearly all of the suspected
Soviet spies were Jewish, and when this tape became public, his alleged anti-Semitism provoked
a media firestorm even though his remarks were obviously implying the exact opposite.
This last point is an important one, since once the historical record has been sufficiently
whitewashed or rewritten, any lingering strands of the original reality that survive are often
perceived as bizarre delusions or denounced as "conspiracy theories." Indeed, even today the
ever-amusing pages of Wikipedia provides an entire 3,500 word article attacking the notion of
"Jewish
Bolshevism" as an "antisemitic canard."
I remember in the 1970s the enormous gusts of American praise for Solzhenitysn's three
volume Gulag Archipelago suddenly encountered a temporary headwind when someone noticed that
his 2,000 pages had included a single photograph depicting many of the leading Gulag
administrators, along with a caption revealing their unmistakably Jewish names. This detail was
treated as serious evidence of the great author's possible anti-Semitism since the actual
reality of the enormously large role of Jews in the NKVD and the Gulag system had long since
disappeared from all the standard history books.
As another example, the Rev. Pat Robertson, a leading Christian televangelist, published
The New World Order in 1991, his fiery attack on the "godless globalists" whom he
considered his greatest enemy, and it quickly became a massive national best-seller. He
happened to include a couple of brief, somewhat garbled mentions of the $20 million which Wall
Street banker Jacob Schiff had provided to the Communists, carefully avoiding any suggestion of
a Jewish angle and providing no reference for that claim. His book quickly provoked a vast
outpouring of denunciation and ridicule across the elite media, with the Schiff story seen as
conclusion proof of
his delusional anti-Semitism . I cannot really fault these critics since in pre-Internet
days they could only consult the indexes of a few standard histories of the Bolshevik
Revolution, and finding no mention of Schiff or his money, naturally assumed that Robertson or
his source had simply invented the bizarre story. I myself had had exactly the same reaction at
the time.
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Only after Soviet Communism had died in 1991 and no longer was perceived as a hostile force
were academic scholars in America once again able to publish mainstream books that gradually
restored the true picture of that past era. In many respects, a widely praised work such as
The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine, published in 2004 by Princeton University Press,
provides a narrative quite consistent with long-forgotten works by Robert Wilton but marks a
very sharp departure from the largely obfuscatory histories of the intervening eighty-odd
years.
Until about a dozen years ago, I had always vaguely assumed that Henry Ford's The
International Jew was a work of political lunacy and the Protocols was a
notorious hoax. Yet today, I would probably consider the former as a potentially useful source
of possible historical events otherwise excluded from most standard accounts, while at least
understanding the argument of why the latter might deserve a place alongside Plato and
Machiavelli as a classic of Western political thought.
' A crucial underlying cause of the First World War was Britain's belief that only a
preventative war could forestall a rising Germany, but I suspect that an important secondary
cause was the parallel German notion that similar measures were necessary against a rising
Russia '
Indeed. I forget where, but I have read that the German General Staff had calculated that
after 1916, Russia would be unbeatable. While I disagree with the rather widespread belief
that Germany was particularly responsible for World War One, it may well have been the case
that once the ball started rolling, many in the General Staff calculated that it would be
better to have it out now than to wait.
Incidentally, to digress, I feel that while it was above all the situation and the
paradigm of the times that brought World War One about, if anyone should be held culpable, it
would be France and Serbia, while -- in contrast to your opinion -- I feel that Britain
probably was the one power least responsible for the outbreak of war.
I'd note that associations between Jews and revolutionary socialism in America weren't just
the product of observing events in Europe.
I read an interesting book called More Powerful than Dynamite that describes the
social unrest and pre-revolutionary agitation that gripped New York City in 1915-1916. The
author appears genuinely unaware of the fact, but a very large proportion -- half?
two-thirds? -- of the figures he names are Eastern European Jews. For whatever reason, a
completely disproportionate percentage of these people came boiling out of their shtetls
absolutely possessed by revolutionary fervor. Was it hatred of Tsarism? A reaction to
being freed from the rule of their traditional communities and rabbis? I don't know -- but
it'd be interesting to read about.
More mundanely, I read Frederik Pohl's memoir of the early science-fiction scene, The
Way the Future Was. In it, he discusses his membership in the Young Communists League or
some such thing in New York City in late thirties -- and notes that although he didn't find
the fact significant, the membership was indeed disproportionately Jewish.
It's a bit like blacks and basketball. Not all basketball players are black, but they
disproportionately are. Ditto for Jews and Communists -- both in Europe and here. As a rough
rule, they seem to have been overrepresented by a factor of between ten and a hundred. I
think that seeing Communism as a Jewish plot is a paranoid over-simplification -- but it is
equally unreasonable to see no connection at all.
As to the reality and extent of China's famine during the Great Leap Forward, I strongly
recommend you read Yang Jisheng's Tombstone: the Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962. It
was real -- and fully as bad as advertised.
According to some, one of the ethnic groups that have benefited the most from the good old
capitalism are the Jews.
Thanks to the capitalist system, many of them have managed to become enormously rich
– some would say thanks to their genetic predisposition towards greed, which of course
is unique only to them.
Well then it makes a perfect sense to me that they would be the ones to finance a
revolution in Russia that would bring a system which pretty much doesn't allow anyone to get
rich.
Wouldn't it have made more sense if members of the Jewish community have financed a
capitalist – sorry – "democratic" revolution in Russia, which will allow them to
prosper financially like they did in the west?
Or was the Bolshevik revolution a payback for the pogroms? What is the logic here? They
did it because they are evil? How did the Jewish financiers of the October revolution knew
that Stalin will come along and pervert the idea of Socialism (to a certain degree), and turn
it into one massive orgy of pogroms (according to some) against anybody and everybody.
The whole idea is pure nonsense. The only way that it will make sense to me is that the
Jews financed the October revolution because they expected that their people will get more
equal treatment under that system than in Czarist Russia. Not because they wanted to unleash
something evil on this world.
Books I do not see mentioned:
Alexander Solschenizyn, ´Die russisch- jüdische Geschichte 1795- 1916, >>
Zweihundert Jahre zusammen <<´, Moskau 2001, München 2002
Antony C. Sutton, ´Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution', 1974 New Rochelle,
N.Y.
Voline ( Vsevolod Mikhailovitsch Eichenbaum), 'The unknown revolution (Kronstadt 1921 Ukraine
1918-21)', New York 1955
Horace Meyer Kallen, 'Zionism and World Politics; A Study in History and Social Psychology',
New York, 1921
Elisabeth Dilling, ´The Roosevelt Red record and its background', 1936, Chicago
And I have a consolation, the murder of Rabin by an orthodox jew after the Oslo Accords
made me wonder if zionist jews did want peace, being retired I had the time to investigate,
and found about about fairy tales such as 'land without people for people without land'.
Sept 11 was the next investigation trigger, once I could no longer prevent the conclusion
that it had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism.
How could our liberator of WWII have become an evil state ?
I found out about Baruch and FDR, etc.
Had there been no Baruch, I wonder if there would have been a WWII.
As Hitler in 1939 threatened jewry 'if they again caused a world war '.
I must add that, though WWI was set up by GB, France and the tsar, I never found evidence
that jews were involved in the conspiracy.
However, the blackmail of the Balfour Declaration, jews do seem responsible for the German
defeat in 1918.
Without USA military interference Germany would have won in November 1917.
One important historical figure who is unknown in the west is Alexander Parvus, aka Israel
Helphand. He was the man who persuaded the German Generals to send Lenin to Russia in the
sealed train. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Parvus#Russian_Revolution
Thanks for this article. I have just reread Ford's 'My Life and Work;' my father's old (1926)
edition. Have also read Robert Wilton's 'Last Days of the Romanoffs' several times so
appreciate references to these two authors. I hope Wilton has been republished in this year
of the anniversary of the cruel martyrdom of the Russian Imperial family by the Bolsheviks.
Here's a fascinating quote from "The International Jew."
In other countries the Jew is permitted to mix more readily with the people, he can
amass his control unchallenged; but in Germany the case was different. Therefore, the Jew
hated the German people; therefore, the countries of the world which were most dominated by
the Jews showed the greatest hatred of Germany during the recent regrettable war.
If you replace "Germany" with "Russia," perhaps this paragraph would be a good explanation
of why Western leaders hate Russia so much. Interestingly enough, modern Jews seem to really
like Germany these days.
What are your thoughts on the refugee crisis in Europe? Given how much Jewish currency
trader George Soros has done to encourage refugee migration into Europe, do you think there's
some sort of Jewish conspiracy at work here?
Much of the problem with Jacob Schiff and his ilk is that he actually thought the 'socialist
utopia' was achievable. He believed all the propaganda. When he was donating his money, he
had no clue the communist takeover would turn out to be a bloody failure detested by the
Russian people who lived all their lives under the system, although there was certainly a
strong element of "Let's get revenge on the Tsar and his ilk for treating us like animals,"
in Schiff's thinking.
Much of what Jews have been trying to do in politics during the 20th century is idealistic
lever-pulling by men with too much Asperger's disorder to understand human nature, and who
keep thinking that if you unleash the dark side of the human personality, everything will
turn out all right.
This is one reason why Jews keep insisting that blacks who commit crimes should only get a
slap on the wrist and be turned loose right back into society again. They honest-to-god think
that scolding will stop sociopaths in their tracks, in denial of all evidence, because Jews
have no understanding of evil human nature. When Jews became a secular, modern, and
scientific-minded people, they lost all their understanding of evil, because as moderns, they
were now 'above all that primitive, backward thinking.'
Jews who think this way keep saying, "Of course communist Russia turned out to be bad
because the wrong people were in charge." This is a bunch of coded wording for, "If me and my
friends were in charge we would do it right because we're different and special," without
realizing that practically everyone becomes corrupt if handed the reins of power.
At one point in their careers, Obama and Hillary, as well as many of their liberal friends
in the Democratic party thought of themselves as decent, well-intended beings who would run
things the Correct Way once in power. But once they were in power, they became corrupt, and
they're still too blinded by their egos to see it.
Their supporters, left-wing Jews, are also too blind to see it because they have no
self-knowledge at all. Part of the problem with Asperger's, which is far too prevalent among
Jews, is that the disorder blocks you from acquiring self-knowledge of your own personality,
as well as preventing from gaining insight into the personalities of others. This leaves you
with the ideological side of your brain entirely in charge.
I read The International Jew about five years ago. Well, I tried to read it, but gave
up before getting half way through. As Ron said, it became quite monotonous and too much of
the discussion was focused on obscure events of the day. I might have persevered, but
eventually the numerous speculative conspiracy-theory-style reaches in explaining
contemporary and historical events got to me.
As for the Protocols , neo-nazis often claim that the important thing about it
isn't whether it was a 'hoax' or not, but whether it explains the present. I suppose that's
true in the sense that it gives an insight into the mindset of the people who were concerned
about the growth of Jewish influence before that influence became a fact. I haven't read the
whole thing, so I can't comment on Ron's claim that it deserves to be a considered a classic
of political theory.
Another neo-nazi point which I also think is partly correct is that "Jews are the skeleton
key to history." Neo-nazis take that and run with it, which leads to all sorts of weird and
wonderful conspiracy theories, but the basic point has to be granted: that an understanding
of certain historical events will always be incomplete without sufficient consideration of
the Jewish role.
It is a forgotten detail of history that even after Ford's considerable hostility to the
Russian Revolution became widely known, the Bolsheviks still described their own industrial
development policy as "Fordism."
This makes it sound like the Russians coined "Fordism." Did they? I don't know. But modern
historians and social scientists with a leftist bent routinely refer to Fordism, both as a
management theory and as a social structure.
A possible consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution was the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany.
In Munich refugees from the Russian Empire met members of a new German Nationalist party, the
NSDAP. The interactions between these people are believed to have resulted in the adoption of
extreme anti-semitic policies by the NSDAP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufbau_Vereinigung
A brave and necessary essay. I was not aware of many of the details here.
That said, it's worth noting that whatever the figures that Schiff contributed during
1917, they would have paled into irrelevance to the 50 million gold marks ($1 billion in
modern currency) that the German government funneled through Swedish and Danish banks to the
Bolsheviks in Saint-Petersburg that year. The Bolshevik Revolution would not have happened
without vast amounts of German money (which, given the wartime context, is
understandable).
Incidentally, apart from being the Bolsheviks' main money-man in the West, Olof Aschberg
also acquired one of the world's finest collections of Russian icons in the process of
selling the values that the Bolsheviks had looted. The collection now resides in a Swedish
museum.
I recently discovered that his son is rather "colorful" too. Robert Aschberg went being a
Maoist in his youth to the anti-racist commissar of Swedish
journalism. Dollars to peanuts he also hates current-day Russia, hates Putin, etc.
Incidentally, he used to be Director-General of the Swedish Institute, which last year
released a
14,000 member list of far right extremists on Twitter, such as myself.
The plans to destabilise the ME originate in Israel.
If part of these plans was to destabilise Europe too, possible, but I never heard of it.
Soros' indoctrination scheme for open society has been running for many decades.
As I feel that the subject of German responsibility for the outbreak of WW1, relevant for
the outbreak of the revolution in Russia, will be attacked with gusto, I suggest to keep in
mind firmly the fact that Germany was the first to declare war on Russia. The reason was
indeed the fear that Russia by 1916 would be unbeatable and all the objectives of the
'Weltpolitik' of Germany, which would have been at a certain point in time opposed and
countered by Russia. To refresh your memory, the date of the calculations was 1912. Just a
few words for orientation (from Wikipedia):
"The German Imperial War Council of 8 December 1912 was an informal conference of some of
the highest military leaders of the German Empire. Meeting at the Stadtschloss in Berlin,
they discussed and debated the tense military and diplomatic situation in Europe at the time.
As a result of the Russian Great Military Program announced in November, Austria-Hungary's
concerns about Serbian successes in the First Balkan War, and certain British communications,
the possibility of war was a prime topic of the meeting
[Kaiser Wilhelms'] opinion was that Austria-Hungary should attack Serbia that December, and
if "Russia supports the Serbs, which she evidently does then war would be unavoidable for us,
too," and that this would be better now than later, after completion of (the just begun)
massive modernization and expansion of the Russian army and railway system toward Germany.
Moltke agreed. In his professional military opinion "a war is unavoidable and the sooner the
better". Moltke "wanted to launch an immediate attack"
Admiral Tirpitz, however, asked for a "postponement of the great fight for one and a half
years" because the Navy was not ready for a general war that included Britain as an opponent.
He insisted that the completion of the construction of the U-boat base at Heligoland and the
widening of the Kiel Canal were the Navy's prerequisites for war. The British historian John
Röhl has pointed out the coincidence that the date for completion of the widening of the
Kiel Canal was the summer of 1914, but a reading of the report of the conference shows no
agreement as to a war in 1914. However, Tirpitz did say that the Navy wanted to wait until
the Kiel Canal was ready in summer 1914 before any war could start. Though Moltke objected to
the postponement of the war as unacceptable, Wilhelm sided with Tirpitz. Moltke yielded "only
reluctantly."
The 'controversial' book of Fritz Fischer "Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegzielpolitik
des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (published in English as Germany's Aims in the
First World War), will certainly come into the discussions. He devotes a large chapter to the
subversive operations of the Germans in Russia in order to provoke the revolution and the
exit from the war with the help of the Jews and Social-Democrats (both Mensheviks and
Bolsheviks).
Ron, extraordinary, provocative stuff in your American Pravda series. Perhaps the most
remarkable aspect of Unz Review is my impression that this is how big-shouldered
people of goodwill and genuinely liberal disposition used to talk a century ago. I don't know
squat about The Protocols except as it's referred to by others, almost always prefaced
as "anti-Semitic". The Unzian approach: "Let's read the damned thing", seems to me superior
and more grown-up.
BTW-a childhood friend of mine and her husband, both Jewish and one of them observant,
retired and now live in the Carolinas. Their occasional stories of elderly neighbors, call
them Morris and Sheldon, returning from prison after having served time for white collar
crimes such as tax evasion or improprieties on government contracts are sort of
unintentionally funny. Looks like they missed the memo on how to be the world's
wire-pullers.
Influenced by Maxim Gorky, he and his nephew Nikolai Pavlovich Schmit[e] were
significant financial contributors of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social
Democratic Workers Party including the newspaper Iskra.[12][13]
"From my distance of many decades, the text of the Protocols struck me as rather bland and
even dull, describing in rather long-winded fashion a plan of secret subversion aimed at
weakening the bonds of the social fabric, setting groups against each other, gaining control
over political leaders by bribery and blackmail, and eventually restoring society along
rigidly hierarchical lines with an entirely new group in control."
That sounds exactly like traditional WASP rule of non-WASP peoples, exactly the way, for
example, that Brit Empire businesses set about arranging for revolution of New Spain against
Spain, and then of Mexican mestizos and Indios against Mexican criollos (meaning full of
nearly full European blood).
Of course, Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was a Judaizing heresy.
From
pages 390-1 of Henry Wickham Steed's Through Thirty Years :
'The gulf that severed Western Europe from Russia during the latter half of the 19th
century was dug and kept open chiefly by Jewish resentment of Russian persecution of the
Jews. Yet that resentment sprang also from Jewish detestation of the Russian Holy Synod and
of the Russian Orthodox Church. Against Russian Christian fanaticism was ranged an intense
Jewish fanaticism hardly to be paralleled save among the more militant sects of Islam. This
Jewish fanaticism allied itself with the anti-Russian forces before and during the earlier
years of the war. It abated only when the Russian Revolution of March 1917 and the subsequent
advent of Bolshevism, largely Jewish in doctrine and in personnel , overthrew the
Russian Empire and the Russian Orthodox Church. The joy of Jewry at these events was not
merely the joy of triumph over an oppressor but was also gladness at the downfall of hostile
religious and semi-religious institutions -- a joy, moreover, in which the Vatican shared, as
its attitude towards the Bolshevist delegates to the Genoa Conference of April, 1922,
significantly indicated.'
The resurgence of Russian Christianity under President Putin has left the 'joy of Jewry'
looking distinctly tattered. Enter the West's largely Jewish-owned governments and media with
their Russophobia campaign.
I feel perhaps the most truthful book ever written on the Bolshevik Revolution was Juri
Lina's "Under The Sign Of The Scorpion". It details both the heavy Jewish influence and the
financial backing by American financiers such as the Schiff's and Warburg's https://archive.org/stream/Under The Sign Of The
Scorpion/sign_scorpion#page/n0
Another great source for information on the backing of the Bolshevik Revolution by
American so called "Capitalist" is Anthony Sutton's "Wall Street And The Bolshevik
Revolution"
A subsequent document5 outlined the terms demanded by Lenin, of which the most
interesting was point number seven, which allowed "Russian troops to move into India"; this
suggested that Lenin intended to continue the tsarist expansionist program. Zeman also
records the role of Max Warburg in establishing a Russian publishing house and
adverts to an agreement dated August 12, 1916, in which the German industrialist
Stinnes agreed to contribute two million rubles for financing a publishing house in
Russia.6
Consequently, on April 16, 1917, a trainload of thirty-two, including Lenin, his wife
Nadezhda Krupskaya, Grigori Zinoviev, Sokolnikov, and Karl Radek, left the Central Station
in Bern en route to Stockholm. When the party reached the Russian frontier only Fritz
Plattan and Radek were denied entrance into Russia. The remainder of the party was
allowed to enter.
Quite, man quite. the British Banksters would send your sweat ass to their London Tower
for a neck stretching ceremony should they over hear Blasphemy suggesting "Britain was not
strongest and most powerful promoter of WWI".
the case begins in earnest in 1896, Switzerland, Hertzl, Zionist Congress.
The failure of the theme British and French and Russian Banksters(generally known as the
Jewish controlled Entente) forced on the Congress (basically to orchestrate successfully the
overthrow the whole of the oil and gas rich Ottoman Arab world. The plan was to replace the
Ottoman system with a Colonial Rule of Law System, to enable Zionist producers of oil and gas
access to Ottoman oil and gas). Revolution after revolution was initiated throughout the
Balkans and Macedonia all designed in one way or the other to bring about this change..
When regime change failed, plan B was initiated.. that plan involved using the highly
distributed small groups of Jewish Populations to migrate into the Ottoman Territory.
communicating the messages and propaganda to these distributed groups was a Jewish Network
task. Immigration was weaponized and used to gain political control over the Ottoman
Territory.. hence WWI purpose: get that control of Ottoman oil and block German and Russia
competition for the Ottoman oil.
British and French Palestine.. the result.
Check WALL STREET and THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION by Anthony Sutton, can be had on Amazon leaves
no doubt that the Zionists bankers were behind the overthrow of the Russian government and
they are behind the overthrow of the Russian and American governments today.
It turns out that the events of the past few years has proven that the views of "right-wing
cranks," anti-Semites and "conspiracy theorists" had a more correct view of world events than
mainstream conservatives. In the eighties I used to gently dismiss the theories of my Bircher
friends (gently because they were nice people). Now I know that most of them were right on
the money. The events of the last few years have proven this. We have a shadowy "deep state"
rebellion against our president, a James Bond villain named George Soros, whose activities
Wikileaks proves controls the Democratic Party and other Leftist parties in Europe. Now,
anyone with half a brain admits that secret societies control governments across the world.
I never read the Protocols in its entirely, only bits and pieces. I remember thinking it
seemed to be written by a caricature of an evil villain, not even a Bond villain, but a
Scooby Doo level villain. It screams fakery from its style. In form, though, it's brilliant.
If I were ever to pen something like it, for the Anglo-Saxon world, I would write it just
like that. It imparts all necessary information and instructions, yet has plausible
deniability built into it. "It's a fraud, you see. It's anti-Anglo-Saxon."
I admire you for your courage, Mr. Unz; this sort of self-published introspection cannot
be as easy as you sometimes make it out to be. Yet, I believe, for the very sake of world
peace, we need to at least be able to discuss these issues. If there's nothing at all to
them, let the light shine on the facts, and let each judge for himself. The censorship around
certain issues, particularly of the Holocaust, only convinces some of their lack of
historical authenticity. Laws aren't required to back up claims which history easily
vindicates, after all.
A crucial underlying cause of the First World War was Britain's belief that only a
preventative war could forestall a rising Germany, but I suspect that an important secondary
cause was the parallel German notion that similar measures were necessary against a rising
Russia.
Required reading here is The Silk Roads, by Frankopan. He demarcates the reason for
Russo-German war. Edward Grey, English foreign minister, at the behest of a declining British
empire, knew that Russian expansion in Asia would eventually threaten Britain's Jewel in the
Crown, India. Russia had to be turned from a focus on Asia to one on Europe, and alliances
with the South Slavs proved just the trick. Russia rightly saw Austria as an easy target for
territorial gains, setting off war amongst what had once been the Dreikaiserbund.
Perfidious Albion has killed more people than any other country as direct and indirect
result of policy.
Most people also do not know, because of whitewashing history, that Germany in 1919 had a
Bavarian Soviet Republic centered in Munich, headed by Communist Kurt Eisner. WWI vets, the
Freikorps, and others rooted them out. Later Herr H and his men weren't just street fighting
for the hell of it; they were clashing with the Communists, still fighting to root the
Communists all out once and for all. Not all Jews were Communists, but many Communists were
Jews.
In 1932, the three people on the ballot in Germany were old von Hindenberg, Hitler and
Communist Ernst Thälmann. Eventually, as we know, Herr H won out. The rewriting history
and whitewashing this Red scare, in the aftermath of WWII, has obscured all of this. My super
educated Jewish husband, who was a history major, had never heard of this. All he knows is of
trains going east, and nothing of the root of the fight.
The same fight is actually going on today in a different form. If people knew more about
the root of the fight generally, perhaps the issues would be clearer. Like writes above: "And
here we are." The same fighting and choices in issues remain, but most people don't even
realize it.
I would like to see elaboration and justification of that apparently careful formulation
of Ron's that "a crucial underlying [sic] cause of the First World War was Britain's belief
[sic] that only a preventative war could forestall [sic] Germany".
Maybe Jilles Dykstra who makes the extraordinary claim that Britain, France and the Czar
conspired to get up the war might pitch in.
Rational consideration, absent any evidence, would star with the demographics. Unlike
Germany and Russia the birth rates of France and Britain had become quite modern and
sustainable. Consistently with its traditional balance of powers policy it made sense for
Britain to make an alliance with France to deter Germany from attacking the latter and, in
particular from occupying the Low Countries – an interest of Britain since at latest
1588. Germany would have to concentrate its resources on its army so its naval building
program did not loom up as more than a cause of expense to the British taxpayer as Britain
stepped up its shipbuilding program accordingly. In a world of no permanent friends what was
it that made Britain turn the alleged belief into some action, not mentioned, to precipitate
a war against Germany – especially when it must have known that Russia wasn't yet
ready. Or is there some record somewhere of Britain calculating that 1914 was the perfect
time to ensure parity of German and Russian losses?
He was a philo-semite, or at least sympathetic to the Jews re the Catholic Church. He
seems to have expected the Jews to convert to Christianity under his new ideas. They rejected
his version of the Gospel, unsurprisingly, and then he did a 180, and published, "On the Jews
and Their Lies."
He seemed to believe that no honest, thinking person could deny what he was preaching,
something hardly unusual in religious figures.
Luther's story somewhat parallels that of Mohammed, who was initially very gratuitous
toward the local Jewish people in Medina. The Jews didn't want any part of his new polity,
and plotted in secret with his enemies, which proved catastrophic for those Jews.
Ron Unz is kickin' ass and takin' names! I just love American Pravda .
The thing about Jacob Schiff is: what really motivated him? I think the standard version
of the story is that he hated Czar because of the pogroms, the Cossacks, etc. But what if
there was something more at work than some merely personal peeve, or some gauzy notion of
'tikkum olaam'? Unz also mentions Olof Aschberg (whom I had never heard of), so what if this
was not merely the lone act of vengeance of a single Russian Jew, but rather a real plot with
a strategy?
One other fact that Unz doesn't mention that draws my attention is that, at exactly the
same time that Schiff was financing the Bolsheviks, the US Army was deployed to Russia:
What were they really doing there? Not even in the official version of events were they
'fighting the Reds'. Some of my Russian contacts have insisted that this was really a
sinister Anglo-Zionist plot to fragment or balkanize Russia. (I'm thinking along the lines of
Mackinder's old Eurasian 'heartland' theory, which some of the commenters above also
mentioned.) If so, could it be that Schiff was really working in tandem with the US Govt. to
carry out such a plan? Could it be that the original Bolsheviks were really just an ISIS-like
terrorist group that somehow got out of hand and managed to take over all of Russia?
"the only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is
going on." – Henry Ford
"There is a great force that creates the movement of thought in the people, and that is
the media. It is in the media that the triumph of freedom of speech finds its incarnation.
Through the Press we have gained the power to influence minds while remaining unobserved. We
shall erase from the memory of men the historical facts we do not want them to know, and
leave only those we wish".- the Protocols
Before you read "the damned thing", you may read an interesting article by Mr Israel
Shamir:
Philosemitic undercurrent was present in many anti RC heresies. Often the idea was that
the reform would bring Jews to Christianity. Before Martin Luther there was Jan Hus and the
subsequent splinter groups that believed that their improved Christianity would be more
palatable to Jews. The end result was Judaization of Christianity.
Martin Luther's anti-semitism has all marks of resentment for being betrayed.
Rebel, that's pretty much my understanding, too, that Luther's "On the Jews . . ." was a
specific ephemeral work addressing a specific issue of the time with respect to Jews, the
Church, and the Reformation. I scanned it years ago, in the Pelikan edition I think, and
can't remember much more about it. I'm pretty sure I've seen it and other works of Luther
described as adiaphoric, not essential to Luther's teaching.
It seems that Soros believes he was anointed by God. "I fancied myself as some kind of
god " he once wrote. "If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies
with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in
trouble."
When asked by Britain's Independent newspaper to elaborate on that passage, Soros said,
"It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of
everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out."
and not a benevolent one. The "philanthropist" persona is fake:
Despite his reputation as an international philanthropist, Soros remains candid about
his true charitable tendencies. "I am sort of a deus ex machina," Soros told the New York
Times in 1994. "I am something unnatural. I'm very comfortable with my public persona
because it is one I have created for myself. It represents what I like to be as distinct
from what I really am. You know, in my personal capacity I'm not actually a selfless
philanthropic person. I've very much self-centered."
So there it is. The lizard himself gave you some basic truths. Now you're free to connect
the dots of his various "philanthropic" projects and see the common thread (white
genocide).
Dear Innocent in Paradise: German "Anti-Semitism" was the invention of a Jewish
journalist, Wilhelm Marr (yes, he was Jewish, and Karl Marx was a Lutheran) hired by the
Zionists to prepare the way for the coming of the Millennium. Anti-Semitism was at that time
already invented in Russia by a respectable doctor, Leon Pinsker, who said Anti-Semitism is
thousands of years old, hereditary and incurable. Dr. Pinsker MD was an early front man, a
public spokesman for Zionism, who already adopted Hatikvah as the anthem, before Herzl was
hired. And yes, Theodore Herzl was also a hired journalist, a front man, an employee, who did
as he was told, until he was disposed of. And yes, the Dreyfus Affair was a gimmick, a phony
Psy-Op like 9/11. And yes, Emile Zola was another hired journalist. And yes, the pogroms,
including the Kishinev pogrom, were just riots. The people killed were rioters. That the
pogroms were Anti-Jewish is pure spin, like what you watch on television. Goyim are hopeless
and helpless, muscle bound but dumb, a little like cattle or beasts of burden. Give them a
peanut, and they are grateful. You can dance circles around them. You can tell them
everything, and they just grunt. And then you can lead them by the ring in their noses
because they were not endowed with free-will and can't think for themselves.
Indeed Israel Shamir's article on Elders of Zion is very good. He cites Solzhenitsyn:
"The Protocols show a blueprint of a social system. Its design is well above abilities
of an ordinary mind, including that of its publisher. It is a dynamic process of two
stages, of destabilization, increasing freedom and liberalism, which is terminated in
social cataclysm, and on the second stage, new hierarchical restructuring of society takes
place. It is more complicated than a nuclear bomb. It could be a stolen and distorted plan
designed by a mind of genius. Its putrid style of an anti-Semitic grubby brochure
[intentionally] obscures the great strength of thought and insight".
"The text demonstrates impressive foresight on the two systems of society, the Western
and the Soviet one. While a strong thinker could possibly predict the development of the
West in 1901, how could he grasp the Soviet future?"
The master-plan begins with reshaping of human mind:
"People's minds should be diverted (away from contemplation) towards industry and trade,
and then they will have no time to think. The people will be consumed by the pursuit of
gain. It will be vain pursuit, for we shall put industry on a speculative basis: what is
withdrawn from the land by industry will slip through the hands of workers and
industrialists and pass into the hands of financiers.
The intensified struggle for survival and superiority, accompanied by crises and shocks
will create cold and heartless communities with strong aversion towards religion. Their
only guide is gain that is Mammon, which they will erect into a veritable cult".
Foresight of Anonym is amazing: in the days of the Protocols' publication, Man was still
the measure of things, and full eighty years would pass, until Milton Friedman and Chicago
School would proclaim Market and Profit as the only guiding light.
Martin Luther was a competing product to Judaism, but the same materialist, Dualist thing
in Christian garb. He was just knocking the competition. The princes supported him because he
said that the peasants deserved to treated like animals. Because they were animals.
"When one discovers a tear in the fabric of reality, there is a natural tendency to nervously
peer within, wondering what mysterious objects might dwell there."
Very Lovecraftian statement. In the previous American Pravda, Ron Unz revealed the
polytheistic secret of Judaism. Perhaps the above "mysterious objects" found in the void
beyond the veil are the gods of the Kabbalah.
" two of his [Fleming's] most memorable Bond villains, Goldfinger and Blofeld, had
distinctly Jewish-sounding names, and that so many of the plots involve schemes of
world-conquest by Spectre "
Agree with the idea that Goldfinger is Fleming's concept of an international criminal of
Jewish origin, probably an agent of the Schiff or Rothschild cartels. But Spectre was a
representation of the shadow power in the Cold War -- the ODESSA/Die Spinne network of
diaspora Nazis who had operational ties with the Dulles faction at CIA.
Robert Aschberg is not the son, but the granson of Robert Aschberg. He was central in
Swedish maoism in the seventies, then turned to journalism. He has been a driving force in
the "anti-extremism"-movement in Sweeden. Not just the Swedish Institute, but also the Expo
– a Swedish branch of the ADL/SPLC "antiracist" network.
Transferring a good part of American manufacturing to China and beggaring the American
working class thereby had quite a bit to do with the Chinese economic miracle and that was
done by our own ruling class, not the Chinese.
Easy, the Entente were blocking Russian ports so that they could not be utilized by the
Germans, whom they were at war with.
This was of course a tragedy for Russia, since the Bolsheviks could point to this as
evidence of an Angl0-French "invasion" of Russia and portray themselves as its defenders
(even though they themselves were more or less direct hirelings of the Germans), while the
Whites got entirely negligible military benefits from it.
There's no need for conspiracies on this score. None of the Western Powers had a
democratic mandate to participate in the Russian Civil War, and having the Bolsheviks win was
not entirely negative from their perspective, since there would then be no need to share the
postwar spoils with it (the French were a partial exception, since the Bolshevik repudiation
of Tsarist era debt hit them far harder).
It's already here in the form of a mixed economy. What we need to fear is the new breed of
elites, Trotskyite racialists who have prospered in the capitalist game and now want world
revolution, at the behest of the Babylonian supremacist cult.
Another very significant book of the time is "The Rulers of Russia" 1938 by Father Denis
Fahey (Amazon), an Irish Catholic Priest who had traveled to Russia and analyzed the make up
and financing of the Revolution. He made most of the same points as Ron and his book was
widely sold at the time even in the USA. Although Fahey was a noted theologist he was also a
brilliant observer and acute analyst. I think that Ron Unz would be very interested to read
this book from a sophisticated and honest contemporary of the Revolution.
Correct, I
made a mistake , Robert is ofc Olof's grandson, it can't be otherwise even just
age-wise.
As a Swede (I assume), do you know what his position on Russia is? I imagine it's the
standard Putlerreich narrative, perhaps turned up to 11. I am curious to see if this guess is
correct.
Yes id like to see Unz take a run at anthony suttons work which strikes me probably true
but all these things so hard to get to bottom when memory holed by powers that be
Luther started out philo-semetic. He railed against the Roman church for using bad
technique in its efforts to convert Jews to Christianity. Once the Jews heard Luther and his
way of explaining the Gospel, they'd come around.
Then Luther met and interacted with many learned and influential Jews and modified his
views accordingly.
But Spectre was a representation of the shadow power in the Cold War -- the ODESSA/Die
Spinne network of diaspora Nazis who had operational ties with the Dulles faction at
CIA.
' "The German Imperial War Council of 8 December 1912 was an informal conference of
some of the highest military leaders of the German Empire " '
Yes, but
I think all the great powers were making preparations and calculations in the same
way.
Against this must be set the fact that Germany was essentially a 'satisfied power' at the
time. As even your quote implies, she sought no change in the status quo, but on the
contrary, feared such a change.
It was other powers that threatened to bring about that change: France, with her incessant
scheming and machinations to create a coalition that could avenge 1870, Serbia, with her
pathological belligerence towards everyone, Russia, with her Slavophile pretensions that, in
the upshot, led her to support a Serbia that was manifestly in the wrong. Here, too, France
played an apparently key if obscured role in egging both Serbia and Russia on, and then in
the case of Russia, making sure she didn't back down.
I am not arguing that Germany was innocent. I am merely insisting that (a) it was above
all the underlying paradigm that made an eventual explosion probable, and that (b) other
powers were more at fault.
There's a lot to be said about it. For example, it's been argued that if Austria hadn't
delayed and sought the support of Germany, but rather, had promptly attacked Serbia, then the
other powers wouldn't have found themselves taking up the positions that made general war
inevitable. Of course, this makes the rather dubious assumption that Austria could in fact
have quickly beaten Serbia, but it is an example of how the blame for the greater
conflagration shifts depending on how one looks at it.
Germany can be blamed for the gratuitious provocation of building a High Seas Fleet.
However, if there was any one nation that could have prevented the war from breaking out, it
would have been France. Absent her activities, a great war becomes discernably less probable.
Serbia would never have dared to have engaged in the provocations she did, and isolated and
without encouragement from France, Russia would have been more likely to seek security in an
accord with Germany and Austria rather than hostility towards them. After all, for Russia
above all, a great war objectively offered nothing. Finally, theories about British bankers
notwithstanding, I see Britain as less guilty than any other player. She didn't even
have an immense conscript army. She was the only player who had refrained from
building one.
The joy of Jewry at these events was not merely the joy of triumph over an oppressor but
was also gladness at the downfall of hostile religious and semi-religious institutions
The resurgence of Russian Christianity under President Putin has left the 'joy of Jewry'
looking distinctly tattered. Enter the West's largely Jewish-owned governments and media
with their Russophobia campaign.
Good observations. However, the degenerate Western "elites," whose degradation was caused
to a large extent by decades of Zionist blackmail and corruption, are unable to mount another
serious challenge to a renewed Russia supported by a rapidly surging China.
therefore regarded American history as just too bland and boring to study.
By contrast, one land I found especially fascinating was China, the world's most populous
country and its oldest continuous civilization, with a tangled modern history of
revolutionary upheaval
In macro terms, Chinese history was more exciting because of massive upheavals and titans
like Mao.
But in micro terms, Chinese history of the 20th century was mostly simple: Until 1950, chaos,
humiliation, and incompetence. After 1950 to mid 70s, one-man show of Maoism, a period that
produced nothing of interest in thought, art, literature, science, technology, cinema, music,
etc. In contrast, US history produced so many important individuals and movements in the
arts, sciences, enterprise, music, and just about everything. For Mao to be god, everyone had
to be ant-like minions. The US, having a more stable system and short-term leaders, was less
exciting on a grand scale. But it achieved so much in so many areas.
That said, it's worth noting that whatever the figures that Schiff contributed during
1917, they would have paled into irrelevance to the 50 million gold marks ($1 billion in
modern currency) that the German government funneled through Swedish and Danish banks to
the Bolsheviks in Saint-Petersburg that year.
But we do not know how much money Schiff put into the project of revolution. We know that
he put a lot of money into Japan:
http://nda-repository.nda.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/11605/91/1/1-2_人文科学抜刷_村岡先生.pdf
By the end of 1905, Kuhn, Loeb&Co., to the surprise of many, floated a bond issue in
the sum of $200 million – equivalent to some $4.5 billion in today's money. Schiff's
loans were an important factor -- and his extensive financial involvement, a deciding
factor -- in bringing victory to Japan.
Is it possible that German project was linked and coordinated with Schiff? Who was
peddling this project to Germans? Are there any links between Alexander Pavrus and Jacob
Schiff?
He very matter-of-factly mentions that Schiff, Warburg and the other top Jewish
international bankers were among the leading backers of the Jewish Bolsheviks, through whom
they hoped to gain an opportunity for the Jewish exploitation of Russia ,
Echoes of the ((("Russian"))) oligarchs that looted the wealth and resources of the
Russian people following the generations of Jewish Bolshevik genocide and slavery of the
Russian people.
They go from being brutalized by commie Jews, to being looted by (crony,
klepto)-capitalist Jews. Such a deal!
Many people point out that the "Russian" oligarchs weren't all Jews, and neither was
Yeltsin- who summarily betrayed Russia and her people to destitution on behalf of their most
intractable enemy, and they'd be right.
But I feel an article like this should include the worst and most loathsome man who ever
lived, and he wasn't a Jew.
Schiff and Trotsky would have been stopped long before their treachery could have sent
Russia and millions of others reeling into the abyss, were it not for the most execrable man
who ever befouled the ether; a one president Woodrow Wilson.
It was Wilson who accommodated Schiff by betraying the American people and handing over
the keys to our Treasury to this sinister cabal of Jewish supremacist banksters.
It was Wilson whose betrayals and intrigues allowed for Trotsky to escape Canadian
internment and be sent with 'suitcases' full of lucre into Russia, with Wilson even arranging
a passport and transport documents.
Also, we shouldn't forget that it was also Wilson who promised the American people that he
would keep us out of the war, (and was consequently elected president) and then did all he
could to betray that promise, and involve us in that disastrous conflict.
Let's not forget that it was Wilson who foisted the ruse of his "Fourteen Points",
guaranteeing 'self-determination' to Germany if she laid down her arms, only to betray
Germany with a starvation campaign into signing Germans into perpetual slavery. Leading
directly to WWII, and all the attendant horrors.
The weight of Woodrow Wilson's singular treachery, treason, betrayals and enormities is
beyond my comprehension, but when calculating the worst villains of the 20th century, he
certainly takes all the cakes I can think of.
The Bolshevik government of Russia paid the volume its own sort of deep respect, with
mere possession of the Protocols warranting immediate execution.
Not just possession of the Protocols, but any perceived 'anti-Semitism' was declared a
capital offense when Lenin came to power. (I remember reading somewhere, that this law, death
for "anti-Semites", was the first one enacted, but I don't remember where I read that).
with the Schiff story seen as conclusion proof of his delusional
anti-Semitism.
conclusive ?
Plato and Machiavelli as a classic of Western political thought.
the problem I would have with calling it "Western", is that I consider the Protocols (and
Bolshevism), as distinctively anti- Western.
For me, the meaning of 'Western' goes back to the Greeks and Romans, marching though
Bysantium and finding its perfect expression in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill
of Rights, and is an expression of something intrinsic to the spirit and genes of Western
man. Fundamental to what I'd describe as the ultimate virtue of the West, is honor.
IOW honesty, decency, blood, home and hearth. Father and motherland, and fair play.
Whereas the Protocols seems to mock these notions as the weaknesses of 'beast-like'
simpletons. The Achilles heal of the West- to be exploited as a means to bashing the West on
the rocks of genocidal malevolence, and enslaving the survivors, just as the Old Testament
commands.
So it's difficult for me to consider the Protocols anywhere near the writings of
Plato/Socrates, who seemed above all to love the Truth. Whereas such quaint weaknesses like
'honor' are exploited in the Protocols with sinister glee.
Sort of like comparing Ron Paul to Richard Pearl. To me they are mutually exclusive.
Anyway, you're a magnificent and brave intellect Mr. Unz, for taking on these most salient
and even urgent issues of our day.
Brother Nathanael Kapner at realjewnews.com has published several pieces on the status of the
Protocols,showing why they are not to be dismissed with the usual tired responses such as
"forgeries". Put Protocols in the search box at his site.
It was the Times on microfilm so a reproduction of that days edition. Don't get me wrong
the Times article can be read as fully endorsing them, but that is the bit where the piece is
rhetorically imagining the effect of the Protocols on lesser minds, so such a quote would be
really obtuse if it was sincere . The Times article that is often cited as accepting the
Protocols authenticity actually took it for granted that the Protocols were fake, it just
bemoaned the lack of information proving they were not what they purported to be. The Times
piece was an appeal for someone to find out exactly who wrote the protocols.
Balfour already in 1907 said to the USA ambassador 'that maybe war was the cheapest way to
keep the British standard of living'.
Patrick J. Buchanan, 'Churchill, Hitler and "The unnecessary war", How Britain lost its
empire and the west lost the world', New York, 2008, Balfour, US ambassador Henry White,
1907, page 48/ 49
See also:
Fritz Stern, 'Gold and Iron, Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German
Empire', New York, 1977.
Jakob Wassermann, 'MEIN WEG ALS DEUTSCHER UND ALS JUDE', Berlin 1921
'From prejudice to destruction', Jacob Katz, 1980, Cambridge MA
'Christianity and the Holocaust of the Hungarian Jewry', Moshe Y Herclz, 1993 New York
University press
Never heard of this treaty.
If you just read the introduction you understand that it never was.
If you understood anything of geopolitics you would know that never would Britain allow
Russia free access to the Med.
The movement of grain ships from Russia to the Med interrupted for two days, already Russia
could not pay the interest on her foreign debt.
So the Straits were perfect for controlling Russia.
It of course may have been that perfidious Albion held out a herring.
We Americans proved in 1863, 1917, 1940, and 1948 (this last continuing until 1971) that
those can be put together quickly, as long as you have a strong cadre to start with. The
British have a strong tradition of reserve units, also.
So when I read these Pravda articles, I am always frustrated because Ron Unz is always
deferring to some hidden jew in his background who he knows will take offense at what he
says, so he has to temper it. Because he is a jew, he cannot call a lying jew a lying jew, or
he will be ostracized and boycotted even more. Unz tells us how Ford documents event after
event for 80 chapters about how jews have conspired, tricked, committed fraud, and even
murdered Christians, sometimes in rituals, to cover it all up, yet as a Jew he cannot
understand that we Christians find this centuries old, documented, and still ongoing, satanic
blood conspiracy to be worthy of more than a nod and a "tsk".
I think within the last few weeks Ron has shown immense courage. Ron is an agent of reform
and I am thankful he exists.
For God's sake read Strunk and White, or if you have, follow Strunk's rule: "eliminate
unnecessary words": all those damn intensifiers -- very, actually, entirely, somewhat, rather
importantly, extremely, considerably, exactly, etc.
None of the civilisations mentioned has been continuous in the sense of unconquered. All
have been subject to foreign conquest, partition and warring states at various times. The
last continuous civilisation was the Japanese, until their defeat in 1945.
No, my money for "the eminent computer scientist" is definitely on Claude Shannon, whom I
ran into a couple of times in the 60s at the house of a Jewish friend and mentor of mine with
whom he used to play chess. I knew about his communism, but not about his Jewish mother. The
main thing about him, of course, was that he had pioneered information theory.
"eliminate unnecessary words": all those damn intensifiers -- very, actually,
entirely, somewhat, rather importantly, extremely, considerably, exactly, etc.
Once I checked around a little, I discovered that numerous mainstream accounts described
the enormous hostility of Schiff towards the Czarist regime for its ill-treatment of
Jews
But the Czarist regime had already fallen in March 1917 and the liberals that replaced it
enacted Jewish emancipation.
And the allies, including the US, had no interest in overthrowing the provisional government,
they wanted it to continue the war against Germany, so Schiff would have acted against
American interests, surely not without some risk.
And of course in November 1917 there was the Balfour declaration, which should have aligned
any ethnocentric Jewish nationalist with the Allied cause.
So apart from irrational hatred of Russia, what plausible motive could Schiff have had for
financing the Bolsheviks?
By the time Jewish capitalists financed the Bolsheviks they had honed their weaponized
economics to a high degree. The similar MO of most if not all "revolutions" in Europe gives
credence to the reality of this articles premise.
It is not hard to find Jewish financing for Cromwell, and later William of Orange. One of
the first things William did after deposing James was borrow money to fight France from a
central bank the newly created Bank of England. The French and the Bolshevik revolutions were
instigated and financed and the reining monarchs were murdered just like Cromwell executed
Charles the first. In France the aristocracy was wiped out. Napoleon thwarted the banker plan
in France and was put down with Rothschild financing. The revolution in Germany that deposed
Kaiser Wilhelm and ended WWI was all too similar though the Kaiser escaped the fate of his
cousin in Russia. Like Napoleon, Hitler thwarted the agenda planned for Germany, that is a
Bolshevik slaughter of Germans. WWII was the result. As Russia is all too aware the US spent
billions to hire revolutionaries to depose the elected, Russia friendly government in the
Ukraine.
The revolutions are not ideological. All that "workers paradise" and "freedom and liberty"
drivel is to motivate the peasants. Russia was pillaged and the likes of Jacob Schiff
received a 20-fold return on investment. Only Bankers win the wars.
This dipshit led the program Trolljägarna (Troll Hunters), which EXPOSED
internet commenters with right-wing views. Such as the dangerously extremist view that Sweden
is for Swedes.
Rysslands Vladimir Putin har trollfabriker som jobbar dygnet runt och har satt upp
tweet-robotar som den senaste tiden gjort allt för att stödja separatisterna i
Katalonien.
Russia's Vladimir Putin has troll factories who work around the clock and have set up
Twitter robots that the most recent time did everything to support the separatists in
Catalonia.
Karl XII should be reviled less for his disastrous invasion of Russia and more for
bringing the Jews into Sweden for the first time ever.
Add to that the tight connection between jews and the secret police and spys and –
you know: intelligence services of all kinds in Eastern Europe. It's said, that they
were heavily dominated by Jews – one of the rather solid reasons for anti-semitism
there after the implosion of the Eastern Block.
Later famous German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki for example was one of those
secret service men in London after he had survived the Third Reich in a hideawy in
Poland.
his is one reason why Jews keep insisting that blacks who commit crimes should only get
a slap on the wrist and be turned loose right back into society again. They honest-to-god
think that scolding will stop sociopaths in their tracks, in denial of all evidence,
Why do you assert that Jews insist criminal blacks be let out because they honest to go
think scolding will work
as opposed to
that the Jews insist blacks be let out because they are parasites who want to weaken their
White host?
What makes YOU an expert in what goes on in Jews' minds?
There are some other examples of Jewish influence in America which few people are aware of.
In the latter part of the 19th century, it became customary for the United States to send
Jewish ambassadors to the Sublime Porte. The first Jew was appointed in 1889, and up until
the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire WASPs would only hold the post for a total of seven
years.
The reason why hardly needs to be explained.
Jews also helped poison Russo-American relations in this period (which previously had been
quite friendly) by successfully lobbying the American government to intervene diplomatically
every time there was a pogrom in Russia.
Jews have never found a more secure perch than within the Anglo-Saxon nations of England and
the United States.
Jews have rarely displayed any gratitude whatsoever for being able to launch their global
plots from such safe perches.
Jacob Schiff was a Jew globalizer banker who funded the Jew-controlled Bolsheviks in
Russia. The Jews were so fond of Bolshevism because they saw it as an excellent way to attack
and destroy their European Christian enemies.
Paul Singer, George Soros, Seth Klarman, Mark Zuckerberg, Shelly Adelson, Mike Bloomberg
and many other wealthy Jews are no different than Jacob Schiff.
Mass immigration will prove to be the ultimate undoing of the Jews in European Christian
nations.
The response to the Jew push for open borders mass immigration will be the mass expulsion
of Jews from European Christian nations.
Much of the problem with Jacob Schiff and his ilk is that he actually thought the
'socialist utopia' was achievable. He believed all the propaganda. When he was donating his
money, he had no clue the communist takeover would turn out to be a bloody failure detested
by the Russian people who lived all their lives under the system, although there was
certainly a strong element of "Let's get revenge on the Tsar and his ilk for treating us
like animals," in Schiff's thinking.
Lol no!
The "socialist utopia" angle was clearly designed to appeal to the poor Russian goyim. Did
I miss the part where Schiff abandoned his treasures and moved to Russia to bask in that
utopia?
The "revenge" angle was the goal. Obviously. He poured money into "utopia propaganda" and
into "revenge". Only one of them worked as advertised. Imagine my shock.
Much of what Jews have been trying to do in politics during the 20th century is
idealistic
Haha, save that shit for Yahoo Answers or Wikipedia.
Is it possible that German project was linked and coordinated with Schiff? Who was
peddling this project to Germans? Are there any links between Alexander Pavrus and Jacob
Schiff?
From The World at the Cross Roads by Boris Brasol (1921), pp. 70-71:
The full history of the interlocking participation of the Imperial German Government and
international finance in the destruction of the Russian Empire is not yet written. Much
time and research will be required in order to disentangle the complex relations between
the two powers, which sought to beat down the Russian Colossus which for centuries stood as
a watchful sentinel on the border of Europe, protecting Western civilization from savage
invasions originated in the depths of Asia.
It is not a mere coincidence that at the notorious meeting held at Stockholm in 1916,
between the former Russian Minister of the Interior, Protopopoff, and the German Agents,
the German Foreign Office was represented by Mr. Warburg, whose two brothers were members
of the international banking firm Kuhn, Loeb & Company, of which the late Mr. Jacob
Schiff was a senior member. Nor is it a mere coincidence that in the later stages of
the Russian Revolution we still find international finance hard at work engaged in further
endeavors to break the last resistance of Russia against the onslaught of the "Triple
Alliance" -- that is of the Central Powers, Revolutionary internationalism and
International Finance itself.
In the latter part of the 19th century, it became customary for the United States to
send Jewish ambassadors to the Sublime Porte.
The most famous being Henry Morgenthau Sr. (1913-1916), perhaps now better known for being
the father of Henry Morgenthau Jr., father of the "Morgenthau Plan".
Morgenthau Sr. was the maternal grandfather of the historian Barbara Tuchman (Guns of
August ).
It was a real agreement. Why do you think the British attacked Gallipoli? It was to fulfil
the promise to Russia. The Russians gave a Quid Pro Quo in the form of allowing Britain a
larger occupation zone in Persia.
By contrast, one land I found especially fascinating was China, the world's most
populous country and its oldest continuous civilization, with a tangled modern history of
revolutionary upheaval, then suddenly reopened to the West during the Nixon Administration
and under Deng's economic reforms starting to reverse decades of Maoist economic
failure.
I used to believe the mainstream American narrative on this too, until I realized that the
faster economic growth starting from the reforms had more to do with China's finally being
able to trade with the US (at its core more a product of what happened later on in Mao's era
than what Deng and his supporters did) than with the accompanying change in economic policy.
I came to the conclusion that China in 1970 had more or less secured herself to the extent
that establishing relations with the US became a possibility. With the industrial and modern
foundation already developed and integration into the wider international community, rapid
economic growth became more or less inevitable. One can think of China in Mao's years as
having developed a proven to work operating system and programming language in bootstrap
mode, on top of which the application software that delivered more immediate and tangible
returns were built as part of "economic reform." Many knowledgeable people in China feel the
same; that those reformists who returned to power afterwards were actually less competent
leaders taking undue credit by building on the work of others.
With the Chinese people clearly having such tremendous inherent talent and their
potential already demonstrated on a much smaller scale in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore,
I believed there was an excellent chance that Deng's reforms would unleash enormous
economic growth, and sure enough, that was exactly what happened. In the late 1970s, China
was poorer than Haiti, but I always told my friends that it might come to dominate the
world economically within a couple of generations, and although most of them were initially
quite skeptical of such an outrageous claim, every few years they became a little less so.
The Economist had long been my favorite magazine, and in 1986 they published an especially
long letter of mine emphasizing the tremendous rising potential of China and urging them to
expand their coverage with a new Asia Section; the following year, they did exactly
that.
I think the comparison between China and Haiti in the late 70s is patently ridiculous, for
obvious reasons. Many in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore look down on mainland Chinese for
being much poorer and for being
共匪 . The reality is that it's like comparing ordinary engineers in the
dominant company to those who started and built an inferior but for the most part working
alternative. And now, that alternative China created is starting to become serious
competition to the long established market standard.
These days I feel tremendous humiliation for having spent most of my life being so
totally wrong about so many things for so long, and I cling to China as a very welcome
exception. I can't think of a single development during the last forty years that I
wouldn't have generally expected back in the late 1970s, with the only surprise having been
the total lack of surprises. About the only "revision" I've had to make in my historical
framework is that I'd always casually accepted the ubiquitous claim that Mao's disastrous
Great Leap Forward of 1959-61 had caused 35 million or more deaths, but I've recently
encountered some serious doubts, suggesting that such a total could be considerably
exaggerated, and today I might admit the possibility that only 15 million or fewer had
died.
Wow, what exactly did you expect back in the late 1970s for the next forty years? More or
less what's happening now? And that was considered extremely farfetched at the time? The more
I look at it, the more I realize that China in the late 1970s was in essence not anywhere
near as bad as it might have appeared on the surface. There was already, for instance, the
expertise to develop not great but passable nuclear submarines, which Andrei Martyanov
characterized in his book as "the most complex machinery in human history." I also realized
that that estimate of 35 million was made by comparing to the death and birth rate of 1958
(so number of excess deaths plus number of fewer births relative to 1958 baseline). It's
laughable to label a "dictator" one does not like as a "mass murderer" by comparing himself
to himself in population statistics. The overall trend was that during his 25 years, the
population of China went from 475 million to 900+ million, hardly what one would expect from
a genocidal state.
Now that China is so much more powerful and credible internationally, more people will
discredit what those silly and politically motivated American scholars have put in their
history books for the masses.
I'm a pretty exceptional and extreme guy (as are you Ron), so I naturally prefer those who
dare to use more extreme and unorthodox approaches. I like revolutionaries who transform
weird into normal, be they in science, be they in politics. Because the most consequential to
our civilization happens at the extremes. Because there's so much more of a story to tell.
Mediocrity and conformism is the default, and more people ought to try radical (but
appropriated hedged) methods if societal advancement is to be optimized for. Like, what
Stalin did, in pioneering the planned economy, was truly revolutionary and met with fierce
opposition from the outside world, but it proved to be a miraculous success. Mao replicated
it successfully in the Chinese context to modernize China. I think Mao was a genius poet and
political thinker and leader and a true revolutionary at heart. His brothers and sons were
all killed for "revolutionary" activities. Nearing the last decade of his life, he wasn't
about leaving behind wealth and power to heirs of blood like the typical dictator/magnate, as
he had few real ones. Most likely, he cared much more about his legacy and what would happen
to China afterwards. He distrusted those people under him running things, Deng included, who
were scrambling to ensure the best position for themselves and their children after he died.
So he launched the Cultural Revolution, using popular uprising to instigate a political
reshuffle at the top. Of course, the people who made it to the top who ran things during his
last decade were very questionable. He may well have been quite displeased with the result.
Nonetheless, he probably felt this political balancing would be the healthiest choice for his
legacy, for the political situation afterwards. The people he brought down came back to power
after he died, and I'm sure many of them secretly resented him but were too scared to say
anything. So he succeeded, unlike Stalin, in not getting posthumously denounced. And China is
still thriving forty years after his death, though maybe not as much as he would have
hoped.
As I write this, I am reminded of Mao's poetic quote:
人间正道是沧桑, which means literally "the correct
course for the human world is for seas to turn into mulberry fields."
Re Nixon and the problems of hiding the ethnic dimension of red-baiting, it was always
puzzling why conservatives focused so much on "Whitaker Chambers and Alger Hiss" because the
story itself seemed pretty inconsequential and not really worth the monumental status it
seemed to possess for conservatives. Now it makes sense if Hiss served the role of being the
respectable, WASP target of redbaiting.
Westerns on TV would have Native Americans burn down everything within sight [and mostly
without any logical reason].
But when you start looking at who're behind such scenarios [writers, directors,
producers], you'll discover a projection of pogroms [quite often by Jews with an Eastern
European background].
And, yes, I fell for it too.
The Hollywood
Indian – Link to Wikipedia [this being a Wikipedia entry, don't expect to find the
full and naked truth]
Wasn't "Fordism" the official state religion in Huxley's "Brave New World", with the
symbol of the capitol T in honor of the Ford Model T automobile replacing the Christian Cross
(resembling the lower case t) as the primary religious symbol?
Not a fact that "Jews have rarely displayed any gratitude .". In the Anglophone countries
many of the great charitable gifts, to art galleries/ museums, to medical research and
hospitals, to musical events and institutions and other objects of charity are from Jews.
The intellectually curious know the problem of Jewish, power, influence , propaganda, and
subversion. Enlightenment has tremendous value, but the paramount question is how do we stop
international Jewish power. The combination of ethnic unity, wealth, media manipulation, high
IQ and institutional infiltration creates a formidable deadly opponent. This has been going
since the ancient world.
JQ has dire consequences for the very survival of western civilization particularly with
mass demographically swamping immigration policies.
What will happen to Jews when the Occident becomes minority majority? Jews will be
perceived as just any other white person by minority groups, many of which harbor hatred
against Jews. There will be a Chinese world hegemony when the west falls, which will not be
good for Jews. The elite Jews need to wake up. Destroying the goyim is not good for them!
Isn't Gallipoli – and the original attempt to send warships through the Bosporus
– explicable as
1. An attempt to knock a German ally out of the war
2. Open an ice free supply route to Russia (and maybe an export route for Russian
grain?)?
If anybody ever benefited from the Bolshevik revolution – it was the workers in the
west, primarily US.
The October revolution forced the capitalists to make concessions to the working class
that they wouldn't have otherwise made simply out of their good natured kind hearts.
If the Jews were so diabolical to unleash the Bolshevik revolution because of sinister
motives only, how come that they didn't predict that it's going to hurt their profit margins
in the US – via increased wages and benefits that they were forced to pay in order to
keep the working class calm – out of fear that the Bolshevik revolution might have
given them some ideas about conducting feasibility study of staging a copycat revolution.
If actually said it counts for some fraction of one per cent of the needed evidence. That
is true, in particular, because it suggests no knowledge of Balfour the man. I recall a
vignette (here's another tiny fractional piece of evidence) from an essay by Leonard Woolf
(Virginia Woolf's v clever husband) in an essay where he describes Balfour in committee in
1915 receiving a note, pausing for just a moment, then continuing "as I was saying, in the
matter of an additional farthing .". The note told him of the sinking of the Lusitania. At
least my informants of what was said on the occasion of news being received of, first, the
invasion of the Soviet Union and, second, Pearl Harbour, reported "we've won the war" as the
enthusiastic expression on both occasions.
I commend resurrection of Leonard Woolf's writings as a pleasure awaiting Ron and like
minded fossickers for small nuggets (with hopes of greater ones).
Destabilize might not be quite the word for it. Pulverize and dilute the various
indigenous national identities? Yes.
One other related maneuver that is underway is that the Jews are giving Muslims territory
in Europe and the United States in exchange for the Jews' having taken Palestine. It's a form
of pacification, of letting the pressure out. It distracts the Muslims with the fruits of
capitalism and other material wealth and political power (in Europe and US). It also clears
potentially resistant young men out of Israel's neighborhood. I suppose one could also view
it as payment of compensatory damages.
Let he who is without hypocrisy cast the first damn .
It's by the way that I agree with your summary of the bust out phase of the life of the
crime organization established through the supposedly "Russian Revolution":
Echoes of the ((("Russian"))) oligarchs that looted the wealth and resources of the
Russian people following the generations of Jewish Bolshevik genocide and slavery of the
Russian people.
So, are not reparations owed to Russians? If so, they must not be financed by further
extractions from the Germans, who appear to be the victims of a set up for a holocaust
(Dresden, etc.) after a suitable pretext had been identified by the same cabal, more or less,
who financed and plotted the 1905 & 1917 insurrections in Russia. Adequate compensation
must include unconditional surrender of any and all ownership and control over the many
"Holocaust" museums that have been foisted upon us in order to cripple us with guilt and to
distract us from another painful pravda about Jewish history.
The painful truth about the Holocaust is basically just this: Any holocaust of Jews in
Europe during the 1940′s can be explained correctly as an own goal brought about by
compassionate activists such as Hugo Preuß. He and others labored for generations to
plunge Europe into chaos again and again and now again with the movement to abolish
border controls and to relocate to Europe tens of millions of Muhammadists, subsaharans
Africans, and other aliens.
I must add that, though WWI was set up by GB, France and the tsar, I never found
evidence that jews were involved in the conspiracy.
T he evidence is there already by 1903 in Zionist co-founder Max Nordau's stirring
speech that year to Zionists in Paris:
Litman Rosenthal:
"About a month later [~Sept. 1903] I went on a business trip to France. On my way to
Lyons I stopped in Paris, and there I visited, as usual, our Zionist friends. One of them
told me that this very same evening Dr. Nordau was scheduled to speak about the Sixth
Congress"
[...]
"When we reached the hall in the evening we found it filled to overflowing and all were
waiting impatiently for the great master, Nordau, who, on entering, received a tremendous
ovation. But Nordau, without paying heed to the applause showered upon him, began his
speech immediately, and said:"
'You all came here with a question burning in your hearts and trembling on your lips,
and the question is, indeed, a great one, and of vital importance. I am willing to answer
it. What you want to ask is: How could I -- I who was one of those who formulated the
Basle program -- how could I dare to speak in favor of the English proposition concerning
Uganda, how could Herzl as well as I betray our ideal of Palestine '
"The whole assembly was under the spell of Nordau's beautiful, truly poetic and exalted
diction, and his exquisite, musical French delighted the hearers with an almost sensual
pleasure. For a few seconds the speaker paused, and the public, absolutely intoxicated by
his splendid oratory, applauded frantically. But soon Nordau asked for silence and
continued":
'Now this great progressive world power, England, has after the pogroms of Kishineff,
in token of her sympathy with our poor people, offered through the Zionist Congress the
autonomous colony of Uganda to the Jewish nation. Of course, Uganda is in Africa, and
Africa is not Zion and never will be Zion.'
[...]
' let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder
leading upward and upward: Herzl, The Zionist Congress, the English Uganda proposition,
the future world war, the peace conference where with the help of England a free and
Jewish Palestine will be created.'
Yes, I found that book as a free read online and read it. It is amazing how purely evil
and so filled with hatred those jewish Bolshevik torturers and mass murderers actually
were/are.
Every description in that book of the many, many ways jews invented for use as a torture
reminds one of Apache Indians of the 1800′s era. There is simply No method of torture
or murderous deaths, them bolshie jews will not do. One thing certain is, whoever reads that
book better have a strong stomach, and even the strongest of men will be found wiping a few
eye tears away now and then, since the abject brutality and totally Inhuman tortures
gleefully done border on being unspeakable.
And with No other valid reason to be found, other than a true explaination of how, be it
Talmudic religion, or other dna traits, or some form insanity present within jewry in
general, folks better trained medically than me can debate But the best reasons when all is
added up is simply jews are jews and its Bad for all non jews period. Far too many historical
evidences and eras seem to validate that regardless of which nation jews choose to infiltrate
in large numbers, so that it then becomes the Next New Host Nation of 1/2 of more of
international worldwide jewry. Very evil and immoral and unethical situations develop and
develop to the proverbial, Inth-degree every damn time.
And to date about the only remedy has been for every host nation to give jewry the Big
Boot Out.
At least now, todays usa host nation, none can claim jews still have zero places to call
home eh.
Israel's big enough to fit them all within it. And you can bet all you own, and win the
bet, if you bet that within two seconds flat of usa jewry finds out of a plan to get jewry
out of America. Most American dwelling jews will screech and squak and holler as if a swine
pig stuck with a dagger knife.
All of their constant talk of how jews so so love israel, how they Own it, and even most
every athiest jew when asked "Why so, a right to return eh jewboy"? Those athiests with out
skipping a beat, will answer back "Oh thats due to G-d (god) Gave land of israel to Us jews,
see"! Indeed that same god they reject and refuse to believe even exists, somehow Gave jews
lands in palestine like a real estate agent at centruy-21 real estate co. eh. And soon as
they get wind of an exit agenda, a thousand excuses to why cannot go live in israel shall
surface and do so fast. Benjamin Franklin, founding father, said it best. They are Paristies
and like Vampires a jew can't live off another vampire. Nor a flea live off of another flea
They always require a Host Body aka Nation to keep 1/2 of jewry in so to provide for the
other 1/2 thru too many corrput ways and means to list.
Yet no other method of fixing a host nation works. How long has america left before even
that option wont work. It sure be real swell if for a change jewry as a whole would finally
just act like Mr. Ron Unz, and be willing to admit to facts and truths without any baggage of
talmudic fantasy and jewy jewish fables eh I wont hold my breath for such, and expect that
unless jews are who make first moves to fix what they fucked up, it will not end good for
anyone involved.
Cannot help but wonder at times what if? What If, about 800 or so years ago when some Pope
and european Kings agreed to hunt down and find and Burn every talmud scrolls or copies etc
to be found What if they succeded and located every single one, by now 800 yrs later maybe
jewry would have assimilated much better and none of this would be reality.
However for now the real main reality is Yes usa Is latest Host nation, Yes many maybe
most jews within usa are grand kids of orig russian bolsheviks, and so far many of them have
shown their true colors and leave no secret that america is Next up to play role russian
whites and christians suffered so badly under .Read that book, see for yourself what a real
fully Depraved and pure evil jewish mind can conjur up when it comes to vicious unspeakable
tortures, and mass murderous venomous hatred for the "other" aka all non jews HINT: Forget
MSM claims of how bad a torture Water Boarding is!..Yes it too sounds not too nice to
experience, but compared to 1917 and onwards Russia and jewsih invented methods of tortures
and mass deaths, no comparison at all.
Many jews and their Shabboz goy defenders will likely claim such an honest book need be
Banned due to it creates more jew haters Well maybe so eh But maybe also after you read of
those vile evil methods, maybe some jews deserve being hated so badly. That alone should
cause naysayer jews and shabboz goys to divert atten To jews and seek a rapid and lasting
jew-fix, before too many more folks read the book perhaps.
Both of the reasons you give are valid in their own right. But it is a fact that the
British had given an assurance to hand Constantinople over to the Russians shortly before
they began the Gallipoli Campaign. If the campaign had succeeded Russia would have got
Constantinople and the Straits.
According to the site I mentioned above (firstworldwarhiddenhistory), the British attacked
Gallipoli to keep Russia in the war until the coming collapse of Germany and Russia –
hard to swallow but the authors make quite a compelling case. I do not want to unnerve anyone
but the site by these two Scots is certainly worth a mention on tis forum.
Aah, the myth of etternal Japan. In the fifth century, the nobility was 60% Korean, 20% Chinese, and 20% native. After that brief period, thie Shogunates were in power. The Mongol invasion was, indeed, unsuccessful, but enough landed and wrought havoc in
Kyushu, the Kamakura Shogunate fell as a result. That it never happened (they were all blown away by divine winds), is simply a confection
for the (unfortunately, still) occupying Americans.
In southern Kyushu, ynu can still see populations of Mongolian ponies, and markers of the
sites of landings and battles. One reason the right hates the current emperor is that he once acknowledged his Korean
ancestry.
People who say things like " [X] has been debunked " without giving any evidence of
the debunking of [X], debunk themselves.
It takes about ten seconds to buttress a claim of 'debunking' by typing in a reference to
the work that supposedly does the debunking.
I know this isn't a graduate seminar or a think-tank tea-room, but given Unz's
preparedness to disclose his previous naïveté (and the process by which
the scales fell from his eyes), it would be good form to make counter-arguments rather than
what amounts to a content-free tweet.
Give Unz some credit: he has the training to discriminate between sources, and seems
genuinely committed to figuring out what things are true and what are not. To assert that his
process is retarded (which is what you're doing by dismissing a source so flippantly),
without any obligation to buttress your assertion, makes you immediately suspect.
This Pravda article was once again a frustrating read because it once again tries to
dance around difficult issues while minimizing offense to jews.
When presenting controversial material, IMHO it is best to minimize offense to everyone,
so that the material can speak for itself. Do not give one's opponents an excuse to label the
article as anti-semitic or anti anything else. Do not give them an excuse to avoid thinking
about the subject matter. Present the facts.
I think the American Pravda series strikes the right tone, and each article surprises me
with vital historical information that has been memory-holed.
I don't think the West will fall, but it will certainly weaken relative to China and East
Asia at large. I feel like the Chinese are the most able to see through Jewish shenanigans
and also most politically able to openly talk about it.
There is a benefit from being half
isolated from Western culture. It's perfectly okay in China to be like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Rui#Controversy
. This is coming from the host of the most prominent English news show of CCTV, China's
virtual TV monopoly.
Chinese businessmen can openly say that Jews are the types to do
whatever they can to get ahead, scruples be damned.
I used to much admire, to a great extent
blindly, Jewish achievement, especially in science. I still do to a great extent. But now I
think they are overrated, especially in terms of raw ability. It's the combination of higher
raw ability and being a privileged minority group within elite Western culture. Nowadays, in
the US it's the East Asian kids winning the 100% meritocratic contests at the high school
level, where there is basically zero, human promotion subjective factor. Moreover, from the
40s on, the Japanese more or less held their own vis-a-vis the Jews in theoretical physics.
Yukawa, Tomonaga, Nambu, Maskawa, Kobayashi all won Nobel, and their work arguably exceeded
that of the typical physics theory Nobel, as there was still some bias in the committee,
against Soviets, against Japanese.
The more mathematical and theoretical and loaded on
individual brilliance the field, the better East Asians have done. My non-Jewish white friend
who placed at the top in elite math contests shocked me by suggesting that in terms of
biological intelligence, East Asians may actually be higher than Jews are.
' If anybody ever benefited from the Bolshevik revolution – it was the workers in
the west, primarily US.
The October revolution forced the capitalists to make concessions to the working class
that they wouldn't have otherwise made simply out of their good natured kind hearts '
I don't think so. When opportunity afforded, capitalists would be just has hard-hearted
and exploitative as ever: see Union Carbide knowingly virtually sentencing workers desperate
for employment to death by having them drill a tunnel through dry silica at the height of the
Great Depression.
On the other hand, long-term, the restriction on immigration drove wages up; Archie Bunker
was able to afford his own house and a stay-at-home wife on a forklift driver's salary, and
that wasn't a TV fantasy. By 1970, it was a reality -- and American workers were hardly
vulnerable to Communist propaganda.
But opening up the floodgates to immigration did away with that. Now we're back to masses
of desperate, suitably docile workers.
It's immigration, not fear of communism. Reduce the supply of labor; conditions for the
working man improve. Increase the supply of labor; they decline. This has been true since at
least the Enclosure movement.
Why do you think that naming a wing after oneself in a museum or university or hospital,
is an expression of ' gratitude '? It's an expression of economic power
, and is self-serving.
"Charity vampires" are a thing: they're the people who draw a $500k/yr salary, and
first-class travel and accom, from the proceeds of earnest-but-naïve 'chuggers' who
collect loose change from earnest-but-naïve citizens.
The notion that $2500-a-plate (and upwards) 'charity dinners/galas/events' exist to raise
money for 'charity', is marketing aimed at rubes. Such events exist in order for people to
rub shoulders with each other, in tax-deductible ways that specifically exclude hoi polloi
(because the price of entry is far too high).
The only thing more likely to fund the lives of an economic vampire than a self-styled
'charity', is a self-styled 'foundation'.
(Note – this is all completely independent of the ethnocultural background of the
vampire in question: Gentile, Joo, and Musselman too there are parasitic sociopaths in all
human societies, and they find the easiest grifts – 'charity' and politics chief among
them).
Claiming that a New York banker financed communist revolutionaries seems rather
implausible to me all the more so at a time when Czarism had already been overthrown and
legal discrimination against bourgeois Jews like Schiff had just been removed by the new
liberal government in Russia.
The situation in 1917 was very unlike that in 1904/05, and supporting the Bolsheviks would
have been much more extreme than supporting Japan (which was then a British ally; public
opinion in the US and Britian had been pro-Japan during the Russo-Japanese war).
I can't think of any plausible reason why Schiff would have supported the Bolsheviks (apart
from completely irrational hatred of Russia or did he want to support his old home country
Germany in WW1 and help Russia knock out of the war?). If he had wanted to make Russia ripe
for exploitation by Jewish finance as Unz seems to insinuate with his vague hints about
"Jewish exploitation", there surely would have been more fitting ways than supporting
communist revolution.
But yes, I suppose expecting an answer to those questions here is probably futile.
"... Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in case of future "meddling," and John McCain , still desperate to take the rest of the world with him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the "disgraceful" display of two heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon has invested a lot of time and money in positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable hole . Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash , motherfucker. ..."
"... The Intelligence Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and crickets. ..."
The Helsinki hysteria shone a spotlight on the utter impotence of the establishment media
and their Deep State controllers to make their delusions reality. Never before has there been
such a gaping chasm visible between the media's "truth" and the facts on the ground. Pundits
compared the summit to Pearl Harbor and
9/11 , with some even reaching for the brass ring of the Holocaust by likening it to
Kristallnacht , while
polls revealed the American people reallydidn't care .
Worse, it laid bare the collusion between the media and their Deep State handlers –
the central dissemination point for the headlines, down to the same phrases, that led to every
outlet claiming Trump had "thrown the Intelligence Community under the bus" by refusing to
embrace the Russia-hacked-our-democracy narrative during his press conference with Putin.
Leaving aside the sudden ubiquity of "Intelligence Community" in our national discourse –
as if this network of spies and murderous thugs is Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood – no one
seriously believes every pundit came up with "throws under the bus" as the proper way of
describing that press conference.
The same central control was apparent in the unanimous condemnations of Putin – that
he murders
journalists , breaks
international agreements , uses bannedchemical
weapons ,
kills women and children
in Syria , and, of course,
meddles in elections . For every single establishment pundit to exhibit such a breathtaking
lack of insight into their own government's misdeeds is highly unlikely. Many of these same
talking heads remarked in horror on Sinclair Broadcasting's Orwellian "prepared statement"
issuing forth from the mouths of hundreds of stations' anchors at once. Et tu, Anderson
Cooper?
The media frenzy was geared toward sparking a popular revolt, with tensions already running
high from the previous media frenzy about family separation at the border (though only one
MSNBC segment seemed to recall that they should still care about that, and belatedly included
some footage of kids
behind a fence wrapped in Mylar blankets). Rachel Maddow , armed with the crocodile tears that
served her so well during the family-separation fracas, exhorted her faithful cultists to
do something.
Meanwhile, national-security neanderthal John Brennan all but called for a coup, condemning the
president for the unspeakable "high crimes and misdemeanors" of seeking to improve relations
with the world's second-largest nuclear power. He called on Pompeo and Bolton, the two biggest
warmongers in a Trump administration bristling with warmongers, to resign in protest. This
would have been a grand slam for world peace, but alas, it was not to be. Even those two
realize what a has-been Brennan is.
Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring
the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in
her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in
case of future "meddling," and John McCain , still desperate to take the rest of the world with
him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the "disgraceful" display of two
heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon
has invested a lot of time and money in
positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice
with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the
American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable
hole . Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash , motherfucker.
Trump's grip on his long-elusive spine was only temporary, and he held another press
conference upon returning home to reiterate his trust in the intelligence agencies that have
made no secret of their utter loathing for him since day one. When the lights went out at the
climactic moment, it became clear for anyone who still hadn't gotten the message who was
running the show here (and Trump, to his credit, actually joked about it). The Intelligence
Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the
media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and crickets.
On to the Playmates .
Sacha Baron Cohen 's latest series, "Who is America," targeted Ted Koppel for one segment.
Koppel cut the interview short after smelling a rat and expressed his
high-minded concern that Cohen's antics would hurt Americans' trust in reporters. But after
a week of the entire media establishment screaming that the sky is falling while the heavens
remain firmly in place, Cohen is clearly the least of their problems. At least he's funny.
*
Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. She covers
politics, sociology, and other anthropological/cultural phenomena. Helen has a BA in Journalism
from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University.
Find more of her work at http://www.helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski .
This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite
which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in
the American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic "cooperation"
associations.
Thanks very much for your feedback. You are correct the Stratfor numbers are all
over the place, but they were the best I could find.
It is difficult to find definitive numbers on the actual Russian Muslim population. Here
is another data point, which points to a quite significant increase in the Muslim population,
from 2008:
Meanwhile, identifying with religions other than Orthodox Christianity was more common
among younger Russians (13% among those ages 16-29, 7% among those ages 30-49) than among
older Russians (1% among those ages 50-69, 4% among those ages 70 and older). According to
the ISSP data, Muslims account for 9% of Russians ages 16-29, 6% of Russians ages 30-49, 1%
of those ages 50-69 and 3% of those ages 70 and older.
The Economist put the Russian Muslim population at about 24-25 million (I added all
the populations in the below map together) in 2002:
A Muslim power? It sounds bizarre. But Russia has more Muslims than any other European state
(bar Turkey); and the Muslim share of the population is rising fast. The 2002 census found
that Russia's Muslims numbered 14.5m , 10% of its total of 145m. In 2005 the foreign
minister, Sergei Lavrov, put the number of Muslims at 20m . Ravil Gaynutdin, head of
Russia's Council of Muftis, talks of 23m , including Azeri and Central Asian
migrants.
Russian Muslims might be less problematic than Middle-Eastern ones though, since they are
probably less inbred, i.e. fewer cousin marriages, and thus likely more intelligent and less
clannish, violent and fanatical, etc.
But their higher intelligence could also be an advantage to them and a double-edged sword
for the native Russian population if they ever wanted to take over the country, once their
numbers have reached critical mass and they are close to a majority in Russia.
Russia's formerly richest man is Muslim, for example:
I'm about 65% Russian, 25% Lak (Dagestani), and 10% other (mostly Italian, Jewish).
Russian 65% DNA doesn't make one Russian, which is primarily the function of culture.
That Political Economy degree from Berkeley surely is a signal for that. I like
humanities. Problem is a lot of US humanities is garbage
Most of them are. We can observe today the results of those "degrees" all over the place
-- cognitive dissonances follow and people become hysterical. In general, modern Western
"economism" (not all of it) operates of the "profound" assumption that wind blows because
trees are moving. Hence Wall Street, "GDP" and virtual economy with consequences of
post-modernism and post-industrialism. Per political, so called, "science" -- it is
altogether a whole other story. In the West, most people who have some grasp on reality are
people primarily from serious academia who dedicated life to a real science and history, and
some from military and intelligence -- the rest is a swamp.
According to the ISSP data, Muslims account for 9% of Russians ages 16-29, 6% of
Russians ages 30-49, 1% of those ages 50-69 and 3% of those ages 70 and older.
This is a highly interesting data point. There are more Muslims ages 70 and older in
Russia than among those ages 50-69.
What this indicates, in my opinion, is that Russian Muslims not only have more babies than
ethnic/native Russians, but that they also live longer.
This is likely due to not drinking alcohol, etc.
So the Russian Muslim population is not only expanding through higher fertility rates, but
also because of higher life expectancies.
According to United Nations statistics, the fertility of Russia's Muslims stands at 2.3,
much higher than the overall national fertility rate of 1.7.[21]
[...]
Its Muslim population is expected to rise from 16.7 million in 2010 to 18.3 million in
2030. A comparatively robust growth among the Muslim population could be attributed to
lifestyle choices like less or no alcoholism and higher rate of reproduction. While the
growth rate for the Muslim population in Russia is projected to be 0.6 percent annually
over the next two decades, the non-Muslim population is expected to shrink by an average of
0.6 percent annually over the same period.[22] Continuation of TFR differentials across
ethnic groups implies long-run shifts in the ethnic composition of the population.
Trey Gowdy is calling on the President and Americans to believe that Russia interfered in our
election and that they are our enemy. When did the war start? I missed it. He is wrong.
He should not be encouraging people to believe things when no evidence is produced, and
when the showing of "interference", or better, "attempted" interference made so far is
preposterous.
1) Russians campaigned for Trump on the internet AFTER the election was over
2) Russians put in campaign ads for all candidates
3) Russians hacked the DNC on the strength of the word of a partisan private organization who
actually worked for the DNC and allegedly examined the computer, when the FBI who had every
right to inspect the computer didn't, and on the strength of the Russian government leaving
the name of its first KGB agent in the metadata in Cyrillic letters.
This is to say nothing about the blatant bias and bad faith by the organizations saying
they interfered.
That is the showing made to the American people of Russian interference, or better,
"attempted" interference, and it is preposterous, stupid and wholly unworthy of belief.
What is Gowdy asking the American people to do. He is asking them dumb-down to the level
of retardation to believe this story. I'd just as soon go to Guantanamo Bay and have those
goons break open my skull and leave me brain damaged. Only then would I perhaps believe
it.
Those people who still think Trey Gowdy is some sort of great conservative warrior are
about as annoying as those who still do not realize that Steve Bannon is nothing but a
bloviating, Deep State douchebag.
says: July
22, 2018 at 8:25 pm GMT 100 Words @Cagey
Beast Thank you, this is an excellent summary of the situation right now. It's worth noting
too just how disconnected the establishment is from the wider public. They have enormous
financial resources and access to the entire legacy media but seem to have almost no real base
of support. Remember how the Never Trumpers had no one more prominent and well-known than Evan
McMullan (!!) to run as their candidate? Note too the tiny number of views the YouTube videos
of the Aspen Institute get: https://www.youtube.com/user/AspenInstitute/videos .
On its own, these things aren't conclusive proof but together they add up. The Aspen
Institute crowd is an almost entirely self-contained subculture. They seem to have no base of
support, beyond their stacks of money, job titles and the power that come with the various
offices they hold. That's probably why they can never stop calling their opponents "populists"
or why Bill Kristol keeps tweeting about encountering scrappy shoeshine boys who shout "give
Trump hell, Mr Kristol!" as he goes about his urban peregrinations. Aspen Institute does make
attempts at outreach, but they invariably cock it up by eliciting, recruiting, or suborning
every single person they bring in. The shitheads even tried to do it to me. You would think
they'd have a dossier saying I hate those cobags.
Their fundamental problem is, Aspen Institute is CIA. Their first and only instinct is to
use people like toilet paper. They don't want popular support. They want agents in complete
control.
Yes, the Aspen Institute is the CIA and the CIA is the Aspen Institute. Or, to be more
precise, the CIA is the armed wing of Washington's permanently governing technocratic party,
in the same way the KGB was the armed wing of the Soviet Communist Party.
Poor Julian Assange is likely going to be in their hands not too long from now. The
citizen of one Five Eyes country will be arrested by another and then sent off to the
imperial metropole, to be kicked around like a political football. The rest of us
Anglosphericals are expected to cheer or remain silent. Either is acceptable.
I hear you, and I sympathize, but this is not mass dementia.
The oligarchy that runs the United States was worried that Donald Trump might actually
(!!) take some consideration for the national interest of the people of the United States of
America. That will never do.
This is not irrational. The screaming, the hysteria, this is the utterly rational,
breathtakingly brutal reaction of a ruling elite that has the moral sense of a reptile. And
it's working. All of Trump's campaign promises to stop wasting trillions on pointless winless
foreign wars of choice, and instead spend that on our own country? Gone. And so much else
besides.
It's dangerous to underestimate an enemy. The useful idiot footsoldiers, screaming in
mindless herd instinct, are one thing. The people behind them – the Koch brothers, Jeff
Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, others – there is nothing at all mindless or demented about
them.
"It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only
one international in scope.
It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars
and the losses in lives."
And we ignored it.
26 years later, in 1961
, President Dwight
Eisenhower - a retired
five-star Army general - gave the nation a dire warning
about what he described as a threat
to democratic government. He called it the
military-industrial complex
, a formidable
union of defense contractors and the armed forces.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.
"
In his remarks, Eisenhower also explained how the situation had developed:
"
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry.
American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can
no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense;
we have been compelled to
create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions
."
57 years after that, we see exactly what they warned about...
and as far as we can
tell, only Ron and Rand Paul remain to argue against 'war' - even though President Trump talks of
'peace', the bombing continues -
and so here we are today, beholden to the US war machine...
Limited number of resources on planet pretty easy to explain endless wars.
Only so much arable land to feed the people on this earth. Is it a wonder why
rapefugees by the millions will come to places where they will be fed and
clothed for free. Its paradise for those backwards brownie turds. Not to
mention most of the drinking water of this planet is found in the Northern
Hemisphere
Things are so ass backwards that the same people who would send their
son to fight in wars overseas for bankers and who will salute the flag
as their son come homes with one leg, don't understand that the war they
are not fighting right now is on their home turf.
this time it's different, this time the useless eater idle worker bees don't
need guns to shoot each other. this time they can be humanely and quickly
vaporized to maintain our leaders' control
Why is it that I make a comment on ZH, like: "if the Deep-State were eliminated
somehow, the USA would enter into an economic depression!" Then a few days later I
see my argument writ-larger on ZH???
"War is a racket. It always has been... It is the only one in which the profits are
reckoned in dollars and the losses in [men's] lives." [there], fixed it for ya.
Men, being disposable, are a free commodity to the MIC which makes war the
profitable racket it is. Value men and war becomes obsolete want to make war
obsolete? Value men. Until then - welcome to perpetual war ~
"The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with
Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia." 1984
So those Facebook ads posted by Russians in 2016 were just like Pearl Harbor, just like
9/11. It's war, says General Hertling! Get those boats in the water! And Trump is Putin's
tool!
I just put forth a hypothesis in the other comments thread which could also apply to
General Hertling, in my opinion, since he appears to be Catholic:
Hertling was born on September 29, 1953 in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Christian
Brothers College High School in Clayton, Missouri, graduating in 1971 -- he is also a
member of the CBC Alumni Hall of Fame, having been elected in 2010.
Christian Brothers College High School (CBC High School) is a Lasallian Catholic
college preparatory school for young men in St. Louis, Missouri . It is located in the
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Saint Louis and is owned and operated by the De La Salle
Christian Brothers Midwest District.
Most of these guys are Catholic; Brennan, Hayden, Panetta, Morell, etc.
I just wanted to explain why, I believe, them being Catholic is relevant in this
context.
My guess is that most of these guys' parents were likely supporters of Sen. Joseph
McCarthy, since his biggest support base was among Catholic Democrats, so they probably
grew up in a very anti-Soviet/Communist/Russian environment and households.
I believe their obsession with alleged, large-scale Russian interference in the election
and their McCarthy-like attitude and tactics might stem from and be a carryover from their
upbringing.
"This war in which we are now engaged is not -- cannot -- be a war between America's
two great political parties. As I have often said in the past, certainly the millions of
loyal Americans who have long voted the Democrat ticket love America just as much and hate
Communism just as much as the average Republican." -- McCarthy speech to the Irish Fellowship
Club, 1954
"... If Trump is serious about a dramatic realignment of US relations with Russia, why did he surround himself with people who are implacably opposed to his approach: Nikki Haley, John Bolton, Mad Dog Mattis, Pompeo Maximus, Bloody Gina Haspel, Christopher Wray, and Dan Coats, who undermined him before Air Force One lifted off from Helsinki? Either Trump should fire them for insubordination or they should resign. Otherwise, this is all psychology not politics ..."
"... What kind of tyrant would appoint all of his own "deep state" coup plotters? ..."
"... Trump's doltish prevarications have done more to boost Mueller's deflating investigation than 1000 hours of the hyperventilating Rachel Maddow . ..."
"... Trump didn't do Putin any favors. The political over-reaction to Trump's obsequiousness will almost certainly prevent the removal of sanctions on the Russian economy. It may even prompt the imposition of more onerous measures. Russian civilians will almost certainly bear most of the price. ..."
He is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant. He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can
do whatever he chooses. He loves to bark orders and to watch underlings scurry to carry them out. He expects absolute loyalty, but
he is incapable of gratitude. The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no
decency.
He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way
and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt. He divides the world into winners and losers. The
winners arouse his regard insofar as he can use them for his own ends; the losers arouse only his scorn. The public good is something
only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning.
He has always had wealth; he was born into it and makes ample use of it. But though he enjoys having what money can get him, it
is not what excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination. He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands
in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble, or wince with pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and
insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they know that is dangerous, the followers
help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power.
His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than desires them. Sexual conquest excites
him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. He knows that those he grabs hate him. For that
matter, once he has succeeded in seizing the control that so attracts him, in politics as in sex, he knows that virtually everyone
hates him. At first that knowledge energizes him, making him feverishly alert to rivals and conspiracies. But it soon begins to eat
away at him and exhaust him.
Sooner or later, he is brought down. He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage.
Donald Trump? Not exactly. This is Stephen Greenblatt's psychological profile of Richard the Third in his briskly readable new
book, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
.
Based on Trump's infantile performance in Helsinki, we'd probably all be better off if Putin just went ahead and annexed the
US.
If Trump is serious about a dramatic realignment of US relations with Russia, why did he surround himself with people
who are implacably opposed to his approach: Nikki Haley, John Bolton, Mad Dog Mattis, Pompeo Maximus, Bloody Gina Haspel, Christopher
Wray, and Dan Coats, who undermined him before Air Force One lifted off from Helsinki? Either Trump should fire them for insubordination
or they should resign. Otherwise, this is all psychology not politics
What kind of tyrant would appoint all of his own "deep state" coup plotters?
Trump's doltish prevarications have done more to boost Mueller's deflating investigation than 1000 hours of the hyperventilating
Rachel Maddow .
Trump was momentarily on track when he wanted to draw a moral equivalence between the brutish global political games of Russia
and the US. But instead of lashing Hillary over her stupid emails, which have nothing to do with antagonizing Russia, why didn't
Trump attack her for her nefarious activities in Ukraine and the decimation of Libya? I know, I know. He's a dotard.
Will Mueller subpoena that soccer ball?
Trump didn't do Putin any favors. The political over-reaction to Trump's obsequiousness will almost certainly prevent
the removal of sanctions on the Russian economy. It may even prompt the imposition of more onerous measures. Russian civilians
will almost certainly bear most of the price.
Trump should have consulted with his Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon. She could have told him from her experience
running the World Wrestling Federation that you have to at least put up a little fight during the Hoedown in Helsinki to make
a fixed outcome look if not real, at least entertaining
For those of us anxious for a de-escalation in tensions between the US and Russia, Trump's petulant display probably ensured
that the opposite will happen
Putin and Trump both sought Bibi's blessing before the summit. Bibi has become the new Billy Graham, who all politicians have
on direct dial for consultation in fraught political moments. Graham always considered him a top notch military strategist, once
urging Nixon to bomb the dikes in North Vietnam which would have killed a million people.
Trump: "What is the server saying?"
The Server: "This subpoena is for you, sir ."
Did QE2 ask Putin to show up 30 minutes late for his huddle with Trump as payback for Trump's tardiness at Windsor?
Ari Melber, MSDNC: "Today, July 16, 2018, will go down in the history books as an inflection point in US-Soviet relations."
The Cold War may be over, as Putin declared, but not the Cold War mentality
"... It is clear that Trump's own DoJ acted to sabotage him by releasing the indictments of the twelve russian GRU officials just before Trump's meeting with Putin. ..."
"... A year ago legislators introduced a bill in Sweden to restrict [total] media ownership to no more than 5% by any person, family, company or ethnic group. The Jews wasted no time screaming anti-semitism. ..."
"... It is a ritual, so the purpose is to convey loyalty. It doesn't placate anyone. What it unfortunately does is to undermine all else Derbyshire says. If he is this uninformed, or conformist, about basic facts, how can one take what he says seriously? ..."
Putin is the illegitimate leader of a corrupt and dysfunctional country, an economic
nonentity among nations, geographically overstretched, with a rusting military and a
population increasingly composed of aging drunks.
I'm not sure what the purpose of this somewhat jingoistic prefatory note is, or whom it is
intended to placate. It is a farrago of false, outdated stereotypes about Russia based
entirely on the situation there in the 1990s.
Like it or not, Putin is the democratically elected leader of Russia, in elections that
have been generally free and fair. They like him over there, and vote for him in huge
numbers. Given that per capita GDP in Russia is about 3-4 times as high as when he took
office, this is not surprising.
As for its being an "economic non-entity among nations", it is a mid-sized economy, about
the size of an Australia, Italy, India and so on, a $2 trillion economy, give or take, using
the purchasing power parity figures. It is no America, China, Japan or Germany, but is
nestled in the tier of countries just below those. Much of the disparagement of its post 2014
economy is based on the US$ figures of its GDP, a misleading measure that is severely
affected by transient fluctuations in the exchange rate.
Lastly, there is plenty of credible evidence that deaths from alcoholism have fallen by
50% or so, since the bad old days, two decades ago. Yes, that's still twice the rate for
males in the EU, but they're sobering up.
Russia has a number of problems but a rusting military? Derbyshire needs to be put up to date
with Putin's successful drive to modernize the Russian military. In some cases (for example,
the hypersonic missiles announced by Putin early this year) they actually have more advanced
weaponry than the US. And Russia has actually won a war in the Middle East (in Syria)
something that the US gave been unable to do for the last 15 years.
"Putin is the illegitimate leader of a corrupt and dysfunctional country, an economic
nonentity among nations, geographically overstretched, with a rusting military and a
population increasingly composed of aging drunks."
Putin took over on December 31, 1999. The country had been raped by the oligarchs and
suffered hyperinflation. Pensioners were driven into horrific poverty en masse. Life
expectancy plummeted. Putin neutralized the oligarchs without renationalizing industries and
put the economy on a more sustainable upward path. The people are now in much better shape,
including ordinary Jews. Drunkenness has lessened. Putin is reasonably popular. There is
hope. Russia also has new advanced weapons.
Losing the 2016 election was a terrible, colossal psychic trauma for the American Left.
They can't believe Trump did it by himself. They can't believe 63 million Americans voted
for him of our own free will.
This just shows that a lot of people no longer trust the MSM. The next step is to take a closer look at Congressional candidates and get commitments for
1) no ME wars 2) infrastructure spending 3) no mass immigration 3) stop $ billions for Israel
6) active swamp draining.
The poisoning in England of Sergei Skripal and his daughter is beyond naughty
It was the falsiest false flag in the history of false flags. Nothing about it made any
sense whatsoever. A complete PR operation. The whole(and failed) purpose was to derail the
World Cup.
Mr. Derbyshire is pretty good at spoon feeding people who enjoy being told that they're
superior to blacks, especially those who also think Brits are, in turn, above them.
But Mr. Derbyshire once again genuflects before his adoptive Uncle Sam, mindlessly
parroting the PutinIsEvilTyrant mantra that the likes of Pat Buchanan, Andrew Napolitano, and
occasionally even Tucker Carlson need to keep their spots along the Right side of
Establishia.
That Mr. Derbyshire does so here -- fancying himself a martyr in the war against
institutional thinking like that at National Review -- indicates naïveté or
cravenness.
Before further embarrassing himself by sharing his gulled views on Russia, he should read
and think about the work of the more informed, insightful authors at Unz Review who provide a
broader and better readership than he deserves.
The poisoning in England of Sergei Skripal and his daughter is beyond naughty; it's
disgraceful, and deserving of diplomatic retaliation
Agree that "diplomatic retaliation" is called for. The U.S. should break off diplomatic
relations to the UK immediately, and through them out on their ear.
The Skripals are DEAD, murdered by MI5 to extend the useful life of Hillary's
anti-Trump "Steele Dossier" that Sergei Skripal helped concoct.
The fact that Britain claims to have Sergei and Yulia Skripal in custody proves that
Britain is responsible. British media coverage is smothered by "D notices" and blithely play
along with a ridiculous government "narrative" – another bad sign.
Does anyone really expect to see the Skripals alive again?
Who else do you expect will come back from the dead?
I don't think there is any reasonable way in which Trump can be said to be a more legitimate
president of his country than Putin. He did not even receive a majority of votes, after all.
Certainly, the electoral college is the way it is done in the US, so overall, Trump is still
the legitimate president of the US, but there are certainly fewer doubts in Putin's case than
in Trump's.
Calling Russia dysfunctional is completely ignorant. That may have been the case in the
90es when the authoritarian darling of the West, the drunkard Yeltsin was in power and the
Russian economy was ruined by oligarchs and American advisors. Things have changed a lot
since then.
The Romanovs undoing was the collusion of a large part of the Russian elite with the British
Empire – the very same British Empire that had happily contributed to the Japanese
Victory in the war of 1905.
The still-slandered Rasputin was a strong voice against the (for the Romanovs) suicidal
war of 1914, and, surprise, the British consul was present on the occasion of his
murder).
Indeed, our ruling class is crazy, as is any ruling class that sides with the British.
Sure, post-Soviet Russia has done naughty things. [ Crimea ] and they've intervened
energetically in Syria's civil war. Naughty for sure
Intervening in Syria's civil war is naughty? Thus saving a christian tradition of 2.000 years is naughty? Mr. Derbyshire certainly knows who is acting murderously naughty in Syria. What has happened in Syria is a disgrace for the christian West.
Derbyshire articles are always tricky: a sharp intelligence married to the capacity for utter
nonsense.
Once Derbyshire dismounts from his immigration/cultural Marxism hobby horse he often ends up
to his ankles in poo of his own making.
He seems to have swallowed the MSM/establishment line on the Skripnals hook, line, &
sinker. His views on Russia are simply embarrassing.
But, he's spot on re: causes of the Russia hysteria. Russia is the great convenience –
perfect to explain the defeat of the vile Clinton & a perfect stick to constantly bash
the President. (I didn't hear the whole of the Putin press conference, but my impression of
Trump's so-called treason was that he merely implied that the US's IC wasn't correct re
hacking etc So this amounts to treason ? Treason, because Trump is correct & the IC are a
ravening pack of liars & monsters.)
Putin is the illegitimate leader of a corrupt and dysfunctional country, an economic
nonentity among nations, geographically overstretched, with a rusting military and a
population increasingly composed of aging drunks. Trump is the constitutionally elected
leader of a country so prosperous, buoyant, and secure, our main national problem is
holding back the tide of people trying to break in across our bordersto share in our
blessed bounty.
So much bullshit. Putin is not an illegitimate leader. The is no country on the face of
the earth more corrupt than the US.
Derbyshire must be under attack by the Deep State.
Derbyshire is a phony. First of all, the deep state in the US is controlled by a certain
ethnic minority. They're not all patriotic Americans by any means. Trump is doing nothing
wrong by winding things up in Syria – or by making peace with Russia, a country with
which the US has little trade. I think Trump is preparing for a bigger clash with China and
the Russia and Middle East things are diversions. Of course, in a clash with China, which
side would Derbyshire be on? 'Nuff said.
Putin is the illegitimate leader of a corrupt and dysfunctional country, an economic
nonentity among nations, geographically overstretched, with a rusting military and a
population increasingly composed of aging drunks. Trump is the constitutionally elected
leader of a country so prosperous, buoyant, and secure, our main national problem is holding
back the tide of people trying to break in across our borders to share in our blessed
bounty.
Richard Lowry employed you for the amusement value of an elderly man making throwaway
remarks. In the course of your current employment, you and your readers might benefit if you
actually checked the numbers now and again.
1. You could classify Russia as a high-end middle income country or a 2d tier affluent
country. Depending on the metric you prefer, its productive base is the world's 6th largest
or 12th largest. Since 1998, it has registered a doubling of domestic product per capita with
a growth rate exceeding that of all but 5 European countries and all but 1 European country
from among those with a population exceeding 4 million. Of course, it has been more dynamic
than North America, the Antipodes, and the affluent Far East.
2. Russia's total fertility rate at 1.75 exceeds both the European and occidental means.
Russia, unlike many countries, has seen a dramatic recovery in fertility since 1998. If past
proves to be prologue, they may reach replacement-level fertility within 10 years. Israel is
the only affluent country with replacement-level fertility as we speak.
3. Russian life expectancy at birth (71.6 years) is depressed for an occidental country.
However, they've pulled out of the public health catastrophe they suffered during their
Yeltsin-era economic depression and have added 7 years to life expectancy at birth since that
time.
4. The homicide rate in Russia is high for an occidental country (11 per 100,000).
However, it's been cut by 30% in the last 7 years or so.
5. Russia's military expenditure ranks 4th globally. Persons familiar with proper
performance metrics can weigh in on how effective that military is. Please note, however,
that Russia is one of a small menu of occidental and quasi-occidental countries willing to
act independently abroad. (The others are the United States, Britain, France, and
Israel).
6. It encompasses all territory in the world which is predominantly Great Russian bar the
city of Narva in Estonia and some border counties in Kazakhstan. Over 90% of it's population
lives in territories in which ethnic Russians predominate. The only peripheral areas in which
Great Russians do not form a majority are in the Caucasus. About 4% of the country's total
population lives in those areas. Russia is not territorially over-stretched.
7. The political order is deficient in various ways. It is, however, pluralistic and
pluralistic to a degree matched in Russian history only between 1905 and 1918 and between
1988 and 2005. The degree of public assent to VP and his confederates in the Duma exceeds
that accorded a head of state and government in just about any other occidental country.
Putin is the illegitimate leader of a corrupt and dysfunctional country, an economic
nonentity among nations, geographically overstretched, with a rusting military and a
population increasingly composed of aging drunks.
Other commentators have noted how highly inaccurate this statement is, so I'll say only
that I lived in Moscow from September 2016 until January 2018 and the country that I saw in
no way resembles Derb's characterization. Russia has its problems but I don't see demographic
replacement or civil war in the cards, as I do for the [sooner-or-later-to-be] Disunited
States.
Russian control of the Crimea is essential to its national security; the Black Sea is to
Russia what the Gulf of Mexico is to the U.S. Any Russian leader, seeing the Ukrainian
government toppled by a U.S. backed coup, that failed to act to secure Crimea, is
irresponsible. The wisdom of Russian involvement in Syria can be fairly debated among
Russians, but Syria is a lot closer to Russia than to the United States. At least Russian
involvement in Syria is not the result of being a pawn of a foreign power, as it is in the
case of the U.S.
"Sure, post-Soviet Russia has done naughty things. They occupied the Crimea and they've
intervened energetically in Syria's civil war. Naughty for sure, but under strong
geostrategic compulsion: Russia needs those naval bases."
Seriously, you wrote this? Besides the hypocrisy of someone living in the US writing this,
you actually think the Syria thing is about Russia wanting naval bases.
That's so wrong, I don't know where to start. I'd be here for a while writing exactly why
I think Russia is in Syria. Not in my wildest imaginings did any of it involve naval bases
though.
"They've murdered people in foreign countries, too. The poisoning in England of Sergei
Skripal and his daughter is beyond naughty; it's disgraceful, and deserving of diplomatic
retaliation -- which indeed it's got: 23 Russian diplomats were expelled from Britain."
So I take it you believe the Russian poisoned this guy?
"On 4 March 2018, he and his daughter Yulia, who was visiting him from Moscow, were
poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.[5][6] As of 15 March 2018,[7] they were in a critical
condition at Salisbury District Hospital. The poisoning is being investigated as an attempted
murder.[6] He holds both Russian and British citizenship.[8] On 21 March 2018 Russian
ambassador to the UK Alexander Yakovenko said that Sergei Skripal is also a Russian
citizen.[9][10] [7]
On 29 March, Yulia was reported to be out of critical condition, 'conscious and
talking'.[11] A week later, on 6 April, Skripal was said to no longer be in a critical
state.[12] He was discharged on 18 May."
I say it never happened. I think it was made up out of thin air. Just for a talking point
and propaganda piece. And it is a clumsy, ludicrous framing job. Nothing clever about it,
just BS as brazen as Colin Powell lying his ass off to the UN.
So in England people theoretically exposed to nerve toxins get treated by the NHS at a
public facility? Really? Really? That's how they do it? Not by a military doctor trained to
specifically deal with cases like this?
I suspect trashing Russia makes him feel better about his own country going to shit. He
knows America and the West in general are anything, but "buoyant". A healthy, confident society does not elect president Donald Trump.
The 3d of these is apportioned about evenly between Zhirinovsky admirers and the
remainder. The last is apportioned between parties of a more social democratic or populist
bent and parties of a more social-liberal bent. The sort of Europhile element you're calling
'the leading opponent' is generally good for 7% of the ballots. People wanting that choice
had that choice, just not the particular person to whom you refer.
To add insult to the Left's injury, the Russians -- well, some of them -- returned
openly to Christianity. And not only did they drop actual Marxism, they showed no
enthusiasm for Cultural Marxism, marginalizing homosexuals and feminists and keeping
themselves overwhelmingly, shamefully, white.
So called "Cultural Marxism", or whatever is passing under this term in the West, didn't
exist in USSR since Stalin. It was a profoundly conservative society with a huge emphasis on
family values, with homosexuality considered a crime and with many other cultural features,
including "folkish" Russian culture (somebody has to lecture Western "academia" on what were
the most popular TV series in USSR in 1960s-1980s) promoted, including a massive and greatly
influential art-movement of Pochvenniki. But I guess for "connoisseurs" of Russian culture
whose bottom line is founded on Solzhenitsyn with some Pasternak and Hollywood cliches it is
difficult to admit the fact that they pretty much know nothing about Russia's history of the
20th century.
I'll even have to admit I agree with the people who piled on Trump for dissing our
intelligence agencies at the news conference. I'm not a fan of those agencies, or indeed of
intelligence agencies in general, ours or anyone else's. I think Trump's right to distrust
them.
Maybe. Maybe not. It is clear that Trump's own DoJ acted to sabotage him by releasing the
indictments of the twelve russian GRU officials just before Trump's meeting with Putin.
I would like to see a couple questions asked of Trump's critics (maybe Tucker Carlson
could ask them).
1.) When was the last time that the Justice Department indicted foreign intelligence
agents living abroad? Have they ever done it? Are we truly shocked that foreign spies are
spying on us?
2.) Has the CIA ever interfered with a foreign election? Is there any current operation in
which they are interfering with a foreign election? Have they supported any NGO or political
party in Russia that is in opposition to the current russian government?
3.) When did liberals decide that the acid test of loyalty to America is one's loyalty to
the US government's clandestine intelligence agencies?
Putin is the illegitimate leader of a corrupt and dysfunctional country, an economic
nonentity among nations, geographically overstretched, with a rusting military and a
population increasingly composed of aging drunks. Trump is the constitutionally elected
leader of a country so prosperous, buoyant, and secure, our main national problem is
holding back the tide of people trying to break in across our borders to share in our
blessed bounty.
Mr. Derbyshire, in what sense is Putin "illegitimate" as the Russian head of state?
I mean, for all my horror of the HellBeast (and it's substantial), let's face it: Trumpy
is the skin-of-his-teeth winner of a Constitutional, yes, but also corrupt and rigged,
election process. And our main national problem isn't holding back the tide of
border-breakers; it's the lack of any interest in doing so on the part of the ruling class,
and the failure of the ruled to rise up and overthrow our corrupt rulers. In a lot of ways,
we make Russia look pretty good.
The Russians went into Crimea after the US instigated a coup ("regime change") against
Ukraine. Crimea is the home to the Black Sea Fleet and has tremendous national importance to
Russia. Think of it as our San Diego.
The Russians went into Syria at the express invitation of the government of the Syrian
Arab Republic. The US is in Syria on the basis of "no one can tell us no." Might makes right?
Is that a principle the Derb really wants to endorse? (If need be, we could go deeper into
the weeds and discuss just who each side, the Americans and the Russians, are supporting in
Syria; that also favors the Russians.)
Perhaps the Derb should educate himself by visiting Pat Lang's site and reading what
non-propagandists are saying.
Putin is the illegitimate leader of a corrupt and dysfunctional country, an economic
nonentity among nations, geographically overstretched, with a rusting military
Watch it there, pal, you are coming dangerously close to what that genius Hitler once said
about Russia – something about Russia being a limp virgin ready to be taken into the
lustful mighty arms of German Mars – or some stupidity like that. It turned out that
our limp virgin by 1945 developed such a phallus that managed to tore a new one to
Germany.
If I was you, I wouldn't worry so much about the condition that Russia is in today, I
would rather worry about the shape that your country of origin – GB is in. On one hand,
Britain still rules over the same eclectic mix of people like in the glory days of its empire
– the only difference is that now they had to scale down their "empire" to about 244
000 sq km and also had to suffer some minor indignities along the way, such as organized gang
rapes from their subjects of indo-pakistani origin, but other than that – it's just
like it used to be.
Putin is the illegitimate leader of a corrupt and dysfunctional country, an economic
nonentity among nations, geographically overstretched, with a rusting military and a
population increasingly composed of aging drunks.
Bullshit!
They've murdered people in foreign countries, too. The poisoning in England of Sergei
Skripal and his daughter is beyond naughty; it's disgraceful, and deserving of diplomatic
retaliation -- which indeed it's got: 23 Russian diplomats were expelled from Britain.
More Bullshit!
I just don't think a news conference in a foreign country is the right place to air that
distrust.
That's your stupid opinion. It was a crappy presentation. And presentation for you means more than substance. You are
NOT helping Derb.
As for its being an "economic non-entity among nations", it is a mid-sized economy,
about the size of an Australia, Italy, India and so on, a $2 trillion economy, give or
take, using the purchasing power parity figures.
It's a $4 trillion economy using the purchasing power parity figures (the same as
Germany).
And many of them are dual citizens, foreign nationals, immigrants or the children of
immigrants, so they are not American at all. No one not a natural born citizen born to natural born citizens should be employed by the
US government in any capacity, including the military.
Mr. JD doesn't appear to keep up with the news about Russia Puzzling.
But even more puzzling: he believes the UK leaders nonsense about the "Skripals affair." A
bad sign, indeed.
As for Trump's performance at Helsinki, I don't see why he should be pained by it: it was no
worse than any of his previous shows.
And Putin was just his usual self: efficient and together. Trump did well to agree that Putin
should present the summary of their talks, as there was no time for producing a written
report for Trump to read. Putin had, as usual, taken notes during the two meetings.
What Trump said in his opening remarks was fine, and he sounded just right and convincing.
The problem arose when he was answering questions, and he certainly shouldn't have run his
intel down as he did, but in all fairness they don't deserve better.
I wonder why nobody denounces the asking of idiotic questions, solemnly to embarrass the
leader of another country [H.E. Mr. Putin] in front of an international audience ?
With the exception of the period 1919 1933 the USA, that is, the ruling class, wanted to
control the world.
In this period the ideas of the ruling class, to be precise, were the same, but the people
had enough of USA blood flowing for imperialism, neutrality laws came, the laws that FDR
hated.
If trying to control the world is crazy, I wonder.
Rome also then wanted to control the then known world, that is, the accessible parts.
The British empire controlled 40% of the world, also the then accessible parts.
So when in fact one man blocks that the whole world is controlled, the ruling class
assumes that after Russia had fallen China will fall too, I wonder if one can say they're
crazy.
If they are, then mankind has been crazy forever.
A historian calculated that on thirteen years of war in Europe on average there were three
years of peace.
If I'm right in my ideas on Trump, he's unique in world history, the first time the ruler
of an empire sees that the empire can no longer be held, and acts accordingly.
Those who still think the USA can conquer those parts of the world the USA does not yet
control, are, of course are near a nervous breakdown. Panic is not good for thoughtful solutions, if one of these days Trump dies unexpectedly,
from whatever cause, it will not surprise me.
What is interesting, to understate, what the reaction will be among those who elected
Trump.
Yeah, what happened to the Novichok story? Last I heard was that a person died 4 months after because she found a novichok dispenser
somewhere, and the UK announced that after painstakingly combing through CCTV footage and
Russian passenger records "they knew who did it".
Trump derangement syndrome makes idiots (greater idiots) of the establishment. These morons
can't see that the alliance between Russia & China is THE greatest threat to US
international ambitions. If appearances are correct Trump wishes to weaken that alliance
– which is diplomacy 101. Trump has a multitude of faults, but his actions re Russia
would possibly gain Bismarck's approval.
It seems this author can't overcome his Cold Warrior past of supporting (((Soviet
dissidents))) against the evils of Communism so he believes what he wants about Russia and
its current state. As others have pointed out here, if he's so wrong about Russia, he's
probably getting a lot else wrong as well. Perhaps Unz should become no country for old men,
and leave the revolution to the younger vanguard who seem much more reality based.
Based commentary by Michael McCaffrey for RT:
Captain America savages
Trump in battle of the useful idiots He just left out Mr. Schwarzenegger's tweets. People playing tough guys doing shouty politics by short message, thinking they are what
they pretend to be on stage. It's pretty liberal out there.
I would add number 7: dismantle the monopoly on American media and internet. You're not going to have a functioning democracy when one small ethnic group controls a
country's media. And expect the inevitable. A year ago legislators introduced a bill in Sweden to restrict
media ownership to no more than 5% by any person, family, company or ethnic group. The Jews
wasted no time screaming anti-semitism.
And expect the inevitable. A year ago legislators introduced a bill in Sweden to
restrict [total] media ownership to no more than 5% by any person, family, company or ethnic group.
The Jews wasted no time screaming anti-semitism.
I can understand person, family and company but ethnic group? Do you mean minority ethnic
group – or are ethnic Swedes not allowed to own more than 5% of their own media?
The Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Warfare just issued a report last week
stating that there is no evidence that chemical weapons were used in Syria. Another false
flag. I really don't believe a word I read in the press any longer. I can't believe that
anyone does.
The left means to take and hold power and that's it.
That idiot Andrew McCarthy from NR has just expressed astonishment that he could have been so
naive as to believe in the integrity of the FISA warrant process. What a load of
codswallop.
last year the BBC had a bunch of nostalgic puff pieces on the 1917 Revolution, this year all
the press is silent about the murder of the Romanovs. The brutal murder of that family was a grisly foreshadow of what was essentially a
government ran by a foreigners was to do to the Russian (and Ukrainian) people. and perhaps its a grisly foreshadow of what the globalists want to do to badwhites. also remember that 'revolution' was sponsored by many wall street firms, who made a ton of
money liquidating the nobility's assets
That stratfor chart is outdated and already proven wrong: It projects a total Russian
population of 137 million in 2020, but in 2018 Russia's population is 146 million (144
without Crimea), and it has been basically stable for years.
It's true that the Muslim share of Russia's population is rising, but it is doing so very
slowly, because the fertility of Russia's Muslims isn't high (below replacement in every
majority-Muslim region except Chechnya). It's currently something 1.9 children per woman for
Muslims, vs. 1.6 for ethnic Russians, and will likely equalize long before Muslims are
anywhere near a majority.
Muslims and the Chinese are taking over the south and east of Russia through high birth
rates and (illegal) immigration.
The trope that Chinese are taking over Russia's east is complete nonsense. Chinese have
little economic incentive to migrate north to Siberia, rather than south to the wealthy
regions of their own country.
what the purpose of this somewhat jingoistic prefatory note is, or whom it is intended
to placate
It is a ritual, so the purpose is to convey loyalty. It doesn't placate anyone. What it
unfortunately does is to undermine all else Derbyshire says. If he is this uninformed, or
conformist, about basic facts, how can one take what he says seriously?
I'm about 65% Russian, 25% Lak (Dagestani), and 10% other (mostly Italian, Jewish).I
have a degree in Political Economy from U.C. Berkeley.
Reminds me of http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html
. That Political Economy degree from Berkeley surely is a signal for that. I like humanities.
Problem is a lot of US humanities is garbage, and if you have only a humanities degree from a
US school, smart, knowledgable people will assume you to be problematic.
Maybe I come across as high V low M too, but I'm not, see https://gmachine1729.com/writings-by-category/pure-math/
. Yes, I also consider many people in programming and software engineering to be high V low
M. I've seen Google senior engineers who don't even know what divergence or curl are.
Jewish activity in the porn industry divides into two (sometimes overlapping) groups:
pornographers and performers. Though Jews make up only two per cent of the American
population, they have been prominent in pornography. Many erotica dealers in the book trade
between 1890 and 1940 were immigrant Jews of German origin. According to Jay A. Gertzman,
author of Bookleggers and Smuthounds:The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 'Jews were prominent in the distribution of
gallantiana [fiction on erotic themes and books of dirty jokes and ballads], avant-garde
sexually explicit novels, sex pulps, sexology, and flagitious materials'.
In the postwar era, America's most notorious pornographer was Reuben Sturman, the 'Walt
Disney of Porn'. According to the US Department of Justice, throughout the 1970s Sturman
controlled most of the pornography circulating in the country. Born in 1924, Sturman grew up
in Cleveland's East Side. Initially, he sold comics and magazines, but when he realized sex
magazines produced twenty times the revenue of comic books, he moved exclusively into porn,
eventually producing his own titles and setting up retail stores. By the end of the 1960s,
Sturman ranked at the top of adult magazine distributors and by the mid-70s he owned over 200
adult bookstores. Sturman also introduced updated versions of the traditional peepshow booth
(typically a dark room with a small colour TV on which the viewer can view X-rated videos).
It was said that Sturman did not simply control the adult-entertainment industry; he was the
industry. Eventually he was convicted of tax evasion and other crimes and died, disgraced, in
prison in 1997. His son, David, continued running the family business.
The contemporary incarnation of Sturman is 43-year-old Jewish Clevelander Steven Hirsch,
who has been described as 'the Donald Trump of porno'. The link between the two is Steve's
father, Fred, who was a stockbroker-cum-lieutenant to Sturman. Today Hirsch runs the Vivid
Entertainment Group, which has been called the Microsoft of the porn world, the top producer
of 'adult' films in the US. His specialty was to import mainstream marketing techniques into
the porn business. Indeed, Vivid parallels the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and
1940s, particularly in its exclusive contracts to porn stars who are hired and moulded by
Hirsch. Vivid was the subject of a behind-the-scenes reality TV show recently broadcast on
Channel 4.
German Christians whose children are force-fed LGBT sex ed in schools and where home
schooling is not permitted, and where parents will be arrested if they do not put their
children in the schools, have sought asylum in Russia, and there have been more than a few of
them, much as the media likes to ignore it. When the US no longer allows home-schooling, and forces their children into the schools,
you will see the same thing happening in the US. Christian Americans will be seeking asylum in Russia
When Trump said he considers Russia a "competitor", he was right. No truer words were ever
spoken.
But the only way to get Americans on board with the greedy plans of greedy people in and
out of government is to demonize your "competitors."
"Naughty things in Syria"??? Saving the non crazies in Syria from jihadi lunatics is naughty?
I suppose if you an Israeli, Saudi or US Democrat. To others , Russia was a savior. This writer appears to be auditioning for a return to NRO.
Russia's economy is stillborn while China's is booming and feasting on America's assets
and market.
Russia's per capita product exceeds China's. It hasn't been as economically dynamic as
China (a 2-fold increase in per capita produce over 1998-2016, v. China's 3.3-fold), but it
has done quite well and has satisfactory macroeconomic indicators across the board. It's
export sector remains dominated by oil and minerals, there's an excess of state ownership in
the economy, and there are some quality of life issues (street crime). Room for improvement,
but not doing badly.
Not by a whole lot (China=$8,800 vs Russia=$10,900 2017).
Also, China's huge GDP is divided by 1.38 billion people.
I doubt anything more than 200-300 million of those ~1.4 billion are involved in contributing
anything significant to China' GDP. So their $12 trillion GDP is quite impressive.
Russia should be doing much, much better.
{It hasn't been as economically dynamic as China}
China's economic 'miracle' is largely thanks to America, like South Korea before, and like
Japan before SK.
America opened up its rich, practically unlimited market to Chinese goods _and_ American
companies were encouraged to setup shop in China ( .like in South Korea).
Chinese are smart people and they learned, and over time started creating their own.
You go to Home Depot or Lowes today and there is hardly _anything_ manufactured in US: it's
all "Made in China".
Russia, on the other hand, is considered an enemy by US, so everything is done to thwart
its economic progress. Russians are also at fault, but we cannot ignore the fact that China
got a huge boost from the economically advanced West to get its (dynamic) economy going.
"... A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order ..."
"... The American ruling class turned to neoliberalism after the failure of Keynesianism -- with its emphasis on state intervention and state-led development -- to overcome the economic crisis of the 1970s and restore profitability and growth in the system. Neoliberalism was not a conspiracy hatched by the Chicago School of Economics, but a strategy that developed in response to globalization and the end of the long postwar boom. ..."
"... For a period, the United States did indeed superintend a new global structure of world imperialism. It integrated most of the world's states into the neoliberal order it dubbed the Washington Consensus, using its international financial and trade institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization to compel all nations to adopt neoliberal policies that benefited a handful of powerful players. It used international loans and debt restructuring not only to remove trade and investment restrictions, but also to impose privatization and cuts in health, education, and other vital social services in states all over the world. The Pentagon deployed its military might to police and crush any so-called rogue states like Iraq. ..."
"... The Making of Global Capitalism ..."
"... Washington's attempt to lock in its dominance through its 2003 war and occupation of Iraq backfired. Even before launching the invasion, Bush recognized that the United States needed to do something to contain China and other rising rivals. In a sign of this growing awareness, he and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, rebranded China, which Clinton had called a strategic partner, as a strategic competitor. ..."
"... Bush used 9/11 as an opportunity to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, as part of a plan for serial "regime change" in the region. If it succeeded, the United States hoped it would be able to control rivals, particularly China, which is dependent on the region's strategic energy reserves. Instead, Washington suffered, in the words of General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Agency, its "greatest strategic disaster in American history." ..."
"... Iran, one of the projected targets for regime change in Bush's so-called "Axis of Evil," emerged as a beneficiary of the war. It secured a new ally in the form of the sectarian Shia fundamentalist regime in Iraq. And while the United States was bogged down in Iraq, China became increasingly assertive throughout the world, establishing new political and economic pacts throughout Latin America, the Middle East, and a number of African countries. ..."
"... Finally, the Great Recession of 2008 hammered the United States and its allies in the EU particularly hard. By contrast, Beijing's massive state intervention in the economy sustained its long boom and lifted the growth rates of countries in Latin America, Australia, Asia, and sections of Africa that exported raw materials to China. ..."
"... Trump's strategy to restore American dominance in the world is economic nationalism. This is the rational kernel within his erratic shell of bizarre tweets and rants. He wants to combine neoliberalism at home with protectionism against foreign competition. It is a position that breaks with the American establishment's grand strategy of superintending free-trade globalization. ..."
"... Demagogic appeals to labor aside, Trump is doing none of this for the benefit of American workers. His program is intended to restore the competitive position of American capital, particularly manufacturing, against its rivals, especially in China but also in Germany. ..."
"... This economic nationalism is paired with a promise to rearm the American military, which he views as having been weakened by Obama. Thus, Trump has announced plans to increase military spending by $54 billion. He wants to use this 9 percent increase in the military budget to build up the Navy and to modernize and expand the nuclear arsenal, even if that provokes other powers to do the same. As he quipped in December, "Let it be an arms race." 21 Trump's fire-breathing chief strategist, former Brietbart editor Steve Bannon, went so far as to promise, "We're going to war in the South China Sea in five to ten years. There's no doubt about that." 22 ..."
"... Trump threatens a significant break with some previously hallowed institutions of US foreign policy. He has called NATO outdated. This declaration is really just a bargaining position to get the alliance's other members to increase their military spending. Thus, both his secretary of state and defense secretary have repeatedly reassured European states that the United States remains committed to NATO. More seriously, he denounced the EU as merely a vehicle for German capital. Thus, he supports various right-wing populist parties in Europe running on a promise to imitate Britain and leave the EU. ..."
"... Trump's "transactional" approach comes out most clearly in his stated approach to international alliances and blocs. He promises to evaluate all multilateral alliances and trade blocs from the standpoint of American interests against rivals. He will scrap some, replacing them with bilateral arrangements, and renegotiate others. Much of the establishment has reacted in horror to these threats, denouncing them as a retreat from Washington's responsibilities to its allies. ..."
"... Hoping that he can split Russia away from China and neutralize it as a lesser power, Trump then wants to confront China with tariffs and military challenges to its assertion of control of the South China Sea. Incoming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has already threatened to deny China access to its newly-built island bases in the South China Sea. ..."
"... On top of all this, multinational capital opposes his protectionism. Of course almost all capital is more overjoyed at his domestic neoliberalism, a fact demonstrated in the enormous stock market expansion, but they see his proposals of tariffs, renegotiation of NAFTA, and scrapping of the TPP and the TTIP as threats to their global production, service, and investment strategies. They consider his house economist, Peter Navarro, to be a crackpot. ..."
"... Beneath the governmental shell, whole sections of the unelected state bureaucracy -- what has been ominously described as the "deep state" -- also oppose Trump as a threat to their interests. He has openly attacked the CIA and FBI and threatens enormous cuts to the State Department as well as other key bureaucracies responsible for managing state policy at home and abroad. Many of these bureaucrats have engaged in a campaign of leaks, especially of Trump's connections with the Russian state. ..."
"... One of Trump's key allies, Newt Gingrich, gives a sense of how Trump's backers are framing the dispute with these institutions. "We're up against a permanent bureaucratic structure defending itself and quite willing to break the law to do so," he told the New York Times ..."
"... The Democratic Party selectively opposes some of Trump's program. But, instead of attacking him on his manifold reactionary policies, they have portrayed him as Putin's "Manchurian Candidate," posturing as the defenders of US power willing to stand up to Russia. ..."
"... Even if Trump weathers the storm of this resistance from above and below, his foreign policy could flounder on its own internal conflicts and inconsistencies. To take one example: his policy of collaboration with Russia in Syria could flounder on his simultaneous commitment to scrap the nuclear deal with Iran. Why? Because Iran is a Russian ally in the region. Most disturbingly, if the Trump administration goes into a deeper crisis, it will double down on its bigoted scapegoating of immigrants and Muslims to deflect attention from its failures. ..."
"... China is accelerating the transformation of its economy. It seeks to push out multinationals that have used it as an export-processing platform and replace them with its own state-owned and private corporations, which, like Germany, will export its surplus manufactured goods to the rest of the world market. 31 No wonder, then, that a survey conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce found that 80 percent of American multinationals consider China inhospitable for business. ..."
"... China is also aggressively trying to supplant the United States as the economic hegemon in Asia. Immediately after Trump nixed the TPP, China appealed to states in the Asia Pacific region to sign on to its alternative trade treaty, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). China is determined to challenge American imperial rule of the Asia Pacific. Though its navy is far smaller than Washington's, it plans to accelerate efforts to build up its regional naval power against Trump's threats to block Chinese access to the strategic islands in the South China Sea. ..."
"... Financial Times ..."
"... Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy ..."
"... Wall Street's Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics ..."
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
"... A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order ..."
"... International Socialism Journal ..."
"... Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance ..."
"... International Socialist Review ..."
"... Imperialism and World Economy, ..."
"... International Socialist Review ..."
"... A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and the State in a Transitional World ..."
The neoliberal world order of free-trade globalization that the United States has pioneered
since the end of the Cold War is in crisis. The global slump, triggered by the 2007 Great
Recession, has intensified competition not only between corporations, but also between the
states that represent them and whose disagreements over the terms of trade have paralyzed the
World Trade Organization. Similar conflicts between states have disrupted regional free-trade
deals and regional blocs. Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement failed to come to a
vote in Congress, and now Trump has scrapped it. The vote for Brexit in the United Kingdom is a
precedent that could lead other states to bolt from the European Union. Rising international
tensions, especially between the United States, China, and Russia, fill the daily
headlines.
Indeed, the world has entered a new period of imperialism. As discussed in previous articles
in this journal, the unipolar world order based on the dominance of the United States, which
has been eroding for some time, has been replaced by an asymmetric multipolar
world order. The United States remains the only superpower, and possesses by far the largest
military reach, but it faces a global rival in China and a host of lesser rivals like Russia.
And the competition between nation-states over the balance of geopolitical and economic power
is intensifying.
The multiple crises and conflicts have also confronted all the world's states with the
largest migration crisis in history. Over fifty million migrants and refugees are fleeing
economies devastated by neoliberalism, the economic crisis, political instability, and in the
case of the Middle East -- especially Syria -- counterrevolution against the Arab Spring
uprisings. The bourgeois establishment and their right-wing challengers have scapegoated these
migrants in country after country.
All of this has destabilized bourgeois politics throughout the world, opening the door to
both the Left and the Right posing as alternatives to the establishment. In the United States,
Donald Trump won the presidency with the promise to "Make America Great Again" by putting
"America First." He threatens to retreat from the post-Cold War grand strategy of the United
States overseeing the international free-trade regime, in favor of economic nationalism and
what has been described as a "transactional" approach to international politics.
While Trump aims to continue certain neoliberal policies at home (such as deregulation,
privatization, and tax cuts for the wealthy), his international policies represent a
significant shift away from global "free trade." He has promised to rip up or renegotiate
free-trade deals and impose protectionist tariffs on economic competitors. To enforce this, he
wants to rearm the American military to push back against all rivals -- China in particular --
and conduct what he depicts in racist fashion a civilizational war against Islam in the Middle
East. He marries this militaristic nationalism to a bigoted campaign of scapegoating against
immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, women, and all other oppressed groups.
Panic in the imperial brain trust
The architects and ideologues of American imperialism recognize that their grand strategy is
in crisis, and worry that Trump's new stand will only magnify it. The Financial Times
' Martin Wolf declares,
We are, in short, at the end of both an economic period -- that of western-led
globalization -- and a geopolitical one -- the post-cold war "unipolar moment" of a US-led
global order. The question is whether what follows will be an unraveling of the post-second
world war era into de-globalization and conflict, as happened in the first half of the 20th
century, or a new period in which non-western powers, especially China and India, play a
bigger role in sustaining a co-operative global order. 1
Obama's favorite neocon Robert Kagan warns that Washington's retreat from managing the world
system risks "backing into World War III," the title of the piece in which he writes:
Think of two significant trend lines in the world today. One is the increasing ambition
and activism of the two great revisionist powers, Russia and China. The other is the
declining confidence, capacity, and will of the democratic world, and especially of the
United States, to maintain the dominant position it has held in the international system
since 1945. As those two lines move closer, as the declining will and capacity of the United
States and its allies to maintain the present world order meet the increasing desire and
capacity of the revisionist powers to change it, we will reach the moment at which the
existing order collapses and the world descends into a phase of brutal anarchy, as it has
three times in the past two centuries. The cost of that descent, in lives and treasure, in
lost freedoms and lost hope, will be staggering. 2
In somewhat more measured tones, the imperial brain trust of American imperialism, the
Council on Foreign Relations, is using their journal, Foreign Affairs , to oppose
Trump and defend the existing neoliberal order with minor modifications. 3 Stewart
Patrick, for example, worries that Trump has laid-out
no broader vision of the Unites States' traditional role as defender of the free world,
much less outline how the country play that part. In foreign policy and economics, he has
made clear that the pursuit of narrow national advantage will guide his policies --
apparently regardless of the impact on the liberal world order that the United States has
championed since 1945. That order was fraying well before November 8. It had been battered
from without by challenges from China and Russia and weakened from within by economic malaise
in Japan and crises in Europe, including the epochal Brexit vote last year. No one knows what
Trump will do as president. But as a candidate, he vowed to shake up world politics by
reassessing long-standing U.S. alliances, ripping up existing U.S. trade deals, raising trade
barriers against China, disavowing the Paris climate agreement, and repudiating the nuclear
accord with Iran. Should he follow through on these provocative plans, Trump will unleash
forces beyond his control, sharpening the crisis of the Western-centered order.
The Council's Gideon Rose fears that Trump is introducing "damaging uncertainty into
everything from international commerce to nuclear deterrence. At worst, it could cause other
countries to lose faith in the order's persistence and start to hedge their bets, distancing
themselves from the Unites States, making side deals with China and Russia, and adopting
beggar-thy-neighbor programs." 4
But the Council and the rest of the foreign policy establishment have little to offer as a
solution to the crisis they describe. For example, the Council on Foreign Relations' president,
Richard Haass's, new book, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of
the Old Order , produces little more than tactical maneuvers designed to incorporate
America's rivals into the existing neoliberal order. 5 But it is within that very
order that the United States has undergone relative decline against its increasingly assertive
rivals, especially China.
Neoliberalism's solution to the crisis last time
The American ruling class turned to neoliberalism after the failure of Keynesianism -- with
its emphasis on state intervention and state-led development -- to overcome the economic crisis
of the 1970s and restore profitability and growth in the system. Neoliberalism was not a
conspiracy hatched by the Chicago School of Economics, but a strategy that developed in
response to globalization and the end of the long postwar boom.
The US ruling class adopted what later came to be known as neoliberalism in coherent form
under the regimes of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain.
6 Neoliberalism had domestic and international dimensions. At home, the mantra was
privatization and deregulation. The ruling class got rid of regulations on capital and launched
a war against workers. They privatized state-run businesses as well as traditionally state-run
institutions like prisons and schools. They busted unions, drove down wages, and cut the
welfare state to ribbons.
Abroad, the United States expanded the program of "free trade" they had pursued since the
end of World War II. Seeking cheap labor, resources, and markets, Washington used its dominance
of international institutions to pry open national economies throughout the world. It aimed
first to incorporate its allies, then its antagonists in this neoliberal world order, with the
promise that it would work in the interests of "the capitalist class" around the world. As
Henry Kissinger once remarked, "What is called globalization is really another name for the
dominant role of the United States." 7 These domestic and international policies
overcame the crises of the 1970s and ushered in a period of economic expansion (interrupted by
a few recessions) that lasted from the early 1980s through to the early 2000s. 8
The brief unipolar moment
Unable to keep pace with the West's economic expansion and the Reagan administration's
massive rearmament program, and beset by its own internal contradictions, the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1991, and the Cold War's bipolar geopolitical order came to an end. The United
States hoped to establish a new unipolar world order in which it would solidify its position as
the world's sole remaining, and unassailable, superpower.
For a period, the United States did indeed superintend a new global structure of world
imperialism. It integrated most of the world's states into the neoliberal order it dubbed the
Washington Consensus, using its international financial and trade institutions like the IMF,
World Bank, and the World Trade Organization to compel all nations to adopt neoliberal policies
that benefited a handful of powerful players. It used international loans and debt
restructuring not only to remove trade and investment restrictions, but also to impose
privatization and cuts in health, education, and other vital social services in states all over
the world. The Pentagon deployed its military might to police and crush any so-called rogue
states like Iraq.
Amidst the heady days of this unipolar moment, much of the left abandoned the classical
Marxist theory of imperialism developed chiefly by the early twentieth century Russian
revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin. In brief, Lenin and Bukharin argued that
capitalist development transformed economic competition into interstate rivalry and war for the
political and economic division and redivision of the world system between the dominant
capitalist powers vying for hegemony. 9
"The development of world capitalism leads," wrote Bukharin, "on the one hand, to an
internationalization of the economic life and, on the other, to the leveling of economic
differences, and to an infinitely greater degree, the same process of economic development
intensifies the tendency to 'nationalize' capitalist interests, to form narrow 'national'
groups armed to the teeth and ready to hurl themselves at one another at any moment."
10
Imperialism was a product of the interplay between the creation of a world market and the
division of the world between national states, and as such was a product of the system rather
than simply a policy of a particular state or party. This was in contrast to the German
socialist Karl Kautsky, who argued that imperialism was a policy favored by some sections of
the capitalists but which ran against the interests of ruling classes as a whole, which, as a
result of the economic integration of the world market, had a greater interest in peaceful
competition.
The new period of globalized capitalism produced new theories that rejected Lenin and
Bukharin's approach. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argued in their 2000 book that
globalization had replaced imperialism with a new structure of domination they termed empire.
Nonstate networks of power, like international financial institutions such as the IMF and the
World Bank, were now, in an era where states were increasingly powerless, the dominant world
players. 11 "The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form
the center of an imperialist project," they famously wrote in the preface. 12 Others
took the argument further, maintaining that a system of globalized transnational production and
trade was fast displacing states, including Washington, as influential centers of power.
13
On the other extreme, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin argue in their 2012 book The Making of
Global Capitalism that the American state organized globalization and integrated all the
world's states as vassals of its informal empire. 14 Though diametrically opposed at
the start, these arguments ended with the same conclusion -- inter-imperial rivalries between
the world's leading states, including the potential for them to spill over into military
conflict -- are not a necessary outcome of capitalism; and today those rivalries are a thing of
the past.
The return of rivalry in an asymmetric world order
Developments in the real world -- such as the Bush administration's 2001 invasion and
occupation of Afghanistan, and two years later of Iraq -- viscerally disproved these arguments.
Indeed, changes in the real world were already undermining the foundations of the postwar world
order that Kagan and others are frantically holding up against Trump's "America First"
nationalism.
Washington's drive to cement its hegemony in a unipolar world order was undermined in
several ways. The neoliberal boom from the early 1980s to the 2000s produced new centers of
capital accumulation. China is the paradigmatic example. After it abandoned autarkic state
capitalism in favor of state-managed production for the world market, it transformed itself
from a backwater producer to the new workshop of the world. It vaulted from producing about 1.9
percent 15 of global GDP in 1979 to about 15 percent in 2016. 16 It is
now the second-largest economy in the world and predicted to overtake the United States as the
largest economy in the coming years.
But China was not the sole beneficiary of the neoliberal expansion. Brazil and other
regional economies also developed. And Russia, after suffering an enormous collapse of its
empire and its economic power in the 1990s, managed to rebuild itself as a petro-power with
disproportionate geopolitical influence because of its nuclear arsenal. Of course, whole
sections of the world system did not develop at all, but instead suffered dispossession and
economic catastrophe.
Washington's attempt to lock in its dominance through its 2003 war and occupation of Iraq
backfired. Even before launching the invasion, Bush recognized that the United States needed to
do something to contain China and other rising rivals. In a sign of this growing awareness, he
and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, rebranded China, which Clinton had called a
strategic partner, as a strategic competitor.17
Bush used 9/11 as an opportunity to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime in
Iraq, as part of a plan for serial "regime change" in the region. If it succeeded, the United
States hoped it would be able to control rivals, particularly China, which is dependent on the
region's strategic energy reserves. Instead, Washington suffered, in the words of General
William Odom, the former head of the National Security Agency, its "greatest strategic disaster
in American history."18
Iran, one of the projected targets for regime change in Bush's so-called "Axis of Evil,"
emerged as a beneficiary of the war. It secured a new ally in the form of the sectarian Shia
fundamentalist regime in Iraq. And while the United States was bogged down in Iraq, China
became increasingly assertive throughout the world, establishing new political and economic
pacts throughout Latin America, the Middle East, and a number of African countries.
Russia also took advantage of American setbacks to reassert its power against EU and NATO
expansionism in Eastern Europe. It went to war against US ally Georgia in 2008. In Central
Asia, China and Russia came together to form a new alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization. They postured against American imperialism in their own imperial interests.
Finally, the Great Recession of 2008 hammered the United States and its allies in the EU
particularly hard. By contrast, Beijing's massive state intervention in the economy sustained
its long boom and lifted the growth rates of countries in Latin America, Australia, Asia, and
sections of Africa that exported raw materials to China.
This was the high-water mark of the so-called BRICS -- Brazil, Russia, India, China, and
South Africa. The lesser powers in this bloc hitched their star to Chinese imperialism,
exporting their commodities to fuel China's industrial expansion. Together they launched the
BRICS bank, officially known as the New Development Bank, and China added another, the Asian
Infrastructure Development Bank, as alternatives to the IMF and World Bank. The recent Chinese
slowdown and the consequent drop in commodity prices have, however, hammered the economies of
many of the BRICS.
These developments cracked the unipolar moment and replaced it with today's asymmetric world
order. The United States remains the world's sole superpower; but it now faces an international
rival in China and in lesser powers like Russia. It must also wrestle with regional powers that
pursue their own interests, sometimes in sync with Washington and other times at odds with
it.
Obama's failure to restore dominance
The Obama administration came to power with the hopes of restoring the credibility and
standing of American power in the wake of Bush's disasters in the Middle East. It implemented a
combined program of stimulus and austerity to restore growth and profitability. By imposing a
two-tier wage structure on the auto industry, it set a precedent for competitive
reindustrialization in the United States, and launched the massive fracking expansion to
provide cheap domestic energy to US corporations.
Intending to extract the United States from its costly and inconclusive ground wars in the
Middle East, Obama turned to air power, shifting the focus of the so-called War on Terror to
drone strikes, Special Force operations, and air support for US proxy forces in different
countries.
Once disentangled from Bush's occupations, Obama planned to conduct the ballyhooed "pivot to
Asia" to contain China's ongoing rise, bolster Washington's political and military alliance
with Japan and South Korea, and prevent their economic incorporation into China's growing
sphere of influence. The now dead Trans-Pacific Partnership was meant to ensure American
economic hegemony in the region, which would then be backed up militarily with the deployment
of 60 percent of the US Navy to the Asia Pacific region. 19 Obama also began to push
back against Russian opposition to the EU and NATO expansion into Eastern Europe -- hence the
standoff over Ukraine.
But Obama was unable to fully implement any of this because US forces remained bogged down
in the spiraling crisis in the Middle East. Retreating from the Bush administration's policy of
regime change to balancing between the existing states, Obama, while continuing to support
historic US allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, at the same time struck a deal with Iran
over its nuclear program. But this strategy was undermined by the Arab Spring, the regimes'
counterrevolutions, attempts by regional powers to manipulate the rebellion for their own ends,
and the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The United States has been unable to resolve many of
these developing crises on its own terms.
Now Russia, after having suffered a long-term decline of its power in the region, has
managed to reassert itself through its intervention in Syria in support of Assad's
counterrevolution. It is now a broker in the Syrian "peace process" and a new player in the
broader Middle East.
While the United States continued to suffer relative decline, China and Russia became even
more assertive. Russia took Crimea, which provoked the United States and Germany to impose
sanctions on the Kremlin. China intensified its economic deal making throughout the world,
increasing its foreign direct investment from a paltry $17.2 billion in 2005 to $187 billion in
2015. 20 At the same time, it engaged in a massive buildup of its navy and air force
(though its military is still dwarfed by the US) and constructed new military bases on various
islands to control the shipping lanes, fisheries, and potential oil fields in the South China
Sea.
Obama did manage to oversee the recovery of the US economy, and China has suffered an
economic slowdown. That has dramatically reversed the economic fortunes of the BRICS, in
particular Brazil, which has experienced economic collapse and a right-wing governmental coup.
The drop in oil prices that accompanied the Chinese slowdown also hammered the OPEC states as
well as Russia.
But China's slowdown has not reversed Beijing's economic and geopolitical ascension. In
fact, China is in the process of rebalancing its economy to replace multinational investment,
expand its domestic market, and increase production for export to the rest of the world. The
aim is to increase its ability to compete with the United States and the EU at all levels.
Thus, well before Trump's election, the United States had been mired in foreign policy
problems that it seemed incapable of resolving.
Trump's break with neoliberalism
Trump's strategy to restore American dominance in the world is economic nationalism. This is
the rational kernel within his erratic shell of bizarre tweets and rants. He wants to combine
neoliberalism at home with protectionism against foreign competition. It is a position that
breaks with the American establishment's grand strategy of superintending free-trade
globalization.
Inside the United States, Trump aims to double down on some aspects of neoliberalism. He
plans to cut taxes on the rich, rip up government regulations that "hamper" business interests,
expand Obama's fracking program to provide corporations cheaper energy, and to go after public
sector unions. He also wants to invest $1 trillion to modernize the country's decrepit
infrastructure. While his Gestapo assault on immigrants is less popular among the business
class, they are salivating over the tax and regulatory cuts. Trump hopes with these economic
carrots to lure American manufacturing companies back to the United States.
At the same time, however, Trump wants to upend the neoliberal Washington Consensus. He is
threatening to impose tariffs on American corporations that move their production to other
countries. He has already nixed the TPP and intends to do the same to the Transatlantic Trade
and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe. He promises to renegotiate NAFTA with Mexico and
Canada to secure better terms, and, in response to Chinese and EU protectionism, he threatens
to impose a border tax of 45 percent on Chinese and others countries' exports to the United
States. These measures could trigger a trade war.
Demagogic appeals to labor aside, Trump is doing none of this for the benefit of American
workers. His program is intended to restore the competitive position of American capital,
particularly manufacturing, against its rivals, especially in China but also in Germany.
This economic nationalism is paired with a promise to rearm the American military, which he
views as having been weakened by Obama. Thus, Trump has announced plans to increase military
spending by $54 billion. He wants to use this 9 percent increase in the military budget to
build up the Navy and to modernize and expand the nuclear arsenal, even if that provokes other
powers to do the same. As he quipped in December, "Let it be an arms race." 21
Trump's fire-breathing chief strategist, former Brietbart editor Steve Bannon, went so far as
to promise, "We're going to war in the South China Sea in five to ten years. There's no doubt
about that." 22
Trump also plans to intensify what he sees as a civilizational war with Islam. This will
likely involve ripping up the nuclear deal with Iran, intensifying the war on ISIS in Iraq and
Syria, and conducting further actions against al Qaeda internationally. It will also likely
involve doubling down on Washington's alliance with Israel. Trump's appointment as ambassador
to Israel, David Friedman, is actually to the right of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. 23 Trump has already begun escalating the ongoing war on Muslims
conducted by the last two administrations, with his executive orders that are in effect an
anti-Muslim ban and have increased the profiling, surveillance, and harassment of Muslims
throughout the country.
To pay for this military expansion, the Trump administration, in Bannon's phrase, plans to
carry out the "deconstruction of the administrative state." Thus, the administration has
appointed heads of departments, like Ed Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency, whose
main purpose is to gut them. 24 No doubt this will entail massive cuts to social
programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
Trump threatens a significant break with some previously hallowed institutions of US foreign
policy. He has called NATO outdated. This declaration is really just a bargaining position to
get the alliance's other members to increase their military spending. Thus, both his secretary
of state and defense secretary have repeatedly reassured European states that the United States
remains committed to NATO. More seriously, he denounced the EU as merely a vehicle for German
capital. Thus, he supports various right-wing populist parties in Europe running on a promise
to imitate Britain and leave the EU.
Trump's "transactional" approach comes out most clearly in his stated approach to
international alliances and blocs. He promises to evaluate all multilateral alliances and trade
blocs from the standpoint of American interests against rivals. He will scrap some, replacing
them with bilateral arrangements, and renegotiate others. Much of the establishment has reacted
in horror to these threats, denouncing them as a retreat from Washington's responsibilities to
its allies.
In a departure from Obama's policy toward Russia, Trump intends to create a more
transactional relationship with the Kremlin. He does not view Russia as the main threat; he
believes that is China. In addition to considering cutting a deal with Russia to drop sanctions
over its seizure of Crimea, he wants to collaborate with Putin in a joint war against ISIS in
Syria.
Hoping that he can split Russia away from China and neutralize it as a lesser power, Trump
then wants to confront China with tariffs and military challenges to its assertion of control
of the South China Sea. Incoming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has already threatened to
deny China access to its newly-built island bases in the South China Sea.
Trump's economic nationalism leads directly to his "fortress America" policies. These
policies chiefly target Muslims and immigrants, but they should not be seen in isolation from
other domestic policies. With the wave of protests against his attacks that emerged from the
moment he stepped into office, Trump and his allies in state governments have introduced bills
that impose increasing restrictions on the right to protest and give the police a license for
repression with impunity. Thus the corollary of his "America First" imperialism abroad is
authoritarianism at home.
Can Trump succeed?
Trump faces a vast array of obstacles that could stop him from implementing his new
strategy. To begin with, he is an unpopular president with an approval rating hovering below 40
percent in his first months in office. He and his crony capitalist cabinet will no doubt face
many scandals, compromising their ability to push through their agenda.
He may be his own biggest obstacle. His 6 A.M. tweets are signs of someone more concerned
with his celebrity status than imperial statecraft. He has already lost his national security
adviser, Michael Flynn, due to Flynn's failure to disclose his communication with Russian
diplomats during the campaign, and his Attorney General Jeff Sessions took heat on similar
charges, forcing him to recuse himself from any investigations of the Trump campaign with the
Kremlin.
There are also real economic challenges to his ability to follow through on his economic
program. He simultaneously promises to cut taxes for the wealthy, spend hundreds of millions on
domestic infrastructure (not to mention the billions it would cost to build a wall along the
US–Mexico border), and cut the deficit. This does not square with economic reality.
On top of all this, multinational capital opposes his protectionism. Of course almost all
capital is more overjoyed at his domestic neoliberalism, a fact demonstrated in the enormous
stock market expansion, but they see his proposals of tariffs, renegotiation of NAFTA, and
scrapping of the TPP and the TTIP as threats to their global production, service, and
investment strategies. They consider his house economist, Peter Navarro, to be a crackpot.
25
Even his cabinet opposes much of his program. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson testified
that he supports the TTP and American obligations to its NATO allies in Europe, including
recent deployments of American troops to Poland. And Trump's Defense Secretary James "Mad Dog"
Mattis disagrees with Trump's proposal to rip up the nuclear treaty with Iran.
Beneath the governmental shell, whole sections of the unelected state bureaucracy -- what
has been ominously described as the "deep state" -- also oppose Trump as a threat to their
interests. He has openly attacked the CIA and FBI and threatens enormous cuts to the State
Department as well as other key bureaucracies responsible for managing state policy at home and
abroad. Many of these bureaucrats have engaged in a campaign of leaks, especially of Trump's
connections with the Russian state.
One of Trump's key allies, Newt Gingrich, gives a sense of how Trump's backers are framing
the dispute with these institutions. "We're up against a permanent bureaucratic structure
defending itself and quite willing to break the law to do so," he told the New York
Times . 26 Thus, the core of the capitalist state is at least attempting to
constrain Trump, bring down some of his appointees and may, if they see it as necessary, do the
same to Trump himself. At the very least, these extraordinary divisions at the top create a
sense of insecurity, and open up space for questioning and struggle from below.
The Democratic Party selectively opposes some of Trump's program. But, instead of attacking
him on his manifold reactionary policies, they have portrayed him as Putin's "Manchurian
Candidate," posturing as the defenders of US power willing to stand up to Russia. As Glenn
Greenwald writes, the Democrats are
not "resisting" Trump from the left or with populist appeals -- by, for instance, devoting
themselves toprotection ofWall Street and environmental regulations
under attack , or supporting the revocation of jobs-killing free trade
agreements, or demanding that Yemini civilians not be massacred. Instead, they're attacking him
on the grounds of insufficient nationalism, militarism, and aggression: equating a desire to
avoid confrontation with Moscow as a form of treason (just like they did when they were the
leading Cold Warriors).
This is why they're finding such common cause with the
nation's most bloodthirsty militarists -- not because it's an alliance of convenience but
rather one of shared convictions (indeed, long before Trump,
neocons were planning a re-alignment with Democrats under a Clinton presidency).
27
Republicans also object to many of Trump's initiatives. For example, John McCain has
attacked his cozy relationship with the Kremlin. And neoliberals in the Republican Party
support the TPP and free trade globalization in general. The neocon Max Boot has gone so far as
to support the Democrat's call for a special counsel to investigate Trump's collusion with
Putin. He explains,
There is a good reason why Trump and his partisans are so apoplectic about the prospect of
a special counsel, and it is precisely why it is imperative to appoint one: because otherwise
we will never know the full story of the Kremlin's tampering with our elections and of the
Kremlin's connections with the president of the United States. As evidenced by his desperate
attempts to change the subject, Trump appears petrified of what such a probe would reveal.
28
Even if Trump weathers the storm of this resistance from above and below, his foreign policy
could flounder on its own internal conflicts and inconsistencies. To take one example: his
policy of collaboration with Russia in Syria could flounder on his simultaneous commitment to
scrap the nuclear deal with Iran. Why? Because Iran is a Russian ally in the region. Most
disturbingly, if the Trump administration goes into a deeper crisis, it will double down on its
bigoted scapegoating of immigrants and Muslims to deflect attention from its failures.
Economic nationalism beyond Trump?
While Trump's contradictions could stymie his ability to impose his economic nationalist
program, that program is not going to disappear any more than the problems it is intended to
address. The reality is that the United States faces continued decline in the neoliberal world
order. China, even taking into account the many contradictions it faces, continues to benefit
from the current setup.
That's why, in an ironic twist of historic proportions, Chinese premier Xi Jing Ping
defended the Washington Consensus in his country's first address at the World Economic Forum in
Davos Switzerland. He even went so far as to promise to come to the rescue of free-trade
globalization if the Trump administration abandoned it. "No one will emerge as a
winner in a trade war ," he declared. "Pursuing protectionism is just like locking one's
self in a dark room. Wind and rain may be kept outside, but so are light and air."
29
One of his underlings, Zhang Jun, remarked, "If anyone were to say China is playing a
leadership role in the world I would say it's not China rushing to the front but rather the
front runners have stepped back leaving the place to China. If China is required to play that
leadership role then China will assume its responsibilities." 30
China is accelerating the transformation of its economy. It seeks to push out multinationals
that have used it as an export-processing platform and replace them with its own state-owned
and private corporations, which, like Germany, will export its surplus manufactured goods to
the rest of the world market. 31 No wonder, then, that a survey conducted by the
American Chamber of Commerce found that 80 percent of American multinationals consider China
inhospitable for business.32
China is also aggressively trying to supplant the United States as the economic hegemon in
Asia. Immediately after Trump nixed the TPP, China appealed to states in the Asia Pacific
region to sign on to its alternative trade treaty, the Regional Comprehensive Economic
Partnership (RCEP). China is determined to challenge American imperial rule of the Asia
Pacific. Though its navy is far smaller than Washington's, it plans to accelerate efforts to
build up its regional naval power against Trump's threats to block Chinese access to the
strategic islands in the South China Sea.
All of this was underway before Trump. That's why Obama was already inching toward some of
Trump's policies. He initiated the pivot to Asia, deployed the US Navy to the region, and
imposed tariffs on Chinese steel and tires. He also complained about NATO countries and others
freeloading on American military largesse. He thus encouraged Japan's rearmament and
deployments of its forces abroad. He also began the move to on-shoring manufacturing based on a
low-wage America with cheap energy and revitalized infrastructure.
So it's imaginable that another figure could take up and repackage Trump's economic
nationalism. Regardless of whether this happens or not, it is clear that there is a trajectory
deep in the dynamics of the world system toward interimperial rivalry between the United States
and its main imperialist challenger, China. Obviously there are countervailing forces that
mitigate the tendency toward military conflict between them. The high degree of economic
integration makes the ruling classes hesitant to risk war. And, because all the major states
are nuclear powers, each is reluctant to risk armed conflicts turning into mutual
annihilation.
For background on this key institution of American imperialism see Laurence H. Shoup and
William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States
Foreign Policy (New York: Authors Choice Press, 2004), and Laurence H. Shoup, Wall
Street's Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal
Geopolitics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015).
Gideon Rose, "Out of Order," Foreign Affairs (January–February,
2017).
Richard Haass, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old
Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).
For one of the best accounts of neoliberalism as a response to globalization and a
strategy to overcome the crisis of the 1970s, see Neil Davidson, "The Neoliberal Era in
Britain: Historical Developments and Current Perspectives," International Socialism
Journal , no. 139 (2013),
http://isj.org.uk/the-neoliberal-era-in-... .
Lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, Oct. 12, 1999, cited by Sam Gindin in "Social Justice
and Globalization: Are They Compatible?" Monthly Review , June 2002, 11.
For an account of the neoliberal boom and consequent crisis and slump, see David McNally,
Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM
Press, 2010).
For a summary of the classical theory of imperialism, see Phil Gasper, "Lenin and
Bukharin on Imperialism," International Socialist Review , no. 100 (May 2009),
http://isreview.org/issue/100/lenin-and-...
.
For a summary and critique of Hardt and Negri's ideas see Tom Lewis, "Empire strikes
out," International Socialist Review , no. 24 (July–August 2002), www.isreview.org/issues/24/empire_strike...
.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2000),
xiii–xiv.
See, for example, William Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class,
and the State in a Transitional World (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins, 2004).
See Ashley Smith, "Global empire or imperialism?" International Socialist Review
, no 92 (Spring 2014), http://isreview.org/issue/92 .
Justin Yifu Lin, "China and the Global Economy," Remarks at the Conference "Asia's Role
in the Post-Crisis Global Economy," November 29, 2011,
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/s... .
Ed Pilkington and Martin Pengelly, "'Let it Be an Arms Race': Donald Trump Appears to
Double Down on Nuclear Expansion," The Guardian , December 24, 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/23/...
.
Phillip Rucker and Robert Costa, "Bannon Vows Daily Fight for the "Deconstruction of the
Administrative State," Washington Post , February 23, 2017,
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-wh-s... .
Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "Rumblings of a 'Deep State' Undermining Trump? It Was Once a
Foreign Concept," New York Times , March 6, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/po... .
Stephen Fidler, Te-Ping Chen, and Lingling Wei, "China's Xi Jingping Seizes Role as
Leader of Globalization," Wall Street Journal , January 17, 2017, www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-xi-jinping-d...
.
For further discussion of this point, see Ashley Smith, "Anti-imperialism and the Syrian
Revolution," Socialist Worker , August 25, 2016, https://socialistworker.org/2016/08/25/a...
.
"... Through neoliberal rationales, they are able to reach many of their social objectives even if they fall short of their policy goals ..."
"... The belief that Trump would alter American conservativism away from neoliberal economics is not without its basis. ..."
"... The marriage between neoliberalism and Christian nationalism that neo-conservatives pursued during the George W. Bush era was going to experience a soft separation under Trump. The pursuit of neoliberalism policies would be relegated in importance, if not abandoned completely, and there would be doubling down on Christian nationalism, with a tripling down on the nationalist element. Unsurprisingly, the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reveals that Trump is ready to renege on his end of this bargain with the hope that poor whites will still be willing to keep up their end. ..."
"... The argument that Trump would somehow overturn America's neoliberal economic order myopically focused on Trump's trade policy. In doing so, it both misunderstood what Trump represented and the ideological framework of neoliberalism. Trump's fever pitch agonizing over the United States' trade deficit with China and Mexico are both the wallowing of an economic idiot and the maneuvering of a political savant. ..."
"... The insinuation was for average Americans to take back what was rightfully theirs by engaging in a new round of economic bargaining with these two nations, if not an open trade war. ..."
"... As the latest tax bill has shown, Trump is dedicated to weakening the ability of the government to extract wealth from the rich. This supreme goal takes priority over the Republican gospel of balance budgets. ..."
"... The Right Nation: Conservative Power in ..."
"... The United States now has an Americanized version of European style far Right politics, and its xenophobic ambitious has come about through a constant assertion of neoliberal values. ..."
"... Understood in proper terms, "economic nationalism" is best described as "market statism" -- where, in Milton Friedman's words, the purpose of the state should be "to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets" but nothing else. ..."
The passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has refuted any notion that
Trump's ascension to the White House would mark an end to neoliberalism. Poor whites who
supported Trump expected him to offer America a new version of conservativism that would break
with neoliberalism. Instead, furthering neoliberal policies has become a critical objective
that works in tandem with Trump's xenophobic rhetoric
With the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, President Trump secured his first major
policy victory. Despite their federal dominance, the Republican Party has proven to be
legislatively constipated. Below the surface of party unity, sectarian differences between the
competing strains of American conservatism have hindered it from taking advantage of its
historical positioning. Nevertheless, tax cuts proved to be a workable common ground that Trump
was able to take advantage of. While commentary of the passage has tended to focus on this
Republican unity, the most significant aspect of the Act's passage is the refutation that
Donald Trump's ascension to the White House would somehow mark an end to the era of neoliberal
economics. Furthering neoliberal policies has not only been an aspect of Trump's agenda but a
critical goal that works in tandem with his xenophobic rhetoric. Far from being opposed by the
Bannon faction of Trump's coalition, neoliberalism has provided a comforting aerie for their
fascist inclinations to develop. Through neoliberal rationales, they are able to reach many
of their social objectives even if they fall short of their policy goals .
The belief that Trump would alter American conservativism away from neoliberal economics
is not without its basis. In a bizarre case of enveloping ironies, Trump's presidential
campaign was successful in portraying him as both a billionaire business wizard and as an
example of an American everyman. He advocated for "draining the swamp" of corrupt Wall Street
executives, while at the same time paraded his practice of tax evasion has an example of his
shrewd financial acumen. The incompatibility of these two personas is obvious, but it has a
certain appeal within the context of America's poor whites. Poor white Americans are both
spiteful toward and enamored by capitalism. They are spiteful because it retards their own
social mobility, but enamored with it because it provides a basis for their own privilege over
racial minorities. Unlike their counterparts among racial minorities, poor whites do not
consider themselves poor by class, but poor by temporary misfortune. They are not poor per se,
but rather down-on-their-luck millionaires whose are unjustly treated by liberal elites and
coddled minorities. For these people, Trump represented an enchanting example of uncouth
success. The fact that he was crass and despised only reinforced the notion that it is not
connections and education that made a person wealthy, but hard work and an intuition for
affluence. Culturally speaking, these are traits are considered innate to white Americans. Of
course, to believe this mythology, many of Trump's low-class acolytes were only willing to
support his campaign under the pretext of an unspoken bargain: they would ignore the reality
that his wealth was inherited and not earned, and he would refrain from the usual Republican
claptrap about the virtues of privatizing Social Security and Medicare. That way both partners
could remain comfortable in their delusions that all their current and potential future wealth
was a product of their own doing. The result of this unspoken bargain was that Trump was
supposed to offer America a new version of conservativism. The marriage between
neoliberalism and Christian nationalism that neo-conservatives pursued during the George W.
Bush era was going to experience a soft separation under Trump. The pursuit of neoliberalism
policies would be relegated in importance, if not abandoned completely, and there would be
doubling down on Christian nationalism, with a tripling down on the nationalist element.
Unsurprisingly, the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reveals that Trump is ready to renege
on his end of this bargain with the hope that poor whites will still be willing to keep up
their end.
Astute observers saw this betrayal coming. The argument that Trump would somehow
overturn America's neoliberal economic order myopically focused on Trump's trade policy. In
doing so, it both misunderstood what Trump represented and the ideological framework of
neoliberalism. Trump's fever pitch agonizing over the United States' trade deficit with China
and Mexico are both the wallowing of an economic idiot and the maneuvering of a political
savant. The issue was always economically inane. A trade deficit in-and-of-itself reveals
very little about the overall health of an economy. Whether a nation should strive for or
against a trade deficit is more dependent on that nation's strategic position within the global
economy, and not necessarily an indicator of the health of domestic markets. But, trade proved
to be a salient issue for symbolic purposes. Stagnation and automation have compelled American
middle and lower classes to accept an economic torpor. Making trade deficits a central campaign
tenant provided these people with an outlet for their class anxieties without having to
question the nature of class itself. Lethargic economic growth was blamed on Mexicans and the
Chinese. The insinuation was for average Americans to take back what was rightfully theirs
by engaging in a new round of economic bargaining with these two nations, if not an open trade
war.
While Trump's criticism of Mexico and China seemed to imply an undoing of international
market liberalization and a return to an age of greater protectionism, in reality, Trump very
rarely recommended such policies. Instead, he made vague references to "good people" who will
make "good deals" for American workers and openly preferred lowering America's corporate tax
rate in order to encourage businesses to reinvest in the United States. The first proposal was
always understood as meaningless. Its value was in showmanship. A person can hoodwink the world
into thinking that they are a genius just by referring to everyone around them as a moron.
However, the second proposal not only does not overturn the reigning neoliberal order, it
strengthens it. As the latest tax bill has shown, Trump is dedicated to weakening the
ability of the government to extract wealth from the rich. This supreme goal takes priority
over the Republican gospel of balance budgets. The deficit be damned if preventing it
smacks of any hint of expropriation of the wealthy. But, the deficit is not entirely damned. It
is an open secret that Republicans are salivating for a fiscal crisis that will provide them
with a pretext for cutting Social Security and Medicare. It was only a matter of time before
Trump's administration wholeheartedly joins them.
The fact that the real potential for cutting favored government programs has not resulted in
the same outcry among Trump's supporters, even among low-class demographics, as his suggestion
that he might soften his position on immigration is a grave concern. Social Security and
Medicare are extremely popular in the United States among poor and working people regardless of
ethnicity and political ideology. Nevertheless, tolerance for their obliteration has become
palatable to the majority of white Americans. In 2004, journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian
Wooldridge published their exhaustive history of the American Right, The Right Nation: Conservative Power
inAmerica . At the time, Michlethwait and Wooldridge could accurately claim
that "in no other country is the Right defined so much by values rather than class Yet despite
the importance of values, America has failed to produce a xenophobic 'far Right' on anything
like the same scale as Europe has." A little over a decade later, Michlethwait's and
Wooldridge's observation has become obsolete. Trump is inept at policy and governance, but he
is a skilled mobilizer and has managed to shift the American Right into a new direction.
The United States now has an Americanized version of European style far Right politics, and
its xenophobic ambitious has come about through a constant assertion of neoliberal
values.
Trump has not only furthered the neoliberal doctrine of privatization, but also that of the
economization of everyday life, and specifically, the economization of American racism. While
fear of cultural differences between "the west" and "the rest" has always been front and center
for the Bannon wing of Trump's coalition, more tactical voices find economic justifications for
their xenophobia: immigrants steal jobs, freeride on welfare benefits, and don't pay taxes. The
image that emerges when these talking points converge is a political system enamored with
quantifying and dispensing material goods between those who deserve and those who do not. For
most modern conservatives, opposition to immigration is not based on an open fear of
differences; rather, it is a feeling that immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, are
unwilling to accept a free market economic system that treats all Americans on fair and equal
terms. Unlike average Americans, who work hard and thus deserve their market remunerations,
immigrants -- and by implication other minorities -- rely on a mixture of government handouts
and liberal acquiescence to the rules. Immigrants cash their welfare checks because liberal
elites look the other way on law enforcement. This worldview suggests that the government
should not only be redirected to strenuous law enforcement but also that it should not be in
the business of providing society with social welfare in the first place. Doing so only creates
an impetus for illegal immigration and lazy minorities. In this manner, Bannon's cheerleading
of "economic nationalism" was always a rhetorical mirage. Understood in proper terms,
"economic nationalism" is best described as "market statism" -- where, in Milton Friedman's
words, the purpose of the state should be "to preserve law and order, to enforce private
contracts, to foster competitive markets" but nothing else.
There is no fundamental difference in the terms of the realpolitik outcomes between
Friedman's neoliberalism and Bannon's economic nationalism, even if they begin from separate
economic philosophies. The only difference is in what should be considered preferable within
market configurations. In Capitalism and Freedom ,
Friedman emphasizes his personal objections to racist ideologies but sees no need for a
government to ensure racial equality. According to Friedman, racism is to be overcome through
individual argumentation, not political struggle; it is the changing of tastes within the
marketplace that will provide the liberation of ethnic minorities, not the paternal hand of the
government preventing discrimination. Friedman's de-politicizing of racial anxieties to mere
matters of "taste," provides an opening for those -- like Bannon -- who are eager to engage in
a culture war, but are well aware of the potentially alienating effects of actually taking up
arms. If racial discrimination is only a matter of "taste," similar to other desires within the
marketplace, then the maintenance of white supremacy is predicated on its profitability. As
long as whiteness can maintain its social hegemony, then Friedman's governmental obligations
"to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets," will
serve to reinforce it. The neoliberal economizing of American racism allows for many of the
effects of white supremacy without necessarily the adoption of any of its core premises.
Trump's coalition of white nationalists and free-market ideologues thus become comfortable
bedfellows, even while maintaining a rhetorical mistrust of each other.
The question is can Trump maintain his coalition of realigned conservatives in time for the
next election cycle? While his low polling numbers and recent Democratic Party successes are
encouraging, they are not foolproof. The destabilizing of the narrative on American racism can
only occur through a refusal to accept the economization of the debate. The exclusion of racial
minorities from social welfare and the utter bureaucratic madness of the United States'
immigration policies have a moral dimension that has to take precedence over concerns regarding
job stealing and tax burdens, no matter how fallacious such arguments are to begin with.
Expecting the Democratic Party's leadership to play a leading role in this de-economization of
the debate is not impossible, but unlikely. Along with Republicans, Democrats have been
complicit in the framing social issues in relations to the economy, and the economy as merely
working in the service of private interests. Only recently has the leftwing of the Democratic
Party been organized and energized enough to counter this influence and return the party to its
New Deal orientation. Whatever its limitations, Roosevelt's "freedom from want" provides a
moral framework for economic policy. It is a reasonable and familiar starting point to break
with a neoliberal credo that economizes all morality within a capitalist framework.
While the left-wing of the Democratic Party has seen tremendous progress, it is still far
from overturning the organization's centrist leadership. In many ways, the passage of the Tax
Cuts and Jobs Act is a painful reminder of how weak the American Left is once Republicans are
able to stay united. Like with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
is extremely unpopular. The trickledown theory of economics that the act is based on is rightly
seen a convenient canard for the rich. So much so, that it has been reduced to a cliché
joke among late night talk show hosts. With the exception of Fox News, the mainstream press has
frequently commented on the nearly universal consensus among economists that the Act will
result in a massive transfer of wealth to the upper class. Intellectually, there is no place
for defenders of the Act to hide. However, unlike opposition to repealing the Affordable Care
Act, opposition to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has been somewhat muted. While Americans still are
seething from the injustices of the 2007-2008 economic collapse, ten years on, they still have
not found a tangible political venue to express their frustrations. This means that regardless
of the outcome of the next election cycle the American Left is going to have to play a
persistent role creating a meaningful outlet for people's dismay, and fostering a political
discourse that recognizes that the Trump phenomenon is rooted in the neoliberal age that
preceded it. The dangerous tantrum-prone child of Trumpism will only be forced off the
playground when its neoliberal parents no longer own the park.
"... The Russians could do nothing to build support for Trump, and there is not a hint of evidence that they tried. They might have done something to harm Hillary, because there was so much there: the private server emails, the Clinton foundation, the murder of Moammer Gaddafi, the call for a no-fly zone in Syria they didn't have to invent it. It was there. So was the hanky panky at the Democratic National Committee, on which the Clintonite accusations focus, perhaps to cause everyone to forget much worse things. ..."
"... When you come to think of it, the DNC scandal focused on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, not on Hillary herself. Screaming about "Russian hacking the DNC" has been a distraction from much more serious accusations against Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders supporters didn't need those "revelations" to make them stop loving Hillary or even to discover that the DNC was working against Bernie. It was always perfectly obvious. ..."
Mass Dementia in the Western Establishment Diana Johnstone July 20, 2018 1,600 Words
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Where to begin to analyze the madness of mainstream media in reaction to the Trump-Putin
meeting in Helsinki? By focusing on the individual, psychology has neglected the problem of
mass insanity, which has now overwhelmed the United States establishment, its mass media and
most of its copycat European subsidiaries. The individuals may be sane, but as a herd they are
ready to leap off the cliff.
For the past two years, a particular power group has sought to explain away its loss of
power – or rather, its loss of the Presidency, as it still holds a predominance of
institutional power – by creation of a myth. Mainstream media is known for its herd
behavior, and in this case the editors, commentators, journalists have talked themselves into a
story that initially they themselves could hardly take seriously.
Donald Trump was elected by Russia ?
On the face of it, this is preposterous. Okay, the United States can manage to rig elections
in Honduras, or Serbia, or even Ukraine, but the United States is a bit too big and complex to
leave the choice of the Presidency to a barrage of electronic messages totally unread by most
voters. If this were so, Russia wouldn't need to try to "undermine our democracy". It would
mean that our democracy was already undermined, in tatters, dead. A standing corpse ready to be
knocked over by a tweet.
Even if, as is alleged without evidence, an army of Russian bots (even bigger than the
notorious Israeli army of bots) was besieging social media with its nefarious slanders against
poor innocent Hillary Clinton, this could determine an election only in a vacuum, with no other
influences in the field. But there was a lot of other stuff going on in the 2016 election, some
for Trump and some for Hillary, and Hillary herself scored a crucial own goal by denigrating
millions of Americans as "deplorables" because they didn't fit into her identity politics
constituencies.
The Russians could do nothing to build support for Trump, and there is not a hint of
evidence that they tried. They might have done something to harm Hillary, because there was so
much there: the private server emails, the Clinton foundation, the murder of Moammer Gaddafi,
the call for a no-fly zone in Syria they didn't have to invent it. It was there. So was the
hanky panky at the Democratic National Committee, on which the Clintonite accusations focus,
perhaps to cause everyone to forget much worse things.
When you come to think of it, the DNC scandal focused on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, not on
Hillary herself. Screaming about "Russian hacking the DNC" has been a distraction from much
more serious accusations against Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders supporters didn't need those
"revelations" to make them stop loving Hillary or even to discover that the DNC was working
against Bernie. It was always perfectly obvious.
So at worst, "the Russians" are accused of revealing some relatively minor facts concerning
the Hillary Clinton campaign. Big deal.
But that is enough, after two years of fakery, to send the establishment into a frenzy of
accusations of "treason" when Trump does what he said he would do while campaigning, try to
normalize relations with Russia.
This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite
which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in the
American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic "cooperation" associations. They
have based their careers on the illusion of sharing the world empire by following U.S. whims in
the Middle East and transforming the mission of their armed forces from defense into foreign
intervention units of NATO under U.S. command. Having not thought seriously about the
implications of this for over half a century, they panic at the suggestion of being left to
themselves.
The Western elite is now suffering from self-inflicted dementia.
Donald Trump is not particularly articulate, navigating through the language with a small
repetitive vocabulary, but what he said at his Helsinki press conference was honest and even
brave. As the hounds bay for his blood, he quite correctly refused to endorse the "findings" of
US intelligence agencies, fourteen years after the same agencies "found" that Iraq was bursting
with weapons of mass destruction. How in the world could anyone expect anything else?
But for the mainstream media, "the story" at the Helsinki summit, even the only
story, was Trump's reaction to the, er, trumped up charges of Russian interference in our
democracy. Were you or were you not elected thanks to Russian hackers? All they wanted was a
yes or no answer. Which could not possibly be yes. So they could write their reports in
advance.
Anyone who has frequented mainstream journalists, especially those who cover the "big
stories" on international affairs, is aware of their obligatory conformism, with few
exceptions. To get the job, one must have important "sources", meaning government spokesmen who
are willing to tell you what "the story" is, often without being identified. Once they know
what "the story" is, competition sets in: competition as to how to tell it. That leads to an
escalation of rhetoric, variations on the theme: "The President has betrayed our great country
to the Russian enemy. Treason!"
This demented chorus on "Russian hacking" prevented mainstream media from even doing their
job. Not even mentioning, much less analyzing, any of the real issues at the summit. To find
analysis, one must go on line, away from the official fake news to independent reporting. For
example, "the Moon of Alabama" site offers
an intelligent interpretation of the Trump strategy , which sounds infinitely more
plausible than "the story". In short, Trump is trying to woo Russia away from China, in a
reverse version of Kissinger's strategy forty years ago to woo China away from Russia, thus
avoiding a continental alliance against the United States. This may not work because the United
States has proven so untrustworthy that the cautious Russians are highly unlikely to abandon
their alliance with China for shadows. But it makes perfect sense as an explanation of Trump's
policy, unlike the caterwauling we've been hearing from Senators and talking heads on CNN.
Those people seem to have no idea of what diplomacy is about. They cannot conceive of
agreements that would be beneficial to both sides. No, it's got to be a zero sum game, winner
take all. If they win, we lose, and vice versa.
They also have no idea of the harm to both sides if they do not agree. They have no project,
no strategy. Just hate Trump.
He seems totally isolated, and every morning I look at the news to see if he has been
assassinated yet.
It is unimaginable for our Manichean moralists that Putin might also be under fire at home
for failing to chide the American president for U.S. violations of human rights in Guantanamo,
murderous drone strikes against defenseless citizens throughout the Middle East, the
destruction of Libya in violation of the UN mandate, interference in the elections of countless
countries by government-financed "non-governmental organizations" (the National Endowment of
Democracy), worldwide electronic spying, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the
world's greatest prison population and regular massacres of school children. But the diplomatic
Russians know how to be polite.
Still, if Trump actually makes a "deal", there may be losers – neither the U.S. nor
Russia but third parties. When two great powers reach agreement, it is often at somebody else's
expense. The West Europeans are afraid it will be them, but such fears are groundless. All
Putin wants is normal relations with the West, which is not much to ask.
Rather, candidate number one for paying the price are the Palestinians, or even Iran, in
marginal ways. At the press conference, asked about possible areas of cooperation between the
two nuclear powers, Trump suggested that the two could agree on helping Israel:
"We both spoke with Bibi Netanyahu. They would like to do certain things with respect to
Syria, having to do with the safety of Israel. In that respect, we absolutely would like to
work in order to help Israel. Israel will be working with us. So both countries would work
jointly."
In political terms, Trump knows where political power lies, and is counting on the influence
of the pro-Israel lobby, which recognizes the defeat in Syria and the rising influence of
Russia, to save him from the liberal imperialists – a daring bet, but he does not have
much choice.
On another subject, Trump said that "our militaries" get along with the Russians "better
than our politicians". This is another daring bet, on military realism that could somehow
neutralize military industrial congressional complex lobbying for more and more weapons.
In short, the only chance to end the nuclear war threat may depend on support for Trump from
Israel and the Pentagon!
The hysterical neoliberal globalists seem to have ruled out any other possibility –
and perhaps this one too.
"Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards the opportunity to open
new pathways toward peace and stability in our world" Trump declared "I would rather take a
political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics."
That is more than his political enemies can claim.
This is a frightening, accurate commentary on what we face as a result of an unaccountable
power structure resorting to any and all means to retain power which, if this structure
continues to exercise it, will lead to our extinction.
In the establishment, it's not dementia as such, it's just serving the highest bidder. You
can accuse only the elites of dementia: they forgot that to enjoy the fruits of your thievery
you have to be alive. If only they die, it would be a great service to the humanity.
Unfortunately, the way things go, they might take us all with them.
Thank you, this is an excellent summary of the situation right now. It's worth noting too
just how disconnected the establishment is from the wider public. They have enormous
financial resources and access to the entire legacy media but seem to have almost no real
base of support. Remember how the Never Trumpers had no one more prominent and well-known
than Evan McMullan (!!) to run as their candidate? Note too the tiny number of views the
YouTube videos of the Aspen Institute get: https://www.youtube.com/user/AspenInstitute/videos
.
On its own, these things aren't conclusive proof but together they add up. The Aspen
Institute crowd is an almost entirely self-contained subculture. They seem to have no base of
support, beyond their stacks of money, job titles and the power that come with the various
offices they hold. That's probably why they can never stop calling their opponents
"populists" or why Bill Kristol keeps tweeting about encountering scrappy shoeshine boys who
shout "give Trump hell, Mr Kristol!" as he goes about his urban peregrinations.
Diana Johnstone is not alone. Others on the alt-Left are starting to wake up, too. This is
Joaquín Flores:
People are seeing through dishonesty, and the old language traps are used up and done
for. If reconquista is the goal, then we need to have an honest conversation about that. If
there's a Latino nation with self determination in the south-west US, or rights 'back' to
the south-west US, then let's speak of it in such terms. Because then we'd be looking at a
Euro-American nation also. Now of course there's issues of interpenetrated peoples, and
identities we carry in our minds in diverse urban centers. But the point here is that we
have to have an honest discourse, and stop hiding reconquista sentiments under the rubric
of 'human rights'. Because European-Americans don't have right of return to Europe, so the
left is promoting what will ultimately be a race war, full scale, if they don't chill the
fuck out and back off this disingenuous approach to policy-wonkism on immigration.
The paradigmatic question today is, how is wealth made, and where does wealth come from?
What is the balance of trade and debts, and how is that is no longer manageable? The US
empire and NATO is no longer manageable. Trump is unwinding NATO. That can't be a bad
thing.
I just finished reading the letters of Thomas Mann, who's an exemplary figure in this
regard. Leading up to World War I, he was a fairly standard old-school conservative
militarist/nationalist. That continued until the end of the war. After the war, he became a
dedicated liberal defender of Weimar. Once the Nazis took over, his liberalism morphed into a
humanist anti-fascism. By the end of the war, that antifascism had come to include overt
sympathy with communism and the Soviet Union (he even praised Mission to Moscow on aesthetic
grounds!) That continued into the late 1940s, when he supported Henry Wallace for president and
was outspoken in his opposition to HUAC .
But then, around 1950 or so, you begin to see, ever so slightly and subtly, Mann's opinions
starting to change once again. He never comes out in defense of McCarthyism, but you begin to
feel a chill and distance toward the left. His criticisms of the repression in the US begin to
modulate and moderate. Till finally, in a 1953 letter to Agnes Meyer, his close friend and
matriarch of The Washington Post, he confesses that he has decided not to publicly oppose
McCarthyism in the New York Times. He reports to her that when he was asked -- "probably by
someone on the 'left'" -- what he thinks about the censorship and restrictions on freedom in
the US, this was his reply: "American democracy felt threatened and, in the struggle for
freedom, considered that there had to be a certain limitation on freedom, a certain
disciplining of individual thought, a certain conformism. This was understandable." Though he
adds some sort of anodyne qualification at the end of that.
It just about broke my heart. That "left" in scare quotes (previously Mann had seen himself
as a part of the left), the clichés about freedom and the Cold War, the betrayal of all
that he had said and done in the preceding decades -- and most important, the seeming inability
to see that he was betraying anything at all.
... ... ....
During the McCarthy years, Arendt wrote in a letter to Jaspers how terrified she was of the
repression. It wasn't just the facts of the coercion she saw everywhere. It was how quickly it
happened, how the mood of the moment had gone so suddenly from a generous and capacious
liberalism to a cramped anticommunism. "Can you see," she wrote, "how far the disintegration
has gone and with what breathtaking speed it has occurred? And up to now hardly any resistance.
Everything melts away like butter in the sun." Victor Klemperer notices and narrates a similar
shift among his friends and colleagues in his diaries of Nazi Germany.
One of the core truths about clever people is that they are very good at coming-up with
clever justifications for whatever it is they happen to believe.
People who were lambasting that kind of politics in 2016 are now embracing it -- without
remarking upon the change, without explaining it, leaving the impression that this is what
they believed all along.
Amusingly, and for essentially the same reasons, a symmetric movement has taken place in
France, with many people self-identifying as socialist (at least nominally) two years ago now
fully behind flat taxes on capital gains, detention of minors up to 90 days if their parents
are undocumented and privatization of passenger trains (three ideas that have historically
been considered outside of the spectrum of reasonnable political opinion, even by the former
mainstream right-wing party).
But coincidentally, I was re-reading Bourdieu's On the State these last weeks so
I'm not so surprised, especially as I don't think that believe is quite the right word
to describe how political and social positions are embraced (and in that respect, I believe
that intellectuals are different only in their vociferous protestations to the contrary, and
their somewhat superior ability to identify with the domineering side).
"In modern societies, the State makes a decisive contribution towards the production and
reproduction of the instruments of construction of social reality. [ ] The State thereby
creates the conditions for an immediate orchestration of habitus which is itself the
foundation for a consensus on this set of shared self-evidences which constitute common
sense ."
So when shifts and breaks in the structure of the field of State power happen, it is
perhaps not so surprising that schemes of perceptions also quickly change so that
single-payer universal health care/the suppression of a capital gain tax can move in a couple
of months from worthy to mention only to summarily dismiss as absurd to common sense.
Glen Tomkins 07.05.18 at 1:48 pm (no link)
I don't understand the problem. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Always. Simple
fact. What's to explain?
Alex Ameter 07.05.18 at 1:49 pm (no link)
American culture is terrifyingly guilty of this. The inability for an empire's people to
understand the concept of blowback when their nation's military incursions into the
surrounding world create deep sources of instability and trauma is one marker of empire in
decline.
That being said, the fact that free will is tenuous at best and humans are so easily
manipulated en masse gives me hope that the species might pull off long-term survival if it
finds the right balance between setting up mutually reinforcing beneficial mechanisms to
guide most human psyches and cultures into generally sustainable behavior and the chaos of a
free reality without socially enforced categorizations or narratives.
Bard the Grim 07.05.18 at 2:02 pm (no link)
I've never liked the wording of the proverbial "When the facts change ." Speaking as a
scientist and pedant, facts don't change. Circumstances, which are facts as a function of
time, can change. Evidence, which is fact revealed by observation, can change. When
discussing how opinions and interpretations change, it's helpful to make those distinctions.
Yan 07.05.18 at 2:50 pm (no link)
Political football @32: "we'd need to know who has changed "in the media, on social media,
among politicians, activists, and citizens"."
"A couple of comments reprimanded me about how Thomas had moved to the right in the 1950s, on
a path similar to Thomas Mann's. [ ] The pressure exerted during McCarthyism was immense and
it took almost superhuman strength to resist it"
I recently read a biography of Bayard Rustin, partially in the hope of getting some
insight into how to integrate civil rights / racial justice and comprehensive
social-democratic reform into one program. One might object: Rustin drifted towards the
neoconservative right in his later years -- did his theoretical framework already carry the
germ of accommodation in the 1960s/70s? But: how easy was it to resist the
neoliberal/Reaganite tide?
SusanC 07.05.18 at 3:37 pm (no link)
Yes, I agree the phenomenon is really interesting.
On the other hand, what other people think can be one of the facts that changed. This is
particularly true of variants of the "lesser evil argument" which were very much in evidence
before the last UK general election and the US presidential election.
If someone was saying, "Look, I know the left of the Democrats prefer Sander's policies,
but the important thing is defeating Trump, and Clinton has the best chance of doing that",
then they can in good faith claim that new facts -- we now know that Clinton didn't win
against Trump -- has caused them to have changed tactics, but their overall objective --
supporting anyone who looks like they could defeat Trump -- is basically unchanged.
The Guardian newspaper became significantly less anti-Corbyn once the general election
results were out (although it still regularly features attack pieces), which looks like
another instance of this.
This entire piece seems to be about big changes in attitude and opinion, leaving me a little
puzzled by the remark about "micro-shifts". But I guess the general drift is this:
the subtle coercions of new opinion, the ever-finer movements we all make to keep up
with the flow, so as not to be left behind.
You want to be engaged with the world, to be part of the conversation, which means you can
be influenced by the conversation, which means you may very well be exposed to some pressures
to conform.
Much like the later Thomas Mann, I have difficulty talking about the left without
quotations (though I'm more likely to use the adjective "lefty"). The present-day right is
certainly a mess, it may indeed have always been a mess (which as I take it is Corey Robin's
main theme) but there were times in the past when the left was also decidedly a mess (and in
some respects it still is [1])–
Why would you be shocked at the lack of intellectual integrity of someone who was a
Stalinist on into the 1940s? Myself, I have a lot of respect from someone like Chomsky who's
managed to be left-wing his entire life without indulging in apologies for Stalin or Mao.
These days, periodically you see someone try to do a i-was-a-righty-until-trump piece but
many people seem to view these with suspicion and regard them as phony ploys for attention of
some sort. We pay lip service to the idea that people should be open to intellectual
change– who could forget the genre where the author demonstrates open-mindedness with
ritual lists of "things I've changed my mind about" (um I see John Quiggin went there)–
but when actually confronted with someone who has changed their mind, the reaction is often
not very positive.
I have a tendency to use the Iraq war as a pundit-litmus test: In principle I'm willing to
continue reading a pro-invasion pundit, but I want to see them recant, and I want to read
their excuses– but really there isn't anything they can say that's going to impress me.
If they're blowing in the wind this badly, if they can ignore the obvious for the sake of
fitting in with the pack, it's unlikely they've got anything of value to add on anything.
[1] my standard example of present-day left-wing madness is the anti-nuclear power stance:
if Jerry Brown were really serious about global warming, he would not have had the Diablo
Canyon plant closed. I would feel happier about Ocasio-Cortez if she were in favor of clean
energy, rather than just "renewable".
Corey: "mainstream liberal opinion -- in the media, on social media, among politicians,
activists, and citizens micro-shifts that happen under the pressure of events the most
pressing fact that seems to change people's opinions is other people's opinions."
1. Most intellectuals aren't guided by intellect but by emotion like everyone else, and so
there is a lot of herd instinct especially in regard to politics.
2. I am not convinced that the media catalogue of mainstream opinion truly reflects the
most widely-held opinions. What is happening out here in the low-income suburbs seems more
amorphous and changeable.
3. A lot of the microshifts are evidence of a political emergence because a compromising
centrist Democrat failed, the new President is no such animal, and the Republican Party is
revealed to centrists as policy obstructionists with lots of false promises, now freely
aiming to destroy the safety-net and distort the justice system. My sense of it is that
consequently a lot more people now see that the time for compromising moderation is over
because it will never be reciprocated by the Republicans in Congress.
This goes along with our old thesis that both parties are breaking up; the only question
was which one would go first. Trump is destroying the Republicans and it opened the cracks
wider in the Democratic Party. Question now is whether the centrist Democrats have the brains
to accept the newbies.
4. Little noticed is that the "intellectuals" and Bernie supporters committed malpractice
by never emphasizing, enough to make it through the media noise, that Sanders' and now
Ocasio-Cortez's "socialism" is not "gov't ownership of the means of production" but rather
New Deal-style social democracy like any sane country. (Bernie's people acted as if everybody
should know this already, but of course they don't.) Next up, will the "intellectuals"
continue to commit malpractice by not helping Ocasio-Cortez explain through the media noise
how it can work?
Speaking as a social democrat who is anti – everything to do with neoliberalism and its
destruction of labour relations and economic safety nets, I was scolded relentlessly by a
brogressive pro-Sanders friend throughout the year of the US election (I'm an Australian, so
is he, so the level of animus was astonishing.) Some of the tropes thrown at me were: Since
you think HC is the least worst candidate, it means you endorse everything she's ever done,
it means you are in favour of neoliberalism, it means you just want to vote for a woman even
though we say Bernie's a better candidate, it means you are pro-war and want to kill Syrian
children, it means you're an elitist who just wants to support the haute bourgeoisie.. on and
on and on.
So fast forward to last week and guess what? of course I'm delighted by a self-described
social democratic (or democratic socialist which seems to be the current wording) winning a
primary. My principles haven't changed. They were just distorted and misrepresented by the
brogressive left. My friend would eagerly adopt the framing employed in the OP (that I've
belatedly seen the light about preferring a social democratic candidate), because of course
that makes him look wise and consistent, and me uneducated and fickle. I completely reject
that frame; it's false.
Mario 07.06.18 at 10:42 pm (no link)
The problem with the modern left is that it has very little political capital (oh, the word!)
apart from principles and morals. Back in the day there was a realistic alternative political
project, which, in principle, had something for everyone. Nowadays though there just isn't
such a project and the result is that all that is left really just is bare morals and
principles, and the resulting piety contests.
As a consequence, the left has, in practice, accepted capitalism as the baseline scenario
and is playing by its rules while pretending something else. (Back when the Damore memo hit
the waves, what really struck me was the idea that the google campus was a "liberal
environment". That was like reading that the death star in star wars was staffed by
budhists.)
The modern left can't provide a constructive answer to the problems of, say, the working
class. Such things are not even much on the radar. Note how trans rights and gender issues
(issues completely irrelevant to the wider population) absolutely dominate the discussion,
while the plight of the working poor, or the well-being of families, is mostly ignored.
Furthermore, many on the modern left use principles and morals as branding tokens (like
wearing Nike shoes, being vegan or driving a hybrid), and don't give much of a damn about
outcomes. That's why they can change opinions overnight without feeling much remorse: it's
not as if these ever were sincere opinions.
But gender is still a construct, no matter how desperately attached to performing their
preferred gender a given person is. That's where people go off the rails. We'll get back
there fairly soon, I'm sure. There are far too many cis men who want to be nice to their
kids and cis women who have ambition toward their careers for us to put up with this gender
role nonsense much longer.
If you pardon me – how do you suggest we negotiate who gets to get pregnant and/or
breast feed?
That "role nonsense" you so attack has reasons to exist. It's not just a whim of the folks
that just happened to be around recently on the planet. A political project that does not
acknowledge that is just plain misanthropy.
mclaren 07.08.18 at 2:23 am (no link)
Does Corey Robin admit how colossally and stupendously wrong he got the entire 2016
zeitgeist?
No? Well, then maybe we shouldn't listen to anything Corey Robin says.
One aspect of his argument that's completely unfair and unrealistic is that people have to
decide on whether to elect a politician or enact a social policy or an economic scheme before
they have any real experience-based empirical information of what the consequences will
be.
Consider: neoliberal globalization was proposed and debated on the basis of books like the
Toffler's Future Shock which got the future entirely wrong. The theory behind these
kind of futurist predictions sounded plausible. Ever-increasing rates of technological change
will result in people constantly moving around the country to new jobs, work will shift from
manufacturing to knowledge work, industries will die off and constantly be replaced by new
ones, the U.S. will offload its manufacturing to 3rd world countries and move to high-profit
knowledge work that will vastly increase the income of the average U.S. worker, and so on.
All completely wrong.
Mobility of workers in the USA has dropped to record lows because the interior of the USA
is now depopulating and mired in poverty and chronic drug addiction due to the destruction of
the middle class by shipping all the high-paid blue collar jobs overseas. Meanwhile, the
areas with high-paying jobs are on both coasts, where housing and everything else has become
so expensive average people can't afford to live there. But the high-paying coastal jobs are
really only for people with artificial licensing barriers to entry that protect their
professions, like doctors or lawyers or lobbyists or defense contractor liaisons who need
special security clearance or financial traders who need to live within 10 blocks of the
stock exchange because any farther away and their high-speed trading internet links will have
too much latency to execute 50,000 trades per second. And so on.
Nobody foresaw that knowledge work would collapse because entire movies or ebooks or music
CDs could be digitized and downloaded and sprayed all over the world with bittorrent. Nobody
foresaw that textbooks and tutorial videos could be digitized and sent to third world
countries where their population would whip our asses by producing centers of technological
innovation like Shenzen or Guangdong or the whole island of Taiwan. No one foresaw that
manufacturing processes prove essential to the very act of technological innovation, so that
when America offshored its factories to Asia, we also lost our ability to innovative
technologically, to the point where even if the USA wanted to bring back industries like iPad
manufacturing to the continential U.S., we couldn't do it because we don't have the essential
process technology engineering knowledge and skills.
So globalization sounded completely reasonable and sensible when it was proposed in the
1970s. Converting the USA to knowledge work seemed like a good economic model. Only in
retrospect does it become clear what a gigantic trainwreck it turned out to be, and why.
Likewise, I supported Obama when he ran in 2008. Obama ran on a bunch of progressive
policies. Single-payer healthcare. Shutting down the drug war. "Not doing stupid stuff." Then
Obama abandons single-payer for a disastrous mandate for-profit ACA system with zero cost
controls guaranteed to raise health insurance premiums limitless forever, and he starts
blowing up wedding parties with drones and prosecutes more whistleblowers than all other
presidents put together. That's not what I signed up for.
But how are voters supposed to know what a politician will really do until he's in office?
The people who voted for FDR voted for a moderate pol who ran on a policy of balancing the
budget. They got a radical progressive who experimented with all sort of wild policies,
including packing the Supreme Court, to find something that would work. That's not what
voters signed up for but it happened to be very successful.
The people who voted for Herbert Hoover voted for a world-famous humanitarian who was
renowned for his 1921 famine relief efforts. Anyone who studied Hoover's life would predict
that he would do a great job spearheading relief efforts for impoverished average workers
thrown onto the street when the Great Depression hit. Instead, Hoover sat around and tried to
rein in the tidal flow of red ink while the U.S. economy crashed and burned.
People change their minds because we live in a fog of uncertainty. No one has the
slightest idea of what the actual results of social or economic policies will be. For
example: crime has plummeted since 1990 in the U.S., but no one has the slightest idea why.
Crime was a huge issue in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, and now it's turned out to be a
problem that mysteriously disappeared on its own. No experts predicted this, no experts have
been able to explain it. An awful lot of American history seems to work like this. People
convulse in frenzies of worry over some huge problem that then just disappears. (Cue the
deadly threat of the USSR or Erlich's "population bomb" of the 1960s or Thomas Malthus' dire
predictions or the myth of "future shock" or the worries of eugenics prophets of the 1920s or
the "yellow peril" predictions of late 19th century colonialis or our allegedly inevitable
rush toward thermonuclear armageddon because of the arms race of the 1950s/60s etc.)
Highly-educated experts with PhDs have demonstrated zero ability to predict the actual
real-world results of current trends or technology or socioeconomic policies. We live in a
world dominated by the Cobra Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
Efforts to pass this off on the high-school-educated population of the USA as some kind of
irrationality ("How eerie and unsettling it can seem when people change their minds") seem
infantile and jejune. How about: "How eerie and unsettling it can seem when highly educated
Ivy League PhDs' predictions and policies turn out to be gigantic trainwrecks that produce
the exact opposite of what was claimed and what was calculated in highly sophisticated
mathematical models"?
Larry Summers, anyone? The man responsible both for the rise of Putin (Summers and his
Harvard team blew up & wrecked the Russian economy in an epic debacle from 19911-1998)
_and_ Trump (Summers infamously urged Bill Clinton to deregulate the financial system and ram
through bad "free trade" agreements like NAFTA that turbocharged globalization and destroyed
the U.S. middle class, leading to a 1930s-style financial crash and mass impoverishment of
Americans exactly the kind of circumstances which, in the 1930s, led to the rise of fascism.
Which of course is what's happening today.
Yet our leaders still listen to ignorant incompetent clowns like Larry Summers with the
utmost respect and reverence. Maybe that's what really "eerie," not people changing their
minds when they discover that the results of the policies proposed by our elites turn out to
be the kind of destructive idiocy at which even a brain-damaged three-year-old would
rebel.
nastywoman 07.08.18 at 7:33 am (no link)
– and the following might be really worth repeating:
"Ever-increasing rates of technological change will result in people constantly moving
around the country to new jobs, work will shift from manufacturing to knowledge work,
industries will die off and constantly be replaced by new ones, the U.S. will offload its
manufacturing to 3rd world countries and move to high-profit knowledge work that will vastly
increase the income of the average U.S. worker, and so on. All completely wrong".
Mobility of workers in the USA has dropped to record lows because the interior of the USA
is now depopulating and mired in poverty and chronic drug addiction due to the destruction of
the middle class by shipping all the high-paid blue collar jobs overseas. Meanwhile, the
areas with high-paying jobs are on both coasts, where housing and everything else has become
so expensive average people can't afford to live there".
Yes?
"Converting the USA to knowledge work seemed like a good economic model".
Not – for anybody who know how few jobs "knowledge work" creates.
"So 'globalization sounded completely reasonable and sensible when it was proposed in the
1970s".
It's still "completely reasonable" for any "Producing Country" – where well paying
manufacturing jobs were kept.
"Only in retrospect does it become clear what a gigantic trainwreck it turned out to be,
and why".
Only in "Consuming Countries" -(like the US) – where the inequality of high paying
"knowledge work" and "Finance" and poor paying "service jobs" let to the trainwreck and the
funny idea that it is the fault of "trade" – while trade created million an million of
better and better paying jobs in "Producing Countries" – which could lead us to Mario
and @135
"For example, while it is mostly an illusion, the right offers jobs"
Yes –
it's mostly a illusion – as only "Producing Countries" offer jobs – while
"Consuming Countries" -(with their right wing idiots) – don't – or better said
they NEVER-EVER will offer enough "good" jobs to make our workers happy -(again)- and that's
why we need politicians like AOC!
And that IS – because we actually DON'T live in a fog of uncertainty??!
-(saying: Nearly everybody on CT knows how well "Social-Democratic Producing Countries"
work)
bruce wilder 07.11.18 at 8:53 am (no link)
many very interesting comments, but i find myself puzzled by the OP's implicit premises
concerning what politics as philosophical discourse is (the nature of the beast), and what it
would mean for an individual person to be "consistent" over time.
it seems to me that political discourse is a stream into which it is not possible to step
into at the same place twice. and, it also seems to me that political discourse always
reflects the panoply of human ambivalence amidst deep uncertainty about the consequences of
public choices conditioned against private actions. could anyone strive to either embody the
full range of ambivalence or be "right"? i think not.
our political opinions are in the nature of hedges: expressions of some thing we think we
"know" balanced against a background of things we choose not to focus on or fully consider.
and we bet our hedges socially, aligning with others on the basis of some portfolio of
salients, and in historical time, ephemeral salients at that. dare i add, for and against?
push-pull marching in step
the split that opened in the Democratic coalition in the 2016 primaries was just as
startling and rapid as the current spate of coming together.
It is significant that Presidents Putin and Trump have both spoken out against "haters"
among America's political establishment who would rather see conflict between Russia and the
United States instead of a normalization of bilateral relations.
Following their landmark, successful summit this week in Helsinki, Putin and Trump
separately made public comments deploring the hostile hysterical reaction emanating from broad
sections of the US political establishment and its dutiful, controlled news media.
Speaking in Moscow to his diplomatic corps, President Putin warned that there were "powerful
forces" within the US which are ready to sacrifice the interests of their country and indeed
the interests of world peace in order to pursue selfish ambitions.
For his part, Trump also slammed opponents in the US who "hated" to see him having a good
meeting with Putin. "They would rather see a major confrontation with Russia, even if that
could lead to war," said the American president.
That's it in a nutshell. Rather than welcoming the opening of a cordial dialogue between the
US and Russia, the American political establishment seems to desire the deepening of already
dangerous tensions between the world's two nuclear superpowers. If that's not deranged, then
what is?
Significantly, the hostile reaction was overwhelmingly on the American side. Russians, by
and large, welcomed the long-overdue summit between Trump and Putin, and the potential
beginning of a new spirit of dialogue and partnership on a range of urgent global problems.
Problems including arms control, nuclear proliferation, and working out political settlement to
conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine and the Korea Peninsula.
Few people would believe that these problems can be resolved easily. But the main thing is
that the leaders of the US and Russia are at least attempting to open a dialogue for
understanding and political progress. That in itself is a breakthrough from the impasse in
bilateral relations which have frozen into a new Cold War since the previous US
administration.
We dare say that most citizens of the world would also endorse this effort by Trump and
Putin at improving the relations between the US and Russia.
Significantly too, according to recent polls, most ordinary Americans seem to be agreeable
or neutral about Trump's diplomatic engagement with Russia. According to a Gallup poll out this
week, the vast majority of US citizens are far more concerned by economic woes than they are by
anything untoward in American-Russian relations.
Thus, what we are seeing in the explosion of hostility towards the Trump-Putin summit is
twofold. It is an American phenomenon, and secondly, it is an angst that animates only the
political class in Washington and the news media corporations. This constituency, it is fair to
say, is an elite faction within the US, albeit extremely powerful, made up of Washington
politicos, the state intelligence apparatus, the corporate media and think tanks, and the deep
state establishment of imperial planners and strategists. In short, this constituency is what
some observers call the "War Party" that transcends the US ruling class.
Any reasonable person would have to welcome the friendly rapport engendered between Trump
and Putin, and at least their initial commitment to working together on major matters of global
security. The dangerous impasse of recent years in which dialogue was absent must be overcome
for the sake of world peace.
Nevertheless, what has become crystal clear this week following the Helsinki summit is the
"War Party" within the US is more determined than ever to sabotage any rapprochement with
Russia.
No sooner had Trump returned to the US, he was assailed with a tidal wave of vilification
for having met Putin in a mutual, agreeable manner. The most disturbing aspect was the
recurring slander denigrating Trump as a "traitor". The hysterical name-calling was conveyed by
all the major news media, citing former intelligence officials and politicians from both
Democrat and Republican parties.
Which again shows that in the US there is really only one party, the War Party.
President Trump was evidently forced into making an embarrassing U-turn over his views
expressed in Helsinki. He made an unconvincing disavowal of statements made alongside Putin.
Trump had been pilloried for appearing to dismiss allegations of Russian interference in the US
elections while he was in Helsinki. Within 24 hours, he was forced into making a retraction,
saying that he did – kind of – believe that Russia had meddled in US democracy.
What Trump was subjected to by the US establishment was akin to the worst years of
McCarthyite Red-Baiting as seen during the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s, when Americans were
mercilessly humiliated and ostracized for being "Communist sympathizers". Today, official
American paranoia is back with a vengeance. In truth, it never went away.
To be fair to Trump he has not completely capitulated to the American derangement syndrome.
He has since said that he is looking forward to holding a second meeting with his Russian
counterpart and continuing their promises of partnership as announced in Helsinki.
However, it is instructive that the American president is, in effect, being held hostage by
powerful elements in the US ruling class who view any kind of detente with Moscow as an
unforgivable betrayal.
Trump's instincts are correct that the whole so-called Russia-gate mania is a phony
contrivance. That has been orchestrated by the US establishment based on its refusal to accept
Trump's democratic mandate, as well as being based on an abiding hostility towards Russia as an
independent world power.
The object lesson here is that the scope for improving US-Russia relations is limited, in
spite of Trump's favorable personal inclinations.
An entrenched animosity towards Russia remains among the American War Party, and the current
president has evidently little room for implementing his avowed policy of normalizing
relations.
Russia therefore cannot place too much faith in making progress towards peaceful relations,
because all-too apparently President Trump has actually very little freedom to exercise his
democratic mandate. That is a damning indictment on the charade of American formal democracy. A
president is elected partly on the basis of peaceful engagement, but the unelected
powers-that-be have another agenda of conflict which they are pursuing come hell or high
water.
What's more, the American derangement syndrome is becoming even more virulent, as can be
adjudged from this week's hysterical backlash over the successful Helsinki summit.
Trump's willingness for dialogue with Russia is a welcome development. But the far more
disturbing development is the full-tilt belligerence and derangement on display among the
American political class. This American political chizophrenia is a clear and present danger to
world peace. American citizens are as much a victim of the madness as are Russians and the rest
of the world.
One positive aspect of the new phase of Cold War is that before it was largely concealed,
and deceived, as a simplistic bifurcated confrontation of Americans versus Russians. Today it
is evidently a situation of an American deranged elite versus the rest of the world, with the
latter including ordinary American citizens who have much more to gain from standing in
solidarity with Russian citizens.
Yes he is a libral domestcally and nationalsit in forign policy -- that's why the term "national neoliberalism" looks appropriate
for definition of his policies
Notable quotes:
"... When one compares these 10 neoliberal commandments with Trump's policy agenda, it is clear that the president is far more neoliberal than his populist rhetoric would suggest. ..."
"... Trump is clearly and consistently positioning himself to cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulate big business and the financial industry, and pursue a wide range of privatization plans and public-private partnerships that will further weaken American unions. In short, he will govern like the neoliberals who came before him and against whom he campaigned so ardently. ..."
"... In fact, Trump's agenda aims to realize the foremost goals of neoliberalism: privatization, deregulation, tax-cutting, anti-unionism, and the strict enforcement of property rights. For example, in his address to Congress , Trump promised "a big, big cut" for American companies and boasted about his administration's "historic effort to massively reduce job-crushing regulations." Ironically, Trump then asserted that he will reduce regulations by "creating a deregulation task force inside of every government agency," itself a contradictory expansion of the administrative state he had just sworn to shrink. ..."
"... Like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Trump was correct to criticize the Obama administration, whose economic team was for a time staffed by neoliberal Democrats like Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, for saving Wall Street after the financial collapse of 2008 while allowing Main Street to go under. Trump's victory is the direct result of the fact that American workers have not been well served by the country's policymaking elites. ..."
"... Yet the resistance that Trump's presidency has inspired across the country must also learn from the contradictions between his economic nationalism and neoliberalism. Those who reject his phony populism must be careful not to dismiss the concerns of Trump's voters, which has unfortunately been the response of too many who console themselves by deriding Trump's supporters as ignorant "deplorables" who deserve what they will get. ..."
"... The problem with the last paragraph is that it tries once again to put the election in purely economic terms. It wasn't. It was largely white cultural backlash. Much of his vote was driven by bans on immigration and a promise to maintain a white rural/suburban culture by bringing jobs back like coal mining or manufacturing jobs to Northwood Michigan. ..."
In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Trump promised to deliver on his populist campaign pledges to protect
Americans from globalization. "For too long," he bemoaned, "we've watched our middle class shrink as we've exported our jobs and
wealth to foreign countries." But now, he asserted, the time has come to "restart the engine of the American economy" and "bring
back millions of jobs." To achieve his goals, Trump proposed mixing massive tax-cuts and sweeping regulatory rollbacks with increased
spending on the military, infrastructure and border control.
This same messy mix of free market fundamentalism and hyper-nationalistic populism is presently taking shape in Trump's proposed
budget. But the apparent contradiction there isn't likely to slow down Trump's pro-market, pro-Wall Street, pro-wealth agenda. His
supporters may soon discover that his professions of care for those left behind by globalization are -- aside from some mostly symbolic
moves on trade -- empty.
Just look at what has already happened with the GOP's
proposed
replacement for Obamacare , which if enacted would bring increased pain and suffering to the anxious voters who put their trust
in Trump's populism in the first place. While these Americans might have thought their votes would win them protection from the instabilities
and austerities of market-led globalization, what they are getting is a neoliberal president in populist clothing.
Neoliberalism is a term most often used to critique market-fundamentalism rather than to define a particular policy agenda. Nonetheless,
it is most useful to understand neoliberalism's policy implications in terms of 10 norms that have defined its historical practice.
These norms begin with
trade liberalization and extend to
the encouragement of exports;
enticement of foreign investment;
reduction of inflation;
reduction of public spending;
privatization of public services;
deregulation of industry and finance;
reduction and flattening of taxes;
restriction of union organization;
and, finally, enforcement of property and land ownership.
Politicians don't necessarily have to profess faith in all of these norms to be considered neoliberal. Rather, they have to buy
into neoliberalism's general market-based logic and its attendant promise of opportunity.
When one compares these 10 neoliberal commandments with Trump's policy agenda, it is clear that the president is far more
neoliberal than his populist rhetoric would suggest. This conclusion will likely surprise his supporters, especially in light
of Trump's assaults on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Despite these attacks, however,
Trump is clearly and consistently positioning himself to cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulate big business and the financial
industry, and pursue a wide range of privatization plans and public-private partnerships that will further weaken American unions.
In short, he will govern like the neoliberals who came before him and against whom he campaigned so ardently.
In fact, Trump's agenda aims to realize the foremost goals of neoliberalism: privatization, deregulation, tax-cutting, anti-unionism,
and the strict enforcement of property rights. For example, in his
address
to Congress , Trump promised "a big, big cut" for American companies and boasted about his administration's "historic effort
to massively reduce job-crushing regulations." Ironically, Trump then asserted that he will reduce regulations by "creating a deregulation
task force inside of every government agency," itself a contradictory expansion of the administrative state he had just sworn to
shrink.
Since so much of Trump's agenda aligns with the long-standing ambitions of the Republican Party, it is likely that Trump will
be able to work with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) to pass strictly neoliberal
legislation. Unlike his approach to trade, which congressional Republicans will probably scuttle, there is little reason to doubt
that we will see new legislation that privatizes public lands, overturns Dodd-Frank and other Wall Street regulations, cuts taxes
on business, makes organizing unions difficult, and allows big landowners to develop, mine, log, and shoot without restraint. For
all the animosity that may exist between the Trump administration and Republican congressmen, the two groups share a neoliberal vision
of the world.
From his new budget proposal we also know that Trump plans to continue the neoliberal assault on social service provisions --
such as the subsidies in the Affordable Care Act -- as well as public broadcasting, arts funding, scientific research and foreign
aid. As Trump vowed to Congress, he intends to implement a plan in which "Americans purchase their own coverage, through the use
of tax credits and expanded health savings accounts." Moreover, the money he does want to spend will be expended on military and
infrastructure projects that will almost certainly be organized around public-private partnerships that will fill the coffers of
Trump's business cronies.
What does Trump's neoliberal agenda mean for those whose discontent with globalization gave him the presidency? Nothing good.
The irony here is that the same neoliberalism that Trump plans to strengthen created the conditions that allowed him to enter the
White House. Like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Trump was correct to criticize the Obama administration, whose economic team was
for a time staffed by neoliberal Democrats like Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, for saving Wall Street after the financial
collapse of 2008 while allowing Main Street to go under. Trump's victory is the direct result of the fact that American workers have
not been well served by the country's policymaking elites.
Yet the resistance that Trump's presidency has inspired across the country must also learn from the contradictions between
his economic nationalism and neoliberalism. Those who reject his phony populism must be careful not to dismiss the concerns of Trump's
voters, which has unfortunately been the response of too many who console themselves by deriding Trump's supporters as ignorant "deplorables"
who deserve what they will get. Going forward, all of those who want to resist the President's agenda must engage those left
behind by neoliberalism and provide them with an economic vision that addresses their very real concerns. After all, Trump's administration
will probably strengthen the forces that have hurt these citizens, and they will need representatives who are genuinely concerned
with their well-being if our political turmoil is to be put to rest.
Don't let his trade policy fool you: Trump is a neoliberal
(2/2) I think the truth is that many of these people are too far gone mentally and emotionally to ever come around to the "correct"
way of thinking (which is to say, they have been so brainwashed by reacting to facile nonsense like "liberty" and "freedom" that
they will believe anything as long as the argument is couched in those terms, despite the fact that when they vote they are indeed
consigning themselves and the rest of the country to a world without those very freedoms for anybody who's not supposedly "one
of them").
A great man once famously said "Conscience do cost." And boy, does it. Liberals need to get over their conscience once and
for all, and push back against conservatives the way conservatives have been for decades, but that can only happen if we are honest
about who we are arguing with, and call them out, boldly and proudly, on their intellectual failings.
(1/2) It's clear the authors don't expose themselves to right-wing news outlets. Far too much is made in liberal media about the
"deplorables" and how they feel suffocated by the economy (or more realistically, by the natural ebb and flow of capitalism),
but they belie the fact that so much of modern conservatism is more about being anti-liberal than it is about any sort of pro-conservative
ideology. The "deplorable" moniker has been adapted and co-opted by conservatives and is now worn proudly as a badge of honor
(in the same way "fake news" began as a liberal criticism of specific, deliberately-misleading media targeted towards the right,
but is now a term used almost exclusively by the right to blanket-describe literally any media that they disagree with). Any criticisms
of Trump are immediately met with criticisms of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Democrats in general. Bring up the KKK's support
of Trump 3 months ago? They'll bring up how the KKK was invented by Democrats 150 years ago.
The authors are too nice/professional to say it, but liberals need to stop handling conservatives with kid gloves and start
calling them what they are: rubes. Because it's not enough that they vote against their own self-interest and the interests of
the country, they take it one further and are actively gleeful in depriving liberals of anything liberals might value. Conversely,
most liberals I know and read online don't have an active hatred of conservatives, instead they have compassion and want to educate
them, and I suppose the thought is that if only enough of these articles get written, they'll eventually come around.
Like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Trump was correct to criticize the Obama administration, whose economic team was for a
time staffed by neoliberal Democrats like Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, for saving Wall Street after the financial
collapse of 2008 while allowing Main Street to go under.
And here you have it. This is how Trump got elected. The Bernibots are the unwitting agent that gave us Trump. And they
are planing on doubling down
The problem with the last paragraph is that it tries once again to put the election in purely economic terms. It wasn't. It
was largely white cultural backlash. Much of his vote was driven by bans on immigration and a promise to maintain a white rural/suburban
culture by bringing jobs back like coal mining or manufacturing jobs to Northwood Michigan.
It is quite possible that Trump can win again in these areas despite implementing neoliberal policies. And it isn't that Democrats
don't have an economic message, they do. But it is one that includes and supports a much wider cultural base and one that many
of that WWC that voted for Trump don't want to hear.
I-Myslef 3/22/2017 1:37 PM EDT
NO. The Rust Belt was handed over to him by Bernie and non stop assault on Clinton and trade ...
"... The borg, financed and sworn to the agenda of globalists and the military-industrial-media complex, has its orders and is acting on them. The globalists want more free trade agreements, no tariffs and more immigration to prevent higher wages. Capital does not have a national attachment. It does not care about the 'deplorables' who support Trump and his policies: ..."
"... Nearly three-fourths, or 73 percent, of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who responded to a Pew Research survey out this week said they felt increased tariffs would benefit the country. ..."
"... Donald Trump is, indeed, a kind of traitor to the Washington Consensus, a hyper-militarized capitalist utopia of corporate dominated global supply chains that doubled the international wage-slave workforce in the last two decades of the 20th century and herded these desperate billions into a race to the bottom. The leadership of both corporate parties conspired to force U.S. workers into the global meat-grinder. ..."
"... The weapon industry and the military recognize that the 'war of terror' is nearing its end. To sell more they need to create an new 'enemy' that looks big enough to justify large and long-term spending. Russia, the most capable opponent the U.S. could have, is the designated target. A new Cold War will give justification for all kinds of fantastic and useless weapons. ..."
"... Trump grand foreign policy is following a realist assessment . He sees that previous administrations pushed Russia into the Chinese camp by aggressive anti-Russian policies in Europe and the Middle East. He wants to pull Russia out of the alliance with China, neutralize it in a political sense, to then be able to better tackle China which is the real thread to the American (economic) supremacy. ..."
President's Trump successful summit with President Putin was used by the 'resistance' and
the deep state to launch a coup-attempt against Trump. Their minimum aim is to put Trump into a
(virtual) political cage where he can no longer pursue his foreign policy agenda.
One does not have to be a fan of Trump's policies and still see the potential danger. A
situation where he can no longer act freely will likely be worse. What Trump has done so far
still does not add up to the
disastrous policies and crimes his predecessor committed.
The borg, financed and sworn to the agenda of globalists and the
military-industrial-media complex, has its orders and is acting on them. The globalists want
more free trade agreements, no tariffs and more immigration to prevent higher wages. Capital
does not have a national attachment. It does not care about the 'deplorables' who support
Trump and his policies:
[P]olls show that Trump appears to still have the support of the bulk of Republican voters
when it comes to tariffs. Nearly three-fourths, or 73 percent, of Republicans and
Republican-leaning independents who responded to a Pew Research survey out this week said
they felt increased tariffs would benefit the country.
Donald Trump is, indeed, a kind of traitor to the Washington Consensus, a
hyper-militarized capitalist utopia of corporate dominated global supply chains that doubled
the international wage-slave workforce in the last two decades of the 20th century and herded
these desperate billions into a race to the bottom. The leadership of both corporate parties
conspired to force U.S. workers into the global meat-grinder.
The weapon industry and the military recognize that the 'war of terror' is nearing its
end. To sell more they need to create an new 'enemy' that looks big enough to justify large and
long-term spending. Russia, the most capable opponent the U.S. could have, is the designated
target. A new Cold War will give justification for all kinds of fantastic and useless
weapons.
Trump does not buy the
nonsense claims of 'Russian meddling' in the U.S. elections and openly says so. He does not
believe that Russia wants to attack anyone. To him Russia is not an enemy.
Trump grand foreign policy is following a
realist assessment . He sees that previous administrations pushed Russia into the Chinese
camp by aggressive anti-Russian policies in Europe and the Middle East. He wants to pull Russia
out of the alliance with China, neutralize it in a political sense, to then be able to better
tackle China which is the real thread to the American (economic) supremacy.
Former CIA chief John Brennan denounced Trump as a "traitor" who had "committed high crimes"
in holding a friendly summit with Putin.
It can't get more seditious than that. Trump is being denigrated by almost the entire
political and media establishment in the US as a "treasonous" enemy of the state.
Following this logic, there is only one thing for it: the US establishment is calling for
a coup to depose the 45th president. One Washington Post oped out of a total of five
assailing the president gave the following stark ultimatum: "If you work for Trump, quit
now".
Some high ranking people working for Trump followed that advice. His chief of staff John
Kelly rallied
others against him:
According to three sources familiar with the situation, Kelly called around to Republicans on
Capitol Hill and gave them the go-ahead to speak out against Trump. (The White House did not
respond to a request for comment.) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker
Paul Ryan held televised press conferences to assert that Russia did meddle in the election.
Others who attacked Trump over his diplomatic efforts with Russia
included the Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats who used an widely distributed
interview for that:
The White House had little visibility into what Coats might say. The intelligence director's
team had turned down at least one offer from a senior White House official to help prepare
him for the long-scheduled interview, pointing out that he had known Mitchell for years and
was comfortable talking with her.
Coats was extraordinarily candid in the interview, at times questioning Trump's judgment
-- such as the president's decision to meet with Putin for two hours without any aides
present beyond interpreters -- and revealing the rift between the president and the
intelligence community.
FBI Director Wray also
undermined his boss' position:
FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday defended Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a
"straight shooter," and said the Russia investigation is no "witch hunt."
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, Wray said he stood by his view that
Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election in some capacity and that the threat
remained active.
A day latter Secretary of Defense Mattis also issued a statement that contradicted his
president's policy:
Secretary of Defense James Mattis took his turn doing the implicit disavowing in a statement
about new military aid to Ukraine:
"Russia should suffer consequences for its aggressive, destabilizing behavior and its
illegal occupation of Ukraine. The fundamental question we must ask ourselves is do we wish
to strengthen our partners in key regions or leave them with no other options than to turn to
Russia, thereby undermining a once in a generation opportunity to more closely align nations
with the U.S. vision for global security and stability."
Pat Lang
thinks that Trump should fire Coats, Wary and Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General who
is overseeing the Mueller investigation.
My advice is to spare Rosenstein, for now, as firing him would lead to a great uproar in
Congress. The Mueller investigation has not brought up anything which is dangerous to Trump and
is unlikely to do so in the immediate future. He and Rosenstein can be fired at a latter
stage.
But Wray and Coats do deserve a pink slip and so do Kelly and Mattis. They are political
appointees who work 'at the pleasure of the President'.
The U.S. has the legislative and the judicative as a counterweight to the president who
leads the executive. The 'deep state' and its moles within the executive should have no role in
that balance. The elected president can and must demand loyalty from those who work for
him.
Those who sabotage him should be fired, not in a Saturday night massacre but
publicly, with a given reason and all at the same time. They do not deserve any warning. Their
rolling heads will get the attention of others who are tempted by the borg to act against the
lawful policy directives of their higher up.
All this is not a defense of Trump. I for one despise his antics and most of his policies.
But having a bad president of the United States implementing the policies he campaigned on, and
doing so within the proper process, is way better than having unaccountable forces dictating
their policies to him.
It will be impossible for Trump to get anything done if his direct subordinates, who work
'at his pleasure', publicly sabotage the implementation of his policies. Either he fires these
people or the borg will have won.
"... Was it Rosenstein who ordered the arrest of the Russian gun lobbyist woman the day after the summit? ..."
"... There is much to suggest that Special Counsel Mueller takes his orders from Rosenstein, but who does Rosenstein answer to, and is he untouchable within the USA legal system? How much cognitive dissonance is the public supposed to handle in relation to Rosenstein not being held accountable for his crimes, including high treason? ..."
Who is actually in charge over there, among the Borg? And how much in charge? They cannot function yet as the collective electronic
mind of science fiction, can they?
Was it Rosenstein who ordered the arrest of the Russian gun lobbyist woman the day after the summit? That looks very
much like an act of desperation. There is much to suggest that Special Counsel Mueller takes his orders from Rosenstein, but
who does Rosenstein answer to, and is he untouchable within the USA legal system? How much cognitive dissonance is the public
supposed to handle in relation to Rosenstein not being held accountable for his crimes, including high treason?
Who are the 'globalists' actually and which is their chain of command? Which positions do Soros, Bezos, CIA-MI6 have? What
is the role of Mossad?
As it appears, after the ascendance of Trump, the actors are not sure themselves anymore about any of this, that is about who
is in charge, or in particular about how much authority and insurance their actual real-life handlers do possess and vouch for.
They waver, in the case of media hysterically so.
"The Intelligence Community", in particular CIA, is a central executive force in the circus, in collaboration with MI6 and
the obedient assets in the NATO sphere, but they have grown so incompetent due to incessant politicizing and sycophantism that
they are perhaps little more a paper tiger by now? If this fact, with the help of Trump and allies, would be perceived clearer
by the political classes of the USA, much good would be the result.
Throughout the day before the
summit in Helsinki, the lead story on the New York Times home page stayed the same: "Just by
Meeting With Trump, Putin Comes Out Ahead."
The Sunday headline was in harmony with the
tone of U.S. news coverage overall. As for media commentary, the Washington Post was in the
dominant groove as it editorialized that Russia's President Vladimir Putin is "an implacably
hostile foreign adversary."
Contempt for diplomacy with Russia is now extreme.
Mainline U.S.
journalists and top Democrats often bait President Donald Trump in zero-sum terms. No doubt Hillary
Clinton thought she was sending out an applause line in her
tweet
Sunday night:
"Question for President Trump as he meets Putin: Do you know which team you play for?"
A bellicose stance toward Russia has become so routine and widespread that we might not
give it a second thought -- and that makes it all the more hazardous.
After President George
W. Bush declared "You're either with us or against us," many Americans gradually realized what was
wrong with a Manichean view of the world. Such an outlook is even more dangerous today.
Since early 2017, the U.S. mass media have laid it on thick with the rough political equivalent
of a painting technique known as chiaroscuro -- "the use of strong contrasts between light and dark,
usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition," in the words of Wikipedia.
The
Russiagate frenzy is largely about punching up contrasts between the United States (angelic and
victimized) and Russia (sinister and victimizer).
Countless stories with selective facts are being told that way.
But other selectively
fact-based stories could also be told to portray the United States as a sinister victimizer and
Russia as an angelic victim.
Those governments and their conformist media outlets are
relentless in telling it either way. As the great journalist
I.F.
Stone
observed long ago, "All governments lie, and nothing they say should be believed." In
other words: don't trust, verify.
Often the biggest lies involve what remains unsaid. For instance, U.S. media rarely mention such
key matters as the promise-breaking huge expansion of NATO to Russia's borders since the fall of
the Berlin Wall, or the
brazen
U.S. intervention
in Russia's pivotal 1996 presidential election, or the U.S. government's 2002
withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, or the more than 800 U.S. military bases
overseas -- in contrast to Russia's nine.
For human survival on this planet, an overarching truth appears in an open letter published last
week by The Nation magazine:
"No political advantage, real or imagined, could possibly compensate for the
consequences if even a fraction of U.S. and Russian arsenals were to be utilized in a
thermonuclear exchange. The tacit pretense that the worsening of U.S.-Russian relations does not
worsen the odds of survival for the next generations is profoundly false."
The initial 26 signers of the open letter "
Common
Ground: For Secure Elections and True National Security
" included Pentagon Papers whistleblower
Daniel Ellsberg, writer and feminist organizer Gloria Steinem, former UN ambassador Gov. Bill
Richardson, political analyst Noam Chomsky, former covert CIA operations officer Valerie Plame,
activist leader Rev. Dr. William Barber II, filmmaker Michael Moore, former Nixon White House
counsel John Dean, Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, former U.S. ambassador to the USSR Jack F.
Matlock Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Alice Walker and Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Nation editor
Katrina vanden Heuvel, former senator Adlai Stevenson III, and former longtime House Armed Services
Committee member Patricia Schroeder. (I was also one of the initial signers.)
Since its release five days ago, the open letter has gained support from
a
petition
already
signed by 45,000 people
. The petition campaign aims to amplify the call for protecting the
digital infrastructure of the electoral process that is now "vulnerable to would-be hackers based
anywhere" -- and for taking "concrete steps to ease tensions between the nuclear superpowers."
We need a major shift in the U.S. approach toward Russia. Clearly the needed shift won't be
initiated by the Republican or Democratic leaders in Congress; it must come from Americans who make
their voices heard.
The lives -- and even existence -- of future generations are at stake in the
relationship between Washington and Moscow.
Many of the petition's grassroots signers have posted comments along with their names. Here are
a few of my favorites:
* From Nevada: "
We all share the same planet! We better learn how to do it safely or
face the consequences of blowing ourselves up!
"
* From New Mexico: "The earth will not survive a nuclear war. The weapons we have today are
able to cause much more destruction than those of previous eras. We must find a way to common
ground."
* From Massachusetts: "
It is imperative that we take steps to protect the sanctity
of our elections and to prevent nuclear war anywhere on the earth
."
* From Kentucky: "Secure elections are a fundamental part of a democratic system. But this
could become meaningless in the event of thermonuclear war."
* From California: "
There is only madness and hubris in talk of belligerence toward
others, especially when we have such dangerous weapons and human error has almost led to our
annihilation already more than once in the past half-century
."
Yet a wide array of media outlets, notably
the
"Russiagate"-obsessed
network
MSNBC
,
keeps egging on progressives to climb toward peaks of anti-Russian jingoism
. The line of
march is often in virtual lockstep with GOP hyper-hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey
Graham. The incessant drumbeat is in sync with what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the madness of
militarism."
Meanwhile, as Dr. King said,
"We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence
or violent coannihilation."
My Father in law is one of the last of the Iwo Jima Marines...he is still of
sound mind, enough to say,
it takes far more courage for a man to solve a
conflict peacefully then to end it violently.
What sickness lies in the
hearts and minds of these people beating the drums of war is beyond me,
especially knowing none of them would ever risk their own lives. Add that to your
definition of Tyranny.
"Fun experiment: of those old enough, how many today who believe the "Trump is a Russian
asset" story, in 2003 believed the Iraq has WMD story? 'Cause the source who lied to you in
2003, the intel community, is your same source today."
Growing up as I did in the Nixon/Vietnam era, I developed a skepticism of the 'official'
story, something that served me well through Iran contra, incubator babies being tossed to
the floor, and WMD's (a skepticism reinforced at the time by Scott Ritter, among others). As
I recall, the WMD story was less a failure of intelligence as much as an administration
insisting on so-called 'stovepiped' intelligence to sell their war to an American public
through a mostly compliant MSM.
Regardless, my conclusion that Trump is a "Russian asset" is a result of my belief that
Trump- who has yet to disclose the financial information that would disprove that belief- is
reliant on Russian money, some or all of it organized crime related, to sustain his 'empire',
and that there is significant overlap between the Russian mob and the Russian government.
His actions as president haven't done anything to dispel me of my belief that he is a
'Russian asset', including his traitorous behavior this past week.
Intelligence community is a new Praetorian guard which since JFK murder can decide the fate of presidents.
Notable quotes:
"... Peter Strzok, the disgraced and disgraceful Federal Bureau of Investigation official, is the very definition of a slimy swamp creature. Strzok twitched, grimaced and ranted his way to infamy during a joint hearing of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, on July 12. ..."
"... Strzok is the youthful face of the venerated "Intelligence Community," itself part of the sprawling political machine that makes up the D.C. comitatus ..."
"... Smug, self-satisfied, cheating creature that he is, Strzok can't take responsibility for his own misconduct, and blames Russia for dividing America. In the largely progressive bureau, moreover, Agent Strzok is neither underling nor outlier, for that matter. ..."
"... A "blind bootlicking faith in spooks" is certainly unwarranted and may even be foolish. What of odious individuals like former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and his predecessor, James Comey, now openly campaigning for the Democrats? Are these leaders outliers in the "Intelligence Community"? ..."
"... Similarly, it's hard to think of a more partisan operator than John O. Brennan -- he ran the CIA under President Obama. True to type, he cast a vote for Communist Party USA, back in 1976, when the current Russia monomania would have been justified. Brennan has dubbed President Trump a traitor for having dared to doubt people like himself. ..."
"... The very embodiment of the Surveillance State at its worst is Michael V. Hayden. Hayden has moved seamlessly from the National Security Agency and the CIA to CNN where he beats up on Trump. The former Bush employee hollered treason: "One of the most disgraceful performances of an American president in front of a Russian leader," Hayden inveighed. Not only had POTUS dared to explore the possibility of a truce with Russia, which is a formidable nuclear power; but the president had the temerity to express a smidgen of skepticism about a community littered with spooks like Mr. Hayden. ..."
"... Pray tell, since when does the Deep State -- FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, DNI, (Director of National Intelligence), on and on -- represent, or stand for, the American People? The president, conversely, actually got the support of at least 60 million Americans. ..."
"... Outside the Beltway, ordinary folks -- Deplorables, if you will -- have to sympathize with the president's initial and honest appraisal of the Intelligence Community's collective intelligence. This is the community that has sent us into quite a few recreational, hobby wars. ..."
Peter Strzok, the disgraced and disgraceful Federal Bureau of Investigation official, is the very definition of a slimy swamp
creature. Strzok twitched, grimaced and ranted his way to infamy during a joint hearing of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees,
on July 12.
In no way had he failed to discharge his professional unbiased obligation to the public, asserted Strzok. He had merely
expressed the hope that "the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating such horrible, disgusting behavior."
But we did not elect YOU, Mr. Strzok. We elected Mr. Trump.
Strzok is the youthful face of the venerated "Intelligence Community," itself part of the sprawling political machine that
makes up the D.C. comitatus , now writhing like a fire breathing mythical monster against President Donald Trump.
As Ann Coulter observed, the FBI is not the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover. Neither is the Intelligence Community
Philip Haney's IC
any longer. Haney was a heroic, soft-spoken, demure employee at the Department of Homeland Security. Agents like him are often fired
if they don't get with the program. He didn't. Haney's method and the
authentic intelligence he mined and developed might have stopped the likes of the San Bernardino mass murderers and many others.
Instead, his higher-ups in the "Intelligence Community" made Haney and his data disappear.
Post Haney, the FBI failed to adequately screen and stop Syed Farook and blushing bride Tashfeen Malik.
A "blind bootlicking faith in spooks" is certainly unwarranted and may even be foolish. What of odious individuals like former
FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and his predecessor, James Comey, now openly campaigning for the Democrats? Are these leaders outliers
in the "Intelligence Community"?
As Peter Strzok might say to his paramour in a private tweet, "Who ya gonna believe, the Intelligence Community or your
own lying eyes?" The Bureau in particular and the IC cabal, in general, appear to be dominated by the likes of the dull-witted Mr.
Strzok.
Similarly, it's hard to think of a more partisan operator than John O. Brennan -- he ran the CIA under President Obama. True
to type, he cast a vote for Communist Party USA, back in 1976, when the current Russia monomania would have been justified. Brennan
has dubbed President Trump a traitor for having dared to doubt people like himself.
The very embodiment of the Surveillance State at its worst is Michael V. Hayden. Hayden has moved seamlessly from the National
Security Agency and the CIA to CNN where he beats up on Trump. The former Bush employee hollered treason: "One of the most disgraceful
performances of an American president in front of a Russian leader," Hayden inveighed. Not only had POTUS dared to explore the possibility
of a truce with Russia, which is a formidable nuclear power; but the president had the temerity to express a smidgen of skepticism
about a community littered with spooks like Mr. Hayden.
As one wag
noted
, not unreasonably, ours is "a highly-politicized intelligence community, infiltrated over decades by cadres of Deep State operatives
and sleeper agents, whose goal is to bring down this presidency."
Pray tell, since when does the Deep State --
FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, DNI, (Director of National Intelligence), on and on -- represent, or stand for, the American People? The
president, conversely, actually got the support of at least 60 million Americans.
That's a LOT of support. Outside the Beltway, ordinary folks -- Deplorables, if you will -- have to sympathize with the president's
initial and honest appraisal of the Intelligence Community's collective intelligence. This is the community that has sent us into
quite a few recreational, hobby wars.
And this is the community that regularly intercepts but fails to surveys and stop the likes of mass murderers Syed Farook and
bride Tashfeen Malik. Or, Orlando nightclub killer Omar Mateen, whose father the Bureau saw fit to
hire as an informant. The same "community" has invited the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Arab-American Institute to help
shape FBI counterterrorism training.
The FBI might not be very intelligent at all. About the quality of that intelligence, consider: On August 3, 2016, as the mad
media were amping up their Russia monomania, a frenzied BuzzFeed -- it calls itself a news org -- reported that "the Russian foreign
ministry had wired nearly $30,000 through a Kremlin-backed bank to its embassy in Washington, DC."
Intercepted by American intelligence, the Russian wire
stipulated
that the funds were meant "to finance the election campaign of 2016." Was this not "meddling in our election" or what? Did
we finally have irrefutable evidence of Kremlin culpability? The FBI certainly thought so. "Worse still, this was only one of 60
transfers that were being scrutinized by the FBI,"
wrote
the Economist, in November of 2017. "Similar transfers were made to other countries." As it transpired, the money was wired from
the Kremlin to embassies the world over. Its purpose? Russia was preparing to hold parliamentary elections in 2016 and had sent funds
to Russian embassies "to organize the polling for expatriates."
While it did update its Fake News factoids, Buzzfeed felt no compunction whatsoever to remove the erroneous item or publicly question
their sources in the unimpeachable "Intelligence Community."
Most news media are just not as inquisitive as President Trump.
This is a war propaganda. Plain and simple. Looks like MIC like cancel is destroying this
country like it destroyed the USSR.
Notable quotes:
"... They have completely forgotten the cost of the Civil War. We in Europe have not forgotten the cost of war and are not going there again. Ever. ..."
"... From badmouthing Russia to appointing Russophobes to high office, to imposing sanctions, to illegally seizing Russian diplomatic property, to committing war crimes in Syria, to a provocative military buildup in Europe, to arming the illegitimate Ukrainian "government," etc., presidential poseur Orange Clown has spent 99% of his "presidency" so far antagonizing Russia; apparently trying to provoke some kind of Russian military response. ..."
"... If it was anyone else other than Vladimir Putin calling the shots in Russia, WW3 probably would've happened already. Yet PCR claims Orange Clown wants peace with Russia? ..."
"... Two factions in the Money Party are at war with each other. Neither one is willing to level with the public as to its true aims and motives -- they are fighting viciously but under the bed sheets, which is why the spectacle looks so unhinged and silly. ..."
The reception of the Trump- Putin meeting is breathtaking. I have in my 61 years never
witnessed such a hate and slander in the MSM. I have after this begun to actually dismiss
that Americans are sensible people! They have completely forgotten the cost of the Civil
War. We in Europe have not forgotten the cost of war and are not going there again.
Ever.
The US has become a lunatic asylum with nuclear weapons, never mind Kim Jong Un, look a
squirrel! But the US is a threat to humanity, included it's protegé Israel, the new
Apartheid state.
"Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace with Russia?"
Wait; what?
From badmouthing Russia to appointing Russophobes to high office, to imposing
sanctions, to illegally seizing Russian diplomatic property, to committing war crimes in
Syria, to a provocative military buildup in Europe, to arming the illegitimate Ukrainian
"government," etc., presidential poseur Orange Clown has spent 99% of his "presidency" so far
antagonizing Russia; apparently trying to provoke some kind of Russian military
response.
If it was anyone else other than Vladimir Putin calling the shots in Russia, WW3
probably would've happened already. Yet PCR claims Orange Clown wants peace with
Russia?
Note to PCR: It is Vladimir Putin who wants peace, not presidential poseur Orange Clown.
If Orange Clown has had some kind of spiritual epiphany/change of heart, he's going to have
to show good faith by taking some kind of unambiguous action; posturing won't suffice.
There is a lot of truth in what you say, but it does not account for the fight we are
currently witnessing. Two factions in the Money Party are at war with each other. Neither
one is willing to level with the public as to its true aims and motives -- they are fighting
viciously but under the bed sheets, which is why the spectacle looks so unhinged and
silly.
It appears that he is trying to save the US from financial collapse. Hence, he is a traitor
to MIC, particularly to the obscenely greedy Pentagon contractors. The US presidents and
Congress always pandered to MIC first and foremost. He broke (or at least tried to break) the
pattern.
You mean, s/he/it is a self-parody? The US MSM, State Department, Congress, and
Administration all became self-parodies lately. It would have been funny if it weren't so
sad.
"... By creating an extremely anti-communist state, the elite will never have to worry about losing control over society because their wealth and power remains safe and sound. ..."
It is an evolution of conspiracy theory, not requiring any kind of convoluted logic or
story telling that used to be required for conspiracy theory to stick. Fake News allows for
simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without
examination.
Here's an ad about COCs (PDF) from
1942. They're used for tanning leather, in soaps and perfumes, as insect repellents, for
dying cloth, as antiseptics, and for many, many other commercial and industrial
purposes.
Damn those Syrian butchers for dropping perfume on civilians!
Fake News is the 21st century version of Conspiracy Theory.
It is an evolution of conspiracy theory, not requiring any kind of convoluted logic or
story telling that used to be required for conspiracy theory to stick. Fake News allows
for simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without
examination.
@The Voice In the
Wilderness In the dim reaches of pre-history, when Walter Cronkite was reporting, a
real journalist wouldn't report that someone launched a chemical weapons attack unless the
journalist had at least two credible, independent sources providing solid evidence that the
story was true. Newspaper editors and television producers knew their reputations were on the
line and that their competitors would make sure the egg on their face stuck if they reported
something blatantly wrong.
Nowadays, there are no competitors, because journalists and news outlets are mostly
hanging out together in one big cheery cartel, every member of which will defend every other
member to protect the reputation of the whole. The goal is not to outdo competitors and gain
more eyeballs or a greater distribution or greater authority over public opinion. The goal is
to defend the status quo by any means necessary, while somehow maintaining the credibility of
the press.
But no, they shouldn't have published a story that Assad had launched a chemical weapons
attack unless they had a significant amount of solid evidence that it was true.
I have a hard time understanding how people can even begin to credit this crap, given how
close it is to what they told us about Saddam Hussein. But it's actually even worse, because
at least Hussein did, at one time, use chemical weapons on the Kurds. I mean, at least he did
it once, even if he didn't have weapons of mass destruction ready to aim at Israel, or the
Saudis, or the U.S.
#7
It was big news. But failure to report it as false with just as much (or more) attention
and timing was journalistic malpractice. They should have been outraged to have been
conned into spreading false propaganda. IF they were legitimate journalists.
@Cant Stop the
Macedonian Signal
I don't know that anyone waits for confirmation anymore. And the two sources could
be the CIA and VOA or one of their tame journalists.
Credibility is in the eye of the beholder. After they all jumped on Saddam's WMD one can
hardly compare them with Cronkite.
I do remember web blogs asking to please wait for the UN inspectors report. When that
report did come out, anyone with integrity, even if not a professional journalist, would have
highlighted that report and retracted the original and not figuratively bury it on page
56.
But we are substantially together on this. They reported is as fact not as an
unsubstantiated claim.
Chomsky's Five News Filters: A little dated but a good starting point.
The first filter is Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation of the Mass Media. Mainstream
media is essentially owned by corporations and the government, because those are the very
agents who fund them. Any favourable studies, studies or information that the government or
corporations want the public to know (or don't want them to know) either ends up being aired
or buried as a result.
The second filter is Advertising License to do Business. Mass media isn't interested in
attracting viewers to educate them, but rather to sell them on something. They're more
interested in engaging an audience with higher buying power than actually making a difference
through education and information. Chomsky provides an excellent example, explaining: "CBS proudly tells its shareholders that while it "continuously seeks to maximize audience
delivery," it has developed a new "sales tool" with which it approaches advertisers: "Client
Audience Profile, or CAP, will help advertisers optimize the effectiveness of their network
television schedules by evaluating audience segments in proportion to usage levels of
advertisers' products and services." In short, the mass media are interested in attracting
audiences with buying power, not audiences per se."
The third filter is Sourcing Mass-Media News. Whatever is aired on mass media needs to be
100% credible, meaning it's viewers need to completely trust what's being aired, without the
need of them using their critical thinking skills. Since the majority of the public trusts
the government and mass corporations, AKA the propaganda machines, most of the "news worthy"
content comes from them. Plus, whatever's aired needs to be approved by corporations or the
government and/or mass media must avoid airing anything that would offend their contributors
and funders.
The fourth filter is Flak and the Enforcers. "Flak" refers to negative responses to a
media statement or program aired on the network. Perhaps the most influential producers of
flak are corporations and the government. Corporations have created large scale organizations
whose sole purpose is to produce flak. The government is also a large producer of flak, as it
constantly corrects or threatens the media based on their interests.
The final filter is Anticommunism as a Control Mechanism. Everything at home seems to be a
lesser evil if there's something on the news that seems much worse (fake terrorist attacks,
false enemies, and/or "radical" states). Anything that sounds too left can also be dismissed
if it sounds too much like "communism." By creating an extremely anti-communist state, the
elite will never have to worry about losing control over society because their wealth and
power remains safe and sound.
@fakenews
namely big, opinion-policing non-profits and their lobbyists and followers, ranging from
religious denominations, to AIPAC and the NRA, to the ADL and SPLC.
"The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many
subordinate political Mafiosi "
What is going on in the US is systematic. Assange, an investigative journalist who became
the light of truth worldwide, is under a grave danger from US' and UK' Intelligence
Communities of the non-intelligent opportunists and real traitors: https://www.rt.com/news/433783-wikileaks-assange-ecuador-uk/
Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton, who was criminally negligent with regard to the most important
classified information, has been protected by the politicking Brennan, Clapper, and Mueller:
" it was over 30,000 emails , emails that were sent through to Hillary Clinton through
the unauthorized server and unsecured server and every email she sent out.
There were highly classified -- beyond classified -- top secret-type stuff that had
gone through that server. an instruction embedded, compartmentalized data embedded in the
email server telling the server to send a copy of every email that came to Hillary Clinton
through that unauthorized server and every email that she sent out through that server, to
send it to this foreign entity that is not Russia."
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/congressional-record-transcript-on-chinagate.html
The Awan Affair, the most serious ever violation of national cybersecurity, has
demonstrated the spectacular incompetence of the CIA and FBI, which had allowed a family of
Pakistani nationals to surf congressional computers of various committees, including
Intelligence Committee, for years. None of the scoundrels had a security clearance! Their
ardent protector, Wasserman-Schultz (who threatened the DC Marschall) belongs to the
untouchables, unlike Assange:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/awan-congressional-scandal-in-spotlight-as-president-suggests-data-could-be-part-of-court-case_2500703.html
Looks like MIC is a cancel of the society for which there is no cure....
While this jeremiad raises several valid point the key to understanding the situation should
be understanding of the split of the Us elite into two camp with Democratic party (representing
interests of Wall Street) and large part of intelligence communality fighting to neoliberal
status quo and Pentagon, some part of old money, part of trade unions (especially rank and file
members) and a pert of Republican Party (representing interests of the military) realizing that
neoliberalism came to the natural end and it is time for change which includes downsizing of the
American empire.
This bitter internal struggle in which neoliberals so far have an upper hand over Trump
administration and forced him into retreat.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump is a traitor because he wants peace with Russia. ..."
"... The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans, as well as the rest of the world, desperately need to notice the extremely hostile reaction to peace on the part of the US Democratic Party, many members of the Republican Party, including the despicable US Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the Western Presstitute Media, a collection of people on the CIA payroll according to the German newspaper editor, Udo Ulfkotte, and the CIA itself. ..."
"... Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of the corrupt filth that rules over us are all in the pay of the military/security complex. Just go and investigate the donations to their re-election campaigns. The 1,000 billion dollar budget of the military/security complex, amplified by the CIA's front corporations and narcotics business, provides enormous sums with which to purchase the senators and representatives that the insouciant American voters think that they elect. ..."
"... Therefore, the American public gets not representation, but lies that justify war and conflict. The military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned the American people to no effect, is in desperate need of an enemy. In obedience to the military/security complex, the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have made Russia that enemy. If Trump and Putin do not understand this, they will easily be made irrelevant. ..."
"... They both can be assassinated, and that is what the statements from Pelosi, Schumer, McCain, Lindsey Graham, et. al., repeated endlessly in the propaganda ministry that is the Western press, encourages. ..."
"... The Supply-Side Revolution ..."
"... When the combination of tax cuts with defense budget cuts came up for a vote, the legendary senator Strom Thurmond, a 48-year member of the US Senate from South Carolina, tapped me on the shoulder. He said: "son, never set your senator up against the military/security complex. He will not be re-elected, and you will be out of a job." I replied that we were just establishing for the record that under no conditions would the Democrats, who wanted more government, vote for a tax rate reduction even if there was a case that it would cure stagflation. He replied: "son, the military/security complex doesn't care." ..."
"... Later as a member of a secret presidential committee, I saw how the CIA attempted to prevent President Reagan from ending the Cold War. ..."
"... Today, right now, at this moment, we are faced with a massive effort of the military/security complex, the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, and the presstitute media to discredit the elected President of the United States and to overthrow him in order that the utterly corrupt elite that rule American can continue to hold on to power and to protect the massive budget of the military/security complex that, along with the Israel Lobby, funds the elections of those who rule us. ..."
"... There is no institution in America, government or private, that can be trusted. Any government or person who trusts America or any Western country is stupid beyond belief. ..."
"... The entire Russiagate hoax is an orchestration by the military/security complex, led by John Brennen, Comey, and Rosenstein. The purpose is to discredit President trump for two reasons. One is to prevent any normalization of relations with Russia. The other is to remove Trump's agenda as an alternative to the agenda of the Democratic Party. ..."
"... President Trump is almost powerless. Putin, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans should recognize this before it is too late for them. President Trump cannot fire and arrest for high treason Mueller and Rosenstein. ..."
"... Reckless and irresponsible comments about treason from former CIA director Brennan, and other ranking public figures, echo similar inflammatory rhetoric from far-right-wing rabble rouser Gen. Edwin Walker, and other members of the John Birch Society, in the days before Pres. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. ..."
"... What's going on in the United States of America beats the band what happened under Joe McCarthy. The witch hunt against a sitting President by 95 percent of the media, major government institutions such as the criminal CIA, FBI, DOJ and the rest of the crooked Intel community plus the rascals in the US Congress can only happen in a totalitarian society, which the US is. ..."
"... The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many subordinate political Mafiosi should be put behind bars instead of running from one TV station to the next and lay the ground for a possibly Trump assassination. ..."
"... As Mr. Rogers correctly states, President Trump is almost powerless. These US fools even try to breed discord between the so-called nationalists and the globalists in Russia for which Medvedev stays. He once served US interests more than Russian ones when he was Prime Minister and got flattered by the ineffable Bill Clinton. ..."
"... So what do we see now ? Putin aiding Trump in steering the USA away from trying to control the whole world, an effort that is destroying the USA, but Deep State does not mind. In this way Russia indeed meddles in USA politics. Trump now invited Putin to come to Washington, the MH17 statement is withheld, the hysteria at CNN is such that MH17 is not even mentioned. In stead: Trump must be mentally deranged. ..."
"... Gore Vidal said there's only one party in America, it's the Money Party and it has two branches. It is even more true today than when he said it. There is no Left or Right anymore, only the question, is it good for Israel? And the American people be damned. ..."
"... Trump is completely powerless to do anything about these two. And this has gone on for a year and a half. ..."
"... It's clear though that Trump believes he has forced his opponents to play a bad hand in their outlandish craze the past week. It's why he doubled down and invited Putin to Washington near the 2018 election time. He perceives this as a chance to re-enact the 2016 election and coast to victory. The establishment is insane, and if he brings their insanity out it plays to his favor. ..."
The US Democratic Party is determined to take the world to thermo-nuclear war rather than to
admit that Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election fair and square. The Democratic Party
was totally corrupted by the Clinton Regime, and now it is totally insane. Leaders of the
Democratic Party, such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, my former co-author in the New York
Times, have responded in a non-Democratic way to the first step President Trump has taken to
reduce the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia that the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama
regimes created between the two superpowers.
Yes, Russia is a superpower. Russian weapons are so superior to the junk produced by the
waste-filled US military/security complex that lives high off the hog on the insouciant
American taxpayer that it is questionable if the US is even a second class military power. If
the insane neoconservatives, such as Max Boot, William Kristol, and the rest of the neocon scum
get their way, the US, the UK, and Europe will be a radioactive ruin for thousands of
years.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (CA), Minority Leader of the US House of
Representatives, declared that out of fear of some undefined retribution from Putin, a dossier
on Trump perhaps, the President of the United States sold out the American people to Russia
because he wants to make peace: "It begs the question, what does Vladimir Putin, what do the
Russians have on Donald Trump -- personally, politically and financially that he should behave
in such a manner?" The "such a manner" Pelosi is speaking about is making peace instead of
war.
To be clear, the Democratic Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives has accused
Donald Trump of high treason against the United States. There is no outcry against this
blatantly false accusation, totally devoid of evidence. The presstitute media instead of
protesting this attempt at a coup against the President of the United States, trumpet the
accusation as self-evident truth. Trump is a traitor because he wants peace with
Russia.
Here is Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (NY) repeating Pelosi's false accusation: "Millions
of Americans will continue to wonder if the only possible explanation for this dangerous
behavior is the possibility that President Putin holds damaging information over President
Trump." If you don't believe that this is orchestrated between Pelosi and Schumer, you are
stupid beyond belief.
Here is disgraced Obama CIA director John Brennan, a leader of the fake Russiagate campaign
against President Trump in order to prevent Trump from making peace with Russia and, thus, by
making the world safer, threatening the massive, unjustified budget of the military/security
complex: "Donald Trump's press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the
threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were
Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are
you???"
NOTICE THAT NOT ONE WESTERN MEDIA SOURCE IS CELEBRATING AND THANKING TRUMP AND PUTIN FOR
EASING THE ARTIFICIALLY CREATED TENSIONS THAT WERE LEADING TO NUCLEAR WAR. HOW CAN THIS BE? HOW
CAN IT BE THAT THE WESTERN MEDIA IS SO OPPOSED TO PEACE? WHAT IS THE EXPLANATION?
The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans, as well as the rest of
the world, desperately need to notice the extremely hostile reaction to peace on the part of
the US Democratic Party, many members of the Republican Party, including the despicable US
Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the Western Presstitute Media, a
collection of people on the CIA payroll according to the German newspaper editor, Udo Ulfkotte,
and the CIA itself.
Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of the corrupt
filth that rules over us are all in the pay of the military/security complex. Just go and
investigate the donations to their re-election campaigns. The 1,000 billion dollar budget of
the military/security complex, amplified by the CIA's front corporations and narcotics
business, provides enormous sums with which to purchase the senators and representatives that
the insouciant American voters think that they elect.
Do you know how large 1,000 billion is? You would have to live for thousands of years and do
nothing for 24/7 except count to reach that figure. It is a sum that nurtures the recipients,
and the recipients regard it as worth protecting.
Therefore, the American public gets not representation, but lies that justify war and
conflict. The military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned the American
people to no effect, is in desperate need of an enemy. In obedience to the military/security
complex, the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have made Russia that enemy. If Trump
and Putin do not understand this, they will easily be made irrelevant.
They both can be assassinated, and that is what the statements from Pelosi, Schumer,
McCain, Lindsey Graham, et. al., repeated endlessly in the propaganda ministry that is the
Western press, encourages. Trump can be assassinated or overthrown in a political coup for
selling out America to Russia, as members of both political parties claim and as the media
trumpets endlessly. Putin can be easily assassinated by the CIA operatives that the Russian
government stupidly permits to operate throughout Russia in NGOs and Western/US owned media and
among the Atlanticist Integrationists, Washington's Firth Column inside Russia serving
Washington's purposes. These Russian traitors serve in Putin's own government!
ORDER IT NOW
Americans are so unaware that they have no idea of the risk that President Trump is taking
by challenging the US military security complex. For example, during the last half of the 1970s
I was a member of the US Senate staff. I was working together with a staffer of the US
Republican Senator from California, S. I. Hayakawa, to advance understanding of a supply-side
economic policy cure to the stagflation that threatened the US budget's ability to meet its
obligations. Republican Senators Hatch, Roth, and Hayakawa were trying to introduce a
supply-side economic policy as a cure for the stagflation that was threatening the US economy
with failure. The Democrats, who later in the Senate led the way to a supply-side policy, were,
at this time, opposed (see Paul Craig Roberts, The Supply-Side Revolution , Harvard
University Press, 1984). The Democrats claimed that the policy would worsen the budget deficit,
the only time in those days Democrats cared about the budget deficit. The Democrats said that
they would support the tax rate reductions if the Republicans would support offsetting cuts in
the budget to support a balanced budget. This was a ploy to put Republicans on the spot for
taking away some groups' handouts in order "to cut tax rates for the rich."
The supply-side policy did not require budget cuts, but in order to demonstrate the
Democrats lack of sincerety, Hayakawa's aid and I had our senators introduce a series of budget
cuts together with tax cuts that, on a static revenue basis (not counting tax revenue feedbacks
from the incentives of the lower tax rates) kept the budget even, and the Democrats voted
against them every time.
When the combination of tax cuts with defense budget cuts came up for a vote, the
legendary senator Strom Thurmond, a 48-year member of the US Senate from South Carolina, tapped
me on the shoulder. He said: "son, never set your senator up against the military/security
complex. He will not be re-elected, and you will be out of a job." I replied that we were just
establishing for the record that under no conditions would the Democrats, who wanted more
government, vote for a tax rate reduction even if there was a case that it would cure
stagflation. He replied: "son, the military/security complex doesn't care."
My emergence from The Matrix began with Thurmond's pat on my shoulder. It grew with my time
at the Wall Street Journal when I learned that some truthful things simply could not be said.
In the Treasury I experienced how those outside interests opposed to a president's policy
marshall their forces and the media that they own to block it. Later as a member of a
secret presidential committee, I saw how the CIA attempted to prevent President Reagan from
ending the Cold War.
Today, right now, at this moment, we are faced with a massive effort of the
military/security complex, the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, and the presstitute
media to discredit the elected President of the United States and to overthrow him in order
that the utterly corrupt elite that rule American can continue to hold on to power and to
protect the massive budget of the military/security complex that, along with the Israel Lobby,
funds the elections of those who rule us. Trump, like Reagan, was an exception, and it is
the exceptions that accumulate the ire of the corrupt leftwing, bought off with money, and the
ire of the media, concentrated into small tight ownership groups indebted to those who
permitted the illegal concentration of a once independent and diverse American media that once
served, on occasion, as a watchdog over government. The rightwing, wrapped in the flag,
dismisses all truth as "anti-American."
If Putin, Lavrov, the Russian government, the traitorous Russian Fifth Column -- the
Atlanticist Integrationists -- the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans think that any
peace or consideration can come out of America, they are insane. Their delusions are setting
themselves up for destruction. There is no institution in America, government or private,
that can be trusted. Any government or person who trusts America or any Western country is
stupid beyond belief.
The entire Russiagate hoax is an orchestration by the military/security complex, led by
John Brennen, Comey, and Rosenstein. The purpose is to discredit President trump for two
reasons. One is to prevent any normalization of relations with Russia. The other is to remove
Trump's agenda as an alternative to the agenda of the Democratic Party.
President Trump is almost powerless. Putin, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North
Koreans should recognize this before it is too late for them. President Trump cannot fire and
arrest for high treason Mueller and Rosenstein. And Trump cannot indict Hillary for her
numerous unquestionable crimes in plain view of everyone, or Comey or Brennan, who declares
Trump "to be wholly in the pocket of Putin," for trying to overthrow the elected president of
the United States. Trump cannot have the Secret Service question the likes of Pelosi and
Schumer and McCain and Lindsey Graham for false accusations that encourage assassination of the
President of the United States.
Trump cannot even trust the Secret Service, which accumulated evidence suggests was
complicit in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.
If Putin and Lavrov, so anxious to be friends of Washington, let their guards down, they are
history.
As I said above, Russiagate is an orchestratration to prevent peace between the US and
Russia. Leading military/security complex experts, including the person who provided the CIA's
daily briefing of the President of the United States for many years, and the person who devised
the spy program for the National Security Agency, have proven conclusively that Russiagate is a
hoax designed for the purpose of preventing President Trump from normalizing relations between
the US and Russia, which has the power to destroy the entirety of the Western World at
will.
If Putin doesn't listen to him, Russia is in the trash can of history.
Keep in mind that no media informs you better than my website. If my website goes down, you
will be left in darkness. No valid information comes from the US government or the Western
presstitutes. If you sit in front of the TV screen watching the Western media, you are
brainwashed beyond all hope. Not even I can rescue you. Nor God himself.
Americans, and indeed the Russians themselves, are incapable of realizing it, but there is a
chance that Trump will be overthrown and a Western assault will be launched against the handful
of countries that insist on sovereignty.
I doubt that few of the Americans who elected Trump will be taken in by the anti-Trump
propagana, but they are not organized and have no armed power. The police, militarized by
George W. Bush and Obama, will be set against them. The rebellions will be local and suppressed
by every violation of the US Constitution by the private powers that rule Washington, as always
has been the case with rebellions in America.
In the West, which the Russians are so anxious to join, all freedoms are dead -- freedom of
assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom of privacy,
freedom from arbitrary search, freedom from arbitrary arrest, along with the Constitutional
protections of due process and habeas corpus. Today there are no countries less free than the
United States of America.
Why do the Russian Atlanticist Integrationists want to join an unfree Western world? Are
they that brainwashed by Western Propaganda?
If Putin listens to these deluded fools, Putin will destroy Russia.
There is something wrong with Russian perception of Washington. Apparently the Russian
elite, with the exception of Shoigu and a few others are incapable of comprehending the
neoconservative drive for US world hegemony and the neoconservative determination to destroy
Russia as a constraint on US unilateralism. The Russian government somehow, despite all
evidence to the contrary, believes that Washington's hegemony is negotiable. (Republished from
PaulCraigRoberts.org by permission of author or representative)
is big question even if Trump wants peace at all. Trump has shown his real face on the very
beginning when he said that they are going to talk about "his friend" Xi, making Putin very
uncomfortable and throwing some worms in Russia~China relationship in front of cameras for
all to see
Trump came to the meeting in hope to impress Putin with his cowboy arrogance, He now says
that he'll be Putin's worst enemy ( if he don't bow to him I guess : ). all Trump cares about
is his ego, nothing else too sweat mouthed sleazy person
Reckless and irresponsible comments about treason from former CIA director Brennan, and
other ranking public figures, echo similar inflammatory rhetoric from far-right-wing rabble
rouser Gen. Edwin Walker, and other members of the John Birch Society, in the days before
Pres. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
What's going on in the United States of America beats the band what happened under Joe
McCarthy. The witch hunt against a sitting President by 95 percent of the media, major
government institutions such as the criminal CIA, FBI, DOJ and the rest of the crooked Intel
community plus the rascals in the US Congress can only happen in a totalitarian society,
which the US is.
The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many subordinate
political Mafiosi should be put behind bars instead of running from one TV station to the
next and lay the ground for a possibly Trump assassination. Trump is portrayed by these
crooks as a "traitor." In the US, traitors usefully deserve death. If these political Mafiosi
don't bring down Trump "legally," they will hire a kind of Lee Harvey Oswald who "shot"
JFK.
As Mr. Rogers correctly states, President Trump is almost powerless. These US fools
even try to breed discord between the so-called nationalists and the globalists in Russia for
which Medvedev stays. He once served US interests more than Russian ones when he was Prime
Minister and got flattered by the ineffable Bill Clinton.
Let's wait and see what happens in the upcoming mid-term elections. If the Dems win both
Houses of Congress, Trump is done. The obstructionists will have the upper hand. If they
can't remove him from office "legally," there will be a hitman out there somewhere.
President smugly making peace with the Russian nation that was supposed to be the evil enemy
in a 3rd and final brother war to devastate the white race beyond recovery.
Little upstart in the Democrat party making left wing politics less palatable to the
masses with her heavy handed socialist rhetoric. All while preaching BDS and anti-Israel
sentiment too, representing Frankenstein's CultMarx monster turning on it's creator.
And fewer and fewer people on all sides buying what the American Pravda is selling with
each passing day. The resulting hysteria is both par for the course and downright
delectable.
" Apparently the Russian elite, with the exception of Shoigu and a few others are incapable
of comprehending the neoconservative drive for US world hegemony and the neoconservative
determination to destroy Russia as a constraint on US unilateralism. " My idea is that many
in Russia understand quite well, this is why they demonstrate Russia's military capabilities
frequently. Why does Putin support Assad and Syria ? Not because he likes these countries,
but because he understands that if these countries also get the USA yoke the position of
Russia and China deteriorate.
Putin is careful not to give USA public opinion more 'reason' to fear Russia. Already a
few years ago something fell into the E part of the Mediterranean. It was asserted that
Russia had intercepted a USA missile fired from Spain to Syria. USA and Israel declared that
an excercise had been held. Putin said nothing.
Despite all that NATO does at Russia's borders Putin does not let himself be provoked.
MH17, I suppose Putin knows quite well what happened, Russia has radar and satelites, yet
Putin never gave the Russian view.
So what do we see now ? Putin aiding Trump in steering the USA away from trying to
control the whole world, an effort that is destroying the USA, but Deep State does not mind.
In this way Russia indeed meddles in USA politics. Trump now invited Putin to come to
Washington, the MH17 statement is withheld, the hysteria at CNN is such that MH17 is not even
mentioned. In stead: Trump must be mentally deranged.
Good to see PCR accepting comments again. It's not just the Dumbocruds, it's the Rupuglicunts
too. Follow the money, it's coming from the same sources. Gore Vidal said there's only
one party in America, it's the Money Party and it has two branches. It is even more true
today than when he said it. There is no Left or Right anymore, only the question, is it good
for Israel? And the American people be damned.
Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace with Russia? The Democrats say he is
The Democrats -- and their wholly-owned MSM -- will call Trump any name that'll stick. It
means little. Even if Trump got everything he wanted on immigration, that particular
toothpaste is already out of the tube and unless we send back some of the millions of
illegal third-world squatters we've no hope of recovering the United States of America.
If you want to talk treason, you need look no further than the Hart-Celler Act of 1965,
whereby the plan was laid to replace the population of this nation with third-world refuse,
which guaranteed cheap labor for GOP capitalists and endless political support for Democrat
traitors.
As the saying goes "timing is everything." I have to admit I was incredulous that you were
somehow able to link to a functioning version of the Nekrosov film. I've been trying to get
my hands on that documentary for the last few years, but to no avail. I finally managed to
read a comment on another blog that recommended that people who were interested in viewing
the film could do so by reaching out to the producer to request a personalized link, after
which you had to request a password from another individual affiliated with the film.
I managed to do all of that a few weeks ago and was able to watch the video on Vimeo for
the full 2 hours. It was riveting, to say the least. After viewing it again, I thought about
making it available to others. Due to the pressures by Browder and his lawyers, however,
Nekrosov was prevented from making his film available to a wider audience. He got around this
limitation by making it available for private viewing only. And to prevent a private viewer
from uploading it onto the internet he cleverly placed a watermark on each film, indicating
the owner of each copy of the video by displaying a number on the screen. I was surprised to
see the version you linked to indeed has this watermark shown on the screen. Somehow, this
did not deter the individual tied to that number from uploading it and being the one
identified as doing so. That said, I'm glad the film is more widely available as it should be
viewed by as many people as possible so that they can realize what a despicable liar Browder
really is and how the passage of The Magnitsky Act was a travesty of justice which must be
reversed.
"Do you know how large 1,000 billion is? You would have to live for thousands of years and do
nothing for 24/7 except count to reach that figure. It is a sum that nurtures the recipients,
and the recipients regard it as worth protecting."
Tens of thousands of years. At one count per second, 31,687 years and a few months.
"In the West, which the Russians are so anxious to join, all freedoms are dead --
freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom
of privacy, freedom from arbitrary search, freedom from arbitrary arrest, along with the
Constitutional protections of due process and habeas corpus."
True. That is the Anglo-Zionist Empire. That is what the WASP Empire delivers, and
it does so to destroy more conservative national and local cultures so their peoples are
tossed into the melting pot and reduced into a goop easy to rule.
Oliver Cromwell taking Jewish money, allying with Jews so he would have the funds to wage
permanent war against the vast, vast majority of non-WASP whites within his reach: that is
the definition of WASP culture; that picture tells you what it always will do.
make something serious about Obama and Hillary destroying whole African country of Libya
killing Colonel Gaddafi on the street, which is greatest war crime in the 21st century so far
or, Bill Clinton bombing Bosnian Serbs '95 opening the door to jihadis to continue behead
people in the middle of the Europe or, Bill Clinton and Nato bombing Serbia '99 to give
"Kosovo" independence killing many civilian and destroying infrastructure on purpose or
Madeline Albright confessing killing half of million Iraqi kids on the camera or, Bush and or
Bushes or those such Bill Browder are just small dirty fish who in comparison is almost not
worth filming I appreciate the effort but get seriously real if you are about to get truth to
people
"The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many
subordinate political Mafiosi "
What is going on in the US is systematic. Assange, an investigative journalist who became
the light of truth worldwide, is under a grave danger from US' and UK' Intelligence
Communities of the non-intelligent opportunists and real traitors: https://www.rt.com/news/433783-wikileaks-assange-ecuador-uk/
Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton, who was criminally negligent with regard to the most important
classified information, has been protected by the politicking Brennan, Clapper, and Mueller:
" it was over 30,000 emails , emails that were sent through to Hillary Clinton through
the unauthorized server and unsecured server and every email she sent out.
There were highly classified -- beyond classified -- top secret-type stuff that had
gone through that server. an instruction embedded, compartmentalized data embedded in the
email server telling the server to send a copy of every email that came to Hillary Clinton
through that unauthorized server and every email that she sent out through that server, to
send it to this foreign entity that is not Russia."
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/congressional-record-transcript-on-chinagate.html
The Awan Affair, the most serious ever violation of national cybersecurity, has
demonstrated the spectacular incompetence of the CIA and FBI, which had allowed a family of
Pakistani nationals to surf congressional computers of various committees, including
Intelligence Committee, for years. None of the scoundrels had a security clearance! Their
ardent protector, Wasserman-Schultz (who threatened the DC Marschall) belongs to the
untouchables, unlike Assange:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/awan-congressional-scandal-in-spotlight-as-president-suggests-data-could-be-part-of-court-case_2500703.html
Trump and Putin made a mistake. I do not understand how it could have happened. They should
have issued communiqué that they have agreed to work toward peace and relieve tensions
and suppress conflicts around the world. (I do not have a time for now to write more.)
(sorry)
If Rosenstein & Mueller had done what they did with the publication of the indictments a
few days before the summit -- and were North Koreans -- they'd be in front of a firing squad
within 24 hours. Trump is completely powerless to do anything about these two. And this
has gone on for a year and a half. This is not a strength of democracy.
The US today is like Venezuela was shortly after Maduro was elected (by a narrow margin)
-- after Chavez's death -- and before violence eventually broke out. The losing opposition
refused to accept the result and tensions simmered for a long time.
Or after Morsi was elected in Egypt and before the military coup. The victory was narrow,
the opposition refused the to accept the result and tensions simmered for a long time.
Or maybe like Bush vs Gore. Bush was kinda saved by 9/11 which completely changed the
atmosphere.
Who knows what will happen. It's clear though that Trump believes he has forced his
opponents to play a bad hand in their outlandish craze the past week. It's why he doubled
down and invited Putin to Washington near the 2018 election time. He perceives this as a
chance to re-enact the 2016 election and coast to victory. The establishment is insane, and
if he brings their insanity out it plays to his favor.
The reception of the Trump- Putin meeting is breathtaking. I have in my 61 years never
witnessed such a hate and slander in the MSM. I have after this begun to actually dismiss
that Americans are sensible people! They have completely forgotten the cost of the Civil War.
We in Europe have not forgotten the cost of war and are not going there again. Ever.
The US has become a lunatic asylum with nuclear weapons, never mind Kim Jong Un, look a
squirrel! But the US is a threat to humanity, included it's protegé Israel, the new
Apartheid state.
"Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace with Russia?"
Wait; what?
From badmouthing Russia to appointing Russophobes to high office, to imposing sanctions,
to illegally seizing Russian diplomatic property, to committing war crimes in Syria, to a
provocative military buildup in Europe, to arming the illegitimate Ukrainian "government,"
etc., presidential poseur Orange Clown has spent 99% of his "presidency" so far antagonizing
Russia; apparently trying to provoke some kind of Russian military response.
If it was anyone else other than Vladimir Putin calling the shots in Russia, WW3 probably
would've happened already. Yet PCR claims Orange Clown wants peace with Russia?
Note to PCR: It is Vladimir Putin who wants peace, not presidential poseur Orange Clown.
If Orange Clown has had some kind of spiritual epiphany/change of heart, he's going to have
to show good faith by taking some kind of unambiguous action; posturing won't suffice.
There is a lot of truth in what you say, but it does not account for the fight we are
currently witnessing. Two factions in the Money Party are at war with each other. Neither one
is willing to level with the public as to its true aims and motives -- they are fighting
viciously but under the bed sheets, which is why the spectacle looks so unhinged and
silly.
It appears that he is trying to save the US from financial collapse. Hence, he is a traitor
to MIC, particularly to the obscenely greedy Pentagon contractors. The US presidents and
Congress always pandered to MIC first and foremost. He broke (or at least tried to break) the
pattern.
Don't blame all Americans. Forty-eight percent of us voted for Trump; it is very likely
that more than half of the rest voted for Hellary only with great reluctance, owing largely
to the unprecedented campaign of vilification directed at Trump. The point is: a very large
majority of people in this country are nowhere near as insane as the media and elites are --
in fact, we're still nowhere near insane enough for their taste!
So Iran has no offensive air force or any Nukes but the Israelis with their air superiority and nukes are making Iran - enemy
#1. How very - American - of them.
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, ..."
"... . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com. ..."
Under the Constitution, these are the offenses for which
presidents can be impeached.
And to hear our elites, Donald Trump is guilty of them all.
Trump's refusal to challenge Vladimir Putin's claim at Helsinki that his GRU boys did not hack Hillary Clinton's
campaign has been called treason, a refusal to do his sworn duty to protect and defend the United States, by a former
director of the CIA.
Famed journalists and former high officials of the U.S. government have called Russia's hacking of the DNC "an act of
war" comparable to Pearl Harbor.
The
New York Times
ran a story on the many now charging Trump with treason. Others suggest Putin is
blackmailing Trump, or has him on his payroll, or compromised Trump a long time ago.
Wailed Congressman Steve Cohen: "Where is our military folks? The Commander in Chief is in the hands of our enemy!"
Apparently, some on the left believe we need a military coup to save our democracy.
Not since Robert Welch of the John Birch Society called Dwight Eisenhower a "conscious agent of the Communist
conspiracy" have such charges been hurled at a president. But while the Birchers were a bit outside the mainstream,
today it is the establishment itself bawling "Treason!"
What explains the hysteria?
The worst-case scenario would be that the establishment actually believes the nonsense it is spouting. But that is
hard to credit. Like the boy who cried "Wolf!" they have cried "Fascist!" too many times to be taken seriously.
A month ago, the never-Trumpers were comparing the separation of immigrant kids from detained adults, who brought
them to the U.S. illegally, to FDR's concentration camps for Japanese Americans.
Other commentators equated the separations to what the Nazis did at Auschwitz.
If the establishment truly believed this nonsense, it would be an unacceptable security risk to let them near the
levers of power ever again.
Using Occam's razor, the real explanation for this behavior is the simplest one: America's elites have been driven
over the edge by Trump's successes and their failures to block him.
Trump is deregulating the economy, cutting taxes, appointing record numbers of federal judges, reshaping the Supreme
Court, and using tariffs to cut trade deficits and the bully pulpit to castigate freeloading allies.
Worst of all, Trump clearly intends to carry out his campaign pledge to improve relations with Russia and get along
with Vladimir Putin.
"Over our dead bodies!" the Beltway elite seems to be shouting.
Hence the rhetorical WMDs hurled at Trump: liar, dictator, authoritarian, Putin's poodle, fascist, demagogue,
traitor, Nazi.
Such language approaches incitement to violence. One wonders whether the haters are considering the impact of the
words they so casually use. Some of us yet recall how Dallas was charged with complicity in the death of JFK for slurs
far less toxic than this.
The post-Helsinki hysteria reveals not merely the mindset of the president's enemies, but the depth of their
determination to destroy him.
They intend to break Trump and bring him down, to see him impeached, removed, indicted, and prosecuted, and the
agenda on which he ran and was nominated and elected dumped onto the ash heap of history.
Thursday, Trump indicated that he knows exactly what is afoot, and threw down the gauntlet of defiance: "The Fake
News Media wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war," he
tweeted. "They are pushing so recklessly hard and hate the fact that I'll probably have a good relationship with Putin."
Spot on. Trump is saying: I am going to call off this Cold War II before it breaks out into the hot war that nine
U.S. presidents avoided, despite Soviet provocations far graver than Putin's pilfering of DNC emails showing how Debbie
Wasserman Schultz stuck it to Bernie Sanders.
Then the White House suggested Vlad may be coming to dinner this fall.
Trump is edging toward the defining battle of his presidency: a reshaping of U.S. foreign policy to avoid clashes and
conflicts with Russia and the shedding of Cold War commitments no longer rooted in the national interests of this
country.
Yet should he attempt to carry out his agenda -- to get out of Syria, pull troops from Germany, and take a second look
at NATO's Article 5 commitment to go to war for 29 nations, some of which, like Montenegro, most Americans have never
heard of -- he is headed for the most brutal battle of his presidency.
This Helsinki hysteria is but a taste.
By cheering Brexit, dissing the EU, suggesting NATO is obsolete, departing Syria, trying to get on with Putin, Trump
is threatening the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment with what it fears most: irrelevance.
For if there is no war on, no war imminent, and no war wanted, what does a War Party do?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book,
Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a
President and Divided America Forever
. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators
writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
There's a small but vocal group of American scholars who say that anti-Russian hysteria is
on the rise. We met with two of them to hear their admittedly unpopular case for the rightness
of Russia.
"... The governments of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, if their countries are to survive, must give up their deluded hopes of reaching agreements with the United States. No such possibility exists on terms that the countries can accept. ..."
"... American foreign policy rests on threat and force. It is guided by the neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony, a doctrine that is inconsistent with accepting the sovereignty of other countries. ..."
"... The Russians -- especially the naive Atlanticist Integrationists -- should take note of the extreme hostility, indeed, to the point of insanity, directed at the Helsinki meeting across the entirety of the American political, media, and intellectual scene ..."
"... There is no support for Trump's agenda of peace with Russia in the US foreign policy arena. The president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, spoke for them all when he declared that "We must deal with Putin's Russia as the rogue state it is." Russia is a " rogue state" simply because Russia does not accept Washington's overlordship. ..."
"... There is no support even in Trump's own government for normalizing relations with Russia unless the neoconservative definition of normal relations is used. By normal relations neoconservatives mean a vassal state relationship with Washington. That, and only that, is "normal." Russia can have normal relations with America only on the basis of this definition of normal. Sooner or later Putin and Lavrov will have to acknowledge this fact. ..."
"... A lie repeated over and over becomes a fact. That is what has happened to Russiagate. Despite the total absence of any evidence, it is now a fact in America that Putin himself put Trump in the Oval Office. That Trump met with Putin at Helsinki is considered proof that Trump is Putin's lackey, as the New York Times and many others now assert as self-evident. That Trump stood next to "the murderous thug Putin" and accepted Putin's word that Russia did not interfere in the election of the US president is regarded as double proof that Trump is in Putin's pocket and that the Russiagate story is true. ..."
The governments of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, if their countries are to
survive, must give up their deluded hopes of reaching agreements with the United States. No
such possibility exists on terms that the countries can accept.
American foreign policy rests on threat and force. It is guided by the neoconservative
doctrine of US hegemony, a doctrine that is inconsistent with accepting the sovereignty of
other countries. The only way that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea can reach an agreement
with Washington is to become vassals like the UK, all of Europe, Canada, Japan, and
Australia.
The Russians -- especially the naive Atlanticist Integrationists -- should take note of the
extreme hostility, indeed, to the point of insanity, directed at the Helsinki meeting across
the entirety of the American political, media, and intellectual scene. Putin is incorrect that
US-Russian relations are being held hostage to an internal US political struggle between the
two parties. The Republicans are just as insane and just as hostile to President Trump's effort
to improve American-Russian relations as the Democrats, as Donald
Jeffries reminds us .
The American rightwing is just as opposed as the leftwing. Only a few experts, such as
Stephen Cohen and Amb. Jack Matlock , President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union, have
spoken out in support of Trump's attempt to reduce the dangerous tensions between the nuclear
powers. Only a few pundits have explained the actual facts and the stakes.
There is no support for Trump's agenda of peace with Russia in the US foreign policy arena.
The president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, spoke for them all when he
declared that "We must deal with Putin's Russia as the rogue state it is." Russia is a " rogue state" simply because Russia does not accept Washington's overlordship.
Not for any other reason.
There is no support even in Trump's own government for normalizing relations with Russia
unless the neoconservative definition of normal relations is used. By normal relations
neoconservatives mean a vassal state relationship with Washington. That, and only that, is
"normal." Russia can have normal relations with America only on the basis of this definition of
normal. Sooner or later Putin and Lavrov will have to acknowledge this fact.
A lie repeated over and over becomes a fact. That is what has happened to Russiagate.
Despite the total absence of any evidence, it is now a fact in America that Putin himself put
Trump in the Oval Office. That Trump met with Putin at Helsinki is considered proof that Trump
is Putin's lackey, as the New York Times and many others now assert as self-evident. That Trump
stood next to "the murderous thug Putin" and accepted Putin's word that Russia did not
interfere in the election of the US president is regarded as double proof that Trump is in
Putin's pocket and that the Russiagate story is true.
"... Propaganda works, proved effective time and again – why it's a key tool in America's deep state playbook. ..."
"... Virtually anything repeated enough, especially through the major media megaphone, gets most people to believe it – no matter how preposterous the claim. ..."
"... Normalized relations with Russia and world peace are anathema notions in Washington. Bipartisan neocons infesting the US political establishment want none of it. America's hegemonic aims matter most – wanting dominance over planet earth, its resources and populations. Endless wars of aggression, color revolutions, and other unlawful practices harmful to human rights and welfare are its favored strategies. ..."
Propaganda works, proved effective time and again – why it's a key tool in
America's deep state playbook.
Virtually anything repeated enough, especially through the major media megaphone, gets
most people to believe it – no matter how preposterous the claim.
Not a shred of evidence suggests Russia meddled in America's political process –
nothing.
Yet an earlier NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed most Americans believe the Russia
did it Big Lie. A months earlier Gallup poll showed three-fourths of Americans view Vladimir
Putin unfavorably.
Americans are easy marks to be fooled. No matter how many times they were deceived before,
they're easily manipulated to believe most anything drummed into their minds by the power of
repetitious propaganda – fed them through through the major media megaphone – in
lockstep with the official falsified narrative.
America's dominant media serve as a propaganda platform for US imperial and monied interests
– acting as agents of deception, betraying their readers and viewers time and again
instead of informing them responsibly.
CNN
presstitute Poppy Harlow played a clip on air of Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asking Putin
in Helsinki the following question:
"Did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials
to help him do that?"
Putin said: "Yes," he wanted Trump to win "because he talked about bringing the US-Russia
relationship back to normal," as translated from his Russian language response.
Here's the precise translation of his remark:
"Yes, I wanted him to win, because he talked about the need to normalize US-Russia
relations," adding:
"Isn't it natural to have sympathy towards a man who wants to restore relations with your
country? That's normal."
Putin did not address the fabricated official narrative notion that he directed his
officials to help Trump win. Yet CNN's Harlow claimed otherwise, falsely claiming he ordered
Kremlin officials to help Trump triumph over Hillary.
He did nothing of the kind or say it, nor did any other Kremlin officials. No evidence
proves otherwise – nothing but baseless accusations supported only by the power of
deceptive propaganda.
Time and again, CNN, the NYT, and rest of America's dominant media prove themselves
untrustworthy.
They consistently abandon journalism the way it's supposed to be, notably on geopolitical
issues, especially on war and peace and anything about Russia.
After rejecting, or at least doubting, the official narrative about alleged Russian meddling
in the US political process to aid his election, Trump backtracked post-Helsinki –
capitulating to deep state power.
First in the White House, he said he misspoke abroad – then on CBS News Wednesday
night, saying it's "true," deplorably adding:
Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, and he "would" hold Russian President
Vladimir Putin responsible for the interference – that didn't occur, he failed to
stress.
GLOR: "You say you agree with US intelligence that Russia meddled in the election in
2016."
TRUMP: "Yeah and I've said that before, Jeff. I have said that numerous times before, and
I would say that is true, yeah."
GLOR: "But you haven't condemned Putin, specifically. Do you hold him personally
responsible?"
TRUMP: "Well, I would, because he's in charge of the country. Just like I consider myself
to be responsible for things that happen in this country. So certainly as the leader of a
country you would have to hold him responsible, yes."
GLOR: "What did you say to him?"
TRUMP: "Very strong on the fact that we can't have meddling. We can't have any of that
– now look. We're also living in a grown-up world."
"Will a strong statement – you know – President Obama supposedly made a strong
statement. Nobody heard it."
"What they did hear is a statement he made to Putin's very close friend. And that
statement was not acceptable. Didn't get very much play relatively speaking. But that
statement was not acceptable."
"But I let him know we can't have this. We're not going to have it, and that's the way
it's going to be."
There you have it – Trump capitulating to America's deep state over Russia on national
television.
From day one in power, he caved to the national security state, Wall Street, and other
monied interests over popular ones.
The sole redeeming part of his agenda was wanting improved relations with Russia and
Vladimir Putin personally – preferring peace over possible confrontation, wanting the
threat of nuclear war defused.
Despite tweeting post-Helsinki that he and Putin "got along well which truly bothered many
haters who wanted to see a boxing match," his remarks on CBS News showed he'll continue dirty
US business as usual toward Russia.
Anything positive from summit talks appears abandoned by capitulating to deep state power
controlling him and his agenda.
Normalized relations with Russia and world peace are anathema notions in Washington.
Bipartisan neocons infesting the US political establishment want none of it. America's
hegemonic aims matter most – wanting dominance over planet earth, its resources and
populations. Endless wars of aggression, color revolutions, and other unlawful practices
harmful to human rights and welfare are its favored strategies.
Will Americans go along with sacrificing vital freedoms for greater security from invented
enemies – losing both? Will US belligerent confrontation with Russia inevitably follow?
Will mushroom-shaped denouement eventually kill us all?
*
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research
based in Chicago.
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US
Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III. http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html "
... I had the privilege of attending the first by invitation only
screening of a documentary"The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes," produced by
Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov. The documentary had been blocked in Europe through lawsuits
filed by some of the parties linked to the prevailing narrative but the Newseum in
Washington eventually
proved willing to permit rental of a viewing room in spite of threats coming from the same
individuals to sue to stop the showing.
Nekrasov by his own account had intended to do a documentary honoring Magnitsky and his
employers as champions for human rights within an increasing fragile Russian democracy. He had
previously produced documentaries highly critical of Russian actions in Chechnya, Georgia and
Ukraine, and also regarding the assassinations of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in
London as well as of journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow. He has been critical of Vladimir
Putin personally and was not regarded as someone who was friendly to the regime, quite the
contrary. Some of his work
has been banned in Russia.
After his documentary was completed using actors to play the various real-life personalities
involved and was being edited Nekrasov returned to some issues that had come up during the
interviews made during the filming. The documentary records how he sought clarification of what
he was reading and hearing but one question inevitably led to another.
The documentary began with the full participation of American born UK citizen William
Browder, who virtually served as narrator for the first section that portrayed the widely
accepted story on Magnitsky. Browder portrays himself as a human rights campaigner dedicated to
promoting the legacy of Sergei Magnitsky, but he is inevitably much more complicated than that.
The grandson of Earl Browder the former General Secretary of the American Communist Party,
William Browder
studied economics at the University of Chicago, and obtained an MBA from Stanford.
From the beginning, Browder concentrated on Eastern Europe, which was beginning to open up
to the west. In 1989 he took a position at highly respected Boston Consulting Group dealing
with reviving failing Polish socialist enterprises. He then worked as an Eastern Europe analyst
for Robert Maxwell, the unsavory British press magnate and Mossad spy, before joining the
Russia team at Wall Street's Salomon Brothers in 1992.
He left Salomon in 1996 and partnered with the controversial Edmond Safra, the
Lebanese-Brazilian-Jewish banker who died in a mysterious fire in 1999, to set up Hermitage
Capital Management Fund. Hermitage is registered in tax havens Guernsey and the Cayman Islands.
It is a hedge fund that was focused on "investing" in Russia, taking advantage initially of the
loans-for-shares scheme under Boris
Yeltsin, and then continuing to profit greatly during the early years of Vladimir Putin's
ascendancy. By 2005 Hermitage was the largest foreign investor in Russia.
Browder had renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1997 and became a British citizen apparently
to avoid American taxes, which are levied on worldwide income. In
his bookRed Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man's Fight for
Justice he depicts himself as an honest and honorable Western businessman attempting to
function in a corrupt Russian business world. That may or may not be true, but the
loans-for-shares scheme that made him his initial fortune has been correctly characterized as
the epitome of corruption, an arrangement whereby foreign investors worked with local oligarchs
to strip the former Soviet economy of its assets paying pennies on each dollar of value. Along
the way, Browder
was reportedly involved in making false representations on official documents and
bribery.
As a consequence of what came to be known as the Magnitsky scandal, Browder was eventually
charged by the Russian authorities for fraud and tax evasion. He was banned from re-entering
Russia in 2005, even before Magnitsky died, and began to withdraw his assets from the country.
Three companies controlled by Hermitage were eventually seized by the authorities, though it is
not clear if any assets remained in Russia. Browder himself was convicted of tax evasion in
absentia in 2013 and sentenced to nine years in prison.
Browder has assiduously, and mostly successfully, made his
case that he and Magnitsky have been the victims of Russian corruption both during and
since that time, though there have been skeptics
regarding many details of his personal narrative. He has been able to sell his tale to leading
American politicians like Senators John McCain, Ben Cardin and ex-Senator Joe Lieberman, always
receptive when criticizing Russia, as well as to a number of European parliamentarians and
media outlets. But there is, inevitably, another side to the story, something quite different,
which Andrei Nekrasov presents to the viewer.
Nekrasov has discovered what he believes to be holes in the narrative that has been
carefully constructed and nurtured by Browder. He provides documents and also an interview with
Magnitsky's mother maintaining that there is no clear evidence that he was beaten or tortured
and that he died instead due to the failure to provide him with medicine while in prison or
treatment shortly after he had a heart attack. A subsequent investigation ordered by then
Russian President Dimitri Medvedev in 2011 confirmed that Magnitsky had not received medical
treatment, contributing to this death, but could not confirm that he had been beaten even
though there was suspicion that that might have been the case.
Nekrasov also claims that much of the case against the Russian authorities is derived from
English language translations of relevant documents provided by Browder himself. The actual
documents sometimes say something quite different. Magnitsky is referred to as an accountant,
not a lawyer, which would make sense as a document of his deposition is apparently part of a
criminal investigation of possible tax fraud, meaning that he was no whistleblower and was
instead a suspected criminal.
Other discrepancies cited by Nekrasov include documents demonstrating that Magnitsky did not
file any complaint about police and other government officials who were subsequently cited by
Browder as participants in the plot, that the documents allegedly stolen from Magnitsky to
enable the plotters to transfer possession of three Hermitage controlled companies were
irrelevant to how the companies eventually were transferred and that someone else employed by
Hermitage other than Magnitsky actually initiated investigation of the fraud.
In conclusion, Nekrasov believes there was indeed a huge fraud related to Russian taxes but
that it was not carried out by corrupt officials. Instead, it was deliberately ordered and
engineered by Browder with Magnitsky, the accountant, personally developing and implementing
the scheme used to carry out the deception.
To be sure, Browder and his international legal team have presented documents in the case
that contradict much of what Nekrasov has presented in his film. But in my experience as an
intelligence officer I have learned that documents are easily forged, altered, or destroyed so
considerable care must be exercised in discovering the provenance and authenticity of the
evidence being provided. It is not clear that that has been the case. It might be that Browder
and Magnitsky have been the victims of a corrupt and venal state, but it just might be the
other way around. In my experience perceived wisdom on any given subject usually turns out to
be incorrect.
Given the adversarial positions staked out, either Browder or Nekrasov is essentially right,
though one should not rule out a combination of greater or lesser malfeasance coming from both
sides. But certainly Browder should be confronted more intensively on the nature of his
business activities while in Russia and not given a free pass because he is saying things about
Russia and Putin that fit neatly into a Washington establishment profile. As soon as folks
named McCain, Cardin and Lieberman jump on a cause it should be time to step back a bit and
reflect on what the consequences of proposed action might be.
One should ask why anyone who has a great deal to gain by having a certain narrative
accepted should be completely and unquestionably trusted, the venerable Cui bono?
standard. And then there is a certain evasiveness on the part of Browder. The film shows him
huffing and puffing to explain himself at times and he has
avoided being served with subpoenas on allegations connected to the Magnitsky fraud that
are making their way through American courts. In one case he can be seen on YouTube running away from a server,
somewhat unusual behavior if he has nothing to hide.
A number of Congressmen and staffers were invited to the showing of the Nekrasov documentary
at the Newseum but it is not clear if any of them actually bothered to attend,
demonstrating once again how America's legislature operates inside a bubble of willful
ignorance of its own making. Nor was the event reported in the local "newspaper of record" the
Washington Post , which has been consistently hostile to Russia on its editorial and
news pages.
A serious effort that a friend of mine described as "hell breaking loose" was also made
to disrupt the question and answer session that followed the viewing of the film, with a
handful of clearly coordinated hecklers interrupting and making it impossible for others to
speak. The organized intruders, who may have gained entry using invitations that were sent to
congressmen, suggested that someone at least considers this game being played out to have very
high stakes.
The point is that neither Nekrasov nor Browder should be taken at their word. Either or both
might be lying and the motivation to make mischief is very high if even a portion of the stolen
$230 million is still floating around and available. And by the same measure, no Congressman or
even the President should trust the established narrative, particularly if they persist in
their hypocritical conceit that global human
Gee, I know G. was a spook of some kind and I always read his articles wherever they turn
up.. but how could he get this wrong unless on purpose: Magnitsky was no lawyer. He was an
accountant and he was a co-conspirator in the frauds being perpetrated that resulted in the
charges. He died alright but there is some shading to the thesis that the fraudsters had him
bumped off because they knew he was a weak link. They bribed somebody in the prison to deny
him medical care. Hey, much like they did to Milosevic knowing they couldn't convict him of
their trumped up charges. Why would G. get wrong such a simple thing to determine? Hmm. I
wonder..
Why would you continue the falsehood of calling Magnitsky a lawyer? He was not a lawyer.
Ever. He is and was an accountant and will remain that until Judgement Day. On the other
other hand, calling him a lawyer is perhaps an even greater insult than calling him an
accountant.
"... Read the first piece in Patrick Cockburn's latest series, 'Catastrophic drought threatens Iraq as major dams in surrounding countries cut off water to its great rivers', here . ..."
"... Part II, 'For this Iraqi tribe massacred by Isis, fear of the group's return is a constant reality', here ..."
"... Part III, 'After series of calamitous defeats, is Isis about to lose its last town?', here . ..."
"... Part III, 'Iraq unrest: Chaos reigns in the country even Saddam Hussein 'found difficult to rule', here. ..."
"The people want an end to the parties," chanted protesters, adapting a famous slogan of the
Arab Spring , as
they stormed the governor's office and the international airport in the Shia holy city of
Najaf.
Part of the wave of demonstrations sweeping across central and southern Iraq, they demanded
jobs, electricity, water and an end to the mass theft of Iraq's oil wealth by the political parties.
Beginning on 8 July, the protests are the biggest and most prolonged in a country where
anti-government action has usually taken the form of armed insurgency.
The demonstrations are taking place in the heartlands of the Shia majority, reflecting their
outrage at living on top of some of the world's largest oilfields, but seeing their families
barely survive in squalor and poverty.
The protests began in Basra, Iraq's third largest city which is at the centre of 70 per cent
of its oil production. A hand-written placard held up by one demonstrator neatly expresses
popular frustration. It read:
"2,500,000 barrels daily
Price of each barrel = $70
2,500,000 x $70 = zero !!
Sorry Pythagoras, we are in Basra"
The protests quickly spread to eight other provinces, including Najaf, Kerbala, Nasariya and
Amara.
In several places, the offices of the Dawa Party, to which the Prime Minister Haider
al-Abadi belongs, were burned or attacked, along with those of parties whom people blame for
looting oil revenues worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the 15 years since the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein.
As the situation deteriorated, Mr Abadi flew to Basra on 13 July, promising to make $3bn
available to improve services and provide more jobs. After he left, his hotel was invaded by
protesters.
The credibility of almost all Iraqi politicians is at a low ebb, the acute feeling of
disillusionment illustrated by the low 44.5 per cent turnout in the parliamentary election on
12 May that produced no outright winner.
The poll was
unexpectedly topped by the Sairoun movement of the populist nationalist cleric, Muqtada
al-Sadr, who has encouraged his followers to start protests against government corruption and
lack of services since 2015.
The Sadrists, who emphasised their socially and economically progressive programme by
allying themselves with the Iraqi Communist Party in the election, are playing a role in the
current protests.
The demonstrations are also backed by the prestigious Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. At ground
level, political activists and tribal leaders have set up a joint committee called "the
Coordination Board for Peaceful Protests and Demonstrations in Basra", its purpose being to
produce a list of demands, unite the protest movement, and keep their actions non-violent.
"The ends don't justify the means," says the committee in a statement. "Let us, being
oppressed, not lead to the oppression of others."
A list of 17 demands is headed by one asking for a government timetable for supplying water
and electricity, both of which are short at a time of year when the temperature sometime
exceeds 50C, making it one of the hottest places on earth.
Local people claim that the last time that the port city of Basra, once called the Venice of
the Gulf, had an adequate supply of drinking water was in 1982. Iran had been supplying some
extra electricity, but has cut this back because of its own needs and failure of Iraq to pay on
time.
The second demand of the protesters is for jobs with "priority to the competent sons of
Basra", the discharge of foreign labourers and employment for a quarter of people living in the
oilfields.
Lack of jobs is a source of continuing complaint all over Iraq. Much of its oil income
already goes on paying 4.5 million state employees, but between 400,000 and 420,000 young
people enter the workforce every year with little prospects of employment.
Anger towards the entire political class is intense because it is seen as a kleptocratic
group which syphoned off money in return for contracts that existed only on paper and produced
no new power plants, bridges or roads.
Political parties are at the centre of this corruption because they choose ministries,
according to their share of the vote in elections or their sectarian affiliation, which they
then treat as cash cows and sources of patronage and contracts.
Plundering like this and handing out of jobs to unqualified people means that many
government institutions have become incapable of performing any useful function.
Radical reform is difficult because the whole system is saturated by corruption and
incompetence. Technocrats without party backing who are parachuted into ministries become
isolated and ineffective.
One party leader told The Independent that he thought that the best that could be
done "would be to insist that the parties appoint properly qualified people to top jobs."
The defeat of Isis in 2017 with the recapture of Mosul means that Iraqis are no longer
absorbed in keeping their families safe so they have they have more time to consider
"corruption" – a word they use not just to mean bribery but the parasitic nature of the
government system as a whole.
There is a general mood of cynicism and dissatisfaction with the way things are run.
"Bad government, bad roads, bad weather, bad people," exclaimed one Iraqi friend driving on
an ill-maintained road.
Corrupt motives are ascribed to everything that happens: a series of unexplained fires in
Baghdad in June were
being ascribed to government employees stealing from state depots and then concealing their
crime by setting fire to the building and destroying it.
Given that the Iraqi security forces are primarily recruited from the areas in which the
protests are taking place, the government will need to be careful about the degree of
repression it can use safely.
The armed forces have been placed on high alert. Three regiments of the elite
Counter-Terrorism Service, which led the attack on Mosul and is highly regarded and well
disciplined, has been ordered south to cope with protests and away from places where there is
still residual activity by Isis.
The protests are largely spontaneous, but the Sadrists, whose offices have not been attacked
by crowds, want to put pressure on Mr Abadi, Dawa and other parties to form a coalition
government with a reform programme.
Many protesters express anti-Tehran slogans, tearing up pictures of Iranian spiritual
leaders such as Ayatollah Khomeini and the current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. They blame
Iran for supporting
corrupt parties and governments in Iraq.
Protesters have so far escalated their actions slowly, gathering at the entrances to the
major oil and gas facilities, but not disrupting the 3.6 million barrel a day production. If
this happens, it would affect a significant portion of world crude output.
Iraq's corrupt and dysfunctional governing system may be too set in its profitable ways to
be reformed, but, if the ruling elite wants to survive, it must give ordinary Iraqi a larger
share of the oil revenue cake.
Read the first piece in Patrick Cockburn's latest series, 'Catastrophic drought
threatens Iraq as major dams in surrounding countries cut off water to its great rivers',
here .
Part II, 'For this Iraqi tribe massacred by Isis, fear of the group's return is a
constant reality',
here
Part III, 'After series of calamitous defeats, is Isis about to lose its last town?',
here .
Part III, 'Iraq unrest: Chaos reigns in the country even Saddam Hussein 'found difficult
to rule',
here.
"Oh for the good old days when Saddam was running things."
Electricity production in Iraq overall is superior to what it
was during Saddam's rule. But availability is not 24/365, which is presumably what they're
demanding:
Prewar Baghdad had electricity 16 to 24 hours per day and was favored for distribution.
The remainder of Iraq received 4–8 hours of electricity per day.[6] Post war, Baghdad
no longer has priority and therefore both Baghdad and the country as a whole received on
average 15.5 hours of electricity per day as of February 2010.[7]
If they want some facsimile of Saddam's rule back, they could easily elect the Sunni Arab
parties to power. Which they haven't. Demonstrations were rare during Saddam's reign because
he killed the opposition and consigned those he did not kill to Abu Ghraib, where they were
raped and/or beaten to within an inch of their lives.
Shiites were unhappy with American occupation because they thought the only thing keeping
them from becoming a Shiite version of Saudi Arabia, economically-speaking was an American
plot to steal their oil and sow division in the country. After GI's left, they discovered,
through ISIS's long record of victories, that Sunni Arabs really, really don't like being
ruled by Shiites, and that Iraq's Sunni Arabs really are better at military endeavors than
the Shiites or the Kurds. They are fortunate that Uncle Sam came to their rescue, yet
again.
It's becoming clear that the Iraq's Shiite Arabs and Kurds could never have lifted the
Sunni Arab foot from their necks by their own efforts. The question is whether their history
books will ever reflect this truth.
"... Hazony responds with the obvious answer that control can be imposed on the unwilling even if the empire builders are not overtly annexing territory. Meanwhile, other neoconservatives have given the game away by pushing their imperialist position a bit further than Krauthammer's. Max Boot, for example , has been quite open in demanding "an American empire" built on ideological and military control even without outright annexation. ..."
"... The belief that the U.S. is a supremely good nation founded on universal principles has consequences that go well beyond electoral politics. Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated talk radio host and co-owner of the website Townhall.com, extols American exceptionalism, which he says springs from American values. ..."
Neoconservatives like Max Boot are fooling themselves if they think imposing 'values' on the rest of the world isn't a matter
of empire.
Recently while reading a book by an Israeli scholar named Yoram Hazony with the provocative title
The Virtue of Nationalism , I encountered
a distinction drawn by the late Charles
Krauthammer between empire building and American global democratic hegemony. Like the editors of the Weekly Standard ,
for which he periodically wrote, Krauthammer believed it was unfair to describe what he wanted to see done, which was having the
U.S. actively spread its own form of government throughout the world, as "imperialism." After all, Krauthammer said, he and those
who think like him "do not hunger for new territory," which makes it wrong to accuse them of "imperialism."
Hazony responds with the obvious answer that control can be imposed on the unwilling even if the empire builders are not overtly
annexing territory. Meanwhile, other neoconservatives have given the game away by pushing their imperialist position a bit further
than Krauthammer's. Max Boot, for
example , has been quite open in demanding "an American empire" built on ideological and military control even without outright
annexation.
The question that occurred to me while reading Krauthammer's proposal and Hazony's response (which I suspect would have been more
devastating had Hazony not been afraid of losing neoconservative friends and sponsors) is this one: how is this not imperialism?
Certainly the use of protectorates to increase the influence of Western powers in the non-Western world goes back a long time.
As far back as the Peloponnesian War, rival Greek city-states tried to impose their constitutional arrangements on weaker Greek societies
as a way of managing them politically. According to Xenophon, when the Athenians then surrendered to the Spartan commander Lysander
in 403 BC, they had two conditions imposed on them: taking down their great wall ( kathairein ta makra teixe ) and
installing a regime that looked like the Spartan one. Thus is arguing that territory has to be annexed outright in order for it to
become part of an American empire so utterly unconvincing.
One reason the views offered by Krauthammer and Boot did not elicit more widespread criticism -- and have enjoyed enthusiastic
favor among Republicans for decades, culminating in the oratorical wonders of George W. Bush -- may have been the embrace of another
neoconservative doctrine: "American exceptionalism." The belief that the U.S. is a supremely good nation founded on universal
principles has consequences that go well beyond electoral politics. Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated talk radio host and co-owner
of the website Townhall.com, extols American exceptionalism, which he says springs from American values.
Those values have "universal applicability,"
according to Prager, and are "eminently exportable." Glenn Beck has taken up
the same theme of "American exceptionalism"
as
an exportable "idea " that is meant for everyone on the planet. The "ideas" or "values" in question are variously defined by
the neoconservative media as "human rights," "universal equality," or just making sure everyone lives like us. Whatever it is, we
are told that to withhold it from the rest of the human race would be uncharitable. Our efforts to bring it to others therefore cannot
be dismissed as "imperialism" any more than the Spanish government of the 16th century thought it was doing wrong by forcing its
religion on indigenous people in the Americas.
Although I'm hardly a fan of his political views, former president Barack Obama once said something that I thought was self-evident
but that offended even members of his own party. According to Obama, "Americans believe they're exceptional. But the Brits and Greeks
believe they're special too." Obama was merely observing that it's okay for others to believe they're special, even if they're not
Americans imbued with "the idea." Yet his statement was received with such uproar that he felt compelled to backtrack. Speaking later
at West Point,
he made it clear that "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being." This from someone whom Fox News assures
us hated America and spent every minute of his presidency denying our greatness! (And, yes, I've heard the rejoinder to this: Obama
was only pretending to believe in the creed he dutifully recited.)
It might be argued (and has been by neoconservatives many times) that the U.S. is both morally superior and less dangerous than
ethnically defined societies because we advocate a "value" or "creed" that's accessible to the entire human race. But this is hardly
a recipe for peace as opposed to what Krauthammer called a "value-driven" relationship with the rest of the world. Australian journalist
Douglas Murray, in his intended encomium Neoconservatism: Why We Need It
, tries to praise his subjects but ends up describing a kind of global democratic jihadism. While Douglas admits that "socially,
economically, and philosophically" neoconservatism differs from traditional conservatism, he insists that it's something better.
He commends neoconservatives for wishing to convert the world to "values." Their primary goal, according to Murray, is the "erasing
[of] tyrannies and [the] spreading [of] democracy," an arduous task that requires "interventionism, nation-building, and many of
the other difficulties that had long concerned traditional conservatives."
Please tell me this is not what it obviously is: an invitation to war and empire building. The quest for hegemony always looks
the same, no matter what moral labels some choose to give it.
Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years. He
is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents .
Probably not so much to short-circuit democratic process that was short-circuited long before
them, but clearly they acted as the guardians of the neoliberal state.
Which confirm the iron law of oligarchy in the most direct way: not only the elite gradually
escapes all the democratic control, they use their power as oranized minority to defend the
status quo, not stopping at the most dirty dirty methods.
Russia-gate is becoming FBI-gate, thanks to the official release of unguarded text messages
between loose-lipped FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and his garrulous
girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. (Ten illustrative texts from their exchange appear at the end
of this article.)
Despite his former job as chief of the FBI's counterintelligence section, Strzok had the
naive notion that texting on FBI phones could not be traced. Strzok must have slept through
"Surity 101." Or perhaps he was busy texting during that class. Girlfriend Page cannot be happy
at being misled by his assurance that using office phones would be a secure way to conduct
their affair(s).
It would have been unfortunate enough for Strzok and Page to have their adolescent-sounding
texts merely exposed, revealing the reckless abandon of star-crossed lovers hiding (they
thought) secrets from cuckolded spouses, office colleagues, and the rest of us. However, for
the never-Trump plotters in the FBI, the official release of just a fraction (375) of almost
10,000 messages does incalculably more damage than that.
We suddenly have documentary proof that key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were
trying to short-circuit the U.S. democratic process. And that puts in a new and dark context
the year-long promotion of Russia-gate. It now appears that it was not the Russians trying to
rig the outcome of the U.S. election, but leading officials of the U.S. intelligence community,
shadowy characters sometimes called the Deep State.
... ... ...
Ironically, the Strzok-Page texts provide something that the Russia-gate investigation has
been sorely lacking: first-hand evidence of both corrupt intent and action. After months of
breathless searching for "evidence" of Russian-Trump collusion designed to put Trump in the
White House, what now exists is actual evidence that senior officials of the Obama
administration colluded to keep Trump out of the White House – proof of what old-time
gumshoes used to call "means, motive and opportunity."
"... And those who are crying "fake news" the most often and the most loudly and using that phrase to discredit anything they do not want to rebut with actual information -- those people are the most suspect. Just like those who cry "conspiracy theory" whenever they see a hypothesis that they do not want to have investigated and want to derail. ..."
"... It would not surprise me at all to learn that both of these phrases were cooked up in some corner of Langley to use to get control of the media. ..."
"... Instead of "dissidents" being labeled schizophrenic and sent to psychiatric wards, as in the USSR, they are labeled as conspiracy theorists and purveyors of "fake news" and the effect is about the same, minus the cost of upkeep in a ward. ..."
"Rather than yell at the top of one's lungs "Fake News" when they read a mainstream or
alternative media story, and immediately discount everything, people ought look CRITICALLY at
the facts, consider any bias, read other sources on the issue, and then draw their own
conclusions."
Absolutely. And those who are crying "fake news" the most often and the most loudly and
using that phrase to discredit anything they do not want to rebut with actual information --
those people are the most suspect. Just like those who cry "conspiracy theory" whenever they
see a hypothesis that they do not want to have investigated and want to derail.
It would not
surprise me at all to learn that both of these phrases were cooked up in some corner of
Langley to use to get control of the media.
Instead of "dissidents" being labeled
schizophrenic and sent to psychiatric wards, as in the USSR, they are labeled as conspiracy
theorists and purveyors of "fake news" and the effect is about the same, minus the cost of
upkeep in a ward.
On just about every issue, in 2016, candidate Trump ran in opposition to Sen. Lindsey
Graham. Donald Trump won the presidency; Lindsey Graham quit the race with a near-zero
popularity, as reflected in the polls.
The People certainly loathe the senator from South Carolina. A poll
conducted subsequently found that Graham was among the least popular senators.
No wonder. Graham is reliably wrong about most things.
But being both misguided and despised have done nothing to diminish Sen. Graham's popularity
with Big Media, left and right. Thus were his pronouncements accorded the customary reverence,
during a July 10 segment, on Fox News' "The Story."
Which is when he told anchor Martha MacCallum that, "Putin is not doing anything good in
Syria."
Then again, Lindsey is being consistent. The revival of "one of the world's oldest Christian
communities," in Syria , is not something the senator we've come to know and loathe
would celebrate.
It's true. "A new Syria is emerging from the rubble of war,"
reports The Economist, a magazine which is every bit as liberal and Russophobic as Graham
and his political soul mate, John McCain, but whose correspondents on the ground -- in Aleppo,
Damascus and Homs -- have a far greater fidelity to the truth than the terrible two.
"In Homs, the Christian quarter is reviving. Churches have been lavishly restored; a large
crucifix hangs over the main street." 'Groom of Heaven,' proclaims a billboard featuring a
photo of a Christian soldier killed in the seven-year conflict. And, in their sermons, Orthodox
patriarchs praise Mr. Assad for saving the Christian communities."
Don't tell the ailing McCain. It'll only make him miserable, but thanks to Putin, Assad "now
controls Syria's spine, from Aleppo in the north to Damascus in the south -- what French
colonists once called la Syrie utile (useful Syria). The rebels are confined to pockets
along the southern and northern borders."
"Homs, like all of the cities recaptured by the government, now belongs mostly to Syria's
victorious minorities: Christians, Shias and Alawites (an esoteric offshoot of Shia Islam
from which Mr. Assad hails). These groups banded together against the rebels, who are nearly
all Sunni, and chased them out of the cities." ("
How a victorious Bashar al-Assad is changing Syria ," The Economist, June 28, 2018.)
A Christian teacher in Homs rejoices, for she no longer must live alongside neighbors "who
overnight called you a kafir (infidel)."
The teacher's venom is directed at John McCain's beloved "rebels." Internet selfies abound
of McCain mixing it up with leading Sunni "rebels," against whom Putin and Bashar al-Assad were
doing battle. Who knows? McCain may even have taken a pic with the infamous "rebel" who
decapitated Syrian Franciscan monk
Father Francois Murad .
Ignoramuses McCain and Graham had both urged the US to send weapons to the "rebels" -- even
as it transpired that the lovelies with whom McCain was cavorting on his sojourns in Syria
liked to feast on the
lungs of their pro-Assad enemies. A devotee of multiculturalism, Lindsey could probably
explain the idiosyncratic cultural symbolism of such savagery.
Infested as it is by globalist ideologues, the permanent establishment of American foreign
policy refuses to consider regional, religious, local, even tribal, dynamics in the Middle
East. In particular, that the "good" guys in Syria -- a relative term -- are not the Islamist
"rebels," with whom the senior Republican senator from Arizona was forever frolicking; but the
secular Alawites.
You likely didn't know that Alawites like al-Assad also "flinch at Shia evangelizing. 'We
don't pray, don't fast [during Ramadan] and drink alcohol,' says one."
Under Putin's protection, the more civilized Alawite minority (read higher IQ), which has
governed Syria since 1966, is in charge again. Duly,
reports the anti-Assad Economist, "Government departments are functioning. electricity and
water supplies are more reliable than in much of the Middle East. Officials predict that next
year's natural-gas production will surpass pre-war levels. The railway from Damascus to Aleppo
might resume operations this summer. The National Museum in Damascus, which locked up its
prized antiquities for protection, is preparing to reopen to the public."
Good thinking. The "rebels" would have blown Syria's prized antiquities to smithereens.
Given that Islamists are not in charge, the specter of men leaving their women and fleeing
Syria has had an upside. Syrian women dominate the workforce. Why, they're even working as
"plumbers, taxi-drivers and bartenders." Had Sen. Graham, his friends the "rebels," and their
Sunni state sponsors won -- Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar -- would this be possible? Turkey is
currently sheltering "Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group linked to al-Qaeda, and other Sunni
rebels."
Aligned against the Christian-Shia-Alawite alliance are Israel and America, too. They've
formed a protective perimeter around rebel holdouts.
Before the breakthrough, when Sunni rebels were gaining ground, Syria's "women donned
headscarves," and "non-Muslim businessmen bowed to demands from Sunni employees for prayer
rooms. But as the war swung their way, minorities regained their confidence." "Christian women
in Aleppo [now] show their cleavage, the internet is unrestricted and social-media apps allow
for unfettered communication. Students in cafés openly criticize the regime."
Contra the robotic sloganeering from Lindsey, Nikki Haley and the political establishment,
Russia has been pushing Bashar al-Assad to open up Syria's political process and allow for the
revival of "multiparty politics."
Alas, the once bitten Assad is twice shy. His attempts, a decade ago, to liberalize Syrian
politics resulted in the ascendancy of Sunni fundamentalism, aka Lindsey Grahamnesty's rebels.
(The nickname is for the Republican senator's laissez-faire immigration policies,
stateside.)
As has Russia called "for foreign forces to leave Syria," Iran's included. Iran commands
80,000 Shia militiamen in Syria. "Skirmishes between the [Iranian] militias and Syrian troops
have resulted in scores of deaths. Having defeated Sunni Islamists, army officers say they have
no wish to succumb to Shia ones."
It all boils down to national sovereignty. So as to survive the onslaught of the Sunni
fundamentalist majority, the endangered Alawite minority formed an alliance with the Iranian
Shia, also a minority among the Ummah. Now, civilized and secular Syrians want their country
back. In fact, many Syrian "Sunnis prefer Mr. Assad's secular rule to that of Islamist
rebels."
So it appears America and democracy have miraculously survived the dreaded Trump-Putin summit or Trump's meeting with his Russian
handler, as the neoliberal ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media would dearly like us all to believe. NATO has
not been summarily dissolved. Poland has not been invaded by Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... So it appears America and democracy have miraculously survived the dreaded Trump-Putin summit or Trump's meeting with his Russian handler, as the neoliberal ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media would dearly like us all to believe. NATO has not been summarily dissolved. Poland has not been invaded by Russia. ..."
"... And so, once again, Western liberals, and others obsessed with Donald Trump, having been teased into a painfully tumescent paroxysm of anticipation of some unimaginably horrible event that would finally lead to Trump's impeachment ..."
"... In the days and weeks leading up to the summit, the global capitalist ruling class Resistance deployed every weapon in its mighty arsenal to whip the Western masses up into a frenzy of anti-Putin-Nazi fervor ..."
So it appears America and democracy have miraculously survived the dreaded Trump-Putin summit or Trump's meeting with his
Russian handler, as the neoliberal ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media would dearly like us all to believe.
NATO has not been summarily dissolved. Poland has not been invaded by Russia.
The offices of The New York Times , The Washington Post , CNN, and MSNBC have not been stormed by squads of jackbooted Trumpian
Gestapo.
The Destabilization of the Middle East, the Privatization of Virtually Everything, the Conversion of the Planet into One Big Shopping
Mall, and other global capitalist projects are all going forward uninterrupted. Apart from Trump making a narcissistic, word-salad-babbling
jackass of himself, which he does on a more or less daily basis, nothing particularly apocalyptic happened.
And so, once again, Western liberals, and others obsessed with Donald Trump, having been teased into a painfully tumescent
paroxysm of anticipation of some unimaginably horrible event that would finally lead to Trump's impeachment (or his removal
from office by other means) were left standing around with their hysteria in their hands. It has become a sadistic ritual at this
point like a twisted, pseudo-Tantric exercise where the media get liberals all lathered up over whatever fresh horror Trump has just
perpetrated (or some non-story story they have invented out of whole cloth), build the tension for several days, until liberals are
moaning and begging for impeachment, or a full-blown CIA-sponsored coup, then pull out abruptly and leave the poor bastards writhing
in agony until the next time which is pretty much exactly what just happened.
In the days and weeks leading up to the summit, the global capitalist ruling class Resistance deployed every weapon in its
mighty arsenal to whip the Western masses up into a frenzy of anti-Putin-Nazi fervor. While continuing to flog the wildly popular
baby concentration
camp story (because the Hitler stimulus never fails to elicit a Pavlovian response from Americans, regardless of how often or
how blatantly you use it), the corporate media began hammering hard on the "Trump is a Russian Agent" hysteria. (Normally, the corporate
media alternates between the Hitler hysteria and the Russia hysteria so as not to completely short-circuit the already scrambled
brains of Western liberals, but given
the
imminent threat of a peace deal , they needed to go the whole hog this time and paint this summit as a secret, internationally
televised assignation between Hitler and well, Hitler).
"... We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People ..."
"... This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Zen Cash ; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; LibertyStickers.com ; and ExpandDesigns.com/Scott . ..."
Peter van Buren discusses the media reaction to President Trump's recent meeting
with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. He compares the entire story of Russian collusion to the
birther conspiracy
movement , in that swaths of Americans have been swept up in a campaign against the
president with very little real evidence presented to support the claims. Van Buren argues that
the divisiveness about Trump being a Russian agent is harmful for the country, and at this
point Robert Mueller and the intelligence community need to "put up or shut up" -- either
present the clear evidence that Trump worked with the Russians, or admit that there is no such
evidence. He goes on to discuss the DNC email leak, Hillary Clinton's private email server, and
the recent indictment of 12 Russian operatives.
"EXCLUSIVE: Ex-British ambassador who is now a WikiLeaks operative claims Russia did NOT
provide Clinton emails – they were handed over to him at a D.C. park by an intermediary
for 'disgusted' Democratic whistleblowers" (
Daily Mail )
Those measures and the resulting uncertainty are prompting some European countries to go
their own way on major industry projects, including the development of a next-generation
fighter jet, potentially leaving U.S. firms behind.
"I think it is forcing Europe together in ways that have unanticipated consequences for the
U.S. defense industry," said Byron Callan, an analyst with Capital Alpha Partners.
The aerospace and defense industry is a huge driver of U.S. jobs and economic growth. In
2017 alone, it generated $865 billion, supporting 2.4 million high-paying American jobs. The
industry produced a positive trade balance of $86 billion in 2017, the largest of any U.S.
industry, which reduced the country's trade deficit by 10 percent.
It is also an important component of U.S. foreign policy. Arms sales are key to
strengthening security partnerships and improving military cooperation with allies.
"Partners who procure American weaponry are more capable of fighting alongside us and
ultimately more capable of protecting themselves with fewer American boots on the ground,"
Peter Navarro, the White House director of trade policy, said during an April press
conference.
So it came as no surprise when the Trump administration announced the decision to send a
large delegation to help sell U.S. products at Farnborough, including top officials such as
Navarro. The administration also used the opportunity to roll out the Conventional Arms
Transfer (CAT) Policy, also known as the "Buy America" plan, an initiative to improve U.S. arms
transfer processes and increase the competitiveness of U.S.-made products.
But the U.S. government showing at Farnborough was disappointing from the start of the
weeklong exhibition Monday. Navarro pulled out at the last minute, as did Ellen Lord, the
Pentagon's top weapons buyer; Heidi Grant, the U.S. Air Force's head of international affairs;
and other U.S. government officials. At the show itself, only five U.S. military aircraft
appeared on static display in the Defense Department corral that normally showcases products
built for the armed services by Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and other U.S. defense giants.
"... There are many modern myths. One of them is about the events of 1989 as being the culmination of a grand historical struggle for freedom and liberty. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For years prior to 1989 the West through a combination of both legal business and criminal activity had interpenetrated the Communist elites with lucrative deals and promises of all kinds. ..."
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
-- Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar"
There are many modern myths. One of them is about the events of 1989 as being the
culmination of a grand historical struggle for freedom and liberty. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For years prior to 1989 the West through a combination of both legal business and criminal
activity had interpenetrated the Communist elites with lucrative deals and promises of all
kinds.
This situation was even more pronounced in "non-aligned" Yugoslavia who for years had
maintained CIA and American and West European business contacts.
In effect, the "cold war" witnessed a rapid convergence between the economic and power
interests of both Western and Communist elites.
The "Communists" (in name only of course) quickly realized the economic benefits available
to them through at times open at times clandestine cooperation with Western business/criminal
interests.
Eventually, Communist elites realized that they had an unprecedented economic opportunity on
their hands: state privatization made possible, in part, with active Western participation.
For them, "Freedom" meant the freedom to get rich beyond their wildest dreams.
And the 1990's were just that. A paradise for thieving on an unimaginable scale all under
the rubric of the rebirth of "capitalism and freedom".
The true outcome of that decade was that the old communist elites not only retained their
social and political power behind the scenes; they also were able to enrich themselves beyond
anything the communist dictatorships could ever hope to offer them in the past.
Yes, the price was to give up imperial, national, and ideological ambitions. But it was a
very small price to pay; since the East European elites had ceased to believe in any of those
things years earlier.
The only firm belief they still held was the economic betterment of themselves and their
families through the acquisition by any means of as many asset classes as possible. In effect,
they became the mirror image of their "enemy" the "imperialist capitalist West".
This was not a case of historical dialectics but historical convergence. What appeared as a
world divided was actually a world waiting to be made whole through the basest of criminal
business activity.
But being clever thieves they knew how to hide themselves and their doings behind
superficially morally impeccable figures such as Vaclav Havel and Lech Wałęsa, to
name just a few. These "dissidents" would be the faces they would use to make a good part of
the world believe that 1989 was a narrative of freedom and not outright pubic theft which it
was.
Yes, people in the east, even in Russia, are freer now than they were. But it should never
be forgotten that the events of 1989/1990 were not even remotely about those revolutionary
dreams.
It was about something much more mundane and sordid. It was about greed. It was about the
maintenance of power. And finally it was about money.
How deep has the Western nexus of power and wealth gone into the heart of the East? So far
indeed that one can easily question to what extent a country like Russia is truly a "national"
state anymore and rather just a territory open to exploitation by both local and global
elites.
For that matter, we can ask the same question about the USA.
On the morning of the summit, Charles M. Blow, maestro of alliteration and subtlety, in
The New York Times (which, we must remember, holds itself to the highest journalistic
standards and in no way resembles a rabble-rousing tabloid), published this impassioned piece
entitled "
Trump, Treasonous Traitor ," accusing the President of "betraying the nation," and
basically demanding that he be tried for treason. "America is under attack," Blow announces,
"and its president absolutely refuses to defend it."
If Mother Jones ' David Corn has his way, Senator Rand Paul, who Corn denounces as "a
traitor," would also be taken outside and shot for the crime of noting that the Attack on
America® Russia allegedly perpetrated is fairly standard clandestine behavior, engaged in
by most developed nations, including the United States of America,
whose history of election interference, coup-fomenting, assassinations, and other, more
hamfisted forms of regime change is common knowledge, or at least it was, until the ruling
classes and the corporate media turned the majority of Western liberals into paranoid
McCarthyite fanatics denouncing anyone who questions the honesty of the US Intelligence
Community as a "traitor," and seeing Russians and Nazis coming out of the woodwork.
"... The documents had been doubted for some linguistic reasons discussed by Gilbert Doctorow who comes to a reasonable conclusion: "Bill Browder['s] intensity and the time he was devoting to anti-Russian sanctions in Europe was in no way comparable to the behaviour of a top level international businessman. It was clear to me that some other game was in play. But at the time, no one could stand up and suggest the man was a fraud, an operative of the intelligence agencies. ..."
"... We do not know whether Browder is, or had been, a spy. This should not surprise us, as he was closely connected to Maxwell, Safra and Berezovsky, the financiers with strong ties in the intelligence community. ..."
"... Perhaps he outlived his usefulness, Mr Browder did. He started the Cold war, now is the time to keep it in its healthy limits and to avoid a nuclear disaster or rapid armaments race. This is the task we may hope will be entertained by the next US President, Mr Donald Trump. ..."
Chapeau, Mr Browder! Hats off for this incredible man. Last month, he succeeded in stopping
a film screening in the European parliament and took off a few articles from American web
sites. This week, he turned the only US screening of a film critical to his version of events
into
a ruckus . No freedom of speech for his enemies! His lawyers prowl around and issue summons
to whoever digs in his sordid affairs. His hacks re-wrote his Wikipedia entry,
expunging even discussions of the topic: despite
hundreds of edits, nothing survived but the official version. Only a few powerful men succeed
purifying their record to such an extent. Still, good fortune (a notoriously flighty lady) is
about to desert Mr Browder.
Who is this extremely influential man? A businessman, a politician, a spy? The American-born
Jewish tycoon William Browder, says The Jewish
Chronicle , considers himself Putin's Number One enemy. For him, Putin is "no friend of the
Jews", "cold-blooded killer" and even "criminal dictator who is not too different from Hitler,
Mussolini or Gadhafi". More to a point, Browder is the man who contributed most to the new cold
war between the West and Russia. The roots were there, still he made them blossom. If the US
and Russia haven't yet exchanged nuclear salvos, do not blame Browder: he tried. For a valid
reason, too: he was hit by cruel Hitler-like Mr Putin into his most susceptible spot, namely
his pocket. Or was there even a better reason?
Browder, a grandson of the US Communist leader, came to Russia at its weakest point after
the Soviet collapse, and grabbed an enormous fortune by opaque financial transactions. Such
fortunes are not amassed by the pure of spirit. He was a ruthless man who did as much as any
oligarch to enrich himself.
Eventually he ran afoul of Mr Putin, who was (and is) very tolerant of oligarchs as long as
they play by the rules. The oligarchs would not be oligarchs if they would found that an easy
condition. Some of them tried to fight back: Khodorkovsky landed in jail, Berezovsky and
Gusinsky went to exile. Browder had a special position: he was the only Jewish oligarch in
Russia who never bothered to acquire the Russian citizenship. He was barred from returning to
Russia, and his companies were audited and found wanting.
As you'd expect, huge tax evasion was discovered. Browder thought that as long as he sucked
up to Putin, he'd get away with bloody murder, let alone tax evasion. He was mistaken. Putin is
nobody's fool. Flatterers do not get a free ride in Putin's Russia. And Browder became too big
for his boots.
It turned out that he did two unforgivable things. Russians were afraid the foreigners would
buy all their assets for a song, using favourable exchange rates and lack of native capital, as
had happened in the Baltic states and other ex-Communist East European countries. In order to
avoid that, shares of Russian blue-chip companies (Gazprom and suchlike) were traded among
Russian citizens only. Foreigners had to pay much more. Browder bought many such shares via
Russian frontmen, and he was close to getting control over Russian oil and gas. Putin suspected
that he had acted in the interests of big foreign oil companies, trying to repeat the feat of
Mr Khodorkovsky.
His second mistake was being too greedy. Russian taxation is very low; but Browder did not
want to pay even this low tax. He hired Mr Magnitsky, an experienced auditor, who used
loopholes in the Russian tax code in order to avoid taxes altogether. Magnitsky established
dummy companies based in tax-free zones of Russia, such as pastoral Kalmykia, small, Buddhist,
and autonomous. Their tax-free status had been granted in order to improve their economy and
reduce unemployment; however, Browder's companies did not contribute to economy and did not
employ people; they were paper dummies swiftly bankrupted by the owner.
Another Magnitsky trick was to form companies fronted by handicapped people who were also
freed from paying tax. In the film, some of these persons, often illiterate and of limited
intelligence, told the filmmaker of signing papers they could not read and of being paid a
little money for the millions passing through their account.
(Mr Browder does not deny these accusations; he says there is nothing criminal in trying to
avoid taxes. You can read about Browder and Magnitsky tricks
here and
here , and learn of the ways they attacked companies using minority shareholders and many
other neat schemes.)
Eventually Magnitsky's schemes were discovered and he was arrested. Ten months later, in
2009, he died in jail. By that time, his patron Mr Browder was abroad, and he began his
campaign against Russia hoping to regain his lost assets. He claimed Mr Magnitsky had been his
lawyer, who discovered misdeeds and the outright thievery of government officials, and was
imprisoned and tortured to death for this discovery.
The US Congress rushed in the Magnitsky Act, the first salvo of the Cold War Two. By this
act, any Russian person could be found responsible for Mr Magnitsky's untimely death and for
misappropriation of Browder's assets. His properties could be seized, bank accounts frozen
– without any legal process or representation. This act upset the Russians, who allegedly
had kept a cool $500 billion in the Western banks, so tit for tat started, and it goes to this
very day.
The actual effect of the Magnitsky Act was minimal: some twenty million dollars frozen and a
few dozen not-very-important people were barred from visiting the US. Its psychological effect
was much greater: the Russian elite realized that they could lose their money and houses
anytime – not in godless Putin's Russia, but in the free West, where they had preferred
to look for refuge. The Magnitsky Act paved the road to the Cyprus confiscation of Russian
deposits, to post-Crimean sanctions and to a full-fledged Cold War.
This was painful for Russia, as the first adolescent disillusionment in its love affair with
the West, and rather healthy, in my view. A spot of cold war (very cold, plenty of ice please)
is good for ordinary people, while its opposite, a Russian-American alliance, is good for the
elites. The worst times for ordinary Russian people were 1988-2001, when Russians were in love
with the US. The oligarchs stole everything there was to steal and sold it to the West for
pennies. They bought villas in Florida while Russia fell apart. That was bad time for
everybody: the US invaded Panama and Afghanistan unopposed, Iraq was sanctioned to death,
Yugoslavia was bombed and broken to pieces.
As the Cold War came back, some normalcy was restored: the Russians stopped the US from
destroying Syria, and Russian officials learned to love Sochi instead of Miami. For this reason
alone, Browder can be counted as a part of the power which eternally wills evil and eternally
works good. The Russian government, however, did not enjoy the cold shower.
The Russians denied any wrongdoing or even political reasons for dealing with Browder. They
say Magnitsky was not a lawyer, just an auditor and a tax code expert. They say that he was
arrested and tried for his tax avoidance schemes, and he died of natural causes while in jail.
Nobody listened to them, until they demanded that Browder testify under oath. He refused. For
two years
lawyers tried to give him a summons , but he was a quick runner. There are funny videos showing Browder
running away from summons.
Some good sense began to seep into American minds. The New Republicwondered : if
Browder was indeed the victim of persecution in Russia and had enlisted the U.S. justice system
to right the balance, why was he so reluctant to offer his sworn testimony in an American
courtroom?
Enter Mr Andrey Nekrasov , a
Russian dissident filmmaker. He made a few films considered to be highly critical of Russian
government. He alleged the FSB blew up houses in Moscow in order to justify the Chechnya war.
He condemned the Russian war against Georgia in 2008, and had been given a medal by Georgian
authorities. He did not doubt the official Western version of Browder-Magnitsky affair, and
decided to make a film about the noble American businessman and the brave Russian lawyer
fighting for human rights. The European organisations and parliamentarians provided the budget
for the film. They also expected the film to denounce Putin and glorify Magnitsky, the
martyr.
However, while making the film, Mr Nekrasov had his Road to Damascus moment. He realised
that the whole narrative was hinging on the unsubstantiated words of Mr Browder. After
painstaking research, he came to some totally different conclusions, and in his version,
Browder was a cheat who run afoul of law, while Magnitsky was his sidekick in those crimes.
Nekrasov discovered an interview Magnitsky gave in his jail. In this interview, the
accountant said he was afraid Browder would kill him to prevent him from denouncing Browder,
and would make him his scapegoat. It turned out Browder tried to bribe the journalist who made
the interview to have these words expunged. Browder was the main beneficiary of the
accountant's death, realised Nekrasov, while his investigators were satisfied with Magnitsky's
collaboration with them.
Nekrasov could not find any evidence that Magnitsky tried to investigate the misdeeds of
government officials. He was too busy covering his own tax evasion. And instead of fitting his
preconceived notions, Nekrasov made the film about what he learned. (
Here are some details of Nekrasov's film)
While the screening in the EU Parliament was been stopped by the powerful Mr Browder, in
Washington DC the men are made of sterner stuff. Despite Browder's threats the film was
screened , presented by the best contemporary American investigative journalist Seymour
Hersh, who is 80 if a day, and still going strong. One has to recognise that the US is second
to none for freedom of speech on the globe.
What makes Browder so powerful? He invests in politicians. This is probably a uniquely
Jewish quality: Jews outspend everybody in contributions to political figures. The Arabs will
spend more on horses and jets, the Russians prefer real estate, the Jews like politicians. The
Russian NTV channel reported that Browder lavishly financed the US lawmakers. Here they present alleged evidence of
money transfers: some hundred thousand dollars was given by Browder's structures officially to
the senators and congressmen in order to promote the Magnitsky Act.
Much bigger sums were transferred via good services of Brothers Ziff, mega-rich Jewish
American businessmen, said the researchers in two articles published on the
Veteran News Network and in The
Huffington Post .
These two articles were taken off the sites very fast under pressure of Browder's lawyers,
but they are available in the cache. They disclose the chief beneficiary of Browder's
generosity. This is Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland. He was the engine behind
Magnitsky Act legislation to such an extent that the Act has been often called the Cardin List . Cardin is a
fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton, also a cold warrior of good standing. More to a point,
Cardin is a prominent member of Israel Lobby.
Browder affair is a heady upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and
international crime. Almost all involved figures appear to be Jewish, not only Browder,
Brothers Ziff and Ben Cardin. Even his enemy, the beneficiary of the scam that (according to
Browder) took over his Russian assets is another Jewish businessman
Dennis Katsiv (he had been partly exonerated by a New York court as is well described in
this thoughtful
piece).
Browder began his way to riches under the patronage of a very rich and very crooked Robert
Maxwell, a Czech-born Jewish businessman who assumed a Scots name. Maxwell stole a few million
dollars from his company pension fund before dying in mysterious circumstances on board of his
yacht in the Atlantic. It was claimed by a member of Israeli Military Intelligence, Ari Ben
Menashe, that Maxwell had been a Mossad agent for years, and he also said Maxwell tipped the
Israelis about Israeli whistle-blower Mordecai Vanunu. Vanunu was kidnapped and spent many
years in Israeli jails.
Geoffrey Goodman wrote
Maxwell "was almost certainly being used as – and using himself as – a two-way
intelligence conduit [between East and West]. This arrangement included passing intelligence to
the Israeli secret forces with whom he became increasingly involved towards the end of his
life."
After Maxwell, Browder switched allegiance to Edmond Safra, a very rich Jewish banker of
Lebanese origin, who also played East vs West. Safra provided him with working capital for his
investment fund. Safra's bank has been the unlikely place where the IMF loan of four billion
dollars to Russia had been transferred -- and disappeared. The Russian authorities say that
Browder has been involved in this "crime of the century," next to Safra. The banker's name has
been connected to Mossad: increasingly fearful for his life, Safra surrounded himself by
Mossad-trained gunmen. This did not help him: he died a horrible death in his bathroom when his
villa was torched by one of the guards.
The third Jewish oligarch on Browder's way was Boris Berezovsky, the king-maker of Yeltsin's
Russia. He also died in his bathroom (which seems to be a constant feature); apparently he
committed suicide. Berezovsky had been a politically active man; he supported every anti-Putin
force in Russia. However, a few months before his death, he asked for permission to return to
Russia, and some negotiations went on between him and Russian authorities.
His chief of security Sergey Sokolov came to Russia and purportedly brought with him some
documents his late master prepared for his return. These documents allege that Browder had been
an agent of Western intelligence services, of the CIA to begin with, and of MI6 in following
years. He was given a code name Solomon, as he worked for Salomon Brothers. His financial
activity was just a cover for his true intentions, that is to collect political and economic
data on Russia, and to carry out economic war on Russia. This revelation has been made in the
Russia-1 TV channel documentary Browder Effect ,
(broadcasted 13.04.2016), asserting that Browder was not after money at all, and his activities
in Russia, beside being very profitable, had a political angle.
The documents had been doubted for some linguistic reasons discussed by Gilbert Doctorow
who comes to a reasonable conclusion: "Bill Browder['s] intensity and the time he was devoting
to anti-Russian sanctions in Europe was in no way comparable to the behaviour of a top level
international businessman. It was clear to me that some other game was in play. But at the
time, no one could stand up and suggest the man was a fraud, an operative of the intelligence
agencies. Whatever the final verdict may be on the documents presented by the film "The
Browder Effect," it raises questions about Browder that should have been asked years ago in
mainstream Western media if journalists were paying attention. Yevgeny Popov deserves credit
for highlighting those questions, even if his documents demand further investigation before we
come to definitive answers".
We do not know whether Browder is, or had been, a spy. This should not surprise us, as
he was closely connected to Maxwell, Safra and Berezovsky, the financiers with strong ties in
the intelligence community.
Perhaps he outlived his usefulness, Mr Browder did. He started the Cold war, now is the
time to keep it in its healthy limits and to avoid a nuclear disaster or rapid armaments race.
This is the task we may hope will be entertained by the next US President, Mr Donald
Trump.
" Browder was not after money at all " Uh, no. Browder was notorious for his greed and
obsession with money. This is someone who had a program that calculated his personal net
worth online and would check it no less than every half hour.
Think Gordon Gekko but too
cheap to even buy a decent suit. While there may have been some intelligence connections
somewhere along the way, as the article states, he went political only when his honey pot was
removed. Without Russia, his fund management business quickly tanked.
This is priceless: "We do not know whether Browder is, or had been, a spy. This should not
surprise us, as he was closely connected to Maxwell, Safra and Berezovsky, the financiers
with strong ties in the intelligence community."
"Israel's Agent of Influence: Senator Ben Cardin shows how it's done:"
"So who does Cardin actually represent? I would suggest that he fits the mold of the
classic agent of influence in that his allegiance to the United States is constrained by his
greater loyalty to a foreign nation."
In Russia, everybody criticises Putin. No danger at all. Andrey Nekrasov was a foremost
critic of Putin, made him no harm. Russia has as much freedom of speech as Europe; still less
than the US.
Incredible–well, not really–that our mainstream media resolutely refuses to
print, much less discuss, the two main pieces of information here:
1. Browder was the one who gained most from Magnitsky's death as evidenced by the
interview in which the latter asserted a fear of being killed by Browder.
2. Nekrasov, the film's director, has a history of making films very critical of Putin and
the Russian government and state.
US media coverage either omits any mention of these two points or buries allusions to them
in the article. The NYT piece on Browder's attempt to block the film's screening at the
Newseum in Washington was filed in the "Europe" section of the paper.
Freedom of speech is under assault in the West and, again and again, we see the common
denominator of these despicable efforts to suppress key information.
How funny to hear people question Browder's Jewishness, in the Unz comments section of all
places. Lest there be any doubt, he, himself, very much identified as being a Jew, to the
extent that he had a Mezuzah on his office doorway and hired only Jewish employees.
Concerning Magnitsky's indeed unusual posthumous trial, this was actually at the behest of
his own mother who refused to sign the legal papers closing the criminal case due to his
death. This is usually a mere formality. However, the Russian legal system is a stickler for
the letter of the law and so the trial went ahead. His mother's motivation was unclear,
though it probably had something to do with extra publicity.
When I first became aware of Mr. Browder a number of years ago, I was curious about his name,
since I was aware of Earl Browder, the former head of the American Communist Party when I was
growing up. After I subsequently learned of the familial connection, I was highly amused to
discover the leap from Communist to capitalist in three generations. But then I recalled that
Dr. Armand Hammer, eventually the controlling shareholder of Occidental Petroleum, had a
father who was also a doctor, an emigrant from Odessa, and a founder of the Communist Party
U.S.A. That was a mere two generations to make the leap from Communist to capitalist.
A few years ago I happened to read an amusing memoir of the girl who was my date to my
high school prom but who went on to achieve a modest fame and acquaintance with many
prominent Americans and foreigners. (I am being intentionally vague.) When I was dating her
in high school and college, I operated under the false assumption that her mother (whom I
met) was Jewish and her natural father (whom I never met); I met her stepfather, who was
Jewish) was Catholic, which I thought was kind of cool, since I was totally nonreligious. You
can imagine my disappointment to learn nearly a half century later that both of her natural
parents were Jewish. Elsewhere in her memoir, my friend referred to her mother's sister, who
was a member of the Communist Party and got caught up in the Hollywood blacklist and lost her
job. (That was the first I heard of it, btw.) Things turned out well for her since she hooked
up with and married a wealthy Jewish doctor, who left her a sizable fortune when he died. She
eventually moved to Israel where she found nirvana, marrying a much younger man and enjoying
late in life "fantastic sex." So, it appears that what motivates many young Communists is the
dream of becoming fantastically wealthy and enjoying life as a plutocrat, not the BS of
improving life for the downtrodden. If I weren't such a natural skeptic, I would have been
very disillusioned, but not as much as I was to discover late in life that her father was
Jewish and not Catholic. Apologies to all those women I dated in my 20′s and 30′s
whom I regaled with the story of my half-Jewish, half-Catholic prom date.
It became tedious to evoke the murky relations of Bolshevism with the Jewish bank cartel
in the financing of Lenin, Trotsky &Co by Jacob Schiff ("a banker who grew up in House of
Rothschild Frankfurt, monopolized American rail system, funded the Rockefellers through First
City Bank, ADL and the NAACP. Schiff's granddaughter married Al Gore's Son" From his base on
Wall Street, he was the foremost Jewish leader from 1880 to 1920 in what later became known
as the "Schiff era", grappling with all major Jewish issues and problems of the day,
including the plight of Russian Jews under the Tsar, American and international
anti-semitism, care of needy Jewish immigrants, and the rise of Zionism" – per
Wikipedia), and Warburg ("Paul Warburg was a planner for the U.S. Federal Reserve System
which is a collection of private banks, and attended as American representative, the Treaty
of Versailles conference, where his brother Max was on the German side of the bargaining
table" by Wiki). One can see why Lenin was 'permitted' to pass through Germany!
Schiff financed the Japanese for their attack on Russia ("He extended loans to the Empire
of Japan in the amount of $200 million, through Kuhn, Loeb & Co Schiff saw this loan as a
means of answering, on behalf of the Jewish people, the anti-Semitic actions of the Russian
Empire, specifically the then-recent Kishinev pogrom"), the 1905 Revolution and the 1917
Revolution. "In addition to his famous loan to Japan, Schiff financed loans to many other
nations, including those that would come to comprise the Central Powers Schiff made sure none
of the funds from his loans ever went to the Russian Empire, which he felt oppressed Jewish
people. When the Russian Empire fell in 1917, Schiff believed that the oppression of Jews
would end. He formally repealed the impediments within his firm against lending to Russia".
It's true that Communist Russia quickly opened the door for foreign investment (NEP) and the
looting of Russia.
When Stalin tried to reduce USSR's dependence on foreign investments, he became instantly the
monster. It is remarkable that America stood behind Trotsky in the case of the so-called
"Show Trials" (The Dewey Commission).
Particularly interesting is that (per Wikipedia);
"Some ten years later, the Dewey Commission was cited in great detail, when in an open letter
to the British press dated 25 February 1946, written by George Orwell and signed by Arthur
Koestler, C. E. M. Joad, Frank Horrabin, George Padmore, Julian Symons, H. G. Wells, F. A.
Ridley, C. A. Smith and John Baird, among others, it was suggested that the Nuremberg Trials
then underway were an invaluable opportunity for establishing "historical truth and bearing
upon the political integrity" of figures of international standing. Specifically, they called
for Rudolf Hess to be interrogated about his alleged meeting with Trotsky and that the
Gestapo records then in the hands of Allied experts be examined for any proof of any "liaison
between the Nazi Party or State and Trotsky or the other old Bolshevik leaders indicted at
the Moscow trials "
BTW I wonder how many people, including posters here, are aware that the U.S., under
President Wilson, sent a military expedition to Russia after the Communist takeover there in
1917 and kept them there for about a year and a half.
When I was in college in the early 60′s, I bought a paperback of George Kennan's
"Russia and the West, Under Lenin and Stalin" (hardcover ed. 1961), the first book of Kennan
that I read, and was startled to learn of our military invasion of Russia at the end of WWI
and after, something I didn't remember being taught in high school American history a few
years earlier. That was about 50 years ago. This past year I got around to reading A. Scott
Berg's much acclaimed biography, "Wilson." I didn't remember reading anything in that
biography re Wilson's commitment of military forces to Russia. I have just reviewed the index
and found one obscure reference to "military intervention in Russia" (p. 590 of hardcover
ed.) and George Kennan.
More important, I reviewed the Bibliography and found no reference to
George Kennan's "Russia and the West, Under Lenin and Stalin." I don't know what to make of
the gross omission by a highly-regarded biographer, but it is clear that an effort has been
made to downplay this aspect of Wilson's policy, for reasons that escape me.
Maybe because I was educated in a different country I was very well aware of this item of
information. It was not only the US, then most of the Western countries from both sides of
WW1, including Britain, France, Italy, then also Czechoslovakia (Austria-Hungary), Japan,
Germany and so on, which sent troops to Russia on the side of Belaya Gvardiya fighting the
Lenin's Bolsheviks, even whilst WW1 was still ongoing.
They fought with Belaya Gvardiya in
Siberia, Ukraine and Crimea (part of Russia, not part of Ukraine until 1953 when given to
Ukraine by the Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev).
Fascinating, thank you. Reading more, I find that Wilson was motivated to safeguard almost
a billion dollars in armaments and equipment [including railway cars] given to Russia by the
U.S in the hopes of Russia prevailing over the Central Powers and thereafter adopting the
capitalist model.
Alas the men and hardware [including frozen machine guns] did not hit the
right wavelength with the Siberian winter.
Many of us are aware of the 'Allied Intervention in the Russian civil war' which occured in
the aftermath of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk while the Entante was still at war with Germany.
The chaos which ensued as a result of the misguided policies of the HLH (Hindenburg,
Ludendorff, Hoffman), especially the 'Napoleonic complex' of Ludendorff compounded by the
greedy desires of many petty German 'Fuersten' for crowns in the East, determined the Allies
to intervene, motivated by the following considerations:
- prevent the German or Bolshevik capture of Allied material stockpiles in Arkhangelsk
- mount an attack helping the Czechoslovak Legions stranded on the Trans-Siberian
Railroad
– resurrect the Eastern Front by defeating the Bolshevik army with help from the
Czechoslovak Legions and an expanded anti-Bolshevik force of local citizens and stop the
spread of communism and the Bolshevik cause in Russia.
Now, this is news only for graduates of American schools where history is no more taught.
The Wikipedia entry ('Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War') would have been
sufficient (for beginners) to set the record straight:
"Severely short of troops to spare, the British and French requested that President Wilson
provide American soldiers for the campaign. In July 1918, against the advice of the United
States Department of War, Wilson agreed to the limited participation of 5,000 United States
Army troops in the campaign. This force, which became known as the "American North Russia
Expeditionary Force" (a.k.a. the Polar Bear Expedition) were sent to Arkhangelsk while
another 8,000 soldiers, organised as the American Expeditionary Force Siberia, were shipped
to Vladivostok from the Philippines and from Camp Fremont in California. That same month, the
Canadian government agreed to the British government's request to command and provide most of
the soldiers for a combined British Empire force, which also included Australian and Indian
troops. Some of this force was the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force; another part was
the North Russia Intervention. A Royal Navy squadron was sent to the Baltic under
Rear-Admiral Edwyn Alexander-Sinclair. This force consisted of modern C-class cruisers and V-
and W-class destroyers. In December 1918, Sinclair sailed into Estonian and Latvian ports,
sending in troops and supplies, and promising to attack the Bolsheviks "as far as my guns can
reach". In January 1919, he was succeeded in command by Rear-Admiral Walter Cowan.
The Japanese, concerned about their northern border, sent the largest military force,
numbering about 70,000. They desired the establishment of a buffer state in Siberia, and the
Imperial Japanese Army General Staff viewed the situation in Russia as an opportunity for
settling Japan's "northern problem". The Japanese government was also intensely hostile to
communism.
The Italians created the special "Corpo di Spedizione" with Alpini troops sent from Italy and
ex-POWs of Italian ethnicity from the former Austro-Hungarian army who were recruited to the
Italian Legione Redenta. They were initially based in the Italian Concession in Tientsin and
numbered about 2,500.
Romania, Greece, Poland, China, and Serbia also sent contingents in support of the
intervention."
All these troops have been involved, in a way or another, in the Russian Civil War, but by
1920 all have been withdrawn. Only the Japanese stayed in the Maritime Provinces of the
Russian Far East until 1922 and in northern Sakhalin until 1925.
There is obviously no space here to talk about the 'Treaty of Rapallo' between Russia and
Germany of 1922 and of the 'Genoa Conference' held in Genoa in 1922, where "the
representatives of 34 countries gathered to discuss global economic problems following World
War I. The purpose was to formulate strategies to rebuild central and eastern Europe,
particularly Russia, after the war, and also to negotiate a relationship between European
capitalist economies, and the new Russian Bolshevik regime". These were signals for the
introduction of NEP (New Economic Policy) and the policy of 'concessions' which was, in
Lenin's terms " a strategic retreat from socialism".
Anyhow, I think that a BA is a minimum requirement in order to gain a modicum of
understanding of these problems. For sure Wikipedia is not sufficient.
There is no question the involvement of U.S. troops in Russia following the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917 is downplayed in the U.S. As I noted, the issue wasn't touched on in my
high school history class, and I was surprised to learn of our military involvement in
Russia's civil war only when I went to college and bought the small paperback of Kennan's
"Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin." In fact, I have a one-volume history of the
U.S. written by one of the U.S.'s leading historians, Samuel Eliot Morison, who was the
highly acclaimed biographer of Christopher Columbus and John Paul Jones and a long-time
professor of history at Harvard. He was also the author of the highly acclaimed "History of
the United States Naval Operations in World War II," a 15-volume effort. In his "The Oxford
History of the American People" (1965, 1122 pages, ending with the 1963 assassination of
JFK), he states briefly at p. 878 that "President Wilson went along [with efforts of France
and Britain to overthrow the Bolsheviks] to the extent of sending a small American force to
Archangel, ostensibly to prevent a cache of military supplies reaching Germany, and
participating in a Japanese-directed invasion of Siberia, to see that Japan did not go too
far." Rather cryptic reference to a somewhat small military involvement that lasted for more
than a year and a half, but, in defense of Morison, his history was a one-volume affair
(published by the Oxford University Press) and the American involvement in Russia had no
effect on the Russian Revolution, other than to sour the relationship between the new
Communist government and the U.S., which did not diplomatically recognize the new regime
until FDR became President in 1933.
A. Scott Berg has no such defense. His detailed biography of Wilson runs to 743 pages, and
he makes no reference at all to the U.S. military contingent that was sent to Russia in 1918
by Wilson and remained there for more than a year and a half. You would think that Berg could
have added a few brief sentences alluding to the military expeditionary force and a brief
summary of its impact, but not a word. This from an author who discusses the infamous "Palmer
raids" at the end of the Wilson Administration and the bombs which set off those raids. I am
just puzzled about the omission and fail to see what agenda is being served, other than it
highlights the utter hypocrisy of Wilson with his vaunted "Fourteen Points," which impliedly
called for respect of international borders. Wilson was also the hypocrite who won reelection
in a close race in 1916 running on a campaign that "he kept us out of war" and the declared
war against Germany a month after he was reinaugurated in March 1917.
BTW I wonder how many people, including posters here, are aware that the U.S., under
President Wilson, sent a military expedition to Russia after the Communist takeover there
in 1917 and kept them there for about a year and a half.
Actually this 'invasion' was to help stabilize Russia during the revolution and to block
Japan in the far east. Russia and the US had been good friends and allies since we helped
Russia during the Crimean War, and with the purchase of Alaska and they had helped us during
the US Civil War.
Harry Truman put an end to all that 'good neighbor policy" when he needed a scapegoat to
launch the National Security State and prevent another depression. On it goes.
Seems like the entire Browder/Magnitsky hustle is nothing more than Jews protecting Jews in a
kind of international crime syndicate. When found out, they even have the network in place to
control the narrative about their crimes to the point that trying to hold them accountable
quickly morphs into a fundamental violation of their human rights.
"What do you mean you can't rip off a country's assets and hide the loot in offshore
accounts? What do you do when you see a $10 bill laying in the street? You take it, of
course! What else is a person suppose to do? When opportunity strikes, you make the best of
it."
Browder and Magnitshy . How history repeats itself! I recall reading that something
similar happened in the Weimar Republic when Germany was stripped of its assets after WWI.
Indeed, even then there was an ((( international syndicate ))) in place to control the
narrative and protect the shysters.
"""Meaning, Putin gets a healthy cut. If he doesn't get a piece of the action, you will
suddenly be found to have evaded taxes, or worse. And, heaven forfend, if you decided to use
your wealth to oppose Putin politically, just as Khodorkovsky."""
What evidence do you have for this libellous allegation?? These assertions are made
habitually in the western media. However this article on Browder demonstrates who are the
parties making such claims and why.
We're talking about his grandson, an international businessman active in Russia at one
time. The WASP grandfather who eventually became CPUSA chief married a Jewish woman and their
mathematician son was the international businessman grandson's father.
Try to get your facts straight before you call everybody and his brother a Nazi.
Being English speaking and brought up in the Anglo-world but with good understanding of
Russia through Communism, made this Jewish Godfather much more damaging to Russia than the
other forced Jewish emigres: Berezovsky, Gusinsky and Khodorovsky.
Browder's ties with Mossad and CIA make him a prototypical Deep-Stater, spreading
Anglo-Zionist dominance of the World (Globalism) and getting personally rich in the process.
If the Anglo-Zionists manage to bring down Russia (say, kill Putin) then Browder could become
the Paul Bremer III of Russia (perhaps titled William Browder I).
There a book, a merciless, factual excoriation of the Browder Hoax: The Killing of William
Browder: Deconstructing Bill Browder's Dangerous Deception by Alex Krainer
Earl Browder, born into a Kansas Methodist farm family became the head of the Communist
party in the U.S. in the 30′s, probably for idealistic reasons. As a Communist, he
became an atheist. He went to Russia and married a Russian Jewish woman. Their son, Felix,
raised as a Jew by his mother, became a mathematician. Felix Browder married a Jewish woman
and their son is the William Browder, subject of this article. William Browder is thus 3/4
Jewish. His one grandfather, from whom he got his name, was born a Christian gentile, but
chucked it up to become a Communist leader. Through marriage to Jewish women, his grandson,
William, is a ruthless capitalist Jewish oligarch who contributed to scavenging the decaying
body of the former Soviet Union.
intensity and the time he was devoting to anti-Russian sanctions in Europe was in no way
comparable to the behaviour of a top level international businessman.
The writer does not know much about the business world, does he? Browder is still looking
to get paid off, and businessmen can be motivated by vengeance (Warren Buffet included).
Anyway, Mr. Browder seems far too focused on his wallet and effective an operator on that
account to have been directed by MI6.
There is this myth that secret intelligence agents are more competent than lesser mortals
(such as policemen). I like reading memoirs and novels about spys as much as anyone, but
rich, tax dodging/philanthropic and litigious people like Browder are the real 007s of this
world. I dare say there are a few holes in his story.
I can only tell Mr. Shamir that if he had stolen as much money as Browder, he'd be
untouchable, too. Look at any dollar bill. It says "IN GOD WE TRUST". This is THE God
Americans trust in. All the other gods are subject to freedom of religion.
Exactly right. Looting Russia– and later working to destroy it for objecting -- is
their YHWH-given right. The Jewish criminality and evil Browder embodies is of so great a
magnitude that it's difficult for a decent person to process such a creature.
Funny, I heard (((Big Media's))) glowing take on Browder the other day and figured he must be
a piece of shit. I don't base conclusions on such hunches, of course, so I guess I'll have to
read the article and check around.
But it's funny how race-realism, countersemitism, and hatred of (((Big Media))) have such
predictive power.
Consortiumnews Volume 24, Number 199
-- –Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995 -- –July 18, 2018
US Media is Losing Its Mind Over Trump-Putin Press Conference July 16, 2018 •
316 Comments
The media's mania over Trump's Helsinki performance and the so-called Russia-gate scandal reached new depths on Monday, says Joe
Lauria
By Joe Lauria Special to Consortium News
The reaction of the U.S. establishment media and several political leaders to President Donald Trump's press conference
after his summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday has been stunning.
" There are exactly two possible explanations for the shameful performance the world witnessed on Monday, from a serving American
president.
Either Donald Trump is flat-out an agent of Russian interests -- maybe witting, maybe unwitting, from fear of blackmail, in
hope of future deals, out of manly respect for Vladimir Putin, out of gratitude for Russia's help during the election, out of
pathetic inability to see beyond his 306 electoral votes. Whatever the exact mixture of motives might be, it doesn't really matter.
Or he is so profoundly ignorant, insecure, and narcissistic that he did not realize that, at every step, he was advancing the
line that Putin hoped he would advance, and the line that the American intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies most
dreaded.
Conscious tool. Useful idiot. Those are the choices, though both are possibly true, so that the main question is the proportions
never before have I seen an American president consistently, repeatedly, publicly, and shockingly advance the interests of another
country over those of his own government and people."
As soon as the press conference ended CNN cut to its panel with these words from TV personality Anderson Cooper: "You have been
watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader, surely,
that I've ever seen."
David Gergen, who for years has gotten away with portraying himself on TV as an impartial political sage, then told CNN viewers:
" I've never heard an American President talk that way but I think it is especially true that when he's with someone like Putin,
who is a thug, a world-class thug, that he sides with him again and again against his own country's interests of his own institutions
that he runs, that he's in charge of the federal government, he's in charge of these intelligence agencies, and he basically dismisses
them and retreats into this, we've heard it before, but on the international stage to talk about Hillary Clinton's computer server
"
" It's embarrassing," interjected Cooper.
" It's embarrassing," agreed Gergen.
Cooper: "Most disgraceful performance by a US president."
White House correspondent Jim Acosta, ostensibly an objective reporter, then gave his opinion: "I think that sums it up nicely.
This is the president of the United States essentially taking the word of the Russian president over his own intelligence community.
It was astonishing, just astonishing to be in the room with the U.S. president and the Russian president on this critical question
of election interference, and to retreat back to these talking points about DNC servers and Hillary Clinton's emails when he had
a chance right there in front of the world to tell Vladimir Putin to stay the HELL out of American democracy, and he didn't do it."
In other words Trump should just shut up and not question a questionable indictment, which Acosta, like nearly all the media,
treat as a conviction.
The Media's Handlers
The media's handlers were even worse than their assets. Former CIA director John Brennan
tweeted : "Donald Trump's press conference
performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes & misdemeanors,.' It was nothing short of treasonous. Not
only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???"
Here's where the Republican Patriots are, Brennan: " That's how a press conference sounds when an Asset stands next to his Handler,"
former RNC Chairman Michael Steele tweeted.
Representative Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, said on Twitter: " As a member of the House Armed Services
Committee, I am deeply troubled by President Trump's defense of Putin against the intelligence agencies of the U.S. & his suggestion
of moral equivalence between the U.S. and Russia. Russia poses a grave threat to our national security."
All these were reactions to Trump expressing skepticism about the U.S. indictment on Friday of 12 Russian intelligence agents
for allegedly interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election while he was standing next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at
the press conference following their summit meeting in Helsinki.
" I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be" Russia, Trump said. "I have great confidence in my intelligence people,
but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today."
The indictments, which are only unproven accusations, formally accused 12 members of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, of
stealing Democratic Party emails in a hacking operation and giving the materials to WikiLeaks to publish in order to damage the candidacy
of Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton. The indictments were announced on Friday, three days before the summit, with the clear intention
of getting Trump to cancel it. He ignored cries from the media and Congress to do so.
Over the weekend Michael Smerconish on CNN
actually said the indictments proved that Russia had committed a "terrorist attack" against the United States. This is in line
with many pundits who are comparing this indictment, that will most likely
never produce any evidence, to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. The danger inherent in that thinking is clear.
Putin said the allegations are "utter nonsense, just like [Trump] recently mentioned." He added: "The final conclusion in this
kind of dispute can only be delivered by a trial, by the court. Not by the executive, by the law enforcement." He could have added
not by the media.
Trump reasonably questioned why the FBI never examined the computer servers of the Democratic National Committee to see whether
there was a hack and who may have done it. Instead a private company, CrowdStrike, hired by the Democratic Party studied the server
and within a day blamed Russia on very
dubious grounds.
" Why haven't they taken the server?" Trump asked. "Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee?
I've been wondering that. I've been asking that for months and months and I've been tweeting it out and calling it out on social
media. Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying?"
But being a poor communicator, Trump then mentioned Clinton's missing emails, allowing the media to conflate the two different
servers, and be easily dismissed as Gergen did.
At the press conference, Putin offered to allow American investigators from the team of special counsel Robert Mueller, who put
the indictment together, to travel to Russia and take part in interviews with the 12 accused Russian agents. He also offered to set
up a joint cyber-security group to examine the evidence and asked that in return Russia be allowed to question persons of interest
to Moscow in the United States.
" Let's discuss the specific issues and not use the Russia and U.S. relationship as a loose change for this internal political
struggle," Putin said.
On CNN, Christiane Amanpour called Putin's clear offer "obfuscation."
Even if Trump agreed to this reasonable proposal it seems highly unlikely that his Justice Department will go along with it. Examination
of whatever evidence they have to back up the indictment is not what the DOJ is after. As I
wrote about the indictments in detail on Friday:
" The extremely remote possibility of convictions were not what Mueller was apparently after, but rather the public perception
of Russia's guilt resulting from fevered media coverage of what are after all only accusations, presented as though it is established
fact. Once that impression is settled into the public consciousness, Mueller's mission would appear to be accomplished."
Still No 'Collusion'
The summit begins. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
The indictments did not include any members of Trump's
campaign team for "colluding" with the alleged Russian hacking effort, which has been a core allegation throughout the two years
of the so-called Russia-gate scandal. Those allegations are routinely reported in U.S. media as established fact, though there is
still no evidence of collusion.
Trump emphasised that point in the press conference. "There was no collusion at all," he said forcefully. "Everybody knows it."
On this point corporate media has been more deluded than normal as they clutch for straws to prove the collusion theory. As one
example of many across the media with the same theme, a New York Times
story on Friday , headlined, "Trump Invited the Russians to Hack Clinton. Were They Listening?," said Russia may have absurdly
responded to Trump's call at 10:30 a.m. on July 27, 2016 to hack Clinton's private email server because it was "on or about" that
day that Russia allegedly first made an attempt to hack Clinton's personal emails, according to the indictment, which makes no connection
between the two events.
If Russia is indeed guilty of remotely hacking the emails it would have had no evident need of assistance from anyone on the Trump
team, let alone a public call from Trump on national TV to commence the operation.
More importantly, as Twitter handle "Representative Press" pointed
out: "Trump's July 27, 2016 call to find the missing 30,000 emails could not be a 'call to hack Clinton's server' because at that
point it was no longer online . Long before Trump's statement, Clinton had already
turned
over her email server to the U.S. Department of Justice." Either the indictment was talking about different servers or it is
being intentionally misleading when it says "on or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for
the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third party provider and used by Clinton's personal office."
This crucial fact alone, that Clinton had turned over the server in 2015 so that no hack was possible, makes it impossible that
Trump's TV call could be seen as collusion. Only a desperate person would see it otherwise.
But there is a simple explanation why establishment journalists are in unison in their dominant Russian narrative: it is career
suicide to question it.
As Samuel Johnson said as far back as 1745: "The greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinions than that they
are in fashion since vanity and credulity cooperate in its favour."
Importance of US-Russia Relations
Trump said the unproven allegation of collusion "has had a negative impact upon the relationship of the two largest nuclear powers
in the world. We have 90 percent of nuclear power between the two countries. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous what's going on with
the probe."
The American president said the U.S. has been "foolish" not to attempt dialogue with Russia before, to cooperate on a range of
issues.
"As president, I cannot make decisions on foreign policy in a futile effort to appease partisan critics or the media or Democrats
who want to do nothing but resist and obstruct," Trump said. "Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards
the opportunity to open new pathways toward peace and stability in our world. I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of
peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics."
This main reason for summits between Russian and American leaders was also ignored: to use diplomacy to reduce dangerous tensions.
"I really think the world wants to see us get along," Trump said. "We are the two great nuclear powers. We have 90 percent of the
nuclear. And that's not a good thing, it's a bad thing."
Preventing good relations between the two countries appears to be the heart of the matter for U.S. intelligence and their media
assets. So Trump was vilified for even trying.
Ignoring the Rest of the Story
Obsessed as they are with the "interference" story, the media virtually ignored the other crucial issues that came up at the summit,
such as the Middle East.
Trump sort of thanked Russia for its efforts to defeat ISIS. "When you look at all of the progress that's been made in certain
sections with the eradication of ISIS, about 98 percent, 99 percent there, and other things that have taken place that we have done
and that, frankly, Russia has helped us with in certain respects," he said.
Trump here is falsely taking credit, as he has before, for defeating ISIS with only some "help" from Russia. In Iraq the U.S.
led the way against ISIS coordinating the Iraqi and Kurdish security forces. But in the separate war against ISIS in Syria, Russia,
the Syrian Arab Army, Kurdish forces, Iranian troops and Hizbullah militias were almost entirely responsible for ISIS' defeat.
A grand deal? (Photo: Sputnik)
Also on Syria, Trump appeared to endorse what is being
reported as a deal between Russia and Israel in which Israel would accept Bashar al-Assad remaining as Syrian president, while
Russia would work on Iran to get it to remove its forces away from the northern Golan Heights, which Israel illegally considers its
border with Syria.
After a meeting in Moscow last week with Putin, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he accepted Assad remaining in power.
" President Putin also is helping Israel," Trump said at the press conference. "We both spoke with Bibi Netanyahu. They would
like to do certain things with respect to Syria, having to do with the safety of Israel. In that respect, we absolutely would like
to work in order to help Israel. Israel will be working with us. So both countries would work jointly."
Trump also said that the U.S. and Russian militaries were coordinating in Syria, but he did not go as far as saying that they
had agreed to fight together there, which has been a longstanding proposal of Putin's dating back to September 2015, just before
Moscow intervened militarily in the country.
" Our militaries have gotten along probably better than our political leaders for years," Trump said. "Our militaries do get along
very well. They do coordinate in Syria and other places."
Trump said Russia and the U.S. should cooperate in humanitarian assistance in Syria.
" If we can do something to help the people of Syria get back into some form of shelter and on a humanitarian basis that's what
the word was, a humanitarian basis," he said. "I think both of us would be very interested in doing that."
Putin said he had agreed on Sunday with French President Emmanuel Macron on a joint effort with Europe to deliver humanitarian
aid. "On our behalf, we will provide military cargo aircraft to deliver humanitarian cargo. Today, I brought up this issue with President
Trump. I think there's plenty of things to look into," Putin said.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for T he Wall Street
Journal, Boston Globe , Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at
[email protected]and followed on Twitter @unjoe .
If you enjoyed this original article please consider
making
a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.
I'm really hard pressed to come up with anything to be optimistic about given the dire nature of our current global and national
predicaments combined with the bat-sheet crazy nature of our current version of the mass psyche. About the only bright spot I
can find is that it is really encouraging to read the overall high quality of the comments here at CN, which suggest that I can
look forward to taking part in some wonderful future conversations in "the camps."
"The Reuters/Ipsos poll gathered responses from 1,011 registered voters throughout the United States, including 453 Republicans
and 399 Democrats. The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 4 percentage points."
Independents/anaffiliated make up more than 42% of the registered voters currently in the USA.
irina , July 17, 2018 at 11:09 pm
"medium = Social / source = Twitter"
Babyl-on , July 17, 2018 at 9:35 pm
I think we should take heart that they are such a small group – loud yes, they have the corporate press, but it is not a big
group and they have already lost the narrative. This has to be the end for them, they have no political support for impeachment
after all this screeching articles can't even get introduced mostly the "resistance" isn't even trying – they know they don't
have evidence.
The scream these words TREASON and COLLUSION but they are powerless politically to do anything. So a "treasonous" president
goes on. Clearly they are at their wits end their heads have actually exploded. The powerful "liberal" cabal which has run Washington
for decades is disintegrating before there very eyes. Clinton is the witch – Trump is the water.
A , July 17, 2018 at 11:33 pm
Okay , I get it, I will go down , but I am not going down by the orange shit head. You guys win, you wanted your Cheeto to
give us some love, and tax breaks , favorable trade deals, get rid of people like me , be besties with Russia, kill everyone from
central America. Cool. You guys win. I hope you are happy , apparently you have achieved what you wanted.
Thanks, Drew and Realist, i just read Finian Cunningham's essay at Information Clearing House. Yes, this is indeed scary. It
does appear a coup is being planned. All the more reason for us to speak up. The thought of Mike Pence is scarier than Trump.
willow , July 17, 2018 at 9:30 pm
I was a Sanders supporter and donor who voted for Trump because he promised diplomacy, whereas Hillary wanted a no-fly zone
in Syria, and her proven track record of supporting illegal regime change in Iraq, Honduras, Libya, Ukraine and Syria. She was
a faux progressive and ultimate racist in that she has the blood of countless brown people (mostly women and children) on her
hands. What is really scary and disheartening is that the pro-WW3 propaganda seems to be working if the reader comments from the
NYT and WaPo are accurate gauges of public perception. The verdict of commenters in corporate media websites is unanimous: Trump
is a traitor for committing the crime of détente. Consortium news readers are informed because we search truth in alternative
media. I hope it's not naďve to believe we are the silent majority and most Americans still possess the common sense and critical
thinking skills necessary to see through the hysteria even if they don't venture to sites like Consortium news.
AnthraxSleuth , July 17, 2018 at 10:19 pm
Don't worry yourself too much. The highest rated MSM news shows only garner about 1.2 million viewers. That's far less than
1% of the American population.
The MSM fancy themselves what they have not been in decades; Relevant.
That was good, mrbt (not enough vowels for me). Yes, we are in a jalopy headed for a cliff. Instead we get a cliffhanger with
this Mueller intel fiasco. I misspoke with the bank bailout, of course, it was 2009 just after Obama got into office; he told
those banksters, "I'm the only one between you and the pitchforks". Now it seems like we're on a roller coaster ready to jump
the track!
mrtmbrnmn , July 17, 2018 at 7:33 pm
This disgraceful and obscene display of pants-wetting by the MSM over the Trump-Putin meeting and press conference was pre-planned
and essentially pre-scripted to advance the deep state regime change op against Trump (and ultimately Putin). I was trying to
imagine these journalistic malpracticers prepped to embarrass and humiliate Obama in a similar setting by asking questions like:
"Mr Obama, which do you prefer, watermelon or chicken bones?"
It is clear beyond doubt that we are helpless passengers in the back seat of the out of control jalopy that is America, barreling
helter skelter down the highway bound to hell and total collapse. The Dementedcrats need to get off the crack pipe and the unconscionable
CIA thug John Brennan might benefit from a frontal lobotomy to get him to chill out.
irina , July 17, 2018 at 8:32 pm
the best description i've read of this insanity is : 'the MSM is (p-faced) drunk on its own p . . . " with appreciation
to the commentor who wrote that !
It sounds like Lisa Page is, unlike Strzok (remember him, from late last week ?) cooperatively providing information which
might implicate China as the 'party which got the 30,000 emails'. Perhaps this is what Trump & Putin talked about ? In which case,
The Donald's walking back his press conference comments may be only a temporary feint. If true, Lisa will need excellent protection
and a new name !
Something big may be in the works, as Stephen says. Now Veterans Today says that a move on Iran by the US was discussed at
Helsinki, and they think that Putin would capitulate in some sort of trade-off -- what, to get off their backs? Putin is much
smarter than that. Zero Hedge just reports that Russia has dumped all their US Treasury bonds, further stating that Russia's close
ties to China indicate a trial run on the market preparatory to China dumping their pile, too. What many feel the big event is
really another economic meltdown, as nothing was done in the 2008 Obama crisis except bail out the banks, which went right back
to their chicanery. The western Deep State always sets up for war to divert attention from internal crisis.
Deniz , July 17, 2018 at 6:59 pm
I get far more concerned when the press, intelligence agencies and various other DC gangsters lavish praise on Trump. Judging
by their reactions, it seems likely that Trump must have actually brought us closer to peace.
Stephen J, excellent verse as usual, "Blame It On Putin". It was reported that "the lights went out" in the White House when
Trump did his U-turn on Russian election meddling. Was that supposed to be symbolic of something?
Thanks Jessika. I believe something big is in the works. The powers that be have had things their own way for so long. The
corporate media monopoly are their mouthpieces and are barking like dogs in a frenzy in case they lose their bones. The bones
being the millions dead from planned wars and blood soaked profits that attained to the corporate cannibals. Enemies are needed
to continue the corrupt system. The War Criminals are getting desperate, the gangsters war is just starting. Unfortunately we
are all Prisoners of "Democracy" https://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-prisoners-of-democracy.html
Antiwar7 , July 17, 2018 at 6:22 pm
David Gergen says Trump acts "against his [Trump's] own country's interests of his own institutions [including] these intelligence
agencies."
There's the rub, isn't it? The interests of our country and of those institutions: are they the same?
Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 6:59 pm
Also worth, sorry for broken record but, using Trump's unique "awfulness" as justification for vigilante-style "trial in the
press" or manipulated/propagandized "public opinion" there's a deep deep antidemocratic anti-due process or rule-of-law desperation
here which has had "liberal" (or "illiberal") precedent we've already seen in "political correctness" and #metoo (emanating from
the "progressive camp" often justified by the awfulness / despicable-ness of those they despise.
This is a very very sad devolution (or arguably the unmasking) of the Democratic Party (I vote the latter).
mike k , July 17, 2018 at 6:13 pm
Trump mumbled some sort of half maybe apology about questioning Russian meddling. But he will contradict that apology just
as quickly. They are really having trouble pinning this guy down on anything. His enemies want to nail him, but he just keeps
moving. For a fat guy, he is pretty nimble.
Now, Trump says he misspoke and "accepts US intel on Russian election meddling"! I guess he got anothet 'trip to the woodshed',
as Skip Scott has often said. James Howard Kunstler is right, it's a "Clusterfuck Nation". Well, the Russians are smart enough
never to trust the US.
irina , July 17, 2018 at 9:49 pm
He got the truth out first and for that I have to give him kudos.
He probably knew backtracking and its attendant issues was
Inevitable. Very nice that power went out while he said he misspoke.
as WaPo itself says, "Truth Dies in Darkness".
Drew Hunkins , July 17, 2018 at 5:18 pm
Look, this is getting frightening.
Never in my lifetime have I witnessed a group think/mob mentality like what's occurring over Russiagate and the overriding
Russophobia fueling it all. This is washing over virtually all planks of the political spectrum. We just had a damaged and awful
president try to do one of the very few things he actually gets right: make rapprochement with Moscow; he was subsequently browbeaten,
smeared and viciously attacked by every single mainstream Western media outlet on the planet. Not just news media, but also the
entertainment media are completely on board -- Kimmel, Fallon, Colbert, Maddow, etc.
To say one kind word about Putin or the modicum of detente that Trump just unsuccessfully tried to pull off is to be mocked,
ridiculed, scoffed at and laughed at by liberal leaning friends, colleagues and acquaintances.
The militarist-corporate propaganda during the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War pales in comparison to this new and scary McCarthyism
that has permeated everything.
I'm 47 y.o. and never experienced anything like this.
The liberal intelligentsia who are falling for this and propagating this have some of the hottest places in heII waiting for
them.
Deniz , July 17, 2018 at 5:31 pm
If you think the overwhelming majority of the US cares about what the press and politicians think, then I would suggest you
spend less time with Democrats. I dont agree with many Republican platforms, but on the reliability of media, they are far more
prescient than the Democrats. I wonder if it is because they have more first-hand knowledge than the Democrats because they tend
to send their kids to the meat grinder oil, wars more frequently than Democrats.
Drew Hunkins , July 17, 2018 at 5:40 pm
The best thing we have going right now Deniz is the cynical and skeptical attitude of much the hardworking American population.
The Russians certainly aren't the ones who foisted this unconscionable inequality on the U.S. population, nor was it the Russians
who caused the American heartland to deteriorate into a wasteland of service sector employment and Oxy dependence. It wasn't Putin
who mired recent American college grads in deplorable debt in the range of $30,000 to $400,000, nor was it Putin who demanded
that millions of Americans go without adequate healthcare coverage.
It's economic inequality and it's political enablers who are stalking the towns and cities of America, not the Russian military.
John P , July 17, 2018 at 6:37 pm
That is the real problem, so why arn't kids, their parents and the poor out on the streets like those of my generation during
the Vietnam war stiring things up. Is it social media which kills the urge to go out and protest and make yourself heard? Get
the money and business influence out of modern day politics, Raise hell !
irina , July 17, 2018 at 8:15 pm
There was a DRAFT during the Vietnam war. That made a huge difference.
And, I think we were actually better informed than today's young people.
Bringing the war live into people's living rooms was New Thing back then,
and we paid attention. Now, we are habituated and just tune out bad news,
unless it happens to be a domestic shooting spree or other home turf stuff.
willow , July 17, 2018 at 9:36 pm
Irina below is right. The draft was the difference. People would wake up and engage if we had the draft. We have an economic
draft today. It's the only option for poor and lower class kids who will never afford college. It's unfortunate that identity
politics doesn't include the socioeconomic bias of targeting of poor kids being used as cannon fodder
irina , July 17, 2018 at 11:12 pm
And moreover, the draft was based on a birthdate lottery.
All in the luck of the draw. (And of course, economic standing
since there were college deferments, etc. etc.)
Realist , July 17, 2018 at 5:49 pm
I'm 71, Drew, and can tell you that the darkest days of the Vietnam War were not as scary. Our power structure has taken McCarthyism
as practiced during the Korean Conflict and doubled down on it, directing its kinetics at the office of the presidency. This is
as close to a civil war or an actual coup d'etat that I have ever seen, much more divisive and explosive than Nixon and Watergate.
Someone claiming authority they do not have may soon make a move against Trump. They've stirred up enough hate by the mob to mask
their motives.
Drew Hunkins , July 17, 2018 at 6:02 pm
Thanks for kicking some historical info to this Gen Xer. You make some very interesting (and quite scary) points.
Over at 'Information Clearing House' the always excellent Finian Cunningham has just penned a dynamite and trenchant essay
on a possible pending coup against Trump.
Realist , July 17, 2018 at 6:32 pm
Thanks. I always read your spot-on posts at the ICH website, Drew.
Drew Hunkins , July 17, 2018 at 8:36 pm
Thanks Realist.
In solidarity,
Drew Hunkins
Madison, WI
Dave P. , July 17, 2018 at 7:13 pm
Yes. This excellent article by Finian Cunningham really nails it.
Monoloco , July 17, 2018 at 6:49 pm
Trump derangement syndrome is so powerful, it turns liberals into neocons.
KiwiAntz , July 17, 2018 at 7:27 pm
Drew your absolutely correct, this is a unprecedented groupthink & dangerous propaganda on a scale that's never existed before!
It's mass hysteria on steroids! And all because of the simple fact that Trump, a man who was never supposed to win the Election
over the anointed candidate, crooked Hillary Clinton occurred! Trump must be removed by a slow motion coup by any means possible?
Whether it's by undermining his authority or belittering his character. If that doesn't work they will take the JFK removal method?
As Stalin stated, death is the solution to all problems, no man, no problem? It's frightening where all this fake Russiagate nonsense
is going to lead us, it's almost as if they want to start the next great extinction event by starting WW3 & a Nuclear War with
Russia? The arrogance of America & its Deepstate, Propagandist MSM & political system is going to be the death of us all!
I don't know that to say. Whatever was left of the republic is either gone or doomed. If we have a mainstream media that is
so nakedly attempting a coup d'état or calling for one with such universal fury based on little evidence and just embroidering
one myth over another then I will have to just focus my energy elsewhere. My comrades on most of the left have, despite decades
of proof that the media is deeply dishonest and constantly howling for one war after another the only hope is to batten down the
hatches and just survive the next decade through local efforts. The sad part is I oppose many of Trump's policies but this isn't
about policies–this is about re-invigorating American militarism and imperialism.
I've been around a lot of crises but nothing like this madness.
As usual the "media impostors" and propaganda pushers blame Putin.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
January 10, 2017
"Blame It" On Putin
There is endless wars and devastation around the world
Western war criminals have their war banners unfurled
Millions dead and many millions uprooted
And the financial system is corrupted and looted
"Blame it" on Putin
The war criminals are free and spreading bloody terror
And their dirty propaganda says Putin is an "aggressor"
These evil plotters of death and destruction
Should be in jail for their abominable actions
But, "Blame it" on Putin.
The American election is won by Donald Trump
Hillary Clinton loses and gets politically dumped
The media is frenzied and foaming at their mouths
They are crying and lying, these corporate louts
They "Blame it" on Putin
Hollywood, too, is getting in on the act
The B.S. merchants are able to twist facts
In their fantasy world of channel changers
They do not approve of a political stranger
They "Blame it" on Putin
The spymasters and their grovelling politicians
All agree that "their democracy" is "lost in transmission"
Their comfortable and controlled system is now in danger
And these powerful parasites are filled with anger
They "Blame it" on Putin
One loose canon talks and babbles of "an act of war"
Could nuclear hell be started by a warmongering whore?
If the madmen of the establishment get their way
Could we all be liquidated in the nuclear fray?
"Blame it" on Putin
There is no doubt that the ruling class
Are all worried about saving their ass
Could there be huge changes and still more coming?
Is the sick and depraved society finally crumbling?
Hey, "Blame it" on Putin
[more info at link below] http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/01/blame-it-on-putin.html
Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 3:46 pm
This just in: (NYT headline / top of page)
Trump Backtracks on Russian Meddling
Under Fire, He Says He Accepts U.S. Intelligence Reports
Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 4:03 pm
and then
Guardian:
Trump flips – then flips again – a day after downplaying Russian interference
President says he supports US intelligence consensus on 2016 election – but then says 'it could be other people also'
I heard him say that. He meant that Russia did it and others could also have been involved.
Will , July 17, 2018 at 3:30 pm
Perhaps New York magazine has it right? "The president isn't a traitor: He's just constitutionally incapable of processing
simple information, or prioritizing the national interest above his own egoistic desires." or more maybe New York's earlier article
from last week suggesting Trumpkin has been a Russian intelligence asset since 1987 is true.
One thing's for sure: Trumpkin borrowed 100's of millions from shady Russian bankers and other oligarchs, some of whom seem
to have laundered a bunch of money through Trump's real estate holdings by buying condos for dollars on the penny. If you foliks
don't see that as being at least somewhat on the same level as Dick Cheney holding those un-exercised Halliburton stock options
at the time Haliburton was servicing the Iraq invasion
michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:06 pm
Or Hillary exchanging access to the State department for donations
Gregory Herr , July 17, 2018 at 7:40 pm
"Cheney has pursued a political and corporate career to make himself very rich and powerful. He is the personification of a
war profiteer who slid through the revolving door connecting the public and private sectors of the defense establishment on two
occasions in a career that has served his relentless quest for power and profits."
Profiting from the death and destruction of a heinous war of aggression that Cheney himself played a key role in instigating
can in no way be compared with shady business dealings. I harbour disdain for shady businessmen who cheat property owners, honest
contractors or workers. But that type of wrongdoing pales in comparison to the wicked malfeasance of Cheney (or the Bush family
for that matter).
Before you "process" any more simple "information" from New York magazine Will, I suggest you take note of the GIGO truism
and check yourself for leakage.
It seems President Lenin Moreno of Ecuador might have the perfect solution for his "problem" in London.
Free Julian Assange, Allow him to walk out of the Ecuadorian Embassy with all the proper rights available for any innocent
man or woman on Earth.
Immediately upon Mr. Assange's exit, allow William (Bill) Browder to enter and occupy the same room at the Ecuadorian Embassy
– whereupon Mr. Browder will reside at that address until July 2024, punished under the identical treatment and conditions as
Julian Assange.
"Problem solved" – President Moreno!
David Otness , July 17, 2018 at 2:50 pm
Not much to say but the USA has gone bat-shit cray-cray.
I'm going to be delighted to be excised from many so-called "friends" – friends of mob mentality.
The US media and Intel complex have induced a national psychosis and a likely Constitutional crisis.
Keep yer powder dry.
Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 3:04 pm
I'd guess half the country considers this -- in the end -- just more partisan theatrics sad to suspect that they actually are
the "sane ones" It's ennui versus cynicism as to which is more deadly .
KiwiAntz , July 17, 2018 at 7:47 pm
The scary thing is, Americans second amendment right to bear arms against enemies both domestic & foreign! There's a Edward
Abbey saying that a days "a Patriot must always be ready to defend his Country against his Govt"! How long will it be before American
citizens reach a tipping point where they recognise that it's enemies are its own domestic leaders & institutions such as the
false corporate propagandist MSM & corrupt Politicians in both Republican & Democratic Parties who are undermining & sabotaging
their human rights as free people! How long will it be before they say enough's enough we can't stomach this anymore?
Larry Gates , July 17, 2018 at 2:37 pm
In the Odyssey a witch-goddess named Circe turned Odysseus' men into pigs. I think Trump is a modern day sorcerer. In the GOP
primaries he turned his more intelligent and more experienced competitors into incoherent cartoon characters. He has done the
same to the entire Democratic establishment, and he has done it to the entire mainstream press. There is no effective opposition
because politicians and the media have become stark-raving mad – wild swine, just as dangerous as the monster they oppose. We
are in America's darkest hour and only half the blame goes to the vulgarian in the White House.
The Ministry of Truth has declared that seeking détente with Russia is an act of treason. And peace is war. Long live Oceania!
jsinton , July 17, 2018 at 6:14 pm
I love it.
BobS , July 17, 2018 at 2:37 pm
The POTUS stood on foreign soil and announced to the world that the leader of one of our historical adversaries was more credible
than the US intelligence services.
If it walks like a traitorous duck, and quacks like a traitorous duck, ..
anon , July 17, 2018 at 4:25 pm
Then it is a traitorous troll.
Gregory Herr , July 17, 2018 at 7:47 pm
That's rich! Do please grace us with an explanation as to why "credible" is an adjective aptly applied to either the FBI or
the CIA.
Dario Zuddu , July 17, 2018 at 2:33 pm
Excellent piece. Fortunately, there is still someone here retaining sanity.
The only thing I have to add is that, most regrettably, it is not only the media and opportunistic politicians that have lost
their minds on this matter.
Large segments of the public appear to have too.
Just take a look at the readers' comments on the very same type of press coverage that is indicted by Mr. Lauria.
They overwhelmingly level the same one sided, unbalanced, shallow, wrong-headed and hysterical attacks on Trump as the press articles
they comment – and for the same completely questionable reasons.
Accusations of Trump "surrendering to Putin", being a "traitor" for siding with Russia instead of the US intelligence community
(on a totally unproven matter, by the way; and since when the US intelligence community is necessarily more reliable than foreign
leaders on these matters?) are the norm in the readers' comment (as well as in the mostly recommended ones).
Incredibly, the same public that lambasted at the intelligence community for its appalling record on Iraq, now does not even want
to consider that same community's obvious self interest in Russia-bashing.
In the USA, who stands the most to loose from a possible pacification of foreign relations with the biggest military counterpart,
i.e., well, Russia?
This question just rings as troubling now as it did at the onset of the cold war.
Yet, nobody seems to wonder it.
It's just over for those of us on the old left. The Orwellian nature of the media has taken hold and we are powerless against
it. We have a population utterly uncurious of facts or history, logic or science, rationality or erudition. It's over. People
want to belong, want to share their anger at whatever enemy there is no matter how ludicrous is that threat from the enemy. This
is how the oligarch has decided to use Trump's election–first to divide us on tribal grounds and second to invent some enemy that
uses all the mythology of Hollywood villains with Russian accents. It's working and it means the oligarchs are unassailable and
now are able to control public opinion with a bunch of gestures on the screen and the population will bark on command. Goebbels
is, somewhere, cackling with delight.
We will be lucky if we avoid war, fortunately the professional military understands the situation much better than the civilian
leaders and have put brakes on our drift into permanent major war everywhere.
Paula Densnow , July 17, 2018 at 2:19 pm
The US media tries to browbeat Trump into saying that he stole the 2016 election with the help of Putin, and when he refuses
to do that, they call him a traitor.
We live in an insane asylum.
Will , July 17, 2018 at 3:31 pm
No, trump is clearly a traitor.
Beard681 , July 17, 2018 at 9:07 pm
To who? The military industrial complex? Bill Browder who renounced his citizenship to avoid Taxes? Certainly not average US
people for whom Russia poses no credible threat.
Robin Harper , July 17, 2018 at 10:31 pm
Gee, if this is all made up, explain this: (And keep in mind, to get an indictment, you MUST have proof.)
The full list of known indictments and plea deals in Mueller's probe:
Total of indictments (so far) – 35.
1) George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, pleaded guilty in October to making false statements
to the FBI.
2) Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser, pleaded guilty in December to making false statements to the FBI.
3) Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chair, was indicted in October in Washington, DC on charges of conspiracy, money
laundering, and false statements -- all related to his work for Ukrainian politicians before he joined the Trump campaign. He's
pleaded not guilty on all counts. Then, in February, Mueller filed a new case against him in Virginia, with tax, financial, and
bank fraud charges.
4) Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide and Manafort's longtime junior business partner, was indicted on similar charges
to Manafort. But in February he agreed to a plea deal with Mueller's team, pleading guilty to just one false statements charge
and one conspiracy charge.
5-20) 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies were indicted on conspiracy charges, with some also being accused of
identity theft. The charges related to a Russian propaganda effort designed to interfere with the 2016 campaign. The companies
involved are the Internet Research Agency, often described as a "Russian troll farm," and two other companies that helped finance
it. The Russian nationals indicted include 12 of the agency's employees and its alleged financier, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
21) Richard Pinedo: This California man pleaded guilty to an identity theft charge in connection with the Russian indictments,
and has agreed to cooperate with Mueller.
22) Alex van der Zwaan: This London lawyer pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Rick
Gates and another unnamed person based in Ukraine.
23) Konstantin Kilimnik: This longtime business associate of Manafort and Gates, who's currently based in Russia, was charged
alongside Manafort with attempting to obstruct justice by tampering with witnesses in Manafort's pending case this year.
24-35) 12 Russian GRU officers: These officers of Russia's military intelligence service were charged with crimes related to
the hacking and leaking of leading Democrats' emails in 2016.
Two ex-Trump advisers lied to the FBI about their contacts with Russians:
Michael Flynn Mario Tama/Getty
No, Trump didn't 'steal' the election. The presidency was handed to him – by Putin.
skipNclair , July 17, 2018 at 2:01 pm
The US media lost its mind long ago.
didi , July 17, 2018 at 1:46 pm
What has happened on this trip of President Trump is simple. The axis Washington-EU/NATO has been thrown under the bus., It
has been replaced by the axis Washington-Moscow. Whether that is a cause to rejoice remains to be seen. Rejoicing now is wildly
premature. Axes can break.
There will be expectations of better lives by the Russian people. What if that does not happen? There have been far more uprisings
and revolutions in Russian history than in ours.
lizzie dw , July 17, 2018 at 1:34 pm
To respond to one commenter's suggestion that the US get rid of the electoral college; if one looked at the map of the US on
post-election morning, one saw that practically the entire country was coloured red – only the coasts were blue. If we went the
"popular vote" route, every president would be elected by the coastal states because that is where most of the people live. The
coastal population does not represent the country. In my opinion, since we want to have a representative government we need the
electoral college so that each state gets to vote. The people in each state can direct the vote of their state.
didi , July 17, 2018 at 1:51 pm
Sorry Lizzie. The population of all states represent our nation. That is why the vote count, while it does not elect the President
and Vice President, is not wholly without meaning. Governing totally against the views of the majority of voters implies that
they are wrong and stupid. That is my view. It is also arrogant.
strngr-tgthr , July 17, 2018 at 2:32 pm
Thanks you! The MAJORITY should ALWAYS rule. There should be no acceptions especially for President of the United States. Too
few people speak this TRUTH! In this day an age there is no reason to have any system or institutions in place that does not speak
for the MAJORITY! Electoral College down!
Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 2:52 pm
Never heard of the "tyranny of the majority", eh? It's a genuine problem with democracy it's quite possible that many issues
would never have reached majority status -- slavery would never have been abolished (so much fuss about a regional "peculiar institutution"),
""The notion of the tyranny of the majority was popularised by the 19th century political thinkers Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy
in America) and John Stuart Mill (On Liberty). It refers to a situation in which the majority enforces its will on a disadvantaged
minority through the democratic process.""
The vote of far too many would be rendered irrelevant if there were no proportional representation mechanism in place too much
of those disenfranchised by the elimination of the electoral college are already amongst the have-nots of our country, at the
further hungry end of income inequality (some do better than other by providing "services" -- vacation homes/destinations and
cheap labor -- to the oligarchs. -- those coasts are where the money and jobs are wealth
The electoral college DOES NOT prevent the "tyranny of the majority" because you do not have equal voting. If every state cast
the same number of votes then you have equal voting. Because each state has different number of electoral votes based on their
populations, candidates can spend their time in a few states while ignoring others.
A national popular vote restores equality
A national popular vote means 3rd party candidates can win because there is no more electoral strategy or asinine argument
of red state / blue state.
Realist , July 17, 2018 at 5:12 pm
We've never had such a system, wise guy. The Senate is inherently undemocratic, based on states' rights, not one man one vote.
Moreover, judges are not elected but appointed by the executive and confirmed by the legislature. Having the president chosen
by the Congress, as is done in all parliamentary systems, would be "tidier" ("fairer?") than the present system, but we've lived
with this mess since 1789 and several times have been governed by a "minority president" without the world coming to an end. The
rules were no excuse for a coup d'etat then, nor are they now.
michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:22 pm
The Constitution allows Amendments to change with changing times. The vote has been given to free men without property, freed
slaves and women. More than 10% of Presidents did not win the plurality of votes. If people truly want their votes to count more,
they can work to amend the Constitution, or vote with their feet and move to states where their votes count more.
A much bigger issue is the lack of proportional voting practiced by most real Democracies around the world. Gerrymandering districts
can result in the party getting the least votes (of the two) in a state still winning the most representatives. Proportional voting
would eliminate this problem, but was outlawed by LBJ in favor of first-past-the-post, winner takes all Districts.
Sorry, Didi, but our federal constitutional republican form of government is neither stupid nor arrogant.
It is a well designed construct that binds together the entire nation, not only the people but the states, into an organic
being. The electoral college consciously factors in the fact that we are a union of states, not only a union of "demos" (people).
That is why the "New Jersey plan" at the Federal Convention was a high point in your high school civics class. The states are
intended to mean something in our federal republican form of government.
Indeed, for those who view the massive growth of our federal government into an imperial hegemon over the past century or so,
it is no small coincidence that the balance constructed by the founders was tipped in favor of Washington, and BIG MONEY, by the
passage of the 17th Amendment in 1912. That amemdment (for the popular election of Senators instead of their being appointed by
state legislatures as written in the constitution) inexorably led to the growth of our imperial state; immediately thereafter
came the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, enactment of a the personal income tax to replace import tariff's to fund the federal
government, our engagement in WW 1, and increasing alliance with the British Empire that lasts today in our "special relationship",
the NATO alliance, and the Anglo American hegemon.
It is also no coincidence that the root source of "Russia-gate" and "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is a sustained effort by British
Intelligence, in cahoots with US deep state intelligence that works not for the people of the US but for the Anglo-American empire
of western capital centered on Wall Street and the medieval City of London. That is why the "golden shower dossier" was written
by a British intelligence officer (Steele), that the basis for the deep state rat Strzok to spy on Trump was an Australian "diplomat"
(read spy) Downer, friend of the globalist Clintons, and US deep state intelligence operatives attempted entrapment of Trump campaign
supporters (such as by Stefan Halper, an Mi-6 and CIA asset).
The entire attack to undermine the results of the Electoral College triumph of Donald Trump is directed by Anglo-American deep
intelligence assets, working for the globalist western capitalist cabal, that cannot permit a mere president to alter their globalist
plans; ergo, deep state rats Brennan and 10 hand picked analysts come up with "Russian collusion", unleasigh Mueller (protector
of the Whitey Bulger Winter Hill Gang), Strzok, Rosenstein, etc. to to find a basis to neuter, if not impeach, the constitutionally
elected President.
Indeed, Pres. Washington foresaw such an eventuality of foreign influence tainting our Republic; see his Farewell Address at
Paragraphs 32-39. Indeed, his prescience amazing; read these warnings:
"So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite
nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing
into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without
adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which
is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained,
and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And
it
gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or
sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of
a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or
foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened
and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of
seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards
a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people
ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of
republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence
to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another
cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on
the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its
tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."
Indeed, if any nation can be found to be interfering in our domestic politics and seeking to influence the actions of the President,
or more precisely to have him removed from power, it's not Russia, its the United Kingdom.
Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 3:59 pm
Interesting, thank you. I will read up on the 17th. I've blamed the "federalization" of politics for a lot of the apparent
decline in citizen interest in Democracy as state and local influence "on people's lives" seemed to have been ceded over to the
fed not entirely a bad thing (when it comes to civil rights, equal opportunity and federal funding for stuff states could never
afford) still, I think something encouraged a complacent electorate even if the educational values of unions (voting for your
interests rather than against) signifies.
backwardsevolution , July 17, 2018 at 4:31 pm
Jim in NH – brilliant post! Thank you. Everybody should read it.
Fred , July 17, 2018 at 10:08 pm
If three million more voted for Hillary than Trump, then majority of voters are wrong and stupid. Good thing the Electoral
College saved us from ourselves.
" one saw that practically the entire country was coloured red – only the coasts were blue."
Right, "only the coasts". The ones where nearly 50% of the US population live.
irina , July 17, 2018 at 8:09 pm
And that 50% mostly live in big cities which would not survive long
without the rural areas which provide the resources to support them.
Fred , July 17, 2018 at 10:09 pm
They actually think food comes from the supermarket Irina.
irina , July 17, 2018 at 11:17 pm
And you buy it with EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) cards.
JoeD , July 17, 2018 at 3:06 pm
The coasts were not blue. Clinton got the west coast. Trump won most of the east: FL, GA, SC, NC and they split Maine. Trump
won 30 out of 50 states. There were also less people who voted in 2016 than did in 2012 and in 2008.
So it does not follow Clinton would win if there was a National Popular vote.
Our electoral system(s) have very serious problems voter access (and apathy) and gerrymandering probably top the list, but
that "neoliberal income inequality" appears to color/overlay everything
Bob Van Noy , July 17, 2018 at 1:33 pm
Great article and commentary CN, many thanks. There is an excellent comment by Craig Murray at his site and one should not
miss the commentary there either
Liberals should be ashamed of themselves. They voted a Russian bribery hag Hillary and now go far-right John Birch in drumming
up war with Russia -- just because Trump hurt their feelings by beating Hillary. Sad!
I was impressed on the eve of 2016 election how ineffective Clinton's constant beating on Obama's drum wrt to Russia-Russia-Russia
had been I don't remember the polls but the numbers for "major concern" iirc were low, around maybe 12% (after months and months)
I think the media is drunk on their own piss . I remember feeling frustrated when Gore (who had a better case for "stolen electoin"
imho) walked away my suspicion is that on completion of the Mueller inquiry this is going backfire badly . even if Manafort gets
decades in prison for money laundering
Anon , July 17, 2018 at 12:22 pm
Debate: Is Trump-Putin Summit a "Danger to America" or Crucial Diplomacy Between Nuclear Powers?
Glenn Greenwald and another thoughtful dude, Joe Cirincione. All substance and strong disagreements without shouting or personal
attacks.
Greenwald:
I also think that that last point that Joe made is actually an important one, and it does put people like me into a difficult
position, which is, you know, on the one hand, of course I don't think that Donald Trump is well intentioned and is going to have
the diplomatic skill to negotiate complicated new agreements of trade and of arms control with very sophisticated regimes like
the one in North Korea, or at least complicated regimes in North Korea, or in Russia. On the other hand, as we've been discussing,
unfortunately, he's the only game in town. There is nobody else who's saying that we ought to question NATO. Democrats, when you
say we ought to question NATO, act like you've committed blasphemy. There is nobody else talking about tariffs and the unfairness
of free trade agreements, except for a couple of fringe people within the Democratic Party. Just like this week, when he said
that the European Union was a foe, what he said was something that for a long time on the left was really kind of just uncontroversial
orthodoxy, which is that of course the European Union is an economic competitor of the U.S., and a lot of what their trade practices
are do harm the American worker. We put up barriers against Chinese products entering the U.S., and yet the EU buys them and then
sells them into the U.S., indirectly helping China circumvent those barriers in a way that directly harms U.S. workers. This is
something that people like Robert Reich and Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders have been talking about for a long time. So it does
make it very difficult when the only person who's raising these kinds of issues and talking about these things-we need to get
along better with Russia and China, we need to reform these old, archaic, destructive institutions-is a megalomaniac, somebody
who's completely devoid of any positive human virtue, which is Donald Trump. So it puts you in the position of kind of trying
to agree with him, while knowing that he's really not going to be able to do anything about those in a positive way.
On the other hand, I don't feel comfortable being aligned with people like Bill Kristol and David Frum and all of those Bush-era
hawks who are now the best friends of MSNBC and the Democratic Party, either, because they're not well intentioned, either. And
so, what I try and do is use Donald Trump and the kind of shifting alliances, that we started off by talking about, to open up
a lot of the debates, that will remain closed if you only look at U.S. politics through the prism of the 2016 election and Republicans
versus Democrats. And I think the most important point is the one that, as I said, Joe made just this week, which is that until
the Democratic Party figures out-and this is true not just of Democrats but of center-left parties all throughout Europe and here
in Brazil-until they figure out how again to reconnect, not with the highly educated class and the rich and the metropolitan enclaves,
but with the working class of these countries, that feel trampled on and ignored, and for that reason are turning to demagogues,
we're going to have more Donald Trumps and worse Donald Trumps, not just in the United States, but throughout the world. And that
is, for me, the greatest problem that we face politically
This is the best article I've read on the topic, hands down.
Realist , July 17, 2018 at 11:38 am
No question about that, TIEDE, but considering the pitifully low standards applied to what emanates from the wreckage of the
American mass media, Mr. Lauria really didn't have much competition to beat. Of course, no matter how deserved, he will not be
winning any Pulitzers, since mediocre groupthink, especially of the warmongering variety, is the new standard of excellence in
American letters.
Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 12:45 pm
As others have noted, it "treason" isn't impeachable, what is? If not now, when?
Should we go off and invade Somalia in retaliation? The anti-Trump/Democrats are undermining their own credibility -- not to
mention the press, whose credibility might reach nosedive if they still had much of an audience .
More ridiculous than GWB after 09/11 . which reminds me that Trump keeps reminding me of want-to-share-a-beer-with GWB but
stupider and with less "fund of knowledge"
Realist , July 17, 2018 at 5:26 pm
And how are these "others" defining "treason?" Whatever they say it is, and without any evidence that it genuinely occurred?
This is not a case of treason, it is a case of attempted mob rule, like the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The
vile media acts as the bull horn of the seditionists, they show some insurrectionists making a hullabaloo on your television screen,
and the coup plotters point and say, "see, it's treason, off with his head!" Meanwhile, your government has been stolen yet again
because some insiders didn't like the results.
michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:42 pm
To have treason you must have a declared war and a declared enemy. If you look at the list of people convicted of treason in
the US, there are what, a dozen?
The President has broad powers of foreign policy (and immigration) which may be a bad thing, but I applaud Trump's peace overtures
to North Korea and Russia as well as Obama's (reviled by many of the same warmongers) deal with Iran. Unfortunately all these
deals are President-specific and undercut by un-elected Intelligence agencies with agendas of their own, and politicians taking
money from the MIC and foreign lobbyists with war profiteering agendas. No one can believe a President no matter how well meaning
and sincere. Clinton abrogated Reagan's deal with Gorbachev, almost destroying Russia, as did Obama reneging on the deal with
Gaddafi, destroying Libya. Clearly the best option is to build up a cache of nuclear arms and to use them if necessary to protect
sovereignty.
gailstorm , July 17, 2018 at 10:53 am
At least Cooper used a small window – there haven't been many U.S. Russia summits – but Fallows? Uh, 9/11 and the Saudis anyone?
More evidence there than Russian collusion and three Presidents – including Trump – have given that a pass.
Treason-schmeason, Dave! You don't seem to know much about the real history of the US government, only the manufactured one
of the powers in charge. Pick up a copy of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's book "The Untold History of the United States".
As for the vaunted democracy these talking bobbleheads and puppet politicians go on about, we don't hear them speaking about
lobbying, do we, or Citizens United or McCutcheon vs Buckley decisions of the Supreme Court? It's not even the Electoral College
that skews the vote and takes democracy out of the citizens' decisions -- it's lobbying, which is legalized fraud and bribery.
No, they go on and on about Russia, Russia, Russia, all to make sure folks look somewhere else while they continue the hijacking.
Dave , July 17, 2018 at 10:35 am
What is amazing is how you and so many GOP are actually defending Russia! This was treason!
Deniz , July 17, 2018 at 10:53 am
What is amazing is the extent that the Democrats are lied to, and the extent that they believe those lies. I am awestruck by
the complete and utter brainwashing of a democratic, educated country by the CIA. Getting Republicans, who are inclined to think
negatively of foreigners is one thing, but Liberal Democrats, who profess to believe in education and equality becoming the brown
shirts, it never occurred to me that was possible.
By the way, i am speaking as a former Democrat, Obama voter.
gailstorm , July 17, 2018 at 10:58 am
Yes, it is quite frightening. I think Trump is dangerously inept but reading the intelligence report on Russia released Jan.,
2017 was the most frightened I have ever been as an American. It provided no evidence (apparently keeping things top secret is
more important than alleged election tampering which should give cause to thought right there) and instead laid out a game plan
for attacking dissenters of U.S. foreign policy.
Realist , July 17, 2018 at 11:18 am
Maybe it's just wishful thinking, because I am one too, but it seems the country must be full of former Democrats (and thoroughly
disillusioned Obama voters), or at least we should be if we want to survive over the long term. Hillary was just another pack
of lies (and threatened violence) too far, which is why she lost. Had NOTHING to do with Russians hacking elections, influencing
the vote or stealing our democracy. That is simply the revisionist bullshit in the aftermath of her self-inflicted debacle, as
she persists in dragging down the party, the country and maybe the world out of self-centered petulance.
Realist , July 17, 2018 at 11:24 am
Unless you are trying to be sarcastic, Dave, you added an extraneous letter to the word you should really want. What Mr. Lauria
has written here is pure "reason," not "treason." Go back and consider all the relevant issues again, this time accurately.
Daniel , July 17, 2018 at 1:12 pm
I guess Dave forgot that our intelligence agencies have lied us into war in the past.
Realist , July 17, 2018 at 5:29 pm
And YOU are prosecuting Russia on what EVIDENCE? None! That is madness and the ticket to war. You are just the sort of pawn
to make Goebbels tremble with delight, Dave.
Samuel , July 18, 2018 at 12:34 am
I am not American but like so many out there, am concerned by what is going on in your once beautiful country. It amazes to
realize that people have chosen to bury truth and reason for hatred's sake. How can one hope to build a secure, prosperous democracy
based on a fraudulent lie? If one can pick a leaf from the Iraqi war it is that one should never believe unquestioningly everything
that comes from the intelligence community. That deception resulted in perhaps millions dead. This time round it might result
in billions dead including Americans. Is that what people like Dave want? Could this be a secret conspiracy to bring destruction
to the entire universe? To what ends?
David G , July 17, 2018 at 10:00 am
Trump's actual treason:
-- turning environmental policy over to the biggest polluters
-- turning financial regulation over to parasitic elites
-- turning education policy over to anti-public, pro-charter grifters
-- turning the FCC over to the big telecoms
-- turning the Iran-nuke deal over to Netanyahu
What gets Trump called a traitor by the Beltway blob:
-- wanting to talk with Russia, and holding a Soviet/Russia summit just like every president since FDR
Wotta country!
Karen , July 17, 2018 at 11:06 am
Exactly!
BrianS , July 17, 2018 at 7:54 pm
Don't relish the me too, or "same here" moniker, but: Exactly!
mike k , July 17, 2018 at 9:39 am
The enemies of Peace, having failed to prevent the Putin/Trump summit, are now busy saying that it was a disaster, and that
it was meaningless – two seemingly discordant observations. The real religion of America is WAR. Anything that smacks of peace
is Heresy!
David G , July 17, 2018 at 10:08 am
"The stories of how North Korea is now violating an imaginary pledge by Kim to Trump in Singapore are even more outrageous,
because big media had previously peddled the opposite line: that Kim at the Singapore Summit made no firm commitment to give up
his nuclear weapons and that the 'agreement' in Singapore was the weakest of any thus far."
Yeah. The lunatics would have the world believe that Trump was a cowardly traitor because he didn't i) berate President Putin
to his face for rigging the election in his favor (as did the impertinent network goon Chris Wallace whom Putin totally pwned,
though absolutely unbeknownst to the American jingoist corp) and ii) summarily declare war on the Russian Federation to cap everyone's
day of fun and games. Insults and war seem to be what the imbeciles so passionately want. I wish I could give them their suicidal
war that didn't involve me, my relatives, friends and other innocent bystanders, but that's not how it works and they will eagerly
take us all down if given the chance. We are seeing war fever sweep across a crazed nation led astray by the worst demagogues
to come down the pike since the "Greatest Generation" got an invite from Uncle Sam to Hitler's big dance. Everybody is a flag
waving blood-lusting maniac, from the corporate boardrooms, to the residue of what is left skulking around the fake newsrooms,
to the cocky stand-up comedians now inhabiting every late night channel spewing trash and attitude without having the first clue.
Must be as invigorating as sucking in the cordite-perfumed air of Berlin circa 1939. The pity is that this time the glorious experience
will be so short once the rockets are launched. Almost seems a waste to squander the experience on a bunch of lame brains who
probably assume they can get their ticket price back if they don't fully enjoy the show.
Realist, As always, your comments are stunningly accurate, and have literary flavor as well. It is really getting there as
you have described.
As Gore Vidal wrote long ago, this brainwashing started long time ago during the nineteenth century when they started inoculating
the innocent American population against socialism and all that, the ideas which were sweeping across Europe in that century.
Here we are now, it is almost a crazed Nation. My wife reads L.A. Times religiously and being a Hillary fan has been watching
CNN, MSNBC, Judy Woodruff and other channels like these.
It is not going to end up pretty, the atmosphere is frightening.
Doran Zeigler , July 17, 2018 at 9:32 am
I consider my politics as beyond progressive, and I am definitely not a Trump cheerleader, but I must say that this article
by Consortium News is by far the most balanced and fair article I have read on the Trump/Putin press conference. Did the Russians
hack Clinton's emails? Most likely. Were the hacks responsible for Clinton's defeat -- not on your life. Hillary offered nothing
other than the same old tired rhetoric and hostilities toward Russia. She basically defeated herself.
The fact that Clinton won the popular vote by three million should dispel any notion that the Russian hacks were effective.
What this does say is that we should get rid of the antiquated and unfair Electoral College. The press conference was not the
venue to grill or attempt to embarrass Putin, besides, Putin could hurl those same accusations at the US for not only interfering
in the Ukraine election, but also contributing millions of dollars to it. Putin, if he wanted, could point to NATO creeping up
to Russian borders when NATO had promised years ago not to go beyond unified Germany. The Russians have a multitude of complaints,
but are more diplomatic than the provocative Americans and would rather not solve these problems in the press.
Is Trump a bumbler -- no doubt. The conference was not the place to air America's dirty laundry or bring up his usual complaints.
All of this hoopla is a dog and pony show, a theatrical media event to distract the American people from their real problems like
a collapsing economy made worse by Trump's tariffs, like the bloated military budget, the horrific income inequality, the rise
of poverty, and an endless stream of worsening problems of which neither party has a solution. It is the old sleight of the hand
trick -- watch the hand I wave in front of you face, but pay no attention to the hand that is stealing you blind.
I am at least happy to see a media outlet that has broken from the pack of running lemmings that are not heading for a cliff,
but are running in a small circle.
Daniel , July 17, 2018 at 1:16 pm
Where is the evidence that Russia, rather than an insider like Seth Rich, released the emails?
Assange has all but verbally confirmed it was Seth Rich, not Russia.
Zinny , July 17, 2018 at 1:44 pm
Begs the question; Why doesn't the NSA either confirm or deny the download?
michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:50 pm
Why doesn't Mueller offer Assange immunity to testify? Sounds like Mueller may offer the Podestas (Manafort's partners in crime
in the Ukraine) immunity to testify against Manafort.
TragiCom , July 17, 2018 at 9:28 am
You'd be forgiven if you thought Brennan's rant was an episode from 'Who is America'!!
Brennan & co. behaving absolutely like unaccountable gangsters. Very dangerous gangsters. Nuclear armed gangsters.
"The indictments, which are only unproven accusations, formally accused 12 members of the GRU, Russian military intelligence,
of stealing Democratic Party emails in a hacking operation and giving the materials to WikiLeaks to publish in order to damage
the candidacy of Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton. The indictments were announced on Friday, three days before the summit, with
the clear intention of getting Trump to cancel it. He ignored cries from the media and Congress to do so."
The most blatant and desperate effort to date to sabotage détente, any effort to cooperate on crucial issues. The media and
its sources are hysterical but scary as hell. Using words like treason without a peep from the media or anyone in Washington is
also scary as hell.
Didn't watch much of the news but curious about CNN, turned it on to watch Blitzer and Rand Paul exchange. Last question do
you trust our security folks or Putin. The patriots versus the devil. Rand Paul ignored it and earlier pointed to our less than
Simon pure history of trying to meddle in elections. Hell we ran the campaign of the greatest thief in Russian history, Yeltsin.
Bottom line, folks will do anything to stop the President's efforts to improve relations with Russia. It began before the inauguration
and has not let up since.
There is reason to use the word treason but it is not Trump's.
It's a bizarre world when Donald Trump is actually the voice of reason in the USA. The corporate media (including our "public"
networks) are running around with their hair on fire at the thought of the two nuclear nations having a rational relationship.
Why can't the public see the insanity of what's going on?
michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:53 pm
Sedition is the more accurate word for those in the Intelligence agencies seeking a soft coup.
richard vajs , July 17, 2018 at 8:54 am
The US Media lost its mind about two years ago. After all this time they are still trying to change the 2016 election. It was
plain then – a dirt-bag vs. a fool. The US Media had a dog in that fight – the dirt-bag. What is driving them insane is that the
"fool" has survived their best efforts to destroy him – should have been easy, but it is not. So the insane manipulators are going
for the throat now – TREASON. It is all ridiculous – America has deep economic problems that need to be addressed, namely the
terminal income inequality that exists. Killing the fool and re-elevating the dirt-bag will accomplish nothing but give the U
S Media and the elites they represent another fifteen minute stroll on the decks of the Titanic
Charron , July 17, 2018 at 8:24 am
The corporate press has been shocked that President Trump would not believe the findings of his own intelligence. Never once
has anyone in the Corporate press ever noted that out intelligence sources, the CIA in particular lied when they said Iraq had
WMDS. It was a terrible lie. And even if you prefer to believe that the intelligence community had merely made a mistake, our
invasion cost us over 3trillion dollars, cost thousands of American soldiers their lives, and ended up causing the death of hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and has ignited the middle east, resulting in the rise of ISIS. But no one in the corporate press
sees fit to even mention the fact that the CIA claimed were a "slam dunk." Nor has anyone in the corporate press mentioned the
fact that James Come, when he was in the FBI, who headed up the Anthrax investigation fingered the wrong man, though he had said
when questioned if he had the right man, said he was absolutely certain that Hatfiield was the man who spread the Anthrax. The
government settled the false charges against Hatfiled for 5.82 million, as it turned out a fellow named ivans. P.S. Robert Mueller
was the head of the FBI during most of the investigation. And let me make this clear, I also think Trump is a scoundrel, but the
members of our corporate press are scoundrels too.
gailstorm , July 17, 2018 at 11:09 am
That the parroted information that got us into Iraq was a lie was widely reported and the intelligence debunked in independent
media at the time. There was no mistake. The information was out there but went ignored by the mainstream media. But it goes back
further. Yugoslavia, the first Gulf War erroneous reporting on such issues has been consistent at CNN.
AnthraxSleuth , July 17, 2018 at 3:18 pm
You could not be more wrong about the Anthrax.
Comey and co. ignored a material witness in that case (me) that caught Hatfill snooping around my house in November of 2001. Approx.
a month and a half after I received an anthrax letter. Mr Comey's Anthrax investigation was no such thing. It was just like Hillary's
email investigation. It was a "matter" not an investigation.
An investigation would have included having agents pay a visit to the man (me) that gave them Hatfill's last name 7 months before
his name became public. I was able to do that b/c I when I caught him snooping around my house he was arrogant enough to wear
his army jacket. Guess what is on your army jacket? Your last name.
MR. Comey's Anthrax matter also ignored when I informed the FBI that Ottillie Lundgren and Cathy Nugyen had posted on the same
internet message board at the same time and to the same article that I did.
Mr. Comey and Mr. Mueller lied then and are lying now.
For kicks and giggles you can hear Hatfill admit that he was in North Carolina at the time I caught him snooping around my
house in NC here . https://youtu.be/fSfcIh1WCdg?t=1640
Mike , July 17, 2018 at 8:01 am
"The queen of diamonds the queen of diamonds"
padre , July 17, 2018 at 7:41 am
You ain't seen nothing yet, wait till your allies come tot their senses!
Well now I feel silly. I just saw the ZeroHedge piece and understand that Robert Parry wrote often about Browder, so presumably
most visitors of this site are familiar with the name. I'll have to look for those articles. Is Browder in the same league as
Soros?
Alcuin , July 17, 2018 at 1:25 pm
Webb: "Trump and Putin are closing in on this Brennan/Browder gang; that's why you had that incredible reaction from Brennan
"
Putin tried to make the point that private citizens are not the state in a country. A private citizen doesn't speak official
government words.
Russian billionaires perhaps poured money into election campaigns. If so, the head of state is not to blame, nor is the crime
done by authority of the government.
Putin said Browder evaded Russian taxes and laundered $1.2 bn into USA, and moved one-third = $400 mn to Clinton's campaign.
Netted him $800 mn. With one-eighth of that Browder bribed Congress to enact Magnitsky (sp) proclamation to spur sanctions.
Russia filed criminal warrants with US under the 1999 treaty (Putin cited) to question Browder and bring charges; unlawfully
ignoring them, US violated treaty.
Browder money 'meddling' in 2016 campaigns is NOT 'Putin dunnit' and NOT 'Kremlin dunnit' and NOT 'Russia dunnit.' Only truthfully,
'Russian Browder dunnit.'
Trump's right for peace, but deplorable (almost) every other way.
If he did 'collude and conspire' that seems the least of his crimes. Impeach him for being morally unfit. Cripes, he was named
in Florida court indictments as co-defendant against charges of rape and abuse of 13- and 14-yo girls; his partner Jeffrey Epstein
was convicted and did time. Forget Russia, Trump's is a sex pervert, racist, and fascist -- unfit for office.
https://www.justice-integrity.org/1445-welcome-to-waterbury-the-city-that-holds-secrets-that-could-bring-down-trump
No link but find July 10 item at ClubOrlov.com titled, Taking Refuge in Insanity. It may be solace for Joe, in a way, and moreover
a general understanding of media cohort insanity.
If understanding is possible.
And MOST I stopped to say Thank You, thank you Joe Lauria. Your work brought me deep relief and it's refreshing.
_____
PS, I predict the 12 indicted Russians do get their day in US courtroom to defend themselves with lawyers rightfully allowed
to question (Mueller's) prosecution witnesses and testimony, and to present defense , and (Mueller's) prosecution loses there.
PPS, any rich moneybags domestic or foreign who aimed to spend in 2016 to hurt Hillary or help Donald be elected,
put all the money into Bernie's campaign: split the left vote and the rightist candidate skulks into office. Vice versa, Dems
in 2020 may prop up a Republican candidate on the left of Trump; split the R's vote between soft and hard rightwingers.
exiled off mainstreet , July 17, 2018 at 2:25 am
Who are the traitors? Those who seek war with a nuclear power or those who wish to solve the problems. What about Browder's
$400,000,000 to the Clinton campaign. Putin wouldn't make such a statement if there were nothing to back it up, though Mueller
is willing to lay unsubstantiated charges which go against proven evidence that the DNC leak was from a thumb drive, not internet
transmission. In any event, why is it so bad that the crimes of the DNC were revealed? I guess the truth is dangerous to the yankee
form of "managed democracy."
Alcuin , July 17, 2018 at 2:10 am
I don't know if it's true or not, but I once read that Nicholas II actually ordered the de-mobilization of the Russian army
on the eve of WWI, but that his order was ignored by his subordinates who were eager for war. Trump in his interview with Hannity
implies at one point that he doesn't have full control over the military -- that the belligerent rhetoric has been having practical
and dangerous consequences. Frightening. Starting at ca. min. 5. https://youtu.be/dRMW4knpiUo
Zhu Ba Jie , July 17, 2018 at 1:22 am
Just for sh*ts & giggles, try listening to prophecy preachers like Bro. Stair at
http://www.overcomerministry.org (Do NOT belive them!) Such folks
have radically different assumptions. Listening will clear your intellectual pallette, so to say.
David G , July 17, 2018 at 1:11 am
Others may not feel the connection strongly, but watching today's (yesterday's now) media meltdown flashed me back to the day
of Colin Powell's Iraqi WMD presentation to the U.N.
I watched that live, and even at the time – before the specific fabrications were exposed – it was such a self-evidently lame
effort that I was genuinely surprised and confused when all the media people instantly hailed the its supposedly irresistible
power in making the case for the coming war. And it's not like I went into the day with such a high opinion of the corporate media.
As with Trump in Helsinki, it was clear the media was activating a pre-arranged narrative (approval then, opprobrium now) rather
than genuinely reacting to what they had seen and heard.
Jared , July 17, 2018 at 6:48 am
That is an excellent assesment.
That is the dumbfound aspect the blatantly preconceived and coordinated attack on the public dialog.
I feel certain the media is being required to sacrifice its reputation for the purpose of distracting the public from some issue.
I dont thing the anderson coopers realise that this is the purpose they belive they are simply acting as political assasins of
the enemy.
Maybe is niave of me but is it possible this is simply to defray discussion of dnc communications and dnc conspiring by which
they pretty much destroyed the democratic brand? Of course there are also the globalists concern with nationalism and populism
and mic with concern fear of outbreak of peace.
gailstorm , July 17, 2018 at 11:23 am
The average journalist, mostly print but even regional TV, statistically makes less money than school teachers. It's quite
different at the national TV level. They are paid ridiculously well and maybe coincidentally (maybe not) removed from the ground
work among the masses. The system has rewarded them so there is natural bias toward the status quo (something that exists to a
degree in objective journalism to begin with). They likely aren't aware but they are hired and keep their jobs based on questions
they are not likely to ask. It's corporate America. Just as in low level administrative job hiring at large companies, blandness
and safe get the jobs.
Chumpsky , July 16, 2018 at 11:23 pm
"Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards the opportunity to open new pathways toward peace and
stability in our world. I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics."
A page taken out of JFK's playbook.
No wonder the democrats/MSM/Deep State are so disturbed and ready to shoot the messenger. He's encroaching on their sanctified
turf!
"As president, I cannot make decisions on foreign policy in a futile effort to appease partisan critics or the media or Democrats
who want to do nothing but resist and obstruct Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards the opportunity
to open new pathways toward peace and stability in our world. I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to
risk peace in pursuit of politics."
Question for those who have seen the video: were these prepared remarks, or were they spontaneous?
I appreciate them either way, but if Trump crafted those lines on the fly I really might have to give the cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing
shitgibbon (thank you, Scotland!) a fresh look.
Nora De Groote , July 17, 2018 at 3:44 am
I was thinking the exact same thing when reading that quote. That doesn't seem like his rhetoric at all. The "good thing bad
thing" is where you have his level of "eloquence" again. Regardless, even if he had to memorize the statement beforehand, he still
scored in my book.
Vivian O'Blivion , July 17, 2018 at 7:10 am
"cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing, shitgibbon" as a Scotsman I can only apologise for my compatriots sickeningly sycophantic language.
We are normally less diplomatic in our appraisals. In Scotland, if you hear the word "f**k", it's just to let you know a noun
is coming.
Zim , July 17, 2018 at 9:00 am
It's hard to believe that statement came out of Trumps mouth. But I believe it to be spot on.
To Chumpsky : A very courageous statement of Trump! He is no fool . You can't tell a bonk from its cover,
David G , July 16, 2018 at 11:12 pm
Lauria: "The media's handlers were even worse than their assets."
Zing! Props to you, Joe.
David G , July 16, 2018 at 11:00 pm
I haven't read the article or the comments yet, but I want to chime in now:
I've been watching MSNBC on and off all day, and the summit has clearly caused their brains (already in parlous condition)
to completely liquefy.
"Treason! Worse than Watergate *and* 9/11!!"
Demented.
tom , July 17, 2018 at 10:07 am
+1
Lois Gagnon , July 16, 2018 at 10:38 pm
Once again, the hypocrisy of the media is on full display. Every president including this one pays total fealty to the criminal
state of Israel which we know has interfered in the US political process, not to mention sinking a US naval vessel. But heaven
forbid there be diplomatic talks with Putin who has bent over backwards to accommodate the US when he can. So far all he's gotten
is sand kicked in his face.
The behavior of the media and its fellow juvenile delinquents in Washington are an embarrassment. They are without realizing
it, making Trump look presidential. You can't make this sh*t up.
mike k , July 16, 2018 at 10:35 pm
The Evil Monsters destroying our world with their greed and violence are being flushed into the open. But will the brainwashed
masses be able to see this? That is the crucial test that humanity faces at this time. The Rulers will go all out to spin this
in their favor, and if that fails, they will probably try to assassinate this dangerous man, President Donald Trump.
Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 10:33 pm
Meanwhile, while everyone is focused on Trump and Putin's summit, the real power of collusion is hard at work.
I'm posting this, because while it's appropriate we talk at length about the disgraceful reception Trump got for his trying
to wage peace, we should not lose sight to what country is using the U.S, as it's useful idiot.
Besides that, an article such as what Phil Giradi wrote should not go unnoticed thank you once again MSM for being the jerks
you are. Did the MSM ever hear of the word 'reporting'? Thank you Joe Lauria & the Parry family for being here when we need you
the most. I don't know what I'd do without the Consortium. Hey kudos to you too Robert Parry, your still number one with me.
For trying to restore a note of sanity and balance in the crucible of journalistic/political dialogue between Russia and the
US centers of power, where we sense the truth will be lost in white hot bombast, and the accepted narrative of reality will be
decided by the heads pushing the correct emotional buttons to fit their nationalistic needs, and their needs for continued employment.
Who can forget the last time all 17 intelligence services were of one mind on weapons of mass destruction – that turned out to
be nonexistent! Let's hope we can catch our breath before we trip into a patriotic war that destroys civilization.
John P , July 16, 2018 at 11:20 pm
Excuse me, but the intelligence service was turned upside down by Bush and his team inserting their own officials to sensor
what was released. The Agencies were very upset that the truth wasn't coming out, and you had the Valerie Plame incident also.
From Slate: "Trump and Putin Met in Helsinki's Hall of Mirrors. Here Are the Highlights." ends with the following:
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
On a related note, Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who set up that Trump Tower meeting by promising Trump's son that it was
"part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump," just tweeted that Putin had lied earlier in the day when he said
he did not know that Trump would be in Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.
Rob Goldstone @GoldstoneRob
President Putin just stated that he had no idea Donald Trump was in Moscow in 2013. I know for sure that he did and tell the full
story in my soon to be released book "Pop Stars, Pageants & Presidents: How an Email Trumped My Life"
1:16 PM – Jul 16, 2018
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
There may not have been collusion but I think we can say there probably was interference, voting machines and misinformation spread
by agents throughout the social communications media of today. And Putin did admit late, that he was for Trump not Hillary.
If there was funding from Russia to the Democrats as some say, and Putin is truthful that he preferred Trump then why did they
give money to the Democrats? Was it to designed to undermine Hillary through its exposure.
Others complain about the timing of the 12 Russian agents, but that was no different from the timing of the Hillary email story
release shortly before the election.
Zhu Ba Jie , July 17, 2018 at 1:44 am
"Putin Stole the Election" is fantasy fiction, just like "Obama is a Kenyan" was.
Typingperson , July 17, 2018 at 1:46 am
So you're OK with Hillary using an illegal, off-the-books email server to do pay-to-play arms deals with shitty countries like
Saudi Arabia–that gave millions of $$ to Clinton Foundation in return?
If lawfully using a govt server, Hillary"s emails would be subject to FOIA petitions. By USA citizen taxpayers and reporters.
Her emails as Sec of State are the property of the American people, who paid her salary. That's what people still don't get.
She used a private server to keep secret the illegal, pay-to-play arms deals–in return for payola bucks to Clinton Foundation.
And Obama turned a blind eye for 4 years. His specialty: Suck-up talking while turning a blind eye.
To Hillary"s incompetence and murderous corruption, to his weekly drone-murders, and to accelerated deportation of innocent
immigrants–and ICE separating parents from kids.
While starting 5 new wars on top of Iraq and Afghanistan–including ongoing genocide of Yemen.
Obama was a good boy for the deep state / war profiteers. And he collected his $60M "book contract." Bribe.
Bill , July 17, 2018 at 3:59 pm
"So you're OK with Hillary using an illegal, off-the-books email server to do pay-to-play arms deals with shitty countries
like Saudi Arabia–that gave millions of $$ to Clinton Foundation in return?"
How is that different from Trumpkin or Bush doing much the same thing?
Tony Frede , July 17, 2018 at 1:50 am
Maybe it doesn't make sense because Russia never really worked for either side.
Ron Johnson , July 17, 2018 at 6:48 am
Tracing who, exactly, did the hacking is always difficult because the evidence left behind is usually impossible to trace.
In the case of the hacking or attempted hacking of certain states' data, the only evidence that it was the Russians came from
Russian language characters in the code. Slam dunk, right? Well no, since our CIA/NSA admitted to using exactly such techniques
to misdirect researchers away from their own hacking.
If you read deeper into the story of how the Russians funded Clinton, you'll find that it was not the Russian government. Putin
pointed out that the money was made 'illegally' in Russia and sent out of the country 'illegally', ending up in Clinton's campaign.
There are a number of differences between the indictments of the Russians and the release of information in the Hillary e-mail
investigation. First, there is no chance the Russians will ever end up in a U.S. court so it is an indictment with no future.
Second, Comey, a supporter of Hillary, made the announcement and subsequently cleared her, probably to save his own career because
the field office that was doing the investigating was about to go public with his dereliction of duty in the Clinton investigation.
Subsequent investigations have revealed how the highly politicized FBI and DOJ went out of their way to protect Clinton. Mueller's
indictments, on the other hand, are just pure political malfeasance.
John P , July 17, 2018 at 7:20 pm
Zhu Ba Jie, I never said that Russia influnced the results of the election. It probably didn't. But what I do think is that
the Russians are probably laughing at how didvided America has become. Neoliberalism which caters to busines rather than liberalism
which caters to the people and the country as a whole is destroying society. People need to get on the streets and voice their
concerns, Get together and form rallies like those who spoke out against the Vietnam War.
Is it social media that makes people babble and rave rather than be active out there getting the much needed attention?
Gather fo support a greener world, a fairer more benevolent world. To get local economies going putting money in needy people's
pockets is far better than trickle down or financing and support for big business. The poor will spend it locally and that's good.
Get out there and make a stir. Trump ain't going to help you. Get rid of PACs, superPACs and other big donor money pots for a
start start. Bernie Sanders and now some new young people are seeing the light. Get in there and help them along. Get out on the
streets and shout for change!
Throw away the smart phone and get marching!
John P , July 17, 2018 at 7:34 pm
Also, Ron Johnson , I'm not American, I didn't know the full story of the mob money and Hillary. My choice was Bernie Sanders
never Hillary or Trump. My fear is, the way things are going, it's like the period between the great wars and the effects of poverty
and big business. Support for the needy and the busting up of big business were two steps which helped the world climb out of
the mire. Perhaps we need to add robotics to the list. People need work and a purpose.
Larry Gates , July 16, 2018 at 9:59 pm
Donald Trump is a vile human being, and I disagree with 98% of what he says and does, but today he was right and everyone else
was wrong. I've been on a trip in my car most of the day, listening to public radio. It was an endless orgy of misinformation
and deep-state propaganda. PRI was as insane and dangerous as Fox News on a really bad day. I'm starting to think that nuclear
war is a more immanent danger than global warming. It isn't just Rachel Maddow who has gone off the deep end. It is the entire
national media. What kind of country have we become? Pray for peace.
strngr-tgthr , July 16, 2018 at 10:45 pm
Larry – Don't buy the Trump CoolAid He is completely wrecking are world order. Last month was Kim, this month was Putin and
now this! Look:
White House Orders Direct Taliban Talks to Jump-Start Afghan Negotiations
He is meeting with all the dictators of the world now! Guaranteed he will have Assad at the White House before we can get him
impeached. This is 100% out of Putin's play book. He is a trader to American Values. Never have we sunk so low, dissing are true
allies and honoring thugs, killers and despots! 110% vile!
Joe Lauria , July 16, 2018 at 11:00 pm
Do you mean like Pinochet, Somoza, Galtieri, Rios Montt, Suharto, Mobuto, shall I go on?
Joe Lauria , July 16, 2018 at 11:02 pm
And it is about time there are direct talks with the Taliban. The U.S. has lost in Afghanistan. It has to try to get something
out of it.
strngr-tgthr , July 16, 2018 at 11:23 pm
We are in Afghanistan for woman's rights! "Hillary: justified by the desire to emancipate Afghan women." And we have all seen
the concern that Trump has for woman (Billy Bush – Babies at the Border, shall I go on?) 120% vile!
You are totally deluded, Mr. Man Without Vowels in His Name, if you think we are in Afghanistan to promote women's rights.
I'm sure you still faithfully watch the Jay Leno Show to stay apprised of Mrs. Leno's featured assessment of that crusade. Ranking
light years ahead of your purported reason for the last 17 years of war in the Hindu Kush are i) the planned oil and gas pipelines*,
ii) the proven deposits of rare earth elements essential to modern electronic devices, and iii) the immediate proximity to Iran,
Russia, China and Pakistan giving Washington the ability to raise hell from its many military bases in Afghanistan on a moment's
notice (all part of Obama's infamous "Pivot to Asia," which implied far more than a new cadre of Peace Corp workers–more like,
we can buy any locals we need with the pallets of Franklins we now air drop on a routine schedule).
* Read "Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden" by Brisard and Dasquie, it's
still relevant 17 years later, while Hillary's "feminist" credentials remain completely irrelevant.
Gene Poole , July 17, 2018 at 5:48 am
An analysis of this contributor's writing style reports a 98.3% likelihood that he/she is Donald Trump.
Larry Gates , July 17, 2018 at 8:04 am
The United States has been "honoring thugs, killers, and despots" at least since Allen Dulles became the director of the CIA
in the 1940s. America is an expansive empire, controlled by our corporate oligarchy. It's all about their money and power. They
talk about human rights, but that is just a cover for their greed. Much of Trump's foreign policy is bad, but it is simply a logical
continuation of the foreign policies of Obama, Bush, and Clinton. Negotiations with Putin is a step in the right direction and
the Orange Beast deserves credit for it. It looks to me like it is you, not me that has swallowed the Kool-Aid.
Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 11:02 am
The Taliban, in the last week – 10 days, has said they will not negotiate as long as the USA occupies Afghanistan This was
abbreviated in most headlines to say that the Taliban refuse to negotiate.
The Americans have launched the "time to negotiate with the Taliban" trial balloon before -- "tragically" coming to nothing.
We (USA) interfere when the Baghdad government attempts their own negotiations. (or simply do things that encourage retaliatory
attacks) . Now ISIS in the mix.
Zhu Ba Jie , July 17, 2018 at 1:47 am
We've become a theater state. A powerful performance is what matters.
Susan Sunflower , July 17, 2018 at 11:08 am
Indeed. The histrionics of the last 48 hours have been beyond belief and credulity. The hardcore news-as-scandal-addicted will
stay tuned, but I lost respect for some "stars" of the news in ways that won't be forgotten I keep expecting Maddow to either
use hand puppets or present "crime reenactment" videos, along with her other show-and-tell visual aids.
BBC is just as bad in terms of prejudice but at least present a professional facade .DW and France 24 are alternatives as is
the (much too short, almost every hour on the hour) RT headline news. RT's interview and talk shows are excellent and quite sober.
It's not that they aren't slanted, they're just not insulting to the audience.
HiggBo , July 17, 2018 at 10:10 am
Maybe now you will think about the things these very same people said about him. Maybe they arent true either.
Hint: The vast majority arent.
Deniz , July 16, 2018 at 9:59 pm
They are losing their minds over Putins announcement of the $400 milion that was transferred Clinton through Browder.
michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:01 am
Seems Hillary learned a lot from Chinagate (where the Clintons paid the illegal donations from a foreign nation back AFTER
winning the Election). And China only received military technology, offshored jobs and permanent favored nation trading status
in return. Win-win.
You can be sure Hillary will claim that $400 million, if ever traced to her despite bleach bitting all her records, was for the
Clinton Foundation Campaign and it was just an inadvertent mixup.
PuddinNTain , July 16, 2018 at 9:54 pm
Thank you for this reasoned piece amidst a plethora of madness. Most of my friends and colleagues who identify as Democrats,
liberals, progressives, haters of Trump, etc, people I have the most in common with, politically speaking, have completely lost
their freaking minds over this stuff. Critical thinking? Who needs it! Mueller and the intelligence community have surely seen
the light since the "Iraq has WMDs" days.
Exactly when did the intelligence community, the sellers of lies and perpetrators of regime change world-wide, become a friend
to the American people?
Drew Hunkins , July 16, 2018 at 9:49 pm
"He had a chance right there in front of the world to tell Vladimir Putin to stay the HELL out of American democracy,.."
What democracy? 99% of the candidates' campaigns have been almost completely funded by Wall Street, the blood thirsty giant
defense contractors, or paranoid and hegemonic Zionist sociopaths.
It's been proven in a recent academic study by Princeton political scientists (and long lamented before these guys got on the
case by such luminaries as Michael Parents, S. Wollin, James Petras, N. Chomsky, Vidal, Hedges) that the American citizenry has
absolutely no influence whatsoever regarding poltico-economic decisions that emanate from Washington, they're drowned out by big
business and the imperialist ruling elites.
So I ask this warmongering Russophobic talking head once again: what democracy? What democracy do you speak of? The same democracy
that mires millions of newly college grads with $30,000 to $500,000 in student loan debt, or the same democracy that's witnessing
close to 50% of the entire population living close to the poverty level, or that has tens of millions of its denizens without
adequate healthcare coverage
Drew Hunkins , July 16, 2018 at 9:55 pm
typo: such luminaries as Michael Parenti, S. Wollin, James Petras
The editor regrets the error.
John P , July 16, 2018 at 11:26 pm
Trump ain't going to help you on that one. You need to get together with others work to get rid of PACs and Super PACs. In
most western countries they wouldn't be allowed.
Sam F , July 17, 2018 at 7:20 am
The political parties are also corrupt, taking donations fed back directly or indirectly from government funding of contractors.
These are extensive rackets supported by half the population, who have never worked for anything but a political gang operation,
and really believe in gangs.
michael , July 17, 2018 at 7:11 am
Why are you bringing up "ponies" that we will never have, when Hillary's private club (or so the judge ruled when Bernie's
supporters tried to fight their fraud, saying private clubs can do what they please, particularly picking potential presidents)
was hacked into by those supercompetent Russians? Much akin to the Nigerian guy who's been trying to help me collect money from
some dead rich relative I didn't know I had. Still waiting, but I'm sure if this was a fraud Mueller and our Intelligence agencies
would be all over it, just like Hillary's Private Club, the DNC. The Russians didn't steal any money from Hillary, as far as I
know, or there would have been War!
gcw919 , July 16, 2018 at 9:29 pm
These media "pundits" are truly an embarrassment. They become apoplectic about "possible" Russian hacking in our elections,
but one can search in vain for their comments about our own interference in Ukrainian politics, and many other countries around
the globe. (eg, Victoria Nuland, Hillary's pit bull, gloating about the US spending $5 billion in "support" of Ukrainian democracy).
Its as if real concerns, such as nuclear annihilation, or catastrophic climate change, were afterthoughts. We are certainly living
in mystifying times.
Mike From Jersey , July 16, 2018 at 10:16 pm
I think the same thing. The whole "election meddling" hoopla, even if it was true, pales to insignificance in light of what
we are actually doing.
We have a base – a military base – in Syria. We weren't invited. We didn't get permission to set up a base. But we set up a
military base in another country while announcing that that country's leader "must go." And now – with a total absence of evidence
– we have the gall to condemn Russia for "meddling in our democracy."
What is wrong with these people? Can't they see the utter hypocrisy in it all?
AZ_bob , July 16, 2018 at 11:29 pm
I tell people all the time, if Russia did put their thumb on the scale, then hey – I guess "What Goes Around, Comes Around"
huh? If you CAN'T take it, DON'T dish it out. Quite simple, really
irina , July 17, 2018 at 1:28 am
The US media's hysterical (in the unfunny sense) response to "Russian meddling"
is very like the husband who catches his wife cheating on him and goes totally postal,
although he himself has been cheating on her ever since their courting days . . .
Tony Frede , July 17, 2018 at 1:53 am
No they don't see the hypocrisy. A large percentage of the population suffers from a severe Irony Deficiency and that can't
be cured.
Layne , July 17, 2018 at 6:55 am
I beat my head against the wall with the very same question! Thanks for sharing..
Tristan , July 16, 2018 at 9:26 pm
Thank you for doing the real journalism needed for readers to gain perspective and understanding. It is important to call out
propaganda in the face of facts. One thing that stands out significantly is the statement by Trump, "I would rather take a political
risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics." Even if only partially pursued, the goal of peace is indeed
a very worthy endeavor. In fact, this is one of the first times in recent memory that a US president has used the word "Peace".
I don't like the majority of what the Trump administration is doing, it is important to stick to the facts and support efforts
that could lead to a reduction of the tensions and hostility which dominate current US / Russia relations.
F. G. Sanford , July 16, 2018 at 9:22 pm
"A productive dialogue is not only good for the United States and good for Russia, but it is good for the world."
I could hear in the inflection of that sentence the profoundly courageous and confidently certain voice of John F. Kennedy.
Gergen, Amanpour, Cooper, Cheney, Brennan, Clapper and the rest of them be damned. The usual suspects, the bought and paid-for
mouthpieces of the "deep state" raised their reptilian ire in the expected reprehensible fashion. War is what keeps them on the
"payroll", and they'll tell any lie it takes to keep those checks rolling in. Despicable. It seems likely that their vitriol may
stem as much from fear of exposure as anything else.
I think President Trump gave a laudable and compelling performance. It's a tragedy that this article will probably not get
the circulation it deserves. Thanks to Joe Lauria for having the guts to write it.
Litchfield , July 16, 2018 at 9:43 pm
Amen.
jaycee , July 16, 2018 at 10:15 pm
Cheers. I noticed the same JFK echo in that sentence.
Brennan and the whole lot of those pundits sound exactly like the paleolithic right from the 50s and 60s, the ones who insisted
MLK was a communist and were so effectively personified by Sterling Hayden in the Dr Strangelove film.
Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 10:35 pm
Here ya go F.G. your on par with Paul Craig Roberts.
I recall about 16 years ago when the U.S. media almost unanimously reported, with absolute certainty, that Saddam Hussein was
harboring numerous weapons of mass destruction. I also recall their fervent calls for regime change because Hussein was a threat
to our national security. There were a few voices who spoke against it, but they were drowned out by MSM. It would appear that
U.S. media is adamantly against anyone who is opposed to war. Is it because war is so profitable for the media, or is it because
war is so profitable for their masters?
Hey, Johnmichael, you must know that the US is headed by an oligarchy, UK too, France, etc. What runs the world is banks and
multinational corporations. The US could actually be called a corporatocracy, because the people have very little say in their
government. Yes, media bashers do bash media when they lie because they are supposed to ferret out facts but they don't, they
serve their money masters. They all use "Goebbels style" messaging, Putin the least, i notice. It's a western script.
Steve , July 16, 2018 at 9:08 pm
Everything the Main Stream media says about Trump applies ten times over to themselves, the presstitutes that they are useful
Idiots of the Corrupt New World Order.
Bob In Portland , July 16, 2018 at 9:03 pm
A look at Mueller's career will go far in explaining why Mueller is handling this and what he won't see while investigating:
I did Bob, and I'm encouraging more to read it. Joe
Dave P. , July 17, 2018 at 3:30 am
Bob – Yes, I have read the article about Mueller's career.
backwardsevolution , July 17, 2018 at 5:08 am
Bob in Portland – excellent read! Thank you. Mueller is like a fixer, a sweeper, someone who cleans up and, as you said, moves
investigations away from the CIA.
"He knew where to look and where not to look."
No doubt he's a valuable asset to the Deep State. Not a nice man.
Seer , July 17, 2018 at 8:39 am
Great work!
Yes, Mueller's a master of misdirection. Was it Parry who noted (likely others as well) that reporting is now less about lying
than deliberate omission. Hard to fact-check what ain't there (vs. a lie which lays out data which can be tested) Knowledge IS
power: we are not to have knowledge.
Bob Van Noy , July 17, 2018 at 9:34 am
Thanks to all in this thread. I filed this statement recently here, and it was edited out. I'll try again because it's appropriate.
A relatively vibrant Press was modified violently in the days and weeks following November 22, 1963. Some careers were enhanced,
some lives were lost. If some contemporary student of History or Journalism wanted to study the decline of American Democracy
they might begin by reading all of the linked article below about a Journalist named Penn Jones
As much as I loathe Trump, I have to admit this is one time I agree with him. No matter how much Trump screws up, the simple
fact is that no one is 100% wrong, and it's important to recognize when they are not wrong.
I don't agree that the Russians are our enemy. I don't believe they are our friends, but there's a large gap between an enemy
and a friend and I place the Russians somewhere in that gap. I don't deny that they hacked into the DNC database, but that doesn't
rise above my threshold of significance and certainly doesn't hold a candle to all the U.S. interference in the politics of most
of the world's nations (which includes deposing democratically elected presidents). And finally, I don't believe in gunboat diplomacy
and I agree that it's better to talk with the Russians than it is to beat the war drums and seek more confrontation.
Having said that, I deplore Trump's behavior toward our European, Canadian and Mexican friends, and his domestic policies are
the worst of any in the last 100 years. But as much as I deplore this buffoon, I believe that he is right in attempting to normalize
relations with Russia.
Litchfield , July 16, 2018 at 9:49 pm
"I don't deny that they hacked into the DNC database,"
Well, you should, because there is zero evidence of a Russian hack.
On what basis in the world do you so confidently assert that you "do not deny" something that is untrue?
The evidence is of an inside leak.
Please, learn the difference between the two, a hack and a leak.
Another indication of the insidious power of the media over common sense.
Realist , July 17, 2018 at 3:22 am
Of course it is entirely within the interests of America to have free and friendly relations with Russia. Why? Not only because
peace beats the hell out of war, especially the nuclear variety, but because we, along with the rest of the world, need Russia's
vast resources in a planet rapidly being depleted of everything essential to modern technology. If they don't sell their products
to the West on the open market because Washington thinks it can steal them after some kind of "regime change," all those essential
goodies will go to China, India and the other peoples of the East whom we look down upon, and are also fixing to mess with.
From all I have gleaned, Russia has always aspired to be a part of the West, ever since Peter the Great opened Russia to Europe,
but Washington thinks that being a member of team West means being a totally subservient vassal to it and only it. Look at how
shamelessly Washington has abused the interests of the EU in its efforts to subjugate Russia. There is mostly one party that threatens
the future of Western prosperity and moral values: the United States, or rather its government. Its motives are uncontested power
and greed to benefit its small clique of decadent aristocrats.
Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 8:51 pm
Why would anyone believe the Liars' Club (the CIA) about anything? Their successes are more shameful than their failures.
Seer , July 17, 2018 at 8:43 am
Ah, but successes and failures are not ours to judge, no, it is for the ruling elite to judge, and given that their power and
wealth has but steadily increased it is safe to say, under their measuring, that the CIA has been quite successful.
Johnmichael2 , July 16, 2018 at 8:45 pm
Putin brilliantly heads an Oligarchy. Trump obsequiously admires Putin because he too, by all of his actions to date, aspires
to the same power. To all of you media bashers, who are on a very strange campaign of denial, don't forget that Trump and his
Goebbels style messaging received prime time from the electronic media throughout the campaign and was probably key to the win.
The real Deep State is the multinational world order of capitalism, which doesn't care what type of government it owns. Yet
CN seems totally oblivious to their existence. If the media is to blame for anything, it is that their coverage tends to be controlled
by ratings; in other words, by money, and the Deep State controls the money.
Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 8:52 pm
The US has oligarchic since 1789.
Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 8:53 pm
Goebbels was far smarter and articulate than Trump.
Danny , July 17, 2018 at 9:57 pm
the free $2B from the same media now screeching for his head? (Fox excepted) the 35-40 minutes dedicated to his empty podium
while Sanders talked? I have some REALLY bad news for you 'bout who was behind that
I highly recommend reading James Howard Kunstler's piece on Russia Insider, "Idiotic Russia Meddling Hoax Kept Alive by Trump-Putin
Summit". On his blog 'Clusterfuck Nation' he titles it "12 Ham Sandwiches with Russian Dressing". Kunstler is a great cynicist
humorist called a dystopian by the NYT. This piece he just published is one of the best and will undoubtedly be picked up by others.
Has a funny cartoon on Russia Insider for a musical based on the Mueller never-ending saga. At least it's a few cynical laughs
for this sorry affair.
Mass hysteria is a frightening spectacle to behold. The power with which it grips the minds of virtually everyone is beyond
belief. As I watched the media coverage of Helsinki unfold, it seemed the media minions were perceptibly working themselves into
a collective frenzy, a totally berserk, bonkers group who were bidding the price of tulips up to a million each. The ironic aspect
of all this to me is that even if the commie bastards did what we say they did would it have made any difference? And if indeed
it was they who hacked HC's "personal" email files and made them available to Wikileaks, I'm glad as Hell they did.
Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 8:56 pm
It would not make any difference. We Americans are to blame for our own follies and mistakes.
KiwiAntz , July 16, 2018 at 9:03 pm
It's Washington & the MSM's mass hysteria, not the common folk who couldn't give a rats ass about this lunacy? Ask the ordinary
citizen in the US or Worldwide what they care about? It's not the never ending Russiagate BS spewed out by the MSM or corrupt
DEMS! It's about, how will my Family be housed, Fed, & cared for! How will I support myself & my Family's needs & wants! THATS
WHAT WE CARE ABOUT, WE DON'T CARE ABOUT THE FAKE RUSSIAGATE NONSENSE & it's BS! But what do these MSM idiots know, they think
their smarter than those who voted for change & are getting that with Mr Trump!
David G , July 17, 2018 at 12:01 am
Right on, Lester D.
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 8:39 pm
I'm starting to get hopeful about Trump after a lot of doubts.
Whatever his limitations, he at least has some common sense. This is something we would never have seen happen with Crooked Hillary
Clinton, ever. Somebody had to listen to Putin, who actually has quite a lot of sensible things to say about this, and is a very
intelligent and articulate politician.
Given enough time, Trump might actually figure things out in Washington before he leaves office and sees all the treasonous forces
in the permanent security state. I didn't vote for either Clinton or Trump in '16 but if he listens to Putin and gives peace a
chance, this will mend all cracks with me.
Maybe they should put up a fence around CNN headquarters and call in a battalion of psychs to provide mental health treatments
to the war profiteers and talking heads.
I voted for peace. I want to see peace. Kudos to Trump and Putin for bringing an oasis of sanity to the world. Nuclear war is
bad for our kids. I am very relieved to see this happening. Even General Eisenhower could not buck the Military Industrial Complex
in 1959 when he tried to reach detente with Khrushchev. Trump will go down in history as a great president if he can pull this
off.
mike k , July 16, 2018 at 8:38 pm
The incredible ugliness of the media, spy agencies, military figures, and politicians is unfortunately only the tip of a huge
iceberg. Underneath all that is the deep state oligarchs, who are willing to sacrifice billions of lives and the very continuation
of life on our precious planet – just to fulfill their insatiable greed for wealth and power. These evil monsters are the real
enemies of Humanity.
Lolita , July 16, 2018 at 8:29 pm
Not only the U.S. Media, but also the Canadian, French, British etc that is, the agitprop tools for NATOland/Soros, ready for
selective and well rehearsed indignation, on cue.
Tonight CBC The National managed to invite a "balanced" panel to discuss the Trump-Putin press conference: a researcher from
Stratfor and a journalist from the Washington Post!!!! LOL
Lolita , July 17, 2018 at 5:32 pm
And when CBC's narrative and their fake-debate in the National is challenged in the comment section the CBC sycophants know
only one action:
"Your account has been banned until 10/15/2018. Reason: We have banned this account for 90 days because we believe it is in
violation of our Terms of Use, specifically repeated off-topic comments, uncivil comments, and personal attacks. For more information,
please visit: http://www.cbc.ca/aboutcbc/discover/submissions.html
."
All of this to mask political censorship
In my last posts, I quoted Joe Lauria and they did not like it one bit:
"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
Good Bye ICIJ
KiwiAntz , July 17, 2018 at 2:16 am
And add NZ's Media to that shameful list of Propagandists telling lies & expecting us to belithis tripe!
The calls of President Trump being a traitor mimic those of the calls that President Eisenhower was a traitor back in the 1950s.
But what can you expect from the cult followers of the former Goldwater girl who have done their best to turn the Party of Gene
McCarthy into the Party of Joe McCarthy?
Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 8:59 pm
Dems have GOP lite for a long time, at least since Reagan.
Pandas4peace , July 16, 2018 at 8:22 pm
Americans need to turn off their damn television sets.
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 8:45 pm
I canceled my cable subscription three months ago and haven't missed it one bit.
Realist , July 17, 2018 at 2:53 am
One needs to keep apprised of the lies that the enemies of humanity so effectively spread through their propaganda in order
to counter them.
Besides, if you ever need a good emetic, there is always the opportunity to tune in Rachel Maddow until your stomach upchucks
its contents.
Seer , July 17, 2018 at 8:51 am
Ha ha! The Rachel Maddow weight loss program!
Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 9:01 pm
Good idea. I quit watching regularly in the '70s. But does make one somewhat alienated from everyone else.
Freedom lover , July 16, 2018 at 10:32 pm
Actually I have Direct TV and for a change I can tune in to channel 321 RT America and listen to some real news instead of
the 24-hr fake news on the rest of the channels.
Skip Scott , July 17, 2018 at 6:55 am
Last night I blocked CNN on the TV where I am currently forced to reside. I am the only one with the p/w to unblock it. Take
that CNN!!!
Well said, as always, Realist, but the scary part is to read the vitriolic anti-Trump responses indicating the 'liberals' would
actually rather risk war! I just read a few of them and honestly wonder if there's any hope for this country, maybe we will have
to take some harsh lessons that will be meted out. They do not realize that they are assisting in bringing down every one of us
with their hate. The controllers who play them love it.
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 8:47 pm
The danger is that they will bring their war hysteria into the next election and get someone elected that is even worse than
Hillary would have been.
Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 9:02 pm
I'm not convinced that anyone is control. "Time and chance come to them all."
Realist , July 17, 2018 at 2:46 am
My, how we have come full circle, Jessika. So, now it's the "liberals" who would rather be "dead" than "red?" That used to
be the far right John Birchers back in my youth. (Not that anyone anywhere on the planet is a genuine "communist" any longer,
not even in Cuba or North Korea.) I just wish there was some mechanism to allow them to self-immolate without killing or harming
the rest of us nearly 8 billion human beings. They have some potent demons colonizing what passes for their minds. Perhaps they
could use a convincing exorcist to drive the Hillary entity out of their system.
Seer , July 17, 2018 at 8:54 am
All comes in cycles. Dixiecrats, anyone?
Brad Owen , July 17, 2018 at 12:09 pm
EXACTLY. Actually, FDR was the "Bernie Sanders" of his day, and completely turned the Party upside down with his "New Deal
for the forgotten man" (Labor and farmers). The traditional D-Party was the party of southern plantation aristocracy and their
money handlers on Wall Street, and the original R-Party contained the fire-breathing radicals within its ranks.
jose , July 16, 2018 at 8:10 pm
It is my understanding that Russia and US are holding approximately 90% of nuclear weapons worldwide. In a sane world, The
US media should be commending Trump for trying to reach an agreement regarding denuclearization with Putin. Nonetheless, Trump
is being grilled for doing what almost the entire planet is seeking: a world free of nuclear weapons. Indubitably, US national
media are very busy undermining Trump's efforts to reduce the scorch of nuclear war. Do the US media think that in a nuclear exchange
humans will survive? We will all lose.
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 8:54 pm
No, the elites on both sides of the political spectrum are living in a mythical Hollywood rich man's fantasy world believing
that the worst that can happen to them is they will retreat to their luxury underground cities and live out the nuclear war, communicating
with their nuclear subs, while the rest of us paeons fry. They don't care about us, at all. They are congenital psychopaths.
It sounds crazy because it is, and it is hard for the rest of us to believe they could be so foolish. They are fatally misguided
in their beliefs that this would ever work and be good for them.
Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 9:34 pm
I think your right. Joe
Jean wyman , July 16, 2018 at 9:53 pm
Good comment Jose. In answer to your observations, I'd pose a question: what was Obusha thinking when he proposed a 3TRILLION
dollar upgrade of America's nukes? Who exactly was it that he was placating and that T-rump isn't.
Skip Scott , July 16, 2018 at 8:09 pm
When the talking heads said that Trump trusted Putin more than his own Intelligence Agencies, I screamed at the TV, "ME TOO!".
I can think of no clearer sign that the CIA is still embedded with the MSM. Discussion of the history of our Intelligence Community
in both the near and distant past, and it's utter lack of trustworthiness, is a forbidden topic. My only hope is that enough people
actually listened to what Putin said, instead of the talking heads' rantings, and saw for themselves that Putin is a rational
and fair-minded leader. The near hysteria of Anderson Cooper and his ilk is a sure sign that their grip on the narrative is slipping.
jose , July 16, 2018 at 8:15 pm
I concur with your post. Personally, I rather listen to Putin than the US national media. You are correct to assert that "Putin
is a rational and fair-minded leader" You would have to be mentally retarded to pay any heed to US national media that have proven
to be a tool of those controlling the livers of power. Well done, Skip.
Joe Lauria , July 16, 2018 at 9:04 pm
"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:07 pm
Anderson Cooper, the grandson of Gloria Vanderbilt, and great-grandson of robber baron railroad mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt
is CIA trained in Operation Mockingbird. https://youtu.be/w8NTLVOjas8
Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 9:33 pm
I said that once, and got booed out of the room. Joe
Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 9:28 pm
Skip I hear ya, but allow me to tell you what I saw, and heard today. So after Trump made his remarks about trusting, or not
trusting, certain intelligence data, I while driving in my car heard callers calling in to the local talk show. The callers who
expressed themselves the way we do on this comment board were berated by the callers who thought this kind of talk (like we here
on CN talk) was treasonous by all known treasonous standards. The callers who sounded like we do here were labeled as their being
crazed Trump supporters, and yet all of them said of how they don't even necessarily like Trump, but right is right and left is
now warmongering. None of the other opposing callers bought this denial of Trump, as they just fluffed it off, as Trump supporters
hiding behind whatever it was their suppose to be hiding behind. Facts are painfully ignored, especially when it comes to analyzing
Trump.
I see the MSM pundits and the strongly patriotic lying legislators taking Trump's remarks while calling him a trader, as the
launching of a great American vs American social confrontation. This new confrontation will pit brother against brother, child
against parent, and wife against husband . just ask my wife. The discontent is about where we were back during the Vietnam years,
as the only thing missing are the peace marchs. This time our civil war will be fought strictly on a social level, aided by an
instigating MSM, as division messes up any real citizen advocacy as the citizen may require to straighten out any of this disconnection
of their society or that's at least the way I see it.
We citizens are officially at war with each other. We will all look back upon this period of our evolvement, and laugh over
the Facebook censorship, and dream of a time when it was merely just about politics, and taxes. We are moving in a direction where
the National Security Deep State is beating up an outsider maverick, and this maverick is now in the Deep States crosshairs. It's
darn strange, and I swear if something awful were to happen to President Trump that the MSM would encourage us Americans to make
Trump's ugly fate a new national holiday . I think there are many among this Deep State cabal who still celebrate with joy the
sad happenings of November 22nd, 1963.
The empire is finally going down, and we are all witnessing it first hand. Joe
Dave P. , July 17, 2018 at 4:14 am
"I see the MSM pundits and the strongly patriotic lying legislators taking Trump's remarks while calling him a trader, as the
launching of a great American vs American social confrontation. This new confrontation will pit brother against brother, child
against parent, and wife against husband . just ask my wife. . . ."
Good observation Joe. It already started happening some time back in our home. A truce was reached with a compromise that my
wife would not watch CNN, MSNBC . . . when I am around the house and I will not read CN and make comments, at least when she is
around. This morning my wife went to our retired neighbor's house to watch these channels with her. Both of them have been feeling
today as if some tragedy has happened.
That is what this two years of Russia Gate hysteria fueled by the Media and Politicians has done to the people. Today was probably
the worst day; they are really messing up the population. It is even worse than those cold war days of 1950's which I have read
about. And there is no end in sight.
Killary had a crap platform. That is why she lost. If the platform was something progressives could support, then people would
come out and vote for her. Her record of dependability is crap; just a double talking republican liar. No good. That's why she
lost. I didn't vote for her and won't vote for her if she is forced on us again. Lyle Courtsal
http://www.3mpub.com
jose , July 16, 2018 at 8:20 pm
You are correct Lyle about Hillary's lost. I would like to add the following:Vladimir Putin has not meddled in the US election,
Hillary Clinton has. Leaked emails reveal that the popular socialist Bernie Sanders had his chance of becoming president stolen
from him by Hillary Clinton and her associates at the Democratic National Committee. If defrauding democracy is worth going to
war over, certainly it is worth going to jail over. Millions of Americans had their votes stolen.
Litchfield , July 16, 2018 at 10:34 pm
Yes, I listened to some of her campaign speeches, and they were embarrassingly awful, and empty of ideas except inciting horror
of "Le Trump"! She was truly pathetic in her confidence that she was in the in-group, addressing others in the "in-group," thus
not needing to actually campaign.
Recently Hillary was awarded the Radcliffe medal, and she spoke at Radcliffe Day. I was horrified that she was given this honor.
I heard that she read from a Teleprompter. That indicates to me that she was and is indeed not physically up to the challenges
of the office, quite apart from her many other deficits.
Seer , July 17, 2018 at 9:07 am
I wouldn't vote for a mass murderer. If you cannot fundamentally be for peace then all else, no matter how wonderful it sounds
(it could be) has nowhere to anchor.
John V. Walsh , July 16, 2018 at 8:05 pm
Great column.
There is no doubt that the Summit moved us away from confrontation with Russia which holds the grave danger of going nuclear.
Bravo for Trump and the brave words he spoke.
Now it is up to us.
If we wish the process to continue which these meetings with Putin initiated, let us raise our voices in support.
If we wish to let the neocons, "Deep State," Dem and GOP elites to stop the process, let us stay silent.
I read the New York times and the comments to the editorial. This is my comment.
The comments here sound like a lynch mob working themselves into a frenzy to hang someone. Proof? Who needs any dang proof.
Clapper the guy who admitted lying to Congress under oath said Trump was guilty and thats good enough for the people who commented
here. The Intelligence Agencies that lied to get the USA to invade Iraq with their WMD claims say he is guilty, well that must
be proof then.
This goes to show that Barnum was right, there is a sucker born every minute. But a whole nation suckered into believing this
nonsence about Russia having Trump elected with not one shred of evidence presented? Even Barnum would have been shocked and surprised
at that one.
Well, I guess that influential people on the inside figure that the "reign of terror" worked out so well in effecting regime
change during the French Revolution that they'd give it another go approximately two centuries later approximately a hundred years
after the Bolshevik Revolution, so maybe this is a natural phenomenon with a periodicity of about 100 years. Perhaps Hillary thinks
she's gonna pick up the pieces as the next Napoleon after the revolution burns itself out. More like her fate will be as the next
Robespierre, hoisted on her own guillotine.
Seer , July 17, 2018 at 9:11 am
Yes, the cycle is tied to the controlling currency, the USD in current day form. That control is rapidly slipping away. The
crooks are pulling the fire alarms in the bank and running out the back door and the public is looking for safety from the crooks'
army (MSM, "authority figures" etc.).
There is nothing left to say.
The summit only leaves one to speculate.
Realist , July 16, 2018 at 7:57 pm
It would seem that there is not a single independent, unbought, honest, objective journalist left working for the corporate
mass media in America. They are all mere puppets delivering the propaganda and fake analysis demanded of them by the oligarchy
that owns them. It's absolutely stunning how lock-step they all are in maintaining the false narrative cooked up by the careless
and arrogant tyrants who threw away a sure thing (Hillary's coronation) by pressing too hard to give her what they thought was
the biggest patsy (Trump) in the clown show called the presidential election. They were so confident they actually allowed the
ballots to be counted and have been scrambling to undo the results using every possible mechanism and pretext ever since. If there
is one thing the American people can count on in the future, it is that no election will ever again be semi-free, fair and not
rock-solid rigged with the contrived results agreed upon months before the charade of elections ever goes on.
A rational mind might say, well, give us more reasonable candidates, those in tune with the problems of the voters (mostly
caused by government), and give us more of them, more parties, more platforms, more options. That is exactly what they intend
to avoid. They tried to force feed us Hillary as the only acceptable figure running for the position, but enough people saw through
that and chose the fellow they wanted us to abhor after they deliberately built him up to help the despised Hillary. Now absolutely
every loyal apparatchik in the elite establishment, and most especially the media–the essential propagandists, are working 24/7
for regime change in Washington, what they perceive as the necessary first step towards regime change in Moscow and later Beijing.
Only then will the NWO–in which they give all the orders and control everything and everybody–be complete.
I tell you, the reach of their tentacles and the uniformity of response amongst their minions is impressive in a most foreboding
way. They will brook NO peaceful co-existence with any geopolitical "partners" or competitors and will not give even the slightest
iota of respect to our own elected leader, not even to his office out of formal courtesy. Rather than "going high" when he "goes
low," they choose to up the ante in ad hominem insults and political thuggery. The power structure in this country has become
irretrievably warmongering neo-con and ruthlessly imperialistic. The most catastrophic consequence will be to see the dissolution
of civilisation itself as the myriad of environmental, population and resource crises hit the planet full on as the century unfolds,
for thuggery, tyranny and simplistic political slogans are not the solutions for escaping the impending bottleneck with an actual
future still remaining for humanity.
Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 8:42 pm
Hey Realist you brought back memories of the 2016 presidential election to when Trump was given 4.9 billion dollars worth of
free air time (JP Sottile quoted the 4.9). As it has been written about of how early on the Clinton campaign thought Trump was
the best to run up against, because who in their right mind would take the Trumpster serious, was the go to mindset among the
DNCer's. So the MSM turned on the cameras at Trump rallies believing that given enough rope that Trump would hang himself. The
backlash that came from this, was mind boggling on many levels. One no one likes Hillary, number two no one likes the MSM. So
with that the MSM, and Hillary's bend strategy was what loss the election for the Democrats, and oh yeah then there's Bernie.
I don't think in total we Americans are all living on the same planet. Joe
Mike From Jersey , July 16, 2018 at 8:55 pm
I am absolutely appalled by the behavior of the American media. They are acting like Trump is a disgrace to the country but
the MSM is a disgrace to journalism.
I don't even like Trump but – to me – he is coming out better in this exchange.
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:17 pm
Excellent statement.
Sam F , July 16, 2018 at 9:29 pm
Indeed the US mass media are no more than propagandists for the arrogant tyrants of its government. But despite US bluster
and economic arm-twisting, educated people know that BRICS cannot be dominated so imperialism is theater not policy. Over 20-40
years, the US can only choose cooperation or self-embargo. Few educated people believe the recycled hysteria of invisible threats.
The enmity of the PTB toward Russia and Korea always starts with and returns to the Mideast and centers upon Israel, which
controls the US mass media and both political parties, and thereby appoints the politicians who control the military budget and
agenda. Indeed "no election will ever again be semi-free." The MIC is large and will attack small countries anywhere, but it is
the servant of Israel.
Zhu Ba Jie , July 17, 2018 at 2:22 am
People who complain aboutIsrael somehow never mention Dispensationalism, Christian Zionism, etc.
Sam F , July 17, 2018 at 6:26 am
Thank you for mentioning those; I did not have room in that comment.
Israel also substantially controls the Christian z leaders.
I thought Mueller was playing politics to announce the indictments of 12 Russians mere hours before Trump met Putin more and
more I'm losing faith in Mueller and the Democrats who have damn near destroyed their party themselves
Seer , July 17, 2018 at 9:17 am
If the fact that the Dems managed to undermine the people's choice for president (Sanders) isn't enough to convince you that
the Dems are destroyed then I don't know what to tell you.
I'm almost certain that the CIA had a hand in that: consider their infiltration into the MSM (ensuring that Sanders was not
talked about). Not only was the CIA involved in trying to derail Trump, but it was active in preempting Sanders. For sure, having
meddling in BOTH parties would likely bring out real pitch forks: when it's just one party it's easy to use the other party to
offset the anger. Joe, if you're reading these comments (still), I'd love to get your take on this "theory."
Thanks for this report, Mr. Lauria; you're certainly of stronger mettle than me. I would not have withstood the noxious exhalations
of the US newsmedia (which itself now openly includes newly "retired" intelligence agents as commentators) you've described in
this article; the anecdotes alone almost had me hurling my phone across the room.
Thank you for performing a valuable public service with this report. Peace.
Welcome to what passes for "reality" in 2018 America. If the stakes for humanity were not so frightfully high these bizarre,
slapstick, nonsense comments from the MSM talking heads would be knee-slapping hilarious in their total off the charts lunacy
and patent absurdity. What can one say? Wow – off the freaking charts! You simply can't make this stuff up! Words are inadequate
in an age of mass delusion posing as sanity!
Gregory Herr , July 16, 2018 at 7:34 pm
I think your words "total off the charts lunacy and patent absurdity" are as adequate as they come in this situation.
Litchfield , July 16, 2018 at 10:42 pm
Not only absurd, though, but also deeply isulting, treasonous, really horrendous that our national-level journalists arrogate
to themselves the right to diss, insult, accuse, charge, condemn, vilify, etc. the president of the United States. I don't like
trump either, I hate waht he is doing in Israel, supporting the rabid Zionists there and here. BUT, standing up to the media and
intelligence onslaught took guts, and he came out of the meeting looking pretty good, I think. The meeting also gave Putin an
opportunity to score a few points for reason, thus an international platform he might otherwise not have had.
I LOVE the Putin points re Browder $$$ (rather, rubles) to Hillary. I do so hope that this topic is taken up and richly sucked
and considered and tasted and finally chewed and swallowed and digested and the real . . . finally is delivered to the AMerican
people regarding Hill's $$$ shenanigans. If that happens it could point once again to an investigation of her emails and those
of her assistant Huma Abedin. Remember her? When do we get the full investigation of this very compromised woman?
These people have no shame, as they take their massive paychecks for lying to keep the fools in line. Well, thanks to websites
like this one and others, there aren't so many fools anymore. They are pathetic, and days of Cronkite, Murrow et al who reported
news objectively are dead and buried.
Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 9:38 pm
Probably they believe their own nonsense, at least when they say. Much as crooked preachers do.
Jean , July 16, 2018 at 10:30 pm
Cronkite wasn't so objective, Jessika. He was pretty bought into the glory of our Viet nam adventuring until the war protesters
(whom he did not represent objectively either) opened Amerika's eyes.
mike k , July 16, 2018 at 7:01 pm
FOR ONCE, I AM PROUD TO STAND WITH OUR PRESIDENT.
irina , July 16, 2018 at 7:17 pm
Roger That.
Mike From Jersey , July 16, 2018 at 8:14 pm
Ditto
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:21 pm
Me, too. An act of extraordinary political courage.
mike k , July 16, 2018 at 6:59 pm
That took guts, Mr. Trump. I didn't know you had it in you. Congratulations for standing up to your (deadly) opponents. They
are now showing themselves to be the evil scum they really are.
Rohit , July 16, 2018 at 6:57 pm
There is one small problem with this article. While I trust Consortium News far more than the New York Times, there are those
who trust the latter. And the article is far too long for those who already believe that Trump is guilty of collusion with Russia.
A shorter article by Consortium News with a one two punch is what is needed.
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:22 pm
Oh, go pound sand, would you?
Zhu Ba Jie , July 16, 2018 at 9:40 pm
People don't change their minds because of rational arguments. Russiagate will go on, in spite of logic and evidence, much
as Birther nonsense does.
mike k , July 16, 2018 at 6:54 pm
I just listened to NBC nightly news, and CNN. They are screaming treason! And the end of America! They are absolutely aghast
that Trump is making peace moves with Putin. Doesn't he know that America is a Warfare State?? To talk peace is against everything
we hold sacred. Beware Mr. Trump, the CIA hit squads will be champing at the bit to field one of their "lone assassins on you".
Pray for the Donald not being gunned down for doing the right thing (for once).
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:37 pm
I still fear someone will do the president harm as a result of this. Trump is taking chances with the mafia that runs this
shadow permanent government, given this level of hysteria. They just have too much at stake. They are used to getting their way.
I hope I'm wrong. The last time a president took on the entire establishment to this extent was JFK. I wish I could be more optimistic.
Litchfield , July 16, 2018 at 10:44 pm
"They are screaming treason! "
How dare they???
they are the treasonous ones.
These crazed zombies are terrifying.
Gregory Herr , July 16, 2018 at 6:52 pm
"I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace, than risk peace in pursuit of politics."
Bravo Mr. President.
Joe Tedesky , July 16, 2018 at 8:27 pm
Great quote Gregory. Joe
Bruce Dickson , July 16, 2018 at 8:51 pm
A JFK-worthy quote, that.
And, to quote its deliverer, "Who would think..?"
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:23 pm
That one statement will go down in history, mark my words.
Jeff Harrison , July 16, 2018 at 6:40 pm
"never before have I seen an American president consistently, repeatedly, publicly, and shockingly advance the interests of
another country over those of his own government and people."
Really? You obviously haven't been paying attention to the US's obeisance to Israel. I can think of no other country that puts
another country's wishes ahead of their own the way the US does with Israel.
"he had a chance right there in front of the world to tell Vladimir Putin to stay the HELL out of American democracy, and he
didn't do it."
And he was wise not to do so. The United States has far more blatantly interfered with Russian elections than what the idiots
in our alphabet soup of intelligence agencies are accusing Russia of now. The reason you call Putin a thug is not because he is
one but because he won't let you get away with that kind of crap. Putin has made it clear that American regime change is off the
table and he intends to see to it that it stays off the table.
Rohit , July 16, 2018 at 7:30 pm
""never before have I seen an American president consistently, repeatedly, publicly, and shockingly advance the interests of
another country over those of his own government and people.""
Is that why he wants NATO to beef up? Is that why he complained about Germany's energy dependence on Russia?
He is not putting Putin above the American people. He is just not accepting the lies told by the FBI which is really pretty
much still controlled by Obama.
JesseJean , July 16, 2018 at 10:33 pm
Bravo, Jeff!
David Hamilton , July 16, 2018 at 6:34 pm
If the allegations are true – of GRU officers successfully phishing for HRC campaign dirt from Chairman Podesta's emails –
then the officers are guilty as charged. As I understand it, this was the avenue through which Wikileaks obtained the content
of Hillary Clinton's speeches to Goldman Sachs. That confirmation of what most already suspected to be true – that Hillary had
been pledging fealty to Wall Street bankers at the expense of the people – probably contributed to Hillary's defeat at the polls.
So, I say "more power to 'em". Those officers show common cause with the common man and woman in America. Hillary was never going
to release those transcripts on her own!
And that same phishing – if true – was certainly no "terrorist attack" or "act of war' or other hyperbolic nonsense like "the
undermining of democracy in America". We have no democracy – only an oligarchy – much like the Russians under Boris Yeltsin. Maybe
the phishing undermined oligarchy here, which would be a good thing. Oligarchy is at the heart of the cruel neo-liberal order
which tyrannizes the people.
Jeff Harrison , July 16, 2018 at 6:42 pm
Julian Assange has consistently said he did not get the files from Russia. Assange has yet to be caught in a lie. The US is
a serial liar and doesn't even look embarrassed when caught in a lie.
David Hamilton , July 16, 2018 at 6:49 pm
Thanks Jeff, maybe I don't understand the transfers to Wikileaks very well. I wonder if the FBI/Justice Department really knows,
like they say they do.
LarcoMarco , July 16, 2018 at 7:41 pm
Well, if DNC's servers and Hillarious' stealth servers and Podesta's email were hacked, the NSA has Hooverd up all the evidence
(if it exists). The Dumpster should demand this material be revealed and also demand disclosure of proof that RussiaGate is more
than Deep State designs.
Something must be done to release Assange! Trump: do something.
backwardsevolution , July 16, 2018 at 8:57 pm
Frederike – I think Trump will release Assange. Patience.
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:33 pm
911 ushered in the post-truth era.
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:25 pm
Maybe they got the information because Hillary took home classified documents and recklessly-knowingly exposed them to hackers
in her private basement server?
Freedom lover , July 16, 2018 at 10:56 pm
"If the allegations are true". Well we probably will never find out will we. Putin was shrewd to offer to have Mueller and
his investigators come to Russia to investigate the indited GRU officers and offering full cooperation with Russian Law enforcement.
Putin and Trump both know that Mueller will make every excuse in the book of why that can't happen. Mueller must be craping his
pants wondering if he will somehow be forced to take his investigation to Russia and have it publically exposed for the fraud
that it is.
backwardsevolution , July 17, 2018 at 3:42 pm
Freedom lover – yes, what a great move by Putin! "Come on, let's work together to get to the bottom of this." Mueller must
just be dying! Unfortunately, Trump is really in danger now.
"I have GREAT confidence in MY intelligence people." Translation: He has little confidence in Obama and Bush intelligence people.
Good for him.
JRGJRG , July 16, 2018 at 9:32 pm
Wow, that was explosive! Just imagine how bad things would be right now if someone other than Putin were in charge of Russia.
We should count ourselves as lucky.
"... No Russian interference in America's political process occurred in 2016, earlier, or is being cooked up for the nation's November midterm elections. ..."
"... Trump knows it and said so in Helsinki. When asked if he holds Russia accountable for anything, he said: ..."
"... Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago. ..."
"... VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected]. My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III." http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ..."
No Russian interference in America's political process occurred in 2016, earlier, or is
being cooked up for the nation's November midterm elections.
Trump knows it and said so in Helsinki. When asked if he holds Russia accountable for
anything, he said:
"I hold both countries responsible (for dismal bilateral relations). I think that the
United States has been foolish. I think we've all been foolish And I think we're all to
blame."
Regarding election meddling, he said:
"There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it. And people are being brought out to
the fore. So far that I know, virtually none of it related to the campaign. And they're going
to have to try really hard to find somebody that did relate to the campaign."
"My people came to me and some others (T)hey think it's Russia President Putin said it's
not Russia. I will say this: I dont see any reason why it would be."
" President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today."
Trump is wrong about most things, not this. No evidence, nothing, proves Russian meddling in
the US political process.
If it existed, it would have been revealed long ago. It never was and never will be because
there's nothing credible to reveal, Big Lies alone.
Trump's above remarks were in Helsinki. In response to a raging Russophobic firestorm of
criticism back home, he backtracked from his above comments, saying he misspoke abroad.
He accepts the intelligence community's claim about Russian US election meddling –
knowing it didn't occur.
Russiagate was cooked up by Obama's thuggish Russophobic CIA director John Brennan , media
keeping the Big Lie alive.
DNC/John Podesta emails were leaked, not hacked – an indisputable fact media
scoundrels suppress to their disgrace.
Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray earlier explained that
"(t)he source of these emails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at all," adding:
"I discovered what the source was when I attended the Sam Adam's whistleblower award in
Washington."
"The source of these emails (came) from within official circles in Washington DC. You
should look to Washington, not to Moscow."
"WikiLeaks has never published any material received from the Russian government or from
any proxy of the Russian government. It's simply a completely untrue claim designed to divert
attention from the content of the material" and its true source.
The Big Lie alone matters when it's the official narrative. The Russian meddling hoax and
mythical Kremlin threat to US security are central to maintaining adversarial relations with
America's key invented enemy.
It's vital to unjustifiably justifying the nation's global empire of bases, its outrageous
amount of military spending, its belligerence toward all sovereign independent states, its
endless wars of aggression, its scorn for world peace and stability, its neoliberal harshness
to pay for it all, along with transferring the nation's wealth from ordinary people to its
privileged class.
America's deeply corrupted political process is far too debauched to fix, rigged to serve
wealth, power and privilege exclusively, at war on humanity at home and abroad.
It's a tyrannical plutocracy and oligarchy, a police state, not a democracy, a cesspool of
criminality, inequity and injustice, run by sinister dark forces – monied interests and
bipartisan self-serving political scoundrels, wicked beyond redemption, threatening humanity's
survival.
Today is the most perilous time in world history. What's going on should terrify everyone
everywhere.
Washington's rage for global dominance, its military madness, its unparalleled recklessness,
threatens world peace, stability, and survival.
*
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research
based in Chicago.
VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."
"... Cutting through the crap on foreign policy is something of a Paul family tradition. ..."
"... When Ron Paul suggested on a Republican presidential primary debate stage in 2008 that U.S. foreign policy created " blowback " that led to 9/11, fellow GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani accused Paul of blaming America and defending the attackers. Paul didn't relent: "Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years." ..."
"... The American Conservative ..."
"... There are neocons in both parties who still want Ukraine and Georgia to be in NATO. That's very, very provocative. It has stimulated and encouraged nationalism in Russia. George Kennan predicted this in 1998 when we still had Yeltsin and Russia was coming in our direction. He said, "If you push NATO up against Russia's borders, nationalism will arise and their militarist tendencies will increase, and you may get someone like a Putin," basically. ..."
"... "It's a big mistake for us, not to say that we're morally equivalent or that anything Russia does is justified," Paul told Tapper. "But if we don't understand that everything we do has a reaction, we're not going to be very good at understanding and trying to have peace in our world." ..."
"... "Most Americans are understandably shocked by what they view as an unprecedented attack on our political system," the New York Times ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... Rand Paul said Sunday, "People need to think through these things before they get so eager to rattle their sabers about wanting to have a confrontation with Russia." ..."
"... Jack Hunter is the former political editor of ..."
Ron and Rand Paul Call Out Foreign Policy Hysteria
And like his father, the senator found himself on the wrong end of the media mob this week.
When Mitt Romney called Russia America's "
number
one geopolitical foe
" during the 2012 election campaign, Barack Obama
mocked
him:
"The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back." Vice President Joe Biden
dismissed
Romney as a "Cold War holdover." Hillary Clinton
said
Romney was "looking backward." John Kerry
said
"Mitt Romney talks like he's only seen Russia by watching
Rocky IV
."
But that was then. This week the Cold War seemed to be back in full force for many former Obama supporters, as
President Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the wake of 12 Russian agents
being indicted
for
allegedly meddling in the 2016 election.
In the midst of this hysteria, Senator Rand Paul was
asked
by CNN's Jake
Tapper on Sunday whether he thought Trump should demand that Putin acknowledge Russia's meddling.
"They're not going to admit it in the same way we're not going to admit that we were involved in the Ukrainian
elections or the Russian election," Paul
replied
. "So all countries that can
spy do. All countries that want to interfere in elections and have the ability to, they try." Paul insisted that U.S.
and Russian meddling are not "morally equivalent," but said we must still take into account that both nations do this.
That's when "Rand Paul" began trending on Twitter.
"Rand Paul is on TV delivering line after line of Kremlin narrative, and it is absolutely stunning to watch," read
one tweet
with nearly 5,000 likes. Another
tweet, just as popular,
said
, "Between
McConnell hiding election interference and Rand Paul defending it, looks like Russia's already annexed Kentucky." A Raw
Story headline on Paul's CNN interview read, "
Stunned
Jake Tapper explains why NATO exists to a Russia-defending Rand Paul
."
But was Paul really "defending" Russia? Was he even defending Russian meddling in U.S. elections? Or was he merely
trying to pierce through the hysteria and portray American-Russian relations in a more accurate and comprehensive
context -- something partisans left and right won't do and the mainstream media is too lazy to attempt?
Cutting through the crap on foreign policy is something of a Paul family tradition.
When Ron Paul suggested on a Republican presidential primary debate stage in 2008 that U.S. foreign policy created "
blowback
"
that led to 9/11, fellow GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani accused Paul of blaming America and defending the attackers. Paul
didn't relent: "Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there.
We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years."
No one in the GOP wanted to hear what Ron Paul had to say because it challenged and largely rebutted Republicans'
entire political identity at the time. Paul was roundly denounced. FrontPageMag's David Horowitz called him a "
disgrace
."
RedState
banned
all Paul supporters.
The American Conservative
's Jim Antle would
recall
in 2012: "The optics were
poor: a little-known congressman was standing against the GOP frontrunner on an issue where 90 percent of the party
likely disagreed with him . Support for the war was not only nearly unanimous within the GOP, but bipartisan."
Rand Paul now poses a similar challenge to Russia-obsessed Democrats. Contra Jake Tapper sagely explaining "why NATO
exists" to a supposedly ignoramus Paul, as the liberal Raw Story headline framed it, here's what the senator actually
said:
There are neocons in both parties who still want Ukraine and Georgia to be in NATO. That's very, very provocative.
It has stimulated and encouraged nationalism in Russia. George Kennan predicted this in 1998 when we still had
Yeltsin and Russia was coming in our direction. He said, "If you push NATO up against Russia's borders, nationalism
will arise and their militarist tendencies will increase, and you may get someone like a Putin," basically.
Do you think Jake Tapper Googled "George Kennan"? That's about as likely as Giuliani Googling "blowback."
"It's a big mistake for us, not to say that we're morally equivalent or that anything Russia does is justified," Paul
told Tapper. "But if we don't understand that everything we do has a reaction, we're not going to be very good at
understanding and trying to have peace in our world."
As for Russian spying -- was Paul just blindly defending that, too? Or did he make an important point in noting both
sides do it?
"Most Americans are understandably shocked by what they view as an unprecedented attack on our political system," the
New York Times
reported in February. "But intelligence veterans, and scholars who have studied covert
operations, have a different, and quite revealing, view."
The
Times
continued: "'If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something
bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,' said Steven L. Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years at the C.I.A., where he
was the chief of Russian operations. The United States 'absolutely' has carried out such election influence operations
historically, he said, 'and I hope we keep doing it.'"
The U.S. will no doubt keep meddling in foreign elections. Russia will do the same, just as it did during the
Obama administration and years prior
. The cries against diplomacy and for war will ebb, flow, flip, and flop,
depending on who sits in the White House and how it makes the screaming partisans feel. Many Democrats who view Trump's
diplomacy with Russia as dangerous would have embraced it (and did) under Obama. Many Republicans who hail Trump's
diplomatic efforts
wouldn't
have done so were he a Democrat. President Hillary Clinton could be having the same meeting with Putin and
most Democrats would be fine with it, Russian meddling or no meddling.
So many
headlines
attempted to portray Paul as the partisan hack on Sunday when the opposite is actually true. It's the left, including
much of the media, that's now turned hawkish towards Russia for largely partisan reasons, while Paul was making the same
realist
foreign policy
arguments
regarding
NATO
and
U.S.-Russia relations
long before the Trump presidency.
Responding to Romney's anti-Russia, anti-Obama comments in 2012, Thomas de Waal, a Russia expert at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace,
told
the
New York Times
, "There's a whole school of thought that Russia is one you need to work with to
solve other problems in the world, rather than being the problem." Rand Paul said Sunday, "People need to think through
these things before they get so eager to rattle their sabers about wanting to have a confrontation with Russia."
But think they won't and sabers they'll rattle, as yesterday's villains become today's heroes and vice versa.
There's the elephant in the room, of course. Nobody seems to want to touch it yet, but everybody knows that
Israeli meddling in US elections puts Russian meddling in the shade. Still, it's fascinating watching the
reporting and waiting to see who will break the silence.
In the meantime, wake me up when there's something
called "the Russia-American Political Action Committee" in DC. Wake me up when US politicians vie to win its
favor, as they vie to win the favor of AIPAC, and win the huge financial contributions that result from getting
its support. Wake me up when Russian oligarchs contribute even a fraction of what Israel donors like Sheldon
Adelson already contribute to US political campaigns – and wake me up when they get results like an American
president moving the US embassy to Jerusalem or an America president sending American troops to stand between
Israel and its enemies Russia may have moved a few thousand votes here or there, but Israel gets American
politicians to send America's children to die in Middle East wars. At the moment, Russia can only dream of
meddling with that degree of success.
Yep – American elections have been corrupted by foreign countries for a long time. Russia's only problem is
that it hasn't learned who to pay off, and how much. Next time Mr. Netanyahu visits Mr. Putin (and he visits
him fairly often), he can give him a few pointers. And then Mr. Putin will be invited to give speeches to joint
sessions of Congress. Just like Mr. Netanyahu. And freshmen US congressmen will be frog-marched to Russia for
instructions, just like they're already frog-marched to Israel.
Russia has been engaging in international espionage dating back at least to Peter the Great. As such, they play
the game as well as, or possibly better, than anyone. They, like we, will do what is necessary-even to the
point of injecting themselves in the internal affairs of another country–if they deem it in their interest to
do so or, as the cliche has it, "in the interest of state". Not very nice but–that's the way the game is
played.
Thank you, Rand Paul and Mr. Hunter, for injecting some much needed sanity into this debate.
There is no need to demonize the Russians. Their country has
national interests and goals. If they are patriots, the Russians will seek to advance those interests and
goals.
We also have interests and goals, and if we are patriots, we seek to advance them (though we disagree on
what our real interests are and what our goals should be).
When our interests concide with that of Russia we collaborate. When they clash, we seek to undermine each
other.
The Russians seem to have been doing it, as their interests now clash with ours. Nothing to be worked out
about. That's how the game is played.
Which does not mean that we should defend ourselves strenuously from such undermining. And the President is
precisely tasked with defending this country and advance its interests. This he seems to be unable to do.
Do not hate the Russians. Do not demonize them. But be aware of what they are doing, because we are NOT in a
Kumbayah moment with them.
Well done, Mr. Hunter. It's a shame that the Pauls' position on foreign policy is not shared by ostensibly
"libertarian" commentators who value DC cocktail parties above all principles.
The left's hatred of Russia goes even deeper than US partisan politics. They hate them because they gave up
their world-wide communism ideology. And they hate them because they are not fully on board with the LGBQTXYZ
movement.
The real problem with Russia is that it exists, and it is too big for us to control. The real problem with
Putin is that he is the first strong leader Russia has had since the fall of the Soviet Union, and he is
messing up our plans for world hegemony.
As one who grew up during the Cold War (the real one) and lived
through the whole thing (the Iron Curtain, the Warsaw Pact, the crushing of Hungary, communists behind every
door and under every bed), I find it very hard to take all the current hysteria about Russia very seriously.
Sane, reasonable comments. Totally agree with your sentiments. Unfortunately, since we live in a
3-ring media circus, so few people will listen or pay heed. In a world possibly even more dangerous than any
time since the Cold War, the act of demonizing one of the two greatest nuclear powers on earth is surely
madness.
CNN etc. headlines are not even thinly veiled editorials against Trump. Not related to just publishing the
news. But telling readers how to think. Mainstream media has an M&M type coating. Remove the outer shell and
you find the good old boys and girls as ever-lurking and ever vigilant Neocon Nation pushing their one and only
agenda on the American people. They are insatiable as long as they do not do the fighting and dying. Stay tough
Trump and realize short of complete capitulation you cannot satisfy these people.
Donald Trump took a step towards peace. Of course, not everyone likes this. As can be seen, Donald Trump has
many enemies, even among Republicans. They want war. These are people dangerous to America and the world.
What is better: peace with Russia, or a global nuclear war?
The Book of Revelation warns: "And another horse, fiery red, came out, and the one who rode it was granted
permission to take peace from the earth, so that people would butcher one another, and he was given a huge
sword." (6:4) "The great sword" – what does it mean?
Jesus gave many important details: "Terrors [φοβητρα] both [τε] and [και] unusual phenomena [σημεια –
unusual occurrences, transcending the common course of nature] from [απ] sky [ουρανου] powerful [μεγαλα] will
be [εσται]." (Luke 21:11)
Some ancient manuscripts contain the words "and frosts" [και χειμωνες] (we call this today "nuclear
winter"), and in Mark 13:8 "and disorders" [και ταραχαι] (in the sense of confusion and chaos). There will be
also significant tremors, food shortages and epidemics along the length and breadth of the regions as a result
of using this weapon.
This weapon will also cause climate change, catastrophic drought and global famine. (cf. Revelation 6:5, 6)
So here we have a complete picture of the consequences of the global nuclear war. Is there any sense in
speeding up this war?
He called out the perfidy and incompetence of American intelligence and foreign policy officials during the
Obama era, as he should have. He wants a productive relationship with a declining nuclear and regional power,
as he should have. Is Putin a nice man? No. But neither is he a pusillanimous Leftist eurotwit.
I'm glad to see adults in the room, at long last. The Sixties are over, baby. Good riddance.
"Of course the Paul's are right as they always are."
Always?
"A number of the newsletters criticized civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., calling him a
pedophile and "lying socialist satyr".[2][15] These articles told readers that Paul had voted against making
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a federal public holiday, saying "Boy, it sure burns me to have a national
holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time
again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate
Whitey Day."[2][16][17] During the 2008 and 2012 presidential election campaigns, Paul and his supporters said
that the passages denouncing King were not a reflection of Paul's own views because he considers King a
"hero".[18][19][20″
That last sentence is a hoot. Talk about "hysteria", but, go ahead, repeat Paul's lies that he knew nothing
about his own newsletter.
Johann:
"The left's hatred of Russia goes even deeper than US partisan politics. They hate them because they gave up
their world-wide communism ideology. And they hate them because they are not fully on board with the LGBQTXYZ
movement."
Like the NRA, The American Conservative needs to open "The Russian Conservative" chapters in Putin's
conservative Russia to protect Putin's murderous government.
It could be that the "Left", whatever that is in addlepated minds, merely desires a little real politik in
our relations with relations with Putin's Russia.
It's hard to tell the difference between ex-KGB Putin and ex-republicans like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan.
The latter two make "full of crap" seem mild praise.
Off the top of my head, a few egregious examples in which the US government has "meddled" in other countries
during the last 100 years:
Mexico (Woodrow Wilson had thousands of US troops occupying Mexico until calling
them back to "meddle" in Europe's War to End All Wars, setting the stage for an even worse war 20 years later.)
Russia (Woodrow Wilson used the US military to "meddle" in the Russian revolution after the War to End All
Wars.)
Korea (undeclared war)
Vietnam (undeclared war)
Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Chile, and much of the rest of Central and South America.
Iran (helped overthrow its government in the 1950s and install the Shah of Iran, setting the stage for the
Iranian revolution.)
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Egypt.
Yemen (huge humanitarian disaster as I write this. US government fully supporting head-chopping Saudi
Arabians in their campaign to starve, sicken and blow to bits hundreds of thousands of people. Support includes
US planes in-flight fueling of Saudi fighter/bomber jets.)
And let us not forget the enormous "meddling" in numerous US government elections and policy debates by . .
. Israel.
"He called out the perfidy and incompetence of American intelligence and
foreign policy officials during the Obama era, as he should have. He wants a productive relationship with a
declining nuclear and regional power, as he should have. Is Putin a nice man? No. But neither is he a
pusillanimous Leftist eurotwit."
It's important to understand what the US intelligence community is calling "interference in our election."
There has been no accusation that the Russians hacked into our electronic voting and changed results. Rather,
they did what we have done in other countries–the Russians ran an influence campaign. They bought ads and
created bots to spread the word. This is so utterly tame . . . there is nothing out of the ordinary US playbook
here.
Hacking the DNC server and revealing underhanded DNC doings? Hey, that's on the DNC for being both venal and
incompetent.
Anybody in 1962 shouting wild paranoid conspiracy theories about
THERE ARE RUSSIAN SPIES EVERYWHERE, THEY'RE TRYING TO TAKE OVER AMERICA
These people in 1962 would be (correctly) dismissed as Right Wing conspiracy kooks, now it's just standard
Lib Dems, RINOs, Neo Conservatives and fake news lying press.
We commissioned this Farstar comics with this theme – I mean like who in 2018 is really scared that Russians
like Anna Kournikova are going to take over America –
Unfortunately, Rand Paul is acting, but not on principle or in good faith. If he really wanted to stand against
manufactured hysteria, he would not accept the US "intelligence" agency claims and refer to their record – e.g.
on Iraq and before regarding stability of the Soviet Union – he would question the staggering difficulties of
attribution and forensics for networked, digital attacks (the main reason why any claims about who hacked whom
have to be read with skepticism), he would point to the corruption of our foreign politics by Saudi and Israeli
interests and money within the Trump-Kushner clan, and both parties, and he would compare the alleged – and
allegedly ineffectual – attempts to influence an already ridiculous election to the very real, pervasive and
corrupting impact of GOP voter disenfranchisement and bipartisan gerrymandering in service of incumbents and
their networks.
Rand Paul is the man who was going to stand against the Haspel appointment. He is a phoney,
but he serves as a weather vane for niche politicians on how the winds are turning.
Nothing about New START, no word about how George Bush made a promise that might have been in bad faith, how
Gorbachev was foolish enough to accept it, and how Bill Clinton broke it across the board, and piled on by
targeting Serbia in the Balkan conflict. Kennan did not refer to the Ukraine on his missive.
If Rand Paul is our last best hope, we are in deep trouble.
Jack Hunter " Senator Rand Paul was asked by CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday whether he thought Trump should
demand that Putin acknowledge Russia's meddling."
(0:01) TAPPER: 48 hours ago the US government, the Trump
administration, said the top Russian military intelligence officers orchestrated a massive hack to affect the
US election. How much do you want President Trump to try to hold Putin accountable for that?
PAUL: I think really we mistake our response if we think it's about accountability from the Russians.
They're another country. They're going to spy on us. They do spy on us. They're going to interfere in our
elections. We also do the same. Dov Levin at Carnegie Mellon studied this over about a 50-year period in the
last century and found 81 times that the US interfered in other countries' elections. So we all do it. What we
need to do is to make sure that our electoral process is protected. And I think because this has gotten
partisan and it's all about partisan politics we have forgotten that really the most important thing is the
integrity of our election. And there are things we can do and things that I've advocated: Making sure it's
decentralized all the way down to the precinct level; making sure we don't store all the data in one place,
even for a state, and that there's a back-up way so that someone in a precinct can say, 'Two thousand people
signed in, this was the vote tally I sent to headquarters.' There's a lot of ways that we can back-up our
election. Advertising, things like that, it's tricky. Can we restrict the Russians? We might be able to in some
ways, but I think at the bottom line we wanted the Russians to admit it. They're not going to admit it in the
same way we're not going to admit that we were involved in the Ukrainian elections or the Russian elections. So
all countries that can spy do. All countries that want to interfere in elections and have the ability to, they
try."
TAPPER: It sounds as though you are saying that the United States has done the equivalent of what the
Russians did in the 2016 election, and it might sound to some viewers that you're offering that statement as an
excuse for what the Russians did.
PAUL: No, what I would say is it's not morally equivalent, but I think in their mind it is. And I think it's
important to know in your adversary's mind the way that they perceive things. I do think that they react to our
interference in both their elections. One of the reasons they really didn't like Hillary Clinton is they found
her responsible for some of the activity by the US in their elections under the Obama administration. So I'm
not saying it's justified
TAPPER: But surely, Senator Paul, the United States has never done what the Russians did.
PAUL: I'm not saying they're equivalent, or morally equivalent, but I am saying that this is the way that
the Russians respond. So if you want to know how we have better diplomacy, or better reactions, we have to know
their response. But it's not just interference in elections that I think has caused this nationalism in Russia.
Also, I think part of the reason is is we promised them when James Baker, at the end when Germany reunified, we
promised them that we wouldn't go one inch eastward of Germany with NATO, and we've crept up on the borders,
and we still have neocons in both parties who want Ukraine and Georgia to be in NATO.
That's very, very provocative and it has stimulated and encouraged nationalism in Russia. George Kennan
predicted this. In 1998 when we still had Yeltsin and Russia was coming in our direction, he said, if you push
NATO up against Russia's borders, nationalism will arise and their militarist tendencies will increase, and you
may get someone like a Putin, basically.
George Kennan predicted the rise of Putin in 1998. And so we have to understand that for every action we
have, there is a reaction. And it's a big mistake for us -- not to say that we're morally equivalent or that
anything that Russia does is justified – but if we don't realize that everything we do has a reaction, we're
not going to be very good at understanding and trying to have peace in the world (3:38)
"... $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America ..."
"... Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America ..."
"... , is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He is the author, most recently, of ..."
So effectively has the Beltway establishment captured the concept of national security that,
for most of us, it automatically conjures up images of terrorist groups, cyber warriors, or
"rogue states." To ward off such foes, the United States maintains a historically unprecedented
constellation
of military bases abroad and, since 9/11, has waged wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya,
and elsewhere that have gobbled up nearly
$4.8 trillion . The 2018 Pentagon budget already totals $647 billion -- four times what China, second
in global military spending, shells out and more than the next 12 countries combined,
seven of them American allies. For good measure, Donald Trump has added an additional
$200 billion to projected defense expenditures through 2019.
Yet to hear the hawks tell it, the United States has never been less secure. So much for
bang for the buck.
For millions of Americans, however, the greatest threat to their day-to-day security isn't
terrorism or North Korea, Iran, Russia, or China. It's internal -- and economic. That's
particularly true for the 12.7% of Americans
(43.1 million of them) classified as poor by the government's criteria : an income below $12,140
for a one-person household, $16,460 for a family of two, and so on until you get to the
princely sum of $42,380 for a family of eight.
Savings aren't much help either: a third of Americans have no
savings at all and another third have less than $1,000 in the bank. Little wonder that
families struggling to cover the cost of food alone increased from 11% (36
million) in 2007 to 14% (48 million) in 2014.
The Working Poor
Unemployment can certainly contribute to being poor, but millions of Americans endure
poverty when they have full-time jobs or even hold down more than one job. The latest figures
from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that there are 8.6 million "working poor,"
defined by the government as people who live below the poverty line despite being employed at
least 27 weeks a year. Their economic insecurity doesn't register in our society, partly
because working and being poor don't seem to go together in the minds of many Americans -- and
unemployment has fallen reasonably steadily. After approaching 10% in 2009, it's now at only
4% .
Help from the government? Bill Clinton's 1996 welfare " reform "
program , concocted in partnership with congressional Republicans, imposed time limits on
government assistance, while tightening eligibility criteria for it. So, as Kathryn Edin and
Luke Shaefer show in their disturbing book, $2.00 a Day: Living on
Almost Nothing in America , many who desperately need help don't even bother to apply.
And things will only get worse in the age of Trump. His 2019 budget includes deep cuts in
a raft of anti-poverty programs.
Anyone seeking a visceral sense of the hardships such Americans endure should read Barbara
Ehrenreich's 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On
(Not) Getting By in America . It's a gripping account of what she learned when, posing
as a "homemaker" with no special skills, she worked for two years in various low-wage jobs,
relying solely on her earnings to support herself. The book brims with stories about people who
had jobs but, out of necessity, slept in rent-by-the-week fleabag motels, flophouses, or even
in their cars, subsisting on vending machine snacks for lunch, hot dogs and instant noodles for
dinner , and forgoing basic dental care or health checkups. Those who managed to get permanent
housing would choose poor, low-rent neighborhoods close to work because they often couldn't
afford a car. To maintain even such a barebones lifestyle, many worked more than one job.
Though politicians prattle on about how times have changed for the better, Ehrenreich's book
still provides a remarkably accurate picture of America's working poor. Over the past decade
the proportion of people who exhausted their monthly paychecks just to pay for life's
essentials actually increased from 31% to 38%. In
2013, 71%
of the families that had children and used food pantries run by Feeding America, the largest
private organization helping the hungry, included at least one person who had worked during the
previous year. And in America's
big cities , chiefly because of a widening gap between rent and wages, thousands of working
poor remain
homeless , sleeping in shelters, on the streets, or in their vehicles, sometimes along with
their families. In New York City, no outlier when it comes to homelessness among the working
poor, in
a third of the families with children that use homeless shelters at least one adult held a
job.
The Wages of Poverty
The working poor cluster in certain occupations. They are salespeople in retail stores,
servers or preparers of fast food, custodial staff, hotel workers, and caregivers for children
or the elderly. Many make less than $10 an hour and lack
any leverage, union or otherwise, to press for raises. In fact, the percentage of unionized workers in such
jobs remains in the single digits -- and in retail and food preparation, it's under 4.5%.
That's hardly surprising, given that private sector union membership has
fallen by 50% since 1983 to only 6.7% of the workforce.
Low-wage employers like it that way and -- Walmart being the
poster child for this -- work diligently to make it ever harder for employees to join unions.
As a result, they rarely find themselves under any real pressure to increase wages, which,
adjusted for inflation, have stood still or even decreased since
the late 1970s. When employment is " at-will
," workers may be fired or the terms of their work amended on the whim of a company and without
the slightest explanation. Walmart announced this year that it would hike its hourly wage to
$11 and that's welcome news. But this had nothing to do with collective bargaining; it was a
response to the drop in the unemployment rate, cash flows from the Trump tax cut for
corporations (which saved Walmart as much as $2
billion ), an increase in minimum wages in a number of states, and pay increases by an arch
competitor, Target. It was also accompanied by the
shutdown of 63 of Walmart's Sam's Club stores, which meant layoffs for 10,000 workers. In
short, the balance of power almost always favors the employer, seldom the employee.
As a result, though the United States has a per-capita income of $59,500
and is among the wealthiest countries in the world, 12.7% of
Americans (that's 43.1 million people), officially are impoverished. And that's generally
considered a significant undercount. The Census Bureau establishes the poverty rate by figuring
out an annual no-frills family food budget, multiplying it by three, adjusting it for household
size, and pegging it to the Consumer Price Index. That, many economists believe, is a woefully
inadequate way of estimating poverty. Food prices haven't risen dramatically over the past 20
years, but the cost of other necessities like medical care (especially if you lack insurance)
and housing have: 10.5% and 11.8% respectively between
2013 and 2017 compared to an only 5.5% increase for food.
Include housing and medical expenses in the equation and you get the Supplementary
Poverty Measure (SPM), published by the Census Bureau since 2011. It reveals that a larger
number of Americans are poor: 14%
or 45 million in 2016.
Dismal Data
For a fuller picture of American (in)security, however, it's necessary to delve deeper into
the relevant data, starting with hourly wages, which are the way more than 58% of adult workers are
paid. The good news: only 1.8 million , or 2.3% of
them, subsist at or below minimum wage. The not-so-good news: one-third of all workers earn
less than $12 an hour and
42% earn less than $15. That's $24,960 and $31,200 a year. Imagine raising a family on such
incomes, figuring in the cost of food, rent, childcare, car payments (since a car is often a
necessity simply to get to a job in a country with inadequate public transportation), and
medical costs.
The problem facing the working poor isn't just low wages, but the widening gap between wages
and rising prices. The government has increased the hourly federal minimum wage more than 20
times since it was set at 25 cents under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Between 2007 and
2009 it rose to $7.25, but over the past decade that sum lost nearly 10% of
its purchasing power to inflation, which means that, in 2018, someone would have to work
41 additional days to make the equivalent of the 2009 minimum wage.
Workers in the lowest 20% have lost the most ground, their inflation-adjusted
wages falling by nearly 1% between 1979 and 2016, compared to a 24.7% increase for the top
20%. This can't be explained by lackluster productivity since, between 1985 and 2015, it
outstripped pay raises, often substantially, in every economic sector except mining.
Yes, states can mandate higher minimum wages and 29 have,
but 21 have not, leaving many low-wage workers struggling to cover the costs of two essentials
in particular: health care and housing.
Even when it comes to jobs that offer health insurance, employers have been shifting ever
more of its cost onto their workers through higher deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, as
well as by requiring them to cover more of the premiums. The percentage of workers who paid at
least 10% of their earnings to cover such costs -- not counting premiums -- doubled
between 2003 and 2014.
This helps explain why, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics , only 11% of workers in the bottom 10% of wage earners even
enrolled in workplace healthcare plans in 2016 (compared to 72% in the top 10%). As a
restaurant server who makes $2.13 an hour before tips -- and whose husband earns $9 an hour at
Walmart --
put it , after paying the rent, "it's either put food in the house or buy insurance."
The Affordable Care Act, or ACA (aka Obamacare), provided subsidies to help people with low
incomes cover the cost of insurance premiums, but workers with employer-supplied healthcare, no
matter how low their wages,
weren't covered by it. Now, of course,
President Trump , congressional
Republicans , and a Supreme Court in which right-wing justices are going to be even
more influential will be intent on poleaxing the ACA.
It's housing, though, that takes the biggest bite out of the paychecks of low-wage workers.
The majority of them are renters. Ownership remains for many a pipe dream. According to a
Harvard study , between 2001 and 2016, renters who made $30,000-$50,000 a year and paid
more than a third of their earnings to landlords (the threshold for qualifying as "rent
burdened") increased from 37% to 50%. For those making only $15,000, that figure rose to
83%.
In other words, in an ever more unequal America, the number of low-income workers struggling
to pay their rent has surged. As the Harvard analysis shows, this is, in part, because the
number of affluent renters (with incomes of $100,000 or more) has leapt and, in city after
city, they're driving the demand for, and building of, new rental units. As a result, the
high-end share of new rental construction soared from a third to nearly two-thirds of all units
between 2001 and 2016. Not surprisingly, new low-income rental units dropped from two-fifths to
one-fifth of the total and, as the pressure on renters rose, so did rents for even those modest
dwellings. On top of that, in places
like New York City , where demand from the wealthy shapes the housing market, landlords
have found ways -- some within the law, others not -- to get rid of low-income tenants.
Public housing and housing
vouchers are supposed to make housing affordable to low-income households, but the
supply of public housing hasn't remotely matched demand. Consequently, waiting lists are
long and people in need languish for years before getting a shot -- if they ever do. Only a
quarter of those who qualify for such assistance receive it. As for those vouchers, getting
them is hard to begin with because of the
massive mismatch between available funding for the program and the demand for the help it
provides. And then come the other
challenges : finding landlords willing to accept vouchers or rentals that are reasonably
close to work and not in neighborhoods euphemistically labelled " distressed ."
The bottom line: more than 75% of "at-risk"
renters (those for whom the cost of rent exceeds 30% or more of their earnings) do not receive
assistance from the government. The real "risk" for them is becoming homeless, which means
relying on shelters or family and friends willing to take them in.
President Trump's proposed budget cuts will make life even harder for low-income workers
seeking affordable housing. His 2019 budget proposal slashes
$6.8 billion (14.2%) from the resources of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development's (HUD) by, among other things, scrapping housing vouchers and assistance to
low-income families struggling to pay heating bills. The president also seeks to slash funds
for the upkeep of public housing by nearly 50%. In addition, the
deficits that his rich-come-first
tax "reform" bill is virtually guaranteed to produce will undoubtedly set the stage for yet
more cuts in the future. In other words, in what's becoming the United States of Inequality,
the very phrases "low-income workers" and "affordable housing" have ceased to go together.
None of this seems to have troubled HUD Secretary Ben Carson who happily ordered a
$31,000 dining room set for his office suite at the taxpayers' expense, even as he
visited
new public housing units to make sure that they weren't too comfortable (lest the poor settle
in for long stays). Carson has
declared that it's time to stop believing the problems of this society can be fixed merely
by having the government throw extra money at them -- unless, apparently, the dining room
accoutrements of superbureaucrats aren't up to snuff.
Money Talks
The levels of poverty and economic inequality that prevail in America are not intrinsic to
either capitalism or globalization. Most other wealthy market economies in the 36-nation
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have done far better than the
United States in reducing them without sacrificing innovation or creating government-run
economies.
Take the poverty gap, which the OECD defines as the difference between a country's official
poverty line and the average income of those who fall below it. The United States has the
second largest
poverty gap among wealthy countries; only Italy does worse.
Child poverty ? In the World Economic Forum's
ranking of 41 countries -- from best to worst -- the U.S. placed 35th. Child poverty has
declined in the United States since 2010, but a Columbia University report estimates that
19% of American kids (13.7 million) nevertheless lived in families with incomes below the
official poverty line in 2016. If you add in the number of kids in low-income households, that
number increases to 41%.
As for infant mortality , according to
the government's own Centers for Disease Control, the U.S., with 6.1 deaths per 1,000 live
births, has the absolute worst record among wealthy countries. (Finland and Japan do best with
2.3.)
And when it comes to the distribution of wealth, among the OECD countries only Turkey,
Chile, and Mexico do worse than the U.S.
It's time to rethink the American national security state with its annual
trillion-dollar budget. For tens of millions of Americans, the source of deep workaday
insecurity isn't the standard roster of foreign enemies, but an ever-more entrenched system of
inequality, still
growing , that
stacks the political deck against the least well-off Americans. They lack the bucks to hire
big-time lobbyists. They can't write lavish checks to candidates running for public office or
fund PACs. They have no way of manipulating the myriad influence-generating networks that the elite uses to shape
taxation and spending policies. They are up against a system in which money truly does talk --
and that's the voice they don't have. Welcome to the United States of Inequality.
Rajan Menon, a
TomDispatch regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of
International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and Senior Research
Fellow at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He is the author,
most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention .
But Rajan ,the American can always " honor the military " at the fast food drive through,
even send a few pennies for the Wounded Warrior Project ,in addition to buying lotteries, and
writing the tithe to the Mega Churches seeking blessing for the military men and women in
uniform . They can sing with Trump"Make America Great Again " . They can come out of the
woodshed to support wars , say things against Mexican, listen to FOX,and gather around
Prospect park to celebrate birthdays , hop into a bus and continue texting to update the
status on social media . They can nod with MSNBC that they have the best freedom that any
corner of the world can afford . They if white can claim being discriminated by Asian
Americans,if black by Mexicans,if Latinos by whites .
Now it seems they could feel proud of the ability to guide China UK and Brazil/Argentina do
the right things .
Why do these experts fail to understand that our national security budget is twice that of
the Department of Defense? It is no secret, POGO runs a tally showing it's twice as much:
In past blog posts, I explained how illegal immigration is a form of slave labor. It seems
powerful people explained this to former President George W. Bush, but didn't tell him not to
repeat it in public and that Americans no longer pick cotton by hand. As a result, Bush said
this during a speech earlier this year:
"There are people willing to do jobs that Americans won't do. Americans don't want to pick
cotton at 105 degrees, but there are people who want put food on their family's tables and
are willing to do that. We ought to say thank you and welcome them."
Bush failed to note that millionaires pay only $10 an hour with no benefits for these
tough jobs, yet most field workers are US citizens or green card holders. Illegals are hired
to hold down wages and deter unions and strikes. If they would pay $20 an hour, plenty of
Americans would show up to work. Most Americans don't know that millions of white Americans
once picked cotton by hand, and picked more than Blacks or Mexicans.
Articles like this pop up here every now and then.
Something doesn't compute.
If the situation is as grim as the article says, why so many people do their best to
immigrate into USA?
Why more, just Westerners, try to immigrate into USA then Americans into those, just
Western, countries?
I've known some Americans around here where I live.
I've known many more locals who've gone to live in USA, let alone tried to get to live in
USA.
Something simply does not compute.
A simple question for an American:
If a person is prudent and sensible, is it really that hard to get by, unemployed, there?
Now, in similar topic an American did explain, some time ago, that there are so many ways
to help those unemployed/underpaid. That the social security net isn't worse, but actually
overall better, then in other Western countries.
Plus, of course, opportunities.
Again, all that data from the article I can't challenge. What doesn't make sense is net
migration, just within Western sphere.
I do know some people, several dozen I guess, who live in USA. They have been doing quite
well. From a bus driver to a top medical professional.
For a fuller picture of American (in)security, however, it's necessary to delve deeper
into the relevant data, starting with hourly wages, which are the way more than 58% of
adult workers are paid. The good news: only 1.8 million, or 2.3% of them, subsist at or
below minimum wage. The not-so-good news: one-third of all workers earn less than $12 an
hour and 42% earn less than $15. That's $24,960 and $31,200 a year. Imagine raising a
family on such incomes, figuring in the cost of food, rent, childcare, car payments (since
a car is often a necessity simply to get to a job in a country with inadequate public
transportation), and medical costs.
You forgot another expense poor communities have – governmental extraction forces
GEF. Local law enforcement target the poor with the many petty offenses(they've purposely
invented) to extract money for expanding and maintaining of their extortion racket. This no
secret or conspiracy theory, for they readily admit to it. They target the poor because they
understand that the poor do not have resources(lawyers, guns, and money) to fight back. They
target the poor because they're poor, and the poor understand this as just another bill to
pay – another added expense of living in their community.
Another indirect expense that makes all Americans a lot less rich – insurance.
Everything that moves and everything that doesn't is at least singular insured or often
double or tripled insured. Property is a good example of how one entity can be insured three
times over by the owner, renter, contractor, sub-contractor. Your body is another example of
how things "must be insured" ; no surprise when Obama care came along to do just that.
Trump makes clear statements, I too like them.
For me the USA is a third world country, the exceptions are oversized cars and gated
communities.
On one of my visits to the USA I was asked if a child could be medically treated in the
Netherlands, the choice for the parents was letting the child die, or sell their house.
In the Netherlands we have treatments that cost several hundred thousands of euro's per year,
paid for by our medical care system.
Per person we pay about € 100 per month.
Pensions, the same.
Though the EU is busy destroying the best pension systems in the world, those of the
Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, this has not yet succeeded.
A disaster as the ENRON pension fund cannot happen here.
The USA is a great country to live in if you're rich.
And, of course, if you're willing to have the illusion that the poor have only themselves to
blame for being poor.
USA society, terrible, in my opinion, 19th century, a moneycracy.
Eisenhower in his farewell speech warned for the military industrial complex, do not have the
impression that anything changed since then.
3 weeks after the US-NATO FAILED coup attempt in Georgia (more than 2000 died), the
petrodollar [i.e., the banks) "crashed" (and Bush gave more than additional weapons [for more
than $1 Billion) to Sakashviili] .
Moreover, as Mr Kucinich explain, massive transfers occurred between certain banks
:
The USA is a great country to live in if you're rich."
And if you hold large number of slaves known as immigrants from Central and S America
Immigrants serve same purpose the slaves did . It balances the poor middle class white's rage
that can tilt the anger and hatred against the rich ( mostly white ).
This situation goes right into the creation of US It missed the social and political and
religious changes of 18 th and 19 the centuries which gave birth to pre 2000 political system
and social systems of EU .
Implosion of Soviet lent more credence to the economic-political system of USA because the
blind and the deaf evaluated it for teh blind and the deaf who missed the success of the
system on the back of African Latin American and Asian poor newly independent ) confused )
countries. Those countries provided the ingredients- moral ,economic,emotional , – to
the working white class . It b;bolstered their hatred dismissive attitude to the foreigners
and cemented their love for a hateful system that hurt actually the interest of the middle
class and poor whites but gave them a sense of connection ,belonging,and partnerships through
color language and religion- all are false .
This is the same mindset that glues the the untouchables and the poor Hindus to the RSS- BJP
– Brahmanical system of oppression
Most of you must have heard of the Magnitsky Act or even maybe of William Browder himself. You
probably know that Browder was a British businessman who founded Hermitage Capital Management
investment fund which Sergei Magnitsky represented as a lawyer
and auditor. Finally, you must have heard that Magnitsky died (was killed) in a Russian jail
while Browder was placed by the Russian government on a black list and denied entry. For the
vast majority of you, that is probably as much thought as you ever gave this topic and I have
to confess that this is also true for me. I never bothered really researching this issue
because I knew the context so well that this, by itself, gave me a quasi-certitude that I knew
what had happened. Still, when I read this book I was amazed at the fantastically detailed
account Krainer provides to what is really an amazing story.
In his book Alex Krainer offers us the truth and truly shows us how deep the rabbit hole
goes....
As Congress still swoons over the anti-Kremlin Magnitsky narrative, Western political and
media leaders refuse to let their people view a documentary that debunks the fable, reports
Robert Parry.
"... Still, doesn't the Universe work in such a way that *good* is constitutionally unable to successfully confront *evil*? Doesn't evil-fighting-evil and destroying a worse-evil leave a little less evil in this world? ..."
...You can't put lipstick on an American fascist pig only because he pretends detente with Russia. It's tantamount to
selling one's soul for an illusion. It's tantamount to treason if you live anywhere except in the U.S. OR Israel! And even if
you live in the U.S. you are enabling the 1% and Zionist power.
That's it. I'm tired of Trumpgod can do no wrong when everything he stands for is wrong. Get the snow out of your eyes!
Guerrero | Jul 17, 2018 7:21:47 PM | 149
Circe @135
For sure I am in agreement: the "Trumpgod" is a shamanistic construction of a demoralized population.
Still, doesn't the Universe work in such a way that *good* is constitutionally unable to successfully confront *evil*?
Doesn't evil-fighting-evil and destroying a worse-evil leave a little less evil in this world?
If that is how this Universe really works, and one has only force to work with, in the material realm, Donald Trump would
seem well enough suited to the role of either lesser or greater-evil; either-way, hopefully leading-to dimunition of error,
self-deception, and suffering of the children of Eve and Adam.
@149 Guerrero said: "Still, doesn't the Universe work in such a way that *good* is
constitutionally unable to successfully confront *evil*?"
Not often one sees metaphysics enter the realm of geo-political debate in this or any
political forum. But, heck, why not? The unseen forces guiding the survival instincts of the
universe (of which the Earth is a part) may indeed be at work. Trump - whatever one sees in
him - seems to be the man for the times. Paradigms are bending, cracking, the conversation is
changing.
I'll never forget the shock in the MSM, almost to the point of stupefaction, at Trump
accusing Obama during the election campaign of being the "founder of ISIS."
What was even more amazing was how weak Obama's response was. I don't think anybody
posting here would disagree that ISIS was Obama's baby - whether through adoption or
progeny.
But what serious candidate for President before Trump would ever say such a thing publicly
- even if he knew it to be true? Whether by design or through blundering, boorish idiocy born
of whatever flaws and motives you want to ascribe to him, Trump is very boisterously
upsetting the political apple cart and with it the entire world order.
If it is indeed for show as the world elites close their grip on the people of the planet
- it is quite a show. But I don't think so...
... that is a much harder conversation to have about why the Democrats have lost elections than just blaming a foreign villain
and saying it's because Vladimir Putin ran some fake Facebook ads and did some phishing emails ... the conversation we need
to be having [about lies/corruption from the deep state and powerful actors acting against US citizens interests, and decline
of institutions that support US citizens' freedom], but we're not having, because we're evading it by blaming everything on
Vladimir Putin.
I agree with Mish on all this, including " Nearly every political action that generates this much complete nonsense and hysteria
from the Left and Right is worthy of immense praise" though he doesn't qualify/define "Left and Right" as the Left and Right establishment
aka. the Uniparty. The statement wouldn't have applied to say the Left and Right establishment that existed when our founders
created the country and were united to create a government that defends our lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness with an
extremely limited (by today's standards) government. You don't see the Freedom Caucus getting hysterical about Trump's meeting
Putin.
Mass hysteria is exactly what it is, because it threatens their gravy train that comes from money taken by force from taxpayers.
the citizens voted against the establishment, and the establishment is fighting back along with their MSM cronies.
I've never been enthralled with Neil Cavuto due to considering him inferior as a host on things financial. Today he just crapped
in his mess kit with me. He has to be dirty, the way he was defending the wonderful intelligence "community" of the USA, and was
hinting that treason may not be a strong assessment of Trump with Putin. He is a real POS along with girly-man Shepard Smith.
Not one criticism of any Cabalist about graft and corruption, and especially no mention of the uranium to Russia by Obama's and
Hillary's REAL treason.
I repeat, all of you goofy imbeciles, Trump is sucking you down into the depths of embarrassment once the hammer drops. I expected
the fruity Smith but must admit the Cavuto stupidity is a bit of a surprise. Someone has pics of that dumb fuck in a compromising
situation.
Looks like a hacking operation by China. They nailed Clinton's completely unprotected system and then inserted code that gave
them all her traffic over e-mail subsequent to that.
That included all her State Department classified traffic which she had her
staff illegally scan and insert in her private e-mail. We are talking about 30,000+ messages.
Strzok was told that by the Intelligence
Community Inspector General WHILE he was running the Clinton e-mail investigation and chose to ignore it. pl
Given the likely culprits, China made the most sense. Thanks for the confirmation!
Meanwhile, under the radar, another segment of the "Gordian knot" is getting ready to be cut.
White House Orders Direct Taliban Talks to Jump-Start Afghan Negotiations
https://www.nytimes.com/201...
The Trump administration has told its top diplomats to seek direct talks with the Taliban, a significant shift in American policy
in Afghanistan, done in the hope of jump-starting negotiations to end the 17-year war.
The Taliban have long said they will first discuss peace only with the Americans, who toppled their regime in Afghanistan in
2001. But the United States has mostly insisted that the Afghan government must take part.
The recent strategy shift, which was confirmed by several senior American and Afghan officials, is intended to bring those
two positions closer and lead to broader, formal negotiations to end the long war.
-----------------------
I am an independent. I voted for Obama twice because his opponents were so unappealing. I am starting to hate the left. I view
them and the neocon establishment behavior nothing short of treasonous.
Within minutes MSM had the theme to broadcast. It was from their puppet masters in the FBI/CIA. They're told what to say. There's
no doubt about that now.
Also, there's no doubt that they are pushing for war with Russia, within months or a few years, depending on what happens to
Trump.
The Russians will know this now. All the post WWII wars were done in the same way: demonizing leaders, "defending democracy",
false flag ops. But this present push is for the end game of killing the host; which is the life strategy of the parasitoid. The
complete destruction of humanity and total ecocide.
The parasitoid corporate fascists are now in full control of the media and their disease vector politicians/bureaucrats, not
just in the US but the EU/NATO as well.
A parasitoid is an organism that lives in close association with its
host and at the host's expense, and which sooner
or later kills it. Parasitoidism is one of six major
evolutionary strategies within
parasitism . Parasitoidism is distinguished by the fatal
prognosis for the host, which makes the strategy close to
predation .
In epidemiology , a disease vector is any agent that
carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another
living organism; [1] [2]
The Dems. and journalists are jumping all over themselves to fawn over the intelligence
services as the defenders of democracy.
What is the journalism equivalent for 'regulatory capture'?
And even assuming that everything in the indictments are 100% true, then the DNC were
grossly negligent in handling their communications. And Clinton too, with her email
server. And the Obama administration for letting this happen.
I just finished reading Donna Brazile's book, Hacks .
According to Brazile, the DNC's IT department was alerted by the FBI. This was back in
2015 when a G-man called the DNC headquarters and was transferred to the DNC's help desk,
which had been outsourced to a Chicago-based company called The MIS Department. And, you
guessed it, this company had connections to Obama.
Well, it gets worse. The help desk guy who answered the phone thought it was a crank call.
And, after a cursory examination of the DNC computer network, he concluded that there was no
hack.
Watching the various media commentary on Russia and Vladimir Putin I am beyond stunned by
the ignorance, insanity and stupidity that grips the vast multitude of talking heads and
so-called reporters as they opine on the upcoming summit. The memes are simple:
Vladimir Putin is a KGB Thug (he probably taught us how to waterboard nuns),
Vladimir Putin is under great political pressure at home (yeah, he only enjoys a 55%
approval rating, but how can that be? Doesn't he control the media?)
Russia's economy is in the tank.
Russia is isolated internationally.
Russia is backing a mass murderer in Syria.
You got the drift. Now let us get back to reality.
Putin and Russia will welcome improved relationships with the West, especially the United
States. But they will not sell out their soul and they will not acquiesce to our lies. Here is
one simple truth and reality that lurks in the background--despite all of our chest thumping
about Russia involvement in Syria, we are in daily coordination with the Russian military on
deconflicting air space and upcoming ground operations. This does not get covered in the media
therefore it does not exist within the consciousness of the American public.
Russia is appropriately and correctly leery of the United States and its sanctimonious
bullshit. Consider the uproar here over "Russian meddling." The U.S. has a long and blood
soaked history of intervening in other countries and ousting elected leaders. Prominent on that
list are Iran, Guatemala, Chile and Vietnam. Our protests against alleged Russian meddling are
like a whore protesting the fact that a high school cheerleader lost her virginity on prom
night.
The Russians have not forgotten our role in developing and launching the Stuxnet virus in
2010. Although it was supposed to only target the Iranian nuclear reactors, it infected the
Russian Space Station and
a Russian nuclear plant . The ground truth is that the United States, through the
activities of the CIA, the NSA and the Department of Defense, has the largest, most robust
computer network operations aka hacking activity, in the world. We live in the biggest damn
glass house.
Syria? We, the United States, along with the Brits, the Turks, the Saudis and the Qataris,
funded, organized and armed Islamic extremists in Syria. We were giving arms to terrorists. It
was the Russians who intervened to stablize the Syrian regime and turn the tables on all of the
rebel groups. We are just sore damn losers. We were out fought and out thought by Russia in
Syria and have been loath to admit the facts.
How about the question of foreign intervention? Let's put Syria to the side. The U.S. has a
far more disgraceful, shameful history on this point. Since December of 1989, we have invaded
Panama, Iraq (twice), Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria. At the same time we have broken our
promise to the Russians to not expand NATO into the former member of the Soviet Union. In fact,
U.S. and British intelligence operatives played a crucial (albeit covert role) in organizing
the Euromaidan:
These protest led ultimately to the ouster of the democratically and legally elected
Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych. In stark contrast to
the alleged meddling of Russia in our 2016 election, the United States actually succeeded in
helping oust an elected President. Vladimir Putin has not forgotten that fact.
The Deep State keeps harping on the "Russian invasion" of Crimea. As I noted in my previous
piece,
Nato, A Naked Emperor , the Russians did not invade. There was a referendum. I am sure that
Putin will point out the fact that the United States continues to "lease" Guatanamo Bay in Cuba
without the legitimacy of an election. The Cubans want us out but we insist that we have a
legal right to be there. Unlike Crimea, which historically was part of Russia, we have no
historic claim to Cuba other than our own greed.
The Deep State also wants Trump to get the Russians to do something about Iran. Do not be
surprised if Vladimir Putin takes time to explain to Donald that Iran's rise in the Middle East
is not because of Russian support. Nope. It is a direct consequence of the U.S. 2003 invasion
of Iraq.
How about future cooperation? The Russians already are playing Lyft driver for U.S.
astronauts as they ferrying us to and from the Space Station. On the nuclear front, Putin
withdrew in 2016 from a treaty , on the disposal of plutonium, in anger over the U.S.
breaking of its promise to not grow NATO and increase military exercises on Russias border.
Putin does not have alzheimer's. He is not going to back off on this point.
At the core of the U.S. mythology about Russia is the lingering resentment of how the
Soviets treated Jews in the former Soviet Union and our self-delusion that we, the United
States, defeated the Nazis. The largest tank battle in history was not the Battle of the Bulge.
It was Kursk and that was led by a Russian General. The West has refused to acknowledge the
critical role that Russia played in defeating the Nazis. Without the incredible stands at
Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, the West probably would have lost the war and we would be
living under a true fascist regime.
History is not a strong suit for Americans. Embarrassing ignorance is our currency. And we
our flush with that cash.
Thanks! So many excellent points. I sure wish someone would create a television network
that did provide good historical analysis of current topics. I'm so tired of screaming at
my television. Fox News is no exception. It may not be as stupid as the others, but it
certainly isn't unbiased as it claims to be.
During my late teenage years The Ugly American was a must read. I'm sad that it may
have had some influence in creating the mindless progressive lefties. But I am even more
upset that it didn't make the right smarter and less defensive and also self
congratulatory (for little reason) about the U.S.'s involvement in the rest of the
world.
I will have to print off your post to carry with me when I am confronted about foreign
events. Sadly, however, few people now ever do discuss politics or current events both
national and foreign. Everyone is afraid to become involved in an unpleasant
confrontation.
"On the nuclear front, Putin withdrew in 2016 from a treaty, on the disposal of
plutonium, in anger over the U.S. breaking of its promise to not grow NATO.."
I recently read an old Jan 2016 NYT article about the pentagon being in the testing
phase of a range of dial a yield delivery systems. Russia pulled out of the disposal
treaty around October 2016.
I see these dial a yield gadgets are included in the 2018 NPR and their conditions of
use. Pentagon now has much more shock and awe to play with. Pentagon also saying
production of plutonium cores needs to be stepped up.
I am beginning to wonder if the Nazi's shifted west. Operation Paperclip of course, but
they already had support from people within the US and the UK. Is the current US/Russia
conflict a phase 2 of WW2 between the descendants of Nazi's that inflitrated the West and
Russia?
Russian suspension of the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PDMA) was
because USA breached the agreement.
Here's a decent summary:
quote
The
decision to suspend the agreement had been expected. The US was supposed to fabricate MOX
fuel from its plutonium costs for building a facility at the Savannah River Site in South
Carolina but costs spiraledout of control. It prompted the administration to use a
cheaper reversible process instead - a "dilute and dispose" alternative that would simply
mix the plutonium with inert materials and store underground making it more difficult to
recover and dispose of it as waste.
According
to the "downblending" method, the Savannah River Site facility would be used to dilute
plutonium and dispose of it at the waste isolation pilot
plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico, instead of transforming plutonium into nuclear fuel. There
is a problem here - the disposal approach would not
change the mix of isotopes in the plutonium to make it more difficult to reuse in
weapons. Changing the disposition method requires formally amending the agreement, which
cannot be done without Russia's consent. In an open breach of the agreement, Moscow has
not been consulted.
Unlike
the United States, the Russian Federation has carried out its obligations. Russian state
nuclear corporation Rosatom has already started producing MOX fuel. A MOX fuel facility
in the city of Zheleznogorsk in Eastern Siberia. BN-600 and BN-800 fast neutron reactors
have been built to use MOX fuel made of weapons-grade plutonium and ensure it is unusable
for nuclear warheads.
Russia had warned the United States about the violation. The Russian president
expressed its concern over the US unilateral move in April, shortly after a nuclear
security summit held in the US.
Back
then, he noted that that the United States was not honoring the agreement by disposing of
plutonium in a way that allowed it to retain its defence capabilities. Washington was
warned.
Zbig giving a lecture. His views on Russia start at the 10 minute mark. If this is what
is being taught - a cultural hatred, blind hatred of Russia - at universities and places
of higher learning in the US.....
The idea that demography is political destiny is not new. Peter Brimelow and Edwin Rubenstein
warned of its dangers in the pages of National Review in the 1990s. Steve Sailer later
argued
that Republicans would fare better by targeting white voters. The problem with these observations was not their accuracy, but their
audience. The GOP establishment and donor elites had little interest in such thinking until Donald Trump's
breakthrough
in 2016. But what happens when Trump leaves office? Will the GOP return to its old ways, as Trump's former chief of staff Reince
Priebus has
predicted ? The answer is almost certainly no. The reasons have little to do with the GOP elite, however, whose views have not
substantially changed. They instead have everything to do with what is happening in the other party. As Brimelow and Rubenstein recently
pointed out in VDARE (and as I did at
American Renaissance
), while the nation is not expected to reach majority-minority status until
2045 , the Democratic Party is already approaching that historic milestone. The political consequences of these changes will
be profound and irreversible. The developments that are unfolding before our eyes are not a fluke, but the beginning of a new political
realignment in the United States that is increasingly focused on race.
The Emerging Majority-Minority Party While warnings of brewing demographic trouble were being ignored by the establishment
right, they received a better reception on the left. In 2004, Ruy
Teixeira and John Judis wrote a book called
The Emerging Democratic
Majority that triumphantly predicted that demographic change would soon produce a "new progressive era." The theory's predictive
powers waxed and waned over the years, but after Trump's 2016 election Teixeira and another coauthor, Peter Leyden, insisted that
Democrats would soon sweep away an increasingly irrelevant GOP and forcibly
impose their will, much as had already happened in California. These arguments have a glaring weakness, however. They assumed
that Democrats would continue to draw the same level of support from white voters. Instead, many have been fleeing to the GOP. Throughout
the 20 th Century, Democrats had won the presidency only by winning or keeping it close among these voters. Barack Obama
was the first to break this pattern, defeating John McCain in 2008 while losing the white vote by
12 percent
. Four years later he beat Mitt Romney while losing it by
20 percent
. Hillary Clinton lost the white vote in 2016 by a similar 20-point
margin . This
loss of white support, coupled with the continued demographic change of the country, has helped push the Democratic Party toward
majority-minority status. Since 1992, the white share of the Democratic presidential vote has dropped an average of about one percent
per year. At its current rate, it could tip to majority-minority status by 2020. It will occur no later than 2024. The political
consequences of this shift are already apparent. In 2008, Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination with
the overwhelming backing of
black voters.
Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in 2016 with similar black and Latino
support . This year's state elections have continued the trend, with minority candidates winning Democratic gubernatorial nominations
in Georgia ,
Texas , New Mexico , and
Maryland , with another likely win in
Arizona later this year. This sudden
surge in minority candidates is not an indicator of increased open mindedness, but of demographic change. While the national
Democratic Party is only just approaching majority-minority status, in much of the nation it is already there.
While the demographic trend of the Democratic Party seems clear enough – as does its leftward drift and increased embrace of minority
candidates – it is still possible to argue that the nation's politics will not divide along racial lines. The most obvious alternative
is that both parties will compete for minority votes and both will experience demographic change in an increasingly
multiracial nation. Could this happen? Black voters seem least likely to change. They already routinely provide Democrats with
90 percent of their votes. They are the backbone of the party, with a former president, nearly 50
members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and numerous mayors in
major American cities among their ranks. Given the Democratic Party's steadfast commitment to black issues such as affirmative action
and Black Lives Matter, few are likely to be won over by the occasional attempts at Republican
outreach . Latinos also typically
support Democrats in presidential elections by a 2-to-1 margin, but they have been a more serious target for Republicans, including
President
George W. Bush , his acolyte
Karl Rove , authors of the
GOP autopsy
released after Mitt Romney's 2012 loss, and occasional
writers
in National Review . Some have observed that many Latinos
value whiteness and are more likely to
self-identify
as white thelonger they have been in the country.
In fact, some Latinos arewhite , particularly
those from Latin America's leadershipclass . Others have
reported on
substantialhostility
that exists between Latinos and blacks that may make them more likely to see whites as natural allies. There are several problems
with these arguments. The most important are
persistent
race-based
IQ differences that will keep most mestizos (who are the
bulk of Latino immigrants)
trapped at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum regardless of their racial identification. Arguments that they will assimilate
like their European predecessors fail to explain why
racialhierarchies have
persisted in their home
nations for hundreds of years. These inequalities probably explain the high levels of
Hispanicsupport for government programs that
are likely to keep most of them tied to the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future. Although Asians also
support Democrats
by a 2-to-1 margin, they seem potentially more
promising . Unlike America's black and Latino populations, East Asians (such as Japanese and Chinese) have IQs that may be slightly
higher than that of white Americans on average.
Moreover, affirmative action policies backed by Democrats typically
work to
their detriment
. However, most Asian immigrants
are not East Asians and their IQs (such as those of Indians or Pakistanis) are much
lower . Finally, no matter
what their nationality, Asians are generally unsympathetic
to whites
who want to restrict nonwhite immigration. Unsurprisingly, all of these reasons have contributed to Asians
movingaway
from the Republican Party, not toward it. Some argue that Republicans have no choice but to accept demographic change and move left
to gain minority support. The GOP may well move left in
ways
that
are
acceptable to its white
working class
base and help it with white moderates – such as protecting Social Security and Medicare. But it will never win a
bidding
war with Democrats for their base of minority voters, nor would the GOP base let it try.
White polarization is the mirror image of nonwhite polarization and its causes are similar. Numerous
scholars have
citedgenetics
as a basis for reciprocal altruism among closely-related kin and hostility toward outsiders among humans and in the animal kingdom
in general. This ethnocentrism is instinctual, present
amongbabies , and whites are
not immune from its effects. Most are socialized to suppress their ethnocentric instincts, but they remain only a
shortdistance beneath the surface. Academics sometimes
argue that
positive direct contact is a promising strategy for overcoming racial differences, but research has shown that the
negativeeffects are more
powerful – something a cursory glance at
crime statistics would
confirm. Rampant white flight and segregation in
neighborhoods
,
schools , and personal
relationships provide the most definitive evidence on the negative influence of direct contact. Its impact on voting is also
well established, particularly for whites and blacks. The shift of white Southerners away from the Democratic Party after civil rights
legislation was enacted in the 1960s was almost immediate and has
remained
strong ever since. White flight produced similar
political
advantages for Republicans in suburbs across the country during this period. Their advantage has softened since then, but primarily
because the suburbs have become
less white , not
lesssegregated . White voting is similarly affected
by proximity to Hispanics. White flight and segregation are a constant in heavily Latino areas in
both
liberal and conservative
states. The resulting political backlash in places like
California and
Arizona has been well-documented and confirmed
by
academicresearch
. Support for President Trump has also been shown to be highly
correlated with
whiteidentity
and
opposition to immigration. These trends are expected to become stronger over time.
Experimental
research has shown that growing white awareness of demographic change makes them more
conservative , less favorably disposed to
minorities, and feel greater attachment to other whites. The effects are heightened the more whites think they are
threatened . The associated
ideological effects are just as important. The influence of ideology is obvious in socially conservative states like North Dakota
and Kansas . However, the Democrats'
growing leftward tilt has become an issue even in liberal states like those in New England, many of which now regularly
elect
Republicans as governors
. In fact, liberal Massachusetts has had
just one Democratic governor in the past quarter century. The power of leftist ideology to drive whites together may reach its
zenith if Democrats resume their attack on segregation in neighborhoods and schools.
De facto segregation has
protected
white liberals from the consequences of their voting
decisions for years. If Democrats are
returned to power, however, they appear
ready
to
touch this electoral
third rail
.
Further evidence of racial polarization can be found by looking abroad. Ethnic conflict has been a constant in human relations –
everywhere and throughouthistory . More recently,
64 percent of
all civil wars since 1946 have divided along ethnic lines
. Such conflicts are highly correlated with genetic diversity and
ethnic polarization . Some of the worst examples,
such as Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sudan, have included ethnic cleansing and genocide. Race-based identity politics are just a lower
form of ethnic conflict. Like ethnic conflict more generally, the strength of such politics depends on the level of ethnic diversity
and corresponding racial polarization. In homogenous societies, for example, politics tends to divide along class and cultural lines.
As a society becomes more diverse, however, ethnicity begins to play a growing
role . Politics and
parties that are explicitly
ethnically-based usually do not appear until much later, when a nation has become more diverse and has begun to suffer extreme racial
polarization. Such politics have been shown to produce substantial ethnic
favoritism
. Their appearance is often a
prelude to civilwar or
partition . The United
States has not reached this stage, but its future can be seen in other nations that are further down the road. One example is Brazil.
While the United States will not become majority-minority until 2045, Brazil reached that milestone in
2010 . For much of the 20
th Century, Brazil viewed itself as a harmonious racial
democracy and a model for the rest of the world, but this image has been tarnished in recent years. The nation's changing demographics
demonstrated their power with the election of Lula da Silva in 2002 and his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, in 2010. Support
for these two presidents – both members of the leftist Workers Party – was
concentrated
in the largely black northern half of the country, while opposition was concentrated in the mostly
white south . Their victories depended on
the nation's changing demographics. Once elected, they rewarded their black supporters with substantial expansions of
affirmative action and
a new cash transfer system, called Bolsa Família, which disproportionately
benefitted
Afro-Brazilians. Since then, Brazil's fortunes have taken a turn for the
worse . Rousseff was
impeached
after a massive corruption scandal in 2016. Crime has
exploded . Black activists
nowderide the notion of "
racial democracy " and have become
more
militant
on racial issues. An explicitly
black political party has
also appeared. This has corresponded with a similar backlash in the white population. The leading candidate for the presidential
election this year is Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes referred to as the
Trump of the Tropics . A white separatist movement called the
South is My Country is drawing substantial support. Brazilians are reportedly
losing faith in
democracy and becoming more receptive to
military
rule .
The preponderance of the evidence – domestic, international, historical, and scientific – suggests that American politics will
continue to polarize along racial and ethnic lines. At least in the short term, Republicans will benefit as white voters flee from
the other party. But will the GOP adequately capitalize on these gains?
Various elements of the
GOPestablishment
, including the
business elite and pro-immigration donors like the
Koch brothers , continue to hold substantial
power within the party. Reince Priebus probably echoed their views when he
said , "I think post-Trump, the party basically returns to its traditional role and a traditional platform."
Such status quo thinking ignores too much. There are numerous signs that the party is changing. Trump's popularity within his
own party is the
second highest among all presidents since World War II, trailing only George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. Congressional
Never Trumpers like Bob
Corker , Jeff Flake
, and
Mark Sanford have been defeated or stepped aside. Prominent
columnists ,
analysts , and at least
one former GOP leader
are now declaring it Trump's party.
These changes are not solely about Trump, however. There were signs of change before his arrival. Eric Cantor's primary defeat
in 2014 was widely
attributed to softness on immigration, which met furious
grassroots opposition . Moreover, if Trump's rise were
merely a one-off event, we would not be seeing the simultaneous rise of nationalist movements in Europe, which is facing its own
immigration crisis .
The more likely answer is that these changes reflect something more powerful than any individual, even the president of the United
States. The same survival
instinct that is present in all living creatures still burns brightly within the world's European peoples. Trump was not the
cause, but a consequence – and we will not go gently into the night.
Patrick McDermott(email him)is a political analyst in Washington, DC.
This ethnocentrism is instinctual, observable even among babies. Whites are not immune from its effects. Most are socialized
to suppress their ethnocentric instincts, but they remain only a short distance beneath the surface.
Even the most vile race-virtuosos' ethnocentric instincts boil to the surface in the flight to "good schools" for their children.
The "Good schools" rationale works for them. Gets them away from the city, away from those awful Blacks. It was always diversity
for thee. The closest most liberals get to diversity is the Hispanic housekeeper. Because the Blacks, you know, they steal the
liquor/silver/Waterford". Heard variations of this a million times..
Brilliant synthesis. Excellent article. Patrick McDermott hits it out of the ballpark, noting correctly that ethnocentrism is
"instinctual". So true. So obvious. And this suppressed truth is just the tip of the iceberg. America lives under 'intellectual
occupation'.
But the hardening scientific facts involving race, kinship, and phenotype are testament to the hollowness of 'anti-racist'
rhetoric and ideologies that dominate so much of the American landscape.
These liberal creeds pretend to repudiate (all) 'racism' and bigotry, but in political fact, they strategically target only
white Americans. This makes these lofty 'values' not only disingenuous but unfair and destructive.
Highfalutin (but bogus) liberalism has come to play a diabolical role. It undermines white cohesion and white solidarity. Meanwhile,
from high above, irreversible demographic changes are being orchestrated.
MacDermott correctly observes that the West's unsought ethno-racial transformation is what's behind the reinvigoration of white
identity in Europe and America. This at least is good news.
Says MacDermott:
"Ethnic conflict has been a constant in human relations -- everywhere and throughout history. More recently, 64 percent of
all civil wars since 1946 have divided along ethnic lines. Such conflicts are highly correlated with genetic diversity and ethnic
polarization. Some of the worst examples, such as Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sudan, have included ethnic cleansing and genocide."
Very true. Very important. And while MacDermott avoids mentioning a more obvious example, the most persistent expression of
this phenomena can be seen in Israel/Palestine, where allegedly 'Semitic' Jews are doing whatever it takes to keep their lesser
(Semitic) cousins at arms length–in this case, in the caged ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank.
Undue and uncompromising Jewish influence in Zio-America is allowing this race-born outrage to continue. Sadly, Israeli savagery
routinely receives Zio-Washington's unconditional blessing, trillion-dollar subsidy, and unflinching diplomatic cover.
But besides the disputed territory and Israel's untouchable political power, what nourishes the endless Israel/Palestine impasse?
Jewish 'exceptionalism' is one key motivator.
The Chosen people are convinced that they are born vastly superior to their Semitic cousins.
Thus, strict segregation is required for the assurance of 'Jewish (genetic) continuity'. This objective however requires steadfast
cruelty since the natives are still restless and rebelling.
Supremacism means never having to say you're sorry. This is especially true since, ironically, peace between Jews and Arabs
could potentially lead to increased Jewish 'outmarriage' in Israel and consequently, the gradual reduction in Israeli (Jewish)
IQ and Jewish 'exceptionalism' (supremacy).
Over time, potential genetic intermingling would very possibly undermine Jewish magnificence and therefore, Jewish cohesion.
This could then translate into a loss of Jewish solidarity and 'community'. It's possible.
This downturn could subsequently affect Jewish wealth and power, and that is certainly not an outcome that the Jewish community
desires.
Leaders of the global Jewish community are smart enough to envision this scenario and to prevent it from happening. They use
The Holocaust (and it's potential re-0currance) as an all-purpose excuse. But it's phony. Self-segregation is a sacred, ancient
Jewish value. Thus the glamorization of interracial romance is directed only at the goyim, as is the message of Open Borders.
Just turn on your TV. It's there constantly.
These 'liberal, democratic' messages however are never advocated in Israel, nor are they directed at young Jews via Israeli
TV, news, entertainment or education.
You will never see glamorous depictions of Jewish/Arab miscegenation on Israeli television, even though black/white 'family
formation' on Jewish-owned mass media in America is ubiquitous.
Hostile US elites (Jews) apparently want non-Jewish whites to become mixed, brown. This racial objective however is anathema
to Jewish values. It's strictly for the goyim.
Meanwhile, whites in America are not permitted to think or hold values like Israeli Jews, or to even express similar preferences
inside the civilization that they and their forefathers created. This speaks volumes about the lack of freedom in America. Yes,
we live under intellectual occupation.
For many Israeli Jews (the dominant thinking goes) strict segregation–if not active warfare–is the only sure way to maintain
'hafrada' (separation) for Jews in Israel since they are surrounded by tens of millions of similar-looking but 'unexceptional'
Arabs.
Unlike America, walls (and segregation) remain sacred in Israel. But not here.
In fact, some Latinos are white, particularly those from Latin America's leadership class
I think the reality is, Latinos/Hispanics simply form lines like any group would do. I am white, all my fellow Hispanic friends
are white, and we consider ourselves essentially an ethnicity within Whiteness, just like Italians, or high-caste French Creoles,
White Persians, Lebanese or Jordanians.
The easiest way to tell if an "ethnic" is conservative or republican (outside of obvious virtue signalers), is to ask yourself,
" Is this person white ?". Other than famous actors and political types that have the luxury being "liberal" (e.g. Salma
Hayek) every day Hispanics, Persians and Arabs that are white, act, do and think, like every day White Anglo-Saxons, Germanics
and Nordics–for the most part (obviously IQ plays a part). Don't get me wrong, there is a difference in IQ and mindset in the
particulars between a Norman and a (white-ish) Sicilian, some IQ, some cultural, but if and when a civil war comes–no one will
have ANY problem knowing where they and others stand and belong.
Reince Priebus: "I think post-Trump, the party basically returns to its traditional role and traditional platform."
And that would be U.S. hegemony and market fundamentalism? Unlikely and unattractive. U.S. military dominance starves our society
and enriches the national security state and the rogue regimes in Tel Aviv and Riyadh. Market fundamentalism does not take into
account human frailty, and would produce widespread desperation.
What can be gleaned from Mr. McDermott's instructive article is that, like it or not, identity needs to be included in the
political lexicon of working class and middle class whites. Elite whites continue to cede power to blacks and browns in politics
and business as the slide into Idiocracy accelerates. This is an opportunity for disaffected whites from the Democratic Party
and Republican Trump supporters to form a coalition.
The political consequences of these changes will be profound and irreversible.
When Ted Kennedy was pushing the 1965 opening of our borders to atone for racism, he made repeated assurances that we would
not end up where we ended up. He said the level of immigration would remain the same, the ethnic mix would not inundate America
with immigrants from any particular place or nation, that the ethnic pattern of America would not be changed, and that we wouldn't
have something crazy like a million immigrants a year, certainly not poor ones who would place a burden on citizens.
When Reagan's amnesty happened, again promises where made that we could and would keep our country. Now, it looks like Brazil
is our future.
Elections are already being decided by racial votes of minorities, which aren't considered racist by that half of America that
eagerly anticipates our demise. What a rude surprise they are in for when they discover they are still white and will be honorary
deplorables once they no longer have political power.
But will the GOP adequately capitalize on these gains?
Ha, Derbyshire doesn't call it the Stupid Party for nothing.
Regarding my home state of Arizona, that 66% figure is an interesting anomaly. Except for my fellow writers, most of the white
folks I know are pretty conservative. Many secretly supported Trump or voted Libertarian in protest of the lousy mainstream choices.
Perhaps this is a reflection of white flight from California.
You dense "scientific" racists can't see the forest for the trees, as is always the case. The importance of this election has
nothing to do with demographics. But you wouldn't know that because all you want to do is scream raceracerace all de liblong day.
No. The importance of this race is that Ocasio-Cortez is "a strikingly perfect candidate, both in policy positions and refusal
to take corporate money. She fits the identity politics profile without once using identity politics virtue-signaling to cover
for lousy policies. This is shattering to the Clintonista crowd, who are spinning like tops."
However, most Asian immigrants are not East Asians and their IQs (such as those of Indians or Pakistanis) are much lower.
Really? How come so many are doctors, scientists and computer programmers? Those aren't typically low-IQ professions. Is this
just a case of aggressive brain-drain? Do all the stupid ones stay behind in India?
In homogenous societies, for example, politics tends to divide along class and cultural lines. As a society becomes more
diverse, however, ethnicity begins to play a growing role.
Yup. That's probably why the Democratic Party traded class war for race war.
Really? How come so many are doctors, scientists and computer programmers?
The advance guard in the US was the professional elite. Not so in the UK. Subcontinentals are much closer, or even below, average
there. Even here, motel owners may outnumber doctors, scientists, and computer programmers combined.
Is this just a case of aggressive brain-drain?
Yes.
And it's worse in Canada.
Do all the stupid ones stay behind in India?
There are a billion more people in India than in the US. Do the arithmetic.
OK. I'll make it simple for you because your understanding doesn't extend beyond simple.
Ocasio-Cortez is a very good candidate, and, unless she is co-opted–which, 99 out of a 100 (notice my use of "statistics,"
I mean damned lies, you statistics-worshipers) is the chance she will be–she is a hundred times better than Crowley the Clintonite
hack. Racists are really stupid. They vote against their own interests, just like all "conservatives."
The author throws around 'left' and 'right' as if they transparently applied in the case of ethnic politics. I would argue that
it has been the economic 'right' that has relentlessly pursued diversity of populations – quite arguably for millennia, and certainly
in the last 50 years. Some sane economic leftists realize this, although they are an endangered and shrinking group.
However if it is the right that is the main mover in favor of diversity (empire preferred to nation state for the easier control
of labor), I'm not sure what solutions there are. Whites voting for the Republican Party is not a long time viable solution since
the owners of that party have fundamentally different interests than the white working class (as leftists have correctly pointed
out over and over).
Ocasio's victory is a nightmare for the Democrats. The Leftist media is touting her as the future of the party, but her platform
makes Obama look like a rightwing extremist.
- Federal Jobs Guarantee
- Medicare for All
- Tuition-free public college
- Reduce prisons by 50%
- Defund ICE
But the real poison pill is her unwavering support for the Palestinians. I'm not making a value judgment on this or any other
of her policies, but if the GOP can tag the next Democratic presidential candidate with Ocasio's worldview, then expect a Trumpslide
in 2020.
What do the (((brains))) and (((primary funders))) behind the Democratic party think of this rising star? Here are some choice
quotes from NY Jewish Week:
To some, the stunning victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken critic of Israel, over 10-term Rep. Joseph Crowley
(D-Queens-Bronx), an Israel supporter, in Tuesday's Democratic primary is seen as another nail in the coffin of Democratic support
for the Jewish state.
"If she maintains her anti-Israel stance, she will be a one-term wonder," predicted George Arzt, a New York political operative.
"I don't think you can have someone with those views in New York City. If she moderates, she could win again. If she doesn't,
there will be massive opposition to her -- maybe even a cross-over candidate from the Latino community with pro-Israel views."
Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic strategist, said he sees Ocasio-Cortez's overwhelming victory -- she won with 57.5
percent of the vote -- as "another step in the ongoing divorce proceedings between the pro-Israel community and the Democratic
Party."
Jeff Wiesenfeld, a former aide to both Republican and Democratic elected officials, said he read Ocasio-Cortez's Twitter
and Facebook postings and said she has voiced opinions that are "downright hostile to Israel."
After 60 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military in May while attempting to breach the fence along the Israel-Gaza
border, Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter: "This is a massacre. I hope my peers have the moral courage to call it such. No state
or entity is absolved of mass shootings of protestors. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity,
as anyone else. Democrats can't be silent about this anymore."
"We have never stepped into a situation in New York City in which a member of Congress starts out hostile to us," he added.
"This is a new frontier."
"While Jewish Democrats support much of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's domestic policy agenda, we disagree with her past statement
regarding Israel, as well as her affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America, which supports the boycott, divestment
and sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel," it added. "In the coming days and months, we hope to learn more about Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's
views, but at the moment, her position on Israel is not in line with our values."
What will Jewish Democrats do if the Ocasio/DSA platform becomes mainstream in the Democratic party? Join up with the anti-Trump
neocons and vote for a third party? While the Republicans can win nationwide elections without Jewish money and votes, there's
no evidence that the Democrats can, at least not yet.
Another factor in Ocasio's surprise victory, as so delicately pointed out by the noted political analyst Andrew Anglin, is
that:
"Furthermore, people want to f*ck her."
No shit. Her good looks and likeable personality mean that she's likely in the media spotlight to stay, no matter how much
the MSM (((gatekeepers))) might want to shield the general public from her, ahem, "problematic" views.
As an aside, I believe her nationwide appeal is enhanced by her complete lack of the godawful, ear-grating Nuyorican accent
so commonplace among her co-ethnics. In fact she speaks with a general American accent with barely even a hint of New Yorkese.
I don't know if this is part of a generalized homogenization of regional accents throughout the country, or if she affects this
dialect for personal and/or political reasons. Either way, it only adds to her appeal.
If the Ocasio-Sanders wing of the Dems continues its electoral ascendancy, then Donald Trump will start looking more and more
like the moderate adult in the room compared to the infantile, gibsmedat, tantrum-throwers on the far left. Which is terrible
news for the Clintonite, corporate bloodsucker wing of the Dems, but fantastic news for the rest of us.
If the Ocasio-Sanders wing of the Dems continues its electoral ascendancy, the same people who voted for Trump will vote for them.
You have no understanding whatsoever about the mood of the current polity.
Economics is just a tool to that end. When identity looked to be more productive, they pivoted quite gracefully.
Welfare bureaucrats derive their power from the poor, not the working, and there are many more poor abroad than at home. Creating
a welfare state thus creates a giant constituency for importing more poor, and poorer.
One of the credos of realism has been "There are no angels, so set the devils against one another." As pie-in-the-sky as economists
can be, they're closer to the truth on this one than the pro-regulation forces, who assume, by definition, that the regulators
will be angels.
Americans, at least Unz reviewers, lump all Hispanic speakers into one category. Does Cortez even speak Spanish, except for her
ethnic purposes? More important, a Puerto Rican origin is both Creole and Roman Catholic. That puts them in a category all their
own. She has no love for Israel because her background did not come under the influence of the Christian Zionist Churches. Her
black origins make her atavistically side with the Palestinians.
You have no clue about "Trump supporters." For your information, they will vote for anyone who shakes things up. Their second
choice after Trump was Sanders. These are facts. Read 'em and weep.
The Establishment wants to pretend that these voters don't exist. Even though they tipped the election. Along with most people
(even here) they want to keep everything in neat boxes labelled Right vs Left, Rep vs Dem, etc etc. Spares them the 'vexation
of thinking'.
Actually, I have a quite contrary view of the political implications of these shifts in racial demographics. For those interested,
here's a link to a long article I published a few years ago on this same exact topic:
So Mueller was a CIA mole in FBI fromthe very beginning. Interesting...
Notable quotes:
"... You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife's family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a "lone nut", as well as the mayor who hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out of the investigation into JFK's murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding. ..."
"... Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections. ..."
"... Mueller, who had been appointed Assistant U.S. Prosecutor under GHW Bush, became FBI Director under George W. Bush just in time not to see the CIA fingerprints on 9/11, which should not be surprising considering whom he didn't see when he investigated BCCI. ..."
"... Additionally, Mueller oversaw the anthrax letter case, never investigating Battelle Memorial Corporation, which had a building within a mile of the mailbox where the letters had been mailed. (Battelle Memorial's corporate motto is "It Can Be Done".) Instead, he centered FBI investigations on scientists in government labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had neither the expertise nor the equipment to make the weaponized military grade anthrax found in the letters. One scientist sued and won millions. The other allegedly "committed suicide". Battelle is noteworthy because it handles the US military's anthrax program. Mueller had no interest that two of the targets who received anthrax letters were at the time the most vociferous opponents of the Bush Administration's Patriot Act. ..."
"... Perhaps his greatest accomplishment aiding the Deep State as FBI Director was his shutting down of Operation Green Quest, the FBI's investigation into the funding behind 9/11 and the terrorist network behind it. Names began popping up like Grover Norquist, the Muslim Brotherhood, old Nazis and the royal family of Luxembourg. Nothing to see here. Move along. ..."
"... @detroitmechworks ..."
"... Only thing missing for me was the tie in to Pappy Bush and the rest of the family. Mueller the consigliere of the CIA. Oh man how fucked are we? ..."
"... Great history of how corrupt Mueller has always been and how he has covered up for so many crimes. I'm just stunned by the number of people who have decided that Mueller's history and the history of the CIA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies wasn't that bad after all just because they are going after Trump. This selective amnesia is simply amazing, isn't it? ..."
"... Clinton's role in helping the CIA to smuggle drugs into Arkansas is never talked about either. Or if it is it's called "a right wing attempt to bring them down." ..."
"... that explains why centrist and liberal media have a disturbing tendency to rehabilitate some of the most vile, reactionary forces on the American right simply because they say vaguely negative things about Donald Trump -- a phenomenon we call "Trumpwashing." ..."
"... Just like Mueller, Brennan is one more war criminal whose actions seem to have been forgotten. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
"... The seas were calm and the skies were clear." ..."
"... "The reason why the ship went down is because of the massive storm that came out of nowhere." ..."
"... It would appear at first glance this is basically an effort at espionage only ..."
"... as it appears they don't ..."
"... I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
"... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
"... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
In the 1950s, when the science fiction genre started making itself felt in movies, there was always the pivotal scene where the
protagonist discovers the dark secret but no one will believe him: a flying saucer hidden under the sand in a field, truckloads of
pod people to replace real people, or that the friendly aliens' book "To Serve Man" wasn't a guide to helping humans, but a cookbook.
It's that moment of sudden realization that no one will believe the hero because it sounds too crazy to believe.
Granted, to the uninitiated, coming to a realization so shocking and threatening to your current mental construction of the world
can appear like paranoia. It becomes a question of the discoverer's knowledge and senses over what everyone else believes. Everyone
else seems to be allowing him or herself to be absorbed into the great growing evil.
Today many of us, certainly readers here at Caucus99, are finding ourselves in similar positions. Our political structure is a
lie, the people who are supposed to represent us and our interests don't, our law enforcement protects the property of the rich,
not our lives, and often are in cahoots with the criminals from whom we are supposed to be protected. I am sure that many of our
old friends and acquaintances have been alienated from some of us here when we began talking about Hillary's track record during
the Presidential campaign, for example. In our current pasteboard world, if you are a Republican or Democrat you must assume that
your designated political party, maybe with a couple of exceptions, are there to look after you.
And there that crazy friend goes, yelling about cookbooks.
I suppose my introduction to the corruption of those in power, at thirteen, was the assassination of JFK. Not actually the assassination,
but the murder of Oswald two days later, in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. I had slept overnight at a friend's and
we came back from shooting basketballs to watch the transfer of Oswald to another facility. That was the moment that I realized all
wasn't what it seemed. But, like most kids my age, the Beatles came along in a month or so and I was swept into the world of rock
and roll, which kept me occupied until I began noticing girls. Until 1968. I was still noticing girls and rock and roll, but I was
also noticing the number of progressives being gunned down by "lone nuts". And I was noticing Vietnam.
I'm not sharing this to explain to you how I became (that loathsome term) a "conspiracy theorist". I just want to explain to you
that the democracy of the United States, and all the characters running across the stage in Washington, D.C., are the cookbook.
I wrote an essay here back in April of 2017 explaining how the Russiagate scandal had been designed to give Hillary Clinton a
casus belli for her future war against Russia, and that what we were seeing since she lost has been a recycling of it to get Trump
in line with the goals of the Deep State. So far nothing much has happened that has moved me from that belief. Now that the Deep
State seems to have persuaded our Dear Leader that he can go on being himself as long as he understands the actual hierarchy and
doesn't get in the way the Deep State, everything seems to be back on track. At least until Donald's next tweet.
But in order to understand the depth of criminality in our system one has to understand how things are done. After World War II
a lot of social awareness began putting pressure on the old system that had driven the world into the Great Depression. FDR had demonstrated
that the government could look out for the poor, could give them jobs when there were no other jobs to be had. The GI Bill sent millions
of vets to college and helped to create the middle class we used to have. Unions had real power in negotiating wages and terms of
service. Government could create a system to help the elderly. The African Americans, coming back home from fighting a war against
fascism, refused go to the coloreds only water fountains. In short, the United States were in for some growing pains.
What happened? As I mentioned above there was a rash of murders of progressive political candidates and leaders in the sixties.
But in order for the forces behind a return to the old rules to keep a lid on any revolutions there had to be something better than
shooting every progressive who raised his head above the lectern. Thus the wave of recruitment of agents and assets in the late sixties
by the CIA, FBI and other agencies. Although I didn't know it directly at the time, arriving on campus in 1968 it was evident that
there was a "presence" of people looking over the shoulders of student activists.
Which brings me to another great revelation. It's not just politicians and political parties that are serving the Deep State.
Any agency that can be corrupted by power will be, eventually.
Which brings us to the courts.
There are certain things that must be preserved for a ruling class to remain legitimate in the eyes of the public. Some people
don't think much beyond the flag. But there are other things. The media is better than ever at keeping uncomfortable truths from
the majority of Americans. But what happens where the criminality of the Deep State collides with our judicial system?
Let me introduce you to the man of the hour in Washington, Robert Swann Mueller III. Robert was born into the upper crust in our
American class system. At one point in his education in private schools John Kerry was a classmate. (Kerry was also a fellow Bonesman
with the Bushes.) Mueller met his eventual bride, Ann Cabell Standish, at one of the dances they attended. They married in 1966,
three years after John Kennedy's assassination. If you have read much about the JFK assassination you would recognize her middle
name. Her grandfather, Charles Cabell, had been second in command at the CIA when John Kennedy was elected President. In the aftermath
of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired three men from leadership positions at the CIA: Director Allen Dulles, Cabell and Richard
Bissell. Charles Cabell was Ann's grandfather. Her grand uncle, Earle Cabell, was the mayor of Dallas at the time of Kennedy's murder
there. Recently declassified JFK documents revealed that Mayor Cabell was also an asset of the CIA at the time. Small world.
You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife's
family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a "lone nut", as well as the mayor who
hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out
of the investigation into JFK's murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding.
Soon thereafter Mueller decided to go to Vietnam because, he said, a classmate had died there and patriotism and so forth. He
became an officer and eventually ended up as an aide-de-camp for the 3rd Marine Division's commanding general, General William K.
Jones. Something else was going on in Vietnam. The CIA had installed its Phoenix Program. I cannot do justice to the Phoenix Program
and won't considering Doug Valentine's work on it is available for everyone, but the Phoenix Program was the CIA's attempt to totally
control the Vietnamese population. Besides massacres of villages, the program assassinated suspected leaders and spies for the Vietcong,
coerced others into being their agents, and kept up files on all the relevant Vietnamese down to the village level. Like in later
wars, the CIA incorporated torture, murder and psychological techniques in order to control their targets. As an aide-de-camp to
a commanding Marine general, there is no way that Mueller didn't know about the Phoenix Program. He probably saw daily briefings.
When he came back to the US he studied law and quickly became a federal prosecutor.
One of the things to mark his career was to deny a pardon to Patty Hearst for her part in the whole Symbionese Liberation Army's
"terror" campaign. What did the SLA have to do with anything? A short history: Donald DeFreeze, a small-time criminal in Los Angeles
agreed to become an informant for the LAPD in order to stay out of jail. After awhile he got tired of ratting out others and asked
to get out of the program. Instead, DeFreeze was incarcerated at the Vacaville Medical Facility for criminally insane prisoners in
the California penal system. There DeFreeze met Colston Westbrook who gave classes for the "Black Cultural Association", an experimental
behavior modification unit inside the prison. Who was Westbrook? He was a CIA agent, trained in psychological warfare and part of
the Phoenix Program. DeFreeze was modified by Westbrook and company for two years. Soon thereafter, he was transferred to Soledad
Prison, from which he "escaped" and became the infamous "Cinque". Then came the Symbionese Liberation Army, a caricature of a black
militant group filled with mostly white people with military backgrounds. The murder of Marcus Foster, a progressive black leader
in the San Francisco East Bay, was done by white men in blackface, according to eyewitnesses. The SLA claimed credit for it. The
SLA kidnapped Hearst, subjected her to torture, rape, sensory deprivation and mind control tactics, just like the CIA did in the
Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Then came the bank robberies.
I bring up the Patty Hearst case because, in 2000, decades after her prison sentence had been commuted, Mueller still opposed
her pardon. Guess what he didn't notice when he rejected her pardon? This has been his pattern throughout his career. We'll return
to Patty Hearst shortly.
Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA. He
prosecuted what was known in the San Francisco Bay Area as the "drug tug" case which had connections to an island in Panama. It was
a drug smuggling case and had tentacles into things like bank frauds in Northern California. He prosecuted Manuel Noriega's drug-smuggling
without noticing Oliver North's drug-smuggling, arms running and money laundering through Panama as a part of Iran-contra.
Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections.
For example, he prosecuted Pan Am 103. Initially, and then later confirmed by an insurance investigator's report, the bomb that
brought down the airliner was believed to be placed onboard by baggage handlers working at the Frankfurt Airport. They were given
the bomb by a terrorist cell who in turn got it from one Monzer al-Kassar, who was a very large heroin dealer, estimated at supplying
twenty percent of the US's heroin at the time. A big operator. And, in fact, one of the passengers on the plane was a drug mule for
al-Kassar. Al-Kassar also happened to be a part of the Iran-contra operation, supplying weapons for North's Enterprise. The operation
was, according to the early reports, carried out by a cell of Palestinian terrorists based in Frankfurt, the Palestinian Liberation
Front-General Command, who got the bomb from al-Kassar and put the bomb on that airline.
Mueller, put in charge of the case, pursued an entirely different direction, accusing two Libyans of bombing the plane. At the
time Libya and Khadafy were getting blamed for a lot of terrorist activity, but the case against the two was so weak as to hardly
be circumstantial.
There were other questions arising from Pan Am 103. A top official in the FBI, Oliver "Buck" Revell, rushed onto the tarmac in
London to pull his son and daughter-in-law off of Pan Am 103 before it went on to explode over Lockerbie, Scotland. Also changing
flight plans were South African President Pik Botha and his negotiating team. Apparently, someone that Revell and Pik Botha knew
gave them the warning.
There was one group that didn't get warned. That was the McKee Team, an assembled group of US intelligence agents tasked to investigate
American hostages in Beruit. They allegedly discovered a link between the hostage takers, drug traffickers and the CIA. They were
returning to the US, against orders, presumably to spill the beans. This was essentially a clean-up operation, tying up loose strings
of the Iran-contra operation. So was Noriega's prosecution.
That's why Mueller got the case. He knew where to look and where not to look.
He also prosecuted ancillary Iran-contra cases. He prosecuted John Gotti for dealing cocaine in the New York City area. The cocaine
he sold was part of the the Iran-contra (CIA) plan where Southern Air Transport flew weapons to Latin America for the contras (whom
Congress had voted against aiding) and bringing back cocaine from Latin America on its return flights, to include Mena, Arkansas.
One of the CIA's pilots, Barry Seal, bragged that he had a "get-out-of-jail" letter written for him by then-Governor Bill Clinton.
At the time, Asa Hutchinson was the federal prosecutor for that corner of Arkansas. He also didn't notice all that cocaine. Hutchson
later served as George W. Bush's first "drug czar" before going into politics. How coincidental.
Mueller, who had been appointed Assistant U.S. Prosecutor under GHW Bush, became FBI Director under George W. Bush just in
time not to see the CIA fingerprints on 9/11, which should not be surprising considering whom he didn't see when he investigated
BCCI. As head of our country's biggest law enforcement agency Mueller did not pursue the House of Saud's part in 9/11 even though
fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and a number of them could be traced to Saudi intelligence, and the money
chain could be traced to Saudis living in the US, some of whom flew out of the US while all other US flights were grounded. He did
not investigate Mohammed Atta's time in Frankfort, Germany, where he was employed by a front company for the BND, West Germany's
equivalent to the CIA. Nor did Mueller investigate Huffman Aviation where Mo Atta and another hijacker matriculated in flying planes
into buildings. Huffman is interesting because while Mo was studying in Huffman's Venice, Florida aviation school a Huffman plane
was busted in Orlando with 43 pounds of heroin. Curiously, the pilot walked away from the DEA without being charged and no one was
prosecuted at Huffman.
Ask Colleen Rowley about Mueller's leadership in the 9/11 investigation.
Additionally, Mueller oversaw the anthrax letter case, never investigating Battelle Memorial Corporation, which had a building
within a mile of the mailbox where the letters had been mailed. (Battelle Memorial's corporate motto is "It Can Be Done".) Instead,
he centered FBI investigations on scientists in government labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had neither the expertise nor the
equipment to make the weaponized military grade anthrax found in the letters. One scientist sued and won millions. The other allegedly
"committed suicide". Battelle is noteworthy because it handles the US military's anthrax program. Mueller had no interest that two
of the targets who received anthrax letters were at the time the most vociferous opponents of the Bush Administration's Patriot Act.
Perhaps his greatest accomplishment aiding the Deep State as FBI Director was his shutting down of Operation Green Quest,
the FBI's investigation into the funding behind 9/11 and the terrorist network behind it. Names began popping up like Grover Norquist,
the Muslim Brotherhood, old Nazis and the royal family of Luxembourg. Nothing to see here. Move along.
A closer examination of Robert Mueller would probably find a lot more of these cases and I encourage others to continue the search.
For example, it's been alleged that Mueller sent innocent men to jail for crimes committed by Whitey Bulger for the benefit of someone
or something within the government and that this allowed Bulger to continue his criminal activities for years.
***
It's been seventy years since the CIA was created, fifty years since JFK was most likely murdered by them. In order to avoid any
consequences for their crimes more and more institutions have had to be infiltrated and corrupted by them. Many of the heroes of
the Left have turned out to be purveyors of "modified limited hangouts" which served the Deep State. Ramsey Clark, who was given
the mantle of "good guy" by the media of the Left, was active as LBJ's Attorney General in blocking Jim Garrison's investigation
into the JFK assassination and was named by Doug Valentine in his THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME as a major proponent of the CIA's OPERATION
CHAOS and the FBI's COINTELPRO. While the media spent a good deal of time talking about how great they were in releasing the Pentagon
Papers to the public, the hero who exposed the military, Daniel Ellsberg, turns out to have been CIA, operating with CIA black ops
in Vietnam. And while the Pentagon Papers exposed our military's great errors in Vietnam the CIA was generally spared. Again. Bob
Woodward, our hero of Watergate, had been a courier for the Office of Naval Intelligence only a few years earlier. Thus, the CIA
and Deep State, which had soured on Nixon, orchestrated that President's departure.
I raise this because Robert Mueller's current task is the investigation of our sitting President. No matter how much you dislike
Trump you can't help but notice that the "evidence" against him conspiring with Putin and Russia is thin gruel. And while Trump,
like most politicians who ascend to the big seat, has a lot of questionable, even indictable business connections around him, the
great dangers of a Putin-Trump conspiracy trumpeted by the media have been fading because, apparently, there was never a there there.
Thus, as Mueller oversees this case, he will find people surrounding Trump who have lied to FBI agents, who have perhaps not registered
as foreign agents, and other crimes that routinely happen out of the public spotlight and aren't prosecuted. What was obvious to
me from the start, that this was a psyop that involved U.S. intelligence, Ukrainian intelligence, Clinton and the DNC, will not be
obvious to Mueller. Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a
means of pressure on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it.
When one begins examining high-profile court cases in post-1963 America one sees a cast of people who keep popping up. Prosecutors,
judges, defense attorneys, coroners, witnesses, reporters, authors. This ensemble keeps reappearing in these show trials. We may
not know what Mueller will find, but we know what he won't find.
There was a review at Truthdig back in 2016 of Jeffrey Toobin's book on Patty Hearst, AMERICAN HEIRESS (Toobin himself worked
as an associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh during the investigation Iran–Contra affair and Oliver North's criminal
trial). In part it reads: "Toobin features the characters who populated the edges of Hearst's story. Robert Shapiro, who would later
work with [F. Lee] Bailey on the O.J. Simpson case, makes a cameo appearance. Lance Ito, the judge in that case, briefly shared a
shooting range with a machine-gun toting SLA member. Reverend Jim Jones offered to help with the food distribution effort; that enterprise
also employed Sara Jane Moore, who served 32 years for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford during his 1975 visit to San
Francisco. Congressman Leo Ryan, who represented Randy and Catherine Hearst's district, endorsed the commutation of Patty's sentence.
"Off to Guyana," he wrote Patty in 1978. "See you when I return. Hang in there." Jim Jones' henchmen shot and killed Ryan before
he could board his flight home. Robert Mueller, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco before taking over as FBI director, strenuously
opposed Hearst's pardon, claiming that her attitude, born of wealth and social position, "has always been that she is a person above
the law.""
When Mueller wrote that line he must have laughed out loud.
That isn't connecting the dots. Its painting a bloody Mona Lisa.
I had no idea how dirty this man was. He is the CIA version of Zelig or Forest Gump. He makes Bill Clinton look like an amateur.
Beginning with the double CIA family ties and proceeding through whitewashing 911, this man is so central to our rotten government
that its a wonder someone hasn't done what you just did a lot sooner.
My hat is off to you. Someone should post this article on our blog.
The one that keeps jumping to mind is the mid 80's game "Paranoia" which was a cartoonish comedy about the drugged citizens
of a complex where the state oversaw everything, and the people were obsessed with celebrities and junk food and oh my goooooodd...
Thanks for pointing to it. I got laughs just reading the wikipedia page.
It sounds like Kafka meets that Russian guy who was simultaneously head of the secret police and leader of the resistance.
LOL.
The one that keeps jumping to mind is the mid 80's game "Paranoia" which was a cartoonish comedy about the drugged citizens
of a complex where the state oversaw everything, and the people were obsessed with celebrities and junk food and oh my goooooodd...
@arendt even
considering they were working from licenses half the time. They ended up essentially creating the universe bibles for Ghostbusters
and the Star Wars EU prior to the reboots.
Unfortunately, that didn't translate into respect. However, I still to this day am amazed at the complexity of thought that
went into many of the rules and the ability they had to match mechanics to maintaining the play feel.
Paranoia in particular was hilarious. Kafka and Three Stooges, and even a little Joseph Heller. Later editions even managed
to work in criticisms of late stage capitalism by having players ALWAYS broke and any unexpected expenses needing to be made up
through crime... which was illegal, to avoid budget shortfalls... which was also illegal...
Bob, thank you. As detailed and extensive as it is, your essay is concise by making it clear exactly what's so wrong with Mueller:
Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA...
Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections...
Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a means of pressure
on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it...
For me, the anthrax case is the most important. Biological weapons are no joke. I believe we learned, from whistle-blowing
scientists, not from the FBI investigation, that the CIA had one of the many illegal biological weapons programs being run with
our tax dollars leading up to the anthrax attack. So whether Battelle was one of the CIA's contractors or yet another cut out,
the investigation by Mueller simply stated those entities, all of them, were eliminated from the investigation.
The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the "suspect" and
the "objective enemy". The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it. He is
never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tendencies"
like a carrier of disease. Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler behaves like a man who persistently insults another man
until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defense.
p423-4
"From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian
replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime ...While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable
of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality, the totalitarian possible crime is based on the logical anticipation
of objective developments.
The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain
category of the population.
"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the
less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out
to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)
"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the
less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn
out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)
The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the "suspect"
and the "objective enemy". The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it.
He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tendencies"
like a carrier of disease. Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler behaves like a man who persistently insults another
man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defense.
p423-4
"From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian
replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime ...While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable
of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality, the totalitarian possible crime is based on the logical anticipation
of objective developments.
The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a
certain category of the population.
"The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are,
the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn
out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)
Great history of how corrupt Mueller has always been and how he has covered up for so many crimes. I'm just stunned by
the number of people who have decided that Mueller's history and the history of the CIA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies
wasn't that bad after all just because they are going after Trump. This selective amnesia is simply amazing, isn't it?
Clinton's role in helping the CIA to smuggle drugs into Arkansas is never talked about either. Or if it is it's called
"a right wing attempt to bring them down."
I almost skipped reading this one, assumed at first from the headline it was going to be about the Russia "investigation" which
I've been steadfast in not paying any attention to.
But wow, this is so much better than I'd expected, a fascinating tapestry. A lot to absorb. At this point I'm just feeling
overwhelmed at how little "we the people" in this country have any say in, or even any knowledge about, what is going on.
Thank you for this excellent history and synthesis.
from those who believe the fairy tale of Russia Gate. John
Brennan has also become a darling of the left. Greenwald wrote about him after Obama appointed him to his cabinet.
Joe posted this
linkthat explains why centrist and liberal media have a disturbing tendency to rehabilitate some of the most vile, reactionary
forces on the American right simply because they say vaguely negative things about Donald Trump -- a phenomenon we call "Trumpwashing."
Just like Mueller, Brennan is one more war criminal whose actions seem to have been forgotten.
conclude from this, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the Mueller investigation of "Russiagate" won't get anywhere near the
Oval Office.
Mostly becuz "Deep State" itself is up to its eyebrows in the affair. And also becuz Trump has very little to do with it. I'm
sure they'd Love to bury Hillary in this, but it looks like that won't happen either. A shame.
I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies
for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in
February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers
for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the
firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order
to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence
services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign
actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations,"
according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were
unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social
media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed
on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe
that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
@snoopydawg@snoopydawg
What the hell? Do these people even know they're on this list, or part of this evidence? Or, are they not even real people, or
are they maybe even govt employees needed to play a role? There's that cookbook again, maybe. Yikes!
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly
recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies
for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they
did.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted
in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to
lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment
accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social
media in order to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence
services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign
actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations,"
according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say
were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social
media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency
placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people
still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
It's obvious that the whole damn Russia Gate conspiracy was just made up. It started when Wikileaks said that they were going
to release the emails between Hillary and Podesta that showed how they rigged the primary against Bernie. The reason why they
did it was to keep people from talking about the contents of the emails. And it worked. The media didn't focus on their contents,
but only on how Wikileaks obtained them.
Another reason for the Russian propaganda crap is so people will give their permission for the upcoming war against Russia
that had already been planned for over two years before the election. And they will. I've seen so many comments that says what
Russia (Putin) did and is still doing was an act of war. Today on ToP one person said that "we need to assassinate Putin." Was
that person HRd for promoting violence which is against the site rules? Nope. Those that believe Russia actually did interfere
with the election also think that the republicans are also Putin's puppets and that is why they won't go against Trump. The front
pagers have been pushing lies about Russia's actions it should be obvious to anyone with a working brain. I'll see a definitive
statement like " The seas were calm and the skies were clear." But they will rewrite their statement to "The reason
why the ship went down is because of the massive storm that came out of nowhere." Hopefully you get my drift on how they're
blatantly lying in their statements.
Hillary's BFF, Nuland and McCain were the ones that worked the hardest on overthrowing the Ukraine government. The USA wanted
to put its own puppet government on Russia's border. Plus the USA and NATO have been installing troops into countries that surround
Russia's borders.
The original reason why the Mueller investigation was created was to find evidence that Trump colluded with Putin to win the
election. None of the Mueller indictments have anything to do with that charge. This is why he was taken off guard when the Russian
lawyers showed up to defend their clients. Hope that you read the entire article.
#13#13
What the hell? Do these people even know they're on this list, or part of this evidence? Or, are they not even real people,
or are they maybe even govt employees needed to play a role? There's that cookbook again, maybe. Yikes!
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were
unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
This also proves my point above how information is selectively posted over there. Just certain parts of the articles are posted,
but the parts of the articles that show the information in a different light are left out. This is from a comment..
It would appear at first glance this is basically an effort at espionage only , but I'm not much more sure than
you are.
If they don't have a US presence ( as it appears they don't ), I can't understand why they even care that Mueller
has charged them. As you point out, they won't be extradited, so none of this really matters. They could have their lawyers
just play a DVD of them confessing followed by giving Mueller the double birds all around and it wouldn't make any difference,
so the only logical answer for this is to try and pry state secrets out legally via the courts instead of through hacking and
spying.
Oops. From the article ..
I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against
the charges.
I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies
for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they
did.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted
in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to
lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment
accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social
media in order to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence
services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign
actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations,"
according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say
were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social
media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency
placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people
still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
off the hook. @snoopydawg
Especially Mueller. Finding the 13 Russians guilty that is. Mueller can then claim, "See! The Russians did it," which gives Hillbots
a warm fuzzy and reason to scold BernieBros with a "told ya so!!" AND, no reason to investigate further. Investigation over. Case
closed! Everyone gets what they want. Alas... Their lawyer showed up.
I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies
for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they
did.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted
in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to
lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment
accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social
media in order to sow discord among American voters.
The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence
services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.
Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign
actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations,"
according to the filing.
The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say
were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors
Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social
media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.
Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency
placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people
still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!
As Powerline notes, Mueller probably didn't see that coming - and the indictment itself was perhaps nothing more than a PR
stunt to bolster the Russian interference narrative.
I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against
the charges. Rather, the Mueller prosecutors seem to have obtained the indictment to serve a public relations purpose, laying
out the case for interference as understood by the government and lending a veneer of respectability to the Mueller Switch
Project.
One of the Russian corporate defendants nevertheless hired counsel to contest the charges. In April two Washington-area
attorneys -- Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly of the Reed Smith firm -- filed appearances in court on behalf of Concord Management
and Consulting. Josh Gerstein covered that turn of events for Politico here. -Powerline Blog
@snoopydawg
Especially since it's supposed to contain all these names of stooges, duped into participating in US politics by the Kremlin.
It's ridiculous.
As Powerline notes, Mueller probably didn't see that coming - and the indictment itself was perhaps nothing more than
a PR stunt to bolster the Russian interference narrative.
I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against
the charges. Rather, the Mueller prosecutors seem to have obtained the indictment to serve a public relations purpose, laying
out the case for interference as understood by the government and lending a veneer of respectability to the Mueller Switch
Project.
One of the Russian corporate defendants nevertheless hired counsel to contest the charges. In April two Washington-area
attorneys -- Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly of the Reed Smith firm -- filed appearances in court on behalf of Concord Management
and Consulting. Josh Gerstein covered that turn of events for Politico here. -Powerline Blog
I have read here in a long time. While I linked ot our Twitter account last night, I did not have time to read it before I
posted it. I am going to link this again because I think it is such an important essay for others to read.
While "marriage of governmental and corporate interests is the very definition of fascism" this marriage also occurs under neoliberalism,
so the author augment is weak, although some of his observations are astute and have a distinct value. Fascism imply far right nationalism
and far right nationalist party in power, often under false pretext of "saving nations from a coming collapse".
Neoliberalism while is also displays high level of merger of corporate and state interests operation of globalist agenda (or at
least used to operate before Trump, who invented "national neoliberalism" regime, aka neoliberalism without neoliberal globalization)
Can Trump "national neoliberalism" be called a flavor of neo-fascism? Hillary probably will tell you yes ;-) But it is impossible
to deny that the US Deep state launched color revolution against Trump (with CIA under Brennan as a coordinating center and FBI as "muscles")
and, essentially emasculated him in just first three month of his Presidency by appointing Mueller as a Special Prosecutor.
So we can talk about gradual sliding into national security state under neoliberalism, but it is not necessary take form of neofascism.
Classic neoliberalism, for example, is cosmopolitan ideology and as such is hostile to nationalism.
Notable quotes:
"... Remember, people used to scoff at the notion of a Deep State (a.k.a. Shadow Government), doubt that fascism could ever take hold in America , and sneer at any suggestion that the United States was starting to resemble Nazi Germany in the years leading up to Hitler's rise to power. We're beginning to know better, aren't we? The Deep State (" a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it ") is ..."
"... Indeed, to anyone who's been paying attention to the goings-on in the world, it is increasingly obvious that we're already under a new world order, and it is being brought to you by the Global-Industrial Deep State, a powerful cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations. ..."
"... It is as yet unclear whether the American Police State answers to the Global-Industrial Deep State, or whether the Global-Industrial Deep State merely empowers the American Police State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked. ..."
"... Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and the pharmaceutical industry. ..."
"... All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins: Walmart, Alphabet (formerly Google), AT&T, Toyota, Apple, Exxon Mobil, Facebook, Lockheed Martin, Berkshire Hathaway, UnitedHealth Group, Samsung, Amazon, Verizon, Nissan, Boeing, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Citigroup these are just a few of the global corporate giants whose profit-driven policies influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care. ..."
"... The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T's massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies." ..."
"... Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the " 14 Eyes Program ," also referred to as the "SIGINT Seniors." This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories). ..."
"... War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its best buyers and sellers . In fact, as Reuters reports, "[President] Trump has gone further than any of his predecessors to act as a salesman for the U.S. defense industry ." ..."
"... The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide). ..."
"... A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State ..."
"There are no nations. There are no peoples There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those
are the nations of the world today. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of
business."
There are those who will tell you that any mention of a New World Order government -- a power elite conspiring to rule the world
-- is the stuff of conspiracy theories
.
I am not one of those skeptics.
What's more, I wholeheartedly believe that one should always mistrust those in power, take alarm at the first encroachment on
one's liberties, and establish powerful constitutional checks against government mischief and abuse.
I can also attest to the fact that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I have studied enough of this country's history -- and world history -- to know that governments (the U.S. government being no
exception) are at times indistinguishable from the evil they claim to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of
terrorism ,
torture, drug trafficking
,
sex trafficking , murder, violence, theft, pornography,
scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
And I have lived long enough to see many so-called conspiracy theories turn into cold, hard fact.
Given all that we know about the U.S. government -- that it treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to
be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; that it repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the
laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; and that it wages wars for profit, jails its own people
for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad -- it is not a stretch to suggest that the government has
been overtaken by global industrialists, a new world order, that do not have our best interests at heart.
Indeed, to anyone who's been paying attention to the goings-on in the world, it is increasingly obvious that we're already
under a new world order, and it is being brought to you by the Global-Industrial Deep State, a powerful cabal made up of international
government agencies and corporations.
It is as yet unclear whether the American Police State answers to the Global-Industrial Deep State, or whether the Global-Industrial
Deep State merely empowers the American Police State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically
enmeshed and interlocked.
This marriage of governmental and corporate interests is the very definition of fascism. Where we go wrong is in underestimating
the threat of fascism: it is no longer a national threat but has instead become a global menace.
Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven
interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the technology
sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and the pharmaceutical industry.
All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels
to increase their profit margins: Walmart, Alphabet (formerly Google), AT&T, Toyota, Apple, Exxon Mobil, Facebook, Lockheed Martin,
Berkshire Hathaway, UnitedHealth Group, Samsung, Amazon, Verizon, Nissan, Boeing, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Citigroup these are
just a few of the global corporate giants whose profit-driven policies influence everything from legislative policies to economics
to environmental issues to medical care.
The U.S. government's deep-seated and, in many cases, top secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations are redrawing
the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up.
Global Surveillance
Spearheaded by the National Security Agency (NSA), which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy,
the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.
Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs
of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the
corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.
Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government
with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept , "The NSA considers
AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company's 'extreme willingness to help. '
It is a collaboration that dates back decades.
Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T's customers. According to the NSA's documents, it values AT&T
not only because it 'has access to information that transits the nation,' but also because it maintains unique relationships with
other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T's massive
infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies."
Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the "
14 Eyes Program ," also
referred to as the "SIGINT Seniors." This global spy agency is made up of
members from around the world (United States, United
Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore,
South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).
Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated
to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the
military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70%
of the countries worldwide).
Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we
do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (
that's $8.3 million per hour ). That doesn't include
wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to
push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053 .
It's not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.
Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons
better suited to a war zone. Trump, no different from his predecessors, has continued to expand America's military empire abroad
and domestically, calling on Congress to approve
billions more to hire cops, build more prisons and wage more profit-driven war-on-drugs/war-on-terrorism/war-on-crime programs
that pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in
its clutches.
Global Policing
Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those
belonging to other nations. There's a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.
There's a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force.
Then you have the
Strong Cities Network program .
Funded by the State Department , the U.S. government has partnered with the United Nations to fight violent extremism "
in all of its forms and manifestations " in cities and communities across the world. Working with the UN, the federal government
rolled out programs to train local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as
address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the
global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo. What this program
is really all about, however, is community policing on a global scale.
It sounds like a good idea on paper, but the problem with the broken windows approach is that it has led to zero tolerance policing
and stop-and-frisk practices among other harsh police tactics.
When applied to the Strong Cities Network program, the objective is ostensibly to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source:
racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police -- acting ostensibly as extensions of the United Nations -- will
identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.
Of course, the concern with the government's anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise
lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist. Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American
"extremists" will carry out their objectives -- to identify and deter potential extremists -- in concert with
fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies,
behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance,
facial recognition,
predictive policing , biometrics, and behavioral
epigenetics
(in which life experiences alter one's genetic makeup).
... ... ...
And then, as I make clear in my book
A Government of Wolves:
The Emerging American Police State , if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march
towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of communities and local governments to invalidate governmental laws, tactics
and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.
Can't believe any sane American thinks Russians – including beautiful Russian tennis
players are more of a threat to us in 2018 then say M13 Gang banger invaders, Chicago Black
street gangs, Afghan and Pakistani child rapists or just the sub Saharan Black African mobs
with their machetes.
We commissioned some Farstar cartoons on this theme – seems pretty basic to me, but
the J media mafia simply goes on and on – there is supposedly a Russian spy behind
every bush, some Russians posted anti Hillary posts on Facebook – oh the horror!
The Saker is missing the point of Anglo Warfare. Anglos don't value direct warfare, so they
don't care if another military has better tech. Anglos realized a long time ago it is much
less costly to just play divide and conquer to defeat a more powerful adversary by getting
other countries to do the fighting.
Hence trying to tarpit Russia in Syria which Putin wisely did not fall for.
The Anglo-Zionist Empire would be foolish to directly confront Russia, so they won't.
Instead they will seek to economically strangle Russia and turn close allies against her such
as Ukraine.
This is something Russias weapons cannot protect itself with.
I am very busy at the moment and have little time to comment. However, I did read the Saker's
review of Martyanov's book and its comments. My small insight is that a son of a Soviet sovok
and a son of White-Russian are cooperating. I always wanted for this to happen, but I still
find it amazing and most significant. For me, it is a good explanation why modern Russia is
so successful compared with US and Soviet Union. The Russians are mostly at peace with their
20th century history and look towards the future. Opposite to this, as the generals usually
fight the previous war, US still fights a country which does not exist any more. The new
Russian challenge is to fight the fifth column of the Russian Liberals, the lovers of the
West, exemplified by Anatoly Elliot Karlin-Higgins, the customary Jewish ideologues with
forked tongues.
My apology for using the disparaging word sovok, which I read for the first time in
disparaging comments by the above mentioned big BSer.
Finally, it would be interesting if the current Russian and Chinese weapons development
would initiate a weapons race which would help crush the already precarious US and Western
financial system. It is not that US military spending is a problem as a percentage of GDP,
but its further increase at this time could be the straw which broke camel's back. In my
mind, Saker and Martyanov with their writing, as well as the Russian civilian and military
leadership with their public statements, show an honest wish to deter the West from attacking
Russia. But the unintended effect on somebody bound on world-supremacy will be to spend even
more (as inefficiently as before) to gain back the supremacy. As I have written many times
before, the only possible solution for the preservation of humanity is the financial
collapse of the US/West .
Or maybe it is a bit like with the most recent US Presidential Election, the Russians win
with either of the two terrible candidates winning. If US chase them in military technology
development, they go bankrupt. If US do not chase them, they cannot attack Russia and China
any more. Shaking down "the allies" for more money is already seriously destabilising the
political order of the West. The overall direction of things is obvious.
Communication satellites were mentioned in the article, that is not LEO since the
Motorola's Iridium died. Most if not all US military communication satellites are in the
geo-sync orbit 36,000 km away. Any decent ASAT system would be targeting both GPS in LEO and
C3 satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
"... The underlying assumption of Trump's strategic thinking is that 'power works': the more intransigent his posture, the greater his belief in a unipolar world based on US power. As a corollary, Trump interprets any ally, adversary, competitor who seeks negotiations, reciprocity or concessions is 'weak' and should be pressured or forced to concede greater concessions and further retreats and sacrifices, up to the ultimate goal of surrender and submission. In other words, Trump's politics of force only recognizes counter-force: limitations in Trump's policies will only result when tangible economic and military losses and costs in US lives would undermine US imperial rule. ..."
"... Iran's one-sided concessions; trading military defense for market opportunities encouraged Trump to believe that he could intimidate Iran militarily by closing all its markets. ..."
"... Trump views President Rohani as a rug seller not a military strategist. Trump believes that an economic squeeze will lead President Rohani to sacrifice his allies in Syria, Lebanon (Hezbollah), Yemen (Houthi), Palestine (Hamas) and Iraq (Shia)and to dismantle its ICBM defense strategy. ..."
"... Trump pursues the strategic goal of weakening Iran and preparing a regime change, reverting Iran into a client state – as it was prior to the 1979 revolution under the Shah. ..."
"... The second reason for Trump's policy is to strengthen Israel's military power in the Middle East. The Trump regime is deeply influenced by the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) in the US, dubbed 'the Lobby'. ..."
"... Trump believes a successful trade war will lead to a successful military war. Trump believes that a submissive China, based on its isolation from the 'dynamic' US market, will enhance Washington's quest for uncontested world domination. ..."
"... Trump's loud, threatening gestures are a real danger to world peace and justice. But his assumptions about the consequences of his policy are deeply flawed. There is no basis to think his sanctions will topple the Iranian regime; that Israel will survive unscathed from a war with Iran: that an oil war will not undermine the US economy; that Europe will allow its companies to be frozen out of the Iran market. ..."
"... Trump's trade war with China is dead in the water. He cannot find alternative production sites for US multi-nationals. He cannot freeze China out of the world market, since they have links with five continents. ..."
"... Are Trump's threats of war part of a strategy of bluff and bombast designed to intimidate, in order to secure political advantages? Is Trump playing the Nixon-Kissinger 'madman' tactic, in which the Secretary of State tells adversaries to accept his 'reasonable' demands or face the worst from the President? I don't think so. ..."
"... Trump's "policy" is simply a reflection of his character as a narcissistic, arrogant bully. To "make America great again" means for him "make America the Global Bully" again. However, behind the facade of all his bravado hides a puppet of the Jewish Power Structure, which is even more dangerous than Trump himself. "Make Zion Great Again" would be a more apposite slogan. ..."
For some time, critics of President Trump's policies have attributed them to a mental
disorder; uncontrolled manic-depression, narcissus bullying and other pathologies.
The question of Trump's mental health raises a deeper question: why do his pathologies take
a specific political direction?
Moreover, Trump's decisions have a political history and background, and follow from a logic
and belief in the reason and logic of imperial power.
We will examine the reason why Trump has embraced three strategic decisions which have
world-historic consequences, namely: Trump's reneging the nuclear accord with Iran ;Trump's
declaration of a trade war with China; and Trump's meeting with North Korea.
In brief we will explore the political reasons for his decisions; what he expects to gain;
and what is his game plan if he fails to secure his expected outcome and his adversaries take
reprisals.
Trump's Strategic Framework
The underlying assumption of Trump's strategic thinking is that 'power works': the more
intransigent his posture, the greater his belief in a unipolar world based on US power. As a
corollary, Trump interprets any ally, adversary, competitor who seeks negotiations, reciprocity
or concessions is 'weak' and should be pressured or forced to concede greater concessions and
further retreats and sacrifices, up to the ultimate goal of surrender and submission. In other
words, Trump's politics of force only recognizes counter-force: limitations in Trump's policies
will only result when tangible economic and military losses and costs in US lives would
undermine US imperial rule.
Reasons Why Trump Broke the Peace Accord with Iran
Trump broke the accord with Iran because the original agreement was based on retaining US
sanctions against Iran; the total dismantling of its nuclear program and calling into question
Iran's limited role on behalf of possible allies in the Middle East.
Iran's one-sided concessions; trading military defense for market opportunities
encouraged Trump to believe that he could intimidate Iran militarily by closing all its
markets.
Trump views President Rohani as a rug seller not a military strategist. Trump believes
that an economic squeeze will lead President Rohani to sacrifice his allies in Syria, Lebanon
(Hezbollah), Yemen (Houthi), Palestine (Hamas) and Iraq (Shia)and to dismantle its ICBM defense
strategy.
Trump pursues the strategic goal of weakening Iran and preparing a regime change,
reverting Iran into a client state – as it was prior to the 1979 revolution under the
Shah.
The second reason for Trump's policy is to strengthen Israel's military power in the
Middle East. The Trump regime is deeply influenced by the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) in
the US, dubbed 'the Lobby'.
Trump recognizes and submits to Zionist-Israeli dictates because they have unprecedented
power in the media, real estate, finance and insurance (FIRE). Trump recognizes the ZPC's power
to buy Congressional votes, control both political parties and secure appointments in the
executive branch.
Trump is the typical authoritarian: at the throat of the weak, citizens, allies and
adversaries and on his knees before the powerful ZPC, the military and Wall Street. Trump's
submission to Zionist power reinforces and even dictates his decision to break the peace accord
with Iran and his willingness to pressure. France, Germany, the UK and Russia to sacrifice
billion-dollar trade agreements with Iran and to pursue a policy of pressuring Teheran to
accept part of Trump's agenda of unilateral disarmament and isolation. Trump believes he can
force the EU multi-nationals to disobey their governments and abide by sanctions.
Reasons for Trump's Trade War with China
Prior to Trump's presidency, especially under President Obama, the US launched a trade war
and 'military pivot' to China. Obama proposed the Trans-Pacific Pact to exclude China and
directed an air and naval armada to the South China Sea. Obama established a high-powered
surveillance system in South Korea and supported war exercises on North Korea's border. Trump's
policy deepened and radicalized Obama's policies.
Trump extended Obama's bellicose policy toward North Korea, demanding the de-nuclearization
of its defense program. President Kim of North Korea and President Moon of South Korea reached
an agreement to open negotiations toward a peace accord ending nearly 60 years of
hostility.
However, President Trump joined the conversation on the presumption that North Korea's peace
overtures were due to his threats of war and intimidation. He insisted that any peace
settlement and end of economic sanctions would only be achieved by unilateral nuclear
disarmament, the maintenance of US forces on the peninsula and supervision by US approved
inspectors.
Trump's unilateral declaration of a trade war against China accompanied his belief that
military threats led to North Korea's "capitulation" – its promise to end its nuclear
program.
Trump slapped a trade tariff on over $100 billion dollars of Chinese exports in order to
reduce its trade imbalance by $200 billion over two years. He demanded China unilaterally end
industrial 'espionage', technological 'theft' (all phony accusations) and China's compliance
monitored quarterly by the US.
Trump demanded that China not retaliate with tariffs or restrictions or face bigger
sanctions. Trump threatened to respond to any reciprocal tariff by Beijing, with greater
tariffs, and restrictions on Chinese goods and services. Trump's goals seek to convert North
Korea into a military satellite encroaching on China's northern border; and a trade war that
drives China into an economic crisis.
Trump believes that as China declines as a world economic power, the US will grow and
dominate the Asian and world economy.
Trump believes a successful trade war will lead to a successful military war. Trump
believes that a submissive China, based on its isolation from the 'dynamic' US market, will
enhance Washington's quest for uncontested world domination.
Trump's Ten Erroneous Thesis
Trump's political agenda is deeply flawed!
Breaking the nuclear agreement and imposing harsh sanctions has isolated Trump from his
European and Asian allies.
His military intervention will inflame a regional war that would destroy the Saudi oil
fields. He will force Iran to pursue a nuclear shield against US-Israeli aggression and lead
to a prolonged, costly and ultimately losing war.
Trump's policies will unify all Iranians, liberals and nationalist, and undermine US
collaborators.
The entire Muslim world will unify forces and carry the conflict throughout Asia, Africa
and the Middle East.
Tel Aviv's bombing will lead to counter-attacks in Israel.
Oil prices will skyrocket, financial markets will collapse, industries will go
bankrupt.
Trump's sanctions and military aggression against Iran will lead to mutual economic
destruction.
Trump's trade war with China will lead to the disruption of the supply chain which
sustains the US economy and especially the 500 US multi-nationals who depend on the Chinese
economy for exports to the US.
China will increase domestic consumption, diversify its markets and trading partners and
reinforce its military alliance with Russia.
China has greater resilience and capacity to overcome short-term disruption and regain its
dominant role as a global economic power house.
Wall Street will suffer a catastrophic financial collapse and send the US into a world
depression.
Trump's negotiations with North Korea will go nowhere as long as he demands unilateral
nuclear disarmament, US military control over the peninsula and political isolation from
China.
Kim will insist on the end of sanctions, and a mutual defense treaty with China.
Kim will offer to end nuclear testing but not nuclear weapons. After Trump's reneged on
the Iran deal, Kim will recognize that agreements with the US are not trustworthy.
Conclusion
Trump's loud, threatening gestures are a real danger to world peace and justice. But his
assumptions about the consequences of his policy are deeply flawed. There is no basis to think
his sanctions will topple the Iranian regime; that Israel will survive unscathed from a war
with Iran: that an oil war will not undermine the US economy; that Europe will allow its
companies to be frozen out of the Iran market.
Trump's trade war with China is dead in the water. He cannot find alternative production
sites for US multi-nationals. He cannot freeze China out of the world market, since they have
links with five continents.
Trump cannot dominate North Korea and force it to sacrifice its sovereignty on the basis of
empty economic promises to lift sanctions.
Trump is heading for defeats on all counts. But he may take the American people into the
nuclear abyss in the process.
Epilogue
Are Trump's threats of war part of a strategy of bluff and bombast designed to
intimidate, in order to secure political advantages? Is Trump playing the Nixon-Kissinger
'madman' tactic, in which the Secretary of State tells adversaries to accept his 'reasonable'
demands or face the worst from the President? I don't think so.
Nixon unlike Trump was not led by the nose by Israel. Nixon unlike Trump was not led by
pro-nuclear war advisers. Nixon in contrast to Trump opened the US to trade with China and
signed nuclear reduction agreements with Russia.
"Trump's sanctions and military aggression against Iran will lead to mutual economic
destruction."
indeed they will, and sadly it well deserved after the last 20yrs off US terrorism.
the US hubris will soon meet karma, and we all know karma is a bitch..
This theory is the opposite of what I suppose is the right explanation, the explanation also
given by prof Laslo Maracs, UVA Amsterdam, that Trump and his rich friends understand that
the USA can to longer control the world, conquering the rest of the world totally out of the
question.
The end of the British empire began before 1914, when the two fleet standard had to
lowered to one fleet.
Obama had to do something similar, the USA capability of fighting two wars at the time was
lowered to one and half. What half a war accomplishes we see in Syria. In the thirties the
British, some of them, knew quite well they could no longer defend their empire, at the time
this meant controlling the Meditarranean and the Far East. Lawrence R. Pratt, 'East of Malta,
West of Suez', London, 1975
The British guarantees to Poland and countries bordering on the Med lighted the fuse to
the powder keg that had been standing for a long time.
Churchill won, the British thought, and some of them think it still, WWII.
But shortly after WWII some British understood 'we won the war, but lost the peace'. I
still have the idea that Trump has no intention of losing the peace, but time will tell.
I suppose Trump just is buying time against Deep State and Netanyahu.
The fool Netanyahu is happy with having got Jerusalem, he does not see the cost in increased
hatred among Muslims, and Israel having won the Eurovision Song Festival.
Trump's "policy" is simply a reflection of his character as a narcissistic, arrogant
bully. To "make America great again" means for him "make America the Global Bully" again.
However, behind the facade of all his bravado hides a puppet of the Jewish Power Structure,
which is even more dangerous than Trump himself. "Make Zion Great Again" would be a more
apposite slogan.
Overall a good analysis, but as far as his support of Israel is concerned, his family
connections with the most ultra-Zionist factions should not be overlooked.
I continue to admire President Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi of China. WHY? .because
RESULTS matter more than opinions on internet websites, T.V., or in printed publications.
N. Korea has stopped performing ICBM or nuke tests, a less extremist regime change "coup"
took place in Saudi Arabia, financing/ weapons flows / intelligence to Syrian terrorists has
dried up with resulting collapse of ISIS, Iran is threatening to release the names of
European & American politicians who previously made millions / billions off the Iran nuke
deal if it is dropped, Harvey Weinstein, Allison Mack, and "Weiner" were untouchable before
Trump, the list just goes on and continues to get bigger.
A major reason for admiration of Putin is that the Mainstream Media (MSM) can't stop
demonizing him. So of course I'm logically led to believe that he is mostly a good guy since
the MSM has proven itself repeatedly to distort the Truth. Putin also largely ended the
oligarchs power, doubled Russian citizens income, used an tiny Russian military in Syria to
gradually reverse ISIS expansion there, improved Russia's internal manufacturing,
agricultural, mining, and technological research/ development, intellectually crushed
international debate opponents repeated using only logic and facts (You should watch the
videos!), built / rebuilt over 10 thousand churches, has patriotic Muslims (Crimea) fighting
for Russia in Syria, etc. etc. Xi of China has pretty impressive credentials but this post is
overly long anyway.
RESULTS CANT MORE THAN WORDS!
Of course they do this, they would be stupid if they didn't.
• Agree: CalDre
I like your frankness. Every countries is into this at different degree, with ZUS the
apex. But been leading in most tech area currently & lazy to produce any useful things,
ZUS is very unhappy that their esponage net result is negative, hence the continuous
whining.
When tide reverse with China leading in most tech, ZUS will complaint about complex patent
system as been flawed in exploitating & suppressing of weaker country innovation, juz as
it did for WTO & Globalization now.
Of course any moronic comments about only China is esponaging US IPR & rise purely due
to US FDI & Tech transfer will resonate CalDre into high chime.
Forensic evidence has already proven that the data on the DNC server was downloaded on a USB
thump drive. The bombshells in Robert Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian intelligence
officers, hackers of DNC server, put a damper on Trump's one on one visit with Putin.
Impact of transferring govt from public domain into private ownership
Oligarch/Pharaoh (TLD) massive wealth, personally owned
Private Corps (PC) (doing govt jobs, or possessing a govt monopoly or power)
Slave Drivers (SD) ( elected by the public to run the govt)
Public (P) ( those forced to accept only recourse is to vote & pay)
After Slave driver elected, discovers must answer to PC, not P, the voters.
PC = derive large % of corporate income from one of the following classes
A. private contractors doing govt jobs (banking, energy, private mercenary
armies, whatever, domestic or foreign or military contractors & 1 Oligarch/ Pharaoh who
live in different places in the world). Please note PC layer collective contributions
(advertising $s) support the privately owned media; enables them to collectively
promote:hide, accelerate:retard programs as needed to adjust the behaviors and attitudes of
the public.
Whole segments of the global economy belong to one or a few enterprises in each class of PCs.
Substantial economic power and most political power hb transferred into private hands.
Private corporations now have or control whole segments of the profit potential in the entire
world, they can now operate transparent to (invisible or visible to) and independent of the
politics of any nation. For example the exclusive right to produce electric power and to
build the infrastructure to deliver that power to homes and businesses is domestic in nature,
but if you look carefully you will see the same pharaohs or oligarchs own them. The patent
that prevents all others from competing in the computer operating system market makes it
possible for one corporation to control every computer in the world. Patents on search engine
technology makes it possible for one privately owned, oligarch controlled corporation to
determines whose website is find-able and whose website is not, to collect personal data on
everyone worldwide, and to deny those who do not agree with the Oligarch.
Note: Privatized govt d/n care who the people elect. because all decisions and political
power belongs to the oligarchs. Elected who fail to support the Oligarchs do not get re
elected? The decisions, laws and use of govt resources are no longer in the hands of the
voting public or their elected representatives.
Total revenue = total cost ($9/stop X 12 mo X 1,000,000 = $108,000,000
Privatise Garbage collection (City grants franchise to corporation A)
Corporation A raises the price from $9/stop to $10/stop:
Total revenue = $10/stop X 12 mo X 1,000,000 stops =$120,000,000
less: Total cost = $ 9/stop X 12 mo X 1,000,000 stops=$108,000,000
Profit the franchise gave to the Franchise owner = $ 12,000,000
means each person in City A was forced to give
one of the private oligarch owned corporations
$12/yr from their pocket.
ACTOR TRUMP has done one thing: Trump has tried to changed which corporations are to be
the recipients of the privatization deals. Putin and Trump both realize they need to counter
the up and coming Indian, Iranian, and Chinese intrusion into the corporate markets their
constituencies have traditionally enjoyed monopoly powers in. The deal with Putin is about
the getting the CIA backed LNG business off Putin's back, but it is a problem for Trump,
because wall street and London have invested heavily in the LNG. LNG explains why Bush, jr
entered the White house, why 9/11 was produced, and why Iraq was invaded, the gas lines to
Europe at the Ukraine were taken over politically, Why Turkey was a big player early on in
the Syrian invasion, why Libya was obliterated, why the Morsey teams in Egypt were destroyed,
and why the CIA invented ISIS invasion into Syria, why the Saudis have agreed to wipe Yemen
of the map and raise production by 1,000,000 bbls/day when the world has already a gut of oil
and why Oligarchs in Iran and Russia have been sanctioned.
But the unmentioned player in all of this, is those who, pledge their allegiance to
Israel?
"... The Donald likes to complain about fake news when these implicate him, but on the other hand he creates and acts on fake news himself: see the Russian sanctions, Skripal case, the two Syrian attacks based on fake news created by the White Helmets, paid by the State Department. ..."
As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is
this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?
The Donald likes to complain about fake news when these implicate him, but on the
other hand he creates and acts on fake news himself: see the Russian sanctions, Skripal case,
the two Syrian attacks based on fake news created by the White Helmets, paid by the State
Department.
On the matter of immigration, even many commentators who support ease of migration also
oppose the extension of government benefits to immigrants.
The idea, of course, is that free movement of labor is fine, but taxpayers shouldn't have to
subsidize it. As a matter of policy, many also find it prudent that immigrants ought to be
economically self sufficient before being offered citizenship. Switzerland, for instance,
makes
it harder to pursue citizenship while receiving social benefits.
This discussion often centers around officially recognized "welfare" and social-benefits
programs such as TANF and Medicaid. But it is also recognized that taxpayer-funded benefits
exist in the form of public schooling, free clinics, and other in-kind benefits.
But there is another taxpayer-supporter program that subsidizes immigration as well: the US
military.
Translation: the US government has begun laying off immigrants from taxpayer-funded
government jobs.
It's unclear how many of these jobs have been employed, but according to the Department of
Homeland security, "[s]ince Oct. 1, 2002, USCIS has naturalized 102,266
members of the military ."
The Military as a Jobs Program
Immigrants, of course, aren't the only people who benefit from government jobs funded
through military programs.
The military has long served as a jobs programs helpful in mopping up excess labor and
padding employment numbers. As Robert Reich noted in
2011 , as the US was still coming out of the 2009 recession:
And without our military jobs program personal incomes would be dropping faster. The
Commerce Department reported Monday the only major metro areas where both net earnings and
personal incomes rose last year were San Antonio, Texas, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and
Washington, D.C. -- because all three have high concentrations of military and federal
jobs.
He's right. While the private sector must cut back and re-arrange labor and capital to deal
with the new economic realities post-recession, government jobs rarely go away.
Because of this, Reich concludes "America's biggest -- and only major -- jobs program is the
U.S. military."
Reich doesn't think this is a bad thing. He only highlights the military's role as a de
facto jobs program in order to call for more de jure jobs programs supported by federal
funding.
Given the political popularity of the military, however, it's always easy to protect funding
for the military jobs programs than for any other potential jobs programs. All the Pentagon has
to do is assure Congress that every single military job is absolutely essential, and Congress
will force taxpayers to cough up the funding.
Back during the debate over sequestration, for example, the Pentagon routinely warned
Congress that any cutbacks in military funding would lead to major jobs losses, bringing
devastation to the economy.
In other words, even the Pentagon treats the military like a jobs program when it's
politically useful.
Benefits for enlisted people go well beyond what can be seen in the raw numbers of total
employed. As Kelley Vlahos
points out at The American Conservative , military personnel receive extra hazard pay "even
though they are far from any fighting or real danger." And then there is the "Combat Zone Tax
Exclusion (CZTE) program which exempts enlisted and officers from paying federal taxes in these
45 designated countries. Again, they get the tax break -- which accounted for about $3.6
billion in tax savings for personnel in 2009 (the combat pay cost taxpayers $790 million in
2009)– whether they are really in danger or not."
Nor do the benefits of military spending go only to enlisted people. The Pentagon has long
pointed to its spending on civilian jobs in many communities, including manufacturing jobs and
white-collar technical jobs.
This, of course, has long been politically useful for the Pentagon as well, since as
political scientist Rebecca Thorpe has shown in her book
The American Warfare State , communities that rely heavily on Pentagon-funded employment
are sure to send Congressmen to Washington who will make sure the taxpayer dollars keep flowing
to Pentagon programs.
Whether you're talking to Robert Reich or some Pentagon lobbyist on Capitol Hill, the
conclusion is clear: the military is both a jobs program and a stimulus program. Cut military
spending at your peril!
Military Spending Destroys Private Sector Jobs
The rub, however, is that military spending doesn't actually improve the economy. And much
the money spent on military employment would be best spent on the private, voluntary
economy.
This has long been recognized by political scientist Seymour Melman who has discussed the
need for "economic conversion," or converting military spending into other forms of spending.
Melman
observes :
Since we know that matter and energy located in Place A cannot be simultaneously located
in Place B, we must understand that the resources used up on military account thereby
represent a preemption of resources from civilian needs of every conceivable kind.
Here, Melman is simply describing in his own way what Murray Rothbard explained in
Man, Economy, and State . Namely, government spending distorts the economy as badly as taxation
-- driving up prices for the private sector, and withdrawing resources from private sector
use.
The military actually destroys jobs in the civilian economy. The higher profits from
cost-plus military manufacturing cause manufacturers to abandon more competitive civilian
endeavors; and the permanent war economy takes engineers, capital and resources away from
civilian production.
But, as a classic case of "the seen" vs. "the unseen," it's easy to point to jobs created by
military spending. How many jobs were lost as a result of that same spending? That remains
unseen, and thus politically irrelevant.
Military fan boys will of course assure us that every single military job and every single
dollar spent on the military is absolutely essential. It's all the service of "fighting for
freedom." For instance, Mitchell Blatt writes , in the
context of immigrant recruits, "I'm not worried about the country or origin of those who are
fighting to defend us. What matters is that our military is as strong as it can be." The idea
at work here is that the US military is a lean machine, doing only what is necessary to get the
job done, and as cost effectively as possible. Thus, hiring the "best" labor, from whatever
source is absolutely essential.
This, however, rather strains the bounds of credibility. The US military is more
expensive than the next eight largest militaries combined . The US's navy is ten times
larger than the next largest navy. The US's air force is the largest in the world, and the
second largest air force belongs, not to a foreign country, but to the US Navy.
Yet, we're supposed to believe that any cuts will imperil the "readiness" of the US
military.
Cut Spending for Citizens and Non-Citizens Alike
My intent here is not to pick on immigrants specifically. The case of military layoffs for
immigrants simply helps to illustrate a couple of important points: government jobs with the
military constitute of form of taxpayer-funded subsidy for immigrants. And secondly, the US
military acts as a job program, not just for immigrants but for many native-born Americans.
In truth, layoffs in the military sector ought to be far more widespread, and hardly limited
to immigrants. The Trump Administration is wrong when it suggests that the positions now held
by immigrant recruits ought to be filled by American-born recruits. Those positions should be
left unfilled. Permanently.
No you retarded fuck, the military is a taxpayer-funed merc army supporting the overseas
hegemonic goals of American-style Corporatism . That the military is full of the sons and
daughters of poor people is only because rich whites won't send their trustfund babies to
kill brown people for oil.
No, asshole. It's about money. About cash and gold. Profit. Markets. Growth. About cheap
or free resources. Access to labor. New customers.
War makes companies rich, it might be the ONLY way they can get rich. War is waged when GM
wants to sell trucks to the Pentagon. When Boeing wants to sell jets. When MIT wants money
for arms research. When NATO wants a reason to exist. The dogs of war are loosed when oil
gets tight. When countries won't "accept our cultural freedoms". When trade agreements aren't
enough to open up new markets.
Isreal has fleeting nothing to do with it, except maybe when war aligns with their
perceived need for hegemony in their own sphere. But by loading all this on Isreal you
encourage others to miss the real fox in the henhouse. You could wipe Isreal off the Earth
tomorrow and still have wars for profit for a thousand years to come.
This nation was born in war. It has practiced war since that day and will be at war with
the rest of the world until humans are killed to the last and the last ounce of profit from
war is had.
or from systematic corruption of all US Institutions and the politicization of all US
Institutions... you need a job, you want to work here, you say this, and you do this, ... tow
the line, no politics, no whistleblowing,... and we won't blackball your ass from the
industry... got it... u got debts, keep ur nose clean!
Yes the pay sucks but you get more done before 8am than most people do in a week. But
seriously its a pretty good gig in the long run. Medical care a decent retirement system,
travel a chance to meet and integrate with different cultures and kill them...its pretty
cool.
Excluding a small percentage, the military is much like the DMV. We have a cartoon vision
of all enlisted being GI Joe, ready to grab a gun and fight evil. This in not the case at
all. Most positions are very simple, repetitive bureaucratic positions. Really is a giant
Jobs program to keep people busy.
"The idea at work here is that the US military is a lean machine, doing only what is
necessary to get the job done, and as cost effectively as possible."
"... Damascus and Moscow welcomed Iran's critical contribution to defeating the opposition and giving Washington and its allies a diplomatic bloody nose in the bargain. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov acknowledges that Iran's presence in Syria -- at the invitation of the regime -- is legitimate and that it would be "unrealistic" to demand its ouster. ..."
"... But instead of viewing the end of the war as an opportunity to lessen Iran's value to the regime and to reduce its footprint in the country, Washington is continuing heedlessly with failed policies created for an environment that no longer exists. As long as the fighting continues and the regime's efforts to reassert sovereignty over the entire country are frustrated by U.S. deployments in the northeast and southeast, Iran's military presence in the country is secure. Likewise, Washington shows no sign of reconsidering international sanctions against the regime, which also forces Syria into the arms of Tehran. ..."
"... A colorblind appraisal of the effects of U.S. policy in Iraq and now Syria would suggest that Washington is either brilliantly in cahoots with Iran to the latter's benefit or is being outplayed by weaker but more clear-eyed players. My vote goes squarely to the latter. ..."
"... Confronted with the disintegration of its diplomatic and military strategy, the Trump administration is reduced to playing spoiler, obstructing the inevitable restoration of the regime's sovereignty over the country and continuing the punishing sanctions that have removed the battered but resilient Syrian private sector from international capital and commercial markets. This policy fails on two fronts -- it creates more gratuitous misery for the Syrian people and it undermines the stated U.S. objective of reducing and removing Iranian and Hezbollah influence in the country. Indeed, continuing to pursue the current policies will leave the U.S. isolated among friends (Jordan and Israel) as well as frenemy Russia, and will postpone rather than speed the day that Iran leaves Syria. ..."
Washington has been on the offensive against the Islamic Republic of Iran for close to half
a century. Largely as a result, Iran, a rounding error in the superpower sweepstakes, has gone
from strength to strength, challenging American power throughout the region, most notably in
Iraq and Syria.
U.S.-led regime change in Iraq created Tehran's historic opportunity to return to Baghdad
for the first time since the creation of the Ottoman caliphate in the 15th century. This
unscripted but entirely predictable outcome was no mean feat, all the more so for being the
opposite of what Washington intended.
The Bush administration knew that it no longer wanted Saddam in the chair, but could not
think beyond this one, giant, uncharted leap into the future. Iran has a far greater and more
lasting interest in the affairs of its neighbor and often bitter enemy. As a consequence, the
mullahs are playing a far longer, and more successful, game.
The legacy of unintended consequences continues to define Washington's policy towards Iraq a
generation after the first Gulf War ended. And so too with Syria. In both countries, U.S.
shortcomings have created a historic opportunity for Iran to enhance its influence in Arab
arenas that when not actively hostile to it (Iraq) are at best lukewarm (Syria).
When asked about Syria's relationship with Iran, Farouk Shara'a, longtime foreign minister
and vice president, once explained to a mutual friend, "You don't have to love the woman you
are sleeping with."
Syria has been in bed with Iran for decades. Saddam's war against Iran in the '80s, the rise
of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and most recently the war against the Assad regime in Syria, have
conspired to throw these two unlikely allies into a cold embrace.
Washington has been oblivious to this essentially ambivalent Syrian attitude towards Iran,
and remains equally so to the opportunities it creates to reduce Iran's footprint in postwar
Syria. Now that the war is winding down, the value of Iran's military contribution to Syria is
declining. In parallel, Syria's interest in reducing the power of its erstwhile Iranian and
Russian friends over its destiny increases.
Damascus and Moscow welcomed Iran's critical contribution to defeating the opposition
and giving Washington and its allies a diplomatic bloody nose in the bargain. Russian foreign
minister Sergei Lavrov acknowledges that Iran's presence in Syria -- at the invitation of the
regime -- is legitimate and that it would be "unrealistic" to demand its ouster.
But while Iran's wartime contribution proved critical to victory, neither Assad nor Putin
was displeased to distance Iranian-backed elements from the recent battle front in the south.
Neither has an interest in enabling Tehran to pursue a postwar Syrian agenda towards Lebanon
and Israel. Nor is either enamored with Iran's continuing efforts to reshape the Syrian
military in its image. On these important issues, Iran stands all but alone against an
invisible, de facto coalition that includes Washington and the EU alongside Israel, Moscow, and
the Assad regime itself.
But instead of viewing the end of the war as an opportunity to lessen Iran's value to
the regime and to reduce its footprint in the country, Washington is continuing heedlessly with
failed policies created for an environment that no longer exists. As long as the fighting
continues and the regime's efforts to reassert sovereignty over the entire country are
frustrated by U.S. deployments in the northeast and southeast, Iran's military presence in the
country is secure. Likewise, Washington shows no sign of reconsidering international sanctions
against the regime, which also forces Syria into the arms of Tehran.
A colorblind appraisal of the effects of U.S. policy in Iraq and now Syria would suggest
that Washington is either brilliantly in cahoots with Iran to the latter's benefit or is being
outplayed by weaker but more clear-eyed players. My vote goes squarely to the latter.
Apart from the lingering campaign against ISIS, in every other respect the U.S. effort in
Syria is imploding. Washington under Obama and now Trump has been forced to uneasily
acknowledge the regime's staying power. It has now been reduced to bickering over the details
of Syrian constitutional reform in the postwar era, a waste of time if ever there was one.
Lately, the U.S. secretary of state, from his respected perch, has personally threatened
Iran's key military strategist and architect of its advances in Iraq and Syria, Qassem
Sulemani, a sure sign that the policymaking process at State is frozen.
In the field, Washington has ignominiously abandoned allies in the southern front. And in
the northeast, the Kurds have embarked on the road back to Damascus, imperiling Washington's
deployment there.
Confronted with the disintegration of its diplomatic and military strategy, the Trump
administration is reduced to playing spoiler, obstructing the inevitable restoration of the
regime's sovereignty over the country and continuing the punishing sanctions that have removed
the battered but resilient Syrian private sector from international capital and commercial
markets. This policy fails on two fronts -- it creates more gratuitous misery for the Syrian
people and it undermines the stated U.S. objective of reducing and removing Iranian and
Hezbollah influence in the country. Indeed, continuing to pursue the current policies will
leave the U.S. isolated among friends (Jordan and Israel) as well as frenemy Russia, and will
postpone rather than speed the day that Iran leaves Syria.
Geoffrey Aronson is chairman and co-founder of The Mortons Group and a non-resident
scholar at the Middle East Institute.
A colorblind appraisal of the effects of U.S. policy in Iraq and now Syria would suggest
that Washington is either brilliantly in cahoots with Iran to the latter's benefit or is
being outplayed by weaker but more clear-eyed players. My vote goes squarely to the
latter.
US foreign policy is controlled by the Israeli lobby and to a lesser extent, by the Saudi
lobby. The illegal and unprovoked attacks by the US on Iraq, Libya and Syria were done at the
behest of these lobbies. The only country that has benefited from all this bloodshed is
Israel, which now dominates the Middle East.
Since this obvious truth cannot be said out aloud, we need to pretend we don't know who is
behind all the mayhem in the Middle East, like this pointless article does.
The writer can't see the forest for the trees. Successive U.S. administrations have behaved
irresponsibly to enhance Israel's position in the guise of bring "democracy" to the region.
Washington's failures have created ongoing misery in Iraq, a failed state in Libya and the
destruction of the ancient land of Syria.
The U.S. continues to
pretend it had no role in the creation of the huge refugee problem that followed its
interventions in Libya and Syria.
No lessons learned, the folly is being played out daily in Yemen where the Pentagon is
leading the a campaign of death and destruction alongside its "democratic" allies, the Salman
clan of Arabia and the sheikhs of the Persian Gulf minnow petrostates.
"the stated U.S. objective of reducing and removing Iranian and Hezbollah influence "
I've yet to see a compelling reason for this "stated objective". If you want to argue that
it's an American interest because the Israel Lobby wants it, well, OK, there are politicians
who can be bribed to do Israel's will, but no real American would agree.
One of these days an American president will make an "opening to Iran" as Nixon once made
one to China. Surely we can bury the hatchet with Iran for the sake of a grand bargain that
accomplishes America's one real interest in the Middle East, which is to free ourselves of the
various parasites who entangle us in their messes, and get the hell out of there. Some of us
hoped that Trump might be that president, but it wasn't meant to be.
"The U.S. continues to
pretend it had no role in the creation of the huge refugee problem that followed its
interventions in Libya and Syria."
Which is ridiculous. When you bomb, invade, and arm insurgencies in people's countries, a
lot of people run away. Everybody knows that.
In the case of our bombing, invading, and/or arming insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Libya, and Syria, a lot of people ran away.
Millions ran into Turkey. Millions more ran through Turkey into Greece and then up through
the Balkans into other NATO countries. And still more came up from Africa and sailed away from
the shores of ruined Libya to our NATO allies Italy, Spain, and France.
We did this. Everybody knows we did it. It's absurd to deny it. What's worse is that many of
the allies destabilized by the refugees warned or even begged us not to start those wars. With
no American interest at stake, no real risk assessment, and no exit strategy formulated, we did
it anyway.
Much simpler explanation: For decades, the United States has been the loyal servant of Israel,
and to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia, faithfully carrying out its masters' every dictate.
As an unintended consequence of Israeli/Saudi policy, Iran has grown much stronger.
The only reason that the US foreign policy establishment is rushing headlong into a war with
Iran is because Israel and Saudi Arabia are terrified of the Iran that they have created.
Another theory is that Trump is just like every other spokesmodel for the US part of the
AZ Empire.
He in a SAG actor, with decades of experience in professional entertainment though, so he
knows how to play to his audience. They love the sh*t out of him, even as he sticks it to
them harder and harder.
"... When one believes that patriotism and defense of empire must be synonymous, and that skepticism of international conflict implies sympathy with a foreign power, it is easy to see why someone would seek out the most nefarious answer. ..."
"... But when one is an empire, the indispensable nation, rules just don't apply to it like they do to other, lesser countries. "He [Rohrabacher] is widely suspected of having an ulterior motive." What Chait means is his cocktail party peers widely suspect it. ..."
"... But what he is convinced about is the utility of the U.S. led liberal world order imposed at the point of a gun. ..."
"... Yet at the same time it's quite out of the question to discuss how Israel controls our politics, tells Congress what bills to pass, frog-marches us into wars on her behalf, openly buys both presidential candidates, etc. ..."
"... It's like a prostitute getting out from under her John and complaining in all seriousness about who a man is looking at her legs. It's positively bizarre. ..."
"... Posting Trump as a decision maker is making fun of the global deplorables as being dull. He is an insider joke, as Hillary, in case someone might misfire. ..."
"... As for Brennan, corporate animals as Brennan do strictly nothing that is grounded in original thought, has any kind of career risk, requires physical courage. Corpses keeping corpses warm. Ah, what a time in history to be a journalist, an artesan of linear fairy and horror. How far away from any meaningfulness. The middle classes, digging their own demise. ..."
"... In fact, the crooked Russians Trump knows are small fry among the CIA agents that looted Russia under CIA's puppet ruler Yeltsin. Felix Sater bragged about it, till they shut him up. Trump aided Russian capital flight by helping Russian crooks and traitors launder their money in real estate (because you don't get to be president without running lots of errands for CIA.) It is a truism that the best oppo is slightly distorted tales of the candidate's dirty work for CIA. That way party dupes foam at the mouth demonizing their enemy figurehead and forget about CIA, who runs them all. ..."
"... As for John Brennan, the walking conspiracy machine, he is the godfather of the U.S. intelligence (civilian) war against outsider Trump. ..."
The former intelligence official Chait trots out as an example is John O. Brennan, who has
gone on the record saying there is something fishy about the Trump-Russia relationship that
might even breach on treasonous. "While the fact that the former CIA director has espoused this
theory hardly proves it, perhaps we should give more credence to the possibility that Brennan
is making these extraordinary charges of treason and blackmail at the highest levels of
government because he knows something we don't." Contrary to that impression, Brennan's
statements should make one very skeptical. Or at least that's the logical conclusion of anyone
outside the establishment groupthink previously described. If the former CIA director knows
something the public doesn't, why has no action been taken? If there is solid, irrefutable
evidence that Donald Trump has been compromised by a foreign power, why is John Brennan keeping
it secret? Congress should be alerted, and Vice President Pence sworn in under the Twenty-fifth
Amendment. But in two years since the original start of the investigation, Brennan has
presented no such evidence. In fact, using Brennan as the example shows how blind one can be
when only seeing life through the establishment paradigm. As CIA director, John Brennan not
only provided a real-guard defense
of torture , but oversaw U.S.
military aid to Syrian jihadists allied with Al-Qaeda. If Donald Trump is a traitor to his
country, what does that make Brennan and his aiding and abetting of America's sworn enemy? The
actions of the Obama administration are widely sourced and admitted by public officials, but
Chait pays no mind. That's because people like Chait don't see crimes committed in defense of
the empire as real crimes.
Chait opens his chronology in the year 1987, when Donald Trump both visited Moscow on a
business trip and began voicing open political sentiments. Trump's comments focused on the
United States' relationship with its allies, saying Americans were getting a raw deal. "The
safest assumption is that it's entirely coincidental that Trump launched a national campaign,
with himself as spokesman, built around themes that dovetailed closely with Soviet
foreign-policy goals shortly after his Moscow stay." Chait is nothing short of duplicitous
here, admitting that the whole premise reaches nothing above coincidental while simultaneously
trying to poison the waters. As Trump said, why shouldn't countries that can afford to defend
themselves do so? Why does the burden fall on the American taxpayer to defend the economically
rich people of Germany and Japan? The answer, Chait says, is to defend the "liberal
international order" of the postwar era. An order that requires U.S. military domination of the
planet. Having other countries defend themselves would take away from U.S. preeminence, and
most importantly, U.S. power. The idea of Americans protecting America only would at first
glance to be the logical, even pro-American answer. But it is certainly the anti-hegemony
answer, and to Chait that puts it in the category of a pro-Soviet goal.
In a single sentence, Chait tries to both summarize and dismiss the downturn in
Russian-American relations that accelerated during Barack Obama's second term. "During the
Obama administration, Russia grew more estranged from the United States as its aggressive
behavior toward its neighbors triggered hostile responses from NATO." Perhaps it would be
unreasonable to expect Chait to detail Russian relations with the West over the past 25 years,
such as NATO expansion eastward in contradiction to
previous promises , the U.S. withdraw from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, or the 2008 Russo-Georgian War with violence initiated by
the latter . But to not only ignore the February 2014 coup in Ukraine that initiated recent
hostilities between the U.S. and Russia, but to also put the blame on the latter's "aggressive
behavior," is at best laughable and at worst dishonest. In February of 2014 the democratically
elected government of Ukraine was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the United States
government, an event Chait and his peers do their best to forget .
Russia's subsequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula (containing the Russian naval base at
Sevastopol) was a wholly reactive measure. To say the recent estrangement was triggered by
anything else than western aggressive behavior is factually inaccurate.
A deep-dive into Paul Manafort's past relationships fills the middle of the article, along
with Chait's biased perceptions. "This much was clear in March 2016: The person [Manafort] who
managed the campaign of a pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine was now also managing the campaign
of a pro-Russian candidate in the United States." What makes Donald Trump pro-Russian? "Well I
hope that we do have good relations with Russia. I say it loud and clear, I've been saying it
for years. I think it's a good thing if we have great relationships, or at least good
relationships with Russia. That's very important," says the President. Donald Trump has not
proposed any kind of military alliance with Russia, giving it financial aid of any kind, or
granting it favored-nation status. Simply to want "good" relations with a country is enough to
be pro-Russian, in Chait's characterization. Does that make Trump pro-any country he doesn't
wish to bomb? Is Donald Trump equally pro-Peruvian, pro-Nepalese, and pro-Tanzanian as he is
pro-Russian? Shouldn't it be the proper view of the United States to try to have good working
relations with all foreign powers, especially if that power has thousands of stockpiled nuclear
weapons? A better description of that view would be pro-American .
It is important to emphasize and explain these seemingly small choices of language because
of how much they reveal of Chait's worldview. When one believes that patriotism and defense
of empire must be synonymous, and that skepticism of international conflict implies sympathy
with a foreign power, it is easy to see why someone would seek out the most nefarious
answer. Chait is willing to overlook obvious, mundane explanations to imply Trump has
committed wrong because to Chait, he already has by opposing the international order's chosen
script. "It is possible to construct an innocent explanation for all the lying and skulduggery
[sic], but it is not the most obvious explanation. More likely, collusion between the Russians
and the Trump administration has continued beyond the campaign." Or, perhaps, politics is
naturally a game for liars and the political world is specially made to house them. "Why would
Manafort, who has a law degree from Georgetown and years of experience around white-collar
crime, behave like this? Of all those in Trump's camp, he is the furthest thing from a true
believer, and he lacks any long-standing personal ties to the president or his family, so what
incentive does he have to spend most or all of his remaining years in prison rather than betray
Trump?" The most obvious answer would seem to be that there is nothing to betray; if there is
no grand conspiracy of Russian collusion, Manafort has not spilled the beans for any reason
more inexplicable than there is nothing to spill. Or if that's too boring, there's always the
answer Chait is giddy to suggest. "One way to make sense of his behavior is the possibility
that Manafort is keeping his mouth shut because he's afraid of being killed." Creativity knows
no bounds.
Chait seeks comfort in those who might be even further down the establishment paradigm than
he is. He describes an exchange between House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin
McCarthy in the summer of 2016 where they joke about Trump and California Congressman Dana
Rohrabacher being on Russian President Vladimir Putin's payroll. While criticizing the GOP
leaders' joke as in bad taste, he describes the foreign policy positions taken by Rohrabacher.
He once again uses the phrase "pro-Russian" to describe them, falling into the same verbal trap
as before. Of interest, Chait mentions Rohrabacher's denouncement of U.S. opposition to the
Crimean annexation as "hypocrisy" considering America's foreign policy. The implication is that
this is some sort of hokum, but it is nothing more than showing American self-awareness. Verbal
reproaches to Russia by the U.S. government are drown out by the facts, including the overthrow
of the Ukrainian government just days before Russian actions in Crimea, and the 2003 invasion
of Iraq which stands to this day as the biggest crime of the 21 st century. But
when one is an empire, the indispensable nation, rules just don't apply to it like they do to
other, lesser countries. "He [Rohrabacher] is widely suspected of having an ulterior motive."
What Chait means is his cocktail party peers widely suspect it.
What follows is a description of Trump's actions as President regarding Russia, which seem
to belie Chait's point of a special closeness. Trump was apparently "apoplectic" when political
realities compelled him to sign new sanctions on Russia in the summer of 2017. Since those
sanctions ran counter to the explicit platform Trump campaigned and won on, that would seem to
be a normal reaction to any policy reversal. Trump says he thinks Russia should be allowed back
into the G7. The idea that a geopolitical power player that approaches nuclear parity with the
United States should be involved in such a global forum doesn't require further explanation.
During that G7 conference Trump expressed the belief that Crimea rightfully belongs to Russia
because the people there speak Russian. He's not wrong; the people of Crimea are ethnically
Russian, speak the language, and culturally identify with Russia proper. The people of Crimea
should have the right to vote in a fair, internationally monitored referendum on whether to be
a part of Ukraine or Russia. That's the right of self-determination, an American goal if there
ever was one. Chait says Putin engineered the end of the U.S.-South Korea military exercises
during the recent negotiations with North Korea. Such an insinuation, outright ignoring the
months of talks that have been taking place between North and South Korea, the stated goals of
the Moon Jae-in administration, and South Korean public opinion, is naïve to the highest
degree. That sort of western-centric view, that the United States is always the decision maker,
is further proof of the establishment imperialistic mindset Chait has written his entire
article from. He concludes with the foreboding note that Trump is about to meet with Putin in a
special summit next month. Somehow Trump meeting with Putin 19 months into his presidential
term is scandalous, while George Bush meeting Putin 5 months into his term, and Barack Obama 6
months into his term (in Moscow no less!) garnered so such suspicious coverage.
Chait, to his credit, almost makes it through the entire article without pulling out one of
the most overused, most debunked
storylines of "Russiagate." The storyline that anyone who says Russia was not behind the 2016
Democratic National Committee hack (or leak )
is " contradicting the conclusion of every U.S. intelligence agency." That conclusion was
reached not by the U.S. intelligence community but handpicked analysts from only four of
seventeen agencies. "But who is bending the president's ear to split the Western alliance and
placate Russia? His motive for these foreign-policy moves is obviously strong enough in his
mind to be worth prolonging an investigation he is desperate to terminate." It cannot be that
good relations with Russia is self-evidently beneficial to the United States, or that Donald
Trump is a genuine believer in that policy. Jonathan Chait is so enamored with established
Washington foreign policy that no disagreement can be anything other than odious.
To reiterate, Jonathan Chait is not convinced that what he wrote is the truth. He admits
that there is no conclusive evidence that Donald Trump was a Russian intelligence asset in 1987
or any other year. But what he is convinced about is the utility of the U.S. led liberal world
order imposed at the point of a gun. The biases of his language towards permanent military
hegemony run through his writing. This leads to the discoloring or even misrepresentation of
the facts.
Hunter DeRensis is a senior at George Mason University majoring in History and
minoring in Public Policy & Administration. You can follow him on Twitter
[@HunterDeRensis]
But what he is convinced about is the utility of the U.S. led liberal world order
imposed at the point of a gun.
He's channeling Lenin/Trotsky:
But what they were convinced about was the utility of the Bolshevik led soviet world order
imposed at the point of a gun.
Same people, same totalitarianism, same repression – the difference is that the U.S.
totalitarians don't quite yet have the absolute power they need to liquidate the
"Deplorables".
The truly absurd thing about all this is that people profess concern about Russia influencing
our poloitical process. If she does, it's in various ways so haphazard, trivial, marginal,
and ineffectual as to verge on the illusory.
Yet at the same time it's quite out of the question to discuss how Israel
controls our politics, tells Congress what bills to pass, frog-marches us into wars on
her behalf, openly buys both presidential candidates, etc.
It's like a prostitute getting out from under her John and complaining in all
seriousness about who a man is looking at her legs. It's positively bizarre.
If only Russian influence was all we had to worry about. Let's get that Israeli implant
out of our cerebral cortex -- then think about whether that Russian fungus on our toenail
really is a problem.
Doesn't the story of the little boy who cried wolf apply here?
Yes, but point being that this seems to be the consensus among the many factions –
mostly of the left (aka soft neoliberals --NNB) , and the retarded left(those who think the
Democratic Party has their back, known as RL – Retarded Left). But some on the hard
right are on board too.
As many contrary, but not mainstream, articles have pointed out – it's faith based,
like a religion. No hard evidence is ever needed, and that is why it keeps getting more
cult-like the more time goes by. Soon there will be a condition named for all the
nonbelievers, and medications prescribed.
Yet at the same time it's quite out of the question to discuss how Israel controls our
politics, tells Congress what bills to pass, frog-marches us into wars on her behalf,
openly buys both presidential candidates, etc.
It would be interesting to see a poll of how many Americans really understand that? 1%
maybe? I don't know, but that's the rub – how effective the corporate owned media has
over the mass mentality of their captive audience.
Yesterday evening, here in the Netherlands, I saw a former Obama adviser interviewed, who
complained about the Atlantic alliance having been built up in 70 years destroyed in a few
days.
Knowing nothing about history and obvious facts seems to be the rule these days.
Until 1917 Europe had intensive trade with Russia.
Why not resume this trade ?
Meaning, since there is nothing much to write about in the heat of the Northern
hemisphere, anything goes. A classic example of inducing irrelevant thought in braindeads.
Trump, true or not? Well, Trump does not matter.
Posting Trump as a decision maker is making fun of the global deplorables as being
dull. He is an insider joke, as Hillary, in case someone might misfire.
As for Brennan, corporate animals as Brennan do strictly nothing that is grounded in
original thought, has any kind of career risk, requires physical courage. Corpses keeping
corpses warm. Ah, what a time in history to be a journalist, an artesan of linear fairy and
horror. How far away from any meaningfulness. The middle classes, digging their own
demise.
This summer will see more then usual "snatch a bone" and have the pack run with it.
Amen.
Trump visits unsteady, dilapidated Moscow in 1987. He notices that the USSR is not the
all-powerful mega-threat it may have been in the 70s.
Trump also visits various glistening European capitals and notices the much higher level
of development.
He then reads that America is paying for the defence of Europe against the USSR. He
notices that this doesn't make sense. Europe has more than enough capacity to defend itself.
America might better spend that money elsewhere.
Two decades later New York Times writer insinuates that Trump could be a sleeper Soviet
agent for coming to this conclusion. Even though Trump was proven right by events.
Here is an interesting historical look at how the United States responded when it believed
that Russia/the USSR was using propaganda against Washington:
I really didn't read very far in this. But let's stop and end with Chait's comment:
"Russia was already broadcasting its strong preference for Trump through the media."
Well hmmm. Considering that Hillary was all but declaring war on Russia and an even-bet to
get us into a shooting war with them, and considering that nearly all the other Republicans
were members of NeoCon incorporated, and considering that Jewish media hysteria about Russia
was ramping up by the day, and considering that Trump was the ONLY candidate poking holes in
the NeoCon narrative, then Russia would have been pretty stupid NOT to prefer Trump.
Yeah, I might prefer the candidate who was far and away the least likely to drop nuclear
bombs on my nation too.
It's simply amazing how such extreme story telling is allowed to avoid the fact that the US
is wasting its resources on pointless conflicts thruout the world while the nation decays.
Also surprising? The fact that supposedly sane political and military leaders can continue
to demand ever more conventional military spending based on a fantasy that war with
China/Russia wouldn't go nuclear.
Where are the liberals with any principles? Or is that a contradiction in terms? Why not
support Trump against the warmongers and fix the country instead?
The linchpin of the TrumpRussianSpy!!1! notion is identifying the Russian mafiya with the
Russian government. Every crooked Russian gets the epithet Putin-linked, close to Putin, or
some variant.
In its purest form you see Amy Knight writing in CIA house organ Daily Beast, "The real
question is where does the Russian criminal state end and the criminal underworld begin, and
how do they work together in what amounts to a new murder incorporated?" This is classic
projection by CIA. It's CIA that recruits every kind of organized crime as agents and
cutouts. They project this trait onto the entire Russian state.
In fact, the crooked Russians Trump knows are small fry among the CIA agents that
looted Russia under CIA's puppet ruler Yeltsin. Felix Sater bragged about it, till they shut
him up. Trump aided Russian capital flight by helping Russian crooks and traitors launder
their money in real estate (because you don't get to be president without running lots of
errands for CIA.) It is a truism that the best oppo is slightly distorted tales of the
candidate's dirty work for CIA. That way party dupes foam at the mouth demonizing their enemy
figurehead and forget about CIA, who runs them all.
"As CIA director, John Brennan not only provided a real-guard defense of torture, but oversaw
U.S. military aid to Syrian jihadists allied with Al-Qaeda. If Donald Trump is a traitor to
his country, what does that make Brennan and his aiding and abetting of America's sworn
enemy? "
Alinsky/Clinton rule: Always accuse your opponent of what YOU are doing.
Why does no one believe the signals intelligence arms of USA allies, even if they say they
stumbled upon communications between the Trump campaign and Russia (as far back as 2015) and
became concerned enough to alert their US counterparts?
I respond to your question with an observation.. the intelligence arms of most of the
nations are interlocked globally. The so called Intelligence groups have done so many regime
changes, false flag operations, tv fake interviews, and contributed to so much false and
misleading and war attitude generating propaganda, that no one believes . If an intelligence
group were to say it was raining outside, those outsiders interested to know, would have to
go look for themselves.
As long as leaders of nations, elected, military, contractor, or bureaucrat operate in
secret, make people who work for them sign NDAs, criminalize truth speaking whistle blowers,
operate as super top secret projects, redirect public socially needed money to fund war
machines, use technology and access to spy on people, or threaten the lives or well being of
human beings who happened to live in a nation that is unfriendly, for no apparent or valid
public stated reason, no reasonable person will ever believe the signal intelligence arms of
USA or its allies.. Colin Powell comes to mind! Secrecy, intentional falsity, 24/7
surveillance, controlled, limited and gated access to knowledge or information, and silence
maintained when the facts should have been make known, has produced a "public enemy at large"
response.
if these agencies presented a hungry angry wolf in plain view, most people would wonder
"what is it" in disguise. One of the first rules in taking over a nation, is to prevent those
who lead from being heard. So not having reliable information constitutes a very dangerous
situation, but it is one that cannot be easily remedied until 9/11, Holocaust, and all kinds
of global events are completely and fully disclosed, and those responsible held
accountable.
It was a speech given to veterans before the election in which she nearly promised
military confrontation with Russia in response to supposed cyber attacks. Shown on YouTube,
ignored by MSM.
"Yet at the same time it's quite out of the question to discuss how Israel controls our
politics "
Yep. It is also third rail to discuss how Israel and Saudi Arabia often work in tandem to
influence U.S. foreign policy. Saudi Arabia has the mountain of cash; Israel has the Mossad.
Jeffrey Epstein is an example of this influence operation at work. As for John Brennan,
the walking conspiracy machine, he is the godfather of the U.S. intelligence (civilian) war
against outsider Trump.
If, like me, you were impressed by the magisterial comprehensiveness of a chart that accompanied
New
York 's cover story , in which Chait outlined his theory that President Trump has
been an agent of the Russian government since 1987, you might assume that he cannot have
missed this crucial personage and is sitting on the info until more becomes clear.
Noble as his intentions might seem, I am not so sure that the revelations can wait this
long. Allow me, in the interest of national security, to rehearse the facts. On April 5,
2013, more than two years before he announced his candidacy for the presidency, Donald Trump
made a cryptic reply to a tweet from an account with the handle @_Mickey_Mouse. "Thanks
Basil," the then-businessman wrote. Unfortunately the tweet to which our future president was
responding seems to have disappeared, along with any information about the account's
provenance. Whoever this "Basil" was, he seems to have covered his tracks exceedingly
well.
But not well enough. Consider the clues that remain in plain sight. "Basil" is, of course,
a Westernized version of "Vasily," one of the most common Russian male first names. St.
Basil, who has given his name to the cathedral that is the single most iconic piece of
Russian architecture, is also the patron saint of Russia and a popular symbol of reactionary
nationalism. A Kremlin operative, of course, would be careful not to select a Twitter handle
easily associated with his employer; he would pick something anodyne and American-sounding.
What could answer better to these descriptions than a cartoon character who helped to win
World War II? If only, you might be thinking, Trump himself were more careful, he would have
avoided using this operative's actual codename in a public forum.
But this is a misapprehension. If there is anything we have learned about the pattern of
Trump-Russia collusion and the antics of the coterie of online nationalists, white
supremacists, anime Nazis, and 4chan memers, it is that they cannot resist making their
little in-jokes and dropping seemingly clever references into their communications. Consider
the wider significance of the date of Trump's tweet. On April 5, in the Year of Our Lord
1242, the great Russian general Alexander Nevsky defeated the Teutonic Knights at Lake Pepius
in the famous Battle of the Ice, an event of enormous significance for nationalists who see
the knights as representative of a proto-liberal globalizing tendency already present in the
European culture of the Middle Ages.
But why that day in 2013, of all years? What is the significance of that gap of some 771
years? Please. To the uninitiated layman this no doubt seems baffling. To someone who
understands the tech-obsessed culture of online neoreactionary pranksters, it is an obvious
(and somewhat amusing) throwback. As any programmer knows, 771 is the code page used in DOS
to produce text in the Russian alphabet. It is, in other words, a retro racist joke, the kind
of thing whose importance would no doubt have been lost on Trump himself while seeming hugely
important (and absolutely hilarious) to "Basil."
But all of this is a distraction from the real question of what exactly Trump and Basil
were discussing. Alas, it may be a long time indeed before most of us know, but that doesn't
mean Bob Mueller doesn't already. It appears that Basil's account has been suspended by
Twitter, which may be the result of a subpoena. It is possible that sources close to Mueller
have told Chait that it would be for the best if Basil, whose communications with the
president and other Kremlin-linked Twitter accounts are in the process of being recovered and
analyzed, remained a secret for the time being. On the other hand, it is possible that this
exchange has escaped both Chait's and Mueller's attention, in which case I draw attention to
it here in the hope of a little-noticed but obvious example of collusion -- one more piece in
the giant, seemingly unsolvable puzzle.
I give voice to the above lunatic fancy, which I was able to concoct with almost minimal
effort in a matter of about 30 seconds with the use of Twitter, Google, and Wikipedia, in the
hope of reminding readers how easy it is to put together a plausible-sounding hypothesis if
you are already convinced of certain premises. In this case, that premise is the fact that
despite the lack of any real evidence, there exists or existed a high-level conspiracy
between Trump and various members of his 2016 campaign and various agents of the Russian
government, up to and potentially including Vladimir Putin himself, to elect Trump president
of the United States two years ago.
This premise has been widely adopted and reiterated in American media on the basis of a
six degrees of Kevin Bacon-like game involving persons as unlikely as a model who once had an
affair with an oligarch who was acquainted with a former Soviet-era ambassador who knows the
president of Ukraine, for whom Paul Manafort once did lobbying many years before his brief
employment by the Trump campaign (phew), and by the appellation of vague but
sinister-sounding adjectives ("Kremlin-linked," "Russia-backed").
Add to this perfervid climate of speculation people's concerns about the species of online
nerd culture known as the "alt-right" and you can pretty much accuse anybody who has ever had
anything to do with Trump of anything. A week before Chait's article appeared, thousands of
persons became convinced that a hitherto-unnoticed press release from the Department of
Homeland Security was
actually a coded neo-Nazi message because the brief declarative sentence in the headline
reminded some observers of a racist slogan that also contains 14 words and because in one
statistic used in the story the natural number 88, which is associated with admirers of Adolf
Hitler, appeared. Did I mention that, like neo-Nazism, which, has its so-called "14 words,"
the press release also contained 14 of what could be considered points, although only 13 of
them appear alongside typographical bullets? Even MSNBC's Chris Hayes, a vociferously
anti-Trump but otherwise level-headed journalist, briefly fell for this nonsense.
The easy flow of ill-gotten Russian money into the economies of Western Europe and the
United States is one of the great unsung evils of the post-Cold War era. The oligarchs do not
particularly care who does their dirty laundry or sells them luxury apartments. This is why
it would be just as
easy , if not in fact
easier , to make a chart like Chait's showing the connections between Hillary Clinton,
Russian business interests, and the Kremlin. Barack Obama's insistence to Dmitry Medvedev that he would
have "more flexibility" after the 2012 election is, considered out of context, subject to the
least generous or responsible interpretation, far more sinister than anything of which Trump
or anyone in his circles has been accused. But the truth is that none of these connections
are especially significant. We are all connected somehow to Russia, just as we are all
complicit in the spoliation of the Third World and the abuse of indigenous peoples because we
all buy products made abroad and use the internet and own stock.
Likewise, there is so much information available about so many people that it has never
been easier to insinuate connections and intentions and conspiracies into meaningless
coincidences. Imagine what Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who unsuccessfully
prosecuted an area businessman for his supposed involvement in a nonexistent conspiracy to
assassinate President John K. Kennedy, would have been able to accomplish with the resources
of the internet at his disposal. The ease with which we can access information has made it
easier than ever for semi-intelligent persons to concoct lurid stories. It should also make
it easier for those of us who are sensible to dismiss them out of hand.
This is why I do not think it is worth calling New York magazine irresponsible
for publishing conspiracy theories. Bores and scolds might suggest that at a time when the
president seems to be getting away with painting any media outlet that criticizes him as
"fake news," it might be a good idea to stick to facts and leave this kind of thing to
ResistanceHole . I disagree. New York has no duty to its readers except
that of entertainment. If squinting to try to tell the difference between the red line
connecting two oligarchs and the green one linking an unknown Florida-based GOP hack to a
longtime party donor is your idea of fun, knock yourself out. But don't pretend that what
you're reading is journalism.
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
Here it comes, the moment we've been waiting for, when Trump and Putin meet in Helsinki to
officially launch the Destruction of Democracy, and very possibly the Apocalypse itself. That's
right, folks, once again, it appears we're looking at the end of everything, because according
to the corporate media, on July 16, 2018, Trump is probably going to
disband NATO so that Putin can invade the Baltic states, then Germany, then the rest of
Europe, and then presumably order an all-out thermonuclear strike on the United States, which
will pretty much end civilization as we know it. Or perhaps the plan is to do away with NATO,
withdraw
all American troops from Poland , let Putin rape and pillage Western Europe, and then have
North Korea nuke both coasts of the US mainland (and Canada, of course) so that a
Putin-Nazified Middle Amerika will have carte blanche to exterminate the Mexicans and make
women wear those "Handmaid" costumes, or some other ridiculously paranoid scenario, possibly
involving Susan Sarandon as some kind of Putin-Nazi triple agent.
Tragically, the global neoliberal establishment is completely powerless to stop Trump and
Putin from carrying out this evil scheme (whatever it turns out to be in the end), because even
the US Intelligence Community has to obey the law, after all, and not do anything sneaky, or
unethical, not even with the fate of democracy at stake. No, unlike the Russians, who go around
blatantly
poisoning people with novichok oatmeal more or less whenever they like, the global
capitalist ruling classes' hands are tied by their own integrity. All they can do is watch in
horror as these two Hitlerian megalomaniacs destroy their entire global empire and establish a
thousand-year Putin-Nazi Reich.
Thank God at least the corporate media are raising their collective voices in protest. In
a recent piece in The Washington Post , Max Bergmann of the Center for American
Progress warns that "this is a summit about appeasement, and we should be terrified that Trump
is going to sell out America and its allies." According to Bergmann, Trump might "accidentally"
share state secrets with Putin, or promise to reduce support for
our freedom-loving Ukrainian Nazis , or stop trying to overthrow the Syrian government so
that Syria, with the help of Russia and Iran, can launch a sneak attack on Israel and drive
"the Jews" into the sea. Worse still, Bergmann speculates, he might make "secret agreements"
with Putin without telling the editors of The Washington Post , which God help us all if
that ever happened.
Not to be out-apocalypsed by The Post ,
Roger Cohen of
The New York Times
published a full-blown dystopian vision wherein Trump, Putin, Marine Le Pen, the AfD, and a
variety of other globalist-hating Hitler-alikes form "the Alliance of Authoritarian and
Reactionary States" (the "AARS"), disband the European Union and NATO, impose international
martial law, and start ethnically cleansing the West of immigrants. Matteo Salvini and Horst
Seehofer, decked out in full Putin-Nazi regalia, personally supervise the genocidal purges,
which frightened Europeans come to support after Putin's irresistible "fake news" bots
brainwash them into believing that a little Russian girl named "Tatiana" has been abducted by
Moroccan migrants off a beach along the Costa del Sol.
... ... ...
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
But to not only ignore the February 2014 coup in Ukraine that initiated recent hostilities between the U.S. and Russia, but to
also put the blame on the latter's "aggressive behavior," is at best laughable and at worst dishonest. In February of 2014 the democratically
elected government of Ukraine was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the United States government, an event Chait and his peers
do their best to forget
. Russia's subsequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula (containing the Russian naval base at Sevastopol) was a wholly reactive
measure. To say the recent estrangement was triggered by anything else than western aggressive behavior is factually inaccurate.
But to not only ignore the February 2014 coup in Ukraine that initiated recent hostilities between the U.S. and Russia,
but to also put the blame on the latter's "aggressive behavior," is at best laughable and at worst dishonest.
You lost me at that point. There was no coup in 2014. That's simply a Putinist lie. Yanukovich ran when he was going to be
brought to book for the murders he ordered on the Maidan. He was interviewed last year and was completely evasive when it came
to questions about the killings he ordered. He's now a fugitive from justice and was righteously removed from office when he ran
for asylum in Russia.
It's long past time for idiots like yourself to get the facts and quit parroting Putin's lies.
I left the Democratic Party yesterday, because I cannot support the first American President who ever installed anywhere in
the world a nazi regime -- it has never happened before, not even under a Republican President; and, until Obama, I had always
assumed that if it ever would happen, it could come only under a Republican President, never under any Democratic one. But I was
wrong -- mortifyingly wrong -- because Barack Obama did this in Ukraine (see here and here for the evidence); he is the first-ever
U.S. President to install a nazi regime anywhere, and so I wrote to my Representative seeking Obama's impeachment by the Democrats
in Congress; and, yesterday, that person, a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives, told me that, notwithstanding
Barack Obama's having unquestionably done this, this Democratic Representative will not introduce on the floor of the U.S. House
(which is the only place where a bill of impeachment can be introduced) a bill of impeachment against this -- what is the appropriate
term for such a person, if not a -- nazi U.S. President. (That's nazi as an ideology, racist fascist, not as a party designation,
which is merely a party's name.) Simply because Obama calls himself a 'Democrat,' that Representative in the House will not introduce
a bill to impeach him. There was no argument on the facts; the facts weren't at issue here at all; it's just that Obama calls
himself a 'Democrat.' That's all ..
Ukraine's Pres. Poroshenko Says Overthrow of Yanukovych Was a Coup
.. The Italian newspaper Il Giornale, and Italian Mediaset Matrix TV, Chanel 5, issued, on November 15th, confessions by a
few of the snipers who on 20 February 2014 fired down into the crowd of "Maidan" demonstrators and police, in order "to sow chaos,"
as they say that they had been instructed to do.
The Georgian mercenary Alexander Revazishvilli said: "Everyone started shooting two or three shots at a time. It went on for
fifteen, twenty minutes. We had no choice. We were ordered to shoot both on the police and the demonstrators, without any difference."
This account is entirely consistent with the leaked phone-conversation on 26 February 2014 in which Urmas Paet, the investigator
whom the EU had assigned to determine whom to blame for the snipers and their massive bloodshed during the overthrow, informed
the EU's Foreign Affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, that the anti-Yanukovych, pro-U.S. and pro-EU side, were to blame, and that
Paet had just been informed of this by Petro Poroshenko (who shortly thereafter became elected as Ukraine's figurehead President).
Paet said: ..
The kookification of the "mainstream"
continues, with none other than Jonathan Chait – the most conventional sort of boring corporate
liberal –
producing
an
unhinged diatribe
purporting to prove
that Donald Trump has been a Russian agent since 1987
–
and that his path to the presidency was paved by his Russian handlers, who were planning it all
along.
And not to be outdone, formerly rational person Marcy Wheeler, whose investigations
as "emptywheel" won her some renown,
is
now claiming
that she not only has definitive proof of Trump's collusion with the Kremlin, but
that, as a result, she was forced to turn one of her sources into the FBI for some vague
cloak-and-dagger-ish reason.
I looked in on the Chait production, and came upon his reiteration of the Alfa Bank computer
link – this was a story, you'll recall, that
claimed there was a stream of communications
between this "Kremlin-connected" bank and the Trump organization.
This, we were told, was
almost certainly Vladimir Putin sending instructions to his zombie-agents in the Trump White House.
Yes, this was actually the story, backed up by several computer "experts" – except it turned out to
be
advertising spam
.
Chait repeats this story,
adding it on top of the several dozen other conspiracy factoids
he throws in the mix – but without mentioning that the computer signals were simply ad-bots.
On the basis of this, and a string of other "interactions" with Russians, we are supposed to
believe that the omnipotent Russian intelligence agencies hatched a plot 30 years ago to put Trump
into the White House. This is a conspiracy theory that's so shoddy and far-fetched that not even
Alex Jones would touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Which brings us to an interesting question: do these people really believe their
own craziness?
In some instances, it's
pure psychopathology.
That's the case, I believe, for
Marcy Wheeler, Louise Mensch, and the more active online Twitter-paranoids. These people have been
so shocked by the unexpected – the election of Trump – that they have been forced into a dubious
mental state bordering on insanity.
However, in the case of Jonathan Chait, it's pure viciousness and cynicism.
He
even says
of his own theory that it's "unlikely but possible."
It's just a show for
the suckers. The same is true for most of the other journalists who have enlisted in #TheResistance
and given up any pretense at objectivity: they are simply doing what they do best, and that is
taking dictation from their spookish sources. The treatment of Russia-gate in the media parallels
precisely what occurred with Iraq's storied "weapons of mass destruction" – reporters are taking it
all on faith, and they don't even necessarily believe it. Thus the biggest hoax since Piltdown Man
is reported as "fact." And of course all this is coming to the fore as Trump takes on NATO and our
European "allies."
For anti-interventionists, Trump's trip to Europe could not be more timely or
enlightening.
He went to the NATO meeting with a few admonitory
tweets
up
front
,
complaining that America pays far more than a fair share of the alliance's monetary costs, and no
sooner does he get off the plane than he
notes
that
for all the anti-Russian rhetoric coming out of our allies, the Germans are cuddling up to the
Russians on the energy front with the Nord Stream II pipeline. Merkel shot back that Germany is,
after all, an independent country and can do what it likes. True, but then why the weird
contradiction between claiming that Russia is a military threat and also setting up the mechanism
of energy dependence?
Before getting on the plane for his European sojourn, the President
reiterated
his
longstanding position:
"We pay far too much and they pay far too little. The United States is spending far more
on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable."
And the cost is not just measured in monetary terms: there's also the incalculable cost
of risking war, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which obligates us to come to the aid of a NATO
ally that's under attack, or at least that claims to be under attack.
In which case, the
government of tiny Montenegro, with a population of a bit over half a million, could declare that
the Russians are trying to pull off a coup, and US troops would be in country "defending" it
against an incursion that may not even exist.
Take a look
at the
Euro-weenies squirming in their seats at that "bilateral breakfast," which was turned into a
lecture by the President about why the burden of empire should not fall only on our shoulders.
Pompeo and Kay Bailey Hutchinson don't look happy, either, but that's just too bad, now isn't it?
The President is speaking truth to the once high-and-mighty – and more power to him!
Meanwhile, the main event is going to be in Helsinki: NATO is just a sideshow.
After all, militarily the alliance is really nothing but the United States and a few Brits: the
Europeans carry little actual weight. The really serious business will take place with Putin,
although there is a relentless propaganda campaign in progress to prevent Trump from making the
Helsinki summit a success.
What must be addressed in Helsinki is the backsliding of both countries when it comes to
preventing a nuclear catastrophe. The program to find and secure loose nukes, which became a
problem after the breakup of the Soviet Union, needs to be renewed, in addition to the mutual
disarmament agreements that have
fallen
by the wayside
, with the US and the Russians
re-arming
.
As tensions between Washington and Moscow rise, the possibility of a nuclear conflict increases,
along with the chances of an
accidenta
l nuclear exchange.
The nuclear death
machine is on automatic, with all kinds of scenarios where it could be set off by something other
than an enemy attack
: a terrorist strike in Washington, D.C., or anywhere, involving
nuclear material, or simply a computer software glitch. Americans would be horrified to learn just
how close we are to an extinction event.
The Trump-haters would rather the President fail than give him credit for securing
the peace.
They would much prefer to wage a new cold war with Russia than put an end
to the horrific threat of utter annihilation that's cast a dark shadow over the world for all this
time. In preferring universal ruin to the vindication of their enemies, they fit the very
definition of what it means to be evil.
Trump is out to transform US foreign policy by – finally! – recognizing the reality that's been
in place since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The old
structures that served us when Communism was thought to be a threat to Europe are no longer
functional, and haven't been for quite some time.
NATO today is nothing but a gigantic
subsidy to two major beneficiaries: our European "allies" and the big arms manufacturers such as
Boeing, Raytheon, etc. The current arrangements allow the European welfare states to huddle under
the US nuclear shield while dispensing all kinds of goodies to their citizens. It's quite a racket
for all concerned: as NATO countries must continually update their military equipment to meet
rising standards, American taxpayers are footing most of the bill.
I have a good friend. Intelligent, usually quite well balanced, but
a bad case of TDS. She keeps falling back on "where there is smoke
there must be fire....we keep hearing about Russia and Trump, so it
must be true."
I have yet to point out to her that is precisely
what was behind Goering's philosophy of "tell a lie often enough and
people will believe it to be true". After all, she is also jewish,
and the Goering reference might make her head explode.
RussiaGate was spawned as Trump was calling her out for her
crimes, the ties to the Uranium One scam were obvious and
public. So in typical fashion she paints her opponent with
the the false brush of her crimes to deflect the reality.
Besides the MI6 need to smear the Russians was first on the
agenda anyway, can't have the Russians looking good on
anything.
Thank Q for exposing all the closet zionists. When you
replace the word "Russiagate" with "Israelgate", then all
the 'fire & fury' over the Trump presidency actually
starts to make sense.
No it's just a hollow divide and conquer meme, to keep the
sheeple arguing about nonsense and keep the flow of fake
news at a high level. Don't give the sheeple a moment of a
break, they might start to think for themselves.
I think deep down these people know it's nonsense, they just hate
Trump so much they feel the need to be dishonest just to try and
hurt him.
It blows my mind because these are the same people who would
have a meltdown if a prosecutor went after a black man with these
tactics. Somehow they feel that a malicious prosecution is
acceptable just this one time.
Ancient hatred of ethnic Russians from the old Khazarian empire,
now known as 'Ukraine'...
It is no wonder, nor surprise that
Khazarian cockroaches who infest the halls of U.S. foreign policy
are apoplectic regarding any warming of common-sense relations
with Russia.
Trump Acceptance Resistance Disorder induced hysteria. So, crazy. And
yet, many are some of the most cynical creatures you'll ever meet- true
misanthropes. So there's that.
how about something interesting.You know about dick eater McAffe and
the crypto world.We all know the dem/lib shit about Russia and Trump
is already complete bullshit.
Yes, the Libtards that think they're smarter than everyone else are
the most trapped by their ego.
Present fact, logic and reasonable
discourse and these geniuses lose their sheet and produce fallacy,
fake news, and eventually run away from the conversation or end up in
tears.
The anti-Russia hysteria comes from all over the Left as well as parts
of the Right...
But as with Chait, Mensch, Kristol, Appelbaum, Gessen
and on and on and on you find Jews wildly over-represented in the Putin
bashing (which is one thing - he's a politician in bed with some bad
hombres and not at all above criticism) and Russia itself.
It's a hell of a LONG list the evil bastards have going-to try to
destroy western civilization with cutesy little names to deflect from the
truth about what they REALLY support.
But hey, what do I know?
I'm sure there are a lot people who can easily add to my list. Have at
it.
I actually like Russia and hope for a good relationship with them, but the
US must fail and Russia is the best cheer-leading on this site has become
unbearable.
I see lots of folks here who want both the US and Russia to succeed.
That's one of the reasons we support the President and his policy of
peace, commerce and honest friendship with old Cold War enemies. It's
not 1949/1950 anymore.
So the Russians realized that US equipment is crap and can be handled by
what they already have.
No real surprise there. U.S. military equipment
is in many cases relying on electronic components from the 70's and 80's
rather than upgrading their electronic systems.
Special counsel Robert
Mueller is again asking for a delay in the sentencing of former national security adviser
Michael Flynn, according to court documents filed Friday.
The special counsel and attorneys for Flynn are asking for two more months before scheduling
his sentencing, requesting to file another status report by Aug. 24.
"Due to the status of the Special Counsel's investigation, the parties do not believe that
this matter is ready to be scheduled for a sentencing hearing at this time," states a joint
status report filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Friday.
This is the third time that prosecutors have asked to delay sentencing for Flynn, who
pleaded
guilty in December to lying to FBI agents investigating Russian interference in the 2016
election.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the clergyman who defied the German Nazi regime and got executed for his
resistance, once observed that "war is not the opposite of peace, 'security' is the opposite
of peace." I might also add it is the opposite of freedom and civilization as well, because
both require trust.
Bombing for Votes: Public opinion shifts during the Iraq war and implications for future
conflicts
Despite the recent summit in Singapore, which mostly made for good television and little
substance, North Korea appears to be
quickly ignoring any promises -- whether implicit, explicit, or imagined -- made to
President Trump to dismantle its nuclear program. In Iran,
Trump's decision to withdraw from the six-party nuclear deal and the re-imposition of
sanctions has created a possibility that Iran will resume pursuing a nuclear weapon of its own.
The common thread between Iran and North Korea, of course, is the continued march of nuclear
proliferation and, with it, an elevated chance of the US initiating armed conflict as a means
to slow or stop such proliferation.
In this post, I'm not going to speculate how probable armed conflict with either Iran or
North Korea might be (although I might take a shot at it in a future post). Instead, I'm
interested in what the public reaction to such a conflict would be and how it would affect
support for Trump, especially in the run up to an election.
To estimate public reaction, it's useful to consider how the public mood shifted throughout
the course of the Iraq war. Even 15 years after it started, the Iraq war continues to be
divisive. As shown in the chart below
from Pew Research , when the Iraq invasion was first launched in March, 2003 a large
majority of the country supported it as the "right decision." By early 2005, however, that
support eroded and has remained relatively stable since then.
Similar to the start of the Iraq war, other research has shown a public "rally around the
flag" effect at the outset of military action. One study , for example,
looked at 41 US foreign policy crises and found the average effect was a boost of 1.4
percentage points to the president's approval rating. But, when the military action was large
enough to merit front-page coverage by the New York Times, that effect jumped by another 8
percentage points, representing a significant lift for any president.
Considering these examples, a president with a low approval rating might be tempted to
initiate an armed conflict in the run-up to an election as a way to shore up public support, at
least temporarily. Given Trump's lack of scruples about any action that might in some way
benefit him, such a scenario is within the realm of possibility for the 2018 midterm elections
or the 2020 presidential election.
Research on the influence of major events on presidential approval ratings, however, shows
that the public reaction to armed conflict cannot be taken for granted. A research paper
recently
published in Presidential Studies Quarterly looked at how approval ratings fluctuated over
the course of George W. Bush's presidency and analyzed the causes of those fluctuations. The
authors reasoned that Bush's presidency was ideal for studying presidential support because it
was so eventful -- the September 11 th terrorist attacks happened during his first
year in office, then Bush initiated large-scale invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the
Great Recession started toward the end of his presidency.
To examine factors that influenced Bush's public support, they modeled his approval rating
based on environmental variables (unemployment, inflation, consumer confidence, battle deaths),
major event variables (9/11 attacks, Iraq invasion, market crash), and ordinary event variables
(positive and negative news coverage of international and domestic events). The environmental
variables were weighted based on
Gallup's monthly Most Important Problem poll , which allows the model to consider the
importance of these variables' salience in the public mindset. (For those who are interested,
they used a Newey-West estimator to build the model to account for heteroscedasticity and
autocorrelation in the errors.)
After creating the model, they grouped the independent variables into three categories:
economic, war, and terror. These categories allowed the authors to examine the impact of each
on Bush's approval rating over the course of his presidency, shown in the chart below.
The results in the chart provide interesting insights that challenge some conventional
wisdom. Economic status is often considered one of the most important factors in presidential
approval but -- according to this study, at least -- for Bush, the economy was almost a
non-factor until the very end of his presidency when the Great Recession started. The 9/11
terrorist attacks, and Bush's response to them, including bombing Afghanistan, provided an
initially huge boost to his approval. But that jump faded almost entirely within a year. The
beginning of the Iraq war, by contrast, provided only a very small, short-term boost to Bush's
approval ratings, which quickly turned into a large negative that continued to weigh down his
ratings for the remainder of his term. By examining the model variables, it's clear that troop
casualty reports had a particularly significant negative impact within the war category.
Based on these results, the study's authors concluded that it is the salience of events that
matters as much or more than the events themselves. When 9/11 happened, people wanted security
and rewarded Bush for taking decisive action that made them feel safer. When the Iraq war
started, the effects of war weariness kicked in fairly quickly and people wanted fewer
causalities and peace. When the Great Recession began, people forgot about everything else and
looked to their own economic prospects.
With those lessons in mind, initiating an armed conflict with Iran or North Korea would be a
high-risk approach to boosting public support in the run-up to an election. Both countries have
powerful militaries and any conflict could quickly lead to high casualty numbers. While no
military action would be risk free, an engineered conflict with a target that could be attacked
with minimal threat to US troops, such as Syria or Yemen, could induce a short-term rallying
effect. As elections approach later this year and in 2020, keep your eyes on those and other
"soft" targets to see if the president tries to bomb his way to his desired outcome.
Joel , July 9, 2018 6:59 am
I'm expecting some sort of Reichstag fire event.
Daniel Becker , July 9, 2018 4:58 pm
All true, though I speculate a draft would change things. Which is why we have an "all
volunteer" military. Those that like the military and war learned well. Unfortunately, it makes
for a defense force that no longer reflects the population which I do not think is good.
'Senator McConnell' always conjures the image and mannerisms of Colonel Sanders (ala
Kentucky Fried Chicken). White planter suit, broad-brimmed hat, weak-chin goatee and
unconvincing sales pitch.
Then again, beardless Mitch looks more like Toby Turtle, and what
he delivers is rarely worth a bucket of greasy chicken.
"... Iran has better – and legal – cause to be in Syria than Victoria Nuland had to meddle in the Ukraine. Impunitivism – do as we tell you, not as we do. ..."
"... I'm not sure which is more worrisome, if Pompeo knew how absurd that is but said it anyway, or if he really doesn't even know ..."
"... What do you not get about us being the ONE INDISPENSABLE NATION (OIN)? The OIN determines and enforces the New World Order! "Rights" don't apply to us. Does God Almighty worry about whether He has the right to do something? No! We have become as Him. ..."
"... It's sort of an interesting concept, and a very new one. I can't recall American saying that Country X can have no dealings with Country Y. I don't think much will come of it. Even assuming that the statement was serious, which there is really no way of knowing, given the Trump/Pompeo propensity to lie, the Iranians must assume that Trump and Pompeo are too ignorant and incompetent to do anything effective about it. ..."
"... No one has any idea when or why to take these people seriously. They say all this blood-curdling stuff one day and a few days later appear to have forgotten it completely and fixated on some other stupid notion. ..."
Mike Pompeo gave an interview to Sky News Arabia
this week in which he made some remarkable statements:
Well, Iran needs to get out of Syria. They have no business there. There's no reason for
them to be there. There's been Iranian influence there for a long time. Iranian forces,
Iranian militias must leave the country.
If Iran has no business in Syria, the U.S. certainly doesn't have any business keeping
troops there. Leave aside the absurdity of the statement that the ally of a government has no
business supporting that government in a war, and just consider the breathtaking hypocrisy of
this statement coming from a U.S. official.
The U.S. is engaged in hostilities in at least a
half dozen countries around the world and attacks other governments at will. Our government has
been actively supporting the Saudi-led attack on Yemen for more than three years, and we have
had U.S. force operating illegally in Syrian territory and airspace for almost four. It is the
height of arrogance and folly to issue this ultimatum. The U.S. has no right or authority to
make such a demand, and the administration should be focused instead on withdrawing our forces
from wars that we have no business fighting or supporting.
What do you not get about us being the ONE INDISPENSABLE NATION (OIN)? The OIN determines and enforces the New World Order! "Rights" don't apply to us. Does God
Almighty worry about whether He has the right to do something? No! We have become as Him.
It's sort of an interesting concept, and a very new one. I can't recall American saying that
Country X can have no dealings with Country Y. I don't think much will come of it. Even assuming that the statement was serious, which
there is really no way of knowing, given the Trump/Pompeo propensity to lie, the Iranians must
assume that Trump and Pompeo are too ignorant and incompetent to do anything effective about
it.
No one has any idea when or why to take these people seriously. They say all this
blood-curdling stuff one day and a few days later appear to have forgotten it completely and
fixated on some other stupid notion.
"... IS THE LEASH NOW OFF THE 'OTHER CIA?' https://southfront.org/is-the-leash-now-off-the-other-cia/ ..."
"... Under Donald Trump, who is on record favoring CIA kidnapping and torture programs, the CIA has been given a green light to carry out "targeted assassinations." ..."
Under Donald Trump, who is on record favoring CIA kidnapping and torture programs, the CIA has been given a green light to
carry out "targeted assassinations."
Although most of these targeted kills have been carried out by drone attacks in Yemen, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Somalia, where civilian deaths from "collateral damage" are estimated to be well over three hundred, recent events
point to the CIA's return to the "bad old days," when it engaged in a global program of assassinating political leaders.
ParadiseNow Giraldi always says
what needs to be said. Excellent article.
Speaking of the news that evaporates--"The story was covered in Israel and Europe but insofar as I could determine did not appear
in any detail in the U.S. mainstream media"--and of the stories that disappear an hour or so after they are posted...
I've never come across anyone in the US who had seen or heard of the story that popped up on my monitor one day while working
in a newsroom in Los Angeles, a headline piece by the BBC stating that the California legislature in Sacramento had just passed a
resolution apologizing to Mel Gibson for the treatment he was subjected to after his drunken comments were illegally relayed to the
press. The article also reported that legislation was passed increasing fines and jail penalties in California for anyone who illegally
gave or sold arrest information to the media.
The story had some serious bearing on our immediate market as numerous celebrities' private medical information etc were being
illegally gathered and sold to news outlets. I brought it to the attention of my (Jewish) chief editor who read the article, thanked
me for the heads up, then completely ignored it.
Shortly after the piece just evaporated from the BBC site, and to this day I can find no trace of it in their archives.
On the subject of Jews celebrating the death of others, I have seen photos of them gaily cooking 'Rachel Corrie pancakes' to celebrate
the death of the American student they brutally crushed to death with a tractor in occupied Palestine.
I have seen photos of them gaily cooking 'Rachel Corrie pancakes'
Here's my take as a (non-Jewish) American.
My sympathies are with the Palestinians with regards to trying somehow to estabilsh sustainable territorial boundaries. IMHO
Israel is clearly stealing land by building settlements in the West Bank. But given the ad-hoc nature of the current borders and
the intent of the various parties, , God/Allah knows how this can be reasonably adjudicated.
I am ambivalent with regards to the plight of those in Gaza, Egypt is certainly in a position to help. The southern border
is after all under their control.
Launching random missiles into southern Israel (assuming that's an actual thing rather than propaganda on the Israeli's part)
seems silly and unlikely to improve the situation.
Both parties seem to regard the other as filth, undeserving of human compassion. How we move forward from here is beyond my
ability to guess.
Arab neighbors seem to view refugees as pawns to be kept in squalor for their own political aims.
It seems like (and this is my own reading from afar) Hamas uses the "right of return" as an issue to turn gullible Palestinian
youth into canon fodder. It's been 75 years and Israel is stronger than ever. Time to wake up and smell the coffee
There is so damn much much fault on both sides .
Now, having said all that – Rachael Corrie pancakes? She was an idiot and I have not the slightest sympathy for her. I wish
I'd thought the joke up .
" Launching random missiles into southern Israel (assuming that's an actual thing rather than propaganda on the Israeli's part)
seems silly and unlikely to improve the situation. "
What do you suggest the inmates of the Gaza concentration camp can do to get attention to their plight ?
The only way seems to be to provoke Israel into some retaliatory action.
Netanyahu is as stupid as Hitler, who let himself be provoked by Poland.
And indeed, both sides see the other as dirt.
Jabotinski in 1923 saw it well 'just force will make Palestinians give up their lands'. But he did not foresee that they never
really would give up.
What he also did not foresee that the ethnic cleansing would cause a growth of the number of Palestinians. As far as I can
see Israel has no long time strategy for dealing with the Palestinian problem.
Trying to convince the great majority of the world's countries in the UN Assembly that they're all wrong, and Israel right,
lunacy.
Are you stupid enough to believe that American voters elected Trump president because
Vladimir Putin influenced them to vote for Russia's candidate? The US Senate Intelligence (sic)
Committee is that stupid. This collection of nitwits actually produced a report that a few ads
allegedly placed online on Putin's instructions, ads that did not cost one-hundredth of one
percent of the huge sum spent by the candidates themselves, both national committees and
everyone else, were decisive in influencing voters who never saw the ads in the first place or
read or responded to tweets.
That a Senate Committee would expect anyone to believe such a far-fetched story shows that
the Senate Intelligence (sic) Committee has no respect whatsoever for the people who elected
President Trump, or, for that matter, for anyone else at home or abroad.
This Senate report is the most incredible bullshit I have every encountered in my life.
There is no evidence whatsoever in the report. Only assertions. And most of these are based on
"open-source" internet postings by trolls and bots financed by the military/security complex
and Democratic Party.
What the report actually tells us is that no member of the Senate Intelligence Committee has
enough intelligence or integrity to serve in the US Senate. It is the Senate Intelligence
Committee that is a disgrace to America and to the entire human race.
"... Trump and his fellow neocons want NATO to serve as a sort of US foreign legion in Third World wars in Africa and Asia. NATO was formed as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to defend western Europe, not to fight in Afghanistan and who knows where else? ..."
"... In Europe, it's hard to find many people who still consider Russia a serious threat except for some tipsy Danes, right wing Swedes, and assorted Russophobic East Europeans. The main fear of Russia seems concentrated in the minds of American neoconservatives, media, and rural Trump supporters, all victims of the bizarre anti-Russian hysteria that has gripped the US. ..."
"... Equally important, most civilians don't understand that neither US and NATO forces nor Russia's military are in any shape to fight war that lasts more than a few days. Both sides lack munitions, spare parts, lubricants, and battlefield equipment. The overworked US Air Force, busy plastering Muslim nations, has actually run low on bombs. US industry can't seems to keep up supplies. There has even been talk of buying explosives from China! ..."
"... At this point NATO is the muscle for projecting and maintaining Western (read US) hegemony. It's activities are a threat to sovereign nations that refuse to be Washington's vassals. So they react with self-defensive postures and programs that NATO can claim are "aggression" in order to justify its own existence. ..."
`We are the schmucks' thundered President Donald Trump, using a favorite New York City
Yiddish term for penis. The object of Trump's wrath at his Make America Great Again' rally in
Great Falls, Montana was the craven, stingy European members of NATO, only 16 of 22 members are
on budget for their US-commanded military spending. Trump wants them to spend much more.
Trump and his fellow neocons want NATO to serve as a sort of US foreign legion in Third
World wars in Africa and Asia. NATO was formed as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to
defend western Europe, not to fight in Afghanistan and who knows where else?
Equally bad, according to Trump, is that the US runs a whopping trade deficit with the
European Union which is busy shipping high-end cars and fine wines to the US. The wicked
foreigners don't buy enough Amerian bourbon, corn and terribly abused pigs.
Trump is quite right that America's NATO allies, particularly Germany and Canada, don't
spend enough on defense. Germany is reported to have less than twenty operational tanks.
Canada's armed forces appear to be smaller than the New York City police department.
But the Europeans ask, 'defense against whom?' The Soviet Union was a huge threat back in
the Cold War when the mighty Red Army had 55,000 tanks pointed West. Today, Russia's land and
navel power has evaporated. Russia has perhaps 5,500 main battle tanks in active service and a
similar number in storage, a far cry from its armored juggernaut of the Cold War.
More important, Russia's military budget for 2018 was only $61 billion, actually down 17%
from last year. That's 4.3% of GDP. Russia is facing hard economic times. Russia has slipped to
third place in military spending after the US, China and Saudi Arabia. The US and its wealthy
allies account for two thirds of world military spending. In fact, the US total military budget
(including for nuclear weapons and foreign wars) is about $1 trillion, 50% of total US
government discretionary spending.
In addition, Russia must defend a vast territory from the Baltic to the Pacific. The US is
fortunate in having Mexico and Canada as neighbors. Russia has North Korea, China, India, the
Mideast and NATO to watch. As with its naval forces, Russia's armies are too far apart to lend
one another mutual support. Two vulnerable rail lines are Russia's main land link between
European Russia and its Pacific Far East.
Trump's supplemental military budget boost this year of $54 billion is almost as large as
Russia's entire 2018 military budget. As for Trump's claim that Europe is not paying its fair
share of NATO expenses, note that that Britain and France combined together spend more on their
military forces than Russia.
ORDER IT NOW
In Europe, it's hard to find many people who still consider Russia a serious threat except
for some tipsy Danes, right wing Swedes, and assorted Russophobic East Europeans. The main fear
of Russia seems concentrated in the minds of American neoconservatives, media, and rural Trump
supporters, all victims of the bizarre anti-Russian hysteria that has gripped the US.
Equally important, most civilians don't understand that neither US and NATO forces nor
Russia's military are in any shape to fight war that lasts more than a few days. Both sides
lack munitions, spare parts, lubricants, and battlefield equipment. The overworked US Air
Force, busy plastering Muslim nations, has actually run low on bombs. US industry can't seems
to keep up supplies. There has even been talk of buying explosives from China!
These essentials of war have been seriously neglected in favor of buying fancy weapons. But
such weapons need spares, electronics, fuel depots, missiles and thousands of essential parts.
As former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld observed, 'you go to war with what you have.'
Neither side has enough. A war would likely peter out in days after supplies were exhausted.
Besides, no side can afford to replace $100 million jet fighters or $5 million apiece tanks
after a war, however brief.
President Trump has learned about war from Fox TV. Europeans have learned from real
experience and don't want any more.
The last time the US put troops into action in North Korea, China lashed out and drove us
back South. In retaliation we dropped more tonnage of bombs and napalm on the North than was
used in the entire Pacific War.
In fact, the US total military budget (including for nuclear weapons and foreign wars)
is about $1 trillion, 50% of total US government discretionary spending.
Disband NATO already. The USSR is gone and Russia has no revanchist plans. Our military
spending on the defense of Europe only frees their budgets for social programs like medical
care and college education.
And what have we gotten for spending the nation's wealth on blowing up the Greater Middle
East, killing a million plus civilians and displacing millions more? Rusting cities,
crumbling infrastructure, a school system that can't compete with even that of India American
Exceptionalism indeed. Exceptionally deluded.
At this point NATO is the muscle for projecting and maintaining Western (read US)
hegemony.
It's activities are a threat to sovereign nations that refuse to be Washington's vassals. So
they react with self-defensive postures and programs that NATO can claim are "aggression" in
order to justify its own existence.
The author of Unconditional Hatred was Captain Russell Grenfell, a British naval
officer who had served with distinction in the First World War, and later helped direct the
Royal Navy Staff College, while publishing six highly-regarded books on naval strategy and
serving as the Naval Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph . Grenfell recognized that
great quantities of extreme propaganda almost inevitably accompany any major war, but with
several years having passed since the close of hostilities, he was growing concerned that
unless an antidote were soon widely applied, the lingering poison of such wartime exaggerations
might threaten the future peace of Europe.
His considerable historical erudition and his reserved academic tone shine through in this
fascinating volume, which focuses primarily upon the events of the two world wars, but often
contains digressions into the Napoleonic conflicts or even earlier ones. One of the intriguing
aspects of his discussion is that much of the anti-German propaganda he seeks to debunk would
today be considered so absurd and ridiculous it has been almost entirely forgotten, while much
of the extremely hostile picture we currently have of Hitler's Germany receives almost no
mention whatsoever, possibly because it had not yet been established or was then still
considered too outlandish for anyone to take seriously. Among other matters, he reports with
considerable disapproval that leading British newspapers had carried headlined articles about
the horrific tortures that were being inflicted upon German prisoners at war crimes trials in
order to coerce all sorts of dubious confessions out of them.
Some of Grenfell's casual claims do raise doubts about various aspects of our conventional
picture of German occupation policies. He notes numerous stories in the British press of former
French "slave-laborers" who later organized friendly post-war reunions with their erstwhile
German employers. He also states that in 1940 those same British papers had reported the
absolutely exemplary behavior of German soldiers toward French civilians, though after
terroristic attacks by Communist underground forces provoked reprisals, relations often grew
much worse.
Most importantly, he points out that the huge Allied strategic bombing campaign against
French cities and industry had killed huge numbers of civilians, probably far more than had
ever died at German hands, and thereby provoked a great deal of hatred as an inevitable
consequence. At Normandy he and other British officers had been warned to remain very cautious
among any French civilians they encountered for fear they might be subject to deadly
attacks.
Although Grenfell's content and tone strike me as exceptionally even-handed and objective,
others surely viewed his text in a very different light. The Devin-Adair jacket-flap notes that
no British publisher was willing to accept the manuscript, and when the book appeared no major
American reviewer recognized its existence. Even more ominously, Grenfell is described as
having been hard at work on a sequel when he suddenly died in 1954 of unknown causes, and
his
lengthy obituary in the London Times gives his age as 62. With the copyright
having long lapsed, I am pleased to include this important volume in my collection of HTML
Books so that those interested can easily read it and decide for themselves.
... ... ...
Assuming these numbers are even remotely correct, the implications are quite remarkable. The
toll of the human catastrophe experienced in post-war Germany would certainly rank among the
greatest in modern peacetime history, far exceeding the deaths that occurred during the
Ukrainian Famine of the early 1930s and possibly even approaching the wholly unintentional
losses during Mao's Great Leap Forward of 1959-61. Furthermore, the post-war German losses
would vastly outrank either of these other unfortunate events in percentage terms and this
would remain true even if the Bacque's estimates are considerably reduced. Yet I doubt if even
a small fraction of one percent of Americans are today aware of this enormous human calamity.
Presumably memories are much stronger in Germany itself, but given the growing legal crackdown
on discordant views in that unfortunate country, I suspect that anyone who discusses the topic
too energetically risks immediate imprisonment.
To a considerable extent, this historical ignorance has been heavily fostered by our
governments, often using underhanded or even nefarious means. Just like in the old decaying
USSR, much of the current political legitimacy of today's American government and its various
European vassal-states is founded upon a particular narrative history of World War II, and
challenging that narrative might produce dire political consequences. Bacque credibly relates
some of the apparent efforts to dissuade any major newspaper or magazine from running articles
discussing the startling findings of his first book, thereby imposing a "blackout" aimed at
absolutely minimizing any media coverage. Such measures seem to have been quite effective,
since until eight or nine years ago, I'm not sure I had ever heard a word of these shocking
ideas, and I have certainly never seen them seriously discussed in any of the numerous
newspapers or magazines that I have carefully read over the last three decades.
Even illegal means were employed to hinder the efforts of this solitary, determined scholar.
At times, Bacque's phone-lines were tapped, his mail intercepted, and his research materials
surreptitiously copied, while his access to some official archives was blocked. Some of the
elderly eyewitnesses who personally corroborated his analysis received threatening notes and
had their property vandalized.
I don't know what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on 17 July 2014 nor do I know
what happed to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370/MAS370 on 8 March 2014. Except that my
suspicion is aroused that there is a connection with these events and the Kuala Lumpur War
Crimes Tribunal which was established to oversee and investigate complaints from victims of
wars and armed conflict in relation to crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against
humanity and other like offences as recognized under International Law.
In November 2011 the tribunal purportedly exercised universal jurisdiction to try in
absentia former US President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
convicting both for crimes against peace because of what the tribunal concluded was the
unlawful invasion of Iraq.
In May 2012 after hearing testimony for a week from victims of torture at Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo, the tribunal unanimously convicted in absentia former President Bush, former Vice
President Dick Cheney, former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Deputy Assistant
Attorneys General John Yoo and Jay Bybee, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and
former counsellors David Addington and William Haynes II of conspiracy to commit war crimes,
specifically torture. The tribunal referred their findings to the chief prosecutor at the
International Court of Justice in the Hague.
In November 2013, the tribunal convicted State of Israel guilty of genocide of the
Palestinian people and convicted former Israeli general Amos Yaron for crimes against
humanity and genocide for his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
Thus, my conspiratorial mind suspects that there is a connection between the Kuala Lumpur
War Crimes Tribunal's convictions and the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370/MAS370 and
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.
The problem is that the convictions by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunals are little
known and were never reported by the mainstream media.
I also have this in the book, with the same details, and after a discussion that also
includes Malaysia's arms purchases in Russia, I write 'But we should be reminded that we are
looking at a 'systems event', a conditional structure of great complexity, in which even
factors that are highly unlikely to have been the cause (such as punishing Malaysia or
killing Putin) may yet have played a role, at some point, in overcoming moral or other
barriers.'
" However, irrespective of the actual perpetrator, and whether it was an intentional act or
an accident, there is no doubt about the West's intent to exploit the event to the maximum. "
The key sentence.
Dutch vice first minister Asscher at the time of the disaster was on vacation in the south of
France.
This fool, in a Dutch tv show, explained the need for secrecy, in the afternoon of the day of
the MH17 disaster prime minister Rutte called Asscher on his mobile, and asked him to call
back on a land line 'so that the Russians could not listen in'.
Until now no Dutch people's representative dared to ask Rutte what was so secret then that
the Russians had tobe prevented from listening in.
The only thing I can think of is that Rutte told Asscher 'we want the Russians to get the
blame'.
It is interesting to see how the MH17 propaganda follows the example of the holocaust
propaganda.
Monuments, remembrances, accusations, but never any concrete facts.
One might also say 'follows the Sept 11 propaganda'.
As a USA politician said 'MH17 is the Dutch Sept 11′.
I did not read the article carefully, so I do not know if it mentions that suspect Ukraine
is part of the investigation organisation, or that Ukraine spied on the investigation.
But the essential question remains, except for an accident, why would Russia shoot down a
passenger plane ?
Putin is not stupid, he does not do things that just harm him.
In a Dutch talkshow the chairman of the Dutch airline pilots organisation Benno Baksteen
mentioned casually that aboard MH370 there were two groups of Chinese technicians specialised
in making planes invisible for radar.
Nowhere in the media this was picked up, Benno Baksteen never again was on tv, and, as far as
I know, he's no longer chairman.
My theory on MH17: control of the plane was taken from the crew from outside, this is
possible since early 2001.
It was directed direction Antarctica, until is crashed, lack of fuel.
The second pilot tried to use his mobile phone to make contact, however, this is not
possible, a passenger plane flies simply to fast, there was a connection, but before he could
say anything the plane was too far away.
Also one of the Sept 11 problems.
So, following the old question 'who benefitted', it is clear for me who the suspect is.
Indeed, after noting the Marxistish approach I wondered how reliable he would be on key
facts if tested. It wasn't encouraging to find him writing that the Dutch Safety Board's
report could be "conveniently [sic] dismissed". As the critical account of a presentation by
him that I shall post below notes he doesn't seem to know the difference between the Dutch
Safety Board's technical investigation and report and the Joint Investigation Team's work on
the criminal aspects of the case. That is pretty elementary and leaves him looking like
someone who could only wave his hands when it is pointed out that the DSB made a compelling
case that MH17 was brought down by a BUK missile fired by someone not named.
He seems to be a retired professor keen to be noticed so his air fares will be paid and
his book with a title which also mentions MH17 will sell.
Anyway here is a useful critique slightly truncated from
" DSB made a compelling case that MH17 was brought down by a BUK missile fired by someone
not named. "
A weird compelling case.
They say they know who did it, a Russian officer, name and photograph have been publicised
here, but they've been unable to ask him why he did it.
Any normal criminal investigation begins with motive, here at the end the motive still is
lacking.
I am not in the least convinced.
The motive, except when it was an accident, lies in the west, the Netherlands objected most
to sanctions.
About a possible accident, Ukraine seems to have misused overflying passenger planes as
shield for its bombers.
But, the Ukrainian pilot said to have shot down MH17 committed suicide.
If he did it, he did what a fighter pilot on a illegal mission would have done, target the
cockpit from behind, no possibility of an emergency signal.
If it was a BUK, it did what a fighter pilot would have done.
But a BUk flies vertical at a speed of 4500 kmh, a passenger plane at some 900.
Why did not the BUK hit from beneath ?
All in all, indeed a very compelling case, as the murder of Kennedy, Sept 11, Diana, etc
"In February 2016 that assertion had still been dismissed as unfit for evidence by the Dutch
chief prosecutor on the JIT, Fred Westerbeke, in a letter to victims' relatives. How can it
possibly have become the core component of the case for the prosecution two years and two
months later?"
That is extremely puzzling – indeed, inexplicable – if you believe that the
object of the exercise is to determine the truth and to see justice done. But it isn't.
As long ago as Plato's "Politeia" ("Republic"), a widely-held view was that "justice is
the will of the stronger", as Thrasybulos argues in that dialogue. As far as I can see, that
is still the most popular view, and it is certainly the one supported by Western governments.
(The Skripal affair is another prominent case in point: the UK government declared who was
guilty without the tedious formalities of investigation, indictment, and trial).
The real object of the Western elites – as embodied in the statements of their
servants in government and the media – is to control public opinion. In this endeavour,
precise accuracy, consistency and objective truth are not only unnecessary hindrances –
they are positive handicaps. The purpose is to imprint on the dim public consciousness some
desired certainties, such as that Russia is aggressive and barbarous, that Mr Putin is a
wicked soulless murderer, and so on.
That is not done by proving a case to courtroom standards. It is done by loudly repeating
memorable and emotional slogans, over and over, until everyone vaguely internalizes them and
anyone who dares to disagree is attacked for disloyalty.
Hence the change in value of the Bellingcat assertions referred to by the quoted passage
is not only unsurprising – it is exactly what we should expect. Yesterday's completely
unproven allegation is today's generally known fact.
Wow what a tremendous article from a bona fide scholar
I have not yet seen anywhere such an accurate and succinct overview of the geopolitical
history of the post-1991 era anywhere
There is something that is not clear though the author mentions a 'land for gas' deal
discussed by Putin and Merkel on the sidelines of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil
' Its tentative provisions included normalising the status of Crimea in exchange for a
massive economic rehabilitation plan and a gas price rebate for Ukraine '
I have no idea what this actually means an 'economic rehabilitation plan for whom ? and
what does 'normalization' of Crimea's status mean recognition of Crimea's rejoining the
Russian Federation ?
The accusation of "Unilateral Gangster Mindset" is not directed against President Trump. It
refers specifically to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Ponpeo. The Statement confirms: "We still
cherish our good faith in President Trump."
"More than 1/2 of Jewish success is due to corrupt and criminal means."
Utter nonsense.
Jews own the Federal Reserve Bank and can hit some keys on their computer and create a few
trillion Federal Reserve notes just like *that* .
They've been injecting hundreds of billion$ into Jewish dominated Wall Street for decades
if not longer. Especially since the 2008 mass-looting of the American tax-slave. The big
banks like Goldman Sachs and Chase are all dominated by Jews, just like the Treasury. The
cash flows to other well connected Jews and gentiles, but Jews are MASSSIVELY
over-represented as the recipients of the swindled lucre.
It was rabbi Dov Zakheim who was the comptroller of the Pentagon when over two trillion
went missing. Do you suppose that cash ended up in the coffers of Presbyterian churches or
injected into the economy of Appalachia?
When some yeshiva decides they need a few tens of thousands or more for 'security'.
especially following 911, where 'lucky' Larry Silverstein collected his billions, they go to
the Treasury.
Madoff, Scott Rothstein. others.. are just the tip of the iceberg.
But the big one is the Federal Reserve Bank where they and they alone have their own
counterfeiting machine, and one thing you can say about Jews, is that they look after their
own.
There are very many hard working and intelligent Jews who earn their money, and they
deserve our admiration. But there is also a lot of graft and fraud and downright treason to
the success of many of them. The scum at Goldman Sachs and guys like Jon Corzine high on the
list.
"The scum at Goldman Sachs and guys like Jon Corzine high on the list."
I would not argue over your point that Jon Corzine is scum, but I would argue with your
insinuation that he is Jewish (otherwise why mention him in a paragraph dealing with Jews).
He's not. He's Protestant.
Later "eqality of means" was replaced by "equality of opportunity". Still huge discrepancy in
wealth typical for neoliberalism is socially destructive. And election of Trump was partially a
reaction on neoliberalism dominance for the last 40 ears.
"... The Founders rejected egalitarianism. They understood that no one is, literally,
"created equal" to anyone else. Certainly, each and every person is created with no less or no
more dignity, measured by his or her own unique potential before God. But this is not what most
contemporary writers mean today when they talk of "equality." ..."
"... by our own maximum possibilities and potential ..."
Notable quotes:
"... The Founders rejected egalitarianism. They understood that no one is, literally, "created equal" to anyone else. Certainly, each and every person is created with no less or no more dignity, measured by his or her own unique potential before God. But this is not what most contemporary writers mean today when they talk of "equality." ..."
"... by our own maximum possibilities and potential ..."
For many Americans the Declaration of Independence is a fundamental text that tells the
world who we are as a people. It is a distillation of American belief and purpose. Pundits and
commentators, left and right, never cease reminding us that America is a new nation, "conceived
in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
Almost as important as a symbol of American belief is Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
It is not incorrect to see a link between these two documents, as Lincoln intentionally placed
his short peroration in the context of a particular reading of the Declaration.
Lincoln bases his concept of the creation of the American nation in philosophical
principles he sees enunciated in 1776, and in particular on an emphasis on the idea of
"equality." The problem is that this interpretation, which forms the philosophical base of both
the dominant "movement conservatism" today -- neoconservatism -- and the neo-Marxist
multicultural Left, is basically false.
... ... ...
Although those authors employed the phrase "all men are created equal," and certainly that
is why Lincoln made direct reference to it, a careful analysis of the Declaration does not
confirm the sense that Lincoln invests in those few words. Contextually, the authors at
Philadelphia were asserting their historic -- and equal -- rights as Englishmen before the
Crown, which had, they believed, been violated and usurped by the British government, and it
was to parliament that the Declaration was primarily directed.
The Founders rejected egalitarianism. They understood that no one is, literally,
"created equal" to anyone else. Certainly, each and every person is created with no less or no
more dignity, measured by his or her own unique potential before God. But this is not what most
contemporary writers mean today when they talk of "equality."
Rather, from a traditionally-Christian viewpoint, each of us is born into this world with
different levels of intelligence, in different areas of expertise; physically, some are
stronger or heavier, others are slight and smaller; some learn foreign languages and write
beautiful prose; others become fantastic athletes or scientists. Social customs and traditions,
property holding, and individual initiative -- each of these factors further discriminate as we
continue in life.
None of this means that we are any less or more valued in the judgment of God, Who judges us
based on our own, very unique capabilities. God measures us by ourselves, by our own
maximum possibilities and potential , not by those of anyone else -- that is, whether we
use our own, individual talents to the very fullest (recall the Parable of the Talents in the
Gospel of St. Matthew).
"All men are created equal" is a simply a rhetorical argument against the "divine right of
kings" used to revive an ancient, fascist, Roman-style Republic style government,
where men of equal political stature are bound together as a band of brothers into a "fasces"
to form a militia, necessary to a free state like Rome once had in its beginning. No king, no
standing army.
Which is why there are fascist symbols throughout the US government, including in the US
Senate. Watch CSPAN if you don't believe me. See those fasces?
And do study what the Founders said more. Like the author of the term "all men are created
equal." He wrote in the same document:
" the merciless Indian Savages " -- Declaration of Independence
Does that sound like he thought whites and Indians were equal? Nope.
He also wrote:
"Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same
government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between
them." (Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography)
Does that sound like he thought blacks and whites were equal? Nope.
So stop spouting false Leftist propaganda about what the term "all men are created equal"
means. All it does is make you sound extremely uninformed.
Yes, there is still an America, living and breathing, somewhat piled-on by Fake
Americans at the moment. Don't give up on the Comeback Kid . You do not want to be as
bitter and wrong as the defeatist Never Trumper" Cuckservatives. The Fake Americans will
have to go back. Just like the Fake Europeans are already going back. Viktor Orban
called Italy's decision to turn away rescue ship a "great moment." And the pendulum is just
beginning to swing. The trend is your friend. Why don't you jump on the team and come on in
for the big win?
Thank you for mentioning Jaffa. I had to look him up. Only Wikipedia so far but I found
something of interest that you might like to comment on. Mention is made of Lincoln rejecting
the Douglas arguments for states's rights on the ground that (majoritarian) democracy should
not be allowed to enslave anyone. Is it possible to say that America's original sin of
slavery ensured that there was an insoluble problem left behind by the original constitution
makers plus the extension of the franchise to all adult white males?
"..a careful analysis of the Declaration does not confirm the sense that Lincoln invests in
those few words. Contextually, the authors at Philadelphia were asserting their historic --
and equal -- rights as Englishmen before the Crown, which had, they believed, been violated
and usurped by the British government,.."
Thank you Mr Cathey. As a non American, I was always puzzled by the obvious falsehood of
the statement "all men created equal" -- particularly in a nation that still legalized
slavery -- and how it could still be repeated ad nauseaum. Interesting, how one victorious
man and one victorious teaching can have such profound consequences for the way people live
and think generations later.
'All men are created equal' is almost the opposite of that other common mistake, 'no pity
for the weak'. Yet both lead to oppressive regimes. A true anthropology will lead to
different healthy political systems. A twisted one, always to repressive institutions.
"All men are created equal" is a simply a rhetorical argument against the "divine right
of kings" used to revive an ancient, fascist, Roman-style Republic style government, where
men of equal political stature are bound together as a band of brothers into a "fasces" to
form a militia, necessary to a free state like Rome once had in its beginning. No king, no
standing army.
My take is a little different, but not incompatible with yours.
The Declaration's assertion is "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights "
So, to begin with, this is not a claim that all men are created equal in ability or
character. The Founders recognized that they were not, and that ordinary social and economic
inequalities, due to innate differences in ability or character, were natural, normal, and
inevitable. The Declaration is first and foremost a legal document. It claims equality of
rights – a legal claim, not a sociological, anthropological, or
psychological one. Moreover, the rights are unalienable – that is, they cannot
be alienated – sold, bartered, or given away – because someone entitled to them
shall have moved from old England to the New World.
The grievance of the colonists was that taxes – the stamp tax, the tea tax, etc.
– had been imposed upon them by the parliament at Westminster, an assembly in which
they were not represented. Hence the slogan, "no taxation without representation." It was a
principle based in the main non-religious issue of the English civil war (1642-1649). Charles
I had attempted to levy "ship money" by royal prerogative, without the consent of Parliament.
Unlike previous levies, which had been confined to coastal towns and were raised only in time
of war, he did so in peacetime and extended the tax to inland areas. This provoked strong
resistance; some local officials refused assistance to collection of the tax. The Petition of
Right, written by Sir Edward Coke, complained:
Your subjects have inherited this freedom, that they should not be compelled to
contribute to any tax, tallage, aid, or other like charge not set by common consent, in
parliament.
Extra-parliamentary taxation was effectively ended by the Long Parliament of 1640. After
the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689, it was formally prohibited by the English Bill of
Rights.
All of this history was much more familiar to the Founders in 1776 than it is to Americans
today. The point of the claim that "all men are created equal" was simply to argue that
Englishmen, under English law, were equally entitled to representation in any assembly that
levied taxes on them, whether they were resident in England or in its colonies.
The argument for levying taxes on the colonies was that they were needed to pay for the
defense of the colonies during what we call the French and Indian War, which was in fact just
the North American theatre of what in Europe is known as the Seven Years' War. That they may
have been needed for this purpose was not in dispute. Englishmen in England were taxed to pay
for the Seven Years' War, but they were represented in the Parliament that levied the tax.
Americans were not. From their point of view the taxes levied on them were as objectionable
as ship money had been to the people of England in the time of Charles I.
The Declaration is therefore a sort of American version of the Petition of Right.
Jefferson was an admirer of Coke and undoubtedly saw the parallel. His high-flown language
about equality was meant to make the case against George III on behalf of English subjects in
North America in the same way that Coke's Petition of Right made the case against Charles I
on behalf of English subjects in England. The colonists' objection was that English subjects,
wheresoever domiciled within English jurisdiction, should have equal rights under English
law.
Jefferson never intended to proclaim the equality of negro slaves or "Indian savages" with
free whites. Jefferson's observations in his Notes on the State of Virginia make quite
clear that he did not believe them to be equals with whites in ability or character. The
Indians he regards as primitives, having some admirable and some frightful qualities, but
above all, as formidable enemies. He despairs of the intelligence of blacks; he faults black
slavery because it brings out lamentable tendencies of laziness and petty tyranny among
whites. These remarks are striking for their candor and have the ring of truth even
today.
I appreciate Mr. Cathey's work here. On Tuesday the 3rd, one of the many overemployed
sycophants in the executive ranks of the corporation which employs me deemed it necessary to
bulk-email all of us peons with the message of how vital diversity and inclusion are
to proper celebration of the 4th. Right -- because reserving mid-January through February for
the blacks, March for women or Hispanics (I forget which), and June for the tutti-fruttis
isn't nearly enough
"... On an optimistic (sort of) note: the US never deliberately attacks a country that has WMDs. The very fact that the US attacked Iraq and Syria shows that Deep State was 100% sure that those countries do not have WMDs. The US never attacked North Korea because it does have WMDs. ..."
"... An avalanche of mistakes leading to the nuclear war between the US and Russia or China is still possible. Then we all lose. Consolation prize: warmongering mega-thieves and the scum serving them in the media will be just as dead as everybody else. ..."
On an optimistic (sort of) note: the US never deliberately attacks a country that has
WMDs. The very fact that the US attacked Iraq and Syria shows that Deep State was 100% sure
that those countries do not have WMDs. The US never attacked North Korea because it does have
WMDs.
An avalanche of mistakes leading to the nuclear war between the US and Russia or China
is still possible. Then we all lose. Consolation prize: warmongering mega-thieves and the
scum serving them in the media will be just as dead as everybody else.
Newly popular Democratic politician hero and nominee for a seat in the U.S. Congress
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used to have these words on her website:
A Peace Economy
"Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States has entangled itself in war and
occupation throughout the Middle East and North Africa. As of 2018, we are currently
involved in military action in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and
Somalia. According to the Constitution, the right to declare war belongs to the Legislative
body, not the President. Yet, most of these acts of aggression have never once been voted
on by Congress. Alex believes that we must end the forever war by bringing our troops home
and ending the air strikes and bombings that perpetuate the cycle of terrorism and
occupation throughout the world."
Now they're gone. Asked about it on Twitter, she replied:
"Hey! Looking into this. Nothing malicious! Site is supporter-run so things happen --
we'll get to the bottom of it."
It will be interesting to see if Ocasio-Cortez will/can maintain her position on Israeli
crimes. Public figures have a long history of backpedaling after getting the riot act read to
them from the hebrew masters.
If people want to use polls I suggest they use the gold standard WPOP fielded by the Unv
of Maryland instead of polls like Pew which are funded by the Pew Charitable Trust , which is
basically a 'Think Tank" that then presents its polls to congress trying to affect political
decisions on issues. People need to be wary of what is an 'opinion maker' instead of just an
opinion taker.
Here is a more detailed accurate picture ..bear in mind also that evans are only 10% of
the population and other factors like party affiliation affect their views. One also has to
wonder "IF" the evans as well as the other public were exposed to the real story on Israel
and not the slanted version of the US med how that would affect the numbers.
What Americans (especially Evangelicals) think about Israel and the Middle East
Evangicals, International Action, Israel, Middle East / North Africa, Views on
Countries/Regions December 4, 2015,
A new poll shows that in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict overall, an
overwhelming 77% of Evangelical Republicans want the United States to lean toward
Israel as compared to 29% to Americans overall and 36% of non-Evangelical Republicans.
In contrast 66% of all Americans and 60% of Non-Evangelical Republicans want the United
States to lean toward neither side .
This pattern holds on other aspects of US policy toward the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
If the UN Security Council considers endorsing the establishment of a Palestinian state, only
26% of all Americans and 38% of non-Evangelical Republicans favor the US voting against it.
However six in ten Evangelical Republicans say that the US should vote against it, thus
vetoing the move.
Evangelical Republicans also differ in that they pay far more attention to a candidate's
position on Israel. When considering which candidate to vote for in Congress or for president
just 26% of all Americans and 33% of non-Evangelical Republicans say they consider the
candidates position on Israel a lot. Among Evangelical Republicans 64% say they consider it a
lot.
Views of Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also vary dramatically. Among the general
public just 32 percent have a favorable view of Netanyahu, as do 47 percent of
non-Evangelical Republicans. Favorable views rise to 66% among Evangelicals.
When asked, in an open-ended question, to name a national leader they most admire 22 percent
of Republican Evangelicals chose Netanyahu, far more than any other leader.
Among Non-Evangelical Republicans 9 percent named Netanyahu and 6 percent for the public as a
whole. Evangelical Republicans represent 23% of all Republicans and 10% of the general
population.
"There are of course partisan differences on Middle East policy in American public attitudes,
but what's most striking is that much of the differences between Republicans and the
national total disappears once one sets aside Evangelical Republicans, who constitute 10% of
all Americans " said Shibley Telhami, the poll's principal investigator. "The Israel
issue in American politics is seen to have become principally a Republican issue, but in
fact, our results show, it's principally the issue of Evangelical Republicans."
One possible explanation for Evangelical Republicans' attitudes is their religious views.
Sixty-six percent of Evangelical Republicans say that for the rapture or Second Coming to
occur it is essential for current-day Israel to include all the land they believe was
promised to Biblical Israel in the Old Testament, with 35% holding this view strongly.
The poll was sponsored by the Sadat Chair at the University of Maryland, and conducted in
cooperation with the University's Program for Public Consultation, and released at the
Brookings Institution. It was fielded by Nielsen Scarborough November 4-11, 2015, among a
nationally representative sample of online panelists of 875, plus an oversample of
Evangelicals/Born-Again Christians of 863. The margin of error is 3-4%.
Other Select Findings:
Overall, twice as many Americans say the Israeli government has too much influence (37%) than
say too little influence (18%), while a plurality (44%) say it's the right level. Among
Democrats, about half (49%) say Israel has too much influence, compared with 14% who say
Israel has too little influence, and 36% who say it's the right level; Among Republicans,
slightly more people say that Israel has too much influence (25%) than say it has too little
influence (22%) with a slight majority (52%) saying it's the right level. The percentage of
people who think that Israel has too little influence increases with age: 8% of 18-24 year
olds feel this way in contrast to 17% of 25-44 year olds, 20% of 45-64 year olds, and 22% of
those who are 65 years of age and older.
Given five options to explain the escalation of Israeli-Palestinian violence the largest
number–31%–attributes it to the absence of serious peace diplomacy, while 26%
blame continued Israeli occupation and settlement expansion in the West Bank, and the same
number blame Palestinian extremists. Only 6% each blame Israeli extremists and Palestinian
authority ineffectiveness
Concerns about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are driven more by considerations related to
human right and international law than US interests. Offered five options to explain their
concern, the largest number -- 47%– say human rights or international law, while 32%
say America's interest. Thirteen percent say cite religious beliefs, while 8% express concern
for Israel's interests .
Overall, 37% of Americans (and 49% of Democrats) recommend punitive measures against
Israel over its settlement policy (27% recommend economic sanctions, and 10% recommend taking
more serious action); 31% recommend that the U.S. limits its opposition to words, 27%
recommend that the U.S. do nothing.
American views of Muslims are strikingly partisan. While 67% of Democrats express favorable
views of Muslims, only 41% of Republicans do.
73% of Evangelicals say that world events will turn against Israel the closer we get to the
rapture or end and 78% say that the unfolding violence across the Middle East is a sign that
the end times are nearer.
"... that Israel provided "tactical" assistance to Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, throughout the Syrian civil war. ..."
"... The fact that Halevy chose the Qatari government-funded Al Jazeera to make his revelation is even more noteworthy considering the fact that Qatar is also a major financial supporter of Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria. ..."
Israel: Our # 1 ally! Don't forget that! No matter how many American goyim they murder! No
matter how many billions they leech out of us while we can't even afford health care or
decent education for goyim chilluns! Number 1!
Israel supported Al Qaeda in Syria: Former Mossad Chief
Special Report. In an interview with the Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera, Efraim
Halevy, the former head of Mossad confirmed what many in the Middle East and around the world
already surmised: that Israel provided "tactical" assistance to Jabhat al-Nusra, the
Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, throughout the Syrian civil war.
The fact that Halevy chose the Qatari government-funded Al Jazeera to make his
revelation is even more noteworthy considering the fact that Qatar is also a major financial
supporter of Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria.
Reports from UN observers in the Golan Heights confirmed regular contact between Israel
Defense Force officers and armed Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State terrorists at the
Syrian-Israeli border.
... ... ...
Halevy said it was "humane" for Israel to provide medical assistance to wounded Syrian
terrorists but that such "humaneness" would never be extended to Shi'a Hezbollah fighters
from Lebanon who have been fighting against the Sunni jihadist terrorists in Syria. Israel's
"humaneness" was also shown for all the world to see in Gaza, where it murdered hundreds of
children, old men, and women in incessant bombing attacks on highly populated areas.
"Jewish IDF medics are treating and saving the lives of Syrian civilians "
Are you serious? There are documented instances of Israeli saving the lives of ISIS -- the
anti-civilian power unleashed by the US/Israel machinations in the Middle East. This has been
accepted even by the US brass.
http://www.inspiretochangeworld.com/2016/12/heres-us-israel-al-qaeda-isis-work-together-syria/
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, on a border with Russia, the Kagans/Banderites putsch in Kiev have
produced the results that should be of interest for the 52 main Jewish organizations in the
US as well as for sanctimonious Israel that continues extracting reparations for the
WWII-related "special" Jewish sufferings: https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/07/ukraine-abducts-journalists-to-exchange-for-terrorists/
"On July 5th, Kiev announced that it is willing to expand the list of prisoners that Ukraine
is ready to exchange for Ukrainians being held in Russia. Among those intended for exchange
is the coordinator of the Volunteers of Victory movement, Elena Yurevich (Odnovol),
arrested for organizing a Victory Day celebration outlawed by Ukrainian authorities.
"
"TTG",
one of SST's trusted writers, posted this report that you didn't read in NYTimes or hear on C
Span: Carrots and Sticks in Syria - TTG 03 Jul 2018
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/carrots-and-sticks-in-syria-ttg.html
. . . possible diplomatic breakthrough in southwest Syria. The core of this breakthrough was
and remains an intense effort to speed peace negotiations between Damascus and various
opposing forces in Syria. It was key to the SAA's recent successes in reducing the eastern
Ghouta, Homs and even the Yarmouk refugee camp pockets. The same methodology has enabled the
rapid recent success in Daraa. This effort is spearheaded by the Russian Reconciliation
Center based at Khmeimim Air Base in Latakia. In addition to pushing peace deals, it
coordinates relief aid to newly reconciled areas.
This carrot of reconciliation would not be effective without the stout stick which the SAA
has become. We are all familiar with the formidable Tiger Force and the growing list of their
combat successes. That success is being reinforced and replicated throughout the SAA by the
Russians. Units are being reorganized and re-equipped along the Russian Army model without
destroying what the Syrians themselves built over years of painful combat experience. Units
raised independently of the SAA, including those trained and advised by the IRGC and Iranian
Green Berets, will be folded into the SAA. This is also happening with some former rebels who
have reconciled with Damascus. We could learn something from this experience given how we
screwed the pooch with the Iraqi and Afghani armies. . . .
there's more at SST
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/carrots-and-sticks-in-syria-ttg.html
Three days ago, Pat Lang passed along reports from Haaretz and Almasdar that "Israel
accepts Syrian control up to the UNDOF Line"
Osama Abo Zayd , Former Spokesman of the Free Syrian Army former Syrian opposition
chief negotiator at the Astana talks. Kevork Almassian , founder of SyrianaAnalysis and Syrian Analyst. Danny Makki , a freelance journalist and commentator on the Syria conflict,
specialising in Syria's relations with Russia and Iran. Yahya al-Aridi , Spokesman for the Syrian Negotiation Commission.
Heated Debate: Kevork Almassian vs. FSA & opposition representatives
The fact that the US is facing a profound crisis, possibly the worst one in its history, is
accepted by most observers, except maybe the most delusional ones. Most Americans definitely
know that. In fact, if there is one thing upon which both those who supported Trump and those
who hate him with a passion can agree on, it would be that his election is a clear proof of a
profound crisis (I would argue that the election of Obama before also had, as one of its main
causes, the very same systemic crisis). When speaking of this crisis, most people will mention
the deindustrialization, the drop in real income, the lack of well-paid jobs, healthcare,
crime, immigration, pollution, education, and a myriad of other contributing factors. But of
all the aspects of the "American dream", the single most resilient one has been the myth of the
US military as "the finest fighting force in history".
For Americans warfare is killing the other guy in his own country, preferably from afar
or above, while making a ton of money in the process.
This is why I don't think there'll be any head-on clash between the US and Russia. It
would violate the above principle. American wars are ones of predation, attacking weaker
countries when the opportunity presents itself. It's a form of banditry, roving the world in
search of the next victim. Parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America are all weak and subject
to US whims. That there's a huge mythology attached to US military prowess is just part of
the brainwashing that goes on. It's been a winning formula for the US which has avoided the
massive casualty rates suffered by other countries. There's always the risk of miscalculation
of course but US politics is mostly show biz so it's hard to assess what part of it's warhawk
talk is real and what's showboating.
says: July 3, 2018 at 11:23 pm
GMT 500 Words John McCain was a traitor and collaborator, while being held captive. He was
given preferential treatment, due to the fact that his captors felt he was 'royalty', due to
his family 'connections'.
His "shoot down" was self-induced, as he DISOBEYED ORDERS and flew well below the 'floor',
getting himself shot down. There were several other jets on that particular mission and HE was
the only one shot down, because the others obeyed their orders!
His ENTIRE life has been one of disrespect of orders and authority, believing himself
bullet-proof, due to his 'family name' and his dad and grand dad being HIGH ranking Navy
Admirals!
His 'nickname' in his HS yearbook was "Punk" and he displayed that behavior as he went on to
the USNA, where he robbed someone, more deserving, of a slot in his class, due to the
'influence' of his father.
He SHOULD have been expelled, several times, but the folks at USNA did not want to go up
against dad. He graduated FIFTH FROM THE BOTTOM in his class . . but STILL ended up going to
Pensacola for flight training!! His classmates who actually 'made the grade' were aghast when
he showed up down there.
His flight grades were well below acceptable and he should have been run out of there too . .
he was an ABYSMAL aviator . . crashing on base leg at Corpus for carrier qualification
training. . he had been out drinking the night before and FELL ASLEEP after turning base leg
and 'configuring' for landing . . he crashed 'wings level' and straight ahead into Corpus
Bay.
He destroyed two other A/C after arriving in the Fleet . . before being shot down.
His nickname in Hanoi was "Songbird". . due to the information he willingly gave his captors. .
tactical stuff. .like 'routes, altitudes', etc., that our guys used to fly from the boat to
their targets and he got several aviators shot down and killed. He recorded 32+ propaganda bits
(a la Tokyo Rose) to be played for our enlisted troops . . to undermine their moral.
The bogus 'story' about not coming home early, when he could have, is just common sense. He
KNEW he would have been 'court-martialed' IF he had accepted any kind of early release, based
upon his 'family connections'.
After his release, his Navy 'flying career' SHOULD have been over, based upon his permanent
injuries, but, his dad intimidated a flight surgeon and he wrongly got back his flight medical
status, when ANYONE else would NOT have 'passed' with his 'condition'. He was 'awarded' the
position of XO at the Navy's largest training squadron, VA-174 at NAS Cecil and when the CO
moved on, he was 'selected', over MANY more qualified officers, to become CO. .he used his
position as XO and CO to take young (junior) female pilots on X-Country flights and screwed
their brains out.
THAT is ILLEGAL in the military and he SHOULD have been convicted at Court Martial for
'fraternization' . .INSTEAD . .daddy got him moved out of the squadron and put in charge of the
Navy's "Liaison" in DC . . along with a VERY early promotion to Captain . . the rest, as they
say, is history.
John McCain is a scum bag . . a DISGRACE to the uniform he wore and his spots did not change
when he became a politician!
As an aside, John McCain's admiral "daddy" was instrumental in the cover-up of the deliberate
Israeli attack on the USS Liberty (GTR-5) in 1967. Maybe "the apple didn't fall far from the
tree". Read More Agree: Cloak And Dagger
ChuckOrloski Writing
apparently as a patriotic & principled American military veteran, RVBlake said:
"I do not recall seeing any U.S. followup to the (Vincennes) atrocity."
Hi RVBlake,
Above, neither do I!
Nonetheless, a sincere thanks for your "higher" service to our very sick society & your
having honorably called the U.S. Navy's attack upon the defenseless Iranian passenger airplane
what it really was -- an "atrocity."
Around the year 2006, I do recall a dreaded sense of shame when faux "war hero," Senator
John McCain, modified the popular Beach Boys song lyric to "Barbara Ann," and to the delight of
his Zio indoctrinated political supporters (at a rally), he fiendishly intoned, "Bomb, bomb
Iran!"
Fyi, RVBlake, a few months ago, author & U.S. military veteran, Philip Giraldi, wrote a
great U.R. article about our "Zionized military."
On Independence Day Eve, you will ever more so appreciate P.G.'s higher service to our
country. Thanks again!
Yes, you are correct about that. The Yugoslav attack was on March 24, 1999. It was three
weeks later than the last Purim – March 3 – Shushan Purim (walled city Purim
– Jerusalem). Erev Purim (Eve of Purim) March 1 and March 2 – Purim. It wasn't
exactly on the date of Purim as the middle east attacks in 1991 – Iraq, 2003 Iraq and
2011 Libya. But near enough to it for the Neocons.
Charles Krauthammer, a neocon who recently died, wanted civilians to be attacked in
Yugoslavia in the 1999 NATO attack and he got his wish. This is his lovely quote.
"Finally they are hitting targets – power plants, fuel depots, bridges, airports,
television transmitters – that may indeed kill the enemy and civilians nearby."
The'Balkan Action Committee' formed during the NATO 1999 attack on Yugoslavia consisted of
neocons who lobbied hard for war against Yugoslavia. Committee members included these neocons
– Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld – three men would later lobby
again for another war in Iraq.
"... IS THE LEASH NOW OFF THE 'OTHER CIA?' https://southfront.org/is-the-leash-now-off-the-other-cia/ ..."
"... Under Donald Trump, who is on record favoring CIA kidnapping and torture programs, the CIA has been given a green light to carry out "targeted assassinations." ..."
Under Donald Trump, who is on record favoring CIA kidnapping and torture programs, the CIA has been given a green light to
carry out "targeted assassinations."
Although most of these targeted kills have been carried out by drone attacks in Yemen, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Somalia, where civilian deaths from "collateral damage" are estimated to be well over three hundred, recent events
point to the CIA's return to the "bad old days," when it engaged in a global program of assassinating political leaders.
"Joshua Ryne Goldberg, a 20-year old living at his parents' house in US state of Florida, is
accused of posing online as "Australi Witness," an IS supporter who publicly called for a
series of attacks against individuals and events in western countries.
An affidavit sworn at the time of the arrest says that, between August 19 and August 28,
Mr Goldberg "distributed information pertaining to the manufacturing of explosives,
destructive devices, or weapons of mass destruction in furtherance of an activity that
constitutes a Federal crime of violence".
US Attorney Lee Bentley III, said Goldberg instructed a confidential source how to make a
bomb similar to two used in the Boston Marathon bombings two years ago that killed three
people and injured more than 260 others.
"Goldberg further admitted that he believed the information would create a genuine bomb,"
Agent Berry alleged.
In the leadup to an exhibition in Garland, Texas, at which pictures of the Prophet
Mohammed were to be displayed, "Australi Witness" tweeted the event's address and reposted a
tweet urging people to go there with "weapons, bombs or with knifes".
Yes, Jews can be evil little sh*ts just like Muslims and indeed anyone can. It is the
trend that matters, as nothing is all or nothing, but I repeat myself!
Anyway, I've got a question for you KA, to see if you can be consistent and whether you
possess the supposedly stereotypical Middle Eastern shame mindset of all or nothing.
I'm a British anti-imperialist and I firmly believe that millions of British people should
not start moving to Arab and Muslims countries and colonise them.
As I am an anti-imperialist I also believe that millions of Arabs and Muslims should not
be allowed to move to Britain and furthermore that those who have already come here should go
home.
Do you agree with me? Are you a consistent anti-imperialist? Or are you just playing for
your team to win and conquer all?
I am not a never Trumper or even anti-Trump but IMO he is headed for a fall in North Korea. He and Pompeo seem to be overly convinced
of the effect of the magnetism of their personalities. Trump's self image ill equips him to deal with the sheer stubbornness of the
inhabitants of a political theocracy and Pompeo suffers people poorly whom he thinks inferior to him in intellect. He hides that
well behind a surface masked in affability.
Have the Chinese sabotaged the deal? They probably have done that, seeking to maintain control of this dependency while teaching
Trump a lesson. Two birds with one stone is always good.
Trump is accustomed to making deals that are executed in trenches when the initial attempt to hustle the "partner" into
giving it all up fails. IMO he will fall back to that method of operation. What will be the effect on Mikey? It will be nothing good.
Trump does not tolerate failure in his zillim "flunkies." They are all just tools to him, to be discarded if they do not
meet his expectations.
He will be particularly incensed because the Europeans may be encouraged in their resistance. pl
Zillim? Don't get the reference but the tone is clear enough...
I think the Singapore summit and everything leading up to it was mostly just good political theater. The game is still wide
open and nothing of substance has happened yet. Turning up the heat just made reducing it back to normal seem like cooling off.
"Have the Chinese sabotaged the deal? They probably have done that,...."
In my lay opinion you are spot on. This is precisely what is happening I believe since North Korea is a Chinese pawn in the
trade contest between Xi and Trump. The question is how much further the trade dispute escalates and where the North Korea deal
card gets played.
It was nice to see Trump's sudden return to sanity by holding talks with North Korea. I
never understood why he accepted psychopaths like Bolton into his office. One could be cynical
(or realistic) and realize that Zionists don't give a damn about Korea, Iran is their target.
Trump can secure peacenik creds and free up forces to focus on Iran. Others note that South
Korea's president walked crossed the DMZ to hug North Korea's leader, and probably told Trump
that he can do this with or without him. The neocons realized they need to give peace a chance
or get dropped from the game.
It's a puzzle, but so far it's good news, especially since it showed that never-Trumpers
prefer world war rather than congratulating Trump for peace. We didn't give up anything. I've
taken part in these war games. South Korean land and airspace is so crowded that war games
there are unrealistic and stupid. Our military is better off practicing elsewhere. The
Deep State is in shock and counterattacked. Trump's peace effort was widely denounced by
their corporate media, and fake news has just appeared from "anonymous intelligence sources"
that North Korea is suddenly increasing production of nuclear material.
Hopefully, Trump will push ahead and learn that he can pull thousands of non-combat GIs out
of South Korea to save a couple billion dollars a year and actually improve our combat
readiness in Korea! Don't fall for lies that keeping troops in Korea saves the USA money
because of contributions from South Korea. It costs a lot more money to maintain equipment and
soldiers on the other side of the world, and to pay GIs thousands of dollars a month to live
off base. South Korea does not pay any of these costs. Its contributions are paying land rent
and base construction payments to South Koreans and bogus contributions like forgiving import
fees, income taxes, and on-base sales taxes for American GIs. G2mil published these
detailed proposals to cut military fat in Korea over the past few years:
Momus writes:
"Showproof of your masters degree in engineering please.
Of course it was a gravitational collapse. The footage shows the section above the
damaged, weakened, fire affected area coming down first in both.
What do you think happened?
Nanothermite toting Mossad suicide demolition gremlins entered the building after the planes
hit and set up?"
Consider your proposal of pancaking floors. Either the floors do not disintegrate to dust
and we find a pack of floors on top of each other in Ground Zero. This we know was not found.
Or the floors hitting each other disintegrate to dust. In that case the floors from up
disintegrate the floors from down, but the floors from down also disintegrate the floors from
up and the collapse stops inn the middle of the building as the floors above that drop on the
floors below have all disintegrated to dust. There is equal reaction to action, so it is
impossible that floors above break floors below and continue breaking them up to the ground
level. If the floors below disintegrate, then the floors above also disintegrate.
There are photos and videos of the collapse. Both may be false, but they are presented by
the official story as authentic, so let us assume they are authentic. In these photos heavy
material is pushed sideways and even up. It cannot happen in a gravitation collapse.
Gravitation pulls things down only. No fires damaged the lower floors, they should have
pancaked because of being hit by floors above, but as said, pancaking either gives a stack of
floors or all disintegrate to dust and the collapse stops. The former case did not happen, no
stack of floors was found.
There were high explosives and thermite, maybe as nanothermite. The building was wired for
demolition before the event. A Mossad team arrived to the place before the plane came, the
dancing Palestinians. Something hit the buildings, maybe planes, maybe drones with missiles.
Later the buildings were pulled in a bit unconventional way. Doors to the roof were blocked
for a better effect and more dead. A passport of a Muslim hijacker was conveniently found, so
the news knew immediately who did it. Osama bin Laden first denied having done the attack.
Then the USA went to destroy Iraq, which had irritated a country in the region. Something
like this happened.
I will not post any diplomas on a forum. Take my word on this: High School 1976, ave
9.7/10, conscript 1976-77, Started studies Fall 1977 in the University of Helsinki (UH math).
and in Helsinki Univ. Techn (HUT EE). Diplomas: BS Nov 1979 from UH, MS Dec 1979 from UH
grade: eximia, MS EE Feb 1981 HUT with honors, that is 2.5 years for two master degrees.
Phil.Lis,(=PhD 3.cycle) 1985 from UH, Doctor of Phil.(PhD) 1988 from UH, Docent
(=habilitation, adj.prof) HUT 1997, Docent NDU 2011. Professor for 13 years in three
universities in communication and military technology. 10 years of research/development
outside academia. 10 years prof. in the defence forces. This should be enough to equal any
ex-navy guy who got a degree in Philosophy and stopped before making a PhD and calls others
wackadoodles.
Wizard writes:
"Well, if the explanation for the second tower to be hit coming down first was amended to
note that there was the weight of many more floors above the point of impact would you still
use the word "idiotic"? How otherwise do you explain the timing? I presume you don't think
each plane hit at exactly the levels which some plotters had relied on????"
The timing of a controlled demolition is determined by the person pressing the button. It
does not need any technical explanation.
I discard the gravitational fall theory for a number of reasons. Here are three, but there
are more:
1) the extremely temperatures long time after 9/11. I remember well when these were told in
the news in my country, it was long before any 911Truthers proposed controlled demolition.
High temperatures long after the event are best explained by very high temperatures just
after the event, which suggests thermite, or something similar causing very high
temperatures, 3000 Celsius or so.
2) Throwing material sideways and up is impossible for gravitation. The videos and photos may
be falsified, but if so, they were falsified by the ones proposing the official explanation.
The collapse in the videos does not at all resemble a gravitational fall, which you can see
e.g. in icebergs.
3) The pancaking theory is false. I did read the paper by Bazant and a student. The equations
are fine, the values set to them are not fine. I agree with 911Truthers concerning Bazant's
article.
I do not indeed think the planes hit exactly on planned places, I also do not think the
planes caused the collapse. I also find your suggestion for timing very odd: if fires had
weakened the steel and that caused the collapse of one floor, then it is completely
irrelevant how many stores were above the level. The time would be determined by the time to
heat the steel to the point that is loses strength. The time would likely be different in
different towers, but mainly because isolation material would be differently thorn, the fuel
would be in different places and so on. The weight above the floor would not much matter
since before the collapse the structure can keep it up, and if the temperature rises enough
then it cannot. Fire can bring down a building, but the way it came down looks very
suspicious. It looks like a fountain throwing material up.
I would still use the word "idiotic" for any suggestion that the fall was by gravitation.
I would also use the same word for your elaboration of the suggestion by the timing
consideration, though in some other topics I acknowledge the reason and knowledge in your
comments. And I especially liked the news that one hijacker's passport landed on the ground
so nicely and that Mossad had a team videoing the event before the plane hit the tower. Both
things are so typical for a gravitational collapse but only in the USA.
Wizard wrote:
"I don't suppose there is any area of science or engineering where I can claim more to you
but I do know enough to prep an expert witness and I am not convinced you can justify your
denial that an extra 1000 tons or so on top of a weakened area would be unrelated to time
taken for collapse. Let me put it this way: if the steel structures which had to cease
supporting the building above had reached through heat a point where it had lost 75 per cent
of the original strength maybe 2 X tons of potential energy would be needed to cause collapse
whereas only X tons would be needed if, through further heating, 90 per cent had been
lost."
You might well convince the jury in a court room, but I do not think engineers would buy
this argument, because they would naturally agree with what you said but then they would
continue to estimate the time between these two events. If you get the steel bars to 400
Celsius, when it still has not lost any of its strength, it will not take long to get it to
650 Celsius when half of the strength has gone. Try heating lead, it is the easiest metal to
try at home. For a long time nothing happens, but when lead starts to soften it very soon
melts.
The trick is to get those steelbars to 425 Celsius when they start to soften. To get them
so hot you need a major fire in the building lasting for a long time, but once you already
have this major fire, the temperature of the steel easily rises close to 1000 Celsius, which
is the burning temperature of jet fuel and office fires. Why would it not rise, if it rose so
high?
That is, normally you do not get steelbars to 400 Celsius because heat escapes by
conduction and radiation , but if you got the conditions that put in heat in faster than
it gets out (it is hot everywhere, heat cannot escape), the temperature of the steel will
rise very fast. Think about the lead example. It takes a long time to get it to soften, since
the heat conducts to the whole piece. You have to rise the temperature of all your lead to
the softening point, but then it is all hot and heat cannot escape to cooler places, so it
fast gets hotter.
Or let me put it another way. 911Truthers say (I have not check, but nobody has denied)
that only 4 steel frame skyscrapers in all times have collapsed because of fire (3 in 9/11
and one in Brazil 2018) and many of these buildings burned long. It means that the steel
frame in the other buildings never softened, did not reach 500-700 Celsius, because heating
steel the heat escapes unless the beams are very thin. You get a heat gradient, but if you
put in less heat than can escape.
It is like pouring water to a bowl with a hole in the bottom. If you pour less than can go
out, it just does not fill. But if you pour faster, then the water level rises and it rises
quite fast. So, you need a major fire to get the steel to 425 Celsius when it starts to
soften, but if you get it there, you must be putting in more heat than can go out and
therefore the steel temperature will rise fast to the temperature of your fire. There should
not be much time between steel starting to soften and steel losing 50% of its strength.
There are measurements that the steel in WTC buildings did not get to high enough
temperatures to lose enough strength. But my main argument was that what determines how high
the steel temperature goes is how badly thorn is heat isolation and how big are the fires.
These things should have been different in the towers and they do not depend on how many
stores were above the plane (or something).
There are too many things wrong with the official 9/11 story. It cannot be defended
outside a kangaroo court.
"As this is the reason, there are twice as many Jews above some range, like 151, than
non-Jewish whites, which is what Terman found. "
Jew IQ is largely a myth established by marketing and media control, starting with the
Einstein brand. The myth is necessary to justify and conceal Jewish tribal nepotism as the
main factor establishing dominance of a hostile elite in host nations. The question has been
examined in numerous locations easily found with a search engine.
There are approximately six times as many white Americans with IQ above 140, as there are
Jews with IQ above 140. No, Jewish intelligence does not account for their dominance in
academia, media, and government. It must be Jew priviledge, not Jew IQ that justifies their
right to rule the goyim.
As a side note all "nation IQ" arguments are scientifically fake/ Izreal and South africa of the past share the same problem
and Izreal might eventually come to the same utcome.
Notable quotes:
"... The single greatest feat of Israel and its overseas missions has not been material success, or the military conquest of millions of unarmed Palestinians, it has been ideological – the widespread acceptance in the US of a doctrine that claims 'Jews are a superior people'. ..."
"... Israel's dominant role in formulating US Middle East policy is largely a product of its success at recruiting, socializing and motivating overseas Jews to act as an organized force to intervene in US politics and push Israel's agenda. ..."
"... What motivates American Jews, who have been raised and educated in the US to serve Israel? After all, these are individuals who have prospered, achieved high status and occupy the highest positions of prestige and responsibility. ..."
"... What turns comfortable, prosperous American Jews into vindictive bullies, willing and able to blackmail, threaten and punish any dissident voices among their Gentile and Jewish compatriots who have dared to criticize Israel? ..."
"... Thirdly, Supremacists compile a very selective list of virtuous Jews, while omitting areas of life and activity where Jews have disproportionately played a negative and destructive role. ..."
"... After all is it Jewish 'genius' that makes Israel a leading exporter of arms, high tech intrusive spy systems and sends military and paramilitary advisers and torturers to work with death squad regimes in Africa and Latin America? ..."
"... In other words, these Nobel recipients, who Supremacists cite as 'examples of Jewish Supremacy', have sown terror and injustice on countless captive peoples and nations – giving the Nobel Peace Prize a dubious distinction. ..."
"... Among the greatest billion dollar swindlers in recent US history, we d find a disproportionate percentage of American Jews – curiously not mentioned by the Supremacists in their usual litany: Bernard Madoff pillaged over $50 billion from his clients, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and Marc Rich are well-known names adding the distinction of 'Jewish genius' to a list of financial mega-felons. ..."
"... The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression was largely due to the financial policies of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. The trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street by Ben Shalom Bernacke and Stanley Fischer, while Janet Yellen ignored the plight of millions of Americans who lost their homes because of mortgage foreclosures. In sum, Jewish Supremacists should proudly take credit for the American Jews who have been disproportionately responsible for the largest economic and foreign policy failures of the contemporary period – including the horrific suffering these have entailed! ..."
"... Back in the more normal world of crime, Russian-Jewish mobsters dominate or share supremacy with the Italian Mafia in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami and scores of cities in between. They display their unique genius at extortion and murder – knowing they can always find safe haven in the 'Promised Land'! ..."
"... Donations from financial billionaires, all 'geniuses', have financed the war crimes of the Israeli state and made possible the expansion of violent Jewish settlers throughout occupied Palestine – spreading misery and displacement for millions. ..."
The single greatest feat of Israel and its overseas missions has not been material
success, or the military conquest of millions of unarmed Palestinians, it has been ideological
– the widespread acceptance in the US of a doctrine that claims 'Jews are a superior
people'.
Apart from small extremist rightwing sects who exhibit visceral anti-Semitism and denigrate
everything Jewish, there are very few academics and politicians willing to question this
supremacist doctrine. On the contrary, there is an incurable tendency to advance oneself by
accepting and embellishing on it.
For example, in August 2015, US Vice-President Joseph Biden attributed 'special genius' to
Jews, slavish flattery that embarrassed even New York's liberal Jewish intellectuals.
Israel's dominant role in formulating US Middle East policy is largely a product of its
success at recruiting, socializing and motivating overseas Jews to act as an organized force to
intervene in US politics and push Israel's agenda.
What motivates American Jews, who have been raised and educated in the US to serve Israel?
After all, these are individuals who have prospered, achieved high status and occupy the
highest positions of prestige and responsibility. Why would they parrot the policies of Israel
and follow the dictates of Israeli leaders (a foreign regime), serving its violent colonial,
racist agenda?
What binds a majority of highly educated and privileged Jews to the most rabidly rightwing
Israeli regime in history – a relationship they actually celebrate?
What turns comfortable, prosperous American Jews into vindictive bullies, willing and able
to blackmail, threaten and punish any dissident voices among their Gentile and Jewish
compatriots who have dared to criticize Israel?
What prevents many intelligent, liberal and progressive Jews from openly questioning
Israel's agenda, and especially confronting the role of Zionist zealots who serve as Tel Aviv's
fifth column against the interest of the United States?
There are numerous historical and personal factors that can and should be taken into account
to understand this phenomenon.
In this essay I am going to focus on one – the ideology that 'Jews are a superior
people'. The notion that Jews, either through some genetic, biologic, cultural, historical,
familial and/or upbringing, have special qualities allowing them to achieve at a uniquely
higher level than the 'inferior' non-Jews.
We will proceed by sketching the main outline of the Jewish supremacist ideology and then
advance our critique.
We will conclude by evaluating the negative consequences of this ideology and propose a
democratic alternative.
Jewish Supremacism
Exponents of Jewish Supremacism (JS) frequently cite the prestigious awards, worldly
successes and high honors, which, they emphasize, have been disproportionately achieved by
Jews.
The argument goes: While Jews represent less than 0.2% of the world population, they have
produced 24% of the US Nobel prize winners; over 30% of Ivy League professors and students; and
the majority of major US film, stage and TV producers.
They cite the 'disproportionate number' of scientists, leading doctors, lawyers and
billionaires.
They cite past geniuses like, Einstein, Freud and Marx .
They point to the founders of the world's great monotheistic religions – Moses and
Abraham.
They lay claim to a unique learning tradition embedded in centuries of Talmudic
scholarship.
Jewish supremacists never miss a chance to cite the 'Jewish background' of any highly
accomplished contemporary public figures in the entertainment, publication, financial fields or
any other sectors of life in the US.
Disproportionately great accomplishments by a disproportionate minority has become the
mantra for heralding a self-styled 'meritocratic elite' . and for justifying its
disproportionate wealth, power and privileges – and influence
Challenging the Myths of Jewish Supremacists
There are serious problems regarding the claims of the Jewish Supremacists.
For centuries Jewish 'wisdom' was confined to textual exegesis of religious dogma –
texts full of superstition and social control, as well as blind intolerance, and which produced
neither reasoned arguments nor contributed to scientific and human advancement.
Jewish scholarship of note occurred among thinkers like Spinoza who revolted against the
Jewish ghetto gatekeepers and rejected Jewish dogma.
Notable scientists emerged in the context of working and studying with non-Jews in
non-Jewish institutions – the universities and centers of learning in the West. The
majority of world-renowned Jewish scholars integrated and contributed to predominantly
non-Jewish (Moslem and Christian) and secular institutions of higher learning.
Historically, highly talented individuals of Jewish origin succeeded by renouncing the
constraints of everyday Jewish life, rabbinical overseers and Jewish institutions. Most
contemporary prestigious scientists, including the frequently cited Nobel Prize winners, have
little or nothing to do with Judaism! And their contributions have everything to do with the
highly secular, integrated culture in which they prospered intellectually – despite
expressions of crude anti-Semitism in the larger society.
Secondly , Jewish Supremacists persist in claiming 'racial credit' for the achievements of
individuals who have publically renounced, denounced and distanced themselves from Judaism and
have dismissed any notion of Israel as their spiritual homeland. Their universal prestige has
prevented them from being labeled, apostate or 'self-hating'. Albert Einstein, often cited by
the Supremacists as the supreme example of 'Jewish genius', denounced Israel's war crimes and
showed disdain for any tribal identity. In their era, Marx and Trotsky, like the vast majority
of emancipated European Jews, given the chance, became engaged in universalistic organizations,
attacking the entire notion that Jews were a 'special people' chosen by divine authority (or by
the latter-day Zionists).
Thirdly, Supremacists compile a very selective list of virtuous Jews, while omitting areas
of life and activity where Jews have disproportionately played a negative and destructive
role.
After all is it Jewish 'genius' that makes Israel a leading exporter of arms, high tech
intrusive spy systems and sends military and paramilitary advisers and torturers to work with
death squad regimes in Africa and Latin America?
Among the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize are three Israeli Prime Ministers who waged wars
of ethnic cleansing against millions of Palestinians and expanded racist 'Jews only'
settlements throughout the occupied Palestinian territories. These include Menachem Begin
(notorious career bomber and terrorist), Yitzhak Rabin (a militarist who was assassinated by an
even more racist Jewish terrorist) and Shimon Peres. Among Jewish American Nobel 'Peaceniks' is
Henry Kissinger who oversaw the brutal and illegal US war in Indo-China causing 4 million
Vietnamese deaths;who wrote the 'template for regime change' by overthrowing the democratically
elected government of Chilean President Allende and condemned Chile to decades of police state
terror; and who supported Indonesia's destruction of East Timor!
In other words, these Nobel recipients, who Supremacists cite as 'examples of Jewish
Supremacy', have sown terror and injustice on countless captive peoples and nations –
giving the Nobel Peace Prize a dubious distinction.
Among the greatest billion dollar swindlers in recent US history, we d find a
disproportionate percentage of American Jews – curiously not mentioned by the
Supremacists in their usual litany: Bernard Madoff pillaged over $50 billion from his clients,
Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and Marc Rich are well-known names adding the distinction of
'Jewish genius' to a list of financial mega-felons.
Among the less respectable notables whose material successes have been tarnished by personal
weaknesses – we have the billionaire and pedophile pimp, Jeffry Epstein; IMF President,
rapist and debaucher Dominic Strauss Kahn, entrepreneur and 'nudist' Dov Charney, New York
Governor and 'repeat customer' Elliot Spitzer, Congressman and exhibitionist Anthony Weiner and
the fun-loving sports impresario who brought down FIFA, the piratical Chuck Blazer. Curiously,
none of these extraordinarily successful notables have been cited as examples of Jewish
Supremacy.
As we contemplate the millions of war refugees driven from the Near East and North Africa,
we should credit the role of US neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologues and policymakers
–a disproportionate percentage of whom are Jews. Millions of Chilean workers suffered as
Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys 'advised' Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet on dismantling
the welfare state (even if it required the murder of trade unionists!). Ayn Rand (Alyssa
Rosenbaum) and her fanatical free market epigones have savaged all progressive social
legislation and turned the most retrograde forms of selfishness into a religion of
'superiority'!
The disastrous US war against Iraq was largely organized, promoted and justified by a
disproportionate percentage of US Jews (Zionists), including leading policymakers in the Bush
and Obama administration – Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, Dennis Ross,
Martin Indyk, David Frum, Shulsky, Levey, Cohen, Rahm Emanuel etc They continue to push for war
against Iran and should be seen as the 'godfathers' of the tragedies of Iraq, Syria and Libya
where millions have fled.
The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression was largely due to the financial
policies of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. The trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street
by Ben Shalom Bernacke and Stanley Fischer, while Janet Yellen ignored the plight of millions
of Americans who lost their homes because of mortgage foreclosures. In sum, Jewish Supremacists
should proudly take credit for the American Jews who have been disproportionately responsible
for the largest economic and foreign policy failures of the contemporary period –
including the horrific suffering these have entailed!
Back in the more normal world of crime, Russian-Jewish mobsters dominate or share supremacy
with the Italian Mafia in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami and scores of cities in
between. They display their unique genius at extortion and murder – knowing they can
always find safe haven in the 'Promised Land'!
On the cultural front, the finest Jewish writers, artists, musicians, scientists have
emerged outside of Israel. A few may have immigrated to the Jewish state, but many other
intellectuals and artists of note have chosen to leave Israel, repelled by the racist,
intolerant and repressive apartheid state and society promoted by Jewish Supremacists.
Conclusion
The record provides no historical basis for the claims of Jewish Supremacists:
What has been cited as the disproportionate 'Jewish genius' turns out to be a two-edged
sword – demonstrating the best and the worst.
Claiming a monopoly on high academic achievement must be expanded to owning up to the Jewish
authors of the worst financial and foreign policy disasters – they too are 'high
achievers'.
Donations from financial billionaires, all 'geniuses', have financed the war crimes of the
Israeli state and made possible the expansion of violent Jewish settlers throughout occupied
Palestine – spreading misery and displacement for millions.
In fairness, the most notorious Jewish swindler in contemporary America was even-handed:
'Bernie' Madoff swindled Jews and Goys, Hollywood moguls and New York philanthropists –
he wasn't picky about who he fleeced.
The latest fashion among Jewish Supremacist 'geneticists' is to extoll the discovery of
uniquely special 'genes' predisposing Jews to experience the 'holocaust' and even inherit the
experience of suffering from long dead ancestors. Such 'scientists' should be careful. As Jazz
artist and essayist, Gilad Altzmon wryly notes, 'They will put the anti-Semites out of
business'.
Ultimately, Jews, who have assimilated into the greater society or not, who inter-marry and
who do not, are all products of the social system in which they live and (like everyone else)
they are the makers of the roles they decide to play within it.
In the past, a uniquely disproportional percentage of Jews chose to fight for universal
humanist values – rejecting the notion of a chosen people.
Today a disproportionate percentage of educated Jews have chosen to embrace an
'ethno-religious' Supremacist dogma, which binds them to an apartheid, militarist state and
ideology ready to drag the world into a global war.
Never forget! Racialist supremacist doctrines led Germany down the blind ally of
totalitarianism and world war, in which scores of millions perished.
Jews, especially young Jews, are increasingly repelled by Israel's crimes against humanity.
The next step for them (and for us) is to criticize, demystify and stand up to the toxic
supremacist ideology linking the powerful domestic Zionist power configuration and its
political clones with Israel.
The root problem is not genetic, it is collective political dementia: a demented ideology
that claims a chosen elite can forever dominate and exploit the majority of American people.
The time will come when the accumulated disasters will force the Americans people to push back,
unmasking the elite and rejecting its supremacist doctrines. Let us hope that they will act
with passion guided by reason.
The simple answer to the questions posed in the beginning is that everything comes down to
one's beliefs.
If you believe yourself to be superior and combine that with a hard-work ethic, you will
create that which you took as a natural given. The belief system of Judaism evolved from one
that was primarily concerned with pleasing God and working towards the afterlife to one
primarily concerned with creating heaven on earth and working towards the material life. Such
doctrines are at the heart of any materialistic ideology. It is a materialistic ideology that
over-indulges in matters of material wealth, accomplishment, and worldly success. But such an
ideology was certainly not the way of Abraham or Moses (or Jesus or Muhammad –
saaws).
So it must be said (and it must be a lesson for every other group, nation, or tribe on
earth): the mixing of race/tribe with religion is wrong. Judaism has largely become (I know
that there are reform movements that differ with such orthodoxy) a religious and ethnic
identity to the point where both become one and the same. A good comment was made above about
the distinction (or lack thereof) between a Jewish atheist and a Jewish rabbi.
I don't think it too out of the ordinary to understand how and why the doctrine of Jewish
supremacism found a cozy home in the United States. The US has had its own doctrine of
exceptionalism for a very long time (just ask the Native Americans). Migration away from the
familiarity of one's extended family and indigenous people by the early colonialists, along
with a framework of post-enlightenment secularism led many Americans to become ignorant of
their own religion. Success, the spoils of war, and material abundance added to all that of
course. And so, most American Christians (which last time I checked, still form the majority
of the US) forgot the criticism of the Jews that Jesus (as) and the Bible taught! Instead,
they began to pick and choose what is convenient to follow as far as their faith goes. It is
far more convenient to fall into praise and worship of those who have a monopoly with regards
to power and authority (especially through mass media), rather than follow in the footsteps
of great religious leaders who constantly challenged those in power.
What is described in the above article does indeed resemble other supremacist and racist
ideologies. From Arab Baathism to German Nazism; the Aryan Nations to the Black Panthers;
American Exceptionalism to European Manifest Destiny these are all alike in that they emanate
from the very darkness of our souls. The first racist/supremacist was iblis (lucifer) i.e.
satan (the leader of the devils). He felt he and those made of the same substance as him were
superior to us (human beings). But it is God who creates all living things and all types of
substances without discrimination or prejudice. The cosmetic differences then are a test for
us to see who will do good, and who will fall into evil (by way of our own free-will).
In the Farewell Sermon, Prophet Muhammad (saaws) said: " All mankind is from Adam and Eve;
an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an
Arab, and a White has no superiority over a Black nor does a Black have any superiority over
a White; except through piety and good deeds "
Whenever I am reminded of the disproportionate number of Jews who receive Nobel Prizes, I
always like to point out that if there were Nobel prizes for networking, Jews would get 100%
of them.
Lame! The article doesn't even try to explain how such a small percentage of the world's
population manages to produce such a large percentage of the world's most productive
scientists and intellectuals. If our hypothesis is that certain ethnic Jewish populations
have, on average, higher native IQs than other peoples, then the fact that many of those
scientists and intellectuals have renounced their Judaism becomes entirely irrelevant.
Further, if we are talking about intellectual superiority, rather than moral superiority,
then it is to be expected that Jews would also excel at villainy. As far as I can see, this
column offers no argument and introduces no evidence that is inconsistent with the hypothesis
of Jewish intellectual superiority. (And no, I am not Jewish).
Jewish is an ethnicity. Zionist is an ideology. Not all Jews are Zionists. Not all Zionists
are Jews. It is Zionist ideology and not Jewish ethnicity that is making trouble in the
world. The idea of the supremacy of ethnic Jews is as silly as the idea of the supremacy of
Texans. Apartheid and expansionism are policies of Zionists and rightfully should be
condemned and resisted.
This sort of tossed-off-the-top-of-the-head stuff (none of it new or refreshed with original
thinking or research) is rather a waste of time. No doubt the natural tribalism and group
purpose that one can find in lots of ethnic and other groups is or seems to outsiders
particularly formidable when found in a group that has an average IQ almost a sd above other
whites', strives mightily and has a 3000 year history, for most of it literate, attached to a
particular homeland. But I have found without the sort of well researched references I would
expect from the author more supremacist chatter amongst young Chinese blog commenters than
from anyone else.
There are obvious elements of truth that one glimpse in this piece but the author does
remarkably little to support his argument beyond assertion.
JUDAISTS MENTALLY DERANGED TO THINK THEY ARE GOD'S CHOSEN; MOST SUCCESS BY CORRUPT MEANS.
Thanks for the excellent article, Sir. Peter the Great does a great job again! You are
right on everything but I would like to add a couple of points.
1. Believing your ethnic group is "chosen" is a delusion, which is a symptom of mental
illness:
God (if there is one), who created all people, would never label one group over the other,
a priori. And if God did so, he would come and tell the others to respect his favorite group
over themselves. God never came and told me or others I know that "Jews" are His "Chosen" and
we are not. Never, never once in my life. Others' religious books never record any such
commandment from God. For a group to engage in shameless self-adulation and then falsely
ascribe it to God is repugnant and an evil fraud in the name of God.
Secondly, this assertion of being "Chosen" is based on the Torah (Old Testament,
Deuteronomy 7:6). The fact that the OT is fiction is obvious from Book 1, Page 1. See: "The
Forgery of the Old Testament" by Joseph McCabe. The earth is not 6000 years old, etc. Higher
criticism showed that the OT was weaved together from four source documents. The scribes, who
imagined a mass murderer Moses (who was so black, the African Pharaoh assumed he was his
grandson for decades) as their prophet were themselves probably mentally deranged African
criminals.
2. More than ½ of Jewish success is due to corrupt and criminal means. Under the
delusion they are Go's Chosen, Judaists lose morals became crooks and criminals at a much
higher rate. Judaists bribe and blackmail politicians in USA and EU to get Israel favorite
treatment and destroy the goyim through alienism and flood it with 3rd world aliens. The
bribed politicians pay them back millions or even billions in grants and contracts and other
favors, such as FCC licenses, protection from criminal prosecution, etc. For example, Jewish
billionaire George Soros (Schwartz) made money in insider trading. Most Judaists succeed due
to nepotism as they hire each other in top positions, to monopolize and control and to goyim
out. Eg. Elena Kagan who never tried a case was suddenly appointed to the Supreme Court.
They also control the Nobel Committee, given the fact that many Judaists who got nobel
prizes got them for no great discovery or invention! See details here:
In summary, Judaism is a mentally deranged criminal cult and the Judaists are a modern
criminal gang that controls all 3 branches of our govt., media and academia and is using its
criminally obtained power to bolster their mythical homeland, Israel, and keeping it pure,
while destroying white goyim thru 3rd world immigration and liberalism in order to rule them
using the divide and conquer strategy.
It is completely obvious to anyone who has had even a slight acquaintance with Ashkenazi Jews
that they average high intelligence. This impression is not only supported by the
psychometric data showing an average Ashkenazi IQ of 112 but also by the astounding record of
extraordinarily high levels of achievement in intellectually demanding fields.
The other day I quickly wrote down a list of about 30 or so of the most prominent chess
players since the latter part of the nineteenth century that I had heard of and then
researched how many of them were Ashkenazi Jews. It turned out that 49% of them were
Ashkenazi Jews. Looking at the percentage of Nobel Prize winners, Fields Medalists etc. that
are Ashkenazi Jews produces similar astonishing results.
Someone who can believe that the extraordinary level of Ashkenazi intellectual achievement
has nothing to do with genetics can believe anything. The denial of a genetic involvement in
high Ashkenazi intellectual achievement illustrates the remarkable power of ideology to cause
people to pretend to believe the most preposterous nonsense.
The intelligence of non-Ashkenazi Jews while nowhere near Ashkenazi levels is still
probably above the world average except for the Falasha. The IQ of the Mizrahi Jews I believe
is somewhere in the low 90′s which while well below average IQ's in most of Europe is
substantially above the average IQ of most Arab populations.
It should be noted that the genetics of Ashkenazi Jews is substantially different from the
genetics of non-Ashkenazi Jews. Ashkenazi Jews are genetically about 60% European (nearly all
Mediterranean European) and 40% Middle Eastern.
No doubt Jews are much more ethnocentric than Europeans in general. However in regard to
ethnocentrism Jews may well be nearer the world average than say Northwest Europeans who
appear unusually low in ethnocentrism.
Of the various unsavory Jews mentioned in this article it is clear that they are all of
high intelligence.
It is perfectly true that Jewish intellectual achievements have little connection with the
Talmud or other aspects of traditional Jewish culture. But that fact itself shows the
weakness of cultural explanations of Jewish achievement. Chess for example was absent from
traditional Jewish culture but when Ashkenazi Jews began to take up the game in the latter
part of the nineteenth century it took only for a few decades for them to become highly
dominant in international competition despite the fact that the game came from gentile
culture.
The intellectual superiority of Ashkenazi Jews is obvious. Hopefully a study of Jewish
genetics will lead to substantial advances in the understanding of human intelligence.
If you think the "Jews" are so intelligent, then how come they read the Torah (OT 1-5) and
not realize that it is a forgery, a piece of fiction and that Abraham and Moses could not
have existed?
The Torah (OT 1-5) is a "forgery" (See: McCabe) and "spurious" (–Thomas Paine). That
is obvious from book 1, page 1. The Earth is not 6000 years old. The universe is not standing
on a "firmament." Cultures (unknown to the scribes) flourished much before. Written records
and archeological evidence using carbon dating show man's presence tens of thousands of years
ago, probably over a 100,000 years ago. A million people cannot live in a vast desert
(without water or food) in a hostile nation for 40 years -- and leave no trace.
Moshe (an Egyptian, therefore African and Negro) never existed. His story is copied from
the older African myth of Mises. Exile and Exodus never happened. For eg., as stated in
"Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho" (by Prof. Ze'ev Herzog of the Dept. of Archaeology, Tel
Aviv University):
"This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel:
the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in
a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel ."
Moshe could not have parted the Red Sea, not only because it violates the laws of physics,
and there was no Moses, but because there was no Red Sea to cross, since Egypt and Israel
have a common land border!
So Judaists who believes that this mythical black mass murderer Moshe is their "prophet",
and are children of a pimp called Abraham, are they mentally retarded or mentally ill?
What turns comfortable, prosperous American Jews into vindictive bullies, willing and
able to blackmail, threaten and punish any dissident voices among their Gentile and Jewish
compatriots who have dared to criticize Israel?
Thank goodness Max Blumenthal didn't take that route. He could've easily, but change is in
the air.
"More than ½ of Jewish success is due to corrupt and criminal means. Under the
delusion they are Go's Chosen, Judaists lose morals became crooks and criminals at a much
higher rate. Judaists bribe and blackmail politicians in USA and EU to get Israel favorite
treatment and destroy the goyim through alienism and flood it with 3rd world aliens."
There is a peculiar trait among Semitic peoples to treat members of other ethnic or
religious groups with a different set of ethics. Gentiles are slow to understand this, as
their Christian universalism forbids them to engage in such activities.
It's not a question of liking Jews or being "anti-Semitic". Quite aside from sentimental
considerations along these lines it is perfectly obvious that Ashkenazi Jews have an
exceptionally high average IQ. Saying this is just to recognize objective reality.
Ashkenazi Jews are no doubt more ethnocentric than most other white Americans or Northwest
Europeans but in this regard it may be the latter who are more exceptional in having a low
degree of ethnocentrism.
Northwest Europeans have often been described as having a "guilt" culture as opposed to a
"shame" culture which is more common in the rest of the world outside Europe. I wonder to
what extent traditional Jewish culture is best described as a "guilt" vs. "shame"
culture.
Ashkenazi Jews are very different genetically from non-Ashkenazi Jews. Most US Jews are
Ashkenazi so statements about Jews in the US are generally about Ashkenazi Jews. Such
statements often do not apply much to Oriental Jews.
There is a definitive correlation between corruption/criminality and worldly success. At
an individual level, those whose morals are weak tend to be more willing to take risks or do
the kinds of work that others would not dare touch or find reprehensibly. Yet, the end result
would be greater worldly accomplishment and success. This does not apply to everyone, but it
is an undeniable reality. At the macro-level, empires don't become empires without having bad
laundry (so to speak). Might makes right as the saying goes. America as a superpower today
would not be in the position it is in without the shedding of so much blood and without so
many transgressions and criminal actions. So my point here is that sometimes, success and
accomplishment correlates with corruption and transgression. Also, compare and contrast
Jewish success and accomplishment in Germany prior to World War 1 and after World War 2.
After the horror of those events, I think many Jewish communities may have altered their
relationship with non-Jews and as a result, believe that they have the right to lie, fool,
and transgress against gentile nations that are going to be hostile towards them no matter
what.
The real accomplishment is one's place in the Hereafter. That was the message that the
Jews used to carry to the nations of the earth. Now, it is the Muslims that carry that
message.
Jim – your perspective here is wrong. It is culture and environment and the type of
beliefs and mentality a person, family, or community have. A set of variable factors some of
which can be controlled and some of which cannot, that result in what we then observe. This
is an age-old debate within the field of genetics nurture vs. nature. But what you are
describing above is nurture the mentality one has or the mentality one is raised by.
Similar arguments can be put forth regarding the rise and fall of whole nations. Some
nations and cultures start off with better resources that allow them to conquer others and
thus, "achieve" more. Think of the military advantages Europe had over Asia and Africa that
allowed for the centuries of colonialism. Prior to that, the geography and natural resources
of Europe gave it many advantages over those lands and peoples that they eventually
conquered. On top of that, Europe developed a manifest destiny mindset (among other
ideologies) which justified its actions. For some, it may have been humanitarian and for
others in Europe, it may have been destructive. Either way, the end result of what they did
was on account of environmental and cultural factors that fall into the realm of "nurture"
rather than "nature". Nature here being a reference to genetics and race and so forth as
opposed to environmental advantages like better food, water, and shelter.
Again, real success and accomplishment is for the Hereafter. The Jews were once entrusted
to lead mankind with this message but they lost it, and so the Muslims (including members of
every Jewish tribe – even the Ashkenazis that revert to Islam) now carry it forth.
What marks a Jew is not his native inelegance but his aggression. The Jew culture is
intellectually aggressive. Human culture is about the use of words – the capacity to
use words separates us from our fellow species. Jews are masters at aggressively manipulating
words.
The Jew culture teaches its children to be intellectually aggressive – it teaches
its children to be argumentative and intellectually combative – it teaches its children
to aggressively win through the use of words at all costs short of jail. In essence they win
by fooling people, by misleading them with words.
In Western culture it is said "that the truth will set you free" – that truth is the
highest value – truth settles disputes, truth rules -- whereas in Jew culture it is
said that "misleading words will gain you money and power."
There is another most important element in Jew culture – it is that they do this
word manipulation together as a tribe. That they dishonestly act together as one. Zionism
exemplifies Jew culture.
The "fact" that Jews are claimed to have an average IQ that is ten points higher than other
whites is rather spurious. "Other whites"includes people like inbred West Virginia Coal
miners, less intelligent southern and eastern Europeans as well as all those somewhat dim
witted white Evangelicals.
If one were to claim that Jews have IQs that are ten points higher than the average
Episcopalian or Presbyterian, that would be an entirely different matter altogether. I have
heard that there is some actively censored data hanging around out there that claims that the
difference between Jews and white gentiles virtually disappears when Jews are pitted against
either active or passive members of these two most prosperous and highest status of the
larger Protestant sects. The same drastic narrowing of test scores would probably happen if
Jews were measured against the less numerous, but just as well off, Congregationalists or
Quakers.
Jews are high function at both ends of the cognitive spectrum: subjective and objective.
One form of cognition primarily manipulates people, often considering them just objects,
while the other is generally focused on manipulating things with much less interest in
people.
Mentalism and Mechanism, the twin modes of human cognition
I have heard that there is some actively censored data hanging around out there that
claims that the difference between Jews and white gentiles virtually disappears when Jews
are pitted against either active or passive members of these two most prosperous and
highest status of the larger Protestant sects.
I would not doubt this at all. In fact there are groups globally that equal or exceed the
average IQ levels of Ashkenazi Jews. For example Indian Brahmins measure around 110-115, as
do North Europeans. One expects in fact, that with reductions in pathogenic loads, improved
nutrition etc. global IQ levels to converge over time. In the end, what matter most for
achievement are grit and efficiency.
The article is patent horse shit. Israeli neocons wouldn't behave nearly so aggressively
without the much larger and more powerful American Christian Zionist population that has
Israel's back.
This is a very confused piece because it doesn't clearly define the meaning of Jewish
Supremacism.
I would argue there is such a thing called Jewish Supremacism -- though Jews will never
call it that and most people are afraid to call it that -- , and we should approach it like
white supremacism or supremacism of any kind. It is what allows Jews to act as if they're
beyond the law or the norms of humanity.
The problem is that the part and parcel of Jewish Supremacism is that we cannot call it
'Jewish Supremacism'. And this is the difference between Jewish Supremacism and White
Supremacism. During the heyday of White Supremacism, whites were saying they are indeed the
best. In contrast, Jewish Supremacists pretend to be egalitarians at war with all kinds of
supremacism, especially the white, Muslim, Russian, and Chinese kind. Indeed, paradoxically,
one of the hallmarks of Jewish Supremacism is we must never ever notice that Jews are
supremacist. It's kind of like the phenomenon of Jewish power/influence. Jews have so much of
it(and proud of it), but we better not notice it. If you do notice, as Rick Sanchez did, you
get in big trouble. Jews have the supremacist power over us all but use that power to insist
that they are all about egalitarianism and that anyone who says otherwise is an evil
'antisemite' who needs to be destroyed. Jews have great power, wealth, and influence but
still act like Holocaust survivors who just walked out of the Nazi Death Camps. It is because
Jewish Supremacism is so well-hidden and masked that it is so dangerous.
Nazis were scum but at least they were honest scum. They said WE ARE THE BEST, SO KISS OUR
ASS WHILE WE KICK YOUR BUTT. In contrast, Jews kick our butt and make us kiss their ass but
also force us to believe that they are healing our souls with their commitment to
egalitarianism and universal conscience. Jewish Supremacism is a silent/invisible
supremacism. That is why it's dangerous. We are made to behave in accordance to the
conviction that Jews are indeed better than us and more deserving than us BUT also made to
see Jews as an eternally helpless people who wouldn't survive unless we took special care of
them. But this passive-aggressive form of superiority is found in Christianity itself. The
mythic Jesus claimed to be the Son of God but also lived and died as the most helpless man.
We are supposed to worship His supreme power but also weep for His most helpless self that
suffered oh so very much like in Gibson's PASSION where Romans whup Him real good.
Anyway, Petras confuses the issue because he's not clear on the meaning of superiority. He
mentions a bunch of bad Jews who did loathsome things. But genius/brilliance/wit/smarts can
be in the service of bad stuff as well as good stuff.
So, the fact that many Jews were involved in financial crimes doesn't disprove the notion
that Jews are superior in certain areas. Indeed, a smart crook is more likely to rob with a
briefcase than with a gun. He may be morally inferior but still has proven his intellectual
superiority. I find the Jordan Belfort character of THE WOLF OF WALL STREET loathsome, but we
have to admit a dummy couldn't have done what he did. So, even though he was a crook, his
example did demonstrate Jewish superiority in brain power. And this goes for other Wall
Street Jewish crooks. Their wickedness doesn't disprove Jewish superiority in the brainy
fields.
It's like blacks are physically stronger and superior in athletics. Blacks can use this
advantage for good things or bad things. A strong black fireman might run out of the building
with 3 children. But a nasty black criminal might use his strength to invade a home, beat up
a white boy, rape his wife, and act like a gorilla. He would have done wrong, but his use of
force would still have demonstrated the physical advantage of the Negro over whites.
Any talent or skill can be used for good or bad. That so many Jews are brainy crooks and so
many blacks are brutish crooks means that Jews have the advantage in mental power and blacks
have the advantage in muscle power.
Of course, being superior in mind doesn't mean one is good in morality. So many smart
people have been lying, manipulative, lowdown vermin. And there have been plenty of Jewish
sons-of-bitches. But to the extent that such Jewish crooks could outwit and out-think others
is proof of Jewish superiority in brain power.
"Historically, highly talented individuals of Jewish origin succeeded by renouncing the
constraints of everyday Jewish life, rabbinical overseers and Jewish institutions. Most
contemporary prestigious scientists, including the frequently cited Nobel Prize winners, have
little or nothing to do with Judaism! And their contributions have everything to do with the
highly secular, integrated culture in which they prospered intellectually – despite
expressions of crude anti-Semitism in the larger society."
But why did secularized Jews achieve more than other people who were also secularized(from
Christianity, Islam, or whatever) at the same time? I agree that the great modern
achievements of Jews in the modern era had to do with Emancipation and secularization, but
non-Jews had the same opportunities as the Jews did, in some cases more as they faced less
overt discrimination and even were favored by affirmative action in places in Hungary.
If secularization does such wonders for any people, why did Jews disproportionally
outperform other groups? In both Hungary and Germany, the small Jewish minority gained
tremendous power and influence even though Hungarians and Germans had the same access to
secularization and modernity. Of course, there were notable non-Jewish artists, scientists,
writers, and etc. in every field, and Jews hardly originated many of these disciplines. But
the fact that Jews did better in them means that Jews might have a genetic advantage when it
comes to intelligence.
It's like this. For most of black existence, they ran around chucking spears at hippos and
beating the bongo drum and hollering ugabuga. Blacks gained athletic domination in the West
when they took up sports like basketball, football, boxing, and etc. So, are we to assume
that blackness has no special advantage in sports? Should we say black success in sports owes
only to black participation in western sports? But non-blacks also participated in western
sports like boxing, track, basketball, and etc. So, why didn't they do as well as blacks?
So, doesn't it make sense to say that, even prior to black participation in sports, something
about the evolution of blackness in the Dark Continent made blacks more better at sports? It
wasn't the sports that made blacks so good. They were so good at sports because their
evolution had made them strong and fast long before they dribbled the first basketball or put
on the first boxing gloves.
Same thing could be true of Jews. While one could argue that Judaism did hold Jews back
from participating in secular sciences, its emphasis on memory, argument, discussion,
contemplation, meditation of profound questions as mind-puzzles, and etc. might have helped
Jews to select the smarter Jews and favor them for breeding with the daughters of smart
Jewish businessmen. Gregory Harpender came up with such theory. Something can be useless in
practical terms but still be useful in identifying the smart and favoring him for
breeding.
Take chess or some kind of mind-game. It has no value in finding the cure for cancer, sending
a man to the moon, splitting the atom, and etc. But a game of chess involves tremendous
skills of reason, logic, memory, foresight, and such. So, if a culture were to use chess to
identify members who are better at it and then favored such kids for having more kids, then
the culture will grow smarter. And who can deny that Judaism was intellectually vigorous even
if, from the perspective of modern society, useless in technological terms. You can't learn
engineering or medicine by reading the Torah and Talmud. But you can learn to use your mind
and probe into profound questions of life and meaning, and through such debate, the culture
of intelligence can be fostered, and the identified brainiacs can be matched to have babies
with the daughters of smart businessmen, and over time, the Tribe grows more intelligent.
"Among Jewish American Nobel 'Peaceniks' is Henry Kissinger who oversaw the brutal and
illegal US war in Indo-China causing 4 million Vietnamese deaths;who wrote the 'template for
regime change' by overthrowing the democratically elected government of Chilean President
Allende and condemned Chile to decades of police state terror; and who supported Indonesia's
destruction of East Timor!"
Kissinger is a shady character, but it came with the territory of dealing in foreign
policy, always a gangster enterprise for all nations. I mean the great Bismarck played dirty
too.
4 million dead in Vietnam War? Wasn't it 2 million? Also, what was Kissinger supposed to
do? South Vietnam was an ally being threatened by the communist north during the Cold War. It
was difficult for US to hold the trust of its allies by letting Vietnam fall to communism. It
was a dirty war where every side fought nasty and hard and did terrible things.
As for Chile, wasn't Pinochet still better than the commie Allende who would have
destroyed the economy? Pinochet did revive the economy. He even graciously stepped aside and
restored democracy. So what if he killed a bunch of commies? Commies love violence and
wherever they took power, used even more ruthless violence against dissidents.
As for what happened in East Timor, Indonesia was an ally of the US, and during the Cold War,
US tolerated its sons of bitches and the USSR tolerated its sons of bitches.
Kissinger was a Cold Warrior and strategist. It is wrong to see his actions through overly
moralistic eyes. If indeed Kissinger should be condemned for working with tyrants, how come
there is no complaint about Kissinger's working behind the scenes to bring about Nixon-Mao
meeting? Mao killed millions of Chiners and then ruined Chinese culture by setting Red Guards
amok to smash things. But the very people who bitch about Kissinger's support of Pinochet --
who killed a few 1000s -- see no problem with Kissinger helping Nixon come to an
understanding with Mao the mass killer of tens of millions. I don't blame Kissinger for the
Mao-Nixon affair. He was a global strategist, and he knew he had to play with the cards dealt
to him.
At any rate, he was far preferable to Neocon lunatics. Kissinger understood foreign policy
as a dirty affair and did what he had to do. He was a realist and pragmatist.
And such a policy is better for the US than the Neocon one that aggressively triggers
unnecessary wars for Jewish interest.
Whether one agrees with Kissinger's decisions or not, he was acting in terms of 'necessary
wars and conflicts' that simply couldn't be avoided. During the Cold War when US allies were
under attack from global communists, US really had no choice but to stick up for the
anti-communists.
As for Israel, the problem is Zionists keep thinking beyond their borders and get US
involved in the mess. Supremacism or no supremacism, the problem of Israel-Palestine is due
to the clash of nationalisms. It's like Yugoslavia after the end of communism. The problem
wasn't supremacism. Serbs didn't think they were racially superior to Croatians didn't think
they were racially superior to Bosnian Muslims didn't think they were racially superior to
Serbians who didn't think they were racially superior to Kosovo Albanians. But each people
had their own vision of national identity and territory. There was serious disagreement about
borders, and that caused the problem.
Now, it is true that Israel does have racial supremacists who say 'Goyim should serve us
like cattle', but even if not a single Jew thought that way in Israel-Palestine, the problem
there would be almost identical. Israel was founded by imperialism. Also, Jews didn't finish
the job. Had they expelled all Palestinians from what were to become Israel, they would have
done better for themselves(thought not for Palestinians, of course). It is proof that
diversity is problematic, especially if it involves people who've come to be historically at
odds with one another.
Even if Jews were to drop every vestige of supremacism in Israel/Palestine, the problem
will not go away since Palestinians have a different vision of Palestine.
It's like South Africa. The end of Apartheid didn't end the problem of race. If anything,
things have gotten worse because blacks have a different vision of what South Africa should
be, with or without Apartheid.
The preponderance of power behind the maniacal behaviors seen in Bibi Netanyahu is not
Jewish, it's the American Christian Right.
I guess the following members of the Israel Lobby – American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Anti-Defamation League, the
American Jewish Congress, the Zionist Organization of America, the Israel Policy Forum, the
American Jewish Committee, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Americans for a
Safe Israel, American Friends of Likud, Mercaz-USA, Hadassah, and the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations – can just close up shop and go
home.
"Judaism is not a religion, nor is it a racial category. Judaism is a group survival
strategy."
But how is it a survival strategy? It cannot be understood apart from its concept of
religion and race. Judaism has been a successful survival strategy because it fused
spirituality with biology. Spirituality alone tends to be too abstract and solipsistic.
Buddhism cannot help any tribal group to survive. And now we see Christianity failing as
well.
As for pure tribalism, it is too petty, tooth-and-claw, gansterist, and/or animalist. Humans
want something more from life than acting like pack animals. They want the vision of their
own community to be something more than 'us versus them, F you!'
Judaism combined a concept of the universe under the power of the one and only God with
the biology of a 'special people'. Jews pulled out their puds and said they have a special
link to the Lord of All that was, is, and will be. In some ways, it was the ultimate
chutzpah. Imagine someone yanking out his penis and saying it is blessed by God. So, what
came out of the Jewish balls gained spiritual meaning. And this ballsian view of things was
furthermore merged with the idea that a Jewish womb/vagina was special for creating authentic
Jewish kids. So, Jewish guys were made to feel special for having special balls/puds that
created special Jewish kids, and Jewish girls were made to feel special for having special
vaginas that pushed out special Jewish kids. So, religion and race were combined. So, the
'survival strategy' aspect of Jewishness cannot be disassociated from the concepts of race
and religion.
"The Jewish group survival strategy has changed over the centuries, based on
circumstances. The 20th and 21th century Jewish group survival strategy is class supremacy.
Early 20th century saw the rise of Jewish bolshevism in the form of proletarian class
supremacy."
But was proletarianism a form of 'class supremacy' or class equality? Proles represented
most people: the working folks. And communism said the economy belongs to all those who work
than to the small elites who own the industries. Communists attacked capitalism as a form of
class supremacism where the ruling bourgeoisie had most of everything.
To some extent, communism reflects Jewish thinking. The notable thing about much of Jewish
culture–though not all–is the extent to which the emphasis is placed on 'ordinary
people' than on 'great men'.
Most histories are histories of great gods, kings, heroes, and etc.
In contrast, many of the most important figures in Judaism are not 'great men' types. They
are ordinary people like you and me. And even a great figure like Moses abandoned his
privileges as a member of the Egyptian elite to become one of the Jews and to lead the Jews
to their promised land. Not as hero or prince or king but merely as a man with a special
calling from God.
This aspect of Judaism may have been good as a survival strategy since it made every Jew,
however lowly, feel special and invested in preserving the Jewish tradition that informed him
of his special place in the universe. One didn't have to be a king, prince, or whatever to
matter. One could be a humble shepherd and still be the favored of God and have meaning in
life. So, even when Jewish political leaders crumbled and fell, the Jewish people continued
to feel special and blessed, even in exile.
But among cultures where all the glory was concentrated among the kings and elites, when they
fell, the entire culture fell and vanished with the demise of the elites since the people
merely counted as obedient sheep who carried out orders.
Another thing about Jewish communists. It's hard to say to what extent they were working
as communists or as Jews. Also, even if they sincerely acted as communists on the conscious
level, who knows what was really driving them in their subconscious?
Many Third World communists were actually driven by nationalism and adopted communism as the
best instrument for liberation. Even if they did believe in communism, their nationalism
actually meant more, and in time, the communist elements grew weaker while the sense of
nationalism remained.
It could be that many Jews were driven to communism as a reaction to anti-Jewishness and
also to Jewish capitalism(since it seemed to benefit only a handful of Jews while so many
went poor and hungry, especially in a place like Russia).
At any rate, I'd wager that most Jewish communists were not consciously using communism as a
Survival Strategy for Jews. Subconsciously, it could have been part of what they were doing,
but we can't be sure. Subconsciously, it's possible that even Jews who rejected Jewishness
were feeling sort of Jewish and different from others. A kind of implicit Jewishness that
finally resurfaced with the ebbing of the ideological dogma of communism. Mere creeds don't
last long. Ideas come and go. What tends to last is identity, historical sense, and territory
if they are preserved.
People generally want to believe in the righteousness of their cause and don't wanna
believe that they adopted some cause out of reasons of vendetta or self-interest.
For example, a lot of anti-Israel rhetoric on the Alt Right is filled with moral outrage,
but in most cases, it has nothing to do with genuine sympathy for Palestinians. It is a
survival strategy for white people that seeks to expose and undermine Jewish power wherever
it can be found because it is seen as the main enemy of the white race.
If Jews didn't cause such trouble for Jews, who in the Alt Right would give a crap about
what is being done to Palestinians?
Turks don't rule the West, so Alt Right doesn't care about all the Turkish violence against
the Kurdish population.
Dear Sonic,please don't create a straw man argument here . This is not about islam's
golden past or the present s ary possibility of the demise of Christianity . It is about the
future of a pluralistic secular egalitarian society free from the the vile machinations of
the Zionism.
Don't generate this kind of discussion. It is nothing but diversion and irrelevant.
If you are a Muslim,you should learn from the 5 th column Zionist . It has destroyed
Protestant religion. Zionism is inserting itself in the frightened psyche of corrupt Saudi .
It can destroy Islam also.
Already in India ,Zionism has started portraying itself as a the ancient monolithic cousin of
the polytheist Hindusim This is the starting point of the Zionist- both are ancient,both gave
birth to other religions and both " don't force conversion" and have high IQ.and surrounded
by most fanatic,fundamentalist and anti modern people. Hindu counterpart in return has added
that no Jews were ever persecuted in India! What a match ! Just some 80 yrs ago Hindu
fanatics RSS was praising Naxi and Hitler and demonizing Jews ,calling themselves Aryan
around the same time when Zionist were cavorting with Hitler,Mussolini abd some other dark
forces.
Jim, there are no non-jewish Ashkenazi and it is accepted genetics that Ashkenazi are part
European. Thus the correct labelling is Ashkenazi European as opposed to other Jewish
European, or European. It is through labelling that various myths are proliferated. Using the
term Ashkenazi European rather than Ashkenazi Jewish immediately brings to social
consciousness where Ashkenazi derive from and how perhaps they inherited such high IQ.
Anyway, Petras confuses the issue because he's not clear on the meaning of superiority.
He mentions a bunch of bad Jews who did loathsome things. But genius/brilliance/wit/smarts
can be in the service of bad stuff as well as good stuff.
So, the fact that many Jews were involved in financial crimes doesn't disprove the notion
that Jews are superior in certain areas.
Just a couple thoughts. Success for Jews has come within larger Christian, high-trust
societies. Being around a lot of Jews in my life, both successful and not successful, I have
come to believe that their number one asset for accomplishment is their high energy,
indefatigable nature. They're neurotic and inquisitive and spend a lot of time reading and
mulling over things. This starts at a young age. And without the neurotic inquisitiveness,
which is a product of high energy, they wouldn't test high on IQ tests and go on to become
top chess players and disproportionate in the Ivy League, Nobel Prizes, etc. IQ is developed,
but it requires someone have a high energy, inquisitive nature or a tiger parent pushing them
in study.
I think Cochran is probably right that high Ashkenazi intelligence is the result of
selection in Europe for high IQ resulting from occupational specialization. Cochran has also
stated that Ashkenazi Jews in Europe have always been an almost exclusively urban population.
All over the world urban populations have higher IQ's than surrounding rural populations. So
in urban environments there is more selection pressure for higher IQ's.
So Jews in European history lived in an urban environment with generally high selection
for intelligence and in addition occupational specialization created additional selection for
high intelligence. An additional factor may have been that lower IQ Jews may have been more
likely to assimilate into the general gentile population. Surviving as a Jew in the midst of
a frequently hostile gentile population may have required high intelligence.
Most likely the alleles underlying high Ashkenazi intelligence are not unique to this
population but have higher frequency there because of past selective forces. Under modern
conditions selection for high intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews has probably lessened.
I honestly don't know how many Christian Zionists there are in the U.S. But it's a ton and
they have a voice in D.C. According to polls, a majority of American Jews side with Obama
over Bibi on the Iran deal. These are examples of Zionists who are not Jews and Jews who are
not Zionists. Zionism is a dangerous ideology. Judaism is an ancient religion. They overlap
but they are not at all the same thing.
I have heard that there is some actively censored data hanging around out there that
claims that the difference between Jews and white gentiles virtually disappears when Jews
are pitted against either active or passive members of these two most prosperous and
highest status of the larger Protestant sects.
Yes, there's nothing special about high IQ Jews. They just have high IQs. Other groups,
like the British upper-middle class also have high IQs that's what happens when you have a
degree of group inbreeding and strong selective pressures for intelligence.
Don't know where my earlier comment went..but briefly:
Why hasn't all this ability produced a significant art of any kind?
Think of Islamic architecture – like the Alhambra (Spain) or the Taj Mahal
(India.)
Think of Christian architecture – medieval gothic (Germany, France, Britain) or
Roman Catholic (St Peters, Sistine chapel, numerous basilicas, churches..)
Art – Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Rubens ..,so many Christian artists..
The Islamic prohibition on reproducing human images did not prevent them from producing
exquisite miniatures and distinctive geometric mathematically-perfect designs, often used to
decorate everything from walls to rugs..to metal,.Syria and Morocco being especially
well-known.
Music..classical European is heavily represented by German (Beethoven, Bach) and other
European continental composers, all from the Christian tradition opera
Asia – look al the Buddhist and Confucius traditions in China, Korea and Japan and
the distinctive architecture and art of those regions and cultures
Don't forget the Indian temples of the Hindus and the ornate stone carvings and painting
that covers every surface..
In short, this perception of supremacy – for those Jews vthat have it – smacks
a good deal more of civilizational insecurity than any real hubris.
I expect the confident ones don't need such contrived (and WASPy-biased) notions of group
'positive affirmation.'
The derangement of the anti-Trumpers, which encompasses many
Democrats and some neo-conservative Republicans, has entered crazy land, especially when Trump
critics try to draw parallels between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler and/or Benito Mussolini.
The ignorance and stupidity displayed by this so-called thought process would be understandable
if those spewing the nonsense were 18 year olds with a public education. But they are not. We
are talking about men and women with college and post graduate education.
One of the earliest examples of this bizarre smear came courtesy of Newsweek:
At the Emmy awards ceremony on Sunday night, Transparent creator Jill Soloway compared
Donald Trump to Adolf
Hitler . Many others have made the same comparison before her: the front page of the
Philadelphia Daily News in December 2015; the Council on America-Islamic Relations;
the Holocaust survivor Zeev Hod. . . .
What makes the comparison between Hitler and Trump so poignant is not just the rhetorical
marginalization of groups, lifestyles or beliefs, but the fact that both men represent their
personal character as the antidote to all social and political problems.
Neither Hitler nor Trump campaign on specific policies, beyond a few slogans. Instead, both
promise a new vision of leadership. They portray the existing political systems as
fundamentally corrupt, incompetent, and, most importantly, unable to generate decisive action
in the face of pressing problems.
Was I asleep in 2008 or did Barack Obama also promise "a new vision of leadership?" I recall
all of the "specific policies" that
President Obama promised to implement :
Exit the bad war in Iraq. Win the good war in Afghanistan. Close Guantánamo. Ban
torture, and pursue a "reckoning" for the torturers, in the words of Obama's soon-to-be
attorney general, Eric Holder. What's more, Obama said he would reform the habit of unnecessary
state secrecy that had given rise to such malignant policies.
After 8 years in office Obama still had not won the "good war," Guantanamo was still open,
his Justice Department gave everyone associated with the CIA torture program a pass and he
pursued more journalists for having the audacity to report on classified material. Oh, and he
helped start a new war in Syria; one that has left tens of thousands dead and more than a
million displaced.
Then there is the additional fact that Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, got a
free pass from the Obama DOJ despite there being clear evidence that she violated Federal law
by putting classified material on her unclassified server. Not only did she use her status as
Secretary of State to enrich herself and her husband, but she led the way in betraying Muamar
Qaddafi and starting a new war in North Africa.
Trying to claim that Trump's campaign rhetoric, which was at times crass and
confrontational, was Hitlerian, displays a fundamental lack of what Hitler was and what he did
to ascend to power.
After the elections of March 5, 1933, the Nazis began a systematic takeover of the state
governments throughout Germany, ending a centuries-old tradition of local political
independence. Armed SA and SS thugs barged into local government offices using the state of
emergency decree as a pretext to throw out legitimate office holders and replace them with Nazi
Reich commissioners.
Political enemies were arrested by the thousands and put in hastily constructed holding
pens. Old army barracks and abandoned factories were used as prisons. Once inside, prisoners
were subjected to military style drills and harsh discipline. They were often beaten and
sometimes even tortured to death. This was the very beginning of the Nazi concentration camp
system.
At this time, these early concentration camps were loosely organized under the control of
the SA and the rival SS. Many were little more than barbed-wire stockades know as 'wild'
concentration camps, set up by local Gauleiters and SA leaders.
How many political opponents has Trumped imprisoned in the 18 months that he has been in
office? (I'll give you a hint, it rhymes with HERO). How many concentration camps has he set
up? Yep. Correct. NONE.
Rather than follow in Hitler's footsteps and suspend the Constitution and declare himself
the Führer, Trump has opted for the Twitter Tsunami and working on defeating the Democrats
at the polls come November. After March 1933 Hitler never troubled himself with elections
again.
In Mein Kampf , Hitler used the main thesis of "the Jewish peril", which posits a
Jewish conspiracy to gain world leadership. [8] The narrative describes
the process by which he became increasingly antisemitic and militaristic , especially during his years in
Vienna. He speaks of not having met a Jew until he arrived in Vienna, and that at first his
attitude was liberal and tolerant. When he first encountered the antisemitic press, he says, he
dismissed it as unworthy of serious consideration. Later he accepted the same antisemitic
views, which became crucial to his program of national reconstruction of Germany.
Mein Kampf has also been studied as a work on political theory . For example, Hitler
announces his hatred of what he believed to be the world's two evils: Communism and Judaism .
In the book Hitler blamed Germany's chief woes on the parliament of the Weimar Republic , the Jews,
and Social Democrats , as
well as Marxists , though
he believed that Marxists, Social Democrats, and the parliament were all working for Jewish
interests. [9] He announced that he
wanted to completely destroy the parliamentary system , believing it to
be corrupt in principle, as those who reach power are inherent opportunists .
Trump? The Art of the Deal (which was written with the help of a journalist) shares nothing
in common with Hitler's Mean Kampf. Hitler was an angry, frustrated man who had never known
success in life. Trump? Big, brash and successful, both in real estate and in marketing Trump.
Unlike Hitler, who made it very clear that he intended to wipe the world of Jews and
Communists, Trump's world view for business success is summarized in 11 pithy points :
Think big
Protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself
Maximize your options
Know your market
Use your leverage
Enhance your location
Get the word out
Fight back
Deliver the goods
Contain the costs
Have fun
Hitler made it quite clear that he was going to embark on global conquest:
And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of
our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless
German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long
last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the
soil policy of the future.
If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her
vassal border states. (Joachim C. Fest (1 February 2013). Hitler . Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt. p. 216. ISBN0-544-19554-X .)
Trump, by contrast, spent a lot of his campaign talking about withdrawing U.S. forces from
military engagements and focusing U.S. resources, instead, on making America great again. His
dismissive statements about NATO, seeking reapproachment with the Russians and the Chinese, and
getting out of the nation building mission in Syria simply enraged the foreign policy
establishment, especially the neo-conservatives.
It is more accurate to view Trump as the anti-Hitler. He is not consumed with taking over
other countries. He simply wants the United States to stop getting the short end of the stick
when it comes to trade or immigration.
Hitler hated Jews and oversaw the Holocaust. Trump's beloved oldest daughter is a Jew and
Trump is a fav among the Hasidic community. Polar opposites on the Jewish question.
The anti-Trumpers seem to imagine that they are the 21st Century version of Colonel
Claus Schenk Graf von
Stauffenberg – the key figure in the 1944 " 20 July plot " to assassinate Adolf Hitler . Hitler led
Germany into a world war. Trump? Talking peace with North Korea and trying to make nice with
the Russians.
If you dare to equate Trump with Hitler let me make it very clear that you are a cretin. It
shows that you lack any understanding of the history of Germany in the 20th Century and, by
making such an analogy, you are shitting on the memory of those who actually fought against
genuine evil. (If you want a quick but thorough education on the subject I recommend the 2009
Academy award winning documentary, The Restless Conscience .)
If Donald Trump is anything he is an obnoxious version of the Road Runner (the Warner
Brothers' cartoon character). Instead of "beeping" he is tweeting and running rings around the
anti-Trumpers, who increasingly appear to resemble Wylie Coyote. The anti-Trumpers are working
furiously to attack Trump at every opportunity. Yet, their schemes, both the simple and the
complex, keep blowing up in their faces or putting them on the defensive. Think of Maxine
Waters as the anvil that Wylie tried to drop on the Road Runner. Result? It landed on the
Democrats and she is now in the process of becoming the face of the Democrat party for the
November election. And God, what a face (put that mug on a bill boards and it is a sure fire
cure for teen age pregnancy--who can pop wood with Maxine glaring at you).
If Democrats want to be smart and have a chance of beating Trump, they need to stop with the
Nazi and Hitler insults and start respecting Trump. Once they respect him and realize that he
actually is a formidable politician and that he had genuine success as a marketing genius they
might be able to formulate a plan to actually beat him. But, like I said, "if they are smart."
With Nancy Pelosi and Chuckie Schummer running the show the word smart is merely an oxymoron.
Beep, beep.
The problem is that this is pure propaganda. Intended to agitate one's base. Donald
Trump is a great used car salesman (i.e. NY real estate). He won because he could
sell to European descendants their old myths and legends. After the Vietnam War and
1970's wage inflation, the little people were thrown under the bus by the global elite.
They are in debt, addicted and can't afford to have families. How great the Western
economy is right now is total BS. A rational discussion of the rise of populism in the
West is avoided. My problem with Donald Trump and why I will never vote for him is that
he is anti-science. He has no grasp of reality only magical thinking. A bull in
the china shop has no plan, no goal, just destruction. His opponents, the media moguls,
war profiteers, and global oligarchs, will go nuclear when tariffs and economic
disruption start cutting their bonuses. The fallout when giants go stomping after each
other will destroy middle America.
The only chance for Americans to survive is to restore the rule of law, strong borders
and treat each other equally; especially the wealthy ones who are free, now, to do
whatever in the hell they want.
I can't get behind him because I believe his lying will undo every good thing he does.
That lying enrages his opponents by the precise path those who lie and exaggerate
criticisms of him does. There seems little doubt he is a genius in manipulating people
and the media, but his method may well prove ultimately self-defeating.
Some are applying this bit of Catch-22 to Trump:
"It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue
and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into
philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and
sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely
required no character."
They aren't all wrong. Outrageous populism is a high wire act, without a net.
Yup! Trump refers to it as "hyperbole" and is consciously aware he's doing it. Plus he
enjoys fucking with the minds of the people that annoy him. Yes indeed, our president is
an expert at trolling.
True dat ;) And Trump has made enemies as a consequence of his behavior. At his age I'm
sure he's aware of this too. But somehow he keeps on going... like a supersized energizer
bunny. And sometimes enemies shift to being colleagues or at least less hostile over
time.
One of those consequences is the silly baby Trump balloon that will be flying over
London while he's there. Very impressive protest, eh? (/snark)
Roger Waters knows a thing to two about memes. Respected him even more when I read last
year how he refused to be another celebrity supporting the White Helmets (he was
approached). He called them out as propagandists.
Here's the Trump baby balloon. Another great example of collective transference.
London anti-Trump protestors get permission to fly massive crowdfunded blimp of the
president depicted as a big baby in a diaper when he visits UK
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...
Merely? Perhaps, but I will opine all politicians BS, but lying is a different category.
Not speaking epistemology, but how people generally react to those two closely related
but nevertheless distinct beasts.
The dem elite uses the Hitler reference as election sloganeering to goose up the "base",
i.e., the coastal portion of it, not the lifelong dems in the upper Midwest, aka the
deplorables who voted for Trump in 2016, . Hey, if they were really concerned about those
folks, they would have to address policy considerations like deindustrialization and
resulting income inequality. But they don't want to go there.
What does the dem elite really think of this new Hitler? Well, Schumer and Pelosi
recently supported giving the so called Herr Trump a massive defense spending
increase.
Just ask them, if they truly consider Trump is Hitler why would they give him those
tools?
What is "pure propaganda?" And, "anti-science?" What the hell are you talking about? A
very bizarre comment. The only thing that is clear from your comment is that you dislike
Trump.
Your response is an example of why the USA is well on its way towards a second civil
war. Civil Discourse is ending. Calling Donald Trump "Adolf Hitler" is agitprop
propaganda intended to stir up their partisans.
As you point out it is not true. The President is anti-science. He is doing his best to
try to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are banned
from using the terms "evidence-based" and "science-based". The White House is actively
dismantling science-based health and safety protections, sidelining scientific evidence,
and undoing recent progress on scientific integrity. What is slowing him down is that
these protections for human and environmental safety are written into the law and federal
regulations.
I'm trying to engage you in a substantive discussion and you are losing your mind.
Dismantling the EPA (which he has not) and NOAA (also still in place, still funded and
still operating) does not make someone "anti-science." There are some clear thinking folk
who find the these Government agencies as guilty of overreach. Opposing some of their
policies, which Trump has done, is not anti-science. Yet, you cry like a beaten dog when
challenged substantively on this and try to blame it on Trump. You are the one being
unreasonable and closed minded. Look in the mirror.
And agitprop? Seriously? The people calling Trump Hitler are anti-Trumpers who
genuinely believe what they are saying. Do you have contradictory evidence? Please
share.
"And agitprop? Seriously? The people calling Trump Hitler are anti-Trumpers who genuinely
believe what they are saying. Do you have contradictory evidence? Please share."
As stated above, a majority of the dem elite recently voted with the repubs to give
the new Hitler a significant defense spending increase. They know full well that calling
Trump the new Hitler is for the rube base come election time.
I agree though--that sort of cynical partisan sloganeering has consequences. Once the
partisan base hops on that train, it's hard to hop off. Hey, but if the dem elite score
big in November that's all that matters to the establishment, unforseen consequences be
damned.
EPA, NOAA and the CDC are regulatory agencies. There was a political decision to ban the
terms "evidence based" and "science based" in Budget documents. Neither the agencies nor
science have been destroyed. "Undoing recent progress on scientific integrity" do you
actually have any proof of that being done by Trump? The publicly available information
is that the "integrity" was rather dubious as there is increasing evidence that numerous
scientific studies can not be replicated as documentedby the NYT in 2015
VV,
And yet Trump is funding or encouraging all kinds of space exploration. However, rather
than getting into an example slinging match with you, I'll just point out that calling
Trump "anti-science" is just about right up there with calling him "Hitler". The EPA and
NOAA = the culmination of human scientific endeavor? If you don't like those agencies you
seek to destroy "science"? Come one, man. That's some intense hyperbole and confirmation
bias in action right there. Maybe he just doesn't like the EPA's negative impact on
business. Could that be it?
He's not anti-science, that's just another ridiculous bit of propaganda from the
so-called left. He is simply a businessman who is not a fan of environmental regulations,
like so many others. Doesn't have the same cost-benefit mindset that environmentalists do
because he has a different worldview.
America, the best bus builders on Earth. Why 43 years after the Vietnam war the darn
thing is just running over poor people left and left; it's almost like they have no
agency, No ability to say "no". If only our school teachers could teach individual
responsibility and initiative as well as they teach how many genders there are and which
bathroom to use. Sadly the only chance for America is new Americans who can get out of
the way of run away busses and do the jobs American Americans won't do - and vote for
politicians who won't run them over with a bus.
PT, IMO, the hardcore Democrat base has past the point of no return. They are too
invested in Trump = Hitler, etc. Their egos are on the line, their emotions. Many people
are incapable of saying "I was wrong" until they have hit rock bottom. I worry what rock
bottom might look like, but it's going to have to happen. And we can see them doubling
down in acts like Perez (DNC Chair) backing the Democratic Socialist Party candidate (aka
Crazy Eyes) in NYC. The platform - stated on line - is to abolish bail, prisons, profit
and borders. Perez says that this is the future of the party. So anyone to the right of,
say, Fidel Castro or Che Guevera is going to be "Hitler" for the foreseeable future. On
the bright side, there is a new #walkaway movement, that may be an info op, but seem to
be picking up steam. In this movement moderate democrats have found a forum in which they
agree that they have been misled and then abandon the Democrat party, never Trump
activists et al. I guess that is an opportunity to save face. Smart move by whoever set
it up.
Also, when you listen to the videos you realize it's not only moderates leaving. One
woman refers to herself as having been an SJW prior. I don't think this is entirely an
"info op" as Brandon seems very authentic. He had his awakening last year and then
eventually decided to make his video and start this movement.
OTOH, what happened between his awakening last year and the releasing of this video is
not that clear. It could well be that a conservative operative (Log Cabin Republicans) in
the gay community encouraged him. But that does not delegitimize the sentiments of the
WalkAway-ers.
I have been following the #WalkAway movement. I walked away 10 years ago and have been
fascinated by all the personal stories about the reasons they walked away. The Democratic
party is in trouble, having no message except anger and hate based on impotence followed
by socialism.
Here's the best article I found on it in case others here have not come across it yet.
It was founded by a gay man from NYC. His video is in this article.
Viral 'Walk Away' Videos Highlight Growing Movement of Democrats Leaving the Party
https://m.theepochtimes.com...
Brandon has copied some amount of the walkaway videos from their Facebook page to
YouTube. Since I don't have my own FB page (use my husband's to view family & friend
updates) I was glad he did that. There are more minorities and gays represented that you
would expect. It's not a "white movement". These videos are typically 6-10 minutes
long.
She will be the cause of an epidemic of Shrivelization of civilization, American style,
natch. As for NATO, the jury is out on whether that institution will undergo immolation
through the auspices of the Trumpster, or, if you will allow, the Trumpsterization of
that institution.
The #resist crowd just won't care about the actual facts or history in my experience
rather they function as cult. Cults shut down thinking.
As for Trump I don't care for his style at all but hoped he would be disruptive to the
deadlock of long standing narratives and he has. Lately I've been more hopeful that he is
working a plan.
Every empire has to adjust, recognize the natural limit to their power or try for
endless expansion until they collapse and die. The British did a fine job of gracefully
dismantling their empire when the US emerged after WW2. Now China is emerging and the US
can recognize a multi-polar world and carve out it's place within it or keep battling for
world dominance as the military arm of globalization. Trump vs. Clinton was clear about
which approach would be used.
Couldn't agree more, except I can't agree about the fine job. We screwed up a lot of
places when we decamped and the evidence is strewn all around. I don''t see that empire
as being some sort of big deal like say the Roman. It wasn't. Naval supremacy and our
being well ahead of the crowd with an industrial society did a lot but it didn't do as
much as all that. Maybe three quarters of the globe wasn't coloured red and the big
continental empires plus the colonial empires of other European countries weren't of
course under our rule. The Russian imperial expansion had I'd guess far more effect on
local populations; in some areas of the British Empire it could be that the locals
scarcely knew we were there. They still got caught up in the chaos we left behind.
I don't believe we can talk of an American "Empire" but we can talk of quasi-imperial
outreach. That US outreach is far more extensive and goes much deeper than in the days of
the British and other colonial empires. The military outreach is also far more extensive.
If it's true that the Americans are seeking to disengage, and one does hear that a lot,
then one hopes they are better at it. Else, as we did, they'll leave a lot of places
worse than they found them.
"Vladimir Putin has positioned himself as the leader of an
authoritarian, white-supremacist and xenophobic movement that wants to
break up the EU, weaken America's traditional alliances and undermine
democracy," Clinton said in a lecture at Trinity College Dublin, where
she received an honorary doctorate.
But I have yet to check the videos of Trinity College. Appreciating help to find the
relevant passage.
*******
More seriously what percentage of people does take the "Hitler card" still seriously
considering its overuse in the post 9/11 universe? He's 73 years dead by now.
The Putin remark starts at the 12:50 mark. Her effect seems really flat, especially when
she is talking about fond memories of previous visits and trying to muster up a bit of
empathy or passion.
Ex-city worker runs anti-Semitic website
Man quits Escondido job after being told be fired or resign
By J. Harry Jones | 6:05 p.m. Sept. 10, 2015
ESCONDIDO -- A 29-year-old clerical employee in the Escondido City Manager's Office was
forced out of his job this week after city officials learned he operates an anti-Semitic
website and is active in a movement that blames Jews for the 9/11 terror attacks. --
City officials said they were unaware at the time that Friend is an outspoken blogger and
contributor to several white supremacist publications. --
"(I thought) it was inevitable that my political and historical views would become known
to the city," he said in an email to the Union-Tribune. "I thought that their knowledge of my
writing, publishing, and speaking activities, as well as the political and historical
perspective I openly espouse, would ultimately result in my termination."
You forgot to mention how the Zio-goons treat them.
I've met plenty of Muslim Israeli citizens. They live great lives. If anything,
they are privileged by not being forcibly conscripted like the Jewish Israelis. A position the
American rich youth were in during the Vietnam draft.
As for how Middle Eastern countries treated their Jews absent Ottoman suzerainity, consider
that every Israeli I met under the age of 35 had at least one grandparent from a majority
Muslim country. Yet there aren't any Jews in almost any of them now. Why?
Here, let me help you it's a bit dated but shows that the Zion-nut behavior is nothing
new.
Between 30 and 54 Palestinians are believed to have died in the gun attack by Baruch
Goldstein in Hebron
Goldstein had lived in Israel for 11 years and was a doctor in the Jewish settlement of
Kiryat Arba, just outside Hebron.
As the settlement's main emergency doctor he was involved in treating victims of
Arab-Israeli violence.
It is reported that his hatred became so intense that eventually he refused to treat
Palestinians.
Goldstein had been a member of the Jewish Defence League, a violent organisation
established by Rabbi Meir Kahane.
South Africa was another state where settlers were trying to displace native population...
what happened with South Africa after apartheid was dismantled is a story that might be repeated
in Israel at some point of time.
@Tyrion 2 It is not
"whataboutery" to point out that Israel is less "an Apartheid state" than practically every
Asian and African country. Not if part of the definition of "Apartheid" is that is an 'especial
evil'.
Since the model for apartheid is South Africa's segregating large parts of its population by
pushing people of common race or ethnicity into Bantustans and restricting their rights in
the rest off South Africa it is easy to see why Israel's treatment of Palestinians is
compared to Apartheid BUT where in Asia or Africa is there anything comparable?
Great, we are making progress here. So good to see you finally submit that Israel is an
apartheid state although less so than African and Asian countries. Good show at least we now
can classify it where it really belongs and drop any pretense of a first rate western style
democracy. Thank you thank you thank you for finally coming clean on this.
I personally would have liked to see Ocasio-Cortez go farther, a lot farther. Israel is a
place where conventional morality has been replaced by a theocratically and culturally driven
sense of entitlement which has meant that anything goes when it comes to the treatment of
inferior Christian and Muslim Arabs
Better to be a minority in Israel than any other Middle Eastern country. The two
settlers guilty of arson are disgusting zealots. But their type is exponentially more common in
Iraq, Syria, Iran and so on.
The criticism of Israel in Western media is disproportionately extremely high given
the much higher rates of this type of thing in the majority of the rest of the world.
As for sniping the leaders of a huge mob trying to invade your country/storm your borders,
doesn't that seem like the most humane way to deal with it? What does Giraldi suggest
they do?
I suppose Western anti-Semites see Western countries going down because they are unable to
deal with this type of thing and get jealous and want to drag Israel down with them. I prefer
that America follow the example of Matteo Salvini. Giraldi prefers 'abolish borders' Cortez.
Indeed, he'd like her to "go a lot farther".
"Better to be a minority in Israel than any other Middle Eastern country."
Nonsense!! Classic hasbara, i.e., "whataboutery."
Reality:
Setting aside Israel's well docmented gross violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention i.e.,
"Collective Punishment" regarding its imprisonment of two million Palestinians in the Gaza
Strip and its repeated mass slaughters of them by land, sea and air, e.g., 2,500, including
over 500 children, in Operation Protective Edge.
Israel is and always has been a racist ethnocracy, i.e., a political structure in which
the state apparatus is appropriated by a dominant ethnic group to further its interests,
power and resources. In short, apartheid.
To wit:
Hendrik Verwoerd, then prime minister of South Africa and the architect of South Africa's
apartheid policies, 1961: "Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state." (Rand Daily
Mail, November 23, 1961)
Jacobus Johannes Fouché, South African Minister of Defence during the apartheid
era, compared the two states and said that Israel also practiced apartheid. (Gideon Shimoni
(1980). Jews and Zionism: The South African Experience 1910-1967. Cape Town: Oxford UP. pp.
310–336. ISBN 0195701798.
"Former Foreign Ministry director-general invokes South Africa comparisons. 'Joint
Israel-West Bank' reality is an apartheid state"
EXCERPT: "Similarities between the 'original apartheid' as it was practiced in South Africa
and the situation in ISRAEL [my emphasis] and the West Bank today 'scream to the heavens,'
added [Alon] Liel, who was Israel's ambassador in Pretoria from 1992 to 1994. There can be
little doubt that the suffering of Palestinians is not less intense than that of blacks
during apartheid-era South Africa, he asserted." (Times of Israel, February 21, 2013)
Video: Israeli TV Host Implores Israelis: Wake Up and Smell the Apartheid
In its 2015 Country Report on Human Rights Practices for Israel and the occupied
Palestinian territories, published in 2016, the U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and
Labor acknowledges the "institutional and societal discrimination against Arab citizens of
Israel."
Ronnie Kasrils, a key player in the struggle against the former South African apartheid
regime, minister for intelligence and a devout Jew: "The Palestinian minority in Israel has
for decades been denied basic equality in health, education, housing and land possession,
solely because it is not Jewish. The fact that this minority is allowed to vote hardly
redresses the rampant injustice in all other basic human rights. They are excluded from the
very definition of the 'Jewish state', and have virtually no influence on the laws, or
political, social and economic policies. Hence, their similarity to the black South Africans
[under apartheid]." (The Guardian, 25 May 2005)
Shlomo Gazit, retired IDF Major General: "[Israel's] legal system that enforces the law in
a discriminatory way on the basis of national identity, is actually maintaining an apartheid
regime." (Haaretz, July 19, 2011)
Israel also differentiates between citizenship and nationality, i.e., "Israeli"
nationality does not exist, only Jews and non-Jews, and each citizen carries an appropriate
identity card. While the implications of this absurdity for discrimination and racism against
non-Jews are obvious, it has been upheld by Israel's Supreme Court.
The effect of its blatantly racist "Citizenship Law" and more than fifty other
restrictions Arab citizens have to endure is well expressed by writer and Knesset member,
Ahmed Tibi: " dutifully defining the state as 'Jewish and democratic,' ignores the fact that
in practice 'democratic' refers to Jews, and the Arabs are nothing more than citizens without
citizenship." (Ma'ariv, 1.6.2005)
For the record: Eminent Jewish Israeli journalist, Bradley Burston, aptly sums up the
horrors Israel inflicts on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and occupied East
Jerusalem:
"Occupation is Slavery"
EXCERPT:
"In the name of occupation, generation after generation of Palestinians have been treated as
property. They can be moved at will, shackled at will, tortured at will, have their families
separated at will. They can be denied the right to vote, to own property, to meet or speak to
family and friends. They can be hounded or even shot dead by their masters, who claim their
position by biblical right, and also use them to build and work on the plantations the
toilers cannot themselves ever hope to own. The masters dehumanize them, call them by the
names of beasts." (Haaretz, Feb. 26/13)
US and Israel are attempting to use internal pressure within Iran yet again with the intent
of sparking enough strife for a regime change:
Indeed a high level joint US-Israeli "working group" has been meeting for months with
just this goal in mind as Axios confirms in a bombshell new report: "Israel and the United
States formed a joint working group a few months ago that is focused on internal efforts to
encourage protests within Iran and pressure the country's government."
In your article posted here two (2) weeks ago at U.R., fyi, the enthusiastic & angry
commenter "Harbinger" hit hard & perhaps unfairly at the articulate & well meaning
dissident commenter "Art."
Harbinger's key contribution was the absolute futility of using the ultra-corrupt &
omnipresent Jewish (ZUSA) political system to change it for America's benefit.
We all recall a percentage of Americans having hope & faith in Kentucky Senator Rand
Paul. Nonetheless, anxious to rise in ZUS presidential standing, Rand found it necessary to
visit the Jerusalem's Western (Wailing) Wall, & wearing a yarmulke. A.k.a., the necessity
for kissing the correct ass.
This year, Rand Paul cast the decisive vote to confirm warmongering Zionist Mike Pompeo as
Secretary of State. (Zigh)
Acknowledging impotent defeatism inherent in Harbinger's & my position, I am sincerely
open for all criticism here.
P.S. Today is the 30th anniversary of the ZUS's barbaric shooting down of the Iranian
passenger plane, the Vincennes. 290 casualties! 66 children. US Navy guided missile Commander,
William Rogers, was cleared of any wrongdoing & awarded America's "Legion of Merit"
medal.
A question, my U.R. Brothers. Does anyone here recall any Congressional or Executive branch
outrage?
That happened in 1988. I was active duty military then and the unit used to receive the
"Navy Times", a newspaper for members of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. I do not
recall seeing any U.S. followup to the atrocity.
Writing apparently as a patriotic & principled American military veteran, RVBlake
said:
"I do not recall seeing any U.S. followup to the (Vincennes) atrocity."
Hi RVBlake,
Above, neither do I!
Nonetheless, a sincere thanks for your "higher" service to our very sick society &
your having honorably called the U.S. Navy's attack upon the defenseless Iranian passenger
airplane what it really was -- an "atrocity."
Around the year 2006, I do recall a dreaded sense of shame when faux "war hero," Senator
John McCain, modified the popular Beach Boys song lyric to "Barbara Ann," and to the delight
of his Zio indoctrinated political supporters (at a rally), he fiendishly intoned, "Bomb,
bomb Iran!"
Fyi, RVBlake, a few months ago, author & U.S. military veteran, Philip Giraldi, wrote
a great U.R. article about our "Zionized military."
On Independence Day Eve, you will ever more so appreciate P.G.'s higher service to our
country. Thanks again!
Thank you. The only reason I ever read The American Conservative years ago was Phil
Giraldi. I was astounded when I learned he worked for the CIA. Speaking of atrocities, this
may not qualify, but days after the Gulf War, in '91, there was a local luncheon given for
the officers stationed at various units in the city, Savannah, GA. I didn't attend, as usual,
but the lieutenant with whom I shared an office did, and she informed me of the festivities.
After lunch, apparently they set up a projector and began showing live footage of the Highway
of Death, the road from Kuwait to Iraq, filled with fleeing, terrified Iraqi soldiers on
their way home, with no taste for combat. My colleague told me of the laughter that filled
the luncheon room at the sight of the Americans bombing and littering the Highway with the
mangled remains of the Iraqis. It was nauseating to hear of this reaction.
I disdain U.S. military officers who would assemble and laugh at live footage from the
"Highway of Death."
Fyi, I am the only son (child) of the late WWII veteran, P.F.C. Charles Orloski, Sr.
Wounded by Japanese mortar fire during Leyte combat, my father spoke proudly about having
fought Japs / Nips. Fowler & Williams truck driver, a patriotic Teamster, my Dad was also
grateful for Harry Truman's nuclear bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki because it "saved
American soldier lives."
Fyi, in August 1970, drafted, I entered Basic Training at Fort Polk, La. and also did
11-Bravo A.I T. in North Fort (Polk).
Incredibly, the antiwar movement was active among "Fresh Meat" inside barracks but every
soldier was indoctrinated to hate what Springsteen rather flippantly described (in song) as
the "Yellow Man."
While marching along toward "Tigerland," every recruit had to sing, "I wannabe an Airborne
Ranger, I wanna live a life of danger, & I wanna kill some Charlie Cong."
Except the gung-ho and "Grunts" who desired officer promotion "bars," most of the guys in my
Company just wanted to smoke, fuck, & go home.
At present, I hate how the George H.W. Bush administration easily managed to make average
Americans "get over" their hesitancy about the unnecessary, immoral, & deadly Vietnam War
and proceed to dust Islamics Republican Guard in what Patrick Buchanan called a "Turkey
Shoot" & where General Schwarzkopf became a heroic conqueror, household name.
By the time of the infamous W. Bush Zionist presidency, the all volunteer ZUS Army was
indoctrinated to hate and want to kill Muslims, a.k.a., those "ragheads" who did 9/11 &
have WMD's.
Taking target practice at the Koran, shooting & tossing Muzzies into river, raiding
Iraqi mosques, and "non-combatant" prisoner torture became S.O.P., rules-of-engagement.
(Zigh) NFL's Pat Tillman was going-ho once.
And poor (& pregnant?) Private Lyndie England? She never got a distinguished service
medal for her role at Abu Ghraib & I really wonder what she'll be doing tomorrow, Fourth
of July.
I'll try & stop yapping now, RVBlake. Summarized, I support the basic soldier who
wants to believe in an honorable America. And not the ZUS War Criminals, Pentagon Chiefs of
Staff, & M.I.C. contractors who collectively "drum-up" global work opportunities.
Fyi, nine total years service, stateside, discharged in 1979, Specialist 4, Pennsylvania
Army Reserves National Guard.
(zzZigh) I did not fight the "Yellow Man, but come Winter 2001, & employed by a Syracuse,
NY-based private corporation, I did many bizarre Haz-Mat emergency responses to White Powder
(Anthrax) threats in eastern Pennsylvania.
Some incidents were gut-busting laughers for the Field Technicians and me!
I have not the slightest interest in debating you or anyone else at UR regarding the
Holocaust, whether it's genuine or the biggest scam ever pulled, or maybe something in between.
Does the truth on this and other events like 9/11 matter? For sure. But it's not the point I'm
making.
What I'm pointing out is that you often preface your Codoh web address with "level playing
field, no name calling" which implies, at least, that you are trying to approach the Holocaust
and the JQ/Israel wider issues without prejudice or obvious bias.
However you lose no opportunity to slag off Jews no matter what the discussion or context is
about. Their looks, intelligence, well kinda everything.
That's the point I'm making and nowt else. So don't waste your time getting back to me with
the likes of "Aha! You can't refute my Codoh arguments!"
That Jews are not entirely the oppressed innocents depicted in endless propaganda, I'm well
aware of.
FWIW, I've been looking at revisionist stuff for several years. But one thing I always treat
with caution on WW2 revision is that most revisionists seem to be fanboys of Hitler. Michael
Hoffman also doesn't believe in the Holocaust but he got flack for saying Hitler was disastrous
for Germany.
Anyway, I'm not hostile to your endless Codoh references; I find it quite amusing.
Correcting the historical record is not being a "fanboy" of anyone. The teaching and
interpretation of history has far reaching consequences for the people, and its precisely the
distortion and falsification of said history which leads to its mass manipulation .
The current establishment supported mythology is that of the good war against the evil
Hitler, who was the most wicked man in history and the German nation that he and his
followers held in hypnotic trance committed history's greatest crime. Hitler alone bore the
enormous preponderance of guilt in the beginning of history's greatest and most destructive
war. As a result, a coalition of the righteous coalesced around the banners of freedom and
"liberation." and "saved the world" from this unique and all encompassing evil, primarily by
"liberating" the European people and saving the Jews from total extermination.
Applied to any other historical time frame, the last narrative would sound like the plot
for a bad Hollywood movie. But for the former enemies of National Socialist Germany , this
Manichean legend serves as the foundation for the current Atlanticist-Zionist hegemony over
much of the globe. Every time a leader emerges that seeks political independence and
financial sovereignty for his people, the situation is a new Munich, the leader is the next
"Hitler" and those who oppose him are the new, prescient and brave Churchill and FDR. It has
become a geopolitical recurring rite of hegemony.
For those who have bothered to study the matter in any depth it has not been too much of a
chore to figure out that Hitler, while no boy scout or saint, never had any intention to
murder all of the Jews of Europe. He did not desire perpetual wars of conquest, only
territorial readjustments. He was not even particularly bellicose, and desired the
construction of a "national socialist state of the first order" wherein the people he
governed would enjoy a decent standard of living and a dignified peace with their European
neighbors. Hitler made numerous offers of disarmament agreements to both France and Britain,
all of which were rebuffed except the Anglo-German Naval Agreement which gave Great Britain a
considerable advantage in warship tonnage. His initial "territorial grabs" all involved
territory ripped from Germany in the Versailles Agreement, and not all of that, since he kept
to his agreement with Italy regarding South Tyrol and made no demands on France for the
return of Alsace Lorraine. Hitler's initial policy regarding Danzig and the Corridor were
much more conciliatory than that of his Weimar predecessors.
Many serious historians now acknowledge that Hitler does not bear sole or even primary
responsibility for the war, which appears to have been foisted upon Germany by the British
War party, international Zionist elements and Germanophobes and closet communists in the FDR
administration- primarily for economic and financial reasons.
The modern establishment view is that Hitler "seduced" the German masses into becoming his
blind followers by his hypnotic oratory.- as if Weimar Germany was not undergoing mass
unemployment, starvation, demoralization and outright degradation- Berlin was the sex capital
of Europe, for God's sake! What bow tied bourgeois politician were the Germans going to turn
to to save them from from economic and social despair and starvation? Hitler's economic
recovery speaks for itself.
A recent book that summarize and adds to Quigley's work and exposes how WWI was a lie set
up by the secret elites working in broad daylight is Hidden History.
It shows how the elites worked with the media and the UK weapons industry to demonize
Germany.
Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.
After starting a deadly but profitable war and dragging the US into it, the victorious
powers held the Paris Peace Conference in the year 1919.
This was the birth of "internationalist society" & Atlanticism.
The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s
I should like to cite several passages from Yuval Harari's excellent book, "
Sapiens ":
p.210: " all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and
the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has
been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures.
two distinct criteria: 1. Religions hold that there is a superhuman order, which is not the product of human
whims or agreements.
2. Based on this superhuman order, religion establishes norms and values that it considers
binding. "
p. 195 It's for your own good : " Evolution has made Homo sapiens. like other
social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two
parts, 'we' and 'they'. We are people like you and me, who share our language, religion and
customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for them. We were
always distinct from them, we owe them nothing. We don't want to see any of them in our
territory, and we don't care an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even
human. "
p. 228 The Worship of Man : " if we take into consideration natural-law
religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervour, unparalleled
missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history. The modern age has
witnessed the rise of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism,
nationalism, and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to
themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system
of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet
Communism was no less a religion than Islam. "
p. 242 Blind Clio : " Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental
infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. Organic parasites, such as
viruses, live inside the body of their host. They multiply and spread from one host to the
other, feeding off their hosts, weakening them, and sometimes killing them. As long as the
hosts live long enough to pass along the parasite, it cares little about the condition of
its host. In just this fashion, cultural ideas live inside the minds of humans. They
multiply and spread from one host to another, occasionally weakening the host and sometimes
even killing them. – can compel a human to dedicate his or her life to spreading that
idea, even at the price of death. The human dies, but the idea spreads. . Successful
cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and
benefits to their human hosts. Similar arguments are common in the social sciences, under
the aegis of game theory. Game theory explains how in multi-player systems, views and
behaviour patterns that harm all players nevertheless manage to take root and spread.
"
It is about the Jews. But it's not just historical prejudices that affected the ancestors of
the Neocons. Amends could and have been made and life can go on. But Russia keeps messing
around by supporting every opponent of Israel. North Korea, Iran, Syria, one thing that ties
Russia's axis together is anti-Israelism.
And for all its faults, Congress is a solid supporter of Israel, as is Trump. Trump's
support of Israel and strong ties to Judaism (if he isn't Jewish he might as well be) were
obvious to those who were looking, but right after the campaign the "Russian collusion"
hysteria was strong and some people may not have understood it. (The Russian collusion thing
is hilarious because the antisemitic Hillary / Obama folks were the colluders.)
So people were surprised when Trump "reluctantly" agreed with Congress' sanctions.
Actually I am sure he was very happy to do so, and to some extent hit back for Russia's
efforts to elect his opponent among other things.
"... As far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews in the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon Adelson. ..."
As far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like
Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews
in the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon
Adelson.
As I always say -- as repulsive and debilitating Jewish influence on US body politic is,
this influence, now transformed in almost complete "intellectual" dominance, it wouldn't have
been possible without willing accomplices from radical Christian Zionists and a massive
corruption in the highest echelons of power.
Agree entirely -- a wholesale dumbing down of masses and even "elites" (both intentional
and not) is a direct result of liberalism as a whole.
The crisis is systemic and Jews are only one, however important, part of that. In the end,
Bolton is a practicing Lutheran but look at him -- the guy is completely mad. And I mean this
in purely psychiatric terms -- he has some real serious demons haunting him and I even have
suspicion about what some of those are. Just an example.
The rant of a coddled establishment chickenhawk, who is quite overrated, relative to the
positions accorded to him (Nasty people don't deserve kindness.)
Notable quotes:
"... When Tucker Carlson on his prime time program last July 11, 2017, demanded that Peters provide facts and figures for his accusations, Peters immediately exploded and implied that program host Carlson was a "Hitler apologist." It was a classic argument and instance of reductio ad Hitlerum. ..."
"... Ralph Peters is one of the nuttiest neocons around, and Fox was smart to dump him. I recall an article long ago where he suggested that the US Govt. should address the drug addition problem in the USA by assassinating drug dealers on the streets in the USA ..."
"... He lives off scraps from neocons by selling his soul for BS talking points and collects a monthly check from Uncle Sam after 20 years of sitting at a desk doing BS intel work, as I once did for a year. It seems he missed his chance at killing commies in Nam by touring Europe, as Fred Reed explained ..."
"... Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, received well deserved praise for taking to task the permeating anti-Russian biases. The highlight of Carlson's exchanges was his encounter with Ralph Peters, who for years has spouted grossly inaccurate propaganda against Russia. Antiwar.com and Russia Insider, are among the counter-establishment English language venues commenting on the Carlson-Peters discussion. The US foreign policy establishment realist leaning National Interest carried a lengthy piece on Carlson's challenge to the neocon/neolib foreign policy perceptions. For the record, more can and should be said in reply to Peter's comments. ..."
"... Peters' characterization of Russia targeting civilian areas is disingenuous. Over the years, the matter of collateral damage is something periodically brought up in response to those killed by US and Israeli military actions. ..."
"... Some Kiev regime elements positively reference the 1995 Croat ethnic cleansing of Krajina Serbs (known as Operation Storm) as a solution for ending the rebel position in Donbass. Russia doesn't seek a massive refugee problem in Donbass and some other parts of the former Ukrainian SSR. As is, a sizeable number of Ukrainian residents have fled to Russia. ..."
Or, recall those on-camera Fox News Russia experts -- think here of General Jack Keane or
the unhinged Colonel Ralph Peters who literally foamed at the mouth when talking about Putin,
calling him "the new Hitler," and who asserted that Putin had committed "worse crimes" than the
German dictator. (Peters is so anti-Russian that he finally
left the Fox News network in March 2018 )
When Tucker Carlson on his prime time program last July 11, 2017, demanded that Peters
provide facts and figures for his accusations, Peters
immediately exploded and implied that program host Carlson was a "Hitler apologist." It was
a classic argument and instance of reductio ad Hitlerum.
Ralph Peters is one of the nuttiest neocons around, and Fox was smart to dump him. I recall
an article long ago where he suggested that the US Govt. should address the drug addition
problem in the USA by assassinating drug dealers on the streets in the USA.
He lives off scraps from neocons by selling his soul for BS talking points and collects a
monthly check from Uncle Sam after 20 years of sitting at a desk doing BS intel work, as I
once did for a year. It seems he missed his chance at killing commies in Nam by touring
Europe, as Fred Reed explained:
Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, received well deserved praise for taking to
task the permeating anti-Russian biases. The highlight of Carlson's exchanges was his
encounter with Ralph Peters, who for years has spouted grossly inaccurate propaganda
against Russia. Antiwar.com and Russia Insider, are among the counter-establishment English
language venues commenting on the Carlson-Peters discussion. The US foreign policy
establishment realist leaning National Interest carried a lengthy piece on Carlson's
challenge to the neocon/neolib foreign policy perceptions. For the record, more can and
should be said in reply to Peter's comments.
Peters falsely claims that Russia hasn't made a concerted effort in confronting ISIS. In
one of his more accurate moments, CNN's Wolf Blitzer said that the ISIS claimed shoot down
of a Russian civilian airliner over Egypt, was in response to Russia's war against ISIS.
You've to be either a liar or clueless to not recognize why Russia has actively opposed
ISIS. The latter sees Russia as an enemy, while having a good number of individuals with
roots in Russia and some other parts of the former USSR.
Peters' characterization of Russia targeting civilian areas is disingenuous. Over the
years, the matter of collateral damage is something periodically brought up in response to
those killed by US and Israeli military actions.
Peters offers no proof to his suspect claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin kills
journalists. There're numerous anti-Putin advocates alive and well in Russia. That country
does have a violence problem. Recall what the US was like in the 1960s thru early
1970′s. For that matter, Bernie Sanders isn't blamed for the pro-Sanders person who
attempted to kill Republican lawmakers.
Given the situations concerning Kosovo and northern Cyprus, Peters is being a flat out
hypocrite regarding Crimea. Donbass is a civil conflict involving some Russian support for
the rebels, who're overwhelmingly from the territory of the former Ukrainian SSR. These
individuals have a realistic basis to oppose the Kiev based regimes that came after the
overthrow of a democratically elected Ukrainian president.
During the American Revolution, most of the pro-British fighters were said to be
colonists already based in America. Furthermore, the American revolutionaries received
significant support from France. With these factors in mind, the Donbass rebels don't seem
less legit than the American revolutionaries.
Some Kiev regime elements positively reference the 1995 Croat ethnic cleansing of
Krajina Serbs (known as Operation Storm) as a solution for ending the rebel position in
Donbass. Russia doesn't seek a massive refugee problem in Donbass and some other parts of
the former Ukrainian SSR. As is, a sizeable number of Ukrainian residents have fled to
Russia.
Putin isn't anti-US in the manner claimed by Peters. Moreover, Peters is clearly more
anti-Russian (in a narrow minded way at that) than what can be reasonably said of how Putin
views the US. Putin's obvious differences with neocons, neolibs and flat out Russia haters
isn't by default anti-US. He was the first foreign leader to console the US following 9/11.
The Russian president has been consistently on record for favoring better US-Russian ties
(even inquiring about Russia joining NATO at one point), thereby explaining why he has
appeared to have preferred Trump over Clinton.
Some (including Trump) disagree with that view, which includes the notion that the
Russians (by and large) prefer predictability. As a general rule this is otherwise true.
However, Clinton's neocon/neolib stated views on Russia have been to the point where many
Russians felt willing to take a chance with Trump, whose campaign included a comparatively
more sympathetic take of their country. At the same time, a good number of Russians
questioned whether Trump would maintain that stance.
Look up Rostislav Ishenko's latest excellent piece yesterday:
I did, and as usual Ishenko takes an oblique approach that shines a light into obscure but
critical corners.
What an eye opener this one is.
Not sure how much was lost in translation, but if I understood correctly the Russians are
massing forces in the Western District, not because they fear an attack from NATO, or plan to
attack Europe but to rescue Europe from a conflagration that will be sparked in Ukraine. That
it was drifting into failed state status is well known, but that a religious war is in the
offing was utterly unknown to me, and I suspect to most others here.
That in turn shines a light on why Poland and the Baltics are begging for US/NATO troops
as well, and at least partially why US/NATO is delivering. As Ukraine drifts into chaos, its
neighbours, being aware of its history of extreme violence and atrocity are preparing
themselves for the spillover. They have no desire to relive the decade+ blood orgy that
erupted in the middle of the 20th C centred on Ukraine (where, IMHO, the real Holocaust
happened).
Overwhelming force applied at an overwhelming pace is the best way of dealing with such an
outbreak, and the Russians are the only party able to deliver. US/NATO forces can be expected
to roar around in their APCs avoiding trouble and then claim credit in accordance with
Western military tradition. Meanwhile, the Russians will go into mopping up the
leftovers.
Makes a lot of sense if Ishchenko's read of the situation is right. It probably has a
bigger impact on Dunford's and Gerasimov's meeting than the USM "going home".
Whew!
PS: Yes, I was aware of the Russian central bank selling off its USTs. With the Petro-Yuan
and Western sanctions now in full swing, it really doesn't need $100B's worth to manage its
U$ denominated imports.
"... Generally, the term "Russia scholar" when applied to most, in our particular case American, experts should be treated as a bad joke. This is not to mention that most of those "scholars" (with the exception of predominantly Jewish Soviet emigres, such as moron Max Boot) can not even speak, forget a complete command, Russian language. ..."
It's not over until it's over. This sentence of yours simply shows how misunderstood the
Soviet period of the Russian history is in the West.
It is not "misunderstood"–it is a complete caricature which now blows into the faces
of those who helped to create it. Western Russia "expertise" is pathetic and some exceptions
merely confirm the rule. Generally, the term "Russia scholar" when applied to most, in
our particular case American, experts should be treated as a bad joke. This is not to mention
that most of those "scholars" (with the exception of predominantly Jewish Soviet emigres,
such as moron Max Boot) can not even speak, forget a complete command, Russian
language.
Quite a few grant-eating "liberals" inside Russia speak the language, but this does not
make them any more competent. Basically, they illustrate the saying that "he, who pays the
musicians, calls the tune". The same applies to "Russia scholars" residing in the US,
regardless of their language proficiency.
However mad Bolton might be, most card-carrying Russophobs and neocons are not crazy:
they are cynical people without scruples working for money.
Very true but they are multidimensional and only some of them are not crazy, Ralph Peters,
Max Boot or many other rabid Russophobes are genuinely mad. Enough to take a look at their
reactions and behavior, I omit here a complete military-political delirium they propagate,
which in itself a fruit of a sick imagination.
So it is both for very many of them. After the death of Richard Pipes I received
communications from person who studied under him, this person has Ph.D in history, he
describes him going completely mad, from going hi pitch in his voice, almost screaming, to
sweating profusely, once the word Russia and Russians were uttered.
The hatred of Russia was palpable. Guess what, Pipes was hailed as America's greatest
"Russia scholar". It is never one thing. Moreover, pathological lust for political power
which afflicted so many is in itself a good indication of a borderline disorder.
If we consider lust for power as a sign of mental affliction, not a single person trying
to become US president is completely normal. Might be true, considering the kind of trash we
are repeatedly getting.
If we consider lust for power as a sign of mental affliction, not a single person trying
to become US president is completely normal. Might be true, considering the kind of trash
we are repeatedly getting.
Combined West and its "electoral" and educational institutions completely stopped
production of real statesmen already in 1970s. We saw last pool of real statesmen depart the
scene with Bill Clinton's victory in 1992. Current Western so called "elites" do not even
qualify for the term mediocrity. Many of then are simply degenerate such as European Greens
or American, so called, Left, albeit the nominal Right also doesn't shine with any traces of
intellect.
An argument that people use against the spontaneous occurrence of life is that there is
almost zero chance of the right amino acids joining up. Anyone who has worked with string and
cables knows that they have a quite extraordinary, almost uncanny, ability to get tangled up
together. Before life happened, there were no bacteria to destroy emerging complexes of amino
acids. (It has been shown that inorganic materials given the sort of conditions that the
newly born planet would have had, can give rise to amino acids.) Also "almost zero chance"
taken an almost infinite number of times over a very long period, adds up to a quite good
chance.
the probability of an emergence of any protein by chance is virtually nil.
probability
that's a tricky word, eh?
from what I've glimmered, it isn't proteins or even amino acids that people wonder over
their original emergence by chance, but rather the (miraculous) DNA molecule itself.
How did those four amino acids arrange themselves in just that way?
The structure seems positively preternatural, and when it comes to the probability of such
an 'accident', how likely was that?
The argument for creationism as far as I've heard it posited, is that our earth was
'seeded' with the DNA molecule, (as presumably other planets throughout the universe were as
well), and that this was done by some intelligent (or otherwise deliberate) agent. (G0d?)
When you look at the DNA molecule, and ponder its probability, what is the likelihood that
it sprang from the ooze by happenstance?
Tell you what, you almost hit the nail on the head. The four bases of DNA could have
appeared by chance in the primordial soup, got linked to deoxyribose and phosphates, and even
got connected in various sequences. The hardest thing to explain is how the system that
converts DNA to messenger RNA and especially the one that then translates RNA sequence into
protein sequence (ribosomes with the supply of transfer RNAs for different codons and amino
acids) emerged. I am not aware of any good model explaining that. My point is that
hypothesizing that this was designed by some intelligent agency does not solve the problem:
next you need to explain how that agency emerged. The answer that this agency (say, God) is
eternal is essentially cheating: this answer would suffice for ribosomes, but it would be
just as unsatisfying for a logically thinking person.
"... While not being a fan of Stalin, I acknowledge that only the people who rose to the top before Bolsheviks took power were good for anything. Those who rose after, from Khruschev on, were worthless nonentities. I consider this negative selection of leaders as one of the drawbacks of the Soviet system. ..."
Compared to modern western leaders Kruschev was rather good leader and Brezhnev is
downright genius. I was and am actually fond of Dear Leonid Iliich. So I believe it is not a
matter of social political organization but systematic and probably human feature.
The West has been producing non entities, idiots and morons at the top with unerring
consistency. It is just that conditions in the West are far more forgiving than in Russia.
Also we have not mentioned destruction and suffering caused by war in ussr somewhat lagging
in few aspects of life standards. Socialism slogan is from everyone by their abilities to
everyone for their contribution.
Hence obviously hardworking and better contributing people should be rewarded especially
like in Stalin times via glorifying and promoting them to higher status. Stahanov movement
comes to mind.
I think Stalin genius is underappreciated. Regarding weapons manufacturing I believe it
was a matter of great patriotic war shock.
That war in every respect has caused great damage to us including probably due to huge
loss of Tim and best human material laying foundation for further problems. Stalin wasted
8-10 years of his life to first win the war and then rebuild the country. Imagine no war. I
am pretty sure there would be no 1991.
While not being a fan of Stalin, I acknowledge that only the people who rose to the
top before Bolsheviks took power were good for anything. Those who rose after, from Khruschev
on, were worthless nonentities. I consider this negative selection of leaders as one of the
drawbacks of the Soviet system.
Materially the people in some Western countries lived better than the Soviet people.
However, the difference was ~2-3-fold at best, not 10+-fold as many in the USSR believed, and
there were (and are) very few countries with higher living standards than Russia. As far as
psychological wellbeing is concerned, the USSR compared to the West even better, except for
the people with excellent education and willingness to work hard, like me. That's the PR
campaign Soviet authorities lost to their peril: the support of better intellectually
equipped and the most active people.
I agree that nobody, even the laziest and most useless, should go hungry today, but the
difference between what those get and what hard-working people get should be many-fold.
Otherwise, the society provides disincentive for the people who can contribute, dragging
itself down.
Also, USSR should have paid more attention to the production of consumer goods, even if it
meant fewer tanks and artillery pieces. It's policies made all these tanks useless, anyway,
not to mention that today these tanks and other military hardware is used against Russia by
former "brothers" (with "bothers" like that, who needs enemies).
I agree that the people who went to college in Soviet times are better educated and more
creative than recent graduates. I am pretty sure that recent successes of Russian MIC are
largely due to the Soviet legacy. We'll see what happens next, as "effective managers" they
are cranking out now are totally useless in real life.
My personal opinion: it is exactly "Paris is worth a mass" conversion. It is based on
Putin's actions, which suggest a very pragmatic (you can say cynical) person, who has the
benefits of his country in mind (rather, who believes that benefits for his country are the
best benefits for him). I could be wrong, though.
The point is that Putin realizes that the Orthodox faith is the cultural framework of
the Russian nation; its development historically, socially and culturally rest in the hands
Orthodox Christianity.
No, it's not. No one can enter the same river twice. Russia will thankfully never go back
to its Orthodox roots completely, although Orthodoxy will co-exist peacefully within the
secular society. Putin's public insistence on rituals of the Orthodox faith is one of his
least attractive features.
Thankfully that chapter of history is over
It's not over until it's over. This sentence of yours simply shows how misunderstood the
Soviet period of the Russian history is in the West.
The Soviet Union has been gone for more than a quarter of a century and yet it is -- to
borrow a phrase from a popular Soviet song -- is more alive than the living. The Soviet
period has become a sort of a yardstick against which the modern Russia is compared in every
area: culture, economy, moral climate, everything.
It is a universal agreement that in many areas Russia doesn't measure up to the Soviet
standards -- culture and education are the prime examples. Hardly anyone in Russia would
disagree that in 25 years Russia hasn't produced anything even remotely comparable with the
Soviet achievements in this spheres. Until it does -- the Soviet Union will live one.
@Quartermaster While there is some "hysteria" when it comes to Russia, there is also much
truth out there, some of which the author is willing to write off as little more than
conspiracy theories.
It is passing strange that those who have strongly criticized Putin have ended up dead.
Anytime one appears to be a serious threat to Putin's position they end up dead. It is possible
that Putin isn't responsible, but given the numbers and the circumstances, it is likely he
knows what is going on.
While Putin was never head of the KGB, much of what he has been up to was learned form iron
Felix's organization. To say Putin is a KGB thug is far from being out of line.
What he has done in Ukraine should make the man, and the country he heads, a pariah. Eastern
Europe is right to be concerned. The fact that Putin has stated, rather pointedly, that the
extent of the USSR is Russia makes the accusation of him being a Soviet revanchist appropriate
as well.
Much of what the author seeks to write off as hysteria, isn't. That "hysteria" is a proper
concern for what Putin is up to, and what he intends. Fortunately, Russia is too impoverished
to all Putin to realize his neo-Tsarist empire. And in pursuing his self-aggrandizing path, he
impoverishes his people even more.
"Neo-Tsarist empire." Ha, that's rich. Congrats, you've managed to outdo even the most
unhinged anti-Putin elements of the l'chaimstream media.
"impoverishes his people even more." You mean be improving their lives as measured by
virtually every metric since kicking out the (((Russian))) banksters and their (((American)))
advisers who were robbing the place blind? Dude, you're delusional. Go peddle your nonsense
elsewhere.
It is passing strange that those who have strongly criticized Putin have ended up
dead.
The logic of this is fascinating in its perversity. Lot's of people who don't criticize
Putin at all or downright admire him die including under unclear circumstances – the
West just doesn't notice. For example, several Russian diplomat have died suddenly and
prematurely in various countries – out UN representative Churkin would be the prime
example. Can you imaging how many wonderful conspiracy theories we could have concocted
should we be so inclined?
It's the same exact "logic" ridiculed in "conclusions" like this: "Everyone who eats
cucumbers dies". And those who don't live forever?
What he has done in Ukraine should make the man, and the country he heads, a pariah.
He, meaning Putin, hasn't done anything in Ukraine – the West did. The West
organized and supported a coup bringing to the power a super-corrupt illegitimate
"government" that relies on armed neo-Nazi groups for the control of the county. Now Ukraine
is a failed state with the dominant neo-Nazi ideology, nonexistent economy, impoverished and
fleeing population and repressive political system, not to mention a civil war. All Putin did
was to resist this development as much as possible, and I do not believe he should be blamed
for that.
Why (Oh Why) do they hate the Russians so much? Let me try to answer that question. Most
armies in history were created for the purpose of enriching the host country by looting
foreign lands. US are bucking that trend – they have an army that's looting mostly the
host country for enriching the same army and those who support it (domestically).
Also, the best armies in history usually belonged to whoever happened to be the economic
powerhouse at the moment – examples are too many to list them all – ancient Rome,
Great Britain 16-19 century, France 19 century, Germany 19-20 century.
There are exceptions to this rule, of course – Genghis Khan – the Mongols
hardly an economic powerhouse, yet a number one military power of its time.
Then we come to Russia. I don't know when exactly Russia underwent the Genghis Khanisation
process, but it's apparent that they did and it served them well throughout their history.
Meaning that their army usually outperforms their economy, and that's what's driving the west
mad at least since Napoleon's times.
They think that Russia doesn't deserve to be a powerhouse like they are thanks to their
military, because they believe that other than their military, the Russians are culturally,
economically, civilizationally, and yes – even genetically inferior to the west.
Tough luck, chums. I have one answer to that: Maybe it's not Russia's fault that
militarily they have always managed to outperform the west. Maybe the fault lies with you.
How can you blame Russia for the fact that your armies suck? But, as they say in the US
– you got to support the troops.
"... Vladimir Putin is NO historian and his fascination with Solzhenitsyn is not a healthy one. Nobody denies the role of Jews (positive, as well as negative) in Russian History but Russia's history is a bit more complex than some Manichean struggle between evil Jews and noble Russian Orthodox Christians. In fact, it is infinitely more complex. ..."
...Moreover, Vladimir Putin is NO historian and his fascination with Solzhenitsyn is
not a healthy one. Nobody denies the role of Jews (positive, as well as negative) in Russian
History but Russia's history is a bit more complex than some Manichean struggle between evil
Jews and noble Russian Orthodox Christians. In fact, it is infinitely more complex.
But if you want to view it as one unstoppable Jewish juggernaut against Christ-loving
Russians, who am I to suggest to you otherwise.
So Boyd D. Cathey
claims that the main reason of anti-russian hysteria is that Russia represents an obstacle to
establishing global US domninance -- a global neoliberal empire led by the USA.
Notable quotes:
"... Consider the recent -- but largely unreported -- formation of an umbrella group, the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), with the goal of "uni[ting] the center-left and the center-right." Its leaders include former John McCain foreign policy advisor Max Boot, The Washington Post ..."
"... When Tucker Carlson on his prime time program last July 11, 2017, demanded that Peters provide facts and figures for his accusations, Peters immediately exploded and implied that program host Carlson was a "Hitler apologist." It was a classic argument and instance of reductio ad Hitlerum ..."
"... National Review ..."
"... The Weekly Standard ..."
"... Indeed, another ploy by Neocon pundits (and Congress) has been to parade Bill Browder, the grandson of American Communist Party boss Earl Browder, as a star witness to President Putin's nefarious dealings. Of course, it should be noted that Browder fils ..."
"... Two Hundred Years Together ..."
"... The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, ..."
"... Beyond the ideological foundations for their hatred of nationalist Russia are economic considerations and the issue of who controls and manages the Russian economy: Wall Street and Bruxelles, or ..."
"... More, for the past twenty-five years Russia has experienced the poisoned tip of Islamic terrorism, domestically, including the brutal war in Tchechnya in the Caucasus region and the horrid bombings in the heart of the country, Moscow. From the beginning of his tenure Putin has offered to cooperate with the United States in the fight against international Islamic terror, but each time it was the United States -- us -- who refused, including famously Paul Wolfowitz during the George W. Bush administration who replied to one such offer: "We don't need your assistance or intel." ..."
"... as Neocon Charles Krauthammer once declared: "We live in a unipolar world today, and there is only ONE superpower, and that is the United States." That attitude was not received with equanimity by post-Communist Russia, a Russia that has discovered its heritage and its traditions and has asked for partnership with the United States, and not the hysteria we have witnessed in the United States sweeping aside all rationality. ..."
Almost one year ago the United States Congress (with only a handful of "nay" votes)
adopted
new and severe sanctions against Russia for its supposed attempt to influence and interfere
in the 2016 national elections. Included in that legislation was a provision -- specifically
placed there by Russophobe Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) -- that President Trump cannot alter
or lift any of the sanctions without future Congressional approbation.
The government of Vladimir Putin, in response to this provocation, announced that the
American diplomatic presence in Russia would be reduced by 755 persons, a drastic move by any
standards. But we cannot say it was unexpected -- or undeserved.
That sanctions vote was fascinating as it illustrated during the first year of the
contentious Trump presidency a rare point of political unity between the socialist
Left, the Democrats and the mainstream media -- formerly noted for their "soft" and favorable
attitude to the old and unloved Soviet Communist Russian regime -- and the conservative/GOP
mainstream, dominated by the Neoconservatives. Of course, perspectives and approaches to the
question differ, whether it was the Trump campaign that was colluding with Moscow, or if it was
Hillary and the Clinton Foundation that had collaborated in some way, but their target remained
the same: that man in the Kremlin and the country he governs.
One thing was clear: the result of the 2016 presidential election had the most unheard of
and remarkable result in recent American political history: a de facto alliance of
these supposedly antipodal political forces. And what we have witnessed is a phalanx of the
pseudo-Right Neocons and the formerly pro-Soviet Left linked together, competing to see who
could be more "anti" and who could come up with the more far-fetched Russia conspiracy
theories, and -- as with the 2017 sanctions -- the latest unwarranted, over the top
legislation.
Consider the recent -- but largely unreported -- formation of an umbrella group, the
Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), with the goal of "uni[ting] the center-left and the
center-right." Its leaders include former John McCain foreign policy advisor Max Boot, The
Washington Post 's Anne Appelbaum, Never Trumper Bill Kristol, former chess wizard Gary
Kasparov, and Richard Hurwitz of Council on Foreign Relations. [See " Neocons &
Russiagaters Unite! ," April 27, 2018] RDI's manifesto calls for "fresh thinking" and urges
"the best minds from different countries to come together for both broad and discrete projects
in the service of liberty and democracy in the West and beyond . Liberal democracy is in crisis
around the world, besieged by authoritarianism, nationalism, and other illiberal forces.
Far-right parties are gaining traction in Europe, Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on Russia
and undermines democracy abroad, and America struggles with poisonous threats from the right
and left."
Or, recall those on-camera Fox News Russia experts -- think here of General Jack Keane or
the unhinged Colonel Ralph Peters who literally foamed at the mouth when talking about Putin,
calling him "the new Hitler," and who asserted that Putin had committed "worse crimes" than the
German dictator. (Peters is so anti-Russian that he finally
left the Fox News network in March 2018 )
When Tucker Carlson on his prime time program last July 11, 2017, demanded that Peters
provide facts and figures for his accusations, Peters
immediately exploded and implied that program host Carlson was a "Hitler apologist." It was
a classic argument and instance of reductio ad Hitlerum .
Of course, such examples aren't rare in the establishment "conservative movement" media.
Pick up any issue of National Review or The Weekly Standard or listen to the
Glenn Beck radio program and you can find the same hysteria, largely laced with faked quotes or
disinformation (e.g., "Putin wants to re-establish the Soviet Union" or "Putin was
head of the KGB" or "Putin has had his enemies assassinated," and so on, ad
nauseum ).
Indeed, another ploy by Neocon pundits (and Congress) has been to parade Bill Browder,
the grandson of American Communist Party boss Earl Browder, as a star witness to President
Putin's nefarious dealings. Of course, it should be noted that Browder fils lost big
time financially in his manipulations in Russia, as investigative journalists Philip
Giraldi and Robert
Parry have documented, and he is engaged in a vicious personal vendetta against Vladimir
Putin.
For the Neoconservative leaders of what passes for "conservatism" these days, it is as if
nothing has changed since 1991, since the ignominious fall of Communism. It's even
arguable that their hostility to Moscow has increased since then.
Let me suggest several reasons for this: First, many of the more prominent Neoconservatives
descend from Russian Jews from the Pale of Settlement, whose memories go back to the
pre-Communist days of persecution and pogroms under the Tsars. They originally welcomed Lenin
and the Communist regime as liberators and formed some of its staunchest supporters and
apparatchiks in the regime of terror that followed (especially in the Cheka and KGB) until
Josef Stalin unleashed a wave of anti-semitism after World War II. [See the partially
translated excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years Together at: https://200yearstogether.wordpress.com , and the
commentary
]
Putin, despite his strong support from native Russian Jews and from the Moscow Rabbinate, is
a Russian nationalist and fervent supporter of the traditionalist Russian Orthodox Church, and
those two factors bring up painful memories of the "bad old days" of discrimination and Jewish
persecution for the Neocons.
A prime example of this comes in a recent volume authored by prominent Neocon journalist and
homosexual activist (yes, the two traits often seem to go together), James Kirchick: The
End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, 2017). In his jumble of
Neocon ideology and prejudice, Kirchick evaluates what for him seems to be happening ominously
in Europe. He is deeply fearful of the efforts to "close borders" against Muslim immigrants
from the Middle East. He blasts Marine Le Pen as a racist -- and most likely a subtle
"holocaust denier!" -- and attacks the attempts in places like Hungary and Poland to reassert
national traditions and Christian identity;
for him these are nothing less than attempts to bring back "fascism."
Russia comes in for perhaps his harshest criticism, and the reason is unmistakable: Russia
seems to be returning to its older national and pre-Communist heritage, to its age-old Orthodox
Christian faith. Russians are returning by the millions to the church and the "old-time"
religion. For Kirchick this can only mean one thing: the triumph of bigotry, anti-semitism, and
"extreme right wing" ideology, and the failure of what he terms "liberal democracy and
equality" (including, he would no doubt include, feminism, same sex marriage, across-the-board
equality, and all those other "conservative values"!).
Kirchick's critique, shared by many of the leaders of the national Republican Party and
dominating the pages of most establishment "conservative" publications and talk radio these
days, joins him arm-in-arm with globalist George Soros in efforts to undermine the Russian
state and its president all in the name of "democracy" and "equality." [See, " George Soros Aghast
as Collapsing EU, while Russia Resurgent, " January 19, 2018]
But, just what kind of "democracy" and what kind of "equality" do Kirchick and Soros
defend?
Beyond the ideological foundations for their hatred of nationalist Russia are economic
considerations and the issue of who controls and manages the Russian economy: Wall Street and
Bruxelles, or Russia, itself. Unlike the weak and pliant Boris Yeltsin, Putin the
nationalist ended the strangle-hold of Russian industry, in particular control of Russia's
important energy sector, by those few international businessmen, the oligarchs (many of them
Jewish), most of whom fled the country. That could not stand! How dare Russia -- and its
president -- oppose the economic diktats of Bruxelles and Wall Street!
Lastly, we should add one more reason for hostility, and that is Russia's remaining
international presence, in particular, in Syria. It is very simple: you don't go from being one
of the world's two "superpowers" to all of a sudden a second-rate, economically-handicapped
"has been" without some remorse. As a patriot and nationalist President Putin has,
understandably, attempted to reassert Russian prosperity and power -- certainly, not as much or
in the same manner as the old Communist leaders. But, from his reasonable point of view, the
largest country in the world does have interests, and not just in what goes on in neighboring
nations where millions of Russians (formerly within Russia) reside, but also with long-time
allies such as Syria.
Is not this same criterion true for the United States and its dealings with its neighbors
and allies?
More, for the past twenty-five years Russia has experienced the poisoned tip of Islamic
terrorism, domestically, including the brutal war in Tchechnya in the Caucasus region and the
horrid bombings in the heart of the country, Moscow. From the beginning of his tenure Putin has
offered to cooperate with the United States in the fight against international Islamic terror,
but each time it was the United States -- us -- who refused, including famously Paul Wolfowitz
during the George W. Bush administration who replied to one such offer: "We don't need your
assistance or intel." And thus, the revealing files on the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston
bombing) were not received.
But, as Neocon Charles Krauthammer once declared: "We live in a unipolar world today,
and there is only ONE superpower, and that is the United States." That attitude was not
received with equanimity by post-Communist Russia, a Russia that has discovered its heritage
and its traditions and has asked for partnership with the United States, and not the hysteria
we have witnessed in the United States sweeping aside all rationality.
The late Richard Pipes wasn't incorrect in his assertion that the image of a foreign
intervention on the side of the Russian Civil War era Whites is a matter that has been quite
bloated from reality.
The Germans did more for the Reds than just transport Lenin from Zurich to Petrograd.
There was also the concerted soft power anti-White/pro-Red left activism in the West, as well
as some other matters mentioned in these non-JRL promoted pieces:
The Jacobin piece linked at the very top of this note makes some broad inaccuracies on the
Russian Civil War era violence. There was plenty of such on the side of the Reds, which BTW
adversely affected a good number of Jews.
Towards the end of the Russian Civil War, the more objective of historians on this issue
note that the Whites had noticeably maintained a better discipline of its forces concerning
the issues of looting and violence. A hypothetical White victory wasn't destine for a
Nazi/Nazi light scenario. One notes the exiled manner of many Whites including Anton Denikin
and Peter Wrangel.
The pogroms against the Jews in Russian Civil War era Ukraine happened before the Whites
established a primary base there. These pogroms included involvement from the forces loyal to
Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura, as well as some locals.
Much of the historical accounting on this subject says that Petliura's forces were the
most violent among Russian Civil War era combatants against the Jews. In more recent years,
there seems to be an increase of claims stating differently -- which appear a blend of
questionably biased views from some on the left and others (not necessarily on the left)
taking an anti-White/pro-Petliura stance.
I'm not sure how pro-White Pipes was as suggested by the leftist author of the above
linked Jacobin piece. I recall Pipes saying rather rather derisively that US based Russian
studies programs had at one time been more influenced by the Whites. Whatever the degree of
that being true has declined as the svidomite (Ukrainian nationalist anti-Russian view) has
gotten greater academic play (Motyl, Kuzio, et al), mixed in with the leftist and JRL court
appointed Russia friendly syndromes.
Quite a few grant-eating "liberals" inside Russia speak the language, but this does not
make them any more competent. Basically, they illustrate the saying that "he, who pays the
musicians, calls the tune". The same applies to "Russia scholars" residing in the US,
regardless of their language proficiency.
Here, I have to politely disagree since Russian "liberals" both grant-supported and ones
that are not is a separate animal altogether. Firs, most of them, grants or no grants, are
the real deal, they got grants because they are the real deal, not the other way around, and
causality in this case really matters. I don't need even to know if Mr. Nekrasov or Gozman
are grant-eaters, their hatred of everything Russian is palpable. The only weaker feeling
than hatred they have is contempt. This cannot be hidden -- it shines through. They do it for
the idea and grants are just a bonus. It all goes back to Russian "Westerners" and liberals
about whom Tyutchev (IIRC) left a profound paragraph.
I guess we have to agree to disagree on this. My point is, all these "ideological
Russia-haters" eat at least three times a day, and they are used to eating well (no McDonalds
burgers for them, they prefer filet mignon). Yes, there is a long history of fights between
"Westerners" and "Slavophiles" in Russia, going even before Tyutchev. However, being a
"Westerner" one does not have to be a traitor. For example, Peter the Great was a
"Westerner", yet he was clearly a Russian patriot (even though he was not quite Russian by
blood). Whereas all this scum are traitors. In the US they would be compelled by the law to
register as foreign agents.
We are talking about the same thing with different words. My point is simply that there
are whores who do it for money and there are whores who do it for both money and
pleasure.
You are right. I am saying this as a biologist. The two genders in mammals ensure
reproduction. I believe that sexual attraction to the same gender, as well as a desire to
change one's gender, are symptoms of mental disorder. This does not mean that these mental
patients should be discriminated against (like we don't discriminate against people suffering
from depression or schizophrenia), but there are certain limitations imposed by their
condition (say, we don't let blind people drive cars or pilot airplanes: this is not
discrimination, this is protection of other members of the society). I was once told by a
"progressive" true believer in political correctness that of course gay people in a straight
society look strange. I pointed out that gay society cannot exist, it would die out in one
generation, as all people, straight and gay, can only be produced by a heterosexual act. Even
in case of artificial in vitro fertilization, you have to mix eggs with sperm, not eggs with
eggs or sperm with sperm -- this is basic biology, nature does not give a hoot about
politically correct BS.
We don't know. Mental disorders usually have a genetic component, so likely this one has
it. Non-genetic (environmental) component would be important, too. Say, if you put too many
male mice in one cage and don't feed them enough, some males will try to f..k other
males.
Stress makes pretty much any mammal go crazy. However, because of political correctness,
no real study of this subject is possible.
No researcher would put his/her career in jeopardy, especially considering how many other
interesting problems there are in biology; no government agency would fund an honest study,
as they don't want a backlash from the PC crowd. So, we have to wait for the societies that
are not afflicted by the rot of PC, such as Russia or China, to develop to the point when
someone focuses on that particular problem.
"... However mad Bolton might be, most card-carrying Russophobs and neocons are not crazy: they are cynical people without scruples working for money. ..."
Yes, sick ideology often attracts nutcases. I know a guy in Ukraine with a history of
mental illness who is a staunch supporter of current "president" Poroshenko.
However mad Bolton might be, most card-carrying Russophobs and neocons are not crazy:
they are cynical people without scruples working for money. Say, Hillary Clinton or Mike
Pompeo are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, but they are not too mad or too stupid
to understand the reality. They are simply greedy scum paid to do the hatched job. The same
applies to most current politicians involved in the smear campaign against Russia. The
greatest sin of Russia and Putin is that they got in the way of thieves who wanted to loot
the whole world but encountered resistance. Assad in Syria, Iran, North Korea, China, and
Venezuela committed the same sin: got between the thieves and their intended loot.
No, it doesn't and, in fact, American military record of imperial adventures in second
half of XX-early XXI century, once one discounts this turkey shoot of incompetent Iraq
military in the Gulf Wars, is rather dismal. Including in the times when the US actually did
have wherewithal to fight (relatively) big wars.
Today the United States is a bankrupt state with over-stretched military and grossly
overrated technological and operational capabilities.
Empire needs military power -- NOBODY in the US top political echelons today, with some
very-very few exceptions (fingers on one hand will be enough to count them), understands the
nature of military power nor knows how to use it.
In other words -- they are incompetent. This competence, or lack thereof, is also the part
of the capability.
"... The Joy of Freedom: An Economist's Odyssey ..."
"... This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Zen Cash ; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; LibertyStickers.com ; and ExpandDesigns.com/Scott . ..."
David Henderson joins the show to talk about the consequences of war for the American
economy and the world political order. Henderson explains that many of the intrusive powers the
state has today are the result of major crises, during which the state seizes some new power,
and then after the crisis gives up much of that power again -- but not all of it. Over time
these powers accumulate into the government we have today. The nascent income tax, for
instance, was raised all the way to 77% for top earners during World War I, and then
'generously' lowered closer to modern levels after the war ended. Railroads were nationalized
around the same time, and then privatized afterward but with much more regulation. Henderson
identifies three crises that had the most impact in this area: World War I, the Great
Depression, and World War II. War in particular has dire consequences for government power, as
demonstrated by the rise of Hitler's fascism in Europe and numerous socialist regimes in the
East, all as a direct result of the aftermath of World War I. He advocates a return to defense,
rather than offense, which would not only save American taxpayers billions each year, but would
also avoid the blowback with which we've become all too familiar.
David R. Henderson is a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and former
professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval
Postgraduate School. He is the author of The Joy of Freedom: An Economist's Odyssey . Read his work at DavidRHenderson.com and
AntiWar.com .
US doesn't have resources anymore of "going big". It is not realistically an option...
I know, and should probably have made it clearer that when faced with that
decision, the US will have to go home. The top levels of the USM pyramid know well the limits
of the box they've gotten themselves into. They've built the wrong force structure for the
world as it is and will be.
Madeleine Albright's famous question to Gen. Powell 'What's the point of having this
superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?' can now be re-worded to
ask "What's the point of having this enormous military edifice and expenditure if it isn't
superb, or even effective?" The answer is that there is no point. Much of it can be
jettisoned without affecting the US' real strategic situation, and almost all of it if
its mandate were to be shrunk to defence of its homeland and close allies.
The recent 6hr meeting in Finland between Gerasimov and Dunford, is (I believe) likely to
have dealt with some of the parameters governing the USM's "going home". I can't even imagine
how they're gonna do this in an organized way, but it's in everybody's interest that it happens
as smoothly as possible. That those two seem to have built a professional rapport and even
understanding is heartening.
The recent 6hr meeting in Finland between Gerasimov and Dunford, is (I believe) likely
to have dealt with some of the parameters governing the USM's "going home"
Most likely, at least Dunford, unlike most of US establishment is professional. Look up
Rostislav Ishenko's latest excellent piece yesterday:
"... At the next level is the global benefactors(Profiteers): expensive war equipment makers, oil well production gear makers, robot makers, transport organizations, phantom for hire mercenary armies labor agencies, Democrat and Republican candidates managers to be placed on the "vote for 5 election" ballots, inventors of the fake, producers of "the fake" into propaganda, distributors of the propaganda designed fake news to masses in the public, and access managers who gate, for massive fees, lobbyist into see and deal with politicians, media giants, and power wielding bureaucrats. ..."
"... without globalism there is no neocon-ism, ..."
"... They will write laws, or get nations to sanction, start wars, regime change, terrorize, whatever to advance and to protect their exclusive right to competition free profit making); you might call it ownership of all of the factors of production by whatever means is necessary. ..."
Who cannot name the few corporations and their owners and directors that strongly support the neocon ideology on the Internet?
Which does the intelligence gathering (spying), which processes the data(data mining), which produces and sells OS(limits user
security), which makes sleuthing back doors for browsers and application software, which make the devices that negotiate the bits
between hardware (CPU) and software (OS), you know one bit for you the user and a duplicate bit of your bit for deep state intelligence
units.
At the next level is the global benefactors(Profiteers): expensive war equipment makers, oil well production gear makers,
robot makers, transport organizations, phantom for hire mercenary armies labor agencies, Democrat and Republican candidates managers
to be placed on the "vote for 5 election" ballots, inventors of the fake, producers of "the fake" into propaganda, distributors
of the propaganda designed fake news to masses in the public, and access managers who gate, for massive fees, lobbyist into see
and deal with politicians, media giants, and power wielding bureaucrats.
As I looked through this list I realized that if the public were to deny its elected government authority to support its neocon
capitalist, the entire economy would be forced to switch from Global to Domestic.. showering all kinds of benefits on the governed
sheep. No wonder the government is so insistent: without globalism there is no neocon-ism, without neocon-ism open
competition would flourish, the restrictions on human progress in copyrights and patents would disappear and prices would move
from controlled levels to competitive levels.
But I do not think the neocons are "ideologues"; unless lawless disregard for humanity in search of profit, is an ideology.
I am not even sure they are tightly organized, they are not colonist, they are monopolist (meaning any profit potential (tangible
or intangible) will soon belong to them or be within their control.
They will write laws, or get nations to sanction, start wars, regime change, terrorize, whatever to advance and to protect
their exclusive right to competition free profit making); you might call it ownership of all of the factors of production by whatever
means is necessary.
I look at them as capitalist, who have co-opted many different governments, who have forgone their humanity, who independently
profiteer, interactively, and for a multitude of different reasons, to produce a common collective set of extremely effective
outcomes
He reminds me of the professor character played by Walter Malthau in the movie Fail
Safe , which came out in the same year as another Cold War themed movie Dr.
Strangelove
Kind of like a broken clock, Pipes wasn't always wrong as noted in detail here:
Pipes and Soviet history are two incompatible entities. They do not relate to each-other
in anyway. Pipes' body of work, among many other things, is in the foundation of an American
decline today.
Consider the recent -- but largely unreported -- formation of an umbrella group, the Renew
Democracy Initiative (RDI), with the goal of "uni[ting] the center-left and the center-right."
Its leaders include former John McCain foreign policy advisor Max Boot, The Washington
Post 's Anne Appelbaum, Never Trumper Bill Kristol, former chess wizard Gary Kasparov, and
Richard Hurwitz of Council on Foreign Relations. [See " Neocons &
Russiagaters Unite! ," April 27, 2018] RDI's manifesto calls for "fresh thinking" and urges
"the best minds from different countries to come together for both broad and discrete projects
in the service of liberty and democracy in the West and beyond . Liberal democracy is in crisis
around the world, besieged by authoritarianism, nationalism, and other illiberal forces.
Far-right parties are gaining traction in Europe, Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on Russia
and undermines democracy abroad, and America struggles with poisonous threats from the right
and left."
My favorite part of the Renew Democracy Initiative's manifesto:
10. The extremists share a disdain for the globalism on which modern prosperity is
based. Whether they are far-left or far-right, they believe in top-down solutions to
problems that can best be resolved through greater freedom, competition, openness and
mobility . Both seek power without compromise or coalition and defer to the rule of law
only when it strengthens their own position. These illiberal forces embrace divisive
rhetoric that makes rational debate impossible. Indeed, they frequently reject established
facts and scientific reasoning in favor of conspiracy theories and malicious myths. Liberal
democracy must address the problems of those disadvantaged by economic change with
practical programs grounded in fact and reason.
Amazing! There are two parts to this. The "openness and mobility" is a nod towards their
status as rootless kosmopolity who destroy civil society and local communities in favor of a
permanent, mobile underclass. But they actually imply that globalism is bottom-up; that
globalism is the result of liberty and the free market. Such balls, these people.
The US elites (neocons are just one type of servants they hired)
ah, so it was Dubya all along!
what a clever little schemer he was! Pretending all that time to be dumb as a rock, and a
tool of organized Zionism, while he was using the neocons to his own advantage!
So while ((Wolfowitz and Feith and Pearl and Kristol)) were being schooled at the feet of
((Leo Strauss)), it was Dubya the college cheerleader all along who was the mastermind behind
the Project for a New American Century and 9/11 !
sure, Goldman Sachs and Hollywood get federal subsidies, but it's the (dying) American
middle class that has been exploiting the world's poor!
The hysterical US foreign policy in the last 10-15 years, with its mindless
suicidal aggressiveness, is in fact death throes of an Empire that resents going
down the drain,
what's been going down the drain has been the blood and tears and future of working class
Americans, forced to suit up their children to go slaughter innocent Arabs and others in a
transparent and treasonous policy intended to bolster Israel – at the direct and
catastrophic expense of America and the American people.
I wonder, as the American people are taxed to the tune of billions every year, to send to
Israel as tribute, is that also a case of US elites using Israel to their own devices? As
Americas roads and bridges crumble, and veterans are denied care?
Or, is it just possible, that the ((owners)) of the Federal Reserve Bank, have used that
printing press as a weapon to consolidate absolute power over the institutions of the
ZUSA?
Do you suppose that when France bombs Libya or menaces Syria, that they're doing it to
benefit the French elite? And that Israel is their dupe, who give them a pretext for doing
so? Or that the French (and British and Polish and Ukrainian, etc..) elite are getting their
marching orders from Jewish supremacist Zionists who're hell bent on using Gentile Christians
to slaughter Gentile Muslims while they laugh and count the shekels? Eh?
They are not. Lobbing for MIC does not require to be Jewish, although many Jews are talented
propagandists. Neocons and Zionists are more closely related, with Zionists being a subset of
Neocons
The "deep state" has always existed everywhere, and always will. It's a feature, not a
bug, depending on whether its interests coincide with the people's, or not. For example, many
of the Romanovs were installed via "deep state" palace coups.
But can we stop using the word "neocon" and simply start using the word "jews"
instead?
From the article:
>Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI) leaders include former John McCain foreign policy
advisor Max Boot, The Washington Post's Anne Appelbaum, Never Trumper Bill Kristol, former
chess wizard Gary Kasparov, and Richard Hurwitz of Council on Foreign Relations.
Every. Single. Time.
Oh, and about those Brits, I found it really interesting to know that all of the Royal
Family's men are circumcised, and it's not done medically as in the USA, it's done by a
Rabbi.
_at_ Quartermaster
>done in Ukraine
That was done by the USA. One of the primary architects of it was Victoria Nuland. She's
Jewish, in case you were wondering.
But can we stop using the word "neocon" and simply start using the word "jews"
instead?
no, because the worst neocons are Gentiles
And I say worst, because at least the Jews are doing what they consider to be 'best for
the Jews', as they foment war, and loot the US treasury of billions of dollars every year to
benefit their tribe.
Whereas the Gentile neocons are serving the Jewish supremacists at the direct of their own
tribe and nation.
Scum like Dick Cheney, James Woolsey, George Will, the entire membership of the GOP in
good standing with 'conservative Inc., Paul Ryan deserves a mention of his own, John McCain
and Lindsey, and all the rest of the rotten neocon Gentiles, who're far, far worse human
beings than Max Boot or William Kristol.
this is perhaps the most contemptible man alive. (even possibly edging out McCain!)
listen how at 1:38 -- 1:42 he advocates taking out all of Syria's defenses, which would of
course lead to the utter destabilization and ultimate carving up of Syria.
what this POS doesn't mention is that he, (and Dick Cheney and other Gentile scum)
are on the strategic board of Genie Energy, which is poised to make trillions of dollars
pumping oil out of Syria's Golan Heights. Which today is universally considered Syrian
territory. But if Assad falls, then that all changes in a heartbeat.
also look at him at 51 seconds in, drooling over the planned destruction of Lebanon by the
ZUS.
here he admits that he's an investor in 'energy and national security matters'
can you imagine a rich man advocating for the slaughter of untold innocents, including
American service men and women, in order to illegally and immorally steal a nations territory
so that he could profit by it with a few shekels more?
There aren't words..
He also was part of John McCain's presidential campaign.
The Jewish neocons are babes in the woods when it comes to the raw, treasonous evil of men
like Woolsey.
All of the verbage to tell us what we already know? That the alliance between the soft
neoliberal, the media and the neocons is all about the Jewish supremacist agenda.
That is to use the might of the US against those who oppose the plan for Greater Israel to
dominate the world thru endless wars and financial manipulation.
To destroy the entire Middle East to steal land, to control the political process in ALL
the countries on Earth particularly the West.
Look at the fake media ownership, the journalists, the "comics" , the sports owners,
academia. All jewish controlled and financed.
Putin is in the way. He's lucky to be alive still.
It used to be that the only things one could depend on were "death & taxes." Now of
course we must add to that list the very dependable presence of CIA / State Dept lies
parroted by MSM all over the West. Lies which are endlessly repeated in defiance of all
physical reality and often in direct opposition to actual events in the actual world we live
in.
From the Ukraine coup, to Russia-gate, to the "Assad's gassing his own people" regime
change propaganda, to the totally surreal Alice in Wonderland Skripnal poisoning nonsense in
the U.K, the Western MSM have been as dependable as the rising sun.
They can and do provide
fact-free, evidence-free reporting directly from the bowels of the deep state in support of
the neocolonial West, including unending support for the never ending resort to mass violence
the West relies upon to keep the rest of the planet subjugated -- just as it has for the last
500+ years.
Sanctions are always a prelude to war. Sanctions are in fact an act of war. that's why
Russians have replaced Arabs as the go-to villains in propaganda and Hollywood movies.
To me it is all quite simple. FDR's aim was to rule the war with junior aides USSR, China and
a smaller Britain. Stalin had other ideas.
Even in 1946 FDR's main backer, Baruch pleaded for a world government, a USA government,
in my view. Deep State still tries to impose this world government.
Despite Trump 'America first' we see a Bolton in the White House, as many see 'the neocons
are back'.
Cannot see much difference between neocons and Deep State.
The big mistake of the British empire was unwillingness to realise that it could no longer
maintain the empire. This already began before 1914, when the two fleet standards became too
expensive, the one fleet standard expressed the inability to maintain the empire.
Obama was forcedto reduce the two war standard to one and half. What a half war
accomplishes we see in Syria. Alas, seldom in history did reason rule. If it will in the
present USA, I doubt it.
The neocons are a collection of sick, murderous, fanatical supremacist ideologues who have
turned the U.S. into the most despicable criminal regime on earth. Because of their control
and influence over the U.S. imperial military/political assets, combined with their
psychopathic mentality and ideology, these scumbags pose a clear threat to the entire world,
but especially to Russia and Europe (and to the U.S. itself, of course). The irony in all of
this is that, although these mostly Jewish bottom-feeders like to smear any foreign leader
they'd like to demonize as "the new Hitler" etc., they themselves are more nefarious and
dangerous to the planet than Hitler and his German Nazis ever were.
Nothing will change until the major members of the neocon collective start getting
individually singled out and receiving the harsh punishments they deserve.
"Cannot see much difference between neocons and Deep State."
And that means that the US Deep State can NOT have a Jewish creation, because it
existed a long time before 1948, a long time before 1939, a long time before the creation of
the Federal Reserve.
There is a reason that Neocons love Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln: the
former was an apologist for the nascent American Deep State, and the latter its perfect tool
right down to being ready and able to slaughter huge numbers of non-Elite whites so the then
virtually 100% WASP-in-blood Elite Deep State could totally control the growing nation.
The source of the American Deep State is the same as England's Deep State: Oliver
Cromwell's deal with Jews, a deal granting Jews special rights and privileges and made
precisely in order to have the money to wage total war to exterminate non-WASP white
Christian cultures and identities.
That is exactly what the Neocons are determined to continue, and they are correct whenever
they assert that they are being loyal to the history and heritage of the Puritans and of
Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party and of the US in the Spanish-American War, World War 1 and
World War 2.
What is different about today's Neocons and, say, the growing number of Jews with major
voices among the British Deep State at the height of Victorianism is that now the original
junior partner has become the acting partner, the dominant partner.
But the original alliance is the same.
You cannot separate the Neocon problem from the WASP problem. You cannot solve the Neocon
problem without also solving the WASP problem.
The business of the Zionist controlled U.S. gov is WAR and this has been the agenda since
1913 and the establishment of the Zionist FED and the Zionist IRS and thus began the WAR
agenda and the American people were set up to pay for the Zionist created wars and the
Zionist agenda of a Zionist NWO.
Thus the Zionists need an enemy and have created enemies where none existed, the case in
point being Russia and lesser created enemies the case in point being any given country in
the Mideast that Israel and the Zionists wish to destroy. In the case of Russia the Zionists
have the added incentive of trying to destroy a Christian country as Russia is now and
historically has been Christian with the exception of the Satanist Zionist takeover of Russia
in 1917 and the murder of some 60 million Russian people by the Satanist ie Zionist
communists.
The U.S. gov is under satanic Zionist control and proof of this is the fact that Israel
and the Zionist controlled deep state did 911 and got away with and every thinking person
knows this to be the truth, may GOD help we the people of America.
From the other side of the Atlantic, what is the WASP problem ?
Whatever one thinks of the USA, protestants from NW Europe created the USA.
Their descendants, in my view, defend their culture.
Hardly any culture in the world goes under without a fight.
Some, maybe many, Germans, again the exception.
The Neocons are mad at Russia for standing in their way of taking over the world. All in the
name of "democracy" of course, nothing sinister there. Russia, and as a matter of fact, the
whole world stood by and let the US have their way for almost 25 years. What did they
accomplish? Diddly. So now, they want Russia to get out of the way for another (at least) 25
years, so they can spread some more "democracy". Let me tell you something, if they couldn't
do it with virtually no opposition between 1991 -2014, and on a trillion dollar "defence"
budgets, maybe there is something else that should be blamed other than Russia. Maybe it's
their incompetence.
There is a lot of truth in this piece, but I think that the overall spin is misleading.
Putin's orthodox faith (likely pretended; he seems to be too intelligent for a true
believer), history of Jewish persecution in Russia, etc., are secondary factors. The US
elites (neocons are just one type of servants they hired) are mad that the world refuses to
be unipolar. Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and many lesser countries, arouse
"righteous indignation" of the robbers because they refuse to let themselves be looted and
bossed by the US elites. All sorts of thieves joined the choir: Jewish and gentile, "right"
and "left", military and civilian, the only common denominator being that they stole a lot
and resent being thwarted from stealing even more.
Moreover, the almighty dollar is about to be exposed as a king with no clothes by various
countries switching the trade to their own currencies, undermining the Ponzi schemes of the
US dollar and US government debt. The hysterical US foreign policy in the last 10-15 years,
with its mindless suicidal aggressiveness, is in fact death throes of an Empire that resents
going down the drain, like all dominant Empires before it, but cannot do anything about
inevitable course of history.
War on the poor and defenseless, it what the Neocon and Zionist-puppet traitors do best.
Terrorists in Syria (white helmets) getting 7 million in new funding from Trump, just as
Russia warns of new chemical attack false flag is in the works. Must kill evil dicktater
Assad for protecting those Christians inside Syria
Russia Warns "Credible Information" Of Impending Staged Chemical Attack In Syria
Elites are robbing Americans and foreigners alike. In fact, the US population gets some
crumbs off elites' table, and enjoys higher living standards than it would have in fair
global competition.
The overall educational level and the level of awareness of what's going on in the world in
the US is dismal. Elites arranged that by maintaining pathetic education system and spreading
lies via MSM; ignorant sheep are more likely to obey, and to approve of persecution of those
"black sheep" who are less ignorant and don't buy the lies of the MSM. Did we see any
protests against "Patriot Act" that trampled the very foundations of our Constitution? Sheep
don't protest, they just follow the leader.
However, we have to remember that clueless ignoramus in the US gets 5-10 times more than
similarly clueless ignoramus in China or India. Bush junior was genuinely dumb, but would he
become US President without his family's ill-gotten riches, or without his ex-CIA chief daddy
becoming the President first? Of course not, most morons in the US never fly that high. The
only reason for his "success" is the fact that he was born into an elite family.
As far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like
Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews in
the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon
Adelson.
See comment 51:
The problem here and abroad are elites. Elites of any kind.
Elites are robbing Americans and foreigners alike. In fact, the US population gets some
crumbs off elites' table, and enjoys higher living standards than it would have in fair
global competition.
some perhaps, but the middle class is dying (literally in the case of middle aged white
men), and the working class is languishing.
It's true the 1% are gorging on a frenzy of corruption and graft, and a no doubt there are
a few who prosper by serving that class, but the Main Streets of America are not, in any way,
profiting off the exploitation of Africa or S. America or anywhere else. Indeed, it is them
that are being exploited.
The overall educational level and the level of awareness of what's going on in the world
in the US is dismal. Elites arranged that by maintaining pathetic education system and
spreading lies via MSM; ignorant sheep are more likely to obey
no argument there!
However, we have to remember that clueless ignoramus in the US gets 5-10 times more than
similarly clueless ignoramus in China or India.
India and China (and Ethiopia and Somalia and Mexico and Brazil and so many other places)
are not poor due to the oppression of Americans. Sure, Goldman Sachs and a thousand other
vultures and thieves have done a lot of damage, but no more that the leadership of those
respective lands.
Has India ever heard of birth control, (for God's sake!) Or Indonesia or a hundred other
places, like Haiti, that overbreed their finite resources and limited space until their
countries are reduced to shitholes.
If a coal miner in West Virginia is doing a little better than an Untouchable in India,
then trust me when I tell you I'm not going to blame the miner (or janitor or mechanic) in
America for the poverty in the corrupt and stupid third world.
As far as the suffering that the ZUSA has actually caused, and is causing in places like
Syria and Yemen, none of that is being done on behalf of the American people, but rather the
typical American is taxed to support these wars and atrocities on behalf of Israel or Saudi
Arabia, respectively.
The only reason for his "success" is the fact that he was born into an elite family.
recently I was ranting on the terrible folly of this very thing.
As far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like
Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews
in the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon
Adelson.
Yes, they're just as selfish and greedy, but they aren't as filled with genocidal
hatred.
It's because of Zionist Jews that Americans were dragged into both world wars.
It's because of Zionist Jews (and assorted corrupt Gentiles) that Israel (with help from
the CIA and ((media)), did 9/11, in order to plunge this century into horrors writ large like
the last Zio-century.
That there are legions of corrupt and soulless Gentiles willing and eager to jump on that
gravy train, is a shame and a sin, but it doesn't excuse the people who are the motivation
behind the wars.
The Kochs (and Chamber of Commerce and other Gentile scum) want massive immigration out of
pure, raw, insatiable greed.
Whereas the Jewish supremacist Zionists want it out of genocidal tribal hatreds.
The typical American middle and working class are ground into the dirt between these two
pillars of Satanic iniquity.
I agree with much of what you're saying, and it's true about the elites in general. But
the ZUSA is completely controlled by Zionist Jews, and I think that's pretty obvious.
This man knew that 9/11 was going to happen, if he wasn't part of the planning. And yet
look at how they abase themselves
It's not just the media. The late night talk show hosts are doing their bit too, as I
heard last night on a Jimmy Kimmel rerun (of a recent show). Can't remember the context as I
was doing the dishes, but did hear him say the usual "Russian illegally annexed Crimea"
standard phrase, immediately followed by "and then invaded Ukraine". The latter just casually
tossed off as a given. People hear these memes constantly repeated and, regardless of their
veracity (suspect to say the least) it becomes part of their worldview.
Who is behind the political preaching of hosts like Jimmy Kimmel ? Inquiring minds want to
know !
Joe Tedesky , July 5, 2018 at 2:43 pm
You know what irina, seeing these late night talk shows go all crazy over Putin makes me
think of the Zio-Media executives, and where their allegiance to power resides. Joe
irina -- I quite agree. The same is true of the former Daily Show crew members who now
have their own shows. Several have shown themselves to be quite the little imperialist war
mongers when it comes to gleefully repeating the CIA sponsored Syrian regime change and
Russiagate propaganda. Samantha Bee & John Oliver kept triggering my gag reflex with
their propaganda lines until I found a simple but effective solution and stopped watching
them altogether. We have an amazingly seamless propaganda system here in the U.S. One can
chose to either get one's "pro-war regime change propaganda" delivered with barely concealed
racism and misogyny from Fox News, or instead opt for hearing the same nonsense delivered
with pretentious blather and catchy jazz interludes at PBS. American democracy is all about
having "choices."
Jeff Harrison , July 5, 2018 at 7:57 pm
I quite agree. I knew the minute that they started calling RT a propaganda outlet that, in
fact, the USG was running a full scale propaganda operation. I don't know if I simply wasn't
paying enough attention or if they have, in fact ramped the operation up, but I can hardly
read any MSM outlet's output without calling bullshit on it.
irina , July 6, 2018 at 2:55 am
Jimmy Kimmel actually used to be funny and there is a really good clip (somewhere on
youtube no doubt) of him reading a 'doctored' Dr. Seuss
book to The Donald (a live guest) during his primary candidacy.
But since The Donald's election Kimmel has opened almost every show with 'ten minutes
hate' segment on The Donald. I still watch (or at least listen) occasionally because I want
to know what is being fed to The Public.
You are absolutely right though, "we have an amazingly seamless propaganda system here in
the US". The average person maybe has 30 minutes to devote to the news, between getting home
and having dinner; they watch some sort of news show and think they are 'informed'. But it
actually takes MANY hours and a knowledge of alternative websites to even begin to piece
together an approximation of what might, in reality, be going on.
The Russians used to say that, at least they knew they were being propagandized.
Unfortunately, probably due to 'American Exceptionalism', most Americans think the MSM is
bringing them 'the truth'. But nothing could be further from The Truth.
"... "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power." ..."
"... Wolfowitz's document was leaked before release, and its bald-faced call for Imperial conquest caused enough of a noise that it was hastily rewritten before its official release a month later. ..."
The personal viciousness of the Neocons' attacks on Putin and Russia may have something to do
with ancient memories (however false they may be), but the geopolitical & geo-economic
challenges that the US & West faces compels even good old-fashioned Anglo-Imperialists to
say nasty things about Russia.
Since Putin came to power, Russia has been working the Plan. Its strategic objectives are
to rejuvenate and consolidate the "Russian World" in Mackinder's Heartland, and from there to
leverage its enormous geographical size & natural resource base to become the
central power on the Eurasian continent. It's unique position culturally and geographically
allows it to aspire to being the Grand Arbiter of Eurasian affairs, the only nation able to
link the two ends of the continent geographically, economically and culturally.
When Wolfowitz wrote his now infamous words
"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the
territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that
posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new
regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from
dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to
generate global power."
he was channelling Mackinder who said
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world.
Wolfowitz's document was leaked before release, and its bald-faced call for Imperial
conquest caused enough of a noise that it was hastily rewritten before its official release a
month later.
The manner of the Wolfowitz Doctrine's emergence was a harbinger of the sort of half-assed
attempt at empire the US embarked on. When it comes to Empire building, one is well advised
to either Go Big, or Go Home. In the event, stretching its half-baked, incoherent doctrines
to the breaking point, a series of inevitable fiascos followed and what we're seeing now is
the last desperate attempts to keep its satraps onside by bamboozling their publics and
making it difficult for clear sighted politicians to lead their countries away from the
increasingly loud sucking sound coming out of Washington. As even that tactic is now failing,
the US will soon face another Go Big, or Go Home moment.
Exactly. "Elites" are doing it. They own Hollywood, too. Republicans like Trump, Ryan,
Graham aren't groveling before organized Int'l Jewry when they take orders from
"billionaires," not at all. It's Chamber of Commerce nerds they secretly answer to, you see,
not Int'l Jewry's Wall Street and Fed, whose business is tricking a profit from honest
American labor wherever it's found, while (apparently for laughs) calling this extortion the
efficient allocation of scarce financial resources. It's all so farcically obvious at this
point yet Conservatism Inc is telling us it's all MAGA magic. Have to love this new face of
Conservatism Inc, too -- a fruitcake whose sexuality derives from an obsession with male
defecation to the extent his kind ingest feces and genital excreta and call it luv.
Nonetheless, the CUFIs will be sending their sons to die and lose their limbs to turn the ME
into one big Tel Aviv and in the process leave poor Moloch seeming like Mickey Mouse in
comparison.
the US will soon face another Go Big, or Go Home moment.
US doesn't have resources anymore of "going big". It is not realistically an option,
unless one wants to start a global war. But I in general agree with your thesis.
Yes, Stalin was not Jewish, but what would you say was the Jewish role (if any) with the
Bolshevik revolution (and the Holodomor and the rest of the horrors visited upon Russia and
beyond, -as described by Solzhenitsyn- by Jewish finance, intrigue, treachery and genocidal
villainy)?
Look first at the list of first Sovnarkom, for starters. Jewish finance and interests were
important but only, again, as part of the puzzle. I do not consider Solzhenitsyn a good
writer, even less a competent Russia historian, not to mention him being a complete amateur
in any affairs pertaining defining military and political factors which led to two Russian
Revolutions (in fact, three, once 1905 is considered). So, I am not interested in discussing
the work of falsifiers.
If the ECB, (an extension of Rothschild's Fed) were in the hands of Gentiles, do you
think Europe would be committing ethnic suicide?
The ongoing White Goyim Genocide project is proof positive that the Tribe is holding the
reigns. Our own gentile "elites" are getting played into this suicide just like everyone
else. Only the lies differ. They don't know that their seat of "power" is at the kiddie table
and that it has an expiration date.
Russia's history is a bit more complex than some Manichean struggle between evil Jews
and noble Russian Orthodox Christians.
obviously
In fact, it is infinitely more complex.
I've delved a bit into it. Read some books and such. But my education is always
incomplete, and I'm an eternal student.
But if you want to view it as one unstoppable Jewish juggernaut against Christ-loving
Russians, who am I to suggest to you otherwise.
naw, that's not how I see it.
The reason I bring up Jews is because I see them as often times bad actors that are
causing dire problems right now, today, in this world. And menacing things I value, like
peace, when peace is practicable.
When you talk about the infinite complexity of Russia's history, so too is that history
tied to her neighbors, and Ukraine's history as well. (I suspect you know where I'm going
with this ; )
So what some very clever and sinister people might do, is use that history and certain
fault lines in the Russian and Ukrainian narratives, to foist strife and death and misery and
war. You see?
Now you may say that Poroshenko is not a Jew, and as far as I know, that's right, (or not,
I don't really know or care), but what I do know, and do care about, is the way neocon Jews
(and goyim stooges) in my country have cynically used those historic fault lines to foment
strife and war.
The way I see contemporary Russian history is one that following the collapse of the SU,
Russia was looted during Yeltin's drunken reign by Rothschild agents known as the "Russian"
oligarchs, (a few of which seem to have been actual ethnic Russians), and from there how
Putin heroically wrested the destiny of Russia from these bad actors.
Then it was on to a bright future, except then Putin grew alarmed by what he saw happening
to Libya, to be followed by Syria and what was it Gen. Clark said.., seven other
countries?
So he put the kibosh in Syria's destabilization, and by doing so, earned the wrath of the
Zionists.
Whereupon neocon Jews like Nuland installed Jews like Yatz in a coup that here in the ZUS
they called "democracy".
The reason ((they)) did that, was to stick a pointed stick into the Russian bear, for
defying ((their)) agenda in the greater Levant.
That's why they blamed Putin for MH17.
That's (probably) why they lowered the price of oil, to harm Putin (and Venezuela and
others)
That's why our media are 24/7, 365 screeching that PUTIN IS HITLER!!!
Because, as far as I can tell, it is Putin that is the only resistance to whatever Bibi
wants.
Because what I can tell you, is that Russia or no Russia, Bibi gets what ever he wants
from "our" fecal government, always.
And so because of this dire paradigm, I do sometimes mention that it is Jewish
supremacists that are foisting these wars. And causing great strife between Russia and the
rest of the world.
I don't fulminate about Jewish supremacists because they stole my twinkle, no.
I talk about Zionist intrigue because that is exactly why the world is demanding that
Putin return Crimea. And pay for the deaths on MH17, and why thousands have died in Donbas,
etc..
These things didn't happen in a vacuum. There are actors involved, and geopolitics, and
Machiavellian intrigues and machinations that should be exposed IMHO.
If the ECB, (an extension of Rothschild's Fed) were in the hands of Gentiles, do you
think Europe would be committing ethnic suicide?
Western Liberalism doesn't have Jewish roots, unless one wants to associate capitalism
with Jews only, which is not the case. This liberalism is flesh and blood of the
Enlightenment and Europe's current problems have roots in this liberalism, together with the
post-WW II cultural shock. It is also rooted in the United States emerging from this war
unscathed. So, no it is not just the tribe, it is the whole clockwork of Western Civilization
and its leader, the United States, which drives it into the gutter. Jews here are just for
the ride and chutzpa–US and Jews were created for each-other. "Rothschild's Fed" in
this case but one of many institutions which was created to enrich a rather substantial (to
put it mildly) American strata of radically not-Jewish waspies who are now trying to find any
justification (and excuses) for them screwing their own country into the increasingly grim
future. Per tribe, ask yourself a question WHO owns this site and who allows, including very
many openly mental people, to freely and openly express their opinions? Is Ron Unz, who is a
real cultural American asset (even though I do not always agree with him) a tribe or not?
Guess who is the most vocal and courageous fighter against anti-Russian madness in US?
Professor Stephen Cohen, is he a tribe?
Here is a great British historian for ya:
"This swift decline in British vigor at home and the failure to exploit the empire were
not owing to some inevitable senescent process of history .That cause was a political
doctrine .The doctrine was liberalism, which criticized and finally demolished the
traditional conception of the nation-state as a collective organism, a community, and
asserted instead the primacy of individual. According to liberal thinking a nation was no
more than so many human atoms who happened to live under the same set of laws .It was Adam
Smith who formulated the doctrine of Free Trade, the keystone of liberalism, which was to
exercise a long-live and baneful effect on British power .Adam Smith attacked the traditional
"mercantilist" belief that a nation should be generally self-supporting "
"The Collapse Of British Power", Correlli Barnett. William Morrow & Company, Inc. New
York, 1972. Page 91.
Now ask yourself a question–IS the United States a nation-state?
The liberalism of the Enlightenment meant that we should all use our rationality to
question the dogmas (and the leaders) of the day, and put them to the test of reason.
That's why it's also known as the Age of Reason.
You obviously intent on ignoring economics of the issue and transition from one mode of
production to another. It was this thing which predetermined all others. I do have 1929
(IIRC) version of Paine's Age of Reason.
US doesn't have resources anymore of "going big". It is not realistically an option
I know, and should probably have made it clearer that when faced with that decision, the
US will have to go home. The top levels of the USM pyramid know well the limits of the box
they've gotten themselves into. They've built the wrong force structure for the world as it
is and will be.
Madeleine Albright's famous question to Gen. Powell 'What's the point of having this
superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?' can now be re-worded to
ask "What's the point of having this enormous military edifice and expenditure if it isn't
superb, or even effective?" The answer is that there is no point. Much of it can be
jettisoned without affecting the US' real strategic situation, and almost all of it if
its mandate were to be shrunk to defence of its homeland and close allies.
The recent 6hr meeting in Finland between Gerasimov and Dunford, is (I believe) likely to
have dealt with some of the parameters governing the USM's "going home". I can't even imagine
how they're gonna do this in an organized way, but it's in everybody's interest that it
happens as smoothly as possible. That those two seem to have built a professional rapport and
even understanding is heartening.
The recent 6hr meeting in Finland between Gerasimov and Dunford, is (I believe) likely
to have dealt with some of the parameters governing the USM's "going home"
Most likely, at least Dunford, unlike most of US establishment is professional. Look up
Rostislav Ishenko's latest excellent piece yesterday:
Frankly, I always read Rostislav Ischenko with interest. After all, he worked for the
Ukrainian government, including Ukrainian Foreign Affairs ministry, until 2014, when it
became abundantly clear that project "Ukraine" is an abject failure. He has a lot of inside
knowledge, although he sometimes predicts as imminent things that happen a year or two after
his predictions. But in most things he tends to be right.
jumping the shark ...revealing files on the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston bombing) were not received .. For all your research can you not see a false flag, i.e. manufactured event for public
consumption
confused see Operation Gladio
Corporate Media's About-Face on Ukraine's Neo-Nazis July 5, 2018 •
59 Comments
U.S. corporate media spent years dismissing the role of neo-Nazis in Ukraine's 2014 coup but
it is suddenly going through a conversion, as Daniel Lazare reports.
By Daniel Lazare Special to Consortium News
Last month a freelance journalist named Joshua
Cohen published an
article in The Washington Post about the Ukraine's growing neo-Nazi threat.
Despite a gratuitous swipe at Russia for allegedly exaggerating the problem (which it hasn't),
the piece was fairly accurate.
Entitled "Ukraine's ultra-right militias are challenging the government to a showdown," it
said that fascists have gone on a rampage while the ruling clique in Kiev closes its eyes for
the most part and prays that the problem somehow goes away on its own.
Thus, a group calling itself C14 (for the fourteen-word ultra-right motto, "We must secure
the existence of our people and a future for white children") not only beat up a socialist
politician and celebrated Hitler's birthday by stabbing an antiwar activist, but bragged about
it on its website. Other ultra-nationalists, Cohen says, have stormed the Lvov and Kiev city
councils and "assaulted or disrupted" art exhibits, anti-fascist demos, peace and gay-rights
events, and a Victory Day parade commemorating the victory over Hitler in 1945.
Yet nothing has happened to stop this. President Petro Poroshenko could order a crackdown,
but hasn't for reasons that should be obvious. The U.S.-backed "Euromaidan" uprising not only
drove out former president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, who had won an OSCE-certified
election, but tore the country in two, precisely because ultra-rightists like C14 were in the
lead.
When resistance to the U.S.-backed coup
broke out in Crimea and parts of the country's largely Russian-speaking east, the base of
Yanukovych voters, civil war ensued. But because the Ukrainian army had all but collapsed, the
new, coup government had no one to rely on other than the neo-fascists who had helped propel it
to power.
So an alliance was hatched between pro-western oligarchs at the top – Forbesputs
Poroshenko's net worth at a cool $1 billion – and neo-Nazi enforcers at the bottom.
Fascists may not be popular. Indeed, Dmytro Yarosh, the fire-breathing leader of a white-power
coalition known as Right Sector, received less than one percent of the vote when he
ran for president in May 2014.
But the state is so weak and riddled with so many ultra-rightists in key positions –
Andriy Parubiy, founder of the neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine, is speaker of the
parliament, while ultra-rightist Arsen Avakov is minister of the interior – that the path
before them is clear and unobstructed. As Cohen points out, the result is government passivity
on one hand and a rising tide of ultra-right violence on the other. In the earlier stages of
the civil war, for instance, the rightwing extremists burned more than 40 people alive in a
labor union building in Odessa, a horrific incident downplayed by Western media.
Cohen's article may have Washington Post readers scratching their heads for the
simple reason that the paper has long said the opposite. Since Euromaidan, the Post
has toed the official Washington line
that Vladimir Putin has exaggerated the role of the radical right in order to discredit the
anti-Yanukovych revolt and legitimize his own alleged interference.
Sure, anti-Yanukovych forces had festooned the Kiev town hall with a white supremacist
banner, a Confederate flag , and a giant image of Stepan Bandera , a Nazi
collaborator whose forces killed thousands of Jews during the German occupation and as many as
100,000 Poles. And yes, they staged a 15,000-strong torchlight parade in Bandera's honor and
scrawled an SS symbol on a toppled
statue of Lenin. They also destroyed a memorial to Ukrainians who
had fought on what Bandera supporters regard as the wrong side of World War II, that is, with
the Soviets and against the Axis.
But so-called responsible, mainstream journalists are supposed to avert their eyes to avoid
being tarred as a "
useful idiot " whom Putin supposedly employs to advance his "anti-American agenda." Ten
days after Yanukovych's departure, the Post dutifully
assured its readers that Russian reports of "hooligans and fascists" had "no basis in
reality."
A week or so later, it
said "the new government, though peppered with right-wing politicians, is led primarily by
moderate, pro-European politicians." A few weeks after that, it
described Bandera as no more than "controversial" and quoted a Kiev businessman as saying:
"The Russians want to call him a fascist, but I feel he was a hero for our country. Putin is
using him to try to divide us."
Thus, the Post and other corporate media continued to do its duty by
attacking Putin for plainly saying "the forces backing Ukraine's government in Kiev are
fascists and neo-Nazis." But who was wrong ?
The New York Times was no better. It
assailed Russia for hurling "harsh epithets" like "neo-Nazi," and
blamed the Russian leader for "scaremongering" by attributing Yanukovych's ouster to
"nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites." The Guardian 's Luke Harding
–
a leading Putin basher –
said of the far-right Svoboda Party:
"Over the past decade the party appears to have mellowed, eschewing xenophobia, academic
commentators suggest. On Monday, the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, said he had
been 'positively impressed' by Svoboda's evolution in opposition and by its behavior in the
Rada, Ukraine's parliament. 'They have demonstrated their democratic bona fides,' the
ambassador asserted."
This is the party whose founder, Oleh Tyahnybok,
said in a 2004 speech that "a Moscow-Jewish mafia" was running the Ukraine and that
Bandera's followers "fought against the Muscovites, Germans, Jews and other enemies who wanted
to take away our Ukrainian state." Had the leopard really changed its spots, according to
Pyatt? Or was it simply a matter of America not giving a damn as long as Svoboda joined the
fight to encircle Russia and advance NATO's drive to the east?
As someone named Marx once observed , "Who you gonna believe, me or your
own two eyes?" As far as Ukraine was concerned, the answer for the corporate press came from
the U.S. State Department. If Foggy Bottom said that Ukrainian neo-Nazism was a figment of
Russia's imagination, then that's what it was, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
Someday, historians will look back on Euromaidan Ukraine as one of the looniest periods in
western journalism – except, of course, for all the ones that have followed. But if one
had to choose the looniest story of all, one that best reflects the abject toadyism of the
reporting classes, it would have to be "Why Jews and Ukrainians Have Become Unlikely Allies," a
1,400-word article
that ran on the Post -owned Foreign Policy website in May 2014. Four years
later, it stands as a model of how not to write about an all-important political crisis.
Cohen's Conversion
Tyahnybok: 'Moscow-Jewish mafia' is running Ukraine.
The piece begins with the usual hand-wringing about Svoboda and Right Sector and expresses
remorse that the latter still venerates the "controversial" Bandera, whose followers "fought on
the side of the Nazis from 1944 until the end of World War II." (Actually, they welcomed the
Germans from the start and, despite rocky relations with the Slav-hating Nazis, continued to
work with them throughout the occupation.)
But then it gets down to business by asserting that as bad as Ukrainian nationalists may be,
Russia is doubly worse. "Despite the substantial presence of right wing nationalists on the
Maidan during the revolution," it says, "many in Ukraine's Jewish community resent being used
by Putin in his propaganda war." The proof is an open letter signed by 21 Ukrainian Jewish
leaders asserting that the real danger was Moscow.
"We know that the political opposition consists of various groups, including some that are
nationalistic," the letter declared. "But even the most marginal of them do not demonstrate
anti-Semitism or other forms of xenophobia. And we certainly know that our very few
nationalists are well-controlled by civil society and the new Ukrainian government –
which is more than can be said for the Russian neo-Nazis, who are encouraged by your security
services."
This was music to Washington's ears. But if neo-Nazis are free of "anti-Semitism or other
forms of xenophobia," how does one explain the white-power symbols in the Kiev town hall? If
nationalists were "very few" in number, why did journalists need to explain them away? If
Russian security forces really encouraged neo-Nazis, where were the torchlight parades and
portraits of Bandera-like collaborators hanging from public buildings in Moscow?
The article might have noted that Josef Zissels, the Jewish community leader who organized
the letter, is a provocative figure who has long maintained close relations with Ukraine's far
right. A self-styled
Zhydobanderivets – a word that roughly translates as "Kike follower of Bandera"
– he has since infuriated other Jewish leaders by criticizing California Congressman Ro
Khanna for sending a letter to the State Department asking that pressure be brought on the
governments of Poland and Ukraine to combat Holocaust revisionism in their countries.
Forty-one Jewish leaders were so angry, in fact, that they sent out
a letter of their own thanking Khannna for his efforts, expressing "deep concern at the
rise of anti-Semitic incidents and expressions of xenophobia and intolerance, including attacks
on Roma communities," and "strongly proclaim[ing] that Mr. Iosif Zissels and the organization
VAAD do not represent the Jews of Ukraine." A Jewish community leader in Russia was so outraged
by the pro-Bandera apologetics of Zissels and a Ukrainian-Jewish oligarch named Igor Kolomoisky
that he
said he wanted to hang both men "in Dnepropetrovsk in front of the Golden Rose Synagogue
until they stop breathing."
So Foreign Policy used a highly dubious source to whitewash Ukraine's growing
neo-Nazi presence and absolve it of anti-Semitism. As crimes against the truth go, this is
surely one of the worst. But now that the problem has gotten too big for even the corporate
media to ignore, overnight muckrakers like Joshua Cohen are seeing to it that getting away with
such offenses will no longer be so easy. Before his abrupt about-face, the author of that
misleading Foreign Policy piece was Joshua Cohen.
Daniel Lazare is the author ofThe Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is
Paralyzing Democracy(Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American
politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications fromThe NationtoLe Monde Diplomatique, and his articles about the Middle East,
terrorism, Eastern Europe, and other topics appear regularly on such websites asJacobinand The American Conservative .
If you enjoyed this original article please consider
making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
mike k , July 6, 2018 at 4:49 pm
The leaders of Israel who sell weapons to the Nazis in Ukraine, are no better than those
Nazis.
Susan Sunflower , July 6, 2018 at 1:37 pm
for those having Alice In Wonderland whiplash, yes the USA was funding the Ukranian
neonazis Azov Brigade before Congress banned the funding in March 2018.
same old "syrian playbook" wrt to enemy-of-my-memory bull .
rosemerry , July 6, 2018 at 10:12 am
The two-hour documentary "Putin" shows in an interview Pres. Putin explaining his
government's cooperating with the Western- supported Ukrainian government for four years
(because they were neighbors and had many links) which he considered normal behavior.
However, once the 2014 election brought in a more "Moscow-friendly" team to govern Ukraine,
the USA began its plans to overthrow it and we see all the consequences shown in this
article.
The tacit support given by the centre-left to the installation of the regime in Kiev
should give them cause for concern writes Frank.
Politics in the Ukraine can only be understood by reference to its history and ethnic and
cultural make-up – a make-up criss-crossed by lasting and entrenched ethnic, cultural
and political differences. The country has long been split into the northern and western
Ukraine, where Ukrainian is the official and everyday lingua franca, and the more
industrialised regions of the east and south where a mixture of Russian speaking Ukrainians
and ethnic Russians reside. Additionally, there has long been Hungarian and Romanian
settlement in the west of the country, and a particularly important Polish presence, whose
unofficial capital, Lviv, was once the Polish city of Lwow. The Russian Orthodox Church is
the predominant form of Christianity in the East, whilst in the west the Christian tradition
tends towards Roman Catholicism.
Politically the Eastern and Southern Oblasts (Regions) which includes the cities and
centres of heavy industry, Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhe, Nikolayev, Kherson,
Simferopol and Odessa, have tended to tilt towards Russia whilst the western regions have had
a more western orientation. This has traditionally been reflected in the electoral division
of the country. There is no party which can be considered 'national' in this respect, except
ironically, the old Communist party, which of course is now banned. The major regional
parties have been the Fatherland party of Yulia Tymoshenko (since renamed) and the former
head of government, Arseniy Yatsenyuk as well as the ultra-nationalists predominantly in the
west of the country, and the deposed Victor Yanukovich's Party of the Regions in the East
(now defunct) along with its junior partner in the coalition, the Ukrainian Communist
Party.
However, what is new since the coup in February 2014 there has been the emergence from the
shadows of ultra-nationalist (fascist) parties and movements, with both parliamentary and
extra-parliamentary (i.e.,military) wings. In the main 'Svoboda' or Freedom Party, and the
paramilitaries of 'Right Sector' (Fuhrer: Dimitry Yarosh) who spearheaded the coup in Kiev;
these have been joined or changed their names to inter alia the Radical Party, and Patriots
of the Ukraine; this in addition to the punitive right-wing militias, such as the Azov
Regiment responsible for numerous atrocities in the Don Bas.
Suffice it to say, however, that these political movements and parties did not emerge from
nowhere.
This far-right tradition has been historically very strong in the western Ukraine. The
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was first established in 1929 and brought
together, war veterans, student fraternities, far-right groups and various other disoriented
socially and political flotsam and jetsam under its banner. The OUN took its ideological
position from the writings of one, Dymtro Dontsov, who, like Mussolini had been a socialist,
and who was instrumental in creating an indigenous Ukrainian fascism based upon the usual
mish-mash of writings and theories including Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, and Charles
Maurras. Dontsov also translated the works of Hitler and Mussolini into Ukrainian.
The OUN was committed to ethnic purity, and relied on violence, assassination and
terrorism, not least against other Ukrainians, to achieve its goal of a totalitarian and
homogeneous nation-state. Assorted enemies and impediments to this goal were Communists,
Russians, Poles, and of course – Jews. Strongly oriented toward the Axis powers OUN
founder Evhen Konovalets (1891-1938) stated that his movement was ''waging war against mixed
marriages'', with Poles, Russians and Jews, the latter which he described as ''foes of our
national rebirth''. Indeed, rabid anti-Semitism has been a leitmotif in the history of
Ukrainian fascism, which we will return to below.
Konovelts himself was assassinated by a KGB hit-man in 1938 after which the movement split
into two wings: (OUN-m) under Andrii Melnyk and, more importantly for our purposes (OUN-b)
under Stepan Bandera. Both wings committed to a new fascist Europe. Upon the German invasion
in June 1941, the OUN-b attempted to establish a Ukrainian satellite state loyal to Nazi
Germany. Stepan Lenkavs'kyi the then chief propagandist of the OUN-b 'government' advocated
the physical destruction of Ukrainian Jewry. OUN-b's 'Prime Minister' Yaroslav Stets'ko, and
deputy to Bandera supported, ''the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing
German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the
like.''
During the early days of the rapid German advance into the Soviet Union there were some
140 pogroms in the western Ukraine claiming the lives of between 13000-35000 people
(Untermensch, in fascist terminology). In 1943-1944 OUN-b and its armed wing the Ukrainian
Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armia – UPA) carried out large scale ethnic
cleansing resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands; this was a particularly gruesome
affair in Volhynia where some 90000 Poles and thousands of Jews were murdered. The campaign
of the UPA continued well into the 1950s until it was virtually wiped out by the Soviet
forces.
It should be said that during this early period Bandera himself had been incarcerated by
the German authorities up until his release in 1944, since unlike Bandera they were not
enamoured of an independent Ukrainian state but wanted total control. Bandera was only
released at this late date since the German high command was endeavouring to build up a
pro-German Ukrainian quisling military force to hold up the remorseless advance of the Red
Army. Also pursuant to this it is also worth noting that during this period the 14th Galizian
Waffen SS Division, a military Ukrainian collaborationist formation established by Heinrich
Himmler, was formed to fight the Soviet forces, and yet another being the Nachtingal brigade;
(1) this unit was integrated into the 14th Galizian in due course. It is also interesting to
note, that every year, and up to 2014 commemoration ceremony including veterans of this unit
takes place with a march through Lviv in an evening torchlight parade – genuine Nazi
pastiche. The flag of this unit is not dissimilar to the Peugeot logo, the standing lion, and
can be seen at ultra-nationalist rallies as well as football matches involving Lviv Karparti
FC. There are also numerous statues of Bandera across Ukraine, and since the 2014 coup even
street names bearing the same name. Significantly the UPA have now received political
rehabilitation from the Kiev Junta, with Bandera declared a hero of the Ukraine and the UPA
rebranded as 'freedom fighters.' One particularly splendid statue of Bandera stands proudly
in Lviv and is usually adorned with flowers.
Other novel attractions the capital of Banderestan include 'Jewish themed restaurants' one
such is Kryivka (Hideout or Lurking Hole) where guests have a choice of dishes and whose
dinning walls are decorated with larger than life portraits of Bandera, the toilet with
Russian and Jewish anecdotes. At another Jewish themed restaurant guests are offered black
hats of the sort worn by Hasidim. The menu lists no prices for the dishes; instead, one is
required to haggle over highly inflated prices ''in the Jewish fashion''. Yes, it's all good
clean fun in Lviv. Anti-Semitism also sells. Out of 19 book vendors on the streets of central
Lviv, 16 were openly selling anti-Semitic literature. About 70% of the anti-Semitic
publications in Ukraine are being published by and educational institution called MUAP (The
Inter-Regional Academy of Personnel Management). MAUP is a large, well-connected and
increasingly powerful organization funded from outside anti-Semite sources, and also
connected to White Supremacist groups in the USA and to the David Duke, former Grand Wizard
of the Ku Klux Klan.
(It is one of the ironies of history that if the Zionists in AIPAC and the Washington
neo-con think tanks, and the Labour Party Friends of Israel, were so concerned about
anti-Semitism, they might try looking for it in Lviv. They wouldn't have to search very
far.)
Present day neo-Nazi groupings in Ukraine – Svoboda (Freedom) party and Right Sector
– have been the direct descendants from the prior ideological cesspool. Heading Svoboda
is Oleh Tyahnybok. Although these are separate organizations Tyahnybok's deputy Yuriy
Mykhalchyshyn is the main link between Svoboda's official wing and neo-Nazi militias like
Right Sector. The Social-Nationalist party as it was formerly known chose as its logo an
amended version of the Wolfsangel, a symbol used by many SS divisions on the Eastern front
during the war who in 2004 a celebration of the OUN-UPA, stated in 2004, that ''they fought
against the Muscovite, Germans, Jews and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian
state.'' And further that ''Ukraine was ruled by a Muscovite-Jewish mafia.'' Tyahnybok came
under pressure from the then President, Yuschenko, to retract his inflammatory statements,
which he did, but he then retracted the retraction!
Given the fact that Svoboda was, apart from its stamping grounds in the west, making
little national electoral headway, it was essential to clean up its image and deny its Nazi
past. But this was always going to be difficult since the members of such groups cannot help
the unscripted outbursts and faux pas which they tend to make and which reveals their true
colours. For example, following the conviction and sentencing of John Demjanjuk to five years
in jail for his role as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people at the Sobibor death
camp, Tyahnybok travelled to Germany and met up with Demjanjuk's lawyer, presenting the death
camp guard as a hero, a victim of persecution ''who is fighting for truth''.
And so it goes on. We can therefore infer that this organization is inveterate fascist. More
disturbing Svoboda has links with the so-called Alliance of National European Movements,
which includes: Nationaldemokraterna of Sweden, Front Nationale of France, Fiamma Tricolore
in Italy, the Hungarian Jobbik and the Belgian National Front. More importantly Svoboda held
several ministerial portfolios in the Kiev administration, and Right Sector swaggers around
Kiev streets with impunity, and/or are being drafted into a National Guard to deal with the
separatist movements in the east, or to beat down anyone who doesn't conform to their Ayran
racial and political ideals.
One would have thought that this mutating revolution in the Ukraine would have drawn
attention of the centre-left to the fact that fascism had gained a vital beachhead in Europe,
and that the danger signals should be flashing. But not a bit of it; a perusal of the
Guardian newspaper quickly reveals that their chief concern has been with a non-existent
'Russian threat'. One of their reporters – or old friend, Luke Harding -described Right
Sector as an ''eccentric group of people with unpleasant right-wing views.'' Priceless! This
must rank as the political understatement of the century. In fact, the Guardian was simply
reiterating the US-imposed neo-conservative foreign policy. But naturally, this is par for
the course.
(1) The Nachtingal brigade, which was later incorporated into the SS Galizien, took part
in a three-day massacre of the Jewish population of Lvov (now Lviv) from 30 June 1941. Roman
Shukhevych was the commander of the Nachtingal and later, in 1943, became commander of the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the "Banderivtsy", or UPA/UIA[5] ), armed henchmen of the fascist
Stepan Bandera, who after the war pretended that they had fought both Nazis and Communists.
Members of the division are also accused of having murdered some 800 residents of the Polish
village of Huta Pieniacka and 44 civilians in the village of Ch?aniów.
Paolo , July 6, 2018 at 7:11 am
Just for the record: the Ukrainians hailed the Nazis as liberators after the Soviets had
let millions of Ukrainians die of hunger in the thirties, a sort of "genocide" that goes
under the name of Holodomor and has officially been recognized by western Parlaments only a
few decades ago. In eastern Ukraine there were no more inhabitants after the Holodomor, and
the Russians imported hundreds of thousand peasants from Russia to get agriculture working
again.
The problems of Ukraine are so deep that fomenting regime change there was a most idiotic
thing to do. Sooner or later the problems will explode, and it will be tough shit. Whoever
helped this regime change should be locked up in some high security jail as far as
possible.
Garrett Connelly , July 6, 2018 at 9:52 am
The big lie is 180° opposite of reality repeated over and over using free corporate
propaganda.
vinnieoh , July 5, 2018 at 3:15 pm
Still scratching my head at the electric last line of Mr. Lazare's piece. I'm mean, I'm
used to "official" organs like WaPo and NYT publishing whatever narrative is most helpful to
whatever pieces are being moved on the chessboard, but for the same "freelance journalist" to
have written both the earlier Foreign Policy piece and the recent WaPo piece is a puzzle to
me.
Does Joshua Cohen just write stuff that goes with the flow (at any particular moment) and
has a good chance of being published (and consequently of himself being paid)?
Or did this
person really have an epiphany, and the scales fell from his eyes? I suspect a third
explanation though what that may be eludes me. One thing is for sure, as a Trump/Putin
meeting gets closer, expect more false "official" narratives concerning both Ukraine and
Syria.
'The U.S.-backed "Euromaidan" uprising not only drove out former president Viktor
Yanukovych in February 2014, who had won an OSCE-certified election, but tore the country in
two, precisely because ultra-rightists like C14 were in the lead But if one had to choose the
looniest story of all, one that best reflects the abject toadyism of the reporting classes,
it would have to be "Why Jews and Ukrainians Have Become Unlikely Allies," a 1,400-word
article that ran on the Post-owned Foreign Policy website in May 2014.'
Here's the thing though: however weird it may sound, there actually DOES seem to exist
some sort of tacit alliance between (some, not all) Jews and Ukrainian Nazis. Even if their
ultimate goals are completely at odds–the Nazis hate the EU, but the Jews mostly want
to join it–they nearly always seem to work together against Russia. It has even been
maintained that the Azov Battalion (one of the all-volunteer Neo-Nazi militias fighting
against the Donbass rebels) was entirely financed for a time by Jewish oligarch Ihor
Kholomoisky, at least until he did something to piss Poroshenko off and got sacked from his
post as governor of Dniepropetrovsk. And in the beginning, Jews who tried to point out that
Neo-Nazi groups were involved in overthrowing Yanukovych, like Dr. Stephen Cohen, were
roundly denounced a 'Russia apologists' just for stating facts.
But now that Washington's whole Ukraine project has gone south, I guess the Nazis, having
outlived their usefulness, are, as usual, to be the fall-guys and take all the blame.
Anna , July 5, 2018 at 2:39 pm
yeh, the Kaganat of Nuland has many veils.
The most stunning aspect of the banderite putsch in Kiev was the dead silence of nazi-hunters
from Wiesenthal Center, the always oh-so-sensitive ADL, the main 52 (fifty-two!) American
Jewish organizations, and the overall docility and compliance of the "righteous" Israel with
the banderite-neo-Nazi ideology by Kagans-selected power structures in Ukraine.
Mr. Kolomojsky, a financier of neo-nazi battalion Azov, is still an Israeli citizen.
Mrs. Nuland-Kagan, the main machinator of the regime change in Kiev, has not been ostracized
by the Jewish Community at large.
The deeply amoral and bloodthirsty Carl Gerschman from NED, who has been the main cheerleader
for the putsch and for the installing the banderite-friendly government in Kiev, has not been
ostracized by the Jewish Community at large either. What a stench!
https://medium.com/@gmochannel/us-staged-a-coup-in-ukraine-brief-history-and-facts-898c6d0007d6
Pft , July 5, 2018 at 9:07 pm
Yeah. The prime minister and many of the top oligarchs are Jewish. Relations between
Ukraine and Israel seem quite good despite the UNSC vote that the US abstained on regarding
Israeli settlements in the West Bank, perhaps reminded by Stalin doing the same to them in
the 1920's.
As for relations with the neo nazis I remember before WWII that Zionists in Palestine
cooperated with Nazis who sent German Jews to Palestine in return for the purchase of German
goods which were being boycotted by Jews in the west
I suspect most Americans don't know Ukrainian history. The early years of Bolshevik rule
were quite brutal and over 10 million rural Christians lost their lives in Ukraine over their
policies .Solzhenitsyn 200 years can shed some light on the roots of the anti-Semitism among
the peasants that developed in the 20's-30's and no doubt has been passed on.
Robert , July 6, 2018 at 4:24 pm
I've thought about this myself and have concluded that a fair number of Jewish
organizations and institutions in the Ukraine were receiving a small portion of the US State
Department funding allocated to the Ukraine each year of $200-250 million, totaling $5
billion since 1992. In return for this rather small (by US standards) outlay to a broad
spectrum of NGOs, private educational and religious institutions, and political groups, the
US purchased an enormous amount of influence. Most of the members of these groups were
unaware of this US support, as the funds were funneled through individual leaders who were
tasked to influence opinion, organize demonstrations and petitions, and write letters to the
press and government members. Scholarships to the US and Canada were offered to promising
youth to ensure continuity of support. For this reason, most Jewish and other groups
operating in Ukraine have, until recently and only with reluctance, been willing to deviate
from the official US "story". Thus, they knowingly (at least as far as their leadership was
concerned) supported an overtly US-led neo-Nazi coup.
mike , July 5, 2018 at 1:24 pm
Makes sense that Josh Cohen is a former U.S. Agency for International Development project
officer involved in managing economic reform projects in the former Soviet Union. Isn't that
really what this is all about? Putin gets elected and takes charge of the economy, jailing
corrupt oligarchs and putting the kibosh on said reform projects sponsored by us in care of
Jeffrey Sachs et al. As Russia tries to reassert its sovereignty the US gets miffed and
retaliates.
The Electronic Intifada has just posted an article by Asa Winstanley detailing how Israel,
among others, has been supplying the Ukrainian Azov Battalion with military arms. It's well
worth reading.
The next time you hear a pro-Israel mouthpiece sounding off about purported antisemitism
in the British Labour Party, or in pro-Palestinine activist circles in the U.S., invite them
to consider Israel's policy -- and that of the U.S. as well as friendly European states -- of
direct military sponsorship of textbook Nazism in Ukraine. Jews are being menaced and beaten
in the streets of Kiev by armed bands who celebrate their historical persecution, while thugs
like Avigdor Lieberman sit cordially with officials representing that regime. But then, such
warm relations between Zionists and anti-Semites is an old story.
Jeff Harrison , July 5, 2018 at 1:03 pm
Interesting. Anyone with two brains to rub together knows that the US, to the best of it's
ability, has been surrounding Russia with compliant right wing governments, usually
dictators, but we've gotten better at manipulating elections to get reliable puppet
government. The bad news is that it is a full time job to stay on top of that.
It used to be that the only things one could depend on were "death & taxes." Now of
course we must add to that list the very dependable presence of CIA / State Dept lies
parroted by MSM all over the West. Lies which are endlessly repeated in defiance of all
physical reality and often in direct opposition to actual events in the actual world we live
in. From the Ukraine coup, to Russia-gate, to the "Assad's gassing his own people" regime
change propaganda, to the totally surreal Alice in Wonderland Skripnal poisoning nonsense in
the U.K, the Western MSM have been as dependable as the rising sun. They can and do provide
fact-free, evidence-free reporting directly from the bowels of the deep state in support of
the neocolonial West, including unending support for the never ending resort to mass violence
the West relies upon to keep the rest of the planet subjugated – just as it has for the
last 500+ years.
irina , July 5, 2018 at 2:06 pm
It's not just the media. The late night talk show hosts are doing their bit too, as I
heard
last night on a Jimmy Kimmel rerun (of a recent show). Can't remember the context as
I was doing the dishes, but did hear him say the usual "Russian illegally annexed Crimea"
standard phrase, immediately followed by "and then invaded Ukraine". The latter just
casually tossed off as a given. People hear these memes constantly repeated and,
regardless of their veracity (suspect to say the least) it becomes part of their
worldview.
Who is behind the political preaching of hosts like Jimmy Kimmel ?
Inquiring minds want to know !
Joe Tedesky , July 5, 2018 at 2:43 pm
You know what irina, seeing these late night talk shows go all crazy over Putin makes me
think of the Zio-Media executives, and where their allegiance to power resides. Joe
Devil's Advocate , July 5, 2018 at 2:48 pm
I would assume you'd have to look at who owns the media source in question. Kimmel's show
is on ABC, which is partly owned by Disney. Follow the money chain of those 2 parent
companies, and you have your answer.
irina – I quite agree. The same is true of the former Daily Show crew members who
now have their own shows. Several have shown themselves to be quite the little imperialist
war mongers when it comes to gleefully repeating the CIA sponsored Syrian regime change and
Russiagate propaganda. Samantha Bee & John Oliver kept triggering my gag reflex with
their propaganda lines until I found a simple but effective solution and stopped watching
them altogether. We have an amazingly seamless propaganda system here in the U.S. One can
chose to either get one's "pro-war regime change propaganda" delivered with barely concealed
racism and misogyny from Fox News, or instead opt for hearing the same nonsense delivered
with pretentious blather and catchy jazz interludes at PBS. American democracy is all about
having "choices."
Jeff Harrison , July 5, 2018 at 7:57 pm
I quite agree. I knew the minute that they started calling RT a propaganda outlet that, in
fact, the USG was running a full scale propaganda operation. I don't know if I simply wasn't
paying enough attention or if they have, in fact ramped the operation up, but I can hardly
read any MSM outlet's output without calling bullshit on it.
irina , July 6, 2018 at 2:55 am
Jimmy Kimmel actually used to be funny and there is a really good clip
(somewhere on youtube no doubt) of him reading a 'doctored' Dr. Seuss
book to The Donald (a live guest) during his primary candidacy.
But since The Donald's election Kimmel has opened almost every show
with 'ten minutes hate' segment on The Donald. I still watch (or at least
listen) occasionally because I want to know what is being fed to The Public.
You are absolutely right though, "we have an amazingly seamless propaganda
system here in the US". The average person maybe has 30 minutes to
devote to the news, between getting home and having dinner; they watch
some sort of news show and think they are 'informed'. But it actually takes
MANY hours and a knowledge of alternative websites to even begin to piece
together an approximation of what might, in reality, be going on.
The Russians used to say that, at least they knew they were being propagandized.
Unfortunately, probably due to 'American Exceptionalism', most Americans think
the MSM is bringing them 'the truth'. But nothing could be further from The Truth.
Peter H , July 6, 2018 at 10:41 am
I can't count the number of times I've had to turn off Colbert's Late Show for his
Russian/Putin bashing BS. So disappointing. That's a rule in my house now. The first mention
of Russia and off it goes.
Drew Hunkins , July 5, 2018 at 12:52 pm
Likewise, the corporate militarist-Zio media should eventually have to concede someday
that the current Syrian "rebels" are little more than ruthless sociopathic
Saudi-Zio-Washington intel agency supported mercenary terrorists.
Folks in the know knew very early on that much of the Kiev putschists and violent invaders
of Eastern Ukraine were neo-Nazi types bent on eradicating the last vestiges of Russian
social and ethnic solidarity.
It's really truly remarkable when one steps back to think about it all. These are the
depraved groups the crypto-fascists, the Wall Street militarist imperialists, and Zionists
have embedded themselves with: bloodthirsty Takfiri mercenary terrorists and neo-Nazis.
Bob Van Noy , July 5, 2018 at 2:25 pm
Each time I see an article like this I'm reminded of the videos of Zbigniew Brzezinski's
early meetings with the Mujahideen and his manipulation of cultures on The Grand Chessboard
or "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" a totally absurd assumption and the natural outcome
of that absurdity, is blowback which this article again addresses. Our "boots on the ground"
end up paying the price of this kind of supposed intellectualism. Shameful. Thank you Drew
Hunkins.
Joe Tedesky , July 5, 2018 at 2:39 pm
Bob the old saying if I got right is the company you keep is what you become. We have
truly loss our way, and Zbigniew Brzezinski is one of the biggest reasons we have become the
predators of this dying green earth. All this for the profit, as all mankind must yield to
the power of the dollar. Sad. Joe
MBeaver , July 6, 2018 at 5:03 am
One would think we had learned from Vietnam. Instead the "peace loving" liberals do
everything to destabilize whole region for nothing and then send soldiers in who die for
their messed up agenda.
JWalters , July 5, 2018 at 7:16 pm
It is truly remarkable. A lot of the behind-the-scenes magic is explained in "War
Profiteers and Israel's Bank" http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com
.
Sergey Krueger is wrong about questioning of gender roles. That comes from the necessity to
to have an identity wedge during neoliberal period of the USA society.
Well, you put it yourself. Liberalism as is it was during the Enlightenment was
questioning all dogmas and everything that is considered normal here we have a double aged
sword. When and what you stop questioning and reasoning about logic of certain things.
Logically they started with kings and after all things were questioned they came now to
roles of males and females, sex, gender and god forbids where this can takes us.
There are certain things that cannot be questioned for society to have a back bone. A
moral and cultural one. Otherwise things turn the way they are now. There is nothing sacred
and everything can be questioned and reasoned about.
If we assume that this is true: "Beyond that, the Ukrainians had no realistic option to defend Crimea. Their military was in extremely
poor shape by the time 2014 rolled around thanks to more than two decades of neglect, monumental corruption and even more monumental
incompetence by Ukrainian politicians and military leaders, while the Russians had well prepared contingency plans and had already begun
far reaching military reforms as a result of their experiences in Chechnya and Georgia."
Then Ukrainian armed forces should drastically improve after several years of fighting.
Notable quotes:
"... The fact that the US leadership didn't even stop to consider how the Russians might react shows just how arrogant, hubristic and incompetent Obama and his national security team really were. ..."
"... Caveat emptor. Karber is a flamboyant blowhard. This is not to dismiss Russia's invasion or or act of war in Ukraine but merely to state that this guy is essentially a Tom Clancy cut out. I like a lot of his slides (I wonder who made them?) and his valuable tactical observations (even if it does sound, at times, like a shopping list for Ukrainian military aid) but he is no SME. https://foreignpolicy.com/2... ..."
If the Obama administration ordered Ukraine not to fight for Crimea on the assumption they could force Russia to give
it back via sanctions, they miscalculated badly.
The Russians believe Crimea rightfully belongs to them and they saw control of it as vital to their national security. There
were some serious shenanigans going on in Kiev, which the Russians interpreted as an American engineered coup. The Russians reacted
to what they believed was a major threat to their national security. The fact that the US leadership didn't even stop to consider
how the Russians might react shows just how arrogant, hubristic and incompetent Obama and his national security team really were.
There is no way the Russians will ever give up Crimea, especially under pressure from the US, NATO and the EU. No Russian politician
could do that and hope to survive. Besides, the Russians have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to endure suffering and hardships
much greater than the capacity of Western nations to endure and the sanctions showed that Russia was far less vulnerable to pressure
than Western politicians assumed.
Beyond that, the Ukrainians had no realistic option to defend Crimea. Their military was in extremely poor shape by the time
2014 rolled around thanks to more than two decades of neglect, monumental corruption and even more monumental incompetence by
Ukrainian politicians and military leaders, while the Russians had well prepared contingency plans and had already begun far reaching
military reforms as a result of their experiences in Chechnya and Georgia.
SurfaceBook •
4 hours ago I disagree with mr kerber's assesment on Crimean ops being the largest air assault in history. Operation Market
Garden in WW2 was the largest Air assault involving divisions of paratroopers from US/UK/Poland into german occupied drop zones
(in conjuction with a land assault forcing it's way to Arnhem).
One other curiousity , Washington 'ordered' Ukraine ? a sovereign nation under orders ? just who is in charge of ukraine at
that time ? see more
To answer your question: Victoria Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasian Affairs during the Obama administration.
In other words, she was the American proconsul for Eastern Europe.
Bottom line? "The Fog of War".........All these scenarios mean nothing after the first "shot" is fired. If any US "enemy" cannot
crush US air power they are finished from the gitgo. Not a fan of our foreign policies but we can "crush" the enemy; we just can't
"rule" them.
Would really like to hear the other side. Where does he get his information from? The Ukrainians? All this Russia-is-evil-and-scheming-to-do-more-evil
is ... slightly over the top. I don't say it's impossible that Russian regular troops have been involved in Donbas but he makes
it sound like Unternehmen Zitadelle
IMHO, beware taking too many lessons away from this conflict. The Ukranian's don't have anything close to the SEAD/DEAD/EW/airpower
capability of the US. What worked against their aviation won't necessarily work against ours. Once mid-high altitude air defenses
are down, enemy jammers will have a short lifespan.
His comments that even light infantry should have the means to get away when under attack, and sufficient armor to counter
attack point to the inadequacies of Army IBCTs (Infantry, not "Interim").
IMHO, IBCTs should have 100% vehicular mobility, and have the option of attaching an independent tank battalion. Cobbling together
random HMMWVs from div/corps just seems silly. Make vehicles part of the core TOE.
see more
You are assuming that we are working within our own timeline. Yes with enough time and blood, we can peal back their defense
network with airpower. The question is, who buys us that time?
Russians (and the Chinese) ground forces trained to fight in contested airspace. The US Army assumes we have it.
Sol, Thanks for posting the link and asking for discussion. One thing that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up
is how much of this is being shared with the PLA and worse the DPRK? They are pretty smart and probility can figure lots of this
out on their own. Is there any PLA observers up front with the RuFA or exchanging TTPs in an AAR? Or professional papers and presentations
at staff school level or higher? I am just a grunt and red leg, but how does the EW and fires part impact the navy? A step is
being taken:
http://soldiersystems.net/2... I wonder when this is part of OPFOR at NTC or 29 Palms?
see more
NO! thank you for sharing !!!!! this is like getting a seat at the Army War College and getting to hear what is never shared
with the troops or the public.
to be honest what i heard in that video was downright shocking. i won't say scary cause i won't be facing that shit but if
i was i'd be beyond concerned.
to answer your question you can bet your last dollar that the Chinese are getting briefings on this. you can bet that they're
not only studying the above vid but getting info from the subject matter experts in Russia.
this guy is senior but i would so love to hear an assessment of Marine Corps chances if war were to break out in Norway or
surrounding countries (we still have the flank). how would a Marine Expeditionary Brigade standup to those type tactics. we're
talking about a lighter formation than the US Army equivalent but with integrated air.
oh and a side note. as much as i think the US Army and Marine Corps would be in a hurtlocker can you imagine what would happen
to any of our European allies if they were somehow isolated and attacked?
my only regret about this whole thing is that i wanted to sit back and drink in serious conversation about this video. instead
i'm getting the usual trolling. i can tolerate that on the majority of subjects i cover here but this one is different. i wanted
to hear from serious individuals doing serious thinking about what the Dr presented.
such is life. if you run across anything else PLEASE send it. i find this fascinating!
he slide at 12.44 is also interesting it shows Russia's "desire" for "friendly relations" with the west and its neighbours.
But i guess like in the cold war there is no shortage of naives that think that Russia understands anything else but sanctions
or force. see more
Caveat emptor. Karber is a flamboyant blowhard. This is not to dismiss Russia's invasion or or act of war in Ukraine but merely
to state that this guy is essentially a Tom Clancy cut out. I like a lot of his slides (I wonder who made them?) and his valuable
tactical observations (even if it does sound, at times, like a shopping list for Ukrainian military aid) but he is no SME.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2...
My conclusions -- Western/ US allies/Nato armies will need to have:
- integrated air defence at every level from platoon to regimental.(manpads, spaag,
- mass fire/steel rain capabilities cheap and heavy MLRS also MLRS launched antiradiation missiles)
the israelis launched AGM Shrikes with boosters from trucks to target Syrian Radars
- Field Army EW sigint/elint/jamming/defense capabilities
- EW munitions (currently russia has tube artillery launched jammers don't know about the US or NATO)
- Small and light SPGs like the Gvozdika
Whilst I agree Russia does tend to export it's kit extensively. Also some of the potential uses such as GPS jamming drones, could
be more than merely inconvenient on very small budgets.
Yes neoliberalism is deeply predatory. Still is survives as a social system for let's say 40 years (1987-2017) and probably will
survive another 20-30 years. And what is coming might be worse. If Trump signify turn to "national neoliberalism" the next
step from it might some kind of neofascism.
Notable quotes:
"... But financialization didn't just have a direct cost -- no value being created, just men in shiny suits betting pebbles on who'd blink first. It also had an opportunity cost. As finance grew to be a larger and larger share of the economy, so the wind got sucked out of the sails of the "real economy", as American economists put it, which simply means people doing the work that actually does create value -- teachers, nurses, engineers, artisans, bakers, small-town factories, and so on. Think about it simply: the more money that was burned up in speculating, the less that was available for making things of genuine value. So the incomes of all these people -- those in the "real economy" -- began to stagnate. New schools and hospitals and energy grids and so on weren't built -- all the money was going towards speculating on the backs the old ones, sometimes, often, on their failures. A black hole was growing at the heart of the economy -- but according to pundits, it was the sun itself. Everything was upside down. The bets were indeed about to all go south at once -- only no one knew understood how or why yet. ..."
"... The third force in the rise of predatory capitalism was the implosion of the institution formerly known as the job. Now, just before peak financialization, beginning in the 1990s, many jobs were "offshored." That's a polite way to say that the speculators above discovered that companies were more profitable when they evaded as much of human civilization as possible. Find a country with no labour laws, no protections, no standards, no rule of law at all, in fact -- and send jobs there. That way, you wouldn't have to pay for pensions, healthcare, childcare, insurance, and so on. Cost savings! Efficiency! Synergies, even -- you could make everything in that one sweatshop. ..."
"... We're used to thinking that offshoring "took" jobs in rich countries. But the truth is subtler -- and more ruinous. They blew apart the idea of a job as we used to know it. As jobs went to countries without good governance, decent labour laws, a boomerang effect happened. ..."
"... Managers began stripping away benefits of every kind, from childcare, to vacations, to healthcare. Until, at last, in a final triumph, the "at-will job" and the "zero-hours contract" were created -- social contracts that were only "jobs" in name, but offered less than no stability, security, mobility, or opportunity. People who didn't have benefits could now be fired on a whim -- and so now they bore all the risk. But the risk of what, precisely? ..."
"... Remember those speculators? Taking huge risks, betting billions with each other, on exactly nothing of real value? Risk had come full circle. Now it was the average person in the real economy who bore all the risks of these bets going bad. If the bets with south, who'd take the hit? All those people with zero benefits, no protection, no safety ..."
"... So in had to step governments. They bailed out the banks -- but didn't "restructure" them, which is to say, fire their managers, wash out their shareholders, and sell off the bad loans and bets. They just threw money at them ..."
"... What does a bankrupt have to do? Liquidate. So governments began to slash investment in social systems of all kinds. Healthcare systems, pension systems, insurance systems, media and energy systems. This was the fourth step in the birth of predatory capitalism: austerity. ..."
"... The only thing keeping the real economy going at this point was investment by the government -- after all, the speculators were speculating, not investing for the long run. It was governments that were effectively keeping economies afloat, by providing a floor for income, by anchoring economies with a vast pool of stable, safe, real, secure jobs, and investing dollars back in societies short of them. And yet, at the precise moment that governments needed to create more of precisely that, they did just the opposite. ..."
"... It's the once prosperous but now imploded middle which turns on the classes, ethnicities, groups, below it. The people who expected and felt entitled to lives of safety and security and stability -- who anticipated being at the top of a tidy little hierarchy, the boss of this or that, the chieftain of that or this, but now find themselves adrift and unmoored in a collapsing society, powerless. ..."
"... Predatory capitalism imploding into strange, new forms of old diseases of the body politic ..."
How did we get here? To a world where the forces of intolerance and indecency are on the rise, and those of decency, wisdom, and
civilization are waning? Is something like a new Dark Age falling?
I think it has everything to do with predatory capitalism, and so I want to tell you a story. Of how it came to be born, in four
steps, which span three decades.
During the 2000s, the economy of the rich world underwent something like a phase transition. It became "financialized", as the
jargon goes -- which simply means that finance came to make up a greater and greater share of the economy. Hedge funds and investment
banks and shady financial vehicles of all kinds went from a modest portion of the economy, to making up a huge chunk of it -- around
half, in some countries.
Now, what was "financialization" for? What were all these bankers, hedge fund managers, investors, and so on, doing? The answer
is: nothing. Nothing of value, anyways. They were simply placing bets with each other. Bets on bets on bets, meta-bets. Economists,
who have something like an inferiority complex, envious of swashbuckling bankers, bought their marketing pitch hog, line, and sinker:
"we're going to reduce risk! Everyone will benefit!" But no such thing was happening -- and anyone could see it. Risk was being
massively amplified, in fact, because every time a speculator made a billion dollar bet with another, they were both betting with
the same pool of money, essentially. Whose money? It wasn't theirs -- it was everyone's. Pensions, savings, bank accounts, earnings,
retirement funds. All that being bet on bets on bets on bets which amounted to nothing. But what if all the bets went south at once?
First, I want you to really understand that what was happening was a zero-sum game, where one had to lose for another to win.
Imagine there are three of us, in a little stone age tribe, with a hundred pebbles each. We spend all day every day finding new ways
to lend pebbles to each other, to bet them on who'll blink first, or even bets on those bets, and so on. In our little economy, does
anyone ever end up better off? Does anyone, for example, discover antibiotics, or even invent the wheel? Nope. We're just fools,
who'll never accomplish, learn, or create anything, sitting around playing a zero-sum game, in which no real value is ever created.
The pebbles never become anything more valuable, like, for example, books, symphonies, knowledge, or medicine. All that is exactly
what was happening during the phase of financialization.
But financialization didn't just have a direct cost -- no value being created, just men in shiny suits betting pebbles on who'd
blink first. It also had an opportunity cost. As finance grew to be a larger and larger share of the economy, so the wind got sucked
out of the sails of the "real economy", as American economists put it, which simply means people doing the work that actually does
create value -- teachers, nurses, engineers, artisans, bakers, small-town factories, and so on. Think about it simply: the more
money that was burned up in speculating, the less that was available for making things of genuine value. So the incomes of all these
people -- those in the "real economy" -- began to stagnate. New schools and hospitals and energy grids and so on weren't built
-- all the money was going towards speculating on the backs the old ones, sometimes, often, on their failures. A black hole was
growing at the heart of the economy -- but according to pundits, it was the sun itself. Everything was upside down. The bets were
indeed about to all go south at once -- only no one knew understood how or why yet.
How was the real economy to survive, then? Another hidden effect of financialization was super-concentration -- the second force
in the rise of predatory capitalism. Mom-and-pop capitalism is a healthy and beautiful thing, an economy of a million little shops,
bakeries, artisans -- but it takes only a modest attachment to a profit motive. But thanks to the rise of massive, global speculation,
only aggressive quarterly profit-maximization was allowed. CEO earnings were hitched to share prices, and your share price only went
up if your earnings did, relentlessly, illogicaly, crazily, every single quarter, instead of stabilizing at a happy, gentle amount
-- and so the only way left, in the end, to achieve it, was to build titanic monopolies, which could squeeze people for every dime.
Once the economy had Macy's, JC Penney, K-Mart, Toys-R-Us and Sears. Now it has Walmart. The story was repeated across every single
industry. Amazon, Google, Apple. A new age of monopoly arose.
But monopolies had an effect, too. The third force in the rise of predatory capitalism was the implosion of the institution formerly
known as the job. Now, just before peak financialization, beginning in the 1990s, many jobs were "offshored." That's a polite way
to say that the speculators above discovered that companies were more profitable when they evaded as much of human civilization as
possible. Find a country with no labour laws, no protections, no standards, no rule of law at all, in fact -- and send jobs there.
That way, you wouldn't have to pay for pensions, healthcare, childcare, insurance, and so on. Cost savings! Efficiency! Synergies,
even -- you could make everything in that one sweatshop.
We're used to thinking that offshoring "took" jobs in rich countries. But the truth is subtler -- and more ruinous. They blew
apart the idea of a job as we used to know it. As jobs went to countries without good governance, decent labour laws, a boomerang
effect happened. The machine discovered that it could do in rich countries what it had done in poor ones -- and so it began stripping
away everything that made a job "a job." Because the economy was increasingly composed of monopolies, giant companies, banks, and
investors had the power to do so with impunity. Speculators began raiding pension funds. Managers began stripping away benefits of
every kind, from childcare, to vacations, to healthcare. Until, at last, in a final triumph, the "at-will job" and the "zero-hours
contract" were created -- social contracts that were only "jobs" in name, but offered less than no stability, security, mobility,
or opportunity. People who didn't have benefits could now be fired on a whim -- and so now they bore all the risk. But the risk
of what, precisely?
Remember those speculators? Taking huge risks, betting billions with each other, on exactly nothing of real value? Risk had come
full circle. Now it was the average person in the real economy who bore all the risks of these bets going bad. If the bets with south,
who'd take the hit? All those people with zero benefits, no protection, no safety, all those people for whom "a job" now meant something
more like "a temporary soul-crushing way to avoid destitution." They're the ones who'd be fired, instantly, lose what little savings
they had, have their already dwindling incomes slashed, be ruined.
And then the bets went bad. As bets tend to do, when you make too many of them, on foolish things. What had the speculators been
betting with each other on? As it turns out, largely on property prices. But people without the stable jobs that had kept such a
huge property bubble going didn't have growing incomes anymore. Property prices couldn't keep rising. Bang! The financial system
fell like a row of dominoes. It turned out that everyone had bet property prices would go on rising -- and on the other side of
that bet was everyone else. All of them had been betting on the same thing -- "we all bet prices will keep rising forever!" The
losses were so vast, and so widespread, that the whole global financial system buckled. The banks didn't have the money to pay each
other for these foolish bets -- how could they have? Each one had bet the whole house on the same thing, and they all would have
gone bankrupt to each other. LOL -- do you see the fatal stupidity of it all yet?
So in had to step governments. They bailed out the banks -- but didn't "restructure" them, which is to say, fire their managers,
wash out their shareholders, and sell off the bad loans and bets. They just threw money at them -- and took those bad bets onto
the nation's books, instead. It was the most foolish decision since the Great Depression. Why?
Well, now governments had trillions in -- pow! -- sudden debt. What were they to do? How would they pay it off? Now, you might
think that Presidents are very intelligent people, but unfortunately, they are just politicians. And so instead of doing what they
should have done -- printing money, simply cancelling each others' debts to each other, which were for fictional speculation anyways
-- they decided that they were "broke". Bankrupt, even -- even though a country can't go bankrupt, anymore than you could if you
could print your own currency at home, and spend it everywhere.
What does a bankrupt have to do? Liquidate. So governments began to slash investment in social systems of all kinds. Healthcare
systems, pension systems, insurance systems, media and energy systems. This was the fourth step in the birth of predatory capitalism:
austerity.
But people's incomes were already dwindling, thanks to the first three steps -- as jobs not just disappeared in quantity, but
also imploded in quality, as monopolies grew in power, and as pointless, destructive, zero-sum speculation sucked the life out of
the real economy. The only thing keeping the real economy going at this point was investment by the government -- after all, the
speculators were speculating, not investing for the long run. It was governments that were effectively keeping economies afloat,
by providing a floor for income, by anchoring economies with a vast pool of stable, safe, real, secure jobs, and investing dollars
back in societies short of them. And yet, at the precise moment that governments needed to create more of precisely that, they did
just the opposite.
Snap! Economies broke like twigs. The people formerly known as the middle class had been caught in between the pincers of these
four forces -- financialization, monopoly, the implosion of the job, and austerity. Together, they shattered what was left of rich
economies -- to the point that today, incomes are stagnant across the rich world, even in much vaunted Scandinavia, while living
standards are falling in many rich countries, like the US and UK.
What do people do as hardship begins to bite -- especially those who expected comfortable, easy lives? They become reactionary,
lashing out violently. They seek safety in the arms of demagogues. That doesn't mean, as American pundits naively think, that "poor
people become authoritarians!" Quite the opposite.
It's the once prosperous but now imploded middle which turns on the classes, ethnicities, groups, below it. The people who expected
and felt entitled to lives of safety and security and stability -- who anticipated being at the top of a tidy little hierarchy,
the boss of this or that, the chieftain of that or this, but now find themselves adrift and unmoored in a collapsing society, powerless.
That gap between expectation and reality is what ruinous. They retain a desperate need to be atop a hierarchy, to be above someone,
the entitled imploded middles -- and what has happened in history, time and again, is that they turn to those who promise them
just that superiority, by turning on those below them. Even if, especially if, it is in the extreme, irrational, yet perfectly logical
form of supremacy and dominion over the weak, the despised, and the impure.
And that is what all today's reactionary, extremist movements --
which I call the Faction --
really are. Predatory capitalism imploding into strange, new forms of old diseases of the body politic -- ultrauthoritarianism,
theosupremacism, kleptofascism, neofeudalism, biodominionism, hatriarchy, technotalitarianism, novel and lethal forms of ruin for
a new dark age.
And so here we are, you and I. On the cusp of that age. A time where the shadows in human hearts shine as black and blinding as
midnight. And once again, it is the folly and hubris of wise men that led us here.
"Five signers were captured by the
British as traitors, and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons in the revolutionary
army, another had two sons captured. Nine of the fifty-six fought and died from wounds or hardships resulting from the Revolutionary
War.
These men signed, and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor!
What kind of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants. Nine were farmers and large plantation
owners. All were men of means, well educated. But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty
could be death if they were captured.
Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British navy. He sold his home
and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags." "What really happened?"
------------
I had a lot of ancestors in that war, some Continentals, some militia. One man in Boston raised his own regiment of militia at
his own expense. He commanded it throughout the war. A lot of these soldiers were old broke down grunts by the end, They made new
lives for themselves. I revere their memory. pl
"All were men of means, well educated. But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty could
be death if they were captured."
They were men of character. They were willing to lose everything for their convictions and beliefs. These are men to be revered.
Thank you Col. Lang for remembering them.
IMO, as a people we no longer have this character. We have allowed big & bigger government over the decades who have usurped
our sovereignty and essential liberty through mass surveillance, civil forfeiture, state secrets doctrine as the cornerstone of
deceit, and now the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence for domestic political purposes.
These were indeed hard and principled men. I offer the example of one of the founding fathers of my hometown. Gideon Hotchkiss
was a new light Puritan receiving a commission as an ensign in a Waterbury militia company in November 1756. He was at Saratoga
in August 1757 when he wrote home about "the melancholy news of our upper fort" referring to the loss of Fort William Henry and
the ensuing massacre. In July 1758 he took part in the battle of Fort Carillon as a lieutenant. He served another year as a captain
in 1760 along with two of his sons.
Leading up to the War of Independence, he served on the local committee of inspection. He sent two sons and a grandson to serve
in the war and organized a troop of light horse cavalry to respond to British incursions such as the raids on Woodbridge and Danbury.
After the fall harvests were completed, his company of veterans served through the winter months when they were most needed.
Once while working in his fields, he heard the sound of battle to the south. He mounted his horse and, along with a servant
boy, rode to meet the British at Westville, north of New Haven. His servant was struck by a cannon ball. Gideon placed the boy's
body in a concealed place, sent his horse back to his farm and joined the battle. This was the British raid on New Haven in July
1779. He was sixty-three years old at the time.
After the War, he was appointed deacon of the church of Columbia Parish, now Prospect. One of his many sons became a Methodist
minister. This Puritan deacon first disowned his son, but he soon forgave and embraced him. One of Gideon's descendants moved
to the Shenandoah Valley. He was Jedediah Hotchkiss, cartographer and staff officer to General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.
Speaking of the signers, only three lived to see America's 50th Anniversary. Thomas Jefferson was unable to attend a reunion organized
by the mayor of Washington, and this article provides the full text of his letter of RSVP.
"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal
of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and
to assume the blessings & security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded
exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. these are grounds of hope for others."
End Quote
It also cites this list of Jefferson quotes on the right to bear arms:
Aides
struggle to talk Trump out of launching invasion
In August of 2017, President Trump
surprised many by openly talking about the idea of launching a military attack on
Venezuela. The public talk of this didn't last long, and it has been all but forgotten. But
not forgotten by President Trump.
This shocked members of his cabinet, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and
National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. They were both opposed to the idea, but it's less
clear if their successors, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, would have a problem with this sort
of unprovoked US attack.
The Americans are treating this like some kind of random event, as if the Fascist monster
somehow happened to get awakaned from its cave by a seismic rumble, to then by accident
stumble into the US Republic for another round of fighting. The unfortunate reality of your
economic system, which refuses to give people their freedom of land, refuses to have laws
against limitless concentration of wealth, is that power will slowly but surely centralize,
until you either are a tirannical class society, or until you have another war that
overthrows the ownership structure to restart the problem from an earlier position, or until
you finally learn what freedom means.
It's not an accident, the Fascist monster didn't get awakened by chance: the problem is
within you, within your own heads, within your laws, in your beliefs, as the consequence of
your system. You are the enemy you fight, even if you don't seem to realize it, and therefore
it is your destiny to experience what the Roman Republic always ultimately becomes.
The Roman Republic falls into dictatorship, into Fascism and war, Empire, mass looting of
external and internal peoples. Your weakness and your ignorance is the strength of the
Fascist system. If you mended with weakness, Fascism would melt as if it never existed. If
you don't, it will overtake and destroy you.
I'm a conservative and a Constitutionalists. I support capitalism and free markets. That
being said, I'm impressed at least one leftist talking head got a good definition for
fascism. The problem is, modern day socialism is also the merging of government and
corporations, with violence used against political opposition.
So, who are the "fascists"? The people that want to be left free in a Constitutional
Republic, or the redshirt ANTIFA that cause violence against conservatives and want the
government to merge with corporations under the guise of "redistribution"?
It sounds to me, through cultural Marxism, the left has bamboozled an entire generation of
ignorant kids that will regurgitate whatever they are told.
Henry Wallace was right he said that fascist called them selfs patriots but hate everything
the us ever stood for they say they love the west yet they hate democracy.
Trump has already deceived his middle class voter. I see Trump as a fascist. Organizations
like Freedom Works, American's for Prosperity, State Policy Network, American's for Tax
Reform, ALEC, if you look at their literature you see that there objective is to turn the
average person against their own government and their own best interests. The 5 Republican
Supreme Court Justices put forth Citizens United in convoluted rhetoric to say that
CORPORATIONS are PERSONS. These justices cemented corporate rule in America unbeknownst the
American Public this hideous act put forth by Citizens United. Supreme Court Justices are not
above the law and on this act should be disbarred, and removed from office. The charge under
the U.S. Conspiracy Fraud Statute, through corporate outside influence manifest the
alteration of the functioning of our government against its own citizens. (Example, the Koch
Brothers, orchestrating the shutdown of the peoples government, Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the
House their gofer in Congress.)
A highly critical view on Trump. Many aspects of Trump foreign policy are captured correctly:
an objective evaluation is the evaluation of a person we do not like ;-)
Trump changed US neoliberalism from "classic" variant to what can be called "National
neoliberalism", which denies neoliberal globalization. And that's a huge change.
When John Feller mentions that "The allies that Trump has cultivated -- Poland, Hungary,
Russia, North Korea, the Philippines -- don't advance any particular national security interests.
They reflect only the personal preferences of Trump himself." he certainly sniffed something
strong. Russia is probably the only country capable to make the USA uninhabitable. And neocon's
Russophobia while lining their pockets is threat to the USA as nation and as a country. After the
war with Russia both might be gone ( as well as Russia, as the USA still enjoys technical
superiority).
Notable quotes:
"... In this week's Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg canvassed administration officials for their one-sentence characterization of this Trump Doctrine. Goldberg narrowed it down to the pugnacious phrase: "We're America, Bitch." ..."
"... When he calls other leaders "weak," Trump is resorting to the old playground epithet: they are "pussies." And, as he put it so indelicately in the Access Hollywood tape, he feels perfectly free to grab them by the pussies. The president is using the power invested in his office to take what he wants. ..."
"... Rape, it has often been said, is not about sex: it's about power. ..."
"... To Trump's followers, "We're America, Bitch" could be understood as a middle finger directed at a cold and unfair world, one that no longer respects American power and privilege. ..."
"... To much of the world, however, and certainly to most practitioners of foreign and national-security policy, "We're America, Bitch" would be understood as self-isolating, and self-sabotaging. ..."
"... John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands. ..."
ada and the successful summit in Singapore, it's hard to know what to call U.S. foreign
policy these days.
It's not just unilateralism, where Washington acts alone and allies be damned. Nor is it
merely unipolarism, in which the United States targets all hegemonic challengers in an effort
to preserve its position as the world's dominant military and economic power.
Let's coin a new term: unileaderism .
According to unileaderism, only the U.S. president makes foreign policy decisions of any
import. Those decisions do not betray any strategic thinking. They may well be contradictory.
And they often leave other members of the administration -- not to mention Congress and the
American people -- totally baffled.
Unileaderism, at least as it's embodied by Donald Trump, is a philosophy bound up entirely
in the personal quirks of the president himself. Instead of strategy, there are only tactics:
wheedling, bluffing, threatening. It's like playing tennis against someone with John McEnroe's
legendary temper and will to win, but few if any of his actual skills.
Neither unilateralism nor unipolarism can explain the spectacle of the last week, when Trump
blasted U.S. allies at the G7 meeting in Canada and then blasted off for Singapore to negotiate
with the leader of the longest standing adversary of the United States. Only unileaderism can
capture this surreal reversal of traditional U.S. foreign policy norms.
The summit with Kim Jong Un was Trump at his most theatrical. He flattered the North Korean
tyrant and signed a declaration of little substance. He showed off his limousine. He played Kim
a White House-produced video crafted
to appeal to the North Korea leader's vanity and nationalism (for instance, by juxtaposing
images from North Korea with those from around the world, by barely mentioning South Korea, and
by ignoring China and Japan altogether).
Don't get me wrong: I'm thrilled that Trump sat down with Kim and initiated a détente
between the two countries. Trump's
pledge to stop war games with South Korea is a major step forward. As for the declaration,
it was a good thing, not a bad thing, that it didn't go into details. North Korea doesn't want
to denuclearize immediately, and Trump doesn't really understand the particulars of the process
anyway. Anything more detailed would have been a conversation stopper.
But the mutual respect that the two leaders expressed was all about unileaderism: their
preference to rule without any regard for democracy or human rights. The format of their
30-minute colloquy was telling: just the two leaders with their translators and no advisors. It
was a throwback to the diplomacy of yesteryear, when royals met to determine the boundaries of
their respective kingdoms.
The contretemps in Quebec was far more disturbing. Trump refused to sign the G7 declaration,
continued to pursue tariffs against major U.S. trading partners, and insulted Canadian leader
Justin Trudeau to boot. It was an extraordinary display of presidential pique.
Trump's tantrum about Trudeau divided his administration into those who leapt into the
fracas to slap the Canadian prime minister and those who shifted into high gear to repair the
fraying U.S. relationship with its northern neighbor. U.S. Trade Representative Robert
Lighthizer continued to work with his Canadian counterparts to negotiate a new NAFTA. But White
House trade advisor Peter Navarro sided with Trump by saying that "there's a special place in
hell" for Trudeau -- the kind of epithet once reserved for the mortal enemies of the United
States.
It was like something out of
Canadian Bacon , the satirical 1995 film about a president hoping to boost his dismal
popularity by promoting a war against the Canucks. Has America been suddenly plunged into
wag-the-beaver territory?
Meanwhile, Trump's proposal to bring Russia back into the G7
caught many of his colleagues off guard, including the National Security Council. Methinks
the NSC doth protest too much. This is the same president who congratulated Russian President
Vladimir Putin on his recent electoral win even though his aides
had written "DON'T CONGRATULATE" in all-caps on his briefing notes. This president delights
in ignoring even is closest "advisors."
Trump's invite to Russia is no surprise. The president wants his buddies at the G7. Angela
Merkel is not his buddy. Vladimir Putin is. Trump treats world affairs like it's an elementary
school club.
Unileaderism may well be the logical endpoint for a country that has used unilateralism to
preserve its unipolarism. And Trump is certainly the product of a particular tendency within
the U.S. political culture that rejects [neo]liberalism and multilateralism.
But it goes beyond that. In its rejection of strategy in favor of tactics, Trumpism is a
repudiation of geopolitics altogether. Trumpism isn't a new kind of opening in the chess game
of international relations. The president, out of rage and stupidity and arrogance, has simply
picked up the board with all of its pieces and flung the whole thing against the wall. He's
playing a different game altogether.
The Trump Doctrine
Ordinarily when pundits come up with a doctrine to define an administration's approach to
the world, they put a label on a collective stance -- even though the label inevitably goes by
the president's name.
In the case of the Trump doctrine, however, the philosophy points more to the president's
gut instincts rather than an approach hammered out by a group of "Vulcans" (in the case of
George W. Bush) or a set of [neo]liberal internationalists (Barack Obama). The Trump doctrine
boils down to Trump. And the word "doctrine" is something of an overstatement.
In this week's Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg
canvassed administration officials for their one-sentence characterization of this Trump
Doctrine. Goldberg narrowed it down to the pugnacious phrase: "We're America, Bitch."
The phrase reveals the Trump approach for what it is: sexual harassment.
When he calls other leaders "weak," Trump is resorting to the old playground epithet:
they are "pussies." And, as he put it so indelicately in the Access Hollywood tape, he feels
perfectly free to grab them by the pussies. The president is using the power invested in his
office to take what he wants.
Rape, it has often been said, is not about sex: it's about power. Having divided
the international community into female (Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau) and
male (Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un), Trump is now buddying up with his locker-room
pals and boasting of how's taken advantage of the "weaker sex."
Goldberg writes:
To Trump's followers, "We're America, Bitch" could be understood as a middle finger
directed at a cold and unfair world, one that no longer respects American power and
privilege.To much of the world, however, and certainly to most practitioners of
foreign and national-security policy, "We're America, Bitch" would be understood as
self-isolating, and self-sabotaging.
Sexual harassment, thanks to the #MeToo movement, has become self-sabotaging. Has the G7
just had their #MeToo moment? Perhaps America's top allies are finished with appeasing Trump
and saying "yes" when they really mean "no." I look forward to the photo op with Merkel and
Macron both wearing their pink pussyhats in solidarity with Trump protesters worldwide.
The End of Geopolitics?
The G7 represents the [neo]liberal international order: an attempt by the world's top
economies to manage disputes and develop a common commitment to certain principles like free
trade. The grouping is an acknowledgment that global capitalism can't survive by the "invisible
hand" alone and needs the guidance of many hands.
The G7 has been spectacularly ineffective in addressing the major issues of the time: global
poverty and inequality, climate change, pandemics. It doesn't represent robust multilateralism.
It leaves out obvious players like China and India. It makes no effort to represent voices of
the powerless.
Still, the G7 has been a very modest check on both U.S. unilateralism and unipolarism. And
now it's emerging as a counterbalance to Trump's unileaderism. The president's combative trade
policies and indiscriminate use of personal invective are uniting much of the world against the
United States. The approval rating of the United States, across 134 countries, dropped in two
years from 48 percent to 30 percent, according to
a 2018 Gallup poll .
On the other hand, the American public's satisfaction with U.S. standing in the world
reached a
13-year high in 2018, a worrisome sign for those of us pushing for progressive foreign
policy alternatives. Trump's unileaderism strikes a chord with a segment of the American
public. It's not just the Russians who crave an "iron fist" leader.
Trump's tactics run afoul of the basic laws of geopolitics: identifying long-term goals,
developing corresponding strategies, and cultivating key allies to achieve those goals. The
allies that Trump has cultivated -- Poland, Hungary, Russia, North Korea, the Philippines --
don't advance any particular national security interests. They reflect only the personal
preferences of Trump himself.
According to a progressive take on foreign policy, the United States should relinquish its
unipolar status as part of a transition to a peaceful multilateral order. Trump's unileaderism
won't, in the end, preserve this unipolar status. It will ultimately destroy the international
community and the very possibility of geopolitics. As the United States sinks further into
aggressive resentment, the world will splinter into hundreds of "Make [My Country] Great Again"
warring factions.
Bush Times Ten
Beginning with the Reagan administration, the concept of a "unitary executive" has gathered
force in both constitutional law and presidential practice. According to this theory, the
president controls the entire executive branch. So, for instance, George W. Bush expanded
presidential power through his use of signing statements that reinterpreted legislative
decisions.
Trump has taken this concept to a whole new level with his meddling in the Russiagate
investigations and his willingness to pardon everyone indicted in the matter, even himself.
Here's a president who can't seem to wait to get rid of his chief of staff because he
no longer wants to have anyone managing him. Trump can't be bothered with briefings because
he prefers to make decisions based on some cocktail of his own hormonal urges and what he
gleans, often mistakenly, from Fox News.
Unileaderism raises the doctrine of the unitary executive to the power of 10. It's bad
enough that a deeply insecure man-boy has latched on to this doctrine. Much worse will happen
when a canny adult adopts the same approach. Trumpism without Trump would finalize America's
descent into the maelstrom.
John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian
novel Splinterlands.
"... The fact of the matter is, if Russia wanted to do, cause lot of difficulty to the American election they could have. Instead, they went and talked privately to us. So when the government says Russia intercepted stuff that was very important to us, I'm being very fuzzy about it, it wasn't about the election. They told us that there were certain people in America doing things that were very deleterious to the War on Terrorism for personal and financial gain, and they could have blown it publicly but they went internally to us." ..."
"... I haven't listened to that particular interview yet, but can say the the HRC emails with Sid Blumenthal show the reason we got in bed with Sarkozy (and Britain) to destroy Libya was: ..."
"... To steal the nationalized oil ..."
"... To steal the hundreds of tons of gold and silver. ..."
"... To prevent Libya from developing a pan-African gold dinar and development bank to complete with the Federal Reserve petrodollar and the IMF. ..."
"... I can also say that Hersh documented that Ambassador Stevens was an arms dealer, smuggling Libyan military weapons into Syria to finish the "regime change" operation still ongoing there. Also, HRC knew her "rebels" were hunting down and murdering any black Libyans they could find even before Gaddafi was anally bayonet raped. ..."
Hello There! I'm curious to know if any readers have comments about a recent Sy Hersh
interview. In response to a question about Russian interference in the last US presidential
election Hersh replied:
"I have been reporting something, I've been watching something since 2011 in Libya, when we
had a secretary of state that later ran for president, and I will tell you: Some stories take
a long time. And I don't know quite how to package it. I don't know how much to say about it.
I assure you that there's no known intelligence that Russia impacted, cut into the DNC,
Podesta e-mails. That did not happen. I can say that.
I can also say Russia learned other things about what was going on in Libya with us and
instead of blowing -- [. . . lots cut out here before returning to the topic . . . ]
The fact of the matter is, if Russia wanted to do, cause lot of difficulty to the
American election they could have. Instead, they went and talked privately to us. So when the
government says Russia intercepted stuff that was very important to us, I'm being very fuzzy
about it, it wasn't about the election. They told us that there were certain people in
America doing things that were very deleterious to the War on Terrorism for personal and
financial gain, and they could have blown it publicly but they went internally to
us."
I haven't listened to that particular interview yet, but can say the the HRC emails with Sid
Blumenthal show the reason we got in bed with Sarkozy (and Britain) to destroy Libya was:
To steal the nationalized oil
To steal the hundreds of tons of gold and silver.
To prevent Libya from developing a pan-African gold dinar and development bank to complete
with the Federal Reserve petrodollar and the IMF.
I can also say that Hersh documented that Ambassador Stevens was an arms dealer, smuggling
Libyan military weapons into Syria to finish the "regime change" operation still ongoing there.
Also, HRC knew her "rebels" were hunting down and murdering any black Libyans they could find
even before Gaddafi was anally bayonet raped.
If I come up with more after listening, I'll post again.
The problem is that there is no clear alternative to neoliberalism. Russian foreign policy is
clearly anti-neoliberal. So in a way, Russia represent another example of National neoliberalism
along with Trump "national neoliberalism".
Notable quotes:
"... I believe most of the confusing and seemingly contradictory actions of Putin can be explained if we assume Putin himself as a neo-liberal. It appears he genuinely believes that he can both retain Russian sovereignty and integrate with the west on a neo-liberal framework. My view is that his reluctance with purging Kremlin's 5th column operators come from his belief that their differences are not reconcilable and that a grand bargain with the western elites is possible where they would consider Russia's elites as equal partners. ..."
Following the re-appointment of Medvedev and his more or less reshuffled government, the
public opinion in Russia and abroad was split on whether this was a good sign of continuity and
unity amongst the Russian leadership or whether this was a confirmation that there was a 5
th column inside the Kremlin working against President Putin and trying to impose
neo-liberal and pro-western policies on the Russian people. Today I want to take a quick look
at what is taking place inside Russia because I believe that the Russian foreign policy is
still predominantly controlled by what I call the "Eurasian Sovereignists" and that to detect
the activities of the "Atlantic Integrationist" types we need to look at what is taking place
inside Russia.
The Russian 5 th column and its typical operations
First, I want to begin by sharing with you a short video translated by the Saker Community
of one of the most astute Russian analysts, Ruslan Ostashko, who wonders how it is that a
rabidly pro-western and vociferously anti-Putin radio station named "Ekho Moskvy" manages not
only to elude normal Russian legislation, but even gets money from the gaz giant Gazprom, which
is majority owned by the Russian state. Ekho Moskvy is also so pro-Israeli that it has earned
the nickname "Ekho Matsy" (Ekho Moskvy means "Echo of Moscow" whereas "Ekho Matsy" means "Echo
of the Matzo"). Needless to say, that radio has the unwavering and total support of the US
Embassy. It would not be an exaggeration to say Ekho Moskvy serves as in incubator for
russophobic journalists and that most the liberal pro-western reporters in the Russian media
have been, at one time or another, associated with this propaganda outfit. In spite of this or,
more accurately, because of this, Ekho Moskvy has been bankrupt for quite a while already, and
yet – it continues to exist. Just listen to Ostashko's explanations ( and make sure to
press the 'cc' button to see the English language captions):
Interesting, no? The state giant Gazprom is doing all it can to keep Ekho Moskvy afloat and
above the law. In fact, Gazprom has been financing Ekho Moskvy for years! According to the
hyper-politically-correct Wikipedia , "As of
2005 Echo of Moscow was majority owned by Gazprom Media which holds 66% of its shares".
If Gazprom is majority owned by the Russian state, and Ekho Moskvy is majority owned by
Gazprom, then does that not mean that Ekho Moskvy is basically financed by the Kremlin? The
reality is even worse, as Ostashko point out, Ekho Moskvy is the most visible case, but there
are are quite a few pro-western media outlets in Russia which are financed, directly and
indirectly, by the Russian state.
So let me ask you a simple question: do you really think that Ostashko is better informed
than the Russian authorities, including Putin himself?
Of course not! So what is going on here?
Before attempting to answer this question, let's look at another interesting news item from
Russia, the recent article " Pension reform as a fifth column tool to overthrow Putin "
(original title "About a fair pension system") by Mikhail Khazin translated by Ollie Richardson
and Angelina Siard from the Stalker Zone blog (and cross-posted here
and here ).
Please read the full article as it sheds a very interesting light on what the Medvedev
government has been up to since it was reappointed. What I want to quote here are Mikhail
Khazin's conclusions: (emphasis added)
In other words, all of this reform is frank poppycock, a political joke aimed at
destroying relations between the People (society) and the Authorities. The specific aim of
this is to overthrow Putin, as our liberals are commanded to do by their senior partners from
the "Western" global project . And it is precisely like this that we should treat this
reform. It has no relation to economic reforms – neither good, nor bad. It not an
economic reform, but a political plot! And it is from here that we have to proceed.
Having explained what is really going on, Khazin then goes on the openly state how such an
operation is even possible:
Now concerning the media. It should be understood that at the end of the 90's-beginning of
the 2000's practically all non-liberal media died. Completely. And of course, practically all
non-liberal journalists definitely died (only a few dozen mastodons from the times of
socialism remain). And the youth that grew from the faculty of journalism are in general
totally liberal. They were a little bit suppressed in the middle of the 2000's, but after
Medvedev's arrival to the president's post they again blossomed. But then the attack of the
State on everything that doesn't reflect "the policies of the party and the government"
began.
And then it so happened that now there are many "patriotic" publications in Russia that
employ mainly liberal journalists. An enchanting sight. These journalists (in full
accordance with the ideas of Lenin that they didn't read) see their main task as supporting
"theirs" – i.e., liberal-financiers, Nemtsov, Navalny and, so on, and to sully the
"bloody KayGeeBee"! And it is this that they are involved in, meaning that, propagandising as
much as possible the policies of the government, they optimally irritate the population by
using Putin personally. There is just a need every time to act out some disgusting story (how
an elderly man died on the way to the polyclinic or hospital, how children were taken away
from a large family, how an official or a priest hit a pregnant woman and/or juvenile
children with their chic car), to explain that this isn't just the result of the policies of
the liberal power, but the concrete fault of the President, who put on their posts the very
ministers and law enforcement officers who encourage all of this.
Amazing, no? This is an attempt to overthrow Putin and it is covered-up by the (pseudo)
patriotic press. What about Putin himself? Why does he not take action? Khazin even explains
that:
Of course, the President is guilty, first of all, because he understands that if he starts
to cleanse this "Augean stable", then he will be obliged to shed blood , because
they won't voluntarily give back their privileges . But the most important thing, and
this is the essence: the liberal Russian elite today set for itself the political task of
removing Putin. Why it decided to do this is an interesting question: if Putin himself and
a liberal are flesh from flesh, then this task is stupid and senseless. Not to mention
suicidal. But if he isn't a liberal (it is probably correct to say not a political liberal)
then, of course, this activity makes sense . But at the same time, for purely propaganda
reasons – because people hate liberals, there is a need to hang the label of political
liberal on him.
Now let's connect all the dots: there is a pro-western (in realty, western-controlled)
faction inside the government which is financing those who are attempting to overthrow Putin by
making him unpopular with the Russian general public (which overwhelmingly opposes "liberal"
economic policies and which despises the Russian liberal elites) by constantly forcing him into
liberal economic policies which he clearly does not like (
he declared himself categorically opposed to such policies in 2005 ) and the so-called
"patriotic media" is covering it all up. And Putin cannot change this without shedding
blood.
"it is quite clear to me that a new type of Russian opposition is slowly forming. Well, it
always existed, really – I am talking about people who supported Putin and the Russian
foreign policy and who disliked Medvedev and the Russian internal policies. Now the voice of
those who say that Putin is way too soft in his stance towards the Empire will only get
stronger. As will the voices of those who speak of a truly toxic degree of nepotism and
patronage in the Kremlin (again, Mutko being the perfect example). When such accusations came
from rabid pro-western liberals, they had very little traction, but when they come from
patriotic and even nationalist politicians (Nikolai Starikov for example) they start taking
on a different dimension. For example, while the court jester Zhirinovskii and his LDPR party
loyally supported Medvedev, the Communist and the Just Russia parties did not. Unless the
political tension around figures like Kudrin and Medvedev is somehow resolved (maybe a timely
scandal?), we might witness the growth of a real opposition movement in Russia, and not one
run by the Empire. It will be interesting to see if Putin's personal ratings will begin to go
down and what he will have to do in order to react to the emergence of such a real
opposition"
Those who vehemently denied that there as a real 5 th column problem inside the
Kremlin are going to have a painful wake-up call when they realize that thanks to the actions
of these "liberals" a patriotic opposition is gradually emerging, not so much against Putin
himself as against the policies of the Medvedev government. Why not against Putin?
Because most Russian instinctively feel what is going on and understand not only the
anti-Putin dynamics at work, but also how and why this situation was created. Furthermore,
unlike most westerners, most Russians remember what took place in the crucial and formative
1990s.
The historical roots of the problem (very rough summary)
It all began in the late 1980s when the Soviet elites realized that they were losing control
of the situation and that something had to be done. To really summarize what they did, I would
say that these elites first broke up the country into 15 individual fiefdoms each run by
gang/clan composed of these Soviet elites, then they mercilessly grabbed everything of any
value, became overnight billionaires and concealed their money in the West. Being fabulously
rich in a completely ruined country gave them fantastic political power and influence to
further exploit and rob the country of all its resources. Russia herself (and the other 14
ex-Soviet republics) suffered an unspeakable nightmare comparable to a major war and by the
1990s Russia almost broke-up into many more even smaller pieces (Chechnia, Tatarstan, etc.). By
then, Russia was subserviently executing all the economic policies recommended by a myriad of
US 'advisors' (hundreds of them with offices inside the offices of many key ministries and
various state agencies, just like today in the Ukraine), she adopted a Constitution drafted by
pro-US elements and all the key positions in the state were occupied by what I can only call
western agents. At the very top, President Eltisn was mostly drunk while the country was run by
7 bankers the so-called "oligarchs" (6 of which were Jews): the " Semibankirshchina ".
This is the time when the Russian security services successfully tricked these oligarchs
into believing that Putin, who has a law degree and who had worked for the (very liberal) Mayor
of Saint Petersburg (Anatolii Sobchack) was just a petty bureaucrat who would restore a
semblance of order while not presenting any real threat to the oligarchs. The ploy worked, but
the business elites demanded that "their" guy, Medvedev, be put in charge of the government so
as to preserve their interests. What they overlooked was two things: Putin was a truly
brilliant officer of the very elite First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence) of the KGB
and a real patriot. Furthermore, the Constitution which was passed to support the Eltsin regime
could now be used by Putin. But more than anything else, they never predicted that a little guy
in an ill-fitting suit would transform himself into one of the most popular leaders on the
planet. As I have written many times, while the initial power base of Putin was in the security
services and the armed forces and while his legal authority stems from the Constitution, is
real power comes from the immense support he has from the Russian people who, for the first
time in very long time felt that the man at the top truly represented their interests.
Putin then did what Donald Trump could have done as soon as he entered the White House: he
cleaned house. He began by immediately tackling the oligarchs, he put an end to the
Semibankirshchina , and he stopped the massive export of money and resources out of
Russia. The then proceeded to rebuilt the "vertical of power" (the Kremlin's control over the
country) and began rebuilding all of Russia from the foundations (regions) up. But while Putin
was tremendously successful, he simply could not fight on all the fronts and the same time and
win.
Truth be told, he did eventually win most of the battles which he chose to fight, but some
battles he simply could not wage not because of a lack of courage or will on his part, but
because the objective reality is that Putin inherited and extremely bad system fully controlled
by some extremely dangerous foes . Remember the words of Khazin above: " if he starts to
cleanse this "Augean stable", then he will be obliged to shed blood, because they won't
voluntarily give back their privileges". So, in a typically Putin fashion, he made a number
of deals.
For example, those oligarchs who agreed to stop meddling in Russian politics and who would,
from now on, pay taxes and generally abide by the law were not be jailed or expropriated: those
who got the message were allowed to continue to work as normal businessmen (Oleg Deripaska) and
those who did not were either jailed or exiled (Khodorkovski, Berezovski). But if we look just
below the level of these well-known and notorious oligarchs, what we find as a much deeper
"swamp" (to use the US expression): an entire class of people who made their fortunes in the
1990s, who are now extremely influential and control most of the key positions in the economy,
finance and business and who absolutely hate and fear Putin. They even have their agents inside
the armed forces and security services because their weapon of choice is, of course, corruption
and influence. And, of course, they have people representing their interests inside the Russian
government: pretty much the entire "economic block" of the Medvedev government.
Is it really any surprise at all that these people also have their paid representatives
inside the Russian media, including the so-called "pro-Russian" or "patriotic" media? (I have
been warning about
this since at least 2015)
Just like in the West, in Russia the media depends first and foremost on money and big
financial interests are very good at using the media to promote their agenda, deny or obfuscate
some topics while pushing others. This is why you often see the Russian media backing
WTO/WB/IMF/etc policies to the hilt while never criticizing Israel or, God forbid, rabidly
pro-Israeli propagandists on mainstream TV (guys like Vladimir Soloviev, Evgenii Satanovsky,
Iakov Kedmi, Avigdor Eskin and many others). This is the same media which will gladly criticize
Iran and Hezbollah but never wonder why the Russian main TV stations are spewing pro-Israeli
propaganda on a daily basis.
And, of course, they will all mantrically repeat the same chant: "there is no 5
th column in Russia!! None!! Never!!"
This is no different than the paid for corporate media in the US which denies the existence
of a "deep state" or the US "Israel Lobby".
And yet, many (most?) people in the US and Russia realize at an almost gut-level that they
are being lied to and that, in reality, a hostile power is ruling over them.
Putin's options and possible outcomes
Sadly, in the US, Trump proved to be a disaster who totally caved in to the Neocons and
their demands. In Russia, the situation is far more complex. So far, Putin has very skillfully
avoided associating himself with the Atlantic Integrationists. Furthermore, the biggest crises
of the past decade or so were all associated with foreign policy issues and those are still
controlled by the Eurasian Sovereignists. Finally, while the Russian government clearly
committed some mistakes or promoted some unpopular policies (such has healthcare reform for
example), they also had their undeniable successes. As for Putin, he continued to consolidate
his power and he gradually removed some of the most notorious individuals from their positions.
In theory, Putin could probably have most top Atlantic Integrationists arrested on corruption
charges, but short of engaging in a massive and bloody purge, he cannot get rid of an entire
social class which is not only large but powerful.
Some of my contacts in Russia expected a purge of Atlantic Integrationists right after the
election, the logic here was "enough is enough" and that once Putin got a strong mandate from
the people, he would finally kick Medvedev and his gang out of the Kremlin and replace them
with popular patriots. That obviously did not happen. But if this pension reform program
continues to further trigger protests or if a major war blows up in the Middle-East or in the
Ukraine, then the pro-western forces inside the Kremlin will come under great pressure to
further yield control of the country to Eurasian Sovereignists.
Putin is an exceedingly patient man and, at least so far, he won most, if not all, of his
battles. I don't believe that anybody can predict for sure how things will play out, but what
is certain is that trying to understand Russia without being aware of the internal conflicts
and the interests groups fighting for power is futile. In her 1000 year long history, internal
enemies have always been far more dangerous for Russia than external ones. This is unlikely to
change in the future.
Since "The Saker" does not approve difference of opinion or dissent on his own site i will
post my response here.
This is yet another episode of "doom & gloom" articles of his in a series that started
almost a year ago. If you have read one, you have read them all. Since then a quite 180
degree different and depression-ridden "The Saker" or whatever is hiding under that name has
produced articles to the effect that "Putin has surrendered", "the end is nigh" or "it's all
over". Hi's sudden embrace of "Paul Craig Roberts" views of all things Russian further
confirms that.
The content aren't necessarily wrong and incorrect but the message is very far from what
the author initially conveyed. The impression is now that things definitely doesn't bode well
for Russia and there's nothing Russians or anyone can do about it, move on. "The Saker" is
now using the encouraging confidence he built up with his "community",that has grown
significantly over the years, to tear it apart it seems.
President Putin has himself categorically stated that "there is no such thing as any "5th
column". When asked about the presence of Kudrin and a few like him, VP said, "it's useful to
hear different points of view, but to suggest they are some sort of 5th column is
nonsense"
I think I would trust his word – he has never been known to lie and he has no reason to
do so.
He gave his reasons for retaining Medvedev plus a few others – good solid rational
reasons. No-body in Russia is doubting them.
Can it be forgotten by this writer, that Medvedev is an appointed position – by the
President. Putin can remove him in an instant any time he likes: he holds the strings, and is
under thrall to no-one.
As for the article the writer refers to in "The Saker", the provenance of the authors shows
how much value to put on it.
The writer – not mentioned here – is one Vadim Potapenko who gives details of
himself as living in Cyprus, and working as a Development Manager – Slotegrator :
Gambling & Casinos.!!
What a young man working in the ethically questionable world of casinos knows about pension
reform and retirement age needs I dont know. He does deal in risk analysis of simplistic
systems I guess, but an expert in the complexities of Government policy he can't be.
The second author is Mikhail Khazin – a man who claims to an economist and publicist,
and states that "Putin is following the ideas of Andropov. They didn t' work then and they
dont now: Putin by his very personality has polarised views in Russia, because some love him
and some hate him"
This about a President with an 80% approval rating, a 77% voter return rate, and who is so
far from any USSR person it's unbelievable. The mans' complete inability to understand the
first thing about Putin, who he is, what he believes in, and the route he is following shows
he is the last person whose views should be even listened to.
This brings me to the finale – more and more it seems "The Saker" wants people to
believe that there are dark forces at work in the Kremlin, that Putin is either too weak and
stupid to deal with them or even worse, is working in with them. In other words, he effects
to support the Russian President but calls him a weakling or a traitor!!
Better to read work by qualified people and investigate Russia for yourself – dont be
led into thinking Russia would be a cakewalk for anyone thinking of invading and making war
on her, because she has a weak and divided leadership. She doesn't have – and waging
war on Russia would have only one end, and it's not pretty.
I believe most of the confusing and seemingly contradictory actions of Putin can be
explained if we assume Putin himself as a neo-liberal. It appears he genuinely believes that
he can both retain Russian sovereignty and integrate with the west on a neo-liberal
framework. My view is that his reluctance with purging Kremlin's 5th column operators come
from his belief that their differences are not reconcilable and that a grand bargain with the
western elites is possible where they would consider Russia's elites as equal partners.
I think this is not a sustainable position, even if western elites were willing to play
ball with Putin and Russia's elites. Because in a neo-liberal world nations cannot retain
their sovereignty and that an international cabal of ultra-rich treat the peoples of the
world as properties of their own. The best that could have happened would be that Russian
elites would be partying with their western fellow billionaires on the corpses of the poor
nations of the world. That part, I am convinced, is not acceptable for Putin (i.e. giving up
sovereignty in return for a seat on the dinner table but I have serious doubts about
anti-imperialism part)
Fortunately for Russia, the same cabal still cannot get over the fact that they lost the
opportunity to rape Russia ad infinitum and still looking for holes in the Russian resolve.
This will force Russia to take a clear anti-imperialist stand sooner or later, and on a war
footing will have to purge all of the (would be) collaborators.
On a second note, it is indeed possible that Putin might have decided to postpone the
decision for the purge after the world cup but I will not believe before I see Medvedev and
Nabiullina be fired.
The Kremlin is financing the craziest knee-jerk Russophobes to discredit liberalism. The
two exist in a comfy symbiotic relationship. What is so difficult about that?
Now let's connect all the dots: there is a pro-western (in realty, western-controlled)
faction inside the government which is financing those who are attempting to overthrow
Putin by making him unpopular with the Russian general public (which overwhelmingly opposes
"liberal" economic policies and which despises the Russian liberal elites) by constantly
forcing him into liberal economic policies which he clearly does not like (he declared
himself categorically opposed to such policies in 2005) and the so-called "patriotic media"
is covering it all up.
The same "fifth column" that has over the past 18 years also forced Putin into adopting a
flat tax, liberalizing land sales, monetizing benefits, and now pensions reform.
If Putin still hasn't managed to get rid of them, then what the hell is he good for?
At least, that's would I'd be asking – if I was the sort to rail against neoliberal
fifth columns.
Reality is, all of those were great successes. Putin is an economic neoliberal and that
is a good thing .
Even if this was the case, surely he must be aware that 92% of Russians oppose this
so-called "reform".
Where on Earth do people support raising the pension age? Thankfully, many
countries (including Russia) have safeguards against demotic idiocy.
As a direct result from these plans, the Communist Party of Russia is launching a
referendum against this project while the "Just Russia" Party is now collecting signatures
to dismiss the entire government.
The business elites are not in a position to demand anything. Medvedev is there as a
whipping boy to protect Putin's ratings. He is very good at that, and that, too, is a good
thing.
This is the same media which will gladly criticize Iran and Hezbollah but never wonder
why the Russian main TV stations are spewing pro-Israeli propaganda on a daily basis.
The author's anti-Israel crusade is not Russia's. That Russia is not to Iran, Palestine,
or Hezbollah what the US is to Israel (a slavish sponsor) is also a good thing.
The same "fifth column" that has over the past 18 years also forced Putin into adopting
a flat tax, liberalizing land sales, monetizing benefits, and now pensions reform.
If Putin still hasn't managed to get rid of them, then what the hell is he good for?
Reality is, all of those were great successes. Putin is an economic neoliberal and that
is a good thing .
Even if Bershidsky gets it, however in the field which doesn't require any serious skills,
except for good accounting. Now, you don't want me to refer to Russia's actual industries,
especially hi-tech, which are nationalized, do you? Does the title Rostec ring a bell? What
is remarkable, founding of Rostec somehow coincided with Putin's Munich Speech–both
events are hardly any evidence of neoliberalism. Is Putin a liberal? Yes, but to a degree and
political mostly–his progression from liberal economic model to a mixed model since
2014 is visible to people with even rudimentary knowledge of Russia. This is not to mention
that Russia, quoting even Wiki:
Russia has an upper-middle income mixed economy with state ownership in strategic areas
of the economy.
Some private bank is not a "strategic" area, nor is "liberalization" of land sales,
resources and real hi-tech sector, however, together with agriculture, are. Since the start
of Putin's tenure, Russia re-nationalized, that is returned to the state control or
ownership, an enormous number of truly strategic companies. In fact, whole industries. Putin
recently himself clearly stated that, especially pointing out a bonanza Russian State got
from 2008 collapse and from sanctions. These are hardly signs of neoliberalism, not to
mention that Russia, rightly so, is considered one of the most protectionist nations in the
world. This is if to discount all this theoretical and metaphysical mambo-jumbo on the
obvious fact that neoliberalism is dead, together with its founding Free Trade gospel, and
stinks to heaven, poisoning surroundings. And, yes, I am sure Russian State has no control
over Novatek (it is a bad joke).
At the very top, President Eltisn was mostly drunk while the country was run by 7
bankers the so-called "oligarchs" ( 6 of which were Jews ): the
"Semibankirshchina".
I think Putin today is in a similar situation as Stalin was in the late 1940s regarding
Jewish political activism and assertiveness, etc.
Despite Stalin's willingness to support Israel early on, various historians suppose that
antisemitism in the late 1940s and early 1950s was motivated by Stalin's possible
perception of Jews as a potential "fifth column" in light of a pro-Western Israel in
the Middle East.
[...] I think increasing the Jewish (and general) death toll in World War II and decreasing
the "official" Jewish population of the Soviet Union served two purposes for
Stalin.
Firstly, for propaganda purposes against the Germans higher death tolls were useful,
and secondly lower "official" numbers of Jews in the Soviet Union were likely intended to
discourage and prevent Jewish empowerment and organizing
[...]
Jeffrey Veidlinger writes that "By October 1948, it was obvious that Mikhoels was by no
means the sole advocate of Zionism among Soviet Jews. The revival of Jewish cultural
expression during the war had fostered a general sense of boldness among the Jewish
masses.
This is slightly off-topic, but I just commented on this subject matter in another
comments thread, which has to do with the fact that many more persons of Jewish origin live
in Russia and the former Soviet states than is commonly known or reported:
Here the original in Russian: http://tavrio.ru/index.php/politics/nazpol/42-skolko-evreev-pf
Archived link: http://archive.is/EDYeZ
[...] And I believe that today, after a great aliyah, the number of halachic Jews in the
countries of the former USSR is about four million. And six million more are those who know
about their Jewish origin.
[...]
Half of the top 25 billionaires in Russia, I believe, come from a Jewish background. I know
strong Jewish ethnic and religious networking, nepotism, etc. exists, but to achieve such a
high billionaire density even the Jewish population has to be at least 2% of the Russian
population (about 3 million at least out of the 150 million Russian population) like it is
the case in the U.S. (about 6 million Jews out of a 300 million U.S. population).
Not just 400,000 (which would be 0.3% of the Russian population) or even lower
estimates, like some sources claim. Wikipedia for example puts the number of Jews in
Russia, at the moment, at a laughable: 179,500
[...]
, which would be about o.15% of the Russian population, but Jews are half of the top 25
billionaires in Russia?
Something does not quite compute here, to put it mildly
Putin might know how many Jews really died in the Holocaust and in World War II,
and this is his way of telegraphing it and signalling to the Jewish Russian community that
they should not get too uppity and bold?
'Holocaust on ice' dance by wife of Putin official causes uproar
Putin has ensured that foreign interests have been prevented from taking over vital
Russian industries such as Oil,Gas, Minerals, Banking and Defence. At best, foreign companies
can only get limited concessions under conditions that suit the Russian State, eg BP.
Putin isn't a Neoliberal, he's a pragmatist. This is a very good thing.
But you are of course correct. Russia is of course not neoliberal so far as Putin's
kleptocratic chums are concerned.
Exactly, nor do you have any qualifications nor skills to write about Russia since, and I
quote Margo Simonyan describing your kind.
Maybe you will finally understand that you do not believe us not because we lie, but
because you know horseradish (dick) about surrounding world, because you are badly
educated, do not read much and when do, do not read what is needed, you visit all the wrong
places and communicate with the same small bunch of prejudiced and/or mental people, who
only reinforce your condescending ignorance.
The picture is mixed. The Federal Antimonopoly Service has been given real teeth since its
humiliation by the Customs Service under Medvedev. It goes beyond antimonopoly. For example,
it reviews incoming foreign investment in the 42 strategic industries. This was originally a
protectionist committee. It gave Pepsico a hard time for buying Wimm-Bill-Dann, clearly a
military asset. These days its approach to foreigners is "how can I help you? Do you want
money?" It is frequently chaired by Putin.
Kudrin's audit committee looks like being FAS Mark 2. He has been given the tools to take
Sechin and other state moguls apart. Will he get to the Rotenbergs/Gazprom? Their behaviour
is outrageous. Certainly not the kind of corporate governance required for a competitive
market. e.g. Gazprom Bank has a Rotenberg son in charge of loans. Gazprom lent another
Rotenberg son the money to build Aviapark. No Rotenberg capital at risk during the whole
process. Now a $1 Bn asset. Kudrin has a target rich environment. Will he settle out of court
or make some high level examples?
I judge a wo/man not on his/her words, but his/her deeds. Suffice to say, the difference
between Russia in 2000 and Russia today, speaks volumes all by itself and is fully self
explanatory as well.
One day the world will realize how close we've come to WW III in the period between
2015/2020. An extended version of the Cuban missile crisis, if you will, but this time with
only one statesman participating in this conundrum, the president of the Russian Federation,
H.E. Mr. V.V. Putin.
Much blood has been shed in Syria, including Russian, so it would be unfair to single out
one particular country, but I know if it hand't been for Russia stepping up to the plate in
2015, the political landscape [in the M.E. and beyond] would be littered with the corpses of
liberty, freedom and unity and the dust wouldn't settle down for decades to come.
The Russian military went in, turned the tide and most of the temporary influx is
retreating back to the motherland as we speak. That's how a 'job' is done properly.
Kudrin has a target rich environment. Will he settle out of court or make some high
level examples?
Read by letters: F-S-B (Operational Technical Departments–Operativno-Technicheskie
Otdely). And then there is always G(R)U. Sure, those boys such as Ulyukaev or Kudrin who saw
so "much" in their lives are real "contenders". I am sure Naryshkin knows what color of stool
Siluanov is having every day. The same goes for Kudrin. But he is a smart boy–he knows
the routine. You obviously missed the revelation of the actual Putin's position in
KGB/SVR–it was all over Russia's TV. Other than that–I agree, it is a "target
rich" environment and yes, Kudrin is perfect for this job.
Hi Daniel – so good to see you again, I was wondering recently where you might
be.
I agree with you – the "proof of the pudding" says it all. One has only to look at
the last 18 years, at where Russia and Russians were back then, and look at her now, all
under Putins' direction and overall management. You do that, then read this sort of stuff and
wonder just what is going on in some people's minds. It makes less than no sense –
which means one has to start looking at premises one would not like to think about.
As for expecting some publicist who thinks Putin is a follower of Andropov as a person worth
printing and quoting – words fail me.
Good to hear from you Daniel – take care mi amigo.
"Since "The Saker" does not approve difference of opinion or dissent on his own site i
will post my response here."
Exactly what brought me here to comment, not on The Saker's own site.
Because I am being critical of the articles' thesis, and because I have criticised the
provenance of the two writers of the article on pension reform, I knew it would not be
published on his site.
I even had a comment I made, refusing to accept a pathetic reference for supposedly "proving"
that V.V. promised to never raise the retirement age, redacted. There's an unfortunate aspect
to the Saker site that puts one off making useful critical comment – the "mods" can
redact your work – or even ditch the entire piece – and leave a vague comment
insulting to your own probity, leaving it looking as though you are some foul mouthed abuser,
yet because you wont be published you can't defend yourself.
I do have to commend "Unz" for it's freedom of expression.
Oh – I agree with your take on the article too – so much of Saker has become a
doom laden cry that denigrates and decries Putin – which seems very odd.
Some more background information on how the Soviet internal passport registration system
worked, for anyone interested:
In the Soviet Union, when someone with parents of two nationalities received identity
papers at age 16, he could pick which nationality to list. A child of a Jewish father and
non-Jewish mother could put down "Jew [ or not ]." The religious principle of
matrilineal descent was irrelevant.
[...]
Persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union started with a policy Joseph Stalin initiated in
1937. Every Soviet citizen was required to carry an internal passport and under
"nationality," Jews were required to list "Jewish." Beckerman says this policy actually may
have been a tough decision for Stalin.
"On the one hand, he followed this Leninist principle [that] all Soviet citizens should
just melt into one general populace that doesn't have any distinctions for nationality," he
says. " But on the other hand, he wanted to control this population and Jews always had
kind of a strange place in the Russian society psyche, so he wanted to know who the Jews
were. "
Following the firsthand account of discrimination experienced by Jews in the Soviet
Union due to having their "nationality" registered as Jewish in their internal passports. I
believe this lends credence to the assumption that most (half-)Jews with just one Jewish
parent likely opted to be identified/registered by the nationality of their non-Jewish
parent, and further strengthens my hypothesis that Holocaust and Jewish World War II
casualties might have been significantly lower than what is generally accepted by
mainstream and anti-revisionist Holocaust and World War II historians and researchers
National identity in USSR was important. Well, it is always important and yes, there was
latent antisemitism (or whatever it is called) in some spheres of Soviet life. Not as big,
though, as Jewish dissidents love to present to those who are ready to listen.
Not as big, though, as Jewish dissidents love to present to those who are ready to
listen.
Hahahaha I agree
Do you happen to know if Andrey Illarionov comes from a Jewish background? I know he is a
dissident now, but I'm not sure whether he is ethnically Jewish or not.
Auschwitz joke angers Jewish groups
Andrei Illarionov, an economic adviser to the president, made the comparison during a
visit to St Petersburg. He has recommended that Russia should not sign the protocol.
[...]
"Then we realised Gosplan was much more humane and we ought to call the Kyoto Protocol an
international gulag. In the Gulag, though, you got the same ration daily and it didn't get
smaller day by day. In the end, we had to call the Kyoto Protocol an international
Auschwitz."
I missed the revelation. I tend to focus on business rather than politics. Expert is the
only journal I try to read regularly. (I am not fluent but I can usually manage if I
focus).
Soros's newspaper still appears in Russia.
A few days after MH17 the front page text something like 'Sorry, Netherlands', in Dutch.
Just imagine a few days after Sept 11 a USA newspaper with headlines, something like 'sorry,
we had to kill a few thousand Americans in order te get an excuse for wars against
Afghanistan and Iraq' ?
After what happened in the groves at jisr al shughour russia stepped up and did what was
right.in that time in the syrian war they stood the moral high ground.the rest is
history.bear in mind that 100 km away live over million russians and that does not include
cyprus.most support likud.
Well spoken. Analysts like the Saker would have us believe that what is happening in Russia
is not really happening but something else is happening – something hidden, something
powerful, all-pervasive, eating away at Putin's power base and destroying him behind the
scenes – like the john Birch Society – A communist under every bed! From what I
can see, and I do not believe I am alone by any means, is that if there are dark forces at
work in the Kremlin and elsewhere in the media for example, they are profoundly weak and
ineffective in Russia at this point. And whilst they might exist, there is little outward
evidence of their workings except the odd Navalny incident, or the constant drippings from
Western oriented media like the Moscow Times. If you want to see the effects of a REAL,
persistent, powerful, pervasive 5th column, you need look any further than the USA with its
Zionist lobby and MIC influence on politics and policy. Or the EU with its incredibly
powerful bureaucracy and its link to Soros and his ilk. Those are real 5th columns, and by
comparison, Russia has little to worry about.
I have followed the Saker for years now, and I too have seen this gradual transformation
from top notch analyst to conspiracy theorist. His website has become almost cult-like. He
has a few 'moderators' who operate anonymously behind the scenes to filter out unflattering
content – not just the crazy insults and freaks that websites like his attract, but
honest content that seeks to criticise, sometimes sharply, his views. If you read the comment
section, it reads like a religious cult at times, most comments prefaced by the seemingly
obligatory preface like "Great analysis, Saker!" "Well said, Saker!" And always there are the
comments both on the part of the Saker and his 'community' that praises that community for
being 'special', unlike the rubbish of other sites, insightful, and more knowledgeable than
others – heaping praise on themselves at the expense of other site with comments to the
effect of "We should be proud that we are not like other sites.".
I fear the Saker has over time fallen prey to the old devil's trick of taking oneself too
seriously. Someone who is constant the object of unquestioned praise can easily fall into
that trap.
Good to see that freedom of thought and freedom of expression is thriving in Russia. They
have fortunately a long way to go in MSM herd-think before they achieve our oppressive
anti-human intellectual conformity.
I agree in that presenting Mr. Putin and Russia as weak seems to encourage military
action, or a coup, against it, just "NOW", when the US is trying ( or simply, pretending ) an
intend of approach ..This has nothing to do with suppossed "depressive" mood of The Saker
himself ..this is a plan .
Thus I agree with you both in the general tone and confussing meddley of articles at
Saker´s site, and as well with your impression on the last "generation" of mods ( to my
view part of the real staff of this project, The Saker ) who, not only were put in charge of
getting rid ( by using the most dirty tricks ) from the genuine former regular
commenters/moderators who had a very personal view on what a good moderation and avoiding of
harsh censure was, but also have displayed a shameful dictatorial censure and editing which
not only amputates genuine and legitimate oppinions but also, as you notice, try, at the same
time, to discredit you as commenter for the rest, by implying you were being rude and
offensive and moreover denying the right to make things clear by allowing you a response to
such a clear outrage, according with most probably direct guidelines from the people who lead
The Saker from behind .
This tactic, of obliterating your comment and answering you by implying that you were
being offensive, ( and even denigrating ) towards somebody ( mainly the author/ owner of the
site and/or his relatives, coleagues and friends ), is common with other sites, like Pat
Lang´s SST. This is why I think these two sites are "closely" related .being their
paterns so similar also both have military ( more concretely counterintelligence ) background
.have a harsh anti-communist stance . and have a team of attack dogs who try to get you
giving up on posting when what you say is of no convenience for them ( or their editorial
line ) .Then, they use the alibi on your comment not being "intelligent", but then you have
there the ubiquitous one-liner sycophant who says nothing all over these two places
permanently .who are never summoned .
But, Isabella, what you so confidently say about Mr. Andropov´s policies, intrigates
me, since I wonder what idea you have on what the ideas, strategies, tactics and future plans
of Mr. Andropov could be to state that VVP is not following them ..I think it is impossible
for you, or even for Mr. Khazin, to know what the plans of Mr. Andropov would be, since he
was, at different times in the USSR, at the helms of secret security agency and foreign
policy, whose main directives were for sure secret, and not at the hand/knowledge of anybody
but a few under/of his "umbrella"/confidence call them "siloviki" or whatever you want .
Thus, in spite of that VVP moves seem to confirm he is a liberal playing the same play
than the capitalist West, we do not know nothing for sure, since, if this would be obvious
for all us, somebody would not be doing its work rightly, as certain senior strategist told
me at Fort Russ .
The worst side of this secrecy, obviously needed for strategic purposes, is that common
people, as happens to me, could start feeling dissapointed with VVP and discouraged of
continuing supporting him .thus some signs from time to time would be neccessary for the
people to continue trusting .
Zionists are Satanists and undermine governments everywhere that they get a foothold and they
already created a holocaust in Russia with the 1917 overthrow of the czar and the resulting
murder of some 60 million Russians and are now trying to undermine the Russian government
again, this is no surprise as this is what Zionists do ie they are killers and wreckers of
governments and are trying to do the same here in America.
One thing noticeable regarding people who comment Putin's policies from abroad, not from
within Russia: much projection of own prejudices and a lot of wishful thinking.
One thing noticeable regarding Putin's policies: no prejudice, no wishful thinking, just
Russian self-consciousness and pragmatism.
Order is restored. Russia's military might is restored. The economy and the living standard
have improved. Russia masters her destiny. So far, what he does works. What else?
The article is written by Saker without any doubt for it has his imprimatur of length for
readers like me, matzo ball radio says it all. Finally, it seems that Jews and Russians have
a sado masochistic arrangements; one can't do without the other. Qui bono?
There seems to be unanimity on this site condemning the Saker, and those commenting on his
blog. But what if he is simply correct in his suspicions about a fifth column in Russia? Is
that really so strange? Do you really think the Atlantacists and their ilk are nonexistent? I
notice no real proof of the inaccuracy of the Saker's contentions, but a lot of ad hominem
critique of his "mood". Maybe he is dead wrong in all his ideas about Putin's Russia –
but where's the proof?? The commenters here seem in danger of falling into the same baseless
contentions trap they accuse the Saker of.
said:
"Putin might know how many Jews really died in the Holocaust "
Please preset proof that any Jews died in 'the holocau$t' as alleged.
Revisionists are just the messengers, the absurd impossibility of the 'holocaust'
storyline is the message.
The '6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers' are scientifically impossible frauds.
see the 'holocaust' scam debunked here: http://codoh.com
No name calling, level playing field debate here: http://forum.codoh.com
To think about "Atlanticists" as some kind of coherent group is to submit to Saker's
paranoia. Such paranoia is normal in nationalism. Shades of the John Birch society. If you
look for evidence of conspiracy X you will always find it.
Very well written synopsis of the current situation, and how Russia came to be in this place
at this time. I appreciate the recap of the history from Yeltsin moving forward.
The "atlanticists" are a rampant fifth column throughout Europe. Germany is particularly
badly infested and in need of a thorough cleaning out. Russians will be better off if they
can keep them mostly out of their country.
Die Zeit Die Anstalt Netzwerke Think Tank Josef Joffe
Given Russian life expectancy, Russian pension age was too low. Naturally, raising it
temporarily lowered Putin's popularity, but taking that hit is the essence of
forward-thinking leadership.
You Israeli-First traitors love citing Ezekiel 38 and Isaiah 17 to justify your wicked
warmongering, but in your malice you have been blinded to the fact that Isaiah 17 describes
not only the destruction of Damascus but also the destruction of a wicked faction in Israel:
the Baal-worshipping Zionists whom you think are beyond God's reach.
These are the people who murdered millions and millions under Yeltsin. By "privatizing" and
other wonderful "conservative" "capitalist" policies. Getting rid of Communism by killing all
the people who benefit by it. Brilliant.
So I guess that makes these "5th columnists" good, right? By your lights, anyway.
I'm still puzzled as to why Illarionov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Illarionov
made that Kyoto Protocol-Auschwitz comparison, and I am still not sure if he is ethnically
Jewish or not. I found some new indicators that point to him having Jewish roots, though.
Either he made the comment in sincerity and not as a joke, or someone (Putin?) told him to
say it that way for propaganda purposes. Maybe being asked/forced to make that comparison
also contributed to him quitting his job some months later?
In a 2005 interview after his resignation from his economic advisory post, he says the
following, which could indicate that the Kyoto Protocol-Auschwitz comparison was not of his
own making, but a talking point given to him by the Kremlin public relations and propaganda
department:
This (gas) war was the last drop in my decision to resign. I was offered to take part
in it as a propagandist who would explain why the price hike and everything else that is
being done in our bilateral relations are liberal economic policies. However, the
factors that led to this decision have nothing in common with liberal economic
policies.
Having outlined all of the problems with the country, he announced who was responsible
– the Jews. "[Yegor] Gaidar [in charge of privatisation under Yeltsin] – he
is a Jew. What good has come in the last 17 years?" He continued, "We are international
communists. Our fight is not with the Chechens or the Georgians. It is with the Jews!"
[...]
The Jewish community in Moscow were equally concerned about Medvedev's ethnicity. One
local Jewish leader was quoted as saying, "I pray it isn't true, because it would only make
trouble, for him and for us".
During his presidency, Vladimir Putin built his popularity on the traditional
ground of national pride and defence of Russia from ill-willed foreigners, but, to his
credit, he has a record of speaking out against antisemitism. His comments that he was
"ashamed" of antisemitism in Russia when he visited Auschwitz in 2005 were seen as
groundbreaking here.
Putin seems to send mixed messages on and to the Jewish community. One to please his
domestic audience of voters who, understandably, are overwhelmingly counter-semitic, because
they blame predominately-Jewish economists and bankers and their radical and failed economic
policies for the many millions of premature deaths during the 1990s economic crisis in
Russia.
An extra 2.5-3 million Russian adults died in middle age in the period 1992-2001
than would have been expected based on 1991 mortality.
And one philo-semitic or semitic-sympathique message to his predominately-Jewish
billionaire/oligarch financial backers to assure them and clam them down that they are safe
with him, unless they turn on him or try to undermine his authority.
Here a video of Illarionov talking about the Russian economy. By the way, he considers
himself to be a libertarian, which could be another indicator that he is Jewish, since
libertarianism is very popular with Jews https://fee.org/articles/libertarianism-rejects-anti-semitism/
Economics in Russia – Andrei Illarionov | Rhodes 2016
The important question: does the truth matter? Most people want the answer they want, not
the truth and should be forced to truthfully answer why. One day that will happen.
With all due respect, I think that seeing Russian politics as eternal fight between Eurasian
Sovereignists (used to be called Slavyanophiles under tsars) and Atlantic Integrationists
(used to be called Westerners in tsarist times) is naïve, maybe even childish. Not to
mention that this does not explain why China is where it is now, and many other obvious
things.
I'd propose an alternative theory. Russian and Chinese elites include people who are OK
being second- or even third-rate in the world elites, and those who want to be first-rate.
The latter are patriotic, because you cannot be first-rate unless you have a strong truly
sovereign country behind you. Apparently, Putin, Xi, and many Russian and Chinese oligarchs
supporting them, want to be seen as first-rate, equals among equals, in contrast to pathetic
nonentities like Ukrainian "president" Poroshenko, most Ukrainian oligarchs, Polish elites,
or elites of vaudeville Baltic statelets.
Thing is, if your country is a poodle of the US, you are second-rate at best (e.g., EU
elites), but when your country is a poodle of the EU, you are no better than third-rate. So,
the whole intrigue in Russian and Chinese politics is essentially the struggle between
ambitious members of the elites (they call themselves patriots, thereby wooing the support of
the populace), and weaker-spirited members, who would rather be third-rate than fight for a
better position (pro-US, or generally pro-Western forces). So far proud patriots are winning
in both Russia and China, but lower grade pro-Western forces won't concede and keep fighting.
As far as pension reform in Russia goes, robbing the public to enrich the elites is in the
interests of both factions. However, I won't be surprised if the patriotic faction blames it
all on pro-Western forces, which Russian and Chinese people do sincerely despise.
That's what Ukies hope for. They were always wrong (Mazepa serving Sweden, some scum
serving Austro-Hungarian Empire, some scum serving Hitler, "holier-than-thou" communists
serving USSR, etc.). They are wrong again. But it's inhumane to say this: you don't want to
shatter pipe dreams of people who have nothing else, and never will.
Lots of people pretended to be persecuted just to get freebees in the US and elsewhere.
Antisemitsm was by ~90% the myth created by these people. One example I know first-hand: in
my year at the school of Biology in the best and most privileged Moscow State University
about 20-25% of students were Jewish or half-Jewish, whereas Jews constituted 2-3% of the
USSR population.
A note for those who know stats: this was a representative sampling: ~ 250 people
graduated from MSU School of Biology in my year, and the picture was pretty much the same in
subsequent years.
The following source claims his mother is Jewish, but I don't know how reliable he is:
As a sidenote, Medvedev's visit is all the more interesting given that he is a Jew, the
son of a Jewish mother and the first Jew to become President of Russia, much less enter the
Kremlin in any capacity besides the following: doctor, scientist, military hero,
foreigner.
I've personally confirmed Medvedev's Jewish identity with former Muscovites, who say
that Medvedev's mother regularly attended the main synagogue in Moscow. The subject has
not been broached much in Russian media, as Medvedev is Putin's man, and, well, Russian
journalists know what's good for them, or they have an accident – there is freedom of
choice in Russia. I wonder if anyone's bothered to tell the Arabs.
You will notice that the comments section at that site is infested with leftist dinosaurs.
Maybe they have a certain influence on the analyses.
Ozymandias
You are spot on. I, too, have noticed a change toward the negative on The Saker's part. A
bit befuddling. Seems that Russia and Putin have been doing well on numerous fronts, in spite
of Western attempts to the contrary. Difficulties may often exist, but I just don't see 5th
column doom and gloom.
Putin is perhaps the most rational, level headed, intelligent leader whom I've seen in my
lifetime. Wish we had his equivalent in the USA.
"... The reason they endlessly get it wrong, of course, is that they listen to the exiles in the US and elsewhere. Those exiles still mainly come from the old upper classes, with their eternal sense of entitlement to power, and their air-tickets ready in their pockets to fly back to Tehran and take back their positions under the Shah. Because of course, the Iranian revolution was one of the first populist movements, where the religious regime appealed directly to "the people", and the upper classes were cut out. The system has worked well - "the people" have continued to vote for the regime, naturally being a majority. ..."
There was a distinct change earlier this year, after the second US fusillade of cruise
missiles, and the Israeli bombing of "Iranian" bases in Syria.
We were all expecting further military action, but nothing happened, in particular no more
Israeli action, although Iranian forces in Syria were hardly damaged.
Instead they started muttering about subversion of the Iranian state from the inside,
which is what b is writing about here. That was a big sign that the all-out assault on Iran
has been called off.
Why? Evidently because the military say no. The scenario was the same as the one back in
2012, the last time we thought to see Israeli aircraft getting permission from Saudi to do
their bombing runs on Iran, but it didn't happen then, because the Israeli military were
saying no. Evidently the position hasn't changed, I was relieved to discover, although the
propagandists claimed the plan is all worked out now, and Iran has little defence.
Well, internal subversion of the regime, then. Hasn't the US been attempting to do
precisely that for 40 years now, ever since the revolution overthrew the Shah in 1979? What
are the conditions which mean that they are going to succeed now, when they've failed for 40
years?
The reason they endlessly get it wrong, of course, is that they listen to the exiles
in the US and elsewhere. Those exiles still mainly come from the old upper classes, with
their eternal sense of entitlement to power, and their air-tickets ready in their pockets to
fly back to Tehran and take back their positions under the Shah. Because of course, the
Iranian revolution was one of the first populist movements, where the religious regime
appealed directly to "the people", and the upper classes were cut out. The system has worked
well - "the people" have continued to vote for the regime, naturally being a
majority.
I don't want to get into a historical disquisition (which in any case I've said before),
but the reason this works is that there's history behind it - I'm pretty sure that the
original Islamisation of Iran (I don't mean the Arab conquest, but the conversion of the
country) was a popular revolt against the pre-Islamic nationalist aristocracy, who didn't pay
any taxes. The present-day Iranian exiles attach themselves strongly to that old nationalist
aristocracy, including most academics of Iranian origin in western universities. They don't
seem to notice that the class they admire grindingly oppressed the poor, such that it led to
a revolution.
currently having an online debate about conditions in the crimea, specifically alleged
russian oppression of crimeans in 2018, but also conditions leading up to the initial
referendum (my opponents claim annexation or conquest, and cite a freedom house survey to back
it up--from what i can see freedom house is fully funded by the us govt). my understanding is
the us fomented the coup in ukraine, along with nato, as opposed to the ukrainian people
rebelling against a russian puppet, which is the us line i believe. any articles or sources
detailing the us role in all this, or rebutting claims that crimeans are being terrified into
silence in 2018 about russian oppression, would be appreciated.
About half of the respondents admit to having been taken by surprise by Russia's actions in
2014. Interestingly, there is agreement among the Crimean population, including the Crimean
Tatars, that successive Ukrainian governments had neglected the region. Roughly one third
of respondents pointed to this neglect as the main cause of the developments in 2014. ...
The majority of survey respondents agree with the statement that the different ethnic
groups in Crimea currently live peacefully side by side. Twenty percent disagree "fully" or
"rather" with this statement, thereby indicating both an uncertainty and unease with the
situation at the moment that reaches beyond the Crimean Tatar share of the population
(about 12 percent). This result is mirrored in the reaction to the ban on the main
political Crimean Tatar organization, the Mejlis, by the Russian authorities: 20 percent
"fully" or "rather" disagreed with this step, compared to 80 percent endorsing this policy.
... The survey clearly spells out the severe disruption of links to the rest of Ukraine,
limited travel to other parts of Russia, the absence of personal international reference
points, and a near-complete integration into the Russian media sphere.
This combination makes any change in the opinions of the majority of the Crimean
population on the annexation unlikely in the foreseeable future. However, it is also clear
that the Crimean population's high expectations in the Russian economy and trust in Russian
(but not Crimean) institutions needs to be carefully managed by Moscow in view of the
already strained financial situation of the majority of the Crimean population.
The authors are also cautious about drawing overly-optimistic conclusions about the present
time: "The risk of conflict emerging within Ukrainian society and growing serious remains,
based on noticeable differences among residents of different regions about the further
geopolitical direction the country should move in. There are also serious problems
connected to restoring Ukraine's territorial integrity and the model of coexistence with
those living in the regions that are currently occupied, how to reach reconciliation and
mutual understanding." ...
Joining the EU remains a strong desire among a majority of Ukrainians. In September
2016, 51% of those surveyed by the Rating Group put integration with the EU ahead of
joining Russia's Customs Union or some other association. Still, in Rating's September 2015
survey, 57% of Ukrainians did so, and in September 2014, 59% did. This noticeable decline
could be the result of a number of factors. For one thing, the Association Agreement did
not have a noticeable impact on the standard of living of most Ukrainians. Many Ukrainians
are also upset at what they see as the European Union's limp response to Russia's
aggression against their country. And the way the granting of a visa-free regime to the EU
has been dragged out for years and the obvious internal squabbles among the Union's members
have also left their imprint on Ukrainians.
Ukraine is a very diverse country. Trump coming to an agreement with Putin that eases
tensions instead of agreeing/dividing on spheres of influence would be their best hope.
pretzelattack@3 re: "...rebutting claims that crimeans are being terrified into silence in
2018 about russian oppression."
I honestly have not heard anything about actual oppression - just that some
Ukrainians and Tartars are still - today - not terribly happy with the
secession/annexation/transfer. Acts of civil disobedience were generally individual, "I don't
want to be part of Russia and I'm not signing these papers or paying taxes," kind of thing. I
know any polls of Crimeans are noted to be terribly flawed - neither the pro-Russian nor the
pro-Ukraine people trust anyone taking polls. They'll not answer or give an answer that seems
to agree with whatever 'side' the pollster might be from.
I can't see how this issue could be fairly considered without at least an acknowledgement
that in 1954, 1.1 million people in Crimea woke up one day to find they were now citizens of
the Ukraine SSR. No polls, no vote, no discussion and no terribly good reasons.
If you need sources to back up your argument that the US helped to foment the Maidan
uprising that overthrew the Yanukovych government, here are a couple that feature a video and
a transcript of a phone conversation.
Information CLearing House: Victoria Nuland [former US Assistant Secretary of State for
Europe during Obama administration] Admits: US Has Invested $5 Billion In The Development of
Ukrainian "Democratic Institutions" http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37599.htm
The article includes the video of the speech Nuland gave to the Washington press corp in
December 2013 in which she talks about "investing" the $5 billion.
This is the famous phone call in which Nuland utters her most memorable lines: "Yats
[Yatsenyuk] is the guy [for deputy prime minister]" and "Fuck the EU".
-----
I have also found details of the Korsun massacre incident that occurred on 20 February
2014. I had known about this massacre but in a hazy way and had thought only a few people had
been killed. However this incident is much more grave and this was the stimulus for the
Crimeans to organise their independence referendum and break away from Ukraine.
Eight buses of Crimean supporters of the Yanukovych government were returning to Crimea
when the convoy was ambushed by Nazi thugs (who had known of the convoy's movements in
advance). The thugs ordered everyone off the buses, beat them up and tortured them. Several
people were killed.
"Americans prepared very seriously and thoroughly for their entrance into Crimea, –
said a member of the Federation Council Committee on defense and security, Dmitry Sablin.
– A year before the events on Maidan in Kiev, they made repair estimates of a number of
buildings in Sevastopol and in Simferopol, where they planned to house the headquarters and
intelligence units. Military airfields and garrisons, which then belonged to Ukraine, they
considered as their own military installations and even sent instructions for their
conversion to NATO standards. In the plans of the U.S. military April 2014 was the start time
of upgrades in Crimea. It seemed to them that the issue has been settled. But the referendum
had thrown off their plans, and on March 18, Crimea became Russian again, where the overseas
guests were no longer welcome. Americans later themselves acknowledged that the Russians
outplayed them on all counts. Well, and from helplessness imposed sanctions -- as a revenge
for Crimea".
This is the tender put out by the US Navy to invite private companies to propose
renovation plans for a school for naval officers' children in the military base in
Sevastopol.
Sabine @6: On political/national/ethnic determinations.
It is a messy situation. I had thought one of the reasons we hate the Nazis is because
ethno-nationalism is evil. And yet, most of the West's leaders fully support Israel, and the
AZ Empire is promoting Kurdish ethno-states in Iraq and Syria (though not in Turkey, where
50% of all Kurds live).
We were all ready to accept a referendum that would have seen Scotland secede from Great
Britain, and yet when people in regions of 1991 Ukraine resisted the Western-fomented coup in
2014, and voted to secede, we are told they are terrorists to be crushed.
Most of the national borders in the Middle East and Africa were created by an elite in
Great Britain and Europe, which divided families and crammed together enemies, creating the
inevitable century of turmoil. And yet, here most of us support the sovereignty of some of
those artificially-created neocolonial states.
Messy.
Personally, I believe in the right to self-determination. If a group of people in a region
choose to form, or dissolve, or maintain, or expand a political entity, then they should be
allowed to. Such decisions should be made by the will of those people only.
What I see as illegitimate is people from outside that region interfering to force their
will on others.
MFS also travelled to the Donbass and made a documentary about his journey there. I saw
the documentary a couple of years ago and from memory I believe he met Givi, one of the
Donbass military commanders. Givi died in early 2017 when a missile hit his office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukQgVoTnAuE
Jen. Thanks for the great links on the Ukraine situation. Oliver Stone created a stunning
documentary, that is the best on the subject I've seen: "Ukraine on Fire"
Unfortunately, it appears to be banned or at lest heavily censored within the US. I saw it
on RT.
I've seen several uploads of this documentary, which was made in 2015. But the resolution
of this version is superb. I recommend it for everyone actually, and I'm happy to say that
it's being hosted on the Vesti News channel - which is worth exploring in its own right.
This is the definitive story told from the inside of the people of Crimea forming a
resistance force to take their land back from Ukraine. It was already happening but the
Korsun massacre detailed above by commenters was the galvanizing point that showed the
Crimeans that Kiev was coming to massacre it also, unless it resisted. And as everyone knew,
Crimea was hated most of all, and its suffering would be far worse than that of Donbass.
Kondrashev is a popular Russian news commentator, and he interviews Putin extensively in
the film. This was made one year after the Crimea restoration to Russia, after the events of
that time, coordinated by Putin, were de-classified.
The documentary is a dramatic and stirring work. You will be totally in love with with
Crimea and the Russian people by the end of it. And you will understand how the Maidan was a
US color revolution in classical style. Your heart will jump when you see the snipers kill
the hard-pressed Berkut. And it's a true story, made from real footage, and with parts
reenacted by the actual people.
When the polite green men show up, in the very nick of time, you may find yourself weeping
with gladness.
"... Since the start of Putin's tenure, Russia re-nationalized, that is returned to the state control or ownership, an enormous number of truly strategic companies. ..."
"... These are hardly signs of neoliberalism, not to mention that Russia, rightly so, is considered one of the most protectionist nations in the world. This is if to discount all this theoretical and metaphysical mambo-jumbo on the obvious fact that neoliberalism is dead, together with its founding Free Trade gospel, and stinks to heaven, poisoning surroundings. And, yes, I am sure Russian State has no control over Novatek (it is a bad joke). ..."
"... Kudrin's audit committee looks like being FAS Mark 2. He has been given the tools to take Sechin and other state moguls apart. Will he get to the Rotenbergs/Gazprom? ..."
The same "fifth column" that has over the past 18 years also forced Putin into adopting a
flat tax, liberalizing land sales, monetizing benefits, and now pensions reform.
If Putin still hasn't managed to get rid of them, then what the hell is he good for? ...
Reality is, all of those were great successes. Putin is an economic neoliberal and that
is a good thing .
Even if Bershidsky gets it, however in the field which doesn't require any serious skills,
except for good accounting. Now, you don't want me to refer to Russia's actual industries,
especially hi-tech, which are nationalized, do you? Does the title Rostec ring a bell? What
is remarkable, founding of Rostec somehow coincided with Putin's Munich Speech--both events
are hardly any evidence of neoliberalism. Is Putin a liberal? Yes, but to a degree and
political mostly--his progression from liberal economic model to a mixed model since 2014 is
visible to people with even rudimentary knowledge of Russia. This is not to mention that
Russia, quoting even Wiki:
Russia has an upper-middle income mixed economy with state ownership in strategic areas of
the economy.
Some private bank is not a "strategic" area, nor is "liberalization" of land
sales, resources and real hi-tech sector, however, together with agriculture, are. Since
the start of Putin's tenure, Russia re-nationalized, that is returned to the state control or
ownership, an enormous number of truly strategic companies. In fact, whole industries.
Putin recently himself clearly stated that, especially pointing out a bonanza Russian State
got from 2008 collapse and from sanctions.
These are hardly signs of neoliberalism, not to mention that Russia, rightly so, is
considered one of the most protectionist nations in the world. This is if to discount all
this theoretical and metaphysical mambo-jumbo on the obvious fact that neoliberalism is dead,
together with its founding Free Trade gospel, and stinks to heaven, poisoning surroundings.
And, yes, I am sure Russian State has no control over Novatek (it is a bad joke).
The picture is mixed. The Federal Antimonopoly Service has been given real teeth since its
humiliation by the Customs Service under Medvedev. It goes beyond antimonopoly. For example,
it reviews incoming foreign investment in the 42 strategic industries. This was originally a
protectionist committee. It gave Pepsico a hard time for buying Wimm-Bill-Dann, clearly a
military asset. These days its approach to foreigners is "How can I help you? Do you want
money?" It is frequently chaired by Putin.
Kudrin's audit committee looks like being FAS Mark 2. He has been given the tools to
take Sechin and other state moguls apart. Will he get to the Rotenbergs/Gazprom?
Their behaviour is outrageous. Certainly not the kind of corporate governance required for
a competitive market. e.g. Gazprom Bank has a Rotenberg son in charge of loans. Gazprom lent
another Rotenberg son the money to build Aviapark. No Rotenberg capital at risk during the
whole process. Now a $1 Bn asset. Kudrin has a target rich environment. Will he settle out of
court or make some high level examples?
Rostek, run by Chemezov, whose main qualification is being buddies with Putin in 1980s
East Germany, famous for passing off an
unsuccessful and outdated Taiwanese manufactured and American designed device as an example
of "Russian innovation" [at pilfering government money].
But you are of course correct. Russia is of course not neoliberal so far as Putin's
kleptocratic chums are concerned. Fortunately, overall domestic economic policy (with said
exceptions) is neoliberal, which rules out a Venezuelan scenario in Russia. That is a good
thing.
But you are of course correct. Russia is of course not neoliberal so far as Putin's
kleptocratic chums are concerned.
Exactly, nor do you have any qualifications nor skills to write about Russia since, and I
quote Margo Simonyan describing your kind.
Maybe you will finally understand that you do not believe us not because we lie, but
because you know horseradish (dick) about surrounding world, because you are badly
educated, do not read much and when do, do not read what is needed, you visit all the wrong
places and communicate with the same small bunch of prejudiced and/or mental people, who
only reinforce your condescending ignorance.
Looks like Brennan abused his power as a head of CIA and should be held accountable for that.
Notable quotes:
"... Did the U.S. "Intelligence Community" judge that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election? ..."
"... it is not that ..."
"... even that is misleading ..."
"... the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express it ..."
"... The second thing to remember is that reports of the intelligence agencies reflect the views of the heads of the agencies and are not necessarily a consensus of their analysts' views. The heads of both the CIA and FBI are political appointments, while the NSA chief is a military officer; his agency is a collector of intelligence rather than an analyst of its import, except in the fields of cryptography and communications security. ..."
"... Among the assertions are that a persona calling itself "Guccifer 2.0" is an instrument of the GRU, and that it hacked the emails on the Democratic National Committee's computer and conveyed them to Wikileaks. What the report does not explain is that it is easy for a hacker or foreign intelligence service to leave a false trail. In fact, a program developed by CIA with NSA assistance to do just that has been leaked and published. ..."
"... Retired senior NSA technical experts have examined the "Guccifer 2.0" data on the web and have concluded that "Guccifer 2.0's" data did not involve a hack across the web but was locally downloaded. Further, the data had been tampered with and manipulated, leading to the conclusion that "Guccifer 2.0" is a total fabrication. ..."
"... "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries." ..."
"... DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying ..."
"... Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically motivated, report as proof of "Russian interference" in the U.S. election without even the pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with common dangers is vital to both countries. ..."
Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence
Posted on by JackDid the U.S. "Intelligence Community" judge that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential
election?
Most commentators seem to think so. Every news report I have read of the planned meeting of
Presidents Trump and Putin in July refers to "Russian interference" as a fact and asks whether
the matter will be discussed. Reports that President Putin denied involvement in the election
are scoffed at, usually with a claim that the U.S. "intelligence community" proved Russian
interference. In fact, the U.S. "intelligence community" has not done so. The intelligence
community as a whole has not been tasked to make a judgment and some key members of that
community did not participate in the report that is routinely cited as "proof" of "Russian
interference."
I spent the 35 years of my government service with a "top secret" clearance. When I reached
the rank of ambassador and also worked as Special Assistant to the President for National
Security, I also had clearances for "codeword" material. At that time, intelligence reports to
the president relating to Soviet and European affairs were routed through me for comment. I
developed at that time a "feel" for the strengths and weaknesses of the various American
intelligence agencies. It is with that background that I read the January 6. 2017 report of three
intelligence agencies: the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
This report is labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment," but in fact it is not
that . A report of the intelligence community in my day would include the input of all the
relevant intelligence agencies and would reveal whether all agreed with the conclusions.
Individual agencies did not hesitate to "take a footnote" or explain their position if they
disagreed with a particular assessment. A report would not claim to be that of the
"intelligence community" if any relevant agency was omitted.
The report states that it represents the findings of three intelligence agencies: CIA, FBI,
and NSA, but even that is misleading in that it implies that there was a consensus of
relevant analysts in these three agencies. In fact, the report was prepared by a group of
analysts from the three agencies pre-selected by their directors, with the selection process
generally overseen by James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Clapper told
the Senate in testimony May 8, 2017, that it was prepared by "two dozen or so analysts --
hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies." If you can hand-pick the
analysts, you can hand-pick the conclusions. The analysts selected would have understood what
Director Clapper wanted since he made no secret of his views. Why would they endanger their
careers by not delivering?
What should have struck any congressperson or reporter was that the procedure Clapper
followed was the same as that used in 2003 to produce the report falsely claiming that Saddam
Hussein had retained stocks of weapons of mass destruction. That should be worrisome enough to
inspire questions, but that is not the only anomaly.
The DNI has under his aegis a National Intelligence Council whose officers can call any
intelligence agency with relevant expertise to draft community assessments. It was created by
Congress after 9/11 specifically to correct some of the flaws in intelligence collection
revealed by 9/11. Director Clapper chose not to call on the NIC, which is curious since its
duty is "to act as a bridge between the intelligence and policy communities."
During my time in government, a judgment regarding national security would include reports
from, as a minimum, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Bureau of
Intelligence and Research (INR) of the State Department. The FBI was rarely, if ever, included
unless the principal question concerned law enforcement within the United States. NSA might
have provided some of the intelligence used by the other agencies but normally did not express
an opinion regarding the substance of reports.
What did I notice when I read the January report? There was no mention of INR or DIA! The
exclusion of DIA might be understandable since its mandate deals primarily with military
forces, except that the report attributes some of the Russian activity to the GRU, Russian
military intelligence. DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, is the U.S. intelligence organ
most expert on the GRU. Did it concur with this attribution? The report doesn't say.
The omission of INR is more glaring since a report on foreign political activity could not
have been that of the U.S. intelligence community without its participation. After all, when it
comes to assessments of foreign intentions and foreign political activity, the State
Department's intelligence service is by far the most knowledgeable and competent. In my day, it
reported accurately on Gorbachev's reforms when the CIA leaders were advising that Gorbachev
had the same aims as his predecessors.
This is where due diligence comes in. The first question responsible journalists and
politicians should have asked is "Why is INR not represented? Does it have a different opinion?
If so, what is that opinion? Most likely the official answer would have been that this is
"classified information." But why should it be classified? If some agency heads come to a
conclusion and choose (or are directed) to announce it publicly, doesn't the public deserve to
know that one of the key agencies has a different opinion?
The second question should have been directed at the CIA, NSA, and FBI: did all their
analysts agree with these conclusions or were they divided in their conclusions? What was the
reason behind hand-picking analysts and departing from the customary practice of enlisting
analysts already in place and already responsible for following the issues involved?
As I was recently informed by a senior official, the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence Research did, in fact, have a different opinion but was not allowed to express
it . So the January report was not one of the "intelligence community," but rather of
three intelligence agencies, two of which have no responsibility or necessarily any competence
to judge foreign intentions. The job of the FBI is to enforce federal law. The job of NSA is to
intercept the communications of others and to protect ours. It is not staffed to assess the
content of what is intercepted; that task is assumed by others, particularly the CIA, the DIA
(if it is military) or the State Department's INR (if it is political).
The second thing to remember is that reports of the intelligence agencies reflect the views
of the heads of the agencies and are not necessarily a consensus of their analysts' views. The
heads of both the CIA and FBI are political appointments, while the NSA chief is a military
officer; his agency is a collector of intelligence rather than an analyst of its import, except
in the fields of cryptography and communications security.
One striking thing about the press coverage and Congressional discussion of the January
report, and of subsequent statements by CIA, FBI, and NSA heads is that questions were never
posed regarding the position of the State Department's INR, or whether the analysts in the
agencies cited were in total agreement with the conclusions.
Let's put these questions aside for the moment and look at the report itself. On the first
page of text, the following statement leapt to my attention:
We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of
the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the
intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political
processes or US public opinion.
Now, how can one judge whether activity "interfered" with an election without assessing its
impact? After all, if the activity had no impact on the outcome of the election, it could not
be properly termed interference. This disclaimer, however, has not prevented journalists and
politicians from citing the report as proof that "Russia interfered" in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election.
As for particulars, the report is full of assertion, innuendo, and description of
"capabilities" but largely devoid of any evidence to substantiate its assertions. This is
"explained" by claiming that much of the evidence is classified and cannot be disclosed without
revealing sources and methods. The assertions are made with "high confidence" or occasionally,
"moderate confidence." Having read many intelligence reports I can tell you that if there is
irrefutable evidence of something it will be stated as a fact. The use of the term "high
confidence" is what most normal people would call "our best guess." "Moderate confidence" means
"some of our analysts think this might be true."
Among the assertions are that a persona calling itself "Guccifer 2.0" is an instrument of
the GRU, and that it hacked the emails on the Democratic National Committee's computer and
conveyed them to Wikileaks. What the report does not explain is that it is easy for a hacker or
foreign intelligence service to leave a false trail. In fact, a program developed by CIA with
NSA assistance to do just that has been leaked and published.
Retired senior NSA technical experts have examined the "Guccifer 2.0" data on the web and
have concluded that "Guccifer 2.0's" data did not involve a hack across the web but was locally
downloaded. Further, the data had been tampered with and manipulated, leading to the conclusion
that "Guccifer 2.0" is a total fabrication.
The report's assertions regarding the supply of the DNC emails to Wikileaks are dubious, but
its final statement in this regard is important: "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not
contain any evident forgeries." In other words, what was disclosed was the truth! So,
Russians are accused of "degrading our democracy" by revealing that the DNC was trying to fix
the nomination of a particular candidate rather than allowing the primaries and state caucuses
to run their course. I had always thought that transparency is consistent with democratic
values. Apparently those who think that the truth can degrade democracy have a rather bizarre
-- to put it mildly–concept of democracy.
Most people, hearing that it is a "fact" that "Russia" interfered in our election must think
that Russian government agents hacked into vote counting machines and switched votes to favor a
particular candidate. This, indeed, would be scary, and would justify the most painful
sanctions. But this is the one thing that the "intelligence" report of January 6, 2017, states
did not happen. Here is what it said: " DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] assesses
that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote
tallying ."
This is an important statement by an agency that is empowered to assess the impact of
foreign activity on the United States. Why was it not consulted regarding other aspects of the
study? Or -- was it in fact consulted and refused to endorse the findings? Another obvious
question any responsible journalist or competent politician should have asked.
Prominent American journalists and politicians seized upon this shabby, politically
motivated, report as proof of "Russian interference" in the U.S. election without even the
pretense of due diligence. They have objectively acted as co-conspirators in an effort to block
any improvement in relations with Russia, even though cooperation with Russia to deal with
common dangers is vital to both countries.
This is only part of the story of how, without good reason, U.S.-Russian relations have
become dangerously confrontational. God willin and the crick don't rise, I'll be musing about
other aspects soon.
Thanks to Ray McGovern and Bill Binney for their research assistance.
Jack F. Matlock, Jr.
Booneville, Tennessee
June 29, 2018
I judge a wo/man not on his/her words, but his/her deeds. Suffice to say, the difference
between Russia in 2000 and Russia today, speaks volumes all by itself and is fully self
explanatory as well.
One day the world will realize how close we've come to WW III in the period between
2015/2020. An extended version of the Cuban missile crisis, if you will, but this time with
only one statesman participating in this conundrum, the president of the Russian Federation,
H.E. Mr. V.V. Putin.
Much blood has been shed in Syria, including Russian, so it would be unfair to single out
one particular country, but I know if it hand't been for Russia stepping up to the plate in
2015, the political landscape [in the M.E. and beyond] would be littered with the corpses of
liberty, freedom and unity and the dust wouldn't settle down for decades to come.
The Russian military went in, turned the tide and most of the temporary influx is
retreating back to the motherland as we speak. That's how a 'job' is done properly.
National identity in USSR was important. Well, it is always important and yes, there was
latent antisemitism (or whatever it is called) in some spheres of Soviet life. Not as big,
though, as Jewish dissidents love to present to those who are ready to listen.
Lots of people pretended to be persecuted just to get freebees in the US and elsewhere.
Antisemitsm was by ~90% the myth created by these people. One example I know first-hand: in
my year at the school of Biology in the best and most privileged Moscow State University
about 20-25% of students were Jewish or half-Jewish, whereas Jews constituted 2-3% of the
USSR population.
And it goes on today. Just over a year ago, Wikileaks source Seth Rich was assassinated. Fox
News and lefty Jimmy Dore reported this, until the Deep State put the screws on and they both
retracted with bogus stories to "correct" their errors. No one talks about this anymore.
"... Although Trump touted the study as a way to "rebuild" the U.S. military when he ordered it in May 2017, economic motives were clearly a crucial factor. Navarro typically cited the importance of a "healthy, growing economy and a resilient industrial base," identifying weapons spending as a key element in achieving such goals. ..."
Other than shouting about building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, one of Donald Trump's
most frequently proclaimed promises on the 2016 campaign trail was the launching of a
half-trillion-dollar plan to repair America's crumbling infrastructure (employing large
numbers of workers in the process). Eighteen months into his administration, no credible
proposal for anything near that scale has been made. To the extent that the Trump
administration has a plan at all for public investment, it involves pumping up Pentagon
spending, not investing in roads, bridges, transportation, better Internet access, or other
pressing needs of the civilian economy.
Not that President Trump hasn't talked about investing in infrastructure. Last February,
he even proposed a scheme that, he claimed, would boost the country's infrastructure with
$1.5 trillion in spending over the next decade. With a typical dose of hyperbole, he
described it as "the biggest and boldest infrastructure investment in American
history."
Analysts from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania -- Trump's alma mater
-- beg to differ. They
note that the plan actually involves only $200 billion in direct federal investment, less
than one-seventh of the total promised. According to Wharton's experts, much of the extra
spending, supposedly leveraged from the private sector as well as state and local
governments, will never materialize. In addition, were such a plan launched, it would, they
suggest, fall short of its goal by a cool trillion dollars. In the end, the spending levels
Trump is proposing would have "little to no impact" on the nation's gross domestic product.
To add insult to injury, the president has
exerted next to no effort to get even this anemic proposal through Congress, where it's
now dead
in the water .
There is, however, one area of federal investment on which Trump and the Congress have
worked overtime with remarkable unanimity to increase spending: the Pentagon, which is slated
to receive more than
$6 trillion over the next decade. This year alone increases will bring total spending on
the Pentagon and related agencies (like the Department of Energy where work on nuclear
warheads takes place) to $716
billion . That $6-trillion, 10-year figure represents more than 30 times as much direct
spending as the president's $200 billion infrastructure plan.
In reality, Pentagon spending is the Trump administration's substitute for a true
infrastructure program and it's guaranteed to deliver public investments, but neglect just about every area
of greatest civilian need from roads to water treatment facilities.
The Pentagon's Covert Industrial Policy
One reason the Trump administration has chosen to pump money into the Pentagon is that
it's the path of least political resistance in Washington. A combination of fear, ideology,
and influence peddling radically skews "debate" there in favor of military outlays above all
else. Fear -- whether of terrorism, Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea -- provides one
pillar of support for the habitual overfunding of the Pentagon and the rest of the national
security state (which in these years has had a combined
trillion-dollar annual budget). In addition, it's generally accepted in Washington that
being tagged "soft on defense" is the equivalent of political suicide, particularly for
Democrats. Add to that the millions of dollars spent by the
weapons industry on lobbying and campaign contributions, its routine practice of hiring
former Pentagon and military officials, and the way it strategically places defense-related
jobs in key states and districts, and it's easy to see how the president and Congress might
turn to arms spending as the basis for a covert industrial policy.
The Trump plan builds on the Pentagon's already prominent role in the economy. By now,
it's the largest
landowner in the country, the
biggest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, the most
significant source of funds for advanced government research and development, and a
major investor in the manufacturing sector. As it happens, though, expanding the
Pentagon's economic role is the least
efficient way to boost jobs, innovation, and economic growth.
Unfortunately, there is no organized lobby or accepted bipartisan rationale for domestic
funding that can come close to matching the levers of influence that the Pentagon and the
arms industry have at their command. This only increases the difficulty Congress has when it
comes to investing in infrastructure, clean energy, education, or other direct paths toward
increasing employment and economic growth.
Former congressman Barney Frank once labeled the
penchant for using the Pentagon as the government's main economic tool "weaponized
Keynesianism" after economist John Maynard Keynes's theory that government spending
should pick up the slack in investment when private-sector spending is insufficient to
support full employment. Currently, of course, the official unemployment rate is low by
historical standards. However,
key localities and constituencies , including the industrial Midwest, rural areas, and
urban ones with significant numbers of black and Hispanic workers, have largely been left
behind. In addition, millions of "discouraged workers" who want a job
but have given up actively looking for one aren't even counted in the official unemployment
figures, wage growth has
been stagnant for years, and the inequality gap between the 1% and
the rest of America is already in Gilded Age
territory.
Such economic distress was crucial to Donald Trump's rise to power. In campaign 2016, of
course, he endlessly denounced unfair trade agreements, immigrants, and corporate flight as
key factors in the plight of what became a significant part of his political base: downwardly
mobile and displaced industrial workers (or those who feared that this might be their future
fate).
The Trump Difference
Although insufficient, increases in defense manufacturing and construction can help areas
where employment in civilian manufacturing has been lagging. Even as it's expanded, however,
defense spending has come to play an ever-smaller role in the U.S. economy, falling
from 8%-10% of the gross domestic product in the 1950s and 1960s to under 4% today. Still, it
remains crucial to the economic base in defense-dependent
locales like southern California, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan,
Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Washington state. Such places, in turn,
play an outsized political role in Washington because their congressional representatives
tend to cluster on the armed services, defense appropriations, and other key committees, and
because of their significance on the electoral map.
A long-awaited Trump administration "defense industrial base" study should be considered a
tip-off that the president and his key officials see Pentagon spending as the way to
economincally prime the pump. Note, as a start, that the study was overseen not by a defense
official but by the president's economics and trade czar, Peter Navarro, whose formal title
is White House director of trade and industrial policy. A main aim of the study is to find a
way to bolster smaller defense firms that subcontract to giants like Boeing, Raytheon, and
Lockheed Martin.
Although Trump touted the study as a way to "rebuild" the U.S. military when he ordered it
in May 2017, economic motives were clearly a crucial factor. Navarro typically
cited the importance of a "healthy, growing economy and a resilient industrial base,"
identifying weapons spending as a key element in achieving such goals. The CEO of the
Aerospace Industries Association, one of the defense lobby's most powerful trade groups,
underscored Navarro's point when, in July 2017, he insisted that "our industry's
contributions to U.S. national security and economic well-being can't be taken for granted."
(He failed to explain how an industry that absorbs more than
$300 billion per year in Pentagon contracts could ever be "taken for granted.")
Trump's defense-industrial-base policy tracks closely with proposals put forward by Daniel
Goure of the military-contractor-funded Lexington Institute in a December 2016
article titled "How Trump Can Invest in Infrastructure and Make America Great Again."
Goure's main point: that Trump should make military investments -- like building naval
shipyards and ammunition plants -- part and parcel of his infrastructure plan. In doing so,
he caught the essence of the arms industry's case regarding the salutary effects of defense
spending on the economy:
"Every major military activity, whether production of a new weapons system, sustainment of
an existing one or support for the troops, is imbedded in a web of economic activities and
supports an array of businesses. These include not only major defense contractors such as
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, but a host of middle-tier and even
mom-and-pop businesses. Money spent at the top ripples through the economy. Most of it is
spent not on unique defense items, but on products and services that have commercial markets
too."
What Goure's analysis neglects, however, is not just that every government investment
stimulates multiple sectors of the economy, but that virtually any other kind would have a
greater ripple
effect on employment and economic growth than military spending does. Underwritten by the
defense industry, his analysis is yet another example of how the arms lobby has distorted
economic policy and debate in this country.
These days, it seems as if there's nothing the military won't get involved in. Take
another recent set of "security" expenditures in what has already
become a billion-dollar-plus business: building and maintaining detention centers for
children, mainly unaccompanied minors from Central America, caught up in the Trump
administration's brutal security crackdown on the U.S.-Mexico border. One company, Southwest
Key, has already
received a $955 million government contract to work on such facilities. Among the other
beneficiaries is the major defense contractor General
Dynamics , normally known for making tanks, ballistic-missile-firing submarines, and the
like, not ordinarily ideal qualifications for taking care of children.
Last but not least, President Trump has worked overtime to tout his promotion of U.S. arms
sales as a jobs program. In a May 2018 meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at
the White House (with reporters in attendance), he typically
brandished a map that laid out just where U.S. jobs from Saudi arms sales would be
located. Not coincidentally, many of them would be in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan,
Ohio, and Florida that had provided him with his margin of victory in the 2016 elections.
Trump had already crowed
about such Saudi deals as a source of "jobs, jobs, jobs" during his May 2017 visit to Riyadh,
that country's capital. And he claimed
on one occasion -- against all evidence -- that his deals with the Saudi regime for arms and
other equipment could create "millions of jobs."
The Trump administration's decision to blatantly put jobs and economic benefits for U.S.
corporations above human rights considerations and strategic concerns is likely to have
disastrous consequences. Its continued
sales of bombs and other weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, for
example, allows them to go on prosecuting a
brutal war in Yemen that has already killed thousands of civilians and put millions more
at risk of death from famine and disease. In addition to being morally reprehensible, such an
approach could turn untold numbers of Yemenis and others across the Middle East into U.S.
enemies -- a high price to pay for a few thousand jobs in the arms sector.
Pentagon Spending Versus a Real Infrastructure Plan
While the Trump administration's Pentagon spending will infuse new money into the economy,
it's certainly a misguided way to spur economic growth. As University of Massachusetts
economist Heidi Garrett-Peltier has demonstrated ,
when it comes to creating jobs, military spending lags far behind investment in civilian
infrastructure, clean energy, health care, or education. Nonetheless, the administration is
moving full speed ahead with its military-driven planning.
In addition, Trump's approach will prove hopeless when it comes to addressing the
fast-multiplying problems of the country's ailing infrastructure. The
$683 billion extra that the administration proposes putting into Pentagon spending over
the next 10 years pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars the American Society of
Civil Engineers claims are needed to modernize U.S. infrastructure. Nor will all of that
Pentagon increase even be directed toward construction or manufacturing activities (not to
speak of basic infrastructural needs like roads and bridges). A significant chunk of it will,
for instance, be dedicated to paying the salaries of the military's massive cadre of civilian and
military personnel or health care and other benefits.
In their study, the civil engineers suggest that failing to engage in a major
infrastructure program could cost the economy $4 trillion and 2.5 million jobs by 2025,
something no Pentagon pump-priming could begin to offset. In other words, using the Pentagon
as America's main conduit for public investment will prove a woeful approach when it comes to
the health of the larger society.
One era in which government spending did directly stimulate increased growth,
infrastructural development, and the creation of well-paying jobs was the 1950s, a period for
which Donald Trump is visibly
nostalgic . For him, those years were evidently the last in which America was truly
"great." Many things were deeply wrong with the country in the fifties -- from rampant
racism, sexism, and the denial of basic human rights to McCarthyite witch hunts -- but on the
economic front the government did indeed play a positive role.
In those years, public investment went far beyond Pentagon spending, which President
Dwight Eisenhower (of " military-industrial
complex " fame) actually tried to rein in. It was civilian investments -- from the
G.I. Bill to increased
incentives for housing construction to the building of an interstate highway system --
that contributed in crucial ways to the economic boom of that era. Whatever its failures and
drawbacks, including the ways in which African-Americans and other minorities were grossly
under-represented when it came to
sharing the benefits, the Eisenhower investment strategy did boost the overall economy in a
fashion the Trump plan never will.
The notion that the Pentagon can play a primary role in boosting employment to any
significant degree is largely a myth that serves the needs of the military-industrial
complex, not American workers or Donald Trump's base. Until the political gridlock in
Washington that prevents large-scale new civilian investments of just about any sort is
broken, however, the Pentagon will continue to seem like the only game in town. And we will
all pay a price for those skewed priorities, in both blood and treasure.
After spending 17 years at Goldman Sachs, Trump's new Treasure Secretary, Steven Mnuchin ran
OneWest Bank in CA. Guess who he worked for? George frigging Soros.
So, Trump is partners with infamous globalist atheist George Soros, Orthodox Jews, Islamic
Extremists, Goldman Sachs and GHW Bush's Carlyle Group.
And one more morsel to ponder. The CEO of CNN (portrayed as rabidly anti-Trump) is one of a
long list of Globalist Zionists who have been Trump supporters for decades.
integer @35. Not a fan of George Soros? Ready to peak into the rabbit hole?
Donald Trump has been business partners with George Soros in at least $6 Billion in
properties for more than a decade before his candidacy. They were even codefendants in a RICO
suit (organized crime, as in the Jewish Mafia).
After spending 17 years at Goldman Sachs, Trump's new Treasure Secretary, Steven Mnuchin ran
OneWest Bank in CA. Guess who he worked for? George frigging Soros.
So, Trump is partners with infamous globalist atheist George Soros, Orthodox Jews, Islamic
Extremists, Goldman Sachs and GHW Bush's Carlyle Group.
And one more morsel to ponder. The CEO of CNN (portrayed as rabidly anti-Trump) is one of a
long list of Globalist Zionists who have been Trump supporters for decades.
"... The implications for today are almost painfully straightforward: the current combination of deficit spending and tax cuts spells disaster for any hopes of shrinking America's striking inequality gap . Instead, credit-card war spending is already fueling the dramatic levels of wealth inequality that have led some observers to suggest that we are living in a new Gilded Age , reminiscent of the enormous divide between the opulent lifestyles of the elite and the grinding poverty of the majority of Americans in the late nineteenth century. ..."
"... Today's wars are paid for almost entirely through loans -- 60% from wealthy individuals and governmental agencies like the Federal Reserve, 40% from foreign lenders. Meanwhile, in October 2001, when Washington launched the war on terror, the government also initiated a set of tax cuts, a trend that has only continued. The war-financing strategies that President George W. Bush began have flowed on without significant alteration under Presidents Obama and Trump. (Obama did raise a few taxes, but didn't fundamentally alter the swing towards tax cuts.) President Trump's extreme tax "reform" package, which passed Congress in December 2017 -- a gift-wrapped dream for the 1% -- only enlarged those cuts. ..."
"... However little the public may realize it, Americans are already feeling the costs of their post-9/11 wars. Those have, after all, massively increased the Pentagon's base budget and the moneys that go into the expanding national security budget , while reducing the amount of money left over for so much else from infrastructure investment to science. In the decade following September 11, 2001, military spending increased by 50% , while spending on every other government program increased only 13.5%. ..."
Credit-Card Wars
Today's War-Financing Strategies Will Only Increase Inequality
By Stephanie
Savell
In the name of the fight against terrorism, the United States is currently waging "
credit-card wars " in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Never before has this
country relied so heavily on deficit spending to pay for its conflicts. The consequences are
expected to be ruinous for the long-term fiscal health of the U.S., but they go far beyond the
economic. Massive levels of war-related debt will have lasting repercussions of all sorts. One
potentially devastating effect, a
new study finds, will be more societal inequality.
In other words, the staggering costs of the longest war in American history -- almost 17
years running, since the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 -- are being deferred to the
future. In the process, the government is contributing to this country's skyrocketing income
inequality.
Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent
$5.6 trillion on its war on terror, according to the Costs of War Project, which I co-direct, at Brown
University's Watson Institute for
International and Public Affairs . This is a far higher number than the Pentagon's
$1.5 trillion estimate,
which only counts expenses for what are known as "overseas contingency operations," or OCO --
that is, a pot of supplemental money, outside the regular annual budget, dedicated to funding
wartime operations. The $5.6 trillion figure, on the other hand, includes not just what the
U.S. has spent on overseas military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria, but
also portions of Homeland Security spending related to counterterrorism on American soil, and
future obligations to care for wounded or traumatized post-9/11 military veterans. The
financial burden of the post-9/11 wars across the Greater Middle East -- and still
spreading , through Africa and other regions -- is far larger than most Americans
recognize.
During prior wars, the U.S. adjusted its budget accordingly by, among other options, raising
taxes to pay for its conflicts. Not so since 2001, when President George W. Bush launched the
"Global War on Terror." Instead, the country has accumulated a staggering amount of debt. Even
if Washington stopped spending on its wars tomorrow, it will still, thanks to those conflicts,
owe more than
$8 trillion in interest alone by the 2050s.
Putting the Gilded Age to Shame
It's hard to fathom what that enormous level of debt will do to our economy and society. A
new Costs of War study by political scientist and historian Rosella Capella Zielinski
offers initial clues about its impact here. She takes a look at how the U.S. has paid for its
conflicts from the War of 1812 through the two World Wars and Vietnam to the present war on
terror. While a range of taxes, bond sales, and other mechanisms were used to raise funds to
fight such conflicts, no financial strategy has relied so exclusively on borrowing -- until
this century. Her study also explores how each type of war financing has affected inequality
levels in this country in the aftermath of those conflicts.
The implications for today are almost painfully straightforward: the current combination
of deficit spending and tax cuts spells disaster for any hopes of shrinking America's striking
inequality gap . Instead, credit-card war spending is already fueling the dramatic levels
of wealth inequality that have led some observers to suggest that we are living in a new
Gilded Age , reminiscent
of the enormous divide between the opulent lifestyles of the elite and the grinding poverty of
the majority of Americans in the late nineteenth century.
Capella Zielinski carefully breaks down what effects the methods used to pay for various
wars have had on subsequent levels of social inequality. During the Civil War, for example, the
government relied primarily on loans from private donors. After that war was over, the American
people had to pay those loans back with interest, which proved a bonanza for financial elites,
primarily in the North. Those wealthy lenders became wealthier still and everyone else, whose
taxes reimbursed them, poorer.
In contrast, during World War I, the government launched a war-bond campaign that targeted
low-income people. War savings stamps were offered for as little as 25 cents and war savings
certificates in denominations starting at $25. Anyone who could make a small down payment could
buy a war bond for $50 and cover the rest of what was owed in installments. In this way, the
war effort promoted savings and, in its wake, a striking number of low-income Americans were
repaid with interest, decreasing the inequality levels of that era.
Taxation strategies have varied quite significantly in various war periods as well. During
World War II, for instance, the government raised tax rates five times between 1940 and 1944,
levying progressively steeper ones on higher income brackets (up to 65% on incomes over $1
million). As a result, though government debt was substantial in the aftermath of a global
struggle fought on many fronts, the impact on low-income Americans could have been far worse.
In contrast, the Vietnam War era began with a tax cut and, in the aftermath of that disastrous
conflict, the U.S. had to deal with unprecedented levels of inflation. Low-income households
bore the brunt of those higher costs, leading to greater inequality.
Today's wars are paid for almost entirely through loans -- 60% from wealthy individuals
and governmental agencies like the Federal Reserve, 40% from foreign lenders. Meanwhile, in
October 2001, when Washington launched the war on terror, the government also initiated a set
of tax cuts, a trend that has only continued. The war-financing strategies that President
George W. Bush began have flowed on without significant alteration under Presidents Obama and
Trump. (Obama did raise a few taxes, but didn't fundamentally
alter the swing towards tax cuts.) President Trump's extreme tax "reform" package, which
passed Congress in December 2017 -- a gift-wrapped dream
for the 1% -- only enlarged those cuts.
In other words, in this century, Washington has combined the domestic borrowing patterns of
the Civil War with the tax cuts of the Vietnam era. That means one predictable thing: a rise in
inequality in a country in which the income inequality gap is already heading
for record territory.
Just to add to the future burden of it all, this is the first time government wartime
borrowing has relied so heavily on foreign debt. Though there is no way of knowing how this
will affect inequality here in the long run, one thing is already obvious: it will transfer
wealth outside the country.
Economist
Linda Bilmes has
argued that there's another new factor involved in Washington's budgeting of today's wars.
In every other major American conflict, after an initial period, war expenditures were
incorporated into the regular defense budget. Since 2001, however, the war on terror has been
funded mainly by supplemental appropriations (those Overseas
Contingency Operations funds), subject to very little oversight. Think of the OCO as a
slush fund
that insures one thing: the true impact of this era's war funding won't hit until far later
since such appropriations are exempt from spending caps and don't have to be
offset elsewhere in the budget.
According to Bilmes, "This process is less transparent, less accountable, and has rendered
the cost of the wars far less visible." As a measure of the invisible impact of war funding in
Washington and elsewhere, she
calculates that, while the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense discussed war
financing in 79% of its hearings during the Vietnam era, since 9/11, there have been similar
mentions at only 17% of such hearings. For its part, the Senate Finance Committee has discussed
war-funding strategy in a thoroughgoing way only once in almost 17 years.
Hidden Tradeoffs and Deferred Costs
The effect of this century's unprecedented budgetary measures is that, for the most part,
the American people don't feel the financial weight of the wars their government is waging --
or rather, they feel it, but don't recognize it for what it is. This corresponds remarkably
well with the wars themselves, fought by a non-draft
military in distant lands and largely
ignored in this country (at least since the vast public demonstrations against the coming
invasion of Iraq ended in the spring of 2003). The
blowback from those wars, the way they are coming home, has also been ignored, financially
and otherwise.
However little the public may realize it, Americans are already feeling the costs of
their post-9/11 wars. Those have, after all, massively increased the Pentagon's base budget and
the moneys that go into the expanding
national security budget , while reducing the amount of money left over for so much else
from infrastructure
investment to science. In the decade following September 11, 2001, military spending
increased by
50% , while spending on every other government program increased only 13.5%.
How exactly does this trade-off work? The National
Priorities Project explains it well. Every year the federal government negotiates levels of
discretionary spending (as distinct from mandatory spending, which largely consists of Social
Security and Medicare). In 2001, there were fewer
discretionary funds allocated to defense than to non-defense programs, but the ensuing war on
terror dramatically inflated military spending relative to other parts of the budget. In 2017,
military and national security spending accounted for 53% of discretionary spending. The 2018
congressionally approved omnibus spending package allocates $700 billion for the military and
$591 billion for non-military purposes, leaving that proportion about the same. (Keep in mind,
that those totals don't even include all the money flowing into that Overseas Contingency
Operations fund). President Trump's proposals for future spending, if accepted by Congress,
would ensure that, by 2023, the proportion of military spending would soar to
65% .
In other words, the rise in war-related military expenditures entails losses for other areas
of federal funding. Pick your issue: crumbling bridges, racial justice, housing, healthcare,
education, climate change -- and it's all being affected by how much this country spends on
war.
Nonetheless, thanks to its credit-card version of war financing, the government has
effectively deferred most of the financial costs of its unending conflicts to the future. This,
in turn, contributes to how
detached most Americans tend to feel from the very fact that their country is now eternally
at war. Political scientist and policy analyst Sarah Kreps argues that Americans become
invested in how a war is being conducted only when they're asked to pay for it. In her
examination of the history of the financing of American wars, she
writes , "The visibility and intrusiveness of taxes are exactly what make individuals
scrutinize the service for which the resources are being used." If there were war taxes today,
their unpopularity would undoubtedly lead Americans to question the costs and consequences of
their country's wars in ways now missing from today's public conversation.
Pressing for a real war budget, though, is not only a mechanism to alert Americans to the
effects (on them) of the wars their government is fighting. It is also a potential lever
through which citizens could affect the country's foreign policy and pressure elected
officials to bring those wars to an end. Some civic groups and activists from across the
political spectrum have indeed been pushing to reduce the Pentagon budget, bloated by war,
corruption , and
fear-mongering . They are, however, up against both the power of an ascendant
military-industrial complex and wars that have been organized, in their funding and in so many
other ways, not to be noticed.
Those who care about this country's economic future would be remiss not to include today's
war financing strategy among the country's most urgent fiscal challenges. Anyone interested in
improving American democracy and the well-being of its people should begin by connecting the
budgetary dots. The more money this country spends on military activities, the more public
coffers will be depleted by war-related interest payments and the less public funding there
will be for anything else. In short, it's time for Americans worried about living in a country
whose inequality gap could soon surpass that of the Gilded Age to begin paying real attention
to our " credit-card
wars ."
" Putin has invaded Ukraine, stealing the Crimea, and attempting to gain a land bridge by
backing a fake revolt in the Donbas with Russian troops, mercenaries, and equipment."
Of course Russia has strategic interests in the Ukraine and the the Crimea is virtually
100% Russian speaking. The Russians remember WW2 and the 20 million Russian dead inflicted
upon them by western Europeans.
If Putin's behavior in the near abroad makes him a "thug," what can we say about Bush,
Obama and Trump?
I find it interesting how while the neocons demonize Putin and are trying to start WW3,
Netanyahu and Putin seem to get along fine. This suggests that the neocons really have
something else in mind besides towing the Israeli line. Namely, keeping the American public
in a state of confusion and acquiescence and ensuring the endless flow of weapons to their
favorite ethnostate.
Putin is just another thug that has imperial desires and is willing to steal his people
blind to realize them.
Other than reliable sources like John Brennan, James Clapper, the New York Times
and the Washington Post , I presume you have evidence to share of this
Putin has invaded Ukraine,
and this.
stealing the Crimea
Two referenda are "stealing"?
a fake revolt in the Donbas with Russian troops, mercenaries, and equipment.
Well, the dead people in Donbas, and their families, would probably disagree it was fake,
particularly since the victim of the US coup d'etat (with its mercenaries) and rightful
President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich, was from Donbas. As for the allegations of Russian
troops and equipment, I return to my request for evidence.
Russian troops shot down MH-17. deal with it.
Yup, and Assad gassed his own people, so did Saddam, six kajillion were gassed in a 2 car
garage located next to crematoria at Auschwitz using explosive bug spray, and the Easter
Bunny leaves chocolate eggs at my house every year.
Antony C. Sutton, ´Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution', 1974 New Rochelle,
N.Y.
describes how Wall Street supported bolshevism in order to prevent that German, suppose also
Dutch and other, trade, with Russia was resumed.
WII and the aftermath created the Atlantic alliance.
Just yesterday Pieter Hoekstra, USA ambassador in the Netherlands, stated that Russia
should be punished for MH17 by more sanctions, no new gas pipeline from Russia to
Germany.
What he did not say that this implies our buying of USA gas, 20% more expensive.
The MH17 show, in my opinion is run like the Sept 11 show...
The USA fear about Russia and the EU member states seems to be twofold:
- more trade with Russia makes subjugation of Russia impossible
- more trade with Russia, and the railway connections with China, threaten to turn the USA
into an economic backwater
You seem to be obsessed with neocons, jews etc. Russia is arch-nemesis of the West long
before them. Or we should admit Napoleon and Charles XII of Sweden were manipulated by Masons
or Knight Templars.
Since Western Capitalism arose, Russia stands as anti-system to the West. As a model of
decent society that is possible without usury, exploitation, violence, enslaving and
pillaging other nations – i.e. outside imperialism-colonialism model. Powers that
control the West live in constant fear since with mighty Russia their time is always limited,
and their power is finite.
"Or we should admit Napoleon and Charles XII of Sweden were manipulated by Masons or
Knight Templars."
They were.
Of course, the Freemasons also penetrated Russia under Peter the Great and were necessary
to all revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire from at least the 1820s.
"... In 2015, suicides accounted for over 60 percent of gun deaths in the U.S., while homicides made up around 36 percent of that year's total. Guns are consistently the most common method by which people take their own lives. ..."
"... When veterans return home from chaotic war zones, resuming normal civilian life can present major difficulties. The stresses of wartime create a long-term, sustained "fight-or-flight" response, not only producing physical symptoms such as sweating, shaking or a racing heart rate, but inflicting a mental and moral toll as well. ..."
"... "Over the course of the year I was there, the units I was embedded with lost three men, and all of them were lost to suicide, not to enemy action," Van Buren said. "This left an extraordinary impression on me, and triggered in me some of the things that I write about." ..."
"... If you enjoyed this original article please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
At War With Ourselves: The Domestic Consequences of Foreign Policies June 25, 2018 •
72 Comments
There is a direct connection between gun violence and suicide rates in the United States and America's aggressive foreign policy,
argues Will Porter.
How America's Gun Violence Epidemic May Have Roots in Overseas War Zones
By Will Porter Special to Consortium News
In recent months a string of school shootings in the United States has rekindled the debate
over gun violence, its causes and what can be done to stop it. But amid endless talk of school shootings and AR-15s, a large piece
of the puzzle has been left conspicuously absent from the debate.
Contrary to the notion that mass murderers are at the heart of America's gun violence problem, data from recent years reveals
that the majority of gun deaths are self-inflicted.
In 2015, suicides accounted for
over 60 percent of gun deaths
in the U.S., while homicides made up around 36 percent of that year's total. Guns are consistently the
most common method by which people take their own
lives.
While the causes of America's suicide-driven gun epidemic are complex and myriad, it's clear that one group contributes to the
statistics above all others: military veterans.
Beyond the Physical
According to a
2016 study conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs, on average some 20 veterans commit suicide every single day, making
them among the most prone to take their own lives compared to people working in other professions. Though they comprise under 9 percent
of the American population, veterans
accounted for 18 percent of suicides in the U.S. in 2014.
When veterans return home from chaotic war zones, resuming normal civilian life can present major difficulties. The stresses of
wartime create a long-term, sustained "fight-or-flight" response, not only producing physical symptoms such as sweating, shaking
or a racing heart rate, but inflicting a mental and moral toll as well.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) accounts for some of the physiological effects of trauma, the "fight-or-flight" response,
but the distinct mental, moral and spiritual anguish experienced by many veterans and other victims of trauma has been termed "
moral injury ."
A better understanding of that concept and the self-harm it motivates could go a long way toward explaining, and ultimately solving,
America's suicide epidemic.
"Moral injury looks beyond the physical and asks who we are as people," Peter Van Buren, a former State Department Foreign Service
officer, said in an interview. "It says that we know right from wrong, and that when we violate right and wrong, we injure ourselves.
We leave a scar on ourselves, the same as if we poked ourselves with a knife."
While not a veteran himself, during his tenure with the Foreign Service Van Buren served for one year alongside American soldiers
at a forward operating base in Iraq. His experiences there would stick with him for life.
"Over the course of the year I was there, the units I was embedded with lost three men, and all of them were lost to suicide,
not to enemy action," Van Buren said. "This left an extraordinary impression on me, and triggered in me some of the things that I
write about."
Van Buren: A profound sense of guilt.
After retiring from the Foreign Service, Van Buren began research for his novel "
Hooper's War ," a fictional account set in WWII Japan. The book centers on American
veteran, Nate Hooper, and explores the psychological costs paid by those who survive a war. Van Buren said if he set the book in
the past, he thought he could better explore the subject matter without the baggage of current-day politics.
In his research, Van Buren interviewed Japanese civilians who were children at the time of the conflict and found surprising parallels
with the soldiers he served with in Iraq. Post-war guilt, he found, does not only afflict the combatants who fight and carry out
grisly acts of violence, but civilians caught in the crossfire as well.
For many, merely living through a conflict when others did not is cause for significant distress, a condition known as "survivor's
guilt."
"In talking with them I heard so many echoes of what I'd heard from the soldiers in Iraq, and so many echoes of what I felt myself,
this profound sense of guilt," Van Buren said.
'We Killed Them'
Whether it was something a soldier did, saw or failed to prevent, feelings of guilt can leave a permanent mark on veterans after
they come home.
Brian Ellison, a combat veteran who served under the National Guard in Iraq in 2004, said he's still troubled by his wartime experiences.
Stationed at a small, under protected maintenance garage in the town of ad-Diwaniyah in a southeastern province of Iraq, Ellison
said his unit was attacked on a daily basis.
"From the day we got there, we would get attacked every night like clockwork -- mortars, RPGs," Ellison said. "We had no protection;
we had no weapons systems on the base."
On one night in April of 2004, after a successful mission to obtain ammunition for the base's few heavy weapons, Ellison's unit
was ready to hit back.
"So we got some rounds for the Mark 19 [a belt-fed automatic grenade launcher] and we basically used it as field artillery, shot
it up in the air and lobbed it in," Ellison said. "Finally on the last night we were able to get them to stop shooting, but that
was because we killed 5 of them. At the time this was something I was proud of. We were like 'We got them, we got our revenge.'"
U.S. military poster. (Health.mil)
"In retrospect, it's like here's this foreign army, and we're in their neighborhood," Ellison said. "They're defending their neighborhood,
but they're the bad guys and we're the good guys, and we killed them. I think about stuff like that a lot."
Despite his guilt, Ellison said he was able to sort through the negative feelings by speaking openly and honestly about his experiences
and actions. Some veterans have a harder time, however, including one of Ellison's closest friends.
"He ended up going overseas like five times," Ellison said. "Now he's retired and he can't even deal with people. He can't
deal with people, it's sad. He was this funny guy, everybody's friend, easy to get along with, now he's a recluse. It's really weird
to see somebody like that. He had three young kids and a happy personality, now he's broken."
In addition to the problems created in their personal relationships, the morally injured also often turn to self-destructive habits
to cope with their despair.
"In the process of trying to shut this sound off in your head -- this voice of conscience -- many people turn to drugs and alcohol
as a way of shutting that voice up, at least temporarily," Van Buren said. "You hope at some point it shuts up permanently . . .
Unfortunately, I think that many people do look for the permanent silence of suicide as a way of escaping these feelings."
A Hero's Welcome?
By now most are familiar with the practice of celebrating veterans as heroes upon their return from war, but few realize what
psychological consequences such apparently benevolent gestures can have.
"I think the healthiest thing a vet can do is to come to terms with reality," Ellison said. "It's so easy to get swept up -- when
we came home off the plane, there was a crowd of people cheering for us. I just remember feeling dirty. I felt like 'I don't want
you to cheer for us,' but at the same time it's comforting. It's a weird dynamic. Like, I could just put this horror out of my mind
and pretend we were heroes."
"But the terrible part is that, behind that there's reality," Ellison said. "Behind that, we know what we were doing; we know
that we weren't fighting for freedom. So when somebody clings onto this 'we were heroes' thing, I think that's bad for them. They
have to be struggling with it internally. I really believe that's one of the biggest things that contributes to people committing
suicide. They're not able to talk about it, not able to bring it to the forefront and come to terms with it."
Unclear Solution
According to the 2016 VA study, 70 percent of veterans who commit suicide are not regular users of VA services.
The Department of Veteran Affairs was set up in 1930 to handle medical care, benefits and burials for veterans, but some 87 years
later, the department is plagued by scandal and mismanagement. Long wait times,
common to
many government-managed
healthcare systems, discourage veterans from seeking the department's assistance, especially those with urgent psychiatric needs.
An independent review was carried out in 2014 by the VA's Inspector General, Richard Griffin, which
found that at one Arizona VA facility, 1,700 veterans were on wait lists, waiting an average of 115 days before getting an initial
appointment.
"People don't generally seek medical help because the [VA] system is so inefficient and ineffective; everyone feels like it's
a waste of time," said a retired senior non-commissioned officer in the Special Operations Forces (SOF) who wished to remain anonymous.
"The system is so bad, even within the SOF world where I work, that I avoid going at all costs," the retired officer said. "I
try to get my guys to civilian hospitals so that they can get quality healthcare instead of military healthcare."
Beyond institutions, however, both Ellison and Van Buren agreed that speaking openly about their experiences has been a major
step on their road back to normalcy. Open dialogue, then, is not only one way for veterans and other victims of trauma to heal, it
may ultimately be the key to solving America's epidemic of gun violence.
The factors contributing to mass murders, school shootings and private crime are, no doubt, important to study, but so long as
suicide is left out of the public discourse on guns, genuine solutions may always be just out of reach.
Will Porter is a journalist who specializes in U.S. foreign policy and Middle East affairs. He writes for the Libertarian
Institute and tweets at @WKPancap.
If you enjoyed this original article please consider
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a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.
A more constructive new on neocons is as well-paid MIC lobbyists. The fact that many Jews
are talented lobbyists can explain the concentration of this particular nationality far better,
although initially neocons really were mostly turn coat Trotskyites.
The neocons believe in only two things. First, that the United States is the sole world
superpower, given license by something like a Divine Entity to exercise global leadership
by force if necessary.
Sounds very similar to another nation that rules over the USA and uses our military for
their private merc army, Israel, who claims they have a divine right to Palestine and can
kill as many Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians as they want.
After all, their G-d declared them to be his pet project and you don't want to go against
G-d, do you?
Not all Jews are neocons, but damn near every neocon is a Jew.
Irving Krystol, the "Godfather of Neoconservatism," is just one example. If you search
YouTube you can find a Brian Lamb Booknotes episode where he interviews Krystol about this
book, "Neoconservatism; an Autobiography."
He admits in this interview, as well as in the book, that he and most of the early neocons
were former Trotskyites.
The first generation of neocons -- Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Gertrude
Himmelfarb, etc. Maybe Norman Podhoretz, but he was always more of a 'main chance' guy.
The rallying cry of world revolution has filtered down after a fashion to their heirs.
It's still all war all the time. And at the end of the day, when the wars have subdued the
planet, who will be chosen to grasp the reins of world government? One guess.
It was and is Jewish and Zionist at its core, without any question.
Wilton was a highly respected journalist whose claims seem to be reflexted in statements
by various, and equally maligned/suppressed writers of the time.
It's not quite a secret. The fact is just hidden by the neocons and their enablers. They
used to trumpet it, though.
There's a quite robust body of evidence, including the principals themselves celebrating
their communism, that shows the founders of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol, et al were
communists.
Moreover, they were communists of the international revolution variety–the flavor
known as Trotskyism.
Here's Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, in an article for the NY Times,
titled "Memoirs of a Trotskyist:"
"I was graduated from City College in the spring of 1940, and the honor I most prized was
the fact that I was a member in good standing of the Young People's Socialist League (Fourth
International). This organization was commonly, and correctly, designated as Trotskyist (not
"Trotskyite," which was a term used only by the official Communists, or "Stalinists" as we
called them, of the day)"
Here's a chart, helpfully prepared by the Washington Post, tracing the genealogy of
neocons:
On the one hand, it has lately become common to hide the Judaism of various figures; 'I
wonder if he's Jewish' can turn into quite a hunt.
On the other hand, some parties seem to label all and sundry as 'Jews.'
Speaking for myself, I wish I just didn't care. Certainly as of twenty years ago, I could
have honestly said I didn't. However, Israel and the fact of our support for her, and the
fact that most Jews ultimately support Israel to one degree or another, make the question
relevant.
Jewish sympathy for Communism causes and is caused by Jewish antipathy to nationalism on the
part of gentiles. Many articles written during the Cold War attest to the Jewish fear that
the demise of Communism would unleash anti-Semitism. For example a piece in the Washington
Post by Joseph Kraft of the ADA on the occasion of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
advised non-intervention on the grounds that Communism wasn't so bad: it kept a lid on
ancient ethnic hatreds. I have heard this line from many apologists for eastern European
Communism.
The anti-nationalist agenda dovetails with the liberal views of Jews on social issues,
since the EU and NATO have become enforcers of political correctness, while the politically
incorrect traditional attitudes of Slavic countries would likely be defended by nationalist
parties. Many Jews would like to see ethnic Russians and their Orthodox church again
subjugated or at least marginalized with a fellow Jew like Garry Kasparov in charge, and they
aren't too keen on Catholicism either.
It's unfortunate that the role of ethnic animosity in the panic over detente cannot be
mentioned in polite society. It is the only factor that explains the datum of near-universal
Jewish antipathy to Russia beginning after the collapse of Communism. I hope this taboo is
successfully challenged going forward, since, as a Christian, I am grateful for Russia as the
only Christian power left in the world.
"... The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director James Comey ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove Russia was not involved in the DNC leak, as Ray McGovern explains. ..."
"... Special to Consortium News ..."
"... The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with Assange. But it came after Assange had offered to "provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases," Solomon quotes WikiLeaks' intermediary with the government as saying. It would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not WikiLeaks' source of the DNC emails. ..."
"... If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, it would reveal a cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly sophisticated cybertools at risk, rather than allow Assange to at least attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC leak. ..."
"... On March 31, 2017, though, WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure up to that point from what it called "Vault 7" -- a treasure trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA files. This disclosure featured the tool "Marble Framework," which enabled the CIA to hack into computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving so-called tell-tale signs -- like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA documents also showed that the "Marble" tool had been employed in 2016. ..."
"... In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed what former FBI Director Comey -- at first inexplicably, now not so inexplicably -- failed to do when the so-called "Russian hack" of the DNC was first reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its key findings with supporting data. ..."
"... Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access to the DNC computers in order to follow best-practice forensics to discover who intruded into the DNC computers? (Recall, at the time Sen. John McCain and others were calling the "Russian hack" no less than an "act of war.") A 7th grader can now figure that out. ..."
Did Sen. Warner and Comey 'Collude' on Russia-gate? June 27, 2018 •
68 Comments
The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director James Comey
ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove Russia was not involved in the
DNC leak, as Ray McGovern explains.
By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News
An explosive
report by investigative journalist John Solomon on the opinion page of Monday's edition of
The Hill sheds a bright light on how Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and then-FBI Director
James Comey collaborated to prevent WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from discussing "technical
evidence ruling out certain parties [read Russia]" in the controversial leak of Democratic
Party emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election.
A deal that was being discussed last year between Assange and U.S. government officials
would have given Assange "limited immunity" to allow him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in
London, where he has been exiled for six years. In exchange, Assange would agree to limit
through redactions "some classified CIA information he might release in the future," according
to Solomon, who cited "interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents turned over to Senate
investigators." Solomon even provided a
copy of the draft immunity deal with Assange.
But Comey's intervention to stop the negotiations with Assange ultimately ruined the deal,
Solomon says, quoting "multiple sources." With the prospective agreement thrown into serious
doubt, Assange "unleashed a series of leaks that U.S. officials say damaged their cyber warfare
capabilities for a long time to come." These were the Vault 7 releases, which led then CIA
Director Mike Pompeo to call WikiLeaks "a hostile intelligence service."
Solomon's report provides reasons why Official Washington has now put so much pressure on
Ecuador to keep Assange incommunicado in its embassy in London.
Assange: Came close to a deal with the U.S. (Photo credit: New Media Days / Peter
Erichsen)
The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with Assange. But it
came after Assange had offered to "provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did
not engage in the DNC releases," Solomon quotes WikiLeaks' intermediary with the government as
saying. It would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not
WikiLeaks' source of the DNC emails.
If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, it would reveal a
cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly sophisticated cybertools at risk,
rather than allow Assange to at least attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC
leak.
The greater risk to Warner and Comey apparently would have been if Assange provided evidence
that Russia played no role in the 2016 leaks of DNC documents.
Missteps and Stand Down
In mid-February 2017, in a remarkable display of naiveté, Adam Waldman, Assange's pro
bono attorney who acted as the intermediary in the talks, asked Warner if the Senate
Intelligence Committee staff would like any contact with Assange to ask about Russia or other
issues. Waldman was apparently oblivious to Sen. Warner's stoking of Russia-gate.
Warner contacted Comey and, invoking his name, instructed Waldman to "stand down and end the
discussions with Assange," Waldman told Solomon. The "stand down" instruction "did happen,"
according to another of Solomon's sources with good access to Warner. However, Waldman's
counterpart attorney David Laufman , an accomplished federal prosecutor picked by the
Justice Departent to work the government side of the CIA-Assange fledgling deal, told Waldman,
"That's B.S. You're not standing down, and neither am I."
But the damage had been done. When word of the original stand-down order reached WikiLeaks,
trust evaporated, putting an end to two months of what Waldman called "constructive, principled
discussions that included the Department of Justice."
The two sides had come within inches of sealing the deal. Writing to Laufman on March 28,
2017, Waldman gave him Assange's offer to discuss "risk mitigation approaches relating to CIA
documents in WikiLeaks' possession or control, such as the redaction of Agency personnel in
hostile jurisdictions," in return for "an acceptable immunity and safe passage agreement."
On March 31, 2017, though, WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure up to that
point from what it called "Vault 7" -- a treasure trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA
files. This disclosure featured the tool "Marble Framework," which enabled the CIA to hack into
computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving
so-called tell-tale signs -- like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA documents also showed that the
"Marble" tool had been employed in 2016.
Misfeasance or Malfeasance
Comey: Ordered an end to talks with Assange.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes among our members two former
Technical Directors of the National Security Agency, has repeatedly called
attention to its conclusion that the DNC emails were leaked -- not "hacked" by Russia or
anyone else (and, later, our suspicion that someone may have been playing Marbles, so to
speak).
In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed what former FBI
Director Comey -- at first inexplicably, now not so inexplicably -- failed to do when the
so-called "Russian hack" of the DNC was first reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its
key
findings with supporting data.
Two month later , VIPS published the results of
follow-up experiments conducted to test the conclusions reached in July.
Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access to the DNC computers
in order to follow best-practice forensics to discover who intruded into the DNC computers?
(Recall, at the time Sen. John McCain and others were calling the "Russian hack" no less than
an "act of war.") A 7th grader can now figure that out.
Asked on January 10, 2017 by Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr (R-NC) whether
direct access to the servers and devices would have helped the FBI in their investigation,
Comey replied
: "Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server
that's involved, so it's the best evidence."
At that point, Burr and Warner let Comey down easy. Hence, it should come as no surprise
that, according to one of John Solomon's sources, Sen. Warner (who is co-chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee) kept Sen. Burr apprised of his intervention into the negotiation with
Assange, leading to its collapse.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and then a CIA
analyst for a total of 30 years and prepared and briefed, one-on-one, the President's Daily
Brief from 1981 to 1985.
If you enjoyed this original article please consider
making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
Putin said that Russia has been blocked from participating in the ongoing international
investigation into the 2014 downing of flight MH17, which Russia has been recently blamed
for. Russian experts "have been denied access to the investigation," said Putin, while
Russia's arguments are "not taken into consideration" because nobody "is interested in
hearing us out."
Truly sensational new document leak confirms Kiev's direct responsibility for shooting
down the Malesian Airlines flight MH17 in Donbass on July 17, 2014. Ukrainian top secret
official documents show us that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) was ordered to hide
all evidence from the Ukrainian responsibility and especially everything which could prove
Ukrainian air forces involvement in executed secret state terrorism operation.
The documents are leaked by Ukrainian official to the Sovershenno Sekretno newspaper.
Russian and English translations from the orginal articles are available with copies of the
leaked documents, which show written orders given by Ukrainian top officials concerning
concealing of the operation, shooting down the flight MH17 .
This article first published on July 30, 2014 contradicts the substance of the recently
released Dutch Safety Board Report. We are bringing it to the attention of our readers in
view of the soon to be released BBC TV documentary, which suggests that the MH17 was shot
down by a Ukrainian jet fighter.
Although the Dutch report concluded that the Russian-made BUK surface-to-air missile
with a 9N314M warhead brought down the Boeing 777, it did not mention which side was
responsible for firing the missile (International Business Times, March 8, 2016
The evidence amply confirms that Malaysian Airlines MH17 was not brought down by a
surface to air missile. It was brought down by military aircraft .
Joint Investigation Team Includes, Excludes Surprising Members
With the Dutch leading the investigation, the logic being that the flight originated from
the Netherlands and the majority of the passengers were Dutch, it has formed a Joint
Investigation Team (JIT). At the onset of its creation it seemed obvious that Malaysia would
too be included, considering it lost the second largest number of citizens to the disaster
and the plane itself was registered in Malaysia. Instead, JIT would end up comprised of
Belgium, Ukraine, and Australia, specifically excluding Malaysia.
Joint Investigation Team Includes, Excludes Surprising Members
With the Dutch leading the investigation, the logic being that the flight originated
from the Netherlands and the majority of the passengers were Dutch, it has formed a Joint
Investigation Team (JIT). At the onset of its creation it seemed obvious that Malaysia
would too be included, considering it lost the second largest number of citizens to the
disaster and the plane itself was registered in Malaysia. Instead, JIT would end up
comprised of Belgium, Ukraine , and Australia, specifically excluding Malaysia.
Malaysia was both surprised and has protested its exclusion from JIT , and has
repeatedly expressed a desire to be included directly in the investigation.
I will never understand why Russia was foolish enough to turn the plane's black box over
(with no strings attached) to Dutch authorities. You would think they would have, at the
minimum maintained physical possession, while allowing one or more neutral parties to examine
and publish it's contents.
With Mueller Trump is on a very short leash indeed, so I doubt that he has great freedom of maneuver.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump has a free hand from his base to negotiate peaceful coexistence with Russia, but he nevertheless must successfully deal with the passion of the neocon wing of the Borg (foreign policy establishment). They still swoon at the thought of the ongoing renewal of the Cold War. ..."
"... John Bolton is an arch-neocon, a neocon's neocon. Trump has sent him to Moscow to arrange an agenda, date and location for a meeting with Vladimir Putin. IMO this is a stroke of genius. What it does is put an enemy of good US-Russia relations in charge of arranging the schedule for discussions to improve US-Russia relations. In LBJ's vulgarism, Bolton is going to be inside the tent peeing out rather than outside peeing in. Having arranged the meeting, he will be personally invested in its success. How sweet that is! ..."
"... People want to believe so badly. I also want to believe, but I live in the real world. What happened the last time Trump made noises about leaving Syria to its own devices, most recently in April? Instant false flag, that's what. With Trump, it's worked twice already, I see no reason that it will not work a third or fourth time, or as often as needed. ..."
"... Without Russia as a selected enemy the US Army, with its expanding budget and end-strength has no important raison d'ętre , and what will the Borg do about that? First we can expect a large increase in the "Russia-bad" propaganda, similar to that on Iran (the greatest state sponsor of this and that). So I suppose Bolton is busy on his back-channel, etc. ..."
"... Between the end of Peace of Vienna and the start of Peace of Yalta there was a 50-year interval - filled with 2 world wars. Let us hope it be different this time. ..."
"... My biggest concern remains that Bibi's support itself will not guarantee acquiescence from the ultra-nationalist elements in Israel and their supporters elsewhere, who want to drag the US into the war. If the folks that carried out Khan Sheikhoun & other false flag CW attacks can be controlled, peace may have a chance. Otherwise, Trump's hand could still be forced. ..."
"... A stroke of genius. Bolton either demonstrates his obedience or is sacked, along with most of other neocons, for trying to spike the upcoming Putin summit. ..."
On a gestalt basis it seems to me from all the bits and pieces of information and rumor that DJT is attempting "The Deal of the
Century!" (an episode or two of his soon to be award winning series on the subject of "The Greatest President.")
Russian cooperation in this is clearly needed. Trump is blessedly lacking in ideological fervor. His Deplorable base is also a
bit short on ideology being focused on wages, prices, taxes and other everyday living issues. Their patriotism expresses itself in
devotion to the flag and the anthem and a willingness to serve in the armed forces, something increasingly absent in the "resistance."
Trump has a free hand from his base to negotiate peaceful coexistence with Russia, but he nevertheless must successfully deal
with the passion of the neocon wing of the Borg (foreign policy establishment). They still swoon at the thought of the ongoing renewal
of the Cold War.
John Bolton is an arch-neocon, a neocon's neocon. Trump has sent him to Moscow to arrange an agenda, date and location for a meeting
with Vladimir Putin. IMO this is a stroke of genius. What it does is put an enemy of good US-Russia relations in charge of arranging
the schedule for discussions to improve US-Russia relations. In LBJ's vulgarism, Bolton is going to be inside the tent peeing out
rather than outside peeing in. Having arranged the meeting, he will be personally invested in its success. How sweet that is!
Trumps is IMO trying for a grand ME bargain to be achieved with Russian help:
Peace in Syria in the context of abandonment of regime change. Trump the pragmatist recognizes that the R+6 forces have won
the civil war and, therefore he wishes to accept the sunk costs of previous American ineptitude in Syria and to walk away. US Embassy
Amman has signaled to the FSA rebels in SW Syria that they should not expect the US to defend them. This is a traditional American
stab in the back for guerrilla allies but the warning indicates to me that some group in the US Government (probably the CIA) has
enough conscience to want to give warning. As soon as that warning was issued the rate of surrenders to the SAA rose.
The US has thus made it clear that the SAA and Russian forces in Syria have a free hand in the SW and it seems that Israeli
air and missile attacks are unlikely against the SW offensive. This has been insured through a Russian mandate that Hizbullah and
IRGC dominated Shia militias stay out of the fight in Deraa and Quneitra Provinces.
The Egyptians have been talking to Hamas about their willingness to enter into a hudna (religiously sanctioned truce) with
Israel. Hamas has frequently offered this before. Such truces are renewable and are often for 10 years. Kushner's team thinks it
has attained Natanyahhu's support for this. The deal would supposedly include; a Gaza-Egyptian industrial zone in the area of Raffa,
an airport, a seaport. In return Hamas would be expected to police the truce from their side of the border. People on SST who have
deep access in Israel doubt the sincerity of apparent Israeli assent, but there is little doubt I think that DJT considers this part
of the Grand Bargain he is attempting to forge.
Nowhere in any of this is anything concerning Iran and I assume that regime change remains the policy. Nor is there anything about
Saudi Arabia and the UAE's mercenary manned war in Yemen. Ah, well, pilgrims, everything in its time. pl
People want to believe so badly. I also want to believe, but I live in the real world. What happened the last time Trump made
noises about leaving Syria to its own devices, most recently in April? Instant false flag, that's what. With Trump, it's worked
twice already, I see no reason that it will not work a third or fourth time, or as often as needed.
Without Russia as a selected enemy the US Army, with its expanding budget and end-strength has no important raison d'ętre
, and what will the Borg do about that? First we can expect a large increase in the "Russia-bad" propaganda, similar to that on
Iran (the greatest state sponsor of this and that). So I suppose Bolton is busy on his back-channel, etc.
No, I mean the Army is especially invested in Europe and has been. I attended C&GSC at the peak of Vietnam and in exercises they
were still mostly concerned with the Fulda Gap, division trains, etc. Big Army. Similar to how Army is going now, back to their
roots so to speak. Even when they claimed they were short of funds, they found a way to send forces to Europe based on the claims
that after Crimea, Russia was (and is) a threat to. . .the U.S.?
Peace with Russia would be a severe blow to Army especially
with the shift to Indo-Pacific which involves Navy and Marines, and Army not much. I know Army was greatly involved with island
operations in WWII, but China is not Japan regarding imperialism, IMO, and anyhow island invasions are not popular in Army.
So I look for a beefed up "Russia threat" campaign to counter Trump, and insider Bolton to be a big part of it.
Good analysis of the political implications of having Bolton establishing a summit as it worked with Pompeo. Always keep your
friends close and your enemies closer good way to clean up the nest of venomous asps.
Gen Sisi must have made an offer too good to resist. We know the House of Saud will finance it. Are they going to political legitimatize
Hamas, turn Gaza in a statelet ? Perhaps Hamas sees, or is being threaten with the money spigot being turned off ? The only way
to get money will be their share of offshore Natural Gas ? All for Hamas perhaps ? Nothing buys peace faster then lining a whole
lot of pockets. With more money and Airports and a Shipping port, opens dangerous doors. Is Israel ready for that ? How will that
be monitored ? So many damn questions. This may prove more problematic then the status quo, in the long run. Something does have
to be done, the conditions in Gaza are unacceptable.
Excellent analysis. In related news, a week or so ago semi-official Russian Vzglyad made a first media shot across the bow for
Iran in which it stressed that the manner of Iran's "presence" in Syria is a complicating factor.
Russia doesn't want to "dislodge" Iran from Syria but she needs Iran out of the border area with Israel. This is the key to a
new arrangement, including, in the long run, Iran's security.
Is there a new ABM Treaty in the works? Another SALT? Another Peace of Yalta?
First two are important but are not clear and present danger for Russia for a number of reasons. Militarization of space is
more important now. The last point, however, is extremely important because either there will be some kind of new geopolitical
arrangement or we will see probability of a global military conflict grow exponentially.
Iranians do not need to be at the border area. All they need is to deploy their true and tested method of arming Syria with tens
of thousands of precision rockets aimed at Haifa and Tel-Aviv. It worked for North Koreans.
No global peace is in the works.
Between the end of Peace of Vienna and the start of Peace of Yalta there was a 50-year interval - filled with 2 world wars.
Let us hope it be different this time.
Between the end of Peace of Vienna and the start of Peace of Yalta there
was a 50-year interval - filled with 2 world wars. Let us hope it be
different this time.
It must be different, plus I disagree with historic parallel--two entirely different paradigms both in warfare, geopolitical
balance and media.
Well I certainly wish The Greatest President luck. Who knows, I'm done underestimating the guy.
My biggest concern remains that Bibi's support itself will not guarantee acquiescence from the ultra-nationalist elements
in Israel and their supporters elsewhere, who want to drag the US into the war. If the folks that carried out Khan Sheikhoun &
other false flag CW attacks can be controlled, peace may have a chance. Otherwise, Trump's hand could still be forced.
The point of maximum danger appears to be at hand, given your characterization of the Daraa op as "betting the farm". Today's
grant of new powers to the OPCW to apportion blame (designed to side-step the Russian veto at the UNSC) now means this body can
effectively determine casus belli . Let us pray the OPCW will not have reason to exercise its new powers in Syria.
A stroke of genius. Bolton either demonstrates his obedience or is sacked, along with most of other neocons, for trying to
spike the upcoming Putin summit.
On topic #2. If the SAA isn't feeling it's oats by now, forcing them fight a major battle that culminates a campaign by themselves
would seem to be the ideal way to exorcise any remaining self doubts and engender a lasting esprit de corps. Stupid is what stupid
does... Once these guys finish up in the SW and head east enforce it'll be show time.
I think it's important to point out that Putin is rather philo-semitic. As evident by his
friendship with Roman Abramovich, Putin is ok with Jewish oligarchs, as long as they play by
his rules ( http://www.unz.com/isteve/israel-admits-a-refugee
). Also, despite being allies with Syria and Iran, Putin has always been on relatively good
terms with Israel and its leaders, especially Avigdor Lieberman.
Ironically, Mark Weber, whose work Mr. Giraldi links to, could be arrested in Putin's
Russia. Thus, the idea that Putin is hostile to Jewish interests is absurd.
First, Putin is a pragmatist and nationalist ..Russia is his only favoritism.
Second, due to Jewish narcissism they think the law was all about them. It wasn't. It
doesn't mention the holocaust. It says :
'Denial of Nazi crimes and "wittingly spreading false information about the activity of
the USSR during the years of World War Two"
This was Putin's "Polish Lite' law ..i.e ..divorcing Russia from any crimes during WWII
and throwing all blame on the Nazis for any war crimes . 'like' killing Jews. Its his
'balancing act' after also condemning anti-Islam attitudes .
Putin is nipping in the bud any and all ethnic attitudes that could cause the same
domestic and political 'unrest' that is now rampant in Europe and the US.
Which is why he also did this: .no 'ethnic ' or 'foreign' agents are going to get a
foothold in Russia .
Russia Deports Israeli Rabbi, Second Deportation of Chabad Rabbi in 2017
For the second time this year, Russian authorities have ordered out of the country a foreign
Chabad rabbi who had lived there for years.
"This week, a Moscow district court ordered Yosef Khersonsky, an Israeli who heads one of
the capital's communities, to leave the Russian Federation in connection with his "setting up
without permission a for-profit foreign entity," the RIA Novosti news agency reported. The
court did not specify the nature of the entity.
In its ruling against Ari Edelkopf, the Krasnodar Court of Appeals accepted the determination
of a Sochi tribunal that Edelkopf, who had been working as Chabad's emissary to the city, was
a threat to national security
Approximately half of the 70 rabbis working for the Chabad-affiliated Federation of Jewish
Communities of Russia are foreign. At least eight of them have been denied permission to work
in Russia over the past decade, Gorin told JTA in March
Under legislation from 2012 that imposed major limitations on the work of groups with foreign
funding, a Jewish charitable group from Ryazan, near Moscow, was flagged in 2015 by the
Justice Ministry as a "foreign agent" over its funding from the American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee and its reproduction in a newsletter of political op-eds that appeared
in the L'chaim Jewish weekly
Last year, a court in Sverdlovsk convicted a teacher, Semen Tykman, of inciting hatred among
students at his Chabad school against Germans and propagating the idea of Jewish superiority.
Authorities raided his school and another one in 2015, confiscating textbooks, which some
Russian Jews suggested was to create a semblance of equivalence with Russia's crackdown on
radical Islam.
says: June 5, 2018 at
8:29 pm GMT 800 Words The fates of Christianity and Communism are both strange and
ironic.
Christianity was the New Faith of heretical Jews who turned against Jewish Tradition. It was
led by radical Jews at odds with Traditional Jews. But even though spread overwhelmingly by
Jews, it became the Faith of non-Jews who came to oppress Jews.
Communism was the New Ideology of radical Jews who reviled Jewish Community and Culture.
Karl Marx loathed Jewishness and its association with greed, exploitation, and capitalism. And
he inspired a generation of radical Jews who were committed to universal justice based on
'scientific' and 'materialist' reading of history. Early communism was dominated by radical
Jews as early Christianity was dominated by heretical Jews.
But as with Christianity, Communism eventually came to be owned by non-Jews who turned
anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist. Why did this problem arise? Because even as many Jews turned
toward universalism and against their own tribalism, many Jews remained tribal or made common
cause with forces at war with radical universalism. Suppose ALL JEWS around the world had
embraced universal socialism when Soviet Union was coming into its own. Soviet Union would
likely not have turned against Jews. But, in fact, even as many Jews did become full-fledged
communists and univeralists, many Jews remained either Jewish or allied with International
Capitalists that waged war on Communism.
And over time, there were signs of second thoughts or dual loyalty among Communist Jews. Were
they communist first or Jewish first? Or did they try to be both at the same time? But can one
be Jewish-tribalist and communist all at once? (Can one be Jewish and Christian at once?)
Likewise, there would have been no Christian 'antisemitism' IF All Jews had converted to
Christianity and gave up on tribalism. But even as a good number of Jews did adopt the New
Faith, the bulk of the Jewish community kept with Tribalism. So, even though Christianity was
founded by Jews, it turned into an anti-Jewish religion. Too many Jews were seen as resistant
and even hostile to the Universal Faith.
Furthermore, there is something intrinsic to Jewish personality and temperament that
ultimately recoils from universalism. Even as secularists, Jews tend to feel 'special' and
'unique', indeed superior over dimwit goyim. This egotism among Jews makes them both
universalist and anti-universalist. It makes them universalist ON THEIR OWN TERMS. Because they
are so smart, wise, and prophetic, their superior ideas must be good and right for all of
mankind. They want to play the role of Moses laying down the Laws for all peoples. But once the
goy masses adopt the New Law as universal truth, Jews begin to grow bored with established
universalism that now seems mediocre and humdrum. It was exciting when they conceived of it and
presented it to humanity as The Shining Truth. But once that Truth becomes official dogma to
every idiot on the street, Jews grow bored and react against univeralism that has lost its
luster.
This contradiction is seen in Judaism itself. It says there is only one God, the only true God;
Jews know better than pagans who believe in silly stupid idols. And yet, Jews want to keep this
God for themselves through the special Covenant. Thus, Jewish God is universal in conception
but tribal in contract(to Jews).
Of late, Jews came up with a new faith that might be called Homomania. Will it also go the
way of Christianity and Communism? Will it turn against Jews and/or will Jews grow tired of
it?
And yet, Homomania may remain as a weapon of Jews because, unlike Christianity and Communism,
it favors elite-minoritism. It is essentially a special alliance between homo minority elites
and Jewish minority elites. So, even as majority of dimwit goyim become enamored of Homomania,
it can never belong to them in the way the Christianity or Communism could. No matter how many
goyim worship Homomania, the object of worship won't be universal brotherhood of man but elite
tooter-hood of fancy neo-aristo fruits(financed by Jews). Also, unlike Christianity and
Communism that eventually came to favor mediocrity -- Jesus favored the meek, and Marx &
Lenin stood for common workers -- , the very nature of Homomania is celebration of elitism,
vanity, egotism, narcissism, privilege, new fashions & fads, and fancy-pants stuff that
homos love so much. As Jews are rich and homos are whoopsy-vain, they make natural allies in
the Current Year.
'Neoconservatism' also isn't likely to fall into the hands of non-Jews. Unlike the spiritual
populism of Christianity and economic populism of Communism, Neoconservatism was devised to be
esoteric-elitist-hegemonic based on carefully crafted coordination among media, academia,
think-tanks, Intelligence services, Deep State, and Israel. So, even though Neo-conservatism
pays lip-service to Humanitarianism and Spreading Democracy, its real agenda and operations are
a very exclusive affair. Leo Strauss came up with a way to Talk the Walk and Walk the Talk.
This is a very superficial view. Israeli interests are taken into account as long as they are
coincide with interests of military-industrial complex and the Us imperial/neoliberal foreign
policy agenda. There is some flexibility, of course, and Israel might be able in certain cases do
push more, but for example to say that invasion of Iraq was done due to Israeli lobbying would be
inaccurate. yes neocons in the US government were active, but that main reason was access to oil
which considered with Israeli geopolitical ambitions in the region.
One might well think that the only serious foreign policy imperative of the Donald Trump
administration is to defend Israel. A president elected because he promised to put United
States' interests first has turned out to be little different than his predecessors, bowing to
the power of various lobbies and constituencies to carry out their wishes while simultaneously
pretending to be serving poorly defined policies to promote the security and well-being of the
American people.
Israel possesses, to be sure, the most powerful foreign policy lobby operating not only in
the United States but as well in Western Europe and Australasia. When Israel makes its
incessant demands, politicians from Washington to Canberra and Wellington pause to listen. In
Britain, fully 80% of Conservative parliamentarians are members of the Conservative Friends of
Israel.
Israel benefits from a large, influential and wealthy community of diaspora Jews that is
willing to do its bidding and which also possesses easy access to the media and to politicians,
many of whom are more than willing to be corrupted by money. This has led to the creation of an
"Israeli narrative," most particularly in the United States, which glamorizes the state of
Israel through the incessant reiteration of expressions like "the only democracy in the Middle
East" and "America's best friend and closest ally," both of which assertions are completely
false.
It should surprise no one that the Trump administration is packed with Israel-firsters from
top to bottom. Those who deal with Israel directly – Ambassador David Friedman, Chief
Middle East Negotiator Jason Greenblatt, and Special Envoy and son-in-law Jared Kushner are all
Orthodox Jews with long standing ties to Israel and its leadership. They are major financial
supporters of Israeli "charities," to include projects on the occupied West Bank, which are
both illegal under international law and contrary to long established U.S. policy. It would
seem, without being too hyperbolic, that Israeli interests are at least as important to them as
are the American interests that they ostensibly represent and are being paid by the taxpayer to
support.
Within the White House, there is virtually no pushback against Israeli pretensions even when
American interests are being damaged. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeatedly voiced his
support of the Jewish state and his animosity towards that state's enemy of choice Iran.
National Security Adviser John Bolton, a long-time neoconservative, has never distanced himself
in any way from complete identification with the policies being promoted by Israel and its
increasingly right wing and racist governments. Donald Trump himself has declared that he will
be the best president for Israel ever, a pledge that he has worked to honor by moving the U.S.
Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in spite of the damage that it does to actual regional
American interests.
But the most vocal advocate for Israel within the Administration is Nikki Haley, U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations, who has consistently taken the hardest of all possible lines
against Israel's claimed enemies while also fully endorsing the most brutal actions undertaken
by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Haley's most recent action reveals that
the United States has truly lost its sense of direction and moral compass. If one were
religious, it might be suggested that it has lost its soul.
Haley's most recent foray into her own style of what she might refer to as statesmanship
came on June 1 st . Kuwait had brought a resolution to the United Nations Security
Council to call on it to fulfil its responsibility to help protect the people of Gaza, who were
being bombed, gassed and shot dead by Israeli Army sniper fire. Nikki Haley, however, was
thinking of something quite different, a resolution she had drafted to denounce Hamas for the
alleged volleys of rockets that were launched into adjacent Israeli controlled areas in
response to the Israeli gunfire and bombings. Votes on the two resolutions followed,
with Haley failing to obtain any votes on her resolution except her own.
Haley again voted alone when she vetoed the Kuwaiti resolution to protect the Palestinian
people. And it was not Haley's first such bit of unilateralism. She had
walked out of a previous Security Council meeting on Israel's killing of Palestinian
protesters as a deliberate insult to their representative who had risen to begin to speak.
Haley unfortunately represents America. America the home of the free and brave?
Bullshit.
OK, book report time. I have just finished reading Bad Blood , by John Carreyrou of the Wall Street
Journal. Good read, fascinating story. It is the saga of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of
Theranos, the miraculous blood-testing company of Silicon Valley. Holmes, formerly said to be
worth $4.5 billion, ended up under criminal indictment for fraud as of 2015. I suppose many
have heard vaguely of Theranos, as I had, but the actual story is astonishing.
Holmes, 19, drops out of Stanford to start a medical-instrumentation company. She is very
smart, very driven, very self-confident, very glib, very cold-blooded, very manipulative, very
willing to take risks, very pretty, and very ruthless. Everything about her is very. If the
foregoing resembles the clinical description of a psychopath, there is a reason.
She also knows almost nothing of the sciences, and nothing at all of electronic or
mechanical engineering, or of medical instrumentation. That is, she has no qualifications in
the field. She is just very–that word again–smart and pretty and talks a swell
show. And yet ye gods and little catfishes, what she managed to do.
Her goal was to invent a medical blood-analyzer that could do a large number of tests on a
single drop of blood from a pricked finger. It was a bright idea. If it had worked, it would
have been a (very) big deal. This of course is also true of anti-gravity space shps and
perpetual motion machines. Making it work required nothing beyond difficult mechanical
engineering, electronic engineering, programming, microfluidics, and a few things that were
impossible. She knew none of these fields.
But holy smack-and-kerpow, Batman, could she talk. Soon she had investment money pouring in.
On her board she got–yes–Henry everlovin' Kissinger and James Mattis (uh-huh, that
one,) and former Secretaries of State and Defense and just about every heavy hitter except Pope
Francis. More money rained down. I mean with people like that vouching for her, Hank the Kiss
and Mad Dog Mattis, it had to be legit–right? She even managed to cozy up to the Clintons
and Obama.
Meanwhile the wretched blood gizmo wouldn't, didn't, and couldn't as it turned out, work. It
was a metal box with inside it a glue-gun robot arm out of Jersey–I am not inventing
this–that made grinding noises and could do only a few tests with wildly unreliable
results. You might think of it as Uncle Clunk. Just the thing you want your life to depend on.
And lives do depend on good lab results.("OK, lady, Uncle Clunk says you got brain cancer. We
have to remove your brain.") Heh. Oops.
So Holmes, who could talk the bark off a tree, faked it. To be fair, she probably thought it
would work or hoped it might and turned to chicanery only when it didn't. Anyway, many of her
deceptions were clearly fraudulent–well, clearly if you knew about them. For example,
most of her results were obtained using commercial analyzers from outfits like Siemens instead
of Uncle Clunk. Financial projections were wildly dishonest. Many employees quit over ethhical
concerns–but they were bound by sharp-fanged nondisclosure agreements they had to sign to
be hired. It was nonsense. Nothing worked. But nobody knew.
Thing was, across America there was a terrific will to believe. Her story was just too good
to pass up. People wanted a female Steve Jobs, a girl to join the boys in a startup world of
wunderkind guys like Gates and Jobs and Wozniak and Zuckerberg and all. There just weren't any
girls. Sure, a few, sort of, a little bit, like Marissa Mayer at Google, but Page and Bryn were
the real starters-up. Holmes was beautiful, smart, so very appealing and just a dynamite
entrepreneur. She had this astonishingly successful company.
Which didn't have a product.
Note that most of the dazzling university dropouts who became billionaires are in software,
not biological sciences. The few in hardware brilliantly put together readily comprehended
pieces, like CPUs and memory chips. There is a reason for this. Programming takes a lot of
brains and little knowledge. Medicine takes reasonable intelligence and lots of knowledge.
Molecular biology takes a lot of brains and a lot of knowledge. A (very) bright kid can learn
Python or C-plus-plus in a couple of months in mommy's basement and actually be a programmer.
It doesn't work with complicated multidisciplinary computerized micro-fluidized gadgets
involving robotic glue-arms. At least, it didn't work.
I wonder why nobody thought of this. When asked for evidence, she ducked, dodged, lied, said
the check was in the mail, and any day now.
The non-disclosure agreements saved her, for a while. All employees had to sign them. Her
lawyer, who was also on her board, was the scary super lawyer David Boies. If you were a
midlevel lab worker, and knew that reagents were out of date, that bad results were being
hidden, that Uncle Clunk didn't work–and said so, a savage law firm with unlimited funds
and, as events proved, not a lot of ethics, would litigate you into sleeping in alleys.
Consequently much was known, but little was said.
Meanwhile–this is crazier than Aunt Sadie, that we kept in the attic–she got
freaking Safeway and Walgreens to bite on putting Theranos booths in their stores so customers
could get quick finger-prick analyses for very little money. Both companies bought into this,
and actually built the booths at considerable expense, without insisting on seeing proof of her
claims. I wonder what she was thinking. The scam obviously was going to collapse at some point.
And did.
A better question might be what her board members and the chain-store executives were
thinking. They were bosses of huge corporations and presumably astute. How did she get away
with it? I will guess. Most of those gulled were old men, or nearly so. Note that old men,
powerful men, rich men, and famous men, are nevertheless men. Holmes was a honey, slender, very
pretty, well-groomed, appealing, smart, and maybe the daughter or girlfriend or mistress that
her prey would have liked.
Andrea Dworkin. Finally, a cure for self-abuse. Would the old guys on Elizabeth's board have
been as smitten by Andrea?
As the Wall Street Journal closed in, and Theranos got wind of it, things became
ethically interesting. Holmes of course knew that Theranos was endangering lives, and had
already established a lack of morality. Some of the board came to suspect and quietly bailed.
The employees were intimidated, though several talked to the Journal anonymously.
But superlawyer David Boies and his associate Heather King among others at the firm knew.
They tried every legal means, or maybe I mean lawyerly means, to block publication of the
story. When federal regulatory agencies issued a long, detailed investigative report making it
absolutely clear that Theranos did not even come close to legality, and was therefore
endangering lives–Boies and King tried to suppress that too. Their success was not great
as the Journal put the whole gorgeous taco online, but they tried. It is a curious fact,
but a fact, that lawyers are often accessories to crime.
Antony C. Sutton, ´Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution', 1974 New Rochelle,
N.Y.
describes how Wall Street supported bolsjewism in order to prevent that German, suppose also
Dutch and other, trade, with Russia was resumed.
WII and the aftermath created the Atlantic alliance.
Just yesterday Pieter Hoekstra, USA ambassador in the Netherlands, stated that Russia should
be punished for MH17 by more sanctions, no new gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
What he did not say that this implies our buying of USA gas, 20% more expensive. The MH17
show, in my opinion is run like the Sept 11 show. Or even the holocaust show, constant
reminders.
The USA fear about Russia and the EU member states seems to be twofold:
more trade with Russia, and the railway connections with China, threaten to turn the USA
into an economic backwater
Precisely. US could eventually (20-30 years from now) turn into a country similar to many
Latin American countries: rich in resources, demographically messy and ungovernable, weak
infrastructure, but above all remote and quasi-provincial.
The 'Atlanticist' project is meant to forestall the provincial Latin American future.
Washington does have some tools: dollar domination, military force, Hollywood, technology.
But none of those are necessarily sustainable without also actively messing up
Euro-Russia-China economic convergence. It might require a war to delay the inevitable slow
descend into a backwater across the Atlantic.
The Communist diaspora in Europe and America was also largely Jewish, including the cabal
of founders of neoconservativism in New York City. The United States Communist Party was from
the start predominantly Jewish. It was in the 1930s headed by Jew Earl Browder, grandfather
of the current snake oil salesman Bill Browder, who has been sanctimoniously proclaiming his
desire to punish Vladimir Putin for various alleged high crimes.
Earl Browder was not, so far as I know, born a Jew. While living in the Soviet Union he
married a Russian Jewess named Raisa Berkman. One of their sons, Felix, married another Jewess,
Eva Tislowitz, and Bill Browder was their son. He is matrilineally Jewish.
Apart from this minor quibble, the description of Bill Browder's career seems quite
accurate.
"Immigration" has become the dominant issue dividing Europe and the US, yet the most important matter which is driving millions
to emigrate is overlooked is wars.
In this paper we will discuss the reasons behind the massification of immigration, focusing on several issues, namely (1) imperial
wars (2) multi-national corporate expansion (3) the decline of the anti-war movements in the US and Western Europe (4) the weakness
of the trade union and solidarity movements.
We will proceed by identifying the major countries affected by US and EU wars leading to massive immigration, and then turn to
the western powers forcing refugees to 'follow' the flows of profits.
Imperial Wars and Mass Immigration
The US invasions and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq uprooted several million people, destroying their lives, families, livelihood,
housing and communities and undermining there security.
As a result, most victims faced the choice of resistance or flight. Millions chose to flee to the West since the NATO countries
would not bomb their residence in the US or Europe.
Others who fled to neighboring countries in the Middle East or Latin America were persecuted, or resided in countries too poor
to offer them employment or opportunities for a livelihood.
Some Afghans fled to Pakistan or the Middle East but discovered that these regions were also subject to armed attacks from the
West.
Iraqis were devastated by the western sanctions, invasion and occupation and fled to Europe and to a lesser degree the US , the
Gulf states and Iran.
Libya prior to the US-EU invasion was a 'receiver' country accepting and employing millions of Africans, providing them with citizenship
and a decent livelihood. After the US-EU air and sea attack and arming and financing of terrorist gangs, hundreds of thousands of
Sub-Sahara immigrants were forced to flee to Europe. Most crossed the Mediterranean Sea to the west via Italy, Spain, and headed
toward the affluent European countries which had savaged their lives in Libya.
The US-EU financed and armed client terrorist armies which assault the Syrian government and forced millions of Syrians to flee
across the border to Lebanon,Turkey and beyond to Europe, causing the so-called 'immigration crises' and the rise of rightwing anti-immigrant
parties. This led to divisions within the established social democratic and conservative parties,as sectors of the working class
turned anti-immigrant.
Europe is reaping the consequences of its alliance with US militarized imperialism whereby the US uproots millions of people and
the EU spends billions of euros to cover the cost of immigrants fleeing the western wars.
Most of the immigrants' welfare payments fall far short of the losses incurred in their homeland. Their jobs homes, schools, and
civic associations in the EU and US are far less valuable and accommodating then what they possessed in their original communities.
Economic Imperialism and Immigration: Latin America
US wars, military intervention and economic exploitation has forced millions of Latin Americans to immigrate to the US.. Nicaragua,
El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras engaged in popular struggle for socio-economic justice and political democracy between 1960 –
2000. On the verge of victory over the landed oligarchs and multinational corporations, Washington blocked popular insurgents by
spending billions of dollars, arming, training, advising the military and paramilitary forces. Land reform was aborted; trade unionists
were forced into exile and thousands of peasants fled the marauding terror campaigns.
The US-backed oligarchic regimes forced millions of displaced and uprooted pr unemployed and landless workers to flee to the US.
US supported coups and dictators resulted in 50,000 in Nicaragua, 80,000 in El Salvador and 200,000 in Guatemala. President Obama
and Hillary Clinton supported a military coup in Honduras which overthrew Liberal President Zelaya -- which led to the killing and
wounding of thousands of peasant activists and human rights workers, and the return of death squads, resulting in a new wave of immigrants
to the US.
The US promoted free trade agreement (NAFTA) drove hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers into bankruptcy and into low wage
maquiladoras; others were recruited by drug cartels; but the largest group was forced to immigrate across the Rio Grande. The US
'Plan Colombia' launched by President Clinton established seven US military bases in Colombia and provided 1 billion dollars in military
aid between 2001 – 2010. Plan Colombia doubled the size of the military.
The US backed President Alvaro Uribe, resulting in the assassination of over 200,000 peasants, trade union activists and human
rights workers by Uribe directed narco-death squad.Over two million farmers fled the countryside and immigrated to the cities or
across the border.
US business secured hundreds of thousands of Latin American low wages, agricultural and factory workers almost all without health
insurance or benefits – though they paid taxes.
Immigration doubled profits, undermined collective bargains and lowered US wages. Unscrupulous US 'entrepreneurs' recruited immigrants
into drugs, prostitution, the arms trade and money laundering.
Politicians exploited the immigration issue for political gain – blaming the immigrants for the decline of working class living
standards distracting attention from the real source : wars, invasions, death squads and economic pillage.
Conclusion
Having destroyed the lives of working people overseas and overthrown progressive leaders like Libyan President Gadhafi and Honduran
President Zelaya, millions were forced to become immigrants.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Colombia, Mexico witnessed the flight of millions of immigrants -- all victims of US and EU wars. Washington
and Brussels blamed the victims and accused the immigrants of illegality and criminal conduct.
The West debates expulsion, arrest and jail instead of reparations for crimes against humanity and violations of international
law.
To restrain immigration the first step is to end imperial wars, withdraw troops,and to cease financing paramilitary and client
terrorists.
ORDER IT NOW
Secondly, the West should establish a long term multi-billion-dollar fund for reconstruction and recovery of the economies, markets
and infrastructure they bombed The demise of the peace movement allowed the US and EU to launch and prolong serial wars which led
to massive immigration – the so-called refugee crises and the flight to Europe. There is a direct connection between the conversion
of the liberal and social democrats to war -parties and the forced flight of immigrants to the EU.
The decline of the trade unions and worse, their loss of militancy has led to the loss of solidarity with people living in the
midst of imperial wars. Many workers in the imperialist countries have directed their ire to those 'below' – the immigrants – rather
than to the imperialists who directed the wars which created the immigration problem. Immigration, war , the demise of the peace
and workers movements, and left parties has led to the rise of the militarists, and neo-liberals who have taken power throughout
the West. Their anti-immigrant politics, however, has provoked new contradictions within regimes,between business elites and among
popular movements in the EU and the US. The elite and popular struggles can go in at least two directions – toward fascism or radical
social democracy.
- more trade with Russia, and the railway connections with China, threaten to turn the USA
into an economic backwater
This is only a surmise I guess but Globalists are plum tired of American middle
class population, and their main purpose in the world is over, and the horses of manufacturing
and technology ''have got out of the barn'' and successfully transplanted to... greener
pastures so that, it's time to make fallow and put the stops to the further
exploitation of North American resources that are too much used up by the damned American
population on their gaddamed consumer needs, and time to put that back in store for a future
where there won't be so many hungry overfed mouths to worry about, so that is the possible
purpose to isolate and crush America at this time.
An induced torpor of complacency will make it seem impossible until the last moment, then
it's too late. (''Have you noticed the exsorbitance high cost of... Latties lately?.puffpuff...
// Hey! they ain't nuthin' on da shelves in da supermarket!!'')
Mean while there's time for the development of Russia and China to have their time in the
sun , for a while, then they get the axe later, and so it goes.
Well, I didn't want to say it but, part of the plan will be a pretty big reduction in pops
which isn't all bad... depends on how the cookie crumbles, (who's ox gets gored.) (Good for
biosphere mainly.)
But if your "In the Club'' and a member in standing which is a only a few you get a ticket
to ride.
The creeps are running America down every way, bread and circuses for a while then Austerity
for real.
Globalists are plum tired of American middle class population, and their main purpose in
the world is over
Bull's eye. That is an under-appreciated dynamic driving everything from economic policies
to the hatred of Trump and populists in general. The narcissistic Western elites cannot stand
their own people. One sees it in the culture, academia, economic policies, and the insane
attempt to dilute native population and replace them with new migrants. (It is amusing that
sophisticated Westerners often boringly allude to the evil 'commies' who 'wanted to elect new
people', and of course never did, but they are unwilling to see it happening at home.)
The purpose for creating the Western middle class after WWII was to prevent a revolution.
That is no longer a threat, so why coddle the deplorables?
- more trade with Russia, and the railway connections with China, threaten to turn the
USA into an economic backwater
This is only a surmise I guess but Globalists are plum tired of American middle class
population, and their main purpose in the world is over, and the horses of manufacturing and
technology "have got out of the barn" and successfully transplanted to greener
pastures so that, it's time to make fallow and put the stops to the further
exploitation of North American resources that are too much used up by the damned American
population on their gaddamed consumer needs, and time to put that back in store for a future
where there won't be so many hungry overfed mouths to worry about, so that is the possible
purpose to isolate and crush America at this time.
An induced torpor of complacency will make it seem impossible until the last moment, then
it's too late. ("Have you noticed the exsorbitance high cost of Latties lately?.puffpuff //
Hey! they ain't nuthin' on da shelves in da supermarket!!")
Mean while there's time for the development of Russia and China to have their time in
the sun , for a while, then they get the axe later, and so it goes.
Well, I didn't want to say it but, part of the plan will be a pretty big reduction in pops
which isn't all bad depends on how the cookie crumbles, (who's ox gets gored.) (Good for
biosphere mainly.)
But if your "In the Club" and a member in standing which is a only a few you get a ticket
to ride.
The creeps are running America down every way, bread and circuses for a while then
Austerity for real.
"... Today we see anti-racism being elevated into a quasi-religion that may be used to justify totalitarian policies. One benefit of this initiative is that it allows the elite to preserve the gap in material wealth between themselves and the victim class. Ending racism is less expensive than ending inequality! ..."
Numerous sources give very high figures for Jews and these have tended to be memory-holed
and maligned as you know what.
Consequently sources which report a low number of jews (do you know of any?) from the period
are at least as suspect, and ones from a later period and embraced by Jewish scholars more
so.
And one must remember that apart from the many name changes by Jews in the Old Bolshevik era
(lots of name changes amongst Israel's 'founders' too) they made substantial effort to hide
their jewishness, as have later sources.
One might consider the attempted Bokshevik coup in Germany a year after the Russian one.
Even wikipedia has to report that this 'Spartacus uprising' was led almost wholly by Jews.
What would they have done had they won? Might the conflation of anti-nationalist communist
violence and Jewish Supremacy have been what led in part to Hitler and his racial nationalists?
There was also a coup in Hungary led by Bela Kun. I agree with you that the threat of Communism
played a role in the rise of militant nationalism and its anti-Semitic aspect. The role of Jews
in the leadership of every Communist uprising is crisply documented by Winston Churchill in his
1920 article http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/WSCwrote1920.html
Paul Johnson in Modern Times claims that Jews did not make up a large percentage of party
members but that is less impressive than their domination of the top ranks. Germany in the 20s
and 30s had an abundance of motives to support a strong nationalist leader since the terms of
the Versailles Treaty were unjust and unendurable, and the solution seemed to involve at least
the willingness to use force to remove the burden. The democratic parties were insufficiently
decisive and would likely have succumbed to Communist agitation or at best preserved a very
unpleasant status quo. The weakness of Communism is that it reduces everything to economics and
the material dimension. It demands the right to dictate without addressing the spiritual
dimension of life. Hitler, by contrast, appealed to national pride and national unity, in
addition to the national need to escape from poverty.
Today we see anti-racism being elevated into a quasi-religion that may be used to
justify totalitarian policies. One benefit of this initiative is that it allows the elite to
preserve the gap in material wealth between themselves and the victim class. Ending racism is
less expensive than ending inequality!
responding to PG's comments and the comments of Rational
Zionist, among them, being many NY Intellectuals, invented mugged reality (Neoconism) , but
party slithering is a another name for divide and conquer.
Fudmier's example as to how to control the vote:
You present an idea to 6 people (there are seven votes including yours, you are the one);
virtually everyone is indifferent or against your idea. Before the vote, how can you make the
outcome favorable to your side? Divide the opinions on a related subject so that the people
must vote for your idea if they take a side on the related subject. I am always either a
Democrat or a Republican, cannot vote for anything the other party presents, no matter how
good it is. So make the idea Republican or Democratic.
them me Total vote for against my idea
no division 1 2 3 4 5 6 ME 7 Me 6 I lose
divide by party D R D R D R ME 7 Me+3 3 I win
As the simple analysis suggests: it is easy to win a vote when the idea is Glued to the
two AAs (glue, attached, or associated). The unpopular idea Glued and attached or associated
with the political party issue splits the vote (such activity divides and weakens the
political power inherent in the voting power of the masses). For example, if we make the vote
to turn off all of the drinking water. the only vote will be mine, but if we say turn off the
drinking water to all but those who are green, we divide the vote. and control the
outcome.
This brings us to the democratic dilemma: should the non green people be included in vote
on that issue? In fact, it is exactly this problem that those who wrote the constitution
intended to establish.
The aggressive foreign policies and national security positions mentioned by PG have been
attached to the standard Jewish line; in other words the duty of a Jew to recognize
him/herself as a Jew and to vote as a member of the clan has been glued to the AAs. It is
nearly impossible to vote for Jewish interest and not vote to demolish Palestinian homes.
I am hoping this list can develop ways to analyse current events into a set of fair play
rules, reading, learning and analyzing books, journals and events and writing about them is
not enough; some kind of action is needed to bring into reality the findings of these
readings, learning and analysis produce. The best way to offset misleading, false or invented
propaganda is to force it to into a rule based debunking process. Simple rules that everyone
can learn, understand and adopt.
Capitalist Russia and its resources represent a major competitor to the resources and
schemes of the capitalist neocon led west. Hating Russia is like being a democrat or a
republican,it keeps the pharaoh options open.
I once found a real great Web page with a great graph, kind of a family tree of the
various western Trot. groups at the time.
It was bizarre, but did not include the neocons, I suppose that was reasonable because it
was only of claimed affilliates to the nonsenical 'Fourth Internatiaoal'.
Also not comprehensive, did not include the minor parties and groupuscules in Japan and
Europe of the boomer gen. , nor the earlier Viet Trots. nor Sri Lanka, the only place they
ever obtained political power except as agents in the shadows.
Of course, they have enormous power in the shadows in the state media in many places, EU,
cabinets in many European nations, etc.
Even without that, the chart and attached notes are bizarre enough.
The 'ite' 'ist' distinction among Trots is not just as you describe, they use it among
themselves, too, at least in English, as one was explaining to me. Understood the words, not
understanding the content at all.
Avoid Trots, their parties (as in social events) are miserable, and their households are
like those of the worst cult religionists.
I make one exception, the HQ of the Kakumaru (Core Circle) is a few hundrd metres from my
house, they are all old people now, they used to have their newspaper for sale until
recently. no more. I would buy it at times.
Have some sympathy, but my opinion is that most such groups were used at the time by the
national police and by the CIA to oppose people with more serious ideas, and the support for
such groups at the time by CIA etc. in the U.S.A and in Europe is making serious cultural and
sometimes violent (I see photos of Antlfa morons, etc., direct descendants) blowback.
I thought that perhaps I had tuned into John Oliver or to Saturday Night Live in error, but
no doubt about it, there was an unmistakable President Donald Trump speaking before an audience
at the National Space Council. He was saying that on his own presidential authority "I'm hereby
directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to
establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. We are going to have the Air
Force, and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal."
Before signing Space Policy Directive 3 mandating the change and abruptly departing, Trump
went on to explain that "My administration is reclaiming America's heritage as the world's
greatest space-faring nation. The essence of the American character is to explore new horizons
and to tame new frontiers. But our destiny, beyond the Earth, is not only a matter of national
identity, but a matter of national security. It is not enough to merely have an American
presence in space. We must have American dominance in space."
The Air Force, which already has a Space Command, will no doubt object to the new
arrangement, preferring instead to roll the expanded responsibilities and money into its
already existing framework. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is also reported to be against
the expansion, explaining in a speech last year that "The creation of an independent Space
Corps, with the corresponding institutional growth and budget implications, does not address
our nation's fiscal problems in a responsive manner."
And Donald Trump will have to get over a couple of bureaucratic hurdles to get his nifty new
interstellar command up and running. First of all, it will require an Act of Congress to create
a new branch of the military. That might not be difficult to do as the expansion is being
packaged as "national security," which Republicans will support reflexively and Democrats will
also get behind not wanting to appear weak before the elections in November. And both parties
will also be willing to line up to benefit from the political contributions coming from defense
contractors as well as the creation of new military support facilities providing jobs in
congressional districts.
And then there is the money, alluded to by Mattis. Start-up funding a new, coequal military
branch would mean a huge increase in the defense budget. As long as the dollar remains the
world's reserve currency and the treasury can print money without any real backing it is
possible to ride the wave, but there are currently significant challenges to the dollars
survival in that role. If its supremacy ends, there goes the economy taking the unrestrained
government spending with it and sinking the Space Command together with much, much more.
Major defense contractors, all of whom were present to hear Trump's speech, were immediately
seen to be drooling over the prospect of a new cash cow. And at the Pentagon champagne corks
were popping at the thought of a couple of hundred new flag officer positions that will have to
be invented and filled as well as the full complement of civilians to staff the bureaucracy.
And think of the uniforms that will have to be distinct from those used by the other branches
of the service, maybe copying those formerly in vogue on the Starship Enterprise or as seen in
the movie Starship Troopers.
The reality is that the United States does indeed have a major national security interest in
protecting its network of satellites in orbit as well as related infrastructure, but there is
still quite a lot in the Trump remarks that is disturbing. Trump is basically saying two
things. The first is that he will be weaponizing outer space and the second is that he is doing
so because he intends for the United States to become dominant in that domain. It is a complete
ass-backwards approach to the problem of potential development of threats coming from beyond
the atmosphere. Instead of arming outer space, Washington should be working with other
countries that have capabilities in that region to demilitarize exploration and both commercial
and government exploitation. Everyone has an interest in not allowing outer space to become the
next site for an arms race, though admittedly working with other countries does not appear to
be something that the Trump Administration enters into lightly. Or at all.
And Trump should also abandon his insistence that the United States develop "dominance" in
space. The use of such language is a red flag that will make any agreement with countries like
Russia and China impossible to achieve. It virtually guarantees that there will be a
competition among a number of nations to develop and deploy killer satellites employing lasers
and other advanced electronic jamming technologies to protect their own outer space
infrastructure.
Trump appears to have internalized a viewpoint that sees the United States as surrounded by
threats but able to emerge victorious by being hyper-aggressive on all fronts. It is a posture
that might unnerve opponents and bring some success in the short term but which ultimately will
create a genuine threat as the rest of the world lines up against Washington. That day might be
coming if one goes by the reaction to recent U.S. votes in the United Nations and Trump's
behavior at G-7 are anything to go by.
No one in his right mind would allow Trump to dominate outer space based on Washington's
track record of irresponsible leadership since 9/11. It has wrecked the Middle East, South Asia
and North Africa, killing possibly as many as 4 million Muslims in so doing. It has bullied
allies into joining its projects in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria while also
disparaging foreign governments and entering into trade wars. It has bankrupted itself in all
but name, systematically dismantled the rights of its own citizens, and has become a rogue
nation by virtually every measure.
And when you have firmly established the principle that might makes right and all the
universe is at the disposal of Washington, what comes next? Antarctica and the arctic region
are by some accounts rich in natural resources. Will we Americans be seeing an Antarctic
Command with a mandate to dominate the polar regions to enhance national security? Stay
tuned.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is
[email protected].
"... The adage from the past that everyone could relate to -- "A nuclear war cannot be unleashed, because there will be no winners" -- is now absent from the political statements that are being heard. It is clear that forces have taken the upper hand on Capitol Hill that are still incapable of imagining the consequences of a nuclear Armageddon. Such a path, even if this scenario proves unlikely, will inevitably lead to a potential undermining of the already fragile non-proliferation regime and a breakdown in the negotiations on establishing control over nuclear facilities, which -- and this is not news -- very few countries are taking part in at the present time. ..."
"... For all these reasons, a dangerous future practice like this needs to be reexamined by Washington, in the interests of preserving global stability. In order to achieve this goal, the strategic guidelines for inflicting a first "preemptive and preventive" nuclear strike, as well as the continuing premise of "unconditional offensive nuclear deterrence," which have remained unchanged since 1945, must be completely eliminated from American nuclear strategies. ..."
It seems odd that the US still does not understand the basic tenets
of Russia's nuclear posture. And it must be said that this is not the first time that Western
analysts have taken such an unprofessional approach. This has become especially glaring in the
run-up to the next NATO summit, which will take place July 11-12 in Brussels.
On the other hand, the
newest US nuclear doctrine , which was approved last February, specifies 14 justifications
for the use of nuclear weapons, including "low-yield" warheads, which is how US arms experts
classify nuclear warheads of 5.0-6.5 kilotons and below. These are precisely the sea- and
air-launched warheads the Pentagon intends to utilize in accordance with its new concept of
"escalating to de-escalate." Under that theory, low-yield nuclear warheads can be employed by
US nuclear forces on an increasing scale in a variety of regional conflicts, with the aim of
"de-escalating" them, which might be accomplished with the help of a nuclear first strike.
This practice could cause a chain reaction in the use of nuclear weapons, involving not only
"low-yield" warheads, but also more powerful nuclear explosives.
The practice being described -- the potential use of low-yield nuclear weapons, which is a
real fixation for the current US administration and is being discussed with increasing
frequency in the US -- suggests that America's military and political leaders are committed to
dramatically lowering the minimum threshold for their use and expanding the list of acceptable
reasons to utilize them under real-world conditions.
The adage from the past that everyone could relate to -- "A nuclear war cannot be unleashed,
because there will be no winners" -- is now absent from the political statements that are being
heard. It is clear that forces have taken the upper hand on Capitol Hill that are still
incapable of imagining the consequences of a nuclear Armageddon. Such a path, even if this
scenario proves unlikely, will inevitably lead to a potential undermining of the already
fragile non-proliferation regime and a breakdown in the negotiations on establishing control
over nuclear facilities, which -- and this is not news -- very few countries are taking part in
at the present time.
For all these reasons, a dangerous future practice like this needs to be reexamined by
Washington, in the interests of preserving global stability. In order to achieve this goal, the
strategic guidelines for inflicting a first "preemptive and preventive" nuclear strike, as well
as the continuing premise of "unconditional offensive nuclear deterrence," which have remained
unchanged since 1945, must be completely eliminated from American nuclear strategies.
These are not ultimatums, as someone defending US nuclear policy has already tried to
portray them. This is a completely natural, logical, and sensible step, which would no doubt be
positively received all over the world.
That is what it's all about. MIC Oligarchs getting rich. Vietnam was a business not a war.
The MIC insiders made a fortune off that fake war.
For all these reasons, a dangerous future practice like this needs to be reexamined by
Washington, in the interests of preserving global instability. That instability keeps murican
arms dealers in business.
Empire doesn't like sovereign countries. Brits still have that empire mentality, the upper
crust's shit don't stink.
It's neocon hubris. They are desperate to nuke someone. Of course the counter strategy is
very simple; escalate to the brink and leave Washington with 2 choices: BTFO or die. These
people are stupid and will eventually get us all killed for nothing.
I am halfway through watching a film of US actor Peter von Berg travelling through the
Donetsk People's Republic and meeting Prime Minister Alexander Zakharchenko and various others
to find out how the Donetsk rebels are creating a socialist state under a situation of war. The
film is as much an implicit criticism of US society (and by extension, Western capitalist
society generally) as it is an investigation of the reality on the ground on Donetsk, ignored
by the Western MSM.
Von Berg visits a greenhouse farm growing tomatoes, a hospital and a factory among other
places he travels to (including the capital, of course) in the DPR.
There is even a short history of the city of Donetsk and how it was founded by 19th-century
Welsh engineer industrialist John Hughes, after whom it was originally named Yuzovka.
If the claims in the 1990s tell-all bestsellers of Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky can
be credited, Israel even considered the assassination of President George H.W. Bush in 1992
for his threats to cut off financial aid to Israel during a conflict over West Bank
settlement policies, and I have been informed that the Bush Administration took those
reports seriously at the time.
I did not know of Ostrovsky's claim but I was very aware of George H.W. Bush conflict with
Yitzhak Shamir which most likely costed him the second term. The conflict obviously was very
deemphasized by the MSM. Iirc Patrick Buchanan wrote about it. Bush decided to say NO to
Israel and put conditions on providing further funding for immigrants form Russia to Israel.
He did it having exceptionally high (90%) approval ratings in the wake of the Desert Storm.
So timing was good. But after Congress going against him and AIPAC busing supporters of
Israel to DC Bush caved in sometime in Sept. 1991. Buchanan believed that if Bush brought the
issue to 'American people' he could have won this conflict but Bush decided to keep Americans
in the dark which is a norm when it come to Israel issues. Bush only complained about being
all alone in the White House during some press conference but most American did not get the
idea what he was compliant about. The Lobby however did not forgive Bush and did not trust
him getting the second term in the office. It must have been decided he had to go. An anti
Bush campaign was continued by Safire and Friedman in weekly columns in the NYT and negative
mostly exaggerated and bogus articles about weak economy were published. The 'It's the
economy, stupid' was bogus made up meme. Clinton was parachuted from Arkansas and Ross Perot
was encouraged to run and then dis-encouraged when he suspended his campaign and then again
encouraged to re-enter the race. He played exactly the same role as Teddy Roosevelt in 1912
election that stopped the incumbent Taft from getting the 2nd term. This gave presidency to
Wilson who brought Federal Reserve and federal tax the the following year and the entrance
into the WWI few years later. Was assassination considered as the plan B in case Bush was
reelected? Do people from The Lobby talk about killing American presidents among themselves?
Yes, they do – even publicly:
ATLANTA JEWISH NEWSPAPER CALLS FOR OBAMA ASSASSINATION. (Jan 22, 2012)
Could Obama be trusted with the 2nd term? Netnayahu's Israel was as not very happy with
him and Obama in the very beginning was talking very tough about Israel (University of
Cairo). W/o his 2nd term there would be no treaty with Iran and there would be a veto of
anti-Israel UN resolution.
It seems like George H.W. Bush must have resigned himself to not being reelected. What
message was he sending by checking the watch during a debate? Was the message: Do not
worry I am just going through the motions. Do not need to kill me.
The question is how come the neocons decided to trust GW Bush? Richard Perle went to
Austin TX and announced that Bush ignorance of the world affairs was an advantage: an empty
vessel that they can fill. Did he also mean that it will be easy to control him like sending
him against Iraq to avenge his father?
GW Bush got coached and tutored by Prince Bandar in 1997:
He lands in Austin, and is surprised when Governor Bush boards the plane before Bandar
can disembark. Bush comes straight to the point: he is considering a run for the
presidency, and though he already knows what his domestic agenda will be, says, "I don't
have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy."
Finally, Bush says, "There are people who are your enemies in this country who also
think my dad is your enemy." Bandar knows Bush is speaking of US supporters of Israel, and
wants to know how he should handle the Israeli-Jewish lobby as well as the neoconservatives
who loathe both the Saudis and the elder Bush. Bandar replies: "Can I give you one advice?
If you tell me that [you want to be president], I want to tell you one thing. To hell with
Saudi Arabia or who likes Saudi Arabia or who doesn't, who likes Bandar or who doesn't.
Anyone who you think hates your dad or your friend who can be important to make a
difference in winning, swallow your pride and make friends of them. And I can help you. I
can help you out and complain about you, make sure they understand that, and that will make
sure they help you." Bandar's message is clear: if Bush needs the neoconservatives to help
him win the presidency, then he should do what it takes to get them on his side. "Never
mind if you really want to be honest," Bandar continues. "This is not a confession booth.
In the big boys' game, it's cutthroat, it's bloody and it's not pleasant."
Yes it is strange that the elder George Bush, who had exorcised the 'ghost of Vietnam',
through his rout of Saddam's forces in Kuwait and earned a 90% approval rating, went on to
lose to Clinton supposedly on account of the economy. The idiot Ross Perot, a capitalist
weaned on the government teat had of course a role. But I thought that the elder Bush was a
shoo-in. Then came Clinton, selling off the Americans' industrial birthright for a song to
the Chinese and the kabuki theatre of the Israeli-Palestinian 'peace process'. In James
Baker, one had the least sympathetic of Secretary of States to Israel in a long time
I recall the image making by the press when GB became inconvenient, although a veteran
pilot in WW2, he was painted as a proverbial wimp.
I recall the image making by the press when GB became inconvenient, although a veteran
pilot in WW2, he was painted as a proverbial wimp.
Why the neocons called him a wimp?
In 1990 George H.W. Bush was very reluctant to go against Saddam Hussain. He seemed to
really believe in the so called "peace dividends", base closings and scaling military down.
And then Saddam Hussain with possible approval April Glaspie fucked it all up for him and us.
It was Margaret Thatcher that twisted his arms to go against Saddam Hussein. Then when in the
Dessert Storm he did not let escalate the plan and stopped the troops form going all the way
into Iraq. The neocons did not like him.
Why we can call him a wimp?
In 1991 he decided to confront Israel but then backed off instead of escalating and
letting the American people know that he needed their support against The Lobby and the sold
out Congress.
An excellent even headed analysis of events and major hypothesis about the assassination.
Remarkable conclusion: " So although committed partisans can continue endless, largely
fruitless debates over "Who Killed JFK," I think that the one firm conclusion we can draw from
the remarkable history of this pivotal event of the twentieth century is that all of us have
lived for many decades within the synthetic reality of 'Our American Pravda.' "
Notable quotes:
"... As Lane recounted in his 1991 bestseller, Plausible Denial , his strategy generally proved quite successful, not only allowing him to win the jury verdict against Hunt, but also eliciting sworn testimony from a former CIA operative of her personal involvement in the conspiracy along with the names of several other participants, though she claimed that her role had been strictly peripheral. ..."
"... Hunt's explosive death-bed confession was recounted in a major 2007 Rolling Stone article and also heavily analyzed in Talbot's books, especially his second one, but otherwise largely ignored by the media. ..."
"... Many of these same apparent conspirators, drawn from the same loose alliance of groups, had previously been involved in the various U.S. government-backed attempts to assassinate Castro or overthrow his Communist government, and they had developed a bitter hostility towards President Kennedy for what they considered his betrayal during the Bay of Pigs fiasco and afterward. ..."
"... While this framework for the assassination is certainly possible, it is far from certain. One may easily imagine that most of the lower-level participants in the Dallas events were driven by such considerations but that the central figures who organized the plot and set matters into motion had different motives. ..."
"... A new presidential election was less than a year away, and Kennedy's shifting stance on Civil Rights seemed likely to cost him nearly all the Southern states that had provided his margin of electoral victory in 1960. A series of public declarations or embarrassing leaks might have helped remove him from office by traditional political means, possibly replacing him with a Cold War hard-liner such as Barry Goldwater or some other Republican. Would the militarists or business tycoons often implicated by liberal JFK researchers have really been so desperate as to not wait those extra few months and see what happened? ..."
"... While his involvement is certainly possible, obvious questions arise. Dulles was a seventy-year-old retiree, with a very long and distinguished career of public service and a brother who had served as Eisenhower's secretary of state. He had just published The Craft of Intelligence , which was receiving very favorable treatment in the establishment media, and he was embarked on a major book tour. Would he really have risked everything -- including his family's reputation in the history books -- to organize the murder of America's duly-elected president ..."
"... On the other hand, it is very easy to imagine that such individuals had some awareness of the emerging plot or may even have facilitated it or participated to a limited extent. And once it succeeded, and their personal enemy had been replaced, they surely would have been extremely willing to assist in the cover-up and protect the reputation of the new regime, a role that Dulles may have played as the most influential member of the Warren Commission. But such activities are different than acting as the central organizer of a presidential assassination. ..."
"... Furthermore, the strong evidence that many CIA operatives were involved in the conspiracy very much suggests that they were recruited and organized by some figure high in their own hierarchy of the intelligence or political worlds rather than the less likely possibility that they were brought in solely by leaders of the parallel domain of organized crime. And while crime bosses might possibly have organized the assassination itself, they surely had no means of orchestrated the subsequent cover-up by the Warren Commission, nor would there have been any willingness by America's political leadership to protect mafia leaders from investigation and proper punishment for such a heinous act. ..."
"... As a total newcomer to the enormous, hidden world of JFK conspiracy analysis, I was immediately surprised by the mere sliver of suspicion directed towards Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain leader's immediate successor and the most obvious beneficiary. ..."
"... Although liberals had grown to revile LBJ by the late 1960s for his escalation of the unpopular Vietnam War, over the decades those sentiments have faded, while warm memories of his passage of the landmark Civil Rights legislation and his creation of the Great Society programs have elevated his stature in that ideological camp. Furthermore, such legislation had long been blockaded in Congress and only became law because of the 1964 Democratic Congressional landslide following JFK's martyrdom, and it might be difficult for liberals to admit that their fondest dreams were only realized by an act of political parricide. ..."
"... An additional factor helping to explain the extreme unwillingness of Talbot, Douglass, and others to consider Johnson as an obvious suspect may be the realities of the book publishing industry. ..."
"... if he had devoted any space to voicing suspicions that our 35th president had been murdered by our 36th, surely the weight of that extra element of "outrageous conspiracy theory" would have ensured that his book sank without a trace. ..."
"... If the plot succeeded and Johnson became president, the conspirators must surely have felt reasonably confident that they would be protected rather than tracked down and punished as traitors by the new president. Even a fully successful assassination would entail enormous risks unless the organizers believed that Johnson would do exactly what he did, and the only means of ensuring this would be to sound him out about the plan, at least in some vague manner, and obtain his passive acquiesce. ..."
"... Based on these considerations, it seems extremely difficult to believe that any JFK assassination conspiracy took place entirely without Johnson's foreknowledge, or that he was not a central figure in the subsequent cover-up. ..."
"... A very useful corrective to the "See No Evil" approach to Johnson from liberal JFK writers is Roger Stone's The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ , published in 2013. Stone, a longtime Republican political operative who got his start under Richard Nixon, presents a powerful case that Johnson was the sort of individual who might easily have lent his hand to political murder, and also that he had strong reasons to do so. ..."
"... Certainly one remarkable aspect of Johnson's career is that he was born dirt-poor, held low-paying government jobs throughout his entire life, yet took the oath of office as the wealthiest president in modern American history , having accumulated a personal fortune of over $100 million in present-day dollars, with the financial payoffs from his corporate benefactors having been laundered through his wife's business. This odd anomaly is so little remembered these days that a prominent political journalist expressed total disbelief when I mentioned it to him a decade ago. ..."
"... The pressure and financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel by the Kennedy Administration eventually became so severe that they led to the resignation of Israel's founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in June 1963. But all these efforts were almost entirely halted or reversed once Kennedy was replaced by Johnson in November of that same year. ..."
"... So although committed partisans can continue endless, largely fruitless debates over "Who Killed JFK," I think that the one firm conclusion we can draw from the remarkable history of this pivotal event of the twentieth century is that all of us have lived for many decades within the synthetic reality of "Our American Pravda." ..."
A strong dam may hold back an immense quantity of water, but once it breaks the resulting
flood may sweep aside everything in its path. I had spent nearly my entire life never doubting
that a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy nor that a
different lone gunman took the life of his younger brother Robert a few years later. Once
I came to
accept that these were merely fairy tales widely disbelieved by many of the same political
elites who publicly maintained them, I began considering other aspects of this important
history, the most obvious being who was behind the conspiracy and what were their motives.
On these questions, the passage of a half-century and the deaths, natural or otherwise, of
nearly all the contemporary witnesses drastically reduces any hope of coming to a firm
conclusion. At best, we can evaluate possibilities and plausibilities rather than high
likelihoods let alone near certainties. And given the total absence of any hard evidence, our
exploration of the origins of the assassination must necessarily rely upon cautious
speculation.
From such a considerable distance in time, a bird's-eye view may be a reasonable starting
point, allowing us to focus on the few elements of the apparent conspiracy that seem reasonably
well established. The most basic of these is the background of the individuals who appear to
have been associated with the assassination, and the recent books by David Talbot and James W.
Douglass effectively summarize much of the evidence accumulated over the decades by an army of
diligent assassination researchers. Most of the apparent conspirators seem to have had strong
ties to organized crime, the CIA, or various anti-Castro activist groups, with considerable
overlap across these categories. Oswald himself certainly fit this same profile although he was
very likely the mere "patsy" that he claimed to be, as did Jack Ruby, the man who quickly
silenced him and whose ties to the criminal underworld were long and extensive.
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An unusual chain of events provided some of the strongest evidence of CIA involvement.
Victor Marchetti, a career CIA officer, had risen to become Special Assistant to the Deputy
Director, a position of some importance, before resigning in 1969 over policy differences.
Although he fought a long battle with government censors over his book, The CIA and the Cult
of Intelligence , he retained close ties with many former agency colleagues.
During the 1970s, the revelations of the Senate Church Committee and the House Select
Committee on Assassinations had subjected the CIA to a great deal of negative public scrutiny,
and there were growing suspicions of possible CIA links to JFK's assassination. In 1978
longtime CIA Counter-intelligence chief James Angleton and a colleague provided Marchetti with
an explosive leak, stating that the agency might be planning to admit a connection to the
assassination, which had involved three shooters, but place the blame upon E. Howard Hunt, a
former CIA officer who had become notorious during Watergate, and scapegoat him as a rogue
agent, along with a few other equally tarnished colleagues. Marchetti published the resulting
story in The Spotlight , a weekly national tabloid newspaper operated by Liberty Lobby,
a rightwing populist organization based in DC. Although almost totally shunned by the
mainstream media, The Spotlight was then at the peak of its influence, having almost
400,000 subscribers, as large a readership as the combined total of The New Republic ,
The Nation , and National Review .
Marchetti's article suggested that Hunt had actually been in Dallas during the
assassination, resulting in a libel lawsuit with potential damages large enough to bankrupt the
publication. Longtime JFK assassination researcher Mark Lane became aware of the situation and
volunteered his services to Liberty Lobby, hoping to use the legal proceedings, including the
discovery process and subpoena power, as a means of securing additional evidence on the
assassination, and after various court rulings and appeals, the case finally came to trial in
1985.
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As Lane recounted in his 1991 bestseller, Plausible Denial , his strategy
generally proved quite successful, not only allowing him to win the jury verdict against Hunt,
but also eliciting sworn testimony from a former CIA operative of her personal involvement in
the conspiracy along with the names of several other participants, though she claimed that her
role had been strictly peripheral. And although Hunt continued for decades to totally deny
any connection with the assassination, near the end of his life he made a series of video-taped
interviews in which he admitted that he had indeed been involved in the JFK assassination and
named several of the other conspirators, while also maintaining that his own role had been
merely peripheral. Hunt's explosive death-bed confession was recounted in a major 2007
Rolling Stonearticle
and also heavily analyzed in Talbot's books, especially his second one, but otherwise largely
ignored by the media.
Many of these same apparent conspirators, drawn from the same loose alliance of groups,
had previously been involved in the various U.S. government-backed attempts to assassinate
Castro or overthrow his Communist government, and they had developed a bitter hostility towards
President Kennedy for what they considered his betrayal during the Bay of Pigs fiasco and
afterward. Therefore, there is a natural tendency to regard such animosity as the central
factor behind the assassination, a perspective generally followed by Talbot, Douglass, and
numerous other writers. They conclude that Kennedy died at the hands of harder-line
anti-Communists, outraged over his perceived weakness regarding Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam,
sentiments that were certainly widespread within right-wing political circles at the height of
the Cold War.
While this framework for the assassination is certainly possible, it is far from
certain. One may easily imagine that most of the lower-level participants in the Dallas events
were driven by such considerations but that the central figures who organized the plot and set
matters into motion had different motives. So long as all the conspirators were agreed on
Kennedy's elimination, there was no need for an absolute uniformity of motive. Indeed, men who
had long been involved in organized crime or clandestine intelligence operations were surely
experienced in operational secrecy, and many of them may not have expected to know the
identities, let alone the precise motives, of the men at the very top of the remarkable
operation they were undertaking.
We must also sharply distinguish between the involvement of particular individuals and the
involvement of an organization as an organization. For example, CIA Director John McCone was a
Kennedy loyalist who had been appointed to clean house a couple of years before the
assassination, and he surely was innocent of his patron's death. On the other hand, the very
considerable evidence that numerous individual CIA intelligence officers and operatives
participated in the action has naturally raised suspicions that some among their
highest-ranking superiors were involved as well, perhaps even as the principal organizers of
the conspiracy.
These reasonable speculations may have been magnified by elements of personal bias. Many of
the prominent authors who have investigated the JFK assassination in recent years have been
staunch liberals, and may have allowed their ideology to cloud their judgment. They often seek
to locate the organizers of Kennedy's elimination among those rightwing figures whom they most
dislike, even when the case is far from entirely plausible.
But consider the supposed motives of hard-line anti-Communists near the top of the national
security hierarchy who supposedly may have organized Kennedy's elimination because he backed
away from a full military solution in the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis incidents. Were
they really so absolutely sure that a President Johnson would be such an enormous improvement
as to risk their lives and public standing to organize a full conspiracy to assassinate an
American president?
A new presidential election was less than a year away, and Kennedy's shifting stance on
Civil Rights seemed likely to cost him nearly all the Southern states that had provided his
margin of electoral victory in 1960. A series of public declarations or embarrassing leaks
might have helped remove him from office by traditional political means, possibly replacing him
with a Cold War hard-liner such as Barry Goldwater or some other Republican. Would the
militarists or business tycoons often implicated by liberal JFK researchers have really been so
desperate as to not wait those extra few months and see what happened?
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Based on extremely circumstantial evidence, Talbot's 2015 book The Devil's Chessboard
, something of a sequel to Brothers , suggests that former longtime CIA Director Allan
Dulles may have been the likely mastermind, with his motive being a mixture of his extreme Cold
Warrior views and his personal anger at his 1961 dismissal from his position.
While his involvement is certainly possible, obvious questions arise. Dulles was a
seventy-year-old retiree, with a very long and distinguished career of public service and a
brother who had served as Eisenhower's secretary of state. He had just published The Craft
of Intelligence , which was receiving very favorable treatment in the establishment media,
and he was embarked on a major book tour. Would he really have risked everything -- including
his family's reputation in the history books -- to organize the murder of America's
duly-elected president , an unprecedented act utterly different in nature than trying to
unseat a Guatemalan leader on behalf of supposed American national interests? Surely, using his
extensive media and intelligence contacts to leak embarrassing disclosures about JFK's
notorious sexual escapades during the forthcoming presidential campaign would have been be a
much safer means of attempting to achieve an equivalent result. And the same is true for J.
Edgar Hoover and many of the other powerful Washington figures who hated Kennedy for similar
reasons.
On the other hand, it is very easy to imagine that such individuals had some awareness
of the emerging plot or may even have facilitated it or participated to a limited extent. And
once it succeeded, and their personal enemy had been replaced, they surely would have been
extremely willing to assist in the cover-up and protect the reputation of the new regime, a
role that Dulles may have played as the most influential member of the Warren Commission. But
such activities are different than acting as the central organizer of a presidential
assassination.
Just as with the hard-line national security establishment, many organized crime leaders had
grown outraged over the actions of the Kennedy Administration. During the late 1950s, Robert
Kennedy had intensely targeted the mob for prosecution as chief counsel to the Senate Labor
Rackets Committee. But during the 1960 election, family patriarch Joseph Kennedy used his own
longstanding mafia connections to enlist their support for his older son's presidential
campaign, and by all accounts the votes stolen by the corrupt mob-dominated political machines
in Chicago and elsewhere helped put JFK in the White House, along with Robert Kennedy as his
Attorney General. Frank Sinatra, an enthusiastic Kennedy supporter, had also helped facilitate
this arrangement by using his influence with skeptical mob leaders.
However, instead of repaying such crucial election support with political favors, Attorney
General Robert Kennedy, perhaps ignorant of any bargain, soon unleashed an all-out war against
organized crime, far more serious than anything previously mounted at the federal level, and
the crime bosses regarded this as a back-stabbing betrayal by the new administration. Once
Joseph Kennedy was felled by an incapacitating stroke in late 1961, they also lost any hope
that he would use his influence to enforce the deals he had struck the previous year. FBI
wiretaps reveal that mafia leader Sam Giancana decided to have Sinatra killed for his role in
this failed bargain, only sparing the singer's life when he considered how much he personally
loved the voice of one of the most famous Italian-Americans of the 20th century.
These organized crime leaders and some of their close associates such as Teamster boss Jimmy
Hoffa certainly developed a bitter hatred toward the Kennedys, and this has naturally led some
authors to point to the mafia as the likely organizers of the assassination, but I find this
quite unlikely. For many decades, American crime bosses had had a complex and varied
relationship with political figures, who might sometimes be their allies and at other times
their persecutors, and surely there must have been many betrayals over the years. However, I am
not aware of a single case in which any even moderately prominent political figure on the
national stage was ever targeted for assassination, and it seems quite unlikely that the sole
exception would be a popular president, whom they would have likely regarded as being
completely out of their league. On the other hand, if individuals who ranked high in Kennedy's
own DC political sphere set in motion a plot to eliminate him, they might have found it easy to
enlist the enthusiastic cooperation of various mafia leaders.
Furthermore, the strong evidence that many CIA operatives were involved in the
conspiracy very much suggests that they were recruited and organized by some figure high in
their own hierarchy of the intelligence or political worlds rather than the less likely
possibility that they were brought in solely by leaders of the parallel domain of organized
crime. And while crime bosses might possibly have organized the assassination itself, they
surely had no means of orchestrated the subsequent cover-up by the Warren Commission, nor would
there have been any willingness by America's political leadership to protect mafia leaders from
investigation and proper punishment for such a heinous act.
If a husband or wife is found murdered, with no obvious suspect or motive at hand, the
normal response of the police is to carefully investigate the surviving spouse, and quite often
this suspicion proves correct. Similarly, if you read in your newspapers that in some obscure
Third World country two bitterly hostile leaders, both having unpronounceable names, had been
sharing supreme political power until one was suddenly struck down in a mysterious
assassination by unknown conspirators, your thoughts would certainly move in an obvious
direction. Most Americans in the early 1960s did not perceive their own country's politics in
such a light, but perhaps they were mistaken. As a total newcomer to the enormous, hidden
world of JFK conspiracy analysis, I was immediately surprised by the mere sliver of suspicion
directed towards Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain leader's immediate successor and
the most obvious beneficiary.
The two Talbot books and the one by Douglass, totaling some 1500 pages, devote merely a few
paragraphs to any suspicions of Johnson's involvement. Talbot's first book reports that
immediately after the assassination, the vice president had expressed a frantic concern to his
personal aides that a military coup might be in progress or a world war breaking out, and
suggests that these few casual words demonstrate his obvious innocence, although a more cynical
observer might wonder if those remarks had been uttered for exactly that reason. Talbot's
second book actually quotes an apparent low-level conspirator as claiming that Johnson had
personally signed off on the plot and admits that Hunt believed the same thing, but treats such
unsubstantiated accusations with considerable skepticism, before adding a single sentence
acknowledging that Johnson may indeed have been a passive supporter or even an accomplice.
Douglass and Peter Dale Scott, author of the influential 1993 book Deep Politics and the
Death of JFK , apparently seem never to have even entertained the possibility.
Ideological considerations are probably an important reason for such remarkable reticence.
Although liberals had grown to revile LBJ by the late 1960s for his escalation of the
unpopular Vietnam War, over the decades those sentiments have faded, while warm memories of his
passage of the landmark Civil Rights legislation and his creation of the Great Society programs
have elevated his stature in that ideological camp. Furthermore, such legislation had long been
blockaded in Congress and only became law because of the 1964 Democratic Congressional
landslide following JFK's martyrdom, and it might be difficult for liberals to admit that their
fondest dreams were only realized by an act of political parricide.
Kennedy and Johnson may have been intensively hostile personal rivals, but there seem to
have been few deep ideological differences between the two men, and most of the leading figures
in JFK's government continued to serve under his successor, surely another source of enormous
embarrassment to any ardent liberals who came to suspect that the former had been murdered by a
conspiracy involving the latter. Talbot, Douglass, and many other left-leaning advocates for an
assassination conspiracy prefer to point the finger of blame towards far more congenial
villains such as hard-line, anti-Communist Cold Warriors and right-wing elements, notably
including top CIA officials, such as former director Allan Dulles.
An additional factor helping to explain the extreme unwillingness of Talbot, Douglass,
and others to consider Johnson as an obvious suspect may be the realities of the book
publishing industry. By the 2000s, JFK assassination conspiracies had long become
passé and were treated with disdain in mainstream circles. Talbot's strong reputation,
his 150 original interviews, and the quality of his manuscript broke that barrier, and
attracted The Free Press as his very respectable publisher, while later drawing a
strongly positive review by a leading academic scholar in the New York Times Sunday Book
Review and an hour long television segment broadcast on C-Span Booknotes . But
if he had devoted any space to voicing suspicions that our 35th president had been murdered
by our 36th, surely the weight of that extra element of "outrageous conspiracy theory" would
have ensured that his book sank without a trace.
However, if we cast off these distorting ideological blinders and the practical
considerations of American publishing, the prima facie case for Johnson's involvement
seems quite compelling.
Consider a very simple point. If a president is struck down by an unknown group of
conspirators, his successor would normally have had the strongest possible incentive to track
them down lest he might become their next victim. Yet Johnson did nothing, appointing the
Warren Commission that covered up the entire matter, laying the blame upon an erratic "lone
gunman" conveniently dead. This would seem remarkably odd behavior for an innocent LBJ. This
conclusion does not demand that Johnson was the mastermind, nor even an active participant, but
it raises a very strong suspicion that he at least had had some awareness of the plot, and
enjoyed a good personal relationship with some of the principals.
A similar conclusion is supported by a converse analysis. If the plot succeeded and
Johnson became president, the conspirators must surely have felt reasonably confident that they
would be protected rather than tracked down and punished as traitors by the new president. Even
a fully successful assassination would entail enormous risks unless the organizers believed
that Johnson would do exactly what he did, and the only means of ensuring this would be to
sound him out about the plan, at least in some vague manner, and obtain his passive
acquiesce.
Based on these considerations, it seems extremely difficult to believe that any JFK
assassination conspiracy took place entirely without Johnson's foreknowledge, or that he was
not a central figure in the subsequent cover-up.
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But the specific details of Johnson's career and his political situation in late 1963
greatly strengthen these entirely generic arguments. A very useful corrective to the "See
No Evil" approach to Johnson from liberal JFK writers is Roger Stone's The Man Who Killed
Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ , published in 2013. Stone, a longtime Republican political
operative who got his start under Richard Nixon, presents a powerful case that Johnson was the
sort of individual who might easily have lent his hand to political murder, and also that he
had strong reasons to do so.
Among other things, Stone gathers together an enormous wealth of persuasive information
regarding Johnson's decades of extremely corrupt and criminal practices in Texas, including
fairly plausible claims that these may have included several murders. In one bizarre 1961
incident that strangely foreshadows the Warren Commission's "lone gunman" finding, a federal
government inspector investigating a major Texas corruption scheme involving a close LBJ ally
was found dead, shot five times in the chest and abdomen by a rifle, but the death was
officially ruled a "suicide" by the local authorities, and that conclusion was reported with a
straight face in the pages of the Washington Post .
Certainly one remarkable aspect of Johnson's career is that he was born dirt-poor, held
low-paying government jobs throughout his entire life, yet took the oath of office as the
wealthiest president in modern American history , having accumulated a personal fortune of
over $100 million in present-day dollars, with the financial payoffs from his corporate
benefactors having been laundered through his wife's business. This odd anomaly is so little
remembered these days that a prominent political journalist expressed total disbelief when I
mentioned it to him a decade ago.
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The Dark Side of Camelot strongly suggest that personal blackmail was a greater
factor than geographical ticket-balancing. In any event, Kennedy's paper-thin 1960 victory
would have been far more difficult without Texas narrowly falling into the Democratic column,
and election fraud there by Johnson's powerful political machine seems almost certainly to have
been an important factor.
Under such circumstances, Johnson naturally expected to play a major role in the new
administration, and he even issued grandiose demands for a huge political portfolio, but
instead he found himself immediately sidelined and treated with complete disdain, soon becoming
a forlorn figure with no authority or influence. As time went by, the Kennedys made plans to
get rid of him, and just a few days before the assassination, they were already discussing whom
to place on the reelection ticket in his stead. Much of Johnson's long record of extreme
corruption both in Texas and in DC was coming to light following the fall of Bobby Baker, his
key political henchman, and with strong Kennedy encouragement, Life Magazine was
preparing a huge expose of his sordid and often criminal history, laying the basis for his
prosecution and perhaps a lengthy prison sentence. By mid-November 1963, Johnson seemed a
desperate political figure at the absolute end of his rope, but a week later he was the
president of the United States, and all those swirling scandals were suddenly forgotten. Stone
even claims that the huge block of magazine space reserved for the Johnson expose was instead
filled by the JFK assassination story.
Aside from effectively documenting Johnson's sordid personal history and the looming
destruction he faced at the hands of the Kennedys in late 1963, Stone also adds numerous
fascinating pieces of personal testimony, which may or may not be reliable. According to him,
as his mentor Nixon was watching the scene at the Dallas police station where Jack Ruby shot
Oswald, Nixon immediately turned as white as a ghost, explaining that he had personally known
the gunman under his birth-name of Rubenstein. While working on a House Committee in 1947,
Nixon had been advised by a close ally and prominent mob-lawyer to hire Ruby as an
investigator, being told that "he was one of Lyndon Johnson's boys." Stone also claims that
Nixon once emphasized that although he had long sought the presidency, unlike Johnson "I wasn't
willing to kill for it." He further reports that Vietnam Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and
numerous other prominent political figures in DC were absolutely convinced of Johnson's direct
involvement in the assassination..
Stone has spent more than a half-century as a ruthless political operative, a position that
provided him with unique personal access to individuals who participated in the great events of
the past, but one that also carries the less than totally candid reputation of that profession,
and individuals must carefully weigh these conflicting factors against each other. Personally,
I tend to credit most of the eyewitness stories he provides. But even readers who remain
entirely skeptical should find useful the large collection of secondary source references to
the sordid details of LBJ's history that the book provides.
Finally, a seemingly unrelated historical incident had originally raised my own suspicions
of Johnson's involvement.
U.S.S. Liberty , our most advanced intelligence-gathering ship, to remain offshore in
international waters and closely monitor the military situation. There have been published
claims that he had granted Israel a green-light for its preemptive attack, but fearful of
risking a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet patrons of Syria and Egypt, had strictly
circumscribed the limits of the military operation, sending the Liberty to keep an eye
on developments and perhaps also to "show Israel who was boss."
Whether or not this reconstruction is correct, the Israelis soon launched an all-out attack
on the nearly defenseless ship despite the large American flag it was flying, deploying attack
jets and torpedo boats to sink the vessel during an assault that lasted several hours, while
machine-gunning the lifeboats to ensure that there would be no survivors. The first stage of
the attack had targeted the main communications antenna, and its destruction together with
heavy Israeli jamming prevented any communications with other U.S. naval forces in the
region..
Liberty and drive off the attackers, each time they were recalled, apparently upon
direct orders from the highest authorities of the U.S. government. Once the Israelis learned
that word of the situation had reached other U.S. forces, they soon discontinued their attack,
and the heavily-damaged Liberty eventually limped into port, with over 200 dead and
wounded sailors and NSA signal operators, representing the greatest loss of American servicemen
in any naval incident since World War II.
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Liberty survivor, risked severe legal consequences and published Assault on the
Liberty in 1979 .
As it happened, NSA intercepts of Israeli communications between the attacking jets and Tel
Aviv, translated from the Hebrew, fully confirmed that the attack had been entirely deliberate,
and since many of the dead and wounded were NSA employees, the suppression of these facts
greatly rankled their colleagues. My old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who ran the
NSA for Ronald Reagan, later shrewdly circumvented the restrictions of his political masters by
making those incriminating intercepts part of the standard curriculum of the Sigint training
program required for all intelligence officers.
In 2007 an unusual set of circumstances finally broke the thirty year blackout in the
mainstream media. Real estate investor Sam Zell, a Jewish billionaire extremely devoted to
Israel, had orchestrated a leveraged-buyout of the
Tribune CompanyLos Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune , investing merely
a sliver of his own money, with the bulk of the financing coming from the pension funds of the
company he was acquiring. Widely heralded as "the grave dancer" for his shrewd financial
investments, Zell publicly boasted that the deal gave him nearly all of the upside potential of
the company, while he bore relatively little of the risk. Such an approach proved wise since
the complex deal quickly collapsed into bankruptcy, and although Zell emerged almost unscathed,
the editors and journalists lost decades of their accumulated pension dollars, while massive
layoffs soon devastated the newsrooms of what had been two of the country's largest and most
prestigious newspapers. Perhaps coincidentally, just as this business turmoil hit in late 2007,
the Tribune ran a massive 5,500 word
storyyLiberty attack, representing the first and only time such a comprehensive
account of the true facts has ever appeared in the mainstream media.
By all accounts, Johnson was an individual of towering personal ego, and when I read the
article, I was struck by the extent of his astonishing subservience to the Jewish state. The
influence of campaign donations and favorable media coverage seemed completely insufficient to
explain his reaction to an incident that had cost the lives of so many American servicemen. I
began to wonder if Israel might have played an extraordinarily powerful political trump-card,
thereby showing LBJ "who was really boss," and once I discovered the reality of the JFK
assassination conspiracy a year or two later, I suspected I knew what that trump-card might
have been. Over the years, I had become quite friendly with the late Alexander Cockburn, and
the next time we had lunch I outlined my ideas. Although he had always casually dismissed JFK
conspiracy theories as total nonsense, he found my hypothesis quite intriguing.
Liberty incident certainly demonstrated the exceptionally close relationship between
President Johnson and the government of Israel, as well as the willingness of the mainstream
media to spend decades hiding events of the most remarkable nature if they might tread on
particular toes.
These important considerations should be kept in mind as we begin exploring the most
explosive yet under-reported theory of the JFK assassination. Almost twenty-five years ago the
late Michael Collins Piper published Final Judgment presenting a very large body of
circumstantial evidence that Israel and its Mossad secret intelligence service, together with
their American collaborators, probably played a central role in the conspiracy.
For decades following the 1963 assassination, virtually no suspicions had ever been directed
towards Israel, and as a consequence none of the hundreds or thousands of assassination
conspiracy books that appeared during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had hinted at any role for
the Mossad, though nearly every other possible culprit, ranging from the Vatican to the
Illuminati, came under scrutiny. Kennedy had received over 80% of the Jewish vote in his 1960
election, American Jews featured very prominently in his White House, and he was greatly
lionized by Jewish media figures, celebrities, and intellectuals ranging from New York City to
Hollywood to the Ivy League. Moreover, individuals with a Jewish background such as Mark Lane
and Edward Epstein had been among the leading early proponents of an assassination conspiracy,
with their controversial theories championed by influential Jewish cultural celebrities such as
Mort Sahl and Norman Mailer. Given that the Kennedy Administration was widely perceived as
pro-Israel, there seemed no possible motive for any Mossad involvement, and bizarre, totally
unsubstantiated accusations of such a monumental nature directed against the Jewish state were
hardly likely to gain much traction in an overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry.
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The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy described the
extreme efforts of the Kennedy Administration to force Israel to allow international
inspections of its allegedly non-military nuclear reactor at Dimona, and thereby prevent its
use in producing nuclear weapons. Dangerous Liaisons: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli
Covert Relationship by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn appeared in the same year, and covered
similar ground.
Although entirely hidden from public awareness at the time, the early 1960s political
conflict between the American and Israeli governments over nuclear weapons development had
represented a top foreign policy priority of the Kennedy Administration, which had made nuclear
non-proliferation one of its central international initiatives. It is notable that John McCone,
Kennedy's choice as CIA Director, had previously served on the Atomic Energy Commission under
Eisenhower, being the individual who leaked the fact that Israel was building a nuclear reactor
to produce plutonium..
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The pressure and financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel by the Kennedy
Administration eventually became so severe that they led to the resignation of Israel's
founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in June 1963. But all these efforts were almost
entirely halted or reversed once Kennedy was replaced by Johnson in November of that same
year.
Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel had previously
documented that U.S. Middle East Policy completely reversed itself following Kennedy's
assassination, but this important finding had attracted little attention at the time.
Skeptics of a plausible institutional basis for a JFK assassination conspiracy have often
noted the extreme continuity in both foreign and domestic policies between the Kennedy and
Johnson Administrations, arguing that this casts severe doubt on any such possible motive.
Although this analysis seems largely correct, America's behavior towards Israel and its nuclear
weapons program stands as a very notable exception to this pattern..
An additional major area of concern for Israeli officials may have involved the efforts of
the Kennedy Administration to sharply restrict the activities of pro-Israel political lobbies.
During his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had met in New York City with a group of wealthy
Israel advocates, led by financier Abraham Feinberg, and they had offered enormous financial
support in exchange for a controlling influence in Middle Eastern policy. Kennedy managed to
fob them off with vague assurances, but he considered the incident so troubling that the next
morning he sought out journalist Charles Bartlett, one of his closest friends, and expressed
his outrage that American foreign policy might fall under the control of partisans of a foreign
power, promising that if he became president, he would rectify that situation. And indeed, once
he had installed his brother Robert as Attorney General, the latter initiated a major legal
effort to force pro-Israel groups to register themselves as foreign agents, which would have
drastically reduced their power and influence. But after JFK's death, this project was quickly
abandoned, and as part of the settlement, the leading pro-Israel lobby merely agreed to
reconstitute itself as AIPAC.
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Final Judgment went through a number of a reprintings following its original 1994
appearance, and by the sixth edition released in 2004, had grown to over 650 pages, including
numerous long appendices and over 1100 footnotes, the overwhelming majority of these
referencing fully mainstream sources. The body of the text was merely serviceable in
organization and polish, reflecting the total boycott by all publishers, mainstream or
alternative, but I found the contents themselves remarkable and generally quite compelling.
Despite the most extreme blackout by all media outlets, the book sold more than 40,000 copies
over the years, making it something of an underground bestseller, and surely bringing it to the
attention of everyone in the JFK assassination research community, though apparently almost
none of them were willing to mention its existence. I suspect these other writers realized that
even any mere acknowledgement of the existence of the book, if only to ridicule or dismiss it,
might prove fatal to their media and publishing career. Piper himself died in 2015, aged 54,
suffering from the health problems and heavy-drinking often associated with grim poverty, and
other journalists may have been reluctant to risk that same dismal fate.
As an example of this strange situation, the bibliography of Talbot's 2005 book contains
almost 140 entries, some rather obscure, but has no space for Final Judgment , nor does
his very comprehensive index include any entry for "Jews" or "Israel." Indeed, at one point he
very delicately characterizes Sen. Robert Kennedy's entirely Jewish senior staff by stating
"There was not a Catholic among them." His 2015 sequel is equally circumspect, and although the
index does contain numerous entries pertaining to Jews, all these references are in regards to
World War II and the Nazis, including his discussion of the alleged Nazi ties of Allen Dulles,
his principal bête noire . Stone's book, while fearlessly convicting President
Lyndon Johnson of the JFK assassination, also strangely excludes "Jews" and "Israel" from the
long index and Final Judgment from the bibliography, and Douglass's book follows this
same pattern.
Furthermore, the extreme concerns that the Piper Hypothesis seems to have provoked among JFK
assassination researchers may explain a strange anomaly. Although Mark Lane was himself of
Jewish origins and left-wing roots, after his victory for Liberty Lobby in the Hunt libel
trial, he spent many years associated with that organization in a legal capacity, and
apparently became quite friendly with Piper, one of its leading writers. According to Piper,
Lane told him that Final Judgment made "a solid case" for a major Mossad role in the
assassination, and he viewed the theory as fully complementary to his own focus on CIA
involvement. I suspect that concerns about these associations may explain why Lane was almost
completely airbrushed out of the Douglass and 2007 Talbot books, and discussed in the second
Talbot book only when his work was absolutely essential to Talbot's own analysis. By contrast,
New York Times staff writers are hardly likely to be as versed in the lesser-known
aspects of the JFK assassination research community, and being ignorant of this hidden
controversy, they gave Lane
the long and glowing obituaryy that his career fully warranted.
When weighing the possible suspects for a given crime, considering their past pattern of
behavior is often a helpful approach. As discussed above, I can think of no historical example
in which organized crime initiated a serious assassination attempt against any American
political figure even moderately prominent on the national stage. And despite a few suspicions
here and there, the same applies to the CIA.
By contrast, the Israeli Mossad and the Zionist groups that preceded the establishment of
the Jewish state seem to have had a very long track record of assassinations, including those
of high-ranking political figures who might normally be regarded as inviolate. Lord Moyne, the
British Minister of State for the Middle East, was assassinated in 1944 and Count Folke
Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator sent to help resolve the first Arab-Israel war, suffered
the same fate in September 1948. Not even an American president was entirely free of such
risks, and Piper notes that the memoirs of Harry Truman's daughter Margaret reveal that Zionist
militants had tried to assassinate her father using a letter laced with toxic chemicals in 1947
when they believed he was dragging his heels in supporting Israel, although that failed attempt
was never made public. The Zionist faction responsible for all of these incidents was led by
Yitzhak Shamir, who later became a leader of Mossad and director of its assassination program
during the 1960s, before eventually becoming Prime Minister of Israel in 1986.
ORDER IT NOW
Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by
journalist Ronen Bergman suggests that no other country in the world may have so regularly
employed assassination as a standard tool of state policy.
ORDER IT NOWW
There are other notable elements that tend to support the Piper Hypothesis. Once we accept
the existence of a JFK assassination conspiracy, the one individual who is virtually certain to
have been a participant was Jack Ruby, and his organized crime ties were almost entirely to the
huge but rarely-mentioned Jewish wing of that enterprise, presided over by Meyer Lansky, an
extremely fervent supporter of Israel. Ruby himself had particularly strong connections with
Lansky lieutenant Mickey Cohen, who dominated the Los Angeles underworld and had been
personally involved in gun-running to Israel prior to the 1948 war. Indeed, according
to Dallas rabbi Hillel Silverman , Ruby had privately explained his killing of Oswald by
saying "I did it for the Jewish people."
JFK film should also be mentioned. Arnon Milchan, the wealthy Hollywood producer who
backed the project, was not only an Israeli citizen, but had also reportedly
played a central role in the enormous espionage projectt to divert American technology and
materials to Israel's nuclear weapons project, the exact undertaking that the Kennedy
Administration had made such efforts to block. Milchan has even sometimes been described as
"the Israeli James Bond."JFK scrupulously avoided presenting any of the details
that Piper later regarded as initial clues to an Israeli dimension, instead seeming to finger
America's fanatic home-grown anti-Communist movement and the Cold War leadership of the
military-industrial complex as the guilty parties.
Summarizing over 300,000 words of Piper's history and analysis in just a few paragraphs is
obviously an impossible undertaking, but the above discussion provides a reasonable taste of
the enormous mass of circumstantial evidence mustered in favor of the Piper Hypothesis..
Final Judgment struck me as quite persuasive, a good fraction of the names and
references were unfamiliar, and I simply do not have the background to assess their
credibility, nor whether the description of the material presented is accurate.
Under normal circumstances, I would turn to the reviews or critiques produced by other
authors, and comparing them against Piper's claims, then decide which argument seemed the
stronger. But although Final Judgment was published a quarter-century ago, the
near-absolute blanket of silence surrounding the Piper Hypothesis, especially from the more
influential and credible researchers, renders this impossible.
However, Piper's inability to secure any regular publisher and the widespread efforts to
smother his theory out of existence, have had an ironic consequence. Since the book went out of
print years ago, I had a relatively easy time securing the rights to include it in my
collection of controversial HTML Books, and I have now done so, thereby allowing everyone on
the Internet to conveniently read the entire text and decide for themselves, while easily
checking the multitude of references or searching for particular words or
phrases..
This edition actually incorporates several much shorter works, originally published
separately. One of these, consisting of an extended Q&A, describes the genesis of the idea
and answers numerous questions surrounding it, and for some readers might represent a better
starting point.
There are also numerous extended Piper interviews or presentations easily available on
YouTube, and when I watched two or three of them a couple of years ago, I thought he
effectively summarized many of his main arguments, but I cannot remember which ones they
were.
The Kennedy assassination surely ranks as one of the most dramatic and heavily reported
events of the twentieth century, yet the overwhelming evidence that our president died at the
hands of a conspiracy rather than an eccentric "lone gunman" was almost entirely suppressed by
our mainstream media during the decades that followed, with endless ridicule and opprobrium
heaped on many of the stubborn truth-tellers. Indeed, the very term "conspiracy theory" soon
became a standard slur aimed against all those who sharply questioned establishmentarian
narratives, and there is strong evidence that such pejorative use was deliberately
promoted by government agencies concerned that so much of the American citizenry was
growing skeptical of the implausible cover story presented by the Warren Commission. But
despite all these efforts, the period may mark the inflection point at which public trust in
our national media began its precipitous decline. Once an individual concludes that the media
lied about something as monumental as the JFK assassination, he naturally begins to wonder what
other lies may be out there.
Although I now consider the case for an assassination conspiracy overwhelming, I think that
the passage of so many decades has removed any real hope of reaching a firm conclusion about
the identities of the main organizers or their motives. Those who disagree with this negative
assessment are free to continue sifting the enormous mountain of complex historical evidence
and debating their conclusions with others having similar interests.
However, among the cast of major suspects, I think that the most likely participant by far
was Lyndon Johnson, based on any reasonable assessment of means, motive, and opportunity, as
well as the enormous role he obviously must have played in facilitating the subsequent Warren
Commission cover-up. Yet although such an obvious suspect must surely have been immediately
apparent to any observer, Johnson seems to have received only a rather thin slice of the
attention that books regularly directed to other, far less plausible suspects. So the clear
dishonesty of the mainstream media in avoiding any recognition of a conspiracy seems matched by
a second layer of dishonesty in the alternative media, which has done its best to avoid
recognizing the most likely perpetrator.
Final Judgment provided an enormous mass of circumstantial evidence suggesting a
major, even dominant, role for the Israeli Mossad in organizing the elimination of both our
35rd president and also his younger brother, a scenario that seems second in likelihood only to
that of Johnson's involvement. Yet Piper's hundreds of thousands of words of analysis have
seemingly vanished into the ether, with very few of the major conspiracy researchers even
willing to admit their awareness of a shocking book that sold over 40,000 copies, almost
entirely by underground word-of-mouth.
So although committed partisans can continue endless, largely fruitless debates over
"Who Killed JFK," I think that the one firm conclusion we can draw from the remarkable history
of this pivotal event of the twentieth century is that all of us have lived for many decades
within the synthetic reality of "Our American Pravda."
Q: Who fired the shot that killed Mussolini?
A: A thousand Italian marksmen.
Johnson has been my perennial favourite as the person who had the most to gain, but he
could not have done it without his Texas machinery, not the least of which was KBR, and they
certainly had a lot to gain by elevating their boy to the pinnacle of power if the rumours,
that JFK planned to scale back in Viet Nam, were true. Coincidence that it happened in
Dallas? Hardly, in that scenario.
Other interesting players on the ground in Dallas that day included GHW Bush, who, unlike
most Americans, can't quite remember where he was when the President was shot. Was he behind
it? Almost certainly not, but he may have been an unwitting co-conspirator by doing something
tangentially connected, e.g. delivering cash. This is pure speculation, but it is interesting
that he rose out of relative obscurity to become a Texas oilman, partnered with a former CIA
operative, with oil interests in a number of international hotspots, and that formed the
basis for him to build a fortune as well as launch a long and storied political career that
saw him elected to Congress, then appointed to the head of the CIA, and ultimately crowned as
President.
I particularly loved it when Trump tried to connect Ted Cruz's father to Oswald. It is not
entirely out of the question, given his father, while a anti-Batista rebel turned
refugee-student at the U of Texas might have crossed paths with Oswald while in Texas .
Yes, all roads seem to lead to Texas, except for that one that goes to NOLA, but that
isn's so far from TX, and it seems like the kind of place oil industry types might go to cat
around and conspire on a coup. It's also one of the few places in the South where Israelis
might not appear to be so out of place.
As for the Israelis well, they're the Israelis. If they saw a shot to capture effective
control of our government by offing a guy more likely to keep them in check for a venal type
who probably didn't give a rat's behind for the Israelis, but salivated over destabilising
the middle east, because destabilizing the middle east actually made Texas oil and other oil
assets around the world controlled by or lifted by Texans in the oil industry far more
valuable, then who can blame them for joining the cabal and taking the shot?
Very nice. Just one thing, though- anyone who was an adult during the Cold War understands
the immense importance of propaganda and 'optics' as they say now. In 1981 the French
Communist Party won 15% of the Presidential vote. Together with the Socilaist Party that was
a combined 40%.
Much of what constituted American' political theater' in the Cold War era consisted of
'double bank-shot' efforts to convince a somewhat cold and borderline hostile European public
to support the trans-Atlantic alliance and the American system which underlay it, a difficult
proposition given that European leftists were ideologically opposed to America's capitalist
system, while seemingly natural-ally European rightists were often repulsed by the gauche
nature of American culture, critical of unrestrained 'Anglo-Saxon' capitalism, plus resentful
of American pop-cultural 'imperialism' as well.
In such a climate the cultivation of a positive American image abroad was a primary
concern of the Deep State, and given what immeasurable harm the exposure of a CIA coup would
have done to America's standing as 'leader of the free world' I cannot imagine the plot was
CIA-hatched or led. CIA connivance and behind-the-scenes assistance raises very interesting
possibilities, though.
Something to consider is that these people in the intelligence agencies are supposed to
protect America , but they can't even spot an assassination when it occurs right under
their noses with a pile of evidence stacked to the ceiling. The majority of Americans can see
it, but not the people tasked with "keeping us safe."WTF?
In the RFK assassination we have video and photos of CIA assassins in the hotel when it
occurs, but they can't see that either.
We have endless crime shows on TV with forensic experts tracking killers, but our real law
enforcement officials can't see anything wrong with the way WTC building 7 implodes.
We are talking about treason and it is ongoing, not simply in the past. Trump delayed
release of the Kennedy files yet again.
A remote viewer psychic came up with an interesting notion as to why JFK was murdered. The
power brokers believed he was reckless and a danger to the whole world.
It's a miracle that the Cuban missile crisis didn't end the world. USSR sub commanders had
immediate authority to use nuclear weapons if attacked – and they were depth
charged.
LBJ had a crew of Texas Oil magnates and John Birch Society types in place and ready to help.
They even posted a 'Wanted for Treason' poster the day Kennedy arrived:
If this is to be believed, the Birch society was in bed with the Zio crew, which might be
believable, because the crusade against Russia was mostly utilizing the bitterness of the
Trotskyites against Stalin's siezure of the Russian state, and thus a natural alliance
between the Zio and Birch groups:
On these questions, the passage of a half-century and the deaths, natural or otherwise,
of nearly all the contemporary witnesses drastically reduces any hope of coming to a firm
conclusion.
Perhaps. One thing that becomes more clear over time is who benefited. Look closely at
those who were put into positions to enable the coverup, people like George Joannides
and Richard Helms. Who was promoted?
The Israel angle is interesting, but Israel doesn't work for me. My government owes
me an explanation. They have a duty to uphold the constitution. They swear an
oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed. It is their duty to protect America
from All Enemies Foreign and Domestic.
The late Harold Weisberg once told me exactly the same thing: figuring out precisely who
was in control of the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the evening of 11/22/63 was the
key to unraveling the cover-up.
U. S. Military authorities ran that thing and made every single damned decision. (Not RFK
or Jacqueline Kennedy.)
Hell, there is credible, provocative and reasonably persuasive evidence the no less a
figure than the legendary USAF Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay flew in to Bethesda and was
playing a major role in directing the autopsy.
The (suspiciously undated) autopsy report was re-written after Ruby shot "Oswald" on
Sunday morning, and the original "draft notes" were burned. The hand-written version was then
edited with very significant changes, most infamously the original wording that JFK had a
"puncture" wound in his neck – WHICH MEANT A SHOT FROM THE FRONT! – was changed
in the typed version as "much smaller".
These changes were not because Humes, Boswell and Finck demanded them. These changes were
done at the behest of military brass, for reasons known only to themselves.
The autopsy was the start of the cover-up, and the autopsy was controlled by the U.S.
Military.
By the way, LeMay was the inspiration for the General Buck Turgidson in "Dr.
Strangelove".
"... The CIA command structure exercises not authority, but something akin to the divine right of kings, concealed for appearances' sake as state secrets ..."
While commenting at the Part I I had similar thoughts concerning the 9/11 as you. The
preponderance of mutually contradictory technical theories of JFK assassination completely
detracted anybody from looking at the qui bono which inevitably would lead to Israel.
It occurred to me that 9/11 may share a similar fate.
This thought was very depressing. Relatively recently we have learned about the term of
the 'cognitive infiltration' from Cass Sustain. It seems clear to me that exactly this
cognitive infiltrations were successfully carried out in the case of JFK truthers.
In writing my article, I'd forgotten to mention that in 1946 Zionist groups led by future
Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir had apparently planned to
assassinate British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. There's a link to a 2003 article from the
Daily Telegraph:
Interestingly enough, the British government files also claim that an American Jewish
activist named Rabbi Korff planned to organize some sort of aerial terrorist bombing attack
against London around the same time. Korff later enjoyed a moment of considerable fame as a
very high-profile supporter of President Richard Nixon shortly before his resignation during
the Watergate Scandal.
I had a relatively easy time securing the rights to include it in my collection of
controversial HTML Books, and I have now done so, thereby allowing everyone on the Internet
to conveniently read the entire text and decide for themselves, while easily checking the
multitude of references or searching for particular words or phrases.
"I really doubt that anyone, even the US vice president or director of the CIA has the
authority to order anything like a political assassination of a sitting President."
Authority is not the word you're looking for. The appropriate term, depending on your
point of view, is either absolute sovereignty or impunity. A US Secretary of State formally
defined sovereignty in absolute life-and-death terms repudiated two millenia ago by the
Germanic tribes of pre-modern Europe. The entire world has negated this viewpoint by
acclamation, so the USA's a throwback.
In universally-acknowledged law, sovereignty is responsibility. But the US government
thinks state responsibility is bullshit, and always did do. The US government has been
assiduously undermining it ever since WWII. The US fights tooth and nail to make sure its
citizens have no recourse to actions of the state, lawful or not.
Congress wrote absolute sovereignty into municipal law in the Central Intelligence Agency
Act, various bureaucratic loopholes, and secret confidential legal pretexts. They gave it to
CIA. The CIA command structure exercises not authority, but something akin to the divine
right of kings, concealed for appearances' sake as state secrets . So you misunderstand,
or misrepresent, the government bureaucracy when you imagine that there's that someone CIA
would be scared to kill. They do what they want. And you do what they tell you to, or
else.
What we have in the case of the Zionist movement and Israel is a pattern of a serial
perpetrator of murder, mass murder and terror. This is a well established fact. That
pattern started well before the creation of Israel, see eg the murder of Jacob Israël
de Haan on 30/6/1924 or the King David Hotel bombing on 22/7/1946. That murderous pattern
continued after the creation of Israel, see for the early days for example the murder of
Folke Bernadotte on 17/9/1948 and then read "Israel's sacred terrorism" based on Moshe
Sharett's Personal Diary:
Since the early days of Zionism there are so many proven Zionist and Israeli state
sponsored murders that it is hard to keep tracking them all. The murderous pattern of
Israeli behaviour continues to the very recent time, think for example of the attampted
assassination of Khaled Mashal on 25/9/1997, the car bomb killing Imad Mughniyah on
12/2/2008, the murder of Brig Gen Mohammed Suleiman on 1/8/2008 (which was just recently
proven by US documents to be an Israeli job), the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh on
19/1/2010 or the recent serial murder of Iranian scientists.
The murder of Jacob Israël de Haan proves that the Zionist movement targeted also
jews. It was not a single case. Naeim Giladi wrote in detail about his role as a Zionist in
attacking Iraqi jews on behalf of Israel in his book: Ben-Gurion's Scandals: How the
Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews. We also know from things like Operation Susannah
and the attempt to sink the USS Liberty that Israel also has already attacked US targets in
the past.
Generally I'ld say Israeli murders and terrors fit in two motive categories: either
Israel committed state sponsored murders to get rid of anactual or perceived enemy like
Khaled Mashal or Imad Mughniyah or someone deemed otherwise harmful to Israeli interests
like Folke Bernadotte, or Israel committed acts of terror and murder with the intention of
blaming the crime on someone else, ie perpetraiting "false flag operations", like it was
the case with attacking Iraqi jews or Operation Susannah. One regular motivation for
Israeli false flag ops was to enlist the US in fighting Israel's real or perceived enemies,
ie starting US-led wars of aggression in the service of Israel. AIPAC/WINEP operatives
publicly talk about using such "options" in the service of starting wars Israel wanted to
get started:
A typical Israeli method to ensure false blame was faking signal intelligence. Victor
Ostrovsky wrote about how the Mossad did falsely blame Libya of terror in his time with
radio signal boxes placed by the Mossad in Libya for that purpose. In the case of the
Ghouta chemical false flag terror attack, Israel simply provided the US with faked signal
intelligence, essentially saying to Obama: now you must go to war, because we proved hereby
that Syria crossed your chemical red lines.
So, now comes the funny thing. Despite this whole record of serial Israeli murder,
terror and false flag terror targeting likewise enemies and friends, terrorists and
innocents, Arabs and Westerners, Muslims, Christians and Jews, Syrians and Americans, and
clear motives for Israel to perpetrate the crimes, there still exists a big taboo of
talking about and investigating a possible Israeli sponsorship of the JFK murder and 9/11.
It's even deemed anti-semitic to speak about this.
What exactly did the editor of Atlanta Jewish Time who called for Obama assassination
say? I could not find the original but here is the quote in The Atlantic
I think the "neocons" tried to get their wars started under Clinton with the USS Cole
attack October 12 2000, while it was being refueled in Yemen's Aden harbor, that they also
blamed on Al-Qaeda.
Sounds very similar to USS Liberty eh? Same people again, same story .
I guess Clinton refused to go along even after ((((Lewinsky))) sex blackmail, and false flag
attack on USS Cole. So they knew they had to get a Republican into office, thats why there
was such a fuss about that election, should also tell you where the Supreme Court stands
9/11, WTC planning, demolition rigging, probably started soon after USS Cole false flag.
It all adds up when you start thinking about it.
and I don't doubt Johnson played a huge role, he obviously did, I also believe some in CIA
played a role as well as in Military/MIC, and probably even Wall St/Banking, Big Oil, that is
what makes it a CONSPIRACY!
But I think the head honcho is Israel/Zionist intrests, and their plan of world
domination.
One important aspect of Piper's book is that his overwhelming focus on Israel and the Mossad
provides a very helpful corrective to the CIA-centricism that I've noticed among so many
"conspiracy people," who seem to believe that the CIA is some sort of all-powerful
controlling force.
For example, in Appendix Six, Piper suggests that Mossad may have assassinated former CIA
Director William Colby, as well as John Paisley, another former high-ranking CIA
official:
I certainly don't know enough about these cases to comment, but the NSA is supposedly also
a pretty powerful intelligence organization, and lots of NSA people were killed or wounded
during the Liberty attack, with absolutely no apparent consequences. And if top CIA people
could also occasionally be killed with relative impunity, maybe that organization also isn't
really so all-powerful.
Furthermore, one of Piper's major arguments is that long-time CIA counter-intelligence
chief James Angleton had effectively become a Mossad intelligence asset at least by the
1960s, and he seems to provide a great deal of circumstantial evidence in favor of this
notion. Therefore, he points toward Angleton as the likely CIA figure who spearheaded the CIA
involvement in the JFK assassination.
One nice thing about my HTML Book software is that it allows full text searches of the
books in question, controlled by the little Search icon next to the Email button. Or you can
use this link:
"..CIA-centricism that I've noticed among so many "conspiracy people," who seem to
believe that the CIA is some sort of all-powerful controlling force."
The CIA was also the "easy" and "obvious" culprit after 9/11. It came under an incredible
amount of criticism from the "courageous" media, and George Tenet, its director at the time,
was almost forced to resign.
It turned out later that the CIA had previously warned G. Bush about the increased risks
of terror attack, and that their warnings were dismissed by Rumsfeld and the NeoCons, who a
contrario were never blamed for anything.
This really shows who is higher up the food chain.
Jack Ruby was running guns and ammunition from Galveston Bay to Fidel Castro's
guerrillas in Cuba about 1957, a former poker-playing partner of the Dallas nightclub owner
told The News Thursday.
James E. Beaird said he waited until 1966, almost three years after the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy, and "nothing had come out so I called them (FBI) just to find
out why I was curious. However, they didn't see fit to even mention it to me again, so I
never heard of anything they ever opened up on it."
Beaird said the FBI finally "sent a man out in 1976. I don't know why they did it
then."
The FBI agent who interviewed Beaird in 1976 didn't mention in his report that Beaird
had volunteered information about Ruby's gunrunning to the bureau in 1966. The report
stated that since the 1963 assassination, "there had been so·much speculation as to
possible foreign connections and he (Beaird) thought it better not to mention his knowledge
of Jack Ruby in Kemah (southeast of Houston on Galveston Bay)."
The Warren Commission in 1964 investigated numerous allegations of gunrunning by Ruby
but concluded that no factual information existed.
Beaird told the FBI that he "personally saw many boxes of new guns, including atltomatic
rifles and handguns," stored in a 2-story house near the channel at Kemah and loaded on
what looked like a 50-foot surplus military boat.
"He stated each time that the boat left with guns and ammunition, Jack Ruby was on the
boat," the FBI report said.
Beaird, who was an automobile dealer in Houston from 1955 to 1957, said Ruby "was in it
for the money. It wouldn't matter what side, just one that would pay him the most I don't
even know who the ship belonged to. But he was in command of it. He went out every time it
went. It was meeting a connection down there (in Cuba), that's all I ever heard."
Ruby would show up in Kemah, generally on weekends, to play poker and "just killing time
until the boat was loaded," Beaird said, and usually was there not more than one or two
hours.
"They loaded up at least twice while I was down there," be said. "Pickup trucks would
carry it from the house over to this boat."
By 1959, Castro had taken control of Cuba and Ruby was beginning to switch sides as
Castro threatened to force Mafia-backed professional gamblers out of the casinos in
Havana.
Dallas Morning News, 18 Aug 1978
What was Ruby's connection to the splinter groups of left-over Cubans in Dallas? Was he
selling them guns? Was he hiring them for odd jobs? Did he hear of the crazy violent commie
anglo Oswald through his connections to these Cubans?
[Hide MORE]
What were these Israeli goats doing in Cuba shortly after the revolution that brought
Fidel Castro to power? It turns out that Castro had taken notice of Israeli goats and was
just waiting for the chance to taste their milk following the establishment in 1960 of
diplomatic relations between the two countries.
"Fidel thought there were goats in Israel that produced milk like cows," recounted
Clarita Malhi, who worked at the Cuban embassy in Israel. "He was really enamored by the
technical progress Israel had made in the field of agriculture."
The Cuban ambassador in Israel was a Jewish millionaire revolutionary by the name of
Ricardo Wolf (Ricardo Subirana y Lobo in Spanish), who decided to fulfill the dream of his
boss who had sent him to Israel. The ambassador went looking for goats that "produced milk
like cows" and could be shipped far across the ocean.
Yitzhak Zilber, a Cuban Jew and a member of Kibbutz Gaash, was chosen for the mission.
Zilber, 89, sent Haaretz photos in which he is seen with the goats he found, waiting for a
plane at the airport and travelling around Cuba.
Ultimately, when the goats for the mission were found, they were brought together at the
airport, awaiting the moment when they could be airlifted to Cuba. An El Al plane landed in
Israel from Cuba with new immigrants from the Cuban Jewish community who had decided to
flee Castro's revolution. They came as part of an agreement under which Cuba effectively
exchanged the immigrants for the goats.
The Haaretz archives contain a piece of information that might buttress the story about
Castro and his Israeli goats. In an article in July 1961, it was reported that the Israeli
Agriculture Ministry had sent an expert to Cuba to help the Cubans improve goat
breeding.
Wolf, who was born in Germany, emigrated to Cuba in the 1920s and became a close
associate of Castro. As a wealthy industrialist, he gave a large sum of money to finance
the revolution. He later politely declined the offer of a cabinet position, but asked
Castro to appoint him ambassador to Israel. Castro assented and Wolf arrived in the country
in 1960 as Cuba's first – and only – ambassador. The trade involving the goats
and the new immigrants was funded by Wolf personally.
'Twas not ever thus. Not only did Cuba establish ties with nascent Israel in 1949, but
Castro dispatched a key supporter, Ricardo Wolf, as his ambassador to Israel in 1960.
Dworin says Wolf, who made his fortune as a pioneer in the metal industry, helped
finance the purchase of the yacht Granma, the cabin-cruiser built for 12 that ferried the
Castro brothers, Che and 80 other revolutionaries from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 -- on the
voyage that would culminate in the overthrow of Batista.
"What can I do to repay you?" Castro, once installed in power, asked Wolf, in Dworin's
telling. "I want to be ambassador to Israel," he replied.
Was Ricardo Subirana Y Lobo (Ricardo Wolf), a Cuban Jew and supporter of Castro, the
bridge between Castro and Mossad? Castro originally offered Wolf the post of Minister of
Finance in the communist government, but Wolf preferred to be Ambassador to Israel.
Hello Ron, I found your comment about growing up with the belief in the lone gunman
official story interesting. I grew up in a communist country which was not part of the USSR
block and I grew up with a belief in the official story that CIA was the main culprit in
the JFK assassination although without a direct mention of LBJ. I would be interested to
learn also what the official story inside the Eastern block was.
Even to this day, I have to admit that this official story was actually very close to the
truth. So many years later and even after reading your high quality article I tend to believe
that LBJ was heavily involved but at arms length distance, that CIA has done all of the
ground work, that Mossad probably assisted and that Oswald did not even shoot let alone kill
anyone.
Why is a local belief relevant? Well because whoever killed Kennedy tried to point blame
at communists, those of USSR and Cuba. What I was lead to believe in this instance proves the
old saying audi alteram partem – do not form any belief before you hear both
sides. This applies to practically all strange events of history. Historical, geographical
and ideological distance make quite a difference in the beliefs that we grow up with.
Next, the culprits would probably be mirrored in the case of 911, where the Israelis have
done most of the ground work, whilst the dual citizens and the US agencies they control
played the supporting and enabling role.
Obviously, the logistics of 911 dwarfs the logistics of the Kennedy assassinations, but it
would be the same team, different era and with a different emphasis. The acts becoming more
self-confident and brazen.
The account you are responding to has Macnamara ordering back nuclear armed planes which
obviously had nothing to do with seeing off Israeli fighters and gunboats.
The more "mainstream" account that has been widely reported is that squadrons of U.S. jets
were twice dispatched to rescue the Liberty, and then twice recalled based on top-level
instructions from D.C.
I've sometimes seen another account floating around on the Internet that the Johnson and
the Israelis had concocted a plan to have the latter sink the Liberty with all hands,
after which Johnson would blame the attack on Egypt and launch a nuclear attack against Cairo
in retaliation. Frankly, I find this scenario *extraordinarily* implausible, and until
someone provides a credible source, I would just dismiss it. And by a "credible source" I
mean something more than some random guy making the claim somewhere in some book.
The 'bad-apples' disinformation relies on the idea that compartmentation and plausible
deniability are incompatible with strict hierarchy. CIA lets a thousand flowers bloom when it
makes a directive, but its assets are always strictly controlled with inducements, coercion,
and compromise. The multiple JFK plots show CIA's telltale M.O. for important programs, not
hordes of sneaky bad apples.
All the mafia-did-it disinformation relies on a sharp distinction between CIA and
organized crime. Anywhere CIA is, they farm crime for agents and cutouts. Robert Kennedy Jr.
makes this point in his book American Values (and that is why it sank without a ripple.)
And of course Johnson had foreknowledge. He was at Clint Murchison's party, in the little
closed-door conclave where CIA green-lighted the coup. So was Rockefeller henchman John
McCloy. CIA arranged to implicate lots of influential people.
The key point here is CIA impunity. CIA did it because CIA can get away with it. That
makes Johnson a figurehead, not a potential threat.
Here's what we all have to face. All of us grew up under an autocratic CIA regime that
hires and fires presidents, legislators, and judges. Kills them, too. They still kill or
torture anyone they want. Ask Gina.
I too have read Stone's book and, while he did not in any way "prove" that LBJ had JFK shot,
he certainly laid out a plausible case for his involvement. Any one who has read Caro's
series of books on LBJ will come away with the realization that he (Johnson) was capable of
having him assassinated as well as having the means and the motivation. The man had no
principles or scruples whatsoever.
I can't comment on any Israeli involvement, but praise for Ron Unz for adding his voice to
those who believe LBJ almost had to have played a role in that event. Like others here, I was
not a JFK fan either. But johnson's elevation to the presidency was an unparalleled disaster
for the USA.
The late Col. Fletcher Prouty was assigned to the Pentagon in charge of Air Force support of
CIA operations in the years leading up to the assassination. His boss there was Gen. Edward
Lansdale, nominally Air Force but actually undercover CIA, father of Special Forces and the
engineer of the coup in the Philippines in the mid-fifties. Those familiar with the JFK
treachery will recall the clear press photos of "the three tramps", men arrested in the
railroad yard behind the grassy knoll, who were led away and never seen again. Two of those
men were Howard Hunt (CIA) and Charles Harrelson (Texas mafia assassin). One of these photos
shows a suited man passing by casually, seeming to reassure the three men. Col. Prouty, who
worked closely with Lansdale for years, positively identified him and this was affirmed by
Gen. "Brute" Krulak, who was at the time commander of MAAG in South Vietnam. The distinctive
shape of his head and his West Point ring are clearly visible. Go to the website dedicated to
Col. Prouty's works at http://www.prouty.org for this and much else directly from the
horse's mouth. By the way, toward the end of the nineties, the only fingerprint on the sixth
floor of the book depository that was not identified after the assassination was matched to
Malcolm Wallace, Lindon Johnson's hitman, reportedly executing at least three murders for
him.
Viewing the Zapruder film carefully, one can see that, during the six seconds of shooting,
the limousine's brake lights are on and it almost comes to a halt. The chauffeur is looking
back all this time and does not speed off until he sees JFK's head explode. There is a film
clip that shows that, as the cortege begins to leave Love Field, the SS agents that attempted
to ride in the normal protective position on the back bumper were called away by the chief of
the detail. The two men protested strongly but were ordered back to a car. There were no
motorcycle outriders, a standard security procedure. The 1112th Military Intelligence group,
which normally would have secured the parade route was ordered to stand down and there was no
additional security to replace them. Make of it what you will.
the passage of a half-century and the deaths, natural or otherwise, of nearly all the
contemporary witnesses drastically reduces any hope of coming to a firm conclusion. At
best, we can evaluate possibilities and plausibilities rather than high likelihoods let
alone near certainties. And given the total absence of any hard evidence, our exploration
of the origins of the assassination must necessarily rely upon cautious speculation.
What pathetic bollocks. You should write for CNN.
If the doctors attending on Kennedy at the Parklands Hospital, men experienced with
gunshot wounds, all agreed, as they did, that Kennedy was killed by a bullet to the front of
his head, then he was not killed by bullets from the Texas School Book Depository window
where Oswald is alleged to have been. Therefore, the Warren Commission Report is based on
lies. In particular, a phony autopsy report and a rewriting of the autopsy report findings by
none other than President-to-be, Gerald Ford. That's not a matter of plausibilities or
possibilities, liklihoods or non-certainties. It's as hard evidence as you ever likely to get
in a court of law.
But Israel didn't do it! LOL. Who said Israel did do it? Only some of the nutters that
comment freely here.
What would be interesting, if anyone would take the trouble to do it, is to delve more
deeply into the political connections of the people in the CIA who organized the crime. If
LBJ was the greatest beneficiary, it is nevertheless likely that there were Republicans on
side with the killing, otherwise the CIA would surely not have acted. That E. Howard Hunt,
Mexico City CIA station chief at the time of the assassination appears to have been connected
with the event through (a) Oswald's visit to the Mexico City CIA office, and (b) Hunt's
alleged presence in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, suggests that Hunt's role
in the Watergate burglary was to see what information the Democratic Party may have had
relating to the assassination that could have been used to damage Richard Nixon in his run
for re-election.
All of this seems pretty interesting and completes my suppositions as to what happened to JFK
and RFK and who was responsible and, perhaps even more importantly, who benefited "cui bono"
a usual criterion in determined who instigated a murder.
" Johnson may indeed have been a passive supporter or even an accomplice."
Lyndon Johnson's long-standing friendship/strategic partnership with J. Edgar Hoover
points to the "passive supporter" role. Act of Treason (1991), by Mark North, documents
Hoover's knowledge of, but not active participation in, the JFK hit. Hoover's job was to
provide bureaucratic support of the coup d'état and to ease his friend Lyndon into the
White House.
The prime mover in the assassination was the Allen Dulles cabal at CIA: The presence of
Lee Harvey Oswald speaks of James Angleton's involvement. But the details of the network that
took the operational role still seems to be in question. There was that group of U.S.
intelligence officers and Mafia figures that began during the second world war. And now the
new research that suggests an Israeli role on one hand, and Fourth Reich elements on the
other. (Fourth Reich elements being the Otto Skorzeny network known as Die Spinne or Odessa
that had ties with MacArthur's WW2 intelligence chief Charles Willoughby.)
So the mystery continues. But however the network that assumed the operational role in the
JFK hit was configured, Allen Dulles was the godfather.
Nice summary of the salient points of the assassinations. A couple of things that did not get
mentioned:
The "wink" as LBJ was being sworn in. It clinches it.
Marion Brown's statement that LBJ, her lover, told her well in advance that JFK was going to
be killed.
Peter Dale Scott stated: The door to the assassination is through Jack Ruby.
Ruby's phone calls were looked at by the FBI and Justice Dept., and catalogued. Almost all
were to Jewish mafia figures–not Italians. When the House Assassinations Committee
asked for these transcripts, they were told they no longer existed! But old copies were
eventually found. Someone in DOJ tried to scrub them from the records.
One of the best books on the assassination IMHO is Gaeton Fonzi's "The Last
Investigation."
Piper's book is essential reading, but he focuses only on Israel and the Jewish connections.
Because of its lack of "balance", it should not be read as a stand-alone treatise on the JFK
assassination.
Among my top ten books are–admittedly a list long out of date:
On the Trail of the Assassins
The Last Investigation
Deep Politics and the Death of JFK
JFK and the Unspeakable
Final Judgment (with above reservations)
Probably more important would be a list of books absolutely NOT to be read–among
them Gerald Posner's "Case Closed."
As a general rule, you can consider ANYONE arguing that Unz is full of s$#t and Oswald did
it as a crazed lone assassin, is a paid TROLL. The assassinations are grounded in solid
research that has been going on since the 1970s, when I attended a four-hour lecture by David
Lifton at SUNY Stony Brook–an event that literally toppled my world. It has never
recovered.
You might want to find a copy of Dr. Mary's Monkey. I think it is a really good read about a
side story to the JFK assassination about the goings on in New Orleans and the CIA.
It matters only because the truth always matters, and until it is satisfied it will always
be a pebble in the shoe. The past is only past because it has happened, but in its own
strange way its always with us. Events that occurred 200 years ago affect today, as well as
those events from 500 years ago. And sometimes things need to be covered up for very good
reasons.
As for our "kulcher", I personally believe it's just part of a nations life cycle. None of
us age younger, neither does a nation, it can also die.
You mention here that you think our alternative media have been dishonest in analyzing
LBJ's likely role in the assassination. Why? Was it because the media feared LBJ might have
them killed?
I very much doubt that. Johnson died at the beginning of 1973, a very widely despised and
hated figure, and surely few people feared any retaliation much after that, let alone Talbot
and Douglass writing forty years later.
I suspect there were several factors, mostly the ones I outlined in my discussion.
First, most JFK researchers were strong liberals or otherwise admired "Camelot," and it
surely would have been very difficult for them to psychologically accept that most of JFK's
top people were perfectly willing to continue working for LBJ, if the latter had murdered the
former.
Also, "LBJ Killed JFK" might sound like such a ultra "crazy conspiracy theory" to
publishers and editors who overwhelmingly may still believe that a "lone gunman" killed JFK.
So writers who considered making such a claim might fear having their careers totally ruined.
I think fear of humiliation, reputation-loss, and the resulting financial damage is a far
greater factor than fear of physical harm.
Here's another factor. Having a vice president come to power by assassinating his
predecessor is the sort of thing that just doesn't happen in developed First World countries.
Offhand, I can't think of even a single case in any major country over the last couple of
hundred years. It would probably be pretty embarrassing for even a Third World
banana-republic. What respectable American historian would want to admit that the politics of
our own country at the height of its international prestige during the early 1960s may have
actually made Guatemala look like a shining example of orderly, constitutional
government?
As for our "kulcher", I personally believe it's just part of a nations life cycle. None
of us age younger, neither does a nation, it can also die.
"Culture" is not a subset of "nation". The American culture has changed -- all culture
changes in accordance with external influences. America, as a nation founded under a set of
Enlightenment principles, has ended. There remains a huge morass/aggregation of conflicting
cultures, overseen and manipulated by a horrificly corrupt government.
McClennan is the son of one of Johnson's attorneys
I read them both along with Piper's book.
They make a lot more sense that the right wing atmosphere of hate Dallas PD including
officer Tippett another of Oswald's Victims and president bush & cia fbi secret service
army navy Air Force departments of agriculture and every other government department and of
course the man directing the military ambush by 15 shooters, umbrella man.
Have fun with your myths legends and fairy tales, naive credulous gullible idiots.
And if the Warren Commission Report was a cover up, what had they to cover up? Government
complicity in the assassination of JFK, obviously. So who, in particular, was involved. Well
obviously that branch of government that does assassinations, the CIA. But that does not mean
that the CIA went rogue.
The CIA serves the powers that be, so whatever the antagonism of some individuals within
the Agency, the CIA would not have acted on the assassination of JFK without bipartisan
political support.
LBJ, the obvious beneficiary, had every reason to give the CIA the nod, but someone on the
other side of the aisle had to be complicit too. Who?
Well Nixon had been the Republican Presidential candidate in the previous election, so he
was the effective head of the party and thus the man to go to.
As I argue
here , Nixon's guilty knowledge of the assassination may have been the real cause of his
downfall. Nixon's Vice President, Gerald R. Ford had been appointed to the Warren Commission
by LBJ and it was he who made a critical falsification of that report, therby casting
responsibility for the killing on Lee Harvey Oswald.
It is likely, therefore, that Ford had the goods on Nixon and blackmailed him into
resignation over the Watergate inquiry.
What exactly did the editor of Atlanta Jewish Time who called for Obama assassination say? I
could not find the original but here is the quote in The Atlantic
Three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed
unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place , and
forcefully dictate that the United States' policy includes its helping the Jewish state
obliterate its enemies.
Yes, you read "three" correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve
Israel's existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario,
don't you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel's most
inner circles ?
Where from did Mr. Andrew Adler, who was forced to resign later, get the idea of killing a
president so he would be replaced with Israel friendly VP? Did Mr. Adler study JFK
assassination and LBJ policy with respect to Israel? Or is it a common knowledge and common
Jewish modus operandi: kill whoever does not like Israel? Do Jews think and talk about
assassinating of American presidents who are unfriendly to Israel? Do Jews believe that the
Deep Sate in Israel considers assassinations and act on it when necessary?
"You mention here that you think our alternative media have been dishonest in analyzing
LBJ's likely role in the assassination. Why? Was it because the media feared LBJ might have
them killed? Was it perhaps because some in our media were on the payroll and being used to
distract from the "mastermind" assassin?"
You have the reason already in Maurice Joly's Dialogues. The opposition media is created
to nominally represent alternative views but in reality to silence of the issues you want
silenced. Even the opposition, which always picks up on everything, agrees with this issue,
so it accepted by all. Much of the alternative media has nothing to fear as it is not
alternative media in anything but appearance. But with the Internet it is getting harder to
do this. Finally they fail.
"As for the Israelis well, they're the Israelis. If they saw a shot to capture effective
control of our government by offing a guy more likely to keep them in check for a venal type
who probably didn't give a rat's behind for the Israelis, but salivated over destabilising
the middle east, because destabilizing the middle east actually made Texas oil and other oil
assets around the world controlled by or lifted by Texans in the oil industry far more
valuable, then who can blame them for joining the cabal and taking the shot?"
So, LBJ just wanted to promote Texas oil and to become the President, no special Israel
connection? And the Israelis just joined the cabal and who can blame them?
I found it very interesting that young LBJ was helping in the Galveston project. Galveston
somehow reminded me of Jacob Schiff. And I also found it fascinating that young Allan Dulles
was the guy who produced the very copy of Joly's Dialogues from which Ohrana plagiarized the
Protocols. Both were working for the dark side from their youth.
I recently learned of another smoking gun. After JFKs Limo arrived at Parkland hospital, many
people looked it over and took photos. There was a bullet hole through the front windshield.
It entered from the front, yet was never discussed afterwards by anyone. The Limo was hauled
away to Washington within hours and secretly repaired. There are lots of links about this,
such as:
Prouty was the source for Mr. X in Oliver Stone's movie JFK. Prouty was an air force pilot
in WWII. He flew missions around the world and witnessed history as it happened. After WWII,
he worked in the pentagon as a liaison officer between the military and the CIA. He saw the
original documents authorizing military support of CIA operations around the world.
As Prouty explains it, throughout human history war was a means of killing the other guy
and taking his stuff. The preparation for war and the prosecution of war provided an
organizing principle for human society that gave people the motivation to develop their own
societies, lest the other guy become more powerful than you and kill you.
As he describes it, with the detonation of atomic weapons at the end of WWII, conventional
war was instantly understood to be obsolete. In any future conventional war, if one side was
about to win a decisive victory, the potentially losing side would simply go nuclear, and
everyone would lose.
With the end of conventional war, and the impossibility of nuclear war, the global power
elite invented the proxy war as the new means for the continuation of war as an organizing
principle of society. In the U.S., the CIA was the tool for starting and prosecuting proxy
wars.
Prouty describes how, at the end of WWII, he was flying supply missions to Okinawa for the
staging of the invasion of Japan. The military bases in Okinawa were overflowing with every
conceivable type of materiel necessary to support more than a million man invasion.
After the atomic bombs were dropped and Japan had surrendered, Prouty claims that he asked
a supply officer if they were just going to send all the supplies back to the states.
The officer said no. He said that all the materiel was going to be divided in half, and
that half was going to Seoul, Korea, and that the other half was going to Hanoi, Vietnam.
Prouty believes that by 1945 Korea and Vietnam had already been decided to be the sites of
the first proxy wars, and that the CIA was already involved in planning the wars.
Kennedy was planning to dismantle the CIA, and Prouty recounts in his books, lectures, and
videos how the JFK assassination reversed the course of history.
The JFK assassination is an endless rabbit hole of history. If you jump in, you won't come
out the same way.
This article is a nice overview that explains the problem. There were many powerful groups
who wanted Kennedy killed, and probably several plots were underway. Allow me to suggest "The
Secret Team" by Col. Prouty to your reading list.
Your last post resulted in too many posts to read, but one pointed to an outstanding video
of Lee Oswald's life, showing facts that make it clear he was a CIA operative. Note that
after he returned from Russia after openly committing treason, he was never arrested, and
granted a spousal visa for his Russian wife. That undeniable fact itself is proof he was a
CIA plant. Oswald hoped to become an official CIA officer and federal employee, but remained
a low-level paid operative until his death. Oswald expressed concern in New Orleans that
operatives were considered disposable.
In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations stated in its Final Report that
the Committee was "inclined to believe that Oswald was in Clinton (Louisiana) in late
August, early September 1963, and that he was in the company of David Ferrie, if not Clay
Shaw,"[64] and that witnesses in Clinton, Louisiana "established an association of an
undetermined nature between Ferrie, Shaw and Oswald less than three months before the
assassination".[65]
The CIA also admitted that Clay Shaw had worked for them in some capacity. See quote
below.
During a 1979 libel suit involving the book Coup D'Etat In America, Richard Helms,
former director of the CIA, testified under oath that Shaw had been a part-time contact of
the Domestic Contact Service of the CIA, where Shaw volunteered information from his
travels abroad, mostly to Latin America.[70] Like Shaw, 150,000 Americans (businessmen, and
journalists, etc.) had provided such information to the DCS by the mid-1970s.[70] [nb 1] In
February 2003, the CIA released documents pertaining to an earlier inquiry from the
Assassination Records Review Board about QKENCHANT, a CIA project used to provide security
approvals on non-CIA personnel, that indicated Shaw had obtained a "five Agency" clearance
in March 1949.[72]
More interesting information below.
New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews testified to the Warren Commission that while he was
hospitalized for pneumonia, he received a call from "Clay Bertrand" the day after the
assassination, asking him to fly to Dallas to represent Lee Harvey Oswald.[28][29]
According to FBI reports, Andrews told them that this phone call from "Clay Bertrand" was a
figment of his imagination.[30]
In his book, On the Trail of the Assassins, Garrison says that after a long search of
the New Orleans French Quarter, his staff was informed by the bartender at the tavern
"Cosimo's" that "Clay Bertrand" was the alias that Clay Shaw used. According to Garrison,
the bartender felt it was no big secret and "my men began encountering one person after
another in the French Quarter who confirmed that it was common knowledge that 'Clay
Bertrand' was the name Clay Shaw went by."[\
So it appears likely that Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw knew each other. Which is sort of
strange.
Then there's George de Mohrenschildt, a very complex and interesting character. I wonder
if anyone here could tell me more about the nature of his relationship with Oswald.
I believe the Zionists in Israel placed the order and Freemasons in the American Deep State
executed the order. It's also quite possible that Zionist terrorists did the actual shooting
as they had the experience in killing Western high profile targets (Moyne, Bernadotte, King
David Hotel bombing, etc) but more likely that elements of the Deep State in America who
hated JFK did the actual shooting. In either case, Oswald was not lone-nut and the case is
certainly not closed. We know this because Trump recently reclassified the sealed JFK
assassination records which were mandated to be released in October, 2017. He stated that he
did so to protect "national security" (aka protect the Deep State and Israel) and to protect
the "names and addresses" of individuals still alive. Trump, far from being an opponent of
the Deep State, is actually working hand-in-hand with them (the Mueller "investigation" is
actually smoke and mirrors to distract the Sheeple from the fact that Trump is actually part
of the Deep State).
I've heard Stone talk about Nixon's reaction to seeing Ruby shoot Oswald, but this surely
wasn't an eyewitness account, as Stone was in 6th grade at the time. His career as a
political operative goes back about 45 years to volunteering for CREEP as a college student
in 1972, somewhat less as an influential one.
Apparently Johnson's mistress said he told her in so many words that the assassination was
going to happen. I think there's little doubt that he was aware and acquiescent, perhaps an
active participant. Ruby probably was his man, and he and Ruby both likely were Israel's men.
A few years later Johnson was blood in the water for the mainstream media shark tank over
Vietnam and civil disorder. If he were the prime mover of the JFK assassination, I doubt that
the media would uniformly have laid off the subject. Only Israel, it would seem, could have
orchestrated such a massive and continuous cover up.
Another well-reasoned and highly-detailed article. I agree that we'll probably never know
many of the important details of how the assassination was planned and who was involved,
given almost all the participants and witnesses are long since dead. However, we can almost
certainly conclude that there was a conspiracy that involved many important individuals from
the establishment, including President LBJ.
What are your thoughts on Seymour Hersh and his book "The Dark Side of Camelot"? I recall
his book received very negative coverage by the MSM, but I can't really judge how credible
his claims happen to be. It's a very shocking book though.
You mention here that you think our alternative media have been dishonest in analyzing
LBJ's likely role in the assassination. Why? Was it because the media feared LBJ might have
them killed? Was it perhaps because some in our media were on the payroll and being used to
distract from the "mastermind" assassin?
So the clear dishonesty of the mainstream media in avoiding any recognition of a
conspiracy seems matched by a second layer of dishonesty in the alternative media, which
has done its best to avoid recognizing the most likely perpetrator.
Here's a good History Channel special on how LBJ may have been involved with the JFK
assassination. I personally think it makes a pretty good case.
says:
June 25, 2018 at 8:09 am GMT 100 Words For anyone who hasn't seen it, here is a stabilized,
panoramic version of the Zapruder film. With this, you can get a clearer idea of the scene and
what really happened. For me at least, it removes a lot of the mystery, revealing that the
physical event itself was not that remarkable, no matter who did it.
Read More Replies:
@JohnnyWalker123 Dan Rather lied about the event to the public.
Which was remarkable.
Watch Rather lie here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXFwbIx2mbc ,
@TonyVodvarka Viewing the Zapruder film carefully, one can see that, during the six seconds
of shooting, the limousine's brake lights are on and it almost comes to a halt. The chauffeur
is looking back all this time and does not speed off until he sees JFK's head explode. There is
a film clip that shows that, as the cortege begins to leave Love Field, the SS agents that
attempted to ride in the normal protective position on the back bumper were called away by the
chief of the detail. The two men protested strongly but were ordered back to a car. There were
no motorcycle outriders, a standard security procedure. The 1112th Military Intelligence group,
which normally would have secured the parade route was ordered to stand down and there was no
additional security to replace them. Make of it what you will. ,
@Heros Every time I see that Zapruder film I am reminded by the Kinks song "Give the people
what they want":
When Oswald shot Kennedy, he was insane
Yet still we watch the re-runs again and again
We all sit glued while killer takes aim.......
Hey Mom there go the pieces of the Presidents Brain
Both Kennedy assassinations were also a massive psyop, and they remain so today. All the
talk shows, all the movies, all the images flashing on screen, all the background music. But
the scandal, is always used to push the sexualize and destroy the family agenda. Kennedy
publicly had so many lovers, including Maralyn Monroe, another psyop herself.
It is the same with Clinton's famous cigar. This obsession with perverse sex is a very
strong indicator of where the scandal is emanating. All the dogs not barking that point to this
place are evidence too.
Much better articles in italian or spanish. They basically say that's because of 'recent'
events of P2 sect fraud in 1981. More sensible to think they don't want globalist with hidden
loyalties infiltrating a new inexperienced government, but I don't follow italian
developments closely. Any thoughts?
If Israel and Jewish Power killed JFK it matters very much. If by a magic wand I could
make people believe that Israel and Jewish Power were behind JFK assassination it would be
much easier to stop and undo all those things that you have listed:
This is simply wrong. Basically, it's the Joo (or any other) conspiracy, according to this
world-view.
The crucial mistake virtually all conspiracy- theories minded people make is that they try
to pin-point a clearly defined group (mostly religious, ethnic, racial,..) as the
source of major socio-cultural changes, and frequently it's Jews (sometimes masons or
something similar).
And this is a major misfire, because no such group exists. There is no causal
connection between any ethnicity/race/ & great upheavals in the West (and in the US) in
past 3-4 decades, especially re immigration debates, influx of culturally & racially
foreign and inimical masses, disintegration of family & denigration of national loyalties
etc. To think that a group (or groups), which is relatively easy to identify, can be the
source of such monumental upheavals bespeaks of historical illiteracy.
There was no ethnic nor ideological group of people behind such shattering revolutions
& world-view changes like transition from Roman republic to Imperial Rome, Protestant
Reformation, Crusades, formation of national monarchies, Enlightenment, collapse of "divine
rights" of kings, imperialist expansion of European powers, national awakening in the 19th C,
WW1 and WW2, Not Jews, not masons, not Illuminati, not Rosicrucians, not some occult
brotherhood residing in the Himalayas.
Simply, Western civilization has come to a dead end -as it was the continuity of the 18th C
Enlightenment- and we are witnessing the processes of further decay, encapsulated in famous
hypothetical question ascribed to Lenin: " Are the forces which propel us to greatness the
same that will, transformed by mutations of History, eventually lead to our collapse
?"
A man who, despite his shortcomings & delusions about the role of technology, various
national cultures and their dominant currents, understood this better than most was Oswald
Spengler. The Western civilizational matrix is old and tired. And this is the root of
the Western decline. That what plagues the West & the US the most (race replacement, PC
"liberal" ideological muzzle, hedonist emptiness & biological collapse manifested in
infertility, pathological altruism, lunatic ideological fashions like n-th wave of feminism,
media aggression promoting "diversity" & homosexualism- as different from homosexuality,
self-hatred of European & Western culture .)-this is as present, although a bit modified,
in Italy, Spain, Denmark, Norway, France, Germany, Switzerland,.. as in the US. And in these
countries Jewish presence in the media & the overall life is negligible or
non-existent.
Although ruling elites differ in these countries, they are a mixture of hereditary
aristocracy, established bourgeois families & plutocratic oligarchs. These groups have,
historically, served their countries. Now, they are morally & culturally bankrupt and
serve outmoded gods whose future is annihilation- similar situation that had befallen pompous
& deluded aristocrats in the 18th-19th C or imperialist jingoists in the 20th.
The failure of nerve that comes with exhausted & geriatric social-cultural matrix
is to blame, not some group conspiracy.
But, the societal-cultural matrix is exhausted, not the people. Our flaw is linear
extrapolation of current events which leads to paralyzing pessimist fatalism. We should know
from history this is a fatal mistake. Just compare Europe in 1930 (cars, planes, fascism,
communism, cubism, quantum mechanics, relativity, psychoanalysis, radio, tanks, films, ..)
and during 1900 (technologically, scientifically, ideologically and artistically more or less
the same as 1880).
So, we should not give up hope, and some of us who are obsessed with Jews, should give up
this tired old chestnut. If all of US Jewish ethno-nationalists were booted to Israel, life
would be somewhat easier for Euro-Americans in some respects, but not essentially different.
Blacks would remain blacks, PC muzzle would remain PC muzzle, dopeheads would remain
dopeheads, Pentagon would remain Pentagon,
Teh author stated: "The story of the Trump collusion plot started with an intelligence
fabrication scheme hatched by US and British Government officials and their agents, including
journalists in Washington, New York and London. This started with the Golden Showers
dossier ; the sequel can be followed here . "
Over weeks and months of last year, Adam Waldman (lead image, left), a Washington lobbyist
with ties to the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton, tried to lure Julian Assange (second
from left) into making incriminating admissions to benefit the Democrats' campaign alleging
Russian collusion in Clinton's defeat by President Donald Trump. Assange tried to use Waldman
for a deal with the US Department of Justice, exchanging an offer to withhold disclosure of
classified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents and trade other secrets, some Russian,
in exchange for a grant of immunity from US prosecution.
At the same time, Oleg Deripaska (third from left), the oligarch in control of the Russian
aluminium industry, paid Waldman to offer US prosecutors information about the Trump election
campaign manager Paul Manafort and others connected to the Trump campaign, including Russians,
in exchange for a US Government promise not to impose sanctions on Deripaska. Last week Luke
Harding (right), a reporter for the Guardian, a London newspaper, sold the story of Waldman's
meetings with Assange and Deripaska as a conspiracy to advance a scheme by President Vladimir
Putin to control the US Government.
Four plotters; more than four schemes; money in Waldman's and Harding's pockets; not a shred
of truth.
The story of the Trump collusion plot started with an intelligence fabrication scheme
hatched by US and British Government officials and their agents, including journalists in
Washington, New York and London. This started with the Golden Showers
dossier ; the sequel can be followed here .
The story of Deripaska's engagement of Waldman as his lobbyist with Hillary Clinton at the
State Department and other officials in the Obama Administration has been running for nine
years. Deripaska's payments to Waldman have averaged half a million dollars a year; that's a
total to date of about $5 million. The failure of every one of Waldman's operations on
Deripaska's behalf can be read at this click .
A semi-annual report of Waldman's lobbying activities for Deripaska is required to be
disclosed by the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA); the record is accessible at the
FARA unit of the Justice
Department in Washington. For example, details of which US officials Waldman met and what he
wanted them to do for Deripaska were accessible in the FARA filings for 2011
here .
Since then the filings can be followed at six-monthly intervals through December 15, 2017.
In last December's filing Waldman claimed to the Justice Department that, among the purposes of
Deripaska's engagement, he was being paid for selecting animal welfare charities and promotion
of a Russian vaccine for ebola.
Waldman claims on his company website that "Endeavor acts as a core member of its Client's
[Deripaska] holding company executive team, and is the sole representative of its Client's
myriad interests before the U.S. government." Today the FARA dossier on Waldman's Russian
clients shows this:
Source:
https://efile.fara.gov/ When Waldman registered himself as lobbying for the Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov, he was doing Deripaska's bidding; Lavrov usually
does .
This means that Waldman's registration as Deripaska's agent in Washington remains active and
he continues to be paid, even though the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control
ordered all US individuals and institutions to cease doing business with Deripaska and his
companies from April 6.
The US Treasury did not sanction Deripaska for supporting animal welfare and an ebola
vaccine. The reasons for Deripaska's sanction, according to the Treasury, were that "having
acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior official of the
Government of the Russian Federation, as well as pursuant to E.O. 13662 for operating in the
energy sector of the Russian Federation economy. Deripaska has said that he does not separate
himself from the Russian state. He has also acknowledged possessing a Russian diplomatic
passport, and claims to have represented the Russian government in other countries. Deripaska
has been investigated for money laundering, and has been accused of threatening the lives of
business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and
racketeering. There are also allegations that Deripaska bribed a government official, ordered
the murder of a businessman, and had links to a Russian organized crime group." For more on the
US action against Deripaska, read
this .
Waldman has sidestepped the ban on taking money from Deripaska by changing his registration
from Endeavor Group -- a lobbying company covered by the OFAC sanction – to "Endeavor Law
Firm PC". That's a one-man company whose only employee is Waldman; it isn't mentioned by the
Endeavor Group's website. As a law firm acting for Deripaska, Waldman isn't banned by the new
sanction.
In February of this year the Murdoch media reported that on Deripaska's instructions,
Waldman was attempting to arrange appearances before the US Senate Intelligence Committee for
Deripaska and for Christopher Steele, one of the authors of the Golden Showers dossier. Both of
them wanted the Democratic minority on the committee to issue the invitations and secure
advance undertakings in writing from the Committee, including immunity from
US prosecution .
Waldman's telephone texts were exchanged with Senator Mark Warner, a former governor of
Virginia; Democratic Party runner for president; and at present vice-chairman of the
Intelligence Committee. The messages were leaked by Republicans in Congress to the Murdoch
media, and then confirmed by Warner himself.
Deripaska, Waldman told Warner, was trying to negotiate his testimony at the Intelligence
Committee against Manafort and the Trump presidential campaign in exchange for protection from
US Government sanctions. Exactly what Deripaska told Waldman he was ready to tell the Senate
Committee about Russian Government involvement with Manafort and the Trump election campaign
has not been disclosed because Waldman failed to get any concession for Deripaska from either
the Senators or from the Justice Department officials whom he was lobbying at the same
time.
Interpreting the series, a Fox News reporter claimed: "Over the course of four months
between February and May 2017, Warner and Waldman also exchanged dozens of [telephone] texts
about possible testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee from Deripaska, Waldman's primary
Russian billionaire client .In the dozens of text messages between February 2017 and May 2017,
Waldman also talked to Warner about getting Deripaska to cooperate with the intelligence
committee. There have been reports that Deripaska, who has sued Manafort over a failed business
deal, has information to share about the former Trump aide. In May 2017, the Senate and House
intelligence committees decided not to give Deripaska legal immunity in exchange for testimony
to the panels. The text messages between Warner and Waldman appeared to stop that month." Trump
responded by tweeting: "All tied into Crooked Hillary."
For the full story of Deripaska's relationship with Manafort, read this .
Assange was first mentioned by Waldman in a message to Warner on February 15, 2017. By then,
according to Ecuadorian Embassy meeting logs exposed only now, Waldman had met Assange
three times in January, and was planning to meet him again in March. Waldman told Warner that
for this he was acting "pro bono"; that's to say, Assange wasn't paying Waldman's bill. To
protect himself, Waldman also claimed that if US officials, including Warner, didn't appreciate
the value of Waldman's negotiations with Assange, he would stop them. In retrospect, Waldman
continued meeting Assange for another nine months. Waldman's trips to London and his expenses
there for at least some of those occasions were charged to other clients of Waldman's.
The significance of Waldman's messages about Assange were ignored in the US at the time of
their first release because US reporters were focused on Waldman's Russian connexion, and the
potential for damage the reporters believed this might do to Trump. Likewise, Waldman's reports
of what Assange told him have been ignored in the London media until the Guardian revealed the
Ecuadorian government reports on Assange and the visit logs. The Guardian's purpose, like the
earlier Murdoch media reporting, was to find a Kremlin connection.
In retrospect, the Waldman-Warner texts reveal that it was Assange's intention to use
Waldman to make a connection, not to the Kremlin, but to the US Government, trading Wikileaks
for Assange's freedom. Assange was requesting, so Waldman told Warner, safe passage to
Washington and release from threats of US prosecution in return for information regarding
"future leaks" and a promise not "to do something catastrophic for the dems, Obama, CIA and
national security". Waldman wrote that to Warner on February 16, 2017, adding: "I hope someone
will consider getting him to the US to ameliorate the damage".
On March 7, 2017, Wikileaks released publicly what Assange had already described to Waldman.
This was the start of publication of the CIA's Vault-7 and Vault-8 files. The files, claimed
Wikileaks, were "the largest ever publication of confidential documents by the agency." They
revealed the extent, cost and penetration, inside the US as well as globally, of CIA
cyber-warfare operations of many kinds, including hacker attacks which the CIA created as false
flags, making them appear to originate from Russian sources.
"Since 2001," Wikileaks announced , "the CIA has gained political and budgetary
preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not
just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force --
its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to
disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in
order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities. By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division,
which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000
registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and
other 'weaponized' malware."
Assange was quoted in the Wikileaks release as saying: "There is an extreme proliferation
risk in the development of cyber 'weapons'. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled
proliferation of such 'weapons', which results from the inability to contain them combined with
their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of 'Year Zero' goes
well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from
a political, legal and forensic perspective."
This was what Assange had told Waldman, days earlier, was the "something catastrophic" he
was planning. But Assange told Waldman more. He was willing to deal if the Justice Department
would agree to a quid pro quo. Waldman's messages to Warner confirm this; they also reveal that
Waldman got no swift response from Justice Department officials, so he asked Warner for his
help. Assange then started his slow release of the Vault-7 archive, one week at a time:
Assange's last publication in the CIA Vault series was on November 9. Waldman's last
meetings with Assange were in the same month.
What exactly were the terms Assange asked Waldman to trade with the Justice Department and
Warner's Intelligence Committee? Was he telling Waldman that he would stop the release of more
CIA Vault-7 documents in return for immunity from prosecution? Did he reveal to Waldman enough
information for the CIA and Justice Department to identify the source of the CIA documents?
Last week, on June 18, the US Attorney's office in Manhattan
announced that it had indicted a former CIA software engineer,
Joshua Schulte (right), as the source of the Wikileaks releases. Read the 14-page indictment
here .
Schulte, 29, had worked in the CIA's Engineering Development Group, which designed the hacking
tools used by its Center for Cyber Intelligence. In late 2016, he left the Agency and moved to
New York to work for Bloomberg. The prosecutors have charged thirteen counts against Schulte;
nine of them relate to the Wikileaks releases, and carry a total of 90 years' imprisonment on
conviction. Schulte has pleaded not guilty.
Bloomberg has
reported Schulte's indictment and court appearance, noting that after he left the CIA in
November 2016 he "worked briefly for Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News,
leaving the company in March 2017." Bloomberg has not been charged with gaining unlawful
advantage from Schulte's expertise. US media reporting the Schulte charges claim his
disclosures were one of the worst losses of classified documents in the CIA's history. Earlier
document releases through Wikileaks by Edward Snowden in 2013 came for the most part from the
National Security Agency (NSA), for which Snowden had been a contractor. He has been charged by
US prosecutors with espionage, and been granted asylum in Russia.
Wikileaks isn't named in the Schulte indictment; instead, it is referred to as
"Organization-1 which posted the Classified Information online". Schulte, the court papers
imply, obtained the classified information during 2016, in the months leading up to his
departure from the CIA in November of that year. Two months later Assange had the files,
because he told Waldman about them during their January meetings.
By the time in March, when Assange started publishing from Vault-7, investigators from the
CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had already identified Schulte as their
suspect. In last week's court papers it is revealed that Schulte was first interrogated by the
FBI within days of the first Wikileaks publication.
How did the FBI find its way so swiftly to Schulte? Had Waldman's contacts with the Justice
Department in February, relaying what Assange had told him, helped pinpoint Schulte as the
Wikileaks source?
Assange's current barrister in London is Jennifer Robinson of Doughty Street Chambers . She and a press spokesman,
Elina Gibbons-Plowright, were asked to clarify the meetings between Waldman and Assange which
had taken place in 2017. In addition to multiple telephone-calls to their offices, the
questions were recorded on Robinson's answer-phone and emailed. She and Gibbons-Plowright were
initially reluctant to respond.
Julian Assange and Jennifer Robinson during London court proceedings in 2011. Assange
took refuge at the Ecuador Embassy in June 2012; he was granted diplomatic asylum by the
Ecuador Government in August 2012, and Ecuadorian citizenship in December 2017. US threats to
have the UK Government arrest him and extradite him have been renewed by the Schulte indictment
of last week.
Then on Friday Robinson replied by email: "Mr Assange is cut off from phone and internet,
and is only permitted legal visits, so the only way I can put your questions to him is to
physically go into the embassy. I have no scheduled visits until next week. I trust you
understand the difficulties of his current circumstances and the impact of this in terms of
ability to provide comment and will acknowledge this in however you report this story."
I replied: "The Waldman-Assange meetings commenced, with your knowledge and counsel for your
client, more than a year ago. The SMS texts were published four months ago. Consequently, the
questions are for you to answer. You will know that Mr Waldman purports to be the one-man
employee of the Endeavor Law Firm PC, as well as the principal of Endeavor Group, a lobbying
firm. You knew that he and Mr Assange discussed matters of law and proposals for the US
Department of Justice."
The questions for Robinson were: 1. After meeting with Mr Assange in mid-February 2017, Mr
Waldman sent an SMS to Senator Mark Warner saying Mr Assange wanted "safe passage from the USG
to discuss the past and future leaks". Please explain what "safe passage" meant then. 2. In
February Mr Assange told Mr Waldman that he was planning "something catastrophic for the dems,
Obama, CIA and national security" – was that the Vault 7 disclosure? 3. Mr Waldman also
quoted Mr Assange as saying he wanted to go to the US "to ameliorate the damage" – what
did Mr Assange mean by "ameliorate the damage"? 4. Mr Waldman says Mr Assange agreed to
"serious and important concessions" for Mr Waldman to take directly to the US Department of
Justice and discuss with those officials. What were these concessions? 5. Within hours or days
of the first Wikileaks publication of the Vault 7 files, the FBI went to interview Joshua
Schulte. Did Mr Assange give Mr Waldman information or promise information about Mr Schulte to
help the FBI and CIA to identify him as a source for the Vault 7 files?
Robinson has not answered.
In Washington Waldman hides from email and telephone contact. His website contact email
address is secured behind a password barrier set up in Germany. His office telephone number
202-715-0966 provides an extension number 1006 for Waldman, but no message can be left on the
answer-phone. Waldman himself does not pick up during office hours. Neither is there an office
receptionist. The telephone directory number, like the email address, is a blind.
Questions were sent to Waldman's personal email address, which he has used to communicate
with me in the past. Waldman was asked to "clarify what were the client relationships and
purposes you held out to Mr Assange which the latter believed to be in his interest to pursue
as often with you as he appears to have done?" Waldman refuses to answer.
Harding, a Guardian correspondent in Moscow between 2007 and 2011, reported last week that
"US intelligence agencies concluded with 'high confidence' last year, in an unclassified
intelligence assessment, that the Kremlin shared hacked emails with WikiLeaks that undermined
Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign as part of its effort to sway the 2016 election in
favour of Donald Trump." For identification of the faults of the US intelligence agency report,
read
this .
For months after the election in November 2016, Harding has suggested by innuendo, the
visits Waldman made to Assange from January to November 2017 – ten reportedly counted
from secret logs
obtained from the Ecuadorian Government -- indicate that Waldman, Assange and Deripaska
were scheming to advance Russian interests in the defeat of the Democratic Party campaign
against Trump.
"It is not clear why Waldman went to the WikiLeaks founder or whether the meetings had any
connection to the Russian billionaire, who is now subject to US sanctions", Harding reported,
then drawing his own conclusion: "But the disclosure is likely to raise further questions about
the extent and nature of Assange's alleged ties to Russia." This was Harding's cue for the
answer he has already decided – Waldman was Assange's back-channel to the Kremlin. In
November 2017, Harding had published a book with this conclusion in the
title, "Collusion – How Russia [sic] Helped [sic] Trump [sic] Win the White House". The
Latin qualifier has been added to identify the innuendoes for which Harding has reported no
conclusive evidence.
The headline claims the Ecuadorian surveillance reports on Assange count nine visits by
Waldman. In Harding's text, he reports three Waldman visits to Assange in January 2017; two in
March; three in April; and two in November. If accurately counted, they add up to ten. Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/ The Waldman telephone texts to Senator Warner which have been
published start in February 2017, and refer to contact with Assange which Waldman had had
already. In March, when Waldman met Assange twice, he told Warner he had "convinced him to make
serious and important concessions and am discussing those w/DOJ [with US Department of
Justice]."
The web and print displays of the story don't provide evidence for the reported connection
between Deripaska and Assange on which Harding sets store. Assange refused to reply to the
questions Harding had sent him; Waldman and Deripaska likewise.
Harding believes Assange met Waldman as a go-between through Deripaska to Moscow. It did not
occur to Harding that Assange was negotiating with Waldman for a deal with Washington.
"It appears that Belfield, an Englishman, has obtained through FOIA the tapes of the in
flight conversations among the Israelis concerning the strikes on USS Liberty. I wrote in my
post quoted below of having read transcripts in the Spring 0f 1968 that were of exactly the
same material. It seems likely that this is the same material now released by NSA. .
pl
"I quote below from my Athenaeum post written in 2010 and entitled "What I know About the
USS Liberty.
"What I know about the USS Liberty" re-published from October, 2007
Jim Ennes, who was a watch standing officer on the USS Liberty asked me for a statement as
to what I knew of the transcripts of Israeil conversations and the ship. This is what I sent
him. I was quoted about this in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Monday. pl
(Wednesday, 19 July 2017) I have re-published this because people have written to me
saying that the transcripts were not published before the recent Haaretz article. pl
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"Dear Jim
I was a student in the Military Intelligence Officer Advanced Course at Ft. Holabird,
Maryland (Baltimore) in 1967-1968. The course lasted about ten months. We students were
required to take several electives from a group offered and I took a course in Cryptology.
This was taught by people from the NSA School at nearby Ft. Meade. This course was taught in
the winter or early spring of 1967-1968. There were several sub-courses, one of which had to
do with voice intercepts. In the course of this, the instructor introduced a booklet produced
at Ft. Meade as material for the course. It contained various course materials. Among them
were transcripts of the translated intercepts of radio conversations between the Israeli
strike commander and his base before and during the attacks on USS Liberty. The instructor, a
retired cryptologic warrant officer or NCO identified the transcript as being of the Liberty
incident. It was also so marked in the booklet.
In the transcript, the flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship in
view, that it was the same ship that he had been briefed on and that it was clearly marked
with the US flag. I think he said that the ship was displaying the US flag on an upper deck,
but my memory of that might be inexact. He asked for confirmation of his orders to attack the
ship and seemed reluctant (understandably) to attack the ship. He asked more than once and
was told to carry out his orders and attack the ship.
There was some further discussion of damage to the ship.
Extensive Interviews with USS Liberty Survivors' – Audio tapes obtained by award
winning British film maker Richard Belfield prove what every USS Liberty survivor, former
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas
Moorer have said all along: that Israel deliberately attacked an American ship. The plan was
to sink it, blame Egypt, and draw the US into the Six Day War on the Israeli side, but the
heroism of the Liberty crew in fighting ship damage, often while wounded, prevented it from
sinking with all hands. The tapes are featured in "The Day Israel Attacked America" by
film-maker Richard Belfield, whose previous production credits include National Geographic TV
and Discovery Channel."
" Despite these very difficult conditions, a member of the crew heroically managed to
jerry-rig a replacement antenna during the attempt, and by trying numerous different
frequencies, was able to evade the jamming "
It was Israeli stupidity that made it possible to send a message despite the jamming.
Israel had constructed missiles that homed in on the antennae and frequencies the Liberty
used.
However, the jamming emitters were so strong that the missiles flew in the direction of the
jammers.
So these had to be switched off after each firing of a missile.
In these pauses, the Liberty could inform Washington that it was an Israeli attack.
Then McNamara had to call back the two bombers with atomic bombs already on their way to
Cairo.
I'm racking my brain where I found this information, but no result, so far.
The Liberty incident is mentioned in many books, articles, and tv reports.
I have found that these "conspiracy theories" are usually quite simple to solve: verify
that there was a conspiracy verify that there was a cover-up verify that mass media is in the
cover-up
- verify that there was a conspiracy
- verify that there was a cover-up
- verify that mass media is in the cover-up
Then, who can make a cover-up in media?
- the mob, no - the CIA, can try but really
cannot do it long - the US President, like for instance JFK, Nixon, Clinton, no - the ones,
who control the media and suppress publications they do not like, yes
Then only, why?
- the assassination of the president succeeded, so something major in
the US politics changed - only one major thing changed
Solving these problems is easy, but the opponents behave as lawyers in kangaroo courts:
deny everything, play a moron, refer to judicial decision, start repeating childish mumble
like wackawackaconspeeracy.. and so on.
Indeed, as with MH17.
Literally overnight EU sanctions against Russia were possible.
And, as with Kennedy, what exactly happened, we do not know, and, I fear, will never
know.
On the afternoon of the day of the disaster prime minister Rutte phoned vice prime minister
Asscher, who was on vacation in the south of France.
Rutte asked him to call back on a landline 'so that Russia could not listen in'.
Fool Asscher told this in a tv show.
Nobody has asked Asscher what was so secret a few hours after the disaster that the
Russians should not know.
Why was the Diana 'accident' ?
I suppose to prevent that the future British king would have a Muslim stepfather.
Why was Anna Lyndh killed accidentally ?
She was to be the next Swedish prime minister, in favor of a EU economic boycott of
Israel
Why was the phoney Hess suicided ?
Had he talked WWII history would have to be rewritten.
Why was Kelly suicided ?
He knew quite well Blair's nonsense about the 45 minutes WMD's
Got my Economics Degree in 1971 – when they still taught the stuff. Maybe I
shouldn't, but I still go nuts when educated writers like yourself distort the origins of
Fascism. It was a three legged stool consisting of government, industry and labor. Taking
care of the working class was a key element. Also, being socialist, it was not market
oriented. Neoliberalism is exactly the opposite with it's 'lump of labor' and unregulated
markets. It arose in defense of the crushing fist of western capitalism and, had it not
been taken over by dictators, might have done the world a lot of good. Other than that you
wrote a nice piece. Keep it up
Now halfway into the 2 nd year of the Trump presidency it is clear that what
seemed to be a severe national hissy fit being thrown by bitterly-defeated leftist Democrats
after the 2016 election, gradually morphing into a chronic collective temper tantrum, has in
fact turned out to be one of the most severe cases of mass psychosis in modern history.
This all-too-real mental derangement is manifested in seething, unhinged, pathological rage
that has utterly consumed the entire Democrat party and countless authoritarian leftist
malcontents across America, who have literally lost their minds thanks to Donald Trump's
stunning victory. Their inability to control or contain it, even as it is becomes their steady
undoing on a national scale, only makes it that much more disturbing.
The Democrat party's legion of arrogant simple-minded fake news media propagandists have
only made matters worse for their fellow traveler politicians. No matter how badly their
clumsy, malignant subversions are backfiring in their faces (the Russian collusion hoax being
Exhibit A), no matter how sloppy, desperate and even absurd their ham-handed manipulations have
become, apparently they will simply never cease their vicious crusade to inflict malicious harm
on and, if possible, destroy the lives of their political opponents.
President Trump's strongest supporters and closest allies have the misfortune of being the
central targets of their psychotic obsession and their most vile, degenerate misbehavior. In
one sense it is a badge of honor to be a target of the seditious American left. But it is also
a serious challenge to live a normal life at the top of their political kill list. Life as a
highly-prized, ruthlessly-hunted target of a rage-driven leftist Democrat/corporate media/deep
state lynch mob is no picnic.
"Greenberg", whose real name turned out to be Gennady Vasilievich Vostretsov, solicited a
meeting with me through my longtime colleague and fellow diehard Trump loyalist Michael
Caputo.
I took the meeting. It barely lasted 20 minutes before I walked out, having neither given
nor received anything whatsoever from Vostretsov, who I never saw or talked to again. My sole
comment after the meeting was to text Michael Caputo that it had been waste of time. We never
discussed it again.
Until a few weeks ago, I had not even recalled having the meeting, given that it was the
only contact I have ever had with Vostretsov and the result was zilch.
Vostretsov's Russian nationality was of no consequence at the time of the meeting and is of
no consequence today, EXCEPT in how it has conveniently created yet another fake news cycle
opportunity wherein the media lynch mob could screech for awhile about how a "Trump ally met
with a Russian!!!!"
(In case you missed the memo, apparently now it is a crime just to meet with anyone even
remotely Russian. Same goes for considering any offer of opposition research .it's all ILLEGAL,
no??).
My short-lived one-off meeting with Vostretsov is of no relevance to anything or anyone
outside of the fake news unreality that is the Russian collusion delusion world.
Just because Democrats and the media cooked up this hoax to sustain their perpetual campaign
of public disinformation and personal destruction doesn't mean sane people have to buy into
it.
There is no dispute that the meeting with Vostretsov was a non-starter and I summarily
walked away from any involvement with him. The substance of the meeting (or more accurately the
lack thereof) is 100% exculpatory of me.
Beyond this, no one has the slightest obligation to entertain or otherwise indulge this
Russian collusion madness merely because some cabal of Democrat spinmeisters and their media
whores are consumed with chasing their own hoax and dragging the world along with them.
Clearly this cabal is willing to twist any and every conceivable circumstance however it
suits their mania to persecute any Trump allies they can. Their attempts to frame and defame
their political opponents are, frankly, pure rubbish, along with their histrionic chest-beating
in favor of their sleazy objectives.
This story, however, does have a real bombshell. It is not that Vostretsov is a Russian
national but that he was an FBI informant for at least 17 years prior to the time he
solicited a meeting with me.
Even more explosive is Vostrestov's extensive criminal history, including violent crimes
that landed him serious prison time in both Russia (10 years) and the United States.
The bombshell becomes nuclear when one considers how Vostretsov's criminal past would have
excluded him from ever being in the United States at the time he tried to lure me into
purchasing campaign intelligence, unless he had some sort of U.S. government
dispensation such as is given only to criminal informants who are doing the bidding of
their FBI patrons and handlers.
These extremely-relevant details, however, have quite deceitfully been either omitted or
glossed over by the leftist media megaphonies, in a brazenly-deceitful attempt to re-cast a
nothing-nowhere one-time meeting I had over two years ago as some sort of puzzle piece in their
disintegrating Russian collusion hoax.
Leftstream media manipulators have purposefully disregarded the most relevant and revealing
facts in order to dishonestly reduce their reporting to: "Stone met with a Russian!!!"
Incredible detail and documentation about Vostretsov's murky past and his decades of work as
an FBI stooge may be found at the website democratdossier.org
Now the FBI is righteously under massive fire for its unprecedented, undeniable
politicization and abuse of its extraordinary law enforcement powers in order to protect
Hillary Clinton from prosecution, despite her clear cut crimes, while conspiring to frame
Donald Trump and those around him with this bogus Russian collusion rap that the kill-Trump
media have been gleefully peddling for nearly two years now.
From democratdossier.org:
" In a
remarkable 2015 court affidavit (attached), Vostretsov admitted that he is FBI informant
who worked for the agency for more than 17 years. He appears to have traded information about
criminal activity for temporary visas provided to him by the FBI. We were able to collect 14
different Significant Public Benefit Parole (SPBP) documents allowing him to enter the US. This
type of visa waiver is made available to international persons participating in a law
enforcement action as an informant. The steady flow of these special waivers, with upgrades
like multi-entry status and extensions, indicate his involvement and success in FBI informant
projects. While Vostretsov claimed in the 2015 affidavit he sent to an immigration judge that
he stopped working for the FBI that year, it would be safe to assume that if a criminal alien
with his immigration background is still in the US today, he is only here with the support from
the US government and is still working with the FBI."
So, to summarize: in May 2016 a person using the alias Henry Greenberg solicited a meeting
with me, claiming they had information of importance to the presidential race. When I met with
this person (who incidentally dressed up like a Trump campaign volunteer) he made no mention of
Russia or Russian affairs and said he wanted $2M for what he had and, further, that he expected
it would be paid for not by me but by Donald Trump himself.
I immediately suspected this was some sort of shakedown and told the person I was not
interested, ending the meeting barely 20 minutes after it began. I never had any contact with
this person again.
Two years later, this individual's name comes up, again via my colleague Michael Caputo, and
I was reminded of this brief, one-off meeting, so wasteful of my time and pointless, from my
view, that I never even recalled it. But then this is the case with 100's upon 100's of
glancing encounters I've had with strangers over the course of a nearly two-year presidential
campaign, not to mention my other professional and personal pursuits, from filming a
documentary to writing multiple books to organizing efforts to beat back the establishment GOP
machinations against Trump in the lead-up to the convention.
I most certainly had not thought at the time of the meeting that is was anything in the same
universe as doing business with a "Russian", as opposed to being solicited by some random
grifter whom I knew little about, either before or after the meeting, and from whom nothing
came but a total waste of my time.
Once I recalled this meeting and pieced it together as something far more sinister than I
had ever thought, with far greater implications than merely a glancing contact with some
shakedown artist, I notified the House Intelligence Committee, and the information was
simultaneously provided to the Washington Post.
A normal, rational, objective observer would conclude from all this that 2 years ago, in the
midst of a whirlwind presidential campaign, I had a single 20-minute meeting with a random con
man who used an alias, who may have been Russian, and about whom I knew literally nothing
else.
Further, the meeting produced literally nothing, I took no further action, there was no
further contact and I had no further thought about or even recall of it until the individual's
name came up recently and took onfar greater dimension once we pieced together what was really
going on (an attempted FBI set-up), after which I reported the truth about Mr. Vostrestov's
(that he was yet another FBI "lure") to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes.
Seems pretty simple, yes?
Well, not according to the Clinton-Obama leftist media juggernaut, which not only spun this
meeting as 'another contact with Russia by a Trump loyalist', but even twisted my own
pro-active revelation of it into some sort of proof that I had lied previously. Some of the
more brazen propagandists went so far as to misportray my voluntary disclosure as a murky
scheme to somehow conceal (in plain sight, no less) long-absent proof they so far have had to
manufacture as they go, in order to prop up their Russian collusion conspiracy theory.
Predictably, the most nasty, malicious and pathologically-deceitful partisan media
manipulators, epitomized by the glib, shifty leftist ambulance chaser and wannabe Watergate
hero narrative flamekeeper Ariel Melber, immediately set about spouting their sanitized
half-truth version of this story out of the usual Clinton-Obama propaganda defamation outlets,
like MSNBC.
A full complement of fake news artists seized on my revelation of this incident as yet
another cheap opportunity to mislead their audiences and, yet again, fire up their tired,
repetitious false narrative, based solely on the same manipulative insinuations and factual
distortions they have used before in an attempt to cast me as having somehow engaged in some
sinister conspiracy.
These media hyenas will never miss a chance to peddle their fabricated version of reality,
even where it completely flies in the face of demonstrable facts (unless, of course, you have
the clairvoyance to read between the lines, aided by a giant pair of leftist lunatic
lenses.)
Rather than highlight that I walked away from this meeting after maybe 20 minutes, never
looking back, taking no action to avail myself of what was offered or even to pass it along to
anyone in the Trump Campaign to pursue, Melber and his fake news wannabes twisted their
coverage of it into a 10 minute roundtable spouting off ways in which they think I have somehow
lied, not been fully honest or am a Soviet spy.
Naturally they simply ignored, or summarily dismissed as mere speculation and a ploy on my
part, the most relevant data point of all -- that "Mr. Greenberg" turned out to be a
17-year FBI informant , who just so happened to be inspired in May 2016, of all times, to
approach someone close to Donald Trump to sell information he supposedly had.
Returning to Melber and his stunted panel of forgettable nobodies looking for their 15
minutes of fame, these bullshitters epitomize the dishonesty and unhinged animus I described
above. These are cheap partisan propagandists who do not report news or analyze facts or
illuminate their audience with insights, but instead manipulate data points and spin the
conclusions that suit their partisan orthodoxy.
Were it not for the Russian collusion hoax, what ever would the likes of Melber and his
fellow dreck peddlers do to fill their airtime? Perhaps when the witch hunt is finally
exhausted and their fake scandal finally falls apart, and I continue to walk the earth a free
man, Ari Melber will have the opportunity to go out and get a real job and do some real work,
rather than further pollute the world with his phony malicious propaganda.
I know beyond question that it is the absolute, unalterable operating premise of leftist
lynch mobsters in anything and everything they either say, write, report or do concerning me
that NOTHING that I say, or have ever said, will not be automatically presumed to be a lie, and
that NOTHING I do, or have ever done, even in the most mundane and transparent of day-to-day
activities, will not automatically be construed as some sort of criminal act or part of some
larger criminal conspiracy (i.e. anything and everything I do or say is, per the jackass media
manipulators, RUSSIAN COLLUSION!!!!).
No matter what is said, no matter what facts come to light, no matter how many defamatory
leftist fabrications about me are serially and conclusively debunked, no matter how
consistently my statements all along are subsequently validated as truthful and correct none of
it matters because deceitful leftist attackbots and cheap Democrat propagandists will
cherry-pick, parse or otherwise manipulate the facts and twist my statements to cast me as a
suspicious villain.
No amount of debunking of their defamatory hoax-peddling spin and lies will dissuade them
from persisting in their deceitful malpractice and their continued pollution of the airwaves
and print outlets with their wildly-false, reckless, baseless allegations and defamatory
suspicion-manufacturing. This is just the bottom line with these news fakers.
From the moment they first hatched their cynical, vindictive partisan charade against the
American people (and sanity generally), almost 2 years ago, the leftist Democrats' sleazy
Russian collusion hoax peddlers, along with their fake news media collaborators, have been
nothing if not consistent.
In their spastic mania to prop up and prolong their Trump-Russia collusion fantasy they have
proven themselves consistently deceitful, consistently manipulative, and consistently consumed
with propagating and perpetuating a pure fiction they know damn well is not simply erroneous or
exaggerated, but in fact is a complete and total fabrication, unparalleled in the amount of
wanton malevolence that is behind it.
Underhanded and calculating as the leftist Democrats' manufactured torrent of breathless
sensationalism, phony outrage and fake news recycling may be, these political bunco artists are
not fooling anyone, at least who has an iota of common sense and rational discernment.
In fact, I doubt that the Russian collusion hoax is genuinely believed even by many of the
vicious profane malcontents who lap up this sort of leftist sewage and hatefully spew it
anywhere and everywhere possible, from social media to the family dinner table.
Of course, leftist Democrats and the Trump-hating national media are far too arrogant and
self-serving to limit their deceitful machinations to merely concocting and proliferating a
cynical treason hoax as a partisan weapon to take down a duly-elected President of the United
States. No, they must also be able to cast their seditious skullduggery as some sort of high
holy public service, saving America from itself by torpedoing the hated president it had the
gall to elect.
[It is precisely this variety of boundlessly hypocritical self-regard that pretty much sums
up the leftist attitude towards everything they do in their ceaseless lust to seize
and wield supreme power.]
Back in reality, no one with even half of a functioning brain buys this patently-absurd
notion that preening partisan pygmies from the megalomaniacal left actually give a rat's ass
about serving the public interest or preserving the sanctity of our Republic.
Only the left's most repulsive partisan parasites (see e.g. Adam Schiff; Eric Swalwell) and
deceitful media propagandists (see e.g. Ari Melber; Don Lemon; MSNBC; CNN; NY Times; WaPo .too
many to possibly list) actually seem to believe there is some high holy civic purpose behind
their endlessly-malicious, pathologically-dishonest scheming to frame, shame and defame
President Donald Trump.
It would take a truly-mindless hoaxster to think they are somehow serving their country by
conspiring to give constant false cover and perverted quasi-legitimacy to a lawless corrupt
bureaucratic hit squad of Trump-hating Hillarybot lawyers and power-crazed federal bullies set
loose, like a pack of rabid hyenas, to gleefully wage a ruthless legal jihad against President
Trump, his family members, staff, political associates, loyal longtime supporters and anyone
even marginally connected to his amazing 2016 victory and his (so far) stunningly- successful
presidency.
Even the seditious trash perpetrating this Russia collusion scam know all too well what
Trump's presidency and, above all, his singular leadership portend for the continued survival
of the undeserved power and illegitimate control that these lowlife self-dealing elites
consider to be theirs by divine right. (Suffice to say, it is not a pretty picture for
them.)
The bottom line is that Russian collusion hoaxsters serve no higher or more noble purpose
than to exact malicious petty revenge on the hated Trump and his allies, and fraudulently undo
the epic smackdown that America handed them and their corrupt fellow swamp dwellers in November
2016 -- once and for all smiting the repulsive amoral witch their party has in the greedy
self-entitled criminal hag Hillary Clinton.
Whether the Russia collusion hoaxsters like it or not, whatever minuscule shards of
credibility, believability and basic dignity they might have once had long ago vaporized into
their own toxic smoke-and-mirrors shit cloud of seething partisan malevolence and brazen
underhanded deceit. It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of scoundrels
I am disturbed and hurt that there is so much hatred towards the entire Jewish people in
the comment section.
Hi, Aaron. Just wanted to take a crack at providing you with an explanation of where I
think most people are coming from on the issue you've raised.
While I obviously don't pretend to speak for all goyim, I can speak for myself.
It's not that goyim are expressing "hatred towards the entire Jewish people" for who they
are. I think they are probably expressing their anger towards what organized Jewry has been,
and is, actually doing.
One case in point is the big push towards diversity led by the ADL. Are you familiar with
the following material they've posted on their website:
This is America.This is ADL. (NB – disingenuously referring to 9 pictures of
distinct-looking individuals)
The United States is a vibrant mix of cultures, races, religions and ethnic groups.
These differences enhance our nation's strength, beauty and collective wisdom. Together, we
all weave the fabric of our pluralistic society.
For over 100 years, the Anti-Defamation League has upheld this distinctly American
concept by leading the fight against anti-Semitism, bigotry and racism. Today, ADL is the
nation's premier human relations and civil rights organization.
If your company or organization wants to be recognized as a leader in the fight to
promote diversity, we invite you to become a member of ADL's Corporate Leadership Council
-- the nation's leading corporate diversity initiative. Additional co-branding, diversity
training and recognition benefits are available to Corporate Partners.
More and more people have come to realize that the ADL has been behind the push towards
diversity. They were the ones to actually coin the phrase "Diversity Is Our Strength."
Given the historically delicate situation of Diaspora Jewry living in host nations- i.e.,
the perennial risks of pogroms and other forms of repression – promoting a policy of
diversity, while damaging to the host nation, made eminent sense, from their perspective.
While this policy had been sustainable before the founding of Israel, it has since become
problematic. Let me explain. While there are still goyim who think the ADL is sincere in
their promotion of diversity, more and more are beginning to notice the blatant contradiction
in Diaspora Jewry's position: while they support the promotion of diversity in their host
nations, they fiercely defend the idea of an ethno-state in the ME. This is becoming an
untenable position in the eyes of many goyim – i.e., either one favours
multiculturalism or one favours mono-culturalism one cannot favour both at the same time.
So if we fast forward this film, what it comes down to is this: Diaspora Jewry must make
up their minds and choose one of the following options:
1) sincerely embrace multiculturalism for all nations by insisting that Israel open its
doors to all peoples of the world and let them become equal citizens; or
2) sincerely embrace mono-culturalism for all nations (and immediately cease and desist
from promoting diversity) by either assimilating or making Aliyah.
If they refuse to choose, because they wish to have their cake and eat it too, I'm afraid
this this film will not have a happy ending.
-- -- -- -- -
P.S. I, for one, am a big fan of true diversity and sincerely embrace mono-culturalism.
That's why I'm in favour of a rainbow of nations. Because, as the saying goes, "variety is
the spice of life."
What makes you think Assad is an idiot? He seems more intelligent than most politicians,
journalists, and politicians in Washington, D.C. (I cringe at having to name the place. It's
like speaking Orc-language in Rivendell.)
Millions of Americans, having been raised on TV propaganda, still have a screaming need to
feel superior to everyone – except perhaps the Israelis.
The government of the USA has marked Putin for destruction. But I think the rest of the
world is rooting for him, and the Russian people, to survive the American onslaught.
Hey uh, not to torque your cognitive dissonance, I know you have a lot of Democrat Party
revolutionary self-criticism sessions to go through, but when Putinhitlernazi takes over, we
get all our human rights, not just the niggardly hind-tit worthless US Bill of Rights that
DHS revoked. The Putinhitlernazi constitution prohibits the bad-faith phony rights the US
government screws us with. And the Putinhitlernazi constitution lets us go over the head of
the government to the international human rights authorities if we get no satisfaction at
home.
Article 17 of the Russian Constitution says rights and freedoms of person and citizen are
recognized and guaranteed pursuant to the generally recognized principles and norms of
international law. Ratified international treaties supersede any domestic legislation
stipulating otherwise. Article 18 states that rights and freedoms of the person and citizen
are directly applicable. That prohibits bad-faith tricks like the US pulls, declaring
"non-self executing" treaties, making legally-void reservations, declarations,
understandings, and provisos to screw you out of your rights. Article 46(3) gives citizens a
constitutional right to appeal to inter-State bodies for the protection of human rights and
freedoms if all available internal means of legal redress are exhausted.
So where can I sign up for the Putinhitlernazi waffle SS commandos? I wanna overthrow this
shitcrap crapshit USA and get my rights.
=>
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Technically, this is flag desecration--but Olbermann has hate America for years.
Of course, this begs
an obvious question. Traitor to
what?
In an "America" which no longer has a definable culture,
language,
ethnos
, history, identity or rule of law, what is there left to betray?
The open celebration of what any other
generation would have called "treason" reveals how fully self-discrediting is the Russian "interference"
narrative.
John Harington
famously quipped: "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper,
none dare call it treason." The "Russian interference" narrative is false because the fact it can be loudly
denounced without being shut down for being the equivalent of "racist" or "xenophobic" shows Russia isn't
very powerful within our government and society.
In contrast, our government and media
seem to not only tolerate openly subversive or even hostile actions by foreign governments against the
United States, but celebrate them.
To criticize any of these countries, or
to suggest dual loyalty on the part of their supporters in this country, is political death. Of course, that
is because such dual loyalty is sufficiently strong that it is dangerous to broach the topic.
Indeed, for some in our Congress, dual
loyalty would be a massive improvement.
The only reason we can't call men like
these traitors is because there's no evidence they ever considered themselves Americans in any meaningful
way. What could be more ridiculous than considering
Chuck Schumer
"a fellow American" with some imaginary "common interest" he shares with me?
It's not double loyalty; that would be
giving Maher too much credit. And it's not treason, because Maher just isn't part of my people, by his own
standards. When Bill Maher refers to "us," I know that doesn't include me or my readers, and I know "the
Russians" hate me a lot less than he does.
Of course, there is a Trump associate
who has disturbing ties with a country doing just that. The main focus of the investigation into "Russian
collusion" is focusing on former
National Security Advisor Michael Flynn
. But Flynn's strongest ties to a foreign power seem to be to be
increasingly extreme and anti-European Turkey
of the autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Incredibly, Flynn
even wrote an editorial demanding more support for Turkey
on election day itself.
[
Our
ally Turkey is in crisis and needs our support
, by Michael Flynn, The Hill, November 8, 2016]
As Turkey is quite openly facilitating
the migrant invasion of Europe and helping ISIS, there's a far better case to claim our NATO "ally" is a
threat than Russia. And yet Flynn's ties to Turkey go all but unmentioned outside evangelical Christian
websites [
Best-selling
author predicted Flynn's departure
, WND,
February 14, 2017]. The MSM is utterly
indifferent to Flynn's ties to Erdogan, even when they seem to be utterly dedicated to destroying General
Flynn personally.
Part of it simply could be the defense
industry and the
"Deep State"
need an enemy with a powerful conventional military to justify their wealth and power. As
it can't be China (that would be racist), Russia will do.
The real reason Russia is hated is
because it is a
media threat.
Russia is funding, or at least is tied to, several alternative media
sources such as
RT,
possibly
Wikileaks, Sputnik etc.
Contrary to MSM claims,
RT
is hardly friendly to the "Alt-Right," instead promoting progressive hosts such as Thom Hartmann. But there
is at least a slightly different point of view than the monolithic Narrative promoted on every late night
comedy show, network news broadcast, cable news broadcast, newspaper headline, and Establishment website [
The
Hard Road For Putin
,
by Gregory Hood,
Radix,
July 22, 2014].
There is also an undeniable,
and openly articulated
, sense of racial hatred expressed against Russians by Jewish members of the
media. Russians are hated both as a specific
ethnos
and as a white nation which does not seem to be
fully committed to "our values," which, as defined by Weimerica's journalist class, consists of various
forms of degeneracy. [
Welcome
to Weimerica
,
by Ryan Landry,
Daily Caller,
May 5, 2017].
John Winthrop's "City Upon A Hill"
we are not.
It's not just idiotic but obscene that
the same journalists gleefully involved in deconstructing the American identity now demand Middle America
rally round the flag out of some misplaced Cold War nostalgia. Needless to say,
these same journalists loved Russia back when it was Communist
and killing millions of Orthodox
Christians.
For immigration patriots, it's
especially obnoxious because the eradication of the American identity is a result of mass immigration. And
immigration is more important than every other issue for two reasons.
Immigration cuts to the heart of what a country is, of who you mean when you say "my people." Are
Americans still one people? Indeed, it's hard to claim America is even a geographic expression: referring
to the United States shorthand
as "America" is now designated as offensive
. The replacement of existing American citizens is
celebrated
by the media and
funded
by our own government.
And even citizenship means nothing, The
MSM constantly promotes
Jose Antonio Vargas
and his illegal friends or the protesters who parade under foreign flags not just as
"Americans" but as people somehow more American than us.
It's a strange definition of patriotism
where wanting peaceful relations with Russia is "treason" but banning the American flag in public schools
because it might offend Mexicans
is government policy
.
Naturally, Leftist intellectuals and the
reporters who parrot their ideas do have some vague idea of "American" identity -- that of a "proposition" or
"universal" nation which exists only to fight a global struggle for equality [
Superpowers
,
by James Kirkpatrick,
NPI,
June 24, 2013].
But can you betray a "proposition
nation?" How exactly does someone turn against a "universal nation?"
Actually, you can. If you are part of
the historic American nation, one of those European-Americans who actually think of this country as a real
nation with a real culture, you are in a strange way the only people left out of what it means to be a
modern "American." To consider America a particular place with a specific culture and history that not
everyone in the world can join simply by existing is treason to a "universal nation." Everyone in the world
can be an "American," except, you know, actual Americans.
This is why the MSM is insistent that
the governing philosophy of "
America
First
," which should simply be a truism for any rational American government, is instead
something subversive and dangerous
.
The hard truth is that "our" rulers
aren't the guardians of our sovereignty, but the greatest threat to our independence.
And this isn't an unprecedented
circumstance in history. During the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia, Carl von Clausewitz
violated
his king's orders to join the invasion of Russia and instead joined the Tsar's forces in the
hope of someday liberating his own country. After all, it wasn't Tsar Alexander that was occupying Prussia;
it was Napoleon. And in the end, he won, Prussia was restored, and eventually it was Prussia that would
unite all of Germany.
The same situation applies today. Today,
those actively pursuing the destruction of my people, culture and civilization aren't in Moscow. I don't
even concede those are enemies at all.
Our enemies are in New York, Washington,
and Los Angeles, in "our" own media companies, government bureaucracies and intelligence agencies.
The real America is under occupation –
and resistance to collaborators is patriotism to our country. We elected Donald Trump because we thought he
could help disrupt and perhaps even end that occupation so we could have a country once again.
The attempt to destroy the President has
ripped the mask off
the forces behind this occupation
. And we owe no loyalty to the collaborators who are trying to destroy
his administration, dispossess our people, and destroy our country.
Because in the end, "treason" to the
occupation is loyalty to America.
(Republished from
VDare
by permission of author or representative)
I concur completely. The Russians are not our enemies. The Russians have never been our enemies. The Soviet
behemoth may have harnessed the captive Russian bear, but, to paraphrase St. Paul, "Our battle was not with
flesh and blood Russians but with the the powers and principalities of international Jewry and its ugly and
deadly spawn, Judeo-Communism." Once it cast off those chains, Russia became a natural ally of the American
people, but not, of course, of the Atlanticist Zionist empire which the American deep state serves.
Orthodox Christian Russia and the United States had a true compatibility of interests, until the advent of
Roosevelt I and his war party of would be empire builders.
The "real" reason Russia is hated is because it has rejected Communism, and it does not
cater to gays.
Cummunist Russia had been , since the thirties, mecca and utopia for the US leftists and
they are now out of their collective mind because their vision of world Marxism with Russia
running the show have been obliterated by the likes of the anti-communist VP.
The Democrats were convinced that they had the election in the bag , and therefore the
accomplishment of eternal one-party government. They would have legalized the illegals as a
gigantic voting block,
and the huge upset dealt to them by the deplorables has driven them off the cliff and into
total
madness.
"Media threat" is such a vague non-descript concept that I don't have the energy or patience
to even elaborate thereon.
Authenticjazzman "Mensa" society member since 1973, airborne qualified US Army vet, and pro
jazz artist.
PS off subject but relevant : Russia has a thriving Jazz scene, and the are some monster
American-style Jazz players coming out of Russia.
Cummunist Russia had been , since the thirties, mecca and utopia for the US leftists and
they are now out of their collective mind because their vision of world Marxism with Russia
running the show
I don't see any evidence that those who call themselves the Left in the US today have any
enthusiasm at all for Marxism. They serve the interests of global capitalism. The Russians are
hated because they don't want to bow down before global capitalism and international bankers,
and because Russia refuses to join in the persecution of Christians. The Russians aren't
communists any more but they (quite rightly) recognise that global capitalism is every bit as
evil as marxism ever was, if not more so.
I haven't noticed any of these so-called leftists in the modern US calling for the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Have you?
It's amazing how many Americans on the right still subscribe to paranoid Cold War delusions
about global Marxism.
The NeoCons are Trotsyists pretending to be Conservatives
I hear this all the time. I know that many Trotskyists morphed into neocons but that's not
quite the same as saying that Trotskyists are neocons are identical. Trotsky may have been a
heretical communist but he was still a communist. Are neocons actual communists? In what way
are they actual communists?
"I don't see any evidence that those who call themselves the Left in the US today have any
enthusiasm at all for Marxism. They serve the interests of global capitalism. The Russians
are hated because they don't want to bow down before global capitalism and international
bankers, and because Russia refuses to join in the persecution of Christians."
Agree.
We have enemies within and enemies without. Regarding our enemies without: the most dangerous
are the Islamic supremacists, and China. The Chinese are a more traditional challenge, and
hence more manageable. The Russians are a natural ally- and perhaps a necessary ally- against
both of these threats. A traditional geopolitical analysis suggests that we always side with
the weaker party- in this case the Russians- against rising/hegemonic states in Eurasia. So
our foreign policy is out of joint. Why our foreign policy class insists upon supporting this
policy is an interesting question- the policy is clearly in error.
I don't agree with everything you say, but thanks for your thoughts on this. If that is
what the ADL is supporting- and I have no reason to doubt you- then they have to be opposed
vigorously. On a lighter note, assimilated Jewish Americans never call our Christian brethren
'goyim' anymore- it might be a problem, considering that 60% of us, including yours truly,
have married outside our religion of birth.
I appreciate the sympathy. The whole situation is a complete mess and getting worse. On a
historical note, a biography just came out about Ernst Kantorowicz, a Jewish- German
medievalist. You might find it interesting. His life was also discussed in a book about the
great medievalists of the 20th Century- 'Medieval Lives', by Cantor. It's a fascinating book.
Kantorowicz was a wealthy, assimilated Jewish- German who grew up with the Prussian upper
class. He was a German officer in World War I, and after the war joined the paramilitary-
right Freikorps and fought against the Communists inside Germany. As a medievalist, he was a
romantic- nationalist associated with a circle of poets and scholars, and friends with Percy
Ernst Schramm, who along with Kantorowicz was one of the great medievalists of his
generation. Then the Nazis took power. Kantorowicz was purged from academic life. Some of his
friends protected him as best they could, while others sided with the Nazis. He got out,
barely, in 1938 and ended up at Berkeley, of all places, and the Institute for Advanced
Study. His friend Schramm became the official historian of the Wehrmacht in WWII, and
observed Hitler at first hand. After the war Schramm turned to Kantorowicz for help in
reentering official, academic life (Kantorowicz helped.) The whole story is a tragic metaphor
for the tragedy of the patriotic, assimilated- nationalist German Jews.
oh btw there was an amusing codicil to the Kantorowicz story. At Berkeley in the
50′s he and the other faculty were called to take an oath before some Govt Commission
that they were not communists. Kantorowicz as a matter of principal refused to take the oath,
since he believed in academic liberty, and was dismissed. In his explanation for his refusal
he stated something to the effect that he was not a communist- in fact, he had shot a bunch
in his youth!- but he wouldn't take the oath.
"Naturally, however, people react with anger when Jews engage in anti-European genocidal
advocacy such as this."
False characterization.
"I do understand your feelings and sympathize with you, but it is surely wrong to infer
that because there is push back against what some Jews do, this is evidence of irrational
hatred. It is not."
It is evidence of irrational hatred due to a belief that Jews overall engage in the
purposeful destruction of cultures. There is the assumption that
diversity/multi-culturalism/tolerance is the bane of existence, that the Jewish propaganda
machine serves as an ethnic and societal meat grinder. Unwitting people are being brainwashed
into promoting these concepts. Except you are conveniently discounting this important fact
human beings have free will. Increasing numbers of people have made decisions of their own
accord about these issues. They embrace these philosophies for a host of reasons. You are a
snake oil salesman of how Cultural Marxism allegedly is murdering our youth. Let us assume
that this Jewish menace would be neutralized. Do you not believe there would be some other
group filling in for that void through their own strategies of indoctrination and mind
control? Perhaps the philosophies you tout would then be force fed down the throats of the
masses.
"According to Corvy, there's something wrong with those who are for the survival of their
own kith and kin. In fact, being against extinction of your own people is how Corvy seems to
define hate speech and racism."
That's not what I stated. I'm not a fan shall we say of you denigrating wholesale a
particular group and characterizing that same group of being a proponent of genocide. You
have every liberty to protect "your own kind", just as those individuals from "your own kind"
have the freedom to question the reasons why you want those protections as well as how those
protections are put in place. Furthermore, don't you realize there is no such thing as
"racism" and "hate speech"? It's a ruse.
"The only investigation worth the name was led by Adm. Moorer, who had been Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among the findings announced by the commission on October
2003:
" Unmarked Israeli aircraft dropped napalm canisters on the USS Liberty bridge, and fired
30mm cannon and rockets into the ship; survivors estimate 30 or more sorties were flown over
the ship by a minimum of 12 attacking Israeli planes.
" The torpedo boat attack involved not only the firing of torpedoes, but machine-gunning of
Liberty's firefighters and stretcher-bearers. The Israeli torpedo boats later returned to
machine-gun at close range three of the Liberty's life rafts that had been lowered into the
water by survivors to rescue the most seriously wounded."
"Shortly before he died in February 2004, Adm. Moorer strongly appealed for the truth to be
brought out and pointed directly at what he saw as the main obstacle: " I've never seen a
President stand up to Israel. If the American people understood what a grip these people have
on our government, they would rise up in arms." Echoing Moorer, former U.S. Ambassador
Edward Peck, who served many years in the Middle East, condemned Washington's attitude toward
Israel as "obsequious, unctuous subservience at the cost of the lives and morale of our own
service members and their families"
That makes no difference, since being jewish is ultimately a racial category not a
religious one. You don't have to take my word for it, you can research how the state of
Israel defines what a jew is, and it is not on religious grounds. In fact they use the
Nuremberg race acts that defined what a jew was as their own criteria, obviously they will
claim they are using it for those fleeing oppression, but anyone who is sincere about this
knows it is because the Nuremberg race acts were correct in their definitions.
Bureaucracies, governmental or academic, hate a non-conformist. I know. I worked (briefly)
for three governments and also held academic appointments at three universities, the last, a
tenure-track appointment, that I abandoned after three days.
The problem for all groups in a multi-cultural society is that group interests are liable
to conflict and thus generate antagonisms that often have a racial or religious aspect. For
Jews, it is worse than for most because they are adherents, or associates by descent, of a
religion that is fundamentally racist. Yahweh, after all, is the God of the Jews, and urges
the Jews to go forth, multiply and rule over the nations of the Earth.
Thus, when Jews succeed as they have done in large numbers in America in gaining positions
of great wealth and power, and especially when they exercise that power for specifically
Jewish interests such as the defense of the state of Israel, they naturally raise feelings of
suspicion, fear and antagonism, as would say a bunch of Russian nationalists if they
ran much
of Hollywood , were among the
principal peddlers of porn in America , had
massive media influence , and held many seats in Congress and used their financial clout
to determine
who holds many of the other seats in Congress .
None of this, of course, alters the fact that it may at times seem tough being a Jew and
an American-firster.
WHY did the Israeli leadership collectively decide to attack the USS Liberty spy ship
and risk serious damage to its relationship with its only superpower supporter? What did the
Israelis know about the Liberty's activities? Why was this a matter of top-level national
importance to Israel?
Somehow, endless repetition of the USS Liberty story never gets around to addressing the
crucial WHY of the operation.
Without addressing the WHY, any account of the attack itself is little more than beating
around the bush. Also, it is remarkable that no consistent U.S. version of the incident has
evolved despite several generations of military and secret service officials transitioning to
the relative safety and anonymity of retirement since then.
One conventional fake answer can easily be disposed off – it is sometimes claimed
that the Israelis hoped to blame the sinking of the Liberty on Egypt, and cause damage to
Egypt's relationship with the U.S. This version is wholly untenable.
First, an air attack would have been plainly visible on military radar across the Red Sea.
Second, then as now, the U.S. had extensive secret service contacts throughout the Egyptian
government. An Egyptian air attack on the USS Liberty would most likely have leaked in
advance, and certainly within hours of a putative Egyptian attack which by definition would
have to involved hundreds of individuals to propose, prepare and implement.
"Somehow, endless repetition of the USS Liberty story never gets around to addressing the
crucial WHY of the operation."
First, there is no "endless repetition of the USS Liberty story" by MSM: this story has
been hushed for many years. Second, apart from disparaging the survivors of USSLiberty, you
suggest no viable explanation to the murderous attack.
The USS Liberty story emphasizes inordinate influence of Israel-firsters on the US policies
abroad and domestically. Here is a excerpt from a speech of Mr. Dershowitz (the Idiot):
"People write a book called the Israel lobby and complain that AIPAC [American Israel Public
Affairs Committee] is one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. My response to that is,
that's not good enough. We should be the most powerful lobby in Washington. . . . We are
entitled to use our power. We have contributed disproportionately to the success of this
country. . . . We are a very influential community. We deserve our influence."
"Israel Lobby Pays the Political Piper:" https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/21/israel-lobby-pays-the-political-piper/
Don't you see how the obnoxious kind – that makes the Lobby, ADL, powerful warmongers
among the Friends of Israel and such – have been destroying the true safe home for
Jewry in the US and EU?
First, there is no "endless repetition of the USS Liberty story" by MSM: this story has
been hushed for many years.
yep
also as we all know, the attack on the USS Liberty was intended as a false flag attack to
be blamed on Egypt in order to get America to fight Israel's wars for them.
It is the well-known modus operendi of cowards. Commit crimes and blame them on people you
don't like, so that those people will be punished for it. It happens all the time in America
with hate "crime" hoaxes. The most egregious example of Israeli's treachery and endemic
cowardice was the false flag attack on 9/11 – that is being used even today to get
Americans to mass-murder people Israel doesn't like and reduce entire nations and regions
into smoking ashes.
"and it turned out that traditional English cultural notions in politics, economics and
religion supplied much of the "magic sauce" that enabled the American experiment to take the
world forward as and when it did."
You do realize that those traditions were a result of the combined efforts of the Britons,
the Picts, the Romans, and the Anglo-Saxon tribes. Moreover, this "American experiment" was
the product of the English, Greek, and Roman ways of governance, as well as the philosophies
of the Enlightenment.
"English traditions achieved unrivaled primacy due to an innate sense of tolerance,
restraint, privacy and secularism paired with traditional respect for organically grown
institutions balanced by distrust of fads and "philosophies."
Thank you for your opinion on this matter.
"One of the advantages of the English language is that the language itself does not allow
a person to identify his profession by saying "I am a philosopher.""
The English language does not prohibit anyone from indicating that their profession is a
"philosopher", considering if a person graduates from university with a doctoral degree in
philosophy and instructs students in this field.
"Israel and Saudi Arabia have always been enemies of secular, Arab nationalist states and
federations. Whether an Arab state is Nasserist, Ba'athist, socialist, Marxist-Leninist or in
the case of Gaddafi's Libya a practitioner of the post-Nassierist Third Political Theory:
Israel and Saudi Arabia have sought to and in large part have succeeded, with western help,
at destroying such states.
Unlike Israel's Apartheid military state and Saudi Arabia's human rights free monarchy, the
aforementioned Arab styles of government are worthy of the word modern. These are countries
which had progressive mixed economies, had secular governments and societies, had full
constitutional rights for religious and ethnic minorities, they championed women's rights and
engaged in mass literacy programmes and infrastructural projects. ..
Syria is the last secular Arab Ba'athist state in the world. Unlike in Israel, minorities
have full constitutional rights and unlike in Saudi Arabia, all religions are tolerated. In
Syria, women can act, speak and dress as they wish. Syria's independence has in the past
thwarted Israel's ambition to annex Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and additional parts of
Syria itself (Israel still occupies Syria's Golan Heights).
Syria remains strongly independent and refuses to surrender its values. Saudi Arabia and Israel are allies in the material and psychological war against secular,
modern Arab countries. It is a war which the United States has been fighting on behalf of
Riyadh and Tel Aviv for decades ."
The basic question – which remains unaddressed in the response – is very
simply:
What was the Israeli leadership trying to do by launching a combined airborne and
naval attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War in 1967?
You mention the Lavon affair in 1954. This scandal arose out of an attempted Israeli
false-flag operation in Egypt that went spectacularly wrong.
The Suez Crisis in 1956 was another major disaster for Israel, the UK and France.
This experience will have informed Israeli government thinking in 1967.
Moreover, as noted in the original post, radar technology at the time, as well simple
visual identification of the attacking jet fighters and vessels precluded even a remote
possibility of dressing up the attack as having been perpetrated by Egypt.
Further, the U.S. had plenty of intelligence assets in both Egypt and Israel to find out
what actually happened to the USS Liberty within hours. An operation of this magnitude
involves at a minimum hundreds of people across different countries and cannot be kept
completely secret.
The Lavon affair was intended to involve small anonymous attacks against random civilian
targets, but failed to achieve this relatively modest objective.
Are we now to believe that the Israelis thought they could pull off a massive combined
air-sea attack against a United States vessel on the high seas (where radar and visual
observation is unobstructed) and blame it on Egypt? The very idea is insane.
So why did Israel resort to this desperate gamble?
Barring a collective bout of insanity throughout Israel's civilian and military
leadership, the most likely explanation is that the USS Liberty itself was seen as a major
and indeed mortal threat to Israel, to such an extent that the Israeli leadership decided to
risk a major rift with the U.S. to eliminate the threat.
How would the USS Liberty itself be a threat? Most likely by compiling high-grade military
intelligence and passing it to Egypt and the other Arab nations. This could have occurred
either pursuant to official directives from the top of the U.S. hierarchy, or perhaps because
the local command went rogue.
as we all know, the attack on the USS Liberty was intended as a false flag attack to be
blamed on Egypt in order to get America to fight Israel's wars for them
This suggestion at least makes logical sense.
However, the idea that Israel's entire senior leadership seriously thought they could pin
a combined air/sea attack in the middle of the Red Sea on Egypt is quite outlandish,
as explained in a separate post above. Given the circumstances, the Israelis must have KNOWN
100% that the attack would be traced back to them within hours at the latest.
In fact, nobody seems to suggest that the U.S. was ACTUALLY DECEIVED for even a split
second about who launched the attack.
Reading between the lines of contemporary and later accounts, it appears that Israel took
IMMEDIATE action to mitigate the fall-out in DC. This again is inconsistent with trying to
pin it on Egypt.
(1) I said that "reading between the lines," one might conclude that Israel IMMEDIATELY
set about containing the fall-out in Washington. Of course, such efforts (if they indeed took
place) would be hugely embarrassing to Israel and would be kept top secret even years
later.
(2) You have still not given us any real theory of WHY Israel would launch a combined
air/sea attack on the USS Liberty.
The idea that Israel was at this precise moment in the middle of the Six Day War
trying to pin the blame on Egypt does not hold water as explained in several posts above.
CONCLUSION: The best working theory at present is that the USS Liberty was providing
high-grade intelligence to the Arab countries fighting Israel in the Six Day War.
If you have a better explanation consistent with the known facts, including the use of
radar by the USS Liberty and airborne units in the area please share it here.
QUESTION: What is known about LBJ's stated and actual positions vis-a-vis Israel, Egypt,
other Arab countries? Post-retirement contacts by LBJ and his family?
as compared to an artificial state that has been squeezing the native population and
importing the (allegedly) ethnically-proper economic migrants?
You seem have peculiar explanations to why such formerly functioning states as Iraq, Libya,
and Syria should better cease to exist (along with the USSLiberty staff). According to your
logic, the ongoing Syrian slaughter is a good deed because it allows for weeding out the
excess of population there. The weeding out also works as a rationale for grabbing the Syrian
natural resources by the "most moral" apartheid state.
And please don't try at lecturing the readers on Israel's virtues vs the US perfidy,
considering the history of betrayal of the US by Israel-firsters. Pollard and more, the
despicable PNAC crowd and the ziocons' obnoxious and stupid global games against
ethnically-wrong humanity. At the head of the current mess is the Israel-occupied Congress,
"conditioned" for guiding the hapless host in a desired direction.
Given the circumstances, the Israelis must have KNOWN 100% that the attack would be
traced back to them within hours at the latest.
then why did they machine gun the lifeboats, eh?
that in itself is a war crime you know, and the ONLY reason they would have done it is to
sink the ship with ALL hands. Thereby leaving no survivors to expose the treachery.
and they had the Johnson regime and traitor McNamara on board with their cowardly,
murderous treason.
What was the U.S. Liberty doing in the Red Sea in 1967?
As a U.S. citizen, I would quite like to know, even at this late stage, what our military
forces were doing far from Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps the answer gives a hint as to what is
happening now.
Since you seem obsessed about the "sovereignty" of former Ottoman territories, please also
explain how exactly the USS Liberty's presence was supposed to assist the "sovereignty" of
Cis-Jordan (i.e. the current sovereign state of Israel).
if you (and Annamaria) don't mind, I'll address this..
What was the U.S. Liberty doing in the Red Sea in 1967?
there was a war going on between a US ally and a nation of strategic importance to the US-
Israel and Egypt. The USS Liberty was a NSA intelligence ship. It was there to monitor what
was going on. Duh.
explain how exactly the USS Liberty's presence was supposed to assist the "sovereignty"
of Cis-Jordan (i.e. the current sovereign state of Israel).
unless you an admiral in the US Navy at the time, no one knows for sure. But a lot of
people have speculated that the USS Liberty was sent by the Johnson regime to get sunk by
Israel and be used as a false flag to take America into war against Egypt.
We already know for a fact that jets were scrambled to assist the USS Liberty and were
called back and ordered not to assist by Johnson through Secretary of State McNamara. And not
once, but twice.
So obviously Johnson wanted her sunk. Whether or not the ship was sent there for that
purpose, or whether Johnson simply decided to let the Israelis sink her once he heard about
it, we'll likely never know.
"As Israel controls US Middle East policy, Israel uses its control to have Washington
eliminate obstacles to Israel's expansion. So far Israel has achieved the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein's government and chaos in Iraq, Washington's war on Syria, and Washington's
demonization of Iran in the hope that sufficient demonization will justify war."
So obviously Johnson wanted her sunk. Whether or not the ship was sent there for that
purpose, or whether Johnson simply decided to let the Israelis sink her once he heard about
it, we'll likely never know.
This interpretation is at least internally consistent. It is also consistent with my
earlier observation that nobody could seriously claim that the U.S. was ACTUALLY DECEIVED for
even a split second about who launched the attack.
Putting the known factors together, we are left with two viable hypotheses as to the
Israelis' reason for sinking the USS Liberty:
(1) To eliminate a mortal threat to Israel's national security in a time of war, e.g.
because the USS Liberty was feeding intelligence information to Egypt and the Arabs.
(2) As an intentional false flag operation, with express (or at least hinted) support
from the Pentagon for the purpose of publicly "justifying" a U.S. war against Egypt.
This would necessarily mean that the sailors and staff on the USS Liberty were
intentionally betrayed and sacrificed by Johnson and McNamara.
In either case, the Israeli leadership would have been painfully aware that it could NOT
mislead the U.S. as to its authorship of the attack, whatever the Pentagon or Israel might
later say in public later.
"Jet aircrafts came in firing and strafing our ship," he said. "Within minutes they took
out hundreds of antennae and all of our .450-caliber machine guns. We were
defenseless."
But all those aboard were not without hope. Utilizing true American ingenuity and never
giving up their fighting spirit, Tourney described a miraculous effort.
"About half-an-hour into the attack," he said, "one of our men stretched a long wire so
that we could transmit a message to the Sixth Fleet: 'Under Attack by Unmarked Fighters.
Send Help.' A number of ships received this SOS, and soon Capt. Joseph Tully of the USS
Saratoga ordered planes to rescue us."
However, in an act that goes well beyond betrayal into the realm of full-fledged
treason, Tourney laid out how Liberty became a ship without a country.
"Defense Secretary Robert McNamara contacted the Saratoga and recalled the fighters,
telling them not to aid our ship," he said. "But, showing true courage, Tully re-launched
the jets, without authorization . . . After the second set of fighter jets were dispatched,
the president of the United States -- Lyndon Johnson -- personally recalled them," said
Tourney.
Tourney says Johnson told Tully: "I don't give a [expletive] if that ship goes to the
bottom and every sailor is lost. We will not embarrass our ally, Israel."
A day or two later as Liberty limped toward a port in Malta, Adm. Isaac Kidd assembled
the survivors in small groups and, after removing his stars, demanded to know what
occurred.
After learning the truth, a red-faced Kidd pinned his stars back on his uniform and
said, "If any of you ever repeat a word, I'll make sure you end up in the penitentiary, or
worse," Tourney said.
English traditions achieved unrivaled primacy due to an innate sense of tolerance,
restraint, privacy and secularism
It may have escaped you that my earlier post referred to the time of the American
Revolution, and in particular to sophisticated British traditions and conventions as they
were perceived by the educated class in the colonies.
The sad decline of Britain in the modern era, and its more colorful history in earlier
ages, are neither here nor there for these purposes.
says:
May 21, 2017 at 2:30 am GMT 200 Words While the "progressives" badmouth bad-bad russkies
for "destroying our democracy," an obscene spectacle of persecution of the most important
whistleblower of our times continues.
"Getting Assange: the Untold Story," by JOHN PILGER
"Hillary Clinton, the destroyer of Libya and, as WikiLeaks revealed last year, the secret
supporter and personal beneficiary of forces underwriting ISIS, proposed, "Can't we just drone
this guy." According to Australian diplomatic cables, Washington's bid to get Assange is
"unprecedented in scale and nature." In Alexandria, Virginia, a secret grand jury has sought
for almost seven years to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted. Assange's
ability to defend himself in such a Kafkaesque world has been severely limited by the US
declaring his case a state secret. In 2015, a federal court in Washington blocked the release
of all information about the "national security" investigation against WikiLeaks, because it
was "active and ongoing" and would harm the "pending prosecution" of Assange. The judge,
Barbara J. Rothstein, said it was necessary to show "appropriate deference to the executive in
matters of national security." This is a kangaroo court."
The Saker publishes some interesting news re the MH17 tragedy:
"SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] orders to destroy all evidence of the conducted special
operation MH17″
http://thesaker.is/sbu-orders-to-destroy-all-evidence-of-the-conducted-special-operation-mh17/
by Scott Humor: " If you want to know my opinion that hasn't changed since 2014. The Boeing
flight MH17 was shot down by the Ukrainian air force fighter jets, but not necessarily
piloted by Ukrainian pilots. It was a CIA and NATO operation to frame Russia. Most likely the
Dutch government was a part of this operation. Now, they are trying to hang all the dogs on
Waltzman -Poroshenko, because neither the Dutch monarchs, nor the CIA would fancy to be
implicated in this crime."
[Hayden] is another legacy of George W. Bush, who appointed this buffoon to the CIA and
the NSA.
Actually, Hayden was initially a Bill Clinton appointee (in 1999), before his
reappointment by Bush.
Further, he was not merely appointed, but appointed out of order. Hayden was the second
consecutive USAF DIRNSA.
Here is
the list of DIRNSA's (I have attempted to show some sort of pattern in the
appointments):
USA (Canine), USAF (Samford), USN (Frost),
USAF (Blake), USA (Carter), USN (Gayler),
USAF (Phillips), USAF (Allen (Phillips only served 2 years before he got kicked upstairs
to run the USAF Systems Command)), USN (Inman),
USAF (Faurer), USA (Odom),
USN (Studeman), USN (McConnell),
USAF (Minihan), USAF (Hayden),
USA (Alexander), USN (Rogers), USA (Nakasone).
So the question is: Why did Clinton pick Hayden in 1999, rather than an Army
general?
I read a profile of Hayden in WaPo where he was depicted as doing the cooking in
the family.
Maybe that endeared him to the Clinton administration decision-makers.
And, if I recall correctly, in his memoir Playing to the Edge , he writes of his work to advance the careers of
women.
No doubt a real plus in some administrations.
As a point of information, WaPo has a pretty extensive profile of Hayden (but not
the one I remember) here:
"Test of Strength"
by Vernon Loeb (who IMO was a quite good reporter on the IC), WaPo , 2001-07-29 (i.e, before 9/11)
It goes into some detail on why and how Hayden transformed the NSA.
BTW, back in the 1970s NSA was divided into groups, A, B, G, S, R, T, ....
Some were mission-specific, some were function-specific.
Somewhat of a matrix organization.
Evidently that organization was deemed inadequate.
Let me bring up another issue here:
Compartmentation versus information-sharing.
In those days compartmentation was quite strict.
People walked around with metal tags attached to their lanyards,
showing which compartments they had been read into,
and thus which parts of the building they could enter.
The 9/11 report faulted such compartmentalization, calling it "stovepipes".
So now we Snowden, say, having access to a vast area of information.
I wonder if it was a bad decision to break down the compartments,
and if the old days of compartmentation should be restored.
Among the array of nasty USAF intelligence generals I dealt with as an SES in DIA I don't
remember Haydon at all. They tended to be filled with animus against the Army and
determined to take over all joint organizations. Maybe he cooked at backyard parties?
Hayden transformed the NSA when he was there. He moved it from just sucking signals out
of the air to vacuuming up all manner of digital information. It was a needed and
successful transformation. Of course it also led to the excessive collection of US
communications.
Right. Just ask Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis and Thomas Drake about how Hayden
"transformed" the NSA. He's a corrupt bastard in my book more keen on playing politics
than doing the right thing.
"... In my article for Consortium News I discussed at length the size of the British footprint in the scandal, and the outsized role in it of various British or British connected individuals such as the ex British spy Christopher Steele who compiled the Trump Dossier, the former chief of Britain's NSA equivalent GCHQ Robert Hannigan, the former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, and the Cambridge based US academic Stefan Halper. ..."
"... I would add that there are now rumours that Professor Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious London based Maltese Professor who also had a big role in the Russiagate affair, may also have had connections to British intelligence. ..."
"... As this article in Zerohedge says, all roads in Russiagate lead to London, not, be it noted, Moscow. ..."
Britain alarmed as John Bolton travels to Moscow to prepare summit...
Days after I discussed rumours of an imminent
Trump-Putin summit , seeming confirmation that such a summit is indeed in the works has been provided with the Kremlin's confirmation
that President Trump's National Security Adviser John Bolton is travelling to Moscow next week apparently to discuss preparations
for the summit.
As far as we know, such a visit is going to take place. This is all we can say for now.
Further suggestions that some sort of easing of tensions between Washington and Moscow may be in the works has been provided by
confirmation that a group of US Republican Senators will shortly be visiting Moscow.
It seems that a combination of the collapse in the credibility of the Russiagate collusion allegations – which I suspect no Republican
member of the House or Senate any longer believes – unease in the US at Russia's breakthrough in hypersonic weapons technology (recently
discussed by Alex Christoforou and myself in this video
), and the failure of the recent sanctions the US Treasury announced against Rusal, has concentrated minds in Washington, and is
giving President Trump the political space he needs to push for the easing of tensions with Russia which he is known to have long
favoured.
One important European capital cannot conceal its dismay.
In a recent article for Consortium News I discussed the
obsessive
quality of the British establishment's paranoia about Russia , and not surprisingly in light of it an article has appeared today
in The Times of London which made clear the British government's alarm as the prospect of a Trump-Putin summit looms.
As is often the way with articles in The Times of London, this article has now been "updated" beyond recognition. However it still
contains comments like these
Mr Trump called for Russia to be readmitted to the G8 this month, wrecking Mrs May's efforts to further isolate Mr Putin after
the Salisbury poisonings. Mr Trump then linked US funding of Nato to the trade dispute with the EU, singling out Germany for special
criticism.
The prospect of a meeting between Mr Trump and Mr Putin appalls British officials. "It's unclear if this meeting is after or
before Nato and the UK visit," a Whitehall official said. "Obviously after would be better for us. It adds another dynamic to
an already colourful week." .
A senior western diplomatic source said that a Trump-Putin meeting before the Nato summit would cause "dismay and alarm", adding:
"It would be a highly negative thing to do."
Nato is due to discuss an escalation of measures to deter Russian aggression. "Everyone is perturbed by what is going on and
is fearing for the future of the alliance," a Whitehall source said.
I will here express my view that the Russiagate scandal was at least in part an attempt by some people in Britain to prevent a
rapprochement between the US and Russia once it became clear that achieving such a rapprochement was a policy priority for Donald
Trump.
In my
article
for Consortium News I discussed at length the size of the British footprint in the scandal, and the outsized role in it of various
British or British connected individuals such as the ex British spy Christopher Steele who compiled the Trump Dossier, the former
chief of Britain's NSA equivalent GCHQ Robert Hannigan, the former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, and the Cambridge based US academic
Stefan Halper.
I would add that there are now rumours that Professor Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious London based Maltese Professor who also
had a big role in the Russiagate affair, may also have had
connections to British intelligence.
A summit meeting between the US and Russian Presidents inaugurated an improvement in relations between the US and Russia is exactly
the opposite outcome which some people in London want.
Bible clutchers. Last time I looked AIPAC in the US consisted of roughly half Israeli's or
Jews and half protestant evangelicals. A few years back I read the stats on the religion of
US voters by percentage. I think that showed close to 25% of US voters evangelicals.
While looking for those stats to provide a link, I ran onto
this WP article on the Trump election and ecumenicals. According to the article, 20% of
US voters are evangelicals. That is a huge zionist voting block and the majority voted for
Trump.
"... the 'news' media don't care about that evil, and that falsehood, and that dangerousness -- they do it anyway, and none of them attacks the others for perpetrating this vicious war-mongering lie, that lying provocation to yet more and worse war than already exists there. ..."
"... accepted the request from Syria's Government, for assistance in protecting Syria's Government, ..."
Both President Trump and former President Obama are commonly said in America's 'news' media
to be or to have been "ceding Syria to Russia" or "ceding Syria to Russia and Iran," or similar
allegations. They imply that 'we' own (or have some right to control) Syria. That's not only a
lie; it is a very evil and harmful one, dangerously goading the US President to go even more
against Russia (and Iran) (and, of course, against Syria ) than has yet been done --
but the 'news' media don't care about that evil, and that falsehood, and that dangerousness --
they do it anyway, and none of them attacks the others for perpetrating this vicious
war-mongering lie, that lying provocation to yet more and worse war than already exists there.
And the fact that none is exposing the fraudulence of the others on this important matter, is a
yet-bigger additional scandal, beyond and amplifying the media's common lying itself. Because
they all function here like a mob, goading to more and worse invasions, and doing it on the the
basis of dangerous lies -- that America, and not the Syrians themselves, own Syria.
These lies simply assume that America (probably referring to the US Government, but
whatever) somehow "has" or else "had" Syria (so that America can now 'cede' it, to anyone); and
this assumption (that the US somehow owns Syria) is not only an imperialistic one
(which is bad, and wrong, in itself), but it reduces to nothingness the rights (in the minds of
the American public) of the Syrian people, to control their own land . That lie is
what America's 'news'media won't expose, but instead they all cooperate with it, when they're
not actually participating, themselves, in spreading these lies.
What they are doing is also to slur Russia, and to slur Iran, for having accepted the
request from Syria's Government, for assistance in protecting Syria's Government, against
the tens of thousands of jihadists who had been recruited throughout the world by the
Saudi-American alliance, to overthrow and replace Syria's Government, to replace it with one
that would be appointed by the Saud family ('America's ally'), the fundamentalist-Sunni royal
family who (as the absolute monarchy there) do actually own Saudi Arabia -- a monarchical
dictatorship, which the US Government calls an 'ally'.
The evilness of this imperialistic assumption, which is being constantly spread by the
US-and-allied 'news'media, is as bad as is its falseness, because "America" (however one wishes
to use that term) never had, never possessed, any right whatsoever to control Syria. Of course,
neither does Russia possess such a right, nor does Iran, but neither Russia nor Iran is
asserting any such right; both instead are there to protect Syria's national
sovereignty, against the invaders (including the US, and the Sauds' regime). But the
US-and-allied 'news'media don't present it that way -- the honest way -- not at all. Such
truths are instead suppressed.
I was immediately struck by this false and evil assumption that the US owns Syria, when
reading the June 15th issue of The Week magazine. It contained, under its "Best
Columns" section, a piece by Matthew Continetti ( "Obama Too Good for
America" ), which says, among other falsehoods, "Obama was wrong about a lot of other
things, too, like ceding Syria to Russia." That phrase, "ceding Syria to Russia" rose straight
out from the page to me as being remarkable, stunning, and not only because it suggests that
America owns that sovereign nation, Syria. I was especially struck by it because the CIA has
several times attempted Syrian coups and once did briefly, in 1949, overthrow and replace
Syria's democratically elected President. But is that really something which today's America's
'news'media should encourage the American public to be demanding today's American
politicians to be demanding from today's American President? How bizarre, even evil, an idea is
that? But it is so normal that it's a fair indication of how evil and untrustworthy today's
American 'news'media actually are. I just hadn't noticed it before.
Publishing such a false and evil idea, without any accompanying commentary that truthfully
presents its context and that doesn't simply let the false and evil allegation stand
unchallenged -- that instead lets it be unchallenged both factually and morally -- is not
acceptable either factually or morally, but then I checked and found that it's the almost
universal norm, in today's US 'news'media. For examples:
On 17 April 2018, CBS News headlined
"Lindsey Graham 'unnerved' after Syria briefing: 'Everything in that briefing made me more
worried'" and presented that US Senator saying, "It seems to me we are willing to give
Syria to Assad, Russia, and Iran." He was criticizing President Trump as being "all tweet and
no action." He wanted more war, and more threat of war. But when President Obama had repeatedly
denied in public that only the Syrian people should have any say-so over whom Syria's
leaders ought to be, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon repeatedly contradicted the US
President's viewpoint on this, and he said,
"The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people." If the American people have
become so dismissive of international law as this, then is it because the US 'news'media start
with the ridiculously false presumption that "America" (whatever that refers to) is the arbiter
of international law, and therefore has the right to dictate to the entire world what that law
is, and what it means? Is America, as being the dictator over the whole planet, supposed to be
something that Americans' tax-dollars ought to be funding -- that objective: global
dictatorship? How does that viewpoint differ, then, from perpetual war for perpetual 'peace' --
a dictum that's enormously profitable for America's big 'Defense' contractors, such as Lockheed
Martin, but that impoverishes the general public, both in America, and especially in the
countries (such as Syria) where 'our' Government drops bombs in order to enforce its own will
and demand, that: "Assad must go!"
In fact, as any journalist who writes or speaks about the Syrian situation and who isn't a
complete ignoramus knows, Bashar al-Assad would easily win any free and fair Presidential
election in Syria, against any contender. His public support, as shown not only in
the 2014 Syrian Presidential election , but also in the many
Western-sponsored opinion-polls in Syria (since the CIA is always eager to find potential
candidates to support against him), show this.
On 17 December 2016, Eric Chenoweth, a typical neocon Democratic Party hack, headlined
"Let Hamilton Speak: Recapturing American Democracy" , and he wrote: "Trump's statements
and appointments make clear he intends to tilt American policy to serve Russian interests:
ceding Syria to Russia by ending support to pro-Western rebels; possibly lifting economic
sanctions and recognizing the annexation of Crimea; proposing an alliance with Russia in the
war on terror while remaining uncommitted to the defense of NATO allies, in particular the
Baltic countries vulnerable to Russian aggression. Restoring American Democracy When they meet
on December 19, Republican Electors who reflect on their constitutional duty should not then
affirm Trump's election." Those
"pro-Western rebels" in Syria were actually led by Al Qaeda's Syrian branch. Without them, the
US regime wouldn't have had any "boots on the ground" forces to speak of there. In fact,
the US regime has
actually been fronting for the Saud family to take over control of Syria if and when Syria's
Government falls. The Saud family
even selected the people who in the U.N. peace talks on Syria represent 'the rebels' -- the
Sauds, who have been Syria's enemy ever since 1950, selected 'Syria's opposition', who were now
seeking to take over Syria if and when 'America's moderate rebels' succeed. Both Al Qaeda and
ISIS are actually fundamentalist-Sunnis, like the Saud family are, and Assad's Government is
resolutely non-sectarian. Assad himself is a non-Islamist Alawite Shiite secularist, which
virtually all fundamentalist Sunnis (such as the Sauds are) are taught to despise and to hate
-- especially because he's Shiite. The US regime knows that neither it, which is considered
Christian, nor Israel, which is theocratically Jewish, could practically succeed at imposing
rule in Syria, but that maybe the Sauds could -- so, they are the actual leaders of the
'pro-Western' forces, seeking to replace Syria's secularist Government. Overthrowing Syria's
Government would be their victory. It would be the Saud
family's victory. But this fact is kept a secret from the American public, by the US
'news'media.
Already by late September of 2015, even prior to Russia's having been requested by President
Assad to enter the war in order to speed up the defeat of what Washington still calls 'the
rebels', it was clear that Washington (actually Riyadh) wasn't going to take over Syria; and
Americans were -- and are -- being taught by the 'news'media, that this was because Obama was
'weak' and didn't care enough about 'human rights' in Syria, and about 'democracy' in Syria.
So, on 28 September 2015, Matt Purple at the libertarian
"Rare Politics" site, headlined
"Pentagon admits that the Syrian rebels it trained handed over weapons to al Qaeda" , and
he wrote "Neoconservatives wail that President Obama is ceding Syria to Russia -- but the
reason the Russians are taking the lead is precisely because America has sidelined itself." But
the US regime hadn't at all "sidelined itself"; it continued -- and it continues to this day --
its invasion and occupation of that land. Trump's
policy on Syria is basically a continuation of Obama's -- and it's not at all "ceding Syria to Russia," or "ceding Syria to Russia and
Iran."
Because of America's 'news'media, it still isn't "ceding Syria to the Syrians" -- as Ban
ki-Moon and international law would. That wouldn't be profitable for Lockheed Martin etc.
(whose biggest customers other than the US Government are the Sauds, and
Trump alone sold $400 billion of US weapons to them ); so, it's not done.
Syria's sovereignty is utterly denied by the US regime, but if the US regime were to
succeed, the big winners would actually be the Saud family.
Do the American people have sovereignty, over 'their' ( our ) Government? US
'news'media effectively ban that question. Perhaps what controls the US Government is
the
Saudi-Israeli alliance: the Sauds have the money, and the Israelis have the lobbyists. Of
course, the US 'news'media are obsessed whether Russia controls the US Government.
That diversionary tactic is extremely profitable to companies such as General Dynamics, and
America's other weapons-manufacturers, which thrive on wars -- especially by selling to the
Sauds, and to their allies (and, obviously, not at all to Russia).
When I saw that Shawn Walker Tweet, and the mostly brilliant take-down responses, I hoped b
would mention it. I can think of no one better suited to address this particularly putrid
propaganda. Bravo! And to the (almost) universally excellent barfly commentariat.
BBC created a whole genre of Russian World Cup scare mongering. One they did was on the
deadly threat of "Russian Football Hooligans." RT did an excellent 4 minute job of combining
journalism with humor to expose that bit of 100% Fake News.
The Media is a complete weapon for propaganda. The "writers" are propagandists. There never
is a report on Russia from the Western media that does not vilify or demonize Russia or
Russians in some way.
The World Cup is experienced by hundreds of thousands of tourists in Russia. They are
going to be the truth-tellers.
The event, like Sochi Winter Olympics will stand for itself. It will be splendid.
And the lies will die.
Never expect the truth from the Media.
Always expect the Russian people to be extraordinary. They have demonstrated it for a
century.
The problem the MSMs have is that the World Cup so far has been a success.
Notable quotes:
"... Also just like the Trump bizzo, when his employers dipped out, Steele's unsubstantiated gossip & slander having done nothing useful, Steele leaked his report to the feds. ..."
"... The claims he makes are utterly fantastic ( WARNING the link is to a graun 'long read' and is brimming with tedious & tendentious bulldust) the most laughable being that 'Putin' - always Putin never any of the many thousands of astute bureaucrats who work in the Russian government, stole a bunch of valuable old paintings from the Hermitage and gave them to the blokes on the World Cup venue committee as a bribe. The feds who went through these poor old buggers' lives with a fine tooth comb found nothing to substantiate that libel. ..."
"... The worst thing about these slanders and the harassment of a few old geezers who prefer sport as a mechanism for nations to interact than war, is that these old fellas were all (well just about all) socialists who yeah probably did allow a coupla mill to fall into their wallets, but who were dedicated to their sport remaining egalitarian. They invested billions into developing their sport all over the world especially in Africa, Latin America and the Mid-East where a shortage of venues, kit and professional coaches used to really hold those nations back. ..."
"... The 'clean sweep' of FIFA has opened the door to neolibs who are talking about corporatising the World Cup like the Olympics, then the billions will all go to corporations and their shareholders ..."
"... It is stuff like this about Skirpal's boss Steele, which really opens up the field of suspects on the 'poisoning'. I have no doubt Skirpal would have been the alleged 'proof' for this farrago of tosh. Russia and Qatar got their world cup final, but england and amerika (who were the finalists against Qatar for hosting in 2022) didn't, surely it is the latter two who are more likely to have a grudge against old Sergei. ..."
"... The Western corporate media is a sorry spectacle to behold. The Baltic and the Scandinavian branches are the most pathetic. Combining native stupidity with pig-headed tenacity to hold on to the past. ..."
And another thing - the other day I came a cross an interesting tidbit, I would include a
link if I can remember where I saw it, it may in fact have even been the graun. It goes like
this:
A few years back the FBI raided the FIFA HQ in Switzerland eventually arresting and charging
many FIFA commissioners alleging they were taking backhanders and at the time I, along with
many other sort of assumed that the amerikans shoving their stickbeaks into an organisation
which was none of their damn business was down to an announcement from FIFA president Blatter
that if the Israeli army and police didn't cease harassing the Palestinian team preventing
players from getting to international games by holding the players up at checkpoints, sometimes
for days, FIFA would have no choice but to penalise the Israeli football team who had already
been granted special dispensation by FIFA to play in the Euro conference rather than the ME one
that their geography should have demanded.
Nuttytahoo did his usual 'antisemite' victim whine so it was a reasonable assumption to think
the fed raid the next week was connected.
It may have been the issue which caused the amerikan sheet sniffers to move, but the actual
investigation was caused by something completely different. Two nations competed for the 2018 world cup hosting rights. One was Russia and the second one
was . . .drumroll. . . England! Yep the perfidious poms had put in their bid and one of the tools in their 'kit' was none other
than the old fibber Christopher Steele, who just as with the Trump investigation, did his
'inquiry' by remote control as he is persona non grata in Russia.
Also just like the Trump bizzo, when his employers dipped out, Steele's unsubstantiated gossip
& slander having done nothing useful, Steele leaked his report to the feds.
The claims he makes
are utterly fantastic ( WARNING the link is to a graun 'long read' and is brimming with
tedious & tendentious bulldust) the most laughable being that 'Putin' - always Putin never
any of the many thousands of astute bureaucrats who work in the Russian government, stole a
bunch of valuable old paintings from the Hermitage and gave them to the blokes on the World Cup
venue committee as a bribe. The feds who went through these poor old buggers' lives with a fine
tooth comb found nothing to substantiate that libel.
The other big lie was that while the Russian president was in Qatar finalising the joint gas
pipeline deal he cut another deal of the 'you vote for us we'll vote for you' as world cup host
in 2018 and 2022 respectively. Yeah that sounds just like President Putin tossing Russia's
economic future to the side while he organised a few soccer games - not.
The worst thing about these slanders and the harassment of a few old geezers who prefer
sport as a mechanism for nations to interact than war, is that these old fellas were all (well
just about all) socialists who yeah probably did allow a coupla mill to fall into their
wallets, but who were dedicated to their sport remaining egalitarian. They invested billions
into developing their sport all over the world especially in Africa, Latin America and the
Mid-East where a shortage of venues, kit and professional coaches used to really hold those
nations back.
The 'clean sweep' of FIFA has opened the door to neolibs who are talking about corporatising
the World Cup like the Olympics, then the billions will all go to corporations and their
shareholders.
No one should begrudge these guys the few quid they grabbed, I know puritans hate it but in
a truly tolerant society we should expect that a few otherwise dedicated types will always
'tickle the peter'. I used to get pissed about it in the union movement but the amounts are
usually small compared to turn-over and I'd rather have a dodgy member of the proletariat who
grabs a little in a position of power than a slimy neolib forever manouvering to flog the
entire kit & kaboodle off to a bunch of anonymous 'financiers'.
It is stuff like this about Skirpal's boss Steele, which really opens up the field of
suspects on the 'poisoning'. I have no doubt Skirpal would have been the alleged 'proof' for
this farrago of tosh. Russia and Qatar got their world cup final, but england and amerika (who
were the finalists against Qatar for hosting in 2022) didn't, surely it is the latter two who
are more likely to have a grudge against old Sergei.
The UK hates the idea that the EU that they left would turn to Russia for friendship. Their
propaganda goes along with the USA that shares this apprehension. Now that Trump has
humiliated the EU, the EU is turning toward Russia despite the UK...
The Western corporate media is a sorry spectacle to behold. The Baltic and the Scandinavian
branches are the most pathetic. Combining native stupidity with pig-headed tenacity to hold
on to the past.
"... The attributions of attacks to countries are very shaky. Throw in a couple of Cyrillic letters and voilà, you have associated a certain IP address or a certain piece of code with Russia. Somehow these simpleton arguments are uncritically accepted as proofs by computer security professionals the world over, who, of all people, really should know better. It's as if all the supposedly smart cryptographers and programmers are completely oblivious to the concept of manipulation. ..."
Could someone remind me the amount of country's America have invaded since the last world war
30 - 40 , I here'd. Compared to Russia 5-8 ? Russia is in Syria by invitation to deal with
rebels/terrorist's .America is now threatening both. Despite being there to attempt a regime
change. Just who do they think they are ? The sooner they are stopped the better and the
easier.
Russia intervened nowhere; the USSR intervened in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In 1993,
Yeltsin's cabal intervened in Russia to preserve Bush's and Clinton's New World Order. USSR
was invited into Afghanistan; Outlaw US Empire wasn't. An incomplete list from William Blum's
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II . A graphic map based on Blum's
book.
Yesterday, Putin met with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Unfortunately, the Kremlin's recap of
the meeting's currently incomplete, but what is recorded is instructive:
"Of course, we look at the Russian Federation as a founder of the United Nations and as a
permanent member of the Security Council, but I would say that at the present moment we look
at the Russian Federation as an indispensable element of the creation of a new multipolar
world.
"To be entirely frank, these are not easy times for multilateralism and not easy times for
the UN. And I think that after the Cold War and after a short period of unipolar world we are
still struggling to find a way to have a structured, multipolar world with multilateral
governmental institutions that can work. And this is something that worries me a lot and is
something in which, I believe, the Russian Federation has a unique role to play."
Considering many think Guterres just an agent for the Outlaw US Empire, maybe his cited
words will cause a reassessment. I'd like to know what followed. Apparently there was some
discussion about Korea and the
economic initiatives being openly discussed since RoK President Moon will arrive in
Russia tomorrow.
Lavrov met with Guterres today, and his
opening remarks shine a bit more light on what was discussed:
"As emphasised by President Putin, we have invariably supported, support, and will
continue to support the UN, this unique universal organisation. We think highly of your
intention, Mr Secretary-General, to raise the profile of the United Nations in world affairs,
particularly in settling regional conflicts. As you noted yourself at the meeting in the
Kremlin yesterday, this is largely dependent on the general state of the international system
as a whole and the UN member states' readiness to act collectively, jointly, rather than
unilaterally, and to pursue the goals enshrined in the UN Charter rather than
self-centred,[sic] immediate aims.
"We note that you have consistently advocated the pooling of efforts by major players to
deal with world problems. This is the logic of the UN Charter, specifically its clauses on
the creation and powers of the UN Security Council. I hope that based on the values we share
we will be able to successfully continue cooperation in the interests of solving
international problems."
Lots of emphasis on the absolute necessity of making the UN Charter whole again and not
allowing any one nation to make a mockery of it by pursuing its "self-centered, immediate
aims."
Ben @ 14
Thanks Ben. Yep that's what l thought reality would look like, that's my sanity safe for a
while longer. Remember we are not alone!
Zanon @ 12
That is a perfect example of 'fake news' we can spot it here ! Or are we here now msm!
Pantaraxia @ 20
Wow that doubles what I was already shocked about ! And then of course there's the comercal
operations destablising country's using greed as a weapon. Plus the banks, I'm sure South
Africa would have been a real success if they'd kept the banking curuption out. Time for
immoral capitalism to fall.
Also don't you just hate victim blaming.There that's me done. Grrr
@b: I know you're just one man and can't do everything, but it would be wonderful if you
could cover the history of hacking accusations against Russia. No one lays out a sequence of
events better than you.
Just yesterday, another accusation has been leveled against Russia by the head of
Germany's BfV intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maassen:
German intelligence sees Russia behind hack of energy firms - media report (Reuters).
It's a serious accusation, and one would expect a serious proof. However, no proof has been
given except that "it fits the Russian modus operandi". Also, the fact that the alleged
attack has been named "Berserk Bear" by some unknown Western analyst. Apparently, that's
enough proof by today's standards.
There is a critical lack of independent thinking and skepticism in the international
computer security circles nowadays. The attributions of attacks to countries are very
shaky. Throw in a couple of Cyrillic letters and voilà, you have associated a certain
IP address or a certain piece of code with Russia. Somehow these simpleton arguments are
uncritically accepted as proofs by computer security professionals the world over, who, of
all people, really should know better. It's as if all the supposedly smart cryptographers and
programmers are completely oblivious to the concept of manipulation.
I'm glad you linked to C J Hopkins. I am impressed with his wit, intelligence and writing
style. He got booted off Counterpunch as I understand and is now published by the Unz Review,
a rather strange but interesting site that picks up talented writers and thinkers from the
left and from the right and appears to pay them.
I say strange because, judging by the
comments, the alt-right appear to imagine that like zero hedge it is their forum and attack
perfectly good articles because they do not fit in with their ideological mindset.
There is a
sort of muddiness in the identity of the site (unlike MOA), but I am pleased that people like
C J Hopkins may get something for their brilliant efforts. Diana Johnstone, someone I have
huge regard for, is another who appears on Unz.
"... For Mattis to lament during a speech at a naval college last week that America's moral authority is being eroded by Putin is a symptom of the delusional official thinking infesting Washington. ..."
"... Mattis told his audience: "Putin aims to diminish the appeal of the western democratic model and attempts to undermine America's moral authority." He added that the Russian leader's "actions are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals." ..."
"... It is classic "in denial" ..."
"... "What a powerful delusion Mattis and Western leaders like him are encumbered with," ..."
"... "The US undercuts and compromises its own avowed beliefs and ideals because it has lost any moral integrity that it might have feasibly pretended to have due to decades of its own criminal foreign conduct." ..."
"... "America's so-called moral authority is the free pass it gives itself to topple democracy in Ukraine, replacing it with neo-Nazis; it has turned economically prosperous Libya into a wasteland, after murdering its leader Muammar Gaddafi; it funds and openly sponsors the MKO terror group in Iran for regime change in Tehran; and it is neck deep in fueling the Saudi coalition's genocidal war in Yemen." ..."
"... Despite this litany of criminality committed by the US with the acquiescence of European allies, Washington, says Martin, "preaches a bizarre doctrine of 'exceptionalism' and somehow arrogates a moral right to dominate the world. This is the fruit of the diseased minds of sociopaths." ..."
Jun 20, 2018, RT Op-ed The statements, views and opinions expressed
in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
It's parallel
universe time when US Pentagon chief James 'Mad Dog' Mattis complains that America's "moral
authority" is being undermined by others – specifically Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
This is the ex-Marine general who gained his ruthless reputation from when illegally occupying
US troops razed the
Iraqi city of Fallujah in the 2004-2005 using "shake and bake" bombardment of
inhabitants with banned white phosphorus incendiaries.
A repeat of those war crimes happened again last year under Mattis' watch as Pentagon chief
when US warplanes obliterated the Syrian city of Raqqa, killing thousands of civilians. Even
the pro-US Human Rights Watch
abhorred the repeated use of white phosphorus during that campaign to "liberate"
Raqqa, supposedly from jihadists.
These are but two examples from dense archives of US war crimes committed over several
decades, from its illegal intervention in Syria to Libya, from Iraq to Vietnam, back to the
Korean War in the early 1950s when American carpet bombing killed millions of innocent
civilians.
For Mattis to
lament during a speech at a naval college last week that America's moral authority is being
eroded by Putin is a symptom of the delusional official thinking infesting
Washington.
According to Mattis, the problem of America's diminishing global reputation has
nothing to do with US misconduct – even though the evidence is replete to prove that
systematic misconduct. No, the problem, according to him, is that Russia's Putin is somehow
sneakily undermining Washington's moral authority.
Mattis told his audience: "Putin aims to diminish the appeal of the western democratic
model and attempts to undermine America's moral authority." He added that the Russian leader's
"actions are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise
our belief in our ideals."
The US Secretary of Defense doesn't elaborate on how he thinks Russia is achieving this
dastardly plot to demean America. It is simply asserted as fact. This has been a theme recycled
over and over by officials in Washington and Brussels, other Western government leaders and of
course NATO and its affiliated think-tanks. All of which has been dutifully peddled by Western
news media.
It is classic "in denial" thinking. The general loss of legitimacy and
authority by Western governments is supposedly nothing to do with their own inherent failures
and transgressions, from bankrupt austerity economics, to deteriorating social conditions, to
illegal US-led wars and the repercussions of blowback terrorism and mass migration of refugees.
Oh no. What the ruling elites are trying to do is shift the blame from their own culpability
on to others, principally Russia. American political analyst Randy Martin says that Mattis'
latest remarks show a form of collective delusion among Western political establishments and
their aligned mainstream news media.
"What a powerful delusion Mattis and Western leaders like him are encumbered with,"
says Martin. "The US undercuts and compromises its own avowed beliefs and ideals because it
has lost any moral integrity that it might have feasibly pretended to have due to decades of
its own criminal foreign conduct."
The analyst added: "America's so-called moral authority is the free pass it gives itself
to topple democracy in Ukraine, replacing it with neo-Nazis; it has turned economically
prosperous Libya into a wasteland, after murdering its leader Muammar Gaddafi; it funds and
openly sponsors the MKO terror group in Iran for regime change in Tehran; and it is neck deep
in fueling the Saudi coalition's genocidal war in Yemen."
Despite this litany of criminality committed by the US with the acquiescence of European
allies, Washington, says Martin, "preaches a bizarre doctrine of 'exceptionalism' and somehow
arrogates a moral right to dominate the world. This is the fruit of the diseased minds of
sociopaths."
This week, three headline-making issues speak volumes about America's declining moral
authority.
... ... ...
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with
articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a
Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal
Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For
over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including
The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his
columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little tired of waiting for the Hitlerian
nightmare that the corporate media promised us was coming back in 2016. Frankly, I'm beginning
to suspect that all their apocalyptic pronouncements were just parts of some elaborate
cocktease. I mean, here we are, a year and half into the reign of the Trumpian Reich, and,
well, where are all the concentration camps, the SS units with their death's head insignia, the
Riefenstahlian parades and rallies? Trump hasn't even banned the Democratic Party, or annexed
Canada, or invaded Mexico, or made anybody wear color-coded armbands. If he doesn't start
Hitlering relatively soon, the oracles of the corporate media are going to have some serious
explaining to do.
I don't think I'm overreacting. After all, back in 2016, The Guardian promised us an
"
Age of Darkness ," and the end of "civilized order" as we know it. "
Globalization is dead, and white supremacy has triumphed ," one of its more hysterical
pundits proclaimed. "
Donald Trump is actually a fascist ," Michael Kinsley assured us in The Washington
Post . Charles Blow of The New York Times warned that Trump's election was "the
beginning of the end," the descent of the republic into "
racial Orwellianism ," whatever that's supposed to mean. Thomas Friedman called it "
a moral 911 ." Paul Krugman predicted nothing short of " a global
recession with no end in sight ." Jonathan Chait, after heroically vowing not to flee the
country with his terrified family, but to stay and fight to the bitter end, guaranteed us that
the "monster," Trump, would "
shake the republic to its foundations ."
Perhaps my seismometer is on the fritz, but I haven't detected much foundation shaking. Yes,
Trump repulses me, personally. I do not like the man. I never have. I was based in New York for
fifteen years, in the 1990s and early 2000s, before he became a game show host, when he was
still just a
shady real estate mogul with alleged ties to organized crime who occasionally appeared on
Wrestlemania and just generally went about the city making a narcissistic ass of himself
and plastering his gold-plated name onto everything. So I have no illusions about his character
the man is an inveterate snake oil salesman with the moral compass of a Tijuana pimp. All I'm
saying is, we were promised Hitler, or Mussolini at the very least, and it seems like all we're
getting so far is just regular old narcissistic Donald Trump.
Of course, he could just be laying low and holding back on the Hitler stuff as part of the
evil master plan personally developed by Vladimir Putin to systematically brainwash Americans
(with state-of-the-art mind-control Facebook ads) into embracing all-out National Socialism and
marching through the streets in full Nazi regalia singing Amerika Über Alles at which
point Trump will rip off his mask, reveal his true Hitlerian face, Steve Bannon will suddenly
reappear in the turret of an M1 Abrams tank at the head of a division of rebel infantry flying
giant Confederate flags as they hideously rumble down Pennsylvania Avenue, and the Putin-Nazi
Holocaust will begin.
Or maybe the extremely serious, Pulitzer Prize-winning political pundit David Leonhardt is
onto something. In
a prominent op-ed in The New York Times , he wonders if Putin's "secret plan" is for
Trump to destroy "the Atlantic alliance" by arriving late for the G7 meeting and "picking
fights over artificial issues," not to mention insulting the Canadian prime minister, which, it
doesn't get much more hair-raising than that. OK, I know you're probably thinking that sounds
like the hopelessly paranoid jabber of some conspiracy theorist nut on YouTube, but we're
talking The New York Times here, folks, and a bona fide "respectable pundit" who wrote a
whole 15,000-word ebook and has been interviewed by Stephen Colbert, among his many other
distinguished accomplishments.
Examined in the context of other blatantly loony theories the corporate media are currently
attempting to ram down our throats, Leonhardt's theory kind of makes sense. The Guardian
, another very serious newspaper, in addition to covering the repercussions of its coverage of
Corbyn's Nazi Death
Cult , is hot on the trail of the soon-to-be-infamous Putin-Banks-Brexit
Connection . According to "documents seen by The Observer ," a Guardian
sister publication, Arron Banks, a "Brexit bankroller," allegedly
had brunch with the Russian ambassador three times , instead of just once, as he had
claimed. He was also allegedly offered a piece of some shady gold deal in exchange for the
number of someone on Trump transition team, which for some reason it was otherwise impossible
to obtain. Or whatever. It doesn't really matter what happened. The point is, Putin
orchestrated the Brexit, presumably as part of his secret plan to destabilize the Atlantic
alliance, and then blackmailed Trump into running for president with
that "pee-tape" the Democrats paid a former British spook to allege exists .
Paul Krugman of The New York Times concurs. In
his latest extremely serious piece of totally respectable grown-up opinionating , he once
again calls Trump "a quisling" (he's developed a fondness for this term, which goes over well
with New York Times readers) and reiterates that Trump is "a de facto foreign agent" and
that "America as we know it is finished." Tragically, according to Krugman, the FBI, CIA, and
other Guardians of Western Democracy are utterly powerless to deal with this quisling, and his
evil puppet master, Putin, because it turns out the entire Republican Party is "hopelessly,
irredeemably corrupt." Yes, it appears the only chance we have to save the world from
Trumpzilla, and imminent Putin-Nazi Holocaust, is to elect a buttload of Democrats to office,
and eventually an Obama-like Democratic President, so they can launch an all-out thermonuclear
war against Russia and North Korea that'll teach these Putin-Nazis to screw around with our
trade agreements!
Oh, and also, we need to cancel the Brexit, and do away with all these "populist" movements
that Putin has fomented all over Europe. For example,
according to billionaire George Soros , the refugee-hating League in Italy is likely
another Putin-backed front, part of his scheme to "dominate the West." One can only assume that
the AfD, the FPÖ, Rassemblement National, and every other extreme-Right party exploiting
people's rage and fear in Europe are parts of Putin's grand conspiracy (except, of course, for
the Ukrainian Nazis the
Western alliance put into power ). Soros, like billionaire Bruce Wayne before him, tired of
waiting for the West to strike back, is taking matters into his own hands. Not only has he been
tirelessly laboring to prevent Donald Trump from "
destroying the world ," now
he's financing "Best for Britain," a campaign to de-brainwash the British people, who,
obviously, only voted for Brexit because they'd been brainwashed by the Putin-Nazis.
I'm not sure how much more bizarre things can get. This level of bull goose loony paranoia,
media-generated mass hysteria, and mindless conformity would be hysterically funny if it
weren't so fucking horrifying in terms of what it says about millions of Westerners, who are
apparently prepared to believe almost anything the authorities tell them, no matter how nuts.
That famous Voltaire quote comes to mind "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make
you commit atrocities," he wrote. Another, more disturbing way of looking at it is, people
willing to believe absurdities, to switch off their critical thinking faculties in order to
conform to an official narrative as blatantly ridiculous as the Putin-Nazi narrative, are
people who have already surrendered their autonomy, who have traded it for the comfort of the
herd. Such people cannot be reasoned with, because there isn't really anyone in there. There is
only whatever mindless jabber got injected into their brain that day, the dutiful repetition of
which guarantees they remain a "normal" person (who believes what other normal persons
believe), and not some sort of "radical" or "extremist."
These people are the people who worry me these "normal" people who, completely calmly, as if
what they are saying wasn't batshit crazy, explain how Trump is just like Hitler, and how Putin
is trying to take over the world. I sit there and listen and smile at these people, some of
whom are friends and colleagues, people who I genuinely like, and who genuinely like me in
return, but who, under the right set of circumstances, would stand by and watch me marched into
prison, or worse, and not utter a word in protest.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
These people are the people who worry me these "normal" people who, completely calmly,
as if what they are saying wasn't batshit crazy, explain how Trump is just like Hitler, and
how Putin is trying to take over the world. I sit there and listen and smile at these
people, some of whom are friends and colleagues, people who I genuinely like, and who
genuinely like me in return, but who, under the right set of circumstances, would stand by
and watch me marched into prison, or worse, and not utter a word in protest.
I've got the same friends. Liberal Putin haters. Dupes, and suckers.
It's true that some of this is a matter of loony cultish shibboleths imposed to enforce
conformity. But there's more to it. This hysterical vilification of Trump is rational and
purposive. The system depends on everybody blaming the other party for what CIA does to you.
CIA has impunity and an illegal state of emergency based on secret law. They can kill anybody
they want and get away with it, including the presidential puppet ruler, ask JFK, oh wait,
you can't, he's dead. That absolute sovereignty means CIA's in charge, the buck stops there.
So it's crucial to keep the public's attention and emotional energy fixed on the puppet.
Russia does pose a threat, but it's not what we're told. Tying the demonized political
enemy to Russia is CIA's way of disguising the real threat Russia poses. Russia is the
world's most effective advocate for black-letter rule of law, including human rights law that
would destroy the CIA police state. The CIA regime's fulla-shitness is obvious to everyone in
the world except the American public.
Russia complies with international law. The USA does not. The largest bloc Russia leads is
not the SCO or the BRICS, it's the G-192, the rule-of-law advocates in UNCTAD, UNESCO, and
the General Assembly. People are now discussing Uniting for Peace as a means to counter US
abuse of veto impunity in the UNSC. Uniting for Peace was originally devised in response to
Soviet obstruction, so the tables have turned in a striking way. The free world is ~USA, and
they're going from strength to strength under the Russian nuclear umbrella. They're going to
break down the Iron Curtain and let us out.
Vlad Putin is the leader of the free World, most popular leader in the World, his people like
what he's doing and that would be delivering them a better life while minding his own
business internationally. Again I ask "what has Russia ever done to the USA"?
The left is sinking fast these days, most people aren't interested in being over run with
immigrants or watching the faggots make fools of themselves or having the State in their
business all the time. Time to pave the roads, give us decent schools and Hospitals, put the
junkies into leaky boats and send them out to Sea and make sure everyone gets fed. That's
what we want, fuck that war shit, nobody wants that. America is nothing but a Thug Nation, at
least Trump is something different, anything would be better than the status quo down
there.
Never mind, they'll be broke soon and the World will be wrecked for ten years, worth it I
say.
Agree.
In their feverish desire to be correct in the eyes of their paymasters, the
ever-opportunistic Paul Krugman of The New York Times, the ever-opportunistic "psychologist"
David Brooks, and the "progressively" profiteering Rachel Maddow of MSNBC have crossed all
barriers of decent behavior. They are the product of Rovian creation of reality , when
facts -- the documented facts -- have no weight anymore.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities," indeed.
Meanwhile, in Syria, "Drivers Behind the War on Syria and the Impoverishment of Us All:"
https://www.globalresearch.ca/drivers-behind-the-war-on-syria-and-the-impoverishment-of-us-all/5644381
"We know that the Western narratives about the war on Syria are entirely false, so what are
some of the real reasons that are driving this overseas holocaust, and who is benefiting from
it?
To be blunt, Western policymakers seek to destroy secular democracy in Syria, along with its
socially uplifting political economy, with a view to installing a compliant fascist Wahhabi
government. The end result is chaos, the enrichment of the transnational "oligarchs" and the
impoverishment of Syria.
In doing this, the policymakers are also impoverishing the vast majority of people in Western
countries1, destroying nation-state sovereignties, and endeavouring to create a totalitarian
World Order.
International financial institutions see local banking as a threat. Consequently, in Aleppo,
Syria, terrorists destroyed local banking institutions."
– Same as in Libya. The banking cabal had led the US/EU coalition of war criminals to
murder hundreds of thousands of people in order to destroy Libyan banking system and to
satisfy Israel's aspirations for Ertez Israel: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38009.htm
"America's Collusion With Neo-Nazis," by Stephen F. Cohen:
ttps://www.thenation.com/article/americas-collusion-with-neo-nazis/
"– That the pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odessa
shortly later in 2014 reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during
World War II has been all but deleted from the American mainstream narrative even though it
remains a painful and revelatory experience for many Ukrainians.
-- That the Azov Battalion of some 3,000 well-armed fighters, which has played a major combat
role in the Ukrainian civil war and now is an official component of Kiev's armed forces, is
avowedly "partially" pro-Nazi, as evidenced by its regalia, slogans, and programmatic
statements, and well-documented as such by several international monitoring organizations.
[The Azov Battalion was financed by a Jewish oligarch Kolomojsky]. (
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Frussia-insider.com%2Fsites%2Finsider%2Ffiles%2F-DaRo81rUvA.jpg&f=1
" -- That stormtroop-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other "impure"
citizens are widespread throughout Kiev-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches
reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s. And that
the police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neo-fascist
acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kiev has officially encouraged them by
systematically rehabilitating and even memorializing Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German
extermination pogroms and their leaders during World War II, renaming streets in their honor,
building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more."
– None of the 52 main Jewish American organizations raised their voices to condemn the
revival of neo-Nazism (banderism) in Ukraine. Is this because of the ethnicity of the State
Dept. organizers of the putsch, Nuland-Kagan and Pyatt? Or is it because of the zionists'
visceral hatred towards Russia that has been protecting the sovereign state of Syria from the
supremacist Israeli thugs?
I loved this article! Funny as hell! I do not have quite the negative view of Trump – I
do think he has matured some from his playboy days and clearly is serious about doing some
good things – but the author's depiction of the posturing buffoons of the media is spot
on. Hitler indeed! Ha ha!
When Hillary started ranting about Trump being "Putin's Puppet", I wondered "Where did that
come from?". I decided that she probably had a pot of evil warming on the stove and needed a
scapegoat to go along with it. Later events haven't proven me wrong.
I just discovered the brilliant Shadia Drury, one of the best resources on the Neocon and
Straussian concept of the 'Noble Lie', and the enemy (previously War On Terror, now Russia
Threat) to unite the nihilism of liberal society and prevent it from disintegrating.
trump derangement syndrome here with Hopkins. Trump was a showman, like thousands of others.
He also enjoyed celebrity , again, only this time, like millions of others.
He likes women, especially in a state of undress. Who doesn't? Women as much as men, like
to look at pictures of naked ladies, maybe more than men.
Maybe the whole article by Hopkins is a joke.
What I do not fully understand, and Hopkins does not help is how lunatic-hatred on the
part of liberals has become so powerful.
I talked some race, as in global North and global South and natural selection, to a
liberal gal the other day, and she thought it made sense. But she still hates Trump.
Or take the current moral Outrage over baby Mexicans at the border. None of it makes any
sense, especially inasmuch as Mom and Pop can just keep family together by going home, which
is not an option for the average burglary suspect, etc. here at home.
Trump has become the default target for every aggrieved world-hating liberal sap. The
world must be changed! I demand it!
It may have something to do also with the perception that maybe they picked the wrong
team, and that various career choices may have been wrong, in terms of jobs/career and so on.
Given the armies of professional liberals wearing badges of Equality but scrambling for
Privilege, Trump's laughter at their expense must drive them nuts.
And/or, the SJW types of youngsters (like I was at the time of Vietnam Slaughters) Trump
is the Absolute Negation of everything they dream about the Perfect World, and their own
badges of Revolutionary Correctness/Rectitude which they desperately seek to pin on their
chests/breasts.
( curiously, many young women bare their breasts in protest about something or other. More
sexual politics, I guess, especially if they have nice tits.)
I am you and you are me and we are all together. Milan Kundera has a great image in one of
his novels about the Revolution in Hungary (?), the communist Revolution that is: A circle
dance of young pioneer dancers spiraling up into the sky, like the Ascent of Christians to
heaven. He admitted that he was of that delusion at the time. Hope morphed into Belief.
The Delusions of Race Equality are also at hand. And even though Trump declares himself
politically correct on that score, the Trump Deranged syndrome SJW children and their
parents, deny that Trump is a fellow true-believer. Trump is a Racist! really, and so on.
After a half-century of blatant failure of Blacks to improve the Content of Their
Character, never mind getting grades good enough to get into college without privileged
access, quotas, etc. older liberals, at least, smell Failure. Disillusion dreams dying hard
contributes to the hatreds afoot.
The kids vote for Bernie, but the parents are also disillusioned about socialism, yet the
kids luv Bernie and even now blame Billary, etc. for Trump. Who can blame the kids what with
the economy punishing their generation like we have not seen for generations
(The ten year cycle of recessions is about to recycle another recession, if history means
anything in this regard. Trump is not out of trouble and his standard issue GOP economics is
not going to save him if a recession roars in. Wages are still super low, etc, etc and will
plummet in another recession, never mind Mexicans.)
So, the desperation of adult liberals is two-fold, or three-fold. Socialism failed. Racial
Equality has failed. They know it but cannot admit it to one-another. Trump has won, a
repudiation of Everything they Luv.
Hatred simmers in the melting-pot, acrid fumes enter the Body Politic. Liberals stagger
while genuine conservatives have adjusted over the last couple decades to the stench of
liberalism, all the while buying guns and waiting for the Tipping Point.
Maybe this begins to account for the hatreds swirling out there. I have not even mentioned
the hatreds of Blacks who are the most aware of their Failure, and register it for example in
their admiration of Elijah Muhammed, Reveredn Wright, and of course, the Obama Zip.
Trump is just the Beginning as the American and European peasantry grab their pitchforks
and head for Brussels and D.C.
On origins of the Russia Threat: just more 'perpetual war' to rescue society from the
inherent nihilism of liberalism:
This is made clear in Strauss's exchange with Kojève (reprinted in Strauss's On
Tyranny), and in his commentary on Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (reprinted in
Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue). Kojève lamented
the animalisation of man and Schmitt worried about the trivialisation of life. All three of
them were convinced that liberal economics would turn life into entertainment and destroy
politics; all three understood politics as a conflict between mutually hostile groups
willing to fight each other to the death. In short, they all thought that man's humanity
depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death. Only
perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and
"creature comforts." Life can be politicised once more, and man's humanity can be
restored.
This terrifying vision fits perfectly well with the desire for honour and glory that the
neo-conservative gentlemen covet. It also fits very well with the religious sensibilities
of gentlemen. The combination of religion and nationalism is the elixir that Strauss
advocates as the way to turn natural, relaxed, hedonistic men into devout nationalists
willing to fight and die for their God and country.
You're right, Drury did give good insight into Strauss & his impact. Whoever compiled
these clips, from Drury on Strauss to the Wolfowitz interview just after 9/11, made all the
right connections.
And the chain of attitudes and actions can be examined in both directions, backward, to
Strauss's expectations of Jew-power in Weimar -- he expected Jews to be the elite overseers
of the "vulgar masses" who resented being resented by said vulgar masses.
It's projection. They fantasize about doing the same things they falsely imagine Trump will
do to them, but to their enemies. They are dangerous. The internet has also allowed the
masses to see just how utterly incompetent the Ruling Class is. Neopotism, networking, and
geography got them their positions, not talent or erudition.
"These people are the people who worry me these "normal" people who, completely calmly, as
if what they are saying wasn't batshit crazy, explain how Trump is just like Hitler, and how
Putin is trying to take over the world. I sit there and listen and smile at these people,
some of whom are friends and colleagues, people who I genuinely like, and who genuinely like
me in return, but who, under the right set of circumstances, would stand by and watch me
marched into prison, or worse, and not utter a word in protest."
They can never be allowed to come to power. Ever. Their hysteria over Trump has let the
mask slip too much. They have been revealed. It is no different than if Hitler had announced
the Holocaust before taking office. At that point, it would have been morally correct to deny
him regardless of the vote. We may very well have to consider this in 2020. Do you really
want to hand your fate over to these people? They have made their psychotic feelings plain.
On top of that, they are incompetent buffoons.
Correct.
Meanwhile, the anonymous "nazi-hunters" at stopantisemitism.org have produced another
anti-First Amendment battle cry, this time again a professor at Columbia University, who
dared to speak the truth about The Lobby: http://hamiddabashi.com
The "nazi-hunters" at stopantisemitism.org should visit the Nuland-liberated Ukraine,
where the activities of the US Zionists (specifically, Nuland-Kagan and Pyatt) have brought
about a revival of neo-Nazism (banderism) and the consequent rise in real anti-semitism --
not the one invented by the Jewish vigilantes at stopantisemitism.org
If the "nazi-hunters" from stopantisemitism.org are serious about the memory of the WWII,
they should better start investigating the pro-Nazi activities of the Kagans' clan first and
foremost (see the "liberated" Ukraine) and then proceed with investigating the Israeli
citizen Kolomojsky, who was the main financier of the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
" the Azov Battalion of some 3,000 well-armed fighters is avowedly pro-Nazi, as evidenced
by its regalia, slogans, and programmatic statements, and well-documented as such by several
international monitoring organizations."
"... Orwell's 1984 is no longer a warning – it's a primer on how to to run your campaign. Use of social media to enforce absolute conformity of opinion, rampant doublethink, teach children to turn in the parents, four fingers equals five fingers – it's all there. ..."
"... Our present cycle of Two-Minutes-Hate seems pretty effective at keeping the Outer Party #Resistance fired up against Donald "Emmanuel Goldstein" Trump. ..."
"... Regular decent folks Democrats really have no idea how far to the Left their party has gone. ..."
"... You can see it in the NY Times. I dropped it recently after reading it for 30 years as I got so sick of their anti-white, gentile, male, heterosexual agenda. I still look at it through a free online subscription from my college, and get disgusted by the pieces in the opinion sections and then log off. ..."
"... I subscribed to the NYT for a number of years. After the recent campaign and the current treatment of our President, Donald Trump, I quit. I am stunned at how these old media properties are being purchased and used for political activism on behalf of their owners and advertisers. They're another example of extreme Left propaganda presented as respectable journalism. ..."
"... The Gray Lady is an old SJW tranny, as far as I can tell.. ..."
"... If a man isn't a committed socialist in 1948, he has no heart. If a man is still a committed socialist in 1984, he has no brain. Orwell was moving to the right, but there are so many "rights" that we can only guess which one he'd have ended up on. Neocon, nationalist, libertarian, who knows. But it's a common arc in one's forties. He didn't make it to 50. ..."
"... Classic satire is often the work of reactionaries: Aristophanes, Juvenal, Swift, Waugh. ..."
"... I have started calling the mass media furies a 'propaganda blitz'. The recent explosion around child separation is a perfect example. It is a combination of major media outlets all going into a froth, the expert use of social media, and the complete shaming of any other viewpoint. They announce a crisis precisely at the time there is movement on an issue, as a means of achieving a purely political objective. Thus, this crisis was timed to coincide with immigration legislation being discussed again. ..."
"... Even small-time progressive players like Russell Moore of the SBC successfully used this recently. They announced a crisis prior to their yearly convention (think voting day for the SBC), used friendly media to spread the word and erupt in hysteria, and used social media to bludgeon their political opponents. It was wicked, but HIGHLY effective. ..."
"... As Steve likes to point out, we need a word for this. I am using 'propaganda blitz', because if you are on the receiving end it is akin to the blitzes over London in WWII, except instead of bombs it is 7-14 days of a brutal, propagandistic news cycle. ..."
From George Orwell's "Inside the Whale," 1940, on the mental atmosphere of English writers
in 1937 (slightly updated):
By 2018 the whole of the intelligentsia was mentally at war. Establishment thought had
narrowed down to 'anti-Trumpism', i.e. to a negative, and a torrent of hate-literature
directed against Russia and the politicians supposedly friendly to Russia was pouring from
the Press. The thing that, to me, was truly frightening about the war in America was not such
Twitter spats as I witnessed, nor even the party feuds on Instagram, but the immediate
reappearance in respectable circles of the mental atmosphere of the McCarthy Era. The very
people who for 65 years had sniggered over their own superiority to Kremlin hysteria were the
ones who rushed straight back into the mental slum of 1950. All the familiar wartime
idiocies, spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good anti-Trumpist?), the
retailing of atrocity stories, came back into vogue as though the intervening years had never
happened.
Of course, people in 1937 or 1950 at least had some justification for their hysteria.
Regular decent folks Democrats really have no idea how far to the Left their party has gone.
Orwell's 1984 is no longer a warning – it's a primer on how to to run your campaign.
Use of social media to enforce absolute conformity of opinion, rampant doublethink, teach
children to turn in the parents, four fingers equals five fingers – it's all there.
Regular decent folks Democrats really have no idea how far to the Left their party has gone.
Orwell's 1984 is no longer a warning – it's a primer on how to to run your campaign.
Use of social media to enforce absolute conformity of opinion, rampant doublethink, teach
children to turn in the parents, four fingers equals five fingers – it's all there.
By 1937 the whole of the intelligentsia was mentally at war. Left-wing thought had
narrowed down to 'anti-Fascism', i.e. to a negative, and a torrent of hate-literature
directed against Germany and the politicians supposedly friendly to Germany was pouring from
the Press. The thing that, to me, was truly frightening about the war in Spain was not such
violence as I witnessed, nor even the party feuds behind the lines, but the immediate
reappearance in left-wing circles of the mental atmosphere of the Great War. The very people
who for twenty years had sniggered over their own superiority to war hysteria were the ones
who rushed straight back into the mental slum of 1915. All the familiar wartime idiocies,
spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good anti-Fascist?), the retailing
of atrocity stories, came back into vogue as though the intervening years had never
happened.
Our present cycle of Two-Minutes-Hate seems pretty effective at keeping the Outer Party
#Resistance fired up against Donald "Emmanuel Goldstein" Trump.
I like the acting ability of the Welsh guy tormenting the English guy from the Burton/Hurt
version of 1984. John Hurt could have done a great O'Brien and Richard Burton could have done
a smashing Winston Smith.
...Orwell and Boxer and Whites Without College Degrees from 2017:
I know what happened to Boxer -- Russian working class -- the work horse in George
Orwell's Animal Farm. Boxer busted his arse building the farm back up to snuff after it had
undergone the revolution and other problems. The pigs -- Stalinists -- rewarded Boxer by
carting him away to the glue factory. Poor Boxer finally realized he was going to the glue
factory while in the truck, but he was so exhausted from his labors in working on the farm
that he didn't have enough strength to kick the truck to pieces to escape.
Whites Without College Degrees(WWCDs) are the new Boxer of the present day. The
Stalinists are now the Globalizers. The Globalizers have decided that all the hard work and
all the soldiering over generations by the WWCDs will be rewarded with deliberate attacks
and sneaky ways to harm them. From mass immigration to de-industrialization to hooking the
WWCDs on drugs, the Globalizer pigs have used every trick in the book to destroy Whites
Without Colllege Degrees. Two academics have described this demographic phenomenom as the
WHITE DEATH.
Regular decent folks Democrats really have no idea how far to the Left their party has
gone.
You can see it in the NY Times. I dropped it recently after reading it for 30 years as I
got so sick of their anti-white, gentile, male, heterosexual agenda. I still look at it
through a free online subscription from my college, and get disgusted by the pieces in the
opinion sections and then log off.
Somehow, though, the Left persuaded itself early on that "1984″ was a prophecy of
the Trump Era. IIRC the book actually saw a jump in sales, and a stage adaptation was mounted
in New York.
I was thinking along your lines (and as yet unaware of the above-mentioned trends) when I
saw someone reading it on a commuter train. I cautiously passed a word to him thinking I
might be making contact with a fellow Rightist; but was quickly disabused of the notion when
he responded with some "resistance" B.S., in the nasally whine typical of the species.
I subscribed to the NYT for a number of years. After the recent campaign and the current
treatment of our President, Donald Trump, I quit. I am stunned at how these old media
properties are being purchased and used for political activism on behalf of their owners and
advertisers. They're another example of extreme Left propaganda presented as respectable
journalism.
The Gray Lady is an old SJW tranny, as far as I can tell..
Yes, most Britons would agree that Orwell needs updating: "That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of
democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." He sounds awfully American here.
If a man isn't a committed socialist in 1948, he has no heart. If a man is still a
committed socialist in 1984, he has no brain. Orwell was moving to the right, but there are so many "rights" that we can only guess
which one he'd have ended up on. Neocon, nationalist, libertarian, who knows. But it's a
common arc in one's forties. He didn't make it to 50.
Classic satire is often the work of reactionaries: Aristophanes, Juvenal, Swift,
Waugh.
Of course, people in 1937 or 1950 at least had some justification for their
hysteria.
This is true, and then some. Just as today, the mainstream media was in on promoting the
leftist agenda, though maybe to a lesser degree. Here's the New York Times' obituary
(or, more accurately, eulogy) for Joseph Stalin back in 1953. Yes, they acknowledge some of
his murderous tendencies, but it seems hard for them to condemn such a great guy for such a
minor flaw. The headline reads, Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia
Into Mighty Socialist State . That's the tone of the the whole article, generally
speaking. It's hard for them to conceal their reverence.
The EU is attempting to surreptitiously ban criticism of the Ruling Class using some
copyright/link tax nonsense that will essentially ban memes and expose anonymous critics. The
mask slips ever more.
If a man isn't a committed socialist in 1948, he has no heart.
Wrong.
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy,
its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. –Winston Churchill
And just two years later, the anti-fascist rhetoric was completely reversed and became
anti-anti-fascist with the Nazi-Soviet pact. And two years after that, it went back to being
anti-fascist when Hitler broke the pact.
Quite
Orwell was clearly moving to the right being very anti Communist ( and fellow travellers )
but at all times he was first and foremost an English nationalist . Certainly he was no
supporter of Left solidarity
In his time perhaps it was still maybe just possible to consider oneself to be of the left
and to be a nationalist.
That era has long finished.
I have started calling the mass media furies a 'propaganda blitz'. The recent explosion around child separation is a perfect example. It is a combination of
major media outlets all going into a froth, the expert use of social media, and the complete
shaming of any other viewpoint. They announce a crisis precisely at the time there is
movement on an issue, as a means of achieving a purely political objective. Thus, this crisis
was timed to coincide with immigration legislation being discussed again.
The left is getting more skilled at it, too, and is significantly helped by the
suppression of right-wing accounts on social media platforms since November 2016. Trayvon was
an early example of this, and they have only gotten better at using the tactics. The
propaganda is often a mix of true and false components.
Even small-time progressive players like Russell Moore of the SBC successfully used this
recently. They announced a crisis prior to their yearly convention (think voting day for the
SBC), used friendly media to spread the word and erupt in hysteria, and used social media to
bludgeon their political opponents. It was wicked, but HIGHLY effective.
As Steve likes to point out, we need a word for this. I am using 'propaganda blitz',
because if you are on the receiving end it is akin to the blitzes over London in WWII, except
instead of bombs it is 7-14 days of a brutal, propagandistic news cycle.
"... Here's a thought: If the USG was truly interested in controlling opium production in Afghanistan it would simply use the counternarcotics money to buy up the crop directly from the farmers. The price at that level would be incredibly cheap compared to the "street value" of the drug. The farmers would happily sell to such a reliable buyer and not need to fear the risk of military interference. The current Afghan government would likely earn the goodwill of the farmers and it would cut off funding to the Taliban. It will never happen, however; because our military project in Afghanistan is mostly about enriching private military contractors while keeping the the "threat" of terrorism alive and well. War is a racket. ..."
"... b, have you read "Whiteout" by Alexander Cockburn (RIP) and Jeffrey St. Clair? It was written decades ago but is still relevant. I'm sure the CIA DOES make money from drugs although the CIA black books budget is so large they hardly need the cash. But one imagines it's nice to have a few millions completely out of government accountability--for lining their own pockets if nothing else. ..."
"... I highly recommend Doug Valentine's book, "CIA as Organized Crime." CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. Since all those CIA officers/agents had Colby's blessing, they assumed Valentine was on their side. Oops! Bottom line: There is ZERO difference between CIA and the Mafia. They are essentially one and the same, though they generally have different spheres of action. One upon which they overlap is drug production, smuggling and distribution. ..."
"... I would add that there is ZERO difference between supra-national finance and the Mafia. For instance, the bank, HSBC was founded to launder opium money after Great Britain fought the Opium Wars forcing China to permit them to import opium into China. Former FBI Director and on again/off again hero of the partisans, James Comey left his career with the US Government to work for HSBC after they were finally fined for laundering cash from both drug smuggling and terrorist groups. His job was to help them "negotiate" the new "oversight" placed on the bank. ..."
"... John Ehrlichman, who served as President Richard Nixon's domestic policy chief admitted back in 1994 that the "War on Drugs" was actually a political tool to crush leftist protesters and black people. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." ..."
"... Mike Ruppert was an associate of Gary Webb's, was a Los Angeles detective and knew a lot about the CIA's involvement in the Crips/Bloods Drug Wars and its massive importation of drugs into the nation. His investigation was used as his website URL , copvcia, although its name was From The Wilderness. Until 911, his investigation was his passion, then he discovered he had another and it was connected to the former. Here's a page many will want to view . It's hard not to reread the entire website. Unfortunately, Mike saved and only released much of the juicier evidence to his subscribers--he had to eke out a living in some manner. ..."
"... Back in 2002, when the poppy production too off, the idea of flooding Russia was in vogue, it may still be in the game. Transit through Iran to Turkey was also in play. Money laundering started out in "Polish Zlotys", through the banks there. ..."
"... I presume much of that counternarcotics money ends up being cash in hand to thousands of foot-soldiers working for local warlords in Afghanistan as farmers, security personnel, soldiers, prostitutes and what-not, in a way similar to how part of Victoria Nuland's $5 billion investment in Ukraine ended up as cash incentives to entice people from as far as Lvov to travel to Kiev to participate in the Maidan demonstrations over the winter of 2013 / 2014. ..."
"... This in addition to the billions being used to buy weapons, train and send jihadists to fight in other parts of western and central Asia, and line people's pockets at every stage of the drug money trail whether in Afghanistan, Wall Street or various tax havens around the planet. ..."
"... And to the east, I remember reading that one of the first things the US did was to build a bridge and highway towards the east; shortly thereafter, heroin flooded into Russia. ..."
"... Alfred W. McCoy is the authority on drugs and CIA. He's still doing great work, publishing books.His first, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is a classic.His latest, In the Shadows of the American Century, is brilliant analysis. Some videos on youtube, also. He has traveled, researched every ratline trail and outpost all over the globe. Read him if you want the real facts. ..."
thanks b... the speculation has always been in my mind anyway - that the money is controlled
by the cia... covert money for covert projects and on and on it goes...
The Taliban curtailed the poppy growing without any problem. Shortly after the US invasion
under the guise of capturing OBL. Almost 18 years later, long after the death of OBL (in
reality and in US military BS) the poppy production has increased exponentially. There are
Pics of US military personnel walking through poppy fields.
Other than drug production there is no need for the US to be in Afghanistan except maybe to
use it as a launching platform to attack Iran. Drugs are an excellent source for funding
black ops.
Not only is the US allowing the production, considering how easy it would be for them to kill
the crops, and IMHO it as also assisting in the transportation of drugs to the West.
If you understand the Afghan government as a narco state, then the fact that opium
production has actually increased –while the U.S. spent billions on counternarcotics
efforts and troop numbers surged – starts to make sense. A completely failed state
– Afghanistan in 2001 – can't really thrive in the drug trade. Traffickers have
no reason to pay off a toothless government or a nonexistent police force. In such a
libertarian paradise, freelance actors – like Saleem, the heroin cook –
flourish.
But as the government builds capacity, officials can start to demand a cut. It's not
that there's a grand conspiracy at the center of government, but rather that, in the
absence of accountability and the rule of law, officials start to orient themselves around
a powerful political economy. Big drug barons with links to the government take over the
trade. People who don't pay, or who fall out with government officials, might find
themselves killed or arrested.
In this light, U.S. counternarcotics programs, which have cost nearly $8 billion to
date, and the Afghan state-building project in general, are perversely part of the
explanation for the growing government involvement in the drug trade. Even the newly
rebuilt Afghan Air Force has been investigated by the U.S. military for alleged
trafficking. In many places, the surge had the effect of wresting opium revenue from the
Taliban and handing it to government officials. For example, in Helmand's Garmsir District,
which sits on key trafficking routes between the rest of the province and Baramcha, a big
Marine offensive in 2011 finally pushed out the Taliban and handed the district back to the
Afghan government. The result? The police began taking a cut from those drug routes. "There
are families, as in Mafia-style, that have the trade carved up between them, and when some
outsider tries to get in on it, they serve him up as a success for drug interdiction," one
Western official who worked in Garmsir told me.
I just luv-ed this next paragraph. Glad I wasn't sipping Coca Cola
while I read it. Would have chortled cola out my nose!
Here is government BS-speak at it's vacuous best (enjoy):
The U.S. government, for its part, acknowledged that there are no quick solutions at hand.
"The U.S. interagency is developing an updated counternarcotics strategy for Afghanistan,"
says Jen Psaki, the State Department's spokeswoman. "These are long-term efforts that build
the foundation for eventual reductions in opium harvests."
Here's a thought: If the USG was truly interested in controlling opium production in
Afghanistan it would simply use the counternarcotics money to buy up the crop directly from
the farmers. The price at that level would be incredibly cheap compared to the "street value"
of the drug. The farmers would happily sell to such a reliable buyer and not need to fear the
risk of military interference. The current Afghan government would likely earn the goodwill
of the farmers and it would cut off funding to the Taliban. It will never happen, however;
because our military project in Afghanistan is mostly about enriching private military
contractors while keeping the the "threat" of terrorism alive and well. War is a racket.
b, have you read "Whiteout" by Alexander Cockburn (RIP) and Jeffrey St. Clair? It was written
decades ago but is still relevant. I'm sure the CIA DOES make money from drugs although the
CIA black books budget is so large they hardly need the cash. But one imagines it's nice to
have a few millions completely out of government accountability--for lining their own pockets
if nothing else.
I highly recommend Doug Valentine's book, "CIA as Organized Crime." CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been
involved in the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. Since all those CIA officers/agents had
Colby's blessing, they assumed Valentine was on their side. Oops! Bottom line: There is ZERO difference between CIA and the Mafia. They are essentially one
and the same, though they generally have different spheres of action. One upon which they
overlap is drug production, smuggling and distribution.
I would add that there is ZERO difference between supra-national finance and the Mafia.
For instance, the bank, HSBC was founded to launder opium money after Great Britain fought
the Opium Wars forcing China to permit them to import opium into China. Former FBI Director
and on again/off again hero of the partisans, James Comey left his career with the US
Government to work for HSBC after they were finally fined for laundering cash from both drug
smuggling and terrorist groups. His job was to help them "negotiate" the new "oversight"
placed on the bank.
John Ehrlichman, who served as President Richard Nixon's domestic policy chief admitted back
in 1994 that the "War on Drugs" was actually
a political tool to crush leftist protesters and black people.
"We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting
the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then
criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their
leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the
evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Mike Ruppert was an associate of Gary Webb's, was a Los Angeles detective and knew a lot
about the CIA's involvement in the Crips/Bloods Drug Wars and its massive importation of
drugs into the nation. His investigation
was used as his website URL , copvcia, although its name was From The Wilderness. Until
911, his investigation was his passion, then he discovered he had another and it was
connected to the former. Here's a page many will want to
view . It's hard not to reread the entire website. Unfortunately, Mike saved and only
released much of the juicier evidence to his subscribers--he had to eke out a living in some
manner.
The CIA is the planet's #1 Terrorist Organization, and it has all 3 types of Weapons of
Mass Destruction. It's often hard to determine which poses a greater threat to humanity: The
CIA or its parent the Outlaw US Empire. If humanity's to have any chance at a viable future,
both the CIA and its Imperial parent must be destroyed for their many crimes.
That CIA was experimenting with narcotics as a tool seemed to have metasticised into
something else during the Air America years, which in turn seems to have morphed via Barry
Seal (& Gary Webb's investigation)and the Cocaine Coyboys onward into Silk Airways (famed
by weapons to Syria scandal) - https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/cockburn-white.html
Back in 2002, when the poppy production too off, the idea of flooding Russia was in vogue, it
may still be in the game. Transit through Iran to Turkey was also in play. Money laundering
started out in "Polish Zlotys", through the banks there.
Addicts were given small sums to
deposit in the banks, by the thousands, which didn't draw attention. A lot of the money was
sent to the U.S. to buy "American Muscle Cars", which were then shipped back to the E.U. and
resold again.
Pakistan was also a transit country where the "Labs" were first set up to
process the opium to heroin. How time fly's when having fun. Addiction to "drugs" isn't the
only addiction nor the addicts involved either. Only one leaf in the book of the minds of
those who believe they are doing the right thing.
I presume much of that counternarcotics money ends up being cash in hand to thousands of
foot-soldiers working for local warlords in Afghanistan as farmers, security personnel,
soldiers, prostitutes and what-not, in a way similar to how part of Victoria Nuland's $5
billion investment in Ukraine ended up as cash incentives to entice people from as far as
Lvov to travel to Kiev to participate in the Maidan demonstrations over the winter of 2013 /
2014.
Also a big portion of the counternarcotics dosh must be going to teams of people digging
up and burning opium and also to teams of people planting new opium seeds in the areas where
the first lot of opium was eradicated later on. Similar to stories people used to hear about
what supposedly happened during the 1930s Great Depression, when teams of people were
employed to dig ditches and then other teams of people were employed to fill up the ditches
which would be dug up again at a later time.
This in addition to the billions being used to buy weapons, train and send jihadists to
fight in other parts of western and central Asia, and line people's pockets at every stage of
the drug money trail whether in Afghanistan, Wall Street or various tax havens around the
planet.
reply to:
".. and IMHO it as also assisting in the transportation of drugs to the West."
Posted by: ken | Jun 18, 2018 2:16:06 PM | 5
And to the east, I remember reading that one of the first things the US did was to build a
bridge and highway towards the east; shortly thereafter, heroin flooded into Russia.
The level of US "counter-narcotic" investment seems to be about right to support the GROWTH
of the narcotics industry...not the otherway around...its black and its dirty
Every comment on this post is like a fine champagne of reality. how do people get by with out
wanting to know the truth. keep the comments coming I need more! Brilliant links. The doors
of perception just opened for me. Who the hell runs our TVs stations that they can turn a
blind I to this lot.
-------
I to find great strength in music, to find the truth. For me it is reggae any group in
society that has sufferd what we discuss on this site for 300 years, but have survived got
stronger and put it to music, I feel needs listening to!!!
The "War on Drugs" was conceived to put black people in jail en masse as Jim Crow came to an
end. Nixon's aides admitted this. Read "The New Jim Crow" for the full story. Marijuana laws
were first introduced in the early 20th century as a tool to arrest and deport Mexicans from
the American southwest. Google it.
The bullshit "War on Drugs" is as phony as the bullshit "War on Terror" in the wake of 3
skyscrapers that were demolished and collapsed at freefall speed.
The real money is to be made in the bullshit wars spawned by these 2 hoaxes that boggle
the mind in their scope.
Basically, these two cornerstones of American domestic and foreign policy are frauds of
biblical proportions.
An empire built on these foundations will come crashing down as fast as WTC 7 on the
afternoon of September 11, 2001.
Various Contra-cocaine type operations of un/controlled shipments of drugs existed in the
early 1990s, some of which existed in order to arm Bosnia (local fighters and foreign
mujahideen), thereby undermining the UN's arms embargo of former Yugoslav states.
Between 1988 and 1992, 22 tons of cocaine was brought into the US via Venezuela by a team
consisting of Mark McFarlin (head of the CIA's counter-narcotics center), Jim Campbell (the
CIA's chief of station in Venezuela) and General Guillén (head of the Venezuelan
National Guard in the pre-Chavez era).
Anti-Drug Unit of C.I.A. Sent Ton of Cocaine to U.S. in 1990
At roughly the same time Albanian mobsters had built a heroin smuggling network for the
purpose of illegally supplying arms to the Bosnian mujahideen. Drugs Paying for Conflict
in Europe
In the summer of 1991, Dutch drug lord Klaas Bruinsma, who had connections with members of
the Dutch elite (corporate and royal), the Colombian Cali cartel and the Yugoslav mafia, was
assassinated by either former cop Martin Hoogland (possibly working for intelligence), or the
Yugoslav mobster Branco Marianovic. In that same summer, the UN Security Council passed
Resolution 713 (the Yugoslav arms embargo), and soon after elements within Dutch customs and
police, in cooperation with Bruinsma's business heirs/infiltrators, started the controlled
shipment of large amounts of cocaine (estimated 25,000 kilo) and hashish (estimated 500,000
kilo) under the name "Operation Delta". The customs officials involved in Operation Delta
were most likely protected by their boss Fred Teeven, later rewarded by given the job of
State Secretary for Security and Justice. Mabel Wisse-Smit, daughter of a top banker
(possibly drug money launderer) and future sister-in-law of the current Dutch king, was first
the lover of drug lord Bruinsma (until his assassination, possibly she was sent to spy on
him) and then the lover of Wall St. banker Mohamed Sacirbey (Bosnia's ambassador to UN in
1992, Bosnia's foreign minister in 1995). Wisse-Smit (later a George Soros
protégé) co-founded the Dutch charity foundation War Child, which was used as a
cover for arms lobbying during the Bosnia war, and she is reported by Bosnian media to have
been involved in a specific arms deal with Egypt.
Alfred W. McCoy is the authority on drugs and CIA.
He's still doing great work, publishing books.His first, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is a classic.His latest, In the Shadows of the American Century, is brilliant analysis. Some videos on youtube, also. He has traveled, researched every ratline trail and outpost all over the globe.
Read him if you want the real facts.
It's good to know so many are well informed on this. I've read Rupert/Webb's stuff and have
Dark Alliance. There's a good movie/documentary out there about Webb but I can't recall the
name right now. Levine wrote about his undercover work in South American being thwarted by
the CIA. And Bo Gritz was trying to set up a deal where the US would buy up Khun Sa's opium
before it could be distributed but the USG wasn't interested. The amazing thing about the
Afghan ramp up in supply was seeing pictures of US soldiers patrolling in the middle of poppy
fields. Meanwhile at home, congress takes bribes (lobbying efforts) to help protect the legal
drug pushers from prosecution by the DEA shoving millions of pills across the country. A
friend's term for this kind of thing is "racket science."
Yeah, his updated edition is a must read. They do not handle the money directly, they let
the guerillas/rebels/revolutionaries handle that as a reward and provide protection from
legal authorities and access to markets using various agencies and mafia at both ends of the
supply-distribution chain. The dollars from the drugs pay for the weapons and support. The
profits go into nameless offshore Eurodollar accounts which then flow into London and Wall
Street as eurodollar loans in many multiples of the deposits (not to be confused with the
euro) to speculate in various markets and drive up asset prices. When the Taliban shut down
opium production we had the Dot.com crash (coincidence?). 100 billion a year can generate 1
trillion in dollars for speculators, and that was sorely missed (along with Clinton running a
surplus instead of a deficit)
There is so much evidence that in many places where they were or are engaged that drug flows
in the region increased and production increased in those areas known for growing the stuff.
Like any organization only those with a need to know have an idea and the majority are clean
and without information
While we are discussing history of the War on Drugs another example of a major consumer
organization (at the time of print) being turned into a vacuous shell....
The WIkipedia summary
"
The book describes the effects and risks of psychoactive drugs which were common in
contemporary use for recreational and nonmedical purposes.[2] The New York Times paraphrased
some major arguments from the book, saying "'Drug-free' treatment of heroin addiction almost
never works", "Nicotine can be as tough to beat as heroin", and "Good or bad, marijuana is
here to stay. The billions spent to fight it are wasted dollars."[3] The book identifies
marijuana as the most popular drug after tobacco, alcohol, and nicotine.[4] A reviewer for
the Journal of the American Medical Association summarized it by saying that "Brecher holds
that the division of drugs into licit and illicit categories is medically irrational and
rooted mainly in historical and sociological factors."[5]
"
karlof1. Amazing that you knew Mike. And yes, the willful ignorance is horribly frustrating.
The way I see it, almost all "Westerners" are willfully ignorant. We all must know that
the only way we live to the "standards" we do is because of the plunder of both our colonial
past and neoliberal present. But most choose to look aside.
For those who haven't seen it, please spend 17 minutes to see Mallence Bart-Williams give an incredible
talk.
"... Trump's vision would seem to include protection of core industries, existing demographics and cultural institutions combined with an end of "democratization," which will result in an acceptance of foreign autocratic or non-conforming regimes as long as they do not pose military or economic threats. ..."
"... Sounds good, I countered but there is a space between genius and idiocy and that would be called insanity, best illustrated by impulsive, irrational behavior coupled with acute hypersensitivity over perceived personal insults and a demonstrated inability to comprehend either generally accepted facts or basic norms of personal and group behavior. ..."
"... Trump's basic objections were that Washington is subsidizing the defense of a wealthy Europe and thereby maintaining unnecessarily a relationship that perpetuates a state of no-war no-peace between Russia and the West. ..."
"... And the neoconservatives and globalists are striking back hard to make sure that détente stays in a bottle hidden somewhere on a shelf in the White House cloak room. Always adept at the creation of new front groups, the neocons have now launched something called the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), with the goal of "uni[ting] the center-left and the center-right." Its founders include the redoubtable Max Boot, The Washington Post's Anne Appelbaum, the inevitable Bill Kristol, and Richard Hurwitz of Council on Foreign Relations. RDI's website predictably calls for "fresh thinking" and envisions "the best minds from different countries com[ing] together for both broad and discrete projects in the service of liberty and democracy in the West and beyond." It argues that "Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, besieged by authoritarianism, nationalism, and other illiberal forces. Far-right parties are gaining traction in Europe, Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on Russia and undermines democracy abroad, and America struggles with poisonous threats from the right and left." ..."
"... There are also the internal contradictions in what Trump appears to be doing, suggesting that a brighter future might not be on the horizon even if giving the Europeans a possibly deserved bloody nose over their refusal to spend money defending themselves provides some satisfaction. In the last week alone in Syria the White House has quietly renewed funding for the so-called White Helmets, a terrorist front group. It has also warned that it will take action against the Syrian government for any violation of a "de-escalation zone" in the country's southwest that has been under the control of Washington. That means that the U.S., which is in Syria illegally, is warning that country's legitimate government that it should not attempt to re-establish control over a region that was until recently ruled by terrorists. ..."
"... In Syria there have been two pointless cruise missile attacks and a trap set up to kill Russian mercenaries. Washington's stated intention is to destabilize and replace President Bashar al-Assad while continuing the occupation of the Syrian oil fields. And in Afghanistan there are now more troops on the ground than there were on inauguration day together with no plan to bring them home. It is reported that the Pentagon has a twenty-year plan to finish the job but no one actually believes it will work. ..."
"... The United States is constructing new drone bases in Africa and Asia. It also has a new military base in Israel which will serve as a tripwire for automatic American involvement if Israel goes to war and has given the green light to the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians. ..."
"... And then there are the petty insults that do not behoove a great power. A friend recently attended the Russian National Day celebration at the embassy in Washington. He reported that the U.S. government completely boycotted the event, together with its allies in Western Europe and the anglosphere, resulting in sparse attendance. It is the kind of slight that causes attitudes to shift when the time comes for serious negotiating. It is unnecessary and it is precisely the sort of thing that Russian President Vladimir Putin is referring to when he asks that his country be treated with "respect." The White House could have sent a delegation to attend the national day. Trump could have arranged it with a phone call, but he didn't. ..."
"... Winston Churchill once reportedly said that to "Jaw, jaw, jaw is better than war, war, war." As one of the twentieth century's leading warmongers, he may not have actually meant it, but in principle he was right. So let us hope for the best coming out of Singapore and also for the G-7 or what replaces it in the future. But don't be confused or diverted by presidential grandstanding. Watch what else is going on outside the limelight and, at least for the present, it is not pretty. ..."
"... Phil nails it as usual. Like him, I'm not very optimistic. Whether overall one approves or disapproves of Trump (and count me as a disapprover), it is obvious that most of the government is operating outside his control and this includes many of his own appointees. The continuities of US policy are far deeper than the apparent discontinuities. ..."
I had coffee with a foreign friend a week ago. The subject of Donald Trump inevitably came
up and my friend said that he was torn between describing Trump as a genius or as an idiot, but
was inclined to lean towards genius. He explained that Trump was willy-nilly establishing a new
world order that will succeed the institutionally exhausted post-World War 2 financial and
political arrangements that more-or-less established U.S. hegemony over the "free world." The
Bretton Woods agreement and the founding of the United Nations institutionalized the spread of
liberal democracy and free trade, creating a new, post war international order under the firm
control of the United States with the American dollar as the benchmark currency. Trump is now
rejecting what has become an increasingly dominant global world order in favor of returning to
a nineteenth century style nationalism that has become popular as countries struggle to retain
their cultural and political identifies. Trump's vision would seem to include protection of
core industries, existing demographics and cultural institutions combined with an end of
"democratization," which will result in an acceptance of foreign autocratic or non-conforming
regimes as long as they do not pose military or economic threats.
Sounds good, I countered but there is a space between genius and idiocy and that would be
called insanity, best illustrated by impulsive, irrational behavior coupled with acute
hypersensitivity over perceived personal insults and a demonstrated inability to comprehend
either generally accepted facts or basic norms of personal and group behavior.
Inevitably, I have other friends who follow foreign policy closely that have various
interpretations of the Trump phenomenon. One sees the respectful meeting with Kim Jong-un of
North Korea as a bit of brilliant statesmanship, potentially breaking a sixty-five year logjam
and possibly opening the door to further discussions that might well avert a nuclear war. And
the week also brought a Trump welcome suggestion that Russia should be asked to rejoin the G-7
group of major industrialized democracies, which also has to be seen as a positive step. There
has also been talk of a Russia-U.S. summit similar to that with North Korea to iron out
differences, an initiative that was first suggested by Trump and then agreed to by Russian
President Vladimir Putin. There will inevitably be powerful resistance to such an arrangement
coming primarily from the U.S. media and from Congress, but Donald Trump seems to fancy the
prospect and it just might take place.
One good friend even puts a positive spin on Trump's insulting behavior towards America's
traditional allies at the recent G-7 meeting in Canada. She observes that Trump's basic
objections were that Washington is subsidizing the defense of a wealthy Europe and thereby
maintaining unnecessarily a relationship that perpetuates a state of no-war no-peace between
Russia and the West. And the military costs exacerbate some genuine serious trade imbalances
that damage the U.S. economy. If Trumpism prevails, G-7 will become a forum for discussions of
trade and economic relations and will become less a club of nations aligned military against
Russia and, eventually, China. As she put it, changing its constituency would be a triumph of
"mercantilism" over "imperialism." The now pointless NATO alliance might well find itself
without much support if the members actually have to fully fund it proportionate to their GDPs
and could easily fade away, which would be a blessing for everyone.
My objection to nearly all the arguments being made in favor or opposed to what occurred in
Singapore last week is that the summit is being seen out of context, as is the outreach to
Russia at G-7. Those who are in some cases violently opposed to the outcome of the talks with
North Korea are, to be sure, sufferers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, where they hate
anything he does and spin their responses to cast him in the most negative terms possible. Some
others who choose to see daylight in spite of the essential emptiness of the "agreement" are
perhaps being overly optimistic while likewise ignoring what else is going on.
And the neoconservatives and globalists are striking back hard to make sure that
détente stays in a bottle hidden somewhere on a shelf in the White House cloak room.
Always adept at the creation of new front groups, the neocons have now launched something
called the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), with the goal of "uni[ting] the center-left and
the center-right." Its founders include the redoubtable Max Boot, The Washington Post's Anne
Appelbaum, the inevitable Bill Kristol, and Richard Hurwitz of Council on Foreign Relations.
RDI's website predictably calls for "fresh thinking" and envisions "the best minds from
different countries com[ing] together for both broad and discrete projects in the service of
liberty and democracy in the West and beyond." It argues that "Liberal democracy is in crisis
around the world, besieged by authoritarianism, nationalism, and other illiberal forces.
Far-right parties are gaining traction in Europe, Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on Russia
and undermines democracy abroad, and America struggles with poisonous threats from the right
and left."
There are also the internal contradictions in what Trump appears to be doing, suggesting
that a brighter future might not be on the horizon even if giving the Europeans a possibly
deserved bloody nose over their refusal to spend money defending themselves provides some
satisfaction. In the last week alone in Syria the White House has quietly renewed funding for
the so-called White Helmets, a terrorist front group. It has also warned that it will take
action against the Syrian government for any violation of a "de-escalation zone" in the
country's southwest that has been under the control of Washington. That means that the U.S.,
which is in Syria illegally, is warning that country's legitimate government that it should not
attempt to re-establish control over a region that was until recently ruled by
terrorists.
And then there is also Donald Trump's recent renunciation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA), eliminating a successful program that was preventing nuclear proliferation on
the part of Iran and replacing it with nothing whatsoever apart from war as a possible way of
dealing with the potential problem. Indeed, Trump has been prepared to use military force on
impulse, even when there is no clear casus belli. In Syria there have been two pointless
cruise missile attacks and a trap set up to kill Russian mercenaries. Washington's stated
intention is to destabilize and replace President Bashar al-Assad while continuing the
occupation of the Syrian oil fields. And in Afghanistan there are now more troops on the ground
than there were on inauguration day together with no plan to bring them home. It is reported
that the Pentagon has a twenty-year plan to finish the job but no one actually believes it will
work.
The United States is constructing new drone bases in Africa and Asia. It also has a new
military base in Israel which will serve as a tripwire for automatic American involvement if
Israel goes to war and has given the green light to the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians.
In Latin America, Washington has backed off from détente with Cuba and has been
periodically threatening some kind of intervention in Venezuela. In Europe, it is engaged in
aggressive war games on the Russian borders, most recently in Norway and Poland. The
Administration has ordered increased involvement in Somalia and has special ops units operating
– and dying – worldwide. Overall, it is hardly a return to the Garden of Eden.
And then there are the petty insults that do not behoove a great power. A friend recently
attended the Russian National Day celebration at the embassy in Washington. He reported that
the U.S. government completely boycotted the event, together with its allies in Western Europe
and the anglosphere, resulting in sparse attendance. It is the kind of slight that causes
attitudes to shift when the time comes for serious negotiating. It is unnecessary and it is
precisely the sort of thing that Russian President Vladimir Putin is referring to when he asks
that his country be treated with "respect." The White House could have sent a delegation to
attend the national day. Trump could have arranged it with a phone call, but he didn't.
Winston Churchill once reportedly said that to "Jaw, jaw, jaw is better than war, war, war."
As one of the twentieth century's leading warmongers, he may not have actually meant it, but in
principle he was right. So let us hope for the best coming out of Singapore and also for the
G-7 or what replaces it in the future. But don't be confused or diverted by presidential
grandstanding. Watch what else is going on outside the limelight and, at least for the present,
it is not pretty.
The Establishment (which includes both major political parties) is furious that Trump may be
defusing the (very real) nuclear threat from Kim for the price of a few plane tickets and
dinners, while the Establishment was gung-ho for throwing away a few trillion dollars,
hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, and our nation's once-good reputation in the process
of neutralizing Saddam Hussein, who didn't even have any nukes to begin with. Yep, they're
sore all right.
Phil nails it as usual. Like him, I'm not very optimistic. Whether overall one approves or
disapproves of Trump (and count me as a disapprover), it is obvious that most of the
government is operating outside his control and this includes many of his own appointees. The
continuities of US policy are far deeper than the apparent discontinuities.
"... However, the truth – at least in retrospect – was that, in the Cold War years, the Soviets were actually doing Washington a strange, if unnoted, favor. Across much of the Eurasian continent, and other places from Cuba to the Middle East, Soviet power and the never-ending contest for influence and dominance that went with it always reminded American leaders that their own power had its limits. ..."
"... This, as the 21st century should have (but hasn't) made clear, was no small thing. It still seemed obvious then that American power could not be total. There were things it could not do, places it could not control, dreams its leaders simply couldn't have. Though no one ever thought of it that way, from 1945 to 1991, the United States, like the Soviet Union, was, after a fashion, "contained." ..."
"... In those years, the Russians were, in essence, saving Washington from itself. Soviet power was a tangible reminder to American political and military leaders that certain areas of the planet remained no-go zones (except in what, in those years, were called "the shadows"). ..."
"... The Soviet Union, in short, rescued Washington from both the fantasy and the hell of going it alone, even if Americans only grasped that reality at the most subliminal of levels. ..."
Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally
knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be
humorous, if it weren't so grim.
If you look, you can find examples of this just about
anywhere. Here, for instance, is a passage in The New York Times from a piece on the
topsy-turvy Trumpian negotiations that preceded the Singapore summit. "The Americans and South
Koreans," wrote
reporter Motoko Rich, "want to persuade the North that continuing to funnel most of the
country's resources into its military and nuclear programs shortchanges its citizens' economic
well-being. But the North does not see the two as mutually exclusive."
Think about that for a moment. The US has, of course, embarked on a trillion-dollar-plus
upgrade of its already massive nuclear arsenal (and
that's before the cost overruns even begin). Its Congress and president have for years proved
eager to sink at least a
trillion dollars annually into the budget of the national security state (a figure that's
still rising and
outpaces by far that of any other power on the planet), while its own infrastructure
sags and crumbles. And
yet it finds the impoverished North Koreans puzzling when they, too, follow such an extreme
path.
"Clueless" is not a word Americans ordinarily apply to themselves as a country, a people, or
a government. Yet how applicable it is.
And when it comes to cluelessness, there's another, far stranger path the United States has
been following since at least the George W Bush moment that couldn't be more consequential and
yet somehow remains the least noticed of all. On this subject, Americans don't have a clue. In
fact, if you could put the United States on a psychiatrist's couch, this might be the place to
start.
America contained
In a way, it's the oldest story on Earth: the rise and fall of empires. And note the plural
there. It was never – not until recently at least – "empire," always "empires."
Since the 15th century, when the fleets of the first European imperial powers broke into the
larger world with subjugation in mind, it was invariably a contest of many. There were at least
three or sometimes significantly more imperial powers rising and contesting for dominance or
slowly falling from it.
This was, by definition, the history of great powers on this planet: the challenging rise,
the challenged decline. Think of it for so many centuries as the essential narrative of
history, the story of how it all happened until at least 1945, when just two "superpowers," the
United States and the Soviet Union, found themselves facing off on a global scale.
Of the two, the US was always stronger, more powerful, and far wealthier. It theoretically
feared the Russian Bear, the Evil Empire , which it
worked assiduously to " contain " behind that famed Iron
Curtain and whose adherents in the US, always modest in number, were subjected to a mania of
fear and suppression.
However, the truth – at least in retrospect – was that, in the Cold War years,
the Soviets were actually doing Washington a strange, if unnoted, favor. Across much of the
Eurasian continent, and other places from Cuba to the Middle East, Soviet power and the
never-ending contest for influence and dominance that went with it always reminded American
leaders that their own power had its limits.
This, as the 21st century should have (but hasn't) made clear, was no small thing. It still
seemed obvious then that American power could not be total. There were things it could not do,
places it could not control, dreams its leaders simply couldn't have. Though no one ever
thought of it that way, from 1945 to 1991, the United States, like the Soviet Union, was, after
a fashion, "contained."
In those years, the Russians were, in essence, saving Washington from itself. Soviet power
was a tangible reminder to American political and military leaders that certain areas of the
planet remained no-go zones (except in what, in those years, were called "the shadows").
The Soviet Union, in short, rescued Washington from both the fantasy and the hell of going
it alone, even if Americans only grasped that reality at the most subliminal of levels.
That was the situation until December 1991 when, at the end of a centuries-long imperial
race for power (and the never-ending arms race that went with it), there was just one gigantic
power left standing on Planet Earth. It told you something about the thinking then that, when
the Soviet Union imploded, the initial reaction in Washington wasn't triumphalism (though that
came soon enough) but utter shock, a disbelieving sense that something no one had expected,
predicted, or even imagined had nonetheless happened. To that very moment, Washington had
continued to plan for a two-superpower world until the end of time.
America
uncontained
Soon enough, though, the Washington elite came to see what happened as, in the phrase of the
moment, " the end of
history ." Given the wreckage of the Soviet Union, it seemed that an ultimate victory had
been won by the very country its politicians would soon come to call "the last superpower," the
"
indispensable " nation, the " exceptional
" state, a land great beyond imagining (until, at least, Donald Trump hit
the campaign trail with a slogan that implied greatness wasn't all-American any more).
In reality, there were a variety of paths open to the "last superpower" at that moment.
There was even, however briefly, talk of a "peace dividend" – of the possibility that, in
a world without contesting superpowers, taxpayer dollars might once again be invested not in
the sinews of war-making but of peacemaking (particularly in infrastructure and the well-being
of the country's citizens).
Such talk, however, lasted only a year or two and always in a minor key before being
relegated to Washington's attic. Instead, with only a few rickety "rogue" states left to deal
with – like gulp North Korea, Iraq and Iran – that money never actually headed
home, and neither did the thinking that went with it.
Consider it the good fortune of the geopolitical dreamers soon to take the reins in
Washington that the first Gulf War of 1990-1991, which ended less than a year before the Soviet
Union collapsed, prepared the way for quite a different style of thinking. That instant victory
led to a new kind of militarized dreaming in which a highly tech-savvy military, like the one
that had driven Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait in such short order, would
be capable of doing anything on a planet without serious opposition.
And yet, from the beginning, there were signs suggesting a far grimmer future. To take but
one infamous example, Americans still remember the Black Hawk Down moment of 1993
when the world's greatest military fell victim to a Somali warlord and local militias and found
itself incapable of imposing its will on one of the least impressive not-quite-states on the
planet (a place
still frustrating that military a quarter-century later).
In that post-1991 world, however, few in Washington even considered that the 20th century
had loosed another phenomenon on the world, that of insurgent national liberation movements,
generally leftist rebellions, across what had been the colonial world – the very world of
competing empires now being tucked into the history books – and it hadn't gone away. In
the 21st century, such insurgent movements, now largely religious, or terror-based, or both,
would turn out to offer a grim new version of containment to the last
superpower.
Unchaining the indispensable nation
On September 11, 2001, a canny global jihadist by the name of Osama bin Laden
sent his air force (four hijacked US passenger jets) and his precision weaponry (19
suicidal, mainly Saudi followers) against three iconic targets in the American pantheon: the
Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and undoubtedly the Capitol or the White House (neither of
which was hit because one of those jets crashed in a field in
Pennsylvania). In doing so, in a sense bin Laden not only loosed a literal hell on Earth, but
unchained
the last superpower.
William Shakespeare would have had a word for what followed: hubris. But give the top
officials of the Bush administration (and the neocons who supported them) a break. There had
never been a moment like it: a moment of one. A single great power left alone, triumphant, on
planet Earth. Just one superpower – wealthy beyond compare, its increasingly high-tech
military unmatched, its only true rival in a state of collapse – had now been challenged
by a small jihadist group.
To president Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, and the rest of their crew, it seemed like
nothing short of a heaven-sent opportunity. As they came out of the shock of 9/11, of that "
Pearl
Harbor of the 21st century ," it was as if they had found a magic formula in the ruins of
those iconic buildings for the ultimate control of the planet. As secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld would instruct an aide
at the Pentagon that day, "Go massive. Sweep it up. Things related and not."
Within days, things related and not were indeed being swept up. The country was almost
instantly said to be "at war," and soon that conflict even had a name, the Global War on
Terror. Nor was that war to be against just al-Qaeda, or even one country, an Afghanistan
largely ruled by the Taliban. More than 60 countries said to have "terror
networks" of various sorts found themselves almost instantly in the administration's potential
gunsights. And that was just to be the beginning of it all.
In October 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan was launched. In the spring of 2003, the
invasion of Iraq followed, and those were only the initial steps in what was increasingly
envisioned as the imposition of a Pax Americana on the Greater Middle East.
There could be no doubt, for instance, that Iran and Syria, too, would
soon go the way of Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush's top officials had been nursing just such dreams
since, in 1997, many of them formed a
think-tank (the first ever to enter the White House) called the Project for the New American
Century and began to write out what
were then the fantasies of figures nowhere near power. By 2003, they were power itself and
their dreams, if anything, had grown even more grandiose.
In addition to imagining a political Pax Republicana in the United States, they truly
dreamed of a future planetary Pax Americana in which, for the first time in history, a single
power would, in some fashion, control the whole works, the Earth itself.
And this wasn't to be a passing matter either. The Bush administration's "unilateralism"
rested on a conviction that it could actually create a future in which no country or even bloc
of countries would ever come close to matching or challenging US military power. The
administration's National Security Strategy of 2002 put the
matter bluntly: The US was to "build and maintain" a military, in the phrase of the moment,
" beyond challenge
."
They had little doubt that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up,
destructive force on Earth, hostile states would be "shocked and awed" by a simple demonstration of
its power, while friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel as well. After all,
as Bush said at a Veterans of
Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the US military was "the greatest force for human liberation
the world has ever known."
Though there was much talk at the time about the "liberation" of Afghanistan and then Iraq,
at least in their imaginations the true country being liberated was the planet's lone
superpower. Although the Bush administration was officially considered a "conservative" one,
its key officials were geopolitical dreamers of the first order and their vision of the world
was the very opposite of conservative. It harkened back to nothing and looked forward to
everything.
It was radical in ways that should have, but didn't, take the American public's breath away;
radical in ways that had never been seen before.
Shock and awe for the last
superpower
Think of what those officials did in the post-9/11 moment as the ultimate act of greed. They
tried to swallow a whole planet. They were determined to make it a planet of one in a way that
had never before been seriously imagined.
It was, to say the least, a vision of madness. Even in a moment when it truly did seem
– to them at least – that all constraints had been taken off, an administration of
genuine conservatives might have hesitated. Its top officials might, at least, have approached
the post-Soviet situation with a modicum of caution and modesty.
But not George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and pals. In the face of what seemed
like the ultimate in possibilities they proved clueless when it came to the possibility that
anything on Earth might have a shot at containing them.
Even among their critics, who could have imagined then that, more than 16 years later,
having faced only lightly armed enemies of various sorts, still wealthy beyond compare, still
with a military funded in a way the next seven
countries couldn't cumulatively match,
the United States would have won literally nothing?
Who could have imagined that, unlike so many preceding imperial powers (including the US of
the earlier Cold War era), it would have been able to establish control over nothing at all;
that, instead, from Afghanistan to Syria, Iraq deep into Africa, it would find itself in a
state of "
infinite war " and utter frustration on a planet filled with ever more failed
states , destroyed
cities , displaced people , and
right-wing "populist" governments, including the one in Washington?
Who could have imagined that, with a peace dividend no longer faintly conceivable, this
country would have found itself not just in decline, but – a new term is needed to catch
the essence of this curious moment – in what might be called self-decline?
Yes, a new power, China, is finally rising – and doing so on a planet that seems
itself to be
going down . Here, then, is a conclusion that might be drawn from the quarter-century-plus
in which America was both unchained and largely alone.
The Earth is admittedly a small orb in a vast universe, but the history of this century so
far suggests one reality about which America's rulers proved utterly clueless: After so many
hundreds of years of imperial struggle, this planet still remains too big, too disparate, too
ornery to be controlled by a single power. What the Bush administration did was simply take one
gulp too many and the result has been a kind of national (and planetary) indigestion.
Despite what it looked like in Washington once upon a time, the disappearance of the Soviet
Union proved to be no gift at all, but a disaster of the first order. It removed all sense of
limits from America's political class and led to a tale of greed on a planetary scale. In the
process, it also set the US on a path to self-decline.
The history of greed in our time has yet to be written, but what a story it will someday
make. In it, the greed of those geopolitical dreamers will intersect with the greed of an ever
wealthier, ever more gilded 1%, of the billionaires who were preparing to swallow whole the
political system of that last superpower and grab so much of the wealth of the planet, leaving
so little for others.
Whether you're talking about the urge to control the planet militarily or financially, what
took place in these years could, in the end, result in ruin of a historic kind. To use a
favored phrase from the Bush years, one of these days we Americans may be facing little short
of "regime change" on a planetary scale. And what a piece of shock and awe that's likely to
prove to be.
All of us, of course, now live on the planet Bush's boys tried to swallow whole. They left
us in a world of infinite war, infinite harm, and in Donald Trump's America where cluelessness
has been raised to a new power.
A 29-year-old former CIA computer engineer, Joshua Adam Schulte, was indicted Monday by the
Department of Justice on charges of masterminding the largest leak of classified information in the spy agency's history .
Schulte, who created malware for the U.S. Government to break into adversaries computers, has been sitting in jail since his August
24, 2017 arrest on unrelated charges of posessing and transporting child pornography - which was discovered in a search of his New
York apartment after Schulte was named as the prime suspect in the cyber-breach one week after WikiLeaks published the "Vault 7"
series of classified files. Schulte was arrested and jailed on the child porn charges while the DOJ ostensibly built their case leading
to Monday's additional charges.
[I]nstead of charging Mr. Schulte in the breach, referred to as the Vault 7 leak, prosecutors charged him last August with
possessing child pornography, saying agents had found 10,000 illicit images on a server he created as a business in 2009 while
studying at the University of Texas at Austin.
Court papers quote messages from Mr. Schulte that suggest he was aware of the encrypted images of children being molested by
adults on his computer, though he advised one user, "Just don't put anything too illegal on there." -
New York Times
Monday's DOJ announcement adds new charges related to stealing classified national defense information from the Central Intelligence
Agency in 2016 and transmitting it to WikiLeaks ("Organization-1").
The Vault 7 release - a series of 24 documents which began to publish on March 7, 2017 - reveal that the CIA had a wide variety
of tools to use against adversaries, including the
ability to "spoof" its malware to appear as though it was created by a foreign intelligence agency , as well as the ability to
take control of Samsung Smart TV's and surveil a target using a "Fake Off" mode in which they appear to be powered down while eavesdropping.
The CIA's hand crafted hacking techniques pose a problem for the agency. Each technique it has created forms a "fingerprint"
that can be used by forensic investigators to attribute multiple different attacks to the same entity .
...
The CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen'
from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution
by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from .
Schulte previously worked for the NSA before joining the CIA, then "left the intelligence community in 2016 and took a job in
the private sector," according to a statement reviewed in May by
The Washington Post .
Schulte also claimed that he reported "incompetent management and bureaucracy" at the CIA to that agency's inspector general
as well as a congressional oversight committee. That painted him as a disgruntled employee, he said, and when he left the CIA
in 2016, suspicion fell upon him as "the only one to have recently departed [the CIA engineering group] on poor terms," Schulte
wrote. - WaPo
Part of that investigation, reported WaPo, has been analyzing whether the Tor network - which allows internet users to hide their
location (in theory) "was used in transmitting classified information."
In other hearings in Schulte's case, prosecutors have alleged that he used Tor at his New York apartment, but they have provided
no evidence that he did so to disclose classified information. Schulte's attorneys have said that Tor is used for all kinds of
communications and have maintained that he played no role in the Vault 7 leaks. - WaPo
Schulte says he's innocent: " Due to these unfortunate coincidences the FBI ultimately made the snap judgment that I was guilty
of the leaks and targeted me," Schulte said. He launched
Facebook and GoFundMe pages
to raise money for his defense, which despite a $50 million goal,
has yet to r eceive a single donation.
The Post noted in May, the Vault 7 release was one of the most significant leaks in the CIA's history , "exposing secret cyberweapons
and spying techniques that might be used against the United States, according to current and former intelligence officials."
The CIA's toy chest includes:
Tools code named " Marble " can misdirect forensic investigators from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to
their agency by inserted code fragments in foreign languages. The tool was in use as recently as 2016. Per the
WikiLeaks release:
"The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi.
This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator
was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators
even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages."
iPads / iPhones / Android devices and Smart TV's are all susceptible to hacks and malware. The agency's "Dark Matter" project
reveals that the CIA has been bugging "factory fresh" iPhones since at least 2008 through suppliers. Another, " Sonic Screwdriver
" allows the CIA to execute code on a Mac laptop or desktop while it's booting up.
The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell's 1984, but "Weeping Angel",
developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB)
, which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.
The Obama administration promised to disclose all serious vulnerabilities they found to Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other
US-based manufacturers. The US Government broke that commitment.
"Year Zero" documents show that the CIA breached the Obama administration's commitments. Many of the vulnerabilities used in
the CIA's cyber arsenal are pervasive and some may already have been found by rival intelligence agencies or cyber criminals.
In addition to its operations in Langley, Virginia the CIA also uses the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt as a covert base for its
hackers covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
CIA hackers operating out of the Frankfurt consulate (
"Center for Cyber Intelligence Europe" or CCIE)
are given diplomatic ("black") passports and State Department cover.
Instant messaging encryption is a joke.
These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking
the "smart" phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.
The CIA laughs at Anti-Virus / Anti-Malware programs.
"Joshua Schulte, a former employee of the CIA, allegedly used his access at the agency to transmit classified material to an outside
organization . During the course of this investigation, federal agents also discovered alleged child pornography in Schulte's New
York City residence ," said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman.
On March 7, 2017, Organization-1 released on the Internet classified national defense material belonging to the CIA (the "Classified
Information"). In 2016, SCHULTE, who was then employed by the CIA, stole the Classified Information from a computer network at
the CIA and later transmitted it to Organization-1. SCHULTE also intentionally caused damage without authorization to a CIA computer
system by granting himself unauthorized access to the system, deleting records of his activities, and denying others access to
the system . SCHULTE subsequently made material false statements to FBI agents concerning his conduct at the CIA.
Schulte faces 135 years in prison if convicted on all 13 charges:
Illegal Gathering of National Defense Information, 18 U.S.C. §§ 793(b) and 2
Illegal Transmission of Lawfully Possessed National Defense Information, 18 U.S.C. §§ 793(d) and 2
Illegal Transmission of Unlawfully Possessed National Defense Information, 18 U.S.C. §§ 793(e) and 2
Unauthorized Access to a Computer To Obtain Classified Information, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030(a)(1) and 2
Theft of Government Property, 18 U.S.C. §§ 641 and 2
Unauthorized Access of a Computer to Obtain Information from a Department or Agency of the United States, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030(a)(2)
and 2
Causing Transmission of a Harmful Computer Program, Information, Code, or Command, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030(a)(5) and 2
Making False Statements, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1001 and 2
Obstruction of Justice, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1503 and 2
Receipt of Child Pornography, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2252A(a)(2)(B), (b)(1), and 2
Possession of Child Pornography, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2252A(a)(5)(B), (b)(2), and 2
Transportation of Child Pornography, 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(a)(1)
Seems like everyone has kiddy porn magically appear and get discovered after they piss off the deep state bastards.
And the best part is that it's probably just the deep state operatives' own private pedo collections that they use to frame
anyone who they don't like.
I was thinking about the advancement of the technology necessary for that. They can do perfect fake stills already.
My thought is that you will soon need to film yourself 24/7 (with timestamps, shared with a blockchain-like verifiably) so
that you can disprove fake video evidence by having a filmed alibi.
Ironically, every single ex gov whistle blower (/pedophile) has the exact same kiddie porn data on their secret server (hidden
in plane view at the apartment). Joe CIA probably has a zip drive preloaded with titled data sets like "Podesta's Greatest Hits",
"Hillary's Honey bunnies" or "Willy go to the zoo". Like the mix tapes you used to make for a new gal you were trying to date.
Depending upon the mood of the agent in charge, 10,000 images of Weiner's "Warm Pizza" playlist magically appear on the server
in 3-2-1... Gotcha!
These false fingerprint tactics were all over the trump accusations which started the whole Russia Russia Russia ordeal. And
the Russia ordeal was conceptualized in a paid report to Podesta by the Bensenson Group called the Salvage Program when it was
appearant that Trump could possible win and the DNC needed ideas on how to throw the voters off at the polls. Russia is coming
/Red dawn was #1 or #2 on the list of 7 recommended ploys. The final one was crazy.. If Trump appeared to win the election, imagery
of Jesus and an Alien Invasion was to be projected into the skies to cause mass panic and create a demand for free zanex to be
handed out to the panic stricken.
Don't forget Black Lives Matters. That was idea #4 of this Bensenson report, to create civil unrest and a race war. Notice
how BLM and Antifa manically disappeared after Nov 4. All a ploy by the Dems & the deep state to remain in control of the countrys
power.
Back to the topic at hand. Its a wonder he didn't get Seth Riched. Too many porn servers and we will begin to question the
legitimacy. Oh wait...
You won't find any kiddie porn on Hillary's or DeNiros laptop. Oh its there. You just will never ever hear about it.
The Vault 7 release - a series of 24 documents which began to publish on March 7, 2017 - reveal that the CIA had a wide
variety of tools to use against adversaries, including
the ability to "spoof" its malware to appear
as though it was created by a foreign intelligence agency ....
It probably can spoof child porn as well.
Is he charged with copyright infringement for pirating child porn?
The intel community sure has a knack for sussing out purveyors of child pornography. It's probably just a coincidence govt
agencies and child pornography are inextricably linked.
It's very easy for a criminal spook to plant child porn on some poor slob's machine - especially when they want to keep him
on the hook to sink his ass for something bigger in the future. Who knows... this guy may have done some shit but I'm willing
to bet he was entirely targeted by these IC assholes. Facing 135 years in prison... yet that baggy ass cunt Hillary walks free...
Funny how they always seem to have a "sting" operation in progress when there's anyone the DC rats want to destroy but strangely,
or not, silent as the grave when one of the special people are fingered.
Of all these things the C_A can do, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that planting CP on a computer of someone you
don't like would be a piece of cake, comparatively speaking.
Of all these things the C_A can do, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that planting CP on a computer of someone you
don't like would be a piece of cake, comparatively speaking.
The "Spoofing" or Digital Finger Print & Parallel Construction tools that can be used against Governments, Individuals, enemies
& adversaries are Chilling.
The CIA can not only hack into anything -- they can download any "evidence" they want onto your phone or computer. Child pornography,
national secrets, you name it. Then they can blackmail you, threatening prosecution for whatever crap they have planted, then
"found" on your computer. They can also "spoof" the source of such downloads -- for instance, if they want to "prove" that something
on your computer (or Donald Trump's computer) came from a "Russian source" -- they can spoof the IP address of a Russian source.
The take-away: no digital evidence the CIA or NSA produces on any subject whatsoever can be trusted. No digital evidence should
be acceptable in any case where the government has an interest, because they have the complete ability to fabricate and implant
any evidence on any iphone or computer. And worse: they have intentionally created these digital vulnerabilities and pushed them
onto the whole world via Microsoft and Google. Government has long been at war with liberty, claiming that we need to give up
liberty to be secure. Now we learn that they have been deliberately sabotaging our security, in order to augment their own power.
Time to shut down the CIA and all the other spy agencies. They're not keeping us free OR secure, and they're doing it deliberately.
Their main function nowadays seems to be lying us into wars against countries that never attacked us, and had no plans to do so.
The Echelon Computer System Catch Everything
The Flagging goes to Notify the Appropriate Alphabet,,,...Key Words Phrases...Algorithms,...It all gets sucked up and chewed
on and spat out to the surmised computed correct departments...That simple.
Effective immediately defund, Eliminate & Supeona it's Agents, Officials & Dept. Heads in regard to the Mass Surveillance,
Global Espionage Spying network & monitoring of a President Elect by aforementioned Agencies & former President Obama, AG Lynch
& DIA James Clapper, CIA John Breanan.
Since 911, they've been "protecting" the shit out of us. "protecting" away every last fiber of liberty. Was watching some fact-based
media about the CIA's failed plan to install Yeltsin's successor via a Wallstreet banking cartel bet (see, LTCM implosion). The
ultimate objectives were to rape and loot post-Soviet Russian resources and enforce regime change. It's such a tired playbook
at this point. Who DOESNT know about this sort of affront? Apparently even nobel prize economists cant prevent a nation from failing
lol. The ultimate in vanity; our gubmint and its' shadow controllers.
This is because people who are smart enough to write walware for the CIA send messages in the clear about child porn and are
too dumb to encrypt images with a key that would take the lifetime of the universe to break.
Next his mother will be found to have a tax problem and his brother's credit rating zeroed out.
Meanwhile Comey will be found to have been "careless".
Yeah I don't believe for a second that this guy had anything to do with child porn. Not like Obama and his hotdogs or Clintons
at pedo island, or how bout uncle pervie podesta? go after them, goons and spooks. They (intelligence agencies) falsely accuse
people of exactly what they are ass-deep in. loses credibility with me when the CIA clowns or NSA fuck ups accuse anyone of child
porn; especially one of their former employees who is 'disgruntled'. LOL. another spook railroad job done on a whistleblower.
fuck the CIA and all 17 alphabet agencies who spy on us 24/7. Just ask, if you want to snoop on me. I may even tell you what I'm
up to because I have nothing that I would hide since, I don't give a shit about you or whether you approve of what I am doing.
"Yeah I don't believe for a second that this guy had anything to do with child porn."
Speculation by my part: He was running a Tor server, and the porn originated from other Tor users. If that is the case ( it
would be easy for law enforcement to just assume it was his) law enforcement enjoys a quick and easy case.
It really doesn't matter if someone wants to hide. That is their right. Only Nazi's like our spy agencies would use the old
Gestapo line, "If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about. Or better yet, you should let me turn your life
upside down if you have nothing to hide. " Bullshit! It's none of their fucking business. How bout that? Spooks and secret clowns
CAN and DO frame anybody for whatever or murder whomever they wish. So why WOULDNT people be afraid when government goons start
sticking their big snouts into their lives??? They can ruin your life for the sake of convenience. Zee Furor is not pleased with
your attitude, comrade.
"... The declaration of the DPRK came after the US- backed Rhee declared the ROK and reneged on peninsula-wide elections that had been agreed to at the UN. I guess you can call it a civil war, but that really isn't germane to the question: Why can the US not stomach any rapprochement between the two de facto Koreas two-thirds of a century later, while it was willing to accept a reunification of a historically more aggressive Germany? ..."
"... According to I.F. Stone in his "Hidden History of the Korean War" (1952), the intent of the Korean War was to destabilize the Chinese Revolution which had consolidated power the year before. ..."
Fearing that peace might break out with the two Koreas talking to each
other, Washington instructed South Korean President Moon Jae-in to
keep the message about anything but peace
. It is not just Trump. A former top official for the Obama
administration warned Moon that South Korea was not going to get anywhere with the North Koreans unless they
have the "US behind them". Humiliating, that is like saying that Moon's "button" is not as big as Kim's. The
metaphor is exactly how the Washington elite see South Korea: as Washington's obedient eunuch. The official
went on to say, "If South Koreans are viewed as running off the leash, it will exacerbate tension within the
alliance". Running off the leash! Now more humiliation, is South Korea a US poodle? Instead President Moon
Jae-in is showing that he has teeth, and that South Koreans want their country back from US humiliating
domination.
During the talks it was agreed for North
Korea to participate in the Winter Olympics in February. The two countries will even march together under a
common flag, and future talks between the two are planned to reduce tension. Trump continues to bluster,
while the two Koreas have "
engaged
in the most substantive direct talks in years". Neocons such as John Bolton are
outraged
that North Korea has proven once again that it is willing to come to the negotiation table.
Bolton says it is a dirty trick and that North Korea is "taking advantage of a weak South Korean
government", adding more insulting humiliation. To Washington, South Korea talking peace is weak, running
off the leash and going it alone without its US master. The North using the peace option is seen as a
provocation and propaganda that Washington will not tolerate. In retaliation the
US sent
more nukes to Guam, and put the state of Hawaii on a full alert that a "
ballistic
missile was inbound
". The nukes outbound to Guam are real; the ones inbound to Hawaii were fake, just
like the ability of the billion dollar THAADS to shoot them down. Too conveniently the Hawaii false alarm
comes just as the US and its vassals are readying for what the US plots to be a
show of solidarity
and unity on killer sanctions against North Korea. The US wants its chorus to perform
the tragedy of telling North Korea to obey or watch 500,000 of their children die. As Madeleine Albright
said about Iraq's 500,000 dead children from US sanctions, "
the
price is worth it
". The US does not think the price of diplomacy is worth it though.
The US continues to block efforts at
diplomacy, and express its contempt for South Korea's elected President Moon Jae-in. He was elected on a
peace platform
by the South Korean people. Moon's predecessor Park Geun-hye sang from the US hymnbook
until she got caught with her hand in the cookie jar. In 2017 the South Korean people went to the street and
demanded the granddaughter of former dictator Park Chung Hee be impeached, and now she is in prison. Peace
is not anything that Washington's plutocrats want to hear, although the South Korean people like the sound
of it, and elected Moon their president by a wide margin. The self-interests in Washington preferred the
corrupt warmonger Park. She carried the US's tune with perfect pitch, even (
allegedly
)
conspired to assassinate the North's Kim Jong-Un. The message of the humiliation from US apparatchiks is
that if Moon does not change his tune the US will try to undermine South Korea's democracy with a regime
change project might be in his future. The US habitually meddles in other's elections, and wants to keep
tensions high on the Korean peninsula, keep the South Koreans in line, make North Korea a boogeyman,
frighten the American people, station 30,000 US troops in South Korea with wartime operational control, buy
more multi-billion dollar THAADS from Lockheed Martin, and divide the Korean people. Even at the risks of a
nuclear war, which the US proposes
making easier
.
The establishment
nearly went to war
with North Korea in 1994 until Bill Clinton negotiated peace. The neocons in
Washington and the mainstream media keep saying that North Korea refused to come to the negotiating table.
Clinton's decision to use diplomacy instead of threats proved the warmongers wrong again. It was the US all
along that refused to talk, preferring belligerence and threats just as it does now. Once Clinton showed a
willingness to bargain, then a nuclear deal was struck. The deal was called the
Agreed Framework
. What North Korea wanted then for it to suspend its nuclear program was for the US to
halt the massive military exercises on North Korea's border, a non-aggression guarantee, compensation for
abandoning its needed electric producing nuclear reactors, and relations with the US. Now the situation with
North Korea is back to where it was in 1994. George W. Bush reversed the path of peace when he came into the
White House. In 2001 he tore up the Agreed Framework, put North Korea on the
Axis of Evil
list in 2002,
invaded Iraq
in 2003, and
hanged Saddam
Hussein in 2006. Very predictably North Korea resumed its nuclear program for self-defense
against a paranoid and unpredictable USA that sees enemies to attack under every bed.
Bush scrapped
the Agreed Framework, and told then South Korean President Kim Dae-jung that future talks
with North Korea were dead. Kim Dae-jung had come to visit Bush shortly after winning the Nobel Peace Prize
for his
Sunshine Policies
of peace with North Korea. Instead of welcoming President Kim and his peace efforts,
Bush humiliated him by shockingly calling North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il a dwarf. North Korea predictably
withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 and resumed work on its nuclear program. A month later
Bush called out North Korea to pay particular attention to Libya as an example of how a country is welcomed
into the international community when it unilaterally gives up its nuclear defense program. North Korea paid
attention and it was listening when Muammar Gaddafi said in a 2008 speech that "
one
of these days America may hang us
like they did Saddam ". In 2011 Gaddafi met a
brutal death
at the hands of US proxies; he was anally raped with a bayonet and left to rot on public
display in a meat locker. Before Gaddafi's corpse was even cold a hysterically glowing Hillary Clinton
cackled "
we
came, we saw, he died", hahaha
". Now fast forward to 2018 and the US is threatening war against North
Korea again.
The US has been abusing Korea since 1871
when it first invaded it with an expeditionary force of Marines to forcibly open trade. Korea just wanted to
be left alone, but the US forced Korea to sign an exclusive trade treaty in 1882 at the point of a gun. In
exchange for that unequal trade agreement the US promised Korea protection. In 1910 the US proved that its
promise was worthless. Instead of protection, President Theodore Roosevelt stabbed Korea in the back by
conspiring with Japan. Roosevelt had enthusiastically supported Japan in the Russo-Japanese War. Japan
pre-emptively attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in a sneak attack. Teddy congratulated Japan for
their brilliance in 1941 his nephew Franklin would call a Japanese sneak attack "a day of infamy". After
Japan and Russia ground down to a bloody stalemate, Japan secretly appealed to Teddy to open negotiations.
Roosevelt acted as a (dis)honest broker in negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth, for which he won the Nobel
Peace Prize. Japan won the spoils of the war. Roosevelt had a secret deal that Japan could have Korea and
the US would take the Philippines. In 1945 the US deceived Korea again. Instead of liberating Korea from the
Japanese occupation, the US occupied Korea for 3 more years until 1948 and then blocked its independence.
The US was largely responsible for the division of Korea and backing dictatorships in South Korea until
1993. Americans do not know the US treachery, but Koreans do. Why would they trust the USA now?
In order to understand North Korea, one
must start with the "anticolonial and anti-imperial state growing out of a half-century of Japanese colonial
rule and a half-century of continuous confrontation with a hegemonic United States", as Bruce Cumings writes
in his book
North Korea: Another Country
. In order to understand South Korea one should take a similar approach. The
Japanese colonization of Korea in 1910 was greeted with cheers from the USA. Teddy Roosevelt encouraged
Japan to have its own
Japanese Monroe Doctrine
for Northeast Asia. The Japanese were harsh rulers, and Koreans remember
colonial times as a national humiliation. Under the Japanese the Korean economy grew rapidly, but Koreans
will rightly argue that little of it helped the average Korean. Like the Korean "comfort women" sex slaves
during World War Two, Koreans were forced to obey their Japanese masters. Some Koreans complied reluctantly,
some willingly and some enthusiastically. Many, but not all of the enthusiastic collaborators came from the
landed aristocratic class of Koreans known as the
yangban
. Other collaborators were traitors that saw advancing their economic and social status by
collaborating. After the division of Korea in 1945 many of the yangban class and collaborators fled to the
South where they felt safe with the US occupation army, and for good reasons. The North was redistributing
the yangban's vast landholdings. Many of the yangban and collaborators were safer in the US occupied south.
Some went on to achieve leadership in business and government in South Korea. For instance, the future South
Korean dictator Park Chung-hee (from 1963 until his assassination in 1979) had collaborated with the
Japanese as a lieutenant in the Japanese army in Manchuria fighting against the Korean resistance fighters.
Korea has a long history of thousands of
years. It united as one people in the 7
th
century and remained so until after World War Two. The
US had started planning for the occupation of Korea six months after Pearl Harbor, according to Bruce
Cumings. The day after Japan surrendered a future Secretary of State Dean Rusk drew a line at the
38
th
Parallel
where the US proposed that Korea be divided, and the Russian allies agreed.
Thousands of Koreans protested in the streets. They were told that a
trusteeship
was temporary until elections. Instead the US feared that the people would elect a communist
government, and so they rigged a fraudulent election for a separate government in the South. The United
Nations rubber stamped it. As in the South, the North then held
separate elections
for the Supreme People's Assembly which then elected Kim Il Sung, a famous
anti-Japanese guerilla resistance leader since 1932. The US and South Korean propaganda portray that North
Korea was a puppet and satellite project of the Soviet Union. This is probably the US projecting its own
imperial intentions. Cummings says that no evidence exists that the Soviets had any long-term designs on
Korea. They withdrew all of their military from North Korea in 1948.
North Korea has experience with US
brutality. During the Korean War the US bombed Korea for 3 years, wiped out 20% of its population and
destroyed every city, village and vital structure. President Truman threatened to bomb them with the atomic
bomb, and General Douglas MacArthur planned to use 30 nuclear bombs which were shipped to a US base in
Okinawa. Truman fired MacArthur not because MacArthur wanted to use nukes, but because Truman wanted someone
more loyal he could trust with them. Truman preauthorized MacArthur's replacement General Matthew Ridgeway
to use the nuclear bombs at his discretion. The US public is oblivious to US recklessness with nuclear bombs
and is passive about what is done in their name. The Korean War (1950 to 1953) is called the Forgotten War
because the US public has amnesia. Whatever propaganda they do remember is a flawed version of history put
out by the US government. Oblivious, passive and amnesia are why all US wars of aggression are quickly
forgotten as the US moves on to the next one.
After the US military occupation of
South Korea from 1945 to 1948, South Korea was ruled by US backed
repressive
dictators until the first democratic election in 1993. The first despot that the US installed
was Syngman Rhee in 1948. Rhee was a practically unknown in Korea because he had lived in the USA from 1912
until 1945, when he was flown back to Korea by the US military. The US pumped billions of dollars into South
Korea to make it a showplace of US-style capitalism during the Cold War, but South Korea did not develop
under either democracy or a free market, according to Ha-Joon Chang, the author of
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
.
For many decades North Korea outpaced
South Korea in economic development and in their standard of living until the 1970's. With the 1991 demise
of its most important trading partner the Soviet Union, North Korea fell on very hard economic times. Then
it suffered two floods and a drought in the 1990′s that resulted in famines. On top of that the US has
imposed killer economic sanctions. So now US propaganda constantly reinforces the belief that North Korea is
an economic failure that cannot even feed its own people. While the US touts that South Korea is an economic
miracle of democracy, capitalism and free markets. Little is ever mentioned about the economic collapse of
South Korea in 1997, which the US had to rescue with a
financial bailout package
that reached $90 Billion. The package included IMF loans that came with
humiliating conditionalities of austerity. The minister of finance Lim Chang Yuel went on TV, humiliated and
begging for the South Korean people's forgiveness.
Despite all the propaganda otherwise,
North Korea is not only willing to sit down at the table with the US, but it has long been proposing
negotiations to a deaf USA ear. What North Korea says it wants today are the same things that were
negotiated with Clinton in the Agreed Framework: security, compensation, and economic relations with the US.
There is nothing unreasonable that North Korea is asking for, and that is probably why the US refuses to
negotiate. It does not want peace for its own insane naked imperialism reasons. Instead the US wants
continued hostilities; otherwise if it wanted peace it would welcome diplomacy.
It is the US that is unpredictable. One
day Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson says
that the US is willing to hold unconditional talks with North Korea. Then he says
the US won't
. Trump says that he will destroy North Korea with fire and fury, and then he says he would
"
absolutely
talk
to North Korea's Kim on the phone". It is the US that is paranoid and finding enemies everywhere:
Cuba, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia to name just a few. The US enemies list has nothing to
do with democracy, freedom and human rights. If it did the US would not be friends, allies, and benefactors
to brutal kingdoms, monarchies, dictators, fascists and human rights abusers such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
Israel, Honduras, Haiti, and Ukraine, for example. US foreign policy is based on hegemony, empire, power,
corporate interests, corruption and self-interests of the high and mighty, not democracy and human rights.
Who is paranoid? Compare how much of a
threat the US is compared to North Korea. Since World War Two North Korea has not invaded anybody. The
Korean War (1950 to 1953) was a civil war and authoritative historians such as I. F. Stone, Bruce Cumings,
and David Halberstam agree that the South was responsible for instigating it too. Korea itself has not
invaded anybody since the 16
th
century. The US has attacked at least
32 countries
just since WW2. North Korea has a defense budget of only
$7.5 billion
, compared to the US $1 Trillion. North Korea has developed nuclear weapons because the US
has been threatening it with nuclear destruction since 1950, introduced nuclear weapons into South Korea in
1957 in violation of the armistice agreement and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US keeps
practicing regime change decapitation invasions and nuclear attacks against North Korea. North Korea has an
estimated arsenal of 20 nuke bombs that are not a threat to the US's 15,000 nuclear arsenal. Instead the US
is an asymmetrical and existential threat to North Korea and every other non-compliant small country. North
Korea has nuclear weapons because it does not want to humiliate itself by being a US poodle. When are the
American people going to wise up to the US propaganda and false cries that the evil wolf is at the door
again?
References:
"North Korea: Another Country", by Bruce
Cumings.
"The China Mirage: The Hidden History of
American Disaster in Asia," by James Bradley.
"Korean Mind: Understanding Contemporary
Korean Culture", by Boye Lafayette De Mente
(Republished from
The
Greanville Post
by permission of author or representative)
United Sh-thole of America. The people in Washington are degenerates. They want to murder millions of
Koreans and tens of thousands of their own people.
This article is too easy on the Norks, who are no angels themselves. It's quite unlikely that the South
started the war, when the South didn't have adequate weaponry or effective armed forces, unlike the North.
North Korea has done some horrible things in the past, most recently the (likely) sinking of a South Korean
vessel.
But overall, yes, in the current situation the US could easily avoid war, but doesn't want to.
Absolutely zero chance of JUSA attacking Korea for the obvious reason that there is nothing in it for the
jooies. Why would the clever conniving jooies waste their satrap's military assets on Korea when they could
be used to further the main jooie goal of destroying the ME and Iran? Think about it ..
Could be that the Trump administration is playing a game of hyper-aggression that always goes 'wrong',
uniting everyone against the empire and bringing America down in the least bad of hard landings from its
imperial role. Trump's kind words vis-a-vis Kim might have served as an assurance that Kim could trust his
channel. That purpose having been served, Trump was back in hyper-aggressive mode with his "I'd" versus "I"
explanation.
Trump's statements regarding Jerusalem, Iran and Pakistan/Afghanistan all follow the same
pattern.
We do have President Moon's statement, cited by a seemingly clueless Patrick Buchanan, that he is
nonetheless grateful to Trump for bringing the North Koreans to the table. Trump's overtly bad behavior
makes it easier for Kim to move against the entrenched forces on his own side.
Just a possibility. But it fits Trump's personality, if you go by indications over the decades rather
than the last two years.
So what? America is not an angel either. Doesn't give America the right to interfere. I'm glad other
countries have the balls to give America a bloody nose. Never has there been such a dishonest and immoral
country.
Where are you from Europe lol?
Hope your not expecting your obedience to pay off someday.
"When are the American people going to wise up to the US propaganda and false cries that the evil wolf is at
the door again?"
The hippie paradigm, if the people have awareness, they will care and change things
I think you underestimate the % of people who don't care and those understand, better them than me. Trump
was quoted as saying about the next Korean war, better Seoul nuked than us or something to that effect. Do
Trump supporters mind what he said that the USA should take the oil at the very least with regards to Iraq?
Nexus321, please, a little respect for our own country. We are the United States of America. Do not curse
the family.
Now, we are, all of us, disappointed with misdeeds done in our name. But, we are Americans and we can fix
this.
We should not judge the essence of ourselves as a nation by what some wayward politician whores do. Check
their motives and see on whose behalf they are working. It ain't ours. If what they do keeps the war game
alive, ask who benefits. Where does the buck lead? There lies the snake. Curse that. Bad deeds done in our
government's name shame us all, but that shame should make us citizens mature and determined, not adolescent
and whiny. I repeat, do not curse the family.
We are a good country founded on solid, moral principles. Act like a white man, Nexus321. Let's take this
country back and delouse it.
I don't know, what were you trying to say? That North Korea should be nuked, since they are "no angels"? no
matter what your personal opinion of them is, the fact, that they didn't attack anybody is still true!
"Since World War Two North Korea has not invaded anybody."
North Korea inarguably invaded the South. The arguable point might be whether or not it was provoked and
therefore a response.
I haven't read the histories the author cites, but I am aware of the history and the case that can be
made, and it is generally consonant with the gist of this article. The declaration of the DPRK came after
the US- backed Rhee declared the ROK and reneged on peninsula-wide elections that had been agreed to at the
UN. I guess you can call it a civil war, but that really isn't germane to the question: Why can the US not
stomach any rapprochement between the two de facto Koreas two-thirds of a century later, while it was
willing to accept a reunification of a historically more aggressive Germany?
Absolutely. There are suburbs coast to coast that depend on weapons manufacturing and all things defense.
They'll stick to the script.
I'm disappointed the author didn't embellish the truth of the Korean war – the way the US went after
civilians like the Nazis and used biological agents. Empire has a lot of secrets about fightin' communism
they still hide.
Screw the "family" mafia for the family is just as corrupt as the leaders you curse, do you really think the
family gives a shit about how many we killed in Asia, do you really think the family gives a shit about how
many we kill in the Mid-East or anywhere else for that matter,and what the country was founded on has no
bearing to what it is today, corrupt to the core, immoral degenerate with a fascist type government which the
"family" is just as guilty of as its leaders .
According to I.F. Stone in his "Hidden History of the Korean War" (1952), the intent of the Korean War was
to destabilize the Chinese Revolution which had consolidated power the year before. As Iraq was told that it
was acceptable to the USA if it reunified with Kuwait in 1993, so North Korea was suckered into attempting
to reunify their country. Those thirty atomic bombs were not intended for Korea which had already been
utterly destroyed by conventional weapons, they were meant for China. McArthur sacrificed a Marine division
by sending it without support to the border of China and predictably brought that country into the war; he
then demanded the nuclear bombing of China. Truman didn't go along and MacArthur was soon replaced. A fine
article from Mr. Pear.
Lots of good stuff but too sympathetic to North Korea which is ruled by a truly vile regime.
North Korea
is not about nationalism. It's about dynasticism. Also, 'Kim Il Sung' was not the real Kim Il Sung. His real name was Kim Sung Ju and he appropriated the
name of a guerrilla fighter. And his cult of personality was obnoxious.
Bak Jung-Hi worked for the Japanese, but collaboration is par for the course when resistance is futile.
Resistance became futile under Japanese who were only defeated by great powers. Sukarno collaborated with
Japanese too. And Kim collaborated with the Soviets. North Korea redistributed land to the peasants but then state collectivized the land, and the peasants
became slaves of the state.
The fact that Red China and communist Vietnam turned to market economics is proof that capitalism works
better than communism. Communism is like City Hall running all the economy of a big city. Who wants that?
The US has been threatening to use nukes against the DPRK during and since the war. Is it any wonder that
they decided to nuke up themselves as a deterrent? They're not going to give up their nuclear deterrent
under the bombast of threats of annihilation but are more likely to dig in and expand it. This doesn't seem
to be particularly complex or difficult to understand. Where does the US think it can go from here, what
does it think it could realistically do to them? It might be a good first step to stop the bluffing. Can we
say 'self-inflicted' when it comes to this confrontation?
{ Can we say 'self-inflicted' when it comes to this confrontation}
The confrontation is not
'inflicted
' as such: it was and is carefully planned.
This is not the first time South Korea has tried to approach North Korea: US previously also threatened SK
leaders, and forced them to back off.
US needs maximum tension on the Korean peninsula to have an excuse to keepa large contingent of armed
forces in the region. If South and North Korean make peace, US will be asked to leave SK.
Next might be Japan. Then US is completely cut out of the region.
So in desperation, US will do anything, possibly even instigating a military clash, to stay in SK and
Japan. Last thing US MIC wants anywhere in the world is peace: it's bad for business.
What we need are more psyops like the recent drill in Hawaii. More fear and loathing so empire can create a
virtual camp x-ray with live updates from Facebook and twitter to coddle the sheep. It's a shame North Korea
can't buy Democracy to keep it from Dying in Darkness.
But how dare Russia try to use our twitter weapon that we use on Americans that the Russians want to use on
Americans too.
Pussy hat controlled resistance, doom porn and fake antiwar will continue to play an
important part of the lives of the American porn consumer. In the name of security the CIA may give us the
race war, or hatred of the wealthy or the ol' immigrant rat trap. The possibilities are endless but the
dictatorship is making itself clear with endless promotion of scarcity through their scribes in social
media.
Post on social media everyday – what you think matters!
To make matters much more confusing, we have hypocritical stealth DOD contractors like Code Pink play up
fake resistance to the threat of war. Barging into meetings as if the whores on Capitol Hill are calling the
shots is an uniquely insidious form of stunt based propaganda. The motive for groups like Code Pink is to
have a group that part of the press can immediately call "far left, unpatrioric" endearing them to at least
half the sheep who are convinced they are the real McCoy of antiwar dynamite.
Code Pink first crushes any
questions about whether Democracy even exists in the USA. "Look at us, we are right here where it matters
isn't the country wonderful"
Then the absolute suffocation of anyone who dares question empires' gun running operations outside of
state approved stunt idiocy and clown show electoral politics.
Why did you omit the fact that the S Korean sex trade is completely run by S Koreans not Americans?
I do
remember an American colonel in the occupation forces stating that he basically ran a brothel.
The US has had sanctions on N. Korea for more than forty years.
During that period, more than one S, Korean government has entertained re-unification. The reason we
might challenge that reunion if because should we actually have to go to war at some point with China, a
friendly Korea with China would be a problem.
But what is driving unification at least when I visited was the population.
But the choice by Pres Trump to entertain conversation -- is a wise choice.
So? Most of the propaganda put out during the Cold War by the Soviet Union turned out to be more accurate
and closer to the truth than propaganda put out by the United States government though the US State
Department. For instance, Russia's version (at the time) as of what transpired immediately prior to and
after Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russia in 1959 (?) turned out to be much more accurate than the
US's version which was essentially a pack of lies.
No idea what you're talking about with 'the Truth'. This article is highly accurate, it seems to me: it's
description of endless and ongoing US atrocities is absolutely true, as is the author's statement that never
has such a rotten, lying government existed, a government that perpetually provokes any and all countries on
earth, that hates peace, that destroys any attempts at decency. I have only read IF Stone, cited here, 'The
Hidden History of the Korean War' or something similar. It is a staggering book. Essentially the war was a
military exercise, a chance for troops to see action, test out new machines and weaponry. Most importantly,
my interpretation here, it presented a vast theater for psy ops and 'country building' ie utter destruction.
These kinds of great experiments are a Brit and by extension US govt specialty. This is really thinking big,
thinking long term. Cut countries in two after first murdering millions and utterly destroying literally
everything–in this case, for example, Seoul was literally first evacuated then set on fire by US troops,
just kinda for fun. It's the kind of really big thinking going on now too (and in all the intervening
years), eg with the utter destruction of Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Britain (a misnomer–it
is really England but wants others to share the burden. I mean, the Welsh??) did this to Ireland four
centuries ago, to India more recently, to mention nothing of Africa and others.
'Then there's a whole range of wild attacks and accusations going all the way back to 1871(!).'
It's
called history, not an American specialty. But rather important to understanding the present and future.
Your whole post is very ignorant.
It was the same in VietNam–we installed a dictator (Diem) who had lived mostly in the US, and reneged on the
national elections that had been agreed on as a part of the peace agreement after the French defeat.
After
JFK tried and lost, nothing has been able to stop the Military bla bla bla complex that actually rules this
country.
If South Korea officially requested this, would the US refuse?
Of course the USG would refuse such a request -- it thinks it is master of the world. The greatest hindrance
to world peace since WWII is the monster on the Potomac.
Michael Kenny's comment ignores the fact that the rocket motors could have been airshipped from the Dnipro factory directly to
DPRK, or even shipped by sea.
Maybe they came via China. The bottom line is we don't know when or how they got there.
What we do know is that Rocket Man's displays of prowess have brought things to a head in one of the Empire's critical nodes. The
background for this crisis is ROK's desire to participate in China's BRI. The chaebols are drooling over the opportunities, but DPRK
isolates them in the southern end of the Korean peninsula. Hence, Putin & Moon's joint announcement in Vladivostok of the "9
Bridges" initiative bringing DPRK into the Eurasian fold.
It would appear DPRK likes the idea, and the suddenness of the thaw in North – South relations is an indication that big wheels
are turning behind the scenes. The US' recent statements indicate it finally dawned on them as well, and that they are, in their
typically knee-jerk fashion, actively trying to torpedo further peaceful developments.
If ROK loosens its tethers to the US sufficiently to gain direct land access to the rest of Eurasia, Japan's Keiretsu will not
allow themselves to be sidelined. Abe & Putin have met 17 times, perhaps as a result of the pressures Abe is already feeling from
them.
The US' absurd statements, the patently silly "Vancouver Summit", the flip-flopping, all indicate that the US and its Imperial
satraps have no idea what to do in the face of Rocket Man's exposure of their irrelevance in the N.W. Pacific.
So let them, officially, invite us to leave.
My bet – and certainly my hope – is that we'd bow out, more
or less gracefully.
And if we refused – well, that would certainly clarify things.
The Korean Peninsula is cursed by geography. Reunification of Korea would mean one of two things.
1. A
Korean Peninsula allied with the US. This would put US troops on the Chinese border. No one should want
this. Too easy for a border incident to escalate into a war between the two most powerful countries and
economies on the planet.
2. A non-aligned Korean Peninsula. No way this would happen. Without US support the entire peninsula
would become a Chinese satellite. Japan fought two wars because it saw Chinese / Russian control of Korea as
an existential threat. Japan would get nukes if this happened and the entire NW Pacific would be greatly
destabilized.
The sad reality is that a buffer state in the north part of the Korean Peninsula is in the best interest
of South Korea, China, Russia, Japan and the US. What everyone needs to figure out is how to make N. Korea
more like East Germany, and less like Stalinist Russia at its worse.
"North Korea is not about nationalism. It's about dynasticism." -- Anon
Except that the current Kim may actually be a Korean nationalist, not a North Korean nationalist, in
which respect he is in agreement with all the Korean people. Korea will become reunited, but the price of
reunification may be, probably will be, that it will become part of Han China.
China regards Korea as it does Tibet, only more so -- as now and since ever throughout all time, as part
of China, speaking and writing Mandarin, integrated into the PRC economically, culturally and politically.
I'm sure this will please the anti-USA crowd gathering here around this article by Pear -- as they always
do to show support for any Leftist revisionist supporter of the "USA==Evil" dogma.
"Except that the current Kim may actually be a Korean nationalist, not a North Korean nationalist, in which
respect he is in agreement with all the Korean people. Korea will become reunited, but the price of
reunification may be, probably will be, that it will become part of Han China."
No, Little Rocket Man is a
self-centered spoiled brat who puts himself above all else. He was raised as a spoiled princeling and acts
like it.
"China regards Korea as it does Tibet, only more so -- as now and since ever throughout all time, as part
of China, speaking and writing Mandarin, integrated into the PRC economically, culturally and politically."
No, China always regarded Korea as a separate kingdom and left it alone as long as Korea paid tribute. It
was Japan that tried to swallow Korea twice, not China.
The only time Korea became part of Han Empire was when China itself was conquered by foreigners. Mongols
conquered China and Korea. Later, Manchus, using Mongol archers, also conquered China and Korea. It was not
China conquering Korea but non-Chinese conquering both.
Even so, the Manchus regarded Korea as a separate kingdom in the end.
Tibet is a different because of its small population. It's a huge area and had less than a million people
when it came under Han hegemony. Same with the Turkic Northwest. It's like US could easily swallow Alaska
and sparsely populated SW territories but didn't try to take Mexico proper.
In a way, Mongols really changed China and Russia. If not for Mongols, Russia might be much smaller and
China too. Both Russia and China were conservative powers. Russian expansion was paradoxically defensive as,
lacking sufficient natural barriers, Russia could only survive as an empire. Even so, Russians might not
have been interested in East Siberia and North Asia if not for concerns of invasions from the East.
Pacifying Siberia and North Asia became a priority because of the memory of threat from the East. Also, the
Mongols proved that the vast area could be traversed if the people had the will to do so.
And if not for Mongols, Current China might be much smaller. Han China used to be much smaller and was
restricted to the East Coast. Chinese were very conservative and not very adventurous, exploratory, and/or
invasive. Instead of trying to conquer northern territories, China just built walls to keep the barbarians
out. And Chinese had little interest in areas outside Han areas.
So, for most of Chinese history, their civilization was mostly along the east coast.
The massive expansion of Chinese borders happened under Mongols who
were
adventurous and expansive.
Mongols not only invaded China but went far beyond.
Later, the Manchus, using Mongol archers and warriors, expanded much further into the West, regions that the
Han Chinese mostly neglected. These semi-barbarian warlords had the aggressive zeal that the conservative
Han Chinese lacked.
Thus, it was Manchu-Mongol ambitions that expanded the size of China, and when the Manchus and Mongols were
either expelled from or dissolved into Han China, their conquests became absorbed into China. Mongolia would
be part of China too if not for Soviets. Like Tibet, Mongolia is huge and sparsely populated. Easier for
Chinese to control. Also, both Mongols and Tibetans are less developed than Koreans who are more adept at
imitation.
Likewise, Byzantine Greeks had an empire they inherited from the Romans.
"Highly unlikely. He called himself Kim Il Sung already when people who have met the original Kim Il Sung
were still around. Such change of identity is not impossible, but not too easy either."
No, 'Kim Il Sung'
was a fraud. He had been part of some resistance movement, but he was not THE Kim Il Sung who's more legend,
like Robin Hood.
Kim was so unknown in Korea that Soviets initially had trouble installing him as leader. Most people saw
him as Soviet stooge, which was what he was.
So, as in the South, the domestic patriots had to be repressed or executed, and a cult of personality had to
be built up around Kim that became more and more ridiculous.
Kim was an unimaginative Stalinist.
That said, I don't see how his 'invasion' of South was a bad thing. How can a Korean invade Korea? The
north/south divide was artificially imposed by great powers on a nation. As idiotic as both Kim and Rhee
were, there was nothing wrong in their dream of reuniting the nation. The great wrong was in the (1)
division of Korea itself (2) installing puppet rulers in both artificially created entities.
Suppose China and Russia divided Israel into north and south. Would it be wrong if either Israel, north
or south, tried to reunify the nation? If north Israel entered south Israel to unify the nation once again,
would that be 'invasion'?
Kim's Stalinism and personality cult would have been bad for Korea, but I don't see anything wrong with
his desire to unify his nation. And in that, Rhee had every right to want to unify the nation.
Where Rhee and Kim were idiotic was in blaming one another instead of blaming the great powers that
divided their nation. But how could either blame his sponsor? If not for USSR, Kim would not have been
installed as leader of north. If not for US, Rhee would not have been shoehorned in as leader of south. They
gained power as dogs to foreign masters.
If they really had sense, both would have stepped down as leader(as both were installed by empires) and
graciously allowed for unification and new leadership chosen by the people than by foreign powers. But both
had petty egos, and Kim wanted to be ruler of all Korea, and Rhee wanted to be ruler of all Korea. Neither
blamed the great powers but just one another.
If Israel were divided by great powers, I think Jews would have enough sense to come together and act in
unison. After all, Israel itself was created by the coming together of all kinds of Jews: capitalist,
communist, socialist, liberal, conservative, secular, religious. Jews may be neurotic and crazy, but they
have enough sense of world affairs and the nature of power.
But Koreans are a stupid people. Divide them and set them against each other like dogs, and they are like
two pitbulls. A culture of slavish servitude and emotions-over-reason made them act like dogs than sensible
humans.
When the british empire ended, I think a lot of borders were drawn to create ever lasting problems/conflicts.
Israel was also it's creation with american backing of course.
When are the American people going to wise up to the US propaganda and false cries that the evil wolf
is at the door
I doubt the masses will ever awake from the constant propaganda. I mean, all major information outlet is
controlled. and besides, the smart ones also believe it is necessary to keep their way of life.
ask any american if their way of life will end, everything will become 100% more expensive, they can no
longer take vacations, work twice as hard for the same pay or less, they will instantly think nothing of the
current wars
very, very very few people are selfless humanists.
I am just scare of the fact if usa attacks NK unilaterally in the near future, china will get involved =
WW3 + maybe nuclear war.
I read similar drooling nonsense to what you just wrote all over the internet: "Look, first off, I
don't support the guy but this is obvious lefty slander".
Ok. You don't support the guy but you need to qualify that non-support by saying he's being impuded.
In other words you support the guy, warning of the coming leftists
– Anonymous
What am I supposed to asy? "I feel your pain" or what? I mean you have to read "similar drooling nonsense
all over the internet" so what?
First off, it's not that I don't support Pear, but I actually condemn him as a Leftist revisionist. And
then there's no' but', there's an
'and' it's obvious lefty drool.
BTW, my "non-support" for Pear is
unqualified, as is my disrespect for you,, Anonymous. Are yoo actually Pear writing under that pseudonym?
No, 'Kim Il Sung' was a fraud. He had been part of some resistance movement, but he was not THE Kim Il
Sung who's more legend, like Robin Hood.
He was made into such a legend by North Korean propaganda after Kim became the leader. He was the most
daring Korean guerrilla commander, but that's not saying very much, because he couldn't do much against the
Japanese.
Kim was an unimaginative Stalinist.
Oh, he had a lot of imagination and original ideas. They led to a dystopia, but original he was. He also
was a skillful and daring politician, who managed to get rid of his pro-China and pro-Soviet factions
simultaneously in the late 1950s, at a time when he depended on both. That was quite bold and required a lot
of political skills. Founding a dynasty in a nominally Marxist-Leninist society was not very easy either.
There was some opposition to it even among his otherwise loyal associates, who wanted a normal communist
succession with one of the top dogs becoming the new leader.
"Oh, he had a lot of imagination and original ideas. They led to a dystopia, but original he was."
He was
shrewd, not original. But then, he was surrounded by second-raters and hacks, not men of talent.
"He also was a skillful and daring politician, who managed to get rid of his pro-China and pro-Soviet
factions simultaneously in the late 1950s, at a time when he depended on both. That was quite bold and
required a lot of political skills."
No, purges were quite common in Stalinist systems. Stalin, Mao, Tito, and the rest all purged 'bad
elements'. Nothing original about that.
And it's not so much that he got rid of pro-China-elements and pro-Soviet-elements as he balanced them out.
If not for the Korean War, he would have leaned to the USSR. But China played such a huge role in the war
that it gave him an opportunity to lean to China as well. so, he played on both USSR and China for aid. Now,
where he was skillful was maintaining this balance even after the Sino-Soviet rift.
"Founding a dynasty in a nominally Marxist-Leninist society was not very easy either. There was some
opposition to it even among his otherwise loyal associates, who wanted a normal communist succession with
one of the top dogs becoming the new leader."
It turned out to be pretty easy because he did it and then his son did it too. It was easy because North
Korea under Kim was more about the dynasty than ideology. People were raised to worship Kim, not to think
ideologically. And Kim surrounded himself with yes-men and hacks. If there was overt opposition, it was
easily dealt with. The gulag.
Kim was a stupid bumpkin who got to leader because Stalin saw him as pliable and obedient.
The US was largely responsible for the division of Korea and backing dictatorships in South Korea
until 1993. Americans do not know the US treachery, but Koreans do. Why would they trust the USA now?
Most SKoreans do not know, either. And those who do and talk about it probably risk imprisonment for
treason.
Moon's predecessor Park Geun-hye sang from the US hymnbook until she got caught with her hand in the
cookie jar. In 2017 the South Korean people went to the street and demanded the granddaughter of former
dictator Park Chung Hee be impeached, and now she is in prison.
She is the daughter.
Korea itself has not invaded anybody since the 16th century.
Korea was invaded by Japan in the 16th century. It's difficult to pinpoint when Korea invaded anyone.
We'd have to go back to a time prior to their nominal unification at least in the 7th century.
The Korean Peninsula is cursed by geography. Reunification of Korea would mean one of two things.
It's the 21st century. There's no curse of geography. It's a global village. Trade is global.
Communication is global. Cultural exchange is global. It has a combined population of 70M. SKorea is
technologically/economically advanced. Its biggest threat is its own lethargy/apathy.
The sad reality is that a buffer state in the north part of the Korean Peninsula is in the best
interest of South Korea, China, Russia, Japan and the US.
No, that's only in the best interest of the US and Japan.
Why did you omit the fact that the S Korean sex trade is completely run by S Koreans not Americans?
Sounds familiar. That's what Japan says about WWII sex slaves.
I do remember an American colonel in the occupation forces stating that he basically ran a brothel.
The subtext being that SKorea turned itself into a brothel? US forces, war and starvation had nothing to
do with women selling their bodies to survive?
I agree. As much as I hate to admit as much, and also being a veteran, the USA government is rotten to the
core. Manipulation and coercion all across the board. Hard to escape the feeling we will pay for these
misdeeds somewhere along the way. Cosmic Justice demands as much. Neither nation nor person can continue on
in such manner indefinitely. USA is the agitator. If the Koreans could just tell Uncle Sam (er . Sap) to
pack his bags and get out of Dodge, they would be on their way to a much better future. nx
You're just going along with this article and making up shit. That's not something Americans did. Your
people are the ones who are mentally and spiritually enslaved by the British till this day. Your people are
so engrained with wanting to be White, even after your motherland was invaded, occupied, murdered by the
British, that your people bleach their skin and praise, put a whites on a pedestal, and strive to be like
their oppressors.
The reason why the United States doesn't want the two Koreas to reunify, is because if they reunite, the
United States loses its revenue. South Korea pays to have American soldiers stationed in their country. The
U.S. sells it's weapons to South Korea, out of fear mongering. The longer the U.S. can keep the two Koreas
separated, the more they can make money off of the fear of war. War creates revenue for the United States.
That's why we keep going at it with the Middle East. It's always the U.S. going to war with others, usually,
over false pretenses. Let's not forget, how we lied about weapons of mass destruction to go to war with
Iraq. Fear mongering, allows the U.S. government to sell weapons to not only South Korea, but to other
countries in Asia. That's why.
Korea, is actually blessed by geography. They're not in Europe & part of the E.U. So they're not forced to
have migrants by the millions in their country against their will, with open borders. They're not located
where the U.S. is, where Latinos invade their country by the thousands. They're not where Japan is, to get
butt raped by mother nature and thank goodness, they're not located where china is. I visited china. It was
horrid. Korea's ecosystem is rich, diverse & unique because it's a peninsula. China, never controlled Korea.
If anything, Korea fought against china, defeating them many times throughout history. They did this before
America existed. Koreans are clever people who have a strong military and several decades of stockpiled
weapons on hand, along with new ones. They don't need American soldiers in Korea after reunification, to
protect them. Japan, is afraid Korea will reunify, because that means Korea will be even stronger. The same
goes for china. A stronger one unified Korea, is a threat to other Asian countries.
You've worked for "Samsung." Lol. and I'm the King of England. China, has the highest suicide rate per
capita. 22.24 for every 100,000. That makes them the country with the highest suicide rate in the world.
Japan is close behind.
By the way, japan, has the lowest birth rate in Asia. They're not reproducing enough male japanese babies to
replace the old, sickly, & dying in the work place. Japan, is screwed. Again, deflecting other's short
comings on to Korea.
It's actually the Middle East, Dubai, that is the plastic surgery capital of the world. They get the most
rhinoplasties. Plastic surgeons go there months out of the year, to make the most amount of money in the
shortest amount of time. Then it's the United States & the UK close behind. Plastic surgery is on the rise
in ethnic chinese countries, like taiwan, hong kong, & singapore, china, japan, & in southeast asian
countries, like philippines, thailand, veitnam, and indonesia, more than ever. As of 2017, these asian
countries get the most procedures done & they compete with each other in who does it the most percentage
wise. No one wants to admit their race of people get plastic surgeries, so they deflect, finger point to
others, especially to better looking people as an excuse as to why others are far more attractive than their
ugly selves. (I'm pointing at you.) Asians do it out of jealousy. They can't stand seeing a Korean get
compliments. Whites get the most plastic surgeries in the West, but asians don't finger point at them,
unless they're discriminated by Whites, because asians think Koreans are far better looking than Whites.
I'll have to remind you that if Korea, in which this is all true, have a technologically advanced country,
are an advanced people, who excel in intelligence, inventions, sports, have a booming economy, are talented,
have the most popular genres of music in the world and one of the most addictive forms of entertainment, (K
pop) and Korean dramas, movies, have the most amazing style unlike other races & nationalities, both men and
women have the best complexions, their skincare products are the most popular in the world, that do what
they say, have two electrictronic companies in which one has completely dominated the globe, a successful
car manufacturing industry, Korean foods & alcohol, that all races love, an amazing rich history unlike any
other, which draws people in to want to learn more about Koreans, the first in asia to always break records
and make history, before any other asian country, the most popular race in asia, and the best looking in
asia and in my opinion, better looking than any other race of people other than some Whites. So with all
these great attributes Korea has, there's no reason to think and hate on them or to think they're less in
any way, unless one is a jealous person or a whole jealous race of people who only hate online, because they
themselves, don't have any of these attributes the Koreans have, hence, making them haters like you, whether
you're asian or not.
If Kiev wants to attack Donbas they better hurry. After World Cup, and definitely next year
when the pipelines bypassing Ukraine will be ready, Ukraine's strategic situation will get
worse. We are in a transition phase: sh..t happened in 2013-15 that is impossible to undo,
but there were fortunately constraints on all sides that prevented a meltdown. In a year or
two most of those constraints will be gone.
Saker is correct that EU countries will not work with Russia. Blaming it all on Washington
was always stupid – there are forces in Europe, in all countries, who want a
confrontation with Russia. Any event, real or fake, will be used to escalate. West cannot
lose this one without another fight. And if they sit on their hands, they will eventually
lose with a disillusioned Ukraine and slowly disintegrating EU. Populist energy needs to be
re-directed eastward, and for that a more aggressive policy is required. This is not
pessimism, there simply is no way for EU elite to climb down. How could UK make up with
Russia without looking like complete idiots? Or Macron and Merkel? The hostility is at this
point inherent in the situation – what started out as a badly thought-out attempt to
get some quick goodies (bases in Crimea, Nato expansion, sell weapons) has evolved into a
real death spiral.
We are one Franz Ferdinand moment away from a catastrophe. Let's enjoy the games while we
still can. Trump knows this, so he is trying desperately to organize a summit or send some
messages of conciliation. But he is powerless and it might be too late for that. Hubris never
dissipates, it requires a disaster and an elite turnover to cure hubris.
Saker is once again completely wrong. His theories fall short to explain lots of real events.
He got hooked on his "Anglo-Zionist" theory and "one Hegemon", which is far from explaining
the reality on the ground. There is no one single hegemon, but two powerful interest groups
in the west. One of the power centers is dominated by the Rothschilds from the City of London
and the other ruled by the Rockerfellers which is based in the US.
The powers described above are sometimes working in collusion but sometimes work against each
other (They were in collusion during the Soviet Afghan war for instance). Currently, we don't
see a collusion but a war being waged in between these two groups. I think it is highly self
evident, so much so that it is happening almost all in the open. In the modern history we
haven't witnessed such a openly fought war ever before (between these two powers). All is at
stake and the war in between these two is vicious. Thus you can explain Trump's attitude
towards EU, everlasting character assasination of Trump by certain opposing circles in the
US, high level resignations, the state of confusion of Nato and much more. If this theory is
right (and I think it is much more viable than any other theory that I came across in the
Alt-Med), this makes Russia firmly embedded into one of the camps. Unfortunately, the
position that Russia took makes him not a sovereign power but on contrary puts him into a
subservient role. The late actions of Russia, especially in Syria, is quite telling. I know
people who admire Russia get quite frustrated when they hear such a scenario and outcome, but
this is possibly the only way Putin believes that Russia can survive. Thus it explains his
latest house clean-up of Euroasian integrists. Even worse, if you believe in this scenario,
it brings Russia and China against each other especially in the long run. This scenario also
put a full stop to the idealist Euroasian multi-polar world order.
Here is the link to an older video in Russian with English subtitles. The guy's name is
Andrei Fursov and he has some interesting things to say regarding this subject. This
interview was just before Obama was elected but is still quite relevent. His newer videos
seems to have lost steam, possibly because he is working for some state connected Russian
institutions and think-thanks and thus I think he is somewhat restricted. After all it is
again the famous "Game Theory", isn't it?
I don't think you realize that armies need supplies. To break into Donbas cities would be
hard enough, but to re-supply them would be impossible. Civilians would mostly evacuate, so
there would be little to 'hide in'. Kiev cannot win militarily as long as Russia opposes it.
Russia can always blast their bases from air, or with missiles. Don't kid yourself, if Russia
has the will, they will prevail.
Since you mentioned 2014, there was a perfect opportunity for Maidanistas to avoid this.
All they had to do was to be friendly and accommodating to its Russian minority. Offer them
autonomy, re-assure them, promise that trade and ties with Russia would continue. Kiev did
the exact opposite, an extremely bad tactic. US kept on telling them to cool it, that one
doesn't win by attacking before ready. But in Kiev emotions prevailed, and so we are where we
are.
Sooner or later a more accommodating government in Kiev will try the 'let bygones be
bygones' tactic on Russia. If we are lucky enough to make it that far.
"... Counting the shooting of JFK in 1963, and the shooting-wouding of Ronald Reagan in 1981 by a guy whose father was working for George Bush's brother (!), plus the two arguably-staged 'impeachments' of Richard Nixon (ending 1974) and Bill Clinton (ending 1999), you have a 40% removal-programme hit rate on the previous 10 US Presidents. ..."
Nice account of 'getting woke' from Ron Unz quite appreciate the tidbits such as the mention
of the once-very-famous Dorothy Kilgallen of the 'What's My Line?' TV show (1950-67)
Counting the shooting of JFK in 1963, and the shooting-wouding of Ronald Reagan in
1981 by a guy whose father was working for George Bush's brother (!), plus the two
arguably-staged 'impeachments' of Richard Nixon (ending 1974) and Bill Clinton (ending 1999),
you have a 40% removal-programme hit rate on the previous 10 US Presidents.
Maybe even more hidden from public knowledge, is the truth of the Watergate 'Silent Coup'
(Colodny / Gettlin book). Bob Woodward was a US Navy intelligence agent under Admiral Maurer,
and when Maurer became head of the US Joint Chiefs and thus the entire US military, Woodward
was planted at the CIA's Washington Post to be the fake 'brave reporter' for the coup
d'état of 'Watergate', entirely a US Joint Chiefs -- CIA operation. Bob Woodward was
apparently such an idiot re journalism at first he needed lots of remedial coaching to meet
minimal standards.
'Deep Throat' was fiction, the CIA had all the info, the CIA fake 'leaker' is another big
distraction game getting repeated (Daniel Ellsberg; Deep Throat; Wikileaks Assange who was
admitted by both Brzezinski and Netanyahu to be fake, seems he isn't even really 'living' at
the London Ecuador Embassy, faker
Edward Snowden , first 'leaking' to the CIA's Washington Post, ha!, with Glenn Greenwald
posing as the latest Jewish 'brave journalist'; Mossad-historian-supervised 'Panama Papers',
etc.)
Another 'impeachment' farce was the Deep State 'Monica Lewinsky' nonsense against Bill
Clinton, fired up when Bill balked in nausea, at the thought of ordering the war-crime
bombing of Serbia that would kill thousands. For Clinton-Lewinsky, another Jewish figure,
Matt Drudge, was propped up to play the Woodward role of 'great investigative reporter' When
Clinton consented to approve the war as his way to stay alive, he was 'acquitted' -- the
bombings of Serbia began shortly afterwards. Clearly, the Deep State cannot even trust its
highly pre-vetted White House occupants.
Now that the Unz site is on board with collusion in US President removals, we still have
to get Unz site writers woke on the laughably fake 9 'trips to the moon' with 6 alleged 'moon
landings' of 1968-72 regarding which director Stanley Kubrick even admitted before in March
1999 before he died, that he faked the 'moon landing' NASA videos (CIA movie studios, Laurel
Canyon, California) 50th anniversary of the 'trips to the moon' starts this December a good
time for Unz debunking
Counting the shooting of JFK in 1963, and the shooting-wouding of Ronald Reagan in 1981 by
a guy whose father was working for George Bush's brother (!), plus the two arguably-staged
'impeachments' of Richard Nixon (ending 1974) and Bill Clinton (ending 1999), you have a 40%
removal-programme hit rate on the previous 10 US Presidents.
Notable quotes:
"... Counting the shooting of JFK in 1963, and the shooting-wouding of Ronald Reagan in 1981 by a guy whose father was working for George Bush's brother (!), plus the two arguably-staged 'impeachments' of Richard Nixon (ending 1974) and Bill Clinton (ending 1999), you have a 40% removal-programme hit rate on the previous 10 US Presidents. ..."
"... Ron's suspicions may be correct. However, I am bothered by two things left out of his article: the identity of the conspirators and their motivation. What was President Kennedy doing that had to be stopped? ..."
One of the main reasons why "conspiracy theory" is used in the pejorative sense:
After JFK was killed, there were many articles and books written claiming a conspiracy.
And then nothing happened.
At some level, most Americans are still convinced that the police and prosecutors are
looking out for them: If it really were proved that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, of
course the conspirators would be prosecuted, right?
The same is true of the "suicide" of Gary Webb, the man who uncovered Iran Contra. He was
found with an alleged suicide note, and two gunshot wounds to the back of the head. The
coroner ruled his death a suicide. Case closed.
The thing is, the kind of high-level people who're generally accused of wanting to murder
poor, poor, innocent JFK both knew that at worst, he'd be gone by January 21, 1969, and knew
more than enough about him to come up with a much better plan. Getting "Dr. Feelgood," with
or without his conscious cooperation, to give JFK a "hot shot" would do the trick just fine,
as would sending in a "bimbo" with a cyanide injector in her beehive hairdo. First rule of
this as in many other things -- KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!)
The kinds of scenarios I've seen from conspiracy believers are so complicated and iffy
that they make Jimmy Carter's "Operation Eagle Claw" look like a sure-fire, can't-lose
winner. Having Oswald be the only shooter makes sense, and comports with what we know of
Oswald's personality. The men who've murdered other presidents were generally attention
sponges with an exaggerated view of their importance in the scheme of things. Oswald thought
he was rightfully a world-shaking hero, instead of the twerp he was, but compared to Charles
Guiteau (who shot James Garfield) Oswald was a shrinking violet.
In criminal investigations the first question always is 'who benefits'.
The weird thing in political suspicious deaths is that this question is seldom asked.
This is the case with, to name a few, Sikorsky, Kennedy, Palme, Anna Lyndh,
Hammarskjöld, Diana, Hess, Pearl Harbour, Sept 11, MH17, MH370, Bernadotte, Barschel,
there must be more.
In the Kennedy case, he was killed some two weeks after he had threatened Israel not to sell
weapons any more, if they continued building the atomic bomb.
Both patsies Harvey Lee Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were selected with respect to the legends,
real or synthetic, that could be used in the post assassination story spin off. In both cases
the legends were to deflect the attention form the actual conspirators. In the case of Oswald
it was his defection to the USSR. Involvement of Soviets in the assassination was an option
that was not played in the media in the end but it could have been if the lone nut assassin
narrative for some reason could not gain the traction. In the case of Sirham his legend as a
disgruntled Palestinian who was upset with RFK's alleged support for Israel was played to the
full extent. It was done for two reasons: (1) to decouple JFK assassination from RFK
assassination; crazy lone nut Texan American and crazy lone nut Arab Palestinian had only one
thing in common: being a crazy lone nut, and (2) paint RFK as a martyr for his pro Israel
views. The second spin off was risky because it brought Israel into the story, nevertheless
the conspirators thought it was important and took the risk so the could make out of RFK the
first (and the only one so far afaik) American politician who died for his pro Israel
position. This certainly pushed away any suspicions that Israel might have been involved or
could have benefited from his assassination. Sirhan Sirhan legend was also used to foreshadow
Palestinian terrorism that began to grow in the wake of the Six Day War of 1967.
Try taking a look at 'Prayer Man', most likely the image of Lee Harvey Oswald on the front
steps of the TSBD building shortly after the shooting. A good introduction can be found at
http://22november1963.org.uk/prayer-man-jfk-assassination
The 1991 Oliver Stone movie unblocked many Americans to think about and consider the
conspiracy behind the assassination. Still four years earlier Stanley Kubrick was reinforcing
the meme of Lee Harvey Oswald in Full Metal Jacket:
Excellent article, Ron. Thankyou for writing this.
On his deathbed, CIA Agent E. Howard Hunt confessed to being involved in the JFK
assassination. He implicated other intelligence agents and Vice-President LBJ. Watch this
short video here in which he confesses.
If anyone wants to understand the JFK assassination in more detail, I highly recommend
watching Oliver Stone's movie JFK. Here's a very good part of the movie that explains how
Oswald couldn't have shot JFK, as Oswald was behind JFK and JFK's head snaps back and to the
left. So the true assassin must've been in the front (his shot knocked JFK's head back)
– and couldn't have been Oswald. Watch the video below. "Back and to the left."
Here's an interesting video on how many JFK assassination witnesses died mysterious
deaths. Start watching this video from 1:50. Particularly interesting is that on the day when
the House tried to get George De Mohrenschildt (a close friend of Oswald and a very prominent
socialite in Dallas) to testify, he was found death. The death was ruled a suicide.
Jack Ruby (the Dallas club owner who assasinated Oswald) claimed that LBJ had JFK
assassinated. See video below.
He also claimed a conspiracy was keeping him from speaking. See video below.
When JFK was assassinated, there was a man with an umbrella who was right next to the
president. It was an extremely sunny day in Dallas on that day. Why was the man holding the
umbrella? Reporter Bill O'Reilly reports evidence that the "Umbrella Man" may have used the
umbrella to fire a dart into JFK. Interestingly, the CIA had developed a dart weapon before
that date. See this video below. Starts at 40 seconds.
Dr. Charles Crenshaw (who treated JFK's bullet wound and went on to become ) claimed that
the entry points of 2 of the wounds he observed were in the front of JFK's throat. Therefore,
the assassin must've been in the front and couldn't have been Oswald. He also claimed that
the wound was tampered with to make it seem the bullet came from behind.
"Dark Journalist" has a very good video on the JFK assassination.
Here's an interesting video of Dan Rather lying about the JFK assassination. This news clip
was made shortly after the assassination. Dan Rather told the American viewing public that
JFK's head went forward after he was shot. Later, it would be revealed that Dan Rather had
lied that day.
By the way, you always hear the Warren Commission found that there was no conspiracy and
that Oswald was the "lone gunman." However, in 1976, the House of Representatives
investigated the matter and concluded that there was a conspiracy behind the JFK
assassination. The assasination involved multiple gunmen. The media never reports this.
The United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was
established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther
King, Jr. The HSCA completed its investigation in 1978 and issued its final report the
following year, concluding that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a
conspiracy. In addition to acoustic analysis of a police channel dictabelt recording,[1]
the HSCA also commissioned numerous other scientific studies of assassination-related
evidence that corroborate the Warren Commission's findings.[2]
Here's a very persuasive History Channel video on how LBJ had JFK killed.
Also, the military-industrial complex wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam.
By the way, it's sort of interesting how the mysterious Gulf of Tonkin incident led to a
huge war in Vietnam.
This video demonstrates how wildly implausible it was that Oswald pulled the trigger. The
FBI couldn't replicate Oswald's supposed shooting with their best shooters.
FBI didn't find a palm print on Oswald's rifle. Then, a week later, a Dallas policeman
found a palm print on the rifle.
"We're through the looking glass people. White is black – and black is white."
Nice account of 'getting woke' from Ron Unz quite appreciate the tidbits such as the mention
of the once-very-famous Dorothy Kilgallen of the 'What's My Line?' TV show (1950-67)
Counting the shooting of JFK in 1963, and the shooting-wouding of Ronald Reagan in 1981 by
a guy whose father was working for George Bush's brother (!), plus the two arguably-staged
'impeachments' of Richard Nixon (ending 1974) and Bill Clinton (ending 1999), you have a 40%
removal-programme hit rate on the previous 10 US Presidents.
Maybe even more hidden from public knowledge, is the truth of the Watergate 'Silent Coup'
(Colodny / Gettlin book). Bob Woodward was a US Navy intelligence agent under Admiral Maurer,
and when Maurer became head of the US Joint Chiefs and thus the entire US military, Woodward
was planted at the CIA's Washington Post to be the fake 'brave reporter' for the coup
d'état of 'Watergate', entirely a US Joint Chiefs – CIA operation. Bob Woodward
was apparently such an idiot re journalism at first he needed lots of remedial coaching to
meet minimal standards.
'Deep Throat' was fiction, the CIA had all the info, the CIA fake 'leaker' is another big
distraction game getting repeated (Daniel Ellsberg; Deep Throat; Wikileaks Assange who was
admitted by both Brzezinski and Netanyahu to be fake, seems he isn't even really 'living' at
the London Ecuador Embassy, faker
Edward Snowden , first 'leaking' to the CIA's Washington Post, ha!, with Glenn Greenwald
posing as the latest Jewish 'brave journalist'; Mossad-historian-supervised 'Panama Papers',
etc.)
Another 'impeachment' farce was the Deep State 'Monica Lewinsky' nonsense against Bill
Clinton, fired up when Bill balked in nausea, at the thought of ordering the war-crime
bombing of Serbia that would kill thousands. For Clinton-Lewinsky, another Jewish figure,
Matt Drudge, was propped up to play the Woodward role of 'great investigative reporter' When
Clinton consented to approve the war as his way to stay alive, he was 'acquitted' – the
bombings of Serbia began shortly afterwards. Clearly, the Deep State cannot even trust its
highly pre-vetted White House occupants.
Now that the Unz site is on board with collusion in US President removals, we still have
to get Unz site writers woke on the laughably fake 9 'trips to the moon' with 6 alleged 'moon
landings' of 1968-72 regarding which director Stanley Kubrick even admitted before in March
1999 before he died, that he faked the 'moon landing' NASA videos (CIA movie studios, Laurel
Canyon, California) 50th anniversary of the 'trips to the moon' starts this December a good
time for Unz debunking
Follow the Jack Ruby trail: If Oswald was "just a patsy," the first thing to do is to
investigate on the man who silenced Oswald, thereby preventing any doubts being raised in a
court case. Strangely enough, no one (not even Ruby's biographer Seth Kantor) seem to care
that Jack Ruby's real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein.
Allow me to quote from my earlier
article, and add a few details: Ruby, the son of Jewish Polish immigrants, was a member of
the Jewish underworld. He was a friend of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, whom he had
known and admired since 1946. Cohen was the successor of the famed Benjamin Siegelbaum, aka
Bugsy Siegel, one of the bosses of Murder Incorporated.
Cohen was infatuated with the Zionist
cause, as he explained in his memoirs: "Now I got so engrossed with Israel that I actually
pushed aside a lot of my activities and done nothing but what was involved with this Irgun
war". Mickey Cohen was in contact with Menachem Begin, the former Irgun chief, with whom he
even "spent a lot of time," according to Gary Wean, former detective sergeant for the Los
Angeles Police Department. So there is a direct line connecting Jack Ruby, via Mickey Cohen,
to the Israeli terrorist ring, and in particular to Menachem Begin, a specialist in false
flag terror. We also know that Ruby phoned Al Gruber, a Mickey Cohen associate, just after
Oswald's arrest; no doubt he received then "an offer he couldn't refuse," as they say in the
underworld. Ruby's defense lawyer William Kunstler wrote in his memoirs that Ruby told him he
had killed Oswald "for the Jews," and Ruby's rabbi Hillel Silverman received the same
confession when visiting Ruby in jail.
Probably as a cryptic message to Johnson, whom he expected to pardon him, Ruby made the
following odd statements to the Warren Commission: "There will be a certain tragic occurrence
happening if you don't take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don't suffer
because of what I have done." He said that feared that his act would be used "to create some
falsehood about some of the Jewish faith."
According to a declassified US State Department document, Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir
reacted to the news that Ruby had just killed Oswald with this sentence: "Ruby is alive, Oy
vaaboy if we get caught!" (quoted in Alan Hart, Zionism , vol. 2, p. 279).
Make it three assassinated Kennedys, with JFK Jr. Hell, make it four, counting his unborn
child : On July 20, 1999, the New York Daily News published a piece by Joel Siegel
titled: "JFK Jr. Mulled Run for Senate in 2000". The page seems to have just been deleted,
but I had saved it, so I reproduce the first lines : "A private poll in 1997 found that John
F. Kennedy Jr. was by far the state's most popular Democrat, and two friends said yesterday
they believed he would have run for office some day. Earlier this year, in one of the
best-kept secret in state politics, Kennedy considered seeking the seat of retiring Sen.
Daniel Moynihan " Moynihan was a former Kennedy associate, so it is likely that he would have
supported JFK Jr.'s bid. And recall that the same seat had once been held by RFK. So JFK Jr.
was walking on his father's and his uncle's footsteps. They saw him coming, and decided to
eliminate him before his ambitions even became public. Guess who won the seat, after JFK Jr.
died in a mysterious plane crash: Hillary Clinton.
What would JFK Jr. have done next if he had been allowed to walk this path? Well, if you want
to know what was on his mind, check some of the covers of his magazine George on
https://www.vfiles.com/vfiles/16372 You will see
that he was obsessed with "conspiracy theories":
In a special "Conspiracy Issue", October 1998, George published a piece by Oliver
Stone, director of the film JFK, titled "Paranoid and Proud of it". Earlier in December 1996,
the cover announces an article on "TWA Conspiracy Theories" (about TWA 800). And in March
1997, another conspiracy theory under the title "Who was behind the killing of Yitzhak
Rabin?". And so on.
Considering that JFK Jr.'s unborn child also died with him, and if we follow the logic of
Ronald Kessler, author of The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He
Founded (1996) (a message to JFK Jr.?), then three generations of Kennedys were punished
for "the sins of the father". That fulfills Exodus 20:5: "I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous
god and I punish a parent's fault in the children, the grandchildren, and the
great-grandchildren among those who hate me."
People conspire all the time. A board of directors gathering for their annual meeting is
literally a conspiracy: they are conspiring to plan the company's trajectory over some period
of time.
Do people ever conspire nefariously? Well, what is the first thing investigators will do
when looking into a company like Enron? That's right, they will subpoena email records,
because despite the negative connotation surrounding the term "conspiracy theory," people
implicitly sense and really know that *this is exactly the kind of shit that happens all the
time*.
For example, the Seth Rich murder, as its official story goes is literally a conspiracy.
Two MS-13 members conspired to rob Mr. Rich while he was walking home from a bar. Why is it
that people will believe that two people will conspire over a few hundred bucks, but refuse
to believe powerful people will conspire over tens or hundreds of billions? Only because of
media programming.
Once you unplug from the Matrix, so much that never made sense comes into clarity. Thanks,
Mr. Unz for your tireless work and financial contributions to the American Pravda series.
I've learned so much and it has been integral to my eyes being opened over the last four
years.
I think we all know the JFK-assassination was a conspiracy. Oswald was the patsy.
But, we do not know for sure who participated in the conspiracy.
The report by the Warren commission was a cover up. CIA Director McCone was "complicit" in
a Central Intelligence Agency "benign cover-up" by withholding information from the Warren
Commission, according to a report by the CIA Chief Historian David Robarge released to the
public in 2014.[24] According to this CIA report, CIA officers had been instructed to give
only "passive, reactive, and selective" assistance to the commission, in order to keep the
commission focused on "what the Agency believed at the time was the 'best truth' -- that Lee
Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy."
Witholding evidence in order to cover up a crime is usually done because of involvement in
the crime. Thus, it is most likely that the CIA was involved in the Kennedy
Assassination.
What evil consumes the innocents?
What witch stages these mind control spectacles? I add one bread crumb to the Ron Unz Trail, through the deep dark forest of the fairy tale of our lives.
No matter who you are, we have a vector for you!
"Lane, it should be noted, was in U.S. Army intelligence in post-war Germany in 1945-47.
This is the branch that became the C.I.A. after the war. Lane was paid some $5 million in
legal fees by the Liberty Lobby, according to a veteran of the lobby. None of this is widely
known among the people who read and support American Free Press. It is important because it
shows how a Zionist Jew from the C.I.A. can actually control a movement that purports to be
working for the American patriot audience. "
Ron's suspicions may be correct. However, I am bothered by two things left out of his
article: the identity of the conspirators and their motivation. What was President Kennedy
doing that had to be stopped? Fifty-five years have passed without any conspirator's deathbed
confession. Gerald Posner's Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of J. F.
K. seemed convincing to me when I read it many years ago. One fact that struck me as
specially persuasive was that the kindly Quaker woman who was sheltering Marina Oswald and
baby saw an ad in the paper for a job at the Book Depository building and pointed it out to
Oswald who applied for the job and got it sometime before the route of the Kennedy drive past
the building was chosen and published. Perhaps Mr. Unz might share his opinion of Posner's
book with us.
Take the pain to read actual eyewitness testimonies from medical personnel who attended
President Kennedy when taken to Parkland hospital after being shot.
That may stop you from embarrassing yourself defending the ludicrous lone gunman
theory.
Wonder if anyone read the Warren Report.
Reading it I got the same feeling as, in the seventies, when I still believed mainstream
history, reading Churchill's memoirs: too good to be true.
Harold Weisberg, 'Whitewash – the report on the Warren Report', 1965, 1966, New York
tears Warren to shreds.
It is a sad comment on mental pliability of US public that someone as perspicacious as Ron
Unz could have for so long subscribed to "single gunman" (alright, he was not single, Oswald
was married) "theory".
I came of age much more recently and my encounters with JFK and RFK's assassinations were all
about supposed conspiracies. If anything, there seems to be a conspiracy to make you think
there's a conspiracy.
Furthermore, it is pretty easy to kill someone so, if there was a conspiracy to kill those
two, goodness knows why the conspirators would not just use more subtle methods
All of these types of theories always seem to end up with their hypothesiser pointing out
inconsistencies in the historical account of incredibly complex events while, at best, only
proposing a much more inconsistent alternative.
Conspirator super genius: how shall we kill him?
Conspirator normal: we could give him an aneurysm so he dies in his sleep in the middle of
the night. It would be utterly untraceable and medically unsuspicious. Indeed, if we do it
when he has one of his girls round, then that will stop further questions.
Conspirator super genius: no, we should stage an assasination in the open. With bullets
that might miss, a patsy who might blab or get away and our target could easily survive and
take revenge. It will also make everyone suspicious and will need endless effort to keep
quiet.
If you examine the first page of JFK's death certificate, (easily done on your search engine)
you will see that the President died of "gunshot wounds to the head and neck." and that he
was killed by a "High Velocity Rifle". At that time a High Velocity Rifle had a muzzle
velocity speed of 2500/600 feet per second, now I believe it is up to 3000 feet per second.
The only weapon associated with Lee Harvey Oswald on the day of the assassination was a
Manlicher Carcano 6.5mm as agreed by the Warren Commission, Pozner (Case Closed) and
Bugliosi. This rifle is not only notoriously inaccurate but has a muzzle velocity of 2000
feet per second and therefore could not have inflicted the wounds to JFK's head and neck that
killed him.
Oswald may have tried to kill the President (personally I doubt it) from the sixth floor
of the Book Depository overlooking Dealy Plaza but he didn't because JFK was killed by a High
Velocity weapon and Oswald didn't have one.
"... Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years ..."
"... If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother's assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy's pro-Israel public positions although these were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America. ..."
"... All this was well known to me. However, I had not known that powder burns later proved that the fatal bullet had been fired directly behind Kennedy's head from a distance of three inches or less although Sirhan was standing several feet in front of him ..."
"... With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies and retainers had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination, and in a number of cases they soon moved overseas, abandoning the country entirely. JFK's widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Sunday Book Review ..."
"... the latest of many intelligent critics who have set out to demolish the tottering credibility of the Warren Commission and draw attention to evidence of a broad and terrible conspiracy that lay behind the assassination of John Kennedy -- and perhaps the murder of Robert Kennedy as well. ..."
"... Summarizing a half-century of conspiracy research, the Talbot and Douglass books together provide a wealth of persuasive evidence that elements of organized crime, individuals with CIA connections, and anti-Castro Cubans were probably participants in the assassination plot. Oswald seems to have been working with various anti-Communist groups and also had significant connections to U.S. intelligence, while his purported Marxism was merely a very thin disguise. With regard to the assassination itself, he was exactly the "patsy" he publicly claimed to be, and very likely never fired a single shot. Meanwhile, Jack Ruby had a long history of ties to organized crime, and surely killed Oswald to shut his mouth. ..."
"... Many others may have suffered a similar fate. Conspirators daring enough to strike at the president of the United States would hardly balk at using lethal means to protect themselves from the consequences of their action, and over the years a considerable number of individuals associated with the case in one way or another came to untimely ends. ..."
"... Less than a year after the assassination, JFK mistress Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer, was found shot to death in a Washington DC street-killing with no indications of attempted robbery or rape, and the case was never solved. Immediately afterwards, CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angelton was caught breaking into her home in search of her personal diary, which he later claimed to have destroyed. ..."
"... Dorothy Kilgallen was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and television personality, and she managed to wrangle an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby, later boasting to her friends that she would break the JFK assassination case wide open in her new book, producing the biggest scoop of her career. Instead, she was found dead in her Upper East Side townhouse, having apparently succumbed to an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, with both the draft text and the notes to her Jack Ruby chapter missing. ..."
"... From childhood, it's always been obvious to me that the MSM is completely dishonest about certain things and over the last dozen years I've become extremely suspicious about a whole range of other issues. But if you'd asked me a couple of years ago whether JFK was killed by a conspiracy, I would have said "well, anything's possible, but I'm 99% sure there's absolutely no substantial evidence pointing in that direction since the MSM would surely have headlined it a million times over." ..."
"... The National Guardian ..."
"... Rush to Judgment ..."
"... A Citizens Dissent ..."
"... , The New York Times ..."
"... Conspiracy Theory in America ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... President John F. Kennedy was indeed killed by a conspiracy, and we are sorry we spent more than a half century suppressing that truth and ridiculing those who uncovered it. ..."
Among other things, occasional references reminded me that I'd previously seen my newspapers
discuss a couple of newly released JFK books in rather respectful terms, which had surprised me
a bit at the time. One of them, still generating discussion, was JFK and the
Unspeakable published in 2008 by James W. Douglass, whose name meant nothing to me. And
the other, which I hadn't originally realized trafficked in any assassination conspiracies, was
David Talbot's 2007 Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years , focused on the
relationship between John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert. Talbot's name was also
somewhat familiar to me as the founder of Salon.com and a well-regarded if
liberal-leaning journalist.
None of us have expertise in all areas, so sensible people must regularly delegate their
judgment to credible third-parties, relying upon others to distinguish sense from nonsense.
Since my knowledge of the JFK assassination was nil, I decided that two recent books attracting
newspaper coverage might be a good place to start. So perhaps a couple of years after watching
that Oliver Stone film, I cleared some time in my schedule, and spent a few days carefully
reading the combined thousand pages of text.
I was stunned at what I immediately discovered. Not only was the evidence of a "conspiracy"
absolutely overwhelming, but whereas I'd always assumed that only kooks doubted the official
story, I instead discovered that a long list of the most powerful people near the top of the
American government and in the best position to know had been privately convinced of such a
"conspiracy," in many cases from almost the very beginning.
The Talbot book especially impressed me, being based on over 150 personal interviews and
released by The Free Press , a highly reputable publisher. Although he applied a
considerable hagiographic gloss to the Kennedys, his narrative was compellingly written, with
numerous gripping scenes. But while such packaging surely helped to explain some of the
favorable treatment from reviewers and how he had managed to produce a national bestseller in a
seemingly long-depleted field, for me the packaging was much less important than the product
itself.
To the extent that notions of a JFK conspiracy had ever crossed my mind, I'd considered the
argument from silence absolutely conclusive. Surely if there had been the slightest doubt of
the "lone gunman" conclusion endorsed by the Warren Commission, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy
would have launched a full investigation to avenge his slain brother.
But as Talbot so effectively demonstrates, the reality of the political situation was
entirely different. Robert Kennedy may have begun that fatal morning widely regarded as the
second most powerful man in the country, but the moment his brother was dead and his bitter
personal enemy Lyndon Johnson sworn in as the new president, his governmental authority almost
immediately ebbed away. Longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been his hostile
subordinate, probably scheduled for removal in JFK's second term, immediately became
contemptuous and unresponsive to his requests. Having lost all his control over the levels of
power, Robert Kennedy lacked any ability to conduct a serious investigation.
According to numerous personal interviews, he had almost immediately concluded that his
brother had been struck down at the hands of an organized group, very likely including elements
from within the U.S. government itself, but he could do nothing about the situation. As he
regularly confided to close associates, his hope at the age of 38 was to reach the White House
himself at some future date, and with his hands once again upon the levels of power then
uncover his brother's killers and bring them to justice. But until that day, he could do
nothing, and any unsubstantiated accusations he made would be totally disastrous both for
national unity and for his own personal credibility. So for years, he was forced to nod his
head and publicly acquiesce to the official story of his brother's inexplicable assassination
at the hands of a lone nut, a fairy tale publicly endorsed by nearly the entire political
establishment, and this situation deeply gnawed at him. Moreover, his own seeming acceptance of
that story was often interpreted by others, not least in the media, as his wholehearted
endorsement.
Although discovering Robert Kennedy's true beliefs was a crucial revelation in the Talbot
book, there were many others. At most three shots had allegedly come from Oswald's rifle, but
Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent in the passenger seat of JFK's limousine, was sure
there had been more than that, and to the end of his life always believed there had been
additional shooters. Gov. Connolly, seated next to JFK and severely wounded in the attack, had
exactly the same opinion. CIA Director John McCone was equally convinced that there had been
multiple shooters. Across the pages of Talbot's book, I learned that dozens of prominent,
well-connected individuals privately expressed extreme skepticism towards the official "lone
gunman theory" of the Warren Commission, although such doubts were very rarely made in public
or on the record.
For a variety of complex reasons, the leading national media organs -- the commanding
heights of "Our American
Pravda" -- almost immediately endorsed the "lone gunman theory" and with some exceptions
generally maintained that stance throughout the next half-century. With few prominent critics
willing to publicly dispute that idea and a strong media tendency to ignore or minimize those
exceptions, casual observers such as myself had generally received a severely distorted view of
the situation.
If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding
of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam
War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection
in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy,
who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he
carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and
the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate
his brother's assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally
wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named
Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy's pro-Israel public positions although these
were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America.
All this was well known to me. However, I had not known that powder burns later proved
that the fatal bullet had been fired directly behind Kennedy's head from a distance of three
inches or less although Sirhan was standing several feet in front of him . Furthermore,
eyewitness testimony and acoustic evidence indicated that at least twelve bullets were fired
although Sirhan's revolver could hold only eight, and a combination of these factors led
longtime LA Coroner Dr. Thomas Naguchi, who conducted the autopsy, to claim in his 1983 memoir
that there was likely a second gunman. Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also reported seeing a security
guard with his gun drawn standing right behind Kennedy during the attack, and that individual
happened to have a deep political hatred of the Kennedys. The police investigators seemed
uninterested in these highly suspicious elements, none of which came to light during the trial.
With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of
their allies and retainers had any desire to investigate the details of this latest
assassination, and in a number of cases they soon moved overseas, abandoning the country
entirely. JFK's widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her
children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be
able to protect them.
Talbot also devotes a chapter to the late 1960s prosecution efforts of New Orleans DA Jim
Garrison, which had been the central plot of the JFK film, and I was stunned to
discover that the script was almost entirely based on real life events rather than Hollywood
fantasy. This even extended to its bizarre cast of assassination conspiracy suspects, mostly
fanatically anti-Communist Kennedy-haters with CIA and organized crime ties, some of whom were
indeed prominent members of the New Orleans gay demimonde. Sometimes real life is far stranger
than fiction.
Taken as a whole, I found Talbot's narrative quite convincing, at least with respect to
demonstrating the existence of a substantial conspiracy behind the fatal event.
Others certainly had the same reaction, with the august pages of The New York TimesSunday Book Review carrying the strongly favorable reaction of presidential historian
Alan Brinkley. As the Allan Nevins Professor of History and Provost of Columbia University,
Brinkley is as mainstream and respectable an academic scholar as might be imagined and
he
characterized Talbot as
the latest of many intelligent critics who have set out to demolish the tottering
credibility of the Warren Commission and draw attention to evidence of a broad and terrible
conspiracy that lay behind the assassination of John Kennedy -- and perhaps the murder of
Robert Kennedy as well.
The other book by Douglass, released a year later, covered much the same ground and came to
roughly similar conclusions, with substantial overlap but also including major additional
elements drawn from the enormous volume of extremely suspicious material unearthed over the
decades by diligent JFK researchers. Once again, the often bitter Cold War era conflict between
JFK and various much harder-line elements of his government over Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam is
sketched out as the likely explanation for his death.
Summarizing a half-century of conspiracy research, the Talbot and Douglass books
together provide a wealth of persuasive evidence that elements of organized crime, individuals
with CIA connections, and anti-Castro Cubans were probably participants in the assassination
plot. Oswald seems to have been working with various anti-Communist groups and also had
significant connections to U.S. intelligence, while his purported Marxism was merely a very
thin disguise. With regard to the assassination itself, he was exactly the "patsy" he publicly
claimed to be, and very likely never fired a single shot. Meanwhile, Jack Ruby had a long
history of ties to organized crime, and surely killed Oswald to shut his mouth.
Many others may have suffered a similar fate. Conspirators daring enough to strike at
the president of the United States would hardly balk at using lethal means to protect
themselves from the consequences of their action, and over the years a considerable number of
individuals associated with the case in one way or another came to untimely ends.
Less than a year after the assassination, JFK mistress Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of
high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer, was found shot to death in a Washington DC street-killing
with no indications of attempted robbery or rape, and the case was never solved. Immediately
afterwards, CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angelton was caught breaking into her
home in search of her personal diary, which he later claimed to have destroyed.
Dorothy Kilgallen was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and television
personality, and she managed to wrangle an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby, later boasting
to her friends that she would break the JFK assassination case wide open in her new book,
producing the biggest scoop of her career. Instead, she was found dead in her Upper East Side
townhouse, having apparently succumbed to an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, with both
the draft text and the notes to her Jack Ruby chapter missing.
Shortly before Jim Garrison filed his assassination charges, his top suspect David Ferrie
was found dead at age 48, possibly of natural causes, though the DA suspected foul play.
During the mid-1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations held a series of
high-profile hearings to reopen and investigate the case, and two of the witnesses called were
high-ranking mafia figures Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli, widely suspected of having been
connected with the assassination. The former was shot to death in the basement of his home one
week before he was scheduled to testify, and the body of the latter was found in an oil-drum
floating in the waters off Miami after he had been subpoenaed for an additional appearance.
These were merely a few of the highest-profile individuals with a connection to the Dallas
assassination whose lives were cut short in the years that followed, and although the deaths
may have been purely coincidental, the full list is rather a long one.
Having read a couple of books that completely upended my settled beliefs about a central
event of twentieth century America, I simply didn't know what to think. Over the years, my own
writings had put me on friendly terms with a well-connected individual whom I considered a
member of the elite establishment, and whose intelligence and judgment had always seemed
extremely solid. So I decided to very gingerly raise the subject with him, and see whether he
had ever doubted the "lone gunman" orthodoxy. To my total astonishment, he explained that as
far back as the early 1990s, he'd become absolutely convinced in the reality of a "JFK
conspiracy" and over the years had quietly devoured a huge number of the books in that field,
but had never breathed a word in public lest his credibility be ruined and his political
effectiveness destroyed.
A second friend, a veteran journalist known for his remarkably courageous stands on certain
controversial topics, provided almost exactly the same response to my inquiry. For decades,
he'd been almost 100% sure that JFK had died in a conspiracy, but once again had never written
a word on the topic for fear that his influence would immediately collapse.
If these two individuals were even remotely representative, I began to wonder whether a
considerable fraction, perhaps even a majority, of the respectable establishment had long
harbored private beliefs about the JFK assassination that were absolutely contrary to the
seemingly uniform verdict presented in the media. But with every such respectable voice keeping
so silent, I had never once suspected a thing.
Few other revelations in recent years have so totally overturned my understanding of the
framework of reality. Even a year or two later, I still found it very difficult to wrap my head
around the concept, as I described in another note to that well-connected friend of mine:
BTW, I hate to keep harping on it, but every time I consider the implications of the JFK
matter I'm just more and more astonished.
The president of the US. The heir to one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in
America. His brother the top law enforcement officer in the country. Ben Bradlee, one of his
closest friends, the fearless crusading editor of one of the nation's most influential media
outlets. As America's first Catholic president, the sacred icon of many millions of Irish,
Italian, and Hispanic families. Greatly beloved by top Hollywood people and many leading
intellectuals.
His assassination ranks as one of the most shocking and dramatic events of the 20th
century, inspiring hundreds of books and tens of thousands of news stories and articles,
examining every conceivable detail. The argument from MSM silence always seemed absolutely
conclusive to me.
From childhood, it's always been obvious to me that the MSM is completely dishonest
about certain things and over the last dozen years I've become extremely suspicious about a
whole range of other issues. But if you'd asked me a couple of years ago whether JFK was
killed by a conspiracy, I would have said "well, anything's possible, but I'm 99% sure
there's absolutely no substantial evidence pointing in that direction since the MSM would
surely have headlined it a million times over."
Was there really a First World War? Well, I've always assumed there was, but who really
knows? .
Our reality is shaped by the media, but what the media presents is often determined by
complex forces rather than by the factual evidence in front of their eyes. And the lessons of
the JFK assassination may provide some important insights into this situation.
A president was dead and soon afterward his supposed lone assassin suffered the same fate,
producing a tidy story with a convenient endpoint. Raising doubts or focusing on contrary
evidence might open doors better kept shut, perhaps endangering national unity or even risking
nuclear war if the trail seemed to lead overseas. The highest law enforcement officer in the
country was the slain president's own brother, and since he seemed to fully accept that simple
framework, what responsible journalist or editor would be willing to go against it? What
American center of power or influence had any strong interest in opposing that official
narrative?
Certainly there was immediate and total skepticism overseas, with few foreign leaders ever
believing the story, and figures such as Nikita Khrushchev, Charles DeGaulle, and Fidel Castro
all immediately concluded that a political plot had been responsible for Kennedy's elimination.
Mainstream media outlets in France and the rest of Western Europe were equally skeptical of the
"lone gunman theory," and some of the most important early criticism of U.S. government claims
was produced by Thomas Burnett, an expatriate American writing for one of the largest French
newsweeklies. But in pre-Internet days, only the tiniest sliver of the American public had
regular access to such foreign publications, and their impact upon domestic opinion would have
been nil.
Perhaps instead of asking ourselves why the "lone gunman" story was accepted, we should
instead be asking why it was ever vigorously challenged, during an era when media control was
extremely centralized in establishmentarian hands.
Oddly enough, the answer may lie in the determination of a single individual named Mark
Lane, a left-liberal New York City attorney and Democratic Party activist. Although JFK
assassination books eventually numbered in the thousands and the resulting conspiracy theories
roiled American public life throughout the 1960s and 1970s, without his initial involvement
matters might have followed a drastically different trajectory.
From the very first, Lane had been skeptical of the official story, and less than a month
after the killing, The National Guardian , a small left-wing national newspaper,
published his 10,000 word critique, highlighting major flaws in the "lone gunman theory."
Although his piece had been rejected by every other national periodical, the public interest
was enormous, and once the entire edition sold out, thousands of extra copies were printed in
pamphlet form. Lane even rented a theater in New York City, and for several months gave public
lectures to packed audiences.
After the Warren Commission issued its completely contrary official verdict, he began
working on a manuscript, and although he faced enormous obstacles in finding an American
publisher, once Rush to Judgment appeared, it spent a remarkable two years on the
national bestseller lists, easily reaching the #1 spot. Such tremendous economic success
naturally persuaded a host of other authors to follow suit, and an entire genre was soon
established. Lane later published A Citizens Dissent recounting his early struggles to
break the total American "media blackout" against anyone contradicting the official conclusion.
Against all odds, he had succeeded in sparking a massive popular uprising sharply challenging
the narrative of the establishment.
According to Talbot, "By late 1966, it was becoming impossible for the establishment media
to stick with the official story" and the November 25, 1966 edition of Life Magazine ,
then at the absolute height of its national influence, carried the remarkable cover story "Did
Oswald Act Alone?" with the conclusion that he probably did not. The next month , The New
York Times announced it was forming a special task force to investigate the assassination.
These elements were to merge with the media furor soon surrounding the Garrison investigation
that began the following year, an investigation that enlisted Lane as an active participant.
However, behind the scenes a powerful media counterattack was also being launched at this same
time.
In 2013 Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, past president of the Florida Political Science
Association, published Conspiracy Theory in America , a fascinating exploration of the
history of the concept and the likely origins of the term itself. He noted that during 1966 the
CIA had become alarmed at the growing national skepticism of the Warren Commission findings,
especially once the public began turning its suspicious eyes toward the intelligence agency
itself. Therefore, in January 1967 top CIA officials distributed a memo to all their local
stations, directing them to employ their media assets and elite contacts to refute such
criticism by various arguments, notably including an emphasis on Robert Kennedy's supposed
endorsement of the "lone gunman" conclusion.
This memo, obtained by a later FOIA request, repeatedly used the term "conspiracy" in a
highly negative sense, suggesting that "conspiracy theories" and "conspiracy theorists" be
portrayed as irresponsible and irrational. And as I wrote
in 2016,
Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points,
with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA
guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread
throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present
day.
This possible cause-and-effect relationship is supported by other evidence. Shortly after
leaving The Washington Post in 1977, famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein
published a 25,000 word Rolling Stonecover story entitled "The CIA and
the Media" revealing that during the previous quarter century over 400 American journalists had
secretly carried out assignments for the CIA according to documents on file at the headquarters
of that organization. This influence project, known as "Operation Mockingbird," had allegedly
been launched near the end of the 1940s by high-ranking CIA official Frank Wisner, and included
editors and publishers situated at the very top of the mainstream media hierarchy.
For whatever reason, by the time I came of age and began following the national media in the
late 1970s, the JFK story had become very old news, and all the newspapers and magazines I read
provided the very strong impression that the "conspiracy theories" surrounding the
assassination were total nonsense, long since debunked, and only of interest to kooks on the
ideological fringe. I was certainly aware of the enormous profusion of popular conspiracy
books, but I never had the slightest interest in looking at any of them. America's political
establishment and its close media allies had outlasted the popular rebellion, and the name
"Mark Lane" meant almost nothing to me, except vaguely as some sort of fringe-nut, who very
occasionally rated a mention in my mainstream newspapers, receiving the sort of treatment
accorded to Scientologists or UFO activists.
Oddly enough, Talbot's treatment of Lane was also rather dismissive, recognizing his crucial
early role in preventing the official narrative from quickly hardening into concrete, but also
emphasizing his abrasive personality, and almost entirely ignoring his important later work on
the issue, perhaps because so much of it had been conducted on the political fringe. Robert
Kennedy and his close allies had similarly boycotted Lane's work from the very first, regarding
him as a meddlesome gadfly, but perhaps also ashamed that he was asking the questions and doing
the work that they themselves were so unwilling to undertake at the time. Douglass's 500 page
book scarcely even mentions Lane.
Reading a couple of Lane's books, I was quite impressed by the enormous role he had
seemingly played in the JFK assassination story, but I also wondered how much of my impression
may have been due to the exaggerations of a possible self-promoter. Then, on May 13, 2016 I
opened my New York Times and found
nearly a full page obituary devoted to Lane's death at age 89, the sort of treatment these
days reserved for only the highest-ranking U.S. Senators or major rap stars. And the 1,500
words were absolutely glowing, portraying Lane as a solitary, heroic figure struggling for
decades to reveal the truth of the JFK assassination conspiracy against an entire political and
media establishment seeking to suppress it.
I read this as a deep apology by America's national newspaper of record. President John
F. Kennedy was indeed killed by a conspiracy, and we are sorry we spent more than a half
century suppressing that truth and ridiculing those who uncovered it.
In a way we now can talk about Intelligence Industrial complex
Notable quotes:
"... The good news is the Deep State seems less competent than we originally feared. ..."
"... In a damning passage , the 568 page report found it "extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same. By departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice." Comey's drafting of a press release announcing no prosecution for Clinton, written before the full investigation was even completed, is given a light touch though in the report, along the lines of roughly preparing for the conclusion based on early indications. ..."
"... Enough: The DOJ Must Show Its Cards to the American Public A Higher Loyalty is Jim Comey's Revenge, Served Lukewarm ..."
"... Attorney General Loretta Lynch is criticized for not being more sensitive to public perceptions when she agreed to meet privately with Bill Clinton aboard an airplane as the FBI investigation into Hillary unfolded. "Lynch's failure to recognize the appearance problem and to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment." Her statements later about her decision not to recuse further "created public confusion and didn't adequately address the situation." ..."
"... Page and Strzok also discussed cutting back the number of investigators present for Clinton's in-person interview in light of the fact she might soon be president, and thus their new boss. Someone identified only as Agent One went on to refer to Clinton as "the President" and in a message told a friend "I'm with her." The FBI also allowed Clinton's lawyers to attend her interview, even though they were also witnesses to a possible crimes committed by Clinton. ..."
"... Page and Strzok were among five FBI officials the report found expressed hostility toward Trump and have been referred to the FBI's internal disciple system. The report otherwise makes only wishy-washy recommendations about things every agent should already know, like "adopting a policy addressing the appropriateness of department employees discussing the conduct of uncharged individuals in public statements." ..."
"... In that sense, the IG just poured a can of jet fuel onto the fires of the 2016 election and walked away to watch it burn. ..."
"... One concrete outcome, however, is to weaken a line of prosecution for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The chief Russiagate investigator has just seen a key witness degraded -- any defense lawyer will characterize Comey's testimony as tainted now -- and a possible example of obstruction weakened. ..."
"... The report thus underscores one of the stated reasons for Comey's dismissal. Firing someone for incompetence isn't obstructing justice; it's the boss' job. ..."
"... the most important conclusion of the report: there is no longer a way to claim America's internal intelligence agency, the FBI, did not play a role in the 2016 election. There is only to argue which side they favored and whether they meddled via clumsiness, as a coordinated action, or as a chaotic cluster of competing pro- and anti- Clinton/Trump factions inside the Bureau. And that's the tally before anyone brings up the FBI's use of a human informant inside the Trump campaign, the FBI's use of both FISA warrants and pseudo-legal warrantless surveillance against key members of the Trump team, the FBI's use of opposition research from the Steele Dossier , and so on. ..."
June
15, 2018The good news is the Deep State seems less competent than we originally
feared.
It will be easy to miss the most important point amid the partisan bleating over what the
Department of Justice Office of Inspector General report on the FBI's Clinton email
investigation really means.
While each side will find the evidence they want to find proving the FBI, with James Comey
as director, helped/hurt Hillary Clinton and/or maybe Donald Trump, the real takeaway is this:
the FBI influenced the election of a president.
In January 2017 the Inspector General for the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz (who
previously worked on the 2012 study of "Fast and Furious"), opened his probe into the FBI's
Clinton email investigation, including public statements Comey made at critical moments in the
presidential campaign. Horowitz's focus was always to be on how the FBI did its work, not to
re-litigate the case against Clinton. Nor did the IG plan to look into anything regarding
Russiagate.
In a damning
passage , the 568 page report found it "extraordinary and
insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors for the admitted purpose
of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates
in the FBI to do the same. By departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department
norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair
administrators of justice." Comey's drafting of a press release announcing no prosecution for
Clinton, written before the full investigation was even completed, is given a light touch
though in the report, along the lines of roughly preparing for the conclusion based on early
indications.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch is criticized for not being more sensitive to public
perceptions when she agreed to meet privately with Bill Clinton aboard an airplane as the FBI
investigation into Hillary unfolded. "Lynch's failure to recognize the appearance problem and
to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment." Her statements later about her
decision not to recuse further "created public confusion and didn't adequately address the
situation."
The report also
criticizes in depth FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged texts disparaging
Trump before moving from the Clinton email to the Russiagate investigation. Those texts
"brought discredit" to the FBI and sowed public doubt about the investigation, including one
exchange that read, "Page: "[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: "No.
No he's not. We'll stop it." Another Strzok document
stated "we know foreign actors obtained access to some Clinton emails, including at least
one secret message."
Page and Strzok also discussed cutting back the number of investigators present for
Clinton's in-person interview in light of the fact she might soon be president, and thus their
new boss. Someone identified only as Agent One went on to refer to Clinton as "the President"
and in a message told a friend "I'm with her." The FBI also allowed Clinton's lawyers to attend
her interview, even though they were also witnesses to a possible crimes committed by
Clinton.
Page and Strzok were among five FBI officials the report found expressed hostility
toward Trump and have been referred to the FBI's internal disciple system. The report otherwise
makes only wishy-washy recommendations about things every agent should already know, like
"adopting a policy addressing the appropriateness of department employees discussing the
conduct of uncharged individuals in public statements."
But at the end of it all, the details really don't matter, because the report broadly found
no political bias, no purposeful efforts or strategy to sway the election. In aviation disaster
terms, it was all pilot error. Like an accident of sorts, as opposed to the pilot boarding
drunk, but the plane crashed and killed 300 people either way.
The report is already being welcomed by Democrats -- who feel Comey
shattered Clinton's chances of winning the election by reopening the email probe just days
before the election -- and by Republicans, who feel Comey let Clinton off easy. Many are now
celebrating it was only gross incompetence, unethical behavior, serial bad judgment, and
insubordination that led the FBI to help determine the election. No Constitutional crisis.
A lot of details in those 568 pages to yet fully parse, but at first glance there is not
much worthy of prosecution (though Attorney General Jeff Sessions says he will review the
report for possible
prosecutions and IG Horowitz will testify in front of Congress on Monday and may reveal
more information.) Each side will point to the IG's conclusion of "no bias" to shut down calls
for this or that in a tsunami of blaming each other. In that sense, the IG just poured a
can of jet fuel onto the fires of the 2016 election and walked away to watch it burn.
One concrete outcome, however, is to weaken a line of
prosecution for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The chief Russiagate investigator has just
seen a key witness degraded -- any defense lawyer will characterize Comey's testimony as
tainted now -- and a possible example of obstruction weakened. As justification for firing
Comey, the White House initially pointed to an earlier Justice Department memo criticizing
Comey for many of the same actions now highlighted by the IG (Trump later added concerns about
the handling of Russiagate.) The report thus underscores one of the stated reasons for
Comey's dismissal. Firing someone for incompetence isn't obstructing justice; it's the boss'
job.
It will be too easy, however, to miss the most important conclusion of the report: there
is no longer a way to claim America's internal intelligence agency, the FBI, did not play a
role in the 2016 election. There is only to argue which side they favored and whether they
meddled via clumsiness, as a coordinated action, or as a chaotic cluster of competing pro- and
anti- Clinton/Trump factions inside the Bureau. And that's the tally before anyone brings up
the FBI's use of a human informant inside the Trump campaign, the FBI's use of both FISA
warrants and pseudo-legal
warrantless surveillance against key members of the Trump team, the FBI's use of opposition
research from the
Steele Dossier , and so on.
The good news is the Deep State seems less competent than we originally feared. But even if
one fully accepts the IG report's conclusion that all this -- and there's a lot -- was not
intentional, at a minimum it makes clear to those watching ahead of 2020 what tools are
available and the impact they can have. While we continue to look for the bad guy abroad, we
have already met the enemy and he is us.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the
Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan. Follow him on Twitter
@WeMeantWell .
"... It wasn't just bad intelligence, it was consistently purposeful bad intelligence. The consequences have been dire for the world, and our country as well. The Russians in that period never represented a serious military threat even to the continent of Europe, far less the US. ..."
"... You are correct. The forever wars are just one of the ways to bleed the Middle Class dry. The media propaganda and rule by the 10% can't let the suckers know what is really going on. There are always enough men to man the colonial wars but they are unwinnable unless the whole nation is involved. ..."
"... Then behind the scenes Obama did very little to back up his speeches with actions as he went with the flow. ..."
"... Obama had two groups to satisfy, the populace and the elite. The populace got empty words, the elite got what they wanted. ..."
"... The MSM is waging a propaganda campaign at every level completely obscuring the truth. And the politicians play the fear card at every level. I don't believe any of us is in "happy compliance" at the airport. I for one, grind my teeth and cuss out the crooked corporations (including that bastard "skull" Chertoff who personally benefited from the x-ray screening machines) that reap a bundle of money from the so called screening and invasive body searches. Travel has become something to dread. ..."
"... The officer corps might be an opponent but I think that America has been badly served by them due to how officers are selected & trained and who makes it to the top. The only time they balk is when some idiot in Washington pushes them to fight the Russians or the Chinese. And most people don't really care in any case so long as the US wins. Out of sight, out of mind as they say. ..."
"... It's harder and harder to sell these military actions to the public. What are we in Korea and Japan for? To contain China? If you ask most people, they'll probably tell you that China won, or at very least our bosses are in league with their bosses. ..."
"... The Borg moves without regard to public sentiment, so we have to replace politicians with those who'll bring it to heel. That's a death sentence, but I feel like enough people have the guts to try and make it happen. ..."
"... *sigh* someone please trot out that Goering quote again: To the extent that public opinion matters, public opinion is easy to arrange. ..."
"... I don't mean to suggest that there isn't a solid electoral reason to have nice vague policies, not least because a campaign against foreign wars would be an excellent way for the left to make common cause with some parts of the right, such as the paleoconservatives and isolationists. ..."
"... It did for Russia. There is now an ongoing civil war on its border in Ukraine. NATO went to war with Serbia in the later 1990's. The breakup of the Atlantic Alliance will splinter Europe. Humans being humans. The strong will try to steal from the weak. ..."
"... The old adage that our country rallies around a war president is no longer operative IMHO. In a nation tired of perpetual war, the commander-in-chief would get at best a short-term surge in public approval by opening up a new battle zone, before slipping precipitously in the polls. Why on earth have the Democrats eagerly embraced the role of the war party, while our country literally crumbles for lack of public investment? Could there be a more effective losing strategy? ..."
"... Why on earth have the Democrats eagerly embraced the role of the war party, while our country literally crumbles for lack of public investment? Could there be a more effective losing strategy? ..."
"... Those are their constituents: beltway bandits, private contractors, public/private partnerships, insurance companies, arms companies, private equity firms, military contractors, and whatever other combinations you want to come up with. ..."
"... I remember when Tim Kaine gleefully suggested that we needed an "intelligence surge" to protect the country. I almost gagged. It was a not so subtle message of "prepare for the handouts to the private military contractor industry". ..."
"... How does positioning 2,000 – 4,000 US troops in Syria fit into your "Trump is a peace-maker" narrative? How about the comment Wednesday that the US will attack Syrian forces if they attack Sunni jihadis (er "moderate rebels") in SW Syria? ..."
"... How about us aiding and abetting a famine in Yemen that could kills tens of thousands? ..."
"... I think you are attributing a sentiment to juliania that her comment does not actually contain. She doesn't say Trump is a peace-maker, she says he was far in front of Bernie in using "anti-war rhetoric as a strategy." The example of Nixon doing the same thing indicates that juliania is well aware that strategic rhetoric and actual decisions are not the same thing. ..."
"... I know a fair number of Trump voters, and my read is similar to juliania's: Trump's anti-war rhetoric was a big draw for a lot of people, and helped many be able to hold their nose and vote for him. Understanding this and commenting on it does not make one a Trump supporter, obviously, or indicate that one puts any credence in his dovish rhetoric. ..."
"... You might be correct and my apologies to juliania if I misread her post. I have heard so much of the "Trump is fighting [the deep state, Wall Street, the neocons]" on other blogs that I am a bit hypersensitive and go off on a rant when I see or perceive that argument. From my perspective, Trump is doing everything in his power to entrench Wall Street, the neocons, etc. ..."
"... The war in Yemen is to secure the Saudi monarchy and our interest in their vast reserves of oil and gas. ..."
"... Are militarism* and democracy compatible? I'm not so sure they are. ..."
"... A lot depends on how you define "democracy", "will of the people" etc.. What the role of "finance" in a context of "capitalism" and "democracy" should be, e.g., citizens united(note orwellian language) may be considered a " reason why they would not be compatible" and even antithetical. ..."
"... America itself is the most destabilizing force on the planet. i would love to see what America leaving the world to its' own devices would look like. Like Weimar/Nazi Germany, nothing good comes from these kind of "American Values." ..."
"... The military is A-ok with Trump and this is what seems to matter. The roar of hysteria from the media over Trump first 2-3 months in office died down considerably when he showed a willingness to engage in a show of force by striking Syria (remember when he was so concerned about the welfare of children?) ..."
"... Only a *faction" of the security establishment is anti-Trump because he is skeptical of *neoliberal* globalism. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the Prez who can't seem to enact *anything* to make lives better for the people who put him in office, is magically able to enact the agenda of the 1%. This repeat of the 1% 's manipulations is one I can do without. ..."
"... Regarding the question posed by this post I think there is very little evidence of an anti-war "fever" and even if there were, and if it were projected into the streets and/or ballot box, I am pessimistic that it could have any effect on the U.S. government of today. I don't think the U.S. government cares what the American people think or feel about anything -- except of course as those cares and feelings affect the mechanisms of control through the propaganda pushed through our media, the levels of surveillance and suppression, and the increased viciousness of our "laws" and their enforcement. ..."
"... I believe the U.S. government is run by several powerful and competing interests. So I think I'll ask a different question -- though in the same vein as that posed by the title of this post. Are those interests who compete with the interests of the MIC and Spook Industrial Complex (SIC) beginning to see the futility and stupidity of our endless wars? ..."
"... "Peaceniks are Kremlin stooges!" It's depressing when you can predict the media's response six months in advance. ..."
Is anti-war fever building in the U.S.? One would not think so given all the signs -- apparent public apathy toward multiple military
involvements, happy compliance with "security" at the increasingly painful airport, lack of protests and so on.
Yet there are two signs I'd like to put forward as indicating a growing willingness to forgo foreign "entanglements" (undeclared
wars), springing either from a weariness with them, a nascent abhorrence of them, or a desire to focus U.S. dollars on U.S. domestic
solutions, like the
hugely popular Medicare for All . (Click to see just how popular Medicare for All, called "Medicare Buy-In" at the link, is across
party lines.)
The first sign is Bernie Sanders, the most popular politician in America and by far its most popular senator, making statements
like these in the speech linked and discussed in the video at the top
of this piece. For example, at 9:00 in the clip, Sanders says (emphasis his):
SANDERS: In other words, what we have seen in time and time again, disasters occur when administrations, Democrat and Republican,
mislead Congress and the American people. And when Congress fails to do its constitutional job in terms of asking the questions
of whether or not we should be in a war. And I think we need to ask that very hard question today.
And here is the point that I hope the American people are asking themselves. Is the war on terror, a perpetual, never-ending
war, necessary to keep us safe?
I personally believe we have become far too comfortable with the United States engaging in military interventions all over
the world. We have now been in Afghanistan for 17 years. We have been in Iraq for 15 years. We are occupying a portion of Syria,
and this administration has indicated that it may broaden that mission even more.
We are waging a secretive drone war in at least five countries. Our forces, right now, as we speak, are supporting a Saudi-led
war in Yemen which has killed thousands of civilians and has created the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet today.
Talk like this is anathema in our militarized state, comments usually relegated to the fringes of public discourse. For Sanders
to say this (and similarly anathemic remarks elsewhere in the speech) certainly denotes a shift, especially since Sanders during
the campaign was not considered strong on foreign policy, especially progressive (non-orthodox) foreign policy.
As Jimmy Dore said in reply to the last sentence quoted above, "It's not Syria? Can you [say] "stop the butcher" is the worst?
No. Turns out what we're doing is the 'worst humanitarian crisis in the world today,' committing siege warfare in Yemen, which
is a war crime. And we're doing it, with Saudi Arabia."
Sanders also says we're "fighting terror" in 76 countries. Let that sink in, as Sanders wishes it to -- we're engaged in military
conflict in 76 countries, almost a third
of the nations in the world. I'm not sure many in the lay public appreciate the importance, or the likely consequences, of that
surprising fact. (For one example of those consequences, consider that foreign wars often
come home .)
Elsewhere in the video Dore asks, "Do you see Chuck Shumer saying our wars have had 'dire consequences'?" Sanders, it seems to
me, is launching a toe-to-toe battle with what right-wingers have lately been calling the American "deep state" and I've been calling
the security establishment.
The second sign comes from Donald Trump during the campaign. This isn't just Sanders going out on a limb -- taking a flier,
as it were -- on a deeply unpopular position. Consider how often Donald Trump, the campaign version, made similar statements:
He also famously
said this about NATO and its mission:
What I'm saying is NATO is obsolete. NATO is -- is obsolete and it's extremely expensive for the United States, disproportionately
so. And we should readjust NATO.
If the U.S. security establishment is working to get rid of Trump, to take him out by whatever means necessary, campaign
statements like that would be one of many reasons.
If Americans Could Vote Against the Forever War, Would They Do It?
I recently
noted how different the outcomes are when the public indicates policy preferences with their votes versus polling data. DC politicians
of both parties ignore polling with impunity. Votes, on the other hand, especially in party primaries, can force change -- witness
the Trump nomination and the Sanders (stolen) near-nomination.
In some ways, small but not insignificant, the 2016 election was a test of the anti-war waters, with Trump asking questions about
the need and mission of NATO, for example, that haven't been asked in over a generation, and Clinton, the proud choice of the neocon
left and right, in strong
disagreement .
It's too much or too early to say that Trump's public pullback from U.S. hegemony helped his election, though that's entirely
possible. But it's certainly true that his anti-Forever War sentiments did not hurt him in any noticeable way.
I'll go further: If Sanders runs in 2020 and adds anti-war messaging to his program, we'll certainly see the title question tested.
If the U.S. security establishment is working to get rid of Trump, to take him out by whatever means necessary, campaign
statements like that would be one of many reasons.
Bernie had better watch his back then. Make sure no one associated with him has any contact with any Russians or Iranians or
whatever.
The "security establishment/Blob" no coubt has already filled its supply chain with anti-Bernie Bernays-caliber ordnance, ready
to deploy. I don't doubt that there are plenty of James Earl Rays out there, happy to be the ones who will "rid the Blob of this
troublesome politician." Just remember that Bernie has a summer house, and his wife was president of a failed college, and he's
a GD Socialist, for Jeebus' sake!
There's far less than six degrees of separation between any one person and someone who is Russian or Chinese or Iranian or
whatever. Even two degrees of separation is enough for a headline these days.
Districts with military casualties correlate to Trump votes. I'd would be nice to see Sanders do a Town Hall on the empire,
in six months or so when this speech has time to sink in, in one such district.
Yes. Sanders is going to have to pull off a communicative high wire act bridging relatively acceptable criticism of "unnecessary
and expensive foreign entanglements" to hinting at the idea that the US citizens have to understand the expansive pressures that
flow from capitalism and the MIC. I've appreciated the regular links here to American Conservative and Unz articles. They are
valuable reminders that some on the Right aren't in complete denial, at least about the MIC.
One scenario would see a revival of the terms of discussion that briefly saw daylight in at least the late 1940s, when state
planners openly linked a "defensive" military posture with a need for markets. It would at least get the cards out on the table
and assist in clarifying how world politics isn't just a matter of great and secondary powers inevitably pushing each other around.
The idea of Realpolitik is a fundamental and fatal ground of reification.
Presidential ambitions aside, it would be a good idea to pressure trump's crew that are plotting to attack Iran. Plus, any
chance to push back against the awful Dem leadership is also a positive. We need to see more grassroots pushback against that
leadership. Sanders is the best around at generating that grassroots pushback.
Bernie makes many salient points on the Military Industrial Complex in a floor speech concerning the Defense Dept. budget bill.
I especially like the part where he is trying to add an amendment that would limit the compensation of CEOs of defense contractors
to no more than the Secretary of Defense ($205,000). This speech will not make him any friends among the military corporate contractors.
(26 min.)
We are in the world's most favorable geopolitical position. We have the Atlantic to the east, the Pacific to the West, Canada
to the North, and Mexico to the South. We have enough nukes to blow up the world many times over. I don't know why we don't don't
treat the entire imperial enterprise as a sunk cost and get out, starting with the Middle East (and by get out, I mean cut off
all funding, too).
The Taliban announced the three-day halt to hostilities earlier this month, days after a unilateral ceasefire lasting until
Wednesday was ordered by the government.
It is the Taliban's first ceasefire since the government they ran was toppled by the 2001 US-led invasion.
I don't know if it's Trump or it's just coincidence. But peace has broken out in Korea for hte first time in decades, and now
peace has broken out in Afghanistan for the first time in decades.
You should take a look at The Threat by Andrew Cockburn. Fairly exhaustive detail about how Russian military
might was inflated, in the 70s and 80s, in virtually every possible way. From badly coordinated civil defense, to the complete
inreadiness of its airforce, to the caste system pervading the army that had reduced morale to almost nothing, the overall picture
is pretty stunning, compared to the magnitude of the threat that was presented to the US public.
It wasn't just bad intelligence, it was consistently purposeful bad intelligence. The consequences have been dire for the
world, and our country as well. The Russians in that period never represented a serious military threat even to the continent
of Europe, far less the US. Nor do they now, spending less than a tenth on their military than the US. The 80 billion dollar
incease in the US military budget this year was more than the entire Russian military budget. Meanwhile,our own bases
encompass the globe, and we wage war and threaten genocide wherever we choose.
The facts are abundantly clear, that our own military represents by far the greatest threat to human life on this
planet.
I want to tell you, that you and I and everyone in this damned country, we are not just the most lied to people in the world.
We're arguably the most lied to people in history, at least if you consider the number and frequency of lies. It's a wonder we
get anything right at all! I encourage you to read more, and read more widely, and to start at a position of distrust, with any
foreign policy reporting that isn't based on first hand knowledge.
I am heartened by the position Bernie is taking, even as I disagree with him on the Russia hysteria and wonder at some of his
qualifications like "blunder" to describe out and out imperialism. We need to start somewhere, and why not start with "let the
people and the people's representatives decide when we use our military"?
I know many progressives on the left have questioned Bernie's foreign policy positions and for not going far enough in opposing
our imperial wars. Personally, I think Bernie knows exactly how stupid, immoral, illegal, and costly our wars are, especially
as it "crowds out spending" on his favored domestic policies. Bernie is also smart enough to know how he would be attacked by
our right-wing corporate media and the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex if he were too outspoken. So, he tempers his
statements, not just because his domestic agenda is most important to him, but also because he knows attacking our militarized
foreign policy will not play well with the working class base he needs to appeal to. Unlike Obama who played up his anti-Iraq
War vote, only to expand our wars across the Middle East and Africa (after collecting his Nobel Peace Prize), Bernie is holding
his cards closer to the vest.
> play well with the working class base he needs to appeal to
I think the working class in the flyover states is ready to hear that the endless war needs to end. It's tricky message to
convey, because "Are you saying my child died in vain?" But Trump saying Iraq was a strategic blunder went over very well, and
military casualties correlate with Trump votes . I think Sanders (or his as-yet-unknown successor) must deliver that
message, but it's going to be tricky, if only because it will smash an enormous number of rice bowls in the national security
and political classes (which overlap). Maybe we could move all the uniform-worshippers to an island, give them a few billion dollars,
and let them play war games among themselves. Cheap at twice the price.
UPDATE I would bet "addiction" would work as a trope in the flyover states; "the war machine is a needle in America's arm"
is the concept. Especially because
veterans are prone to opioid addiction . Again, the rhetoric would be tricky to avoid blaming victims or "hating the troops,"
but I think there's good messaging to be found here. (People do horrid things when trapped in addictive systems. That's why they
seek cure )
Sanders needs to protect the people who are part of the 95% who work for the military industrial complex. He does this not
by raising welfare (which Americans find humiliating), not by only giving extensive retraining benefits, (which in an opportunity
starved country like America, will only lead to work stints at an Amazon Warehouse) but by repurposing the capitol and retraining
the working people to issues that must be addressed for the future, such as energy sustainability or infrastructure that can resist
increasingly severe climate chaos. Furthermore, he must announce and do both simultaneously, probably via an MMT program and raising
Taxes on rhe elite 2% and via transaction taxes on all capitol outflow from the USA.
Stopping the war machine, but putting people out of work, will never be acceptable to those who work for the war machine or
the friends and family of those people.
You are correct. The forever wars are just one of the ways to bleed the Middle Class dry. The media propaganda and rule
by the 10% can't let the suckers know what is really going on. There are always enough men to man the colonial wars but they are
unwinnable unless the whole nation is involved.
The Bolshevik Revolution and the Bonus Army were within living memory of WWII leaders. The new global aristocracy has lost
all history and doesn't perceive the inevitable consequences of inequality. My personal opinion was that for Marshall and Truman
one of the reasons for the use of atomic weapons on Japan was that they did not want millions of combat tested soldiers traveling
across the USA by train with the ultimate destination a number of deadly invasions of the Japanese Islands. Each worse than Okinawa.
They were afraid of what the soldiers would do. This is also the reason why these Vets got a generous GI Bill.
You reminded me of Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq. She protesteted at the GWB TX compound if you recall and remains
an activist to this day. I can't speak for her but it seems to me like she understands that her son should not have died to further
this ugly, pointless war.
I can't begin to understand the pain of losing a child, spouse, parent, etc., but I can wrap my head around it enough that
I don't want anyone to experience it. And I have no doubt that facing the true causes of the war would make the pain worse. But
every time I hear this nonsense about how some poor kid "didn't die in vain" in VietRaq, I want to scream "yes they did! Now what
are we going to do to stop it from happening again???".
The tropes of "supporting the troops", yellow ribbons, "they are protecting us", etc. just keeps the propaganda ballon inflated.
Here is how I support the troops: I'm against war.
This reminds me of Forest Gump where some well meaning hippies call Forest Gump a baby killer. The peace activists must refrain
from blaming and shaming soldiers as a group; specfic criminals (such as those who committed crimes at my lai) should investigated,
shamed and punished, the whistleblowers should be greatly honoured, and soldiers ad a group should be respected and not blamed
for going to war, as indeed many do not know the truth for why the war was fought. On the other hand, politicians, lobby groups,
and venal media and intelligence agencies should be exorciated for the lies that they believe or spread, as indeed it should be
their business to try to discern the truth.
Hence it was very admirable when members of the Mossad leaked out facts that Iran was not pursuing development of the Nuclear
bomb, even while Netanyahoo was pursuing a media blitz to justify greater economic and ultimately military aggression against
Iran
Who is "blaming and shaming" anyone? I'm saying that I agree with this mother who lost her child that we should be extremely
skeptical about the motivation for war of any kind. And the lack of skepticism (expressed or not) impedes any real movement away
from war without end.
The Sheehans are real people who lost a son and brother. Forest Gump is just some character from a dumb movie. Good grief.
I think that you can respect the sacrifice and commitment of people who sign up to fight for their country while still criticizing
the uses that leaders have chosen to put them to. In fact I think that makes the message stronger: the willingness of our friends,
family, children etc. to sign up to fight and die for America places a duty and obligation on our leaders to ensure they are deployed
wisely and for the betterment of America and the world. Those leaders – the ones we elected – have failed in that trust, and continue
to fail. Our military friends and family haven't let us down – we've let them down, by not holding our government accountable.
It's time we changed that!
"The rally featured a pointed anti-war speech from Obama, then a fairly anonymous state lawmaker, who deemed the impending
Iraq engagement 'a dumb war.'"
The political entertainer Obama gave a number of speeches advocating transparency in government, advocating for financial reform
and even mentioned "we tortured some folks" decrying torture.
Then behind the scenes Obama did very little to back up his speeches with actions as he went with the flow.
Obama's Illinois anti-war speech served him well, as he could milk this "anti-war" stance for years while running military
actions as President.
Obama had two groups to satisfy, the populace and the elite. The populace got empty words, the elite got what they wanted.
Bernie Sanders actually DID vote against the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq
Sadly, there is no contemporaneous transcript*
or recording . I remember the 2008 controversy vividly, because the Obama campaign released a campaign ad that purported to
be Obama delivering the Chicago 2002 speech, but it quickly emerged that he had re-recorded it for the campaign (see the link).
I think we're more than being lied to. The MSM is waging a propaganda campaign at every level completely obscuring the
truth. And the politicians play the fear card at every level. I don't believe any of us is in "happy compliance" at the airport.
I for one, grind my teeth and cuss out the crooked corporations (including that bastard "skull" Chertoff who personally benefited
from the x-ray screening machines) that reap a bundle of money from the so called screening and invasive body searches. Travel
has become something to dread.
You can tell a lot about a country's intent by the design of the army they assemble. Here is a deep technical description about
the new army the Russians are putting together. Hint: it is not designed to attack.
"The decision to create a tank army (armoured corps in Western terminology) is an indication that Russia really does fear attack
from the west and is preparing to defend itself against it. In short, Russia has finally come to the conclusion that NATO's aggression
means it has to prepare for a big war."
Interesting technical take on the whole thing. Worth a read.
Well, Russia could probably triumph over the austerity-racked countries of the EU, with the possible exception of France. But
it wouldn't be able to hold much for long if it had to occupy anything. And it would take a mauling in the process, a mauling
that would be prohibitively expensive to repair. The modern Russian military simply isn't organized in a fashion that is conducive
to large scale conquest. It has exactly one fully integrated, combined arms unit suitable for full-scale armored warfrare, the
1st Guards Tank Army, which was reactivated in 2014.
The nightmare visions of armor pouring through the Fulda Gap were basically always delusional. In 2018 they're downright laughable.
I don't think that the US can stop at this point. As an example, the one time the people were asked if they wanted to bomb
Syria the answer was a definite 'no' so the next time they never even bothered asking them. There is far too much money, power
and prestige at stake too consider stopping.
The officer corps might be an opponent but I think that America has been badly served by them due to how officers are selected
& trained and who makes it to the top. The only time they balk is when some idiot in Washington pushes them to fight the Russians
or the Chinese. And most people don't really care in any case so long as the US wins. Out of sight, out of mind as they say.
America is more likely to get single-payer health than for the US armed forces to pull back as any suggestion of the later
brings charges of being 'unpatriotic'. At least with single-payer health you only get charged with being a 'socialist'. Know a
good place to start? The US Special Operations Command has about 70,000 people in it and they want more. The US would be better
served by cutting this force in half and giving their jobs back to regular formations.
These are the people that want constant deployments in more and more countries hence cutting them back would be a good idea.
I expect things to go along until one day the US armed forces will be sent into a war where they will take casualties not seen
since the bad days on 'Nam. Then there will be the devil to pay and him out to lunch.
It's harder and harder to sell these military actions to the public. What are we in Korea and Japan for? To contain China?
If you ask most people, they'll probably tell you that China won, or at very least our bosses are in league with their bosses.
The Borg moves without regard to public sentiment, so we have to replace politicians with those who'll bring it to heel.
That's a death sentence, but I feel like enough people have the guts to try and make it happen.
One issue I have right now with 'anti-War' is that to be 'anti' is one thing, but to make serious arguments you have to be
able to present arguments about what you are actually 'for'. For example, if the US were to suddenly withdraw from the eastern
Pacific, the effect could be highly destabilising and could actually increase the chance of war. These are questions that need
to be answered.
Just to take one example of I think a positive idea – there is research
here which argues that the 'optimum' nuclear deterrent is less
than 100 warheads. This is of course a difficult argument to put into political play, but its important I think to put the militarists
on the back foot in order to make arguments for withdrawal from empire and peace mainstream.
I would bet that most people think that being anti-war encompasses the following:
-being for peace
-being for stability
-being for more social spending instead of military spending
-being for fewer civilians being killed
-being for fewer military deaths
Is that enough to meet your ridiculous threshold for 'serious arguments?'
you're being cavalier. PK makes a great point, and your vague and oyerly broad "fors" remind me of many arguments regarding
the 2016 election. The democrat side (Brock and CTR et al) couldn't say what they were for outside of abstract bernaysian generalities.
If you want to convince people (and I have this difficulty, as do I'm sure most of the readers here, trying to get dems off of
the russia russia russia putins bitch train)
You really need to focus on slow walking through complicated and dangerous waters, and just shut up sometimes when certain
people are just not going to listen, but if you can get that one cogent, not hysterical argument into the minds of the people
you want to convince, then you have a chance to stem the tide. Read some of the fantastic commentary regarding brexit from our
european commenters as an example of what works in discourse, and how to puts facts on the ground in a way people can relate to.
> You really need to focus on slow walking through complicated and dangerous waters . Read some of the fantastic commentary
regarding brexit from our european commenters as an example of what works in discourse, and how to puts facts on the ground in
a way people can relate to.
That's a cogent argument. I don't mean to imply in my comments that "getting out" will be easy. ("You must do it, Catullus,
you must do it. You must do it whether it can be done or not.")
We might begin by renaming the "Department of Defense" to the "Department of War," just to be truthful, and then ask ourselves
what kind of wars we want to fight. And I think most people would be very willing to cross anything that looked like Iraq off
the list, followed (it is to be hoped) with a willingness to rethink self-licking ice cream cones as our industrial policy. In
a way, the project would have the same feel as my hobbyhorse, gutting the administrative layers of the universities as not central
to mission.
Thanks tegnost. I don't mean to suggest that there isn't a solid electoral reason to have nice vague policies, not least
because a campaign against foreign wars would be an excellent way for the left to make common cause with some parts of the right,
such as the paleoconservatives and isolationists.
The problem as I see it with policies 'against' something is that you end up a little like Five Star in Italy – having gotten
into power on opposing everything bad about Italy, they are now facing a 'now what' moment, and are seemingly clueless about what
to do. As usual, the right makes the running.
The war-mongers will always find "serious arguments" for why we musn't end the American empire. Their arguments will be nuanced
and filled with details that would take the average citizen months, if not years, to verify and analyze. When the best minds in
the American empire can fail to forsee the fall of the Soviet Union or the response to their coup on Chavez, why should we put
credence in their "serious" analyses?
Meanwhile, the case against war is a simple and easily verifiable. "My son is dead." "My friend came home a broken person."
etc. Telling poor Americans that their family members need to keep dying because allowing them to come home would, maybe, make
war more likely in a country they've only seen on a map is an argument not likely to find much traction. It is also, in my mind,
ethically vapid -- an argument that presses for a guaranteed evil as a means of avoiding a possible evil.
Trying to forsee the outcome of major (or even minor) changes to a system as complex as the American empire is a sucker's game.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is likely a sucker themselves. In situations of such complexity, the only way forward is the ontological
one. All teleology is sheer fantasy. We should act, therefore, not on the basis of what we think will happen as a result of our
actions, but rather on the basis of what the just thing to do is. You can't base your actions on ends (as in "the ends justify
the means") because the situation is so complex that there is no way to credibly predict the ends that any action might lead to.
IMHO, the ethical policy is to bring 'em home. All of 'em. Let them protect our country, as they've sworn to do. Let us put
them to work rebuilding our infrastructure, assisting those who need it, and making the country better than it is, rather than
filling it up with more walking wounded from our endless imperial adventuring.
It did for Russia. There is now an ongoing civil war on its border in Ukraine. NATO went to war with Serbia in the later
1990's. The breakup of the Atlantic Alliance will splinter Europe. Humans being humans. The strong will try to steal from the
weak.
The question is how to restore the West's middle class. Without a middle class; revolts, religious and ethnic wars will inevitable
break out all over. The unrest right now is due to democracy not being compatible with globalization.
It was not just Bush who told lies to justify an invasion of Iraq. Members of Congress and the press did as well. Sen. Biden,
the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee then, would only allow pro-war people to testify to his committee. At the
time a lobbyist told me that the leadership of the Democratic party had decided to promote this war. They felt this would remove
this issue from the next election, which would then focus on economic issues that would play to their strength.
Thanks for this. Another reason to break up the MIC is all the money that would be freed up for health care, infrastructure
and the country's many other needs. Perhaps Sanders now realizes that the balance in USG priorities needs to be restored and he
is making an economic, and not just humanitarian argument.
As for Trump, it's just possible he meant what he said about NATO and all the rest. If one believes his real priorities are
his family and business it's hard to see what he gets out of perpetual war. That's more Obama and Hillary's bag.
Which doesn't make the above true. But we should at least entertain the possibility that it could be true.
As one who could never bring himself to vote for Trump (or for Clinton, for that matter), let me make a counter-intuitive prediction.
If Trump allows the MIC to goad him into starting a new war with Iran, he will lose if he decides to run again.
If, on the other hand, he starts no new war against Iran or any other country that does not threaten us militarily, then he
will be re-elected should he decide to go for another term.
The old adage that our country rallies around a war president is no longer operative IMHO. In a nation tired of perpetual
war, the commander-in-chief would get at best a short-term surge in public approval by opening up a new battle zone, before slipping
precipitously in the polls. Why on earth have the Democrats eagerly embraced the role of the war party, while our country literally
crumbles for lack of public investment? Could there be a more effective losing strategy?
Why on earth have the Democrats eagerly embraced the role of the war party, while our country literally crumbles for lack
of public investment? Could there be a more effective losing strategy?
They do it for the money, pretty much everyone in congress is a millionaire, including the ones who were not millionaires when
they got elected hmmmmmm .
Those are their constituents: beltway bandits, private contractors, public/private partnerships, insurance companies, arms
companies, private equity firms, military contractors, and whatever other combinations you want to come up with.
I remember when Tim Kaine gleefully suggested that we needed an "intelligence surge" to protect the country. I almost gagged.
It was a not so subtle message of "prepare for the handouts to the private military contractor industry".
> Another reason to break up the MIC is all the money that would be freed up for health care, infrastructure and the country's
many other needs
Since Federal taxes don't fund Federal spending, the connection between gutting the MIC and more money for health care is not
direct.
However, if you think in terms of real resources , the effect is as you say. (The same reasoning applies to finance,
where enormous salaries sucked in the best talent that might otherwise have been put to non-parasitical purposes.)
Mt is not yet sellable to the public, will take years. Best story is that foreign wars strip resources from local spending
and jobs, which is also what most pols seem to think. Bills should be presented as less for mil and mor for infra. Starve mic
You don't have to go back to the last campaign to see anti-war rhetoric as a strategy. Trump is already, in his meeting with
Kim, starting the ball rolling. (Moon of Alabama.com has a good recent post on the subject). Sorry Bernie, you are late to the
party, too late. Reminds me a bit of 1968. Nixon got in promising to end that war (which he didn't.) But it is good to see anti-war
stuff going mainstream at last. May it bear fruit this time around!
And yes, Gaius Publius, anti-war statements Trump made during his first campaign DID make a huge difference. They won him the
presidency, in my opinion.
How does positioning 2,000 – 4,000 US troops in Syria fit into your "Trump is a peace-maker" narrative? How about the comment
Wednesday that the US will attack Syrian forces if they attack Sunni jihadis (er "moderate rebels") in SW Syria?
How about us aiding and abetting a famine in Yemen that could kills tens of thousands?
Is setting us on a potential course for war with Iran further evidence of your "dovish" Trump?
I think you are attributing a sentiment to juliania that her comment does not actually contain. She doesn't say Trump is
a peace-maker, she says he was far in front of Bernie in using "anti-war rhetoric as a strategy." The example of Nixon doing the
same thing indicates that juliania is well aware that strategic rhetoric and actual decisions are not the same thing.
I know a fair number of Trump voters, and my read is similar to juliania's: Trump's anti-war rhetoric was a big draw for
a lot of people, and helped many be able to hold their nose and vote for him. Understanding this and commenting on it does not
make one a Trump supporter, obviously, or indicate that one puts any credence in his dovish rhetoric.
You might be correct and my apologies to juliania if I misread her post. I have heard so much of the "Trump is fighting
[the deep state, Wall Street, the neocons]" on other blogs that I am a bit hypersensitive and go off on a rant when I see or perceive
that argument. From my perspective, Trump is doing everything in his power to entrench Wall Street, the neocons, etc.
I was also receptive to the idea that Trump might be less hawkish than HRC (although I did not vote for him) but have now been
thoroughly disabused of that notion.
SW Syria does not have Kurds active, so these are Sunni jihadi-lites. They are however not HTS, which we re-branded from Al-Nusra
and had been classified as an Al Qaeda affiliate at one time. Of course we are framing it as a de-escalation zone; others call
it a jihadi base.
The war in Yemen is to secure the Saudi monarchy and our interest in their vast reserves of oil and gas. The war in
Syria is to secure our preferred pipeline feeding the EU. Our entrenched position surrounding Iran is no accident – we are an
existential threat to Iran and intend to remain that way. If China discovered a giant oil field under its western desert we'd
be there too. One rationale for all this control freakery is that we think we can maintain our "capitalist" economy, our silly
pretenses about a free market, etc. But Karma is the real truth-teller here: Free markets do not work. So it follows logically
that privatization also does not work. And to continue, at some point, forced capitalism fails. Markets fail. Profit seeking could
be the thing that brings it all down. It's a strangely comforting thought because it leaves us with a clear vision of what not
to do anymore. Unfortunately, people are not angels. If we attempt to invoke the ghost of John Foster Dulles and not engage in
little wars but just sell arms to every tin pot dictator it will be worse chaos than it is now. And worse still, chaos in a time
of environmental devastation. The only good option is the Mr. Scrooge option. Instead of arms and WMD and fascist control for
the sake of preventing uprisings, we should skip the fascist control part and directly mainline the resources to make civilization
thrive. Since that's definitely not capitalism, we'll have to think up a new ism.
Yes, let's devote enormous real resources to fabricating bespoke military aircraft that catch fire on the runway. Meanwhile,
we don't have any machine shops anymore .
> I have the feeling that Sanders here is reacting to all the ex-CIA (but not 100% ex) candidates taking over the D Party.
That is an excellent point. (I don't think it's just CIA, though; it's CIA and military personnel generally.* That's why I
voted against ranked Jared Golden low, because Golden (like Seth Moulton in MA) fits that template, which is vile.
UPDATE * "Professional authoritarians," we might call them. That would fit all this neatly into Thomas Frank's framework.
People ask if capitalism and democracy are compatible, and I think they are, at least I don't see any inherent reason why they
would not be compatible.
Another question: Are militarism* and democracy compatible? I'm not so sure they are.
Ancient Athens was on some level democratic, and the populist party typically favored war and expansion. E.g.Pericles and the
peloponesian war come to mind. By contrast, the aristocratic parties were generally less in favor of military adventurism.
However, a constitutional republic is not compatible with empire.
The link between populism and war featured prominently in "Electing to fight. Why emerging democracies go to war" This is a
fairly obscure book (one review in Amazon), but – by a wide margin – the best book I have ever read about politics or political
science. The last 100 pages are cliff notes versions of the politics underlying the start of many wars; the first 150 pages are
a really dense read.
A lot depends on how you define "democracy", "will of the people" etc.. What the role of "finance" in a context of "capitalism"
and "democracy" should be, e.g., citizens united(note orwellian language) may be considered a " reason why they would not be compatible"
and even antithetical. Noting that "militarism" depends on public funding, where should the power to influence this funding
be? Neo-cons, dominated by militarists, and neo-liberals, dominated by de-regulated banksters, may not be the same but certainly
seem like symbionts in the context of 326MM people.
America itself is the most destabilizing force on the planet. i would love to see what America leaving the world to its'
own devices would look like. Like Weimar/Nazi Germany, nothing good comes from these kind of "American Values."
the Ugly American is what American Values signify, and mostly always have. America is the most destabilizing force i ever read
of or heard of. Americans have just taken the Nazi theme of One People, One Land and One Leader on a Global scope. and it ain't
good. Either do as America tells you, or we will bring American Democracy to your country.
Maybe there's hope, as Caitlyn Johnstone implies in her last essay, i sure doubt it, though, as long as America/the Empire
continues to destabilize not just the Pacific but everywhere else in the world. Why does anything think the South/Central Americans
come to America. The American Empire has screwed up the Western Hemisphere so badly, these "refugees hope to escape from the American
made Plantations the Western Hemisphere has been carved into. These immigrants are just part of the blowback from the American
Way.
also makes me wonder if the Europeans don't understand why there are refugees coming through Greece and via boats, primarily
to Italy. dont they see it's America's Wars in MENA that are causing this "invasion." gosh, what a black and white cause and effect.
Germany needs workers due to the low birth rate. so, open the doors to the chaos America has made in the Middle East, and voila,
cheap labor and departure from an America made hell in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, Algeria, the whole "New American Century"
Project the Neocons have us in and paying for.
Doesn't the average European see how American and Apartheid Israeli support for forces like the Taliban, Al Queda, Wahabbism,
and the ongoing media censored Yemeni/Palestinian Holocaust, wars of profit, i.e. created the refugess that are streaming into
Europe. Maybe the Europeans are also stymied by the Rich who keep the wars going and the Media who profit off the death of the
"deplorables" who no longer "matter."
i know in America most Americans are ignorant due to total control of the Media and the "narrative" that controls what can
be said. Americans have no shame when it comes to getting what they want, politically. no enough blowback. no sense of connection
between here and there or anywhere outside the Media Narrative.
as a bumper sticker from long ago said, "if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." The Empire will not give up
until it can't go on.
Thanks for calling attention to this. I noticed the same thing immediately, and I gave the remainder of the article less credence
because of it. A true leftie knows the difference between Improved Medicare for All and a Medicare buy-in program.
To me, making the argument that one must be 'for' something is simply a way to dismiss whatever the 'anti' side represents,
whether or not PK meant to be dismissive.
And it reminds me of the efforts to impede and dismiss the anti-war or occupy-type movement outright – "what, you people don't
have any policies (and nothing for us to analyze to death and criticize??) !!!! How dare you speak up about something!!! Go away
until you go to Harvard and produce a few papers. Until then, your silly notions mean nothing to us!!" and the underlying elitism
of the concept.
So, that is what I am reminded of, again, whether or not PK meant it that way.
(Before reading the comments) "If Americans Could Vote Against the Forever War, Would They Do It?"
Sadly, I think the answer is no, mainly because Americans do not vote based on foreign policy unless it "comes home," eg in
the form of body bags – a lot of them. The "wasted money" argument, which brings it home, might be the most effective; that's
a pitfall of MMT. Of course, as a practical matter there's a POLITICAL choice between guns and butter, whether or not the economics
is valid.
In those remarks, Sanders is filling in the gaping hole in his resume. It may be an indication that he plans to run in 2020.
Finally: I question whether the 2016 nomination was actually "stolen." Certainly there was a good deal of cheating by the party,
but I'm not convinced it was decisive (there's no way to be sure). The actual votes ran about 47% for Sanders, and that's including
Oregon and California. I think that reflects the actual nature of the Democratic Party.
The reason is that its membership has been falling, if not plummeting, at the same time that its policies have become more
and more right-wing. Affiliation, which is a poll result, is down near 30%; I suspect registrations have fallen, too, but I haven't
seen numbers. Given the variations in state law, registrations aren't very indicative. All that means that the remaining party
members are a remnant that has been selected for conservatism. The primary vote reflects that. (This doesn't change the argument
that the Dems knowingly chose their weaker candidate; it just means that the voters did, too.)
The military is A-ok with Trump and this is what seems to matter. The roar of hysteria from the media over Trump first
2-3 months in office died down considerably when he showed a willingness to engage in a show of force by striking Syria (remember
when he was so concerned about the welfare of children?)
Only a *faction" of the security establishment is anti-Trump because he is skeptical of *neoliberal* globalism. However
this faction is doing a great job of re-enacting the framework used to deny/disrupt/disable during the Clinton administration:
scandals and selective corruption investigations. This serves a purpose: to martyr the Prez with the constituents who *should*
be holding the Prez accountable on lack of follow through and betrayal of promises made on the camapign trail.
Trump voters can't make him hold himaccountable; they are too busy feeling he has been victimized -- and many Trump voters
are victims, so the identification is real.
Meanwhile, the Prez who can't seem to enact *anything* to make lives better for the people who put him in office, is magically
able to enact the agenda of the 1%. This repeat of the 1% 's manipulations is one I can do without.
Regarding the question posed by this post I think there is very little evidence of an anti-war "fever" and even if there
were, and if it were projected into the streets and/or ballot box, I am pessimistic that it could have any effect on the U.S.
government of today. I don't think the U.S. government cares what the American people think or feel about anything -- except of
course as those cares and feelings affect the mechanisms of control through the propaganda pushed through our media, the levels
of surveillance and suppression, and the increased viciousness of our "laws" and their enforcement.
I believe the U.S. government is run by several powerful and competing interests. So I think I'll ask a different question
-- though in the same vein as that posed by the title of this post. Are those interests who compete with the interests of the
MIC and Spook Industrial Complex (SIC) beginning to see the futility and stupidity of our endless wars? Are those interests
growing anxious at enriching their share of the pie by shoving aside the budget gluttons feasting on war? Are any of those interests
whose long-term, and often short-term interests are damaged by endless wars and their ongoing deconstruction of American Empire
finally growing weary of how those wars undermine the American Empire? War may be a racket but the burning of bridges and collapse
of Empire isn't a racket I would hope even the most clueless of our masters will continue to tolerate. Have the MIC and SIC assumed
power?
So-called Ukrainian 'maidans' have bored the world community to death. And the public has
been taking the protests currently under way in Kiev for no more than traditional autumn and
winter open-air parties, similar to the Parisian 'fire shows'. Meanwhile, much more significant
confrontation has been taking place in Kiev, alongside with the circus of ex-president of
Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili. An inner conflict between two anticorruption and power-wielding
departments of the country is long overdue. In their relations with the media, both
representatives of those organizations and members of various Verkhovna Rada fractions have
been describing specific processes that are taking place in Ukraine as 'Makhnovshchina' or a
war of all against all, literally speaking.
After returning from the international anti-corruption forum organized by the U.S. State
Department, Nazar Holodnitsky, head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office
(SAP) of Ukraine, stated in an interview
to TSN , the Ukrainian TV channel, that a standoff of law enforcement agencies may escalate
into a war harmful to entire Ukraine. Thus, a conflict between the National Anti-Corruption
Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the General Prosecutor's Office (GPO) has evolved into a hybrid
war with interrogations involving physical and mental pressure and mutual accusations of all
sorts of evils. Delegates of both sides have simultaneously visited their U.S. sponsors and
come back comforted with just another assurance of '1000% support'.
Such confrontation of the government institutions raises eyebrows, I must say. State
Department has publicly been sympathized with both the corruption fighters and the General
Prosecutor's Office upon condition of the settlement of conflict by legal means and punishment
of officials guilty of criminal charges. Meanwhile, the FBI has also been drawn in this
undeclared war. In June 2016, the FBI and NABU adopted the Memorandum of Understanding, which
allows the FBI to assist NABU and SAP in the matter of investigations and implementation of
anti-corruption actions. The Bureau's special agents and analysts have been working in NABU on
a temporary rotational basis.
The mere presence of the FBI suggests an idea about another U.S. security service which has
been standing invisibly by in Ukraine, since it gained independence. This is the CIA, a classic
rival of the FBI. The very secret visit in 2014 of the former Central Intelligence Agency chief
John
O. Brennan preceded the beginning of active hostilities in Ukraine. The CIA stood behind
the appointment of the recent Kiev government. It had also protected the acting president of
the country from rivals, up to a certain time. For instance, they conduced to the resignation
of Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a former rather ambitious Prime Minister of Ukraine who was in conflict
with Petro Poroshenko and running for his post.
That helps explain the real cause of furious intransigence of NABU and the General
Prosecutor's Office throwing wild accusations at each other. They have virtually been used by
power-wielding structures and political forces of another state for a showdown. A never-ending
internal fighting in the American national security environment has become the talk of the town
being eventually accreted with new dirty wash. It seems that it has become more acute, with the
passing of time.
For example, the FBI dealt a hard blow to the CIA bringing 12-count charges including
conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, false statements, and other
against Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's former campaign chairman and his business associate,
Richard Gates. His other partner, Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager was involved as well.
Manafort was renowned for his associations with the CIA and for consulting the Party of Regions
which was led by Victor Yanukovych. It became clear who was he FBI's source of such detailed
and valuable data after the statements by
Artem Sytnyk , Director of NABU and Serhiy Leshchenko , a Ukrainian
MP.
Nevertheless, the CIA won at this stage of confrontation, because Trump came to power. Even
support to the current President of the USA prior to the elections wasn't of much assistance to
the FBI Director Comey.
History has witnessed a number of episodes when Ukraine was a stage for showdown by
political forces from other countries. It never ended peacefully. As far back as in the XVII
century Ukrainian territory had become a theatre of operations owing to the bloody strife
between Polish hetmans (high military commanders in the Army of the Kingdom of Poland) of
Ukrainian and Cossack origin. As a result, lands of the Zaporizhian Host voluntarily pledged
allegiance to Russia.
During World War II the Ukrainian people suffered much harder. At that time the Third Reich
was intensely seeking for ways to weaken the USSR, even before it invaded Poland in 1939. It
was decided to use the ancient divide-and rule tactics proven by Julius Caesar, involving
gradual tearing away of territories with malcontent population. Ukraine was considered the most
prospective area for fomenting disaffection.
However, there also was both ideological and political discord among the highest ranks of
the Third Reich. Thus, Alfred Rosenberg, the main ideologue of Nazism, along with admiral
Wilhelm Canaris (who was accused of 'spiritual instigation' of a plot against Hitler) were
planning the establishment of Ukrainian buffer state controlled by the Third Reich. Using such
promises they managed to recruit Andriy Melnyk, a central figure in the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and notorious Stepan Bandera who, just like Mr. Yatsenyuk, was
striving to lead the government in independent Ukrainian state. If the second one kept clinging
to his aims all the time, Melnyk was good at matching to desires of his sponsors from Hitler's
surrounding. When Himmler and Koch didn't recognize Rosenberg's ideas and wanted to weaken his
power in the National Socialist Worker's Party, Melnyk was quick to assure them of his
willingness to cooperate on any terms, especially when they let him know that Fuhrer didn't
like the idea of a Ukrainian buffer state.
It is a paradox that those relations that had developed both within various branches of
OUN-UPA and the Third Reich senior ranks coordinating them were similar to the recent situation
in Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalist leaders were used not only for German purposes, but also for
elimination of competitors in power. For instance, Rosenberg, after all, had to abandon his
point of view. Many of his influential followers resigned just like chief Comey did to the
delight of chief Pompeo, this May. Although NABU, the organization most thoroughly maintaining
a steady U.S. course prepared for Ukraine, has been successfully continuing investigations,
digging into Poroshenko who fell into disfavor for his poor record. And here you are, Marie
Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a close acquaintance of the U.S. president's
national security advisor McMaster and Secretary of Defense Mattis has
indirectly supported Saakashvili's demonstration. In September, Saakashvili hanged out
happily with contenders of the recent president in future election Valentyn Nalyvaichenko and
Andriy Sadoviy, in Lviv. Now a big friend of Senator McCain Yulia Timoshenko and a number of
Verkhovna Rada MPs endorse him.
This mess of warring parties seems to be disordered and extremely headachy. The situation
has been much worse for the number of competing forces and foreign organizations standing
behind them in Ukraine was much greater during the Third Reich and it continues to be so at
present. The recent Ukrainian bellum omnium contra omnes has been a reflection of competitive
battle between various security and governmental agencies in the USA.
A single distinct and unequivocal fact is that being a neighbour of such a huge state as
Russia, Ukraine was always suffering from those who wish to weaken that influential country.
Over and over again throughout Ukrainian history the country was exploited, with nationalist
sentiments artificially ignited and false promises made. Even 'humane' Rosenberg's scheme
ascribed Ukraine the role of a mere supplier of raw materials and a buffer state between
Germany and Eastern Slavic countries without any right to independence.
As such, the USA regards Ukraine as an administered territory which is useful for strategic
and economic aims. They skillfully manipulate Kiev government with carrot and stick.
Undesirable Ukrainian political puppet might be branded as corrupt and replaced by more
manageable nominee, at any time. There is always a possibility to initiate another blood
shedding Maidan with oppressions and civil war, in case of urgency. Today's Ukraine is no freer
than it was in 1941, during the invasion of Nazi Germany. Melnyks, banderas, hetmans
skoropadskies have been replaced by new 'heroes', who never changed their essence. For
evanescent promises and artificially inflated ambitions they've been tearing the country apart
without mercy either to each other, or their countrymen. Meanwhile, the world community has
been watching with approval the beacon of democracy vigorously setting things to order in 'dark
and ignorant' Ukraine. Each of them thinking, 'Better them than me.'
The current anti-Russian hysteria is the attempt to unite the society which become hostile to neoliberal elite.
Notable quotes:
"... A casual glance at facts and history makes it instantly clear that the United States has no "moral authority" of any kind whatsoever, and is arguably the hub of the most pernicious and dangerous force ever assembled in human history. But the establishment Russia narrative really is that cartoonishly ridiculous: you really do have to believe that the US government is 100 percent pure good and the Russian government is 100 percent pure evil to prevent the whole narrative from falling to pieces. ..."
"... In reality, Russia is nothing other than a rival power structure that the US-centralized empire wants to either collapse or absorb, but they can't just come right out and tell the public that they're dangerously escalating tensions with a nuclear superpower because westerners live in an invisible empire ruled by insatiably greedy plutocrats, so they make up nonsense about Putin being some kind of omnipotent supervillain who has infiltrated the highest levels of US government and is trying to take over the world. ..."
"... All this new cold war hysteria and nuclear brinkmanship has basically been America acting like a bitchy high school drama queen because Russia is saying mean things about it behind its back? How does a guy named "Mad Dog" get to be such a thin-skinned little snowflake? ..."
"... As we've been discussing a lot recently, control of the narrative is absolutely essential for rulers to maintain their rule. When you hear establishment policy makers babbling about "Russian propaganda" and Putin's attempts to "undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals," all that they are saying is that the plutocrats who rule America need to be able to control the way Americans think and vote, and that the Russian government is making it a bit harder for them to do that. ..."
"... It seems to be that every criticism leveled at Russia, and China even, is a simple reflection of what the USA is doing. Deflection. Classic 'pot calling the kettle black' stuff. ..."
"... You're paying more respect to it than it deserves by giving it a clinical diagnosis, implying "projection" as a psychological defense. Let's call it by its simple name: dirty rotten lying, propaganda, trickery. It's not like the assholes don't know they are lying – of course they do! And they know we know it, too, and don't care. ..."
At a graduation ceremony for the US Naval War College (barf), US Secretary of Defense James Mattis
asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aims to diminish the appeal
of the western democratic model and attempts to undermine America's moral authority," and that "his actions are designed not to challenge
our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals."
A casual glance at facts and history makes it instantly clear that the United States has no "moral authority" of any kind whatsoever,
and is arguably the hub of the most pernicious and dangerous force ever assembled in human history. But the establishment Russia
narrative really is that cartoonishly ridiculous: you really do have to believe that the US government is 100 percent pure good and
the Russian government is 100 percent pure evil to prevent the whole narrative from falling to pieces. If you accept the idea that
the exchange is anything close to 50/50, with Russia giving back more or less what it's getting and simply protecting its own interests
from the interests of geopolitical rivals, it no longer makes any sense to view Putin as a leader who poses a unique threat to the
world. If you accept the idea that the west is actually being far more aggressive and antagonistic toward Russia than Russia is being
toward the west, it gets even more laughable.
In order to believe that the US has anything resembling "moral authority" you have to shove your head so far into the sand you
get lava burns, but that really is what is needed to keep western anti-Russia hysteria going. None of the things the Russian government
has been accused of doing (let alone the very legitimate questions about whether or not they even did all of them) merit anything
but an indifferent shrug when compared with the unforgivable evils that America's unelected power establishment has been inflicting
upon the world, so they need to weave a narrative about "moral authority" in order to give those accusations meaning and relevance.
And, since the notion of America having moral authority is contradicted by all facts in evidence, that narrative is necessarily woven
of threads of fantasy and denial.
Establishment anti-Russia hysteria is all narrative, no substance. It's sustained by the talking heads of plutocrat-owned western
media making the same unanimous assertions over and over again in authoritative, confident-sounding tones of voice without presenting
any evidence or engaging with the reality of what Russia or its rivals are actually doing. The only reason American liberals believe
that Putin is a dangerous boogieman who has taken over their government, but don't believe for example that America is ruled by a
baby-eating pedophile cabal, is because the Jake Tappers and Rachel Maddows have told them to believe one conspiracy theory and not
the other. They could have employed the exact same strategy with any other wholly unsubstantiated conspiracy narrative and had just
as much success.
In reality, Russia is nothing other than a rival power structure that the US-centralized empire wants to either collapse or
absorb, but they can't just come right out and tell the public that they're dangerously escalating tensions with a nuclear superpower
because westerners live in an invisible empire ruled by insatiably greedy plutocrats, so they make up nonsense about Putin being
some kind of omnipotent supervillain who has infiltrated the highest levels of US government and is trying to take over the world.
Of equal interest to the Defense Secretary's "moral authority" gibberish is his claim that Putin's actions "are designed not to
challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals."
I mean, like what? So Russia isn't challenging America militarily and isn't taking any actions to attempt to, but it's trying
to, what, hurt America's feelings? All this new cold war hysteria and nuclear brinkmanship has basically been America acting
like a bitchy high school drama queen because Russia is saying mean things about it behind its back? How does a guy named "Mad Dog"
get to be such a thin-skinned little snowflake?
I'm just playing. Actually, when Mattis says that the Russian government is trying to "undercut and compromise our belief in our
ideals," he is saying that Moscow is interrupting the lies that Americans are being told about their government by the plutocrat-owned
media. As we've
been
discussing a lot recently, control of the narrative is absolutely essential for rulers to maintain their rule. When you hear
establishment policy makers babbling about "Russian propaganda" and Putin's attempts to "undercut and compromise our belief in our
ideals," all that they are saying is that the plutocrats who rule America need to be able to control the way Americans think and
vote, and that the Russian government is making it a bit harder for them to do that.
More and more, the threads of the establishment narrative are ceasing to be unconsciously absorbed and are being increasingly
consciously examined instead. This development has ultimately nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with our species
moving
out of its old relationship with mental narrative as it approaches evolve-or-die time in our challenging new world. I am greatly
encouraged by what I am seeing.
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Harry S Nydick / June 17, 2018
This is so right on that it is scary. The only problem, while more are questioning, is the fact that the majority of Americans
actually believe the bullshit that people like Mattis says. And, with a nickname like Mad Dog, it's a wonder that he hasn't been
put down yet.
Even today I had to deal with a typical American – 'swallow-it-hook-line-and-sinker' – idiot.
"The stock market is honest and above board.' 'All immigrants don't belong here.' 'It's fine if the government violates your
civil rights' 'Oh and immigrants don't have any.'
I could go on, but I learned long ago to say my piece and move on. For some people, there is no changing their minds, nor even
opening them up to considering the truth. There are the descendants of those who were protested against in the 1960s. The 'My
country right or wrong' people. Most likely they never had the balls, as children, to speak back to their parents, when those
adults were in the wrong. I always wondered whether intellectual blindness is a learned trait. I'm pretty sure that it must be.
William / June 17, 2018
Much or most of what you write about the American narrative is true. However, you weave it into a narrative that ignores central
historical facts and themes. Examples; Russia's behavior in Poland after WW2, the Hungarian revolution, the Check invasion and
oppression, the take over of Manchuria in the last weeks of WW2.
Stalin killing 20-40 million of his own people, Chechnya, the
Korean war, the Berlin wall. Not to mention recent assassinations of its own citizens. Yes, America has done cruel and horrific
things in many countries, but it pales to what the Russians have done throughout the ages. It would be akin to comparing what
the Nazis did to what the French underground did in response. Both killed, both did things that were horrific, but the French
did it in response and not nearly in the same magnitude. Historical contrast is very important when viewing these issues. It is
very easy to criticize one's own country but balance is called for. Was Russia justified in taking Crimea, perhaps, but then was
Hitler justified in taking the Sudetenland?
JRGJRG / June 17, 2018
What Lee Yates just did there is a beautiful example of Advantageous Comparison defense in Bandera's Moral Disengagement Theory.
Yes, the US is morally bankrupt, but so what? The Soviets or Hitler or somebody else was worse. Sorry, that is bullshit.
What did the US overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran have to do with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? Nothing. And he brings
up Russian Crimea, which voted 95% to rejoin Russia, an example of democracy in action.
william / June 17, 2018
The so what is this: when dealing with monsters one has to stoop as low to defend against it. What happened in Iran was Brittain's
provocation. They approached Eisenhower once previously and he refused to intervene. It was only after they convinced him that
it was a Russian plot to take over the oil fields that he relented. So yes it was wrong and even monstrous but put in the historical
perspective at the time, it made sense. At that time, France was in danger of collapsing and with it the rest of Europe. I am
of Middle Eastern ethnicity so I too am sensitive to Western colonialization of the region. However, things are not always as
simple as we would like them to be.
I really enjoy when people lower themselves to using vulgarities because they disagree with a point of view-most flattering and
intelligent.
JRGJRG / June 17, 2018
Just more evasive moral disengagement. So the Dulles boys finally duped Ike into giving the green light to the overthrow of democratically
elected Mossadegh installing a bloodthirsty tyrant that ended up destabilizing the Middle East for the next 50years and running,
based on the pretext of Russia hysteria.
Was it true the Russians were really going to take over the oilfields? I never heard
that story before. I doubt it very much. History teaches a different lesson. Mossadegh had the temerity to want to share oil profits
with the Iranian people who owned it. Thats too much democracy for any country.
Just like Truman was tricked into Korea. Or Johnson was duped into Vietnam.
And so how do you explain why the CIA overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala beginning a reign of terror with genocude lasting 50 years
against unarmed peasant villages? East Timor? Chile? Brazil and Argentina? Greece? Angola?
This is just more Advantageous Comparison to justify moral bankruptcy. Sorry, sometimes things are as simple as they look.
No I respectfully disagree. If these seem like difficult moral choices to you, I pity you.
JRGJRG / June 17, 2018
Although I must apologize for not recognizing your rank as a cut above the usual G-7 troll with your knowledge of the advanced
techniques of argument for moral disengagement, defending your country against the indefensible. Tough job that calls for an expert.
You must be one of those G-12 trolls called to fill in for overtime duty on fathers day. I'm sorry your wife and kids are going
to be missing you today. You can make it up to them tomorrow.
William / June 18, 2018
Funny thing, I agree that the overthrow was wrong, and horrible. I also think it was wrong and perhaps criminal when we invaded
both Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of my relatives were killed by tyrants in the Middle East and much of what has happened there
is ugly. But again, I do not stoop to personal disparagement. It has no place in honest debate. Same tactic used by the deplorable
. Trump and McCarthy for that matter, and of course, now you. As for Mossadegh, he was truly a statesman. England owned the oil
fields and he went to the UN to mediate the purchase of the oil fields at market value. The English refused and tried to convince
Eisenhower that it was a Russian plot. He tried again and finally Eisenhower relented, wrongly I might add. But do remember, that
Eisenhower also stopped the English and French when they wanted to invade Egypt to take over the Suez.
Lee Yates / June 17, 2018
Thank You, JRGJRG. I did not know that I knew that much philosophy. What I said was more in light of current events circa the
1990s. Our "bankers" went to Russia and "helped" them get capitalism. Well they got it, and now their gangsters/bankers are just
as wealthy and sophisticated as ours, or more so. Politically, I cannot really blame Putin for holding a grudge about our meddling
in Russia and general promotion of Boris Yeltsin. Still I doubt that he would make it easy for us to install another Yeltsin or
buy all of Russia's resources either, so why would we make it easy for him to meddle in our country, or do what we do overseas?
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
This is what you're doing, even if you don't recognize it. If you understand this you will begin to understand the errors of your
own ways. This is how totalitarianship develops. Read and learn.
Take off the blinders and fully explain how the U.S. genocide of native Americans – and the ongoing horrific treatment of them
– pales in comparison to anything except, possibly, the unnecessary dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan.
Sorry, but your
dissertation of an excuse just doesn't cut the mustard – or maybe your mother never told you that two wrongs don't make a right.
Or in the case of the U.S., dozens of never ending wrongs. Unless you really open your eyes and mind and understand the truth,
you will never come off as anything more than an apologist for the top 1/10th of the top 1%.
Harry S Nydick / June 17, 2018
This was a reply to William, but comes off looking as an original comment and criticism of Caity, with whom I am in complete agreement
on todays article.
jrgjrg / June 18, 2018
Not just the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, but remember that Gen. LeMay firebombed every city in Japan before the bombs
were dropped, causing at least another half million deaths. Robert MacNamara said in an interview that if the US had lost the
Second World War they both would have been tried as war criminals, and it would be right. See:
Always impressed by Caitlin driving a bulldozer through lying narratives. We need more Caitlin's; we need an antiwar mass movement
of Caitlin's. But the antiwar movement is very weak and it is divided against itself.
In the 1990's there was a coming together of the Chronicles paleoconservatives and the CounterPunch progressives against the
US/NATO attack on Yugoslavia. But today Thomas Fleming and Chronicles have retreated and those controlling CounterPunch have explicitly
rejected an alliance with the 'right' against the US march to war.
I wish I could share the Caitlin enthusiasm for the future but I am depressed and fearful for the future. The US public is
asleep. The US is gearing up for war in Europe and Asia. Starting with Clinton each president has murdered about a million souls.
They are gearing up for a bigger war in the MENA and even Eastern Europe with Iran as the major target and will likely claim another
million+.
From Jungian psychology I learned that unless the opposites come close together change (a birth out of the tyranny of the status
quo) will not happen. The elites in control of the US use the fake dialectic of the major two parties to keep us apart. Those
in charge of each pole of the fake dialectic derive power from defending it against the 'other' and see alliance with the 'other'
as a diminution of their power (a good example is those in control of CounterPunch arguing against antiwar alliance with the 'right';
that they are captured by their power drive is plain to see).
Liberals (neolibs) and many progressives have walked straight into a trap set by the CIA that engineered a Cold War v2. They
knew the neocons would come along. The CIA, Wall Street, military, NSA are marching to war. They thirst for their holy war. They
are the supremacist 'exceptional and indispensable' while the rest of the world is unexceptional and dispensable.
If the left and right do not come together in an antiwar alliance then how can the warmongering trajectory of the US change?
geoffreyskoll / June 17, 2018
It's just like you, Caitlin, to bring up such quibbles as genocide, slavery, torture, and a few others too minor to even mention.
We're talking IDEALS here. You know like complete global domination, slavish catering to the most exploitive class in human history–the
stuff that makes America great!
Lee Yates / June 17, 2018
I agree that the U.S. is Imperialist and has been for a long time. However, it is false that Russia opposes the US kleptocracy
or represents anything other than the same bankster/gangsters that run the West. They came into the fold after the end of the
Soviet Union, and there they remain, probably not too happy about it, but neither are we right. The elites from all over launder
money, hide wealth enjoy power and luxury beyond our imagination. A small spat between them is death sentence for the rest of
us, but they will make up and enjoy their stolen wealth again.
The moral authority that the West or USA enjoys is a hollow thing,
much like Christianity at the height of the Church's power. But the words are still there maybe some day a true believer will
come along and do something about them.
Forgive me, I could not get beyond the 'undermine America's moral authority'. I take it, Mattis means the 'moral authority' to
starve the Yemenis to death and deny them medicine while they are dying . aided by our French Poodle and a mad woman from the
Isles! Or maybe the 'moral authority' of Albright when she said killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children 'was worth it'.
Or maybe it was 'moral authority' of Clinton, giggling over the sadist murder of Kaddafi. Some how, as an American I don't feel
'moral authority' , all I feel is the pain of inhumanity.
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
No, no, no, you're still not getting it. Let me explain it to you. It means the authority of the autocrats to determine what's
moral for you. They themselves are above morality, like Nietzsche taught, remember? Authoritarianism.
Now do you understand?
elkojohn / June 17, 2018
As was hinted at by the FBI-IG report, neither political party in the criminal U.S. government is complying with law (domestic
nor international). The U.S. government system is an organized crime syndicate of liars, thieves and murders. The ruling class
and the inside players of the secret government consider the common folk to be deplorable, trailer-park trash.
That's the mind-set of the "holier-than-thou" professionals working inside the U.S. government. Whatever trust, loyalty and
respect citizens had for this government has been completely squandered – and voters (not Putin) gave the FU finger to the status
quo by electing Trump.
The treasonous, seditious, murdering 2-party dictatorship has absolutely NO ONE to blame but themselves. The time has come
to eliminate and defund the secret espionage agencies that run our government, – and which have morphed into crime syndicates.
Ditto the two political parties. Until we see all the top level law-breakers in jail (i.e., Clinton, Bush, Obama), until we witness
2/3's of the House and the Senate being purged and replaced, until we witness the complete dismantling of the FED, until we witness
ALL military bases around the world being closed and our troops brought home, until we witness the M-I-C's budget cut down to
1/4th and used ONLY for national protection, until we witness a purge of the CIA/FBI cartel, until we witness manufacturing being
restored to this country, until we witness the USA cutting all special interest lobbying (in particular, Israel and Saudi Arabia),
until we witness the break-up of the death grip that Wall St. and the banking monopoly has on our economy, until we witness the
full restoration of the "rule of law" in our government, – until then, it will be the absolute, open, in-your-face, tyrannical,
24/7, lawlessness of the U.S. government that destroys this nation.
So I disagree with James Mattis, that the U.S. holds the moral high ground.
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
You're paying more respect to it than it deserves by giving it a clinical diagnosis, implying "projection" as a psychological
defense. Let's call it by its simple name: dirty rotten lying, propaganda, trickery. They're playing the "I'm rubber and you're
glue" game. It's not like the assholes don't know they are lying – of course they do! And they know we know it, too, and don't
care.
WillD / June 17, 2018
Mattis didn't realise how well he described Trump. When you look at what Trump's regime has done since taking office last year,
it 'trumps' [pun intended] Putin's efforts, such as they are, by a mile. Putin could never hope to achieve so much in such a short
time, if that's what he wanted to do.
It seems to be that every criticism leveled at Russia, and China even, is a simple reflection of what the USA is doing.
Deflection. Classic 'pot calling the kettle black' stuff.
All one has to do is change a few names in the narrative – replace Putin with Trump, Russia / China with USA. That's it. Easy.
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
You're paying more respect to it than it deserves by giving it a clinical diagnosis, implying "projection" as a psychological
defense. Let's call it by its simple name: dirty rotten lying, propaganda, trickery. It's not like the assholes don't know they
are lying – of course they do! And they know we know it, too, and don't care.
WillD / June 17, 2018
No, you misunderstood what I was saying. I'm not saying he/they use it as a defense, but that they don't realize how close it
is to what it (the USA) is doing.
Believe me, I have no respect for Mattis & that mob, nor Putin for that matter. None of them deserve respect.
I agree with you on the dirty rotten lying, too. They do know they are lying, but don't know how close to the truth it is when
applied to them.
jrgjrg / June 17, 2018
No worries. We are in the "post-truth era." That sounds crazy, I know. The plutocrats are discussing this exact topic this year
at the Bilderberg Conference.
As yours truly, we noticed the drastic shift as to pointing to supranational guidance of
international political events. As for his mention, blaming Trump and Netanyahu to be
suppreme leaders and deciders, we see them rather as spokespersons, blowing and hissing
publicly the script of what Saker calls the Anglo-Jewish maffia, the only subgroup that
sorted for quality, not quantity in strategy(global evidently and necessarily) and membership
for in-group only benefit. Elitist, subjectively better organized than any entity other,
territorially mostly independent in case of emergency, and moral conviction based on
historical Judaist values, strategies and tactics. Play all sides and stay invisible.
Below the prudent lines of Saker quoted.
The AngloZionist Empire is not based in the US, or in the EU, or Israel, or anywhere
else on the planet. It is a trans-national entity with regional variations and which
includes different interest groups under its umbrella. You can think of it as a gigantic
criminal gang racketeering the entire planet for "protection". To think that by presenting
a "liberal" face to these thugs will gain you their support is extremely naive as these
guys don't care about your face: what they want is your submission.
As for Putin, it could be, that he is, for now, on a footing of equal to the insiders of
above, he must somehow understand (Putin gives a public impression to be cognitively superior
to all other political tarts of the moment) that real problems are global, and Russian
nationalism, or international expansion based on Russian nationalism are just a political
tool to rally bulk humanity. Very similar to the palm oil, corn syrup and digital porn obese
consumerism of the West promotion. At most bickering and infighting can be done by visible
actors as Putin, Trump, Xi (affected indirectly), but there must be a scenario, and war
cannot be anything more then policing.
To be noticed, that it pleads for Saker's intellectualism to correct and even reverse,
after due analysis his opinions unlike a Tom Engelhardt(at that qualitative rather inferior).
No "to big to fail" here. Let's wait and see, how Saker's intuition can take him into
quantitative analysis of what moves beyond and against nationalist and EU, US, Russia, China
dialectics. The old adagio of the information age: networks, was historically present in
International Jewry. One can be a policeman, be a thief, but foremost one is a Jew.
Honest writing of Saker.
How good are these supranational, corporatacracy (another commenter), "globally organized
elites" groups with better cohesion? To our definite impression, not good enough, though way
above the bulk of humanity and most of the middle class media comprehension. Two singular
dramas of our age, that will decide the twenty-first century. Better and not good enough.
Only to be arrested by bringing in AI, eugenetics, rebranding goals and focus. It is in
itself a pocket drama repeated over and over that analysis is mostly litterary, never relies
on the best of information, is fragmented. Even today indexing big data lumps could solve
this partly. Alternative media in the first place apply the same archaic methods while better
tools are available. That said unz.com is above the fray in focussing and searching methods.
It should spark some hidden outliers glued into the bulk of the deplorables by individual
fate.
War-ing and economics, the epistomology of politics, the focus of daily news, should be
seen as consequences, not prime causes of attention. In the end they impose toxicity,
migrations, excess population densities, excess total human numbers. The goal itself of
humanity should be reasserted as quality of life for all standing and future humans.
Then strategy and tactics derive from there. Why? Well the same supra national elites, the
only ones that can take on the essentials tend to forget they are frogging in the same tub,
that nature probably using more disruptive method will take care of the human plague if
not.
"... There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of history, resentment over losses (Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and contempt towards anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional hatreds have been added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays, stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push. Most Europeans turn out on reflection to be quite gullible and stupid. ..."
"... There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is also a minority view in the German world, mostly based on their business realism that is neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement between EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and EU-Russia economic ties are such an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility will go on. ..."
"... After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases, nations that were literally saved from extermination were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in Czech Republic 20 years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again. ..."
The U.S. has warned both Russia and Germany against pursuing a planned gas pipeline that would
run between the two countries, threatening to impose sanctions and claiming the project would
threaten the security of its European allies.
Construction has recently begun for the Nord Stream 2 project, a planned pipeline that would
extend from Russia along an existing pipeline through the Baltic Sea into northeastern Germany.
Once finished, Nord Stream 2 would reportedly double the amount of gas that Russia could
provide Europe. State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Sandra Oudkirk told reporters in
Berlin Thursday that the project could bolster Russia's "malign influence" in the region and
that Washington was "exerting as much persuasive power" as it could to stop it, according to
the Associated Press.
Europe in diplomatic push to ease Russia sanctions | Financial Times
https://www.ft.com/content/9b9bbd3c-44a5-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fdApr 20, 2018 - A Europe-wide
diplomatic push is under way to persuade the Trump administration to ease US sanctions
targeting Russia, as fears mount that ...
We are talking apples and oranges. EU wants cheap, reliable energy from Russia and to export
to Russia as much as possible without interference from US. That is pure business. But the
dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia, some because they are fed by the
security-military-academic spending, some because they 'studied' and were politically formed
in US or UK. Some because that's just the way they are.
There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of
history, resentment over losses (Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about
perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and contempt towards
anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional
hatreds have been added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays,
stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push. Most Europeans turn out on
reflection to be quite gullible and stupid.
There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is
also a minority view in the German world, mostly based on their business realism that is
neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement between
EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and
EU-Russia economic ties are such an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility
will go on.
After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional
anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases, nations that were literally saved from extermination
were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in Czech Republic 20
years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again.
My advise to Russia would be to mind its
own business and not try to sacrifice for the others or to help them. It has always backfired
because the cultural milieu in Europe is naturally resentful of Russia and the east in
general. Business doesn't change that.
First, there is no "EU", at least not in political terms . More crucially, there is no "EU
foreign policy". Yes, there are EU member states, who have political leaders, there is a big
business community in the EU and there are many EU organizations, but as such, the "EU" does
not exist, especially not in terms of foreign policy. The best proof of that is how clueless
the so-called "EU" has been in the Ukraine, then with the anti-Russian sanctions, in dealing
with an invasion of illegal immigrants, and now with Trump. At best, the EU can be considered a
US protectorate/colony, with some subjects "more equal than others" (say, the UK versus
Greece). Most (all?) EU member states are abjectly obedient to the US, and this is no surprise
considering that even the so-called "EU leader" or "EU heavyweight" – Germany –
only has very limited sovereignty. The EU leaders are nothing but a comprador elite
which doesn't give a damn about the opinions and interests of the people of Europe. The
undeniable fact is that the so-called "EU foreign policy" has gone against the vital interests
of the people of Europe for decades and that phenomenon is only getting worse.
Second, the single most powerful and unified organization in Europe is not even an EU
organization, but NATO. And NATO, in real terms, is no less than 80% US . Forget about those
fierce looking European armies, they are all a joke. Not only do they represent no credible
force (being too small, too poorly trained, under-equipped and poorly commanded), but they are
completely dependent on the US for a long list of critical capabilities and " force
multipliers ": command, control, communications, intelligence, networking, surveillance,
reconnaissance, target acquisition, logistics, etc. Furthermore, in terms of training, force
planning, weapon systems procurement, deployment and maintenance, EU states are also totally
dependent on the US. The reason? The US military budget totally dwarfs anything individual EU
states can spend, so they all depend on Uncle Sam. Of sure, the NATO figurehead – the
Secretary General – is usually a non-entity which makes loud statements and is European
(I think of that clown Stoltenberg as the prefect example), but NATO is not run by the NATO
Secretary General. In reality, it is run by the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), who
is the head of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and these guys are as red,
white and blue as it gets. Forget about the "Eurocorps" or any other so-called "European
armies" – it's all hot air, like Trudeau's recent outburst at Trump. In reality in the
EU, as in Canada, they all know who is boss. And here is the single most important fact: NATO
desperately needs Russia as justification for its own existence: if relations with Russia
improve, then NATO would have no more reason to exist. Do you really think that anybody will
let that happen? I sure don't! And right now, the Europeans are busy asking for more
US troops on their soil, not less and they are all
pretending to be terrified by a Russian invasion , hence the need for more and bigger military
exercises close to the Russian border . And just to cover all its bases,
NATO is now gradually expanding into Latin America .
Third, there is a long list of EU governments which vitally need further bad relationships
with Russia . They include:
Unpopular governments which need to explain their own
failures by the nefarious actions of an external bogyman . A good example is how the
Spanish authorities blamed Russia for the crisis in Catalonia. Or the British with their
"Brexit". The Swedes are doing even better, they are already preparing their public opinion for a
"Russian interference" in case the election results don't turn out to be what they need.
Governments whose rhetoric has been so hysterically anti-Russian that they cannot possibly
back down from it. Best examples: the UK and Merkel. But since most (but not all) EU states
did act on the Skripal false-flag on the basis of the British "highly likely" and in the name
of "solidarity", they are now all stuck as accomplices of this policy. There is no way they are
simply going to admit that they were conned by the Brits.
EU prostitutes : states whose
only policy is to serve the US against Russia. These states compete against each other in the
most abject way to see who can out-brown-nose each other for the position of "most faithful and
willing loyal servant of the US". The best examples are, of course, the three Baltic statelets,
but the #1 position has to go to the "fiercely patriotic Poles" who are now
willing to actually pay Uncle Sam to be militarily occupied (even though the very same
Uncle Sam is trying to racketeer them for billions of dollars ). True, now that EU
subsidies are running out, the situation of these states is becoming even more dire, and they
know that the only place where they can still get money is the US. So don't expect them to
change their tune anytime soon (even if
Bulgaria has
already realized that nobody in the West gives a damn about it ).
Governments who want
to crack down on internal dissent by accusing any patriotic or independent political
party/movement to be "paid by the Kremlin" and representing Russian interests. The best
example is France and how it treated the National Front. I would argue that most EU states are,
in one way or another, working on creating a "national security state" because they do realize
(correctly) that the European people are deeply frustrated and oppose EU policies (hence all
the anti-EU referendums lost by the ruling elites).
Contrary to a very often repeated myth, European business interests do not represent a
powerful anti-russophobic force . Why? Just look at Germany: for all the involvement of Germany
(and Merkel personally) in the Ukraine, for all the stupid rhetoric about "Russia being an
aggressor" which "does not comply with the Mink Agreements", North Stream is going ahead! Yes,
money talks, and the truth is that while anti-Russian sanctions have cost Europe billions, the
big financial interests (say the French company Total) have found ways to ignore/bypass these
sanctions. Oh sure, there is a pro-trade lobby with Russian interest in Europe. It is real, but
it simply does not have anywhere near the power the anti-Russian forces in the EU have. This is
why for years now various EU politicians and public figures have made noises about lifting the
sanctions, but when it came to the vote – they all voted as told by the real bosses.
Not all EU Russophobia is US-generated , by the way. We have clearly seen that these days
when Trump suggested that the G7 (or, more accurately, the G6+1) needed to re-invite Russia, it
was the Europeans who said "nope!". To the extend that there is a "EU position" (even a very
demure and weak one), it is mostly anti-Russian, especially in the northern part of Europe. So
when Uncle Sam tells the Europeans to obey and engage in the usual Russia-bashing, they all
quickly fall in line, but in the rare case when the US does not push a rabidly anti-Russian
agenda, EU politicians suddenly find enough willpower to say "no". By the way, for all the
Trump's statements about re-inviting Russia into the G6+1 the US is still busy slapping more
sanctions on Russia .
The current mini-wars between the US and the EU (on trade, on Iran, on Jerusalem) do not at
all mean that Russia automatically can benefit from this . Again, the best example of this is
the disastrous G6+1 summit in which Trump basically alienated everybody only to have the G6
reiterate its anti-Russian position even though the G6+1 needs Russia far more than Russia
needs the G7 (she really doesn't!). Just like the US and Israeli leaders can disagree and, on
occasion, fight each other, that does not at all mean that somehow they are not fundamentally
joined at the hip. Just think of mob "families" who can even have "wars" against each other,
but that does not at all mean that this will benefit the rest of the population whom all
mobsters prey upon.
The Ukrainian crisis will only benefit anti-Russian forces in Europe . There is a very high
probability that in the near future the Ukronazi regime will try to reconquer Novorussia
(DNR/LRN). I submit that the outcome of such an attack is not in doubt – the Ukronazis
will lose. The only question is this: to whom will they lose:
Option one: they lose to the combined forces of the DNR and LNR. This is probably the most
likely outcome. Should this happen, there is a very high probability of a Novorussian counter
attack to liberate most of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, especially the cities of
Slaviansk and Mariupol. Since past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, we can
be pretty darn sure of what the reaction in Kiev and in the West will be: Russia will be
blamed for it all. The AngloZionists will never admit that the Ukronazi regime lost a civil
war to its own people because the Novorussians will never accept a Nazi regime ruling over
them. Thus, a Novorussian victory will result in more hysterical Russophobia.
Option two: the Ukronazis succeed in their attack and threaten to overrun Donetsk, Lugansk and the rest of
Novorussia. Putin simply cannot allow this to happen. He has made that promise many times and
he has recently repeated it during his "open line" with the Russian people. If the Russians
are forced to intervene, this will not be a massive ground invasion – there is no need
for that. Russia has the firepower needed in the form of missile and artillery strikes to
destroy the attacking Urkonazi forces and to impose a no-fly zone over all of Novorussia. If
Kiev pushes on and launches a full-scale attack on Russia proper, the Ukrainian armed forces
will be totally disorganized and cease combat in about 48 hours. This scenario is what I call
the "Neocon dream" since such a Russian intervention will not be imaginary, but quite real
and the Kremlin will even confirm it all very publicly and probably recognize the two
Novorussian Republics just like what happened in 08.08.08 when Saakashvili decided to invade
South Ossetia. So, AngloZionists will (finally!) have the "proof" that Russia is the
aggressor, the Poles and Balts will prepare for an "imminent" Russian invasion and I think
that there is a pretty good chance that NATO forces will move into the Western Ukraine to
"stop the Russians", even if the said Russians will have absolutely no desire (or even
possible motive) to want to invade the rest of the Ukraine or, even less so, Poland, Sweden
or the Baltic statelets.
I will admit that there is still a small possibility that a Ukronazi attack might not
happen. Maybe Poroshenko & Co. will get cold feet (they know the real condition of the Ukie
military and "dobrobat" death squads) and maybe Putin's recent not-so-veiled threat about "
grave consequences for the Ukrainian statehood " will have the needed effect. But what will
happen even if this attack does not take place? The EU leaders and the Ukronazi regime in Kiev
will still blame Russia for the Ukraine now clearly being a failed state. Whatever scenario you
find more likely for the Ukraine, things there will only get worse and everybody will blame
Russia.
The crisis in Syria will only benefit anti-Russian forces in Europe. It is becoming pretty
clear that the US is now attempting a reconquista of Syria or, at least, a break-up of
Syria into several zones, including US-controlled ones. Right now, the US and the "good
terrorists" have lost the war, but that does not stop them from re-igniting a new one, mostly
by reorganizing, retraining, redeploying and, most importantly, re-branding the surviving "bad
terrorists" into "good ones". This plan is backed by Saudi money and Israeli firepower.
Furthermore, Russia is now reporting
that US Special Forces are already working with the (new) "good terrorists" to – you
guessed it – prepare yet another fake chemical attack and blame it on the Syrians. And
why not? It worked perfectly already several times, why not do that again? At the very least,
it would give the US another try at getting their Tomahawks to show their effectiveness (even
if they fail again, facts don't matter here). And make no mistake, a US "victory" in Syria (or
in Venezuela) would be a disaster not only for the region, but for every country wanting to
become sovereign (see Andre Vltchek's excellent article on this topic here ). And, again, Russia will be
blamed for it all and, with certifiable nutcasts like Bolton, Russian forces might even be
attacked. As I wrote already many times, this is far from
over . Just as in the Ukrainian case, some deal might be made (at least
US and Russian military officials are still talking to each other ) but my personal opinion
is that making any kind of deal with Trump is as futile as making deals with Netanyahu: neither
of them can be trusted and they both will break any and all promises in a blink of an eye. And
if all hell breaks loose in Syria and/or Iran, NATO will make sure that the Europeans all
quickly and obediently fall in line ("solidarity", remember?).
The bottom line is this: currently, the EU is most unlikely to become a viable partner for
Russia and the future does look rather bleak.
One objection to my pessimism is the undeniable success of the recent Saint Petersburg
summit and the Parliamentary Forum. However, I believe that neither of these events was really
centered around Europe at all, but about the world at large (see excellent report by Gilbert
Doctorow on this topic
here ). Yes, Russia is doing great and while the AngloZionist media loves to speak about
the "isolation" of Russia, the truth is that it is the Empire which is isolated, while
Russia and China are
having tremendous success building the multi-polar world they want to replace the Empire
with. So while it is true that the western leaders might prefer to see a liberal "economic
block" in the new Russian government, the rest of the world has no such desire at all
(especially considering how many countries out there have suffered terrible hardships at the
hands of the WTO/WB/IMF/etc types).
Conclusion :
The AngloZionist Empire is not based in the US, or in the EU, or Israel, or anywhere else on
the planet. It is a trans-national entity with regional variations and which includes different
interest groups under its umbrella. You can think of it as a gigantic criminal gang
racketeering the entire planet for "protection". To think that by presenting a "liberal" face
to these thugs will gain you their support is extremely naive as these guys don't care about
your face: what they want is your submission. Vladimir Putin put it best
when he said " They do not want to humiliate us, they want to subdue us, solve their
problems at our expense ".
However, if the EU is, for all practical purposes, non-existent, Russia can, and will,
engage with individual EU member states. There is a huge difference between, say, Poland and
Italy, or the UK and Austria. Furthermore, the EU is not only dysfunctional, it is also
non-viable. Russia would immensely benefit from the current EU either falling apart or being
deeply reformed because the current EU is a pure creation of the US-backed Bilderberger types
and not the kind of Europe the European people need. In fact, I would even argue that the EU is
the single biggest danger for the people of the European continent. Thus Russia should use her
resources to foster bi-lateral cooperation with individual EU member states and never take any
action which would strengthen (or even legitimize) EU-derived organizations such as the EU
Parliament, the European Court of Human Rights, etc. These are all entities which seek to
undermine the sovereignty of all its members, including Russia. Again, Putin put it best when
he
recently declared that " either Russia is a sovereign country, or there is no
Russia ".
Whatever the ideology and slogans, all empires are inherently evil and inherently dangerous
to any country wanting to be truly sovereign. If Russia (and China) want to create a
multi-polar world, they need to gradually disengage from those trans-national bodies which are
totally controlled by the Empire, it is really that simple. Instead, Russia needs to engage
those countries, political parties and forces who advocate for what de Gaulle called "
the Europe of
fatherlands ". Both the AngloZionist Empire and the EU are undergoing the most profound
crisis in their history and the writing is on the wall. Sooner rather than later, one by one,
European countries will recover their sovereignty, as will Russia. Only if the people of Europe
succeed in recovering their sovereignty could Russia look for real partnerships in the West, if
only because the gradually developing and integrating Eurasian landmass offer tremendous
economic opportunities which could be most beneficial to the nations of Europe. A prosperous
Europe " from the Atlantic to the
Urals " is still a possibility, but that will happen only when the current European Union
and NATO are replaced by truly European institutions and the current European elites replaced
by sovereignists.
The people of Russia, EU and, I would argue, the United States all have the same goal and
the same enemy: they want to recover their sovereignty, get rid of their corrupt and, frankly,
treacherous elites and liberates themselves from the hegemony of the AngloZionist Empire. This
is why pushing the issue of "true sovereignty" (and national traditional values) is, I believe,
the most unifying and powerful political idea to defeat the Empire. This will be a long
struggle but the outcome is not in doubt.
The usual Saker, but, there are a couple of not bad snippets:
The EU leaders are nothing but a comprador elite which doesn't give a damn about the
opinions and interests of the people of Europe.
The AngloZionist Empire is not based in the US, or in the EU, or Israel, or anywhere
else on the planet. It is a trans-national entity with regional variations and which
includes different interest groups under its umbrella.
They do not want to humiliate us, they want to subdue us, solve their problems at our
expense".
As for this:
If Russia (and China) want to create a multi-polar world, they need to gradually
disengage from those trans-national bodies which are totally controlled by the Empire, it
is really that simple.
Saker is once again completely wrong. His theories fall short to explain lots of real events.
He got hooked on his "Anglo-Zionist" theory and "one Hegemon", which is far from explaining
the reality on the ground. There is no one single hegemon, but two powerful interest groups
in the west. One of the power centers is dominated by the Rothschilds from the City of London
and the other ruled by the Rockerfellers which is based in the US.
The powers described above are sometimes working in collusion but sometimes work against each
other (They were in collusion during the Soviet Afghan war for instance). Currently, we don't
see a collusion but a war being waged in between these two groups. I think it is highly self
evident, so much so that it is happening almost all in the open. In the modern history we
haven't witnessed such a openly fought war ever before (between these two powers). All is at
stake and the war in between these two is vicious. Thus you can explain Trump's attitude
towards EU, everlasting character assasination of Trump by certain opposing circles in the
US, high level resignations, the state of confusion of Nato and much more. If this theory is
right (and I think it is much more viable than any other theory that I came across in the
Alt-Med), this makes Russia firmly embedded into one of the camps. Unfortunately, the
position that Russia took makes him not a sovereign power but on contrary puts him into a
subservient role. The late actions of Russia, especially in Syria, is quite telling. I know
people who admire Russia get quite frustrated when they hear such a scenario and outcome, but
this is possibly the only way Putin believes that Russia can survive. Thus it explains his
latest house clean-up of Euroasian integrists. Even worse, if you believe in this scenario,
it brings Russia and China against each other especially in the long run. This scenario also
put a full stop to the idealist Euroasian multi-polar world order.
Here is the link to an older video in Russian with English subtitles. The guy's name is
Andrei Fursov and he has some interesting things to say regarding this subject. This
interview was just before Obama was elected but is still quite relevent. His newer videos
seems to have lost steam, possibly because he is working for some state connected Russian
institutions and think-thanks and thus I think he is somewhat restricted. After all it is
again the famous "Game Theory", isn't it?
The U.S. has warned both Russia and Germany against pursuing a planned gas pipeline that
would run between the two countries, threatening to impose sanctions and claiming the project
would threaten the security of its European allies.
Construction has recently begun for the Nord Stream 2 project, a planned pipeline that would
extend from Russia along an existing pipeline through the Baltic Sea into northeastern
Germany. Once finished, Nord Stream 2 would reportedly double the amount of gas that Russia
could provide Europe. State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Sandra Oudkirk told
reporters in Berlin Thursday that the project could bolster Russia's "malign influence" in
the region and that Washington was "exerting as much persuasive power" as it could to stop
it, according to the Associated Press.
Europe in diplomatic push to ease Russia sanctions | Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/9b9bbd3c-44a5-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fdApr
20, 2018 – A Europe-wide diplomatic push is under way to persuade the Trump
administration to ease US sanctions targeting Russia, as fears mount that
Excellent comment as usual Beckow, I could have typed the same. In fact, I have been
commenting online since 1992 that neither EU, nor most European states can be friends of
Russia. This was based on how those treated Yugoslavia/Serbia during the recent Balkan wars
that the same entities helped initiate. Because Serbia is Russia without nuclear weapons.
Russia would have gotten exactly the same treatment (Barbarossa 2) as Yugoslavia if it did
not have them. Nobody expected Russia to recover so quickly from Yeltsin and even
develop the world leading stand-off weapons on a budget. This is the only reason that
Barbarossa 2 will never happen. But they cannot stop hoping for a US-lead miracle.
Yet, the economic interest is there and if China and Russia manage to economically
integrate Europe and Asia, then the Euro-doggies will stop yapping and biting at the Russian
heels and will fall in line. What else could one expect from such pathetic shameless trash?
Give the One-Road another 15 years and watch this unfurle.
Finally, although I believed that Ukronazis would attack Novorussians, I now think that
Ukraine may have run out of suicidal dumb maniacs. It is much cheaper to make noise and beat
your Galician chest then to engage the enemy protected by Russia. Ukraine is, unfortunately,
already a total economic basket case, plus all One-Road plans circumvent it (as MH17 should
have, due to instability). Will there ever be a better example than Ukraine of the benevolent
influence of the Anglo-Zionist on a country?
As yours truly, we noticed the drastic shift as to pointing to supranational guidance of
international political events. As for his mention, blaming Trump and Netanyahu to be
suppreme leaders and deciders, we see them rather as spokespersons, blowing and hissing
publicly the script of what Saker calls the Anglo-Jewish maffia, the only subgroup that
sorted for quality, not quantity in strategy(global evidently and necessarily) and membership
for in-group only benefit. Elitist, subjectively better organized than any entity other,
territorially mostly independent in case of emergency, and moral conviction based on
historical Judaist values, strategies and tactics. Play all sides and stay invisible.
Below the prudent lines of Saker quoted.
The AngloZionist Empire is not based in the US, or in the EU, or Israel, or anywhere
else on the planet. It is a trans-national entity with regional variations and which
includes different interest groups under its umbrella. You can think of it as a gigantic
criminal gang racketeering the entire planet for "protection". To think that by presenting
a "liberal" face to these thugs will gain you their support is extremely naive as these
guys don't care about your face: what they want is your submission.
As for Putin, it could be, that he is, for now, on a footing of equal to the insiders of
above, he must somehow understand(Putin gives a public impression to be cognitively superior
to all other political tarts of the moment) that real problems are global, and Russian
nationalism, or international expansion based on Russian nationalism are just a political
tool to rally bulk humanity. Very similar to the palm oil, corn syrup and digital porn obese
consumerism of the West promotion. At most bickering and infighting can be done by visible
actors as Putin, Trump, Xi(affected indirectly), but there must be a scenario, and war cannot
be anything more then policing.
To be noticed, that it pleads for Saker's intellectualism to correct and even reverse,
after due analysis his opinions unlike a Tom Engelhardt(at that qualitative rather inferior).
No "to big to fail" here. Let's wait and see, how Saker's intuition can take him into
quantitative analysis of what moves beyond and against nationalist and EU, US, Russia, China
dialectics. The old adagio of the information age: networks, was historically present in
International Jewry. One can be a policeman, be a thief, but foremost one is a Jew.
Honest writing of Saker.
How good are these supranational, corporatacracy(another commenter), "globally organized
elites" groups with better cohesion? To our definite impression, not good enough, though way
above the bulk of humanity and most of the middle class media comprehension. Two singular
dramas of our age, that will decide the twenty-first century. Better and not good enough.
Only to be arrested by bringing in AI, eugenetics, rebranding goals and focus. It is in
itself a pocket drama repeated over and over that analysis is mostly litterary, never relies
on the best of information, is fragmented. Even today indexing big data lumps could solve
this partly. Alternative media in the first place apply the same archaic methods while better
tools are available. That said unz.com is above the fray in focussing and searching methods.
It should spark some hidden outliers glued into the bulk of the deplorables by individual
fate.
War-ing and economics, the epistomology of politics, the focus of daily news, should be
seen as consequences, not prime causes of attention. In the end they impose toxicity,
migrations, excess population densities, excess total human numbers. The goal itself of
humanity should be reasserted as quality of life for all standing and future humans.
Then strategy and tactics derive from there. Why? Well the same supra national elites, the
only ones that can take on the essentials tend to forget they are frogging in the same tub,
that nature probably using more disruptive method will take care of the human plage if
not.
The CIA seems to have spent five billion $ in Ukraine.
Who wants to incorporate Ukraine in the west therefore is not clear, the USA, NATO or EU, or
all of them ?
In any case, many in Europe see Putin just as an honest gas supplier.
Trump's gas is much more expensive.
Definitely. He stays well within the Judeo-Overton window. He is kosher, so to speak.
Sure, like Alex Jones, he will make the occasional slap at Israel or Zionism, but he will not
verge outside of the window's "Nazi Germany was the ultimate evil" or the holy 6 million
martyrs. I also have never read any of his work where he delves into 9/11, and what it means
about everything that has happened since.
You have three "not bad snippets" that I don't really agree with:
The EU leaders are nothing but a comprador elite which doesn't give a damn about the
opinions and interests of the people of Europe.
It is not that they don't give a damn, it is that they take their orders from a higher
source. Euro-serfs see the coerced passage of Lisbon and Maastricht, the ongoing 3rd world
invasion, the restriction of free speech, the increasing criminality, the ECB destruction and
removal of elected officials in Greece and Italy. They know it is a sham, they just don't
understand why, because they are constantly being lied to. Saker is not helping here.
The AngloZionist Empire is not based in the US, or in the EU, or Israel, or anywhere
else on the planet. It is a trans-national entity with regional variations and which
includes different interest groups under its umbrella.
Saker is not willing to tell us exactly who this entity is. He is not going to take us
outside of the Judeo-Overton window.
They do not want to humiliate us, they want to subdue us, solve their problems at our
expense
With this dog whistle he is treading on thin ice. Sure, "their problems" could describe
past crimes like Maidan that may be catching up with them, but it could also cover such
things as Gaza, the Liberty, the King David Hotel, or even the targeting of Nagasaki in 1945.
As usual though, he won't confront the serpent.
The best examples are, of course, the three Baltic statelets, but the #1 position has to
go to the "fiercely patriotic Poles" who are now willing to actually pay Uncle Sam to be
militarily occupied (even though the very same Uncle Sam is trying to racketeer them for
billions of dollars).
Talking about individual EU countries, the Poles need to realize that they're no longer
dealing with Imperial Russia or the Soviet Union, and try exploring avenues for productive
co-operation with Russia. It's working with "historic enemy" Germany, so why not with
"historic enemy" Russia?
There are plenty of opportunities, with the first one surely being shutting down US bases
on Polish territory and getting US missiles out of Poland. The current USA and the UK are
under UZA management which is clearly hostile to everything modern Poland stands for.
"For targeting purposes, the bombing crew used St. Mary's Urakami Cathedral, the largest
Christian church in East Asia. At 11:02 a.m., on Aug. 9, 1945, when the bomb was dropped over
the cathedral, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan."
Hey, Quartermaster, why don't you tell us more about the amazing progress achieved by
Ukraine after the Kagans-sponsored revolution of 2014? For instance, you could tell us
(proudly?) about the rise of neo-Nazi power in Ukraine and about certain Kolomojsky, the
Ukrainian/Israeli thug, and his financing of the Azov battalion.
The EU countries put people in prison for questioning the tight official narrative/numbers of
holocaust biz.
What is wrong with using the word "Ukronazis?"
How would you name the happy warriors beholden to the memory of the 14th Waffen Grenadier
Division of the SS (1st Galician)?
"The newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater
Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in
Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Moscovite
occupation.
The Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army which has been formed on the Ukrainian lands, will
continue to fight with the Allied German Army against Moscovite occupation for a sovereign
and united State and a new order in the whole world.
Long live the Ukrainian Sovereign United Ukraine! Long live the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists! Long live the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the
Ukrainian people – STEPAN BANDERA" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Ukrainian_State_Act
We are talking apples and oranges. EU wants cheap, reliable energy from Russia and to
export to Russia as much as possible without interference from US. That is pure business. But
the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia, some because they are fed by the
security-military-academic spending, some because they 'studied' and were politically formed
in US or UK. Some because that's just the way they are.
There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of
history, resentment over losses (Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about
perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and contempt towards
anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional
hatreds have been added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays,
stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push. Most Europeans turn out on
reflection to be quite gullible and stupid.
There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is
also a minority view in the German world, mostly based on their business realism that is
neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement between
EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and
EU-Russia economic ties are such an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility
will go on.
After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional
anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases, nations that were literally saved from extermination
were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in Czech Republic 20
years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again. My advise to Russia would be to mind its
own business and not try to sacrifice for the others or to help them. It has always backfired
because the cultural milieu in Europe is naturally resentful of Russia and the east in
general. Business doesn't change that.
"... There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of history, resentment over losses (Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and contempt towards anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional hatreds have been added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays, stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push. Most Europeans turn out on reflection to be quite gullible and stupid. ..."
"... There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is also a minority view in the German world, mostly based on their business realism that is neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement between EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and EU-Russia economic ties are such an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility will go on. ..."
"... After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases, nations that were literally saved from extermination were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in Czech Republic 20 years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again. ..."
"... Failure has never discouraged true fanatics. It is a mistake to see them only in Washington and London, there are plenty of them in positions of power in Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, and even Stockholm. ..."
"... And in Washington the loudest ones are often bitter ethnics from eastern Europe. I honestly think it is about 50-50 whether this gets escalated beyond all reason and we face a catastrophe (so I admit that I don't know :). ..."
"... On the one hand there are the nukes. On the other, it is so hard to climb down for any ideological fanatic. They felt that they were so close, when they bombed Beograd and Russia did nothing, they thought it was all just a question of time. And then Putin happened and the dream has been slowly dying. Imagine the painful void that they have to live with every day. So they hate. Any concession to people who hate you is counter-productive, thus there will be no deal between Russia-EU. Only obvious trade. ..."
... EU wants cheap, reliable energy from Russia and to export to Russia as much as possible without
interference from US. That is pure business. But the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia, some because they are fed
by the security-military-academic spending, some because they 'studied' and were politically formed in US or UK. Some because
that's just the way they are.
There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of history, resentment over losses (Germany,
Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and
contempt towards anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional hatreds have been
added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays, stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push.
Most Europeans turn out on reflection to be quite gullible and stupid.
There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is also a minority view in the German
world, mostly based on their business realism that is neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement
between EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and EU-Russia economic ties are such
an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility will go on.
After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases,
nations that were literally saved from extermination were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in
Czech Republic 20 years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again.
My advise to Russia would be to mind its own business and not try to sacrifice for the others or to help them. It has always
backfired because the cultural milieu in Europe is naturally resentful of Russia and the east in general. Business doesn't change
that.
Thanks. Current trends strengthen Euro-asia (and thus China and Russia), so West will have to do something, otherwise they
get weaker over time.
There has been a maximalist group in the West who believe that ' anything is possible ', that even with nukes it is
possible to defeat and dismember Russia. The key factor would be internal instability inside Russia. Maidan, Saaksavilli's mad
dash in 2008, and the support for Caucas separatists were all done with that in mind. It has mostly failed with Russia becoming
more united in the process.
Failure has never discouraged true fanatics. It is a mistake to see them only in Washington and London, there are plenty
of them in positions of power in Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, and even Stockholm.
And in Washington the loudest ones are often bitter ethnics from eastern Europe. I honestly think it is about 50-50 whether
this gets escalated beyond all reason and we face a catastrophe (so I admit that I don't know :).
On the one hand there are the nukes. On the other, it is so hard to climb down for any ideological fanatic. They felt that
they were so close, when they bombed Beograd and Russia did nothing, they thought it was all just a question of time. And then
Putin happened and the dream has been slowly dying. Imagine the painful void that they have to live with every day. So they hate.
Any concession to people who hate you is counter-productive, thus there will be no deal between Russia-EU. Only obvious trade.
The best examples are, of course, the three Baltic statelets, but the #1 position has to
go to the "fiercely patriotic Poles" who are now willing to actually pay Uncle Sam to be
militarily occupied (even though the very same Uncle Sam is trying to racketeer them for
billions of dollars).
Talking about individual EU countries, the Poles need to realize that they're no longer
dealing with Imperial Russia or the Soviet Union, and try exploring avenues for productive
co-operation with Russia. It's working with "historic enemy" Germany, so why not with
"historic enemy" Russia?
There are plenty of opportunities, with the first one surely being shutting down US bases
on Polish territory and getting US missiles out of Poland. The current USA and the UK are
under UZA management which is clearly hostile to everything modern Poland stands for.
Im Bundestag kämpfen Merkel und ihre Treuesten derweil darum, ihre
Anti-Deutschland-Politik unter anderem gegen die CSU durchzusetzen -- sogar in der CDU gibt
es erste Mutige, die sich daran erinnern, wer sie bezahlt und wem sie eigentlich verpflichtet
sind.
Rough translation:
" In the German parliament Merkel and her supporters battle to continue their anti German
policy against the CSU -- even in the CDU (Merkel's party) there are courageous people who
that remind Merkel by whom she is paid, and to who she has obligations. "
There are German rumours that Merkel will fall this week.
Historians from time to time write how curious it is that apparently unrelated events in
different parts of the world change history.
I wonder if the Trump election with the realisation, long overdue, in Germany, that the
migrants are a burden in stead of a contribution to the economy, may combine to Merkel's
fall,in her wake maybe the implosion of the EU, and the end of the euro.
It was Merkel who prevented Greece leaving the euro.
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars; the men
they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
It is completely unnecessary and foolish to bring up and try to argue about
the faith of another man, especially by superimposing one's own views onto the matter. It's
clear that you believe it is impossible or highly unlikely to have high intelligence and be a
true believer, but to me that is neither here nor there.
The point is that Putin realizes that the Orthodox faith is the cultural framework of the
Russian nation; its development historically, socially and culturally rest in the hands
Orthodox Christianity. Yes! Russia's history and the levers of power were wrenched away from
its traditional Orthodox roots by those intent on revenge, those with a mad desire to unite the
world under the banner of international communism, bringing about (so they hoped and continue
to hope) the birth of their messiah. Thankfully that chapter of history is over, but it's not
over for the chosen: intent on revenge on Russia, just as they are forever intent on their
innocence in all historical matters, they have moved on and rooted themselves into another
host: the USA. They will be smacked down and put in their place again, but I hesitate to
estimate the scheduling. The main question is how many human lives will they end through their
machinations before the smack down.
The point is that Putin realizes that the Orthodox faith is the cultural framework of
the Russian nation; its development historically, socially and culturally rest in the hands
Orthodox Christianity.
No, it's not. No one can enter the same river twice. Russia will thankfully never go back
to its Orthodox roots completely, although Orthodoxy will co-exist peacefully within the
secular society. Putin's public insistence on rituals of the Orthodox faith is one of his
least attractive features.
Thankfully that chapter of history is over
It's not over until it's over. This sentence of yours simply shows how misunderstood the
Soviet period of the Russian history is in the West.
The Soviet Union has been gone for more than a quarter of a century and yet it is –
to borrow a phrase from a popular Soviet song – is more alive than the living. The
Soviet period has become a sort of a yardstick against which the modern Russia is compared in
every area: culture, economy, moral climate, everything.
It is a universal agreement that in many areas Russia doesn't measure up to the Soviet
standards – culture and education are the prime examples. Hardly anyone in Russia would
disagree that in 25 years Russia hasn't produced anything even remotely comparable with the
Soviet achievements in this spheres. Until it does – the Soviet Union will live
one.
Russia still is a neoliberal country. What do you expect ?
It is interesting that Russia which oppose neoliberal globalization in foreign policy, implements neoliberal reforms within
the country. The current pensoin reform is clienly neoliberal in spirit, even if it does not include privatization. there is
a big different between those who work at factories and those who work at offices.
Notable quotes:
"... I don't share your and some other commenters' fixation on Jews. I believe it's a red herring. Elites, Jewish and gentile, are equally repulsive and guilty of most ills that afflict our world. Despite its many failings, one of the redeeming qualities of communism was that it called for confiscation of the possessions of moneyed elites. In reality, they were mostly hanged or shot. Considering what they are doing to the US and other countries, this was amply justified. ..."
"... Basically there were real issues behind those color revolutions in Ukraine and elsewhere but without progressive force caring about people there were ulterior forces that led those eruption of real grievances and these grievances are caused by the system of capitalism you have just described. Yours and other former Soviet citizens excellent education is another testament to communism regime. ..."
"... Regarding new found religious feelings. it is obviously all fake. ..."
"... I can't say that today's Russia is all bad or all good. I think open borders is a huge achievement. People have a chance to see the reality with their own eyes: wherever you go in Europe or Asia now, you meet lots of people from Russia, which means that they have the money to travel and an interest in other cultures, as you meet them in museums and at historical sites all over Europe. ..."
"... I do resent what current authorities did to the education system: they degraded it, ostensibly in an attempt to reform and make it more Western-like. I think these "reforms" were extremely ill-conceived, the school is becoming much worse (in fact, American-like, although it must be degraded a lot more to sink all the way down to the US level). ..."
"... I resent than instead of improving Russian Academy of Sciences (it was pretty bad in the USSR) they essentially emasculated it. If you go by publications, there is less decent research in Russia now than there was in the USSR. ..."
"... Huge inequality is another negative, especially considering that most oligarchs got rich by looting state property, and now continue to enrich themselves the same way (heads of most Russian corporations, state-owned and private, are nothing but thieves). That made Russia more US-like, but I consider that regress rather than progress. ..."
"... On the other hand, I consider it a huge achievement that in international affairs Russia today is pursuing its own interests, rather than engaging in a thankless task of saving the world. I subscribe to the Protestant dictum that "God helps those who help themselves", so whoever is worth saving will save themselves, and the rest be damned. ..."
Maybe it is presumptuous to express my opinion about another person's faith, but let me
remind you that Putin was a KGB officer and a member of the communist party. As such, he was
(or pretended to be) a militant atheist. Now he publicly goes to church and remains there
throughout the service (mind you, Russian Orthodox Christmas and Easter services are
all-night affairs). Thus, he either lied then or is lying now about his faith. Take your
pick.
Yes, Orthodox Christianity was one of the pillars of Russian culture. But again, let me
remind you that one of the greatest Russian writers, Leo Tolstoy, was excommunicated by the
church. What's more, current patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox church, was
photographed with a watch worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, owns an apartment in the
center of Moscow, likely worth millions of $, and a collection or rare books in this
apartment with a huge value. If you are a Christian, you should know that "it is easier for a
camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of
God" (Matthew 19:24; also Mark 10:25).
I don't share your and some other commenters' fixation on Jews. I believe it's a red
herring. Elites, Jewish and gentile, are equally repulsive and guilty of most ills that
afflict our world. Despite its many failings, one of the redeeming qualities of communism was
that it called for confiscation of the possessions of moneyed elites. In reality, they were
mostly hanged or shot. Considering what they are doing to the US and other countries, this
was amply justified.
I frankly do not think that communism requires redemption. It was first attempt at moving
humanity towards next step in social evolution and it did not happen under the best
conditions. It happened in the country ridden with accumulated problems from previous regime
mishandling the country for a couple of centuries with those issues coming to a head and
after so much pressure it resulted in massive eruption of violence which would have been even
worse without Bolsheviks as it would lead to Russia disintegration and Russian state death.,
There would have happened something similar to modern Ukraine.
Basically there were real
issues behind those color revolutions in Ukraine and elsewhere but without progressive force
caring about people there were ulterior forces that led those eruption of real grievances and
these grievances are caused by the system of capitalism you have just described. Yours and
other former Soviet citizens excellent education is another testament to communism
regime.
Current Russian regime got bad roots and I do not believe anything good will come out of
these bad roots. The system is freakish and rotten at the core. It care s not for people.
Current increase of retirement age is another testament to this. Bolsheviks when they started
made their intentions rather obvious in destroyed and poor country. They assured real human
rights while current system removed those rights and there is no guarantees that we as a
soviet citizen used to enjoy. Obviously things were not perfect. They never are.
Regarding new found religious feelings. it is obviously all fake.
I also wonder what do you think of spontaneous life appearance? I read some books on this
issue including Dawkins' and Behe, but considering your experience and professional
background it would be very interesting to hear your thoughts.
I can't say that today's Russia is all bad or all good. I think open borders is a huge
achievement. People have a chance to see the reality with their own eyes: wherever you go in
Europe or Asia now, you meet lots of people from Russia, which means that they have the money
to travel and an interest in other cultures, as you meet them in museums and at historical
sites all over Europe.
I do resent what current authorities did to the education system: they
degraded it, ostensibly in an attempt to reform and make it more Western-like. I think these
"reforms" were extremely ill-conceived, the school is becoming much worse (in fact,
American-like, although it must be degraded a lot more to sink all the way down to the US
level).
I resent than instead of improving Russian Academy of Sciences (it was pretty bad in
the USSR) they essentially emasculated it. If you go by publications, there is less decent
research in Russia now than there was in the USSR.
Huge inequality is another negative,
especially considering that most oligarchs got rich by looting state property, and now
continue to enrich themselves the same way (heads of most Russian corporations, state-owned
and private, are nothing but thieves). That made Russia more US-like, but I consider that
regress rather than progress.
On the other hand, I consider it a huge achievement that in
international affairs Russia today is pursuing its own interests, rather than engaging in a
thankless task of saving the world. I subscribe to the Protestant dictum that "God helps
those who help themselves", so whoever is worth saving will save themselves, and the rest be
damned.
Percentages of ethnic groups to be destroyed and/or deported to Siberia by Nazi Germany from future settlement areas.[15][16][3]
Ethnic group/Nationality Population percent subject to removal
Russians[17][16] 50–60% to be physically eliminated and another
15% to be sent to Western Siberia
Estonians[3][18] almost 50%
Latvians[3]
50%
Czechs[16]
50%
Ukrainians[16] 65%
Belarusians[16] 75%
Poles[16]
20 million, or 80–85%
Lithuanians[3] 85%
Latgalians[3] 100%
"... "We are going to do the worst thing we can do to you. We are going to take your enemy way from you." ..."
"... "There's no way I would ever agree to give [Russia] that legitimacy," ..."
"... "The Soviet Union may have fallen, but the evil it represents is alive and well in Putin's Russia." ..."
"... "He is no friend of the United States," ..."
"... "He's dismembering democracies everywhere and trying to do so in our own backyard." ..."
"... In order to put to rest this tortured Soviet ghost, it needs to be reminded that the business of "dismembering democracies" ..."
"... "move to re-Sovietize the region." ..."
"... "In respect of Karl Marx, I think he must be turning in his grave to see what the country that was founded on many of his precepts is doing in the name of supporting Syria by condoning the use of chemical weapons on Syrian territory." ..."
"... "recapturing the Soviet position on the world stage." ..."
"... "America's Putin apologist" ..."
"... "The intelligence committees have never produced any evidence," ..."
"... "They never even did a forensic exam of the DNC computers." ..."
"... "genetically driven to co-opt." ..."
"... "The parting with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will be long and difficult," ..."
"... "We must acknowledge that many will not believe or agree with the death warrant written in Minsk and confirmed in Alma-Ata." ..."
"... Like this story? Share it with a friend! ..."
Listening to Western media and politicians these days, you would never guess that nearly
three decades ago the Soviet hammer and sickle lowered for the last time over the Kremlin,
replaced by the Russian tricolor. Ironically, the collapse of the Soviet Union - an empire made
up of 15 republics encompassing some 12 million
square miles - has been far more difficult for the West to come to grips with than it has
been for the Russian people, who witnessed the decline and fall firsthand. Indeed, many
Westerners are ardent believers that the Soviet Union is still alive and kicking.
This apparent paradox was foreseen many years ago by the Soviet political scientist, Georgi
Arbatov, when he told a
US diplomat shortly after the collapse: "We are going to do the worst thing we can do to
you. We are going to take your enemy way from you."
Thirty years later the West still revisits the grave of its former Soviet nemesis, yearning
for its rise from the ashes. Just this week, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham conjured up the
spirit of America's ex arch-enemy when responding to Donald Trump's suggestion that Russia be
readmitted into the G7.
"There's no way I would ever agree to give [Russia] that legitimacy," Graham
said
. "The Soviet Union may have fallen, but the evil it represents is alive and well in
Putin's Russia."
"He is no friend of the United States," he continued. "He's dismembering
democracies everywhere and trying to do so in our own backyard."
In order to put to
rest this tortured Soviet ghost, it needs to be reminded that the business of "dismembering
democracies" has been solely the purview of the US and its NATO allies. At a time when the
world lacked a countervailing force to check Western military aggression – which the
Soviet Union duly provided – the West eagerly pursued a regime-change agenda
that not only destroyed viable governments, like Iraq and Libya, but set in motion a migrant
crisis that the European Union is
at pains to control today. Read more Russia should be
back in G7 as 'we spend 25% of time' talking about it anyway – Trump
For its part, Russia has resorted to military action against a foreign country on just one
occasion. In August 2008, in response to a deadly attack on Russian peacekeepers in South
Ossetia, Russian forces entered Georgian territory. Even the EU
concluded that the government of ex Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvili, was to blame
for sparking the five-day conflict.
So, what is the reason for Graham's gross distortion of the historical record? And why the
apparent need to conflate modern, democratic Russia with the vanquished Soviet Union? For the
answer, it is always helpful to follow the money trail, and unsurprisingly it leads straight to
the door of America's largest defense contractors.
It is no secret that Lindsey Graham – perhaps second only to John McCain - is one of
the most notorious war hawks in Washington. During his failed run for the 2016 presidential
elections, the Super PAC supporting his bid collected $2.9 million, the bulk of which came from the
coffers of defense contractors.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, another darling of the military industrial complex, who
raked in just under $500 million from the defense industry for her presidential bid, was
portraying Russia as some sort of Soviet-style menace as early as 2012.
Discussing Vladimir Putin's efforts to promote greater economic integration in Eurasia,
Clinton
depicted the venture as a "move to re-Sovietize the region." Unfortunately, no one
challenged the Democrat to explain how one of the largest capitalistic ventures in the world
could be confused with communism.
Clearly, Western leaders are intentionally dragging up memories of the bygone Cold War-era
in order to incite an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty - the ultimate stimulant for military
spending, corporate profit-taking and, last but not least, NATO sprawl up to Russia's border.
For defense sector lobbyists, the rhetoric is music to the ears.
The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but
very few outlets have covered it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative of
Tump and the election. https://t.co/2dL8Kh0hof
The threat of peace
does not boost the bottom line of the defense contractors, who represent some of the most
influential people in Washington, while the politicians who are most hawkish on foreign policy
are richly rewarded. In short, it is a marriage made in hell, with a 'honeymoon' somewhere in
the Middle East. Russia, due to its stunning resurgence, which was put on full display in Syria
as it foiled another Western scheme for regime change, has also appeared on the radar.
Thus, we see Western politicians and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic attempting to
make a strained connection between Russia and the Soviet Union, and even more now with
'Russiagate' and the Skripal saga in full hysteria mode. This is clearly being done in an
effort to isolate Russia on the global stage.
Britain's Ambassador to the United Nations Karen Pierce, for example, in a heated debate
with her Russian counterpart, Vassily Nebenzia, lectured Russia for its 'regrettable behavior'
in Syria, saying : "In respect of
Karl Marx, I think he must be turning in his grave to see what the country that was founded on
many of his precepts is doing in the name of supporting Syria by condoning the use of chemical
weapons on Syrian territory."
One wonders how such a high-ranking official could possibly understand what is happening in
Syria today when the collapse of the Soviet Union seems to have escaped her attention.
Meanwhile, perennial Russophobes, which make up the overwhelming majority of fellowship
positions among US think tanks, regularly argue that Russia is somehow 'nostalgic for empire,'
and determined to 'restore the glory of the Soviet times.'
Anne Applebaum, a member of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, gave a distorted version of reality on
Ukrainian television, arguing that Vladimir Putin is interested in "recapturing the Soviet
position on the world stage." There is just one problem with that position: Not a single
thing the Russian leader has done or not done to date would reasonably support that thesis. But
good luck finding an academic to challenge such misguided notions.
Whenever the tiny cadre of Western academics strays from the reservation and argues from the
Russian perspective, they are exiled to academia's version of the Gulag Archipelago seldom to
be heard from again. Stephen Cohen, emeritus at Princeton University and NYU, is referred
to as "America's Putin apologist" among his peers for daring to suggest there might
just be an alternative reality to the mainstream media madness we are being fed about 'Putin's
Russia' on a daily basis.
Speaking on the subject of 'Russiagate,' Cohen acknowledged what so few academics have the
intellectual courage to say: there is no evidence whatsoever to show that Putin ordered the
hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. "The intelligence committees have
never produced any evidence," Cohen said
. "They never even did a forensic exam of the DNC computers."
Obviously, this sort of 'crazy talk' is not well received in US policy circles, and if it
were not for Cohen's serious credentials as a leading expert on Russia he would be simply
'exiled' from the mainstream discourse. That is because the US has entered a dark,
unrecognizable place where top officials, like James Clapper, the former Director of National
Intelligence, can actually describe the Russian people
in racist overtones, saying they are "genetically driven to co-opt."
The reality is that the West is acquiring a dangerous totalitarian mindset (genetically
driven?) in that it has become – similar perhaps to the Soviet times - nearly impossible
to question anything that the mainstream media, think tanks and academia disseminates.
"The parting with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will be long and
difficult," Izvestia
warned with uncanny foresight. "We must acknowledge that many will not believe or agree
with the death warrant written in Minsk and confirmed in Alma-Ata."
Indeed, nostalgia for the Soviet times – complete with a new cold war and lucrative
arms race - is so rampant in the West that its roots are beginning to crack through the
surface. Such a repressive climate chokes off all any discussion that presents a challenge to
the official narrative which proclaims, as absolute fact, that 'Russia is aspiring for
Soviet-style empire,' a groundless assertion that is every bit as ridiculous as it is
dangerous.
If the current trend towards the homogenization of thought continues - like a chapter torn
from Orwell's 1984 - Westerners will awake one sunny morning to a shiny new totalitarian state
of their own design and making, complete with jackboots on the streets, under an awning falsely
proclaiming 'democracy'.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. Former Editor-in-Chief of The Moscow
News, he is author of the book, 'Midnight in the American Empire,' released in 2013.
Democrats can lament all they want, but they did have a very good candidate that they allowed to be thrown under the bus. That
was Bernie Sanders. Despite his "socialist" leanings, (for you conservatives), he was really fresh blood to the Democratic party.
And even though Jimmy Carter is old, he has a very good working mind, better than all that are currently in the Democratic party.
Clinton turned the Democratic party into a Mafia organization, taking orders from her, paving the way for her, knocking
off anyone that looked like potential trouble, like Seth Rich, John Ashe, Joe Montano, Victor Thorn, and Shawn Lucas. All five
of these guys died within 6 weeks of each other. Strange? Not if you are operating an old style mafia organization. Democrats
need to resign the party, and form something new, that has fresh ideas, and people who are not there for self-coronations. The
most honest democrat you have left is Jimmy Carter. Democrats are not honest today.
They need to purge the leadership of the DNC - Perez, Clinton and the gang, they are the ones that shoved Hillary Clinton down
Democrats throats instead letting Bernie Sanders, the real nominee, win the nomination. The DNC fucked over themselves, no one
else is to blame.
Howard Dean is the one that got Obama elected the first time. From 2005 to 2009, he headed the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) and successfully implemented the 50 State Strategy, which aimed for Democrats to be competitive in places considered Republican-dominated
territory. As a result, during the midterms in 2006, Democrats won the House back and gained seats in the Senate. In 2008 Barack
Obama also used the same strategy to win his presidential bid.
Just like the DNC and Democratic bourgeoise fucked over Bernie, they fucked over Howard Dean. Obama didn't select Howard Dean
for his cabinet for Secretary of Health and Human Services - even though he was a successful governor, is a medical doctor, and
was one of the main reasons Obama won in 2008.
Obama has always been about himself. I mean who publishes a memoir about yourself when you're just a nobody? Even Obama knows
a loser when he sees one...the Democratic Party. He did more for the Republican Party than any Republican could ever do. One of
the Greatest Presidents in my lifetime for the conservative movement.
The Dems are caught between a rock and a hard place. The result of losing 1000s of seats nationwide since 2010 means you've
got no farm system to develop politicians/leaders. It's no different than any sports franchise. The successful ones have a deep
bench and prospects to knock off old, overpaid, underachieving veterans. If the Dems trot out Obama, he will be a death sentence
for the Dems' chances in November. Guy is hated by almost everyone. Don't believe the approval ratings from CNN. He got more popular
towards the end when people realized he was finally leaving.
Obama and the Clinton's have DESTROYED the Democrat party!!! Leaders of the current Democratic party apparatchik, Schumer,
Pelosi, Schiff, et al , are fucking idiots!!! I see a Red tsunami wave for the mid-term election!
An interesting point about refugees and emigration of Ukrainians to Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... Donbass is a civil conflict involving some Russian support for the rebels, who're overwhelmingly from the territory of the former Ukrainian SSR. These individuals have a realistic basis to oppose the Kiev based regimes that came after the overthrow of a democratically elected Ukrainian president. ..."
"... During the American Revolution, most of the pro-British fighters were said to be colonists already based in America. Furthermore, the American revolutionaries received significant support from France. With these factors in mind, the Donbass rebels don't seem less legit than the American revolutionaries. ..."
"... Some Kiev regime elements positively reference the 1995 Croat ethnic cleansing of Krajina Serbs (known as Operation Storm) as a solution for ending the rebel position in Donbass. Russia doesn't seek a massive refugee problem in Donbass and some other parts of the former Ukrainian SSR. As is, a sizeable number of Ukrainian residents have fled to Russia. ..."
"... Putin isn't anti-US in the manner claimed by Peters. Moreover, Peters is clearly more anti-Russian (in a narrow minded way at that) than what can be reasonably said of how Putin views the US. Putin's obvious differences with neocons, neolibs and flat out Russia haters isn't by default anti-US. He was the first foreign leader to console the US following 9/11. The Russian president has been consistently on record for favoring better US-Russian ties (even inquiring about Russia joining NATO at one point), thereby explaining why he has appeared to have preferred Trump over Clinton. ..."
"... the Russians (by and large) prefer predictability. As a general rule this is otherwise true. However, Clinton's neocon/neolib stated views on Russia have been to the point where many Russians felt willing to take a chance with Trump, whose campaign included a comparatively more sympathetic take of their country. At the same time, a good number of Russians questioned whether Trump would maintain that stance. ..."
Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, received well deserved praise for taking to
task the permeating anti-Russian biases. The highlight of Carlson's exchanges was his
encounter with Ralph Peters, who for years has spouted grossly inaccurate propaganda
against Russia. Antiwar.com and Russia Insider, are among the counter-establishment English
language venues commenting on the Carlson-Peters discussion. The US foreign policy
establishment realist leaning National Interest carried a lengthy piece on Carlson's
challenge to the neocon/neolib foreign policy perceptions. For the record, more can and
should be said in reply to Peter's comments.
Peters falsely claims that Russia hasn't made a concerted effort in confronting ISIS. In
one of his more accurate moments, CNN's Wolf Blitzer said that the ISIS claimed shoot down
of a Russian civilian airliner over Egypt, was in response to Russia's war against ISIS.
You've to be either a liar or clueless to not recognize why Russia has actively opposed
ISIS. The latter sees Russia as an enemy, while having a good number of individuals with
roots in Russia and some other parts of the former USSR.
Peters' characterization of Russia targeting civilian areas is disingenuous. Over the
years, the matter of collateral damage is something periodically brought up in response to
those killed by US and Israeli military actions.
Peters offers no proof to his suspect claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin kills
journalists. There're numerous anti-Putin advocates alive and well in Russia. That country
does have a violence problem. Recall what the US was like in the 1960s thru early
1970′s. For that matter, Bernie Sanders isn't blamed for the pro-Sanders person who
attempted to kill Republican lawmakers.
Given the situations concerning Kosovo and northern Cyprus, Peters is being a flat out
hypocrite regarding Crimea. Donbass is a civil conflict involving some Russian support for
the rebels, who're overwhelmingly from the territory of the former Ukrainian SSR. These
individuals have a realistic basis to oppose the Kiev based regimes that came after the
overthrow of a democratically elected Ukrainian president.
During the American Revolution, most of the pro-British fighters were said to be
colonists already based in America. Furthermore, the American revolutionaries received
significant support from France. With these factors in mind, the Donbass rebels don't seem
less legit than the American revolutionaries.
Some Kiev regime elements positively reference the 1995 Croat ethnic cleansing of
Krajina Serbs (known as Operation Storm) as a solution for ending the rebel position in
Donbass. Russia doesn't seek a massive refugee problem in Donbass and some other parts of
the former Ukrainian SSR. As is, a sizeable number of Ukrainian residents have fled to
Russia.
Putin isn't anti-US in the manner claimed by Peters. Moreover, Peters is clearly more
anti-Russian (in a narrow minded way at that) than what can be reasonably said of how Putin
views the US. Putin's obvious differences with neocons, neolibs and flat out Russia haters
isn't by default anti-US. He was the first foreign leader to console the US following 9/11.
The Russian president has been consistently on record for favoring better US-Russian ties
(even inquiring about Russia joining NATO at one point), thereby explaining why he has
appeared to have preferred Trump over Clinton.
Some (including Trump) disagree with that view, which includes the notion that the
Russians (by and large) prefer predictability. As a general rule this is otherwise true.
However, Clinton's neocon/neolib stated views on Russia have been to the point where many
Russians felt willing to take a chance with Trump, whose campaign included a comparatively
more sympathetic take of their country. At the same time, a good number of Russians
questioned whether Trump would maintain that stance.
I suppose many of us saw the Tucker with Max Boot. Boot seemed unhinged, really
emotionally overwrought by Tucker raising commonsensical challenges to his neocon orthodoxy.
Sad, angry man.
The "collective West" clearly pursued its own goals in Ukraine, and the last thing they were concerned was well being of
Ukraine people. Russia also viewed Ukraine mainly from the position of its own interests, although being isolated they provided
somewhat better terms for economic cooperation, just to counter influence of the EU and the USA.
The USA wanted the Ukraine to became yet another Baltic republic as a part of its geopolitical efforts of encircling Russia
and, if possible, installing another Yeltsin-style comprador government. EU wanted a market for its good and to exclude
Russia from using Ukrainian resources as well as the leverage to get better prices for Russian natural resources.
So the Ukrainian people got on the receiving end of those efforts and paid a huge price. Was it unavoidable or not is
difficult to say. May be less bloodshed was possible but economic decimation of Ukraine and conversion it into a debt slave was in
the cards, and probably was not avoidable. It just occurred faster and the drop of the standard of living went deeper that
in other circumstance.
For all his corruption and thugishness Yanukovich tried to play Russia against the West and get some concession from both. Now
such a policy is impossible as the country de-facto lost independence as happens with any debt-slave.
So the conflict in Donbass became important for Poroshenko government as the mean of uniting people, who became disillusioned
in the results of EuroMaydan and pointing to Russia as a scapegoat for all their difficulties. In a way Poroshenko now needs
Donbass conflict to survive politically.
While there is some "hysteria" when it comes to Russia, there is also much truth out there,
some of which the author is willing to write off as little more than conspiracy theories.
It is passing strange that those who have strongly criticized Putin have ended up dead.
Anytime one appears to be a serious threat to Putin's position they end up dead. It is
possible that Putin isn't responsible, but given the numbers and the circumstances, it is
likely he knows what is going on.
While Putin was never head of the KGB, much of what he has been up to was learned form
iron Felix's organization. To say Putin is a KGB thug is far from being out of line.
What he has done in Ukraine should make the man, and the country he heads, a pariah.
Eastern Europe is right to be concerned. The fact that Putin has stated, rather pointedly,
that the extent of the USSR is Russia makes the accusation of him being a Soviet revanchist
appropriate as well.
Much of what the author seeks to write off as hysteria, isn't. That "hysteria" is a proper
concern for what Putin is up to, and what he intends. Fortunately, Russia is too impoverished
to all Putin to realize his neo-Tsarist empire. And in pursuing his self-aggrandizing path,
he impoverishes his people even more.
It is passing strange that those who have strongly criticized Putin have ended up
dead.
The logic of this is fascinating in its perversity. Lot's of people who don't criticize
Putin at all or downright admire him die including under unclear circumstances – the
West just doesn't notice. For example, several Russian diplomat have died suddenly and
prematurely in various countries – out UN representative Churkin would be the prime
example. Can you imaging how many wonderful conspiracy theories we could have concocted
should we be so inclined?
It's the same exact "logic" ridiculed in "conclusions" like this: "Everyone who eats
cucumbers dies". And those who don't live forever?
What he has done in Ukraine should make the man, and the country he heads, a pariah.
He, meaning Putin, hasn't done anything in Ukraine – the West did. The West
organized and supported a coup bringing to the power a super-corrupt illegitimate
"government" that relies on armed neo-Nazi groups for the control of the county. Now Ukraine
is a failed state with the dominant neo-Nazi ideology, nonexistent economy, impoverished and
fleeing population and repressive political system, not to mention a civil war. All Putin did
was to resist this development as much as possible, and I do not believe he should be blamed
for that.
"Neo-Tsarist empire." Ha, that's rich. Congrats, you've managed to outdo even the most
unhinged anti-Putin elements of the l'chaimstream media.
"impoverishes his people even more." You mean be improving their lives as measured by
virtually every metric since kicking out the (((Russian))) banksters and their (((American)))
advisers who were robbing the place blind? Dude, you're delusional. Go peddle your nonsense
elsewhere.
"... More fundamentally, the quarter-century of invasions and occupations that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union is rapidly developing into a conflict between major nuclear-armed powers. The effort of the American ruling class to offset its economic decline using military force is leading mankind to the brink of another world war. As the National Defense Strategy, published less than a month before the release of the indictments, declared, "Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security." ..."
"... The Mueller indictment is intended to provide an appropriate "narrative" for military aggression motivated by different aims. At the same time, it serves as a ready-made pretext for censorship and domestic repression that goes far beyond the extraordinary measures adopted under the framework of the "war on terror." Russia, the American people are supposed to believe, uses domestic social opposition to weaken the United States, rendering political dissent effectively treasonous. ..."
"... Already, this campaign has led the major US technology firms to implement far-reaching measures to censor political speech on the Internet. Google is manipulating its search results and Facebook is manipulating its news feeds, while seeking to turn the social media platform it has developed into an instrument of corporate-state surveillance. ..."
"... Now, the Democrats, along with their appendages among the organizations of the upper-middle class, are at the forefront of the campaign for war, employing neo-McCarthyite tactics to criminalize opposition while seeking to subordinate all popular opposition to the Trump administration to its right-wing and militarist agenda. ..."
Fifteen years ago, on February 5, 2003, against the backdrop of worldwide mass
demonstrations in opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq, then-US Secretary of State
Colin Powell argued before the United Nations that the government of Saddam Hussein was rapidly
stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction," which Iraq, together with Al Qaeda, was planning to
use against the United States.
In what was the climax of the Bush administration's campaign to justify war, Powell held up
a model vial of anthrax, showed aerial photographs and presented detailed slides purporting to
show the layout of Iraq's "mobile production facilities."
There was only one problem with
Powell's presentation: it was a lie from beginning to end.
The World Socialist Web Site , in an editorial board statement published the next day,
declared the brief for war "the latest act in a diplomatic charade laced with cynicism and
deceit." War against Iraq, the WSWS wrote, was not about "weapons of mass destruction." Rather,
"it is a war of colonial conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that
center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global hegemony."
The response of the American media, and particularly its liberal wing, was very different.
Powell's litany of lies was presented as the gospel truth, an unanswerable indictment of the
Iraqi government.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who rushed off a column before he could
have examined Powell's allegations, declared, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations
-- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove
to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a
doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude
otherwise."
The editorial board of the New York Times -- whose reporter Judith Miller was at
the center of the Bush administration's campaign of lies -- declared one week later that there
"is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has the
capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and more
recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors."
Subsequent developments would prove who was lying. The Bush administration and its media
accomplices conspired to drag the US into a war that led to the deaths of more than one million
people -- a colossal crime for which no one has yet been held accountable.
Fifteen years later, the script has been pulled from the closet and dusted off. This time,
instead of "weapons of mass destruction," it is "Russian meddling in the US elections." Once
again, assertions by US intelligence agencies and operatives are treated as fact. Once again,
the media is braying for war. Once again, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the American government
-- which intervenes in the domestic politics of every state on the planet and has been
relentlessly expanding its operations in Eastern Europe -- are ignored.
The argument presented by the American media is that the alleged existence of a fly-by-night
operation, employing a few hundred people, with a budget amounting to a minuscule fraction of
total election spending in the US, constitutes a "a virtual war against the United States
through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda" ( New York Times ).
In the countless articles and media commentary along this vein, nowhere can one find a
serious analysis of the Mueller indictment of the Russians itself, let alone an examination of
the real motivations behind the US campaign against Russia. The fact that the indictment does
not even involve the Russian government or state officials is treated as a nonissue.
While the present campaign over Russian "meddling" has much in common with the claims about
"weapons of mass destruction," the implications are far more ominous. The "war on terror" is
exhausted, in part because the US is allied in Syria and elsewhere with the Islamic
fundamentalist organizations it was purportedly fighting.
More fundamentally, the quarter-century of invasions and occupations that followed the
dissolution of the Soviet Union is rapidly developing into a conflict between major
nuclear-armed powers. The effort of the American ruling class to offset its economic decline
using military force is leading mankind to the brink of another world war. As the National
Defense Strategy, published less than a month before the release of the indictments, declared,
"Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national
security."
Russia is seen by dominant sections of the military-intelligence apparatus as a principal
obstacle to US efforts to control the Middle East and to take on China -- and it is this that
has been at the center of the conflict between the Democratic Party and the Trump
administration.
There have already been a series of clashes in recent weeks between the world's two largest
nuclear-armed powers. On February 3, a Russian close-air support fighter was shot down by
al-Nusra Front fighters, which are indirectly allied with the United States in its proxy war
against the government of Bashar Al-Assad. Then, on February 7 and 8, Russian soldiers were
killed in US air and artillery barrages in Deir Ezzor, in what survivors called a "massacre."
Both the US and Russian governments have sought to downplay the scale of the clash, but some
sources have reported the number killed to be in the hundreds.
Even as US and Russian forces clashed in Syria, representatives of the Kremlin and the
Pentagon sparred at the Munich security conference this weekend over the deployment and
development of nuclear weapons. While accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Washington this month issued a nuclear posture review envisioning
a massive expansion of the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons.
The Mueller indictment is intended to provide an appropriate "narrative" for military
aggression motivated by different aims. At the same time, it serves as a ready-made pretext for
censorship and domestic repression that goes far beyond the extraordinary measures adopted
under the framework of the "war on terror." Russia, the American people are supposed to
believe, uses domestic social opposition to weaken the United States, rendering political
dissent effectively treasonous.
Already, this campaign has led the major US technology firms to implement far-reaching
measures to censor political speech on the Internet. Google is manipulating its search results
and Facebook is manipulating its news feeds, while seeking to turn the social media platform it
has developed into an instrument of corporate-state surveillance.
Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic
principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it. The
target of the repressive measures is not Russia, but the American working class. The ruling
elite is well aware that as it plots war abroad, it stands upon a social powder keg at
home.
The working class must draw the necessary conclusions from its past experiences. In 2003,
the Democratic Party supported the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq and provided it with
the necessary political cover. Now, the Democrats, along with their appendages among the
organizations of the upper-middle class, are at the forefront of the campaign for war,
employing neo-McCarthyite tactics to criminalize opposition while seeking to subordinate all
popular opposition to the Trump administration to its right-wing and militarist
agenda.
Pathological Russophobia of neocons is explanation by two factors: (1) they are lobbyists for
MIC and this is the way MIC wants the US foreign policy to be execute; (2) this is the way of
earning money for people, many of whom are good no nothing else.
Notable quotes:
"... Beyond the ideological foundations for their hatred of nationalist Russia are economic considerations and the issue of who controls and manages the Russian economy: Wall Street and Bruxelles, or ..."
"... From the beginning of his tenure Putin has offered to cooperate with the United States in the fight against international Islamic terror, but each time it was the United States -- us -- who refused, including famously Paul Wolfowitz during the George W. Bush administration who replied to one such offer: "We don't need your assistance or intel." ..."
Almost one year ago the United States Congress (with only a handful of "nay" votes)
adopted
new and severe sanctions against Russia for its supposed attempt to influence and interfere
in the 2016 national elections. Included in that legislation was a provision -- specifically
placed there by Russophobe Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) -- that President Trump cannot alter
or lift any of the sanctions without future Congressional approbation.
The government of Vladimir Putin, in response to this provocation, announced that the
American diplomatic presence in Russia would be reduced by 755 persons, a drastic move by any
standards. But we cannot say it was unexpected -- or undeserved.
That sanctions vote was fascinating as it illustrated during the first year of the
contentious Trump presidency a rare point of political unity between the socialist
Left, the Democrats and the mainstream media -- formerly noted for their "soft" and favorable
attitude to the old and unloved Soviet Communist Russian regime -- and the conservative/GOP
mainstream, dominated by the Neoconservatives. Of course, perspectives and approaches to the
question differ, whether it was the Trump campaign that was colluding with Moscow, or if it was
Hillary and the Clinton Foundation that had collaborated in some way, but their target remained
the same: that man in the Kremlin and the country he governs.
One thing was clear: the result of the 2016 presidential election had the most unheard of
and remarkable result in recent American political history: a de facto alliance of
these supposedly antipodal political forces. And what we have witnessed is a phalanx of the
pseudo-Right Neocons and the formerly pro-Soviet Left linked together, competing to see who
could be more "anti" and who could come up with the more far-fetched Russia conspiracy
theories, and -- as with the 2017 sanctions -- the latest unwarranted, over the top
legislation.
Consider the recent -- but largely unreported -- formation of an umbrella group, the Renew
Democracy Initiative (RDI), with the goal of "uni[ting] the center-left and the center-right."
Its leaders include former John McCain foreign policy advisor Max Boot, The Washington
Post 's Anne Appelbaum, Never Trumper Bill Kristol, former chess wizard Gary Kasparov, and
Richard Hurwitz of Council on Foreign Relations. [See " Neocons &
Russiagaters Unite! ," April 27, 2018] RDI's manifesto calls for "fresh thinking" and urges
"the best minds from different countries to come together for both broad and discrete projects
in the service of liberty and democracy in the West and beyond . Liberal democracy is in crisis
around the world, besieged by authoritarianism, nationalism, and other illiberal forces.
Far-right parties are gaining traction in Europe, Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on Russia
and undermines democracy abroad, and America struggles with poisonous threats from the right
and left."
Or, recall those on-camera Fox News Russia experts -- think here of General Jack Keane or
the unhinged Colonel Ralph Peters who literally foamed at the mouth when talking about Putin,
calling him "the new Hitler," and who asserted that Putin had committed "worse crimes" than the
German dictator. (Peters is so anti-Russian that he finally
left the Fox News network in March 2018 )
When Tucker Carlson on his prime time program last July 11, 2017, demanded that Peters
provide facts and figures for his accusations, Peters
immediately exploded and implied that program host Carlson was a "Hitler apologist." It was
a classic argument and instance of reductio ad Hitlerum .
Of course, such examples aren't rare in the establishment "conservative movement" media.
Pick up any issue of National Review or The Weekly Standard or listen to the
Glenn Beck radio program and you can find the same hysteria, largely laced with faked quotes or
disinformation (e.g., "Putin wants to re-establish the Soviet Union" or "Putin was
head of the KGB" or "Putin has had his enemies assassinated," and so on, ad
nauseum ).
Indeed, another ploy by Neocon pundits (and Congress) has been to parade Bill Browder, the
grandson of American Communist Party boss Earl Browder, as a star witness to President Putin's
nefarious dealings. Of course, it should be noted that Browder fils lost big time
financially in his manipulations in Russia, as investigative journalists Philip
Giraldi and Robert
Parry have documented, and he is engaged in a vicious personal vendetta against Vladimir
Putin.
For the Neoconservative leaders of what passes for "conservatism" these days, it is as if
nothing has changed since 1991, since the ignominious fall of Communism. It's even
arguable that their hostility to Moscow has increased since then.
Let me suggest several reasons for this: First, many of the more prominent Neoconservatives
descend from Russian Jews from the Pale of Settlement, whose memories go back to the
pre-Communist days of persecution and pogroms under the Tsars. They originally welcomed Lenin
and the Communist regime as liberators and formed some of its staunchest supporters and
apparatchiks in the regime of terror that followed (especially in the Cheka and KGB) until
Josef Stalin unleashed a wave of anti-semitism after World War II. [See the partially
translated excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years Together at: https://200yearstogether.wordpress.com , and the
commentary
]
Putin, despite his strong support from native Russian Jews and from the Moscow Rabbinate, is
a Russian nationalist and fervent supporter of the traditionalist Russian Orthodox Church, and
those two factors bring up painful memories of the "bad old days" of discrimination and Jewish
persecution for the Neocons.
A prime example of this comes in a recent volume authored by prominent Neocon journalist and
homosexual activist (yes, the two traits often seem to go together), James Kirchick: The
End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, 2017). In his jumble of
Neocon ideology and prejudice, Kirchick evaluates what for him seems to be happening ominously
in Europe. He is deeply fearful of the efforts to "close borders" against Muslim immigrants
from the Middle East. He blasts Marine Le Pen as a racist -- and most likely a subtle
"holocaust denier!" -- and attacks the attempts in places like Hungary and Poland to reassert
national traditions and Christian identity;
for him these are nothing less than attempts to bring back "fascism."
Russia comes in for perhaps his harshest criticism, and the reason is unmistakable: Russia
seems to be returning to its older national and pre-Communist heritage, to its age-old Orthodox
Christian faith. Russians are returning by the millions to the church and the "old-time"
religion. For Kirchick this can only mean one thing: the triumph of bigotry, anti-semitism, and
"extreme right wing" ideology, and the failure of what he terms "liberal democracy and
equality" (including, he would no doubt include, feminism, same sex marriage, across-the-board
equality, and all those other "conservative values"!).
Kirchick's critique, shared by many of the leaders of the national Republican Party and
dominating the pages of most establishment "conservative" publications and talk radio these
days, joins him arm-in-arm with globalist George Soros in efforts to undermine the Russian
state and its president all in the name of "democracy" and "equality." [See, " George Soros Aghast
as Collapsing EU, while Russia Resurgent, " January 19, 2018]
But, just what kind of "democracy" and what kind of "equality" do Kirchick and Soros
defend?
Beyond the ideological foundations for their hatred of nationalist Russia are economic
considerations and the issue of who controls and manages the Russian economy: Wall Street and
Bruxelles, or Russia, itself. Unlike the weak and pliant Boris Yeltsin, Putin the
nationalist ended the strangle-hold of Russian industry, in particular control of Russia's
important energy sector, by those few international businessmen, the oligarchs (many of them
Jewish), most of whom fled the country. That could not stand! How dare Russia -- and its
president -- oppose the economic diktats of Bruxelles and Wall Street!
Lastly, we should add one more reason for hostility, and that is Russia's remaining
international presence, in particular, in Syria. It is very simple: you don't go from being one
of the world's two "superpowers" to all of a sudden a second-rate, economically-handicapped
"has been" without some remorse. As a patriot and nationalist President Putin has,
understandably, attempted to reassert Russian prosperity and power -- certainly, not as much or
in the same manner as the old Communist leaders. But, from his reasonable point of view, the
largest country in the world does have interests, and not just in what goes on in neighboring
nations where millions of Russians (formerly within Russia) reside, but also with long-time
allies such as Syria.
Is not this same criterion true for the United States and its dealings with its neighbors
and allies?
More, for the past twenty-five years Russia has experienced the poisoned tip of Islamic
terrorism, domestically, including the brutal war in Tchechnya in the Caucasus region and the
horrid bombings in the heart of the country, Moscow. From the beginning of his tenure Putin
has offered to cooperate with the United States in the fight against international Islamic
terror, but each time it was the United States -- us -- who refused, including famously Paul
Wolfowitz during the George W. Bush administration who replied to one such offer: "We don't
need your assistance or intel."
And thus, the revealing files on the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston bombing) were not received.
But, as Neocon Charles Krauthammer once declared: "We live in a unipolar world today, and there
is only ONE superpower, and that is the United States." That attitude was not received with
equanimity by post-Communist Russia, a Russia that has discovered its heritage and its
traditions and has asked for partnership with the United States, and not the hysteria we have
witnessed in the United States sweeping aside all rationality.
Ralph Peters is one of the nuttiest neocons around, and Fox was smart to dump him. I recall
an article long ago where he suggested that the US Govt. should address the drug addition
problem in the USA by assassinating drug dealers on the streets in the USA.
He lives off scraps from neocons by selling his soul for BS talking points and collects a
monthly check from Uncle Sam after 20 years of sitting at a desk doing BS intel work, as I
once did for a year. It seems he missed his chance at killing commies in Nam by touring
Europe, as Fred Reed explained:
Nothing new in the above article. That such people are elevated to the stature of cushy
mainstream propping and ridicule by some non-mainstream others is a tell all sign on what's
wrong with the coverage.
Regarding this excerpt:
A prime example of this comes in a recent volume authored by prominent Neocon journalist
and homosexual activist (yes, the two traits often seem to go together), James Kirchick:
The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, 2017). In his jumble of
Neocon ideology and prejudice, Kirchick evaluates what for him seems to be happening
ominously in Europe. He is deeply fearful of the efforts to "close borders" against Muslim
immigrants from the Middle East. He blasts Marine Le Pen as a racist -- and most likely a
subtle "holocaust denier!" -- and attacks the attempts in places like Hungary and Poland to
reassert national traditions and Christian identity; for him these are nothing less than
attempts to bring back "fascism."
Russia comes in for perhaps his harshest criticism, and the reason is unmistakable:
Russia seems to be returning to its older national and pre-Communist heritage, to its
age-old Orthodox Christian faith. Russians are returning by the millions to the church and
the "old-time" religion. For Kirchick this can only mean one thing: the triumph of bigotry,
anti-semitism, and "extreme right wing" ideology, and the failure of what he terms "liberal
democracy and equality" (including, he would no doubt include, feminism, same sex marriage,
across-the-board equality, and all those other "conservative values"!).
Kirchick's critique, shared by many of the leaders of the national Republican Party and
dominating the pages of most establishment "conservative" publications and talk radio these
days, joins him arm-in-arm with globalist George Soros in efforts to undermine the Russian
state and its president all in the name of "democracy" and "equality." [See, "George Soros
Aghast as Collapsing EU, while Russia Resurgent," January 19, 2018]
But, just what kind of "democracy" and what kind of "equality" do Kirchick and Soros
defend?
The rant of a coddled establishment chickenhawk, who is quite overrated, relative to the
positions accorded to him (Nasty people don't deserve kindness.)
A suggestive dose of McCarthyism that simplistically references the Cold War period with
present day realities, which include a subjectively inaccurate overview of what has
transpired in Syria and Crimea. Put mildly, James Kirchick is quite ironic in his use of
"lazy".
To me it is all quite simple.
FDR's aim was to rule the war with junior aides USSR, China and a smaller Britain.
Stalin had other ideas.
Even in 1946 FDR's main backer, Baruch pleaded for a world government, a USA government, in
my view.
Deep State still tries to impose this world government.
Despite Trump 'America first' we see a Bolton in the White House, as many see 'the neocons
are back'.
Cannot see much difference between neocons and Deep State.
The big mistake of the British empire was unwillingless to realise that it could no longer
maintain the empire.
This already began before 1914, when the two fleet standars became too expensive, the one
fleet standard expressed the inability to maintain the empire.
Obama was forcedto reduce the two war standard to one and half.
What a half war accomplishes we see in Syria.
Alas, seldom in history did reason rule.
If it will in the present USA, I doubt it.
Sanctions are always a prelude to war. Sanctions are in fact an act of war. Putin's mistake
was in thinking he could reason with the Neoconservatives. The Neocons are not guided by
pragmatic or rational concerns. Of course, many are starting to think Putin was just "part of
the show" all along, as evidenced by his recent capitulation to Netanyahu.
The American Government are a bunch of morons. I ask again "what has Russia ever done to the
USA"? A real thin book as far as I can see, time to grow up and be big boys, there's money
over there.
The American diplomat, Bruce P Jackson, who is credited with expanding NATO, made a statement
several years ago. He heavily criticized Putin, saying he was responsible for "the largest
theft of Jewish property since the Nazis."
Excellent analysis by Dr. Cathey of the roots of the anti-Russian hysteria. This is also
reflected in popular culture – Hollywood movies and the various spy/covert ops novels
of people like Ted Bell and Brad Thor, who has hinted that he may run against Trump in the
2020 Republican primaries. Russians have replaced Arabs as the go-to villains.
Was Jackson referring to some of the oligarchs who had fallen out with Putin and was he
suggesting Putin rather than the state benefitted? Would he have included the Orthodox
Khordokovsky as Jewish?
The neocons are a collection of sick, murderous, fanatical supremacist ideologues who have
turned the U.S. into the most despicable criminal regime on earth. Because of their control
and influence over the U.S. imperial military/political assets, combined with their
psychopathic mentality and ideology, these scumbags pose a clear threat to the entire world,
but especially to Russia and Europe (and to the U.S. itself, of course). The irony in all of
this is that, although these mostly Jewish bottom-feeders like to smear any foreign leader
they'd like to demonize as "the new Hitler" etc., they themselves are more nefarious and
dangerous to the planet than Hitler and his German Nazis ever were.
Nothing will change until the major members of the neocon collective start getting
individually singled out and receiving the harsh punishments they deserve.
I wonder what jewish property Putin stole.
In the USSR there was hardly any private property.
What was stolen, sold for ridiculously low prices, was state property, to former USSR
managers, and/or foreign 'investors'.
As far as I understand it, some crooks have been persecuted.
Any foreigner who, after 1990, went to live in a former USSR state can explain it.
Some did to me.
Possibly Jackson is referring to how Putin threw out Soros, and his Open Society
indoctrination organisation.
Hungary just now also threw him out.
Timmermans of the EU again threatened the E European nations, for refusing to let migrants
enter.
Soros wants multi ethnic countries
"Cannot see much difference between neocons and Deep State."
And that means that the US Deep State can NOT have a Jewish creation, because it
existed a long time before 1948, a long time before 1939, a long time before the creation of
the Federal Reserve.
There is a reason that Neocons love Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln: the
former was an apologist for the nascent American Deep State, and the latter its perfect tool
right down to being ready and able to slaughter huge numbers of non-Elite whites so the then
virtually 100% WASP-in-blood Elite Deep State could totally control the growing nation.
The source of the American Deep State is the same as England's Deep State: Oliver
Cromwell's deal with Jews, a deal granting Jews special rights and privileges and made
precisely in order to have the money to wage total war to exterminate non-WASP white
Christian cultures and identities.
That is exactly what the Neocons are determined to continue, and they are correct whenever
they assert that they are being loyal to the history and heritage of the Puritans and of
Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party and of the US in the Spanish-American War, World War 1 and
World War 2.
What is different about today's Neocons and, say, the growing number of Jews with major
voices among the British Deep State at the height of Victorianism is that now the original
junior partner has become the acting partner, the dominant partner.
But the original alliance is the same.
You cannot separate the Neocon problem from the WASP problem. You cannot solve the Neocon
problem without also solving the WASP problem.
This is true only in the loosest sense. There is a huge difference between holding church
membership, or attending church, and being a Christian. Putin may have done the 1st two, but
the last is utterly unknown to him.
Can't believe any sane American thinks Russians – including beautiful Russian tennis
players are more of a threat to us in 2018 then say M13 Gang banger invaders, Chicago Black
street gangs, Afghan and Pakistani child rapists or just the sub Saharan Black African mobs
with their machetes.
We commissioned some Farstar cartoons on this theme – seems pretty basic to me, but
the J media mafia simply goes on and on – there is supposedly a Russian spy behind
every bush, some Russians posted anti Hillary posts on Facebook – oh the horror!
While there is some "hysteria" when it comes to Russia, there is also much truth out there,
some of which the author is willing to write off as little more than conspiracy theories.
It is passing strange that those who have strongly criticized Putin have ended up dead.
Anytime one appears to be a serious threat to Putin's position they end up dead. It is
possible that Putin isn't responsible, but given the numbers and the circumstances, it is
likely he knows what is going on.
While Putin was never head of the KGB, much of what he has been up to was learned form
iron Felix's organization. To say Putin is a KGB thug is far from being out of line.
What he has done in Ukraine should make the man, and the country he heads, a pariah.
Eastern Europe is right to be concerned. The fact that Putin has stated, rather pointedly,
that the extent of the USSR is Russia makes the accusation of him being a Soviet revanchist
appropriate as well.
Much of what the author seeks to write off as hysteria, isn't. That "hysteria" is a proper
concern for what Putin is up to, and what he intends. Fortunately, Russia is too impoverished
to all Putin to realize his neo-Tsarist empire. And in pursuing his self-aggrandizing path,
he impoverishes his people even more.
The business of the Zionist controlled U.S. gov is WAR and this has been the agenda since
1913 and the establishment of the Zionist FED and the Zionist IRS and thus began the WAR
agenda and the American people were set up to pay for the Zionist created wars and the
Zionist agenda of a Zionist NWO.
Thus the Zionists need an enemy and have created enemies where none existed, the case in
point being Russia and lesser created enemies the case in point being any given country in
the Mideast that Israel and the Zionists wish to destroy. In the case of Russia the Zionists
have the added incentive of trying to destroy a Christian country as Russia is now and
historically has been Christian with the exception of the Satanist Zionist takeover of Russia
in 1917 and the murder of some 60 million Russian people by the Satanist ie Zionist
communists.
The U.S. gov is under satanic Zionist control and proof of this is the fact that Israel
and the Zionist controlled deep state did 911 and got away with and every thinking person
knows this to be the truth, may GOD help we the people of America.
While I defer to no one in my loathing and contempt for the WASPs of the Northeastern
U.S., whose career of mischief began with the brutal war of conquest against my native South,
I'd would like to point out what I see as some problems in your assigning to Oliver Cromwell
to baleful title of WASP the first.
To wit: "Oliver Cromwell's deal with Jews, a deal granting Jews special rights and
privileges."
This simply isn't true. Menasseh ben Israel did indeed present a "Humble Address on Behalf
of the Jewish Nation" to the Lord Protector and the Counsel of State in 1655. Readmission was
opposed by most of the English people and of the Puritan pastorate. However, there was no Act
of Parliament, proclamation by Cromwell or notice from the Council of State allowing
readmittance. Some historians have "deduced" that Cromwell have Menasseh "verbal assurance
that they'd be allowed it, but those are deductions and speculation and no more. As far as sa
subsequent petition for Jews to be allowed to practice Judaism in their homes and have a
burial place outside the City of London, Cromwell referred that to the Council of State,
which took no action.
Who did grant the Jews religious tolerance and naturalized a number of Jews by an Act of
Parliament? Why, Charles II – after the Restoration.
You wrote: "made precisely in order to have the money to wage total war to exterminate
non-WASP white Christian cultures and identities."
I can only assume you are referring to the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, which began in
May 1649. I assume you're aware that Ireland had been engulfed in a bloody and brutal civil
war since 1641; indeed, one of the precipitating causes of the English Civil War was the
matter of who would control the army raised to suppress the rebellion (Charles I or
Parliament). Also as you know, England was swept by fear that Charles meant to bring an Irish
army to England to suppress Parliament (and, indeed, there's probably more evidence that this
was the actual case than there is that Cromwell cut a deal with the Jews). At any rate, there
is no one single shred of evidence or even contemporary speculation that the Cromwellian
conquest was at the behest of the Jews. It should be instead regarded in the context of the
17th century wars of religion, rather than 21st century conspiracy theory. Cromwell ended the
civil war and pacified Ireland – in a brutal fashion, of course, but probably less
vicious than Wallenstein in Germany.
Or are you referring to the Scots, crushed at Preston, Dunbar and Worcester? Again, the
quarrel with the scots was over the matter of church governance, and the English
unwillingness to impost the Presbyterian system on England. If Cromwell stood for anything,
it was religious tolerance for the various sects that exploded after the Civil War; the sort
of forced conformity demanded by the Scots displeased him (see the letters to Major Crawford
in 1643).
And while both the New Englanders and English are labeled "Puritan," may I point out that
the Puritan movement was a large one, with considerable variance. Cromwell favored tolerance
and theologically tended toward a sort of univeralism (to judge by his pastors, eg Jeremiah
Burroughs); I imagine that if he had gone to New England, he'd have been chased out along
with Sarah Hutchinson and Roger Williams by the fanatical shits of Boston.
Boston is the "urgrund" of the WASP plague; not Cromwell. And while there's any number of
things to fault him for, creation of the WASP was not one of them. In theological and
existential terms, Cromwell and the New Model were probably closer to the Puritan "pioneers"
of the Appalachian and Southern frontiers – many of whom were descended of troops
planted in Ireland by Cromwell – and who of course made up the rank and file of the
Confederate States Army.
You might want to take a look at the history of the Unitarian movement. You'd find
everything you need to support your dislike of the WASP plaque there; I certainly have.
1 undermines democracy abroad, and America struggles with poisonous threats from the right
and left."
Think of Israel. But no don't think of Isreal. That is anti Semitism
2 "Putin wants to re-establish the Soviet Union" or "Putin was head of the KGB" or "Putin has
had his enemies assassinated," and so on, ad nauseum)."
Think of US – harking back to the past of Roosevelt and Reagan and Eisenhower or to
Monroe
Think of Pap Bush working for CIA
Thinks of thousands of people – leaders, trade unionists, communist, socialists killed
by USA
3 Bill Browder, the grandson of -- – have documented, and he is engaged in a vicious
personal vendetta against Vladimir Putin."
Think of -
be afraid of the screwing the neocons They will move to China or India and denounce US sue
the country, and poison the well of the democracy and the well of the justice ,media,
religious organizations to get back at US
4 James Kirchick: -- efforts to "close borders" against Muslim immigrants "
Think of the perversions of the beliefs and attitudes within the psyche of this false
man
He is of the same mindset that encourages Islamophobia among the clueless , zealous fervent
bible thump er and among the poor indigent uneducated misinformed white populations of France
USA Australia and Poland . He does same to the military and leftists secular outfit of
Richard Dawkins .
He then encourages to dismember Arabs countries . The half-baked moron Richard Dawkins type,
and military, and the white trash fall for it and get ready to pick up the gun for the
invisible pervasive psychopathic chants of Kirchick. He also makes sure that each and every
members of the opposite conflicting groups never stray way from kowtowing to Zionism who is
the enemy of the Islam and the Christianity and the of the respective people.
Jews definitely feel comfortable in all weather and among the separates and in all kind of
geography
The more Christian that country and its leaders become, the more the atheistic west hates
them. Too bad "Uncle Joe" wasn't still the Premier. We would treat that murderous atheist as
a beloved relative, maybe even hand him over half of eastern Europe like we did last time.
Instead, we send in LGBT protesters to disturb their new found faith.
From the other side of the Atlantic, what is the WASP problem ?
Whatever one thinks of the USA, protestants from NW Europe created the USA.
Their descendants, in my view, defend their culture.
Hardly any culture in the world goes under without a fight.
Some, maybe many, Germans, again the exception.
Also waiting for that other nut who always comes with his tirades about "surrendering ukraine
to Putin", no matter what article is about.
Mike something, was it?
"talking about Putin, calling him "the new Hitler," and who asserted that Putin had
committed "worse crimes" than the German dictator."
Classic garbage in, garbage out.
fact: Hitler and the Germans did not, could not have committed the crimes they are
alleged to have committed.
"we've often fantasized about drawing up an indictment against Adolf Hitler himself. And
to put into that indictment the major charge: the Final Solution of the Jewish question in
Europe, the physical annihilation of Jewry. And then it dawned upon us, what would we do?
We didn't have the evidence."
- so called "holocaust historian" Raul Hilberg,
Revisionists are just the messengers, the absurd impossibility of the ridiculous
'holocaust' storyline is the message.
The '6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers' are scientifically impossible frauds.
See the 'holocaust' scam debunked here: http://codoh.com
No name calling, level playing field debate here: http://forum.codoh.com
"Neoconservatives descend from Russian Jews from the Pale of Settlement, whose memories go
back to the pre-Communist days of persecution and pogroms under the Tsars. They originally
welcomed Lenin and the Communist regime as liberators and formed some of its staunchest
supporters and apparatchiks in the regime of terror that followed (especially in the Cheka
and KGB) until Josef Stalin unleashed a wave of anti-semitism after World War II."
There is no proof of these "pogroms" and the fake "wave of anti-semitism after World War
II".
The source of such claims are Jews who benefit / profit from making such claims.
The umpteenth serving of the classic US hegemonist pro-Putin/anti-EU line. The distinction is
thus not between those who favour the maintenance of US global hegemony and those who oppose
it. It is whether Putin is still useful as a battering ram to destroy the EU precisely so as
to maintain US global hegemony into the indefinite future. The most logical explanation of
the known facts surrounding the Ukrainian coup is that Victoria Nuland was in cahoots with
Putin. Behind Nuland, of course were the US neocons. The split came when Putin waded into the
Syrian civil war on Assad's side. By doing so he made himself a threat to Israel and, for the
neocons, the whole point of maintaining US global hegemony is to prop up Israel. Logically,
therefore, their priority became Putin's defeat and removal. The other side of the US
hegemonist camp, which seems to be motivated by something like hubris or a master race
delusion, still believes that Putin can be used to break up the EU. That's the position Mr
Cathey is arguing.
I don't think Putin is still viable as an anti-EU battering ram. The American groups that
have been financing far-right nationalism in Europe have got caught in the web of their own
contradictions. On the one hand, they preach national identity and sovereignty to us but
then, as Mr Cathey is doing here, they justify Putin's refusal to respect Ukrainian
sovereignty and the Ukrainian national identity. Secondly, European nationalism is
essentially "anti-other". That means that it is inherently anti-American, which makes newly
nationalist Europe the inevitable enemy of US domination. It also means that anti-Semitism is
inherent in European nationalism, which is probably what has Soros up in arms. The final
contradiction is that, very often, the same people who preach nationalism at us in Europe
preach white nationalism in the US. If white Americans are a single ethnic group and entitled
to live in a single political entity, then we white Europeans must also be a single ethnic
group and should also live in a single political entity (the EU, for example).
I never cease to be amused at the way in which the various American anti-EU scams cut across
each other and cancel each other out!
"WASP" in the "USA" refers fairly specifically to the Protestants of New England and New
York who as a result of the War of Northern Aggression attained complete power over the
development of the American empire. Their interests were concentrated in banking, railroads,
industry and so on. While descended from the Puritans of New England, most of them had lost
any traditional religious fervor by, oh, 1700 or so and gradually moved into loopy,
nonsensical ideologies like Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, the Social Gospel, and various
other creation-fixing endeavors like temperance, abolitionist, progressivism and so on. To
them can be attributed the Gnostic notion of the United States as God's appointed righter of
wrongs around the world, with quite coincidentally matched up with their commercial
interests. On the whole about as nasty and horrible group of people that ever walked the
earth; however. WASP does not include the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of Appalachia, the
Deep South, Texas and so on. The Bush family are WASPs. Robert E. Lee was not a WASP. Jake is
correct to disdain them; he's wrong in saying Cromwell was the archetype.
@ Neoconservatives descend from Russian Jews from the Pale of Settlement.. yes but the Lenin
crowd were from Salonkia (1908) and Hertzl's Germany @ many above Exactly, the by name, rank
and serial number identification including dual nationalities, corporate by name ownership,
board membership, and positions, management, advisory positions or whatever.
Deeper yet into the deep state might identify the corporate officers, directors and
outside auditors who serve the needs of those identified. Bureaucrat who echo deep state
intentions might be a problem?
Who cannot name the few corporations and their owners and directors that strongly support
the neocon ideology on the Internet? Which does the intelligence gathering (spying), which
processes the data(data mining), which produces and sells OS(limits user security), which
makes sleuthing back doors for browsers and application software, which make the devices that
negotiate the bits between hardware (CPU) and software (OS), you know one bit for you the
user and a duplicate bit of your bit for deep state intelligence units.
At the next level is the global benefactors(Profiteers) . expensive war equipment makers,
oil well production gear makers, robot makers, transport organizations, phantom for hire
mercenary armies labor agencies, Democrat and Republican candidates managers to be placed on
the "vote for 5 election" ballots, inventors of the fake, producers of "the fake" into
propaganda, distributors of the propaganda designed fake news to masses in the public, and
access managers who gate, for massive fees, lobbyist into see and deal with politicians,
media giants, and power wielding bureaucrats.
As I looked through this list I realized that if the public were to deny its elected
government authority to support its neocon capitalist, the entire economy would be forced to
switch from Global to Domestic.. showering all kinds of benefits on the governed sheep
. No wonder the government is so insistent: without globalism there is no neocon-ism, without
neocon-ism open competition would flourish, the restrictions on human progress in copyrights
and patents would disappear and prices would move from controlled levels to competitive
levels.
But I do not think the neocons are "ideologues" ; unless lawless disregard for
humanity in search of profit, is an ideology. I am not even sure they are tightly organized,
they are not colonist, they are monopolist (meaning any profit potential (tangible or
intangible) will soon belong to them or be within their control. They will write laws, or get
nations to sanction, start wars, regime change, terrorize, whatever to advance and to protect
their exclusive right to competition free profit making); you might call it ownership of all
of the factors of production by whatever means is necessary. I look at them as capitalist,
who have co-opted many different governments, who have forgone their humanity, who
independently profiteer, interactively, and for a multitude of different reasons, to produce
a common collective set of extremely effective outcomes.
Interesting, the video asserts that part of Leo Strauss's philosophy was the introduction of
Plato's 'Noble Lie', which, in this case, was the bugaboo of an evil Russian Empire as a foil
to bring Americans together and avoid the inevitable collapse of liberalism into nihilism. I
wonder if anyone can confirm this as part of Strauss's gift the the neopsychoticons?
Also, pretty obvious reason for hatred of Russia is the closeness of the State and the
Church. Strauss here talks about how the secular sphere has but one purpose, providing room
for the meddlers to thrive:
The Neocons are mad at Russia for standing in their way of taking over the world. All in the
name of "democracy" of course, nothing sinister there. Russia, and as a matter of fact, the
whole world stood by and let the US have their way for almost 25 years. What did they
accomplish? Diddly. So now, they want Russia to get out of the way for another (at least) 25
years, so they can spread some more "democracy". Let me tell you something, if they couldn't
do it with virtually no opposition between 1991 -2014, and on a trillion dollar "defence"
budgets, maybe there is something else that should be blamed other than Russia. Maybe it's
their incompetence.
James Kirchick: by encouraging balkanization of ME per the plans advocated by PNAC now FDD
and Friends of Syria or SITE -Sharon-Netanahyu Joe Lieberman Kirchick favorite White Helmet
or Jishs Fishas Islam Whitewash ludicrous Jihadist and cemented in stone by Yoneen Yidod ( or
what ever is the name of that Jew ) sends those same muslims he encourages the "deplorable"
to feel suspicious and hate and same time advocating the acceptance by the countries .
"Neo-Tsarist empire." Ha, that's rich. Congrats, you've managed to outdo even the most
unhinged anti-Putin elements of the l'chaimstream media.
"impoverishes his people even more." You mean be improving their lives as measured by
virtually every metric since kicking out the (((Russian))) banksters and their (((American)))
advisers who were robbing the place blind? Dude, you're delusional. Go peddle your nonsense
elsewhere.
My favorite part of the Renew Democracy Initiative's manifesto:
10. The extremists share a disdain for the globalism on which modern prosperity is
based. Whether they are far-left or far-right, they believe in top-down solutions to
problems that can best be resolved through greater freedom, competition, openness and
mobility . Both seek power without compromise or coalition and defer to the rule of law
only when it strengthens their own position. These illiberal forces embrace divisive
rhetoric that makes rational debate impossible. Indeed, they frequently reject established
facts and scientific reasoning in favor of conspiracy theories and malicious myths. Liberal
democracy must address the problems of those disadvantaged by economic change with
practical programs grounded in fact and reason.
Amazing! There are two parts to this. The "openness and mobility" is a nod towards their
status as rootless kosmopolity who destroy civil society and local communities in favor of a
permanent, mobile underclass. But they actually imply that globalism is bottom-up; that
globalism is the result of liberty and the free market. Such balls, these people.
I recall an article long ago where he suggested that the US Govt. should address the
drug addition problem in the USA by assassinating drug dealers on the streets in the
USA .
Russia seems to be returning to its older national and pre-Communist heritage, to its
age-old Orthodox Christian faith. Russians are returning by the millions to the church and
the "old-time" religion. For Kirchick this can only mean one thing: the triumph of bigotry,
anti-semitism, and "extreme right wing" ideology, and the failure of what he terms "liberal
democracy and equality".
more so even than any concern for Jewish supremacy or glorification of sodomy or all the
other shibboleths oozing out of the gaping orifices of Jewish fudge packers like Kirchick, is
a visceral, unearthly animosity (hatred) for the Western world and its (comparatively)
beautiful, well-adjusted, happy and prosperous people.
Indeed, it is the 'happy' part that drives them insane with stinging malice and seething,
rancorous rage.
I remember as a kid celebrating Christmas, and how the Jewish children I knew were not
allowed. This is all part of the carefully constructed paradigm that the Jewish elite impose
on their people to keep them resentful and envious. Eventually metastasizing into a
deep-seated hatred.
They want to see all those ruddy-cheeked Christians pay! for their pain during those
terrible years.
Like the boy who was picked last for sports or never 'got the girl', they develop a
psychological imperium of wrath, which their religion bolsters in spades.
That is why when ever they get the drop on the Gentiles (who tormented them with
good-natured hails of 'Merry Christmas!, which stung to their core, because all that love and
happiness was not for them. ) – regardless of the obvious sincerity of the
Christians. – [which made it even worse]
Eventually it roils and burns in their ids like an acid. And they want revenge. And
that's why the Palestinians, and the Syrians and Lebanese are menaced day and night.
That's why the Russians and Ukrainians and Estonians and Poles, and so many others
suffered to monstrously under the cruel Jewish, Bolshevik yoke.
It has nothing to do with fear over a re-ascendant Russia. Hardly. That's laughable.
Rather, the reason they can't abide Russians going to church and thriving and prospering,
is because it means the Russians have become happy again, and that drives them
absolutely bonkers with murderous, Talmudic rage.
Good description of them. Basically I see all their anti Russian crap, as a revenge minded
attitude so often seen from jews. They tried to overtake the largest nation, of mainly Whites
and Christians, at least once prior to 1917 jewish revolt against Russia. That was I believe
in 1905, it ended when the $$$ ended. But with another better funded, by usa and german
fellow jew banksters, attempt in 1917.
Those Bolshevik jews took over Russia first, then every eastern nation which also was
mainly a White and Christian peoples nation's. They did so basically by mass Murdering aprox
1/2 of orig populations in those nations. And now 100 years later, after Russian soviet
commies has crashed, and a huge return to prior Christian ways etc, is going gangbusters Due
to Bolsheviks and jews for the most part getting that Big Boot Out jews are so famous
for.
So now here in America we have inherited most of those Children and especially Grand Kid
jew commies of the Orig 100 years ago Russian Bolshevik butchers, torturers, and mass
murderous bastards. And besides infiltrated into All what matters in usa society and govnt
and culture, they also have as a "side agenda" of sorts a massive huge Lusting for typical
jewish blood thirsty revenge upon Russia and its Christian Whites,and of course its leader
Putin. Those jews had Russia in palm of hand, then totally Lost it. They began with around
8.5 to maybe 10-million jews in Russia/Poland soviet and today have around less than 27o,ooo
total jews within Russia iirc.
Likely it was Putin more than all other issues or reasons those, mostly jewish swindlers,
finally were also Booted Out and their scammed assets from their Raping of Russia resources
etc Taken away from them Being such mamon/money worshipers they are also so famous for, no
other thing would so piss them scamming jews off eh.
I also believe that after the jewish 1917 revolt in Russia, when top control jews there
with plans to use control of Russia as largest nation on earth, to gain their foamed at mouth
lust of a JWO control made reality. That it finally dawned on them that in order to Rule as a
JWO one world govnt of jewry Vs all gentile others, they could never do so without a huge
Navy like usa has.
You must have Navy ships to Carry Jet fighter planes To distant areas you wish to rule
over, because most other nations wont simply agree to being jew-ruled with a JWO clan of
fanatical jewry. Ergo you need also Ocean Waters, warm waters to Park said ships and navigate
those waters to get to those other reluctant nations. Russia failed for such scheme plans for
jewry.
So since so many of the tribe were in usa already .Just join fellow tribe in usa, and turn
America and its military etc into a huge Tool of international jewry so to complete jwo plans
that Russia didn't fulfill.
And both the agenda of jewish revenge, as well as their desired jwo plans probably play an
equal part within those evil nasty minds that they are also so famous for having.
In response to your query, the difference between the US and Russia is that in geopolitics
the latter has performed well above the cards it has been dealt with.
And where, dear sir, can we find any "religious fervor" in the likes of that beau ideal of
the Southern antebellum statesman, John C. Calhoun? Calhoun began life as a Calvinist (a
Presbyterian) and ended it as a kind of Unitarian. This is almost the exact trajectory as the
religious life of the Boston Yankee culture. The Old Nullificator was backcountry
Scotch-Irish – as opposed to WASP – but Unitarian crap is Unitarian crap no
matter where it exists.
Calhoun was, of course, a giant among those of the 1830s and '40s who pushed the South
from the 18th century American conception of slavery – as something that should be
contained until its eventual death – to a new conception that exclaimed, vigorously,
that slavery was a legitimate part of the American way of life. No, no. I cannot abide this
poison. If you all want to condemn Hamilton and Sumner and all, go ahead. I'll agree. But
when Lincoln – that flawed man – saw the original sin of the American republic as
the protection of slavery, he was right. And he was neither fanatical nor alone in his view.
To this day, we tend to conflate Lincoln and the anti-slavery bloc with the radical
Republican abolitionist bloc. This is unfair.
General Meade, the victor of Gettysburg, was condemned by the radical Republicans in
Congress because of their hatred for Lincoln. Some unity there.
The Anti-Federalist Marylander Luther Martin was right to criticize the powerful framers
for allowing the slavery problem to go on, for enshrining it in the Constitution. Too many
antebellum Southern elites decided that the likes of Martin were wrong.
You will find few "Northerners" more amenable to the South than me. I live only a few
miles north of the Mason-Dixon. I count Confederate soldiers among my kin. One was even born
in Pennsylvania, and fought in his own hometown during Lee's invasion.
But no one forced the state of South Carolina to fire at Fort Sumter. No one in the North
forced the Southern elites to accept a conception of black slavery as a "positive good" (i.e.
James Henry Hammond). The idea of a "War of Northern Aggression" is convenient and cute, but
I live near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. You may not have heard of its burning, but I have.
And it attests to the truth, which is that if the South had the numbers the North had, then
it would have done what you all so hate Sherman and Custer for doing in Georgia and the
Shenandoah: burn, burn, burn. Perhaps there were just as many hell-fire and brimstone types
in the South as there were in Boston.
P.S. Judah Benjamin. Apparently those Southern "Anglo-Saxons" (As General Lee described
himself) weren't so uncomfortable with the Jewish folks.
There is a lot of truth in this piece, but I think that the overall spin is misleading.
Putin's orthodox faith (likely pretended; he seems to be too intelligent for a true
believer), history of Jewish persecution in Russia, etc., are secondary factors. The US
elites (neocons are just one type of servants they hired) are mad that the world refuses to
be unipolar. Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and many lesser countries, arouse
"righteous indignation" of the robbers because they refuse to let themselves be looted and
bossed by the US elites. All sorts of thieves joined the choir: Jewish and gentile, "right"
and "left", military and civilian, the only common denominator being that they stole a lot
and resent being thwarted from stealing even more. Moreover, the almighty dollar is about to
be exposed as a king with no clothes by various countries switching the trade to their own
currencies, undermining the Ponzi schemes of the US dollar and US government debt. The
hysterical US foreign policy in the last 10-15 years, with its mindless suicidal
aggressiveness, is in fact death throes of an Empire that resents going down the drain, like
all dominant Empires before it, but cannot do anything about inevitable course of history.
Wally, by keeping Americans always focused on Hitler and Nazis and SS storm troops, they
will not have time, nor ever find out what the Real True 20th century crimes against humanity
were. When starting in 1917 JEWS that invented communism, and Used it as main means to mass
murder almost 1/2 of eastern euro nations and Russia itself Those crimes and mass killings
jewry should get blame for makes whatever bads or evils done by Hitler and Nazis Pale in
comparison, and makes german Nazis look like small kindergarten kiddies at play in back yard
sand box with wooden swords.
Thanks to internet over past 15 years, many usa folks are waking up and getting very
jewized up.
Which we know is main reason such massive attempts at internet censorship has been
occurring. And is happening at a furious pace like no other agenda we have seen in our lives.
Plus the EU and Canada nations non stop Prison terms for truth tellers of any jew issues.
Soon to arrive here in usa with 99.9% of us senate and congress full approval votes when
pressed by AIPAC and 599 Other jewish usa orgs.
We can toss out our sun glasses as our American future does Not look bright at all. Unless
we see soon a massive wake up call and enough armed citizens willing to take back America.
That too looks very dim so far.
I think Jake should say WASP elites rather than just WASP. The majority of the US Anglo-Saxon
stock are working class and middle class who, along with the Catholic Irish, German, and
Italian, have made this country what it is; and in their demographic decline we see the
decline of the United States. The problem here and abroad are elites. Elites of any kind.
In every political question we should remember to look past grandiose abstractions and see
the operative gut loyalties, both our own and those of the competing sides. What is going on
with Russia is simply Jewish mania to prevent Russia from being Russian and keep it under
Jewish or surrogate rule. Similarly, NATO and the EU are now just enforcers of political
correctness. The Slavs and other illiberal peoples of central and eastern Europe are to be
re-subjugated now that Communism is not there to persecute the priests and re-educate the
sexists. The author, in citing ancient persecutions of Jews to excuse the machinations of
current Jews, attempts to meet his critic half-way. Some day perhaps we will be able to state
the truth without the dance of apology.
Here is an analogy: Suppose in the 90s we thought it critical to weigh in on the Northern
Irish Question. Suppose we had a Department of Irish Affairs to formulate US policy, and it
was staffed by Clancy, Reilly, Finnegan, O'Toole and O'Meara. Would anyone hesitate to raise
the issue of objectivity? Or suppose our middle-eastern team consisted of 5 guys named
Muhammad. Do you think there might be questions?
The US elites (neocons are just one type of servants they hired)
ah, so it was Dubya all along!
what a clever little schemer he was! Pretending all that time to be dumb as a rock, and a
tool of organized Zionism, while he was using the neocons to his own advantage!
So while ((Wolfowitz and Feith and Pearl and Kristol)) were being schooled at the feet of
((Leo Strauss)), it was Dubya the college cheerleader all along who was the mastermind behind
the Project for a New American Century and 9/11 !
sure, Goldman Sachs and Hollywood get federal subsidies, but it's the (dying) American
middle class that has been exploiting the world's poor!
The hysterical US foreign policy in the last 10-15 years, with its mindless
suicidal aggressiveness, is in fact death throes of an Empire that resents going
down the drain,
what's been going down the drain has been the blood and tears and future of working class
Americans, forced to suit up their children to go slaughter innocent Arabs and others in a
transparent and treasonous policy intended to bolster Israel – at the direct and
catastrophic expense of America and the American people.
I wonder, as the American people are taxed to the tune of billions every year, to send to
Israel as tribute, is that also a case of US elites using Israel to their own devices? As
Americas roads and bridges crumble, and veterans are denied care?
Or, is it just possible, that the ((owners)) of the Federal Reserve Bank, have used that
printing press as a weapon to consolidate absolute power over the institutions of the
ZUSA?
Do you suppose that when France bombs Libya or menaces Syria, that they're doing it to
benefit the French elite? And that Israel is their dupe, who give them a pretext for doing
so? Or that the French (and British and Polish and Ukrainian, etc..) elite are getting their
marching orders from Jewish supremacist Zionists who're hell bent on using Gentile Christians
to slaughter Gentile Muslims while they laugh and count the shekels? Eh?
It is passing strange that those who have strongly criticized Putin have ended up
dead.
The logic of this is fascinating in its perversity. Lot's of people who don't criticize
Putin at all or downright admire him die including under unclear circumstances – the
West just doesn't notice. For example, several Russian diplomat have died suddenly and
prematurely in various countries – out UN representative Churkin would be the prime
example. Can you imaging how many wonderful conspiracy theories we could have concocted
should we be so inclined?
It's the same exact "logic" ridiculed in "conclusions" like this: "Everyone who eats
cucumbers dies". And those who don't live forever?
What he has done in Ukraine should make the man, and the country he heads, a pariah.
He, meaning Putin, hasn't done anything in Ukraine – the West did. The West
organized and supported a coup bringing to the power a super-corrupt illegitimate
"government" that relies on armed neo-Nazi groups for the control of the county. Now Ukraine
is a failed state with the dominant neo-Nazi ideology, nonexistent economy, impoverished and
fleeing population and repressive political system, not to mention a civil war. All Putin did
was to resist this development as much as possible, and I do not believe he should be blamed
for that.
War on the poor and defenseless, it what the Neocon and Zionist-puppet traitors do best.
Terrorists in Syria (white helmets) getting 7 million in new funding from Trump, just as
Russia warns of new chemical attack false flag is in the works. Must kill evil dicktater
Assad for protecting those Christians inside Syria
Russia Warns "Credible Information" Of Impending Staged Chemical Attack In Syria
Thanks for your eloquent response. A few thoughts:
1. I wouldn't extend Calhoun's religion, ot the lack thereof, to the "common soldier" of
the Confederacy. You might take a look at Fehrenbach's "Lone Star" history of Texas; he
understands the "puritanism" of the South.
2.
But when Lincoln – that flawed man – saw the original sin of the
American republic as the protection of slavery, he was right.
–> sorry, I don't think "original sin" is attributable to nations. History is a
bloodbath, and always will be, and the whole notion that slavery is some sort of "sin"
demanding atonement is quite ridiculous. That's the sort of gnosticism practiced by the
Bostonians that played sure a huge part in causing the War of Nort.. er. War for Southern
Independence. Far as antebellum slavery itself, might I recommend the work of Genovese and
Fogelberg on the character of American slavery? A review of how exactly the victorious
Yankees and their Republican bosses provided for the liberated slaves after Appomattox is
enlightening.
3.
But no one forced the state of South Carolina to fire at Fort Sumter.
Saint Abe himself admitted he connived South Carolina into opening fire.
4.
I live near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. You may not have heard of its burning, but I
have.
So we have that in common!
5.
nd it attests to the truth, which is that if the South had the numbers the North had,
then it would have done what you all so hate Sherman and Custer for doing in Georgia and
the Shenandoah: burn, burn, burn. Perhaps there were just as many hell-fire and brimstone
types in the South as there were in Boston.
This is speculation on your part, so hardly the truth. Stonewall Jackson, of course, would
have been happy to bring fire and sword to the North. Probably Edward Ruffin, too. But at the
same time, the South was primarily acting a defensive capacity during the war, not as a force
of invasion.
5.a: "
Perhaps there were just as many hell-fire and brimstone types in the South as there were
in Boston."
hellfire and brimstone in what sense?
6,
P.S. Judah Benjamin. Apparently those Southern "Anglo-Saxons" (As General Lee described
himself) weren't so uncomfortable with the Jewish folks.
-- yes, AND? What's your point? what's this to do with anything? When the Confederate
memorial in Beaumont, Texas was dedicated around the turn of the last century, the local
rabbi gave opening remarks. Different creeds tended to get along somewhat better in Dixie.
That's a well known fact.
7.
You will find few "Northerners" more amenable to the South than me. I live only a few
miles north of the Mason-Dixon. I count Confederate soldiers among my kin.
Why would I find that controversial? Are you suggesting I was arguing for a "celtic
south"? I always thought the notion ridiculous. I know Grady McWhiney and others push it, but
it's inaccurate to say the least.
Elites are robbing Americans and foreigners alike. In fact, the US population gets some
crumbs off elites' table, and enjoys higher living standards than it would have in fair
global competition.
The overall educational level and the level of awareness of what's going on in the world in
the US is dismal. Elites arranged that by maintaining pathetic education system and spreading
lies via MSM; ignorant sheep are more likely to obey, and to approve of persecution of those
"black sheep" who are less ignorant and don't buy the lies of the MSM. Did we see any
protests against "Patriot Act" that trampled the very foundations of our Constitution? Sheep
don't protest, they just follow the leader.
However, we have to remember that clueless ignoramus in the US gets 5-10 times more than
similarly clueless ignoramus in China or India. Bush junior was genuinely dumb, but would he
become US President without his family's ill-gotten riches, or without his ex-CIA chief daddy
becoming the President first? Of course not, most morons in the US never fly that high. The
only reason for his "success" is the fact that he was born into an elite family.
As far as Jews are concerned, this appears to be yet another red herring, like
Russia-bashing. Are gentile Koch brothers or Walton family any better than the worst Jews in
the US? They are just as selfish, greedy, and repulsive as George Soros or Sheldon
Adelson.
See comment 51:
The problem here and abroad are elites. Elites of any kind.
The root is neoliberal government that came to power in 2015
Notable quotes:
"... Why is any of this still "surprising" ..."
"... Economist Ha Joon Chang popularized the term "ladder kicking" to describe the way in which most developed countries used tariffs and trade restrictions to ascent to the top but are all for "free trade" now. ..."
"... Once again, so long as "Original Sin" is a reality, there is little hope. Keynes' BANCOR was the idea to begin to fix this, but short of some other global currency initiative, we're left to the International Finance Vultures as the primary arbiters of what's possible. ..."
Thanks for the link. I will be spending some time thinking of what Argentina would best
employ as best practices from where it is.
Would they be best off if they stopped issuing such high paying bonds? Should they pay them
all off and stop with it. It does appear to me that issuing bond after bond is one of the
single most dangerous things you can do.
It would appear to me to be a superior practice to sell what you produce for the best price
you can get on the open markets and dictate the value of your currency.
I'll have to do some more study here.
Again, thanks for the link.
You're uttering the discourse of the most recalcitrant neo-liberal cum
austerity-fundamentalists around.
The US doesn't tax soybean exports. Argentina needs to maximize its exports to earn
foreign exchange.'
it's misleading to say the least to draw a comparison between how the US handles soybean
exports and Argentina does it. They're around a quarter of the latter's exports, barely a
hundredth of the latter's.
The US will never have forex issues, Argentina does have them, and they are very serious.
You make it as if simply exporting commodities will fill the country's economy with USD,
while in truth those dollars will be neatly parked in tax heavens. Eliminating tax and
controls over Argentina's biggest exports -agricultural commodities- is in practice as if
these commodities were produced not in this country but in some foreign territory over which
only the very few who hold most of the land are sovereign. Which is what the current
administration has been doing for the past two years.
You also make it as if the current situation where the value of the peso is given over
completely to whatever short-term speculators feel like doing with it whenever LEBACs are due
is more desirable than the capital controls imposed by the previous government. These
prevented the hurtful rapid rise we're seeing in the exchange rate and reduced the negative
consequences of the fiscal deficit thus allowing significant investment in and expansion of
the real economy.
Addressing the fiscal deficit through increased value added and income tax is something
that clearly benefits the owner over the working class and depresses private consumption. I
can only sarcastically wonder who would want such a thing.
I don't feel the need or the duty to defend the previous government, but victimization of
the Sociedad Rural is something I just lack the words to condemn strongly enough
Argentina is probably the most self sufficient country on earth. It has everything,
fertile land that produces an abundance of wheat, barley, oats, rye, wine grapes. As well as
oil, gas. uranium, silver, gold, lead, copper, zinc. Foreigners are well aware of the wealth
in Argentina and are more than willing to lend to Argentinian governments and companies. This
is why Cristina Kirchner refused to give in to the US vulture funds as it dissuaded
foreigners from believing that reckless lending would always be rewarded. Macri ponied up,
restarting the old familiar economic doom cycle. As always its the old dog for the long road
and the pup for the puddle. Macri is now in a place that he chose, the puddle. As long as
foreig lenders remain reckless Argentina will remain mired in the mud, well short of its
potential. I was last there in 2008 when the country was booming. When I heard of Macri's
plan to pay the vulture funds I knew they were headed for disaster. This is just the
beginning.
Those "foreign lenders" can't be called "reckless." Some, maybe most among them always
seem to profit from the looting, whether by "bailouts" or "backstops" from governments like
the US that for "geopolitical reasons" facilitate that lending, or by extortion after the
first-round lenders (who know the risks, of course -- they are big boys and girls after all)
have been forestalled.
Call them "wreckers," maybe. Like early denizens of the Florida Keys, and other places,
who set fires or put up lamps that resembled lighthouses to lure passing ships onto the sands
and rocks where their cargoes and the valuables of their drowned passengers and crews could
be stripped.
Why is any of this still "surprising" to anyone?! Most countries in the world
(non G7/G8) are forced to go into foreign debt in order to pursue their "development"
initiatives. They are told they can export themselves out of trouble but the "free
trade" (more like unfair trade!) mantra puts them at a distinct disadvantage –
"unequal
exchange" was the term Marx used for it.
Economist Ha Joon Chang popularized the term
"ladder kicking" to describe the way in which most developed countries used tariffs and
trade restrictions to ascent to the top but are all for "free trade" now.
Once again, so long as "Original Sin" is a reality, there is little
hope. Keynes' BANCOR was
the idea to begin to fix this, but short of some other global currency initiative, we're left
to the International Finance Vultures as the primary arbiters of what's possible.
Bolton must be "turning and burning." Good! Will Kim survive this at home? We will see. Will the North Koreans actually follow
through on this? We will see. Will the US follow through on this? We will see. Who will be the poor bastard who will be the first
McDonald's manager in Pyongyang? Will he end his days in the Gulag? What will Nancy Pelosi say about this? Where was Kim's dishy
sister during the Singapore expedition? She is the head of propaganda in NOKO. pl
I couldn't be happier with the outcome of this summit. No one is talking war in Korea anymore. So Trump gave away future military
exercises on the Peninsula and characterized them as provocative. So what? In exchange we have a North Korea feeling a little
less threatened. The idea of a denuclearized Peninsula could lead to a minimal or even nonexistent US presence along with a complete
dismantling of the North's nuclear weapons program. That would be grand. There will be a lot of fault found in this summit and
its outcome, but I don't care. This was a bold and courageous move on Trump's part. Some may think it was a courage born out of
ignorance, but it was also born out of a willingness to try something new, a willingness to deal with KJU as a partner. This is
refreshing. Trump done good and the world is better today than it was a few short months ago.
Perhaps Trump can apply this same reasoning to other military deployments and exercises. Recognize their potential provocativeness
and withdraw. Withdraw from Syria. Withdraw from Europe. Apply the same type of conciliatory engagement to Iran, Cuba and others
that he showed to North Korea. Now that would be a legacy.
Trump is blowing holes in old paradigms. The concepts he's applying aren't particularly genius; rather just sensible, but
he's the only one who seems to be able think outside the box enough to even consider making a try for a new way. I'm sure that
a lot of prep work went into this historic meeting; lots of wheeling and dealing. However, the simple yet elegant, idea behind
it all is that it's better for all parties to be friends than enemies. Trump has transcended all the moralizing that holds back
others (e.g."But North Korea has gulags!"). He realizes that redemption of bad actors is possible through friendship and prosperity.
An adversarial relationship fixes nothing unless an actual existential war is waged and one winner emerges from the carnage- and
war is costly. This kind of acting on cost/benefit analysis is one reason why some of us voted for a businessman as opposed to
a career pol. Glad you are able to give credit where it's due.
Now if Trump can just blow holes in the old paradigms concerning Iran and Cuba. Now would be the time to do it. Obama was doing
that in the case of Iran and Cuba and the neocons and Republicans gave him holy hell for daring to question those old paradigms.
If Trump could get over supporting anything Obama supported, I believe he could carry these policies of reconciliation to fruition
despite the opposition. He's like the honey badger. He just don't give a f#ck. And that's just what the situation calls for.
The ultimate paradigm that needs holes blown into it is Israel's parasitic relationship with the US. I've said it before. The
sooner Trump realizes our policies regarding Israel are a cost center, the better off we will all be.
IMO, he'll get there. First he needs to build momentum and trust. He has to prove himself to the world. NoKo is a great
place to start. The neocons and borg are less invested in certain outcomes there - therefore the probability of sabotage is lower.
Trump has to deal with both the external powers as well as the internal (I think the internal are the bigger barriers to success).
I don't think he really gives a flying f###k about how Kushner or his daughter feel about Israel. He tossed Israel and the US
rightwing a bone w/ the embassy move. That's as much as they'll get from here on out if they get too pushy. Despite some Islamic
quarters making big noise about it, I don't see them actually doing anything more than protesting and getting shot for it. We've
annihilated Iraqi uniformed forces twice in recent history. That serves as an object lesson to the rest of the countries in the
region. So a cost free bone toss by Trump as far as he is concerned.
I agree largely with your post, however I just cannot see how it can lead to further withdrawals, simply because it kind of
implies the US is there for the benefit of others and not for themselves. They could pull out of Europe now. Pretty sure everyone
knows Russia is not going to invade Europe, right?
But yes, Trump has shown good faith, and lets hope NK reciprocate. I think they will. The idea that Kim wants his country in
its current state is just ignorant.
I'd say the same reason why the US has bases all over the world. Please excuse my ignorance, I am just a lay man with a keen interest.
Why have bases in Japan? Or indeed anywhere? Hegemony, no? Why not pull out years ago? Genuine questions. The US seems to want
to check EU growth - why would they pull out their military presence there? Or, say, Japan? There are no "allies", just overlapping
interests, right?
Since Commodore Perry's mission to Japan in 1853, what has US gained except war and unemployment in her interactions with Japan?
Would it not have been a superior policy to leave Japan alone to wallow in her brutal feudalism and delay or prevent the unleashing
of that brutality on the rest of East Asia?
One could say the same about all empires I guess. The pursuit of power and domination seems to cloud all judgment. So, in your
opinion, should the US have any bases outside of the US? I am from the UK, so there are still bases lingering from our own days
of rule. They really just kept as forward operating positions, right? For example, the UK base in Cyprus used for ME operations.
The two Cyprus bases are just springboards for adventurism. IMO we should abandon NATO as a vestige of the Cold War an leave you
Europeans to your own devices. Korea? We should leave as soon as Trump can arrange it. Australia? Why are we there? So that we
can meddle in Asia? Where else? I can't think of anywhere we should stay off our own territory.
LeMoore00 "Hegemony" as a goal or reward has no value except to the collective ego of the Borg. If there was some economic value
derived from these commitments and deployments there would be some basis for your remark but there is not.
So is Trump genuinely trying to extricate the US from these situations? There is a view amongst the commentariat that perhaps
he is trying to alienate allies in order for them to begin cutting lossening ties with the US, causing the very isolation Trump
made a significant part of his campaign. Thoughts?
South Korea is strong and rich enough to look after the North. The complicated matter of how reunification will occur will be
for them to work out between them. The nuclear issue is really the easy part.
The necessary framework for nuclear disarmament or re-unification is a Global Peace - a la Peace of Yalta - is lacking; in
my opinion.
We have entered a period of Warring States - waiting, I suppose, for the Shi, Hwang Ti moment - but until such time a multipolar
world does not make itself conducive to such strategic settlements - certainly not with NATO still existing.
When one considers the fact that Arms Control is dead, NPT is dead, Peace of Yalta is dead, JCPOA is dead then one cannot rightly
expect a strategic settlement on the Korean Peninsula between US and DPRK.
No doubt, for what can the NK leadership conclude when they have seen a consistent foreign policy -be Republican or Democrat-
of destroying any nation whose policies are seen as a threat by the US? There is no basis of trust.
Trump deserves huge credit for the way he handled himself with a man who has been demonized by our propaganda ministry media
and the deep state criminals who have been trying to pull a regime change in Washington since January 2017...
I have to admit I gave up on Trump quite a while ago...today changes everything...
Is it surreal that President Trump is the most moderate and sensible voice not only in the room but in the entire country...?
This is what the people voted for...and this is what 'presidential' looks like...Trump is headed for the history books in a
very very large way...
I have to believe that he is consolidating control of the machinery of state...I was actually first surprised by Pompeo's breakthrough
and surprise visit to DPRK...and even Bolton has turned out not to be the spoiler I had feared...
What in the world is going on here...?
Did the universe just turn upside down...?
All of the questions Col Lang asks are relevant, but just the huge success that this day has become overshadows everything
for now...
What next...will Putin and Trump finally get together and really start putting the screws to the enemies of mankind that are
besetting both men...?
This seems to be the meat of the summit from the George Stephanopoulos interview:
G: Did you talk about pulling troops out? U.S. troops out of South Korea.
T: We didn't discuss that, no. But we're not gonna play the war games. You know, I wanted to stop the war games, I thought
they were very provocative. But I also think they're very expensive. We're running the country properly, I think they're very,
very expensive. To do it, we have to fly planes in from Guam -- that's six and a half hours away. Big bombers and everything else,
I said, 'Who's paying for this?' I mean, who pays, in order to practice.
Apparently the South Koreans were caught by surprise (again).
I'm assuming canceling war games once in a while is fine....but what happens to readiness if they are cancelled over a long
time and how important (and specific to a North Korean context) are these games? Experts...please weigh in? How long would it
take North Korea to take over South Korea with conventional troops and weapons?
Kim invading SK, its 600,000 effectives (3mln reserves), 30,000 US servicemen & nukes & Carrier strike group, on the eve of a
diplomatic breakthrough that could end up with engraving his name in gold throughout history...
Sounds a bit like Assad gassing his civilians right on the brink of a strategic victory. But on a devastating, enormous, monumental
scale.
i dont know if you aware that south korean military is estimated 5x stronger compared to NK , and it is a folly to compare the
1950 SK and NK in term of combat strength , readiness and whatnot
The key condition that triggered this series of events was NK's development of a nuclear weapon and delivery capability. That
put KJU in a position to make conciliatory moves towards SK and the rest followed. However, Trump's disposition to try something
The key condition that triggered this series of events was NK's development of a nuclear weapon and delivery capability. That
put KJU in a position to make conciliatory moves towards SK and the rest followed. However, Trump's disposition to try something
new was also instrumental... and fortuitous.
I meant it's fortuitous for us. I agree it's inherent in his character. That's why i think it's entirely possible he and/or
his organization conspired with Russians to circumvent election laws and norms to gain some kind of advantage in the election.
He would feel no inhibition to trying something new. It's inherent in his character.
Here's a fascinating tidbit on the Trump Teams PR efforts...
White House Created Production Video to Assist Singapore Summit Talks With North Korea .
https://theconservativetree...
Details are surfacing of a video put together by the White House to assist in diplomacy messaging toward Kim Jong-un and the team
of North Korea negotiators. According to reports, toward the end of the talks between President Trump and Kim Jong-un the video
was shared in both Korean and English languages to the audience of both teams. The video was also shared with the international
media audience prior to President Trump's remarks at the press conference
------------------------
The 4 min video is very well done, and as one commenter pointed out is a great example of positive propaganda.
Perhaps his hiring as NSC chief was a case of "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Or as LBJ put it, "Have them
inside the tent pi**ing out."
Kim's sister was in Singapore. She is the one who handed him all the documents to be signed , after bringing him the pen which
has been dusted and verified by a NOKO agent.
Seems like Trump echoed what I assume is a N Korean view..no nukes anywhere around the Korean peninsula which, I'd imagine, in
the view, would include S. Korea and Japan and perhaps...and in return POTUS gets to build some resorts on N Korean beaches...I
hope I'm wrong but that seemed the between the lines message
No more war games with S. Korea??? as added inducement for Kim..to sign an agreement that didn't expand beyond previous agreements
with respect to nukes?
"and in return POTUS gets to build some resorts on N Korean beaches." If this is not irony you may actually be too stupid for
SST. that would put you in an elite group.
If you want some insight into DT's or Kim's personalities, look at the list of people Sammy "The Bull" Gravano murdered. DT and
Kim are both criminals who have risen to the "top" through criminality. This current claptrap is DT trying to bring out the base
for the midterms. How are things in Yemen these days?
I'm pretty certain that zero of Trump's supporters live in Yemen. How about the Obama replacement 2020 candidate; are they going
to run on liberating Yemen? I'm sure that will pull the democratic base out to vote.
Many Trump supporters, and even some on the left, like to talk about the "Deep State"
secretly having complete control of our government, thus rendering our elected leaders to be
nothing more than meaningless figureheads. Let's investigate.
Long before the term 'Deep State' became popular, the term "Military Industrial Complex" was
coined by President Dwight Eisenhower.
He gave his now famous Military Industrial Complex (MIC) speech on Jan 17, 1961.
During his ominous farewell, Ike mentioned that the US was only just past the halfway point
of the century and we had already seen 4 major wars. He then went on to talk about how the MIC
was now a major sector of the economy. Eisenhower then went on to warn Americans about the
"undue influence" the MIC has on our government. He warned that the MIC has massive lobbying
power and the ability to press for unnecessary wars and armaments we would not really need, all
just to funnel money to their coffers.
Jump to Ike's warning about the "unwarranted influence... by the Military-Industrial
Complex" at 8:41
His warning though proven correct, was sadly not heeded. Within a few years JFK was
assassinated shortly after giving his "Secret government speech" warning the American people
about "secret governments and secret organizations that sought to have undue control of the
government.
JFK was in his grave for less than 9-months before Gulf of Tonkin incident which was a
series of outlandish lies about a fictitious attack on a US naval ship that never happened,
which caused the US to enter the Vietnam war.
President Johnson lied his way into a war with North Vietnam and within less than a year
would joke that "maybe the attack never happened". By the time the war ended in 1973, Johnson's
bundle of lies had killed 2.45 million people.
The MIC however, saw the Vietnam war as a great victory and a template for the future
success to their objectives. Ever since the Vietnam War, the MIC has urged the government to
enter into as many ambiguous and unwinnable wars as possible, since unwinnable wars are also
never-ending. Never-ending wars equate to never-ending revenue streams for the war
industry.
Eisenhower warned us about the concept of one particular industry taking control of our
government, but sadly his predictions fell of deaf ears.
Since Eisenhower's time several other over "Industrial Complexes" have followed the MIC
example and taken control of our government to suit their needs as well. Their objective is to
buy out politicians in order to control the purse strings of Congress and they have been highly
successful.
The list of these ÏC industries includes, but is not limited to the companies
below:
1. The Drug Industrial Complex. (DIC)
The prescription drug industry has massive control of our government and our health care
system. A recent Mayo Clinic study concluded that 70% of Americans are on at least one
prescription drug.
The most tragic example is opioids, though similar arguments can also be made in reference
to the anti-depressant epidemic, obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
The sicker America is, the better it is for the DIC.
The drug lobby is 8x larger than the gun lobby and is indirectly responsible for the deaths
of between 59.000 and 65,000 people in 2016 alone, but if we dig deeper, that number could
easily be 2 or 3 times higher, Since deaths related to opioids from infection related to opioid
related infections are extremely common Anti-depressants are being prescribed 400% more than
they were in the 1990's. They are commonly prescribed to adolescent women and we live up to the
name "Prozac Nation" when we realize that 1 in 5 women between the ages of 40 and 59 are taking
antidepressants. The list of other prescription medicines to enhance the DIC revenue streams is
extensive.
There are two primary industrial complex rules when it comes to prescription drug centric
treatment:
Firstly, no curing is allowed, ever. Treatment of conditions with temporary benefits is
allowed, but healing is not permissible, since it interrupts revenue streams.
And second, any and all "natural" or homeopathic treatment whether it be related to diet,
supplements vitamins, anti-oxidants or physical exercise/meditation should all be relegated
to "quackery." Doctors who do not adhere to the prescription drug method of treating patients
should also be referred to as adherents to "quackery" and should be reprimanded, fined and in
extreme cases have their medical licenses revoked.
2. Real Estate Industrial Complex. (RIC)
Goal: Keep housing prices rising as much as possible, year after year after year.
How this is implemented: Endorse the borrowing of money to entice people into buying
excessively large homes in order to promote the "dream" of home ownership. Once people buy into
this scheme, they are then saddled with massive home taxes to their city and the burden of the
taxes utilities that go along with owning an excessively large home. Stigmatize anyone who is
over the age of 25 and lives in the same domicile as a parent or grandparent.
Make sure all media channels repeat over and over incessantly that high real estate prices
are "signs of a great economy," while ignoring the crippling effect high home prices have on
working class families who can barely pay their mortgage.
3. College Industrial Complex
(CIC)
The average tuition in 1971-1972 was $1832.00 and now it is officially over $31,000.00.
There are over 60 colleges and universities where the tuition has already exceeded
$60,000.00 per/year.
A college education used to be something that people saved and paid cash for, but now there
has been a cultural shift where students are expected to take out loans that are often in the
hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain a college degree.
Why is this all so expensive? When we look at our universities and colleges, we see an
obsession with elaborate new buildings and sports stadiums, more than actual learning.
There are several emerging/innovative ideas to make a college education better, faster and
far more affordable. Such concepts probably won't take hold until the inevitable collapse of
the entire educational system takes place.
4. Health Insurance Industrial Complex
(HIC)
Much of the US healthcare system is now governed by the "Healthcare Affordability Act"
passed by the Obama administration in 2010.
The HIC proved how powerful they were when Congress was not allowed to read the legislation
before voting for it, publicly displaying that the HIC who wrote the bill behind closed doors
is more powerful than Congress itself.
What transparent public committees were behind this important legislation?
In reality, there was no transparency at all, this is stated clear as day by Healthcare
Affordability Act primary architect Jonathan Gruber stated: "Lack of transparency is a huge
political advantage, Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically,
that was really, really critical for the thing to pass."
The Speaker of the House at the time was Nancy Pelosi, who famously said from the leadership
podium as House Speaker: "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.'
Our elected officials were not allowed to read the most important legislation of the past 30
years before voting for or against it. There is no greater testimony to the level of
dysfunction in Congress than the Healthcare Affordability Act, formed by secret committees and
then not allowing Congress to read it before voting.
* * *
Let's think back to 1961 when Eisenhower warned us about what would become the Vietnam War.
The American people's ignoring his warning caused arms manufacturers and big business to assume
nearly complete control of US government.
If we had listened to Ike, millions of people would not have died in the wars of the last 57
years and we would have trillions of dollars less in debt. Perhaps we still have time to heed
his warning before our entire country collapses under the weight of corruption, crippling debt
and never-ending wars, let's hope so.
* * *
Kevin Paul is the founder of Alternativemediahub.com, which refers to itself as "The
megaphone of independent journalism." Born in MA, he came within 2% of winning the R party
nomination to oppose Ted Kennedy in 2006 and holds degrees in business and political
science.
"... It is our joy that during the hard years of the war the Red Army and the Soviet people were led by the wise and experienced leader of the Soviet Union – the GREAT STALIN. ..."
"... "He found Russia working with wooden plows and left her equipped with atomic piles" ..."
"... "Wait, if the revolution hadn't happened, Russia would have simply frozen at 1913 levels forever?" ..."
"... "If Tsarist Russia was so industrially backward, where did her working class come from, with the Bolshevik Party as its self-proclaimed leadership?" ..."
"... physical eradication ..."
"... Petropavlovsk ..."
"... History of a Town ..."
"... so deep ..."
"... Map of the "Future Europe" (not like Wilhelm II would have liked it!) ..."
"... lesser ..."
"... starets ..."
"... Children of the Arbat ..."
"... In turn, this makes me wonder–had an independent Ukrainian state limited to central and western Ukraine been created, how viable would it have been? After all, this state would have been landlocked ..."
"... with the caveat that I do not consider it politically realistic even for the USSR ..."
Vladislav Pravdin – GREAT STALIN (1949)
.
It is our joy that
during the hard years of the war the Red Army and the Soviet people were led by the wise and experienced
leader of the Soviet Union – the GREAT STALIN.
Translator's Foreword (Fluctuarius Argenteus)
And now for something completely
different. Instead of snippets from larger works, here's Egor Kholmogorov's two-part takedown of the notion
of "Stalin as a Russia national hero" merged into a single text.
The relationship of Russian nationalism
and Neo-Stalinism is a torturous one. Modern Neo-Stalinism emerged in the early 2000s as one aspect of an
anti-Yeltsinist and anti-Liberal consensus, an attempt to reconcile the Imperial and Soviet past under the
banner of a broadly defined Russian patriotism and do away with the kind of historical nihilism that painted
Stalin as the ultimate expression of a "millennium-old Russian yearning for slavery". Many, including the
author of the article and its translator, paid lip service to this movement in their younger years.
By approximately 2005, the movement had
gone mainstream, and by 2012, it completely morphed into a cancerous outgrowth. The nerve of early
Neo-Stalinist rhetoric was the belief that Stalin had made a U-turn from (((Old Bolshevik
cosmopolitanism))), legalised some forms of Russian national consciousness, and generally put Russian
history back on track (i.e.,
was not true Marxism, and it was good
). The Neo-Stalinism of The New Tens is virulently hostile towards
the slightest hint of Russian patriotism and a positive appraisal of pre-1917 Russia, going as far as to
condemn liking Alexander Nevsky and Peter the Great (both lionised under Stalin) as "Vlasovism" (oh the
sweet irony).
Needless to say, this text provoked some
gnashing of teeth in the Neo-Stalinist camp.
AK's Foreword
After
my takedown of Lenin
, some
people suggested that I extend it to Stalin. But what point is there when we have Kholmogorov? I agree with
this 90%, down to the biographical details of my own modest (if still regrettable)
quasi-Stalinophile sentiments
a decade ago.
This is something that afflicted many
Russian patriots of that time, being part of a general rejection of the Russophobic narratives of the
liberal elites. Support for Stalin became
intensely tribal,
and a means to troll those people. However, it has now gone on for far too long. That
particular culture war is no longer relevant, and lingering Stalinophilia now only serves to distort Russian
history and Russia's self-image of itself. It is time to put that mustachioed, medals-bedecked Halloween
costume back into the cupboard.
Although we may quibble with some details
– I had quite a few myself as I edited this – this piece may be considered to be as close to a Russian
nationalist statement on Stalin as any.
38% of Russian citizens polled by Levada Center
put Joseph Stalin at #1 among the greatest heroes of
Russian and world history. He is followed by Putin, Pushkin, Lenin, Peter I, Gagarin, Leo Tolstoy, Georgy
Zhukov, Catherine II, Lermontov, Lomonosov, Mendeleev, and even Brezhnev and Gorbachev. The only
non-Russians who made it to the top are Napoleon, Newton, and Einstein.
Well well well This is an obvious
disgrace. If trustworthy, it reveals than the average Russian doesn't have the vaguest idea about the course
of Russian and world history and the true importance of historical figures. To be fair, sociologists aren't
that far from the masses, mixing in the same poll politicians, generals, writers, and scientist, whose
relative importance just can't be measured by the scale. Essentially, this a list of the best-advertised
personalities.
The absolute disaster here is that, in
2017, almost a good half our citizens are confident enough to place Stalin at #1 in Russian and world
history. Of course, the Generalissimo here is playing the part of an epic or even mythological hero; the
details and real achievements do not matter. For our people, Stalin is a byword for "a strong Russia to be
reckoned with in the global arena". And this strength acts as an acceptable rationale for everything else:
millions of murdered Russians, from great scientists to common villagers, demolished churches and martyred
priests, a completely fleeced countryside Everything is pardoned and justified, following Isaac Deutscher's
formula
:
"He found Russia working with wooden plows and left her equipped with atomic piles"
(which is frequently misattributed to Winston Churchill instead of this obscure Trotskyite and has "atomic
piles" replaced with the "atomic bomb").
In other words, Stalin is seen by the
Russian consciousness as the architect of our incredible grandeur, which was enabled by the tremendous
industrial leap forward and Victory in the Great Patriotic War. This grandeur is enough to excuse his
transformation of Russia into a hellish bloodbath of terror.
If we put mythological and epical
thinking aside and deal with historical facts, is Stalin's #1 place among the greatest personalities in
world history, afforded by our compatriots and sociologists, in any way justified?
I have never been into anti-Stalinist
hysterics. I even published multiple articles calling to refrain from cartoonish nihilism while evaluating
Stalin's contribution to our country's Victory in the Great Patriotic War. I am an even stauncher opponent
of identifying Russia with Stalin, of using Stalin's horrifying atrocities as a pretext to erase our
national heroism and demand "reparations", "territorial concessions", and other vile nonsense. I couldn't
care less about Stalin being distasteful to other countries and nations – the Russians are blameless before
them.
What really concerns me is Stalin's
place in the history of the Russian people. And it is in this domain, no thanks to meddlesome "National
Stalinists" who go as far as to
put Stalin on icons
, where the role of this historical figure is inflated to infinity and beyond. It now
turns out that it wasn't Stalin's good fortune that the Russians stayed loyal to him during the military
debacle of 1941, as he claimed himself in his famous
Victory Toast
. No, it was a great honor and mercy for the Russians on Stalin's part, because he
condescended to rule them, shoot them, exile them where they could plow permafrost, let them get slaughtered
in Nazi encirclements, and starve them with famines. It turns out that we Russians are allegedly unworthy of
Stalin, our Messiah.
This boundless and hypertrophied
propaganda poisoning the minds of our countrymen is sometimes even more obscene than the cult of the Great
Leader as it existed in his lifetime. To heighten Stalin's pedestal, they keep placing more and more
falsehood at its base, be it myths of a pathetic backward Tsarist Russia or new slander against victims of
the regime, long rehabilitated by state security and never held in contempt by the nation or history. Even
the greatest of victims, such as
Nikolai Vavilov
, are now dragged through the mud, and the most despicable of rogues, such as
Trofim Lysenko
, are now lionized, for the sole purpose of keeping Stalin's halo intact.
That is why we have to return to the
question of Stalin the historical figure and not Stalin the myth, and enquire into the degree and character
of his greatness.
The first foundation stone of Stalin's
pedestal is the Industrialization. Allegedly, the very Russia that languished in backwardness under the
pathetically incompetent Tsars made a huge industrial leap under Stalin, storming into global industrial
leadership, beating Hitler, and becoming a superpower.
This claim is false in several
respects. First, Tsarist Russia wasn't backward either in industry or in military technology. The country
was developing dynamically, and there is no reason to suggest she would have reached a lower level of
industrial progress than the one attained by the USSR in 1939. When we were little kids, Soviet textbooks
hypnotized us with diagrams of industrial development compared to "Russia in 1913". And no one would pose
the question:
"Wait, if the revolution hadn't happened, Russia would have simply frozen at 1913 levels
forever?"
. And here's another naďve question no one came to ask Soviet history teachers:
"If
Tsarist Russia was so industrially backward, where did her working class come from, with the Bolshevik Party
as its self-proclaimed leadership?"
Russian industrialization began in the
1890s mostly thanks to the efforts of Count Sergei Witte, who was a follower of the great German economist
Friedrich List, the theorist of the forces of production (a term later plagiarized by Karl Marx) and
protectionism. An active ally of Witte's was Dmitry Mendeleev, not only a famous chemist but also an
economist who organised the Russian oil industry and also followed List's principles of economic
protectionism.
Enjoying the complete support of
Emperors Alexander III and Nicholas II, Witte achieved an impressive surge in industrial development.
However, he was often criticised for overstraining the Russian peasantry to achieve said surge, which
backfired with the unrest of 1905-06 that coincided with a cyclic crisis in world economy. In 1909, Russia
saw the start of a new economic boom and a new wave of industrialization overseen by Peter Stolypin.
Stolypin's approach was much more
merciful to the peasantry than Witte's. The countryside stopped being an economic donor and became a
full-fledged partner, reaping the benefits of industrialization together with urban areas. The Great War,
despite extreme conditions, gave an even greater boost to Russia's military and industrial development. It
was was the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as the ensuing "War Communism" and Civil War, which caused the
terrible desolation that almost plunged the country into a new Stone Age. As a member of the Bolshevik
leadership, Stalin was directly responsible for that.
Evidently, to endure as a Great Power
(and, consequently, protect the Bolshevik dictatorship from being deposed by a foreign invasion), Russia
couldn't stay at the rock bottom where Bolshevism had flung her. Hence the idea of resuming
industrialization, now under a new Communist management and based on Communist ideas. Stalinism didn't
attempt anything new here, because industrialization had already been running for a quarter of a century
under the Tsars and was in any case supported by all rival Communist factions. Stalin's contribution to
industrialization is limited to inventing a new method, not based on strong-arming the countryside (as with
Witte) or robbing it blind (as proposed by Trotsky and
Pyatakov
).
Stalin's industrialization was powered
by the
physical eradication
of the Russian countryside via forced collectivization, punitive
expeditions, mass exile, famine, and terror. Yes, this method of industrialization had been previously
unknown to the wider world and could be perfectly dispensed with, as demonstrated by Tsarist Russia. But can
the invention of cannibalism be considered a contribution to the culinary arts? Probably not.
To Stalin's credit, he was very
successful in simultaneously bleeding the country dry to gain funds for industrialization with exploiting
the vicissitudes of the global market. The Great Depression engulfed the entire world, flooding the market
with cheap imported machinery and tractors, as well as jobless American engineers. In this respect, Stalin's
industrialization turned out to be cheaper for the USSR than if it had happened at the peak of the global
business cycle. But let's not forget that Russian bread and Russian exports also became cheaper cheaper. To
turn a profit, Soviet industrialization needed not just cheap labor, but a slave-like one, spurred by a
famine stemming from Stalin's 1930-31 attempts at monopolizing global grain exports. As grain prices kept
falling during the Great Depression, the Soviet Union was forced to increase export volume and thus
physically decimate its own citizenry with starvation and terror.
In 1929, the Soviets exported 1.3
million metric tons of grain worth $68 a ton, earning $88 million. In 1930, the exports amounted to 4.8
million tons worth $45 to $60 a ton, netting a marvelous $288 million in profits. However, in October 1930,
grain prices on the world market collapsed. After completely fleecing the peasantry and exporting 5.2
million tons, Stalin earned a paltry $72 million. At the same time, a mass urban exodus from the countryside
required greater grain procurements for the domestic market as well. Combined with plummeting grain harvests
in 1931-32, this would lead to a terrible famine, now appropriated by Ukrainian nationalists under the name
of "Holodomor" and "genocide" (in reality, the Kuban and Volga regions didn't suffer any less).
Stalin's great contribution to
industrialization consisted in employing slave labor not in a Bronze Age or plantation economy, but in an
economy of the Industrial Age, a feat hitherto unknown to human history. Stalin surpassed the kings of Egypt
because the Pharaohs used slave labor to build the Pyramids only in Soviet textbooks. In reality, the work
teams of peasants that took part in those colossal construction projects were well remunerated and had
decent working conditions by Ancient Egyptian standards. Stalin demonstrated that Southern slave owners
could compete with the industry of the Union if only they had abandoned their paternalistic views of their
slaves and sent them, overseen by cruel taskmasters, to build factories, roads, and mines
Low labor costs, achieved through
extreme coercion and terror, did make the USSR capable of undertaking projects that hadn't been considered
economically viable in Tsarist Russia, such as the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, dependent on both
Kuznetsk coal and Urals ore. When capital was the main factor of production, such projects wouldn't have
made a profit. The historical Russian model of industrialization was capital-intensive: the Morozovs,
Ryabushinkys, Tereschenkos, Putilovs, Konovalovs and other tycoons invested in costly machinery, often more
advanced than in neighboring Germany. Based on this trend, the Russian-American economist Alexander
Gerschenkron wrote of the advantages of "economic backwardness", that is, a belated industrialization.
The Bolsheviks blew the old Russian
industry to smithereens. However, the Great Leader and the Great Teacher successfully triumphed over the
laws of economics. The leading economic factor in Soviet industrial projects, in Soviet circumpolar
canal-digging and railroad construction, was
labor
. Slave labor. The profitability of most
industrial projects soared, as a train full of Gulag convicts acted as a replacement for costly machinery,
which was doubly economical: money was saved on both expensive equipment and maintenance for the workers
themselves.
Stalin sought to apply the same
principle of making labor the main industrial factor while lowering the importance of capital everywhere,
including science.
Sharashkas
and threats of arrest turned out to be a better stimulus for scientific progress, in the
short run at least, than German sausages and American mansions with swimming pools. Alas, biology is
different from mechanics: Vavilov couldn't get wheat chromosomes to
vernalize
even at gunpoint, which ended in his elimination and the rise of Lysenko, who promised to
impose Stalinist labor discipline even on plant life
Is enriching global economic thought
with the principle of forced labor superiority to the capital enough to make Stalin the greatest person in
history? I don't think so. Russia used to have its own model of industrialization, which had produced
excellent results and created an industrially developed economy integrated into the global economic system.
Of course, it wasn't without its failings, and had patent elements of financial dependence. But didn't the
USSR have the same kind of dependence on foreign credit, both during and after the industrialization, though
only working harder to conceal it? Professor Katasonov's calculations
reveal
that all profits from Soviet exports, all the gold pillaged from the Church and the general
populace, all the money made from
art sales
couldn't pay for the equipment imported by the USSR. This meant that the Soviets were
systematically dependent on foreign loans, which Stalin himself acknowledged on multiple occasions in his
correspondence. In this respect, the Great Leader merely differed from the Tsar in hiding his debts from the
masses.
World War II caught Stalin's Soviet
Union in the midst of an incomplete industrialization, dependent on foreign imports in many types of
machinery, up to the eyes in debt, with a part of the populace – oftentimes the intellectually and
economically superior one – exterminated or jailed, and with a unique slave-labor driven industrial economy.
Any organic path of Russia's development, especially Stolypin's, would have given Russia much better
historical prospects.
But perhaps the Stalinist Soviet Union
developed some kind of unique technology that was beyond the powers of old Russia? Nope. Stalin did bequeath
us the proverbial atomic piles, using slave labor and nuclear espionage to save the billions of dollars
spent by the USA on the Manhattan Project, which the Soviets simply didn't have. God forbid me from
chastising Stalin for that act of espionage – actually, it was one of his greatest and most innocent
achievements that cost only two human lives (the Rosenbergs) and saved millions of them.
However, Stalin kept dreaming of Soviet
battleships for the entirety of reign, but the USSR never managed to complete its large warships program.
The naval contribution to the defense of Leningrad in WWII consisted of
Gangut
and
Petropavlovsk
, two Tsarist battleships built by
Admiral Grigorovich
and paid for by a Duma browbeaten into submission by Stolypin. Soviet aircraft
carriers at that time were also a complete impossibility.
The story of Stalin's fighter planes
turned into a tale of endless anguish for engineers, constructors, and pilots, which the Great Leader
himself confirmed by mass imprisonment of the apparatchiks responsible for the wartime aircraft production
(the so-called "Aviation Affair"). The same thing happened with bombers: It would suffice to mention that
the Soviet Tu-4 was a reverse-engineered copy of the American B-29.
These examples have nothing to do with
the myth of Russia's backwardness. Quite to the contrary: Russia, by virtue of NOT being a backward country
and having amassed a huge intellectual and technological potential, could survive the emigration and mass
murder of scientists and engineers and the savagery of the slave labor system, and advance to new
technological horizons. However, almost all of these new horizons were revealed to us by "old-schoolers".
The most prominent of the Soviet scientists involved in the nuclear and missile projects came almost
exclusively from the ranks of the "enemy class
These examples have nothing to do with
the myth of Russia's backwardness. Quite to the contrary: Russia, by virtue of NOT being a backward country
and having amassed a huge intellectual and technological potential, could survive the emigration and mass
murder of scientists and engineers and the savagery of the slave labor system, and advance to new
technological horizons. However, almost all of these new horizons were revealed to us by "old-schoolers".
The most prominent of the Soviet scientists involved in the nuclear and missile projects came almost
exclusively from the ranks of the "enemy class" of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, receiving their
education either before the Revolution or in the 1920s, when the old foundations of education hadn't been
completely ruined. Without these human resources, Stalin wouldn't have had a shot at leaving Russia with
atomic piles. The same atomic piles, however, could well have be developed by the same date by a Tsar
Alexey Nikolayevich
or
Mikhail Alexandrovic
h
By the way, about those plows that
Stalin "found Russia" with. Indeed, Stalin took Russia with wooden plows from Lenin. And Lenin had grabbed
Russia by the neck after she had lost her Tsar, under whose rule she had been a country with automobiles,
armored cars, Sikorsky airplanes, early aircraft carriers, battleships and tank blueprints. And the truth is
that Stalin took Russia from Lenin with plows and left her with the same implements. The plow was in use in
1953 just as in 1924, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (the
sokha
, the Russian light wooden
plow, is better suited to certain soil types than heavier plows). All in all, measuring the trajectory of
Stalinism in terms of plows and atomic piles is a gross oversimplification.
However, let us not lapse into slander
and calumny by claiming that all Stalin's achievements came only as a result of cannibalism and mass
destruction of his own citizens. After the war, many residential and industrial objects in the Soviet Union
were erected by German POWs, following the same slave labor model. Some select citizens of the USSR whirled
around Moscow in an Opels (rechristened Moskvitch) while sporting nice Carl Zeiss glasses. Stalinist
industrialization got a new a material and moral resource: Victory. And that Cictory is what our compatriots
deservedly count as one of Stalin's greatest achievements.
Can the victor in the greatest war in
history
not
be named the greatest man in history? This is a story for our next article.
So, let's go back to Stalin as the
"greatest person in Russian and world history". This reputation – to the degree that it actually exists
among the populace and wasn't engineered by sociologists – dwells mostly upon the Soviet Victory in the
Great Patriotic War. World War II being the greatest war ever waged by mankind, it seems reasonable and
justified to hail the victor in this war as the greatest man ever.
There can be a lot of objections to
this. First, the Great Patriotic War was just one part of World War II, won fair and square by the United
States. The Americans, having lost the least amount of people by dint of replacing them with guns and
dollars, using the Russians to do the bloody work, and stealing the thunder of their British allies, went on
to become the masters of the postwar world order.
Even during the Cold War, the USSR was,
for a long time, a mere challenger to American supremacy and not an equal contender. And we all know how
this war ended for us. The US victory in WWII under President Roosevelt is undisputed. He died when their
victory was a
fait accompli
, and President Truman took no new decisions of his own (Roosevelt would
have probably nuked Hiroshima, too). But is Roosevelt the greatest person in history? Not quite! He keeps
getting flak from the left and the right, even for his New Deal, even for his meagre concessions to the
Soviets in Tehran and Yalta. Even in the US proper, his ranking among top US presidents never rises above
#2, and usually he occupies the #3 spot.
Regarding Russia, her greatest pre-1941
war was the Patriotic War of 1812, greatest by the stature of the enemy (Napoleon, one of the greatest
characters in history), by the size and the power of his Army of the Twelve Nations, the tragedy of the fall
of the Russian capital, the charity and sacrifice of the nobility, the merchant class, and the peasantry,
the complete destruction of the adversary – in all these respects, the "thunder of 1812" was historically
unparalleled. Who won this war? Alexander I the Blessed. To quote Pushkin's lines, "he conquered Paris, he
founded
the Lyceum
".
But is this Emperor counted among the
all-time greats of Russian history, according to Levada or whatever other poll? No. He is half-forgotten,
his reputation destroyed by ignominious military settlements (still less outrageous than the Gulag), the
infamy of
Arakcheevschina
(still not quite the
Yezhovschina
), the sin of patricide[1] (is it worse than Patria-cide?), the ridicule of other, much less
flattering Pushkin poems[2]. And if it is ever to be proven that he was already been canonised by the
Orthodox Church as a saint and revered by the common folk under the name of Feodor Kuzmich[3], this glory
and grace would only be bestowed upon his second life, granted to expiate the sins of the first.
Stalin founded no Lyceum, he created
the sharashkas, and, to paraphrase Saltykov-Schedrin's
History of a Town
, "torched public schools
and abolished (some of) the sciences". He didn't reach Paris but quite definitely conquered Berlin, a feat
unseen since the days of Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, God bless her memory. He lucked out with his enemy –
Hitler wasn't as great as Napoleon, but he was extraordinary vile towards the Russians and brought Russia
untold of devastation. Before the invasion, his generals fulminated with very clear instructions: "war
crimes in the East are not to be considered as such", "any cultural assets in the East do not matter".
Anyone who would stand between Hitler and the Russians and organize resistance was deserving of great
praise.
Stalin is deserving of such praise,
too. He managed to collect himself and lead the struggle, distributing his forces so that Hitler's onslaught
got bogged down in Russia's expanse and failing to reach any Russian capital except Kiev. He evacuated and
thus preserve the bulk of Soviet industrial production. The army that he assumed supreme command of
experienced almost no defeats after November 1942 and led an unstoppable march to the Elbe. Stalin was
prudent enough to make peace with the Russian people and unfurl the banner of Russian patriotism – quickly
furled back up after the war but not as completely, since no one dared to derogate the Russians as brazenly
as in the 1920s and 1930s. Stalin was shrewd enough while dealing with the Alleis that the USSR ended the
war with large, even somewhat excessive gains. It is historically disingenuous to deny Stalin these
achievements, and it would be nothing but a parallel falsehood to the rising tide of diehard Stalinist lies,
which provoked this essay in the first place.
If we are to speak of Stalin's greatness
in world history and Russian history, his halo needs to be knocked down a couple of notches. Who is to blame
but the country's political and military leader for allowing the claws of the German eagle to sink
so
deep
into the chest of our eagle-turned-red-star? Who is to answer for the unthinkable casualties
sustained by our army in the 1941 encirclements?
Of course, these losses can't be deemed
"excessive". Modern calculations place Soviet and German irrevocable military losses at 11.5 million vs. 8.6
million, a ratio of 1:3 to 1. But what are these 3 million "surplus" dead if not the price paid for the
chaos and incompetence reigning in 1941, especially in September and October, when the tide of the
Blitzkrieg seemed to have been stemmed?
Yes, June 22, 1941 was a case of the
Wehrmacht's military luck, intensified by a vile sneak attack. Luck has its place in warfare. But the
encirclements near Kiev and Vyazma, the siege of Leningrad, to say nothing of the crushing 1942 defeats,
were less a case of German good luck than our own failures.
The more one reads documents and
memoirs, the clearer it is that Stalin's interference in warfare was incompetent, arbitrary, and
short-sighted. He was intelligent, driven, obstinate, obsessive about details, and despotic, all great
qualities for a general, but his mind was corrupted by Bolshevism, a belief that applying enough pressure is
all it takes to achieve a result, and a resulting utopian mindset. His meticulousness often turned into
nitpicking, and he would obsess over trivial details. In spite of the Neo-Stalinist mythology, his views
were ideologically blinkered in many important questions. Given the conditions of a hyper-centralized system
of military management, all of the Commander-in-Chief's foibles, all of his idiosyncrasies and fantasies
took their greatly magnified toll on the real command of warfare. Yes, Stalin was smarter than Hitler, but
setting the bar for greatness so low would be embarrassing even for the Generalissimo himself.
"It is all well and good", some might
say, "and a lot of what you say might be true –
but don't forget, the winner takes it all.
"
Perhaps a winner does take it all, but
it doesn't make him immune to criticism for misusing his spoils of victory. An untold loss of life,
devastation, suffering, the horror of POW camps, occupation, and terror should have given the Russian a
right to sizeable reparations. Did Stalin give its due to the nation he called "great" in his Victory Toast?
Let's give an objective rundown of military gains and talk about Stalin's diplomacy.
When you hear any talk of Stalinism as
an era when Russia was a Great Power to be reckoned with, you should realize that World War II started, and
started the way it did, only because the pre-war Stalinist USSR was a pariah state, a rogue state written
off by everyone. Through Foreign Affairs Commissar Maksim Litvinov, Stalin kept proclaiming a policy of
collective defense, trying to cobble together anti-Fascist coalitions. He waged a "proxy war" with the Nazis
in Spain, which was such an ideological trash fire that many past Republican sympathizers had to admit that
Franco, a rational nationalist with a strong vision of unity, was better than bloodthirsty Red psychos.
Nothing revealed the truth about Red methods for the European Liberal Left and pitted former fellow
travelers against the Soviet Union quite like the Spanish Civil War.
When, in 1938, an agreement regarding
the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was reached in Munich, no one bothered to ask the opinion of the USSR,
an alleged "Great Power".
When, in 1938, an agreement regarding
the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was reached in Munich, no one bothered to ask the opinion of the USSR,
an alleged "Great Power". This pushed Stalin towards a reasonable and prudent idea: if you can't side with
hyenas against a wolf, you pit the wolf against the hyenas. In his 1939 pact with Hitler, Stalin attempted,
without a major war or sometimes without a single shot fired, to restore the territorial losses of 1918: the
Baltics, Western Ukraine and Belarus, and Bessarabia. He bungled with Finland but at least got Vyborg back.
He also grabbed what hadn't belonged to Russia but should have: Galicia and Bukovina (the latter would be
cited by Hitler as a pretext for the invasion on June 22, 1941).
Was this return to imperial borders
justified? It was. Did Stalin do well by this? Probably yes. Did those returned territories do any good for
the Russians? Not at all. Stalin fixed the crimes and mistakes of Lenin, a fellow Bolshevik. He pushed the
balance of Russian history from "in the red" to "zero". Doesn't sound much for a "great leader".
But what happened to the regathered
lands? They were turned into ethnic republics that easily "de-occupied" themselves in 1991. Only tiny tracts
of borderlands were annexed to the Pskov oblast. A once heavily Russified Vilna, recaptured from Poland, was
given to the Lithuanian SSR. A Moldovan Republic was merged from Bessarabia and Transnistria, which is now
on its way to fusing with Romania and dragging the Transnistrian Russians with it. However, Stalin's most
toxic and jinxed gift of all was Galicia. The entirety of Ukrainiznig potential accumulated there over the
course of Austrian and Polish dominance engulfed Soviet Ukraine and dragged it into the abyss of
"anti-Moskalism". Stalin could fight the Banderites however he wanted, but, in the national absence of a
Russian idea in the USSR, with Ukrainism propped up by all means possible, it became inevitable that
Ukrainian identity would crystallize according to Galician precepts. Petro Poroshenko owes an enormous debt
to Stalin, who enabled the Ukrainization of Ukrainizers.
All of these toxic gifts came with a
terrible price, paid for by our people during the war. This price gave the Russians the right to expect even
greater gifts, now destined only for the Russian people and no one else.
So what happened in reality? Pechenga,
once the scene of
St. Tryphon of Pechenga's
ascetic devotion, became Russian once again. Another restoration of what had
been ours before. Carpathian Ruthenia, however, despite the pleas of Rusyn delegates to incorporate their
land into the RSFSR, was not united with Russia and sacrificed on the altar of Ukrainization.
The rest was a gift to Poland, that
backstabber who managed to reap three harvests from the same field. In exchange for restoring to Russia what
Lenin had given away with the
Riga peace treaty
, they occupied, with Stalin's consent, all of Eastern Germany, and expelled its ethnic
German population, and gained highly developed industrial regions, and received the lion's share of East
Prussia, and got the Augustów district back from the USSR, and kept running around the world for 80 years
complaining about the "Russian occupation" and demanding Lvov and Grodno back. Talk about stuffing the
goose! And who kept feeding that pocket monster as a ploy to appease the British? Stalin, that's who.
If there's ever a World War III, it
will start with a NATO blockade of Kaliningrad. And Stalin would be to blame for that, because he stripped
the Augustów district from Belarus and carved up East Prussia in such a way that our communications with
Kaliningrad stretch through Lithuania, always eager to block them entirely. Another toxic gift, because
Stalin didn't even believe that Prussia would not stay with the Russians forever. He wanted to trade it in
exchange for German neutrality, which is why the first wave of Russian settlement there mainly consisted of
exiles. As a result, it wasn't really Stalin's gift to the Russians but Adenauer's: the West German
Chancellor wasn't swayed by the prospect of neutrality.
The same happened in the Far East.
Stalin did the barest minimum of what every government of nationalist Russia would have done in a military
grudge match against Japan: restoring the losses of the Russo-Japanese War and grabbing the Kuril Islands
"for the trouble". However, even those gains were left in a suspended and toxic state. Instead of
strong-arming Japan into accepting the totality of our gains without further delay, the peace treaty
question was dragged out until it blossomed into the mythical problem of the so-called Northern Territories.
Toxic gifts, here we go again.
Let's not forget the assets in Manchuria
sacrificed in the name of solidarity with Red China – the Chinese Eastern Railway and Dalniy/Dalian, all the
more frustrating because Manchuria's specificities made it possible to give it a
sui generis
status
profitable to the Soviets.
What could have been
:
Map of the "Future Europe" (not like Wilhelm II would have liked it!)
For the USSR, WWII resulted in
lesser
territorial gains that would have been plausibly claimed by Russia at the end of the Great War,
which was "surrendered" by the Bolsheviks in Brest-Litovsk. Almost everywhere he would go, Stalin only
picked up what had been squandered by Lenin. He failed to gain from a crushing German defeat even a half of
what could have and would have been acquired by the Tsar. Under the Tsar, Galicia would have been
incorporated into Russia under a Russian banner (to say nothing of the Turkish Straits). The few
acquisitions of the Soviet Empire actually beneficial for the Russians, such as Kaliningrad, turned out to
be this way almost by pure happenstance.
As part of a package deal involving
these gains, the Russians got a bunch of freeloaders that had to be schooled in the ways of Communism and
kept in line at gunpoint (East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia). And they had to be fed, fed, and fed once
again. Exhausting the Russians under the burden of hangers-on in an incomprehensible Communist experiment is
hardly a solid basis for greatness.
If we calculate the war losses of our
nation and our more than modest gains, our victory was indeed Pyrrhic – as great as it was unprofitable. If
it was indeed a historical comeback, it remedied not the historical faults of Tsarist Russia but those of
Stalin's mentor Lenin, who had wrecked historical Russia both morally and territorially.
Let's give Stalin his due. He knew very
well that he had started the war and had been rubbish at managing it. The Russians had every reason to give
him the boot. He explicitly mentioned this in the Victory Toast:
"A different people could have said
to the Government: "You have failed to justify our expectations. Go away. We shall install another
government which will conclude peace with Germany and assure us a quiet life."
However, Stalin also considered the
Russians' understanding that "running away" from a world war, failing to complete it for a second time would
be tantamount to ending our history as a great nation. This was evident to both people of intelligence and
the national instinct of the masses. Even such a fervent anti-Communist as Ivan Ilyin wrote that a desertion
similar to the one of 1917 was impossible, that one had to fight on and win. Stalin harnessed this resource
of Russian prudence and patience to reap the laurels of victory. However, he failed to repay most of his
"debts" to the Russians.
The war was barely over, but Marxist
historians wasted no time in trampling all over the academic defenders of Russian Imperial legacy led by
Academician Tarle
. By Stalin's and Zhdanov's decree, the term "Russian nation-state" was almost
completely purged from the historical idiom. Orthodox hierarchs were still needed for reasons of
international diplomatic representation, but the persecution of the Church would make a comeback, including
the closure of churches (bear in mind that most of the churches "opened under Stalin" were churches that
reopened by themselves under German occupation, and churches reopened in Stalin-held territories were a drop
in the ocean). Barely four years after the victory, state security boss Viktor Abakumov would torture those
few Soviet apparatchiks who dared to have but a smidgen of Russian identity. Stalin would destroy his
incredibly talented assistant Nikolay Voznesenskiy, ruining all chances of the USSR being led by an
intellectually developed Russian person. In the USSR, a prison of the Russian people designed by Lenin and
built by Stalin, they briefly opened a fresh-air shutter and then slammed it shut.
We, Russians, cannot elevate this man to
the rank of the greatest genius in history while keeping a straight face. We cannot sell our memory –
mutilated national livelihood, demolished churches, massacred priests and murdered scientists, engineers,
and poets, our forefathers exiled to Siberia for refusing to give their last horse to Red activists – for a
minute of Stalin's "Victory Toast".
Yes, we should be fair in our historical
judgement and shouldn't defame Stalin with the fantasies of the "children of the Arbat"[4]. But we also
should, with even greater force and rage, be fair in the opposite respect: never cutting Stalin any slack
for his horrifying sins, mistakes, cruelties, and injustices, never forgetting just how many eggs he broke
to make his omelet.
***
[1] Alexander I is
widely accepted to have been complicit in the palace coup that led to the death of his
father Paul I.
[2] For instance,
in the so-called Chapter X of
Eugene Onegin
Pushkin described Alexander I as
"a feeble and conniving ruler, a bald fop, the enemy of all work, crowned with glory by
happenstance".
[3] Legend has it
that Alexander I, remorseful of his past misdeeds and faced with a profound religious
crisis, feigned his own death in 1825 and fled to Siberia, where he lived as a
starets
(mystic hermit) under the name of Feodor Kuzmich (died 1864). The Orthodox
Church officially canonized Feodor Kuzmich as a saint in 1984 but rejects his
identification with the Emperor.
[4] Reference to
Anatoly Rybakov's 1987 novel
Children of the Arbat
(referring to a central
Moscow street populated by high-ranking "Old Bolsheviks" after the revolution), a
hallmark of Perestroika anti-Stalinism, where Stalin was portrayed as a
one-dimensionally diabolical and sadistic figure.
38% of Russian citizens polled by Levada Center put Joseph Stalin at #1 among the greatest heroes of
Russian and world history. He is followed by Putin, Pushkin, Lenin, Peter I, Gagarin, Leo Tolstoy, Georgy
Zhukov, Catherine II, Lermontov, Lomonosov, Mendeleev, and even Brezhnev and Gorbachev. The only
non-Russians who made it to the top are Napoleon, Newton, and Einstein.
Well well well This is an obvious disgrace. If trustworthy, it reveals than the average Russian
doesn't have the vaguest idea about the course of Russian and world history and the true importance of
historical figures.
How
trustworthy
is it? Volgograd hasn't been renamed Stalingrad. The still popular in Russia Putin
has spoken out against Stalin era oppression. By and large, the May 9 Victory Day honors the Russian people,
without emphasizing Stalin.
A Moldovan Republic was merged from Bessarabia and Transnistria, which is now on its way to fusing
with Romania and dragging the Transnistrian Russians with it.
Any polling support of this? At last glance, Moldovan support for becoming a part of Romania is closer to
15% than 33%. Either way, there's no majority. In addition, the Gagauz have a legit basis to break from
Moldova, were it to merge with Romania. Never mind trying to get Pridnestrovie (
Transnistria
) to go
along with such a move.
Pridnestrovie is ethnically pretty evenly distributed among Russiasn, Ukrainians and Moldovans, while
having a pro-Russian outlook.
Upon further review, I came across this reference to a poll on Moldovan support for becoming a part of
Romania:
Still a clear minority, with a noticeably strong opposition in Gagauzia (under the control of Moldova)
and the disputed territory of Pridnestrovie (which has essentially been separate from Moldova since the
Soviet breakup).
Stalin's great contribution to industrialization consisted in employing slave labor not in a Bronze
Age or plantation economy, but in an economy of the Industrial Age Stalin surpassed the kings of Egypt
because the Pharaohs used slave labor to build the Pyramids only in Soviet textbooks. In reality, the
work teams of peasants that took part in those colossal construction projects were well remunerated and
had decent working conditions by Ancient Egyptian standards
Really? '
Slave labor
' was never used to build Industry? This is just silly, and borders on its own
nihilism. From pre-Victorian Britain to US company towns and China's recent out-sourcing paradise, the
quasi-slave methods have always been used to build industry. There was nothing all that extra-ordinary about
1930′s Soviet Union, other than sheer size. That's how stuff gets built.
And the belated, romantic look at the builders of the Pyramids is neither here, nor there. We don't know,
but I suspect the day to day conditions were not that great and probably approximated what peasants building
endless dams in Soviet Union experienced.
Stalin was a Bolshevik and Bolshevism was a revenge, not an economic ideology.
Stalin's mind was corrupted by Bolshevism, a belief that applying enough pressure is all it takes to
achieve a result
True, but why is there no mention of why tens of millions were ready for the revenge on the system? The
life before Bolsheviks wasn't that great and WWI bloody mess was the last straw; the Bolshie nihilism came
out of enormous suffering.
I often hear that it was 'about to get better', 'look at European welfare states' or New Deal. I wouldn't
be so sure. After hundreds of years of not caring why would the elites voluntarily change the systems to be
more broadly-based and spread the wealth? What makes people think that
the 20th century enormous
egalitarian progress
was about to happen without the threat of Bolshevism, socialism of all kinds,
Maoism, even fascism in its more populist forms?
We can see that right after the 'revenge' systems collapsed in the late 20th century, the elites
immediately went back to restoring the wonderful neo-liberal systems from the early 20th century. There is
no fear any more, so why not? Why not have it all? We are living in a transition era before the real
consequences hit again. Beginnings are often fun, the neo-liberalism is a pyramid system with its asset
privatisation and appreciation, there are lost of winners in the first few decades. But we are heading
towards the same paralysis that spawned Bolshevism and other basically revenge philosophies. I would worry
about that a lot more than about 'Lithuania' blocking the Augustow pass to Kaliningrad (Russia has planes
and ships, don't they?).
I wasn't even aware that Stalin had any connection to that idea. The way I had heard it, it was Beria who
was favorable to German re-unification – but Khrushchev won the power struggle.
That means nothing, do you have a point? Would you like to be an English coal-miner in the early 19th
century? Or a peasant on Polish latifundias in Galicia? Or work 12 hours a day for Foxconn in Shenzhen
today?
Tens of millions out of hundreds of millions isn't much.
Ok, I can go with hundreds of millions seeking revenge on the system towards the end of WWI. They were
clearly either a majority or close to it.
Russia had no choice but to fight to the end in WWII. Win or lose. If they lost they would be largely gone
today, physically gone. And so would Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians and a few other ethnic groups.
Surviving is not an '
epic failure
', it is better that the alternative. The post-WWII settlement
was about the best Russia could had done, small adjustments here and there, but they basically got it right.
The issue was that they didn't know how to disengage and withdraw. By 1960′s they should had let go. On
their own terms. And that wasn't Stalin's fault, but his successors.
"win back lost three provinces of Greater Romania"
That is tricky because one cannot really define Greater Romania or most other states in that region.
There are no natural borders, the population was mixed. E.g. who does Silesia 'naturally' belong to? The
shift of Poland westward was quite unnatural, but probably the best of all available options. I agree that
adding Galicia to Ukraine was a disaster, but what was an alternative? You couldn't reunite 5-10 million
Ukrainians with Poland. And they were not viable as a separate state at that time.
Obviously Galicia is a sparsely populated and financially irrelevant shithole in Ukraine. It's political
relevance is massively overrated ( plus many have left there to go to Russia or Poland) .the big problem is
American money or organisations over there, not the political power of the individuals there.
[Hide MORE]
Obviously it's to do with American money because the "nationalism" of the fuckedup fake sytate of Ukraine makes even less
sense if propagated by idiots from Galicia ( so does the fantasism about the Golodomor, for a region
never touched by it)
The Soros/State Department for the orange revolution and other elections either side of it then
criminally exaggeratd the number of people living there, and then under-exaggerated massively the
amount of people in the most populous areas of Ukraine (Novorossiya 5 out of 7) hence why we had all
these retarded lies about "120% turnout in Donetsk)
I am not familiar with Herr Rudel, but let me try to explain:
Keeping Silesia as part of Germany after
WWII was untenable – most Germans were expelled, or about to be driven out. Poles were very, very angry, and
the resulting geography would threaten both shrunken Poland (Galicia was gone) and Czechoslovakia. Silesia
reaches out quite far eastward.
Making it a part of East Germany would make E Germany too big for the Western allies. That could be
reshuffled, but went against 'let's keep divided Germany as small as possible' attitude at Potsdam.
The option of having an independent Silesia, with 'Silesian' ethnicity (it does exist), was economically
not viable: land-locked, surrounded, destroyed.
So what would be a better option than (re-)uniting it with Poland and allowing millions of Poles from the
Galician east to move there? It has been relatively stable.
You should cut it out, you are being irrelevant. I am talking 'industrialisation', that has happened in
different countries at different times. I can find 'company towns' in US (Colorado mines ) that were
brutally exploitative. And you can find huge relatively nice areas of Russia's industrialisation. Picking up
the worst examples in one, and the best in another is not serious.
The 5-year old miners in England in
1840′s were not better off than most peasants in Russia sent to build a big dam. It was all sh..t, thus the
revenge I mentioned today check out some working conditions in Asia, is Stalin responsible for that?
So what? The Ukrainization had already wrought tremendous changes by 1932 when it was scaled back. And it
seems obvious that Galicians would shift their attention east as they sought to break free of Poland and
weren't powerful enough to stand on their own.
If your argument is that the "average" Stalinist experience for the working person was not any worse than
the "average" experience in an industralizing country like America or Britain, then you are truly a comical,
damned fool.
The whole point of what made the Soviet Union so bad was that the average was nasty, poor,
and brutal beyond any other country in modern history.
For example. Digging a canal is always hard work. When the Erie Canal was built in New York State in the
early 1800s, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 workers died during the process – virtually all of them during
a malaria epidemic when working in a swampy area. A small pox epidemic is said to have killed about 1,200
Chinese coolies building the Transcontinental Railroad in America, and a few more may have died due to
Indian attacks in the Nevada wilderness.
By contrast, death estimates for the Moscow-Volga canal alone range from as low as 30,000 (!) to around a
million (!). So around a hundred years after less than a thousand Americans died on a big canal project,
Stalin and his minions managed to exceed their death total by several tens of thousands. Why is this? With
all of the technology developed by the 20th century, it still takes many more thousands of deaths to
accomplish a big task? Couldn't great Comrade Stalin – friend of Russian people – do better than those awful
western capitalist bosses?
Perhaps because capitalists in Britain and America actually fed their employees? Whereas Stalinist
laborers could not eat?
On the other hand, sometimes Stalin could be quite, uh, paternalistic towards his beloved industrial
slaves. For example, one P.I. Shcherbakov reports the following story from the building of the Moscow-Volga
Canal: "On July, 4, 1934, Joseph Stalin himself had visited the construction site. Observing the foundation
pit, he noticed that the inmates were working barefoot. Even if it was in summer, the weather was not very
warm. Stalin immediately interrogated his retinue – the directors of the project – why the workers have no
footwear. They stalled, saying that they had to bring too many workers on the site, and that the footwear
was on the way. The Leader ordered abruptly the footwear to be delivered within two hours, and several men
in charge for the provision to be shot. They were shot right away near the ditch."
Had Germany won WW1 (not going into WW2), it most certainly would have rearranged borders further to
its liking. Reasonable failure.
Bethmann-Hollweg put forth Germany's demands with the
Septemberprogramm
.
They were:
France should cede some northern territory, such as the iron-ore mines at Briey and a coastal strip
running from Dunkirk to Boulogne-sur-Mer, to Belgium or Germany.
France should pay a war indemnity of 10 billion German Marks, with further payments to cover veterans'
funds and to pay off all of Germany's existing national debt. This would prevent French rearmament, make
the French economy dependent on Germany, and end trade between France and the British Empire.
France will partially disarm by demolishing its northern forts.
Belgium should be annexed to Germany or, preferably, become a "vassal state", which should cede
eastern parts and possibly Antwerp to Germany and give Germany military and naval bases.
Luxembourg should become a member state of the German Empire.
Buffer states would be created in territory carved out of the western Russian Empire, such as Poland,
which would remain under German sovereignty "for all time".
Germany would create a Mitteleuropa economic association, ostensibly egalitarian but actually
dominated by Germany. Members would include the new buffer states.
The German colonial empire would be expanded. The German possessions in Africa would be enlarged into
a contiguous German colony across central Africa (Mittelafrika) at the expense of the French and Belgian
colonies. Presumably to leave open future negotiations with Britain, no British colonies were to be
taken, but Britain's "intolerable hegemony" in world affairs was to end.
The Netherlands should be brought into a closer relationship to Germany while avoiding any appearance
of coercion.
Sounds a lot like the European Union.
Noteworthy that the German reparations' demand is about thirteen times smaller than Versailles imposed on
the Germans (granted, the war was only a month old at the time). Land over money apparently.
Not listed here, but the Germans also intended to continue their Drang nach Osten by settling veterans in
the east. Nothing like Generalplan Ost of course.
After the collapse of Russia, Germany started realizing some of these aims by setting up a network of
puppet states in Eastern Europe ruled by German princes.
By contrast, death estimates for the Moscow-Volga canal alone range from as low as 30,000 (!) to
around a million (!).
Well, a million is just nonsense. It's possible that 30,000 is also nonsense. In addition to the Erie
canal there are unfortunately other examples
"A cruel tax and trade-usurious exploitation of the peasantry (in India) had caused widespread hunger .
If 1825-1850. the famine twice struck the country and claimed 0.4 million human lives, in 1850-1875 famine
killed 5 million, in 1875-1900. -- 26 million."
(ИСТОРИЯ ВОСТОКА IV Восток в новое время (конец XVIII -- начало XX в.) Книга 2)
The industrialization of Western Europe was accompanied by the murder (direct or indirect) of tens, maybe
hundreds of millions of people. And America was part of the same system (the transatlantic slave trade was
measured in numbers with six zeros)
It's also not only in India, but industrialization in the UK was not following very 'ethical labour' inside
the UK itself.
Revealed: Industrial Revolution was powered by child slaves
Child labour was the crucial ingredient which allowed Britain's Industrial Revolution to succeed, new
research by a leading economic historian has concluded.
After carrying out one of the most detailed statistical analyses of the period, Oxford's Professor
Jane Humphries found that child labour was much more common and economically important than previously
realised. Her estimates suggest that, by the early 19th century, England had more than a million child
workers (including around 350,000 seven- to 10-year-olds) – accounting for 15 per cent of the total
labour force. The work is likely to transform the academic world's understanding of that crucial period
of British history which was the launch-pad of the nation's economic and imperial power
Her work has revealed that during most of the 18th century only around 35 per cent of ten year old
working-class boys were in the labour force while the figure for 1791-1820 (when large scale
industrialisation started) was 55 per cent, rising to 60 per cent for the period of 1821-1850.
The number of eight-year-old working-class boys at work also rose substantially in that period – with
around a third of them being part of the work force between 1791 and 1850 compared to less than 20 per
cent before 1791.
(there was basically zero support for Russian nationalists of course, with no substantial number of
Ukrainians from Russian-ruled Ukraine joining the Whites)
You're big on giving personal anecdotes. I've heard from folks knowing the Whites in Ukraine, that
Ukrainian was spoken among those with Russian Empire roots (not Galician) fighting on the side of the
Whites. That recollection is quite believable given the actual circumstances.
Petliura's support was limited and his forces were unable to successfully defeat the Whites. Petliura's
weakness explains his willingness to become Pilsudski's puppet in a move that saw Petliura recognizing all
of Galicia going to Poland. In turn, the Galician Ukrainian Army en masse came under the command of the
Russian Whites.
If your argument is that the "average" Stalinist experience for the working person was not any worse
than the "average" experience in an industralizing country like America or Britain
You provide a classical straw man diversion, so common among 'educated' in the West. No, my argument is
that industrialization, then and now, in 19th century or in the 1930′s, is often a painful, violent,
unpleasant process. I specifically mentioned China's today outsourced factories where people work 12 hours,
jump from roofs, and live pretty close to a slave life. That was very common in 19th century England where
5-year olds were dropped to 'mine for coal'.
Your method is predictably faulty: pick a worst examples, worst place, worst time (1930′s) in Russia,
exaggerate or quote '
some people say that maybe a 1 million died..
' and compare it to heavily '
explained
'
case in Britain or US, with allusions to 'malaria', etc.. and that gives you a self-satisfied feeling that,
of course, the sh..t in Britain-US doesn't stink, and never did. Forget slavery, Victorian child labor,
koolies, forget all of that and just focus razor-sharp on that 'Volga-canal'.
And you are surprised nobody takes you seriously? Fighting straw men is the true fools's errand
It was a disaster because it created a dysfunctional Ukraine with populations quite different and attitudes
that are hard to reconcile. But it took a few generations, in 1945 I still think it was the best among the
available bad options.
If you ask me to start from scratch (that was not possible in 1945 with all the emotions), I would say
that Galicia existence as a province of a larger 'Habsburg-lite' country might had worked the best. It would
fit the pro-Western orientation of Galicians, keep them in 'Europe', and allow the east to rationally
develop on its own. That was not an option in 1945, so we got the mess that we have today. It will get much
worse before this is settled.
Here is a problem I see with what you are doing (this applies to Kholmogorov as well): you are tearing
down an idol without offering anything in its place. Stalin for Russians is more than a war-time leader,
he is a religious figure, a moustached Russian Jesus. Ukrainians, who reject Stalin are expected to
worship Stepan Bandera, but what will Russians believe in? People in this part of the world have a need
for some idols in their lifes.
Russians and Ukrainians have better alternatives than Stalin and Bandera to look to with pride.
Why should the British oligarchy
care
about the plight of Indians?
Whom should it provide those
excuses to, anyway?
It would only be comparable if the "British oligarchy" had starved a couple of million Englishmen to
death (the English being the state-making people of Britain). However, as I recall, the last famine
affecting ENGLAND occurred prior to the Black Death (!).
Stalin's heavy handedness in Galicia didn't help things from a Soviet and to a certain degree Russian
viewpoint.
The Galician Ukrainians were generally not happy with being ruled by Poland. Having Russian speaking
Soviets (including some Ukrainians) being brutal following Molotov-Ribbentrop and before the Nazi attack on
the USSR, nurtured a convoluted image among those with a pro-Bandera/Captive Nations Committee sentiment.
But Galicians have by and large been content to develop within a Ukrainian state. They often refer to
themselves as the 'Piedmont of Ukraine' and relish their role of being in the vanguard of Ukraine's national
revival. In fact, I know of no Galician of any stature that has advocated Galicia apart from the rest of
Ukraine – the Western Ukrainian Republic was an anomaly that lasted for a short time and was only to be a
temporary solution for Ukraine's larger development.
To provide context doesn't men defending something. Isolated thoughts often become just empty sloganeering.
I have seen an estimate by an Indian historian that claimed that British Empire caused the death of 200
million people. From India to Africa, from America to Ireland.
Probably true, or maybe exaggerated, maybe
it was only 100 million. People die for all kinds of reasons. French and Spanish (even Italians) can also be
counted on causing millions and millions to die. The two objections that I hear is that it was long time ago
and that it was 'not their own people'. Both are partially true, but not really relevant – Masais were being
killed by Britain in 1950′s and Irish are kind of part of the family.
Context matters, but I disagree with 'hero Stalin' arguments – I generally dislike heroes of all kinds.
And Stalin was a twerp, murderer and in many ways a failure. To defend him out of spite is silly. Let
history take care of what happened. (I am also puzzled by Pushkin at #3, what gives? he was shot because he
was inept in social situations, a hero? I suspect low level autism )
The Great Famine (Irish: an Gorta Mór, [anˠ ˈgɔɾˠt̪ˠa mˠoːɾˠ]) or the Great Hunger was a period of
mass starvation, disease, and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1849.[1] It is sometimes referred
to, mostly outside Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine, because about two-fifths of the population was
solely reliant on this cheap crop for a number of historical reasons.[2][3]
During the famine, about
one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland,[4] causing the island's population to
fall by between 20% and 25%.[5]
Since the Acts of Union in January 1801, Ireland had been part of the United Kingdom.
Executive
power lay in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Chief Secretary for Ireland, who were
appointed by the British government. Ireland sent 105 members of parliament to the House of Commons of
the United Kingdom, and Irish representative peers elected 28 of their own number to sit for life in the
House of Lords. Between 1832 and 1859, 70% of Irish representatives were landowners or the sons of
landowners.[8]
Records show that Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine. When Ireland
had experienced a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the
Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in
the 1780s overrode their protests.[79] No such export ban happened in the 1840s.[80]
Throughout the entire period of the Famine, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food.
Sure, it didn't help. Also Hitler's, Bandera's, Polish, and even Habsburg heavy handedness didn't help.
Look around, most of history are stupid heavy-handed over-reaching acts
Ok, but would you agree that Ukraine has had a few contradicting tendencies? Galicians are 10-15% of Ukraine
and are totally Western-oriented. Donbass is not, no matter how you spin it. And Odessa, Kiev or Kharkov are
also not quite in the '
West-is-best, and there can be nothing else
' camp. Thus today's difficulties
in Ukraine.
The economic integration of the eastern 2/3 of Ukraine with Russia is real and hard to change
without major living standards disruption. That says that a compromise, or some degree of decentralisation
are required. Galicians and their allies don't want a compromise – they want it all. It will not work. It it
will cause a lot of tears and regrets.
Why should the British oligarchy care about the plight of Indians?
Whom should it provide those excuses to, anyway?
It would only be comparable if the "British oligarchy" had starved a couple of million Englishmen to
death. However, as I recall, the last famine affected BRITAIN occurred prior to the Black Death (!).
This is a joke? The English common people of the times of James Watt, worked fifteen hours a day for a
bowl of soup for the family. Children were chained to carts to carry coal and ore through narrow passages in
the mines. Throughout England, concentration camps (work houses) were established. A little earlier White
British were traded as cattle-raids were carried out in port cities to replenish the number of slaves on
sugar cane plantations. But white slaves in the tropical climate died very quickly, so they were replaced by
Negroes. British slave owners сonducted (as far as I know) even breeding work: white female slaves crossed
with black slaves , to obtain the optimal breed.
Grigory Potemkin was going to buy several tens of thousands of Englishmen for the settlement of the Crimea
and Novorossiya. Count Vorontsov (Russian Ambassador to England) managed to destroy this deal, otherwise in
the Crimea would speak English.
In England there was no short-term mass famine (similar to the famine in Ireland in 1848-49) but
monstrous living conditions killed the British monotonously and daily.
If my grandma had different genitalia, I would have called her a grandpa. I would have also grown up a very
confused kid: Why do I of all kids have a transgendered grandma and is this a sign of the things to come?
Anyhow, my favorite theory about history is this: The most optimal history, with the best case scenario
circumstances is the one that already happened. There is only one history and we can't improve on it based
on our superior knowledge now.
Sure Russia could have benefited from having a less homicidal maniac as a leader, but you can't improve
some parts of the equations that you don't like, without effecting the rest. Thank God that Russia was
communist in WW2 and that Hitler used that as an excuse as to why he hated the Slavs – because of communism
– yeah right.
Russia is not communist since 1991, why do they still hate them? Russia will be hated by the west no
matter what kind of political system they have. It's called jealousy. By having communism it provided Hitler
for an excuse to declare that to be the primary reason why the Russians have to be annihilated.
If the political system in Russia in WW2 was "democracy" – that might have lulled them into believing
that when the going got tough, a "deal" could have been made with the Nazis (even Stalin tried to sue for
peace with Hitler), or the west or whomever they might have ended up fighting in the revised version of
history of WW2. By not having those delusional options that they – the Russians as a democracy can make a
deal with the west which will save them – they might have avoided committing a national suicide.
In England there was no short-term mass famine (similar to the famine in Ireland in 1848-49) but
monstrous living conditions killed the British monotonously and daily.
England and Ireland were the same country (under the union – the United Kingdom), ruled from London –
until 1922. (Part of Ireland – Northern Ireland – is still with the United Kingdom).
So there was a mass famine, in which 25% of the population fell in one republic of the United Kingdom,
under the rule of London.
Couple this with your observation that there was virtually no support for Russian nationalism in
Ukraine, and what you have is a large area where in fact it appears that the Ukrainian national idea was
quite popular.
In central Ukraine the Ukrainian idea was popular. An overwhelming majority of the people voted for
Ukrainian parties, and they clearly had a Ukrainian self-identity. But unlike Galicians, or Poles, or Finns,
they were less likely to fight and die for their national idea in 1917-1920. To be sure, this spirit was not
absent – 100,000 volunteers isn't nothing. But it wasn't much either.
To put it in perspective – the two Donbas oblasts had 6.5 million people in 2013, compared to 27 or so
million ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian-ruled parts of Ukraine. So about 1/4 the population. Donbas
militias have about 40,000 troops. That would be equivalent to 160,000 troops in 1917 Ukraine. Now, there
are numerous caveats – Russia lavishly supplies the Donbas militias, Ukrainian ones were on their own, and
there are some pro-Kiev volunteers from Donbas whereas there were virtually no pro-Russian ones among
Russian Empire Russians.
Of course, to repeat myself, there was basically zero sentiment among these people to fight for Russia.
There were some Kadets from among ethnic Russians in Kiev but no pro-White military units of
Ukrainians/Little Russians from Russian-ruled Ukraine. Even Makhno, already losing, murdered Wrangel's
emissary's rather than join forces with him.
I've heard from folks knowing the Whites in Ukraine, that Ukrainian was spoken among those with
Russian Empire roots (not Galician) fighting on the side of the Whites.
Name any military units from Russian Ukraine who fought on the side of the Whites. There were not.
Zero. Some Ukrainian-speaking Cossacks from the Kuban did, but Kuban isn't in Ukraine.
the Galician Ukrainian Army en masse came under the command of the Russian Whites.
It's telling that only the Galicians (briefly) placed themselves under White command but no ethnic
Ukrainian forces from Russian Ukraine ever did. Galicians did it after they became stateless (Petlura signed
Galicia over to Poland in exchange for help against the Soviets) during a typhoid epidemic and received
much-needed medicine from the Entente that the Whites had access to. I don't think they ever fought a battle
for the Whites, although I may be mistaken on that point. The Whites disintegrated before the Galicians
could get healthy.
Under similar circumstances some Galicians ended up fighting in the Red Army against Poland. One of the
Red Galician commanders, Alfred Bizanz (an ethnic German), eventually made his way west and 20 years later
become a commander of the Galician SS Division.
: Out of curiosity–had Ukraine been smaller (no Galicia, Volhynia, Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Bessarabia, and
northern Bukovina–for instance, had Hitler never become to power in Germany and there would have thus been
no German-Soviet partition of Poland), and had Ukraine would have joined the Eurasian Economic Union after
the collapse of the Soviet Union (if it would have still occurred in this scenario, that is), what do you
think that the long(er)-term future of the Eurasian Economic Union would have looked like in this scenario?
Also, as a side note, it's interesting that, with the exception of Yekaterinoslav Guberniya, Ukrainian
parties don't appear to have done very well in "Novorossiya" in the 1917 elections. Indeed, they failed to
win in the Kharkiv Guberniya, in the Taurida Guberniya, and in the Kherson Guberniya.
In turn, this makes me
wonder–had an independent Ukrainian state limited to central and western Ukraine been created, how viable
would it have been? After all, this state would have been landlocked (I can't see Russia agreeing to give up Yekaterinoslav Guberniya considering that it would cut off the Taurida Guberniya, the Kherson Guberniya, and
the Bessarabian Guberniya from the rest of Russia) and would have thus had to rely on Russia, Poland, or
Romania for sea access.
Finally, off-topic, but as a side question–why exactly were Ukrainians outside of Galicia unwilling to
fight en masse for the Ukrainian national cause in 1917-1920?
Sure Russia could have benefited from having a less homicidal maniac as a leader, but you can't
improve some parts of the equations that you don't like, without effecting the rest. Thank God that
Russia was communist in WW2 and that Hitler used that as an excuse as to why he hated the Slavs – because
of communism – yeah right.
Russia is not communist since 1991, why do they still hate them? Russia will be hated by the west no
matter what kind of political system they have. It's called jealousy. By having communism it provided
Hitler for an excuse to declare that to be the primary reason why the Russians have to be annihilated.
Read
Mein Kampf
. The H-man didn't use communism as an "excuse". He openly planned to eliminate
Russians because they stood in the way of his dream of a continental German Empire, and he considered slavs
to be racially inferior (a view he reneged on at the end of his life for obvious reasons).
The idea that the West is "naturally" hostile to Russia is completely bogus. The American Empire has been
mostly hostile to Russia since 1945, and yes for America communism was mostly (though not completely) an
excuse. The "wise men" who formulated the doctrine of Containment admitted as much.
Prior to 1945 Russia was part of the normal European state system. Depending on the state of the times
Russia could be friendly, isolated, allied, at war, etc. with any number of European states. Where was the
implacable Western hatred of Russia exactly?
Germany fought two wars with Russia in the 20th century, but in the 19th century it was a German
statesman (vom Stein) who convinced Tsar Alexander to join with Prussia in forming the Sixth Coalition to
finally beat Napoleon. Only the year before one out of three soldiers in Napoleon's Grand Army had in fact
been German!
Likewise Napoleon invaded Russia, but a century later France was Russia's greatest ally.
Awhile back, I had earlier presented those in the officer ranks of the White Russians with ties to Ukraine.
You pooh poohed that by noting their ties to Russia proper (for lack of a better term) – which BTW was part
of the same entity as much of what's now known as Ukraine.
That the White leadership was top heavy with folks from outside Ukraine doesn't mean that there wasn't a
noticeable degree of rank and file White participation among people from the territory of what became the
Ukrainian SSR – including individuals who'd qualify as being ethnic Ukrainian. Hence the previously noted
recollection of Ukrainian being spoken among the Whites. I also know someone whose family joined the Whites
after serving under Skoropadsky. That person's family has direct roots to Ukraine and has what's considered
a typical Ukrainian surname. He has played a lead role in patriotic Russian anti-Communist emigre circles.
Know some others with a similar background as well.
The Whites started their anti-Bolshevik opposition outside the territory of what became modern day
Ukraine. The Russian Civil War era elections in Kiev didn't include a large segment of the overall
population of what became the Ukrainian SSR and is therefore not so conclusive in determining public opinion
at the time there. Hence, it's within reason to say (as has been previously stated by others) that a good
number of folks on the territory of what became the Ukrainian SSR weren't so motivated to support any of the
lead Russian Civil War era combatants.
Meantime, it's clear that Petliura lacked support on the territory he sought to represent. He was
militarily no match for either the Whites or Reds. The latter two had support within what became the
Ukrainian SSR. Despite their differences, the Whites and Reds each supported some form of Russo-Ukrainian
togetherness which brings to mind Skoropadsky's edict for an
All-Russian Federation
, inclusive of
Russia and Ukraine:
Due to the dominating German presence, Skoropadsky and the Whites had problems connecting. In addition,
the Germans restricted the amount of weapons to Skoropadsky's forces – which was to greatly assist those who
overthrew Skoropadsky as WW I came to an end.
On another matter you recently brought up, Makhno fought Petliura's forces. Makhno, was arguably more of
an anarchist than a Ukrainian nationalist.
The idea that the West is "naturally" hostile to Russia is completely bogus
Let's drop the 'naturally' qualifier, since we wouldn't agree on how to define it. That leaves a
question: has West been hostile to Russia? Yes, in the last 10-15 years, no sane person could deny it. Maybe
there are reasons for it, but the hostility is undeniable – and it covers Brits, Americans, French, German,
Spanish, and even Italians. Dutch, Swedes and Danish have also been hostile.
West claims that they would not be hostile if Russia '
would change its ways
'. Interesting, by that
standard we could all be friends. I always tell people '
if you do 100% what I want, and agree with me
100%, I will be your best friend'
. To ask others to change is to admit that you dislike them as they
are, thus logically, you simply dislike them.
The second weasel excuse is that West likes Russian people, just dislikes their government (for some
strange reason always personalised as 'Putin'). We hear this less and less because it is so absurd –
Russians have chosen the government, they agree with most main policies. Let's call spade a spade: West
doesn't like Russia as it is.
How long has this been going on before 2000? Putting aside the communist era, one can find very strong
anti-Russian sentiments in all main Western countries at least since late 18th century, with Britain being
the outstanding hater. There were occasional opportunistic thaws when some country needed an ally, or needed
something, but in general West was always quite hostile towards Russia. It is too big, it is Orthodox, it
has its own vibe. From Napoleon, to Crimean War (West invaded to side with Ottoman Moslems to keep Russia
from gaining influence in the Balkans), to Hitler's coalition
European Christian civilization will not prosper divided. West gleefully destroyed and abandoned
Byzantium 500 years ago. They are making the same mistake today.
Maybe no-one here knows or cares, but I would be interested to know about the impact of the war with Germany
on Marxist-Leninist ideology in Russia. It seems like the original Marxist conception was that the workers'
revolution would just happen and spread until it was universal.
Then fascism was supposed to be a last-ditch
defense of the system by the capitalists. So after an enormous war in which fascism was actually defeated –
did they think that now the tide had turned? And with the disintegration of the European maritime empires,
and with many of the newly independent countries turning towards socialism, an optimistic attitude (towards
the eventual global victory of socialism) must have been possible for many decades Maybe I should read
something by Suslov, I've heard that he was the ideological chief in the Brezhnev era.
Name the ethnic Ukrainian units or military formations from Russian ruled
Ukraine that fought on the side of the Whites in 1917-1920.
You failed to do so.
Because there were none.
There was no widescale or even smallscale support for Russia among ethnic Ukrainians in Russian-ruled
Ukraine. Only, perhaps, some individuals out of the millions. But you failed to provide even names of those
so it must have been a small number indeed.
Saying you know someone or heard of someone doesn't count.
Meanwhile, around 100,000 ethnic Ukrainians from Russian-ruled Ukraine did fight for various Ukrainian
nationalist leaders from Russian-ruled Ukraine, such as Symon Petliura, or Danylo Zeleny (30,000 troops at
peak). Not much from a territory of 27 million people, but more than the virtually zero who took up arms for
Russia.
Makhno's wife was a Ukrainian-language teacher. His forces were basically neutral towards those of the
Ukrainian nationalist Petliura while being bitterly opposed to the Whites; Makhno contributed to Denikin's
defeat, and even when he was about to be defeated by the Bolsheviks he killed Wrangel's envoys rather than
cooperate with the Whites.
(I am also puzzled by Pushkin at #3, what gives? he was shot because he was inept in social
situations, a hero? I suspect low level autism )
Levada doesn't explicitly say 'heroes', just 'great personalities', so Pushkin would be considered due to
his cultural contributions.
The polls are often based on the public's knowledge of historical figures, their perception of who is
good and current societal moods (which is why Putin is a joint second place).
Much as I love the idea of enslaving the English, all of this is something out of a parallel universe.
Oh really?
"
Both in England and in France used all means in order to gain the right immigrants (slaves)
In
Bristol simply abducted men, women and children
Under Cromwell held mass sending Scottish and Irish
prisoners. From 1717 to 1779 Britain sent to the colonies 50 thousand exiles (as slaves), and in 1732 the
humane Evangelist John Ogtrop founded a new colony in Georgia wanting to gather many prisoners for debt
Consequently, there was widespread and long-lasting white slavery it disappeared for economic reasons, not
for racial ones
."
Fernand Braudel. -- Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe sičcle
There are many similar examples in this book. Here's another (not going to translate into English, as I
don't have time):
"
Задержанного бродягу пороли плетьми "прикованного палачом к задку телеги". Ему выбривали голову, его
клеймили каленым железом; в случае рецидива его грозили повесить без суда и следствия или отправить на
галеры – и запросто отправляли В 1547 г. английский парламент постановил, что бродяги будут не более не
менее обращаться в рабство (эта мера была два года спустя отменена, так как не удалось решить вопрос с
использованием этих рабов) идея витала в воздухе. Ожье Бузбек (представитель испанского короля при турецком
султане) полагал что "ежели бы рабство применялось справедливо или мягче, как того требуют римские законы,
не было бы необходимости вешать и карать всех тех, кои ничего не имея ничего кроме свободы и жизни
становится преступником от нужды". И в конечном счете это решение возобладает в 17 веке ибо разве заключение
в тюрьму и на каторжные работы это разве не рабство? Повсюду бродяг сажают под замок: в Италии в приюты для
бедных, в Англии в работные дома (workhouse), в Женеве в исправительную тюрьму (Discipline), в Германии в
исправительные дома (Zuhthauser), в Париже – в смирительные дома (maison de forse): в Гранд Опиталь
созданный ради заключения там бедняков в 1662, в Бастилию, Венсенский замок, Сен-Лазар, Бисетр, Шарнтон,
Мадлен, Сен-Пелажи. На помощь властям приходили также болезни и смерть И однако же ни неутомимая
труженица-смерть, ни свирепые тюрьмы не искоренили зло Не взирая на экономический подьем, пауперизм
усилился в 18 веке из за демографического роста Тысячи крестьян оказались выброшенными на дороги – наподобие
того, как задолго до этого времени происходило в Англии с началом огораживаний. В 18 веке эта человеческая
грязь от которой никому не удавалось избавится поглощала все: вдов, сирот, калек, беглых подмастерьев,
священников без церковных доходов, стариков, погорельцев, жертв войн, обрюхаченных служанок, девиц матерей
ото всюду прогоняемых и детей посылаемых за хлебом или на воровство Порядочные люди старались не думать о
этих "подонках общества, отбросах городов, биче республик, материале для виселиц. Их столько и повсюду, что
было бы довольно трудно их счесть, а годны они лишь на то, чтобы отправить их на галеры или повесить, чтобы
служили примером
"
White Cargo is the forgotten story of the thousands of Britons who lived and died in bondage in
Britain's American colonies.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as
slaves. Urchins were swept up from London's streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy
was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide "breeders" for Virginia. Hopeful migrants
were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be
bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.
Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael
Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on
whites throughout British rule. The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried
to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in
Anglo-American history.
This is a saga of exploration and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the
overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface
.
However, I did not read this book, perhaps the author of a falsifier like Solzhenitsyn. But the story
about the failed purchase of two-legged cattle ("free" British) for the settlement of the Crimea – true. And
this is the end of the 18th century.
Your personal anecdotes haven't been shown to be more legit than the ones I've provided.
Militarily, Petliura's forces did nothing of significance against the Whites and Reds for the reasons I
mentioned. You fail to grasp the fact that people on what became Ukrainian territory fought on the White side. Such
folks were typically never with Petliura – which is understandable given how many never supported him.
There's some difference on the actual number of Petliura's forces. Lehovich notes that just prior to
Petliura's break with the Galician Ukrainians, he commanded a force of 35,000, of which 20,000 were
Galician.
Wikipedia and other sources make note that Makhno fought Petliura's forces.
Upon Petliura's break with the Galician Ukrainian Army, the Whites severely beat his forces in the areas
of Uman, Gaisin and Birsula. Thereafter, Petliura's forces retreated behind Polish lines.
You're irrelevantly boorish, with an autistic trait by not acknowledging the obvious about folks ethnically
akin to the territory of what became the Ukrainian SSR, who fought on the White side, without having
previously been associated with Petliura, who lacked a good deal of popular support.
Their looting aside, what great battles did Zeleny's forces win? In comparison, Makhno had military
significance in a way that Petliura and Zeleny didn't. Onc e again noting that Makhno was more of an
anarchist than Ukrainian nationalist. The academically written works on the Russian Civil War give little
comparative mention to Zeleny.
Makhno fought all factions which sought to impose any external authority over southern Ukraine,
battling in succession the Ukrainian Nationalists, the Imperial German and Austro-German occupation, the
Hetmanate Republic, the Russian White Army, the Russian Red Army, and other smaller forces led by
Ukrainian otamans.
Denikin was militarily stronger than Petliura. That aspect motivated Makhno to concentrate more of his
efforts against Denikin than Petliura.
An autistic trait is the inability to not grasp a valid point that conflicts with a rehashed mantra. You've
exhibited such much unlike myself.
Once again noting that folks ethnically akin to what became the former Ukrainian SSR fought on the White
side, without having necessarily been associated with Petliura's forces or any other committed to a complete
Ukrainian separatism from Russia – thereby explaining the accounts of Ukrainian being spoken among some
Whites. Quite believable given Petliura's limited popularity.
So, the russians invaded, looted and destroyed our countries and kept us imprisoned by force for 50
years in their dystopia and now they call us freeloaders that needed to be fed?
The USSR exported oil, gas, and other raw materials to COMECON members and got inferior, overpriced
manufactured goods in return. The RSFSR was likewise one of only two net donors to the USSR. Moreover, in 1946-47, "conquered" East Germans were literally fed at the expense of
starving Russians
.
Consequently, Kholmogorov is perfectly correct.
So your real objection is "tone" or similar crap. This makes you the East European edition of an SJW.
* Indentured servants – People
*willingly*
signed a
contract to work for x number of years (as I recall, 3-5 was standard) in return for the Trans-Atlantic
ticket. Well, labor laws were harsh then, no doubt about that.
* Press-ganging into the Royal Navy – Perhaps closer to "white slavery", but then again, you could look
at it as a sort of roughhouse conscription. And they got paid once in service.
All of the rest was either (1) not slavery, or (2) much have been small-scale and untypical.
First off, we're talking about a replacement religion for the bozos who march around with Stalin icons.
But I'll defend them anyway.
First image has a powerful aesthetic that evokes the techpriests of the Adeptus Mechanicus in the
Imperium of Man. Praise be to the Omnissiah!
This is also in line with Kholmogorov's vision of
Atomic
Orthodoxy
, whereby our permanent nuclear stalemate leads to the primacy of ideological struggle. Psykers
awake!
Second image is the book cover to a sci-fi novel by Alexander Zorich, which is a collective pen-name for
a male and female writer from Kharkov. Their series takes place in the 27th century where Russia and Ukraine
are united, and constitute a space empire.
Press-ganging was doubtless unpleasant for those experiencing it, but was minor compared to the full-scale
conscription present in every other European state.
Sending rebels and other criminals to America was
obviously much more humane than the alternative of execution or mutilation. Georgia was actually founded by
philanthropists to try and reform criminals, but failed like most such projects. There was of course nothing
unique about this, the French attempt to try and populate Louisiana with prostitutes, among other criminals,
is well-known.
Once again a double standard is applied to Britain.
You completely flopped in trying to disprove the historically obvious:
- Petliura had limited support on
the territory which became the Ukrainian SSR
- that resulted in his willingness to become Pilsudski's puppet.
If his vision was so popular, the Whites and Reds would've had a difficult time with him, which wasn't
the case – partly on account of the Reds and Whites each finding support on the territory that became the
Ukrainian SSR. As noted earlier, there was also the matter of many on the territory of what became the
Ukrainian SSR, not being so supportive of any of the armed groups.
Galicia is the North-Western part of the modern Ukrainian state. It was always part of Poland throughout
history. They're distantly related to people in Ukraine proper, and were annexed to the Ukrainian SSR by
Stalin in 1939.
They're the political and cultural driver behind a 'Western' orientation for Ukraine. Which is not
surprising: they're just wanting to rejoin a historical greater Poland.
Which will happen sooner or later, one way or the other. Outright annexation is probably unfeasible
today, so Poland as a 'plan B' is right now in the process of giving Galicians Polish citizenship.
These people (in very many cases) were not volunteers (read the quote carefully). Temporary slavery (7
years) on sugar cane plantations (where white people have been dying for 2 years) is an evil joke. There was
(along with temporary) and permanent white slavery. And if you like the British Empire slavery, I have
absolutely no idea what you're up against Stalin. Stalin's concentration camps were no worse than the
British plantations. And of course, in both cases, the victims were "criminals".
Once again a double standard is applied to Britain.
I don't think that's the motivation in this case, it's rather an attempt to claim that whites were
subject to slavery just as blacks (which isn't true, indentured servitude was limited in time). Part of the
debate who's had it worse in American history, blacks or "white trash".
In reality, many were children of single mothers who had been forced to give them up for adoption in
an era when their solitary status constituted a grave social stigma.
An excellent program that should immediately be revived, in other words.
Single mothers are parasites and a plague on society.
If a single mother is unable or refuses to marry prior to giving birth to her child, by law the child
should be immediately confiscated from her and placed for adoption (alternatively, raised by the state as a
janissary).
No abortion unless the child is mixed race or genetically unfit, as we want to inflict maximal emotional
trauma on these whores rather than provide them with an easy way out.
The USSR exported oil, gas, and other raw materials to COMECON members and got inferior, overpriced
manufactured goods in return.
Even if that's true, the "freeloader" accusation is still grotesque, since those countries would have
been economically much better off and enjoyed a higher standard of living outside the Soviet orbit. At the
very least, it would be nice to acknowledge that the Soviet system was bad for everyone involved and
Russians hardly its only victims.
Kholmogorov really comes across as incredibly autistic on these matters. Ok, he's writing for a Russian
audience which likes that kind of narrative, I get that. But hard to see what's the point then of
translating him into English, unless one wants to confirm the worst suspicions about Russian nationalists.
Kholmogorov really comes across as incredibly autistic on these matters. Ok, he's writing for a
Russian audience which likes that kind of narrative, I get that. But hard to see what's the point then of
translating him into English, unless one wants to confirm the worst suspicions about Russian
nationalists.
Absolutely correct. But Kholmogorov is a very marginal figure in Russia.
Levada doesn't explicitly say 'heroes', just 'great personalities', so Pushkin would be considered due
to his cultural contributions
That clarifies it. But if you ask people about 'greatness', their answers are based on notoriety for
some, admiration for others, sympathy, etc. I recently saw Pushkin on a list of African contributors to civilisation due to his partial Abyssinian
ancestry. His story has always puzzled me.
You're
German
. Other than some unhinged HIAG fanatics (are any left?), without exception even German
nationalists are so traumatized by WW2 and the postwar denazification that none of you dare to assert
yourselves. I see it as increasingly likely that we'll be forced to liberate you. Though perhaps you'll yet
find your Stresemann.
Russians, and many other nationalities, aren't like that.
That said I'll agree that Russian nationalists in general (not just Kholmogorov) could use a better tone
on certain subjects. They're particularly unhinged about the Baltic states, even people of mild temperament
like Dmitri.
The loser countries between Germany and Russia of course object to this assertiveness. Boo-hoo. Try not
being losers instead. The Poles to their credit do try.
there were zero military units and virtually no Ukrainians from Russian-ruled Ukraine fighting for the
Whites.
I am not sure people put that much thought into it. If they did, the Whites were socially very
unsympathetic for most people. The uniforms, rituals, pomposity. A friend of mine is a descendant of a White
Russian officer, he says he wouldn't fight with the Whites either, too snotty and you had to polish your
boots.
Out of curiosity, how many people in Ukraine fought for the Reds? Since they won, there had to be a few.
Or were they mostly Latvian riflemen with angry lapsed Jews as officers?
It's got to be his strong Christian Orthodox message. Don't forget, Kholmogorov stated that:
Petro Poroshenko owes an enormous debt to Stalin, who enabled the Ukrainization of Ukrainizers.
Don't forget, in the Russian nationalist parallel universe (for internal consumption only!
Stalin
was the father of the Ukrainian nation. I can't wait to get my hands on Karlin's magnum opus 'Putler, the
Dark Lord of the Kremlin', where it will finally be revealed to whom exactly Putler owes his fortunes to. Is
it just a coincidence that both Putler and Porkoshenko were implicated in the 'Panama papers' scandal, where
both civic patriots, in their own right, were implicated in international money laundering projects? Seems
like its been all quieted down since when it first surfaced in 2015?
I see it as increasingly likely that we'll be forced to liberate you
No thanks, Americans "liberating" us is one of the main reasons for the mess we're in (interesting though
that even Trump supporters have this messianic impulse to tell other peoples what to do, that seems to be an
unchanging constant of the American character).
Look, I get how those "might is right" power fantasies are great fun on internet message boards, but they're
not a sound basis for constructive and mutually beneficial European-Russian relations which is still what I
want. It's not my business to tell Russians how to run their country or how to deal with their history, but
I just don't see how a vision as one-sided as Kholmogorov's will do much good. I'm all for nationalism in
the sense of rejecting mass immigration, multiculturalism etc., but do I want a return to pre-1914
nationalisms with all their national antagonisms? Given how it ended last time, certainly not.
Russians have the same problem that Germans had: they are visibly impatient with smaller nationalities.
Americans are like that too. It eventually backfires.
loser countries between Germany and Russia of course object to this assertiveness
You miss the longer historical picture if you dismiss us as 'loser countries'. In the last 100 years, by
any standard, the big winners have been the smaller countries between Germany and Russia (or West and
Russia). Politically, demographically, economically they have prospered beyond anything one would guess in
1900. This includes the endlessly demonised post-WWII period. They also probably have a better future than
their western and southern neighbours. All we need is peace and well managed borders, and for the Western
meddlers to mind their business.
Why do the German people continue to elect politicians and political parties that encourage the immigration
patterns of third world refugees? Or are the results different than in France, where its plainly obvious
that the country is descending into the sewers? (for some reason, one doesn't expect more from the French).
Even if that's true, the "freeloader" accusation is still grotesque, since those countries would have
been economically much better off and enjoyed a higher standard of living outside the Soviet orbit.
You have to realize that Kholmogorov argues here with
Stalinists
. What kind of argument is likely
to get through to them? Certainly not any of the regular anti-Stalin bromides that have currency in the
West.
This whole thing is so out of context, I don't know why it was translated in the first place.
Russians have the same problem that Germans had: they are visibly impatient with smaller
nationalities. Americans are like that too. It eventually backfires.
Actually, Russians are generally not like that. Or at least they weren't in the past. What you are seeing
is a natural reaction to the messages the Russians were getting from the Eastern Europe in the past 30
years.
This whole thing is so out of context, I don't know why it was translated in the first place.
What context? Although I find most of Kholmogorov's ideas to be infantile and unbelievable, I applaud
Karlin for bringing it up here, outside of the ghetto that it was intended for. It's good to see just what
sorts of idiotic ideas and concerns are circulating today in the parallel universe of the Russian
nationalists. Keep doing it Anatoly!
You have to realize that Kholmogorov argues here with Stalinists. What kind of argument is likely to
get through to them?
Complaining that Russians didn't get enough out of WW2 in territorial annexations is a really weird
argument imo (Kholmogorov even complains about the loss of Russian influence in Manchuria does anybody in
Russia care about this?).
The part about collectivization and industrialization is more relevant imo given the damage Stalinist
methods caused to Russia itself (I know many Russian commenters here will disagree about that, and I'm not
going to argue with them since that's an internal Russian debate as far as I'm concerned).
What's weird about it?
What the hell is the point of conquering Berlin and not getting anything out of it
other than Konigsberg?
The Russians might as well have made a separate peace after 1943.
Instead they quite literally
wasted
millions more men in order to impose communism in Eastern
Europe, and proceeded even to impose yet another famine on their own people in order to shore up the
ridiculous East German regime.
If the Germans had won instead you can bet your country would've gotten something out of it.
That's interesting, thanks. Haven't had time to read it yet but here is an article by the author cited above
(Jane Humphries), from the
Economic History Review
, on the same subject, based on her book
What the hell is the point of conquering Berlin and not getting anything out of it other than
Konigsberg?
Well, what exactly should Russia have annexed then? And what would have been done to the non-Russian
population already in place there? Forced population transfers like in East Prussia or former East Poland?
If they had been left in place, that would obviously conflict with Russian nationalism in the narrow sense
and be more in the tradition of multiethnic imperialism.
Out of curiosity, how many people in Ukraine fought for the Reds? Since they won, there had to be a
few. Or were they mostly Latvian riflemen with angry lapsed Jews as officers?
The Reds had a lot of ethnic Russian troops from cities like Kharkiv. There were a few ethnic Ukrainians
fighting for the Reds (perhaps the most significant was Semyon Timoshenko, from Odessa region) but mostly it
was a matter of anarchists or nationalists making temporary alliances with the Reds and placing themselves
under Red command in order to keep the Whites out. Even some of the Galicians temporarily joined the Reds,
in order to fight against Poland:
Kholmogorov apparently thinks the Tsarist WW1 war aims were good.
I'm not Russian, and I suggest that
Karlin propose his own hypothetical war aims.
Had I been in Stalin's shoes, I would've concluded a separate peace with Germany as soon as practical.
Russia is not a country which needs more territory, resources, and population. The blood letting from
1943-1945 were not worth anything which could have been obtained.
Essential aims would have been independent and neutral Central European buffer states, resumption of
German-Russian trade, and German technological assistance.
If you want me to discuss "maximalist" objectives, I would've annexed everything up to the Elbe. Cities
would be depopulated of unreliable nationalities and overtime replaced with East Slavs and other reliable
groups. Peasants, farmers, etc. would continue to work their lands but for Russian barons. No peasant would
be admitted to a city unless with Russian fluency and sincere profession of the Orthodox faith. Catholic and
Protestant Churchs would be turned into Orthodox churchs. German technicians, scientists, machinists, and
other skilled technical workers would be employed in Russian service under good conditions.
Stalin couldn't really have concluded a separate peace with Hitler in 1943 (or anytime later).
1) The
Western powers might've made a peace with Hitler themselves after this. Then Hitler would've destroyed the
USSR, and Stalin would've made a fool of himself.
2) Hitler might've won the war in the West, and then turned once more on the USSR. You know the story from
here on.
3) The Western allies might've defeated Hitler anyway, but would've been way more hostile to the USSR (which
then would immediately be seen as a treacherous power willing to prop up Hitler despite having been attacked
by him), the USSR would've received way less assistance from them (the bulk of it came 1943-45), would've
been unable to steal the nuclear secrets (the Britons wouldn't have sold the designs of their jet engine, by
the way), and so would've been much weaker relative to the victorious and way more hostile West.
As a bonus point, how would you sell the separate peace to your own population, which by that point in
time properly hated the Germans, and with good reasons?
I'm not Russian, and I suggest that Karlin propose his own hypothetical war aims.
That would indeed be interesting, and I'd also like to see specific statements about how one should have
dealt with non-Russian populations in those areas.
In general, I find AK's stance on those issues somewhat contradictory. To me it seems like he's clearly a
Russian ethnic nationalist. But then he lauds the multiethnic Tsarist empire with all its troublesome
national minorities, and makes insinuations about lost chances for territorial annexations (as if Russia
weren't a huge country even today) that would have brought even more non-Russians into that empire.
This basically comes down to the thesis that Hitler was demonic and would return to finish off the USSR no
matter what.
I'm highly skeptical of this thesis.
The Western allies had proven already in 1940 that they were completely unwilling to negotiate with
Hitler. Granted, who knows what the reaction to a separate peace would have been.
There is one simple criteria when truing to evaluate a ruler or a statesman. Just compare the country before
and after him/her. In this sense Stalin is as great as Peter the Great, just not in name. No amount of "what
if", "alternative history" or "cost and effect" analysis can change that.
Of the topic (or precisely on
the topic) both Russian Empire and more recently Soviet Union collapsed, and there must have been a
perfectly mundane reasons for that.
It's a duty of current generations to learn the good and bad from both, avoid pitfalls and continue forward.
There was plenty that the empire left to the SU that it could build upon, just as there is quite a bit of
legacy left by the Soviet Union that modern RF can rely on.
But, as someone here already mentioned here, and I agree, that is what Putin has been doing.
I agree the Makhnovists fought mainly against the Whites, who were the biggest threat for them, but
neutrality and occassional collaboration with the Petliurists was purely tactical.
This isn't as big of a deal as you're making it out to be. The trouble is that people like us have created a
mental anchor by settling on the term "nationalism".
A Russian ethnic nation-state is not necessarily more
desirable than a Russian-dominated multiethnic empire, nor vice-a-versa. It depends on the particular
circumstances and conditions.
Or to move over to your country, would a federal Europe be a bad thing if it was led by people with ideas
more like yours or the Magyar Miracle rather than Jean Claude Juncker?
Steve Sailer likes to harp on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and points out that because "continentalism"
isn't a political concept no one ever thinks of this. Hence the patriotic resistance in Europe gets itself
into traps like Marine Le Pen campaigning for the abolition of the Euro.
Authors are filmmakers or something. Actual historians were not impressed. Sorry, you believe nonsense.
I'm afraid in this case your sense of nonsense is misplaced. I read the book a couple of years ago, and
while it had its flaws I found it pretty convincing.
The fact that "actual historians" don't like it says nothing, since it is obviously an anti-PC book that
could not possibly be embraced by the guardians of our past. However, before the "conventional wisdom" had
coalesced to relegate it to the rubbish bin, an early review in the
New York Times
was far more
favorable:
"White Cargo" is meticulously sourced and footnoted -- which is wise, given its contentious material --
but it is never dry or academic. Quotations from 17th- and 18th-century letters, diaries and newspapers
lend authenticity as well as color. Excerpts from wills, stating how white servants should be passed down
along with livestock and furniture, say more than any textbook explanation could. The authors are not
only historians, but also natural storytellers with a fine sense of drama and character.
Despite the heaviness of the subject matter, their playful way with words and love of literary
allusion come through. There are kidnapping victims of the kind written about in Daniel Defoe's "Colonel
Jack," and a tumultuous ocean voyage that may have inspired Shakespeare's writing of "The Tempest."
What little discussion there is about this forgotten bit of American history is sometimes linked to
those with ulterior political motives, usually interested in delegitimizing current-day discourse about
race or the teaching of black history. "White Cargo," which was first published in Britain last year, has
a refreshing sense of distance and neutrality. The authors take care to quote African-American sources
and clearly state that they have no wish to play down the horrors of the much larger black slave trade
that followed.
If anything, Jordan and Walsh offer an explanation of how the structures of slavery -- black or white --
were entwined in the roots of American society. They refrain from drawing links to today, except to
remind readers that there are probably tens of millions of Americans who are descended from white slaves
without even knowing it.
By the way, one of the authors that you so belittle last year published a very well-received book
entitled
The King's City: London under Charles II: A city that transformed a nation – and created modern
Britain
-- the third volume in his trilogy about Charles II (the first two written jointly in
collaboration with the second author of
White Cargo
).
Hitler was demonic and would return to finish off the USSR no matter what
Not demonic, just driven by an ideology. He believed in his own mission to create the great Thousand Year
Reich up to the Ural (and beyond, actually), and would've thought such a stroke of luck as a sign from
Providence that he needs to press ahead with his plans. In any event, Hitler was unwilling to even seriously
negotiate with Stalin, because he also didn't (and couldn't) trust Stalin, a man he'd already betrayed
before. So the issue was mutual. Hitler was (must've been) afraid that Stalin would stab him in the back
later. While Stalin was (must've been) afraid that Hitler would stab him in the back later, as he'd already
done once.
But what did exactly the US or the UK gotten out of their victory? The US got some satellite states (just
as the USSR), but because it was richer to begin with and didn't have an insane economic system, it could at
least keep them after 1990. But those satellites were actually still unreliable from a US viewpoint. It's
questionable if they will keep them another seven decades, I highly doubt it. In the meantime they opened up
their borders to prove the world that they are not racists. They also opened up their markets to Japan and
Germany and South Korea etc. to prop those countries up.
It seems to me that long term, the US got just as little from its victory as Russia. It might actually be
totally destroyed ethnically, while Russia at least plausibly could stay Russian long term. If you compare
ethnically Russian areas 1939 and 2018, they are almost the same. But ethnically white American areas 1939
vs. 2018, and it seems like the Americans were even bigger losers.
People change their beliefs. Hitler for instance no longer consider slavs to be inferior at the end of his
life. Supposing you're correct then we have my maximalist vision of a Russian Empire reaching the Elbe,
ideally with a port on the North Sea as well if the army could've gotten there in time (plausible with a
different offensive strategy in 1944-45).
But what did exactly the US or the UK gotten out of their victory? The US got some satellite states
(just as the USSR), but because it was richer to begin with and didn't have an insane economic system, it
could at least keep them after 1990. But those satellites were actually still unreliable from a US
viewpoint. It's questionable if they will keep them another seven decades, I highly doubt it. In the
meantime they opened up their borders to prove the world that they are not racists. They also opened up
their markets to Japan and Germany and South Korea etc. to prop those countries up.
It seems to me that long term, the US got just as little from its victory as Russia. It might actually
be totally destroyed ethnically, while Russia at least plausibly could stay Russian long term. If you
compare ethnically Russian areas 1939 and 2018, they are almost the same. But ethnically white American
areas 1939 vs. 2018, and it seems like the Americans were even bigger losers.
I have complained bitterly about this before. American foreign policy took a permanently fatal wrong turn
with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Previously American foreign policy had oscillated between isolationism and expansionism, but always with
a clear pursuit of American self-interest. This was firmly established already in the 1790s, when George
Washington flatly rejected airheaded nonsense about aiding revolutionary France b/c muh liberty.
After FDR American foreign policy pursued idealistic, errant nonsense. The only significant departures
from that have been Nixon and Trump.
This started when FDR placed sanctions on Italy for the "crime" of invading Ethiopia. Willingly giving up
commercial exports during the Great Depression.
The outrages continued with FDR's refusal to punish Mexico from expropriating American oil interests in
1938.
Our fate was sealed with the adoption of the Atlantic Charter (airheaded rubbish) and the passing of the
Lend-Lease Program, where we gave weapons to countries fighting the Axis in exchange for nothing (other than
a 99 year lease of some British bases). Why not instead demand Bermuda and the British West Indies?
The appropriate strategy in dealing with the Axis would've been either hemispheric defense (as proposed
by the American First Committee) or joining them to dismember the British Empire.
I'm surprised you have such a PC view of American history. As multiple sources make clear, the information
presented in
White Cargo
is correct -- large numbers of (white) people were effectively involuntarily
"enslaved" in colonial America, in conditions that were no better (and often worse) than enslaved Africans.
Surely his views and outlook are a little distinctive, in every country, not just Russia (or America). But
it doesn't make them less entertaining/interesting/funny, etc.
From the perspective of a blog, if the viewpoint of the blogger is more frequently found in the public ,
then they would be easier to find, less rare – and there would be less reason for audience to visit the
blog. If all the blogger's views are 'typical' – then why would anyone visit the blog? They could read the
main news sites and encounter the identical content.
More generally, the more thinking or thoughtful people, will usually have more unusual and unpredictable
combinations of views, which cannot be categorized into simple groups.
If you encounter that your views can 'map' predictably onto any political movement, common ideology, or
political party in your country -then you need to question your views (and the influence of conformism in
the predictability).
Thanks. How does an anarchist-nationalist temporarily allied with the Reds look like in person? I am always
amused by the ability of certain eastern European types to push the boundary of coherent thought. There is
too much of something there, or maybe something missing. Many just want a gun to take a revenge on the
crappy world.
It is not different today: there are Pan-Slavic nationalists who hate anything Russian (or
even Polish), are fanatically pro-Western, loudly admire Israel and more quietly the Nazis, their economic
policy is quasi-communist and social views are to the right of a 19th century pope. Quite a mess.
Cities would be
depopulated
of unreliable nationalities and overtime replaced with East Slavs
and other reliable groups
I'm curious, just how exactly you envision the 'depopulation' of the indigenous nationalities to have
taken place? Do you feel that a rather war weary Russia was really in any position to follow through on any
such violent and crazy proposals? As far as 'reliable East Slav groups' we can see today how that ha turned
out in Ukraine. As many others here have pointed out, did Russia really need extra territories? I can't
figure out what motivates such malicious and incoherent ideas? Me thinks that Thorfinnsson should stick to
the calculation of P/E ratios and not to international relations?
Both Reds and anarchists were opposed to the landlords and capitalists, so they had common cause against the
Whites and could cooperate against them in order to prevent White victory. Similarly, both Reds and
non-Russian nationalists were opposed to the Whites who were Russian nationalists. In the Galicians' case,
it was opposition to the Poles who had just conquered their country.
In reality cooperation between Reds and nationalists wasn't as substantial as between anarchists and
Reds.
It wasn't the product of ideological twisting, it was simply a matter of – we hate them more than each
other, so let's cooperate against them, for now.
natural reaction to the messages the Russians were getting from the Eastern Europe in the past 30
years
Possibly, although I would say that messages have been mixed. I have argued with my comprador friends
that full devotion to the Atlanticist West limits one's options, that it is the worst game strategy, and
that burning bridges is a often a bad idea. But rationality is in short supply when salmon buffets call and
that umpteenth trip to a DC 3- star hotel for 'training' is dangled in front of them.
To be fair, Russians for most of the last 25 years were not that different, and would probably do it
again. Human weakness has few boundaries.
No, it was the peak, but it was not typical. 'Typical' is defined as 'faithfully representing'. 1930′s
were an extreme, the 1917-1991 period as a whole was very different. So yes, you are cherry-picking.
How about them 5-year olds in the British mines? Ok, with that?
The war-weary Russian population would have been in need of vast reconstruction. And also the non-Russian
populations of Europe. The workers of these conquered cities would've been very useful for that.
Depopulation isn't a euphemism here for execution or even necessarily deportations. Unlike Hitler and his
gang I don't have fantasies of wiping people out.
Look instead at something like, say, the history of England and the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms. The preceding Brittonic and Romano-British populations weren't eliminated at all. The ruling
classes were replaced, the cities transformed, and overtime the countryside itself.
If Canute the Great had established a real dynasty then today there wouldn't even be an England, but not
because demonic vikings had some demented plot to butcher every Englishman.
As far as I can tell Ukrainians were generally reliable in Tsarist and Soviet times.
And no, Russia didn't need extra territory. I said that myself. But I figured German_reader was curious
about a maximalist proposal.
on
topic, Stalin kinda sucked, what with the random arrests, the Doctors' Affair, the random
arrests, but with all the degeneracy and decivilization going on – rap battles, corruption, gopniks,
RSP-shki, "kowtowing to the West" – you sometimes wish he was back.
I am sure it sounds weird to you, but what Kholmogorov is doing here, is telling the Stalinists that even by
their own criteria their hero is a failure. What they say are his greatest achievements are not so great
after all, even from the Imperial Stalinist POV.
Another way Kholmogorov likes to troll Stalinists is to take a Soviet accomplishment (like going into
space) and credit Nicholas II.
You are getting warmer, it is about unbounded hatred. Any enemy will do. Did they have flow-charts
mapping out the complexity? Or does this kind of well-calculated hatred come to them intuitively?
My intuition tells me that when you mess with people repeatedly, and they end up living worse and worse,
at some point the '
kill them all
' mentality takes over. It happened in Ukraine in 1917-20, in WWII
and after. I hope we can avoid it from happening again. But if Ukraine lives as today in 2020-25 (lousy
living standards), if there are guns everywhere, something could spark the downward spiral again.
Incidentally, I consider that Kaliningrad should be remained to it proper name.
Korolevets?
hem do what they will with Poland would have been particularly amusing. However, it was not
politically realistic, even for a totalitarian system such as the USSR.
The war-weary Russian population would have been in need of vast reconstruction. And also the
non-Russian populations of Europe. The workers of these conquered cities would've been very useful for
that.
The populations of Russia and Eastern Europe had already been depopulated severely due to the savagery of
the war. The returning Soviet soldiers, including the remnant of the remaining population, had their hands
full with rebuilding of what was left of their own settlements, not in a position to 'repopulate' nor
rebuild Eastern Europe without the direct participation of its own indigenous populations. A prolonging of
the war at the expense of millions of more lives, either resettled (to where?) or exterminated, would not
have been in the cards. Besides, what makes you think that Eastern Europe would have fared any better than
it did, with a new race of Russian ubermensch calling all of the shots anyway? History has shown us that
they did a rather lousy job of things in their own country and in those that it did end up controlling.
The populations of Russia and Eastern Europe had already been depopulated severely due to the savagery
of the war. The returning Soviet soldiers, including the remnant of the remaining population had their
hands full with rebuilding of what was left of their own settlements, not in a position to 'repopulate'
nor rebuild Eastern Europe without the direct participation of its own indigenous populations.
Take the conquered women as polygamous wives. Rapid repopulation follows.
A prolonging of the war at the expense of millions of more lives, either resettled (to where?) or
exterminated, would not have been in the cards.
Hence why I suggested making peace in 1943.
Besides, what makes you think that Eastern Europe would have fared any better than it did, with a new
race of Russian ubermensch calling all of the shots anyway? History has shown us that they did a rather
lousy job of things in their own country and in those that it did end up controlling.
Did I say it would've fared better?
My point was that the whole point of
winning
a war is to get something out of it. Something that
everyone aside from the Axis apparently did not understand.
I suppose the French did try to get something out of it, but their demands were ignored by the real
victors.
I think that you assume that things have to make a lot more sense than they have to. The Adeptus Mechanicus
is honestly not a terrible response to overwhelming complexity – which is pretty likely if we ever get to
the point where we have code creating code creating code.
They're dealing with machines they don't fully understand, realize that it has very real "demons"
within(viruses), and the safest way to handle it has just been to keep doing whatever works. Thus the
stories of prayers ending with hitting the "on" switch: the functionality is still there, it has just been
couched in ritual.
At some point, the only realistic way of handling it is ritual – which is very human anyway. I've been
involved in a lot of pretty high tech stuff for awhile and while its not quite religious, the tendency
toward some form of ritual really does gradually take over, even if we tend to call them procedures or "best
practices." There's a lot of weirdness, cultishness and bubble insanity in SV, and this isn't even
considering the more fringe things like transhumanism or immortality organizations.
Seems like a possible outcome of this proposed peace is a future war against Britain and Japan at the same
time. Oddly, Russia might be able to gain America as an ally in such a conflict.
And obviously, heavy reparations to turbocharge Russia's continuing postwar industrialization.
Unrealistically long time horizons. The US did of course unambiguously win the war – it accounted for
something like 50% of world manufacturing production by 1945. It dominated all the markets. In the late
1940s-early 1950s, if it had really wanted to, it could have conquered the entire world and/or instituted a
one world government. (The Soviet nuclear deterrent was not credible until 1955 or so).
To develop
Thorfinnsson's idea of a 1943 Nazi-Soviet peace further (
with the caveat that I do not consider it
politically realistic even for the USSR
):
First off, I do not think the Allies would have made a separate peace with the Nazis. Public opinion
there mattered more, for obvious reasons (democracy), and it's not even clear that the Russians hated the
Germans more (there are accounts of German POWs being treated generously – disgracefully – well, by elderly
babushkas with low national consciousness).
With the Wehrmacht having its hands untied in the East, D-Day would no longer be feasible. However, the
Manhattan Project would not be going away, with the result that a campaign of democidal atomic attrition
against the German population would begin from 1945.
The Nazis are not limp-wristed like the Kaiser or even Hindenburg/Ludendorff and will hold onto power as
German city after city gets wiped off the Earth.
At some point, Germany will be sufficiently weak for an Allied invasion to be possible, especially
considering that there would have been years to prepare for it. Obviously, at this point, the USSR could use
the opportunity to scavenge. Even the East Europeans will be less of a problem at this point, having been
subjected to 2-3x the degree of democide by the Nazis as they were historically. There will at a basic level
be much fewer of them. And they'd hate the Germans even more.
The USSR could have used the armistice with Germany to refocus on science spending and turbocharge the
nuclear program, developing it earlier and having a credible deterrent by 1950 instead of 1955. So no
Operation Unthinkable in principle (IRL, the USSR in reality seriously lucked out on that score!!).
The USSR exported oil, gas, and other raw materials to COMECON members and got inferior, overpriced
manufactured goods in return.
Moreover, in 1946-47, "conquered" East Germans were literally fed at the expense of starving Russians.
50/50= truths/myths. East Germans, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians have similar stories. They always blamed
shortages on the so-called 'exports' to USSR. There were no noticeable Soviet products in stores there but
plenty of Eastern Block products in Soviet Union.
inferior, overpriced manufactured goods in return
How anybody can determine what was overpriced or underpriced in the system of exchange they had? Eastern
European products often were inferior with respect to the West but superior to what was being produced in
the USSR. Muscovites were going crazy when shoes from Czechoslovakia or DDR were sold in few stores. Anybody
lined up for Soviet products in Hungary or Poland. Perhaps for
Sovetskoye Shampanskoye
before the New
Year's Eve
Buses and pharmaceuticals form Hungary, high-tech optical and electronics equipment from DDR, ship
industry in Poland mainly functioning for USSR, more that 50% sulphuric acid used in the USSR was from
Poland, CSFR motor vehicles, for example, passenger cars, trams, motorcycles , lathes, pumps , compressors.
(10 min of googling).
Russian nationalist want empire but they do not know how they are going to run it. Actually they did not
know in the past. They have never managed to culturally dominate people they subjugated except for some
Siberian tribal people. One thing is true, the emotional prerequisite for Russians is to be loved and
appreciated by the people they subjugated. When they see all the evidence to the contrary they display the
spurned lover syndrome and show hurt ego how much they sacrificed for the subjugated and so on. You even
detect it in Uber-rational A. Karlin. Americans have it too but to much lesser extent because they are much
more secure in their beliefs. They do not have to support them by myths only. It suffices to look around and
see how America is powerful and dominant. But the megalomania and some sense of missions are very similar
among Russians and Americans. People from 'lesser' countries are fed up with it. Now they may sympathize
with Russia in hope that counterbalancing of American power would be good but when they hear the nationalist
imperial spiel like that of Kholmogorov they pause and have a second thought and may consider that beefing
up Ukraine might be a very good thing after all and opening border with Mexico and turning the US into a
Latin America might be a good thing after all from the point of view of small countries that want to have
more sovereignty whether to create the ethno-state state or gay utopia or both.
1. Germany was not doing well at the start of 1917. AH and Turkey were doing catastrophically.
2. There is
a difference between the degree of hurt you can expect if you sign an armistice when you're losing (applies
to both Russia and Germany in 1918), and if you capitulate and/or are conquered (France in 1940 lost the
bulk of its core territory, for instance).
Well a good enough number did fight on the White side, thereby explaining why they never lost to Petliura's
forces, which were representative of a completely separatist Ukraine, until Petliura sold out to Pilsudski –
in a move which saw the Galician Ukrainian Army en masse come under the command of the Whites.
and it's not even clear that the Russians hated the Germans more (there are accounts of German POWs
being treated generously – disgracefully – well, by elderly babushkas with low national consciousness)
iirc about 90% of the Germans taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1941-1943 didn't survive the war; it's
also clear that German prisoners were frequently tortured and killed.
Not that I'm complaining, Germans started the war and if anything behaved worse. But you can't seriously
believe that Russians felt
less
hatred for Germans than the British, let alone the Americans did.
That's completely implausible.
There were a few ethnic Ukrainians fighting for the Reds
Another one of your gross understatements. Also keeping in mind that a number of folks from the territory
of Russian Empire Ukraine could qualify as ethnic Ukrainian, but identified differently.
Why should Britain and France have supported the realization of such extreme war aims to the benefit of
Russia? Their alliance with Russia was purely one of convenience, liberal opinion in the West despised
Tsarism. And once the US had entered the war, the whole war was changed into a "crusade for democracy"
anyway, which made such imperialist annexations even more unlikely.
Your idea of Tsarist Russia being unjustly robbed of great territorial gains is fantasy imo. The Bolshevik
takeover was deplorable for many reasons, but not because Russia failed to gobble up even more land.
I think that you assume that things have to make a lot more sense than they have to. The Adeptus
Mechanicus is honestly not a terrible response to overwhelming complexity – which is pretty likely if we
ever get to the point where we have code creating code creating code.
They're dealing with machines they don't fully understand, realize that it has very real "demons"
within(viruses), and the safest way to handle it has just been to keep doing whatever works. Thus the
stories of prayers ending with hitting the "on" switch: the functionality is still there, it has just
been couched in ritual.
At some point, the only realistic way of handling it is ritual – which is very human anyway. I've been
involved in a lot of pretty high tech stuff for awhile and while its not quite religious, the tendency
toward some form of ritual really does gradually take over, even if we tend to call them procedures or
"best practices." There's a lot of weirdness, cultishness and bubble insanity in SV, and this isn't even
considering the more fringe things like transhumanism or immortality organizations.
Atomic physics is a field already near theology.
The idea of future religions integrating such scientific concepts is something beautiful (and there was
already something this in the Soviet Union).
There has to be some actual integration though.
You can't take current priests (low IQ, superstitious people who usually fail maths in school), and put
them next to an abstract scientific concept like the word 'atom' – without making both sides look
ridiculous.
It is like the arrangement most designed to turn them into an object for ridicule from educated people.
(Likewise photos of priests near to specific technology which was entirely created by Soviet trained
people).
It is just like seeing the scene of primitive monkeys from the 2001 film.
"It seems obvious that the ideal combination is both. And the
*late*
Russian Empire was in
fact just that."
I agree with you that ideal combination would indeed be "both".
I am not sure that "late" Russian Empire was just that, though.
Perhaps, I am much too influenced by later Bolshevik propaganda, winners, after all, get the privilege to
write the (hi)story.
But, most likely, the Russian Empire's fate is just another case of that famous "too little too late".
Russians, having the first hand experience of these, epic, failures of both the Empire and Soviet Union,
have both the necessary perspective and hindsight to move on in much better future. We have to see if they
have acquired the wisdom, too. Again, in this respect, and in my opinion, Putin has been doing a "hell of a
job" so far.
Russia was also crumbling even without the Bolsheviks. The Kerensky offensive was a catastrophe. Military
discipline had completely evaporated.
Assuming the Russians had hung in long enough to participate at
Versailles, I doubt they would've gained much. Britain and America would both oppose most of Russia's war
aims. Certainly the idea that President Wilson and David Lloyd George would agree to transfer Constantinople
to Russia is a fantasy.
Probably Russia would've gotten some more sullen Poles to administer, Galicia, and the rest of Armenia.
And of course the reparations which the Germans would largely fail to pay.
Dismemberment of Germany like France and Russia wanted was never going to be tolerated by Britain or
America.
Note that I posit a Cold War emerging between France/UK and Russia after the war.
Absent nuclear weapons, why exactly would that have stayed a Cold war in the 1920s/1930s and not become a
hot one? Russia was seen as a potential rival to British imperial interests well before 1914 and would have
been seen as an even greater threat in your scenario.
However, the great bulk of them relate to economic and political ones inherent to Communism (e.g.
central planning; using your
*own*
population as disposable bodies
Obviously I agree about the defects of communism, but the insinuation that it would be ok to treat other
populations as "disposable bodies" really irritates me what exactly would be your problem with the Nazis
then, apart from the fact that they targeted Russians as a population to be disposed of? The general vibe I
get from this thread is that any moral considerations would be for losers and cucks anyway.
Have to say, these insights into the views of Russian nationalists make me think it's probably better
they're still fairly marginal in Russia and not looked kindly upon by the state.
The "sicko nationalist stuff bordering on fascism" is how statecraft was practiced from the Bronze Age
to Bismarck.
If I understand you correctly, you're actually an American, and therefore I find it amusing that you
subscribe to such 'tribal' worldviews. For all of its faults, 'American exceptionalism' which acts a an
underlying motivator for American imperialism, does not include components of ethnic or national superiority
(imperialism without the 'pure blood' racial component) that I think is a step in the right direction. For
all of the criticism of the inclusion of different ethnicities in the make-up of American society (and I'm
not a proponent of open borders, etc;), I think that a strong case can be made that one of the strengths of
the vibrant, US nation, is its inclusion of all ethnicities. Although it's getting harder and harder,
immigrants are still adding to the overall good of American society. US multiculturalism should not be a
blueprint for all societies throughout the world, but it certainly will continue to slowly influence how
many of the advanced countries of the world model their own societies. I strongly suspect that your own
genetic make-up was formed through the melding of more than just your own German heritage that began over 5
centuries ago? Even Karlin's ethnic pedigree is far from 'pure' Russian, and the both of you don't seem to
be any worse for the resulting cocktail?
Here's the exact quotation, taken from Makhno's three volume autobiography:
One thing alone must bother me in publishing this outline, and that is that it does not come out in
the Ukraine and in the Ukrainian language. The Ukrainian nation is advancing culturally step by step
toward a full definition of its own individual essence and this [the memoirs, F.S.] could be important.
That I cannot publish my writings in the language of my people is not my fault but that of the conditions
in which I find myself.[68]
Russia behaving like any normal European country
*one century ago*
with respect to
war aims – note that Germany would have created a continental empire, and here is the French version
But how many Germans or Frenchmen are still going on about this as if it were relevant today? French and
German nationalists have rather different concerns now, all this talk about territorial annexations and
imperialism looks like out of another universe.
The problem isn't that Russian imperial elites a century ago had extreme ambitions (which backfired
horrendously on them), the problem is that one can get the impression that Kholmogorov and others like him
think like that even today.
This further reinforces my suspicions that Russia should not have any sentimental illusions about
Europeans, even European nationalists.
Self-fulfilling prophecy "They'll hate us anyway, so why not give them a reason?". Hardly a constructive
sentiment.
The "sicko nationalist stuff bordering on fascism" is how statecraft was practiced from the Bronze Age
to Bismarck.
It wasn't though. The borders of France, for example, barely changed for centuries, despite being the
most powerful nation in Europe. Louis XIV's attempt to acquire just Belgium and some German cities united
all of Europe against him. Of course even those conquests which were made were within the framework of
multi-national empires (which often disadvantaged the dominant ethnicity, if anything), rather than
Assyrian-style subjugation.
Events like the Polish Partitions were unique and regarded as horrible.
I suppose this is the American educational system at work.
Americans were mostly white supremacists and frequently Anglo-Saxon supremacists as well for more than three
centuries.
The unforced error of admitting millions upon millions of non-Anglos from the 1840s through WW1
diluted the original American identity beyond the possibility of restoration, but mid-century experiences
(Great Depression, WW2, mass media, space race, etc.) managed to forge a composite American nation.
But then America's elite threw it all in the trash by deciding that white supremacy was getting in the
way of winning the ever important HEARTS AND MINDS of shithole countries like Upper Volta.
America isn't a blueprint for anyone, other than wreckers who want to break nations. It's a warning.
Too bad for Eurocucks that they're our vassal states and thus instead following us like lemmings off the
cliff.
That's not to say that a focus on purity is necessarily desirable. Obviously such a focus in Russia or
America today is ridiculous and counterproductive. But in a country like Sweden or Japan it isn't.
My family's genealogy is pretty well done, but no doubt if you go far enough back you'd be likely to find
something more "exotic" than a German. Danes and Norwegians certainly; and possibly Scots, Dutchmen, and
Walloons. Finns and Slavs less likely but who knows.
iirc about 90% of the Germans taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1941-1943 didn't survive the war
They were high but 90% sounds unlikely though it would be good if someone looked the figures up (though I
dimly recall that might have been the case in the singular aftermath of Stalingrad).
Anyhow, the two situations are not comparable not even on account of the Nazis having been the ones who
attacked as by the fact that the USSR faced a food crisis of its own. A few million died of food shortages
within
the USSR during 1941-43; IIRC, around half of all Gulag deaths ever also occurred during that
period. It was undergoing a low-key famine of its own then (unlike Germany, which was well fed until late
1944). I mean yes, sovcucks will sovcuck, but I suppose even they draw the line at privileging captured
enemy combatants over their "own" people.
I think it was in Beevor's Stalingrad there was some account of a German POW Wehrmacht doctor getting fed
and clothed by Russian peasants to supplement his low rations. Certainly there was very little of that
happening wrt Russian POWs in Germany.
The French themselves developed a concept known as the
NATURAL BORDERS OF FRANCE
, and the "natural"
eastern border was the Rhine. And the Rhineland was
completely
German.
Napoleon succeeded in making
that the eastern French border, but we know how that turned out.
This thread is about Joseph Stalin and thus involves the discussion of
history
.
No doubt French and
German nationalists have views on the two World Wars as well.
Russia has territorial concerns France and Germany do not for the simple reason that the USSR collapsed
and stranded millions of Russians outside Russia's borders. Russia's late historical development also means
we have oddities like two pseudo-Russian nations on its border. The only comparable thing to this in France
or Germany is, what, Corsica?
The situation of Russia today is comparable to that of Germany after 1919, not Germany after 1990.
The French made hardly any progress towards accomplishing that between Richelieu and Napoleon. Louis XIV
only got Alsace and Louis XV Lorraine (part of a negotiated swap) and Corsica , over a span of almost 200
years. They couldn't even add the Spanish/Austrian Netherlands despite occupying them many times.
The revolutionary policy of annexation was obviously new (and not repeated in the 19th century) and ended in
complete failure, with France being restored to pre-Revolutionary borders.
Frederick II's annexation of Silesia was also regarded as exceptional and shocking.
All of this is despite Europe being more at war (and on a large scale) than not during the 17th and 18th
centuries.
What's unique about the Polish Partitions at all?
Nothing like it was repeated (barring the very minor and ultimately irrelevant division of Venice).
Austria and Russia couldn't even ever finish off the Ottoman Empire, despite having the idea since Potemkin
and Catherine the Great.
though I dimly recall that might have been the case in the singular aftermath of Stalingrad
Stalingrad is well known, only about 6000 of the Germans captured there survived; but iirc the same was
true for Germans taken prisoner in 1941/1942 (the numbers weren't that high by WW2 standards, somewhat above
100 000, unfortunately I can't find a reference right now). Anyway, it could of course hardly be expected
that the Soviet Union in 1941/42 would give much priority to caring for German pows, and in any case the
policy changed during the later years of war; I also don't doubt that something like with the elderly
Russian women you mentioned did happen. It just seems implausible to me that Russians could have felt
less
hatred for Germans than the western allies, when the entire character of the war in the east was
different (mostly conventional war in the west vs. highly ideological war in the east that was waged as a
war of extermination and conquest by the Germans).
But how many Germans or Frenchmen are still going on about this as if it were relevant today?
It is a concern in
a historic context
.
I mean, the entire point of the second half of EK's article is that Stalinists say Stalin is good because
he returned the Russian Empire to its older borders; EK points out that it was merely a rectification of
Lenin's sabotage, came at a huge cost, and in the end turned out to be a toxic gift anyway.
What, exactly, is controversial about any of that?
Modern Russian nationalists are quite open about having imperial ambitions on Belorussia, Novorossiya,
and to a lesser extent, Northern Kazakhstan (fast becoming demographically unfeasible) and
Malorossiya/Central Ukraine (has become politically unfeasible since 2014).
You are of course free not to like that, but, whatever. Romanian nationalists have imperial ambitions on
their lost province of Moldova:
(Incidentally, Russian nationalists don't, aside from Transnistria; even though more Moldovans would vote
to join Russia
"... Germany's mighty Wehrmacht, which included the Luftwaffe, was destroyed by Stalin's Soviet Union. The Red Army claims to have destroyed 507 German divisions, 48,000 German tanks, 77,000 German aircraft, and 100 divisions of Axis troops allied to Germany from Italy, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Finland. ..."
"... Of Germany's 10 million casualties in WWII, 75% were inflicted by the Red Army. The once mighty Luftwaffe was decimated over Russia. Almost all German military production went to supplying the 1,600 km Eastern Front where Germany's elite forces were ground up in titanic battles like Kursk and Stalingrad that involved millions of soldiers. ..."
On my many walking visits to the vast Normandy battlefield in France, I kept recalling the
ever so wise dictum of Prussia's great monarch, Frederick the Great: 'he who defends
everything, defends nothing.' On this 74 th anniversary of the D-Day landings, it's
well worth recalling the old warrior-king.
Adolf Hitler, a veteran of the infantry, should certainly have known better. Defending the
European coast from Brittany to Norway was an impossibility given Germany's military and
economic weakness in 1944. But he did not understand this. Having so brilliantly overcome
France's Maginot Line fortifications in 1940, Hitler and his High Command repeated the same
strategic and tactical errors as the French only four years later: not having enough reserves
to effectively counter-attack enemy breakthrough forces.
Germany's vaunted Atlantic Wall looked formidable on paper, but it was too long, too thin,
lacked defensive depth and was lacking in adequate reserve forces. The linear Maginot Line
suffered the same failings. America's fortifications protecting Manila and Britain's
'impregnable' fortifications at Singapore also proved worthless. The Japanese merely marched
into their undefended rears.
In 1940, the German Wehrmacht was modern history's supreme fighting machine. But only four
years later, the Wehrmacht was broken. Most Americans, British and Canadians believe that D-Day
was the decisive stroke that ended WWII in Europe. But this is not true.
Germany's mighty Wehrmacht, which included the Luftwaffe, was destroyed by Stalin's
Soviet Union. The Red Army claims to have destroyed 507 German divisions, 48,000 German tanks,
77,000 German aircraft, and 100 divisions of Axis troops allied to Germany from Italy, Romania,
Hungary, Slovakia, and Finland.
Few Americans have ever heard of the Soviet Far East offensive of 1945, a huge operation
that extended from Central Asia to Manchuria and the Pacific. At least 450,000 Japanese
soldiers were killed, wounded or captured by the Red Army, 32% of Japan's total wartime
military losses. The Soviets were poised to invade Japan when the US struck it with two nuclear
weapons.
Of Germany's 10 million casualties in WWII, 75% were inflicted by the Red Army. The once
mighty Luftwaffe was decimated over Russia. Almost all German military production went to
supplying the 1,600 km Eastern Front where Germany's elite forces were ground up in titanic
battles like Kursk and Stalingrad that involved millions of soldiers.
Soviet forces lost upwards of 20 million men. Total US losses, including the Pacific, were
one million. To Marshal Stalin, D-Day, the North African and Italian campaign were merely
diversionary side-shows to tie down Axis forces while the Red Army pushed on to Berlin.
D-Day was without doubt one of the greatest logistical feats of modern military history.
Think of General Motors versus the German warrior Siegfried. For every US tank the Germans
destroyed, ten more arrived. Each German tank was almost irreplaceable. Transporting over one
million men and their heavy equipment across the Channel was a triumph. But who remembers that
Germany crossed the heavily defended Rhine River into France in 1940?
ORDER IT NOW
By June, 1944, German forces at Normandy and along the entire Channel coast had almost no
diesel fuel or gasoline. Their tanks and trucks were immobilized. Allied air power shot up
everything that moved, including a staff car carrying Marshal Erwin Rommel strafed by Canada's
own gallant future aviator general, Richard Rohmer. German units in Normandy were below 40%
combat effectiveness even without their shortages in fuel.
The Germans in France were also very short of ammunition, supplies and communications. Units
could only move by night, and then very slowly. Hitler was reluctant to release armored forces
from his reserves. Massive Allied bombing of Normandy alone killed 15,000 to 20,000 French
civilians and shattered many cities and towns.
Churchill once said, 'you will never know war until you fight Germans.' With no air cover or
fuel and heavily outnumbered, German forces in Normandy managed to mount a stout resistance,
inflicting 209,000 casualties on US, Canadian, British, Free French and allied forces. German
losses were around 200,000.
The most important point of the great invasion is that without it, the Red Army would have
reached Paris and the Channel Ports by the end of 1944, making Stalin the master of all Europe
except Spain. Of course, the Allies could have reached a peace agreement with Germany in 1944,
which Hitler was seeking and Gen. George Patton was rumored to be advocating. But the
German-hating Churchill and left-leaning Roosevelt were too bloody-minded to consider a peace
that would have kept Stalin out of at least some of Eastern Europe.
"... In Syria the goal of Israel, the US, Saudis and other Gulf satrapies was the same: eliminate a strong secular regime that keeps the country unified and convert Syria into a bunch of impotent warring Bantustans. ..."
"... Israel wanted to make sure that there is no Syria to fulfill UN SC resolution and retake its Golan Heights, and have a chance of creating additional occupied "security areas" at will; Saudis and allied satrapies wanted to build oil and gas pipelines through Syrian territory without having to ask the permission of real government; the US wanted to promote Israeli and Saudi interests and create Libya-like chaos, making Syrian territory free-for-all playground. ..."
"... Russian intervention ruined those plans. Moreover, it appears that Iranian, Hezbollah, and other forces supporting Assad submitted to overall Russian military planning and possibly command: the war became pretty successful all of a sudden; high-ranking Iranian commanders are no longer killed in Syria on a regular basis. Thus, Russia foiled Israeli, Saudi, and the US plans. But it is important to keep in mind that Putin did this to promote Russian interests in the region, not Iranian or even Syrian. For the most part these interests coincide, but when they don't, Russian actions might look like a "betrayal" of partners, even though Russia cannot betray anyone there, as it did not pledge allegiance to anyone. ..."
"... Russia (both under tsars and in Soviet times) used to put too much effort into a thankless task of saving the world and learned its lesson. ..."
"... Yes, the string of ME wars (Syria is not an exception: remember Somalia, Libya, turmoil in Egypt, Yemen, etc) is part of the global war between the US Empire and Russia, where Russia seeks lasting order and balance of interests, whereas the Empire creates chaos in the hopes of getting new puppets and generally dominating, on behalf of Israel and itself. ..."
"... Yes, the US Empire is on the decline, hence the US policies are becoming more and more hysterical. In essence, no enemy undermines the US in the ME and all over the world more than it undermines itself. That's how all dominant Empires in history ended: by committing suicide. ..."
"... Bottom line is, Putin's Russia fends for itself, entering into long- and short-term deals with anyone (even Erdogan, who is as trustworthy as a used car salesman), as long as those deals serve its interests. ..."
"... Objectively, Russia cannot let the Empire (or Israel, for that matter) vanquish Assad or Iran. However, Putin tries to minimize the costs for Russia, and therefore will avoid direct confrontation with Israel or the Empire as long as possible. That's the whole story, the rest is fantasy. ..."
Let's look at that thesis from a purely logical point of view. First, what were the Israeli
goals initially? As I have explained
it elsewhere , initially the Israelis had the following goals:
Bring down a strong
secular Arab state along with its political structure, armed forces, and security services.
Create total chaos and horror in Syria justifying the creation of a "security zone" by Israel
not only in the Golan but further north. Trigger a civil war in Lebanon by unleashing the
Takfiri crazies against Hezbollah. Let the Takfiris and Hezbollah bleed each other to death,
then create a "security zone", but this time in Lebanon. Prevent the creation of a Shia axis
Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon. Break up Syria along ethnic and religious lines. Create a Kurdistan
which could then be used against Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Make it possible for Israel to
become the uncontested power broker in the Middle-East and force the KSA, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait
and all others to have to go to Israel for any gas or oil pipeline project. Gradually isolate,
threaten, subvert and eventually attack Iran with a wide regional coalition of forces.
Eliminate all centers of Shia power in the Middle-East.
Now let's stop right here and ask a very simple question: if Putin and Netanyahu were on the
same side all along, what should Putin have done to aid the Israelis? I submit that the obvious
and indisputable answer is: absolutely nothing . By the time the Russian initiated their (very
limited but also very effective) intervention in Syria those plans were well under way towards
full realization!
The undeniable truth is that Putin foiled the initial Israel plan for Syria.
In fact, Hezbollah and Iran had already intervened in Syria and were desperately "plugging
holes" in a collapsing Syrian front. So, if anything, Putin has to be the one to be credited
for forcing the Israelis to give up on their "plan A" and go to plan "B" which I described here and which can be
summarized as follows:
Step one, use your propaganda machine and infiltrated agents to re-start the myth about an
Iranian military nuclear program. ( ) If Trump says that the JCPOA is a terrible deal, then
this is so. Hey, we are living in the "post-Skripal" and "post-Douma" era – if some
Anglo (or Jewish) leaders say "highly likely" then it behooves everybody to show instant
"solidarity" lest they are accused of "anti-Semitism" or "fringe conspiracy theories" (you
know the drill). So step one is the re-ignition ex nihilo of the Iranian military nuclear
program canard. Step two is to declare that Israel is "existentially threatened" and ( ) and
let the dumb Americans fight the Iranians.
As I have explained it in great detail
here , Russia does not have any moral obligation to protect anybody anywhere, not in the
Middle-East and most definitely not Syria and/or Iran. I have also explained in great detail
here
why Putin also has a lot of pragmatic internal reasons for not getting Russia involved in a
major war in the Middle-East.
Finally, as I have explained here , the Israelis
are clearly baiting Iran by striking Iranian (or, more accurately, Iranian-linked or
Iranian-supported) targets in Syria. They hope that Iran's patience will come to an end and
that the Iranians will retaliate with enough firepower to justify not only an attack on
(relatively low value) Iranian-linked targets in Syria but on Iran proper, thus leading to a
guaranteed Iranian retaliation on Israel and The Big Prize: a massive US attack on Iran.
Now let's look at Russian actions once again. If Putin was "on the same side with Netanyahu
all along", he would be helping the Israelis do what they are doing, that is baiting the
Iranians, right? But what did Putin really do?
It all began with a statement by Foreign Minister Lavrov who declared that all foreign
forces must leave Syria. It is my understanding that no direct quote exists from Lavrov's
initial statement, only interpreted paraphrases . Lavrov also made some
clarifying comments later, like
this one . But let's not get bogged down in trying to decide which was an off-the-cuff
comment and which one was "official", but let us begin by noticing this: even before Lavrov's
comment on "all foreign forces" the same Lavrov also said that "
all US forces must leave Syria after the defeat of the terrorist forces ". May I also
remind everybody here that Israel has been illegally occupying the Syrian Golan for years and
that the IDF exactly fits into the definition of "foreign force in Syria"? It gets better,
according to the Syrians and, frankly according to common sense and international law,
the Syrians say that all foreign
forces must leave Syria except those legally requested to stay by the Syrian government . So
when the Russians say that all foreign forces
including Iranians (assuming Lavrov really said that) must leave Syria they have absolutely
no legal or other authority to impose that, short of a UNSC Resolution endorsing that demand.
Considering that the Israelis and the USA don't give a damn about international law or the
UNSC, we might even see a day when such a resolution is passed, enforced on the Iranians only,
and ignored by the Israelis. The trick here is that in reality there are rather few Iranian
"forces" in Syria. There are many more "advisors" (which would not be considered a "force") and
many more pro-Iranian forces which are not really "Iranian" at all. There is also Hezbollah,
but Hezbollah
is not going nowhere , and they are Lebanese, not Iranian anyway. No doubt the Israelis
would claim that Hezbollah is an "Iranian force" but that is basically nonsense. And just to
add to the confusion, the Russians are now being cute and saying: "
of course, the withdrawal of all non-Syrian forces must be carried out on a mutual basis, this
should be a two-way street ". I suggest that we can stop listing all the possible
paraphrases and interpretations and agree that the Russians have created a holy (or unholy)
mess with their statements. In fact, I would even submit that, what appears to be a holy (or
unholy) mess, is a verydeliberate and crafty ambiguity .
According to numerous Russian sources, all this rhetoric is about the southern part of Syria
and the line of contact (it ain't a border legally speaking) between Syria and Israel. The
deals seem to be this: the pro-Iranian forces and Hezbollah get out of the south, and in
exchange, the Israelis let the Syrians, backed by Russian airpower and "advisors" regain
control of southern Syria but without any attempts to push the Israelis out of the Golan which
they illegally occupy. Needless to say, the
Syrians are also insisting that as part of the deal, US forces in southern Syria must pack
and leave. But, frankly, unless the US plans to have tiny (and useless) US enclaves inside
Syrian controlled territory I don't see the point of them staying. Not only that, but the
Jordanians seem to
be part of this deal too. And here is the best part: there is some pretty good evidence
that Hezbollah
and Iran also are part of the deal . And, guess what?
So are the Turks .
This sure looks like some kind of major regional deal has been hammered out by the Russians.
And if that is really the case, then that would also explain the tense denials in
Israel and
Iran , followed by
more confirmations (also
here ) And, just to make things even more confused, we now have Stoltenberg (of all
people!) saying that NATO
would not assist Israel in case of an Iranian attack which, considering that the NATO
Secretary General has no power, that NATO is about 80%+ made up of the USA and that the
US now has permanent a "tripwire" force inside Israel and could claim to be under attack,
is utter nonsense, but still amusing to note as "adding to the chaos".
If all this looks to you like evidence for the thesis that "Putin and Netanyahu were on the
same side all along", then I wonder what it would take to convince you otherwise because to me
this looks like one of three things:
some kind of major regional deal has been made or some
kind of major regional deal is in the process of being hammered out or some kind of major
regional deal has been made but nobody trusts anybody else and everybody wants to make that
deal better for itself
and, of course, everybody wants to save face by either denying it all or declaring victory,
especially the AngloZionists.
So let's ask the key question: is there any evidence at all that Putin and/or Assad is/are
"ditching Iran"?
Away from the realm of declarations and statements and back to the world
Let's begin with a simple question: What does Iran want above all else?
I submit that the overwhelming number one priority of Iran is to avoid a massive US
attack on Iran.
Not because of a non-existing Iranian nuclear program threatening Israel, but because Iran
offers a most successful, and therefore dangerously competing, alternative civilizational model
to both the AngloZionist Empire and the Saudi-Wahabi version of Islam. Furthermore, unlike
(alas!) Russia, Iran dares to openly commit the "crime of crimes", that is, to publicly
denounce Israel as a genocidal, racist state whose policies are an affront to all of civilized
mankind. Finally, Iran (again unlike Russia, alas!) is a truly sovereign state which has
successfully dealt with its 5th columnists and which is not in the iron claws of IMF/WB/WTO/etc
types (I wrote about that last week so I
won't repeat it here).
I also submit that Iran also has as a top priority to support all the oppressed people of
the Middle-East. Resisting oppression and injustice is a Quranic imperative and I believe that
in its Iranian interpretation this also extends to non-Shia Sunnis and even Christians
and Jews, but since I know that this will trigger all sorts of angry accusations of being naive
(or even a Shia propagandist) I will concede that helping the oppressed Shia in the region is
probably more important to the Iranian leaders than helping all the other oppressed. In secular
terms, this means that Iran will try to protect and assist the Shia in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon
and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, considering the amazing
mercy shown by Hezbollah to the SLA in southern Lebanon in 2000, and the fact that
currently, the Syrian security forces are acting with utmost restraint in the parts of Syria
which have accepted the Russian deal (this even has some Russian analysts outright worried ) I
think that Iranian-backed forces liberating Syria from Daesh are the best thing which anybody
could hope for.
"My personal evaluation is that Putin is playing a very complex and potentially dangerous
game. He is trying to trick not one, but many "devils", all at the same time." Of course you
knew that all along, didn't you? Welcome back! i truly really mean that.
Saker, your argument hinges on 2 premises:
1. Russia is not ethically obliged to defend either Syria or Iran
2. Putin is playing a very clever, complex, dangerous game "trying to trick not one, but many
"devils", all at the same time."
Re 1: the whole 'game' in Syria and the wider ME is not about noble obligations, it is all
about power and influence. Russia has tried to portray itself as the new power broker,
believing that defeating Daesh with the help of Iran, Hezbollah and the SAA was enough to
attain that status. Russia seems to believe it can stay on the sidelines concerning the
ZioNazi statelet's & the US's incessant provocations of Syria and Iran; Russia also
stayed on the sidelines when the FUKUS trio bombed Syria over the fake chemical attack.
Unfortunately for Russia, that sideline position has only encouraged, and continues to
encourage, the muderous, psychopathic war criminals in Washington and Jerusalem to ever more
boldness because they see Russia's position as weakness. And that increasing boldness is
risking a major unplanned confrontation that puts humanity in danger. So Russia DOES have an
ethical obligation, if not to its 2 allies (which I do not agree with) then certainly to the
world.
As for your 2nd premise, unless you have access to Putin's inner circle and are privy to
his thinking, it is completely speculative, seemingly given in by an urge to defend Putin's
inaction.
Incidentally, in 2011 Russia/Putin promised Assad those S300′s, and basically
reneged on that (signed?) promise to its ally? Ethically this is unacceptable, no matter how
you spin it.
Perhaps not one of Saker's better articles. But core point has value: there is a deal.
Putin
is
dealing with a soggy bag of spitting devils.
I dont discount the possibility of war: especially if the zionist can manufacture appropriate
circumstances. However, ulimately Iran is (relatively) a side show.
The Empire is still committed to sanctions/propaganda/
diplomatic/political means to its ultimate goals of regime change in Russia, followed by
further intensified action against an isolated China.
Yes, the Zionist ghost in the Empire Golom itches to lash out militarily. But as we know,
they both like enemies such as Gaza, or Iraq, Libya & Syria until the Russians said
"enough !". They like enemies sufficiently small as to match their courage & moral vision
.
As a Russian I thought this text is pretty funny, because it reminded me of a classic
debate going on the Russian internet: "Путин
слил" (Putin sold out) vs "Путин
хитрый план" (this is all part of
an eleborate 3-D chess combination). Clearly, Saker is inclined towards the "3-D chess"
explanation.
It wasn't a "defensive war". Leaving out the fact that Israel's existence itself is not
entirely legitimate as the Arabs never recognised the UN mandated partition of Palestine, it
was Israel that started the war of 1967 by attacking Egypt, Syria's ally.
Russians are not conducting ethnic cleansing in Crimea or Donbass, herding native
population into reservations like Gaza, killing those, who try to escape – you know,
all these things that Israel is doing.
Thank you. Your insightful comment has somehow transformed my initial experience from an
exercise in futile reading into a significant and thoughtful -- nope! Sorry. This is a
repeat offence. 4,000 words of meandering foolishness is unredeemable. The Saker's writing,
in nearly every case, and over a long period of time, shows him to be a disingenuous hack who
delivers bulky loads of zero.
The Empire's propaganda machine denies and obfuscates this, and those who believe it don't
see i"
A NYT scribe was quoted by Globalresearch and ?Huffingtonpost saying :"Americans eagerly
and passionately want to believe something ,something , coming out of government " just to
feel good and and confident.
Personally, I hate unsolicited advice, but I am tempted to give it to the Saker: read what
you wrote at least once and edit in the process, so that your writing does not feel like a
stream of consciousness, where one has to fish for pearls of meaning in the muddy waters of
endless text. You are not a politician, your job is not to generate content-free verbal
diarrhea.
Back to substance. In Syria the goal of Israel, the US, Saudis and other Gulf
satrapies was the same: eliminate a strong secular regime that keeps the country unified and
convert Syria into a bunch of impotent warring Bantustans.
Israel wanted to make sure that there is no Syria to fulfill UN SC resolution and
retake its Golan Heights, and have a chance of creating additional occupied "security areas"
at will; Saudis and allied satrapies wanted to build oil and gas pipelines through Syrian
territory without having to ask the permission of real government; the US wanted to promote
Israeli and Saudi interests and create Libya-like chaos, making Syrian territory free-for-all
playground.
Russian intervention ruined those plans. Moreover, it appears that Iranian, Hezbollah,
and other forces supporting Assad submitted to overall Russian military planning and possibly
command: the war became pretty successful all of a sudden; high-ranking Iranian commanders
are no longer killed in Syria on a regular basis. Thus, Russia foiled Israeli, Saudi, and the
US plans. But it is important to keep in mind that Putin did this to promote Russian
interests in the region, not Iranian or even Syrian. For the most part these interests
coincide, but when they don't, Russian actions might look like a "betrayal" of partners, even
though Russia cannot betray anyone there, as it did not pledge allegiance to anyone.
There is no moral dimension to the events: Putin is purely pragmatic, rational rather than
moral. Russia (both under tsars and in Soviet times) used to put too much effort into a
thankless task of saving the world and learned its lesson.
Yes, the string of ME wars (Syria is not an exception: remember Somalia, Libya,
turmoil in Egypt, Yemen, etc) is part of the global war between the US Empire and Russia,
where Russia seeks lasting order and balance of interests, whereas the Empire creates chaos
in the hopes of getting new puppets and generally dominating, on behalf of Israel and
itself.
Yes, the US Empire is on the decline, hence the US policies are becoming more and more
hysterical. In essence, no enemy undermines the US in the ME and all over the world more than
it undermines itself. That's how all dominant Empires in history ended: by committing
suicide.
Bottom line is, Putin's Russia fends for itself, entering into long- and short-term
deals with anyone (even Erdogan, who is as trustworthy as a used car salesman), as long as
those deals serve its interests.
Objectively, Russia cannot let the Empire (or Israel, for that matter) vanquish Assad
or Iran. However, Putin tries to minimize the costs for Russia, and therefore will avoid
direct confrontation with Israel or the Empire as long as possible. That's the whole story,
the rest is fantasy.
Well, I know some history, about 100 times more than an average US citizen. Stalin's USSR
pushed for the creation of Israel and then supplied it (via satellites) with weapons to fight
Arab neighbors. Later the USSR took a strong pro-Arab anti-Israeli position. The position of
Yeltsin's Russia did not matter, as the regime was run by traitors dismantling and looting
everything. Putin's Russia is quite neutral, in a sense that Putin does not want to fight
Israel, but does not want to be seen as her friend, either. Israeli intelligence considers
Russia an unfriendly country, even though Russia pays pensions to Russian Jews who emigrated
to Israel, including military pensions to WWII vets. Bibi carefully avoids any confrontation
with Russia, even though Putin's interference in Syria thwarted Israeli goal of turning it
into something like Somalia or Libya.
My point is, Putin acts out of self-interest, avoiding direct confrontations wherever
possible, but firmly moving towards his goals. That includes his dealings with Syria, Israel,
Turkey, Iran, China, North Korea, and would include dealings with Devil himself, if such a
personage existed. Nothing personal, strictly business. That's what the Saker studiously
refuses to see.
Well, Putin maintains close relations with Assad government in Syria, Hezbollah, Iran, and
Turkey, all of which Israel considers foes. He is not particularly friendly with the US and
many of its vassals who provide political cover for Israeli crimes. However, Putin does not
want to be seen as a foe of Israel, either. He talks to Netanyahu on the regular basis and
likely has some situational deals with Israel. At least Israel studiously avoids any
confrontations with Russian military forces in Syria. Russia reciprocates by avoiding direct
confrontations with Israeli forces, even when they clearly break international law. You can
call it prudent policy or a bargain with the Devil, depending on your preferences.
Putin blunted Imperial aggression for the first time since Washington's defeat in Vietnam.
How this can be construed as cooperation with Israel is a mystery.
Saker defends Putin and Russia. That's why his detractors (Zionist scum) hate him. Why are
Zionist trolls working to discredit Saker if Putin is one of them?
I too found this piece difficult to read. I think because is takes so long to refute a
proposition that is so obviously false.
Israel has had a covert and now an overt role in the war in Syria, from the beginning. It
is laughable nonsense to proclaim they have protected Assad. They have provided material
support and medical aid to injured jihadists so they can return to Syria and continue their
mass murder.
I don't think this is really too complicated. Now that the war in Syria is winding down and
legitimate Russian interests have been secured (much praise goes to them for as well saving
the Syrian people from Zio-American terror), we are starting to see that Russian and Iranian
interests are diverging. Since they were never identical, this should not be too surprising.
The fact is, the relationship between Russia and Israel is complicated, and Russia has no
problem with a Zionist state in the Middle East. Whatever one may think of Israel, it's
presence/existence does not conflict with Russian interests. If Iran wishes to escalate the
fighting to attack Israel, it should not expect Russian sympathy on the matter. (And Assad's
government should know when to declare victory and go home.)
You really think Putin does not know that the tail is wagging the dog, the dog with the
neocons and AEI, that want the USA to conquer the whole world militarily ?
You obviously did not read the article, or it does not fit your prejudices.
A ME without an Israel would solve a lot, a USA without AIPAC and whatever could solve many
remaining problems.
The headlines in Israeli newspapers about the closeness between Putin and Bibi may be a
clever ploy to hide just the opposite, there's no deal between Russia and Israel, the latter
can offer the former little as you say yourself.
The best option for Putin would be to stick with Iran, get the country into the Chinese
run Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (both China and Russia have hinted as such), this will
boosts the organisation clout, and deter the US from attacking Iran.
I always look forward to The Saker's writing. He's a zealot, to be sure, and he needs a
proofreader / editor. But his intelligence, moral decency, desire to educate, and dedication
to what he thinks is right, are all plain to see.
Israel is the primary source of instability in the ME, and Organized Jewry is the driving
force behind much global chaos and subversion, no doubt. Putin unquestionably knows this. (He
has publicly spoken about the Jewish role in the early Bolshevik state, and his purge of the
worst Jewish oligarchs engendered much of the insane hostility towards him by the neocons
etc. Curiously he did pass a law banning Holocaust denial, however.)
However these twin malefactors will not go away quietly, and Putin/Russia knows this as
well. Organized Jewry and their brain-dead Bible-thumper bots in America may want global
conflagration, but Russia does not so they are properly proceeding with caution. They are
under no obligation to help the Iranians expand the fighting.
Yes, I disagree with the proposition that Russia doesn't have to defend Iran, which
borders Russia and has ethnic Russians. In fact, Putin cannot allow the Anglo-Zionists to
control Iran, because that would threaten Russia in several ways. Putin would have to go all
in to prevent a successful attack on Iran.
Iran is NOT "escalating" anything, nor is it trying to attack Israel. This is a red
herring being used against Iran much like the nuclear file BS. Be careful with the
anti-Iranian propaganda. If there is a country more demonized than Russia, it is surely
Iran.
Direct Iranian military presence in Syria is relatively small, even if Iranian backed
militias(many of them Syrian) are included. Iran has a defense pact with Syria and has been
invited by the Syrian government to help just like Russia.
The Iranian support is often overlooked but it has been crucial to hold and defeat the
mercenaries/jihadists backed by the ZUSA led coalition.
Mark Sleboda, during a RT CrossTalk debate, stated clearly that without Iran, ISIS and Al
Qaeda could not have been defeated in Iraq and Syria.
As for Syria, I really don't understand your statement. The Syrians will seek, and rightly
so, to restore all of their country.
Obviously there are differences within the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance in Syria, and
Zionist officials & propaganda will try exploit any rifts I doubt they'll succeed, though
they may use their media to pretend they achieved something
B of MoA is very much pro-Russia, a retired German army officer, have a look at:
Syria – Israel Falsely Claims Iran Pull-Back Deal With Russia – Again
Israel loves to pretend that it is an important country which can move other governments
to do its bidding.
1. Russia has no way to keep Iran out of Syria or to tell Iranian advisors and militia
where to go or not to go. The Syrian government will not do away with its best ally, Iran,
which came to its help before Russia came in and will continue to help while Russia lowers
its presence in the conflict. Were Russia to play "either-or" hardball with the Syrian
government the decision would likely be against Russia and for Iran.
2. Iran already announced that it will not take part in the upcoming Daraa operation in
southwest Syria.
Also important to understand the situation; RUSSIA HAS REACHED THE END OF THE ROAD IN
SYRIA, SO DAMASCUS WILL CONTINUE TO FIGHT ON WITH ITS REMAINING ALLIES
Elijah J Magnier
"As for the Israelis, they would make Satan himself look honest and are ideologically
incapable of honesty (or even decency)."
I would have written "naturally" rather than "ideologically", but notwithstanding, the
Saker knows it, I know it, and I have a hard time believing that Putin doesn't know it.
Actually, I believe everybody knows it, some just dare not say it or have more interest in
pretending, that's all. The corollary is that you can never trust a single word an Israeli
utters. It's like the punch line of an old Serbian joke about a monk tempted by the devil to
break his fast only to get exposed before his fellow monks. When the monk asks "but why?", as
there seems to be no gain for the devil, he's answered "I never tell the truth".
Unlike the Saker, I don't see this turning into a hot war, which doesn't mean that I see
the Anglo-Zionist imperialists getting along with Russia. They will go more and more into
hysterics mode but that is a sign of impotence. If I were Russian, I would just let the USA
bleed its taxpayers white through defence spending, knowing that the psychopaths in New York,
Washington DC, Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem are crazy but not suicidal. I believe they have
realised that a hot war against Russia is now unwinnable. They had a window of opportunity
that is now closed.
It seems to me that the Saker calls Russian Jews "zionists" just in order to avoid calling
them Jews. As I wrote before, Russian Jews don't descend from Judea, they descend from
Khazars, a tribe originating from the shores of the Black Sea that espoused Judaism in the
early Middle Age. Russia is their homeland, not Israel, and though Judaism plays a big role
in why they feel entitled, they want to rule Russia for the sake of ruling Russia, not for
Israel, and not because they are USA's 5th column. The bolsheviks didn't give a damn about
Israel. They wanted Russia. And they wanted the whole world incidentally. Confusing the
Russian "Jewish problem" to Zionism is a huge mistake. It is a domestic problem, not a
foreign imported one. With or without Israel, it remains the same, unlike the American
"Jewish problem". If you remove Russia-obsessed Jews and hard-core Zionists from the picture,
the remainder of USA Jews actually contribute to the richness of American society.
All that said, though the whole article often slides from fact-based analysis into wishful
thinking, I generally agree that the Russian approach is the only possible sensible one.
Putin is guided by the principle that "doing no harm" does indeed less harm than inflicting
harm to punish harm. So far, it works, even though a lot of people are frustrated by what
they perceive as bad guys' impunity. Refusing to punish the bad guys because it would entail
too much "collateral damage" is a sign of humanity, not weakness. I praise Putin for it.
So who is the biggest threat to the Shia and, I would argue, to all the people of the
Middle-East? The Takfiris of Daesh of course.
This is quite a non-sequitor after listing Israel's goals in the region; as we all know,
Daesh, Alqueda, etc. are the tools. They cannot supply themselves, they only achieve success
if they are sponsored by other powers, as they have been all along.
The truth is that Israel, unlike Iran, has very little to offer Putin or Russia.
What about calling off the Empire from their necks?
(I generally agree with 90% of the analysis, 100% of the tone and direction, but every
week or so there seems to be one or two statements that are just glaringly inconsistent in
the Saker's articles, like he was fulfilling some contractual obligation or something)
You are right of course, I did not mean to give that impression, Iran is definitely
unfairly maligned. However, if they continue supporting Hezbollah, they should not be
surprised if Israel works out a deal with Russia to strike these assets (while duplicitously
hitting Syrian government forces), because this is simply not Russia's particular fight. The
only question would be how far Israel would push the envelope, and what Russia would do
then.
After my departure from government in part over my disagreement with the Iraq War, this
willingness to place the United States in peril to serve the interests of a foreign country
began to bother me, and there is no country that manipulates the U.S. government better or more
persistently than Israel. I gradually became involved with those who were pushing back against
the Israel Lobby, though it was not generally referred to in those terms before Stephen Walt
and John Mearsheimer produced their seminal work The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy in 2006.
It does not take a genius to figure out that the United States is deeply involved in a
series of seemingly endless wars pitting it against predominantly Muslim nations even though
Washington has no vital interests at stake in places like Syria, Libya and Iraq. Who is driving
the process and benefiting? Israel is clearly the intended beneficiary of a coordinated effort
mounted by more than 600 Jewish organizations in the U.S. that have at least as part of their
programs the promotion and protection of Israel. Ironically, organizations that promote the
interests of a foreign government are supposed to be registered under the Foreign Agents
Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) but not a single pro-Israel organization has ever done so nor
even been seriously challenged on the issue, a tribute to their power in dealing with the
federal government.
Those who are in the drivers' seat of the Israel promotion process are what some would
describe as the Israel Lobby but which I would prefer to call a subset of the Jewish Lobby,
which in itself is supported by something I would designate Jewish Power, an aggregate of
Jewish money, control over key aspects of the media and entertainment industries plus easy
access to corrupted politicians desirous of positive press and campaign donations. This
penetration and control of the public discourse has resulted in the creation of what I would
refer to as the official "Israel narrative," in which Israel, which claims perpetual
victimhood, is reflexively referred to as "the only democracy in the Middle East" and
"Washington's closest ally and friend," assertions that are completely false but which have
been aggressively and successfully promoted to shape how Americans view the Israeli-Arab
conflict. Palestinians resisting the Israeli occupation are invariably described as
"terrorists" both in the U.S. and Israel.
While the Israeli lobby has been a major influence in pushing America in a militaristic
direction, it has mostly been pushing against an open door. The US has been militarily
expansionist and imperialist since its inception while always finding a way to blame its
enemies. The most hilarious recent example of this was Trump blaming Canada (yes, Canada!)
for burning the White House in the war of 1812. In reality of course, it was the US which
invaded Canada and burned some regional government buildings there. The war party in the US
is an unholy alliance of Christian, Jewish and secular Zionists and American exceptionalists.
Many Jews and Christians are opposed to these militaristic policies, but unfortunately they
are without political influence.
Dr. Giraldi this is much more difficult than it seems. I have "friends" who have retired from
the CIA (if that is possible) and they tell me that there are at least two factions in the
CIA Hierarchy that are extremely pro Israel. Would you care to comment on this or is this
just their imagination?
Fifty-one years ago today Israeli fighter aircraft and torpedo boats tried to sink the USS
Liberty, a surveillance ship stationed off the coast of Egypt during Israel's attack on Egypt
and Syria. Israel was unable to sink the USS Liberty, but did manage to kill or wound almost
the entire crew. Thirty-four Americans were killed and 174 were wounded.
There are two explanations for the attack. As Washington has blocked every attempt at an
investigation, we do not know which one is correct. Perhaps both are the reasons for the
attack.
One is that Israel, which was committing a war crime by mass execution of Egyptian prisoners
of war, was fearful that the USS Liberty's surveillance had discovered the crime. The other is
that Israel fearing an unfavorable outcome of the war that Israel had initiated intended to
blame the attack on the USS Liberty on Egypt, thus bringing the US into the war on Israel's
side.
I have written about this attack a number of times, having interiewed sailors and officers
on board during the attack, an officer, Captain Ward Boston, who was ordered to produce a
cover-up, and Admiral Tom Moorer, former Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff. Frustrated at Washington's coverup, indeed, Washington's complicity in the
crime, upon retirement Admiral Moorer convened the Moorer Commission to set the record
straight.
The Moorer Commission concluded:
" That there is compelling evidence that Israel's attack was a deliberate attempt
to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew.
"That fearing conflict with Israel, the White House deliberately prevented the US Navy
from coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support
while the ship was under attack.
"That surviving crew members were threatened with 'court-martial, imprisonment or worse'
if they exposed the truth; and [the survivors] were abandoned by their own government.
"That there has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history.
"That a danger to our national security exists whenever our elected officials are willing
to subordinate American interests to those of any foreign nation."
You can find my articles on my website or online as well as the proceedings of the Moorer
Commission.
The most disturbing thing about the Israeli attack is that when the Liberty's distress
signal reached the fleet commander and US Navy fighters were launched to drive off the Israeli
attackers, the White House ordered the fleet commander to recall the American jets. Frustrated
by his inability to defend the US Navy from murderous assault, the fleet commander used open
radio to scare off the Israelis by announcing that US fighters were on their way to the
Liberty's rescue. This caused the Israelis to immediately call off the attack and to issue an
apology that it had mistaken the USS Liberty, which was flying a massive American flag and had
USS Liberty in tall letters, as an Egyptian ship.
ORDER IT NOW
On orders from the White House, Admiral McCain, Senator McCain's father, ordered a cover up.
The Liberty's crew were ordered not to mention the event. It was two decades before one of the
Liberty's officers, then retired, wrote the story. American taxpayers, who were shelling out
billions of dollars from their desperate needs every year to enable Israel to purchase the US
government with the billions of dollars hapless Americans are forced to hand over to Israel,
knew nothing about the attack for 20 years.
If 51 years ago Israel had such power over the US government that the White House itself
refused to protect an American ship from Israeli attack and then covered up the attack in order
to give Israel a free pass, just imagine how much more control Israel has achieved over the US
government in the past half century. If you have any doubt that Israel rules America, just look
at Nikki Haley's subservience to Israel in the UN as US ambassador, or at President Trump
himself defying the entire world and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Just look at Trump, on
Israel's orders, unilaterally disregarding the Iranian nuclear agreement signed by President
Obama and upheld by all other signatories, in the hopes of creating a pretext for an American
attack on Iran that serves only Israel's interest. Just look at the extraordinary groveling at
Israel's feet of the entire US Senate and House of Representatives who unanimously pass Israel
Lobby sponsored laws and resolutions. Just look at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN,
National Public Radio, MSNBC, and so on who serve as megaphones for the voice of Israel.
Every American, especially those superpatriots who wrap themselves in the flag, should be
totally ashamed that their government is nothing but an adjunct of Israel. (Republished from
PaulCraigRoberts.org
by permission of author or representative)
The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream mediaIn short: because they are rapidly losing the propaganda monopoly by system failure
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find a source to inform me about the exact origin
(who and when) of the term 'fake news'. Generally, the term became mainstream during the last
years, and especially after some shocking events for the Western neoliberal establishment, like
Trump's presidency and Brexit.
Very briefly, it appears that the term was suspiciously invented by the neoliberal apparatus
to discredit people who supported such events, through social media and other Internet
platforms completely independent from the mainstream media control. Of course, one can easily
discredit this perception as 'conspiracy theory' or even 'fake news', as well.
While it's true that there has been a lot of hyperbole, misinformation and hard propaganda
circulated inside the cyberspace, it seems that the 'fake news' term was expanded somehow to
include even opinions and positions outside the dominant neoliberal orthodoxy expressed by the
political center in the West.
What's perhaps most interesting in the whole story, is that the term 'fake news' eventually
backfired against the establishment, as it was immediately adopted by the political 'extremes'
outside the neoliberal center, to include the misinformation and the smearing campaigns by the
mainstream media against those who didn't comply with the neoliberal narratives. Mainstream
media propaganda is what brought us numerous wars and plenty of disaster in previous decades,
after all.
numerous wars and plenty of disaster in previous decades, after all.
Now, a
relatively new technology with its origins in the beginning of the previous decade,
seems that it spreads a sort of panic among the mainstream media, often described as
'information apocalypse'.
What is new is the democratisation of
advanced IT, the fact that anyone with a computer can now engage in the weaponisation of
information. 2016 was the year we woke up to the power of fake news, with internet
conspiracy theories and lies used to bolster the case for both Brexit and Donald Trump. We
may, however, look back on it as a kind of phoney war, when photoshopping and video
manipulation were still easily detectable. That window is closing fast. A program developed
at Stanford University allows users to convincingly put words into politicians' mouths.
Celebrities can be inserted into porn videos. Quite soon it will be all but impossible for
ordinary people to tell what's real and what's not. What will the effects of this be? When a public figure claims the racist or sexist audio of
them is simply fake, will we believe them? How will political campaigns work when millions
of voters have the power to engage in dirty tricks? What about health messages on the
dangers of diesel or the safety of vaccines? Will vested interests or conspiracy theorists
attempt to manipulate them? Unable to trust what they see or hear, will people retreat into
lives of non-engagement, ceding the public sphere to the already powerful or the
unscrupulous? The potential for an "information apocalypse" is beginning to be taken seriously. The
problem is we have no idea what a world in which all words and images are suspect will look
like, so it's hard to come up with solutions. Perhaps not very much will change –
perhaps we will develop a sixth sense for bullshit and propaganda, in the same way that it
has become easy to distinguish sales calls from genuine inquiries, and scam emails with
fake bank logos from the real thing. But there's no guarantee we'll be able to defend
ourselves from the onslaught, and society could start to change in unpredictable ways as a
result.
The perspective described here is indeed frightening. Yet, what's really impressive in this
article and in other similar articles by the big media on the Internet, is that there is a type
of information elitism, implying that there is a media priesthood, which has the copyright of
Truth. You can tell that by the fact that the article completely ignores the possibility that
this technology could be used by the mainstream media too, to manipulate the public.
Inside this increasingly artificial reality, is there really anyone today who holds the keys of
the 'ultimate' truth? I don't think so.
So, this bizarre panic around the mainstream media about this new, and indeed frightening
technology, is not coming from their concern that you will be heavily misinformed. It's coming
from the fact that they want the monopoly to misinform you. Because they know that after
decades of lies and propaganda being upgraded to a literally scientific level, their
credibility today has reached a record low.
Celebrities can be inserted into porn videos by anyone. I don't like it. I don't think is
right.
Personalities should be protected and perhaps we need a new legislation code to achieve
that.
But what about the mainstream media pundits who will use this frightening technology to grab
the consent of the masses for another devastating war with millions of dead?
Nowhere in the Western world is truth respected. Even universities are imposing censorship
and speech control. Governments are shutting down, and will eventually criminalize, all
explanations that differ from official ones. The Western world no longer has a print and TV
media. In its place there is a propaganda ministry for the ruling elite.
Whistleblowers are prosecuted and imprisoned despite their protection by federal statue. The
US Department of Justice is a Department of Injustice. It has been a long time since any
justice flowed from the DOJ.
The total corruption of the print and TV media led to the rise of Intermet media such as
Wikileaks, led by Julian Assange, a prisoner since 2012.
Assange is an Australian and Ecuadorian citizen. He is not an American citizen. Yet US
politicians and media claim that he is guilty of treason because he published official
documents leaked to Wikileaks that prove the duplicity and criminality of the US
government.
It is strictly impossible for a non-citizen to be guilty of treason. It is strickly
impossible under the US Constitution for the reporting of facts to be spying. The function of
the media is to expose and to hold accountable the government. This function is no longer
performed by the Western print and TV media.
Washington wants revenge and is determined to get it. If Assange were as corrupt at the New
York Times, Washington Post, CNN, National Public Radio, MSNBC, etc., he would have reported
the leaker to Washington, not published the information, and retired as a multi-millionaire
with Washington's thanks. However, unfortunately for Assange, he had integrity.
Integrity today in the Western world has no value. You cannot find integrity in the
government, in the global corporations, in the universities and schools, and most certainly not
in the media.
After leaving Assange, an Australian citizen, to Washington's mercy since 2012, belated
pro-Assange protests in Australia forced the US vassal state to come to Assange's aid before
the new corrupt president of Ecuador sells him to Washington for muilti-millons of dollars by
revoking his asylum.
When the story was printed in the Sydney Morning Herald, the incompetent or brainwashed, or
bought-and-paid-for journalist, Nick Miller, wrote:
"Assange entered the embassy on June 19, 2012, after he had exhausted his appeals against an
extradition order to go to Sweden to face rape and sexual assault allegations.
Nick Miller has committed libel, whether from his ignorance or from pay.
There was no extradition order from Sweden for Assange to be returned to Sweden "to face
rape and sexual assault allegations." No such charges were issued by the Swedish prosecutorial
office, and no such charges were made by the women involved.
The case had already been closed by the Swedish prosecutorial office, and the two women who
willingly shared their beds with Assange did not press any charges. The Swedish female
prosecutor, who many suspect reopened the closed case at the urging of Washington, wrote in the
extradition request that she only wanted Assange for questioning.
Normally, extraditions are not granted for questioning. There has to be actual criminal
charges, and there were no such charges against Assange. However, under pressure from
Washington, a corrupt UK court granted, perhaps for the first time in history, extradition for
questioning.
Assange's attorneys understood that if Assange left his embassy refuge and travelled to
Sweden to be questioned, there was nothing to prevent Sweden from turning him over to
Washington to be tortured, as Washington does, into confession of some crime.
Consequently, Assange's attorneys told the Swedish female prosecutor, a person who seems
shortchanged on integrity, that Assange would be available for questioning in his place of
refuge. The prosecutor, showing her hand, refused to question Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy
in London. After refusing for many months while the presstitutes blackened Assange's repution
as a "rapist who was escaping justice," the sort of ignorant nonsense that Nick Miller writes,
the prosecutor consented to go to London to interview Assange.
As nothing incriminating emerged from the questioning and as neither of the women claimed
that they were raped, the female prosecutorclosed the case for the second time. But the corrupt
British would not release Assange. They claimed that he was wanted for jumping bail, an
argument that made no sense as the charge for his arrest had been dismissed. But Washington
insisted, and British "justice" again served Washington instead of justice.
The basis of the political assault on Assange came from the concern of one of his willing
sex partners that he had not used a condum. With everyone worried crazy about HIV and Aids, the
woman inquired at a Swedish public office if Assange could be required to take a HIV/Aids test.
Assange, not realizing his vulnerability, apparently refused the test, and thus opened himself
to a controversy that Washington immediately took advantage of.
It is safe for rock stars to have groupies, but not for truth-tellers.
If you understand the extreme extent to which the US government has gone, riding roughshod
over many laws and traditions, to destroy Assange, perhaps you can understand the threats that
the very few of us who have the education, experience, and integrity to tell you the truth live
under.
When I write an article, it does not inform me. I already know. When I inform you, I am
doing so at my risk. I am not going to take this risk if readers do not support this website. I
do this for you. If it is not important to you, I have no need to do it.
You need to support truth-tellers as we are a disappearing breed under constant assault.
Mixture of interesting although almost irrelevant information about personalities such as
Gorbachov and his wife (viewed over rose glasses) with some idiotic statements. Avoid.
The collapse of the USSR was the collapse of the society which ideology (Marxism-leninism)
collapsed and replacement it with neoliberalism. Neoliberal counterrevolution.
Also the economics of the USSR was a war economics. Part of it was due to the threat from the West and embargo on high tech.
Part due to own military-industrial complex. Agriculture was a failure. The net result was deterioration of he standard of
living in 80th. People because seduced by western consumerism and elite was seduced by neoliberal ideology. So
neoliberal revolution (counter-revolution) logically followed
April 5, 2017
In this lecture, William Taubman, professor of Political Science at Amherst College and the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author, sheds a light on how Mihail Gorbachev undermined the Soviet
system in pursuit of his dream of the democratized country.
The West will always hate Russia. Because the Soviet Union destroyed the colonial world
order where the rules of the West. Despotism of the "white man" was destroyed, and enslaved
peoples of Africa, Asia, Islamic world, Latin America was released. In the 19th century, the
West ruled the world, now only n their historical lands. Russia has caused considerable
damage to Western domination.
Why USSR collapsed according to America, Fake news. The USSR empire collapsed for the same
reasons that European empires collapsed. The American empire has been in decline for a while
now and will eventually collapsed too.
The USSR was doomed to collapse. It is a totally corrupted union, with selfish leaders who
lived in luxury while the people lived in poverty. However, it devoted its resources to
military development. No extra resources were given to production of consumer goods and foods
for the people. Its union comprises many countries with different races and cultures, which
could never be reconciled. Its collapse is just a matter of time, and could not blame
Gorbachev.
I don't normally write about historical anniversaries. They're usually well covered by a
plethora of writers much better than I. But today's date marks an event which intersects a
project I began working several months ago on the history of nuclear weapons and related
policies. Fifty five years ago, today, June 10, President John F. Kennedy delivered a
commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C. on what he considered to be the
most important matter of his time, indeed for all time: world peace. I read through it a couple
of months ago and found it to be well worth remembering, not only for its particular content,
but for the direction that Kennedy indicated in those remarks of where he wanted the world to
go in.
To begin with, Kennedy clearly rejected the kind of "peace" that the geopoliticians have
been taking us towards in recent years. "What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we
seek?" he asked rhetorically. "Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of
war. Not a peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I'm talking about genuine peace
– the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living – the kind that enables
men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not
merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely in our time but
peace for all time."
Remember, this was about eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy was very
acutely aware of the danger that nuclear weapons represented. Weapons of such power made no
sense, he said, and the accumulation of weapons that could never be used except to keep the
peace couldn't possibly be the only way, much less the most efficient way, to keep the peace.
"I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men," he said.
Kennedy called on his audience to not only look at the leadership of the then-Soviet Union,
but also to look inward at our own attitudes "as individuals and as a nation – for our
attitudes are as essential as theirs." He rejected the notion that peace was impossible. "By
defining our goal more clearly – by making is seem more manageable and less remote
– we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly
towards it."
Secondly, Kennedy rejected demonization of the Soviet Union. While he found Communism
repugnant, he said "we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements – in
science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage." He
also made a number of points which are even more relevant today. "Almost unique among the major
world powers we have never been at war with each other," he said. "And no nation in the history
of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World
War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or
sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including nearly two-thirds of its industrial base,
was turned into a wasteland – a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east
of Chicago."
Today, Kennedy went on, it is the US and the Soviet Union that are in the most danger of
devastation. "All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24
hours," he said. "So, let us not be blind to our differences," Kennedy advised, "but let us
also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which these differences can
be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe
for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit
this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all
mortal."
The remainder of Kennedy's remarks dealt with the arms control efforts of his administration
which culminated in his declaration that the US would no longer conduct nuclear tests in the
atmosphere. "Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty – but I hope
it will help us achieve one."
Glenn Seaborg, who was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission at the time, reports in his
1981 book "Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban," that the genesis of the speech came from a
discussion that Kennedy had with the journalist Norman Cousins. Cousins had been engaged in a
series of candid discussions with Khrushchev and had related the content of these discussions
to the White House. "I advocated making a breathtaking offer to the Russians and the President
said he would think about it..." Cousins recalled.
I was 23 when Kennedy died. I remember him as a rather ineffective president more popular
abroad than in the US who was elected through his father's adroit and ruthless use of his
money with labor union leaders and his mob connections. Kennedy had style but not a lot
of substance. Let us remember the filthy way he treated the beautiful and cultured woman
who had married down with him. The only really good thing one can say about him was that
Johnson was worse.
I don't know I quite admire the pragmatism to use the mob and zionist money to get
elected, but then once in office to turn round and attempt to destroy them because they
had that unhealthy power. Arrogant and inexperienced initially, but no lack of substance.
His comments on Vietnam, Algeria, the Middle East and the Soviet Union showed the
broader education his background allowed, and perhaps an Irishman's ability to understand
the underdog.
Tell me how he attempted to destroy the Zionists. Tell me. The underdog? Sentimental
claptrap. He was Joe Kennedy's son and like him was a Harvard man.
RFK was having the DoJ force the ZOA to register under the FARA Act, Ben Gurion resigned
over JFK's hostile relations with Israel, as well his pressure over Dimona. We know JFK
pledged to destroy the Israel lobby and his actions in office support this.
It would have been interesting to have seen what would have happened in regards to
Vietnam, the Cold War and the Middle East if JFK had served his second term, as it is you
and the world got LBJ.
I was 2 when Kennedy died so I have no memory of his administration. My dad, who
joined the John Birch Society after Goldwater lost in 1964, probably would have agreed
with you. It'll probably take me two years to go through the documents comprehensively
but the impression I have so far, on the nuclear issue at any rate, is of a president
struggling mightily to be in control of his presidency, rather than be controlled by
events and outside forces. But how completely can we really judge a presidency that was
cutoff after only two and-a-half years?
"Kennedy's assassination two months later brought to and end any chance of a follow
through on that treaty..."
Cui bono? Who benefits from that assassination? Nuclear weapons are very expensive and
we've done nothing but spend trillions more on them since and Obama wanted and Trump
wants to spend more.
JFK's approach for peace re-emerged in China around 2008 and is what Xi has been
promoting for some time, but what a difference - a one time speech by JFK before he is
assassinated vs. 10 years into a fully supported strategic plan that spans two different
leaders.
"The win-win strategy of opening up is the key foundation of win-win cooperation.
"Implementing the win-win strategy of opening up" was initiated in the "Proposals for the
11th Five-Year Plan on National Economy and Social Development" passed in the 5th Plenary
Session of the 16th CPC Central Committee. Inheriting and developing the concept of
"equality and mutual benefit," the proposals highlighted the strategic importance of
"mutual benefit and win-win outcomes." The Report to the 17th National Congress of the
CPC, mentioning "win-win outcomes" five times, promised that China would "unswervingly
follow a win-win strategy of opening up." When attending the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM)
in October 2008, then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao delivered a speech entitling "Sharing
Weal and Woe, Promoting Mutual Benefit."
BEIJING -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has ratcheted down Beijing's heated rhetoric
and called on the government to expand its foreign policy agenda through cooperation and
diplomacy.
China should "promote the peaceful resolution of differences and disputes between
countries through dialogue and consultation and oppose the wilful use of threat of
force", Mr Xi said in a major policy address this weekend, said a report by the official
Xinhua news agency late on Saturday.
"We have advocated the building of a new type of international relations underpinned
by win-win cooperation," he told a meeting of top leaders convened by the Communist Party
to discuss foreign policy. China championed "a new vision featuring common,
comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security".
I believe there was more substance to Kennedy than is commonly known. A pivotal period in
his life was apparently the fall of 1951. He was still in the House of Representatives
but was preparing to run for the Senate against the incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge II. In
order to burnish his foreign policy credentials he and his brother
Robert, who was fresh out of law school, took a seven week trip to the Far East, South
Asia and perhaps other areas. Being the male offspring of Joe Kennedy it's hard to
believe they didn't atronize various fleshpots along the way, but they did serious work
as well, meeting with heads of government and chiefs of state such as Sukarno of
Indonesia and Nehru of India.
According to writers such as James Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable and
James DiEugenio in Destiny Betrayed , Kennedy came away from these encounters with
the assessment that most of these first generation leaders of the post-colonial era
genuinely sought to establish and nurture democratic institutions in their countries.
However in terms of economics they were at various points along the capitalist-socialist
spectrum. Kennedy appeared to have arrived at the view that it was in the best long-term
interest of the USA to nourish these countries efforts in this direction, and to do so
even in the cases of the ones whose economies were socializing considerable elements of
their economies. He also appeared to advocate not leaning them too forcefully to follow
in lock-step behind USA leadership in world affairs.
Kennedy defeated Lodge in November, 1952, no doubt with a lot of help from his
father's money and connections. That same election, however, installed General Eisenhower
as President and just as importantly the Dulles brothers as heads of the State Department
and the CIA.
In his book entitled The Brothers Stephen Kinzer describes how the
"self-righteous prude" and the "charming libertine" (as John Foster and Allen,
respectively, are characterized in the dust jacket blurb) capitalized on their close
sibling relationship and similar views to dominate the Republican administration's
foreign policy. With regard to the USSR and China that policy was Manichean, but in the
rest of the world, the economic colonialism that the USA had been practicing in Latin
America and the Philippines since the turn of the century was extended to south Asia and
Africa. According to the author, the brothers rarely went into a national security
meeting without coordinating their advocacy of their positions beforehand.
Kennedy's voice, albeit a muted one, was one of the few raised on the Senate floor in
opposition to the "If you're not with us you're against us" words and actions of the
Eisenhower/Dulles administration. After all JFK already had his eye on the Oval Office
and it was tactically unwise to deviate very far from the herd. One such occasion was
when he spoke out was in opposition the administration's decision not to send an observer
to the first ever conference of non-aligned countries at Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. The
USSR was not a participant but did send observers and was active in the lobbies when the
conference was not in session. Mainland China was a articipant.
One stop on JFK's and RFK's itinerary in 1951 was Saigon. As Douglass relates, they
were minded there by a young Foreign Service officer whom JFK had previously known from
school days named Edwin Gullion. Among the touring politician's appointments was one with
the commanding French general, who gave Kennedy a rosy presentation full of statistics on
how the French were winning and it would be only a matter of time until the Vietminh was
done for. That evening the two Kennedys and Gullion adjourned to the roof of the Hotel
Continental and at dinner Kennedy asked Gullion for his take on "what's really going on."
The diplomat debunked the French narrative saying the conflict was fundamentally one of
colonial liberation, that the Vietminh's adoption of communism was motivated mainly to
get the support of the USSR and China (it's my impression that as time went on the more
doctrinaire communists in the movement came to dominate) and also discussed the tenacity
and resilience the Vietnamese people had developed over centuries fighting off domination
from their neighbor to the north. Gullion also told the brothers how the revolving door
governments of metropolitan France of that era were losing the will and ability to
support the increasingly costly war. Finally he offered his opinion that if the USA got
directly involved we'd likely get worn down as well. Gullion's input made a profound
effect on the Kennedy brothers that they carried with them all the way into and through
JFK's presidency.
Fueling hysteria about "Russian disinformation," "Russian meddling," and "Russian
propaganda" has quickly become a lucrative pastime. Now NATO's Atlantic Council has gathered
the leading proponents under one umbrella.
"Russian's everywhere, everywhere Russians" – that's long been the mantra of NATO's
propaganda wing, the Atlantic Council. And, since 1961, the American lobby group's raison
d'être has been to convince the world that Moscow presents an existential threat to
the rest of Europe.
And as NATO has expanded, the "think tank's" agitprop has evolved from the "reds in the bed"
whispers of the Soviet-era to today's new racket: "disinformation."
This week, Atlantic Council
announced a new initiative known as the "DisinfoPortal."
Their latest wheeze is pitched as "an interactive online guide to track the Kremlin's
disinformation campaigns abroad." Something you can take to mean pretty much everything which
contradicts NATO-friendly messaging, whether accurate or not.
As we await info on Kim-Trump, I think it wise to examine what Trump's outbursts at and
beyond the G6+1 are based upon--his understanding of Economic Nationalism. Fortunately,
we have
an excellent, recent, Valdai Club paper addressing the topic that's not too technical or
lengthy. The author references two important papers by Lavrov and Putin that ought to be read
afterwards. Lavrov's
is the elder and ought to be first. Putin's Belt & Road International Forum
Address, 2017 provides an excellent example of the methods outlined in the first paper.
I
could certainly add more, but IMO these provide an excellent basis for comprehending Trump's
motivations as he's clearly reacting to the Russian and Chinese initiatives. Furthermore, one
can discover why Russia now holds the EU at arms length while
Putin's "I told
you so" reminder had to sting just a bit.
Then to recap it all, I highly suggest reading Pepe Escobar's excellent article I linked to yesterday higher up in the thread.
This is prophetic article, no question about it. "National neoliberalism" and interesting term.
Notable quotes:
"... Political theorist Sheldon Wolin writes in Democracy, Inc. ..."
"... By contrast, in Trump's America -- where an emergent "national neoliberalism" may be gradually guiding us to a more overt and obvious totalitarian politics -- we can expect a similar fusion of state and market interests, but one in which the marketplace and big business have almost total power and freedom of movement (I think that labor will do poorly in this configuration). State and market in the U.S. will fuse further together in the coming years, leading some to make close parallels with European fascism. But it will do so not because of heavy handed government dictates and interventions, but rather because domestic privatization initiatives, appointments of businessmen to government posts, fiscal stimulus and the business community's need for protection abroad will bring them closer. Corporate interests will merge with state interests not because corporations are commanded to, but rather because the landscape of risk and reward will shift and redirect investment patterns to a similar effect. This may be where a budding U.S. totalitarianism differs most starkly from its European cousins. ..."
And why the world is about to get much more dangerous The election of Donald Trump "represents a triumph of neoliberal
thinking and values." (Photo: Carlo Allegri/ Reuters) Many writers and pundits are currently framing Trump's election in terms of
a dispossessed and disenfranchised white, male working class, unsatisfied with neoliberal globalization and the insecurity and hardship
it has unleashed -- particularly across regions of the United States that were formerly manufacturing powerhouses (like the Rust
Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, four states believed to have cost Hillary Clinton the election). While
there is much truth to this perspective and substantial empirical evidence to support it, it would be a mistake to see Trump's election
wholly in these terms.
"What Trump's election has accomplished is an unmasking of the corporate state."
Trump's election is in some ways a neoliberal apex, an event that portends the completion of the U.S. government's capture by
wealthy corporate interests. While in my opinion Trump's election does not signal the beginning of a rapid descent into European-style
fascism, it appears to be a key stage in the ongoing process of American democratic disintegration. American democracy has been under
attack from large and wealthy corporate interests for a long time, with this process accelerating and gaining strength over the period
of neoliberal globalization (roughly the early 1970s to the present). This time period is associated with the rise of powerful multinational
corporations with economic and political might that rivals that of many national governments.
In terms of the political consequences of these trends in the U.S., certain thinkers have argued that the U.S. political system
is not democratic at all, but rather an "inverted totalitarian" system. Political commentator Chris Hedges notes: "Inverted totalitarianism
is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in
the faceless anonymity of the corporate state." Citing the American political theorist Sheldon Wolin, Hedges continues, "Unlike the
Nazis, who made life uncertain for the wealthy and privileged while providing social programs for the working class and poor, inverted
totalitarianism exploits the poor, reducing or weakening health programs and social services, regimenting mass education for an insecure
workforce threatened by the importation of low-wage workers." Our inverted totalitarian system is one that retains the trappings
of a democratic system -- e.g. it retains the appearance of loyalty to "the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press,
[and] the independence of the judiciary" -- all the while undermining the capacity of citizens to substantively participate and exert
power over the system.
In my view, what Trump's election has accomplished is an unmasking of the corporate state. Trump gives inverted totalitarianism
a persona and a face, and perhaps marks the beginning of a transformation from inverted totalitarianism to totalitarianism proper.
In spite of this, it makes no sense to me to call the system toward which we are heading (that is, if we do not stand up and resist
with all our might right this second) "fascism" or to make too close comparisons to the Nazis. Whatever totalitarian nightmare is
on our horizon, it will be uniquely American. And it will bear a striking resemblance to the corporate oriented system we've been
living in for decades. Indeed, if the pre-Trump system of inverted totalitarianism solidified in the context of global neoliberalism,
the period we are entering now seems likely to be one characterized by what I call "national neoliberalism."
Trump's Election Doesn't Mean the End of Neoliberalism
Trump's election represents a triumph of neoliberal thinking and values. Perhaps most importantly, we should all keep in mind
the fact that Americans just elected a businessman to the presidency. In spite of his Wall Street background and billionaire status,
Trump successfully cast himself as the "anti-establishment" candidate. This configuration -- in which a top-one-percenter real estate
tycoon is accepted as a political "outsider" -- is a hallmark of neoliberal thinking. The fundamental opposition between market and
government is a central dichotomy in the neoliberal narrative. In electing Trump, American voters are reproducing this narrative,
creating an ideological cover for the closer connections between business and the state that are in store moving forward (indeed,
Trump is already using the apparatus of the U.S. federal government to promote his own business interests). As states and markets
further fuse in coming years, this representation of Trump and his administration -- as being anti-government -- will help immunize
his administration from accusations of too-cozy relationships with big business. Trump's attempts to "drain the swamp" by imposing
Congressional term limits and constraints on lobbying activities by former political officials will also help to hide this relationship.
(Has anyone else noticed that Trump only addresses half of the "revolving door," i.e., he plans to limit the lobbying of former politicians,
but not the political roles of businessmen?)
"Whatever totalitarian nightmare is on our horizon, it will be uniquely American."
Trump's Contract with the American Voter, his plan for the first 100 days in office, discusses policies and programs many of which
are consistent with neoliberal thinking. (I understand the term "neoliberalism" to emphasize at its core the importance of private
property rights, market-based social organization, and the dangers of government intervention in the economy.) Trump's plan redirects
the activities of the U.S. government along the lines touted by neoliberal "market fundamentalists" like Milton Friedman, who advocate
limiting government's role to market-supportive functions like national defense (defense stocks are doing very well since the election)
and domestic law and order (Trump's proposals have a lot to do with altering immigration policy to "restore security"). Trump also
plans to use government monies to revitalize physical infrastructure and create jobs. Other government functions, for example, health
care provision and education as well as protecting the environment and public lands, are open for privatization and defunding in
Trump's agenda. Under Trump, the scope of federal government activities will narrow, likely to infrastructure, national defense,
and domestic policing and surveillance, even if overall government spending increases (as bond markets are predicting).
Trump also seems content to take neoliberal advice in regard to business regulation (less is best) and the role of the private
sector in regulating itself (industry insiders understand regulatory needs better than public officials). Trump's plan for the first
100 days specifies "a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated." As of the
time of this writing, his selection of cabinet appointees illustrate a broad willingness to appoint businesspeople to government
posts. As of mid-December 2016, a Goldman Sachs veteran, Steven Mnuchin, has been appointed Secretary of the Treasury; billionaire
investor Wilbur Ross has been appointed Secretary of Commerce; fossil fuel industry supporter and Oklahoma Attorney General Scott
Pruitt has been appointed as EPA administrator; and fast-food mogul Andrew Puzder has been appointed as Secretary of Labor. Trump's
business council is staffed by the CEOs of major U.S. corporations including JP Morgan Chase, IBM and General Motors. To be fair,
the "revolving door" between government and industry has been perpetuated by many of Trump's predecessors, with Trump poised to continue
the tradition. But this is not to say that neoliberalism will continue going in a "business as usual" fashion. The world is about
to get much more dangerous, and this has serious implications for patterns of global trade and investment.
Trump's Election Does Mean the End of Globalism
The nationalism, xenophobia, isolationism, and paranoia of Donald Trump are about to replace the significantly more cosmopolitan
outlook of his post-WWII predecessors. While Trump is decidedly pro-business and pro-market, he most certainly does not see himself
as a global citizen. Nor does he intend to maintain the United States' extensive global footprint or its relatively open trading
network. In other words, while neoliberalism is not dead, it is being transformed into a geographically more fragmented and localized
system (this is not only about the US election, but also about rising levels of global protectionism and Brexit, among other anti-globalization
trends around the world). I expect that the geographic extent of the US economy in the coming years will coincide with the new landscape
of U.S. allies and enemies, as defined by Donald Trump and his administration.
Trump's Contract with the American Voter outlines several policies that will make it more expensive and riskier to do business
abroad. All of these need not occur; I think that even one or two of these changes will be sufficient to alter expectations in business
communities about the benefits of certain cross-border economic relationships. Pulling the United States out of the TPP, along with
threats to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement and attempts to renegotiate NAFTA, is already signaling to other countries that
we are not interested in international cooperation and collaboration. A crackdown on foreign trading abuses will prompt retaliation.
Labelling China a currency manipulator will sour relations between the two countries and prompt retaliation by China. As Trump goes
forward with his anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies, he will alienate the United States' traditional allies in
Europe (at least until Europe elects its own nationalist and xenophobic leaders) and communities across the Global South. The U.S.
election has already undermined performance in emerging markets, and bigoted rhetoric and policy will only increase anti-American
sentiment in struggling economies populated largely by people of color. Add to this the risk of conflict posed by any number of the
following: his antagonizing China, allying with Russia, deploying ground troops to stop ISIS, and pulling out of the Korean DMZ,
among other initiatives that seem likely to contribute to a more confrontational and violent international arena. All of this is
to say that Trump will not have to intervene directly in the affairs of business in order to nationalize it. The new global landscape
of conflict and risk, combined with elevated domestic spending on infrastructure and security, will bring U.S. business and investment
back home nonetheless.
National Neoliberalism and State-Market Relations
Fascist states are corporatist in nature, a state of affairs marked by a fusion of state and business functions and interests,
with an often significant role for labor interests as well. In the fascist states on the European continent in the 1930s and 1940s
-- systems that fall under the umbrella of "national socialism" -- the overwhelming power of the state characterized this tripartite
relationship. Political theorist Sheldon Wolin writes in Democracy, Inc. in regard to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy
(as well as Stalinist Russia), "The state was conceived as the main center of power, providing the leverage necessary for the mobilization
and reconstruction of society".
By contrast, in Trump's America -- where an emergent "national neoliberalism" may be gradually guiding us to a more overt
and obvious totalitarian politics -- we can expect a similar fusion of state and market interests, but one in which the marketplace
and big business have almost total power and freedom of movement (I think that labor will do poorly in this configuration). State
and market in the U.S. will fuse further together in the coming years, leading some to make close parallels with European fascism.
But it will do so not because of heavy handed government dictates and interventions, but rather because domestic privatization initiatives,
appointments of businessmen to government posts, fiscal stimulus and the business community's need for protection abroad will bring
them closer. Corporate interests will merge with state interests not because corporations are commanded to, but rather because the
landscape of risk and reward will shift and redirect investment patterns to a similar effect. This may be where a budding U.S. totalitarianism
differs most starkly from its European cousins.
Sasha Breger Bush is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Denver and author of Derivatives
and Development: A Political Economy of Global Finance, Farming, and Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
"... But if we take seriously the idea that Trump is a consequence of the disintegration of American democracy rather than the cause of it, this "blame game" becomes especially problematic. Partisan bickering, with one party constantly pointing to the other as responsible for the country's ills, covers up the fact that Democrats and Republicans alike have presided over the consolidation of corporate power in the United States. To paraphrase Ralph Nader, the U.S. corporate state is a two-headed beast. Sure, President Trump and the Republican Party are currently handing over public lands to oil and gas companies, eliminating net neutrality, introducing pro-corporate tax legislation, kowtowing to the military industrial complex, defunding the welfare state, and attempting to privatize education and deregulate finance. But let's not forget our recent Democratic presidents, for example, who are also guilty of empowering and enriching big business and disempowering and impoverishing ordinary Americans. ..."
"... All of this is to say that I'm considerably less excited about 2018 and 2020 than many others -- on what counts as the U.S. left -- appear to be. Democratic Party victories at the ballot box would certainly reduce some of the pressures on a variety of marginalized groups who are suffering mightily under President Trump. This is, of course, a good thing. But, Democratic victories will not "fix" the structural problems that underpin our current political crisis nor will they ensure a freer and more just future. ..."
This article is from Dollars & Sense : Real World Economics, available at
http://www.dollarsandsense.org
Last winter, in the wake of the 2016 Presidential election, I wrote an article for
Dollars & Sense in which I argued that Trump's election represented a transition
toward "national neoliberalism" in the United States ("Trump and National Neoliberalism:
Trump's ascendance means the end of globalism -- but not of neoliberalism," January/February
2017).
I argued that this emergent state of affairs would be marked by a completion of the takeover
of the U.S. government by corporate interests. I saw the election of Trump -- a top
one-percenter and real estate tycoon firmly rooted in the culture and logic of big business,
who has somehow convinced many Americans that he is an anti-establishment "outsider" -- as an
"unmasking" of the corporate state, a revelation of the ongoing merger between state and market
that has arguably been ongoing since the 1970s. In short, I envisioned a movement away from
"global neoliberalism," a state of affairs characterized by the increasing preeminence of
transnational corporate capital in a relatively open global political-economic system, and
towards "national neoliberalism," a state of affairs in which transnational corporate dominance
is cemented in the context of an ever more fragmented and dangerous global system.
About ten years ago, political theorist Sheldon Wolin published Democracy
Incorporated , diagnosing American democracy with a potentially fatal corporate disease.
Referring to the specter of "inverted totalitarianism," Wolin writes in his preface:
Primarily it represents the political coming of age of corporate power and the political
demobilization of the citizenry. Unlike the classic forms of totalitarianism [e.g. Germany,
Italy], which openly boasted of their intentions to force their societies into preconceived
totality, inverted totalitarianism is not expressly conceptualized as an ideology or
objectified in public policy. Typically it is furthered by power-holders and citizens who often
seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions. There is a certain
heedlessness, an inability to take seriously the extent to which a pattern of consequences may
take shape without having been preconceived. Wolin paints a picture of a gradual process of
change in which many different actors, some wealthy and powerful and others not, unwittingly
push the country's politics, bit by bit in piecemeal fashion, towards an undemocratic,
corporate-controlled end. Many of these actors may have good intentions. Many of them may see
themselves as champions of the people. Many of them may actually speak out against the very
interests that they in other ways empower.
This framework for thinking about the plight of the United States, which has for me been
legitimated over and over again during Trump's first year in office, conditions how I think
about President Trump and the Republican Party, and how I think about our opportunities for
nonviolent social transformation, freedom, and social justice. It's hard not to point to
President Trump and blame him for our problems. He is a bigot who has struck out at immigrants,
Muslims, Arabs, African-Americans, Mexicans, women, LGBT people, and disabled people. He lacks
the basic knowledge of politics and foreign policy that are a necessary condition for competent
leadership. He picked up a congratulatory call from the President of Taiwan in December 2016,
disrupting relations with China, and called North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un "short" and
"fat." He is a paranoid and narcissistic demagogue who has scorned and marginalized
journalists, and made the terms "fake news" and "alternative facts" household words. He is a
corrupt businessman who is using the levers of power that he controls to enrich Big Business,
as well as his cronies, his friends, and himself. I could go on.
It's also hard not to point to Republicans in Congress. After the election, there was hope
that the "never Trump" Republicans would win out and that Trump's agenda would be blocked. This
has not happened. While some in Congress, like Senators McCain (R-Ariz.), Corker (R-Tenn.),
Collins (R-Maine), Flake (R-Ariz.) and Murkowski (R-Alaska) have defied Trump in certain
contexts (e.g. on foreign policy), on many issues congressional Republicans have simply fallen
in line (e.g. with tax reform). Today, the Republican Party is often discussed by liberals in
the same breath as Trump, with everyone hoping for good news in 2018 and 2020.
But if we take seriously the idea that Trump is a consequence of the disintegration of
American democracy rather than the cause of it, this "blame game" becomes especially
problematic. Partisan bickering, with one party constantly pointing to the other as responsible
for the country's ills, covers up the fact that Democrats and Republicans alike have presided
over the consolidation of corporate power in the United States. To paraphrase Ralph Nader, the
U.S. corporate state is a two-headed beast. Sure, President Trump and the Republican Party are
currently handing over public lands to oil and gas companies, eliminating net neutrality,
introducing pro-corporate tax legislation, kowtowing to the military industrial complex,
defunding the welfare state, and attempting to privatize education and deregulate finance. But
let's not forget our recent Democratic presidents, for example, who are also guilty of
empowering and enriching big business and disempowering and impoverishing ordinary
Americans.
President Obama presided over the modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, a process that
President Trump is continuing. As William Hartung recently reported in Mother Jones ,
"There is, in fact, a dirty little secret behind the massive U.S. arsenal: It has more to do
with the power and profits of weapons makers than it does with any imaginable strategic
considerations." President Obama also helped corporations get richer and more powerful in other
ways. He negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multilateral trade deal that, if Trump had
not withdrawn us, would have expanded U.S. corporate access to overseas markets and given
multinational corporates new policy leverage over governments (via investor-state dispute
settlement mechanisms). (See Robin Brand, "Remembering the 'Tokyo No'," Dollars &
Sense , January/February 2015.) In 2012, as he was running for his second term, Obama
proposed a reduction in the corporate tax rate to 28%, not much different from the bill just
passed by Congress. He also lobbied Congress for the $700 billion Wall Street bailouts after
the Great Recession, continuing on the policy path set by his Republican predecessor, President
Bush. (Obama received huge campaign contributions from finance, insurance, and real estate.) In
terms of income inequality, CNBC had to reluctantly conclude that the gap widened under Obama,
in spite of all his powerful rhetoric about equity and equality.
President Clinton negotiated and signed NAFTA into law, a trade agreement that created
hardship for millions of American manufacturing workers and farmers, and generated large
profits for multinational industrial and agricultural corporations. Clinton also pushed for
welfare reform, signing into law a "workfare" system that required recipients to meet strict
job and employment related conditions. Millions of people became ineligible for payments under
the new system, and poverty increased especially among households in which members were
long-term unemployed. Clinton's 1997 tax proposal advocated cutting estate taxes and capital
gains taxes, and did not favor lower-income Americans. The Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities noted, "Analyses by the Treasury Department indicate that when fully in effect, the
Clinton plan would give the 20 percent of Americans with the highest incomes about the same
amount in tax cuts as the bottom 60 percent combined. This is an unusual characteristic for a
tax plan proposed by a Democratic President."
All of this is to say that I'm considerably less excited about 2018 and 2020 than many
others -- on what counts as the U.S. left -- appear to be. Democratic Party victories at the
ballot box would certainly reduce some of the pressures on a variety of marginalized groups who
are suffering mightily under President Trump. This is, of course, a good thing. But, Democratic
victories will not "fix" the structural problems that underpin our current political crisis nor
will they ensure a freer and more just future.
I plan to support third-party candidates at the ballot box in coming years, in the hopes of
contributing to the creation of a new kind of political infrastructure that can help us to
unmake the corporate state.
SASHA BREGER-BUSH is an assistant professor of political science at the University of
Colorado–Denver.
There is no universal, global brotherhood of "nationalist, right-wing, anti-SJW" values as
you seem to be trying to imply. The western far-right/alt-right is entirely self-serving and
their appeals to some kind of global nationalistic ideology is basically just a thin facade
that they promote in order to help generate support for their own self-serving agenda. The
only reason that the western far-right wants to reach out for allies right now is because
they are on the ropes and in a position of weakness; if the western far-right was instead in
a position of strength then they would not hesitate to put their boot on your neck. You are
quite naive if you don't think otherwise.
As an long time observer of the western far-right; its very clear that at the end of the
day, it is not principles that they care about, it is only themselves. That in itself would
be fine if they were upfront about it, however the problem is that they insist on being very
deceptive about their true motives. As I have said in this post, and so many others; why is
it that the far-right wants to postulate about "rights" and "fairness" when it comes to the
preservation of the white race, but then when it comes to any other ethnic group on earth
that has been negatively impacted by western colonialism the far-right just tells them to go
fuck themselves? This tells you all you need to know about how the far-right really feels
about its so called vaunted principles regarding racial/cultural preservation. They believe
in it for themselves yes, but will be more than willing to compromise this belief when it
comes to any others. You are missing the forest for the trees if you insist on adhering to
notions of abstract jointly-held values at the expense of basic strategic interests; this is
something I guarantee you is not lost on the western far-right.
You also assume that SJWism is going to spread to east asia and negatively affect the
culture there in the same way that it has in the west. Is this or is this not the primary
motivation why you seek an alliance with the western far-right? Have I understood your motive
correctly? Going on the assumption that this is actually your motive; then why haven't you
taken into account the fact that culturally and genetically speaking, east asians simply
think differently than whites do? There is no reason to believe that SJWism is going to run
as rampantly in east asia as it has in the west. It will gain a foothold that is for sure,
but it won't gain the same kind of traction that it has in the west. Ideologies cannot
completely change the essential natures of people, if this was the case then the alt-right
(based on racial determinism) would not exist in the first place. Anyways this is a moot
point; if the west fully declines then it would be unable to export its leftist ideals
anyways, so I don't see what you're mad about.
Once again, to reiterate my original point. It is absurd for POC to assume that the
western far-right in any way, shape or form represents their interests or at the very least
is a neutral entity towards them. It is true that POC is a clumsy, extremely general term,
but in this context it functions perfectly. The western far-right worldview is basically
encapsulated as "whites vs all others"; therefore within this context, a pan non-white
concept like POC is useful for working within such a stark, extremist ideological framework.
What is playing out in the west right now is basically the west struggling with its own past
actions; highly conscientious POC need to sit on the sidelines, shutup and let this play out
on its own. There is no need to take sides here, the west made its own bed, let it sleep in
it, this has nothing to do with POC.
Most of us are against both 'invite the world' and 'invade the world'.
Im an old hand on the internet far-right/alt-right scene; what you said is generally true
except with a major caveat. The alt-right is against invading the world only when it doesn't
result in any net gain for the west. The alt-right doesn't actually have a principled stance
against colonization/invading other countries; rather they are only against invading other
countries when it inconveniences them, but when it happens to benefit them, they are fully
supportive of all kinds of invasions. This is probably one of the things that disgusts me
most about the alt-right is how they lack any kind of true, consistent moral foundation but
like to act as if they do.
Its not really a useful argument to ask if something is really a grassroots thing or not.
You could apply that same line of reasoning to anything to the extent where it could obscure
the true reality of an event. Is globalization due to the actions of a jewish ruling class?
Perhaps. But many on the alt-right still blame jews in general because they understand that
there is something in jewish culture that is sympathetic to the globalization project
overall. The same thing applies to western colonization as well. Regardless of what the
western ruling class chose to do, there was an eager, sympathetic and compliant population
which enabled western colonization to happen. If the population was not enthusiastic about
the colonization project then the broad and thorough scale of european colonization would
have been impossible otherwise.
The very act of colonizing and expansion is something that speaks to the very soul of
western man. Most on the far-right fully agree with this sentiment btw and this is something
that you see them say over and over. Simply trying to deflect all the blame on the ruling
class and absolve the people actually carrying out actions is pretty disingenuous. The
reality is, both the ruling class and its subjects are both equally culpable for european
colonization. More importantly, I want to add that while colonialism may not have originated
as a grassroots movement, it certainly had (and continues to have) grassroots support
(especially among the far-right). Which is something that is equally important to consider
(and equally damning as well)
You have a weird obsession with colonialism. Everyone's self-serving; the form changes but
at the end of the day, that's nature.
You're just as self-serving, except that you've apparently have a global image of "POC"
being united for some reason. And evidently the West, which for whatever foibles it has,
shouldn't at least make an effort to survive?
Lol, you couldn't address any of my points, that's why you just throw everything out and
take potshots at me.
The modern world, and nearly everything that unz.com is about ultimately goes back to
colonialism. You could equally say that the writers on unz.com have a weird obsession with
immigration/globalization. Likewise, I could equally say that you have some weird obsession
with leftism. You see how flawed your logic is?
No, im not being self-serving here. I know that my usage of the term POC triggered your
anti-left/anti-SJW sensibilities, but you're reading too much into the usage of a word. The
term POC was used because it was appropriate for the context (as I explained in my reply to
you and you conveniently ignored), not because I have an extreme left political
orientation.
Once again, to reiterate my original point. It is absurd for POC to assume that the
western far-right in any way, shape or form represents their interests or at the very least
is a neutral entity towards them. It is true that POC is a clumsy, extremely general
term, but in this context it functions perfectly. The western far-right worldview is
basically encapsulated as "whites vs all others"; therefore within this context, a pan
non-white concept like POC is useful for working within such a stark, extremist ideological
framework. What is playing out in the west right now is basically the west struggling
with its own past actions; highly conscientious POC need to sit on the sidelines, shutup
and let this play out on its own. There is no need to take sides here, the west made its
own bed, let it sleep in it, this has nothing to do with POC.
As for the west trying to make some effort to survive; I had never claimed that it should
not. In fact I never made any argument to that effect in any of my comments on this article.
In fact, I want you to prove me wrong . Since you seem so sure of your position, quote
and paste where I clearly made an argument to the effect of the west should just give up and
stop trying to survive. I'll be waiting.
You need to work on your reading comprehension. Clearly I have been making the argument
that POC (I hope you get triggered by this) need to stop trying to prop up the west by
rubbing shoulders with the alt-right and should instead sit back and watch things play out.
This is not their fight. Making this argument is completely different than what you were
trying to imply I was saying.
As I've said before, I give as much effort to a reply as I think a person deserves.
Obviously you're not one of them, in no small part because of your insane fetish with
"colonialism" – which I barely could care for.
Indeed, colonialism can be plenty helpful for improving the condition of a population
objectively, which is surprising given that its goal is traditionally extractive but when the
native elite is so incompetent or even more extractive of their population, then it is a net
benefit to the population.
Not that I really care; I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with conquest. At the end
of the day, competition is the means to determine which values and memes of humanity survive
and by removing violence completely as a method, it leads to warping of the population.
I'm descended from mandarins; I have a pretty clear line of family history as far back as
the Yuan. We've done beautiful things – marvelous terraced farms, canals that remain to
this day, and a slew of impressive artwork. We've done terrible things – kept
generations of illiterate serfs and bondsmen. "European colonialism" may hurt us, but the
Cultural Revolution did a lot more damage and almost wiped us out. And we've invaded Vietnam,
and I don't regret it: Annam, the peaceful south. Had the Ming held it, had it remained
Chinese, its hard to argue that it would not be wealthier and more beautiful than it is
now.
So no, I don't feel anything in common with your so-called POC. And your rants about
colonialism only irritate me further. There are many terrible things in life and the world.
And often, they are also beautiful and glorious things.
LOL. This is hilarious, keep backtracking. You obviously care because you bothered to
reply in the first place. Tellingly, you were unable to address the most cogent points in the
argument that I brought up against you in my previous replies and instead prefer to dissemble
about something that has nothing to do with the original point of discussion. Don't think I
didn't notice the (clumsy) sleight of hand. You try to act as if you're above replying to me
but really the problem is that you're unable to argue against the points that I made. Its
really that simple. If you were able to disprove my arguments then you would already be doing
that instead of talking in circles about it.
Ethically speaking, colonialism is wrong. Doesnt matter who does it, white black or
yellow. That being said, I understand the dark parts of human nature and why colonialism
happens. Time and time again, I have clearly stated how the crux of my argument is the
hypocrisy of the far-right when it comes to the topic of colonialism, not so much the act of
colonialism itself. That's it. And I couldn't make my point any clearer. The onus falls on
you, and not on I to correctly perceive this point. My problem is not that the west colonized
the world (shit happens), my problem is that the far right wants to celebrate and condone
colonialism (hence celebrate the historical destruction of other races and cultures) while
simultaneously wanting to complain about their own racial displacement and cultural
destruction (ironically brought about by globalization which in turn was brought about
through western colonialism in the first place). The far-right has a major ideological
consistency here which it is either blind to, or willfully ignores. I'm sorry but the western
far-right can't have its cake and eat it too. It needs to clearly decide how they feel about
the ethics of colonization and then take a principled and consistent stance on it.
Regardless, both in the comments for this post, and for the entirety of my posting
history, my stance regarding colonization has been the same. It is you that has misunderstood
it due to your faulty reading comprehension, and anybody who doubts my words is perfectly
free to read my prior comments in this thread as well as look through my comment history as
well. Therefore, the thrust of your reply completely misses the mark. I suspect however that
your misunderstanding was intentional considering how clearly I made my point regarding
colonialism in all of my posts. Regardless, why should anyone take what you have to say
seriously when you have already demonstrated a clear tendency for poor reading comprehension
or willful misperception? Don't forget about this:
You're just as self-serving, except that you've apparently have a global image of
"POC" being united for some reason. And evidently the West, which for whatever foibles
it has, shouldn't at least make an effort to survive?
God, that's stupid.
As for the west trying to make some effort to survive; I had never claimed that it
should not. In fact I never made any argument to that effect in any of my comments on this
article. In fact, I want you to prove me wrong . Since you seem so sure of your
position, quote and paste where I clearly made an argument to the effect of the west should
just give up and stop trying to survive. I'll be waiting.
I'm still waiting for you to clearly provide proof of your assertion that I implied the
west should just give up; which in fact I never wrote anything to the effect of that, but in
your rush to debunk me, you obviously missed that. The alt-right always prides itself on
relying strictly on the facts, so please live up to this ethos. Everything I wrote is an open
book, either prove your assertions or admit that you can't.
So no, I don't feel anything in common with your so-called POC. And your rants about
colonialism only irritate me further. There are many terrible things in life and the world.
And often, they are also beautiful and glorious things.
Nor do you have to feel anything in common with so-called POC. Do you think I care what
you feel? You vastly overestimate your own importance. Remember, it was you who went out
of you way to start up this dialogue with me, not I . I'm glad that my "rants" regarding
colonialism irritate you. That being said, if they irritate you so much, instead of
responding to them, please ignore them from now on. You are aware that you are not obligated
to reply to anything I write, right?
True! There are many terrible things in life and the world, and also there are many
glorious and beautiful things as well. I think it is beautiful that the west has lived at the
expense of others for so long, and now we are reaching a point where everything that the west
has done is now catching up with it in unexpected ways. It turns out the the universe has a
sense of humor afterall. What goes up, must come down. This applies to all races and all
civilizations. As humans, we must seek to live in harmony with each other, and not simply
exploit and kill one another. There is beauty in seeking to rise above such primitive
impulses, and if possible acting with understanding and compassion towards our fellow man.
That is truly the meaning of "being civilized".
Truly I do not harbor ill-will against the west because it is western, rather I harbor
ill-will towards the west because of its past actions and present attitudes. This is why I
specifically target the far-right (because of their present attitudes about the west's past
actions), as opposed to attacking all western people. I especially have a soft-spot for
westerners that are able to genuinely feel remorse about the past. I strongly believe in the
concept of forgiveness and letting things go, provided that the sentiment is genuine and
mutual. Actually on that topic; even indifference is an acceptable emotion. I think its
stupid to morally hold westerners to past events when even they are indifferent about their
own racial/cultural future. I only stick it to the far-right because they automatically incur
higher moral/ethical standards for themselves to meet when they want to start talking about
the importance of having moral rights for racial/cultural survival.
That being said, the west has a tremendous amount of momentum from its past actions
gathered against it; so it doesn't really matter how I feel, the west will still have to deal
with everything that is happening to it and what is going to happen to it in the future.
Nothing you say or do will impact this in any way, so you might as well enjoy the ride
instead of complaining that I am pointing out inconvenient truths which harm your delicate
sensibilities. Ironically those who complain most about fragile SJW snowflakes are those who
get triggered the easiest themselves
In fact, looking at your history, you are a rare breed: you are a genuine, unironic
anti-white crusader. You actually think there is something uniquely evil about "white
people" and talk without any sense of contradiction that you have "extensive experience of
white people."
The mind boggles.
It was a mistake to give you any time at all.
This is actually a lie what you have written. For your convenience, and for the
convenience of anybody reading, I have provided the quote of what I had originally written
which you are referring to:
GammaRay says:
April 29, 2018 at 7:04 pm GMT • 200 Words
@Wizard of Oz
This is an interesting question and definitely worth looking into. That being said, I do
not buy into the reasoning that an exploding british population is the only or even major
reason behind colonization. From learning about european culture, and understanding the
general weltanschauung of white people, as well as from having extensive social experience
with them; it is clearly evident to me that there is a strong extraversive, expansive
component that exists in the white collective consciousness which under certain
circumstances strongly compels them to colonize, displace and replace much more so than
other races would do so under similar circumstances. What alt-righters/WN would call
"ambition" and "drive", others might prefer to recognize it as "greed". Regardless of the
semantic trivialities; it is clear that there is a strong internal drive within westerners
that causes them to vigorously pursue both the physical and cultural colonization of "the
other". This is not a negative or positive judgment though; it is merely intended to be
understood as an objective observation.
What I had written clearly strives to be dispassionate and objective as opposed to the
maniacal and frothing at the mouth anti-white diatribe that you are attempting to make it out
to be.
Im sorry but the truth of the matter is that HBD is probably real; racial differences
probably exist on a genetic level which influence the behavior and temperaments of different
races and ethnic groups. The fact that whites are more likely to be domineering and have a
tendency for colonizing "the other" does not make them evil; it is an impulse that can be
channeled in both positive and negative ways. That being said, just because I bring up this
inconvenient fact doesn't automatically make me racist or "anti-white". I am merely trying to
work within a framework of reality, we have both multiple centuries of history to draw
inferences from, as well as interpersonal anecdotal observations of white behavior both in
real life as well as on the internet in spaces such as these. I don't think its very
controversial that I am making observations based on noticing patterns. I mean, is noticing
patterns illegal or something undesirable?
"... That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say. ..."
"... The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack. ..."
"... "No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.] ..."
"... "Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since . ..."
"... "More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi." ..."
"... The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ] ..."
"... Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies. MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers. ..."
"... The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. ..."
"... I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed out" propaganda. One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not. No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply." ..."
"... There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths. ..."
"... Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked" to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another ..."
"... (FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and printed. ..."
"... Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden. ..."
"... Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their "investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again. ..."
"... Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's activities are a complete sham. ..."
"... Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely cause of the Russiagate scams. ..."
"... Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." ..."
"... For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic conspiracy. ..."
"... Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB drive, it is not a known. ..."
"... There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings. ..."
"... Don't forget this Twitter post by Wikileaks on October 30, 2016: Podesta: "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36082#efmAGSAH- ..."
"... Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face? ..."
"... If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars. ..."
"... My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody? ..."
If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked
into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand
close scrutiny . It
could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to
investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with
WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity -- including two "alumni" who were former
National Security Agency technical directors -- have long since concluded that Julian Assange
did not acquire what he called the "emails related to Hillary Clinton" via a "hack" by the
Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access
to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage
device -- probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained
this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.
On January 18, 2017 President Obama admitted
that the "conclusions" of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian hacking got to
WikiLeaks were "inconclusive." Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA "Intelligence Community Assessment of
Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections" of January 6, 2017, which tried to
blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained
no direct evidence of Russian involvement. That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of
that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian
intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to
WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.
Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA "assessment" became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff
(D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off the
blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump. It simply could not have been that
Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself. No, it had
to have been the Russians.
Five days into the Trump presidency, I had a chance to
challenge Schiff personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks.
Schiff still "can't share the evidence" with me or with anyone else, because it does not
exist.
WikiLeaks
It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that
Assange announced the pending publication of "emails related to Hillary Clinton," throwing the
Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias in favor of
Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders. When the emails
were published on July 22, just three days before the convention began, the campaign decided to
create what I call a Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the
emails by blaming Russia for their release.
Clinton's PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later admitted that she golf-carted around to various
media outlets at the convention with instructions "to get the press to focus on something even
we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails
from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton." The
diversion worked like a charm. Mainstream media kept shouting "The Russians did it," and gave
little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer'
Fox, Bernie didn't say nothin'.
Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work fabricating "forensic
facts" to "prove" the Russians did it. Here's how it played out:
June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish "emails related to
Hillary Clinton."
June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple
conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there
is evidence it was injected by Russians.
June 15, 2016: "Guccifer 2.0" affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the
"hack;" claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was
synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."
The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a
pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish
and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack.
Enter Independent Investigators
A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for
reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the "handpicked analysts"
who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do. The independent investigators found
verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5,
2016 showing that the "hack" that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or
anyone else.
Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for
example) by an insider -- the same process used by the DNC insider/leaker before June 12, 2016
for an altogether different purpose. (Once the metadata was found and the "fluid dynamics"
principle of physics applied, this was not difficult to
disprove the validity of the claim that Russia was responsible.)
One of these independent investigators publishing under the name of The Forensicator on May
31
published new evidence that
the Guccifer 2.0 persona uploaded a document from the West Coast of the United States, and not
from Russia.
In our July 24, 2017 Memorandum to President Donald Trump we stated ,
"We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI."
Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be
related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made aware of in this
general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish a trove of original CIA
documents that WikiLeaks labeled 'Vault 7.' WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or
former CIA contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the
information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.
"No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which
disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's
Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital
Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned
President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.]
Marbled
"Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it
race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described
and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part
3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too
delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has
never been mentioned since .
"The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, it seems, 'did not get the memo' in time. Her March
31
article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: 'WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA
cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations.'
"The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use
'obfuscation,' and that Marble source code includes a "de-obfuscator" to reverse CIA text
obfuscation.
"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post
report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by
WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution
double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian,
Korean, Arabic and Farsi."
A few weeks later William Binney, a former NSA technical, and I commented on
Vault 7 Marble, and were able to get a shortened op-ed version
published in The Baltimore Sun
The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was
neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his
associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a
non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24
Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like
it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we
know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and
with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [
President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017
VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together
at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary
straightforwardness. ]
We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin.
In his interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager
– to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7
disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's
technology enables hacking to be 'masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can
understand the origin' [of the hack] And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or
any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack.
"'Hackers may be anywhere,' he said. 'There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States
who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a
scenario? I can.'
New attention has been drawn to these issues after I discussed them in a widely published
16-minute
interview last Friday.
In view of the highly politicized environment surrounding these issues, I believe I must
append here the same notice that VIPS felt compelled to add to our key Memorandum of July 24,
2017:
"Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in
the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we
add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political
agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our
former intelligence colleagues.
"We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say
and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." The fact we find it
is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Savior in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer before serving as
a CIA analyst for 27 years. His duties included preparing, and briefing one-on-one, the
President's Daily Brief.
ThomasGilroy , June 9, 2018 at 9:44 am
"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post
report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by
WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic
attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in
Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi."
Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of
choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies.
MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to
blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the
supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US
allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not
capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of
the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during
the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis
could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth
Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted
by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers.
The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the
CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. It must be the Gulf of Tonkin all
over again. While Crowdstrike might have a "dubious professional record and multiple
conflicts of interest", their results were also confirmed by several other cyber-security
firms (Wikipedia):
cybersecurity experts and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant,
SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and the editor for Ars Technica, have rejected the claims of
"Guccifer 2.0" and have determined, on the basis of substantial evidence, that the
cyberattacks were committed by two Russian state-sponsored groups (Cozy Bear and Fancy
Bear).
Then there was Papadopoulas who coincidentally was given the information that Russia had
"dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Obviously, they were illegally
obtained (unless this was another CIA false flag operation). This was before the release of
the emails by WikiLeaks. This was followed by the Trump Tower meeting with Russians with
connections to the Russian government and the release of the emails by WikiLeaks shortly
thereafter. Additionally, Russia had the motive to defeat HRC and elect Trump. Yesterday,
Trump pushed for the reinstatement of Russia at the G-7 summit. What a shock! All known
evidence and motive points the finger directly at Russia.
Calling everything a false flag operation is really the easy way out, but ultimately, it
lets the responsible culprits off of the hook.
anon , June 9, 2018 at 11:28 am
I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed
out" propaganda.
One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not.
No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin
supply."
CitizenOne , June 8, 2018 at 11:40 pm
There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence
agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false
flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false
flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible
to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths.
In pre computer technology days there were also many false flags which were set up to
create real world scenarios which suited the geopolitical agenda. Even today, there are many
examples of tactical false flag operations either organized and orchestrated or utilized by
the intelligence agencies to create the narrative which supports geopolitical objectives.
Examples:
The US loaded munitions in broad daylight visible to German spies onto the passenger ship
Lusitania despite German warnings that they would torpedo any vessels suspected of carrying
munitions. The Lusitania then proceeded to loiter unaccompanied by escorts in an area off the
Ireland coast treading over the same waters until it was spotted by a German U-Boat and was
torpedoed. This was not exactly a false flag since the German U-Boat pulled the trigger but
it was required to gain public support for the entrance of the US into WWI. It worked.
There is evidence that the US was deliberately caught "off guard" in the Pearl Harbor
Attack. Numerous coded communication intercepts were made but somehow the advanced warning
radar on the island of Hawaii was mysteriously turned off in the hours before and during the
Japanese attack which guaranteed that the attack would be successful and also guaranteed that
our population would instantly sign on to the war against Japan. It worked.
There is evidence that the US deliberately ignored the intelligence reports that UBL was
planning to conduct an attack on the US using planes as bombs. The terrorists who carried out
the attacks on the twin towers were "allowed" to conduct them. The result was the war in Iraq
which was sold based on a pack of lies about WMDs and which we used to go to war with
Iraq.
The Tonkin Gulf incident which historians doubt actually happened or believe if it did was
greatly exaggerated by intelligence and military sources was used to justify the war in
Vietnam.
The Spanish American War was ginned up by William Randolph Hearst and his yellow
journalism empire to justify attacking Cuba, Panama and the Philippines. The facts revealed
by forensic analysis of the exploded USS Maine have shown that the cataclysm was caused by a
boiler explosion not an enemy mine. At the time this was also widely believed to not be
caused by a Spanish mine in the harbor but the news sold the story of Spanish treachery and
war was waged.
In each case of physical false flags created on purpose, or allowed to happen or just made
up by fictions based on useful information that could be manipulated and distorted the US was
led to war. Some of these wars were just wars and others were wars of choice but in every
case a false flag was needed to bring the nation into a state where we believed we were under
attack and under the circumstances flocked to war. I will not be the judge of history or
justice here since each of these events had both negative and positive consequences for our
nation. What I will state is that it is obvious that the willingness to allow or create or
just capitalize on the events which have led to war are an essential ingredient. Without a
publicly perceived and publicly supported cause for war there can be no widespread support
for war. I can also say our leaders have always known this.
Enter the age of technology and the computer age with the electronic contraptions which
enable global communication and commerce.
Is it such a stretch to imagine that the governments desire to shape world events based on
military actions would result in a plan to use these modern technologies to once again create
in our minds a cyber scenario in which we are once again as a result of the "cyber" false
flag prepared for us to go to war? Would it be too much of a stretch to imagine that the
government would use the new electronic frontier just as it used the old physical world
events to justify military action?
Again, I will not go on to condemn any action by our military but will focus on how did we
get there and how did we arrive at a place where a majority favored war.
Whether created by physical or cyberspace methods we can conclude that such false flags
will happen for better or worse in any medium available.
susan sunflower , June 8, 2018 at 7:52 pm
I'd like "evidence" and I'd also like "context" since apparently international electoral
"highjinks" and monkey-wrenching and rat-f*cking have a long tradition and history (before
anyone draws a weapon, kills a candidate or sicc's death squads on the citizenry.
The DNC e-mail publication "theft" I suspect represents very small small potatoes for so
many reasons As Dixon at Black Agenda Report put it . Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism
writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked"
to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another
(FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund
marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy
targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is
able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and
printed.
Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as
source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal
State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden.
Skip Scott , June 8, 2018 at 1:07 pm
I can't think of any single piece of evidence that our MSM is under the very strict
control of our so-called intelligence agencies than how fast and completely the Vault 7
releases got flushed down the memory hole. "Nothing to see here folks, move along."
I don't think anyone can predict whether or not Sanders would have won as a 3rd party
candidate. He ran a remarkable campaign, but when he caved to the Clinton machine he lost a
lot of supporters, including me. If he had stood up at the convention and talked of the DNC
skullduggery exposed by Wikileaks, and said "either I run as a democrat, or I run as a Green,
but I'm running", he would have at least gotten 15 pct to make the TV debates, and who knows
what could have happened after that. 40 pct of registered voters didn't vote. That alone
tells you it is possible he might have won.
Instead he expected us to follow him like he was the f'ing Pied Piper to elect another
Wall St. loving warmonger. That's why he gets no "pass" from me. He (and the Queen of Chaos)
gave us Trump. BTW, Obama doesn't get a "pass" either.
willow , June 8, 2018 at 9:24 pm
It's all about the money. A big motive for the DNC to conjure up Russia-gate was to keep
donors from abandoning any future
Good Ship Hillary or other Blue Dog Democrat campaigns: "Our brand/platform wasn't flawed. It
was the Rooskies."
Vivian O'Blivion , June 8, 2018 at 8:22 am
An earlier time line.
March 14th. Popadopoulos has first encounter with Mifsud.
April 26th. Mifsud tells Popadopoulos that Russians have "dirt" on Clinton, including "thousands of e-mails".
May 4th. Trump last man standing in Republican primary.
May 10th. Popadopoulos gets drunk with London based Australian diplomat and talks about "dirt" but not specifically
e-mails.
June 9th. Don. Jr meets in Trump tower with Russians promising "dirt" but not specifically in form of e-mails.
It all comes down to who Mifsud is, who he is working for and why he has been "off grid" to journalists (but not presumably
Intelligence services) for > 6 months.
Specific points.
On March 14th Popadopoulos knew he was transferring from team Carson to team Trump but this was not announced to the
(presumably underwhelmed) world 'till March 21st. Whoever put Mifsud onto Popadopoulos was very quick on their feet.
The Australian diplomat broke chain of command by reporting the drunken conversation to the State Department as opposed to his
domestic Intelligence service. If Mifsud was a western asset, Australian Intelligence would likely be aware of his status.
If Mifsud was a Russian asset why would demonstrably genuine Russians be trying to dish up the dirt on Clinton in June?
There are missing pieces to this jigsaw puzzle but it's starting to look like a deep state operation to dirty Trump in the
unlikely event that he went on to win.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:28 pm
Ms. Clinton was personally trying to tar Trump with allusions to "Russia" and being
"Putin's puppet" long before he won the presidency, in fact, quite conspicuously during the
two conventions and most pointedly during the debates. She was willing to use that ruse long
before her defeat at the ballot box. It was the straw that she clung to and was willing to
use as a pretext for overturning the election after the unthinkable happened. But, you are
right, smearing Trump through association with Russia was part of her long game going back to
the early primaries, especially since her forces (both in politics and in the media) were
trying mightily to get him the nomination under the assumption that he would be the easiest
(more like the only) Republican candidate that she could defeat come November.
Wcb , June 8, 2018 at 5:25 pm
Steven Halper?
Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:33 am
I might add to this informative article that the reason why Julian Assange has been
ostracized and isolated from any public appearance, denied a cell phone, internet and
visitors is that he tells the truth, and TPTB don't want him to say yet again that the emails
were leaked from the DNC. I've heard him say it several times. H. Clinton was so shocked and
angry that she didn't become president as she so confidently expected that her, almost
knee-jerk, reaction was to find a reason that was outside of herself on which to blame her
defeat. It's always surprised me that no one talks about what was in those emails which
covered her plans for Iran and Russia (disgusting).
Trump is a sociopath, but the Russians had nothing to do with him becoming elected. I was
please to read here that he or perhaps just Pompeo? met with Binney. That's a good thing,
though Pompeo, too, is unstable and war hungry to follow Israel into bombing yet another
innocent sovereign country. Thank, Mr. McGovern for another excellent coverage of this
story.
MLS , June 7, 2018 at 9:59 pm
"no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team"
Do tell, Ray: How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's investigation –
with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks – has and has not
done?
strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:14 am
MLS: Thank you! No one stands up for what is right any more. We have 17 Intelligency
agencies that say are election was stolen. And just last week the Republicans Paul Ryan,
Mitch McConnel and Trey Gowdy (who I detest) said the FBI and CIA and NSA were just doing
there jobs the way ALL AMERICANS woudl want them to. And even Adam Schiff, do you think he
will tell any reporter what evidence he does have? #1 It is probably classified and #2 he is
probably saving it for the inpeachment. We did not find out about the Nixon missing 18
minutes until the end anyways. All of these articles sound like the writer just copied Sean
Hannity and wrote everything down he said, and yesterday he told all suspects in the Mueller
investigation to Smash and Bleach there mobile devices, witch is OBSTRUCTION of justice and
witness TAMPERING. A great American there!
Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:48 am
strgr-tgther:
Sean Hannity??? Ha, ha, ha.
As Mr. McGoven wrote .."any resemblance between what we say and what presidents,
politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental."
John , June 8, 2018 at 5:48 am
Sorry I had to come back and point out the ultimate irony of ANYONE who supports the
Butcher of Libya complaining about having an election stolen from them (after the blatant
rigging of the primary that caused her to take the nomination away from the ONE PERSON who
was polling ahead of Trump beyond the margin of error of the polls.)
It is people like you who gave us Trump. The Pied Piper Candidate promoted by the DNC
machine (as the emails that were LEAKED, not "hacked", as the metadata proves conclusively,
show.)
incontinent reader , June 8, 2018 at 7:14 am
What is this baloney? Seventeen Intelligence agencies DID NOT conclude what you are
alleging, And in fact, Brennan and his cabal avoided using a National intelligence Estimate,
which would have shot down his cherry-picked 'assessment' before it got off the ground
– and it would have been published for all to read.
The NSA has everything on everybody, yet has never released anything remotely indicating
Russian collusion. Do you think the NSA Director, who, as you may recall, did not give a
strong endorsement to the Brennan-Comey assessment, would have held back from the Congress
such information, if it had existed, when he was questioned? Furthermore, former technical
directors of the NSA, Binney, Wiebe and Loomis- the very best of the best- have proven
through forensics that the Wikileaks disclosures were not obtained by hacking the DNC
computers, but by a leak, most likely to a thumb drive on the East Coast of the U.S. How many
times does it have to be laid out for you before you are willing and able to absorb the
facts?
As for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, (and Trey Gowdy, who was quite skilled on the
Benghazi and the Clinton private email server investigations- investigations during which
Schiff ran interference for Clinton- but has seemed unwilling to digest the Strozk, Page,
McCabe, et al emails and demand a Bureau housecleaning), who cares what they think or say,
what matters is the evidence.
I suggest you familiarize yourself with the facts- and start by rereading Ray's articles,
and the piece by Joe diGenova posted on Ray's website.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:12 pm
The guy's got Schiff for brains. Everyone who cares about the truth has known since before
Mueller started his charade that the "17 intelligence agency" claim was entirely a ruse,
bald-faced confected propaganda to anger the public to support the coup attempted by Ms.
Clinton and her zombie followers. People are NOT going to support the Democratic party now or
in the future when its tactics include subverting our public institutions, including the
electoral process under the constitution–whether you like the results or not! If the
Democratic party is to be saved, those honest people still in it should endeavor to drain the
septic tank that has become their party before we can all drain the swamp that is the federal
government and its ex-officio manipulators (otherwise known as the "deep state") in
Washington.
Farmer Pete , June 8, 2018 at 7:30 am
"We have 17 Intelligency agencies that say are election was stolen."
You opened up with a talking point that is factually incorrect. The team of hand-picked
spooks that slapped the "high confidence" report together came from 3 agencies. I know, 17
sounds like a lot and very convincing to us peasants. Regardless, it's important to practice
a few ounces of skepticism when it comes to institutions with a long rap sheet of crime and
deception. Taking their word for it as a substitute for actual observable evidence is naive
to say the least. The rest of your hollow argument is filled with "probably(s)". If I were
you, I'd turn off my TV and stop looking for scapegoats for an epically horrible presidential
campaign and candidate.
strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:50 pm
/horrible presidential campaign and candidate/ Say you. But we all went to sleep
comfortable the night before the election where 97% of all poles said Clinton was going to be
are next President. And that did not happen! So Robert Mueller is going to find out EXACTLY
why. Stay tuned!!!
irina , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm
Not 'all'. I knew she was toast after reading that she had cancelled her election night
fireworks
celebration, early on the morning of Election Day. She must have known it also, too.
And she was toast in my mind after seeing the ridiculous scene of her virtual image
'breaking the glass ceiling' during the Democratic Convention. So expensively stupid.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:50 pm
Mueller is simply orchestrating a dramatic charade to distract you from the obvious reason
why she lost: Trump garnered more electoral votes, even after the popular votes were counted
and recounted. Any evidence of ballot box stuffing in the key states pointed to the
Democrats, so they gave that up. She and her supporters like you have never stopped trying to
hoodwink the public either before or after the election. Too many voters were on to you,
that's why she lost.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:57 pm
Indeed, stop the nonsense which can't be changed short of a coup d'etat, and start
focusing on opposing the bad policy which this administration has been pursuing. I don't see
the Dems doing that even in their incipient campaigns leading up to the November elections.
Fact is, they are not inclined to change the policies, which are the same ones that got them
"shellacked" at the ballot box in 2016. (I think Obama must own lots of stock in the shellack
trade.)
Curious , June 8, 2018 at 6:27 pm
Ignorance of th facts keep showing up in your posts for some unknown reason. Sentence two:
"we have 17 intelligency (sic) agencies that say ". this statement was debunked a long time
ago.
Have you learned nothing yet regarding the hand-picked people out of three agencies after all
this time? Given that set of lies it makes your post impossible to read.
I would suggest a review of what really happened before you perpetuate more myths and this
will benefit all.
Also, a good reading of the Snowden Docs and vault 7 should scare you out of your shell since
our "intelligeny" community can pretend to be Chinese, Russian, Iranian just for starters,
and the blame game can start after hours instead of the needed weeks and/or months to
determine the veracity of a hack and/or leak.
It's past trying to win you over with the actual 'time lines' and truths. Mr McGovern has
re-emphasized in this article the very things you should be reading.
Start with Mr Binney and his technical evaluation of the forensics in the DNC docs and build
out from there This is just a suggestion.
What never ceases to amaze me in your posts is the 'issue' that many of the docs were
bought and paid for by the Clinton team, and yet amnesia has taken over those aspects as
well. Shouldn't you start with the Clintons paying for this dirt before it was ever
attributed to Trump?
Daniel , June 8, 2018 at 6:38 pm
Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on
their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their
"investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry
picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again.
More than 1/2 of their report was about RT, and even though that was all easily viewable
public record, they got huge claims wrong. Basically, the best they had was that RT covered
Occupy Wall Street and the NO DAPL and BLM protests, and horror of horrors, aired third party
debates! In a democracy! How dare they?
Why didn't FBI subpoena DNC's servers so they could run their own forensics on them? Why
did they just accept the claims of a private company founded by an Atlantic Council board
member? Did you know that CrowdStrike had to backpedal on the exact same claim they made
about the DNC server when Ukraine showed they were completely wrong regarding Ukie
artillery?
Joe Lauria , June 8, 2018 at 2:12 am
Until he went incommunicado Assange stated on several occasions that he was never
questioned by Muellers team. Craig Murray has said the same. And Kim Dotcom has written to
Mueller offering evidence about the source and he says they have never replied to him.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm
Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to
divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the
truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's
activities are a complete sham.
MLS wrote, "How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's
investigation – with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks
– has and has not done?"
Robert Mueller is NOT a Special Prosecutor appointed by the Congress. He is a special
counsel appointed by the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, and is part of the
Department of Justice.
I know no one who dislikes Trumps wants to hear it. But all Mueller's authority and power
to act is derived from Donald J. Trump's executive authority because he won the 2016
presidential election. Mueller is down the chain of command in the Executive Department.
That's why this is all nonsense. What we basically have is Trump investigating himself.
The framers of the Constitution never intended this. They intended Congress to investigate
the Executive and that's why they gave Congress the power to remove him or her via
impeachment.
As long as we continue with this folly of expecting the Justice Department to somehow
investigate and prosecute a president we end up with two terrible possibilities. Either a
corrupt president will exercise his legitimate authority to end the investigation like Nixon
did -or- we have a Deep State beyond the reach of the elected president that can effectively
investigate and prosecute a corrupt president, but also then has other powers with no
democratic control.
The solution to this dilemma? An empowered Congress elected by the People operating as the
Constitution intended.
As to the rest of your post? It is an example of the "will to believe." Me? I'll not act
as if there is evidence of Russian interference until I'm shown evidence, not act as if it
must be true, because I want to believe that, until it's fully proven that it didn't
happen.
F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 8:22 pm
There must be some Trump-Russia ties.
Or so claim those CIA spies-
McCabe wants a deal, or else he won't squeal,
He'll dissemble when he testifies!
No one knows what's on Huma's computer.
There's no jury and no prosecutor.
Poor Adam Schiff hopes McCabe takes the fifth,
Special council might someday recruit her!
Assange is still embassy bound.
Mueller's case hasn't quite come unwound.
Wayne Madsen implies that there might be some ties,
To Israelis they haven't yet found!
Halper and Mifsud are players.
John Brennan used cutouts in layers.
If the scheme falls apart and the bureau is smart,
They'll go after them all as betrayers!
They needed historical fiction.
A dossier with salacious depiction!
Some urinous whores could get down on all fours,
They'd accomplish some bed sheet emiction!
Pablo Miller and Skripal were cited.
Sidney Blumenthal might have been slighted.
Christopher Steele offered Sidney a deal,
But the dossier's not copyrighted!
That story about Novichok,
Smells a lot like a very large crock.
But they can't be deposed or the story disclosed,
The Skripals have toxic brain block!
Papadopolis shot off his yap.
He told Downer, that affable chap-
There was dirt to report on the Clinton cohort,
Mifsud hooked him with that honey trap!
She was blond and a bombshell to boot.
Papadopolis thought she was cute.
She worked for Mifsud, a mysterious dude,
Now poor Paps is in grave disrepute!
But the trick was to tie it to Russians.
The Clinton team had some discussions.
Their big email scandal was easy to handle,
They'd blame Vlad for the bad repercussions!
There must have been Russian collusion.
That explained all the vote count confusion.
Guccifer Two made the Trump team come through,
If he won, it was just an illusion!
Lisa Page and Pete Strzok were disgusted
They schemed and they plotted and lusted.
If bald-headed Clapper appealed to Jake Tapper,
Brennan's Tweets might get Donald Trump busted!
There had to be cyber subversion.
It would serve as the perfect perversion.
They would claim it was missed if it didn't exist,
It's a logically perfect diversion!
F.G., you've done it again, and I might add, topped even yourself! Thanks.
KiwiAntz , June 7, 2018 at 7:30 pm
What a joke, America, the most dishonest Country on Earth, has meddled, murdered &
committed coups to overturn other Govts & interfered & continues to do so in just
about every Country on Earth by using Trade sanctions, arming Terrorists & illegal
invasions, has the barefaced cheek to puff out its chest & hypocritcally blame Russia for
something that it does on a daily basis?? And the point with Mueller's investigation is not
to find any Russian collusion evidence, who needs evidence when you can just make it up? The
point is provide the US with a list of unfounded lies & excuses, FIRSTLY to slander &
demonise RUSSIA for something they clearly didn't do! SECONDLY, was to provide a excuse for
the Democrats dismal election loss result to the DONALD & his Trump Party which just
happens to contain some Republicans? THIRDLY, to conduct a soft Coup by trying to get Trump
impeached on "TRUMPED UP CHARGES OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION"? And FOURTLY to divert attention away
from scrutiny & cover up Obama & Hillary Clinton's illegal, money grubbing activities
& her treasonous behaviour with her private email server?? After two years of Russiagate
nonsense with NOTHING to show for it, I think it's about time America owes Russia a public
apology & compensation for its blatant lying & slander of a innocent Country for a
crime they never committed?
Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 7:11 pm
Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely
cause of the Russiagate scams.
I am sure that they manipulate the digital voting machines directly and indirectly. True
elections are now impossible.
Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any
resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely
coincidental."
Antiwar7 , June 7, 2018 at 6:23 pm
Expecting the evil people running the show to respond to reason is futile, of course. All
of these reports are really addressed to the peanut gallery, where true power lies, if only
they could realize it.
Thanks, Ray and VIPS, for keeping up the good fight.
mike k , June 7, 2018 at 5:55 pm
For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which
pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering
a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic
conspiracy.
And BTW people have become shy about using the word conspiracy, for fear it will
automatically brand one as a hoaxer. On the contrary, conspiracies are extremely common, the
higher one climbs in the power hierarchy. Like monopolies, conspiracies are central to the
way the oligarchs do business.
John , June 8, 2018 at 5:42 am
Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in
knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is
involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB
drive, it is not a known.
There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that
the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth
Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being
done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated
reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings.
" whether or not"?!! Wow. That's an imperialistic statement.
Drew Hunkins , June 7, 2018 at 5:50 pm
Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic
charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and
Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the
mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by
Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was
the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable
DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his
crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they
even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face?
So sickening to see the manner in which many DNC sycophants obsequiously genuflect to
their godlike Mueller. A damn prosecutor who was arguably in bed with the Winter Hill
Gang!
jose , June 7, 2018 at 5:13 pm
If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They
know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The
Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars.
Jeff , June 7, 2018 at 4:35 pm
Thanx, Ray. The sad news is that everybody now believes that Russia tried to "meddle" in
our election and, since it's a belief, neither facts nor reality will dislodge it. Your
disclaimer should also probably carry the warning – never believe a word a government
official says especially if they are in the CIA, NSA, or FBI unless they provide proof. If
they tell you that it's classified, that they can't divulge it, or anything of that sort, you
know they are lying.
john wilson , June 7, 2018 at 4:09 pm
I suspect the real reason no evidence has been produced is because there isn't any. I know
this is stating the obvious, but if you think about it, as long as the non extent evidence is
supposedly being "investigated" the story remains alive. They know they aren't going to find
anything even remotely plausible that would stand up to any kind of scrutiny, but as long as
they are looking, it has the appearance that there might be something.
Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 4:08 pm
I first want to thank Ray and the VIPS for their continuing to follow through on this
Russia-Gate story. And it is a story.
My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After
all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart
Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not
be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for
justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved
in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody?
Now we have Sean Hannity making a strong case against the Clinton's and the FBI's careful
handling of their crimes. What seems out of place, since this should be big news, is that CNN
nor MSNBC seems to be covering this story in the same way Hannity is. I mean isn't this news,
meant to be reported as news? Why avoid reporting on Hillary in such a manner? This must be
that 'fake news' they all talk about boy am I smart.
In the end I have decided to be merely an observer, because there are no good guys or gals
in our nation's capital worth believing. In the end even Hannity's version of what took place
leads back to a guilty Russia. So, the way I see it, the swamp is being drained only to make
more room for more, and new swamp creatures to emerge. Talk about spinning our wheels. When
will good people arrive to finally once and for all drain this freaking swamp, once and for
all?
Realist , June 7, 2018 at 5:25 pm
Ha, ha! Don't you enjoy the magic show being put on by the insiders desperately trying to
hang onto their power even after being voted out of office? Their attempt to distract your
attention from reality whilst feeding you their false illusions is worthy of Penn &
Teller, or David Copperfield (the magician). Who ya gonna believe? Them or your lying
eyes?
Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 10:00 pm
Realist, You can bet they will investigate everything but what needs investigated, as our
Politico class devolves into survivalist in fighting, the mechanism of war goes
uninterrupted. Joe
F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 5:34 pm
Joe, speaking of draining the swamp, check out my comment under Ray's June 1 article about
Freddy Fleitz!
Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 6:59 pm
That is just what I was reminded of; here is an antiseptic but less emphatic last
line:
"Swamp draining progresses apace.
It's being accomplished with grace:
They're taking great pains to clean out the drains,"
New swamp creatures will need all that space!
Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 11:00 am
We must realize that to them, "the Swamp" refers to those in office who still abide by New
Deal policy. Despite the thoroughly discredited neoliberal economic policy, the radical right
are driving the world in the libertarian direction of privatization, austerity, private bank
control of money creation, dismantling the nation-state, contempt for the Constitution,
etc.
"... the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block " Siberian candidate " Trump. ..."
"... The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The Washington Post , Dearlove told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers" opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin." ..."
"... Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down. When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst). ..."
"... Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaid advisor . ..."
"... Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom every Russian is a Boris Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that Lokhova convincingly argues are absurd. ..."
"... As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, argued that the Iraqi military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too. ..."
"... Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult" hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... describes Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort. ..."
"... But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK. ..."
"... Stefan Halper then infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign. Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other. ..."
"... The rightwing Federalist website speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating it." Clovis believes that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue after inauguration. ..."
"... Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a "nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency with violating US election laws. ..."
"... As The Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2 article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election Day. ..."
"... Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not his government. ..."
"... Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker ..."
"... But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press." ..."
"... It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice. ..."
"... "Russiagate" continues to attract mounting blowback at Clinton, Obama and the Dems. Might well be they who end up charged with lawbreaking, though I'd be surprised if anyone in authority is ever really punished. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-02/fbi-spying-trump-started-london-earlier-thought-new-texts-implicate-obama-white ..."
"... I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb, Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged "puppet." ..."
"... The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what really happened. ..."
"... I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump did. ..."
"... Long-time CIA asset named as FBI's spy on Trump campaign By Bill Van Auken https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/21/poli-m21.html ..."
"... What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was "in the lead". ..."
"... Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House. Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal ideology for the most part. ..."
"... The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White House. ..."
"... It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its existence based on foreign enemies. ..."
"... So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab. ..."
As the role of a well-connected group of British and U.S. intelligence agents begins to
emerge, new suspicions are growing about what hand they may have had in weaving the Russia-gate
story, as Daniel Lazare explains.
Special to Consortium News
With the news that a Cambridge academic-cum-spy
named Stefan Halper infiltrated the Trump campaign, the role of the intelligence agencies in
shaping the great Russiagate saga is at last coming into focus.
It's looking more and more massive. The intelligence agencies initiated reports that Donald
Trump was colluding with Russia, they nurtured them and helped them grow, and then they spread
the word to the press and key government officials. Reportedly, they even tried to use these
reports to force Trump to step down prior to his inauguration. Although the corporate press
accuses Trump of conspiring with Russia to stop Hillary Clinton, the reverse now seems to be
the case: the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block "
Siberian
candidate " Trump.
The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business
partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The
Washington Post , Dearlove
told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers"
opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years
earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US
authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in
communication with the Kremlin."
Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down.
When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make
him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable
scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for
his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director
Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top
Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese
academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA
Director (and now NBC News analyst).
In-Bred
A few things stand out about this august group. One is its in-bred quality. After helping to
run an annual confab known as the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, Dearlove and Halper are now
partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are
connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also
connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke
and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another
MI6 vet. Alexander Downer
served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is
linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped
found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an
unpaid
advisor .
Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about
this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom
every Russian is a Boris
Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike
Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian
scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that
Lokhova convincingly
argues are absurd.
Halper: Infiltrated Trump campaign
In December 2016, Halper and Dearlove both resigned from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar
because they suspected that a company footing some of the costs was tied up with Russian
intelligence – suspicions that Christopher Andrew, former chairman of the Cambridge
history department and the seminar's founder, regards as " absurd " as well.
As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known,
Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of
Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass
destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency,
argued that the Iraqi
military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in
fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too.
Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence
against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend
the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses
fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult"
hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly
misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and
spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine.
The result is a diplo-espionage gang that is very bad at the facts but very good at public
manipulation – and which therefore decided to use its skill set out to create a public
furor over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
It Started Late 2015
The effort began in late 2015 when GCHQ, along with intelligence agencies in Poland,
Estonia, and Germany, began monitoring
what they said were " suspicious 'interactions' between figures connected to Trump and
known or suspected Russian agents."
Since Trump was surging ahead in the polls and scaring the pants off the foreign-policy
establishment by calling for a rapprochement with Moscow, the agencies figured that Russia was
somehow behind it. The pace accelerated in March 2016 when a 30-year-old policy consultant
named George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser. Traveling in
Italy a week later, he ran into Mifsud, the London-based Maltese academic, who reportedly set
about cultivating him after learning of his position with Trump. Mifsud claimed
to have "substantial connections with Russian government officials," according to prosecutors.
Over breakfast at a London hotel, he told Papadopoulos that he had just returned from Moscow
where he had learned that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands
of emails."
This was the remark that supposedly triggered an FBI investigation. The New York
Timesdescribes
Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at
meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr.
Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort.
But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later
tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking
British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security
agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in
such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK.
After Papadopoulos caused a minor political ruckus by
telling a reporter that Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize for criticizing
Trump's anti-Muslim pronouncements, a friend in the Israeli embassy put him in touch with a
friend in the Australian embassy, who introduced him to Downer, her boss. Over drinks, Downer
advised him to be more diplomatic. After Papadopoulos then passed along Misfud's tip about
Clinton's emails, Downer informed his government, which, in late July, informed the FBI.
Was Papadopoulos Set Up?
Suspicions are unavoidable but evidence is lacking. Other pieces were meanwhile clicking
into place. In late May or early June 2016, Fusion GPS, a private Washington intelligence firm
employed by the Democratic National Committee, hired Steele to look into the Russian angle.
On June 20, he turned in the first of eighteen memos that would eventually comprise
the
Steele dossier , in this instance a three-page document asserting that Putin "has been
cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years" and that Russian intelligence
possessed "kompromat" in the form of a video of prostitutes performing a "golden showers" show
for his benefit at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. A week or two later, Steele
briefed the FBI on his findings. Around the same time, Robert Hannigan flew to Washington
to brief CIA Director John Brennan about additional material that had come GCHQ's way, material
so sensitive that it could only be handled at "director level."
One player was filling Papadopoulos's head with tales of Russian dirty tricks, another was
telling the FBI, while a third was collecting more information and passing it on to the bureau
as well.
Page: Took Russia's side.
On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on
U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in which he complained that " Washington and other western
capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such
as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed "
unease " that someone representing the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's
side in a growing neo-Cold War.
Stefan Halper then
infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks
before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter
re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign.
Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other.
On July 11, Page showed up at a Cambridge symposium at which Halper and Dearlove both spoke.
In early September, Halper sent Papadopoulos an email offering $3,000 and a paid trip to London
to write a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean, his specialty.
"George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?" Halper asked when he got there,
but Papadopoulos said he knew nothing. Halper also sought out Sam Clovis, Trump's national
campaign co-chairman, with whom he chatted about China for an hour or so over coffee in
Washington.
The rightwing Federalist website
speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that
"Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating
it." Clovis believes
that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in
the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue
warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought
a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue
after inauguration.
Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty
rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does
his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite
countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the
sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a
"nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said
it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others
on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for
corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency
with violating US election laws.
But the corruption charges have nothing to do with Russian collusion and nothing in the
indictment against IRA indicates that either the Kremlin or the Trump campaign were involved.
Indeed, the activities that got IRA in trouble in the first place are so unimpressive –
just $46,000 worth of Facebook
ads that it purchased prior to election day, some pro-Trump, some anti, and some with
no particular slant
at all – that Mueller probably wouldn't even have bothered if he hadn't been under
intense pressure to come up with anything at all.
The same goes for the army of bots that Russia supposedly deployed on Twitter. As The
Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2
article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a
six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one
billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election
Day.
The Steele dossier is also underwhelming. It declares on one page that the Kremlin sought to
cultivate Trump by throwing "various lucrative real estate development business deals" his way
but says on another that Trump's efforts to drum up business were unavailing and that he thus
"had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather
than business success."
Why would Trump turn down business offers when he couldn't generate any on his own? The idea
that Putin would spot a U.S. reality-TV star somewhere around 2011 and conclude that he was
destined for the Oval Office five years later is ludicrous. The fact that the Democratic
National Committee funded the dossier via its law firm Perkins Coie renders it less credible
still, as does the fact that the world has heard nothing more about the alleged video despite
the ongoing deterioration in US-Russian relations. What's the point of making a blackmail tape
if you don't use it?
Steele: Paid for political research, not intelligence.
Even Steele is backing off. In a legal paper filed in response to a libel suit last May, he
said the document "did not represent (and did not purport to represent) verified facts, but
were raw intelligence which had identified a range of allegations that warranted investigation
given their potential national security implications." The fact is that the "dossier" was
opposition research, not an intelligence report. It was neither vetted by Steele nor anyone in
an intelligence agency. Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig
up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at
taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not
his government.
Using it Anyway
Nonetheless, the spooks have made the most of such pseudo-evidence. Dearlove and Wood both
advised Steele to take his "findings" to the FBI, while, after the election, Wood pulled
Sen. John McCain aside at a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to let him know that
the Russians might be blackmailing the president-elect. McCain dispatched long-time aide David
J. Kramer to the UK to discuss the dossier with Steele directly.
Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker found a former national-security
official who
says he spoke with him at the time and that Kramer's goal was to have McCain confront Trump
with the dossier in the hope that he would resign on the spot. When that didn't happen, Clapper
and Brennan arranged for FBI Director James Comey to confront Trump instead. Comey later
testified that he didn't want Trump to think he was creating "a J. Edgar Hoover-type
situation – I didn't want him thinking I was briefing him on this to sort of hang it over
him in some way."
But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry
observed a few
days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on
government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure
hate to see end up in the press."
Since then, the Democrats have touted the dossier at every opportunity, TheNew
Yorker
continues to defend it , while Times columnist Michelle Goldberg cites it as well,
saying it's a
"rather obvious possibility that Trump is being blackmailed." CNN, for its part, suggested not
long ago that the dossier may actually be Russian
disinformation designed to throw everyone off base, Republicans and Democrats alike.
It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the
intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the
public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that
they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this
out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice.
Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing
Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a
wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique , and his articles about
the Middle East, terrorism, Eastern Europe, and other topics appear regularly on such websites
as Jacobin and The American Conservative.
Mueller is trying to omit the normal burden of legal liability, "wilful intent" in his
charges against the St Petersburg, social media operation. In a horrifically complex area
such as tax, campaign contributions or lobbying, a foreign entity can be found guilty of
breaking a law that they cannot reasonably have been expected to have knowledge of.
But the omission or inclusion of "wilful intent" is applied on a selective basis depending on
the advantage to the deep state.
From a practical standpoint, omission of "wilful intent" makes it easier for Mueller to get a
guilty verdict (in adsentia assuming this is legally valid in America). Once the "guilt" of
the St Petersburg staff is established, any communication between an American and them
becomes "collusion".
I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's
persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the
White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been
motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten
into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never
recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb,
Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would
have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged
"puppet."
The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his
candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were
always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of
jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to
beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat
themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and
other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what
really happened.
backwardsevolution , June 3, 2018 at 2:50 pm
Realist – good post. I think what you say is true. Trump got too caught up in the
birther crap, and Obama retaliated. But I think that Trump had been thinking about the
presidency long before Obama came along. He sees the country differently than Obama and
Clinton do. Trump would never have built up China to the point where all American technology
has been given away for free, with millions of jobs lost and a huge trade deficit, and he
would have probably left Russia alone, not ransacked it.
I saw Obama as a somewhat reluctant globalist and Hillary as an eager globalist. They are
both insiders. Trump is not. He's interested in what is best for the U.S., whereas the
Clinton's and the Bush's were interested in what their corporate masters wanted. The
multinationals have been selling the U.S. out, Trump is trying to put a stop to this, and it
is going to be a fight to the death. Trump is playing hardball with China (who ARE U.S.
multinationals), and it is working. Beginning July 1, 2018, China has agreed to reduce its
tariffs:
"Import tariffs for apparel, footwear and headgear, kitchen supplies and fitness products
will be more than halved to an average of 7.1 percent from 15.9 percent, with those on
washing machines and refrigerators slashed to just 8 percent, from 20.5 percent.
Tariffs will also be cut on processed foods such as aquaculture and fishing products and
mineral water, from 15.2 percent to 6.9 percent.
Cosmetics, such as skin and hair products, and some medical and health products, will also
benefit from a tariff cut to 2.9 percent from 8.4 percent.
In particular, tariffs on drugs ranging from penicillin, cephalosporin to insulin will be
slashed to zero from 6 percent before.
In the meantime, temporary tariff rates on 210 imported products from most favored nations
will be scrapped as they are no longer favorable compared with new rates."
Trade with China has been all one way. At least Trump is leveling the playing field. He at
least is trying to bring back jobs, something the "insiders" could care less about.
I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've
underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always
the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the
chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons
and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their
favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump
did.
Abe , June 2, 2018 at 2:20 am
"Pentagon documents indicate that the Department of Defense's shadowy intelligence arm,
the Office of Net Assessment, paid Halper $282,000 in 2016 and $129,000 in 2017. According to
reports, Halper sought to secure Papadopoulos's collaboration by offering him $3,000 and an
all-expenses-paid trip to London, ostensibly to produce a research paper on energy issues in
the eastern Mediterranean.
"The choice of Halper for this spying operation has ominous implications. His deep ties to
the US intelligence apparatus date back decades. His father-in-law was Ray Cline, who headed
the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence at the height of the Cold War. Halper served as an aide
to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Alexander Haig in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
"In 1980, as the director of policy coordination for Ronald Reagan's presidential
campaign, Halper oversaw an operation in which CIA officials gave the campaign confidential
information on the Carter administration and its foreign policy. This intelligence was in
turn utilized to further back-channel negotiations between Reagan's campaign manager and
subsequent CIA director William Casey and representatives of Iran to delay the release of the
American embassy hostages until after the election, in order to prevent Carter from scoring a
foreign policy victory on the eve of the November vote.
"Halper subsequently held posts as deputy assistant secretary of state for
political-military affairs and senior adviser to the Pentagon and Justice Department. More
recently, Halper has collaborated with Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, the British
intelligence service, in directing the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSi), a security think
tank that lists the US and UK governments as its principal clients.
"Before the 2016 election, Halper had expressed his view – shared by predominant
layers within the intelligence agencies – that Clinton's election would prove 'less
disruptive' than Trump's.
"The revelations of the role played by Halper point to an intervention in the 2016
elections by the US intelligence agencies that far eclipsed anything one could even imagine
the Kremlin attempting."
Sorry for not commenting on other posts as of yet. But I think I have a different
perspective. Russia Gate is not about Hillary Clinton or Putin but it is about Donald Trump.
Specifically an effort to get rid of him by the intelligence agencies and the MSM. The fact
is the MSM created Trump and were chiefly responsible for his election. Trump is their
brainchild starlet used to fleece all the republican campaigns like a huckster fleeces an
audience. It all ties to key Supreme Court rulings eliminating campaign finance regulations
which ushered in the age of dark money.
When billionaires can donate unlimited amounts of money anonymously to the candidate of
their choosing what ends up is a field of fourteen wannabes in a primary race each backed by
their own investor(s). The only way these candidates can win is to convince us to vote. The
only way they can do that is to spend on advertising.
What the MSM dreamed of in a purely capitalistic way was a way to drain the wallets of
every single one of the republican Super PACs. The mission was fraught with potential
checkmates. Foe example, there could be an early leader who snatched up the needed delegates
for the nomination early on which would have stopped the flow of advertising cash flowing to
the MSM. Such possibilities worried the MSM and caused great angst since this might just be
the biggest haul they ever took in during a primary season. How would they prevent a
premature end of the money river. Like financial vampire bats, ticks and leeches they needed
a way to keep the money flowing from the veins of the republican Super PACs until they were
sucked dry.
What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like
a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the
term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause
all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was
"in the lead".
It was a pure stroke of genius and it worked so well that Carl Rove is looking for a job
and Donald Trump is sitting in the White House.
Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one
little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House.
Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a
democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal
ideology for the most part.
What to do? Trump was now the Commander in Chief and was spouting nonsense that the
establishment recoiled at such as Trumps plans to form economic ties with Russia rather than
continue to wage a cold war spanning 65 years which the MIC used year after year to spook us
all and guarantee their billions annual increase in funding. Trump directly attacked defense
projects and called for de-funding major initiatives like F35 etc.
The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin
horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every
year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the
hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and
entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of
governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White
House.
What to do? There was clearly a need to eliminate this bad guy since his avowed policies
were in direct opposition to the game plan that had successfully compromised the former
administration. They felt powerless to dissuade the Administration to continue the course and
form strategies to eliminate Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya, Ukraine and other vulnerable
targets swaying toward China and Russia. They faced a new threat with the Trump
Administration which seemed hell bent to discontinue the wars in these regions robbing them
of many dollars.
It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very
threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the
hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its
existence based on foreign enemies.
So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and
the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It
had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in
the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they
committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the
White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab.
In the interim, they also forgot on purpose to tell anyone about the election campaign
finance fraud that they were the chief beneficiaries of. They also of course forgot to tell
anyone what the fight was about for the Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Twenty seven
million dollars in dark money was donated by dark money donors enabled by the Supreme Court's
decisions to eliminate campaign finance regulations which enabled these donors to buy out
Congress and elect and confirm a Supreme Court Justice who would uphold the laws which
eliminate all the election rules and campaign finance regulations dating back to the Tillman
Act of 1907 which was an attempt to eliminate corporate contributions in political campaigns
with associated meager fines as penalties. The law was weak then and has now been
eliminated.
In an era of dark money in politics protected by revisionist judges laying at the top of
our federal judicial branch posing as strict constructionists while being funded by the
corporatocracy that viciously fights over control of the highest court by a panicked
republican party that seeks to tie up their domination in our Congress by any means including
the abdication of the Constitutional authority granted to the citizens of the nation we now
face a new internal enemy.
That enemy is not some foreign nation but our own government which conspires to represent
the wealthy and the powerful and which exalts them and which enacts laws to defend their
control of our nation. Here is a quote:
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they
create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral
code that glorifies it.
Frederic Bastiat – (1801-1850) in Economic Sophisms
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:32 am
Different journalist covering much the same ground:
"Russiagate" is strictly a contrivance of the Deep State, American & British Spookery,
and the corporate media propagandists. It clearly needs to be genuinely investigated (unlike
the mockery being orchestrated by Herr Mueller from the Ministry of Truth), re-christened
"Intellgate" (after the real perpetrators of crime), pursued until all the guilty traitors
(including Mueller) who really tried to steal our democratic election are tried, convicted
and incarcerated (including probably hundreds complicit from the media) and given its own
lengthy chapter in all the history books about "The Election They Tried to Steal and Blame on
Russia: How America Nearly Lost its Constitution." If not done, America will lose its
constitution, or rather the incipient process will become totally irreversible.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 6:25 am
Your timing of events is confused.
The deep state didn't try and steal the election because they were overly complacent that
their woman would win. Remember, they didn't try to use the dodgy, Steele dossier before the
election.
What the deep state has done is reactively try to overcome the election outcome by launching
an investigation into Trump. The egregious element of the investigation is giving it the
title "investigation into collusion" when they in all probability knew that collusion was
unlikely to have taken place. To achieve their aim (removing Trump) they included the line
"and matters arising" in the brief to give them an open ended remit which allowed them to
investigate Trump's business dealings of a Russian / Ukrainian nature (which may venture
uncomfortably close to Semion Mogilevich).
If as you state (and I concur) there was no Russian collusion, then barring fabrication of
evidence by Mueller (and there is little evidence of that to date) you have nothing to worry
about on the collusion front. Remember, to date, Mueller has stuck (almost exclusively) to
meat and potatoes charges like tax evasion and money laundering. If however the investigation
leads to credible evidence that Trump broke substantive laws in the past for financial gain,
then it is not reasonable to cry foul.
Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:02 am
The Deep State assisted the DNC in knocking out Sanders. THAT was ground zero. Everything
since then has been to cover this up and to discredit Trump (using him as the distraction).
Consider that the Deep State never bothered to investigate the DNC servers/data; reason being
is that they'd (Deep State) be implicated.
Skip Scott , June 1, 2018 at 7:29 am
Very true Seer. That is the real genesis of RussiaGate. It was a diversion tactic to keep
people from looking at the DNC's behavior during the primaries. They are the reason Trump is
president, not the evil Ruskies.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:13 am
We all seem agreed that the Russia collusion is an exercise in distraction. I can't say I
know enough to comment with authority on whether the DNC would require assistance from the
deep state to trash Bernie. From an outsider perspective it looked more like an application
of massively disproportionate spending and standard, back room dirty tricks.
There is a saying; don't attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.
In this case, try replacing incompetence with MONEY.
dikcheney , June 2, 2018 at 5:09 pm
Totally agree with you Skip and the Mueller performance is there to keep up the
intimidation and distraction by regularly finding turds to throw at Trump. Mueller doesnt
need to find anything, he just needs to create vague intimations of 'guilty Trump' and
suspicious associates so that no one will look at the DNC or the Clinton corruption or the
smashing of the Sanders campaign.
Their actual agenda is to smother analysis and clear thinking. Thankfully there is the
forensicator piecing the jigsaw as well as consortium news.
robjira , June 1, 2018 at 11:55 am
Spot on, Seer.
michael , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm
Those servers probably had a lot more pay-to-play secrets from the Clinton Foundation and
ring-kissing from foreign big donors than what was released by Wikileaks, which mostly was
just screwing over Bernie, which the judge ruled was Hillary's prerogative. Some email chains
were probably construed as National Security and were discreetly not leaked.
The 30,000 emails Hillary had bit bleached from her private servers are likely in the hands
of Russians and every other major country, all biding their time for leverage. This was the
carrot the British (who undoubtedly have copies as well) dangled over idiot Popodopolous.
Uncle Bob , June 1, 2018 at 10:33 pm
Seth Rich
anon , June 1, 2018 at 7:42 am
Realist is likely referring to events before the election which involved people with
secret agency connections, such as the opposition research (Steele dossier and Skripal
affair).
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:32 am
Realist responded but is being "moderated" as per usual.
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:31 am
Hillary herself was a prime force in cooking up the smear against Trump for being "Putin's
puppet." This even before the Democratic convention. Then she used it big time during the
debates. It wasn't something merely reactive after she lost. Certainly she and her
collaborators inside the deep state and the intelligence agencies never imagined that she
would lose and have to distract from what she and her people did by projecting the blame onto
Trump. That part was reactive. The rest of the conspiracy was totally proactive on her part
and that of the DNC, even during the primaries.
Don't forget, the intel agencies led by Clapper, Brennan and Comey were all working for
Obama at the time and were totally acquiescent in spying on the Trump campaign and
"unmasking" the identities and actions of his would-be administration, including individuals
like General Flynn. The cooked up Steele dossier was paid for by money from the Clinton
campaign and used as a pretext for the intel agencies to spy on the Trump campaign. There is
no issue on timing. The establishment was fully behind Clinton by hook or crook from the
moment Trump had the delegates to win the GOP nomination. (OBTW, I am not a Trump supporter
or even a Republican, so I KNOW that I "have nothing to worry about on the collusion front."
I'm a registered Dem, though not a Hillary supporter.)
Moreover, if you think that Mueller (and the other intel chiefs) have been on the
impartial up-and-up, why did the FBI never seize and examine the DNC servers? Why simply
accept the interpretation of events given by the private cybersecurity firm (Crowdstrike)
that the Clinton campaign hired to very likely mastermind a cover-up? That is exceptional
(nay, unheard of!) "professional courtesy." Why has Mueller to this day not deposed Julian
Assange or former British Ambassador Craig Murray, both of whom admit to knowing precisely
who provided the leaked (not hacked) Podesta and DNC emails to Wikileaks? Why has Mueller not
pursued the potential role of the late Seth Rich in the leaking of said emails? Why has
Mueller not pursued the robust theory, based on actual evidence, proposed by VIPS, and
supported by computer experts like Bill Binney and John McAfee, that the emails were not, as
the Dems and the intel agencies would have you believe on NO EVIDENCE, hacked (by the
"Russians" or anyone else) but were downloaded to a flash drive directly from the DNC
servers? Why has Mueller not deposed Binney or Ray McGovern who claim to have evidence to
bear on this and have discussed it freely in the media (to the miniscule extent that the
corporate media will give them an audience)? Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a
kangaroo court he is running? Is the media really independent and impartial or are they part
of a cover-up, perpetrating numerous sins of both commission and omission in their highly
flawed reportage?
I don't see clarity in what has been thus far been propounded by Mueller or any of Trump's
other accusers, but I don't think I am the one who is confused here, Vivian. If you want to
meet a thoroughly confused individual on what transpired leading up to this moment in
American political history, just go read Hillary's book. Absolutely everyone under the sun
shares in the blame but her for the fact that she does not presently reside in the White
House.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 1:48 pm
You have presented your case with a great deal more detail and clarity than the original
post that prompted my reply. You are also a great deal more knowledgeable than I on the
details. I think we are 98% in agreement and I wouldn't like to say who's correct on the
remaining 2%.
For clarity, I didn't follow the debates and wouldn't do so now if they were repeated. Much
heat very little light.
The "pretext" that the intel agencies claim launched their actions against Trump was not the
Steele dossier, at least that is what the intel agencies say. Either way your assertion that
it was the dossier that set things off is just that, an assertion. I think this is a minor
point.
On the DNC servers and the FBI we are 100% singing from the same hymn book and it all sticks.
Mueller's apparent disinterest in the question of hack or USB drive does rather taint his
investigation and thanks for pointing this out, I hadn't thought of that angle. I still think
Mueller will stick to tax and money laundering and stay well clear of "collusion", so yes he
may be running a kangaroo court investigation but the charges will be real world.
The MSM as a whole are a sick joke which is why we collectively find ourselves at CN, Craig
Murray's blog, etc. I wouldn't like to attribute "collaboration" to any individual in the
media. It was the reference to hundreds of journalists being sent to jail in your original
post that set me off in the first place. When considering the "culpability" of any individual
journalist you can have any position on a spectrum from; fully cognisant collaborator with a
deep state conspiracy, to; a bit dim and running with the "sexy" story 'cause it's the
biggest thing ever, the bosses can't get enough of it and the overtime is great. If American
journalists are anything like their UK counterparts, 99% will fall into the latter
category.
Don't have any issue with your final point. Hillary on stage and on camera was phoney as
rocking horse s**te and everyone outside her extremely highly remunerated team could see
it.
Sorry for any inconvenience, but your second post makes your points a hell of a lot clearer
than the original.
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:26 pm
My purpose for the first post in this thread was to direct readers to the article in Unz
by Mike Whitney, not to compress a full-blown amateur expose' by myself into a three-sentence
paragraph. You would have found much more in the way of facts, analysis and opinion in his
article to which my terse comments did not even serve as an abstract.
Quoting his last paragraph may give you the flavor of this piece, which is definitely not
a one-off by him or other actual journalists who have delved into the issues:
"Let's see if I got this right: Brennan gets his buddies in the UK to feed fake
information on Russia to members of the Trump campaign, after which the FBI uses the
suspicious communications about Russia as a pretext to unmask, wiretap, issue FISA warrants,
and infiltrate the campaign, after which the incriminating evidence that was collected in the
process of entrapping Trump campaign assistants is compiled in a legal case that is used to
remove Trump from office. Is that how it's supposed to work?
It certainly looks like it. But don't expect to read about it in the Times."
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm
Vivian – 90% of all major media is owned by six corporations. There most definitely
was and IS collusion between some of them to bring down the outsider, Trump.
As far as individual journalists go, yeah, they're trying to pay their mortgage, I get it,
and they're going to spin what their boss bloody well tells them to spin. But there is
evidence coming out that "some" journalists did accept money from either Fusion GPS, Perkins
Coie (sp) or Christopher Steele to leak information, which they did.
Bill Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that enabled these six media
conglomerates to dominate the news. Of course they're political. They need to be split up,
like yesterday, into a thousand pieces (ditto for the banks). They have purposely and with
intent been feeding lies to the American people. Yes, some SHOULD go to jail.
As Peter Strzok of the FBI said re Trump colluding with Russia, "There was never any
there, there." The collusion has come from the intelligence agencies, in cahoots with Hillary
Clinton, perhaps even as high as Obama, to prevent Trump being elected. When that failed,
they set out to get him impeached on whatever they could find. Of course Mueller is going to
stick with tax and money laundering because he already KNOWS there was never any collusion
with Russia.
This is the Swamp versus the People.
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 1:52 pm
Realist – another excellent post. "Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a kangaroo
court he is running?" As you rightly point out, Mueller IS being very selective in what he
examines and doesn't examine. He's not after the whole truth, just a particular kind of
truth, one that gets him a very specific result – to take down or severely cripple the
President.
Evidence continues to trickle out. Former and active members of the FBI are now even
begging to testify as they are disgusted with what is being purposely omitted from this
so-called "impartial" investigation. This whole affair is "kangaroo" all the way.
I'm not so much a fan of Trump as I am a fan of the truth. I don't like to see him –
anyone – being railroaded. That bothers me more than anything. But he's right about
what he calls "the Swamp". If these people are not uncovered and brought to justice, then the
country is truly lost.
Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:38 pm
Precisely. Destroy the man on false pretenses and you destroy our entire system, whether
you like him and his questionable policies or not.
Some people would say it's already gone, but we do what we can to get it back or hold onto
to what's left of it. Besides, all the transparent lies and skullduggery in the service of
politics rather than principles are just making our entire system look as corrupt as
hell.
michael , June 1, 2018 at 5:00 pm
When Mueller arrested slimy Manafort for crimes committed in the Ukraine and gave a pass
to the Podesta Brothers who worked closely with Manafort, it was clear that Russiagate was a
partisan operation.
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 6:17 pm
Michael – good point!
KiwiAntz , June 1, 2018 at 1:00 am
Its becoming abundantly clear now, that the whole Russiagate charade was had nothibg to do
with Russia & is about a elaborate smokescreen & shellgame coverup designed to divert
attention away from, firstly the Democratic Party's woeful defeat & its lousy Candidate
choice in the corrupt Hillary Clinton? & also the DNC's sabotaging of Bernie Saunders
campaign run! But the most henious & treacherous parts was Obama's, weaponising the
intelligence agencies to spy (Halper) on the imaginary Mancharian Candidate Trump & to
set him up as a Russia stooge? Obama & Hillary Clinton are complicent in this disgraceful
& illegal activity to get dirt on Trump withe goal of ensuring Clinton's election win?
This is bigger than Watergate & more scandalous? But despite the cheating & stacking
of the card deck, she still lost out to the Donald? And this isn't just illegal its
treasonous & willful actions deserving of a lengthy jail incarceration? HRC & her
crooked Clinton foundation's funding of the fraudulent & discredited "Steele Dosier" was
also used to implement Trump & Russia in a made up, pile of fictitious gargage that was
pure offal? Obama & HRC along with their FBI & CIA spys need to be rounded up,
convicted & thrown in jail? Perhaps if Trump could just shut his damn mouuth for once
& get off twitter long enough to be able too get some Justice Dept officials looking into
this, without being distracted by this Russiagate shellgame fakery, then perhaps the real
criminal's like Halpert, Obama,HRC & these corrupt spooks & spies can be rounded up
& held to account for this treasonous behaviour?
Sean Ahern , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 pm
Attention should be paid also to the role of so called progressive media outlets such as
Mother Jones which served as an outlets for the disinformation campaign described in Lazare's
article.
Here from David Corn's Mother Jones 2016 article:
"And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian
counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with
memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian
government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump -- and that the FBI requested more
information from him."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump/
Not only was Corn and Mother Jones selected by the spooks as an outlet, but these so
called progressives lauded their 'expose' as a great investigative coup on their part and it
paved the way for Corn's elevation on MSNBC for a while as a 'pundit.'
Paul G. , May 31, 2018 at 8:46 pm
In that vein did the spooks influence Rachel Maddow or is her $30,000. a day salary
adequate to totally compromise her microscopic journalistic integrity.
dikcheney , June 3, 2018 at 6:57 am
Passing around references to Mother Jones is like passing round used toilet paper for
another try. MJ is BS it is entirely controlled fake press.
Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:23 pm
Stefan Halper was being paid by the Clinton's foundation during the time he was spying on
the Trump campaign. This is further evidence that Hillary Clinton's hands are all over
getting Russia Gate started. Then there's the role that Obama's justice department played in
setting up the spying on people who were working with the Trump campaign. This is worse than
Watergate, IMO.
Rumors are that a few ex FBI agents are going to testify to congress in Comey's role in
covering up Hillary's crimes when she used her private email server to send classified
information to people who did not have clearance to read it. Sydney Bluementhol was working
for Hillary's foundation and sending her classified information that he stole from the
NSA.
Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills were concerned about Obama knowing that Hillary wasn't using
her government email account after he told the press that he only found out about it at the
same time they did. He had been sending and receiving emails from her Clintonone email
address during her whole tenure as SOS.
Obama was also aware of her using her foundation for pay to play which she was told by
both congress and Obama to keep far away from her duties. Why did she use her private email
server? So that Chelsea could know where Hillary was doing business so she could send Bill
there to give his speeches to the same organizations, foreign governments and people who had
just donated to their foundation.
Has any previous Secretary of State in history used their position to enrich their spouses
or their foundations? I think not.
The secrets of how the FBI covered for Hillary are coming out. Whether she is charged for
her crimes is a different matter.
F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 7:48 pm
If Hillary paid a political operative using Clinton Foundation funds – those are tax
exempt charitable contributions – she would be guilty of tax fraud, charity fraud and
campaign finance violations. Hillary may be evil, but she's not stupid. The U.S.Government
paid Halper, which might be "waste, fraud and abuse", but it doesn't implicate Hillary at
all. Not that she's innocent, mind you
Rob , June 1, 2018 at 2:14 am
I need some references to take any of your multitude of claims seriously. With all due
respect, this sound like something taken from info wars and stylized in smartened up a little
bit.
the idea that Stefan Halper was some sort a of mastermind spy behind the so called
"Russiagate" fiasco
seems very implausible considering what he seems to have spent doing for the past 40
years
going back to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980 and his efforts then.
i think he must have had a fairly peripheral role as to whatever or not was going on
behind the scenes from 2016 election campaign, and the campaign to first stop Trump getting
elected, and secondly, when that failed, to bring down his Presidency.
of course, the moment his name was revealed in recent days, would have shocked or
surprised those of in the general
public, but not certainly amongst those in Government aka FBI/CIA/Military-industrial
circles.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 4:36 pm
chris m – Halper is probably one of those people who hide behind their professor (or
other legitimate) jobs, but are there at the ready to serve the Deep State. "I understand.
You want me to set up some dupes in order to make it look like there was or could be actual
Russian meddling. Gotcha." All you've got to do is make it "look like" something nefarious
was going on. This facilitates a "reason" to have a phony investigation, and of course they
make it as open-ended an investigation as possible, hoping to get the target on something,
anything.
Well, they've no doubt looked long and hard for almost two years now, but zip. However, in
their zeal to get rid of their opponent, who they did not think would win the election, they
left themselves open, left a trail of crimes. Whoops!
This is the Swamp that Trump talked about during the election. He's probably not squeaky
clean either, but he pales in comparison to what these guys have done. They have tried to
take down a duly-elected President.
F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 5:09 pm
His role may have been peripheral, but I seem to recall that the Office of Net Assessments
paid him roughly a million bucks to play it. That office, run from the Pentagon, is about as
deep into the world of "black ops" spookdom as you can get. Hardly "peripheral", I'd say.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:13 pm
F. G. Sanford – yes, a million bucks implies something more than just a peripheral
involvement, more like something essential to the plot, like the actual setting up of the
plot. Risk of exposure costs money.
ranney , May 31, 2018 at 6:17 pm
Chris, I think the Halper inclusion in this complex tale is simply an example of how these
things work in the ultra paranoid style of spy agencies. As Lazare explains, every one knew
every one else – at least at the start of this, and it just kind of built from there,
and Halper may have been the spark – but the spark landed on a highly combustible pile
of paranoia that caught on fire right away. This is how our and the UK agencies function.
There is an interesting companion piece to this story today at Common Dreams by Robert Kohler
titled The American Way of War. It describes basically the same sort of mind set and action
as this story. I'd link it for you if I knew how, but I'm not very adept at the computer.
(Maybe another reader knows how?)
We (that is the American people who are paying the salaries of these brain blocked, stiff
necked idiots) need to start getting vocal and visible about the destructive path our
politicians, banks and generals have rigidly put us on. Does any average working stiff still
believe that all this hate, death and destruction is to "protect" us?
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:07 pm
ranney – when you are on the page that you want to link to, take your cursor (the
little arrow on your screen) to the top of the page to the address bar (for instance, the
address for this article is:
"https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/31/spooks-spooking ")
Once your cursor is over the address bar, right click on your mouse. A little menu will
come up. Then position your cursor down to the word "copy" and then left click on your mouse.
This will copy the link.
Then proceed back to the blog (like Consortium) where you want to provide the link in your
post. You might say, "Here is the link for the article I just described above." Then at this
point you would right click on your mouse again, position your cursor over the word "paste",
and then left click on your mouse. Voila, your link magically appears.
If you don't have a mouse and are using a laptop pad, then someone else will have to help
you. That's above my pay grade. Good luck, ranney.
irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:13 pm
If you are using a Mac, either laptop w/touch screen or with a mouse, the copy/paste
function
works similarly. Use either the mouse (no need to 'right click, left click') or the touch
screen
to highlight the address bar once you have the cursor flashing away on the left side of
it.
You may need to scroll right to highlight the whole address. Then go up to Edit (there's
also
a keyboard command you can use, but I don't) in your tool bar at the top of your screen.
Click on 'copy'. Now your address is in memory. Then do the same as described above to
get back to where you want to paste it. Put your cursor where you want it to be 'pasted'.
Go back to 'edit' and click 'paste'. Voila !
This is a very handy function and can be used to copy text, web addresses, whatever you
want.
Explore it a little bit. (Students definitely overuse the 'paste and match style' option,
which allows
a person to 'paste' text into for example an essay and 'match the style' so it looks
seamless, although
unless carefully edited it usually doesn't read seamlessly !)
Remember that whatever is in 'copy' will remain there until you 'copy' something else. (Or
your
computer crashes . . . )
ranney , June 1, 2018 at 3:39 pm
Irina and Backwards Evolution – Thanks guys for the computer advice! I'll try it,
but I think I need someone at my shoulder the first time I try it.
backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 8:53 pm
ranney – you're welcome! Snag one of your kids or a friend, and then do it together.
Sometimes I see people posting things like: "Testing. I'm trying to provide a link, bear with
me." Throw caution to the wind, ranney. I don't worry about embarrassing myself anymore. I do
it every day and the world still goes on.
I heard a good bit of advice once, something I remind my kids: when you're young, you
think everybody is watching you and so you're afraid to step out of line. When you're
middle-aged, you think everybody is watching you, but you don't care. When you're older, you
realize nobody is really watching you because they're more concerned about themselves.
Good luck, ranney.
irina , June 2, 2018 at 10:00 pm
I find it helpful to write down the steps (on an old fashioned piece of paper, with old
fashioned ink)
when learning to use a new computer tool, because while I think I'll remember, it doesn't
usually
'stick' until after using it for quite a while. And yes, definitely recruit a member of the
younger set
or someone familiar with computers. My daughter showed me many years ago how to 'cut &
paste'
and to her credit she was very gracious about it. Remember that you need a place to 'paste'
what-
ever you copied -- either a comment board like this, or a document you are working on, or
(this is
handy) an email where you want to send someone a link to something. Lots of other
possibilities too!
mike , June 1, 2018 at 7:43 pm
No one is presenting Halper as a mastermind spy. He was a tool of the deep state nothing
more.
It seems a mistake to frame the "Russiagate" nonsense as a "Democrat vs Republican"
affair, except at the most surface level of understanding in terms of our political
realities. If one considers that the Bush family has been effectively the Republican Party's
face of the CIA/deep state nexus for decades, as the Clinton/Obama's have been the Democratic
Party's face for decades now, what comes into focus is Trump as a sort of unknown, unexpected
wild card not appropriately tethered to the control structure. Simply noting that the U.S.
and Russia need not be enemies is alone enough to require an operation to get Trump into
line.
This hardly means this is some sort of "partisan" issue as the involvement of McCain and
others demonstrates.
One of the true "you can't make this stuff up" ironies of the Bush/Clinton CIA/deep state
nexus history is worth remembering if one still maintains any illusions about how the CIA
vets potential presidents since they killed JFK. During Iran/Contra we had Bush, the former
CIA director now vice president, running a drugs for arms operation out the White House
through Ollie North, WHILE then unknown Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was busy squashing
Arkansas State Police investigations into said narcotics trafficking. Clinton obviously
proved his bona fides to the CIA/deep state with such service and was appropriately rewarded
as an asset who could function as a reliable president. Here in one operation we had two
future presidents in Bush and Clinton both engaged in THE SAME CIA drug running operation.
You truly can't make this stuff up.
Russiagate seems to be in the end all about keeping deep state policy moving in the "right
direction" and "hating Russia" is the only entree on the menu at this time for the whole
cadre of CIA/deep state, MIC, neocons, Zionists, and all their minions in the MSM. The Obama
White House would have gladly supported Vlad the Impaler as the Republican candidate that
beat Hillary if Vlad were to have the appropriate foaming at the mouth "hate-Russia" vibe
going on.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:18 pm
Gary – great post.
irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm
Roger that. I would really like to see an inquiry re-opened into the
teenage boys who died 'on the train tracks' in Arkansas during the
early years of the Clinton-Bush trafficking. Many questions are still
unanswered. Speculation is that they saw something they weren't
supposed to see.
Mark Thomason , May 31, 2018 at 1:12 pm
This all grows out of the failure to clean up the mess revealed by the Iraq fiasco.
Instead, those who did that remained, got away with it, and are doing more of the same.
Babyl-on , May 31, 2018 at 12:46 pm
So, here is my question – Who, ultimately does the
permanent/bureaucratic/deep/Imperial* state finally answer to? Who's interests are they
serving? How do they know what those interests are?
It could be, and increasingly it looks as if, the answer is – no one in particular
– but the Saud family, the Zionist cabal of billionaires, the German industrialist
dynasties, the Japanese oligarchy and never forget the arms dealers, all of them once part of
the Empire now fighting for themselves so we end up with the high level apparatchiks not
knowing what to do or who to follow so they lie outright to Congress and go on TV and babble
more lies for money.
It's a great contradiction that the greatest armed force ever assembled with cutting edge
robotics and AI yet at the same time so weak and pathetic it can not exercise hegemony over
the Middle East as it seems to desire more than anything. Being defeated by forces with less
than 20% of the US spend.
Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:36 pm
You're right. They answer to no one because they are not just working in this country, but
they think that the whole world is theirs.
To these people there are no borders. They meet at places like the G20, Davos and wherever
the Bilderberg group decides to meet every year. No leader of any country gets to be one
unless they are acceptable to the Deep State. The council of foreign relations is one of the
groups that run the world. How we take them down is a good question.
Abe , May 31, 2018 at 12:43 pm
Following the pattern of mainstream media, Daniel Lazare assiduously avoids mentioning
Israel and pro-Israel Lobby interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the
Israel-gate reality underlying all the Russia-gate fictions.
For example, George Papadopoulos is directly connected to the pro-Israel Lobby, right wing
Israeli political interests, and Israeli government efforts to control regional energy
resources.
Lazare mentions that Papadapoulos had "a friend in the Israeli embassy".
But Lazare conspicuously neglects to mention numerous Israeli and pro-Israel Lobby players
interested in "filling Papadopoulos's head" with "tales of Russian dirty tricks".
Papadopoulos' LinkedIn page lists his association with the right wing Hudson Institute.
The Washington, D.C.-based think tank part of pro-Israel Lobby web of militaristic security
policy institutes that promote Israel-centric U.S. foreign policy.
The Hudson Institute confirmed that Papadopoulos was an intern who left the pro-Israel
neoconservative think tank in 2014.
In 2014, Papadopoulos authored op-ed pieces in Israeli publications.
In an op-ed published in Arutz Sheva, media organ of the right wing Religionist Zionist
movement embraced by the Israeli "settler" movement, Papadopoulos argued that the U.S. should
focus on its "stalwart allies" Israel, Greece, and Cyprus to "contain the newly emergent
Russian fleet".
In another op-ed published in Ha'aretz, Papadopoulos contended that Israel should exploit
its natural gas resources in partnership with Cyprus and Greece rather than Turkey.
In November 2015, Papadapalous participated in a conference in Tel Aviv, discussing the
export of natural gas from Israel with a panel of current and past Israeli government
officials including Ron Adam, a representative of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
and Eran Lerman, a former Israeli Deputy National Security Adviser.
Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of
the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon
and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and
on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region.
Israeli plans to develop energy resources and expand territorial holdings in the Syrian
Golan are threatened by the Russian military presence in Syria. Russian diplomatic efforts,
and the Russian military intervention that began in September 2015 after an official request
by the Syrian government, have interfered with the Israeli-Saudi-U.S. Axis "dirty war" in
Syria.
Israeli activities and Israel-gate realities are predictably ignored by the mainstream
media, which continues to salivate at every moldy scrap of Russia-gate fiction.
Lazare need no be so circumspect, unless he has somehow been spooked.
"Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of
the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon
and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and
on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region."
And water. Rating energy and water, what's at the top for Israel. Israel would probably
say both but Israel shielded by the US will take what it wants. That is already true with the
Palestinians.. The last figure I heard is that the Palestinians are allocated one fifth per
capita what is allocated to Israel's
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:59 am
A large swamp is actually an ancient and highly organized ecosystem. Only humans could
create a lawless madness like Washington DC.
irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:24 pm
Yes that is a good description of a swamp. BUT, if it loses what sustains it --
water, in the case of a 'real' swamp and money in the case of this swamp --
it changes character very quickly and becomes first a bog, then a meadow.
I am definitely ready for more meadowland ! But the only way to create it
is to voluntarily redirect federal taxes into escrow accounts which stipulate
that the funds are to be used for (fill in the blank) Public Services at the
Local and Regional levels. Much more efficient than filtering them through
the federal bureaucracy !
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:21 pm
But how would one avoid prosecution for nonpayment of taxes?
That seems a very quiet way to be rendered ineffective as a resister.
irina , June 1, 2018 at 2:30 am
The thing is, you don't 'nonpay' them. The way it used to work, through the
Con$cience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account, was that you filed
your taxes as usual. (This does require having less withholding than you owe).
BUT instead of paying what is due to the IRS, you send it to the Escrow Account.
You attach a letter to your tax return, explaining where the money is and why it
is there. That is, you want it to be spent on _________________(fill in the blank)
worthy public social service. Then you send your return to the IRS.
When I used to do this, I stated that I wanted my tax dollars to be spent to develop
public health clinics at neighborhood schools. Said clinics would be staffed by nurse
practitioners, would be open 24-7 and nurses would be equipped with vans to make
House Calls. Security would be provided.
So you're not 'nonpaying' your taxes, you are (attempting) to redirect them.
Eventually,
after several rounds of letters back and forth, the IRS would seize the monies from the
escrow account, which would only release them to the IRS upon being told to by the
tax re-director. Unfortunately, not enough people participated to make it a going
concern.
But the potential is still there, and the template has been made and used. It's very
scale-
able, from local to international. And it would not take that many 're-directors' to shift
the
focus of tax liability from the collector to the payor. Because ultimately we are liable
for
how our funds are used !
Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:19 pm
this was done a lot during the Vietnam conflict, especially by Quakers. the first thing,
if you are a wage earner, is to re-file a W2 with maximum withholdings-that has two effects:
1) it means you owe all your taxes in April. 2) it means the feds are deprived of the hidden
tax in which they use or invest your withholding throughout the year before it's actually
due(and un-owed taxes if you over over-withhold). Pretty sure that if a large number of
people deprive the government of that hidden tax by under-withholding, they will begin to
take notice.
Abe , May 31, 2018 at 11:54 am
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence agency of the government
and armed forces of the United Kingdom.
In 2013, GCHQ received considerable media attention when the former National Security
Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency was in the process of collecting
all online and telephone data in the UK. Snowden's revelations began a spate of ongoing
disclosures of global surveillance and manipulation.
For example, NSA files from the Snowden archive published by Glenn Greenwald reveal
details about GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) unit, which uses "dirty
trick" tactics to covertly manipulate and control online communities.
In 2017, officials from the UK and Israel made an unprecedented confirmation of the close
relationship between the GCHQ and Israeli intelligence services.
Robert Hannigan, outgoing Director-General of the GCHQ, revealed for the first time that
his organization has a "strong partnership with our Israeli counterparts in signals
intelligence." He claimed the relationship "is protecting people from terrorism not only in
the UK and Israel but in many other countries."
Mark Regev, Israeli ambassador to the UK, commented on the close relationship between
British and Israeli intelligence agencies. During remarks at a Conservative Friends of Israel
reception, Regev opined: "I have no doubt the cooperation between our two democracies is
saving British lives."
Hannigan added that GCHQ was "building on an excellent cyber relationship with a range of
Israeli bodies and the remarkable cyber industry in Be'er Sheva."
The IDF's most important signal intelligence–gathering installation is the Urim
SIGINT Base, a part of Unit 8200, located in the Negev desert approximately 30 km from Be'er
Sheva.
Snowden revealed how Unit 8200 receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens, as part of
a secret agreement with the U.S. National Security Agency.
After his departure from GCHQ, Hannigan joined BlueteamGlobal, a cybersecurity services
firm, later re-named BlueVoyant.
BlueVoyant's board of directors includes Nadav Zafrir, former Commander of the Israel
Defense Forces' Unit 8200. The senior leadership team at BlueVoyant includes Ron Feler,
formerly Deputy Commander of the IDF's Unit 8200, and Gad Goldstein, who served as a division
head in the Israel Security Agency, Shin Bet, in the rank equivalent to Major General.
In addition to their purported cybersecurity activities, Israeli. American, and British
private companies have enormous access and potential to promote government and military
deception operations.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 12:23 pm
Thanks Abe. Sounds like a manual for slave owners and con men. What a tangled wed the rich
bastards weave. The simple truth is their sworn enemy.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:19 pm
Interesting that a foreign power would be given all US communications data, which implies
that the US has seized it all without a warrant and revealed it all in violation of the
Constitution. If extensive, this use of information power amounts to information warfare
against the US by its own secret agencies in collusion with a foreign power, an act of
treason.
Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:18 am
This has been going on for a LONG time, it's nothing new. I seem to recall 60 Minutes
covering it way back in the 70s(?). UK was allowed to do the snooping in the US (and, likely,
vice versa) and then providing info to the US. This way the US govt could claim that it
didn't spy/snoop on its citizens. Without a doubt Israel has been extensively intercepting
communications in the US..
Secrecy kills.
Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:23 am
Yes, but the act of allowing unregulated foreign agencies unwarranted access to US
telecoms is federal crime, and it is treason when it goes so far as to allow them full
access, and even direct US bulk traffic to their spy agencies. If this is so, these people
should be prosecuted for treason.
F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 11:36 am
To listen to the media coverage of these events, it is tempting to believe that two
entirely different planets are being discussed. Fox comes out and says Mueller was "owned" by
Trump. Then, CNN comes out and says Trump was "owned" by Clapper. Clapper claims the evidence
is "staggering", while video clips of his testimony reveal irrefutable perjury. Some of
President Trump's policies are understandably abhorrent to Democrats, while Clinton's email
server and charity frauds are indisputably violations of Federal statutes. Democrats are
attempting to claim that a "spy" in the Trump campaign was perfectly reasonable to protect
"national security", but evidence seems to indicate that the spy was placed BEFORE there was
a legitimate national security concern. Some analysts note that, while Mueller's team appears
to be Democratic partisan hacks, their native "skill set" is actually expertise in money
laundering investigations. They claim that although Mr. Trump may not be compromised by the
Russian government, he is involved with nefarious Russian organized crime figures. It
follows, according to them, that given time, Mueller will reveal these illicit connections,
and prosecution will become inevitable.
Let's assume, for argument, that both sides are right. That means that our entire
government is irretrievably corrupt. Republicans claim that it could " go all the way to
Obama". Democrats, of course, play the "moral high ground" card, insinuating that the current
administration is so base and immoral that somehow, the "ends justify the means". No matter
how you slice it, the Clinton campaign has a lot more liability on its hands. The problem is,
if prosecutions begin, people will "talk" to save their own skins. The puppet masters can't
really afford that.
"All the way to Obama", you say? I think it could go higher than that. Personally, I think
it could go all the way to Dick Cheney, and the 'powers that be' are in no mood to let that
happen.
Vivian O'Blivion , May 31, 2018 at 12:19 pm
The issue as I see it is that from the start everyone was calling the Mueller probe an
investigation into collusion and not really grasping the catch all nature of his brief.
It's the "any matters arising " that is the real kicker. So any dodgy dealing / possible
criminal activity in the past is fair game. And this is exactly what in happening with
Manafort.
Morally you can apply the Nucky Johnson defence and state that everyone knew Trump was a
crook when they voted for him, but legally this has no value.
There is an unpleasant whiff of deep state interference with the will of the people
(electoral college). Perhaps if most bodies hadn't written Trump's chances off in such an off
hand manner, proper due diligence of his background would have uncovered any liabilities
before the election.
If there is actionable dirt, can't say I am overly sympathetic to Trump. Big prizes sometimes
come with big risks.
David G , May 31, 2018 at 5:14 pm
My own feeling from the start has been that Mueller was never going to track down any
"collusion" or "meddling" (at least not to any significant degree) because the whole,
sprawling Russia-gate narrative – to the extent one can be discerned – is
obviously phony.
But at the same time, there's no way the completely lawless, unethical Trump, along with
his scummy associates, would be able to escape that kind of scrutiny without criminal conduct
being exposed.
So far, on both scores, that still seems to me to be a likely outcome, and for my part I'm
fine with it.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 5:29 am
My thoughts exactly. Collusion was never a viable proposition because the Russians aren't
that stupid. Regardless of any personal opinion regarding the intelligence and mental
stability of Donald Snr., the people he surrounds himself with are weapons grade stupid. I
don't see the Russians touching the Trump campaign with a proverbial barge pole.
Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:26 pm
it just happens that Trump appears to have been involved (wittingly or not), with the
laundering a whole lot of Russian money and so many of his friends seem to be connected with
wealthy Russian oligarchs as well plus they are so stupid, they keep appearing to (and
probably are) obstructing justice. The Cohen thing doesn't get much attention here, but it's
significant that they have all this stuff on a guy who is clearly Trump's bagman.
Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:15 pm
There is also quite an indication that the entire Mueller investigation is a complete
smoke screen to be used as cannon fodder in the mainstream media.
On the one hand, Mueller and his hacks have found nothing of import to link Trump to
anything close to collusion with members of the Russian government. And I am by no means a
Trump supporter by any stretch of the imagination, except as a foil to Clinton. However, even
my minimalist expectations for Trump have not worked out either.
In addition. the Mueller investigation has been spending what appears to be a majority of
its time on ancillary matters that were not within the supposed scope and mandate of this
investigation. Further, a number of indictments have come down against people involved with
such ancillary matters.
The result is that if Mueller is going beyond the scope of his investigatory mandate, this
may come in as a technicality that will allow indicted persons to escape prosecution on
appeal.
Such a mandate, I would think, is the same thing as a police warrant, which can find only
admissible evidence covered by the warrant. Anything else found to be criminally liable must
be found to be as a result of a completely different investigation that has nothing to do
with the original warrant.
In other words, it appears that the Mueller investigation was allowed to commence under a
Republican controlled Congress for the very reason that its intent is simply to go in circles
long enough for Republicans to get their agendas through, which does not appear to be working
all too well as a result of their high levels of internecine party conflicts.
This entire affair is coming to show just how dysfunctional, corrupt, and incompetent the
entirety of the US federal government has become. And to the chagrin of all sincere
activists, no amount of organized protesting and political action will ever rid the country
of this grotesque political quagmire that now engulfs the entirety of our political
infrastructure.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:48 pm
Very true that the US federal government is now "dysfunctional, corrupt, and
incompetent."
What are your thoughts on forms of action to rid us this political quagmire?
(other than ineffective "organized protesting and political action")
Have you considered new forms of public debate and public information?
Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:34 am
All of this is blackmail to hold Trump's feet to the fire of the Israel firsters (such
actions pull in all the dark swampy things). By creating the Russia blackmail story they've
effectively redirected away from themselves. The moment Trump balks the Deep State will reel
in some more, airing innuendos to overwhelm Trump. Better believe that Trump has been fully
"briefed" on all of this. John Bolton was able to push out a former OPCW head with threats
(knew where his, the OPCW head's children were). And now John Bolton is sitting right next to
Trump (whispering in his ear that he knows ways in which to oust Trump).
What actual "ideas" were in Trump's head going in to all of this (POTUS run) is hard to
say. But, anything that can be considered a threat to the Deep State has been effectively
nullified now.
Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:22 am
Possible, but Manafort already tried to get his charges thrown out as being the outcome of
investigations beyond the remit He failed.
Brendan , May 31, 2018 at 10:26 am
There's no doubt at all that Joseph Mifsud was closely connected with western
intelligence, and with MI6 in particular. His contacts with Russia are insignificant compared
with his long career working amongst the elite of western officials.
Lee Smith of RealClearInvestigations lists some of the places where Mifsud worked, including
two universities:
"he taught at Link Campus University in Rome, ( ) whose lecturers and professors include
senior Western diplomats and intelligence officials from a number of NATO countries,
especially Italy and the United Kingdom.
Mifsud also taught at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and the London Academy of
Diplomacy, which trained diplomats and government officials, some of them sponsored by the
UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Council, or by their own governments."
Two former colleagues of Mifsud's, Roh and Pastor, recently interviewed him for a book
they have written. Those authors could very well be biased, but one of them makes a valid
point, similar to one that Daniel Lazare makes above:
"Given the affiliations of Link's faculty and staff, as well as Mifsud's pedigree, Roh thinks
it's impossible that the man he hired as a business development consultant is a Russian
agent."
Politically, Mifsud identifies with the Clintons more than anyone else, and claims to
belong to the Clinton Foundation, which has often been accused of being just a way of
funneling money into Hillary Clinton's campaign.
As Lee Smith says, if Mifsud really is a Russian spy, "Western intelligence services are
looking at one of the largest and most embarrassing breaches in a generation. But none of the
governments or intelligence agencies potentially compromised is acting like there's anything
wrong."
From all that we know about Joseph Mifsud, it's safe to say that he was never a Russian
spy. If not, then what was he doing when he was allegedly feeding stories to George
Papadopoulos about Russians having 'dirt' on Clinton?
I read somewhere that Mifsud had disappeared. Was that true? If so, is he back, or still
missing?
Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 6:21 pm
Here are some excerpts that will answer your question from an article by Lee Smith at
Realclearinvestigations, "The Maltese Phantom of Russiagate".
A new book by former colleagues of Mifsud's – Stephan Roh, a 50-year-old
Swiss-German lawyer, and Thierry Pastor, a 35-year-old French political analyst –
reports that he is alive and well. Their account includes a recent interview with him.
Their self-published book, "The Faking of Russia-gate: The Papadopoulos Case, an
Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with Mifsud in which he denies saying
anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they write, stated "vehemently that he
never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos." Mifsud asked rhetorically: "From where
should I have this [information]?"
Mifsud's account seems to be supported by Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat who
alerted authorities about Papadopoulos. As reported in the Daily Caller, Downer said
Papadopoulos never mentioned emails; he spoke, instead, about the Russians possessing
material that could be damaging to Clinton. This new detail raises the possibility that
Mifsud, Papadopoulos' alleged source for the information, never said anything about
Clinton-related emails either.
In interviews with RealClearInvestigations, Roh and Pastor said Mifsud is anything but a
Russian spy. Rather, he is more likely a Western intelligence asset.
According to the two authors, it was a former Italian intelligence official, Vincenzo
Scotti, a colleague of Mifsud's and onetime interior minister, who told the professor to go
into hiding. "I don't know who was hiding him," said Roh, "but I'm sure it was organized by
someone. And I am sure it will be difficult to get to the bottom of it."
Toby McCrossin , June 1, 2018 at 1:54 am
" The Papadopoulos Case, an Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with
Mifsud in which he denies saying anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they
write, stated "vehemently that he never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos.""
Thank you for providing that explosive piece of information. If true, and I suspect it is,
that's one more nail in the Russiagate narrative. Who, then, is making the claim that Misfud
mentioned emails? The only source for the statement I can find is "court documents".
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:20 am
The election scams serve only to distract from the Israel-gate scandal and the oligarchy
destruction of our former democracy. Mr. Lazare neglects to tell us about that. All of
Hillary's top ten campaign bribers were zionists, and Trump let Goldman-Sachs take over the
economy. KSA and big business also bribed heavily.
We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for
democracy is lost.
We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and
foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious preference.
Otherwise the United States is lost, and our lives have no historical meaning beyond
slavery to oligarchy.
Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 9:51 am
You are right Sam. Israel does work the fence under the guise of the Breaking News.
Joe
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm
My response was that Israel massacres at the fence, ignored by the zionist US mass
media.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:48 am
The extreme wealth and privileges of oligarchy depend on the poverty and slavery of
others. Inequality of income is the root cause of most of our ills. Try to imagine what a
world of economic equals would be like. No striving for more and more wealth at the expense
of others. No wars. What would there be to fight over – everyone would be content with
what they already had.
If you automatically think such a world would be impossible, try to state why. You might
discover that the only obstacle to such a world is the greedy bastards who are sitting on top
of everybody, and will do anything to maintain their advantages.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:52 am
How do the oligarchs ensure your slavery? With the little green tickets they have hoarded
that the rest of us need just to eat and have a roof over our heads. The people sleeping in
the streets tell us the penalty for not being good slaves.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 12:50 pm
Very true, Mike. Those who say that equality or fairness of income implies breaking the
productivity incentive system are wrong. No matter how much or how little wage incentive we
offer for making an effort in work, we need not have great disparities of income. Those who
can work should have work, and we should all make an effort to do well in our work, but none
of us need the fanciest cars or grand monuments to live in, just to do our best.
Getting rid of oligarchy, and getting money out of mass media and elections, would be the
greatest achievement of our times.
Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 5:30 pm
An old socialist friend of my dad's generation who claimed to have read the biography of
Andrew Carnegie had told me over a few beers that Carnegie said, "that at a time when he was
paying his workers $5 a week he 'could' have been paying them $50 a day, but then he could
not figure out what kind of life they would lead with all that money". Think about it mike,
if his workers would have had that kind of money it would not be long before Carnegie's
workers became his competition and opened up next door to him the worst case scenario would
be his former workers would sell their steel at a cheaper price, kind of, well no exactly
like what Rockefeller did with oil, or as Carnegie did with steel innovation. How's that
saying go, keep them down on the farm . well. Remember Carnegie was a low level stooge for
the railroads at one time, and rose to the top .mike. Great point to make mike, because there
could be more to go around. Joe
Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:16 pm
"We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for
democracy is lost.
We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and
foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious
preference."
Good luck with that!!!
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:19 pm
Well, you are welcome to make suggestions on how to save the republic.
john wilson , May 31, 2018 at 9:10 am
The depths of the deep state has no limits, but as a UK citizen, I fail to see why the
American "spooks" need any help from we Brits when it comes state criminal activity. Sure, we
are masters at underhand dirty tricks, but the US has a basket full of tricks that 'Trump'
(lol) anything we've got. It was the Russians wot done mantra has been going on for many
decades and is ever good for another turn around the political mulberry tree of corruption
and underhand dealings. Whether the Democrats or the Republicans win its all the same to the
deep state as they are in control whoever is in the White House. Trump was an outsider and
there for election colour and the "ho ho ho" look what a great democracy we are, anyone can
be president. He is in fact the very essence of the 'wild card' and when he actually won
there was total confusion, panic, disbelief and probably terror in the caves and dungeons of
the deep state.
Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:33 am
I'm sure the result was so unexpected that the shadowy fixers, the IT mavens who could
have "adjusted" the numbers, were totally caught off guard and unable to do "cleanly." Not
that they didn't try to re-jigger the results in the four state recounts that were ordered,
but it was simply too late to effectively cheat at that point, as there were already massive
overvotes detected in key urban precincts. Such a thing will never happen again, I am
sure.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:36 am
It appears that UK has long had a supply of anti-Russia fearmongers, presumably backed by
its anti-socialist oligarchy as in the US. Perhaps the US oligarchy is the dumbest salesman,
who believes that all customers are even dumber, so that UK can sell Russophobia here thirty
years after the USSR.
Bob Van Noy , May 31, 2018 at 8:49 am
"But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry
observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information
about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press."
Perfect.
Recently, while trying to justify my arguement that a new investigation into the RFK Killing
was necessary, I was asked why I thought that, and my response was "Modus operandi," exactly
what Robert Parry learned by experience, and that is the fundamental similarity to all of the
institutionalized crime that takes place by the IC. Once one realizes the literary approach
to disinformation that was fundamental to Alan Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, even Ian
Fleming, one can easily see the Themes being applied. I suppose that the very feature of
believability offered by propaganda, once recognized, becomes its undoing. That could be our
current reality; the old Lines simply are beginning to appear to be ridiculous
Thank you Daniel Lazar.
Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:39 am
The recognition of themes of propaganda as literary themes and modus operandi is helping
to discredit propaganda. The similarities of the CW false-flag operations (Iraq, Syria, and
UK), and the fake assassinations (Skripal and Babchenko) by the anti-Russia crowd help reveal
and persuade on the falsehood of the Iraq WMD, Syria CW, and MH-17 propaganda ops. Just as
the similarities of the JFK/MLK/RFK assassinations persuade us that commonalities exist long
before we see evidence.
Bob Van Noy , June 1, 2018 at 1:11 pm
Many thanks Sam F for recognizing that. As we begin to achieve a resolution of the 60's
Kllings, we can begin to see the general and specific themes utilized to direct the programs
of Assassination. The other aspect is that real investigation Never followed; and that took
Real Power.
In a truly insightful book by author Sally Denton entitled "The Profiteers" she puts
together a very cogent theory that it isn't the Mafia, it's the Syndicate, which means (for
me at least) real, criminal power with somewhat divergent interests ok with one another, to
the extent that they can maintain their Own Turf. I think that's a profound insight
Too, in a similar vain, the Grand Deceptions of American Foreign Policy, "scenarios" are
simply and only that, not a Real possible solution. Always resulting in failure
Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 9:23 pm
Yes, it is difficult to determine the structure of a subculture of gangsterism in power,
which can have many specialized factions in loose cooperation, agreeing on some general
policy points, like benefits for the rich, hatred of socialism, institutionalized bribery of
politicians and judges, militarized policing, destruction of welfare and social security,
deregulation of everything, essentially the neocon/neolib line of the DemReps. The party line
of oligarchy in any form.
Indeed the foreign policy of such gangsters is designed to "fail" because destruction of
cultures, waste, and fragmentation most efficiently exploits the bribery structure available,
and serves the anti-socialist oligarchy. Failure of the declared foreign policy is success,
because that is only propaganda to cover the corruption.
You know, not only Gay Trowdy but even Dracula Napolitano think people like Lazare ,
McGovern, etc. are overblown on this issue.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 1:47 pm
SocraticGadfly – Trey Gowdy hasn't even seen the documents yet, so he's hardly in a
position to say anything. The House Intelligence Committee, under Chairman Nunes, are being
stymied by the FBI and the Department of Justice who are refusing to hand over documents.
Refusing! Refusing to disclose documents to the very people who, by law, have oversight.
Nunes is threatening to hit them with Contempt of Congress.
Let's see the documents. Then Trey Gowdy can open his mouth.
What I take from this head spinning article is the paragraph about Carter Page.
"On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in
which he complained that "Washington and other western capitals have impeded potential
progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality,
corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed "unease" that someone representing
the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's side in a growing neo-Cold War
Mr. Page hit the nail on the head. There is no greater sin to entrenched power than to
spell out what is going on with Russia. It helps us understand why terms like dupe and
naïve were stuck on Carter Page's back.. Truth to power is not always good for your
health.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:07 am
The tyrant accuses of disloyalty, all who question the reality of his foreign
monsters.
And so do his monster-fighting agencies, whose budgets depend upon the fiction.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 am
Daniel Lazare – good report. "It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth
degree." This wasn't a case of paranoia. This was a blatant attempt to bring down a rival
opponent and, failing that, the President of the United States. This was intentional and
required collusion between top officials of the government. They fabricated the phony Steele
dossier (paid for by the Clinton campaign), exonerated Hillary Clinton, and then went to town
on bringing down Trump.
"Was George Popodopolous set up?" Of course he was. Set up a patsy in order to give you
reason to carry out a phony investigation.
"If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged
themselves to notice." They're not befogged; they're following orders (the major television
and newspaper outfits). Without their 24/7 spin and lies, Russiagate would never have been
kept alive.
These guys got the biggest surprise of their life when Hillary Clinton lost the election.
None of this would have come out had she won. During the campaign, as Trump gained in the
polls, she was heard to say, "If they ever find out what we've done, we'll all hang."
I hope they see jail time for what they've done.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:38 am
Apparently what has come out so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Some are saying this
could lead all the way up to Obama. I hope not, but they have certainly done all they can to
ruin the Trump Presidency.
JohnM , May 31, 2018 at 9:58 am
I'm adjusting my tinfoil hat right now. I'm wondering if Skripal had something to do with
the Steel dossier. The iceberg may be even bigger than thought.
Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:18 am
It is known that Skripal's close friend living nearby was an employee of Steele's firm
Orbis.
Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 2:58 pm
Exactly, his name is Pablo Miller and he is the MI6 agent who initially recruited Sergei
Skripal. Miller worked for Orbis, Steele's company and listed that in his resume on LinkedIn
but later deleted it. But once it's on the internet it can always be found and it was and it
was published.
robjira , May 31, 2018 at 2:13 pm
John, both Moon Of Alabama and OffGuardian have had excellent coverage of the Skripal
affair. Informed opinions wonder if Sergei Skripal was one of Steele's "Russian sources," and
that he may have been poisoned for the purpose of either a) bolstering the whole "Russia =
evil" narrative, or b) a warning not to ask for more than what he may have conceivably
received for any contribution he may or may not have made to the "dossiere."
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:20 am
Interesting details in this article, but we have known this whole Russiagate affair was a
scam from the get go. It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over
Hillary. The chagrined dems came together and concocted their sore loser alibi – the
Russians did it. They scooped up a lot of pre-election dirt, rolled it into a ball and
directed it at Trump. It is a testament to the media's determination to stick with their
story, that in spite of not a single scrap of real evidence after over a year of digging by a
huge team of democratic hit men and women, this ridiculous story still has supporters.
David G , May 31, 2018 at 10:31 am
"It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over Hillary."
Not so.
Daniel Lazare's first link in the above piece is to Paul Krugman's July 22, 2016 NY Times
op-ed, "Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate". (Note how that headline doesn't even bother to
employ a question mark.)
I appreciate that that Krugman column gets pride of place here since I distinctly remember
reading it in my copy of the Times that day, months before the election, and my immediate
reaction to it: nonplussed that such a risible thesis was being aired so prominently, along
with a deep realization that this was only the first shot in what would be a co-ordinated
media disinformation campaign, à la Saddam's WMDs.
Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 3:37 pm
Actually, I think the intelligence agencies' (CIA/FBI/DNI) plan started shortly after
Trump gave the names of Page and Papadopoulos to the Washington Post (CIA annex) in a meeting
on March 21, 2016 outlining his foreign policy team.
Carter Page (Naval Academy distinguished graduate and Naval intelligence officer) in 2013
worked as an "under-cover employee" of the FBI in a case that convicted Evgeny Buryakov and
it was reported that he was still an UCE in March of 2016. The FBI never charged or even
hinted that Page was anything but innocent and patriotic. However, in October 2016 the FBI
told the FISA Court that he was a spy to support spying on him. Remember the FISA Court
allows spying on him AND the persons he is in contact, which means almost everyone on the
Trump transition team/administration.
Here is an excerpt from an article by WSJ's Kimberley Strassel:
In "late spring" of 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed White House "National
Security Council Principals" that the FBI had counterintelligence concerns about the Trump
campaign. Carter Page was announced as a campaign adviser on March 21, and Paul Manafort
joined the campaign March 29. The briefing likely referenced both men, since both had
previously been on the radar of law enforcement. But here's what matters: With this briefing,
Mr. Comey officially notified senior political operators on Team Obama that the bureau had
eyes on Donald Trump and Russia. Imagine what might be done in these partisan times with such
explosive information.
And what do you know? Sometime in April, the law firm Perkins Coie (on behalf the Clinton
campaign) hired Fusion GPS, and Fusion turned its attention to Trump-Russia connections.
David G , May 31, 2018 at 4:56 pm
Most interesting, Chet Roman. Thanks.
My understanding is that Trump more or less pulled Page's name out of a hat to show the
WashPost that he had a "foreign policy team", and thus that his campaign wasn't just a hollow
sham, but that at that point he really had had no significant contact at all with Page
– maybe hadn't even met him. It was just a name from his new political world that
sprang to "mind" (or the Trumpian equivalent).
Of course, the Trump campaign *was* just a sham, by conventional Beltway standards: a
ramshackle road show with no actual "foreign policy team", or any other policy team.
So maybe that random piece of B.S. from Trump has caused him a heap of trouble. This is
part of why – no matter how bogus "Russia-gate" is – I just can't bring myself to
feel sorry for old Cheeto Dust.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 6:56 am
Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal had some good advice:
"Mr. Trump has an even quicker way to bring the hostility to an end.
He can – and should – declassify everything possible, letting Congress and the
public see the truth.
That would put an end to the daily spin and conspiracy theories. It would puncture
Democratic arguments that the administration is seeking to gain this information only for
itself, to "undermine" an investigation.
And it would end the Justice Department's campaign of secrecy, which has done such harm to
its reputation with the public and with Congress."
What do you bet he does?
RickD , May 31, 2018 at 6:44 am
I have serious doubts about the article's veracity. There seems to be a thread running
through it indicating an attempt to whitewash any Russian efforts to get Trump elected. To
dismiss all the evidence of such efforts, and , despite this author's words, there is enough
such evidence, seems more than a bit partisan.
What evidence? I've seen none so far. A lot of claims that there is such evidence but no
one seems to ever say what it is.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:06 am
RickD – thanks for the good laugh before bedtime. I'm with Mr. Merrell and I
actually want to see some evidence. Maybe it was Professor Halper in the kitchen with the
paring knife.
Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:21 am
Unfortunately, what this guy says is what most Americans still seem to believe. When I ask
people what is the actual hard evidence for "Russiagate" (because I don't know of any that
has been corroborated), I get a response that there have been massive examples of Russian
hacks, Russian posts, tweets and internet adverts–all meant to sabotage Hillary's
candidacy, and very effective, mind you. Putin has been an evil genius worthy of a comic book
villain (to date myself, a regular Lex Luthor). Sez who, ask I? Sez the trustworthy American
media that would never lie to the public, sez they. You know, professional paragons of virtue
like Rachel Maddow and her merry band.
Nobody seems aware of the recent findings about Halpern, none seem to have a realistic
handle on the miniscule scope of the Russian "offenses" against American democracy. Rachel,
the NY Times and WaPo have seen to that with their sins of both commission and omission. Even
the Republican party is doing a half-hearted job of defending its own power base with
rigorous and openly disseminated fact checking. It's like even many of the committee chairs
with long seniority are reluctant to buck the conventional narrative peddled by the media.
Many have chosen to retire rather than fight the media and the Deep State. What's a better
interpretation of events? Or is one to believe that the silent voices, curious retirements
and political heat generated by the Dems, the prosecutors and the media are all independent
variables with no connections? These old pols recognise a good demonizing when they see it,
especially when directed at them.
Personally, I think that not only the GOPers should be fighting like the devil to expose
the truth (which should benefit them in this circumstance) but so should the media and all
the watchdog agencies (ngo's) out there because our democracy WAS hijacked, but it was NOT by
the Russians. Worse than that, it was done by internal domestic enemies of the people who
must be outed and punished to save the constitution and the republic, if it is not too late.
All the misinformation by influential insiders and the purported purveyors of truth
accompanied by the deliberate silence by those who should be chirping like birds suggests it
may well be far too late.
backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:53 pm
Realist – a most excellent post! Some poll result I read about the other day
mentioned that well over half of the American public do NOT believe what they are being told
by the media. That was good to hear. But you are right, there are still way too many who
never question anything. If I ever get in trouble, I wouldn't want those types on my jury.
They'd be wide awake during the prosecution's case and fast asleep during my defense.
This is the Swamp at work on both sides of the aisle. Most of the Republicans are hanging
Trump out to dry. They've probably got too much dirt they want to keep hidden themselves, so
retirement looks like a good idea. Get out of Dodge while the going is good, before the real
fighting begins! The Democrats are battling for all they're worth, and I've got to hand it to
them – they're dirty little fighters.
Yes, democracy has been hijacked. Hard to say how long this has been going on –
maybe forever. If there is anything good about Trump's presidency, it's that the Deep State
is being laid out and delivered up on a silver platter for all to see.
There has never been a better chance to take back the country than this. If this
opportunity passes, it will never come again. They will make sure of it.
The greatest thing that Trump could do for the country would be to declassify all
documents. Jeff Sessions is either part of the Deep State or he's been scared off. He's not
going to act. Rosenstein is up to his eyeballs in this mess and he's not going to act. In
fact, he's preventing Nunes from getting documents. It is up to Trump to act. I just hope
he's not being surrounded by a bunch of bad apple lawyers who are giving him bad advice. He
needs to go above the Department of Justice and declassify ALL documents. If he did that, a
lot of these people would probably die of a heart attack within a minute.
mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:11 am
You sure came out of the woodwork quickly to express your "serious doubts" RickD.
Skip Scott , May 31, 2018 at 8:07 am
Please provide "such evidence". I've yet to see any. The entire prosecution of RussiaGate
has been one big Gish Gallop.
strgr-tgther , May 31, 2018 at 9:39 pm
RickD – Thank you for pointing that out! You were the only one!!! It is a very
strange article leaving Putin and the Russians evidence out and also not a single word about
Stromy Daniels witch is also very strange. I know Hillary would never have approved of any of
this and they don't say that either.
John , June 1, 2018 at 2:26 am
What does Stormy Daniels have to do with RussiaGate?
You know that someone who committed the ultimate war crime by lying us into war to destroy
Libya and re-institute slavery there, and who laughed after watching video of a man that
Nelson Mandela called "The Greatest Living Champion of Human Rights on the Planet" be
sodomized to death with a knife, is somehow too "moral" to do such a thing? Really?
It amazes me how utterly cultish those who support the Red Queen have shown themselves to
be – without apparently realizing that they are obviously on par with the followers of
Jim Jones!
strgr-tgther , June 1, 2018 at 12:17 pm
That is like saying what does income tax have to do with Al Capone. Who went to Alctraz
because he did not pay income tax not for being a gangster. So we know Trump has sexual
relations with Stormy Daniels, then afterward PAID her not to talk about it. So he paid Story
Daniels for sex! That is Prostitution! Same thing. And that is inpeachable, using womens
bodies as objects. If we don't prosecute Trump here then from now on all a John needs to say
to the police is that he was not paying for sex but paying to keep quiet about it. And
Cogress can get Trump for prostitution and disgracing the office of President. Without Russia
investigations we would never have found out about this important fact, so that is what it
has to do with Russia Gate.
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My late friend Christopher Hitchens once
told me that his American friends often expressed surprise at the number of articles and books he was able
to produce. He said that there was a simple reason for his high productivity, which was: "I never watch
television."
He was definitely telling the truth about
this, since the only television in his apartment in Washington was in the spare bedroom where I was staying
and it did not work.
Christopher was right to believe that
time spent watching television was time largely wasted, or could be spent more usefully in some other
activity. Television supplies less information, and at a slower speed, than newspapers, books or radio.
The internet is more efficient, speedy and weakens state and elite monopolies over news and knowledge.
Misused it may be to spread misinformation and propaganda, but the internet remains the most democratic
instrument of communication to emerge since the invention of printing.
The strength of the internet is that it
supplies infinite quantities of information. But this is also its weakness, because this great torrent of
data makes it difficult to distinguish facts that are significant from those that are trivial or
meaningless. Emails, for instance, make it easy to communicate information in any quantity, but are less
good at promoting discussion and explanation.
The sending and receiving of emails can
become as big a waste of time as television ever was. I often have prolonged and inconclusive email
exchanges over a period of days or weeks on a matter that could have been dealt with in 10 minutes by a
short conversation on the phone.
Once I came near to cancelling a weekend
book tour to Barcelona because I could not face another email from the efficient and energetic organisers of
the event. When I printed their messages out, they covered 25 pages. Fortunately, everything was put right
in the end by a short talk on the phone, which should have taken place weeks earlier.
Soon afterwards, I gave a lecture at a
university in the UK which was reasonably well attended, but I pointed out politely to the people in charge
that there might have been more people present if they had advertised the topic on which I was speaking.
"But you never sent it to us," they
replied defensively. I knew I had done so, and later found my email giving the title of my lecture, which my
hosts had understandably missed, about half way through our lengthy exchange of messages.
The obvious reason for this plague of
emails – along every other sort of internet communication – is that they are too easy to send. At a deeper
level, their frequency and length may be fuelled by a natural human tendency to be over-impressed by the
amount of information supplied and believe instinctively that, if there is a lot of it and it is in great
detail, then it is more likely to be true. In practice, the opposite is usually the case.
In the 1990s, I used to interview Iraqis
who claimed to have escaped from Iraq and to have secret information about the inner workings of Saddam
Hussein's regime and his weapons of mass destruction.
My heart used to sink as they produced
more and more uncheckable detail, which they assumed would add to their credibility, but made me ever more
convinced that they were making the whole thing up.
Politicians and security forces have
been traditionally prone to believe that accumulating mountains of data will enable them to influence or
monitor whole populations. Their critics buy into the idea that the internet has vastly increased the amount
of information about people that can be garnered from their online activities.
Part of Cambridge Analytica's pitch to
its clients was to claim that, once its computers had harvested information about millions of voters, it
could identify and target those most likely to support a particular party or politician.
In practice, this data-driven approach
never worked and campaigns that relied on it, like Hillary Clinton's presidential bid in 2016, have usually
ended in failure.
Security agencies are likewise
vulnerable to a similar myth – in which they themselves may not believe – that trying to identify all
potential "terrorists" will make the country safer.
The Prevent programme, which aims to
detect potential Islamic jihadis before they act, has proved useless or counter-effective for many reasons,
but a main one is that by trying to turn everybody into an informer the authorities produce a deluge of
dubious information.
This clogs up the system and leaves
those who were truly dangerous, like the Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, to slip through a net that has been
spread too wide and has too many holes.
People have always had an exaggerated
respect for facts and, thanks to the internet, these are now easily accessible in far greater quantities
than ever before. There is a tedious debate about "fake facts", but this is not really the problem. The fact
is, people do not really know what a fact is.
My father Claud Cockburn, a journalist
formerly on
The Times
, once did some damage to his reputation by explaining that facts were not
"like pieces of gold ore in the Yukon", waiting for the prospector to dig them out and give them to the
world.
Unlike gold nuggets waiting to be
excavated, there are an infinite number of facts in the universe, but these only gain significance and have
a meaning because somebody – a journalist, a policeman – decides that they matter, so every fact in the
media is the result of the point of view of the person who chose to report them and related them to other
facts.
This theory, which became known as the
"heresy of the facts", earned my father some abuse from people who thought he was admitting, as they had
long suspected, that journalists make things up.
But many years after he had written
about it, I requested his file from MI5, and a year later 26 bulky folders were deposited in the National
Archives at Kew. They very much bore out his belief that what mattered most was not the collection of facts,
so much as the choice made about which of these were significant and true.
MI5 had been much interested in my
father's activities in the 1930s, when he ran a newsletter similar to
Private Eye
. The security men
had many sources of information, several of them well-informed and accurate (such as his former boss, the
bureau chief of
The Times
in Berlin), but others were conspiracy theorists and crackpots.
One man was convinced that my father was
the head of a Comintern sabotage ring in Western Europe, its counterpart in the US being
The Time
magazine office in New York.
Claud told one woman he had met at
dinner (as a joke) that revolution was imminent, and would begin with a mutiny by the Brigade of Guards. She
immediately wrote to MI5 in extreme alarm, warning them about the plot.
Looking through the MI5 reports, it
becomes clear that their usefulness, like that of the great quantities of information transmitted by the
internet, depended entirely on the quality of the person (in this case an MI5 officer) who reviewed them.
(Republished from
The Independent
by permission of author or representative)
"... our government's support for Saudi Arabia and Egypt are not exceptions to the rule at all. They are the rule ..."
"... The problem here isn't just liberal hypocrisy and double standards. The deeper issue is that, as the great American iconoclast Mark Twain knew, you cannot maintain democracy at home while conducting an authoritarian empire abroad. ..."
"... "It was impossible," Twain wrote, "to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home." ..."
"... "Just a decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words," the historian Alfred W. McCoy has observed , "colonial police methods came home to serve as a template for the creation of an American internal security apparatus in wartime." The nation's first Red Scare, which crushed left and labor movements during and after World War One, drew heavily on the lessons and practices of colonial suppression in the Philippines and Cuba. As McCoy shows in his latest book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power , ..."
"... "The fetters imposed on liberty at home," James Madison wrote in 1799 , "have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers abroad." Those are wise words well worth revisiting amidst the current endless Russiagate madness, calculated among other things to tell us that the FBI, the CIA, and the rest of the nation's vast and ever more ubiquitous intelligence and surveillance state are on our side. ..."
A final matter concerns the problem of imperial chickens coming home to roost. Liberals
don't like to hear it, but the ugly, richly documented historical fact of the matter is that
their party of binary and tribal choice has long joined Republicans in backing and indeed
crafting a U.S. foreign policy that has imposed
authoritarian regimes (and profoundly undemocratic interventions including invasions and
occupations) the world over . The roster of authoritarian and often-mass murderous
governments the U.S. military and CIA and allied transnational business interests have backed,
sometimes even helped create, with richly bipartisan support, is long indeed.
Last fall, Illinois Green Party leader Mike Whitney ran some fascinating numbers on the 49
nation-states that the right-wing "human rights" organization Freedom House identified as
"dictatorships" in 2016. Leaving aside Freedom House's problematic inclusion of Russia, Cuba,
and Iran on its list, the most remarkable thing about
Whitney's research was his finding that the U.S. offered military assistance to 76 percent
of these governments. (The only exceptions were Belarus, China, Central African Republic, Cuba,
Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria.). "Most
politically aware people," Whitney wrote:
"know of some of the more highly publicized instances examples of [U.S. support for
foreign dictatorships], such as the tens of billions of dollars' worth of US military
assistance provided to the beheading capital of the world, the misogynistic monarchy of Saudi
Arabia, and the repressive military dictatorship now in power in Egypt apologists for our
nation's imperialistic foreign policy try to rationalize such support, arguing that Saudi
Arabia and Egypt are exceptions to the rule. But my survey demonstrates that our
government's support for Saudi Arabia and Egypt are not exceptions to the rule at all. They
are the rule ."
The Pentagon and State Department data Whitney used came from Fiscal Year 2015. It dated
from the next-to-last year of the Obama administration, for which so many liberals recall with
misplaced nostalgia. Freedom House's list should have included Honduras, ruled by a vicious
right-wing government that Obama and his Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton helped install in a June 2009 military coup .
The problem here isn't just liberal hypocrisy and double standards. The deeper issue is
that, as the great American iconoclast Mark Twain knew, you cannot maintain democracy at home
while conducting an authoritarian empire abroad. During the United States' blood-soaked
invasion and occupation of the Philippines, Twain penned an imaginary history of the
twentieth-century United States. "It was impossible," Twain wrote, "to save the Great Republic.
She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the
helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at
home."
"Just a decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words," the historian
Alfred W. McCoy has observed , "colonial police methods came home to serve as a template
for the creation of an American internal security apparatus in wartime." The nation's first Red
Scare, which crushed left and labor movements during and after World War One, drew heavily on
the lessons and practices of colonial suppression in the Philippines and Cuba. As McCoy shows
in his latest book, In the Shadows of the
American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power , the same basic process --
internal U.S. repression informed and shaped by authoritarian and imperial practices abroad and
justified by alleged external threats to the "homeland" -- has recurred ever since. Today, the
rise of an unprecedented global surveillance state overseen by the National Security Agency has
cost the US the trust of many of its top global allies (under Bush43 and Obama44, not just
under Trump45) while undermining civil liberties and democracy within as beyond the
U.S.
"The fetters imposed on liberty at home," James Madison wrote in 1799 , "have ever
been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary
dangers abroad." Those are wise words well worth revisiting amidst the current endless
Russiagate madness, calculated among other things to tell us that the FBI, the CIA, and the
rest of the nation's vast and ever more ubiquitous intelligence and surveillance state are on
our side.
The Democratic Party has made a strategic decision to bypass candidates from its progressive
wing and recruit former members of the military and intelligence agencies to compete with
Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. The shift away from liberal politicians to
center-right government agents and military personnel is part of a broader plan to rebuild the
party so it better serves the interests of its core constituents, Wall Street, big business,
and the foreign policy establishment. Democrat leaders want to eliminate left-leaning
candidates who think the party should promote issues that are important to working people and
replace them with career bureaucrats who will be more responsive to the needs of business. The
ultimate objective of this organization-remake is to create a center-right superparty comprised
almost entirely of trusted allies from the national security state who can be depended on to
implement the regressive policies required by their wealthy contributors. Here's more
background from Patrick Martin at the World Socialist Web Site:
"An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA,
Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic
candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of
military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political
history.
If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as
widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as
many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power
in the lower chamber of Congress .
it should be noted that there would be no comparable influx of Bernie Sanders supporters
or other "left"-talking candidates in the event of a Democratic landslide. Only five of the
221 candidates reviewed in this study had links to Sanders or billed themselves as
"progressive." None is likely to win the primary, let alone the general election." ("The CIA
Democrats, Patrick Martin, The World Socialist Web Site)
Progressive candidates are being ignored to make room for center-right
functionaries who will focus on reducing government spending, rolling back Trump's trade
policy, and supporting the foreign wars. This new wave of fiscally-conservative Democrats will
execute their tasks in a party that serves as the political wing of the federal bureaucracy.
Democrat leaders have long-abandoned the idea that a party should be a vehicle for political
change. Their aim is to create a top-down pro-business collective that marginalizes activists
and liberals in order to avoid disruptive political convulsions that impact corporate
profitability. Here's more on the Dems' attack on its liberal base from an article by Patrick
Martin:
"The New Jersey Democratic Party establishment successfully imposed its choice in
contested congressional nominations, brushing aside several candidates backed by Bernie
Sanders and his Our Revolution group. Nearly every Sanders-backed candidate in other states
-- for governor of Iowa and congressional seats in Iowa, Montana New Mexico and California --
suffered a similar fate." ("US primary elections in eight states confirm rightward shift by
Democratic Party", Patrick Martin, The World Socialist Web Site)
As a result "Only a handful of candidates running under the Bernie Sanders banner survived
primaries held in six states on Tuesday. As of Wednesday afternoon, only seven of 31 candidates
endorsed by Our Revolution -- - had been declared winners." (USA Today)
Simply put, Democrat leaders have successfully derailed the progressive bandwagon. Even so,
Sanders role vis a vis the Democratic Party has always been a bit of a ruse. Here's how author
Tom Hall sums it up:
"The major political function of Sanders' campaign is to divert the growing social
discontent and hostility toward the existing system behind the Democratic Party, in order to
contain and dissipate it. His supposedly 'socialist' campaign is an attempt to preempt and
block the emergence of an independent movement of the working class." ("Is Bernie Sanders a
socialist?", July 16, 2015), Tom Hall, World Socialist Web Site)
Sanders task will become increasingly more difficult as progressives realize that
the Dems are building a party apparatus that sees activism as a fundamental threat to their
strategic objective, which is to create a secure environment where business can flourish.
Sanders has helped the party by seducing leftists with his fake liberalism, but he has
undermined the aims of working people who need an independent organization to advance their own
political agenda. As long as Sanders continues to sell his populist snake oil from a Democratic
soapbox, liberals are going to continue to hope that the party can be transformed into an
instrument for progressive change. The evidence, however, suggests the party is moving in the
opposite direction. Here's more from Patrick Martin's:
"The Democratic Party's promotion of a large number of military-intelligence candidates
for competitive districts represents an insurance policy for the US ruling elite. In the
event of a major swing to the Democrats, the House of Representatives will receive an influx
of new members drawn primarily from the national security apparatus, trusted servants of
American imperialism The preponderance of national security operatives in the Democratic
primaries sheds additional light on the nature of the Obama administration (which) marked the
further ascendancy of the military-intelligence apparatus within the Democratic Party .
The Democratic Party is running in the congressional elections not only as the party that
takes a tougher line on Russia, but as the party that enlists as its candidates and
representatives those who have been directly responsible for waging war, both overt and
covert, on behalf of American imperialism. .
The upper-middle-class layer that provides the "mass" base of the Democratic Party has
moved drastically to the right over the past four decades, enriched by the stock market boom,
consciously hostile to the working class, and enthusiastically supportive of the
military-intelligence apparatus which, in the final analysis, guarantees its own social
position against potential threats, both foreign and domestic. It is this social evolution
that now finds expression on the surface of capitalist politics, in the rise of the
military-intelligence "faction" to the leadership of the Democratic Party." ("The CIA
Democrats", Patrick Martin, The World Socialist Web Site)
The dramatic metamorphosis of the Democratic party hasn't taken place in a vacuum but in a
fractious and politically-charged environment where elements within the intelligence community
and law enforcement (FBI) are attempting to roll back the results of the 2016 presidential
elections because their preferred candidate (Hillary Clinton) did not win. And while these
agencies have not yet produced any hard evidence that their claims (of collusion with Russia)
are true, there is mounting circumstantial evidence that senior-level officials at these
agencies were actively trying to entrap members of the Trump campaign to justify more intrusive
surveillance in the hopes of uncovering incriminating evidence that could be used in
impeachment proceedings.
As more information surfaces, and we learn more about the "unmasking", wiretapping, National
Security Letters, FISA warrants, paid informants and other surveillance abuses that were
directed at the Trump campaign, we should think back to 2005 when the New York Times first
reported that the National Security Agency had been eavesdropping on Americans inside the
United States "without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying."
("Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts", New York Times) That incident was reported
just 13 years ago and already we can see that the infrastructure for a permanent Orwellian
police-state –that uses its extraordinary powers of surveillance to sabotage the
democratic process and maintain its stranglehold on power– has already arisen in our
midst. And while Russiagate is proof-positive that these malign spying techniques are already
being used against us, the Democratic party is now creating a home for deep-state alums and
their military allies so they continue to prosecute their war against personal liberty and the
American people.
"The ultimate objective of this organization-remake is to create a center-right superparty
comprised almost entirely of trusted allies from the national security state who can be
depended on to implement the regressive policies required by their wealthy contributors."
If by "regressive" you mean a move away from a mixed economy to a more fundamentalist
market-based approach, then yeah, I would agree.
"Their aim is to create a top-down pro-business collective that marginalizes activists and
liberals in order to avoid disruptive political convulsions "
The only activism I've seen from progressives in the past two years has nothing to do with
economic concerns; their energy is entirely focused on race, gender, and sexuality. The
cultural-Marxist troika.
" Russiagate is proof-positive that these malign spying techniques are already being used
against us, the Democratic party is now creating a home for deep-state alums and their
military allies "
You forgot to mention neoconservatives who are now finding safe spaces for their
warmongering in the liberal media. Currently the Democrats are inflamed with identity
politics; more than likely this infection will continue to fester for another two election
cycles. Democrats are proceeding down a dark path: identity politics brings only conflict,
civil war.
The Democrat party is a high-low coalition of the fringes. The ultra rich use the poor to
attack the middle so they can distract everyone else from uniting and doing something like
raising taxes on the rich or deporting minorities to democrat neighborhoods. So, it's not
surprising that the high part of the coalition would strike back.
This only further strengthens my desire to see a secession movement. When statist
democrats are in power, they will surely abuse this growing national security state to keep
us down. It's time to break up the USSA ASAP before it's too late.
"Democrat leaders want to eliminate left-leaning candidates who think the party should
promote issues that are important to working people."
Note to M. Whitney: the New Deal coalition is dead. Left/Progressives today despise
working people. Didn't you get the memo? Working people are deplorable! Antifa, BLM, the
Women's Studies Dept, the sex lobby, Amy Goodman, Michael Moore – they all hate working
people.
"Progressive candidates are being ignored to make room for center-right functionaries who
will focus on reducing government spending, rolling back Trump's trade policy, and supporting
the foreign wars."
Note to M. Whitney: Progressives today love free trade and advocate war against Russia.
Didn't you notice when pro-war progressives kicked you off the Counterpunch website? Today's
Progressives love War! Punch the Nazi!
"Simply put, Democrat leaders have successfully derailed the progressive bandwagon"
Note to M. Whitney: The progressive bandwagon exists solely for identity politics
hysteria, and it is not derailed. Haven't you noticed the race and gender, baiting and
slander bandwagon barreling down the highway? It's getting louder all the time.
Stop holding out hope that someday there will be a groundswell of progressives on the left
who are on the side of the little guy. Progressives are an elite crowd of identity politics
ideologues. Radical reformers are misanthropes – they don't like social norms because
they don't like basic human nature. They will never like working stiffs. They will never care
about 3rd world villagers getting bombed.
The fault line here is race and gender politics. You are on the right side on war and
economic issues and you are on the wrong side on race/sex/gender issues. Don't blindly accept
the dogma that differing group outcomes are caused by Bad White Males. Trust in facts and
reason. Don't feel you have to grovel because you're white or male. Change your mind on these
issues – it's called learning.
It brings power to its practitioners. Which is the whole point.
You forgot to mention neoconservatives who are now finding safe spaces for their
warmongering in the liberal media
Why wouldn't they? Warmongering has been a "liberal" preoccupation for a century, since
the income-taxing suffragist Wilson. Remember Bob Dole's "Kinsley gaffe" in the 1976 debate
with Walter Mondale.
From comments: "Putin, if people would listen, proposes a model that I find acceptable. Respect for
national sovereignty and government institutions. In this model, yes, we would tolerate
authoritarian governments as long as they respect the sovereignty and stability of other
countries." But the problem with this statement is the dynamics of American Imperialism, which would not tolerate any
government which is not a vassal.
Notable quotes:
"... Idealism in foreign policy is, by definition, the pursuit of a dreamy vision of a better world that does not seriously ask whether the ideal is actually compatible with reality. Illusions set idealists up for terrible surprises. Addressing problems through, for example, the lens of Fukuyama-style Hegelian idealism, according to which the world is inexorably progressing toward liberal democratic values, would in today's world be not only absurd but dangerous. ..."
"... When realist thinkers -- from Machiavelli to Kissinger -- prick the bubbles of the dreamers, they incur only wrath. For idealists, it is the height of cynicism and bad manners to point out that cunning and force are what actually dominate world affairs. ..."
"... For Kissinger, peace depends upon "a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other's domestic affairs and checking each other's ambitions through a general equilibrium of power." The Peace of Westphalia and, to some degree, the Congress of Vienna embodied such an arrangement, offering the lesson that balance-of-power theory is indispensable in analyzing world events. ..."
"... However, Kissinger was intellectually astute enough to recognize that, in order to create and maintain this equilibrium of power, something more than a mechanical balance is required: enlightened statesmen. Kissinger states explicitly that balance-of-power "does not in itself secure peace." If world leaders refuse to play by Westphalian rules, the system will break down. He warns of the rise of radical Islamists, for example, who refuse to think in Westphalian terms. ..."
"... Morality in foreign affairs, then, is not found in a set of abstract rules of behavior for nation-states, nor is it found in deploying military power to advance some progressive, idealistic cause. Morality can be found only in the souls of righteous statesmen who, under complex international circumstances, act not out of malice or hatred, nor out of greed or pure self-interest, but who find a path to peace that is compatible not only with the interest of their own nations but that of the others. ..."
"... Just had to correct that one sentence, there. Kissinger had no problem intervening in the affairs of "independent states" that posed little military or political threat to the United States, but perhaps threatened the commercial interests, profits or market share of American companies and capitalists. ..."
"... The record of the foreign policy realists, Republican or Democratic, is drenched in blood, from Afghanistan, Indonesia and Angola to Chile, Nicaragua and Guatemala, not to mention Cambodia from Nixon to Carter to Reagan. And the long-term consequences of their decisions (Iran in 1953, Afghanistan under Carter and Brezinski) can bite the rest of us pretty hard, too. Hell, George H.W. Bush and James Baker brought us the first Iraq War, which should have been left to the Arab League to solve (and, frankly, I give not a whit for the independence of the Emirs of Kuwait). ..."
"... An American imperialist is still, when all is said and done, an American imperialist, and woe be to any small, non-nuclear independent state that gets in the way of said imperialist making the world safe for ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs or Citibank. ..."
"... What Machiavelli wrote is that statesmen should advocate conventional religious morality as the default position in most circumstances but when faced with an existential emergency they must sacrifice their soul to not do good and use evil but only as an occasion calls for it to protect the nation. ..."
"... Putin, if people would listen, proposes a model that I find acceptable. Respect for national sovereignty and government institutions. In this model, yes, we would tolerate authoritarian governments as long as they respect the sovereignty and stability of other countries. ..."
"... Kissinger is famous for his attachment to the balance of power concept, particularly in relation to the Congress of Vienna, but I always think that he leaves out the main point. The balance of power wasn't an end in itself. It was a means to the end that the European powers wanted to achieve, namely, the restoration of the "ancien régime". The idea of the balance of powers was to prevent the Great Powers getting into fights with each other, leading to mutual destruction, which, indeed, is what ultimately happened in 1914. ..."
"... There are countless examples where realists cherry-picked the facts (variables). ..."
"... Good discussion. Machiavelli's central insight is that a national leader must get their hands dirty, even to the point of committing evil, to protect the nation from disaster, to reform corruption, to remove internal insurrectionists. But using evil for good is limited to only those real (realistic) threats against the nation. According to Machiavelli in his Discourses, glory is reserved for those who are the founders of republics, reformers or religious leaders of a nation, military leaders followed by literature writers and artists who reflect republican virtues. Contra William Smith, foreign policy can not ALWAYS be "just and moral", which is an idealistic a notion. ..."
Great power competition is everywhere these days -- in Syria, Ukraine, the South China Sea,
North Korea. With the rise of China and the rejuvenation of Russian military power, realist
thinking is suddenly back in vogue, as it should be.
Idealism in foreign policy is, by definition, the pursuit of a dreamy vision of a better
world that does not seriously ask whether the ideal is actually compatible with reality.
Illusions set idealists up for terrible surprises. Addressing problems through, for example,
the lens of Fukuyama-style Hegelian idealism, according to which the world is inexorably
progressing toward liberal democratic values, would in today's world be not only absurd but
dangerous. The liberal idea that the UN can foster world order through international
institutions is likewise naïve and perilous. Fantasy lands in art and literature can be
wonderful divertissements , but using them as the basis for great nation's foreign
policy can produce nightmares.
George W. Bush created a dream world in his mind where it seemed plausible for American
military power to end "tyranny in our world." Tyranny, as anyone who has not slipped the bonds
of reality knows, is rooted in the human soul and cannot be "ended." Tyranny can be checked and
mitigated, but only through extraordinary effort and with the help of a rich tradition.
But it is always easier to assign oneself virtue based on self-applauding and unrealistic
notions about world peace. When realist thinkers -- from Machiavelli to Kissinger -- prick the
bubbles of the dreamers, they incur only wrath. For idealists, it is the height of cynicism and
bad manners to point out that cunning and force are what actually dominate world affairs.
Yet for all their sagacity, realist thinkers are not without their problems either. They
tend to deny the moral nature of human beings and the role that this may play in world events.
Because they have seen the great danger of moralistic idealism in foreign policy, they
sometimes don't think morality should be considered at all. Realist theory has a cold, inhumane
quality that makes it inattentive to the moral dimension of human existence.
The failure of realists to incorporate moral considerations into their thinking has made
realism unpopular with the American people, who historically believe that their nation's
foreign policy should have at least some moral content. They, after all, send their own boys
and girls to war, and they would like to think that those sacrifices are not made for some
mechanistic balance of power. They know that statesmen must often make cold calculations in the
national interest, but surely somewhere in there must be right and wrong, as in all human
endeavors.
Because some realists have adopted the philosophically untenable position that morality has
no role in world affairs, many Americans have signed on with the moralists' disastrous crusades
instead. The realists have the stronger policy case, but they have ceded the moral ground to
the idealists.
Ironically, it may be the work of Henry Kissinger that can show realists an intellectual
path toward restoring a sense of morality in foreign policy.
For Kissinger, peace depends upon "a system of independent states refraining from
interference in each other's domestic affairs and checking each other's ambitions through a
general equilibrium of power." The Peace of Westphalia and, to some degree, the Congress of
Vienna embodied such an arrangement, offering the lesson that balance-of-power theory is
indispensable in analyzing world events.
However, Kissinger was intellectually astute enough to recognize that, in order to
create and maintain this equilibrium of power, something more than a mechanical balance is
required: enlightened statesmen. Kissinger states explicitly that balance-of-power "does not in
itself secure peace." If world leaders refuse to play by Westphalian rules, the system will
break down. He warns of the rise of radical Islamists, for example, who refuse to think in
Westphalian terms.
Kissinger also says that enlightened leaders must not only recognize the realities of power
politics and the hard Machiavellian truths of international competition, but possess a certain
moral quality that he calls "restraint." Without a willingness to restrain themselves and to
act dispassionately, world leaders will be incapable of building an international order. When
facing difficult challenges, enlightened diplomats and statesmen must have the moral courage to
accept certain "limits of permissible action." Implicit in Kissinger's thought is that
morality, though of a realistic kind, is essential in foreign policy. Only statesmen of a
certain temperament and moral character can support the Westphalian model.
Morality in foreign affairs, then, is not found in a set of abstract rules of behavior
for nation-states, nor is it found in deploying military power to advance some progressive,
idealistic cause. Morality can be found only in the souls of righteous statesmen who, under
complex international circumstances, act not out of malice or hatred, nor out of greed or pure
self-interest, but who find a path to peace that is compatible not only with the interest of
their own nations but that of the others. Such a policy cannot be sketched out in the
abstract in advance; it can emerge only through the moral leadership of genuine statesmen who
act to find a specific solution in a set of complex, concrete circumstances. This is one of the
great lessons of classical political philosophy: justice is not an abstraction but found
concretely in the soul of the just man.
The answer to the question of what a just and moral foreign policy might look like is that
it's the kind that truly just and moral, but also supremely realistic, statesmen will adopt.
That such statesmen are rare is what has caused the great philosophers to lament that only the
dead have seen the end of war.
William S. Smith is managing director and research fellow at the Center for the Study of
Statesmanship at The Catholic University of America.
Implicit in Kissinger's thought is that morality, though of a realistic kind, is essential
in foreign policy. Only statesmen of a certain temperament and moral character can support
the Westphalian model.
1) In 1971, the government of Pakistan carried out a genocide of its Hindu minority in
what is now Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Somewhere between 1 and 3 million Hindus were
killed, and many thousands of Bengali Muslim leaders and intellectuals were murdered by the
Pakistani regime.
Kissinger and Nixon supported Yahya Khan's government, and even shipped weapons to
Pakistan while the genocide was going on.
From Gary Bass's article in the New Yorker:
While the slaughter in what would soon become an independent Bangladesh was underway,
the C.I.A. and State Department conservatively estimated that roughly two hundred thousand
people had died (the official Bangladeshi death toll is three million). Some ten million
Bengali refugees fled to India, where untold numbers died in miserable conditions in refugee
camps. Pakistan was a Cold War ally of the United States, and Richard Nixon and his
national-security advisor, Henry Kissinger, resolutely supported its military dictatorship;
they refused to impose pressure on Pakistan's generals to forestall further
atrocities.
2) Kissinger was one of key organizers of the 1973 coup against the democratically elected
Allende government in Chile. When Allende was elected, this moral stalwart told his staff "I
don't see any reason why we should stand around and do nothing when a country goes communist
because of the irresponsibility of its own people."
In the first months after the coup d'état, the military killed thousands of
Chilean leftists, both real and suspected, or forced their "disappearance". The military
imprisoned 40,000 political enemies in the National Stadium of Chile In October 1973, the
Chilean songwriter Víctor Jara, and 70 other political killings were perpetrated by
the death squad, Caravan of Death (Caravana de la Muerte).
The government arrested some 130,000 people in a three-year period; the dead and
disappeared numbered thousands.
****************
Tom Lehrer once said that satire died when Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Fortunately William Smith's article about Kissinger's "morality" shows that comedy is not yet
dead, even if the comic relief is inadvertent.
For Kissinger, peace depends upon "a system of MAJOR POWERS refraining from interference in
each other's domestic affairs and checking each other's ambitions through a general
equilibrium of power."
Just had to correct that one sentence, there. Kissinger had no problem intervening in the
affairs of "independent states" that posed little military or political threat to the United
States, but perhaps threatened the commercial interests, profits or market share of American
companies and capitalists.
The record of the foreign policy realists, Republican or Democratic, is drenched in blood,
from Afghanistan, Indonesia and Angola to Chile, Nicaragua and Guatemala, not to mention
Cambodia from Nixon to Carter to Reagan. And the long-term consequences of their decisions
(Iran in 1953, Afghanistan under Carter and Brezinski) can bite the rest of us pretty hard,
too. Hell, George H.W. Bush and James Baker brought us the first Iraq War, which should have
been left to the Arab League to solve (and, frankly, I give not a whit for the independence
of the Emirs of Kuwait).
Would the realists have responded to the 2009 coup in Honduras with any more morality than
Hilary Clinton did? Would the economic war upon Venezuela be any less damaging than it has
been under Bush II, Obama or Trump? Yes, some of the realists would not have launched the
invasion of Iraq, but would they have lifted the sanctions regime on Iraq? Would they have
restrained the Saudis in Yemen?
An American imperialist is still, when all is said and done, an American imperialist, and
woe be to any small, non-nuclear independent state that gets in the way of said imperialist
making the world safe for ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs or Citibank.
Dr. Smith apparently has a misunderstanding about Machiavelli's realism being devoid of
morality.
What Machiavelli wrote is that statesmen should advocate conventional religious morality
as the default position in most circumstances but when faced with an existential emergency
they must sacrifice their soul to not do good and use evil but only as an occasion calls for
it to protect the nation.
Example: Truman authorizing the dropping on A-bombs on Japan;
Churchill not warning the City of Coventry they were to be bombed by the Luftwaffe in WW II
because to warn them would have revealed that the Brits had cracked the German secret codes;
and Pres. Reagan freeing American hostages in Iran in exchange for drug money to fund the
Contras in Nicaragua.
This is in sharp contrast to statesmen (women) such as Hillary Clinton
who used evil gratuitously by taking bribes from foreign nations to fund her foundation; or
Pres. Bill Clinton who "wagged the dog" by bombing a drug factory in Sudan to divert
attention away from a sex scandal.
Machiavelli was not anti-religious or anti-morality,
contrary to pop explanations by liberal media, novels and academics (read Erica Benner's book
Machiavelli's Ethics).
Henry Kissinger as a moral man? I really wish you had a better example to prove your valid
point. The man who was responsible for the murder of millions in Indo China including the
bombing of non combatant countries like Laos is hardly qualified to talk about morality of
anything.
Im not sure morality is even possible. I wonder if it ever was possible.
Everyone in the west is taught the values of multicultural and diversity while the rest of
the world is still tribal. It is those tribes who we (US) considers allies which are
controlling much of our foreign policy. The other constituency is just as old and its the
monied class or the corporations whose only goal is to maintain and grow revenue.
Thank god we have domestic and international law which constrains our foreign policy to
moral issues.
These terms get murky.
Neocons are idealists but most definitely believe in great power competition and dominance.
U.S. interests can only be protected if authoritarian regimes are replaced by pro-U.S.
Democratic govts which is why we were so aggressive in expanding our influence in Eastern
Europe, often through covert means and by force in the M.E. I never had much use for the term 'realism'.
Putin, if people would listen, proposes a model that I find acceptable. Respect for
national sovereignty and government institutions. In this model, yes, we would tolerate
authoritarian governments as long as they respect the sovereignty and stability of other
countries.
We have been brainwashed to consider him an offender in this model because of Ukraine but
his response was a minimalist response to a crisis on his border. We go on crusades and
experiment on other countries thousands of miles away from our shores.
Kissinger is famous for his attachment to the balance of power concept, particularly in
relation to the Congress of Vienna, but I always think that he leaves out the main point. The
balance of power wasn't an end in itself. It was a means to the end that the European powers
wanted to achieve, namely, the restoration of the "ancien régime". The idea of the
balance of powers was to prevent the Great Powers getting into fights with each other,
leading to mutual destruction, which, indeed, is what ultimately happened in 1914.
Westphalia
was a slightly different situation. A 30-year, on again–off again, triangular German
"civil war" between Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists, with much foreign interference, had
reached a stalemate, which, in practice, amounted to a Catholic defeat. The only way out was
to let everybody keep what they had and agree not to try to take more. It was forced
forbearance rather than balance.
In Europe, at least, peace certainly depends upon "a system of independent states refraining
from interference in each other's domestic affairs and checking each other's ambitions
through a general equilibrium of power". The European Union is the modern expression of that
principle.
That's why Putin's interferences in Ukraine's domestic affairs and his undisguised
attempts to destroy the EU have set off alarm bells all across Europe and why US
unwillingness to check his ambitions is making the EU the only viable option to ensure peace
in Europe.
Kissinger is an extremely bad person to cite on the subject of morality in a realist foreign
policy. John Quincey Adam's would be better. Coincidentally, TAC printed him on this very
subject --
"Idealism in foreign policy is, by definition, the pursuit of a dreamy vision of a better
world"
It need not be that. The "vision thing" that Bush I famously did not do could well be a
part of our national interest, one of the things coldly evaluated, and contributing to our
strength when done correctly.
Of Wayne Lusvardi's examples of "existential" emergencies for which evil can be done to
"protect the nation," "Truman authorizing the dropping on A-bombs on Japan" is at best
debatable given the evidence that the Japanese were willing to surrender as long as they
could keep their emperor, and especially to keep the Soviets from declaring war on them,
while "Churchill not warning the City of Coventry they were to be bombed by the Luftwaffe in
WW II" is legitimate, in my opinion.
But "Reagan freeing American hostages in Iran in exchange for drug money to fund the
Contras in Nicaragua" is laughable. American pride may have needed protection from the
hostage "crisis," but the American nation certainly did not, as it was not threatened in any
way. American foreign policy continued on its way, funding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan,
backing the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese Stalinists who drove them from power in
Cambodia, and buying off Egypt, so you can't even say that America's "standing in the world"
particularly suffered from the hostage "crisis."
And as for "Pres. Bill Clinton who 'wagged the dog' by bombing a drug factory in Sudan to
divert attention away from a sex scandal," I'll trump that shameful episode with Pres. Ronald
Reagan invading Grenada two days after the Beirut barracks bombing.
Our D.I. In basic training in his frustration to turn raw recruits into soldiers would raise
his arms to the sky imploring the aid of the Commander-in-Chief in the heavens and holler,
"Dear Lord, give'em books and all they do is eat'em!" That's the way I viewed William Smith's
essay on the need for an infusion of a reconstituted morality in our foreign policy.
After
basic training, I then served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam, where I was confronted with
the grim and brutal reality of that quagmire and learned that the road to hell is paved with
good intentions. LBJ would come to regret calling South Vietnam President Ndo Dinh Diem the
"Churchill of Asia." There lies the dilemma when idealism confronts reality.
More generally,
I disagree with the centrality of the Westphalian concept of what constitutes a nation in the
post-modern world. Smith mentions the influence of non-actors such as jihadists to alter our
foreign policy goals but overlooks how corporations have also altered that concept with their
doctrine of globalization for profits which undercuts national sovereignty established in
Westphalia. Smith seems to be wandering between two worlds, "one dead / The other peerless to
be born" as Mathew Arnold lamented in his poem "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse."
Smith is
trying to promote a revisionist history of the last fifty years just as Niall Ferguson did in
the first volume of his authorized biography of Henry Kissinger as an idealist. Ferguson
notes even Kissinger obviously knew the war was a lost cause after he did two fact-finding
tours in South Vietnam early in the war but thought the war was still necessary to prosecute
to save a vestige of our credibility as policeman to the world. Ken Burns also attempts a
revisionist coup of the Vietnam War when he editorialized in his documentary that our
fearless leaders prosecuted that war with the best intentions. So unfortunately, I view this
essay as a current trend to to promote revisionism in our history of the last fifty years
despite the contrary conclusions of the historical facts.
But as John Adams, a foundering
father, once observed "facts are stubborn things."
I agree-Putin's response to our actions is often not even considered: The biggest flaw with realism that it's like a multivariate experiment
-- with everyone
having different variables they think to be relevant. For instance, Kissinger thought Vietnam would fall under Chinese influence under Communist
NVA, yet he ignored the variable of ethnic rivalries between Chinese and Vietnamese. GWB ignored the variables of Iran -- how it would swoop in and nurture newly Shia Iraq..
There are countless examples where realists cherry-picked the facts (variables).
Vietnam: perhaps the only conflict fought on half of another of but minor, if any real
benefit to the US. That with or without Sec. Kissinger is clear as day. As for quagmires --
it seems that all ward have them. Vietnam was a quagmire because our policy was one of
protect and hold as opposed to invade and conquer -- an unfortunate choice. In the world of a
realist, we should have killed any and all Vietcong, raced up to Hanoi and ended the matter.
'nough said.
I am not sure many here are reading the same article, because my take is that the author
is claiming that Sec Kissinger was a realist -- practical – what needed to be done to
accomplish task A -- morality doesn't enter into it. That explains why he found Pres Nixon's
faith amusing. So all of the comments bemoaning the Sec lack of moral attend, only confirms
the realists perspective.
Nonetheless,
I disagree with your version of the last seventeen years. it has not been orchestrated or
led by realists. Quite the opposite. The rhetoric may be couched in all manner of idealism ,
but so was their application of force.
A realist would not give a lick aboy religious affiliation to the aims of regime chang,
cpital market or democracy creation. The onlu factor that would have mattered is who was on
board, or not in the way -- all challengers regardless of their faith, political agendas,
personality, or concerned about symbols as nonsensical historical artifacts would moved aside
by any means necessary. A realist so engaging such large opposition would decided the matter
-- to utter destruction to complete compliance – period.
In fact, I will contend that these pseudo realists, were thwarted by their own bouts if
idealist moral relativity and were the worst sort for the job at hand.
What a joke of an article, Kissinger as a moralist. He is one of the major war criminals of
the second half of the 20th Century. He has the blood of hundreds of thousands if not
millions on his hands, as others above have details. And not all foreigners. Lest we forget
the part he played in Nixon's great lies about Vietnam that delayed a peace settlement to
help Nixon get elected. 30,000 dead Americans later we got pretty much the same settlement.
The author of this article has entered into the realm of the absurd.
Wow, I thought I wasn't ever going to read anything on economic war on Venezuela! Finally,
even if it is from the comments.
There is an article about not to support/encourage a cup here, but obviously, when it is
about the bad economic situation, only the leftish govenrments are blamed, as if Venezuela
wasn't thoroughly dependet on debt.
Besides of that, even if that mention weren't thre, I agree and thanks most of the
comments in this article.
Good discussion. Machiavelli's central insight is that a national leader must get their
hands dirty, even to the point of committing evil, to protect the nation from disaster, to
reform corruption, to remove internal insurrectionists. But using evil for good is limited to
only those real (realistic) threats against the nation. According to Machiavelli in his
Discourses, glory is reserved for those who are the founders of republics, reformers or
religious leaders of a nation, military leaders followed by literature writers and artists
who reflect republican virtues. Contra William Smith, foreign policy can not ALWAYS be "just
and moral", which is an idealistic a notion.
If, as Samuel Johnson is reputed to have said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel"
then using Kissinger as an example of realism is the last refuge of a fantasist.
This article on almost a year old but thinks are developing as predicted. Which increases its
value.
"... Since when did Trump become an expert on political science and world history anyway? Who
does he think he is lecturing? Yet another US middle school classroom?! Does he not realize that
a good number of the countries represented at the UN consider themselves Socialist?! Furthermore,
while I don't necessarily disagree with the notion that Socialist and Communist ideas have often
been a disaster in the 20th century, Socialism in the 21st century is an entirely different beast
and the jury is still very much out on this issue, especially when considering the social,
political, economic, ecological, psychological and even spiritual disaster Capitalism is now
proving to be for much of the planet. Being the President of a country as dysfunctional as the
US, Trump would be well-advised to tone down his arrogant pontifications about Socialism and
maybe even open a book and read about it. ..."
"... My guess is that all they want is to send a clear messages to the Comprador elites
running most countries that this is the "official ideology of the AngloZionist Empire" and if
they want to remain in power they better toe the line even if nobody takes this stuff seriously.
Yup, back to a 1980s Soviet kind of attitude towards propaganda: nobody cares what everybody else
really thinks as long as everybody continues to pretend to believe the official propaganda.
..."
"... Ever since the Neocons overthrew Trump and made him what is colloquially referred to as
their "bitch" the US foreign policy has come to a virtual standstill. ..."
"... Because, and make no mistake here, if the US cannot get anything constructive done any
more, they retain a huge capability to disrupt, subvert, create chaos and the like. ..."
"... However, the US themselves are now the prime victim of a decapitated Presidency and a
vindictive and generally out of control Neocon effort to prevent true American patriots to "get
their country back" (as they say) and finally overthrow the regime in Washington DC. ..."
Notable quotes:
"... Since when did Trump become an expert on political science and world history anyway? Who does he think he is lecturing? Yet another US middle school classroom?! Does he not realize that a good number of the countries represented at the UN consider themselves Socialist?! Furthermore, while I don't necessarily disagree with the notion that Socialist and Communist ideas have often been a disaster in the 20th century, Socialism in the 21st century is an entirely different beast and the jury is still very much out on this issue, especially when considering the social, political, economic, ecological, psychological and even spiritual disaster Capitalism is now proving to be for much of the planet. Being the President of a country as dysfunctional as the US, Trump would be well-advised to tone down his arrogant pontifications about Socialism and maybe even open a book and read about it. ..."
"... we all know who Trump's puppet-masters are nowadays so we know what to expect ..."
"... Trump is now clearly fully endorsing that fairytale that "The West" (in which Trump now hilariously includes Poland!) has defeated Hitler and saved the world. The truth is that the Nazis were defeated by the Soviets and that all the efforts of the Poles, French, Brits and even Americans were but a minor (20% max) sideshow to the "real event" (Those who still might believe in this nonsense can simply read this ). Yet again, that the Americans would feel the need to appropriate for themselves somebody else's victory is, yet again, a clear sign of weakness. Do they expect the rest of the planet to buy into this nonsense? Probably not. ..."
"... My guess is that all they want is to send a clear messages to the Comprador elites running most countries that this is the "official ideology of the AngloZionist Empire" and if they want to remain in power they better toe the line even if nobody takes this stuff seriously. Yup, back to a 1980s Soviet kind of attitude towards propaganda: nobody cares what everybody else really thinks as long as everybody continues to pretend to believe the official propaganda. ..."
"... Ever since the Neocons overthrew Trump and made him what is colloquially referred to as their "bitch" the US foreign policy has come to a virtual standstill. ..."
"... Because, and make no mistake here, if the US cannot get anything constructive done any more, they retain a huge capability to disrupt, subvert, create chaos and the like. ..."
"... However, the US themselves are now the prime victim of a decapitated Presidency and a vindictive and generally out of control Neocon effort to prevent true American patriots to "get their country back" (as they say) and finally overthrow the regime in Washington DC. ..."
"... It appears that for the foreseeable future Trump will continue to focus his energy on beating Obama for the status of "worst President in US history" while the Neocons will continue to focus their energy on trying to impeach Trump ..."
"... I still maintain that the worst President in history (excluding possibly Woodrow Wilson) was Bill Clinton (strongly influenced, no doubt, by Hillary.) Sure, the 90′s were a great time in America, but Clinton's evil actions (signing NAFTA, the Crime Bill, ignoring Bin Laden, and repealing Glass-Steagall to name just a few) had not yet come to fruition. ..."
"... Consider that the scene he bought into is the product of 70 years of constant propaganda aimed at the American psyche and how successful that has been. ..."
"... Hillary would not have done anything different than Trump. Trump is a dumb shit sycophant of the Deep State just like Hillary. ..."
"... "Step by step the US is getting closer to a civil war" That pretty much says it all. All it will take is for US troops to get an unexpected butt kicking somewhere, sometime. ..."
Late this morning, outraged emails started pouring in. My correspondents reported "getting
sick" and having their "heart ache". The cause of all that? They had just watched Trump's
speech at the UN...
You can read the full (rush, not official) text
here or watch the video here .
Most of it is so vapid that I won't even bother posting the full thing. But there are a few
interesting moments including those:
"We will be spending almost $700 billion on our military and defense. Our military will
soon be the strongest it has ever been"
This short sentence contains the key to unlock the reason behind the fact that while the US
military is extremely good at killing people in large numbers, it is also extremely bad at
winning wars. Like most Americans, Trump is under the illusion that spending a lot of money
"buys" you a better military. This is completely false, of course. If spending money was the
key to a competent military force, the US armed forces would have already conquered the entire
planet many times over. In reality, they have not won anything meaningful since the war in the
Pacific.
...then he suddenly decided to share this outright bizarre insight of his:
The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that
socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela,
wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and
devastation and failure.
Since when did Trump become an expert on political science and world history anyway? Who
does he think he is lecturing? Yet another US middle school classroom?! Does he not realize
that a good number of the countries represented at the UN consider themselves Socialist?!
Furthermore, while I don't necessarily disagree with the notion that Socialist and Communist
ideas have often been a disaster in the 20th century, Socialism in the 21st century is an
entirely different beast and the jury is still very much out on this issue, especially when
considering the social, political, economic, ecological, psychological and even spiritual
disaster Capitalism is now proving to be for much of the planet. Being the President of a
country as dysfunctional as the US, Trump would be well-advised to tone down his arrogant
pontifications about Socialism and maybe even open a book and read about it.
I won't even bother discussing the comprehensively counter-factual nonsense Trump has spewed
about Iran and Hezbollah, we all know who Trump's puppet-masters are nowadays so we know
what to expect . Instead, I will conclude with this pearl from The Donald:
In remembering the great victory that led to this body's founding, we must never forget
that those heroes who fought against evil, also fought for the nations that they love.
Patriotism led the Poles to die to save Poland, the French to fight for a free France, and
the Brits to stand strong for Britain.
Echoing the nonsense he spoke while in Poland, Trump is now clearly fully endorsing that
fairytale that "The West" (in which Trump now hilariously includes Poland!) has defeated Hitler
and saved the world. The truth is that the Nazis were defeated by the Soviets and that all the
efforts of the Poles, French, Brits and even Americans were but a minor (20% max) sideshow to
the "real event" (Those who still might believe in this nonsense can simply read this ). Yet
again, that the Americans would feel the need to appropriate for themselves somebody else's
victory is, yet again, a clear sign of weakness. Do they expect the rest of the planet to buy
into this nonsense? Probably not.
My guess is that all they want is to send a clear messages to the Comprador elites
running most countries that this is the "official ideology of the AngloZionist Empire" and if
they want to remain in power they better toe the line even if nobody takes this stuff
seriously. Yup, back to a 1980s Soviet kind of attitude towards propaganda: nobody cares what
everybody else really thinks as long as everybody continues to pretend to believe the official
propaganda.
[Sidebar: When my wife and I watched this pathetic speech we starting laughing about the
fact that Trump was so obscenely bad that we (almost) begin to miss Obama. This is a standing
joke in our family because when Obama came to power we (almost) began to miss Dubya. The
reason why this is a joke is that when Dubya came to power we decided that there is no way
anybody could possibly be worse than him. Oh boy where we wrong! Right now I am still not at
the point were I would be missing Obama (that is asking for a lot from me!), but I will
unapologetically admit that I am missing Dubya. I do. I really do. Maybe not the people
around Dubya, he is the one who truly let the Neocon "crazies in the basement" creep out and
occupy the Situation Room, but at least Dubya seemed to realize how utterly incompetent he
was. Furthermore, Dubya was a heck of a lot dumber than Obama (in this context being stupid
is a mitigating factor) and he sure did not have the truly galactic arrogance of Trump
(intelligence-wise they are probably on par)].
In conclusion, what I take away from this speech is a sense of relief for the rest of the
planet and a sense of real worry for the US. Ever since the Neocons overthrew Trump and
made him what is colloquially referred to as their "bitch" the US foreign policy has come to a
virtual standstill. Sure, the Americans talk a lot, but at least they are doing nothing.
That paralysis, which is a direct consequence of the internal infighting, is a blessing for the
rest of the planet because it allows everybody else to get things done. Because, and make
no mistake here, if the US cannot get anything constructive done any more, they retain a huge
capability to disrupt, subvert, create chaos and the like.
But for as long as the US remains paralyzed this destructive potential remains mostly unused
(and no matter how bad things look now, Hillary President would have been infinitely worse!).
However, the US themselves are now the prime victim of a decapitated Presidency and a
vindictive and generally out of control Neocon effort to prevent true American patriots to "get
their country back" (as they say) and finally overthrow the regime in Washington DC.
Step by step the US is getting closer to a civil war and there is no hope in sight, at least
for the time being. It appears that for the foreseeable future Trump will continue to focus
his energy on beating Obama for the status of "worst President in US history" while the Neocons
will continue to focus their energy on trying to impeach Trump , and maybe even trigger a
civil war. The rest of us living here are in for some very tough times ahead. As they say in
Florida when a hurricane comes barreling down on you "hunker down!".
Netanyahu has spoken, stating that Trump has given the boldest, most courageous UN speech
that he has ever heard. Well that settles that with the prescient oracle rendering his
definitive and omnipotent judgment!
A lot of old friends didn't like President Trump's UN speech today because it didn't
break cleanly with UniParty foreign policy! E.g. Paul Craig Roberts' comments here. But
it did contain these revolutionary comments on immigration and refugee policy ! The
latter especially significant because Trump has to set the quota for U.S. quota for
refugees (actually expedited, subsidized, politically favored immigrants) in the next few
days. Who knows what Trump will do! But Hillary would never even have said it
[...] For the cost of resettling one refugee in the United States, we can assist more than 10
in their home region.
[...] For decades, the United States has dealt with migration challenges here in the Western
Hemisphere. We have learned that, over the long term, uncontrolled migration is deeply
unfair to both the sending and the receiving countries.
For the sending countries, it reduces domestic pressure to pursue needed political
and economic reform, and drains them of the human capital necessary to motivate and
implement those reforms.
For the receiving countries, the substantial costs of uncontrolled migration are
borne overwhelmingly by low-income citizens whose concerns are often ignored by both media
and government.
I still maintain that the worst President in history (excluding possibly Woodrow
Wilson) was Bill Clinton (strongly influenced, no doubt, by Hillary.) Sure, the 90′s
were a great time in America, but Clinton's evil actions (signing NAFTA, the Crime Bill,
ignoring Bin Laden, and repealing Glass-Steagall to name just a few) had not yet come to
fruition.
Assuming the keen political insight Trump exhibited to get himself the job he sought still
exists, perhaps all this insane blather is proof it continues. Consider that the scene he
bought into is the product of 70 years of constant propaganda aimed at the American psyche
and how successful that has been.
Then imagine Trump feeding the ravenous American mindset for the status quo while actually
working around it. Brilliant! Then again, if he truly means what he says, all is lost.
Thank you Stephen Miller! He must be reading Peter Singer:
International support for countries bearing the greatest refugee burden also makes economic
sense: it costs Jordan about €3,000 ($3,350) to support one refugee for a year; in
Germany, the cost is at least €12,000.
Another threat to the Church is the illegal immigration control movement. If this movement
succeeds, and what is perceived by Latin Americans and other governments as an escape valve
is shut off, these governments would logically say, "Our demographic course cannot
continue." These governments would have little choice but to confront the Church and say,
"If we are to survive as governments, then we must get serious about population growth
control. Otherwise, we in Latin America are destined to become a sea of chaos. We, as Latin
Americans, must make family planning and abortion services fully available and encourage
their use." Turning off the valve to illegal immigration is therefore a serious threat to
the power of the Church.
President Trump's Message: Make The United Nations Great
In fact, he's strengthened our alliances in meetings in Washington with key allies, by
going to foreign capitals - the trip to France and the Bastille Day with America's
oldest ally, with which the United States has in recent years had something of a rocky
relationship – was strengthened enormously by that visit to Paris this year. And
the president has, you know, both on a personal level and on an alliance level, really
strengthened the alliance with France and with President Macron. In fact, he met with
him yesterday and had a very, extremely positive and friendly meeting where they talked
substantive business, but they also talked about the history of the alliance and reminisced
a bit about the grandeur of that trip to Paris in July.
The French president's suggestion that African women are breeding like animals and must
be restrained by an enlightened elite awakens primordial terrors in the hearts of the
mainstream Left and Right.
[...]
If Europeans are replaced with Africans, Western Civilization will disappear. The choices
are simple: The West, yes or no? The white race, yes or no? Our rulers have exhausted all
other options.
Peter Singer on How Political Correctness Let African Population Growth Run Amok for a
Generation
The outrage evoked by Macron's remark, however, appears to have little to do with its
inaccuracy. Macron violated a taboo that has been in place since the International
Conference on Population and Development, held under the auspices of the UN in Cairo in
1994. The conference adopted a Programme of Action that rejected a demographically driven
approach to population policies, and instead focused on meeting the reproductive-health
needs of individuals, especially women. Population targets were out; rights were in.
Don't lose hope
[...]
I shared this video here at the Unz Review before, but I would like to share it again,
because it best encapsulates and captures what I personally associate with term "Alt
Right"
"Step by step the US is getting closer to a civil war" That pretty much says it all.
All it will take is for US troops to get an unexpected butt kicking somewhere,
sometime.
Churchill himself, one of a long list of Anglo-genocidal killers (according to The Saker's
last post) admitted that, "The Red Army tore the guts out of The Wehrmacht." Is this even in
dispute?
In Russian thinking therefore, with only 20% contribution by American/UK Commonwealth
forces, we subtract that, and this is the diplomatic question. Why would Stalin's T34s not
have rolled up to The English Channel and installed compliant Communist regimes in
France/Belgium/Holland as they did in Eastern Europe?
They did the same in North Korea by installing the grandfather (Kim Il-Sung) of this young
'Rocket Man' in 1945 at the conclusion of the fighting against Japan in the far-east.
It is a very sad day to admin the neocon Kristof ( see Robert Parry evalution of this guy at
America's Journalistic Hypocrites – Consortiumnews
) is mostly right in his one year old Trump evaluation. Rephazing Oscar Wilde (
Notable quotes:
"... But while you voted for Trump because you put faith in his gauzy pledges, I bet he will do no better with campaign promises than with marriage vows. ..."
"... The biggest Trump bait-and-switch was visible Friday when he talked about giving Americans "access" to health care. That's a scam his administration is moving toward, with millions of Americans likely to lose health insurance: Instead of promising insurance coverage, Trump now promises " access " -- and if you can't afford it, tough luck. ..."
"... This promise of "access" is an echo of Marie Antoinette. In Trump's worldview, starving French peasants wouldn't have needed bread because they had "access" to cake. ..."
"... Let's not get distracted by his howls or tweets. What's most important at this moment is not Trump's theatrics, but the policies he is putting in place in areas like health care and immigration that will devastate the lives of ordinary Americans. ..."
"... The truth is that among the biggest losers from Trump policies will be you Trump voters, especially those of you from the working and middle class. You were hoping you'd elected a savior, and instead Donald Trump is doing to you what he did to just about everyone who ever trusted him: He's betraying you. ..."
You've been had. President Trump sold you a clunker. Now that he's in the White House, he's betraying you -- and I'm writing in
hopes that you'll recognize that betrayal and hold him accountable.
Trump spoke to your genuine pain, to the fading of the American dream, and he won your votes. But will he deliver? Please watch
his speeches carefully. You'll notice that he promises outcomes, without explaining how they'll be achieved. He's a carnival huckster
promising that America will thrive with his snake oil.
"We're going to win, we're going to win big, folks," Trump declared Friday at the CPAC meeting, speaking of his foreign policy.
Great! Problem solved. Next? He then outlined his take on drug trafficking and what will surely be his outcome:
"No good. No good. Going to stop." Wow! Why didn't anyone else think of that?
Similarly, all looks rosy for tax outcomes: "We're going to massively lower taxes on the middle class," Trump said.
But that seems like a classic shell game. The Tax Policy Center
estimated that
Trump's tax plan (to the extent that there is one) would hugely increase the federal debt and give middle-income households an average
tax cut of $1,010, or 1.8 percent of after-tax income -- while the top 1 percent would save $214,690, or 13.5 percent of after-tax
income.
Trump made more than 280 campaign promises as a candidate, and a few -- such as infrastructure spending to create jobs -- would
be sensible if done right. But there still is no infrastructure plan, and The Washington Post Fact Checker
is tracking
60 specific campaign promises and found only six cases so far of promises kept.
It's still early, and Trump has nominated a smart conservative to the Supreme Court and followed his campaign line on issues like
barring refugees.
But while you voted for Trump because you put faith in his gauzy pledges, I bet he will do no better with campaign promises
than with marriage vows.
Health care will be one of the greatest betrayals. On Friday, he described his plan: "We're going to make it much better, we're
going to make it less expensive."
Yet the steps that Republicans seem likely to take on health care will hurt ordinary Americans.
For example, Trump seems poised to weaken the
contraception
mandate for insurance coverage and curb funding for women's health clinics. The upshot will likely be more unintended pregnancies,
more abortions, more unplanned births -- and more women dying of cervical cancer.
The biggest Trump bait-and-switch was visible Friday when he talked about giving Americans "access" to health care. That's
a scam his administration is moving toward, with millions of Americans likely to lose health insurance: Instead of promising insurance
coverage, Trump now promises " access
" -- and if you can't afford it, tough luck.
This promise of "access" is an echo of Marie Antoinette. In Trump's worldview, starving French peasants wouldn't have needed
bread because they had "access" to cake.
Many of you voted for Trump because he campaigned as a populist. But instead of draining the swamp, he's wallowing in it and monetizing
the presidency. He retains his financial interests, refuses to release his taxes or explain what financial leverage Russia may have
over him, and doubled the fee to join Mar-a-Lago to $200,000.
The greatest betrayal of all will come if, as some of his
advisers
recommend , he "reforms" and tears holes in some of the big safety net programs like Medicaid, Social Security or Medicare. Medicaid
is particularly vulnerable.
Trump howls at the news media, not just because it embarrasses him, but because it provides an institutional check on his lies,
incompetence and conflicts of interest. But we can take his vitriol: When the time comes, we will write Trump's obituary, not the
other way around.
Let's not get distracted by his howls or tweets. What's most important at this moment is not Trump's theatrics, but the policies
he is putting in place in areas like health care and immigration that will devastate the lives of ordinary Americans.
Trump's career has often been built on scamming people who put their faith in him, as Trump University shows. Now he's moved the
scam to a much bigger stage, and he boasts of targeting Muslims, refugees and unauthorized immigrants.
Please don't cheer, or acquiesce in these initial targets. The truth is that among the biggest losers from Trump policies
will be you Trump voters, especially those of you from the working and middle class. You were hoping you'd elected a savior, and
instead Donald Trump is doing to you what he did to just about everyone who ever trusted him: He's betraying you.
The sooner you recognize that, the sooner you can fight back and push for policies that will protect your health care and Social
Security, defend the integrity of our election system and protect your own interests. You have a false savior, and you will have
to turn on him to save yourselves and our nation.
"... There is no indication that Bolton was aware that Cambridge Analytica was exploiting the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users -- but he was certainly aware that it was using an extensive trove of personal data to target voters ..."
"... What Bolton was paying Cambridge Analytica to do is, perhaps, more damning than his use of the shady data firm. "The Bolton PAC was obsessed with how America was becoming limp wristed and spineless and it wanted research and messaging for national security issues," Wylie told the Times . "That really meant making people more militaristic in their worldview," he added. ..."
"... "That's what they said they wanted, anyway." Cambridge Analytica produced fear-mongering advertisements aimed at drumming up support for Bolton and other hawkish Republicans. The relationship between the firm and the Super PAC grew "so close that the firm was writing up talking points" for Bolton after only a few months of collaboration. ..."
Speaking at CPAC in 2017, John Bolton boasted that his Super
PAC's implementation of "advanced psychographic data" would help elect "filibuster majorities"
in 2018. According to a New York Times
report published on Friday, Bolton's Super PAC paid $1.2 million to Cambridge Analytica,
the British firm that has come under scrutiny for its misuse of Facebook data to influence
voters. Bolton's Super PAC, moreover, was heavily funded by the Mercer family, who gave
millions to Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 presidential campaign.
There is no indication that Bolton was aware that Cambridge Analytica was exploiting the
personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users -- but he was certainly aware that it was
using an extensive trove of personal data to target voters. "The data and modeling Bolton's PAC
received was derived from the Facebook data," Christopher Wylie, the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica turned whistleblower, told the Times . "We definitely told them about how we
were doing it. We talked about it in conference calls, in meetings."
What Bolton was paying Cambridge Analytica to do is, perhaps, more damning than his use of
the shady data firm. "The Bolton PAC was obsessed with how America was becoming limp wristed
and spineless and it wanted research and messaging for national security issues," Wylie told
the Times . "That really meant making people more militaristic in their worldview," he
added.
"That's what they said they wanted, anyway." Cambridge Analytica produced fear-mongering
advertisements aimed at drumming up support for Bolton and other hawkish Republicans. The
relationship between the firm and the Super PAC grew "so close that the firm was writing up
talking points" for Bolton after only a few months of collaboration.
Further down the thread, 'Weakaspiss' makes a pertinent observation; " government has
forgotten they govern for all, and have a primary duty for those who are least able to
prosper."
In fact, they've "forgotten" nothing.
Instead, they've fallen for the self-serving blandishments of Libertarian dogma.
Where have I learned of these ?
By reading the posts of GA's resident Libertarians.
The sub-texts of which are wonderfully instructive.
1. Nothing is more important than the individual.
2. And as an individual and a Libertarian, I am infinitely superior to you.
3. Plus I resent paying taxes, which are outright theft.
4. Since I believe, utterly without basis in reality, that taxes levied on hard-working,
wonderful freedom-loving ME, sustain the likes of lazy, parasitical YOU.
5. Meanwhile, govt, if it cannot be destroyed, must always be demonised and underfunded. And
so-called 'programs of public benefit' for the parasites--like Medicare, or the ABC-- must be
sold outright to the private sector.
6. No I don't want to debate about it, if there's a chance I'll lose the argument.
My ego demands I win every time..
7. Certainly not with losers of lower social status, who were 'educated' in a union-run
public school.
8. And don't even come near me, losers. Yuk ! You're probably not even white !
9. Because I socialise only within my own tribe, thank you very much.
10. Besides, you're probably living off my taxes.
11. Did I mention taxes somewhere ?
12. Taxes are theft.
Our conservatives have "forgotten" NOTHING.
Instead, they've fallen for a sociopathic ideology which tells them their least attractive
impulses are positively praiseworthy.
Hence the nasty, ego-driven tone of current political life.
Injected directly into the bloodstream of our body politic by a Lying Rodent.
Its philosophy may be simply stated
Does your policy shit all over people you never cared for anyway ?
THEN DO IT.
Fascism is the word that most interests me when looking a the present trajectory in
Australia
We're not there yet
And there's no one on the government benches who's a new Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini
But the next generation ..............
They make me uncomfortable. Some of the younger and as yet unheralded apparatchiks on the
conservative fringe worry me. They're smart. Know the advertising and selling the message
strategies. Have money and are well connected to the barons/oligarchs who pull the strings
and they're ambitious.
Paradoxically a collapse of the Liberal Party will help them. In spite of it all we need a
fiscally conservative, slightly socially conservative political movement in Australia but the
drift to extremism is quite pronounced and profoundly worrying, especially in a time where
climate change poses existential questions about our future.
This next election will not be a cakewalk. It'll be as bitterly fought as any in a
generation and the consequences of a loss will be, for progressive forces, catastrophic.
"Although people with low expectations are easier to con, fomenting cynicism about democracy
comes at a long-term cost. Indeed, as the current crop of politicians is beginning to
discover, people with low expectations feel they have nothing to lose."..... Yes, but that's
part of the Devilish Plan: Why do you think that the Neoliberals and Conservatives spend so
much time nurturing their relationship with both Police and the Army?.... They want to be
sure that if their Neoliberal-Conservative project goes truly belly up, they will be the ones
holding the guns.
Yes, it's sinister.... it's dangerous.... it's a time bomb, and we can only defuse it with
the help of a majority of Australians waking up, standing up and Democratically vote against
Fascism.
"... Just yesterday Pieter Hoekstra, USA ambassador in the Netherlands, stated that Russia should be punished for MH17 by more sanctions, no new gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. What he did not say that this implies our buying of USA gas, 20% more expensive. The MH17 show, in my opinion is run like the Sept 11 show. Or even the holocaust show, constant reminders. ..."
"... The USA fear about Russia and the EU member states seems to be twofold: (1) more trade with Russia makes subjugation of Russia impossible; (2) more trade with Russia, and the railway connections with China, threaten to turn the USA into an economic backwater ..."
Antony C. Sutton, ´Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution', 1974 New Rochelle, N.Y.
describes how Wall Street supported bolshevism in order to prevent that German, suppose also Dutch and other, trade, with Russia
was resumed.
WWII and the aftermath created the Atlantic alliance.
Just yesterday Pieter Hoekstra, USA ambassador in the Netherlands, stated that Russia should be punished for MH17 by more
sanctions, no new gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. What he did not say that this implies our buying of USA gas, 20% more expensive.
The MH17 show, in my opinion is run like the Sept 11 show. Or even the holocaust show, constant reminders.
The USA fear about Russia and the EU member states seems to be twofold: (1) more trade with Russia makes subjugation of
Russia impossible; (2) more trade with Russia, and the railway connections with China, threaten to turn the USA into an economic
backwater
Another column by Girardi disconnected from reality and full of his bête noir, the
neocons.
Russia has long been a colonial power. It simply expanded into its near abroad and has
remained an empire in spite of the dissolution of the Tsarist/Soviet empire. Putin is just
another thug that has imperial desires and is willing to steal his people blind to realize
them. As a result, corruption runs rampant and the oligarchs enrich themselves at the expense
of the Russian people who have, historically, simply been sheep.
I haven't seen any hatred that Giraldi imagines, but I have seen fear in Putin's
neighbors, and concern in those who aren't nearby who hate to see people oppressed by thugs
like Putin. Putin has invaded Ukraine, stealing the Crimea, and attempting to gain a land
bridge by backing a fake revolt in the Donbas with Russian troops, mercenaries, and
equipment.
Putin is just another thug that has imperial desires and is willing to steal his people
blind to realize them.
Other than reliable sources like John Brennan, James Clapper, the New York Times
and the Washington Post , I presume you have evidence to share of this
Putin has invaded Ukraine,
and this.
stealing the Crimea
Two referenda are "stealing"?
a fake revolt in the Donbas with Russian troops, mercenaries, and equipment.
Well, the dead people in Donbas, and their families, would probably disagree it was fake,
particularly since the victim of the US coup d'etat (with its mercenaries) and rightful
President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich, was from Donbas. As for the allegations of Russian
troops and equipment, I return to my request for evidence.
The mystique of the European Union is anti-nationalism, based on the theory that "nations"
are bad because they caused the devastating wars of the twentieth century, while European
unification is the sole guarantee of "peace". Convinced of their mission, the Eurocentrists
have had no qualms in throwing out the baby of democratic choice along with the nationalist
bathwater.
The notion that "peace" depends on "Europe" persists despite the NATO bombing of Serbia and
European participation in U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, not to mention EU
participation in the current major military buildup in the Baltic States against "the Russian
enemy". Indeed, thanks to NATO, the EU is gearing for a war even worse than the previous
ones.
Since the "nation-state" is blamed for evil in the world, the Eurocentrists react with
horror at growing demands in Member States for a return to "national sovereignty". This,
however, is a natural reaction to the economic and social disasters resulting from policies
dictated by EU institutions in Brussels. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty legally bound member
countries to centralized neoliberal monetarist policies; not only "socialism" became illegal
– even Keynesianism was ruled out. Promised endless peace and prosperity, citizens of
European countries were cajoled into giving up their sovereignty to EU institutions, and many
now want it back.
Disillusioned Italy
Italian disillusion is particularly significant. Italy was an exceptionally enthusiastic
founding member of the unification begun with the 1957 Treaty of Rome. And yet, Italy's own
history illustrates what can go wrong with such unification, since the 19 th century
political creation of a unified Italy centered in Turin led to the enrichment of the industrial
north at the expense of southern Italy, where the splendor of Naples declined into chronic
poverty, crime and corruption. Now Italy is "the south", in the periphery of a European Union
centered around Germany.
Antagonism between North and South Italy has given way to a much stronger antagonism between
Italy and Germany – each blaming the other for the crisis.
It is only fair to recall that Germans were very attached to their Deutsche Mark and to
their own austere financial policies. Germany could only be lured into the common currency by
agreeing to let the euro follow German rules. France eagerly supported this concession based on
the notion that the common currency would unify Europe. It is doing quite the opposite.
Germany is a major exporting nation. Its trade with the rest of the EU is secondary. It uses
the EU as its hinterland as it competes and trades on the global scale with China, the United
States and the rest of the world. The proceeds of Germany's favorable EU trade balance is less
and less invested in those countries but in Germany itself or outside the EU. In the official
German view, the main function of the Southern EU members is to pay back their debts to
Germany.
Meanwhile, Italy's once flourishing industrial network has lost its competitive edge due to
the euro. It cannot save its exports by devaluation, as it was accustomed to doing. Italy's
debt is now 132% of its GNP, whereas the Maastricht Treaty governing the monetary union puts a
ceiling of 60% on national debt. And to continue paying the debt, public services are cut back,
the middle class is impoverished, the domestic market declines and the economy gets even
weaker.
This is precisely the situation that has plunged Greece into ever deepening poverty.
But Italy is not Greece. Greece is a small peripheral country, which can be pounded to death
by creditors as a warning of what can happen to others. Italy, on the contrary, is too big to
fail. Its collapse could bring the whole EU crashing down.
Italy's Potential Strength Through Weakness
The traditional Italian parties had no solution beyond those that have ruined Greece: cut
back social spending, impoverish workers and pensioners, and pay back the foreign banks, with
interest.
The odd coalition of the League and the M5S was obliged to try something different:
basically, to invest in the economy rather than abandon it to its creditors. Their program
combines lower taxes with Keynesian stimulation of investment. Since the leader of the League,
Matteo Salvini, and Luigi Di Maio of M5S do not like each other, they selected law professor
Giuseppe Conte to be Prime Minister in their coalition cabinet. The interesting choice was that
of Paolo Savona for the key post of Minister of Economy and Finance. Savona, whose long career
has taken him across the summits of Italian and international finance, was certainly the most
qualified choice imaginable. Savona knows everything there is to know about the Italian economy
and international currency creation.
And yet, it was the appointment of this 81-year-old expert that created outrage in the
Eurocenter.
The uproar was spurred by the fact that in one of his books Savona had described the euro as
"a German prison". Savona had also said it was necessary to prepare a Plan B, to leave the euro
if there is no other choice. "The alternative is to end up like Greece."
This hint of disloyalty to the euro was totally unacceptable to the European
establishment.
The Center struck back in the person of the largely figurehead President of Italy, Sergio
Mattarella, who used, or misused, his unique constitutional power by refusing to approve the
government. On May 28, he designated as Prime Minister Carlo Cottarelli of the International
Monetary Fund – a man who represented everything the Italians had just voted against.
Known in Italy as "Mr. Scissors" for his advocacy of drastic government spending cuts,
Cottarelli was supposed to run an apolitical "technical" government until new elections could
be held in the fall.
This coup against the Italian voters caused momentary rejoicing in the Authoritarian Center.
The European Budget Commissioner (a German of course), Günther Oettinger, was reported to
be gloating over the prospect that "the markets" (meaning the financial markets) would soon
teach Italians how to vote. Italy's economy "could be so drastically impacted", he said, as to
send a signal to voters "not to vote for populists on the right and left."
This simply intensified Italian indignation against "German arrogance".
Meanwhile Savona wrote a letter to President Mattarella which introduced a bit of cold
reason into an increasingly hysterical situation. He reminded the president that an important
meeting of EU heads of state was to be held at the end of June; without a political government,
Italy would be absent from negotiations which could seal the fate of the EU. Italy's plea for
economic change could expect French support. Savona denied having called for leaving the euro;
in the spirit of game strategy, he had mentioned the need for Plan B in order to strengthen
one's position before negotiations. He made it clear that his strategy was not to leave the
euro but to transform it into a genuine rival to the dollar.
"Germany prevents the euro from becoming 'an essential part of foreign policy', as the
dollar is for the United States", wrote Savona. But change becomes necessary, as the dollar is
less and less suitable for its role as world currency.
Indeed, the Italian crisis merges with a mounting trans-Atlantic crisis, the U.S. uses
sanctions as a weapon in competition with its European "partners". The paradox is that Italy
could use its very weakness to oblige Germany to reconsider its monetary policy in a moment
when the German economy is also facing problems due to U.S. sanctions on deals with Russia and
Iran, as well as protectionist measures. Savona's message was that clever diplomacy could work
to Italy's advantage. In its own interest, Germany may need to accept transformation of the
euro into a more proactive currency, able to defend European economies from U.S.
manipulation.
It was a matter of hours before Cottarella stepped back and a new M5S-League government was
formed, with Savona himself back as Minister of Relations with the European Union.
Italy's Double Jeopardy
The new Italian cabinet sworn in on June first is riven with contradictions. Despite all the
released anti-EU sentiment, it is definitely not an "anti-EU" government. Conte is back as
Prime Minister. The new foreign minister, Enzo Moavero Milnesi, is a staunch pro-European. As
Interior Minister, the northern Italy chauvinist Salvini – who doesn't even care
particularly for Southern Italians – will get tough with migrants. As Minister of
Economic Development, Di Maio will try to find ways improve conditions in the southern regions
that elected him. Since Salvini is the more experienced of the two, the League is likely to
profit from the experiment more than the M5S.
Some Italians warn that by leaving the "German prison" Italy would simply find itself even
more dependent on the United States.
One should never forget that ever since the end of World War II, Italy is an occupied
country, with dozens of U.S. military bases on its territory, including air bases with nuclear
weapons poised to strike the Middle East, Africa or even Russia. The Italian Constitution
outlaws participation in aggressive war, and yet Italian bases are freely used by the United
States to bomb whichever country it pleases, regardless of how Italians feel about it. Worst of
all, the U.S. used its Italian "NATO bases" to destroy Libya, a disaster for Italy which
thereby lost a valuable trade partner and found itself inundated with African refugees and
migrants. While international financial experts exhort Italy to cut government expenses, the
country is obliged by NATO to spend around 13 billion euros to buy 90 U.S. F-35 fighters and to
increase its military spending to around 100 million euros per day.
Italy's economic prospects have been badly hit by U.S.-enforced sanctions against trade with
Russia and Iran, important potential energy sources.
U.S. economic aggression, in particular Trump's rejection of the Iranian nuclear deal, is
the issue with the potential to bring European leaders together at a time when they were
drifting apart. But at present, the Europeans are unable to defy U.S. sanctions in punishment
for trade with those countries because their international dealings are in dollars. This has
already led to U.S. exacting billions of dollars in fines from the biggest French and German
banks, the BNP and Deutsche Bank, for trading that was perfectly legal under their own laws.
The French petroleum giant has been obliged to abandon contracts with Iran because 90% of its
trade is in dollars, and thus vulnerable to U.S. sanctions. And that is why the idea is growing
of building financial instruments around the euro that can protect European companies from U.S.
retaliation. [2] See Wolfgang
Münchau, "The euro must be made more robust to rival the dollar; US sanctions expose the
mistakes made by the founders of the single currency", The Financial Times, 27 May, 2018.
https://www.ft.com/content/ca8c6826-5f76-11e8-ad91-e...56df68
The Disappearance of the Left
The disappearance of left political forces has been almost total in Italy. There are many
reasons for this, but a curable part of the problem has been the inability of what remains of
the left to face up to the two main current issues: Europe and immigration.
The left has so thoroughly transformed its traditional internationalism into Europism that
it has been unable to recognize EU institutions and regulations as a major source of its
problems. The stigmatization of "the nation" as aggressively nationalistic has held back left
ability to envisage and advocate progressive policies at the national level, instead putting
its hopes forever in a future hypothetical "social Europe". Such a transformation would require
unanimity under EU rules – politically impossible with 28 widely differing Member
States.
Without such inhibitions, the far right capitalizes on growing discontent.
Another related handicap of the left is its inability to recognize that mass immigration is
indeed "a problem" – especially in a country like Italy, with a flagging economy and 20%
official unemployment (although this figure is probably too high, considering undeclared
labor). There is resentment that prosperous Germany issued a general invitation to refugees,
which for geographic reasons pile in Mediterranean countries unable to cope. The mass influx of
economic migrants from Africa is not even "taking jobs away from" Italians – the jobs are
not there to take. These migrants fled war and misery to come to Europe in order to earn money
to send back to their families, but how can they meet possibly meet these expectations?
It is all very well to extol the glorious hospitality of America entreating the world to "
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched
refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me ". Such
generosity was suited to a new nation with huge empty spaces and rapidly growing industry in
need of a work force. The situation of a "full" nation in a time of economic downturn is quite
different. What is to become of the tens of thousands of vigorous young men arriving on Italian
shores where there is nothing for them to do except sell African trinkets on the sidewalks of
tourist centers? To make matters worse, the great contemporary thrust of technical innovation
aims at replacing more and more workers with robots. Leftist denial of the problem leaves its
exploitation and resolution to the extreme right.
Some leftist politicians in Italy, such as Stefano Fassina of the Sinistra Italiana
are waking up to this need. A left that dogmatically ignores the real concerns of the people is
doomed. A bold, honest, imaginative left is needed to champion Italians' independence from both
German-imposed austerity and the expensive military adventurism demanded by the United States.
But the interlaced problems created by unregulated globalization do not lend themselves to easy
solutions.
Notes
[1] David Adler,
"Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists", The New York Times, May 23,
2018.
Italy's primary problem is not the euro per se. It isn't even the much talked about
"proliferagacy". Italy has in fact run a primary surplus for most of the last 20 years
(primary surplus is the government budgetary balance sans interest payments). Italy's main
problem is the disastrous lack of productivity.
Its per capita productivity growth has actually declined by 0.1% the last 20 years,
versus around 0.7% positive growth for Germany and 0.6% for France. What explains this?
Supply side factors. Italy has many large-scale firms which are world-class. This leads a
naïve observer to conclude that the problem lies elsewhere.
Scratch the surface a little bit, and you'll find that the main problem for Italy is in
the SME sector. The comparison with the German Mittelstand is relevant here. Though many
German firms are still family-owned, they nevertheless have a significant amount of
meritocracy. Family scions frequently take on more ceremonial roles if they can find a
competent outsider to run large parts of the company. By contrast, Italian SMEs are much more
nepotistic. Italy also has far less labour mobility, meaning that the potential pool
of labour that a local company can draw from is quite limited.
There is therefore no easy solution. Devaluation is not a panacea. Italy is running a
current account surplus already. Their problem is lack of growth, which in turn is rooted in
supply-side factors.
There's a good paper by Luigi Zingales of University of Chicago (himself an Italian) as
you can surmise. He writes a lot of what I've outlined in greater detail if anyone is
interested in diving deeper:
The take-away is that there is no simple solution, Italy's problems are deep, structural
and tied to their social organisation. Devaluation, while tempting, would not fix these
issues and given that Italy is already running a current account surplus, it is hard to make
the case for one. Their exports is already competitive. Their debt problem stems from lack of
growth, not persistent budget deficits (mostly running a primary surplus for past few
decades).
Just to illustrate the point about the myth of 'profligate' Italy.
The problem is lack of growth, not lack of fiscal discpline. And the lack of growth is
rooted in deeply entrenched supply-side structural patterns, which changing the currency (or
letting it devalue) will do nothing to fix.
The interesting thing is that it is in Italy the same as in France, both what is called
extreme left, Mélenchon, and extreme right, Marine le Pen, are against the EU.
In the first round of the presidential elections Mélenchon and Le Pen together got 40%
of the votes.
In Italy now what is called extreme left and extreme right together formed a government.
Brussels fears for the euro.
They're quite right, the southern European countries, including France, have a long histories
of solving economic problems by devaluation, made impossible by the euro.
As the retired German sociologist Seeckt, retired men can speak their minds, says 'the big
mistake of the EU was (and is, my opinion) that the northern EU countries said to the
southern "become like us" '.
Cultures change very slowly, in France traces of the Louis XIV reign can still be found, a
love of bureaucracy.
In about 1973 an Italian consultant said to me 'there is only one way to solve our
problems, sell our civil servants for what they cost, and buy them back for what they're
worth'.
World Values Survey results indicate that in Europe and the United States, people who
describe themselves as "centrist" on the average have less attachment to democracy (e.g.
free and fair elections) that those on the left, and even those on the far right
I find this article sort of weird. And the above statement is based on this -- ->David
Adler, "Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists", The New York Times, May
23, 2018
Which is based on this -- -> http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV6.jsp
And theses questions: ..which are totally sloppy. For instance question V138. 'People obey
their rulers. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.' is a ridiculous kindergarten question. A 'serious'
question on the value of democracy would have been "People obey the (rule of) law", not
'rulers'. Sorry, this is junk in which evidently those who didnt go for 1 or 2 or 9 or 10
were categorized as centrist and you and Adler somehow interpreted that as the problem.
Then you proceed to say .."Leftist denial of the problem leaves its exploitation and
resolution to the extreme right.'
And that .'A bold, honest, imaginative left is needed to champion Italians' independence from
both German-imposed austerity and the expensive military adventurism demanded by the United
States. '
So what is your point? .That 'centrist' should move to the left to solve your
problems?
The survey questions:
[MORE]
"I'm going to describe various types of political systems and ask what you think about
each as a way of
governing this country. For each one, would you say it is a very good, fairly good, fairly
bad or very bad
way of governing this country? (Read out and code one answer for each):
Very
good
Fairly
good
Fairly
bad
Very bad
V127. Having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections
1
2
3
4
V128. Having experts, not government, make decisions
according to what they think is best for the country
1
2
3
4
V129. Having the army rule
1
2
3
4
V130. Having a democratic political system
1
2
3
4
(Show Card T)
Many things are desirable, but not all of them are essential characteristics of democracy.
Please tell me for
each of the following things how essential you think it is as a characteristic of
democracy. Use this scale
where 1 means "not at all an essential characteristic of democracy" and 10 means it
definitely is "an
essential characteristic of democracy" (read out and code one answer for each):
Not an essential An essential
characteristic characteristic
of democracy of democracy
V131. Governments tax the rich and subsidize the poor. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
V132. Religious authorities ultimately interpret the laws. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
V133. People choose their leaders in free elections. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
V134. People receive state aid for unemployment. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
V135. The army takes over when government is incompetent. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
V136. Civil rights protect people from state oppression. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
V137. The state makes people's incomes equal. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
V138. People obey their rulers. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
V139 Women have the same rights as men.
Good analysis of the reasons the left has declined. I do not see them changing course, but
rather doubling down. In Spain, Podemos wants to have universal basic income (or something
close to it) AND open borders
For a generation, acceptance of the neoliberal doctrine "there is no alternative" has
paralyzed politics in the West. If there is no alternative, what is politics to be
about?
What is politics to be about? Why, tranny bathrooms, of course!
Not being any kind of an economist and in general mistrusting economy as a wannabe science, I
would just take a compass, find the economic center point of EU and draw a circle. Whatever
is far from the center will face problems because in unification the center develops faster
than the outskirts. The traditional solution to this dilemma is to have borders (no
unification) since borders create a micro-economy that can function in its limits (better
than outskirts of an unified economy) just like animal species can survive if there are
natural barriers but removing them many species die out. Another alternative is to pack your
bags and move closer to the center.
I agree with much of this. But a quibble when you say that the EU was created out of a desire
to remove the evil of nationalism and create peace. That's the lipstick on the pig. The EU
was and is entirely devoted to boosting the profits of the super-rich, and putting big
finance in charge. The push against nationalism has nothing to do with peace, and only
because nationalism will tend to fight against the strip-mining of a society for profit. And
massive immigration was never a moral issue, neither today nor in the America of a century
ago. It was all about cheap labor and the massive profits that flow therefrom. Even with all
those resources, mass immigration in the United States at the end of the 19th and beginning
of the 20th centuries, created crushing poverty and a massive spike in crime. It was only
after the borders had been closed, after the shock of the Wall Street crash in 1929 (no, NOT
1924), and there was an immigration time-out, that America developed its prosperous middle
class. Which hurt profits for the rich, which is why it is being rolled back
LOL. Yes, there's a wedge issue a thinking man can sink his teeth into.
SCOTUS just reignited another one by surprisingly getting a case right, 7-2, in finding
for religious liberty and the baker who didn't want to do a wedding cake for poofters. I seem
to recall Tucker Carlson feeling the wrath and fury of all MSM for daring to suggest that the
baker had a legitimate constitutional issue.
Breyer and Kagan voted with the Republican/goy majority. Kagan, of course, regularly gets
offered up as the embodiment of in-your-face liberal-feminist-Jewish rule, but the couple of
opinions I've read by her suggested a pretty good legal mind, possibly tempered by some
common sense.
In any case, yes, identity politics provide the MSM with all the wedge issue substance
needed for the American public discourse. Europe, however, may have some remaining
expectations of adult content.
These "problems" are 100% within the context of the neoliberal consensus. The idea that we
have to have 2-3% annual growth – forever – or the world will somehow be
devastatingly awful is not a very sound foundation for a Good life.
That fiscal discipline you speak of is a significant factor in Italy's lack of growth.
Furthermore, it was designed and implemented for precisely that reason.
Their (Italy's) problem is lack of growth, which in turn is rooted in supply-side
factors
That is a fallacy that lies at the heart of the current European crisis. (I agree with the
other things you wrote.). It is not the 'supply', but lacking demand that is constraining
growth. All supply and higher productivity solutions are based on more 'flexible' labor,
removal of barriers, including borders, more 'competition' in everything. That translates in
practise into working more for less .
It had worked initially in the 70′s to 90′s when the entrenched inefficiency
was the main issue. It hasn't worked in the last 10-15 years. Suggesting more 'supply and
higher productivity' reforms simply means doubling down on policies that are failing. What is
needed is a huge shift in the labor markets toward more demand for workers so they can
improve their work lives, raise incomes, create more economic security. What Europe (and
West in general) need is a very tight labor market. By all means, cut and simplify taxes,
abandon austerity, promote some inflation, but the main reform that is needed is to restrict
outside labor migration and simultaneously restrict outflow of work. That is explicitly anti
neo-liberalism, it is also at the heart of the populist appeal.
Left has completely lost its way with its inability to distinguish between its local
voters and the feel-good charity towards the rest of the world. They are in effect being used
by the most anti-left business interests to keep labor as cheap as possible. Power to
negotiate doesn't come from institutions – it comes from having a strong hand in the
labor demand-supply equation.
Given the left collapse, the future is with the nationalist political forces. Trump
understands it, so does Salvini, La Pen, Orban, The names might change, but unless democracy
is completely abolished the 'selfish', restrict cheap labor politicians will eventually
prevail.
Please help me understand the implications of your comment.
Are you implying support for government debt fuelled expenditures as in Greece before the
GFC – or Argentina time and again?
Are you really saying the EU's (?EZ's) fiscal discipline rules were designed so that Italy
(and maybe some and what other country?) would have lower growth in economic activity? If so
why? And designed and intended by what persons?
Lot of people still think Keynes is wrong because its used as an excuse to tax and spend.
He wasn't wrong about the fact that fiance matters. Neither was Kalecki and neither was
Irving Fischer wrong that fiance matters after figuring out his disastrous mistake. Even
Thomas Mun understood money needs to circulate. Seems like Europe thinks the idea's of the
Spanish empire are best. Hoard coin.
It seems to me that the issue boils down to this:
- Capitalism seeks to concentrate capital and maximize profits;
- Communism seeks to concentrate capital, albeit in a different form than capitalism and
minimize profits.
- Efficiency means low cost and/or poorly made, and competition is no longer local, its
global.
- Free trade has replace fair trade.
The economic system in place today is not sustainable. In the not so distant past,
products exported had to have an internal market, or they were considered "dumped" into the
market at artificially low prices. tariffs were imposed for dumping. Today, electronic
products, such as alarm clocks, which are made in Asia, are dumped into the American market.
The electrical systems in Asia are incompatible with the 110v 60hz system in the US.
Ice hockey equipment is made in that global ice hockey powerhouse, Mauritius, as are winter
parkas and mitts. Cars produced in Japan include models for export that would not fit on the
roads in Japan. The list of these types of productions is endless. De-regulation has produced
20th and 21st century sweatshops in areas like call-centres, which are fast becoming
off-shored.
Local and national producers have been eliminated due to ending import duties to protect
internal companies. The set up has shifted taxation on imported goods to income taxes and
business taxes.
The narrative says competition is good, and higher production means lower cost to the
consumer. That only works when the competition is on a level playing field, and I'm employed
to be able to buy what is on offer. As for consumer products, how many TVs or refrigerators
do I really need? Korea has the capacity to supply all of the world's automobiles. Over
supply is rampant.
So, who really benefits? Those who seek to concentrate the wealth, and have the capability
to transfer out of the country, the value of a smaller (economic) country's GDP, with the
push of a button. When it all collapses they'll be off on their private islands or hiding in
their bastions.
On another note, yes, Italy is occupied, but so is Germany. The current German government,
according to a 1956 Constitutional Court ruling is not the legitimate government of Germany.
The "Old" Reich i.e. Wiemar Republic is. Therefore, it is an occupation government of the
Allies.
As if we didn't understand that.
A lot of bad assumptions and conclusions in this article.
Matteo Salvini has been supported by the southerners as well as the northerners because he is
defending Italy and Italians from the Globalists and their hordes invading Italy and DiMaio
and the MS5 agree with him and gave him the Interior ministry to handle it. But he still gets
a lot of resistance from the controlled globalist press. Go Salvini!
And the problem is, that Italy lacks competitiveness on a global scale. It's a puppet-home
perspective (and zero-sum-reasoning) to argue, that German exports are the reason, that
Italin exports declined. – Look at delivery cars, for example. something now even
Italian customers by more and more in Asia (once, this was a quasi monopoly, because it was
just something everybody did, to buy Italian Vans. – Even that is eroding now. And look
at -look at what you want in Italy consumer products, industrial products,
Meanwhile, Italy's once flourishing industrial network has lost its competitive edge due
to the euro.
So – this is a complete hoax, in the end. Especially since Italy is drowned in cheap
money – except that most of it is not invested, nowadays, but used to pay – for
the pensions, for social security, for univeristies the Police
Meanwhile in rome: The local authorities tell the public, that there are "missing busses"
at RomaTransporti or however th correct name of thsi fabulous enterprise is. Story is true
though: There are at least dozens 8some say:Hundreds!) of buses, which exist only in the
paperwork
"The idea that we have to have 2-3% annual growth – forever – or the world
will somehow be devastatingly awful is not a very sound foundation for a Good life."
Growth in GDP per capita is sustainable provided excess population is disposed of, which,
historically, it always has been via conflict. A world without war and the sanctity of human
life are the ideas in opposition here.
Centrist is a focus group tested term used to hide what a Centrist actually is. Neither
Center Right nor Center Left has ANY ideology. A Centrist seeks/holds office to receive money
from rent seekers. Nothing else.
Bottom line, IMHO:
A good idea (EU) failed because power corrupts.
A bad idea (nationalism) is coming up. Won't be pretty, especially there.
As
Growth in GDP per capita is sustainable provided excess population is disposed of,
which, historically, it always has been via conflict. A world without war and the sanctity
of human life are the ideas in opposition here.
Nobody is willing, apparently, to address the real issue:
Automation, overproduction, mass of people not needed as workers/employers anymore.
The nature of (modern/future) work, DISTRIBUTION of produced good and services, organization
of such society, etc.
Nationalism is regression into known.
We need a change of a full paradigm. Pass too hard.
Looking at the mix of "people" and "leaders" I go for a decent bloodshed as the most
likely option, hopefully not within next 10 years.
Hopefully.
From what other authors say, and what seems far more reasonable, demand has collapsed
because the corporate locust is doing the same thing they are doing in America, namely
destroying the entire industrial base and leaving a wasteland of debt and unemployment. Add
to that an inability to have a monetary policy and it's game over:
Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, a former chairman of Ferrari, Fiat and Alitalia, and now a
public enemy because of his dismissal of the "Made in Italy" label, acquired both companies
and moved them to Turkey, choosing profit over quality -- and Italian jobs. Montezemolo, of
aristocratic background, is a champion of Italian neoliberalism, having founded the
influential "free market" think tank Italia Futura (Future Italy) in 2009.
"Capital osmosis" is well known fact in economic science, and it means that, inside one
limited area, profit always runs from the "lower capitally equipped" sides to higher ones.
That is the reason why countries always take the money from rich sides and give it to poorer
ones. The truth isn't that poor part of nation works less, or that is stupid or unorganized;
no, the truth is in that "osmosis".
"... The neocons believe in only two things. First, that the United States is the sole world superpower, given license by something like a Divine Entity to exercise global leadership by force if necessary. That has been translated to the public as "American exceptionalism." Indeed, U.S. interventionism in practice has been by force majeure preferably as it leaves little room for debate or discussion. And the second neocon guiding principle is that everything possible must be done to protect and promote Israel. Absent these two beliefs, you do not have a neocon. ..."
"... Just yesterday Pieter Hoekstra, USA ambassador in the Netherlands, stated that Russia should be punished for MH17 by more sanctions, no new gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. What he did not say that this implies our buying of USA gas, 20% more expensive. The MH17 show, in my opinion is run like the Sept 11 show. Or even the holocaust show, constant reminders. ..."
"... The USA fear about Russia and the EU member states seems to be twofold: (1) more trade with Russia makes subjugation of Russia impossible; (2) more trade with Russia, and the railway connections with China, threaten to turn the USA into an economic backwater ..."
"... Precisely. US could eventually (20-30 years from now) turn into a country similar to many Latin American countries: rich in resources, demographically messy and ungovernable, weak infrastructure, but above all remote and quasi-provincial. ..."
"... The 'Atlanticist' project is meant to forestall the provincial Latin American future. Washington does have some tools: dollar domination, military force, Hollywood, technology. But none of those are necessarily sustainable without also actively messing up Euro-Russia-China economic convergence. It might require a war to delay the inevitable slow descend into a backwater across the Atlantic. ..."
"... Here's Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, in an article for the NY Times, titled "Memoirs of a Trotskyist:" "I was graduated from City College in the spring of 1940, and the honor I most prized was the fact that I was a member in good standing of the Young People's Socialist League (Fourth International). This organization was commonly, and correctly, designated as Trotskyist (not "Trotskyite," which was a term used only by the official Communists, or "Stalinists" as we called them, of the day)" ..."
"... Here's a good PBS movie lauding these "intellectuals:" http://www.pbs.org/arguing/about.html ..."
"... There are probably five big reasons for all the Russia hate: ..."
"... 1. Keep the fracturing United States together by focusing on an external aggressor. ..."
"... 2. Keep the Europeans in line by making them afraid of the Russians. ..."
"... 3. This: "There are a huge number of cuckservatives who still think it is 1980. It isn't just neocons, but just about any cold-war cuckservative" -- geezer boomers who are having an end-of-life crisis. ..."
"... To some extent you're mistaking your target here. I'll readily agree the neo-cons amount to a Zionist cabal bent on perverting US conservatism into a tool to serve Israel. On the other hand, I think that spectacular figures dating from 1920 concerning Jews and Bolshevism should be checked. ..."
"... Jewish sympathy for Communism causes and is caused by Jewish antipathy to nationalism ..."
"... For example a piece in the Washington Post by Joseph Kraft of the ADA on the occasion of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia advised non-intervention on the grounds that Communism wasn't so bad: it kept a lid on ancient ethnic hatreds. I have heard this line from many apologists for eastern European Communism. ..."
"... The anti-nationalist agenda dovetails with the liberal views of Jews on social issues, since the EU and NATO have become enforcers of political correctness, while the politically incorrect traditional attitudes of Slavic countries would likely be defended by nationalist parties. Many Jews would like to see ethnic Russians and their Orthodox church again subjugated or at least marginalized with a fellow Jew like Garry Kasparov in charge, and they aren't too keen on Catholicism either. ..."
"... It's unfortunate that the role of ethnic animosity in the panic over detente cannot be mentioned in polite society. It is the only factor that explains the datum of near-universal Jewish antipathy to Russia beginning after the collapse of Communism ..."
"... my opinion is that most such groups were used at the time by the national police and by the CIA to oppose people with more serious ideas, and the support for such groups at the time by CIA etc. in the U.S.A and in Europe is making serious cultural and sometimes violent (I see photos of Antlfa morons, etc., direct descendants) blowback. ..."
"... I think that people can be inclined to claim that everyone they don't like is a Jew. I also think that while Jews were certainly disproportionately represented among the Bolsheviks and the leftist revolutionary movements of the early twentieth century in general, these movements weren't overwhelmingly Jewish, nor even necessarily mostly Jewish except in the case of Hungary. ..."
"... With all due respect, current Russia-bashing in the US is not an issue of Jews vs non-Jews. It's more about the direct contradictions of the interests of the US as a country with those of the US as an Empire. It is in the best interests of the US as a country to maintain good working relationship with Russia, China, and others, both to achieve economic prosperity and to solve complex international problems. However, as an Empire, the US does not tolerate anyone refusing to toe the line, be it Russia, China, Iran, Syria, or even Venezuela. The fact that the US Empire is in decline makes its policy less and less rational, more and more hysterical. That's how all dominant Empires ended: not so much by being destroyed by opponents, but because of suicidal overreach. ..."
First of all not all neocon are Jews and not all jews are neocons. neocons are first and
foremost lobbyists for MIC. This job does not require any ethic component. but it is very
attractive for intellectuals who are not good for anything else, including many Jewish
intellectuals ( Max Boot is
a nice example of this trend; Rephrasing Tucker Carlson remark we can say that he is a neocon
because he does not want to paint houses ;-)
Also the role on Jews in Russia during Perestroika and the dissolution of the USSR was
enhanced by the fact that they were one of the few with strong connection to relatives in the USA
who emigrated earlier under the USA pressure and this they have larger financial resources to
operate with which was of tremendous importance during privatization. It is unclear how many of
them were simply puppets of foreign interests, not an independent players. For example William
Browder was probably closely connected to MI6.
It would interesting to see on the USA in 30 years -- in 2050. I wish I would be one of those
people who do understand what is going on and were the USA is moving. I am not. The worst outcome
based on current trends is that in 30 years from now the USA might turn into a country similar to
large Latin American countries: demographically messy and ungovernable, with weak infrastructure,
but above all quasi-provincial. Looks like the the US neoliberal elite (including Silicon Valley
techno-elite) now tenaciously cling to the idea of "world superpower" and at the core that means
maintaining technology superiority along with the controlling oil and gas deposits, first of all
in the Middle Easts (with Israel and Saudi help) as well as weakening and, possibly, dismembering
of Russia and China as two dangerous competitors alliance between which is very undesirable
outcome for the USA and can make the USA irrelevant for Europe. Euromaidan was an important step
in this direction on Russia front, a bold and brilliant political move if you ask me. Poor
Ukrainians do not understand how they were played.
Having just returned from a trip to Russia, I am pleased to report that the Russian people
and the officialdom that I encountered displayed none of the vitriol towards Americans that I
half expected as a response to the vilifying of Moscow and all its works that pervades the U.S.
media and Establishment. To be sure, many Russians I spoke with were quick to criticize the
Trump Administration for its hot and cold performance vis-à-vis the bilateral ties to
Moscow while also expressing mystification over why the relationship had gone south so quickly,
but this anger over foreign policy did not necessarily translate into contempt for the American
people and way of life that characterized the Soviet period. At least not yet.
Somewhat to my surprise, ordinary Russians were also quick to openly criticize President
Vladimir Putin for his autocratic tendencies and his willingness to continue to tolerate
corruption, but everyone I spoke to also conceded that he had generally acted constructively
and had greatly improved life for ordinary people. Putin remains wildly popular.
One question that came up frequently was "Who is driving the hostility towards Russia?" I
responded that the answer is not so simple and there are a number of constituencies that, for
one reason or another, need a powerful enemy to justify policies that would otherwise be
unsustainable. Defense contractors need a foe to justify their existence while congressmen need
the contractors to fund their campaigns. The media needs a good fearmongering story to help
sell itself and the public also is accustomed to having a world in which terrible threats lurk
just below the horizon, thereby increasing support for government control of everyday life to
keep everyone "safe."
And then there are the neocons. As always, they are a distinct force for creative
destruction, as they put it, certainly first in line with their hands out to get the funding of
their no-expenses-spared foundations and think tanks, but also driven ideologically, which has
made them the intellectual vanguard of the war party. They provide the palatable intellectual
framework for America to take on the world, metaphorically speaking, and constitute the strike
force that is always ready to appear on television talk shows or to be quoted in the media with
an appropriate intelligent sounding one liner that can be used to justify the unthinkable. In
return they are richly rewarded both with money and status.
The neocons believe in only two things. First, that the United States is the sole world
superpower, given license by something like a Divine Entity to exercise global leadership by
force if necessary. That has been translated to the public as "American exceptionalism."
Indeed, U.S. interventionism in practice has been by force majeure preferably as it leaves
little room for debate or discussion. And the second neocon guiding principle is that
everything possible must be done to protect and promote Israel. Absent these two beliefs, you
do not have a neocon.
The founding fathers of neoconism were New York Jewish "intellectuals" who evolved (or
devolved) from being bomb throwing Trotskyites to "conservatives," a process they self-define
as "idealism getting mugged by reality." The only reality is that they have always been faux
conservatives, embracing a number of aggressive foreign policy and national security positions
while also privately endorsing the standard Jewish liberal line on social issues. Neocon
fanaticism on the issues that they do promote also suggests that more that a little of the
Trotskyism remains in their character, hence their tenacity and ability to slither between the
Democratic and Republican parties while also appearing comfortably on disparate media outlets
considered to be either liberal or conservative, i.e. on both Fox news and MSNBC programs
featuring the likes of Rachel Maddow.
Antony C. Sutton, ´Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution', 1974 New Rochelle, N.Y.
describes how Wall Street supported bolshevism in order to prevent that German, suppose also
Dutch and other, trade, with Russia was resumed.
WWII and the aftermath created the Atlantic alliance.
Just yesterday Pieter Hoekstra, USA ambassador in the Netherlands, stated that Russia
should be punished for MH17 by more sanctions, no new gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
What he did not say that this implies our buying of USA gas, 20% more expensive. The MH17
show, in my opinion is run like the Sept 11 show. Or even the holocaust show, constant
reminders.
The USA fear about Russia and the EU member states seems to be twofold: (1) more trade
with Russia makes subjugation of Russia impossible; (2) more trade with Russia, and the
railway connections with China, threaten to turn the USA into an economic backwater
more trade with Russia, and the railway connections with China, threaten to turn the USA
into an economic backwater
Precisely. US could eventually (20-30 years from now) turn into a country similar to
many Latin American countries: rich in resources, demographically messy and ungovernable,
weak infrastructure, but above all remote and quasi-provincial.
The 'Atlanticist' project is meant to forestall the provincial Latin American future.
Washington does have some tools: dollar domination, military force, Hollywood, technology.
But none of those are necessarily sustainable without also actively messing up
Euro-Russia-China economic convergence. It might require a war to delay the inevitable slow
descend into a backwater across the Atlantic.
It's not quite a secret. The fact is just hidden by the neocons and their enablers. They
used to trumpet it, though. There's a quite robust body of evidence, including the principals
themselves celebrating their communism, that shows the founders of neo-conservatism, Irving
Kristol, et al were communists. Moreover, they were communists of the international
revolution variety -- the flavor known as Trotskyism.
Here's Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, in an article for the NY
Times, titled "Memoirs of a Trotskyist:" "I was graduated from City College in the spring of
1940, and the honor I most prized was the fact that I was a member in good standing of the
Young People's Socialist League (Fourth International). This organization was commonly, and
correctly, designated as Trotskyist (not "Trotskyite," which was a term used only by the
official Communists, or "Stalinists" as we called them, of the day)"
Here's a chart, helpfully prepared by the Washington Post, tracing the genealogy of
neocons:
I am currently reading "The Revolution Betrayed" by Trotsky. Trying to understand this
Trotsky neocon link better and to determine to what extent it makes sense. One connection is
certain: (1) Trotsky was completely insane. (2) Neocons are completely insane.
The Communist diaspora in Europe and America was also largely Jewish, including the
cabal of founders of neoconservativism in New York City. The United States Communist Party
was from the start predominantly Jewish. It was in the 1930s headed by Jew Earl Browder,
grandfather of the current snake oil salesman Bill Browder, who has been sanctimoniously
proclaiming his desire to punish Vladimir Putin for various alleged high crimes.
Earl Browder was not, so far as I know, born a Jew. While living in the Soviet Union he
married a Russian Jewess named Raisa Berkman. One of their sons, Felix, married another
Jewess, Eva Tislowitz, and Bill Browder was their son. He is matrilineally Jewish.
Apart from this minor quibble, the description of Bill Browder's career seems quite
accurate.
There are probably five big reasons for all the Russia hate:
1. Keep the fracturing United States together by focusing on an external
aggressor.
2. Keep the Europeans in line by making them afraid of the Russians.
3. This: "There are a huge number of cuckservatives who still think it is 1980. It
isn't just neocons, but just about any cold-war cuckservative" -- geezer boomers who are
having an end-of-life crisis.
4. Greed. Russia has natural resources and wishes to export them to competing markets,
undercutting our Ruling Class's cut.
5. Russia is traditionally white and nominally Christian, socially conservative. Leftists
beat up on Russia as a proxy for beating up on traditional white Americans. Back when Russia
started their anti-gay thing, American leftists went nuts on them. Of course, Saudi Arabia is
much worse but we didn't hear anything about them because they aren't white and being
critical in such a case would be waycist.
To some extent you're mistaking your target here. I'll readily agree the neo-cons
amount to a Zionist cabal bent on perverting US conservatism into a tool to serve Israel. On
the other hand, I think that spectacular figures dating from 1920 concerning Jews and
Bolshevism should be checked.
Jewish sympathy for Communism causes and is caused by Jewish antipathy to
nationalism on the part of gentiles. Many articles written during the Cold War attest to
the Jewish fear that the demise of Communism would unleash anti-Semitism. For example a
piece in the Washington Post by Joseph Kraft of the ADA on the occasion of the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia advised non-intervention on the grounds that Communism wasn't so
bad: it kept a lid on ancient ethnic hatreds. I have heard this line from many apologists for
eastern European Communism.
The anti-nationalist agenda dovetails with the liberal views of Jews on social issues,
since the EU and NATO have become enforcers of political correctness, while the politically
incorrect traditional attitudes of Slavic countries would likely be defended by nationalist
parties. Many Jews would like to see ethnic Russians and their Orthodox church again
subjugated or at least marginalized with a fellow Jew like Garry Kasparov in charge, and they
aren't too keen on Catholicism either.
It's unfortunate that the role of ethnic animosity in the panic over detente cannot be
mentioned in polite society. It is the only factor that explains the datum of near-universal
Jewish antipathy to Russia beginning after the collapse of Communism . I hope this taboo
is successfully challenged going forward, since, as a Christian, I am grateful for Russia as
the only Christian power left in the world.
I once found a real great Web page with a great graph, kind of a family tree of the
various western Trot. groups at the time.
It was bizarre, but did not include the neocons, I suppose that was reasonable because it
was only of claimed affiliates to the nonsensical 'Fourth International'.
Also not comprehensive, did not include the minor parties and groupuscules in Japan and
Europe of the boomer gen. , nor the earlier Viet Trots. nor Sri Lanka, the only place they
ever obtained political power except as agents in the shadows.
Of course, they have enormous power in the shadows in the state media in many places, EU,
cabinets in many European nations, etc. Even without that, the chart and attached notes are
bizarre enough.
The 'ite' 'ist' distinction among Trots is not just as you describe, they use it among
themselves, too, at least in English, as one was explaining to me. Understood the words, not
understanding the content at all.
Avoid Trots, their parties (as in social events) are miserable, and their households are
like those of the worst cult religionists.
I make one exception, the HQ of the Kakumaru (Core Circle) is a few hundred meters from my
house, they are all old people now, they used to have their newspaper for sale until
recently. no more. I would buy it at times.
Have some sympathy, but my opinion is that most such groups were used at the time by
the national police and by the CIA to oppose people with more serious ideas, and the support
for such groups at the time by CIA etc. in the U.S.A and in Europe is making serious cultural
and sometimes violent (I see photos of Antlfa morons, etc., direct descendants)
blowback.
' That's not how research works. You're searching for a low figure which will
magically be reliable, right?'
I think that people can be inclined to claim that everyone they don't like is a Jew. I
also think that while Jews were certainly disproportionately represented among the Bolsheviks
and the leftist revolutionary movements of the early twentieth century in general, these
movements weren't overwhelmingly Jewish, nor even necessarily mostly Jewish except in the
case of Hungary.
Finally, I think the press tends to exaggerate, and that particularly in 1920, claiming
that the Bolsheviks were Jews would have been a good way of vilifying the movement. After
all, it remains one to this day.
So for all these reasons, while as I have said it is possible the figures are
accurate, I don't think they should be accepted on faith.
It's all an interesting question. On the one hand, we have 'data' of dubious reliability.
On the other hand, there's a decided reluctance among modern researchers to go into the
question in detail.
responding to PG's comments and the comments of Rational Zionist, among them, being many
NY Intellectuals, invented mugged reality (Neoconism), but party slithering is a another name
for divide and conquer.
Fudmier's example as to how to control the vote:
You present an idea to 6 people (there are seven votes including yours, you are the one);
virtually everyone is indifferent or against your idea. Before the vote, how can you make the
outcome favorable to your side? Divide the opinions on a related subject so that the people
must vote for your idea if they take a side on the related subject. I am always either a
Democrat or a Republican, cannot vote for anything the other party presents, no matter how
good it is. So make the idea Republican or Democratic.
them me Total vote for against my idea
no division 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Total votes 7 Voted for me 1 (myself only) I lose
divide by party D R D R D R R Total votes 7. Voted for me (republican votes) 4 I win
As the simple analysis suggests: it is easy to win a vote when the idea is Glued to the
two AAs (glue, attached, or associated). The unpopular idea Glued and attached or associated
with the political party issue splits the vote (such activity divides and weakens the
political power inherent in the voting power of the masses). For example, if we make the vote
to turn off all of the drinking water. the only vote will be mine, but if we say turn off the
drinking water to all but those who are green, we divide the vote. and control the
outcome.
This brings us to the democratic dilemma: should the non green people be included in vote
on that issue? In fact, it is exactly this problem that those who wrote the constitution
intended to establish.
The aggressive foreign policies and national security positions mentioned by PG have been
attached to the standard Jewish line; in other words the duty of a Jew to recognize
him/herself as a Jew and to vote as a member of the clan has been glued to the AAs. It is
nearly impossible to vote for Jewish interest and not vote to demolish Palestinian homes.
I am hoping this list can develop ways to analyse current events into a set of fair play
rules, reading, learning and analyzing books, journals and events and writing about them is
not enough; some kind of action is needed to bring into reality the findings of these
readings, learning and analysis produce. The best way to offset misleading, false or invented
propaganda is to force it to into a rule based debunking process. Simple rules that everyone
can learn, understand and adopt.
Capitalist Russia and its resources represent a major competitor to the resources and
schemes of the capitalist neocon led west. Hating Russia is like being a democrat or a
republican, it keeps the pharaoh options open.
What I miss is USA fear that the European states, as they did before 1917, will resume
trade with Russia. Contrary to popular opinion, the Dutch Golden Century was not golden by
trade to east or west Indies, but because we were halfway between the Iberian peninsula and
the Baltic Sea.
This fear, I fear, now is intensified by the China Russia Iran railway facilities, with
the Khazakstan dry port. If the important European countries turn around, the USA will become
an economic backwater.
Just yesterday USA ambassador Pete Hoekstra tries to sell us expensive USA gas, 20% more
expensive, to punish Russia for MH17. Another statement that shows that Russia had no
interest whatsoever in shooting down MH17.
Pete does not seem to understand that he's urging the Netherlands to punish itself.
I'm ashamed, Pete must be a Frysian, like me, w're supposed to be intelligent persons.
There was also a coup in Hungary led by Bela Kun. I agree with you that the threat of
Communism played a role in the rise of militant nationalism and its anti-Semitic aspect. The
role of Jews in the leadership of every Communist uprising is crisply documented by Winston
Churchill in his 1920 article http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/WSCwrote1920.html
Paul Johnson in Modern Times claims that Jews did not make up a large percentage of party
members but that is less impressive than their domination of the top ranks. Germany in the
20s and 30s had an abundance of motives to support a strong nationalist leader since the
terms of the Versailles Treaty were unjust and unendurable, and the solution seemed to
involve at least the willingness to use force to remove the burden.
The democratic parties were insufficiently decisive and would likely have succumbed to
Communist agitation or at best preserved a very unpleasant status quo. The weakness of
Communism is that it reduces everything to economics and the material dimension. It demands
the right to dictate without addressing the spiritual dimension of life.
Hitler, by contrast, appealed to national pride and national unity, in addition to the
national need to escape from poverty. Today we see anti-racism being elevated into a
quasi-religion that may be used to justify totalitarian policies. One benefit of this
initiative is that it allows the elite to preserve the gap in material wealth between
themselves and the victim class. Ending racism is less expensive than ending inequality!
With all due respect, current Russia-bashing in the US is not an issue of Jews vs
non-Jews. It's more about the direct contradictions of the interests of the US as a country
with those of the US as an Empire. It is in the best interests of the US as a country to
maintain good working relationship with Russia, China, and others, both to achieve economic
prosperity and to solve complex international problems. However, as an Empire, the US does
not tolerate anyone refusing to toe the line, be it Russia, China, Iran, Syria, or even
Venezuela. The fact that the US Empire is in decline makes its policy less and less rational,
more and more hysterical. That's how all dominant Empires ended: not so much by being
destroyed by opponents, but because of suicidal overreach.
Amid 'Russiagate' Hysteria, What Are the Facts? | The Nation
"W
hom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."
That saying -- often misattributed to Euripides -- comes to mind most mornings when I pick up
The New York Times
and read the latest "Russiagate" headlines, which are frequently featured across two or three columns on the front
page above the fold. This is an almost daily reminder of the hysteria that dominates our Congress and much of our
media.
A glaring example, just one of many from recent months, arrived at my door on February 17. My outrage spiked
when I opened to the
Times
'
lead editorial
: "Stop Letting the Russians Get Away With It, Mr. Trump." I had to ask myself: "Did the
Times
' editors perform even the rudiments of due diligence before they climbed on their high horse in this
long editorial, which excoriated 'Russia' (not individual Russians) for 'interference' in the election and
demanded increased sanctions against Russia 'to protect American democracy'?"
It had never occurred to me that our admittedly dysfunctional political system is so weak, undeveloped, or
diseased that inept Internet trolls could damage it. If that is the case, we better look at a lot of other
countries as well, not just Russia!
The New York Times
, of course, is not the only offender. Its editorial attitude has been duplicated or
exaggerated by most other media outlets in the United States, electronic and print. Unless there is a mass
shooting in progress, it can be hard to find a discussion of anything else on CNN. Increasingly, both in Congress
and in our media, it has been accepted as a fact that "Russia" interfered in the 2016 election.
So what are the facts?
It is a fact that some Russians paid people to act as online trolls and bought advertisements on Facebook
during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. Most of these were taken from elsewhere, and they comprised a
tiny fraction of all the advertisements purchased on Facebook during this period. This continued after the
election and included organizing a demonstration against President-elect Trump.
It is a fact that e-mails in the memory of the Democratic National Committee's computer were furnished to
Wikileaks. The US intelligence agencies that issued the January 2017 report were confident that Russians hacked
the e-mails and supplied them to Wikileaks, but offered no evidence to substantiate their claim. Even if one
accepts that Russians were the perpetrators, however, the e-mails were genuine, as the US intelligence report
certified. I have always thought that the truth was supposed to make us free, not degrade our democracy.
It is a fact that the Russian government established a sophisticated television service (RT) that purveyed
entertainment, news, and -- yes -- propaganda to foreign audiences, including those in the United States. Its
audience is several magnitudes smaller than that of Fox News. Basically, its task is to picture Russia in a
more favorable light than has been available in Western media. There has been no analysis of its effect, if
any, on voting in the United States. The January 2017 US intelligence report states at the outset, "We did not
make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election."
Nevertheless, that report has been cited repeatedly by politicians and the media as having done so.
It is a fact that many senior Russian officials (though not all, by any means) expressed a preference for
Trump's candidacy. After all, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had compared President Putin to Hitler and had
urged more active US military intervention abroad, while Trump had said it would be better to cooperate with
Russia than to treat it as an enemy. It should not require the judgment of professional analysts to understand
why many Russians would find Trump's statements more congenial than Clinton's. On a personal level, most of my
Russian friends and contacts were dubious of Trump, but all resented Clinton's Russophobic tone, as well as
statements made by Obama from 2014 onward. They considered Obama's
public comment
that "Russia doesn't make anything" a gratuitous insult (which it was), and were alarmed by
Clinton's expressed desire to provide additional military support to the "moderates" in Syria. But the average
Russian, and certainly the typical Putin administration official, understood Trump's comments as favoring
improved relations, which they definitely favored.
There is no evidence that Russian leaders thought Trump would win or that they could have a direct
influence on the outcome. This is an allegation that has not been substantiated. The January 2017 report from
the intelligence community actually states that Russian leaders, like most others, thought Clinton would be
elected.
There is no evidence that Russian activities had any tangible impact on the outcome of the election. Nobody
seems to have done even a superficial study of the effect Russian actions actually had on the vote. The
intelligence-community report, however, states explicitly that "the types of systems we observed Russian actors
targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying." Also both former FBI director James Comey and NSA
director Mike Rogers
have testified
that there is no proof Russian activities had an effect on the vote count.
There is also no evidence that there was direct coordination between the Trump campaign (hardly a
well-organized effort) and Russian officials. The indictments brought by the special prosecutor so far are
either for lying to the FBI or for offenses unrelated to the campaign such as money laundering or not
registering as a foreign agent.
So, what is the most important fact regarding the 2016 US presidential election?
The most important fact, obscured in Russiagate hysteria, is that Americans elected Trump under the terms set
forth in the Constitution. Americans created the Electoral College, which allows a candidate with a minority of
popular votes to become president. Americans were those who gerrymandered electoral districts to rig them in favor
of a given political party. The Supreme Court issued the infamous
Citizens United
decision that allows
corporate financing of candidates for political office. (Hey, money talks and exercises freedom of speech;
corporations are people!) Americans created a Senate that is anything but democratic, since it gives
disproportionate representation to states with relatively small populations. It was American senators who
established non-democratic procedures that allow minorities, even sometimes single senators, to block legislation
or confirmation of appointments.
Now, that does not mean that Trump's presidency is good for the country, just because Americans elected him. In
my opinion, the 2016 presidential and congressional elections pose an imminent danger to the republic. They have
created potential disasters that will severely try the checks and balances built into our Constitution. This is
especially true since both houses of Congress are controlled by the Republican Party, which itself represents
fewer voters than the opposition party.
I did not personally vote for Trump, but I consider the charges that Russian actions interfered in the
election, or -- for that matter -- damaged the quality of our democracy ludicrous, pathetic, and shameful.
"Ludicrous" because there is no logical reason to think that anything that the Russians did affected how people
voted. In the past, when Soviet leaders tried to influence American elections, it backfired -- as foreign
interference usually does everywhere. In 1984, Yuri Andropov, the Soviet leader then, made preventing Ronald
Reagan's reelection the second-most-important task of the KGB. (The first was to detect US plans for a nuclear
strike on the Soviet Union.) Everything the Soviets did -- in painting Reagan out to be a warmonger while Andropov
refused to negotiate on nuclear weapons -- helped Reagan win 49 out of 50 states.
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"Pathetic" because it is clear that the Democratic Party lost the election. Yes, it won the popular vote, but
presidents are not elected by popular vote. To blame someone else for one's own mistakes is a pathetic case of
self-deception.
"Shameful" because it is an evasion of responsibility. It prevents the Democrats, and those Republicans who
want responsible, fact-based government in Washington, from concentrating on practical ways to reduce the threat
the Trump presidency poses to our political values and even to our future existence. After all, Trump would not be
president if the Republican Party had not nominated him. He also is most unlikely to have won the Electoral
College if the Democrats had nominated someone -- almost anyone -- other than the candidate they chose, or if that
candidate had run a more competent campaign. I don't argue that any of this was fair, or rational, but then who is
so naive as to assume that American politics are either fair or rational?
Instead of facing the facts and coping with the current reality, the Russiagate promoters, in both the
government and the media, are diverting our attention from the real threats.
I should add "dangerous" to those three adjectives. "Dangerous" because making an enemy of Russia, the other
nuclear superpower -- yes, there are still two -- comes as close to political insanity as anything I can think of.
Denying global warming may rank up there too in the long run, but only nuclear weapons pose, by their very
existence in the quantities that are on station in Russia and the United States, an immediate threat to
mankind -- not just to the United States and Russia and not just to "civilization." The sad, frequently forgotten
fact is that, since the creation of nuclear weapons, mankind has the capacity to destroy itself and join other
extinct species.
In their first meeting, President Ronald Reagan and then General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev agreed that "a
nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." Both believed that simple and obvious truth and their
conviction enabled them to set both countries on a course that ended the Cold War. We should think hard to
determine how and why that simple and obvious truth has been ignored of late by the governments of both countries.
America had dramatically changed since John F. Kennedy seduced voters with the promises of
the New Frontier. A young family, the campaign jingles, the embrace of television, and the
prospect of America's first Catholic president injected a sense of patriotic adrenaline into
the 1960 campaign. There were "high hopes" for Jack and a sense of cultural validation for
Catholics who remembered Al Smith's failed presidential bid in 1928. In 1960, the Everly
Brothers and Bobby Darin crooned through the radio, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
proved a national sensation, and Americans flocked to movies like Spartacus in
magnificent downtown theaters.
But the frivolity and innocence, however illusory, were shattered on November 22, 1963.
Kennedy's assassination violently shifted America's cultural fault lines. One afternoon
accelerated the nation's sociological maladies, intensified its political divisions, and
evaporated its black-and-white contentment. Americans proceeded on a Technicolor path of
disruption, one that had transformed the nation by the time of Bobby's announcement on March
16, 1968. It was that year when The Doors and Cream blasted from transistor radios, John
Updike's Couples landed on the cover of Time , and 2001: A Space Odyssey
played in new suburban cinemas. The country had experienced a dervish frenzy, and Bobby was
fully aware of his nation's turbulent course.
The country was rocked by young students protesting a worsening war in Vietnam. Racial
tension exploded and riots destroyed urban neighborhoods. America's political evolution forever
altered its electoral geography. Bobby was embarking on a remarkable campaign that challenged
the incumbent president, a man he despised for many years. But the source of this strife
stemmed from the White House years of Bobby's brother. "While he defined his vision more
concretely and compellingly than Jack had -- from ending a disastrous war and addressing the
crisis in the cities to removing a sadly out-of-touch president -- he failed to point out that
the war, the festering ghettos, and Lyndon Johnson were all part of Jack Kennedy's legacy,"
wrote Larry Tye in his biography of Bobby.
For the 1968 primary, Kennedy metamorphosed into a liberal figure with an economic populist
message. Kennedy's belated entry turned into an audacious crusade, with the candidate
addressing racial injustice, income inequality, and the failure of Vietnam. He balanced this
message with themes touching upon free enterprise and law and order. Kennedy hoped to appeal to
minorities and working-class whites. He quickly became a messianic figure, and the press
embellished his New Democrat image. By late March, Johnson announced that he would not seek
reelection during a televised address. Through his departure, Johnson worked to maintain
control of the party machine by supporting Hubert Humphrey, his devoted Vice President. But in
the following weeks, Kennedy built momentum as he challenged McCarthy in states like Indiana
and Nebraska. His performance in both states, where anti-Catholic sentiments lingered,
testified to Kennedy's favorable electoral position.
In April 4, Kennedy learned that the Rev. King had been assassinated. He relayed the civil
rights leader's death in a black neighborhood in Indianapolis. His words helped spare
Indianapolis from the riots that erupted in cities across the country, ultimately leading to
nearly 40 people killed and over 2,000 injured. MLK's assassination served as an unsettling
reminder to Kennedy's family, friends, campaign aides, and traveling press. During Kennedy's
first campaign stop in Kansas, the press corps stopped at a restaurant where the legendary
columnist Jimmy Breslin asked, "Do you think this guy has the stuff to go all the way?"
"Yes, of course he has the stuff to go all the way," replied Newsweek's John J.
Lindsay. "But he's not going to go all the way. The reason is that somebody is going to shoot
him. I know it and you know it. Just as sure as we're sitting here somebody is going to shoot
him. He's out there now waiting for him. And, please God, I don't think we'll have a country
after it."
Despite what happened in 1963, the Secret Service had yet to provide protection of
presidential and vice presidential candidates and nominees during the 1964 election or the 1968
primary. But all the signs were there that Kennedy needed protection. The frenzied crowds
increased in size, taking a physical toll on the candidate. In one instance, "he was pulled so
hard that he tumbled into the car door, splitting his lip and breaking a front tooth that
required capping," writes Nye. "He ended up on a regimen of vitamins and antibiotics to fight
fatigue and infection For most politicians, the challenge was to attract crowds; for Bobby, it
was to survive them." In California, just 82 days after his announcement, Kennedy met the fate
that so many feared.
♦♦♦
Bobby Kennedy was a complicated figure from a family that continues to engage America's
imagination. In his autobiography, the novelist Philip Roth, who recently passed away,
reflected on Kennedy's assassination:
He was by no means a political figure constructed on anything other than the human
scale, and so, the night of his assassination and for days afterward, one felt witness to the
violent cutting down not of a monumental force for justice and social change like King or the
powerful embodiment of a people's massive misfortunes or a titan of religious potency but
rather of a rival -- of a vital, imperfect, high-strung, egotistical, rivalrous, talented
brother, who could be just as nasty as he was decent. The murder of a boyish politician of
forty-two, a man so nakedly ambitious and virile, was a crime against ordinary human hope as
well as against the claims of robust, independent appetite and, coming after the murders of
President Kennedy at forty-six and Martin Luther King at thirty-nine, evoked the simplest,
most familiar forms of despair.
For those schoolchildren and their parents in June 1968, Kennedy's campaign offered a sense
of nostalgia. They remembered the exuberance of his brother's campaign, the optimism of his
administration, and the possibilities of the 1960s. For the nation's large ethnic Catholic
voting bloc, another Kennedy reminded them of that feeling of validation in the 1960 election.
Of course, it had been a tumultuous decade for these voters. They lived in cities that had
precipitously declined since JFK's campaign visits in 1960. Railroad stations ended passenger
service, theaters closed, factories shuttered, and new highways offered an exodus to suburbia.
As Catholics, they prayed for the conversion of Russia, adapted to Vatican II reforms, and
adjusted to new parishes in the developing outskirts. Young draftees were shipped off to a
catastrophic war, which only intensified their feelings of disillusionment. Their
disenchantment raised questions about their sustained support for Democrats. Kennedy may have
proved formidable for Nixon in the general election, but the Catholic vote was increasingly up
for grabs.
Pat Buchanan understood this electoral opportunity for Republicans. In a 1971 memo, Buchanan
argued that Catholics were the largest bloc of available Democratic voters for the GOP: "The
fellows who join the K.of C. (Knights of Columbus), who make mass and communion every morning,
who go on retreats, who join the Holy Name society, who fight against abortion in their
legislatures, who send their kids to Catholic schools, who work on assembly lines and live in
Polish, Irish, Italian and Catholic communities or who have headed to the suburbs -- these are
the majority of Catholics; they are where our voters are."
In subsequent presidential elections, Catholic voters flocked to Democrats and Republicans.
Their electoral preferences were driven by the issues of the moment and often by location. The
geographical divide of our politics has only intensified. The 2016 presidential election
encapsulated this trend. Voters in Appalachia and the Rust Belt overwhelmingly supported Donald
Trump that year. Many of these voters previously supported Obama in both 2008 and 2012. In
1968, these voters likely appreciated Kennedy's campaign message. But the tragedy of the nation
is now a loss of optimism -- the belief that tomorrow will be a better day. Americans are
overwhelmed by ideological tension and socio-economic angst. The prosperity enjoyed by large
metropolitan regions has not spilled over into the heartland. There is no nostalgia for 1968
because countless Americans understand that the nation has failed to address income inequality,
job displacement, urban decline, and mass poverty. It was so long ago, but America did lose its
innocence on November 22, 1963. Bobby Kennedy's death in 1968 served as a reminder that it
would never return.
Charles F, McElwee III is a writer based in northeastern Pennsylvania. Follow him on
Twitter at @CFMcElwee
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"... Northern Observer, someday Israel will go the way of Rhodesia if it's lucky. Many believe Israel orchestrated JFK's death; he insisted on inspecting Dimona for nuclear weapon development. ..."
"... If you look at actual evidence in the case you would understand that Sirhan did not and could not have killed Sen. Kennedy. Just look at autopsy report and it says he was killed by bullets fired and virtual point blank range from below and the back of the head. In addition, sound analysis proves that there were 13 shots fired but the alleged murder weapon only held 8 shots. So let's stop this charade. ..."
More troublingly, Robert Kennedy's death occurred within five years of his elder brother's,
and under similar circumstances. It is important to recall how unprecedented their deaths were
to the generation who witnessed them. If time has removed the shock of the assassinations of
the Kennedy brothers, it should not obscure just how anomalous they are. Bad luck may be part
of the mythos of the Kennedy family, but lightning does not strike the same place twice, and
political assassinations are exceedingly rare in American history. Both Kennedy brothers hurled
themselves into the most tumultuous and divisive issues of their time -- Israeli nationalism
and anti-communism -- and both appeared to have paid a heavy price.
In the first place, I don't think that failure of Robert Kennedy had anything to do with a
substantial limitation of the liberal world view, but with another concept, or argument:
The end cannot justify the means because it is the mean, which is a process, which
conditionates the end, in itself only an outcome.
Robert Kennedy supported violence made by the Zionist movement, turned into a State, and
if you ask me, it was that violence which -no pun intended- backfired against him.
Now, about the out balance between loyalty and allegiance homeland/nation, I think it
should be looked at from Sirhan perspective. Yes, he had escaped from what, in his
perspective, was zionist persecution, just to end in a country where that persecution was
supported actively by some high profile politicians. I am not going to say that murder is
right, but some how it had to feel for him as if that anti palestinian israely persecution
had reappeared very near to his home.
From that point of view, he wasn't a refuge anymore; the country where he was living had
become an acomplice of that persecution.
Maybe, if Robert Kennedy had considered a less bellicist way to support Israel, like
sending military support without delivering neither the means nor the command decissions to
the government of Israel, but keeping it in the hand of the U.S., who knows.
This article doesn't quite try to justify Oswald's or Sirhan's actions. But it places them
firmly in a political context rather than a criminal one.
It also suggests that JFK and RFK both went too far – that they "hurled themselves
into the most tumultuous and divisive issues of their time" and thus bear a degree of
responsibility for their own fates.
If we want to debate the merits of arming Israel, or undermining Cuba, then let's have
that debate. But this is altogether the wrong way to frame it. I, for one, don't ever want
the Overton window on such issues to be shifted by the acts, or even the potential acts, of
an assassin.
Israel twice begged Jordan not to join the war that it was already fighting with Egypt and
Syria – a war of aggression and genocide, where Nasser boasted of the impending total
destruction of Israel, Egyptian state media spoke of a road from Tel Aviv to Cairo paved in
Jewish skulls, and Israel's rabbinate consecrated national parks in case they had to be used
for Jewish mass graves.
Sirhan Sirhan's entire identity was wrapped up in the frustrated need for Jewish servitude
and inferiority, the bitterness that a second Holocaust had failed. He was exactly like the
Klan cops in Philadelphia, Mississippi, murdering Freedom Riders who tried to deprive them of
their most cherished resource: assured superiority over their traditional designated victim
group.
Hinted at but ignored is another aspect by which 1968 presaged 2018. In 1968 Bobby Kennedy
waited until after Gene McCarthy had challenged LBJ and LBJ had withdrawn from the race
before entering. For many (most?) McCarthy backers, Kennedy was an opportunistic, privileged
spoiler. In the same way, many of Bernie Sanders' supporters looked upon Hillary Clinton as
the privileged spoiler of a Democratic Party establishment that had tried and failed to move
the party to the right. The McGovern was followed by Carter, who was followed by Mondale, who
was followed by Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, and Hillary. For Democrats, then, it's
been fifty years of struggling to find a center, a struggle Republicans pretty much found in
Ronald Reagan.
John Wilkes Booth was wrapped up in bitterness, defeat & a warped loyalty to his
homeland, too.
It's interesting I guess to examine assassins' motives, but to what point?
Northern Observer, someday Israel will go the way of Rhodesia if it's lucky.
Many believe Israel orchestrated JFK's death; he insisted on inspecting Dimona for nuclear
weapon development.
Let the many who criticize TAC for not printing pro Israeli essays read this one. Also, read
the numerous blogs supporting this thrust. The "small nation" phrase was a tip-off to the
author's loyalties. I think this article is more worthy of the New York Times. Let us not
forget June 8, 1967, is another anniversary, when the sophisticated and unmarked aircraft and
PT boats using napalm of the author's "small nation" attacked the USS Liberty in
international water, with complete disregard to the ship's American markings and large US
flag. http://www.gtr5.com/ This event
received scant coverage on P19 of the aforementioned NYT. "Small nation"; indeed!
The only way one can defend Israel's apartheid policies is by demonizing all of their
victims.
Sirhan Sirhan is Jordanian – a nation that was invented specifically to be an
apartheid state with no Jews at all, forever closed to Jewish inhabitation or immigration.
That is his view of normalcy. I'm sorry it's also yours.
This is pure bunk. The idea that Sirhan Sirhan was the assassin of RFK has been categorically
disproven by the analysis of the fatal bullets, which none of came from Sirhan's gun. And RFKs friends and close advisors all knew that he had no love for Israel. Whatever he
said in support of Israel was for the media purposes only.
Having worked in Jordan and watched Israelis do business and as tourists (Jewish shrines)
there, I saw and heard no antisemitism. From my perspective, there seemed to be a positive
relationship. Elat and Aqaba are like sister cities. In fact, there seemed to be high-level
cooperation. Keep looking you will find bigotry to justify your positions.
I completely agree with Steve Naidamast. This article is indeed "pure bunk" because Sirhan
Sirhan is a side story. That's why this article, with such an angle, should simply never have
been published.
If you look at actual evidence in the case you would understand that Sirhan did not and
could not have killed Sen. Kennedy. Just look at autopsy report and it says he was killed by
bullets fired and virtual point blank range from below and the back of the head. In addition,
sound analysis proves that there were 13 shots fired but the alleged murder weapon only held
8 shots. So let's stop this charade.
TTT -- yo weren't just talking about Sirhan. I wasn't talking about him at all. I have no
sympathy for people who practice terrorism, whether it is done by Palestinians, Jordanians,
or the IDF.
"... Final Judgement: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination was originally published 20 years ago in January. Michael Collins Piper in this book argued that the Israelis killed Kennedy. Vanunu endorsed Piper's book. ..."
"... A JFK researcher once wrote that Piper was on to something in his research linking Israel to the assassination of President. But he said that we had to proceed with caution. Because to be accused of anti-Semitism is about the same as being accused of being a child molester. ..."
Mordecai Vanunu was the original whistleblower. In 1986 he told the world that Israel had
nuclear weapons publishing photos of the secret Dimona works in the British press. He said
Prime Minister Ben Gurion ordered the assassination of JFK because the President opposed
Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons. Ben Gurion resigned in protest over JFK's Israeli
policies. Vanunu also wrote a letter in 1997 saying that there was even a link between the
assassination of Kennedy and Israel's launching of the 1967 war.
Final Judgement: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination was originally published 20
years ago in January. Michael Collins Piper in this book argued that the Israelis killed
Kennedy. Vanunu endorsed Piper's book.
The Oliver Stone movie JFK was the kosher version of the assassination. Piper does not
dispute that Clay Shaw had connections to the CIA. But the film neglects Shaw's connections to
the heart of the Israeli nuclear program. He was on the Board of Directors of Permindex, a
Swiss assassination bureau. Permindex is an Israeli front and were not run by the CIA as Oliver
Stone had said. A primary shareholder in Permindex was the Banque De Credit International of
Geneva, founded by Tibor Rosenbaum, an arms procurer and financier for the Mossad. That bank
was used by Meyer Lansky to launder hot money. Permindex was owned by CMC of Rome, which was
founded by a Hungarian Jew named George Mandel who had deep connections with Israel and the
Mossad. Mandel was the first man to start rumors about Auschwitz being a death camp. The
Chairman of the Board at Permindex was Louis Bloomfield, a Canadian Jew and close associate of
Edgar Bronfman. He also had long standing connections with the Rothschilds dating back before
WW II.
The Stern family funded Clay Shaw's defense. They can be traced back to the Purple Gang of
Detroit. The Stern family owned WDSU radio and TV stations in New Orleans. They ran stories on
Lee Harvey Oswald who was a member of an FBI front group called the Fair Play for Cuba
Committee. This gave Oswald the cover of being a Leftist while spying on American liberals. The
Stern family was heavily invested in the NUMEC nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, which was the
source of Israel's first nuclear bomb. NUMEC also dumped nuclear waste in Pennsylvania.
Piper said Clay Shaw might have had more to do with CIA-Mossad attempts to assassinate
Charles De Gaulle than he did with the assassination of President Kennedy.
Ed Asner played Guy Bannister, the private detective, in the movie JFK. Bannister was a good
friend ofKent and Phoebe Courtney. Bannister and the Courtneys were active in conservative
politics. But the Courtneys did frustrate the work of people on the Right that the
Anti-Defamation League did not like. Joe Pesci played David Ferrie in the movie JFK. He was a
pilot and a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald. Bannister, Ferrie and Oswald spied on Leftists in New
Orleans. Guy Bannister also was a friend of Botnick who was the head of the New Orleans of ADL
office. The Courtneys, Bannister, Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald were actively spying on Leftists
in New Orleans for the ADL and Botnick.
The producer of JFK was the Israel spy Arnon Milchan who sold nuclear triggers to Israel. A
J Weberman, an Israeli citizen, was the first to say that District Attorney Jim Garrison had an
unpublished manuscript that charged Israel was behind the assassination of President
Kennedy.
John King offered Jim Garrison a judgeship to stop his investigation of Clay Shaw. King was
a business partner of Bernie Cornfeld whose Investors Overseas Service was a 2.5 billion dollar
fraud. It was a subsidiary of Permindex and was linked to Tibor Rosenbaum and the Mossad.
The London Jewish Chronicle denounced President Kennedy's UN delegation position that
displaced Palestinians had the right to return to the land that Israel had illegally taken from
them during the 1948 war. The Jewish Chronicle published this in London on November 22,
1963.
Adlai Stevenson, a former Presidential candidate, was the American UN ambassador at the
time. Stevenson's son was also a Senator and opposed Israel's excesses. He was critical of
Israel sinking the USS Liberty in the 1967 war, which killed 34 American sailors.
Lyndon Johnson said he wanted the USS Liberty to sink to the bottom of the Mediterranean
even while the Israelis were attacking the ship. LBJ was sleeping with a former Irgun
terrorist, Mathilde Krim. Her husband was one of LBJ's many Jewish advisers.
A JFK researcher once wrote that Piper was on to something in his research linking
Israel to the assassination of President. But he said that we had to proceed with caution.
Because to be accused of anti-Semitism is about the same as being accused of being a child
molester.
The suggestion that LBJ was shacked up with a Zionist when Israel attacked and tried to sink
the USS Liberty in 1967 is not used here as a metaphor, as in "strange bedfellows;" it is meant
literally as in shacked up. You see, he was 'close friends" with Arthur and Mathilde Krim and
Johnson even built a little cottage on his ranch called "Mathilde's house." No one has a tape
of Johnson's doings in his bedroom that night, with the possible exception of J Edgar Hoover,
who was famous for such things, and Hoover's secretary destroyed "those" files when he
died.
We know LBJ had a different mistress , and in his usual crude
manner said he could shall we say "get more sex" than JFK. So was he shacked up with the pretty
Zionist or not? You will have to judge on probabilities. In a way, that is not is the big
scandal, anyway.
The big scandal is that Israel attacked the USS Liberty as a false flag, to blame it on
Egypt at the start of the Six Day War and thus draw the U.S. in openly on Israel's side. The
big scandal is that LBJ ordered other ships to NOT help them and 34 men died in a vicious
attack that, save for a miracle, did NOT send the ship to the bottom of the sea, killing all on
board.
Was she genially attracted to Johnson, or she was on "special mission"?
This "pretty woman" was a former member of Irgun, no more no less: "Danon spent his time
"recruiting and carrying out secret Irgun operations throughout Western Europe," and his wife
used her bicycle to transport explosives across international borders bound for the Irgun in
Palestine– "a seemingly innocent petite and pretty blonde out for a bicycle ride," Neff
says."
Also: "At the University of Geneva, Mathilde was a brilliant student of biology and genetics.
Appalled by newsreels of Nazi concentration camps in 1945, she sought out Jewish activists,
joined the Zionist underground Irgun and spent a summer smuggling guns over the French border for
resistance [ sic ] fighters against British rule in Palestine." "Mathilde became so
enamored of the Jewish struggle and of Danon's daring undercover operations in Europe that she
converted to Judaism and married Danon. Then she, too, became an Irgun agent."
If we approach JFK assassination from cue bono principle it is clear the Israel can be viewed
as a few beneficiaries of his death. Especially taking into account the level of Links of LBJ and
Israel lobby.
Notable quotes:
"... Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days that Changed the Middle East ..."
On January 15, Mathilde Krim, a scientist and socialite, died on Long Island at 91, and the
obituaries described her courageous leadership in the fight against AIDS. Krim was incensed by
the widespread stigmatization of AIDS victims as somehow deserving the disease, and she worked
to lift prejudice that kept our society from taking the illness seriously. (I saw her work for
myself, attending a fundraiser at her East Side townhouse back in the 90's).
What the news has not told you about is Krim's other great achievement: helping to swing the
White House to Israel's side in the 1960's. The no-daylight policy of U.S. alignment with the
Israeli government, so obvious today in Trump's deference to Netanyahu, was born under Mathilde
Krim's dear friend Lyndon Johnson. In the feverish weeks surrounding the 1967 war, Krim, who
had once emigrated to Israel, and her husband Arthur, a leading fundraiser, were continually at
Johnson's side, and advised him on what to say publicly.
"Johnson was the pivotal president for our relationship with Israel and I think Mathilde
Krim's sway over Johnson was such that it turned the entire relationship, allowing Israel to
continue on, especially after the Six Day War, in a manner that defied not only the U.N. but
the whole world with regard to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians," says Martin Brod, a
retired systems analyst in New York who has long studied the role of Israel's American friends
in cementing the special relationship. Here is that story.
Mathilde Krim was a person of depth, intrigue and compassion. Born Mathilde Galland in 1926
in Italy to parents of Swiss, Italian and Austrian background, she moved with her family to
Switzerland as a girl and went on to be a brilliant student, earning a Ph. D. in genetics from
the University of Geneva.
When she learned about the Holocaust as a teenager, Krim identified with Jews. She felt as
she did for AIDS victims 40 years on, a need to protect them against bigotry, abandonment, and
rejection from the wider community.
These feelings led Krim to support Zionist militants during and after the war. The New York
Times
obituary by Robert D. McFadden includes one reference to her Zionist zeal:
Appalled by newsreels of Nazi concentration camps in 1945, she sought out Jewish
activists, joined the Zionist underground Irgun and spent a summer smuggling guns over the
French border for resistance fighters against British rule in Palestine.
After earning a bachelor's degree in 1948, she married an Irgun comrade, David Danon, a
Bulgarian medical student, and converted to Judaism.
Danon had been exiled by the British from Palestine for his Irgun activities, and Krim saw
him as a "dashing and heroic figure" dedicated to a noble cause that had used terrorism to
achieve its ends, she said in an interview with the late Donald Neff, a former Time Magazine
correspondent, for his book Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days that Changed the Middle
East (1984).
Krim said she was moved by the "despair" of the Zionists. The blowing up of the King David
Hotel in 1946 and the assassination of Lord Moyne in 1944 "represented the depth of the
convictions of Danon and the Irgunists, the measure of both their commitment and their
despair," Neff related. Danon spent his time "recruiting and carrying out secret Irgun
operations throughout Western Europe," and his wife used her bicycle to transport explosives
across international borders bound for the Irgun in Palestine– "a seemingly innocent
petite and pretty blonde out for a bicycle ride," Neff says.
Mathilde Krim in the lab, undated photo
She and Danon had a daughter and moved to Israel in 1953, but there the marriage ended, and
Krim didn't stay an Israeli that long either. She was working as a geneticist at the Weizmann
Institute south of Tel Aviv when board member Arthur Krim came to visit. Arthur was a leading
entertainment lawyer and studio executive, a former chairman of United Artists and Orion
Pictures, and assiduously political. He was an adviser to several Democratic presidents due to
his fundraising network, backing traditional Jewish causes: Israel and the U.S. civil rights
movement.
"The story was that the head of the Weizmann Institute introduced Mathilde to Arthur Krim,
suggesting that he might find her interesting because she spoke many languages and was a very
attractive woman," Brod says. "It developed into a romance after she showed him around the
institute."
Arthur and Mathilde Krim with President Kennedy, May 1962, at the Krim residence in NY.
Photo by Cecil Stoughton.
The two married in 1958, when Mathilde was 32 and Arthur was 48. Mathilde soon moved to New
York, and went to work at Sloan Kettering as a researcher. And Arthur became chair of the
Democratic National Finance Committee.
Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday, Mr. President in Madison Square Garden in 1962.
It was on that account that Mathilde formed one of the most important relationships of her
life. In May 1962 Arthur Krim helped assemble Hollywood names for the famous fundraising gala
at the Madison Square Garden at which Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday, Mr. President to Jack
Kennedy (a few months before her death). The after-party was held at the Krim mansion, Mathilde
Krim related later in an
interview with the LBJ Library; and Vice President Lyndon Johnson was an outsider at the
party. Mathilde empathized with Johnson and befriended him as he sat on a staircase.
I think he was a great man, that's the best word. And he was imposing. He was not only
physically an imposing man, and great. He had a great heart, he had a great intelligence, and
he put them both to work, in fantastic ways.
Brod believes that Mathilde Krim was strategic in forming the friendship.
From the day they first met which was at the party for JFK at the Krim residence in the
city– from that day forward she speaks proudly of having nurtured a relationship with
Johnson because Johnson was not part of the JFK inner circle. I don't think it was an
accident that she approached Johnson and developed this ongoing relationship. I have a
feeling that from her entry into the United States if not before there was a plan of how she
could best serve Israel and she began serving them when she was living in Switzerland in her
first marriage and her work with the Stern gang. She had a strong stomach to involve herself
with that kind of terror, and she certainly lived up to it here.
The transition from Kennedy to Johnson in 1963 was an important moment in the history of the
special relationship.
Kennedy had bridled at the pro-Israel influence. In 1960, his campaign was in trouble when a
group of Jewish leaders gave him $500,000 at the Pierre Hotel in New York, and then
"interrogated Kennedy stringently on matters affecting Jews and Israel," (as
Abba Eban later related ). "As an American citizen [Kennedy] was outraged" by the effort to
take "control" of JFK's Middle East policy, his friend the newspaperman Charles Bartlett told
Seymour Hersh.
As president, Kennedy maintained some distance from the Israeli government. He supported the
right of return of Palestinian refugees and vigorously opposed Israel's acquisition of nuclear
weapons. The CIA had obtained evidence of the Israeli nuclear project in the desert at
Dimona– claimed to be a fabric factory, Brod says– and in the year before he was
assassinated, Kennedy had pushed Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi
Eshkol, to account for the activities.
His successor had fewer scruples about backing Israel. Johnson's political career was
interwoven with Jews, as his wife later reflected, and he saw that nuclear nonproliferation
"made for bad politics," as Hersh says in The Samson
Option , because it alienated the Jewish community. Johnson ultimately suppressed
intelligence reports that Israel was becoming a nuclear power. "By 1968, the President had no
intention of doing anything to stop the Israeli bomb," Hersh writes.
Mathilde Krim dances with Johnson at January 20, 1965, inaugural ball following his
reelection in 1964.
Mathilde Krim was undoubtedly a factor in that policymaking. Throughout his presidency, the
Krims were among Johnson's very closest friends. They had a room in the White House and built a
house on Lake Lyndon B. Johnson in the Texas hill country so as to be near his ranch in
Stonewall when he was on vacation there. Johnson stayed at their house in New York.
It has been suggested that Mathilde Krim was LBJ's lover. "It was a barely hidden secret in
leading government circles in Israel and the United States at the time that Mrs. Krim was
extremely close to Lyndon Johnson," Helena Cobban wrote in her blogpost on Krim last
week. While Brod points out that Johnson was a "competitive womanizer," according to
his
aide Bill Moyers, and certainly the president had social opportunities alone with Mathilde
Krim.
Mathilde Krim and Lady Bird Johnson with President Johnson in a helicopter en route to the
LBJ Ranch from the Krim Ranch, November 1966. Photo by Mike Geissinger of the White House.
But the essence of the relationship was political; and the Krims' influence was apparent
throughout the days leading up to the 1967 war, when Johnson signaled to Israel that it had a
yellow light to go ahead with the war, a signal "tantamount to a green one," in the view of
scholar William Quandt, as it let the Israelis know that the U.S. would not condemn them for
launching the war, and if they got into trouble the US would come to their side.
Mathilde Krim was a "key channel" for the Israelis to signal their plans to Johnson and to
get signals in return, Cobban writes:
The huge role that Mrs. Krim played in 1967 is well-known to everyone who has seriously
studied US-Israeli relations at that time. After all, she was an integral part of a
well-oiled pro-Israeli influence movement at the heart of the US political system, and the
DC-Tel Aviv signaling process that she was part of worked strongly in Israel's favor to
transform not just the Middle East but the whole shape of global politics.
Donald Neff also says that Mathilde Krim's influence swayed American policy: Johnson "left
himself more open to a passionately partisan voice than was prudent or even healthy during the
accelerating crisis."
Neff's book documents Mathilde Krim's steady presence at Johnson's side that spring. Ten
days before the war began, Johnson spent Memorial Day weekend 1967 at his ranch in Texas with
the Krims, and regularly received communications about the mounting crisis in the Middle East
from Eshkol with the Krims close at hand.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, Arthur Krim, A.W. Moursund, Lady Bird Johnson, Mathilde Krim.
At a ranch near Kingsland, Texas, April 13, 1968. White House photo by Mike Geissinger.
"We talked with him all the time about Israel," Krim told Neff. Johnson admired the Israelis
because he was a rancher dealing with dry land, she said, and "he had an entirely emotional
liking for Jews, for what they had suffered, for the way they had been discriminated against,
as he felt he had been discriminated against by the Eastern Establishment."
On June 3, the following Saturday night, the Krims were Johnson's company at a fundraiser at
the Waldorf Astoria in New York, intended in part to shore up his support in the Jewish
community. Arthur Krim hosted the fundraiser; and Johnson sat between Mathilde Krim and Mary
Lasker, another huge contributor to the party (and widow of Albert Lasker, an Israel backer).
The legendary fundraiser Abe Feinberg was there, and served as a conduit for the Israeli war
plans, reports William Quandt in his book Peace Process .
"[H]e leaned over and whispered in his ear: 'Mr President, it can't be held any longer.
It's going to be within the next twenty-four hours."
Two days later, on the morning of June 5, Mathilde Krim was in her bed in her room on the
third floor of the White House when Johnson came in to tell her the war had begun. In his book
1967, Tom Segev reported that Johnson was accompanied by two security men and that Krim opened
the door in her nightgown. Johnson said, "We are at war," then turned around and left.
According to Segev, Johnson was angry. "Until the end of his life he viewed the war as a
mistake." (That regret about the war seems to be footnoted by Segev to former national security
adviser Walt Rostow's archive).
Later that afternoon, the Jewish community was angered when State Department spokesperson
Robert J. McCloskey said at a press conference: "Our position is neutral in thought, word and
deed." The statement suggested that the U.S. would do to Israel what it had done under
Eisenhower in 1956, and force the country to withdraw from lands it seized in war.
Over the next few days Johnson came under intense pressure to deny McCloskey's assertion.
"Seldom, if ever, had a president been subjected or allowed himself to be subjected, to such a
concerted campaign as Lyndon Johnson that Wednesday. It was all pro-Israel; Arabs seemed to
have no advocates," Neff notes acidly.
Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas phoned Johnson, and Mathilde Krim dictated memos to the
president, urging him to repair the damage that McCloskey had done with Jewish Americans.
In one memo that LBJ later read to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Krim called on the president
to make a speech calling "for a permanent peace settlement." Those words meant that the U.S.
would not demand an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories.
In another memo, Krim told the president he did not understand "the resentment still
lingering [among Jews] after the McCloskey statement" and the political dangers inherent. She
channeled the Israelis and American Jews:
"There are reports of very strong anti-American feelings in Israel -- that Israelis feel
they have won the war not with the U.S. but despite the U.S. In the Jewish community it is
very difficult to explain the coincidence of the statement and the beginning of hostilities.
The Jews are a people with a persecution complex and they understood the statement of the
State Dept. to mean that in an hour of gravest danger to them that this country disengaged
itself That is why they reacted so violently
"There is great danger that the Jewish rally to be held tomorrow in Lafayette Square here
will be anti-Johnson, rather than a pro-Israel demonstration. Even Minister [Ephraim] Evron
[at the Israeli embassy] says things are going out of hand."
She advised Johnson that he could "salvage" the situation if he made a "very strong
statement." Krim then went back to New York City, but her last call to the White House June 7
was at a minute before midnight, Neff reports.
She was back at Johnson's side on the weekend, which he spent at Camp David preparing a
speech that he would give on Monday, June 12, "which was to establish the nation's official
policy in the Middle East," Neff says. Johnson read drafts of his speech Saturday night at
dinner with the Krims and others, "inserting additions and making changes, also accepting
comments and suggestions from all at the table," according to notes in the Presidential Daily
Diary. Also commenting at that dinner: Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt. Such was Mathilde
Krim's status.
Johnson gave the speech on Monday morning, and issued five principles of peace in the
region, beginning with "security for all nations in the region." And though the list included
"justice for the refugees," Johnson did not call on Israel to withdraw– not till all
principles were attained.
Putin & Moscow denounce Iran for anti-Israeli activity From retired Indian Ambassador M
K Bhadrakumar,
'Russia Censures Iran' :
Close ties between Russia and Israel are sailing into full view it all does seem a cosy
condominium between Putin and Netanyahu Extraordinary statements for an establishment think
tank known to be close to the Kremlin:
The commentary contextualised Putin's recent call for the withdrawal of all foreign forces
from Syrian soil. It openly rapped the Iranians on the knuckle: "Iran's operations in Syria
go far beyond fighting terrorists and are hardly welcomed by anyone within the region and
beyond. This heightens tensions in Israel's relations with its bitter rivals Serving as a
platform for fighting the 'Zionist' enemy is something Syria needs the least."
Key elements [according to the Kremlin-tied think tank]:
a) Russia holds Iran as responsible for ratcheting up tensions with Israel;
b) Russia thoroughly disapproves of Syria being turned into a turf for Iran's policy of
'Resistance' against Israel; and,
c) Moscow expects the Assad regime to distance itself from Iran's anti-Israeli
activities.
The most valuable part is the comments. They, while biased, given a very good overview of the complexity of the issues and the
US political system and political clans that seen power within it.
I think more powerful interests the Israel were involved. Israel would never do this on their own. Now more then 50 years after JFK assassination I have suspicion that probably this murder will never be solved
although several plausible hypothesis were already establish (the role on LBJ and CIA, especially Angleton, are two
most prominent). The theory tht Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin theory is discredited, but there is no consensus about what
should replace it other then consensus that CIA played an important role and there was understand that LBJ will cover this up.
A really interesting quote from comments: " I think Gary Wean was correct, there was a plot to stage a fake assassination attempt
on JFK within which the actual assassination was hidden, presumably overseen by Angleton. Too many who knew better were looking the
other way, and their effective complicity made them very interested in a cover up.
Notable quotes:
"... In March 1964, he had a face-to-face conversation with mobster Jimmy Hoffa, his sworn enemy, whom he had battled for ten years ..."
"... Robert also asked his friend Daniel Moynihan to search for any complicity in the Secret Service, responsible for the President's security ..."
"... And of course, Robert suspected Johnson, whom he had always mistrusted, as Jeff Shesol documents in Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade (1997). ..."
"... Robert also contacted a former MI6 officer who had been a friend of his family when his father was Ambassador in London. This British retired officer in turn contacted some trusted friends in France, and arrangements were made for two French Intelligence operatives to conduct, over a three-year period, a quiet investigation that involved hundreds of interviews in the United States. Their report, replete with innuendo about Lyndon Johnson and right-wing Texas oil barons, was delivered to Bobby Kennedy only months before his own assassination in June of 1968. ..."
"... "President Kennedy's assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and fake mirrors, and when the curtain fell, the actors, and even the scenery disappeared. [ ] the plotters were correct when they guessed that their crime would be concealed by shadows and silences, that it would be blamed on a 'madman' and negligence." ..."
"... Garrison was allowed to view Abraham Zapruder's amateur film, confiscated by the FBI on the day of the assassination. This film, despite evident tampering, shows that the fatal shot came from the "grassy knoll" well in front of the President, not from the School Book Depository located behind him, where Oswald was supposed to be shooting from. ..."
"... He refrained from openly supporting Garrison, believing that since the outcome of the investigation was uncertain, it could jeopardize his plans to reopen the case later, and even weaken his chances of election by construing his motivation as a family feud. ..."
"... In conclusion, there can be little doubt that, had he been elected president, Robert Kennedy would have done everything possible to reopen the case of his brother's assassination, in one way or another. This fact certainly did not escape John's murderers. They had no other option but to stop him. This first conclusion is a sufficient reason to conduct a comparative analysis of both Kennedy assassinations, in search of some converging clues that might lead us to the trail of a common mastermind. We begin with Robert's assassination. ..."
"... Even if we assume that Sirhan did kill Robert Kennedy, a second aspect of the case raises question: according to several witnesses, Sirhan seemed to be in a state of trance during the shooting. ..."
"... In 2008, Harvard University professor Daniel Brown, a noted expert in hypnosis and trauma memory loss, interviewed Sirhan for a total of 60 hours, and concluded that Sirhan, whom he classifies in the category of "high hypnotizables," acted unvoluntarily under the effect of hypnotic suggestion: "His firing of the gun was neither under his voluntary control, nor done with conscious knowledge, but is likely a product of automatic hypnotic behavior and coercive control." [17] Jacqui Goddard, "Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert F.Kennedy, launches new campaign for freedom 42 years later," The Telegraph, December 3, 2011, on www.telegraph.co.uk/search/ ..."
"... We know that in the 1960s, American military agencies were experimenting on mental control. Dr Sidney Gottlieb, son of Hungarian Jews, directed the infamous CIA MKUltra project, which, among other things, were to answer questions such as: "Can a person under hypnosis be forced to commit murder?" according to a declassified document dated May 1951. [18] Colin Ross, Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists , Manitou Communications, 2000,summary on www.wanttoknow.info/bluebird10pg ..."
"... hypnotize him into becoming ..."
"... programmed killer" ..."
"... If Sirhan was hypnotically programmed, the question is: Who had some interest in having a visceral anti-Zionist Palestinian blamed for the killing of Robert Kennedy? Israel, of course. But then, we are faced with a dilemma, for why would Israel want to kill Robert Kennedy if Robert Kennedy was supportive of Israel, as the mainstream narrative goes? ..."
"... Robert had not been, in his brother's government, a particularly pro-Israel Attorney General: He had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a "foreign agent" subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would had considerably hindered its efficiency (after 1963, the AZD escaped this procedure by changing its status and renaming itself AIPAC) [21] The Israel Lobby Archive, www.irmep.org/ila/forrel/ . ..."
"... Robert Kennedy's death had not been a bad thing for the precious "American-Israeli relationship." Rather, it was a great loss for the Arab world, where Bobby was mourned just as had his brother John before him. ..."
"... But there is plenty of evidence that Angleton, who was also the head of the CIA "Israel Office," was a Mossad mole. According to his biographer Tom Mangold, "Angleton's closest professional friends overseas [ ] came from the Mossad and [ ] he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death." [24] Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: the CIA's Master Spy Hunter, Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 318. No less that two monuments were dedicated to him at memorial services in Israel during ceremonies attended by chiefs of Israeli Intelligence and even a future Prime Minister. [25] Michael Howard Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of COunterintelligence, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, p. 153. ..."
"... Oswald's assassin is known as Jack Ruby, but few people know that his real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, and that he was the son of Jewish Polish immigrants. Ruby was a member of the Jewish underworld. He was a friend of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, whom he had known and admired since 1946. ..."
"... there is a direct line connecting Jack Ruby, via Mickey Cohen, to the Israeli terrorist ring, and in particular to Menachem Begin, a specialist in false flag terror. We also know that Ruby phoned Al Gruber, a Mickey Cohen associate, just after Oswald's arrest; no doubt he received then "an offer he couldn't refuse," as they say in the underworld. ..."
"... a single bullet supposed to have caused seven wounds to Kennedy and John Connally sitting before him in the limousine, and later found in pristine condition on a gurney in Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. ..."
"... Five months later, Kennedy's death relieved Israel of all pressure (diplomatic or otherwise) to stop its nuclear program. Faced with Johnson's complete lack of interest in that issue, John McCone resigned from the CIA in 1965, declaring: "When I cannot get the President to read my reports, then it's time to go." ..."
"... Kennedy's determination to stop Israel's Dimona project was only part of the "Kennedy problem". During his first months in the White House, Kennedy committed himself by letters to Nasser and other Arab heads of State to support UN Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Ben-Gurion reacted with a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Washington, intended to be circulated among Jewish American leaders, in which he stated: ..."
"... "Israel will regard this plan as a more serious danger to her existence than all the threats of the Arab dictators and Kings, than all the Arab armies, than all of Nasser's missiles and his Soviet MIGs. [ ] Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man.'" [43] Quoted in George and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present , W.W. Norton & Co., 1992, p. 51. ..."
"... After Kennedy's death, American foreign policy was reversed again, without the American public being aware of it. Johnson cut the economic aid to Egypt, and increased the military aid to Israel, which reached 92 million dollars in 1966, more than the total of all previous years combined. ..."
"... Several investigators have identified Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy's vice-president, as the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination. It is, at least, beyond doubt that the plotters acted with the foreknowledge that Johnson, who automatically stepped in as head of State after Kennedy's death, would cover them. ..."
"... Johnson's privileged control over the Navy is an important aspect of the case because the Navy was critical in the setting up and in the cover-up of the plot. ..."
"... Lee Harvey Oswald had been recruited by the Navy and not by the CIA. He was a Marine, and as a Marine he had worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). ..."
"... at the Naval Hospital in Washington, under the control of Navy officers, that Kennedy's autopsy was performed, after his body had been literally stolen at gunpoint from Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The report of this autopsy stated that the fatal bullet had entered the back of Kennedy's skull, which contradicted the testimonies of twenty-one members of the Dallas hospital staff who saw two entry bullet-wounds on the front of Kennedy's body. This was critical because Oswald was presumably shooting from behind Kennedy, and could not possibly have caused these bullet wounds. ..."
"... It is noteworthy that Johnson had actually taken advantage of his connections in the Navy to participate in the greatest corruption case ever recorded at that time. His accomplice Fred Korth was forced to resign as Navy Secretary in November 1963, only weeks before the Dallas coup, after the Justice Department headed by Robert Kennedy had implicated him in a fraud involving a $7 billion contract for the construction of 1,700 TFX military aircraft by General Dynamics, a Texan company. Johnson's personal secretary, Bobby Baker, was charged in the same case. ..."
"... Because of this mounting scandal and other suspicions of corruption, Kennedy was determined to change Vice-President for his upcoming reelection campaign. ..."
"... President's visit, Nixon publicized the rumor of Johnson's removal, and the Dallas Morning News was reporting on November 22 nd : "Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson." Instead, Johnson became president that very day. ..."
"... According to his biographer Robert Caro, Johnson was a man thirsting "for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will." ..."
"... Jack Ruby, whom Nixon identified a one of "Johnson's boys," according to former Nixon operative Roger Stone ..."
"... He said that feared that his act would be used "to create some falsehood about some of the Jewish faith," but added that "maybe something can be saved [ ], if our President, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me." [49] Read Ruby's deposition on jfkmurdersolved.com/ruby.htm With such words, Ruby seems to be trying to send a message to Johnson through the Commission, or rather a warning that he might spill the beans about Israel's involvement if Johnson did not intervene in his favor. We get the impression that Ruby expected Johnson to pardon him. ..."
"... It is on record, thanks to Kennedy insider Arthur Schlesinger ( A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House, 1965), that the two men who convinced Kennedy to take Johnson as his running mate, were Philip Graham and Joseph Alsop, respectively publisher and columnist of the Washington Post , and strong supporters of Israel. ..."
"... Thanks to JFK's death, Israel was also able to carry out its plan to annex Palestinian territories beyond the boundaries imposed by the United Nations Partition plan. By leaning on Pentagon and CIA hawks, Johnson intensified the Cold War and created the climate of tension which Israel needed in order to demonize Egyptian president Nasser and reinforce its own stature as indispensable ally in the Middle East. ..."
"... During the Six Day War of 1967, Israel managed to triple its territory, while creating the illusion of acting in legitimate defense. The lie could not deceive American Intelligence agencies, but Johnson had given a green light to Israel's attack, and even authorized James Angleton of the CIA to give Israel the precise positions of the Egyptian air bases, which enabled Israel to destroy them in just a few hours. ..."
"... Meanwhile, Johnson, from the White House, intervened personally to prohibit the nearby Sixth Fleet from rescuing the USS Liberty after the crew, despite the initial destruction of its transmitters, had managed to send off an SOS. ..."
"... The USS Liberty affair was suppressed by a commission of inquiry headed by Admiral John Sidney McCain II, Commander-in-Chief of US Naval Forces in Europe (and Father of Arizona Senator John McCain III). Johnson accepted Israel's spurious "targeting error" explanation. In January 1968 he invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, to Washington, and warmly welcomed him to his Texas ranch. What's more, Johnson rewarded Israel by lifting the embargo on offensive military equipment: US-made tanks and aircraft immediately flowed to Tel Aviv. ..."
"... Let's now conclude our overview of the evidence: beside the fact that John and Robert were brothers, their assassinations have at least two things in common: Lyndon Johnson and Israel. ..."
"... Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State , Progressive Press, 2014 , and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land Clash of Civilizations , 2018. ($30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556). ..."
"... With my limited studies on the JFK murder I came to the same conclusion: Piper was essentially correct, but you fill up the case of Robert Kennedy in a convincing way. Maybe Meyer Lansky could be mentioned, he probably had some role. But the issue was the bomb. ..."
"... I think Gary Wean was correct, there was a plot to stage a fake assassination attempt on JFK within which the actual assassination was hidden, presumably overseen by Angleton. Too many who knew better were looking the other way, and their effective complicity made them very interested in a cover up. ..."
"... Israel was created by the British oligarchs as a bridgehead in the Middle East. Furthering Israel was/is furthering the interests of those oligarchs (who ran the British Empire which morphed to the Anglo-American Empire). JFK was critical of Israel. If someone killed him, it the Anglo-American deep state. Israel likely pulled the trigger. Let's remember what the fake father of Modern Zionism who admired Cecil Rhodes, Theodor Herl said: "England will get ten million agents for her greatness and influence." ..."
"... In spite of the mendacious narrative regurgitated in the West about the war of 1967, it was Israel who planned and attacked its neighbors. The seizing of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza were objectives Israel couldn't achieve in 1948 and deterring Nasser, an objective failed in 1956. The only problem Israel had was: would another US President intervene. Norman Finkelstein, who's research on 1967 is to date unchallenged successfully, showed that Israel sent diplomats to Washington ..."
"... Cuba casinos and crime were run by Meyer Lansky. You immediately get the Israel connection as he was a great fried of Israel. Cuban gangsters are implied in the conspiracy to kill JFK, but that is a link to the theory of Piper. To find the high level perpetrators it is only enough to ask what important US politics changed when LBJ become the President. Towards Cuba or gangsters, no. ..."
"... Did Israel kill the Kennedys? It is entirely possible. In fact, any conspiracy theory that links the murders that does not see the Israelis and American Jews involved is almost certainly a waste of time. But here is what is essential: if Israel and/or American Jews 'did it,' you can bet your every penny and the lives of your children, spouse, and siblings that America's WASP Deep State was behind it all. ..."
"... This article is simply bizarre. If the CIA didn't do it why is it still sanitizing the files 55 years later? ..."
"... LBJ's negotiation with Warren is a matter of historical record. He told Warren that if he didn't stick with the official bullshit story, Cuba's responsibility would lead to war entailing nuclear war with Russia. ..."
"... John, Robert and Ted Kennedy were all extremely friendly to Israel and extremely supportive of the interests of diaspora Jews. They led the Democratic Party away from the old-left emphasis on economic justice and peace, towards the new-left emphasis on issues of race and sex. ..."
"... They weakened the labor unions with their campaign against the Teamsters, they supported tax cuts for the very wealthy, their support for increased immigration was hostile to the economic interests of the American working class, and they supported an intensification of the cold war against the Soviet Union. They even knowingly lied about an imaginary "missile gap", in order to present the Democratic Party as more hawkish than Eisenhower's Republicans. ..."
"... In response to the Suez Crisis, Khrushchev's Soviet Union definitively became the patron of Israel's Arab enemies. Simultaneously, Khrushchev was overseeing a Thermidorian reaction against the excesses of early Bolshevism in eastern Europe. Stalin was denounced, Matyas Rakosi was exiled, Kaganovich was purged from the Politburo, Solzhenitsyn was released from the gulags, and the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries were treated less harshly than they would have been in the days of Lenin and Trotsky. A new Bukharinite, almost semi-nationalist, form of communism developed in eastern Europe – far less deadly, and with jobs and patronage more fairly distributed among the various ethnicities ..."
"... I have no desire to defend the Jews, or Judaism, or Zionism, or the State of Israel, but the charges that they were involved with the Kennedy assassinations are completely without merit and ought to be repugnant to decent people. The fact that they were directly responsible for the attack on the USS Liberty is more than enough reason to despise the Israelis; they do not need to be beaten with every club or charged with every crime. To do so is vindictive and paranoid and shameful, and I cannot be sanguine about the motives of those who would whip themselves and others into such a frenzy. ..."
"... Here's Mathilde Krim with a soirée of Fine Folks to include LBJ & Lady Bird. She certainly made the rounds. Definitely an Intelligence Operative considering her prodigious network of contacts ..."
"... Not Israel exactly but the banker clans that created Israel with US wealth and still own monopolies in banking, media, and drugs legal and illegal. Kennedy was put in office because they thought he was just a skirt chasing son of a bootlegger that would not interfere with the Globalist agenda. Kind of like Bill Clinton. Then he starts talking about "secret societies" and backing off the constant war agenda. And he fostered a trusting relationship with Russia, trying to really be president. He is the last one to try that. ..."
"... I recently bought a book about Lansky's Havana operations from Cuba. Before the revolution by Castro Lansky run the crime empire there. It is also written of his connections to Israel, which you can check even from Wikipedia. We all get our information from books and documents. This book was rather OK concerning facts. Lansky lost a lot when Castro came to power. In 1963 Lansky had a very good reason to want the USA to attack Cuba to gain his empire. Besides, he run the USA organized crime at that time and had reasons not to like Kennedys actions against organized crime. ..."
"... Behind the JFK and RFK assassinations is the Allen Dulles gang: Richard Helms, David Atlee Phillips, and James Jesus Angleton. ..."
"... Oswald was a CIA asset since his time as Marine serving at the US Atsugi base in Japan. Researcher HP Albarelli connects Oswald to right-wing Agency operative and pedophile David Ferrie as far back as the early 1950s. Oswald was also part of Angleton's false defector program, which inserted him into the USSR in the late 1950s. ..."
"... The willingness of so many revisionists to make saints out of the Kennedys -- which on any objective reading they clearly were not -- is by itself sufficient to discover the all-too-human wellsprings of their motivation. You have a beef with Israel, with the CIA, with Lyndon Johnson, with the whole American Deep State. I get that; I'm no fan of these people, either. But I'm not going to pervert my entire view of history so as to cast them in the role of the eternal villain. Self-deception is not only bad for your psychological health, it's also very politically inexpedient. You will never accomplish anything by this method. ..."
"... Garbage. Oswald was impersonated in Mexico. He didn't try to kill Walker. ..."
"... The most likely scenario is of course that the assassinations met the needs of not only Israel/Mossad, but of the U.S. oligarchs/Wall Street, European oligarchs, and the U.S. deep state forces of the CIA/Pentagon. It isn't an "either/or" with the Mossad vs the CIA as to who is the culprit, but rather that everyone benefited by these assassinations. From the U.S. Joint Chiefs who wanted to end JFK's efforts to stop the Cold War, to Mossad who wanted carte blanche Israeli power in the Middle East AND the bomb, to the CIA which most definitely did not want to be "splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds" – you have a set of powerful interests that converge and all benefit by these deaths. ..."
"... The whole debate of whether Israel is the tail wagging the dog misses the point that the very creation of Israel was all about helping the Western colonial powers maintain neo-colonial power in the Middle East as their former colonies were being liberated post-WWII. ..."
"... all these parties not only benefited, but also knew each other's secrets and operated in coordination to make these events happen, and to sew intrigue and endless questions in their wake. ..."
"... the CIA had planned a faked failed assassination coup to force JFK into acting against Castro, but was double-crossed. This fits the scenario which I also believe for 9/11. http://rockthetruth.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-911-triple-cross.html And I liked Janney's book. ..."
"... Next we have to look what changed in the US policy after the successful assassination, since it had to have some goal. The USA did not attack Cuba, so that was not the goal. The USA forgot Israel's nuclear bomb project, so that was the goal. (Go through the other alternatives and discard.) ..."
"... Because local Jews & pro-Israel bunch are not equivalent to "deep state". It is true that Zionist Jews are now more influential than ever, but they do not "own" US nor direct most currents of US policy. Being 2% of US population, Jews are perhaps 20-25% among American elites (which, evidently, is not the majority), and most of them are liberals who are not involved in shaping of American middle east politics. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld . were/are American imperialists, and not some Jewish puppets. ..."
"... It is bizarre to consider that Israelis would even think of, let alone try to execute US president, just because he gave them slap on the wrist at some point. ..."
"... And, in 1963, Zionist Jews (and all US Jews) were much less influential then today, after 5 decades that have, beginning with counter-cultural 60s, multiculturalism & Vietnam war, transformed US beyond recognition. Back in 50s/early 60s they had just wanted to assimilate into society as quickly as possible & minimize traces of their ethnic identity, while Israel was a schnorrer, beggar economy trying to survive & keep a low profile. ..."
"... That Golda Meir or Ben Gurion would even contemplate anything similar is simply weird: https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-golda-meir-had-doubts-on-kennedy-death-1.5292291 ..."
"... According to Stephen Green, for the purposes of this internal memorandum, Kent defined "acquisition" by Israel as either (a) a detonation of a nuclear device with or without the possession of actual nuclear weapons, or (b) an announcement by Israel that it possessed nuclear weapons, even without testing. Kent's primary conclusion was that an Israeli bomb would cause 'substantial damage to the U.S. and Western position in the Arab world. ..."
"... Thus it was that John F. Kennedy informed Israel, in no uncertain terms, that he intended – first and foremost – to place America's interests – not Israel's interests – at the center of U.S. Middle East policy. ..."
"... Here's just one example of the CIA trying to clean out the jewish Israeli agents at the CIA. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/355/661/500422/ ..."
"... JFK was killed by somebody. This somebody had power to modify Audiograph data in 1970ies. This data was available to CIA, FBI and the Warren Commission members, maybe also to others. CIA had dealings with mafia concerning assassination of Castro. The mafia that had been in Havana was Lansky's mafia. Thus, CIA had dealings with Lansky's gangsters. Dulles, LBJ and Angleton did not like JFK's policies, especially towards Israel. Israel was weak at that time, but had friends in the US, like Lansky, Angleton, LBJ, Dulles. Together these might have pulled the assassination, but even together they could not make the coverup by media. There had to be media and the US media has a tendency to silence one topic only. No President can control the media, the CIA can influence, but not control, mafia cannot control media. Only one power can do it and does it. ..."
"... [It's not good commenting policy to produce a continuing series of lengthy totally unsourced excerpts, spread over series of different comments, which makes it difficult for others to avoid them. They have now been consolidated, but you should stop this sort of bad behavior.] ..."
"... In case of JFK it is pretty obvious that Israel was the greatest beneficiary of his death because of JFK determination to stop Israel's nuclear program. Some correspondence of JFK with PM's of Israel is available on line. Israel defense doctrine was formulate to be based on what later was called Samson Option. In 1963 Israel still cooperated with France on its secret nuclear program. ..."
"... JFK definitively was set on stopping Israel nuclear program which Israel was conducting in secret cooperation with France. After strong letter on May 18, 163 letter PM Ben Gurion preferred to resign than to answer the letter ..."
"... During that same 1962-63 period Senator William J. Fulbright of Arkansas, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, convened hearings on the legal status of the American Zionist Council (AZC). The Committee uncovered evidence that the Jewish Agency, a predecessor to the state of Israel, operated a massive network of financial "conduits" which funnelled funds to U.S. Israel lobby groups. As a result, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) ordered the AZC to openly register and disclose all of its foreign funded lobbying activity in the United States. The attempt was subsequently thwarted first by the Israel lobby itself and then by the death of President Kennedy which lead to growing concerns regarding the impact of the ever-growing Zionist influence on U.S. policy making decisions. On April 15, 1973, Fulbright -- who lost his Senate seat the following year -- had no qualms about boldly announcing on CBS Face the Nation that : "Israel controls the U.S. Senate. The Senate is subservient, much too much; we should be more concerned about U.S. interests rather than doing the bidding of Israel. The great majority of the Senate of the U.S. -- somewhere around 80% -- is completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants; Israel gets. This has been demonstrated time and again, and this has made [foreign policy] difficult for our government." ..."
"... While it is quite plausible that the Zionist entity and the CIA regime have congruent criminal interests, this is not what Guyanot theorizes. He imagines a CIA that sets up all the preconditions for a coup, without actually meaning to go through with it, and a foreign devil that unexpectedly takes it all and runs with it. That's idiotic. It also happens to be CIA's boilerplate excuse for all their grave crimes. There's nothing new up there. What's worse, it's plagiarized from Langley fops and jarheads. It's not just stupid, but stupid in a telltale way. ..."
As Lance deHaven-Smith has remarked in Conspiracy Theory in America:
"It is seldom considered that the Kennedy assassinations might have been serial murders. In fact, in speaking about the murders,
Americans rarely use the plural, 'Kennedy assassinations'. [ ] Clearly, this quirk in the Kennedy assassination(s) lexicon reflects
an unconscious effort by journalists, politicians, and millions of ordinary Americans to avoid thinking about the two assassinations
together, despite the fact that the victims are connected in countless ways."
[1] Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy
Theory in America , University of Texas Press, 2013,kindle 284-292.
John and Robert were bound by an unshakable loyalty. Kennedy biographers have stressed the absolute dedication of Robert to his
elder brother. Robert had successfully managed John's campaign for the Senate in 1952, then his presidential campaign in 1960. John
made him not only his Attorney General, but also his most trusted adviser, even on matters of Foreign or Military affairs. What John
appreciated most in Robert was his sense of justice and the rectitude of his moral judgment. It is Robert, for example, who encouraged
John to fully endorse the cause of the Blacks' civil rights movement
[2] John Lewis' testimony is in the
PBS documentary American Experience Robert F. Kennedy. .
Given this exceptional bond between the Kennedy brothers, what is the probability that the two Kennedy assassinations were unrelated?
Rather, we should start with the assumption that they are related. Basic common sense suggests that the Kennedy brothers have been
killed by the same force, and for the same motives. It is, at least, a logical working hypothesis that Robert was eliminated from
the presidential race because he had to be prevented from reaching a position where he could reopen the case of his brother's death.
Both his loyalty to his brother's memory, and his obsession with justice, made it predictable that, if he reached the White House,
he would do just that. But was there, in 1968, any clear indication that he would?
The question has been positively answered by David Talbot in his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
, published in 2007 by Simon & Schuster. Robert had never believed in the Warren Report's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the
sole assassin of his brother. Knowing too well what to expect from Johnson, he had refused to testify before the Warren Commission.
When its report came out, he had no choice but to publicly endorse it, but "privately he was dismissive of it," as his son Robert
Kennedy, Jr. remembers [3] Associated
Press, "RFK children speak about JFK assassination," January 12, 2013, on www.usatoday.com . To close friends who wondered why
he wouldn't voice his doubt, he said: "there's nothing I can do about it. Not now."[4] David Talbot, Brothers: The
Hidden History of the Kennedy Years , Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 278-280, 305.
From 22 November 1963, Robert was alienated and monitored by Johnson and Hoover. Although still Attorney General, he knew he was
powerless against the forces that had killed his brother. Yet he lost no time beginning his own investigation; he first asked CIA
director John McCone, a Kennedy friend, to find out if the Agency had anything to do with the plot, and came out convinced that it
hadn't. In March 1964, he had a face-to-face conversation with mobster Jimmy Hoffa, his sworn enemy, whom he had battled for
ten years, and whom he suspected of having taken revenge on his brother. Robert also asked his friend Daniel Moynihan to
search for any complicity in the Secret Service, responsible for the President's security[5] David Talbot, Brothers, op.
cit. , 2007, p. 21-22. . And of course, Robert suspected Johnson, whom he had always mistrusted, as Jeff Shesol documents
in Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade (1997).
In fact, a mere week after JFK's death, November 29, 1963, Bill Walton, a friend of the Kennedys, travelled to Moscow and passed
to Nikita Khrushchev, via a trusted agent who had already carried secret communications between Khrushchev and John Kennedy, a message
from Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy; according to the memo found in the Soviet archives in the 90s by Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy
Naftali ( One Hell of a Gamble , 1998), Robert and Jackie wanted to inform the Soviet Premier that they believed John Kennedy
had been "the victim of a right-wing conspiracy," and that "the cooling that might occur in U.S.-Soviet relations because
of Johnson would not last forever."[6] David Talbot, Brothers, op.
cit., p. 25-7.
ORDER IT NOW
Robert also contacted a former MI6 officer who had been a friend of his family when his father was Ambassador in London. This
British retired officer in turn contacted some trusted friends in France, and arrangements were made for two French Intelligence
operatives to conduct, over a three-year period, a quiet investigation that involved hundreds of interviews in the United States.
Their report, replete with innuendo about Lyndon Johnson and right-wing Texas oil barons, was delivered to Bobby Kennedy only months
before his own assassination in June of 1968. After Bobby's death, the last surviving brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, showed no
interest in the material. The investigators then hired a French writer by the name of Hervé Lamarr to fashion the material into a
book, under the pseudonym of James Hepburn. The book was first published in French under the title L'Amérique brűle, and was
translated under the title Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK . Its conclusion is worth quoting:
"President Kennedy's assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and fake
mirrors, and when the curtain fell, the actors, and even the scenery disappeared. [ ] the plotters were correct when they guessed
that their crime would be concealed by shadows and silences, that it would be blamed on a 'madman' and negligence."
[7] James Hepburn, Farewell
America: The Plot to Kill JFK, Penmarin Books, 2002, p. 269.
Robert had planned to run for the American Presidency in 1972, but the escalation of the Vietnam War precipitated his decision
to run in 1968. Another factor may have been the opening of the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1967.
Garrison was allowed to view Abraham Zapruder's amateur film, confiscated by the FBI on the day of the assassination. This film,
despite evident tampering, shows that the fatal shot came from the "grassy knoll" well in front of the President, not from the School
Book Depository located behind him, where Oswald was supposed to be shooting from.
When talk of the investigation began, Kennedy asked one of his closest advisors, Frank Mankievitch, to follow its developments,
"so if it gets to a point where I can do something about this, you can tell me what I need to know." He confided to his friend
William Attwood, then editor of Look magazine, that he, like Garrison, suspected a conspiracy, "but I can't do anything
until we get control of the White House."[8] David Talbot, Brothers, op.
cit., p. 312-314.He refrained from openly supporting Garrison, believing that since the outcome of the investigation
was uncertain, it could jeopardize his plans to reopen the case later, and even weaken his chances of election by construing his
motivation as a family feud.
In conclusion, there can be little doubt that, had he been elected president, Robert Kennedy would have done everything possible
to reopen the case of his brother's assassination, in one way or another. This fact certainly did not escape John's murderers. They
had no other option but to stop him. This first conclusion is a sufficient reason to conduct a comparative analysis of both Kennedy
assassinations, in search of some converging clues that might lead us to the trail of a common mastermind. We begin with Robert's
assassination.
Just hours after Robert's assassination, the press was able to inform the American people, not only of the identity of the assassin,
but also of his motive, and even of his detailed biography.
[9] Extract of TV news in the documentary
film Evidence of Revision: Part 4: The RFK assassination as never seen before , 01:11:42 Twenty-four-year-old Sirhan Bishara
Sirhan was born in Jordania, and had moved to the United States when his family was expelled from West Jerusalem in 1948. After the
shooting, a newspaper clipping was found in Sirhan's pocket, quoting favorable comments made by Robert regarding Israel and, in particular,
what sounded like an electoral commitment: "The United States should without delay sell Israel the 50 Phantom jets she has so
long been promised." Handwritten notes by Sirhan found in a notebook at his home confirmed that his act had been premeditated
and motivated by his hatred of Israel.
That became the story line of the mainstream media from day one. Jerry Cohen of the Los Angeles Times wrote a front page
article, saying that Sirhan is "described by acquaintances as a 'virulent' anti-Israeli," (Cohen changed that into "virulent
anti-semite" in an article for the The Salt Lake Tribune ), and that: " Investigation and disclosures from persons
who knew him best revealed [him] as a young man with a supreme hatred for the state of Israel." Cohen infers that "Senator
Kennedy [ ] became a personification of that hatred because of his recent pro-Israeli statements." Cohen further revealed that:
After September 11, 2001, the tragedy of Robert's assassination was installed into the Neocon mythology of the Clash of Civilizations
and the War on Terror the story. Sirhan became a precursor of Islamic terrorism on the American soil. In a book entitled The Forgotten
Terrorist, Mel Ayton, who specializes in debunking conspiracy theories, claims to present "a wealth of evidence about [Sirhan's]
fanatical Palestinian nationalism," and to demonstrate that "Sirhan was the lone assassin whose politically motivated act
was a forerunner of present-day terrorism" (as written on the back cover).
In 2008, on the 40 th anniversary of Robert's death, Sasha Issenberg of the Boston Globe recalled that the death
of Robert Kennedy was "a first taste of Mideast terror." He quotes Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz (best known as Jonathan
Pollard's lawyer), as saying:
The fact that Sirhan was from a Christian family was lost on Dershowitz. The Jewish Forward took care to mention it on
the same occasion, only to add that Islamic fanaticism ran in his veins anyway:
"But what he shared with his Muslim cousins -- the perpetrators of September 11 -- was a visceral, irrational hatred of Israel.
It drove him to murder a man whom some still believe might have been the greatest hope of an earlier generation."
This leitmotiv of the public discourse begs the question: Was Bobby really a supporter of Israel? But before we answer that question,
there is on more pressing one:
Did Sirhan really kill Bobby?
If we trust official statements and mainstream news, the assassination of Robert Kennedy is an open-and-shut case. The identity
of the killer suffers no discussion, since he was arrested on the spot, with the smoking gun in his hand. In reality, ballistic and
forensic evidence show that none of Sirhan's bullets hit Kennedy.
According to the autopsy report of Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Thomas Noguchi, Robert Kennedy died of a gunshot wound to the
brain, fired from behind the right ear at point blank range, following an upward angle. Nogushi restated his conclusion in his 1983
memoirs, Coroner . Yet the sworn testimony of twelve shooting witnesses established that Robert had never turned his back
on Sirhan and that Sirhan was five to six feet away from his target when he fired.
Tallying all the bullet impacts in the pantry, and those that wounded five people around Kennedy, it has been estimated that at
least twelve bullets were fired, while Sirhan's gun carried only eight. On April 23, 2011, attorneys William Pepper and his associate,
Laurie Dusek, gathered all this evidence and more in a 58-page file submitted to the Court of California, asking that Sirhan's case
be reopened. They documented major irregularities in the 1968 trial, including the fact that the bullet tested in laboratory to be
compared to the the one extracted from Robert's brain had not been shot by Sirhan's revolver, but by another gun, with a different
serial number; thus, instead of incriminating Sirhan, the ballistic test in fact proved him innocent. Pepper has also provided a
computer analysis of audio recordings during the shooting, made by engineer Philip Van Praag in 2008, which confirms that two guns
are heard. [13] Frank Morales, "The
Assassination of RFK: A Time for Justice!" June 16, 2012, on www.globalresearch.ca; watch on YouTube, "RFK Assassination 40
th Anniversary (2008) Paul Schrade on CNN."
Even if we assume that Sirhan did kill Robert Kennedy, a second aspect of the case raises question: according to several witnesses,
Sirhan seemed to be in a state of trance during the shooting. More importantly, Sirhan has always claimed, and continues to
claim, that he has never had any recollection of his act:
"I was told by my attorney that I shot and killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy and that to deny this would be completely futile,
[but] I had and continue to have no memory of the shooting of Senator Kennedy."
Psychiatric expertise, including lie-detector tests, have confirmed that Sirhan's amnesia is not faked. In 2008, Harvard University
professor Daniel Brown, a noted expert in hypnosis and trauma memory loss, interviewed Sirhan for a total of 60 hours, and concluded
that Sirhan, whom he classifies in the category of "high hypnotizables," acted unvoluntarily under the effect of hypnotic suggestion:
"His firing of the gun was neither under his voluntary control, nor done with conscious knowledge, but is likely a product of automatic
hypnotic behavior and coercive control."
[17] Jacqui Goddard, "Sirhan Sirhan,
assassin of Robert F.Kennedy, launches new campaign for freedom 42 years later," The Telegraph, December 3, 2011, on www.telegraph.co.uk/search/
If Sirhan was hypnotically programmed, the question is: Who had some interest in having a visceral anti-Zionist Palestinian
blamed for the killing of Robert Kennedy? Israel, of course. But then, we are faced with a dilemma, for why would Israel want to
kill Robert Kennedy if Robert Kennedy was supportive of Israel, as the mainstream narrative goes?
The dilemma rests on a misleading assumption, which is part of the deception. In fact, Robert Kennedy was definitely not
pro-Israel. He was simply campaigning in 1968. As everyone knows, a few good wishes and empty promises to Israel are an inescapable
ritual in such circumstances. And Robert's statement in an Oregon synagogue, mentioned in the May 27 Pasadena Independent Star-News
article found in Sirhan's pocket, didn't exceed the minimal requirements. Its author David Lawrence had, in an earlier article entitled
"Paradoxical Bob," underlined how little credit should be given to such electoral promises: "Presidential candidates are
out to get votes and some of them do not realize their own inconsistencies."
All things considered, there is no ground for believing that Robert Kennedy would have been, as president of the US, particularly
Israel-friendly. The Kennedy family, proudly Irish and Catholic, was known for its hostility to Jewish influence in politics, a classic
theme of anti-Kennedy literature, best represented by the 1996 book by Ronald Kessler with the highly suggestive title, The Sins
of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded.[20] Ronald Kessler, The Sins
of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.
Robert had not been, in his brother's government, a particularly pro-Israel Attorney General: He had infuriated Zionist leaders
by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations aimed at registering
the American Zionist Council as a "foreign agent" subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938,
which would had considerably hindered its efficiency (after 1963, the AZD escaped this procedure by changing its status and renaming
itself AIPAC) [21] The Israel Lobby
Archive, www.irmep.org/ila/forrel/ .
In conclusion, it is only with outstanding hypocrisy that The Jewish Daily Forward could write, on the 40th anniversary
of Bobby's death:
Robert Kennedy's death had not been a bad thing for the precious "American-Israeli relationship." Rather, it was a great loss
for the Arab world, where Bobby was mourned just as had his brother John before him.
Of course, the fact that the Zionist media lied when granting Robert Kennedy some posthumous certificate of good will toward Israel,
and thereby provided Israel with a fake alibi, is not a sufficient reason for concluding that Israel murdered Robert. Even the fact
that the masterminds of the plot chose as their programmed instrument an anti-Zionist Palestinian, and thereby stirred a strong anti-Palestinian
feeling among Americans at the same time as getting rid of Robert, does not prove that Israel was involved. What is still lacking
for a serious presumption is a plausible motive.
The motive of Robert's assassination must be found, not in what Robert publicly declared in an Oregon synagogue during his presidential
campaign, but rather in what he confided only to his most close friends: his intention to reopen the investigation on his brother's
death. Our next question, therefore, is: What would an unbiased investigation, conducted under the supervision of Robert in the White
House, have revealed?
It is obvious to anybody just vaguely informed that a genuine investigation would first establish that Oswald was a mere "patsy"
, as he said himself, a scapegoat prepared in advance to be blamed for the crime and then be slaughtered without a trial.
We will not here review the evidence that contradicts the official thesis of the lone gunman. It can be found in numerous books and
documentary films.
Just as notorious is the theory that the plot to kill Kennedy originated from a secret network within the CIA, in collusion with
extremist elements in the Pentagon. That conspiracy theory looms the largest in books, articles and films that have been produced
since John Kennedy died.
That CIA-Pentagon theory, as I will call it (add the military-industrial complex if you wish) has a major flaw in the motive ascribed
to the killers: besides getting rid of Kennedy, the theory goes, the aim was to create a pretext for invading Cuba, something the
CIA had always pushed for and Kennedy had refused to do (the Bay of Pigs fiasco). With Oswald groomed as a pro-Castro communist,
the Dallas shooting was staged as a false flag attack to be blamed on Cuba. But then, why did no invasion of Cuba followed Kennedy's
assassination? Why was the pro-Castro Oswald abandoned by the Warren Commission in favor of the lone nut Oswald? Those who address
the question, like James Douglass in his JFK and the Unspeakable , credit Johnson with preventing the invasion. Johnson, we
are led to understand, had nothing to do with the assassination plot, and thwarted the plotters' ultimate aim to start World War
III. This is to ignore the tremendous amount of evidence accumulated against Johnson for fifty years, and documented in such groundbreaking
books as Phillip Nelson's LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK's Assassination (2010) or Roger Stone's The Man Who Killed Kennedy:
The Case Against LBJ (2013).
Another weakness in the CIA-Pentagon theory is the lack of agreement about the mastermind of the plot. In fact, one of the names
that comes up most often is James Jesus Angleton, the head of Counter-Intelligence within the CIA, about whom Professor John Newman
writes in Oswald and the CIA :
"In my view, whoever Oswald's direct handler or handlers were, we must now seriously consider the possibility that Angleton
was probably their general manager. No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind
to manage this sophisticated plot."
[23] Michael Collins Piper,
False Flag, op. cit., p. 78.
Another aspect must be taken into account: if the trail of the CIA is such a well-trodden path among Kennedy researchers, it is
because it has been cut and marked by the mainstream media themselves, as well as by Hollywood. And that began even before the assassination,
on October 3, 1963, with an article by the New York Times' chief Washington correspondent Arthur Krock. The article denounced
the CIA's "unrestrained thirst for power" and quotidian unnamed "very high official" who claimed that the White House
could not control the CIA, and that:
In such a way, The New York Times was planting a sign, a month and a half before the Dallas killing, pointing to the CIA
as the most likely instigator of the upcoming coup. The sign said: "The President is going to fall victim of a coup, and it will
come from the CIA."
One month after Kennedy's assassination, it was the turn of the Washington Post to use a very similar trick, by publishing
an op-ed signed by Harry Truman, in which the former president said he was "disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its
original assignment." "I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations,"
at the point of becoming across the globe "a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue [ ] there are now some searching
questions that need to be answered."[27] "Harry Truman Writes: Limit
CIA Role to Intelligence," Washington Post, December 22, 1963, quoted in Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA
in the Murder of JFK , Skyhorse Publishing, 2011 , p. 246. Truman was hinting at the CIA's role in toppling foreign
governments and assassinating elected leaders abroad. But given the timing of his article, one month to the day after Dallas, it
could only be understood by anyone with ears to hear, and at least subliminally by the rest, as an indictment of the CIA in the Kennedy
assassination. This article, widely reprinted in the 1970s after the creation of the Church Committee and the House Select Committee
on Assassinations, is regarded as Truman's whistleblowing. Yet its mea culpa style is quite unlike Truman; that is because
it was not written by Truman, but by his longtime assistant and ghostwriter, a Russian born Jew named David Noyes, whom Sidney Krasnoff
calls "Truman's alter ego" in his book, Truman and Noyes: Story of a President's Alter Ego (1997). Truman probably never saw
the article prior to its publication in the Washington Post morning edition, but he may be responsible for its deletion from
the afternoon print runs. [28] Thomas
Troy, "Truman on CIA," September 22, 1993, on www.cia.gov ; Sidney Krasnoff, Truman and Noyes: Story of a President's Alter Ego,
Jonathan Stuart Press, 1997.
So the two most influential American newspapers, while ostensibly defending the official theory of the lone gunman, have planted
directional signs pointing to the CIA. Most Kennedy truthers have followed the signs with enthusiasm.
In the 70s, the mainstream media and publishing industry played again a major role in steering conspiracy theorists toward the
CIA, while avoiding any hint of Israeli involvement. One major contributor to that effort was A. J. Weberman, with his 1975 book
Coup d'État in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, co-authored by Michael Canfield . According
to the New York Jewish Daily Forward (December 28, 2012), Weberman had "immigrated to Israel in 1959 and has dual American-Israeli
citizenship," and is "a close associate of Jewish Defense Organization founder Mordechai Levy, whose fringe group is a spin-off
of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane's militant right-wing Jewish Defense League." Weberman acknowledged Neocon Richard Perle's assistance
in his investigation. [29] Michael
Collins Piper, False Flags: Template for Terror, American Free Press, 2013, p. 67. The Weberman-Canfield book contributed
to the momentum that led the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to reinvestigate in 1976 the murders of JFK and Dr.
Martin Luther King.
It is also in this context that Newsweek journalist Edward Jay Epstein published an interview of George De Mohrenschildt,
a Russian geologist and consultant for Texan oilmen who had befriended Oswald and his Russian wife in Dallas in 1962. In this interview,
De Mohrenschildt admitted that Oswald had been introduced to him at the instigation of Dallas CIA agent J. Walton Moore.
[30] James Douglass, JFK and the
Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Touchstone, 2008 , p. 46. That piece of information is dubious for several
reasons: First, Moore was officially FBI rather than CIA. Second, De Mohrenschildt was in no position to confirm or deny the words
that Epstein ascribed to him: he was found dead a few hours after giving the interview. In fact, De Mohrenschildt's interview published
by Epstein contradicts De Mohrenschildt's own manuscript account of his relationship to Oswald, revealed after his death.
[31] George de Mohrenschilldt,
I am a Patsy! on jfkassassination.net/russ/jfkinfo4/jfk12/hscapatsy.htm De Mohrenschildt's death was ruled a suicide. The
Sheriff's report mentions that in his last months he complained that "the Jews" and "the Jewish mafia" were out to
get him. [32] Read the Sheriff's
Office report on mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death2.txt Needless to say, Epstein didn't mention anything about this. More suspicions
arise from the fact that Epstein's main source for his 1978 book, Legend: the Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald , was James
Jesus Angleton, who was actively spreading disinformation at the time of the HSCA, defending the theory that Oswald was a KGB agent
with CIA connections.
By a strange paradox, the authors who stand for the consensual conspiracy theory of a CIA plot against Kennedy build their case
on the biography of Oswald, while at the same time claiming that Oswald had almost nothing to do with the killing. If Oswald was
"just a patsy," as he publicly claimed, the quest for the real culprits must logically begin by investigating the man who silenced
Oswald.
Oswald's assassin is known as Jack Ruby, but few people know that his real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, and that he was
the son of Jewish Polish immigrants. Ruby was a member of the Jewish underworld. He was a friend of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen,
whom he had known and admired since 1946. Cohen was the successor of the famed Benjamin Siegelbaum, aka Bugsy Siegel, one of
the bosses of Murder Incorporated . Cohen was infatuated with the Zionist cause, as he explained in his memoirs: "Now I
got so engrossed with Israel that I actually pushed aside a lot of my activities and done nothing but what was involved with this
Irgun war".[35] Mickey Cohen,
In My Own Words , Prentice-Hall, 1975, p. 91-92. Mickey Cohen was in contact with Menachem Begin, the former Irgun chief,
with whom he even "spent a lot of time," according to Gary Wean, former detective sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department.
So there is a direct line connecting Jack Ruby, via Mickey Cohen, to the Israeli terrorist ring, and in particular to Menachem
Begin, a specialist in false flag terror. We also know that Ruby phoned Al Gruber, a Mickey Cohen associate, just after Oswald's
arrest; no doubt he received then "an offer he couldn't refuse," as they say in the underworld.[36] Michael Collins Piper, Final
Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy , American Free Press, 6 th ed., ebook 2005, p. 133-155,
226. Ruby's defense lawyer William Kunstler wrote in his memoirs that Ruby told him he had killed Oswald "for the Jews," and
Ruby's rabbi Hillel Silverman received the same confession when visiting Ruby in jail.
[37] William Kunstler, My Life
as a Radical Lawyer , Carol Publishing, 1994, p. 158; Steve North, "Lee Harvey Oswald's Killer 'Jack Ruby' Came From Strong Jewish
Background," The Forward , November 17, 2013, on forward.com
That is not all. At every levels of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, we also find the fingerprints of the Israeli deep state. JFK's
trip to Dallas, being officially "non political," was sponsored by a powerful business group known as the Dallas Citizens Council,
dominated by Julius Schepps, "a wholesale liquor distributor, member of every synagogue in town, and de facto leader of the Jewish
community," as described by Bryan Edward Stone in The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas.[38] Bryan Edward Stone, The Chosen
Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas, University of Texas Press, 2010, p. 200. Kennedy was on his way to the reception organized
in his honor when he was shot.
The "host committee" inviting Kennedy was chaired by another influential figure of the wealthy Jewish community in Dallas: advertising
executive and PR man Sam Bloom. According to former British Intelligence Officer Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, it was Bloom who suggested
to the Police "that they move the alleged assassin [Oswald] from the Dallas police station to the Dallas County Jail in order
to give the newsmen a good story and pictures." Oswald was shot by Ruby during this transfert. Hughes-Wilson adds that, "when
the police later searched Ruby's home, they found a slip of paper with Bloom's name, address and telephone number on it."[39] John Hughes-Wilson, JFK-An
American Coup d'État: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination, John Blake, 2014.
After the Dallas tragedy, Israel's sayanim were also busy fabricating the official lie. Apart from its chairman Earl Warren,
chosen for his figurative role as Chief Justice, all key people in the investigative Commission were either personal enemies of Kennedy
-- like Allen Dulles, the CIA director fired by Kennedy in 1961 -- or ardent Zionists. The man who played the key role in fabricating
the government lie purveyed by the Warren Commission was Arlen Specter, the inventor of what came to be called the "magic bullet"
theory: a single bullet supposed to have caused seven wounds to Kennedy and John Connally sitting before him in the limousine,
and later found in pristine condition on a gurney in Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Specter, who with an ironic touch
of chutzpah titled his autobiography Passion for Truth, was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and, at his death in 2012,
was mourned by the Israeli government as "an unswerving defender of the Jewish State," and by AIPAC, as "a leading architect
of the congressional bond between our country and Israel."[40] Natasha Mozgovaya, "Prominent
Jewish-American politician Arlan Specter dies at 82," Haaretz, October 14, 2012, on www.haaretz.com.
So, at all stages of the plot, we find a Zionist cabal including business men, politicians and Irgun-connected gangsters, not
forgetting media executives, all devoted to Israel.
The most plausible motive for Israel to kill Kennedy has been revealed by two books: Seymour Hersh's The Samson Option
in 1991, then Avner Cohen's Israel and the Bomb in 1998, and the lead has been followed up in 2007 by Michael Karpin in
The Bomb in the Basement. What these investigators reveal is that Kennedy, informed by the CIA in 1960 of the military aim pursued
at the Dimona complex in the Negev desert, was firmly determined to force Israel to renounce it. With that purpose in mind, he replaced
CIA Director Allen Dulles by John McCone, who had, as Eisenhower's chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), leaked to The
New York Times the truth about Israel's Dimona project; the story was printed on December 19, 1960, weeks before Kennedy was
to take office. As Alan Hart writes, "there can be no doubt that Kennedy's determination to stop Israel developing its own nuclear
bomb was the prime factor in his decision to appoint McCone."[41] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real
Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2009 , p. 273. Then Kennedy urged Ben-Gurion
to allow regular inspections of Dimona, first verbally in New York in 1961, and later through more and more insistent letters. In
the last one, cabled June 15, 1963 to the Israeli ambassador with instruction to hand it personally to Ben-Gurion, Kennedy demanded
Ben-Gurion's agreement for an immediate visit followed by regular visits every six months, otherwise "this Government's commitment
to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized."[42] Warren Bass, Support any
Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance, 2003, p. 219. The result was unexpected: Ben-Gurion
avoided official reception of the letter by announcing his resignation on June 16. As soon as the new Prime Minister Levi Eshkol
took office, Kennedy sent him a similar letter, dated July 5, 1963, to no avail. Did Ben-Gurion resign in order to deal with Kennedy
from another level?
Five months later, Kennedy's death relieved Israel of all pressure (diplomatic or otherwise) to stop its nuclear program.
Faced with Johnson's complete lack of interest in that issue, John McCone resigned from the CIA in 1965, declaring: "When I cannot
get the President to read my reports, then it's time to go."
Kennedy's determination to stop Israel's Dimona project was only part of the "Kennedy problem". During his first months in
the White House, Kennedy committed himself by letters to Nasser and other Arab heads of State to support UN Resolution 194 for the
right of return of Palestinian refugees. Ben-Gurion reacted with a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Washington, intended to be
circulated among Jewish American leaders, in which he stated:
After Kennedy's death, American foreign policy was reversed again, without the American public being aware of it. Johnson
cut the economic aid to Egypt, and increased the military aid to Israel, which reached 92 million dollars in 1966, more than the
total of all previous years combined.
For 50 years, the Israeli trail in the Kennedy assassination has been smothered, and anyone who mentioned it was immediately ostracized.
American congressman Paul Findley nevertheless dared write in March 1992 in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs :
"It is interesting to note that in all the words written and uttered about the Kennedy assassination, Israel's intelligence agency,
the Mossad, has never been mentioned." One single author has seriously investigated that trail: Michael Collins Piper, in his
1995 book Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy. Piper was largely ignored by the mainstream
of the Kennedy truth movement. But his work has made its way nevertheless. In 2013, Martin Sandler wrote about Piper's work in his
edition of letters by Kennedy, which included those addressed to Ben-Gurion about Dimona: "Of all the conspiracy theories, it
remains one of the most intriguing." It is, in fact, a theory widespread in Arab countries.
[45] Listen to Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi on the topic on www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV4kvhs8I8E
Several investigators have identified Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy's vice-president, as the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination.
It is, at least, beyond doubt that the plotters acted with the foreknowledge that Johnson, who automatically stepped in as head of
State after Kennedy's death, would cover them. The context of national crisis enabled him to bully both Justice and the press
while achieving his life's ambition. Johnson not just benefitted from the plot; he participated in its elaboration. As a former senator
from Texas, he could mobilize high-ranked accomplices in Dallas to prepare the ambush. Johnson also had his men in the Navy. In 1961,
Texan senator John Connally had been appointed as Navy Secretary at the request of Johnson. When Connally resigned eleven months
later to run for governor of Texas, Johnson convinced Kennedy to name another of his Texan friends, Fred Korth.
Johnson's privileged control over the Navy is an important aspect of the case because the Navy was critical in the setting
up and in the cover-up of the plot. First, contrary to a widespread but erroneous belief, Lee Harvey Oswald had been recruited
by the Navy and not by the CIA. He was a Marine, and as a Marine he had worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).
Secondly, it is at the Naval Hospital in Washington, under the control of Navy officers, that Kennedy's autopsy was performed,
after his body had been literally stolen at gunpoint from Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The report of this autopsy stated that the
fatal bullet had entered the back of Kennedy's skull, which contradicted the testimonies of twenty-one members of the Dallas hospital
staff who saw two entry bullet-wounds on the front of Kennedy's body. This was critical because Oswald was presumably shooting from
behind Kennedy, and could not possibly have caused these bullet wounds.
It is noteworthy that Johnson had actually taken advantage of his connections in the Navy to participate in the greatest corruption
case ever recorded at that time. His accomplice Fred Korth was forced to resign as Navy Secretary in November 1963, only weeks before
the Dallas coup, after the Justice Department headed by Robert Kennedy had implicated him in a fraud involving a $7 billion contract
for the construction of 1,700 TFX military aircraft by General Dynamics, a Texan company. Johnson's personal secretary, Bobby Baker,
was charged in the same case.
Because of this mounting scandal and other suspicions of corruption, Kennedy was determined to change Vice-President for his
upcoming reelection campaign. [46] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK's Assassination, XLibris, 2010, p. 372. While in Dallas the day before
the President's visit, Nixon publicized the rumor of Johnson's removal, and the Dallas Morning News was reporting on November
22 nd : "Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson." Instead, Johnson became president that very day.
Many Americans immediately suspected Johnson's involvement in the Dallas coup, especially after the publication in 1964 of a book
by James Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon , which portrayed Johnson as deeply corrupt. According to his biographer Robert
Caro, Johnson was a man thirsting "for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate
and dominate them, to bend them to his will."[47] Quoted in Phillip Nelson, LBJ:
The Mastermind, op. cit. , p. 17.
"If you don't take me back to Washington tonight to give me a chance to prove to the President that I am not guilty, then you
will see the most tragic thing that will ever happen." "There will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don't take
my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don't suffer because of what I have done."
He said that feared that his act would be used "to create some falsehood about some of the Jewish faith," but added that "maybe
something can be saved [ ], if our President, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me."
[49] Read Ruby's deposition on jfkmurdersolved.com/ruby.htm
With such words, Ruby seems to be trying to send a message to Johnson through the Commission, or rather a warning that he might spill
the beans about Israel's involvement if Johnson did not intervene in his favor. We get the impression that Ruby expected Johnson
to pardon him.
Yet Johnson did nothing to get Ruby out of jail. Ruby's sense of betrayal would explain why in 1965, after having been sentenced
to life imprisonment, Ruby implicitly accused Johnson of Kennedy's murder in a press conference: "If [Adlai Stevenson] was Vice-President
there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy."[50] See on YouTube, "Jack Ruby Talks."
Ruby died from a mysterious disease in his prison in 1967.
Ruby is not the only link between Johnson and Israel, far from it. In truth, Johnson had always been Israel's man. His electoral
campaigns had been funded since 1948 by Zionist financier Abraham Feinberg, who happened to be president of the Americans for Haganah
Incorporated, which raised money for the Jewish militia. It is the same Feinberg who, after the Democratic primaries in 1960, made
the following proposal to Kennedy, as Kennedy himself later reported to his friend Charles Bartlett: "We know your campaign is
in trouble. We're willing to pay your bills if you'll let us have control of your Middle East policy." Bartlett recalls that
Kennedy was deeply upset and swore that, "if he ever did get to be President, he was going to do something about it."[51] Seymour Hersh, The Samson
Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy , Random House, 1991, p. 94-97.
It is on record, thanks to Kennedy insider Arthur Schlesinger ( A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House, 1965),
that the two men who convinced Kennedy to take Johnson as his running mate, were Philip Graham and Joseph Alsop, respectively publisher
and columnist of the Washington Post , and strong supporters of Israel.
[52] Arthur Schlesinger,
A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House (1965), Mariner Books, 2002, p. 56; Alan Hart, Zionism, vol. 2, op.
cit., p. 257. Schlesinger doesn't reveal Graham and Alsop's arguments, and states that Kennedy's final decision "defies
historical reconstruction" -- a curious statement for a historian so well informed on the topic. But Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's
personal secretary for twelve years, had her own idea about it. She believed that Kennedy was blackmailed with proofs of his many
infidelities to his wife: " Jack knew that Hoover and LBJ would just fill the air with womanizing." Whatever the details of
the blackmail, Kennedy once confided to his assistant Hyman Raskin, as an apology for taking Johnson, "I was left with no choice
[ ] those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems and I don't need more problems."[53] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The
Mastermind, op; cit. , p. 320.
In 2013, Associated Press reported about newly released tapes from Johnson's White House office showing LBJ's "personal and
often emotional connection to Israel," and pointed out that under Johnson, "the United States became Israel's chief diplomatic
ally and primary arms supplier." An article from the 5 Towns Jewish Times "Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson?"
recalls Johnson's continuous support of Jews and Israel in the 1940s and 50s, and concludes: "President Johnson firmly pointed
American policy in a pro-Israel direction." The article also mentions that, "research into Johnson's personal history indicates
that he inherited his concern for the Jewish people from his family. His aunt Jessie Johnson Hatcher, a major influence on LBJ, was
a member of the Zionist Organization of America." And, in an additional note: "The line of Jewish mothers can be traced back
three generations in Lyndon Johnson's family tree. There is little doubt that he was Jewish."[54] Morris Smith, "Our First Jewish
President Lyndon Johnson? – an update!!," 5 Towns Jewish Times, April 11, 2013, on 5tjt.com.
Whatever was the reason of Johnson's loyalty to Israel, it is a fact that, thanks to Johnson, Israel could continue its military
nuclear program undisturbed, and acquire its first atomic bomb around 1965. Historian Stephen Green writes: "Lyndon Johnson's
White House saw no Dimona, heard no Dimona, and spoke no Dimona when the reactor went critical in early 1964."[55] Stephen Green, Taking Sides:
America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel, William Morrow & Co., 1984, p. 166.
Thanks to JFK's death, Israel was also able to carry out its plan to annex Palestinian territories beyond the boundaries imposed
by the United Nations Partition plan. By leaning on Pentagon and CIA hawks, Johnson intensified the Cold War and created the climate
of tension which Israel needed in order to demonize Egyptian president Nasser and reinforce its own stature as indispensable ally
in the Middle East.
During the Six Day War of 1967, Israel managed to triple its territory, while creating the illusion of acting in legitimate
defense. The lie could not deceive American Intelligence agencies, but Johnson had given a green light to Israel's attack, and even
authorized James Angleton of the CIA to give Israel the precise positions of the Egyptian air bases, which enabled Israel to destroy
them in just a few hours.
Four days after the start of the Israeli attack, Nasser accepted the ceasefire request from the UN Security Council. It was too
soon for Israel, which had not yet achieved all its territorial objectives. On June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a NSA spy ship stationed
in international waters off Sinai, was bombed, strafed and torpedoed during 75 minutes by Israeli Mirage jets and three torpedo boats,
with the obvious intention of sinking it without leaving any survivors. (Even the rescue channels were machine-gunned.) Meanwhile,
Johnson, from the White House, intervened personally to prohibit the nearby Sixth Fleet from rescuing the USS Liberty after the crew,
despite the initial destruction of its transmitters, had managed to send off an SOS.
The attack would have been blamed on Egypt if it had succeeded, that is, if the ship had sunk and its crew had all died. The operation
would then have given Johnson a pretext for interveening on the side of Israel against Egypt.
But it failed. The USS Liberty affair was suppressed by a commission of inquiry headed by Admiral John Sidney McCain II, Commander-in-Chief
of US Naval Forces in Europe (and Father of Arizona Senator John McCain III). Johnson accepted Israel's spurious "targeting error"
explanation. In January 1968 he invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, to Washington, and warmly welcomed him to his Texas
ranch. What's more, Johnson rewarded Israel by lifting the embargo on offensive military equipment: US-made tanks and aircraft immediately
flowed to Tel Aviv.
This failed false flag attack is evidence of the secret complicity of Johnson and Israel, implying high treason on the part of
Johnson.
Let's now conclude our overview of the evidence: beside the fact that John and Robert were brothers, their assassinations
have at least two things in common: Lyndon Johnson and Israel.
First, their deaths are precisely framed by Johnson's presidency, which was also the context for other political assassinations,
such as Martin-Luther King's. Johnson was in control of the State during the two investigations on John and Robert's murders.
Secondly, in both cases, we find the fingerprints of Israel's deep state. In the case of Robert, it is the choice of the manipulated
patsy, which was obviously meant to disguise Robert's assassination as an act of hatred against Israel. In the case of John, it it
is the identity of the man asked to kill the patsy, a Jewish gangster linked to the Irgun.
Johnson and Israel, the two common elements in the Kennedy assassinations, are themselves closely linked, since Johnson can be
considered as a high-level sayan, a man secretly devoted to Israel, or owned by Israel, to the point of committing high treason
against the nation he had been elected to lead and protect.
The causal link between the two assassinations then becomes clear: even if Robert had been pro-Israel, which he was not, Israel
and Johnson would still have had a compelling reason to eliminate him before he got to the White House, where he could -- and would
-- reopen the investigation on his brother's death.
What should have been obvious from the start now appears brightly clear: in order to solve the mystery of the assassination of
John Kennedy, one has simply to look into the two other assassinations which are connected to it: the assassination of Lee Harvey
Oswald, the man whose trial could have exposed the hoax and possibly put the plotters into the light, and the assassination of Robert
Kennedy, the man who would have reopened the case if he had lived. And both these assassinations bear the signature of Israel.
At his death in 1968, Robert Kennedy left eleven orphans, not counting John's two children, whom he had somewhat adopted. John's
son, John F. Kennedy Jr., aka John John, who had turned three the day of his father's funeral, embodied the Kennedy myth in the heart
of all Americans. The route seemed traced for him to become president one day. He died on July 16, 1999, with his pregnant wife and
his sister-in-law, when his private plane suddenly and mysteriously nose-dived into the ocean a few seconds after he had announced
his landing on the Kennedy property in Massachusetts.
John John had long been portrayed as a superficial, spoiled and harmless young man. But that image was as misleading as young
Halmet's in Shakespeare's play. John had serious interest in mind, and, at age 39, he was just entering politics. In 1995 he founded
George magazine, which seemed harmless until it began to take an interest in political assassinations. In March 1997, George
published a 13-page article by the mother of Yigal Amir, the convicted assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The article
was supporting the thesis of a conspiracy by the Israeli far-right. So JFK Jr. was eliminated while following in the footsteps of
his father, entering politics through the door of journalism and taking an interest in the crimes of the Israeli deep state. Canadian-Israeli
journalist Barry Chamish believes John Kennedy Jr. was assassinated precisely for that.
[56] Barry Chamish, "The Murder of
JFK Jr – Ten Years Later," www.barrychamish.com (also on: www.rense.com/general87/tenyrs.htm).
The nonsensical notion of a mysterious curse on the Kennedy family is an obvious smoke screen. The unsolved murders of JFK and
his two legitimate heirs -- his younger brother and his only son -- require a more rational explanation. The sense that the official
stories about their deaths amount to a huge cover-up is obsessing the American psyche, a bit like a repressed family secret affecting
the whole personality from a subconscious level.
President John Kennedy and his brother are heroic, almost Christ-like figures, in the heart of a growing community of citizens
who have become aware of the disastrous longtime effect of their assassinations. Only when the American public at large come to grips
with the truth of their deaths and honor their legacy and sacrifice will America have a chance to be redeemed and be great again.
[9] Extract of TV news in
the documentary film Evidence of Revision: Part 4: The RFK assassination as never seen before , 01:11:42
[10] Jerry Cohen, "Yorty
Reveals That Suspect's Memo Set Deadline for Death," Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1968, pages 1 and 12, on latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2008/06/june-6-1968.html.
Jerry Cohen, "Jerusalem-Born Suspect Called An Anti-Semite," The Salt Lake Tribune , June 6, 1968, on
www.newspapers.com. See also Harry Rosenthal, "Senator Kennedy's support
for Israel promoted decision declares Sirhan," The Telegraph, March 5, 1969, on news.google.com
[11] Sasha Issenberg, "Slaying
gave US a first taste of Mideast terror," Boston Globe, June 5, 2008, on
www.boston.com
[12] Jeffrey Salkin, "Remember
What Bobby Kennedy Died For," Forward.com, June 5, 2008. Also Michael Fischbach, "First Shot in Terror War Killed RFK,"
Los Angeles Times, June 02, 2003, on articles.latimes.com
[13] Frank Morales, "The
Assassination of RFK: A Time for Justice!" June 16, 2012, on www.globalresearch.ca;
watch on YouTube, "RFK Assassination 40 th Anniversary (2008) Paul Schrade on CNN."
[14] Philip Melanson,
The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations On the Conspiracy And Cover-Up, S.P.I. Books , 1994, p. 25. For
a full overview, watch Shane O'Sullivan's 2007 investigative documentary RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy.
For more detail, read his book Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy , Union Square Press, 2008. See
also Don Schulman's testimony in The Second Gun (1973), from 42 min 40.
[15] In a parole hearing
in 2011, failing to convince the judges for the fourteenth time. Watch on YouTube, "Sirhan Sirhan Denied Parole":
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsm1hKPI9EU
[16] Shane O'Sullivan,
Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy , Union Square Press, 2008, p. 5, 44, 103.
[17] Jacqui Goddard, "Sirhan
Sirhan, assassin of Robert F.Kennedy, launches new campaign for freedom 42 years later," The Telegraph, December 3, 2011,
on www.telegraph.co.uk/search/
[18] Colin Ross, Bluebird:
Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists , Manitou Communications, 2000,summary on
www.wanttoknow.info/bluebird10pg
[19] David B. Green, "Brainwashing
and Cross-dressing: Israel's Assassination Program Laid Bare in Shocking Detail," Haaretz, February 5, 2018.
[20] Ronald Kessler,
The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.
[22] Jeffrey Salkin, "Remember
What Bobby Kennedy Died For , " op. cit. .
[23] Michael Collins Piper,
False Flag, op. cit., p. 78.
[24] Tom Mangold, Cold
Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: the CIA's Master Spy Hunter, Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 318.
[25] Michael Howard Holzman,
James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of COunterintelligence, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, p. 153.
[26] "Assassination studies
Kennedy knew a coup was coming," on Youtube. Image of Arthur Krock's article is shown on
www.youtube.com/watch?v=snE161QnL1U at 1:36.
[27] "Harry Truman Writes:
Limit CIA Role to Intelligence," Washington Post, December 22, 1963, quoted in Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the
CIA in the Murder of JFK , Skyhorse Publishing, 2011 , p. 246.
[28] Thomas Troy, "Truman
on CIA," September 22, 1993, on www.cia.gov ; Sidney Krasnoff, Truman and Noyes:
Story of a President's Alter Ego, Jonathan Stuart Press, 1997.
[29] Michael Collins Piper,
False Flags: Template for Terror, American Free Press, 2013, p. 67.
[30] James Douglass,
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Touchstone, 2008 , p. 46.
[31] George de Mohrenschilldt,
I am a Patsy! on jfkassassination.net/russ/jfkinfo4/jfk12/hscapatsy.htm
[32] Read the Sheriff's
Office report on mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death2.txt
[33] Meir Doron, Confidential:
The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon – Arnon Milchan , Gefen Books, 2011, p. xi.
[34] Stuart Winer, "Hollywood
producer Arnon Milchan reveals past as secret agent," The Times of Israel, November 25, 2013, on
www.timesofisrael.com ; Meir Doron, Confidential: The Life of Secret
Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon – Arnon Milchan , Gefen Books, 2011, p. xi
[35] Mickey Cohen, In
My Own Words , Prentice-Hall, 1975, p. 91-92.
[36] Michael Collins Piper,
Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy , American Free Press, 6 th ed., ebook 2005,
p. 133-155, 226.
[37] William Kunstler,
My Life as a Radical Lawyer , Carol Publishing, 1994, p. 158; Steve North, "Lee Harvey Oswald's Killer 'Jack Ruby' Came From
Strong Jewish Background," The Forward , November 17, 2013, on forward.com
[38] Bryan Edward Stone,
The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas, University of Texas Press, 2010, p. 200.
[39] John Hughes-Wilson,
JFK-An American Coup d'État: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination, John Blake, 2014.
[40] Natasha Mozgovaya,
"Prominent Jewish-American politician Arlan Specter dies at 82," Haaretz, October 14, 2012, on
www.haaretz.com.
[41] Alan Hart, Zionism:
The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2009 , p. 273.
[42] Warren Bass, Support
any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance, 2003, p. 219.
[43] Quoted in George and
Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present , W.W. Norton & Co., 1992,
p. 51.
[44] Philip Muehlenbeck,
Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy's Courting of African Nationalist Leaders, Oxford UP, 2012.
[51] Seymour Hersh,
The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy , Random House, 1991, p. 94-97.
[52] Arthur Schlesinger,
A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House (1965), Mariner Books, 2002, p. 56; Alan Hart, Zionism, vol. 2,
op. cit., p. 257.
[53] Phillip Nelson,
LBJ: The Mastermind, op; cit. , p. 320.
[54] Morris Smith, "Our
First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson? – an update!!," 5 Towns Jewish Times, April 11, 2013, on 5tjt.com.
[55] Stephen Green,
Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel, William Morrow & Co., 1984, p. 166.
My interest in this is as the reader of a good thriller which I can excuse myself spending time on because it is just possible
that I shall learn something about the real world including important levels of government. So no dog in any fight. But I am alerted
to conventional journalistic slickness by such foolishness as the snide and inaccurate statement that Alan Dershowitz is best
known as counsel for Jonathan Pollard. Also the slippery statement that a connection between the two brothers' assassinations
should be "assumed". (Obviously it is worth asking a few questions such as "could there be common motives but that sort of intelligent
lateral thinking is not what the author was talking about).
Arthur J. Schlesinger is mentioned so why not his careful journal record of what RFK had to say about his brother's assassination.
A recent NYRB article suggests that, while he didn't think much of the Warren Commission's work, his suspicions only extended
to Cuba and "gangsters".
A recent TV series (not mentioned here) using recently declassified material does strongly suggest that Oswald was relying
for support on a group if fiercely anti-Castro Cubans who had been infiltrated by a Castro man. Not difficult to see why in the
end he might have thought he was a patsy. Also there is no mention here of the at least plausible theory that the fatal bullet
was one accidentally fired by a Secret Serviceman in the car behind.
The total rubbish about JFK Jr's plane crash also serves to undermine credibility and support the view that this is written
by someone suffering a severe case of confirmation bias.
A very good article. With my limited studies on the JFK murder I came to the same conclusion: Piper was essentially correct,
but you fill up the case of Robert Kennedy in a convincing way. Maybe Meyer Lansky could be mentioned, he probably had some role.
But the issue was the bomb.
The truth is that Robert Kennedy was much despised by Israel and its Jewish-American lobby of the time, the American Zionist Council
(AZC) and was considered a major foe. After many months of back and forth, on Oct 11, 1963 the New York law firm representing
the AZC received a formal written demand from Attorney General RFK's office to immediately (72 hours) proceed to register as foreign
agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. Forms for said registration accompanied the letter. This would have
upended the AZC's operations and rendered it or any subsequent Israeli lobby (AIPAC) – near powerless.
The JFK assasination is a very interesting whodunnit and the couple of books I have read on it led to me to the very same conclusion
as the author. A lot of credit must go to Piper. I think Gary Wean was correct, there was a plot to stage a fake assassination
attempt on JFK within which the actual assassination was hidden, presumably overseen by Angleton. Too many who knew better were
looking the other way, and their effective complicity made them very interested in a cover up.
Israel was created by the British oligarchs as a bridgehead in the Middle East. Furthering Israel was/is furthering the interests
of those oligarchs (who ran the British Empire which morphed to the Anglo-American Empire). JFK was critical of Israel. If someone
killed him, it the Anglo-American deep state. Israel likely pulled the trigger. Let's remember what the fake father of Modern
Zionism who admired Cecil Rhodes, Theodor Herl said: "England will get ten million agents for her greatness and influence."
A parallel could also be established between the killing of JFK and the "Six-Day War" of 1967
In 1954, Israeli teamed with the Muslim Brotherhood to plant explosives in American and British offices to start a civil war
to prompt the presence of British troops. The failed terror plot was known as the "Lavon Affair".
In 1956, Israel (supported by Britain and France) invaded Egypt to retake the Suez Canal nationalized by Nasser. Deterring
Nasser who had crushed the Muslim Brotherhood (a British machination aimed at keeping Muslim nations backwards culturally and
economically ( https://bit.ly/2J06YDO )) was also another primary objective.
Einsenhower was the one who tenaciously worked on removing Israel from Egypt but it didn't come easy:
1956-1957: England and France removed their troops following Einsenhower's advise but Israel did not. As a result, Eisenhower
joined the 75 countries at the UN General Assembly (February 1957) to pass a resolution against Israel's occupation of Egyptian
territory. Despite that, Israel still refused to remove its troops. It made Einsenhower reach out to the Congress but it was heavily
bought out by Zionists and the end-result was to no avail.. When that failed, Einsenhower met with congressional leaders to gather
support but even they were in support of Israel. Einsenhower then went on TV to make the case public. After which he threatened
Israel with sanctions (including the $40M of tax deductible donations and $60M of private bonds). Making the case public and threatening
economically worked – Israel withdrew its troops.
The failed invasion was a major blow to Britain (who's PM resigned) France and Israel (who destroyed everything on its way
out).
In spite of the mendacious narrative regurgitated in the West about the war of 1967, it was Israel who planned and attacked
its neighbors. The seizing of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza were objectives Israel couldn't achieve in 1948 and deterring
Nasser, an objective failed in 1956. The only problem Israel had was: would another US President intervene. Norman Finkelstein,
who's research on 1967 is to date unchallenged successfully, showed that Israel sent diplomats to Washington
The U.S. agreed with Israel that Nasser had no plans to attack.
The U.S. agreed that Israel would easily defeat Egypt on the battlefield, either alone or with any combination of other
Arab nations.
And the U.S. tacitly gave Israel permission to start the war, or at least indicated there would be no repeat of Eisenhower's
repudiation after the 1956 Suez invasion.
We all know who followed JFK. None other than absolute bent-over to Israel, Lyndon Johnson.
-- -- --
If I could make a parallel on the Palestinians: it's "interesting" how they always found themselves in the spotlight of major
plots, killings and terror acts after the creation of the British Zionist State known as Israel. One has to only remember the
airplane hijackings, Munich, etc. Coincidentally, most of those Palestinians were all led by the infamous Abu Nidal – who was
never apprehended while the rest of the Palestinians were either killed or arrested.
The case of 9/11 wasn't any different. The five dancing Israelis, who were "documenting the event" from New Jersey proclaimed
– while being arrested:
"We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem."
Ari Ben-Menashe, in his book "Profits of War : Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network" spoke of the CIA and the Mossad
covertly training Palestinians in Yugoslavia to have them attack Western targets. The ultimate goal was to draw negative attention
and sentiment against their cause.
Most of the information was from the book Nemesis: The True Story of Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O, and the Love Triangle That
Brought Down the Kennedys , by Peter Evans.
In December 1971 Aristotle Onassis's ex-wife Tina met with their daughter Christina to ask her to stop bad-mouthing her current
husband Stavros Niarchos, a man long hated by Aristotle Onassis. Christina was Niarcho's niece and step-daughter, since he had
been married to Tina's sister Eugenie and was now married to Tina herself. Among the accusations that Christina kept repeating
about Niarchos was that he had murdered Eugenie. In order to give Christina a broader perspective, Tina informed Christina that
her father Aristotle had financed the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
The next day Christina passed this information on to her brother Alexander Onassis, who subsequently placed some related papers
into a safe-deposit box. After that, Alexander told his lover Fiona Thyssen that these papers would prevent his father Aristotle
from harming Fiona, a woman long hated by Aristotle Onassis. Since Fiona was 16 years older than Alexander, Aristotle considered
her to be a gold-digger and wanted her out of Alexander's life.
Several months later Alexander showed some of his papers to Yannis Georgakis, a lawyer who was close to the entire Onassis
family. The papers included photocopies of pages from the notebooks of Sirhan Sirhan, who had assassinated Robert Kennedy. During
the weeks before the assassination, Sirhan would place himself into a hypnotic state and write stream-of-conscious thoughts into
a notebook. On one page Sirhan had written at the center of a roundel, amid Arabic writing, the single name Fiona . On
another page he had written 2 Narkos! . On a third page, between the lines One Hundred thousand Dollars and Dollars
and One Hundreds , Sirhan had written in Arabic: they should be killed , next to which he had written the number
three .
It was obvious to Tina, Christina and Alexander that for some reason Sirhan had been hypnotized into a fixation on killing
three people -- Fiona Thyssen, Stavros Niarchos, and Robert Kennedy -- who had long been fiercely hated by Aristotle Onassis.
=====
[MORE]
In the fall of 1974 a 34-year-old photographer Helene Gaillet was stranded in Paris on her way to a job in Africa, because the
job was canceled. A year earlier she had met Aristotle Onassis at a dinner party in New York, and he had told her to call him
if she ever needed a place to stay in Paris. She called his number but was told he was away on his private island, Skorpios, in
the Aegean Sea. Several minutes later, however, Onassis returned her call and invited her to join him in Skorpios. He would fly
her there at his own expense. She accepted his invitation and subsequently spent several days with him there.
During that time they had a short affair, which included a series of intimate conversations about their lives. By that time
his health was failing (he died four months later), so he was in a confessional mood. During one of those conversations he told
her, "You know, Helene, I put up the money for Bobby Kennedy's murder."
=====
In May 1968 the above-mentioned lawyer Yannis Georgakis was serving as the chief executive officer of Olympic Airways, which
was owned by Aristotle Onassis. Georgakis was informed by a Mossad official serving in Israel's embassy in Paris that Onassis
was meeting regularly in Paris with a Palestinian terrorist named Mahmoud Hamshari. About a week later Onassis informed Georgakis
that a Palestinian terrorist group had demanded $1.2 million in protection money from Olympic Airlines, threatening to blow up
the company's airliners if the money was not paid. Onassis said he had reached an agreement with Hamshari and now needed $200,000
from the company's funds to pay the first installment of the protection money. Onassis assured Georgakis that the subsequent installment
payments would be arranged "off the books" and channeled through Onassis's Panama corporations.
Reluctantly, Georgakis agreed to provide the $200,000. He asked to be included in any future negotiations between Onassis and
Hamshari, but Onassis assured him that the entire agreement had already been settled and that no further negotiations should occur.
Onassis flew to New York with the $200,000 in cash. He put all the money into a shopping bag and gave it to his long-time chauffeur,
Roosevelt Zanders, who personally delivered the money to someone in an apartment at United Nations Plaza. As instructed by Onassis,
Zanders did not ask for a receipt for the money.
To be continued.
Continued from my previous comment at 7:08 a.m.
=====
In January 1954 Aristotle Onassis signed a secret agreement with Saudi Arabia's finance minister. The agreement basically said
that Onassis would provide Saudi Arabia with its own fleet of oil tankers. Saudi Arabia expected that its ownership of such a
fleet would help that country to become independent of Western petroleum companies, to earn a fuller share of profits, and eventually
to nationalize the entire industry on its territory. Onassis expected to earn hundreds of millions of dollars for his role in
the arrangement.
Despite the secrecy, however, the US Government soon learned of the deal and during the following months employed a variety
of methods to undermine it. The US Justice Department found fault with Onassis's past purchases of oil tankers and subsequently
seized his tankers and also money he had earned from those tankers. In February 1954 the Justice Department arrested Onassis himself
and charged him with criminal conspiracy to buy the tankers illegally. The State Department pressured the Saudi government to
disassociate itself from Onassis. Arrangements were made for Peru to seize nine of Onassis's whaling ships. One of Onassis's business
associates was pressured to sue Onassis for swindling him out of $200,000 and to accuse Onassis of paying a $350,000 bribe to
the Saudi finance minister. Eventually in October 1954 King Saud decided not to sign the agreement, which therefore became void.
All these developments almost bankrupted Onassis.
Most of Onassis's anger about the collapse of the Saudi deal was misdirected toward Robert Kennedy, who in 1954 was a 29-year-old
attorney working on the staff of a Senate subcommittee. One of Kennedy's investigations for the subcommittee had raised accusations
about shipping business that some Greek companies conducted with Red China, but this issue did not involve Onassis in particular.
Kennedy did not play any apparent role in the seizure of Onassis's assets or in his arrest. The business associate who sued Onassis
hired as an expert witness an accountant who had worked for Robert's father Joseph Kennedy for many years, but that accountant
had no direct association with Robert Kennedy himself.
In fact Robert Kennedy had nothing at all to do with the US Government's discovery of Onassis's Saudi deal. The CIA station
in Athens had been informed about it by another Greek shipper, Stavros Niarchos, who was Onassis's brother-in-law (the two men
were married to two sisters). Niarchos had heard about the deal from Onassis's wife Tina, who was involved in a love affair with
Niarchos.
In order to protect the real source of its information, the CIA cleverly encouraged Onassis's initial reaction that the deal
had been exposed during Kennedy's investigation of the Greek shippers who did business with Red China. For example, the accountant
of Robert Kennedy's father was apparently moved into and out of the lawsuit in order to inflame Onassis's suspicions about Kenned's
role in the matter. Niarchos himself certainly collaborated in the continuing effort to divert Onassis's anger away from himself
and onto Kennedy. And in the following years Kennedy himself publicly criticized Onassis on many occasions, which further enraged
Onassis.
=====
In the early 1960s Onassis became closely involved in several business enterprises with a fellow Greek ex-patriot, Spyros Skouras,
who had immigrated to the United States in 1912. Skouras became a movie producer and during that career, he clashed angrily several
times with Joseph Kennedy, who was also a movie producer. In May 1962 Skouras's movie studio was losing millions of dollars in
the filming of Cleopatra and Something's Got to Give . The latter movie starred Marilyn Monroe, who was extraordinarily
capricious and absent during the filming. In conversations with Onassis, Skouras blamed Monroe's misbehavior on Robert Kennedy,
her secret lover. Skouras knew about this affair (and about Monroe's earlier affair with John Kennedy) and informed Onassis.
Exasperated by the problems and losses caused by these two films, Skouras decided to leave the movie business and to establish
a shipping business. Onassis invested $10 million in Skouras's shipping business, which intended to introduce new loading and
unloading technology that would require far fewer longshoremen. Because of this manpower issue, Onassis became involved in negotiations
with Jimmy Hoffa, the chief of the Teamsters labor union and also a hater of Robert Kennedy, who was then the US Attorney General.
During this same time, Onassis began a love affair with Lee Radziwill, the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy. Lee and her
husband Prince Stanislas Radziwill were each divorced from previous spouses when they married each other, so they married in a
civil wedding instead of a Roman Catholic wedding. Since John Kennedy was now President of the United States, Robert Kennedy used
the family's prestige to try to convince the Catholic Church to annul the Radziwills' previous marriages. This effort (and the
Kennedy family's reputation) was endangered by publicity about Lee's affair with Onassis, and so Robert Kennedy phoned Onassis
directly and asked him to stay away from Lee. Onassis responded with the words, "Bobby, you and Jack fuck your movie queen [Monroe]
and I'll fuck my princess [Radziwill]." Onassis thus revealed to Robert Kennedy that he knew about the Kennedy-Monroe affairs,
which were still very secret.
Also during this same time, Hoffa learned (perhaps from Onassis) about the Kennedy brothers' affairs with Monroe and so he
bugged Monroe's home and telephones to record related conversations. Through these recordings, Hoffa learned that Monroe and Robert
Kennedy had met in Monroe's home on August 4, 1962, a few hours before she died of an overdose and that some of Kennedy's associates
had subsequently entered her house during the period between her death and the notification of the police. Hoffa apparently hinted
to Onassis about the existence of these tape recordings, since Onassis asked Monroe's publicist whether he knew anything about
them, offering to pay big money to buy them.
=====
During the following months Robert Kennedy communicated subtle threats in order to pressure Onassis to stay away from Lee Radziwill.
The main thrust of these threats was that Kennedy would exploit his position as US Attorney General to cause legal problems for
Onassis and his businesses. This pressure backfired, as Onassis arranged for Radziwill to live blatantly with him on his yacht.
The feud escalated dramatically in September 1963, when Jackie herself also moved onto the yacht for a few weeks in order to convalesce
from a miscarriage. Robert Kennedy responded by continuing his subtle threats against Onassis, and Onassis responded by seducing
Jacqueline on the yacht.
Refreshed by her affair with Onassis, Jacqueline returned to the White House. A few weeks later, on November 22, 1963, John
Kennedy was assassinated. At Jacqueline's invitation, Onassis came and stayed in the White House during the funeral days. Robert
Kennedy confronted Onassis in the White House, and they eventually engaged in a ridiculous argument that embarrassed Onassis in
front of the other guests. Kennedy wrote up a written statement for Onassis to sign, promising to donate half of his wealth to
the poor, and Onassis signed the paper with Greek words that nullified the promise.
In the months following the assassination, Jacqueline wanted to quickly marry Onassis, but this desire was discouraged by Robert
Kennedy, who now headed the Kennedy family. Robert Kennedy managed to prevent the marriage as long as he lived. He was assassinated
on June 5, 1968. Onassis then married Jacqueline on October 20.
=====
To be continued.
Continued from my previous comments.
=====
In January 1968 David Karr arranged for Mahmoud Hamshari, also known as Dr. Michel Hassner, to be introduced to Aristotle Onassis.
Karr introduced Dr. Michel Hassner to Onassis's circle as an expert in aviation finance who would propose a restructuring of the
debt of Onassis's Olympic Airline. Eventually, Hamshari (aka Hassner), using money provided by Onassis, arranged for Sirhan Sirhan
to assassinate Robert Kennedy.
David Karr had known Onassis since 1956. Karr worked in many varied jobs during his life, but at that time he managed a public
relations company that specialized in helping companies that were involved in proxy fights in corporate takeovers. It might be
more accurate to say that Karr was specialized in performing dirty tricks for his clients. He collected and distributed (or threatened
to distribute) scandalous information about his clients' opponents. By 1967 Onassis was using Karr for a variety of secret tasks;
in that year, for example, he asked Karr to ask Soviet officials about possibly supplying crude oil for a refinery he considered
building near Athens. Onassis's closest associates wondered about that assignment, because Karr had no expertise related to the
petroleum business or to the Soviet Union. Onasssis's trust in Karr was a mystery.
At some point in his own past, while working as a movie producer in Hollywood, Karr had become acquainted with William Joseph
Bryan, Jr., a local hypnotist. Bryan's American Institute of Hypnosis treated people in the film industry for alcohol and drug
additions, and he had served as the technical adviser on the filming of the movie The Manchurian Candidate. Karr gave Bryan's
phone number to Hamshari and advised him to visit Bryan. Karr later said he referred Hamshari to Bryan because Hamshari complained
that he suffered headaches whenever he visited Los Angeles, which he did frequently during 1967 and 1968.
==============
In the summer of 1979 Karr contacted Leslie Linder, a former movie agent, whom Karr had known while he worked in the movie
business. Karr wanted Linder to represent his proposed memoirs, which would include a revelation that Onassis had played a key
role in the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Linder was interested and scheduled another discussion of the proposal again with
the added participation of Oscar Beuselinck, a London lawyer.
In the meantime, Karr departed for a business meeting in Moscow, where he planned to open a big hotel. He remarked that he
had all the evidence of the Onassis story in Paris, and he promised to call Linder and Beuselinck as soon as he returned from
Moscow.
Karr was found dead in his Paris apartment on the morning of July 7, 1979. He had a fractured larynx, and blood was found on
his pillow. A forensic examination concluded he had died of a heart attack, but his widow Evia Karr and his business partner Ronnie
Driver insist that Karr was murdered by agents of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Continued from my previous comments
=====
Mahmoud Hamshari was born in a village near Jaffa in 1939 and eventually became an important official in the Palestinian Fatah.
In June 1967, following the Six-Day War, he attended a Fatah meeting in Damascus to discuss further strategy. The meeting's participants
represented a broad scope of attitudes within Fatah, and Hamshari appeared to be among the most aggressive. When he spoke, he
focused his anger on US support of Israel and proposed actions that would attack the US. In particular, he proposed the Fatah
"kill a high-profile American on American soil" in order to make the US "think twice about backing the Jews."
This proposal seemed to earn little explicit support at the meeting, so Hamshari then proposed that the organization greatly
increase its fund-raising activities in the US, in order to manipulate the US to support the Palestinians too. Fatah apparently
adopted this proposal and assigned Hamshari himself to implement it, operating under the supervision of Fatah's intelligence chief,
Abu Iyad (Salah Khalef). In the following months, Hamshari began to travel to Europe and the United States, using several false
names, including Dr. Michel Hassner. Late in 1967 a Fatah official gave Hamshari a list of Palestinian immigrants living in Los
Angeles. The list had been acquired from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which had records on the Sirhan family, then
living in Los Angeles.
=====
In some unknown circumstances, Dr. Hassner (Hamshari) began to associate frequently with David Karr, a mysterious associate
of Aristotle Onassis. Karr did not introduce Hassner to Onassis directly, but instead introduced him indirectly into Onassis's
nner circle as an investment consultant for Arab Bank, specializing in the restructuring of airline debts. Such expertise was
of interest because Onassis's Olympic airline was struggling with debts. A meeting between Hassner and Onassis was scheduled for
a day in January 1968 in Paris, but Onassis left for Athens unexpectedly right before the meeting. Therefore Hassner met instead
with several members of Onassis's inner circle. The airline's chief executive officer, Yannis Georgakis, was not informed about
the meeting by Onassis and so did not participate.
At this meeting, Hassner revealed to the group that he had been approached by a Palestinian terror group who demanded that
the airline pay $350,000 to the group so that they not blow up bombs on Olympic airliners. Hassner said he was acting only as
an honest broker, a facilitator, and did not know the identities of the terrorists, who had contacted him through the Palestine
National Fund.
After Onassis returned to Paris, he began to meet frequently in Paris with Hassner, the two alone. Between meetings, Hassner
sometimes traveled to Los Angeles and back. Karr says that during this period he gave Hassner the phone number of a Los Angeles
hypnotist named William Joseph Bryan, Jr.
Georgakis, the CEO of Olympic, heard about Hassner for the first time in May 1968. He heard about him not from Onassis, but
from a Mossad official stationed at the Israeli embassy in Paris. Onassis himself informed Georgakis about a week later, saying
that he had already decided to pay $1.2 million (no longer just $350,000) to Hassner and that Georgakis should provide the first
$200,000 in cash from Olympic funds. Georgakis complied, and Onassis subsequently flew with the cash to New York, where his chauffeur
delivered it to an apartment at United Nations Plaza.
=====
To be continued.
Allow me to conclude with one more passage.
=====
On the evening of June 4, 1968, an itinerant Christian preacher named Jerry Owen (he himself said) parked a horse trailer outside
the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Robert Kennedy's campaign organization had scheduled its anticipated victory following
the California primary elections. Later that night, Sirhan assassinated Kennedy in the hotel. The next day, Owen reported to the
Los Angeles police that he had picked up Sirhan and a young woman hitchhiking on June 3. During the course of that meeting, Owen
said, Sirhan had agreed to buy a horse from Owen on the night of June 4 in the hotel parking lot. That deal, explained Owen, was
why he himself had parked his horse trailer in the parking lot and why Sirhan had four one-hundred-dollar bills in his pocket
when he was arrested. Owen further surmised that Sirhan intended to use the horse trailer as a get-away vehicle.
The Police basically dismissed Owen's report as a publicity stunt. (In 1970 this incident was examined in a lawsuit that Owen
filed against a television station. During that trial, several witnessed testified that Owen had become acquainted with Sirhan
at the Corona race track, where on one occasion a few weeks before the assassination Owen had given Sirhan a large wad of cash)
Immediately after he was arrested, Sirhan declared that "I did it for my country." Within a few minutes, though, he began avoiding
any discussion of his motive. He instead wanted to talk with the investigating policemen about Albert DeSalvo, the so-called Boston
Strangler. Later, Sirhan claimed that he had no memory of anything about the assassination, about his intention, about his notebooks,
or about the act itself. During his trial he reluctantly allowed his lawyers to construct a legal defense of diminished responsibility
due to mental illness.
Sirhan was not hypnotized by himself or anyone else in order to manipulate him to assassinate Robert Kennedy. Even without
the hypnosis, Sirhan was willing and eager to assassinate Kennedy because of the latter's support for Israel. The initial purpose
of Sirhan's self-hypnosis was to focus his mind and bolster courage for this difficult mission. Eventually, though, the hypnosis
served also as a legal excuse to try to avoid execution. The notebook served as evidence that he was often in deep trances and
so plausibly had no memory of the assassination. Also, the hypnosis deflected political blame from the Palestinian cause as Sirhan's
main motivation.
Sirhan hoped that if he could avoid execution, then eventually he would be freed in a prisoner swap forced by Palestinian terrorists.
He was sentenced to death, but later that sentence was commuted when the Supreme Court declared the death penalty to be unconstitutional.
Sirhan mentioned Albert DeSalvo repeatedly in his notebooks and at the police station immediately after his arrest. DeSalvo
had been hypnotized by a Los Angeles hypnotist named William Joseph Bryan. After he died in 1977, a couple of prostitutes whom
he frequently hired told investigators that he sometimes bragged that he had hypnotized Albert DeSalvo and Sirhan Sirhan.
They most certainly did. They stole US enriched plutonium and triggers for Israel's continuing illegal nuclear weapons programs.
They also whipped up the entire cold war and the Vietnam war as a cover for the genocide and theft of Palestine. They passed nuclear
weapons research through jews like the Rosenbergs and Pollard to their other puppet, the USSR, so that the US and the entire planet
could be kept under their strategy of tension while they set up the capital of the planet in Jerusalem.
But that is all merely frosting on the cake. This family and its satellites started the American Revolution, the French Revolution,
the US war of northern aggression, the Spanish-American war, WWI, WWII, the Korean War and is directly responsible for the never
ending wars for Eretz Israel. With their Havara agreement, this family set up all the jews that it deemed racially inferior to
suffer through WWII in Europe while it forced the National Socialists to set up training centers to train young Zionist Übermenschen
in all facets of German technology before shipping them, with their belongings, tools and equipment to Palestine. It is also amazing
that immediately after the war they twisted Germany's arm into resuming the shipments of technology, power stations, trains and
ships.
Israel clearly is not a legal state in any sense of the word. It is the capital of by far the worlds largest crime syndicate.
It is a scourge to all humanity.
JFK had also told an aide that Israel would have the 'bomb' over his dead body. Well, Israel has the bomb and control of the
USA, thanks to their murders of the Kennedy's and the masterminding of the 9/11 False Flag.
But if you point this out, you'll get hit with a barrage of anti-Semite slurs, accusing one of being a neo-Nazi or worse, all
the while never discussing what you just wrote.
"A recent NYRB article suggests that, while he didn't think much of the Warren Commission's work, his suspicions only extended
to Cuba and "gangsters"."
Cuba casinos and crime were run by Meyer Lansky. You immediately get the Israel connection as he was a great fried of Israel.
Cuban gangsters are implied in the conspiracy to kill JFK, but that is a link to the theory of Piper. To find the high level perpetrators
it is only enough to ask what important US politics changed when LBJ become the President. Towards Cuba or gangsters, no.
Did Israel kill the Kennedys? It is entirely possible. In fact, any conspiracy theory that links the murders that does not
see the Israelis and American Jews involved is almost certainly a waste of time. But here is what is essential: if Israel
and/or American Jews 'did it,' you can bet your every penny and the lives of your children, spouse, and siblings that America's
WASP Deep State was behind it all.
Once this guy writes, "Given this exceptional bond between the Kennedy brothers, what is the probability that the two Kennedy
assassinations were unrelated? Rather, we should start with the assumption that they are related. Basic common sense suggests
that the Kennedy brothers have been killed by the same force, and for the same motives," there is really no point in reading further.
If his reasoning is so weak and silly as this, what confidence can a reader have in anything else he might come up with? Two women
tried to kill Gerald Ford in 1975; does "basic common sense suggest" that they represented "the same force"? Robert Kennedy and
Martin Luther King were both killed in 1968; does that suggest their murders were related? This guy belongs on Infowars.
I had long thought the shareholders of the Federal Reserve (FR) were behind the assasination. Kennedy had signed the executive
order to forbid the FR from charging interest on its fraud money. He had also proposed the issuance of United States Notes backed
by silver. This would have denied the FR a lot of future income.
Later events by Johnson surely indicated he was at least a water boy for the FR. Johnson went on to sign the coin act that
removed silver from dimes and quarters and reduced the amount of silver in fifty cent coins. He also removed the gold cover requirement
for Federal Reserve notes.
At the very least there were two reasons to get rid of Kennedy; stop the Dimona project and remove jeopardy to FR income.
It is the same Feinberg who, after the Democratic primaries in 1960, made the following proposal to Kennedy, as Kennedy
himself later reported to his friend Charles Bartlett: "We know your campaign is in trouble. We're willing to pay your bills
if you'll let us have control of your Middle East policy."
Whatever the details of the blackmail, Kennedy once confided to his assistant Hyman Raskin, as an apology for taking Johnson,
"I was left with no choice [ ] those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems and I don't need more
problems."
I wonder if Trump is confiding in anyone? If he is, it would be interesting to hear what he's saying.
"We all know that Jack and Bobby were killed by lone nutcases three years apart and there can't possibly be any connection
between them. Stop messing about with the Official Narrative."
Maybe the Magic Bullet got Bobby too.
In any case, the involvement of Israel would explain why the complete JFK assassination files will never see the light of day.
Even the CIA doesn't have that kind of clout.
My comment was about the author's failure to take account of one of tbe best sources for what RFK thought and proposed. Obviously
that suggests the question whether it was sloppy research or dishonest suppression.
As to your Meyer Lansky point you do not indicate whether you have any serious claim to knowing anything useful about him and/or
his connection to Israel but surely it is rubbish to talk of his interest in Cuban casinos being relevant. Really!? In 1963? And
anyway you would only be making sense if you were asserting – with reason – that RFK felt constrained to use to his friend Schlesinger
"Cubans or gangsters" as code for Israel.
Or, conceivably you think RFK didn't know what you know about the involvement of Israel but wanted a further inquiry which
might have produced an embarrassing truth about Israel. Really?
Not only did Israel kill JFK and RFK but they also killed JFKjr. with a bomb on his plane and the Israelis did 911 and by the
way the Israeli attack on the USS LIBERTY where 34 dead and 174 were wounded in brutal attack on an American ship and every one
of these diabolical act proved over and over again that Israel and the Zionists control America lock stock and gun barrel.
America is an Israeli slavery colony and the America military is a proxy arm of the IDF to fight Israels wars .
This whole article on Israeli angle is simply preposterous.
If the Dimona project was so crucial, there were numerous other options for Israel to try to persuade JFK to let them proceed
with their project. To try to latch JFK's supposedly adamant decision onto one or two documents is absurd: politicians frequently
change their opinions & actions and there is no proof that JFK considered Dimona to be such a big deal, make-or-break of anything.
Then, Israelis would, even if this were true, be more prone too blackmail JFK- mostly about his sexual escapades, or try to,
say, eliminate him in a clandestine manner (poisoning or something similar).
No, the JFK assassination was a public execution, a coup by the deep state (in modern parlance) in front of the whole world,
the message being: we can do whatever we want & you can't do anything about it.
This family and its satellites started the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the US war of northern aggression,
the Spanish-American war, WWI, WWII, the Korean War
Hmmm – sounds like a family of winners. So how do I sign up with them?
Lansky killed Kennedy for Israel and for mob interests within the U.S. Knock off one president and reap multiple benefits.
Lansky was a fanatical Zionist as well as a crime boss. The JFK hit is all about Permindex and the Lansky-Marcello connection.
The following is from 'Final Judgement' by Michael Collins Piper. "Tibor Rosenbaum was one of the godfathers of the state of
Israel and the first director for finance and supply for Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad. Rosenbaum was a prime financial
angel behind the Permindex corporation. His Swiss banking concern, the Banque De Credit International, also served as the chief
European money laundry or the global crime syndicate of Miami-based crime chief Meyer Lansky."
Yaras, a friend of Jack Ruby, was the hitman. Oswald was heavily intertwined as well.
Lyndon Johnson must have completely known that the hit would take place because he immediately dropped all operations JFK implemented
regarding Israel.
"Given this exceptional bond between the Kennedy brothers, what is the probability that the two Kennedy assassinations were
unrelated? If his reasoning is so weak and silly as this, what confidence can a reader have in anything else he might come up
with?"
I do not find it silly at all. Assuming that the Kennedys were close (which is most probably true), then if JFK was worried
about Israel's atom bomb program, Robert almost certainly knew about it and shared JFK's opinion. He may not have known who was
behind the JFK assassination, but he would very probably have opened the case. If the case is honestly studied, it is immediately
seen as a conspiracy. I confirmed it easily to myself by analyzing the Dictabelt data: more than one shooter. As the likely culprit
is very probably to be found by checking what changed in the US policy (and what changed was the US attitude to the Israel bomb),
the argument of the article becomes quite strong: the purpose of the second assassination was very possibly to cover the first
assassination. I find it purely logical, not silly.
Biff wisely reflected: "I always thought the CIA was suspect, but obviously there are more angles to the story."
Hi Biff,
This article author, Laurent Guyenot, did an admirable job at attempting to distance CIA involvement from Israeli intelligence,
and the killing of JFK, pursuant coup, overturning a US election.
Not so with author Peter Janney who wrote the terrific book, "Mary's Mosaic." He focused upon CIA James Jesus Angleton's Israeli-cozy
career & deadly pre/post assassination undertakings prior to November 23, 1963.
F.y.i, Biff, perhaps you're aware about the Fall 1964 murder (unsolved!) of Mary Pinchot Meyer, CIA Cord Meyer Jr.' ex-wife
and JFK flame?
Unfortunately, Israeli interest & involvement in JFK's killing escaped Peter Janney's survey. Nonetheless, below is Mr. Janet's
very sound description about CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton's mad pursuit to locate & confiscate the diary of the
dead, Mary Pinchot Meyer.
Subsequently, I do not endorse a "Rush to Judgement" that exonerates the CIA from the treasonous Kennedy murders.
They threatened to assassinate 0bama if he got out of line: Atlanta Jewish Times featured a column by its owner-publisher
suggesting that U.S.-based Israeli Mossad agents might someday need to "order a hit" on the president of the United States.
On Jan. 13 the Atlanta Jewish Times featured a column by its owner-publisher suggesting that Israel might someday need to "order
a hit" on the president of the United States. In the column, publisher Andrew Adler describes a scenario in which Israeli Prime
Minister Netanyahu would need to "give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to
Israel." The purpose? So that the vice president could then take office and dictate U.S. policies that would help the Jewish state
"obliterate its enemies." Adler wrote that it is highly likely that the idea "has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles."
He threatened the fake Jews narrative on Hitler too:
From JFK diary. The diary reveals that during his time in Berlin, Kennedy wrote about visiting Hitler's bunker only months
after Germany surrendered in the Second World War.
"You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of
the most significant figures who ever lived," Kennedy wrote in his diary in 1945.
"He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about
him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him," he added. "He had in him the stuff
of which legends are made."
"The room where Hitler is supposed to have met his death showed scorched walls and traces of fire," he wrote. "There is no
complete evidence, however, that the body that was found was Hitler's body."
"The Russians doubt that he is dead," Kennedy added. JFK was visiting Europe after a stint in the Navy.
Screwed up world we live in when these frauds are our #1 ally, according to the traitors in DC.
We shoulda destroyed them after USS Liberty incident, 9/11 and the mass murder that followed would have been prevented.
To understand exactly what Kennedy's order was trying to do, we must understand the purpose of the legislation which gave
the order its underlying authority. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (ch. 25, 48 Stat 51) to which Kennedy refers permits
the President to issue silver certificates in various denominations (mostly $1, $2, $5, and $10) and in any total volume so
long as the Treasury has enough silver on hand to redeem the certificates for a specific quantity and fineness of silver and
that the total volume of such currency does not exceed $3 billion. The Silver Purchase Act of 1934 (ch. 674,48 Stat 1178) also
grants this power to the Treasury Secretary subject to similar limitations. Nowhere in the text of the order is a quantity
of money mentioned, so it is unclear how Marrs arrived at his $4.2 billion figure. Moreover, the President could not have authorized
such a large issue because it would have exceeded the statutory limit.2
As economic activity grew in the fifties and sixties, the public demand for low denomination currency grew, increasing the
Treasury's need for silver to back additional certificate issues and to mint new coins (dimes, quarters, half-dollars). However,
during the late fifties the price of silver began to rise and reached the point that the market value of the silver contained
in the coins and backing the certificates was greater than the face value of the money itself.2
To conserve the Treasury's silver needs, the Silver Purchase Act and related measures were repealed by Congress in 1963
with Public Law 88-36. Following the repeal, only the President could authorize new silver certificate issues, and no longer
the Treasury Secretary. The law, signed by Kennedy himself, also permits the Federal Reserve to issue small denomination bills
to replace the outgoing silver certificates (prior to the act, the Fed could only issue Federal Reserve Notes in larger denominations).
The Treasury's shrinking silver stock could then be used to mint coins only and not have to back currency. The repeal left
only the President with the authority to issue silver certificates, however it did permit him to delegate this authority. E.O.
11,110 does this by transferring the authority from the President to the Treasury
Secretary.2
E.O. 11,110 did not create authority to issue new silver certificates, it only affected who could give the order. The purpose
of the order was to facilitate the reduction of certificates in circulation, not to increase them. In October 1964 the Treasury
ceased issuing them entirely. The Coinage Act of 1965 (PL 89-81) ended the practice of using silver in most U.S. coins, and
in 1968 Congress ended the redeemability of silver certificates (PL 90-29). E.O. 11,110 was never reversed by President Johnson
and remained on the books until 1987 when there was a general cleaning-up of executive orders (E.O. 12,608, 9/9/87). However,
by this time the remaining legislative authority behind E.O. 11,110 had been repealed by Congress with PL 97-258 in 1982.2
In summary, E.O. 11,110 did not create new authority to issue additional silver certificates. In fact, its intention was
to ease the process for their removal so that small denomination Federal Reserve Notes could replace them in accordance with
a law Kennedy himself signed. If Kennedy had really sought to reduce Federal Reserve power, then why did he sign a bill that
gave the Fed still more power?
If I could make a parallel on the Palestinians: it's "interesting" how they always found themselves in the spotlight of
major plots, killings and terror acts after the creation of the British Zionist State known as Israel.
But not 9/11 that was perpetrated by inconveniently Saudi terrorists hosted thousands of miles away from Palestine in Nowheresville,
Afghanistan.
Great article. Well-researched and well-presented. It's a convincing case. It reveals the CIA was compromised in favor of Israel.
That was then and this is now.No doubt the Israeli termites have completely consumed the structure. I would have to imagine at
this point the CIA is a dupe division of Mossad and it's so inundated with Israeli Moles to rid the undemocratic organization
of the infestation would be tantamount to playing whack-a-mole. The only option is to burn it to the ground. Destroy it, end it,
and jail the majority of its members, past and present, for High Treason.
One other purpose of Israeli nuclear weapons , not often stated, but obvious, is their "use" on the United States
.
THE THIRD TEMPLE'S HOLY OF HOLIES:
ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Warner D. Farr, LTC, U.S. Army
The Counterproliferation Papers
Future Warfare Series No. 2
USAF Counterproliferation Center
Air War College
Air University
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
September 1999
Johnson, IMHO, worst President in US history. HE DID MORE LASTING DAMAGE than even Obama. But the Kennedy myth is overdrawn.
If JFK had lived he would have been reelected but not by a Johnsonian o landslide. Consequently, Congress would have kept him
in check. If HHH had been his VP, Kennedy would have got less out of Congress than with Johnson ( who knew where the bodies were
buried).
The real tragedy is not that Kennedy was so good; it was that Johnson was so bad. Had Bobby won in 1968, he would have torn the
country apart worse than Johnson. There are so many loose ends in this feature it is hard to find where to start. But it is clear
that this person believes that for a few years we Americans had Gods living amongst us.
The curse of the whole Kennedy family was raised by Teddy while successfully avoiding blame and guilt for Mary Jo's unfortunate
accident. However, the author brings the curse to life again while seeming to reject it concerning JFK, junior's plane crash disappearance.
Could pilot error by lack of experience and failure to heed weather forecast advice have had any role in this family's continuing
misadventures?
Is there any explanation for anything negative happening to this clan that can not be blamed on Jews, right-wing extremists, Cosa
Nostra, CIA, the Navy, military intelligence or talk radio?
you can bet your every penny and the lives of your children, spouse, and siblings that America's WASP Deep State was behind
it all.
Certainly complicit. The article does seem to give a pass to the CIA, but if the CIA is everything it's cracked up to be, it
had to know about this and the author even indicates some of its more influential agents were cooperative with Mossad so in the
least it was compromised and therefore complicit in High Treason. If it didn't know, the CIA should have been abolished then &
there but it certainly should be abolished now.
Who hasn't been mentioned so far is the very beautiful and brilliant Mathilde Krim. Krim was LBJ's mistress in the 1960s. She
also just happened to be a fanatical supporter of the interests of Israel. In the late 1940s, she had been an active promoter
of the Israeli terror group The Irgun. Mathilde was also most likely a Mossad agent with long-time contacts to the highest levels
of the Israeli government.
I would have loved to hear the "pillow talk" between these two total opposites: the incredibly crude, totally uncultured and
flabby LBJ and the cultured, slim, sleek and highly educated Krim. You can bet that she was able to supply Israel with a constant
supply of all sorts of top secret information that she was able to extract out of her bedmate. Maybe she also gave advice to LBJ
about who exactly to assassinate or what transgressions by Israel for LBJ to ignore (like the USS Liberty attack).
Mathilde Krim's husband was the very wealthy Arthur Krim, one of the most powerful and active supporters of Israel in the USA.
Mathilde Krim's relationship with LBJ was most likely known about by her husband but was "overlooked" by him because of its huge
value to Israel as both as a source of information as well as for its potential use as blackmail. (You can bet that somewhere
in Israel is a vault full of movies taken of their bedroom activities.)
The heads of MSM at the time apparently knew all about the relationship between Krim and LBJ but "wisely" chose to ignore it
just as they had done for JFK and his affairs.
You can also bet that Krim dropped her boyfriend LBJ like a hot potato once he left office and was no longer of use to her
friends.
I've often wondered to what extent the CIA is Zionized and acting in concert with Israel, and how long it has been that way.
Anecdotally: I had two students at the University of Wisconsin who interviewed with the CIA. Both were NY Jews who ardently supported
Israel, and I do mean ardently. This piece was an eye opener for me. I read all about Angleton in The Devil's Chessboard, but
nothing about his connection with Israel. And LBJ a Jew??
This article is simply bizarre. If the CIA didn't do it why is it still sanitizing the files 55 years later? Surely this
article (which contains numerous basic errors (for example, there were never two entry wounds seen on the front of JFK's body,
only a neck wound) is either written by an ignorant hack or more likely a CIA hack's imaginative narrative designed to confuse
the idiots. For a start try the Kennedy and King website hosted by Jim D'Eugenio and spend a few years getting the facts before
taking this rubbish seriously.
Its actually quite easy. Promise your first born and swear complete and total obeisance, and you are in the club. But remember,
never refuse to partake in the ceremonies and sacrifices. And don't ever even think about backing out of your oath to give up
your first born, otherwise expect the same as what happened to Heath Ledger or Kurt Kobain.
When Langley wants to take that CIA smell off their official line, they use a foreign source. Guyenot's act is boilerplate disinfo,
reinterpreting the obvious with double-reverse psychology.
Like, Truman's editorial, assiduously suppressed by Dulles himself, was a diabolical head-fake. And But but but no invasion
of Cuba followed Kennedy's assassination!! CIA framed Cuba not to justify an immediate attack on Cuba, but to force Warren to
bend over for the official story. LBJ's negotiation with Warren is a matter of historical record. He told Warren that if he
didn't stick with the official bullshit story, Cuba's responsibility would lead to war entailing nuclear war with Russia.
And more standard CIA argumentum ad ignorantiam: you don't know who the CIA mastermind was, so it was Israel. You don't know
who the mastermind was because CIA flouts the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act.
Guyenot applies Occam's sledghammer to prove that it wasn't the guys who had military, commercial, and criminal cutouts nationwide,
extensive illegal domestic operations including blanket surveillance, arbitrary classification authority, and impunity in municipal
law. It was Israel, who cleverly put one over on the dumb ol' CIA, nyuk nyuk nyuk. And CIA couldn't do nuthin' about it. This
is how stupid they think you are.
JFK blah blah blah. CIA's your CHEKA. They've ruled your country since inception. They kill and torture whoever they want.
What are you gonna do about it?
Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill JFK? LHO was a devotee of Casto and when he visited the Cuban Consulate in Mexico and was denied permission
to travel to Cuba Oswald stormed out. The Kennedys were trying to kill Castro, and Oswald,, who had narrowly missed killing
Edwin Walker months before, and found himself in a job that provided a shot on the JFK parade route, killed JFK for his anti communism.
Kennedy had almost taken the world to WW3 in the Cuba crisis, which was Nikita Khrushchev's response to JFK's insane revival of
Eisenhower's plan to give Germany a say in Nukes (to save the US taxpayer money basically). Perhaps it is just as well that Marine-trained
rifleman Oswald put an end to Kennedy when he did.
John, Robert and Ted Kennedy were all extremely friendly to Israel and extremely supportive of the interests of diaspora
Jews. They led the Democratic Party away from the old-left emphasis on economic justice and peace, towards the new-left emphasis
on issues of race and sex.
They weakened the labor unions with their campaign against the Teamsters, they supported tax cuts for the very wealthy, their
support for increased immigration was hostile to the economic interests of the American working class, and they supported an intensification
of the cold war against the Soviet Union. They even knowingly lied about an imaginary "missile gap", in order to present the Democratic
Party as more hawkish than Eisenhower's Republicans.
The Kennedy brothers adopted this platform after the crucially important events of 1956-1957:
In response to the Suez Crisis, Khrushchev's Soviet Union definitively became the patron of Israel's Arab enemies. Simultaneously,
Khrushchev was overseeing a Thermidorian reaction against the excesses of early Bolshevism in eastern Europe. Stalin was denounced,
Matyas Rakosi was exiled, Kaganovich was purged from the Politburo, Solzhenitsyn was released from the gulags, and the Hungarian
counter-revolutionaries were treated less harshly than they would have been in the days of Lenin and Trotsky. A new Bukharinite,
almost semi-nationalist, form of communism developed in eastern Europe – far less deadly, and with jobs and patronage more fairly
distributed among the various ethnicities.
In other words, Soviet communism was no longer "good for the Jews". No longer were millions of counter-revolutionary "antisemites"
being murdered. No longer were Jews massively over-represented in positions of power and prestige. And no longer was the Soviet
Union a supporter of Zionism and Israel.
Similarly, the rise of American Jews from the working class into the upper middle and wealthy classes, meant that domestically
the American old-left economic policies such as progressive taxation and support for rogue unions such as the Teamsters, were
no longer "good for the Jews".
In these circumstances, Eisenhower's moves towards detente with the Soviet Union, insistence on Israeli withdrawal from the
Sinai, support for immigration restriction (which prevented the migration into America of the Jewish former ruling class of communist
eastern Europe – Kaganovich, Rakosi and hordes of lesser-known radical Bolsheviks, commissars and secret police agents), and even
his continuation of FDR-era progressive taxation and public works projects, were seen as "bad for the Jews", just as Kennedy's
exact opposite platform was seen as "good for the Jews".
Perhaps more significantly, the Eisenhower-Nixon cultural conservatism (praising Robert E. Lee as the greatest American who
ever lived, expressing regret for having appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, and living a chaste life of faithfulness
to their wives) contrasted with the cultural radicalism of the Kennedy brothers (full support for the most radical elements of
the civil rights movement, libertine personal lives filled with not-so-secret love affairs).
Compared to what came before, JFK represented an assault on the ethnic self-respect of old-stock Americans and the cultural
norms of traditional Christianity – to the delight of the Jewish movements examined in Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique
.
Whatever personal animosity may have existed, in political terms LBJ was indistinguishable from the Kennedy brothers. He too
was hostile towards the Soviet bloc, a friend of Israel, and supportive of the cultural left.
Given this macro-historical background, I think the simplest explanations of the assassinations are correct, and the various
convoluted conspiracy theories are incorrect.
Lee Harvey Oswald was an old-left Marxist who saw JFK as an enemy, a traitor against the "true" left.
Jack Ruby was a hyper-ethnocentric Jewish gangster who murdered Oswald to avenge the death of the Jewish people's best friend.
Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian nationalist.
Conspiracy theorist are typically Kennedy sycophants who don't like being reminded that their heroes were enemies of socialism,
enemies of the long-suffering Palestinian people, and heroes to the likes of Jack Ruby.
They'd prefer to believe that JFK and RFK were martyrs murdered by reactionary WASPs – but that is pure fantasy.
I'm really beginning to wonder what Ron Unz is doing with his website. Last week we got that moronic article by 9/11 doucher David
Lorimer, and now we are treated to a 10,000 word disquisition about how Israel assassinated the Kennedys -- both of which articles
are rather baseless canards but are deeply emotionally appealing to a certain coterie of contrarians and which are sure to attract
(and have attracted) the most odious collection of commenters who are both uninterested in and oblivious to the the truth about
any of it. Not only is it a frustrating exercise in futility to try to discuss anything with such people (their minds are closed
not only with respect to the lunacy that they themselves believe but also with respect to what they assume you believe
-- they've already assigned you to a camp and will never allow you to depart from it), but also the subjects themselves have grown
tiresome and tedious and are only anymore of interest to the very same propounders of revisionist idiocy who keep them alive with
their siege mentality.
What purpose can there be in publishing such articles other than to fuel the febrile files of this phantasist fringe? There
is nothing here in the interests of truth; this is demagoguery and obscurantism of the worst sort. Articles like this are the
intellectual equivalent of a plague bacillus, winding its way through human minds, putrefying and perverting all in its course.
Such foul air requires a constant nosegay of truth to ward it off, and these flowers are in very short supply around here.
I have no desire to defend the Jews, or Judaism, or Zionism, or the State of Israel, but the charges that they were involved
with the Kennedy assassinations are completely without merit and ought to be repugnant to decent people. The fact that
they were directly responsible for the attack on the USS Liberty is more than enough reason to despise the Israelis; they do not
need to be beaten with every club or charged with every crime. To do so is vindictive and paranoid and shameful, and I cannot
be sanguine about the motives of those who would whip themselves and others into such a frenzy.
Here's Mathilde Krim with a soirée of Fine Folks to include LBJ & Lady Bird. She certainly made the rounds. Definitely an Intelligence
Operative considering her prodigious network of contacts. A Cancer to Humanity. It reminds me of a scene from Rosemary's Baby.
Considering that you belong to the resident Hasbara brigade, your position fits well with the hypothesis of this piece – the
"limited hang-out" of the U.S. "deep state" to cover up the Israeli connection.
Dimona was clearly a major point of contention – and it is very unlikely that JFK would have aided and abetted the shenanigans
surrounding the war of 1967. Israel had plenty of reason to do away with him.
"the bullet tested in laboratory to be compared to the the one extracted from Robert's brain had not been shot by Sirhan's revolver,
but by another gun, with a different serial number; "
The author seems blankly ignorant of guns, apparently believing that a serial number can be determined from a bullet. He sounds
as though he has some vague recollection that marking left by lands and grooves on bullets are unique to the gun firing them,
and somehow confuses this with serial numbers. Amateurish research does not breed confidence in conclusions. Does he give a link
to which labortory and its report?
Well researched and written article! Additional and further research is needed in the following possibilities raised by the people
living outside of the US in 1960's:
1. JFK's opposition to the planning of Israelis initiating a war against the Arab states in 1967
2. Killing 2 birds with one shot by falsely accusing an Arab for killing RK before he reopens the assassination case of his brother
3. Destruction of the world media from the 1967 war to the assassination of RK
4. Involvement of LBJ in both assassinations since he is a Zionist from his mother side
Yes, the JFK assassination was a public execution, but why would that incriminate the deep state rather than Israel? I would
rather think the opposite. I think you also miss a point that you could perhaps get by reading James Douglass: JFK considered
it his most important task to abolish nuclear weapons. It was possible then. So it makes sense to believe that his determination
to stop Dimona was very, very strong.
No, I am not that ignorant. Either I expressed myself poorly (English being not my native language), or you misunderstood.
The serial number of the gun from which the test bullet was shot (as indicated on official report) is different from the serial
number of Sirhan's gun (as indicated on another official report.
Thank you Laurent Guyénot. This is a long(ish) article, and obviously complex.
So, in breaking down this theory, one must first admit, in light of what is known of the Kennedy assassinations, consideration
of the Torah-Pharisees-Talmud international collective as a potential prime operative, is reasonable, based on the
prime-facia motives .
Specifically:
1. the intention of registering the American Zionist Council (AZC subsequently AIPAC ) as a "foreign agent" subject to
the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938
2. the Kennedy's determination to stop Israel [secretly, like many things] developing its own nuclear bomb
3. Kennedy committed to support UN Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees
Anybody familiar with the trends of the last 200 years of the activities and well- [self]- published political motivations
of Torah-Pharisees-Talmud international collective , notably pro-zionists and their leading spokes people,
would be aware that each one of the listed intentions, if validated , would be considered ample justification
for another political assassination, from such an extremist ideological perspective.
The thornier, but potentially more revealing issue is capability .
But one must ask oneself, who in the world, could have the capability to kill a sitting U.S. president and a leading presidential
nominee?
In consideration of this question, one can greatly reduce the number of potential suspects, since the range is extremely
small, and I would suggest, probably included the collaboration of several of the very few limited candidates.
For example, does anyone think that the Soviet Union could possibly have managed this alone, or even more ridiculously, Fidel
Castro?!
I personally think it at least on the verge of absurd.
Capability continued
Frequently, I find myself drawn back to Gilad Atzmons excerpt from testimony, as expert witness on Jewish Identity politics,
at 'hate crime" trial of Arthur Topham 20151108-20151109
Sourced originally at: http://blog.balder.org/?p=1673
"When we criticise Jewish politics (Israel, Zionism, the Lobby etc') some Jews are "racially offended" in spite of the
fact that race, biology, blood or ethnicity was never mentioned. When we criticise Jewish racism some Jews hide behind the
argument that we are criticizing their religion. When we occasionally criticise the religion or some obscene Jewish religious
teaching we are quick to learn that Jews are hardly religious anymore (which is true by the way). The meaning of it is simple,
yet devastating. The Jewish triangle makes it very difficult, or even impossible to criticise Jewish politics, ideology and
racism because the Identity is set as a field with a tri-polar gravity centre. The identity morphs endlessly. The contemporary
3rd category (political) Jew is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, this is the quantum mechanics that is set to suppress
any possible criticism."
But most particularly, " Jew is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, this is the quantum mechanics that is set to suppress
. ""
I am also reminded of Noam Chompsky's model (explanation), as described in Manufacturing Consent for what he
describes as a passive media skewing mechanism (my words), along the lines of, systemically, many slight slanted/nudged
editorial decisions, which aggregated, may well completely distort an accurate picture of events.
By not being able to identify one clear, discrete actor/provocateur, the system, the way it operates, will be incapable
of actually making a determination and assignment of cause.
Now, if one followed a operational model of negative sum gain gaming of systems to always gain advantage, one
might have identified this weakness in the system, and employed a quantum-mechanics like distribution of a fifth column in the
system to effect the political change one desired.
That's a good point but it still doesn't explain how Sirhan Squared fired the fateful shot from behind Kennedy when he was
always in front of Kennedy.
Fyi, I have always felt horrible for Sirhan Squared. So much so, I named my dog after him and it's a female dog. You should
see the reaction when I take her to the vet and they ask her name and I say it's Sirhan Sirhan. The look is priceless. My next
dog's name will be Jesus. I'm sure it will go over equally as well with the hoi polloi.
Does anyone really believe that if a POTUS decided to eradicate Israel's nuclear weapons program and cut off all funding to
Israel that said POTUS wouldn't be assassinated before he/she could make it happen? Trump has been egregiously disrespectful to
the Intelligence Community and yet he's still alive, but what if Trump was egregiously disrespectful to Israel instead of kissing
Israel's ass as the first Jewish POTUS that he is? What if Trump ended all American aid to Israel and went to the United Nations
and put forth a resolution for Israel to eliminate its nukes because if Iran and North Korea and Ted Nugent can't have them, neither
can Israel. If Trump got elected on such a platform, which he never would have by the way, he would have been assassinated before
he or any POTUS could implement such a plan. Israel has made it clear many times over, it will do ANYTHING & EVERYTHING it has
to do to protect itself existentially and I'm sure that includes assassinating the POTUS if need be and all else fails.
Not Israel exactly but the banker clans that created Israel with US wealth and still own monopolies in banking, media, and drugs
legal and illegal. Kennedy was put in office because they thought he was just a skirt chasing son of a bootlegger that would not
interfere with the Globalist agenda. Kind of like Bill Clinton. Then he starts talking about "secret societies" and backing off
the constant war agenda. And he fostered a trusting relationship with Russia, trying to really be president. He is the last one
to try that.
"As to your Meyer Lansky point you do not indicate whether you have any serious claim to knowing anything useful about him
and/or his connection to Israel but surely it is rubbish to talk of his interest in Cuban casinos being relevant. Really!? In
1963? And anyway you would only be making sense if you were asserting – with reason – that RFK felt constrained to use to his
friend Schlesinger "Cubans or gangsters" as code for Israel.
Or, conceivably you think RFK didn't know what you know about the involvement of Israel but wanted a further inquiry which might
have produced an embarrassing truth about Israel. Really?"
I recently bought a book about Lansky's Havana operations from Cuba. Before the revolution by Castro Lansky run the crime empire
there. It is also written of his connections to Israel, which you can check even from Wikipedia. We all get our information from
books and documents. This book was rather OK concerning facts. Lansky lost a lot when Castro came to power. In 1963 Lansky had
a very good reason to want the USA to attack Cuba to gain his empire. Besides, he run the USA organized crime at that time and
had reasons not to like Kennedys actions against organized crime.
There is no reason for "Cubans and gangsters" to be a code word for Israel as Cubans and gangsters were almost certainly involved
in the JFK assassination.
I think Robert Kennedy did know of the Israel atom bomb project and he did not like it, same as JFK. Robert Kennedy probably
did not know if Israel was involved in the JFK assassination but was going to investigate who was. It might have lead to Israel.
There was this danger.
You lose all credibility for anything sensible you might say when you spout such tendentious rubbish as "he is[sic] a Zionist
from his mother [sic] side". You presumably are confusing the Orthodox criterion for someone to be a Jew with the choice a person
makes to be a Zionist (for which you don't even have to be a Jew come to think of it). It's even sillier than people saying Rupert
Murdoch is a Jew because a great or great great grandmother may have been Jewish.
Interesting and well-researched article, but ultimately, as commenter Wizard of Oz notes, it serves the author's "confirmation
bias."
Behind the JFK and RFK assassinations is the Allen Dulles gang: Richard Helms, David Atlee Phillips, and James Jesus Angleton.
It is true, as the author notes, that Angleton had deep ties with Mossad. It is also true that since the end of the second world
war, Israeli skullduggery in the US and Europe has been massive. But these two political murders were planned and executed by
the above Dulles cabal.
Oswald was a CIA asset since his time as Marine serving at the US Atsugi base in Japan. Researcher HP Albarelli connects Oswald
to right-wing Agency operative and pedophile David Ferrie as far back as the early 1950s. Oswald was also part of Angleton's false
defector program, which inserted him into the USSR in the late 1950s.
The grooming and handling of Sirhan Sirhan in California in the mid 1960s speaks of a well-entrenched domestic network of CIA
assets. He was picked for patsydom for a number reasons, and Angleton, again, a prince of an ally for Mossad, liked Sirhan's Palestinian
background, which amped up the Arab threat, in the eyes of the US audience, to his Israeli friends. The author is correct that
Thane Caesar was the real assassin of RFK. Previous to the RFK hit, Caesar work for the Hughes corporation in Burbank. The sprawling
Howard Hughes business empire had served as a CIA cover since the 1950s.
Why would the Dulles gang want to murder the Kennedy brothers? JFK: revenge for the Bay of Pigs betrayal and the subsequent
firing of Dulles. RFK: a man who worked closely with the Agency in the early 1960s on the Castro project. David Talbot's book
Brothers, referenced by the author, makes clear that RFK had an absolutely clear conception of who killed his brother. There was
no way he was going to reach the White House.
Both brothers also sought to wind down the profitable war in Vietnam. RFK was especially vocal about his goal of ending the
war on the'68 campaign trail. And then there's Richard Nixon: a national security state favorite since his time as congressman
during the so-called Red Scare of the early 1950s, Nixon was their favored candidate in the '68 election. RFK's death sealed the
deal for Nixon. Nixon would go on to incur the wrath of his former national security state allies with his secret negotiations
with China and the USSR while president. Because of his previous good works for them, a political death was arranged rather than
a violent physical one.
Yes, I believe that Oswald killed Kennedy. I have no reasonable doubt that Oswald alone fired the fatal shot.
I also believe that the question, while certainly not irrelevant, is little thought of by most people today and would not affect
their lives one way or the other. This is not to say that truth should not be investigated and justice done whenever possible.
Falsehoods of any sort should be brought to light and expunged from the historical record, for there is no telling what damage
an error may do even long after the fact. However, in the first place, I do not think that the historical record has enshrined
any major errors in the case of the Kennedys; and in the second place, the fervency with which the contrarians (and they alone)
continue to revive this long-buried topic does not savor of an honest pursuit of truth. I gather they would not be satisfied even
if all the world were converted to their opinion.
They have some sort of an agenda. What it is varies from case to case and is not something I'm willing to speculate upon. But
this sort of crusading over the meaning of an historical event is never anything but a quest for political power in the present
moment, and is usually driven not by any coherent ideology but by the sheer passion for revenge. The willingness of so many revisionists
to make saints out of the Kennedys -- which on any objective reading they clearly were not -- is by itself sufficient to discover
the all-too-human wellsprings of their motivation. You have a beef with Israel, with the CIA, with Lyndon Johnson, with the whole
American Deep State. I get that; I'm no fan of these people, either. But I'm not going to pervert my entire view of history so
as to cast them in the role of the eternal villain. Self-deception is not only bad for your psychological health, it's also very
politically inexpedient. You will never accomplish anything by this method. Just imagine the dismay that will come upon you if,
peradventure, you happen to have a real shot at gaining some actual power and then you realize that your only friends and compatriots
are the unreliable fruit loops who've been yup-yupping your articles these past years. A lot of help they're going to be.
The assertion that Israel had anything to do with assassinating either Kennedy brother is just not true. It is falsehood and
lies and intellectual pollution. The reverence for such a belief belongs as a sub-genre of postmodern urban mysticism and religious
occultism, along with the belief that the CIA planted explosives in the World Trade Center.
PTI, but just wanted to make a quick observation. Is it just me or have others noticed that there have been quite a number
of Presidents upon whom this honorary title has been bestowed, including:
LBJ
Ronald Reagan
Barack Obama
Donald Trump
(Bill Clinton and George W Bush should receive honorary mention).
I should have mentioned that Jeff Gates goes into the LBJ/Krim relationship, NUMEC, McCain father and son, the USS Liberty,
with a measure of Jeff Flake in his book. It bears rereading, now if only I can find it.
Well you have just proved what a hopeless amateur you are as conspiracy theorist and as analyst.
What you have now shown is all you dredged up about Meyer Lansky is a million miles from proving that he had sufficient reason
to murder Kennedy. To make any sense of your bizarre notion of cause and effect and of motive you would have to suppose that a
US President could be expected to look after the Cuban interests of a known criminal even going to the extent of using US armed
forces to do it. Specifically your barmy idea entails that Lansky had a communications conduit to LBJ and thought he had obtained
assurance from Johnson that the US would go to war to overthrow Castro and restore an American criminal's casino. Pathetic.
There is indeed no need for "Cubans or gangsters" to be code for "Israel" but again you have shot yourself in the foot by your
missing the point completely. My obvious point, which you managed to get confused about, was that Bobby Kennedy had no reason
not to mention Israel to his confidant Schlesinger so his use of the words "Cubans" and "gangsters" meant that he didn't have
Israel in mind
The most likely scenario is of course that the assassinations met the needs of not only Israel/Mossad, but of the U.S. oligarchs/Wall
Street, European oligarchs, and the U.S. deep state forces of the CIA/Pentagon. It isn't an "either/or" with the Mossad vs the
CIA as to who is the culprit, but rather that everyone benefited by these assassinations. From the U.S. Joint Chiefs who wanted
to end JFK's efforts to stop the Cold War, to Mossad who wanted carte blanche Israeli power in the Middle East AND the bomb, to
the CIA which most definitely did not want to be "splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds" – you have a set
of powerful interests that converge and all benefit by these deaths.
The whole debate of whether Israel is the tail wagging the dog misses the point that the very creation of Israel was all about
helping the Western colonial powers maintain neo-colonial power in the Middle East as their former colonies were being liberated
post-WWII.
The oligarchic power blocs in Europe, the U.S., the U.K. and Israel have all benefited from the assassinations of the
Kennedy brothers and the policy shifts that were then possible by their permanent removal from political office. Chasing the –
"was it the Mossad, or was it the CIA"- train, leaves us grasping at phantoms like "the girl in the polka dot dress," or "the
second Oswald," and simply distract from the obvious reality that all these parties not only benefited, but also knew each other's
secrets and operated in coordination to make these events happen, and to sew intrigue and endless questions in their wake.
I did not mean to exonerate the CIA. I tried to be as brief as I could, so I didn't get into the detail of CIA involvement.
CIA had to be involved to some extent in order to be blackmailed into powerlessness. My point is that CIA was not the mastermind
and I wanted to point out that the mainstream media were pointing to the CIA, which is in itself very significant: it is like
when the mainstream media say "the CIA controls the media". I am actually inclined to agree with Gary Wean's thesis (as Piper
seemed to do) that the CIA had planned a faked failed assassination coup to force JFK into acting against Castro, but was double-crossed.
This fits the scenario which I also believe for 9/11.
http://rockthetruth.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-911-triple-cross.html
And I liked Janney's book.
I agree about the plane crash inserted into the article. It was a combination of an unusually thick fog and an inexperienced
pilot. There was a thread recently in which John Jrs plane crash was discussed. A couple of pilots who flew the same Plane write that
in that kind of fog with a pilot unskilled in flying by instruments it was not shot down but just happened.
Another poster write that he was in the area that night and it was one of the worst fogs he'd ever seen.
Of course he does. He is part of that dwindling demographic which believes whatever they are told by the kosher mainstream
media, i.e., CBS, Time Magazine, CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, Fox, the History Channel, NBC, ABC, etc. There may be variations, but the
narrative remains within the acceptable kosher parameters.
An individual who believes in the official version of 9/11 will have no trouble at all believing in the "lone nut" theory of
Oswald or Sirhan. For want of a better term, I would call it "Mainstream Delusionism." It affects all of those who choose to accept
the bogus liberal/conservative bifurcation of mainstream politics here in the US.
"What you have now shown is all you dredged up about Meyer Lansky is a million miles from proving that he had sufficient reason
to murder Kennedy. To make any sense of your bizarre notion of cause and effect and of motive you would have to suppose that a
US President could be expected to look after the Cuban interests of a known criminal even going to the extent of using US armed
forces to do it. Specifically your barmy idea entails that Lansky had a communications conduit to LBJ and thought he had obtained
assurance from Johnson that the US would go to war to overthrow Castro and restore an American criminal's casino. Pathetic."
1) The assassination of JFK was a conspiracy because there were more than one shooter. This is shown by analyzing the Audiograph
and the Dictabelt, and the Zapruder film shows that one shot came from the front. You have two pdf files by me in this link
2) Next we have to look what changed in the US policy after the successful assassination, since it had to have some goal. The
USA did not attack Cuba, so that was not the goal. The USA forgot Israel's nuclear bomb project, so that was the goal. (Go through
the other alternatives and discard.)
3) Finally make a scenario who could have done the assassination. As the Audiograph was manipulated in 1970ies, there was someone
with access, like CIA (or FBI? etc). There was Ruby, so there was a link to Jewish gangsters leading to Lansky, who was the high
boss of organized crime. Much points to LBJ. So, I got this scenario:
Totally agree about the Jewish role in JFKs assassination. As for Oswald, he was an avowed communist and the American communist
party and all the far left groups were very, very, Jewish at the time. It was impossible to be a goyishe leftist and not meet
a lot of lefty Jews at the time.
Oswald always told people he became interested in communism when he was living in NYC age 11 & 12. It was the time of the Rosenberg
atomic spy trials.
"Old Jewish ladies" in his Bronx neighborhood were always handing out pamphlets defending the Rosenbergs.
Perhaps I missed it in the article but the "manufacturer" of the single bullet theory was Jewish Senator Arlen Specter of the
Warren Commission. Another point about the Kennedy's hatred of Israel .it was much greater than anyone thought especially from
the old man Joe. It evidently may have had something do with business dealings both legitimate and illegitimate.
Lyndon Johnson's great-grandparents, on the maternal side, were Jewish and Johnson helped smuggle Jews legally and illegally
into Texas ( http://www.5tjt.com/our-first-jewish-president-lyndon-johnson-an-update/
). It always sounds antisemitic but rule one that is accurate about 97% of the time is that most of the political, economic or
social upheaval in the world always has something to do with Jews.
The Kennedy worship on display by Mr. Guyenot, like that of Oliver Stone, is remarkable. I'm not singling him out – a lot of people
share in it. But the notion that the Kennedys were some kind of unique family of righteous, justice-seeking heroes is ludicrous.
They were a clan of reckless, smarmy, cynical politicians. John was probably the best of them, and he seemed to have had a few
good instincts, but he was massively compromised by his libido, which opened him up to blackmail.
And the notion that John-John was killed by some kind of conspiracy is ridiculous. He was a light-weight and a dilletante.
I don't imagine anyone feared his political or literary ambitions. His was another case of DWK – driving while Kennedy. Nobody
in that family could be trusted behind the controls of any kind of vehicle. I wouldn't knowingly step in front of stroked-out
old Joe in his wheelchair.
Clearly LBJ did not run for a second term and keep control of the investigative agencies because he could be implicated in the
assassination of the Kennedy brothers. Or maybe people who think that way are spending too much time smoking hash in their mommy's
basement.
I've read the book Nemesis that claims Onassis paid for the murder of Robert Kennedy. It also claims Onassis and Jacqueline
agreed to marry on a cruise she took on Onassis' yacht a few months before JFK was killed.
The plan was when he either lost the 64 election or was re elected and his Presidency ended in January 69, she would divorce
JFK for his numerous adulteries and marry Onassis. Who knows? It's all enjoyable reading anyway.
My favorite genres are political, spy, detective, financial corruption and historical thrillers. So I enjoy all the Kennedy conspiracy books.
Every Marine is considered a "rifleman," even those who fail to qualify with the rifle. At the end of his tour Oswald tested
on the low end of 'marksman,' which is the lowest of three qualifying categories. Which means he wasn't a particularly good shot.
Thanks for this intelligent, insightful and courageous article.
It is exceptionally interesting and well-researched, and simply outstanding, considering the intellectual decadence and cowardice
of thoughts we have been dragged into. Thanks also for the sensitivity of your conclusion: John and Robert Kennedy's memory is cherished throughout the world. They
died because they wanted to make the world a better place for humankind. They will never be forgotten.
Because local Jews & pro-Israel bunch are not equivalent to "deep state". It is true that Zionist Jews are now more influential
than ever, but they do not "own" US nor direct most currents of US policy. Being 2% of US population, Jews are perhaps 20-25%
among American elites (which, evidently, is not the majority), and most of them are liberals who are not involved in shaping of
American middle east politics. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld . were/are American imperialists, and not some Jewish puppets.
As regards Kennedy, it is true that he had strong positions re nuclear weapons, but, having in mind huge arsenals of US & Soviet
Union, and smaller ones of Britain, China..- Israel's nuclear program was not considered to be something spectacularly important,
especially at that stage. It is bizarre to consider that Israelis would even think of, let alone try to execute US president,
just because he gave them slap on the wrist at some point.
And, in 1963, Zionist Jews (and all US Jews) were much less influential then today, after 5 decades that have, beginning with
counter-cultural 60s, multiculturalism & Vietnam war, transformed US beyond recognition. Back in 50s/early 60s they had just wanted
to assimilate into society as quickly as possible & minimize traces of their ethnic identity, while Israel was a schnorrer, beggar
economy trying to survive & keep a low profile.
The assertion that Israel had anything to do with assassinating either Kennedy brother is just not true. It is falsehood
and lies and intellectual pollution
No one but a Jew and/or Israel supporter would make that statement.
Only Israel had anything to gain from Kennedy's murder and they used some Jewish organized crime members to set it up. Only our
Israeli occupied congress, not the CIA, could have "controlled' the investigation to ensure it produced the conclusion it fed
to the public.
In his book, The Passionate Attachment, former Undersecretary of State George Ball summarized the results of Johnson's Middle
East policies:
First, the Johnson administration put America in the position of being Israel's principal arms supplier and sole unqualified
backer.
"Second, by assuring the Israelis that the United States would always provide them with a military edge over the Arabs, Johnson
guaranteed the 'escalation of an arms race
Third, by refusing to follow the advice of his aides that America make its delivery of nuclear-capable F-4 Phantoms conditional
on Israel's signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Johnson gave the Israelis the impression that America had no fundamental
objection to Israel's nuclear program.
"Fourth, by permitting a cover-up of Israel's attack on the Liberty, President Johnson told the Israelis in effect that nothing
they did would induce American politicians to refuse their bidding.
From that time forth, the Israelis began to act as if they had an inalienable right to American aid and backing."
As Stephen Green concluded in his discussion of the incredible changes in U.S. policy toward Israel that took place during the
Johnson era in 'Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With A Militant Israel':
"By June of 1967, for a variety of reasons that prominently included 'domestic political considerations,' Lyndon Johnson and his
team of foreign-policy advisors had completely revised U.S.-Israeli relations. To all intents and purposes, Israel had become
the 51st state."
This was the exact opposite of what Kennedy's attitude toward Israel was and had he lived we would probably have a different relationship
with Israel today.'
Former high-ranking U.S. diplomat Richard H. Curtiss, writing in 'A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli
Dispute', elaborated on Kennedy's attitude toward the Middle East controversy. In a chapter appropriately titled: "President Kennedy
and Good Intentions Deferred Too Long," Curtiss comments:
"It is surprising to realize, with the benefit of hindsight, that from the time Kennedy entered office as the narrowly-elected
candidate of a party heavily dependent upon Jewish support, he was planning to take a whole new look at U.S. Mideast policy.
"He obviously could not turn the clock back and undo the work of President Truman, his Democratic predecessor, in making the establishment
of Israel possible. Nor, perhaps, would he have wanted to.
"Kennedy was determined, however, to develop good new personal relationships with individual Arab leaders, including those with
whom the previous administration's relations had deteriorated.
Soon after Kennedy assumed office, Israel and its American lobby began to understand the import of Kennedy's positioning in regard
to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel was not happy – to say the very least – and began putting heat on the White House through
its supporters in Congress, many of whom relied upon support from the Israeli lobby for campaign contributions and political leverage.
By mid-1963 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion hated Kennedy with a passion. In fact, he considered JFK a threat to the
very survival of the Jewish State .
Kennedy according to Curtiss cited four areas causing a strain in U.S.-Israel relations: 1) Israel's diversion-from the Arab
States-of the Jordan River waters; 2) Israel's retaliatory raids against Arab forces in border areas; 3) Israel's pivotal role
in the Palestinian refugee problem; and 4) Israel's insistence that the United States sell advanced Hawk missiles to Israel.
"The President outlined to Mrs. Meir what has come to be called the Kennedy Doctrine. Kennedy told Meir that U.S. interests
and Israel's interests were not always the same.
The Talbot memorandum described Kennedy's forthright stance:
"We know, "that Israel faces enormous security problems, but we do too. We came almost to a direct confrontation with the Soviet
Union last spring and again recently in Cuba. Because we have taken on wide security responsibilities we always have the potential
of becoming involved in a major crisis not of our own making.
"Our security problems are, therefore, just as great as Israel's. We have to concern ourself with the whole Middle East. We would
like Israeli recognition that this partnership which we have with it produces strains for the United States in the Middle East
when Israel takes such action as it did last spring when Israel launched a raid into Syria, resulting in a condemnation by the
UN Security Council. Whether right or wrong, those actions involve not just Israel but also the United States."
According to Seymour Hersh: "Israel's bomb, and what to do about it, became a White House fixation – part of the secret presidential
agenda that would remain hidden for the next thirty years."
In March, 1963, Sherman Kent, the Chairman of the Board of National Estimates at the CIA, wrote an extended memorandum to the
CIA's Director on the highly controversial subject entitled "Consequences of Israeli Acquisition of Nuclear Capability."
According to Stephen Green, for the purposes of this internal memorandum, Kent defined "acquisition" by Israel as either (a) a
detonation of a nuclear device with or without the possession of actual nuclear weapons, or (b) an announcement by Israel that
it possessed nuclear weapons, even without testing. Kent's primary conclusion was that an Israeli bomb would cause 'substantial
damage to the U.S. and Western position in the Arab world.
According to Green, "The memorandum was very strong and decidedly negative in its conclusions" which were as follows:
"Even though Israel already enjoys a clear military superiority over its Arab adversaries, singly or combined, acquisition of
a nuclear capability would greatly enhance Israel's sense of security. In this circumstance, some Israelis might be inclined to
adopt a moderate and conciliatory posture
"We believe it much more likely, however, that Israel's policy toward its neighbors would become more rather than less tough.
Israel would seek to exploit the psychological advantages of its nuclear capability to intimidate the Arabs and to prevent them
from making trouble on the frontiers."
In dealing with the United States, the CIA analyst estimated, a nuclear Israel would "make the most of the almost inevitable Arab
tendency to look to the Soviet Bloc for assistance against the added Israel threat, arguing that in terms of both strength and
reliability Israel was clearly the only worthwhile friend of the U.S. in the area.
"Israel," in Kent's analysis, "would use all the means at its command to persuade the U.S. to acquiesce in, and even to support,
its possession of nuclear capability."
In short, Israel would use its immense political power – especially through its lobby in Washington – to force the United States
to accede to Israel's nuclear intentions.
Stephen Green believes that Kennedy's position vis-a-vis Israel was an important stand: "It was a remarkable exchange, and
the last time in many, many years in which an American president precisely distinguished for the government of Israel the differences
between U.S. and Israeli national security interests."
Thus it was that John F. Kennedy informed Israel, in no uncertain terms, that he intended – first and foremost – to place America's
interests – not Israel's interests – at the center of U.S. Middle East policy.
Kennedy's friendly overtures to the Arab states were only a public aspect of what ultimately developed into an all-out 'secret
war' between Kennedy and Israel.
Another part of the all secret war between Kennedy and Israel according to Hersh was Ben-Gurion's hated Kennedy because he consider
his father an anti semite and Hitler supporter. Hersh wrote, "The Israeli prime minister, in subsequent private communications
to the White House, began to refer to the President as 'young man.' Kennedy made clear to associates that he found the letters
to be offensive."
Kennedy himself told his close friend, Charles Bartlett, that he was getting fed up with the fact that the Israeli "sons of bitches
lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability."
Obviously, to say the very least, there was no love lost between the two leaders. The U.S.-Israeli relationship was at an ever-growing
and disastrous impasse, although virtually nothing was known about this to the American public at the time." .Green
There seem to be a lot of small plane crashes which involve controversial politicians
such as, JFK ,Jr, Ron Brown, Wellstone, John Towers, Michael Connell, (Bush campaign it expert) to name but a few.
There use to be detailed analysis of the Martha's Vineyard crash on the web, but these seem
To have been scrubbed lately and only official MSM versions are easily available.
An exception to that rule is the book, Ron Brown's body: how one man's death saved
The Clinton Presidency.
Am very gratified when busy U.R. authors engage comments corresponding to their articles. Thank you!
Comment # 80, you wrote: "I did not mean to exonerate the CIA."
Above, I knew such was impossible since your mentioning having read James Douglass's classic, "JFK and the Unspeakable."
Also you wrote:. My point is that CIA was not the mastermind "
Above, so it appears you believe that CIA depended upon the Israeli intelligence Lowerarchy as the JFK assassination planning
/ operational "mastermind?"
Had he come squeaky clean, I intuit CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton might support such a view as yours.
Such smacks of how the ZUS military (Gitmo-based) tribunal deceptively presented Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) as the 9/11 terror
attack "mastermind."
To conclude, am very pleased to have read this sentence: "And I liked Janney's book."
F.y.i., just last month while attending a Delaware Valley High School varsity baseball game, while in the stands, I spoke with
three (3) mother's who lived in nearby, Milford, Pa. One lady taught public school.
Regrettably, no one had any knowledge about Mary Pinchot Meyer's JFK affair, brutal murder on the Georgetown canal-trail, and
her Milford, Pa burial @ the Gifford Pinchot estate.
Thanks very much, Laurent Guyenot!
Continue to be honestly unflappable.
There is nothing cynical about such ultimate patriotic sacrifice; the pompous Zionist posting on this thread could not even
start to comprehend the adjective "patriotic".
He was a Texan (like Audie Murphy) and familiar with rifles from an early age. He was a trained rifleman who though not an
expert shot scored 49 hits and one miss at a target 200 yards away. LHO was seen practicing at a rifle range before Dallas, and
at a range of under 100 yards his performance in getting one fatal shot on Kennedy was good, not exceptional, even for a rusty
and mediocre shot (which he was not).
Charles Wittman was a Texan too, as was Chris Kyle.
I just have to say this about the Jew hasbara who insist people believe that the CIA is the 'deep state' when in fact the CIA
and the FBI are the ONLY gov arms that aggressively go after Israel and the Jew fifth column in the US ..and it is ONLY Congress
and/or the WH that has stopped them and interfered in their investigation time after time. As for the other retards who promote
this -- -you're are dangerously stupid .so stupid you dont even know who the real deep state is.
On December 13, 1999, Ciralsky was terminated from his job as a lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). On July 19,
2000, Ciralsky filed suit against the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and nine of their employees and agents, alleging
that he had been "interrogated, harassed, surveilled and terminated from his employment with the CIA solely because he is a Jew
and practices the Jewish religion."
689 F. Supp. 2d 141 (2010)
Adam CIRALSKY, Plaintiff,
v.
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, et al., Defendants.
Civil Action No. 00-1709-JDS.
United States District Court, District of Columbia.
February 26, 2010
Shortly after he began working at the CIA, the Agency initiated a reinvestigation of Plaintiff's security clearance, administering
a series of polygraph examinations and interviews to evaluate his fitness. On August 19, 1997, Plaintiff failed a polygraph examination.
In the month following this polygraph session, various CIA employees interviewed Plaintiff on four separate occasions. At one
of these interviews on September 11, 1997, Plaintiff was given a laptop computer and told to use it to document and explain issues
arising out of the failed polygraph session of August 19, 1997. Plaintiff returned this laptop to the CIA on September 29, 1997.
The veracity of Plaintiff's declarations in these interviews was tested through another polygraph examination on October 3, 1997.
Following the reinvestigation, the CIA advanced the process of revoking Plaintiff's security clearance. On October 20, 1997,
the CIA placed Plaintiff on administrative leave and informed him that an employee review panel ("ERP") would reconsider his access
to classified information. After Plaintiff submitted a memorandum defending himself, the ERP met on or about November 21, 1997,
and recommended that the CIA revoke Plaintiff's security clearance and terminate his employment. After reviewing two additional
memoranda submitted by Plaintiff in response to certain damaging information, the ERP maintained its initial recommendation when
it reconsidered the matter on March 6, 1998. Records of both ERP meetings describe the panel's concern to be Plaintiff's failure
to disclose information about and lack of candor regarding several contacts that were or may have been involved in the Israeli
security establishment. See Pl.'s Mot. for Disc. Attach. 1 and 2 (official summaries of ERP meetings).
"The UK also developed nuclear weapons, as did France. The incredibility of America blowing its own brains out by getting into
a nuclear exchange to defend Britain, France or Israel meant that those countries having their own nuclear deterrent suited America."
As the article we are commenting mentions, JFK wanted inspections on Israel nuclear weapon program, which unlike those of UK
and France, was secret and denied. Israel was not yet the best friend of the USA. JFK had to ponder what should be the US-Arab
relations. Trump is now against North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons, yet he is not opposing British and French nuclear weapons.
So, we know JFK was trying to stop the Israel nuclear weapon program and probably would have offered US protection instead.
JFK was killed by somebody. This somebody had power to modify Audiograph data in 1970ies. This data was available to CIA, FBI
and the Warren Commission members, maybe also to others. CIA had dealings with mafia concerning assassination of Castro. The mafia
that had been in Havana was Lansky's mafia. Thus, CIA had dealings with Lansky's gangsters. Dulles, LBJ and Angleton did not like
JFK's policies, especially towards Israel. Israel was weak at that time, but had friends in the US, like Lansky, Angleton, LBJ,
Dulles. Together these might have pulled the assassination, but even together they could not make the coverup by media. There
had to be media and the US media has a tendency to silence one topic only. No President can control the media, the CIA can influence,
but not control, mafia cannot control media. Only one power can do it and does it.
We do not need to know if the reason for the assassination was the Israel atomic bomb program (though it is likely and a sufficient
reason). We only need to know who could coverup the issue and especially cover it up in media.
I looked at this JFK stuff after accidentally watching a video by Donald B. Thomas, where he explained his echo analysis of
the Dictabelt. His paper was refuted by former members of the Warren Commission. I checked, did not fully agree with Thomas but
got more or less similar conclusions, I think I did it more correctly being much closer to the field than Thomas. The response
by these Warren Commission members was false, in my opinion intentionally, so I checked what might be their backgrounds. This
showed that echo analysis must always be done.
I doubt Oswald was a genuine Communist, he knew David Ferrie (who was hated Communism) in the 1950s, it may have been Ferrie
who got him involved in the CIA, and I suspect it was the CIA that sent Oswald to the USSR
Once he returned from the USSR and got involved with pro Castro groups in the US he was the perfect fall goy in the plot to
murder Kennedy
An interesting fact, when his car made the turn past the book depository LBJ ducked down to tie his shoe laces just as the
shooting started, strangely he also wanted Connolly to travel in his car not with JFK
There was at least one other plot to assassinate Kennedy, in the Chicago plot the patsy was to be another former Marine called
Thomas Vallee
Sorry, they were not Warren Commission members, they were members of a scientific panel, which refuted the House Select Committee
of Assassinations findings. Anyway, I checked their backgrounds as their paper was strangely wrong when there were Nobelists in
the group.()
The author made the point to me that English is not his first language, though he certainly writes it well, and that his mention
of serial numbers may have been misleading. It was, at least for me. In any event I retract my criticism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vehk03v23y4 This
documentary goes into great detail about the many strange things going on the day of the JFK Jr's crash.
The missing seat, flying instructor's seat – taken out of the plane ? How long it took to find the plane? JFK jr was another Kennedy
assassination.
I totally agree with you. That's my take. Oswald the pro Castro life long communist worked right on the Kennedy parade route.
Sirhan's bother was killed by an Israeli bombing of a crowded intersection. His father was fired from a 25 year job with the
City of Jerusalem with no pension. Family rental property was confiscated with no compensation
When Sirhan was 4 armed Israeli soldiers invaded the family home and gave the family 1 hour to leave. No compensation of course.
Family moved from a nice 10 room house to a pilgrims hostel run by the Greek Orthodox Church to which they belonged.
Family ended up in Pasadena Ca. Summer of 1967 the papers were full of RFK's promises to Israel. Sirhan believed those articles.
So he shot that supreme scum bag RFK.
RFK was absolutely into the Democrat party War on Whites. He was marching with Cesear Chavez and worshipped MLK. He persecuted,
not prosecuted the White male Teamsters Union. Had he been elected he would have enforced affirmative action and pro Hispanic
& pro black activism as eagerly as 2 other anti White Presidents, Johnson and Nixon did. RFK was pro black from the day his brother
became president
Personally, I don't give a rats ass about who killed the pro Hispanic pro black enemy of Whites, RFK.
Just a side note: there is a surviving witness of the Robert Kennedy assassination , Paul Schrade.
He attended Sirhan's parole bid in 2016, and told the panel that he believed Sirhan shot him at the hotel, but that an unidentified
second shooter killed Mr Kennedy.
Interestingly, even hard core MSM report the inconsistencies within the official inquiry:
" But the autopsy showed the candidate was shot from behind, with evidence that indicated he was hit at close range . "
Murdoch's maternal grandfather was a Rabbi. That makes him and his mother Jewish. And I doubt a rabbi's daughter would raise
her children completely no Jewish whether religuous or tribal ethnic Jewish.
Red Scare?? If you can't read any of the numerous books written about the Verona Papers and Soviet KGB archives opened after
1990, at least ask Mr. Google about them.
Both archives reveal that the HUAC and McCarthy & FBI investigations show that there were many, many more Soviet spies entrenched
in the federal government during and after the FDR administration that the HUAC & McCarthy investigations ever revealed.
Does your post have anything to do with your disbelief in Darwin and evolution and the Bible history that goes back to God's
creation of the world 6,000 years ago?
[It's not good commenting policy to produce a continuing series of lengthy totally unsourced excerpts, spread over series
of different comments, which makes it difficult for others to avoid them. They have now been consolidated, but you should stop
this sort of bad behavior.]
You're right. But there's also a lot of small plane ceashes that involve entertainment people especially musicians on tour.
Could it be that politicians musicians some businessmen and wealthier than average people use small planes more than the rest
of us who just drive and use airlines when traveling?
I don't watch YouTubes. If someone can't get it together enough to write a coherent account of their theories it's worthless.
There's a dozen YouTubes and internet articles about Kennedy's lack of instrument certification and the unusual fog of the
century that night.
If anyone killed him it would be Hildabeast. You Kennedy worshipers do realize that Joe Kennedy created a massive Kennedy worshipful
PR machines back in the 1920s and it's more powerful now than ever or do you?
joe Kennedy 3 is running for President. He is the one who nearly died of a heroin overdose on a plane trip. He is raising questions
about his father s death as a means of getting publicity and sympathy for his campaign from all the old baby boomers who remember
the Kennedy deaths
Both archives reveal that the HUAC and McCarthy & FBI investigations show that there were many, many more Soviet spies entrenched
in the federal government during and after the FDR administration that the HUAC & McCarthy investigations ever revealed.
Yes, but McCarthy played it badly by going after too many people with tenuous connections with communists and radicals. Just
because your side is right doesn't mean your side should give into hysteria.
Also, by McCarthy came on the scene, most of the spies had been captured and Soviet intelligence had effectively been ended
in the US. So, McCarthy just kept looking for more and more suspects, and it got a bit ridiculous.
We saw the same problem after 9/11. Yes, the government had been lax in security and there needed to be more vigilance. But
Bush II and Co. over-played their hand and even used 9/11 as hysteria for war with Iraq.
Funny how RFK's kid comes out and acknowledges the obvious, that CIA whacked his family, and all of a sudden this frog Guyenot
shows up in multiple alt media with his Orientalism shtik saying, oh wait, it was the Zionazis.
You see, CIA was just kidding about murdering Kennedy but those crafty Jews got away from them and really did it, Oops! Just
like all those incompetent pilots got away from CIA on 9/11 and really did what CIA only pretended they could do so we could catch
them red-handed. Oops!
Cracks me up, CIA's still trying to shit you even though they're so utterly, hopelessly busted that they have to blame it on
the Jewish State, the most despised shithole on earth. CIA's running out of people who are more despicable and full of crap than
them.
Interesting. When Oswald was in boot camp he scored as sharp-shooter between 210 and 219 points out of 250. HE would fire 10
rounds slow fire from the off-hand (standing) position from 200 yards. Then later he would fire 10 rounds rapid fire in 60 seconds
from the standing to sitting position. So this hitting 49 of 50 rounds from 200 yards is a cock and bull story.
What is not a cock and bull story is a beer drinking session in spring 1959 with Sergeants Dean Nelson from Arkansas, Leroy Alsbury
and another Sergeant Dorsey from Illinois at enlisted club MCAS El Toro, California. Topic turned to a Marine who was at a near
by station called LTA. They knew him from Japan and said he was frequently in trouble and he was convinced that the US was corrupt
for among other things "using germ warfare in Korea". They said he was called Ossie Rabbit.
I doubt Oswald was a genuine Communist, he knew David Ferrie (who was hated Communism) in the 1950s, it may have been Ferrie
who got him involved in the CIA, and I suspect it was the CIA that sent Oswald to the USSR. Once he returned from the USSR and
got involved with pro Castro groups in the US he was the perfect fall goy in the plot to murder Kennedy.
Oswald needed some kind of Ism to give meaning to his marginal life. Playing Marxist radical gave his life meaning. It was
more about personality than ideology.
He hung around anti-communist types because he saw himself as a brilliant agent-provocateur who would play all sides in a 5D
chess. He was seriously deluded as a mover and shaker of history when he was a total non-entity. The fact is no one gave a damn
about him. Even Russians found him useless and didn't want him. When he defected to Russia, he thought he would be accepted as
a great hero. Russians just sent him to a factory to work. Back in the US, he wanted attention, but no one gave it to him. Radical
and Marxist groups had no use for him. He was too low, too un-intellectual.
So, he created his own Narrative as a man who would rub shoulders with all sides to make something happen. So, it was disingenuous
for him to bitch that he was just a 'patsy'. He put himself in places to play the role of 'patsy' to all sides. It's what he relished
as he wanted to be where the action is. But he was useless as a patsy.
So, he finally decided to do something big and kill JFK. But he didn't even have the guts to say he did it. He ran like a chicken
and killed a cop.
I suspect Ruby was sent by the Mafia to kill Oswald. Why? Even though mafia didn't order the hit, it feared that Oswald would
blab about the mafia because the idiot met some mafia types when he was dillydallying with anti-Castro factions.
renfro insightfully wrote:
"By mid-1963 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion hated Kennedy with a passion. In fact, he considered JFK a threat to the
very survival of the Jewish State."
Hi renfro,
In contrast, & as you may might know, Ben-Gurion loved GOP, Richard M. Nixon, who became the 1st sitting-USrael president to
visit Israel!
F.y.i., On comeback trail, RMN wrote an interesting book titled "Leaders" in which David Ben-Gurion is deified.
Thanks for such thoughtful posts, renfro.
P.S.:
Below is a work of political-satire which was also posted by "The Smirking Chimp" web site, & afterward, the concerned editor
badgered me for anti-semitism, & subsequently, I became the Smirking Chimp's U-peel Shrimp!
Yes but I read a mobster's autobiography, Chauncey Holt, and he said tinkering with a guy's plane was a great way to off someone.
As you note plane crashes happen.
Despite my reservations about the statement, "Only Israel had anything to gain from Kennedy's murder." , I find this
comment be very well organized and persuasive.
While I don't think intent to somehow disrupt the zionist occupier of Palestine lands acquiring nuclear weapons
capability and actual armaments as the only potential disposition of JFK, which would have made him a target of the Torah-Pharisees-Talmud
global collective , I agree that even by itself, it would have.
Well, I agree with Wiz and Anon, that your post is sane . What is obvious, however, is that you either haven't done
your homework or are a sophisticated troll. James Douglas' JFK and the Unspeakable , which sums up decades of research
is a good place to start. Peter Dale Scott's Deep Politics and the Death of JFK is also essential to get a sense of some
of the moving parts and the need for humility, in approaching the matter.
I agree. And have come to the conclusion that, once one gets very jewized up and comprehends just how involved international
jewry and its current political offspring of Zionists are, in so many events. That they really do represent also a true misfortune
for the entire world of non jewish goyim.
And furthermore, I have concluded that due to so many bad, wrong, evil ongoing events that are headed by or consist of an huge
number of jews involved within them. That at this late date point in time, it would almost be better when discussing various past
and current and even likely future events, as far as jewish involvments, to instead ask the question of
What Is there that history has proven as evil or wrong within such events, that jews have Not been involved in or with eh?
Because the deeper you go into such events and infos, and ergo the longer back in past times one delves into such issues The
more one learns of a constant jewish involvement throughout history going back at least 3,500 yrs ago! ..35-Centuries so far,
with most times each century getting worse and more evil due to their insidious craving of remaining stiff necked and stubborn,
and always unwilling to repent or change period.
And yes yes I know there are a few so called good jews But imho those good types number very very few when compared to jewry
as a whole. For I consider their huge silent bunch of tribe members as willing accomplices, and based upon the ever ongoing group
silence we see no matter which jews do wrongs and no matter how bad those wrongs are. No other logic nor sane conclusion can be
had.
And for immediate proof examples of how their majority tribe members always cover for, deny wrongs, toss out straw men, or
simply revert to the time tested method of Fully ignore all presented facts, and begin to use vile slanderous name calls of "Nazis"
and "Antisemite" etc. One only need read any of the many articles here on This forum, as well as all other website forums that
have become infested with Zionist jews and hasbara agents.
And for these reasons one must also conclude is the main reason that every time jews get booted from another host nation, the
entire bunch bar none get booted out. Yes that means those few good jews also get booted out, which some can argue is unfair But
after 109 host nations and around a total of 300+ boot outs since about 1800 yrs ago Well one can also understand why a host nation,
having no good method to determine accurately which are the few good ones, always ends up giving the big boot out to them all
eh.
And also one can conclude that most everything jews have complained about for that entire 3,500 years and still do today, has
been caused by jews themselves by their own disgusting ways and traits and evil criminalities etc ..There simply would be zero
so called antisemitism if there were zero jews within a nation period. But good luck in attempting to convince any jews of such
truths.
One of the very best and most accurate descriptions yet I have read or heard of regarding jewry and why they have been so despised
by so many distinctly different groups of gentiles, and in so many different locations and in so many eras of time has to be what
the new testament verses about them states (Paraphraseing here) "For they are the adversaries of God and of All of Mankind"!
That single short verse speaks volumes of past and present truths.
He has been consistently debunking political manipulation over the last 10 years. He does so with objectivity and measure,
and thanks to his hard work and erudition. He tries to avoid baiting into easy and stupid conspiracy theories, such as the ones
promoted by Michael Moore and Alex Jones.
Mr Guyenot has loyal and long-standing readers within the French-speaking world, where he is highly respected (and ignored
by MSM, which is a badge of honour).
He mostly publishes on a right-wing, populist website that attracts readers from all political shades, thanks to their more honest
and overt positions.
I just read from Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land ..and Clash Of Civilizations. The book is an excellent
history of the nefarious role played by Jews in the cycle of civilizations for thousands of years up to the JFK assassination
and 9/11 which feature Jews in supporting and initiating roles. These two mentioned events are arguably the endgame of the Anglo-Zionist
Empire. The destroyers indeed!
The JFK assassination and 9/11 featured Jews documenting the event for celebration and narrative control. The dancing Israelis
and Abraham Zapruder were on site at the exact moment of the mortal event. What a coincidence the Jew Chorus shouts! I would like
to know more about Abraham Zapruder, born in the Ukraine in 1905. Did he know the Zionist founders of the apartheid state?
A friend of mine visited the Book Depository and was struck by how close Oswald was. It was an easy shot.
The question the conspiracy idiots don't consider is: If the "deep state" wanted to get rid of him, why not expose JFK in a
sex scandal forcing his resignation?
It would be (a lot) safer than a "conspiracy" composed of the entire government. A forced resignation from a sex scandal would
make Kennedy a laughing stock and totally disgrace him. The assassination made him a martyr, causing the passage of every measure
he had favored.
The fallout concerning the East German woman from Bobby Baker's stable whom JFK had consorted with was still bubbling on November
22, 1963.
We see more and more articles about "the Jews killed the Kennedys." True or not, this is not good for the Jews. This opens the
floodgates to "the Jews did 9/11."
Defending 9/11 is problematic for the Jews. There are many many angles that are impossible to defend.
Wiz of Oz,
Are you a troll or a Zionist sympathizer? Giving birth by a Zionist the child is a Zionist or Zionist sympathizer even if he or
she doesn't acknowledge it! This can go back as far as 7 generations if you really like to know!
Your comments are worthless indicating you have nothing to say or to add to the subject matter! Bye!
RFK was NOT going to win the presidency in 1968. A few weeks before his death, he lost the Oregon primary to Eugene McCarthy.
RFK couldn't get enough votes beyond his black base to win a general election. A poll in late May 1968 had him running 10 points
behind Nixon. Robert Kennedy was about as out of touch with Middle America as George McGovern would be for years later.
Hubert Humphrey was way ahead in delegates and in those days the "bosses" still had control. Humphrey was better liked than
Bobby withing the party. The New York primary was going to give Bobby a poor result for his "home state."
Although, RFK won the California primary, his 46-42 margin was 3-4 points lower than expected and was due to a heavy black
and Mexican vote. Bobby still didn't do well enough with white voters.
If we reject the official versions of JFK and RFK assassinations and assume they were results of conspiracies with Oswald and
Sirhan as active players or patsies then we must go by the qui bono, cui prodest, cuius bonum legal principle which certainly
will not prove who were the conspirators but will point to the most likely conspirators.
In case of JFK it is pretty obvious that Israel was the greatest beneficiary of his death because of JFK determination to stop
Israel's nuclear program. Some correspondence of JFK with PM's of Israel is available on line. Israel defense doctrine was formulate
to be based on what later was called Samson Option. In 1963 Israel still cooperated with France on its secret nuclear program.
JFK definitively was set on stopping Israel nuclear program which Israel was conducting in secret cooperation with France.
After strong letter on May 18, 163 letter PM Ben Gurion preferred to resign than to answer the letter:
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/When-Ben-Gurion-said-no-to-JFK
Finally, Kennedy had enough, and in a personal letter dated May 18, 1963, the president warned that unless American inspectors
were allowed into Dimona (meaning the end of any military activities), Israel would find itself totally isolated. Rather than
answering, Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned. Kennedy's repeated emphasis on America's "deep commitment to the security of Israel"
was all well and good, but, as seen after Egypt's sudden expulsion of UN peacekeepers in 1967, Israel could not depend on anyone
– even the US.
Ben-Gurion's successor, Levi Eshkol received Kennedy's next letter, which upped the pressure, warning that the American
commitment and support of Israel "could be seriously jeopardized."
At the same time RFK as AG was considering forcing pro Israel lobbies to register as Foreign Agents. The last before JFK death
communication from DOJ was on 10/11/1963: DOJ Demanded for AZC Registration "the Department expects a response from you within
72 hours with regard to this matter." Six days later
http://www.israellobby.org/azcdoj/
"Judge Rifkind then made a plea for no registration, stating it was the opinion of most of the persons affiliated with the
Council that such registration would be so publicized by the American Council on Judaism that it would eventually destroy the
Zionist movement he did not believe his clients would file any papers or sign any papers indicating that the organization was
an agent of a foreign principal. I told him that any such information or material that is supplied on that basis would be made
part of the Department's public files available for inspection by the public "
In DOJ internal memo on 4/30/1964 before replacing RFK as AG with Nicholas Katzenbach the following was stated: "This is the
most blatant stall we have encountered. Do you mind suggesting what we do next because all of us here would call their records
before a grand jury." RFK resigns as AG in September 1964. When Katzenbach became acting AG and then AG exchanges between Jewish
lobby and DOJ continued but no action was taken by DOJ. Eventually on n 11/27/1967, four years and five days after JFK's death
AIPAC applies for a federal tax exemption. The lobby has won.
As far as RFK is concerned the conspirators could not allow him to become president, period. His assassination is predicated
on conspiracy of JFK assassination and subsequent cover up. If we assume that Sirhan was indeed hypnotized patsy conspirators
seem to overdid the cover story and the created legend (though it worked for most people who bought the story) by trying to bring
attention to Palestinians who were allegedly upset with RFK's strong pro-Israel stance. The problem with the story is that RFK
did not demonstrate that he had strong pro-Israeli position. Anyway, most people got a message that RFK got killed because he
was pro-Israel, so certainly Israel was off the suspect list, right?
Since the two assassinations dozens of theories were floated, including the most ridiculous ones, like that Onassis was behind
it, which got public exposure often in MSM. The only theory that can't get any traction in MSM is the one linking Israel.
Although this is actually an insightful comment, you overlook the fact that Organized Jewry has no problem turning on former
acolytes (even fellow Jews) who are not completely lockstep with the party line.
The tenuous connections were not all that tenuous. For instance Owen Latimore was indeed a soviet agent who influenced many
state department operatives.
The real reasons McCarthy was brought down was that the entire communist operation was so heavily Jewish. It's really a wonder
that the Rosenbergs were arrested and found guilty.
I read that silly RFK the dead messiah would have cured the problems thing you posted. What a crock.
JFK MLK RFK the holy trinity what a load.
Robert Kennedy jr is running for president. He just wants to get his name in the papers and the internet and get votes from
all the baby boomers who grow up when the media was so worshipful of the Kennedys and MLK.
I'm really beginning to wonder what Ron Unz is doing with his website. Last week we got that moronic article by 9/11 doucher
David Lorimer, and now we are treated to a 10,000 word disquisition about how Israel assassinated the Kennedys -- both of which
articles are rather baseless canards but are deeply emotionally appealing to a certain coterie of contrarians and which are
sure to attract (and have attracted) the most odious collection of commenters who are both uninterested in and oblivious to
the the truth about any of it.
I would be disappointed if all the articles on unz.com were like this one; but it is better to have some articles that we might
consider moronic, than to expect Ron Unz to personally arbitrate between fact and fiction on readers' behalf – as the NYT and
WP do.
There will always be boundaries on what can be published, and IMHO in most media the boundaries are far too narrow. It is better
if the boundaries are over-broad than over-narrow. A possible downside with over-broad boundaries is that bad stories might "taint"
good ones, by association; on the other hand, a narrow scope might be taken to imply that the publisher endorses each article.
The same with commenters: IMHO it is better to have some that are odious, than to give moderators the job of removing any comments
that could reasonably be considered offensive. It is not difficult to scan the comments and skip past the ones that are not informative.
On the article itself, it did make us think about the headline question for half an hour – even if most of us agree that Betteridge's
Law Of Headlines applies in this case. I looked up the JFK Jr case again, remembering the official story that his plane crashed
into the sea during very heavy rain – only to find that this is not the official story at all (JFK Jr was supposedly disoriented
by conditions that were merely hazy). So who spread the "heavy rain" story and why? And if the Israelis killed JFK Jr, should
we remove his name from the "Clinton body count"?
Nowadays we accept that Israel, India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. It is worth remembering that in the sixties the Israeli
nuclear weapons program was a shocking secret, and it remained so until 1986 when Mordechai Vananu told the story. JFK's opposition
to Dimona, and the possible Israeli reaction to it, must be seen in this context.
Michael Rivero has examined the many clues that JFK JR was assassinated. Here are some of clues that he found. We don't have
a "free" press in our MSM. Investigating or questioning the narratives given to us by our "free controlled press" is considered
"conspiracy theories".
Having established that the government and the media have a prior (and quite deplorable) record of deliberate lies to the public,
let us look at how the official story of the crash of John F. Kennedy Jr's plane evolved, and why it is suspect.
As first reported by United Press International, John F. Kennedy Jr. on approach to Martha's Vineyard in 8 mile visibility, was
in radio contact with the ground, calmly informing them of his intentions to drop off a passenger before proceeding to Hyannis
airport. Then, according to ABC News, JFK Jr's plane went into a steep dive, and crashed.
However, even before the wreckage was found, the story being put out in the media began to change. Gone was the previously reported
radio conversation a calm JFK Jr. had with ground personnel just before the plane fell out of the sky, replaced by a declaration
from the NTSB that JFK Jr. had not used his radio at all as he approached Martha's Vineyard. Gone also was the originally reported
8 mile visibility while the media began to hammer home the claim that Martha's Vineyard had been totally blanketed with a haze
so heavy that pilots in the air would have been blind.
No sooner were the various stories put out but they quickly fell apart.
Here are some examples.
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. was lost.
FACT: When JFK Jr. radioed controllers on the Cape (as reported on Boston TV News) to announce his approach to Martha's Vineyard,
radar showed him to be just where he stated he was and at the correct altitude for the approach.
PROPAGANDA: JK Jr. was in "over his head".
FACT: JFK Jr's conversational tone on the radio reveals that he was calm. He was not disoriented. He didn't ask for directions.
He didn't indicate he had any problem at all. He clearly was confident he was going to find the airport and land.
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. stalled the plane.
FACT: The radar track shows that he was well above stall speed.
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. went into a steep turn and lost his horizon.
FACT: There is no reason for JFK Jr. to have been in any turn at all at that point on the flight path leading into the airport.
He was already lined up with the main runway at Martha's Vineyard airport.
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. didn't know his altitude and simply "flew into the ocean".
FACT: The radar track shows him flying at the proper altitude, then (as ABC News put it) "falling out of the sky".
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. lost his instruments, and that is why he could not handle the dark and hazy (?) conditions
FACT: The fact that the radar was getting good data from his encoding altimeter proves his instruments were operating.
PROPAGANDA: JFK Jr. would have lost his artificial horizon if the vacuum pump failed in the aircraft.
FACT: MSNBC is the only media outlet to have tried to hype this one, using a self-proclaimed "aviation expert". His claim is also
false, as there is a backup vacuum system in the pitot assembly of that aircraft.
PROPAGANDA JFK Jr. was a reckless pilot.
FACT: This claim was planted everywhere in the media, always attributed to an "unnamed source". One reporter, Cindy Adams at the
New York Post, later had cause to suspect she had been lied to. So did Andrew Goldman at the New York Observer. Interviews with
individuals directly familier with JFK Jr's flying ability shown on Inside Edition confirmed that he was a highly skilled and
careful pilot.
PROPAGANDA JFK Jr's wife was afraid to fly with him.
FACT: Again a story attributed to "unnamed sources", and again debunked by the interviews shown on Inside Edition. JFK Jr's wife
had no problem flying with JFK Jr. and flew with him often.
PROPAGANDA JFK Jr. had only 40 hours experience.
FACT: He had 40 hours in that one aircraft. His total experience was about 300 hours, more than enough to qualify him for a commercial
pilot's license. According to FAA statistics, 300 hours made him a more careful and safer pilot than one with 1000 hours, who
is more complacent.
PROPAGANDA The weather was very hazy.
FACT: The FAA issued VFR weather conditions that night, and the weather report (mentioned in the UPI story) called for 8 mile
visibility. One witness on shore reported that there was very little haze and that standing on the shore, he could see airplanes
out over the ocean on approach to the island, proof that airplanes on the approach could see the shore. This claim is backed up
not only by the weather report of 8 mile visibility, but by a weather radar image taken at about the time of the crash. This radar
image is showing haze and fog along New York and Long Island (if this radar image were of clouds, the FAA would not have declared
VFR flying conditions that night) but none at all at Martha's Vineyard. On the morning after the crash, CNN reported that weather
could be ruled out as a factor in the crash!
PROPAGANDA: Martha's Vineyard is very dark and won't show through the haze.
FACT: That may have been true only a few months ago. However, as evidenced by a Letter to the Editor of the Martha's Vineyard
Times just days after the JFK Jr. crash, new lights installed on the island, lights that point up in the sky, are so bright they
are drawing complaints from island residents.
That the Kennedy family has been the target of political assassination is a part of the American political landscape. It's a given.
That cover-ups surrounded the deaths of Kennedys is also a given.
That our government lies to us, with the media's help, is a given.
There is good cause to assume we are being lied to yet again.
During that same 1962-63 period Senator William J. Fulbright of Arkansas, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, convened
hearings on the legal status of the American Zionist Council (AZC). The Committee uncovered evidence that the Jewish Agency, a
predecessor to the state of Israel, operated a massive network of financial "conduits" which funnelled funds to U.S. Israel lobby
groups. As a result, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) ordered the AZC to openly register and disclose all of its foreign
funded lobbying activity in the United States. The attempt was subsequently thwarted first by the Israel lobby itself and then
by the death of President Kennedy which lead to growing concerns regarding the impact of the ever-growing Zionist influence on
U.S. policy making decisions. On April 15, 1973, Fulbright -- who lost his Senate seat the following year -- had no qualms about
boldly announcing on CBS Face the Nation that : "Israel controls the U.S. Senate. The Senate is subservient, much too much; we should be more concerned about U.S. interests
rather than doing the bidding of Israel. The great majority of the Senate of the U.S. -- somewhere around 80% -- is completely
in support of Israel; anything Israel wants; Israel gets. This has been demonstrated time and again, and this has made [foreign
policy] difficult for our government."
AIPAC eludes US law, part of international lobby for Israel
The most powerful and effective foreign-government lobby in Washington is so dominant that it has been able to avoid registering
for the past 55 years. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was last confronted by FARA when its predecessor organization
the American Zionist Council was pressured by John F. Kennedy's Justice Department in 1962 and 1963. Kennedy's death stopped that
effort -- and ended White House attempts to hold Israel accountable for the development of its secret nuclear weapons program
(which depended on nuclear material removed illegally from the United States with the connivance of a company located in Pennsylvania
called NUMEC).
A Jewish Defector Warns America:
Benjamin H. Freedman Speaks on Zionism
And no doubt your 'friend' could have fired the "magic bullet" as well. "Sex scandal"? LOL. That would have taken years to have had any impact, if at all. And since when do sex scandals force Presidents to retire. Given your logic, a sex scandal could have been used against Lincoln, therefore John Wilkes Booth is innocent.
I visited the Book depository when I was in Dallas for a week and noted that the distance was short, the window was way above
the street and it would have been an easy shot. I doubt a Marine would have missed.
What's really silly is the way people who've never held any type of gun in their lives keep insisting that Oswald's score on
the Marine marksman test proves he was a bad shot. Just because he didn't get the highest score doesn't mean he wasn't capable
of firing the shot that killed Kennedy.
Thanks for your perspective! I have read some of M. Guanot's work with interest.
While it is quite plausible that the Zionist entity and the CIA regime have congruent criminal interests, this is not what
Guyanot theorizes. He imagines a CIA that sets up all the preconditions for a coup, without actually meaning to go through with
it, and a foreign devil that unexpectedly takes it all and runs with it. That's idiotic. It also happens to be CIA's boilerplate
excuse for all their grave crimes. There's nothing new up there. What's worse, it's plagiarized from Langley fops and jarheads.
It's not just stupid, but stupid in a telltale way.
An engineer is highly trained, not highly educated. That might be why he applies bog standard old-fashioned Orientalism, which
originally applied to Jews, then didn't, and now does again – and voila, we've got a suspect that isn't CIA! Guyanot's Orientalism
is interesting because it highlights the Israeli state's exploitation of biblical myth as pretext for genocidal ideology. But
he's over his head when trying to re-interpret the documented conduct of the US command structure. Perhaps that's how he falls
into the CIA's propaganda line. Let's hope so.
Polack is, effectively, almost any Polish national who dances upon the official
fairy-telling narrative of Polish state puppeteers. In that Marvelous Universe, Poland is a
truly indispensable part of the West, for its glorious deeds of once Saving the Christendom
in Vienna, and containing the Bear all other time.
In reality, it is a loser entity that 'Cannot Into Space' on many historic occasions
– mostly from building multi-ethnic empire to invading Russia. Poles suffer from being
surrounded by equally capable neighbors, Russians and Germans. Chopin is good, but he is
neither Mozart nor Chaikovsky, and to have such genii, one has to build empire first, and
then enjoy imperial music and literature.
For the West, Poland is an 'useful idiot' or a dupe, never treated as equal partner. In
Western (Capitalist) division of nations labor Poles are The Exploited. They are 1) cannon
fodder from Vienna to Monte-Cassino 2) theater of war and destruction to prevent Russians
from entering and destroying True Europe 3) cheap labor or preferrable white slaves 4) one
who pays for everything. Today, option 3 is fullfilled, others are selected by the the West.
Poland is a still a resource, and will be consumed by the West on any pretext. To the East,
there is a Big Brother that has its own resources.
We Russians used to treat the Polish identity illness, by capturing Warsaw many times. The
prognosis is still grave. Dear Polish brethren, we have no other options for you. Stick with
the West, keep your Catholic dreams and continue to perish. When you go critical, we may
think of surgery again.
The US decided, by promulgating Act 447, that a Polish Jew has never been a citizen of
Poland; he was a member of Jewry, and his property should revert to Jewry, not to the
Goyish Polish state.
It is nice that the US issues laws that are supposed to have effect in other states; the
slightly tipsy Galactus of Democracy is in his Heaven, all is right with the World.
It means that they can seize property of recently deceased ones in the Homeland and
embiggen the Tribe, But how are they going to enforce it in Poland? Sanctions? Threats to
move NATO out of Poland? No F-35 for you?
(Also, did the Scriptures say anything about when the Monstrously Swollen Jewish Messiah
will meet Ultra-Confucius for a Battle at the End of Times?)
The West pushed the Poles to rise against Germans in 1944, hoping to re-establish
anti-Russian Poland once again, but did nothing when the rebels bled to death. (Well, not
exactly nothing: they complained why Russian soldiers do not want to die for them).
Please do not forget the extraordinary role of the RAF and SAAF aircrews who flew supplies
to the Home Army in Warsaw from bases in southern Italy. Many of them lost their lives and
are buried in a Commonwealth cemetery in Krakow.
Magnificent article . Pole troops even invaded Spain with Napoleon , those " catholic " Poles
did not seem to feel bad for joining antichristian French revolutionary armies invading
Catholic Spain .
Polish Pope John Paul II , Woytila , joined forces with Reagan and Thatcher , with the
most wild anglosaxon imperialism , against the rest of the world . John Paul II , with his 27
year pontificate , left the Catholic Church devastated , the Catholic churches empty , the
people faithless .
When Polacks , baltics , and other weirdo countries of eastern europe joined the EU I
realized that the EU had no future .
Poland is a very sinister country , a factor of endless conflicts .
To liken Jewry to a feudal order of obligations and ownership explains a lot about their
collective behavior.
I hope the Polish people tell the United States to go to hell.
Perhaps there is little that we as Americans can do right now to stop the control freaks
in our Zionist controlled government from behaving like ruthless feudal landlords, but I am
hoping that the rest of the Western world removes the American boot off its neck and tells
the US to -- - off.
"... Brock sees oddities in how the Russia case began. " These types of investigations aren't normally run by assistant directors and deputy directors at headquarters ," he told me. "All that happens normally in a field office, but that isn't the case here and so it becomes a red flag. Congress would have legitimate oversight interests in the conditions and timing of the targeting of a confidential human source against a U.S. person." -The Hill ..."
"... A series of text messages recovered by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and special agent Peter Strzok reveal political pressure around the same time as the Trump-Russia probe officially opened. ..."
"... "We're not going to withstand the pressure soon," Page texted Strzok on Aug. 3, 2016 - days after Strzok returned from London and opened the official Trump-Russia investigation. ..."
"... John Solomon of The Hill notes, "they were dealing with simultaneous challenges: the wrap-up of the Hillary Clinton email scandal and the start of the Russia-Trump probe." ..."
"... The texts reveal that Strzok and Page were also concerned about someone within the DOJ leaking details of their investigation ("This is MUCH more tasty for one of those DOJ aholes to leak," Strzok texted Page), as well as concerns that the White House was spearheading the investigation. ..."
A new report from John Solomon of
The Hill ties together several loose threads floating around over the genesis of the FBI/DOJ espionage operation against the
Trump campaign, who was involved in the "setup" of campaign aides, and how text messages between FBI employees suggest that the Obama
White House was not only aware of the operation - but possibly directing it .
Not only is the timeline moved up from the summer of 2016 to spring, Solomon provides clarification on early contacts between
the players involved in DOJ/FBI sting and Trump campaign aides.
The bridge to the Russia investigation wasn't erected in Moscow during the summer of the 2016 election.
It originated earlier, 1,700 miles away in London, where foreign figures contacted Trump campaign advisers and provided the
FBI with hearsay allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, bureau documents and interviews of government insiders reveal. These contacts
in spring 2016 -- some from trusted intelligence sources, others from Hillary Clinton supporters -- occurred well before FBI headquarters
authorized an official counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016.
The new timeline makes one wonder: Did the FBI follow its rules governing informants? -
The Hill
" The revelation of purposeful contact initiated by alleged confidential human sources prior to any FBI investigation is troublesome
," Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), an ally of President Trump and chairman of a House subcommittee that's taking an increasingly aggressive
oversight role in the scandal, told me. " This new information begs the questions: Who were the informants working for, who were
they reporting to and why has the [Department of Justice] and FBI gone to such great lengths to hide these contacts ? "
Retired assistant FBI director for intelligence Kevin Brock also has questions. Brock supervised an agency update to their longstanding
bureau rules governing the use of sources while working under then-director Robert Mueller. These rules prohibit the FBI from directing
a human source to perform espionage on an American until a formal investigation has been opened - paperwork and all.
Brock sees oddities in how the Russia case began. " These types of investigations aren't normally run by assistant directors
and deputy directors at headquarters ," he told me. "All that happens normally in a field office, but that isn't the case here
and so it becomes a red flag. Congress would have legitimate oversight interests in the conditions and timing of the targeting
of a confidential human source against a U.S. person." -The Hill
The Text Messages
A series of text messages recovered by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and special agent
Peter Strzok reveal political pressure around the same time as the Trump-Russia probe officially opened.
"We're not going to withstand the pressure soon," Page texted Strzok on Aug. 3, 2016 - days after Strzok returned from London
and opened the official Trump-Russia investigation. At the time, as John Solomon of The Hill notes, "they were dealing with
simultaneous challenges: the wrap-up of the Hillary Clinton email scandal and the start of the Russia-Trump probe."
The texts reveal that Strzok and Page were also concerned about someone within the DOJ leaking details of their investigation
("This is MUCH more tasty for one of those DOJ aholes to leak," Strzok texted Page), as well as concerns that the White House was
spearheading the investigation.
"Went well, best we could have expected," Strzok texted Page after an Aug. 5, 2016, meeting. "Other than Liz quote 'the
White House is running this.' " Page then texted to assure Strzok of a paper trail showing the FBI in charge: "We got emails that
say otherwise."
"... Let me just say this: the President used the word "wiretapping" but I think it was very clear to us that have been in the intelligence business, that this was a synonym for "surveillance". ..."
"... When I was in senior position in CIA's counterterrorism center, I had a deputy who was an FBI officer. An office in FBI HQ down in Washington had an FBI lead with a CIA deputy. There's a lot more cooperation than one would think. There are individuals that do assignments in each other's organisations to help foster levels of cooperation. I had members of NSA in my staff when I was at CIA, members of diplomatic security, members of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and it was run like a task force, so, there's a lot more cooperation than the media presents, they always think that there are these huge major battles between the organisations and that's rarely true. ..."
"... John Brennan is acting more like a political operative than a former director of CIA. ..."
The mighty CIA has fallen victim to a major breach, with WikiLeaks revealing the true scope of the Agency's ability for cyber-espionage.
Its tools seem to be aimed at ordinary citizens – your phone, your car, your TV, even your fridge can become an instrument of surveillance
in the hands of the CIA. How does the CIA use these tools, and why do they need them in the first place?
And as WikiLeaks promises even more revelations, how is all of this going to shape the already tense relationship between new
president and the intelligence community?
A man who has spent over two decades in the CIA's clandestine service – Gary Berntsen is on SophieCo.
Sophie Shevardnadze: Gary Berntsen, former CIA official, welcome to the show, great to have you with us.
Now, Vault 7, a major batch of CIA docs revealed by Wikileaks uncovers the agency's cyber tools. We're talking about world's most
powerful intelligence agency - how exactly did the CIA lose control of its arsenal of hacking weapons?
Gary Berntsen:
First off, I'd like to say that the world has changed a lot in the last several decades, and people are communicating in
many different ways and intelligence services, whether they be American or Russian, are covering these communications and their coverage
of those communications has evolved. Without commenting on the specific validity of those tools, it was clear that the CIA was surely
using contractors to be involved in this process, not just staff officers, and that individuals decided that they had problems with
U.S. policy, and have leaked these things to Wikileaks. This is a large problem, for the U.S. community, but just as the U.S. is
having problems, the Russia face similar problems. Just this week you had multiple members of the FSB charged with hacking as well,
and they have been charged by the U.S. government. So both services who are competitors, face challenges as we've entered a new era
of mass communications.
SS: So like you're saying, the leaker or leakers of the CIA docs is presumably a CIA contractor - should
the agency be spending more effort on vetting its own officers? Is the process rigorous enough?
GB: Clearly.
Look There have been individuals since the dawn of history. Espionage is the second oldest occupation, have conducted spying
and espionage operations, and there have been people who have turned against their own side and worked for competitors and worked
for those opposing the country or the group that they're working with. It's been a problem from the beginning, and it continues
to be a problem, and the U.S. clearly is going to have to do a much better job at vetting those individuals who are given security
clearances, without a doubt.
SS: The CIA studied the flaws in the software of devices like iPhones, Androids, Smart TVs, apps
like Whatsapp that left them exposed to hacking, but didn't care about patching those up - so, in essence the agency chose
to leave Americans vulnerable to cyberattacks, rather than protect them?
GB: I think you have to understand, in this world that we're operating and the number one target of our intelligence
community are terrorists. Since the attacks of 9\11, 16 years ago, the obsession of the American intelligence community is to
identify those planning terrorist attacks, collecting information on them and being able to defeat them. These individuals are
using all these means of communication. I have spoken with many security services around the world, since my retirement back in
2005-2006, a lot of them have had problems covering the communications of somebody's very devices and programs that you've talked
about - whether they be narcotraffickers or salafist jihadists, they are all piggybacking off of commercial communications. Therefore
the need for modern intelligence services to sort of provide coverage of all means of communications. And there's a price that
you pay for that.
SS: One of the most disturbing parts of the leaks is the "Weeping Angel" program - CIA hacking into
Samsung Smart TVs to record what's going on even when the TV appears to be turned off. Why are the CIA's tools designed to penetrate
devices used by ordinary Western citizens at home?
GB: Look, I wouldn't say it has anything to do with Western homes, because the CIA doesn't do technical operations
against American citizens - that's prohibited by the law. If the CIA does anything in the U.S., it does it side-by-side with the
FBI, and it does it according to FISA - the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act laws. It's gotta go to the judge to do those
things. Those tools are used primarily against the individuals and terrorists that are targeting the U.S. or other foreign entities
that we see as a significant threat to the U.S. national security, which is the normal functioning of any intelligence service.
SS: Just like you say, the CIA insists it never uses its investigative tools on American citizens
in the US, but, we're wondering, exactly how many terrorist camps in the Middle East have Samsung Smart TVs to watch their favorite
shows on? Does it seem like the CIA lost its direction?
GB: Plenty of them.
SS: Plenty?...
GB: I've travelled in the Middle East, Samsungs are sold everywhere. Sophie, Samsung TVs are sold all over
the world. I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East, I've seen them in Afghanistan, I've seen them everywhere. So, any kind
of devices that you can imagine, people are using everywhere. We're in a global economy now.
SS: The CIA has tools to hack iPhones - but they make up only around 15 % of the world's smartphone
market. IPhones are not popular among terrorists, but they are among business and political elites - so are they the real target
here?
GB: No. The CIA in relative terms to the size of the world is a small organisation. It is an organisation
that has roughly 20 or more thousand people - it's not that large in terms of covering a planet with 7 billion people. We have
significant threats to the U.S. and to the Western world. We live in an age of super-terrorism, we live in an age when individuals,
small groups of people, can leverage technology at a lethal effect. The greatest threats to this planet are not just nuclear,
they are bio. The U.S. needs to have as many tools as possible to defend itself against these threats, as does Russia want to
have similar types of tools to defend itself. You too, Russian people have suffered from a number of terrible terrorist acts.
SS: Wikileaks suggest the CIA copied the hacking habits of other nations to create a fake electronic
trace - why would the CIA need that?
GB: The CIA, as any intelligence service, would look to conduct coverage in the most unobtrusive fashion as
possible. It is going to do its operations so that they can collect and collect again and again against terrorist organisations,
where and whenever it can, because sometimes threats are not just static, they are continuous.
SS: You know this better, so enlighten me: does the he CIA have the authorisation to create the
surveillance tools it had in the first place? Who gives it such authorisation?
GB: The CIA was created in 1947 by the National Security Act of the U.S. and does two different things - it
does FI (foreign intelligence) collection and it does CA - covert action. Its rules for collection of intelligence were enshrined
in the law that created it, the CIA Act 110, in 1949, but the covert action part of this, where it does active measures, when
it gets involved in things - all of those are covered by law. The Presidential finding had to be written, it had to be presented
to the President. The President's signs off on those things. Those things are then briefed to members of Congress, or the House
Permanent Subcommittee for Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence. We have a very rigorous process of review
of the activities of our intelligence communities in the U.S.
SS: But you're talking about the activities in terms of operations. I'm just asking - does CIA need
any authorisation or permission to create the tools it has in its arsenal? Or it can just go ahead
GB: Those tools and the creation of collection tools falls
under the same laws that allowed the CIA to be established. And that was the 1949 Intelligence Act. And also, subsequently, the
laws in 1975. Yes.
SS: So, the CIA programme names are quite colourful, sometimes wacky - "Weeping Angel", "Swamp
Monkey", "Brutal Kangaroo" - is there a point to these, is there any logic, or are they completely random? I always wondered...
GB: There's absolutely no point to that, and it's random.
SS:Okay, so how do you come up with those names? Who like, one says: "Monkey" and another one says: "Kangaroo"?...
GB: I'm sure they are computer-generated.
SS: Trump accused Obama of wiretapping him during the campaign Could the CIA have actually spied
on the president? It seems like the agency doesn't have the best relationship with Donald Trump - how far can they go?
GB: Let me just say this: the President used the word "wiretapping" but I think it was very clear to us that
have been in the intelligence business, that this was a synonym for "surveillance". Because most people are on cellphones, people
aren't using landlines anymore, so there's no "wiretapping", okay. These all fall under the Intelligence Surveillance Act, as
I stated earlier, this thing existing in the U.S.. It was clear to President Trump and to those in his campaign, after they were
elected, and they did a review back that the Obama Administration sought FISA authorisation to do surveillance of the Trump campaign
in July and then in October. They were denied in July, they were given approval in October, and in October they did some types
of surveillance of the Trump campaign. This is why the President, of course, tweeted, that he had been "wiretapped" - of course
"wiretapping" being a synonym for the surveillance against his campaign, which was never heard of in the U.S. political history
that I can remember, I can't recall any way of this being done. It's an outrage, and at the same time, Congressional hearings
are going to be held and they are going to review all of these things, and they are going to find out exactly what happened and
what was done. It's unclear right now, but all we do know - and it has been broken in the media that there were two efforts, and
at the second one, the authorisation was given. That would never have been done by the CIA, because they don't do that sort of
coverage in the U.S.. That would either be the FBI or the NSA, with legal authorities and those authorities the problem that
the Trump administration had is they believed that the information from these things was distributed incorrectly. Any time an
American - and this is according to the U.S. law - any time an American is on the wire in the U.S., their names got to be
minimized from this and it clearly wasn't done and the Trump administration was put in a bad light because of this.
SS: If what you're saying is true, how does that fall under foreign intelligence? Is that more of
the FBI-NSA expertise?
GB: It was FBI and NSA - it was clearly the FBI and the NSA that were involved, it would never have been the
CIA doing that, they don't listen to telephones in the U.S., they read the product of other agencies that would provide those
things, but clearly, there were individuals on those phone calls that they believed were foreign and were targeting those with
potential communications with the Trump campaign. Let's be clear here - General Clapper, the DNI for President Obama, stated before
he left office, that there was no, I repeat, no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. This has been something
that has been dragged out again, and again, and again, by the media. This is a continuing drumbeat of the mainstream, left-wing
media of the U.S., to paint the President in the poorest light, to attempt to discredit Donald Trump.
SS: With the intelligence agencies bringing down Trump's advisors like Michael Flynn - and you said
the people behind that were Obama's loyalists - can we talk about the intelligence agencies being too independent from the White
House, playing their own politics?
GB: I think part of the problem that we've seen during the handover of power from President Obama to President
Trump was that there was a number of holdovers that went from political appointee to career status that had been placed in the
NatSec apparatus and certain parts of the intelligence organisations. It is clear that President Trump and his team are determined
to remove those people to make sure that there's a continuity of purpose and people aren't leaking information that would put
the Administration into a negative light. That's the goal of the administration, to conduct itself consistent with the goals of
securing the country from terrorism and other potential threats - whether they be counter-narcotics, or intelligence agencies
trying to breach our you know, the information that we hold secure.
SS: Here's a bit of conspiracy theories - could it be that the domestic surveillance agencies like
the NSA or the FBI orchestrated the Vault 7 leaks - to damage CIA, stop it from infringing on their turf?
GB :I really don't think so and that is conspiracy thinking. You have to understand something, in the
intelligence communities in the U.S., whether it be the CIA and FBI, we've done a lot of cross-fertilizations. When I was in senior
position in CIA's counterterrorism center, I had a deputy who was an FBI officer. An office in FBI HQ down in Washington had an
FBI lead with a CIA deputy. There's a lot more cooperation than one would think. There are individuals that do assignments in
each other's organisations to help foster levels of cooperation. I had members of NSA in my staff when I was at CIA, members of
diplomatic security, members of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and it was run like a task force, so, there's a lot more cooperation
than the media presents, they always think that there are these huge major battles between the organisations and that's rarely
true.
SS: Generally speaking - is there rivalry between American intel agencies at all? Competition for
resources, maybe?
GB: I think, sometimes, between the Bureau and the CIA - the CIA is the dominant agency abroad, and the FBI
is the dominant agency in the U.S. What they do abroad, they frequently have to get cleared by us, what we do domestically, we
have to get cleared by them, and sometimes there's some friction, but usually, we're able to work this out. It makes for great
news, the CIA fighting FBI, but the reality is that there's a lot more cooperation than confrontation. We are all in the business
of trying to secure the American homeland and American interests globally.
SS: I'm still thinking a lot about the whole point of having this hacking arsenal for the CIA since
you talk on their behalf - the possibility to hack phones, computers, TVs and cars - if the actual terrorist attacks on US soil,
like San Bernardino, Orlando are still missed?
GB: Look. There are hundreds of individuals, if not thousands, planning efforts against the U.S. at any
time. It can be many-many things. And the U.S. security services, there's the CIA, the FBI, NSA - block many-many of these things,
but it is impossible to stop them all. Remember, this is an open society here, in America, with 320 million people, here. We try
to foster open economic system, we allow more immigration to America than all countries in the world combined. This is a great
political experiment here, but it's also very difficult to police. There are times that the U.S. security services are going to
fail. It's inevitable. We just have to try the best we can, do the best job that we can, while protecting the values that attract
so many people to the U.S.
SS:The former CIA director John Brennan is saying Trump's order to temporarily ban travel from some
Muslim states is not going to help fight terrorism in 'any significant way'. And the countries where the terrorists have previously
come from - like Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan, it's true - aren't on the list. So does he maybe have a point?
GB: John Brennan is acting more like a political operative than a former director of CIA. The countries that
Mr. Trump had banned initially, or at least had put a partial, sort of a delay - where states like Somalia, Libya, the Sudan,
Iran - places where we couldn't trust local vetting. Remember something, when someone immigrates to the U.S., we have what's called
an "immigration packet": they may have to get a chest X-ray to make sure they don't bring any diseases with them, they have to
have background check on any place they've ever lived, and in most of these places there are no security forces to do background
checks on people that came from Damascus, because parts of Damascus are totally destroyed - there's been warfare. It is actually
a very reasonable thing for President Trump to ask for delay in these areas. Look, the Crown-Prince, the Deputy Crown-Prince of
Saudi Arabia was just in the United States and met with Donald Trump, and he said he didn't believe it was a "ban on Muslims".
This was not a "ban on Muslims", it was an effort to slow down and to create more opportunity to vet those individuals coming
from states where there's a preponderance of terrorist organisations operating. A reasonable step by President Trump, something
he promised during the campaign, something he's fulfilling. But again, I repeat - America allows more immigration into the U.S.,
than all countries combined. So, we really don't need to be lectured on who we let in and who we don't let in.
SS: But I still wonder if the Crown-Prince would've had the same comment had Saudi Arabia been on
that ban list. Anyways, Michael Hayden, ex-CIA
GB: Wait a second, Sophie - the Saudis have a reasonable form to police their society, and they provide accurate
police checks. If they didn't create accurate police checks, we would've given the delay to them as well.
SS: Ok, I got your point. Now, Michael Hayden, ex-CIA and NSA chief, pointed out that the US intelligence
enlists agents in the Muslim world with the promise of eventual emigration to America - is Trump's travel ban order going to hurt
American intelligence gathering efforts in the Middle East?
GB: No, the question here - there were individuals that worked as translators for us in Afghanistan and Iraq
and serving in such roles as translators, they were promised the ability to immigrate to the United States. Unfortunately, some
of them were blocked in the first ban that was put down, because individuals who wrote that, didn't consider that. That has been
considered in the re-write, that the Trump administration had submitted, which is now being attacked by a judge in Hawaii, and
so it was taken into consideration, but the objective here was to help those that helped U.S. forces on the ground, especially
those who were translators, in ground combat operations, where they risked their lives alongside American soldiers.
SS: You worked in Afghanistan - you were close to capturing Bin Laden back in 2001 - what kind of
spying tools are actually used on the ground by the CIA to catch terrorists?
GB: The CIA as does any intelligence service in the world, is a human business. It's a business where we work
with local security forces to strengthen their police and intelligence forces, we attempt to leverage them, we have our own people
on the ground that speak the language, we're trying to help build transportation there. There's no "secret sauce" here. There's
no super-technology that changes the country's ability to conduct intelligence collections or operations. In Afghanistan the greatest
thing that the U.S. has is broad support and assistance to Afghan men and women across the country. We liberated half of the population,
and for women were providing education, and when the people see what we were doing: trying to build schools, providing USAID projects
- all of these things - this makes the population willing to work with and support the United States. Frequently, members of the
insurgence groups will see this and sometimes they do actually cross the lines and cooperate with us. So, it's a full range of
American political power, whether it's hard or soft, that is the strength of the American intelligence services - because
people in the world actually believe - and correctly so - that American more than generally a force of good in the world.
SS: Gary, thank you so much for this interesting interview and insight into the world of the CIA.
We've been talking to Gary Berntsen, former top CIA officer, veteran of the agency, talking about the politics of American intelligence
in the Trump era. That's it for this edition of SophieCo, I will see you next time.
GreenPizza:
Just thinking here in the light of how things are unfolding with the CIA I am wondering since Federal crimes are committed
can the FBI investigate the CIA acting as America Federal Law Enforcement.
RedBlowDryer -> GreenPin
I think the US intelligent agencies are harming their country more than any enemy of the US.
CyanGrapes
There is a reason why JFK wanted to dismantle the CIA. This guy is lying.
PurpleWieghts
CIA needs hacking tools to make it look like it was carried out by another state simply for plausible deniability.
Carl Zaisser
a "force for good in the world"?...sounds like the American white hat-black hat myth...read Naomi Klein's "The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism". This is a detailed litany of America's various kinds of interventions in multiple
countries that cold hardly be described as "a force for good in the world"...a force for "America's values" (read with
ironically), perhaps
Carl Zaisser
WHO is responsible for the outbreak of chaotic warfare in Libya and Syria?
Should we trust the Saudi vetting services...think of who the September 11 bombers were? Was there another reason they were
not on Trump's banned countries list? Too big to mess with, i.e., oil and weapons sales?
GreenPin
Amazing how they justify their destructive behaviour in a way as they are serving America people and doing good around the
wold. You can sugar count your crimes against humanity as much as you can, but the reality of today' human misery speaks for
itself.
waterbearer
since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence
XXX
interesting, but begs the question "Can we really trust what this guy tells us?" If not, what parts can we trust, and what
parts can't we?
XXX
You'd have to deconstruct his talking points and I don't know how that is done. Intelligence probably knows how to do that. I
noticed he was becoming more zealous on hegemony and exceptionalism as the interview neared the end.
I agree. Bernsten is almost like-ably energetic, but he is, in the end, an uncompromising warrior of the empire.
XXX
if Trump is to be controlled--they gotta have some dirt--or threat against his family --it's how they operate---
XXX
Mr. Berntsen left out the very important NSC10/2 legislation, which gave the CIA free reign with deniability as the cover.
This needs to be repealed. With this legislation, the CIA answers to no one, and goes around the world wrecking havoc with the
governments and people where they like. We will never have peace until that legislation is repealed.
XXX
This is why interesting books to read about the history of the CIA.
The Dulles brothers,
David Talbot: The Devil's Chessboard,
Fletcher Prouty: The Secret Team.
XXX
I applaud former CIA and FBI Gary Bernstein for speaking out on the most powerful intelligence networks on the planet
regarding their surveillance activities. Every nation needs intelligence to safeguard but if we go beyond the call of duty and
get exposed .this leaves Pres Trump and his Adm with no option but to consider corrective measures with a visit to Langley
etc.. Here again the failures of Liberalism are coming up in the wash for cleaning up.
XXX
Liberalism has not been running the country for the last 54 years. We have been under a coup government and just got used
to it.
This is the essence of the JQ. Jewish interest transcends borders and so it is futile to
speak of "Israel wants" when essentially all the major Jewish orgs are very Zionist and in
effect act as a fifth column within their respective host nations.
The big mistake of Jew-aware people and organizations is (and has always been in the past)
to treat Jews based on that perceived unity as if they were a monolithic organization, which
they aren't.
Hitler thought that Jews were pushing the US (and previously the UK) to enter the war. (He
was not wrong.) He thought that a good way to make them stop this would be to threaten
European Jews. He thought that if American Jews saw that a war might endanger the very lives
of all European Jews (and his threats beginning in January 1939 were quite explicit in that
regard – "if Jews succeed in pushing the world into a world war once again, the result
will be the extermination of European Jewry"), then American Jews might be deterred from
pushing the US into the war.
Hitler's calculations would've been correct, if Jewry were monolithic organization, which
it is not. If there was a World Jewish Committee which would regularly meet, then they'd
coolly and rationally examine the possibilities, and perhaps decide that the destruction of
the National Socialist German Reich was not worth the destruction of European Jewry. They
might try to engage in talks with the Germans to get Jews out of Europe in exchange for
guaranteed peace, or something.
But Jewry was totally decentralized. Hitler's anti-Jewish threats merely had the effect of
making Jews (including influential Jews) more determined in their anti-German or anti-Nazi
hatred, and so strengthened their push for war.
I'm afraid a similar strategy (which I had proposed just this week) would probably lead to
similar results: if Russia started threatening Israel in response to American policies
(pushed by American Jewry), the result would be a strengthening of resolve and would make
Israel (whose policies are currently not very hostile to Russia, for example they don't
participate in any sanctions or embargoes against it) also explicitly hostile to Russia.
So I'm not sure what a strong Russian stance against Israel would accomplish. I understand
for example utu, since he'd be delighted if a nuclear war broke out between Israel and
Russia, but I can understand why Russians (including Putin and Karlin) don't really want to
risk it for Arabs.
This People and Power film from 2010 investigated accusations that in 1952 the United States
acquired and used germ-warfare technology on North Korea.
The film followed professor Masataka Mori as he journeyed inside the secretive regime of
North Korea to take eye-witness testimony from survivors of, and witnesses to, the germ-warfare
attacks. Together with Professor Mori, who has investigated these claims over a twenty year
period Al Jazeera's team travelled to the villages and townships where the US Army/Air Force
allegedly dropped bombs containing infected insects, rodents and food.
Mori's painstakingly acquired trust, and the remarkable evidence he has collected, produced
a film which is both extraordinary and controversial - not least because it comes at a time
when America and its allies are so determined to prevent North Korea developing nuclear weapons
- the most potent of all weapons of mass destruction.
In Harbin, China, Mori located survivors of the wartime Japanese army's Unit 731 responsible
for germ warfare attacks on China. After the war, the man behind this research co-operated with
US Army scientists in return for not being prosecuted for war crimes.
Harbin also houses a small research museum dedicated to uncovering the extent of Unit 731's
activities - both during World War Two and in the years when America allegedly adopted it.
Is amazing how those insect field bombs we're laying perfectly on top of a layer of snow
that it did not penetrate after falling from an airplane and the capsules weren't even dented
or destroyed in any way amazing
Russia vetoed resolutions to investigate the allegations, the US pow's who "confirmed" the
use of biological weapons later admitted to being tortured to make those statements and
renounced everything they said, in the 1990's the US released Soviet documents and
communications confirming it was a disinformation campaign by NK which was then backed up by
former Soviet officials.
And one year later in 1953 they clandestinely tested LSD in the bread of an unsuspecting
French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit while France was considered a "friend".Some psycho friend
the US is...
"... The reports delivered during the four-hour meeting provided a devastating exposure of the connection between propaganda and censorship by the media and the warmongering of governments in Britain, the United States and across the world. ..."
"... Professor Piers Robinson (Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism) spoke on the rebranding of government propaganda as "public relations." Drawing on his research into the Iraq war, he cited material from the Chilcot Inquiry into the war confirming the systematic manipulation and exaggeration of "intelligence" on Iraq's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction. This included discussions between the US and British governments over how the 9/11 terror attacks could be used for regime change operations, under the slogan of the "war on terror", which Robinson described as a propaganda slogan for mobilising support for military operations. ..."
"... Stuart gave a presentation on his examination of film recorded by BBC personnel at Atareb Hospital in Aleppo on August 26, 2013 purporting to show the aftermath of a napalm-style bombing by Syrian government forces. The footage was broadcast the same evening that parliament delivered a shock vote against a military attack on Syria. He showed that much of it was staged. Not only did this potentially include the use of military casualty trauma simulations, but BBC personnel were travelling in vehicles displaying ISIS flags and alongside senior members of the western-funded White Helmets. ..."
"... It was impossible to have a functioning democracy without a functioning fourth estate, he said. This had been the gold standard but was no longer the case. Henningsen noted widespread popular opposition to war in the US that successive presidential candidates had sought to manipulate, only to betray once in power -- from George W. Bush to Barack Obama and Donald Trump. ..."
"... The mainstream media have enormous assets and resources but claim democracy is threatened by "fake news", when they are the purveyors of fake news and the real threat to democracy. ..."
"Government propaganda and the war on terror from 9/11 to Syria"
Media on Trial held a successful event in Leeds on Sunday, in the face of sustained efforts
to prevent the meeting taking place.
The group was formed by Frome Stop War, based in Somerset. Working with academics,
investigative journalists and other interested parties and individuals, and drawing on the
illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, Media on Trial seeks to "cultivate public scepticism when faced
with establishment and corporate media's partisan reporting at times of conflict". It held
well-attended meetings in Frome and London last year. Its success in exposing the ongoing
regime-change operations in Syria, and government/media propaganda to this end, has made its
members the subject of an organised media smear campaign, culminating in efforts to silence it
altogether.
" Government propaganda and the war on terror from 9/11 to Syria" was booked at
Leeds City Museum. But in an assault on free speech, Labour-run Leeds City Council in West
Yorkshire cancelled the event .
Sheila
Coombes speaking at Media on Trial
Sheila Coombes (Frome Stop War) has reported that the ban, made on May 3 -- World Press
Freedom Day -- came after a series of attacks on several of the
featured speakers by the Huffington Post , Guardian and Times
newspapers as "Assad Apologists".
Among those targeted were Professor Piers Robinson
(University of Sheffield), Professor Tim Hayward (University of Edinburgh) -- both of the
Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM) -- and investigative journalist Vanessa
Beeley.
Having travelled to Leeds to check out the venue, Coombes was told that Leeds City Council
had cancelled the event, suggesting that "security issues" were involved. She was informed that
it was a blanket ban and that no other council-run venue would host it.
Less than an hour after she had been informed, the Yorkshire Post ran an online
article welcoming the ban, followed by a similar report in the Huffington Post . The
speed of publication suggests that these media outlets were aware of the ban before Coombes
herself had been informed.
Piers Robinson speaking at the Media on Trial event
Coombes reports that she was in contact with police regarding security arrangements for the
event and that she had been informed by the police officer in charge that he had advised Leeds
City Council there was "no intelligence to assess a threat". A second alternative private venue
was also cancelled.
Media on Trial was forced to keep details of the third venue secret until shortly before it
was due to open and restrict entrance to those who had already purchased tickets. The panel was
eventually able to go ahead on Sunday at the Baab-ul-llm Islamic education centre, one of the
few venues prepared to stand in defiance of this campaign of censorship. Approximately 200
people attended.
The reports delivered during the four-hour meeting provided a devastating exposure of
the connection between propaganda and censorship by the media and the warmongering of
governments in Britain, the United States and across the world.
Professor Piers Robinson (Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism) spoke on
the rebranding of government propaganda as "public relations." Drawing on his research into the
Iraq war, he cited material from the Chilcot Inquiry into the war confirming the systematic
manipulation and exaggeration of "intelligence" on Iraq's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction.
This included discussions between the US and British governments over how the 9/11 terror
attacks could be used for regime change operations, under the slogan of the "war on terror",
which Robinson described as a propaganda slogan for mobilising support for military
operations.
Robert Stuart is an independent researcher whose presentation on the "irregularities" in the
BBC Panorama documentary, "Saving Syria's Children," encouraged film producer and
writer Victor Lewis-Smith to tear up his BBC contract in disgust.
Robert Stuart speaking at
the Media on Trial event
Stuart gave a presentation on his examination of film recorded by BBC personnel at
Atareb Hospital in Aleppo on August 26, 2013 purporting to show the aftermath of a napalm-style
bombing by Syrian government forces. The footage was broadcast the same evening that parliament
delivered a shock vote against a military attack on Syria. He showed that much of it was
staged. Not only did this potentially include the use of military casualty trauma simulations,
but BBC personnel were travelling in vehicles displaying ISIS flags and alongside senior
members of the western-funded White Helmets.
Professor Tim Hayward (Environmental Political Theory) questioned the morality of the media
presenting information that was untrue and its implications for democracy and society. He
questioned the media's complicity in glorifying jihadi figures, despite this being in
contravention of the British governments' own anti-terror laws. He drew attention to broadcasts
on Channel 4 that provided flattering accounts of British women signing up for jihad. The media
were guilty of inverting the truth and placing a "lockdown" on information that breached the
rudiments of journalistic integrity.
American journalist and broadcaster Patrick Henningsen (21st Century Wire), drew attention
to the unprecedented conditions in which the meeting was being held, "in secret, in a
tent".
It was impossible to have a functioning democracy without a functioning fourth estate, he
said. This had been the gold standard but was no longer the case. Henningsen noted widespread
popular opposition to war in the US that successive presidential candidates had sought to
manipulate, only to betray once in power -- from George W. Bush to Barack Obama and Donald
Trump.
The mainstream media have enormous assets and resources but claim democracy is threatened by
"fake news", when they are the purveyors of fake news and the real threat to democracy.
Peter Ford is a former UK ambassador to Syria (2003–2006) and now Director of the
British Syrian Society. He noted that the government had been forced to convene the Leveson
Inquiry into the media after the phone-hacking scandal involving Murdoch's News of the
World . But those actions were trivial in comparison with the real charge sheet that
needed to be presented against the media: that of "war mongering and aiding and abetting war
mongering".
Vanessa Beeley is an international investigative journalist and photographer who had
reported from inside Syria (including East Aleppo), Egypt and Palestine. She played an
important role in exposing Syria's White Helmets as an arm of western propaganda and regime
change operations.
She delivered a moving account of the situation within Syria and the capital Damascus. In
addition to detailing the role of the White Helmets and other institutions financed and backed
by western governments, Beeley noted that, especially following the Second World War, pro-war
propaganda was deemed a threat to peace. The Nuremberg Trials in 1946 characterised propaganda
to facilitate war as a serious crime against humanity; one of the gravest that could be
committed. Today, those who advocate peace and the defence of international law are smeared and
silenced, while those who promote war are being lauded in the media.
In the short time available for questions, contributions were made, including the
possibility of practical action against war-mongering.
Julie Hyland, speaking for the World Socialist Web Site , was greeted warmly by the
audience for raising that the high point of the international campaign of smears and censorship
is the attack on Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is in grave danger of eviction from
the Ecuadorian Embassy and extradition to the United States.
Henningson replied that the embassy had determined to cut Assange's internet access and
personal communications while Syria was being targeted for military strikes. "I don't
underestimate the influence of Julian Assange at those critical times. His own website was
taken offline as the air strike by the US, Britain and France were happening, along with
several other web sites". He added, "Julian Assange is being silenced because they don't want
someone like him to have a platform".
Video of the Media on Trial Leeds event can be viewed here
"... Thucydides tells us that war changes the meaning of words . Social media demonstrated this maxim several years ago when " mil-splaining " military-related holidays was all the rage. ..."
"... Increasingly civilians see " soldiers as symbols that allow them to feel good about themselves, and the country" -- but many also see OxyContin that way. ..."
"... A strategy is needed that's rooted in serious analysis of American interests and strengths and a realistic assessment of the world. For nearly a generation, we have failed to align ends, ways, and means . Like " The Weary Titan ," America finds itself unable (or unwilling) to adapt to a changing world. ..."
"... What do we have to show for our expenditures? A divided country, financially exhausted while waging war across the globe against an elusive enemy -- who is, frankly, not a threat remotely approaching the resources we have aligned against him. Beyond the material costs, there's the social. Our military has become a syncretic religion, enjoying the support but not due consideration of the nation. This situation is genuinely tragic . ..."
"... The reason US acts like an empire is because she *IS* an empire. ..."
"... It recently dawned on me that the US' empire status solidified during and after WWII is the biggest reason why it's so easy for America to wage prolonged, deep-involvement wars. NATO, overseas bases, freedom of navigation, etc. ..."
"... But let's be honest: when we "killed" the draft we killed, in part, what is called social cohesion in this country. ..."
"... "This Memorial Day, don't cringe when someone says "Thank you for your service" and proceed to correct them." ..."
"... U.S. policy of perpetual war has been well established since 9/11. Everyone who joins the military is well aware of the job description (kill and destroy) and has free will. ..."
"... The U.S. military is currently providing refueling, logistics and intelligence support to the odious Saudis as they pulverize Yemen to smithereens and starve the population. And those American service people are "defending our freedoms" by doing so? ..."
"... The reason these episodes of introspection are called for is because of the massive propaganda machine (Pentagon, Corporate, MSM) of Military Exceptionalism that is the architect of the pathological incongruence. ..."
"... The 'military-civilian' divide, as the author stated it, is as much a product of a media that no longer holds policymakers accountable for seemingly endless military engagements and, the true effect that our endless military engagements are having on the very fabric of our society and on those engaged in them. ..."
"... With a volunteer military that effectively is at the disposal of whoever happens to be in office, no grass-roots opposition movement to hold politicians accountable, and 95 percent of the population untouched by war, the most veterans will receive is a "thank you for your service" as we go on with our daily lives. ..."
"... In my opinion, Demanding answers and justifications for sending people into harms way is the best expression of respect for our military personnel. ..."
"... " instead of asking 'what' we need to break the stalemate in Afghanistan, could ask 'why' there is a stalemate at all -- and whether American forces can truly ameliorate the structural, cultural, and historical obstacles to achieving desired ends there." ..."
"... Be aware that when you ask why, many people (including, sadly, many veterans) will consider this questioning of government foreign policy as a species of treason. Once, while on active duty with the US Army (1970), I suggested to a fellow officer that sending US troops to fight in Vietnam might not be in nation interest. I was immediately and vigorously condemned as a communist, a fascist, and a traitor. ..."
"... According to this reasoning, once the first soldier dies in battle, any criticism of the war denigrates the sacrifice of the deceased. So, we must continue to pile up the dead to justify those who have already died. This is part of the mechanism of war, and is an important reason why it is always easier to start a war than to stop one. ..."
Thucydides tells us that war
changes the meaning of words . Social media demonstrated this maxim several years ago when
" mil-splaining
" military-related holidays was all the rage. From memes outlining the differences between
Veterans, Armed Forces, and Memorial Day, to Fourth of July "safe space" declarations seemingly
applied to all vets, the trend was everywhere. Thankfully, it seems now to have passed.
Memorial Day is, of course, for remembering the fallen, those who died in service to the
nation. Veterans and their families remember their loved ones in ways they deem appropriate,
and the state remembers, too, in a somber, serious manner.
This remembrance should in no way preclude the typical family barbecue and other customs
associated with the traditional beginning of summer. National holidays are for remembering and
celebrating, not guilt. Shaming those who fail to celebrate a holiday according to one's
expectations is a bit like non-Christians feeling shame for skipping church: it shouldn't
matter because the day means different things to different people. Having a day on the calendar
demonstrates the national consensus about honoring sacrifice; anything more than that is a slow
walk towards superficiality. President Bush stopped golfing during the Iraq war, but it didn't
stop him from continuing it.
Instead, Memorial Day should engender conversation about our military and the gulf between
those who serve and those who don't. The conversation shouldn't just be the military talking at
civilians; it must be reciprocal. Increasingly civilians see " soldiers as symbols
that allow them to feel good about themselves, and the country" --
but many also see OxyContin that way. This situation is lamentable because the
aforementioned "mil-splaining" could only occur in a country so profoundly divided from its
military as to misunderstand basic concepts such as the purpose of holidays. It's also striking
how the most outspoken so-called "patriots" often
have little connection to that which they so outlandishly support. Our "thank you for your
service" culture is anathema to well-functioning civil-military relations.
The public owes its military more consideration, particularly in how the armed forces are
deployed across the globe. Part of this is empathy:
stop treating military members as an abstraction , as something that exists only to serve a
national or increasingly political purpose. Our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines are
deserving of praise and support -- especially considering the burden they've carried -- but
what they need more is an engaged public, one that's even willing to
scrutinize the military . Because scrutiny necessitates engagement and hopefully
understanding and reform.
But the civil-military divide goes
both ways. Military members and veterans owe the public a better relationship as well. This
Memorial Day, don't cringe when someone says "Thank you for your service" and proceed to
correct them. Open a dialogue: you might
build a real connection . Better yet, volunteer to speak at a school or church: partly to
explain your service, sure, but more so to show that military personnel are people, too, not
just
distant abstractions . Veterans are spread across the county and better able to interact
with civilians than our largely cloistered active duty force. They shouldn't go to schools,
churches, and civic organizations for the inevitable praise. They should go to educate, nurture
relationships, and chip away at the civil-military divide.
Perhaps by questioning the fundamentals -- the "why" instead of the so often discussed
"what" in military operations -- the public would be in a better position to demand action from
a Congress that, heretofore, has largely abdicated serious oversight of foreign policy. Perhaps
the public, instead of asking "what" we need to break the
stalemate in Afghanistan , could ask "why" there is a stalemate at all -- and whether
American forces can truly ameliorate the structural, cultural, and historical obstacles to
achieving desired ends there.
A strategy is needed that's rooted in serious analysis of American interests and
strengths and a realistic assessment of the world. For nearly a generation, we
have failed to align ends, ways, and means . Like "
The Weary Titan ," America finds itself unable (or unwilling) to adapt to a changing
world. Consumed by domestic strife and the emergence of nationalism
, American foreign policy has wandered fecklessly since the end of the Cold War. While we can
strike anywhere, this
capability is wasted in search of a lasting peace.
What do we have to show for our expenditures? A divided country, financially exhausted
while waging war across the globe against an elusive enemy -- who is, frankly, not a threat
remotely approaching the resources we have aligned against him. Beyond the material costs,
there's the social. Our military has become a syncretic religion, enjoying the support but not
due consideration of the nation. This situation is
genuinely tragic .
For America to dig its way out of its domestic and foreign troubles it must start with
sobering analysis. For the civil-military dialogue, Memorial Day is as good a place to begin as
any day. So this weekend, civilians should move beyond "Thank you for your service" and ask a
vet about his or her service and lost comrades. Veterans, don't expect praise and don't
lecture; speak with honesty and empathy, talk about what you've done and the conditions you've
seen. You might be surprised what we can learn from each other.
John Q. Bolton is an Army officer who recently returned from Afghanistan. An Army
aviator (AH-64D/E), he is a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a 2005 graduate of West
Point. The views presented here are his alone and not representative of the U.S. Army, the
Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
12 Responses to On Memorial Day,
Getting Beyond 'Thank You For Your Service'
(This reply was intended for an older article
"http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-deep-unfairness-of-americas-all-volunteer-force"
from 2017 but since the topics are kind of related, so )
The reason US acts like an empire is because she *IS* an empire.
It recently dawned on me that the US' empire status solidified during and after WWII
is the biggest reason why it's so easy for America to wage prolonged, deep-involvement wars.
NATO, overseas bases, freedom of navigation, etc. Scrapping/re-constituting these
frameworks would put the US on par with most other countries on earth sporting home-bound
defense forces. Congressional authority/oversight would be reinvigorated, and acting under
the auspices of the UN becomes a procedural impairment (sovereignty concerns and selfishness
notwithstanding). A practical start would be lobbying for more base closures abroad, for
those who feel strongly about this.
But there is a danger: nature abhors a vacuum.
The other thing, I am definitely for professionalism in militaries. Better to have one
dedicated soldier than three squirmish kids dragged into the mud.
Seems to me a universal draft would be the best way to say thank you. Under that scenario
most wars would be avoided or resolved quickly as the cost would be political defeat. An all
volunteer/mercenary force is blatantly unfair as virtually no kids of the wealthy fight,
prohibitively expensive, as recruiting and retaining soldiers in these times is an uphill
challenge, and dangerous as it encourages needless risk since only a tiny percentage of the
voting population pay the price
Sir: Thank you for your timely comments. I am a USN veteran and fully support the idea that
communication has to be a two-way street between civilians and our military women and men.
But let's be honest: when we "killed" the draft we killed, in part, what is called social
cohesion in this country. Not having common experiences makes us all more foreign to one
another which leads to isolation and platitudes such as "Thank you for your service." I have
heard that comment many times, too, and after a while it comes across as: "better you than
me." I know I am being cynical but I am also only human .
Re: "This Memorial Day, don't cringe when someone says "Thank you for your service" and
proceed to correct them."
U.S. policy of perpetual war has been well established since 9/11. Everyone who joins
the military is well aware of the job description (kill and destroy) and has free
will.
Thanking someone for signing up for the War Machine to wreck havoc on natives thousands of
miles from American shores makes little sense.
The U.S. military is currently providing refueling, logistics and intelligence support
to the odious Saudis as they pulverize Yemen to smithereens and starve the population. And
those American service people are "defending our freedoms" by doing so?
The U.S. military slaughters the Syrian army operating in their own country and we are
supposed to thank them for "their service"? Military drone drivers who slaughter Yemeni
wedding parties from comfortable installations in Florida and the operators on U.S. Navy
ships who launch missiles into Syria based on bogus False Flag scenarios are "Warrior
Heroes"?
The veterans we should be thanking are the ones who realized early on that they were being
played for chumps by the war-mongers and got out. If John Q. Bolton has that understanding,
why hasn't he gotten out?
The real "heroes" in America are the young people who get real jobs in the real economy
providing real value to their fellow citizens.
The reason these episodes of introspection are called for is because of the massive
propaganda machine (Pentagon, Corporate, MSM) of Military Exceptionalism that is the
architect of the pathological incongruence.
This is an excellent article. Memorial Day should call upon all Americans to ask some
essential questions.
As an aside, The Washington Post ran an article today about the funeral of Spec. Conde who
recently was killed in Afghanistan. The article spoke of Spec. Conde's motivations for
serving, the events that led to his death, the funeral service, and the effect that his death
at age 21 had and will have on his family and those who knew and loved him.
What struck me most about the article was how remote the funeral service and the family's
grief seem from the rest of what is taking place in America. For example, there was an
oblique reference to a funeral detail for a veteran who committed suicide that apparently no
one attended.
The 'military-civilian' divide, as the author stated it, is as much a product of a
media that no longer holds policymakers accountable for seemingly endless military
engagements and, the true effect that our endless military engagements are having on the very
fabric of our society and on those engaged in them.
The vast majority of the American public go about their daily lives, seemingly insulated
from the effects of our endless engagements. For example, Spec. Conde's death in Afghanistan
did not even make the front page of our major media when it first happened. The death of four
soldiers in Niger has faded from view.
With a volunteer military that effectively is at the disposal of whoever happens to be
in office, no grass-roots opposition movement to hold politicians accountable, and 95 percent
of the population untouched by war, the most veterans will receive is a "thank you for your
service" as we go on with our daily lives.
Thank you, Sir, for articulating my position. In 7 Second Soundbite format, "I Support the
Troops, not the Policy that put them in harms way."
The military should never be deployed for political purposes. As a nation, we have willfully
refused to learn anything from the lessons of Korea and Viet Nam.
Military service preserves the Ultimate Expression of America, "Question Authority!" (I
recognize the Irony of suppressing it within it's ranks.) In my opinion, Demanding
answers and justifications for sending people into harms way is the best expression of
respect for our military personnel.
Accept Officer Bolton's challenge. When you see me kneeling at the National Anthem, ask me
why. [The Answer: I do it to show respect for those that have fallen at the hands of those
who oppose the Values embodied in the American Flag.]
" instead of asking 'what' we need to break the stalemate in Afghanistan, could ask 'why'
there is a stalemate at all -- and whether American forces can truly ameliorate the
structural, cultural, and historical obstacles to achieving desired ends there."
Be aware that when you ask why, many people (including, sadly, many veterans) will
consider this questioning of government foreign policy as a species of treason. Once, while
on active duty with the US Army (1970), I suggested to a fellow officer that sending US
troops to fight in Vietnam might not be in nation interest. I was immediately and vigorously
condemned as a communist, a fascist, and a traitor.
According to this reasoning, once the first soldier dies in battle, any criticism of
the war denigrates the sacrifice of the deceased. So, we must continue to pile up the dead to
justify those who have already died. This is part of the mechanism of war, and is an
important reason why it is always easier to start a war than to stop one.
Perhaps we need "our leaders" to do some war "Service."
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
March 9, 2009
"Should We Have War Games for the World's Leaders"?
Yesterday's enemies are today's friends and today's friends are tomorrow's enemies, such
is the way of the world, and wars of the world. All these wars cause enormous bloodshed,
destruction and suffering to those affected. Therefore, would it not be much simpler to have
war games for all of the world's leaders and elites every few years? We have Olympic Games
every four years where the world's athletes from different countries compete. And many of
these countries are hostile to each other, yet they participate in the Olympics. So if
enemies can participate for sport, why not for war games? How could this be arranged? All the
leaders and elites of the world would have to lead by example, instead of leading from their
political platforms, palaces and offshore tax havens, while the ordinary people have to do
the dirty work in wars. The world's leaders and elites would all be in the front lines first.
A venue could be arranged in a deserted area and the people of the world could watch via
satellite TV their courageous leaders and other elites leading the charge in the war games
.
[read more at link below] http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2009/03/should-we-have-war-games-for-worlds.html
Mark Karlin: How much money has gone to the U.S. war on terror and what has been the impact of this expenditure?
Tom Engelhardt: The best figure I've seen on this comes from the Watson Institute's Costs of War Project at Brown University and
it's a staggering
$5.6 trillion , including certain future costs to care for this country's war vets. President Trump himself, with his usual sense
of accuracy, has inflated that number even more, regularly speaking of
$7
trillion being lost somewhere in our never-ending wars in the Greater Middle East. One of these days, he's going to turn out
to be right.
As for the impact of such an expenditure in the regions where these wars continue to be fought, largely nonstop, since they were
launched against a tiny group of jihadis just after September 11, 2001, it would certainly include: the spread of terror outfits
across the Middle East, parts of Asia, and Africa; the creation -- in a region previously autocratic but relatively calm -- of a
striking range of failed or failing states, of major cities that have been turned into absolute
rubble (with
no money in sight for serious
reconstruction), of internally
displaced people and waves of refugees at levels
that now match the moment after World War II, when significant parts of the planet were in ruins; and that's just to start down
a list of the true costs of our wars.
At home, in a far quieter way, the impact has been similar. Just imagine, for instance, what our American world would have been
like if any significant part of the funds that went into our fruitless, still spreading, now nameless conflicts had been spent on
America's crumbling infrastructure , instead of on the rise
of the national security state as the unofficial fourth branch of government. (At TomDispatch , Pentagon expert William Hartung
has estimated that approximately $1 trillion annually goes into that security state and, in the age of Trump, that figure is
again on the rise.)
Part of the trouble assessing the "impact" here in the U.S. is that, in this era of public demobilization in terms of our wars,
people are encouraged not to think about them at all and they've gotten remarkably little attention. So sorting out exactly how they've
come home -- other than completely obvious developments like the
militarization
of the police, the
flying of surveillance drones in our airspace, and so on -- is hard. Most people, for instance, don't grasp something I've long
written about at TomDispatch : that Donald Trump would have been inconceivable as president without those disastrous wars, those
trillions squandered on them and on the military that's fought them, and that certainly qualifies as "impact" enough.
What makes the U.S. pretension to empire different from previous empires?
As a start, it's worth mentioning that Americans generally don't even think of ourselves as an "empire." Yes, since the Soviet
Union imploded in 1991, our politicians and pundits have proudly called this country the "last" or "lone" superpower and the world's
most "exceptional" or "indispensable" nation, but an empire? No. You need to go someplace off the mainstream grid -- Truthout or
TomDispatch , for instance -- to find anyone talking about us in those terms.
That said, I think that two things have made us different, imperially speaking. The first was that post-1991 sense of ourselves
as the ultimate winner of a vast imperial contest, a kind of arms race of many that had gone on since European ships armed with cannon
had first broken into the world in perhaps the fifteenth century and began to conquer much of it. In that post-Soviet moment of triumphalism,
of what seemed to the top dogs in Washington like the ultimate win, a forever victory, there was indeed a sense that there had never
been and never would be a power like us. That inflated sense of our imperial self was what sent the geopolitical dreamers of the
George W. Bush administration off to, in essence, create a Pax Americana first in the Greater Middle East and then perhaps the world
in a fashion never before imagined, one that, they were convinced, would put the Roman and British imperial moments to shame. And
we all know, with the invasion of Iraq, just where that's ended up.
In the years since they launched that ultimate imperial venture in a cloud of hubris, the most striking difference I can see with
previous empires is that never has a great power still in something close to its imperial prime proven quite so incapable of applying
its military and political might in a way that would successfully advance its aims. It has instead found itself overmatched by underwhelming
enemy forces and incapable of producing any results other than destruction and further fragmentation across staggeringly large parts
of the planet.
Finally, of course, there's climate change -- that is, for the first time in the history of empires, the very well-being of the
planet itself is at stake. The game has, so to speak, changed, even if relatively few here have noticed.
Why do you refer to the U.S. as an "empire of chaos"?
This answer follows directly from the last two. The United States is now visibly a force for chaos across significant parts of
the planet. Just look, for instance, at the cities -- from
Marawi in the Philippines to
Mosul and
Ramadi
in Iraq,
Raqqa and
Aleppo
in Syria,
Sirte in Libya, and so on -- that have literally been -- a word I
want to bring into
the language -- rubblized, largely by American bombing (though with a helping hand recently from the bomb makers of the Islamic State).
Historically, in the imperial ages that preceded this one, such power, while regularly applied brutally and devastatingly, could
also be a way of imposing a grim version of order on conquered and colonized areas. No longer, it seems. We're now on a planet that
simply doesn't accept military-first conquest and occupation, no matter the guise under which it arrives (including the spread of
"democracy"). So beware the unleashing modern military power. It turns out to contain within it striking disintegrative forces on
a planet that can ill afford such chaos.
You also refer to Washington D.C. as a "permanent war capital" with the generals in ascension under Trump. What does that represent
for the war footing of the U.S.?
Well, it's obvious in a way. Washington is now indeed a war capital because the Bush administration launched not just a local
response to a relatively small group of jihadis in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but what its top officials called a "Global War
on Terror" -- creating possibly the worst acronym in history: GWOT. And then they instantly began insisting that it could be applied
to at least 60 countries supposedly harboring terror
groups. That was 2001 and, of course, though the name and acronym were dropped, the war they launched has never ended. In those years,
the military, the country's (count 'em)
17
major intelligence agencies, and the
warrior
corporations of the military-industrial complex have achieved a kind of clout never before seen in the nation's capital. Their
rise has really been a bipartisan affair in a city otherwise riven by politics as each party tries to outdo the other in promoting
the financing of the national security state. At a moment when putting money into just about anything else that would provide security
to Americans (think health care) is always a desperate struggle, funding the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state
continues to be a given. That's what it means to be in a "permanent war capital."
In addition, with Donald Trump, the generals of America's losing wars have gained a kind of prominence in Washington that was
unknown in a previously civilian capital. The head of the Defense Department, the White House chief of staff, and (until recently
when he was succeeded by an even more militaristic civilian) the national security advisor were all generals of those wars -- positions
that, in the past, with rare exceptions, were considered civilian ones. In this sense, Donald Trump was less making history with
the men he liked to refer to as "
my generals " than channeling it.
What is the role of bombing in the U.S. war-making machine?
It's worth remembering, as I've written in the past, that from the beginning the war on terror has been, above all (and despite
full-scale invasions and occupations using hundreds of thousands of U.S. ground troops), an
air war . It started that way. On September 11, 2001, after all, al-Qaeda sent its air force (four hijacked passenger jets) and
its precision weaponry (19 suicidal hijackers) against a set of iconic buildings in the U.S. Those strikes -- only one of them failed
when the passengers on a single jet fought back and it crashed in a field in Pennsylvania -- may represent the most successful use
of strategic bombing (that is, air power aimed at the civilian population of, and morale in, an enemy country) in history. At the
cost of a mere $400,000 to $500,000 , Osama
bin Laden began an air war of provocation that has never ended.
The U.S. has been bombing, missiling, and
drone-assassinating ever since. Last year, for instance, U.S. planes dropped an estimated
20,000 bombs just on the Syrian city
of
Raqqa , the former "capital" of the Islamic State, leaving next to nothing standing. Since the first American planes began dropping
bombs (and cluster munitions ) in
Afghanistan in October 2001, the U.S. Air Force has been in the skies ceaselessly -- skies by the way over countries and groups that
lack any defenses against air attacks whatsoever. And, of course, it's been a kind of rolling disaster of destruction that has left
the equivalent of World Trade Center tower after tower of dead civilians in those lands. In other words, though no one in Washington
would ever say such a thing, U.S. air power has functionally been doing Osama bin Laden's job for him, conducting not so much a war
on terror as a strange kind of war for terror, one that only promotes the conditions in which it thrives best.
What role did the end of the draft play in enabling an unrestrained U.S. empire of war?
It may have been the crucial moment in the whole process. It was, of course, the decision of then-president Richard Nixon in
January 1973 , in
response to a country swept by a powerful antiwar movement and a military in near rebellion as the Vietnam War began to wind down.
The draft was ended, the all-volunteer military begun, and the American people were largely separated from the wars being fought
in their name. They were, as I said above, demobilized. Though at the time, the U.S. military high command was doubtful about the
move, it proved highly successful in freeing them to fight the endless wars of the twenty-first century, now being referred to by
some in the Pentagon (according to the Washington Post ) not as "permanent wars" or even, as General David Petraeus put it, a "
generational struggle
," but as "
infinite war ."
I've lived through
two periods of public war mobilization in my lifetime: the World War II era, in which I was born and in which the American people
mobilized to support a global war against fascism in every way imaginable, and the Vietnam War, in which Americans (like me as a
young man) mobilized against an American war. But who in those years ever imagined that Americans might fight their wars (unsuccessfully)
to the end of time without most citizens paying the slightest attention? That's why I've called the losing generals of our endless
war on terror (and, in a sense, the rest of us as well) " Nixon's
children ."
17 major intelligence agencies. For fuck's sake! It's not seventeen – it is SIXTEEN! ;-)
Looney
P.S. I hate re-posting shit or using the same joke twice, but THIS is worth re-posting (from January 13, 2017): U.S. intelligence agencies contend that Moscow waged a multifaceted campaign of hacking and other actions All Democrats, from our own MDB to Hillary and 0bama, have been citing the "
17 intelligence agencies
" that agree with their ridiculous claims.
Here's the list of "The Magnificent Seventeen", but (spoiler alert!) there are actually only SIXTEEN INTEL AGENCIES, but who
counts? The highlighted agencies have nothing to do with Hacking, Elections, Golden Showers, or whatever sick lies the Libtards
have come up with.
Each Agency's responsibilities are very clearly defined by Law and 13 out of the "17 agencies" have absolutely nothing to do
with the DNC, Wikileaks, Elections, Hillary's e-mails, the Clinton Foundation, the Russian Hacking, etc.
Twenty-Fifth Air Force - Air Force Intel only
Intelligence and Security Command (US Army) – Army Intel only
Central Intelligence Agency is prohibited by Law to conduct any activities within the US!!!
Coast Guard Intelligence – Coast Guard, really?
Defense Intelligence Agency – Military Intel only
Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (Dept. of Energy) – Nukes, Nuclear Plants
Office of Intelligence and Analysis (Homeland Security)
Bureau of Intelligence and Research - State Dept. Intel
Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (Treasury) – Treasury and Hacking/Elections? Hmm
Office of National Security Intelligence (DEA) – Drug Enforcement, really?
Intelligence Branch, FBI (DOJ)
Marine Corps Intelligence Activity - Marine Corps Intel only
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (Dept. of Defense) – Satellites, Aerial Intel
National Reconnaissance Office (Dept. of Defense) – Defense Recon Only
NSA
Office of Naval Intelligence Navy Defense – Navy only
On the rare occasions when the US halfheartedly admits that, somehow, mistakes might have been made, it cannot evade employing
important US citizenish "core values" like hypocricy and psychological projection.
Four days ago an outstanding example of this type of embarrassment,
Russia's Moral Hypocrisy , was posted by Colonel
James McDonough, US Army attaché to Poland. Its urgent bleatings display the inadequacy and extremely low level of cohesion to
which US propaganda has fallen. The short version: the US fights for all good against all bad, and the Russians disagree because
they are very bad and also mean people.
Two days ago, Colonel Cassad posted a response to McDonough's piece which skewered it like a kebab. Using a
nota bene format, each point is considered and then crushed
into a paste. Even via the Yandex machine translation, the well-deserved kicking to the curb comes through loud and clear.
Wars are always about money and control. The war machine supports so many jobs in the US from shipyards to consulting. It's
a way to pump cash into a system that essentially died after the 2001 crash.
During a memorial day conversation today, "But you live in the evil empire and reap the benefits, why are you complaining about
the democrats. Can't you see the black mark on your soul is more important because you support the Empire on either side of the
so called two party system."
More divide & conquer BS the commies are belching now that they've been caught "red handed".
If it was a family member resolve yourself that you will have to just deal with it. If only a friend or acquaintance, resolve
yourself that there may come a time in the not to distant future you will have to slit their throat lest they slit yours.
Morbid as it maybe, nmewn is still correct. It's kinda like the saying, " Two people can keep a secret, as long as one of them
is dead." You cannot truly depend on or trust anyone, except yourself. And often times family can be worse than friends.
Well, what do want me to say?...lol...I know we're all thinking the same thing, we've all had the very same conversations with
these assholes whether friends or family. They are unreachable.
Hey, don't kill the guy pointing out the elephant in the middle of the room ;-)
It's not sixteen either, it was three ...the CIA ( Brennan ) the FBI ( Comey at the time) and the NSA which in my opinion was
in a go-along-to-get-along position. Seventeen was a lie when Hillary first uttered it. "The [intelligence community assessment] was a coordinated product from three agencies: CIA, NSA and the FBI, not all 17 components
of the intelligence community," said former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper during a congressional
hearing in May. "Those three under the aegis of my former office."
He spoke the truth (that time) probably not wanting another perjury charge ;-)
It's the attitude. The American political leaders have this idea of righteousness and exceptionalism. They think they'll go
around the world telling everyone else what to do. I've got two words for them - Fuck-off:
This article could have been written by a second-year political science undergraduate at a U.S. public university. This adds
a sum total of zero to the public understanding of the rise of American imperialism.
To state the obvious; the CIA has deeply humiliated the American people in their attempt to tie the American people to be responsible
for the CIA's crimes against humanity across the world.
The CIA appears to be the world's greatest threat to peace and prosperity. It is the penultimate terrorist organization, being
the direct or indirect creator of all other terrorist organizations. It also appears to be the world's penultimate illegal drug
smuggler and pusher making all other illegal drug trading possible and instigating the horrors of addiction and suffering around
the world.
If I believed that the CIA was working in any way on behalf of the US government and the American people then it would be sad
and shameful indeed. However, it is my belief that the CIA instead was captured long ago, as was the secret military operations
and now works for a hidden power that wants to dominate or failing that, destroy humanity.
It's those Select Highly Compartmentalized Criminal Pure Evil Rogue Elements at the Deep State Top that have had control since
the JFK Execution that have entrenched themselves for decades & refuse to relinquish Control.
The Agency is Cancer. There should be no question about the CIA's future in the US.
Dissolved & dishonored. Its members locked away or punished for Treason. Their reputation is so bad and has been for so long,
that the fact that you joined them should be enough to justify arrest and Execution for Treason, Crimes Against Humanity & Crimes
Against The American People.
The author seems comfortable finding fault with Bush and Trump but can't muster up a criticism of Obama (the Cal Ripken of
presidential war mongers), Clinton, Holder, et al.
What a dichotomy. On the one hand, America self-righteously proclaiming it is the one protecting everyone's freedom, while
at the same time making war and spying and oppressing others. On the other hand, seems like America is at war with everyone to
have such a large military and 17 spy agencies, and more people in prison than any other country in the world. Really sounds like
America has got some serious problems.
Note, a majority of the Muslims living close to Iraq still held a positive view of the U.S. even after the 1990-1991 attack
on Iraq. And after 12 years of starvation sanctions, even denying Iraq baby formula with the claim that it "can be used to make
weapons". And after the UK and US bombing Iraq on average once a week for those 12 years, targeting water refineries so Iraqis
had to drink dirty water, and power plants so there was no air conditioning in the blistering summer heat. Causing the death of
half a million children, as confirmed by the U.S. ambassador to the UN, which State Secretary Madeleine Albright said was "worth
it".
Even after that mass murder, 60% of Gulf residents were generally positive toward the U.S.
"Clash of cultures," right? There wasn't much Islamism at all, except the anger directed at thieving puppet rulers installed
after the European empires withdrew. Arabs, who were mostly secular, had always loved the U.S. as an anti-imperialist country.
Thus they couldn't understand when the U.S. backed the Zio invasion of Palestine. And then started sanctioning and attacking every
Middle Eastern nation that supported the Palestinians.
The U.S. used to have many "Arabist" diplomats, those who wanted to work with Arab nationalists, especially against the Soviets.
But the pro-Arab diplomats were sidelined by the media-backed neocon line, where everything was about who were for or against
the Palestinians. Saddam Hussein in Iraq had been secular and pro-American, but he gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide
bombers - these families saw their homes razed with all their possessions, with just an hour's notice, by the Israelis. For the
crime of giving these destitute people some money, all of Iraq was targeted.
No wonder the Arabs started hating the U.S. Still even after the Iraq invasion in 2003, most Arabs just want to be left alone
by the U.S. But that is not allowed. Arab nationalism was destroyed in favor of puppet regimes.
"... Exactly right Sam. 'It's the oligarchs, stupid" should be our slogan. To keep us focused on the real source of most of our problems. ..."
"... Memorial ceremonies and flag waving allow the rich dictators to demand loyalty to themselves in the name of the principles they have overthrown. The rich despise America's principles and spit upon the Constitution. ..."
"... Actually, there are a lot of evil empires. History has a long list too. The natural state of man is to create evil abusive murderous empires which kill as many people as they can. "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his." George S. Patton ..."
"... The National Security State is a protection racket for western oligarchy. All the romanticism that surrounds Memorial Day is just to keep the sentimental mythology in tact. Of course, 911 and the GWOT was used to reinforce the troops as national heroes mindset. ..."
"... Americans are that classic example of lab mice being used to form the predetermined outcome of the experimentation. We Americans should just look up and wave and give our controllers the finger, as we all smile and go in the other direction. Joe ..."
As much as I admire and respect Ray McGovern – he and other veterans must understand
that suggesting the best leaders in our government would be those with a military background
is disappointing. I would rather NOT have those types calling the shots. Look what it's got
us?
Cindy reminded me of a quote (whose origin I forget): 'War undoes a mother's work." All
power to Cindy Sheehan and all the peace seekers out there. #WomenMarch4Peace
mike k , May 28, 2018 at 5:47 pm
What if Memorial Day was an occasion to remember all the horrific crimes of our nation,
and vow to atone for them? Instead of a day to worship and kiss the militarist boot that is
grinding our culture into the dirt.
KiwiAntz , May 28, 2018 at 6:20 pm
It's not that America hates peace, they hate, not being able make a profit from War? Peace
& it implies means the MIC is obsolete & no longer needed so no more trillions off
dollars wasted on stupid Wars & Militarily hardware? Just imagine all that wasted money
being put to better use in America, such as on social programs & providing universal
healthcare, free college education for America's youth, infrastructure spending & other
things? That's the unfortunate thing about funding this bloated killing machine called the
MIC?
Send "our leaders" to the front lines of war.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
March 9, 2009
"Should We Have War Games for the World's Leaders"?
Yesterday's enemies are today's friends and today's friends are tomorrow's enemies, such
is the way of the world, and wars of the world. All these wars cause enormous bloodshed,
destruction and suffering to those affected. Therefore, would it not be much simpler to have
war games for all of the world's leaders and elites every few years? We have Olympic Games
every four years where the world's athletes from different countries compete. And many of
these countries are hostile to each other, yet they participate in the Olympics. So if
enemies can participate for sport, why not for war games?
[read more at link below] http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2009/03/should-we-have-war-games-for-worlds.html
Jeff , May 28, 2018 at 12:38 pm
As with everybody else, I'll say this is a great piece because it is. Nominally speaking,
I would be left with little to say. But I have one little comment to augment what Ray has
said. We are frequently told that our military "protects our freedom" and when you say
something that somebody doesn't like, they'll say "thank a vet for your freedom to say
something like that." Pfui.
The military hasn't "protected our freedom" in a very long time.
Protecting our freedom implies that it is under attack from some external group with capable
of being an existential threat to the existence of the United States.
The last time that
happened was WWII. Not one single country we've attacked since then has had a snowball's
chance in hell of bringing the US to its knees and please note that no country has actually
attacked us. As for the "thank a vet for your freedom to say nasty things about the
government", the military doesn't protect us from our own government. The government is
supposed to protect our constitutional guarantees. They've been doing a shitty job ever since
9/11.
Sam F , May 28, 2018 at 12:05 pm
Afghanistan has been a wonderful test of the corrupt former democracy of the US. The
"graveyard of empires" is of no value to anyone, but sought by all empires solely because
they fear that Russia might want it.
Britain invaded Afghanistan and failed three times in the 19th century, each campaign a
"surge" from the last, their oligarchy afraid of a "threat" to "their" India, of an invasion
by Russia. In two centuries that never happened, but they still claim this.
The US warmongers seek Afghanistan to harass Russia, block the Asian road project, harass
Pakistan, harass Iran for the zionists, or get opium revenue to their secret gangs. These
projects are all unconstitutional, genocidal, and damaging to US security.
America is history's largest example of the destruction of democracy by unregulated economic
power, the dictatorship of oligarchy. Their political tyrants create foreign monsters to pose
as protectors and accuse their moral superiors of disloyalty. Their mass media sells wars to
those angry at the misfortunes brought upon them by the rich, as the means to symbolic
personal triumph by killing all who disagree.
The ruined "American Century" can be saved only by a humanitarian vision, and if the people
cannot depose US oligarchy so as to rise to that vision, the US must hide in shame from the
enemies its selfishness has made, ruined by isolation and embargo. No one will miss the US
when it has collapsed into permanent disgrace.
Wake up, America! We are slaves until the oligarchy is destroyed.
mike k , May 28, 2018 at 4:02 pm
Exactly right Sam. 'It's the oligarchs, stupid" should be our slogan. To keep us focused
on the real source of most of our problems.
Sam F , May 28, 2018 at 6:20 pm
Thank you, Mike. It is hard to recommend solutions when focused upon the problems of
oligarchy, without advising people to shake their cage or use extreme measures, but we have
seen good ideas here, and the vision is certainly needed.
John , May 28, 2018 at 9:57 pm
The only thing wrong with your post is the claim "The "graveyard of empires" is of no
value to anyone".
Afghanistan is first, geographically positioned so that many pipelines are planned to run
through it.
Also, Afghanistan is very mineral-rich, including and especially in Lithium – which is
needed for batteries for everything from consumer electronics to electric cars.
Ray McGovern is a national treasure, and so is Cindy Sheehan. They are 2 of the
all-too-few voices willing to stand against the horrific military industrial machine. Just
imagine how much courage it took both of them to do what they did back in 2004, at the height
of the jingoistic blood-lust fest the neocons created in the wake of 9/11. I have watched and
read the work of both of these amazingly courageous people over the course of 15 years or so,
and what strikes me as tragic is that there are still so many who buy into the 'patriotism'
b.s. and are willing to sacrifice their own children to senseless wars.
Anon , May 28, 2018 at 10:17 am
Memorial ceremonies and flag waving allow the rich dictators to demand loyalty to
themselves in the name of the principles they have overthrown. The rich despise America's
principles and spit upon the Constitution.
Soldiers are the fools of rich dictators and they know it, hoping to escape war and retire.
They have no honor.
Flag-wavers are cowardly imbeciles destroying America because they have no principles. They
are traitors.
vinnieoh , May 28, 2018 at 10:15 am
Since CN decided to re-cycle this piece (that is not a complaint against its quality,)
I'll post this as evidence that ordinary little citizens can have more knowledge, common
sense, and morality than our ruling class.
From: lawrences
To:
Subject: The impending war against Iraq
Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 12:43 PM
Dear Sir:
Although I am a resident of Ohio, I am contacting you because you have proven to be a man
of honor and reason and a powerful force in the U.S. Senate. I am strongly opposed to the
impending war in the Middle East, and have already expressed these views to the senators from
Ohio, but I believe that if anybody can mobilize opposition to this impending disaster, it
may be you. I listened to your comments prior to the non-debate concerning the Resolution to
authorize the use of force, and I agree that the real consequences of this conflict were not
addressed at all.
This conflict is worse than folly. I believe that at the very least: the situation in the
Middle East will be much worse and not better; world opinion will solidify against Americans
and American policies; terrorist organizations and activities will be strengthened, not
weakened; we will be bankrupted into the unforeseeable future. At the worst, this act of
aggression could plunge humanity into global conflict the likes of which previous human
experience will not have prepared us. Lest these concerns seem selfish and self-centered, I
do not wish to again see American sons and daughters slaughter innocent civilians from the
safety of our high-tech weaponry, and all for the true purpose of expanding the corporate
oligarchy.
Now is not the time to remain silent for the purpose of political expediency. While
representative democracy still exists between these shores it is time to rein in a chief
executive and his cabal who are apparently in the throes of a consuming blood-lust. I have
considered myself and have voted Democrat all of my life (I'm 50 years old), and I must say
that I am disgusted that most of the elected Democrats in Washington have been struck mute on
this issue. No reasonable person who is fully contemplating the consequences of what is about
to happen could come to the conclusion that any good is going to come from this. I believe,
despite the gaudy and superficial manifestations of popular American culture, that this
country is populated by reasonable people, and our elected representatives should consider
the consequences of remaining mute and cowardly as George II leads us into a national
disgrace and disaster.
History, if indeed there be anyone left to record it, will justly lay the blame for this
catastrophe at our feet. Please sir, I implore you, do everything in your power to stop this
from happening.
A sincere Veteran, American, and a Human Being,
Vince Lawrence
email: *********@***.net
"Happy" Memorial Day. One last thought. Kind of paraphrases what Ray was trying to say,
and they are my own words that I decided on, several years into the criminal invasion of
Iraq: One can not earn honor and glory for one's self by prosecuting an illegal and immoral
policy.
Is this perhaps one of many reasons for the high suicide rate of GWOT veterans?
Sam F , May 28, 2018 at 11:05 am
With the endless "marches of folly" of our dictatorship of rich traitors, Memorial Day has
become a flag-waving psyop for a "national religion" of lies and bullying that sacrifices
poverty [sicken] draft animals to the ideological fantasies of opportunist demagogues. Their fake
praise for "the fallen" and disgusting lies about the motives and effects of their constant
genocides and subversions betray their deliberate murder of US citizens and foreign innocents
to get money, public office, and promotions. The families of those sacrificed should denounce
rather than legitimize these schemes of murder by corrupt politicians.
Dorothy Hoobler , May 28, 2018 at 10:12 am
A great article! Another extraordinary quality about Cindy Sheehan was and is that she saw
the tragedy for the mother's of Iraq was as real as her own. Very few people have that sense
of common humanity – certainly none of our politicians.
mike k , May 28, 2018 at 7:39 am
The United States of America is the Evil Empire on this planet. One of the most evil
groups in this Empire of Evil is the military. Young people are trained to kill and brutalize
others, then celebrated as heroes – just as ruthless hit men are celebrated and honored
by the Mafia. The worst among us are put forward as the best. Noble words are turned into
lies in the mouths of our politicians and media propagandists.
CitizenOne , May 28, 2018 at 10:16 am
Actually, there are a lot of evil empires. History has a long list too. The natural state
of man is to create evil abusive murderous empires which kill as many people as they can. "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for
his."
George S. Patton
The problem comes not from war itself but from the ultimate reason for the war. Some wars
like WWII were necessary because the all too real possibility that Germany would come to
dominate Europe and Japan would dominate the Pacific. It was a classical war fought purely
for economic gain by the Axis powers. Also it was classical since it was a war waged by
governments and heads of state. Hence when it was over those nations unconditionally
surrendered and the war ended.
Fast forward to later years and many still question the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria and Libya.
The reasons become complex for these wars and the outcomes less certain than the clear
victory in WWII. We lost Vietnam and all the hype about dominoes and evil empires didn't
happen. We won Iraq but that outcome created ISIS which we later funded to attack Syria. Is
this what we expect our leaders to do?
Another example is the Iran Coup d'etat where we installed a dictator to counter Iran's
nationalizing the oil companies. This led to the student uprising, the hostage crisis and our
long cold war with Iran. We had an October Surprise when we found out that Iran Contra went
back to before the Reagan Election and there is evidence that George Bush was personally
negotiating terms with the Iranians in order to prolong thir captivity until after the
election. It seems to me that secretly dealing with a foreign enemy nation that is holding US
citizens hostage to prolong their captivity for political gains fits the definition of high
crimes and misdemeanors.
Why don't hold leaders accountable under the law?
George Bush went on to be the international spokesperson for The Carlyle Group perhaps the
largest private arms dealers on the planet. All of the investors in the Carlyle Group became
insanely wealthy after 9/11. Their basic investment strategy was to buy up depressed military
defense contractor stocks which fell after the Berlin Wall came down knowing that those
stocks would go up if there were another conflict. What about the moral conflict of their
investment strategy especially since major shareholders were also in key positions to be able
to influence foreign policy?
It seems fairly obvious that when federal intelligence agencies fail to react to foreign
nationals learning to fly with no desire to go to landing school there was at least willful
ignorance regarding the plans of Osama. The reasons for recent wars seems entirely too
conflicted. Just like the classical wars of the past, today's wars are still being waged by
the leaders of nations for economic gain.
Are our troops to blame? Absolutely not. They are young, idealistic and loyal. They
believe in America and are willing to fight for our freedom. They are to be honored on this
day for their sacrifice.
On the other hand, the leaders who are making a killing behind the scenes while ginning up
wars for profit wherever they can need to be held accountable for their actions and at least
a shred of acknowledgement by the "liberal" media needs to reach peoples ears.
We can honor the dead for their sacrifice but we need to honor the living by preventing
their lives being lost in the quest for money.
CitizenOne , May 28, 2018 at 10:17 am
Here is a link to the Carlyle Group a few documentaries.
Great little essay CitizenOne. You give a valuable lesson in the art of 'buying low and
selling high, and damn those who don't agree'. We are witnessing what you get from an all for
profit military. Take the profit out of war, and you will end all war. Joe
John , May 28, 2018 at 10:11 pm
I really have to wonder why the Carlyle Group is not better known.
An arms dealing consortium started by the Bush and Bin Laden Family, that JUST HAPPENED to be
meeting in NYC on Sept 11, 2001, for a super-early morning meeting, in a conference room with
a panoramic view of the Twin Towers No, nothing suspicious there .
Sam F , May 28, 2018 at 10:50 am
Yes, in the military "young people are trained to kill and brutalize others, then
celebrated as heroes."
Also true as Citizen says that many are "young, idealistic and loyal willing to fight for our
freedom."
But no one not paid to recite propaganda would think that the US has been fighting for its
freedom, and no one who pays attention thinks that it is fighting for anything positive. So
the military above age 20-25 just don't question the obvious lies, due to their ulterior
motives. Those who agree with the foreign policies of US warmongers don't believe in the
principles of America, only its dictators' ideology of lies and killing for profit. The
majority are simply forced to go along with the dictators like everyone else.
CitizenOne , May 28, 2018 at 1:05 pm
But fighting for our freedom is exactly what the propaganda preaches. Like Orwell's
"nineteen eighty-four", the citizens of Oceania are taught to hate Emmanuel Goldstein and the
enemy states Eastasia and Eurasia. Perhaps the most disturbing part is that you never really
know if Big Brother or Emmanuel Goldstein even exist. It could be that these are fictional
straw men that serve the purpose of the state to control the masses. Either way, real or not,
it is the same issue to be handled by the state. It is all fake news all the time in
Oceania.
I'm not selling the volunteers who sign up short. I do not believe they join the military
(for the most part) so they can become legal mafia wise guys. Obviously and especially given
the recent trends to use contractors (mercenaries and soldiers of fortune) there is some of
that going on.
Let's face facts. Propaganda works. At least PT Barnum was correct when he said you can
fool most of the people most of the time.
I don't know any parents who wish their children in the military would bring home lots of
money they got pilfering corpses. However I do know that governments wage wars to bring home
lots of money by pilfering other nations.
This point is key. Blaming servicemen and women for the foreign policy decisions of our
government is ludicrous as is any suggestion they should take the "high ground". In the
military you follow orders; period.
On the other hand we should never allow those who want to squash criticism of our
government to use the false argument that in so doing, the critics of the government are
dishonoring the folks that sacrificed for the nation. That is the false patriotism used by
totalitarian nations to silence debate while conducting immoral and unethical deeds. As
Samuel Johnson said in 1775, "(false) Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel"
Sam F , May 28, 2018 at 2:32 pm
Indeed there is diversity among volunteers, perhaps even as mercenaries. One certainly
does not wish to unfairly criticize the volunteer with good intentions. But I see thuggish
teams here who often fired guns at our charity to "defend the town" (their thug tribe
subset), who apparently learned "skills" in the military. So it seems that many sign up for
the opportunity to kill for the tribe, looking for any excuse to vent their anger at unknown
processes. They are looking for an imaginary enemy just as much as the demagogues who
"defend" us in Washington.
Truthful and thoughtful people like Ray know the truth of this and all wars but they, like
Ralph Nader, will never be guests on any corporate T.V. shows, nor will any of the swamp
creatures dare to debate them in public, as they could not defend the lies they perpetrate
for profit. The insanity of our foreign policy has miseducated the general public to the
point of insanity. I always get the usual zombie phrase of "Thank you for your service" and
the bewildered look when I say that I didn't serve, I was used. They usually never approach
me again and look at me as some sort of creature because I don't see the world through their
eyes but they look thru the glass darkly. I have no idea how we are going to make them see
the truth of this tragic farce and inhumanity. we destroy the world and ourselves with the
illusions that pass as truth. I guess I just want to know the truth when I die! They will
never see the fact that all are connected as well as every particle in the universe, one and
the same, that is the mystery of it all that the sages tried to get people to understand. God
in you, you are god and everyone else is also. Not separate! You can connect to the sacred my
understanding this. Thank you Ray, for being who you are and for having the courage to speak
the truth, with much love, Jack Williams.
RickD , May 28, 2018 at 7:35 am
As a fellow veteran I echo and support your eloquent words.
War is a profit center, the cause is generally linked to corporate desire for capturing
markets and an ever increasing need for more and more profits.
That wars endure is directly linked to the vast amounts spent on the MIC as well, and not the
needs of our nation as a whole.
CitizenOne , May 28, 2018 at 1:18 pm
I agree. Well said.
Add Noam Chomsky ("Evil Noam") to the list of banned interviewees. After years of cold
shoulders, he got his shot on PBS but at the last minute the higher-ups at PBS decided to
pull the plug so there was just 5 minutes of radio silence. He is the man America loves to
hate. The most dangerous liberal in America etc
Amazing how the "liberal" press fails to connect with him despite his best efforts.
CitizenOne , May 28, 2018 at 1:19 pm
Here is a link to The "Evil Gnome" Chomsky. BTW, I think he would fit right in here.
Chomsky is most emphatically not a "Liberal".
He is very openly a Libertarian Socialist.
RnM , May 28, 2018 at 5:18 am
It's very disconcerting how Memorial Day has, in this topsy-turvey culture has become a
celebration of the type of denial and forgetting that Ray McGovern so eloquently describes.
Thanks, Ray for again upholding the spirits of the American Revolution, and the Civil War for
us, and to name the names of certain betrayers of the Americans who may or may not have
chosen wisely (Who can really say about the origins of any one individual's choices?)
Myself, I boycott cookouts and partying the last weekend in May, and buy an artificial poppy
instead from a disabled Vet It's a time for remembering and committing to put those memories
toward sanity (i. e., not repeating the same futile actions).
Realist , May 28, 2018 at 1:52 am
Not to sound callous, but without forced conscription, nobody joins the military against
their free will. Unless they spent their formative years under a rock, or possess an IQ in
the low double digits, they ought to know from just casual exposure to the media, school
books, zines and even graphic novels that America is not under any real threat from any other
country or combination of countries on the face of the earth. Yes, the propaganda is
pervasive, but it's patently transparent, just like the politicians who hypocritically sell
it; like Trump telling one narrative on Monday and a diametrically opposite story on Tuesday.
No one in authority has any credibility any longer.
The grunts ought to know that they join the American service to exert the power and
influence of the empire into every far corner of the globe through use of lethal force with
extreme prejudice. Our American "heroes" get to do all their killing "over there," on the
other side of the planet, never here in any actual defense of their "homeland." They are not
accurately described as "defenders" or "warriors" or any other lauditory appellation. Rather,
they are raiders, conquerors, conquistadors, or legionnaires. When they attack they put the
"Blitzkrieg" to shame with the obscene kill ratios their space-age weapons allow against
thoroughly outclassed relatively primitive countries that have never left their own borders,
let alone fired a shot at America. Our troopers stomp 10,000 miles to go shoot fish in a
barrel, only they are human beings, not fish or turkeys, which would be another apt analogy
for what the U.S. military specializes in. They have massacred millions from Viet Nam to
Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen and made untold more homeless
refugees, and their apologists want the world to feel sorry and shed crocodile tears for the
few thousand of them who randomly died because someone effed up while they were following
immoral and illegal orders. Many of those were accidentally killed by their own comrades and
subsequently lied about by the government and its media mouthpieces.
The only pity I feel for these hired killers is the way they were recruited: being plucked
by means of bribes and false promises from a disintegrating working class deliberately
sabotaged by the economic policies of its own government. For them the army takes the place
of a job and a living wage. For children of the disappearing middle class, enlisting is their
last hope to cover some college tuition, if they finish their hitch alive. I wouldn't say
either of these groups is eager to do the dirty work the chain of command has in store for
them. Even the kids from the hood can mostly see through the trickery and hypocrisy. They
know they won't be defending Compton, Overtown, the Lower Ninth Ward or West Garfield Park
from any Jihadis. Those fish aren't biting as frequently any more, so the feds have to
recruit numerous immigrants in return for promises of citizenship rather than deportation.
The other thing they now do is to hire mercenaries–"independent
contractors"–which used to be against American law not that long ago, but now makes up
nearly half the manpower in hotbeds like Iraq and Syria. The next logical step for our great
and powerful empire will be to establish an equivalent of the old French Foreign Legion, in
which dregs from all over the planet are employed in the armed service of American empire or
maybe ISIS and Daesh already qualify for that role? Do our hired terrorists get medical and
retirement benefits? Probably ahead of taxpayers once AmGov starts prioritizing to save money
under its new constitution.
Did that sound disrespectful? What is to be respected about a society that allows its
leadership to scoop up dispensable citizens to use as cannon fodder in the service of an
empire that kills and thieves wantonly to benefit only a tiny fraction of those at the very
tip of the pyramid?
LarcoMarco , May 28, 2018 at 4:08 am
"Not to sound callous, but without forced conscription, nobody joins the military against
their free will. Unless they spent their formative years under a rock, or possess an IQ in
the low double digits"
Most Americans of fighting age, I believe, consider military enlistment far beneath them.
So, I am totally mystified when I read about polls that reveal the military is the profession
Americans hold in the highest esteem.
Realist , May 28, 2018 at 8:14 am
I think that most also believe genocidal wars of aggression are not exactly moral or in
the interests of the country or themselves. They've got better things to do with their lives
than throw them away killing people who did nothing inimical to our country on the other side
of the world. They may spout patriotic platitudes about the military because they are
expected under serious social pressure and they don't want the hassle of a public
argument.
The second line of my text that you included within your quotes is not a dependent clause
to the first sentence. It is part of the next sentence: an adverbial clause modifying "they
ought to know that America is not under any real threat " which is the main declarative
statement. I'd rather not be misunderstood.
Skip Scott , May 28, 2018 at 11:16 am
I think the biggest problem is that neither our children, nor the vast majority of the
citizenry, are taught any critical thinking skills. It is all about image. Teenage boys fall
for anything that paints them as macho men. The 1986 movie Top Gun was all about recruiting
teenage boys who wanted to be macho men to be our new generation of cannon fodder in our "all
volunteer" armed forces and, as HW said, "to kick the Vietnam syndrome once and for all".
I really do pity these kids as victims as much as those they are sent to kill. I am
reminded of Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" when the Ghost of Christmas Present reveals the two
children beneath his robe, who are ignorance and want. "but mostly beware this boy, for on
his forehead I see that which is written "doom" "
Skip I'll go along with that considering to how many of my generation found themselves
standing in a rice paddy with bullets whistling by, until they finally realized that that
John Wayne image was just a movie. Joe
Sam F , May 28, 2018 at 10:32 am
I think that you both agree, and I agree with you both. The polls are deceptions of the
MIC.
Realist , May 28, 2018 at 4:36 pm
Yes, and I realise that most Americans, being herd animals who don't do nuance, would tell
most of us here to "go back to Russia" for the remarks we've posted, even though they really
don't want the lives of their friends and relatives wasted in wars of conquest.
Cindy Sheehan is right not to let that go.
I had at least six classmates killed in Nam. They've been dead much longer than they
lived, the first one buying the farm in January of 1966.
Lois Gagnon , May 28, 2018 at 9:22 pm
Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be soldiers. I raised my boys to be pro-peace. When
the recruiters started calling in their senior year of high school, they were prepared to
resist. It galled me that they had to register for the draft at all.
The National Security State is a protection racket for western oligarchy. All the
romanticism that surrounds Memorial Day is just to keep the sentimental mythology in tact. Of
course, 911 and the GWOT was used to reinforce the troops as national heroes mindset.
As you say, if you are even casually paying attention, you know what the real aim of US
militarism is. There's a lot of active denial going on. The truth is just so damn ugly, most
folks would rather avoid it even when their own kids get taken down by it. We are a sad
spectacle of a country right now.
John , May 28, 2018 at 10:23 pm
My dad was a vet who was scarred by 'Nam.
When the army recruiter called me, I told him "Your motto is, 'be all that you can be in the
army'. Well, if all you are capable of is is allowed by the army, then it would probably be
better for you to go get killed in war and weed out the gene pool."
I was 17 at the time, it was the best I could come up with off the time of my head.
Ray misses a point or two, especially important with the rise of alt-right types with
Trump in office. We as a nation must NEVER forget that Memorial Day was founded to remember Union dead from
the Civil War.
Consortiumnews.com , May 28, 2018 at 5:53 am
This is a reprint of a piece Ray wrote in May 2015. It focuses on the Bush and Obama
administrations.
Strngr - Tgthr , May 28, 2018 at 12:43 am
How to Honor Memorial Day? (hmmm omg) With who is in office what is there to be proud of?
(Stalingrad?) Articles like this go back and forth between Presidents like Bush (akk: Cheney)
& Obama, I suppose to be politically correct in the wrong way. But all one has to do is
look at HISTORY and just see what party is the party of war and PEACE. If anyone thinks Obama
would have invaded Iraq in the first place after 9-11 – it is not even an argument. He
would not even fire missles in to Syria. (Don't do stupid stuff was his way.) And so eight
years after don't do stupid stuff we have a guy who can't wait to drop a H-Bomb someplace to
make his mark on histiory. Great, lets be thankful. I guess he will drop it wherever Putin
and Juliana Assange want it.
LarcoMarco , May 28, 2018 at 4:16 am
Obama lost his balls when his version of John Bolton, Killary, sawed them off. Then she
cooked up false intelligence, a la Dumbya, which led to Libya's dismemberment under Obomber's
passive watch.
Lois Gagnon , May 28, 2018 at 9:27 pm
Funny how Dembots always attempt to brush the destruction of Libya under the rug as if the
people who perished there and continue to suffer and die as a result of Killary's
warmongering never existed.
John , May 28, 2018 at 10:40 pm
Democrats the party of peace?
You mean like in the former Yugoslavia?
Libya?
Vietnam?
Yemen?
Heck, your hero the Queen of Chaos is on video pimping the war in Iraq!
The Dims have forced almost all of the anti-war people out! (Cynthia McKinney, Dennis
Kucinich, etc)
The parties of peace are the Greens and Libertarians. If you vote for EITHER Dimocraps or
Repugnicans, you are actively supporting wars of aggression.
Even in your own delusional rhetoric, you engage in sabre-rattling against Russia (the ONE
good thing that Trump had going for him in his campaign was detente with Russia, but the
Dims, with their histrionic unhinged ranting about the thoroughly discredited "Russia Hacked
The Elections" nonsense – which Ray McGovern has written about rather extensively) and
you point at Assange, who is a hero who has NEVER been shown to print incorrect information,
unlike anyone in the Dim party, as if, by telling UNDENIABLE TRUTH, he is somehow a bad
guy.
As far as Obama's claim to "not do stupid stuff", it is well documented that, under his
administration, a Nazi-led coup in Ukraine was fomented, Al-Queida was armed and trained in
Syria, arms funding for Israel was INCREASED after they carried out grave war crimes (which
meet the Geneva Convention definition of Genocide), Libya was decimated (based on lies), etc
ad nauseum.
Is David Brock still sending out paychecks?
Joe Tedesky , May 27, 2018 at 11:33 pm
Ray thanks for this important article, as your struggling with it paid off.
Now I'm not one to rain on anybody's parade, but I have a hard time reconciling people's
true patriotism while we all stand for the National Anthem at sporting events, or other
events where our flag is honored. Not to judge anyone's admiration of our country, but with
all of the honoring of our military, and with jets flying over the ball yard, I find these
over produced displays of patriotism to be a bit over the top. Like, do these people not know
that our country is feared by the majority of the world's population, and that this fear is
based on a real life deadly everyday reality? Don't these taxpayers, who complain all the
time about paying high or any taxes at all realize that this military spending our country is
doing, is a debt trap just waiting to gobble up what's left of the American treasure if there
still is any treasure left? Or are the joyous fans just glad that they didn't, or don't have
to serve in our ever active military? Why can't these cheering patriots see through the many
lies about war, that this country's leaders have lead us to time and time again? Ask a red,
white, and blue, sports fan when was the last time America won a war . then listen to their
silence, and watch the contortions in their face muscles twitch. At this point you may wish
to leave these patriots alone, for the confusion over your questioning all of this military
madness may make them slash out at you.
Not only has America gone a step to far with its for profit war machine, but it's war
propaganda has been so packaged as to make it, one hellva commercial grade product. And in
America isn't that's what it's all about packaging a fantastically shinny beautifully made
profitable product.
RnM , May 28, 2018 at 5:37 am
Joe --
Your comment is a apt distillation of the fruits of the purposeful dumbing down of the US.
I'd put the latest push (by Dubya) squarely in the lap of the Bushes.
Joe Tedesky , May 28, 2018 at 9:21 am
Americans are that classic example of lab mice being used to form the predetermined
outcome of the experimentation. We Americans should just look up and wave and give our
controllers the finger, as we all smile and go in the other direction. Joe
Memorial Day should be a time of sober reflection on war's horrible costs, not a moment to
glorify war. But many politicians and pundits can't resist the opportunity...
Originally published on 5/24/2015
How best to show respect for the U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and for their
families on Memorial Day?
Simple: Avoid euphemisms like "the fallen" and expose the lies about what a great idea it
was to start those wars in the first place and then to "surge" tens of thousands of more troops
into those fools' errands.
First, let's be clear on at least this much: the 4,500 U.S. troops killed in Iraq so far and
the 2,350 killed in Afghanistan [by May 2015] did not "fall." They were wasted on no-win
battlefields by politicians and generals cheered on by neocon pundits and mainstream
"journalists" almost none of whom gave a rat's patootie about the real-life-and-death troops.
They were throwaway soldiers.
And, as for the "successful surges," they were just P.R. devices to buy some "decent
intervals" for the architects of these wars and their boosters to get space between themselves
and the disastrous endings while pretending that those defeats were really "victories
squandered" all at the "acceptable" price of about 1,000 dead U.S. soldiers each and many times
that in dead Iraqis and Afghans.
Memorial Day should be a time for honesty about what enabled the killing and maiming of so
many U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and the
senior military brass simply took full advantage of a poverty draft that gives upper-class sons
and daughters the equivalent of exemptions, vaccinating them against the disease of war.
What drives me up the wall is the oft-heard, dismissive comment about troop casualties from
well-heeled Americans: "Well, they volunteered, didn't they?" Under the universal draft in
effect during Vietnam, far fewer were immune from service, even though the well-connected could
still game the system to avoid serving. Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Joe Biden, for example,
each managed to pile up five exemptions. This means, of course, that they brought zero military
experience to the job; and this, in turn, may explain a whole lot -- particularly given their
bosses' own lack of military experience.
The grim truth is that many of the crëme de la crëme of today's Official
Washington don't know many military grunts, at least not intimately as close family or friends.
They may bump into some on the campaign trail or in an airport and mumble something like,
"thank you for your service." But these sons and daughters of working-class communities from
America's cities and heartland are mostly abstractions to the powerful, exclamation points at
the end of some ideological debate demonstrating which speaker is "tougher," who's more ready
to use military force, who will come out on top during a talk show appearance or at a
think-tank conference or on the floor of Congress.
Sharing the Burden?
We should be honest about this reality, especially on Memorial Day. Pretending that the
burden of war has been equitably shared, and worse still that those killed died for a "noble
cause," as President George W. Bush liked to claim, does no honor to the thousands of U.S.
troops killed and the tens of thousands maimed. It dishonors them. Worse, it all too often
succeeds in infantilizing bereaved family members who cannot bring themselves to believe their
government lied.
Who can blame parents for preferring to live the fiction that their sons and daughters were
heroes who wittingly and willingly made the "ultimate sacrifice," dying for a "noble cause,"
especially when this fiction is frequently foisted on them by well-meaning but naive clergy at
funerals. For many it is impossible to live with the reality that a son or daughter died in
vain. Far easier to buy into the official story and to leave clergy unchallenged as they gild
the lilies around coffins and gravesites.
Not so for some courageous parents. Cindy Sheehan, for example, whose son Casey Sheehan was
killed on April 4, 2004, in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, demonstrated uncommon grit when
she led hundreds of friends to Crawford to lay siege to the Texas White House during the summer
of 2005 trying to get Bush to explain what "noble cause" Casey died for. She never got an
answer. There is none.
But there are very few, like Cindy Sheehan, able to overcome a natural human resistance to
the thought that their sons and daughters died for a lie and then to challenge that lie. These
few stalwarts make themselves face this harsh reality, the knowledge that the children whom
they raised and sacrificed so much for were, in turn, sacrificed on the altar of political
expediency, that their precious children were bit players in some ideological fantasy or pawns
in a game of career maneuvering.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is said to have described the military
disdainfully as "just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." Whether or
not those were his exact words, his policies and behavior certainly betrayed that attitude. It
certainly seems to have prevailed among top American-flag-on-lapel-wearing officials of the
Bush and Obama administrations, including armchair and field-chair generals whose sense of
decency is blinded by the prospect of a shiny new star on their shoulders, if they just follow
orders and send young soldiers into battle.
This bitter truth should raise its ugly head on Memorial Day but rarely does. It can be
gleaned only with great difficulty from the mainstream media, since the media honchos continue
to play an indispensable role in the smoke-and-mirrors dishonesty that hides their own guilt in
helping Establishment Washington push "the fallen" from life to death.
We must judge the actions of our political and military leaders not by the pious words they
will utter Monday in mourning those who "fell" far from the generals' cushy safe seats in the
Pentagon or somewhat closer to the comfy beds in air-conditioned field headquarters where a
lucky general might be comforted in the arms of an admiring and enterprising biographer.
Many of the high-and-mighty delivering the approved speeches on Monday will glibly refer to
and mourn "the fallen." None are likely to mention the culpable policymakers and complicit
generals who added to the fresh graves at Arlington National Cemetery and around the
country.
Words, after all, are cheap; words about "the fallen" are dirt cheap especially from the
lips of politicians and pundits with no personal experience of war. The families of those
sacrificed in Iraq and Afghanistan should not have to bear that indignity.
'Successful
Surges'
The so-called "surges" of troops into Iraq and Afghanistan were particularly gross examples
of the way our soldiers have been played as pawns. Since the usual suspects are again coming
out the woodwork of neocon think tanks to press for yet another "surge" in Iraq, some
historical perspective should help.
Take, for example, the well-known and speciously glorified first "surge;" the one Bush
resorted to in sending over 30,000 additional troops into Iraq in early 2007; and the
not-to-be-outdone Obama "surge" of 30,000 into Afghanistan in early 2010. These marches of
folly were the direct result of decisions by George W. Bush and Barack Obama to prioritize
political expediency over the lives of U.S. troops.
Taking cynical advantage of the poverty draft, they let foot soldiers pay the "ultimate"
price. That price was 1,000 U.S. troops killed in each of the two "surges."
And the results? The returns are in. The bloody chaos these days in Iraq and the faltering
war in Afghanistan were entirely predictable. They were indeed predicted by those of us able to
spread some truth around via the Internet, while being mostly blacklisted by the fawning
corporate media.
Yet, because the "successful surge" myth was so beloved in Official Washington, saving some
face for the politicians and pundits who embraced and spread the lies that justified and
sustained especially the Iraq War, the myth has become something of a touchstone for everyone
aspiring to higher office or seeking a higher-paying gig in the mainstream media.
Campaigning in New Hampshire, [then] presidential aspirant Jeb Bush gave a short history
lesson about his big brother's attack on Iraq. Referring to the so-called Islamic State, Bush
said, "ISIS didn't exist when my brother was president. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out the
surge created a fragile but stable Iraq. "
But suffice it to say that Jeb Bush is distorting the history and should be ashamed. The
truth is that al-Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before his brother launched an unprovoked invasion
in 2003. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" arose as a direct result of Bush's war and occupation. Amid the
bloody chaos, AQI's leader, a Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, pioneered a particularly
brutal form of terrorism, relishing videotaped decapitation of prisoners.
Zarqawi was eventually hunted down and killed not during the celebrated "surge" but in June
2006, months before Bush's "surge" began. The so-called Sunni Awakening, essentially the buying
off of many Sunni tribal leaders, also predated the "surge." And the relative reduction in the
Iraq War's slaughter after the 2007 "surge" was mostly the result of the ethnic cleansing of
Baghdad from a predominantly Sunni to a Shia city, tearing the fabric of Baghdad in two, and
creating physical space that made it more difficult for the two bitter enemies to attack each
other. In addition, Iran used its influence with the Shia to rein in their extremely violent
militias.
Though weakened by Zarqawi's death and the Sunni Awakening, AQI did not disappear, as Jeb
Bush would like you to believe. It remained active and when Saudi Arabia and the Sunni gulf
states took aim at the secular regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria AQI joined with other
al-Qaeda affiliates, such as the Nusra Front, to spread their horrors across Syria. AQI
rebranded itself "the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" or simply "the Islamic State."
The Islamic State split off from al-Qaeda over strategy but the various jihadist armies,
including al-Qaeda's Nusra Front, [then] seized wide swaths of territory in Syria -- and the
Islamic State returned with a vengeance to Iraq, grabbing major cities such as Mosul and
Ramadi.
Jeb Bush doesn't like to unspool all this history. He and other Iraq War backers prefer to
pretend that the "surge" in Iraq had won the war and Obama threw the "victory" away by
following through on George W. Bush's withdrawal agreement with Maliki.
But the crisis in Syria and Iraq is among the fateful consequences of the U.S./UK attack 12
years ago and particularly of the "surge" of 2007, which contributed greatly to Sunni-Shia
violence, the opposite of what George W. Bush professed was the objective of the "surge," to
enable Iraq's religious sects to reconcile.
Reconciliation, however, always took a back seat to the real purpose of the "surge" buying
time so Bush and Cheney could slip out of Washington in 2009 without having an obvious military
defeat hanging around their necks and putting a huge stain on their legacies.
Cheney and Bush: Reframed the history. (White House photo)
The political manipulation of the Iraq "surge" allowed Bush, Cheney and their allies to
reframe the historical debate and shift the blame for the defeat onto Obama, recognizing that
1,000 more dead U.S. soldiers was a small price to pay for protecting the "Bush brand." Now,
Bush's younger brother can cheerily march off to the campaign trail for 2016 pointing to the
carcass of the Iraqi albatross hung around Obama's shoulders.
Rout at Ramadi
Less than a year after U.S.-trained and -equipped Iraqi forces ran away from the northern
Iraqi city of Mosul, leaving the area and lots of U.S. arms and equipment to ISIS, something
similar happened at Ramadi, the capital of the western province of Anbar. Despite heavy U.S.
air strikes on ISIS, American-backed Iraqi security forces fled Ramadi, which is only 70 miles
west of Baghdad, after a lightning assault by ISIS forces.
The ability of ISIS to strike just about everywhere in the area is reminiscent of the Tet
offensive of January-February 1968 in Vietnam, which persuaded President Lyndon Johnson that
that particular war was unwinnable. If there are materials left over in Saigon for reinforcing
helicopter landing pads on the tops of buildings, it is not too early to bring them to
Baghdad's Green Zone, on the chance that U.S. embassy buildings may have a call for such
materials in the not-too-distant future.
The headlong Iraqi government retreat from Ramadi had scarcely ended when Sen. John McCain,
(R-AZ), described the fall of the city as "terribly significant" which is correct adding that
more U.S. troops may be needed which is insane. His appeal for more troops neatly fit one
proverbial definition of insanity (attributed or misattributed to Albert Einstein): "doing the
same thing over and over again [like every eight years?] but expecting different results."
As Jeb Bush was singing the praises of his brother's "surge" in Iraq, McCain and his Senate
colleague Lindsey Graham were publicly calling for a new "surge" of U.S. troops into Iraq. The
senators urged President Obama to do what George W. Bush did in 2007 replace the U.S. military
leadership and dispatch additional troops to Iraq.
But Washington Post pundit David Ignatius, even though a fan of the earlier two surges, was
not yet on board for this one. Ignatius warned in a column that Washington should not abandon
its current strategy:
"This is still Iraq's war, not America's. But President Barack Obama must reassure Prime
Minister Haider al-Abadi that the U.S. has his back, and at the same time give him a reality
check: If al-Abadi and his Shiite allies don't do more to empower Sunnis, his country will
splinter. Ramadi is a precursor, of either a turnaround by al-Abadi's forces, or an Iraqi
defeat."
Ignatius's urgent tone was warranted. But what he suggests is precisely what the U.S. made a
lame attempt to do with then-Prime Minister Maliki in early 2007. Yet, Bush squandered U.S.
leverage by sending 30,000 troops to show he "had Maliki's back," freeing Maliki to accelerate
his attempts to marginalize, rather than accommodate, Sunni interests.
Perhaps Ignatius now remembers how the "surge" he championed in 2007 greatly exacerbated
tensions between Shia and Sunni contributing to the chaos now prevailing in Iraq and spreading
across Syria and elsewhere. But Ignatius is well connected and a bellwether; if he ends up
advocating another "surge," take shelter.
Keane and Kagan Ask For a Mulligan
Jeb Bush: Sung his brother's praises. (Sun City Center, Florida, on May 9, 2006. White House
photo by Eric Draper)
The architects of Bush's 2007 "surge" of 30,000 troops into Iraq, former Army General Jack
Keane and American Enterprise Institute neocon strategist Frederick Kagan, in testimony to the
Senate Armed Services Committee, warned strongly that, without a "surge" of some 15,000 to
20,000 U.S. troops, ISIS would win in Iraq.
"We are losing this war," warned Keane, who previously served as Vice Chief of Staff of the
Army. "ISIS is on the offense, with the ability to attack at will, anyplace, anytime. Air power
will not defeat ISIS." Keane stressed that the U.S. and its allies have "no ground force, which
is the defeat mechanism."
Not given to understatement, Kagan called ISIS "one of the most evil organizations that has
ever existed. This is not a group that maybe we can negotiate with down the road someday. This
is a group that is committed to the destruction of everything decent in the world." He called
for "15-20,000 U.S. troops on the ground to provide the necessary enablers, advisers and so
forth," and added: "Anything less than that is simply unserious."
(By the way, Frederick Kagan is the brother of neocon-star Robert Kagan, whose Project for
the New American Century began pushing for the invasion of Iraq in 1998 and finally got its way
in 2003. Robert Kagan is the husband of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs
Victoria Nuland, who oversaw the 2014 coup that brought "regime change" and bloody chaos to
Ukraine. The Ukraine crisis also prompted Robert Kagan to urge a major increase in U.S.
military spending. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's " A Family Business
of Perpetual War. "] )
What is perhaps most striking, however, is the casualness with which the likes of Frederick
Kagan , Jack Keane, and other Iraq War enthusiasts advocated dispatching tens of thousands of
U.S. soldiers to fight and die in what would almost certainly be another futile undertaking.
You might even wonder why people like Kagan are invited to testify before Congress given their
abysmal records.
But that would miss the true charm of the Iraq "surge" in 2007 and its significance in
salvaging the reputations of folks like Kagan, not to mention George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
From their perspective, the "surge" was a great success. Bush and Cheney could swagger from the
West Wing into the western sunset on Jan. 20, 2009.
As author Steve Coll has put it, "The decision [to surge] at a minimum guaranteed that his
[Bush's] presidency would not end with a defeat in history's eyes. By committing to the surge
[the President] was certain to at least achieve a stalemate."
According to Bob Woodward, Bush told key Republicans in late 2005 that he would not withdraw
from Iraq, "even if Laura and [first-dog] Barney are the only ones supporting me." Woodward
made it clear that Bush was well aware in fall 2006 that the U.S. was losing. Suddenly, with
some fancy footwork, it became Laura, Barney and new Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen.
David Petraeus along with 30,000 more U.S. soldiers making sure that the short-term fix was
in.
The fact that about 1,000 U.S. soldiers returned in caskets was the principal price paid for
that short-term "surge" fix. Their "ultimate sacrifice" will be mourned by their friends,
families and countrymen on Memorial Day even as many of the same politicians and pundits will
be casually pontificating about dispatching more young men and women as cannon fodder into the
same misguided war.
[President Donald Trump has continued the U.S.'s longest war (Afghanistan), sending
additional troops and dropping a massive bomb as well as missiles from drones. In Syria he has
ordered two missile strikes and condoned multiple air strikes from Israel. Here's hoping, on
this Memorial Day 2018, that he turns his back on his war-mongering national security adviser,
forges ahead
with a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jung-Un rather than toy with the lives of 30,000
U.S. soldiers in Korea, and halts the juggernaut rolling downhill toward war with Iran.]
It was difficult drafting this downer, this historical counter-narrative, on the eve of
Memorial Day. It seems to me necessary, though, to expose the dramatis personae who played such
key roles in getting more and more people killed. Sad to say, none of the high officials
mentioned here, as well as those on the relevant Congressional committees, were affected in any
immediate way by the carnage in Ramadi, Tikrit or outside the gate to the Green Zone in
Baghdad.
And perhaps that's one of the key points here. It is not most of us, but rather our soldiers
and the soldiers and civilians of Iraq, Afghanistan and God knows where else who are Lazarus at
the gate. And, as Benjamin Franklin once said, "Justice will not be served until those who are
unaffected are as outraged as those who are."
"... Shatter Syria and Iraq Into Many Small Pieces ..."
"... By WashingtonsBlog ..."
"... February 25, 2016 ..."
"... With several of the "Clean Break" paper's authors now holding key positions in Washington, the plan for Israel to "transcend" its foes by reshaping the Middle East looks a good deal more achievable today than it did in 1996. Americans may even be persuaded to give up their lives to achieve it. ..."
"... "[T]he actual purpose was to blow the country to smithereens: to atomize it, and crush it, so that it would never rise again. ..."
"... "When we invaded and occupied Iraq, we didn't just militarily defeat Iraq's armed forces – we ..."
"... dismantled their army ..."
"... , and their police force, along with all the other institutions that held the country together. The educational system was destroyed, and not reconstituted. The infrastructure was ..."
"... , and never restored. Even the physical hallmarks of a civilized society – ..."
"... electrical plants ..."
"... water facilities ..."
"... – were bombed out of existence or else left to fall into disrepair. Along with that, the spiritual and psychological infrastructure that enables a society to function – the bonds of trust, allegiance, and custom – was ..."
"... , leaving Iraqis to fend for themselves in a war of all against all. ..."
"... By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya , Global Research, November 2006) ..."
Its roots can be traced, at least in part, to a paper published in 1996 by an Israeli
thinktank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Entitled "A clean break:
a new strategy for securing the realm", it was intended as a political blueprint for the
incoming government of Binyamin Netanyahu . As the title indicates, it advised the right-wing
Mr Netanyahu to make a complete break with the past by adopting a strategy "based on an
entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the
nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism "
***
The paper set out a plan by which Israel would "shape its strategic environment", beginning
with the removal of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad.
With Saddam out of the way and Iraq thus brought under Jordanian Hashemite influence, Jordan
and Turkey would form an axis along with Israel to weaken and "roll back" Syria. Jordan, it
suggested, could also sort out Lebanon by "weaning" the Shia Muslim population away from Syria
and Iran, and re-establishing their former ties with the Shia in the new Hashemite kingdom of
Iraq. "Israel will not only contain its foes; it will transcend them", the paper concluded.
***
The leader of the "prominent opinion makers" who wrote it was Richard Perle – now
chairman of the Defence Policy Board at the Pentagon . Also among the eight-person team was Douglas Feith, a neo-conservative lawyer, who now holds
one of the top four posts at the Pentagon as under-secretary of policy .
***
Two other opinion-makers in the team were David Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav (see US
thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy , August 19). Mrs Wurmser was co-founder of
Memri, a Washington-based charity that distributes articles translated from Arabic newspapers
portraying Arabs in a bad light. After working with Mr Perle at the American Enterprise
Institute, David Wurmser is now at the State Department, as a special assistant to John Bolton,
the under-secretary for arms control and international security.
A fifth member of the team was James Colbert, of the Washington-based Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs (Jinsa) – a bastion of neo-conservative hawkery whose advisory
board was previously graced by Dick Cheney (now US vice-president), John Bolton and Douglas
Feith.
***
With several of the "Clean Break" paper's authors now holding key positions in Washington,
the plan for Israel to "transcend" its foes by reshaping the Middle East looks a good deal more
achievable today than it did in 1996. Americans may even be persuaded to give up their lives to
achieve it.
(Before assuming prominent roles in the Bush administration, many of the same people –
including Richard Perle, Paul
Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, John Bolton and others – advocated their imperial views
during the Clinton administration via their American think tank, the "Project for a New
American Century".)
Thomas Harrington – professor of Iberian Studies at Trinity College in Hartford,
Connecticut –
writes :
[While there are some good articles on the chaos in Iraq, none of them] consider whether the
chaos now enveloping the region might, in fact, be the desired aim of policy planners in
Washington and Tel Aviv .
***
One of the prime goals of every empire is to foment ongoing internecine conflict in the
territories whose resources and/or strategic outposts they covet .
***
The most efficient way of sparking such open-ended internecine conflict is to brutally smash
the target country's social matrix and physical infrastructure.
***
Ongoing unrest has the additional perk of justifying the maintenance and expansion of the
military machine that feeds the financial and political fortunes of the metropolitan elite.
In short divide and rule is about as close as it gets to a universal recourse the imperial
game and that it is, therefore, as important to bear it in mind today as it was in the times of
Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Spanish Conquistadors and the British Raj.
To those -- and I suspect there are still many out there -- for whom all this seems too neat
or too conspiratorial , I would suggest a careful side-by side reading of:
a) the "Clean Break" manifesto generated by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced
Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) in 1996
and
b) the "Rebuilding America's Defenses" paper generated by The Project for a New American
Century (PNAC) in 2000, a US group with deep personal and institutional links to the
aforementioned Israeli think tank, and with the ascension of George Bush Junior to the White
House, to the most exclusive sanctums of the US foreign policy apparatus.
To read the cold-blooded imperial reasoning in both of these documents -- which speak, in
the first case, quite openly of the need to destabilize the region so as to reshape Israel's
"strategic environment" and, in the second of the need to dramatically increase the number of
US "forward bases" in the region .
To do so now, after the US's systematic destruction of Iraq and Libya -- two notably
oil-rich countries whose delicate ethnic and religious balances were well known to anyone in or
out of government with more than passing interest in history -- , and after the its carefully
calibrated efforts to generate and maintain murderous and civilization-destroying stalemates in
Syria and Egypt (something that is easily substantiated despite our media's deafening silence
on the subject), is downright blood-curdling.
And yet, it seems that for even very well-informed analysts, it is beyond the pale to raise
the possibility that foreign policy elites in the US and Israel, like all virtually all the
ambitious hegemons before them on the world stage, might have quite coldly and consciously
fomented open-ended chaos in order to achieve their overlapping strategic objectives in this
part of the world.
Iraq's fate was sealed from the moment we invaded: it has no future as a unitary state. As I
pointed out again and again
in the early days of the conflict, Iraq is fated to split apart into at least three separate
states: the Shi'ite areas around Baghdad and to the south, the Sunni regions to the northwest,
and the Kurdish enclave which was itching for independence since well before the US invasion.
This was the War Party's
real if unexpressed goal from the very beginning: the atomization of Iraq, and indeed the
entire Middle East. Their goal, in short, was chaos – and that is precisely what we are
seeing today.
"[T]he actual purpose was to blow the country to smithereens: to atomize it, and crush
it, so that it would never rise again.
"When we invaded and occupied Iraq, we didn't just militarily defeat Iraq's armed forces
– wedismantled their army, and their police force, along with all the other
institutions that held the country together. The educational system was destroyed, and not
reconstituted. The infrastructure waspulverized, and never restored. Even the physical hallmarks of a civilized
society –roads,bridges,electrical plants,water
facilities,museums,schools– were bombed out of existence or else left to fall into disrepair.
Along with that, the spiritual and psychological infrastructure that enables a society to
function – the bonds of trust, allegiance, and custom – wasdissolved, leaving Iraqis to fend for themselves in a war of all against all.
" What we are witnessing in post-Saddam Iraq is the erasure of an entire country. We can
say, with confidence: We came, we saw, we atomized."
Why? This is the question that inevitably arises in the wake of such an analysis: why
deliberately destroy an entire country whose people were civilized while our European ancestors
were living in trees?
The people who planned, agitated for, and executed this war are the very same people who
have advanced Israeli interests – at America's expense – at every opportunity. In "
A Clean
Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm ," a 1996 document prepared by a gaggle of
neocons – Perle, Douglas Feith, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Robert Loewenberg,
David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was urged
to "break out" of Israel's alleged stagnation and undertake a campaign of "regime change"
across the Middle East, targeting Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and eventually Iran. With the
exception of Iran – and that one's still cooking on the back burner – this is
precisely what has occurred. In 2003, in the immediate wake of our Pyrrhic "victory" in Iraq,
then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
declared to a visiting delegation of American members of Congress that these "rogue states"
– Iran, Libya, and Syria – would have to be next on the War Party's target
list.
The division of Iraq along sectarian-ethnic lines has been on the drawing board of the
Pentagon for more than 10 years .
What is envisaged by Washington is the outright suppression of the Baghdad regime and the
institutions of the central government, leading to a process of political fracturing and the
elimination of Iraq as a country .
This process of political fracturing in Iraq along sectarian lines will inevitably have an
impact on Syria, where the US-NATO sponsored terrorists have in large part been defeated.
Destabilization and political fragmentation in Syria is also contemplated: Washington's
intent is no longer to pursue the narrow objective of "regime change" in Damascus. What is
contemplated is the break up of both Iraq and Syria along sectarian-ethnic lines .
The formation of the caliphate may be the first step towards a broader conflict in the
Middle East, bearing in mind that Iran is supportive of the al-Maliki government and the US
ploy may indeed be to encourage the intervention of Iran.
The proposed re-division of both Iraq and Syria is broadly modeled on that of the Federation
of Yugoslavia which was split up into seven "independent states" (Serbia, Croatia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia (FYRM), Slovenia, Montenegro, Kosovo). According to Mahdi Darius
Nazemroaya, the re division of Iraq into three separate states is part of a broader process of
redrawing the Map of the Middle East.
The above map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed
Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map
Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006).
Similarly, Neooconservatives in the U.S. and Israel have long advocated for the
balkanization of Syria into smaller regions based on ethnicity and religion. The goal was to
break up the country, and to do away with the sovereignty of Syria as a separate
nation.
In 1982, a prominent Israeli journalist formerly attached to the Israeli Foreign Ministry
allegedlywrote a book
expressly calling for the break up of Syria:
All the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units . Dissolution of
Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is
Israel's primary target on the Eastern front in the long run.
It is well-documented that – in 1996 – U.S. and Israeli Neocons advocated : Weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.As Michel Chossudovsky
points out :
Destabilization and political fragmentation in Syria is also contemplated: Washington's
intent is no longer to pursue the narrow objective of "regime change" in Damascus. What is
contemplated is the break up of both Iraq and Syria along sectarian-ethnic lines.
In 2013, former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas
said :
Let them both [sides] bleed, haemorrhage to death: that's the strategic thinking here. As
long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria.
Indeed, in May 2015, one of the key architects of
the Iraq war – John Bolton –
said:
The Arabs divided between Sunnis and Shias – I think the Sunni Arabs are never going
to agree to be in a state where the Shia outnumber them 3-1. That's what ISIS has been able to
take advantage of.
I think our objective should be a new Sunni state out of the western part of Iraq, the
eastern part of Syria run by moderates or at least authoritarians who are not radical
Islamists. What's left of the state of Iraq, as of right now, is simply a satellite of the
ayatollahs in Tehran. It's not anything we should try to aid.
In September 2015, Pentagon intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart said
that he has "a tough time" seeing either Iraq or Syria really coming back together as sovereign
nations.
In general, Israel ideally prefers regime changes that result in the installation of stable
puppets. That is Plan A. But Plan B is to balkanize . Better to divide and conquer than to
countenance a "rogue" (independent) neighbor.
So it is noteworthy that Israel is endorsing its Plan B for Syria just when its enemies are
making it plain that Plan A (" Assad Must Go ") is not
happening any time soon.
And SecState John Kerry confirmed
just yesterday that "Plan B" is to break Syria up into different states.
Memoria day is an anti-war holiday designed to remeber horrible number of Civil war dead. But now it is converted into
something like glorification of militarism day.
Neocons are renegade Trotskyites 'aligned' with US imperialism and how fighting for "world neoliberal revolution".
Pay for their revolutionary fervor is much better though.
Notable quotes:
"... Trotsky helped create the Red Army as well as the intellectual underpinnings of the (worldwide) communist revolution. This movement destroyed/ended/ruined the lives of many millions of innocent people. Shouldn't a movement that caused this much damage ruin the reputation of its architects? ..."
"... Frunze was the real architect of the Red Army, while Trotsky's main contribution to the Red Army was getting Czarist commanders to join. Trotsky likely had Frunze assassinated, rather than Stalin. ..."
"... Considering America (and Japan's) Siberian adventure, and the mass killings involved, e.g. by Japanese and Americans, well, pots and kettles and all that. ..."
"... that today's Trotskyites come down on the side of Isramerican-backed Sunni terrorists in Syria should surprise no one. Because yesterday's Trotskyites are now called (((neo-cons))) originally via the "anti-Stalinist" Partisan Review, then Commentary, then Nat Review. ..."
"... It was quite striking how, when Gaddafi was brutally murdered, you got similar reactions from Hillary Clinton and British Socialist Workers Party honcho Alex Callinicos – malicious gloating. ..."
"... It was a bit like a flash of lightning on a dark night – a brief illumination of surroundings and what these people really stand for, as opposed to the ideological posturing. ..."
"... Whenever I read anything purporting to identify international bad guys and good guys, I always like to ask: "Who has this purported bad guy invaded recently? How many bombs has this bad guy dropped on other people's countries?" I feel it clarifies matters. ..."
"... Maybe Bronstein himself was a delusional revolutionary true believer, we'll probably never know for sure, but I doubt very much his neocon disciples are motivated by some internationalist idealism. ..."
"... A well known saying in left wing activist circles in the UK was "Never trust a Trot." ..."
"... Trotskyites, much more than Stalinists, love war, worship war, live to make war for everybody and everything they see as not theirs. Trotskyites have as large an appetite for carnage leading to their greater empire than any people that ever lived with the exception of Mongols. ..."
Trotsky helped create the Red Army as well as the intellectual underpinnings of the (worldwide) communist revolution. This
movement destroyed/ended/ruined the lives of many millions of innocent people. Shouldn't a movement that caused this much damage
ruin the reputation of its architects?
Not in the case of Trotsky. He was such a brilliant Jew!
Trotsky was not that competent militarily, and even tried to arrange a transfer of e.g. Czech troops to Vladivostok to allow
them to fight on the western front, and allowed American inspections of German prisoners of war in a hope of forestalling the
coming Allied invasion (through Siberia and the North). Frunze was the real architect of the Red Army, while Trotsky's main
contribution to the Red Army was getting Czarist commanders to join. Trotsky likely had Frunze assassinated, rather than Stalin.
Considering America (and Japan's) Siberian adventure, and the mass killings involved, e.g. by Japanese and Americans, well,
pots and kettles and all that.
If we are to compare death tolls, we could look at the US and UK armies' intervention (and Canada's!), directly (1994, from
Burundi, mainly to prevent Hutu civilians from fleeing), and, more importantly, via proxy (1990 to the present, using the Ugandan
army, armed by the former armies, with constant supply flights until at least 1994) in Rwanda and later Congo-Kinshasa. Two million
Hutu (Rwanda, 1994, from former Kagame Henchman, Eric Hakizimana) and five to ten million eastern Congolese (mainly in the Kivus),
from that intervention alone. The intervention also included the assassination of Rwandan president Habyarimana, and of former
Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira (Burundi's first democratically elected president, deposed in a baTutsi (feudal aristocrat)
coup likely sponsored by same western armies), mere days after the
death threat by former US secretary of state for
African affairs, Herman Cohen.
that today's Trotskyites come down on the side of Isramerican-backed Sunni terrorists in Syria should surprise no one. Because
yesterday's Trotskyites are now called (((neo-cons))) originally via the "anti-Stalinist" Partisan Review, then Commentary,
then Nat Review.
It was quite striking how, when Gaddafi was brutally murdered, you got similar reactions from Hillary Clinton and British
Socialist Workers Party honcho Alex Callinicos – malicious gloating.
It was a bit like a flash of lightning on a dark
night – a brief illumination of surroundings and what these people really stand for, as opposed to the ideological posturing.
Whenever I read anything purporting to identify international bad guys and good guys, I always like to ask: "Who has this
purported bad guy invaded recently? How many bombs has this bad guy dropped on other people's countries?" I feel it clarifies
matters.
@The practical result of this verbal agitation is simply to align this brand of Trotskyism with U.S imperialism.
Wasn't 'Trotskyism' 'aligned' with US imperialism from the very moment when he transported the Warburg-Schiff money to Russia
to carry on the 'permanent revolution'?
And when Stalin cut Trotsky's crap who jumped to his defense? The Dewey "Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon
Trotsky in the Moscow Trials". And who are the imperialist 'neo-cons' other than 'old Trotskyists'?
I did not read about the suspicion that Bron(f)stein in reality was a German agent. What one reads in these two books does not
make the suspicion go away
John W Wheeler-Bennett, 'Brest-Litovsk, The forgotten peace, March 1918', 1938, 1963, London
Erich Ludendorff, 'Meine Kriegserinnerungen 1914 = 1918′, Berlin, 1918
If they weren't so nefarious, the trotsies wouldn't be worth reading, let alone mentioning. Maybe Bronstein himself was a
delusional revolutionary true believer, we'll probably never know for sure, but I doubt very much his neocon disciples are motivated
by some internationalist idealism.
Neocons are jewish supremacists aided by corrupt to the core goyim, plain and simple. They do have in common with their guru
one conviction, that the end justifies the means. That is the recipe of evil.
It's a pity that so many youth are misled still today in believing in the hoax that Trotskyism is somehow something moral.
Trotsky was himself a murderer. Killing is immoral. It sometimes is necessary and cannot be avoided as with regards to the psychotic
butchers who came from abroad to Syria and are known as ISIS but it is still immoral.
Normal people sense killing as immoral therefore psychopaths have to come up with stories such as Germans slaughtering Belgian
babies with bayonets, Iraqis throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators, Serbs genociding Bosniaks or Albanians, Qadhafi readying
for genocide in Benghazi, Assad pulling children's fingernails or gassing them, Iran being responsible for 9/11 etc, all in order
to dehumanise the enemy of the moment and compel people to accept that killing "sub-humans" half way around the world is a moral
act. It isn't. Period.
Unlike all those fake atrocities, Western and Saudi trained, armed and financed foreign terrorists in Syria did film themselves
doing horrors. They videotaped themselves burning people alive, throwing people off building tops. They videotaped themselves
beheading children. Assad didn't make those videos, ISIS did, to brag. Only mentally ill people can support those "rebels" against
Assad. Yet, as a Christian, I don't consider killing them as moral, I consider it as necessary and unavoidable, but it is an act
that mandates penitence.
Trotsies ignore those qualms and, whether real or alleged followers, are sick people. End of story.
From Trotsky's doctrine of Permanent Revolution onward, the hallmark of Trotskyism has been a quest for intellectual purity in
revolution – no contradictions allowed. No mixed economies under socialism. No pragmatic alliances. No consideration of national
security. Stake everything on a worldwide wave of revolution. Every real-world tactical issue since 1939 has led to fracturing
of the Trotskyist movement, generally into a "pure" faction and a "get something done" faction. International Socialists represented
the "pure" faction after the 1939 split (after it spun off the forebears of the neoconservative movement). Its sole contribution
of significance was as an intellectual incubator for Christopher Hitchens. More "pure" factions spun off in the early 1960s, which
sooner or later degenerated into cults. Lyndon LaRouche made his mark leading one of the "pure" factions. The "get something done"
faction made its mark as highly effective organizers of protests against the war in Vietnam but started chasing silly fads of
the student New Left, trying unsuccessfully to connect them to a revolutionary strategy. Their "revolutionary" rationale for those
movements blew up when they went in a decidedly bourgeois-aligned bureaucratic direction and became adjuncts to the Democratic
Party. WSWS represents the revival of purist Trotskyism, which offers cogent critiques of the glorified left-liberal postmodernist
"Trotskyism" of Louis Proyect and Socialist Alternative, but seems to choke on the question of what they themselves actually intend
to accomplish.
The Russian revolution served German interests more than it did American ones. Germany sponsored Lenin's return from Zurich
to lead the revolution that would get Russia out of the war. It makes no sense to contend that the Russian revolution served American
interests or that Warburg-Schiff were acting on their behalf. They were acting against the US interest in keeping Russia in the
war against Germany. They had been financing anti-Tsarist activity in Russia for years.
If one wants to make the case that Trotsky was a German agent, they would have to explain his agitation for spreading the revolution
into Germany. You could make a stronger case that George Washington was a French agent against Britain. Revolutions have tended
to occur in the cracks and contradictions opened in the struggles between the great powers, including the revolutions in China
and Vietnam.
The problem is not that an ignorant, Tony McKenna, will still in 2018 be a Trotskyst , that is a defender of a mass murderer.
The problem is that the writer of this piece seems to believe that it is worth spending time writing an article about such
an ignorant and irrelevant man. Maybe because he "writes well", which, she admires.
That one can "write well" and "speak well, as intellectuals do, but be a jerk, doesn't occur to Ms Johnson.
The problem is also because the writer herself, ignores how profoundly ignorant is Tony McKenna.
"Revolution is very rare. It is more a myth than a reality "
No, Revolutions are criminal enterprises. They always were and they always will be.
Robespierre, Lenine, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Mao were criminals.
The first European revolution – The French Revolution – was the first big lie and the first to put into practice the industrial
killing of a people – People of Vendée – . The first EUropean Genocide was committed by the French revolutionaries.
It is not by chance that all major criminals (Lenine etc ) studied the French Revolution and would apply later in their countries
the model that the French terrorists (Revolutionaries) applied to France.
Those who are interested in knowing the truth about the Franch Revolution (and all revolutions and why so called Trotskysts
are a bunch of fools) should read Reynald Secher – A French Genocide: The Vendee.
"In our era, the most successful revolutions have been in Third World countries"
Well, if one can write such nonsense, then when can admire Tony McKenna and waste time writing a silly article.
Great article! Thanks to Diana Johnstone for writing such a fine article which blows right out of the water so much of the BS
being bandied about in relation to the Syrian War, Stalin, etc. Ms. Johnstone is a REAL intellectual. Wish there were more like
her in the Anglosphere nowadays.
President Asad is a doctor by profession. He is a family man and has raised a beautiful family. Prior to this Saudi Terrorist
Revolution he rode his own car, at times taking his family shopping .hardly signs of a baby killer or a 'chemical animal'.
Trotskyites, much more than Stalinists, love war, worship war, live to make war for everybody and everything they see as not
theirs. Trotskyites have as large an appetite for carnage leading to their greater empire than any people that ever lived with
the exception of Mongols.
Trotskyites and WASPs – who created the largest empire in world history – in bed together, with the evil House of Saud, could
destroy civilization.
I just finished Kotkin's Stalin book chapter on the purges, which made no sense (the book is good but has no narrative). The
purges would have made more sense as a full on battle with the Trotskyite elements. My other theory is that they were a paychological
projection of guilt from the collectivization murders, realized as more murders.
Fools and idiots come in various shapes and sizes, as do socialists and wildlife. The zebra stands out from afar, its stripes
give it away. Likewise, the Trotskyites stand out markedly in the fairly jumbled-up socialist landscape, given away by their towering
stupidity and luminous obstinacy. Whenever some wretched poor, weak country is being bombed by the West, these useful idiots of
empire jump up and down in merriment. Whenever a union anywhere is trying to extort more money for less work, these fools give
their support. The burning down of churches and the spreading of atheism at gunpoint is another trait of theirs. Christian Socialists
they hate with a special vengeance, taking their cue from Marx the great "visionary", whose vision was fairly deficient in many
ways.
Stalin had Trot's head badgered-in, if I recall. Well, with a head as stupid as Trotsky's, half the world would be itching
to bash it in. One of those good things that Stalin did, IMHO.
The purges would have made more sense as a full on battle with the Trotskyite elements.
That's exactly how I interpret Stalin's purges, too. I think he was trying to wrest control of the Communist Party generally–and
the NKVD specifically–from the (((Trotskyite))) mafia which then dominated them.
I just finished Kotkin's Stalin book chapter on the purges, which made no sense (the book is good but has no narrative).
Is Kotkin Jewish? Maybe the reason his recounting of the purges doesn't make sense is because he doesn't really want to talk
about what prompted them. Like anything else in life, if you want to understand Stalin's purges, you first have to understand
the context in which they took place.
Syrians have told me that Bashar al-Assad was a decent chap. But taking his family shopping could not be different from John McCain
walking through Baghdad with one hundred soldiers around him and helicopters overhead to show how safe it was. If Bashar al-Assad
"went shopping" in Damascus (instead of London or Paris) then two thousand plain clothes were also shopping with him. And for
what would he "go shopping" in Damascus? Shopping for an illusion, that's what.
"In the context of a global neoliberalism, where governments across the board were enacting the most pronounced forms of
deregulation and overseeing the carving up of state industries by private capital, the Assad government responded to the heightening
contradictions in the Syrian economy by following suit -- by showing the ability to march to the tempo of foreign investment
while evincing a willingness to cut subsidies for workers and farmers." [ -Tony McKenna ]
This is like cursing the pizza store owner who gives 'protection' money to the mafia, without cursing the mafia which extorts
him! As Johnstone later points out, back then Assad had little choice but to try and make his peace with Uncle Scam as best he
could, since the USSR was no longer around to protect Syria.
McKenna concludes by quoting Louis Proyect: "If we line up on the wrong side of the barricades in a struggle between the
rural poor and oligarchs in Syria, how can we possibly begin to provide a class-struggle leadership in the USA, Britain, or
any other advanced capitalist country?"
Ah yes: Louis Proyect. The one and only! It was he who recently defended the 'rebels' as proletarian Bolsheviks struggling
for a new, socialist Syria:
"The Syrian rebels are generally drawn from the poor, rural and unrepresented majority of the population, the Arab version
of John Steinbeck's Joad family. Despite the tendency of some on the left to see them as sectarians who rose up against a generous
Baathist welfare state because it supported a different interpretation of who was the true successor to Muhammad, the revolutionary
struggle in Syria was fueled by class hatred."
The trouble with Trotskyists is that they are always "supporting" other people's more or less imaginary revolutions. They
are always telling others what to do. They know it all. The practical result of this verbal agitation is simply to align this
brand of Trotskyism with U.S imperialism.
Which is why, once they reach a certain age and a certain level of burn-out, rather than simply give up on politics entirely,
they usually tend to become neoconservatives , as did Chris Hitchens. For them, the Rockefeller/Rothschild 'new world order'
is the next best thing to Trotsky's 'world revolution'.
The thing that escaped the author is that Trotskyism is a dead horse. The number of Trotskyists in any country is as close to
zero as makes no difference. These deluded weirdos are outnumbered even by flat-Earthers.
I don't know if Kotkin is a member of the tribe, but he definitely is on the Putin/Russia bashing wagon and is deeply steeped
in all the classic WASP institutions.
Most of the Hoover people seem to have the anti-Russian disease.
The give away in his chapter on the purges was that he blamed it on the defective personality of Stalin, i.e. Stalin was just
crazy.
Certainly Stalin was a brutal murderer, but any time the sole reason for a historical event is someone's personality you can bet
you're reading propaganda.
If you have an sources that make for a better reading on the purges, please do post.
Absolutely. Ghadafi was sodomized by bayonet and Clinton cackled over it with malicious glee.
The posing of Assad as some kind of monster is just lynch-mob rationalization. McKenna doesn't believe what he is saying any
more than Stalin believed show trial confessions obtained under torture.
It's all the more pleasurable to these psychopaths that they cloak their crimes with phony virtue. Hence, putting Assad out
there as this cartoon villian.
As if ISIS, who we fostered and nurtured, was any better? Or communist Kurds? My God how we forget each disaster from Afghanistan
to Iraq, to Libya, to Syria now the scorched-earth war and subsequent disease, etc.? These people thrive on death and mayhem.
Excellent point. The global revolution socialists are hard core ideologies who put ideological purity over practical considerations.
Hence their failure to achieve any kind of real world success. Wherever socialists have had some sustainable success it has been
achieved by combining socialism with elements of nationalism and capitalism. The communist military successes in Russia, China
and Vietnam were achieved by appealing to nationalism. The Chinese economic miracle has been achieved through state capitalism.
The Scandinavian welfare state has depended on government support for big companies like Volvo and Nokia.
There are lessons here for English-speaking countries with their dogmatic attachment to liberal values like free trade, open
borders and anti-nationalism.
Eh No. The first *modern* European revolution was the American revolution, and it's not a joke. Fully European, of European
people and European powers. All European powers indeed, UK, France, Spain, many German states, and so on. And French revolution
was broadly more than Robespierre, it was UK, Spain, the German states, the Pope, the Austrian Empire, the many factions of the
French people (if such concept had any sense then, in a territory only less than 25% spoke French), all of them were criminals,
or only was Robespierre? Was criminal the previous kingdom, in a permanent basis of bloody wars and social injustice?
Maybe revolutions are simply a security valve, steaming a bit and that's all. By the way, the word itself goes back to Coppernicus,
a revolution is a full orbit of a planet around the Sun. It ends where started.
The entire Human History is criminal, against Humankind itself and our own planet. We must understand, not look for criminals.
You are right. I was surprised to see the article as I thought they were all in old age homes.
They really really are gone in America, even in the universities. May be because in America because our "struggle" is multi
millionaire Jews and upper middle class blacks Asians Hispanics and Indians against poor Whites.
In America a $200,000 a year black women school administrator is an opressed victim. The poorest disabled White man is a privileged
aristocrat who must be sent to the guillotine.
I'm very interested in the Vendeens. I have the memoirs of Renee Bourderau.
It's not a book. I got it from the library of Congress copying service and put the pages in a binder.
Loyola uni Los Angeles has a copy in their rare books section. UCLA and USC libraries have lots of books about it, many in
English. The Lucius Green library at Stanford has many Vendean resistance books too
Quite a different story from the conventional Masonic enlightenment narrative. Our American Whiskey rebels were lucky they
surrendered so quickly or they might have met the fate of the Vendeans. There used to be a website devoted to Renee Bourdereau
maintained by some college history department.
The trouble with Trotskyists is that they are always "supporting" other people's more or less imaginary revolutions. They
are always telling others what to do. They know it all. The practical result of this verbal agitation is simply to align this
brand of Trotskyism with U.S imperialism. The obsession with permanent revolution ends up providing an ideological alibi for
permanent war.
For the sake of world peace and progress, both the United States and its inadvertent Trotskyist apologists should go home
and mind their own business.
Trotsky was a danger to the survival USSR, because he was an internationalist as is the Israeli-allied globalist cabal that
runs the USA. His differences with Stalin and the nationalists inside the Kremlin was not a small disagreement, as you assert.
You must not have ever even picked up a book on the subject.
Would you be surprised to learn that Lenin too was conspiring with the Japanese in 1904-5?
'Revolutionary defeatism' was a central tenet of his worldview and of Trotsky's too.
As brutal as Stalin was, his rule was providential, in the sense that he saved Russian nationalism, culture, and spirituality
from absolute destruction at the hands of the usual suspects' willing instrument, Lev Davidovich Bronstein.
Bronstein was an agent of the Jewish banking cabal headquartered in New York. He was financed primarily by Jacob Schiff of
Kuehn and Loeb.
Trotsky and his acolytes desired the total destruction of Russian culture and Russian Orthodoxy in particular.
Stalin was sagacious enough to realize that the Russians would never fight against the Germans and their allies for the cause
of world revolution, but knew they would fight for their Russian motherland and its spiritual traditions and folkways. Stalin
restored the patriarchate, opened up many churches, and commissioned the composition of the "Hymn of the Soviet Union" (now the
Russian National Anthem with different lyrics) in the Orthodox chorale tradition; it would ultimately replace "The Internationale."
In the meantime, the almost entirely kosher Trotskyites became viciously anti-Soviet (actually anti-Russian) and pledged their
temporary allegiance to their great American golem.
The origins of the Cold War (and today's Russia xenophobia) was- in my humble opinion- the great schism and struggle between
the international rootless tool of Wall St. and his acolytes and the ruthless- but providential -Georgian autocrat.
This Permanent revolutions is very good. But what you going to do with the Old revolutioners..
It does not bode well. If they are in the way of more and other revolutions
This Permanent revolutions is very good. But what you going to do with the Old revolutioners..
It does not bode well. If they are in the way of more and other revolutions
Louis Proyect – this is a vile scribe, who blackens the pages of the Counterpunch. A part of the Trotskyite gang that took over
this once venerable magazine!
I remember with emotion the old days, where in Minnesota, the Communist Party with me among others, and the Trotskyist of the
WS with you, among others, if my memories are good, we were fighting inside the movement against the war from VietNam.
The Trotskyists said then that once peace is won, it would be necessary to work for the overthrow of the regime of "pro-Soviet
revisionist HoChiMinh".
Even today, most of the troskysts (and CPF Eurocommunists for that matter) still deny the socialist character of China, Viet
Nam, Cuba, North Korea, and so on.
And this is even more true since these countries are inscribing their economy in the continuity of Lenin's NEP!
We come to this fable of the end of History with "globalized capitalism", as we enter a multipolar world where the socialist
countries (China, VietNam, North Korea, Cuba, Kerala ) in alliance with the BRICS non-imperialist, take over.
Have you evolved from Minnesota, or are you still a fellow traveler on the WS Trotskyite?
Maybe you're right. The first European Revolution was the American Revolution Except that it wasn't really a Revolution. If
we want to be precise, we should call it war for "Independence"/For Power.
What is sure is that future criminals (Europeans/Asians/Africans) will have the French revolution has their model and not the
American Revolution.
Revolution or not, the fact of matter is that Americans have nothing to learn from Europeans in terms of barbarism. Indian Genocide
is an example how "revolutionary" (criminal), the American Elite were/are.
"The entire Human History is criminal" – It's false.
"We must understand, not look for criminals." Obvious. But if you understand the nature of revolution you know that revolutions
are made by criminals Not just Robespierre, of course.
Renée Bourdereau is what Howard Zinn calls "Unsung Heroine".
In France, today they prefer to celebrate criminals like Robespierre, Turreau, Westermann etc..(executioners of Vendéen Genocide)
Normal, Revolution won and French politicians and Elites are very proud of their "République".
If you're interested in Vendée, you have to read Reynald Secher. He's one of the greatest French Historian. Of course he's
almost unknown because he doesn't write the official history, which is most about propaganda and not trying to find the truth.
Yes, it was. All Revolutions are about power. Obviously the Americans could not overthrown the British Crown, an Ocean in the
Middle. But they would have do if they could. Dettaching part of the Empire was (is) a way to make easier the way for others.
And, actually, American Revolution was and is a model. It was a successful model for most of Latin American independences, many
bloodbaths and not at all exempts of tyrants and psycopaths. Nor the American Revolution was an angelical promenade.
Of course, choose a model depends on the user. In fact the point here is your meeting point, actual or pretended. The ayatollahs
cannot choose the French Revolution at all as a model, not to say the Soviet one (the American neither, obviously).
What I am trying to say it's maybe Revolutions are more an accident than a deliberate political move. Maybe if the French Revolution
had not existed, France neither nowadays. And without her, the French bourgeoise. A forgotten Revolution is the Polish one, earlier
than French too. If none speaks about it's because it was a complete failure (by the way, no violence at all), and Poland was
dismembered and ceased to exist for 125 years.
If you have such "accidents" you seriously cannot expect normal people at command. The more brutal the affair, the more brutal
the "criminals". Makes no difference being an arson or an accident. You have a fire and minimizing the disaster is over any other
considerations. Call them criminals if you want, but I guess they did not many chances to behave other way. It is a common place
to say Lenin was the saint, Trotsky the martyr, and Stalin the beast. Trostky was a toff, and Stalin was a redneck who did the
dirty job. The Central Committee under Stalin was killed more than 500 out of 600 members in 30 years, all commies and most of
them personally selected by Stalin himself, I mean, it's hard to believe any real treason beyond a paranoia of pure power. But,
Russia do exist today if things had ran other way? Can anyone say the number of dead people would be lesser? Hitler came to power
with no Revolution at all, on the contrary, the 1919 German Revolution was another failure, ending with Hitler.
Kotkin's writing is readable and the details are interesting. But he appears to be a full on propagandist on the important
details, like the Tsar, the Czech and Austrian conflicts, as well as the Stalin purges.
You tell me, a man who purges millions for no apparent reason (Kotkin gives none other than paranoia) isn't an implied psychopath?
Frankfurt School ideology replaced Marxism as the driving ideology of the American Left during the 1960s. Nominal Marxists
tried to fudge that ideology into Marxism because they thought it would help to sell Marxism, but boy were they wrong! Marxist
theory instead became a talisman for selling the various identitarian ideologies used to divide and weaken the working class –
the exact opposite of what the opportunist-identitarian Marxists had anticipated. Their claims that identitarian movements were
somehow akin to the anti-colonial nationalist movements of the postwar era were diametrically wrong. They became tools of the
ruling class in their 40+ year neoliberal campaign to impose hyper-exploitive colonial conditions on the former imperial homelands.
We are all Third World now.
The idea that Stalin was fighting a Jew-mafia takeover of the USSR has been put forth by several prominent Third Positionists,
such as Francis Parker Yockey:
There are, in my judgment, three great novels that explore American military life in the
twentieth century. They are, in order of publication, Guard of Honor (1948) by James
Gould Cozzens, From Here To Eternity (1951) by James Jones, and The Sand Pebbles
(1962) by Richard McKenna.
The first is a book about airmen, set at a stateside air base during World War II. The
second is a soldier's story, its setting Schofield Barracks in the territory of Hawaii on the
eve of Pearl Harbor. In The Sand Pebbles, the focus is on sailors. It takes place in
China during the 1920s when U.S. Navy gunboats patrolled the Yangtze River and its
tributaries.
As far as I can tell, none of the three enjoys much of a following today. Despite winning
the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Guard of Honor has all but vanished. To the extent that
the other two retain any cultural salience, they do so as movies, superb in the case of From
Here to Eternity , colorful but mediocre in the case of The Sand Pebbles.
Yet for any American seeking an intimate account of military service, all three novels
remain worth reading. Times change, as do uniforms, weapons, and tactics, but certain
fundamentals of military life endure. Leaders and led see matters differently, nurse different
expectations, and respond to different motivations. The perspective back at higher headquarters
(or up on the bridge) differs from the way things look to those dealing with the challenges of
a typical duty day. The biggest difference of all is between inside and outside -- between
those in uniform and the civilians who necessarily inhabit another world. Each in his own way,
Cozzens, Jones, and McKenna unpack those differences with sensitivity and insight.
Of the three, McKenna's novel in particular deserves revival, not only because of its
impressive literary qualities, but because the story it tells has renewed relevance to the
present day. It's a story about the role that foreign powers, including the United States,
played in the emergence of modern China.
Prompted in part by the ostensible North Korean threat, but more broadly by the ongoing rise
of China and uncertainty about China's ultimate ambitions, the American military establishment
will almost inevitably be directing more of its attention toward East Asia in the coming years.
To be sure, the conflict formerly known as the Global War on Terrorism continues and appears
unlikely to conclude anytime soon. Yet the character of that conflict is changing. Having come
up short in its efforts to pacify the Islamic world, the United States is increasingly inclined
to rely on proxies, generously supported by air power, to carry on the jihadist fight in
preference to committing large numbers of U.S. troops. Almost imperceptibly, East Asia is
encroaching upon and will eventually eclipse the Greater Middle East in the Pentagon's
hierarchy of strategic priorities.
It's this reshuffling of Pentagon priorities that endows The Sand Pebbles with
renewed significance. If past is prologue, McKenna's fictionalized account of actual events
that occurred 90 years ago involving U.S. forces in China should provide context for anyone
intent on employing American military power to check China today.
Of course, the armed forces of the United States have a long history of involvement in East
Asia. Ever since 1898, when it liberated, occupied, and subsequently annexed the Philippines,
the United States has maintained an enduring military presence in that part of the world.
To the extent that Americans are even dimly aware of what that presence has entailed, they
probably think in terms of three 20th-century Asian wars: the first in the 1940s against Japan;
the second during the 1950s in Korea; the third from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s in
Vietnam. In each, whether as ally or adversary, China figured prominently.
Yet even before the attack on Pearl Harbor initiated the first of those wars, U.S. air,
land, and naval forces had been active in and around China. Dreams of gaining access to a
lucrative "China Market" numbered among the factors that persuaded the United States to annex
the Philippines in the first place. In 1900, U.S. troops participated in the China Relief
Expedition, a multilateral intervention mounted to suppress the so-called Boxer Rebellion,
which sought to expel foreigners and end outside interference in Chinese affairs. The mission
succeeded and the U.S. military stayed on. Army and Marine Corps units established garrisons in
"treaty ports" such as Shanghai and Tientsin.
Decades earlier, the U.S. Navy had begun making periodic forays into China's inland
waterways. In the early 20th century, employing small shallow-draft vessels captured from Spain
in 1898, this presence became increasingly formalized. As American commercial and missionary
interests in China grew, the Navy inaugurated what it called the Yangtze Patrol, with Congress
appropriating funds to construct a flotilla of purpose-built gunboats for patrolling the river
and its tributaries. Under the direction of COMYANGPAT back in Shanghai, small warships flying
the Stars-and-Stripes sailed up and down the Yangtze's immense length to "protect American
lives and property."
This is the story that McKenna, himself a YANGPAT veteran, recounts, focusing on a single
fictional ship the U.S.S. San Pablo. Known as "Sand Pebbles," the few dozen sailors
comprising the San Pablo's crew are all lifers. A rough bunch, their interests rarely
extend beyond drinking and whoring. In 1920s China, an American sailor's modest paycheck
provides ample funds for both pursuits.
Even afloat, life for the Sand Pebbles is more than agreeable. Onboard the San Pablo,
an unofficial second crew consisting of local Chinese -- "contractors," we would call them
today -- does the dirty work and the heavy lifting. The Americans stay topside, performing
routines and rituals meant to convey an image of power and dominance.
San Pablo is a puny and lightly armed ship. Yet it exists to convey a big impression,
thereby sustaining the privileged position that the United States and the other imperial powers
enjoyed in China.
The revolutionary turmoil engulfing China in the 1920s necessarily challenged this
proposition. Nationalist fervor gripped large parts of the population. Imperial privilege
stoked popular resentment, which made San Pablo 's position increasingly untenable, even
if the Sand Pebbles themselves were blind to what was coming. That their own eminently
comfortable circumstances might be at risk was literally unimaginable.
McKenna's narrative describes how the world of the Sand Pebbles fell apart. His nominal
protagonist is Jake Holman, a machinist mate with a mystical relationship to machinery. Jake
loathes the spit-and-polish routine topside and wants nothing more than to remain below decks
in the engine compartment, performing duties that on San Pablo white American sailors
have long since ceased to do. In the eyes of his shipmates, therefore, Jake represents a threat
to the division of labor that underwrites their comforts.
The ship's captain, one of only two commissioned officers assigned to San Pablo,
likewise sees Jake as a threat to the status quo. To my mind, Lieutenant Collins is McKenna's
most intriguing creation and the novel's true focal point. Although the Sand Pebbles are
oblivious to how they may figure in some larger picture, for Collins the larger picture is a
continuing preoccupation. He sees his little ship, the entire U.S. Navy, America's providential
purpose, and the fate of Western civilization as all of a piece. Serious, sober, and dutiful,
he is also something of a fanatic.
Collins dimly perceives that powerful forces within China pose a direct threat not only to
the existing U.S. position there, but to his own worldview. Yet he considers the prospect of
accommodating those forces as not only intolerable, but inconceivable. So in the book's
culminating episode he leads Jake and several other Sand Pebbles on a symbolic but utterly
futile gesture of resistance. Fancying that he is thereby salvaging his ship's honor (and his
own as well), he succeeds merely in killing his own men.
I interpret McKenna as suggesting that there is no honor in denying reality. Only waste and
needless sacrifice result. Today a national security establishment as blind to reality as
Lieutenant Collins presides over futile gestures far more costly than those inflicted upon the
Sand Pebbles. It's not fiction and it's happening right before our eyes.
So skip the movie. But read McKenna's book. And then reflect on its relevance to the present
day.
"... * Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. His latest book is A Whistleblower at the CIA . (City Lights Publishers, 2017). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org . ..."
by Melvin Goodman
25 May, 2018 President Donald Trump's abrupt decision to run away from a summit meeting
with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un should not be a surprise to anyone. The White House is
encouraging the notion that China's Xi Jinping is to blame for souring the notion of a
U.S.-North Korean summit and for toughening Kim Jong Un's negotiating position, and the
mainstream media is doing its predictable best to validate such a self-serving explanation. In
actual fact, the Trump administration was never prepared to discuss any issue that resembled
arms control and disarmament, and national security adviser John Bolton, the formidable
chairman of the new "war cabinet," was never agreeable to the idea of U.S.-North Korean
diplomacy.
Any exercise in arms control and disarmament involves two sets of negotiations: first is the
internal set within the administration itself; second is the external set with foreign
counterparts. Typically, the internal negotiations within any administration is the tougher
road. One of President John F. Kennedy's greatest successes was disciplining the Pentagon in
1963 in order to negotiate the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Over the past fifty years, there has
never been an arms control and disarmament treaty that the Pentagon has welcomed.
President Richard Nixon and national security advisor Henry Kissinger were particularly
skillful at disciplining the national security bureaucracy that found the civilian and
uniformed military leaders of the Pentagon opposed to any arms control negotiations with the
Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger had to win the bureaucratic battles before garnering the
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Antiballistic Missile Treaty in 1972. Nixon and
Kissinger also knew how to prepare for summitry, which finds the Trump administration
particularly clueless.
President Ronald Reagan learned important lessons in the 1980s when Secretary of Defense
Casper Weinberger and his senior advisor, Richard Perle, had to be defeated bureaucratically on
the way to the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. Weinberger and Perle were routed and
ultimately resigned. It is not an exaggeration to say that the internal negotiations on the
home front were just as difficult as the external negotiations with the Soviet Union. And in
some ways, negotiating with Soviet leaders Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev was less
problematic because they had a genuine interest in disarmament and they had more control over
their military establishments than their U.S. rivals.
In the case of the U.S.-North Korean summit, which probably would not have led to North
Korean denuclearization, there was a reasonable opportunity of arranging a serious deescalation
of U.S. and North Korean military activities on the Korean peninsula. National security adviser
Bolton has never shown any interest in deescalating military rivalries with any U.S.
adversaries, and the general officers around President Trump are not prepared to reduce the
U.S. military presence in South Korea or to temper U.S.-South Korean exercises that are so
threatening to the North Koreans. Communist military doctrine views such exercises as a
possible prelude to an actual attack.
Bolton is new to Trump's national security team, but he is clearly the major winner in this
diplomatic setback. Other members of the team, including the Secretaries of State and Defense
were not consulted prior to the sudden announcement on May 24, 2018, and there is no record of
any deliberations at the National Security Council for preparations for an historic meeting
with Kim Jong Un, let alone the possible trade offs in any disarmament discussion. In record
time, Bolton has taken charge of the national security and foreign policies of the Trump
administration, and has quietly built a neoconservative team of staffers at the NSC that will
take hardline positions on all items on the international agenda.
Inside and outside government, Bolton has typically surrounded himself with a like-minded
group of advisers and staffers who share his bellicose views and his bellicose manner that
deprived him of any chance to gain congressional confirmation for a senior position in previous
administrations. Bolton is already consulting with former members of the Pentagon's short-lived
Office of Special Plans (OSP) that was responsible for falsifying intelligence in 2002-2003 to
make the case for war against Iraq. In previous assignments at the United Nations and the
Department of State for the Reagan and Bush administrations, Bolton had a well-earned
reputation for falsifying intelligence on a variety of issues in order to justify hardline
positions and to argue against arms control negotiations.
Any connection to OSP is particularly revealing because of the results of a study by the
Pentagon's Inspector General that determined the office's major mission was to provide the
White House with "intelligence" to make the case for war. According to the IG, David Wurmser
was the creator of a provocative and specious Power Point presentation that linked Iraq and al
Qaeda for which there was no credible evidence. The phony intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction and possible Iraqi-al Qaeda links were the keys to making the case for war. Wurmser
is now advising Bolton on staffing decisions at the NSC.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo may not have been involved in the decision making to scuttle
the summit, but it is noteworthy that his first selection of an important ambassadorial post
was a senior uniformed officer and not a foreign service professional. One of Pompeo's first
decisions as secretary of state was to select Admiral Harry Harris Jr. as ambassador to South
Korea. It was predicted at the time that Harris would join Bolton and Pompeo in arguing against
the pursuit of a diplomatic bargain with North Korea. Admiral Harris was well known for his
hard line briefings over the years before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Obama
administration actually issued a "gag order" on Harris prior to President Barack Obama's
meetings with Xi Jinping.
The emergence of Bolton and the neoconservative staffing at the NSC points to more hardline
decision making that will be influenced by cherry-picked data, unexamined assumptions, and an
unwillingness to hold open debates on foreign policy options. President Trump survived his
first foreign policy crisis in Syria last month because of the effective and moderating role
played by Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Bolton's "success" in halting the diplomatic
minuet between Washington and Pyongyang points to greater instability in the near term with
U.S. allies as well as adversaries. And if Bolton's neoconservative allies dominate the debates
at the NSC, there will be little room for Secretary of Defense Mattis to operate and more room
for Bolton's pursuit of hardline foreign policies.
"... Coming Next, Part 2: The post WWII global strategy of the neocons has been shaped chiefly by Russophobia against the Soviet Union and now Russia ..."
"... * Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice . Visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk .com ..."
In this first of a two-part series, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould trace the origins
of the neoconservative targeting of Russia.
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould April 29.2018
The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel last September reported
that, "Stanley Fischer, the 73–year-old vice chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, is
familiar with the decline of the world's rich. He spent his childhood and youth in the British
protectorate of Rhodesia before going to London in the early 1960s for his university studies.
There, he experienced first-hand the unravelling of the British Empire Now an American citizen,
Fischer is currently witnessing another major power taking its leave of the world stage the
United States is losing its status as a global hegemonic power, he said recently. The U.S.
political system could take the world in a very dangerous direction "
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the creation of the so called Wolfowitz
Doctrine in 1992 during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, the United States
claimed the mantle of the world's first and only. Unipower with the intention of crushing any
nation or system that would oppose it in the future. The New World Order, foreseen just a few
short years ago, becomes more disorderly by the day, made worse by varying degrees of
incompetence and greed emanating from Berlin, London, Paris and Washington.
As a further sign of the ongoing seismic shocks rocking America's claim to leadership, by
the time Fischer's interview appeared in the online version of the Der Spiegel , he had
already announced his resignation as vice chair of the Federal Reserve -- eight months ahead of
schedule. If anyone knows about the decline and fall of empires it is the "globalist" and
former Bank of Israel president, Stanley Fischer. Not only did he experience the unravelling of
the British Empire as a young student in London, he directly assisted in the wholesale
dismantling of the Soviet Empire during the 1990s.
As an admitted product of the British Empire and point man for its long term imperial aims,
that makes Fischer not just empire's Angel of Death, but its rag and bone man.
Alongside a handful of Harvard economists led by Jonathan Hay, Larry Summers, Andrei
Shleifer, and Jeffry Sachs, in the "Harvard Project," plus Anatoly Chubais, the chief Russian
economic adviser, Fischer helped throw 100 million Russians into poverty overnight –
privatizing, or as some would say piratizing – the Russian economy. Yet, Americans never
got the real story because a slanted anti-Russia narrative covered the true nature of the
robbery from beginning to end.
As described by public policy scholar and anthropologist Janine R. Wedel in her 2009 book
Shadow Elite: "Presented in the West as a fight between enlightenment Reformers trying
to move the economy forward through privatization, and retrograde Luddites who opposed them,
this story misrepresented the facts. The idea or goal of privatization was not controversial,
even among communists the Russian Supreme Soviet, a communist body, passed two laws laying the
groundwork for privatization. Opposition to privatization was rooted not in the idea itself but
in the particular privatization program that was implemented, the opaque way in which it
was put into place, and the use of executive authority to bypass the parliament."
Intentionally set up to fail for Russia and the Russian people under the cover of a false
narrative, she continues "The outcome rendered privatization 'a de facto fraud,' as one
economist put it, and the parliamentary committee that had judged the Chubais scheme to 'offer
fertile ground for criminal activity' was proven right."
If Fischer, a man who helped bring about a de facto criminal-privatization-fraud to
post-empire Russia says the U.S. is on a dangerous course, the time has arrived for post-empire
Americans to ask what role he played in putting the U.S. on that dangerous course. Little known
to Americans is the blunt force trauma Fischer and the "prestigious" Harvard Project delivered
to Russia under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. According to The American Conservative's James Carden "As the Center for Economic and Policy
Research noted back in 2011 'the IMF's intervention in Russia during Fischer's tenure led to
one of the worst losses in output in history, in the absence of war or natural disaster.'
Indeed, one Russian observer compared the economic and social consequences of the IMF's
intervention to what one would see in the aftermath of a medium-level nuclear attack."
Neither do most Americans know that it was President Jimmy Carter's national security
advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1970s grand plan for the conquest of the Eurasian heartland that
boomeranged to terrorize Europe and America in the 21 st century. Brzezinski spent
much of his life undermining the Communist Soviet Union and then spent the rest of it worrying
about its resurgence as a Czarist empire under Vladimir Putin. It might be unfair to say that
hating Russia was his only obsession. But a common inside joke during his tenure as the
President's top national security officer was that he couldn't find Nicaragua on a map.
If anyone provided the blueprint for the United States to rule in a unipolar world following
the Soviet Union's collapse it was Brzezinski. And if anyone could be said to represent the
debt driven financial system that fueled America's post-Vietnam Imperialism, it's Fischer. His
departure should have sent a chill down every neoconservative's spine. Their dream of a New
World Order has once again ground to a halt at the gates of Moscow.
Whenever the epitaph for the abbreviated American century is written it will be sure to
feature the iconic role the neoconservatives played in hastening its demise. From the chaos
created by Vietnam they set to work restructuring American politics, finance and foreign policy
to their own purposes. Dominated at the beginning by Zionists and Trotskyists, but directed by
the Anglo/American establishment and their intelligence elites, the neoconservatives' goal,
working with their Chicago School neoliberal partners, was to deconstruct the nation-state
through cultural co-optation and financial subversion and to project American power abroad. So
far they have been overwhelmingly successful to the detriment of much of the
world.
From the end of the Second World War through the 1980s the focus of this pursuit was on the
Soviet Union, but since the Soviet collapse in 1991, their focus has been on dismantling any
and all opposition to their global dominion.
Pentagon Capitalism
Shady finance, imperial misadventures and neoconservatism go hand in hand. The CIA's
founders saw themselves as partners in this enterprise and the defense industry welcomed them
with open arms. McGill University economist R.T. Naylor, author of 1987's Hot Money and the
Politics of Debt , described how "Pentagon Capitalism" had made the Vietnam War
possible by selling the Pentagon's debt to the rest of the world.
"In effect, the US Marines had replaced Meyer Lansky's couriers , and the European central
banks arranged the 'loan-back,'" Naylor writes. "When the mechanism was explained to the late
[neoconservative] Herman Kahn – lifeguard of the era's chief 'think tank' and a man who
popularized the notion it was possible to emerge smiling from a global conflagration – he
reacted with visible delight. Kahn exclaimed excitedly, 'We've pulled off the biggest ripoff in
history! We've run rings around the British Empire.'" In addition to their core of
ex-Trotskyist intellectuals early neoconservatives could count among their ranks such
establishment figures as James Burnham, father of the Cold War Paul Nitze, Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Brzezinski himself.
From the beginning of their entry into the American political mainstream in the 1970s it was
known that their emergence could imperil democracy in America and yet Washington's more
moderate gatekeepers allowed them in without much of a fight.
Peter Steinfels' 1979 classic The
Neoconservatives: The men who are changing America's politics begins with these fateful
words. "THE PREMISES OF THIS BOOK are simple. First, that a distinct and powerful political
outlook has recently emerged in the United States. Second, that this outlook, preoccupied with
certain aspects of American life and blind or complacent towards others, justifies a politics
which, should it prevail, threatens to attenuate and diminish the promise of American
democracy."
But long before Steinfels' 1979 account, the neoconservative's agenda of inserting their own
interests ahead of America's was well underway, attenuating U.S. democracy, undermining
détente and angering America's NATO partners that supported it. According to the
distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff, détente had been
under attack by right-wing and military-industrial forces ( led by Senator "Scoop"
Jackson ) from its inception. But America's ownership of that policy underwent a shift
following U.S. intervention on behalf of Israel during the 1973 October war. Garthoff writes in
his detailed volume on American-Soviet relations Détente
and Confrontation , "To the allies the threat [to Israel] did not come from the Soviet
Union, but from unwise actions by the United States, taken unilaterally and without
consultation. The airlift [of arms] had been bad enough. The U.S. military alert of its forces
in Europe was too much."
In addition to the crippling Arab oil embargo that followed, the crisis of confidence in
U.S. decision-making nearly produced a mutiny within NATO. Garthoff continues, "The United
States had used the alert to convert an Arab-Israeli conflict, into which the United States had
plunged, into a matter of East-West confrontation. Then it had used that tension as an excuse
to demand that Europe subordinate its own policies to a manipulative American diplomatic gamble
over which they had no control and to which they had not even been privy, all in the name of
alliance unity."
In the end the U.S. found common cause with its Cold War Soviet enemy by imposing a
cease-fire accepted by both Egypt and Israel thereby confirming the usefulness of
détente. But as related by Garthoff this success triggered an even greater effort by
Israel's "politically significant supporters" in the U.S. to begin opposing any
cooperation with the Soviet Union, at all.
Garthoff writes, "The United States had pressed Israel into doing precisely what the Soviet
Union (as well as the United States) had wanted: to halt its advance short of complete
encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army east of Suez Thus they [Israel's politically
significant supporters] saw the convergence of American-Soviet interests and effective
cooperation in imposing a cease-fire as a harbinger of greater future cooperation by the two
superpowers in working toward a resolution of the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian problem."
"... The following is the third part of a three-part interview with Professor Piers Robinson, an academic at the University of Sheffield and a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. Parts one and two appeared on May 24 and May 25. ..."
"... We initially issued two briefing notes on Skripal. That was partly because some of the people in the Working Group who had been looking at chemical/biological events in Syria had relevant knowledge and were aware that what the British government was saying straight off was inaccurate, i.e., the idea that the nerve agent used was Russian and only the Russians could have produced it, etc. ..."
"... I did feel, because at the time the Syrian government was retaking large portions of territory, that the representation of Skripal might be being exploited as part of a broader propaganda drive against Russia (which was providing military support to Syria). ..."
"... If there was going to be an escalation in Syria, beyond the bombing that occurred, that would take us up against the Russians. There was a good possibility that the Skripal event was going to be exploited as part of a broader anti-Russian propaganda drive. ..."
"... when [Foreign Secretary] Boris Johnson pretty much said it was the Russians who must have poisoned the Skripals, that appeared to be a statement of certainty that was not warranted. And, of course, the recent history of Iraq and UK government claims regarding alleged WMD stockpiles was an important reminder that governments can be strongly motivated to distort and manipulate their claims, especially when intelligence is involved. ..."
"... I think the Skripal poisoning might be connected to events in the US. We do know, because Alex Thomson from Channel 4 tweeted on March 12 that the government had put a D-notice restriction on the reporting of [MI6 agent] Pablo Miller. Professor Paul McKeigue (University of Edinburgh) has issued a new briefing talking about this matter. ..."
"... Pablo Miller was Skripal's handler. He was connected to [former MI6 officer] Christopher Steele. He was responsible for the dossier alleging Trump's collusion with Russia. That, as I understand it, was a key part of initiating proceedings and investigations against Trump. It appears that the dossier was linked to the Democratic National Committee in that they apparently commissioned it. ..."
"... If it is the case that Skripal was in any way connected with that, it forms a possibility that there was a motive for someone other than Russia to have carried out the poisoning. ..."
"... More broadly, there is the possibility that the whole Russia-gate narrative is being used for bigger political purposes -- to influence Trump, to try and shore up action in the Middle East, perhaps on some level to distract Western publics from increasing awareness of how we have been involved in wars in the Middle East. ..."
The following is the third part of a three-part interview with Professor Piers Robinson,
an academic at the University of Sheffield and a member of the Working Group on Syria,
Propaganda and Media. Parts one and two appeared on May 24 and
May 25.
Julie Hyland: What is your estimation of the alleged poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal
by Russia, and how do they relate to the war in Syria?
PR: We initially issued two briefing notes on Skripal. That was partly because some of
the people in the Working Group who had been looking at chemical/biological events in Syria had
relevant knowledge and were aware that what the British government was saying straight off was
inaccurate, i.e., the idea that the nerve agent used was Russian and only the Russians could
have produced it, etc.
I did feel, because at the time the Syrian government was retaking large portions of
territory, that the representation of Skripal might be being exploited as part of a broader
propaganda drive against Russia (which was providing military support to Syria).
If there was going to be an escalation in Syria, beyond the bombing that occurred, that
would take us up against the Russians. There was a good possibility that the Skripal event was
going to be exploited as part of a broader anti-Russian propaganda drive.
It's not something you can pinpoint for sure at this stage because you don't have access to
the information. I don't think we will know the full truth of exactly what is happening for
some time. But you can make an informed judgement call.
What we do know is that the claims being made at the time were not tenable. So when
[Foreign Secretary] Boris Johnson pretty much said it was the Russians who must have poisoned
the Skripals, that appeared to be a statement of certainty that was not warranted. And, of
course, the recent history of Iraq and UK government claims regarding alleged WMD stockpiles
was an important reminder that governments can be strongly motivated to distort and manipulate
their claims, especially when intelligence is involved.
I think the Skripal poisoning might be connected to events in the US. We do know, because
Alex Thomson from Channel 4 tweeted on March 12 that the government had put a D-notice
restriction on the reporting of [MI6 agent] Pablo Miller. Professor Paul McKeigue (University
of Edinburgh) has issued
a new briefing talking about this matter.
Pablo Miller was Skripal's handler. He was connected to [former MI6 officer] Christopher
Steele. He was responsible for the dossier alleging Trump's collusion with Russia. That, as I
understand it, was a key part of initiating proceedings and investigations against Trump. It
appears that the dossier was linked to the Democratic National Committee in that they
apparently commissioned it.
If it is the case that Skripal was in any way connected with that, it forms a possibility
that there was a motive for someone other than Russia to have carried out the poisoning.
More broadly, there is the possibility that the whole Russia-gate narrative is being used
for bigger political purposes -- to influence Trump, to try and shore up action in the Middle
East, perhaps on some level to distract Western publics from increasing awareness of how we
have been involved in wars in the Middle East.
In a related area that people don't usually connect, the same psychological warfare methods
being used in the Middle East are being used in the attack on public education to privatize
education globally.
I've had a degree of dialogue with Piers on Facebook .
Despite the fact that he has done some important work here regards state propaganda and
Syria I have found his political positions very much the typical University sociology
professor , where bourgeois ideology and Post modernism runs rampant .
Not immune to running off a line of expletives and ad hominems as if they constitute an
argument, Piers came to the defence of Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Bealey when I had the
audacity to make a distinction between the defence of Syria against US Imperialism and a
defence of Assad per se and Putin
Both engaged in a somewhat lumpen diatribe on the question, despite the fact that I
clearly never once promoted an Imperialist line . The situation was in fact reminiscent of
what in more recent times the WSWS faced in regards Iran , when it seemingly ''had the
audacity'' to support the Iranian working class against its own bourgeois rulers.
Pity the poor blogger's lot: there are more interesting papers being published every week
than any essayist, however diligent, can possibly cope with. And there will be more, as the
vast genetic databases give up their secrets. No sooner does one team scoop the others with a
savage novelty than their rivals counter-attack with their own surprising findings. If you are
curious about mankind, it is the best time to be alive. We are likely to learn more about
ourselves in the next few decades than was possible in the last few centuries.
Sex Differences in the Adult Human Brain: Evidence from 5216 UK Biobank Participants
Stuart J Ritchie, Simon R Cox, Xueyi Shen, Michael V Lombardo, Lianne M Reus, Clara Alloza,
Mathew A Harris, Helen L Alderson, Stuart Hunter, Emma Neilson, David C M Liewald, Bonnie
Auyeung, Heather C Whalley, Stephen M Lawrie ,Catharine R Gale, Mark E Bastin, Andrew M
McIntoshIan, J Deary.
Cerebral Cortex, bhy109, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhy109
Published: 16 May 2018
Sex differences in the human brain are of interest for many reasons: for example, there
are sex differences in the observed prevalence of psychiatric disorders and in some
psychological traits that brain differences might help to explain. We report the largest
single-sample study of structural and functional sex differences in the human brain (2750
female, 2466 male participants; mean age 61.7 years, range 44–77 years). Males had
higher raw volumes, raw surface areas, and white matter fractional anisotropy; females had
higher raw cortical thickness and higher white matter tract complexity. There was
considerable distributional overlap between the sexes. Subregional differences were not fully
attributable to differences in total volume, total surface area, mean cortical thickness, or
height. There was generally greater male variance across the raw structural measures.
Functional connectome organization showed stronger connectivity for males in unimodal
sensorimotor cortices, and stronger connectivity for females in the default mode network.
This large-scale study provides a foundation for attempts to understand the causes and
consequences of sex differences in adult brain structure and function.
There is much to discuss here, but my attention was drawn by two phrases "considerable
distributional overlap" (which in my experience means that one group is pretty different from
another) and "generally greater male variance" (which agrees with most of the observations on
sex differences indicating that men are leptokurtic (more variable), women more platykurtic
(less variable).
Women are more at risk of dementia, depression, schizophrenia and dyslexia. Men are better
than women at mental rotation tasks, and are more physically aggressive; women are more
interested in people than in things, are more neurotic and more agreeable.
One of the most interesting sex differences is intelligence. Here is their introduction to
the topic:
There is more to sex differences than averages: there are physical and psychological
traits that tend to be more variable in males than females. The best-studied human phenotype
in this context has been cognitive ability: almost universally, studies have found that males
show greater variance in this trait (Deary et al. 2007a; Johnson et al. 2008; Lakin 2013;
though see Iliescu et al. 2016). This has also been found for academic achievement test
results (themselves a potential consequence of cognitive differences, which are known to
predict later educational achievement; Deary et al. 2007b; Machin and Pekkarinen 2008; Lehre
et al. 2009a, 2009b), other psychological characteristics such as personality (Borkenau et
al. 2013), and a range of physical traits such as athletic performance (Olds et al. 2006),
and both birth and adult weight (Lehre et al. 2009a). To our knowledge, only two prior
studies have explicitly examined sex differences in the variability of brain structure
(Wierenga et al. 2017; Lange et al. 1997), and no studies have done so in individuals older
than 20 years. Here, we addressed this gap in the literature by testing the "greater male
variability" hypothesis in the adult brain.
[]
We tested male–female differences (in mean and variance) in overall and subcortical
brain volumes, mapped the magnitude of sex differences across the cortex with multiple
measures (volume, surface area, and cortical thickness), and also examined sex differences in
white matter microstructure derived from DT-MRI and NODDI. We tested the extent to which
these differences were regionally-specific or brain-general, by adjusting them for the total
brain size (or other relevant overall measurement; for instance, adjusting volume differences
for total brain volume and cortical thickness differences for mean cortical thickness), and
examining whether the differences found in the raw analyses were still present. We tested the
extent to which these structural differences (in broad, regional, and white matter measures)
mediated sex variation in scores on two cognitive tests, one tapping a mixture of fluid and
crystallized reasoning skills (skills previously found to be linked to brain volumes;
Pietschnig et al. 2015) and one testing processing speed (previously found to be linked to
white matter microstructural differences; see Penke et al. 2012). At the functional level, we
also examined large-scale organization of functional networks in the brain using
resting-state fMRI functional connectivity data and data-driven network-based analyses.
The study compared 2750 females (mean age = 61.12 years, SD = 7.42, range =
44.64–77.12) and 2466 males (mean age = 62.39 years, SD = 7.56, range =
44.23–76.99). These are extremely large samples, two orders of magnitude larger than the
early studies in the 1980s, and way larger than many of the studies that the Press report so
frequently. Consider them "Foxtrot Oscar" samples.
The first result is startling: male brains are very much bigger, a colossal 1.4 effect size.
92% of men will be above the mean for women. On average men have 117.8 cm3 more brain than
women. All this extra brain must be doing something for men, you might surmise, other than just
helping them perpetually contemplate the relative advantages of the more complicated positions
adopted during sexual intercourse. Perhaps not. Broadly the same effect of male advantage can
be found in all the brain region sub-comparisons. Male brains are both larger, and also vary
more in size. Greater male variability seems a fact of nature. If there were a direct
relationship between brain size and cognitive ability, there would be many, many more bright
men than bright women.
The cognitive test was limited to a 13-item verbal-numerical test to be completed in 2
minutes, which ought to be enough to grade the general population. The mere notion of such a
test will discomfort those citizens who regard their own intellects as more wide-ranging and
multi-faceted than could ever be measured by mere earthly means, and who rank their brainpower
of greater value to Western Civilization in ways that could not possibly be assayed in 120
seconds. Personally, I quail at the thought of having to subject myself to such a harsh
evaluation. I mean, 13 into 120 is, let me see, well, not very long at all to solve each item.
On reflection, 9 seconds to pass each question. Can such people exist?
The test might be a little crude if the purpose is to detect sex differences across the
broad range of different cognitive tasks, and also a bit limited if the volunteers are, as one
might expect of this database, somewhat brighter volunteers interested in contributing to
science. However, these are minor quibbles. All intellects can be evaluated in 2 minutes. I
like it. Here are the details:
Verbal-numerical reasoning. This test (UK Biobank data field 20016) consisted of thirteen
multiple-choice items, six verbal and seven numerical. Participants responded to the items on
a touch-screen computer. One of the verbal items was: "Stop means the same as:
Pause/Close/Cease/Break/Rest/Do not know/Prefer not to answer". One of the numerical items
was: "If sixty is more than half of seventy-five, multiply twenty-three by three. If not
subtract 15 from eighty-five. Is the answer: 68/69/70/71/72/Do not know/Prefer not to
answer". Participants had a two-minute time limit to answer the thirteen questions. The
"prefer not to answer" option was considered as missing data for the purposes of the present
analyses. The scores from the test formed a normal distribution.
Reaction Time. This test (UK Biobank data field 100032), which followed immediately after
the verbal-numerical reasoning test, was modelled on the game of 'snap': participants
responded by pressing a button on a button box as quickly as possible with their dominant
hand whenever the symbols on two 'cards' displayed to them on the computer screen matched.
The test had twelve rounds; the first four rounds were considered 'training' (or practice)
rounds so were not included in the calculation of the final score, and four of the remaining
rounds did not include matching symbols. Thus, the final score was calculated on the basis of
the four rounds with matching symbols (the mean time in ms to press the button across these
four trials was the score variable). We excluded the scores of 8 participants who had
Reaction Times of 1100ms or longer. After this exclusion, the Reaction Times formed an
approximately normal distribution. Note that, for analyses, we reflected the raw scores so
that higher scores meant better performance (this meant that the two cognitive tests
correlated positively with each other).
The choice reaction time task should be a good measure of mental alertness, though 4 out of
8 trials is on the short side. However, there is a case for saying that all reaction time tests
should have only one trial. If the person responds very slowly, in real life he would be dead.
That is what reaction times are for. Here are the results for the two cognitive tests:
The insert above shows: female mean, male mean, t-test, probability, d (effect size), and
finally the Bayes Factor showing the probability there is a sex difference. The full results
for Table 2 are in the paper.
Sure enough, Table 2 shows that the cognitive tests are only an effect size of about 0.2 in
favour of men. Where did all the male brain size advantage go? 0.2 of a standard deviation
works out to 3 IQ points. Nothing much, you may say, considering that the test-retest
reliability of the Wechsler is 4 IQ points, but if this is a true representation of male-female
differences, then we can calculate what it would mean for the male/female balance at the higher
levels of ability. As you may have seen in previous posts, if men are really 3 points brighter
than women, and women's standard deviation is narrower than men, say 14 rather than 15 points,
then this makes a big difference at the higher reaches of intelligence.
Here are the estimates, if one assumes men have an IQ of 102, (sd 15) and women an IQ of 99,
(sd 14).
At IQ 130: 69.8% men
At IQ 145: 80.3% men
The authors correctly point out that the sample, though the biggest collected for scanning,
may not be a perfect representation of the population at large (though I doubt this directly
affects sex differences).
This is a very substantial paper. It shows a massive sex difference in brain size of 1.4 d,
and when one factors in that brain size relates to intelligence at a correlation of about 0.28,
then the predicted intelligence difference will be a large 0.39 d, but the observed difference
is only half that. Paradoxical. One implication is that there are sex-linked differences in
brain structure and dendritic arborization which overcome pure size differences. If so, how is
this balancing act achieved? Why don't all people have the smaller, more craftily wired version
of the human brain, which presumably requires a smaller blood supply. On the other hand, it
might be that the cognitive testing has not been wide enough, and has ignored tasks in which
males have an advantage. By the way, if one sex has an advantage in one skill, this is not an
error of testing, it is a triumph of testing that a real difference has been revealed.
It is possible that, in a rush to ensure that men and women's mental ability scores can be
presented as equal, in general men's stronger subject areas have been under-sampled. Test
producers are under pressure to minimize sexual and racial differences. This may have
suppressed the size of real differences. In defence of any group who think that their
specialist strong points have been ignored, we should set the sampling frame for cognitive
tests as wide as possible. These points do not invalidate the findings of this fine paper on
brains, but they leave open the possibility that there is a small but real male advantage in
intelligence which a broader scope of tests would reveal.
9/11 remains a problem for the legitimacy of the Neocons and the US political elite in
general. But like with JFK assassination they hope to weather the storm. And not without reason.
The power of MSM almost guarantee that.
Notable quotes:
"... So far as the Twin Towers are concerned, their core consisted of 287 steel columns, and steel does not begin to melt until 2,770°F, while fires caused by kerosene can only rise to around 1,700°F. The Twin Towers collapsed at virtually free fall speed, as did WTC 7, which was not hit by an aeroplane, a fact that was not even mentioned by the 9/11 Commission. ..."
"... in the view of a former NIST employee, 'reached a predetermined conclusion by ignoring, dismissing and denying the evidence.' In other words, the official account – and all the more so in the case of Building 7 with 82 steel columns – is a lie. ..."
Creative chaos is an interesting concept by itself. In modern socity persention of event is
moderated by MSM and, especially TV coverage. That create Matrix style soituation, when power
that be can control narrative, no matter how unscientific it is and how many hole it contain.
Somebody clled the USA the "society of illusions" and that nickname reflects this reality.
Review of David Ray Griffin, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World
(Olive Branch Press, 2017, 398 pp.)
published in Paradigm Explorer: The Scientific & Medical Network (London,
2018/2)
This brilliant, meticulous and searing analysis is David Ray Griffin's most powerful and
important book about the hegemonic foreign policy ambitions of US
neoconservatives and the way in which 9/11 was used to pursue these Machiavellian ends. This
is a book that should have been written by a mainstream investigative journalist, but David
has done their work for them, which they have signally failed to do by accepting the 9/11
Commission claims and labelling those who questioned these as 'conspiracy theorists', a term
originally devised by the CIA to use against their opponents when the position of plausible
deniability in undercover operations was under threat. The book is widely endorsed, for
instance by Professor Daniel Sheehan, who remarks that it is 'a clear and non-sensationalist
presentation of the historical and scientific facts, by one of our generation's most cogent
thinkers. This book should convince any honest and objective person – with a political
and scientific IQ above room temperature – that we have been systematically lied to
about the events of 9/11 and the American invasions in the Middle East.' Seasoned readers of
this journal will recall that I have reviewed all of David's books on 9/11 – here he
summarises his case in the context of the foreign-policy background, with the first part
devoted to this, and the second to a concise discussion of the shortcomings of official
explanations of 9/11.
The failure to prevent 9/11 attack was in itself a massive intelligence disaster,
and may partly be explained by some of the background elaborated in this book. The aftermath
of 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union left the US in a unipolar geopolitical position and
without any clear enemy. The war on terror declared in the wake of 9/11 gave rise a new enemy
and justified further increases in military expenditure on 'security' grounds. During the
1990s, neoconservative thinkers had urged the US to consolidate its status as an unchallenged
superpower and, where deemed necessary in terms of its strategic interests, to act
unilaterally to establish a Pax Americana. This injunction was reinforced by the doctrine of
American exceptionalism, only recently reiterated by the incoming Secretary of State, Mike
Pompeo, and also espoused by John Bolton, the newly appointed National Security Adviser. As a
'benign' power, the US has the right to intervene where it sees fit; other countries such as
Russia may be equally unique, but they are not 'exceptional'.
In 1997, William Kristol founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with a
call to shape this new century in a way favourable to American principles and interests. In
September 2000, PNAC published a document called Rebuilding America's Defences where
they advocated the use of US military supremacy to establish an empire including the whole
world – hence 'the next president of the United States must increase military spending
to preserve American geopolitical leadership.' This aim should be understood in the Pentagon
context of achieving Full Spectrum Dominance, a policy already developed in the 1990s.
Chillingly, the document reflected that the process of transformation might be a slow one in
the absence of 'some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbour'
– 9/11 was this event and enabled a fast track of neoconservative policies, beginning
with the attack on Afghanistan that had actually been planned many months previously, and the
destructive consequences of which are spelt out in detail. It should be noted that Dick
Cheney has been a leading figure in the neoconservative movement, and it would be more
accurate to describe the Bush – Cheney administration as the Cheney – Bush
administration, at least in the first term.
The chapter on military spending, pre-emptive war and regime change is an eye-opener. The
idea of pre-emptive-preventive war came to be known as the Bush Doctrine, elaborated in a
2002 national security strategy document with the dangerous clause that America can in
self-defence 'act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed' – I will
come back to this below when discussing drones. Challenging regimes hostile to US interests
meant overthrowing them and replacing them, and the 2002 list ominously included Iraq, Iran,
Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan. The events of the last 15 years show how dangerous
it is in terms of unintended consequences to sow a wind without reaping a
whirlwind: the emergence of ISIS as a result of the invasion of Iraq is just one example.
This document was written by Philip Zelikow, who would later be named the executive
director of the 9/11 commission.
The next chapter is a detailed analysis of the Iraq war and the propaganda campaign of
lies required to justify it, both in the US and the UK. David refers to meetings by
Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, with members of the Bush administration and CIA director
George Tenet. Dearlove remarked that 'the intelligence and facts are being fixed around the
policy', which was also the case in the UK with the so-called dodgy dossier. Amazingly, a
2008 report by the Centre for Public Integrity enumerates as many as 935 false statements
made by members of the Bush administration in the two years following 9/11. David
itemises a few of these with reference to weapons of mass destruction as well as biological
and chemical weapons. During this time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff produced a much more
cautious assessment, which was set aside. In addition, (p. 61) CIA analysts felt pressured by
Dick Cheney to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives,
which dictated the conclusions their analyses should yield. The consequences of the Iraq war
are well-known and include an estimated 2.3 million Iraqi deaths, 4,500 American
deaths and hundreds of thousands of serious injuries, including 320,000 brain injuries. As to
the economic cost, this had reached $4 trillion by 2014, a devastating opportunity cost in
terms of what the money might have been spent on. It should also be noted that the contract
for rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure went to Halliburton, of which Dick Cheney
is a major shareholder and former chief executive officer.
Space does not permit a detailed discussion of all the global chaos brought about by US
interventions in the Middle East on the basis that it could solve all of its problems
by means of military power. Chaotic collapse was regarded as a form of 'creative destruction'
providing a basis for destabilising a regime and eventually removing the incumbent,
especially in this geopolitically significant area for oil and gas (p. 109). David discusses
Libya, showing how the same kinds of lies were used to bring about regime change there, then
he moves on to Syria, where the intractable disaster is ongoing, as we all know. In addition
to military factors, it may also be a case that a form of weather warfare was used (this is
not suggested in the book) to help create the drought as a key destabilising factor; in
either event, whether deliberate or due to climate change, the drought was significant. In
Syria, out of the pre-war population of 22 million, 11% have been killed or injured, 5
million have fled the country and a further 8 million are internally displaced. In addition,
as we know, this chaos also led to the refugee crisis that precipitated the Brexit vote.
David devotes a separate chapter to drone warfare, posing and responding to
a number of key questions: are drone killings acceptable? Are they de facto assassination? Do
drone strikes rarely kill civilians? Are drone strikes used only when capture is impossible?
Are drone strikes used only for imminent threats? Do drone strikes help defeat terrorism?
Don't drones at least keep American warriors safe? There is no good case to be made for drone
warfare extrajudicial killing in the name of 'self-defence'; sometimes 'signature strikes'
were employed and continued on a large scale during the Obama administration. The
justification is tortuous to say the least where 'an imminent threat of violent attack
does not require the US to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons will take
place in the immediate future' (p. 146). This is a 'more flexible' understanding of imminence
which 'defines the term in a way that excludes its only actual meaning' (!).
The chapter on shredding the Constitution makes depressing reading where 'unaccountable
executive power has replaced due process and the checks and balances established by the US
constitution', first embodied in the Patriot Act. David systematically shows how various
amendments to the Constitution have been violated: the first on freedom of speech and
assembly, the fourth on security against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the fifth
relating to deprivation of life, liberty or property without due process of law. In addition,
torture violates the Constitution, and the overall result has been an undoing of
democracy in the name of security – an Orwellian outcome.
After chapters on potential nuclear and ecological holocaust (the latter the subject of
one of David's previous books – Unprecedented ), he moves on to a summary
analysis of the events of 9/11 and its aftermath. Here he condenses the findings of his
previous books to show how numerous miracles, defined as violations of the laws of nature,
were necessary in order to sustain the 9/11 Commission's official explanation. He shows how
the choice of Philip Zelikow as Executive Director of this supposedly impartial and
independent commission was in fact an insider selection leading to a foregone structure and
conclusion and tight control on individual commissioners. As early as March 2003, prior to
the first meeting of the commission, Zelikow had prepared a detailed outline including
chapter headings, subheadings and sub sub-headings. The pre-ordained task was to explain how
the building had been brought down by fire and the impact of the airliners.
So far as the Twin Towers are concerned, their core consisted of 287 steel columns,
and steel does not begin to melt until 2,770°F, while fires caused by kerosene can only
rise to around 1,700°F. The Twin Towers collapsed at virtually free fall speed, as did
WTC 7, which was not hit by an aeroplane, a fact that was not even mentioned by the 9/11
Commission.
The official reports on WTC 7 and the Twin Towers were provided by the National Institute
of Standards and Technology (NIST), which was an agency of the Bush-Cheney administration.
Its reports are more political than scientific as it is a fact of physics that a steel frame
building can only come down essentially in freefall if all the core columns are severed
simultaneously by explosives – in the case of Building 7, the roofline remained
virtually horizontal throughout the sudden collapse. Readers can consult comparative videos
for themselves showing an example of controlled demolition compared with the destruction of
Building 7. In addition, massive sections of steel columns and beams were horizontally
ejected from the Twin Towers up to 650 feet, which is quite inconsistent with the vertical
effects of gravitational collapse. David summarises six miracles required by the official
explanation that, in the view of a former NIST employee, 'reached a predetermined
conclusion by ignoring, dismissing and denying the evidence.' In other words, the official
account – and all the more so in the case of Building 7 with 82 steel columns –
is a lie.
In his conclusion and after further short chapters on the Pentagon attack and Mohamed
Atta, David lists 15 miracles required by the official 9/11 commission explanation. He asks
why mainstream media have not properly examined the evidence, and one significant factor
already mentioned is the fear of being labelled a 'conspiracy theorist', implying credulity,
gullibility and irrationality. In the case of David Ray Griffin, nothing could be further
from the truth: his analysis is thorough and forensic. He explains how the CIA invented this
conspiracy theory tactic in 1964 in the wake of the Warren Report into the Kennedy
assassination. It has become a powerful and intimidating rhetorical device, especially for
journalists who pride themselves on their scepticism and objectivity.
Rather than follow the a priori argument that no government could be evil or
competent enough to cover up 9/11, David urges people to look at the empirical evidence
– and if you, the reader, are feeling similarly uncomfortable, I encourage you to read
this book and his other ones for yourself and to understand the logic of false flag
operations that can be attributed to opponents by means of a suitable propaganda campaign. So
far as 9/11 is concerned, there is a large body of informed and expert professional opinion
across various disciplines that has studied the evidence and concluded that the official
account is false – see also the 9/11 Consensus Panel, the results of which was soon be
published in 9/11 Unmasked: A Six-Year Investigation by an International Review Panel
. This book is a highly significant contribution to exposing the Big Lie of 9/11 and the
neoconservative foreign policy background, and is as such a passionate plea for mainstream
media exposure to put a stop to further Machiavellian ambitions for full spectrum dominance
of the world.
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
One of the most complicated and frustrating aspects of operating a global capitalist empire
is maintaining the fiction that it doesn't exist. Virtually every action you take has to be
carefully recontextualized or otherwise spun for public consumption. Every time you want to
bomb or invade some country to further your interests, you have to mount a whole PR campaign.
You can't even appoint a sadistic torture freak to run your own coup-fomenting agency, or shoot
a few thousand unarmed people you've imprisoned in a de facto ghetto, without having to do a
big song and dance about "defending democracy" and "democratic values."
Naked despotism is so much simpler, not to mention more emotionally gratifying. Ruling an
empire as a godlike dictator means never having to say you're sorry. You can torture and kill
anyone you want, and conquer and exploit whichever countries you want, without having to
explain yourself to anyone. Also, you get to have your humongous likeness muraled onto the
walls of buildings, make people swear allegiance to you, and all that other cool dictator
stuff.
Global capitalists do not have this luxury. Generating the simulation of democracy that most
Western consumers desperately need in order to be able to pretend to believe that they are not
just smoothly-functioning cogs in the machinery of a murderous global empire managed by a class
of obscenely wealthy and powerful international elites to whom their lives mean exactly
nothing, although extremely expensive and time-consuming, is essential to maintaining their
monopoly on power. Having conditioned most Westerners into believing they are "free," and not
just glorified peasants with gadgets, the global capitalist ruling classes have no choice but
to keep up this fiction. Without it, their empire would fall apart at the seams.
This is the devil's bargain modern capitalism made back in the 18th Century. In order to
wrest power from the feudal aristocracies that had dominated the West throughout the Middle
Ages, the bourgeoisie needed to sell the concept of "democracy" to the unwashed masses, who
they needed both to staff their factories and, in some cases, to fight revolutionary wars, or
depose and publicly guillotine monarchs. All that gobbledegook about taxes, tariffs, and the
unwieldy structure of the feudal system was not the easiest sell to the peasantry. "Liberty"
and "equality" went over much better. So "democracy" became their rallying cry, and,
eventually, the official narrative of capitalism. The global capitalist ruling classes have
been stuck with "democracy" ever since, or, more accurately, with the simulation of
democracy.
The purpose of this simulation of democracy is not to generate fake democracy and pass it
off as real democracy. Its purpose is to generate the concept of democracy , the only
form in which democracy exists. It does this by casting a magic spell (which I'll do my best to
demystify in a moment) that deceives us into perceiving the capitalist marketplace we
Westerners inhabit, not as a market, but as a society. An essentially democratic society. Not a
fully fledged democratic society, but a society progressing toward "democracy" which it is, and
simultaneously isn't.
Obviously, life under global capitalism is more democratic than under feudal despotism, not
to mention more comfortable and entertaining. Capitalism isn't "evil" or "bad." It's a machine.
Its fundamental function is to eliminate any and all despotic values and replace them with a
single value, i.e., exchange value, determined by the market. This despotic-value-decoding
machine is what freed us from the tyranny of kings and priests, which it did by subjecting us
to the tyranny of capitalists and the meaningless value of the so-called free market, wherein
everything is just another commodity toothpaste, cell phones, healthcare, food, education,
cosmetics, et cetera. Despite that, only an idiot would argue that capitalism is not preferable
to despotism, or that it hasn't increased our measure of freedom. So, yes, we have evolved
toward democracy, if we're comparing modern capitalism to medieval feudalism.
The problem is that capitalism is never going to lead to actual democracy (i.e., government
by and for the people). This is never going to happen. In fact, capitalism has already reached
the limits of the freedom it can safely offer us. This freedom grants us the ability to make an
ever-expanding variety of choices none of which have much to do with democracy. For example,
Western consumers are free to work for whatever corporation they want, and to buy whatever
products they want, and to assume as much debt as the market will allow to purchase a home
wherever they want, and to worship whichever gods they want (as long as they conform their
behavior to the values of capitalism and not their religion), and men can transform themselves
into women, and white people can deem themselves African Americans, or Native Americans, or
whatever they want, and anyone can mock or insult the President or the Queen of England on
Facebook and Twitter, none of which freedoms were even imaginable, much less possible, under
feudal despotism.
But this is as far as our "freedom" goes. The global capitalist ruling classes are never
going to allow us to govern ourselves, not in any meaningful way. In fact, since the mid-1970s,
they've been systematically dismantling the framework of social democracy throughout the West,
and otherwise relentlessly privatizing everything. They've been doing this more slowly in
Europe, where social democracy is more entrenched, but, make no mistake, American "society" is
the model for our dystopian future. The ruling classes and their debt-enslaved servants,
protected from the desperate masses by squads of hyper-militarized police, medicated in their
sanitized enclaves, watching Westworld on Amazon Prime as their shares in private
prisons rise and the forces of democracy defend their freedom by slaughtering men, women, and
children in some faraway country they can't find on a map, and would never visit on vacation
anyway this is where the USA already is, and where the rest of the West is headed.
Which is why it is absolutely crucial to maintain the simulation of democracy, and the
fiction that we're still living in a world where major geopolitical events are determined by
sovereign nations and their leaders, rather than by global corporations and a class of
supranational elites whose primary allegiance is to global capitalism, rather than to any
specific nation, much less to the actual people who live there. The global capitalist ruling
classes need the masses in the West to believe that they live in the United States of America,
the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and so on, and not in a global marketplace. Because, if
it's all one global marketplace, with one big global labor force (which global corporations can
exploit with impunity), and if it's one big global financial system (where the economies of
supposed adversaries like China and the United States, or the European Union and Russia, are
almost totally interdependent), then there is no United States of America, no United Kingdom,
no France, no Germany or not as we're conditioned to perceive them. There is only the global
capitalist empire, divided into "national" market territories, each performing slightly
different administrative functions within the empire and those territories that have not yet
surrendered their sovereignty and been absorbed into it. I think you know which those
territories are.
But getting back to the simulation of democracy (the purpose of which is to prevent us from
perceiving the world as I just suggested above), how that works is, we are all conditioned to
believe we are living in these imperfect democracies, which are inexorably evolving toward
"real" democracy but just haven't managed to get there quite yet. "Real" being the key word
here, because there is no such thing as real democracy. There never has been, except among
relatively small and homogenous groups of people. Like Baudrillard's Disneyland, "Western
democracy" is presented to us as "imperfect" or "unfinished" (in other words, as a replica of
"real democracy") in order to convince us that there exists such a thing as "real democracy,"
which we will achieve someday.
This is how simulations work. The replica does not exist to deceive us into believing it is
the "real" thing. It exists to convince us that there is a "real" thing . In essence, it
invokes the "real" thing by pretending to be a copy of it. Just as the images of God in church
invoke the "god" of which they are copies (if only in the minds of the faithful), our imperfect
replica of democracy invokes the concept of "real democracy" (which does not exist, and has
never existed, beyond the level of tribes and bands).
This is, of course, ceremonial magic but then so is everything else, really. Take out a
twenty dollar bill, or a twenty Euro note, or your driver's license. They are utterly
valueless, except as symbols, but no less powerful for being just symbols. Or look at some
supposedly solid object under an electron microscope. Try this with a tablespoon. As that bald
kid in The Matrix put it, you will "realize that there is no spoon" or, rather, that
there is only the spoon we've created by believing that there is a spoon.
Look, I don't mean to get all spooky. What that kid (among various others throughout
history) was trying to get us to understand is that we create reality, collectively, with
symbols or we allow reality to be created for us. Our collective reality is also our religion,
in that we live our lives and raise our children according to its precepts and values,
regardless of whatever other rituals we may or may not engage in on the weekend. Western
consumers, no matter whether nominally Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, or of any other
faith, live their lives and raise their children according to the values and rules of
capitalism. Capitalism is our religion. Like every religion, it has a cosmology.
In the cosmology of global capitalism, "democracy" is capitalist heaven. We hear it preached
about throughout our lives, we're surrounded by graven images of it, but we don't get to see it
until we're dead. Attempting to storm its pearly gates, or to create the Kingdom of Democracy
on Earth, is heresy, and is punishable by death. Denying its existence is blasphemy, for which
the punishment is excommunication, and consignment to the City of Dis, where the lost souls
shout back and forth at each other across the lower depths of the Internet, their infernal
voices unheard by the faithful but, hey, don't take the word of an apostate like me. Go ahead,
try it, and see what happens.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Really good, amusing article.
Our replica of democracy is not to deceive us, but to convince us that there really IS
an(unattainable) democracy. The promised land is always just beyond the horizon
"It does this by casting a magic spell that deceives us into perceiving the capitalist
marketplace we Westerners inhabit, not as a market, but as a society."
Yes. Consumer capitalism requires illusion and MK-ULTRA programs to function.
"We create reality, collectively, with symbols "
And those symbols, often repurposed from earlier iterations like the swastika, stem from
ancient sources. Maybe the structure of our reality was designed years ago.
"This is, of course, ceremonial magic but then so is everything else, really."
Yep. The narrow-focused rationalists who have degraded science into a religion will never
accept that there is a sliver of magic and sorcery, originating from Kabbalistic practices,
that operate as a higher level science, the mechanics of which non-initiates can't
quantify.
I agree with much of what this columnist wrote. However this entire globalist criminal
enterprise is rapidly crumbling. This is shown in the rise of patriotic/loyalist and Marxist
parties in Europe and the Far Right and Far Left in the U.S. The globalist elite 0.001%
empire of the banksters, crapitalists and fingerciers and their lackeys, knaves and varlets,
along with their political prostitute puppets, is built on sand. These worthless cretins have
loaded down every nation on earth, and especially in the West, with massive, crushing debt.
Ditto for individuals and businesses. It is not sustainable. In addition they have off shored
much of Western industry into Third World nations and flooded Western nations with Third
World proles to hold down wages and depress living conditions. Reaction among the native
Whites is building stronger by the day. At some point this volcano is going to blow. When it
does all bets are off as to how much destruction will happen.
At this point the super rich and their banks and trans-national corporations can either
gradually give way to democratic change and re-industrialize the West, discount all these
debts, and stop this Third World invasion and begin swift repatriation of these interlopers
and save much of their wealth and power or they will soon face armed revolution and
civil/class/racial war in the streets. These worthless elites have fouled their own nests
since they have left virtually no Western nation untouched by these triple evils of debt,
immigration and de-industrialization. They either never learned the lessons of the French and
Russian revolutions or believe it could not happen in the 21st Century to them. Either way it
makes no difference. Globalism is crumbling and going the way of other evil isms: Fascism,
Communism, Nazism, Imperialism, Colonialism, etc. Its days are numbered and the writing is on
the wall. Meanwhile those nations not controlled by the Western White Collar Mafia, namely
Russia and China, along with Iran and a few other Asian and Middle Eastern nations, are
building up their economies and militaries and increasingly challenging the Western tyrants.
We are definitely in for troubled times ahead. Always remember: Those who make peaceful
change impossible, make violent change inevitable. Globalism has had its evil day and its
black sun is setting. The only questions now are will it go peacefully and quietly or loudly
and violently and what will replace it. I hope and pray something good and true.A new world
order built that that is God and Christ and not man based with peace, prosperity, and justice
for all in a natural order of things.
Free movement of capital, in Europe since 1997, took away power from politicians.
The German Lafontaine made it clear.
He stated that when in Basel a German spoke to the bankers assembled there, blaming them,
they clapped their hands.
One sees it in the terminology used, what in the good old days was called protectionism, a
word suggesting something positive, now is trade war, definitely something bad.
It for me is the same as with privatisation of universal services, water, electricity, etc.,
neither privatising anything is good, also a state economy is not good, as the USSR made
clear.
In the good old days in W European countries we had mixed exonomies, commercial enterprises
for cars and jeans, state enterprise for electricity and public transport.
In my opinion a mixed world economy also is the best option, this means regulation of capital
movement, to mention one thing.
A little snapshot to illustrate the point. Standing in the passport control line at Newark
Airport -- interminably, because of about 24 stations for checking people back in to the
motherland, maybe five were manned. This was in mid-afternoon on a weekday, a time when many
international flights were arriving. The wait was about an hour and a half.
While waiting, you get a superb view through the window of the Manhattan skyline, and
might have occasion to think about all the swells in the financial sector whose ever-growing
prosperity has sucked money not only out of the real economy of goods and services, but out
of government as well, a point Michael Hudson often makes. E.g., cap those property taxes in
California, but drive housing prices in California and interest rates sky high to transfer
wealth out of the hands of home owners and governments, and into finance capital.
You can work yourself up into a pretty good lather thinking about this while you wait your
turn at an under-funded passport control station.
I would recommend this book to unz readers. I read it years ago and its basic premise becomes
more observably true every year .and pertains to the US as well, something Chu didn't
mention.
World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global
Instability
By Amy Chua
Category: World Politics | Economics | Management
"Chua shows how in non-Western countries around the globe, free markets have concentrated
starkly disproportionate wealth in the hands of a resented ethnic minority. These
"market-dominant minorities" – Chinese in Southeast Asia, Croatians in the former
Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America and South Africa, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in
West Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia – become objects of violent hatred. At the same time, democracy empowers the impoverished majority, unleashing ethnic
demagoguery, confiscation, and sometimes genocidal revenge."
So maybe revolutions will be the new way of managing the world,
An ex furniture salesman, now the Prime Minister of Israel would not agree. He thinks
history has ended. Jerusalem is soon to be or already is the capital of the globalist world.
Hate speech laws replace the sanctity of the Monarchs and Churches with the sanctity of
Israel and identity politics. His lackeys have even taken away the freedom to shop via the
criminalisation of BDS. Talpiot program has turned everything into a video game. He is either
a genius or a complete fool. But I hope you are right and he is wrong. Another point.
Democracy real and simulated only became fashionable a hundred years ago.
That's the first I've heard of "progressing towards democracy" as a major feature of the
modern Western worldview (a la USSR progressing towards communism, I suppose). No, I've
encountered such ideas before among pundits, but I don't think most people in America, say,
believe that they currently don't live in a democracy but will later live in a "true"
democracy. That seems like a rather exotic notion outside of very narrow intellectual
circles.
Also, "as long as they conform their behavior to the values of capitalism and not their
religion". But people are free to conform their behaviour to the values of their religion to
a large extent. They're not free to violate the laws of what you'd call capitalist society.
But that is not the same as being forced to conform to its values.
Which is why it is absolutely crucial to maintain the simulation of democracy, and the
fiction that we're still living in a world where major geopolitical events are determined
by sovereign nations and their leaders, rather than by global corporations and a class of
supranational elites whose primary allegiance is to global capitalism, rather than to any
specific nation, much less to the actual people who live there.
But it can go wrong. The simulation was supposed to make Hillary Clinton President –
but, in the event, it veered over to real Democracy and produced Trump.
Equally the Brexit vote was planned to fail – but that also turned in a real
Democratic result with a majority for Brexit.
Simulated Democracy is a difficult process and it's probably due for more failures given
the difficulty of controlling the modern flow of information.
I suppose we are all going to spend the rest of our lives listening to bitter millenials rant
about the evils of capitalism. After all, they could move out of their parent's basement if
the government would force the banks to forgive all their student loans.
It should be obvious by now that all forms of government eventually morph into what we see
all around us today. But let's not confuse free market capitalism (which has never existed)
with the aristocratic fascisms that we call "Communism" or "Democracy."
The only way to really solve the problem of government is make government irrelevant.
Well, CJ, If I were your political science professor, I'd fail your sorry ass for 'communist
jargon' and 'Marxist jingoism' maybe that works fine if you're into looking for strokes when
singing to the choir but it won't build alliances that accomplish anything. But maybe that's
not your point, and the substance of your butt-hurt whining is about "I'm CJ Hopkins!" kinda
like "I'm Rick James!"
Look dude, if you want to get down and dirty with your enemies, hit below the belt, and do
it like this:
The worlds elites have us mind controlled and financially controlled via the Zionist Fed that
creates money out of thin air and then loans this money to our gov and we goyim and charge
interest on this ether created money and there in lies the control for by their control over
the money they control every thing.
In addition the Zionists fastened the IRS on we goyims and this IRS is a off shoot of the
FED and so our money is sent to the Zionist bankers who own the FED to make sure we pay for
the wars that the Zionists have arranged for we Americans and so this is a trap that has been
laid by the central bankers which insures their dominance for ever and ever.
This system of control has been in existence since 1913 when the zionist bankers fastened
the FED and the IRS on to the American people and the author of this article is exactly
right, we are in a financial prison a prison without bars but a prison none the less.
In regards to voting as Stalin said ie it is not who votes that counts but who counts the
votes.
These worthless cretins have loaded down every nation on earth, and especially in the
West, with massive, crushing debt. Ditto for individuals and businesses. It is not
sustainable.
Any given iteration of the capitalism model is unsustainable by its very nature, of
course. Any capitalist instantiation is self-exhausting, as capitalism eventually transfers
all wealth (or some very large fraction) to the wealthy. ALL. At that point, that instance
collapses at some rate determined by its state of monetization.
But not all wealth evaporates. After a financial collapse, a new zero-point establishes at
or near "true value". The capitalism model reasserts, and continues. It may be inherent to
the nature of Man.
'Democracy' is a scam that privatizes power, while socializing responsibility.
Reminds me of Oswald Spengler, though he is better read about than read, IMHO. From
wikipedia: "Spengler asserts that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and the
media are the means through which money operates a democratic political system."
But one minor quibble: yes, for now, in the West, fake democracy is certainly better than
old-style feudalism. But it doesn't have to be, and it doesn't have to stay that way. In many
nominally capitalist and 'democratic' countries – like India, Bangladesh, etc. –
half the population is chronically malnourished, the physical standard of living well below
that of late medieval europe (!). Now that communism has been vanquished, capitalism has no
need of a bargain of power for a decent standard of living, and the rich are moving towards
dragging the entire world towards the Indian model of cheap-labor serfdom. Yes it can happen
here.
Citizens United isn't helping, brought to you by the corrupt Supreme Court. They're starting
to push putting Ted Cruz in SCOTUS, that would be a huge mistake.
"Democracy" is a sham, the candidates are carefully pre-selected and promoted by the
corrupt media, if that fails, the unelected delegates and super delegates can always void
your vote.
This is why we only get Mitt Romneys, Clintons, Bushes, the same ol dirtbags out of
millions of people.
Americans clearly want the homicidal wars to end, are the wars/occupations ending?
More Americans clearly are turning away from supporting Israel, does it matter?
Most Americans want mass immigration and illegal immigration stopped, is it stopping?
There is a petition to End the Federal Reserve scam, do any of the petitions go anywhere?
Go sign it, lets find out .
The Mexican maid is the answer to our collective misery. What do I mean? Well! The white boys
have given up on rebelling against the Empire (1% + 10% Jews and Whites with a small
sprinkling of non-white goys) and da coloreds (Indians and Chinese) are too wrapped up in
trying to prove their worth to the lost crackas while the niggas (Blacks et al) are simply
too stupid to understand, let alone do anything about improving their lot. Alas, fear not!
The unwelcome army of latinas from Central America, employed as caretakers will prove their
worth by simply poisoning the whole perfidious lot, slowly. So, welcome to America,
Guadalupe!
The suffocating hold that propaganda has on an uncritical public must rank as an historic
coup for the ages. It is the modern version of the allegory of the cave. Simpletons are
willing to die for their puppeteers in wars that serve no other purpose than to enrich their
owners. But die for their masters they will. Yet there is a glaring contradiction in foreign
wars and America's favorite pastime, regime change. The chances of "real" democracy, for
instance, taking root in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates, Egypt are virtually non-existent.
Worse still, they are simply not allowed. And any other countries that steer an independent
course from American hegemony will suffer consequences -- regime change, economic sanctions
or direct military action. Yet it is the public sold on its exceptionalism, living in a
"real" democracy (confused with rampant consumerism and hedonism) that has so utterly failed
to see -- and act, on these contradictions. Although the notion of "inching" toward "real"
democracy may serve to pacify the public, with the ever growing militarization of the deep
police state, true democracy will simply not be allowed to flourish. It is the only credible
threat to rampant capitalism. What is significant is that the lumpen proletariat firmly
believe that they live in a democracy. So change is rendered redundant in such a scenario.
Best expression of capitalism, religion, democracy as a Weltanschauung.
To fuse the totalitarian, univeral concept that paires so well to 98% of the world
population we suggest consumerism.
Do not take for granted that our de facto global elites, and the mercenary middle-classes
have a clear understandig where they are heading. There is cognitive dissonance in idea,
method and projection of their in-group opportunism. Ethics being nothing more then superior
opportunism. Smart, but ailing and failing a religion. In fact the theory proves the
cognitive capacity of the authors.
The ongoing debunking of the sacred yet impossible '6M Jews' is what is really driving so
called "hate speech laws". What your told is merely the pretext.
Below is where free speech on the impossible 'holocaust' storyline is illegal, violators
go to prison for Thought Crimes.
An obvious admission that the storyline doesn't stand up to scientific, logical, &
rational scrutiny.
And coming to your neighborhood.
The 'holocaust' storyline is one of the most easily debunked narratives ever contrived.
That is why those who question it are arrested and persecuted. That is why violent, racist,
& privileged Jewish supremacists demand censorship. What sort of truth is it that
denies free speech and the freedom to seek the truth? Truth needs no protection from
scrutiny.
This is an elegant fleshing out of fashionable despair. Yes, self-rule is a myth. What does
Hopkins recommend to replace it with? Is the aspiration of a democratic republic the problem,
or is it money, media, and the subversion of power?
As flawed as our belief in democracy is, I haven't heard the better alternative. Just as
some say we must go to Mars because we are destroying earth, I think we should take care of
this earth as repairing and caring for it might be within our means. Instead of throwing
democracy out, we should try and make it work.
For example, been reading about the rise of antibiotic resistant germs and industrial
farming. The problem was long known, but there was no political will to do anything about it
because the industry could lobby and also control regulators. In theory, the government
worked for the greater good of all the people, but in practice it auctions us all to special
interest.
Capitalists defend the current system by saying it's not really capitalism. Well, whatever
it is, it came about because democracy was not actual but rather an ongoing auction of
national interest to special interest.
It's a good article and makes a good case, but you will have to wait just a bit longer
until us believers die off as you will not pry this democracy, our heritage and our best
chance, from my cold hands.
similar experience coming through Atlanta.
Want to create jobs? Coulda created 50 there. At least. And prevented missed flight
connections. Obama time.
I shall proudly call myself an idiot then, as I believe capitalism and democracy are both
bad.
The only system capable of inspiring passion and loyalty is some form of feudalism –
personal loyalty to a lord is a beautiful thing, noblesse oblige a beautiful thing, sacred
kingship is a beautiful thing, the tradition of beautiful craftsmanship that arises when
economic considerations are not uppermost is a beautiful thing, the standards of excellence
that are natural to a system that recognizes hierarchy and inequality is a beautiful
thing.
I also think personal freedom, and tolerance for eccentricity is far greater when the
social system is firmly grounded. In a democracy where nothing is secure conformity of
opinion and personality become urgent – to maintain even minimum stability.
Japan has retained elements of feudalism to this day yet is economically far more
egalitarian than America – because when economics is the sole standard of value, the
ambitious will gather all wealth into their hands.
Seeing the Japanese bow to each other – such a beautiful gesture.
Yeah, I suppose I could have half tried but the self-righteous indignation (tone) puts me
off. It's like Tom Englehardt, get people all tied up in some hopeless, helpless outrage that
accomplishes precisely nothing, no solutions, no pointing to a direction that might get
something done. In any case CJ is in Berlin but I bet he wouldn't give a New York second's
thought to risking his butt and work to put the German politicians nuts in a vise, but Hey!
you never know, here's his chance, he can promote this:
Of my five years exile in Germany, two of those years were in Berlin and I can assure you
the German political animal is an authentic coward, and Gregor Gysi of Die Linke is no
exception, he'd go after CJ before he'd go after the NATO war criminals is my best bet. Maybe
CJ has the balls to risk it?
Marxist twaddle about "democracy", lol. As if the founders didn't warn us so strenuously
about the tyranny of the majority.
Our government was formed not so that we could vote on what I am allowed to eat, but so
that others would have no say in it.
The centralization of power and conformity across previously sovereign states now
prohibits people from voting with their feet. The globalists are the next extension of the
same tyranny.
We don't have limited governments and free markets. We have big brother government and a
captured regulatory apparatus ensuring only large corporations can survive. Regulatory law is
nowhere in the constitution and they dictate over subjects also not in the constitution.
I knew it was over when the US electorate was swooned over Iraqis having purple fingers
voting "secret ballots". The candidates names were secret. But all you need to tell the
sheeple is that they voted.
This piece is typical Marxist sleight of hand. To have a government of the people, by the
people, and for the people, you limit what the government can do. Then you have liberty.
Self-rule.
Mr. Hopkins' article is an effective, accurate description of why and how things have
declined into a sort of soft fascism during the last 40 years or so in particular.
Democracy can easily be done on the individual level. There are plenty of resources for this.
I am not my brother's keeper anyway. don't tell me there is no democracy – just people
who want others to give it to them. Go all Thoreau on the world. Go off the grid, or Alaska,
or an island somewhere. Democracy is not for pansies.
no solutions, no pointing to a direction that might get something done
Preceding "solution" is description, and descriptive explanation. The article is not
intended as a set of solutions. It is a description and explanation.
Excellent article with much needed humor. We no longer have a word for an economic system
that supports human life. Hunting and gathering was early agriculture. Moving some rocks and
dirt out of the way to get some obsidian was mining. Knocking rocks against the obsidian was
early manufacturing. The excess from farms, mines and factories is what WAS called capital.
We are supposed to believe that a farmer can't plant a seed without a loan! We are in the
last stages of financialism. Since the word capitalism is useless how about "real stuffism"?
I'm a physical scientist and I can guarantee that math and the physical world always ends
financialism.
That line got me to laughing a lot harder than the rest of your bullshit, so I had to stop
reading. Your comments are now relegated to the "Duuuuuuuhhhhhh .MARXISM!!!" bin.
You could open up the scope of this post's valid point and say that it's not just democracy
that's simulated here. Rights and rule of law are simulated too. Democracy, fetishized though
it is, in degenerate ritual form, is a very small part of rights and rule of law
(specifically, ICCPR Article 25, one article of one of nine core human rights instruments or
about 100 total instruments in world-standard customary and conventional international law.
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/UniversalHumanRightsInstruments.aspx
)
This exchange is a really good catch. Latching on to the term deep state allows CIA to bat
away a puffball question that avoids the real question. Their scripted answer to the scripted
easy question: employees 'aimed at' the president's objectives and Amerca's objectives. This
is clever first of all because it says objectives and not orders. It's a weaker formulation
that the Pike-Committee era line, CIA works for the president. CIA is trying to evade the US
commitment to command responsibility in the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against
Torture. Secondly, the DCI purports to interpret the president's objectives and proclaim
America's objectives. Used to be State or NSC did that, subject to presidential directives or
decision documents. Pompeo says CIA works for him. We're at the point Frank Zappa told us to
expect: CIA's removing the stage set so we're sitting looking at the brick wall. Pompeo's
telling you that CIA's in charge.
The hard question is: Does CIA have impunity in municipal law? The answer is yes, of
course it does. It's there in black and white in the Central Intelligence Agency Act, the
Houston memo, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the operational files exemption,
and the political questions doctrine. If the DCI had no impunity the new DCI would be in
prison. CIA is obligated to prosecute or extradite its torturers and murderers. Na ga happen.
CIA has the arbitrary life-and-death power of a totalitarian state. CIA is beyond criminal.
Its arbitrary suspension of non-derogable rights and jus cogens says, Law? Fuck law.
I agree that the US is the ultimate expression of materialism.
The original Pilgrim Fathers were looking for religious freedom, but later waves of
immigrants came for economic opportunity, and the US was the first place that "Citizens"
morphed into "Consumers".
Congressmen are bought and sold, and they're probably OK with that, along the lines that
their vote has value, and they'll support whoever bids the highest (which isn't the electors
back home).
Like AaronB says, the US (and West in general) has no spiritual foundation, and is just a
cynical game of exploitation and corruption pretending to be "Democratic" . Real Democracy
does exist, but it's not something that Americans would want to be involved with – it
requires a high level of personal commitment and responsibility (probably obligatory),
regular local public meetings, investment in studying issues, and the primacy of local
decision making and voting over Federal power ( i.e. power residing at the lowest level
possible – which in the US would be the County and State). In other words it's hard and
time consuming work.
To take a parallel, the late Roman Empire was also a sink of absolute corruption and self
interest that couldn't defend its frontiers and finally collapsed, first socially, then
economically.
The spiritual Phoenix that rose out of its ashes was Christianity, with the barbarian
invaders converting and building Christendom in Europe (Rome) and also in the Middle East
(Byzantium). The early Christian communities in the Late Roman Empire were heavily persecuted
but still recognized for their high level of morality, work ethic and "respectability", and
in its last days (too late), the Empire actually adopted to Christianity through the
conversion of Constantine.
It should be obvious by now that all forms of government eventually morph into what we
see all around us today. But let's not confuse free market capitalism (which has never
existed) with the aristocratic fascisms that we call "Communism" or "Democracy."
You are on the right path, good observations.
Thinking people are aware of the fact that Moderns have permission not freedom.
What a surprise another commie writer on economic issues on Unz! These economic pos articles
resemble what you read in the NY times. Sheesh.
"Western consumers are free to buy whatever products they want"
Pure crap. Depending on the state you live in, think for a moment of all the restrictions,
taxes and permission you must go through to own a car, buy gass, freon, herbicide. Pharmacy
products, illegal drugs guns etc. A list a mile long. Anyone who describes the USA as a free
market is plain wrong and has no idea about the problems we face.
Liberty and the free market are not part of the problem. They are part of the
solution.
Switzerland, Singapore, and old Hong Kong to name a few examples are some of the
wealthiest in the world because of low to no taxes and max economic freedom. Two of the three
were crushed by ww2. Came back stronger than ever in 40 yrs or so.
You only discuss democracy as some monolithic idea, with some idealised notion that 'real'
democracy can only be tribal or small scale. This is not true.
Representative democracy = evolutionary autocracy and the right to shout. Laws and
regulations, being made by representatives – and only representatives – remain
purely autocratic in their creation and destruction.
Direct democracy – those tribes. Doesn't work for a society that has a huge
population and needs a 'directing mind' as Aurelius likened the individuals' equivalent.
Semi-direct democracy – a combination of the power to create or strike law by both
representatives (elected or selected), and the electorate. Switzerland has it (to a degree
because of its media, just check the June 10th banking referendum propaganda machine), China
approximates it because it polls its population on every level, decision and preference.
At the very least, the electorate should have power to strike laws made by representatives
and rescind previously struck laws by representatives. This is only fair – people
should have a process for declaring directly what laws they want to abide by. Representatives
may not like it, but society is society, it should be able to make these choices, for good or
bad.
Representative democracy – democracy in the spirit of the law, and autocracy in the
letter of the law – is for the most part an autocracy, with a progressive dumbing down,
frustration, and marginalisation of the electorate due to their practical lack of true power
to change society.
Then there's the question of education and media, as you need a smart and well informed
public with semi-direct much more than with representative. And preferably constitutionally
enforced armed military neutrality, as herd behaviour often tends to violence.
Finally – revolutionary democracy: revolts against systems can often be democratic,
if bloody, so build an effective system that considers the opinions and worries of the
masses.
Three sentences and I was done; and a play wright living in Berlin. Berrrrlin Dude, lets do
some history, Socialism sucks. But I do agree that my vote has been diluted to zero, by
design.
"... Global capitalists do not have this luxury. Generating the simulation of democracy that most Western consumers desperately need in order to be able to pretend to believe that they are not just smoothly-functioning cogs in the machinery of a murderous global empire managed by a class of obscenely wealthy and powerful international elites to whom their lives mean exactly nothing, although extremely expensive and time-consuming, is essential to maintaining their monopoly on power. Having conditioned most Westerners into believing they are "free," and not just glorified peasants with gadgets, the global capitalist ruling classes have no choice but to keep up this fiction. Without it, their empire would fall apart at the seams. ..."
One of the most complicated and frustrating aspects of operating a global capitalist empire
is maintaining the fiction that it doesn't exist. Virtually every action you take has to be
carefully recontextualized or otherwise spun for public consumption. Every time you want to
bomb or invade some country to further your interests, you have to mount a whole PR campaign.
You can't even appoint a sadistic torture freak to run your own coup-fomenting agency, or shoot
a few thousand unarmed people you've imprisoned in a de facto ghetto, without having to do a
big song and dance about "defending democracy" and "democratic values."
Naked despotism is so much simpler, not to mention more emotionally gratifying. Ruling an
empire as a godlike dictator means never having to say you're sorry. You can torture and kill
anyone you want, and conquer and exploit whichever countries you want, without having to
explain yourself to anyone. Also, you get to have your humongous likeness muraled onto the
walls of buildings, make people swear allegiance to you, and all that other cool dictator
stuff.
Global capitalists do not have this luxury. Generating the simulation of democracy that most
Western consumers desperately need in order to be able to pretend to believe that they are not
just smoothly-functioning cogs in the machinery of a murderous global empire managed by a class
of obscenely wealthy and powerful international elites to whom their lives mean exactly
nothing, although extremely expensive and time-consuming, is essential to maintaining their
monopoly on power. Having conditioned most Westerners into believing they are "free," and not
just glorified peasants with gadgets, the global capitalist ruling classes have no choice but
to keep up this fiction. Without it, their empire would fall apart at the seams.
... ... ...
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Since the very first summit talk National Security Advisor John Bolton set impossibly high
expectations for the results. Trump fell for it.
The various 'hostile statements'
go back to remarks by Bolton who has
for some time compared disarmament of North Korea to Libya. On April 29 Bolton again
asserted
that the 'complete de-nuclearization' of North Korea would follow the 'Libya model'. North
Korea never really offered to 'de-nuclearize'. It rejects the 'Libya model' for two
reasons:
When Libya made peace with the U.S. it was not a nuclear capable state which North Korea
is. North Korea demands to be seen as equal to other nuclear armed states.
Libya's transfer of the little nuclear production equipment it had was followed a few
years later by a full fledged war waged by France, the U.K. and the U.S. against Libya and
its government under Muhammad Ghaddafi. The war destroyed the country. North Korea has no
intent to allow a repeat of such treason.
North Korea pushed back against the Bolton statement. On May 16 the White House made amends
by
not endorsing what Bolton said :
Referring to the Libya comparison, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday
that she hadn't "seen that as part of any discussions so I'm not aware that that's a model
that we're using.
"I haven't seen that that's a specific thing. I know that that comment was made. There's
not a cookie cutter model on how this would work."
But a day later Donald Trump was asked about the Libya comparison and he
seemed to agree with it:
"The model, if you look at that model with Gaddafi, that was a total decimation . We went in
there to beat him. Now that model would take place if we don't make a deal , most likely. But
if we make a deal, I think Kim Jong-un is going to be very, very happy."
We
called that the 'art of the mafia deal': "Sign here or we will kill you." Signing under
threat is something North Korea will never do.
The U.S. media played down Trump's talk as somewhat off-the-cuff. North Korea did not react
to it. The summit train was still on track.
But on May 21 Vice President Pence
revived the issue in an interview with Fox News :
PENCE: We really hope that Kim Jong-un will seize the opportunity to dismantle his nuclear
weapons program and do so by peaceable means. You know, there were some talk about the Libya
model last week. And you know, as the president made clear, you know, this will only end like
the Libya Model ended if Kim Jong-un doesn't make a deal .
MACCALLUM: Some people saw that as a threat.
PENCE: Well, I think it's more of a fact. President Trump made it clear the United States
of America under his leadership is not going to tolerate the regime in North Korea possessing
nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that threaten the United States and our allies. We've
made it clear that we are continuing to bring economic and diplomatic pressure to bear on
North Korea that all options are on the table to achieve that end .
Propaganda System says summit cancelled because of DPRK's "aggressive talk." Well, it's very
clear that all the "aggressive talk" came from the Outlaw US Empire, making Trump's letter a
fraud despite its authenticity.
As for JCPOA, yesterday I provided this link to
Khamenei's "conditions" to EU for Iran to remain within JCPOA. Today, Khamenei has tweeted a
listing of his "Experiences from the #JCPOA for decisions to make today and in the
future" with point #2 being the most important as it goes to the root of the impasse existing
between the Islamic Republic and the Outlaw US Empire.
I am going to disagree with your projected outcome b while thanking you again for such fine
reporting.
I project the reunification of North and South Korea as a result of this latest "throw
America under the bus" move by the plutocrat "Apprentice" Trump.
It is sad to comment that we are watching our species "leadership" battle about who will
be in charge and no time is spent on discussing what sort of future might be best for
humanity..........sigh
This may seem counter-intuitive but the crazies will say that it is more imperative than
ever to stop Iran before they get nuclear armed ICBM's from N. Korea or help N. Korea build
nuclear ICBM's. I've already heard this crazy talk on FOX and the FDD brigades.
Can't wait to hear Sean Hannity bray ... 'appeasement doesn't work, Trump is
Winston Churchill. It's all Bill Clinton's fault.'
Trump suffered two big losses this week: 1) he got rolled by the Chinese in trade
negotiations, and 2) he won't take home a Nobel to Trump Tower.
Trump won a very narrow election because he was going to bring jobs back, and he wasn't
going to fight any stupid wars.
Now he's painted himself into a corner where his only options are war: a trade war with
China or, as jawbone speculates, a jailhouse scenario where Trump targets the weakest
opponent. I think he's cooked.
US/Trump gain several levers in this cancellation.
With the Trade Talks w/China going nowhere, they get to use sanctions hard against China. The
excuse will be North Korea. Banking and commodities moving again to N.K. will be the excuse.
This gains leverage for Trade Talks.
Also, South China Sea, requires the forceful presence of the QUAD navies. To bring them
into SCS and ECS to show Maximum Force to Pyongyang also is leverage against China.
It whips up Japan, India and Australia to a froth against China's naval power.
So, Trump gains useful tools to look like the Hegemon he is.
Parity with Kim was a big problem in Singapore meeting. Trump never wants parity. He
always wants dominance.
One reason why he doesn't want to sit with Putin as equals.
There's always a lot more to any of these "events".
China, Eurasia and Russia are the game for the Hegemon. North Korea is just a sector on
the GO board.
It was clear from the start that the 'Globalist/Deep State' wanted nothing to do with this
summit. The U.S. presence on the Korean Peninsula depends on a permanent state of war.
However the damage may already be done. The U.S. now clarifies its role as being at the
root of the problem, not the solution.
It will be interesting to see if the U.S. will be able to maintain its control over South
Korea, or will South Korea begin to move closer to the Multi-polar World Order.
Red Ryder @ 16: You assume that Trump enjoys Putin-like levels of support domestically. He
does not. Yes, now he can ratchet things up now against China. But eventually the pain must
come home, and the U.S. population has very little capacity to endure pain, and certainly not
on behalf of political leadership engaged in brinkmanship.
Trump is cooked.
Robert Snefjella , May 24, 2018 2:00:27 PM |
22Circe , May 24, 2018 2:17:46 PM |
23
1.How John Bolton Sabotaged The North Korea Talks
Trump is fully responsible for this outcome. Trump hired Bolton and has been
itching to have him on board since day one. Trump put a hawk like Pompeo at State. Trump
thinks he can bully everyone into submission and he used the Libya model to threaten Kim if
he doesn't agree to de-nuclearize. Trump has shown all his full Neocon colors, soliciting
Neocons to boost his poll numbers by declaring Jerusalem capital of Israel and destroying the
JCPOA and then threatening the EU to submit to this disastrous decision, and since his polls
numbers are rising. Trump is a thug and a fraud so quit treating him like he's a man-baby in
baby pants who still doesn't know any better. It's all intentional and was planned from the
start with his Zionist financiers.
2.Giving up its nuclear capabilities would be suicidal as the U.S. will not honor any
security guarantees it might give in exchange. Trump proved such when he canceled the JCPOA
deal with Iran.
Did you think that maybe, just maybe when Trump realized Kim was playing hardball and
would not cower to de-nuclearization; he turned on the fake outrage to postpone, yes postpone
the summit because there would be no way that he could justify giving NK a deal that was more
lenient and weaker than the JCPOA? I've been writing, that upon recognizing that Kim is no
pushover, Trump would find an excuse to save face; a way to slither out of this, so he could
justify the irrational demands being exacted against Iran.
3.The U.S. media played down Trump's talk as somewhat off-the-cuff. North Korea did not
react to it. The summit train was still on track.
NO it wasn't still on track. North Korea had already given the U.S. the shut out and
channels of comm. were cut after Max Thunder military exercises offended and humiliated Kim
who had just recently made the gesture of releasing of releasing 3 U.S. prisoners.
The U.S. was already shut out and NKn officials incommunicado and the WH was keeping this
under wraps. So, to save face, Trump used NKs reaction to the Pence comments to postpone
while he still had a chance to posture strength.
Trump has no clue how to operate in good faith and respect because he's a thug, an
egotistical opportunist and a blowhard and has surrounded himself with Neocon birds of a
feather that he chose deliberately thinking that he could bully Kim into submission and then
claim the Nobel Prize for himself when really all the rapprochement diplomacy was initiated
by Kim around the Olympics and then through subsequent gestures towards Moon.
Trump is getting a well-deserved schooling from young Kim.
It was to be expected. Never trust the US. It is all just a theater, as it was withh Hussein
an Qaddafi and others before them. The Evil Empire will not budge.
The Evil Empire needs a "color revolution", methinks. So we will just fund some outlying
"LEGAL" radical group, :) , free speech and all, you know like the IRA back in the day, just
fund them. They will find they way.
Majority of South Koreans see unified nuclear Korea as strongly stabilizing politically and
militarily factor in the region.
Yes, SK does not trust US that ignores openly returning of Japanese militarism while
Japanese are capable of building 100 nukes in 9-12 months while missiles threatening Koreans
they already have.
Both Koreans want nukes as guarantee that Japanese occupation and Chinese influence will
never happen again.
Of course blinded globalists do not want to see it in DC as much as in Beijing or
Moscow.
Posted by: Den Lille Abe 24
The Evil Empire needs a "color revolution", methinks.
It will never happen. Fifty years ago Uncle Sam learned how to crush all resistance
movements. Here in Uncle Sam Land we are living with the results: a militarized police state
where folks are regularly gunned down for failure to instantly obey police commands. Even
obeying their commands can still result in death.
Police gun down three civilians a day. Every day. Three hundred and sixty-five days a
year. When the police strap on their gun belt at the beginning of each duty shift, they are
confirming their willingness to gun down a civilian on a moment's notice. Not even the
military does that - they train to kill combatants, not civilians. Yes their definition of
"combatant" is very loose, but they still claim most of the dead are "combatants". Not so the
police.
Anything that has even a *hint* of being a potential movement is co-opted or crushed, like
the "Occupy Movement" a few years ago. Instead of a non-violent revolution there will be more
repression, more police murder, and more suffering as the empire continues to decay from the
incompetence, greed, and corruption of Our Dear Leaders.
I'm not sad to be closer to the end of my life than to the beginning. The near-term future
looks to be very, very grim indeed.
The very real possibility of China carrying through on its statement that it would not help N
Korea if it initiated hostilities but would come to N Korea's aid if it was attacked make a
war in Korea unlikely. Israel really wants the US to go to war with Iran. It almost succeeded
in 2006 with Bush junior in office. The realists in the US military know that war with Iran
would be a no-win contest. That doesn't mean it won't happen. However, Hezbollah is still in
Lebanon and Syria has won its war against the jihadis although many more will die before its
over. So unless Israel can manipulate a unilateral US attack on Iran it won't happen in the
near future. When the inevitable next economic downturn happens (which will be worse than
2008 because they really didn't fix anything but just created 10s of trillions of dollars to
kick the can down the road - this coming downturn will be worse) the war needed to keep
control will happen. That leaves Venezuela. It's nearby. It has oil. The Venezuelan military
will be a slam dunk for the US military. I can remember Grenada and Panama.
The public counts for nothing in Hegemonic policy. 17 years of war in Afghanistan is
meaningless to the voter. Trillions missing, 11 T, 20 T. is nothing. They only care about
their wallet, their stomach and today's Latte.
This move was to disrupt Moon's influence, to separate (again and forever) the South and
the North, and to leverage against China.
You can judge American domestic sensibilities as integral to this policy, but I think you
are really off base.
Hegemony is Empire. And the citizens of the Empire enjoy security at all costs. They have
given their privacy to the Deep State, their jobs to Global Liberalism, their children to
drugs (legaliziation is universal) and just want a Latte in the a.m. and the blue pill to get
hard.
Most males are neutered. The Army is Volunteer. They fear nothing but random terror or
psychotic events or false flag violence.
But they could care less if Trump nukes Pyongyang and Teheran in the same day.
Cooked? The enemies of Empire are cooked, and the dolts called voters are cooked.
South Korea has over 20 nuclear reactors and has re-evaluated its nuclear enthusiasm after
the Fukushima catastrophe involving primarily four reactors. Japan has over 50 reactors, most
idle since Fukushima. But these reactors whether operating or not have also left a legacy of
large amounts of highly radioactive materials, for example spent fuel pools.
Japan has attempted to cleanup its contaminated environment, and one of the highly visible
results is tens of millions of large plastic bags containing radioactive material.
Much of the radioactive material from Fukushima ended up in the North Pacific Ocean, and
much has been deposited around Earth. The North Pacific Ocean coincidentally over the last
few years has experienced unprecedented loss of life.
A real war in the region, even without involvement of nuclear weapons, would have the
potential to create a global scale nuclear catastrophe, among other terrible results.
So for this, as well as other reasons, there is an enormous incentive for all the
countries in the area to find peaceful solutions.
The problem is, as often noted, that the US has a war habit, a war dependence, and a war
'belief system'; simultaneously, a declining military and financial Empire to hang onto. They
also have an elite and deep state with deeply pathological characteristics. And they are at a
seeming 'safe' distance from the Koreas etc. So the horrific remains a possibility.
One of the great problems with the 'Russia did it' crazy-dishonest meme, and the Ukraine
coup, is that it is now difficult for the Americans to have any kind of sensible dialogue
with Russia, let alone one that Russia could trust. And by making China into the 'next big
enemy' an adult type dialogue is again made near impossible.
Mike Maloney 17
The US support for foreign wars has dropped a bit. TPTB don't care. If they can't get
support, they'll take a lack of protest. It's boots on the ground that gets attention. And
the media is on board with either keeping things like Libya below the public radar or only
one-sided viewpoints as with Syria.
Circe 23
I tend to agree that it's not Bolton wagging the tail (Trump). But it is back to birds of a
feather. Trump brought him in of his own accord. It's like the way the media portrayed Obama
as being on the fence for wars with the usual suspects (Hillary, Kerry, Power, Rice) pushing
for war. Whether Obama, Bush, or Trump, Harry Truman was right that the "buck stops here"
(the President's desk).
Has anyone considered that this is simple a face-saving exercise from both sides?
As in: both sides have understood that the chasm between them is much too wide to warrant
a top-level summit and, therefore, that meeting should be delayed until there is at least
*some* prospect of something coming from it.
I mean, the idea that Trump can be offended by belligerent rhetoric is, well, it's pretty
outlandish, don't ya' think?
And, after all, despite the "suddenness" of Kim and Moon meeting on the DMZ line, it bears
mention that when Kim did step over the line there was - surprise! surprise! - a pre-prepared
document just waiting for both of them to sign.
As I said earlier in another thread before this one went up, the prevailing emotion that
drove the orange incompetent to tip over the card table and deny the chance of cutting a deal
with North Korea, has nothing to do with paper tiger Bolton's aggression and everything to do
with Trump's lack of spine - cowardice in short.
Last weekend the NYT ran a story
highlighting the chaotic manner that trumpist 'negotiators' aka sunkist fell into when
attempting to do a trade deal with China. This was a 'home' match conducted on amerikan soil
where there could be no problem with screwy communications being intercepted yet still
orangekist failed to present a unified front - chiefly because trump had provided no
leadership about negotiation priorities - how could he? Trump remains ignorant of the nuts
and bolts inner workings of the policy positions that he trumpets should be adopted.
In the middle of high level talks with China the two lead amerikan negotiators have to step
outside for a quick blue. Coats didn't come off but the cursing out of each other could be
heard back in Beijing without any reliance on 'new tech'. What a joke. Now the other side
were free to run a wedge play and get what they needed.
I apolgise to those who cannot get past the nyt paywall, I only lucked in/out because I
never read the f##kin' rag any more.
I was wised up to orange negotiating incompetence by this article Trump
Has No Idea How Diplomatic Deals Work at FPdotcom. In it a former oblamblam era
negotiator outlines the screwups which orangekist idiots make:
Based on these experiences, what was stunning to learn about the China trade negotiations
was how at every step of the way, U.S. President Donald Trump's economic team did precisely
the wrong the thing. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, U.S. Trade Representative Robert
Lighthizer, Director of Trade and Industrial Policy Peter Navarro, Chief Economic Advisor
Larry Kudlow, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross executed a textbook case study in how to
not conduct international negotiations.
yep the writer one Ilan Goldenberg is likely a dem partisan and maybe even a liberal
interventionist zionist to boot, but he/she does set out a cogent set of reason about how
orangekist screwed the pooch listed under three main hedings which detail exactly how
orangekist destroyed any chance of a viable outcome. They are elementary school mistakes in
negotiating but sunkist made them:
Failure to prepare
Leaking sensitive negotiating positions
Circular firing squad
The NYT on the other hand in typical pseudo-intellectual bitchy style it uses concentrates
on the gossip around last week's summit that led to the collapse of negotiation. The NYT
kicked off with:
"On Friday, Mr. Trump's chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, told reporters that China
had offered to reduce its trade surplus with the United States by $200 billion. Two days
later, he said that the number was merely a "rough ballpark estimate," and that the two
countries never expected to reach an agreement and merely planned to issue a statement
laying out next steps.
It was a muddled end to a chaotic process -- one that revealed an American team riven
by conflicts over tactics and policy, working for a president eager for a victory but torn
by his desire to have a smooth summit meeting next month with North Korea, over which China
wields enormous influence."
Yep so what? Given that both these publications are like user manuals for empire, who
reads 'em except as a somewhat amusing way to see the collapse of amerika Inc. Certainly not
me, or most readers at MoA I imagine, but the idjits of pennsylvania ave have lived and died
on the NYT since they first nutured their megalomania. Being taken apart so publically hurt
everyone on the sunkist team sure, but Trump couldn't a flying F*ck bout that. However it
also made him look like a prize goose hanging around the oval office waiting to be
cooked.
trump has become what he claimed to despise - the criticism has cut his fragile persona
and he has now decided only re-election can give him the acceptance and validation to which
he aspires.
Consequently instead of calling in his team and giving them an exact & achievable set of
outcomes, with fallback positions and a workable toolbox of targets, li'l donnie tells the
world he has lost his
balls attempting to conceal his cowardice with the usual trumpian bumptious bluster.
What a mess; both China and the people of North Korea can have a quick laugh up their
sleeves and then get down to factoring trumpian cowardly incompetence into any further
dealings.
Japan's Abe creep will be alternating between anger at the crass stupidity and fear at the
way this issue has suddenly been boiled down to one option - extreme violence, when even old
blind Freddie can see that the amerikans really have no stomach for conflict with a
comparably strong, superior strategically China. Japan will have no choice but go through
'back channels' to cut a deal with China and by proxy North Korea.
A major bulwark has been pulled outta the foundations of empire and replaced with a yellow
belly. hahahha it couldn't have happened to a bigger hatful of arseholes.
This is not about North Korea. It is about controlling China and Russia.
The 'Globalists/Deep State' want regime change in North Korea so that they can put their
military on the N.K./Chinese border. N.K. nuclear capability is just an excuse. For the
'Globalist/Deep State' this summit is the worst news possible.
Russia and China want the U.S. out of East Asia altogether. They have already told the
U.S. that they will not allow the U.S. to attack or take over N.Korea.
I look for the gamesmanship around de-nuclearization to continue. The question is whether
or not Russia/China will be able to shake South Korea loose from U.S. control. I am not sure
that Trump even knows what the real game is.
There will be no U.S. attack on North Korea, for the same reason that they haven't
attacked Syria (beyond token strikes with no follow-up). The U.S. cannot afford to show the
world that it is just a paper tiger, and thus dares not face Russia directly.
The following items are very nearly certain to be correct. The USSA is not going to reach any
direct agreements with N. Korea, since the only card in play is N. Korea removing its nuclear
deterrent, and that card will never be played. (The whole Trump and Kim meeting was doomed
from the start.)
The USSA is most unlikely to attack Iran. The geographic obstacles alone would make it
very cost ineffective, and they also have Russian anti-air. Plus they would destroy the Saudi
oil facilities. Besides, the Chinese would not put up with either of these adventures; all
they would have to do is recall their giant cargo ships and the USSA economy would sink like
a rock.
So that leaves Venezuela. Where might that go? Nobody knows. Brazil would likely be very
unhappy about that. Brazil is probably the third most powerful nuclear power. But the
assholes are fairly likely to go for Venezuela.
@71 "Has anyone considered that this is simple a face-saving exercise from both sides?"
Yes but this is very high stakes poker they are playing. More than just saving face is
involved.
Trump was losing the 'diplomatic game' and his advisors kept reminding him of that. So now he
is looking for a major concession from Kim.
The question is what happens if he doesn't get guaranteed denuclearisation before agreeing to
talks? And it's hard to see that happening.
Yeah probably correct amerika has been pushed off the block and now it can only hide
behind the high walls n locked gate of it's funky and unkempt backyard playing cowboys and
indians with itself.
It would be great if the honest injuns leapt out from behind that rotten orange tree down the
back whooping & waving tomahawks but I just don't see that happening since foggy bottom
has hospitalised injun leaders by dobbing them in to mommy. That gave power back to the slimy
arse kissers of yesteryear. That shift is only temporary but the timing does mean there won't
be much initial push back until the people of Latin America take back what has been
stolen.
Of course JCPOA plays a role here too since europe won't sit on it's hands for a south
american fuck over, but equally they may use that situation as a trading card for their own
agenda...
I get the feeling Trump is like Hitler - he makes his expectations known and then sits back
while all the competing groups within his regime squabble with each other over who does what.
Didn't work too well for Hitler, why does anybody think it'll work any better for Trump.
Otherwise, this is just the neo-con fuckwits like Bolton hammering a few more nails into
the exceptionalist coffin - in a few days or weeks Trump will realize what a threat to
Trump's ambitions Bolton is and sack the cretin.
......If the US cannot hold onto its beach-head in SK, then a future invasion of
China becomes near-impossible .
My goodness such radical dream "future invasions of China become
near-impossible"
Two countries the fucking USA should never invade: One is India and the other China. Why
you might ask? These are two most populated countries. The populations multiples fast and
swallow its invaders. Both arms with nuclear weapons. They were invaded and colonized for
centuries. They learned and moving fast into the next century not as frens but arch rivals.
China unlike India took an aggressive>peaceful dictatorial system while India the
fucking western Democracy . Nevertheless both systems are doom to fail as history had
shown to date. The dictatorial and democracy systems still control by the rich and powerful
Oligarch - sugar coated outside to please its citizens.
I think there was general consensus here beforehand that the US never wanted a summit with
Kim.
But also some had said that North Korea didn't want a meeting either, and I agree strongly
with this. But talking with the US seemed a piece of the necessary protocol that had to be
played out.
So we've seen the round of betting go full circle, and the US checked the bet - and it
could be argued, so did North Korea, since its own actions were not very costly. It's like
the face-saving suggested by commenters, but it's even more than this, it's much more simply
an empty play, a "free round" in the poker parlance. [Explanation of checking the bet , for non-poker
players.]
The protocol has been observed with the US for this round, now the play moves back to the
Koreas. The next round of betting increases the pot. Would this be the peace treaty? I don't
know. One supposes that the US remains in the betting to an extent, but the Koreas will
continue to drive the game. This round has shown all of Asia that the US is not serious. The
day comes closer that China and the UN can sponsor the reunification of the Koreas, and the
US will have to leave.
This game is being run by Korea. As far as I can tell, it proceeds apace.
@65 "If the US cannot hold onto its beach-head in SK, then a future invasion of China becomes
near-impossible. "
It always was an impossibility. But a US military presence all the way up to the Yalu
River is the ultimate prize for the USA, in the same way that pushing NATO up to the very
border of the Russian Federation gives the USA a major strategic advantage.
In both cases it brings the idea of a 1st strike nuclear decapitation into the picture,
and that is just as big a nightmare to Beijing as it is to Moscow.
It is a crazy way to deal with other nuclear powers, but that's modern-day America for
you.....
"... " . . . Nevertheless, their work is done. The poison seeds of their lies have been planted in millions of unquestioning U.S. brains, from the high and mighty to the average consumer of "news" and will continue to sprout and spread. More lies are needed to cover up the first lies and on and on and on it goes. . ." ..."
"... A lot of accusations that are not backed up by any evidence ..."
"... " personally i blame clinton" Personally I blame AIPAC, BIS, and the Shadow Masters Clinton is just another scapegoat-puppet. ..."
"... It was British Intelligence which first sounded the alarm wrt pre-candidate Trump due to his stated intention to establish a positive relationship with Putin and Russia, thus overturning the basis for the entire post-war paradigm based on the division of the world into East and West. ..."
"... In my view, the purpose of the congress authorized investigation is not to impeach POTUS. That would provide a precedent that neither the democrats, nor the republican would accept. Instead, the investigation is intended to discredit the president and by proxy, the republicans for the upcoming elections. ..."
Since day one, I felt the entire Russia-gate fiasco was horse excrement. It just never
passed the smell test. My suspicions were confirmed day by day as Mueller came up with
nothing. To my amazement, the MSM pushed the story to the limit with no objectivity, agenda
driven, politically motivated, journalistic suicide. They've shown themselves as the
propaganda outlets they always were, but we were loath to admit.
Robert Emmett , May 19, 2018 at 8:43 am
"They misled their readers, they made fools of themselves, and they committed a crime
against journalism. And now they're trying to dodge the blame."
That may well be. And Robert Parry meticulously documented such a case. Nevertheless,
their work is done. The poison seeds of their lies have been planted in millions of
unquestioning U.S. brains, from the high and mighty to the average consumer of "news" and
will continue to sprout and spread. More lies are needed to cover up the first lies and on
and on and on it goes. That's the nature of a infectious culture of lies. The cultured medium
explodes, escapes the lab and runs rampant, leaving those who initiated the whole mess to
scramble in a mad attempt to "save face". It wouldn't surprise me if the H-ill-re eventually
becomes the first, and last, U.S. woman CEO to drop the big one. If you sometimes hear a
faint glug-glug-glug pulsing in your ears, that's the sound of U.S. circling the drain.
mike k , May 19, 2018 at 10:03 am
Very well stated Robert. I like the virus metaphor for propaganda. It's like gossip --
spreading, infecting the gullible with lies .
Rob , May 19, 2018 at 1:51 pm
Excellent point. As you say, their work is done. The Russiagate meme is now firmly
implanted in the minds of tens of millions of Americans, and nothing short of a public
confession by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton that they fabricated the story and
fanned the flames in the media will dislodge it. I cannot envision any other means of killing
this particular virus. All contrary facts and logic will be brushed aside as fake news
created by Russian agents or stooges.
Dave P. , May 19, 2018 at 2:26 pm
Robert Emmet,
" . . . Nevertheless, their work is done. The poison seeds of their lies have been
planted in millions of unquestioning U.S. brains, from the high and mighty to the average
consumer of "news" and will continue to sprout and spread. More lies are needed to cover up
the first lies and on and on and on it goes. . ."
Yes. You have summarized it very well. That is how it is in our home too. My wife had been
listening to this for some time, Russia, Russia, Russia, and Putin , Putin, evil Putin
destroying our democracy, and so on on TV and in Newspapers, that it has gone into the
subconscious now. And I read that they, the Ruling Power Structures have done the same to
people in Western Europe too.
j. D. D. , May 19, 2018 at 7:54 am
While many of the particulars are correct regaring the paucity of evidence against
associates of the President, the author misses two key points, upon which the entire Mueller
coup operation rests. First, that the campaign against Trump started not in the Clinton
campaign or anywhere related, but rather in London with British intelligence, as the Guardian
itself has boasted. Not only did MI6's Steele prepare the document that formed the basis of
the allegations of "collusion" but it is well known that GCHQ's Hannigan met personally with
Brennan in the summer of 2016 to sound the alarm with a "not yet with it" US intel community.
Second, the basis of the investigation itself hinges on the alleged "hacking" of the
Clinton/DNC emailswhich showed her to be a craven puppet of Wall Street, released just prior
to the Democratic Convention. That entire scenario, that the source of the infamous emails
were a result of "Russian hacking," was conclusively and repeatedly demolished on this
website by fomer top NSA analyst William Binney, and his cohorts at the Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
mike k , May 19, 2018 at 10:07 am
The Clinton campaign paid Steele to do his thing. Their operation against Trump began the
day after his surprise victory.
backwardsevolution , May 19, 2018 at 9:16 pm
Their operation began long before Trump's victory. It began in earnest just a few days
after Hillary Clinton was wrongfully exonerated, way back in July of 2016.
voza0db , May 19, 2018 at 6:29 am
The funniest part of all this nonsense is that the democrats are going to keep this
Illusion of RUSSIAGATE alive until the next elections!
So after the next loss in the upcoming elections we all know who to blame for another
democratic loss, right?!
RnM , May 19, 2018 at 3:34 am
You paint a nearly hopeless picture, Mike.
Let us all trust that Mr. Trump, who, despite the intentions of the Totalitarians outed in
Daniel Lazare's fine summary article, is the DULY ELECTED POTUS (by the common folk -- no one
has made a serious demonstration of vote counting fraud, from my recollections), continues in
office.
The American Experiment (in enlightened governance of, by, and for the governed) is in grave
jeopardy. The enemy of the Enlightenment's fine accomplishment is Monotheism, which is the
philosophical parent of Monarchy, which is the civic governing manifestation of said
religious thought patterns.
Sam F , May 19, 2018 at 8:52 am
I'll suggest that the "American Experiment" is threatened by money power, more than
religion, although many fundamentalists are deluded to support zionism. Religion is a problem
where it rationalizes simplistic political views, but the root causes are ignorance and
selfishness. Monotheism is not really the problem now that there are few monarchies. The
Enlightenment, and enlightenment of individuals, has many enemies.
mike k , May 19, 2018 at 10:12 am
The enemies of good government are the greedy and powerful oligarchs who hate democracy,
and do everything to distort and destroy it. No need to drag monotheism into it.
RnM , May 19, 2018 at 4:25 pm
My career was spent working with local rural politics. Good governance is by far imperiled
by corrupt locals on the take.
Also, Stalin did his purging by setting up secret local committees of three, who fed him
names through a beaurocratic pipeline. The Big Guy gets the blame (or credit), but the little
fellas do the dirty work.
Sam F , May 20, 2018 at 4:21 pm
You are very right about local government corruption, which may have factions based upon
tribal loyalties, but is caused by poor moral standards throughout our society. Most local
officials are elected with little or no public knowledge of who they are, and as a result are
mere low-end power-seekers who will abuse whatever power they can get.
David G , May 19, 2018 at 2:50 am
"[The NY Times] article fails to mention that at the time the conversation with the
Australian ambassador took place, the Clinton communications in the news were the 30,000
State Department emails that she had improperly stored on her private computer. Instead of
spilling the beans about a data breach yet to come, it's more likely that Papadopoulos was
referring to emails that were already in the news -- a possibility the Times fails to
discuss."
I've been shouting just this at my TV set (oddly, to little effect). And the same goes for
other allegedly damning references to "Clinton emails" in connection with the infamous Trump
Tower meeting and probably elsewhere.
But unfortunately, there are many people who don't care about evidence and rational
inquiry, and they prefer believing in evidencefree conspiracy theories that match their
prejudices. One accusation that is not backed up by any evidence is used to making other
accusations that are not based on evidence look more likely.
voza0db , May 19, 2018 at 6:49 am
:lol: " A lot of accusations that are not backed up by any evidence " the good
old PROPAGANDA ! It's alive and kicking
voza0db , May 19, 2018 at 6:47 am
Russia is in fact the only REAL EMPIRE in this world!
They hack and manipulate everything and everyone
Anna , May 19, 2018 at 8:26 am
Have you checked the number of US overseas military bases recently?
Do you know why the US Congress is called "Israel-occupied territory?"
Don't you love -- love! -- MSM.
voza0db , May 19, 2018 at 3:35 pm
Hello Anna!
I know that my written sarcasm is very bad sorry about that! And yes I do love MainShitMedia! Their the best.
Sam F , May 19, 2018 at 7:08 am
Try defining "hacking an election." The term pretends that a few techies tampered
machines.
In the US the election machine makers do that, no doubt, but not likely elsewhere. The US has a very long history of manipulating elections throughout the world and in the
US.
Even while it pretends to be "promoting democracy" it is installing dictators and faking
elections.
The ultimate election hack is allowing big money to control mass media and political
campaigns, as in the US.
Only when we restrict funding of mass media and elections to limited contributions will we
restore democracy.
Realist , May 20, 2018 at 4:21 am
Washington and its media tools have hacked this guy's brain is what it amounts to.
They could tell the American public anything and have it believed, like, for instance,
that the ideal gas law does not apply to inflated footballs in cold weather.
Realist , May 21, 2018 at 3:32 am
Correction: All your unfounded assertions are bogus. Just read this one simple piece that just came out for the accurate course of events.
While I am fully on board with rubbishing Russia-gate as malignant nonsense, I do think it
may be a mistake to rely too much on there turning out to be no nefarious nexus between Trump
and Russia.
In Trump we have someone devoid of knowledge, sense, or character, an almost altogether
wrong guy -- very much including his views on U.S. foreign policy -- who for some reason has
a positive and constructive attitude toward Russia and Putin (though, of course, he has
mostly gone along with the anti-Russia Beltway consensus in his actions as president when
pressured).
It's possibly it's just an isolated, unexplained instance of Trumpian sanity, but to me
it's at least as likely to be the result of greed or fear, based on some grubby link to
Russia that is as yet undisclosed.
J. Decker , May 19, 2018 at 7:43 am
"who for some reason has a positive and constructive attitude toward Russia and
Putin".
Maybe the reason is that Putin is one of history's penultimate statesman who presents the
strongest opposition to the global war/banking beast and last bastion of hope? Time
magazine's Most Powerful Man of the Year (or something like that as I wouldn't be caught dead
reading it.
So does that make Trump a puppet for Russia or a keen observer?
David G , May 19, 2018 at 11:54 am
Do you think Cheeto Dust really capable of appreciating Putin for the reasons you
cite?
"Keen" isn't a word that springs to my mind when I think of Trump.
backwardsevolution , May 20, 2018 at 2:32 am
David G -- maybe you need to oil your springs. When you're trying to navigate your way
through the swamp, you tend to notice capable players who are doing it and admire them for
it.
Anna , May 19, 2018 at 8:28 am
Let's begin with Uranium One and the $500.000 fee for a half-hour speech by Bill.
Mike From Jersey , May 19, 2018 at 1:59 pm
I am also a Green voter. When the choice became Hillary vs Donald that -- for me -- was
the last straw. I de-registered as a Democrat and registered as a Green.
Skip Scott , May 21, 2018 at 7:32 am
Good for you Mike. I refuse to be a part of the "lesser of two evils" gambit any longer.
Let's hope we can build a movement.
andrew , May 18, 2018 at 10:40 pm
the core accusations are
1. that the russians hacked the dnc, there is no evidence and no basis for this accusation.
none.
2. that the russians spread a deadly fake news virus that was incredibly damaging to
hillary's campaign. there is no evidence of this and it is a completely ridiculous idea if
one just stops for a moment to contemplate the astronomical amount of fake news available at
all times on the internet and television. what was the fake news lie that was so supremely
effective? nobody knows. there wasn't one. there was for hillary unfortunately a real news
truth about the dnc released by wikileaks but that was not from russians or a lie.
3. that the russians hacked the election. again absolutely no proof or evidence of this has
been offered.
it is in fact a political witch hunt that has been incredibly destructive. it has
distracted energy and attention away from real things that have happened. it has instigated
proxy warfare with russia in syria. it has discredited journalism. it has made an honest man
out of trump.
personally i blame clinton. this mendacious , self defeating , and bizarre ruse is so in
keeping with so many of her and bill's greatest hits. these two people continue to damage the
progressive movement . they won't go away it would seem. i hope after russiagate sputters to
a stop the clintons will finally be finished.
David G , May 19, 2018 at 1:59 am
well said, andrew
RnM , May 19, 2018 at 4:37 am
A Witch Hunt, alright! Not FOR a witch, but BY a witch.
J. Decker , May 19, 2018 at 7:51 am
" personally i blame clinton"
Personally I blame AIPAC, BIS, and the Shadow Masters Clinton is just another
scapegoat-puppet.
j. D. D. , May 19, 2018 at 11:41 am
Yes, all true but you fail to identify the cause, which goes well beyond naming Russia as
an excuse for Hillary's defeat. It was British Intelligence which first sounded the alarm wrt
pre-candidate Trump due to his stated intention to establish a positive relationship with
Putin and Russia, thus overturning the basis for the entire post-war paradigm based on the
division of the world into East and West.
Jeff , May 19, 2018 at 11:59 am
Thanx, Andrew. You wrote the comment I was going to write. I do, however, have one nit.
Russia-gate has not made an honest man out of Trump. Nothing could make an honest man out of
Trump. He is nothing but an incompetent con artist whose real skill was getting people to
lend him money after he had blown it all on bad deals and lousy management. I personally
suspect that the connection between Trump and Russia is not with the Russian government but
with the Russian oligarchs who are laundering their ill-gotten gains looting Russian state
enterprises through Trump.
mike k , May 18, 2018 at 10:28 pm
The slimy rats always indulge in phony alibis for their criminal tricks. They should be
investigated and charged with falsely accusing an elected President, in order to unseat him.
Anyone who votes for a "democrat" in the future is just a simple clueless idiot. Trump is a
horrible President, but this does not justify the criminal conspiracy to unseat him through
slander and innuendo lacking any evidence whatever. The appointment of a "special council"
was meant to change the result of the presidential election, and nothing else.
mike k , May 18, 2018 at 10:32 pm
If Trump were to be impeached on the basis of this phony witch hunt, it would be the end
of whatever semblance we have of a democracy forever. The whole affair reminds me of the
criminal removal of the President of Brazil recently.
Al Pinto , May 19, 2018 at 11:01 am
In my view, the purpose of the congress authorized investigation is not to impeach POTUS.
That would provide a precedent that neither the democrats, nor the republican would accept.
Instead, the investigation is intended to discredit the president and by proxy, the
republicans for the upcoming elections.
The results of the investigations, actual and/or
fabricated, will be invaluable campaign material for the democrats. Especially with the help
of the main stream media, it's going to very effective headlines to grab the limited
attention that most people in the US have for politics
Sam F , May 18, 2018 at 10:10 pm
The Russia-gate hysteria worked fine as a distraction from Israel-gate.
All of Hillary's top ten donors were zionists, and Trump appointed Goldman Sachs to run the
economy.
Not that KSA, the MIC, or WallSt et al lost any bribery chances.
Russia-gate also pressured Trump into the zionist camp. Just what Israel ordered.
Of course the US mass media are almost entirely owned by zionists.
Mission accomplished; time to backtrack; we never really said that.
"... Back in 1973 there was a feeling of inevitability as the Watergate investigation progressed, every week more incriminating details that we know now came from inside the FBI. The Mueller probe, on the contrary, seems to be stumbling forward and not really getting anywhere as it goes fishing for info and issues like Stormy's accusations take over the news. ..."
"... Joe -- Russiagate was made up, fashioned out of nothing. If we want to talk about collusion, we need to talk about Uranium One. Now there's where some serious money changed hands, and the Clinton's hands are all over it. ..."
"... I think RussiaGate was invented also. I also think it's pretty obvious that Hillary gets a free get out of jail card when it comes to any FBI investigation over her. I also believe that if Trump were in cahoots with Putin, that Mueller by now would have revealed it, as Democrates would be whooping it up better than a homeless person hitting the super multi-million dollar lotto. ..."
"... The Empire is falling, and the Empire is blaming all it's idiotic decisions on the Russians. Our MSM which was always a subject of debate, has gone off the rails with this 24/7 anti-Trump, anti-Russian, news business. I'm suffering from all this hate aimed at Russia, and I'm believing that our MSM is winning on that front. Like I said, both Hillary and Donald's past practices may need investigated, but when will we Americans start discussing the many other issues of our day, is all I'm asking? ..."
"... No backwardsevolution the Empire is in trouble, and we are watching it make an ass out of itself while it goes down the drain. I'm sorry at this point in time I don't see any good guys, or gals. ..."
It also seems that Yahoo also has the total (if not enthusiastic) support of Putin these
days. Pretty tough to buck Israel and achieve peace in the Middle East when it has the full
support of both the American Zionist oligarchs and the Russian Zionist oligarchs (who harbor
most of their wealth in the West and represent the Atlanticist faction in Russia, in other
words play for team USA) who probably comprise the largest and most influential power
factions in both countries. No wonder AIPAC is the most powerful lobby whose existence is
vehemently denied. If it comes to pass, World War III may essentially be fought because of
perceived grievances by thin-skinned megalomaniacs like Adelson and Browder and their ability
to wrap politicians around their pinkies using their billions in wealth. I think the Russians
especially dislike being played by con-men like Browder, who gets full support from the
bought-off American Congress.
Excellent in the facts and your conclusions. It is difficult to imagine what you have done
in so few words -- summarize so clearly what became a maze of groundless speculation early on
only to end as major byzantine monument to almost nothing but empty accusation, political
invective, widespread loose talk and media posturing/gossiping. You described, in the end, a
failed circus of second-rate illusions.
Mike From Jersey , May 19, 2018 at 10:07 am
The Times used to be a credible source of information. Now, I won't even read Times
article unless it is on an issue in which I am very well versed. I simply don't want to be
propagandized. And when I read an article in a matter in which I am well versed, I am often
outraged at the slants and selective omissions.
Joe Tedesky , May 19, 2018 at 9:22 am
I have come to the conclusion that they are all bad, and that this constant pounding of
Russia interference in our American political establishments is nonsense.
Whether it be Russia-Gate or Uranium One scandals, it always leads back to Russian
collusion, or how Putin is hell bent on subverting American democracy. It's like the word
come down from a Bilderberg high echelon get together where the supreme elite said, 'now you
political puppies go fight amongst yourselves but remember Putin is our target'. After all
Putin's handling of the Rothschild oligarchs is enough to get even the most least powerful
leaders into hot water, let a lone the world's other nuclear super power. So Putin must
go.
So while Palestinians this week died protesting their confinement, N Korea was insulted
away from the negotiating table over a Gaddafi inspired threat, as Europeans looked for
another currency to replace the U.S. Dollar, our American news media gave little time to
those news stories, as it stayed stuck on Russia-Gate, or as FOX is attempting to do with
their trying to launch a Hillary investigation into her poor use of computer servers added to
her selling off uranium stock, we Americans are isolated by what really should matter. Please
keep your eyes on the center ring, for what's around it doesn't matter, is the mantra.
What I'm saying, is that these scandals are in house fights, and that the MSM's
circumventing of any real news, is just another way to dumb us Americans down. Not to say
that investigating political chicanery isn't a priority, but should these investigations be
so overwhelmingly reported over any or all other news? If you answered no to that, then
should we next begin to wonder to what we are not being told, is exactly the very news we
should be talking about?
Back in 1973 there was a feeling of inevitability as the Watergate investigation
progressed, every week more incriminating details that we know now came from inside the FBI.
The Mueller probe, on the contrary, seems to be stumbling forward and not really getting
anywhere as it goes fishing for info and issues like Stormy's accusations take over the news.
It's possible, I suppose, that Mueller will come up with something before November, but
there's no sense of inevitability. How could there be? Sixty three American citizens voted
for Trump. Bad news for the country, bad news for Clinton, bad news for the MSM, bad news for
the Deep State. Ironies abound.
Joe Tedesky , May 19, 2018 at 2:58 pm
The one comparison between 1973 and 2018, is that they have the exact same calendar dates.
In my mind, the only thing WaterGate has in common with Russia-Gate is that the MSM likes to
say that the two scandals are the same. And why not, when you are huckstering the news to
sell insurance and pharmaceutical commercials?
WaterGate was of course a break in, and finding Nixon's involvement was key. Russia-Gate
wasn't a break in, and as Mueller's Investigation is struggling to find Russian collusion,
Mueller gives the impression that he's on to something, when eventually we find out he has
nothing. I mean the WaterGate investigation started out with the knowledge that there was a
break in, but the Russia-Gate investigation began with lots of allegations with no proof to
be found. WaterGate didn't, at least in my opinion, start out as a fishing expedition, but
the Russia-Gate Investigation was not only a fishing expedition in as much as it has been a
deep sea fishing trip at its best.
You pointed out the voter support of Trump phillip but might I reference you to the many
who didn't vote, or at least the bunches of voters who left the presidential pick a blank?
America is broken phillip, every institution and every agency which operates inside of it is
too. In my estimation to make it right we Americans will need to go back to starting from
scratch. Let it begin!
backwardsevolution , May 19, 2018 at 8:05 pm
Joe -- Russiagate was made up, fashioned out of nothing. If we want to talk about
collusion, we need to talk about Uranium One. Now there's where some serious money changed
hands, and the Clinton's hands are all over it.
What is comparable to Watergate, but a hundred times worse, is what is trickling out now
and what the media have gone out of their way to cover up -- the plot by James Comey and
other members of the FBI, John Brennan and others in the CIA, Clapper, the Department of
Justice (Rod Rosenstein, Sally Yates, Loretta Lynch, Hillary Clinton) to overthrow a
duly-elected President.
The Inspector General's report on the FBI and the Department of Justice's role in all of
this is apparently damning. Some of these people may end up in jail.
I think Russiagate was invented because, as Hillary said, "If they find out what we've
done, we'll all hang." She was trading favors with foreign governments in exchange for cash
into the Clinton Foundation. That's why she was using a private server. She didn't want to
use the government servers as they would have a back-up of her files, and when you're intent
on stealing, the last thing you want is a "back-up" of your dirty dealings.
All of this Russiagate insanity has been one great big deflection away from the true
crimes.
It looks like all of them are going to have a date with a Grand Jury.
Joe Tedesky , May 19, 2018 at 9:03 pm
I think RussiaGate was invented also. I also think it's pretty obvious that Hillary gets a
free get out of jail card when it comes to any FBI investigation over her. I also believe
that if Trump were in cahoots with Putin, that Mueller by now would have revealed it, as
Democrates would be whooping it up better than a homeless person hitting the super
multi-million dollar lotto.
The Empire is falling, and the Empire is blaming all it's idiotic decisions on the
Russians. Our MSM which was always a subject of debate, has gone off the rails with this 24/7
anti-Trump, anti-Russian, news business. I'm suffering from all this hate aimed at Russia,
and I'm believing that our MSM is winning on that front. Like I said, both Hillary and
Donald's past practices may need investigated, but when will we Americans start discussing
the many other issues of our day, is all I'm asking?
I'm tired of the constant insinuating that Trump is a Putin puppet, as I'm also
experiencing fatigue over Hillary's being continually left off the hook. Although even more
so, I'm sick of all of them, I'm just venting over our sad state of us citizens being well
informed.
Good to hear from you backwardsevolution. Joe
backwardsevolution , May 19, 2018 at 9:48 pm
Joe Tedesky -- "Like I said, both Hillary and Donald's past practices may need
investigated, but when will we Americans start discussing the many other issues of our day,
is all I'm asking?"
Yes, you are so right, Joe, because those other issues are what the average American
really cares about: the price of health care and housing, and whether they're going to be
able to put food on the table.
Of course, had Donald Trump been colluding with the Russians, that certainly would have
been of importance to the country, but they've been looking under every rock for almost two
years now and haven't found anything. Well, Stormy Daniels did pop up, but, hey, Trump never
professed to be an angel. All they've done is tied him up in knots and prevented him from
dealing with the important issues. They have also left far too many Americans with the
impression that he's a traitor when he's not, and by holding these charges above his head,
they've probably pushed him into doing things that he wouldn't ordinarily have done.
If what I'm hearing about the Inspector General's report is anything close to the truth,
then these people (the Deep State people I mentioned above) tried to overthrow a sitting
President. These people are running a parallel government. That is very dangerous and will
have to be dealt with severely, with criminal charges.
Hey, Joe, on that happy note, you have a good night.
Joe Tedesky , May 19, 2018 at 10:37 pm
I'm suffering from RussiaGate fatigue, like I said. I never bought into the Russian
collusion thing. I'm more bothered by the forever nonsense the MSM has us on, where there is
no closure. I mean you sit and listen to people like Rachel go through their hysterics and
after 20 minutes per monologue she gives you nothing.
The Hillary crimes are frustrating because nothing comes of her getting to meet the hard
justice she deserves. Seriously this evil witch starts a civil war withinside of our
governments bureaucracy, and yet no one hears that much about it the way it's going down. On
the other hand Donald Trump for mostly the bad of it, gets news coverage beyond what any
America politician ever gets, and we're suppose to believe we are operating on normal.
No backwardsevolution the Empire is in trouble, and we are watching it make an ass out of
itself while it goes down the drain. I'm sorry at this point in time I don't see any good
guys, or gals.
I might add Trump's Middle East policies among his other hard nosed geopolitical endeavors
leaves me exhausted trying to figure him out. Hillary should no doubt be in jail, but here we
are still on the down low and nothing seems to be working as it should.
Thanks, I do value your opinion. Joe
backwardsevolution , May 19, 2018 at 11:38 pm
Joe Tedesky -- "I'm sorry at this point in time I don't see any good guys, or gals."
Yes, I agree. One good thing about Trump's presidency is that it has exposed the Deep
State actors. These are the people who run the government, not the President, and it doesn't
matter who is elected. If you don't play along, you're Kennedy'd! That's why so few good
people ever vie for top positions; you get hammered.
Joe, the World Cup is coming and all is well! I'm going to knock off, watch some old
videos, and get myself psyched up. Good talking to you, Joe, as always.
Realist , May 20, 2018 at 4:06 am
Watergate was focussed. Iran-Contra was focussed. Underlings were convicted in both on
charges directly related to the main issues. Nixon resigned and Reagan retired, the Congress
not having the will to impeach him, which would have been politically unpopular.
"Out-of-the-loop" Bushdaddy saved himself from later impeachment by pardoning some key
cabinet members under Reagan (most notably Caspar Weinberger). In contrast, Whitewater
blossomed into a full-blown fishing expedition, as has so-called Russiagate. Ken Starr didn't
just investigate a land deal or management of the White House travel office, but went over
the lives of both Clinton's with a fine tooth comb, eventually precipitating impeachment
charges over a stained blue dress. Now, I suppose, the Clinton's and their Democratic
adherents feel that turnabout is fair play, though it is undoubtedly just as divisive and
destructive to the country as their go round. The woman has obviously been traumatized during
her years in the public arena and in the aftermath of the election, but she does the country
a great disservice by pushing her vendetta.
Joe Tedesky , May 20, 2018 at 9:09 am
The Clinton pass was always going to be a problem, and many people knew that going into
the 2016 Presidential Election Campaign. This didn't stop Hillary though. Why, many here on
this comment board wrote with good reason why the Clintons should remain in retirement, but
oh no Hillary was going to run come hell or high water. Only a sociopath would overlook so
many good reasons of why not to run.
Great perspective Realist. One would think you had a scientific mind . oh wait you do.
Joe
As I'm sure others commenters on this site will note, those guilty of trying to create a
lynch mob and encourage hysteria, will as with Iraq WMD's, emerge unscathed, even more
honored for their service to America. And with and increasing number of Americans, we will
feel more and more that you cant believe anything anymore and that is a disastrous position
to be in for a nation.
mike k , May 19, 2018 at 9:59 am
Herman, it has always been a mistake to rely on belief without careful examination. Plato
said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Discerning the truth is intellectual work
-- something our false educational system does not teach us to do. Those who learn to sort
things out and demand the real truth are mostly self-educated. To wake others up who have
been taught to conform and accept authorities, is a lengthy and often thankless task. The
tenacity with which many hold onto their false beliefs, is a formidable obstacle to creating
a new and better society. I wish I knew a way to accomplish this awakening of our fellows,
but I do not. We are left with the option of shortcuts, which are no better than new forms of
propaganda to compete with those our subjects have already incorporated in their thinking and
character. Following a new leader or movement seems the most one can expect from our
brainwashed brothers and sisters
"... In the case of the fabricated Russia Gate narrative the results of the Trump election and widespread public distrust of the election process was turned into a new cold war with Russia which benefited major defense contractors and resulted in sanctions against Russia and huge windfalls for the Military Industrial Complex as the US ponied up to fund our national defense industry. ..."
"... We should by now be educated that major failures of our economy and political processes precipitated by government deregulation or corrupted elections will be used by the main stream media to create fictional enemies of our nation to turn public anger into a public movement to blame a target of opportunity which will benefit the wealth and power structures which is based on fiction and contrived plots to benefit the very powerful and wealthy organizations such as big banks and the military. ..."
"... The root cause of this is that they (the MSM) own the microphone. They have the ability to lie without rebuttal because they own that single megaphone to tell lies. They have the ability to create fictions and fantasies which go unchallenged because they own the megaphone. ..."
"... From our history: The creation of the Tea Party was a watershed moment where the big banks turned their bailout by the US government into a political movement which was manufactured by the press as a new and never heard about new political party (The Tea Party) into a political movement aimed to grant the big banks and wealthy Americans tax breaks which resulted in a 3.5 trillion bailout we are now on the hook for. ..."
"... How many news corporations supported the lies about WMDs and Iraq's secret stockpiles of Uranium and chemical weapons? The NY Times and the Washington Post were among the most fervent supporters of those lies and they have never acknowledged their errors. ..."
"... So it is with the Trump administration and the media's aim to turn our attention away from the real reasons our election system is corrupted by dark money by creating fake facts to convince us that Russia is a war monger which stole the election and must be countered by more massive military spending and a renewal of the old Cold War. ..."
"... The NY Times got it wrong in Iraq. They got it wrong in Ukraine. They got it wrong in the last election. They got it wrong on savings and loan deregulation under Reagan. They got it wrong on banking deregulation under Clinton. They got it wrong with Russia Gate. They have gotten it wrong so many times that the statement "they got it wrong" is a testament of their ability to fool us all. ..."
"... Yes, I continually read that the government was "in error", they "didn't understand", or "their models were incorrect". Yeah, sure, whatever you say. ..."
"... It's all just one big "Fleece the Sheep" game, except they can't let the sheep know they're being fleeced. Errors and omissions are all part of the game, and the media act to call the sheep to the starting line. ..."
"... Dan if Robert Blum had had his way the CIA would have been privately funded by secret donations. CIA got caught laundering money in the middle to late 60″s and as always CIA makes investigations go away. A recount of the episode can be found in Jane Mayers book Dark Money. The CIA wrote the book on laundering money. Then the ICIJ and the Paradise Papers expose how large the off shore industry is. ..."
"... I was convinced that Russiagate was a complete fabrication after reading the following penned by Caitling Johnstone:" this administration has already killed Russians in Syria, greatly escalated nuclear tensions with Russia, allowed the sale of arms to Ukraine, established a permanent military presence in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, forced RT and Sputnik to register as foreign agents, expanded NATO with the addition of Montenegro, assigned Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine, shut down a Russian consulate in San Francisco and expelled Russian diplomats " ..."
"... Trump is a thug and a money laundering crook, not a machievelian plotter. His total ignorance of world politics is dangerously leading us to armagedden. ..."
The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which
was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain
more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy.
In the case of the fabricated Russia Gate narrative the results of the Trump election and widespread public distrust of the election
process was turned into a new cold war with Russia which benefited major defense contractors and resulted in sanctions against Russia
and huge windfalls for the Military Industrial Complex as the US ponied up to fund our national defense industry.
We should by now be educated that major failures of our economy and political processes precipitated by government deregulation
or corrupted elections will be used by the main stream media to create fictional enemies of our nation to turn public anger into
a public movement to blame a target of opportunity which will benefit the wealth and power structures which is based on fiction and
contrived plots to benefit the very powerful and wealthy organizations such as big banks and the military.
Trump won because the media cleaned up big time by playing the Super PACs for suckers just as deregulation of the big banks enabled
them to clean up by merging savings banks with investment banks which moved all the savings banks deposits into risky investments.
There is a clear and present danger born out and evidenced by former economic collapses that the media and the big financial institutions
will create public relations campaigns based on the mantra of deregulation to swindle Americans even further. They have a proven
ability to use their power to persuade Americans that some other reason is responsible for the latest swindle.
The root cause of this is that they (the MSM) own the microphone. They have the ability to lie without rebuttal because they own
that single megaphone to tell lies. They have the ability to create fictions and fantasies which go unchallenged because they own
the megaphone.
From our history: The creation of the Tea Party was a watershed moment where the big banks turned their bailout by the US government
into a political movement which was manufactured by the press as a new and never heard about new political party (The Tea Party)
into a political movement aimed to grant the big banks and wealthy Americans tax breaks which resulted in a 3.5 trillion bailout
we are now on the hook for.
How many media/news organizations signed onto the Tea Party after the implosion of the banking industry and beat the drums to
grant tax breaks for billionaires? All of them.
How many of the media corporations beat the drums to blame Russia for the election results which resulted in sanctions against
Russia and a new Cold War with Russia which resulted in windfall profits for the defense industry? All of them.
How many news corporations supported the lies about WMDs and Iraq's secret stockpiles of Uranium and chemical weapons? The NY
Times and the Washington Post were among the most fervent supporters of those lies and they have never acknowledged their errors.
The facts are clear in all of these major failures of our free press to get it right. In every case the media have conspired to
fool most of the people into believing the lies of the government and the financial sectors published by main stream press as facts
which are giant falsehoods.
The result of this collaboration between the press and the wealth in our nation has been to deceive us and to lead us down paths
that twist our understanding to a new understanding that benefits the wealthy in times of prosperity and in times of crisis.
So it is with the Trump administration and the media's aim to turn our attention away from the real reasons our election system
is corrupted by dark money by creating fake facts to convince us that Russia is a war monger which stole the election and must be
countered by more massive military spending and a renewal of the old Cold War.
The NY Times got it wrong in Iraq. They got it wrong in Ukraine. They got it wrong in the last election. They got it wrong on
savings and loan deregulation under Reagan. They got it wrong on banking deregulation under Clinton. They got it wrong with Russia
Gate. They have gotten it wrong so many times that the statement "they got it wrong" is a testament of their ability to fool us all.
CitizenOne – "'They got it wrong' is a testament of their ability to fool us."
Yes, I continually read that the government was "in error", they "didn't understand", or "their models were incorrect". Yeah,
sure, whatever you say. They can't come out and inform us that they lied from the get-go because that would prove intent to deceive,
so they cover up their tracks by saying they made an "error" whenever things fall apart, as they knew they would.
It's all just one big "Fleece the Sheep" game, except they can't let the sheep know they're being fleeced. Errors and omissions
are all part of the game, and the media act to call the sheep to the starting line.
Dave P. , May 20, 2018 at 11:49 pm
Citizen One – Excellent post. Very informed comments indeed.
Skip Scott , May 21, 2018 at 7:15 am
Citizen One-
Great post. It reminded me of a joke I saw the other day:
"A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there
is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier and says, "look out
for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."
munchma quchi , May 19, 2018 at 11:51 pm
re: "Without offering a shred of evidence, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a
formal assessment on Jan. 6, 2017, that "Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election [in
order] to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential
presidency." The "assessment" contains this disclaimer: " [You (the author) did not include a disclaimer. please remedy this.]
F. G. Sanford , May 20, 2018 at 9:39 am
Ms. Quchi,
I think the disclaimer said that intelligence assessments are based on sources, methods and interpretations and rely on raw data.
It's raw, so it has to be properly marinated until it's fit for consumption. Addenda to the disclaimer indicate that the Intelligence
Community will not accept outrageous conspiracy theories, noting specifically that, "They hate us for our freedom, and those weapons
of mass destruction must be here somewhere." It's the standard "release from liability" which accompanies all official narratives.
Kinda like eating tuna fish: It's pretty good once you get past the smell.
Chet Roman , May 20, 2018 at 11:35 am
Page 13 of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017
explains: "High confidence does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong. Judgments
are not intended to imply that we have proof that show something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information,
which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents."
robert e williamson jr , May 19, 2018 at 7:35 pm
Dan I really can not disagree with much you have to say here. Except there are a few things about this whole affair that bug
the hell out of me. For instance the fact that the village idiot from new york spent over $400 million in cash the last 9 years
before he ran for president.
Your effort here sounds quite a lot like whining about having nothing to report. Calm down these things take time. If Russia
isn't to blame fine but Mueller is not talking and seems to be conducting himself very professionally.
Dan if Robert Blum had had his way the CIA would have been privately funded by secret donations. CIA got caught laundering
money in the middle to late 60″s and as always CIA makes investigations go away. A recount of the episode can be found in Jane
Mayers book Dark Money. The CIA wrote the book on laundering money. Then the ICIJ and the Paradise Papers expose how large the
off shore industry is.
Trump like doing business with Russians during a time when Russian oligarchs were hiding the money they pulled from the Soviet
coffers. I think it has gotten him in trouble.
Also interesting is the accounts of what has happen with the Inslaw / PROMIS case and Bill Hamilton. Was this software and
early version of what CIA and NSA use to monitor the world now?
One last thing in your last paragraph here you claim the Dimocraps have gone off the deep end with the Russian Connection thing.
Dan the dimocraps went off the deep end with their undying allegiance to Israel. And they do little damned else.
When this is finished if CIA allows the release of the Dogdamned files maybe we will learn what happened. Chill my brotha !
kntlt , May 20, 2018 at 6:14 pm
Listen to this man.
drC , May 19, 2018 at 7:27 pm
"The press, the intelligence community, and the Democrats" have committed FAR MORE than a mere "crime against journalism".
For kryssakes, this isn't a debating society at Yale! They have provoked international tensions, suspicions and distrust that
have pushed the world far closer to the brink of a third world war, damaging national economies across the globe & negatively
impacting the lives of millions.
jose , May 19, 2018 at 6:30 pm
I was convinced that Russiagate was a complete fabrication after reading the following penned by Caitling Johnstone:" this
administration has already killed Russians in Syria, greatly escalated nuclear tensions with Russia, allowed the sale of arms
to Ukraine, established a permanent military presence in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, forced RT and Sputnik
to register as foreign agents, expanded NATO with the addition of Montenegro, assigned Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative
to Ukraine, shut down a Russian consulate in San Francisco and expelled Russian diplomats "
Since the US national media have been
aware of the lack of solid evidence against Russia allege meddling case, they now want to pretend it has not been their fault.
Their sheer dishonesty underscores their deviant reporting.
ranney , May 19, 2018 at 5:54 pm
Joe, Abe, Andrew, Sam, Mike,
You are all correct in blaming the MSM for ignoring Israel in all this and whitewashing the main cause of our problems in the
middle east. I agree that Russia has not been interfering in our politics any more than virtually all the other countries in the
world who have embassys here and things they want to "lobby" for. I believe spying is universal and the US does it more than most,
but everyone does it including Russia (and UK, France Germany Israel, Ukraine and on and on for everyone on the map).
What I find increasingly strange is the fact that the MSM and just about everyone else is ignoring the fact that Trump did indeed
have business with Russia. He was trying to get permission and financial backing for a Trump tower to be built in Moscow. and
he had been trying for a while before he even thought of running for president. THAT is what his now indicted lawyer was doing
initially, along with others in Trump's employ. That is why there is indeed evidence of contact with Russians during the pre-
campaign and during the campaign as well. Trump didn't want to lose this lucrative deal which, also involves money laundering
and other illegal, and/or shady dealings.
I can't figure out why Muller hasn't subpoenaed or somehow got hold of Trump's tax returns. I'm pretty sure he'd find all the
crimes we need to impeach him.
Trump is a thug and a money laundering crook, not a machievelian plotter. His total ignorance of
world politics is dangerously leading us to armagedden. And I can't help but wonder why Muller is slow walking this whole investigation.
I'm pretty sure he can see what I can see. Trump is a crooked, money launderer, ultra con man with his Trump towers and other
ploys, and too dumb and ignorant of history and science to understand how dangerous the game he plays is to the world when he
has the power of the presidency. But Muller knows that! So what else is really going on that explains why he has moved at snails
pace to stop the damage?
Does anyone have a good guess at that? I'd really like to read it.
"... Could it be that Mueller is there for some other reason? we know there are special interests that the democrats represent and since the US federal system doesn't really lend itself to any sort of coalition govt of any form, that the investigation is cover for the those interests being represented in some fashion the form doesn't allow for. ..."
"... Presumably the op would have allowed HRC to undertake just the sort of actions against Russia that, after Trump's election, have been undertaken in any case. The difference being that there is at least some reason to bet that HRC along with Obama knew something of the operation, and that in conjunction with UK/Ukrainian interests was planning her early foreign policy directives. The election of Trump on this reading was accidental to the op as originally designed. Is this right? ..."
Could it be that Mueller is there for some other reason? we know there are special interests
that the democrats represent and since the US federal system doesn't really lend itself to any
sort of coalition govt of any form, that the investigation is cover for the those interests
being represented in some fashion the form doesn't allow for.
That's what I'm thinking. It is apparent the "The Mueller Investigation" is - firstly - a
major distraction. It is also apparent that it doesn't make any headway, lead to any
conclusions or indictments of any big fish.
Re: Mueller. If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was
undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you
never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA
coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump.
Presumably the op would have allowed HRC
to undertake just the sort of actions against Russia that, after Trump's election, have been
undertaken in any case. The difference being that there is at least some reason to bet that
HRC along with Obama knew something of the operation, and that in conjunction with
UK/Ukrainian interests was planning her early foreign policy directives. The election of
Trump on this reading was accidental to the op as originally designed. Is this right?
The other possibility being that the operation was demanded by Trump winning the Republican
primary, as a kind of insurance policy. He being the only candidate who could not be
predictably counted on to follow the anti-Putin hard liners in the Military-intelligence
community, something needed to be done to ensure that, on the off chance that he won, the
anti-Russian measures already being planned for would not be affected.
So it is perhaps
unlikely that this op would have been necessary had, say, Jeb Bush or Rubio won the primary.
What made it necessary was the unknown quantity that Trump represented. This would mean,
again, that the op was not so much partisan (Dem v Rep) as it was about ensuring continuity
of military-intelligence decisions in face of relatively unknown entity. Had Bush won the R
nomination, there would have been no op because the Bush family like the Clintons are down
for whatever.
"... I am so ashamed of my vote for Trump. He is such a neocon draft dodging neocon coward! I thought I voted for the peace candidate and all we got was Hillary but with WWE style bravado. Thank God for Tulsi! Where is Ron Paul when we need him? I give Rand an A- ..."
"... Tulsi Gabbard is one of the few politicians left with some semblance of conscience. I say if the old men and women want a war so badly, let THEM go fight it, instead of devouring our young. ..."
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) spoke on the floor today urging support for her amendment in the
2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that upholds Congress's constitutional power to
declare war. The congresswoman's amendment strikes the language of Section 1225 of the FY2019
NDAA that authorizes the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State to develop and
implement a strategy to counter the "destabilizing activities of Iran" and only afterwards
inform Congress. The amendment will be on the House floor for a vote tomorrow, May 23.
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said:
"Make no mistake – the authorization in Section 1225 of the underlying bill authorizes
our U.S. military to go to war with Iran, which is one of the main reasons why I voted against
this bill in committee. This provision authorizes the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of
State to 'develop and implement a strategy with foreign partners to counter the destabilizing
activities of Iran.'
"The provision does not define what destabilizing activities they want our troops and
taxpayer dollars to counter. It does not define a clear objective or end-state for our troops
to achieve. In addition, this provision shuts the American people out from this decision
entirely by circumventing Congress's constitutional responsibility to declare war and giving
unilateral power and unending authorization to 'counter Iran' to this and future
Administrations – without defining in any way, shape, or form what the objective really
is.
"It sidelines Congress and the American people entirely, with the only requirement being
that the Administration report to Congress after their plan is being implemented, and only for
the next 4 years, while the authorization for war has no expiration date.
"It gives after-the-fact license for what is already happening in the Middle East.
Since
2015 , without express Congressional authorization, US troops have been providing direct
military support to Saudi Arabia in Yemen through information sharing, logistical support, and
refueling Saudi warplanes which have dropped U.S.-made bombs on Yemeni civilians. The most
recent attack was on a Yemeni wedding party, with two rounds of bombing
killing
more than 20 people and wounding dozens of others . This Saudi-led interventionist war has
created one of the worst humanitarian disasters in history, worsening a situation that has led
to mass starvation,
cholera outbreaks , devastation, thousands of civilian deaths, and tens of thousands of
injuries.
"It gives total authority to the Administration to keep US troops in Syria, or any other
country in the Middle East, as long as they deem it necessary – an intention clearly
stated by members of this Administration. To name a few examples, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley
said last month that
US troops would stay in Syria indefinitely until their goals are accomplished –
namely to counter Iran. National Security Advisor John Bolton said in a 2015 op-ed entitled 'To
Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran' that 'the United States could do a thorough job of destruction,
but Israel alone can do what's necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American
support for Iran's opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.' Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo recently advocated that the US will 'crush' Iran with economic and military pressure
unless it changes its behavior in the Middle East.
"It's clear that if left unchecked, war hawks in the Trump Administration will drag our
country into more Middle East wars, leaving destruction in its wake around the world and here
at home. Trillions of taxpayer dollars have already been spent on these regime change wars in
the Middle East since 9/11. Rather than dumping more taxpayer dollars in these wars as this
provision authorizes, we should instead be investing in rebuilding our communities right here
at home.
"For too long, the US has engaged in military adventurism and interventionist wars, sending
our troops overseas, with no clear objective or end state. 'Countering Iran' is not an end
state that our military or diplomats can achieve. Without a clear objective, you end up in
endless war. So what is the objective of this authorization for war? Is it regime change in
Iran? Regime change in Syria? More war against Iran in Syria? Yemen? I strongly urge my
colleagues to consider the serious consequences of Section 1225 being enacted because it would
authorize any or all of these actions. It is Congress's responsibility and constitutional role
to declare war. The American people have a right to a real debate on such a declaration. I urge
my colleagues to support the passage of my amendment."
19 thoughts on
"Rep. Tulsi Gabbard Urges Congress To Oppose Authorization for War Against Iran"jsinton says:
May 22, 2018 at 8:57 pm Tulsi is all alone out there. The Dems and Trump are running a
race to see who can be the bigger hawk, thus that's how we got the NDAA. They're all
cowards now.
Tom Callaghan says:
May 23, 2018 at 2:03 pm "Tulsi is all alone out there." Maybe its because people
who want to voice support for her can't clear "moderation" on this site.
Tulsi Gabbard is one of the best in US politics. Courageous,
intelligent, a leading voice for peace, I love her. I wish more Americans would listen to
her.
Tulsi Gabbard for president! Congress has abdicated it's
responsibility as the declarer of war. Our Founding Fathers didn't intend for the
president to declare war anyplace he wants, against anyone he wants, and for any reason
he wants. Trump swore to uphold the Constitution, but obviously has no regard for it. The
sooner he's out of the White House, the better off we'll be and the better off the world
will be.
For a politician or a media person if you are a relentless
cheerleader for Israel at all times on all matters life will be easy.
If you are willing to try, now and then, to do the right thing like Barack Obama did
with the Iran Deal AND like Ronald Reagan did in 1982 when he demanded Israel but a stop to
its massacre of civilians in Beirut you will be reviled as a "betrayer, a jew hater and an
antisemite."
Both of those Presidents were so attacked. For Reagan, check out his
Autobiography, Page 416. For Obama, visit any comment board any day in the last 10
years.
The Adelson-Netanyahu wing of the Israel Lobby is sitting in the catbird seat.
Trump is their useful idiot. Bolton and Pompeo are facilitators. Senators Cotton
and Cruz, cheerleaders.
If they conclude a war with Iran will save their bacon before the Mid Terms,
they'll get their way.
It's time for Democrats to put on their Woman and Man Pants.
I am so ashamed of my vote for Trump. He is such a neocon draft
dodging neocon coward! I thought I voted for the peace candidate and all we got was Hillary
but with WWE style bravado. Thank God for Tulsi! Where is Ron Paul when we need him? I give
Rand an A-
Tulsi Gabbard is one of the few politicians left with some
semblance of conscience. I say if the old men and women want a war so badly, let THEM go
fight it, instead of devouring our young.
Anybody know where Walter B. Jones, Republican from North
Carolina's Second District, is on this? He represents the region where Fort Bragg and Camp
Lejeune are located.
After initially supporting W Bush's wars, he turned against them and has
been one of the few anti-war Republicans. Despite facing well-funded primary challengers,
backed by the Republican establishment, Jones wins easily over and over. He seems to
genuinely care about the fighting men he represents.
The NYT thinks it's a nothing-burger until someone proves Halper was spying? Right, it wasn't
spying; it was an insurance policy. Just ask Strozk and whomever else was meeting over that
topic.
Didn't they all decide they needed an insurance policy when it looked like Clinton might
not win? Hadn't they already completely screwed the pooch covering up for her?
Early in her candidacy, the issue of the private server for government business was
already out there. They–media and law enforcement–let it ride.
What extraordinary treatment she got! In the end it was immunity and destroyed evidence,
party favors all around. Then, she lost. Oops?
The DNC didn't have to provide their server as evidence. Congress's completely odd choice
of IT services went down the rabbit hole. The Clinton Foundation was never investigated as
political slush funds are SOP. There is plenty of evidence that the State's power is being
abused. This can't stand. If this is all accepted and passed or forgotten with the next
financial crisis and/or war, our country is truly gone.
And I agree with Ma Laoshi that twitting is venting, not fighting back. Until these crimes
against the country are addressed with actions taken in public, not behind closed doors and
redacted into oblivion, I have no confidence thatTrump will be more than a speed bump for the
Deep State.
There is no question that Trump of over his head and folded early on, adopting the deep state
foreign policy in even more militant incarnation the under Obama.
All those moves about "Russiagate" now is an empty sound or a cat fight of the faction of the
US elite for contracts and sinecures in government.
Notable quotes:
"... Since being inaugurated, orange clown has reversed himself on the pre-election intimations and campaign promises that apparently got him elected. Instead of improving relations with Russia, he's made everything worse; he never misses a chance to provoke Russia. Instead of pulling out of Afghanistan, he's escalating that pointless war. He's increased the illegal, immoral and unconstitutional U.S. military occupation of Syria. He's escalating the genocidal war against Yemen. He's arming the corrupt puppet government in Kiev. He's already slaughtered more people with drone strikes than Obama did in eight years. He's surrounded himself with bloodthirsty psychopaths. He's trying to overthrow the Maduro government in Venezuela. He puts Israel first and America second (or lower) on the list. He wants more military spending. He seems to want a bigger, more powerful more and aggressive NATO, not the reverse. Rather than investigate 9/11, he studiously avoids the topic. Etc., etc., etc. ..."
"... From a "deep state" perspective, what is there to dislike about orange clown? How can the "deep state" have any kind of serious problem with someone who's making Obama look like Mister Rogers? ..."
"... Has the "deep state" deployed a "lone nut" against him? Apparently not. Is he being impeached? No. Is there even a hint of political opposition to his reckless, imperial "foreign policy"? No. Have any of his appointees been blocked? No. Has there been any kind of significant legal action against him challenging his blatantly unconstitutional military adventurism for example? As far as I know, no. ..."
"... Not where I live in the Northwest. I have spoken to people who are convinced Trump is "beyond guilty" of collusion. These people are either CNN watchers or work in IT. Everyday I go to the gym people are either watching CNN or MSNBC on their screen. ..."
"... How do you "manipulate" a reasonable person into flirting with planetary extinction? How can someone who actually cares about America be manipulated into risking war with Russia for no good reason? Such a person is not morally or mentally fit for the job of president in the first place. ..."
"... So in essence Trump's whole campaign platform was reversed by "deep state" "manipulation" but rather than surround himself with reasonable people, appeal to his supporters, investigate or threaten to investigate 9/11, or even resign (rather than become a mass-murderer), he decides to stay on because he enjoys killing people with drones and he loves the vacations, etc.? ..."
"... The more likely case is that orange clown's a con man whose whole campaign was a calculated bait and switch fraud from the beginning. And all this "out to get Trump" nonsense depicting Trump as hapless "victim" of the deep state is pure political theater. ..."
"... Michael Caputo now says he was approached by a SECOND recruiter, someone other than Halper. ..."
"... Yes, Halper was involved in getting President Carter's debate briefing book to the Reagan/ BUSH campaign ahead of the debate. He's been in there, connected, for years and years, a call-boy the players, the powers-that-be have at their disposal. ..."
"... Democrats and Republicans serve the same master, no difference, neither have real any real power. The Wall St bankers,, The Lobby, MIC, International Corporations call the shots. All the politicians are dirty, and deep state has plenty of blackmail info on ALL of them if they step out of line. They're only puppets for you to get angry at, and vote out to ease your anger. But nothing changes with elections because the ones with power are unelected, and never move. See Jim Traficant or JFK for what happens when one dares to tell the truth, or challenge the establishment. ..."
"... If Trump really wanted to change things, if he was the real deal, he would have Sessions start a new 9/11 investigation, and start imprisoning and executing the perps and traitors, all the way from Tel Aviv back home to Wall St. All of them. ..."
"... In fairness, his life expectancy after such an announcement would be about 6 minutes. Getting the public to realize the truth about 9/11 is the best chance I can see for real political change in the U.S., but hoping that anyone in Washington will lead the charge seems quite futile. A group of lawyers representing victims' families recently filed a petition for a new investigation – the media of course were not interested. It really comes down to spreading the word on the grassroots level. ..."
"... Halper was not a recruiter. He was there to collect information for the FBI, the very definition of a spy. ..."
"... The Democrats truly hate the whole concept of democracy. They've tried as best they can to ban democracy from their party. And now they've instituted both illegal campaign tactics before the election and a coup after the election to try to keep the power in the Democratic Party and the money flowing to them. ..."
"... Did Imram Awan leak the documents exposing that the DNC was colluding with the Clintons and rigging the primaries and convention in her favor? After all, that's where this all began. ..."
"... That was when Hillary came up with the idea to try to blame the Russians for the leaks and thus lead the world close to nuclear war for her own personal ambition. ..."
So, help me out here – the only reason the NYT is even reporting on this is because
Congress was closing in on this turd's identity, right?
"F.B.I. agents sent an informant to talk to two campaign advisers only after they
received evidence that the pair had suspicious contacts linked to Russia during the
campaign.
"Suspicious contacts" = Russians who talked to Trump's employees.
So the FISA surveillance, the national-security letters, the FBI informants and 18
months of relentless probing-harassment have all been justified on the basis of allegations
about Russia hacking that may or may not have happened at all??
The one silver lining to all of this is that the GOP can to absolutely DRAG the Democrats
about this in the next election. If the GOP is smart, they will not listen to a goddamn word
coming out of the mouths of the Democrats or their (((Big Media))) mouthpieces during the
2020 election. They will not respond to a single point they have to make, except to call them
hopelessly corrupt authoritarians who are unfit to govern until they come clean about their
malfeasance and cut the rot from their ranks, and then spout their other talking points and
drop the mic.
"According to people familiar with (General Michael) Flynn's visit to the intelligence
seminar, the source was alarmed by the general's apparent closeness with a Russian woman
who was also in attendance. The concern was strong enough that it prompted another person
to pass on a warning to the American authorities that Mr. Flynn could be compromised by
Russian intelligence, according to two people familiar with the matter."
*Facepalm*
These fucks are beyond parody now. We're literally ruled by corrupt morons, stooges, and
degenerates.
"The cockblocking/penis-envy concern was enough for Stasi agents to follow up "
I would be shocked if both political party's didn't have a myriad of spies in each other's
campaigns dating back to Lincoln! Grow up people, there's a ton of money here.
Rod Rosenstein is a traitorous weasel POS who never should've been appointed. Christopher
Wray worked as a deputy to James Comey and is highly likely dirty and another deep state
puppet. Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, McConnell, Pompeo, John Kelly, Kirstjen Nielsen, Gina Haspel,
John Bolton, Nikki Haley, all are deep state puppets. Why does Trump keep appointing more
deep state puppets to take over from the other deep state puppets?
I cannot for the life of me understand why Jeff Sessions continues to stick up for
Rosenstein the weasel. My only explanation is that this whole thing is a coup set up by Deep
State and Mike Pence from the get go so Pence can be president, and Sessions is in on the
coup to keep his job.
I did not know it was Rosenstein's memo that prompted Trump to fire James Comey. Trump
needs to bring that out in the open and let everyone know Rosenstein set him up. This POS
weasel needs to go to jail. As long as he's still in the DOJ no real investigation of deep
state will ever take place. We've got the fox guarding the hen house.
It notes that all the corporate media knows it was Halper, but they obey the Deep State
and refuse to report this, pretending that evil Republicans are trying to out an innocent FBI
spy. Even today, their coverage is "alleged" informant. For some reason, NBC News was the
only "mainstream" team to ignore this absurd BS and report his name as part of the biggest
news story of the decade. Note that Halper is not a Democratic Party mole, but a Bush family
mole.
Doesn't Mueller have the self-respect to end his witch hunt and crawl back under a
rock?
A very strong move by President Trump. It is a fact that the FBI sent an informant, Mr.
Halper, to gather information on the Trump campaign. The FBI can plead it was to gather info
on alarming Russians, but the informant my gather other info just as easily. If the FBI can
send one, Halper, they can just as easily send another, or more unknown informants. This
RussiaGate nonsense has always been a matter to be tried in the court of public opinion, by
innuendo. Therefore President Trump's investigation can use the "have you stopped beating
your wife?" method. Every time the FBI says no to a question it looks like they are lying to
cover something bigger. Informants have Control Officers, who write reports to superiors, the
reports make reference to code words, places and dates. Reports generate memos and orders.
Everything becomes fuel for innuendo and the only out the FBI will have is "We honestly
thought .but no, we found nothing".
A point well made in qualification of the merits of the article. Surely the author knows
on reflection that no political party or campaign is going to forgo the chance of getting
inside information on what their opponents are up to, including crimes – and
spying.
Since Trump could do some shuffling so as to appoint an Attorney-General who wouldn't
recuse himself or get rid of Rosenstein by appointing him a judge, or ambassador just for
example maybe it is best to assume that the President doesn't feel immediately threatened and
is reasonably confident that he can find and time his countermeasures satisfactorily. It is
hardly beyond belief that there are Trump moles in Mueller's army who are assuring him that
his instinct is right: apparent witch hunting persecution by Mueller is actually a harmless
distraction and so good for him until the time is right to blow it up.
Considered in its entirety, this Trump/Russia business is indeed turning into the political
crime (& shame) of the century. Were someone who had died in the 50′s to suddenly
resurrect, they would suffer the equivalent of a psychotic episode or a bad LSD trip.
Its mind boggling to anyone even vaguely conscious .
Mr Trump needs to clean house: politiclly difficult, yes, but Trump needs to visit a Lehman
Bros' moment on the DOJ, CIA & FBI.
No doubt the above toxic agencies will (again) spew forth the magic word:
"Russia-Russia-Russia" to render all opposition impotent.
One may, of course, truly wonder whether a majority of citizens will awake & notice the
stench of rotting democracy & having noticed, draw the correct conclusions and –
finally – act .
Trump has surrounded himself with lifer Deep Staters who no doubt tell him that
investigations and prosecutions will do grave harm to national security and, at the same
time, would appear to be his own politically motivated witch hunt, the kind one sees only in
third-world basket case countries, and that would reflect more poorly on him than on the
actual cabal attempting to overthrow him and overturn his election.
But the actual collusion has become so obvious that he has to pull the trigger, because
nobody else is going to. Sessions should have been all over this a year ago, but he too is a
long-serving government employee, which suggests he is also of the swamp. As for Congress, a
few brave souls, e.g. Nunes, have tried and have been exposed to withering fire from all
sides.
The purpose of the informant/spy was to "dirty" Page and Papadopoulos; to make them plausible
suspects so that full use of the NSA database could be used on the Trump team both pre- and
post-election and as far back in the past as they wanted to go. The warrants used on Page and
Papadopoulos were counterintelligence warrants that allow using NSA resources on anyone "two
hops" (two people) away from Page and Papadopoulos. "Two-hops" would easily include everyone
near Trump even if Page and Papadopoulos had only minimal contact with the campaign. This is
the heart of the crime. Page and Papadopoulos were used as place-holders to gather
information on everyone near Trump. The informer was used to set those two up.
Trump posting something on Twitter isn't "fighting back"–it's venting steam. As the
article correctly states, letting the DOJ investigate itself is a joke. So Trump needed a
Special Counsel of his own, and he needed him right after his inauguration. It may be that
Trump likes a dose of Russia Scare to push overpriced American weapons and LNG to clueless
Europeans. It may be that he's found out (or at least his people have) that he needs
Deep-State sleaze for his anti-Iran campaign. It may be that Trump well knows he's vulnerable
on nepotism, old NY Mob ties, and oh yeah some sexual peccadilloes, so he better play along
and color within the lines. Or it may simply be that Trump is a moron without the attention
span for anything beyond venting on Twitter.
It doesn't really matter now, the ship has sailed, he's gone too far in with "Putin-Assad
baby killers" to return to sanity now.
"After 18 months of withering attacks and accusations, Donald Trump has decided to get up off
the canvas and fight back."
If "they" are really out to "get" orange clown, why don't "they" go after him for his
impeachable war crimes in Syria, for example? Why don't "they" at least bring a lawsuit
against him for his illegal, immoral and unconstitutional occupation of Syria?
Generally speaking, when one party ostensibly dislikes another party, and apparently seeks
to "get" that party, isn't there usually some kind of plausible, identifiable reason for the
enmity?
Since being inaugurated, orange clown has reversed himself on the pre-election intimations
and campaign promises that apparently got him elected. Instead of improving relations with
Russia, he's made everything worse; he never misses a chance to provoke Russia. Instead of
pulling out of Afghanistan, he's escalating that pointless war. He's increased the illegal,
immoral and unconstitutional U.S. military occupation of Syria. He's escalating the genocidal
war against Yemen. He's arming the corrupt puppet government in Kiev. He's already
slaughtered more people with drone strikes than Obama did in eight years. He's surrounded
himself with bloodthirsty psychopaths. He's trying to overthrow the Maduro government in
Venezuela. He puts Israel first and America second (or lower) on the list. He wants more
military spending. He seems to want a bigger, more powerful more and aggressive NATO, not the
reverse. Rather than investigate 9/11, he studiously avoids the topic. Etc., etc., etc.
From a "deep state" perspective, what is there to dislike about orange clown? How can the
"deep state" have any kind of serious problem with someone who's making Obama look like
Mister Rogers?
"In any event, Trump has decided to throw caution to the wind and go for broke. He's
decided that the only way he's going to get his enemies off his back is by flushing them out
into the open and subjecting their activities to public scrutiny."
Has the "deep state" deployed a "lone nut" against him? Apparently not. Is he being
impeached? No. Is there even a hint of political opposition to his reckless, imperial
"foreign policy"? No. Have any of his appointees been blocked? No. Has there been any kind of
significant legal action against him challenging his blatantly unconstitutional military
adventurism for example? As far as I know, no.
3D chess, 4D chess or what is it up to now, 14D chess? Trumpistas have too much faith in
their man. Trump is a businessman not a politician. He's in over his head. Just look at how
easily he was goaded into canning James Comey that set off this whole sorry affair.
One may, of course, truly wonder whether a majority of citizens will awake & notice
the stench of rotting democracy & having noticed, draw the correct conclusions and
– finally – act.
Not where I live in the Northwest. I have spoken to people who are convinced Trump is "beyond guilty" of collusion.
These people are either CNN watchers or work in IT. Everyday I go to the gym people are either watching CNN or MSNBC on their
screen. Most Americans are brain dead sheeple.
"Has the "deep state" deployed a 'lone nut' against him? Apparently not. Is he being
impeached? No. Is there even a hint of political opposition to his reckless, imperial
'foreign policy'? No. Have any of his appointees been blocked? No. Has there been any kind of
significant legal action against him challenging his blatantly unconstitutional military
adventurism for example? As far as I know, no.
So how is anybody actually '[on] his back'?"
Answer: the Deep State obviously is on his back, It is has successfully manipulated him
into a foreign policy that he did not want. He wanted an America First policy, but because of
political blackmail and dishonest allegations about collusion with Russia, Trump has felt
compelled to do what Zionists want in the Middle East. At home, massive legal immigration
continues, there will be no mass deportations, and the border wall will not be built. The
Democrats will be firmly entrenched after Trump is gone from the scene.
"the Deep State obviously is on his back, It is has successfully manipulated him into a
foreign policy that he did not want. "
Or so goes the Trump apologists' claim. But that's pure unfounded speculation.
How do you "manipulate" a reasonable person into flirting with planetary extinction? How
can someone who actually cares about America be manipulated into risking war with Russia for
no good reason? Such a person is not morally or mentally fit for the job of president in the
first place.
So in essence Trump's whole campaign platform was reversed by "deep state" "manipulation"
but rather than surround himself with reasonable people, appeal to his supporters,
investigate or threaten to investigate 9/11, or even resign (rather than become a
mass-murderer), he decides to stay on because he enjoys killing people with drones and he
loves the vacations, etc.?
I think not. The more likely case is that orange clown's a con man whose whole
campaign was a calculated bait and switch fraud from the beginning. And all this "out to get
Trump" nonsense depicting Trump as hapless "victim" of the deep state is pure political
theater.
"In an earlier version of this article I stated that the FBI planted a spy INSIDE the Trump
campaign. This is not correct, which is why I asked editor Ron Unz to remove the article. The
informant was not part of the Campaign but sought information from members of the Campaign."
Hyper-technical hair splitting that is ultimately false. The point of Halper's approaches
were to recruit people in the campaign to provide information. Those recruits would have been
spies. Michael Caputo now says he was approached by a SECOND recruiter, someone other than Halper.
Trump is head of the Executive Branch. The DoJ and FBI are part of the executive branch and
subordinate to Trump. He can send 30-40 US Marshals to FBI headquarters, and to DoJ
headquarters, and have them extract by force the necessary documents, and no one can say
"boo!"
I wish he would.
The downside of course is that everyone in the media and in Congress would scream
"tyrant!" So Trump currently is leaving them alone to continue digging their own grave with
the Mueller/Russia witchunt, as the country moves towards the midterm elections.
Yes, Halper was involved in getting President Carter's debate briefing book to the Reagan/
BUSH campaign ahead of the debate. He's been in there, connected, for years and years,
a call-boy the players, the powers-that-be have at their disposal.
Stefan Halper is one of the creepy-crawly things that have been living under the rock
Donald Trump kicked over.
As Steve Sailer points out, Halper is the son-in-law of CIA man Ray. S. Cline, who was
instrumental in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Democrats and Republicans serve the same master, no difference, neither have real any real
power. The Wall St bankers,, The Lobby, MIC, International Corporations call the shots. All
the politicians are dirty, and deep state has plenty of blackmail info on ALL of them if they
step out of line. They're only puppets for you to get angry at, and vote out to ease your
anger. But nothing changes with elections because the ones with power are unelected, and
never move. See Jim Traficant or JFK for what happens when one dares to tell the truth, or
challenge the establishment.
9/11 and silence from both sides with regard to a real investigation into the biggest
"terrorist" attack in US History, and the murder of 3000 Americans, this tells you who is in
power, the people that pulled it off. Neither party supports a real investigation into this
attack, they both work for the same people. The fact that the MSM still lies about it means
they are also controlled by the goons. The FBI, CIA lies about it, and Muellers coverup of
the crime tells you all of the "Intelligence" and "Law" enforcement agencies are also
controlled by the same cabal.
Until they start telling the truth about 9/11, you can bet the same goons are still in
charge, no matter who the president is, no matter which Democrat or Republican you elect, the
shadow government, deep state are still calling the shots. If you do vote, vote 3rd party.
The whole election system is rigged to keep out most anyone who might dare to challenge the
establishment, thats why we only get lowlifes like Mitt Romney or the Cintons running for
office year after year, out of millions of people the same dirtbags just won't go away.
Everything else is just noise, distractions from this reality. If Trump really wanted to
change things, if he was the real deal, he would have Sessions start a new 9/11
investigation, and start imprisoning and executing the perps and traitors, all the way from
Tel Aviv back home to Wall St. All of them.
If Trump really wanted to change things, if he was the real deal, he would have Sessions
start a new 9/11 investigation, and start imprisoning and executing the perps and traitors,
all the way from Tel Aviv back home to Wall St. All of them.
In fairness, his life expectancy after such an announcement would be about 6 minutes. Getting the public to realize the truth about 9/11 is the best chance I can see for real
political change in the U.S., but hoping that anyone in Washington will lead the charge seems
quite futile. A group of lawyers representing victims' families recently filed a
petition for a new investigation – the media of course were not interested. It
really comes down to spreading the word on the grassroots level.
Hyper-technical hair splitting that is ultimately false. The point of Halper's
approaches were to recruit people in the campaign to provide information. Those recruits
would have been spies. Michael Caputo now says he was approached by a SECOND recruiter,
someone other than Halper.
Halper was not a recruiter. He was there to collect information for the FBI, the very
definition of a spy.
Hatunggal Muda Siregar, a spokesman for MNC, said the theme park and the Trump
properties are separate projects within the Lido development. The agreement with the
Chinese company to build the theme park does not include any financing for the project, he
said.
Mr. Trump's business dealings in Indonesia prompted scrutiny even before his
inauguration, and he pledged not to embark on any new deals while in office. But the Trump
Organization held onto the projects in Indonesia, saying the contracts with Mr. Hary were
signed in 2015 and were binding.
Yet another nothing burger. This an old deal made before he even ran for president. The
Chinese loan does not extend to building of the Trump properties.
As the article repeatedly pointed out:
There isn't any evidence that the agreement with the construction company was intended
to sway the Trump administration on any matters.
If there's no evidence, why report it at all? To give more ammo to people who are always
for looking for any reason to disparage Trump, and only bother to read headlines.
"It's worth noting, that the current Russia investigation is based on the dubious claim that
Russia hacked DNC computers."
Imran Awan is not Russian, he's a Paki. And he didn't need to hack the DNC, Debbie
Wasserman Schultz let him in and gave him the password. There, huge mystery solved.
"Anyone who refers to Trump as 'orange clown' is obviously partisan to the point of not
worth listening to."
You may be right about that; now that I think about it, it does seem too generous.
How about "teflon-don-the-con-man"; or, "the ignorant orange savage in the White House"?
Of course there's always the Biblical description to fall back on: "the beast from the earth"
(i.e. the second beast of Rev 13); will that work?
Meanwhile, at the same time we also learn that there is evidence that there really was
collusion between the Trump campaign and foreign powers that wanted to see it elected in
return for favorable policies. But, the problem that the Deep State has is that the foreign
powers were not the cartoon-pinup-all-purpose villan of the Russians. No, it was Israel and
Saudi Arabia.
The point of all of this is that the United States is supposed to be a democracy which
means that the government does what the people want it to do. The one thing that we are
seeing is that nobody in Washington wants that. The Democrats truly hate the whole concept of
democracy. They've tried as best they can to ban democracy from their party. And now they've
instituted both illegal campaign tactics before the election and a coup after the election to
try to keep the power in the Democratic Party and the money flowing to them.
But, it turns out Trump was off cutting deals with Israel and Saudi Arabia that now seem
to have the USA headed straight into a disasterous war that was the last thing that voters
wanted. The voters keep electing candidates who claim to be against these wars. The problem
is that they whole bunch of them are a lot of liars, and the one and only thing they are
truly against is democracy and letting the people have a say.
America desperately needs a Democracy Movement. One that cleans the temples of DC of all
of the corrupt liars that currently rule us in both fake parties.
"He's decided that the only way he's going to get his enemies off his back is by flushing
them out into the open and subjecting their activities to public scrutiny. It's a risky
strategy "
It's the only strategy he can pursue. If he doesn't take the fight out into the open,
where his enemies are vulnerable, they will bury him.
Did Imram Awan leak the documents exposing that the DNC was colluding with the Clintons and
rigging the primaries and convention in her favor? After all, that's where this all began.
It was a bit before the conventions when those emails leaked. Hillary certainly knew that
they could be the death of her lifelong quest to see how much she could steal as President.
If the Bernie voters were upset that the whole fake primary and caucus process had been
rigged all along and refused to support Hillary, then she was done as a Presidential
contender.
That was when Hillary came up with the idea to try to blame the Russians for the leaks and
thus lead the world close to nuclear war for her own personal ambition.
You know it's funny, all those 'conservatives' screaming that Edward Snowden is a traitor,
that we should trust the US government to spy on us in secret because national security
demands it, etc. Because only bad people have something to hide, right?
And now we begin to see exactly what it means when the central government can essentially
spy on anyone for any reason not so wonderful after all, is it?
There is an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal
is a conservative who's been arrested. I guess a civil libertarian is a national security hawk that's been spied on.
I see your point, bread and circus for the people. I'm more worried about is Israel attacking
Lebanon, tbh, dragging the entire ME in to the conflict ending up with trump/bibi and Erdogan
stumbling us into a ww and/or financial breakdown.
America desperately needs a Democracy Movement. One that cleans the temples of DC of all
of the corrupt liars that currently rule us in both fake parties
Yes indeed we do. The Dems are using the corruption theme, but of course they are
hypocrites also and don't live up to ethical standards either.
Still, maybe an election platform based on ITS THE CORRUPTION STUPID ..will open the eyes of
some of our more mentally challenged voters.
Hate always works – Tump pretended he was going to drain the hateful deep state swamp to
save his little people -- -so I guess the Dems can pretend they are going to kill the corrupt
to save the little people.
Democrats Roll Out Anti-Corruption Message for 2018
1 day ago – Instead, Democrats are returning to an anti-corruption message that A
decade later, Trump seized on a similar theme, directing voter ire at
Mueller is the only admirable man in this mess. Trump's problem is he is for once up against
an honest man, someone he cant threaten or bribe or bully.
Trump, as we say in the south, is white trash he is way out of his class with Mueller.
Mueller's investigation isn't going to 'wrap up' soon -- and Trump is still in peril
Anyone paying attention over the last year knows Mueller will not yield to political
pressure. His investigators haven't leaked; they have ignored vicious personal attacks; they
haven't veered in the slightest from prosecutorial professionalism.
So to "wrap it up," Trump would have to make a move, but will he?
The president and his lawyers are strategizing about whether he will agree to be
interviewed by Mueller, either voluntarily or under subpoena. If he were to refuse, as the
current swing of the pendulum suggests, and then try to end the probe, he would only seem
more guilty and undermine his support even among Republicans. If his refusal were to lead, as
expected, to a court battle, we would expect the Supreme Court to settle the issue. Any move
by Trump to preempt it would again only undermine his credibility.
In addition, the president and his circle are well aware of how fast the midterm election
is approaching and what effect an attempt to fire Mueller could have on the outcome. They
want to avoid any action that would help the Democrats flip the House. Such a shift would
change every calculation, not least because a Democratic majority could move to impeach the
president early next year.
Of course, Trump may calculate that he could get away with firing Mueller now, if he moved
quickly and the Republican leadership rallied to his side. But it is equally possible that
Congress would respond with legislation to reinstate Mueller. Again, the field of battle
would shift to the courts.
Most importantly, even a successful ouster of Mueller would not derail the investigation
at this point. Too much evidence has been gathered, and too many prosecutors, who have surely
considered and planned for the contingency, stand ready to carry on. Should Trump try to
shutter the entire special counsel's office, a much graver and politically and legally
riskier act than firing Mueller or Rosenstein, other divisions in the Department of Justice,
in particular the Southern District of New York, would also be ready to take up the
charge.
The strength of all that evidence, the careful work done thus far, and the indictments
already filed are the special counsel's protection against "witch hunt" tweets and
protestations that the investigation is already over with nothing to show for it.
In the course of the past year, we've learned not to underestimate what Mueller knows and
what bombshell he may have prepared. It may involve the Russians and the campaign, it may
involve obstruction of justice, but there are other relevant threads as well: the true motive
behind the Seychelles meeting between Trump associate Erik Prince and the head of a Russian
wealth fund, the hacking of Democratic Party emails and its links to Trump political advisor
Roger Stone, the recent sale of Russia's state owned oil company to Qatar.
Last week we discovered that Mueller was way ahead of us on the huge payments made to
Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen for access to the president. We don't yet know what
he's found out from cooperating witnesses, including Michael Flynn and Rick Gates, that might
point directly at the president. And there is still the possibility that Paul Manafort or
Cohen could decide to cooperate with the investigation.
None of these threads signals Trump's removal from office. A conviction in the Senate, no
matter what happens in the midterm, would require a good number of Republicans to turn
against the president, which seems remote absent a smoking gun that proves grave criminal
conduct. But it is more than plausible that the probe and associated investigations will
result in additional indictments of Trump associates -- including Jared Kushner and Donald
Trump Jr. -- and will leave Trump seriously wounded, an untenable candidate in 2020. Once he
leaves office, his legal exposure, both civil and criminal, would skyrocket.
The "wrap it up" crowd is indulging in wishful thinking. The first anniversary of the
Mueller investigation is unlikely to be the last.
Harry Litman teaches constitutional law at UC San Diego. He is a former U.S. attorney
and deputy assistant attorney general.
The question for me is 'can the majority of the USA people be convinced that the era since
1898 is over, that USA foreign policy can no longer be determined merely by internal
politics, internal politics including pressure groups as neocons, AIPAC and AEI ?'.
Maybe the question is the wrong one: can the majority of the USA be made to see that these
pressure groups will ruin the USA, and that their power must be liquidated ?
What Trump's intentions are with threatening Iran, I do not know.
The long term effect must be driving Iran in Russian and Chinese arms.
What the European industrial countries will do, I also do not know.
Is Germany willing to be cut off from trade with the East, or will Germany decide that her
future lies in the East, the Asian continent, from which we are not divided by an ocean,
where countries exist that do not think, as far as I know, that they have a Manifest Destiny
to rule or 'police' the world.
You know it's funny, all those 'conservatives' screaming that Edward Snowden is a traitor,
that we should trust the US government to spy on us in secret because national security
demands it, etc. Because only bad people have something to hide, right?
And now we begin to see exactly what it means when the central government can essentially
spy on anyone for any reason not so wonderful after all, is it?
There is an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal
is a conservative who's been arrested. I guess a civil libertarian is a national security
hawk that's been spied on.
It's got to
be either one of the stupidest acts that I can recall or a very wicked plan by Washington
neocons to sabotage Korean peace talks. How else to describe the decision by Big Brother USA
and junior sidekick South Korea to stage major air force exercises on North Korea's border. The
prickly North Koreans had a fit, of course, as always when the US flexes its muscles on their
borders. Continuing South and North Korean peace talks scheduled this week were cancelled by
the furious North Koreans. The much ballyhooed Singapore summit between US President Donald
Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong-un is now threatened with cancellation or delay. Who can blame
the North Koreans for blowing their tops? As Trump administration mouthpieces were gabbing
about peace and light, the US Air Force was getting ready to fly B-52 heavy bombers and F-22
Raptor stealth fighters around North Korea's borders and missile-armed subs lurked at sea. This
provocation was the first of two major spring military exercises planned by the US and its
reluctant South Korean satrap. In case North Korea failed to get the message, the second
exercise is code-named 'Maximum Thunder.' And this right after Trump and his neocon minions
reneged on the sensible nuclear treaty with Iran. In a policy one could call 'eat sand and
die,' Trump demanded that Iran not only give up any and all nuclear capacity (Iran has no
nukes), but also junk its non-nuclear armed medium range missiles, stop backing the
Palestinians, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, roll over and be good, don't do
anything to upset Israel, and pull out of Syria. In short, a total surrender policy leading to
future regime change. Hardly an encouragement for North Korea. North Korea was right on target
when it accused arch-neocon John Bolton of trying to sabotage the peace deal. In 2005-2006,
Bolton served as the Bush administration's ambassador to the UN. He established a tradition for
the post of being anti-Muslim, pro-Israel and anti-Russian, a policy continued to this day by
the current US UN rep, loud-mouthed neocon Nikki Haley. In the 2005-2006 period, after years of
negotiations, the US and North Korea were close to a nuclear/peace deal. Enter John Bolton. He
succeeded in sabotaging the US-North Korea deal. Why? Because Bolton, as an arch neocon, was
fanatically pro-Israel and feared that North Korea might provide nuclear technology to Israel's
foes. As usual with the neocons, Israel's interests came before those of the United States.
Trump's newly named Secretary of State, Michael Pompeo, is also an ardent neocon. Last week,
Bolton went onto US TV and actually suggested North Korea might follow the course set by Libya,
of all places. Libya's then ruler, Muammar Kadaffi, bought some nuclear equipment from Pakistan
so he could hand it over to the US as a gesture of cooperation after the Bush administration
invaded Iraq. The handover was done with much fanfare, then the US, France and Britain attacked
Libya and overthrew Kadaffi. The hapless Libyan leader was eventually murdered by French
agents. Is this what Bolton has in mind for North Korea? The Northerners certainly seemed to
think so. Some wondered if Bolton and perhaps Pompeo were trying to sabotage the North Korea
deal. Or were at least being incredibly obtuse and belligerent. Was Trump involved in this
intrigue? Hard to tell. But he can't be happy. His minions and bootlickers are promoting Trump
for the Nobel Prize – rather ahead of events. Or was the US military rattling its sabers
and trying to protect its huge investments in North Asia? The Pentagon takes a dim view of the
proposed Korean nuclear accords. The burst of sweetness and light coming from Pyongyang just
sounds too good to be true. Veteran Korea observers, this writer included, find it hard to
believe Kim Jong-un will give up his nuclear weapons, particularly after seeing Trump's deceit
in dealing with Iran and Kadaffi's murder. Speaking of de-nuclearization, why does North Korea
not demand that the US get rid of its nuclear weapons based in South Korea, Okinawa, Guam and
with the 7 th Fleet? Many are targeted on North Korea. US nuclear weapons are based
on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Others are secretly based in Japan. Why not demand the US
pull out all its 28,500 troops in South Korea and some 2,000 military technicians at air bases?
Conclusively halt those spring and fall military maneuvers that raise the threat of war. End
the trade embargo of North Korea that amounts to high level economic warfare. Establish normal
diplomatic relations. Pyongyang has not even begun to raise these issues. Smiles and hugs are
premature.
The US Empire has no desire for diplomacy and realistic concessions on both sides when it
comes to North Korea. The US will attempt to have its way and its way only with NK. The great
tragedy is, as long as the US remains entrenched on the Korean peninsula, North and South
Korea cannot make the peace process work that is so long overdue their peoples.
Who is really in control? The US seems like a country at war with itself. One minute, one
decision, another minute, the opposite decision. Trump himself started out with promise but
now follows the Jewish agenda to the letter.
Could it be that the US power structure is completely split along the lines of MAGA vs.
Zionists and everything the rest of the world experiences is secondary?
My advice to Kim – keep the nukes, and try to eat less.
USA stupidities have long consequences.
The British, experienced in ruling an empire, did not want outside interference in the Korean
civil war.
The list of USA stupidities is long, Philippines, Japan, China, South America, Iraq, Iran,
Libia, Syria, two world wars.
Peter Lowe, The Origins of the Korean War, London, 1986
Barbara W. Tuchman, 'Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911- 45', New York,
1970, 1985
William L. Neumann, 'America encounters Japan, From Perry to MacArthur', 1963, 1965, New
York
Charles Callan Tansill, 'Amerika geht in den Krieg', Stuttgart 1939 (America goes to War,
1938)
Charles A. Beard, 'President Roosevelt and the coming of the war 1941, A study in appearances
and realities', New Haven, 1948
Roy Mottahedeh, 'The Mantle of the Prophet, Religion and Politics in Iran', Oxford, 1985,
2000
Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990
Alan Friedman, 'Spider's Web, Bush, Saddam, Thatcher and the Decade of Deceit', London,
1993
There are more books I could mention, but this seems enough.
The USA's problem, as I see it, that, until now, foreign policy could be determined by
internal political reasons.
Trump's problem, making clear that this is over.
Eric Margolis is one of the 2 or 3 best 'mainstream' published columnists in the country. He
nails the nearly innumerable problems with Neocons about as well as can be done.
As Trump administration mouthpieces were gabbing about peace and light, the US Air Force
was getting ready to fly B-52 heavy bombers and F-22 Raptor stealth fighters around North
Korea's borders and missile-armed subs lurked at sea.
Yet it's them Eye-rainianz what's da threat to whirled peas.
Hey Eric, perhaps instead of "gabbing," you really meant "gabbling?"
US foreign policy: Say one thing, do the opposite, piss on yer own citizens, blame it all
on someone else, and laugh all the way to the bank.
The sad fact is the American troops and nukes are staying in S. Korea to use as a cudgel
against China. The tension, rhetoric and sanctions will continue; though, unless Trump and
his war cabinet are criminally insane, no war will ensue that allows Kim's forces to get in a
punch. Needless American and S. Korean losses wouldn't play well in the media, especially in
an election year. Pre-emptive genocide on a vast scale (implying a nuclear attack), however,
is always possible from the Americans and their "free world" vassals wouldn't dare to
criticise it, nor would the compliant American media. Not when we've been brainwashed to
believe that American cities are N. Korean targets. Once an American military infestation
occurs in a country it cannot be extirpated without killing the host, and the parasite is too
deeply embedded in S. Korean tissue to be driven out or just walk away.
John Bolton does indeed present a quite ferocious image and I am sure the only thing that
held him back from a military career was the possibility that, one day, he might have to
fight.
There's one nation that will benefit from the NK deal, as they have been playing footsies
with the N. Koreans for some time. That nation is Israel.
Trump the Schlump: Iran Nuclear Deal Is Bad; North Korean Nuclear Deal Is
Good
The only country that stands to benefit from this disjointed and hypocritical U.S.
nuclear proliferation policy is Israel. It was the far-right government of Israeli Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, aided and abetted by Israel's wealthy American Jewish
billionaire troika of political influence peddlers – Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer,
and Bernard Marcus – who, in the end, convinced Trump to trash the JCPOA. Trump's
two new additions to his national security and foreign policy team, Pompeo and National
Security Adviser John Bolton, have long advocated blowing up the JCPOA, charging that Iran
has been violating the deal. Nothing is further from the truth, as demonstrated by
conclusive reports on Iran's nuclear program from the International Atomic Energy Agency,
Israel's own Mossad intelligence service, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency..
Israel's clandestine links with North Korea date back to the operations of the Israel
Corporation, which controlled Israel Aircraft Industries and Zim Israel Navigation
Shipping Company. Eisenberg was the first Israeli to establish trading links with the
People's Republic of China, which eventually extended to North Korea and Khmer
Rouge-controlled Cambodia. Eisenberg's chief exports to China and North Korea were weapons.
In the latter part of his life, Eisenberg was found more often in Beijing, where he died in
1997, than in Tel Aviv. As with Israel's covert oil business with Iran, Eisenberg's
weapons sales to China and North Korea were handled by a shell corporation in Panama called
United Development, Inc.
Wow, imagine that, our foreign policy being run by neoCONs and Zionists in service to
Apartheid Israel.
Those that know 9/11 was an Israeli masterminded False Flag will recall ZIM as the Israeli
shipping outfit that broke their WTC lease–costing them over 50k–several weeks
before 9/11 and got the hell out of Dodge, as if they knew something bad was going to
happen.
Gosh, what would the USA do without our good friend and ally Israel always
stabbing us in the back?
Margolis seems like a pretty worldly, well connected guy. He should send the video of
Ghaddafi being sodomized with a sharpened stick to Kim as a reminder of what can happen to
him if he gives up his nuclear deterrent.
"North Korea was right on target when it accused arch-neocon John Bolton of trying to
sabotage the peace deal. "
Bolton is merely the stalking horse in this particular scam. (It is for this kind of role
that Bolton was picked in the first place). Apparently we're to infer that orange clown
really, really, really, really, really, really, really wants some kind of a peace deal with
North Korea, just like he really, really, really, really, really, really, really wants better
relations with Russia for example alas there's always a fly in the imperial ointment.
In reality of course there was never any chance of a peace deal with North Korea, just
like there was never any chance of a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, or a withdrawal from
Syria, or cooperation with Russia (on anything), or a real investigation into 9/11, etc.
Instead what we get is affectatious posturing by actors on a stage; "government" by
diabolical jewish-supremacist-inspired dialectics.
Looks like Putin does not see alternative to neoliberalism... Also he need to provide for
Russia a time to get from knees it was put by yeltzin regime. Russia is still very week
economically in comparison with the alliance of US and EU. It does not have China advantage of
hosting manufacturing of many high tech products.
Notable quotes:
"... to me this does strongly suggest that Putin is on the retreat, that he has made a major mistake and that the Empire has scored a major victory. ..."
Meh. I am personally unconvinced. How can Putin say that he wants serious reforms while
keeping the exact same type of people in command? If indeed the Medvedev government did such a
great job, then why is there any need for such major reforms? If Putin's power base is indeed,
as I believe it to be, in the people, then why is he trying to appease the financial elites by
catering to their interests and agenda? Most crucially, how can Russia free herself from the
financial and economic grip of the Empire when the Empire's 5 th column agents are
(re-)appointed to key positions? And in all of Russia was there really nobody more qualified
than Mutko or Kudrin to appoint to these positions?
Of course, there always this "Putin knows something you don't" but I have always had a
problem with that kind of logic which is essentially an open-ended universal cop-out. I hope
that I am wrong, but to me this does strongly suggest that Putin is on the retreat, that he
has made a major mistake and that the Empire has scored a major victory. And I will gladly
admit that I have yet to hear an explanation which would explain this, never mind offer one of
my own.
On the external front, has Russia caved in to Israeli pressure? Ruslan Ostashko offers a
very good analysis of why this is hardly the case: (I don't necessarily agree with his every
conclusion, but he does make a very good case:
Yes, Netanyahu *did* with his repeated strikes on Syria, thumb his nose at Putin (that
famous Israeli chutzpah at work for you!), and yes, Putin wining and dining Netanyahu
was a painful sight and a PR-disaster. But on substance, did Israel get Russia to "betray
Iran"? No, and not because the Russians are so heroically principled, but because Israel really
has nothing to offer Russia. All Israel has is a powerful pro-Israel lobby inside Russia, that
is true. But the more they use that lobby the more visible it becomes, the more questions at
least Eurasian Sovereignists will ask.
The Israelis sure don't want to give the impression that the run Russia the way they run the
US, and Netanyahu's reception in the Kremlin recently has already raised a lot of eyebrows and
the impression that Putin caved in to the demands of this arrogant bastard are not helping
Putin, to put it mildly. A lot of Russian analysts (Viktor Baranets, Maksim Shevchenko, Leonid
Ivashev) wonder what kind of arguments Netanyahu used with Putin, and the list of possibilities
is an outright uninspiring one.
Part five – another truism: there is a difference between excellent, good, average,
bad and terrible
Even if the situation in Russia has changed for the worse, this is hardly a reason to engage
in the usual "Putin sold out" hysteria or to declare that "Russia caved in". Even when things
are bad, there is still a huge difference between bad and worse. As of right now, Putin is not
only the best possible person to be the President of Russia, Russia also continues to be the
objective leader of the resistance to the Empire. Again, the black-and-white "Hollywood" type
of mindset entirely misses the dynamic nature of what is going on. For example, it is quite
clear to me that a new type of Russian opposition is slowly forming. Well, it always existed,
really – I am talking about people who supported Putin and the Russian foreign policy and
who disliked Medvedev and the Russian internal policies. Now the voice of those who say that
Putin is way too soft in his stance towards the Empire will only get stronger. As will the
voices of those who speak of a truly toxic degree of nepotism and patronage in the Kremlin
(again, Mutko being the perfect example). When such accusations came from rabid pro-western
liberals, they had very little traction, but when they come from patriotic and even nationalist
politicians (Nikolai Starikov for example) they start taking on a different dimension.
For example, while the court jester Zhirinovskii and his LDPR party loyally supported
Medvedev, the Communist and the Just Russia parties did not. Unless the political tension
around figures like Kudrin and Medvedev is somehow resolved (maybe a timely scandal?), we might
witness the growth of a real opposition movement in Russia, and not one run by the Empire. It
will be interesting to see if Putin's personal ratings will begin to go down and what he will
have to do in order to react to the emergence of such a real opposition.
Much will depend on how the Russian economy will perform. If, courtesy of Trump's
megalomaniacal policies towards Iran and the EU, Russia's economy receives a massive injection
of funds (via high energy prices), then things will probably stabilize. But if the European
leaders meekly cave in and join the sanctions against Iran and if the US succeeds in imposing
even further sanctions on Russia, then the Medvedev government will face a serious crisis and
the revival of the Russian economy promised by Putin will end up in an embarrassing failure and
things could also go from bad to even worse.
... ... ...
For Hezbollah, Iran or Russia to defeat Israel, the US or the entire Empire, there is no
need to plant a flag on the enemy's main symbolic building like what Soviet soldiers did in
Germany. All they need to do to win is simply to survive because the other's sides survival is
predicated upon their elimination, it's really that simple. Israel cannot claim victory as long
as Hezbollah exists, the US cannot claim world Hegemony if Iran openly defies it, and the
AngloZionist Empire cannot clain world hegemony over the our planet as long as the Russian
civilizational realm openly challenges it. So while all the talk about the Iranians wanting to
"
wipe Israel off the map " is just a typical ziomedia invention, it is true that by
their very existence Hezbollah, Iran and Russia do represent an existential threat to Israel,
the US and the Empire .
This is the biggest and the fatal weakness of the AngloZionist Empire: its survival depends
on the colonization or destruction of every other country out there. Every independent country,
whether big and powerful, or small and weak, represents an unacceptable challenge to the
hegemony of the "indispensable nation" and the "chosen people", which now try to rule over us
all. This might well be the ultimate example of Hegelian dialectics at work in geopolitics: an
Empire whose power generates it's own demise. Many empires have come and gone in history, but
the globalized world we live in, this dialectical contradiction is tremendously potentialized
by the finite conditions in which empires have to operate.
... ... ...
Right now Putin still has a lot of "credibility capital" left in spite of his recent
mistakes. However, Putin recent decisions have raised a lot of unpleasant questions which must
be answered and will so in time. In the meantime, as they say in the US, " hope for the
best, prepare for the worst, and settle for anything in the middle ". The Scripture also
warns us not to make idols of leaders: " Trust not in princes, nor in the children of men,
in whom there is no safety " (Ps 145:3 LXX). The worldly evil we are fighting, today in the
shape of the AngloZionist Empire, is but a manifestation of a much deeper, spiritual evil: "
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high
places " (Eph. 6:12). The young men and women from the Shia movement Amal got it right when
they chose the name "Party of God" for their movement when they created Hezbollah in 1985. And
Iran was right when it became an Islamic Republic: if we want to defeat the Empire we need to
always let spiritual matters and moral crieria remain above any of our "pragmatic" worldly
political considerations or national/ethnic loyalties: that is how we can defeat those who
place a dollar value on absolutely everything they see in their narrow materialistic
worldview.
A truly amazing article and the most amazing thing of all is the total lack of even
one paragraph of the existence of China. This article could have been written, word for word,
by a defender of the Empire and the China omission would have been identical.
The Key player on the world scene manages to wear the clock of invisibility like
the Shadow of old time radio and movies. Quite a feat!
robertmagill.wordpress.com
Second, each process carries within itself the seeds of its own contradiction. This is
what makes processes dynamic.
"what makes processes dynamic", could it be "more then just linear"? Referring to changes
of direction regardless of interaction(group dynamics) with other processes. Example: the
Roman Empire process, growing then imploding?
Even the Pantsir which was recently destroyed by the Israelis (with the usual
pro-Israeli PR campaign) was not even on combat alert: the unit was not even camouflaged
and its crew was standing around and smoking. The Israelis are masters at making this look
all very impressive and heroic, but in military terms, this is nonsense: they clearly hit a
unit which was not even part of the action (whatever that "action" was).
Not sure how an AD unit can be "not part of the action" anywhere in any meaningful sense
in the midst of an ongoing surge of strikes within a strategic campaign of air attacks such
as Israel is waging against Syria.
Without knowing the context (how long had it been stationary and out of ammo/action, as it
reportedly was at the time of the strike, and what was the context for the Israelis getting a
missile through to it when it should have been covered by other operational defences), it's
hard to know how much its loss should be put down to Syrian fault, and how much to Israeli/US
technical competence or just to the vagaries of war.
But it certainly doesn't look good and that's of course why the Israelis are so keen to
publicise it.
As for the Saker piece, as usual lots of good points and some not so good, but that's
about all one can expect on such complex topics. Imo he's rather over-stating the case in
excusing the Russian failure to halt the ongoing Israeli assault on Syria. Yes, Russia has no
formal alliance with Syria or Iran committing it to defend them (and by the way these are
attacks on Syria not just Iran, though occasionally they hit Iranian forces within Syria and
allied with Syria – the claims of targeting just Iranian forces are Israeli propaganda
to create a seeming pretext good enough for the pro-Israeli media in the US sphere). But to
say there is no moral onus on Russia whatsoever to do so is simply overstating it –
Iranians, Syrians and Russians are fighting side by side in Syria and that in itself creates
some moral pressure not to stand by and watch your allies get butchered with impunity when
you can do something about it.
But from a purely pragmatic point of view, failing to halt the Israeli attacks is damaging
to Russia, on at least two counts. First, it unavoidably creates a perception of weakness
and/or betrayal, and of unreliability and two-facedness. In a more concrete sense, though,
the simple fact is that Iranian, Syrian and Russian interests are in fact fundamentally
aligned in Syria and diametrically opposed to the Israeli objective, on the core issue, which
is the survival and stabilisation of the Syrian state. Israeli impunity and the level of
attacks it is now carrying out are incompatible with the goal of stabilising Syria, and will
have to be stopped at some time if that goal is to be achieved.
If the Russian government thinks that by appeasing the Israelis it can somehow hope that
they might be persuaded to slow down or halt the attacks, perhaps if the Iranians pull out,
then the Russian government is profoundly naïve. Claims that the strikes are motivated
by Iranian presence are pretexts, not reasons. If that pretext goes, another will be found.
The Israeli goal remains to destroy the Syrian state, destroy Hezbollah and destroy Iran as a
regional rival. Israel does not need to do these things – claims that it is
under serious threat are outright propaganda lies. It wants to do them, in order to
gain in regional power over its rivals and increase further its impunity to continue and
escalate its ongoing settler colonisation programs enabled by the US.
Those objectives are important enough that it isn't going to halt in pursuing them as a
favour to Russia, no matter how meek and submissive the Russian government acts, but they are
not important enough for Israel to face open conflict with a major power for them. Israel
does these things because it can. When it is forcefully told that it can no longer do them,
it will stop doing them.
One can certainly argue (and I have done so in the past) that the time isn't right for
Russia to put a halt to Israeli attempts to destabilise the Syria government, though that
argument grows increasingly threadbare. One cannot argue credibly, I think, that it will not
be necessary to do so at some point soon.
This is a very good interpretation of the recent events which have confused us all.
Personally I think any and, all deals Putin has made with the Western Zionists have a short
shelf life as, there seems to be no contract the West will honor short of complete
capitulation.
Patience is a good thing here and,, Putin knows in the end Russia is the prize. So, I
believe right now he is smart to play short ball with Washington and, Tel Aviv. There's a
level of immaturity in guys like Netanyahu and, Trump. Let me just say, they have their egos
to protect.
Saker, what do you know about AI as it relates to Tyler, anything? Is this a topic which can
excite from you an article or, two?
"the "New Russia" (as I like to call it) is not based on anything other than a Constitution
written mostly by US advisors"
That's a bit harsh. Judging by what the Russian command structure has been seen to say and
do, they are evidently based on rights and rule of law, not on the perverted US model but on
black-letter customary and conventional international law. Russia dominates US performance in
terms of human rights,
They took over from France as the world's most articulate advocate of rule of law, and did
it better. In Syria they stressed pacific resolution of disputes, notably by brokering Syrian
chemical weapons disarmament through OPCW. They also press-ganged a military staff committee
and enforced UN Charter Article 47 at gunpoint, using all the megatonnage needed. Now they're
the world's policeman, and they're not USA-style asshole cops. They're taking the role of
international civil servants in the UN Charter's sense. That may be one reason why they're
not consistently kicking US ass, as we would wish: Peace is the law. Friendly relations
– it's the law, A/RES/25/2625.
Not that they're perfect examples of rights or law – the indicators show that in the
specific respect of invitations to special procedures, they're about as bad as the USA, and
that's pretty bad. And your point about double standards on Israeli impunity is very
important. But their opposition to the West is not general, but meticulously grounded in law.
Recall that they justified even a vital interest, Crimean accession, in terms of the Kosovo
precedent set out by the ICJ.
the pantsir was being reloaded.. no rockets in the tubes, maybe that is how it was not
part of the action;)
weapons without ammo cant do their intended operations as far as i know,,
Being out of ammo doesn't mean being "not part of the action". It means you should be
either be being reloaded or getting under cover to reload, or be covered by other systems, or
both.
Were the autocannons out of ammo as well? If it was running low on ammo shortly before,
why wasn't it already on the move towards cover, since the S1 can reportedly fire on the
move? If it was under such rapid and sustained attack that its ammo was exhausted in a
saturation attack (and that of its covering systems as well, bearing in mind it was
reportedly located at a major airbase), and it had no time to move or be reloaded before it
was hit, then it absolutely was not "not part of the action".
I take no joy in pointing it out, but this was a clear defeat for the Syrian AD systems,
however you explain it. It's not the end of the world – losses are inevitable in
combat. Lessons can be learned. But it can't be airily dismissed as "not part of the
action".
What "cancellation" of which promise to supply the S-300?? There never was any promise to do
so to start with. There were only certain questions asked by the JMSM in certain time before
the long-planned visit of Netanyahu on May, 9. The Russian generals had to give some sort of
replies. An ambiguous ones. But the JMSM of course made a conclusion that Russia indeed is
planning the sale. Fast-forward to 9th of May, Bibi comes/Bibi leaves, and the same JMSM
would ask the new questions. To which Moscow obviously had to voice a denial. As a result
– Bibi is a hero at home, while Putin was made look weak. http://www.ancreport.com/report/the-phantom-s-300/
The photos I've seen indicate that the system (if really the same one) had indeed fired
off its missiles and was ready to move as its hydraulic stabilizers had been retracted, and
its radar panel folded. If the crew left the system uncamouflaged and were "standing around
smoking", that can suggest a number of different possibilities. It may indicate a breakdown
in discipline, but they may have been awaiting orders, or even had a mechanical breakdown en
route to a new location. Likely a combination. Who knows?
So, maybe not "part of the action" in the sense that it was actively targeting/firing at
incoming missiles, but definitely "part of the action" in the sense that it had been
obviously doing just that moments before. If its missiles and auto-cannon had seen some
successes, it may even be seen to have "won" rather than been part of a "clear defeat".
In any case, it seems that surprisingly little damage was done. The system was hit in the
front cab area and looked eminently repairable in the photos.
The SAA has seen some discipline problems in the field, and since a number of the the
general staff defected early in the war, a disjointed command & control system. Under
Russian tutelage, they're vastly better today than they were 2 years ago, but perhaps not
quite there yet. If the reports from late 2015 are to be believed, the Russians were very
frustrated with how the SAA operated, and basically had to impose discipline by threatening,
and then actually leaving.
My guess is that that's a large part of why the Russians are reluctant to provide potent
weapons such as the S300. The political implications of using them can outweigh their
military utility, and so must remain under strict control. If somebody starts shooting down
US or IL jets at stand-off distances, things can get uncomfortably complex very quickly. The
Russians don't need that to worry about along with everything else.
Russia and Russians will have to come to terms with the fact they are disliked in large parts
of Eastern Europe, with the possible exception of Serbia.
There are reasons for this, whether just or unjust.
The reaction to comment #1 which might be seen as sarcastic seems a case in point.
I am certain that unfortunate accidents like the coup in Ukraine might in the future be
avoided by a bit more self-awareness and awareness of massive prejudices inherited from an
often less than glorious past.
One has to see, however, that in the Ukrainian case, like in the Georgian case before,
Russia acted swiftly and decisively to reach a position which might be considered better than
the status quo ante before the Free West™ started its sheganigans. So perhaps the
awareness exists and the contingency planning is in place?
That is why I still have more than a little hope for Syria and by extension christendom in
Syria and Lebanon. All to often it is forgotten that these wars in Arabia are also wars
against the christion minorities in Arabia.
The Israeli goal remains to destroy the Syrian state, destroy Hezbollah and destroy Iran
as a regional rival. Israel does not need to do these things – claims that it
is under serious threat are outright propaganda lies. It wants to do them, in order
to gain in regional power over its rivals and increase further its impunity to continue and
escalate its ongoing settler colonization programs enabled by the US.
In fact it seems to go further. Planned Greater Israel expands territorially to include
Jordan, Lebanon, most of Syria, western Iraq (oil producing regions), all the Gulf States,
all northern Saudi Arabia (oil producing regions) and the Sinai and other parts of Egypt.
It's the Israeli Imperial dream of becoming a World Power and also controlling the world's
oil supply, somewhat analogous to Hitler's dream of a German World Empire based on
colonization of the East and a Greater Germany extending to the Urals.
Both are/were racist-Imperialist projects with the difference that the Germans tried to
realize the dream using their own military (insufficient) while the Israelis are trying to do
it using US forces.
How long the US plays along (or rather is intimidated into playing along) with this one
sided project is an open question – and there's clearly the issue of how Israel is
going to win these wars without troops on the ground. At least Hitler had most of his army in
Russia and detailed plans for post-war ethnic German settlement.
The Americans aren't going to fight more large scale ground wars in the Middle East and
Israeli/US proxy forces have failed – so that leaves the destruction of the Middle East
from the air – which doesn't really further the Greater Israel project. Political
control on the ground stays the same – generating even greater
anti-Israeli/anti-American sentiment (if that is possible).
Russia correctly opts to keep clear of this mess, and there is only negative blowback for
Israel and the United States – actually serving to isolate internally destabilize these
countries.
At the moment the Russians look either two-faced or weak (and perhaps they are both) in
the face of Israel. That's not a look Russia can afford to have come to be their
characterising feature, in the long run.
Yes, from certain perspectives it does indeed look like that, but I doubt many of us here
are very aware of the calculi being used at the state level, and especially of Russia's.
"Losing face" may be the equivalent of sacrificing a pawn.
There are some complex processes underway, involving a bewildering number of moving parts.
"Russiagate" is imploding in the US at an accelerating rate, heading for a constitutional
crisis. The 2 Koreas are cooking up a scheme between them (w/ support) to end the US'
domination of the W. Pacific. More critical than all, in my view, is Trump's abrogation of
the JCPOA. This has put the US on a trajectory at odds with its allies, and played directly
into the hands of its adversaries. As evidence of the latter, Merkel and Putin have met 2x in
May, and Germany's new foreign minister has also visited with Lavrov. It may well be the
geo-political tipping point.
Remembering Obama's & Kerry's words at the the time the JCPOA was agreed
Obama in Aug '15: "Instead of strengthening our position as some have suggested, Congress's rejection would
almost certainly result in multilateral sanctions unraveling We'd have to cut off countries
like China from the American financial system trigger(ing) severe disruptions in our own
economy and, by the way, rais(ing) questions internationally about the dollar's role as
the world's reserve currency. "
John Kerry, a few days later: "If we turn around and nix the deal and then tell them, 'you're going to have to obey our
rules and sanctions anyway,' that is a recipe, very quickly, for the American dollar to
cease to be the reserve currency of the world. "
With the EU now agreeing to transact with Iran in EURs, Obama's & Kerry's words look
to have been much more than hyperbole, "Losing face", in these circumstances may be nothing
more than what you do as you play rope-a-dope while the big guy punches himself out.
We shall see what happens after the World Cup.
I think that's colouring current events more than we give it credit for. It's an opportune
time for rogue nations to play games and throw tantrums, but I think a new set of rules will
be introduced after the show is over.
{Maybe it would have been better if the Germans had defeated and occupied Russia and
killed all the commies.}
Maybe it would have been much better for Nazis to have occupied whatever putrid swamp you
are from and killed off pond scum like you.
Nazis invaded Soviet Union in order to exterminate the Slavic peoples, the supposed
Untermenschen , take their fast, fertile lands, and populate them with the alleged
"Master Race".
Except they turned out to be somewhat less than "Master", because those
Untermenschen chased the pitiful remainders of the Nazi invaders all the way back to
Berlin, and those Untermenschen Red Army soldiers pissed on the ashes of the supposed
"Master Race" leader.
(Hitler's bloviations about Bolsheviks and all that was just a convenient excuse and to
snow his military who might be less than enthusiastic about murdering civilians of SU.)
btw: it is not too late for youse and your buddies to put on your uniforms, polish up your
jack-boots, grab your weapons .and invade Russia. Who know maybe youse will get lucky and
will get a gift wrapped Sarmat express -delivered right to your address.
"John Brennan, James Clapper and Admiral Rogers stage-managed a paper in January, 2017 that
asserted that the Intelligence Community believed various things about Russian government
tinkering with the US election (much as the US does in other countries' elections)".
Except that:
1. The paper's assertion was untrue (and known by the authors to be untrue). Far from "the
intelligence community" believing any such thing, it was eventually admitted that a handful
of picked individuals from three agencies (of the 16) had cautiously expressed that "belief"
– with the proviso that they acknowledged that they knew of no supporting evidence.
Presumably a handful of picked (and anonymous) individuals would be highly susceptible to
bribery, blackmail, or a combination of the two.
2. The sentence quoted does not make it clear that, whereas the US government routinely
manages and controls other countries' political affairs (it goes a very long way further than
"tinkering") the alleged Russian "tinkering" was on a tiny scale, and had nothing to do with
the Russian government.
An assertion is less than an allegation. Both have some factual basis, however little that
factual basis may be.
A belief is less than an assertion. A belief is based on faith. A factual basis is not
necessary.
In other words, the document was a leap of faith.
A picture taken on May 16, 2018 shows a general view of the meeting
of the permanent delegates of Arab League during extra-ordinary emergency session held at the
League's headquarters in the Egyptian capital Cairo. (AFP Photo) Palestinian Foreign Minister
Riyad al-Maliki suggested on Thursday that Arab countries should recall their ambassadors to
the United States in response to Washington moving its Israel embassy to Jerusalem.
"There is no harm in Arab states collectively recalling their ambassadors in Washington to
their capitals for consultations," Maliki said in live televised remarks at the Arab League in
Cairo.
The United States opened its new Israel embassy in Jerusalem on Monday in a controversial
move to the holy city from Tel Aviv that has brought wide condemnation. Israeli soldiers killed
more than 60 Palestinians who protested in the Gaza Strip while the embassy opened.
Turkey was the first country to withdraw its ambassador to Washington after the Israeli
bloodshed, which came on the same day the embassy move took place. Turkish envoy Serdar
Kılıç arrived back in Ankara on Wednesday afternoon.
Maliki also said members of the Arab League, whose foreign ministers gathered in Cairo on
Thursday for an extraordinary meeting to discuss the issue, should summon U.S. ambassadors "to
remind them of the Arab rejection of the U.S. embassy's transfer to Jerusalem."
He said Arab states had agreed at previous summit meetings that they would cut ties with any
country that moves its embassy to Jerusalem.
Lebanon's delegation said its foreign ministry had sent a letter to the International
Criminal Court demanding it "undertake measures" to hold to account those responsible for the
killings of Palestinians. It did not specify what those measures should be.
It was unclear what the response would be to Maliki's suggestion. Several Arab countries
such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia enjoy strong ties with the administration of President Donald
Trump.
The larger problem with Thiessen's "analysis" is that it fails to grasp that North Korea's
government won't accept the "offer" Trump is making because accepting it means giving up the
one thing that does more to guarantee the regime's security than any promise that the U.S.
could ever make. Trump talked about giving Kim "very strong protections" if he agreed to get
rid of the nuclear weapons, but there are no protections that the U.S. could offer that would
be any stronger than the ones he currently possesses. Kim is coming to the summit as the leader
of a nuclear-weapons state conducting talks at the highest level with the global superpower,
and he isn't going to agree to give up that status in exchange for obviously worthless promises
from Donald Trump. The more that the Trump administration and its boosters delude themselves
into thinking that they have North Korea on the defensive, the worse the summit will go for the
U.S. and its allies.
" The more that the Trump administration and its boosters delude themselves into thinking
that they have North Korea on the defensive, the worse the summit will go for the U.S. and
its allies."
This summit can really only go one way. Trump, ever the fool, will swagger in, offer
nothing, bluster, and in the end be handed his hat. I don't think there's anyway to spin this
as anything other than the poop storm that it is. No Nobel is Trump's future. Sad.
"giving up the one thing that does more to guarantee the regime's security than any promise
that the U.S. could ever make"
It could be argued at this point that nuclear proliferation in a world of unipolar
aggression might well be stabilizing not only whichever regimes the US decides to destabilize
on a given day, but also the international order and even peace. Certainly, China's modest
arsenal of minimum means of reprisal and Russia's outsized arsenal matching US folly warhead
for warhead and warhead for interceptor demonstrate that US impunitivism is not even deterred
by that. But Iraq was attacked precisely because Bush and his cronies were certain Saddam had
no effective WMD deterrent – no nukes, everything else a desirable post-hoc
justification.
Trump has the EU "cornered", and only fools will believe that this is to the benefit of
the world, or even the US – unless the EU finally recognizes the magnitude of its
"ally" problem, and their captive populations elect politicians that, for good or ill, will
break with the US.
Trump has zero leverage over Iran and North Korea, not only because he is already
committed to acts of aggression including all-out economical warfare and soon naval blockade,
but also because both nations – and their backers in China and Russia – have long
realized that any possible "appeasement" on their part will have as much impact on US conduct
as EU "consultations" or South Korean "coordination" – now with a US theater commander
as "ambassador". The Moon government has relegated itself to the bleachers as the welfare of
South Korea is at stake because, just like the EU3, it does not dare question the unilateral
"alliance" it has acquiesced to over decades.
We live in the age of a nation unhinged. But Guatemala, Paraguay and Romania are following
from ahead, demonstrating that the US might be acting unilaterally, but not alone, and this
"coalition of the unseemly eager" is, in terms of outcomes, no different from posturing
collaborators in Germany, France and the UK, or the hapless hostages in South Korea.
Surely, Thiessen and Trump have the world outnumbered and surrounded. What could possibly
go wrong, with leaders of such sparkling brilliance in charge?
The most pathetic display here is the establishment biparty published opinion applauding
Trump for pursuing the purest expression of Godfather Diplomacy, turned into farce. America's
sickening fascination with and glorification of organized crime and racketeering aside
– prosperity gospel wins – it is quite obvious that we cannot make "offers they
cannot refuse" by putting a horse's ass on a pillow.
America's sickening fascination with and glorification of organized crime and
racketeering aside – prosperity gospel wins – it is quite obvious that we cannot
make "offers they cannot refuse" by putting a horse's ass on a pillow.
Actually b., that was a horse's head on a pillow in "The Godfather." Were you
thinking of Trump or Bolton when you wrote that?
The biggest obstacle Donald Trump is
going to face in his upcoming negotiations with Kim Jong-un, is not Kim's unwillingness to abandon his
nuclear weapons program, but resistance from powerful elements in the foreign policy establishment who will
do everything they can to scuttle the agreement. We've already seen an example of this just this week when
US nuclear bombers were included in the US-Korea joint military drills that are currently underway in the
south. The B-52′s were clearly added to the massive "Max Thunder" exercises to provoke the DPRK leadership,
increase tensions, and convince Kim that it was pointless to trust Washington. The move was bitterly
criticized in North Korea's state media which summed up the situation like this:
"At a time when the DPRK-U.S. summit
is approaching, the U.S. has launched the largest ever drill involving B-52 strategic nuclear bomber,
F-22 Raptor stealth fighters and other nuclear strategic assets. This is an extremely provocative and
ill-boding act going against the trend for peace and security on the Korean peninsula .The extremely
adventurous 2018 Max Thunder joint air combat exercises are aimed at precision strike on key strategic
objects of the DPRK and the seizure of the air control together with the U.S ."
The North's assessment is entirely
correct. The drills are a simulation of a preemptive attack on North Korea that would annihilate the
military, level Pyongyang and "decapitate" the leadership. They are a deliberate provocation designed to
poison the atmosphere prior to the June 12 summit in Singapore. They're also a clear violation of the
Panmunjom Declaration which affirms the mutual commitment of the North and South "to completely cease all
hostile acts against each other in every domain, including land, air and sea, that are the source of
military tension and conflict." (Panmunjom Declaration)
What we'd like to know is whether Trump
was consulted about the drills? Did he give the go-ahead? Was it his decision to tweak Kim's nose after Kim
had just made a number of conciliatory gestures including the total banning of nuclear weapons and ballistic
missiles tests, the returning of three US prisoners to US custody, and meeting with leaders in the south in
order to end hostilities and normalize relations? Is Trump responsible for this diplomatic disaster?
Of course not. Trump's objectives are
completely clear. He wants to win the Nobel Prize and he wants to be recognized as a foreign policy genius,
both of which are within his grasp if he persuades Kim to ditch his nukes. Trump does not want to provoke
Kim who, so far, has acted in good faith. He wants to cut a deal with him. The exercises represent the
interests of some other constituency, some deeper faction within the national security state who have a
stake in the outcome of future negotiations. They want the talks to fail so they can preserve the status
quo. They want a divided Korea that "languishes in a permanent state of colonial dependency". That works
just fine for them, which is why the military drills were not postponed or cancelled. It's also why John
Bolton has been making incendiary comments about the "Libya model", and why the media has been fueling
public pessimism while misrepresenting US position. According to many media reports, the North will be
expected to 'totally decommission its nuclear weapons, missiles and biochemical weapons' without any
immediate compensation.
That's not the deal. That's never been
the deal. No one on the North Korean side ever said that Washington was going to get something for nothing.
And it's not going to happen either. Kim is looking for a tradeoff, a decommissioning of his nuclear weapons
in exchange for basic security guarantees. That's the deal.
So who's spreading all these false rumors
and what is their objective? Here's more from North Korea's state media:
"The U.S. is miscalculating the
magnanimity of the DPRK as signs of weakness and trying to embellish and advertise as if these are the
product of its sanctions and pressure.
The U.S. is trumpeting as if it would
offer economic compensation and benefit in case we abandon nukes. But we have never had any expectation
of U.S. support in carrying out our economic construction and will not make such a deal in future .
If the Trump administration takes an
approach to the DPRK-U.S. summit with sincerity for improved DPRK-U.S. relations, it will receive a
deserved response from us. However, if the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our
unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but
reconsider our proceeding to the DPRK-U.S. summit." (End of statement)
The North doesn't want Washington's
money or its economic inducements. The North wants assurances that the US will not attack it in the future.
That's it. That's what Kim wants. He wants an end to the hostilities so he can move ahead with a regional
economic-integration plan that will draw the two Koreas closer together, end the North's isolation,
strengthen the North's economy, and pave the way for prosperity. In other words, Kim is offering to give up
his nuclear weapons to (essentially) get Washington off its back and out of its hair.
None of this has anything to do with
Trump's absurd "maximum pressure" campaign, which had no impact on Kim's decision at all. The North is not
motivated by Trump's hysterical threats of "total destruction", but by a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to
emerge from its long-term seclusion and become an active participant in an ambitious economic integration
plan that will link North and South Korea to the rest of Asia via massive infrastructure and energy
projects. The only catch to this proposal, is that the DPRK must abandon its nuclear weapons program and
agree to resolve its issues with Seoul. In other words, Kim's eagerness to denuclearize is not an attempt to
placate Washington, but an effort to meet the minimal requirements of his economic partners in Beijing,
Moscow and Seoul.
The United States is not central to the
critical economic-political developments on the peninsula, in fact, the region is making a concerted effort
to sever its ties with Washington by creating a giant free trade zone that will connect the region through "
large trilateral infrastructural and energy projects," to Japan, Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Europe.
Check this out from the Kremlin website:
"The Korean Government has recently
created the Northern Economic Cooperation Committee This has completed the creation of a management
system that will make Korea the leader in the development of the Far East. The Committee is tasked with
strengthening economic cooperation with Northeast Asian and Eurasian countries. In the future,
cooperation between the Committee and Russia's Far Eastern Federal District and the Ministry for the
Development of the Russian Far East will play a key role in the development of the Far East.
Next year, we will create a
Korean-Russian Regional Cooperation Forum. It should bolster contacts between regional governments in
Korea and the Russian Far East. Cooperation channels between regional economic communities and small and
medium-sized businesses will greatly expand contacts between people and promote practical cooperation ..
The North Korean nuclear and missile
ambitions are the biggest threat to the development of the huge potential of the Korean Peninsula and the
Russian Far East. This is why we have come to the conclusion that this problem must be settled as soon as
possible." (Kremlin website)
See what's going on? Kim has been asked
to choose between prosperity or nukes, and he has wisely chosen prosperity. He has decided to participate in
a common economic space that allows commerce to flourish without the bulk of the profits to be siphoned off
by the voracious western corporations. Is it any wonder why powerful members of the foreign policy
establishment want to torpedo the plan?
The integration plan is not some
pie-in-the-sky apparition, but a broad and detailed economic blueprint for regional development; power
plants, highways, high-speed rail, and pipeline corridors. It's the whole nine yards. Here's more from The
South China Morning Post:
"President Moon Jae-in gave the
North's leader Kim Jong-un a USB drive containing a "New Economic Map of the Korean Peninsula" at the
fortified border village of Panmunjom on April 27. The initiative included three economic belts – one
connecting the west coast of the peninsula to China, making the region a centre of logistics; one
connecting the east coast to Russia for energy cooperation and one on the current border to promote
tourism.
"The new economic map includes
railway links between the two Koreas and China's northeast stretching all the way to Europe ."
"The plan would have a huge impact on China's northeastern region as it would transform the region as a
centre of logistics in East Asia, which could function as a driving force for the rapid economic growth
of the region .A railway connection would bring a myriad of investments from overseas and would help the
economy take off."
Yet observers added that the
initiatives were dependent on Kim accepting Seoul's definition of denuclearisation – namely the complete,
verifiable and irreversible dismantling of the North's nuclear programme." (The South China Morning Post)
Kim must denuclearize in order to take
advantage of this unprecedented opportunity, which is why he is eager to make hefty concessions to Trump
while getting very little in return. Think about it: Trump gets the nukes and the Nobel Prize while Kim gets
a lousy piece of paper with Washington's guarantees for security. That's a great deal for Trump but not a
very good deal for Kim. Even so, Kim is prepared to cooperate in order to meet his obligations and move
forward with an economic plan that will strengthen his economy and improve the lives of his people. He's
making the right choice.
Some of Trump's deep state opponents
probably think that they can derail Kim's plans by sabotaging the June 12th Summit. But that's not entirely
true. Kim does not need to reach an agreement with Trump, he merely has to convince his main trading
partner, Beijing, that he's made a sincere effort that was rejected by an unreasonable and tyrannical
Washington. If Kim proves that he's willing to go the extra mile for peace– by offering to decommission his
nuclear arsenal– then Beijing is going to reward his behavior by easing the sanctions and restoring the
DPRK's economic lifeline. Bottom line: Kim is going to win one way or another.
In my opinion, the cat-n-mouse game Kim
is playing with Trump is a bit of a ruse because, in truth, Kim is going to have to give up his nukes
whether he makes a deal with Trump or not. As we said earlier, Moscow, Beijing and Seoul have all made
denuclearization a basic requirement for participation in their economic integration plan, so it's a done
deal. Kim is going to have to abandon his nuclear weapons. The fact is, Russia and China don't want the
smaller, surrounding nations to have nukes any more than the US wants Mexico, Canada or Cuba to have them.
It dramatically impacts regional security.
Finally, it wouldn't surprise me if
Washington's deep state powerbrokers are more concerned about the proposed regional free trade zone, then
they are about the North's nuclear weapons. In order for the US to be a major player in the most populous
and prosperous region in the world, it must implement its "pivot to Asia" strategy that controls China's
explosive growth and prevents the emergence of an economic or military rival. The so called "Putin Plan" for
vast economic integration is a direct threat to Washington's dream of maintaining its dominant position in
the global economy. If successfully implemented, the Putin Plan will greatly accelerate the pace of imperial
decline.
North Korea has been trying to cut a peace deal for decades, but our Deep State blocks all such efforts. I
documented the wasteful and aggressive efforts of US Army generals to thwart peace in a series of articles.
This was the latest:
The MIC will be under tremendous amount of pressure from the American people if it didn't create phony and
perceived enemies by propaganda! The MIC knows that if it didn't do that the military budget will erode over
time meaning less money in the MIC pockets!
So far, I don't see any indication that Washington knows how to deal with this threat.
America
pivots away from Atlantacist doctrine.
America turns away from finance capitalism (state sponsored usury) and resurrects the "American System"
of Peshine Smith and Henry Clay. The American System is internal growth using Industrial Capitalism, where
Treasury Money (not corporate bank credit) channels into the commons and industry.
In other words, America resurrects Constitutional Money and Industry. This type of economy was at the
birth of the U.S., especially in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania colonies.
America can make all it needs internally, it doesn't need Atlantacist "ship-borne" movement of minerals
and goods. America is a continental country like Russia with everything it needs.
Island countries like U.K. need "Atlantacist" doctrine to control the world. BIZWOG (Britain and Israel
World Government) is the core of Atlantacism, not the U.S.
Oligarchs in America who benefit from the Atlantacist system will have to be ejected by force. A good
parasite makes its host think said parasite is beneficial.
I suppose Kim understand quite well that giving away his atomic bombs and missiles is the beginning of his
end like Saddam and Ghadaffi.
In the good old days deposed dictators went to their south of France mansions and died in their beds.
The USA changed this custom.
This change does have repercussions.
A USA at crossroads, dominating the world or not, causes much uncertainty in the world.
The same kind of thing happened back during the Cuban Missile Crisis: elements of the government attempted
to provoke the Soviets into attacking American reconnaissance aircraft so they'd have an excuse to fire back
and invade.
Bolton's comments about "Libya" were a transparent attempt to scuttle the deal. He knew that the N.
Korean leadership had watched the tapes of Qaddafi being killed; N. Korea directly stated that Libya was the
reason for them developing nukes, so Bolton knew how the comments would be taken. He was hoping to sneak
them by unnoticed. Meanwhile, neocons like William Krystal say "we need to be willing to walk away from
negotiations." That's what they are hoping for.
I think the author might be saying that Kim might cut out Trump from all de-nuke talks and
instead go around him.
In this case, Kim would ignore Trump and the US altogether and turn his nukes over to China. China and
Russia would give security guarantees to N Korea which is worth a million times more than a US guarantee and
China and Russia have a clear incentive to back it up.
Meanwhile the US and especially Trump would look bad. Trump would be viewed as having a Nobel prize
within his grasp but bungling it at the goal line while letting China and Russia steal his thunder.
The US, if they tried any funny business, would look really bad. What could they do amyway?
Ironically, it could actually be Kim that gets the Nobel prize instead. Lol if it goes down that way.
Great article.
As per usual, msm misrepresents reality of Nth Korea's reaction to military drills: no mention of the added
full compliment of strategic air force. Failure to properly explain the meaning of "Libyia solution". No
wonder the Nth questions the competence & good faith of the Sth.
I believe its time for China-Russia etc to come out of the shadows: how can the Nth agree to discarding its
nuclear shield without security guarantees from its friends ? That the US can't be trusted with its enemies
-- OR its friends is obvious to all but the self-interested & the fanatic.
Here, no doubt is the problem as the rulers of the USA see it.
[Kim] wants an end to the hostilities so he can move ahead with a regional economic-integration plan
that will draw the two Koreas closer together, end the North's isolation, strengthen the North's economy,
and pave the way for prosperity.
None of that must be allowed to happen unless it's under the authority of our jealous commercial and
political G-ds. It's essentially the big reason for all US involvement in foreign wars since 1898 if not
earlier. Probably the big reason for the Lincoln's War of Northern Bankers Against Southern Planters as
well.
What was needed to make the world safe for peace, [the old liberals] argued, was to implement economic
freedom, free trade and goodwill among the nations, and popular government. I want to stress the
importance of both of these requirements: free trade at home and in international relations, and
democracy.
The fateful error of our age has consisted in the fact that it dropped the first of these
requirements, namely free trade, and emphasized only the second one, political democracy.
In doing
so, people ignored the fact that democracy cannot be permanently maintained when free enterprise, free
trade, and economic freedom do not exist.
I would also add that people ignored the fact that peace cannot be permanently maintained when free
enterprise, free trade, and economic freedom do not exist and I believe that's the point Mises was making.
Neither can peace be maintained when we allow ignorant crackpots to pilot the ship, and that's what "we've"
been doing since the institution of the so called "democratic republic."
Also, I'm not a huge fan of democracy, especially for a large state, and there should be no large states
especially world government. All states claim a monopoly on force and all inevitably lead to political and
economic slavery. They are not compatible with either freedom or peace.
Oops, I should have read further before posting my comment, above.
Mike already made the point and is spot
on, here
He has decided to participate in a common economic space that allows commerce to flourish without the
bulk of the profits to be siphoned off by the voracious western corporations. Is it any wonder why
powerful members of the foreign policy establishment want to torpedo the plan?
The same kind of thing happened back during the Cuban Missile Crisis: elements of the government
attempted to provoke the Soviets into attacking American reconnaissance aircraft so they'd have an excuse
to fire back and invade.
True, and there is a pattern.
" this entire myth, so prevalent then and even now about Hitler, and about the Japanese, is a tissue
of fallacies from beginning to end. Every plank in this nightmare evidence is either completely untrue or
not entirely the truth.
If people should learn this intellectual fraud about Hitler's Germany, then they will begin to ask
questions, and searching questions "
Murray Rothbard, Revisionism for Our Time
Mr. Rothbard was an American Jew and an historian of the very highest caliber.
"So far, I don't see any indication that Washington knows how to deal with this threat."
Sure they do: They plan to act like the proverbial chess-playing pigeon, wings-a-flapping, knocking down
all the pieces, and shitting all over the board.
They will keep emphasizing the grave threat the Norks pose to the American people, they will ratchet up
sanctions on the nations that "prop up" the Nork regime by trade (though they will continue to be lenient to
South Korea as long as it buys US arms), they will start locking those other nations out of SWIFT, etc., and
ultimately they will strike to decapitate the Norks, even if they have to go it alone. They are banking on
the belief that the Chinese and South Koreans will stand down in the face of all of our awesomeness.
It's not the
Libya Plan
, it's the
Chile Plan
. Trump promises Kim he can be
Dictator for
Life
, like Putin and Trump if he has his druthers and Xi too, if he promises to drop his
Nuke Program
.
This is where the world is headed. The
Post Carbon World
is to be divvied up into
Fiefdoms
run
by
Oligarch Tyrants
and they all belong to the
Consortium
known as
The Worldwide Oligarch
Network
. A
Confederacy
of
Oligarchic Fiefdoms
.
In otherwords, a giant
Global Plantation
of sorts.
Here's yah julip, Massa Hawkins, all minty & frosty, jus like you like it!!
Get accustomed to saying that or something akin to it because it's coming to a theater near you in the
not-too-distant future.
See what's going on? Kim has been asked to choose between prosperity or nukes, and he has wisely
chosen prosperity. He has decided to participate in a common economic space that allows commerce to
flourish without the bulk of the profits to be siphoned off by the voracious western corporations. Is it
any wonder why powerful members of the foreign policy establishment want to torpedo the plan?
Stop with this nonsense. Yes, you're correct, Kim doesn't want that prosperity siphoned off by
Western
Corporations
. Why? Because he and his cronies will be doing the siphoning, thank you very much. Let's
not paint this tyrant as a
Goody Two Shoes
, because he's not.
Fyi, my criticism of Kim doesn't mean I agree with threatening North Korea or that I agree with how the
Western Foreign Policy Establishment
has treated North Korea historically. What it means is, there
are no
Good Guys
in this equation. They're ALL
Bad Guys
.
The biggest obstacle Donald Trump is going to face in his upcoming negotiations with Kim Jong-un, is not
Kim's unwillingness to abandon his nuclear weapons program, but resistance from powerful elements in the
foreign policy establishment of China who will use Trump's desire for a foriegn policy success to weaken the
trade agreement so China can continue deindustrialising Ameraica and the rest of the West .
Kim put Trump in the land of the promised, then went back on his word to get Trump to concede on trade,
and of course Trump is doing just that. The deep state will sell out the long term interests of their
country in the name of security consideration. Politicians want to get that foreign policy coup, which the
North Koreans are perennially dangling. They Koreans will never give up the nukes that China effectively
gave them unless the Chinese order them to, and that will only happen isTrump completely sells out the US on
trade. The US would not dare attack North Korea and risk Chinese military intervention AGAIN. China is
holding all the cards unless Trump just refuses to play diplomatic dupe to decepticon Korea (north and south
for South Korea also wants access to the Western market) . Korean diplomacy basically consists of giving
America false hope. The best thing is would be to leave North Koreato stew in their own juice, and impose
tariffs on China, Japan and South Korea too. They are all aggressor states.
How courteous is the Japanese;
He always says, "Excuse it, please."
He climbs into his neighbor's garden,
And smiles, and says, "I beg your pardon";
He bows and grins a friendly grin,
And calls his hungry family in;
He grins, and bows a friendly bow;
"So sorry, this my garden now."
Trump is a puppet of the Zionists who are the controllers of every facet of the U.S. gov and these
warmongers want the America people kept in a world of continual hysteria and war to further the Zionist goal
of a NWO.
The zionist warmongers created the wars in the mideast by Israels attack on 911 and blaming it
on the muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq and thus started the bombing and invasion of these countries and then
the zionists included Syria and followed their plan of regime change in 7 countries , all for the greater
Israeli goal and their NWO goal.
If anyone doubts that Israel and their zionist dual citizens control the U.S. gov , just remember they
did 911 and got away with it.
Assuming all of this isn't merely "drama queening" for the nobel prize gambit. And I have my suspicions that
it is.
An article that posits as major contention a Nobel peace prize for this president is not going to
taken seriously by me.
As for the joint exercises -- and the President's ignorance, that's a very hard sell. No sale at all. At
this juncture that President Moon Jae-in did not put a halt of a postponement on the matter leaves his
decision making in doubt. Certainly there are those in S. Korea and the US who prefer to maintain the status
quo. But neither President Trump nor President Moon get to cry foul play by their subordinates on this
question.
The US has shrifted North Korea before on the question of disarmament.
This all smells like Kabuki theater of sorts. My subordinates made me do it in this case does not wok for
me. -- laugh. Given the lean on the use of force, I suspect that the admin wanted to make a show of force to
the point and if I buy any this -- it backfired.
Yeah the Deep State. Isn't it ridiculous, even Trumps own advisers are sidetracking him. Trump and the
Chinese president should make
a grand bargain
. Denuclearize Korea, help them unify make a 100 mile
wide demilitarized zone against the Chinese border and reduce and keep US forces well south of the current
DMZ or get them out completely. Let the Koreans, mostly the South pay, for the unification.
Think about it: Trump gets the nukes and the Nobel Prize while Kim gets a lousy piece of paper with
Washington's guarantees for security. That's a great deal for Trump but not a very good deal for Kim.
I'm sure there's something missing from your formula, Mike. In order for this deal to make sense from a
N. Korean perspective, they would have to have been extended security guarantees by China, Russia, or
perhaps both. Washington's promises aren't worth jack. Go ask Iran. Hell, go ask Libya.
Bolton is doing his job, being the neocon mouthpiece. His bosses figured out that in order for NK to denuke,
the US might have to demilitarize in S.Korea altogether, while China will reap the benefit of modernizing
NK. Neocons need to constraint China as much as possible. They do not accept a multi-polar world.
Trump again shows himself as the weak minded fool controlled by neocons. He is blaming China for this
fall out, instead of his own generals for staging the unnecessary military exercises and John Bolton for his
maniacal zeal to create trouble the world over.
China who will use Trump's desire for a foreign policy success to weaken the trade agreement so China
can continue deindustrialising Ameraica and the rest of the West.
Any kind of trade agreement can be reneged upon at any time; so, extorting concessions on trade cannot be
a long-term strategy. China isn't "deindustrialising Ameraica and the rest of the West" – the West is doing
it all to itself; and it doesn't really affect all Western countries: the industry in South Korea, Germany,
and Taiwan is humming along just fine. Within Europe for example the common currency has done much more
damage in this regard than the Chinese.
It is clear that China doesn't see trade with the U.S. as the foundation of future prosperity, but
instead focuses on trade with
everyone else
, particularly in Eurasia and Africa; kind of like a
reverse Monroe doctrine. As part of that strategy, they want to push the U.S. out of Korea, and they are
probably quite prepared to cut their losses if the Americans choose to respond by severing financial and
trade relations. It is very clear that the U.S. are unable and unwilling to engage in honest dealings with
anyone anyway.
In order for this deal to make sense from a N. Korean perspective, they would have to have been
extended security guarantees by China, Russia, or perhaps both. Washington's promises aren't worth jack.
Precisely, and they likely already have obtained those guarantees (whatever
they
may be worth).
The North Koreans (in coordination with China and Russia) are trying to trade their nukes for a complete
U.S. withdrawal from South Korea.
convince Kim that it was pointless to trust Washington.
Because Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, and just
about everything else the US has done was not enough. If anyone is stupid enough to trust Washington, they
deserve what's coming to them.
It's possible that Kim's own military might force him to pull out of this de-nuke proposal. They'd be giving
up their one major deterrent in return for promises of riches which may never be delivered. Their fears of
being double-crossed are grounded in reality. Also, a Korea that's unified may not be desired by other
countries. It might become too much of a regional power and want to ease the US out. The calculation may be
that it's best to continue to see it divided and at loggerheads with each other. What's good for the Koreans
may not be considered good for other interested parties.
The biggest obstacle Trump will face is non-trustworthiness of the US. One agreement with the NK was already
reached more than 10 years ago, and the US pulled out of it under Bush Jr. Now the US pulled out of the Iran
deal. Basically, the US consistently demonstrates that it is useless to come to any agreements with it, as
it cannot be trusted to abide by them. That's yet another example that no enemy did as much damage to the US
as its own governments (all of them).
Ol' Ben commented to the effect that scum floats to the top in politics and bad government. He should
have added that "bad government" is a redundancy, since all of them are all bad too.
The best guarantee of security, of course, is to have a nuclear deterrent. A US promise not to attack would
be a poor substitute. America's main concern is that NK not sell arms to Iran or Syria, thereby menacing
Israel. If Kim formally agrees to that, maybe we can make a deal. It's largely up to China, since we don't
want to fight them in order to get rid of Kim.
Bolton's role may well be to scare Kim. He's pretty scary.
In general the bad guys are telling Trump to bargain away the MAGA agenda in return for traditional
Republican goals, e.g. tax cuts for the rich and anything that is good for Israel, such as an NK that can't
sell WMD to Iran. Since Trump is all too willing to go along. The RINOs and the Big Donors always win
because money talks louder than votes, or that's the way professional politicians insist on looking at it.
Beautifully done Mike W! Your writing is so clear and compact. The question remains as to how far the US
will go to stop the peace and prosperity process from unfolding in Korea? Are the neocons crazy enough to
attack N. Korea? We can only stay tuned
"Welcome, President Trump, to the infuriating, indecipherable game of North Korean nuclear diplomacy,"
says CNN's Stephen Collinson. An "unexpected series of threats" has "threatened to nix next month's
planned summit in Singapore between Trump and North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un". Kim lashed out at
US-South Korea military drills, cancelled a high-level meeting with South Korean officials, and warned
that there was "little point" in the US summit if the White House was going to require its nuclear
arsenal to be dismantled "up front".
Korean diplomacy is underrated As Mearshimer says, following the treaty of "Kang-wah (February 1876),
which opened three Korean ports to Japan . Neither Japan nor Russia was able to gain the upper hand in
Korea, mainly because Korean policymakers skillfully played the two great powers off against each other ".
Eventually the Russia-Japan war resulted and you could make an argument that WW1 (and even 2) stemmed from
the Russian deterrent being removed from the international equation in 1905.
China proved to the US it would not stand for North Korea being crushed, and the US would not dare test
that again. In 2000, China openly threatened the US mainland with a nuclear strike in any war over Taiwan
declaring independence.
China isn't "deindustrialising Ameraica and the rest of the West" – the West is doing it all to
itself; and it doesn't really affect all Western countries: the industry in South Korea, Germany, and
Taiwan
China is deindustrialising the West , and Germany is deindustrialsing Europe while being deindustrialize
itself by China . The only difference is that the process started later in Germany and there is more
resistance. The EU single market is a barrier to non EU trade and is about creating a Germany dominated
area. the capital goods China uses are bought from Germany in a great many cases.
South Korea, Taiwan and Japan are happy to have the North Korean nuke menace ,
North Korean nuclear distraction has long had unwelcome ramifications way beyond military policy.
Repeatedly since the Clinton era, it has cramped Washington's style on international trade, for instance.
And trade, of course, is absolutely central to the new administration's program.
It is fair to say that all the more important East Asian nations have a vested interest in
exaggerating the North Korean threat. The more terrifying North Korea is made to appear, the more
desperately Washington will seek out advice and help from China, Japan, and South Korea. That tends to
ensure that trade talks with these mercantilist nations are consigned to the backburner.
Moreover at times of tension, Pentagon officials inevitably take charge. As the East Asians have
gleefully realized for generations, the Pentagon is a remarkably soft touch on trade, and in return for
the merest hortatory support for its military objectives will pull the rug from under the most carefully
conceived plans drawn up elsewhere in Washington to get East Asia to open up.,/b>
The business class of the West love the returns they get in China, they are not going to switch to
investing in the West, but rather will wait out the era of Trump, whereupon the investing in China will
resume apace. It won't be possible to slow the growth of China down and so America will be eclipsed. The
military won't be much use then, because China will have bigger and better toys.
Thee is a logical hole in the article that I was going to leave alone -- but as yet no one else noted it, I
will.
The article pushes some press for a nobel peace prize *that really bugs me -- I voted and have
defended this president, even being called a moral reprobate and utterly unchristian in doing so.
Despite the press for this so called prize. The author never states what the president contributed to the
peace process the than the president's contend of "massive pressure." But in this the article athe cleanly
indicates no such pressure had any effect. If the pressure failed, I am unclear why thee is any talk at all
about nobel awards.
This president has done one monumental shift in our North Korean policy -- open and direct talks including
both heads of state and staff. While long over due and laudable -- one of the jobs of the white house is
manage policy to our advantage that taps down on the use of force. It doesn't take a genius IQ to figure out
direct talks is a key step in that process. And as such requires no special recognition. I took a look at
why President Roosevelt received a novel peace prize -- and if that is the model neither Presidents on the
this or the previous administration should be so honored.
If they have removed the bombers, it's a double fault. The response should have been.
We conducted these exercises routinely as preparation for the unfortunate worst case scenario. And while
we are disappointed our routine has been misinterpreted -- It is our intention to proceed forward in peace
negotiations.
North Korea's sudden nuclear and ICBM twin leap is a function of how useful China finds it to have Trump
asking them for help. North Korea does nothing on its own account.
The smart money wants to be in China
that is where the big returns are, so business is waiting out Trump. Subordinating the well being of the
nation's population to profit is called economic rationality. The alternative is called fascism. Trump does
not have the popular support to go against economic rationality.
Toys don't win wars, people do. In Afghanistan, the US and NATO troops with all their fancy toys are scared
to stick their noses out of the bases, whereas Taliban with medieval mindset and automatic rifles roam the
country freely.
China is deindustrialising the West The business class of the West love the returns they get in
China, they are not going to switch to investing in the West
So whose fault is it – China's, or the Western capitalists? Pick one.
Germany is deindustrialsing Europe while being deindustrialized itself by China. The EU single
market is a barrier to non EU trade and is about creating a Germany dominated area. the capital goods
China uses are bought from Germany in a great many cases.
The EU common market as such wasn't a problem; as long as each European country had its own currency that
was allowed to float, the trade imbalance problem was mitigated. It was the Euro, which was foisted on
Germany by the French as a price for their consent to German reunification, that caused the trade imbalances
within Europe to explode.
But with or without the Euro, Germany's manufacturing sector will survive and thrive. China's labour cost
advantage over Germany will vanish, just like Japan's did. Just wait and see.
Cannon fodder wins wars. The first born tend to be cleverer and less likely to fight because they get and
inherit the best of everything (including first place in the womb).. There are a lot of big families in
Afghanistan. Many young men of the burgeoning population are second sons and are thus reckless. The Taliban
roam and die freely, but there are a lot of them growing up and stepping into the place of the dead,.
the Trump/Kim meeting was not instituted by the USG. China, Russia, and SK have all been in negotiation with
Kim, and they all realize that the USG word is essentially worthless. I suspect Kim has agreed with his
neighbors to de-nuclearize in return for some robust security agreements along with the opening of trade in
the region. The U.S. will need to think hard and long about doing anything to disrupt what is essentially a
regional policy shift. I think Trump has been invited along on the ride just to stroke his and the USG's
sense of self importance. The world is changing, and the future lies in the east. Unfortunately, too many of
those behind the curtain controlling USG foreign policy are too blinded by their arrogance and hubris to
realize that, and instead of welcoming a peaceful multi-centered world, will continue on their chosen path
of aggression, demands and sanctions until we become the isolated one.
Since President Moon Jae-in has been working in this matte with North Korea for more than twenty yeas, I
find it hard to believe he intends to allow an opportunity to slip by based on training routine exercises.
Trump was elected to punish both, so a lot of Americans apparently blame both.
The EU common market as such wasn't a problem; as long as each European country had its own
currency that was allowed to float, the trade imbalance problem was mitigated.
At the cost of throwing people out a job, which only worked when people knew things would eventually get
better. Things are not going to get better for the lower orders of West, they are good and getting better
for the financial elite and China.
But with or without the Euro, Germany's manufacturing sector will survive and thrive. China's
labour cost advantage over Germany will vanish, just like Japan's did. Just wait and see
.
China is 10 times larger than Japan, hence the economies of scale are probably going to become more
salient than labour costs (there is a new factory complex in China making laptops that has a bigger
workforce than the British Army). German
business
are going to do well out of China's rise. American
business have no objection to China making everything and America being supreme in financial services.
Unfortunately the country would become weaker than China while a substantial part of the population became
increasingly disgusted with their lot in life (in real terms worse of than their parents). The majority
ethnic population and state institutions must object to a policy that creates ever increasing numbers of
unemployed and ignores state power for the profit of a minority. Therefore the people (there a
lot
of
them) and the deep state are diverging from the business community–increasingly seen as an fifth column with
interest in destroying the country as a nation-state. But nation states are a thing with emergent properties
not found in their parts. Hence untrammeled capitalism with money sloshing around the world wrecking states
and the people who make up nations is a fundamentally unstable system that leads to ethnic nationalism and
militarism. The deep nation-state is nothing you can put your finger on. but at bay it will turn on the
business elite and try to wrest control from them.
Meanwhile, neocons like William Krystal say "we need to be willing to walk away from negotiations."
That's what they are hoping for.
Sorry but the Jew's trash talking days are over. There is NO there
there!
The Jew is losing his power. Truth is starting to gain strength. The world's attitude is turning away
from Jew coercion, through their control of the US government.
Jew power is a function of US government power. And US power is losing out, all around the world.
Trump's overbearing, tuff talking sing-song, is losing its steam. Bolton's big mouth has complicated the
NKorea nuke deal. He illustrates to the world, the dishonesty of the US foreign policy under Jew control.
The Israeli embassy deal was a total embarrassment. Innocent blood was flowing as Jarrad and Ivanka were
speaking their hollow words. Gaza innocence won the day.
Europe is fighting to preserve the Iran nuke deal. They are passing laws to protect their businesses from
US sanctions. China and Russia are stepping up with deals to counter Trump's Jew favoring sanctions.
The world does not revolve around the US any more. The US elites still did not realize that – they
degenerated too much after 1991. However, some of the US vassals are even more deluded than the US elites.
Grown up Europeans (like Germany, France, and even the UK) are learning, judging by their refusal to follow
the US lead on the Iranian deal, which is totally illegal from the point of view of the international law
(when there was one, before it was repeatedly trampled by the US). But the pathetic inconsequential poodles,
like Poland, Ukraine, and Baltic vaudeville states, refuse to learn. More fools them.
China is deindustrialising the West , and Germany is deindustrialsing Europe while being
deindustrialize itself by China . The only difference is that the process started later in Germany and
there is more resistance. The EU single market is a barrier to non EU trade and is about creating a
Germany dominated area. the capital goods China uses are bought from Germany in a great many cases.
How is China deindustrializing Germany if the EU is a barrier to non EU trade? You don't see many US,
Japanese, or Chinese goods in Europe.
Trump's objectives are completely clear. He wants to win the Nobel Prize and he wants to be recognized
as a foreign policy genius
Trumps chances of being recognized as any kind of genius by intelligent people are slim and none.
That's not the deal. That's never been the deal. No one on the North Korean side ever said that
Washington was going to get something for nothing. And it's not going to happen either. Kim is looking
for a tradeoff, a decommissioning of his nuclear weapons in exchange for basic security guarantees.
That's the deal.
If Kim has any intelligence at all he will demand full denuclearization of the Korean peninsula (South
Korea has had US nuclear weapons stationed there for decades) and removal of all US military personnel and
material.
US guarantees are worthless.
North Korea's demands are pretty clear: a formal end to the Korean War and a peace treaty with the US, and
the removal of the US military from the Korean peninsula.
These demands are supported by China and many South Koreans. They're opposed by Japan and some South
Korean conservatives. I don't think your notion that China, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan are all
aligned on the North Korea issue is true.
If the US wanted to satisfy most of the parties here, and satisfy the isolationists and anti-foreign
policy adventurers that supported Trump, then obviously the US would agree to North Korea's demands. This
would also, by the way, satisfy Russia. You would only upset Japan and some South Korean hardliners.
So why doesn't the US make a deal that agrees to NK's demands, satisfies most of the parties involved and
many Trump supporters and Americans? Clearly Trump, being an astute negotiator and businessman with an
instinct for what people like and is popular, is inclined towards such a deal. Obviously what's holding the
US back from such a deal are American foreign policy hawks and the deep state, who want to maintain the US
military presence globally.
Kim's laughing his ass off. Americans are so stoopid. What makes anyone think NK will go out of it's way to
get along with the US? Why would they? Kim's doing just fine and he has Trump as jester to amuse him. I'm
sure he's enjoying the hell out of this.
Trump's fans really thought he had the Nobel sewed up. That's really funny. What's funnier is they think
he's helping them.
All of these morons ripe for milking. I should have become a preacher and had an easy, rich life.
"If the US wanted to satisfy most of the parties here, and satisfy the isolationists and anti-foreign policy
adventurers that supported Trump, then obviously the US would agree to North Korea's demands. This would
also, by the way, satisfy Russia. You would only upset Japan and some South Korean hardliners."
As someone
who supports this admin and the agenda that was advanced during the campaign, you description is fa afield
from why I voted. I am not an isolationist, though the county could use some minding its own affairs for a
time. Nor was my vote premised on being anti-foreign policy. In fact, I have never head of anyone being
anti-foreign policy. A policy less reliant on the use of force as its main thrust was and is the issue.
,
Trump acts as a bully. That might work in some cases, but probably not in NK case...
Notable quotes:
"... North Korea wants a step-by-step approach, each concession by Pyongyang to be met by a U.S. concession. And Bolton sitting beside Trump, and across the table from Kim Jong Un in Shanghai, may be inhibiting. ..."
"... If we expected Kim to commit at Singapore to Bolton's demand for "complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization," and a swift follow-through, we were deluding ourselves. ..."
After Pyongyang railed this week that the
U.S.-South Korean Max Thunder military drills were a rehearsal for an invasion of the North, and imperiled
the Singapore summit, the Pentagon dialed them back.
The B-52 exercises alongside F-22 stealth
fighters were canceled.
But Pyongyang had other objections.
Sunday, NSC adviser John Bolton spoke of
a "Libyan model" for the North's disarmament, referring to Moammar Gadhafi's surrender of all his weapons of
mass destruction in 2004. The U.S. was invited into Libya to pick them up and cart
them off, whereupon sanctions were lifted.
As Libya was subsequently attacked by
NATO and Gadhafi lynched, North Korea denounced Bolton and all this talk of the "Libyan model" of unilateral
disarmament.
North Korea wants a step-by-step
approach, each concession by Pyongyang to be met by a U.S. concession. And Bolton sitting beside Trump, and
across the table from Kim Jong Un in Shanghai, may be inhibiting.
What was predictable and predicted has
come to pass.
If we expected Kim to commit at Singapore
to Bolton's demand for "complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization," and a swift follow-through,
we were deluding ourselves.
At Singapore, both sides will have
demands, and both will have to offer concessions, if there is to be a deal.
What does Kim Jong Un want?
An end to U.S. and South Korean military
exercises and sanctions on the North, trade and investment, U.S. recognition of his regime, a peace treaty,
and the eventual removal of U.S. bases and troops.
He is likely to offer an end to the
testing of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, no transfer of nuclear weapons or strategic missiles to
third powers, a drawdown of troops on the DMZ, and the opening of North Korea's borders to trade and travel.
As for his nuclear weapons and the
facilities to produce them, these are Kim's crown jewels. These brought him to the attention of the world
and the Americans to the table. These are why President Trump is flying 10,000 miles to meet and talk with
him.
And, unlike Gadhafi, Kim is not going to
give them up.
Assuming the summit comes off June 12,
this is the reality Trump will face in Singapore: a North Korea willing to halt the testing of nukes and
ICBMs and to engage diplomatically and economically.
As for having Americans come into his
country, pick up his nuclear weapons, remove them and begin intrusive inspections to ensure he has neither
nuclear bombs nor the means to produce, deliver or hide them, that would be tantamount to a surrender by
Kim.
Trump is not going to get that. And if
he adopts a Bolton policy of "all or nothing," he is likely to get nothing at all.
Yet, thanks to Trump's threats and
refusal to accept a "frozen conflict" on the Korean peninsula, the makings of a real deal are present, if
Trump does not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
For there is nothing North Korea is
likely to demand that cannot be granted, as long as the security of South Korea is assured to the degree
that it can be assured, while living alongside a nuclear-armed North.
Hence, when Kim cavils or balks in
Singapore, as he almost surely will, at any demand for a pre-emptive surrender of his nuclear arsenal, Trump
should have a fallback position.
If we cannot have everything we want,
what can we live with?
Moreover, while we are running a risk
today, an intransigent North Korea that walks out would be running a risk as well.
ORDER IT NOW
A collapse in talks between Kim and the
United States and Kim and South Korea would raise the possibility that he and his Chinese patrons could face
an East Asia Cold War where South Korea and Japan also have acquired nuclear weapons and the means to
deliver them.
In the last analysis, the United States
should be willing to accept both the concessions to the North that the South is willing to make and the
risks from the North that the South is willing to take.
For, ultimately, they are the one who
are going to have to live on the same peninsula with Kim and his nukes.
Trump ran on a foreign policy that may
fairly be described as a Trump Doctrine: In the post-post-Cold War era, the United States will start looking
out for America first.
This does not mean isolationism or the
abandonment of our allies. It does mean a review and reassessment of all the guarantees we have issued to go
to war on behalf of other countries, and the eventual transfer of responsibility for the defense of our
friends over to our friends.
In the future, the U.S. will stop
futilely imploring allies to do more for their own defense and will begin telling them that their defense is
primarily their own responsibility. Our allies must cease to be our dependents.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a
new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America
Forever."
Questionable but interesting. "Trump's "policy" is simply a reflection of his character as a narcissistic, arrogant
bully.
To "make America great again" means for him "make America the Global Bully" again." Trump really believe like a typical bully.
In case of tough resistance he folds and appologize. Otherwise he tries to press opooneent into complete submission.
Notable quotes:
"... The underlying assumption of Trump's strategic thinking is that 'power works': the more intransigent his posture, the greater his belief in a unipolar world based on US power. As a corollary, Trump interprets any ally, adversary, competitor who seeks negotiations, reciprocity or concessions is 'weak' and should be pressured or forced to concede greater concessions and further retreats and sacrifices, up to the ultimate goal of surrender and submission. ..."
"... Trump views President Rohani as a rug seller not a military strategist. Trump believes that an economic squeeze will lead President Rohani to sacrifice his allies in Syria, Lebanon (Hezbollah), Yemen (Houthi), Palestine (Hamas) and Iraq (Shia)and to dismantle its ICBM defense strategy. ..."
"... Trump pursues the strategic goal of weakening Iran and preparing a regime change, reverting Iran into a client state – as it was prior to the 1979 revolution under the Shah. ..."
"... Trump recognizes and submits to Zionist-Israeli dictates because they have unprecedented power in the media, real estate, finance and insurance (FIRE). Trump recognizes the ZPC's power to buy Congressional votes, control both political parties and secure appointments in the executive branch. ..."
"... Trump is the typical authoritarian: at the throat of the weak, citizens, allies and adversaries and on his knees before the powerful ZPC, the military and Wall Street. ..."
"... Trump's unilateral declaration of a trade war against China accompanied his belief that military threats led to North Korea's "capitulation" – its promise to end its nuclear program. ..."
"... Is Trump playing the Nixon-Kissinger 'madman' tactic, in which the Secretary of State tells adversaries to accept his 'reasonable' demands or face the worst from the President? I don't think so. ..."
"... China got Trumps to waiver ZTE ruling, with Huawei declared no longer a threat to US security. ..."
"... "Speaking to soon-to-be graduates of the Virginia Military Institute on Wednesday, Tillerson dropped this truth bomb: "If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom." Woof. ..."
For some time, critics of President Trump's policies have attributed them to a mental
disorder; uncontrolled manic-depression, narcissus bullying and other pathologies. The question
of Trump's mental health raises a deeper question: why do his pathologies take a specific
political direction? Moreover, Trump's decisions have a political history and background, and
follow from a logic and belief in the reason and logic of imperial power.
We will examine the reason why Trump has embraced three strategic decisions which have
world-historic consequences, namely: Trump's reneging the nuclear accord with Iran ;Trump's
declaration of a trade war with China; and Trump's meeting with North Korea.
In brief we will explore the political reasons for his decisions; what he expects to gain;
and what is his game plan if he fails to secure his expected outcome and his adversaries take
reprisals.
Trump's Strategic Framework
The underlying assumption of Trump's strategic thinking is that 'power works': the more
intransigent his posture, the greater his belief in a unipolar world based on US power. As a
corollary, Trump interprets any ally, adversary, competitor who seeks negotiations, reciprocity
or concessions is 'weak' and should be pressured or forced to concede greater concessions and
further retreats and sacrifices, up to the ultimate goal of surrender and submission. In
other words, Trump's politics of force only recognizes counter-force: limitations in Trump's
policies will only result when tangible economic and military losses and costs in US lives
would undermine US imperial rule.
Reasons Why Trump Broke the Peace Accord with Iran
Trump broke the accord with Iran because the original agreement was based on retaining US
sanctions against Iran; the total dismantling of its nuclear program and calling into question
Iran's limited role on behalf of possible allies in the Middle East.
Iran's one-sided concessions; trading military defense for market opportunities encouraged
Trump to believe that he could intimidate Iran militarily by closing all its markets.
Trump views President Rohani as a rug seller not a military strategist. Trump believes
that an economic squeeze will lead President Rohani to sacrifice his allies in Syria, Lebanon
(Hezbollah), Yemen (Houthi), Palestine (Hamas) and Iraq (Shia)and to dismantle its ICBM defense
strategy.
Trump pursues the strategic goal of weakening Iran and preparing a regime change,
reverting Iran into a client state – as it was prior to the 1979 revolution under the
Shah.
The second reason for Trump's policy is to strengthen Israel's military power in the Middle
East. The Trump regime is deeply influenced by the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) in the US,
dubbed 'the Lobby'.
Trump recognizes and submits to Zionist-Israeli dictates because they have unprecedented
power in the media, real estate, finance and insurance (FIRE). Trump recognizes the ZPC's power
to buy Congressional votes, control both political parties and secure appointments in the
executive branch.
Trump is the typical authoritarian: at the throat of the weak, citizens, allies and
adversaries and on his knees before the powerful ZPC, the military and Wall Street.
Trump's submission to Zionist power reinforces and even dictates his decision to break the
peace accord with Iran and his willingness to pressure. France, Germany, the UK and Russia to
sacrifice billion-dollar trade agreements with Iran and to pursue a policy of pressuring
Teheran to accept part of Trump's agenda of unilateral disarmament and isolation. Trump
believes he can force the EU multi-nationals to disobey their governments and abide by
sanctions.
Reasons for Trump's Trade War with China
Prior to Trump's presidency, especially under President Obama, the US launched a trade war
and 'military pivot' to China. Obama proposed the Trans-Pacific Pact to exclude China and
directed an air and naval armada to the South China Sea. Obama established a high-powered
surveillance system in South Korea and supported war exercises on North Korea's border. Trump's
policy deepened and radicalized Obama's policies.
Trump extended Obama's bellicose policy toward North Korea, demanding the de-nuclearization
of its defense program. President Kim of North Korea and President Moon of South Korea reached
an agreement to open negotiations toward a peace accord ending nearly 60 years of
hostility.
However, President Trump joined the conversation on the presumption that North Korea's peace
overtures were due to his threats of war and intimidation. He insisted that any peace
settlement and end of economic sanctions would only be achieved by unilateral nuclear
disarmament, the maintenance of US forces on the peninsula and supervision by US approved
inspectors.
Trump's unilateral declaration of a trade war against China accompanied his belief that
military threats led to North Korea's "capitulation" – its promise to end its nuclear
program.
Trump slapped a trade tariff on over $100 billion dollars of Chinese exports in order to
reduce its trade imbalance by $200 billion over two years. He demanded China unilaterally end
industrial 'espionage', technological 'theft' (all phony accusations) and China's compliance
monitored quarterly by the US. Trump demanded that China not retaliate with tariffs or restrictions or face bigger
sanctions. Trump threatened to respond to any reciprocal tariff by Beijing, with greater tariffs, and
restrictions on Chinese goods and services.
Trump's goals seek to convert North Korea into a military satellite encroaching on China's
northern border; and a trade war that drives China into an economic crisis. Trump believes that as China declines as a world economic power, the US will grow and
dominate the Asian and world economy.
Trump believes a successful trade war will lead to a successful military war. Trump believes
that a submissive China, based on its isolation from the 'dynamic' US market, will enhance
Washington's quest for uncontested world domination.
Trump's Ten Erroneous Thesis
Trump's political agenda is deeply flawed! Breaking the nuclear agreement and imposing harsh
sanctions has isolated Trump from his European and Asian allies. His military intervention will
inflame a regional war that would destroy the Saudi oil fields. He will force Iran to pursue a
nuclear shield against US-Israeli aggression and lead to a prolonged, costly and ultimately
losing war.
Trump's policies will unify all Iranians, liberals and nationalist, and undermine US
collaborators. The entire Muslim world will unify forces and carry the conflict throughout
Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Tel Aviv's bombing [of Iran] will lead to counter-attacks
in Israel.
Oil prices will skyrocket, financial markets will collapse, industries will go bankrupt.
Trump's sanctions and military aggression against Iran will lead to mutual economic
destruction.
Trump's trade war with China will lead to the disruption of the supply chain which sustains
the US economy and especially the 500 US multi-nationals who depend on the Chinese economy for
exports to the US. China will increase domestic consumption, diversify its markets and trading
partners and reinforce its military alliance with Russia. China has greater resilience and
capacity to overcome short-term disruption and regain its dominant role as a global economic
power house.
Wall Street will suffer a catastrophic financial collapse and send the US into a world
depression.
Trump's negotiations with North Korea will go nowhere as long as he demands unilateral
nuclear disarmament, US military control over the peninsula and political isolation from
China.
Kim will insist on the end of sanctions, and a mutual defense treaty with China. Kim will
offer to end nuclear testing but not nuclear weapons. After Trump's reneged on the Iran deal,
Kim will recognize that agreements with the US are not trustworthy.
Conclusion
Trump's loud, threatening gestures are a real danger to world peace and justice. But his
assumptions about the consequences of his policy are deeply flawed. There is no basis to think
his sanctions will topple the Iranian regime; that Israel will survive unscathed from a war
with Iran: that an oil war will not undermine the US economy; that Europe will allow its
companies to be frozen out of the Iran market.
Trump's trade war with China is dead in the water. He cannot find alternative production
sites for US multi-nationals. He cannot freeze China out of the world market, since they have
links with five continents. Trump cannot dominate North Korea and force it to sacrifice its
sovereignty on the basis of empty economic promises to lift sanctions. Trump is heading for
defeats on all counts. But he may take the American people into the nuclear abyss in the
process.
Epilogue
Are Trump's threats of war part of a strategy of bluff and bombast designed to intimidate,
in order to secure political advantages? Is Trump playing the Nixon-Kissinger 'madman'
tactic, in which the Secretary of State tells adversaries to accept his 'reasonable' demands or
face the worst from the President? I don't think so.
Nixon unlike Trump was not led by the nose by Israel. Nixon unlike Trump was not led by
pro-nuclear war advisers. Nixon in contrast to Trump opened the US to trade with China and
signed nuclear reduction agreements with Russia. Nixon successfully promoted peaceful
co-existence.
"Trump's sanctions and military aggression against Iran will lead to mutual economic
destruction."
indeed they will, and sadly it well deserved after the last 20yrs off US terrorism.
the US hubris will soon meet karma, and we all know karma is a bitch..
You didn't have to be genius to see this coming. In fact, NK played Trump as
expected. Anything else would have been gross negligence by their diplomatic
negotiators. Getting Trump to speculate about a prospective Nobel (for himself) for bringing nuclear
peace to the Pacific was baiting the hook nicely.
The US is now dealing from a position of weakness. Let's see what NK can extract in terms of
keeping their weapons and gaining economic assistance in return for getting the meetings back
on track.
This theory is the opposite of what I suppose is the right explanation, the explanation also
given by prof Laslo Maracs, UVA Amsterdam, that Trump and his rich friends understand that
the USA can to longer control the world, conquering the rest of the world totally out of the
question.
The end of the British empire began before 1914, when the twe fleet standard had to lowered
to one fleet.
Obama had to do something similar, the USA capability of fighting two wars at the time was
lowered to one and half.
What half a war accomplishes we see in Syria.
In the thirties the British, some of them, knew quite well they could no longer defend their
empire, at the time this meant controlling the Meditarranean and the Far East.
Lawrence R. Pratt, 'East of Malta, West of Suez', London, 1975
The British guarantees to Poland and countries bordering on the Med lighted the fuse to the
powder keg that had been standing for a long time.
Churchill won, the British thought, and some of them think it still, WWII.
But shortly after WWII some British understood 'we won the war, but lost the peace'.
I still have the idea that Trump has no intention of losing the peace, but time will tell.
I suppose Trump just is buying time against Deep State and Netanyahu.
The fool Netanyahu is happy with having got Jerusalem, he does not see the cost in increased
hatred among Muslims, and Israel having won the Eurovision Song Festival.
Trump's "policy" is simply a reflection of his character as a narcissistic, arrogant
bully.
To "make America great again" means for him "make America the Global Bully" again.
However, behind the facade of all his bravado hides a puppet of the Jewish Power Structure,
which is even more dangerous than Trump himself. "Make Zion Great Again" would be a more
apposite slogan.
Wall Street collapsing will not cause a world depression, but will reflect the very real
depression that will arise from huge disruptions to the US supply chain and energy costs and
the knock-on effect that will have on the global economy.
A strike on Iran won't by itself be enough to cripple the US economy, but the loss of a
single aircraft carrier might be enough of a pull on a thread that unravels the magical
mantle of military force that currently holds the empire together and keeps the vassal-states
in line to cause things to go pear-shaped quickly.
Nobody can accuse Donald of not being obedient executioner of tasks given by his Masters.
You don't have to be dark skinned to reside in Masters quarters, orange haired and white is
ok too..
Overall a good analysis, but as far as his support of Israel is concerned, his family
connections with the most ultra-Zionist factions should not be overlooked.
Trump believes that as China declines as a world economic power, the US will grow and
dominate the Asian and world economy.
On what basis does the author say that? Trump is smart enough to know that China is
growing as an economic and military power, not declining.
A fairly poorly (and likely hastily) written article.
Trump is under the control of Zionists just as is the U.S. gov with Zionist dual citizens in
control of every facet and has been since 1913 when the Zionists created the FED and the IRS.
Trump is like the Roman emperor Caligula and is a Trojan Horse for the Zionist agenda of a
NWO and is continuing the tradition of the U.S. gov breaking its word about everything, just
ask the native American Indians.
The nuke agreement with Iran was a sham. Iran lied about what they were doing. The agreement
had never been submitted to the Senate and so was never ratified. Our "allies" in Europe and
Asia knew that and their reaction has not been nearly as negative as the author of this
column has claimed.
I continue to admire President Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi of China. WHY? .because
RESULTS matter more than opinions on internet websites, T.V., or in printed publications.
N. Korea has stopped performing ICBM or nuke tests, a less extremist regime change "coup"
took place in Saudi Arabia, financing/ weapons flows / intelligence to Syrian terrorists has
dried up with resulting collapse of ISIS, Iran is threatening to release the names of
European & American politicians who previously made millions / billions off the Iran nuke
deal if it is dropped, Harvey Weinstein, Allison Mack, and "Weiner" were untouchable before
Trump, the list just goes on and continues to get bigger.
A major reason for admiration of Putin is that the Mainstream Media (MSM) can't stop
demonizing him. So of course I'm logically led to believe that he is mostly a good guy since
the MSM has proven itself repeatedly to distort the Truth. Putin also largely ended the
oligarchs power, doubled Russian citizens income, used an tiny Russian military in Syria to
gradually reverse ISIS expansion there, improved Russia's internal manufacturing,
agricultural, mining, and technological research/ development, intellectually crushed
international debate opponents repeated using only logic and facts (You should watch the
videos!), built / rebuilt over 10 thousand churches, has patriotic Muslims (Crimea) fighting
for Russia in Syria, etc. etc.
Xi of China has pretty impressive creditials but this post is
overly long anyway.
RESULTS COUNT MORE THAN WORDS!
Of course they do this, they would be stupid if they didn't.
• Agree: CalDre
I like your frankness. Every countries is into this at different degree, with ZUS the
apex. But been leading in most tech area currently & lazy to produce any useful things,
ZUS is very unhappy that their esponage net result is negative, hence the continuous
whining.
When tide reverse with China leading in most tech, ZUS will complaint about complex patent
system as been flawed in exploitating & suppressing of weaker country innovation, juz as
it did for WTO & Globalization now.
Of course any moronic comments about only China is espionaging US IPR & rise purely due
to US FDI & Tech transfer will resonate CalDre into high chime.
Well, he is not meeting with North Korea either, since Kim didn't chicken out, and is not
that stupid as to offer his head on the plate! Bolton made sure of that.
Hastily written article cobbled by bits of public info here & there without deep
analysis.
1. Today NK declared they have indefinitely terminate all high level exchange with SK. If
Trumps insisted on another Libya & Iraq defank & ending model advocate by Bolton,
meeting with Trumps will be cancelled. Trumps needs the Korea peace credit to get his Nobel
Prize, so as to booster his coming Nov election win. Kim has baited Trumps to put him in
tight corner now, hence WH still insisting to go ahead prepare for the meeting.
If venue does changed to Beijing from Trumps' choice of Spore (Kim's cargo plane can't fly
his limousine so far, also a risk of him as Spore is US vassal), we will see Kim has K.O.
Trumps in another round. Kim will get to keep its nuke weapon until USM remove its Korea
present, clear all sanctions, with UNSC guaranteed its safety. If Trumps has the meeting
cancelled, then China can roll out its own play book as unchallenged leader in solving Korea
crisis. Either way, Trumps will lost influence to China.
2. Trade war with China has exposed ZUS deep weakness in its brinkmanship when china
retaliated with no compromise. Four most senior trade & treasury secs scrambled 10,000
miles to Beijing to seek detente, but return empty handed in 2 days with their ridiculous
demands in hubris. Still China got Trumps to waiver ZTE ruling, with Huawei declared no
longer a threat to US security.
Btw, this author has wrongly written about the $100B trade tariff, its only $50B so far.
Another additional $100B is only a empty threat ZUS dare not release to avoid China
retaliation.
3. JCPOA cancelling is godsend move.
First, EU with Germany & France having huge investments in Iran is crying loud that they
have to be free from been ZUS vassal. If they caved in to ZUS sanction threat, then EU bosses – Macron & Merkel will
face revolt from Europe business sector. China & Russia will be happy to pick up whatever
investments in fire sales.
If EU decided to rebel & chart its own destiny with a little spine, then ZUS has lost
its tight clutch over EU. EU has juz announced to trade Iran oil in Euro, hasten
de-dollarization. The geopolitical game is changing tide. In either way of EU decision, China
& Russia win.
Now Iran will continue to enjoy free trades with everyone except ZUS that it dislike most,
& win moral high ground in international standing by keeping to JCPOA.
ZUS has juz ordered Trumps to shoot its own foot. It pay the high price of losing every
credibility in international agreement, forced EU into seeking independency, have EU trade in
Euro, with Iran, China & Russia all smiling.
Of course, but I just wanted to make a point not write a book or even a PhD thesis. thanks
for the supplementary material though. Your comments about oil are spot on as you know. The wars were about smashing some real
competition.
Somebody has to shovel the BS occasionally, to keep the smell down here. I guess it's my
turn today, sigh.
The nuke agreement with Iran was a sham. Iran lied about what they were doing.
Then the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and many of the major European
countries must also be lying when they say that Iran is fully complying with the JCPOA.
The agreement had never been submitted to the Senate and so was never ratified.
The United Nations Security Council endorsed the JCPOA; see UNSC resolution 2231.
According to the UN treaty, UNSC resolutions are automatically the law of the land,
even in the USA -- no Senate ratification needed.
Have you ever made a comment that was other than your mere and clearly biased opinion? Try
it sometime; it would be interesting to see what evidence you provide to support such
transparently erroneous ideas.
Trump's only strategy is to do what Israel orders him to do. The Neocon Jews and their friends including the Jew In Chief of
the White House Jared Kushner are running the show. You can easily see this in ... Niki Haley's presentation before the UN including
walking out before the Palestinian Rep had a chance to speak.
Trump is up to his arms in shady deals with Jewish financiers of his properties and they
will get what they want from him politically. It's Israel against the world and the US is
nothing more than their war whore. More people will die for this strategy that comes from
formerly Tel Aviv and now from the Magic Jewish Capital called Jerusalem.
New York City's Hip Hop station Hot 97's morning show, "Ebro in the Morning," dedicated an
entire segment to yesterday's demonstration in Gaza where the two blasted Israel and
President Donald Trump http://pic.twitter.com/43XIqhKFWZ
-- Gigi Hadid (@GiGiHadid) May 15, 2018
Hadid posted screen shots of Al Jazeera's coverage alongside an image of the Nakba with text
written by a relative,
"Almost One Million Palestinians were violently forced out of their country and never allowed
back to Palestine. The Hadid family was amongst them and they fled in fear to Syria where
they became refugees."
Why are these important? Because they have millions of followers on social media .because
their audience and followers are the coming voter and leadership force .for better or worse
..and for Israel its the 'worse'.
Gigi Hadid for instance has 9 million followers on twitter.
Giuliani: Mueller's team told Trump's lawyers they can't indict a president
This true. BUT ..'if' any criminal wrong doing by Trump before he was president is revealed in the
course of the Russia investigation he can be indicted for that after he is out of office. IN ADDITION ..'if' any criminal wrong doing is revealed in Trump's businesses then any
persons involved in it within his businesses including his sons or daughter can be indicted. And now, as they have no presidential protection.
imo .this is what Trump is most afraid of ..some criminal business like money laundering
being exposed. not that Mueller will find Russian election collusion.
"Speaking to soon-to-be graduates of the Virginia Military Institute on Wednesday,
Tillerson dropped this truth bomb:
"If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative
realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway
to relinquishing our freedom."
Woof.
..
Why is this important? Because the graduating class of VMI selects its speakers so that
tells you where the minds of the elite military schools are on Trumpism.
n that Cohen tries to stay clear of anything outside his expertise, Russian history and
geopolitics. Several times I've heard him fondly reminisce about being raised in Kentucky. So
he may not be a complete Upper West Side liberal.
Writing objectively, Mr. Anon noted: "Being a pizza deliveryman is probably more dangerous
than most every military MOS."
Hi Mr. Anon,
Thanks for your satiric-service including recognition of often brave pizza
deliverymen!
I have a true work experience to share.
In late-Autumn, 2001, as a dual-Business Manager & Emergency Spill Response Supervisor
for Pa. E.M.A. Haz-Mat Certified Teem Environmental, Inc., one afternoon, the excitable
company-owner called a mandatory meeting for all personnel.
Addressing supervisors & (very skilled) Field Technicians, the rather timid owner
ordered, "Starting today & through the weekend, TEEM is contracted to perform potential
sarin gas terror attack responses within NYC subways & tunnels! So everybody better keep
their pagers on when you go home & be immediately prepared to respond to sarin gas
attacks!"
A dear friend & late-coworker, Warren Hill, became uncomfortable with the assignment
and sensibly spoke up, "Uh, what the fuck? Do we get extra military pay for dealing with the
crazy Taliban while we ain't armed with nothin' but V.O.C. & Hnu meters, Personal
Protection Equipment?"
Unused to having to deal with reasonable employee-challenges, the TEEM owner lost it,
screamed, What's wrong with you, Warren?!! Can't you read the advertisement painted on our
E.R.V., "TEEM Environmental responds to all incidents involving US D.O.T. Hazardous
Materials! Get on the ball, would 'ya, Warren!"
Upon reflection, I stuck neck-out, came to Warren's aid, and opined, "But the Haz-Mat
customers who have signed our company 'Emergency Spill Response Agreements' are not known to
pose secondary-life threatening hazards after initial accidental discharges happened."
"Bah , Just keep your pager on, Chuck!" replied our civilian Commander Stassi.
P.S.: For anyone interested, attached below is my "wordy" 2015 article that delivers an
example of how civilian private-company employees fought in the War Against (White Powder)
Anthrax terror threats.
Cases where the "perp(S)" never caught, an open case, and to this day, I suppose either
Federal or State governments cut lots-of-checks, payable to private Emergency Spill Response
companie$, for their services.
"... In fact, "Intelligence" is simply another word for "information" and in ages gone by the term was used in that way by authorities like Clausewitz or Jomini. ..."
"... Like any labor of scholarship involving the study of human beings by human beings, the work is nearly always conducted with incomplete and ambiguous information as a basis for the analysis. ..."
"Were we right or were we wrong?" This
was Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet's central question in his 2004 talk to the faculty
and students of his alma mater, Georgetown University. What he was talking about, of course, was the
critical political issue of whether or not the Intelligence Community (IC) of which he was the titular head
"got it right" in telling the American people and their government that Iraq was a clear danger to the
United States, as opposed to being a threat to regional states, and if that danger was substantial enough
to serve as a justifiable basis for war, invasion and occupation. In Tenet's address there was much of
self-protection and an implicit warning that neither he nor the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would
accept to be "scapegoated" in a search for the roots of misadventure in Iraq. His words establish a claim
to blamelessness for the CIA and the larger Intelligence Community in the decisions leading up to the Iraq
campaign and a related claim to have done as well as could fairly have been expected. In other words, he
wished to be thought innocent in this matter. Is that reasonable? Is it fair to expect American citizens
and officials to believe that the Intelligence Community did its work well in helping the government of the
United States to make sound decisions about Iraq? This is an important question, because if they did not,
then why were their judgments so flawed in spite of the incredible amounts of taxpayer money lavished on
the agencies of the IC? Why should so much money have been lavished on these agencies if they could do no
better?
In spite of the importance of this
question, impatience with the performance of the intelligence people ought to be somewhat dependent on the
outcome of a national debate as to what should be expected of the process labeled "intelligence." Reporters
sometimes ask rhetorically if decisions should really be made on the basis of intelligence. At first
hearing questions like this seem to be both naďve and nonsensical since it is obvious that information is
the stuff that decisions must be founded on. Nevertheless, decipherment of these statements leads to an
understanding that those who say things like this think that "intelligence" is a form of thinking both
esoteric and obscure, a dark art, separate and distinct from the normal way of knowing things and subject
to acceptance or rejection by special rules of perception. In other words, they think that it is something
like astrology, to be judged by its own "rules."
In fact, "Intelligence" is simply
another word for "information" and in ages gone by the term was used in that way by authorities like
Clausewitz or Jomini. There is nothing mystical or mysterious about the process by which information or
"intelligence" is collected, collated, analyzed and disseminated. "Intelligence" is scholarship conducted
in the service of the state. The great bulk of the information used as data in this scholarship comes out
of the huge archival files of the major agencies supplemented by daily "feedings" of; diplomatic chit-chat,
aerial and satellite reconnaissance, intercepts of communications and hopefully the products of espionage
(clandestine HUMINT). Like any labor of scholarship involving the study of human beings by human beings,
the work is nearly always conducted with incomplete and ambiguous information as a basis for the analysis.
This natural phenomenon is aggravated
by the desire of the studied group to hide something, usually, that which is under study. When George Tenet
said before his Georgetown audience that "We never get things altogether right in the Intelligence
business, nor altogether wrong," he was correct but his statement was irrelevant to a discussion of the
utility of the intelligence process since the quality of the analytic product depends on many variables,
among them; good information and the quality of the minds brought to bear on the imperfect information. It
is both trite and a truism that "intelligence is an art and not a science." What this means is that human
beings may succeed or they may fail in making judgments based on less than complete data and that the
skill, intelligence and experience of those involved is the most important factor in determining the
outcome. To say that "Intelligence" is a flawed process is simply meaningless in a discussion of the
effectiveness of the state in making decisions. If the "Intelligence Community" as it now exists were
abolished, some other group would have to assume the burden of performing the same functions for the
benefit of the state. What would they be called? Perhaps it might be, "The Agency for Special Planning?"
The issue of the effectiveness and
efficiency of the existing Intelligence Community is a separate but linked question from that of knowing
whether or not the elected or appointed officials of the Bush Administration may have intruded themselves
inappropriately into the deliberations of the Intelligence Community in a way that led to distortions in
the estimates of Iraq's significance that were presented to the president and the Congress. It is widely
believed now that this occurred but that is not the subject of this essay.
The question under examination here is
simple. Premise: "The Intelligence Community produced poor quality intelligence on Iraq." Therefore, one
asks – Are there imbedded structural defects in the present United States Intelligence Community that
contributed either directly or indirectly to the production of estimates that were unsound and which failed
the nation? And, moreover, are there characteristics in the present intelligence community of the United
States which now prevent and will prevent it from "reforming" itself? It is clear that the inability of the
Intelligence Community to forecast or estimate Iraq's true condition was a major failure. Why did this
happen, and how can the defects in the "community" be repaired? What "limits" are there in the psychology
and structure of the government that may prevent "repair" of the system?
ORDER IT NOW
The author's conclusion after a working
lifetime of studying the flaws in the system from within the community and from the evidence of continuing
contacts with old colleagues and new friends in the intelligence agencies is that there are a multitude of
problems in the intelligence forces of the United states and that most of them have grown up over a very
long time, are now "built into" the system and are unlikely to be resolved without outside intervention by
the Congress of the United States. It is impossible to consider them all but a few of the most important
are so intractable as to be worth discussing here:
-Leadership. There is a natural
tendency in the general public to believe that the upper levels of the Intelligence Community are filled
with learned, avuncular and sensitive people somehow reminiscent of "George Smiley," the wonderful British
spy and spymaster whose presence fills the earlier novels of John Le Carre. The character, "Smiley" is
wise, sadly pessimistic, a profound student of mankind and devoted to his "people." He has a deeply
empathic nature, is widely read, speaks several languages and is so dedicated to his craft and its ethic
that he fears nothing and will take any risk either to protect his own "people" or to "launch" operations
that, if they fail may destroy him. What a marvelous conception this man is!
There are people like that in the
leadership of US Intelligence. There are a few, but there once were many more and they are fewer all the
time. In fact, the "system" works in such a way that people like "Smiley" are feared and distrusted by the
bureaucratic politicians who really run the intelligence agencies. What are really to be found in the upper
echelons of the "community" are either people who early in their government service became specialized in
the generalized management of organizations (often after early substantive analytic work) or others who
were "staff " of some kind, (budgetary planners, lawyers. liaison staff, etc.) The Directors of the various
agencies are naturally attracted to such people because they are focused on the administrative functions of
the agencies and the protection of their ultimate superior, the Director. This makes them a kind of
"insurance policy " for the directors of the agencies.
The old veterans of the intelligence
trade often make a distinction between "real intelligence officers" and "managers." "Real intelligence
officers" are those who are known to be qualified and capable of the difficult work of analysis and field
collection of information and who are known to have the moral character required to stand up to the
pressure that is present in every political administration to make the "reality" presented by the
"Intelligence Community" conform to the " reality" envisioned by the policy of the administration in power.
The "managers" are essentially courtiers grouped about the throne of whichever baron of the Intelligence
Community they may serve. The "managers" functions center on liaison with the other barons, lobbying the
Congress for money and "protection" of the boss (the Director of their agency). Such people as the
"managers" are easily recognized by the directors of the agencies as very valuable to their career survival
in the stylized "dance" conducted around Washington by the various parts of the United States Government
but they are not well suited to leading "real intelligence officers" to feats of brilliant analysis or
imaginative collection operations because they are always in a "defensive crouch" fearing that the "real
intelligence officers" will cause trouble for them or "the boss" through disagreement with the "picture"
desired by the administration of the day or in Human Intelligence (HUMINT) operations (espionage) gone bad
which result in publicity that could be damaging to the "managers'" careers. Incredibly, these are the
people who tend to be promoted to "line" command "at the top" in the collection, and analytic functions of
the agencies over the heads of the "real intelligence officers."
This pattern of rule by the
"managerial" class is now so well established in the intelligence agencies that it is simply expected that
senior jobs which control large parts of the agencies in the analytic and HUMINT collection fields will be
held by "managers" as opposed to "real intelligence officers." This tendency is so firmly rooted now that
the author has often heard very senior "real intelligence officers" described as "just an analyst," or
"just an operator" in the context of a selection board picking someone for a high level leadership job in
the very field in which the "real intelligence officer" is an authority respected throughout the
government.
This tendency is perpetuated and
reinforced by a process of "mirror-imaging" in personnel selections in which the ever-growing number of
"managers" who are in senior leadership position simply select others like them in the next generation for
the top jobs. This results in a leadership cadre in the Intelligence Community which is more and more
hostile to the risks demanded as the price of real success in collection and analysis and more and more
favorable to the self indulgence of a focus on the "turf battles and budget wars" endemic to Washington and
at the same time less and less driven by the desire to do good intelligence work. The personnel management
disaster described above is ultimately the responsibility of the directors of the agencies that make up the
Intelligence Community. If they wanted to have a different focus in their agencies, there would be a
different focus. There have been many fine and devoted heads of the various American intelligence agencies,
but all too often the directors themselves are members of the "managerial class" within the Intelligence
Community or simply politically selected party functionaries. All too often directors see themselves as
"travelers" on a journey to yet further heights within the government and therefore not "decisively
committed" to the work of their people. For many directors, the "managerial class" within their agencies is
a natural ally in controlling the "wilder impulses" of the "real intelligence officers" in the
organization.
ORDER IT NOW
-Risk Aversion. One of the most trite
and tedious of the many things said in the national media and in the U.S. Congress about the failures of
the Intelligence Community in Iraq and with regard to so many issues is that "HUMINT (espionage in this
context) must be improved!" Repetition of this thought has become obligatory in any "serious" discussion of
security issues but in fact, no one has done much to improve US espionage capabilities. This would be
amusing in its inanity if the underlying phenomenon were not so serious. In fact, the media and the
Congress are largely responsible for creating the operating environment in which the wreck of once
formidable American espionage capabilities became inevitable. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the
public and its representatives convinced themselves that the intelligence services were somehow the enemies
of the American people. The FBI COINTELPRO program aimed at Director Hoover's personal list of enemies and
the Nixon Administration's meditations (the Houston Plan) on the possibility of effectively combining all
U.S. counterintelligence groups into one force contributed to that idea. The Houston Plan was never
approved or implemented but the concept itself was enough to "trigger" demand for congressional
investigations into the "misdeeds" of U.S. counterintelligence groups.
Rather inevitably the "witch hunt"
spread to include U.S. clandestine intelligence. The "Church Committee" in the US Senate resulted. Up until
that time it was generally believed in the population of the United States that the intelligence services
were filled with honorable people trying to protect the country, but the spirit of that age disagreed and a
barrage of "literature" and films spread the idea that career intelligence officers were amoral
opportunists animated by a kind of nihilistic sadism. "The Three Days of the Condor," "The Bourne
Identity," and similar rubbish which portrayed a universe unfamiliar to anyone who had ever worked in
intelligence filled people's heads with the idea that the clandestine services were to be tolerated but
only just barely tolerated and that they must be closely watched and restricted. American espionage
capabilities began to decline from that time and the process has not yet been reversed.
A mass of regulations were enacted in
those and following years which tied the hands of the clandestine services so effectively that they have
never recovered. Several categories of people were placed "off limits" as possibilities for recruitment as
foreign agents (for example, reporters, professors, employees of American companies) without regard for the
fact that these very people have inherent access to people and information often needed to carry out
effective intelligence work. The rationale seemed to be that some kinds of people needed to be "protected"
from the "dirty" business of espionage. The same kind of "thinking" has caused the clandestine services to
rely far too much on "liaison" relationships with foreign intelligence services as a substitute for
conducting American run espionage against difficult targets. The reason? Disclosure of foreign operations
does not entail the career risk for the "managers" that the failure of an American operation would bring.
The creation of this kind of operating
environment served as a powerful "enabling" mechanism for the not so gradual assumption of power in the
intelligence agencies by the "managerial class." In an atmosphere dominated by fear of violation of
legislated restrictions on behavior and the use of clandestine funds, it was only natural that the
directors of the agencies would look to those who had little interest in driving forward the limits of
accomplishment and every interest in "limiting the damage" and "preventing surprises" for themselves and
"the boss." This has resulted in a degree of control over operations by lawyers and financial officers that
is suffocating to the ability of skilled operatives to mount the kind of potentially rewarding but risky
operations that would be needed, for example, to penetrate "Al-Qa'ida." Clandestine operations are
inherently dangerous. It follows that if they are evaluated by people who "know the cost of everything but
the value of nothing," they will inevitably be disapproved before execution if the risks are considerable.
Those in Congress who wrote the rules used as excuses to disapprove these operations will then "bleat"
pitifully about the need for "better HUMINT" the next time a disaster occurs.
Analysis by Committee. Much the same
phenomena exist on the analytic "side" of the intelligence business. Brilliant people from the best schools
"sign up" for a career in intelligence work from a sense of patriotism, intellectual curiosity, and a
desire to "make a difference" in the world. What typically happens to them after that is that they are
"eaten alive" by bureaucracies utterly controlled by the "managerial" mentality. Young analysts are called
on to write papers that demand a fresh look, hard work and an undying devotion to the truth. The draft
papers they write are not their property and these papers should not be subject to the vanities of "pride
of authorship" so common in other works of scholarship, but neither should they be treated with a lack of
respect for the views of the analysts and the creativity that the authors bring to the task. Too often, the
"editing by committee" system that prevails results in papers that are not only irrelevant to the security
needs of the nation but are actually misleading because of their lack of intellectual honesty.
In the "managerial" world, nothing
matters so much as "staying in step" with the consensus in the various agencies of the intelligence world
as well as making sure that analysis does not deny the political leadership of the country an intellectual
"platform" from which they can proclaim their vision of the future. The "mere" belief of the analysts
counts for little in the judgment of the "managers" when weighed against the career destroying effect of
disapproval or disfavor from on high.
As a result analysis is "ironed out"
in a "layer cake" system of committees at ever-higher layers of bureaucracy. These committees are made up
of supervisors at the appropriate layer and they "take care" to insure that the interests of the various
parties within an agency are protected in the text that goes forward to the next higher layer and that
untoward results are avoided. When this process is ended, what is typically produced is a stereotypical
example of the "lowest common denominator," not something on which the country should "hang its hat" in
making decisions affecting the national fate, and certainly. Such papers are inevitably reflective of the
kind of "group think" that grows up in any highly integrated and hierarchical bureaucracy that controls the
career long expectations of its inhabitants. In other words, an individual analyst has no chance whatever
of having his or her views expressed at the national level unless a large and self-serving group of
careerists approve them and find them not to be threatening to their collective view of what serves the
group's perceived best interest in terms of its relations with the rest of the intelligence community and
the sitting government.
ORDER IT NOW
The rule of the "managerial class" in
the intelligence community ensures the permanence of this "system." The ruling group will reproduce itself
through "mirror imaging"
ad infinitum
and will be maintained in position through the perceived
self-interest of the kind of people who typically become directors of the major intelligence agencies. This
is not to say that there have not been brave, courageous and creative directors of the major intelligence
agencies. The author has had the honor of serving under several. It was a pleasure and they know who they
are, but the sad truth, known to all who have served for extended periods in intelligence is that most
directors are part of the problem. The truth is that intelligence is an art best practiced by gifted
eccentrics, people widely and deeply educated, favored by nature and training with intuition beyond the
average and who care more for the truth than anything else. Such people consistently will follow their
"nose" and their instincts on a trail of information like bloodhounds until they arrive at a truth that
matters to the people of the United States. In the espionage field of endeavor, the function of managers is
to be "enablers," to make workable the environment in which gifted case officers can break through the
manifold barriers that will enable the penetration of groups that threaten the lives of our people. What
must be avoided is the selection of managers who instinctively feel that their function is to "hold back"
the operators and analysts in order to preserve "peace" within the bureaucracy.
Domination of the Intelligence
Function by the Executive Branch: All the intelligence agencies are parts of the Executive Branch. The CIA
is a separate organization within the Executive Branch and directly subordinated to the president. The
Defense Intelligence Agency is part of the Defense Department as is the National Security Agency. The State
Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) is obviously part of that department. All these groups
are deeply imbedded within these "ministries" of government in a constitutional system which ensures that
the authority of the political party that controls the white House will control the intelligence agencies
as well. This means that the temptation that will always be presented to politicians to attempt to shape"
both information collection and the analysis of that information to their taste is likely to be
overwhelming.
In most American administrations, the
most senior authorities (generally elected) are wise enough to know that without sound and objective
judgments from the intelligence agencies, the information upon which they base decisions is worthless. The
reason one creates separate information gathering and analysis systems under the rubric of "intelligence"
is that there is an inherent "conflict of interest" in any system that allows policy decision makers to be
the same people who judge what the reality is upon which such decisions are based. Decision makers can
always choose to decide policy questions based on their own view of the world, but it is intuitively
obvious that this is not the best way to insure good decisions. For this reasons the most senior
authorities generally restrain their subordinates on the policy side of government and prevent excessive
interference with the process of judging information.
The danger is that the wisdom of that
attitude is not universally appreciated and in some government past, present or future, policy officials
may choose to drive the intelligence people supporting their deliberations towards judgments unsupported by
convincing and dependable evidence. If one doubts the seriousness of the possible consequences of such a
"cattle drive" one need only consider such historical examples of misadventure as the US strategic
obsession with the likelihood of a Japanese first strike on the Philippines in 1941. This led the US
Government to focus attention of its analytic force in that direction so firmly that Japanese preparations
for an attack in Hawaii were completely missed. Another example would be the obsession with the
"inevitability" of victory that influenced intelligence to "miss" completely enemy preparations for the Tet
Offensive of 1968 in spite of the mass of information available that indicated something really "big" on
the way. In both cases the results of policy or strategic thinking having been allowed to "intrude" on
analysis were simply catastrophic. Strong leadership by "real intelligence officers" can help to prevent
such disasters. The "dissent" taken by the State Department in the October 2002 NIE on Iraq may well have
been an example of the survival of such leadership.
How can this be prevented? This
problem exists across the world in every country where serious foreign policy and military issues must be
considered and decisions on policy and strategy made on the basis of a systematic consideration of
available data. In every country there is the problem of trying to insure that the judgments of the
information or intelligence people are untainted by external pressures. There have been various methods and
structures adopted to deal with this danger to the national security. In some places external "think tanks"
are used to "test" the result of internal analysis. In others countries, reliance is placed on the
competitive analysis of two or more intelligence agencies, often one military and the other civilian.
In Israel, within the Directorate of
Military Intelligence there exists something called the "Devil's Advocate" a name borrowed from the process
of canonization within the Catholic Church in which a cleric is appointed to oppose the sainthood of one
who has been presented for consideration for that honor. In the Israeli "Devil's Advocate" section, the
officers so employed have the job of opposing the analysis accepted by the government and of preventing the
acceptance of institutional "group think" as the basis for decisions. For the senior Israeli officers who
serve in the "Devil's Advocate" section it is understood that opposition to the judgments of the rest of
the intelligence community will have a career price and that the officers who do this work should look
forward to a fruitful life in retirement from the army soon after their service in this job. Nevertheless,
they perform a vital; perhaps "priceless" is not too strong a word, service for their country. None of
these devices seem altogether suitable for the United States as a "safeguard" against overwhelming pressure
to bring their analysis into conformity with policy. The sheer scale of the institutions involved in
American life dictate modification of the methods used in smaller governments. Some approach that combines
the better features of these institutional "fixes" would probably be appropriate.
Can the "Intelligence Community" change
itself to eliminate the problems discussed above?
It cannot.
The United States "Intelligence
Community" is a "mature bureaucracy," a group of institutions that have reached a stable equilibrium in
their internal politics and in their relationships
I guess Lang is talking about what he refers to as the "Borg". His biggest problem is that he is one of
them, as this long disinformation article shows.
How can you even pretend there were "intelligence
failures" after these guys murdered the Kennedy's and pulled off the 9/11 new Pearl Harbor.
As usual, Lang is just laying a smoke screen for his war criminal Masonic brothers.
Of course Iran is a danger to the USA.
In 1953 there was the CIA coup, that ended democratic Iran, and brought the USA puppet shah in power.
In 1979 Muslim clerics had the audacity to send the puppet away, and put themselves in power.
Since then they, with success, resisted the USA yoke.
Right now Assad is a danger to the USA, he's still alive, and, with help of Russia, and some help of
Erdogan, in power.
Both regimes undermine USA prestige in the world.
Fascinating stuff, thanks. One of the best articles I've read on Unz, in fact, and that's saying quite a
lot because there's been a lot of great stuff here over the past few years.
Mr. Lang hasn't appreciated my pending questions about his first two columns here at Unz Review, but I have
a couple more, one substantive, the other editorial.
1. What does Mr. Lang specifically advocate, if
anything?
He urges Congress to revamp a bureaucracy. But he says that when Congress addressed that bureaucracy in
the mid-1970s as part of the post-Vietnam "'witch hunt'" it "tied the hands of the clandestine services so
effectively that they have never recovered." (He seems to see himself as one of those so bound. But that's
not made clear in the context of anything between 1968 (Tet) and the circa 2002 warmongering against Iraq.)
So if a Congressman during a hearing were to ask Mr. Lang how his work had been hampered before he
retired, and for his specific recommendations going forward, what would he say?
This is an interesting critique of the current state of the intelligence community. The author's contention
that the system has devolved into a bureaucratic muddle under the thrall of the executive branch seems
accurate but:
The disregard for the Church Committee and pining for the days of the gifted operator being
free from pesky managerial control seems misplaced. I know most Americans have a limited sense of history
and memory but, for example, look at the blowback from the Mossadegh coup, the bad intelligence we received
from Gehlen about the Soviets, MK ULTRA, Robert Parry's revelation that members of the intelligence
community interfered with Carter's attempt to negotiate the release of the hostages held by the mullahs.
There are many more such examples. I am not so sure that the "good ol days" were that great. Also, is it
even true that the Executive branch is in control(does the tail wag the dog)?
Interesting analysis – apparently reflecting imperial institutions bureaucratized to the point of
calcification, like an alzheimers brain. I wonder if by extension the senior ranks of the military in
general have become inhabited by risk-averse careerists? Can this explain at least partly its lack of
success in warmaking since Vietnam?
Lang is what we draft soldiers use to call "Lifers"; people who define their life by their love of guns and
bombs etc. Reading him daily over the years brings to mind Kissinger's denigration of military men's
intelligence or Hitler's comment that Generals don't understand economics. Not intelligence in the sense of
IQ ( I have learned a lot from him; smarter than me no doubt). Rather intelligence in the sense of not
being able to see reality through the lens of their love of shoot 'em up bang bang.
For example, he really would have us believe that there is something wrong with "Intelligence". They make
mistakes. Not the reality that they provide the rational for the wars he is so proud to have been a part
of. He is proud of his killing deeds in Vietnam, which was largely the result of what: failed intelligence
in the Gulf of Tonkin? He is proud of the role he played in the killing Kaddafi's baby daughter. Was this
the result of failed intelligence about terrorism? Come on Pat your are like the Robert Duval character in
Apocalypse Now who "loved the smell of Napalm in the morning." Intelligence has not failed the likes of
you. It provides the rational for you to do what is you live to do – killing. You spent your adult life
killing or being responsible for killing people whose only crime was to be sitting on oil.
When you were doing your killing in Vietnaum, draftees like me were saying "hell no I won't go". There was
a saying at the time: "What if someone gave a war and no one showed up". If people like you would stop
showing up we would not have troops stationed in 125 countries in the world today. Guys like you show up
because you love the shit and you could care less about the accuracy of Intelligence. Intelligence is the
opium of the people. It gives them a reason to pay people like you to act out your childhood fantasies
about war.
Repectually!
@ heros-
thank you, saved me a bunch of snarking at the author
.
as for the article itself, I rarely don't finish articles and comment on them, but the sophistry is so wide
and deep, it was impossible to finish
.
the author -as does the korporate/lapdog media- makes a number of presumptions which are not supported by
current reality (which is -in fact- the reason for their role as gatekeepers) firstly, AS IF we had a
system which makes decisions based on facts, the greatest good for the greatest number, and -you know-
reality
we do not
.
what we have imposed upon us, is a PURPOSEFULLY corrupted and broken system which is used by the 1% to
enforce their will all the 'fact finding', 'research', etc, etc, etc, is so much window dressing and
bullshit to justify doing what they want to do and has NOTHING to do with what eggheads, pontificators,
pundits, academics, etc have researched, experimented on, or theorized
.
repeat: it is ALL bullshit to make the insane decisions FOR the 1% seem like the only choice we have
Oh Americans! One thing about brits that I like is tbat they never hesitated talking about their empire or
imperial interests. But all americans seem to have have blinkers (set by their imperial hubris or genuine
belief that their country stands for the good) even supposedly intellectuals cannot escape it. Taleb calls
them intellectual yet idiot, l suppose Lang is one of them.
The intelligence community, while apparently giving useful tactical-level information
sometimes
, is
now, from what I seen, just a propaganda tool. Look at the Skripal farce. The IC of the "five eyes"
confirmed Russia was behind trying to kill the Skripals by smearing his door handle with nerve agent (so
ludicrous it's like something out of
A Fish Called Wanda
). Or Russian collusion and the Steele
dossier and golden showers. Or Clapper as head of the NGA in 2003 claiming they had satellite photographic
proof Saddam was moving WMD's. Or Assad's "chemical attacks on his own people". What's worse is that the IC
hucksters (not IC, per se, just those pitching the wares) no longer even bother putting on an elaborate dog
and pony show, show & tell, and holding vials of inert anthrax at the U.N. Pretty soon we won't even need
the IC middleman, though I'm sure the six-figure contractors, who now make up the bulk of the IC, will
still be collecting the big bucks for "protecting America".
What is truth?," asked an exasperated Pontus Pilate after being badgered by a certain (((group))) to
take action and put a certain innocent God-man to death. Somethings never change.
Mr. Lang created a false dichotomy which basically is reduced to No True Scotsman
fallacy written from the position of the true Scotsman. There are no true Scotsmen.
Things are much simpler. It all comes down to integrity which is a question of morality. Mr. George Slam
Dunk Tenet produced what he was asked to produce. There was a war to be had and he had to do his job and
show that he was a team player and he did it. This was not an issue of bad intelligence or that somebody
made a mistake. If anybody had integrity there in CIA he would refuse and be ready to resign. I haven't
heard of anybody resigning or being fired prior to war in 2003. The additional dimension was a fear of
physical threat. Mr. George Slam Dunk Tenet had attacks of anxiety fearing that he or his family would be
hit while driving around Washington DC on business or with his family. Was it because there was something
wrong with Mr. Tenet psychologically or was the idea planted in his mind by somebody who had enough
credibility to make Mr. Tenet believe it? If the latter it shows that in Washington DC thing are done not
differently than in some third wold capitol.
From the TV adaptation of Smiley's People, spoken by George Smiley as portrayed by Alec Guinness (49:30):
In my time, Peter Guillam, I've seen Whitehall shirts go up and come down again. I've listened to all the
excellent arguments for doing nothing and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop
up and down and call it progress. I've seen good men go to the wall and the idiots get promoted with
dazzling regularity. All I'm left with is me. And the thirty odds years of Cold War without the option.
Oh, SUCH nonsense. What hope is there of a sensible attempt to alter the disastrous course Western foreign
policy is taking if anyone can read a stunning piece of analysis like that and come up with such a reply?
The author has a valid point regarding "groupthink" in the intelligence services but his descriptions of
the alternatives don't seem to hold much water. It's not like even it its glory days American HUMINT was
anywhere near up to, say, Soviet standards.
as for the article itself, I rarely don't finish articles and comment on them, but the sophistry is so
wide and deep, it was impossible to finish
But nevertheless you feel entitled to judge an author
whose article you haven't even read? At what point did you decide it was sophistry pure and simple?
The purpose of the Iraq war was to reunite Iran and Iraq as a bulwark against Israel. The goal was
achieved. The resurgent Iran we are seeing today is the fruit of the Iraq war.
Watch what is happening
rather than what the talking heads are saying. And keep your friends close and enemies closer.
If you listen closely you can hear the knashing of teeth in Israel that big brother stopped re-arranging
the chess pieces in the M.E. after he installed a Iran allied shia (Nouri Al-Maliki) as leader of Iraq.
. Intelligence Pact
It seems that, as Blitzer contends, Washington and Tel Aviv made a deliberate effort in the mid-1950s to
put an end to these covert operations against one another. Most observers assign responsibility for this to
top CIA official James Angleton .. Sharing information on Arab countries may have been one example of this.
Another may have been assistance in getting nuclear weapons for Israel. According to Seymour Hersh,
"sources close to" Angleton told former New York Times reporter Tad Szulc that the CIA helped the Israelis
obtain technical nuclear information in the late 1950s. "This fits in with something I had been told by a
high-level CIA official," Seymour Hersh added in 1978, "that Angleton, then in charge of CIA liaison with
Israeli intelligence, gave the Israelis similar technical information in the mid-1960s." [19] During this
period, enriched uranium was vanishing from an American atomic energy company with close ties to the
Israeli government. [20] ..
A similar pattern of cooperation between US and Israeli intelligence agencies exists in the area of
military procurement. "Israelis were caught in the Pentagon with unauthorized documents," one US official
told former Congressman Paul Findley, "sometimes scooping up the contents of 'inboxes' on desk tops." This
official recalled that a number of Israelis were very quietly asked to leave the US as a result of such
activities; no formal charges were ever filed against them. Several US officials told Findley that the
Israelis would submit orders for military items they were not supposed to have or even to know about --
using top-secret code numbers and sometimes precise specifications. Presumably they obtained the
information from friendly executive branch contacts, but no official efforts were undertaken to discover
the sources of the leaks. [22] ..
@leander
.
1. it appears you are guilty of the 'sin' you accuse me of: my post SAID why I thought it was sophistry (as
well as in agreement with heros analysis) in short, because IT DENIES OBVIOUS REALITY
the author prattles on AS IF 'intelligence'/information that is gleaned by spooks or WHOEVER, actually
matters in what decisions our 1% superiors make on our 99% behalf (but NOT for our 99% benefit)
.
2. don't be such an authoritarian tool: FORGET about what the 1% SAY is what guides their decisions, etc,
LOOK AT WHO BENEFITS, you scared, shorn, sheeple again, in short, as they EXPLICITLY STATED in the
bulldozing run up to the eye-rack-eee war part 1, they 'fixed the intelligence' around the ALREADY MADE
DECISION TO ATTACK for the greedy reasons of Empire, NOT because sad damn who's sane was our
hitler-of-the-month ™
*snort*
it is difficult to take such propaganda victims as yourself seriously; you are stuck on the superficial
layer of what Empire presents as 'reality', and don't see (or even GUESS) that there is a man behind the
curtain pulling the levers to bedazzle you
.
bread and circuses, kampers, bread and circuses
hee hee hee
ho ho ho
ha ha ha
ak ak ak
Pity the English. They have been slaves of a racist-supremacist, foreign sect ever since Cromwell let the
sect back in the country. Time for Americans to again free themselves from the "city of london" sect.
The
goy and the golem: James Angleton and the rise of Israel
.. "Angleton was was a leading architect of America's strategic relationship with Israel that endures
and dominates the region to this day," Jefferson Morley writes in The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA
Spymaster James Jesus Angleton. More than any other man, the longtime chief of U.S. counterintelligence
made possible Israel's shift "from an embattled settler state into a strategic ally of the world's greatest
superpower."
Angleton did so chiefly by burying any effort in the U.S. intelligence establishment to question
Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons in the 1960s. "Angleton's loyalty to Israel betrayed U.S. policy on
an epic scale," Morley writes. "Instead of supporting U.S. nuclear security policy, he ignored it." ..
My first contact with CIA was while visiting the remote Mojave Airport in California in the early 1980s
during a motorcycle trip to Death Valley. While there I noticed numerous Boeing 707 airline sized planes
parked off a faraway field in the distance. There must have been at least twenty five or thirty of these
airline size planes just sitting in isolation from the rest of the planes at the airport.
At first, I
thought the planes were merely being mothballed (stored) there until I saw one of them start to move.
Curious, I remember asking one of the workers at the airport about who owned the large planes and was told
that no one really knew but it was referred to as the "spook airline" because the planes and their use were
shrouded in absolute secrecy. Nobody knew who piloted the planeseither because their pilots arrived at the
airport either in smaller executive size planes or in vans that went without stopping directly up to the
planes after entering the airport property.
it was only later that I discovered these planes belonged to Air America, the "the CIA airline" and were
apparently used to ferry large numbers of mostly mercenary soldiers to areas the CIA was interested in at
the time. I also learned that the Mojave Airport was only one of several other similar such bases of Air
America operation. A friend described laughingly described Air America as the "Coup Airline" because of the
CIA's propensity for the overthrowing of unfriendly governments.
About this same time, I also started reading more and more articles about the fact that our elected
representatives, even at the highest levels, didn't actually fully know what the CIA was up to because of
the CIA's so-called, ultra secret "black budgets" which allowed it to operate without any sort of control
from our elected representatives below the Presidental level who claimed they didn't want to know about
these "black" activities out of fear of getting blamed once the activities arising out of them became
known.
I also started reading about rumors that parts of the CIA had become essentially self-funding using
illicit activities like drug running and arms sales to avoid any sort of even marginal budget control by
even the President of the US. The CIA's own airline would, of course, provide the ideal transportation
vehicle to facilitate such activities.
Essentially this meant that a significant part of the CIA had been allowed to essentially go rogue
without any sort of real supervision whatsoever. Unfortunately, The Mossad, would have been more than happy
to step in and provide this oversight using friendly Zionists already embedded within the agency.
There are those who now claim that parts of the CIA are hotbeds of Israeli controlled spying activities
operating specifically within its unsupervised "black budgets".
State department leader Dean Acheson warned this would happen in the mid-1940′s when plans started being
made to turn the wartime OSS into the CIA. I have always thought his opinion might have been formed by his
secret wartime access to the Venona Transcripts which extensively detailed how intelligence agencies in
both the US and the UK had become hotbeds of Communist spying activities. (Sort of like the Israelis and
the CIA today. )
Read about Acheson's very prescient criticism here
I would earnestly recommend that you go to the Colonel's site, SST, and read, from the beginning long ago,
his articles analysing the defects of Western foreign policy and what leads to those defects. You will find
there the most powerful and informed thinking on this subject that there is.
I myself don't really belong
here because I'm a tooth and nail Deplorable as well as a foreigner. But so what? We both know that what
our respective elites are doing is wrong. We both know that there has to be some other way. If we don't
seek out balanced and considered analysis then we might as well run off and join those many dissidents for
whom dissidence is merely a hobby, or those many others for whom it merely offers occasion for dispute.
So, these inner problem's within every major intel agency can be basically summed up in just four
word's ..Beware the jews within.
Now back to my soon to be finished one page book that will sum up
everything false we were told or taught regarding WWII in all it's many areas .."The Complete Untold Truth
about, WWII" .
"Them Germans was Correct!" The End.
Best one page book length expose' one can obtain in the vast search for real fact based Truth, of which
international jewry so hate's for one to learn of eh.
Get rid of the intelligence agencies.
If Jewsa needs info about a region, country, even itself, ask Russia, China. Answers will be intelligent,
diplomatic, accurate, and relevant.
Billions saved can go to help, real help not bombs, countries
destroyed for Israel and impoverished by Goldman Sachs, Monsanto, ilk.
I asked at what precise part of his piece you smelt sophistry. Maybe I have lost my ability in reading
comprehension of your language. Could well be? Apparent from being more generally not too fond of
sloganeering.
a number of presumptions which are not supported by current reality
Just look at how during the reign of Chabad Rabbi Dov Zakiem appointed as Head of Pentagon $$$ controls
etc What began as a mention to tv reporters a day prior to 9/11 event's of somehow pentagon cannot account
for a Missing $2.3-TRILLION!!! Has as of last date I read any new revelations of that missing cash, morphed
into almost $9.5-TRILLION missing!!! And that last amount was like several month's ago.
What a
Cohencidence eh? And just think what new and worse swindle scams Israel and it's mossad wonderkins can
come up with to do next with so large an amount of Black Budget ready cash available?
Yes Yes I know that several hasbara clown's and tribal member's will say no such stolen cash ever goes
to 100% innocent Israel and it's equally innocent jewry aka "The World's Biggest and Only Victim's that
ever matter".
But daily now another 10,000 folks in America awaken to fact that research proves beyond all doubt that
virtually Every evil and bad and immoral and unethical type issue or event since 3,500 yr's ago has More
jewdeo fingerprint's all over it than any other cause period.
And once red pilled and awakened to such real truth's .None are able to return to their former asleep
position even if they wished to No amount of jewish hasbara propagandas will ever be able to undo real
truth once that cats been let out of the bag so to speak.
Mossad/Israel state moto:.."By Deception(lies!) You Shall Cause War's" .Indeed they do eh.
The author is right as far as he goes but he ignores the CIA/Wall Street complex that was established by
Allen Dulles – that complex is at the very core of the US Deep State.
That complex is held together from the top; notice that only the very connected are put in charge of the
CIA and connected means very tied into Wall Street.
The CIA, in spite of their low period in the 1970′s, has been very effective in controlling the US media.
Note how the Brennan secret team created a trap that the democrats walked right into.
And note how they have the FBI taking the fall while the CIA continues to operate in the shadows.
I like the author; he brings some sanity but he is still a creature of US supremacism.
He doesn't like me; he has blocked me from commenting at his site.
But I still hope he speaks out as far as he goes.
It is helpful to learn the point of view of the knightly orders, which, as in the middle ages, constitute a
parasitic class indoctrinated to see nothing but the stylized ethical set pieces proper to their order.
Here are a few things Lang cannot acknowledge without jeopardizing his identity:
Impunity. Doesn't show up in the list of CIA flaws, but it's staring him in the face, right there in
black and white: the Central Intelligence Agency Act, the Rogers/Huston get-out-of-jail-free card, the
Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the operational files exemption, the political questions doctrine,
and lots of secret law and regulations. Under municipal law (strictly speaking, it doesn't meet minimal
legal standards, it's administrative red tape,) CIA can get away with anything. So they are institutionally
criminal. This is a sore point, frantically repressed. Even vague recollections of old movies are enough to
trigger the traditional posturing of honor-based chivalric cultures.
Operations. Beltway courtiers are constrained to discuss CIA's intelligence function in isolation from
its overwhelmingly dominant, and inherently criminal, clandestine operations function. In reality, all
analysts are paid to do is complain about NCS crime. Then when their next criminal racket gets caught, NCS
trots out some analysts to say, 'We at CIA warned about this.' CIA operations includes gun-running,
drug-dealing, human trafficking and pedophile blackmail, murder, torture, coercive interference, and
aggression by armed bands and irregulars. Intelligence is not CIA's business.
Rule of law. Lang, in the context of the USG going to war, writes, "If the "Intelligence Community" as
it now exists were abolished, some other group would have to assume the burden of performing the same
functions." Right. That other group would be the duly constituted authority under US supreme law, the UN
Security Council, which the intelligence community devoted most of their efforts to subverting with foreign
corrupt practices and fabricated war propaganda. It's not like CIA got stuck with this job, they usurped
it.
Having had my comments deleted and been blocked several times on SST, I can tell anyone who would listen to
not listen to your advice and waste hours poring over that myopic blog. Myopic, because anytime someone
writes an interesting comment that contradicts any of Lang's masonic beliefs, Lang gets nasty. Even
TwistedGenius has had to dance around a snarling Lang because he crossed some secret line.
Sure, Lang was
right about a lot of things from 2003-2007. But he was also often wrong and no one ever dared to call him
on it.
Once again, I will point out Lang's complete failure to deviate from the narrative on things like all
these gun-grabbing "mass shootings". As I recall Lang was even very wishy washy about the second amendment,
offering to sell his guns in a government gun grab. So he lies to us about about what his masonic brethren
are up to on this front.
But of course the biggest void in his analysis is the JQ. He attends barmitzfa's, purim, and who knows
what other kind of cabal rituals. He cannot deal with the JQ because he is borg, and he knows what kind of
punishment would await him. And angry jews crying for blood revenge aren't any where near as bad as when
the masonic brotherhood turns on you.
Agree but I think it is much more than a smoke Screen and preparation for war.
The 527 paid slave drivers and their bureaucrats and military (called the USA) has become a permanent false
flag operation. The 9/11 advisory explained:
1. slave drivers have been ordered to spy on slaves,
2. slave drivers have been ordered to silence all slave protests and objections,
3. slave drivers have been ordered to study the slaves like rats in cage,
4. slave drivers have been ordered to deprive the slaves until production is sufficient to satisfy the
Pharaohs.
5. slave drivers have been ordered to keep the USA dark, slaves are not allowed to know or learn anything
they don't pay for.
6. Slaves are expected to listen to Pharaoh produced, media distributed propaganda at least 12 hours per
day.
Americans now live in fear of the Bastards from the Dark Side Kingdom of Lies.
The problem is how to save America from the USA. The USA is milking our cattle, selling our eggs,
fencing us in with costly schooling and licenses to be eligible to get work, spying on our thoughts,
destroying our earning platforms, price and ticket gating our access to information, bottling and selling
to us, our once free water and air, and generally putting Americans at risk to attack from the global
outside and famine blight from the inside.
Now, the prime suspect in the breach has been identified: a 29-year-old
former C.I.A. software engineer who had designed malware used to break into the computers of terrorism
suspects and other targets, The New York Times has learned.
Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched the Manhattan
apartment of the suspect, Joshua A. Schulte, one week after WikiLeaks released the first of the C.I.A.
documents in March last year, and then stopped him from flying to Mexico on vacation, taking his passport,
according to court records and relatives. The search warrant application said Mr. Schulte was suspected of
"distribution of national defense information," and agents told the court they had retrieved "N.S.A. and
C.I.A. paperwork" in addition to a computer, tablet, phone and other electronics.
But instead of charging Mr. Schulte in the breach, referred to as the Vault
7 leak, prosecutors charged him last August with possessing child pornography, saying agents had found
10,000 illicit images on a server he created as a business in 2009 while studying at the University of Texas
at Austin.
Court papers quote messages from Mr. Schulte that suggest he was aware of
the encrypted images of children being molested by adults on his computer, though he advised one user, "Just
don't put anything too illegal on there."
In September, Mr. Schulte was released on the condition that he not leave
New York City, where he lived with a cousin, and keep off computers. He was jailed in December after
prosecutors found evidence that he had violated those rules, and he has been held at the Metropolitan
Correctional Center in Manhattan since then. He has
posted on Facebook under a pseudonym a series of essays
critical of the criminal justice system.
It is unclear why, more than a year after he was arrested, he has not been
charged or cleared in connection with Vault 7. Leak investigators have had access to electronic audit trails
inside the C.I.A. that may indicate who accessed the files that were stolen, and they have had possession of
Mr. Schulte's personal data for many months.
... ... ...
According to his family and
his
LinkedIn page
, Mr. Schulte did an internship at the National Security Agency while working on a bachelor's degree in computer
engineering. He worked in the C.I.A.'s Engineering Development Group, which designed the hacking tools used by its Center for
Cyber Intelligence. He left the agency in November 2016 and moved to New York to work for Bloomberg L.P. as a software engineer.
Most of the government's cyberespionage is carried out by the N.S.A., but the C.I.A. also employs hackers. The leaked Vault 7
documents came from the agency's Engineering Development Group and included descriptions and instructions for the use of agency
hacking tools, but only a small amount of the actual computer code for the tools.
From reader comments: If I had my way, I would bring back the draft with NO college
deferments. In fact, the sons and daughters of politicians would get called up first. Service in
the IDF doesn't count. ... ... "Yes, but expand that. Mandate that we first enlist, train, and promptly deploy any children and
grandchildren of all members of Congress, members of the President's Cabinet, federal judges, Federal Reserve Board of Governors,
and the CEOs/CFOs/CIOs etc. of military companies (including Northrup Grumman, Boeing, and their ilk). "
This is a very large "sinecure"
At a deeper level, military forces are agents/enforcers for the elite. Its primary role is the providing expansion and the
defense of the interests of the ruling elite against external and internal enemies. Without addressing the dominant social
interests in the state, a focus on shringking the military budget is quite inadequate.
I don't have a problem with 4% of GDP, but I have a big problem with what we're getting for
our money.
A quarter million for a four-star general is fine, if the general is any good (almost none
of them are by design). In theory a general is equivalent to a division manager in a Fortune
500 company, but COs in the US military have amazingly little power. They're not even free to
hire and fire their own subordinates in most cases. So our senior officers are really paid
generously to pretend they are great military commanders.
The average SAT score at West Point is only 1340 these days. Prior to the Vietnam War I
believe West Point was academically competitive with Ivy League schools, or at least that's
what Class of '68 veteran John T. Reed states.
The Naval Academy is 1322 and the Air Force Academy is 1370.
These aren't bad scores, but clearly these officers aren't elite academically.
The enlisted personnel seem adequate in quality thanks to the AFQT, other than women of
course. They're overpaid compared to what is available for them in the private sector.
The pension system, in addition to being overly generous, has perverse incentives. As any
service-member approaches that magical 20 year mark, any kind of independent thinking must
disappear (which the military already does so much to eliminate). Want your fat pension?
Better shut up and emulate your COs in every way possible. It should just be replaced with a
Thrift Savings Plan (gov't equivalent of a 401k).
One sixth of the force consists of women. Every last one of them subtracts from the
efficacy of the military.
One sixth of personnel are officers, which is far too many officers.
Then you have all the unnecessary EO officers, JAGs, and other political commissars.
I don't have an issue with the various recreational perks in the armed forces as they
contribute to espirit de corps. The private sector could use more of this, honestly.
The GI Bill is also politically objectionable as we should not be giving money to The
Enemy (colleges in this case).
This is the price a mercantile republic pays for an all volunteer fighting force.
When you have less than 5% of the population serving in the military and commitments all
over the globe, then you need to be prepared to pay for those professional services (yes, the
military is a profession like any other). If you're prepared to go back to a draft force, then we can start talking about changes to
the pay and benefit system.
Personally, I think service of some kind, be it military or community, ought to be a
requirement to vote. Service guarantees citizenship.
Maybe you can help me on the following ancillary matter? F.y.i., Mighty John Bolton passed on an opportunity to fight LBJ's atrocious war against
communism, in Vietnam. As PreZident Trump's present Iranophobe-warmongering N.S.A. Adviser, I tried (but failed)
to determine how much pay & "bennies" Bolton now gets from the bottomless Executive
Branch feeding trough.
Same scam, different tactics. 40 years ago we lived in Annapolis, MD in the lowest tier of a then – New housing
development concept. Our cramped townhouses were on the scrabble outer ring.
The most lavish houses were in the inner-ring, on a divided boulevard, extensively
landscaped and maintained. At least 3/4 of those homes were owned by "Double-Dippers"–
military retirees collecting military retirement pay while employed as civil servants in
Federal gov, with defense contractor consulting on the side.
"Thank you for your service,"– in cash, if you please.
I do not mind community service, but I object to military service and I do not want to
vote. Voting gives legitimacy to a system that I oppose. I was born in the geographical area
now ruled by the government of the United States of America. Perhaps, LT Dan, you would be in
favor of a status such as non-citizen resident. I was born in this area by a quirk of fate,
not any choice on my part. I do not usually agree with US government policy, nor do I want
the US government to represent me or "protect" me. It would be just for me to pay less taxes
since I do not desire and would gladly refuse most of the "services" the government provides,
especially those noted in the above article.
Neither me, my father, my grandfather, nor my great grandmother served in the US Military,
but one of the large defense contractors put bread on the table for four generations of my
family. My 90-year old grandmother is still collecting my grandfather's pension from that
firm and he's been dead for 30 years!
US is rich and the debt is high. Both can be true at the same time. But taxes are relatively low so if there is a
government debt crisis paying down the debt would just involve raising taxes. Just look at GDP per capita US which is very
high up there so I don't see how anyone can argue the US is not a very rich country.
Despite many problems, the US has many advantages like half the world's Ashkenazim who are very good at creating
unbeatable new companies .etc., etc., etc .
Thanks for the laughs. You must be of the Maven-Krugman school of debt. You're all wrong, and it's obviously beyond your
understanding that though you can fool almost all of the goyim almost all of the time, you can't fool all of us all the time.
AEN, thank you for your fine input, but I suspect you're throwing pearls to swine who
don't even want to understand.
Even worse, when they claim that debt is good, they conveniently leave out the part about
who it's good for.
We dumb goyim have repeatedly proven ourselves to be pretty easy marks, but some of us
have a clue as to who's paying for it all, and its good to know that a few know who that
would be, so thanks again.
That was a jolting eye-catcher. So this general still receives a six-figure pension
check!? I've often marveled at the moral fiber exhibited by these gilded peacocks, who, when
faced with supporting criminal actions by their government, such as invading countries who've
done us no harm, click their heels and proceed. Instead of taking an instant retirement,
knowing their pensions are secure.
You would still be required to pay some kind of lease or tax for the land which you
occupy, but would otherwise be left alone. You would also be subject to the criminal laws of
the jurisdiction you occupied. You would also pay taxes for any consumption that requires use
of infrastructure or interstate commerce.
The United States is large enough that such an arrangement is still possible.
" US spends 4% of GDP on the military versus 2% in China, France, UK. That's high but
considering how rich the US is, not unbearable. Weak article "
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
Every productive dollar that's ever existed has been flushed down the MIC rathole. The
whole "budget "is an elaborate ruse to conceal the chains that bind you.
10's of trillions disappear with gleeful approval on a regular basis.
Mr. Girard, buon giorno. You must be my elder. In '68 I was paid $96 plus $26 combat pay
while in Nam.
Yea, things are out of control. Unfortunately, the store clerk you ran into the other day is
representative of how the majority of "we the people" think. Hence, don't expect change
anytime soon.
I have been a fan of yours for sometime now. Mostly at NEO, sometimes art Rense. I recently
began accessing UNZ and was pleased to see your name in the list of contributors. Sadly I
don't predict improvement in the majorities attitude. But, you do fine work, dom't quit just
yet. As long as we can keep the internet affordable reality may trickle down. I believe the
net is the reason the "fake news" moniker had to be. Sort if like "conspiracy theory". Same
party owns both copyrights.
Keep your head up.
Joseph
Foreign entanglements, searching for monsters to destroy, acting as the world police
– this is the main problem.
Yooge problems for sure, but playing Sugar Daddy to Izzie-land is the biggest one of all
in terms of dollars as well as moral capital, and it probably dwarfs welfare subsidies to
"defense" corporations.
When I joined the U.S. Army in 1965 my starting pay was slightly less than 100 dollars per
month. Soldiers then were said to be "in the service". Today they are "in the military".
Later in life I realized that I had been "in the service" of evil. Still later I learned that
the love of money is the root of evil.
The American Dollar Dies in New York – a Satire from Uganda:
JS, Since Rumsfeld admitted, the day before 911 when he helped murder 30 forensic
accountants plus a handful of Naval Investigators, you are 1 of the few I ever heard mention
the stolen money. Since the Clinton administration up to 2016 the number is now $21
$Trillions, from just 2 departments.
BB, I personally know a couple who are around seventy, very healthy and active, who have
parlayed multiple pension-qualifying careers between them in the armed forces, postal
service, teaching, and county government, into astounding lifestyles. Harley motorcycle,
Winnebago, big house, weekend cottage, cruises, the whole shebang.
They're very nice people, part of the local Puerto Rican ascendancy, first generation
descendants of the Puerto Ricans recruited by the now defunct local steel mills back in the
1950s.
I'm sure it can be said they worked for what they got, but, still . . . you gotta wonder
what's going on.
Military spending has one virtue, it is constitutional as it fulfills one duty of the
FedGov, one it has often shirked, defend the country.
Giraldi can whine all he likes, but the DOD is not an entitlement program, nor does the
Pentagon get all it wants. It never has gotten all it wants, no matter how much Giraldi
whines to the contrary.
I've never seen such a warped and delusional understanding of the voracious, insatiable,
wasteful and corrupt National Security State presented so succinctly
P.S. I have a feeling that War Machine accounts have written Quatermaster a lot of checks
over the years. I.e., he knows what side his bread is buttered on.
anon, tell it like it is. Everyone should also know the debt servce cost to our budget is
the interest Americans pay. What's 2% of 20 trillions? 40 billions? IDK l, but it's alot.
Well that's the federal reserve *a private corp.) income estimate for the yeat, which the
share holders, all 6 of them, pay no income tax.
Since the Clinton administration up to 2016 the number is now $21 $Trillions, from just
2 departments.
Can you explain to me how that even works, technically? E.g. the DoD is supposed to have
"stolen" a lot more money than its entire regular budget – how could they even lay
their hands on such sums? What accounts did that money sit in before it was siphoned off,
without anyone noticing?
The US military are the equivalent of the Roman Empire's honestiores, or upper classes. As
well as the benefits accruing from service, they had special legal treatment, like being
exempt from judicial torture. So Arthur Lichte merely gets part of his pension docked for
raping a woman. Nothing to see here , mate, move along. Even someone like Chelsea ( " They
call her Natasha, but she looks like Elsie" ) Manning spends a mere 7 years in prison and
gets the Defence Department to pay for "gender reassignment".
The point about judicial torture is important as America has recently revived the practice.
Would Assange be waterboarded if they got hold of him ? Would he have met a fatal "accident"
in custody?
Who knows ? But don't you even think about doing that to an American serviceman, even one as
degenerate as Manning.
That wasn't a response. It was just name calling. So if you aren't convinced by my
rebuttal it's certainly not because you had more intelligent analysis.
You use a lot of figures but not the appropriate statistics. What do big aggregate numbers
like 200k in debt per family really mean?
I look at the percentage of tax revenue v. GDP compared to other first world countries. US
is actually on the low side by this measure. That means it's possible to raise taxes and only
moderately harm the economic growth engine. And no one has addressed the advantages the US
economy has in particular having half of the world's Ashkenazim.
Rumsfeld admitted, the day before 911 when he helped murder 30 forensic accountants plus
a handful of Naval Investigators,
Thanks, it's nice to know that there are others who are wide awake. Trouble is, even those
who have a clue can't even imagine the .0001% of it, I'm sure.
What accounts did that money sit in before it was siphoned off, without anyone
noticing?
We'll probably never know. The system is not exactly designed for transparency, and
besides, guess where the missile, errr, "plane" hit the Penta-graft?
Wouldn't it be fun to ask Rummy the Smirking Dummy that question?
I bet this swinish character could provide a bit of insight with a little Nuremberg or Abu
Ghraib style info gathering as well, and here's a partial rap sheet
Dov S. Zakheim was sworn in as the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) and Chief
Financial Officer for the Department of Defense on May 4, 2001. Dr. Zakheim has previously
served in a number of key positions in government and private business.
Most recently, he
was corporate vice president of System Planning Corp., a technology, research and analysis
firm based in Arlington, Va. He also served as chief executive officer of SPC International
Corp., a subsidiary specializing in political, military and economic consulting. During the
2000 presidential campaign, he served as a senior foreign policy advisor to then-Governor
Bush.
From 1985 until March 1987, Dr. Zakheim was Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for
Planning and Resources in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Policy). In that
capacity, he played an active role in the Department's system acquisition and strategic
planning processes. Dr. Zakheim held a variety of other DoD posts from 1981 to 1985.
Earlier, he was employed by the National Security and International Affairs Division of the
Congressional Budget Office.
Dr. Zakheim has been a participant on a number of government, corporate, non-profit and
charitable boards.
The United States military is a giant jobs program, Giraldi!
So what of it! Who cares. Conjure up those dollars out of thin air and let the troops have
some loot. Did the Founding Fathers warn us about large standing armies in their writings and
actions? Yes.
Did the Founding Fathers know that a large standing army would require a concentrated form
of governmental power to collect the loot to pay for that army? Yes.
Did we just pass the 800 year anniversary of the Magna Carta? Yes. Was the Magna Carta
about standing armies and concentrated government power, among other things?
Were the Founding Fathers somewhat ungrateful to the British Empire for its efforts in the
French and Indian War? Yes.
Would the Founding Fathers be surprised to find a Jew billionaire named Shelly Adelson
controlling the use of the US military in the Middle East and West Asia? The cynical and
smart ones wouldn't be surprised at all.
The GOP has the War budget and the US military and the Democrats have the public schools
and many other government workers. The GOP always promises to spend more loot on the War
budget and the US military and the Democrats always promise to spend more money on the public
schools and other government programs.
Giraldi has written a CLUNKER of a blog post, folks!
Giraldi should write about mass immigration, monetary extremism and the impossibility of
paying for the retirement of the baby boomers.
Mass Immigration: DEMOGRAPHY
Monetary Policy: DEBT
Baby Boomers: NATION WRECKERS
The American Empire is soon to go belly up in a manner similar to the upcoming demise of
treasonous rat John McCain.
The WASP /JEW ruling class of the American Empire knows this. A pleasant consolation is
that China, Japan and Europe are just as badly bankrupt as the American Empire is.
Raise the federal funds rate to 10 percent and implode the American Empire. Young people
must no longer be saddled with massive unpayable debt and the unpayable retirement of the
baby boomers. Pull the plug on the baby boomers now, and let the young people have a
future.
The Chinese, Japanese and Europeans will implode also. Use the nuclear deterrent and
offshore balancing to keep global peace.
Giraldi can whine all he likes, but the DOD is not an entitlement program, nor does the
Pentagon get all it wants.
If it isn't an entitlement program, then what would one look like? Do you know the meaning
of "sinecure?"
You can whine about Giraldi all you want but he's right and yer wrong, and thank G-d that
the Pantygon doesn't get all it wants. Can you explain whether it should and why?
PS: Read the comments regarding disabilities and retirement bennies and then get back to
us.
You really don't want affirmative action nurses looking after anymore than those Bombay
specials that the VA hires as doctors. It's not a perk, it's just free.
The VA is a train wreck because of these people. No one wants to say squat because you
have to point a finger at all the AA hires and that would get you labeled as a racist.
And oh they are paid, very, very well. The average RN makes over a $100k at the VA. I know
private sector nurses who went to work for the VA because of the pay and bennies. Plus you
can't get fired.
You do realize that "waterboarding" is part and parcel of SERE school in the military and
has been for a very long time. It's where the Pentagon/CIA got idea of applying to a bunch of
sand monkeys.
Anyone who is special ops gets waterboarded so are fighter pilots and the like. The MSM
always neglects this fact.
Dov Zakheim is a nasty Neo-Conservative Jew rat, that is widely known. Zakheim was one of the
Neo-Conservative rats who helped to drag the US military into the Iraq War debacle. Seems
Neo-Conservative rat boy Dov Zakheim also made himself a wealthy rat through his connections
to the WASP / JEW ruling class of the American Empire.
But,
Let's not forget nasty Neo-Conservative Jew rat Michael Chertoff and his pal General
Michael Hayden. Baby boomers Chertoff and Hayden have made out like bandits from their involvement in the
Deep State of the American Empire. I say the baby boomers are an evil generation of nation wreckers. Tweets from 2015:
At least half of our military bills should be sent to Israel. Practically all of our wars
these days are on their behalf. The other half should be paid by a war tax. All those who
support going to "necessary" wars overseas for "humanitarian" reasons or other will pay into
this tax, starting with the neocons and the media (not just mainstream liberal media but many
right wing neocon mouthpieces like National Review, Breitbart, DailyCaller).
Last but not least, any elected official who votes for or calls for war with any nation,
from Trump to Pence, Nikki Haley, John McCain, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo et al. should fork
out 100% of their salaries to pay for the war until it ends.
What evidence is there that the trade discussion is based on China reducing treasury
holdings rather than counter-tariffs on US agricultural goods and potentially in a number of
other areas like education services (blocking Chinese families from sending kids to lower
ranked US colleges)?
America's Republican politicians complain that "entitlements," by which they mean
pensions and medical care, are leading the country to bankruptcy even as they fatten the
spending on the Pentagon, which now takes 12 percent of the overall budget.
The US military budget should be $100 billion .do what you can.
"Despite many problems, the US has many advantages like half the world's Ashkenazim who
are very good at creating unbeatable new companies. Just look at how the half the 40 riches
entrepreneurs under 40 in the US according to Forbes are Jewish. Jews are producing so much
innovation in the US that it offsets a lot of the problems like military spending at 4% of
GDP and less productive sub-populations."
Average daily volume in the Treasury market is $500 billion, and the Federal Reserve
System is authorized to create unlimited quantities of currency to purchase Treasuries (and
other gov't securities) in any case.
This isn't the financial weapon of mass destruction people think it is.
The Chinese themselves know this, which is why they stopped adding to their position and
have gradually reduced it.
A more effective strategy would be to focus financial firepower where the Federal Reserve
isn't authorized to operate, such as the commercial paper market. Probably Congress itself
would then act, but if you can buy enough seats for hard money dweebs you might be able to
cause serious trouble.
I'm sure the Roman Empire had some version of waterboarding.
The Roman Army's form of punishment was known as decimation , a word now
commonly used by semi-literates to torture knowledgeable historians, philologists, and
wordsmiths, including not a few Baby Boomers , who apparently know a lot more than
you, and who also are smart enough to blame the guilty -- and not an entire generation -- for
the misdeeds or evil gains of a relatively few assholes.
But I know subtle nuance like that must be difficult to understand for those who can paint
-- or splatter -- only with a very broad brush.
As if remotely possible to do so, Realist recommended:
"The US military budget should be $100 billion .do what you can."
Hi (Sur)Realist,
A question. Above, who would meaningfully tell that to the ZUS Defense Department, Joint Chiefs of
Staff, & the military contractors? Sheldon Adelson? Netanyahu? Take heart! I trust Peter Aus will appear & bring your do-gooder passion into
practical reality. Thanks, nevertheless!
You make my point for me.
As I said, Judicial Torture was used on humiliores, and, indeed, in European Inquisitorial
Systems until the late C18th and early C19th.
A person or entity whose liabilities outweigh its assets, is not rich.
This is more true when the entity, like the US Fed Gov, has vastly more liabilities than
physical assets, let alone readily marketable assets.
The fed gov has promised to pay more each year than it has recently taken in as revenue,
and more than it has any realistic hope of generating anytime soon.
The fed gov is in hock more than 20 trillion in the books right now, and over 100 trillion
projected forward.
Yeah the fed gov is rich.
Looking at average and median private-household net worth will not make the picture much
rosier.
Commissaries, gyms, and hair salons on bases in the USA must end.
Pay the soldiers well, but have them live and try to get by in the same economy and world
as their employers -- WE THE TAXPAYERS.
Also, require soldiers to live off base and pay their own housing (boosting their cash pay
accordingly) OR start counting their housing as taxable income as it would be for the rest of
us mere TAXPAYERS.
Evil baby boomers in Europe, England and the United States have been protected by the
monetary extremism of the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve
Bank.
It is now time to financially liquidate the evil baby boomer generation. If the Federal
Reserve Bank raised the federal funds rate to 10 percent, and the ECB and BoE raised interest
rates similarly, the baby boomers in the USA, England and most of Europe would be financially
busted. The baby boomers have been the generation that benefited the most from the monetary
extremism of the last few decades, and especially since 2008.
The federal funds rate went over 20 percent in 1981, 10 percent now would wipe out the
asset bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate. Do it.
The baby boomers are an evil generation of nation-wreckers. Bill Clinton and George W Bush
are prime examples of evil globalizer baby boomers.
Tough shit that you don't like his tone. We don't like being systematically ripped off and
told it's patriotic.
We should start either taxing the military employees' housing allowance OR require them to
buy their own housing off-base. I'd be fine with increasing cash salary to make up for it.
Let's get an honest number on what their salaries really are and then debate whether they get
paid enough.
And by all means let's reform and reduce officer pensions. End this last-three-years
calculation and require more than 20 years "service" to get half or more of one's salary as
pension. They are desk jobs and they can and should work at least, say, THIRTY years before
being able to retire st that level of pension and work elsewhere.
Military is a wasteful fraudulent untrustworthy bureaucracy like any other in the fed gov
-- or worse because they get a free pass from a lot of people.
The oil and gas resources alone owned by the federal government are worth some $200
trillion. Then there's the fact that the taxing authority of the federal government makes any fiscal
deficit a matter of choice to begin with.
Am fairly sure you know about Donald Rumsfeld early political career, including his
special assignment as an ambitious congressman, & on behalf of the A.Z.C.
If not, below I link ZUS Defense Secretary "Shit Happens" treasonous letter to Robert F.
Kennedy.
And we need Russian equipment to get into space these days, apparently. That would be troublesome even if Russia were an ally, as perhaps they should be.
It's worse when our gov chooses to slander, threaten, sanction, and encircle the country
on whom we are relying.
Imagine China refusing to sell us what we need AND Russia refusing to let us use or buy
its space equipment.
For that matter, there's so much demand for oil and natural gas in India and China --
likely to keep increasing, too -- Russia eventually may be able to say "we will sell to
anyone EXCEPT companies and facilities in the USA, and anyone caught reselling to the USA
will join them on the blacklist." If Iran and, say, Venezuela or Nigeria did the same, watch
out.
Deliberate dishonest distraction. Whether the DOD got as much as it wanted, it gets much
more than our actual defense requires, and the people on the gravy train know it.
The fact that defense is a specifically enumerated duty and power of the fed government,
has nothing to do with the proper amount to spend on that function.
Money spent attacking countries that are not attacking us here in the USA, are not
preparing for imminent attack on us here in the USA, and are not aiding those who are
attacking or preparing to imminently attack us here in the USA is NOT part of that legitimate
constitutional function.
Same with money spent defending Israel or Saudi Arabia, helping the saudis kill Yemenis in
Yemen, helping islamists or anyone else overthrow the gov of Syria, etc.
Same with money spent defending (or controlling) Germany, France, South Korea, Japan,
etc.
Calling that "whining" is not an argument. It suggests that you lack an honest, logical
argument on this issue.
The threat is the Mexicans we have allowed in, not any credible military threat from
Mexico's armed forces.
Our military should be posted on the entire southern border with orders to kill all
invaders who do not heed warnings to turn back. Add a minefield, barbed wire fencing where
absent, and armed drones.
The clothing allowance is for purchase, upkeep, and repair of uniforms. There is a
bureaucratic mindset of having things clearly laid out which guarantees a lot of this
spending, especially when the time preferences of new enlistees bears out the wisdom of
having a specially set aside and clearly labeled clothing allowance. Many good critics with
detailed grievamces skip over the governmental addiction to trying to solve reality with
longer and longer rulebooks.
Radical Center proposed: "Russia eventually may be able to say "we will sell to anyone
EXCEPT companies and facilities in the USA, and anyone caught reselling to the USA will join
them on the blacklist."
Hi Radical Center,
Speaking with utmost respect for your typical sound-thought, have you ever approached the
issue from the Globalist's (ideal) "Radical Center" perspective where the planet's economic
& military Superpowers decide how crude oil & natural gas sale & distribution is
done?
Radical Center opined: "Our military should be posted on the entire southern border with
orders to kill all invaders who do not heed warnings to turn back."
Hi Radical Center,
The biggest problem I have with the solution (above) is your having used, in error, the
words, "Our military."
Were that the actual case, Jewish Lobbies, billionaire ZUS Jews, Congress, & PreZident
Trump would be very pissed at Mr. Giraldi's for provocatively having the gall to use the
description, "American military" in his article title.
Thanks again, Radical Center. By increment, you are getting there! So please simply
consider dropping the word "Our"?
Like one of the Maven Shama's "old grey mares, "That ain't what it used to be."
There are two standards one for enlisted personnel and the other for officers. During the
Grenada situation some enlisted personnel and officers were caught attempting to ship
captured AK-47 rifles back to the states. The enlisted personnel got "hard time" in
Leavenworth while the officers got "letters of reprimand". Double standard, indeed.
I might have made the military a career, but the disparities in both facilities and treatment
of officers vs. enlisted was a real turn-off. I completed my enlistment honorably and
returned to civilian life.
It is my humble opinion (and personal observation) that the commissioned officer rank
structure where there is concern for the enlisted troops ends with the rank of colonel. The
general staff is more akin to political office than it is to serving in the military and
taking care of their military subordinates.
As to "pay and allowances", when I was active duty (1969-1971) it was not much. In fact, at
the time, those of us in uniform were looked down upon and blamed for the prosecution of the
Vietnam conflict. Not only that, legislated job programs that were supposed to go to us
Vietnam veterans never materialized.
Yes, the all-volunteer forced made it necessary to increase "pay and allowances" to
relatively attractive levels.
If I had my way, I would bring back the draft with NO college deferments. In fact, the sons
and daughters of politicians would get called up first. Service in the IDF doesn't count.
You are correct. The rest of the world that falls under the USA "defense umbrella" can
afford extravagant social programs as they do not pay for their defense. In fact, WE are
required to pay rent on foreign bases in which to place our troops.
If I had my way, all foreign troop deployments would stop. Those countries requesting our
"protection" would have to pay for it.
Seems to me, that was one of President Trump's campaign promises–making foreign
countries pay for their defense.
You sir are an American hating leftist. The military, until the left decided it was the
government's job to provide cradel to grave care for everyone accounted for more than 75
percent of the federal budget. To complain that the military consumes 12 of the budget while
Medicaid consumes 50 percent is a straw man. Having been an infantry man I can tell you that
anyone who can do 20 or 30 years deserves a life long pension. Being a man is hard on the
body.
He's currently a court bailiff, a patronage job here, earning maybe in the low $30s. Plus,
his 20-year Army pension, plus his 20+-year postal service pension. He's a high school grad.
His wife is fully retired with a 20-year Army pension, and a teacher's pension with about 20
years in.
I'll take a wild guess their retirement income is no less than $100,000 a year in my very
low-cost area.
A go-figure sort of deal. Not just double-dipping. More than that, as you and other folks
here have said. It's a mentality, a mind-set. For some of the worst of those high-salary
government folks, there are only three types of Americans: Bill Gates and other billionaires,
government workers, and Americans who are too stupid to find a corporate or government milch
cow.
You're right, of course. These days I try to always write and say "the US government"
rather than "OUR government." I should have done the same with "US military."
Mandate that we first enlist, train, and promptly deploy any children and grandchildren of
all members of Congress, members of the President's Cabinet, federal judges, Federal Reserve
Board of Governors, and the CEOs/CFOs/CIOs etc. of military companies (including Northrup
Grumman, Boeing, and their ilk).
Looks like US military belong to the privileged class like it was in late Roman empire
Notable quotes:
"... This why career servicemen love the military, they are making 2-3 times more than comparable civilians, and they know it! Read my article if you are confused. Then many of these "retirees" leave at age 40 with nice retirement, then get a regular federal job, and put in for every minor ache and pain and get a thousand or more dollars each month in VA tax free "disability" pay. Sleep Apnea (aka snoring) is a popular disability to claim worth up to 50%. Some get 100% disability but you wouldn't know it if you met them, and still work for Uncle Sam full time! The LA Times reported that after Senator John McCain announced he was fit to run for President, he was getting military retirement, 100% tax free VA disability, his Senator pay and social security retirement! ..."
"... For me the pay and benefits aren't the core problem. We are paying to destabilize the world, kill US citizens, kill civilians, increase terror all for wars that don't benefit the American citizenry as a whole in any way. ..."
Today's United States has 2,083,000 soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen on active duty
plus reserves. Now that the military is an all-volunteer rather than a conscript force, it is
understandable that pay and benefits should be close to or equivalent to civilian pay scales.
Currently, a sergeant first class with 10 years in service gets paid $3968 a month. A captain
with ten years gets $6271. That amounts to $47,616 and $75,252 a year respectively plus
healthcare, food, housing, cost of living increases and bonuses to include combat pay.
Though there are several options for retirement, generally speaking a soldier, sailor Marine
or airman can retire after 20 years with half of his or her final "high three" pay as a
pension, which means an 18-year-old who enlists right out of high school will be 38 and if he
or she makes sergeant first class (E-7) he or she will be collecting $2338 a month or more for
a rest of his or her life adjusted for cost of living,
Many Americans would be astonished at the pensions that general officers and admirals
receive, particularly since 80% of them also land in "retirement" generously remunerated
positions with defense contractors either in active positions soliciting new contracts from
their former peers or sitting on boards. General David Petraeus, whom
The Nation describes as the "general who lost two wars," pulls in a pension of $220,000
even though he was forced to resign as CIA Director due to passing classified information to
his mistress. He is also chairman of a New York City based company KKR Global, which is part of
a private equity firm Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts. He reportedly is paid in six figures plus
bonuses for "oversee[ing] the institute's thought leadership platform focused on geopolitical
and macro-economic trends, as well as environmental, social, and governance issues."
It apparently is difficult to take money away from general and flag officers. An Air Force
four-star general named Arthur Lichte was reduced in
rank to a two-star in 2017 after he was found guilty of having raped a lower ranking woman
officer. His pension went down from $216,000 to $156,000 due to the reduction. Normally,
however, America's 1,000 general and flag officers can look forward to comfortable
retirements.
But on top of that rather generous bit of cash there are the considerable other benefits, as
the old recruiting sergeants would put it, the "bennies." Military retirees can receive full
tuition and expenses at a college or technical school if they choose to go back to school. This
is why one sees so many ads for online universities on television – they are trolling for
soldier dollars knowing that it's free money. The retiree will also have access to heavily
subsidized medical care for him or herself plus family. The medical care is a significant bonus
under the Tricare system, which describes itself on its website as "the gold standard for
medical coverage, [that] is government managed health insurance." A friend who is retired
recently had a hip replacement operation that would have cost $39,000 for only a few hundred
dollars through Tricare.
What is significant is that even enlisted military personnel can start a second career on
top of their pension, given that many of them are still in their thirties. Some that have
security clearances can jump into highly paid jobs with defense contractors immediately while
others also find places in the bureaucracy with the Department of Homeland Security. Working
for the government twice is called "double dipping."
Some would argue that military personnel deserve what they get because the jobs are by their
very nature dangerous, sometimes fatal. Indeed, the number of maimed and PTSD-afflicted
soldiers returning from the endless wars is a national tragedy and caring for them should be a
top priority. But the truth is that only a very small fraction, by some estimates far less than
20% of Army and Marine personnel in so-called "combat arms," ever are in danger. Air Force and
Navy personnel rarely experience combat at all apart from bombing targets far below or
launching cruise missiles against Syrians. It is true that given the volatile nature of war
against insurgents in places like Afghanistan many soldiers in support roles can come under
fire, but it is far from normal and most men and women in service never experience a gun fired
in anger.
Some numbers-crunchers in the Pentagon have already raised the alarm that the current pay,
benefits and retirement levels for military personnel is unsustainable if the United States
continues its worldwide mission against terrorists and allegedly rogue regimes. And it is also
unsustainable if the U.S. seeks to return to a constitutional arrangement whereby the nation is
actually defended by its military, not subordinated to it and being bankrupted by its
costs.
Wait, so this is a lefty Democrat blog now, where The Nation is cited favorably?
Our men in uniform, particularly the grunts, make sacrifices that the others don't make.
Sure, some officers are corrupt and the military manages to manufacture demand for its
expensive products, but this article goes way too far.
Captains with just eight years in service rake in over $100,000 a year with nothing more than
a four-year degree in history! Senior enlisted can also make over $100,000 a year with a high
school diploma, plus free family health care and zero contributions to retirement. After just
four years of service, a married GI is making more than the average American college graduate
with 20 years of work experience! I wrote about this several years ago for those who still
fall for the draft era "poor GI myth".
Note our military spends billions of dollars on recruiting ads, but never mentions high
pay. If they did, Congress may end the annual pay boost and lines would form at recruiting
stations. Even most "experts" and reporters are confused because military lobbyists use the
inflated ECI index (which includes increased health care and workers comp costs) rather than
just wages, and pretend housing and food allowances are not income. Even the average military
pilot earns twice a much as the average airline pilot, based on facts not Pentagon spin
stories.
This why career servicemen love the military, they are making 2-3 times more than
comparable civilians, and they know it! Read my article if you are confused. Then many of
these "retirees" leave at age 40 with nice retirement, then get a regular federal job, and
put in for every minor ache and pain and get a thousand or more dollars each month in VA tax
free "disability" pay. Sleep Apnea (aka snoring) is a popular disability to claim worth up to
50%. Some get 100% disability but you wouldn't know it if you met them, and still work for
Uncle Sam full time! The LA Times reported that after Senator John McCain announced he was
fit to run for President, he was getting military retirement, 100% tax free VA disability,
his Senator pay and social security retirement!
Now before some ignorant servicemen whine about those serving in combat zones or deployed
on ships, note that fewer than 10% of GIs ever serve in a real combat zone, not the fake ones
like Bahrain. They rate their pay, but not those working soft office jobs in Hawaii or San
Diego or Florida. Keep in mind that we have a volunteer force, and our military must constant
prune the career force since far too many want to stay in as long as possible. No one leaves
because of poor pay, but because of political BS.
I usually share your disdain for The Nation magazine. But in the vein of stopped
clock correctness twice a day even it can sometimes be correct, witness its editor Steve
Cohen's completely admirable efforts to lend sanity and substance to America's Russian
foreign policy!
I've seen articles decrying that first-year married privates are eligible for food stamps.
Because their housing, medical, and the cost of living differential are not "income". They're
living on more than twice the reported income. So yeah, they have arranged the pay precisely
so that they are not subject to any income tax, and are in some cases eligible for food
stamps.
They have rec vehicles they can check out, boats and four-wheelers, snowmobiles and etc.,
special parks and land reservations, scenic cabins they can stay at with trifling fees or are
free. Ours has a golf course that must be staggering for upkeep. Gyms, facilities for parties
and events – stuff you'd pay a lot for in the private sector. The subsidized shopping
is still there, but is not the huge discount it was at one time, at the bases in this
state.
The state gives them all kinds of benefits like instant residency for hunting and fishing.
The stores give them discounts. Military appreciation days.
And frankly it isn't your STEM people, business and tech fields going into the military.
Their next best alternatives are a pittance by comparison. For who you are getting, the
quality of recruit, this is well paid.
I don't mind that so much as having three times the size we need to defend our borders,
which is what we should be doing and no more. Foreign entanglements, searching for monsters
to destroy, acting as the world police – this is the main problem.
4% of GDP, is it? Not sure about that but I do know it's 30% of federal tax revenue.
Military spending is about $1 trillion, if you include
all the various categories , per annum; whereas Federal receipts are about $3.3 trillion
per annum.
So about 30% of all Federal tax receipts – 30% of the money stolen from me at
gunpoint, which forces me to labor for months every year without pay – goes to corrupt
contractors, murderers and war criminals to oppress and murder people and destroy property
throughout the world in service to the Evil Empire, including, of course, Jew supremacist
Israel.
So since you think it's so "bearable", you Evil Empire supporter, why don't you kindly
give me back my 1 month of stolen labor every year to pay for your beloved Evil Empire's
perpetual Campaign of Death, Oppression and Destruction?
Clearly is if you look at your debt to GDP and deficit.
Interesting because the US has its history as part of the English tradition of no standing
armies, militias, all possible due to the favourable geography of having a strip of water, or
moat as Shakespeare put it, to deter potential invaders. The US military really is a WWII and
Cold War creation. That the US seems to be the only nation not have benefited from the end of
the cold war dividend in reduced military spending is an impressive feat by lobbyists and
neocon ideologues.
For me the pay and benefits aren't the core problem. We are paying to destabilize the
world, kill US citizens, kill civilians, increase terror all for wars that don't benefit the
American citizenry as a whole in any way. At one time they might have been for
corporations now they are for Israel.
You're spot on. By the Late Roman Empire, society was divided into 2 groups – the
humiliores ( lower classes ) and the honestiores ( upper classes ). Soldiers belonged to the
latter group, and most historians consider that the common soldier never had a higher status
in any society.
History doesn't repeat itself exactly, but modern day America has largely followed the Roman
route. Certainly, the sheer cost of the Roman Military was a factor in the decline and fall
of the Roman Empire.
The Roman soldier had a much more dangerous period of military service than the risk averse
modern American military. Roman veterans certainly earned their benefits.
What is the real "defense burden" (the percentage of our GDP spent on the military) sans
bullshit accounting tricks and "reclassification" of expenses.
For example, if we used accounting methods as used in some of the more efficient, less
bloated military establishments of our allies, what would be the actual cost to our economy
of our defense spending?
For all we know, military expenditures may actually be back to Reagan Cold War percentage
levels, or slightly more.
Article didn't mention the dependency allowance. I looked on military websites to find the
amount but you have to be registered military to find the amount
There is a clothing allowance, why? And the military is heavily affirmative action
Hispanic black and female I live near a big VA. Twice a day hundreds of VA employees drive
right past my house. Almost all are black. I drive through the VA often. Most everyone I see
is black except for the Indian immigrant Drs.
California vets get some kind of no down payment low interest mortgage. When they retire
they can get a loan for $50,000 to use for setting up a business or buying rental
property.
Our men in uniform, particularly the grunts, make sacrifices that the others don't
make.
Based on my experience as a young kid, and observations as an old fart, I call BS on that
unless "sacrifice" has acquired a new meaning on the street that I'm unaware of.
US spends 4% of GDP on the military versus 2% in China, France, UK. That's high but
considering how rich the US is, not unbearable. Weak article.
The US is rich? Living on borrowed, stolen and extorted money and we're rich? The US has
become a huge third world strip mall republic, complete with an overstuffed and parasitic
military, and you think we're rich?The whole murderous,mendacious, thieving, and morally and
financially bankrupt enterprise is poor by any significant measure, so your "reasoning" is
what's weak.
Rank 'Ol Rummie spoke the truth once and it happened one day before the towers were
pulled.
Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon
"The adversary is closer to home; it's the Pentagon bureaucracy "
- Donald Rumsfeld on Sept. 10, 2001
PS: For those who don't know where the missile, err, "plane" hit the Pentagon on 9/11, do
a tad of research and tell me, with a straight face, that it was some coincidence.
Federal Debt $20 trillion, Accumulated Balance of Trade Deficit since 1990 $12 trillion (
unadjusted for inflation ). That's not even including State and Local Debt, never mind
Private Debt.
The only thing preventing complete bankruptcy is that the Dollar is the World's Reserve
Currency- for now. Once China and others start dumping US Treasury Bonds, that will be
over.
Two of my friends own motorcycle dealerships in San Antonio. Gee. I wonder how they can
sell so many, compared to dealers in towns without major military bases
We spend more than the next ten nations, COMBINED. To "defend ourselves" from goat herders
that can't afford passports or air tickets. 800 bases scattered across the planet. But,
thinking about it, folks like somalians have been invading the US OH. WAIT! Federal refugee
programs have been importing somalis. NEVER MIND.
We fight them there so we can bring them here and put them on welfare/food stamps? Makes
perfect sense.
I was in the field and in a number of firefights during my year in Vietnam, 69 – 70,
and I find the idea of some store or VA clerk thanking me for my service offensive as all get
out because I know these well meaning strangers, who owe me nothing at all, are being played
for fools to serve the interests of America's worst enemy, Israel and its American fifth
column. I'm also disgusted by this new breed of soldier who's less any sort of manly patriot
than a skin-headed, "muh brothers, muh mission" wind-up martinet who mistakes the vain
daintiness of pumping iron as well as technical superiority's easy targets for manliness. As
for the Pentagon, it's the mother of all bureaucracies whose leaders but for the costumes are
no more warriors than the time-serving hacks in any other bloated bureaucracy, who couldn't
care less, as the facts make clear, about sending young Americans to die and be maimed so the
sons of their Israeli masters need not.
I used to feel smug after jumping from the US military to banking in the knowledge that my
starting pay was several multiples of my military pay and even outstripped that of the JCS
heads who I served under.
Somewhere along the way, probably in the 2000s during the so-called War for Talent,
Federal civilian and military pay got a significant uptick well in excess of what the KSAs
(Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities) of these folks as measured by OPM and DoD, and there has
been no looking back.
Giraldi might be right that the troops are overpaid, but that is just the tip of the
iceberg that is the Military Industrial Security Academic Complex.
Defense spending is allegedly 3.6% of GDP ($700B / $19,000B) but is actually over 5% if you
factor in the hidden Defense spending. VA benefits, over $100B, nuclear arsenal covered under
Dept of Energy (my favorite) over $30B, Defense portion of debt service over $100B, and other
places that I'd have to dig up.
Defense spending is over 30% of the budget, the low ball 15% is only if you include social
security and medicare which you should not because that is covered by dedicated payroll
taxes. If payroll taxes were eliminated, those programs would go away but the budget deficit
would not be impacted. This is a trick that defense consultants play to make Defense spending
look smaller.
Defense spending is over 50% if you also discount our annual debt service, this is why the
$1.3T featured $600B for domestic vs $700B for Defense.
I thought that singling out military pay was a tad mean spirited. Capping pensions that
disproportionately benefit Generals who then go onto consulting jobs for Defense contractors
and get paid positions on FOX might be a good idea but I didn't like the tone of this
column.
No serious person who says they care about budget deficits can approach them without
looking at Defense Spending.
- Chris Chuba
One of the disturbing actions of the soldier worshipping conservatives is the Wounded Warrior
scam which uses crippled and deformed GIs in ads aimed at the heartstrings of the American
public. The fact that so many soldiers are returning from useless wars in dire condition
should be the responsibility of the Department of Defense (War) and its Government which is
responsible for the mayhem and violence in so many parts of the world not a subject for
organized begging which often preys on the suffering of the young.
Re; Mr. Giraldi's brave & unspoken words: "(ZUS military) Pay and benefits are way out of
control"
With a long history of planning & implementation, below, presstv explains how radical
"citizens" were headhunted & placed in control as to when & how our hallowed ZUS
troop commanders do their Jewish job assignments.
US is rich and the debt is high. Both can be true at the same time. But taxes are
relatively low so if there is a government debt crisis paying down the debt would just
involve raising taxes. Just look at GDP per capita US which is very high up there so I don't
see how anyone can argue the US is not a very rich country.
Despite many problems, the US has many advantages like half the world's Ashkenazim who are
very good at creating unbeatable new companies. Just look at how the half the 40 riches
entrepreneurs under 40 in the US according to Forbes are Jewish. Jews are producing so much
innovation in the US that it offsets a lot of the problems like military spending at 4% of
GDP and less productive sub-populations.
Good article, Phil. I served in the 1970s, tail end of Vietnam Stateside, and never heard a
shot fired in anger. I am grateful for the G. I. benefits I received.
No institution in a representative democracy ought to be above measured criticism. I have
a relative who volunteers at the local VA clinic, and there's some sketchy evidence that some
patients with very good group health insurance benefits are working the system and getting VA
treatment to avoid co-pays.
I personally found David Hackworth's criticism of the American military fairly persuasive.
Deep bureaucratization, tunnel vision, advancing officers for their inoffensiveness and
favor-currying chops, the whole mess.
Plus add the big three already mentioned by some folks above. (1) America's armed forces
are a Petri dish for social engineering, (2) corruption, (3) the political mafia-zation of
America's armed forces so that it's acting as a White House-directed quasi-mercenary
"enforcer" for corporate interests and various other sovereign interests.
"An Air Force four-star general named Arthur Lichte was reduced in rank to a two-star in 2017
after he was found guilty of having raped a lower ranking woman officer".
You say he was ***reduced in rank*** for raping a female subordinate?
Why wasn't he given 50 lashes, a dishonourable discharge, and a prison sentence? Even a
random civilian would get the prison sentence for rape. And for such a senior officer to
commit a crime like that is, of course far, far worse.
Israel and their ziocons control every facet of the U.S. gov and have used the U.S. army as a
proxy army of Israel to fight and die for Israel in the ME while they sit it out in their
ivory towers in Tel Aviv and New York City and London.
To add to the tragedy millions of civilians have been killed in these wars for Israel in
Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria and Yemen and various other places through out the
ME, and all of this carnage for Israel.
Just like the Roman empire where the rulers paraded their conquering armies through Rome ,
Trump wants to parade his Israeli proxy armies through D.C. and take their review as a
Caligula. Trump is a puppet of the zionists and Netanyahu and his controllers the ROTHCHILDS
ie the RED SHIELD which is dripping with Americans blood.
Orwell was right, the wars never end in OCEANIA and we have become Oceania, and all
because of our zionist masters.
That was a very good article with lots of facts that I was unaware regarding the various
forms of compensation. I have not been in the miltary. I will tell you that I have seen how
things work on the procurement end, and that is the real shitshow, moneywise. The amount of
wasted money in personnel involved in trying to micromanage a contractor, the "generation" of
paperwork that must weigh 10X vehicle max-gross-weight in order to sign off on it, and other
things, ruin the job for the technician or engineer in any company making stuff for the US
military.
(BTW, that last sentence of mine brought up the only one (little tiny) thing that I didn't
like about the article. You KEEP USING "his and her", "he and she", etc. Enough of that crap,
please, Mr. Giraldi. Unz is one of a number of place on-line on which one doesn't have to be
PC. He can write as he pleases. The rest of your English is very professional,
so why this?).
Anyway, great article, just the facts and honest opinion without any hyperbole. Regarding
your very last paragraph, BTW, it's not just that the army is so costly, but if America ever
had to defend itself from one of the countries we buy parts from, cough, China , cough, cough,
that'll be a laugh. We are operating on borrowed money, as Jack S (#16) stated, AND foreign
supply lines. We're number 1! Yeah!
Among the lots of good comments on the thread so far, yours is kind of an outlier, to put
it nicely. No, you cannot be both rich and in debt (6 – 7 X more than your yearly
income) at the same time. . There are perhaps different definitions of broke that people
or families may use for themselves.
1) Out of spending cash – got assets, but awaiting more income before any spending
can resume. That's not too bad – it just shows lack of foresight or bad luck.
2) Broke even – got some assets, but owe the same amount – income is about the
same as expenditures expected. There are lots like this – they need to buckle down, but
will probably be OK.
3) Flat broke – can't borrow anymore due to bad payment history, even to friends and
family – not enough income to pay expenditures or even on this.
4) Broke like the US Feral Government – borrowing 1/3 of the money for the
$4,000,000,000,000 budget each year, as only 2/3 can be collected via personal
income/corporate income/excise/etc. taxes (just look near the back of the IRS 1040
instructions – they're not hiding this stuff). Total debt of $20,000,000,000,000 is 5 X
the budget each year and 6-7 X the income collected yearly. It is > 100 % of the total
GDP. There is no coming out of this hole without financial pain for almost everyone but those
with a Challenger or other large/medium-cabin business jet with precious metals stashed on an
island or S. American/Oriental country with a runway on your compound with armed guards.
"some"? Har-Dee-Har-Har. What percentage of people who separate from the military claim a
"service related disability"? With that designation they not only get the retirement benefit
bump but also set-asides for government jobs and contracts as well. Based on the number of
service related disability claims by veterans, the United States must have the most
physically fragile fighting force on the planet.
And in this age of stupid perpetual wars, every "disabled veteran" is assumed have been
shot up in the Middle East when if fact it's more likely they tripped on the steps on the way
back from lunch at Fort Leavenworth. That erroneous assumption of a combat related disability
is great for milking benefits from a sympathetic public.
And there's more. Sleep apnea claims as a service related disability by veterans have
exploded. Same with PTSD.
The web is saturated with advice on how to game the military disability system.
A vet I knew laughed as he told me he got a disability award for his knee. Only that
injury came from playing too much basketball at his U.S. base. Another "disabled veteran" I
know does Cross Fit to stay in shape. His most dangerous deployment was to southern Europe
where he met his wife. And yes, he advertises his disability on his business web site and
does qualify for government contract set-asides.
Too bad for the taxpayers though. Since the military has been sanctified by the powerful
Pentagon/MSM "Warrior-Hero" propaganda engine, challenging out of control military benefits
is a political and social third rail.
The web is saturated with advice on how to game the military disability system.
A vet I knew laughed as he told me he got a disability award for his knee. Only that
injury came from playing too much basketball at his U.S. base. Another "disabled veteran" I
know does Cross Fit to stay in shape. His most dangerous deployment was to southern Europe
where he met his wife. And yes, he advertises his disability on his business web site and
does qualify for government contract set-asides.
Too bad for the taxpayers though. Since the military has been sanctified by the powerful
Pentagon/MSM "Warrior-Hero" propaganda engine, challenging out of control military benefits
is a political and social third rail.
"... Iran's actions in the region were not the subject of the meeting where Haley said this, and talking incessantly about Iran to avoid addressing the issue at hand has become a typical maneuver for Haley whenever U.S. clients commit some outrage that she would rather ignore. ..."
The Trump administration's Iran obsession would almost be comical if it didn't have such a dangerous distorting effect on our
foreign policy. Iran's actions in the region were not the subject of the meeting where Haley said this, and talking incessantly
about Iran to avoid addressing the issue at hand has become a typical maneuver for Haley whenever U.S. clients commit some outrage
that she would rather ignore. Whether she is busy whitewashing Saudi coalition crimes in Yemen or running interference for Israel
after it massacres over 60 people, Haley's m.o. is to change the subject.
Haley also risibly
claimed that Israel was acting with restraint yesterday:
"No country in this chamber would act with more restraint than Israel has. In fact, the records of several countries here today
suggest they would be much less restrained," she said.
The ambassador's claim is absurd on its face, and it is an insult to the dozens of democratic states around the world that do
not behave this way. Haley also ignores that there are no other states in the world that keep millions of people trapped in a blockaded
enclave as Israel does with the inhabitants of Gaza. Not only would the vast majority of democratic governments not act as Israel's
government has acted over the last few weeks, but none would have any need to confront massive protests from a population that has
been deliberately starved and impoverished for more than a decade. The excessively violent response to the Gaza protests calls attention
to the cruel policy of collective punishment imposed on all of the people living in Gaza, and there is no excuse for either of them.
"... I'd say the Saudis and the petrodollar are the main reason for the US trying to keep Iran poor and on the defensive. The Iranians will never accept American control over the Mideast oil supply, while the Saudis have signed on as long as we provide military protection. If the US ever allows the petrodollar to fail, its economy will crumble. That won't be allowed to happen without a fight. ..."
"... this creates an opening for a presidential campaign based on the slogan "no more Jewish wars." ..."
"... The Israelis and their American Jewish bros and worldwide Jewry assume that on averages, Iranians will be smarter and have a better work ethic than any Arabs, which means that if left alone. Iran could come to dominate the Moslem Middle East. And that easily could lead to Israel being made little more than a tiny dot wit nukes the US backs to the hilt. ..."
Why did the Cockatoo-in-Chief renege on the Iran deal deeply prized by Russia, China,
France, Germany, England, and the European Union? Why did he deliberately damage relations with
Europe and cost American workers many thousands of jobs at Boeing among others? Why do all of
this to hurt a country that poses no danger to the United States?
Israel.
Israel, Israel. Israel. Israel.
Always Israel.
If Iran were a threat to the existence of Israel, things would be different. If Muslims
conquered the Jews, they would presumably treat them as badly as Israelis, and very likely
worse. It would be ugly in the extreme. To prevent this, use of the American military would be
justified.
But Iran does not threaten the existence of Israel. It does threaten Israel's dominance in
the Mid-East. Iran is far larger and more populous than Israel, strategically located, and has
vast amounts of oil. It is a large market for many European products. By contrast, Israel is
small and has nothing anyone needs or wants. Left to itself, Iran would become the dominant
regional power. It moves fast in that direction now with burgeoning trade with Europe in, among
many other things, airliners. With economic influence comes political influence.
Consequently Israel does not want Iran to prosper. If it can, Israel will use the American
military to prevent this prospering. It will destroy America's relations with the rest of the
world to prevent it. It is doing so.
As thinking people know, the twaddle about the Iranian's development of an atomic bomb is
just that–twaddle. The Europeans know this, which is why they are not alarmed. The US
government know it, since the intelligence agencies have repeatedly said that Iran does not
have a program aimed at producing a nuclear weapon.
But: Whenever the American government, or those controlling it, wants to drive the US into a
war, it invents a frightening danger and warns of it over and over and over until a poorly
educated public believes it: The Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq's WMD, the Iranian bomb. It's
a frightening world, Washington tells us. Things go bump in the night. Boo.
Where does Trump fit into this? Although his supporters offer him as a masterly statesman,
biographies, which few read, show him to be profoundly ignorant, incoherent, narcissistic,
weak, and easily manipulated. He loves attention and craves praise. He is also corrupt. As a
businessman he danced just this side of the law in many shady real-estate deals. All of this is
documented, but few will read of it.
Some will say that this isn't true. Go back and look at the things he said during the
campaign, the positions he was going to take before he was modified. He astonished people who
worked in his White House not just by his lack of knowledge but his lack of interest in
learning. We are ruled by a histrionic dwarf.
But, in a country with no checks and balances on presidential power, foreign policy is what
he says it is, and America attacks whoever he wants it to attack.
So why did he ditch the Iran deal? There is of course anti-Jewish posting on the web to the
effect that the Jews are manipulating the government to go to destroy Iran for the benefit of
Israel. This doesn't hold water, or only a little water. Surveys have shown that American Jews
favor the Iran deal more than do other Americans. This probably is because they are more
attentive and better informed than the notoriously clueless US public. (e.g. JStreet
and
WashPost. ) But while "the Jews" didn't sink the Iran deal, a comparatively small number of
Israel-firsters did. These are the Neocons, warlike and heavily Jewish, plus the Jewish lobby
AIPAC plus a few Jewish billionaires. Collectively they determine American foreign policy, and
not for the benefit of America–which, again, has nothing to gain and much to lose by
being manipulated into a war that does not matter to America.
Members of AIPAC are often accused of dual loyalty. I don't think so, though it is the best
we can hope for. They should recuse themselves, though of course they will not.
The assertion that America should fight only wars in the America interest will be called,
sigh, anti-Semitism. It is not. Yes, there exists in some quarters an obsessive, grinding
hatred of Jews. Historically this hostility has been common if not universal and has led to
brutal pogroms. But it has nothing to do with war against Iran. The desire for America to have
an independent foreign policy hardly suggests a Cossack mentality. There is no reason to let
Israel and a small set of Israeli patriots in New York force policies much to the harm of the
United States.
But this is not at all unlikely. In Washington–where I worked in journalism for
decades–fear of Jews is so great that no one dares say what a great many are thinking. It
gets ridiculous. I remember many years back interviewing in the Pentagon the general who headed
the armor command, whose name I forget. In such interviews there is usually a babysitter
present, often a major from public affairs, who tries to manage spin.
The general and I were chatting about tanks, in which we both had a technical interest. He
commented that the Merkava, a home-brew Israel tank, was reasonably good but not in a class
with the American M1. As inflammatory comments go, this was truly lame. Yet when I left, the
babysitter came charging down the corridor to assure me that the general was not insulting the
Israeli tank, the general didn't mean, and the major hoped I wouldn't think etc. It's that
crazy.
Whether Trump believes what he says about Iran's imaginary lunge for a Bomb is not clear. In
Washington it is routine to lie about this or that dreadful danger so as to herd the
deplorables toward a desired folly–but is Trump herding or herded? He is clueless about
things military and appears to have no grasp of technology. Geography is not his strong suit,
as witness his invention of a country called "Nambia." Netanyahu and the Neocons outclass him
by a wide margin and apparently drive him like a truck.
If Trump were an American President, he would tell the Israelis to fight their own wars with
their own military. Is he? Watch.
Fred Reed is a retired news weasel and part-time sociopath living in Mexico with his
wife and three useless but agreeable street dogs.
If there's a column to be written that reflects the elite consensus of Western Europe and its
sneering attitude towards the United States, Fred Reed is sure to write it. That is unless
he's writing a column reflecting the elite consensus of Mexico City. He'll do that one too.
This hard-hitting, well-written article seems to have issued from a different pen than the
one you usually wield. I'm not criticizing the other Fred as I enjoy reading his columns
irrespective of my agreeing with what he may have said or left unsaid. But generally, the guy
who writes under the pen name Fred is a little more circumspect in discussing IsraelFirsters,
or so it seems to me. If I'm mistaken I'm sure the clamoring commenters will correct me by
showing how this piece too, is just a backhanded Zionist ploy to lull me into letting my
guard down etc.
If Iran were a threat to the existence of Israel, things would be different. If Muslims
conquered the Jews, they would presumably treat them as badly as Israelis, and very likely
worse. It would be ugly in the extreme. To prevent this, use of the American military would
be justified.
Why is that? I thought you had gotten over the Policeman of the World syndrome, Fred.
Fred wrote that were the situation reversed the Muslims would treat the Jews even worse than
the Jews treat them but where does he draw this presumption from? Iran is said to have the
largest population of Jews in the ME outside of Israel and they even have representation in
the Iranian parliament. Many of them are highly critical of Israel and don't consider it to
be the real deal.
There have always been Jews living in the ME when the power equation was reversed and yet
they stayed and they survived. Prior to the unrestrained violence of the Jews in the Nakba
relations appeared to be quite cordial.
The Israelis are always looking for enemies to fight, and Iran, as a large country with a
decent sized military and deeply Islamic government, is a possible threat, but I don't think
Israel is the main reason most American leaders are for keeping pressure on Iran . I'd say
the Saudis and the petrodollar are the main reason for the US trying to keep Iran poor and on
the defensive. The Iranians will never accept American control over the Mideast oil supply,
while the Saudis have signed on as long as we provide military protection. If the US ever
allows the petrodollar to fail, its economy will crumble. That won't be allowed to happen
without a fight.
Nice try, but the Saudi lobby doesn't run the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the
government. You know perfectly well (((who))) does:
" I don't care if Americans think we're running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or
the government. I just care that we get to keep running them."
Trump's backing out of the Iran deal has raised the price of oil by 'escalating middle East
tensions'. Saudis who sell oil are profiting, and they are barely-hidden good friends of the
Israelis. Russians who sell beaucoup oil are profiting, and they are, despite what Unz's Saker-Faker
says, good friends of the Israelis
Trump's buddies in US shale oil debt, are profiting and getting a bail-out, and they and
Trump are good friends of the Israelis
The US petro-dollar is profiting and getting an extra boost of life, as higher-price
oil-sales by Saudis and others get recycled into US dollars
Iran which sells oil is profiting, and they too may be ultimately in the game with the
Israelis, 'the best enemy money can buy', like the old Soviet Union was for the US the UK
economist Antony Sutton proving half a century ago that the 'Cold War' was a scam
Win – win – win, it seems – oil buyers such as Europe being the 'losers'
– with some common soldiers and people, cannon fodder, being dead in the middle East,
to make it all look legit
Iran stuck rigorously to the agreement despite its humiliating and provocative nature. WTF does only Iran have to comply to
this intrusive inspection on nuclear power? To appease Israel of course that doesn't lose any sleep over Iran's nuclear
energy...
It would be extremely politically correct and would be excoriated, of course, but this
creates an opening for a presidential campaign based on the slogan "no more Jewish wars." ...
Why do all of this to hurt a country that poses no danger to the United States?
Israel.
Israel, Israel. Israel. Israel.
Always Israel.
Money.
Money.Money.Money.Money
Always Money.
Trump, King of the Deal, is looking forward to the 120+billion, Jimmy Carter took from
Iran, earning interest in our vaults. Prediction: Trump reverses: rewrites the deal; keeps
their Money, pleases us all.
Surveys have shown that American Jews favor the Iran deal more than do other
Americans.
Maybe, but they're also not calling attention to the skullduggery and machinations of
AIPAC, Bibi and and Likud party in trying to get another war started. Jews favoring the deal
aren't going to rock the boat with their fellow Jews who are against it.
Trump is just Bibi's pawn like I feared he would be. I'm still in shock that Fred had the cajones to criticize Bibi and Israel and call them
out for the hostilities and looming war with Iran . I figured he might try to pin it all on
the alt-right just like the alt-right is the only thing standing in the way of racial amity
between white and mestizo and a black-brown utopia in America.
Its been fascinating how in the latest propaganda campaign that Iran's nuclear weapons
program has suddenly become real. Before, while this deal was being negotiated, almost all
the world's intelligence agencies agreed that Iran was not producing nuclear weapons. Only
the Israelis disagreed. The war-war-war-and-more-endless-war factions of the American deep
state said Iran was making nuclear weapons, but even then the official intelligence estimates
said they were not.
There is a lot of very slippery language around this. Before the deal, America and
especially the pro-war media, had a way of talking about "Iran's nuclear program". This was a
reference to Iran's legal and permitted civilian nuclear program, but done in a scary and
threatening way that made the audience assume that it was about Iran's nuclear weapons, which
is was not. Now, Trump takes this even further and rants and yells about "Iran's nuclear
research" as if that was the same thing as a program producing nuclear weapons, which of
course it is not.
Trump is destroying America standing in the world and tearing apart the trans-Atlantic
alliance all over a mythical nuclear weapons program that the Ayatollah had banned as being
"un-Islamic" and which all the world's intelligence agencies agreed that Iran did not
possess.
Technically, Trump and Bibi are both Sheldon Adleson's pawns, as the casino owner
finances the campaigns of both.
Adelson's money comes from productive Americans, as do the billion$ funneled to Israel
from the US government. Thus do we finance our own destruction. Irony is hell, ain't it?
You said it "he's an actor" Trumps a slime ball and he has a long record to prove it, as
far as the N.Korea deal goes it will be a no go, because no matter how much Kim offers it
will never be enough, and lets not even get into the fiscal mess with Trump only making it
worse, for that too within its own time will straighten itself out, but not to our liking I'm
sure.!!!
But while "the Jews" didn't sink the Iran deal, a comparatively small number of
Israel-firsters did.
Fair enough, Fred; but then, where are the voices of the rest of them ? You're not
suggesting that "comparatively small number" of them are controlling the whole discussion,
are you?
Unless we hear a clear protest from 'the rest of them' in the near future, I would rather
posit that, in spite of their recorded support for the deal, they will tacitly acquiesce to
Trump's actions to help build the 'greater Israel.'
It may be that Trump knows quite well that Kennedy was killed two weeks after he threatened
Israel not to sell them arms any more, if they continued developing their atomic bomb.
Avner Cohen,'Israel and the Bomb', New York 1998
An interesting aspect of the book is that this period of two weeks has been more or less
buried.
The author refers to common hatred of Jews, expressed in pogroms. I would give the quote but
am unable to copy because of all the fancy software. But use your 'find in page' for
"pogrom". Note that the word is Russian, meaning something like excessive violence.
That the author is talking off the top of his head is forgivable. We are most of us
carrying the same load of crap. But it would be good to see the level of scholarship here at
Unz equal to that at the Dailystormer, from where I get this quote:
In actual fact, the idea of pogroms in the Russian Empire, in which "thousands of Jews
were slaughtered" has been utterly debunked. They've been debunked not by an obscure "Far
Right" think-tank, but by Professor John Klier – a widely respected scholar and
non-Jewish former head of the British Association for Jewish Studies who published his
findings in a number of volumes via Cambridge University Press (I summarize Klier's
findings here). Among Klier's findings, the most important of which can be found in
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82 (2011) was that the vast majority of pogrom
narratives were developed and disseminated by a single Prussian Rabbi – Yizhak
Rülf.
According to Klier, Rülf specialized in "sensationalized accounts of mass
rape." These accounts would then be disseminated in the Western media with the help of
Jewish journalists, and used by groups like the British-based Russo-Jewish Committee to
push for Western government 'action' against the Tsar.
Despite contemporary British
government investigations which revealed that no rapes had occurred and perhaps only one or
two murders had been committed throughout the Russian Empire, and because most of the
general public will never hear about the research of Professor Klier, the myth of thousands
of massacred Jews in eastern pogroms remains in the popular consciousness, and is obviously
still very deeply embedded in the Jewish folk memory.
Cannot see why:
- EU is becoming irrelevant
- the USA must continue wars
On the contrary, the USA must stop spending huge sums on wars that just cost money.
Both the USA and the EU are pretty much autarcic, EU trade with non EU countries is just some
5% of gross EU income.
Do not know the figure for the USA, but it must be in the same order of magnitude.
The dollar indeed is a huge problem, but what will happen if the USA no longer pays interest
on and amortization of loans ?
Not much, I suppose.
A country cannot go bankrupt.
Maybe China would have the biggest problem, the Chinese regime fails in making Chinese
consume, they save.
If export is no longer possible, huge unemployment will result.
Fred is correct that Israel does not want Iran to prosper, which means that Israel would have
finagled a plan to have the US destroy Iran even if Iran had not tinkered with nukes. It has
to do with Arab vs. Indo-European. The Israelis and their American Jewish bros and worldwide
Jewry assume that on averages, Iranians will be smarter and have a better work ethic than any
Arabs, which means that if left alone. Iran could come to dominate the Moslem Middle East.
And that easily could lead to Israel being made little more than a tiny dot wit nukes the US
backs to the hilt.
Jews know that Arabs are like them Semitic, and the core-deep culture says to ally with 1
Arab nation is better for Jews. So Saudi Arabia is in. The Saudis would do virtually anything in order to be the top dog of the Moslem world,
because then Saudis would destroy all political power tied to Shiites, and steal all oil
wells controlled by Shiites, giving nearly 100% of it to Sunni Arabs.
The Jewish plan is to enable various Mohammedans to slaughter one another, which means
they cannot be focused on Israel, and to use the US to supply the money and manpower to jump
start every move and play it out.
JFK was murdered because he went against the Deep State, and that includes his desire to
stop Israel from illegally developing nukes.
Jews began their war against the Kennedys because of Joe, who realized the machinations of
various Brit Elites and American WASP Elites and Jews to make certain there would be a WW2.
And, as makes perfect sense going back to the very beginning of WASP culture, the desires of
Jews and WASP Elites were a perfect match.
If a nuclear device is "lit off" in an American or European city, it will have Israel's
fingerprints all over it. Israel is desperate to keep the American money spigot running, as
well as sabotaging the Palestinian "peace process" that the world wants it to take
seriously.
In fact, if a nuclear device is "lit off" anywhere in the world, it will have come from
Israel's secret nuclear "stockpile".
The "power outage" in Atlanta was a convenient excuse for Israel to perform a logistical
"sleight of hand", as an Israeli plane was allowed to land and take off during the "power
outage" without receiving customs clearance or inspection. This is one of many Israeli
companies that possesses a "special exemption" granted by the U S government that frees it
from customs inspections. Just maybe another one of Israel's nukes was just being
pre-positioned, getting ready for "the big one". As most Americans are tired of all of the
foreign wars being fought for Israel's benefit, another "incident" on American soil would be
enough to galvanize the American public, once again, (just like WTC 9-11) to support another
war for Israel's benefit. Israel's "samson option" is a real threat to "light one off" in a
European or American city, if Israel's interests are not taken seriously.
Israel refuses to abide by IAEA guidelines concerning its nukes as they are already
distributed around the world. Israel would not be able to produce all of them as most of them
are not in Israel, proper. No delivery systems are needed as Israel's nukes are already "in
place". Look for another "false flag" operation with the blame being put on Iran or Syria.
You can bet that some Iranian or Syrian passports will be found in the rubble.
Israel also threatens to detonate nuclear devices in several US cities. Talk about total
INSANITY; the so-called "Samson Option" is it.
As an aside, American "foreign aid" is prohibited from being given to any country that has
not signed the "Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty" or refuses to abide by "International
Atomic Energy Agency" (IAEA) guidelines regarding its nuclear devices. Guess what?? Israel
does not abide by EITHER and still gets the majority of American "foreign aid". This
prohibition also applies to countries that do not register their "agents of a foreign
government" with the U S State Department. Guess what?? Israel (again) with its "American
Israel Political Action Committee" (AIPAC) still gets "foreign aid" in contravention of
American law..
There are forty or so congressmen, senators and thousands of high-level policy "wonks"
infecting the U S government who hold "dual citizenship" with Israel. Such dual citizenship
must be strictly prohibited. Those holding dual citizenship must be required to renounce said
foreign citizenship. Refusal to do so should result in immediate deportation with loss of
American citizenship. Present and former holders of dual citizenship should never be allowed
to serve in any American governmental capacity.
When Netanyahu addressed both houses of congress, it was sickening to see our politicians
slobber all over themselves to PROVE that they were unconditional supporters of Israel just
who the hell do they work for? Certainly not for the interests of the American people and the
United States they should renounce their United States citizenship and be deported to
Israel
Mr. Reed is quite wrong when he says this (but hardly surprising):
"If Iran were a threat to the existence of Israel, things would be different. If Muslims
conquered the Jews, they would presumably treat them as badly as Israelis, and very likely
worse. It would be ugly in the extreme. To prevent this, use of the American military would
be justified."
Perhaps he needs to brush up on ME history:
For the record:
In 638 CE Palestine fell to the Muslims under Caliph Omar. To this day, many Jews refer to
the arrival of the Muslims as a "liberation" for Omar gave them unfettered access to
Jerusalem, which they had been denied under the Christian Byzantines. Omar was equally
generous to the Christians. "Never in the sorry story of conquest up to that day, and rarely
since, were such noble and generous sentiments displayed by a conqueror as those extended to
Jerusalem by Omar." (Report by Sir William Fitzgerald on the Local Administration of
Jerusalem, Jerusalem: Government Printer, 1945, p.4)
In 1187, Saladin liberated Jerusalem from the brutal Crusaders and invited the Jews they had
expelled to return and practice their faith freely. (It is easy to understand why Palestine's
indigenous Arab Jews were among Zionism's most ardent opponents.)
To quote Israeli Rabbi Menachem Froman, chief rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, and
a champion of inter-religious reconciliation: "[E]very Jew who learns the writings of the
great sages – who, at the head of them all stands Maimonides – knows that our
great thinkers wrote in the Arabic language, lived in Islamic states and participated with
the great Muslim thinkers in the effort to explain the words of God, according to the paths
of the sages and amidst the difficult bloody battles that we have had since the beginning of
Zionism with the Muslims." We know that the war between the Jews and the Muslims is the work
of the cursed devil. We know that Islam is named after peace." (Haaretz, September 18,
2006)
the 'petrodollar' / Federal Reserve Note / fiat debt slavery for the planet, is the
weapon with which the Fiend menaces mankind.
There really isn't a petrodollar basis for the US economy. The edifice upon which the US
economy is built is more of a consumer-dollar + welfare dollar + MI-complex dollar. Each of
which has some share of a "petrodollar" component.
"The Jewish plan is to enable various Mohammedans to slaughter one another, which means
they cannot be focused on Israel."
– This is known as Oded Yinon plan for Eretz Israel. A blueprint for the ongoing
slaughter. So Jewishly "most moral."
Oded Yinon, "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties," Association of Arab-American
University Graduates, Inc. Belmont, Massachusetts, 1982, Special Document No. 1, ISBN
0-937694-56-8
"The Schutzstaffel (literally "Protection Squadron") was a major paramilitary organization
under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) The two main constituent groups were the
Allgemeine SS (General SS) and Waffen-SS (Armed SS). The Allgemeine SS was responsible for
enforcing the racial policy of Nazi Germany and general policing, whereas the
Waffen-SS consisted of combat units within Nazi Germany's military. A third component of the
SS, the SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV), ran the concentration camps and extermination
camps. Additional subdivisions of the SS included the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD)
organizations. They were tasked with the detection of actual or potential enemies of the Nazi
state, the neutralization of any opposition, policing the German people for their commitment
to Nazi ideology, and providing domestic and foreign intelligence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel
– Sounds like Mossad and the "most moral" IDF.
Warsaw Ghetto: "On January 18, 1943 the Germans suddenly entered the Warsaw Ghetto Within
hours, some 600 Jews were shot and 5,000 others removed from their residences. The Germans
expected no resistance, but the action was brought to a halt by hundreds of insurgents armed
with handguns and Molotov cocktails.
I remember taking an immigration law class in law school. The question of dual citizenship came up, specifically as to when it began. Not surprisingly, it began when
Israel became a nation so that jews could hold citizenship
in both countries with impunity.
It was just another facet of the old practice of felons fleeing the United States before
being prosecuted for their crimes by boarding an el al flight to israel. That ruse has been
done many times especially for the rabbis who bugger or otherwise molest the children under
their charge.
Hamas is a creation of Israels mossad just like ISIS aka AL CIADA which creation is shared
by the U.S. and Israel and Britain ie the CIA and the MOSSAD and MI6.
As usual, it's both. Foreign Influencer #1 and Foreign Influencer #2 are terrified of Iran
for a number of reasons. Frankly, if we ditch them both and ally with Iran we'd have more
influence in the region. JK, Iran needs us far less than the other two. Anyway, go figure,
our "friends" play us like a fiddle and get their problems solved.
"... A historically low percentage of our population -- less than half a percent -- actually serves in the military. Compare that to around 9% during the Vietnam War, and 12% during World War II. Remarkably few of us ever see combat, ever even know anyone who was in combat, ever get to hear firsthand stories of what went on or witness what life is like for such a returning veteran. Not surprisingly, America's wars now largely go on without us. There is no personal connection. Here in "the homeland" -- despite the overblown fears of "terrorism" -- it remains "peacetime." As a consequence, few of us are engaged by veterans' issues or the prospect -- essentially, the guarantee -- of more war in the American future. ..."
Memorial Day is over. You had your barbeque. Now, you can stop thinking about America's wars and the casualties from them
for another year. As for me, I only wish it were so.
It's been Memorial Day for me ever since I first met Tomas Young. And in truth, it should have felt that way from the moment I
hunkered down in Somalia in 1993 and the firing began. After all, we've been at war across the Greater Middle East ever since. But
somehow it was Tomas who, in 2013, first brought my own experience in the US military home to me in ways I hadn't been able to do
on my own.
That gravely wounded, living, breathing casualty of our second war in Iraq who wouldn't let go of life or stop thinking and critiquing
America's never-ending warscape brought me so much closer to myself, so bear with me for a moment while I return to Mogadishu, the
Somalian capital, and bring you -- and me -- closer to him.
Boom!
In that spring of 1993, I was a 22-year-old Army sergeant, newly married, and had just been dropped into a famine-ridden, war-torn
country on the other side of the planet, a place I hadn't previously given a thought. I didn't know what hit me. I couldn't begin
to take it in. That first day I remember sitting on my cot with a wet t-shirt draped over my head, chugging a bottle of water to
counter the oppressive heat.
I'd trained for this -- a real mission -- for more than five years. I was a Black Hawk helicopter crew chief. Still, I had no
idea what I was in for.
So much happened in Somalia in that " Black
Hawk Down " year that foreshadowed America's fruitless wars of the twenty-first century across the Greater Middle East and parts
of Africa, but you wouldn't have known it by me. That first day, sitting in a tent on the old Somali Air Force base in Baledogle,
a couple of hours inland from the capital city of Mogadishu, I had a face-to-face encounter with a poisonous black mamba snake. Somehow
it didn't register. Not really.
This is real , I kept telling myself in the six months I spent there, but in a way it wasn't or didn't seem to be.
After about a month, my unit moved to the airport in Mogadishu -- away from the snakes, scorpions, and bugs that infested Baledogle,
but closer to dangers of a more human sort. Within a few weeks, I became used to the nightly rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire
coming at us from the city. I watched the tracers streak by as we crouched behind our sandbagged fighting positions. We would return
from missions to find bullet holes in the skin or rotor blades of our Black Hawk helicopters, or in one case a beer-can-sized hole
that a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) round punched cleanly through the rear stabilizer without -- mercifully -- detonating.
And yet none of it felt like it was quite happening to me. I remember lying on my cot late at night, not far from the flight line
full of Black Hawks and Cobras, hearing the drone of low-flying American AC-130 gunships firing overhead for hours on end. The first
boom would come from the seaward side of the field as the gunship fired its M102 howitzer. A few seconds later, another
boom would mark the round's arrival at its target across town, sometimes with secondary explosions as ammunition stores went
up. Lying there, I remember thinking that those weren't the routine training rounds I'd heard a hundred times as they hit some random
target in a desolate training area. They were landing on real targets, actual people.
Two other memorable boom s come to mind -- one as we waited in the back of a sun-baked supply truck, heading out on a volunteer
mission to give inoculations to kids at a Somali orphanage. Boom . The ground shook to the sound of one of our Humvees and
the four Army soldiers in it being
blown apart by the sort
of remote-controlled bomb that would become a commonplace of insurgents in America's twenty-first century wars. And a second, the
loudest during my six months there, as a generator perhaps 20 feet from our tent exploded into flames from an incoming RPG round
that found its target in the middle of the night.
This is real . I kept saying that to myself, but truthfully the more accurate word would have been surreal . The
care packages I was receiving, the Tootsie Rolls and Cracker Jacks and letters from my wife back home telling me how much she missed
me might as well have been from another planet.
Our helicopters flew daily reconnaissance missions ("Eyes over Mog" we called them) above the Somali capital. We did battle damage
assessments, checking out pockmarked buildings the AC-130s had targeted the night before, or the shot-up safe house that Somali warlord
Mohamed Aidid -- our operation's target (just as the US would target Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and the leaders of various
terror groups) -- had reportedly been using as a control center. Once a beautiful mansion, it was now riddled with thousands of bullet
holes and TOW missile craters.
We flew over Mogadishu's bustling marketplace, sometimes so low that the corrugated metal roofs of the stalls would blow off from
our rotor wash. We were always looking for what we called "technicals" -- pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted in their beds
-- to take out. Viewing that crowded marketplace through the sight of a ready-to-rock M-60 machine gun helped reinforce the message
that all of this was beyond surreal.
Lives were ending violently here every day, and my own life, too, could have ended at any moment. Yet it was just about impossible
to believe that all of a sudden I was in the middle of a violent set of incidents in a third-world hellhole, the sort of thing you
might read about in the paper, or more likely, would never hear about at all. You'd never know about our near-nightly scrambles to
our fighting positions behind a pile of sandbags, as the AK-47s cracked and the tracers flew overhead. It wouldn't even register
as a blip in the news back home. In some bizarre way, I was there and it still wasn't registering.
A Soldier Just Like Me
Just days after returning home from Somalia, I (like so many others) watched the footage of dead American soldiers -- at least
one a Black Hawk crew chief -- being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by cheering Somalis. For the first time, I found myself
filled with a sense of dread, a profound that-could-have-been-me feeling. I imagined my mother looking at such a photo of me, of
her dead son's body -- as someone's mother was undoubtedly doing.
If my interior landscape was beginning to shift in unsettling ways, if the war, my war, was finally starting to come home, I remained
only minimally aware of it. My wife and I started a family, I got a civilian job, went to college in the evening using the GI Bill,
and wrote a couple of books about music -- my refuge.
Still, after Somalia, I found myself drawn to stories about war. I reread Stephen Ambrose's blow-by-blow account of the D-Day
landings, picked up Ron Kovic's Vietnam memoir, Born On The Fourth Of July , for the first time, and even read All Quiet
On The Western Front . And all of them somehow floored me. But it wasn't until I watched
Body of War , Phil Donahue's 2008 documentary about Iraq war veteran
and antiwar activist Tomas Young, that something seemed truly different, that I simply couldn't shake the feeling it could have been
me.
Tomas was a kid who had limited options -- just like me. He signed up for the military, at least in part, because he wanted to
go to college -- just like me. Yes, just like so many other kids, too -- but above all, just like me.
He, too, was deployed to one of America's misbegotten wars in a later hellhole, and that's where our stories began to differ.
Five days after his unit arrived in Iraq -- a place he deployed to grudgingly, never understanding why he was being sent there and
not Afghanistan -- Tomas was shot, his spinal cord severed, and most of his body paralyzed. When he came home at age 24, he fought
the natural urge to suffer in silence and instead spoke out against the war in Iraq. Body of War chronicled his first full
year of very partial recovery and the blossoming of his antiwar activism.
Just a few weeks after the film's release, however, it all came crashing down. He suffered a pulmonary embolism and sank into
a coma, awakening to find that he'd suffered a brain injury and lost much of the use of his hands and his ability to speak clearly.
The ensuing years were filled with pain and debilitating health setbacks. By early 2013, he was in hospice care, suffering excruciating
abdominal pain, without his colon, and on a feeding tube and a pain pump. Gaunt, withered, exhausted, he continued to agitate against
America's never-ending war on terror from his bed, and finally wrote a "
last letter " to former President George
W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney, airing his grievances, which got
significant media
attention .
When I read it, I felt that he might have been me if I hadn't lucked out in Mogadishu two decades earlier. Maybe that's what made
me reach out to him that April and tell him I wanted to learn more about what had happened to him in the years between Body of
War and his last letter, about what it meant to go from being an antiwar agitator in a manual wheelchair to a bedridden quadriplegic
on a feeding tube and under hospice care, planning to soon end his own life.
A Map of the Ravages of War
When I finally met Tomas, I realized how much he and I had in common: the same taste in music and books, the same urge to be a
writer. We were both quick with the smart-ass comment and never made to be model soldiers because we liked to question things.
Each moment we spent together only connected us more deeply and brought me closer to the self that war had created in me, the
self I had kept at such a distance all these years. I began writing his story because I felt compelled to show other Americans someone
no different from them who had had his life, his reality, upended by one of our military adventures abroad, by deployment to a country
so distant that it's an abstraction to most of us who, in these days of the All-Volunteer Army, don't have a personal connection
either to the US military or to the wars it so regularly fights.
A historically low percentage of our population -- less than
half a percent
-- actually serves in the military. Compare that to around 9% during the Vietnam War, and 12% during World War II. Remarkably
few of us ever see combat, ever even know anyone who was in combat, ever get to hear firsthand stories of what went on or witness
what life is like for such a returning veteran. Not surprisingly, America's wars now largely go on without us. There is no personal
connection. Here in "the homeland" -- despite the overblown fears of "terrorism" -- it remains "peacetime." As a consequence, few
of us are engaged by veterans' issues or the prospect -- essentially, the guarantee -- of more war in the American future.
Tomas understood the importance of sharing the brutal fullness of his story. For him, there were to be no pulled punches. When
I told him I wanted others to learn of his harrowing tale, of his version of the human cost of war, that I wanted to help him to
tell that story, he responded that he had indeed wanted to write his own book. He'd scrapped the project because he could no longer
write, and even Dragon voice-to-text software wouldn't work because his speech had become so degraded after the embolism struck.
Instead, he shared everything. Tomas and his wife, Claudia, opened their lives to me. I slept in their basement. During my periodic
visits, he introduced me to an expansive mind in a shrunken world, a mind that wanted to range widely in a body mostly confined to
a hospital bed, surrounded by books, magazines, and an array of tubing that delivered medications and removed bodily wastes in a
darkened bedroom.
"I need to be fed," he said to me one day. "Do you want to see what that's like?" Then, he lifted his shirt and showed me the
maze of tubing and scars on his body. It was a map of the ravages of war.
He was unflinchingly honest, sensing the importance of his story in a country where such experiences have become uncommon fare.
Like his comic book heroes Batman and the Punisher, he wanted to make sure that no one would have to endure what he'd gone through.
An All-Too-Real Life and Surreal Wars
Tomas Young's war ended on the night before Veterans' Day 2014 when he passed away quietly in his sleep. His pain finally came
to an end.
The bullets that hit him in the streets of Baghdad in 2004 brought on more than a decade of agony and hardship, not only for him,
but for his mother, his siblings, and his wife. Their suffering has yet to end.
Stories of the reality of war and its impact on this country are more crucial now than ever as America's wars seem only to multiply.
Among us are more than
2.5 million veterans of our recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We owe it to them to read their accounts -- and an
increasing number of them are out there
-- and do our best to understand what they've been through, and what they continue to go through. Then perhaps we can use that knowledge
not only to properly address their needs, but to properly debate and possibly -- like Tomas Young -- even protest America's ongoing
wars.
It would have been perfectly understandable for Tomas to have faced the pain, frustration, and failing health of his final years
privately and in silence, but that wasn't him. Instead, he made his story part of our American record. To stay on top of important
articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com
here .
Mark Wilkerson spent eight years in the
US Army as an AH-1 Cobra and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crew chief with the 3rd Infantry and 101st Airborne Divisions. He was deployed
with the 101st to Somalia for six months in 1993. He is the author of Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend and co-wrote
Pearl Jam Twenty . He has three children: Alex, Nick and Sam. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Melissa. His
latest book is Tomas Young's War
(Haymarket Books).
"... Several years ago Putin made a speech at the UN in favor of upholding International Law I thought at the time this "diplomatic statesmanship" was going to be Putin's way of bring Russia back into equal power with the Europeans and the US. Some have wondered and been asking about Putin not being as aggressive as he could be in defending Syria and Iran. Putin's holding off on tough talk/action could be amassing more power in the end. Putin comes off as the voice of sanity..exactly what the Europeans want to hear and see. ..."
Several years ago Putin made a speech at the UN in favor of upholding International Law I
thought at the time this "diplomatic statesmanship" was going to be Putin's way of bring
Russia back into equal power with the Europeans and the US. Some have wondered and been
asking about Putin not being as aggressive as he could be in defending Syria and Iran.
Putin's holding off on tough talk/action could be amassing more power in the end. Putin comes
off as the voice of sanity..exactly what the Europeans want to hear and see.
As Europe turns away from the US they turn to Putin.
If anyone remembers all the Jew rags making fun of "old Europe" during the Iraq war run up
and urging that the US break with them as outdated relics no longer needed in the new modern
age -- this is what it was all about -- separating the US from its traditional allies who
were not as subservient to Israel as the US. So .now we are down to the Jew plan Europe and
sanity vr the US Orange Clown and his allies of midget Nazi Israel, Saudi and the UAE.
Germany begs Russia to pick up the torch that US has dropped
"Germany's Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, who has a history of expressing anti Russian
rhetoric relevant to Russia's presence in Syria as well as an alleged cyber attack on the
German Foreign Ministry which Maas says that he 'has to assume stemmed from Russia', has
turned an about face. He has traveled, for the first time, to Moscow to discuss international
diplomacy, the Iran nuclear deal, peace talks on Ukraine, and Syria.
Maas met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, where he encouraged Russia to
leverage its influence with Iran to help spur the Middle Eastern state in remaining committed
to the nuclear deal, which Trump abandoned earlier in the week.
Germany's Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, who has a history of expressing anti Russian
rhetoric relevant to Russia's presence in Syria as well as an alleged cyber attack on the
German Foreign Ministry which Maas says that he 'has to assume stemmed from Russia', has
turned an about face. He has traveled, for the first time, to Moscow to discuss international
diplomacy, the Iran nuclear deal, peace talks on Ukraine, and Syria.
Maas met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, where he encouraged Russia to
leverage its influence with Iran to help spur the Middle Eastern state in remaining committed
to the nuclear deal, which Trump abandoned earlier in the week.
Maas then declared that Germany was interested in bringing back the peace talks on the
Ukraine, together with other European partners. Maas also pointed out that the Syrian
conflict can't be settled without Russia, before contributing a wreath to the tomb of the
unknown soldier, which is a dedication to Russian soliders who died fighting the Germans in
WW2.
Deutsche Welle reports:
Germany's top diplomat Heiko Maas and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov both called
for the nuclear deal with Iran to be upheld on Thursday, during Maas' first official visit
to Russia. The appeal marks a rare moment of unity between Moscow and Berlin just days
after US walked out on the 2015 accord.
In Moscow, Maas urged Russia to influence Tehran and make it stick to the deal, which
aims to limit Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. The German foreign minister also
said he was seeking details from the US on its plans for future sanctions against Iran
US President Donald Trump has shrugged off pressure from allies to keep the deal in place
and called the accord "defective at its core." However, leaders of the UK, France, and
Germany all contacted Iranian President Hasan Rouhani in the attempt to salvage the
accord.
Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel called Rouhani on Thursday to reaffirm Germany's
commitment to the deal "as long as Iran continues to fulfil its obligations," said Merkel's
spokesman Steffen Seibert. Merkel also said she was ready to negotiate about Iran's
ballistic missiles and involvement in Syria and Yemen.
Angela Merkel is also set to visit Russia next week.
Visiting Moscow on Thursday, Germany's top diplomat Maas suggested reviving the peace
talks between Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia on the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Lavrov responded by saying Russia was "ready to consider" this offer.
Maas also called for "honest dialogue" with Moscow and for Russia to be included in
global diplomacy, despite its differences with Berlin. Maas admitted that the conflict in
Syria "cannot be solved without Russia."
The German diplomat also laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow,
which is dedicated to the Soviet soldiers killed during World War II.
Also in a bid to get Russia to assume a leadership position relative to preserving the
nuclear deal, and by extension, the European economy, Merkel got on the phone with Russian
President Vladimir Putin, where he mutually voiced his concern over Trump's action, and
where Merkel also came forward about the situation in Syria.
TASS reports:
BERLIN, May 11. /TASS/. Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy Peter Altmaier
has confirmed that he will visit Moscow at the beginning of the next week, he said in an
interview with German radio station Deutschlandfunk released on Friday.
"I will follow my colleague [German Foreign Minister Heiko] Maas, who attended
negotiations in Moscow yesterday. I will be there on Monday and Tuesday, and Chancellor
[Angela Merkel will visit Sochi -- TASS] during the week," Altmaier said.
"... Suppose there were no Russia in Syria, what would have happened? Libya would have been the fate. Most likely US would have recognized Golan Ht as Israel's. Oil harvesting companies would become more visible. Lebanon would have been in flames. Nothing else in ME. Some more terror attacks in EU may be. ..."
"... The real purpose of the Donald's missile-rattling is nothing more than helping Bibi Netanyahu keep his coalition of right wing religious and settler parties (Likud, United Torah Judaism, Shas, Kulanu and the Jewish Home) together, thereby maintaining his slim 61-vote majority in the 120-seat Knesset. ..."
"... Netanyahu's malefic political glue is the utterly false claim that Iran is an "existential threat" to Israel because it is hell-bent on getting the bomb. ..."
"... As a matter of record, of course, Netanyahu has been saying this since the early 1990s and he has always been wrong because there were never any facts or logic to support his blatant fear-mongering. ..."
There have been major developments this week, all of them bad, including Putin re-nominating
Medvedev as his Prime Minister, and Bibi Netanyahu invited to Moscow to the Victory Day Parade
in spite of him bombing Syria, a Russian ally, just on the eve of his visit. Once in Moscow,
Netanyahu compared Iran to, what else, Nazi
Germany . How original and profound indeed! Then he proceeded to order the bombing of Syria
for a second time , while still in
Moscow. But then, what can we expect from a self-worshiping narcissist who finds it appropriate
to serve
food to the Japanese Prime Minister in a specially made shoe ? The man is clearly batshit
crazy (which in no way makes him less evil or dangerous). But it is the Russian reaction which
is so totally disgusting: nothing, absolutely nothing. Unlike others, I have clearly said
that it is not the Russian responsibility to "protect" Syria (or Iran) from the Israelis. But
there is no doubt in my mind that Netanyahu has just publicly thumbed his nose at Putin and
that Putin took it. For all my respect for Putin, this time he allowed Netanyahu to treat him
just like Trump treated Macron. Except that in the case of Putin, he was so treated in his own
capital. That makes it even worse.
[Interestingly, while whining about "Nazi Iran" Netanyahu did say something truly profound
and true. He said " an important history lesson: when a murderous ideology emerges, one has
to push back against it before it is too late". That is indeed exactly what most people
across the world feel about Israel and its Zionist ideology but, alas, their voice is
completely ignored by those who rule over them. So yes, it sure looks to me like it is becoming
"too late" and that the consequences for our collective cowardice -- most of us are absolutely
terrified from speaking the plain truth about our Zionist overlords - will cost us all a
terrible price.]
Then, of course, there is Donald Trump pulling out of the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan
of Action (JCPOA) in spite of Iran's full compliance and in spite of the fact that the US does
not have the authority to unilaterally withdraw from this multilateral agreement. But being the
megalomaniac that he is, and not to mention the spineless lackey of the Israel Lobby, Trump
ignored all that and thereby created further tensions between the US and the rest of the world
whom the US will now blackmail and bully to try to force it to support the US in its rabid
subservience to Israel. As for the Israelis, their "sophisticated" "strategy" is primitive to
the extreme: first get Trump to create maximal tensions with Iran, then attack the Iranians in
Syria as visibly and arrogantly as possible, bait the Iranians into a retaliation, then bellow
"OI VEY!!!" with your loudest voice, mention the Holocaust once or twice, toss in a "6 million
people" figure, and get the US to attack Syria.
How anybody can respect, nevermind admire, the Israelis is simply beyond comprehension. I
sure can't think of a more contemptible, nasty, psychopathic gang of megalomanical thugs (and
cowards) than the Israelis. Can you?
Nonetheless, it appears undeniable that the Zionists have enough power to simultaneously
force not one, but two (supposed) superpowers to cave into their demands. Not only that, they
have the power to do that while also putting these two superpowers on a collision course
against each other. At the very least, this shows two things: the United States has completely
lost its sovereignty and is now an Israeli protectorate. As for Russia, well, she is doing
comparatively better, but the full re-sovereignization the Russian people have voted for when
they gave their overwhelming support to Putin will not happen. A comment I read on a Russian
chat put it: "Путин кинул
народ -- мы не за
Медведева
голосовали" or " Putin betrayed
the people -- we did not vote for Medvedev ". I am not sure that "betrayed the people" is
fair, but the fact that he has disappointed a lot of people is, I think, simply undeniable.
It is still way too early to reach any conclusions at this point, and there are still way
too many unknown variables, but I will admit that I am very worried and that for the first time
in 4 years I am having major doubts about a fundamental policy decision by Putin. I sure hope
that I am wrong. We will find out relatively soon. I just hope that this will not be in the
form of a major war.
Paul Craig Roberts has repeatedly, for some years now, questioned Putin's apparent
willingness to bend over backwards to placate his "partners" in the West.
PCR has maintained consistently that the West can not be trusted, that Russia's attempts
at accommodation are taken as signs of weakness, acting only to embolden the West in its
continuing vicious assaults.
Of course, Russia is playing for time: hoping that over time the strategic tables will
increasing tip in its own & China's etc favour.
However, I suspect Saker & PCR are right: further submission will only lead to ever more
vicious attacks. This is made all the worse by China's unwillingness to assert itself
internationally as the 2nd largest economic power. (As if it can't see the US strategy, via
tariffs etc to retard, if not destroy its future economic development)
One might have a tiny mite of hope that the West might ultimately act sanely. However, with
the Zionists now pulling all the strings sanity is over & out.
Netanyahu is regarded in Washington, and perhaps also Moscow, as almost Churchillian for his
efforts to protect Israel and by extension the region and the US.
Who among us wants horizontal nuclear proliferation and a nuked up Iran armed with
ICBM's?
I've been waiting to hear your take, Saker, since things are very bad indeed. I did not like
what I saw happen on May 9th. Here is my very abbreviated take on it.
Bibi knows that he's pulled Trump fully into the Israeli orbit. He as much as told Putin
he would attack Syria and dared him to do anything about it. If Putin responded with force,
that would provide Israel and America with all the provocation they need to go all-in against
Syria, Iran, and Russia, which is what the Ziocons were hoping to accomplish anyway. Putin,
seeing all this and being the better man, can only sit back and take it. For now.
Bibi pissed in Putin's face and nobody could do a thing about it. But the whole world saw
what happened and nobody with half a brain is on the side of the Israelis. I'm no longer
upset that Putin didn't respond. He has admirable restraint and patience. The very hand of
God Himself will move against the Israelis for all their crimes and treachery, and Putin will
still be one of His chief instruments.
How anybody can respect, nevermind admire, the Israelis is simply beyond comprehension.
I sure can't think of a more contemptible, nasty, psychopathic gang of megalomanical thugs
(and cowards) than the Israelis. Can you?
Yes I can, Saker, you live among them.
Then, of course, there is Donald Trump pulling out of the so-called Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JCPOA) in spite of Iran's full compliance and in spite of the fact that the
US does not have the authority to unilaterally withdraw from this multilateral
agreement
.
See Club Orlov http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/ 5/10 regarding the
120+ billion of Iranian money we hold in dollars the dead broke US gets to keep by pulling
out of the deal.
Good call.
That is why we follow you Saker.
It is the responsability of the american men to rebel and fix this goverment.
Im from cuba and the worst part here is that we have been delivered to be control and saked
by people that we took the lunch from them when we where kids,in the school yard.
Agree. Putin seems to have rolled over and is crying uncle. Sad. Perhaps he is waiting
until his new weapons are fully stockpiled before he makes any serious attempts to defend --
ultimately -- himself and his nation.
Without Russia putting some brakes on the Empire's unopposed oppressions, there is little
hope for truth, justice, etc. in the world. There is no attempt to print the truth in
national publications (that has been going on for a long time), and increasingly, little
attempt to hide the fact that they are not printing the truth. The masses, instead of
rebelling against obvious lies, seem to have internalized doublethink and do not have any
significant impulse to rise up and defend their own interests. The propaganda is too thick,
too strong, and too unopposed. Things look grim.
Who among us wants horizontal nuclear proliferation and a nuked up Iran armed with
ICBM's?
I think that would be a good check of Israel's power that could stabilize the ME and
return to the path of development that existed there still till early 1980s when the process
of destabilization began which was a part of the Yinon plan. If Israel remains the absolutely
dominant power people in ME countries will be allowed to live in Hobbesian chaotic world only
where they will be encouraged to engage in ethnic and sectarian fighting forever.
How anybody can respect, nevermind admire, the Israelis is simply beyond
comprehension.
Why not? Israel has been successfully expanding its territory, and getting two superpowers
to cave into its demands (Saker's own words). That is pretty admirable in my book. This is certainly worth of both respect and admiration, even if one otherwise wishes to
see Israel burn in a sea of atomic fire.
Anyhow, there's no reason for Russia to care. Increased American tensions with Iran will
raise the price of oil. Also a reminder that the Kremlin couldn't care less about American
murders of Russian mercenaries. So in what world will they concern themselves with
Iranian ones.
A comment I read on a Russian chat put it: "Путин
кинул народ -- мы
не за
Медведева
голосовали" or "Putin betrayed
the people -- we did not vote for Medvedev".
Ah yes, the сирийские
братушки ("Syrian brothers"). Perhaps Western
Russophiles consider them such, but few Russians do.
So The Saker is correct, Putin did not betray "his" people. (Well, he did, but that
happened in 2014, not now).
I'm no longer upset that Putin didn't respond. He has admirable restraint and patience.
The very hand of God Himself will move against the Israelis for all their crimes and
treachery, and Putin will still be one of His chief instruments.
This is your wishful thinking talking. You are still upset with Putin and you should be.
May 9 parade with Netanyahu and bombing in Syria really looked very bad. To me it signified
Putin's capitulation. At least it is the end game and Russia realized she was outplayed as
she is apparently not ready to go all the way with the nuclear blackmail. Putin will stay put
waiting for the stupid World Cup while Netanyahu will be escalating or some face saving
measure will be found for Russia to withdraw from Syria or Russia will be invited to be a
part of occupational government there.
Chinese looking from afar probably are disappointed but they never trusted Russian corrupt
elite staying the course.
Suppose there were no Russia in Syria, what would have happened? Libya would have been the fate. Most likely US would have recognized Golan Ht as Israel's.
Oil harvesting companies would become more visible. Lebanon would have been in flames.
Nothing else in ME. Some more terror attacks in EU may be.
But would these have changed the internal dynamics within US ? No It would not. US would
still be going down the path it has been and that path would still be what it is today at
home and abroad.
Social anarchy, takeover of Democrats by non-whites , takeover of GOP by religious
militant and bipartisan tax cutting for pro big business will continue unhindered . Is it
good? No. But good for the destruction of the country. That is good .
ME without USA would then look like no different until Russia also faces the same fate that
has happened to Wiemar Germany and Egyptian/ Persian in the historical past.
on another note after seeing shabas putin next to netanyahu holding picture of a commie
terrorist commissar let me say Saker the "ukronazis" have the stalinist russians pegged right
thank God they left Russia some hope for a jew free state
Paul Craig Roberts has repeatedly, for some years now, questioned Putin's apparent
willingness to bend over backwards to placate his "partners" in the West.
The problem isn't bending over backward .it's bending over forward.
Netanyahu is regarded in Washington, and perhaps also Moscow, as almost Churchillian for
his efforts to protect Israel and by extension the region and the US.
"With Sharon's backing, terrible things were done. I am no vegetarian, and I supported
and even participated in some of the assassination operations Israel carried out. But we are
speaking here about mass killing for killing's sake, to sow chaos and alarm, among civilians,
too. Since when do we send donkeys carrying bombs to blow up in marketplaces?"
-- Mossad officer, quoted in Ronen Bergman's Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of
Israel's Targeted Assassinations
[Interestingly, while whining about "Nazi Iran" Netanyahu did say something truly
profound and true. He said "an important history lesson: when a murderous ideology emerges,
one has to push back against it before it is too late". That is indeed exactly what most
people across the world feel about Israel and its Zionist ideology but, alas, their voice
is completely ignored by those who rule over them. So yes, it sure looks to me like it is
becoming "too late" and that the consequences for our collective cowardice -- most of us
are absolutely terrified from speaking the plain truth about our Zionist overlords - will
cost us all a terrible price.]
Add to that the Jews' other genocidal favorites; diversity, multiculturalism, open
borders, and anti-nationalism-fur-de-goyim.
Of course, Saker and his fellow cucked "Russian nationalists" don't add them, which
is part of the reason that I'm indifferent to Russian nationalists anymore.
Then, of course, there is Donald Trump pulling out of the so-called Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JCPOA) in spite of Iran's full compliance and in spite of the fact that the
US does not have the authority to unilaterally withdraw from this multilateral
agreement.
Let's just say I'm not taking flatheads' word on this one.
In the meantime, I want to refocus on the Skripal case.
Only took you like a thousand words to get around to the point; congratulations.
This is made all the worse by China's unwillingness to assert itself internationally as
the 2nd largest economic power. (As if it can't see the US strategy, via tariffs etc to
retard, if not destroy its future economic development)
In reality the US strategy is now to be a bit less than a total globalist-run whorehouse.
Which will probably be changed back with the next new president. China's main concern will be
internal stability and security for the foreseeable future.
One indeed can admire how a few thousand jews wield such power.
I consider the rest of jewry as their victims.
But then, why not admire Hitler, he was on his own.
In both cases, disaster struck.
Jews still do not see that the present situation in the USA resembles the Weimar
Republic.
Henry Ford knew this quite well 'in the end most Jewish enterprises fail through
overconfidence'.
Possibly the first time was when they were, as is asserted, implicated in the murder of the
Roman emperor.
Rome twice sent big armies to Palestine.
If Rome also invented Christianity to undermine them, it remains an interesting theory.
I am inclined to agree with you Putin is smarter and would not/cannot fall for the bait. I
believe history will confirm that he will save the human race from total annihilation that we
possibly face in months/years to come. I was hoping that Trump would also be a force for good
but my view is changing as each day passes. I do not understand the subservient position that
the US takes with Israel. Yes there is an aggressive Zionist faction who control America and
yes nobody dares speak out against them but there must come a time when enough is enough.
Unfortunately if Trump meant it when he said he would drain the swamp he has been prevented
from doing so.
I wouldn't be too hard on Putin. I have a whacked theory that the Jews see the control of the
USA slipping. 9-11 was a huge screw up and more and more people know. They had talked of
moving to India or China but I don't think that will work. Neither will allow the same stunts
they have pulled around Whites. I think the psychopathic Jews are breed to be a parasite on
the White Man and it will never work elsewhere. So they're fucked. What can they do? Well if
you're a psychopath then the best thing to do would be to start a China/Russia vs. USA nuke
war and while this goes on nuke the Europeans, Arabs and maybe a little germ warfare thrown
in for good measure. You sit in the middle and hunker down then start over.
Now this may be completely crazy but psychopaths are crazy by most peoples definition and
the above is perfectly logical. Maybe Putin doesn't think of it in directly these terms like
I laid out but he can't help but notice that these animals are off, a lot. The Jews position
gets worse every single day. They will have no luck at all disarming the Americans and the
internet, despite their censorship, can;t be completely closed down. Their media platform is
failing. No one believes what they say.
We should get rid of the Jews. Peacefully if we can but by any means necessary. Jewish
populations upon moving into another territory are in no way distinguishable from a tribe of
psychopaths over the long term. No one wants to live with psychopaths.
Mr Saker,
I agree with your first part of the article and if I may add, Putin is a corrupt capitalist
much like his brother in the US, Trump! They do love wealth and power so much that they both
are prime targets for corruption by the wealthy Z's. Now that they both have become pawns and
subservient to a third party, the Z's are dancing in street for taking control of the 2
superpowers! The one point that I'd disagree with is about your concerns of the 2 super
powers having to come closer to a potential military conflict! Since a third party has taken
control of the two superpowers the 2 countries are NOT allowed to challenge each other
militarily because there's zero or even less than zero benefits for the real people who are
in charge!
It was a real stab in the back for our allies and that's really hard to see.
I definitely see yours and the Saker's arguments in making this point, however,
personally, it all looks to me like act 1 of a bigger play. Like Trump, Putin seems to make
his concessions up front, but there must, by necessity be a payback concession somewhere down
the road; if their allowed survival itself isn't the original concession already.
The nature of the understanding between Russia and Israel, which has not been covered
anywhere in the news, must ultimately not be so difficult to determine for journalists
investigating it, if such journalists actually existed.
None of them has any interest in covering this, however, because: the west can't deviate
from the onslaught of Russian vilification; Russia, doesn't want to show its vulnerabilities
and Israel doesn't want to show its power.
But I suspect some of this will come to light as the next phase of operations against
Iran.
The mere threat of a military attack from the White House is madness because it arises
from blatant lies that have absolutely nothing to do with US national security. Nor, for
that matter, the security of any other country in the region, including Saudi Arabia and
Israel.
The real purpose of the Donald's missile-rattling is nothing more than helping Bibi
Netanyahu keep his coalition of right wing religious and settler parties (Likud, United
Torah Judaism, Shas, Kulanu and the Jewish Home) together, thereby maintaining his slim
61-vote majority in the 120-seat Knesset.
Netanyahu's malefic political glue is the utterly false claim that Iran is an
"existential threat" to Israel because it is hell-bent on getting the bomb.
But that's where the whopper comes in. It amounts to the ridiculous postulate that Iran
is so fiendishly evil that if it is involved in the nuclear fuel cycle in any way, shape or
form -- presumably even just operating a uranium mine -- it is only a matter of months
before it will have a bomb.
As a matter of record, of course, Netanyahu has been saying this since the early 1990s
and he has always been wrong because there were never any facts or logic to support his
blatant fear-mongering.
But maybe this will blow the top on the economic fiction that's been going on since at
leads Greenspan:
And that gets us to the madness at the other end of the Acela Corridor. On a day in
which there was no good news whatsoever -- except that defense spending will go ever higher
making the impending yield shock even worse -- the stock market rose by another 1%.
There is no mystery as to why, however. Honest price discovery and the discounting of
real world information was totally destroyed by the Fed's monetary central planners years
ago.
The only thing the casino discounts today is the trading points on the hourly, daily and
weekly stock charts, and the presumption that both the fiscal and central banking branches
of the state stand ready to "stimulate" whenever a serious breach occurs on the charts.
Nothing could be more mistaken -- and for reasons we will amplify upon in Part 2.
But the spoiler alert is this: The private sector is now swamped under record and
unsustainable debt in both the household and business sectors. By succumbing to the most
incendiary Deep State meme of all -- the Iranian Nuke lie -- the Donald has now made a
public debt catastrophe an absolute certainty.
It looks like a smackdown following the announcement of the superweapons. My thought on
Putin's gloating show was why not keep these weaponse developments secret. Once the
toothpaste is out of the tube you can't push it back in. One explanation may be that Putin
thought he was in charge up to that point, but may have found out differently. I don't know
if Russia has a Rothschild central bank. But agreed, it certainly looks bad. Plus Israel has
hit Syria again. It all looks very bad.
Don't be ridiculous,. Most of us would trust Iran with nukes even if they wanted them,
which they do not, before the Zionist terrorist state. As the Saker said. "How anybody can
respect, never mind admire, the Israelis is simply beyond comprehension. I sure can't think
of a more contemptible, nasty, psychopathic gang of megalomaniacal thugs (and cowards) than
the Israelis. "
ussia's objectives in Syria are not identical
to their own? Are they not students of history?
I can only imagine the negotiations that went on in Russia among Netanyahu and company and
the Russian government. I'm certain that Russia made assurances that it would not provide
S-300 systems. What did Netanyahu have to pay for that? Perhaps assurances that he would stop
pushing the Americans to bomb Syrian positions? I don't know. You have an imagination. Think
of what Putin wants that Netanyahu could provide.
I congratulate Mr Roberts for his courage.
"We must take it on faith alone."
I also agree with all his references to Israel. I loathe people who demand acts of faith (or
self induced stupidity)
Russia has a national, sovereign, bank , led by a very competent economist, Elvira
Nabiulina.
However, Russia's economy is not a match to its military status. Russia's entire GDP is
lower than South Korea's, and is only slightly over twice the Pentagon's budget.
I think this is one of the reasons why President Putin must tread carefully: Russia's
economy and internal stability are very vulnerable to external economic and financial
pressure.
All of these events are CIA/Mossad/MI6. All of them.
From 9/11 to mass shootings, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, white supremecists and even
Antifa, all funded, trained by the state, with our tax dollars.
Fighting wars: The United States has been fighting wars nonstop since its military invaded
Afghanistan in October 2001. That's almost 17 years of invasions, occupations, air campaigns,
drone strikes, special operations raids, naval air and missile attacks, and so much else,
from the Philippines to Pakistan, Afghanistan to Syria, Libya to Niger isn't fighting
unending wars across thousands of miles of the planet for almost 17 years without end, while
making the president into a global assassin, just a tad extreme?
Of course it is. But despite the title of the article, I can't help but notice that most
of it concentrates on the 16 of those 17 years that happen to have occurred before the Trump
"caliphate". But why should Tom Englehardt be expected to get such trivial details correct?
After all, Tom turned out to be wrong when he ominously warned us about the dangers of Trump
getting us into another Korean war.
Tom's own words from July 9th, 2017 haven't aged well
If hostilities broke out and spiraled out of control, as they might, countless people
could die, nuclear weapons could indeed be used for the first time since 1945, and parts of
Asia could be ravaged (including possibly areas of Japan). What a second Korean War might
mean, in other words, is almost beyond imagining.
the officials he appointed went to work to transform the very refugees we had such a
hand in creating into terrifying bogeymen, potentially the most dangerous and extreme
people on the planet, and then turned to the task of ensuring that none of them would ever
arrive in this country. Doesn't that seem like an extreme set of acts and responses?
No, Tom. It seems like normal behavior from people who aren't ethnomasochists. I'm not
some kind of -phobic with an irrational fear if I want my descendants to not live in a
wartorn country they may eventually end up suffering a total genocide at the hands of these
"widows and orphans" (read: military-aged males who think European lands are up for grabs and
will be theirs in the future).
You see, the normal person who voted for Trump wanted what his surface-level politics
during the campaign trail were about. Not the stuff he's actually been doing which no one
voted for (yes, democracy is a bad system with no accountability,) but the stuff he talked
about. The end to this neoliberal insanity which you support most of. If you really cared so
much about the environment, you wouldn't be for mass migration. If you really cared about
minimizing conflict, you wouldn't be for mass migration since migration is the same as war in
its effects and eventual outcome.
It is not some arbitrary preference that I want a territory maintained for my kind and not
invaded by unending migration of alien peoples whom we are poked, prodded, pressured, coerced
and forced to miscegenate ourselves out of existence with by social engineers bent on a
European genocide, which they are beginning to get louder and louder with their intent on
with each passing year and the constant gloating that they think "in the future, there won't
BE any white people! and that's a good thing!"
The reason we care more about these terrorist attacks on our soil is that we expect them
to do as they do in their own countries, but the glaring fact is the people doing this in our
countries aren't us, and never will be us. They are interlopers we didn't invite in; they
were invited in from the top down with no consent.
Speaking of which, people own weapons in the US because they can and because they don't
trust their government. Given what that government has done for the last 50+ years, why
should they? People in other countries would do the same were they not such totalitarian
nightmare states crushing down on their native population, like in Britain. Speaking of
bogeymen by the way, you want to pin this all on Trump when the material conditions for much
of what you wring your hands about existed well before he even announced his run. Criticize
the fact that he isn't doing what he was elected to do. Don't try to concoct some lame duck
grand narrative that he caused all of these problems, because he didn't.
The reason America is becoming "extreme" is because it's no longer a real, solvent
country. No longer a nation–a coherent people with real, concrete commonalities. It is
many people vying for power and handouts and patronage, many of whom share nothing in common
at all. I share no peoplehood with Africans, Arabs, Mestizos and a host of others who've been
flooded in over the last several decades and have transformed the country into something it
manifestly as per the census data was not just decades back.
I share no peoplehood with Africans, Arabs, Mestizos and a host of others who've been
flooded in over the last several decades and have transformed the country into something it
manifestly as per the census data was not just decades back.
I'm willing to bet you share a lot more personhood with those people you listed than the
people who "own" your country. BTW, the people who "own" your country most likely hate your
guts, and consider you expendable if you ever get in their way.
" This subject came to my mind recently thanks to a story I noticed about another extreme
wedding slaughter "
Better late than never.
How long it is ago that a Malaysian president spoke to mainly western diplomats, and asked
the question 'who are the terrorists, those who, at 17 km height push buttons in
B-52′s, or those who give their lives on the ground ?', I do not remember.
The diplomats left during the speech.
UN expert on human rights De Zaya's wanted, suppose he does not live any more, Great
Britain and the USA persecuted for bombing German cities in WWII, just killing women,
children and old men.
Dresden is the best known example, alas it is not known that even small towns as Anklam were
bombed.
And then, when began all this ?
Churchill saw the genocide in what is N Afghanistan as a necessary act.
And of course the Muslim religion was to blame.
Winston Churchill, 'The Story of the Malakand Field Force', 1898, 2004, New York
Ian Hernon, 'Britain's Forgotten Wars, Colonial Campaigns of the 19th Century', 2003, 2007,
Chalford – Stroud
The last book also describes this genocide, but one of the most bloody massacres described is
against the Sikh army.
I'd like to thank Unz for this brief comic relief on their site. Sometimes the affairs in the
world seem too much and a good laugh every now and then is necessary. For example Bashir
Al-Assad killing his own people on a regular basis was hysterical!! Imagine him getting Sarin
gas from ISIS depots paid for by Israel and the United States just so he could get the same
United States to bomb him! That's like saying Obama was a weak president for NOT attacking
Syria when he was merely informed as to who was REALLY not killing Syrian civilians because,
as Putin proved, Assad didn't have those weapons. What was really funny was that America does
not have extremists in charge so when we kill civilians it must be an accident!
"Its national security budget is larger than those of the next eight countries combined "
My favourite statistic is to compare the increase in the formal US "defence" budget ($80
billion) for this year with the total Russian defence budget ($46 billion).
I couldn't agree more, Your comment sums up how a lot of people are feeling. No wonder
Nationalist or Nationalist inspired parties and leaders are emerging all over the European
world, We are waking up and beginning to take our own side
I just cannot believe that you Americans descend to squabbling about who is more virtuous
– Nero or Caligula.
Mr Putin showed that he understands the system perfectly. First he said that he sees no
point in talking to European leaders, since they all take their orders from Washington. Then
he further explained that presidents come and presidents go, but the policies remain exactly
the same.
It's a shame that so few Americans understand their own political system as well as Mr
Putin does.
"However, one thing is, almost by definition, obvious. We are not a nation of extreme acts or
extreme killers. Quite the opposite".
The USA is admirably positioned for security: it controls most of a large isolated
continent, with only Canada and Mexico as immediate neighbours and vast oceans to the sides.
As Jules Jusserand, French Ambassador to the US, remarked in 1910:
"The United States was blessed among nations. On the north, she had a weak neighbour; on
the south, another weak neighbour; on the east, fish; and on the west, fish".
Long before that, Abraham Lincoln said more or less the same thing:
"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify
against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush
us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the
treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a
commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge,
in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be
expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from
abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation
of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide".
- Abraham Lincoln; The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume
I, "Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum,of Springfield, Illinois (January 27, 1838), p.
109.
So it is surprising to find out that the USA has been at war for 93% of its existence.
That means Americans have experienced peace during only 21 years out of 239.
That's rather odd, isn't it, for a country with impregnable natural borders whom no one
has even tried to attack?
"Yes, we make mistakes. Yes, we sometimes kill. Yes, we sometimes even kill the innocent,
however mistakenly".
A very rough estimate suggests that, since 1950, the US government through its armed
forces has killed at the very least 10 million Asians alone. Three million in Korea, the same
in Vietnam and its neighbours, and the same in Iraq. That's without even considering the
dozens of other nations the USA has attacked (and with which, legally, it is still at war
since no peace treaties were ever concluded).
I recently discovered UNZ.COM and was delighted to have found a site with good intelligently
written articles, then I read this utter crap and now I'm wondering
We here in the United States are, of course, eternally shocked by their extremism, their
willingness to kill the innocent without compunction, particularly in the case of Islamist
groups, from the 9/11 attacks to ISIS's more recent slaughters.
Tom appears to be another lackey for Zionism, ready to keep telling lies about those evil
Moozies that supposedly attacked the USA on 9/11, when anyone who still has brain cells left
knows that 9/11 was an Israeli masterminded False Flag with help from traitors in the WH,
the Pentagon, CIA, FBI and NSA. With generous assistance from the Lying MSM.
Take your CIA pres releases elsewhere Mr. Tom, we no longer wish to hear your lies in
support of endless wars for the glory of Apartheid Israel realizing its YINON plan to stretch
Israel from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates and from Turkey to Arabia.
Oded Yinon's "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties"
The nonsense that Assad's army deliberately poisons its own people with chemical weapons
is a well-known false-flag. How could he control his Syrian army if that went on? It is
absolutely ridiculous.
As for 9/11, it was an inside job – with many Israeli "students" laying the
explosives in the THREE buildings at night over a period of months. The fact that no one
lived in them and that a Bush company was responsible for security is all you need to know.
Naturally, there were no Israeli victims – a statistical impossibility if they were not
forewarned.
The most thoroughly amoral, vicious ruling group in the region is the House of Saud. And the
US and the Israelis are both deep into bed with the Saudis.
"Only to those who do not know that many people live in deserts"
People do not "live in deserts" rather they live in settlements which are located in the
desert.
They do not just go out into the blazing sand and throw down blankets and buckets, and
then start "Living in the desert".
And they do not hold bonafide "wedding parties" out in the desert, under the relentless
burning sun, rather they hold their wedding parties in settlements which are located in thte
desert with a modicum of human comforts.
Look friend myself being world traveler, I have been to north africa on more than one
occasion, and I know wtf I am talking about.
AJM "Mensa" qualified since 1973, airborne trained US army vet, and pro jazz artisit.
Where are the Scripals? How are they feeling these days? (68 days and counting), Are they alive ?
Notable quotes:
"... To clarify: Sergei Skripal has been suspected of playing a role in concocting the fake "Steele dossier" that helped launch the Russiagate NARRATIVE. ..."
"... The "dossier" was also used by Comey's FBI to obtain FISA warrants to monitor Trump campaign communications. (The NSA had intercepts all along but Comey's FBI needed a "provenance.") ..."
"... Like the Hound of the Baskervilles, the absence of questions in the British media speaks volumes. "The truth is the first casualty in a war." ..."
In the meantime, I want to refocus on the Skripal case. There is one outright bizarre thing
which I initially dismissed, but which really is becoming disturbing: the fact that the Brits
are apparently holding Sergei and Iulia Skripal incommunicado. In other words, they have been
kidnapped.
There was this one single telephone call between Iulia Skripal and her sister, Victoria, in
which Iulia said that she was okay (she was clearly trying to reassure Victoria) but it was
clear that she could not speak freely. Furthermore, when Victoria mentioned that she would want
to visit Iulia, the latter reply 'nobody will give you a visa'. After that – full
silence. The Russian consulate has been making countless requests to
have a visit, but all that the Brits have done since is have Scotland
Yard post a letter which was evidently not written by Iulia and which said " I have
access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian
Embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can. At the moment I do not
wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them
". What friends?! What family?! Nonsense!
Her sister tried to contact her many times through various channels, including official
ones, and then in total despair, she posted the following message on Facebook:
" My darling sister, Yulia! You are not communicating with us, and we don't know
anything about you and Sergey Victorivich. I know that I have no right to interfere in your
affairs without asking your permission, but I worry too much. I worry about you and your dad.
I also worry about Nuar. [Nuar is Yulia Skrial's dog, whom she left to stay at a kennel
center, while she was traveling to the UK.] He is now at the dog hotel, and they want to get
paid. We have to decide something what to do with him. I am ready to take him and to take
care of him until you come back home. Besides Nuar, I am concerned about your apartment and
your car. Nothing has been decided about their safety and maintenance. We can help with all
that, but I need your power of attorney in my or my sister Lena's name. If you think that all
of these is important, draw up a power of attorney form in a Russian consulate in any
country. If you won't do that, we will understand and won't interfere in your
affairs.
Vika "
No reply ever came.
I just entered the following query into Google: "
Skripal ". April 10 th has an entry saying that she was released from the
hospital. That is the most recent one I have found. I looked on Wikipedia , the
same thing, there is nothing at all.
I have to admit that when I first heard the Russian complaints I figured that this was no
big deal. I thought " the Brits told the Skripals that Putin tried to poison them, they are
probably afraid, and possibly still sick from whatever it is which made them sick, but the
Brits would never outright kidnap two foreign citizens, and most definitely not in such a
public way ".
I am not so sure anymore.
First, let's get the obvious one out of the way: the fear for the security of the Skripals.
That is utter nonsense. The Brits can organize a meeting between а Russian diplomat in
the UK at a highly protected UK facility, with tanks, SAS Teams on the standby, helicopters in
the air, bombers, etc. That Russian diplomat could speak to them through bullet-proof glass and
a phone. And, since the Russians are all so dangerous, he can be searched for weapons. All
which the Skripals need to do is to tell him/her "thank you, your services are not needed".
Conversation over. But the Brits refuse even that.
But let's say that the Skripals are so totally terrified of the evil Russians, that they
categorically refuse. Even by video-conference. It would be traumatic for them, right?
Okay.
What about a press conference then?
Even more disturbing is that, at least to my knowledge, nobody in the western corporate
media is asking for an interview with them. Snowden can safely speak from Russia and address
even large conferences, but the Skripals can't speak to anybody at all?
But here is the worst part of this: it has been two months already since the Skripals are
held in total secrecy by the UK authorities. Two months, that is 60 days. Ask any specialist on
interrogation or any psychologist what kind of effect 60 days of "specialized treatment" can do
to a person.
I am not dismissing the Russian statements about "kidnapping" anymore. What I see is this:
on substance, the Skripal false flag has crashed and burned, just like MH17 or the Douma
chemical attack, but unlike MH17 or Douma, the Skripals are two witnesses whose testimony has
the potential to result in a gigantic scandal, not just for the May government, but for all
those spineless Europeans who showed "solidarity" with Britain. In other words, the Skripals
will probably never be allowed to speak freely: they must either be killed or totally
brainwashed or disappeared. Any other option would result in a scandal of planetary
magnitude.
I can't pretend like my heart goes out to Sergei Skripal: the man was an officer who gave an
oath and who then betrayed his country to the British (he was a British agent, not a Russian
one as the press writes). Those holding him today are his former bosses. But Iulia? She is
completely innocent and as of April 5 th (when she called her sister Victoria), she
was clearly in good health and with a clear mind. Now she has been disappeared and I don't know
which is worse, the fact that she might never reappear or that she might one day reappear
following months of British "counseling". As for her father, he paid for his betrayal and he
too deserves a better fate than being poisoned, used and then disappeared.
In the big scheme of things (the Zionists war against our entire planet), two individuals
like Sergei and Iulia Skripal might not matter. But I think that the least we can do is to
remember them and their plight.
This also begs the question of what kind of society we live in. I am not shocked by the fact
that the British state would resort to such methods (they have always used them). I am shocked
that in a so-called western "democracy" with freedom, pluralism and "European values" (whatever
that means) the Brits could get away with this.
How about some "solidarity" with the Skripals – you, Europeans?!
As noted on this site some three weeks ago, former British ambassador Craig Murray suggested
some time ago that Sergei and Yulia Skripal were most likely murdered by Western secret
services in order to keep the "Russiagate" fiction (somewhat) alive.
Sergei cannot win – even if he was NOT involved in Russiagate, murdering him creates
flexibility to hang the story on him without contradiction. Yulia is icing on the cake
– "Surely Her Majesty's Government wouldn't murder a pretty girl like Yulia!"
Rather bizarrely, it appears appears that all premises connected with the Skripals are to
be demolished, purely to protect the public, you understand.
To clarify: Sergei Skripal has been suspected of playing a role in concocting the fake
"Steele dossier" that helped launch the Russiagate NARRATIVE.
The "dossier" was also used by Comey's FBI to obtain FISA warrants to monitor Trump
campaign communications. (The NSA had intercepts all along but Comey's FBI needed a
"provenance.")
Whether Skripal was actually involved in inventing the dossier or not, his absence will be
used to milk the narrative afloat a little longer.
Like the Hound of the Baskervilles, the absence of questions in the British media speaks
volumes. "The truth is the first casualty in a war."
Russia should request a third party for instance a well known British public figure as an
intermediary to contact Skripals on behalf of Russia. The UK wil not be able to claim that
such figure will put undue pressure on the Skripals and would be forced to either facilitate
contact or be exposed as actually kidnapping the Skripals.
Potential intermediaries Corbyn, Galloway, UN representative, Tulsi Gabbard. There are
numerous candidates.
In other words, the Skripals will probably never be allowed to speak freely: they must
either be killed or totally brainwashed or disappeared. Any other option would result in a
scandal of planetary magnitude.
That certainly explains why Britain did not kill them with Novichok.
The British are working hard on new super-secret identities for the Scripals. They are so
secret that even the Scripals would not be allowed to know them. Technically, the British
could tell the Scripals their new identities, but then they would have to kill them, in order
to keep them secret.
It is clear that every person including The Saker who write about the Skripals and Russian
affairs do not have the in-depth knowledge of John Helmer the longest serving independent
western journalist in Moscow. In this post by John Helmer dated 23/03/2018
he writes about the British Court of Protection's findings.
Below are two excerpts (in parenthesis his comments) but I implore you to read the whole
article as well as other postings on the potential appointments in Putins new government.
"British High Court Justice David Williams has issued the first court adjudication of
evidence presented by the British Government of what happened to Sergei Skripal and Yulia
Skripal when they succumbed to poisoning in Salisbury on March 4. Following three days of
closed-door hearings this week in London, the judge issued a ruling for publication
yesterday."
"Representing the Skripals, Vikram Sachdeva QC told the judge "that in this case at present
it did not appear practicable or appropriate to seek the views of others who might be
interested in the welfare of Mr Skripal (his mother perhaps) or Ms Skripal (perhaps a
fiancé).
" the Skripals are two witnesses whose testimony has the potential to result in a gigantic
scandal, not just for the May government, but for all those spineless Europeans who showed
"solidarity" with Britain . "
Based on recent history, one can safely bet that there will be no scandal.
The bombing of the Lockerbie plane was an evil crime that took 270 innocent lives, and was
attributed by the official UK/US intelligence centres to the former Libyan government under
late President Gaddafi.
When this government came under NATO attack in 2011, its foreign minister Moussa Koussa
defected and sought refuge in London. He had previously been head of Libyan secret services
for 15 years (!!!), and as such, would have organised and supervised the Lockerbie "terror"
attack.
What did the UK/US governments do with him? Send him to trial at the Hague? Of course not.
He was sent to a safe heaven somewhere in the NATO proxy EAU.
Nobody cares about the victims of false flag attacks, quite the contrary: the less
investigations, the more efficient the false flag.
The most heinous thing a human can do
is eat another human. Fear of cannibalism along with the other two great taboos, incest and inter-family
violence, are the bedrocks of human culture. Without these taboos there is no human civilization, yet
zombie cannibals are everywhere, from the most popular TV shows in the US and Europe to the most played
PC games. Everywhere we look there is a zombie dragging his feet looking for human prey. The ubiquitous
nature of this meme of semi-human creatures that survive only by breaking the most fundamental of human
taboos is a clear indicator of a collective cultural pathology.
Humans must not only kill and eat
plants and animals to survive, we must make sure they keep coming back so they can be killed and eaten
again and again. Life needs death; we must kill to live, and eventually we all wind up as someone else's
food. This paradox lies at the core of the world's religions and mythologies and the fear/repulsion of
eating other humans is the keystone of our culture, without it we turn on ourselves and self-annihilation
ensues. The zombie meme is a modern myth pointing to a deep fear of self-destruction.
The great psychologist and mystic Carl
Jung was asked if a myth could be equated to a collective dream and he answered this way, "A myth is the
product of an unconscious process in a particular social group, at a particular time, at a particular
place. This unconscious process can naturally be equated with a dream. Hence anyone who 'mythologizes,'
that is, tells myths, is speaking out of this dream."
If a person had a recurring nightmare
that she was eating her family it would be a clear symptom of a profound psychological disturbance.
Cultures don't dream, but they do tell stories and those stories can tell us much about the state of the
collective psyche.
Many of the themes in our popular
culture are conscious story telling devices with the definite purpose of social engineering/control, but
others seem to just emerge from the collective unconscious like the stuff of dreams. The zombie meme is
clearly of the latter variety. It's pointing to a fear that something has broken in our culture and what
awaits us is a collective psychotic break of apocalyptic proportions.
Exposure to the general public helps in understanding this I think. Go to a mall, watch Mark Dice
videos online. People are astonishingly stupid. Staggeringly stupid.
I'm so stupid I never even heard of Mark Dice and despite the idea that I have an extremely high CI
(Curiosity Index) I am not even tempted to have such a desire. Anyway, I'm constantly amazed at how stupid
we humans can be, yet remarkably, we stumble along. It baffles the bl
**
p outta me.
And that would just be "too terrible to contemplate" wouldn't it?
"... In early 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration was putting intense pressure on [José] Bustani to quit as director-general of the [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]. ..."
"... Bolton continued, according to Bustani's recollections: "You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don't comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you." ..."
"... John Bolton was also behind a campaign against the IAEA and its chief Mohamed ElBaradei. ElBaradei's phone was tapped and rumors were launched against him to oust him from his office. ..."
In early 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration was putting
intense pressure on [José] Bustani to quit as director-general of the [Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons].
...
Bolton -- then serving as under secretary of state for Arms Control and International
Security Affairs -- arrived in person at the OPCW headquarters in the Hague to issue a
warning to the organization's chief. And, according to Bustani, Bolton didn't mince words.
"Cheney wants you out," Bustani recalled Bolton saying, referring to the then-vice president
of the United States. "We can't accept your management style."
Bolton continued, according to Bustani's recollections: "You have 24 hours to leave
the organization, and if you don't comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to
retaliate against you."
There was a pause.
"We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York."
José Bustani successfully negotiated to get OPCW inspectors back into Iraq. They
would have found nothing. That would have contradicted the U.S. propaganda campaign to wage war
on Iraq. When Bustani did not leave voluntarily, the U.S. threatened to cut the OPCW's budget
and "convinced" other countries in the executive council to kick
him out .
John Bolton was also behind a campaign against the IAEA and its chief Mohamed ElBaradei.
ElBaradei's phone was tapped and rumors were launched against him to oust him from his
office.
The U.S. administration, the neoconservatives and the media are running
a remake (recommended) of the propaganda campaign they had launched to wage war on Iraq.
This time the target is Iran:
As with Iraq, it's easier for Bolton and Netanyahu to achieve that goal if they discredit the
current system of international inspections. Bolton has called the inspection efforts
established by the Iran nuclear deal "fatally inadequate" and declared that "the
International Atomic Energy Agency" is "likely missing significant Iranian [nuclear]
facilities." In his 2015 speech to Congress attacking the Iran deal, Netanyahu insisted that
"Iran not only defies inspectors, it also plays a pretty good game of hide-and-cheat with
them."
Anyone who counters their propaganda must go. Bolton, who demands to
bomb Iran , is back in charge. One of his natural targets is the IAEA which certifies that
Iran sticks to the nuclear deal. It seems that Bolton
succeeds with his machinations:
The chief of inspections at the U.N. nuclear watchdog has resigned suddenly, the agency said
on Friday without giving a reason.
The departure of Tero Varjoranta comes at a sensitive time, three days after the United
States announced it was quitting world powers' nuclear accord with Iran, raising questions as
to whether Tehran will continue to comply with it.
Varjoranta, a Finn, had been a deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy
Agency and head of its Department of Safeguards, which verifies countries' compliance with
the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, since October 2013.
Another
casualty is the State Department bureaucrat who certified Iran's compliance with the
nuclear deal:
One of the State Department's top experts on nuclear proliferation resigned this week after
President Donald Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, in what
officials and analysts say is part of a worrying brain drain from public service generally
over the past 18 months.
Richard Johnson, a career civil servant who served as acting assistant coordinator in
State's Office of Iran Nuclear Implementation, had been involved in talks with countries that
sought to salvage the deal in recent weeks, including Britain, France, and Germany -- an
effort that ultimately failed.
...
The office Johnson led has gone from seven full-time staffers to none since Trump's
inauguration.
The man who launched the war on Iraq now gets
awards . Netanyahoo is
agitating for war on Iran just like he agitated
for war on Iraq. Shady groups of
nutty "experts"peddle
policy papers for 'regime change'. U.S. "allies" are put under pressure. With their
willingness to "compromise" they actually further the prospect of
war . When they
insist on sticking to international rules malign
actors prepare
measures to break their resistance. All that is still just a "shaping operation", a
preparation of the battlefield of public opinion. This buildup towards the war will likely take
a year or two.
What is still needed is an event that pushes the U.S. public into war fever. The U.S.
typically uses false-flag incidents - the Tonkin incident, the sinking of the Maine, the
Anthrax murders - to create a psychological pseudo-rationale for war. An Israel lobbyist
begs for
one to launch war on Iran.
One wonders when and how a new 9/11 like incident, or another Anthrax scare, will take
place. It will be the surest sign that the countdown to war on Iran has started.
Posted by b on May 12, 2018 at 06:35 AM | Permalink
John Bolton's a man? Does a coward who instigated others to fight get to be called a man?
Likewise Cheney Bush Clinton Obama Trump Bibi etc etc etc.
Easy to be ruthless when others take the risks and pay the costs.
isn't the same unity throughout the powers that be, particularly in the mainstream media,
that there was when Bush was President. Trump through the hatred he generates theoughout the
'upper crust', makes it hard for many deep staters to get on board a war drive he would lead.
And as you said, b, Trump needs a real or false flag, one with many casualties, and
something that won't fall apart from lack of evidence and a few days of rational scrutiny.
Sounds like a job for the Saudi mercenaries, Al Qaeda or ISIS.
People in high places are leaving due to team Trump threats.
Receiving mail from team trump employed black cube is no small thing. Kudos to you b for
sticking with it.
Two thoughts on US going to war with Iran. 10 It will destroy the US or certainly the US
empire and hegemony. 2) Iran needs plenty of help and respect during and after as they will
destroy the US. Not physically, but they will destroy US power.
The question we all want to know is, did Trump appoint lunatic Bolton entirely of his own
volition, or was he forced to appoint this psychopath? The reach of the US deep state seems
to be limitless. A curious thing happened the other day when someone in the US administration
announced that America would no longer be funding the white helmets propaganda outfit. Over
here in the UK parliament an opposition member of parliament was practically foaming at the
mouth with rage and demanded of prime minister Mrs May that the UK would be continuing to
fund the white helmets. When she assured him that the UK was fully behind the white helmets
and that funding would remain in place, there was a cheer from around the house. I'm amazed
that Bolton allowed the administration to cut off funding when even the UK idiots in
parliament want to fund the propaganda arm of the head choppers.
I am just curious to know how much influence John Bolton can exercise as National Security
Advisor: is his position part of the President's Executive Office and does he (Bolton, that
is) have a department to answer to him and a budget? Is his position any more secure than,
say, Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State?
The more that Trump is pushed into a corner by investigations of various scandals, the more
he needs something to distract from them. A war in a far-off country would be the perfect
thing to get people rallying around the President.
Jen @9:
From what I understand, Pompeo is much higher on the food chain. The SoS is in the line of
succession; advisors are not. I believe the position is just a single individual with closer
access to the POTUS.
I said it many times before, and I can safely repeat it again, there wont be a hot war with
Iran. Entire NATO couldnt defeat Iran, and US would go alone (maybe Israel would piggyback
few shots). It would end as catastrophe for US and de-facto end as the main superpower.
Pentagon (and even CIA) are many things, but suicidally stupid isnt one of them, neither is
Trump, or even Nutjobyahoo.
What we will see is more sanctions (to try to create civil unrest) and another "color
revolution" endeavor, and it will fail too.
Trump coopted by the neo-cons? Exactly what lever would they have on Trumpty Dumbdy that
isn't already public knowledge? Misogyny, Philandering?... already tried that pussy-grabbing
Stormy front. Financial improprieties? That Trump Inc. was/is a serial bankrupt corporation,
even screwing low-income students and any building contractor it could?... Old news. That
Trumpty Dumbdy is too stupid to read the full documentation presented to him, that he can't
write/deliver a coherent, logical line of thought?... obvious from well before the day he
officially declared his candidacy.
Trump (and his real estate "empire") was and is a product of the Rothschild cabal, and he
was deliberately foisted on the US electorate to be the only one in the country Killary could
beat... OOPS!
So we are now seeing Plan-B, where Trumpty is manipulated and browbeaten to shed the few
shreds of intelligence and decency he still possessed. All the Deep State/Rothschild-enablers
have to do is appeal to Trumpty's fragile ego, or Melania's emotional jags, and they are in
control.
But even Bolton's ilk must know Russia and China will not stand by while FUKUS/Nutty/MBS
openly attack Iran. Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya show the likely course of events where the
Zionists are allowed to carry on with the Yinon Plan. Syria is the line in the sand, despite
Erdogan trying to play the US off Russia for historical gotcha gains. Don't forget, Erdogan
owes his life to Putin, who ensured the US coup failed by targeting the rogue Turk jets
tasked with shooting Erdogan's plane down... I'd bet the Turk pilots were told that if they
even turned on their targeting systems, they would be shot down... self preservation is a
strong deterrent.
Israel/Saudi on their own cannot withstand even Syria, Hizbolla and Iran directly, even if
the russian military only backstopped the Syrian alliance. Ahe US public won't tolerate
another Iraq debacle, as zero body bags landing at Edwards AFB is the limit. Let alone that
Iran would be Iraq on steroids especially for the several 1,000 in the western Syria caldron.
It's a big caldron right now, but with Russian-manned mobile S-400's/etc. protecting all
Syrian, Iranian and possibly Iraqi airspace, those soldiers/mercenaries are sitting ducks
after the first bomb lands in Iran.
Apologies if following musings are a bit disjointed.
American chronic hostility towards Iran, and long standing American economic and
informational and low-level war gainst Iran, has an insane, out-of-touch with reality,
ideological/mythological tinge/component to it. I won't try a broad psycho-analysis, or
assemble many possible reasons why that might be.
But among those possible components there is a long standing implacable totalitarian bent
to US power wielders, reflected in their ordained geo-political communications in the United
States. The American economic sanctions and continuously variously hostile policy towards
Cuba over more than half a century is an example. The former 'brothel dof the Caribbean' was
apparently fine for the US, and the death squad ridden countries of Central America are quite
acceptable, but Cuba out of the capitalist orbit? Cuba as attempting a different ideology,
and approach: terrible recalcitrant. The very demon of the hemisphere.
In his revelatory book The Praetorian Guard, former CIA John Stockwell noted that as he
was growing up, basically nobody questioned the prevailing American ideology and system. Real
searching basic debate was absent. Within the context of a culture where freedom of speech is
technically prioritized, lauded as an ideal, somehow self-censorship and discussion is
limited to within-the-box of convention, thus discussion as scripted theatre, propaganda,
dominated overwhelmingly.
No real debate, but what was repeated ad infinitum were messianic messages'we swear
allegiance to the flag', we're number one, we're the free world, we're the good guys.
After the JFK coup d'etat, basically everything in American media became an exercise in
controlling all political discourse and trying like crazy to make sure pretense prevailed.
This was if anything accentuated after the 9/11 false flag treasonous mind-f**k.
There was also a deadly military doctrine adopted by the US after WW2, when segments of US
power decided to go for global military domination, basically permanent war and war
preparation. The cliche is that the first casualty of war is truth, but in the case of the
United States, doubly so, as that train had already left the station.
The United States is a kind of astonishingly cautionary historical example of the deranged
trajectory that dishonesty, pretense and censorship as normalized and dominant will ensure.
So many natural advantages, but the external manifestation of the US became mass murder and
subterfuge; internal problems of the US are festering, metastisizing, and tens of millions of
Americans are deeply demoralized, anxiety ridden, emotion-related
drug-medication-dependent.
Back to Iran. A few years ago while driving in the evening I turned on the car radio and
the first words I heard from a (Jewish) talk show host on a Toronto station was the question:
Do you think the Americans have the balls to nuke Iran? Really bizzarre sick question that
apparently could be sent out glibly and sefely into the Canadian political discussion
universe as an intellectual feat. And on numerous occasions for many years it has been
commonplace in Canadian mass media to depict Iran in a hostile, negative light. And as German
writer Udo Ulfkotte bravely told us before his untimely death, the CIA also influences and
controls and thus contaminates much of European mass media communication.
So the American insanity and dishonesty and war mongering is playing itself out on a broad
stage, (witness the truly crazy pathetic British government's behaviour of late) and crazy
people do crazy things, so yah, Iran is still in the crosshairs. But there is a kind of
desperate, fading, dated quality to the American obsession with 'evil Iran', and lies and
make-believe and insanity cannot escape colliding with reality. The collision can make a
helluva a mess, but at some point hopefully the pendulum swings towards a reassertion of
sanity and decency and honesty.
How many times will Americans shoot themselves in the foot for Israel and fairy tales?
"But even Bolton's ilk must know Russia and China will not stand by while FUKUS/Nutty/MBS
openly attack Iran"
It appears Putin and Russia have decided to sit all this out. While Putin was enjoying the
Victory Parade with Netanyahu,,, Netanyahu was bombing his ally Syria. Putin was all smiles
and so far all we hear is crickets.
Putin will sell his S-400 systems to anyone that wants them EXCEPT Syria and all they want
is the S-300.
I don't know what's going on but as far as Russia is concerned I wouldn't bank on their
helping Iran.
China? China can be purchased like cloths on a rack.
No,,, I think it's pretty open right now for the US to attack Iran. Whether it can survive
a war with Iran is doubtful,,, but that's never stopped them before.
Yes "take out" as I defined not through occupation/invasion but fighter jet strikes and/or
from sea. That wont take more than 1 day for 3 top Nato nations.
I wonder what is going through the minds of Kim and the South Korean leadership. It is
obvious that the US is not agreement capable. What sort of guarantees can the US provide.
Even if China and Russia provide guarantees it may not be enough. Kim sees that if a deal is
made, then the crippling sanctions could be reimposed or remain. Kim and his sister are not
stupid.
Neocons and Bolton are Trotskyites. Permanent Revolutionists
The ruling elite never really knew how dumb people were until the internet and social
media. With the help of Trumps supporter and Facebook investor Thiel and his company Palintir
and Facebook to help them figure out all the data they collected, they know they can make the
cattle believe anything without making it believable to anyone with an IQ under 120
The few that figure it out without being members of the cult are isolated and
inconsequential.
Plato told us what he hoped would happen. Leo Straus who is the godfather of the neocons
emphasized Platos Noble Lie which is behind all of todays fake news/history . Plato was
heavily influenced by Irans Zoroastrianism
I believe elements behind the reformation in the 16th century and Sabbateans from the 17th
century, Frankists , Freemasons and Jesuits from the 18 th century and Zionists , and
Martinists and Marxists from the 19th century joined forces to create a NWO that is a
Luciferian cult of Global Synachrists
The neocons are the latest manifestation of the Synarchists, and unfortunately for the
world this means global terror much like the Rothschild back Trotsky hoped to accomplish
in
the 20th century before being thwarted by Stalin. It also means the end of Religion as
Neocons corrupt Protestant Christianity, in US and Across the Atlantic while CIA controlled
Jesuit Pope Francis destroys Catholicism. Zionism and the Holocaust wiped out Torah believers
and the GWOT and neocons are proceeding to destroy Islam after corrupting it with Islamism
with help from the Saudi Arabias corrupt Wahhabism which has spread Islamic extremism along
with US and Israel
For those who believe the US can be destroyed, you are in denial. There is no stopping the
US/Israel//British/EU alliance. The only hope is that once the perpetual revolution is over
that the philosopher kings described by Plato will be merciful. Unfortunately, given many of
them are neo-malthusians who think most of humanity are worthless consumers of Gaias precious
resources, i am not optimistic
However you would define war US (Israel) and Iran is at war footing for decades, nothing new
here, so I would not panic here that Bolton would do something.
It cannot be more clear that as much as Trump is a flaccid clown of ignorance and
belligerence to cover up his tax evasion crimes from Muller, Bolton plays role of barking
poodle that all, did not get anything done what global oligarchic interests tell him or he
will be put down.
And Please do not compare Iran to Iraq especially after two Iraqi wars, Iran is in
position to cause major damage to global oligarchic interests and hence there will be no
escalation despite fire and fury rhetoric as it was in NK case, it is all about reintegration
of Iranian oligarchy to global oligarchic country club and what we witness is negotiating of
condition of selling out Iranians to neoliberal globalists and by that advance a step in
isolating Russia to achieve the same purpose, surrender to globalism.
Also I do not see Netanyahu welcoming hundreds of Iranian missiles landing in Tel Aviv as
Saddam only shot few Soviet museum item at Israel and back then all hit their however random
targets. There would be no random targets this time so there would be death and vital damage,
not to mention that Israel could loose Golan Height in the process. Also there is no way in
hell for US to invade Iran, or gather 600k troops as it was in 1991 for one quarter Iran size
Iraq.
I know that spreading fear brings clicks but here on this blog we know better than
that.
Don't underestimate Trump. He came to office on an audacious promise to drain The Swamp. It's
a very specialized task. It was never going to be easy and I'm quite certain that he went in
knowing that his first misjudgment would probably be his last. I don't know how to drain The
Swamp but if Trump thinks he can then I do too. I've been pleasantly surprised at his ability
to engage with senior officials on the World Stage and appear Presidential. Compared with
bumbling fools like Ronny Raygun, Jimmy Carter and Dubya, Trump leaves them for dead in the
"100% on the ball" stakes. Whilst I'm waiting, with fingers crossed, I console myself with
the following thoughts:
1. Hillary would have been worse.
2. The non-people he wants to neutralise are the worst bunch of scum and arseholes on the
planet.
3. Since he's the only person with a Swamp plan, we shouldn't be too picky about his timing
and tactics.
4. Trump is an extremely clever individual.
thanks b... and thanks for the Atlantic article from peter beinart... i thought it was a good
article.. here's a quote from it "More than 60 percent of Republicans, according to a March
Pew Research Poll, think the United States was right to invade Iraq. George W. Bush's
approval rating among Republicans, according to a January CNN poll, is 76 percent." and "It's
rare to see non-Americans on political talk shows. That matters because non-Americans
overwhelmingly think pulling out of the Iran deal is nuts. And non-Americans are more likely
to raise fundamental questions about American nuclear policy -- like why America isn't
pushing for inspections of Israel's nuclear program, and why America keeps demanding that
other nations denuclearize while building ever more nuclear weapons of its own."
then you can read @20 Robert Snefjella post - thanks robert - and note the radio interview
from toronto..
sorry to say, but this 'neo-con' term is a quick term to describe so much of what looks
like the koolaid american citizens drink regularly.. and there is plenty of it to go around
in canada too..
americans by and large look like a nation of idiots, spoon fed everything they know..
i tend to agree with harrys view @13... colour revolution will continue.. but unlike
harry, i do believe the bombs will fall and we will enter some type of ww3 scenario.. the
usa-israel are too much led by the neo con koolaid to step away from any of their ongoing
insanity.. i just can't see the insanity stopping with rational, reasonable people having a
say.. so, maybe i don't fully agree with harry other then in the short term..
I agree with your assessment that Trump is a very clever individual - when it comes to
manipulating the media and distracting from his words and actions, but I disagree with every
other assertion you have made and find that he has filled his administration with grifters
and con artists that rival the days of Grant or Harding.
And if you have grown up in America under DACA and are about to be deported or are losing
your health insurance coverage because key provisions of ACA have been overturned, just try
reciting "Hillary would have been worse!"
Utter nonsense. The US and Israel are coward bullies. They will pounce when the odds are
good, but they are quite rational about when they are not. There have been endless threats
and sabre rattling by the US and Israel against Iran for decades, but they never followed
through. They will most certainly not do so now, when the relative military position of Iran
is better than ever. And this "crying wolf" article will join the the countless others
written before on the junkpile of historical falsification...
There is a strong delusion that maintains its satanic grip on the "leadership" in DC.
The depiction of Mordor in Tolkien's "Fellowship of the Rings" series is very fitting in
describing the present pure evil and absolute darkness of those who plan for war and
destruction in the secret chambers in the upper echelons of our society.
What will stop the madness, death, and destruction that has rained down and continues to
rain down on so many millions of hapless men, women, and children in the Middle East and
abroad? Will it take a few US cities completely destroyed and hundreds of thousands of
Americans vaporized before the insanity of US Empire is stopped?
I pray for peace for the sake of my children and grandchildren. I pray for a "great
awakening" amongst the nations of the world to demand an end to the evil US/Zionist madness
before it is too late.
Any US attack on Iran will be by air, not ground. Though special ops will be inserted in the
Afghan border provinces (where the last protests were the largest, fertile ground for
insurgents).
Missiles of all kinds will fall on the regime, the military, the Quds, the militias.
And it will be huge, maybe the largest, heaviest attack ever. Once the air defenses are
down, bombers will cover the major infrastructure sites with the heaviest bombing since
Belgrade and Nam.
Only when the UNSC convenes, probably, no sooner than five or six days, will the attack
slow or cease.
Iran will have been set back a few decades. That is the soft goal. The harder goal will be
the insurgency and destabilization of the regime and final regime change.
It will take nothing special for this attack to happen. Trump has already made up his
mind.
When it will happen is when the US and Israel feel they can suppress the Hezbollah missile
threat. Until they have a workable plan for that, not much can happen on a large scale.
But it will come. Small or large, a missile attack will come to Iran. The regime is in the
sights of the Hegemon.
Top 3 nato countries could take out Iran military within a day, but nato cannot invade,
occupy it in my opinion.
Rubbish.
I assume you're referring to countries other than the United States. In which case, you do
know that Germany has about half-a-dozen airworthy attack aircraft, the Royal Navy and
France's aircraft carriers would require just about every ship in the other European navies
to protect them and part of the reason the British and French begged the United States to
intervene in Libya was because they'd run out of PGMs.
Give the European NATO countries a couple of years to build up their forces and force
projection skills and European NATO might be in a position to bomb Iran, but as soon as they
started building up their forces in the Gulf States, Iran could go to the UNSC to demand that
this obvious aggression should be stopped and when FUKUS veto any resolution, Iran has carte
blanche to launch preemptive strikes across the Persian Gulf. End of European NATO's war on
Iran
And after the Iraq fiasco, I suspect the only country that would go to war without a UNSC
resolution is the United States. Germany would almost certainly decide to sit it out, France
most probably would and the UK would probably also sit it out.
Finally, even if the top 3 NATO countries did try to get away with a limited air attack,
the best response for Iran would be to sink every ship in the Persian Gulf and go on doing so
until the United States invades and becomes bogged down in a quagmire far worse than Iraq or
Afghanistan.
I have to agree with those who say a direct attack on Iran is imminent. Sure, some would love
this to happen whether Yahoo or Bolton but for now will be happy to apply the "squeeze" of
sanctions, ostracism/propaganda. The goal seems to have been to destroy and if not that, then
to set the countries back ... under the thumb as it were.
Yes, the US with some assistance could rip Iran's military apart but not take over the
country. A majority are somewhat satisfied with the theocratic setup. They know the history
with the US/West. And how would Iran react? Long range attacks on Israel or much
closer-to-home attacks on the Gulf States and the Saudis as well as blocking at Hormuz?
Saddam lobbed a few Scuds at Israel and Riyadh but didn't have much. Iran has more and better
missile tech ... which TPTB are going after now ... while Yahoo still pushes "nuclear
programs" since he knows (like Iraq) there are no real weapons there.
The US will do everything possible to reimpose sanctions. Hence gaining control of the IAEA
and inspection process. This is designed to offer the Europeans a face saving way to back
down and submit to US will regarding sanctions. It will probably succeed. Europe, whether it
likes it or not, is playing good cop in the game.
War, as in an actual US attack in Iran itself, is pretty much out if the question. A false
flag designed to be blamed on Iran and big enough to warrant a war will be placed under
enormous scrutiny. Not by the US MSM, of course, but by the rest of the world and the
alternative media.
The fact is, before anyone can attack Iran, they have to win in Syria and it doesn't look
like they are going to.
As far as sanctions, Iran's best bet may be to give the EU 3 weeks to prove its intent to
confront the US (which is unlikely) Then Iran can resume its civilian nuclear development at
the fastest possible pace, with the offer to discontinue once the US returns to the
JCPOA.
Peter Beinart, the author of the "As with Iraq" piece above, gets all wound up in the details
of nuclear inspections and forgets that in 2003 he supported the misbegotten Iraq invasion
and war because a (supposed) peaceful aftermath would help the people of Iraq, and so the
people who oppose the war were wrong.
The truth is that liberalism has to try to harness American military power for its purposes
because American tanks and bombs are often the only things that bring evil to heel.
Opposing this war might have helped liberals retain their purity, but it would have done
nothing for the people suffering under Saddam. If liberals are betrayed a second time in
the Gulf, hawkish liberalism may well go into temporary eclipse. But one day we, and they,
will need it again. . . here
That's akin to the position that Trump has taken on Iran.
In this effort, we stand in total solidarity with the Iranian regime's longest-suffering
victims: its own people. The citizens of Iran have paid a heavy price for the violence and
extremism of their leaders. The Iranian people long to -- and they just are longing, to
reclaim their country's proud history, its culture, its civilization, its cooperation with
its neighbors. . . here
Old Microbiologist , May 12, 2018 11:12:51 AM |
38
IMHO what we are seeing are the last ditch efforts of a failing nation. Russia isn't sitting
it out but is taking a wait and see attitude. The same for China. All the bluster and twitter
tweets in the world mean nothing until someone actually does something. Israel managed to
shoot off a massive strike which at best was 50% effective. This was against "old" Pantsir
S-1 systems which were quite effective. No one has seen the S-300 yet in action and Russia is
holding it back keeping the ECM signature still secret until it is absolutely necessary.
Russia cannot fight the US or Israel in Syria. They simply doesn't have the forces present.
But, what they can do is push gently and make the FUKUS+I over-commit. Don't forget that the
US is working at a current $22 Trillion of debt and these debacles are going to burn money
faster than they can print. In the mean time Russia/China are creating an alternate economic
system to bypass the petrodollar and especially the SWIFT banking. That is in place and
perhaps we will see more countries deciding to bail on the dollar and join the growing crowd.
The US has demonstrated a complete lack of respect for sovereignty and has so far reneged
on every treaty. This means that the US is at best an unreliable partner. The South Koreans
have wised up seeing that the US is very willing to sacrifice the entire peninsula and every
soul living there to kill off the DPNK. That should scare the bejeezus out of every nation
friendly to the US anywhere in the world. They are losing friends so fast now it is scary.
This only forces the inevitable and the US is going to have to bet the farm to try and keep
the hegemony alive. It won't work and the US has the worst record of war fighting imaginable.
They can't beat the goat-herders in Afghanistan for example over a span of now 17 years.
Fighting a real military such as Iran would be impossible and especially if China throws in
her weight. Iran is very important to China and to a lesser extent Russia as well. There is
no danger of the US or NATO winning there. However, this could break the bank if it goes
south. So, what we are seeing is an existential threat to the US in the form of rebellion
against the dollar. Finally, we are seeing countries that have the weight of forces (nuclear)
with serious resistance. It is for this reason we are not seeing a counter-attack against
Israel. As Napoleon said "Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of
destroying himself".
The two FUKUS mass missile attacks on Syria, as well as Israel's latest jab, were a test of
the Russian systems and general Syrian ability to interdict said missiles. If the missiles
can't get through even at such short range, it is obvious Israeli/FUKUS aircraft can't
either. Attempting the same "air war" stunt in Iran will just give the US MIC a big boost
replacing virtually every piece of hardware sent over Iran airspace.
Again, the US soldiers/mercenaries currently in eastern Syria are in a caldron-in-making.
They can no longer count on escaping via land transport through Iraq or Turkey, and without
any air support/transport, they are trapped. Does anyone think the US public will tolerate
the Deep State sacrificing about 5,000 soldiers/mercenaries immediately after the bombing of
Iran starts? The handful of body bags from other recent US misadventures were not
well-received at home, so the potential for another Vietnam?
Iran will not be the turkey-shoot Iraq was, Saddam was still under the delusion Rumsfeld's
handshake gave him immunity from Deep State/Zionist machinations. Iran's leadership is under
no such delusion, remembering the admitted 1953 CIA overthrow of democratically elected
Mossadegh and the installation of the Shah.
Putin and Assad know time is on their side, and the longer they can delay a major
FUKUS/Israeli/Saudi offensive, the better prepared they are and the less effect Zionist
propaganda has worldwide. The IDF murdering unarmed Palestinians using a Gandhiesque tactic
of showing how venal Nuttyyahoo's regime is... like Britain in India... there is no way to
make this slaughter seem justified, and attempting to keep it out of the public consciousness
has not worked.
"But it will come. Small or large, a missile attack will come to Iran. The regime is in the
sights of the Hegemon."
That would be 'former Hegemon'.
The likelihood of war other than the predictable guerrilla campaigns launched from abroad,
campaigns with which Iran has been successfully dealing for decades, seems to me to be
low.
While everyone is watching Iran and Syria, the most important developments are those taking
place in Korea, where some sort of peace agreement seems inevitable. And where anything short
of war will mean an immense strengthening of the positions of Russia and China.Not least
because Japan and Taiwan will be forced to adjust to the new reality.
In Korea... and in western Europe.
This is where the worst cracks in the US hegemonic facade are beginning to show: the logic of
Eurasia and the illogic of Atlanticism are inescapable. The western european economies,
including Germany's, France's and (the weakest link of all?) Italy's are dying for access to
the eastern markets. Historically Germany has shared its technologies and culture with
Russia, which has been the great source of its raw materials and food. The ending of the Iran
deal seems to be the excuse needed to slip back into that relationship.
Those who rave against Putin's 'betrayal' understand nothing. It is necessary to lower the
tension internationally in order for the tectonic movements, which are already well advanced,
to settle.
Bolton and the warmongers depend on perpetuating war but all the momentum, internationally,
is against war. The propaganda which has been their main weapon, is failing, their
credibility is rapidly declining.
Outside Israel, the rump of the Saud family court which supports the Riyadh regime and the
degenerated dregs of NATO trotskyism-inhabited by elderly, aethereal creatures who live in
the Academy and know nothing of the world- the only people who want war are the speculators.
And they are just as happy to have peace, anything that excites the market.
Those who claim that Iran could be defeated in a couple of days are, presumably, talking of
nuclear weapons. Do they really believe that such an attack would not be deterred by Iran's
allies?
Trump is "clever", not intelligent. He is the personification of "bullshit baffles brains"
methodology. Indications are he is marginally literate, as all info briefs have to be a
couple pages at most and point form. It is obvious he has no patience to work through the
finer details of complex situations, simply taking the position of whatever of his advisers
can spread the BS in the most eloquent or forceful way.
But mostly whatever panders to his ego. Make Trumpty think he is being "the decider" (like
Gerge W. Stupid) or that he is being the "tough guy" and he'll sign or say anything.
@ 33, It took NATO 73 days to bring Serbia down, and in the end it required trickery
(promising Milosovich he can stay then color revolutionizing him out)
Serbia did not have the means to close the straights of Hormuz. Nor did it have a missile
arsenal that could strike at several regional US bases. Nor could it destroy Saudi and
Kuwaiti oil refineries. Nor did Serbia have several thousand US ground troops in easy
reach.
Serbia also had the misfortune of being attacked during the weakest point in Russian
history since the 1600s. Russia is quite certain to help Iran because it has a strong
interest in Iran repelling a US attack. Even if you believe Russia is 100% cynical, they will
have an enormously strong reason to see the US bogged down for a decade and bled white.
The Pentagon is aware of all of this and they aren't idiots. The fact is, the US was in a
much better position to attack Iran in 2006 or 7, and they still didn't do it, because it was
a terrible idea even back then. They will not do it now when it is a much worse idea.
Simply put, if attacking Iran were so easy, they would have done it a long, long time
ago.
Now, attempts to destabilize and possibly preach rebellion to Iran's minorities, that they
will do (without much success) But open war is a line they won't cross.
@38 -- "This was against "old" Pantsir S-1 systems which were quite effective. No one has
seen the S-300 yet in action and Russia is holding it back keeping the ECM signature still
secret until it is absolutely necessary."
My reading is the S-300 has a range that would cover commercial airports in Tel-Aviv and
it is probably too much risk for Putin to deliver these to Damascus in case an 'event' occurs
and a civilian jet goes down. In any case, some suggest there are more effective equipment
solutions for Syrian defense/response. Of course, in the wryly Russian way, Israeli
destruction of "old" Pantsir S-1 systems simply opens up the rational and legal opportunity
to provide a whole lot of 'new' updated replacement Pantsir S-1 systems. Background:
https://sputniknews.com/military/201804171063644024-pantsir-top-facts/
I think that the UN has always been mostly a circus court for empire....make it look like US
is benevolent.
So now when the fig leaf comes off in public people are aghast. Empire only works like
empire and when the wheels start to come off, the whole facade is exposed for the dog and
pony show it has always been.
Will this be enough to change the world of global private finance? Iran, remember, refuses
to become a member of the Western banking/elite cabal.
So just why might Trump be directed to attack Iran in his regular pompous manner. Is this
a religious war we are fighting for Israel?
NO!!! It is all about the continuation of the Western form of social organization that has
as its core religion the God of Mammon. Those at MoA who read me know that the God of Mammon
that I write about have the tenets of private finance and property along with the rules of
inheritance which has resulted in the elite of the past few centuries.
I continue to posit that all that is happening relates to that issue and the struggles
around it not discussed in public for whatever reasons.
But carry on educating me and others about all the proxy shit going down and its relevance
to how our society works....or doesn't........I want evolution and I want it this
morning!!!!!!!
The coming "war on Iran" will be an excuse for all kinds of mischief. Some possibilities:
>> seizing western Iraq further isolate Syria by blocking Iran-Syria land route
>> attack and occupation of Lebanon to clear Hezbollah and allow for Israeli land grab up to Litani river (a goal previously
expressed)
>> new round of terror attacks (from new/re-branded groups) focused on
Syria, Iranian, and Russian interests (with a few attacks on the West to muddy the
waters) The psychological part of a war of attrition
>> intensified Ukraine-Russian frictions full court press
>> ISIS expansion into Central Asia accelerate what has already begun
>> Shut down of North Stream and Turk Stream expect the 'cage match' with "recividist nations" to get nasty
Curious how things have calmed down on the Israel front. Things not gone quite as well as
hoped? Or perhaps it is that they've figured out that there's nothing to do. SOHR, opposed to
the Syrians, but with good telephone connections in Syria, has now come up with a list of a
handful of Iranian dead. So I suppose a few Iranian camps were actually hit. But the only
actual videoed strikes were against Syrians. It's what you'd call a nothing-burger, much like
the 102 missile strike.
And this is the launch of a campaign against Iran?? Strange way of showing it. In my view,
the US and Israel are so boxed in by their constraints, that it's very difficult to act
decisively. No casualties, so no overflights of Syria, let alone Iran. No interruption of
Gulf oil exports, as the Gulfies wouldn't like it. Gulf emirates not to be overturned. I'm
sure I can think of some more....
@40 -- "The handful of body bags from other recent US misadventures were not well-received at
home, so the potential for another Vietnam?"
More likely an unlearned repeat of 'rhyming' history with Trump playing Jimmy Carter and
the "5,000 soldiers/mercenaries" playing the suckers (in summer heat). How's the Big 'D'
going to negotiate that deal over the mid-terms?
But that was Democrat 'smart' -- perhaps this re-mix will be closer an up-scaled rerun of
Reagan's Iran–Contra scandal? Who's playing Oliver North?
Another great post. Thank you. Implied I think in your musings is, 'What will people
remember of the U.S.' in a hundred years? The 20th century popular music. Blues, Jazz, Rock
'n Roll, and Country & Western for starters.
When have UNSC ever done to stop aggression by the same states that commit the
aggression?
The topic wouldnt even raised in the UNSC.
Of course Iran wont start a "preemptive" war. Not atleast since that will be a suicide
mission for themselves.
Russia wont do anything then (us attack on iran), just look how they treated previous US
wars, everytime people have said the same that RUssia will help and repel an attack, it have
never happend and will never happen.
At 51...uh, you do realize Russia has an expeditionary force that is actually fighting and
keeping Syria alive as we post, right? Perhaps they are not fighting as much as you would
like, but they are fighting and Syria continues to exist because of it. As regards Iran, if
Iran falls the Syria falls and Russian bases will be gone. Fortunately for all, that won't
happen.
It is difficult to say what kind of scope the false flag would need to be to rally public
opinion at home for an Iranian incursion. In many ways, pre-9/11, the antiwar movement was
much stronger as was shown by the rallies against leading up to the Iraqi invasion. And yet
this couldn't forestall it.
OTOH, independent media has come a long way in its reach and so cries of "false flag" have
already been sounded, and, by and large, I believe America is fatigued with the ME. It is
doubly ironic that dems like Schumer have been crying foul against DJT for playing soft with
NoKo. I know that the current dem/lib establishment has thrown its antiwar credentials out
the window, in favor of color revolutions, freedom, and LGBTQUIOGDTFBJK rights to fornicate
in public spaces, but, my god, I would never have imagined the globalists to be THAT stupid
in their disregard for basic human needs the world over for soverignty and national
pride.
People have touched on it before, but is this whole current theater just an old money vs.
new money second showing? The return of the repressed, with the globalist/neolib model being
rundowned and usurped by nationalist oligarchs? It would seem the DJT has chosen to err to
the old money side to the betterment of the world. And I, for one, as an American would
rather have my elites localized so we would actually have access to their asses when we
decide to put a pitchfork up them. It is very difficult to get past TSA with weaponized
peasant tools.
Israel's a bit late there then. The disturbances were at the beginning of the year.
They're over now. The effect of the sanctions will be to swing people behind the regime, for
the moment, at any rate.
No thats wrong too, Russia is not on a mission to save Syrians state, they are in Syria
due takfiri threat. Nothing else, as we all see proof of past days...
As for your other statment, I am well sure that Syria have fallen long long before Iran
(if they ever do that).
@52 Lysander. I agree (btw never mind anon's trolling attempts). Simply put, the road to
Tehran goes through Damascus and last I checked the Jasmine City was doing fine ;) If
US/KSA/IL attempts a hot war on Iran it will only precipitate its fall..
Am reminded of the 3 Stooges, whenever I read about these warmongers, like " Bombs Away"
Bolton. Moe tells a group of people, "We will fight till the last drop of.....", then points
to Curly and finishes, "....your blood!" These bastards love war, but never are at the front
line, fighting and dying along side our best. They sit at their plush offices and conference
halls in the best hotels, sipping champagne and eating the best foods, making six or seven
figure incomes. While our brothers, neighbors, fathers, sons, uncles die overseas, or come
back a mental mess, and get crapped on by out government. What these no good for nothing rat
bastards need is to experience the hell they unleash upon us and the rest of the world.
i read this line a lot, from all spheres, and it always perplexes me. to be
fatigued you'd have to be overwhelmed, inundated, and i'd wager that the ME and what's
going on there hardly crosses the vast majority of minds in more than a peripheral way, you
know, like beyond certain key words they hear on tv.
one thing's for sure though, the ME is most definitely fatigued with America!
Looks like there might not be a Coalition Of The Willing in any anti-Iran military operation.
Quite the opposite, it's a further lessening of US world hegemony.
. . .Cartoon of Trump giving the middle finger Goodbye,
Europe! in Der Spiegel.
Why are commentators assuming that, *if* the US does launch a war of aggression against Iran,
it will do so in tandem with its NATO allies--and the UK, France, and Germany in particular?
It is doubtful that these allies will even abide by the new US economic sanctions imposed
upon Iran. Why think that they will be willing, or even politically able, to follow the US
orders for war?
b is right that the neocons are setting up a replay of the 2001-2003 Iraq propaganda
campaign. But the global and domestic conditions that enabled the success of that campaign no
longer hold. The US is far weaker now than then; Iran is more powerful and unified than Iraq
ever was; NATO countries have hundreds of billions of dollars of trade contracts in place or
projected with Iran; Russia and China are far stronger. It just doesn't add up.
I suppose what I was trying to say is that the narrative TPTB have spun over the last
twenty years has gone beyond the realm of convoluted to the average American and now has
completely unwound into chaos. It was only three years ago that we were being told about the
surging threat of ISIS to Americans. Well...that didn't last long...and now they are back to
Iran which the west knows very little about and really doesn't care to. Us Americans like the
good guy/bad guy fight. But if you can't drum up a good enough backstory for the black hats,
I'm afraid that the average American will simply change the channel.
That being said...a compelling backstory isn't really needed for pyschopaths to wage their
war anyway.
Several here ave wondered what kind of false flag could motivate the populace in NA and the
EU to support an attack on Iran. May I propose one?
First stage - Israel (using the EW cover from AlTanf) bombs the Iranian nuclear plant.
Radiation release threatens tens of thousands.
Second stage - Supposed 'Iranian' counter-attack sets oil tankers ablaze (For maximum PR
effect do not sink them) in the Hormuz straights closing the gulf to shipments of Gulf
sourced oil. Oil prices temporarily spike to over $200 a barrel,
Europe's supply of oil is cut drastically, industries world-wide are paralysed and the US
(secure with its' supply sourced outside the gulf)is free to ride to the rescue - all while
RUSSIA (and China) have NO LEGITIMATE REASON to oppose the aggression.
bevin 41 The likelihood of war other than the predictable guerrilla campaigns launched from abroad,
campaigns with which Iran has been successfully dealing for decades, seems to me to be
low.
Yes, the US Army is demonstrably weak especially for any foreign invasion.
Historically Germany has shared its technologies and culture with Russia, which has
been the great source of its raw materials and food. The ending of the Iran deal seems to be
the excuse needed to slip back into that relationship.
And also China's BRI -- coming up June 28-- -- The China Germany BRI Summit 2018
As the first and third largest exporters globally, China and Germany will prove crucial
drivers of trade along the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road.
Together these form the Belt and Road Initiative, a landmark shift in the global economic
order that will touch over 65 countries across four continents.
The China Germany BRI Summit 2018 will dispel myths on what the Belt and Road Initiative
means for the world, tackle the challenges for global financial institutions and
corporations looking to leverage the initiative, and identify the enormous opportunities in
M&A, capital markets and trade finance. here .
@ Anon 64 Dont bet on that, May, Trump Agree to Counter Iran's 'Destabilising Activity' - Downing
Street
OMG, not the powerful UK military!! (heh)
Besides, haven't you heard? The UK isn't in Europe any more, or soon won't be.
Posted by: Don Bacon , May 12, 2018 1:45:05 PM |
73
@ Anon 64 Dont bet on that, May, Trump Agree to Counter Iran's 'Destabilising Activity' - Downing
Street
OMG, not the powerful UK military!! (heh)
Besides, haven't you heard? The UK isn't in Europe any more, or soon won't be.
Posted by: Don Bacon | May 12, 2018 1:45:05 PM |
73 /div
The extremely complex entanglement of Germany with (roughly) the NATO/EU alliance on the
one hand and Russia/China on the other is a prime reason why I do not believe that Germany
(which is by far the biggest economy in the EU) will be able to be strong armed or enticed
into signing up with another Zionist driven US war of aggression with a country as major as
Iran.
Re the possibility of a "united front" of western powers confronting Iran, the truth is that
no one knows for certain at this point how it this will play out.
We have to remember the deafening silence of the western media during the obvious
Skripjal-Ghouta fakery, so there's a good chance the US/Israel axis will again have a
relatively free hand to concoct any number of escalating false flags, not all of which will
stick, but some probably will. So that is a cause for concern re any future "coalition".
As for enforcing the sanctions, I've seen people argue both ways - that this is a bridge
too far for Europe, and accepting it will both do too much economic damage and make Europe
appear too obviously as US toadies; and OTOH, Europe will be blackmailed into knuckling under
when confronted with illegal US fines and secondary sanctions.
> Curious how things have calmed down on the Israel front. Things not gone quite as
well as hoped?
This is all that needs to be noted about the absurdity of even the idea that the US regime
is capable of attacking Iran.
This delusion appears to be the same type thinking as the "Generals Always Fight the
Previous War" saying.
The days of the Israeli regime flying at will over countries bombing at will are over. And
the days of the US regime parking an aircraft carrier off the coast of a country and
leisurely taking out its air defense network are long gone.
Russian air defense and electronic warfare tech are now being shown to be significantly
superior to US regime offensive capabilities in real world combat. So much so that the most
common reaction has been to try to rationalize the fact with crazy conspiracy theories about
behind the scenes wink and nod agreements between the US regime and Russia.
Trump foolishly trying to attack Iran to distract from his political problems would end up
as the first modern US regime leader who lost an aircraft carrier and ten dollar gas
prices.
Israeli's were cowering in their sewers while their junk air defense network repeatedly
failed to defend against a minor Syrian retaliatory barrage while Syrians in Damascus were
cheering on their rooftops as their Russian air defense network knocked Israeli missiles from
the sky.
Syria smacking down the Israeli regime is going to have Trump's military advisors sitting
him down and giving him a hard dose of reality about the Israeli/Saudi/Neocon delusions about
attacking Iran.
Pompeo(US) and Zarif(Iran) are currently making the diplomatic rounds, the former looking for
a new & improved plan, and the latter emphasizing that the US never adhered to the old
plan and united opposition to sanctions is in everyon'e best interest.
from the Iran statement:
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has not only made explicit and official statements against
the agreement in violation of its provisions, but has in practice also failed to implement
U.S. practical – and not merely formal commitments under the JCPOA. The Islamic
Republic of Iran has recorded these violations in numerous letters to the Joint Commission
convened under the JCPOA, outlining the current U.S. Administration's bad faith and
continuous violations of the accord. Thus Mr. Trump's latest action is not a new
development but simply means the end of the obstructionist presence of the United States as
a participant in the JCPOA. . .
here
The apparent US line now, as before, is to "change the regime's malign behavior" which is
ridiculous and thus doomed.
@ MISchi 69: There have been Russian-operated S-400's in Syria for years. Even the US
propaganda rags admit it is significant in reducing FUKUS attacks. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34976537
So just because Russia isn't giving the SAA S-300's doesn't mean Syria has no protection.
The fact the updated S-200s and Pantsirs are doing the job reasonably well will give FUKUS
and Israeli/Saudi military planners pause. Note that the cowardly Israeli jets attack from
Lebanese or Jordanian airspace.
And Nuttyyahoo merely crashed the Victory Day festivities, and Putin is too gracious a
host to kick Nutty out. But the body language between them was obvious, Putin was not happy
to see Nutty trying to capitalize on Putin's good manners.
@ Ian 77 According to Reuters it is.
Reuters doesn't take comments so I'm telling you (and others), if you don't mind, because you
are misleading people with something that isn't true.
As much as Bolton and his ilk would love to attack Iran, I have to disagree that a
full-fledged war is likely. USrael will ratchet up tensions all they can, hoping that Iran
will take the bait and actually respond, but the only way an actual war MAY be fought is with
a massive false flag attack. However, it took a massive false flag attack to allow the
neocons to invade Iraq, so said black op would have to be on that magnitude. Here's the thing
though, the neocons seem to be getting worse at false flags and more over the world ain't
buying them like they used to.
Sure you can get your European lackeys to sign up to a few sanctions, but will anyone
actually support the utter tanking of the world economy? Because that will be the end result
of war with Iran and behind closed doors everyone knows this. Look up the Millennial War
Games simulation that pitted the US against Iran. And how did that $200 million exercise turn
out? The US had to "refloat" its fleet in order to win. Using older Chinese anti- ship
missiles the Iranians decimated US naval assets. The US hasn't developed counter measures
against these while the Iranians have undoubtedly improved on these missiles. No matter what
happens to its ground forces and population centers, shipping in the Persian Gulf will be
shut down. That one action will raise the price of oil to over $200 a barrel overnight,
possibly much higher. And with that the global economy will be left in tatters. Too many of
the world's leaders understand this completely and simply will not go along with the US and
line up against Iran like they did with Iraq.
no, Netanyahu was invited. I read about it a week before the parade. Lavrov always says that
you don't need to negotiate with your friends, but you do with your enemies. Hence the
invite.
Like the Godfather said in the eponymous movie "Keep your friends close but your enemies
closer."
UKs military is of course far stronger than Iran,
we will see renewed sanctions against Iran and EU will be onboard and have already mentioned
they "need" to pressure Iran more.
The attacks on Iran will be only financial, not military, is my guess. The big news in the
military sector is often on cyber attacks. Cyber will be a "new military front."
Financial is akin to cyber. No shooting. The military experts don't discuss financial, I
guess because the U.S. is the only country capable of it, controlling world finance as it
does. But a full-on sanctions regime on another small country like Iran could do a lot of
damage and hurt a lot of people, as it did in Iraq previously. Sort of like what the U.S. did
to Japan to precipitate the war in the Pacific, except Iran's reactions must be much more
limited.
So the big question is Europe, and if it is able to legislate any significant
counter-sanction laws that would encourage Iran-Europe business. France looks good on this,
Germany is more significant.
I do wish people would stop calling themselves Anon. It's very difficult to know which is
which. It's easy enough to anonymise yourself with a distinctive handle. Maybe b should ban
it as a handle.
Many years ago I got to hear Sir Edmond Hillary speak to the assembled students at my
school, just a few years after his amazing climbing feat. No multimedia or lasers pointers or
cheesy-brand tee-shirt cannons, ... just an electric performance by an incredible man that
shaped my life, one foot at a time.
Several decades later, I watched SEH demonstrate Simple Green soap at REI. So incredibly
sad. I'll never forget either presentation. The Man in the Moon had become another Soapy
Salesman.
At the same time I first heard SEH speak, my father, an international businessman, brought
home a Buddhist monk exchange student from Asia for the holiday. It was spellbinding to meet
a bright and well-off monk, who knew all this amazing arcane reality, that we call the Wheel.
It shaped my entire approach to the summit.
Several decades later, in fact, just recently, I watched a performance by a Tibetan monk
troupe, after which they essentially begged for sponsors for the remaining exiled monks now
starving in India by the 1000s. They are dying out, like the 1,000s, the 10,000s of
aboriginal valley cultures that once walked the Earth.
Soapy Sales and Starving Monks, who only decades ago were both sitting on Top of the
World. Kind of like everyone's experience, even John Bolton's, former UN ambassador, now a
sleazy salesman-demonstrator for Death Inc, too proud to sell soap, or to busker for alms.
He's pathetic.
So let me bring it on home.
A student of mine is a senior monk in Asia. His charge is to free the spirits of the just
dead. Not the two monks chanting and incense and sprinkling with flower petal water in front
of a cherished photo. No, he blesses the *dying*, the human roadkills from the reckless
Chinese Escalades bombing through SEAsian commute traffic, the black and blue herion addicts
with the needle still in their arm, bright red blood bubbling out of their noses, the raped,
strangled, discarded and bloating young girls, dumped in the nearest rice paddy ditch.
He gets those calls. He never talks about his work, never shows the horror pictures or
trashes the perps. He sends selfies, pics of meals, flowers and temples. So I asked him,
doesn't this bother you at night, the carnal evil, the rape, the murder? Don't you wanna see
justice done?
He said simply, we're all going to die, many of us soon, we have very little time away
from the Wheel. We should spend every precious second of free time uplifting those who are
below us, the poor, the infirm, the feeble, the indentured, the slave, ...because we're all
gonna die as beggars some day. We should hold faith with the beggars.
Bolton is a sick fuck, in a pantheon of sick fucks. Why squander a nanosecond meditating
on any of them? They are nothingness, the void. MoA seems to have a fascination with evil and
death, and making Death's bit players into pop-idols. Selling a different brand of soap, I
guess.
Closing Hormuz would likely be the Iranian response to a sustained bombing campaign. A
single strike on a nuclear facility could elicit a missile strike on the attacking party (US,
Isreal or both.) Or it could involve multiple attacks on vulnerable US troops in Iraq and
Syria. Iran has several rungs in its escalation ladder. It doesn't have to jump to the top
one all at once.
Of course financial sanctions are the main, if not the only, US war-winning tactic
available today. Mainly the control of the VISA and SWIFT exchange systems. But I'm not
financially knowledgeable. It was one reason that Iran signed in 2015. I remember well, about
10 years ago, the husband of an Iranian student arriving with $20K (?) sewn into his
overcoat, to pay for his wife's studies.
However, the US has used this tactic so often now, that people must be looking to ways of
getting round the problem. I'm not quite sure how much success they may have had. People talk
about Russia-China erecting a parallel to the SWIFT system. I hope this does happen, though
it must be expensive. Non-US allies need it.
@lLaguerre: Russia already has set up its version of SWIFT. As has China, as well as both
agreeing to transactions in rubles/yuan first for petroleum, then recently for all other
trade, to bypass the US$ SWIFT system. The US gets a "cut", every time a corporation/country
converts from local currency to US$, then again when that same US$ cash is converted to the
currency of the second trading partner. To avoid this, non-US countries keep US$ reserves to
trade between themselves. This scam was set up at Bretton Woods after WW2 when the US economy
was the only economy/industrial-base left unscathed.
"In 2017, the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, said at a meeting with
President Vladimir Putin that Russia is ready for disconnection from SWIFT."
Because of their large inertia, these things, when they get moving, cannot be stopped and
proceed to the inevitable. The ziocons have pushed the boulder and it's starting to roll.
That is what a lot of panicky people said in 2013, that Obama's invasion of Syria was
inevitable because Assad was gassing his people in Ghouta. It didn't happen. As it turned
out, the "massive momemtum" was in the Zionist propangda, hoping to sucker the U.S. into the
Middle East again.
i think swift and bis are linked in with imf.. unfortunately i don't know how it all works,
but russias central bank is part of imf.. the way imf is set up favours the developed
countries over the developing countries.. they have some other tricks to keep control over it
too, but i do believe it is tricky navigating moving away from it all, which is why the
financial system is the first line of action to put other countries deemed out of line - into
line.. some have tried to get the imf to change without success which is why i believe brics
was working towards an alternative.. of course the b in brics went thru a type of regime
change under a different facade and i am not sure where they are at with that at this moment
in time...
Julian Assange
@JulianAssange
There is something very odd about the Joseph Mifsud story and the role of the UK in the 2016
US presidential election:
(thread)
5:07 PM · Mar 22, 2018
DEVELOPING: A major new front is opening in the political espionage scandal. In summer 2016,
Brennan with his FBI liaison Strzok, along with help from Kerry @ State, were trying to set
Russian espionage traps for minor players in the Trump campaign through cultivated intel
assets
@MISchi: Israel may have been "invited", but only as a standard diplomatic courtesy, not as a
"guest of honour" as the MSM and Hasbara would have us beleive. The US was probably invited
too... and didn't have the grace to show up? The US and EU were for sure in 2014, but
"boycotted" it over the US coup in Ukraine. Nuttyyahoo was just looking for MSM cover for the
illegal bombing he knew was going to happen, making it look like Putin was "in on it".
I'd guess Putin is simply giving Nutty all the rope Nutty needs to hang himself in the
court of world public opinion. When I see an official statement from Putin (or any Russian
senior official) saying Putin gave any approval of Israel's past and present illegal
incursions in Syria, let alone the illegal occupation of the Golan, I'll believe Nutty being
at the Victory Parade was some sort of endorsement by Putin of Nutty's insanity.
I agree with Lysander's logic. Iran will not be attacked in the "normal" manner; it will be
asymmetrical. The performance of not-so antiquated air defenses in Syria are the big game
changer as Iran has those and its own S-300 version. Plus all those big stationary targets.
Plus, I figure Bolton has a target on his back, as do other neocons--you don't murder over a
million without creating some enemies. I see lots of bluster to foment as much chaos as
possible to accentuate the asymmetrical impact. But as for an actual military assault, Bolton
and company are a decade plus too late.
To negate the potential effect of another Operation Northwoods, I think it wise to pull up
those old pdf docs and spread them around the world via social media--a move I'm frankly
surprised has yet to be made--along with some additional contemporary context.
@james: The Russian central bank is a member of the IMF/World Bank/BIS/SWIFT system as are
nearly every other central bank in the world. Not being "in" this club severely restricts the
ability to do international trade. Russia and China are quietly spearheading the move to
conduct international trade in local currencies, outside the US$-reserve-currency scam
(sorry, system). Both Russia and China have set up alternative systems, which along with the
SCO/AIIB offer participating countries a way to side-set US economic terrorism and sanctions.
The Rothschilds may have managed to stall the BRICS for now, but that won't last long.
It is unclear to what extent Israel is given unfairly favorable treatment and to what extent it is the most useful
allies (along with KSA) of f the USA in the middle East securing energy supplies to the according to Carter doctrine,
Notable quotes:
"... The latest outrage against the First Amendment comes from South Carolina, the home state of the arch-Zionist poseur and United Nations Ambassador extraordinary Nikki Haley. A new hate speech law was inserted in the state's recently approved annual budget. ..."
"... The legislation borrows from the U.S. State Department definition of anti-Semitism, which proscribes speech that "demonizes" or applies "double standards" to Israel "by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation" as anti-Semitic. ..."
"... While the State Department definition is a guideline, the South Carolina's specific inclusion of it in legislation makes explicit that criticism of Israel as hate speech can be subject to criminal penalties. It also is binding on all the states universities and educational institutions. ..."
"... The law was promoted by Alan Clemmons, a Mormon legislator who has led numerous delegations to Israel and who has been described as "Israel's biggest supporter in a U.S. state legislature." ..."
"... Normally foreign governments have what is referred to as sovereign immunity which prevents their being sued, but that all changed in the U.S. with the passage of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) of 2016, which permitted individual lawsuits in any federal court involving any government's alleged participation in international acts of "terrorism." This has resulted in a series of multi-billion-dollar lawsuits against Iran, the Palestinians and also Saudi Arabia. Many of the lawsuits have Israeli citizens as plaintiffs, suing in American courts. ..."
"... Indeed, it is far more plausible that Israel was involved in 9/11 than was Iran. Israel operated a massive spying operation directed against Arabs in the U.S. and several of its intelligence officers were seen in Jersey City to be filming themselves while dancing and cavorting in delight as the twin towers went down, suggesting some prior knowledge. ..."
"... But, of course, no one would be allowed to sue Israel in an American court. The 9/11 Commission failed to examine the case against Israel even though it allegedly sought to compile a "full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding" the attacks, but it did investigate the possible ties to Iran. It found the only evidence of any Iranian support to consist of certain 9/11 hijackers travelling through Iran on their way to Afghanistan without having their passports stamped. ..."
"... Israel is a fiscal off-shore through passage for decanting public funds to private hands, a physical vault to hold assets, reinsert assets into the global financial system. ..."
"... As imprecise as can be, but to popularize the situation: the before Castro, Cuba Mafia save haven. ..."
"... This is partly the explanation of "military capitalism" deployed rather recently in insider circles to capture an existing situation where the US is left to prop up it's financial make believe using military show of. That is partly why "war" is so publicly discussed, actions are leaked, this contrary to what real war requires, deep stealth. ..."
"... American "foreign aid" is prohibited from being given to any country that has not signed the "Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty" or refuses to abide by "International Atomic Energy Agency" (IAEA) guidelines regarding its nuclear devices. Guess what?? Israel does not abide by EITHER and still gets the majority of American "foreign aid". ..."
"... There are forty or so congressmen, senators and thousands of high-level policy "wonks" infecting the U S government who hold "dual citizenship" with Israel. Such dual citizenship only reinforces "split loyalty"–NOT upholding the interests of the United States, and must be strictly prohibited. ..."
"... Those holding dual citizenship must be required to renounce said foreign citizenship. Refusal to do so should result in immediate deportation with loss of American citizenship. Present and former holders of dual citizenship should not be allowed to serve in any American governmental capacity. ..."
Time to question the loyalty of some legislators and judges
I have a number of times
discussed
how the U.S. and other governments have legislated and otherwise promoted Jewish and
Israeli interests in ways that most people would find unacceptable if they were aware of what exactly has
been going on. Here in the United States, special Medicare coverage and immigration status have been
granted, often concealed in other legislation, to benefit holocaust survivors and Russian Jews seeking to
emigrate. State legislatures and the U.S. Congress have meanwhile been working hard to pass legislation
that blocks and even criminalizes the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) protests
against Israeli behavior while universities have been banning anti-Israel demonstrators and groups on
campus because they apparently are offensive to the sensitivities of some Jewish students.
The latest outrage against the First
Amendment comes from South Carolina, the home state of the arch-Zionist poseur and United Nations
Ambassador extraordinary Nikki Haley. A new
hate speech law
was inserted in the state's recently approved annual budget.
The legislation borrows
from the U.S. State Department definition of anti-Semitism, which proscribes speech that "demonizes" or
applies "double standards" to Israel "by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other
democratic nation" as anti-Semitic.
While the State Department definition
is a guideline, the South Carolina's specific inclusion of it in legislation makes explicit that
criticism of Israel as hate speech can be subject to criminal penalties. It also is binding on all the
states universities and educational institutions.
The law was promoted by Alan Clemmons,
a Mormon legislator who has led numerous delegations to Israel and who has been described as "Israel's
biggest supporter in a U.S. state legislature."
Supporters of the Bill of Rights have
been universally opposed to the bill, but pro-Israel groups have praised the initiative and are expecting
a "new wave" of legislation all across the United States blocking any criticism of the self-described
Jewish State. The Brandeis Center has
enthused
"This bill gives South Carolina the
tools to protect Jewish students' and all South Carolina students' right to a learning environment free
of unlawful discrimination. We are hoping this momentous step will result in another national wave to,
once and for all, begin defeating rising anti-Semitism."
Other states will undoubtedly follow
the South Carolina lead, so it would appear that any criticism of Israel will become illegal in the
public square if the many friends of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have their way. And they generally
do get what they want from the federal level all the way down to the states and local communities, so be
prepared.
Israel also is regularly exploiting
the American legal system to punish countries that it has defined as its enemies. Its government
sponsored lawfare organization called Shurat Hadin has initiated a number of lawsuits in U.S. courts to
punish Palestinians and Iranians. Ironically, it is currently seeking to demonstrate that Hamas is
committing
war crimes in Gaza
, where Israel has been using army snipers to kill unarmed demonstrators.
Other lawsuits filed on behalf of
mostly Jewish Americans in U.S. courts seeking compensation from Iranians and Palestinians are also
pending, with the tribunals in Manhattan particularly prone to being sympathetic to the plaintiffs. Last
week, at the Federal Court for the Southern District of Manhattan, Judge George Daniels
issued a default judgment
relating to his 2011 determination that Iran and Hezbollah materially and
directly supported al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks and are legally responsible for damages to the hundreds
of family members of victims who are named in the case. The judge ordered Iran to pay $6 billion in
compensation – "$12,500,000 per spouse, $8,500,000 per parent, $8,500,000 per child, and $4,250,000 per
sibling" to the families and estates of the deceased. A 4.96 annual interest rate will also be applied to
the amount, starting from September 11, 2001 to the date of the judgement."
Normally foreign governments have
what is referred to as sovereign immunity which prevents their being sued, but that all changed in the
U.S.
with the passage of
the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) of 2016, which permitted
individual lawsuits in any federal court involving any government's alleged participation in
international acts of "terrorism." This has resulted in a series of multi-billion-dollar lawsuits against
Iran, the Palestinians and also Saudi Arabia. Many of the lawsuits have Israeli citizens as plaintiffs,
suing in American courts.
Though the lawsuit claimed, and Judge
Daniels agreed, that Tehran had supported the 9/11 hijackers with training and other assistance, most
authorities would question that judgement. Many would consider it to be ludicrous as Iranian Shi'ites
were considered to be kill-on-sight heretics by al-Qaeda. The idea that Iran was somehow involved in 9/11
is in reality a ridiculous Israel Lobby contrivance that
was first floated
in 2015 by ex-CIA Director James Woolsey, a renowned Zionist stooge and conspiracy
theorist who is viewed by many as not completely in possession of all his marbles.
Indeed, it is far more plausible that
Israel was involved in 9/11 than was Iran. Israel operated a massive spying operation directed against
Arabs in the U.S. and several of its intelligence officers were seen in Jersey City to be filming
themselves while dancing and cavorting in delight as the twin towers went down, suggesting some prior
knowledge.
But, of course, no one would be
allowed to sue Israel in an American court.
The 9/11 Commission
failed to examine the case against Israel even though it allegedly sought to
compile a "full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding" the attacks, but it did
investigate the possible ties to Iran. It found the only evidence of any Iranian support to consist of
certain 9/11 hijackers travelling through Iran on their way to Afghanistan without having their passports
stamped.
In his Farewell Address President
George Washington
warned that
" a passionate attachment of one
nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the
illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing
into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of
the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite
nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions;
by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and
a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to
ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to
betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity;
gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public
opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption,
or infatuation. As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly
alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot."
If one believes that deference to
the special foreign interest of one powerful and wealthy segment of the population is appropriate in a
democracy then I suppose the Jewish/Israeli pander has to be considered acceptable. I happen to believe
that, as our first president so clearly articulated, it is not, particularly as much of the concession
that Jews are somehow to be treated differently than the rest of the community due to their alleged
victimhood contributes to a criticism-free ride for an Israel which is eagerly seeking a new war in the
Middle East. It would be a war that the United States would inevitably get pulled into by Israel's
friends in Congress and the media. It would also be catastrophic for all parties involved and it all
starts with the belief that Israel should somehow be protected and its enemies punished while also being
exempt from being made accountable for its actions.
It's more than time to question, it's time to prosecute. If Alan Clemmons, or any other legislator, has
gone to Israel, with any assistance from Israel financial or otherwise, then Clemmons (and others) have
taken a bribe. Failure to prosecute, just as failure to enforce current immigration laws, is the road to
anarchy.
As for Judge Daniels, I guess I could cut him some slack, given it's a default judgment, but that goes
out the door if he was the judge that certified the case going forward in the first place. There is no
prima facie evidence of Iran's involvement in 9/11, and therefore, false statements made in the statement
of claim are a perversion of justice. A judge is supposed to rule on facts, not conjecture.
75 years ago, people hid Jews to protect them from imprisonment and possible death by European-led
jailers. Now in 2018, people are hiding Europeans to protect them from imprisonment and possible death
by Jewish-led jailers
89-year-old Ursula Haverbeck-Wetzel is right now being hunted by German police at the behest of Jewish
groups, because she did not show up at prison a few days ago, to serve a two-year-jail sentence for
questioning the official narrative of the Jewish killings in World War II It is recognised by Jews and
others that at her age, the long jailing may kill her
The 'International Auschwitz Committee' says German police should use 'high pressure' to find this
elderly woman and imprison her, even though it may kill her
And yet Jews who speak like this claim they do not understand why people develop antipathy to Jews
It is in fact the International Auschwitz Committee which is 'inciting anti-semitism', as they inspire
Germans to hide elderly people from Jews 'like Anne Frank was hidden from Germans'
However much Ursula Haverbeck might be in error in her historical opinions, this is appalling and
shocking treatment of a grandmotherly woman soon to be 90 years of age sending her very possibly to
death for her ideas regarding an era to which she is a living personal witness (Haverbeck was born in
1928, and will turn age 90 this 8 November)
This reminds of the case of a World War II Jewish witness, a rabbi's son, who was with the Russian
advance troops who liberated places like Auschwitz,
Joseph Ginzburg – Joseph G Burg, direct interrogator of Auschwitz and other camp survivors
The
fiercely anti-Nazi and very Jewish Burg, said the Holocaust was an exaggeration, a fraud fabricated by
Zionists, he wrote books on this, & had many of those books burned by the modern West German government
tho the old Bonn regime never had the stomach to jail rabbi's son Joseph Ginzburg (1908-90), despite his
holocaust denial
OT but since it seems Israel first stooge Insane McCain is finally going to meet Satan.
What I want to know is, has anybody announced how they intend to handle all the people who want to
piss on his grave? Will there be a lottery, will there be those "take a number" machines, will it be
first come first served or will there be some kind of contest, like writing an essay?
On the day of Sept 11, when I still, of course, believed the Muslim terror attack story, I said to my
wife 'just Israel benefits'.
I simply could not see how these Muslim attacks benefitted Muslims.
No idea, at the time, as Anatol Lieven also did not have at the end of the month, his article 'New Cold
War' in the then still independent Guardian, that these attacks would be used to justify wars on
Afghanistan and Iraq.
It was 2004 when Hollings made his famous speech, promising war to AIPAC for the jewish vote, 'that is
politics'.
I'm convinced the neocons will not pull this off
this time
. After many years of war a passive
public may be catching on. I expect the price of oil to jolt upwards this afternoon. When people begin
asking why the answers need to be that our "ally" Israel keeps threatening war if they don't get their
way and Trump doesn't tear up the P5+1 treaty.
A 90 year old woman must "serve a two-year-jail sentence for questioning the official narrative of the
Jewish killings in World War II "
This is surreal. Liberal democracy (what's left of it) down the rabbit hole. Imprisonment as a
consequence of
questioning
history ? Yes, I know, Germany has its sensitivities, but should
historical guilt excuse a vicious assault on core values & a vulnerable individual ?
No context to the article that matters. Lost in deviations.
The real issue: any transaction to and from Israel makes some Jewish and elite non Jewish Americans
accessory. Israel is a fiscal off-shore through passage for decanting public funds to private hands, a
physical vault to hold assets, reinsert assets into the global financial system.
As imprecise as can be, but to popularize the situation: the before Castro, Cuba Mafia save haven.
One must realize that when the dollar, as is happening looses part of it's reserve status(currently
under way, partly global transactions start escaping the dollar accountability, thus leaving a smaller
margin of cooking the books), there need to be a trustworthy insertion point into the Yuan, any digital
currency, international financial markets, currency speculation for the elites of the West, evasion of
embargos for the exeptionals.
This is partly
the explanation of "military capitalism"
deployed rather recently in insider
circles to capture an existing situation where the US is left to prop up it's financial make believe
using military show of. That is partly why "war" is so publicly discussed, actions are leaked, this
contrary to what real war requires, deep stealth.
Israel is a Swiss knife for corporate international billionaires, no billionaires no Israel.
Would the JASTA act open the way for litigation against Israel's involvement in 9/11? Of course, there
would have to be a change in venue because the southern district of Manhattan is kind of evil's
homecourt.
Might be just the right crack in the absurdity, to investigate, prosecute and sentence the
perpetrators. I mean if they can go after a ninety year old woman, why not a geriatric Jerome Hauser, Dov
Zakheim, etc?
Just spit-balling here, I'll go back to my observational pessimism
American "foreign aid" is prohibited from being given to any country that has not signed the "Nuclear
Non-proliferation Treaty" or refuses to abide by "International Atomic Energy Agency" (IAEA) guidelines
regarding its nuclear devices. Guess what?? Israel does not abide by EITHER and still gets the majority
of American "foreign aid".
This prohibition also applies to countries that do not register their "agents
of a foreign government" with the U S State Department. Guess what?? Israel (again) with its "American
Israel Political Action Committee" (AIPAC) still gets "foreign aid" in contravention of American law..
There are forty or so congressmen, senators and thousands of high-level policy "wonks" infecting the U S
government who hold "dual citizenship" with Israel. Such dual citizenship only reinforces "split
loyalty"–NOT upholding the interests of the United States, and must be strictly prohibited.
Those holding
dual citizenship must be required to renounce said foreign citizenship. Refusal to do so should result in
immediate deportation with loss of American citizenship. Present and former holders of dual citizenship
should not be allowed to serve in any American governmental capacity.
The American Presidents Johnson and Nixon were satisfied with the Israeli explanation that they would not
be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the mid east. Successive administrations accept this
declaration and are not interested in forcing them to join the IAEA.
Fair enough too given the history of their persecution and the massive contributions of Jewish
brainpower to America's bomb project and many prior and subsequent, scientific, medical, legal and
industrial efforts.
I hope not. There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
Thanks to Giraldi and all
the commenters here who want to see our government function on our behalf. Right now it's riddled with
treason. Despite large majorities of both parties consistently identifying money as corrupting our
politics, bribery became normalized in part so that Jewish politics could prosper. Now we no longer even
expect our representative to pretend.
He says he "didn't think it was going to become, you know, the 7-year devastating conflict that it became."
That is apparent. Libya was already descending into the F-UK-US "Mission Accomplished" with NATO bombers warming
up to finish the job. Perhaps Max's dad had assured him that Syria would follow the same pattern his emails with
Hillary Clinton show he had helped plan and define in Libya.
BTW: Has he ever addressed his father's role in the destruction of the once most prosperous country on the
African continent? I haven't read or heard anything from Max on Syd Blumenthal's pre-Qaddafi "removal"
explanation that Libya had to be destroyed to:
Steal their nationalized oil.
Confiscate the hundreds of tons of gold and silver Libya held.
Prevent Libya from establishing a gold-backed currency and pan-African development bank to compete with the
US petro-dollar and IMF, and lift Africa out of neo-colonial subservience.
Yeah. Max was "pretty quiet on Libya and not really - didn't really make any coherent statements on that
either."
That newspaper that Max publicly maligned and quit ("grandstanding" as he now says) "had taken an
anti-imperialist agenda." Did that paper ever reject any articles Max wrote defending "the Syrian revolution"? I
didn't think so. Who had "an agenda"? Because it sure sounds like it was Max who was so focused on his new book
release and two upcoming book tours that at the least he abandoned journalistic values. Or did he fear that
"being associated" with a paper that also published articles critical of "the revolution" could hurt book sales?
After all, he thought it was all going to be over soon anyway.
It would also be nice for Max to explain why, once he changed his position on Syria after Russia had helped
turn the tide, he, Ben and Rania scrubbed all their anti-Syrian/pro-"rebel" posts from the internet without
explanation. How Orwellian.
Syria isn't the only topic Blumenthal wrote lies about. Him, his cohort mentioned here, and many other
presstitutes destroyed their credibility to the point where no deed no matter how valorous can regain it for
them--By their actions, they committed journalistic suicide.
It appears greed yet again trumped integrity.
It's always for
A Few Dollars More.
My only concern is that if this is the reception people can expect for changing their mind and talking about it
does that discourage anyone else from doing the same?
They should apologise to those they maligned. But is a vilificatory focus on the insufficiency of their
repentance really helping the anti-imperialist cause?
Blumenthal, and his vocal support for the Palestinian people deserves kudos. If he has
changed his stance on the Syrian debacle, good. I don't know too many people who are always
prescient enough to get everything right from the get-go, so, even without an apology, he deserves credit for
finally getting it right.
I became familiar with Max Blumenthal through Democracy Now. His position on Syria was inexplicably appalling,
but at least he had the decency to eventually call them out:
b. I'm genuinely honored that you chose to post a comment of mine. Thank you. And thank you for correcting my
errors in spelling Al Akhbar and Ben Norton's actual surname.
Once I catch up on the "news," I'll be back to check comments.
I was a follower of Max before the 2011 turmoil. I thought he was OK. He knew what was going around in
Palestine and I was pretty sure he was an advocate for the better. I dont know what to think anymore. What is
right and what is wrong. Can someone enlighten me :-(
Thank you for putting down what most of us who have been following The Arab spring since Tunisia
know about those 3 turncoats aka Triumvirate.
@ Anon #5
Speak for yourself. Those who do follow the ME knew and realised what was the goal back in Dara'a in
February 2011. It has started since 1980's and Assad didn't want to be another b---h of the US. Colin Powell
thought he could sway him with threats back in 2003 and then Robert Ford - so called Ambassador went on with
his task when he got the job in Damascus together with Eric Chevallier who was MAN enough to realise what was
happening.
Posted by: Daniel | May 9, 2018 5:10:21 PM | 9
(Thanks to b for the recognition)
I agree with b. Your comment was thorough, well-articulated and verifiable.
...and flushed out some Moral Equivalence ideologues of the Thomas L Friedman variety.
Black Agenda Report of course has got it right since day one since Blacks more than any other group know not to
trust Western establishment narratives and discourses on human rights and humanitarian intervention. Their
articles on Libya from 2011 are but one proof of this.
Margaret Kimberley's latest on Trump and Israel is
excellent as always:
here.
Oh please! The first attack on Max Blumenthal was embarrassing enough. Moon of Alabama is very fortunate to
have gained as much respect as it has; it's very foolish to squander people's patience with this vindictive
tripe. By the way I'm also offended by the fact that someone presumed to edit my Nom de Comment
"nationofbloodthirstysheep" when I made what I think was a useful comment on the Gulf of Scripal Incident. If I
had wanted to post under the name" nation of sheep" I would have done so.
Max Blumenthal's support for the Palestians, especially those in Gaza, has been solid. As we all know Gaza is
led by the Muslim Brotherhood. As we all should know is that it was the MB in Syria that began war against the
Syrian government. It took about a year for Islamists mercenaries to arrive and begin to dominate the
opposition to Assad's government. Of course, the Saudis and Qatar were financing the MB forces from the
beginning.
I noticed that many westerners who were involved in Palestinian's struggle for their rights
immediately backed the MB in Syria in the first year of the Syrian war. Recall how they came out and supported
the MB when they seized the Yarmouk refugee camp in opposition to the Syrian government. Many good hearted, but
absurdly naive, youthful people who supported the Palestians, came out and attacked Assad.
Max is one of those people. He is young and hopefully is capable of reform. We should accept his apology.
I wasn't aware of Max Blumenthal saying "Alternet Grayzone is the only progressive outlet questioning the main
line". I always prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt and respect how these writers have changed their
minds and are sticking to it, but this statement leaves a bad taste in the mouth, considering the outlets that
have been questioning it since the beginning. Perhaps he meant "mainstream-alternative progressive outlets", or
"foundation-funded independent outlets". Thanks b and Daniel for the background of which I was not aware.
it is one thing for them to be wrong and another for them to never acknowledge
it.. it is kinda like bush 2 and his war on iraq... no acknowledgement and as obama used to say, instead of
accountability we just have to move on.. bullshit.. these folks would do well to acknowledge when they are
wrong.. i don't know that any of them have..
This all sounds childish to me. Fixation on the degree of sincerity of an apology is for the playground.
They had a view they changed their view from new evidence or by reflection or both. They may have done some
harm by simply being human as we all can and do regularly, we humans being human and all.
These people fully acknowledged their error and were suitably contrite. One should bear in mind the fog of
propaganda surrounding the so-called Arab spring; CIA Isis recruiters were very active in the pro-Palestinian
movements. I actually knew some young people on the streets of Oakland and Berkeley who had been convinced that
the Wahhabi Takfiris were a persecuted minority and were nearly swept away.
Let's be quite clear about this, even if it means going off-message. The Ba'thist regime is not very nice, but
it's a million times better than a jihadi regime in Damascus. It's why Asad has retained the support of
Syrians.
The Syrian students I know have been asked to repay their scholarships. Up to 300k euros. They can't
and so are forced to remain refugees. Even the Alawites. It's not improbable that Asad will forgive them in the
end, but suicides are in prospect. They could cope if it weren't for the war.
The war is going well, but hard on those conscripted. I wonder whether it isn't really a volunteer army now,
after all the deaths. The hardened army is very small, but enough to knock off Ghouta, and enough to put a big
hole in Idlib, some time ago. my opinion is that Idlib won't resist and will collapse, but we'll have to see.
While these three did get it wrong about Syria and may not have given the best explanations of what changed
their minds, they actually come off as pretty contrite, more than I thought they would be capable of. The
podcast is useful for exposing how the Syria issue has crippled the bds movement in North America and the role
of gulf state money in that process. I look forward to what they have to say about the particularly insidious
role of IS Trotskyism in destroying the anti-war movement in the anglophone world. Its fine to score points
against these people for their very real past mistakes, but from an organizing point of view, what matters more
is to understand the situation we're in now, and they are contributing. With formerly reliable outlets like
Counterpunch getting worse on this issue with every passing day, it seems odd to be attacking those who have
rectified their mistakes.
@24
"it seems odd to be attacking those who have rectified their mistakes. "
I certainly hope that it is just "odd". I would hate to have to think that the attacks were due to their
relative effectiveness and the expanded reach of what they have to say. It's sad to consider that in the best
case envy might be a motivation. The worst case is unthinkable.
Been a student of US History and its Empire since 1960s--50+ years--and I'm being told integrity no longer
matters. Can someone tell me when the USA lost its integrity regarding its own basic law and the UN Charter it
helped create, how hard it is to discover that fact, and why it matters? In our Orwellian Age, just how
important is one's credibility, and why should we trust someone who sold hers/his for
A Few Dollars More
?
Perhaps their heretofore "expanded reach" was dependent on their message of the moment's
usefulness to the existing power structure and their willingness to sing on cue? It wouldn't be the first time
political capital earned for good cause has been spent in favor of the enemy. Liberal "performative contrition"
is meaningless. If those three have done it once, they'll do it again. They are now of no service to the people
except as examples, and absolutely replaceable.
It's obvious you're trolling or shilling. Move on to your next assignment please.
Thanks Daniel for your comment and to B who elevated it to a full post. Daniel's comment should serve as an
inspiration to the rest of us!
While attacking Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton and Rania Khalek for their failure
to apologise to people they had previously slandered on their podcast show may seem poor form, I think that
what Daniel says and B adds is relevant information to consider "going forward", as the cliche goes, when next
the trio cover another or a new Middle Eastern issue, or even revisit the situation in Syria if that should
change. Will Blumenthal et al stand steadfast in their opinion or will they revert to supporting the forces
trying to topple Assad if they sniff that the tide is turning against the SAA and its allies?
@29 jen.. i agree... it is worth reading daniels comment @163 in 'trump ends the nuclear deal' thread as well
as @156 george lanes initial comments to this post of daniels too..
i usually try not to judge people by their family connections but blumenthal's dad is such a noxious neoliberal
asshole it's hard to believe the apple could have fallen
that
far from the tree.
a lot of the so
called "left" is also infected with the "every revolution is good cuz leaders are teh suck amirite?!?!?"
disease. whether it's - as a great article i recently saw suggests - the residue of marxism or just teen angst
writ large, they just assume any leader that isn't a 100% pinkwashed socialist-feminist-____ist should be
overthrown by the "wisdom of the masses". too bad they fail to see the hands of the "elite" behind every
protest and youtube meme.
this also explains the reflexive stupidity that oozes from western mouths every time putin is mentioned
(because high approval ratings and legit election wins don't count if it's backwards gay-hating slavs).
while he and the others do write about israel, that falls into the "so you want a damn cookie?" category.
opposing israel is opposing every foul part of human nature (especially historical european tendencies)
distilled in one arid shithole of a colony pretending to be a country. his hissy fits about gilad atzmon aren't
exactly profiles in courage either and offer a glimpse of the "third way" mentality he seems to have inherited
from his father.
@14
BAR is indeed great. they have morals and convictions and they actually stick to them consistently. freedom
rider is especially good and her recent piece on israel is as good or better than anything on mondoweiss or EI.
extra fun historical context:
the inhabitants of what is now called the GCC or gulf states or whatever were one of the heaviest users of
african slaves during the slave trade. this included the barbary pirates that the US marines were basically
created to destroy when they committed the dreadful sin of kidnapping
white
people from the southern
beaches of europe. that's where the marine song comes from and the "shores of tripoli" and etc. so the marines
have basically been killing muslims for hundreds of years.
as for why the arabian peninsula has so few black folks compared to the west: they castrated all the males.
oddly, one slave helped the moors conquer spain (the term "moors" being that time's "muzzies").
UserFriendly @2:
. . . If this is the reception people can expect for changing their mind . . .
Journos, pols, and other public figures that take
strategic positions
as it is convenient to them are
deplorable.
Anyone that was honestly wrong would be contrite.
= = = =
Richard C @3:
. . . Is a vilification focus . . . Really helping
Yes it is, especially for those taking
strategic positions
.
= = = =
Anon @5:
All have been wrong some time . . .
Morons, trolls, and opportunists are right as often as a broken clock.
= = = =
NOBTS @14:
. . . It's very foolish to squander people's patience with this vindictive tripe
I guess you have no family or friends among the millions dead injured and displaced.
= = = =
Babyl-on @20:
They had a view they changed their view . . . being human and all
Not good enough Babyl-on. As a long time patron of the bar I think you should see that more clearly than
others.
= = = =
Peter Gose @24:
. . . They actually come off as pretty contrite . . . And they are contributing
I always feel that it is best to explain your mistakes and not simply apologize. Very instructive and
restores confidence. And if they were "burned" by being misinformed, they should be / would be vindictive
toward those that misled them.
@27
So... it suits the existing power structure that these people should be speaking relatively truthfully at this
point? If that's the case then I suppose the majority of Moon of Alabama's followers ( I contributed €50 by the
way) would be in the same boat. The only way I can see this working out for the ruling elite is if being on the
right side i.e. the left side, is totally marginal and pathetic, so thoroughly divided and conquered as to be
irrelevant.
I read Max's book Goliath recently. It's very damning of the rightward turn of the Israeli govt AND the Israeli
people. People in the US are nowhere near as xenophobic as a majority of Israelis are now. I admit I had not
paid much attention to support he would have had for the "Syrian rebels." But the point is to be made and it
would be interesting to know of his thoughts on his father's actions with respect to Libya. Maybe Max realizes
he's late to the party and is having a me too moment.
somebody 34
The Team Obama love affair with MB was obvious. I thought it interesting that the Egypt military put a stop to
their plans once they achieved power there. They were useful for the initial protest violence in Syria until
more support could arrive.
In a future piece, I will address what Trotsky stood for and
use that criteria to differentiate among the various groups that call themselves Trotskyist today.
Bruce @37, this is true. The proud Trotskyists at the WSWS are consistently anti-war and have called out
several socialist organizations for being pro-NATO intervention in Libya and Syria. I find their philosophical
positions woefully reductive and uninteresting (one of them told me once that both "analytic" and "continental"
philosophy are "non-sense" and that the only true philosophy is Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism, and also that the
Frankfurt school is the root of the perversion of Marxist philosophy), but nonetheless they do extremely
admirable and important work in reporting on the ground in places like Amazon distribution centers or
interviewing immigrant families terrorized by ICE. They have been speaking out loudly on Google censorship as
well, which is laudable.
On this topic of pro-intervention leftists, see Whitney Webb's response to the open
letter signed by Chomsky, Judith Butler, and others, calling for the humanitarian US military to save Rojava
and "increase support for the SDF":
here.
It now appears as though a war may have broken out between Syria and Israel. Israel claims that
"Iran" attacked it at the Syria/Israel border at the Golan Heights. See NOW (Syrian) News :
Notwithstanding Israel's attack on Syria, minutes ago, it should be noted, IMHO, that Max Blumenthal is simply
a "Limited Hangout". And in it for a "Few Dollars More". h/t Karlof1
So the Likudniks, who most resemble the Israelites from the first eight or nine books of the Torah, violent,
deceitful, putting the Philistines to the sword, taking their land and cattle and enslaving their women and
children, always falling away from the Commandments but always forgiven by YHWH, are building another brick BS
box to add to the structure that will, if the dual-citizens that stand atop our Imperial government have their
way, lead to some kind of "war on Iran."
I wonder what it feels like to get vaporized in a nuclear explosion... Expect it won't hurt for long -- less
painful than having to watch as the Fokkers who own us slow-walk all of us into economic and environmental
collapse, maybe quick-stepping now toward an answer to that neocon-naive question, "What good are all these
wonderful weapons for if we never USE them?" C;mon, all you Revelation Believers and Armageddonists, GET IT
OVER ALREADY, WILL YOU? THE SUSPENSE IS KILLING US!
I long ago rejected the notion that there will be some kind of retribution in some kind of "afterlife" where
the people who are bast@rds and sh!ts in this life have to atone, somehow. Anyone who might be a candidate for
eternity in the fiery lake obviously shares that disbelief. Fork 'em, if only we could reach them and stop them
somehow...
oh and let me aim a quote from pat lang - "Any sort of incident or provocation will be accepted by the US as
causus belli." that is indeed how low the usa has sunk to...
Sigh. You'd think that the left, whose only real power comes from solidarity, would be natural coalition
builders, but they aren't. I feel like all I ever see is ideological purity tests and an eagerness to shun and
expel people over differences rather than try and reach people where they are and work to change their views to
match your own. It just gets me so depressed because the right does not have this problem at all; the bible
thumpers showed up en mass for the pussy grabber. I'll just add this to my list of reasons not to procreate and
to commit suicide before the climate change shit hits the fan.
am i the only idiot here who thinks the idea of iran lobbing some missiles into israel from the golan heights
is like an oversized pack of lies? maybe i should take out a regular subscription to the times of israel to get
the '''real'''news..
This makes no sense at all. I can't even tell what we are supposed to be getting so angry about. Is it that
these three people sound insufficiently repentant? Is it their tone of voice we are judging? Or is it that they
took too long to reach their current positions? Personally I couldn't care less, as long as today they're
pushing the conversation in a positive direction. And I don't think there are many people out there
communicating more effectively than Blumenthal and Norton.
For JTMcPhee @44 regarding those "Revelation Believers and Armageddonists" who tipped the Electoral College
scales in the U.S., giving the world
All-About-Him
instead of
You-Know-Her
: sort of like a choice
between Genghis Khan and Atilla the Hun (or Hen).
Left Behind by Jesus
Jesus loves the rich, you know
Ask them, they will tell you so
Help the poor? Why that's a crime!
Best to work them overtime
Off the books, though, lest they say
That you owe them extra pay
Jesus loves those tax cuts, too
Just for some, though, not for you
See a poor kid that's a clerk?
Send him to Iraq to work
Jesus loves the army, see?
Just the place for you and me
Not the rich, though, they don't serve
What a thought! What perfect nerve!
If you think this life's a pain
Wait till Jesus comes again
Then on Armageddon Day
He will take the rich away
Sure, you thought that you'd go, too,
Not that you'd get one last screw
Just like your retirement
That the rich already spent
Jesus with the winners goes
Losers, though, just get the hose
What on earth would make you think
That your lord's shit doesn't stink?
After all he left you here
With the rich, so never fear
They'll upon your poor life piss
In the next life and in this
Jesus loves the rich, so there!
Don't complain it isn't fair
Jesus said to help themselves
Then he'd help them stock their shelves
So they did and he did, too
What has this to do with you?
Jesus loves the rich just fine
Why'd you think he pours their wine?
Jesus votes Republican
Ask them: they'll say "He's the One!"
Still a few loose coins around
That the rich have not yet found
Gotta go now, never mind
If you end up left behind
Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006
This "solidarity" concept is stupid. There are people who call
themselves "leftists" who demand loyalty to Hillary. Um, no, we cannot have "solidarity" with Soros' minions.
We never needed "solidarity" to begin with. No significant social movement ever really depended on
"solidarity". We must think for ourselves, not just follow the party line.
@38 Wow, even the WSWS Trotskyists buy into that right wing shit about the Frankfurt School now? Man, that
'cultural marxism' conspiracy theory is so virulent even some Marxists believe it...
The only surprising thing here is how many pro trolls jumped in the defense of the spent trio. The three have
been used up, sacrificed by their owners and there is no going back. Most of the usual good commenters here
understand this well - credibility is a bit like virginity - one can go onto an operating table to regain it,
but it is never the same.
When will the ordinary people understand, like the smart commenters here, that many
regime agents pose as anti-regime activists and journalists, to be sacrificed by their creators at some
important moment. Internet is full of such.
@38, Massinissa, yes they got a bit angry when I made that connection with right-wing libertarians and their
Cultural Marxism argument about the Frankfurt school being the source of the downfall of Western civilization.
To be fair, they would reject that whole argument as well, but they nonetheless hold the Frankfurt school to be
a perversion of Marxist thinking to be rejected entirely, with no usefulness or value whatsoever.
As I think further about all this, why do I give a fuck about these intramural cat fights among journalists and
blogers. We the consumers are not in the least interested in your petty emotional bruises over improper
apologies. This crap goes on day after day in the press - journalists carping at one another and pissing off
everyone they subject to it. The Intercept practically has a section devoted to fights with other journalists.
I want reporting, the reporting I have seen from those who are sullied here is of high quality nothing in it
indicates duplicity of any kind instead it shows almost encyclopedic knowledge of the subject and issues. I am
really not interested in the complete moral biography of each and every journalist, are you?
>>> blues
, May 9, 2018 9:00:48 PM | 52
Clinton? left? LOL Thats the best laugh I've had in awhile. I meant the actual left.
/~~~~~~~~~~
As I think further about all this, why do I give a fuck about these intramural cat fights among journalists and
blogers. We the consumers are not in the least interested in your petty emotional bruises over improper
apologies. This crap goes on day after day in the press - journalists carping at one another and pissing off
everyone they subject to it. The Intercept practically has a section devoted to fights with other journalists.
I want reporting, the reporting I have seen from those who are sullied here is of high quality nothing in it
indicates duplicity of any kind instead it shows almost encyclopedic knowledge of the subject and issues. I am
really not interested in the complete moral biography of each and every journalist, are you?
When will the ordinary people understand, like the smart commenters here, that many regime agents pose as
anti-regime activists and journalists, to be sacrificed by their creators at some important moment. Internet is
full of such.
Then ask: Is it really the case that "....many regime agents pose as anti-regime activists and journalists,
to be sacrificed by their creators at some important moment"? Is that the case, or is it not? Because if it is,
in fact, the case, then we must address it. I mean, it would be kind of stupid to just ignore that, right?
Well I have seen it several times with my own eyes. So as one of "we the consumers" I cannot just go and
dismiss it as a "cat fight".
I remember the first time Trump attacked Syrian forces was over a chocolate cake with chines president. Could
this be the same treatment or a reply by Putin if he gave a green light to Syria they can reply in kind inside
Israel, while Nuty is the guest of honor in Moscow?
@kooshy
The ayrian government is not controlled by putin. They can choose to respond any way thry want to for the
ongoing aggression and zionist invasion they dont need a "green light" from mosow you only need tosee how rt is
covering the news to understand that russia has nothing to do with thi a
I don't assume a commenter is controlled opposition "until they
prove otherwise". But for anyone named "Hal Turner" (the FBI's honeypot blogger), I have severe doubts to begin
with.
What you say is true, sorry to say. One reason why it is true is that there has not been
a viable American political left for at least a half century now and probably longer. There were some stirrings
of legitimate left politics in a few of the civil rights groups (certainly not all) in the early 1960s, and for
a long time the Black Panthers represented by far the healthiest left movement in the US since the 1920s-30s.
But the mass potential for a real socialist politics came to an end, I think, with the assassination of King,
and the local pockets of black nationalist resistance were bombed or shot or disappeared by FBI and police
forces over the next decade. The remaining Vietnam anti-war movement was largely useless. Many of them are
today the aging equestrians of the professional liberal #Resistance.
Occupy had some promise but was easily dissipated. The Democratic primaries demonstrated that a moderate
social democrat could outearn corporate PAC financed tools via aattracting a huge number of small donations
from people earning between 35K-100K (which is a *relatively* piss poor class of people, politically speaking).
Some of this momentum carried over into socialist party gains and electoral victories in 2018, and in some
states motivated a younger social democratic ("progressive" I suppose they call themselves) insurgency against
Democratic Party empty suits. How lasting and successfull this development will prove to be is uncertain. My
hope is that the 2020 Democratic primary season is much more destructive for internal party structure than that
of 2016 was; ideally the party itself would implode, ceasing to exist altogether or remade entirely on an
explicitly socialist, or at least social democratic platform, the #Resistance crew jumping over to the
Republicans.
Just go away. You are not going to fool anybody round here into taking you seriously with such
comically C-grade troll phrases as "return to relevance" and "such a divisive post."
From Ben Norton via the link given by b above ("this episode"):
"We have been criticized, mostly by people who I think have been somewhat unfair, but I think there are
valid criticisms, in that early on in the conflict we were kind of knee jerk response supportive of the
opposition out of the idea that this is like some progressive revolution against an evil authoritarian regime
etc., you know believing a lot of those talking points which we now know are significantly more complex, if not
just flat out false."
First, thanks to many MoA barflies for the kind words. I am far more often than not impressed with the
knowledge and analytical abilities of those Bernhard has attracted to this site no doubt attracted by those
same qualities in b. I have learned, and continue to learn much from y'all. So getting props from people I
admire is really quite touching.
Most of the criticisms seem to be along the lines of 'we should not
criticize people who change their minds lest we scare off others."
Of course we should encourage everyone to cut through the propaganda in every way we can. We are all
swimming 24/7 in a 360 degree ocean of PR/Propaganda of a sort that Bernays and Goebbels could have only
dreamt. I have no doubt that right this moment I hold some disinformation that was deliberately fed to me, and
I hope that I am appreciative when someone else helps to lift a veil for me.
In fact, I have no doubt that some propaganda is designed for people like myself (and others here at MoA and
elsewhere), whom the propagandists know are aware of their work, and so we are on the lookout for it. I'll
return to that thought.
And when one has a breakthrough as profound as making a 180 degree turn on an issue so great as a war, I
absolutely agree that we should welcome that person with warmth and love.
But I also believe we should be skeptical of EVERY journalist/opinion maker who has a substantial platform.
For in all but the rarest of cases, the fact of having a substantial platform means having a substantial
financial backing. Not all financial backing is dubious of course, but I think we all agree that critical
thinking should always be engaged.
So, how should a journalist with a large following who is also a significant opinion maker handle reversing
directions on a war? Should that person scrub all previous work from the internet, and just start writing the
opposite?
Or should that person help others to have a similar epiphany (most especially those readers who had bought
the product this journalist had been selling for the previous 5 years)? In teaching there is a method termed
"guided discovery," whereby the teacher lays out a path for the students to use their own minds to come to the
correct conclusion. I can think of no better time to use this method than when one is actually having that very
same "discovery" process, or had just had it.
Max could have written articles revealing one piece of false propaganda after the other as he now says he
and his cohorts did privately amongst themselves. Today, they complain that "leftists/progressives" attack them
as "Assad apologists" and such. We all know that the first response to a new viewpoint that is opposite of one
already deeply held is almost always rejection. And when the person presenting this new information had for
years actually helped instill in the audience the opposite view, it's only normal for people to become suspect
of the journalist's motives.
But that's not the path Max, (and Ben and Rania) chose. Was this a case of being a poor teacher, or
something else possibly something a bit more sinister?
Let's consider other things in Max's record. ,
In an earlier comment, I described the disinformation in Max's book, "The 51 Day War" and in his
characterization of fellow Jewish writer, Gilad Atzmon. At the least, as a journalist, Max should know better
than to spread such incorrect and dangerous ideas.
And we cannot ignore that Max was amongst the first to blame a youtube video for the attack at the US
Embassy Mission that killed Ambassador Stevens, his aid and later, two former Navy Seals (read: mercenaries).
He wrote this even before the Obama Administration officially made that claim. How'd he know? And when his
daddy sent Hillary Max's OpEd (and again Max's daddy had worked with Hillary Clinton in understanding why Libya
had to be destroyed, and how to do that), Hillary wrote back,
Another author Max vociferously and wrongly labels an "anti-Semite" and liar is Allison Weir. Everyone
should read her in depth study of the origins of the Jewish State of Israel in the Levant, "Against Their
Better Judgement" and frequent her website, ifamericansknew.org.
BTW: It was Max who coined the JSIL term for Israel which I frequently use. We can be critical of a source
and still appreciative of useful and true information from that source. Even Controlled Opposition must reveal
some true information not found in MSM in order to build the trust that allows them to then feed disinformation
into our minds.
Check out this
4 minute video
to
see clearly how Max duplicitously slanders this good woman:
So, back to my earlier question, "what would a propaganda designed for people who already know the MSM is
propaganda look like?" I think I may have provided at least one answer.
żWhen the Kent State Cambodian War protesters were shot in the back by the Natiinal Guard?
żWhen Billy Graham exorted 'Bomb the Gooks for Jesus!' at the Lincoln Memorial during those protests, and
Time Magazine called him 'America's Preacher' while recently released tapes show Graham telling Nixon to nuke
Hanoi??
żWhen thr Hells Angels beat that guy to death at Altamont while the Stones were pleased to introduce
themselves?
I actually earned a degree in journalism, even though I went to an undistinguished university and was
persecuted by the head of the department. I could never support myself as a journalist because unlike Max
Blumenthal, I didn't have the resources to travel to other countries and just do journalism. I had to do
something else to support myself. Nevertheless, I knew what was up in Syria the minute I saw that al Jazeera
had started churning out anti-Assad propaganda: this was early in 2011, while Libya was still in turmoil. There
is no excuse for anyone not to have paid attention to Libya--Thierry Meyssan barely escaped with his life after
NATO put out an order to kill him! And there is no excuse for anyone to have seen Syria as anything else than
an aggression by the U.S., NATO, the GCC and Israel. This is not about some naive kid (and Max Blumenthal is
neither young nor naive) falling for romantic propaganda: it is about the son of a highly placed CIA employee
who himself claims to be a journalist, and who was the closest advisor to Secretary of State Clinton on the
Middle East. As Sidney Blumenthal's son, Max had the best education, a hell of a lot of exposure to the deep
state, and is independently wealthy. With these privileges, why wasn't it him who was in Turkey reporting on
the U.S., NATO and the World Health Organization sending weapons and terrorists into Syria? Why was it Serena
Shim, someone that Turkey, with the nod of the CIA, could murder with impunity? And what is Blumenthal
reporting on right now? Nothing that will risk his neck or his reputation, God forbid. Taking risks is for
people like Shim, who lost her life, like Wassim Issa, who just lost both legs, like Vanessa Beeley, who has
had her name dragged through the mud by FBI agent Sibel Edmonds and the entire British media establishment.
The really funny thing here is you folks are ripping Blumenberg a new a**hole for "changing his mind" when you
guys are so wrong about Syria. Blumenstock and his friends were closer to the truth
before
their
conversion. That's right, the story you guys believe about Assad being a bit of a hard a** but a relatively
benign dictator is pure fantasy.
The Syrian Ba'athist regime is renowned for its savage brutality against even suspected dissenters. How you
people can explain away the well documented record of this violence says something about your echo chamber
state of mind. And yes the Syrian government and its Russian patron target civilian areas and hospitals. Again,
this is credibly documented. You are buying into a propaganda narrative. Vanessa Beeley, for example, is a
Ba'athist stenographer who is not telling the whole story. Before you all start hollering, and throwing
furniture let me ask how many Syrians post here? Right.
Nothing I can say will convince anyone to change their mind and that's okay because who am I and, besides,
everyone here has the internet and knows how to use search. If you are brave or not completely brainwashed yet
start with this article (you don't have to agree with everything in it) to get a sense of where your chosen
narrative is at its weakest.
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-debate-over-syria-has-reached-a-dead-end/
Have fun!
I wonder if Syria were to regain the Golan Heights of Syria and then blitzkreig beyond in a New 7 Day War,
all the way to Haifa and beyond, whether the same Rabbinicals and Evangelicals who worship Zionism would defend
Syria's right to 'the spoils of war' and then turn a blind eye as Syria blockades Haifa into a concentration
camp the way Isreal has turned Gaza into one? Would they talk about Syrians being the New Chosen of Jaweh?
Would they throw away their yarmulkels, and wear black and white Hezbullah scarves, just to be among the
victors? Would Netanyahu be treated in the press like Arafat was treated, as a loser?
I tend to give thanks for small miracles, given the dire straights the world of journalism is in. Blessed are
those who repent and at least max, Rhania and Ben appear to have sincerely repented the error of their early
days, and max, in particular, has done some truly great work, exposing the Chemical false Flags and the White
helmets for what they were and are. Sure, he and others stood on the shoulders of some braver and more
perceptive souls such as Sharmine Narwani, Vanessa Beely and Eva Bartlett, among the very - so very - few who
dared question the dominant narrative starting in 2011.
I also think that perhaps people don't realize just
how difficult it was to be a western journalist/reporter and have any kind of career back in 2011/2012 while
questioning the dominant narrative. Very very few did in the west, if truth be said. yes, there were Syrian
connected reporters and opinionators like the Syrian perspective, MOA and a few, all too few, others. But one
could count the English reporters of truth on one finger. Not just Syria, but also Libya and probably even
Egypt. So, not everyone is super-brave from the get-go. not everyone has the analytic skills and integrity of
"b", but then b is not stuck with writing for the Guardian, is he? And he and Ziad fadel hand Sharwani and
those few others we heard from, many times did not earn their living from writing geopolitic (I think I need to
add The Saker to the list. I believe I discovered him only in 2013 or so).
So, if some who first wandered in the desert got some kahunas later, it's definitely better than never. IMO,
it's kind of small minded to excoriate those who failed to see the full picture back as it was happening. Me, I
see the glass as half full rather than half empty, and as I sit here i can only wish for more converts to the
truth. Say Monbiot of The Guardian? now, that would be nice, wouldn't it?
I also would like to remind people just how caught up so many western liberals were in the spectacle of the
Arab Spring (that wasn't much in the end, and we should think long and hard about why that was so). We - as in
many of us - projected our wishes upon the Arab millennials and students, but little did we do - as in any of
us - to research the sad, tragic realities in their own countries. The dependence of Egypt on tourism for
example all but doomed their spring to another long Winter. We, who have jobs and/or comfortable positions
somewhere and/or comfortable enough retirement that allows some to post here (and post well and thoughtfully
for many, which takes time and is definitely a luxury), how could we even imagine what it means to have so
little that to lose that meager income from tourists is a catastrophe? In the end the majority of the Egyptians
went for bread and butter or Sisi would not have prevailed (please don't read this as defense of the Sisi
regime. It's just me trying to understand why the revolution in Egypt did not succeed). But all this happened
back in 2011 to 2013, and Syria seemed like one more exclamation mark on some elusive "Arab Spring". Of course,
it was no such thing but I only knew that from reading far more widely than most people do, and I wasn't a
journalist trying to eke out a living either. As commenters we have the luxury of writing as we see fit,
without fear of being fired. Anonymously too, most of us. But for reporters out in the open, I reckon it must
have been a little harder.
Actually, I am trying to work up a little piece on the mysterious - and not so mysterious - reasons Syria
became such a red line for writers of all kinds, that to cross it back in 2012-2015 meant vitriol in the
mailbox and who knows what else. Sure it became easier in 2015 once the Russians stepped in, but I am trying to
figure out why that was the case. What was so special about 2016, other than that was the year the russians
really helped turn things around? and it was election season in the US too. Still, I am struglgling to wrap
arms around this strange conundrum of why Syria?
Finally, speaking about red lines and daniel's comment. Gilad Atzmon is the most obvious case of a red line
those who write in the open cannot cross. No matter how pro-palestinians and/or anti-zionists they are. Gilad
is a lithmus test and has been for quite a while now. Just another somewhat strange phenomenon, and snother
occasion for yet another piece (which I will write under still another name - for good reason. After all, the
mere mention of the name Atzmon could be enough to get one kicked out of "polite' society....and I do like the
free food and drinks served in those societies - now and then....).
This is not only suspiciously vindictive, it's a bore. Isn't there something more pernicious to explore than
Max Blumenthal's lack of perfection? 1) The implication that he changes his positions for financial gain is
laughable. If Max is trying to sell out, he's going about it all wrong. 2) He's under no obligation to explain
his father's actions. 3) You seem to be implying that he was quiet about Libya because of his father's
involvement. Isn't that what you're supposed to do if you have a conflict of interest? 4) You don't like the
name "Moderate Rebels?" Dude your writing for a website called "Moon Over Alabama" Let's just agree to judge on
content rather than title.
Assad's opposition has turned him into a hero, not us. He is a veritable paladin next to the Jihadi
headchoppers that would take over if he fell.
And how has regime-change ever helped anyway? Toppling Saddam was a disaster for USA in terms of
international standing, financial cost, and the end result (increased Iranian influence). Libya after Qaddafi
is a nightmare where ISIS conducts slave auctions. Afghanistan's 18-year war is a quagmire of dumbfuckery so
profound that it is only talked about in hushed terms when reauthorizations are needed. In Ukraine, the West
'won' a money pit.
@73 daniel. your question "what would a propaganda designed for
people who already know the MSM is propaganda look like?" - the intercept?
@76 diana.. good post.. thanks..
@80 merlin.. thanks for your post.. i am still conflicted on the arab spring.. on the one hand it seemed
like a natural occurrence.. on the other hand it seems like the powers that be were waiting to take advantage
of it too, especially in the case of syria...i suppose we could give max, ben and rania a pass based on the
general view that the arab spring was upon the middle east and everyone knew what a brutal dictator assad was..
i think a few folks woke up during the ukraine shakedown 2014, and they might have got to thinking that indeed
the yinon plan was still on track or that general clarks comments which i quote here were indeed relevant.. "As
I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a
chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed
as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq,
then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off Iran."
that arab spring thing seemed like good cover for any number of tricks, not to mention regime change.. i
have a hard time buying into the thought that someone who is supposed to cultivate critical thinking would
overlook this myself.. maybe investigative reporters are supposed to skip the critical thinking class? i don't
buy that myself.. i relate more to diana's comment @76 and think that it is fair to criticize max and any other
number of public journalists, or bloggers.. i do it with other posters here and i get it when folks do it with
b, as a few have here on this thread, even if i don't agree with them in this instance..
thanks to the many commentators here that continue to give me greater insight to overcome the blind spots
that i carry around without being fully or even partly aware of them.. it's ongoing..
I agree with your assertions about the paid shills of our
world....they are paid to get out in front of trains not of their creation and start a parade.
Your posting has brought a new "class" of trolls to MoA. Maybe we can open some of their minds and they will
quit their day jobs.
Although par for the course for most people, your short sightedness, your disregard for factual evidence and
your sheer inability for critical evaluation is exasperating.
It is because of people like you that offer sustenance to a predatory and exploitative elite that we find
ourselves in the bind we are in.
People like you have completely bought into the narrative of the ostensible benevolence of presumably
democratic governments. People like you have completely been sold on the desirability of the centralization of
power. People like you have gladly waded into the self defeating fable of the righteousness of centralized
education.
It is people like you that happily cheer-on our elites as they gradually divest society of their labor and
their wealth by lowering interest rates artificially.
It is people like you that merrily support our elites as they progressively reveal themselves to be mere
enforcers for predatory financial interests
It is people like you that rejoice in the orgy of government profligacy that gradually weighs down the
creativity, the productivity and the mere right to existence of individuals the world over.
It is people like you that revel in the self declared virtue of transnational political entities that, time
and again, are caught abetting and often, colluding with retrograde, sanguinary individuals the world over.
You are a deluded soul. Either that, or you have an agenda.
I know how hard it is for people to change their views, my self included. Sure you could say Max and Co. should
have known better but what does that say about 99% of journalists on this planet who still firmly sticks with
and probably believes the official NATO propaganda narrative?
I think having an article and debating this is
both helpful and informative. However resorting to name calling like "turncoats" implies playing for a team.
Tribalism and partisan hackery is something we should avoid at all costs. I've been accused of being a Putin
lover and Assad lover by those who cling to the NATO narrative. The truth is I think both as assholes but I
also understand the position they are in.
Is the Baath regime ideal? Fuck no. Would a Muslim brotherhood Regime be better? Highly doubtful. Would
Al-Nusra or and ISIS Regime bet better? WTF? are you kidding me?? There is no black and white here, but some
are much more gray that others. Same goes for journalists and people, none of us are without flaws. But the
ability to change your mind and correct course is a good property especially in a journalist. This "no true
Scotsman" mentality is a luxury we can't really afford in the fight against the onslaught of corporate pro WAR
media.
Serious tribalism here, quite ugly to see, no criticism is allowed.
People that are wrong must apologize lol,
I mean get off your high horse.
Also attacking Blumenthal, Khalek, Norton, its like a teenager trying to pick a fight with a bodybuilder,
and those who play with fire is going to be burnt himself by the same smearing.
Attacking people that is on your own side, also shows how misguided these blogposts are.
Democracy Now, pleeeeease the white wash agency for USA exceptionalism and other crimes against
humanity. Next you'll be quoting the Guardian. Reposting content from either of these two is like passing round
used toilet paper for another try.
I can understand the alround eagerness to condemn. It's a standard pattern of putting the bar very high for
others. It's as people have to demonstrate how good they are themselves by condemning others. Julian Assange is
far from perfect as well but he has done a huge service.
I think it was perfectly normal for a progressives to support the demonstrations and rebellion against Assad.
This fit in with the Arab Spring and there was a legitimate aspiration for more democracy. There was also a
violent component from the start , and there were strong exhortations to avoid all negotiations and avoid all
compromise because Assad certainly was going to fall. It's to Max Blumenthal's credit that he caught on to the
component which was there from the start and which quickly started to dominate: the intent , mostly from
outside, to destroy or degrade the state. I think Blumenthal has done very good work on many fronts and I
respect him.
I do not appreciate how he bashes people who have not caught on. It does not necessarily get
easier over time to change your mind. The amount of propaganda on the issue has also increased. Once you're on
the outside it's easy, but it is also easy to underestimate how hard it is to change your mind from the inside.
I understood the nature of the conflict from the start. Therefore I'm much smarter than Blumenthal. He
should listen to me.
I can believe that Blumenthal is obfuscating his change of mind. But I've known about his change of mind for
a long time from interviews so I never even noticed the obfuscation.
It's not pretty. Ok. So it's not pretty.
Fantastic piece by Daniel, it's nice to see that some people have some standards. Both Norton and Blumenthal
have lied about various issues, not just Syria, though the way Max, Ben and Rania all changed positions at the
same time on Syria is highly shady. Same with the deletion without explanation of their past work on Syria,
Libya etc. Max has helped his war profiteer, Clinton employee father sell lies on various issues, we should't
be grateful that he(or they) rebranded on Syria after he already did so much damage. We should be skeptical as
to why.
@ Anon who wrote: "Attacking people that is on your own side, also shows how misguided these blogposts are."
Unless you want to replace global private finance with totally sovereign finance you are not on my side. Are
you on my side Anon? Do you think Max B is on my side ?
Take your obfuscating BS to some other blog you come in and say is misguided.
As C @ 91 says, the fact that Max Blumenthal et al experienced their Damascene moment (cough, cough) at about
the same time is suspicious in itself. The timing of that moment too, with the Russian entry into the Syrian
war in September 2015 and the turnabout in Syria's fortunes that started soon after, must also be considered.
One might almost have guessed that Blumenthal, Norton and Khalek were planning and co-ordinating their move
together, and looking for the right moment.
They must surely know that they are playing the role of gatekeepers in demarcating how far dissent from the
official narrative about Syria is allowed to go. The fact that some commenters here have taken their contrition
at face value and question or criticise others who have reservations about the depth of the trio's actions
demonstrates the power of that role, and why some of us might be justified in doubting their motives for acting
the way they have.
Until Max Blumenthal does something that truly threatens the powers that be, like Thierry Meyssan and Serena
Shim, I will regard him as another Sibel Edmonds--a government infiltrator posing as a dissident. By the way,
if anyone wants to know what really happened at the beginning of the invasion of Syria, read Thierry Meyssan's
writings from Libya and Damascus at the time: "John McCain, conductor of the Arab Spring" is amazing. So is
another one Thierry published on Voltaire, The rebirth of the Syrian Arab Army
https://www.voltairenet.org/article190703.html
This pissing contest comes off very much like the scene in Monty Python's "Life of Brian" in which members of
the People's Front of Judea badmouth the Judean People's Front. The ultimate insult was to call anyone with a
different opinion a "SPLITTER!" From my point of view, Max, Ben and Rania have their hearts in the right place.
(Has no one heard their saber-like takes on Ukraine?) They are not the enemy. In "Brian's" time, it was Rome,
and in our time it is the Western Empire. Let's all keep that in mind.
I agree with many posters here that the criticism of "prodigal children" of anti-imperialism should be
measured. This is a political cause, and we are not assembling an elite force that can smash most entrenched
enemies. Instead, we should strive to analyze the reality, spread the word and convert.
And we have to accept
that we differ on many issues, and very often we differ with our own past position. Back when the issue was
Kosovo intervention, I though that this is good idea. Now I know that "Beware the Greeks when they bring gifts
[Trojan Horse, for those deficient in classics]" should get another corollary "beware imperialists when they
care about human rights".
And it is not just vicarious imperialists or people who maintain civil relationship with members of Hamas
who may wrongly generalize. Assuming that Muslim Brotherhood is always and everywhere a force of evil violates
the good principle "location, location, location". Like Marxism, MB ideology has gamut of different trends, and
it is a bit to its credit that in Syria it did such a miserable job, being outplayed by Salafist -- they do not
do a good job as a warrior cult, they are actually too normal for that.
If moonofalabama has searchable archive, I was posting that it is immensely
speculative that Trump is a lesser evil than Clinton, in particular, his consistent praise of Bolton puts under
question mark all reasonable fragments of sentences that one could collect from his tweets and speeches.
Domestically, the guy is a wrecking ball, internationally -- it is still a bit open issue, I hope for malignity
mellowed by ineptitude, I mean, the outcome leave a chance for recovery. Then again, Clinton is much less smart
than some think her to be, so the grounds for opposing her more than Trump were illusionary.
I meant to add to my previous post (92) that requiring absolute ideological purity has been deadly to the left
ever since the left began. It is one of the main reasons why a broad-based leftwing movement has never taken
hold and lasted. A pox on these sectarian ideological squabbles. If the left wants to win, it must put them
aside once and for all.
Those who argue for leniency for Blumenthal and the others would have us overlook the MANY betrayals of other
so-called progressives. Such betrayals are too frequent to be just a matter of 'bad apples' or 'bad judgement'.
These "turncoats" take
strategic positions
on issues to advance their career. Hillary, the "progressive
that gets things done", and Obama, the "community organizer", are two notable examples. Another would be
Bernie's 'sheepdog' betrayal of his Movement - even after it was clear that Hillary and the DNC had conspired
against him. Such people slyly conflate progressive ideals with divisive identity politics. By throwing off the
moral core of progressivism they advance the interests of TPTB. Their many loyal sycophants and apologists rush
to defend the indefensible and try their best to muddy waters BUT WE KNOW THE GAME by now so fuck off! You
can't piss down our backs and tell us it raining anymore.
'Progressive' pundits and journalists that become useful idiots instead of watchdogs are even worse because
they claim to be truth-tellers. You don't get to lead the next parade after you've led people over a cliff.
"... A McClatchy journalist investigated further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was disinformation. ..."
"... Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma. ..."
"... The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny. Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation. ..."
"... Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them, anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them. ..."
"... No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of Russian responsibility) have been shattered. ..."
"... Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation. ..."
"... The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote." ..."
"... Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?" ..."
"... Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth. ..."
"... 1984, anyone? ..."
"... The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and other sites is just so stupid its painful. ..."
"... Presumably the Skripals touch the cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW can't even get the amounts of the chemical right. ..."
"... Biggest problem with the world today is lazy insouciant citizens. ..."
"... One very important point Lavrov made was the anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction of humanity; ..."
"... while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter envisioned. ..."
"... Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation. ..."
"... Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™. ..."
"... Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar. ..."
"... And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™ apparatus. ..."
"... Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls' school. ..."
"... In the Guardian I only read the comments, never the article. Here, I read both. That is the difference between propaganda and good reporting. ..."
The Grauniad is slipping deeper into the disinformation business:
Revealed: UK's push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance is the headline of a page one piece
which reveals exactly nothing. There is no secret lifted and no one was discomforted by a
questioning journalist.
Like other such pieces it uses disinformation to accuse Russia of spreading such.
The main 'revelation' is stenographed from a British government official. Some quotes from
the usual anti-Russian propagandists were added. Dubious or false 'western' government claims
are held up as truth. That Russia does not endorse them is proof for Russian mischievousness
and its 'disinformation'.
The opener:
The UK will use a series of international summits this year to call for a comprehensive
strategy to combat Russian disinformation and urge a rethink over traditional diplomatic
dialogue with Moscow, following the Kremlin's aggressive campaign of denials over the use of
chemical weapons in the UK and Syria.
...
"The foreign secretary regards Russia's response to Douma and Salisbury as a turning point
and thinks there is international support to do more," a Whitehall official said. "The areas
the UK are most likely to pursue are countering Russian disinformation and finding a
mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons."
There is a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons. It is the
Chemical Weapon Convention and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
It was the British government which at first
rejected the use of these instruments during the Skripal incident:
Early involvement of the OPCW, as demanded by Russia, was resisted by the British
government. Only on March 14, ten days after the incident happened and two days after Prime
Minister Theresa may had made accusations against Russia, did the British government invite
the OPCW. Only on March 19, 15 days after the incident happen did the OPCW technical team
arrive and took blood samples.
Now back to the Guardian disinformation:
In making its case to foreign ministries, the UK is arguing that Russian denials over
Salisbury and Douma reveal a state uninterested in cooperating to reach a common
understanding of the truth , but instead using both episodes to try systematically to divide
western electorates and sow doubt.
A 'common understanding of the truth' is an interesting term. What is the truth? Whatever
the British government claims? It accused Russia of the Skripal incident a mere eight days
after it happened. Now, two month later, it admits that it
does not know who poisoned the Skripals:
Police and intelligence agencies have failed so far to identify the individual or
individuals who carried out the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the UK's national security
adviser has disclosed.
Do the Brits know where the alleged Novichok poison came from? Unless they produced it
themselves they likely have no idea. The Czech Republic just admitted that it
made small doses of a Novichok nerve agent for testing purposes. Others did too.
Back to the Guardian :
British politicians are not alone in claiming Russia's record of mendacity is not a personal
trait of Putin's, but a government-wide strategy that makes traditional diplomacy
ineffective.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, famously came off one lengthy phone call with Putin
– she had more than 40 in a year – to say he lived in a different world.
No, Merkel never said that. An Obama administration flunky planted that
in the New York Times :
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking
with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call
said. "In another world," she said.
When that claim was made in March 2014 we were immediately suspicious
of it:
This does not sound like typically Merkel but rather strange for her. I doubt that she said
that the way the "people briefed on the call" told it to the Times stenographer. It is rather
an attempt to discredit Merkel and to make it more difficult for her to find a solution with
Russia outside of U.S. control.
A day later the German government
denied (ger) that Merkel ever said such (my translation):
The chancellery is unhappy about the report in the New York Times. Merkel by no means meant
to express that Putin behaved irrational. In fact she told Obama that Putin has a different
perspective about the Crimea [than Obama has].
A McClatchy journalist investigated
further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was
disinformation.
That disinformation, spread by the Obama administration but immediately exposed as false, is
now held up as proof by Patrick Wintour, the Diplomatic editor of the Guardian , that
Russia uses disinformation and that Putin is a naughty man.
The British Defense Minister Gavin Williamson
wants journalists to enter the UK reserve forces to help with the creation of
propaganda:
He said army recruitment should be about "looking to different people who maybe think, as a
journalist: 'What are my skills in terms of how are they relevant to the armed forces?'
Patrick Wintour seems to be a qualified candidate.
Or maybe he should join the NATO for Information Warfare the Atlantic Council wants to
create to further disinform about those damned Russkies:
What we need now is a cross-border defense alliance against disinformation -- call it
Communications NATO. Such an alliance is, in fact, nearly as important as its military
counterpart.
Like the Guardian piece above writer of the NATO propaganda lobby Atlantic Council
makes claims of Russian disinformation that do not hold up to the slightest test:
By pinning the Novichok nerve agent on Sweden or the Czech Republic, or blaming the UK for
the nerve gas attack in Syria, the Kremlin sows confusion among our populations and makes us
lose trust in our institutions.
Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that
several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in
Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma.
The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny.
Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation.
The bigger aim behind all these activities, demanding a myriad of new organizations to
propagandize against Russia, is to introduce a strict control over information within 'western'
societies.
Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed
with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy'
disinformation.
That scheme will be used against anyone who deviates from the ordered norm. You dislike that
pipeline in your backyard? You must be falling for
Russian trolls or maybe you yourself are an agent of a foreign power. Social Security? The
Russians like that. It is a disinformation thing. You better forget about it.
Excellent article, in an ongoing run of great journalism.
I am curious - have you read this? https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/
It purports to be a book by an American military man intimately familiar with the covert ops
portion of the US government. The internal Kafka-esque dynamics described certainly feel
true.
One of the reasons newspapers are getting worse is the economics. They aren't really viable
anymore. Their future is as some form of government sanctioned oligopoly. Two national papers
-- a "left" and a "right" -- and then a handful of regional papers. All spouting the same
neoliberal, neoconservative chicanery.
Genuine journalist Matt Taibbi warned of this sort of branding of disparate views as enemy a
month ago. He was also correct. Evil and insidious. The enemy of a free society.
Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning
of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as
they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA
will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them,
anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them.
I agree that it's difficult to see how the drive to renew the Cold War is going to be
stopped. I presume that, with the exception of certain NeoCon circles, there isn't a desire
for Hot War. Certainly not in the British sources you quote. Britain wouldn't want Hot War
with Russia. It's all a question of going to the limit for internal consumption. Do a 1984,
in order to keep the population in-line.
thanks b... i can't understand how any intelligent thinking person would read the guardian,
let alone something like the huff post, and etc. etc... why? the propaganda money that pays
for the white helmets, certainly goes to these outlets as well..
the uk have gone completely nuts! i guess it comes with reading the guardian, although, in
fairness, all british media seems very skewed - sky news, bbc, and etc. etc.
it does appear as though Patrick Wintour is on Gavin Williamson's propaganda
bandwagon/payroll already... in reading the comments and articles at craig murrays site, i
have become more familiar with just how crazy things are in the uk.. his latest article
freedom no
more sums it up well... throw the uk msm in the trash can... it is for all intensive
purposes, done..
Meanwhile, OPCW chief Uzumcu seems to have been pranked again, this time by his own staff
(this is how I interpret it):
He claimed that the amount of Novichok found was about 100 g and therefore more than
research laboratories would produce, i.e. this was weaponized Novichok.
Q: What is our reaction to the Guardian article on a "comprehensive strategy" to "deepen
the alliance against Russia" to be pursued by the UK Government at international forums?
A: Judging by the publication, the main current challenge for Whitehall is to preserve
the anti-Russian coalition that the Conservatives tried to build after the Salisbury
incident. This task is challenging indeed. The "fusion doctrine" promoted by the national
security apparatus has led to the Western bloc taking hasty decisions that, as life has
shown, were not based on any facts.
No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the
US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political
justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of
Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was
built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of
Russian responsibility) have been shattered.
Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian
logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to
see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting
countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation.
Hmmm... My reply to c1ue went sideways it seems. Yes, The late Mr. Prouty's book's the real
deal and the website hosting his very rare book is a rare gem itself. Click the JFK at page
top left to be transported to that sites archive of writings about his murder. The very important essay by
Prouty's there too.
The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is
his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote."
This one detail tells us so much about how propaganda works, and about how it can be
defeated. Successful propaganda both depends upon and seeks to accelerate the erasure of
historical memory. This is because its truths are always changing to suit the immediate needs
of the state. None of its truths can be understood historically. b makes the connection
between the documented but forgotten past "truth" of Merkel's quote and its present
reincarnation in the Guardian, and this is really all he *needs* to do. What b points out is
something quite simple; yet the ability to do this very simple thing is becoming increasingly
rare and its exercise increasingly difficult to achieve. It is for me the virtue that makes
b's analysis uniquely indispensable.
Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime,
"whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to
understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted
contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does
this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?"
Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no
essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth.
The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and
other sites is just so stupid its painful. This implies that the Skripals both closed the
door together and then went off on their day spreading the stuff everywhere, yet no one else
was contaminated (apart from the fantasy policeman).
Presumably the Skripals touch the
cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected
as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance
of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the
chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW
can't even get the amounts of the chemical right.
The problem is,,, most know it's all BS but find it 'easier' to believe or at most ignore, as
then there is no responsibility to 'do something'. Biggest problem with the world today is
lazy insouciant citizens. (Yes,,, I'm a PCR reader) :))
Did you catch the Lavrov interview I linked to on previous Yemen thread? As you might
imagine, the verbiage used is quite similar. One very important point Lavrov made was the
anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction
of humanity; and that while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the
rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of
forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter
envisioned.
"I cannot sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it is right to ban
a meeting with very distinguished speakers, because it is questioning the government and
establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead."
Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed
with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy'
disinformation. _______________________________________
Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and
including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™.
This isn't a new insight, but it's worth repeating. It struck me anew while I was
listening to a couple of UK "journalists" hectoring OPCW Representative Shulgin, and
directing scurrilous and provocative innuendo disguised as "questions" to Mr. Shulgin and the
Syrian witnesses testifying during his presentation.
It flashed upon me that there is no longer a reasonable expectation that the Perpetual Big
Liars must eventually abandon, much less confess, their heinous mendacity. Just as B points
out, there are no countervailing facts, evidence, rebuttals, theories, or explanations
that can't be countered with further iterations of Big Lies, however offensively incredible
and absurd.
Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or
technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech
Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought
off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar.
And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy
arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have
been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly
independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™
apparatus.
Even as the Big Liars reach a point of diminishing returns, they respond with more of the
same. I wish I were more confident that this reprehensible practice will eventually fail due
to the excess of malignant hubris; I'm not holding my breath.
Is Putin capitulating? Pro US Alexei Kudrin could join new government to negotiate "end of
sanctions" with the West.
Former finance minister Alexei Kudrin will be brought back to "mend fences with the West"
in order to revive Russia's economy. Kudrin has repeatedly said that unless Russia makes her
political system more democratic and ends its confrontation with Europe and the United
States, she will not be able to achieve economic growth. Russia's fifth-columnists were
exalted: "If Kudrin joined the administration or government, it would indicate that they have
agreed on a certain agenda of change, including in foreign policy, because without change in
foreign policy, reforms are simply impossible in Russia," said Yevgeny Gontmakher . . . who
works with a civil society organization set up by Mr. Kudrin. "It would be a powerful
message, because Kudrin is the only one in the top echelons with whom they will talk in the
west and towards whom there is a certain trust."
Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington
Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill
Clinton in charge of a girls' school.
It would mark Putin's de facto collapse as a leader. We
shall know very soon. Either way, if anyone wondered what the approach to Russia would be
from Bolton and Pompeo, we now know: they will play very hard ball with Putin, regardless of
what he does (or doesn't do), and with carefree readiness to risk an eventual snap.
Certainly looks like @ 18 is a fine example of what b is presenting.
A good way to extract one's self from the propaganda is to refuse using whatever meme the
disinformation uses, e.g. that Sergei Skripal was a double agent -- that is not a known, only
a convenient suggestion.
Military intelligence is far better described as military
information needed for some project or mission. Not surreptitious cloak and dagger spying.
This is not to say Sergei Scripal was a British spy for which he was convicted, stripped of
rank and career and exiled through a spy swap. To continue using Sergei Scripal was a double
agent only repeats and verifies the disinformation meme and all the framing that goes with
it. Find some alternative to what MSM produces that does not embed truthiness to their
efforts.
I realize it's from one of the biggest propaganda organs in the world... take this New
York Times report of the OPCW's retraction with a 100 grams -- 100mg? -- of salt:
Kudrin is a neoliberal and as such is an
enemy of humanity and will never again be allowed to hold a position of power within Russia's
government. Let him emigrate to the West like his fellow parasites and teach junk economics
at some likeminded university.
"... The leak, and the cover up, shows the "collaboration between the media and the intelligence community in building up Russiagate," ..."
"... The report also states that Clapper "subsequently acknowledged discussing the dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic." ..."
Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, who landed a job at CNN in
August 2017 after leaving the government, leaked information to CNN's Jake Tapper regarding the
infamous Steele dossier and its salacious allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump -
then denied his actions to Congress under oath.
The leak, and the cover up, shows the
"collaboration between the media and the intelligence community in building up Russiagate," Max
Blumenthal, a journalist and bestselling author, told Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear.
... ... ...
The report also states that Clapper "subsequently acknowledged discussing the dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper and
admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic."
Blumenthal explained that the dossier was the catalyst for the Russiagate scandal.
"I think this should be a bigger scandal than it is," he told hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou.
"... Inside the Tent gatekeepers have relentlessly attacked those brave individuals who have questioned the official narratives, but its these individuals- smeared as 'crackpots' and 'conspiracy theorists' who the public are turning to for their analysis. ..."
"... After the lies told about Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya people no longer tamely accept what the NeoCon Establishment tells us. ..."
"... We're at an 'Emperor's New Clothes' moment in British politics where more and more people have found the courage to say out loud 'The Emperor has no clothes!'. ..."
"... The elite have been lying to us and they know that we know they've been lying. The question is: what are we going to do about it?" ..."
"Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased
coverage, the British haven't bought it. Literally or metaphorically. Inside the Tent
gatekeepers have relentlessly attacked those brave individuals who have questioned the official
narratives, but its these individuals- smeared as 'crackpots' and 'conspiracy theorists' who
the public are turning to for their analysis.
Compare the number of retweets the former UK
Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray gets when he publishes on the Skripal case, with those
who try and denigrate him. My own Twitter following has increased by several thousands since
early March.
Citizen Halo got a big boost in followers after she was smeared by The Times.
After the lies told about Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya people no longer tamely accept what the NeoCon Establishment tells us.
We're at an 'Emperor's New Clothes' moment in British politics
where more and more people have found the courage to say out loud 'The Emperor has no
clothes!'.
The elite have been lying to us and they know that we know they've been lying. The
question is: what are we going to do about it?"
"... You know the rest: Libya sunk in chaos, but the neocolonial hyenas didn't care that much. They just started a race for country's resources on behalf of their beloved corporate monsters. ..."
A top member of the cabal made some statements proving one more time his level of commitment to
execute the sinister plan. John Bolton spoke to "Face the Nation" and said that the US will
seek the 'Libya model':
" We're looking at the Libya model of 2003, 2004 ... " and " One thing that Libya did
that led us to overcome our skepticism was that they allowed American and British observers
into all their nuclear related sites ... "
Let us translate and expand the latest phrase:
Once we "overcome our skepticism", meaning "make sure that our next target gives up its nukes,
or, has no nukes", then "we are free to invade". Apparently, that's the 'Libya model'. Of
course, we all know now what happened to Libya.
As Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told to Sharmini
Peries and the RealNews
:
If I were Kim Jong-un I would not be very happy about that. After all, that ended in " we
came, we saw, and he died " - I believe it was the way Secretary Clinton in her
warmongering stance characterized it.
Looking at what Libya has been made to turn into without Gaddafi there, and with the removal of
Gaddafi the way we did, I'd be very alarmed if I were North Korea, if that was the proposition
I was looking at, coming from the Secretary of State and the President of the United
States.
It appears that Bolton indirectly certifies the position supported by many, that the US and
allies invade a targeted country after they make sure that it has given up its nuclear arsenal.
It seems that the warmongering cabal understands the relations with other nations only in terms
of power and level of losses in case of war.
Recall that the Western
hypocrites eventually decided that puppet Gaddafi should change role and become
again the 'bad guy' in his last 'permformance' . You know the rest: Libya sunk in chaos, but
the neocolonial hyenas didn't care that much. They just started a race
for country's resources on behalf of their beloved corporate monsters.
Still we are talking about dismissing a lot of financial benefit, I suspect that even Pres
Macron hedged his press for a better deal while keeping what's in place considered that
potential loss.
" The missiles under development do not in any way threaten the United States and they
were not in any event part of the agreement and should not be considered a deal breaker."
They already tried this argument when those tests were conducted and failed. It's clear as
day, such tests are not on the table. Not with this agreement.
"But who will tell him? Will it be John Bolton or Nikki Haley or Mike Pompeo? I doubt it."
That is how his previous advisers were caught in a double bind. They supported action in
Syria, but not Iran. Yet taking action in Syria was part of taking action against Iran. It
appears they got squeezed by their own agenda.
I've been Bolton watching .he's fired and replaced almost everyone on Trump's in house
security council and is now firing the homeland security team members.
Trump , besides being mobbed up with Russian Jewish mafia in his personal business, is now
fully Zionized and Neoconned in the WH. He's also sweating blood over what may come out of
Cohen so he's in the perfect enraged and unbalanced mental state to unload his frustrations
by pushing the button on whoever the Jew Fifth Column and Neo psychos tell him to.
Given the choice between decimating Iran with another ME war and the complete collapse of
the US ..I am praying for a 1920′s like total meltdown of WS and the whole financial
system.
That seems to me to be the only possible event other than a bloody revolution that would
bring our corrupt and unreformable government to a screeching halt.
Yep people would suffer some but tough shit .maybe, just maybe they would wake and realize
IT'S THE CORRUPTION STUPID .both foreign and domestic.
Breaking the Iran deal is the only pre-election promise that Trump is going to keep. Not that
Trump necessarily knew it or planned it. Trump could be stopped if there was an opposition in
this respect. Trump's decision will approved by Democrats. People in American, including the
whole Congress are too afraid to say anything positive and constructive about Iran just as
they are too afraid to object to monolithic anti Putin's Russia narrative that was
constructed in last 18 months.
Everything that took place since the election seems to be a part of the Deep State
maneuvering to get Trump exactly to this point. Bombing Syria, conflict with Russia and
attack against Iran is the only place where Trump can get fully bi-partisan consensus.
A pity PG published before hearing the latest whether Netanyshu's news is true or false
– not that he could have anticipated it.
I had just come across a circular current affairs email from a former very senior
Australian public servant with interests in Foreign Affairs and Treasury matters. I have done
my best to extract the relevant parts to paste below. To save time you could go straight to
"Netanyahu". I would be interested in your or PG's analysis. It seems unlikely that the
documents would all be fake but if some have been "adjusted" you might find yourself
searching for the fake as a needle in a haystack.
Israel's Discovery of Secret Iranian Nuclear Policy
It is difficult to understate the importance of Israel's "discovery" that, after in 2005
Iran signed a deal with the US (under Obama) and major European countries, it did not in fact
comply with the agreed restrictions on its nuclear activity in return for the lifting of
sanctions which included considerable US dollar "reserves". The press conference by Israel PM
Netanyahu and initial reactions from Trump are reported in the attached Trump on Iran. This
report appeared in my inbox at about 10 am this morning but was not mentioned on "our" ABC's
lunch time news. Another one for CEO Michelle Guthrie to explain.
Israeli PM Netanyahu told the press conference in Jerusalem that "After signing the
nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret files," he said. "In
2017 Iran moved its nuclear weapons files to a highly secret location in Tehran."It is
amazing that Mossad was able to penetrate the Iranian hiding place and then smuggle the
55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs back to Israel. Netanyahu rightly describes Israel's
ability to acquire the archive as marking "a massive intelligence coup".
The "atomic archive" was compiled by Iran with the express purpose of preserving its
secretive nuclear weapons plan known as Project Amad, which aimed to "design, produce and
test five warheads, each with a 10 kiloton TNT yield, for integration on a missile. "That is
like five Hiroshima bombs to be put on ballistic missiles," asserted Netanyahu.
Netanyahu outlined Project Amad as containing five key elements described by the Times of
Israel thusly: "Designing
[I lost something here]
Trump Proclaims Netanyahu Announcement on Iran Shows 'I've Been 100% Right'
6621
President Donald Trump listens during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela
Merkel in the East Room of the White House, Friday, April 27, 2018, in Washington. (AP
Photo/Evan Vucci)
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
by MICHELLE MOONS30 Apr 2018Washington, DC2,238
From a White House Rose Garden podium this afternoon, President Donald Trump declared that
he has been "100 percent right" on continued Iran nuclear development and brand new evidence
from the Israeli Prime Minister proves that.
Moments before President Trump and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari held a joint press
conference in the White House Rose Garden on Monday afternoon, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu took to televisionairwaves.
Netanyahu announced that he was in possession of intelligence that proves Tehran has been
running a secret nuclear weapons development program (see report below on what Netanyahu
said).
President Trump was asked about Netanyahu's announcement moments later during the joint
press conference. He was also asked if he had made a decision on whether to pull out of the
Iranian nuclear deal and if Trump does decide to pull out, does it send the wrong message to
North Korea regarding a potential nuclear deal there.
"No, I think it sends the right message," remarked Trump. "In seven years that deal will
have expired and Iran is free to go ahead and create nuclear weapons. That's not acceptable.
Seven years is tomorrow."
"If anything it's proven right, what Israel has done today with the news conference and
Prime Minister Netanyahu just gave a very I got to see a little bit of it," said Trump. "That
is just not an acceptable situation."
"I've been saying that's happening," said Trump. "They're not sitting back idly they're
setting off missiles which they say are for television purposes. I don't think so."
"We'll see what happens," said Trump who remarked that many have said they believe they
know what he's going to do, hinting that they believe he is going to pull out of the Iran
nuclear deal. A decision on whether to pull out will be made on or before May 12.
"That doesn't mean we won't negotiate a real agreement," President Trump assured. He added
that the current agreement "wasn't approved by too many people and it's a horrible agreement
for the United States, including the fact, Mr. President [Buhari], that we gave Iran 150
billion dollars and 1.8 billion in cash. Nigeria would like some of that."
"You know what we got? We got nothing," Trump said of the Iran deal.
Trump concluded, "I think if anything, what's happening today and what's happened over the
last little while and what we've learned has really shown that I've been 100 percent
right."
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Watch: Netanyahu – 100,000 Secret Files Prove Iran 'Lied Big Time' About Nukes
4242
by AARON KLEIN30 Apr 201811,417
TEL AVIV -- In a dramatic press conference in Jerusalem aimed at the international
community, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday unveiled a cache of secret
files he says were obtained from inside a hidden Iranian site and clearly demonstrate that
Tehran maintained a secret nuclear weapons program despite declarations to the contrary.
Netanyahu explained that the structure of the U.S.-led international nuclear agreement was in
part based on deceptive Iranian descriptions of its previous nuclear work. He said Iran's
failure to disclose its secret program while misleading the world shows the nuclear deal is
"based on lies based on Iranian deception."
The Israeli leader presented evidence that Iran continued research for a nuclear weapons
program even after signing the 2015 nuclear deal.
"Iran's leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons," Netanyahu began. "Tonight
I'm here to tell you one thing: Iran lied."
"After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret
files," he said. "In 2017 Iran moved its nuclear weapons files to a highly secret location in
Tehran."
Netanyahu said the secret nuclear files prove the following:
Iran lied about never having a secret nuclear program. Second, even after the deal it
continued to expand its nuclear program for future use. Third, Iran lied by not coming clean
to the IAEA. Finally, the nuclear deal is based on lies based on Iranian deception.
The prime minister's speech was based on 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs that
Netanyahu said were smuggled out of an "atomic archive" painstakingly preserving Iran's
secretive nuclear program so that the country would have the option of restarting its nuclear
weapons activities after the nuclear deal expires or in the case of Tehran prematurely
bolting the agreement. Israel's ability to acquire the archive marks a massive intelligence
coup for the Jewish state.
"Iran lied. Big time," Netanyahu said of the half-ton of material obtained by Israel.
The trove, Netanyahu added, contains "incriminating documents, incriminating charts,
incriminating presentations, incriminating blueprints, incriminating photos, incriminating
videos and more."
He said Israel shared the material with the U.S., and that "the United States can vouch
for its authenticity."
The "atomic archive" was compiled by Iran with the express purpose of preserving its
secretive nuclear weapons plan known as Project Amad, which aimed to "design, produce and
test five warheads, each with a 10 kiloton TNT yield, for integration on a missile."
"That is like five Hiroshima bombs to be put on ballistic missiles," asserted
Netanyahu.
Netanyahu outlined Project Amad as containing five key elements described by the Times of
Israel thusly: "Designing nuclear weapons, developing nuclear cores, building nuclear
implosion systems, preparing nuclear tests and integrating nuclear warheads on missiles."
Netanyahu said that in 2003, Iran shut down the version of Project Amad that existed at
the time and instead divided its nuclear program into both covert and overt components.
Besides archiving the material for future use, Netanyahu said Iran continued to research
nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu called on President Donald Trump to "do the right thing" as the May 12 deadline
to recertify the nuclear agreement approaches.
"The right thing for the United States. The right thing for Israel. And the right thing
for the peace of the world," he concluded.
Well, Trump's trumpeting that he was 100% correct about Iran after Netanyahu's latest lies
about Iran could go in one of two ways:
1. Despite knowing that Netanyahu is lying through his teeth about Iran's nuclear
aspirations (while avoiding any mention of Israel's own stolen nukes), Trump could use this
as a fig leaf and choose to pull out of the Iran deal. The timing of this coincides with Iran
dropping the dollar, the same thing Ghadaffy and Saddam did before getting destroyed.
Interestingly, Russia and China may drop the dollar too. It is unlikely that they will pull
out of the deal. The UK and France might, but Germany probably won't as its interests lie
with Russia. So, even if the US pulls out of the deal, Iran still wins, and Israel/US become
increasingly isolated.
2. Trump is just blowing smoke and won't pull out of the deal, or maybe, congress won't
let him. Constitutionally, the Iran deal is a treaty, and I believe congress (Israeli
territory) has a say in it – but they have not really been upholding the Constitution,
so that may not matter. But, assuming he does not tear up the deal, Iran still wins.
So, either way the wind blows, it really doesn't matter to Iran. We are a has-been
power.
Meanwhile, Israel is poking the Russian bear in Syria by striking at an Iranian depot there,
killing many. Whether Russia provided S-300 systems to Syria or not, Iran is likely to
provide their own version of the S-300. Israel's days may be numbered. War clouds darken the
skies.
"The strategy of dragging the US into a regional conflagration couldn't be more
clear."
Israel: like a brain tumor or brain parasite, it degenerates its host's reasoning capacity to
the point where the host loses all concept of its own personal interests.
Renewed sanctions may or may not shut defiant Asian bankers out of the American market but
they sure as hell would shut American banks out of the Asian market. The message would be
clear: anyone doing business with an American bank would be subject to arbitrary actions of
the US government.
Big elephant in the room, is Russia's indulgence of Israel, letting the Israelis kill
Iranians and others in Syria, as they just did despite Vladimir Putin's empty 'warning' to
Netanyahu Putin who refuses to give Syria Russia's advanced missile defences that would block
Israeli attacks on his alleged 'ally'
A sentiment amongst Arabs & MidEast Muslims is that you cannot trust the white or
European governments, they may help you in part out of self-interest (e.g., Russia in Syria),
but they seem to always cut a deal with Israel
V. Putin always chummy with 'Putin's Rabbi' Berel Lazar of the Mossad-tied Chabad Jewish
religious cult, Putin a 'Russo-Zionist' who has Unz's 'The Saker' Andrei Raevsky distracting
from Putin's deep Israeli ties
But then there is Netanyahu's powerful new presentation re Iran
Those who argue that the withdrawal of the U.S. from JCPOA will be countered by the
continued cooperation of the other signatories to the agreement are, one might
unfortunately note, somewhat delusional. The U.S. has tremendous leverage in financial
markets.
Probably Trump will fuck over China on the Korean Peninsula and EU on Iran.
The Bolshevik MSM will blame it on nationalism as it leads to the collapse of the dollar,
as the rest of the world stops bowing to US treachery and criminality (yes, sanctions are war
crimes).
This will lead to a move for a global currency or the like.
Trump is being set up for failure. He was a buffoon (Orangutan) to begin with, not very
bright, far too egotistical and morally depraved, a perfect Shabbath goy for the
((bankers).
Iran's clear intent to build nukes, threaten Israel and control militarily and via a Shite
theocracy centered in Teheran, a vast swathe of the Middle East and Western Asia is a good
thing?
Netanyahu/IDF has the prescience, balls and military to destroy the Mullahs dream and the
sooner he does it the better for the world.
Any American that doesn't want to fight and die for the glory of Apartheid Israel is a
neo-Nazi anti-Semite!
We should be glad to see our sons and daughters getting killed for Israel's regional
expansion plans and not complain when gasoline goes to $10 a gallon, after all, it's for our
friend and ally Israel that we suffer this minor inconvenience.
Everyone knows that his Imperial Majesty Netanyhau needs a to expand the invasion of Syria
with the carpet-bombing of Iran, to help keep Bibi our of prison for corruption, fraud and
perjury.
Look how prescient Bibi was in regards to our invasion of Iraq!
FLASHBACK: Netanyahu Said Iraq War Would Benefit The Middle East
"If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous
positive reverberations on the region the test and the great opportunity and challenge is
not merely to effect the ouster of the regime, but also transform that society and thereby
begin too the process of democratizing the Arab world."
The pressure on Iran MIGHT be a backdoor incentive to stop sharing ANYTHING with North Korea,
ever again. No nuclear fuel, no triggers, no missiles. War with either is simply unthinkable
and tipping over governments leaving only rubble, dangerous rubble this time with either, is
NOT an option.
Israel can pretty much HAVE Syria, I guess, but we aren't going to send the troops and
Bibi is going to have to handle Iran at his own peril. Our interest, our TRUE further
interest with Iran at this point with the UN sitting on them is to deprive North Korea of any
further tech. Hence, the "noise" over the deal with Iran. Hope so, anyway.
You are working for a paycheck, don't just phone it in. Be convincing. E.F.F.O.R.T. Use
assorted words that indicate a sprightly, bright mind, not a poor home-office worker. Come
on.
I'm 99.999% sure that he's lying, I saw a brief clip of him and his lips were moving.
It would be a wonderful day for peace in the ME if Iran had not 5 but 10 nukes ready to
launch. I doubt that they'd be launched but they would serve as an excellent deterrent to
Nuttenyahoo's murderous insanity.
How many with knowledge of arabic, and knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program, will get
the opportunity to investigate if this is not a massive fraud ?
I suppose months will be needed to investigate.
And even is there is such an investigation, and the conclusion would be fraud, who would dare
to say so, and who would believe it ?
I did not see that Netanyahu invited anyone to investigate.
Putin is weak. Put pressure on him and he folds. Any people who trusts an outsider are
stupid–sadly, Arabs, in particular, and Muslim, in general, keep doing this over and
over again. Insanity? Dumb Arabs got snookered by Lawrence of "Arabia"/Britain into fighting
Turkish Muslims. Now those Arabs are "enjoying" life under the American jackboot.
This is not a regional conflagration, as the USA Civil War was not, as the Spanish Civil
war was not, as the Korean civil war was not, as the Saudi Yemen conflict is not.
Netanyahu/IDF has the prescience, balls and military to destroy the Mullahs dream and
the sooner he does it the better for the world.
Oh yeah? Then why doesn't he?
You know why? Because the Israelis are scared shitless of the Iranians. Think about
it: they can't even handle Hezbollah! They're not going to try their luck with Iran. Oh no!
Here's what they're going to do (or at least try to do): they're gonna try and get their big,
dumb Washington golem to attack Iran for them.
Now, let's see what Russia and China do. They've already successfully blocked USreal's
attempt at overthrowing the Syrian government. Are they gonna sit back and let them go after
Iran? Somehow I doubt it.
How many with knowledge of arabic, and knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program
Farsi, not Arabic. These are Persians, man.
I suppose months will be needed to investigate.
I don't think so.
The IAEA verification programme is still on.
They (the IAEA) can emit an official statement RIGHT THIS EVENING.
Tell Nethanyahoo to STFU and get out of here and re-affirm compliance under the
treaty.
NOBODY is forbidding Iran to keep reams of paper with concentric circles (apparently drawn
by someone who believes he thinks this should look like) on it in safes – or PowerPoint
presentations on CDs for that matter.
Do they have an undeclared stash of HEU somewhere? No? Then end of story.
As one informed observer has noted, "a train wreck is probably coming, with very
damaging consequences that are hard to predict."
You know, I agree with Giraldi's basic premise that the JPCOA is a good idea–at any
rate, it would be a good idea if Washington were under saner management.
But the way things are going these days, I say: bring it on! Let Chump go ahead and
unilaterally cancel the agreement. Either: a.) this will cause a huge rift within NATO; or
b.) all the Euro-muppets will finally see who it is that really runs their continent and
revolt against their own Quisling rulers.
The U.S. and Israel are also expressing concern about Iranian ballistic missile
capability. Again, ballistic missiles would appear to be a weapon that Israel alone seeks
to monopolize in its neighborhood because it seeks to regard itself as uniquely threatened,
that is, always the victim.
Don't those crazy mullahs realize who the real victims are here? You know, I think
Iran needs to start building some Holocaust memorials!
The U.S. has tremendous leverage in financial markets. If it chooses to sanction Iran
over its missiles while also re-introducing the old sanctions relating to the nuclear
developments, it would be a brave European or Asian banker who would risk being blocked out
of the American market by lending money or selling certain prohibited goods to the
Iranians.
Which means what? It means that Iran, off limits to USraels' various puppet-states, falls
ever deeper into the Chinese orbit, thereby strengthening the new Eurasian system that is
forming. Again: bring it on!
You put some relatively coherent comments on this site once in a while, but "knowledge of
arabic" to understand documents and CDs from Iran? WTF is wrong with you, man!
Exactly! Phil is a good man, put in years working for US intelligence, the US government,
the US military perhaps (I forget). He is unable to make the jump that is necessary. Council
for the National Interest indeed! Phil, make the jump. Realize and accept that the US is
history, the population is brainwashed and your trying to edumacate them will result in
bupkis! Then start supporting the powers that will bring down the US (China, Russia, Iran,
Syria, Iraq, etc), because they are the ones that will get to Israel and its fifth column.
The parasite has taken over the host; the host must die in order to eradicate the
parasite.
It's absolutely imperitive for the "Resistance" that US withdraws from the nuclear accord,
for it to win.
It's the golden chance for the human race to rid itself of the Anglo-Wahabi-Zionist scum. The
evil empire needs controlled wars, the Resistance needs full blown war. Unless that happens,
elites will maintain their grip over the socio-economical factors. This scum has infected the
institutions so deep, nothing short of a full blown war will accomplish this. It's harsh
sure, but ain't truth always is ?
"Big elephant in the room, is Russia's indulgence of Israel"
There is no elephant in the room. Russia is in Syria because Putin was invited by his
friend and war criminal, The King of Israel. Russia is playing the bad/good cop role.
Only a fool can't see that.
"A sentiment amongst Arabs & MidEast Muslims is that you cannot trust the white or
European governments"
If the Arabs themselves are in bed with European and American governments, I don't believe
that is correct to say that "sentiment" exist.
Maybe among some young honest Arabs, who are irrelevant.
Even The House Saud, the "protector of Islam's holiest sites" is in the bed with the
enemies of Arabs/Islam. She has always been. Today, only those we are willingly blind, can't
see it.
The House of Saud is as much Muslim as American Presidents are Christians. or Tony Blair
is a Christian.
Again, only naîve readers take "The Saker" seriously.
The man is not only a bad writer but a very bad propagandist. Same standard of Propaganda
than MSM.
Paul Craig Roberts is more intelligent and a better writer than "The Saker", but he is so
obssessed with the tree that he refuses to see the forest.
PCR is a religious man. Sometimes beliefs impede you to see the reality.
The Mullahs have been working with the NorKs on nukes. The Iranians started violating the
agreement before the ink was dry on the parchment. Anyone that truly believes the Iranians
gave up their efforts to get nukes is a hot prospect to buy the Brooklyn bridge.
Russia is in Syria because Putin was invited by his friend and war criminal, The King of
Israel. Russia is playing the bad/good cop role.
Only a fool can't see that.
So the US gave Iran $150 billion and $1.5 billion in cash and Nigeria would like some of
that. A lot of places would like some of that including the deplorables in the US. If it was
a waste and a fraud to give it to Iran why repeat the scenario with Nigeria or an of the 140
plus contries/states/ nations seeking a US handout?
Trump will pull out of the nuclear agreement with Iran because this is what Netanyahu and the
ziocons who control the U.S. gov want and the Zionists have controlled the U.S. gov for over
100 years and this control has given us wars and debt and destruction both here in America
and around the world.
If anyone doubts that Israel controls the U.S. gov , just remember that Israel did 911 and
got away with it.
Jews are religious psychopaths and so are Moslems. Why exactly is it better to have the
former, rather than the latter, be the big dog in the Middle East?
For all their other faults, I don't recall Moslems in the West trying to take over the
media, entertainment industry, education and financial systems and government in order to
undermine and ultimately destroy the host nation and advance their own race.
Strange how many people believe that France is pursuant of her own national interest in
spite of Macron being a zio-bankster puppet. France has been infected by Zionists ever since
de Gaulle had to resign and is therefore as untrustworthy as the USA or the UK.
The French simply play the role the globalist mafia assigns them at any given moment.
Just remember Iran, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan .. have never attacked America, probably never
will, unless provoked to do so, which is exactly what we are doing now.
Who has attacked America? Israel, Saudis, Pakis, our allies and traitors within our own
"government". Let that sink in. That is who our "government" is now. Allied with the enemy.
Traitors, every one of them that kiss Israels ass, sell the Saudis billions in weaponry, send
billions in taxpayer foreign aid.
9/11, Lavon affair, USS Liberty, JFK assassination, Las Vegas Massacre, many more that we
still don't know of because they control the media.
The Israelis and traitors are cooking up a false flag right now as we speak to justify war
with Iran. The provocations don't seem to be working fast enough
It is, on the contrary, an American interest not to have another nuclear proliferator in
the Middle East in addition to Israel, which Washington has never dared to confront on the
issue.
Mr. Giraldi, thanks again for another great article. However, I'm proud to say for the
first time I am able to correct you on something. It is not true that Washington has never
stood up to Israel on it's obtaining nuclear weapons. In point of fact John F Kennedy stood
up to them on it and demanded that the international community be able to inspect Dimona.
This was such an acrimonious issue between Kennedy and David Bin-Gurion that it ultimately
resulted in the latter retiring from office:
Shortly after our president's untimely death the Israelis stole hundreds of pounds of
enriched uranium from Apollo, Pennsylvania, probably deliberately transferred to them in fact
by NUMEC:
Today, more is publicly known about the NUMEC affair than ever before. In 2009 The FBI
released a detailed statement that was made in 1980 by a former NUMEC employee who said he
started work at Apollo in February 1965 and was fired in October 1978 by the present owner,
Babcock and Wilcox, Inc., for job abandonment following an alleged job-related illness. The
former employee said he encountered armed strangers on the uranium plant's loading dock one
night in early 1965. He said they were loading what appeared to be canisters of HEU onto a
truck in racks that he had not seen before. He also saw a shipping manifest that said the
material was heading to a ship bound for Israel on the Zim-Israel shipping line. He said
that a NUMEC manager later threatened him to keep his mouth shut about what he had seen.
From the mid 1980s through 2009, the FBI also declassified some of its other reports from
the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Those reports indicated that Zalman Shapiro, throughout
the time he headed NUMEC, collaborated with a number of Israeli officials.
Kennedy's death marks the end of an era when Washington (sometimes) acted independently of
Israel. From November 22, 1963 onward every US president has happily cooperated with Israel
in foreign affairs.
But then again I'm sure you know all of this history. I wonder though how many people have
pondered its implications.
" Even the generals in the Pentagon favor continuing it [the JCPOA] as do U.S. close
allies Germany, France and Britain. The ability of Israel and its Lobby to dominate U.S.
foreign policy formulation in certain areas is thereby exposed for what it is: sheer
manipulation of our system of government by a small group dedicated to the interests of a
foreign government using money and the political access that money buys to achieve that
objective."
Israel has no right to comment on Iran's nuclear activities as the Jewish state is not
party to a non-proliferation agreement. Netanyahu and Israel "are in no position to accuse
Iran of anything, they're not part of the nuclear deal, they're not even a member of the
[Nuclear Proliferation Treaty]," Hamed Mousavi, Professor of political science at the
University of Tehran, told RT.
"And we have to remember that Israel is the only regime in the region that actually has
nuclear weapons," he concluded.
I implore all readers to spread the word for people to do a minimal amount of research
about these people that threaten the very existence of the biosphere on Earth (such a lovely
little blue planet), the best place to start is " The Controversy " by
Douglas Reed
You can find it online by using a search engine using those tags.
Protect your identity.
Avoid google.
Russia & Israel are Birds of a Feather as far as I'm concerned. They both make
EVERYTHING about them. It's ALL about them. Always. How they're a People . A Proud
People with a Proud Heritage . Blah blah blah blah ..ad nauseum.
Both of them also play the Victim Card in perpetuity and as cover for their
Predations .
It's telling that NO ONE, whether it be The Mainstream Media or The Alternative
Media , investigates the Nexus between Israel & Russia. Afterall, Israel is
comprised of more than few Soviet/Russian Jews and Putin is very concerned about
Russians in the Diaspora .
In December 2016, Kiev voted for UN Resolution 2334, demanding that Israel cease
"settlement activity," which led to a short crisis between Jerusalem and Kiev, but things
are now back on track.
Israel, however, must balance its relations with Ukraine with Jerusalem's close
relations with Moscow.
Only an idiot thinks that Iran is honest. Only an idiot thinks that Iran has peaceful
intentions. And only an idiot thinks that Iran under the mullahs is a better place for its
citizens than Iran under the Shah.
Iran has been attacking other countries and groups for decades. Do you people not remember
the hostages? Attacking tankers in the gulf? Funding the Beirut barracks attack?
If you want to whine about how bad America and Israel are, you need to find a "victim"
that isn't a bloodthirsty gang of Farsi terrorists.
Had to laugh. This has been clear for as long as the US Government has made treaties with the
Native Nations.
"They and others also have noted that U.S. exit from the agreement will mean that other
nations will negotiate with Washington with the understanding that a legal commitment entered
into by the President of the United States cannot be trusted after he is out of office."
For all the people who are warning me how the evil foreign Zionazis run America, let's look
how your fearless leader Bibi got his start. Recruited at MIT, immediate big job with BCG,
the Mormon spooks' slush fund, then prompt, inexplicable Obama-style preferment by DCI Bush
and NOCmeister Schultz, then up like a rocket.
"Netanyahu was spotted at MIT in 1973 and the grooming began there when he was in his
early twenties. After graduating, he received a high paying job at Boston Consulting. His
boss was Ira Magaziner (CFR). But he quit the job in 1979, returned to Israel, starting
selling furniture at the Rim company, then organized an anti-terror convention. Inexplicably,
the CFR sent a team of their biggest guns including George Bush Sr, Richard Perle and George
Shultz to this unknown 27 year old's get-together. Once the convention was over, Netanyahu
returned to work selling home furniture for three years until 1982, when Washington
Ambassador Moshe Arens invited him to be his deputy. He claimed the choice was indirectly
made by those who came to his convention and "were impressed with his performance." That
means Bush and Shultz pressed Arens to bring Bibi to Washington. From there, they pushed his
career higher. In 1985, Shultz chaired another anti-terror convention in Washington
supposedly organized by Netanyahu. By the time Bibi was UN Ambassador, Schultz visited him
every time he was in New York, and that was often."
So don't gimme this Jew business. Netanyahu is CIA's homonculus. Israel will cease to
exist the instant they quit doing CIA's dirty work. CIA says jump and Israel says how high.
The whole US government says how high. This all comes back to your National Command
Authority, which is CIA.
Whatever the nature of the political rule in Iran, there's a signed multilateral
agreement.
Whatever you believe the intentions of the Iranians are, civilised people judge actions using
evidence, not alleged intentions, notwithstanding that regarding intentions, I'd trust an
Iranian over an Israeli any time.
As for the "land bridge" to the Mediterranean, we common sense people call that a road and we
believe roads are good for trade and therefore for peace.
Mr. Giraldi,
I generally like Your work.
Let's look at this logically though.
North Korea is not launching missiles overs Japanese waters or doing nuclear testing. Is it a
coincidence that this happened under Trump's short time in office. Ditto for the Syrian and
Iraq terrorists being de-funded, weapons shipments being stopped, and satellite /drone / etc
military info sources canceled with their forces then being crushed? Ditto for the massive
governmental changes in Saudi Arabia? Ditto for FAIRER trade agreements with China. Ditto for
unemployment rates for AfroAmericans being the lowest in decades? .ON and ON..
So why assume that because French president ..Macaroni.., who is a former Rothchild banker,
has any integrity in his opinions about Iran?
The poor Iranians, like the North Koreans, Syrians, and Iraqis, have suffered enough. My
assumption here is that the Iranian people will one day idolize Donald Trump, for saving them
from their oppressors. These oppressors include their own religious hierarchy, the
international bankers, the globalists, the Obama's, the Bushes, the Clinton's, and other
pychopathic and narrissitic power hungry predators. Of course Trump, is just the tip of the
spear. We know that components of the military, intelligence services, and other powerful
forces are openly and secretly supporting this movement toward transformation.
And only an idiot thinks that Iran under the mullahs is a better place for its citizens
than Iran under the Shah.
I'll add ..
And only an idiot thinks that Iran under the Shah was a better place for its citizens
than Iran would have been under Mossadeq had the CIA not murdered him to reseat the
Shah.
Are The Koch Brothers and The Mercers Jewish? They have no qualms about destroying the
Biosphere and they are Trump Supporters . I know Stephen Miller is Jewish and
he's one of two people to miraculously survive Trump's Stalinesque Purges .
If you're a Trump Supporter , you're an Israel Supporter and a Zionist
Supporter and you're an enemy of the Palestinians and the imminent war with Iran
is your doing by virtue of your support.
With notable objectivity, Johnny Smoggins wrote:
"For all their other faults, I don't recall Moslems in the West trying to take over the media
in order to undermine and ultimately destroy the host nation and advance their own race."
Hi Johnny Smoggins,
Bingo! A totalitarian control-priority (characteristic) is media takeover.
America's mighty Jewish Corporate Media had the advantage of an expert "blueprint" to
follow, & of course, unlimited financial means & devotional will to do it.
Please consider perusing "Protocols of Zion," in particular
[MORE] # 12, (published in
Russia, 1905), & linked below?
Libya's & anti-Zionist Colonel Qaddafi wrote a "Green Book" designed to help direct
Islamic nations in developing society's based upon Allah's "Protocols," the Quran.*
Soon after Qaddafi's barbaric murder, no one here @ U.R. requires reminder of how ZUS
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, boasted about the evil deed in a now famous "sound
bite"?
Thanks, Smoggins!
*. For those interested, Cynthia McKinney has written valuable articles on the
late-Qaddafi's humane social engineering plans.
Forgive me had I misidentified the works as "Green Book"? Likely U.R. commenter "Talha" knows
more & better than I.
I am not so sure about that. It was never voted on in the affirmative with a 2/3 Senate
vote. They had a goofy vote where it only could be undone by a 2/3 Senate vote. Every treaty
we seem to have done (like NAFTA) has never followed the Constitution for treaties. They
pretend it is something else and only a simply majority in Congress is needed.
Would the American people "forgive" him for whatever those sins were/are?
In 50 years, what would be remembered most about Trump, that he diddled little boys on
some Russsian Jewish oligarch's yacht, or that he gave the green light to US men & women
to be diddled by zionist Jews and their shabbas goy to destroy Iran for the benefit of
Israel, after which those same zionist Jews will pull the plug on Wall Street, abandon the
USA if not actively set out to destroy it, as zionists and banksters move on to better
opportunities.
We've seen this play before, quite a few times and over millennia, and the ending was
always the same: the state that hosted Jews ended up destroyed by those Jews, and those Jews
benefited and moved on to plow fresh fields.
" "By the rivers of Babylon, we wept as we remembered Zion If I forget thee, O
Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. The do-er of all these shall never falter,"
Hier said, the words taken from the Biblical Psalm 137. . . .
Hier . . . believed to be the first rabbi to speak at a presidential inauguration since
1985. . . .
has known the parents of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner for decades. . . . have also been
generous donors to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. . . ."
Hier did not recite the ending verses of Ps. 137:
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.
Our latest grandchild is not yet 3 months old.
Susan Rice's mushroom cloud imagery was phantasmagorical and calculated to induce
fear.
Biblical images conjured by "seizing your infants and dashing them agains the rocks," and
"slaying the first-born of Egyptians" and "slaying the ten sons of Haman and 75 000 innocent
Persian" may or may not be mythical; it is certain that these scenes form a central part of
Jewish religious celebration.
It is equally certain that Jews in Israel target Palestinian children, TODAY, to maim them
or to kill them
Ronen Bergman has written and spoken of Israel's use of assassination "more than any other
nation," to "change history."
At what point must we see a pattern and take it seriously?
When do Christians run out of cheeks and turn, instead, to ensuring a safe future for
their "posterity?"
Isn't that what United States founding documents promised, and isn't that why we spend so
much of our treasure and energy -- to ensure that OUR posterity -- our grandchildren -- can
grow up free of fear of having their brains dashed against the rocks in service to a
psychopathic god?
Your comment is gibberish , in the context of my comment, and it makes me doubt
that you are a real, individual person.
You have no idea what I do or don't support, above and beyond my belief that the more
people who know about the 2500 years of the Torah-Pharisees-Talmud adherents
objectives and methods, the better off the world will be.
I encourage you to read " The Controversy ", by Douglas Reed , and
thereby educate yourself.
If you are real person, please explain your gibberish, and/or refrain from commenting on
my comments, in the future.
BTW: though I see no relevance to my comment, whatsoever, I am no particular supporter of
the current POTUS, beyond the fact that he won the contest as fairly as it is won, according
the way the actual system works; that is definitely NOT to say that I support or
believe in said system. And I will say that at the time I believed he was less bad than his
cheating opponent in the general election, and I have not changed that belief.
Who cares? Atomic bomb technology is 70 years old and any physics graduate student could
probably produce a functional uranium bomb design. The sooner the Iranians have a bomb the
sooner Adolph Netanyahu will have to stop crying about attacking Iran or do it and bring
about a war that might end Israel for good.
Interestingly, Russia and China may drop the dollar too. It is unlikely that they will
pull out of the deal.
The alternative for a world Reserve Currency would be the Euro. The Euro block is about
the same size economically as the US, it doesn't run big trade deficits and it's a large oil
importer (i.e. Saudi Dollar balances could be replaced with Euro balances).
Problem that the Saudis don't have a choice in the matter – the US forces them to
hold Dollars, and the Chinese won't accept the reality that the Yuan is insufficiently traded
to make it a world currency.
So the Russians alone could switch to Euros (require payment for their oil and gas in
Euros) which would encourage the Europeans to reduce their Dollar balances. Europeans would
in fact need a dual system – reserve Dollars for ME (non-Iranian) oil and reserve Euros
for Russian oil and gas.
This would already be bad for the US financial system, and much worse if third party
countries followed the Russian lead.
What? $20,000 for that 2005 Kia? Oh, Bibi, you giveaway artist you! It's worth waaaaaaaay
more than that? How about $50,000? Or a $million? No amount is too much for Congress to give
YOU, sweet Bibi McCree!
The U.S. and Israel are also expressing concern about Iranian ballistic missile
capability. Again, ballistic missiles would appear to be a weapon that Israel alone seeks
to monopolize in its neighborhood because it seeks to regard itself as uniquely threatened,
that is, always the victim. It is an argument that sells well in the U.S. Congress and in
the media, which has apparently also obtained traction in the White House. It is
nevertheless a fake argument contrived by the Israelis.
Exactly. Israel wants to stop what is unstoppable–other nations' in the region
desire for technological modernization. This modernization means, inevitably, better armed
forces and this Israel doesn't like. In fact, Israel BSed so many people for such a long time
that now her actual legitimate security concerns are simply drowned in the flood of
Israel-inspired threat inflation and other BS she "sells" in the US.
Could God the Almighty smash this despicable cockroach Jeffrey Feltman? http://www.voltairenet.org/article200978.html
"After the vain attempt in 2004 by Secretary of State Colin Powell to transform the Arab
League into a regional tribunal, Western aggression began with the assassination of Lebanese
ex-Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, in 2005. The US ambassador in Beïrut at that time,
Jeffrey Feltman – who probably organised this crime himself – immediately accused
Presidents Bachar el-Assad. yet false witnesses were unmasked, and the accusation
collapsed.
13 years later, Jeffrey Feltman is the number 2 of the United Nations, and the business at
hand is the alleged chemical attack on the Ghouta. The main suspect is, as usual, President
el-Assad."
– Who is Jeffrey Feltman? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_D._Feltman
"Jeffrey Feltman was born to Jewish parents in Greenville, Ohio, in 1959 Feltman served in
the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv from 1995–98 He served in Embassy Tel Aviv as Ambassador
Martin Indyk's Special Assistant on Peace Process issues from 2000-01. He then moved to the
U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem "
-- Jeffrey Feltman is a ziocon arsonist, a dangerous member of the Fifth Column of
Israel-firsters in the US. Feltman is a bloody slanderer, a criminal.
This is a verbose article that tries to be too clever by half. It is all old news.
The whole reason for the JCPOA agreement was that we already knew Iran was developing
nuclear weapons. All Netanyahu (proved) is that Iran lied about it.
Anyone who believes that Iran won't continue to pursue nuclear weaponization regardless of
what deals it signs is naive in the extreme. It can can only be made more difficult.
Anyone want to speculate that Israel has already smuggled a nuke into Iran and is
perfectly happy to let Iran believe it?
Don't misunderstand me. I am not supporting Shiite hegemony. Just observing.
I'm under no illusions about Moslems, friend. I want neither in the West at all. But too
many Whites, mostly stupid Christ cuck types, act as apologists for the Jews and Israelis and
allow them to get away with far too much.
It would be great if Bibi had enough prescience to bring up his son to become a decent
human being.
Enjoy:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/09/middleeast/israel-netanyahu-son-strip-club-recording-intl/index.html
"In the tape, Yair Netanyahu, now 26, can be heard demanding money from Ori Maimon -- the son
of Kobi Maimon, an Israeli gas tycoon.
"My father did a good deal for you, brother," Yair is heard telling Ori. "We fought in the
Knesset for it, brother," Yair then continues saying. "My father battled for it, I
remember."
That's when Yair asks Ori for a little over $100.
"You are crying over 400 shekels," Yair taunts Ori. "My father sorted your father out with 20
billion dollars and you are crying over 400 shekels?" he adds, laughing.
The 400 shekels was "for the whore," Yair says.
Later, Roman Abramov, another friend of Yair, who joined the two at the strip club, tells the
men, "This conversation should not get out. God save us. God, if this gets out, it will be
hell."
A while later again, Yair asks: "Speaking of whores, what is open at this hour?"
If Putin is weak, who is strong? Show me anybody else in this entire damn world with guts
enough to resist the US gang?
Putin and Russia have been under pressure for at least 10 years and so far haven't folded.
All Putin is doing is trying to protect the Russian people from the worst of it. After all,
he is the President of Russia, not Iran or Syria, and his prime responsibility is to the
citizens of Russia.
The full court press for war on Iran has taken place today (4/30). The Zionist controlled
cable networks had Bibi Nut-n-yahoo on wall to wall coverage. Of course Trump followed the
Zionist party line like the good NY Real Estate guy he is and ate all the tripe that
Nut'n-yahoo made up (with the Mossad imprimatur) to convince the public to follow the Zionist
party line. I hope there is much push back but I have my doubts.
annamaria discussed the rather obscure activities of "cockroach," Jeffrey Feltman.
Hi annamaria,
Below is Jewish Corporate Media, Fox News Division's, brief interview with Israeli
Ambassador to the ZUS on JCOPA.
Please annamaria, for sake of "Continuing Education," watch this stilted discussion in
correspondence with Protocols of Zion, # 12, which I linked within comment 72?
Israel wants the U.S. to destroy Iran. We all get that. So the easy understanding regarding
Trump's behavior is that he is an Israeli. America First was a lie. I don't believe Trump is
an idiot or a mad man. But a case can be made. It's possible that Trump is controlled and is
not really commander of U.S. forces. If this is so and he does not tell us about it he is a
coward. Any way I turn it Trump is an idiot, a mad man, a coward or a Jew.
I'm a deplorable. That doesn't change. Trump gave us an identity and Clinton gave us our
name. Trump beat down the door. God bless him. But once he was inside he was all alone. We
deplorables desperately need leadership. Trump ain't it.
Only an idiot thinks that Israel is honest. With two liars lying constantly, who to
believe? Maybe it is best to tune both of them out and stay out of it..
" . . . it is a major foreign policy objective of the Israeli government and its
powerful U.S. lobby."
This was almost too painfully humorous to continue.
why was it painfully humorous, because it's (obviously!) true?
Germany as well as Denmark supported attacking Syria
other than tepid words about Assad being 'held to account', or made to 'atone', when has
Germany ever suggested it would 'green light or 'pull the trigger for an 'attack' on
Syria?
Wonder which Jew wrote this speech for Trump? Gotta get more vomit bags.
President Donald Trump Proclaims May Jewish History Month
May 1, 2018 By JTA
(JTA) -- President Donald Trump proclaimed May Jewish Heritage Month.
In his statement issued by the White House on Monday, Trump said that "Jewish Americans
have helped guide the moral character of our Nation."
President George W. Bush first proclaimed May Jewish Heritage Month in 2006, and it has
been proclaimed annually by the sitting president ever since.
The statement also said: "They have maintained a strong commitment to engage deeply in
American society while also preserving their historic values and traditions. Their passion
for social justice and showing kindness to strangers is rooted in the beliefs that God
created all people in his image and that we all deserve dignity and peace."
He added that: "Through their actions, they have made the world a better place."
Trump also wrote that the "contributions of the Jewish people to American society are
innumerable, strengthening our Nation and making it more prosperous," noting that Jewish
Americans have served in all levels of government and served in the U.S. military, as well as
contributed to the arts and established philanthropic and volunteer networks. He also noted
the Nobel prizes won by Jewish Americans
"Ronen Bergman has written and spoken of Israel's use of assassination "more than any
other nation," to "change history.""
And then the Jews spread the rumors of the existence of a secret cult- that works and has
been working for centuries assassinating dissidents and leaders . They live in Iraq and Iran
They smoke Hashish and they assassinate after being duped by the mixture of the religion and
the smoke.
Big elephant in the room, is Russia's indulgence of Israel,
It may be that Putin's fall back position, in the event that Israel is successful in
dragging the US into Iran, is to let the US further its own demise. He knows the Jews are
destroyers of nations and they will destroy the US eventually.
Iran's clear intent to build nukes, threaten Israel and control militarily and via a
Shite theocracy centered in Teheran, a vast swathe of the Middle East and Western Asia is a
good thing?
Yes! Of course it's a good thing, when you consider the alternative.
Iran didn't attack our Navy ship in a cowardly and treacherous act of war, now did
they?
Iran didn't send its Mossad to film the WTC being attacked with planes full of terrified
American men, women and children, or start dancing in wild celebration when the planes
exploded into the towers, slaughtering all those Americans horrifically. It was Israelis who
did that, knowing those attacks were going to happen, and not warning us Americans, because
they wanted us to get slaughtered, and cheered about it, as the flames were still burning
Americans and people were dropping from the towers to their horrible deaths.
Israel gets billions upon billions of dollars of largess from the American people, and
that's how they repay our generosity, by laughing at our slaughtered citizens?
I honestly don't know of any Iranians who would have laughed at 9/11, even considering all
the evils that the ZUSA has perpetrated on Iran over the decades (always on Israel's behalf
of course)
So yes, absofuckinglutely, I'd prefer Iran to have nukes and hegemony if anyone in the
Middle East is to have them/it. Certainly more so than fanatical, murderous, criminal,
treacherous, cowardly Israel.
Bibi belongs at the end of a rope, not lecturing the rest of the planet on his pretexts
(lies) for more wars.
We have created a world where A and master of A can have 1000 to 100 of nukes, where these
psychopaths can threaten with nuclear bombs but Iran or Syria can't have nukes.
This is accecpted as normal by not only the very psychopaths like Netanyahu or Yalom or B'lom
or S 'lom or Kagan-Kristol- Kushner-Kaplan-Kruthammer but by the folks going around
nonchalantly their daily businesses in local cafe, offices,restaurant,hotel,street
shows,school debates,town hall meetings , water fountain discussions in offices and during
breaks from works.
These same sob also say how Muslim imposed dhimmitudes on the rest of non Muslims and how
they treated their conquered citizen . One of their favorites is this – Church or
Synagogue or teh Temple couldn't be higher than the Mosque in the vicinity. This they use to
justify abominable attitude to Muslims which then transform into pre-conscious hatred and
animosity to the Arabs/Palestine/Iran.
So the US gave Iran $150 billion and $1.5 billion in cash
Typical example of falling for the pundit media.
The US did not GIVE Iran any money.
The money came from Iran's US 'frozen funds' .Obama 'released' their money, it was not US
money.
(Jabotinsky–for those who don't know–was a radical Zionist who fought with the
Irgun terrorist group against the Brits, and it was he who first came up with the 'Greater
Israel' plan that the Netanyahoos have dedicated themselves to ever since.)
Bibi's older brother Yonatan was a commander of an elite IDF commando unit which
successfully staged a raid at Entebbe, Unganda in 1976. Yonatan probably was the
heir-apparent, but alas, he was killed during the raid, so Bibi had to fill in.
Nice try, hasba-rat! Now go peddle your Noam-Chomsky nonsense elsewhere
Can they survive without supporting each and every Jewish agenda? Can they make money
unless they wet their toes in the cesspool operated ,maintained,and enriched by the Jewish
monetary system of control?
Israel Charged With Systematic Harassment of U.S. Marines
By Donald Neff
It was 12 years ago, on March 14, 1983, that the commandant of the Marine Corps sent a
highly unusual letter to the secretary of defense expressing frustration and anger at Israel.
General R.H. Barrow charged that Israeli troops were deliberately threatening the lives of
Marines serving as peacekeepers in Lebanon. There was, he wrote, a systematic pattern of
harassment by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that was resulting in "life-threatening situations,
replete with verbal degradation of the officers, their uniform and
country."
[MORE]
Barrow's letter added: "It is inconceivable to me why Americans serving in peacekeeping roles
must be harassed, endangered by an ally It is evident to me, and the opinion of the U.S.
commanders afloat and ashore, that the incidents between the Marines and the IDF are timed,
orchestrated, and executed for obtuse Israeli political purposes."1
Israel's motives were less obtuse than the diplomatic general pretended. It was widely
believed then, and now, that Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most
Machiavellian politician-generals, was creating the incidents deliberately in an effort to
convince Washington that the two forces had to coordinate their actions in order to avoid
such tensions. This, of course, would have been taken by the Arabs as proof that the Marines
were not really in Lebanon as neutral peacekeepers but as allies of the Israelis, a
perception that would have obvious advantages for Israel.2
Barrow's extraordinary letter was indicative of the frustrations and miseries the Marines
suffered during their posting to Lebanon starting on Aug. 25, 1982, as a result of Israel's
invasion 11 weeks earlier. Initially a U.S. unit of 800 men was sent to Beirut harbor as part
of a multinational force to monitor the evacuation of PLO guerrillas from Beirut.
The Marines, President Reagan announced, "in no case would stay longer than 30 days."3 This
turned out to be only partly true. They did withdraw on Sept. 10, but a reinforced unit of
1,200 was rushed back 15 days later after the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps at
Sabra and Shatila that accompanied the Israeli seizure of West Beirut. The U.S. forces
remained until Feb. 26, 1984.4
During their-year-and-a-half posting in Lebanon, the Marines suffered 268 killed.5 The
casualties started within a week of the return of the Marines in September 1982. On the 30th,
a U.S.-made cluster bomb left behind by the Israelis exploded, killing Corporal David Reagan
and wounding three other Marines.6
Corporal Reagan's death represented the dangers of the new mission of the Marines in
Lebanon. While their first brief stay had been to separate Israeli forces from Palestinian
fighters evacuating West Beirut, their new mission was as part of a multinational force sent
to prevent Israeli troops from attacking the Palestinian civilians left defenseless there
after the withdrawal of PLO forces. As President Reagan said: "For this multinational force
to succeed, it is essential that Israel withdraw from Beirut."7
"Incidents are timed, orchestrated, and executed for Israeli political
purposes."
Israel's siege of Beirut during the summer of 1982 had been brutal and bloody, reaching a
peak of horror on Aug. 12, quickly known as Black Thursday. On that day, Sharon's forces
launched at dawn a massive artillery barrage that lasted for 11 straight hours and was
accompanied by saturation air bombardment.8 As many as 500 persons, mainly Lebanese and
Palestinian civilians, were killed.9
On top of the bombardment came the massacres the next month at Sabra and Shatila, where
Sharon's troops allowed Lebanese Maronite killers to enter the camps filled with defenseless
civilians. The massacres sickened the international community and pressure from Western
capitals finally forced Israel to withdraw from Beirut in late September. Troops from
Britain, France, Italy and the United States were interposed between the Israeli army and
Beirut, with U.S. Marines deployed in the most sensitive area south of Beirut at the
International Airport, directly between Israeli troops and West Beirut.
It was at the airport that the Marines would suffer their Calvary over the next year.
Starting in January 1983, small Israeli units began probing the Marine lines. At first the
effort appeared aimed at discovering the extent of Marine determination to resist
penetration. The lines proved solid and the Marines' determination strong. Israeli troops
were politely but firmly turned away. Soon the incidents escalated, with both sides pointing
loaded weapons at each other but no firing taking place. Tensions were high enough by late
January that a special meeting between U.S. and Israeli officers was held in Beirut to try to
agree on precise boundaries beyond which the IDF would not penetrate.10
No Stranger to the Marines
However, on Feb. 2 a unit of three Israeli tanks, led by Israeli Lt. Col. Rafi Landsberg,
tried to pass through Marine/Lebanese Army lines at Rayan University Library in south
Lebanon. By this time, Landsberg was no stranger to the Marines. Since the beginning of
January he had been leading small Israeli units in probes against the Marine lines, although
such units would normally have a commander no higher than a sergeant or lieutenant. The
suspicion grew that Sharon's troops were deliberately provoking the Marines and Landsberg was
there to see that things did not get out of hand. The Israeli tactics were aimed more at
forcing a joint U.S.-Israeli strategy than merely probing lines.
In the Feb. 2 incident, the checkpoint was commanded by Marine Capt. Charles Johnson,
who firmly refused permission for Landsberg to advance. When two of the Israeli tanks ignored
his warning to halt, Johnson leaped on Landsberg's tank with pistol drawn and demanded
Landsberg and his tanks withdraw. They did.11
Landsberg and the Israeli embassy in Washington tried to laugh off the incident, implying
that Johnson was a trigger-happy John Wayne type and that the media were exaggerating a
routine event. Landsberg even went so far as to claim that he smelled alcohol on Johnson's
breath and that drunkenness must have clouded his reason. Marines were infuriated because
Johnson was well known as a teetotaler. Americans flocked to Johnson's side. He received
hundreds of letters from school children, former Marines and from Commandant Barrow.12 It was
a losing battle for the Israelis and Landsberg soon dropped from sight.
But the incidents did not stop. These now included "helicopter harassment," by which
U.S.-made helicopters with glaring spotlights were flown by the Israelis over Marine
positions at night, illuminating Marine outposts and exposing them to potential attack. As
reports of these incidents piled up, Gen. Barrow received a letter on March 12 from a U.S.
Army major stationed in Lebanon with the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization
(UNTSO). The letter described a systematic pattern of Israeli attacks and provocations
against UNTSO troops, including instances in which U.S. officers were singled out for
"near-miss" shootings, abuse and detention.13 That same day two Marine patrols were
challenged and cursed by Israeli soldiers.1
Two days later Barrow wrote his letter to Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, who
endorsed it and sent it along to the State Department. High-level meetings were arranged and
the incidents abated, perhaps largely because by this time Ariel Sharon had been fired as
defense minister. He had been found by an Israeli commission to have had "personal
responsibility" for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.15
Despite the bad taste left from the clashes with the Israelis, in fact no Marines had been
killed in the incidents and their lines had been secure up to the end of winter in 1983. Then
Islamic guerrillas, backed by Iran, became active. On the night of April 17, 1983, an unknown
sniper fired a shot that went through the trousers of a Marine sentry but did not harm him.
For the first time, the Marines returned fire.16
The next day, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was blown up by a massive bomb, with the loss of
63 lives. Among the 17 Americans killed were CIA Mideast specialists, including Robert C.
Ames, the agency's top Middle East expert.17
Disaffected former Israeli Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky later claimed that Israel
had advance information about the bombing plan but had decided not to inform the United
States, a claim denied by Israel.18 The Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.
Veteran correspondent John Cooley considered the attack "the day [Iranian leader Ayatollah]
Khomeini's offensive against America in Lebanon began in earnest." 19
Still, it was not until four months later, on Aug. 28, that Marines came under direct fire by
rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons at International Airport. They returned fire
with M-16 rifles and M-60 machine guns. The firefight resumed the next day with Marines
firing 155mm artillery, 81mm mortars and rockets from Cobra helicopter gunships against Shi'i
Muslim positions. Two Marines were killed and 14 wounded in the exchange, the first
casualties in actual combat since the Marines had landed the previous year.20
From this time on, the combat involvement of the Marines grew. Their actions were
generally seen as siding with Israel against Muslims, slowly changing the status of the
Marines as neutral peacekeepers to opponents of the Muslims.21 Israel could hardly have
wished for more. The polarization meant that increasingly the conflict was being perceived in
terms of the U.S., Israel and Lebanon's Christians against Iran, Islam and Lebanon's Shi'i
Muslims.
Accelerating the Conflict
Israel accelerated the building conflict on Sept. 3, 1993 by unilaterally withdrawing
its troops southward, leaving the Marines exposed behind their thin lines at the airport. The
United States had asked the Israeli government to delay its withdrawal until the Marines
could be replaced by units of the Lebanese army, but Israel refused.22 The result was as
feared. Heavy fighting immediately broke out between the Christian Lebanese Forces and the
pro-Syrian Druze units, both seeking to occupy positions evacuated by Israel, while the
Marines were left in the crossfire. 23On Sept. 5, two Marines were killed and three wounded
as fighting escalated between Christian and Muslim militias.24
In an ill-considered effort to subdue the combat, the Sixth Fleet frigate Bowen fired several
five-inch naval guns, hitting Druze artillery positions in the Chouf Mountains that were
firing into the Marine compound at Beirut airport.25 It was the first time U.S. ships had
fired into Lebanon, dramatically raising the level of combat. But the Marines' exposed
location on the flat terrain of the airport left them in an impossible position. On Sept. 12,
three more Marines were wounded. 26
On Sept. 13, President Reagan authorized what was called aggressive self-defense for the
Marines, including air and naval strikes.27 Five days later the United States essentially
joined the war against the Muslims when four U.S. warships unleashed the heaviest naval
bombardment since Vietnam into Syrian and Druze positions in eastern Lebanon in support of
the Lebanese Christians.28 The bombardment lasted for three days and was personally ordered
by National Security Council director Robert McFarlane, a Marine Corps officer detailed to
the White House who was in Lebanon at the time and was also a strong supporter of Israel and
its Lebanese Maronite Christian allies. McFarlane issued the order despite the fact that the
Marine commander at the airport, Colonel Timothy Geraghty, strenuously argued against it
because, in the words of correspondent Thomas L. Friedman, "he knew that it would make his
soldiers party to what was now clearly an intra-Lebanese fight, and that the Lebanese Muslims
would not retaliate against the Navy's ships at sea but against the Marines on shore." 29
By now, the Marines were under daily attack and Muslims were charging they were no longer
neutral.30 At the same time the battleship USS New Jersey, with 16-inch guns, arrived off
Lebanon, increasing the number of U.S. warships offshore to 14. Similarly, the Marine
contingent at Beirut airport was increased from 1,200 to 1,600.31
A Tragic Climax
The fight now was truly joined between the Shi'i Muslims and the Marines, who were
essentially pinned down in their airport bunkers and under orders not to take offensive
actions. The tragic climax of their predicament came on Oct. 23, when a Muslim guerrilla
drove a truck past guards at the Marine airport compound and detonated an explosive with the
force of 12,000 pounds of dynamite under a building housing Marines and other U.S. personnel.
Almost simultaneously, a car-bomb exploded at the French compound in Beirut. Casualties were
241 Americans and 58 French troops killed. The bombings were the work of Hezbollah, made up
of Shi'i Muslim guerrillas supported by Iran.32
America's agony increased on Dec. 3, when two carrier planes were downed by Syrian missiles
during heavy U.S. air raids on eastern Lebanon.33On the same day, eight Marines were killed
in fighting with Muslim militiamen around the Beirut airport.34
By the start of 1984, an all-out Shi'i Muslim campaign to rid Lebanon of all Americans was
underway. The highly respected president of the American University of Beirut, Dr. Malcolm
Kerr, a distinguished scholar of the Arab world, was gunned down on Jan. 18 outside his
office by Islamic militants aligned with Iran.35
On Feb. 5, Reagan made one of his stand-tall speeches by saying that "the situation in
Lebanon is difficult, frustrating and dangerous. But this is no reason to turn our backs on
friends and to cut and run."36
The next day Professor Frank Regier, a U.S. citizen teaching at AUB, was kidnapped by Muslim
radicals.37 Regier's kidnapping was the beginning of a series of kidnappings of Americans in
Beirut that would hound the Reagan and later the Bush administrations for years and lead to
the eventual expulsion of nearly all Americans from Lebanon where they had prospered for more
than a century. Even today Americans still are prohibited from traveling to Lebanon.
The day after Regier's kidnapping, on Feb. 7, 1984, Reagan suddenly reversed himself and
announced that all U.S. Marines would shortly be "redeployed." The next day the battleship
USS New Jersey fired 290 rounds of one-ton shells from its 16-inch guns into Lebanon as a
final act of U.S. frustration.38 Reagan's "redeployment" was completed by Feb. 26, when the
last of the Marines retreated from Lebanon.
The mission of the Marines had been a humiliating failure -- not because they failed in their
duty but because the political backbone in Washington was lacking. The Marines had arrived in
1982 with all sides welcoming them. They left in 1984 despised by many and the object of
attacks by Muslims. Even relations with Israel were strained, if not in Washington where a
sympathetic Congress granted increased aid to the Jewish state to compensate it for the costs
of its bungled invasion, then between the Marines and Israeli troops who had confronted each
other in a realpolitik battlefield that was beyond their competence or understanding. The
Marine experience in Lebanon did not contribute toward a favorable impression of Israel among
many Americans, especially since the Marines would not have been in Lebanon except for
Israel's unprovoked invasion.
This negative result is perhaps one reason a number of Israelis and their supporters today
oppose sending U.S. peacekeepers to the Golan Heights as part of a possible Israeli-Syrian
peace treaty. A repeat of the 1982-84 experience would certainly not be in Israel's interests
at a time when its supporters are seeking to have a budget-conscious Congress continue
unprecedented amounts of aid to Israel.
1. I thought it was a great line -- a funny turn of phrase.
2. You might want to keep my comments in the context they are delivered.
3. Removing the comments from their context and asking what they mean -- doesn't make any
sense to me. My comments are about the issue of whether the Europeans would be on board
breaking the agreement. I have been one who contended that would not be inclined to forego
the financial loss. But when France, Germany, Denmark, and Great Britain joined or supported
the faux chem use response. It suggested that the quid pro quo was in and supports Dr.
Giraldi's position that the Europeans are not as tied to the financial gains as I might
think.
4. Caveat: Pres Macron's press here suggests they may not have to choose. Which bolsters
the position that the money matters. time will tell.
Your comments about atonement and what not are in some other field and as far as I can
tell well off the mark. .
Oh, here we go again.. the old CIA did it meme the jooos are innocent, innocent I tell
you!
I've heard them all ..the US uses Israel to 'colonize' Palestine, the Israel Palestine
fight is the evil white man's fault for holocausting the jews, the US uses Israel to 'expand
its empire', the WASP are controlling the Jews ad nausea.
Re: Strike on Hama & Alleppo:
There is unsubstantiated report that Israeli F-15 flying over Jordan via Eastern route whilst
blending in with US coalition forces:
Here's how #Israel attacked
#Syria on
29/4/2018 using the Coalition fly zones against the #SAA
Israel after many attempts to penetrate the Syrian airspace from the west, they're now
using the east, which is poorly covered by radars, where they can blend within the
Coalition jets pic.twitter.com/hKr5IEZaj6
Just when I thought it was safe to turn on the radio . there was Danielle Pletka. (Today's
"Washington Journal" on CSPAN.) Didn't you post some background on her, or was it someone
else? (I'm just hoping there's an antidote )
A judge in the US has issued a default judgement requiring Iran to pay more than $6bn to
victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed almost 3,000 people, court filings
show.
Monday's ruling in the case – Thomas Burnett, Sr et al v. The Islamic Republic of Iran
et al – finds "the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and
The Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran" liable for the deaths of more than 1,000
people as a result of the September 11 attacks, Judge George B Daniels of the Southern
District Court of New York wrot
Iran is ordered to pay "$12,500,000 per spouse, $8,500,000 per parent, $8,500,000 per child,
and $4,250,000 per sibling" to the families and estates of the deceased, court filings say.
How does the anti Iran narrative work? Each and every lever has been joined just like it
would be in a jungle by the poachers and in a Chicago street by the Latino gangs . Then they
call it a democracy with rule of law reigning supreme .
Saturday's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, billed as a celebration of the
First Amendment and a tribute to journalists who "speak truth to power," has to be the worst
advertisement in memory for our national press corps.
Comedian Michelle Wolf, the guest speaker, recited one filthy joke after another at the
expense of President Trump and his people, using words that would have gotten her kicked out of
school not so long ago.
Media critic Howard Kurtz said he had "never seen a performance like that," adding that Wolf
"was not only nasty but dropping F-bombs on live television." Some of her stuff was grungier
than that.
The anti-Trump media at the black-tie dinner laughed and whooped it up, and occasionally
"oohed" as Wolf went too far even for them, lending confirmation to Trump's depiction of who
and what they are.
While the journalistic elite at the black-tie dinner was reveling in the raw sewage served
up by Wolf, Trump had just wrapped up a rally in Michigan.
The contrast between the two assemblies could not have been more stark. We are truly two
Americas now.
"Why would I want to be stuck in a room with a bunch of fake-news liberals who hate me?"
said Trump in an email to supporters, adding that he would much rather "spend the evening with
my favorite deplorables who love our movement and love America."
"... Demonization of North Korea was the first victim of the summit: the South Koreans saw that the much besmirched Kim was quite a worldly guy, even with a very slight trace of Swiss German in his speech. Women's diplomacy also played a role: Kim's sister, Kim Yo Jong, made the first contact with the President of the South during her visit to the Olympics. Kim's wife, a well-known actress, became friends with Moon's wife. This North Korean ruler is a regular guy, they say today in Seoul. ..."
"... But a sharp-sighted observer of The Guardian had noticed that it won't be easy for Trump to do his usual bellicose sabre-rattling after the peaceful meeting of the two Korean leaders. He has been trapped. "If Trump tries to play hardball with Kim, he risks looking like a warmonger and a bully whose policies are inimical to Korean interests, north and south. Intentionally of otherwise, Moon, a lifelong advocate of detente with personal connections to North Korea, has spiked Trump's guns." ..."
"... Actually, there is not much of reason for the Trump-Kim summit. Trump can take his troops home, and let the Koreans to settle their relations as they find fit. If the Russians and the Chinese did it, so can the Americans, too. The world, including Korea, is fully grown up and it can live without American tutelage. ..."
"... There was an agreement for the nuclear disarmament of North Korea, and the US reneged on it all right. There is an agreement for the denuclearisation of Iran, and now the US President intends to renege on it, too. ..."
"... However, if the US withdraws its troops and agrees to denuclearisation of the peninsula, and if this withdrawal will be "complete, verifiable and irreversible", there is a room for some play. North Korea would like to be treated as a responsible member of the nuclear club, on a par with England and France; it may cease nuclear tests and allow observers or suchlike. ..."
There is no doubt that the people of Korea, of the North and the South, want peaceful
reunification and the prosperity of their country. But so far the US has prevented it. The US
deep state preferred to have its military bases in South Korea with its nuclear weapons aimed
not only at Pyongyang, but also at Beijing and Vladivostok. Last year, the US brought in its
THAAD missile defence system to South Korea, directly threatening the North, Russia, and
China.
The Americans outlined the goal of the talks as they see it – the nuclear disarmament
of North Korea. This is all that interests them. A North Korea without nuclear weapons is
always vulnerable to a volley of Tomahawks, as in Syria. But Kim is not that simple. Instead of
"nuclear disarmament of North Korea," he proposed "the liberation of the Korean peninsula from
nuclear weapons" – and, importantly, these words were repeated by the president of the
South.
The liberation of the peninsula from nuclear weapons means, first of all, the removal of
American bases and occupation forces, and the banning of American ships capable of carrying
nuclear weapons from entering Korean ports. And then, without the invaders being present, the
two independent Koreas will agree on their own terms. This, roughly, is the logic of Kim
– and Moon accepted it, uttering the cherished words "the liberation of the peninsula"
instead of "the elimination of the North Korean nuclear program."
Russia as an original member of the nuclear club has traditionally supported the idea of
nuclear disarmament of all non-member countries. But it does not actively insist
on it, if only because India, Pakistan and Israel are among the new nuclear powers, and the
last not only did not sign the non-proliferation treaty, but also does not agree with any
control over its nuclear weaponry. Under these conditions, it makes no sense to insist on the
nuclear disarmament of North Korea. But, let us repeat, Russia is for disarmament. If this
disarmament brings about the elimination of US bases in South Korea, this can only be
welcomed.
The summit in the DMZ (demilitarized zone) has already had an effect. We have no doubt that
the North is short of freedom, but in the South, there is certainly freedom of speech, isn't
there?
It turned out that in South Korea until this very day no one had seen or heard Kim, the
North Korean president, on a video or in live broadcast. The Independent , a British
quality newspaper,
reported :
Until the meeting, many South Koreans had never actually heard Kim Jong-un speak. The
leader is usually seen only in heavily edited footage, and accessing more videos of him can
land people in jail. "I can't believe I'm listening to the voice of Kim Jong Un. Someone I
have only seen as a jpeg is speaking now," South Korean Lee Yeon-su wrote on Twitter. It is a
dramatic change for South Koreans, who under the National Security Act are banned on threat
of jail from accessing media considered pro-North Korean.
Internet resources "sympathetic to North Korea" or, worse, praising North Korea, are banned
there; and accessing such sites, or listening to Pyongyang Radio can send a South Korean to
prison for several years. A good word about the northern neighbour can earn you a long stretch
in jail under the Law on Combating Terrorism.(The law also provides for the death penalty, but
it has not been used for the last ten years.) Anti-communist propaganda in the South is part of
the school curriculum, part of the news program, part of everyday life.
After the summit, the surprised South Koreans wrote in their social media that the bloody
tyrant from the North looked like a teddy bear, small, plump and cute.
And he speaks the same language as they do. And he eats buckwheat noodles, which they
love.
ORDER IT NOW
Demonization of North Korea was the first victim of the summit: the South Koreans saw
that the much besmirched Kim was quite a worldly guy, even with a very slight trace of Swiss
German in his speech. Women's diplomacy also played a role: Kim's sister, Kim Yo Jong, made the
first contact with the President of the South during her visit to the Olympics. Kim's wife, a
well-known actress, became friends with Moon's wife. This North Korean ruler is a regular guy,
they say today in Seoul.
At the NATO headquarters there was a lot of teeth gnashing and demands not to relax the
sanctions, or rather to add some more sanctions. The Western mainstream media keeps saying that
this summit had been just a preparation for the real main thing, for the meeting of Kim and
Trump. But a sharp-sighted observer of The
Guardian had noticed that it won't be easy for Trump to do his usual bellicose
sabre-rattling after the peaceful meeting of the two Korean leaders. He has been trapped. "If
Trump tries to play hardball with Kim, he risks looking like a warmonger and a bully whose
policies are inimical to Korean interests, north and south. Intentionally of otherwise, Moon, a
lifelong advocate of detente with personal connections to North Korea, has spiked Trump's
guns."
Actually, there is not much of reason for the Trump-Kim summit. Trump can take his
troops home, and let the Koreans to settle their relations as they find fit. If the Russians
and the Chinese did it, so can the Americans, too. The world, including Korea, is fully grown
up and it can live without American tutelage.
It won't be easy sailing. The US wants to keep its fingers in, and demands "complete,
verifiable and irreversible" disarmament of North Korea. But Kim knows what had happened to
countries and leaders that trusted the US promises and disarmed. Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein
disarmed, and were brutally killed. Russia disarmed in 1991 only to find itself being treated
as irrelevant. The US walked out of treaties made in the Soviet days without as much as "by
your leave". Non-nuclear North Korea would already be bombed, as it was in 1950-1953. Nothing
indicates that Kim is a suicidal maniac or a new Gorbachev.
There was an agreement for the nuclear disarmament of North Korea, and the US reneged on
it all right. There is an agreement for the denuclearisation of Iran, and now the US President
intends to renege on it, too.
However, if the US withdraws its troops and agrees to denuclearisation of the peninsula,
and if this withdrawal will be "complete, verifiable and irreversible", there is a room for
some play. North Korea would like to be treated as a responsible member of the nuclear club, on
a par with England and France; it may cease nuclear tests and allow observers or
suchlike.
Israel, this important power behind the Capitol Hill, bears a strong animosity against North
Korea, for North Korea has been instrumental in providing missile technology to the Axis of
Resistance.
The Russians are not going to great lengths for the sake of North Korea. The relations
between two neighbours are cool, mutual trade is small. Russia will probably follow China's
line regarding Korea. The Chinese would like to see a more obedient North Korea, but they are
used to fierce Korean independence by now. They apparently agreed to Kim's steps during recent
Kim's meeting with President Xi.
In such a happy, happy day for Korea, I do not want to think about possible complications.
For the first time in years, light has appeared in the gloomy skies of Korea, divided in 1945,
and never reunited, unlike Vietnam and Germany. Maybe now it's Korea's turn?
"... Those who argue that the withdrawal of the U.S. from JCPOA will be countered by the continued cooperation of the other signatories to the agreement are, one might unfortunately note, somewhat delusional. The U.S. has tremendous leverage in financial markets. ..."
"... The United States could force the entire JCPOA quid pro quo agreement to collapse, and that might be precisely what the White House intends to do. ..."
"... Add into the equation the clearly expressed and oft-times repeated Israeli intention to begin a war with Iran, starting in Syria, sooner rather than later, a disaster for American foreign policy is developing that might well make Iraq and Afghanistan look like cake walks. Iran will surely strike back in response either to the termination of the JCPOA or to Israeli bombing of its militiamen and surrogates in Syria. ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
The analysis of the recent exchanges
between French President Emmanuel Macron and President Donald Trump suggest that Washington is most likely
about to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement with Iran that was
signed by the U.S. and five other governments in July 2015. The decision will likely be made public before
the deadline on re-ratifying the agreement, which is May 12
th
. As one informed observer
has noted
, "a train wreck is probably coming, with very damaging consequences that are hard to predict."
Macron was polite, both in his meeting
with Trump and during his speech before Congress, not hammering on the unimaginable awfulness of the White
House decision while also offering an alternative, i.e. cooperation with the United States to improve the
nuclear agreement while also supporting the principle that it is worth saving. Whether that subtle nudge,
coupled with a pledge that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon, will be enough to change minds either in
Congress or the White House is questionable as the unfortunate truth is that going to war with Iran is
popular among the policy makers and media for the usual reason: it is a major foreign policy objective of
the Israeli government and its powerful U.S. lobby.
Iran has been vilified for decades in the
American media and it rarely gets a fair hearing anywhere, even when its behavior has not been particularly
objectionable. Currently, it is regularly demonized by the Israelis and their supporters over its apparent
plan to create an arc of Shi'a states extending through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, a so-called "land bridge"
to the Mediterranean Sea. What that would accomplish exactly has never really been made clear and it assumes
that the Syrians and Iraqis would happily surrender their sovereignty to further the project.
The Iranians for their part have made it
clear that no modification of the agreement is possible. They note, correctly, that the JCPOA was not a
bilateral commitment made between Tehran and Washington. It also included as signatories Russia, China,
France, Britain and the European Union and was ratified by the United Nations (P5+1). They and others also
have noted that U.S. exit from the agreement will mean that other nations will negotiate with Washington
with the understanding that a legal commitment entered into by the President of the United States cannot be
trusted after he is out of office.
Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to
eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%, and
reduce by two-thirds the number of its gas centrifuges for 13 years. For the next 15 years, Iran will only
enrich uranium up to non-weapons level of 3.67%. Iran also pledged not to build any new heavy-water
facilities and to limit uranium-enrichment activities for research and medical purposes to a plant using old
technology centrifuges for a period of 10 years. To guarantee compliance with the agreement, Iran accepted
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) proposal that it have highly intrusive access by a team of
unannounced inspectors of all the country's nuclear facilities. In return, Iran was to receive relief from
U.S., European Union, and United Nations Security Council sanctions, an aspect of the agreement that the
United States has never fully complied with.
Trump's objection to the agreement is
that it is a "bad deal" that virtually guarantees that Iran will have a nuclear weapon somewhere down the
road. There is, however, no factual basis for that claim and that it is being made at all is largely
reflective of Israeli and Israel Lobby propaganda. It is, on the contrary, an American interest not to have
another nuclear proliferator in the Middle East in addition to Israel, which Washington has never dared to
confront on the issue. The JCPOA agreement guarantees that Iran will not work to develop a weapon for at
least ten years which is a considerable benefit considering that Tehran, if it had chosen to initiate such a
program, could easily have had breakout capability in one year.
The U.S. and Israel are also expressing
concern about Iranian ballistic missile capability. Again, ballistic missiles would appear to be a weapon
that Israel alone seeks to monopolize in its neighborhood because it seeks to regard itself as uniquely
threatened, that is, always the victim. It is an argument that sells well in the U.S. Congress and in the
media, which has apparently also obtained traction in the White House. It is nevertheless a fake argument
contrived by the Israelis. The missiles under development do not in any way threaten the United States and
they were not in any event part of the agreement and should not be considered a deal breaker.
Ironically, the JCPOA is approved of by
most Americans because it prevents the development of yet another potentially hostile nuclear armed power in
a volatile part of the world. American Jews, in fact, support it more than other Americans, according to
opinion polls. Even the generals in the Pentagon favor continuing it as do U.S. close allies Germany, France
and Britain. The ability of Israel and its Lobby to dominate U.S. foreign policy formulation in certain
areas is thereby exposed for what it is: sheer manipulation of our system of government by a small group
dedicated to the interests of a foreign government using money and the political access that money buys to
achieve that objective.
Those who argue that the withdrawal
of the U.S. from JCPOA will be countered by the continued cooperation of the other signatories to the
agreement are, one might unfortunately note, somewhat delusional. The U.S. has tremendous leverage in
financial markets.
If it chooses to sanction Iran over its missiles while also re-introducing the old
sanctions relating to the nuclear developments, it would be a brave European or Asian banker who would risk
being blocked out of the American market by lending money or selling certain prohibited goods to the
Iranians.
The United States could force the entire JCPOA quid pro quo agreement to collapse, and
that might be precisely what the White House intends to do.
Add into the equation the clearly
expressed and oft-times repeated
Israeli intention
to begin a war with Iran, starting in Syria, sooner rather than later, a disaster for
American foreign policy is developing that might well make Iraq and Afghanistan look like cake walks. Iran
will surely strike back in response either to the termination of the JCPOA or to Israeli bombing of its
militiamen and surrogates in Syria.
America forces in the region will surely be sucked into the
conflict by Israel and will wind up taking the fall. Someone should tell Donald Trump that there are real
world consequences for breaking agreements and rattling sabers. But who will tell him? Will it be John
Bolton or Nikki Haley or Mike Pompeo? I doubt it.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is
Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation
that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is
[email protected].
I am beginning to think the astonishing real capitulation of South Korean Government to North Korea demands
and Trump's acquiescence in this is a prelude to the war on Iran. Now Netanyahu has announced the casus
belli. Israel plots its wars and never fights a war on two fronts. hope I am wrong.
"... Today, Theresa May is claiming -astonishingly – that the UK attack on Syria is "to deter chemical weapons attacks in Syria and the UK". I don't think the motive for a Skripal false flag could be more starkly demonstrated. ..."
"... It is also worth noting that the most ardent supporters of this military action, outside Saudi Arabia and Israel, are the Blairites in the UK and the Clinton Democrats in the USA. The self-described "centrists" are actually the unhinged extremists in today's politics. ..."
"... This attack on Syria is, beyond doubt, a huge success for the machinations of Mohammed Bin Salman. Please do read my post of 8 March which sets out the background to his agenda, and I believe is essential to why we find our nations in military action again today. Despite the fact the vast majority of the people do not want this ..."
March 4 2018 Sergei and Yulia Skripal are attacked with a nerve agent in Salisbury
March 6 2018 Boris Johnson
blames Russia and calls Russia "a malign force"
March 7 2018 Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia arrives in
London for an official visit
March 13 2018 Valeri Gerasimov, Russian Chief of General Staff,
states that Russia has intelligence a fake chemical attack is planned against civilians
in Syria as a pretext for US bombing of Damascus, and that Russia will respond
militarily.
March 19 2018 Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia arrives
in Washington for an official visit
April 8 2018 Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia arrives
in Paris for an official visit
April 8 2018 Saudi funded jihadist groups Jaysh
al Islam and Tahrir al-Sham and UK funded
jihadist "rescue group" The White Helmets claim a chemical weapons attack occurred in
their enclave of Douma the previous day – just before its agreed handover to the Syrian
army – and blame the Syrian government.
April 11 2018 Saudi Arabia pledges
support for attack on Syria
April 14 2018 US/UK/French attack on Syria begins.
I have always denied the UK's claim that only Russia had a motive to attack the Skripals. To
denigrate Russia internationally by a false flag attack pinning the blame on Russia, always
seemed to me more likely than for the Russians to do that to themselves. And from the start I
pointed to the conflict in Syria as a likely motive. That puts Saudi Arabia (and its client
jihadists), Saudi Arabia's close ally Israel, the UK and the USA all in the frame in having a
powerful motive in inculcating anti-Russian sentiment prior to planned conflict with Russia in
Syria. Any of them could have attacked the Skripals.
Today, Theresa May
is claiming -astonishingly – that the UK attack on Syria is "to deter chemical
weapons attacks in Syria and the UK". I don't think the motive for a Skripal false flag could
be more starkly demonstrated.
We do not yet know how many children and other civilians have died so far in what the media
always pretend are magically "pinpoint" attacks on Syria. Denying the "collateral damage" is
part of the neo-con playbook. The danger is that they will not stop but continue to push,
testing how far they can go in weakening Syrian government forces to promote their jihadist
allies on the ground, before they spark a real Russian reaction. That way madness lies.
It is also worth noting that the most ardent supporters of this military action, outside
Saudi Arabia and Israel, are the Blairites in the UK and the Clinton Democrats in the USA. The
self-described "centrists" are actually the unhinged extremists in today's politics.
This attack on Syria is, beyond doubt, a huge success for the machinations of Mohammed
Bin Salman. Please do read my post of 8 March which sets
out the background to his agenda, and I believe is essential to why we find our nations in
military action again today. Despite the fact the vast majority of the people do not want
this
Recall it is Mike Pompeo who has been responsible for the effort to stop CIA support for
ISIS, on directions from Donald J. Trump and the Pentagon faction which essentially
controls the White House.
Mike Pompeo was President of Sentry International, an oilfield equipment company and
close partner of Koch Industries. Also recall the recent meeting between the heads of the
FSB and SVR, Alexander Bortnikov and Sergey Naryshkin, received by Pompeo, then director of
the CIA, and Dan Coats, director of National Intelligence.
Alexander Bortnikov and Sergey Naryshkin Secretly Received in the United States
In hindsight this meeting appears to have been a strategy session conducted by extremely
important high level individuals from Russia with their 'partners' in the United
States.
The meeting occurred immediately before the firing of Rex Tillerson, an agent of the
UK-Rothchild 'Octopus,' which effectively controls Exxon-Mobil (the Rockefellers sold their
interest several years ago) of which Tillerson was formerly head. Tillerson, who once ran
the foreign policies of multiple countries dominated by Exxon-Mobil including Qatar, was
said to have been caught red-handed by the NSA under James Kelly, of assisting the UK
conspiracy to launch a chemical false flag attack in Eastern Ghouta, the discovery of which
led to Tillerson's unceremonious dismissal by Donald Trump via Twitter, a truly
unprecedented way to fire a US Secretary of State.
The lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), naming WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange as co-conspirators
with Russia and the Trump campaign in a criminal effort to steal the 2016 US presidential election, is a frontal assault on democratic
rights. It tramples on the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which establishes freedom of the press and freedom of speech as
fundamental rights.
Neither the Democratic Party lawsuit nor the media commentaries on it acknowledge that WikiLeaks is engaged in journalism, not
espionage; that its work consists of publishing material supplied to it by whistleblowers seeking to expose the crimes of governments,
giant corporations and other powerful organizations; and that this courageous campaign of exposure has made both the website and
its founder and publisher the targets of state repression all over the world.
Assange himself has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for the past six years, since he fled there
to escape efforts by the British, Swedish and American governments to engineer his extradition to the United States, where a secret
grand jury has reportedly indicted him on espionage and treason charges that could bring the death penalty. Since the end of March,
the Ecuadorian government, responding to increasing pressure from US and British imperialism, has cut off all outside communication
with him.
The reason for the indictment and persecution of Assange is that WikiLeaks published secret military documents, supplied by whistleblower
Chelsea Manning, revealing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as diplomatic cables embarrassing to the US State Department
because they detailed US attempts to manipulate and subvert governments around the world.
The Democratic National Committee on Friday filed a 66-page complaint that reeks of McCarthyism, with overtones of the Wisconsin
senator's demagogy about "a conspiracy so vast" when he was spearheading the anticommunist witch hunts more than 70 years ago. After
detailing a long list of supposed conspirators, ranging from the Russian government and its military intelligence agency GRU to the
Trump campaign and Julian Assange, the complaint declares: "The conspiracy constituted an act of previously unimaginable treachery:
the campaign of the presidential nominee of a major party in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win
the Presidency."
"... Mr Rouhani said in a live broadcast on state television that: "I am telling those in the White House that if they do not live up to their commitments, the Iranian government will firmly react." ..."
"... The Iranian leader did not say what this reaction would be, but the Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said at the weekend that it was "highly unlikely" that Iran would remain in the agreement – to which Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain are also signatories – if the US pulled out. ..."
The White House sounds as if it has already decided to exit the agreement, which Mr Trump
persistently denounced before and after his election as "the worst deal in the world".
But he has put forward no alternative to what was successfully negotiated by President
Barack Obama in 2015 other than a series of demands with which Iran is unlikely to comply, and
appear designed to put the blame for the US action on Iran.
US officials admit that Iran has so far abided by the terms of the 2015 accord.
A more openly confrontational posture by the US towards Iran would achieve very little,
unless Washington replaces the attempt to achieve its ends by diplomacy with sustained military
action. Iran is already on the winning side in the wars that have raged in Iraq since 2003 and
in Syria since 2011.
It is closely allied to the Iraqi and Syrian governments and to reverse the balance of power
in the region, the US would have revert to sustained military intervention on the scale of the
Iraq War, something Mr Trump has always opposed.
Iran may have already decided that the deal cannot be saved. Iranian president Hassan
Rouhani warned Mr Trump on Tuesday that the US must stay within its terms which Tehran signed
with other great powers or face "severe consequences".
Mr Rouhani said in a live broadcast on state television that: "I am telling those in the
White House that if they do not live up to their commitments, the Iranian government will
firmly react."
The Iranian leader did not say what this reaction would be, but the Iranian foreign
minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said at the weekend that it was "highly unlikely" that Iran would
remain in the agreement – to which Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain are also
signatories – if the US pulled out.
He added that Iran might immediately begin enriching uranium, but it would not develop a
nuclear device.
European leaders are trying to save the deal which Mr Trump has denounced as full of
"terrible flaws", but this will prove difficult without radical concessions which Iran has
rejected. These include stopping Iran's ballistic missile programme, extending the terminal
date of the agreement, and more intrusive inspections by nuclear inspectors.
ORDER IT NOW
No decision in Washington is final until it is announced by Mr Trump himself – and
often not even then – but the promotion of officials with a record of hostility to the
agreement suggests that it cannot be rescued. Mr Trump has said publicly that he sacked his
secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, because he wanted to stay with the Iran agreement negotiated
by President Obama.
His replacement, Mike Pompeo, is a long-term foe of the accord, once claiming that 2,000
bombing sorties would be enough to eliminate Iran's nuclear capability. "This is not an
insurmountable task for the coalition forces," he said.
President Emanuel Macron is in Washington on a state visit, trying to save the agreement by
making it more palatable to the White House. He will be followed in the US at the end of the
week by the German chancellor Angela Merkel, while Theresa May will probably express her views
by telephone.
All three leaders will try to reconcile Mr Trump to not leaving the accord and their
arguments will revolve around supplementary sanctions and other measures targeting the Iranian
ballistic missile programme and Iran's allies abroad such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The European leaders' mission may not be entirely hopeless: in confrontations over Syria and
North Korea, Mr Trump's belligerent rhetoric has been followed by more carefully calculated
action.
His opening stance is normally bombastic and uncompromising in order to intimidate the other
side into making concessions. It does not necessarily have to be taken at face value. But this
periodic moderation may not come into play in the case of Iran, towards which he has been
uncompromisingly hostile, claiming that it is the hidden power behind "terrorist" activity in
the Middle East.
The White House is in a position to hurt Iran economically by re-imposing economic
sanctions, not that these were ever really lifted after 2015, but US political options are more
limited. It may talk about regime change in Tehran, but is not in a position to do much about
it.
There is a further US weakness: the US, often prompted by Israel, and Saudi Arabia, has a
track record of underestimating the extent to which Iran, as the largest Shia Muslim power,
plays a leading role in a coalition of states – Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – because
of the predominant influence of the Shia in these countries. It is very difficult to defeat
Iran there – the northern tier of the Middle East – but it is in this region that
the US has chosen over the years to try to roll back Iranian influence.
The balance of power between Iran and its enemies is going to be difficult to shift whatever
Mr Trump decides about the fate of the Iran nuclear deal.
The White House is in a position to hurt Iran economically by re-imposing economic
sanctions, not that these were ever really lifted after 2015
The White house is only in a position to hurt Iran to the extent that the subordinate
countries of the US sphere are willing to continue to roll over and allow the US to bully and
manipulate them, and their companies, into compliance with unilateral US sanctions targeting
Iran. As such, this will represent another opportunity for the countries of the US sphere to
break away somewhat from their subservience to Washington, and from the insidious
manipulation by the Israel lobbies that tirelessly influence their own governments towards
confrontation with Iran.
Whether the poodle governments are willing or able to take such a step towards standing on
their national hind legs again, remains to be seen.
The balance of power between Iran and its enemies is going to be difficult to shift
whatever Mr Trump decides about the fate of the Iran nuclear deal.
Though why it would be in Britain's, or any European country's, or even the US's interests
to reduce Iranian weight in the region is far from clear. Iran has long been the better side
in the ME, as compared with the Gulf sunni despots or the Israeli thugs.
It can prove a slippery slope for Iran to renegotiate the deal. Next president might have 2
incentives to double down on Iran and ask for more concessions including dismantling of army,
navy,demobilization of Hizbollah, transfer of the bases/territories in Iraq /Lebanon/Syria to
US or UK or Israel. It can ask for Iranian oil's ownership -sales and acceptance of 3 rd junk
American arms. This attitude will endear the president to warmongering FOX CNN WSJ MSNBC and
also to other .
Withdrawing from the deal will impact negatively the negotiations with North Korea. Trump is
stuck between his bombasting declarations against Iran and his desire of solving the nuclear
issue with North Korea
My opinion is that Trump for now can only make dramatic threats to Iran and remain in the
deal.
Withdrawing from the deal will impact negatively the negotiations with North Korea.
Maybe, but maybe not. My impression is that NK involvement in these talks is probably
driven by Chinese pressure – specifically the Chinese adherence to the latest rounds of
draconian UN sanctions. In that case, it seems unlikely new evidence of US untrustworthiness
will change anything, given the wider US track record in Libya and elsewhere. It's hardly as
though the NKs aren't fully aware of US perfidy and military aggression, after all.
Mr Cockburn starts off with major, although common, error, which is that there is a conflict
between
the U.S. and Iran. That simply is not true.
First, the U.S. has no Iranian policy. What it does have is an Israeli plan, pushed by
traitors such as John Bolton and fools like Lindsey Graham, and hundreds for extremely
dedicated Israeli supporters throughout our government.
Second, the U.S. congress is a joke. Most of the world laughs at the foolishness and
corruption and cowardice of our "Parliment of Fowles," or congress of whores, bought and sold
by hundreds of lobbyists with cash to make their arguments cogent.
The U.S. is crippled by a flawed system and will eventually go the way of all flesh.
in confrontations over Syria and North Korea, Mr Trump's belligerent rhetoric has been
followed by more carefully calculated action.
Carefully calculated to. . . increase the war effort, including greatly increased aerial
bombing of Afghanistan, that poor tribal country on the other side of the planet, and a
reversal of a Syria pull-out coupled with senseless missile attacks.
And Iran is in a higher category, the arch-enemy of Israel (and thus the US) and Iran's
support of "terrorist" (Hezbollah) activity in the Middle East which is why the US has had a
consistent (excepting the puppet Shah) anti-Iran policy for fifty years. Why change it?
Especially now when Iran is a big winner in Syria and Israel is a big loser (along with the
US).
I did not vote for Trump to make Israel great but to make America great. He is betraying a
large segment of his base. His options are very limited. Contrary to what Pompeo says, his
military options, if exercised, would lead to America losing at least half its planes and
half its ships. The American military know this and as a result are opposed to any military
attack. They would do everything they could to prevent such an attack. After their very poor
performance regarding the missile attack on Syria they would be even more adamantly opposed.
Trump really has no alternative to the current agreement. If he is stupid enough to break
this agreement, how can he expect the North Koreans to take him at his word.
Iran does not need the so-called "West". She can get everything she needs from Russia and
China.
So, Pompeo thinks 2000 airstrikes will solve the problem? I regularly read about US fighter
aircraft falling out of the sky or being out of service for maintenance issues. Time for
China to invade Taiwan? Or Russia to settle Ukraine permanently?
And does Hezbollah just idly stand by, holding 1000′s of missiles against Israel?
What does Iraq (mostly Shia) do? Allow their nation to be used for bombing? Or bases?
And the Gulf? Can the global economy survive $100 a barrel oil? Can the US afford total
control and sweeping of this huge waterway?
The big question now is, do the EU poodles show some courage?
All of which lead me to believe that China has guaranteed that it will intervene in full
force, should outside forces launch an attack on North Korea. And that North Korea believes
them – after all, exactly that scenario played out in 1950.
This, along with Chinese economic pressure, has pushed the North Koreans to agree to
de-nuclearization talks.
CitizenOne April 23, 2018 at 11:23 pm I dug this up based on the article which is pertinent.
It is the basis for propaganda in WWI:
We do not want war.
The opposite party alone is guilty of war.
The enemy is the face of the devil.
We defend a noble cause, not our own interest.
The enemy systematically commits cruelties; our mishaps are involuntary.
The enemy uses forbidden weapons.
We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous.
Artists and intellectuals back our cause.
Our cause is sacred.
All who doubt our propaganda, are traitors.
So let's translate this into modern language.
We do not want war. Translation: "We want War"
The opposite party alone is guilty of war. Translation: We are guilty of Preemptive War"
The enemy is the face of the devil. Translation: "We demonize the enemy as the Devil. The
enemy is the Devil (Putin)"
We defend a noble cause, not our own interest. Translation: "We are in it purely for our
self interest. Oil, Gas, Mineral resources, Mining, Banking etc. We are in it for our own
interest"
The enemy systematically commits cruelties; our mishaps are involuntary. Translation: "Our
actions are our own of our own volition. We create and hide atrocities and cruelties by us and
exemplify and magnify cruelties by our enemy"
The enemy uses forbidden weapons. Translation: We can attack our enemies at will because
they have weapons of mass dwstruction"
We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous. Translation: "Our weapons are
superior"
Artists and intellectuals back our cause. Translation: "The Liberals back our cause for
War"
Our cause is sacred. Translation: "The Conservatives back our cause for War"
All who doubt our propaganda, are traitors. Translation: "Everyone who doubts the main
stream propaganda is a Traitor"
Donald Trump beware, there is a band of oligarchs waiting to pin you as a Traitor for
doubting the propaganda.
I say keep on keeping on with your attacks on the intelligence agencies who have signed onto
and have in fact created all of the fake news against our newly appointed enemy in Russia that
seeks to create a new yet old enemy by resurrecting the old Cold War and turn it into a new
Cold war. They should be shuttered and discredited for their lies which have seduced the
Congress on both sides of the aisle to sanction Russia and enact laws preventing the President
from refusing the compulsions of the Congress to engage in acts of war with an unproven enemy.
Perhaps there is a Russian Bear like the one predicted by Reagan with his "Bear in the Woods"
campaign created by the Reagan conservatives.
"... ( Editors Note : Operation Mockingbird was a CIA program started in the 1950s to influence the US media, which was gradually exposed by investigative journalists starting in the late 60s, culminating in sensational televised congressional hearings in 1975 which shocked the nation, forcing the program's termination. Critics maintain that the same tactics have continued since, under different programs. Wikipedia ) ..."
"... nowadays a reporter is either unemployed or a prostitute ..."
The latest hot topic in the Russian media. Russian politicians are talking about it. Historical precedent and behavior of Western
media suggests that they are. The Saker Fri, Apr 22, 2016 |
52,080
195 MORE: Politics A major topic in the Russian media is
mystification with how Putin is portrayed in the Western media.
Wildly popular at home, and seen as a decent, modest, an admirable person, and Russians don't understand how there can be such
a disconnect with Western impressions.
Recently, leading Russian commentators and politicians have been suggesting that this can only be explained by a deliberate campaign
to defame Putin, by governments or other groups.
The day before another member of Putin's inner circle, Vyasheslav Volodin,
made similar remarks , telling foreign journalists "an attack on Putin is an attack on Russia." The logic, they argue, is that
by defaming the leader of a country, you weaken his power domestically by undermining popular support for him, and internationally,
by rallying popular opinion to support policies against that country. The ultimate goal, they argue, is to weaken the country itself.
They also talk about regime change. They argue that if one looks at the facts, that there is evidence of ongoing character assassination
which cannot be explained by a vague popular zeitgeist in the West, but is more likely the result of a dedicated effort to introduce
this defamation into the news flow.
Newsweek has been one of the most virulent Putin-bashers for years
The issue of manipulation of news by intelligence services has been in the news recently with revelations that the CIA and German
Secret Service (GSS) have long-running programs to influence how media executives and top journalists convey and interpret the news,
including direct cash payments. Here are some examples they point to:
Portraying him as a scheming dictator trying to rebuild a repressive empire.
Claiming he personally ordered the murder of a number of journalists, and personally ordered a KGB defector to be murdered
with radiation poisoning.
Frequently citing unsubstantiated rumors he is having an affair with a famous gymnast.
Allegations that he has stashed away billions for his personal benefit, without providing evidence.
Recent article in Newsweek claiming he leads a luxurious and lazy lifestyle, sleeping late.
Recent article in NYT focusing on a supposed personal arrogance.
Hillary Clinton mentioning in speech after speech that he is a bad guy, a bully, that one must confront him forcefully.
Mis-quoting him on his regret about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Articles about a supposed super-luxury villa built for him in southern Russia.
The over-the top headlines in the western media (they were worst of all in Germany) portraying him personally responsible
for murdering the victims of MH17.
And soft stuff - magazine covers making him look sinister, monstrous, etc.
RI sat down with The Saker , a leading analyst
of Russia in international affairs, and asked him what he thinks:
-----------------------------------
So, is there any credence to this line of thinking, or is this conspiracy theorists running wild?
There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the US is waging a major psyop war against Russia, although not a shooting war, for
now, and that what we are seeing is a targeted campaign to discredit Putin and achieve "regime change" in Russia or, should that
fail, at the very least "regime weakening" and "Russia weakening".
And the Economist has been the very worst of them all...
So this is a US government program?
Yes, Putin is absolutely hated by certain factions in the US government two main reasons:
1. He partially, but not fully, restored Russia's sovereignty which under Gorbachev and Yeltsin had been totally lost Russia then
was a US colony like Ukraine is today and,
2. He dared to openly defy the USA and its civilizational model.
a free and sovereign Russia is perceived by the US "deep state" as an existential threat which has to be crushed. this is a full-scale
political assault on Russia and Putin personally.
So what the Russians are saying, that the constant personal attacks against Putin in the global media are partly the result
of deliberate efforts by US intelligence services, basically, planted stories
Yes, absolutely
It seems like "Operation Mockingbird" all over again Are you aware of other instances aimed at Putin?
( Editors Note : Operation Mockingbird was a CIA program started in the 1950s to influence the US media, which was gradually
exposed by investigative journalists starting in the late 60s, culminating in sensational televised congressional hearings in 1975
which shocked the nation, forcing the program's termination. Critics maintain that the same tactics have continued since, under different
programs. Wikipedia )
Yes, of course. Since this defamation has very little traction with the Russian public Putin's popularity is higher than ever
before .., there is an organized campaign to convince them that Putin is "selling out" Novorussia, that he is a puppet of oligarchs
who are making deals with Ukrainian oligarchs to back-stab the Novorussian resistance
So far, Putin's policies in the Ukraine have enjoyed very strong support from the Russian people who still oppose an overt military
intervention
but if Kiev attacks Novorussia again - which appears very likely - and if such an attack is successful - which is less likely
but always possible - then Putin will be blamed for having given the Ukrainians the time to regroup and reorganize.
Warm and fuzzy...
So you are saying that if the Ukrainian military strengthens its position enough to deliver a serious blow to the East Ukrainians,
the US can use this as a method to strike at Putin's support base
Yes, that's right ... t here are a lot of "fake patriots" in Russia and abroad who will reject any negotiated solution and who
will present any compromise as a "betrayal". They are the "useful idiots" used by western special services to smear and undermine
Putin.
Is it limited to government special ops, or are there other groups who might have an interest in doing this?
Yes, well here is something that most people in the west don't appreciate there is a major behind-the scenes struggle among Russian
elites between what I call the "Eurasian Sovereignists" (basically, those who support Putin) and what I call the "Atlantic Integrationists"
(those whom Putin refers to as the "5th column).
The western media talks about this as the struggle between Russian liberals and conservatives, reformers and reactionaries,
right?
Well its sort of like that, but not exactly
The former see Russia's future in the Russian North and East and want to turn Russia towards Asia, Latin America and the rest
of the world, while the latter want Russia to become part of the "North Atlantic" power configuration.
The Atlantic Integrationists are now too weak to openly challenge Putin - whose real power base is his immense popular support
- but they are quietly sabotaging his efforts to reform Russia while supporting anti-Putin campaigns.
Regarding the revelations of CIA activities in Germany, do you think this is going on in other countries, in the US?
I am sure that this is happening in most countries worldwide. The very nature of the modern corporate media is such that it makes
journalists corrupt.
As the French philosopher Alain Soral says " nowadays a reporter is either unemployed or a prostitute ". There are, of
course, a few exceptions, but by and large this is true.
This is not to say that most journalists are on the take. In the West this is mostly done in a more subtle way - by making it
clear which ideas do or do not pass the editorial control, by lavishly rewarding those journalists who 'get it' and by quietly turning
away those who don't.
If a journalist or reporter commits the crime of "crimethink" he or she will be sidelined and soon out of work.
There is no real pluralism in the West where the boundaries of what can be said or not are very strictly fixed.
Ok, but is it like what has been revealed in Germany, similar specific operational programs in France, the UK, Italy, Latin
America, etc.
Yes, one has to assume so – it is in their interests to have them and there is no reason for them not to.
As for the CIA, it de-facto controls enough of the corporate media to "set the tone". As somebody who in the past used to read
the Soviet press for a living, I can sincerely say that it was far more honest and more pluralistic than the press in the USA or
EU today.
Joseph Goebbels or Edward Bernays could not have imagined the degree of sophistication of modern propaganda machines.
If the US is doing it, can't one assume other governments are too? Are the Russians doing it against western leaders?
I think that all governments try to do that kind of stuff. However, what makes the US so unique it a combination of truly phenomenal
arrogance and multi-billion dollar budgets.
The US "deep state" owns the western corporate media which is by far the most powerful media on the planet. Most governments can
only do that inside their own country ... to smear a political opponent or discredit a public figure, but they simply do not have
the resources to mount an international strategic psyop campaign. This is something only the US can do.
So foreign governments are at a great disadvantage in this arena vis-a-vis the US?
Excellent. Another point to grasp is that the Banksters do not want a true capitalism, where inefficiency fails, & competition
trims profits.
They want what we now have in the West : a crony corporatist state, where ever fewer giant globalist multinationals dominate both
commerce & countries, pay no taxes, to the benefit of their CEOs , shareholders & their banksters.
In short, effectively, a Fascism.
Book : Pawns in the Game, by William Guy Carr. See where those "Atlantic Integrationists" came from.
Russia today is the only power standing up to the world oligarchy. If Russia falls then we will all be living as slaves behind
a barb wired fence, with chips under our skin, etc. etc.
Yes, and Russia has actually been making efforts to keep the dollar afloat, because they know the US hegemons will get even
nastier of their precious dollar becomes worthless. Their goal isn't to integrate Ukraine into the EU. They want to create a failed
state on Russia's border, and also hopefully engage them militarily in Syria and in places like Chechnya.
I've heard tell...Russia's central banking institution does not belong to the state. Does this sound familiar? I do not believe
that the international banking system give two turds about the affairs of Russia, unless...Russia moves to control it's own central
bank, then there would be real war.
Bankers have no allegiance except to money
It is headed by Chicago-school wannabes who follow the dictates of a banking system aimed at preversving the US banks at the
expense of their onw country's economy.
Nabuliana (sp ?), the head of the Russian CB, knows she is on borrowed time but still keep favoring the US over Russia.
What is it they also say about dying Empires. The US did not retain Empire status for long, when you look at Russia and China,
they are just a toddler on the block?
Very interesting perspective.
I'm very curious to hear western comments on Russian conspiracy theories that Fed already owns Russia and current straggle is
a straggle for independence. It seems wild but for people who view Federal Reserve Bank as a direct enemy of humanity it doesn't
seem very far-fetched.
WHEN PUTIN WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT of Russia in 2000, Russia was bankrupt. The nation owed $16.6 billion to the Rothschild-run
International Monetary Fund while its foreign debt to the Rothschild-controlled Paris & London Club Of Creditors was over 36 billion
dollars.
But Putin took advantage of the current boom in world oil prices by redirecting a portion of the profits of Russia's largest
oil producer Gazprom so as to pay off the country's debt. The continual surge in oil prices greatly accelerated Russia's capacity
to restore financial sovereignty.
By 2006 Putin had paid off Russia's debt to the Rothschilds. Russia's financial dependence on the Mafia financiers was now
over. I doubt they've gotten another hold since then.
You need to understand that President Putin's divorce is a private matter. In the Anglo World they stick their nose into these
private matters but in Russia they do not. Who knows; there have been people who got divorced so the spouse would not cop it in
the event of big problems. They even got married again later on. The Anglo World is also dumb, always behaving as if the removal
of ONE man would cure something, e.g. Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad - nah. Or take Myanmar; if only the lady (whose name I cannot spell)
would rule the country, everything would be fine. Nah - she's extremely racist and will not utter the name of one tribe 'Rohingyas'.
There is definitely a campaign against Russia and President Putin. For Germany it's the
Atlantik-Brücke which steers the press, in Australia the Australia-American Leadership Dialogue, something else in the other
countries, just like the late Brian Crozier masqueraded as a journalist but was CIA funded. The campaign needs to be ignored although
it is really peculiar that Bush Sr. was fine as CIA chief, and Putin as KGB officer was not. I'ts just the usual American double
standards.
(I think) .... Putin's divorce is not yours to wonder about or criticise.
'Sides, he said, at his last Q&A, he gets on better with his ex now than he did when he was married. That should be good enough
for you.
I THINK the time has come for RUSSIA to play HARDBALL with teh us gov and cia, nsa. etc...
and that is to OPENLY , REPEATEDLY -- RIGHT AT THE LEVEL OF UN AND INTERNATIONAL FORUMS - RIGHT INTO any ''talks" between EU/WEST/
and relations with other nations
always INCLUDE , INSERT -- part of discussions -- teh CIA/US GOV /ENTITIES
attempts against russia.
MAKE IT very prominent that it can NOT be ignored no matter what the USA TRIES...
in order to puit FRONT AND CENTER in the world the attention on THE CIA.
don't let it remain ''incidental" topic to ''major issues"
rather -- make it A CENTRAL topic in every instance and keep throwing t at the USA so that all international meetings ALWAYS
bring up
\
USA/CIA - USA,/CIA -- sabotage -- oh yet again another CIA operation in macedonia, oh another one in cnetral asia...etc....
let us remember --
2 cia emplyed ''pschiatrist/psychologists" who took care of the ''methodology" of CIA TORTURE are right now being sued in a
US court that is forced to open hearings -- on the suit by former tortured detainees...
the PORTUGUESE AMERICAN woman - SOUSA -- is ordered to appear in an ITALIAN COURT to face her charges for conspiracy to kidnap,
rendition , torture the arab/italian citizen
more and more will come, that is inevitable and the CIA ought to be BROUGHT BEYOND just ''topic of discussion" --but as the
DEEP STATE that it is -- out into the open -- calling out, searchng out its operatives, officers, policy makers, amerifcan officials
-- that' sort of thing...and the only way to do that is make it a WORLD GLOBAL CAUSE TO BRING UP in all matters of international
governance and relations -- in press conferences...assemblies, treaties, etc...
I just want to point out that German media is worst, because Germans need the most convincing to go to war with Russia. The
western media now has to combat the anti-war tendencies they propagated onto Germans ever since the end of WW2. If you read the
comments on all these anti-Putin propaganda articles, you can tell that Germans hate their own media for doing so.
Hey, I`m from Germany (Stuttgart), and i can definitely say, that we Germans hate our media and get the informations we need
from the Internet. Angela Merkel do what Obama says to her and we can do nothing. if we go to the street and make a Demonstration
they say we are nazi or the media say nothing. many People (the old People) in Germany hate Putin and belive the lies from the
media, but we, the young people dont belive the lies. We love Putin and wish Angela Merkel will be a little bit like Putin.
I'm also German (Lahr, Schwartzwald) and totally agree. NEVER watch German TV. It is like for imbeciles. Cooking, singing,
festivals everything to keep us from thinking for ourselves. I also get all my info from sites like this one and many others.
Love Putin and think Ouma Merkel sold out to the US.
Sounds like American tv. But without all the series about serial killers, violence and perversion. What they have done to us
and our collective psyche here is sick, and demonic.
but this is not just a problem IN america -- germane TV as some of our friends here have said - getng shallower -- IS A PART
of the ''influence" of american ''way\" ..
to bring up mostly and primarily shallow past-times...that takes up LIFE HOURS...when you really count it,,,
ONE shallow pastime after another...the WORST imo,,,apart from these silly ''reality shows\" (which ARE copied throughout the
world unfortunately in that desire to be ''more american" -- even in CHINA ) -
are these ''game shows" -- trivia shows..that used to be just CHILD'S play n the backyard and really is where they OUGHT to
stay so children can be children...
but NATIONAL CULTURE? trivia shows? give me a BREAK!
but that's exactly what americana brings to societies..the HIGHLIGHTING AND GLORIFICATION OF SILLINESS and SHALLOWNESS as a
NATIONAL ETHOS.
and a sure-fire way of turning out , reshaping and ''winning hearts and minds" by making them exposed - without choice really
-- to ''the only games in town"
SILLY LITTLE GAMES that 'TRAIN the mind to become STUPID".
this - THIS is the great TRIUMPH of the american society over the world. where everything -- even WAR -- is now ''entertainment"
- to be ''packaged" - promoted sold, and switched around like cotton candy by the powers that be...and deeper critical thought
-- or honest simplicity of thought and discourse is ''NOT ALLOWED".
"... The entire Liberal narratives around Vladimir Putin and Alexander Dugin are actually political reconstructions of the "Yellow Peril" stereotype of the evil Asian who schemes to conquer the west, a viscous racist caricature straight out of the old dime magazine pulps. ..."
"... Originally Putin was depicted by liberals as merely a fiendish Asian criminal mastermind. After he finally started responding to the endless provocations, he became the terrible Fu Manchu, leader of a secret society of assassins, always plotting to destroy the west. Next to him is Alexander Dugin, a diabolical eastern sorcerer and leader of a fanatical sect. ..."
"... These sterotypes are 100% racist, and of the kind of brutal American "Yellow Peril" racism that justified both the mass internments of the Japanese in concentration camps and the nuclear genocide of two civilian cities. ..."
The entire Liberal narratives around Vladimir Putin and Alexander Dugin are actually
political reconstructions of the "Yellow Peril" stereotype of the evil Asian who schemes to
conquer the west, a viscous racist caricature straight out of the old dime magazine
pulps.
Originally Putin was depicted by liberals as merely a fiendish Asian criminal
mastermind. After he finally started responding to the endless provocations, he became the
terrible Fu Manchu, leader of a secret society of assassins, always plotting to destroy the
west. Next to him is Alexander Dugin, a diabolical eastern sorcerer and leader of a fanatical
sect.
Now (straight out of a Fu Manchu plotline) Putin is supposedly plotting to install his
puppet as president of the United States.
These sterotypes are 100% racist, and of the kind of brutal American "Yellow Peril"
racism that justified both the mass internments of the Japanese in concentration camps and
the nuclear genocide of two civilian cities.
Philip May, husband of Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May happens to be a senior executive
of Capital Group which is a major holder of both Lockheed Martin and British Aerospace
(BAE).
Theresa May's husband's Investment Firm made a financial killing from the bombing of
Syria
According to Investopedia, Philip May's Capital Group owned around 7.09% of Lockheed Martin
in March 2018 – a stake said to be worth more than £7Bn at this time.
...
Every single JASSM used in the recent bombing of Syria costs more than $1,000,000, and as a
result of their widespread use during the recent bombing of Syria by Western forces, the share
price of Lockheed Martin soared.
Trump betrayal of his voters is as staggering as Obama betrayal. May even more so.
Notable quotes:
"... It is fitting that one of the first things that will happen during Pompeo's tenure as chief diplomat is the repudiation of a successful diplomatic agreement solely for reasons of spite and ideology. That reflects the contempt for diplomacy and compromise that Pompeo shares with the president. It is an early reminder why having Pompeo in charge of U.S. diplomacy is so dangerous and why it would have been better not to confirm him. ..."
"... North Korea wasn't going to give up its nuclear weapons anyway, and now it will look at Trump's reneging on the nuclear deal as proof that they are right to keep them. ..."
"... Pompeo's recent statements are those of an ignorant and incompetent jackass. Barely two weeks in and sane Americans are already nostalgic for Tillerson. ..."
"... Instead, as Pompeo's current trip and whereabouts make very clear, he's aping the same old tired Bush/Obama Middle East crap and still running errands for the corrupt rulers of Israel and Saudi Arabia. ..."
"... And if Trump doesn't stop betraying his voters with all this pointless, staggeringly expensive Middle East crap, he'll be gone in 2020. ..."
It is fitting that one of the first things that will happen during Pompeo's tenure as chief
diplomat is the repudiation of a successful diplomatic agreement solely for reasons of spite
and ideology. That reflects the contempt for diplomacy and compromise that Pompeo shares with
the president. It is an early reminder why having Pompeo in charge of U.S. diplomacy is so
dangerous and why it would have been better not to confirm him.
Pompeo also
said this weekend that he didn't think North Korea would care if the U.S. withdrew from the
agreement:
"I don't think Kim Jong Un is staring at the Iran deal and saying, 'Oh goodness, if they
get out of that deal, I won't talk to the Americans anymore,'" Pompeo told reporters
traveling on his plane en route from Saudi Arabia to Israel. "There are higher priorities,
things that he is more concerned about than whether or not the Americans stay in the
[agreement]."
It is obvious that North Korea has bigger concerns than U.S. adherence to the JCPOA, but it
doesn't follow that they won't take U.S. withdrawal as another sign that negotiating with
Washington is pointless. North Korea already has other reasons to doubt U.S. trustworthiness.
John Bolton's
endorsement of using negotiations with Libya as a model couldn't be more tone-deaf, since
North Korean officials frequently cite the overthrow and death of Gaddafi as a cautionary tale
of what happens when a government makes a deal with the U.S. It is possible that North Korea
won't put much stock in what happens to the JCPOA one way or another for a very different
reason: unlike Iran, North Korea has no intention of making significant concessions, and it is
engaged in talks with the U.S. to get as much as it can out of the fact that it is now a
full-fledged nuclear weapons state.
North Korea wasn't going to give up its nuclear weapons
anyway, and now it will look at Trump's reneging on the nuclear deal as proof that they are
right to keep them.
Our involvement in international "diplomacy", already weird, embarrassing, and destabilizing
because of Trump's random behavior, now seems to be spinning out of control. Pompeo's
recent statements are those of an ignorant and incompetent jackass. Barely two weeks in and
sane Americans are already nostalgic for Tillerson.
Wake me up when any senior member of this government turns out to be something other than
crooked, stupid, vulgar, incompetent, or some kind of foreign agent. We voted for Trump
hoping for a radical re-dedication to American interests. Instead, as Pompeo's current
trip and whereabouts make very clear, he's aping the same old tired Bush/Obama Middle East
crap and still running errands for the corrupt rulers of Israel and Saudi Arabia.
November 2018 is already slated to be a Republican bloodbath, in great part because our
government, the Congress in particular, is serving foreign interests and Wall Street instead
of America. And if Trump doesn't stop betraying his voters with all this pointless,
staggeringly expensive Middle East crap, he'll be gone in 2020.
Don't fall into the associated trap either, of the false equation between STATED and ACTUAL goals.
Fox and Hunt are fully aware that to actually admit their actual goal, would be (probably) just about the only thing which
would provoke an electoral backlash which would sweep the Conservatives from office. The NHS is proverbially "the nearest thing
the English have, to a religion" and is a profoundly dangerous subject for debate.
Fox and Hunt may be weaving an incomprehensible web of sophistry and misdirection, but no part of it is accidental.
With the still largely ignored Saudi slaughter in Yemen now in its fourth year, RT's
In The Now
has resurrected a
forgotten clip from a 2016 CNN interview with Senator Rand Paul, which is currently going
viral.
In a piece of cable news history that rivals Madeleine Albright's infamous words during a
1996
60 Minutes
appearance
where she calmly and coldly proclaimed of 500,000 dead Iraqi children that
"the price is
worth it,"
CNN's Wolf Blitzer railed against Senator Paul's opposition to a proposed $1.1
billion US arms sale to Saudi Arabia by arguing that slaughter of Yemeni civilians was worth it
so long as it benefits US jobs and defense contractors.
At the time of the
2016 CNN interview
, Saudi
Arabia with the help of its regional and Western allies -- notably the U.S. and Britain -- had
been bombing Yemen for a year-and-a-half, and as
the
United Nations noted
, the Saudi coalition had been responsible for the majority of the
war's (at that point) 10,000 mostly civilian deaths.
At that time the war was still in its early phases, but now multiple years into the
Saudi-led bombing campaign which began in March 2015,
the
U.N. reports at least
"5,000 children dead or hurt and 400,000 malnourished."
... ... ...
Senator Paul began the interview by outlining the rising civilian death toll
and massive refugee crisis that the U.S. continued facilitating
due to deep military assistance
to the Saudis
:
There are now millions of displaced people in Yemen. They're refugees. So we supply the
Saudis with arms, they create havoc and refugees in Yemen. Then what's the answer? Then we're
going to take the Yemeni refugees in the United States? Maybe we ought to quit arming both
sides of this war.
Paul then narrowed in on the Pentagon's role in the crisis: "We are refueling the Saudi
bombers that are dropping the bombs. It is said that thousands of civilians have died in Yemen
because of this."
CNN's Blitzer responded, "So for you this is a moral issue. Because you know, there's a lot
of jobs at stake. Certainly if a lot of these defense contractors stop selling war planes,
other sophisticated equipment to Saudi Arabia, there's going to be a significant loss of jobs,
of revenue here in the United States. That's secondary from your standpoint?"
Paul countered, "Well not only is it a moral question, its a constitutional question." And
noted that Obama had partnered with the Saudi attack on Yemen without Congressional approval:
"Our founding fathers very directly and specifically did not give the president the power to go
to war. They gave it to Congress. So Congress needs to step up and this is what I'm doing."
* * *
For further context of what the world knew at the time the CNN interview took place, we can
look no further than the United Nations and other international monitoring groups.
A year after Blitzer's statements,
Foreign Policy published a bombshell report
based on possession of a leaked 41-page draft
UN document, which found Saudi Arabia and its partner coalition allies in Yemen (among them the
United States) of being guilty of horrific war crimes, including the bombing of dozens of
schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure.
The U.N. study focused on child and civilian deaths during the first two years of the Saudi
coalition bombing campaign - precisely the time frame during which the CNN Wolf Blitzer and
Rand Paul interview took place.
"The killing and maiming of children remained the most prevalent violation" of children's
rights in Yemen , according to the 41-page draft report obtained by Foreign Policy.
The chief author of the confidential draft report, Virginia Gamba, the U.N. chief's
special representative for children abused in war time, informed top U.N. officials Monday,
that she intends to recommend the Saudi-led coalition be added to a list a countries and
entities that kill and maim children , according to a well-placed source.
The UN report further identified that air attacks "were the cause of over half of all child
casualties, with at least 349 children killed and 333 children injured" during the designated
period of time studied, and documented that, "the U.N. verified a total of 1,953 youngsters
killed and injured in Yemen in 2015 -- a six-fold increase compared with 2014" - with the
majority of these deaths being the result of Saudi and coalition air power.
Also according
AP reporting at the time
: "It said nearly three-quarters of attacks on schools and
hospitals -- 38 of 52 -- were also carried out by the coalition."
But again, Wolf Blitzer's first thought was those poor defense contractors:
...Because you know, there's a lot of jobs at stake. Certainly if a lot of these defense
contractors stop selling war planes, other sophisticated equipment to Saudi Arabia, there's
going to be a significant loss of jobs, of revenue here in the United States.
* * *
This trip down memory lane elicited suitable responses on Twitter:
Honestly, with all these drug addicts, pedos, government dependents,
and fraudulent finance and advertising pieces of shit at home, I'd
really like to see some infighting here. No need to sell abroad.
Note to readers : Looks like Eric is writing a satire, but this is not immeduatly
obvious...
Notable quotes:
"... Trump must stick to the nuclear treaty with Iran or possibly face a new Mideast war; that it's essential for the US to join the Paris climate accord; and that the US must resume its role of multilateral world engagement. ..."
"... I think I figured it out but just to be sure: this is a parody, right? Macron is presiding over an ailing French economy; to distract from it, he has now made himself a war criminal by illegally attacking Syria. In doing so, he has been suicidally reckless with France's few naval assets, which could (and frankly, should) have been sunk at a moment's notice. ..."
After delivering kisses and hugs, Macron then went before the US Congress and threw down the
gauntlet. He told America's legislators tough truths they were not used to hearing in the Trump
era. Namely: that the right's political and economic nationalism is stupid and toxic; that
Trump must stick to the nuclear treaty with Iran or possibly face a new Mideast war; that
it's essential for the US to join the Paris climate accord; and that the US must resume its
role of multilateral world engagement.
... ... ...
That is, at least until the abrasive nature of French politics, labor wars, and financial
hanky panky derail his meteoric rise. No one yet understands where Macron came from or who is
really behind him. The French Rothschilds, for whom Macron used to work as a banker, are the
most obvious suspects. But we don't really know for sure.
I think I figured it out but just to be sure: this is a parody, right? Macron is
presiding over an ailing French economy; to distract from it, he has now made himself a war
criminal by illegally attacking Syria. In doing so, he has been suicidally reckless with
France's few naval assets, which could (and frankly, should) have been sunk at a moment's
notice.
He went to Washington where he was supposed to deliver the "tough message" that
Trump better not think about destroying the Iran nuclear deal. Instead, this big child turned
like a leaf in the presence of his master, and is now firmly on the jew-approved,
anti-Iranian track.
The only problem with that of course is that that track leads to war, and more
specifically a war of such proportions that the resulting refugee flows will wreck Europe,
including the country for which Macron was supposed to be responsible–and that is the
good outcome, if China and Russia would interdict an attack on Iran we'd be pretty close to
going nuclear.
The French people will need to rid themselves of this Zionist scum before these
catastrophes come to pass.
Macron is Blair with a shinier suit, his antics on foreign policy can't hide the deep seated
problems in France from a stagnant economy, the leading indicators in France are
deteriorating, to a low level civil war between immigrants and the French. He is like a
vision from a discredited and bygone age. Macron was un danser at Rothschild, he seeks to
sell further US involvement in Syria to Trump.
The only thing Macron got right was keeping the nuclear deal with Iran. The rest was just the
usual globalist, one world mumbo jumbo. Macron can man up and send thousands of French troops
to Syria if he feels so strongly in a Western presence there.
Here was Europe – and much of Asia – telling Trump to stop acting like a
petulant, amateur monarch and start acting like the president of the United States.
On the contrary, Macron was imploring Trump to betray his base and serve the interests of
Israel and the world's elites.
Macron and Merkel are both trying to destroy their own people and remake their nations by
welcoming a mass influx of Afro-Islamic invaders. At minimum they should be met with boos,
jeers and bullhorns wherever they go. At most their people should working towards another
Bastille day for them and other traitors complete with guillotines.
A few thoughts on our disastrous trillion-dollar military:
It is unnecessary. It does not defend the United States. The last time it did so was in
1945. The United States has no military enemies. No nation has anything even close to the
forces necessary to invade America, and probably none the desire. A fifth of the budget would
suffice for any real needs.
"Our boys" are not noble warriors protecting democracy, rescuing maidens, and righting
wrongs. They are, like all soldiers, obedient and amoral killers. Pilots bombing Iraq or Syria
know they are killing civilians. They do not care. If ordered to bomb Switzerland, they would
do it. This is the nature of all armies. Glamorizing this most reprehensible trades is just a
means of usefully stimulating the pack instinct which we often call patriotism.
The militarily is America's worst enemy. It does enormous damage to the United
States while providing almost no benefit. Start with the war on Vietnam that cost hugely in
money and lives, ours and theirs, with no benefit. Iraq: high cost, no benefit. Afghanistan:
High cost, no benefit. Syria: High cost, no benefit.
The costs in lives and money do not include the staggering cost of weapons that do nothing
for America or Americans. Do you, the reader, believe that you are safer because of the F-35?
Do a dozen aircraft carriers improve the lives of your children? Will the B-21, an unbelievably
expensive new thermonuclear bomber, make your streets safer? Then add the bleeding of
engineering talent better spent on advancing America's economic competitiveness. The country
has many crying needs, falls behind China, but money and talent go to the military.
We cannot escape from the soldiers. The armed forces have embedded themselves so deeply into
the country that they have almost become the country. America is little more than a funding
mechanism for what clumsily may be called the military-industrial-intelligence-media-Israeli
complex. Some of these entities belong to the military (NSA). Some depend on it
(Lockheed-Martin). Some use it to their own ends (Israel), but the military is the central
infection from which the other symptoms flow. Congress? A storefront, a subcommittee of the
Knesset or, as P. J. O'Rourke put it, a parliament of whores. Factories, jobs, contracts, towns
depend on military spending. If the Second Marine Division folded, Jacksonville NC would dry up
and blow away. So would dozens of other towns. Without military spending, California's economy
would crash. Universities depend on military research funding.
The military has achieved its current autonomy by degrees, unnoticed. The Pentagon learned
much in Vietnam, not about fighting wars, which it still cannot do well, but about managing its
real enemy, the public. The media, which savaged the war on Vietnam, are now firmly controlled
by the corporations that own them. Thus we do not see photos of the horrors committed by
American aircraft bombing cities. While the existence of phenomenally expensive weapons like
the B-21 is not quite suppressed, coverage is so slight that most Americans have never heard of
it. This the Complex learned from the F-35 debacle. And of course Congress, thoroughly bought
and wanting jobs in its districts, allows no serious opposition to anything military. Neither
Congress nor the media point out the extent to which military expenditure dominates the
economy, draining resources from civilian needs.
Why does the military not win wars? In part because winning is not in the interest of the
Pentagon and those who feed on it. Wars generate profitable contracts for all manner of
supplies and equipment. Either winning or losing ends the gravy train. For example, the war on
Afghanistan of almost two decades has become an entitlement program for the arms industry,
accomplishing nothing, killing countless peasants, and lacking purpose other than maintaining
an unneeded empire and funneling money to the Complex.
How did the Complex free itself from civilian control? The crucial step in depriving the
public of influence was the neutering of the constitutional requirement that wars be declared
by Congress. The military thus became the private army of the President and those who control
him. Then came the All Volunteer Army, which ended inconvenience to or mutilation of the
children of people of importance, leaving the body bags to be filled by deplorables from
Memphis or Appalachia or Mexico. America's wars then became air wars and finally drone wars,
reducing casualties to very few. The public, both ignorant and uninvolved, became
acquiescent.
As I write, we wait to see whether Trump, and those behind him, will put America deeper into
the Mid-East and perhaps war with Russia. If he does, we will read about it the next day in the
newspapers. It will be expensive, dangerous, and of no benefit to anyone but the arms industry
and Israel.
Despite the asphyxiating economic presence, the military keeps aloof from America. This too
serves the purposes of the Complex, further preventing attention by the public to what is not
its business. In the days of conscription there was a familiarity with the armed services.
Young men from most social classes wore the uniform however ruefully and told of their
experiences. Not now. The career military have always tended to keep to themselves, to
socialize with each other as the police do. Now the isolation is almost hermetic. You can spend
years in Washington or New York and never meet a colonel. Military society with its
authoritarianism, its uniforms and its uniform government-issue outlook is not compatible with
civil society. To the cultivated, military officers seem simple-minded, conformist and well,
weird.
ORDER IT NOW
Add it all up and you see that the citizenry has no say–none–over the Complex,
which is autonomous and out of control. If the Complex wants war with Russia or China, we will
have-war with Russia or China. Ask people whether they would prefer a naval base in
Qatar–which most have never heard of, either the base or the country–or decent
heath care. Then ask them which they have.
The military destroys America and there is nothing–nothing at all–that you can
do about it.
Further, the Complex drives foreign policy, and in directions of no benefit to America or
Americans. For example, the contrived fury against Russia. Why this? Russia presents no danger
to America or anyone else. The Complex makes foreign policy for its own ends, not ours.
A rising Asia is challenging the America military Empire. The tide runs against the Complex.
North Korea faced Washington down and became a nuclear power. The Crimea went back irrevocably
to Russia. East Ukraine does the same. Iran got its treaty and becomes part of the world order.
In the South China Sea, China ignores the US, which once was supreme in all the seas. The war
against Afghanistan heads for its third decade and the war on Syria seems to have failed. Other
things go badly for the Empire. The dollar is under siege as reserve currency. China grows
economically, advances rapidly in technology and, doubtless terrifying to Washington, tries to
integrate Asia and Europe into a vast economic bloc. The Complex beats the war drums as its
fingers loosen on the world's collective throat.
Washington desperately needs to stop the rollback of American power, stop the erosion of the
dollar, block the economic integration of Eurasia and Latin America, keep Russia from trading
amicably with Europe. It will do anything to maintain its grip. All of its remote wars in
far-off savage lands, of no importance to America or Americans, are to this purpose. A
militarized America threatens Russia, threatens China, threatens Iran, threatens North Korea,
threatens Venezuela, expands NATO, on and on.
America has been hijacked.
Fred Reed is a retired news weasel and part-time sociopath living in Mexico with his
wife and three sueless but agreeable street dogs. (Republished from
Fred on Everything by permission of author or representative) ← Herding
Hamsters and Other Cosmic Refle...
Fred, a bit harsh in places. Having served for twenty-four years, '76-'00, active &
reserve, I can say with certainty that the men & women who comprise the armed forces are
a more complex & nuanced group than your brief description of them as "obedient and
amoral killers." The number that are amoral killers is probably about the same as those whose
main motivation for joining is patriotism, i.e. relatively small.
That said, I get what you're saying. The problem is that nature abhors a vacuum. If
America brings the troops home, closes all the bases and "raises the drawbridge" the various
bad-actors of the world will proceed to aggress against their neighbors much more so than
they already do. Would be an interesting experiment, though, for America to cease being the
world's policeman. I suspect that the rest of the so-called free world would be begging us to
resume the role almost immediately.
Sad to say, the principle "bad actor" in the world today, and the one committing the most
aggression, is the United States itself. The United States generates the most instability and
is the country that threatens world peace the most. I half expect to see the U.S. try to
torpedo the Korean peace talks, just to be able to maintain troops on the Korean
peninsula.
Fred's had two good articles in a row and his conclusion is spot on: the United States has
been hijacked.
because certain countries/people within the reach of "various bad-actors of the world"
would pay the price.Heavy price.
There is that prevalent mantra here about Russia/China being forces of good. Yeah ..
I've used the analogy here several times:
US is like Tywin Lannister. Russia Rose Bolton, China Slavers Bay.
Neither that good, but, definitely prefer the first.
We live in strange times. Back in 50s/60s, the Anglo-Right represented militarism &
empire while Jewish Left represented anti-war & peace with USSR. Today, the Real Right
oppose war & support peace while Jewish 'left' call for more empire, intervention, &
new cold war.
Sirs,y
I worked as an electrical inspector for the DCMA under contractors to the DCMA. I worked for
2 years in Iraq and 6 in Afghanistan. I meet and worked many honorable and competent military
people; I also had the misfortune to meet a great many who were not so good. Unfortunately,
the people that can't make in the military are sent over to the contractors who hire them
because of the old boys network and the vets perf. These are the worst.; if you are a
civilian working under LOGCAP without the military service you WILL NEVER get advancement .
The slugs from the military get all the gravy jobs and it is AA run wild. The ethnics stick
together and the dumb white guys who believe in merit end up in the crappy jobs doing all the
work and not getting any credit and the first to be laid off.
Not only that the LOGCAP program brinsg in Balkans and Indians to cut Americans out of
jobs. Indians make about 700 USD a month 4 times what they would make at home. Balkans,
around 4K 3 times what the make at home. These guys worm their way in and never leave; so
your average American contract employee shows up and he is getting screwed from the get
go.
The story I was told if you get 100K the contractor get 200-250K
Fred, you'd best look out the window to see who's at the door for the next few weeks. You may
have written too much truth for the military-industrial-intelligence-media-Israeli complex to
tolerate. Mossad has a few idle operatives in Mexico. Don't get too high-profile. They kill
people for a lot less.
The U.S. military is basically the right-wing/Republican version of the social welfare
state:
[...] Welfare's last stand Long in retreat in the US, the welfare state found a haven in an unlikely place –
the military, where it thrived for decades
[...]
– https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-us-military-became-a-welfare-state
Listen to Jennifer Mittelstadt explain the term "military welfare state" on The
Strategy Bridge's podcast :
[...]
America's all-volunteer army took shape in the 1970s, in the wake of widespread opposition
to the draft. Abandoning compulsory conscription, it wrestled with how to attract and
retain soldiers -- a task made more difficult by the military's plummeting prestige after
Vietnam. The army solved the problem, Jennifer Mittelstadt shows, by promising to take care
of its own -- the more than ten million Americans who volunteered for active duty after
1973 and their families. While the United States dismantled its civilian welfare system in
the 1980s and 1990s, army benefits continued to expand.
Yet not everyone was pleased by programs that, in their view, encouraged dependency,
infantilized soldiers, and feminized the institution. Fighting to outsource and privatize
the army's "socialist" system and to reinforce "self-reliance" among American soldiers,
opponents rolled back some of the military welfare state's signature achievements, even as
a new era of war began.
Right now, since unemployment is so low, recruiters have a harder time finding qualified
candidates:
Trump Wants To Beef Up The Military, But Recruiters Are Having Trouble Finding People
(HBO)
Booming military benefits
The cost of military pay raises and benefits programs, which have increased almost 90 percent
since 2001, have become the fastest-growing part of the Pentagon's budget and now account for
more than a quarter of all defense spending. Here is a look at the types of compensation
provided to active-duty troops and retirees, how those costs have grown and where they are
headed. – https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/national/booming-military-benefits/200/
OMG Yet another nitpicking, mean-spirited, petty, big-mouth,, intellectually bone-lazy
commenter. Do you actually carefully read and ponder what is written? Is your attention span
longer than a few minutes? Do you have any respect for an author–or for yourself? Has
it occurred to you that the author's main points are on the whole absolutely correct and even
self-evident? If you're going to take the trouble to critique, how about doing it with
intellectual and moral integrity, with some degree of thoroughness and, frankly, coherent
thought? Are you even capable of it? Wouldn't it have been better for you to exercise some
self-control and keep silent?
I'd suggest you read a little outside of what American MSM wants you to believe.
Russia is, as Fred has said, of no danger to anybody. I would add – to anybody who
leaves her alone.
As with poking a bear; if you leave it alone, it ignores you. Start hitting it, it rips you
to bits. Same analogy.
As to Ukraine, everyone now who still has 2 brain cells synapsing is aware that Ukraine was a
US organised, backed and paid for coup d'etat. IN fact, Putin gets a huge amount of crap from
many Alt-Med sites and commentators for NOT going in with tanks and levelling Kiev to the
ground, which she could have done in 1.5 days flat. Including tea breaks.
Russia has nothing to do with Moldova.
Georgia, with some encouragement from a few CIA types had an insane President, who launched
an unprovoked attack on South Ossetia, and fired on and killed Russian peacekeepers at 2 a.m.
one morning. Many in Georgia were being air-bombed. A young girl there visiting from America
with her aunt was rescued – by Russian soldiers. She tried to thank them on US tv, and
was cut off by the anchor!! Once the situation in Georgia had been resolved with the Georgian
troops returned to base, Russia left. Something America has never, ever, done. Where ever it
goes, it stays, like brown sticky stuff on your shoe.
So get your facts straight. Remember, Putin made a small comment that the Empire appears to
have overlooked. You should never, he said, corner anyone. Read up about what a cornered rat
did to him, and what he learned from it.
The Empire is pushing and pushing and pushing. Putin has warned and warned and warned.
Russia is no danger to anyone who leaves her alone – something the Ruling Regime of the
Fascist Empire of America seems unable to grasp.
Even assuming Vladimir Putin has such designs (I'm skeptical that he wants more ethnic
minority headaches than he has already), why is any of this the business of the United
States?
Fine job stating the obvious Fred. I mean that as a compliment. It is the obvious that is
most likely to be overlooked by my countrymen.
It's the foggy bottom. The District of Corruption. The seat of the Anglo/Zio Empire that
is the most dangerous enemy of the people of earth. The good news – the empire is in
steep decline. The bad news – it will reach peak madness just before it dies.
The US military just got an unneeded 10% budget boost because of spin that its budget was
cut, while it has increased each year. The only cuts were to the big increases demanded. The
Pentagon also lies and says that every military readiness issue is not caused by
incompetence, but a lack of money.
Watch the idiotic responses by Fox News propagandists when former Republican Congressmen
David Stockman recently informed them that the Pentagon budget should be slashed, not
increased.
Totally agree. The US is seen in most of the world as the bully of the nations, not the
policeman, even in the EU (don't be fooled by our leaders, we don't control them).
OMG, that "news" video. Not only do these "journalists" babble like first-graders –
they have even unlearned to present facial expressions appropriate for sentient human beings.
Turn off the sound and it's like watching "Finding Nemo".
No Isreal could'nt take over the Mid-East if we weren't around, they would either get
along with their neighbors or cease to exist,the world gained nothing in Korea except the
thousands and millions slaughtered,the world gained nothing with our false flag to get us
into Nam except for the thousands and millions slaughtered and then it was on to
Afghanistan,Yemen Syria,yes your right the world would be a safer place without out endless
wars, and if we can't fine one we create one, the Mid-East is more than proof of that, and
you know I don't know of any country or countries who are crying for us to be the policeman,
when we lack the capability to even control the whores in congress>>>
How did the Complex free itself from civilian control? The crucial step in depriving
the public of influence was the neutering of the constitutional requirement that wars be
declared by Congress . The military thus became the private army of the President and
those who control him.
If I'd come upon this paragraph first, I'd have thought I was reading an article by
Ron Paul . However,
most Americans don't want to hear the old boring stuff about "muh Constitution", right, so
they will never understand this.
Good column, Mr. Reed. About the only thing I see missing is the American elites' use of
the US military as a grand social experiment, which will make these forces not so effective
in a real war with a serious enemy. Being the big bully of the world will work out fine until
the first knock-out punch, or the money runs out. The latter will probably happen first
– (see peak neocon here and here .)
LOTS of ad hominem directed at Fred in these comments, without even the slightest refutation
whatsoever at the content of his article. There is clearly a strong emotional need to believe
that the US military is "a global force for good" among many commenters, since there shouting
down of Fred is emotional and without evidence of where he has made an error in his thinking.
And to the first commenter who thinks people of earth who would be begging to have the US
military back in their homelands should it ever leave: you have obviously never met a person
who is not from America. There is really nothing else I can say to such an insane, immature,
deliberately stupid remark. God help you. No country on earth wants the US military in it. If
any sizeable portion of the brainwashed, two-digit IQ, blaspheming american "christian"
population ever wakes up to the scam, it could be over in an election cycle, but it's
probably impossible. The crushing weight of universal propoganda and perfectly orchestrated
identity politics is just too much.
On a personal level, I have met many men who work for the war profiteers, some at fairly
influential levels. They are pure, straight evil; filled with more explosive anger and hate
than anyone you've ever met. They are as bad as bad gets. Trust me. To this day, I have never
met people like them.
That aeon article was stupid. The first half summarized the (prescient, in my view as a
one-and-done army officer) worry that adding all these social welfare bennies would turn the
army into a bunch of single mothers, which it did, and undermine readiness. The second half,
which I guess was the overall point of the article, was whining about how "boo hoo the
military is getting its bennies privatized, how are we going to care for all these single
mothers?"
Another hit-and-run one post wonder. Fred Reed's columns seem to be literally filled with
you deranged sockpuppets. One post and then poof -- you're gone, never to be seen
again. Quite interesting.
The scary thing about all this is pax-americana is slowly dying. Recent economic figures
coming out of the west show this. All recent gains have nothing in common with industrial
output. Profits are all related to the stock market grandest Ponzi scheme in the history of
western man.
The US does need $ Trillions in debt to pay for 1) ME wars, 2) stock market speculation 3)
keep the US "consumer" afloat and 4) cover endless government and trade deficits.
However, there is a problem. It only works in a ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy)
environment where borrowing is almost free (i.e. it can be almost unlimited), and the FED has
been working hard on providing it.
Paying interest on this debt is something that can't happen -- although in fact the
impossible does seem to be happening. Interest rates have recently run up to 3%, which is
very bad news in this environment.
Monster leverage in places like the NASDAQ can't accept higher rates, the government can't
pay market interest rates on its debt, and over-borrowed consumers only took loans because of
low monthly payments, so what gives?
Probably credit worthiness (counter-party risk) in a replay of 2008.
When the thing goes into reverse, the FED will once again flood the banks with money (QE
Infinity) but this time it's going to be more obvious than ever that the money doesn't
represent anything real -- and my guess -- for what it's worth -- is that the US dollar will
finally risk its credibility (i.e. a 10% increase in the money supply = a 10% fall in the
dollar) and US Reserve Currency status is gone.
"In February 2013, guarded by its well-paid ISIS mercenaries, New Jersey-based Genie
Energy was granted an oil exploration permit in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights of
southern Syria.
[...]
Genie Energy's strategic advisory board includes Royal Dutch/Shell owner Lord Jacob
Rothschild, former US Vice-President Dick Cheney, Newscorp (Fox News & Wall Street
Journal) Chairman Rupert Murdoch, former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, former US
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, former CIA Director & Dyncorp insider James Woolsey
& former Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu.
[...]
"A leaked CIA document from 1983 reveals the Rothschild plan for Syria. The document,
written by CIA officer Graham Fuller, argues that the West should, "bring real muscle to bear
against Syria" by toppling then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, replacing him with a
pro-banker puppet, and cutting Syria's weapons supply line from Russia."
"This would then pave the way for a City of London-controlled oil & gas pipeline which
would originate in Qatar."
"The pipeline is to run north through Bahrain, Saudi Arabia & Jordan before crossing
Syria and entering Turkey on its way to Europe. Such a huge volume of gas would help the
bankers end Russia's Gazprom stranglehold on natural gas imports into Europe."
[...]
Even before 1983, Western intelligence agencies had backed Syria's Muslim Brotherhood in a
clandestine war to remove the elder Assad.
[...]
"With Genie Oil drilling in the occupied Golan and the race to build a City of
London-controlled pipeline continuing apace, one can be sure that despite the upper hand
which Assad and his Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah backers have gained in the Syrian war of
late, Rothschild and his minions will be serving up more pretexts to keep a war-weary
President Trump fighting for their empire in Syria."
"It's up the the American people to back the President's urge to leave by making it loud
and clear that its time for the US to get out of Syria, and out from under the thumb of the
City of London banksters."
If Merkel refers to a total cessation of Iran's nuclear program, then she's technically
correct. Except, the deal wasn't made to attain that outcome as Iran was not going to
relinquish its rights under the NPT. And just what are "the problems with Iran" Merkel
alludes to? Iran's helping to defeat NATO's terrorists within Iraq and Syria? Insisting the
Outlaw US Empire obey International Law and abandon its illegal incursion into Syria? Trying
to awaken the real International Community to the massive crime being committed daily in
Yemen and the longstanding ongoing crime against Palestinian peoples by Zionists? Seems to me
those are Merkel's problems, not a problem with Iran.
Merkel is a symbol for Germany in this regard, a puppet to american interest, add to that
the sucking up o israel and the result
is a vassal neocon-zionist warbent regime.
Will Germany be part of another conflict of war, this time with Iran? Crazy state (no offense
to germans, this is the illogical behaviour by all of eu which of course not will follow
Germany and thus US in its new warmongering).
Roger Stone said that he has known John Bolton since the Reagan years. Stone claims Bolton is
not a neocon warmonger but a guy who is a staunch believer in the old doctrine of peace
through strength. Interesting as Stone despises neocons. Bolton went to Yale undergrad and
Yale Law. Haley has a degree in accounting from Clemson, a mediocre land grant public
university in South Carolina.
Ok, you all, I have a personal story about John Bolton that I'm gonna drop here. This story
comes from someone who used to live next door to John Bolton in Bethesda (or Chevy Chase?).
Bolton's former (and current?) neighbor is a Harvard-trained medical doctor and a liberal
Jewish guy. He has two daughters who are now grown. One is now a veterinarian in North
Potomac. Anyway, his daughters were like 10 and 12-years old when they would water Bolton's
plants when he was away on travel. One time when Bolton was traveling he asked the older girl
to water his plants and he'd pay her $25. She agreed. Then a few days later she had something
come up and would not be able to do it and asked her younger sister if she could take care of
it she could have the full $25. The younger sister agreed. After Bolton returned from his
trip the younger sister went over to Bolton and explained what happened and that she, not her
older sister, had taken care and watered his plants. Bolton told her that he was not going to
pay her because the agreement was strictly between him and her older sister. That was last
interaction they had with Bolton. End of story.
Watergate was the ultimate leftist deep state fake news story. Wash Post reporter
Bernstein out to avenge his communist parents' persecution by the Sen Nixon in the 50s.
CIA operatives Bradlee and his mentee Bob Woodward staged a coup.
Watch how unethical "the boys" are in their pursuit of the truth in the '76 movie version
of Watergate, "All the President's Men."
You are partially correct. There is more to the story. Mark Felt was "deep throat" and was
expecting to be appointed FBI director. When Nixon chose L. Patrick Gray as FBI director
instead of Mark Felt, all bets were off and he went after Nixon. The rest is history
This is a fairly good discussion. But only because it's on television. Otherwise,
information and chatter of this quality is commonplace on the internet or any area that's
free of Jewish censorship. My recent dinner with James Petras was more informative. (But
maybe I'm just boasting).
But Sachs (Jewish) does pull a fast one, claiming that the destabilization of Syria is due
to US and Saudi meddling. Ok. He's mostly right on that. But there's more. And surely Sachs
know it.
Sachs leaves out Israel in this discussion even though Israel has actually attacked and
bombed Syrian positions inside Syria at least three times over the past seven years.
'
Zionists worldwide have been trying to get Assad overthrown for decades. Israel and Syria
are, in fact, still in a technical state of war since Israel seized Syrian territory in 1967
during the Six Day War.
In June of that year (just before the USS Liberty was attacked by Israeli forces) the
Jewish State preemptively invaded Syria. Israel still occupies Syria's Golan Heights and
intends to keep the Golan.
Plus, since Israel basically dictates Washington's official policies in the Mideast, it is
Israel–every bit as much as either occupied Washington or subservient Saudi
Arabia–that is probably most responsible for the anti-Assad chaos and carnage inside
Syria.
This manufactured Syrian 'civil war' that has cost no less than 500,000 lives and the
displacement of millions.
Sachs–like all loyal Zions–purposefully deflected attention away from Israel
in this discussion, even though he knew better. In effect, Sachs deceived. He lied for
Israel.
" ..Israel has actually attacked and bombed Syrian positions inside Syria at least three
times over the past seven years." LOL. Try, in the last seven weeks!
Sure, Israel is most responsible. But as for Sachs, since this point was already discussed
under Pat Lang's article, I'll just quote myself.
Okay, Sachs has corpses in his closet. But, IMO, take gold where you find it . limited
hangout or not.
If your adversary speaks some truth, that doesn't make it a lie. Plus, you're not going
to get every angle covered n every clip. The fact that he called out US covert
fomentation of regime-change in Syria [on major network TV!!!] makes this golden.
I agree. Sachs nor anyone on TV will mention that Israel is driving all of this. I thought
the reveal of the operation name was good, Timber Sycamore. I'm hopefully using this 5 minute
interview to wake up a friend or two who actually still believe "the news" (MSM).
I was listening to an older interview, below, from 2008 with Daryl Bradford Smith and Texe
Marrs as they discuss the worldwide scourge that is zionism. I know you're well versed in it
Mark but I'd recommend UR readers give it a listen. It explains how long this has been going
on and details many atrocities.
In the interview, it mentions that Neocon Michael Ledeen wants to use the US to destroy
Syria. The term "mission accomplished" fits here. Just a continuation of the PNAC plan.
Apparently Trump is backtracking on the US Troop pullout from Syria, or he was lying in
the first place when he made that announcement:
the head of the US military's Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, arrived in Israel to
reassure the head of the National Security Council, the IDF Chief of Staff and other senior
defense officials that Americans have no "immediate plans" to leave Syria , and will
continue supporting Tel Aviv's means of maintaining security and stability on its
border
"... Haley is a fool and grotesquely ignorant. ..."
"... She is a vile creature who has no contact with truth whatsoever. Does Trump not see this at all? Perhaps he does in a dim way, but by now he is so suborned and by the Deep State and depressed by the relentless opposition that he is probably glad no one is criticizing his U.N. appointment at least. ..."
"... Haley ran for governor of SC as the "tea party" candidate. She killed the careers of a number of would be Republican establishment politicians, which is why many voted for her. In other words, she is a total opportunist, a classic, typical unprincipled Republican. ..."
"... She has learned how to manipulate the system up to a certain point, but is too dumb to go any further. How sad that people like Adelson are able to buy elections. ..."
"... Ask Mike Pence. She's Pence's pick. Pence wants a fellow Ziocon stooge at the UN instead of pro Assad Tulsi Gabbard. ..."
"... She is not a moron; rather smart, clever and articulate riding on the wings of the jew to power. Immorality is her shield, no one her judge, americans a lower caste, the jew a higher caste. ..."
"... Nikki Haley is just a bit-part actress similar to the talented & useful woman featured in LeCarre's complex but educational novel "The Little Drummer Girl." ..."
"... Most men don't like their trophy wives either, that is, they like them at first but the match soon deteriorates from there. They tend to look good in the original packaging but are way overpriced and not worth the money. Buyers remorse is the rule rather than the exception. ..."
"... Nimrata the neocon harpy is just one of the gifts that the 1965 immigration and naturalization act keeps on giving. She's the Republican version of Hildabeast Clinton. ..."
"... "Nikki Haley in a nutshell: stupid; big mouth; infantile understanding of foreign affairs; easily manipulated; will do anything for more money and attention; and a total dumbshit sellout to Israel with zero integrity, morality, or empathy. " ..."
"... Hmmmm. A typical Trump appointee. Trump saw her qualifications and just had to have her on his team. He sees himself in her, y'know. ..."
"... The mistake here is to talk about the "US". The "US" (as in the population of the United States), have no to say in any of this. They voted against war but it was pointless (Trump is ramping up the pressure on Russia and Iran) and that crowd of US "consumers" is as politically useless as it gets. ..."
I have noticed Haley's awfulness from the beginning, which I see is now 15 months. Awful
though Bolton is, one feels that he has some knowledge that might even make him pull back
from Armageddon (maybe, not sure).
But Haley is a fool and grotesquely ignorant. Notice how, in the alleged chemical
attacks, she takes no thought or action at all to ascertain truth, but she outdoes herself
trumpeting the harm caused, and the children suffering.
As if the fact that children are suffering somehow proves guilt. I can't imagine anything
so ignorant.
She is a vile creature who has no contact with truth whatsoever. Does Trump not see
this at all? Perhaps he does in a dim way, but by now he is so suborned and by the Deep State
and depressed by the relentless opposition that he is probably glad no one is criticizing his
U.N. appointment at least.
Never dismiss the fool, for he wards no fear, no blame and and no trust. He sees no worth
or value and can be swayed by the most trivial things. He seeks no reward but an emotional
gratification. While these sound of a foe easily defeated the truth is oft the opposite for
your threat and presence are fallen on the senseless. If you must fight a fool you must give
him room and let hubris and frailty fight your war, otherwise, you must be swift, with out
mercy and be able to ward the madness that will ensue.
I don't know who penned that but I think it's profound.
Nikki Haley's yappings are just the barking of a dog.
She has no agency. If she sounds 'scary', it's only because she is owned by Zionist
globalist supremacists. If they ordered her to shut up and be nice to Russia and Iran, she
will obey.
She has no mind of her own. Same with Bolton the Dolton.
And she's different from Samantha Power, how? Under Obomba
Or John Bolton under Bush the Lesser?
Seems to be a tradition in the making of putting the most arrogant, rude, least
diplomatic, and aggressive person possible in the position of ambassador to the UN.
Has anybody ELSE been steady, three administrations, non-stop PUKING? Makes it clear, if
nothing else, our "humanitarian" face has peeled off, revealing the brain-eating zombie
underneath.
When you confront staunch Israel supporters with the isolation of Israel in the world, as can
be seen at UN voting, the answer is that this is because of the anti Israel Muslim bloc in
the UN.
The weird thing about jews is that with all their cleverness they're unable to see
reality.
Israel is right, the rest of the world is wrong.
Now even if this were the case, any sensible person would take reality into
consideration.
Not so idiots as Netanyahu.
When the next jewish catastrophe has happened, jews again will see how how they are the
eternal innocent victims, if then jews still will exist, as a nuclear world war is likely to
kill any human being world wide.
Already around 1953 a USA diplomat said that Israel should behave as a small ME country, in
stead of the head of an international group.
They still do not understand.
Once (Bolton) was kind of an anomaly, because, after all, it WAS Bush the Lesser.
But Nobel Peace Prize-sporting Obomba, puts in Power.
Now we got Haley.
Maybe TWICE is a co-inkydink, but this is absurd! Fucking EVERYBODY blows us away
diplomatically! Who is worse? N. Korea does some wicked TWEETS, but their diplomats are
circumspect. Ours are visibly RABID.
One of these days, someone is gonna put us out of their misery, and suck though it will,
it will be highly deserved! Afterward, perhaps humans can progress once the USA is a giant
smoking crater. Or at least D.C. Has ANYONE ever begged for it THIS bad? Ever?
Nikki Haley is THE mouthpiece of the Zionist aggressive occupation regime. She serves its
interests and acts to the detriment of the American people that have to carry the can for the
partisanship with this rogue Zionist state. President Trump should sack her before she
challenges him in the next presidential race. Haley will have the backing of the
trigger-happy Ziocon establishment and the Zionist billionaires.
Together with John Bolton, they seem like the perfect "Doomsday Couple" to bring the U.S.
down. Perhaps they are the last true believers in Zionism, the Jewish racist ideology,
although both are not Jewish. It's not surprising that Jewish and American exceptionalism are
similar in their racist beliefs.
Haley's behavior is hyperbolic, arrogant, and extremely dangerous to the reputation of the
U. S. but it seems as if she acts according to the slogan: Freely you live, if you haven't a
reputation to lose. But under the borderline Trump administration even a "un-American"
behavior, it benefits the Zionist regime, seems acceptable.
So far, all so-called chemical weapons attacks by the al-Asad government were false flag
attacks carried out either by al-Nusra, ISIS or al-Qaida terrorist organizations or by the
"White Helmets" themselves that are a so-called a terrorist affiliate organization, disguised
as paramedics, to draw the U. S. directly into the Syrian conflict.
Under Obama, they failed, and Trump made some symbolic bombings to pacify the
trigger-happy Zionist lobby. How mentally deranged Haley seems, shows her arrogant statement:
"We need to see Russia choose to side with the civilized world over an Assad government that
brutally terrorizes its people."
With which "civilized world" should Russia take sides? Does Haley mean the U. S. or the
Zionist occupation regime? The first one has slaughtered millions of people in endless wars,
the later has been subjugated another people for over 50 years and destroyed its existence.
This "civilized world" and its values are for the garbage dump.
Despite his twitter manticism, Trump was still a kind of common sense that can
differentiate between the good for America in contrast to the good for Israel for the sake of
the American people.
Noeconservatives arguably don't have enough appeal for them to get the presidency.
Unfortunately, they can still have clout as evidenced by Haley in her role and how the likes
of MSNBC and CNN uncritically praise her.
Well if she does make it to POTUS we have historical equivalence. The Dying days of the Roman
western Empire. in the mid 4th century BC. Roman Empire at this stage had two imperial
cities. one situated in ROME being hounded by the Goths and the other one in the East
Byzantium present day Istanbul. The point is in the western dying Imperial days they put as
emperor a child well Haley becomes POTUS one could only say History repeating itself. The
scary thing about all this is pax-americana is slowly dying. Recent economic figures coming
out of the west show this. All recent gains have nothing in common with industrial output.
Profits are all related to the stockmarket grandest ponzi scheme in the history of western
man.
Latest events from the Skripal imbroglio to Douma all show signs of desperation .
BY DECEPTION YOU MAY WAGE WAR.
Note the three countries that illegally bombed Syria on the sad nite of April 13th 2018 were
the exact ring leaders to the total destruction of the highest standard of living of the
African continent.
RINSE ,LATHER ,REPEAT.
Post Scriptum: It is sad and scary to see that from 1999 to this day not withstanding all the
lies that NATO and FUKUS have spewed to the world and have been exposed as such we the
sheeple can fall for the same trap.
THE WEST HAS ENTERED INTO THE WORLD OF ZOMBIES .
Critical thinking gets labelled as enemies of the state. Boy Goebbels must be so envious of
recent events.
How Orwellian our western society has become.
Another very good article by Philip Giraldi. If the US wasn't dominated by foreign agents and
roving gangs of ziocon lobbyists, Giraldi would be widely respected, considered 'mainstream',
and known to millions. But powerful forces are determined to prevent this.
What we get instead are empty suits reading scripts.
We live in an era where political extremism (aggressive war is a prime example of
extremism) has been declared 'centrist' and 'moderate'. Advocates of non-intervention are
labeled 'fringe'.
Political illusions happen. They happen by design.
Fortunately, Giraldi demonstrates a commendable ability to separate US interests from
contrived foreign agendas. This is not often done. And he does it well.
For revealing this, Giraldi and a few other daring intellectuals have been defamed as 'far
right'. Their sin? Telling the truth (to the best of their ability) about Zio-American
malfeasance in American life and on the world stage.
Their quiet exile from the corridors of political power shows how debased and unmoored our
culture has become. Giraldi's diminished status is the end-product of targeted censorship,
economic sabotage, and strategic defamation. This phenomena affects us all.
What do we get instead?–delusional sell-outs like John McCain, Lindsey Graham,
Hillary Clinton and Nikki Haley. Frauds all, including the journalists who adore them. The
corruption in America is wide and deep.
Washington's queer political values are hopelessly under the thrall of liberal
interventionists, ne0con militarists, televised war barkers, and deep state vampires. These
amoral extremists have become America's political 'establishment'.
Trump notwithstanding, the Swamp, the alphabet government agencies, the two Parties, the
major lobbies, donors, and NGOs (and of course, Big Media) are what rules America.
Average, non-organized voters have no political influence.
But it is our mainstream news and entertainment media that ultimately earns the most
responsibility for Zio-Washington's trigger-happy embrace of aggressive militarism in all
policies and instances that could affect Israel (which is virtually everything.)
This Zionist 'value' opens a very big door.
This commitment is a recipe for endless strife and intervention. Yet our media supports
it. Continuously and uniformly.
And the chief beneficiary is (you guessed it).
Incredibly, Washington spends far more time agonizing over borders and security in the
far-away shitholes (pardon the expression) than on our own southern border. Who dreamt up
this ridiculous scheme?
This level of corrupt insanity did not happen by accident.
Incredibly, if enough empty suits and talking heads repeat a myth or falsehood enough
times, it becomes 'true'. Voila! The magic of TV.
Political hallucinations and bizarre double standards become very real. Very 'true'.
The problem with being arrogant when you are on top of the world is that you are remembered
and reviled when you get knocked down a peg. The guys in the dock at Nuremburg learned that
at the end of a rope. She'll never face that sort of justice, though, because we can't lose,
right?
The lack of any coherence in policy means that the State Department now has diplomats
that do not believe in diplomacy and environment agency heads that do not believe in
protecting the environment.
But I disagree, Mr. Giraldi! Their is coherence in State policy, that is to serve the
State of Israel.
Nutty Nikki is idiotic, vindictive, hateful and very bellicose and would not hesitate to
use our kids and tax dollars to support Apartheid Israel, and is loved by multi-billionaire
Sheldon Adelson, which means she will be the next POTUS.
Haley ran for governor of SC as the "tea party" candidate. She killed the careers of a
number of would be Republican establishment politicians, which is why many voted for her. In
other words, she is a total opportunist, a classic, typical unprincipled Republican.
She has learned how to manipulate the system up to a certain point, but is too dumb to
go any further. How sad that people like Adelson are able to buy elections.
When is Trump going to prosecute Soros for conspiracy to interfere with the U.S. and other
countries?
The lack of progress on immigration can, maybe, be explained as Trump faces fierce
resistance, but Bolton, Haley, and Pompeo are unforced/forced errors, that will make it
nearly immposible for him to keep his promise of ending these stupid wars.
Better than Hillary, but more than a little disappointing.
Haley has too many skeletons in her closet to run for president. While running for SC
governorship rumors of her affair with conservative blogger Will Folks surfaced. She tried to
deny it of course, claiming to be "completely faithful" to her husband of 13 years, then Will
Folks shared text messages and frequent, lengthy middle of the night phone calls between
them, some as long as 180 minutes, all after 10pm (hey she had to put the kids to bed first):
In his latest book, Michael Wolffe claimed that Nikki Haley had an affair with Trump,
which Haley dismissed as "disgusting", one wonders if Trump took that as a compliment.
Wouldn't surprise me one bit if Haley is sleeping with her current "advisor" at the UN
(paid for by taxpayers btw) Jon Lerner, who she has also kindly shared with Mike Pence, one
hopes only the advising part, not the bed, but who knows.
Something tells me she's sleeping with Netanyahu as well. She sure loves her Jewish
men.
"Ambassadors" are supposed to make peace, but Trump who claimed he wanted to end all foreign
wars end up with an ambassador to the World who only wants to make wars, with everybody! She
even wanted Trump to send troops to Venezuela! Anytime Trump is within 10 ft of this mad
woman, he's talking about bombing somebody.
Was there ever any evidence that Trump considered Tulsi for Amb. to UN? Wasn't that just
goofy talk from Tulsi's fans?
I doubt she would have wanted it, anyway. Not exactly a step up, being appointed to a
position from which you could be summarily dismissed .. as opposed to an elected official
with a definite term and, other than pressure from the DNC – which she has handily
bucked – freedom to express independent views.
She is not a moron; rather smart, clever and articulate riding on the wings of the jew
to power. Immorality is her shield, no one her judge, americans a lower caste, the jew a
higher caste.
I keep wondering why Trump has not fired that know-nothing. He's not been afraid to fire
people for far less offenses against his Admin. I suspect that the Israel Lobby will not let
him, and made him hire her in the first place. She used to be a "Never-Trumper," after all.
In an otherwise fine piece, I wish that Giraldi would have opined as to why she's still
there.
Haley is a stupid, opportunistic woman who simply goes where the money is, and that is by
doing the bidding of the Zionists in USA and Israel. The author even points out that her
mentor is Zionist asswipe from the National Review Johah Goldberg's wife! She comes across as
such a stupid woman that she perhaps doesn't realize she's being brainwashed and used as a UN
mouthpiece of advance the Zionist Israeli agenda.
Nikki Haley in a nutshell: stupid; big mouth; infantile understanding of foreign affairs;
easily manipulated; will do anything for more money and attention; and a total dumbshit
sellout to Israel with zero integrity, morality, or empathy.
Well, what I'm trying to say, very sadly, is that this insufferable douchebag wench will
most likely be your next president
Does a purportedly high IQ protect one from stupidity?
High IQ signals intelligence, but not wisdom. Wisdom comes from experience, and being able
to apply your high IQ to learn from those experiences. Many high IQ people in fact lack
practical wisdom a.k.a. common sense
No doubt, it's hard especially for an ally (like me) to get under Philip Giraldi's
thick-skin, but I am compelled to try now.
Nikki Haley is just a bit-part actress similar to the talented & useful woman featured
in LeCarre's complex but educational novel "The Little Drummer Girl."
Indeed, she could become President of ZUS as could Oprah Winfrey. All originate from
Jewish Central Casting, selection.
In closing, linked below is some homegrown CENSORSHIP originating from "The Land of Milk
& Honey."
Most men don't like their trophy wives either, that is, they like them at first but the
match soon deteriorates from there. They tend to look good in the original packaging but are
way overpriced and not worth the money. Buyers remorse is the rule rather than the
exception.
to show disdain for the UN by sending yet another cartoon Exceptionalist;
factional carveups: to give the neoTrotsykites a position that they think is
meaningful;
to keep Haley out of domestic politics and too busy to properly prepare the ground
for a presidential candidacy.
There are probably others – note that none of them has anything to do with diplomacy
or international relations (except as a repudiation of the concepts).
Neither are effective at all: under both Bolton and now Haley (and "RicePower") the
US has had to increase the baksheesh it distributes around the world in order to buy
compliance and diplomatic support – they have, as a group been unable to slow the
decline of US prestige.
So the 'operational' side of things is a wash.
Bolton's preternaturally unpersuasive, because he's a grotesque parody of a human
being.
And there's where it gets interesting: there is upside risk to Haley if she were
able to Clintonise herself – by which I mean behave more like Bill , not more
like Hillary. If she was more 'aw-shucks', she would get more done (frankly I don't think
that's her aim, because like all politicians she's interested in doing things for herself,
not for her current boss).
Haley could be far more persuasive/effective because in her best moments she's quite
personable (plus she's still very pretty when she turns on the charm, which is always
a plus).
The downside is that her 'best' moments are very few and far between – she spends
most of her time with that particularly waspish hate-face so common among formerly-pretty
women who realise that their best years are behind them.
Frankly, the notion that she's a plausible presidential candidate is laughable: when the
US does eventually elect a female president, the successful candidate will be whiter than the
whitest Pilgrim.
It is beyond farcical to believe that the Republican voter base would elect a 'dusky'
woman for the highest national office: bear in mind that Haley would be repudiated ex
ante by Democrats because she's on the wrong side, and US presidential politics is almost
entirely decided by base-mobilisation.
Deep down Haley probably realises this, and that will also be a source of rancour.
How exactly are these neocon Israel apologists created, vetted, accepted?
It must be some weird ceremony that would make La Cosa Nostra look like
a Ladies Garden Club invitation.
By the way, 3,000 Palestinians weren't shot at the latest dustup.
Nimrata the neocon harpy is just one of the gifts that the 1965 immigration and
naturalization act keeps on giving. She's the Republican version of Hildabeast Clinton.
If she ever ascends to the throne in D.C. her "conservatism" will consist of militant
philo-semitism while being liberal on social policy and a warhawk on foreign policy. Hannity
will gush joyfully over her.
"Nikki Haley in a nutshell: stupid; big mouth; infantile understanding of foreign affairs;
easily manipulated; will do anything for more money and attention; and a total dumbshit
sellout to Israel with zero integrity, morality, or empathy. "
Hmmmm. A typical Trump appointee. Trump saw her qualifications and just had to have her on
his team. He sees himself in her, y'know.
To keep the bluff going, the US can't afford to push the button. End of story.
The mistake here is to talk about the "US". The "US" (as in the population of the United States), have no to say in any of this. They
voted against war but it was pointless (Trump is ramping up the pressure on Russia and Iran)
and that crowd of US "consumers" is as politically useless as it gets.
Power in the US is held by a rabid crowd of Zionist who control Congress and the media,
and THEY DECIDE what happens along the lines of "Israel First".
So your question should be, "To keep the bluff going, can Israel afford to push the (US)
button?"
The answer could well be Yes.
1) Syria and Iran would be destroyed giving Israel undisputed dominance of the Middle
East.
2) The US would be plunged into chaos and the COG (Continuity of Government) legislation
installed by Reagan would come into play. This is basically an Emergency Dictatorship run
from bunkers around the US, that the Zionists tried for on 9/11 (and failed to get) but would
certainly achieve under this new scenario.
With totalitarian control of the United States, the Zionist Neo-Bolsheviks could do what
they wanted with the remains of the US population, and who cares if 100 million Goys die in a
nuclear exchange with Russia/China (which would also conveniently be in ruins).
...President Barack Obama, who had run a quasi-antiwar liberal campaign for the White House, had embraced the assassination program
and had decreed, "the CIA gets what it wants." Intelligence budgets were maintaining the steep upward curve that had started in 2001,
and while all agencies were benefiting, none had done as well as the CIA At just under $15 billion, the agency's budget had climbed
by 56 percent just since 2004.
Decades earlier, Richard Helms, the CIA director for whom the event was named, would customarily
refer to the defense contractors who pressured him to spend his budget on their wares as "those bastards." Such disdain for commerce
in the world of spooks was now long gone, as demonstrated by the corporate sponsorship of the tables jammed into the Grand Ballroom
that evening. The executives, many of whom had passed through the revolving door from government service, were there to rub shoulders
with old friends and current partners. "It was totally garish," one attendee told me afterward. "It seemed like every arms manufacturer
in the country had taken a table. Everyone was doing business, right and left."
In the decade since 9/11, the CIA had been regularly blighted by scandal-revelations of torture, renditions, secret "black site"
prisons, bogus intelligence justifying the invasion of Iraq, ignored signs of the impending 9/11 attacks-but such unwholesome realities
found no echo in this comradely gathering. Even George Tenet, the CIA director who had presided over all of the aforementioned scandals,
was greeted with heartfelt affection by erstwhile colleagues as he, along with almost every other living former CIA director, stood
to be introduced by Master of Ceremonies John McLaughlin, a former deputy director himself deeply complicit in the Iraq fiasco. Each,
with the exception of Stansfield Turner (still bitterly resented for downsizing the agency post-Vietnam), received ringing applause,
but none more than the night's honoree, former CIA director and then-current secretary of defense Robert M. Gates.
Although Gates had left the CIA eighteen years before, he was very much the father figure of the institution and a mentor to the
intelligence chieftains, active and retired, who cheered him so fervently that night at the Ritz-Carlton. He had climbed through
the ranks of the national security bureaucracy with a ruthless determination all too evident to those around him. Ray McGovern, his
supervisor in his first agency post, as an analyst with the intelligence directorate's soviet foreign policy branch, recalls writing
in an efficiency report that the young man's "evident and all-consuming ambition is a disruptive influence in the branch." There
had come a brief check on his rise to power when his involvement in the Iran-Contra imbroglio cratered an initial attempt to win
confirmation as CIA director, but success came a few years later, in 1991, despite vehement protests from former colleagues over
his persistent willingness to sacrifice analytic objectivity to the political convenience of his masters.
Gates's successful 1991 confirmation as CIA chief owed much, so colleagues assessed, to diligent work behind the scenes on the
part of the Senate Intelligence Committee's staff director, George Tenet. In 1993, Tenet moved on to be director for intelligence
programs on the Clinton White House national security staff, in which capacity he came to know and esteem John Brennan, a midlevel
and hitherto undistinguished CIA analyst assigned to brief White House staffers. Tenet liked Brennan so much that when he himself
moved to the CIA as deputy director in 1995, he had the briefer appointed station chief in Riyadh, an important position normally
reserved for someone with actual operational experience. In this sensitive post Brennan worked tirelessly to avoid irritating his
Saudi hosts, showing reluctance, for example, to press them for Osama bin Laden's biographical details when asked to do so by the
bin Laden unit back at headquarters.
Brennan returned to Washington in 1999 under Tenet's patronage, initially as his chief of staff and then as CIA executive director,
and by 2003 he had transitioned to the burgeoning field of intelligence fusion bureaucracy. The notion that the way to avert miscommunication
between intelligence bureaucracies was to create yet more layers of bureaucracy was popular in Washington in the aftermath of 9/11.
One concrete expression of this trend was the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, known as T-TIC and then renamed the National Counter
Terrorism Center a year later. Brennan was the first head of T-TIC, distinguishing himself in catering to the abiding paranoia of
the times. On one occasion, notorious within the community, he circulated an urgent report that al-Qaeda was encrypting targeting
information for terrorist attacks in the broadcasts of the al-Jazeera TV network, thereby generating an "orange" alert and the cancellation
of dozens of international flights. The initiative was greeted with malicious amusement over at the CIA's own Counterterrorism Center,
whose chief at the time, José Rodríguez, later opined that Brennan had been trying to build up his profile with higher authority.
"Brennan was a major factor in keeping [the al-Jazeera/al-Qaeda story] alive. We thought it was ridiculous," he told a reporter.
"My own view is he saw this, he took this, as a way to have relevance, to take something to the White House." Tellingly, an Obama
White House spokesman later excused Brennan's behavior on the grounds that though he had circulated the report, he hadn't believed
it himself.
Exiting government service in 2005, Brennan spent the next three years heading The Analysis Corporation, an obscure but profitable
intelligence contractor engaged in preparing terrorist watch lists for the government, work for which he was paid $763,000 in 2008.
Among the useful relationships he had cultivated over the years was well-connected Democrat Anthony Lake, a former national security
adviser to Bill Clinton, who recommended him to presidential candidate Barack Obama. Meeting for the first time shortly after Obama's
election victory, the pair bonded immediately, with Obama "finishing Brennan's sentences," by one account. Among their points of
wholehearted agreement was the merit of a surgical approach to terrorist threats, the "need to target the metastasizing disease without
destroying the surrounding tissue," as Brennan put it, for which drones and their Hellfire missiles seemed the ideal tools. Obama
was initially balked in his desire to make Brennan CIA director because of the latter's all-too-close association with the agency's
torture program, so instead the new president made him his assistant for counterterrorism and homeland security, with an office down
the hall from the Oval Office. Two years into the administration, everyone in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom knew that the bulky Irishman
was the most powerful man in U.S. intelligence as the custodian of the president's kill list, on which the chief executive and former
constitutional law professor insisted on reserving the last word, making his final selections for execution at regularly scheduled
Tuesday afternoon meetings. "You know, our president has his brutal side," a CIA source cognizant of Obama's involvement observed
to me at the time.
Now, along with the other six hundred diners at the Helms dinner, Brennan listened attentively as Gates rose to accept the coveted
award for "exemplary service to the nation and the Central Intelligence Agency." After paying due tribute to previous honorees as
well as his pride in being part of the CIA "family," Gates spoke movingly of a recent and particularly tragic instance of CIA sacrifice,
the seven men and women killed by a suicide bomber at an agency base, Forward Operating Base Chapman, in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009.
All present bowed their heads in silent tribute.
Gates then moved on to a more upbeat topic. When first he arrived at the Pentagon in 2007, he said, he had found deep-rooted resistance
to "new technology" among "flyboys with silk scarves" still wedded to venerable traditions of fighter-plane combat. But all that,
he informed his rapt audience, had changed. Factories were working "day and night, day and night," to turn out the vital weapons
for the fight against terrorism. "So from now on," he concluded, his voice rising, "the watchword is: drones, baby, drones!"
I challenge anyone to name a modern war prosecuted by the US government and its allies that did not involve at its root the direct
fabrication of blatant lies on enormous levels, both as a casus belli and also to manipulate public opinion in favor of
hostilities.
The clandestine activity represented by these *provocations* isn't even good spycraft. The Skripal case and the latest use
of chlorine gas in Syria are risible, clumsy, amateur attempts to wangle the empire into war that the callowest rube could see
through. And yet, it's working its magic on the media. The politicians, suborned by the war machine, give unanimous bipartisan
assent.
Saddam's WMD, Gulf of Tonkin, etc., etc. And now a ridiculous false flag attack in Syria. Did it take place at all? But the
narrative is all. The press in the USA is more effectively controlled and conformist than in Germany in the late 1930s and nobody
goes around beating up journalists or sending them to a KZ. The Syrian Gov't is winning the civil war, things are going well but
what Assad really needs is to have the crap bombed out of his military by Uncle Sam. What transparent bullshit.
Great post. The Zionist Israelis are the shit and scum of planet Earth. You cannot get any
worse than Avigdor Lieberman, Ariel Sharon (now dead thank god!), Bibi Netanyahu, etc. The
Zionists are very much like the CIA: they work secretly, scheming and planning their ugly
machinations in the shadows for selfish gain.
But seriously, Israel is arguably the most vile, hate consumed, parasitical, shithole
'country' that ever existed! Look at how it is such a massive parasite on the US taxpayer and
US government: over 2 billion in 'aid' every year, and rising! Why!? Why does Israel get this
American foreign aid, the largest foreign recipient by far, with not so much as a question
from congress?
Because fucking AIPAC has every congressman by the balls! If they don't have their tongue
deeply wedged up the collective Zionist asshole–the zionists donate massively in the
next election cycle to an obedient pro-zionist candidate to replace said thinking, reasonable
congressman. These are the facts!
Oh, and make sure to watch the youtube videos on illegal Israeli settlers in Hebron.
Fucking outrageous: these Zionist settlers make white slave holders during the Old South era
look like saints! They terrorize Palestinians, literally throwing shit, urine, vomit, molotov
cocktails, rocks, burning tires, anything that causes harm at the Arab homes. And they do it
with a sick fucked up kind of satisfaction as the IDF soldiers look on and couldn't give a
shit. And what does the US government do about this? Nothing! Not a goddamned thing is done;
in fact they provide the weapons to kill off the Palestinians. And don't forget the fucking
asshole CAT corporation, making millions selling those giant tank bulldozers to the Israeli
zionists to bulldoze Arab homes, olive trees, roads, and people! If I ever run into a CAT
employee I'm gonna kick his fucking ass!
But when [Lang] bristles that "I confess that I was unaware that this is a forum for people
who hate America," I won't be getting my hopes up too high.
That does sound like something parroted by Slumlord Hannity and other Fox News
types. What is America? Land? People? Government? If I don't like the government and its
policies (purchased by moneyed interests and non-Americans) am I an "America hater"? I lived
all my life in America. I have close relatives and immediate family who fought in wars and
immediate family buried at Arlington. How does one qualify as an America hater? Not to
genuflect to the military and their illegal and gravely immoral wars and actions? To disagree
with the neocon/neolib policies and policymakers? Policies which run counter to Christian
morality and natural law? If so then I'm an America hater in good standing.
I dislike the policies of my government as much as you appear to dislike the policies of
yours. So we're on the parallel tracks there. But it's possible to do that and still be a
patriot. That's democracy.
Democracy's not working at present, certainly not in my country and maybe not quite as
expected for all those Americans patriots who voted anti-neocon. But it's still a good idea,
democracy, wouldn't you agree?
I'm as irritated as anybody by Brit-chauvinism, but their eminent contribution to the
technical and philosophical foundations of modern society – from Newton and Bacon
through Locke, Smith, and Burke to Maxwell, Whitehead, and Turing – is undeniable.
why did the Russians allow Israel so much freedom in Syria..from the start of their Syrian
project?
I could never understand that..it seemed/seems so obviously contradictory and
counter-productive. And why is Putin ever so conscious to 'compromise' with Israel - in
Israel's favor no less..all the time?
Oh my! these things make no sense in modern reality, nor in historical perspective. the
Khazars have no reason to love Russia/Russians..indeed have every reason to hate them, and
desire to eliminate Russia/Russians. and it seems clear the 1917 Revolution turned into a
Khazar revenge for the destruction of old Khazaria with Russian collusion..not to mention the
German invasion the intent of which surely was to destroy Russia, bring whatever remaining
Russian rump to its knees in perpetual servitude..the Russian 'Fatherland' forever under rape
of its resources by the global capitalists
But this is not something I tear my hair out at the roots over. I think Putin is a fine
politician and a very smart man.. But he is still a politician. and as per the way
politicians operate, and the way Jews handle politicians and politics globally, the way Putin
behaves relative to Israel suggests the Zionists have something on him that is serious enough
to discipline his behavior in their favor..in Israels favor
Putin has no reason at all, as a real Russian patriot, charged with the protection of the
collective Russian interest, to be as conscientious, solicitous, of Israeli interest as he
is. that he is is not a good sign at all. from afar I would like to trust Putin, revere him
as the current savior of the world, but cant go all the way with him. I dearly appreciate the
fact that he appears bent on prevention of ww3. that is a globally commendable fact, one I am
sure the world appreciates
but that Russian/Israeli-Jewish thing is rather unseemly and very concerning
Why expand the war that they are winning into a bigger war that is less likely of
victory?
The Izzies have learned that their planes are no longer safe attacking from Syrian airspace,
the S-300 mean that the Izzies will no longer be safe attacking Syria from Lebanese
airspace.
From what I have read of him President Putin is a strategist as well as a Patriot.
There are still some shrinking pockets of rebellion in Syria, then there is the Turkish
acquisition of Northern Syria to unwind, slowly slowly catchee monkee.
-- Here is the terrorist camp in Turkey, run by a British officer James le Mesurier:
"James le Mesurier founded both Mayday Rescue and the White Helmets after "retiring" from the
British Army and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Mayday Rescue's annual budget is $35
million, with the funds coming from USAID, the UK Conflict Security and Stability Fund, and
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To date, an estimated 3,000 recruits have been through the
Mayday Rescue training programs and deployed into 120 different locations in rebel-held parts
of Syria."
-- Here is another dishonorable British officer, Paul Tilley:
"Tilley ran British government
communications during the Libya invasion, working directly out of 10 Downing Street. In
November 2014, soon after le Mesurier was founding Mayday Rescue and the White Helmets,
Tilley "retired" from the British service to found the strategic communications firm.
Incostrat provides the social media and other communications services for Mayday and
the White Helmets."
– Any Qs about le Mesurier' and Tilley' devotion to militant Islamists and fanatical
Israelis when good money is paid for the devotion??
I can think of two other important questions, what is the point of lying? and who exactly do
they think they are fooling?
Firstly it is worth saying that both sides are likely to exaggerate the effectiveness of
their systems, deliberately or otherwise. Let us start with the US claim of 100%
effectiveness of their weapons system and 0% of the Syrian/Russian systems, this is plainly
nonsense. Even with no air defences at all a certain number of malfunctions would be expected
to happen. The Syrian/Russian claims are also likely to be wrong, many of the claimed
intercepts were just as likely to be malfunctions.
So what is the point of lying?
First off, a reputation for unreliability is bad for sales, pure and simple. Nobody is
going to be enthusiastic about spending large amounts of money on stuff that doesn't work
very well, this would apply equally to both sides.
Secondly, the appetite of the general public for war in general and superpower
confrontation in particular is going to be somewhat diminished if it is perceived that the
other side is technologically equal or even superior. This factor is logically going to be
more important to the side likely to initiate conflict.
So who do they think they are fooling?
Potential customers for weapons systems are usually not going to be naive enough to take
the manufacturers claims at face value, they are likely to employ their own experts to assess
the various claims. They will not be completely immune to deception of course.
Each other. Neither side would want their opponents to have the best information
available, for obvious reasons. It is notable that both sides appear to have declined to
fully commit their latest equipment, the Russians in particular. It is likely that both sides
have reasonably good intelligence on what happened, neither side is likely to be fooled
easily.
The general public are the most obvious targets of deception and the most easily fooled.
It is one thing to risk a superpower conflict when your population in general is confident
that you have a clear technological edge and are likely to escape the worst. It would be
quite another matter to get the public on board if they believed they were up against a more
or less equal opponent and were likely to get thoroughly nuked. Once again this logic applies
far more strongly to the side likely to initiate a conflict for they are the ones who must
manufacture consent. For this reason it would appear that the Russians have somewhat less
motivation to lie than their US counterparts.
They lie because they can and after lying their pathetic lives away they are not even
aware that they are lying. Hilary can fall down the steps in front of hundreds of cameras and
lie that she did not fall. Joe Biden can lie to a reporter that he graduated number one in
his law class and totally ignore the school records that he graduated in the bottom of his
law class.
"... The "attack" on Syria had two purposes: a saving of face, and a disposal of old ordnance. ..."
"... I suspect that only Israel had any real interest in saving the face of their hired boogeyman. Trump being a flunky of Israeli, he did what he had to do. ..."
At the same time it is clear that there was an understanding between the governments to
insure that Russian red lines were not crossed. The evidence for the Douma gas attack is
non-existent. The film evidence has now been thoroughly de-bunked as part of the information
operations (propaganda) of the White Helmets scheme funded by the Saudis and largely conducted
by the UK info warriors of 77 Regiment. It seems clear that US DoD was not privy to that IO
project and for that Reason SECDEF Mattis was blind-sided by the deception. The struck targets
(successful or not) have long been known to the US IC as facilities of the former Syrian
Government chemical warfare programs. The Russians were told to stay out of those areas and so
a reasonable compromise was made with a president easily fooled by social media and under heavy
pressure by a population equally easy to deceive.
Nevertheless, most of the missiles failed and that failure must be dealt with.
Col. Pat Lang at his best -- explaining how military systems and strategies work.
But Lang wrote: "It seems clear that US DoD was not privy to that IO project and for
that Reason SECDEF Mattis was blind-sided by the deception."
That would not have happened if Mattis -- and Trump -- included Phil Giraldi and Unz
forum, as well as Lang's own SST in their daily intelligence diet.
Phil Giraldi exposed the White Helmets almost a year ago --
and for Eva Bartlett's on-the-scenes coverage of White Helmets activities in Syria.
The Corbett Report can be found on the Unz Forum. Corbett painstakingly deconstructed a
Guardian hit-piece on Beeley, Bartlett and Tim Anderson, reproducing the emails in which the
Guardian journo accused those independent correspondents of collusion with a Russian
propaganda effort
Unz Forum also hosts the Jimmy Dore show which amplified a corporate-media interviews of
Jeffrey Sachs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O2TRzA2ezk
, who told (what is presumably) a large audience that US has been engaged in the deliberate
destabilization of Syria and killing of Syrian citizens since at least 2012, (and that it
should STOP!);
False flags, needed, on both sides. In the West that means catching of-handed the media,
all media, all alternative media, by infusing lies, firehosing bloat, short attention span
snippets to decoy and on, nothing yet invented to the rescue. That seems to work still, since
the public still baits the flying dung, a given, and the scribes and editors, the graphically
endowed complying.
Military back and forth, "arena" sports, pro-wresling, nothing more, nothing much. The
better teams can as well play video games to see who "wins". War is essentially obsolete,
makes the superstructures of the war machines on all sides obsolete. The main reason is
environmental toxicity which blows back with a vengeance, war having no impact on population
numbers, war having an impact on migration numbers and directions though. The migration
effects of local wasteland wars seems to be interpreted by dumb elites globally as
desirable(herding and how to herd large numbers of humanoids), a learning experiment. Our
guess, in the long term, an unefficient weapon.
The information interchanges, essentially deciding on the rules of the local experiment,
of the major players, open up views on how a global elite can function. For now in the early
stages, but since global rule is unavoidable, an encouraging phenomenon.
The back country, our "gens de rien", our "deplorables" yet do not, will never, understand
what is driving their sorry asses. The middle class of "shepherd dogs" tow the line of the de
facto power, no independent thinking to be expected. The internet is as obfuscating as the
printed press and TV ever was. Give or take, seventy percent of it ignorance of
writer-editors, thirty percent of incapacitation to see anything but career and individual
interests in the short term.
Technology(hard and soft, as they go together) has been wrestled from the hands of
independent players, the major example being Asssange, who had an impact on the exact
granular outliers, where it matters, and has been put aside silently by the ones, the only
ones that should be grateful and could have had an impact on using chaos of the masses,
globally, to counter the dummer, short-term policies of the elites, and pressure for faster
and cleaner global rule. The middle class as a whole sucks up to power, they have done so
always historically.
In all, the world goes well, the Chinese are ahead, the Russians and most independant
power nuclei(Iran, Brasil(fell of the wagon), Turkey, most of Asia), now align themselves
regarding systemic thinking. Nationalism of course is dead most local elites know this, even
in the US, and probably Putin, the overt advertising to the Russians just a decoy. Sunny
Islam has no rational stategy, and in the short term, bets everything on breeding.
Consumerism(dead man walking), has truly dumbed down the masses globally, regarless of
other factors. It has been the biggest success of capitalism Western style. Again the world
goes well for having global rule act more decisively, where it matters, to step up local
experiments into global strategy, in the long term.
The main problem to be addressed, since it affects all other burning issues, as ecological
toxicity, and on, by reinforcing these positive tendencies. One single person less, has at
least a fifty percent larger impact than any other measure of redress on survival of the
human race per individual. The local experiments of global attitudes hopefully are a start to
smarter elites behaviour. Our elites have failed for a long time now, anything progress has
been a detour to decay and sludge, and timeliness is pressing.
I think you mean 77th Brigade (a propaganda and psi ops unit).
The 77th Regiment were the East Middlesex -- and were disbanded in 1881.
BTW, the 77th Brigade takes its number from the Chindits -- Orde Wingate's Indian Army
special operations unit, who carried out deep penetration raids against the Japanese in
Burma.
Wingate was a rather fanatical Zionist and helped set-up the Haganah, the precedecessors
of the IDF.
My inclination has been to believe the Russian side from quite early on, mostly on the basis
that the claimed US targeting spread simply doesn't seem credible. To aim 76 missiles and
guided bombs at the Barzeh "complex" seems ludicrous overkill, for a small group of basically
civilian buildings that once were part of the chemical weapons program but according to
recent OPCW inspections are no longer in use as such. The spread suggested by the Russians,
on the other hand, seems much more credible for a punitive strike, especially if you assume
the US did not expect Syrian only defences to work effectively and thus did not plan for much
redundancy.
As this becomes more widely accepted, it makes the US action in Syria much less of a
defeat for Russia (because they had to stand by and watch their ally get pummelled) and much
closer to something that is actually a win for Russia and an embarrassment for the US. It all
helps to push the credibility of Russian air defences to still higher levels.
If the Russian government goes through with the suggested plan to deliver the promised
S300 systems to Syria in response, then this will have been a major defeat for those behind
this shameful incident and this shameful war -- primarily the Israelis and US Israeli lobby,
along with the Saudis. Doing so would be the absolute best way to make those behind the
attack grind their teeth in frustration, so hopefully Russia will go through with it this
time rather than coming to some "compromise" with Israel.
At some point, Russia needs to end the impunity Israel has to strike at Syria at will, and
to declare an exclusion zone over the whole of Syria for all un-invited foreign air forces
(ideally this would include a deal with Lebanon to allow that country also to exclude Israeli
air operations from its own airspace). The need to rebuild Syria is endlessly hampered by
regular attacks and the threat of them. Once the recovery of territory on the ground is
complete or nearly so, the best way to do this would seem to be to first make the Syrian air
defences, backed up by Russian forces in extremis, strong enough for the task. Then to
authorise the Syrians to retaliate to Israeli strikes on a tit for tat basis with missile
attacks on Israeli territory. Then to announce a full exclusion of US and other intruding air
forces, perhaps in conjunction with an offensive to recover territories in the east after
Idlib has been settled.
Imo this is what the Russians need to do if they are to bring the Syrian matter to a
successful conclusion, but it will mean some more tense confrontations with the various US
sphere forces.
Mr. Lang sounds like Mr. Buchanan in his latest piece published here: someone who considers
himself dissident, but who thoughtlessly accepts that his Uncle Sam is the good guy.
The article, especially this paragraph
"The US has been committed to global war for seventeen years. This has been a special kind
of war waged against Islamist guerrillas and terrorists worldwide. Such a war often demands
equipment quite different from that used against states, especially a peer state. In that
context relatively scarce funds have not been devoted to product improvement on things like
TLAM (Tomahawk). Instead the funds available have been devoted to UAVs (drones) and the
incredible costs of large ground forces in the absence of conscription. The Obama
Administration liked to use the armed forces but did not think of them with anything like the
high priority it gave to its social programs. The resulting sequester of defense funding
played a role in the decline of US equipment efficacy against that of the Russians. There
will be a change in that funding."
begs some questions:
1. Does Mr. Lang support the attack on the alleged "Syrian government chemical warfare
connected sites"? He sounds like he does. But why?
2. Does Mr. Lang support US military conscription? He sounds like he does. But why?
3. Does Mr. Lang believe that more money should be spent on US military equipment like
Tomahawk missiles for use against the government forces of Syria and Russia? He sounds like
he does. But why?
I also wonder why Mr. Unz sees this new author as "interesting, important, and
controversial," with a "perspectiv[e] largely excluded from the American mainstream
media."
and for Eva Bartlett's on-the-scenes coverage of White Helmets activities in Syria.
Is the Trump Administration/DoS trying to gaslight us?
US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert yesterday: we "are very grateful for all
the work the White Helmets continue to do.. on behalf of the US government and coalition
forces.. I just exchanged emails with them the other day peoples bills are still being
paid..'
Maybe there is another possibility.
Merely speculating.
Mr. Trump claims he sent 100 plus missiles to impress whoever he needs to impress. They are
satisfied. He looks tough.But he sends in only 20.
The Russians claim he sent in 100 and they nullified 2/3. They look good.
If 2/3 of 100 were nullified, should there not be more random craters with missile remnants
or duds recovered by the Syrians?
Why would you want our missiles to work against the Russians? This debacle has given us at
least another six months of relative peace. The SAA can now continue clearing out jihadist in
the East. FUKUS won't try again after making some adjustments to harden the electronics, but
that will take some time. The only other option would be an overwhelming attack, winning
through sheer numbers, but in that case the Russians will certainly counterattack, & I
don't think CENTCOM wants to find out first hand how effective Russian offensive missiles
systems are.
Note: If I were to guess, the Tomahawk attack was almost completely neutralized. It was
the B-1, firing at relatively close range, that scored the hit on the "chemical weapons
complex." This is why the Russians are sending the S-300 to Damascus.
If Russia declared Syria an exclusion zone Israel would call that bluff within
weeks.
Presumably it wouldn't be a bluff, and presumably the need for it not to be a bluff is why
the Russians haven't done it yet.
In that theater of operations the Israelis would absolutely massacre the Russian
presence and any reinforcements. Israel would easily take apart any integrated air defense
system and accompanying ground units the Russians could employ by combined commando raid,
ground incursion and air/missile strikes.
This appears to be pure fantasy.
Regardless, Israel isn't going to go to war with Russia merely to defend its freedom to
attack Syria any time it wants. For all the wailing by Israel advocates, it just isn't that
important to them. So long as they can get away with it, they'll do it. When they are forced
to stop, they'll stop.
I believe if Israel sees its existence threatened it will act decisively.
Israel's existence is not meaningfully threatened by the loss of their ability to launch
illegal attacks on Syria at will. The idea that it is, is a lie put about by the Israel lobby
to rationalise and justify its actions.
Is the Trump Administration/DoS trying to gaslight us?
LOL. Why, yes, now that you mention it. Quelle surprise , eh?
The "attack" on Syria had two purposes: a saving of face, and a disposal of old
ordnance.
I suspect that only Israel had any real interest in saving the face of their hired
boogeyman. Trump being a flunky of Israeli, he did what he had to do.
Old ordnance or semi-0ld, revenue must be generated for the MI-complex. The bigger it
grows, the more maintenance it requires. Disposal of old weaponry is just a form of cashflow.
The wealthy and powerful insist on remaining wealthy and powerful. Your money is required to
maintain that wealth and power. You will surrender your money to the powerful, or you will
die. A simple equation.
New air defense systems will soon be delivered to Damascus
the Syrian Defense Ministry "analyzed in detail" the results of the missile attack of
the United States and its allies.
"Based on it, a number of changes have already been introduced into the air defense
system of the country, which will further increase its reliability ," Rudskoy said.
While the air defense systems were not named, it is widely believed to be the S-300
system.
The latest Syria bombing: tactically irrelevant, it showed the foundation of the
F.UK.US-Israel empire, air power, ineffective and was a major strategic defeat.
Trump shouda put that McMahon wrestling lady in the propaganda department,
shes pretty good at convincing 50 year old adults that wrestling is real.
Americans just aren't buying what these idiots are trying to sell us with these chemical
attacks by the brutal dicktaters.
I'm honestly confused by the stupidity lately, either Trump is a genius or he is the dumbest
person on the planet.
The totally insane actions of these morons lately is waking people up in massive numbers, is he
doing it intentionally? Like a call for help or something? Trying to show us who is really
behind all this this crap? (Israel)
Because if he isn't, thats exactly what its doing.
"A very senior civilian colleague in DIA once asked me why sophisticated weapons so often
malfunction or are otherwise defeated. I told her that it was simply a fact of life that in
actual warfare "whatever can go wrong, will go wrong." She resolutely stated that this should
not be. "The manufacturers guarantee that they will work as advertised," she insisted. "
Another reason we can't win wars and we get into wars we shouldn't. Senior officials that
naive and uninformed about warfare.
Lockheed Martin got $35.2 billion from taxpayers last year. That's more than many
federal agencies.
Of Lockheed Martin's $51 billion in sales last year, nearly 70 percent, or $35.2
billion, came from sales to the U.S. government. It's a colossal figure, hard to
comprehend.
Boeing is in second place with annual sales of $26.5 billion in 2016, a year in which
the top five defense contractors -- including General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop
Grumman -- had total sales of nearly $110 billion to the U.S. government, according to
federal procurement data. The five biggest defense contractors took in more money from the
U.S. government than the next 30 companies combined.
But no one can touch Lockheed, the manufacturer of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The
company is so big that some have likened it to a government agency and have quipped that
Marillyn Hewson, Lockheed's chief executive, is as powerful as a Cabinet secretary -- or
higher. When she gives her annual state of the company speeches, flanked by a pair of flags
-- one American, one with the company logo -- she looks, well, presidential.
In 2013, Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis, now the secretary of defense, told Congress, "If
you don't fully fund the State Department, then I need to buy more ammunition."
Analysts say that to make the Lockheed-Martin Marietta merger successful, the new
company will have to slash thousands of jobs.
" This merger can't create more revenue. It can only pay off through reduced
costs , and that means people" will be laid off, said Robert D. Paulson, who heads the
aerospace industry practice for the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in Los Angeles.
--
Norman Augustine was the focus of the article and head of the merged companies who was
expected to wield the "scalpel" in order make the merger financially viable.
Over the years I'd done some research on Augustine, so when I saw a video of Augustine
schmoozing with George W. Bush at the Cosmos Club celebrating Bush's inauguration early in
2001, I thought, Uh oh, the game's afoot.
Cutting staff simply was not producing the revenue stream Lockheed Martin needed to
support lavish lifestyles that even LM weapons sellers enjoyed, particularly when their major
clients were based in TelAviv, requiring visits of 5 to 8 months' duration.
"... I agree Trump is an Israeli Flunky, but he likes Missile Strikes, so I think the Missile Strike, his second on Syria, was as much his idea as it was Israel's. It makes for great Optics. It makes Trump, in his Twisted Mind at least, look Big & Strong throwing Rocks at Toddlers in their Playpens. ..."
I suspect that only Israel had any real interest in saving the face of their hired
boogeyman. Trump being a flunky of Israeli, he did what he had to do.
I agree Trump is an Israeli Flunky, but he likes Missile Strikes, so I think the
Missile Strike, his second on Syria, was as much his idea as it was Israel's. It makes for
great Optics. It makes Trump, in his Twisted Mind at least, look Big & Strong throwing
Rocks at Toddlers in their Playpens.
Some of you do not understand the degree of compartmentation in government. It is nothing
like a monolith. The WHs are largely funded by USAID which is part of State Department, and
administered by the UK. There is no particular reason why Mattis would know much about it. It
is possible that Trump doesn't know much about it.
If Mattis didn't know about it, then he should have done and likewise with Trump.
Ignorance of the hard facts by either of these men is scarcely believable and even if true
would be totally inexcuseable.
"Lange didn't support the strike but he saw it as the best of a lot of bad options."
Better than the option of allowing a real investigation?
At the crucial moment, Lang published the following on his website. More than likely it
was seen by Mattis:
An appeal to James Mattis
I beseech you, sir, to consider the possibility that the supposed chlorine gas attack at
Douma, Syria may have been a carefully constructed propaganda fraud on the part of the
rebels encircled in Douma. Such a fraud would have as its purpose the elicitation of
exactly the kind of response that we are seeing in the Western media. The rebels have been
defeated in East Gouta Their fighters and families are being evacuated to Turkish occupied
Jarabulus by air-conditioned bus. How would it benefit the Syrian government to make such
an attack in this situation?
I hope that you will determine the exact facts of what occurred at Douma before any
action is taken.
I recommend that you send someone competent to Syria to make an on the ground
investigation.
If Mattis didn't know about it, then he should have done and likewise with Trump.
Ignorance of the hard facts by either of these men is scarcely believable and even if true
would be totally inexcuseable.
It were wise to consider that Mattis' access to information might be being impeded –
actively and/or passively – by the NeoCon bitter enders installed during the previous
administrations, people who believe that it is their job to do so. (We have been seeing this
very thing from the bitter enders at the FBI and the "Justice" departments in their plotting
against the new administration, yes? So you have an example of that right in front of your
eyes.)
With that understanding, and given Col. Lang's likely experience of this sort of
obstruction by hostile underlings, his appeal to Mattis might be seen as an admonition to dig
a little deeper, & to press his underlings about their truthfulness. So, Mattis could
indeed be misinformed, and precisely because of the compartmentalization that you accede.
Hence the letter going hand in hand with his worries about active and/or passive obstruction
in access to vital information, or the existence of contrary intelligence and
interpretation.
"... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies. ..."
"... the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies. ..."
"... The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule. ..."
"... But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils. ..."
In a three-part series published last week,
the World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and military operatives into the Democratic
Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant seats and those with Republican
incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant swing to the Democrats.
... ... ...
The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA,
NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus.
This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts"
for the television networks .
In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while essentially ignoring Trump's attacks
on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs
like Medicaid and food stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the
military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice.
This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the
intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen
candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation
with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.
The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its
operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that
score. A chorus of media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire editorial board
of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip
up support on alleged "human rights" grounds for an expansion of the US war in Syria.
The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers
to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic
Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining
the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.
The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence
operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience
invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given
preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.
The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration
has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened
its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.
The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of
American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose
interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class
is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.
Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right policies. But it is impossible to carry
out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx
of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that
the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the
corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.
it's a wonder there's anything left of this country at all.
spiritually, there isn't
just as morally, the ZUSA is a dead husk. This country has absolutely zero credibility or
standing in the world anymore. All they've got is a military they can use to menace and bully
the rest of the planet into submission. Which is a specialty of the Clintons.
It's wasn't just the Branch Dravidians who were burned alive (no doubt to the cackling of
the war hag), or just Gadhafi who was murdered by her sub-human orcs, but this man also had
his country illegally bombed and was dragged off to a mock kangaroo court until he was given
a chance to speak, whereupon he humiliated his tormentors
the reason I post this image of the hag is to remind readers of what the alternative to Trump
actually was.
Fred likes to fulminate over all things Trump (and us Deplorables – calling us 'gas
station louts, and much worse ; ), for his own dubious agenda (biological warfare ; ), but
the fact remains that even as Trump adopts all the traits of a neocon war pig, and always has
been an egotistical and superficial man, he's still a gazillion times to the n'th power
preferable to the gorgon war hag.
For all of Trump's many foibles and failings, he isn't the root cause of all the things
Fred is lambasting in this article. Rather it's the ((deepstate)) that Trump has made a
devil's bargain with, which does not change with presidents. If we're ever to prevent the
looming war with Russia, then it would behoove us to look behind the curtain at the fiend
pulling the levers. Talking about Trump, as if he's the cause of it all, is like being
enthralled over the theatrics of the wizard of Oz.
This is all about hamster herding, as neoliberalism in is crisis both domestically and
internationally.
Notable quotes:
"... Whoever wrote Trump's speech for him -- he obviously cannot put together two sentences with dependent clauses without wandering onto the far shores of incoherence -- worked the moral-outrage pump hard. The gas attack, by whomever made, killed, eeek, squeak, seventy civilians and little children. More hamster-herding: git along little furry dogies. On many days in the Mid-East, the United States has killed more civilians than all the gas attacks real or invented in the entire war. The pilots, unprincipled as are all military men, know they are doing it, and don't care. They get paid for their humanitarianism. By us. ..."
"... Assad had won his war and had no need of gassing a few civilians. He would have to know that it would give Washington a pretext for an attack. Which it did. Is Assad so foolish? ..."
"... Similarly with the poisoning of what's-his-spy and his daughter. Russia had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose, as we have seen. It is one thing to believe Mr. Putin capable of bad things. To believe him stupid is quite another. Note that Theresa May became hysterical before it was established that Russia did it, which has still not been established. The orchestrated expulsion of Russian diplomats by all the vassal states, also before anything definitive had been determined, was just too cute. ..."
"... Who had anything to gain by the gaseous adventurism Answer: The American Empire -- not America, not Americans -- and Israel. Both are desperate to keep Syria from surviving. Note that Washington has a history of lying the country into wars. The Maine in 1898, the Gulf of Tonkin, the imaginary WMD in Gulf I. Plus ca change, plus ca doesn't. ..."
"... Because the Empire's hegemony over the Mid-East, Asia, and the world weakens. The Empire totters. Syria is at the heart of the looming demise. ..."
"... If -- when -- America leaves, Pakistan will become an economic client state of China, without a shot being fired. Afghanistan will quickly follow as China invests in its minerals. This is why Washington cannot leave. ..."
"... Washington's approach to hegemony is military, relying on bombing and economic sanctions. This requires huge military expenditures that cripple the domestic economy and produces countless countries that would break with America if they could. By contrast, China's approach is economic, smarter and much cheaper. ..."
"... "Get ready Russia, missiles will be coming at Syria, nice and new and 'smart'!" This is not adult language. It is the taunting of a twelve-year-old. Nya hnya nya! Yet it is classic Trump. This man has absolute power to launch wars whose consequences we will have to bear. Is this not splendid? ..."
"... The strangest thing with Syria is how obsessed the Empire is with destroying it. Various reasons are given such as Israel, gas pipelines, and containing Iran. At the end of the day I think it's primarily psychological. The Empire is outraged that the Assman dares to resist. ..."
"... As to "hamster herding", include "media herding", consenting and dissenting alike. The main reasons for the latter are "bread" writing, and real "believes" of ignorance. Seems the layer, includes second tier politicians, "public intellectuals" alike. A case of "garbage in, garbage out" and a secondary condition of individual middle class jockeying. ..."
"... As to the choice of what can be called "military capitalism" of the US, it has no longer any other options, contrary to Russia and China. Give or take a single percentage point or two, there must be some insiders that fully understand that the global system of economics is now running into the wall, there is no solution to that. Neither is there a venue-way for China, or Russia, economically, outside of global consent. They might have a few cycles more of trade, cleaning the plate, which they choose to do, what looks admirable in the short term to many, but ultimately will equally grind to a standstill. ..."
"... the elites depend on the loot provided by enormous military budgets, and sanctions they can work around .Historically, empires are rarely allowed to shrink until the home country is completely bankrupt. ..."
Only three weapons of mass destruction exist: Nuclear explosives, artillery, and aerial
bombing. Think Dresden, Hiroshima, Guernica, Falluja.
Two: Whoever wrote Trump's speech for him -- he obviously cannot put together two
sentences with dependent clauses without wandering onto the far shores of incoherence -- worked
the moral-outrage pump hard. The gas attack, by whomever made, killed, eeek, squeak, seventy
civilians and little children. More hamster-herding: git along little furry dogies. On many
days in the Mid-East, the United States has killed more civilians than all the gas attacks real
or invented in the entire war. The pilots, unprincipled as are all military men, know they are
doing it, and don't care. They get paid for their humanitarianism. By us.
Three: Something smells. The use of toxins, either by Assad in Syria or by Russia in West
Pakistan -- England, I meant, England -- makes no sense. Assad had won his war and had no
need of gassing a few civilians. He would have to know that it would give Washington a pretext
for an attack. Which it did. Is Assad so foolish?
Similarly with the poisoning of what's-his-spy and his daughter. Russia had nothing to
gain and a great deal to lose, as we have seen. It is one thing to believe Mr. Putin capable of
bad things. To believe him stupid is quite another. Note that Theresa May became hysterical
before it was established that Russia did it, which has still not been established. The
orchestrated expulsion of Russian diplomats by all the vassal states, also before anything
definitive had been determined, was just too cute.
Hamster herding.
Four: Who had anything to gain by the gaseous adventurism Answer: The American Empire --
not America, not Americans -- and Israel. Both are desperate to keep Syria from surviving. Note
that Washington has a history of lying the country into wars. The Maine in 1898, the Gulf of
Tonkin, the imaginary WMD in Gulf I. Plus ca change, plus ca doesn't.
Five: Syria is of no importance, at all, to America or Americans. It has nothing America
wants or needs. It poses no danger to America. It is somewhere else. This lack of vital
interest to America it shares with North Korea, Afghanistan, the Ukraine, the Crimea, the South
China Sea, and all the other places where the Empire looks for war. Then why does Washington
risk nuclear war by accident with Russia, which also poses no danger to America?
Because the Empire's hegemony over the Mid-East, Asia, and the world weakens. The Empire
totters. Syria is at the heart of the looming demise.
Things go badly, Empire-wise. Start with the war on Afghanistan, now creeping toward its
third decade, and neighboring Pakistan. China invests heavily in infrastructure in Pakistan:
The Karakoram Highway, the Karachi reactors, the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, the IP
pipeline, Guadar. If -- when -- America leaves, Pakistan will become an economic client
state of China, without a shot being fired. Afghanistan will quickly follow as China invests in
its minerals. This is why Washington cannot leave.
Afghanistan borders Iran, which Washington maintains as an enemy at the behest of Israel.
Iran borders Iraq, wrecked by the United States and sharing a religion with Iran. Without the
threat of American military power, it could easily align itself with Iran and Asia. In Syria,
Assad seems to have won unless the Empire doubles or triples down. Thus the contrived gassing
of children and Trump's missile attack. Turkey balances between east and west, and could easily
decide that Asia is the future.
The Empire totters, wounded and dangerous.
Six: Washington's approach to hegemony is military, relying on bombing and economic
sanctions. This requires huge military expenditures that cripple the domestic economy and
produces countless countries that would break with America if they could. By contrast, China's
approach is economic, smarter and much cheaper. It is China's Belt and Road Initiative to
integrate all of Eurasia into one huge trading block, excluding guess who, that has the Empire
in a panic. How do you bomb a trade agreement?
Seven: Russia and China have adult leadership. Putin and Xi are stable, intelligent, and
competent. Their interests are not Washington's and they will do whatever is in the interest of
their countries, but they are not stupid, ignorant, weak, juvenile, or crazy. By contrast,
Trump is a loon, ignorant of practically everything, mentally chaotic, and easily modified.
"Get ready Russia, missiles will be coming at Syria, nice and new and 'smart'!" This is
not adult language. It is the taunting of a twelve-year-old. Nya hnya nya! Yet it is
classic Trump. This man has absolute power to launch wars whose consequences we will have to
bear. Is this not splendid?
At this stage in the game I'm not one to ramble about "3D Chess", but I get the sense that
Trump's tweeting was intended to warn Putin and thus deescalate. Of course on the flip
side we have (uncomfirmed) reports that Trump and his bloodthirsty NSC chair Fox Bolton were
arguing for a bigger attack than the generals would agree to.
If nothing else it's quite clear that any effort to withdraw from Syria simply immediately
results in a false flag attack. Even if chemical weapons were as awful as is supposed (I
agree with Mr. Reed), that doesn't make it relevant to American interests.
The strangest thing with Syria is how obsessed the Empire is with destroying it.
Various reasons are given such as Israel, gas pipelines, and containing Iran. At the end of
the day I think it's primarily psychological. The Empire is outraged that the Assman dares to
resist. `
"Note that Washington has a history of lying the country into wars. The Maine in 1898 ..":
add the War of 1812. In fact, presumably add all other American wars until, I suppose, WWII.
And even then the US severely provoked Japan, though it seems to me that the blame for the
war was Japan's: even the perfidious Yanks couldn't force her to behave with such reckless
idiocy in the Pacific.
Re: "It serves nicely, however, to alarm publics with minds of low voltage."
In 1958, I still believed that there was a significant intellectual difference between the
American bourgeosie and the cattle one sees peering between the slats of large trucks as they
contentedly munch hay on their way to the abattoir.
That was owing to the public's colossal ignorance of its history, its predatory character,
and its total faith in the national myths of manifest destiny, etc.
The percentage of gas casualties who died as a result of their wound was much lower than
for injuries inflected by other means (shell splinters, explosives, bullets). Taking
countermeasures against chemical attacks is possible. To be effective, gas usually has to be
delivered by the ton, usually by artillery. Nerve gas is much deadlier, but also very tricky
to use.
Not advocating gas warfare, but it's not a death ray.
In the whole of the Unz sphere, the only article that makes sense of Syria pot-shots, by
adhering to a necessary global scope.
Irrelevant. Trump is a punching bag, that is as much as Obama was a surfboard, these
figureheads are actors, better or worse. Putin, Xi, do matter, Putin harnessed a streamlined
decision making nucleus out of chaos internally, it again gave meaning to the mention of
"Russia". Xi probably does matter, we do not know, neither of us were able to observe one or
the other. What matters is that there is rational coherence in both systems, China and
Russia. Because of infighting, the West looks ridiculously bloated, and stumbling.
As to "hamster herding", include "media herding", consenting and dissenting alike. The
main reasons for the latter are "bread" writing, and real "believes" of ignorance. Seems the
layer, includes second tier politicians, "public intellectuals" alike. A case of "garbage in,
garbage out" and a secondary condition of individual middle class jockeying.
As to the choice of what can be called "military capitalism" of the US, it has no
longer any other options, contrary to Russia and China. Give or take a single percentage
point or two, there must be some insiders that fully understand that the global system of
economics is now running into the wall, there is no solution to that. Neither is there a
venue-way for China, or Russia, economically, outside of global consent. They might have a
few cycles more of trade, cleaning the plate, which they choose to do, what looks admirable
in the short term to many, but ultimately will equally grind to a standstill.
Our take,
globally, there is some consensus about above, in minimal, stealthy cycles, and the
situation in Syria today is to be seen as a proverbial napkin sketch of the architect of
project global government. Putin was degraded in his status, his error, to propagate
nationalistic posing on the world scene, was offensive to the project of world rule. He got
away with a warning and loss of face.
There was, and is, to be seen some experimenting with method (stealth outside the public
view), timeliness and international consent. That is hopeful, if one can get from a pot-shot,
and not firing back, to addressing the real problems of the world, all and every, only
solvable by global consent, and in a timely manner, Syria must be seen as a hopeful
experiment of "global collegiate" ruling.
If "real" war, not policing, "real" major shifts of riches, from finite, generational
elites to abhorrent masses of commoners and ridiculous attitudes middle classes, results, we
humbly retract. The crest of the wave will have an undercurrent: even worse conditions
applied to the number of human under-classes, even temporarily more wastelands created, but
adhering to collegiate global consent, and sold to the masses as a prime Hollywood style
production. That is what the elites seem to strive for.
The important element is they seem to grasp, as only sub-group of humanity, that they are
condemned to one another, the "chevalier seul" attitudes are projections to the public.
Indeed, the people want it very much But the elites depend on the loot provided by
enormous military budgets, and sanctions they can work around .Historically, empires are
rarely allowed to shrink until the home country is completely bankrupt.
The fact that 99.9% of neocons are chickenhawks and never experienced the level of sufferings
the wat inflicts on people is defining chanracteristic of all US neocons. Especially female
neocon -- a unique US breed.
Notable quotes:
"... At the core of the American philosophy is voluntarism, the justification of action based purely and simply on the will. ..."
"... The clearest and perhaps the best expression of American voluntarism come of age was expressed by Karl Rove during the George W. Bush administration, as reported by Ron Suskind in New York Times Magazine ..."
"... We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. ..."
"... The point of the voluntarist order is to act, to impose one's will on global reality by any means necessary. The truth is not something to be understood, or grasped, still less something that should condition one's own actions and limit them in any way. Truth is reducible to whatever is useful for imposing one's will. ..."
"... For America's voluntarist order, whether these events as described are true in the objective sense is of no more importance than whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You will recall that, just prior to the Iraq invasion, the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah some 83 times in order to oblige him to confess a nonexistent connection between Saddam's Iraq, al-Qaeda, and chemical weaponry. That is voluntarism in action right there. "We're an empire now and we create our own reality." It was not a one-off. It is now the norm to make sure the facts are fixed to match the desired policy. ..."
"... Voluntarism is the fruit of an anti-civilization, and of a technological way of knowing, as the great Canadian philosopher George Grant put it, that bears a striking resemblance to what C.S. Lewis described in his pre- Nineteen Eighty-Four ..."
At the core of the American philosophy is voluntarism, the justification of action based
purely and simply on the will. The distinguishing characteristic of voluntarism is that it
gives pride of place to the will as such, to the will as power, the will abstracted from
everything else, but especially abstracted from the good. The notion of the good is necessarily
inclusive of the whole, of all sides. Concern exclusively for oneself goes by a different
name.
The clearest and perhaps the best expression of American voluntarism come of age was
expressed by Karl Rove during the George W. Bush administration, as reported by Ron Suskind in
New York Times Magazine on October 17, 2004:
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying
that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities,
which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you,
all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
This oft-quoted statement is naively assumed to have been the expression of a single moment
in American politics, rather than a summation of its ethos by one of its shrewder and more
self-aware practitioners. The point of the voluntarist order is to act, to impose one's will on
global reality by any means necessary. The truth is not something to be understood, or grasped,
still less something that should condition one's own actions and limit them in any way. Truth
is reducible to whatever is useful for imposing one's will.
We can see this voluntarism at work among our forebears. The Skripal affair in Britain led
to almost immediate action -- the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats from the United States
alone -- well before the facts of this dubious incident, which has led to zero deaths, could be
established. Indeed, when the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, suggested first
establishing what had happened and only then acting, he was widely accused of weakness. When
one is "history's actor," action mustn't be delayed. That, after all, is the whole point.
The suffering of innocents should always concern us. But in Syria, the facts regarding who
is the guilty party, including in this latest case of a gas attack in Douma, are very far from
having been established. What's more, though reputable investigators such as Hans Blix and
MIT's Theodore Postol have cast serious
doubt on the reliability of the evidence linking such attacks to Assad's government,
official accounts in the U.S. proceed as if there is not the slightest controversy about the
matter.
For America's voluntarist order, whether these events as described are true in the objective
sense is of no more importance than whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You
will recall that, just prior to the Iraq invasion, the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah some 83
times in order to oblige him to
confess a nonexistent connection between Saddam's Iraq, al-Qaeda, and chemical weaponry.
That is voluntarism in action right there. "We're an empire now and we create our own reality."
It was not a one-off. It is now the norm to make sure the facts are fixed
to match the desired policy.
Voluntarism is the fruit of an anti-civilization, and of a technological way of knowing, as
the great Canadian philosopher George Grant put it, that bears a striking resemblance to what
C.S. Lewis described in his pre- Nineteen Eighty-Four anti-utopia That Hideous
Strength . In that novel, the institution called N.I.C.E., like the U.S. foreign policy
establishment today, is essentially a voluntarist bureaucracy run by men without culture,
trained in technical sciences and sociology-like "disciplines" and "law" understood in a purely
formalistic sense, who assume human affairs are understandable as aggregates of facts without
value. Such "men without chests" (Lewis's phrase) live in a world where the good and the true
have forever been severed of their mutually defining link. The resulting, essentially
irrational world they inhabit is one that has only one logic left: that of will and power.
It is an American empire where we create our own reality, the mirror image of ourselves, and
it is indeed precisely hideous. If the builders of empire continue to get their way, it may all
soon enough come to a violent and ignominious end. Historians, if they still exist, will marvel
at our folly.
Paul Grenier, an essayist and translator who writes regularly on
political-philosophical issues, is founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political
Philosophy.
For another outstanding account of 'a technological way of knowing', check out Jacques
Ellul's 'The Technological Society'.
Not only was this incident fabricated, it was known the preparations were known in
advance. I remember reading an article two weeks before Douma about the preparations for the
fabrication. Felix Somary was quite right in writing in July 1914 that "the information
available to insiders, and precisely the most highly placed among them, is all to often
misleading" (quoted in Jim Rickards "The Road to Ruin").
Volunteerism, voluntarism, the mysterious workings of the "will," we're famous for all of it,
but this is not so uniquely American, Rove's comment reminds me of something that Tolstoy
might put in Napoleon's mouth, actually. Pride, plus the tunnel-vision typical of
technocrats, academics, specialists
Karl Rove is a man without a chest–a "chickenhawk," a proud and willful man puffed
up on ignorance and willpower, wrecking the world–and nothing more than that, unless he
wills it to be.
Volunteerism is two things, Power to the Ladies Who Lunch, and we don't have to pay for a
social safety net because somebody else will provide it voluntarily for free.
It has no larger meaning, and no role in foreign policy.
The foreign policy described here is just Smedley Butler's "racket" using US foreign
policy and forces for private ends.
Paul has made reclaiming Congress' role in matters of war one of his signature issues.
Pompeo testified before the Foreign Relations Committee that he doesn't think the president
needs Congressional authorization to order attacks on other states. Trump's nominee thinks that
the president can start wars on his own authority, so Paul should be voting against his
nomination for that reason alone. Voting to confirm Pompeo is an effective endorsement of the
very illegal and unauthorized warfare that Paul normally condemns.
"Instead, Paul will get nothing except widespread derision for caving to pressure. "
Depressing. I thought he'd have more guts. Perhaps he's keeping his ammunition dry for
some important purpose, and maybe the White House IOU he now holds has value. We'll see.
I have disliked Sen. Paul ever since the British Petroleum disaster, when he bemoaned that
making BP pay for damages was "anti-business" as if seafood fisheries, motels, and
restaurants were not businesses too.
In no way MSM will drop "Russiagate" theme. They are way too invested in it. Douma attack changes nothing at all, contary to
the author claims.
Notable quotes:
"... the Russian Conspiracy Theory -- rammed down the throats of everyone around the globe since Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States -- has finally been laid to rest. ..."
"... Russia may or may not act, but it is rather unlikely that they will -- at least in the short term -- as the full combined might of the West is still an overwhelming force that no one nation can contend with. Russia knows this, and they are not stupid. But this is not to say that things cannot, nor will not, change in the future. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the chatter of Russian collusion, via the corrupt and dying MSM has petered out, as even those suffering from an extreme case of brainwashing find it hard to comprehend how a puppet can so easily slap its master across the face and get away with it. ..."
"... If President Trump was truly a puppet of Vladimir Putin -- or at least once was -- then parties in the know would have promptly released the evidence, destroying Trump in the process. The reason why it hasn't happened is simply because the evidence doesn't exist. ..."
"... Hilariously, it is the MSM who cry wolf about fake news and conspiracy theories, while at the same time, pushing their own half-truths, fake news and conspiracy theories. ..."
"... It is sad to see how far the "guardians of the truth" have fallen and how decadent the MSM has become. They are so greedy and corrupt that they have pushed us towards a path that places the West on the precipice of war with a global, nuclear power. ..."
"... The Demorats need impeachment to fire up their base and get their cash. They filed a lawsuit to generate propaganda points for the MSM to wallow in. ..."
"... The Main Stain Media are still pushing the Russia Narrative every chance they get, as a side show now, a little jab here a little jab there not really attached to anything. ..."
But the Russian Conspiracy Theory -- rammed down the throats of everyone around the globe
since Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States -- has finally been laid
to rest.
With a resounding boom as the missiles landed in Syria, the hopes and dreams of the MSM
proving that President Trump is simply a Russian puppet were shattered in one swift tactical
strike.These strikes came at a great risk, as they hit key Syrian assets -- assets that President
Putin and his Russian forces vowed to protect. Acting together
with its joint allies , Britain and France, the United States struck out against Syria for
what the Western Intelligence community claims were chemical attacks against the Syrian
civilian population, orchestrated by its own government.
Whether or not these claims are true is debatable (and highly suspect) but regardless, the
chips have fallen, and we are now in a precarious position as the West once again plunges
itself, ham-fisted, back into the cold war era.
Russian leaders have vowed that there will be consequences for these acts against an ally
they have sworn to protect. Yet to this date, no retaliation has seemed to occur.
Russia may or may not act, but it is rather unlikely that they will -- at least in the short
term -- as the full combined might of the West is still an overwhelming force that no one
nation can contend with. Russia knows this, and they are not stupid. But this is not to say
that things cannot, nor will not, change in the future.
Still, this has come at a cost. Russia has once again been forced into further isolation, as
its Western peers condemn their actions and threaten them with even more trade sanctions.
Pushed to the point of desperation, who knows what actions they will take in the coming
years?
Meanwhile, the chatter of Russian collusion, via the corrupt and dying MSM has petered out,
as even those suffering from an extreme case of brainwashing find it hard to comprehend how a
puppet can so easily slap its master across the face and get away with it.
If President Trump was truly a puppet of Vladimir Putin -- or at least once was -- then
parties in the know would have promptly released the evidence, destroying Trump in the process.
The reason why it hasn't happened is simply because the evidence doesn't exist.
Hilariously, it is the MSM who cry wolf about fake news and conspiracy theories, while at
the same time, pushing their own half-truths, fake news and conspiracy theories.
It is sad to see how far the "guardians of the truth" have fallen and how decadent the MSM
has become. They are so greedy and corrupt that they have pushed us towards a path that places
the West on the precipice of war with a global, nuclear power.
The final nail in the Russian collusion coffin has been put in place, but at what cost?
A dumb article: The Russians have not vowed anything. As Lavrov has stated publicly, "there will be consequences" is a
factual observation, not a vow to revenge anything. Revenge does not help. It is not the way Putin thinks -- Putin thinks in
terms of interests and the trade off between risks/costs and benefits.
"With 4 indictments, 2 guilty pleas, not sure how anyone thinks it's over. AS for the Syria attack. . . "
Four indictments that have NOTHING to do with Trump colluding with Russia and are SOLEY upon the people indicted. Two
guilty pleas for "lying" which your side is advocating that lying is no longer an issue we should care about.
AS FOR SYRIA: Interesting you put the Syria strike on Putin when it was obviously led by Britain and France or are we now
to believe they along with Trump are Putin puppets too? However, you do seem to be FINALLY admitting your "NGO"'s are nothing
but state sponsored shams intent on manipulating the world wide masses to believe their propaganda. After all it was YOUR
people who claimed there was a supposed chemical attack and demanded retaliation.
Keep spinning in circles, as the dog who chases his tail is in a world all of his own making.
Reaper • Sat, 04/21/2018 - 09:58 Permalink
BS. The neo-cons know the strike was deliberately ineffective. The Demorats need impeachment to fire up their base and
get their cash. They filed a lawsuit to generate propaganda points for the MSM to wallow in.
JailBanksters • Sat, 04/21/2018 - 09:59 Permalink
The Main Stain Media are still pushing the Russia Narrative every chance they get, as a side show now, a little jab
here a little jab there not really attached to anything.
We haven't seen anything like this since the Russians were accused of hacking the Federal Election, over to you Bob.
Well that's right Jim, and now for something completely different.
"... Yeah. Sociopath. Gives me the shivers. Bill is the same, but conceals it better. I mean, WTF, the guy had state troopers bringing him any pussy he spotted on his lunch break. ..."
Yeah. Sociopath. Gives me the shivers. Bill is the same, but conceals it better. I mean,
WTF, the guy had state troopers bringing him any pussy he spotted on his lunch break.
Jesus,
the rejects this country brings to the White House it's a wonder there's anything left of
this country at all.
To he contrary, all of the Pearl Harbor hearings were meant to protect Marshall and Stark,
and use Kimmel and Short as scapegoats. As such, all of them were cover ups.
In order to find someone who was willing to lay the USA fleet ready for destruction in the
mouse trap Pearl Harbour FDR had to jump 50 promotion places. Kimmel sent the three essential
aircraft carriers on exercise shortly before the attack. So, in my opinion, Kimmel knew quite
well what was coming.
What the hearings were meant for I do not know, as I'm not a mind reader. In any case,
there was no cover up: Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., 'Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, A
critical examination of the foreign policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and its aftermath',
Caldwell, Idaho, 1953 The introduction of the book makes clear how to suppress the truth.
"... Putting aside his partisan motivations, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) was unusually blunt two months ago in warning of legal consequences for officials who misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and his associates. Nunes's words are likely to have sent chills down the spine of those with lots to hide: "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said ."The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created." ..."
"... The media will be key to whether this Constitutional issue is resolved. Largely because of Trump's own well earned reputation for lying, most Americans are susceptible to slanted headlines like this recent one -- "Trump escalates attacks on FBI " -- from an article in The Washington Post , commiserating with the treatment accorded fired-before-retired prevaricator McCabe and the FBI he ( dis)served . ..."
"... What motivated the characters now criminally "referred" is clear enough from a wide variety of sources, including the text messages exchange between Strzok and Page. Many, however, have been unable to understand how these law enforcement officials thought they could get away with taking such major liberties with the law. ..."
"... None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, "opposition research," or other activities directed against the Trump campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind that it was considered a sure thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which point illegal and extralegal activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not prison. The activities were hardly considered high-risk, because candidate Clinton was sure to win. ..."
"... Comey admits, "It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the re-started investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in the polls." ..."
"... The key point is not Comey's tortured reasoning, but rather that Clinton was "sure to be the next president." This would, of course, confer automatic immunity on those now criminally referred to the Department of Justice. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men -- even very tall men. One wag claimed that the "Higher" in "A Higher Loyalty" refers simply to the very tall body that houses an outsized ego. ..."
"... "Hope springs eternal" would be the cynical folk wisdom. FYI we haven't had a functioning constitution since the National Security Act of 1947 brought this nation under color of law, but the IC types wouldn't have you know that. Too tough to square the idea you'd never have had your CIA career in a world where the FISA court couldn't exist either. ..."
"... there is concrete evidence that the Democratic party/Clinton manipulated the primaries to destroy Clinton's challanger. That the DOJ, FBI & other alphabet agencies conspired with Clinton to equally, destroy Trump's campaign. ..."
"... We saw the same nonsense with Obama, the "peace president". Obama a man who never saw a Muslim he did not want to bomb or a Jew he did not want to bail out ..."
"... The best thing about this referral is that it also demands deputy AG Rod Rosenstein the weasel to recluse himself from this case. Rosenstein is the pinnacle of corruption by the deep state. ..."
"... Former CIA Director John Brennan is the prime mover behind the ongoing coup attempt against Trump. He gathered his deep state allies at DOJ and the FBI to join him in this endeavor. Brennan's allies -- McCabe, Lynch, Strzok, Yates, ect., may or may not be aware of Brennan's true motive behind creating all the noise and distraction since the 2016 election. It could be they're just partisan hacks; or they're on board with Brennan to keep secret what was revealed in the hack of the Podesta emails. ..."
"... I noticed Comey tried to pull a J Edgar-style subtle blackmail on Trump by the way he brought up the so-called "dossier" ..."
"... Bill Clinton got recruited into CIA by Cord Meyer, who bragged of it himself in his cups. ..."
"... Hillary cut her teeth on CIA's Watergate purge of Nixon. (If it's news to anyone that the Watergate cast of characters was straight out of CIA central casting, Russ Baker has conclusively tied the elaborate ratfeck to the intelligence community.) ..."
"... Obama was son of spooks, grandson of spooks, greased in to Harvard by Alwaleed bin-Talal's bagman. ..."
Wednesday's criminal referral by 11 House Republicans of former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton as well as several former and serving top FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials
is a giant step toward a Constitutional crisis.
Named in the referral to the DOJ for possible violations of federal law are: Clinton, former
FBI Director James Comey; former Attorney General Loretta Lynch; former Acting FBI Director
Andrew McCabe; FBI Agent Peter Strzok; FBI Counsel Lisa Page; and those DOJ and FBI personnel
"connected to" work on the "Steele Dossier," including former Acting Attorney General Sally
Yates and former Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente.
With no attention from corporate media, the referral was sent to Attorney General Jeff
Sessions, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah John Huber.
Sessions appointed Huber months ago to assist DOJ Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz. By
most accounts, Horowitz is doing a thoroughly professional job. As IG, however, Horowitz lacks
the authority to prosecute; he needs a U.S. Attorney for that. And this has to be disturbing to
the alleged perps.
This is no law-school case-study exercise, no arcane disputation over the fine points of
this or that law. Rather, as we say in the inner-city, "It has now hit the fan." Criminal
referrals can lead to serious jail time. Granted, the upper-crust luminaries criminally
"referred" enjoy very powerful support. And that will come especially from the mainstream
media, which will find it hard to retool and switch from Russia-gate to the much more delicate
and much less welcome "FBI-gate."
As of this writing, a full day has gone by since the letter/referral was reported, with
total silence so far from T he New York Times and The Washington Post and other
big media as they grapple with how to spin this major development. News of the criminal
referral also slipped by Amy Goodman's non-mainstream DemocracyNow!, as well as many
alternative websites.
The 11 House members chose to include the following egalitarian observation in the first
paragraph of the
letter conveying the criminal referral: "Because we believe that those in positions of high
authority should be treated the same as every other American, we want to be sure that the
potential violations of law outlined below are vetted appropriately." If this uncommon attitude
is allowed to prevail at DOJ, it would, in effect, revoke the de facto "David Petraeus
exemption" for the be-riboned, be-medaled, and well-heeled.
Stonewalling
Meanwhile, the patience of the chairmen of House committees investigating abuses at DOJ and
the FBI is wearing thin at the slow-rolling they are encountering in response to requests for
key documents from the FBI. This in-your-face intransigence is all the more odd, since several
committee members have already had access to the documents in question, and are hardly likely
to forget the content of those they know about. (Moreover, there seems to be a good chance that
a patriotic whistleblower or two will tip them off to key documents being withheld.)
The DOJ IG, whose purview includes the FBI, has been cooperative in responding to committee
requests for information, but those requests can hardly include documents of which the
committees are unaware.
Putting aside his partisan motivations, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes
(R-CA) was unusually blunt two months ago in warning of legal consequences for officials who
misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and
his associates. Nunes's words are likely to have sent chills down the spine of those with lots
to hide: "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said
."The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created."
Whether the House will succeed in overcoming the resistance of those criminally referred and
their many accomplices and will prove able to exercise its Constitutional prerogative of
oversight is, of course, another matter -- a matter that matters.
And Nothing Matters More Than the Media
The media will be key to whether this Constitutional issue is resolved. Largely because of
Trump's own well earned reputation for lying, most Americans are susceptible to slanted
headlines like this recent one -- "Trump escalates attacks on FBI " -- from an
article in The Washington Post , commiserating with the treatment accorded
fired-before-retired prevaricator McCabe and the FBI he ( dis)served
.
Nor is the Post above issuing transparently clever warnings -- like this one in a
lead
article on March 17: "Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting
the FBI. 'This is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI's going to win,' said one ally,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. 'You can't fight the FBI. They're going
to torch him.'" [sic]
Mind-Boggling Criminal Activity
What motivated the characters now criminally "referred" is clear enough from a wide variety
of sources, including the text messages exchange between Strzok and Page. Many, however, have
been unable to understand how these law enforcement officials thought they could get away with
taking such major liberties with the law.
None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, "opposition research," or other activities
directed against the Trump campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind
that it was considered a sure thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which
point illegal and extralegal activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not
prison. The activities were hardly considered high-risk, because candidate Clinton was sure to
win.
But she lost.
Comey himself gives this away in the embarrassingly puerile book he has been hawking, "A
Higher Loyalty" -- which
amounts to a pre-emptive move motivated mostly by loyalty-to-self, in order to obtain a
Stay-Out-of-Jail card. Hat tip to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone for a key observation, in his
recent article
, "James Comey, the Would-Be J. Edgar Hoover," about what Taibbi deems the book's most damning
passage, where Comey discusses his decision to make public the re-opening of the Hillary
Clinton email investigation.
Comey admits, "It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an
environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making
her an illegitimate president by concealing the re-started investigation bore greater weight
than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in the
polls."
The key point is not Comey's tortured reasoning, but rather that Clinton was "sure to be the
next president." This would, of course, confer automatic immunity on those now criminally
referred to the Department of Justice. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men -- even very
tall men. One wag claimed that the "Higher" in "A Higher Loyalty" refers simply to the very
tall body that houses an outsized ego.
I think it can be said that readers of Consortiumnews.com may be unusually well equipped to
understand the anatomy of FBI-gate as well as Russia-gate. Listed below chronologically are
several links that might be viewed as a kind of "whiteboard" to refresh memories. You may wish
to refer them to any friends who may still be confused.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and
then a CIA analyst for a total of 30 years. In retirement, he co-created Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
A weird country, the USA.
Reading the article I'm reminded of the 1946 Senate investigation into Pearl Harbour, where,
in my opinion, the truth was unearthed.
At the same time, this truth hardly ever reached the wider public, no articles, the book, ed.
Harry Elmer Barnes, never reviewed.
Will McCabe wind up in jail? Will Comey? Will Hillary face justice? Fingers crossed!
The short answer is NO. McCabe might, but not Comey and the Killer Queen, they've both served Satan, uh I mean the
Deep State too long and too well.Satan and the banksters–who really run the show–take care of their own and
apex predators like Hillary won't go to jail. But it does keep the rubes entertained while the banksters continue to loot, pillage and
plunder and Israel keeps getting Congress to fight their wars.
"Hope springs eternal" would be the cynical folk wisdom. FYI we haven't had a functioning
constitution since the National Security Act of 1947 brought this nation under color of law,
but the IC types wouldn't have you know that. Too tough to square the idea you'd never have
had your CIA career in a world where the FISA court couldn't exist either.
Consortium News many sops tossed to 'realpolitik' where false narrative is attacked with
alternative false narrative, example given, drunk Ukrainian soldiers supposedly downing MH 17
with a BUK as opposed to Kiev's Interior Ministry behind the Ukrainian combat jet that
actually brought down MH 17, poisons everything (trust issues) spewed from that news
service.
The realpolitik 'face saving' exit/offer implied in the Consortium News narrative where
Russia doesn't have to confront the West with Ukraine's (and by implication the western
intelligence agencies) premeditated murder of 300 innocents does truth no favors.
Time to grow up and face reality. Realpolitik is dead; the caliber of 'statesman' required
for these finessed geopolitical lies to function no longer exist on the Western side, and the
Russians (I believe) are beginning to understand there is no agreement can be made behind
closed doors that will hold up; as opposed to experiencing a backstabbing (like NATO not
moving east.)
Back on topic; the National Security Act of 1947 and the USA's constitution are mutually
exclusive concepts, where you have a Chief Justice appoints members of our FISA Court, er,
nix that, let's call a spade a spade, it's a Star Chamber. There is no constitution to
uphold, no matter well intended self deceits. There will be no constitutional crisis, only a
workaround to pretend a constitution still exists:
To comprehend the internal machinations s of US politics one needs a mind capable of high
level yoga or of squaring a circle.
On the one hand there is a multimillion, full throttle investigation into – at best
– nebulus, inconsequential links between trump/ his campaign & Russia.
On the other there is concrete evidence that the Democratic party/Clinton manipulated the
primaries to destroy Clinton's challanger. That the DOJ, FBI & other alphabet agencies
conspired with Clinton to equally, destroy Trump's campaign.
Naturally, its this 2nd conspiracy which is retarded.
Imagine, a mere agency of a dept, the FBI, is widely considered untouchable by The President
! Indeed, they will "torch" him. AND the "the third estate" ie: the msm will support them the
whole way!
As a script the "The Twilight Zone" would have rejected all this as too ludicrous, too
psychotic for even its broad minded viewers.
And that will come especially from the mainstream media
I quit reading right there. Use of that term indicates mental laziness at best. What's mainstream about it? Please
refer to corporate media in proper terms, such as PCR's "presstitute" media. Speaking of PCR, it's too bad he doesn't allow comments.
The MSM is controlled by Zionists as is the U.S. gov and the banks, so it is no surprise that
the MSM protects the ones destroying America, this is what they do. Nothing of consequence will be done to any of the ones involved, it will all be covered
up, as usual.
What utter nonsense. These people are ALL actors, no one will go to jail, because everything
they do is contrived, no consequence for doing as your Zionist owners command.
There is no there there. This is nothing but another distraction, something o feed the
dual narratives, that Clinton and her ilk are out to get Trump, and the "liberal media" will
cover it up. This narrative feeds very nicely into the primary goal of driving
Republicans/conservatives to support Trump, even as Trump does everything they elected him
NOT TO DO!
We saw the same nonsense with Obama, the "peace president". Obama a man who never saw a
Muslim he did not want to bomb or a Jew he did not want to bail out
Yet even while Obama did the work of the Zionist money machine, the media played up the
fake battle between those who thought he was not born in America, "birthers" and his blind
supporters.
Nothing came of any of it, just like Monica Lewinsky, nothing but theater, fill the air
waves, divide the people, while America is driven insane.
The best thing about this referral is that it also demands deputy AG Rod Rosenstein the
weasel to recluse himself from this case. Rosenstein is the pinnacle of corruption by the deep
state. It's seriously way pass time for Jeff Sessions to grow a pair, put on his big boy
pants, unrecuse himself from the Russian collusion bullshit case, fire Rosenstein and Mueller
and end the case once and for all. These two traitors are in danger of completely derailing
the Trump agenda and toppling the Republican majority in November, yet Jeff Sessions is still
busy arresting people for marijuana, talk about missing the forest for the trees.
As far as where this referral will go from here, my guess is, nowhere. Not as long as Jeff
Sessions the pussy is the AG. It's good to hear that Giuliani has now been recruited by Trump
to be on his legal team. What Trump really needs to do is replace Jeff Sessions with
Giuliani, or even Chris Christie, and let them do what a real AG should be doing, which is
clean house in the DOJ, and prosecute the Clintons for their pay-to-play scheme with their
foundation. Not only is the Clinton corruption case the biggest corruption case in US
history, but this might be the only way to save the GOP from losing their majority in
November.
But it does keep the rubes entertained while the banksters continue to loot, pillage and
plunder and Israel keeps getting Congress to fight their wars.
Sadly I think you're right. Things might be different if we had a real AG, but Jeff
Sessions is not the man I thought he was. He's been swallowed by the deep state just like
Trump. At least Trump is putting up a fight, Sessions just threw in the towel and recused
himself from Day 1. Truly pathetic. Some patriot he is.
" He's ferreted out more than a few and probably has a lot better idea who his friends are
he certainly knows the enemies by now."
He failed to ferret out Haley, Pompeo, or Sessions and he just recently appointed John
Bolton, so I don't agree with your assessment. If his friends include those three, that says
enough about Trump to make any of his earlier supporters drop him.
Anyway, not having a ready made team, or at least a solid short list of key appointees
shows that he was just too clueless to have even been a serious candidate. It looks more as
though Trump is doing now what he intended to do all along. That means he was bullshitting
everybody during his campaign.
So, maybe the neocons really have been his friends all along.
" America is a very crooked country, nothing suprises me".
Every country on this insane planet is "crooked" to a greater or lesser degree, when to a
lesser degree, this is simply because they, the PTB, have not yet figured out how to
accelerate, how to increase their corruption and thereby how to increase their unearned
monetary holdings.
Money is the most potent singular factor which causes humans to lose their minds, and all
of their ethics and decency.
And within the confines of a "socialist" system, "money" is replaced by rubber-stamps, which
then wield, exactly in the manner of "wealth", the power of life or death, over the unwashed
masses.
Authenticjazzman "Mensa" qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro jazz
musician.
BTW Jeff Sessions is a fraternal brother of Pence (a member of the same club, same
[recently deceased] guru) and is no friend of Trump.
That would explain why Sessions reclused himself from the start, and refused to appoint a
special council to investigate the Clintons. He's in on this with Pence.
Just as it looks like the Comey memos will further exonerate Trump, we now have this farce
extended by the DNC with this latest lawsuit on the "Trump campaign". The Democrats are now
the most pathetic sore losers in history, they are hell bent on dragging the whole country
down the pit of hell just because they can't handle a loss.
Wishful thinking that anything will come of this, just like when the Nunes memo was released.
Nothing will happen as long as Jeff Sessions is AG. Trump needs to fire either Sessions or
Rosenstein ASAP, before he gets dragged down by this whole Russian collusion bullshit case.
Former CIA Director John Brennan is the prime mover behind the ongoing coup attempt against
Trump. He gathered his deep state allies at DOJ and the FBI to join him in this endeavor.
Brennan's allies -- McCabe, Lynch, Strzok, Yates, ect., may or may not be aware of Brennan's
true motive behind creating all the noise and distraction since the 2016 election. It could
be they're just partisan hacks; or they're on board with Brennan to keep secret what was
revealed in the hack of the Podesta emails.
John Podesta, in addition to being a top Democrat/DC lobbyist and a criminal deviant, is
also a long-time CIA asset running a blackmail/influence operation that utilized his
deviancy: the sexual exploitation of children.
What kind of "physical proof" could Assange have? A thumb drive that was provably
American, or something? Rohrabacher only got Red Pilled on Russia because he had one very
determined (and well heeled) constituent. But he did cosponsor one of Tulsi Gabbard's "Stop
Funding Terrorists" bills, which he figured out on his own. Nevertheless, a bit of a loose
cannon and an eff'd up hawk on Iran He's probably an 'ISIS now, Assad later' on Syria.
I noticed Comey tried to pull a J Edgar-style subtle blackmail on Trump by the way he brought
up the so-called "dossier". Anyone could see it was absurd but he played his hand with it,
pretending it was being looked at. I would say Trump could see through this sleazy game Comey
was trying to play and sized him up. Comey is about as slimy as they get even as he parades
around trying to look noble. What a corrupt bunch.
"The culprit has swayed with the immediate need for a villain "
[What follows is excerpted from an article headlined Robert Mueller's Questionable Past
that appeared yesterday on the American Free Press website:]
During his tenure with the Justice Department under President George H W Bush, Mueller
supervised the prosecutions of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, the Lockerbie bombing (Pan
Am Flight 103) case, and Gambino crime boss John Gotti. In the Noriega case, Mueller ignored
the ties to the Bush family that Victor Thorn illustrated in Hillary (and Bill): The Drugs
Volume: Part Two of the Clinton Trilogy. Noriega had long been associated with CIA operations
that involved drug smuggling, money laundering, and arms running. Thorn significantly links
Noriega to Bush family involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Regarding Pan Am Flight 103, the culprit has swayed with the immediate need for a villain.
Pro-Palestinian activists, Libyans, and Iranians have all officially been blamed when US
intelligence and the mainstream mass media needed to paint each as the antagonist to American
freedom. Mueller toed the line, publicly ignoring rumors that agents onboard were said to
have learned that a CIA drug-smuggling operation was afoot in conjunction with Pan Am
flights. According to the theory, the agents were going to take their questions to Congress
upon landing. The flight blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.
There has been some former high flyers going to jail recently. Sarkozy is facing a hard
time at the moment. If it can happen to a former president of France it can happen to
Hillary.
Am I a Christian? Well, no. I had some exposure to Christianity but it never took hold. On
the other hand, I do believe there was a historical Jesus that was a remarkable man, but
there is a world (or universe) of difference between the man and the mythology. Here's some
of my thoughts on the matter:
Nothing uncanny about it. There's a frenetic Democratic cottage industry inferring magical
emotional charisma powers that explain the outsized influence of those three. The fact is
very simple. All three are CIA nomenklatura.
(1.) Bill Clinton got recruited into CIA by Cord Meyer, who bragged of it himself in his
cups.
(2.) Hillary cut her teeth on CIA's Watergate purge of Nixon. (If it's news to anyone that
the Watergate cast of characters was straight out of CIA central casting, Russ Baker has
conclusively tied the elaborate ratfeck to the intelligence community.)
(3.) Obama was son of spooks, grandson of spooks, greased in to Harvard by Alwaleed
bin-Talal's bagman. While he was vocationally wet behind the ears he not only got into
Pakistan, no mean feat at the time, but he went to a falconry outing with the future acting
president of Pakistan. And is there anyone alive who wasn't flabbergasted at the instant
universal acclaim for some empty suit who made a speech at the convention? Like Bill Clinton,
successor to DCI Bush, Obama was blatantly, derisively installed in the president slot of the
CIA org chart.
Excellent post and quite accurate information, however my point being that the irrational
fear harbored by the individuals who could actually begin to rope these scumbags in, is just
that : Irrational, as they seem to think or have been lead/brainwashed to believe that these
dissolute turds are somehow endowed with supernatural, otherworldy powers and options, and
that they are capable of unholy , merciless vengeance : VF, SR, etc.
And the truth is as soon as they finally start to go after them they, they will fall apart at
the seams, such as with all cowards, and this is the bottom line : They, the BC/HC/BO clique,
they are nothing more than consumate cowards, who can only operate in such perfidious manners
when left unchallenged.
Authenticjazzman "Mensa" qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro Jazz
artist.
Angela Merkel is not stupid - things are way worth than that.
She's got a PhD in physical chemistry, and what's rather mind-boggling in that context is the
fact that her husband Joachim Sauer is a professor of chemistry and one of the worlds
foremost experts in surface chemistry.
In the 2000s this guy was in the top 30 list of the worlds most extinguished chemists - let
that sink in for a second.
The couple Merkel/Sauer knows exactly how to evaluate that so-called evidence, yet... - as I
said the situation is way worse as generally anticipated.
A classified U.S. State Department cable signed by Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton reported that Saudi donors
were a major support for Sunni militant
forces globally, and some American officials worried that rebels being supported had ties to
Al Qaeda.[14]
Notable quotes:
"... Read more at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore ..."
Timber Sycamore 20/04/2018 Timber Sycamore was a classified weapons supply and
training program run by the United StatesCentral Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and supported by various Arab intelligence services, most notably that of Saudi Arabia . Launched in
2012 or 2013, it supplied money, weaponry and training to rebel forces fighting Syrian
President Bashar
al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War . According to U.S.
officials, the program has trained thousands of rebels. President Barack Obama secretly authorized the CIA to
begin arming Syria's embattled rebels in 2013. [3] However,
the CIA had been facilitating the flow of arms from Libya to Syria "for more than a year" beforehand in
collaboration with "the UK ( United Kingdom ), Saudi Arabia and
Qatar ."
The program's existence was suspected after the U.S. Federal Business Opportunities website
publicly solicited contract bids to ship tons of weaponry from Eastern Europe to Taşucu , Turkey and
Aqaba , Jordan. One
unintended consequence of the program has been to flood the Middle East's black market with
weapons including assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. The U.S. delivered
weapons via Ramstein – supposedly in breach
of German laws.
In July 2017, U.S. officials stated that Timber Sycamore would be phased out, with funds
possibly redirected to fighting the Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant (ISIL), or to offering rebel forces defensive capabilities.
... ... ...
According to American officials, the program has been highly effective, training and equipping thousands of U.S.-backed
fighters to make substantial battlefield gains.[2][19]
American officials state that the program began to lose effectiveness after
Russia intervened militarily in the
Syrian Civil War.[19]David Ignatius, writing in The Washington Post, remarked
that while the CIA program ultimately failed in its objective of removing Assad from power, it was hardly "bootless": "The
program pumped many hundreds of millions of dollars to many dozens of militia groups. One knowledgeable official estimates that
the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years."[8]
... ... ...
U.S.-backed rebels often fought alongside al-Qaeda's
al-Nusra Front, and some of the U.S.
supplied weapons ended up in the hands of the al-Nusra Front, which had been a major concern of the Obama administration when
the program was first proposed.[10]
... ... ...
The program remains classified,[14][10]
and many details about the program remain unknown, including the total amount of support, the range of weapons transferred, the
depth of training provided, the types of U.S. trainers involved, and the exact rebel groups being supported.[18]
However, The Canberra Times
reported that two thousand tons of Soviet era weapons were delivered to Aqaba as recently as April 2016.
Trump strangely immature twits on Douma attack disqualify his as a statesman.
Notable quotes:
"... the strike has been definitely an act of aggression against a sovereign state despite an objection of a permanent SC member, namely Russia. ..."
"... Now the gates of hell are open, international law has been demolished, and this happened because Putin agreed to accommodate Trump's strike, said Ivashov. ..."
"... I'd consider that a good conclusion of the fictional chemical weapons story. The story has fallen to pieces altogether, anyway. The poisoning of Skripal ended with the old spy in good health; with Boris Johnson being caught lying; with [the chemical weapons control body] OPCW refusing to connect Skripal's poison to Moscow; and with Brits keeping Miss Skripal incommunicado under duress, away from her fiancé and the rest of her family, a clear sign of a collapsing story. ..."
"... The Syrian part of this story collapsed as well, after Robert Fisk , one of the very best British Middle East observers (next to David Hirst) visited Douma and delivered a report straight from the donkey's mouth, i.e. as told by a doctor of the clinic videoed by the White Helmets. ..."
"... The Russians actually located some people who are seen in the video, and they say it was staged. ..."
"... An interesting bit of data, proving that preparations for the strike were carried out before the alleged attack, has been published by the Cyprus banking community blog. They say the British air base of Akrotiri on Cyprus had its perimeter urgently strengthened (by the British company Agility) on April 5, that is before the alleged Douma gas attack ..."
"... The OPCW could dispel the mist around both cases, that of Skripal and that of Douma, but do not hold your breath. It appears that OPCW is as integrated into the machinery of the Masters of Discourse as any other international body. Refusal of OPCW to allow Russia to take part in Skripal investigation, despite the clear requirement of its own charter, makes its conclusion doubtful, at best. ..."
"... While inability of OPCW inspectors to enter Douma despite all efforts of Damascus and Russians to facilitate their entry tells us they are not eager to investigate; like they weren't eager to enter Khan Sheykhun last year. ..."
"... please! Trump validated an obvious false flag – again – and launched the strikes before any kind of investigation could have challenged it – again. He's no "hero". He's a weak man at best . Please don't insult real heroes and real bravery. ..."
"... if somebody looks like an idiot, behaves like an imbecile, speaks like a stupid asshat it's very likely you are dealing with an idiot. Stupid bringing boltons and haleys to his circus just had some unforeseen by idiot consequencies. ..."
... Let us face it: Putin did not stop the strike and he didn't make the offender pay a
price for this breach of the Law of Nations.
... ... ...
What is worse, Trump's strike destroyed what was left of the international law structure
established by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. These three giants created the UN and its
Security Council in order to avoid such eventualities by forbidding aggression, and the
strike has been definitely an act of aggression against a sovereign state despite an objection
of a permanent SC member, namely Russia.
Now the gates of hell are open, international law has been demolished, and this happened
because Putin agreed to accommodate Trump's strike, said Ivashov.
... ... ...
The Russian military experts here in Moscow told me that out of a hundred missiles fired by
the US and their allies, only one or two were modern cruise missiles ("nice and smart") and
they destroyed the research institute in Barzeh. (It was not a "chemical weapons centre", just
a chemical research institute; it's destruction was a copy-paste of Bill Clinton's bombing of
the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan over a similar pretext.)
All other missiles were old and at the end of their service; they had to be utilised
somehow, and so they were. A few of them might have been downed by Syrian anti-aircraft fire,
others fell without inflicting much damage.
The Russian experts who were in contact with the US military told me that the US military
used this occasion for retraining and refreshing reserve pilots; what they call "a milk run".
This combination of old missiles and less experienced pilots helped to lower the efficiency of
the strike. And both sides, the Russians and the Americans, admitted that the deconfliction
line was operative all the time, to avoid eventualities.
I'd consider that a good conclusion of the fictional chemical weapons story. The story
has fallen to pieces altogether, anyway. The poisoning of Skripal ended with the old spy in
good health; with Boris Johnson being caught lying; with [the chemical weapons control body]
OPCW refusing to connect Skripal's poison to Moscow; and with Brits keeping Miss Skripal
incommunicado under duress, away from her fiancé and the rest of her family, a clear
sign of a collapsing story. Hopefully, Jeremy Corbyn will be able to use May's debacle for
his political advantage.
The Syrian part of this story collapsed as well, after
Robert Fisk , one of the very best British Middle East observers (next to David Hirst)
visited Douma and delivered a report straight from the donkey's mouth, i.e. as told by a doctor
of the clinic videoed by the White Helmets. He said:
"There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at
night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the
basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here [to the clinic]
suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a "White Helmet", shouted
"Gas!", and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was
filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not
gas poisoning."
The Russians actually located some people who are seen in the video, and they say it was
staged. (Western media says they were threatened into saying what they said). I have more
trust in Fisk's report, than in the Russian one, but that may be my own prejudice. Anyway, both
versions are not mutually exclusive, they do not contradict each other, but they undermine the
fake story that provided the cue for the strike.
An interesting bit of data, proving that preparations for the strike were carried out
before the alleged attack, has been published by the Cyprus banking community blog. They say
the British air base of Akrotiri on Cyprus had its perimeter urgently strengthened (by the
British company Agility) on April 5, that is before the alleged Douma gas attack . The
second British air base, Dhekelia, carried out similar works on April 12, a week later, before
the decision to strike had been adopted by the British government. The Dhekelia works were done
with great speed and urgency, and road-constructing equipment had to be taken from the nearby
villages of Xylotympou and Ormideia. The payment to the local workers had been routed via HSBC
bank in Hong Kong, they say. And indeed these bases (forcibly retained by Britain) were used
for the strike on Syria.
The OPCW could dispel the mist around both cases, that of Skripal and that of Douma, but
do not hold your breath. It appears that OPCW is as integrated into the machinery of the
Masters of Discourse as any other international body. Refusal of OPCW to allow Russia to take
part in Skripal investigation, despite the clear requirement of its own charter, makes its
conclusion doubtful, at best.
While inability of OPCW inspectors to enter Douma despite all efforts of Damascus and
Russians to facilitate their entry tells us they are not eager to investigate; like they
weren't eager to enter Khan Sheykhun last year.
Meanwhile, the Western media and the Jihadi groups on the ground are busy to create a new
web of lies instead of the old one. Now they say the Fisk report is suspicious because he was
allowed in by the Russians. We can learn of their attitudes from the following twit
"Salih @Salih90119797 Apr 17 More
Replying to @Elizrael
We salute Israel in spite their crimes in Palestine we hope they'll continue their strikes
every part of Syria; Iran regime should comedown"
These "Islamic rebels" are actually Israel's stooges rather than warriors of the Prophet.
Anyway, people who manufactured these beautiful and complicated simulacra, are still around,
and doubtless they will prepare a new one, if it will be necessary. In my view, the two
presidents have made heroic efforts at saving their countries and mankind from destruction;
both risked their good names, their positions, their reputatiosn to go that far. Trump
minimized the bombing, Putin minimized the response.
Both have made some mistakes. Mr Putin made his big mistake when he gave Israel carte
blanche to bomb Syria whenever she feels like it. Israeli strikes (and there were more than a
hundred of them last year) created the air of permissiveness and that allowed Trump to follow
in Israel's footsteps. If Israel bombs Syria, and Russians do not react, why can't Trump? It
appears unfair for the US to be bested by its satellite. If you permit Tom to grab your
girlfriend's pussy without a single objection, you must be expect that Dick and Harry will try
to repeat this feat. Israel created the precedent, the US used it.
I asked Senator Alexey Pushkov, the head of the foreign relations committee, whether he
doesn't think it was a mistake, in hindsight. He justified the policy saying that Russia came
to Syria in order to fight jihadi groups, ISIS, Al Qaeda et al, not Israel. Russia is friendly
to Israel, Iran and Turkey, and it does not want to sort out local disagreements. Pushkov
stressed that Russia always censured Israeli raids on Syria, though it didn't act against them.
As a matter of fact, if Russia criticized Israel, it was done very, very quietly. The only time
this condemnation was made public, happened just now, when the Israeli strike occurred in a
very tense moment.
Mr Trump made a mistake when he fired the missiles instead of firing Mueller. But anyway,
thank you, Mr Trump, for limiting the damage. Try to complete the withdrawal from Syria, while
at it.
What is worse, Trump's strike destroyed what was left of the international law structure
established by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.
That was accomplished by Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroeder when they bombed
Kosovo without an SC resolution – simultaneously transforming NATO from a defensive
pact to an instrument of US imperialism.
The truth can't be hidden any more the army can't just run amuck at will. Trump and Putin are
playing the long game they don't want war they can make more money elsewhere. It's a new day
thank God.
General (Ret) Leonid Ivashov, an important Russian military observer
I would avoid, despite his high public profile, Ivashov as entirely reliable contemporary
military observer. At least I would be very cautious when referencing him. He has his moments
but many of his "predictions", not to speak of advice, were not exactly prescient, to put it
mildly. Paradoxically, it was his consistently grim, almost to the point of being apocalyptic
view of Russia all long that I simply stopped paying attention to him. obviously, reality
turned out to be much different. In the end, him "cooperating" with Dugin is not exactly a
good sign.
This would be too good a result even for the best, latest, and most update systems. The
unimpressive outcome of the attack can be explained easier by Trump's decision to minimise
the damage, as indeed the Israeli military says.
Anything Israel's military says on this issue is irrelevant and, as always, driven by
purely ideological and political considerations. Here is a taste:
Israel's worst nightmare is competent and properly armed Syrian Air Defense and this is
precisely where it is going right now in the area. Per best–subsonic TLAMs of any
variety represent with appropriate targeting within integrated system easy targets for
something like S1s, which were created from the inception as anti-TLAM systems. Recent IAF
strike in Syria (about couple weeks ago) was to prevent deployment of Iranian TOR-M1 in
Syria. So, Israelis' opinions on this issue can not absolutely, especially having IDF
"stellar" record of bluster and boasting, be taken seriously. Here is an opinion of high
ranking US military-intelligence officer which is rather revealing.
Kosovo was Blair's first real taste of bombing the innocents and how he liked it. It was
hardly surprising to see the veteran warmonger popping up yet again after the Douma hoax and
as always he was calling for bombs as the solution. It's always bombs with Blair and it seems
he just can't help himself. Which ever side Blair is backing is certain to be the side which
is wholly in the wrong. This is the trusted Blair principle and with its 100% record of
success, it will save hours of research trying to get a handle on just where the real blame
lies in any given crisis. Interestingly, you could substitute the US for Blair and you would
get the same result.
The main question is whether this Russian fight aversion will encourage the Americans to
carry out a future strike, or whether Trump will rein in his adversaries.
Any potential future strikes will diminish Russian fight aversion. Previous Russian
restraint was commendable and useful but that part of the conflict is over now. Too many
people "in charge" never experienced – or even contemplated – real, personal,
consequences for their actions. This will have to change.
In my view, the two presidents have made heroic efforts at saving their countries and
mankind from destruction; both risked their good names, their positions, their reputatiosn
to go that far. Trump minimized the bombing, Putin minimized the response.
Nigga please! Trump validated an obvious false flag – again – and launched
the strikes before any kind of investigation could have challenged it – again. He's no
"hero". He's a weak man at best . Please don't insult real heroes and real
bravery.
Well, I don't know how you can be certain that it isn't Putin. Those writing the script
might well choose Putin or create another monster to play the role. Putin has been called the
new Hitler by the well known democrat and war criminal: Hillary Clinton; and by the clown
pretending to be a man and British foreign secretary : BoJo. But I'm not sure that Russia
will play the role of Germany. It may well be China. In that case, Hitler will be the Chinese
"dictator"
It will be the "whites" against the yellow peril. The MSM and Hollywood, will of course
"educate" the masses about this new danger for western "democracy" and "values".. I dare
predict that even Russia will be on board
That's unfair competition. Putin is a normal human being, clearly superior in every way
compared to intellectually handicapped nonentities like Trump, Merkel, Macron, May, etc. The
West needs Nixons, De Gaulles, and Kohls to stand a chance.
Suicidal policies of the US have achieved almost impossible: an alliance between Russia
and China. Russian poet Alexandr Blok wrote more than 100 years ago the poem "Scythians".
Here is a relevant part of it (translated by Alex Miller):
We shall abandon Europe and her charm.
We shall resort to Scythian craft and guile.
Swift to the woods and forests we shall swarm,
And then look back, and smile our slit-eyed smile.
Away to the Urals, all! Quick, leave the land,
And clear the field for trial by blood and sword,
Where steel machines that have no soul must stand
And face the fury of the Mongol horde.
But we ourselves, henceforth, we shall not serve
As henchmen holding up the trusty shield.
We'll keep our distance and, slit-eyed, observe
The deadly conflict raging on the field.
We shall not stir, even though the frenzied Huns
Plunder the corpses of the slain in battle, drive
Their cattle into shrines, burn cities down,
And roast their white-skinned fellow men alive
Normally I enjoy Israel Shamir's reporting. However, in this piece he writes as a military
analyst, which he is not.
On the one hand there is nothing to be gained by using satire to describe the recent
strike on Syria. There is nothing funny about it politically or militarily.
Next, it has already been reported on other sites that the Syrian military hardware used
to deflect the large majority of US missiles has been heavily upgraded to support better
responses even when using rather dated missile technology.
Israel Shamir has also recently written in other pieces that Putin has little liking for
Isreal's Netanayu and that in all of the meetings the two had, the Israeli prime minister
received very little to nothing as Putin ignored his requests.
It has also been reported that Syria will receive the upgraded S-300 missile systems. And
it is expected they will be moved into the hands of Syrian troops rather quickly.
In terms of US hardware, there is really no such thing as "old" as much of the hardware is
junk in any case. Since the Vietnam Conflict, US military suppliers have attained a very well
deserved reputation for producing low quality weaponry with only a few exceptions
withstanding (ie: F-16). In fact, all of the recent, major US military systems that have been
placed into operations or trial-testing have proven to be less than adequate for their
tasks.
Finally, quite a number of military analysts have already demonstrated that Russian
missile technology is, at the minimum, ten years in advance of similar US technology. Right
now there is no contest.
The Russians know how to build exceptional equipment at a fraction of the cost that the US
spends on similar equipment. And they will continue to do so.
This is the single reason that the US did not go for the throat in this recent attack as
foolish as it was. What we have now is similar to the US Army facing the Wehrmacht in WWII;
there was no contest between the two as German soldiers and their equipment were far and away
the best in the world at the time. This time however, the US will not be able to count on
overwhelming numerical superiority and its manufacturing prowess to subdue a well armed
adversary since it has lost both a long time ago
This article is a lot of useless verbiage focusing on the kabuki theater by which the masses
need to be distracted.
The reason for this madness has nothing to do with any of the reasons stated. My best
guess is that It has to do with the global ponzi scheme that is the US dollar. Trump goes
along with it because he has been counseled that this is necessary to prevent a global
economic collapse. Same for France and Britain. This discredits the conspiracy theory that
the global elite want a collapse.
What amazes me is that Russia knows what the real reason for this insanity is, but they
also stick to the prescribed talking points. As do the author and most of the commenters
The reason (for Putting being in bed with Israel and generally doing nothing) could be
something as simple as Russia's recognition that it is in no position to take on the
US-Israel combine. Why resist when you fear getting your nose bloodied?
I suspect that if Putin could turn the clock back, he would do so and rewrite his March 1
speech to refrain from bragging about weaponry and abilities that he himself does not seem to
believe in. He is normally a man of very few words, invariably polite in the old nineteenth
century style. So what got into him on March 1?
Yes but those psychopaths don't mind And they don't mind reminding Putin " you don't want
WW3 .Do you ?"
then those psychopaths use the rational thinking on the part of Putin as an endorsement of
their cunning treacherous anti human anti citizen anti civilizatioanl activities .
Well, Trump lost me. He is too much like his enemies. The Deplorables are in desperate need
of leadership. But none of that matters with regard to Syria. What matters is Imperial
aggression, having been blunted, must finally be stopped at Damascus. And this must be done
without provoking a nuclear war. Putin has made much progress toward this end. If he is
successful he will get full credit. Trump will get none.
Playing rope a dope is painful and makes a fighter appear weak. The Anglo/Zio Empire is in
steep decline. Time favors Putin.
Israel is NOT on good terms with Russia. Israel, along with Saudi Arabia, France, Briton
and the United States, is AT WAR with Russia. The difference is the Israelis must keep their
options open. When the U.S. is just another big country in the Americas Russia will be the
arbiter of peace in the region. Israel may have to come to terms with the Palestinians and
may have to give up claims on Lebanon and Syria.
Now, with the neocon madman, Bolton, on board, we will watch our MIIC storm Syria and
confront Russia so that manipulating-Israel can keep Syria's Golan heights which it now
occupies. The true Endgame, of course, is not Syria but IRAN. THE Neocons hold grudges longer
than any.
I agree, civilization-wise Russia is a lot more West than East. The only difference is,
over many centuries Russians learned to live peacefully side-by-side with Muslims and
Buddhists, who represent the Eastern civilization.
That's why I called the alliance between Russia and China almost impossible. It is quite
unnatural. The only driving force for it is the US policy of provoking both Russia and China
at the same time. The US and its obedient vassals in the EU succeeded in building high level
of distrust in Russia, so that ordinary people (not oligarchs, but looks like Putin got a
taste for being popular among the real people, not just the most successful thieves) consider
China a lot more trustworthy than the West. While there is certain level of respect for the
US in Russia, maybe because its bullying is naively straightforward, a large chunk of the
population simply despises spineless, subservient, and utterly hypocritical Europe. I left
Russia in 1991. Back then this was unthinkable. Things changed.
A few years ago Pat Buchanan rightly wrote that Obama administration made sure that when
the US needs Russia as a counterbalance against China, Russia won't be there for them. Trump
faithfully continues this suicidal policy. China has money (enough to finance Russian
projects, projects in Asia and Africa, and seriously undermine the US dollar by introducing
oil futures trading in yuans at the same time), whereas Russia has weapons. Both have very
determined people (as quite a few events in Syria clearly showed). Bottom line is, the US
with all its sidekicks stands no chance against Russia or China separately, and even less
chance against both of them together. I am sure that, being unnatural, the alliance between
Russia and China won't live long after the downfall of the US from its position in the world.
But the way things stand now, it will certainly last until that downfall.
Personally, I am not sure that Pax Sinica is going to be any better than Pax Americana,
but history shows that all dominant Empires eventually lose that position. In the last 20-30
years the US elites did everything to speed up the demise of this particular Empire.
This is the 4th round of jousting in Syria by my count
1) September 17, 2016 – US warplanes "accidentally" hit Syrian airbase right after
cease-fire
2) April 7, 2017 – Trump fires Tomahawks at airbase to punish Assaf for chemical
weapons
30 February 7, 2018 – US decimated pro-regime and Russian mercenary forces
3) April 13, 2018 – UK/US/ France fire missiles to punish Assad for chemical
weapons
This latest one had the makings of beginning a bigger war but through back channels they
both backed down. To their credit, neither military wants to get in to a direct conflict.
"A few years ago Pat Buchanan rightly wrote that Obama administration made sure that when
the US needs Russia as a counterbalance against China, Russia won't be there for them. Trump
faithfully continues this suicidal policy"
One can not dismiss "stupidity" as an explanation. To be an American president one needs
only strong voice, presentation skills and to be ready to serve american"national interest"
which is of course private interests of different groups being the "Israel national interest"
and MIC the most important ones. They're interlinked.
That said, I don't believe those who really have power in the USA and tell the President
what to do, are stupid. So this apparent "US policy of provoking both Russia and China at the
same time" seems to me unconvincing. We do not have enough information to know what is really
going on.
The division between East and West is an artificial one. Of course "west" is not christian
any more. And I don"t know if we can say that "west" was really christian once.
Anyway, Christianity wouldn't have existed without the "East". The Greek Miracle is a Myth.
Plato wouldn't have existed without the "East".
"Personally, I am not sure that Pax Sinica is going to be any better than Pax
Americana"
Well, historically Chinese empire seems to be less aggressive than any other empire we know
of.
They are not interested in civilizing the barbarians But maybe that isn't true anymore.
Empires, like people, do change.
Grudge ?
I fear the hatred among Muslims against Israel and the USA is greatly underestimated.
Maybe Norman Finkelstein understands, in speeches he explained why Israeli jews are of the
opinion that there never can be peace between them and surrounding Muslims, because of what
the zionists did, and still do, to Palestinians.
Therefore, I suspect, the Israeli plans, to a large extent already executed, to destabilise
the whole Middle East.
Putin therefore is their big enemy.
Now Germany is about to buy USA Predators, I predict more terrorist acts in Germany
If Trump hasn't been skinned yet by the neocons in Washington, it's because he
judiciously brought into his camp the worst warmongers, John Bolton and Nikki Haley as
human shields in the case of a neocon attack: nobody can accuse a man whose security
adviser is Bolton and the UN ambassador is Haley of being soft on Putin. Now they can't
voice their indignation. As they say in the army, it's better to have them inside the tent
pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.
if somebody looks like an idiot, behaves like an imbecile, speaks like a stupid asshat
it's very likely you are dealing with an idiot. Stupid bringing boltons and haleys to his
circus just had some unforeseen by idiot consequencies.
As for Putin – it's pure shame, even have no desire to speak about his slick policy.
He's surely not an idiot, but his goals more and more differ from mine.
I hope this praise of Trump is a rhetorical device. The US has committed to law that is
immutable by Congress, which says the US must refrain from use or threat of force (UN Charter
Article 2(4).) "But we used armed force in a feckless, half-assed way" doesn't cut it.
What this sissy fight tells us is that the memory of JFK has taught Trump to choose his
options from the menu – bomb this or that or the other thing. Bitch about the menu, ask
for other options, like peace, and CIA will kill you. As such, Trump is irrelevant to US
conduct. He does what CIA will let him do. US policy continues unchanged.
I disagree in presenting the aggression on Syria as a fight between Trump and Putin.
This aggression against Syria is a terrorist act made by coward and criminal people
throwing bombs and running away. (If they are real christians, they should realized that they
have committed a mortal sin). Yet, on the positive side, it has showned that neither Trump
nor Putin want a real war and the Apocalypse.
Russia in not fighting the Empire because the Empire is managed by the Devil but because
the Empire want to bring Russia to mercy. Russia has no choice; Russia has to fight to avoid
"de passer sous le joug".
The Chinese are dealers and traders, the Empire is their biggest customers, they dont want to
kill their customers as long as they can do business with him. That is probably the rationale
to avoid them being dragged into a conflictual situation.
Both Russia and China are not driven against the Empire by idelogy, only Iran is, and when
Iran is fighting against the Empire, Iran is figthing the Devil.
Russia is involved in the Middle-East crisis almost by accident. The 2 Chechnya wars gave
Russia some real allergy to the terrorists and Tartus is also an important outpost on the
Mediterranean Sea.
The Middle-East crisis is driven by Israel and the Zionists and as long as the zionists
are running the Empire, the crisis will go on. They want to reduce all the Arabs in the
Middle-East to the state of the Palestinians in Gaza. The victims are the people of Syria,
Lybia, Irak, the Yemen and Lebanon and the US, the UK and France do not care.
The US with theirs Europeans dominions are fighting there on behalf the Zionists.
Only a major worldwide economic crisis could bring down the Empire, bring peace to the
Middle-East and push the Israelis to an other migration.
Jatras an excellent commentator who has long experience in DC as a senate advisor and US
diplomat asks the questions that this silly article by Yoda Shamir fails to ask
' The question remains: will the US peacefully relinquish its position as the sole
arbiter of authority, legality, and morality in a unipolar world in favor of a multipolar
order where Russia's and China's legitimate interests and spheres of influence are
respected? Or will we continue to risk plunging mankind into a global conflict?..'
Jatras also gives a great 35 thousand foot overview of the events of recent days and some
of what is being discussed going forward in terms of Syria
And oh yes he does address only tangentially the entire thesis of the silly Yoda Shamir
article here
' There was even some speculation that the whole thing was a charade worked out in
cooperation with the Russians.
Even if true (and it's unlikely) the mere fact that Trump would have to engage in
such a ruse speaks volumes about the weakness of his position.
"Whatever Trump says, America is not coming out of Syria," writes Patrick Buchanan. "We
are going deeper in. Trump's commitment to extricate us from these bankrupting and
blood-soaked Middle East wars and to seek a new rapprochement with Russia is
"inoperative"..'
So much for Yoda Shamir's joustfest
comparing these two articles is a prime example why Jatras is a respected commentator
' 3. Russia is in reality militarily weak and tottering economically. Very plausible,
very plausible indeed. Putin's March 1st boastful speech then makes perfect sense as the
desperate bluff of the desperate leader of a desperate state '
Yet another koolaid addict popping up out of nowhere here on Unz and spreading manure
lavishly
' Another friend who has spoken with military commanders in the CENTCOM AOR told me:
All of the knowledgeable aircraft commanders are usually scared shitless about
the prospect of a legitimate air-to-air skirmish with a SU-30 or any Russian air
superiority fighter '
And this about Russian air defense capability
' Any air defense engineer with a security clearance that isn't lying through his teeth
will admit that Russia's air defense technology surpassed us in the 1950′s and we've
never been able to catch up. The systems thy have in place surrounding Moscow make our
Patriot 3′s look like fucking nerf guns '
' I wrote a piece for the Unz Review yesterday. You can see it over there. There were
over a hundred comments. Most of them were favorable, but some were just awful '
The Russians are predestined to fight 'the West'
Instinctively they have always known this
Rationally they have always tried to explain it away
War and Peace can be read as a coming of age story of the Russian Nation
Somehow the Russian Elite is more susceptible to the lure of 'the West' than the Russian
commoner
The commoner knows in her gut that 'the West' is her mortal enemy
No doubt that Russia will eventually go all the way against 'the West'
Dragging her feet is just the way Russia always has behaved in existential conflicts
When Napoleon and Hitler came knocking on her door she behaved no different
This time it is different though
I sense that Russia will want to finish this conflict for good
I expect they will go full Carthago on 'the West', erasing them from history
Russian leaders do seem remarkably sensible, especially when viewed from a western country
where hysteria is the norm.
It is because of this sensibility I fear the worst. The mass-delusion gripping the Western
political class disconnects them from reality, I can't see this ending well. I would not be
surprised if a Western politician announced: "We need to destroy the world in order to save
it"
Once the Russian Leaders realize the extent of Western delusion the sensible thing to do
might be wiping them out for good.
The only problem with this solution would be that I would be wiped out as well.
The nature of power is evil. It's not about "Jewish power". It's about Power.
Agree completely
Also would say that the whole Israel wagging the US dog is not realistic either
Look rationally at the Empire structure we see the vassals like EU and Nato states plus
Japan South Korea, Taiwan etc always falling obediently in line
Just today Assad called France a 'Slave' and sent back his silly French Legion of
Honor award that they gave him in 2001
Slave just about nicely sums it up
Yet Israel is able to operate with more freedom than the galley slaves why is that ?
It's because Israel is the most valuable of the empire's properties an unassailable
fortress in the most geopolitically important region
One could argue that the power of the US Jewish lobby is the thing that let's Israel
exercise the kind of independence that the slaves cannot
I have no truck with calling Israel out on its crimes against the Palestinians that has to
stop but Israeli society is much smarter and realistic than koolaidland US
I hope it won't come to that, as I live in the US. The hysteria is scary, though. Here it
is fuelled by sore losers, Killary and her handlers: she and most of them are guilty of so
many crimes (real criminal offenses that put normal people to jail for many years) that they
need a distraction. MIC also wants justification for even more money thrown into its maw.
Their greed and the perfidy of various self-proclaimed liberals endanger us all.
Yet Israel is able to operate with more freedom than the galley slaves why is that ?
It's because Israel is the most valuable of the empire's properties an unassailable
fortress in the most geopolitically important region
One could argue that the power of the US Jewish lobby is the thing that let's Israel
exercise the kind of independence that the slaves cannot
In fact quite the opposite. Little Israel controls half a continent (North America) in the
same way that little (Imperial) Britain controlled the Indian sub-continent. When Great
Britain lost India (the Jewel in the Crown) its power was gone, and when Israel loses the US
(its Jewel in the Crown) it's power is also gone.
Trump's Establishment Sin: Being an Open and Unabashed Devil
It's the open crassness of Trump as much as his policy substance that bothers establishment
operatives. Look at Trump's recent yucky White House sit-down with Mohammed bin Salman (MBS),
the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. You can view it on YouTube here . It's incredible. With MBS grinning
sheepishly next to him, the Insane Clown President held up posters showing all the big-dollar
weapons and war systems the Saudis are purchasing from the U.S. Trump brazenly boasted about
Washington's $12.5 billion arms deal with the most reactionary government on the planet.
"That's peanuts for you," Trump chided the crown prince while dangling the posters under his
nose. "Saudi Arabia is a very wealthy nation, and they're going to give the United States some
of that wealth, hopefully, in the form of jobs, in the form of the purchase of the finest
military equipment anywhere in the world," Trump told reporters. MBS looked embarrassed as
Trump listed the prices of the weapons the U.S. was selling to the Saudis: "$880 million $645
million $6 billion that's for frigates."
The president sounded like a car dealer boasting about the bargains at Trump Ford-Mazda. It
was ugly and humiliating for everyone involved and has been condemned in the dominant corporate
media for its decadent unpleasantness.
"Trump administration plans to make the U.S. an even larger weapons exporter by loosening
restrictions on the sale of equipment ranging from fighter jets and drones to warships and
artillery. Reuters reveals that the new initiative will provide guidelines that
could allow more countries to be granted faster deal approvals, and will call on Cabinet
officials to help close deals between foreign governments and U.S. defense contractors The
role U.S. Cabinet officials may be asked to play in pushing arms exports abroad as part of
the new initiative, which will call for a 'whole of government' approach -- from the
president and his Cabinet to military attachés and diplomats -- to help draw in
billions of dollars more in arms business overseas."
So, do you think the Obama administrations sold arms to Saudi Arabia and other reactionary
governments around the world? Do you think it enlisted Cabinet officials and U.S. diplomats in
the project of advancing U.S. arms sales across a blood-drenched planet? If you answered "Hell
yes it did" to both questions, then you are correct. Here is a
forgotten story from the final days of the Obama administration, penned by
Motherboard 's Farid Farid, who was understandably underwhelmed by Obama's suspension
of the sale of one type of munition to the Saudis in early 2017:
Obama's Administration Sold More Weapons Than Any Other Since World War II
Many were sold to the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.
President Barack Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, will leave office in a few
weeks with the dubious honor of having sold more weapons than any other American president
since World War II. Most of the arms deals totaling over $200 billion in the period from 2008
to 2015 have ended up in the Middle East, according to a Congressional Research Service
report published in December Focusing on arms deals to developing nations, the extensive
report found that Saudi Arabia was the top arms importer with deals worth around $94 billion
from 2008-2015. Under Obama the overall sales, pending delivery of equipment and specialized
training for troops, to Saudi Arabia alone has ballooned to $115 billion.
Saudi Arabia is spearheading a coalition of Arab nations in a bombing campaign closing in
on two years against the insurgent Houthi militias in Yemen, who took over the capital Sanaa
in September 2014. The United States has sent special operations forces to assist the Arab
coalition in a grinding war that has seen over 10,000 killed, 2.2 million displaced and
nearly half a million children on the brink of famine from the ensuing crisis.
Earlier this month, the United States decided to halt future sales of precision-guided
munitions, which are supposed to hit specific targets and minimize collateral damage, to the
Gulf kingdom citing civilian deaths in Yemen. But experts are skeptical this will deter Saudi
Arabia from continuing to fuel its regional proxy wars.
"Frankly it was a really minor and temporary punishment. I don't view it as a major
consequence and it is more symbolic than anything," said Cole Bockenfeld, deputy director of
policy at Project on Middle East Democracy.
He pointed to the US partially suspending military aid to Egypt after the military
overthrew the unpopular government in July 2013 as another example of the lack of political
will of the Obama administration to rock relations with its allies. The Congressional report,
Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations 2008-2015, noted that Egypt was the biggest
recipient of arms deliveries last year worth $5.3 billion.
"What's changed during the Obama administration is that increasing arms sales has become a
standardized component of diplomacy at all levels of government, not just in the defense
department," Bockenfeld told Motherboard. "For US diplomats to become the salesmen, that has
been a new element which really increased exports."
What's the main difference between Trump and Obama when it comes to U.S. arms sales abroad?
As the noted liberal arms trade analyst William
Hartung told DN's Amy Goodman this week , "Well, [Trump's] much more blatant about it.
He's shouting it from the rooftops . He's playing a very personal role .he held up a chart
[during his appalling meeting before reporters with MBS] that showed 40,000 jobs from Saudi
arms sales, and it showed the states, and they were all the swing states -- Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Michigan, Florida. So, among other things, not only is this a business proposition for Trump,
but it's a blatant political move to shore up his base."
So here's an interesting question: which is worse – (a) quietly equipping the most
reactionary government on Earth and much of the rest of the world with lethal, high-tech means
of mass destruction while posing as some kind of progressive and noble peace agent or (b)
loudly equipping the most reactionary government on Earth and much of the rest of the world
with lethal, high-tech means of mass destruction while boasting about the resulting revenue and
jobs to reporters and your white-nationalist political base?
Something tells me the Yemeni victims of Riyadh's U.S.- made bombs, missiles, bullets, and
artillery don't care all that much either way.
Ultimately Trump is a typical playground bully, he's a bullshitter, a blowhard. All talk.
Trump was the same with Kim, and is the same with Putin and Assad.
Like all bullies underneath he is a coward, he threatens Putin with ridiculous teenager
Tweet threats, but as soon as Putin but back Trump backpeddles.
I've just stumbled on this absolute gem, from the New York Times, 17/1/2003:
"Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S.
government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi
defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show
(1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja [a 1988 chemical attack on Kurdish
villages that killed 5000 civilians], and
(2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a
fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its
diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame."
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped Saddam Hussein build up his arsenal of deadly
chemical and biological weapons. As an envoy from President Reagan 19 years ago, he had a
secret meeting with the Iraqi dictator and arranged enormous military assistance for his war
with Iran. Mr Rumsfeld, at the time a successful executive in the pharmaceutical industry,
still made it possible for Saddam to buy supplies from American firms. They included viruses
such as anthrax and bubonic plague, according to the Washington Post.
The USA provided $1.5 billion worth of Pathogenic, toxigenic and other biological research
materials were exported to Iraq; 1985-89.
1) US based company, Alcolac International exported mustard gas to Iraq; 1987-88.
2) Almost 150 foreign companies supported Saddam Hussein's WMD program; 1975-
3) US directly attacked Iran by hitting Iran's oil platforms; 1987.
4) US directly attacked Iran's navy in unproportioned and unreasonable war; 1988.
5) US shot down Iranian civilian airliner in the Iranian territory; 1988.
This is the equivalent of a pathological paedophile giving a sermon against child abuse
when the US preaches its corrupt moral practices regarding Syria!!!
In an age of fake news and endless propaganda it's very difficult these days to see the woods
from the trees... The words butcher and thug are easily thrown around in the Syrian civil
war.
It appears some people have short memories as it wasn't that long ago when we were witnessing
the alternative world of Islamic State in Syria. Head choppers running amok and anyone
suspected of being gay being chucked off tall buildings. Women being flogged to death for
trumped up charges of adultery. Kids having their hands cut off for stealing apples.
To make matters worse these sadistic psychopaths were armed and driving around in vehicles
supplied by the West... It had developed into a living hell for many as the death cult of
Isis took hold.
I remember the so called thug Putin saying someone had to take on these terrorists...
The West were reluctant to do the dirty work required... So it came down to Russia to get
boots on the ground to help defeat Islamic State.
Why does the UK supply the terror supporters of the Arabian Peninsula with weapons while
fighting and vilifying Assad? This is real hypocrisy. Yemenis suffer horrendously from Saudi
attacks, the UK's close friends. Assad always guaranteed religious freedom and Syrians
enjoyed much more freedom than any of the Middle Eastern countries.
What's actually is disconcerting is the fact that mainline media have taken the alleged
chemical attack as a fact. They don't have their reporters on the ground or even Western
military personnel in the area. But a claim and some unauthenticated videos from headchoppers
are taken as a fact. A fact which is not allowed to be tested or critiqued. Does it mean they
just want more bombs and missiles to hammer Syria and any reason/justification would do?
Unsurprising to see the likes of CNN and MSNBC siding with Haley. Trump should've dumped
her awhile back. Contrary to the CNN/MSNBC spin, she has been an embarrassment for the US at
the UN. Upon her UN appointment, it was thought that Haley couldn't be worse than Samantha
Power.
During his presidential bid, Trump spoke of bringing in competent non-establishment types.
The case for Jim Jatras as UN ambassador:
As noted, Tulsi Gabbard would've been a good selection as well.
The US didn't challenge Russia's more updated missile defense system in Syria shielding
Russian forces. It's not like Washington can control everything.
Through their anti-Syrian proxies, the US has a roughly 30% control of Syria. A few days
before the most recent alleged Syrian government chemical attack, Trump said he wanted out of
Syria. I believe he was either duped into bombing, or knows that the chemical weapon claim is
in the very suspect/outright BS ranges of probality.
"... British governments, both Labour and Conservative, have, in pursuing the so-called 'national interest' abroad, colluded for decades with radical Islamic forces, including terrorist organizations. They have connived with them, worked alongside them and sometimes trained and financed them, in order to promote specific foreign policy objectives. Governments have done so in often desperate attempts to maintain Britain's global power in the face of increasing weakness in key regions of the world, being unable to unilaterally impose their will and lacking other local allies. Thus the story is intimately related to that of Britain's imperial decline and the attempt to maintain influence in the world. ..."
"... But whereas Sharif Hussein was a follower of orthodox Sunni Islam, Ibn Saud adhered to the radical doctrine of Wahhabism, which Winston Churchill was moved to describe as " bloodthirsty ..."
"... British support for the mujahideen, married to the huge support provided by Washington, was indispensable in the eventual success of these self-styled 'holy warriors' in taking control of a country that had embraced modernity and turning it into a failed state mired in religious oppression, brutality, backwardness and poverty. ..."
"... Britain, along with the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, covertly supported the resistance to defeat the Soviet occupation of the country. Military, financial and diplomatic backing was given to Islamist forces which, while forcing a Soviet withdrawal, soon organized themselves into terrorist networks ready to strike Western targets. ..."
"... Islamic resistance ..."
"... We trust the Western leaders are prepared for the enormous beneficial possibilities that could just possibly open up if the Afghan rebellion were to succeed. ..."
"... Manchester, England is home to the largest Libyan community in Britain, and there is strong evidence to suggest that when the Libyan uprising broke out MI6 facilitated the ability of Libyan Islamists in Britain to travel to Libya to participate in the fighting. Among them was Salman Abedi, who it is thought received military training in the country before being allowed to return to the UK thereafter. ..."
"... This brings us on to Syria and, as with Libya, the question of how so many British Muslims have been able to travel from the UK to Syria via Turkey to take part in the anti-Assad insurgency since 2011? It also brings into sharp focus a policy that has veered between the ludicrous and the reckless. ..."
"... As for the recklessness of Britain's actions in Syria, look no further than the country's recent participation in the illegal missile strikes that were carried out in conjunction with the US and France, justified on the basis of as yet unproven allegations that Syrian government forces had carried out a chemical weapons attack on Douma, just outside Damascus. The only beneficiaries of such actions by the Western powers are Salafi-jihadist groups such as ISIS (whom it was later reported took advantage of the missile strike to mount a short-lived offensive), Al-Nusra and Jaysh al-Islam. ..."
"... The latter of those groups, Jaysh al-Islam, is a Saudi proxy. It was the dominant group in Douma and throughout Eastern Ghouta until the district's liberation by the Syrian Army and its allies with Russian support. ..."
Britain's strategic relationship with radical Islam goes back decades and continues to this
day. There is no more foul a stench than the stench of hypocrisy, and there is no more foul a
hypocrisy than the British government painting Bashar al-Assad as a monster when in truth he
and the Syrian people have been grappling with a twin-headed monster in the shape of
Salafi-jihadi terror and Western imperialism. Both are committed to destroying Syria as an
independent, non-sectarian state, and both are inextricably linked.
Author and journalist Mark Curtis charts in detail
the contours of this history in his book 'Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical
Islam':
" British governments, both Labour and Conservative, have, in pursuing the so-called
'national interest' abroad, colluded for decades with radical Islamic forces, including
terrorist organizations. They have connived with them, worked alongside them and sometimes
trained and financed them, in order to promote specific foreign policy objectives. Governments
have done so in often desperate attempts to maintain Britain's global power in the face of
increasing weakness in key regions of the world, being unable to unilaterally impose their will
and lacking other local allies. Thus the story is intimately related to that of Britain's
imperial decline and the attempt to maintain influence in the world. "
As far back as the First World War, when the Middle East began to assume strategic
importance in the capitals of Western imperial and colonial powers, the British ruling class
went out of its way to identify and recruit loyal local proxies in pursuit of its regional
objectives. Britain's relationship with the Arab tribal chief, Ibn Saud, who would go on to
establish Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s, began in 1915 with the Darin Pact, demarcating the
territory then controlled by Saud as a British protectorate.
The following year, the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans erupted. Begun and inspired by
Saud's fierce rival, Sharif Hussein, head of the Hashemite Arab tribe, the revolt was heavily
bankrolled and supported by the British – a period immortalized in the exploits of
British military agent T E Lawrence, known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia.
But whereas Sharif Hussein was a follower of orthodox Sunni Islam, Ibn Saud adhered to the
radical doctrine of Wahhabism, which Winston Churchill was moved to describe as "
bloodthirsty " and " intolerant ." Regardless, when it came to its imperial
interests there was no tiger upon whose back the British ruling class was not willing to ride
during this period, and which, as events have proved, it has not been willing to ride
since.
The most egregious example of this policy, one that continues to have ramifications today,
was the support provided by the UK to the Afghan mujahideen in the late 1970s and 1980s. The
insurgency's objective was the overthrow of Kabul's secular and left-leaning government, whose
crime in the eyes of the Islamist insurgency's US and UK sponsors was that it had embraced the
social and economic model of Moscow rather than Washington during the first Cold War.
British support for the mujahideen, married to the huge support provided by Washington, was
indispensable in the eventual success of these self-styled 'holy warriors' in taking control of
a country that had embraced modernity and turning it into a failed state mired in religious
oppression, brutality, backwardness and poverty.
Mark Curtis again:
" Britain, along with the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, covertly supported the
resistance to defeat the Soviet occupation of the country. Military, financial and diplomatic
backing was given to Islamist forces which, while forcing a Soviet withdrawal, soon organized
themselves into terrorist networks ready to strike Western targets. "
While Washington's primary role in channeling military and financial support to the Afghan
mujahideen, known as
Operation Cyclone , may until have succeeded in overshadowing London's role in this dirty
war, declassified British government cabinet papers which were made public in 2010 and
reported in the UK media make grim reading.
They reveal that three weeks after Soviet forces arrived in Afghanistan at the request of
the Afghan government in Kabul, struggling to deal with an insurgency that had broken out in
the countryside, the Thatcher government was planning to supply military aid to the "
Islamic resistance ." A confidential government memo provides a chilling insight into
the insanity that passed for official policy: " We trust the Western leaders are prepared
for the enormous beneficial possibilities that could just possibly open up if the Afghan
rebellion were to succeed. "
It will be recalled that out of the ensuing collapse of Afghanistan emerged the Taliban,
under whose rule the country was turned into a vast militant jihadist school and training camp.
Many of the most notorious Islamist terrorists began their careers there, fighting the Soviets
and then later broadening out their activities to other parts of the region and wider world. In
this regard, Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda loom large.
Other notorious names from the world of Salafi-jihadism for whom Afghanistan proved
indispensable include the Jordanian Abu al-Zarqawi, who founded Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) during
the US-UK occupation, an organization that would over time morph into ISIS.
Abdelhakim Belhaj and other Libyan Islamists cut their jihadist teeth in Afghanistan in the
1980s. Returning to Libya, they formed the Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group (LIFG) in the eastern city of Benghazi. Though the group may have been
disbanded in 2010, having failed to topple Gaddafi despite repeated attempts to assassinate the
Libyan leader with, it's been
claimed , the support of Britain's MI6, former members of the LIFG, including Belhaj, were
important actors in the 2011 Libyan uprising.
By way of a reminder, the uprising in Libya started in Benghazi and would not have succeeded
without the air support it received from NATO. Britain's then prime minister, David Cameron,
was key in pushing for that air support and the sanction of the UN under the auspices of
Security Council Resolution 1973. Though protecting civilians was central in wording of this
UNSC resolution, it was shamefully distorted to justify regime change, culminating in Gaddafi's
murder by the 'rebels.'
Staying with the LIFG, in the wake of the Manchester suicide-bomb attack in May 2017, which
left 23 people dead and 500 injured, the fact that the bomber, a young Libyan by the name of
Salman Abedi, was the son of a former member of the LIFG, did not receive anything like the
media attention it should have at the time.
Manchester, England is home to the largest Libyan community in Britain, and there is strong
evidence to suggest that when the Libyan uprising broke out MI6 facilitated the ability of
Libyan Islamists in Britain to travel to Libya to participate in the fighting. Among them was
Salman Abedi, who it is thought received military training in the country before being allowed
to return to the UK thereafter.
This brings us on to Syria and, as with Libya, the question of how so
many British Muslims have been able to travel from the UK to Syria via Turkey to take part
in the anti-Assad insurgency since 2011? It also brings into sharp focus a policy that has
veered between the ludicrous and the reckless.
Emblematic of the former was ex-prime minister David Cameron's
claim , which he made during a 2015 Commons debate over whether the Royal Air Force should
engage in air strikes against ISIS in Syria, that fighting as part of the Syrian were 70,000
moderates.
As for the recklessness of Britain's actions in Syria, look no further than the country's
recent participation in the illegal missile strikes that were carried out in conjunction with
the US and France, justified on the basis of as yet unproven allegations that Syrian government
forces had carried out a chemical weapons attack on Douma, just outside Damascus. The only
beneficiaries of such actions by the Western powers are Salafi-jihadist groups such as ISIS
(whom it was later
reported took advantage of the missile strike to mount a short-lived offensive), Al-Nusra
and Jaysh al-Islam.
The latter of those groups, Jaysh al-Islam, is a Saudi proxy. It was the dominant group in
Douma and throughout Eastern Ghouta until the district's liberation by the Syrian Army and its
allies with Russian support.
Given the deep and longstanding ties between London and Riyadh; given the fact,
reported towards the end of 2017, that British military personnel were embedded in a
training role with Saudi forces in Yemen; given the news that a British special forces sergeant was
killed in northern Syria at the end of March this year while embedded with the Kurds, revealing
for the first time that British troops were operating in the country on the ground –
given all that, the question of who else British special forces and military personnel may be
embedded with in Syria is legitimate.
In the context of the British state's long and sordid history when it comes to riding the
back of radical Islam in pursuit of its strategic objectives, readers will doubtless draw their
own conclusions.
John Wight has written for newspapers and websites across the world, including the
Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and
Foreign Policy Journal. He is also a regular commentator on RT and BBC Radio. John is currently
working on a book exploring the role of the West in the Arab Spring. You can follow him on
Twitter @JohnWight1
The biggest damage from the strikes on Syria was to the credibility of the US, French and
Airstrip One governments. In the days of dubya at least some effort was put into the false
flags.
Great article, except the USA did not "acquire the Philippine Islands", it invaded! The
Syrian disaster is best explained by a Columbia University professor, who was mistakenly
booked on MSNBC, as Jimmy Dore explains:
"... Such people, then and now, fervently believe in the Manifest Destiny of the United States as mankind's best hope of a utopian future and concomitantly in the responsibility of the United States to lead mankind toward that future. Neocons believe that inside every Iraqi, Filipino or Syrian there is an American waiting to be freed from the bonds of tradition, local culture and general backwardness. ..."
"... Local rulers must be removed as the principal obstacle to popular emulation of Western and especially American culture and political forms. In the run up to the invasion of Iraq I was often told by leading neocon figures that the Muslims and particularly the Iraqis had no culture worth keeping and that once we had created new facts, (a Karl Rove quote) these people would quickly abandon their old ways and beliefs as they sought to become something like Americans. ..."
"... This notion has one major flaw. It is not necessarily correct. Often the natives are willing to fight you long and hard to retain their own ways. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War the US acquired the Philippine Islands and sought to make the islands American in all things. The result was a terrible war against Filipino nationalists who did not want to follow the example of the "shining city on a hill." No, the "poor fools" wanted to go their own way in their own way. The same thing happened in Iraq after 2003. The Iraqis rejected occupation and American "reform" of their country and a long and bloody war ensued. ..."
"... I am told that the old neocon crew argued as hard as possible for a disabling massive air and missile campaign intended to destroy the Syrian government's ability to fight the mostly jihadi rebels. John Bolton, General (ret.) Jack Keane and many other neocons argued strongly for this campaign as a way to reverse the outcome of the civil war. James Mattis managed to obtain President Trump's approval for a much more limited and largely symbolic strike but Trump was clearly inclined to the neocon side of the argument. What will happen next time? ..."
"... Paul Wolfowitz infamously told the US Senate "we chose to use the fear of nuclear weapons because we knew that would sell." ..."
"... The current US is rather like a cross country trip in bad weather. The vehicle is bogged down in deep mud, giving the driver and occupants two options 1) Look out the windows and say, "We're bogged down in deep mud. What are we going to do?" 2) Refuse to look out the windows and say, "There's something wrong with this vehicle. Can we fix the engine?" ..."
"... Well clearly the US's European satrapies don't share directly in the US updated Manifest Destiny idea, but the US sphere elites in general are fully indoctrinated in the universalist ideology of internationalist social-liberalism and "democracy"-uber-alles (where "democracy" – whether in Republican, constitutional monarchic or other form – is in reality a kind of managed gerrymander to keep the established and US-favoured elites safely in control and ensure "populists" are excluded by any means necessary), and sees itself as on a mission to promote the spread of US style liberal (managed) "democracy" throughout the world (except where it's currently inconvenient to push it too hard for reasons of temporary expedience, such as in places like Saudi Arabia). ..."
"... The current breed of opportunists operating without any kind of responsibility makes the international corps of political whores-in-charge. These politicians look at the Blairs (a $100 million fortune) and Cheney & Bush (both getting richer with every day) and they know that the opportunisms, however criminal, will be rewarded by the "deciders." The incompetent and sycophantic politicians in the EU/UK governments have zero regards for their citizenry. We can be absolutely sure that there are no idealists among the leading UK politicians in power. ..."
"... Short answer, F,UK were the world's leading imperial powers before WWII and seek to leverage American military and financial power to restore some degree of imperial power. The Atlantic Charter and the UN Charter were bitter pills for the old empires. France sought to override the UN Charter by force in Vietnam and Algeria, but lacked the wherewithall. Britain, France, and Israel sought to override it by force in the 1956 Suez Crisis until Daddy Ike told them that it wasn't cool. The umbrella of American power is their best remaining means of re-establishing imperial power. It puts the onus on the US for violations of international law, but promises them some restoration of imperial power in MENA. ..."
"... "Making the world safe for democracy" was the sales pitch for preserving the F, UK empires long before there was Israel. That effort was driven largely by American Blue Blood bankers who had risky investments in the UK war effort. American Jews were suspected of loyalty to the Kaiser because they loathed the Russian Tsar. ..."
In 2004 I published an article in the journal, Middle East Policy that was entitled
"Drinking the Koolaid." The article reviewed the process by which the neocon element in the
Bush Administration seized control of the process of policy formation and drove the United
States in the direction of invasion of Iraq and the destruction of the apparatus of the Iraqi
state. They did this through manipulation of the collective mental image Americans had of Iraq
and the supposed menace posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Not all the people who
participated in this process were neocon in their allegiance but there were enough of them in
the Bush Administration to dominate the process. Neoconism as it has evolved in American
politics is a close approximation of the imperialist political faction that existed in the time
of President William McKinley and the Spanish-American War. Barbara Tuchman described this
faction well in "The Proud Tower."
Such people, then and now, fervently believe in the Manifest Destiny of the United States as
mankind's best hope of a utopian future and concomitantly in the responsibility of the United
States to lead mankind toward that future. Neocons believe that inside every Iraqi, Filipino or
Syrian there is an American waiting to be freed from the bonds of tradition, local culture and
general backwardness. For people with this mindset the explanation for the continuance of old
ways lies in the oppressive and exploitative nature of rulers who block the "progress" that is
needed. The solution for the imperialists and neocons is simple. Local rulers must be removed
as the principal obstacle to popular emulation of Western and especially American culture and
political forms. In the run up to the invasion of Iraq I was often told by leading neocon
figures that the Muslims and particularly the Iraqis had no culture worth keeping and that once
we had created new facts, (a Karl Rove quote) these people would quickly abandon their old ways
and beliefs as they sought to become something like Americans.
This notion has one major flaw.
It is not necessarily correct. Often the natives are willing to fight you long and hard to
retain their own ways. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War the US acquired the
Philippine Islands and sought to make the islands American in all things. The result was a
terrible war against Filipino nationalists who did not want to follow the example of the
"shining city on a hill." No, the "poor fools" wanted to go their own way in their own way. The
same thing happened in Iraq after 2003. The Iraqis rejected occupation and American "reform" of
their country and a long and bloody war ensued.
The neocons believe so strongly that America must lead the world and mankind forward that
they accept the idea that the achievement of human progress justifies any means needed to
advance that goal. In the case of the Iraq invasion the American people were lectured endlessly
about the bestialities of Saddam's government. The bestialities were impressive but the
constant media display of these horrors was not enough to persuade the American people to
accept war. From the bestialities meme the neocons moved on to the WMD meme. The Iraqi
government had a nuclear weapons program before the First Gulf War but that program had been
thoroughly destroyed in the inspection regime that followed Iraq's defeat and surrender. This
was widely known in the US government because US intelligence agencies had cooperated fully
with the international inspectors in Iraq and in fact had sent the inspectors to a long list of
locations at which the inspectors destroyed the program. I was instrumental in that
process.
After 9/11 the US government knew without any doubt that the Iraqi government did not have a
nuclear weapons program, but that mattered not at all to the neocons. As Paul Wolfowitz
infamously told the US Senate "we chose to use the fear of nuclear weapons because we knew that
would sell." Once that decision was made an endless parade of administration shills appeared on
television hyping the supposed menace of Iraqi nuclear weapons. Vice President Cheney and
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were merely the most elevated in position of the many
vendors of the image of the "mushroom shaped cloud."
And now we have the case of Syria and its supposed chemical weapons and attacks. After the
putative East Gouta chemical attack of 2013, an OPCW program removed all the chemical weapons
to be found in Syria and stated its belief that there were no more in the country. In April of
2017 the US-Russian de-confliction process was used to reach agreement on a Syrian Air Force
strike in the area of Khan Sheikoon in southern Idlib Province. This was a conventional weapons
attack and the USAF had an unarmed reconnaissance drone in the area to watch the strike go in
against a storage area. The rebel run media in the area then claimed the government had
attacked with the nerve gas Sarin, but no proof was ever offered except film clips broadcast on
social media. Some of the film clips from the scene were ludicrous. Municipal public health
people were filmed at the supposed scene standing around what was said to be a bomb crater from
the "sarin attack." Two public health men were filmed sitting on the lip of the crater with
their feet in the hole. If there had been sarin residue in the hole they would have quickly
succumbed to the gas. No impartial inspection of the site was ever done, but the Khan Sheikoon
"gas attack" has become through endless repetition a "given" in the lore of the "constant
Syrian government gas attacks against their own civilians."
On the 4th of April it is claimed that the Syrian Government, then in the process of
capturing the town of Douma caused chlorine gas to be dropped on the town killing and wounding
many. Chlorine is not much of a war gas. It is usually thought of as an industrial chemical, so
evidently to make the story more potent it is now suggested that perhaps sarin was also
used.
No proof that such an attack occurred has been made public. None! The Syrian and Russian
governments state that they want the site inspected. On the 15th of April US Senator Angus King
(I) of Maine told Jake Tapper on SOTU that as of that date the US Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence had not been given any proof by the IC or Trump Administration that such an attack
had occurred. "They have asserted that it did" he said.
The US, France and the UK struck Syria with over a hundred cruise missiles in retaliation
for this supposed attack but the Administration has not yet provided any proof that the Syrian
attack took place.
I am told that the old neocon crew argued as hard as possible for a disabling massive
air and missile campaign intended to destroy the Syrian government's ability to fight the
mostly jihadi rebels. John Bolton, General (ret.) Jack Keane and many other neocons argued
strongly for this campaign as a way to reverse the outcome of the civil war. James Mattis
managed to obtain President Trump's approval for a much more limited and largely symbolic
strike but Trump was clearly inclined to the neocon side of the argument. What will happen next
time?
Colonel W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and
U.S. Army Special Forces (The Green Berets). He served in the Department of Defense both as a
serving officer and then as a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service for many
years
The most important part of this article on neocons and their policies is what was never
mentioned: Israel. While superficially the neocons may claim they believe in the Manifest
Destiny of the United States to impose American democracy on other cultures, the truth is
that below the superficial is a deep and unquestioning obedience to further Zionist policies
and the promotion of Israel über alles. Syria is a prime example of this and any article
on U.S. policies regarding regime change or bombing Syria that leaves out a mention of
Israeli influence is all foreplay and nothing else and just about as satisfying.
I understand your point, but Col. Lang's statement of acquired is correct. The USA
"acquired" the Phillipine islands as a result of the treaty ending the Spanish-American war.
There was a following military occupation and war against nationalist rebels, but that
doesn't make his wording incorrect.
The neocons have a right to their opinion and their desired world order, just like anyone
else. What they DO NOT have, is the right to perpetrate WARS OF AGRESSION, which include both
War Crimes an Crimes Against Humanity under its purview, to reach those goals. Under our
Constitution and system of government ONLY Congress is legally authorized to declare war on
another nation. Congress has NOT declared war on the sovereign nation of Syria, there is no
self defense issue here and such an attack has not been approved by the United Nations so, IT
IS NOT UP TO THE PRESIDENT AND SOME GROUP OF HIS ADVISORS.
Those in the military have sworn an oath to defend the Constitution. You are not obligated to
obey obviously criminal orders, in fact you are obligated to defend against all those
violating our Constitution. By God, do your duty.
Where is Congress? They should be making sure that these criminals do not exercise authority
that is reserved to Congress. By not preventing these crimes the military and Congress become
accomplices and accessories to the most heinous crime defined by mankind WAR OF
AGRESSION.
Any and all those in authority who ordered past attacks and or order future attacks are
guilty of WAGING AGGRESSIVE WAR. Any one who assisted in any way are accomplices, and/or
accessories to the crimes and are equally guilty and subject to arrest and prosecution
without time limit. The excuse of following orders will not be accepted.
If the neocons actually carry out the criminal act of "a disabling massive air and missile
campaign intended to destroy the Syrian government's ability to fight the mostly jihadi
rebels," don't be surprised if the Russians and Chinese vaporize the United States.
I have to wonder why, with the known facts of this 2013 attack in the public domain, our
'other IC' never goes there except with the most vague allusions. Here is the 2013 attack in
known detail:
I'm no fan of 'Realpolitik', let the chips fall as they should. In fact, the reality of
2013 should inform us of the reality of 2018, and where to bring the pressure to pop the
abscess – before the abscess becomes WWIII
Great to see Colonel Lang added to the list of Unz writers. His direct expertise and
experience in ME military and intel matters are unsurpassed, and as someone who has been
intentionally excluded from the mainstream media because of his determination to express
inconvenient truths that the powerful would prefer remain unsaid, he fits perfectly into the
Unz mission statement: "A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial
Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media."
After the putative East Gouta chemical attack of 2013, an OPCW program removed all the
chemical weapons to be found in Syria and stated its belief that there were no more in the
country.
Let's recall whilst considering this point that the OPCW is not some anti-American
bureaucracy uninfluenced by US power. Here is what happened to an OPCW leader who crossed the
US neocons:
"We can't accept your management style," Bolton told Bustani in 2002, as Bustani
recounted to The Intercept.
"You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don't comply with this decision
by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you," he reportedly continued. After a
pause, Bolton reportedly said, "We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New
York."
Bustani was taken aback by Bolton's directness, but did not back down, according to The
Intercept.
Bustani eventually was forced to step down after the US convinced its allies in the
organization to rally against him, according to The Times. He was forced out by a stunning
vote of 48 to 7 and 43 abstentions.
If the OPCW appears to be cooperating suspiciously with US objectives on an issue, that's
credible. The contrary, not so much.
On that note, let's also recall that the OPCW inspected one of the main targets of the
recent US action, claimed by the US and its collaborators to be an active chemical weapons
site, the Barzeh research centre, in 2017:
He said it's "totally incorrect" that chemical weapons were being developed there. "The
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) visited here and didn't report
anything wrong with this place."
.
CBS News looked into the OPCW report from Barzeh and it noted the Syrians had delayed the
visit for security concerns, but didn't find any red flags.
I have long been a fan of Colonel Lang's stand against the current neocon policy in the
Middle East. Here I find the most authoritative account of the thinking behind the Syrian
disaster I have seen.
I am still puzzled by the support given by our European and UK politicians to this
destructive policy. Is it merely a matter of catching the crumbs from the neocon's table? Our
politicians surely can't think they're exceptional too. Though in a way one hopes they might
be – I no longer believe that those politicians represent the thinking of the great
mass of people in Europe and the UK.
Lang spelled that out in "Drinking the Koolaid," the 2004 article mentioned in the first
sentence.
He wrote:
" . . .single-minded intensity in pursuing his goals was nothing new for [Douglas]
Feith. In July 1996, he had been a principal author of a study prepared for Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This paper advocated abrogation of the Oslo accords and the
launch of a new regional balance-of-power scheme based on American-Israeli military
dominance with a subsidiary military role for Turkey and Jordan . The study was
produced by the "Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies" (IASPS), a
Jerusalem-based Likud-party-linked think tank, and was called "A Clean Break: A New
Strategy for Securing the Realm." In it, Feith and company wrote,
"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by
weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing
Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq -- an important Israeli strategic objective in its own
right -- as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions."
The study-group leader was Richard Perle . Other members of the team included
Charles Fairbanks Jr., a longtime friend of Paul Wolfowitz since their student days
together at the University of Chicago; and David Wurmser , an American Enterprise
Institute Middle East fellow, and his wife, Meyrav Wurmser , who headed the
Washington, DC office of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Her boss in
that group was a retired Israeli intelligence officer, Yigal Carmon.
On July 8, 1996, Richard Perle presented the "Clean Break" document to Netanyahu, who was
visiting Washington. Two days later, the Israeli prime minister unveiled the document as
his own regional foreign-policy design in a speech before a joint session of the U.S.
Congress.
Regulars on Unz forum regularly mention "A Clean Break," but noting the "regional
balance-of-power scheme based on American-Israeli military dominance with a subsidiary
military role for Turkey and Jordan, " and given the amount of money and military aid US
taxpayers provide to Israel, why is this group hiring, training and arming "moderate rebels"
to "foil Syria's regional ambitions" rather than carrying out the mission
themselves?
Also, and based on comments by US Congressman Steven Russell (R-OK) (among others) in
appearances on C Span, where praise is lavished on Jordan's king Abdullah, it appears Jordan
is still on board the aging ship Clean Break , tho Turkey is threatening mutiny.
The same actors -- including the sociopathic Michael Ledeen– of this neocon cabal
have been reading the same script from the run-up to war with Iraq
to the fulfillment of their obsession with attacking Iran:
Notice that fifteen years on, the neocon criminal gang has added new, younger members,
i.e. Richard Goldberg and Michaela Dodge. Goldberg is fanatically pro-Israel from his Jewish
day school primary school to his anti-BDS activities in Illinois government and anti-Iran
achievements in US senate.
Disagree because Jimmy Dore made a mistake in heaping so much praise on Sache without
knowing who he was. In my opinion, Jeffrey Sachs's appearance on MSNBC is a smokescreen, political cover to
exonerate the Deep State, banister predators and Israel firsters from complicity in the
destruction of Syria. Sachs was a leading actor, together with George Soros, Paul Wolfowitz and Jonathan Bush,
brother-in-law of the late, sainted Barbara Bush, in the Rape of Russia in the Yeltsin
years.
Our southern neighbors are the largest threat to the US than any Middle Eastern State.
I will continue to contend to drop the label "neoconservative" because it is inaccurate.
What we have are those who desire intervention for political and mercantilism *economic"
ambitions -- interventionists.
-- -- -- -- -- -- –
" I was often told by leading neocon figures that the Muslims and particularly the Iraqis
had no culture worth keeping and that once we had created new facts, (a Karl Rove quote)
these people would quickly abandon their old ways and beliefs as they sought to become
something like Americans. This notion has one major flaw. It is not necessarily correct.
Often the natives are willing to fight you long and hard to retain their own ways. In the
aftermath of the Spanish-American War the US acquired the Philippine Islands and sought to
make the islands American in all things."
I am unclear why you are equivocating here. It is entirely incorrect as demonstrated
throughout the region repeatedly.
True. I love Col. Lang's blog and have followed it for years now. He's really good at
military strategy, and–as a ME specialist–is very helpful in analyzing and
predicting events in Syria, Iraq, etc. But the main thing that's missing at his blog ('Sic
Semper Tyrannis') is any analysis of Israel's role in this. There's no mention of the Oded
Yinon plan, or the Clean Break memo, or the 'Pearl Harbor-type event' paper. And while Lang
is very good at pointing out the absurdity of Washington's statements relative to reality,
he's not so good at untangling propaganda from what really motivates the highest-level
people who are behind all of this . Hint: it's not 'democracy promotion'.
I wonder if the neocons have any idea about forward.
Their forward for me is just world domination, that what Franklin Roosevelt already tried,
but what failed miserably. In 1946 the Soros then, Bernard Baruch, in vain pleaded for a world government, that is,
the USA governing the world.
Stalin and Mao tse Tung had other ideas.
We now have Putin, the Chinese government, India, Iran, IS, the other BRICS countries, I
think the majority of Muslims, most S and Middle American countries, with other ideas.
Even on German sites debate exists on the continuing USA occupation.
Soros' conflict with Hungary is there for anyone to see.
Fool Macron states that the EU must have more power, to destroy increasing
nationalism.
He does not see that with more EU power nationalism rises.
Shortly before the Brexit referendum someone in Britain said 'they even interfere with vacuum
cleaners'.
You're just wasting your nerves, and time. Just looking at what is done rather than what is
being said, I see the world geopolitically moving in a splendid direction, with practically
enlightened leaders in the major three countries. I see a false flag that had cost no lives,
Syria becoming invincible to both NATO and Israel – a dream come true, I also see
Russia firmly establishing itself on the Med for a first time, a forging of peace between the
two Koreas after 60 years. All those are results to which the White House under Trump
crucially contributes. (*)
In the rest of the world, we can see improvement in the living conditions in most parts of
the world unparalleled in history.
The biggest problem are the European & American chattering and fear-mongering classes,
imperialists and anti-imperialists alike. Surprisingly, they look like two sides of a same
coin. On his website, Mr. Patrick Lang speaks about Mr. Trump, his president, in the most
pejorative terms, while he has the highest praises for Collin Powell, who steadily and
with a pronounced servility served the neocons. It was exactly Mr. Lang that, by serving
Collin Powell, assisted the neocon dominance in the White House, and, among else, the Iraq
disaster. Our greatest enemy demons are those inside ourselves.
(*) Trump's critics want to have their cake and eat it: Trump is wrong because of his
stupendous warmongering, and by being such "a moron" as to be disastrous for his mad
plans. Occam's Razor applied to those two extraordinary observations points to the solid
likelihood they are illusions. Illusion-making would be consistent with what I know about DJT
personally anda fine a tit-for-tat to what the msm do to him. When surrounded by open mouths
of beasts, throw them a bone or two.
The most important part of this article on neocons and their policies is what was never
mentioned: Israel.
Yeah, one has to willfully ignore the overwhelming historical evidence of the perfidious
Jewish cabal dragging TR and his "conscripts" by the nose up San Juan Hill.
If the Neocons would follow the example of (atheist or perhaps actual demon worshipping,
socialist/Marxist, drug addict, bisexual) Jones and his main female inner circle and its
largely black male inner circle of enforcers and also drink the kool-aid and die, then we'd
be happy they were making a batch.
Trump has made a complete mess of this and "next time" thus inevitably means something
much more solid. He has dug himself deeper into the Russiagate hole and there's only one
way out. Since Putin is totally bogged down in Syria, there's no hurry on "next time". All
Putin can do is sit and wait for it to happen. Trump will probably have to act before the
midterms.
I think this whole charade served another purpose. And Nikki Haley's comments added to it
("we will never be friends with Russia and will we smack Russia whenever we want"). It
allowed the Russians to start thinking the unthinkable. Unleashing the nuclear genie and
using MAD to end the madness. I believe it will create a ramping up of nuclear forces in
Russia. I don't believe the option was really on the table until the false flag and the
completely irrational and unhinged response from the West. Preceded by the other ludicrous
Skripal affair which the U.S. and other Western countries accepted as true and evicted
Russian officials based on it. I think in the final hours before the missile strikes of last
Friday it was a somber mood among Russian military planners and there was a a begrudging
willingness to consider the unthinkable nuclear option. Now I think it is fully on the table
and Russian planners will start thinking and visualizing about scenarios and will make its
future use more real and thus much easier to undertake. In fact, merely thinking about and
visualizing about scenarios will create an excitement which will animate their future
decision. If the Punjabi Clemson accounting major, Nimrata Randhawa, is correct and will not
be friends with Russia and smack them whenever "we" want, you'd better get right with God and
live your final days virtuously because the end of the world as we
know it is at hand.
Regarding Barzah/Barzeh, here is the actual OPCW document dated 23 March 2018 referring to
the November 2017 inspection:
In accordance with paragraph 11 of Council decision EC-83/DEC.5, the second round of
inspections at the Barzah and Jamrayah facilities of the SSRC was concluded on 22 November
2017. The results of the inspections were reported as an addendum (EC-87/DG.15/Add.1, dated
28 February 2018) to the report entitled "Status of Implementation of Executive Council
Decision EC-83/DEC.5 (dated 11 November 2016)" (EC-87/DG.15, dated 23 February 2018).
The analysis of samples taken during the inspections did not indicate the presence of
scheduled chemicals in the samples, and the inspection team did not observe any activities
inconsistent with obligations under the Convention during the second round of inspections
at the Barzah and Jamrayah facilities
Interestingly, this document is not particularly easy to find, for some (no doubt
innocent) reason it has not (yet?) been included among the list of "Progress Reports" on the
OPCW site:
Such people, then and now, fervently believe in the Manifest Destiny of the United
States as mankind's best hope of a utopian future and concomitantly in the responsibility
of the United States to lead mankind toward that future. Neocons believe that inside every
Iraqi, Filipino or Syrian there is an American waiting to be freed from the bonds of
tradition, local culture and general backwardness.
So the Neocons want to better the lives of Iraqis, Filipinos and Syrians by "introducing"
them to the American way of life?? – Such kind and well meaning people.
The current US is rather like a cross country trip in bad weather. The vehicle is bogged
down in deep mud, giving the driver and occupants two options 1) Look out the windows and
say, "We're bogged down in deep mud. What are we going to do?" 2) Refuse to look out the
windows and say, "There's something wrong with this vehicle. Can we fix the engine?"
The US as a society, isn't going anywhere until it can face reality, and have an open and
frank public debate about the Israeli/Zionist subversion of US institutions.
Your view is a common myth. Why do people assume the Philippines belonged to Spain, who
could give it away? Anyway, by the time the American Army arrived, there was an established
Filipino government and a large regular army that was running the nation. Just a few tiny
pockets of Spanish troops remained waiting for rescue. After the Americans saved them, they
attacked and invaded the Philippines, fighting the regular Army for over a year until it was
destroyed, then the resulting insurgency. The US military conquered the Philippines beginning
with the bloody "Battle of Manila".
The fact is that Israel and the dual citizen ziocons aka neocons control the U.S. gov and
proof of this is that Israel did the attack on the WTC on 911 and got away with it, and also
did the attack on the USS LIBERTY and got away with that, and numerous other subversive
things that would take a book to document, and got away with it all.
Lang may have been loosely paraphrasing here. The version I'm familiar with is:
"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government
bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of
mass destruction as the core reason," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon
transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.
The Zionist Entity, the great albatross around America's neck.
In a way it was fine that W. Patrick Lang did not mention the Zionist Entity by name. It's
smart not to mention it all the time as it can be like 'beating a dead horse' among other
things . Not mentioning it directly and just saying Neocon deflects the accusation of the
anti-'S' label but in a subtle manner associates Zionism with Neocons, which can be a more
persuasive way to make the point without screaming, like me (lol), that it's the same
thing.
" administration shills appeared on television hyping the supposed menace of Iraqi nuclear
weapons. Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "
I propose that international politics would be greatly clarified if we were to place a
'CFR' next to the name of every member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
I'm very glad to see Colonel Pat Lang writing for the Unz review.
His own website–Sic Semper Tyrannis– is one of the best, most informative sites
on the internet.
It is "must read" for anyone who wants to follow national security issues, Syria, Ukraine and
beyond.
Lang doesn't mince words or pull his punches. And his analysis is never short of
brilliant.
This is really a great addition for the Unz Review. Good work, Ron and a hearty "Welcome" to Colonel Lang!
"This is what you get when you have too much Jewish influence over opinion. Friedlander
says "regime change never works," but obviously it does, sometimes, like in Japan and
Germany after WWII. "
WWII actions against Japan and Germany were not "regime changes" that "worked," they were
total wars of destruction, conquest and genocide of the German people, in the case of
Germany, which lost ~10 of its pop. while Japan lost ~5%.
Japan has recovered, to a certain extent, probably because Japan's adversary was not Jews.
Germany is still a fully occupied and de-culturalized state. Witness, for example, the
Thompson article where Hindemann is compelled to discuss "Nazis" totally out of context.
"I was often told by leading neocon figures that the Muslims and particularly the Iraqis had
no culture worth keeping and that once we had created new facts, (a Karl Rove quote) these
people would quickly abandon their old ways and beliefs as they sought to become something
like Americans. This notion has one major flaw. It is not necessarily correct."
Only the meanest culture -free bastards can get away with this as a policy statement . It
is millions times worse when someone condones it by saying " It is not necessarily
correct"
That argument rests on assumptions that I consider ugly, a-historical, and
counterproductive. What was done to Germany and Japan -- and to the former Ottoman empire as well as Iran --
from ~1907 'til today, was precipitated by some of the world's greatest psychopaths. They are
still at large. THAT is the problem, not "HBD."
One of the reasons Tom Friedman supplied for his support to Iraq war among many similar
excuses, was the support Saddam offered to the suicide bombers. One of the reason the terrorist one day may think is the support given by the Zionists to
the bombers attacker gentile politicians .
Come to think of it, I mostly agree with this comment: Col. Lang conflated American
operating principle of "Manifest Destiny" with the zionist / neoconservative ideology
(psychopathology).
imo the process is more subtle: Manifest Destiny/Anglos and zionist/neoconservatives share
mythological roots in Abrahamism, which posits that the "chosen" have a lock on truth,
morality and god, and that they have the right and obligation to destroy anyone who fails to
subscribe to that truth and their overlordship of it -- Evangelical Christians and Anglicans
hold this concept fast.
The zionist twist on this is twofold: First, Jews believe they are the ordained by god to
be in charge; Jews have been chosen by god to "teach the world ethics, to drag the rest of
the world kicking and screaming to behave morally." http://www.aish.com/sp/ph/96037069.html
Apparently, some Jews really believe this.
Second, but the larger zionist agenda is to establish Jews as a hegemonic if not global
imperial power from a base in Israel, and they are using USA treasure, political and military
power as its tool to achieve what are, ultimately, Jewish goals.
To be sure, US policymakers, elites, and tens of thousands of ordinary citizens willingly
and/or unwittingly subscribe to a similar predatory and dominating agenda. But if (when?)
Jewish zionists achieve their goals, US will be discarded like toilet paper.
It's useful to recognize that the early leaders of the zionist movement -- Herzl, Nordau,
Pinsker and others -- recognized early on that Jews needed the support of a major power to
achieve their goals, and solicited that support from the German kaiser, the Ottoman sultan,
and the British.
When Chaim Weizmann's activities to gain British support were successful, the same zionist
Jews who had earlier petitioned Germany and Ottoman turned violently against those
same powers and brought about their destruction. Germany's destruction was maneuvered in
short order; the destruction of the Ottoman empire successor states has taken longer.
there are plenty of interventionists on the press for democracy and "capitalism" as cause
for stabilizing regions that are not Jews or all that active in Zionists policies.
The desire to regime change in North Korea and parts of Africa are not all that beneficial
to Zionist ambitions. I am not all convinced that Israel is a democracy. But it's clear that
neither Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan are going to raving democratic capitalist states –
every. Muslim faith precludes such a system. even if said states did embrace democracy --
there is no evidence and would in all likelihood not reflect what exists in the US. Because
what exists in the US is founded on a particular history and environment and inter-relational
dynamics.
The grand narrative they advance would be attractive as policy even minus the existence of
Israel.
-- Cutting off nonsense at the pass: I do think Israel has a right to exist. –
Ah, you want me to propagandize for your preferred positions. You want me to scream every
day that the JEWS did it. You are supposed to be able to read between the lines and understand
the truth of things. You are more of sa simpleton than I had thought. You should stay off my
blog.
There was neither regime change nor unconditional surrender in Japan.
Germany was destroyed, physically and politically.
Indoctrination of the Germans with their guilt for two world wars, and the murder of six
million jews, goes on to this day.
But even this indoctrination is crumbling.
Many Germans do not see how the country they live in, that should just have a defensive army,
cooperates in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
Many Germans see how the poor jews who survived the holocaust treat the Palestinians.
Germany now is going to buy Predators:
Okay, Sachs has corpses in his closet. And yes, Dore is dopey. (Sachs has been on MSNBC
many times. It was no mistake.) But, IMO, take gold where you find it . limited hangout or
not.
If your adversary speaks some truth, that doesn't make it a lie. Plus, you're not going to
get every angle covered n every clip. The fact that he called out US covert fomentation of
regime-change in Syria makes this golden.
Here's the clip without Jimmy Dore's interruptions, only 5 min.
If you split the difference between two extremes, you end up pleasing no one and being
attacked by both sides. Democracy is a flower that smells sweet and ends up in the pipe of
every crackpot loon in history. In this world, facts and reality matter. Ideology is the
shortcut that retards use to move the masses towards easy solutions that make life hard.
Blood and religion form bonds. Ideas just make the stupid angry and the smart embrace
theories and abandon reliable methods. New ideas can be beneficial or they can be fair, they
rarely can be both. Without winners there are no losers. Unless you benefit from work, there
is no incentive to do it.
There are no simple solutions. There are no complex problems. Problems can always be
simplified by division and parsing. Solutions can only be simplified to avoid the hard facts
and avoid actually solving them.
What has any of this have to do with the subject? These are the things you need to bring to
the table.
Discussing this issue will lead to nothing but overly emotional hype and obfuscation. Using
the above can stop the endless appeals to emotionalism that carries the masses away from
facts.
I'll say to you what I say to others. I beat up the Zionists both here and in Israel all
the time but I am not going to say that all Jews are responsible for the ills of the world.
As for the neocons their agenda is much larger than just Zionism.
I am still puzzled by the support given by our European and UK politicians to this
destructive policy. Is it merely a matter of catching the crumbs from the neocon's table?
Our politicians surely can't think they're exceptional too.
Well clearly the US's European satrapies don't share directly in the US updated Manifest
Destiny idea, but the US sphere elites in general are fully indoctrinated in the universalist
ideology of internationalist social-liberalism and "democracy"-uber-alles (where "democracy"
– whether in Republican, constitutional monarchic or other form – is in reality a
kind of managed gerrymander to keep the established and US-favoured elites safely in control
and ensure "populists" are excluded by any means necessary), and sees itself as on a mission
to promote the spread of US style liberal (managed) "democracy" throughout the world (except
where it's currently inconvenient to push it too hard for reasons of temporary expedience,
such as in places like Saudi Arabia). There might well be a psychological component akin to
Stockholm Syndrome, whereby people like Blair, Macron etc see the power of the US and the US exceptionalist ideology over their countries, know they are subordinate to it, and seek to
internalise a wider version of it for themselves so that they can tell themselves that when
they are serving Washington's objectives and profiting handsomely thereby, they are actually
doing it for their own noble ideals.
Then of course, human beings being human, there are also other self-serving motivations
underlying the idealist pretext – collaboration for personal gain with the
jewish/Israeli lobby that is hugely powerful in the UK and Europe as well as in the US,
military-industrial types wanting to boost the status and budgets of the military, etc. These
are the real motivations, as opposed to the legitimising pretext that is the supposedly noble
ideal of American exceptionalism or internationalist social liberalism.
Lately the British regime's enthusiasm for the interventionist project seems to be greater
even than that of the US regime, for instance.
The American Empire is facing a historical junction: does become a mercenary putative
force for Zionist Israel or Will the USA priorize its own NATIONAL interests over Israeli.
The prize of becoming a Zionist surrogate will mean the progressive deterioration of the
American empeirein the Middle East, and the world. America faces severe national debt,
decaying infrastructure, and internal social fragmentation. On the other hand Israel is
poised to become the ENERGY hub for the European, African, Asian economies,without Israeli
OIL supply lines all those economies will be paralyzed. Furthermore American blind,almost
irrational support for Israel will mean more dangerous terrorists attacks and more
frequent..The Trump presidency is in fact a Neocon presidency, the democratic decision making
(war) process is dead, and this Syrian war means that it doesn't matter whom iselected
president ultimately AIPAC, Israel, make the final decisions.
I don't know if anyone outside US believes so called "theoretical background"of the neocons
that they think US is the pinnacle of the human civilization that they want to export their
model to the other places in the world, etc. This is so absurdly stupid is that it is hard to
believe anyone would buy it. All of what they do just talks volumes about what they care for:
money and power; the rest, as can be understood from their lousy "philosophy", are just
details.
I also think that their affection to Israel is fake. People in the power positions do not
have such dispositions. I am sure there is some genuine idiots among US political class who
buys what they actually say but most of them just ride the tide while it is useful for them.
I am sure that once Israel loses its usefulness for the ones who actually wield power inside
US political class, Israel would also be trashed just like Arab countries they destroyed.
Don't assume US neocons are calling all the shots. It was Sarkozy (goaded by Zionist
Bernard Henri Levy) took the lead to attack Libya. And at least some believe London is still
the core of Imperialist aggression.
Yesterday, for the first time, a Russian general pierced this lie on RT when he stated
that there was proof that the UK was behind the well-orchestrated and completely staged
"gas attacks" in Douma.
Yes, you read that right, he said the UK. Not the US, not Israel, not Saudi Arabia, but
the UK. Those of you familiar with my writing know that I am constantly pointing my finger
at the City of London for the lies, deception, and wars which dominate the headlines of
their propaganda rags."
"Is it merely a matter of catching the crumbs from the neocon's table? "
-- Correct. The current breed of opportunists operating without any kind of responsibility
makes the international corps of political whores-in-charge. These politicians look at the Blairs (a $100 million fortune) and Cheney & Bush (both getting richer with every day)
and they know that the opportunisms, however criminal, will be rewarded by the "deciders."
The incompetent and sycophantic politicians in the EU/UK governments have zero regards for
their citizenry. We can be absolutely sure that there are no idealists among the leading UK
politicians in power.
To believe that American ruling class (which is heavily zionized) has any idealistic
motivations instead of a rabid drive for money and power is an illusion. The majority of the
US politicians are committed to the criminal enterprises, whether local or global, when the
enterprises promise a gesheft, which is the only criterion.
OK.
I understand the basic thing you are saying in #69. I don't get your bit about HBD being the reason regime change won't work wrt Arabs.
WHY will regime change "not work w/ Arabs" ? Is it because Arab states have fewer and less
complex political structures and institutions? That surely does not apply to Iran, but then
Iran is not Arab (tho many Arabs are in the Iranian population. Thus, Iran is already a more
complex culture than USA/Europe is willing to be).
I cannot buy the notion that Arabs as Arabs are biologically capable of lesser
civilizational attainment -- different, maybe, but it takes an exceptionalist to claim that
civilization A is superior to civilization B, for solely biological reasons.
Reading the Wikipedia article on Timber Sycamore, I'm struck by the significance of Sachs'
omission; TS is a US program, but the overall effort it's a part of is more of a Sunni Arab
project than an American one. Saudi Arabia is providing more money and weapons, Jordan is
hosting the effort, Qatar gives money, etc; it's a US-backed Sunni program.
I'm talking about the moral component; I think our Zionist interventionist policies are
stupid, not in American interests, and really only serve Zionist interests. but it's not
really "our" mess, as Sachs states, so much as a Sunni/Zionist mess.
Glad you made that distinction, between zionists and neocons.
Zionism is just about the most complex -ism on the planet.
Neocons are just what they say they are: Trotskyites in Beltway drag. Trotskyites
dominated the Jerusalem Conference in 1979 when GWOT was birthed; G H W Bush did doula
duty.
I wonder what the linkage is between Jabotinsky and Trotsky? Both are revolutionaries,
both advocate violence. Jabotinsky picked up on that change in Jewish behavior from
petitioning from a posture of subservience– shtadlones – to demanding,
with arrogance; Netanyahu is his worthy acolyte.
Neocons have some genuine psychopaths among them -- the world would be a better place if
an ice axe were wielded in Ledeen's vicinity.
It's consistent with what Ronen Bergman told Brian Williams http://www.nbcnews.com/video/rock-center/46318982#46318982 "Israel has long used assassination against its enemies, "hoping that by taking out
individuals, they can alter, change the course of history,"
It would be really nice if it were possible to "put this tired, tattered old straw man to
bed", but it is not likely to happen. The radical Zionists immediately use criticism of
Israel to conflate criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism. This is made far easier for them
by the confusion around "Jewishness" that is deliberately (and conveniently, for their
purposes) cultivated; is being a Jew a racial thing, a religious thing, a cultural thing
regardless of the individual Jew's adherence to and practice of the tenets of Judaism? This
ambiguity opens the door for claims that criticisms of the excesses of radical Zionism are at
root leveled against all Jews regardless of their actual beliefs, political behaviors,
and their self-perception regarding their roles in the life of the nation. Of course, true
anti-Semites do in fact hold all Jews responsible for the actions of rabid Zionists, so
everybody "wins".
Except for real flesh and blood Jews, who are individuals with their own agency. My oldest
friend is a Jew, I work with Jews, I make classical music with Jews. So I will never buy the
blanket condemnation of Jews qua Jews. Do I wish that more American Jews would
distance themselves from and be more critical of the "professional Jews" who are in
leadership roles at radical Zionist organizations? Yes, but I have some sympathy for why this
does not happen. As a historically disparaged minority, albeit with some reasons for that
status, the reluctance is self-enforcing; there is a disincentive to talk smack on your
"community" for fear of the ostracism, and reputational and career damage that might follow
(there is no reasoning with one-issue fanatics, after all).
Look at how blacks who lodge criticism of the behaviors of some in their community
make out. Not too well, even when the criticisms are justified, and the ills perpetuated by
these criticized behaviors work to the detriment not only of individual blacks, but also to
the perception of blacks in general in the wider society.
So I think that Col. Lang is justified in his refusal to tar all Jews with the sins and
excesses of some portion of that community. This seems to me to be intellectually and morally
correct. Certainly it serves to help put the criticisms of NeoConservatism out there while
yet insulating him to a degree from the blanket charges of anti-Semitism. And indeed, the
NeoCons are not strictly radical Zionists, and some among them have other motivations
behind their actions.
Short answer, F,UK were the world's leading imperial powers before WWII and seek to
leverage American military and financial power to restore some degree of imperial power. The
Atlantic Charter and the UN Charter were bitter pills for the old empires. France sought to
override the UN Charter by force in Vietnam and Algeria, but lacked the wherewithall.
Britain, France, and Israel sought to override it by force in the 1956 Suez Crisis until
Daddy Ike told them that it wasn't cool. The umbrella of American power is their best
remaining means of re-establishing imperial power. It puts the onus on the US for violations
of international law, but promises them some restoration of imperial power in MENA.
Looking at the parade of toads that have occupied the White House in recent years, I have
more and more respect for Eisenhower's balls in the 1956 crisis. Such a move by an American
President seems unimaginable today.
Neocon-run Twitter took out Red Elephants account.
Twitter bans Red Elephants but lets CNN have many accounts. Twitter favors Official
Lies of the Conspiratorial Deep State against Speculative Dissent of Free
Thinkers. PC is War against ASK SPEECH. We are not supposed to ASK questions of the Globalist
Power.
According to Rules of Political Correctness, ASK SPEECH is not FREE SPEECH. Don't you dare
ASK Questions. Just accept the Answers provided by Ministry of Propaganda or MSM that
colludes with Deep State of NSA, CIA, FBI, Wall Street, and Hollywood. PC says we should
Ass-kiss than Ask Questions.
World is divided between Askingers and Ass-Kissers. Those who ask questions of the power
and those who ass-kiss the power. Unsurprisingly, most people in power got there by
ass-kissing and being ass-kissed. We must ASK WHY.
"Making the world safe for democracy" was the sales pitch for preserving the F, UK empires
long before there was Israel. That effort was driven largely by American Blue Blood bankers
who had risky investments in the UK war effort. American Jews were suspected of loyalty to
the Kaiser because they loathed the Russian Tsar.
Hillary Mann Leverett, (looking very sharp), Michael Patrick Flanagan, Don DeBar.
CrossTalk on US Foreign Policy: Aggressive Posture
"It doesn't matter who the president is. It doesn't matter which party controls the White
House. One can easily ask the following question: Is Trump's time in office serving George W.
Bush's third term or Barack Obama's third term? The neocons are firmly in the saddle."
It is much better to view this issue in ideological terms as neocons and neoliberalas and
remnant of paleoconservatives and News Dealers.
Notable quotes:
"... Jews are a powerful voice but they are, by and large, not in the decision-making seat. Why do you absolve Trump, Haley, Pence, Bolton, etc.? Maybe they are "brainwashed" by the Jews? Well maybe the Jews are "brainwashed" too? ..."
Today, America's Big Jews and Little Jews bear responsibility for this sad situation
– end of story.
That is simply ignorant and racist. Most of the Senate is not Jews, the President is not a
Jew, the Secretary of Defense is not a Jew, and the vast majority of general aren't Jews. Yet
they are all going along with this "bomb Syria" thing, with a few exceptions – one of
them being Bernie Sanders, a Jew.
Jews are a powerful voice but they are, by and large, not in the decision-making seat.
Why do you absolve Trump, Haley, Pence, Bolton, etc.? Maybe they are "brainwashed" by the
Jews? Well maybe the Jews are "brainwashed" too?
I don't see how you get to selectively blame one group and absolve others except via
ignorant, counterproductive and stupid racism.
By the way, Jerry Brown is a huge advocate of open borders and a primary contributor to
it. Is he a Jew too?
It's fair and honorable to point out the Jewish role in these affairs, but it is just as
unfair and dishonorable to not only ignore, but try to bury, the non-Jewish role in these
affairs.
I agree with "think peace" – but the non-Jews Trump, Pence, Ryan, Haley, Pompeo,
etc. are anything but peaceful. I don't see any Jewish guns to their head, so they are 100%
responsible for their own actions. Why do you excuse them? Hmmm?
The Zioncons have got Trump by the balls through their pitbull Robert Mueller and poodle Rod
Rosenstein. I despise Alan Dershowitz as he is a major Zionist but I agree with him when he
said Jeff Sessions needs to unrecuse himself, fire Mueller and Rosenstein. Trump's hands are
tied. If he fires any of these 3 clowns, both the DNC and GOP will immediately try to impeach
him. It's time for Jeff Sessions to grow a pair, unrecuse himself, fire the pitbull and the
poodle, and start immediate investigation into Mueller, Rosenstein and their collusion with
Clinton on Uranium One.
I was one of Jeff Sessions' biggest supporters, complained loudly when Trump wanted to
fire him. Now I wish I hadn't. Trump was right and should've fired him. He's easily the
weakest, most worthless AG. The biggest case is swirling around him threatening to kill off
everything that Trump wanted to do, and he's doing absolutely nothing to help the man who
hired him.
According to Wikipedia's article on him, Larry Silverstein built 7 World Trade Center,
then in January 2001 bought the entire WTC complex from the Port Authority of NY & NJ,
then "After a protracted dispute with insurers over the amount of coverage available for
rebuilding World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, 4 and 5, a series of court decisions determined
that a maximum of $4.55 billion was payable and settlements were reached with the insurers in
2007.[21]" It says nothing about his receipt of funds from the collapse of #7, which was
surely a controlled demolition that he ordered, so that he had to have known in advance and
planned for the 9/11 attacks -- on the taller buildings, 1 & 2. But foreknowledge doesn't
necessarily mean that he planned the 9/11 attacks, nor that he financed them -- far less that
the Mossad did the attacks.
If the 19 fanatical Sunnis who did 9/11 did it, and some people (such as here) think that
Israel financed them, or ordered them, then people can believe anything, but mere
foreknowledge doesn't necessarily mean causation. All of the actual evidence, thus far
released, indicates that the Sauds, working with George W. Bush, planned the attacks, but
that Bush demanded deniability and therefore instructed Condoleezza Rice not to let George
Tenet in during the final days to tell him the details so that action to prevent it would be
able to be taken.
If you google just the three words (no quotation-marks) "zuesse sauds 9/11″ you can
see the articles, which link through to the base evidence, all of which implicates the Sauds,
and none of which implicates Israel (though my linked article on Israel as the hypothesis
does discuss and demolish 'evidence' that Israel did it).
Sir, You are shredding your own credibility here. The more anyone looks into the lead up
to 9/11 and the events following, the more one has to conclude that Israel was behind it.
Sure, there were others who played minor roles but you can only see things as you say you do
by selectively excluding certain incriminating facts because taken all together, Israel did
it.
A cursory understanding of physics reveals the truth of the statement in that short video
clip that if one building was wired for demolition, all three were. This was a large, costly
and sophisticated undertaking so who had access? Who supervised the security of the
buildings? How many of the names one comes across suddenly abandoned homes and businesses and
returned to Israel after the event? Who was able to quash earlier, more accurate reports and
organise the media chorus of the fake narrative in time for the evening news broadcasts? The
list is long indeed, I have listed but a small fraction of indicators that Israel did indeed
do it.
Did you make this up while on the toilet or while keyboarding your UNZ BS?
W was the one NOT in the loop. Too dumb to trust. The yehudi Saudis do what they are
told.
The evidence implicating the Sauds would consist of lies. Like the 'evidence' implicating
Assad to chemical attacks if such even occur.
Few Saudis and 9-11: Wolfowitz al Saud, Zelikow al Saud, Feith al Saud, Wurmsers al Saud,
Libby al Saud, Zakheim al Saud, Chertoff al Saud. Just a very few.
UUUge mistake, Jimmy Dore; you should have done some homework before you elevated Jeffrey
Sachs to truth-teller status. Spend a few minutes with The Saker -- William Engdah interview:
http://thesaker.is/the-rape-of-russia-saker-blog-exclusive-interview/
Sache is not trustworthy.
Sachs worked closely w/ Soros to plunder USSR/ FSU. His job now is to establish
Jews/Israel/banker class, Deep State of which he's a part, and think tankers as absolutely
innocent of any complicity in the destruction of Syria. He's most likely in it up to his
eyeballs.
"Harvey" Oswald didn't shoot anyone -- his denial was perfectly plausible, and his murder
at Ruby's hands was a desperate stopgap measure to shut him up before he started naming his
handlers who had framed him. Badly.
They never planned to let "Harvey" survive to see an actual trial, because of the lack of
evidence against him, and therefore the evidence of a high-level conspiracy would then be so
obvious.
No trial, no test of the evidence against him.
"Harvey" was exactly what he claimed to be -- he was the patsy.
"... The Russians have clearly prepared for such an attack ever since the Shayrat strike the very powerful Russian radars in Syria are capable of tracking any flying object and the Syrian SAM batteries are networked into that system and are fed that radar data in real time ..."
"... As for the Pantsir yes this point defense system is the perfect tool to shoot down cruise missiles it is the successor of the Tor SAM system that was designed specifically to shoot down T-hawks ..."
"... The older SAMs did not perform badly according to the Russian MoD assessment the S125 is a 1950s era system that the Serbs used to down two F117s and an F16 much more difficult targets than a T-hawk ..."
If taken at face value, one detail that stands out is that the Russians' original boast
that the missile attack was thwarted by "old Soviet-era air defense" is not true. 47 of the
71 intercepts they claim were done by modern Pantsir and Buk systems that Syria purchased
around 2010. The older systems had noticeably worse performance than the modern systems.
The other interesting tidbit there is that the Russian General claims that "the survey of
this and other facilities revealed neither this number of ammunition fragments nor the
corresponding number of craters". In other words, as FB states above, that even though 25
missiles hypothetically got through in the attacks on Barzeh and Djaramani, the damage on the
ground does not correspond to that many missiles.
' I don't believe that "the fix was in" because the runways of major military airports
were targeted. There was no guarantee that the Pantsir and Buk's would be as effective as
they were. I don't see Putin happily agreeing to have those airport runways put out of
commission. a bit of deconfliction, yes, a total charade, no '
I agree with this on the basis of sound logic. There is no way that we can know the facts
about what kind of communuication and coordination [if any] took place behind the scenes. But
we have a lot of inconsistencies in the US narrative first we were told that eight targets
were going to be hit then, post facto, it was just three.
One of the sites the Barzeh research center in Damascus area was supposedly hit 76 times
this on an area of about one acre [half a hectare...5,000 square meters]. Looking at high
quality pictures of the site after the attack it is clear that adjacent buildings only meters
from the targeted site are undamaged as are light poles surrounding the whole complex as well
as stands of pine trees again only meters away
The idea that 76 450kg high explosive warheads detonated here is visibly absurd and is
quite easy to analyze technically using accepted and authoritative engineering methods for
explosive effects
I consider it proven beyond doubt that there is no chance whatsoever that 76 missiles hit
that site I doubt it would even be one tenth of that
And it is also logical to ask why would you even launch 76 missiles on a one acre complex
that has three buildings a single T-hawk can take out a building or even a ship as seen on
the pentagon show off video below
The answer is obvious of course no military professional would send 76 missiles on one
small target that is simply bullshit
So that brings us to the next logical question if they did not send 76 missiles at Barzeh
where did they go ?
Well that's what makes the story of airfields targeted but the missiles intercepted
believable
Let's remember we are dealing with Proven Liars here everybody knows that recetly
Phil Giraldi had an article here titled 'Liars Lying About Everything '
The few pictures I've seen of interception attempts were all too high in the sky to be
targetting a TLAM or a Storm Shadow which are ground following missiles. They need to fly
high enough to avoid power lines but that's it. (Apparently in Iraq 1, hitting power lines
was the main mechanism by which they and most lost US Marine Corps helicopters were destroyed
).
The professional military people knew what was at stake in limiting the damage engendered by
the war crime engaged in to placate the neocon power structure. Since armageddon was at
stake, even according to Mattis's own statements, he apparently was able to rein Trump in to
some degree, according to this contribution and more clearly from some other reports. We now
also have increasing proof that the "chemical weapons" thing was a provocation, though the
yankee regime's worldwide propaganda wurlitzer keeps playing the same nihilist song. I agree
with others who have concluded that if Mattis is eliminated, that is when we will have to
worry. Presumably, for now, since the normal secrecy is combined with a laudable profound
survival instinct, the military will keep a lid on any investigations this generates. If not,
as Whitney has indicated, we are in deep shit.
What exactly do you know about the flight characteristics of cruise missiles ?
Over on the other thread you first tried to argue that the Barzeh site I discussed in my technical
analysis was not the site of the missile strike
Then when I provided a sat image released by the pentagon and published in newspapers
around the world confirming definitively that the site I analyzed in my original
comment was indeed the site of the missile strike you said this
' I didn't say it was a fake picture. I said it was a demolition site. The same site
being demolished as a conjecture. The best alternative at the moment is that the
payloads were not 450 kg '
I then pointed out to you the physical fact of flight that removing 450 kg from the
nose of a winged cruise missile would shift its center of gravity in the aft direction and
make the missile unflyable
Not being able to argue with the laws of physics you then suggested that the 450 kg
warhead was replaced by an equal weight with less explosive power since we had already
established that the lack of damage to nearby structures was inconsistent with 76 claimed
T-hawk hits on that small site
At which point I mentioned that your statements were on a level with the Prince Charles
infamous 'tampon' phone call hence your new nickname Tampon Phil
Now here you are again just asking for more punishment
You may also wish to consult a topographical map of
Syria to see some of the mountains that these cruise missiles would have to fly over to
reach those inland targets
You will note the north to south mountain chain along the coast including the
Anti-Lebanese Mountains that rise to 10,000 ft
My discussion of the T-hawk technical characteristics in that link above includes such
crucial parameter as wing loading and thrust to weight ratio which determine this flight
vehicle's climb rate and turn rate
' The few pictures I've seen of interception attempts were all too high in the sky to be
targetting a TLAM or a Storm Shadow which are ground following missiles.
They need to fly high enough to avoid power lines but that's it '
And how do they get over those mountains Tampon Phil ?
Are they ground following there too ?
And also please let us know the scaling method you used to determine the height of those
missiles from photos that would be helpful
Yes there is no question that the US would have targeted Syrian airfields apparently a few
did get through at one airfield but the others were fully rejected
Laymen who know nothing about aircraft or missiles do not understand the complexities and
detail involved they simply accept the brochure 'information' presented on wikipedia and such
about the capabilities of such flight vehicles
This does not shed any light on a fascinating and important subject important because now
we have had some air combat between US and Nato airpower [Ship, sub and air launched cruise
missiles vs. Russian air defenses]
Clearly the Russians won there was not a single death on the Syrian side the US did
destroy a few buildings most notably the Barzeh research center in the Damascus area
We can tell the Russians won this round because the US is claiming completely ridiculous
stuff that they launched 76 T-hawks with a combined TNT tonnage of nearly 40 tons yet little
pine shrubs standing 20 feet away are completely intact
I mean how stupid ?
Clearly the US is claiming such a high number of attacks on the three buildings that they
did hit because they failed to hit those airfields and we know that they failed to hit those
airfields because if they did we would have satellite imagery being boastfully released
You can tell as much by the information that is withheld as you can by the information
they give out
Now for some basic technical facts cruise missiles are not hard to shoot down once they
are spotted but the hard part is spotting them because they are small and thus do not bounce
back strong radar reflections
They can fly close to terrain although this is not always the case as I have
explained previously and depends on the ingress route and the type of terrain along that
flight path ie if it is required to fly over mountainous terrain it must fly quite high
In 1999 the Serbs shot down a number T-hawks with their 1950s era Soviet equipment here is
the remains of one T-hawk airframe in the Belgrade Aviation Museum
Once spotted on radar the T-hawks and similar subsonic cruise missiles are sitting ducks
they have no means of evading missile shots either from an air to air missile launched
from a fighter jet or a surface to air missile launched from an air defense battery
A fighter jet relies on a radar warning receiver to alert the crew that it has been
targeted by a missile shot and the crew can instantly commence evasive maneuver which is
basically going into a steep banked turn so as to break radar lock and evade the missile
shot
Cruise missiles have no such RWR and it would be pointless to equipment with such since
they have very poor turning performance
This is due to their very high wing loading which is the ratio of wing area to aircraft
weight a T-hawk weighs about 3,000 lb but has a wing area of only about 10 square feet for a
wing loading of 300 lb/ft^2
That is about three times as high as a passenger jet's wing loading and as much as five
times higher than a fighter jet
Think of wing loading and how it relates to maneuverability by considering a person
carrying a backpack if that person is running and they need to change course having that
extra weight on their back will not let them zigzag like a runner carrying no weight
The same is true for climb performance think of carrying 100 lb in your backpack and
climbing up a set of stairs
The physical laws of flight performance are based on Newtonian Mechanics and cannot be
argued with
The thrust to weight ratio of a cruise missile is about comparable to that of a passenger
jet the thrust of the T-hawks Williams turbofan engine is about 700 lb against a weight of
3,000 lb that is less than 0.25 thrust to weight
A powerful fighter like an F15 will have a thrust to weight ratio of close to unity or
even above ie it's engine thrust is actually equal to or greater than its weight and the
airplane can thus climb straight up like a rocket
So the key in defending against subsonic cruise missiles which fly at about the same speed
as passenger jet, about 500 mph [800 km/hr] is to pick them up on radar
The Russians have clearly prepared for such an attack ever since the Shayrat strike
the very powerful Russian radars in Syria are capable of tracking any flying object and the
Syrian SAM batteries are networked into that system and are fed that radar data in real
time
We also saw in some of those missile intercept videos near the Damascus airport that
Syrian jets were taking off and landing this is because the jets would use their onboard
radar to find the cruise missiles and data link that info back to the SAM batteries
A fighter is easily capable of taking down a cruise missile with an AA shot also but this
all comes down to pilot skill and training something which the SyAAF may not be dealing with
on a regular basis considering their focus on the fight against ground targets in Jihadist
areas
As for the Pantsir yes this point defense system is the
perfect tool to shoot down cruise missiles it is the successor of the Tor SAM system that was designed
specifically to shoot down T-hawks
The older SAMs did not perform badly according to the Russian MoD assessment the S125
is a 1950s era system that the Serbs used to down two F117s and an F16 much more difficult
targets than a T-hawk
The S200 is a huge missile with a 350 km range exceeded only by the latest S400 long range
missile introduced into service only a couple of years ago
It flies extremely fast 2,500 m/s which is about Mach 8 it is even faster than the new
S400 missiles which fly at 2,000 m/s by comparison the USN Raytheon SM6 air defense missile
used on Aegis missile ships flies only at M3.5 about 1,000 m/s
The high speed of the S200 is actually its disadvantage against a slow moving target like
a cruise missile the laws of physics tell us that the faster the vehicle is flying, the
larger its turn radius will be thus the big S200 is not going to do well against cruise
missiles this is not surprising
Overall the Russian MoD version of events is certainly way more credible than the US
version which is full of holes
Looks like it was all about Turkey. "Turkey seems to me to be the swing state here. You cannot isolate Russia without Turkey.
Not only do they uncork themselves form the Black Sea , there will be no NATO fodder with
casualties that no one cares about. Turkey is a big chunk of NATO. This is to sy nothing
about trade. Sanction sound nice and dandy in the US, but in Turkey it wrecks their
economy."
Notable quotes:
"... Suffice it to say, that the information from these US-funded organizations is invariably unreliable. Their sole task is to create a justification for more carnage. ..."
"... In fact, the appointments of warhawks John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to the national security team, suggests that Trump may be planning a major escalation in the near future. The president has aligned himself with a Zionist right-wing fringe who see the conflict as a proxy-war with Iran that must be won in order to establish US-Israeli regional hegemony and maintain a stranglehold on vital resources and pipeline corridors. Trump's missile attack is just a minor skirmish in that much larger war. ..."
"... I am a card carrying deplorable. I prefer Trump to Mueller. But I can no longer defend Trump. He is a Zionist first and an American second. ..."
"... I don't believe that "the fix was in" because the runways of major military airports were targeted. There was no guarantee that the Pantsir and Buk's would be as effective as they were. ..."
"... If Trump gets in trouble for a fake missile attack in response to a fake chemical weapons attack that made use of non-existent WMD, then what can I say? ..."
"... Regardless of Trump's ignorance, who still believes in presidents having real power by status of function alone, Obama never mattered neither, the pot-shots were a worthy experiment on how to apply global rule, by global consensus ..."
"... "Or perhaps we should judge Trump by the company he keeps. Bolton in Washington and Israel/Saudi Arabia in the MENA. The scum of the earth." ..."
"... Yes, I base my opinion of Trump's loyalties on exactly that. It started with his appointment of Nikki Haley and all the Trumpeteers on ZH chanting "keep your friends close and your enemies closer". Just seeing the way his choices of neocons and Goldman Sachs thieves for his inner circle were being defended by people who claimed to have voted for him kept me from defending Trump. ..."
"... Turkey seems to me to be the swing state here. You cannot isolate Russia without Turkey. Not only do they uncork themselves form the Black Sea , there will be no NATO fodder with casualties that no one cares about. Turkey is a big chunk of NATO. This is to sy nothing about trade. Sanction sound nice and dandy in the US, but in Turkey it wrecks their economy. ..."
"... Seems to me that Trump is trying to walk a tightrope here he likely knows the 'chemical' attack is a false flag and his response was designed to appease the zios without actually causing much damage ..."
In short, the attacks accomplished nothing except, perhaps, to temporarily mollify the
warmongering western media and their bloodthirsty puppetmasters in the foreign policy
establishment.
The fact that Trump felt compelled to launch the attacks before the chemical weapons
inspectors from the OPCW had even touched down in Damascus, shows that Washington is not
interested in providing justifications for its criminal aggression. Similar to claims of Russia
hacking the 2016 US elections or the alleged use of toxic nerve agent in the Skripal incident,
the case against Syrian President Bashar al Assad was based on the thin gruel of uncorroborated
allegations by jihadist-linked organizations on the ground whose long history of staging
provocative incidents to foment a crisis is part of the public record. We're not going to waste
our time on that nonsense here. Suffice it to say, that the information from these
US-funded organizations is invariably unreliable. Their sole task is to create a justification
for more carnage.
... ... ...
Some readers will remember that Trump tacitly revealed his motivation for the attacks in a
tweat he delivered just days before the incident. Here's what he said on April 11:
"Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia
Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama.
Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). No
Collusion, so they go crazy!" The Real Donald Trump
What Trump is saying is that his real enemy is Mueller not Putin. It's Mueller, the bigwig
Dems and the media that are fomenting this Russphobic hysteria and trying to destroy Trump. And
that's what precipitated the 'wag the dog' scenario that unfolded on April 14th. Trump was
trying to get his enemies off his back by incinerating a few empty buildings in Syria. And, it
almost worked, but now information is beginning to leak-out that could be damaging to both
Trump and his chief lieutenants.
... ... ...
...how does one explain this tidbit from RT:
"Before we took the action, the United States communicated with the Russian Federation to
reduce the danger of any Russian or civilian casualties," (US Ambassador to Russia) Jon
Huntsman said, claiming that "all the targets were linked with the Assad regime's illegal
chemical weapons program."
The US ambassador to Russia said that the US strikes were coordinated with Russia to avoid
a great power confrontation." (RT)
Military analyst Publius Tacitus is even more explicit in a post at Colonel Pat Lang's
website, Sic Semper Tyrannis. He says:
"Russia was told where we were going to strike. Russia in turn warned the Syrians. Both
the Syrians and the Russians evacuated key personnel and equipment from the target sites. Any
claim by the United States that we caused devastating damage or destroyed essential
capabilities is total fantasy." (Trump's big Flop in Syria", Publius Tacitus, Sic semper
Tyrannis)
... ... ...
In any event, we can see that the April 14 missile attacks were largely a symbolic
muscle-flexing exercise that was aimed at pacifying Trump's domestic rivals rather than
punishing Assad for crimes he never committed. (It is worth mentioning that there have been
many credible reports that the US used banned substances in its siege of Raqqa last year.) The
fact that Putin limited his response to a perfunctory denunciation, suggests that Trump
achieved his objectives. (In other words, he avoided WW3) Here's part of what Putin said:
"Russia condemns in the strongest possible terms the attack against Syria, where Russian
military personnel are assisting the legitimate government in its counterterrorism
efforts.
Through its actions, the US makes the already catastrophic humanitarian situation in Syria
even worse and brings suffering to civilians. In fact, the US panders to the terrorists who
have been tormenting the Syrian people for seven years, leading to a wave of refugees fleeing
this country and the region.
The current escalation around Syria is destructive for the entire system of international
relations." (Kremlin, RU)
Putin is right. Washington's support for the Sunni extremists in Syria has prolonged the war
and turned the country into a smoldering wastelands. Unfortunately, it does not look like the
US is going to throw in the towel anytime soon. In fact, the appointments of warhawks John
Bolton and Mike Pompeo to the national security team, suggests that Trump may be planning a
major escalation in the near future. The president has aligned himself with a Zionist
right-wing fringe who see the conflict as a proxy-war with Iran that must be won in order to
establish US-Israeli regional hegemony and maintain a stranglehold on vital resources and
pipeline corridors. Trump's missile attack is just a minor skirmish in that much larger
war.
Prof Emeritus Steve Cohen essentially concurs with your analysis. Tonight Cohen expressed
concern that the national drumbeat against Trump essentially checkmates any efforts to repair
US-Russian relations.
As an aside, UR readers are referred to Robert Fisk's very recent report in the UK
Independent that the purported Syrian gas attack actually arose from artillery-induced
asphyxiation in underground tunnels.
I don't believe that "the fix was in" because the runways of major military airports were
targeted. There was no guarantee that the Pantsir and Buk's would be as effective as they
were. I don't see Putin happily agreeing to have those airport runways put out of commission.
a bit of deconfliction, yes, a total charade, no. This could have quite easily escalated
Why fiasco ?
The effectiveness of anything can only be judged by knowing what the objective was.
Those who want Syria, or/and Assad attacked, most of them, have the idea that something was
done.
Difficult for USA propaganda media to state that Trump did nothing.
Then there now is the fact that Syrian systems are quite capable of resisting missile
attacks.
Possibly Israel will think twice before launching another attack.
So in my opinion, what Trump did is possibly a great success.
If Trump gets in trouble for a fake missile attack in response to a fake chemical weapons
attack that made use of non-existent WMD, then what can I say? It's really Trump himself more
than the neocons who's to blame. His refusal to grow a pair and stand up to Washington will
ultimately be his downfall.
What Trump is saying is that his real enemy is Mueller not Putin. It's Mueller, the
bigwig Dems and the media that are fomenting this Russphobic hysteria and trying to destroy
Trump. And that's what precipitated the 'wag the dog' scenario that unfolded on April
14th.
It's long past time for Trump to fire Mueller. The fake 'RussiaGate' investigation is over
and didn't find anything actionable. How much longer is Trump going to allow this little
fishing expedition to go on?
Trump was trying to get his enemies off his back by incinerating a few empty buildings
in Syria. And, it almost worked, but now information is beginning to leak-out that could be
damaging to both Trump and his chief lieutenants.
As a candidate, Trump never hesitated to call out the BS in DC. But if, as president, he
goes along with this kabuki-theater, then he deserves what he gets.
Regardless of Trump's ignorance, who still believes in presidents having real power by status
of function alone, Obama never mattered neither, the pot-shots were a worthy experiment on
how to apply global rule, by global consensus. Next to it, Gaza comes to mind, even the South
African government of "natives" see the potential for Boers containment as inspired by Gaza.
Pot-shots, latter Russia moves, Chinese containment attitudes:
By experimenting, science progresses, the science of governing, the size of experiments,
containment, all these goodies that matter and can make for advancements in efficiently,
ruling the human mess into survival. Building data, in a few years, resulting into something
of predictability in a global context, over longer periods of time. More of this dipping into
the chest of tools.
The element to be accented: local experiments, global intent.
"Or perhaps we should judge Trump by the company he keeps. Bolton in Washington and
Israel/Saudi Arabia in the MENA. The scum of the earth."
Yes, I base my opinion of Trump's loyalties on exactly that. It started with his
appointment of Nikki Haley and all the Trumpeteers on ZH chanting "keep your friends close
and your enemies closer". Just seeing the way his choices of neocons and Goldman Sachs
thieves for his inner circle were being defended by people who claimed to have voted for him
kept me from defending Trump.
I figured that he was getting support from a pool of neocons and that made him one of
them.
The missile attacks confirmed Israels control over the U.S. gov which was proven by the fact
that Israel did 911 and got away with killing some 3000 Americans. Israel and her ziocons
control the U.S. gov lock stock and gun barrel and are destroying America.
Assad has never used gas attacks on the Syrian people , these attacks were perpetrated by
the CIA and the MOSSAD and MI6 and NATOs Operation Gladio, these people are satanist war
mongers straight from HELL.
God bless Assad and Syria and Putin and Russia for standing against these satanic forces
that are HELL bent on destroying Syria.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people
believe is false." CIA director William Casey (CIA director, 1981-1987)
Turkey seems to me to be the swing state here. You cannot isolate Russia without Turkey.
Not only do they uncork themselves form the Black Sea , there will be no NATO fodder with
casualties that no one cares about. Turkey is a big chunk of NATO. This is to sy nothing
about trade. Sanction sound nice and dandy in the US, but in Turkey it wrecks their
economy.
What a bunch of shite. It just shows that Mike Whitney and his fans have no idea of what
is actually going on behind the scenes, and continue to glom on to the MSM shrieks of Mueller
and Russia, Russia, Russia.
If you believe this had anything whatsoever to do with Mueller then you're a chump and
clearly don't even deserve to be enlightened. I would suggest turning off the CNN, but you're
already infected.
Mueller has been cock-blocked and Trump is in command. The revelations to come from the IG
Report and more are going to be delicious. There will be much wailing and gnashing of
teeth.
The point was to send a message to Assad that the US and it's allies are able and willing to
take action should he try to cross the red line drawn around Saudi Arabia. Once the war winds
down and the Syrian state starts regrouping and rebuilding there's naturally going to be a
payback time against the regional actors who poured so many resources into trying to demolish
the Syrian state. This means Saudi Arabia which is vulnerable in a number of ways. SA is a
huge customer and spends billions in the US and allied countries and is thus under the US
umbrella of protection as a valuable ally. There's bound to be a lot of nervousness in Riyadh
right now so the US must demonstrate a willingness to act militarily to them.
So he's brought NATO to the table regarding funding, is about to solve the greatest
crisis/threat to the world by bringing NK to the table re; Denuclearization, and has plans to
solve the ME situation (which you clearly know nothing about) using the GCC.
Yet he's a feckless, nutless POS.
You seem to be somewhat lacking in judgement. Beyond redemption with your TDS. A crazed
loon.
Did you miss the first part of the IG's report? Do you realize what's to come? Nah, it's
all Russia, Russia, Russia nonsense with your ilk.
Keep it up – you keep us amused with your ignorant thrashing about.
You raise points of doubt and effectively deal with them yourself. Putin would have been
very unlikely to have been involved in any detailed negotiations over targets. These would
have been dealt with by his military commanders. If airfields were targeted then it would
appear details were indeed known to the Syrian defenders. This goes some of the way to
explain the abysmal success rate of the US missiles in this fiasco as Mike Whitney and many
others rightly call it. So a hoax it certainly was and one to compare with the hoax gas
attack in Eastern Ghouta.
Trump is in the pockets of the Zionists, and has become a Zionist because the one thing he
understands is which side his bread is buttered on. To make sense of anything we do in the ME, you only need to ask one question: "What does
Israel want."
It just seems like a very dangerous ploy for a meaningless reward (the natural resources
Syria and strategic importance of Syria are very modest).
Maybe true, except for the fact that Syria, under Assad's leadership serves as a
convenient land route over which sophisticated weapons produced in Iran are delivered to
Hezbollah defense forces in Lebanon. In my opinion, this is the primary reason behind current
US and Israeli efforts being made to destroy Assad. The bottom line is that Israel has been
attacking it's weak neighbors for such a long time, until they simply find it impossible to
live with the reality of being unable to invade Lebanon on the slightest pretext. In addition
and more ominous, Hezbollah's leader Hassan Rouhani has publically stated that Hezbollah
defense forces may eventually extend their protection to the Palestinian people held captive
in the Gaza Strip
This is what tomfoolery looks like- when "I love mah Generals" and you allow them to
"lead the way."
At the same time we have a "three-pete" of the absolutely idiotic accusations that Assad used
chem-WMDs on his own civilians. Everyone that uses the internet can ferret out the truth.
This isn't ten years ago. This is 2018. Doesn't Intel realize how immature they appear? I'm
not only mad as hell, I'm SO disappointed in just how stupid the Government of the United
States appears to anyone with half a brain.
I'm ashamed of the Country I thought I loved.
I am a card carrying deplorable. I prefer Trump to Mueller. But I can no longer defend
Trump. He is a Zionist first and an American second.
Seems to me that Trump is trying to walk a tightrope here he likely knows the 'chemical'
attack is a false flag and his response was designed to appease the zios without actually
causing much damage
Iran doesn't want to escalate the situation and give Trump any leverage on Iran deal. Iran
wants to deprive any moral political or legal supports from EU to USA on this.
Trump pulls out. Rest remains same. This will give Iran moral political and legal
authorities to pursue its nuclear program with China and Russia . This will have domino
effects on other areas of these 3 countries – how to conduct business internationally.
So a choreographed coordinated attack works for Iran. Trump is happy. His base angry. His
enemies can't go after him for few hours or days . Mad madam prostitute Nick Halley has to be soothed by Kudlow telling her she was not a
demented rat.
Why are many commenters so excited? Everything is appropriate: fake missile strike in
response to fake chemical weapons use.
That's a good way to put it. Just wish Trump had exercised more restraint in his tweet, he
should not have called Assad a "monster". The real monsters are right here in the US, the
Israel Lobby and the Deep State led by Rod Rosenstein the fucking weasel, and the biggest
monster of them all is right there in the White House with him, Mike Pence, the one who hired
Rosenstein, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton. Pence the Ziocon has been working hard to
subvert Trump since Day 1. He wants to be president.
Judging from German press, Germany really looks like a US colony, not even vassal state.
Notable quotes:
"... She was promoted over Kohl's natural successor, Schaeuble, who was discredited using comparatively trifling allegations of accepting improper donations (aka bribes) on behalf of the party. ..."
"... Merkel has betrayed German interests at every turn, most blatantly in the context of the Greek debt fiasco and the refugee fake crisis. She goes along with imposing sanctions on Russia, which hurts export-oriented Germany like no other Western country. ..."
"... Merkel's selection as chancellor does not explain why German electorate keep electing her party as majority, which then is in the position to name her as chancellor. German people have been lobotomized and neutered after decades of Soros-Neocon brainwashing. ..."
The most interesting aspect of this false response to a false flag attack is the non
participation by Germany. Turkey has one foot in both camps. Germany will be next to turn.
Time is working against Imperial Washington.
Merkel is a CIA asset. She has skeletons in her closet from her time in East Germany, and
her meteoric rise to power was clearly engineered by a third party -- she herself lacked both
the experience and the power base within the party for doing it herself. She was promoted
over Kohl's natural successor, Schaeuble, who was discredited using comparatively trifling
allegations of accepting improper donations (aka bribes) on behalf of the party.
Merkel has betrayed German interests at every turn, most blatantly in the context of
the Greek debt fiasco and the refugee fake crisis. She goes along with imposing sanctions on
Russia, which hurts export-oriented Germany like no other Western country. At the same
time, the "ultra-right" (i.e. common sense) party "Alternative fuer Deutschland" is forever
mired in ridiculous infighting, which regularly escalates just ahead of elections -- funny
how that is. Must be those meddling Russians.
Long story short, hell will freeze over before Merkel decides herself what is for
breakfast, never mind for policy. I wish we could clone Putin and import him.
Merkel's selection as chancellor does not explain why German electorate keep electing her
party as majority, which then is in the position to name her as chancellor. German people have been lobotomized and neutered after decades of Soros-Neocon
brainwashing.
There is no other explanation for people who are committing slow self-extermination as a
distinct ethnos. Same with the French electorate: they had a chance to elect a true French
patriot and instead chose another globalist weirdo poodle.
Merkel's party has no majority – actually her party's share of the vote is at
historic lows with less than one third (traditionally it was 45-50%). She has moved that
formerly conservative party to the left by co-opting green and welfare agendas of the
competing parties. The other formerly strong party, the Social Democrats, have been reduced
to a status of auxiliaries in an eternal "grand coalition". In spite of infighting, the new
"right-wing" AfD came in third in the last elections.
But of course, as you say, the people's failure to get rid of her is due in large measure
to relentless media brainwashing, they swallow the refugee nonsense because it is
subliminally suggested that it atones for the "holocaust" etc. I don't read a single German
newspaper anymore, the manure is just too depressing.
Militarily subsidised by Nato, Germany spends next to nothing on its own defence and is
keeping wages down even more than usual by importing immigrants, thereby aiding its
deindustrialising of the rest of the EU. Russia is declining in national power compared to
Germany by getting into silly pissing contests with America. Adolf Hitler always said it
would be necessary to sacrifice millions of Germans to make Germany Great. He would approve
of Merkel.
What keeps German wages down, in real terms, is the Euro, not the migrants.
You are correct on the neglect of the armed forces. I have griped about it often, but I
have recently changed my tune. If the forces were indeed up to snuff, this would only cause
the U.S. to "ask" for their deployment in their many endless idiotic wars. Letting the troops
degrade to some sort of war museum on wheels is a sly way of getting out of that –
can't deploy in the short term, sorry, no spark plugs, but will be more than happy to go
along for the next war so I now see this as one of the few things Merkel got right.
"Philip May, husband of the UK prime minister, works for a company that is the largest
shareholder in arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, whose share price has soared since the recent
airstrikes in Syria.
The company, Capital Group, is also the second-largest shareholder in Lockheed Martin -- a US
military arms firm that supplies weapons systems, aircraft and logistical support. Its shares
have also rocketed since the missile strikes last week. . . ."
We have got it: Philip Owen believes religiously in the words of Theresa May, Boris
Johnson, and Gavin Willaimson. And, of course, Blair is a paragon of honesty for Philip
Owen.
What are you doing here, on the Unz Review? -- This is not a ziocon stink-tank source of
(dis)information, and this is not the ziocons-controlled MSM's presstitutes' haven.
You make yourself ridiculous by parroting the MSM "wisdom." Your frustration over the
impending defeat of "moderate" terrorists in Syria affects your reason and amplifies your
rabid hatred of Russia. Don't expect any sympathy for your "victimhood" on this site.
"Porton Down is just one of the Pentagon-funded military laboratories in 25 countries
across the world, where the US Army produces and tests man-made viruses, bacteria and toxins
in direct violation of the UN convention . These US bio-laboratories are funded by the
Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program–
Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and are located in former Soviet Union
countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.
The Pentagon-funded military facilities are not under the direct control of the host state as
the US military and civilian personnel is working under diplomatic cover. The local
governments are prohibited from public disclosure of sensitive information about the foreign
military program running on their own territory."
– All statements in this article are sourced, unlike the pronouncement of the miserable
puppets Blair, May, Johnson, and Willaimson.
Trump is a typical business tycoon: a clueless moron. Pence is just a weasel. Weasels are
carnivores, but small ones: sometimes they eat, sometimes they get eaten. I hope Pence gets
eaten.
In response to a caller's concern, Oklahoma congressman Steve Russell told the C Span
Washington Journal audience this morning that there was "no danger from a chemical plume"
after missiles struck Syrian chemical plants "because the attack was designed to burn up" the
fumes.
Russell explained that while "Nazis used chemicals in the holocaust." and Russians
deliberately target hospitals and schools with barrel bombs, "no other nation takes as much
care to prevent harm to civilians" as the USA.
The Corrupt U.S. Congress Cheers as the War Industry Steals Billions from the People's
Coffers !
Christian Sorensen | April 13, 2018
"Missile Production Capacity
In February, Newsbud reported on the war industry increasing its capacity to produce
Hellfire missiles.
Capacity to produce other missile types is expanding as well.
On 6 March 2018, BAE Systems received close to $13.7 million to help increase production
capacity of the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS). With its headquarters in
London, BAE Systems links the U.K. war industry to the United States, effectively
underpinning the 'special relationship' between the two countries.
On 19 March 2018, Raytheon received roughly $7.8 million to improve the production
capacity of AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles. Steps Raytheon might take to increase missile
production include adding more equipment, altering staffing levels, and upgrading its
facilities.
The war industry has been operating at full steam for the past seventeen years. Now, these
contracts tell us, the boardrooms of prominent war industry giants believe there is reason to
produce more Hellfire, APKWS, and Sidewinder missiles. Is it war with Iran? A bigger
offensive against President Assad's forces in Syria? Conflict in Korea?
The U.S. war industry is expecting more sustained, high-tempo hostilities in the near
future. You've been warned."
Iran doesn't want to escalate the situation and give Trump any leverage on Iran deal. Iran
wants to deprive any moral political or legal supports from EU to USA on this. Trump pulls
out. Rest remains same. This will give Iran moral political and legal authorities to pursue
its nuclear program with China and Russia.
This will have domino effects on other areas of these 3 countries -- how to conduct
business internationally.
So a choreographed coordinated attack works for Iran. Trump is happy. His base angry.
His enemies can't go after him for few hours or days . Mad madam prostitute Nick Halley
has to be soothed by Kudlow telling her she was not a demented rat.
At Sec. St. nomination hearing, Pompeo bragged that "we had killed a couple of hundred
Russian contractors." As a former civilian contractor in a war zone, I note that he just put
a target on the forehead of every American contractor working in a war zone. It is now open
season on them. Who will have blood on their hands?
In my opinion, the ego becomes "mental" when it starts believing in duality, that it's the
centre of the personality and in control. It's just the centre of the field of consciousness.
"The axiom of Maria. A precept in alchemy: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of
the third comes the one as the fourth."
Jung used the axiom of Maria as a metaphor for the whole process of individuation. One is the
original state of unconscious wholeness; two signifies the conflict between opposites; three
points to a potential resolution; the third is the transcendent function; and the one as the
fourth is a transformed state of consciousness, relatively whole and at peace."
"In my opinion, the ego becomes "mental" when it starts believing in duality, that it's
the centre of the personality and in control. It's just the centre of the field of
consciousness."
Stuart begins: Our ego is a vestigal organ, long since gone by the by, and all that
remains is a cell-wall-less gooey-plasma ready at the moment to luminesce and retire into
nothingness.
I take it as axiotmatic that our Whole Mind cannot lose it Self.
OK, Rob from Canada, now to your opinions:
One: "the ego becomes "mental" when it starts believing in duality".
Two: "(the ego is) the centre of the personality".
Three: "(the ego is) in control".
Four: "(the ego) is the centre of the field of consciousness".
Regarding Point One: Please explain how fracturing an entirely mistaken ideal can lead to
dualism and not chaos?
Two: "Who says?"
Three: "Of What?"
Four: An unconscious ideal cannot attain consciousness, except in illusions.
Hi Stuart! Here's my take on the issue of ego being mental, and from my own experience it is
correct. With very little practice one can observe his thoughts and internal dialogue. It
doesn't require meditation. It's simply a matter of paying attention to our internal
dialogue. We all talk to ourselves. That internal dialogue is the ego talking to itself. The
ego is a mental construction based on the brain's interpretation of it's experience since
birth. So what are we witnessing the ego's internal dialogue and thoughts with? That's where
our "spirituality" lies, regardless of religion or no religion. We all have immediate access
to the witness to our own ego but few use it. The "witness" is silent. It observes and knows,
but doesn't know how or why it knows. Call it "knowingness". That witnessing awareness is
silent. Zen Buddhists call it the practice of "no mind". In modern sports it's called being
in "The Zone". Though silent is is a very aware state of consciousness.
Instead of using our brain to think when we want to use it to think, we let the brain's ego
think us and think our lives for us. Our ego is our own worst enemy. The ego never sees the
"big picture" of all involved. The ego/mind is always insecure and spends it's life trying to
compensate is some way or another to overcome it's basic insecurity.
Humans for the most part, identify with their mental chatter (the ego). Any real spiritual
teaching, teaches us to identify, instead, with the observer of the ego, which is
transcending the ego.
All the problems we face on this planet are because of insecure individual egos, grouping to
form tribal egos, such as tribes of nationalism, tribes of religious beliefs, tribes of
political beliefs, tribes of sports team fans. Egos tend to be competitive and want to be
"one up" in some way. One can easily see that the party of Democrats has an ego identity as
does the party of Republicans. Egos are mental creations. Mental creations are not
necessarily true. They are beliefs about our perception, whether actually correct or not. The
witness or observer we all have and share knows the truth of the moment and the appropriate
action to take. Of all the books on Spiritual Practices I've read through the years (I'm 80),
I recommend Eckhart Tolle's "The Power Of Now". The best to you!
To Barry, thank you for your post. I have read Tolle's book too, about 8 years ago, and found
it really making good sense to me. Your explanation of our internal dialogue not being who we
really are, is very clear and well-said. These can be hard concepts to get one's head around.
You did an admirable job of it in your post.
Thanks again for posting your thoughts.
Barry, I pride myself in speaking to an octogenarian! "And from my own experience" .
"Here's my take on the issue of ego being mental, and from my own experience it is
correct. With very little practice one can observe his thoughts and internal dialogue. It
doesn't require meditation. It's simply a matter of paying attention to our internal
dialogue. We all talk to ourselves. That internal dialogue is the ego talking to itself. The
ego is a mental construction based on the brain's interpretation of it's experience since
birth."
Barry, the internal dialogue of what you speak, is to me, your conscience and your inner
self, not the ego talking to a hallucination of itself; for what can an illusion manifest but
more illusions of : it : self.
The ego is a misprojection from our higher mind; ergo, not mind, but misunderstanding,
illusion, maya, separate from reality, separate from us, not us, not anyone, just lost
awareness with no where to settle but nonexistence from which it came.
Cool. I´d take it a bit further, though. Putting the mind on emptiness, the place
without characteristics, in a deep meditative state. One sees the way things really exist,
the way consciousness creates our reality, the truth of emptiness and karma. Its called
entering the stream. The beginning of the transformation to the divine being. Its an
experience that changes you forever.
Beyond words. Meditation is essential.
On a side note I would add that 3-4 years ago when Ukraine was boiling, much of the
discussion by concerned people focused on countries outside of the US, and the damage caused by
the US. The US, in this context, was largely regarded as an evil but coherent entity.
But that coherence has now come more and more into question. Discussion shifted gradually,
as the US made more and more mistakes and lost battle after battle in so many theaters, and
revealed itself as a failing actor. And in the last year or two there's much more discussion
about the US itself, largely trying to pierce the obscurity of how that country is actually run
and by whom. This shift was already happening, and Trump of course added to the
fascination.
I was glad to see that gradual shift. To me it indicated the war itself was won, while many
battles were yet to be fought. I think it's true that Russia, China, Iran and others are
increasingly concerned with curtailing the damage that the US can still inflict. Every day they
increase in actual, effective power, and the US decreases in that power. Yesterday's battle
will be fought differently tomorrow, because the balance of that power will have shifted again
by then.
Syria has been an enormously useful magnifying glass to show us so much about the relative
power balances of many nations. And even as the US lashes out in its death throes, it is
increasingly cornered and stymied. The same is true of Israel. It's reaching the point - if not
already there - that every move made by the US will result in clear damage to itself, with no
gain, and no damage to its targets.
The other side has had sufficient time to wargame countless contingencies, and think them
through and make preparations for them. Increasingly, it gets to choose what damage to allow
and what to stop, because the costs of every action have now been calculated - and the passage
of time reduces the costs too, so the equation constantly updates.
This is true outside of Syria also, in all theaters and on many planes of
activity.
The US Deep State doesn't want to "conquer" any country. Then they'd have to pay the bill
for the destruction they caused... think an actual Marshall Plan, not the Iraq and Afghan
Debacles. It is not trying to "win". It is trying to destroy those countries' ability to
function outside the iron-fist influence of the IMF/BIS/etc. banks/economy.
... ... ..
As for US operations in Syria being handed off "to others", i.e. to Prince's latest
iteration of Blackwater/Xi/Academia, the last we heard of Erik was trying to sell a budget
airforce/drone system to countries in Africa. What a joke.
Not going to happen in Syria,
because Russia, Iran, Hezbolla and Syria would have no qualms about directly assaulting
Prince's Kurd/Arab/Wahabbist mercenaries... Eric may be a self-serving parasite, but he's not
stupid enough to directly take on the Russian military, or even the SAA for that matter.
Especially with no NATO air cover...
Killary is not around to unilaterally impose a Libya-style
no-fly-zone.
Trumpty Dumbdy is trapped, just trying to convince his base that he really is getting the US
out of being Israel's and the Rothschilds' bitch, but that is not a potential reality.
It would
involve dismantling the FED and cutting off the yearly $multi-billion military aid tap to
Israel. I doubt he is smart or informed enough to comprehend the situation he is in. Any sane,
intelligent person would walk away and tell the Zionist/Rothschild/Deep State to find another
patsy.
Count on an inverted yield curve and Treasury Department derivative losses in the trillions
on interest rate swaps sold to Wall Street banks.
Wall Street banks have been buying surplus US government debt that the world doesn't want
to finance huge budget deficits over the last 10 years and the Treasury Department sold them
insurance protection against capital loses on that debt.
A lot of malinvestment in fracking and share buybacks with borrowed money has
overleveraged corporations. Personal debt, corporate debt and government debt compared to GDP
are at 1929 levels and a lot of that debt will be uncollectible.
The USA has kicked the financial can down the road for 10 years. It created a huge asset
inflation bubble with borrowed money ie all malinvestment via interest rate suppression by
the Fed that will blow up when the yield curve goes inverted signifying a financial panic is
underway. That is the demand for short-term money(to borrow) is greater than the supply of
money to short-term borrow.(to lend)
All I have to do is look at the SPX chart of the SP500 to know the US is FUKUS. The bull
market that started in 2008 has started a head&shoulders topping pattern. In 2019 I
expect 52-week lows to be hit and a bear market worse the 2008 financial crisis to be
underway.
People keep tossing out "The US economy is tanking, it is going to implode/explode/crumble
sooner or later" etc., etc. Such beliefs may be soothing to hold but they do not rest on
knowledge or economic literacy. Briefly, here is why.
Economies do not tank because of massive credit. Money Supply = M1 + M2 + M3, where M3 is
the outstanding credit in the economy. The US M3 is huge because the economy itself is huge.
Modern economies have moved away from paper notes and in future all money supply will
essentially be M2 + M3. M2 (total outstanding bank deposits) and M3 are in turn fusing into
one as credit card payments replace the practice of mailing out cheques.
Nor is high foreign indebtedness in itself a sign of future imminent collapse. Yes, it is
worryingly high presently, but no it is not imminent that some sort of disaster will befall
the US Treasury. No one forces the rest-of-the world to buy US treasuries, bonds, and stocks.
Yet governments, corporations, and individuals from all over the world line-up to buy these.
Ask yourselves why. The answer is: Money and Capital flows to low risk and high return zones.
This is how it always has been, and this is how it always will be. Why do Alibaba and the
other Chinese majors seek listing on American stock exchanges?
Yes, there are plenty of things wrong with the USA, and yes it may end up paying a dear
price for its arrogance, aggression, and cruelty all over the world (not to talk of its
collapsing morality, ethics and social cohesion at home) but there is nothing the matter with
its economy. Those who wait for its supposedly "Ponzi scheme" to collapse will wait to
eternity, I am afraid.
@guest. I think your conclusion that the US economy is not tanking is blinkered. The US
economy tanked in 2008 and would had crashed into a worse depression had not the Chinese held
up the US economy (the Chinese also held up Europe by holding up the German economy). Alibaba
is not the biggest Chinese company to list in the US. The biggest which is twice as
profitable, twice the market capitalisation of Alibaba(more than USD500 billion) and listed
on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, is Tencent.
The US economy and the US dollar was viewed as safe haven becuase there was no
alternative. The US dollar and the US economy became a bubble because of the global demand
for the US dollar resulting from there being no alternative. Besides the use of the USD is
enforced by the US military.
But, if you have been following the latest economic development, that had changed. The US
economy is no longer the biggest, certainly not the strongest. The US dollar is no longer
indispensable. It's value is now perched on the edge of a sharp slippery slope due to US
financial mismanagement and profligacy ala the late great USSR!
Its stupendous, useless, egoistic and hubristic military spending and other factors will
push the US economy down that very slippery slope to oblivion.
But China will be waiting at the bottom of that slope to cushion the fall!
No, it's not over Saker, but compared to 2007 victory is in sight.
First, my opinion is that the Russia/China asymmetric attack on US dollar hegemony will
create a second financial crisis next year, worse than the one in 2008.
Second, in my opinion, Russia and China are winning on the most important Grand
Strategic/Moral level of warfare for global public opinion. The UN votes are illustrative of
that moral victory. Also, Qatar, Turkey and the Philippines switching sides are examples of
moral victory.
"Facts simply don't matter. And neither does logic. All that matters are perceptions!"
That's the perfect strategy to defeat yourself.
"Those who defeat others are strong, those who defeat themselves are mighty." Lao Tzu
Napolean marched into Russia in 1812 with lot's of allies but left several months later
with none.
I agree with MK Bhadrakumar assessment of the strike on Syria over your assessment. It's a
moral defeat for the F#$%ing stupidest, exceptional nation on the face of the earth.
Well, I'm not sure what old Lao was smoking on that day but if we replace the word
"mighty" with "exceptional" then perhaps Trump fits the bill in a modern context.
Putin the Great vs Trump the Mighty (and Exceptional) who managed to defeat
himself.
Russia and China have stopped buying US Treasuries, in fact are selling down for gold. The
deficit if 1.3T will be more costly to fund, and the debt impossible to service. And China
with the petro-yuan has tolled the death knell. Added to that is the dysfunction of the US
political system. The mid-terms will be very interesting. I doubt Trump will see out 1 term,
never mind 2.
And yes, the so-called US allies are fair weather friend.
Rob is right: the coming economic crisis will be nothing like 2007, or like any depression
that occurred over the past century for that matter. It is the first time a cycle is ending
with interest rates so low, so the trick of lowering them further cannot be used this
time.
Even though hyperinflation is not happening because of globalised and cheap offer (Richard
Duncan), Western economies are slowly collapsing under the burden of debt (Prof Steve Keen,
Prof Michael Hudson).
The global Ponzi scheme will soon end, with major geopolitical consequence. The US, being
given their history, will probably go to full blown war where this can bring most economic
gains. The Chinese are fully aware of that, and are preparing for it All of their plans ( the
OBOR initiative, the petro-yuan) depend on a strong Russia, The Chinese will not let Russia
go down, their own survival depend on Russia.
All the best.
I know b is not fond of us posting content from other blogs but the Saker has just put up
a must-read interview with a personal favorite author of mine, F. William Engdhal, entitled
"The rape of Russia". Very informative, it documents the strategies put in place during the
Yeltsin years to plunder the assets of the new CIS. Enjoy!
After collapse of the USSR the mount of infometion that has flown to the West is staggering.
KGB might be then most open of intelleigence services in this sense. multiple defector probably
created a very complete picture of the organization and its methods.
July 2, 1996
A NOTE ON KGB STYLE
Wayne Lambridge
The KGB like any enduring institution has a style, its own way of doing things. When we
seek to understand the service and its officers, we should perhaps pay attention to how they
do business as well as to what kind of business they do. This article is intended to raise
the subject for discussion, to present largely one man's opinion. It is far from a definitive
study.
By way of indicating something about KGB style, consider the implications for the
organization as a whole of a communication system that carries one tenth or less as much
traffic -- both electric and by pouch -- as its American equivalent. The KGB sends very few
cables and its dispatches are infrequent. For maximum security, they are pouched on
undeveloped microfilm, which is recovered and printed when the dispatch reaches its
destination. Although Moscow headquarters does excellent and prompt printing, both exposure
and development are sometimes haphazard in the field. Ten years ago, they were downright
unreadable at times. Now, the quality is generally better. Volume, however, does not seem to
have risen much.
The prints of the developed films are seen by the Rezident (the KGB Chief of Station) and
by the case officer concerned. In large Rezidentury (KGB Stations) some intermediate may also
read the traffic, but that is by no means always the case. The Rezident keeps a file --
sometimes in the form of notes or perhaps as copies of pertinent cables and dispatches -- for
reference. The case officer keeps all his files in a briefcase or a notebook. Calling them
"files" is perhaps misleading. It is better to say that the KGB officer keeps a movable
In-Box. When a document leaves that box it is either returned to the Rezident or destroyed
and the fact of destruction recorded. The case file is really in the case officer's head. The
excellent memory that KGB officers often display concerning the details of their operations
may well be traceable to the necessity of remembering the vital information on each operation
that they cannot look up anywhere. Of course, when a new case officer replaces an old one,
especially if the latter has been unable to brief his successor fully, complications may
ensue. Illness, car accidents and PNG'ing have led to real chaos in some KGB operations when
a harassed new man has tried to tie down the broken threads of a departed colleague's dropped
contacts.
Although the amount of paper that he sees is small, the KGB case officer is held strictiy
accountable for each sheet of it. When he destroys a document, a notation to that effect is
included on a record. Even his scrap paper may bear a serial number and have to be accounted
for. At the Moscow headquarters each document is sewn into the file by the senior officer
directly responsible for the case. A special record of all documents in the file is kept by
the case officer and its accuracy is regularly verified by the case officer's supervisor.
Safe storage areas are locked and sealed with wax each night.
The ritual of sewing in the documents is often regarded as a waste of time by senior case
officers in Moscow. Nevertheless, they would not dream of delegating the job. It seems to
have a symbolic significance as an embodiment of both their authority and their
responsibility.
The KGB case officer is his own intel assistant. At headquarters he does his own traces,
gets his own documents from the archives and handcarries his own messages. Not too long ago,
he also often wrote or typed his own dispatches. Even now he may write his own telegrams and
personally take them and dispatches to his supervisor for review. In the field he is, if
anything, even more responsible for doing everything connected with his operation except for
technical surveillance and the like where he must call on experts.
The field case officer under official cover often works at his cover job about as much as
do his colleagues who do not have intelligence responsibilities. This obligation is usually
not as demanding on the case officer's time as it might first appear because KGB cover slots
are usually selected so that cover duties complement intelligence tasks to a substantial
degree. By contrast, other KGB officers have virtually no serious cover responsibilities and
rely on the all-embracing security system of the Soviet colony to protect their true
affiliation. In either case, the 'KGB officer is not expected to spend much time on the
administrative or reporting aspects of his intelligence job. Within the limitations of his
cover assignment, he is supposed to be out on the street, making contacts, working agents and
performing other intelligence tasks, reporting only the highlights and the most crucial
information back to headquarters.
In developing new sources, he will usually bring things along to the point where
recruitment or some other substantial development is clearly foreseeable before asking for
traces from headquarters or getting approval to go ahead with his plan. Local informers and
support agents are sometimes picked up without reference to headquarters at all, except
perhaps after the fact of recruitment. The KGB officer must account with some precision,
however, for his operational expenditures and is usually quite limited in what he can spend
for development prior to coming up with a concrete proposal for recruiting a source.
Once an agent is recruited or is established as a source, headquarters' control and
demands for accountability are exacting, though never voluminous. For a recruited source with
significant access, a senior officer, such as a branch chief or his deputy is specifically
charged with responsibility for the case. Moscow's concern to insure that information is
really coming from the source as described by the case officer and that the source is bona
fide is very considerable. Somewhat by contrast, Moscow's requirements (outside of S&T
operations) sometimes seem quite general, apparently leaving it up to the case officer and
source to report what seems to them most important. On the other hand, reporting is expected
to be factual and documentary, if possible. Sometimes the KGB seems obsessed with documents
as the only reliable sources. Speculation is not usually encouraged.
In such a system of extreme compartmentation and vertical lines of communication and
authority, the advisory role of staffs and other elements not within the chain of command is
small. The First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB, has a
counterintelligence unit, for example, that actually takes over a case from the regular chain
of command in the event that the agent appears to be doubled, compromised or in danger of
compromise. The field case officer may remain the same, but in Moscow the Counterintelligence
Service assumes full authority for directing the case. Deception and some types of complex
political action operations often appear to be run directly by the headquarters element,
Department A, that prepares the operation in Moscow. In such cases, of course, local assets
of a Rezidentura may well be employed in support, but the operations are frequently run by
specialists.
The typical KGB officer, trained in an environment where political agitation is part of
daily fare, sees political action and propaganda as part of his regular routine. There are
numerous examples of Soviet officers around the world who seem to concentrate almost
exclusively on pushing the Soviet line on the issues of the day with whatever contacts they
meet. To them the political approach is not something apart from spotting, developing,
assessing, recruiting and agent handling. It is integral to that effort. Some do it crudely,
some ineffectively, some with great skill. The point is that in almost all cases, it is a
part of the operation.
In addition to politics, KGB recruiting and training of staff personnel emphasizes
operational and area knowledge and experience from bottom to top. The main sources for new
KGB officers are the institutes of International Affairs and Eastern Languages in Moscow.
These institutions, which are better compared to the U.S. service academies than to other
organizations of higher learning in America, prepare young Soviet citizens for careers abroad
not only in the intelligence services, but for the foreign service, the Ministry of Foreign
Trade, Radio Moscow, etc. Assignment of a student after graduation is worked out among the
various consuming organizations. The students are under what amounts to military discipline
and are required to accept the assignment given them. Few students, see much difference among
the organizations these days except for differences in pay, length and location of overseas
service and other practical matters.
In the course of their education the students learn two or three foreign languages well
and study the history and culture of the area in which they specialize in considerable
detail, although current politics is likely tobe a much weaker course than history. Access to
native sources is still circumscribed. A substantial number of students go for a year or more
as exchange students or as trainees with Soviet organizations working abroad. As a result,
they often end up knowing the area, its language, its politics, customs, police systems,
local geography and so on very well. Although the old-style Soviet intelligence officer who
was raised in the shadow if not the institutions of the Komintern and could recruit agents
through appeals to an international revolutionary ideology are long since past, the newest
generation of Soviet intelligence officers can be quite effective by trading on their precise
knowledge of target personalities and the problems and frustrations of the countries in which
they operate.
A KGB officer is ranked in his service by two systems. He progresses up the ladder from
junior lieutenant to senior lieutenant and so on up to colonel and general. At the same time,
he is classified as a junior case officer, case officer or senior case officer and then as he
progresses further by his position, such as Rezident, which he may hold. His pay depends on
his ranking in both hierarchies and there is no necessary coincidence between where he stands
in one and where he stands in the other. The operational designations are based on his
experience and performance as an operator. His formal rank is largely based on length of
service up through major or lieutenant colonel. The chain of command is designated through
the operational positions rather than formal rank. For example, a major of State Security
from some other part of the KGB might be transferred into the First Chief Directorate under
the designation of junior case officer and find himself subordinate to a senior lieutenant
who had attained the position of case officer.
The phenomenon of marked disparity between formal rank and operational designation was
probably more common during the period of considerable expansion of the First Chief
Directorate's personnel ten and more years ago than it is today. At that time officers from
other branches of the service were being brought into the First Chief Directorate more
frequently than they are now. Nevertheless, the emphasis on operational experience and
operational ability continues to be a marked element of the KGB style. The top officers in
the service, for example, usually involve themselves directly in operations. They meet and
develop agent candidates, they recruit and they handle agents.
In part this is a consequence of the strongly operational orientation of the KGB as a
whole. A direct involvement in operations comes naturally to almost everyone in the
organization. This operational orientation is manifest also in the concentration of
relatively few cases per case officer. Generally, one man may handle four or five agents or
targets under development. He is not expected to spread his range of intelligence activities
further, although he may well be encouraged to develop a large circle of casual contacts from
whom a relatively small number of serious targets may be selected.
From the foregoing one can see that the typical KGB officer is a man who sees himself in a
strict vertical chain of command. He expects to do everything necessary for his operation
without much outside help, except in technical matters. Depending upon circumstances, the
case officer may be closely guided by the Rezident in a particular operation, but he is not
supposed to discuss it with anyone else. (Gossip and shop-talk are endemic, however, in part
to overcome the excessive official compartmentation.) Although the case officer is held
strictly to account for the results of his actions, he is not expected to report on
day-to-day developments to headquarters and in fact the capacity of his communications system
is far too limited to permit him to do so. He is street-oriented in the concept of his job
and does not put in a lot of time at the desk writing reports, reading guidance from
headquarters or maintaining his files. When he has a problem he takes it up with his boss and
he is generally not expected to have many problems. He is supposed to know the difference
between what he really needs consultation about and what he ought to be able to handle on his
own.
His boss in turn has the responsibility of not only guiding the case officers that work
for him, but of ensuring that vital information pertinent to the work of one case officer but
acquired through another is made available. In both operational guidance and information
sharing, the role of the Rezident is crucial. There is virtually no lateral distribution of
communications and an extreme emphasis on compartmentation. Although the rigid
compartmentation of the system is probably a major vulnerability, superiors both in the field
and headquarters are usually able to keep up with each case because they are not overwhelmed
with paper. Relatively primitive (in terms of capacity) communications equipment and the
custom that each officer prepare his own reports and keep them brief make it possible for
such reports as do get written to be read all the way up the chain of command. The general in
command of the First Chief Directorate has been reported on several occasions as reading all
the incoming traffic. Much of the outgoing traffic is also signed personally by him.
The strictness of the chain of command and the limited amount of communications place a
great weight of responsibility on each Rezident and on each case officer. As with all Soviet
officials, KGB case officers have a norm to fulfill for the year and are usually called to
account for their activities during part of the annual home leave in the Soviet Union. In a
system like that, if something goes wrong, someone must be found to have been responsible.
This can encourage an extreme of caution, particularly when the relations between case
officer and the Rezident are not of the best or when the headquarters desk officer is not
cooperative and understanding of the problems in the field.
Although we are accustomed to think of Soviet organizations as highly impersonal, in the
KGB personalities and the private connections of individual officers are often crucial to the
success or failure of an operation -- or a career. In many ways, the KGB is an organization
made to order for the man who wants to claim all the glory for himself and put all the
mistakes on the backs of his subordinates. Family connections or other personal contacts have
special significance in this sort of an organization because they can provide a secure and
effective second channel for communication in a system in which there is otherwise only one
narrow route watched over by jealous monitors for all the messages an officer may want to
send.
The emphasis on the role of the individual in the organization also has its advantages, of
course. A capable officer, particularly one from an influential family, working under a
Rezident who knows his business and will accept responsibility is likely to find himself in a
stimulating work environment that may compensate very well for shortcomings of the service or
the Soviet system as a whole that might otherwise disturb him.
While the KGB style as outlined above is in many ways admirably suited to running
operations, it appears to have limitations in the way it makes use of the product of its
operations and in evaluating whether the operations themselves are really worthwhile. There
are enough instances on record to permit the generalization that in political matters
especially Moscow is often reluctant to receive bad news. The ambitious case officer may find
himself frustrated by pressure to conform, either from his Rezident or from Moscow, when he
tries to report things as he sees them. To a large degree this is probably an inevitable
manifestation of the extreme isolation from the outside world in which the Soviet policy
makers live and their lack of exposure to unwelcome information. In addition, the emphasis on
operations as such and the overall environment of the KGB, which is predominantly an internal
security, criminal investigation, and antisubversive organization, probably discourages the
kind of critical intellect by whom frank reporting, regardless of its content, is most
prized.
This last consideration, the emphasis on an investigative, operational style at the
expense of analytical curiosity, may well be the source of considerable tension within the
First Chief Directorate today. Bigoted and inflexible ultimate consumers are problems enough.
But also the older generation of KGB officers, including many of today's Rezidenty, was
largely trained in war time and internal security operations. Their juniors, speaking
broadly, are more academically inclined, more tempted to discourse on their theories, more
interested in foreign societies and politics per se and less dedicated to fulfilling the
obligations of the party and the state. They are often perceptive and realistic about
developments not only abroad, but also in their own country. Bearing in mind the importance
of personal relations and the dependence of juniors on seniors in the rigid chain of command,
the signs we see these days of tension and cynicism among these younger officers should not
be surprising.
As they rise in the KGB, we may see some organizational changes over time. If these
changes preserve the laconic style of communication while at the same time do away with some
of the most cumbersome and archaic aspects of the communications and records keeping systems,
the KGB could become an even more formidable institution than it is today. The problem of
encouraging intelligence analysis and imaginative, critical thinking is a problem for Soviet
society as a whole. As a part of that society, the KGB shares the problem, but probably not
in greater degree than other Soviet institutions and possibly less than many.
Judgments about the influence the KGB style has on KGB officers as individuals, about the
implications for KGB operations of the way they do business, about the relevance of the style
to Western operations against Soviet targets, and about many other related matters lead us
beyond the scope of this note which, as stated in the introductory paragraph, hopes only to
raise an interesting topic for further comment. If this piece succeeds in making the point
that KGB organizational style is important to Western intelligence and that we should concern
ourselves with it more than we have, it will have served its purpose.
"... The topic of China is delicate here in Russia. If one considers the total and basically psychotic enmity from the West, offer of friendship from China is a godsend. ..."
"... If you read very carefully the articles written by high level advisors of Putin, you would see that they harbor no illusions. Russia itself contains a significant number of former apparatchiks whose "Russian soul" evolved through the 1990s to a point exactly resembling what you described about the Chinese. I am convinced that president Putin is a patriot, and when he meets this type of people, he recognized right away what they were, whether they were Russian or Chinese. ..."
Shame on Arabs and China! My personal experience with Chinese convinced me that the real God
for them is money. Beside collecting money by any means possible, these people have no other
issue to talk or discuss. They had shown zero interest in the geopolitics or the dire situation
of the planet, or suffering of humanity. They did not show any emotional or sentiment towards
what is happening in the World.
Majority of them express some kind of inferiority complex towards West. China Will soon or
later betray Russia, They do not think about any higher moral or human value, heroism,
solidarity, except for collecting money.
But the Number one betrayal came from Arabs, 22 Arab countries, and some 90% of them are
happy in their slave minded status. They are the biggest disgrace for humanity and Muslims.
Some of them are more aggressive then their masters in the West.
If not for the virus of Wahabism which infected the body of many Muslims, there could
emerge a true alliance of Orthodox Christians and True Muslims. Such an alliance would be
undefeatable, even without money worshiping China.
Antoni, you know obviously what you are talking about. Especially since I myself am Chinese,
and spent almost two decades coordinating the visit of Chinese officials and business folks
to US, on behalf of the US government. This was my previous career, before I abandoned it and
moved to Russia.
The topic of China is delicate here in Russia. If one considers the total and basically
psychotic enmity from the West, offer of friendship from China is a godsend. One would not
want to speak too undiplomatically about the Chinese mentality, and the current state of
Chinese National psyche.
If you read very carefully the articles written by high level
advisors of Putin, you would see that they harbor no illusions. Russia itself contains a
significant number of former apparatchiks whose "Russian soul" evolved through the 1990s to a
point exactly resembling what you described about the Chinese. I am convinced that president
Putin is a patriot, and when he meets this type of people, he recognized right away what they
were, whether they were Russian or Chinese.
The overseas Russian get very emotional at such trying times for their motherland. I more
than relate to that. But they show a natural tendency to idealize everything about Russia,
and gets instantly suspicious on hearing a different opinion. The same eagerness to believe
is now extended to the new great Asian ally of Russia. I wrote something a couple of days ago
to the same effect. The moderator even did not allow me to post. I hope now that this war
charade has temporarily abated, the moderator would regain a minimal level of calmness and
openness for dialogue.
"Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth." – Mahatma Gandhi
Hizbullah, Persia, Russia vs China
The real power and fearlessness is not about numbers. It is about soul and its vibrant
energetic radiation.
How can a small movement of people like Hizbullah be more vibrant and fearless and outspoken
against oppression and international criminals then the so called giant nation of China?
How could Bolivia a small nation can be so to the point then China?
How can Iran (Persia) with its 70 millions people and totally surrounded by Kosher Nostra
mafia can be so brave and standing tall against the international oppressors of humanity in
compare to China, which doing practically nothing?
It is not about numbers, it is about power of soul, about life philosophy, about way of life,
about believe in true and one God. So that is way Persians historically influenced humanity
more then anything China can dream of.
There is reason why King Cyrus, is mentioned several times in Bible. There is a reason why
Saadi poetry about humanity is written in the entrance of UN:
Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul.
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.
If you've no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain!
"Saadi Persian poet"
But perhaps, the most significant solid power and force which has not only the soul of
justice, solidarity and humanity, but even instrument of physical power and ability to fight
back a total war is Mother Russia. Despite its shortcomings, Russia is a gift from God,
Russia is the historic Rom of our time, mentioned in Sura 30 of Quran (30:1-5 "To Whom Power
Belongs" Declares the truth of the universe).
Russia may be is the second period of Zul-Qarnain mentioned in the Sura 18 of Quran.
Russia is an exceptional Caucasian (White race, i personally do not believe in race ) people,
(if we exclude Persians as Caucasians) which does not participate in the oppression of
non-Europeans and blocking the total subjugation of planet by Western and its minions.
When you talk with Russians and Westerners, you will immediately recognize the difference.
Russians are not arrogant and it is exactly what Quran describing a kind of Christians, who
are not arrogant, but a people with love and affection. I have no illusions, but i talking in
general terms, i talking about sum of all vectors and direction of this common vector.
Numbers are not important, historically majority always were wrong. Truth is still truth even
you are a minority.
So, the conclusion is that, if I am right and if Russia is righteous and just and hold on
rope of God, no force of this plant can defeat Russia. Russia does not need China, China is
not a nation of ideology, faith or religion, they only believe in money, which is also the
god of Western world and its minions. China is not a natural ally of Mother Russia, natural
ally of Russia is nations with believe in God, justice, solidarity, soul and judgment
day.
My personal encounter with Chinese convinced me that they have a completely different mindset
and I was completely disappointed.
With love and respect to Russia and its heroic people
Yow Darius my man, you speak the truth. It is fire and light in one's soul, and nothing else.
And if one might add, a preparedness to die, a simplicity and gentleness of character. Labels
mean nothing.
Degeneration afflicted many nations, comes in many forms, it can be a well-mannered and
finely dressed German so proud of himself, it can be an oily and greedy petty Chinese
businessman, it can be a Mercedes driving Arab in front of some big hotel in Dubai.
Globalism is a satanic cult of our times. They are huge in numbers, but their souls are
small, enslaved, and twisted. We have no fear of them. Keep well brother.
I agree with everything you said. I will take a more wait and see approach with China. I
hope for the sake of the world they jump onboard. Ultimately the issue is materialism. The
Anglo zios want to deal with a world in which everyone has a price on their head, so they can
be easy to buyout and compromised. Since the Zionists are the one with the most capital,
anyone who wants a piece of the world, will have to go through them. So that materialistic
outlook the Chinese have, can be a huge opening for the zios to exploit.
The state of the Arab leaders are even more pitiful. A bunch of animals who are enslaved
to their lusts, and desires. I would tell them to enjoy it, because their end will not be
good. Most of them have sold out to the highest bidder(Zionists) a ling time ago.
Now the Wahhabi movement, what's left to say about this devious, malicious cult. If you're
interested check this article out. It talks about the founder of the Wahhabi movement,
Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, and how he was in cahoots with British spy's who were looking for
a way to bring down the ottoman empire. I have to do more research on this article, however
as someone who has studied wahhabisim, I'm fairly certain it was a movement that had
malicious intent from the beginning, regardless of the article I linked below. It's just
somewhat hard to explain to non Muslim's because some of it deals with matters of theology.
Anyways I enjoyed reading you're post. Peace my friend.
Saker says "But what could the Russians have done?" is the right question.
Ans: Provide advanced defensive weapons well-ahead of time so that the Syrians themselves can
impose a cost.
In addition what the Russians have already done, why is Russia not selling advanced
anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons to countries in the cross-hairs of the West? Often, they
talk about selling S-300 to Syria. Now imagine, Syria has Bastion, anti-sub weapons, and
S-300. There will be costs to the West in this case. I think, this possibility is something
Russia can do. Why wait, as it is obvious that promises by the West are basically lies.
(Despite, dismantling the CW, the same argument is used to justify the attack. The Skripal
case uses this method against Russia itself.)
What has the Russians got by withholding the sale of such weapons? What is the Russian
calculus?
The attack was pretty clearly highly coreographed and followed strict rules that were not
violated. The US provided a turkey shoot for the Syrian AD restricting the missile flight
path to lanes with no typical deviations to confuse the AD. I'm sure this is what the
Russians required in order to guarantee no response from them.
So there are a number of important questions here.
There was insistence that an attack must occur, despite Russian objections. The US and
Russian militaries worked out a way for this to occur as safely as possible. Good that they
pulled it off safely as it implies a high level of competence and discipline on both
sides.
It seems likely from public behavior that the Pentagon thought this a bad idea and was
fully aware of the dangers.
Where is Trump on this and was he forced to acquiesce?
It also seems clear that the pressure on Russia has not diminished and that the 'allies'
intend to try and force an agreement on Syria through Geneva process that partitions the
country and likely deposes Assad.
The Russian side said that the president of Russia had been insulted/disrespected and that
there would be consequences for this action.
There has not been much effective push back in Europe to this policy of direct
confrontation.
China is wearing a mask in public but is not pleased and has offered some diplomatic
support in public.
I rate the situation as highly dangerous, unpredictable, with a great deal going on behind
the scenes.
As an addendum b over at moa has pointed out in his summary that while the US Defense Dept is
claiming only 3 targets Russian and Syrian sources claim many more, specifically airports. I
also read that B1s, I believe, used laser guided bombs in the attack and I have no idea what
the targets were as all discussion has focused only on the cruise missiles. Perhaps more
sites were targeted than was agreed upon.
Also, regarding the Skripal poisoning, Russia has obtained the evidence of BZ use from the
Swiss OPCW lab, perhaps through back channels. I see this as hopeful – Russia does have
friends in Europe, although the remain afraid or without the power to assist openly.
Postings in various places suggest that the US deviated from the agreed on plan and that the
Russian jets that scrambled near the end of the attack put a stop to further deviations.
Perhaps a broken promise like this led to the specific assertions of disrespect.
Thanks to the Saker especially and all the commenters for this forum and the robust
discussion.
However, I think Russian behaviour is consistent with the long game strategy. Syria lost
three buildings and its citizens were celebrating in the streets. The US had the bulk of its
missiles shot down. This is quite simply posturing by the Empire. I don't think the last 48
hours add to the perception the US can whatever it wants whenever it wants. If anything its
the opposite.
I think the US will try again. Its attempt will be no more powerful or successful than
what just occurred. They will continue to do so for many years yet. They will continue the
delusional narrative delivered ad nauseam to its own people for another decade at least.
My point is that as each month goes by, it matters less.
The American hrandstanding is becoming white noise.
I am encouraged by the last 48 hours. I admire Russian restraint. I have for years now and
I expect to continue to do so for some time yet.
As former analyses of you spoke of, the russians Lack the number of planes etc the
Wallstreet-fascists have. This time they will use to speed up the stuff they need. The stuff
Putin spoke off in his march speech. The provocation as much to to with it I guess.
And time Saker is not at the Side of the US, as the petro dollar Will be replaced and
their debts Will reach astronimical figures. Remember China is a creditor of this fascist
regime. Simply stop funding this moron shit. Why did China buy worthless state-papers from
the US??
The americans didnt dare to kill Any russian a hoge difference to the event Pompeo was
bluffing about. So ..?
China bought the worthless state-papers from the US because it give it's leader's the good
life and the illusion of great wealth. If they sell off the Treasuries than that illusion
with evaporate in hyperinflation. The Russians are only waist deep into the Global Economy,
they probably can crawl out with some effort -- the Chinese are up to their eyeballs in it,
they cannot.
China was being pragmatic and keeping its major market afloat. Little point in being the
factory of the world if the world stops buying what you produce through lack of
liquidity.
I have faith in the Chinese leadership–they are ordinary people like everyone else but
their culture and mindset gives them a clever edge that the west has lost, long ago.
It is indeed not over, because in history there is seldom a clear beginning and an end.
However, the Saker is being too pessimistic. The FUKUS coalition avoided the Russian
positions (ie showed a wariness and respect), and Syria did stand tall in defending
herself.
For Russia to have taken the bait and reacted reflexively would have been
counterproductive. As things stand, no escalation occurred, and Russia comes out looking
cool-headed and mature. In effect the good guys.
The US is in sharp decline. It's current behaviour demonstrates that it is in the final
stages of Empire. Time is on Russia and China's side. To engage the US unless absolutely
necessary would work to favour the US and against the rising powers of China and Russia.
Kevin Barrett re-posted a Gordon Duff censored article re the SAA capturing a Takfiri
chemical weapons facility in East Ghouta with western weapon components and reporting the
capture of AZ personnel:
Some excerpts:
"The Syrian Arab Army and with the help of Russian captured a shipment of chemical weapons
destined for the Eastern Ghouta. These were British weapons produced at Porton Down in
Salisbury.
"American, British and Israeli military personnel captured in Syria have confirmed they were
ordered to stage chemical attacks in East Ghouta by their governments.
"The Americans are still being held along with Israeli's while British prisoners are being
negotiated for. Sources in Damascus told us that representatives of Oman in Damascus
approached the Russian Office of Reconciliation on behalf of Britain for the return of
British chemical warfare personnel.
"The shells are identified as VX gas from British stockpiles.
"Russian officials in Syria informed Britain through Oman that they would have to directly
deal with Syria for the return of their personnel. We have received no further information
since, Damascus has remained silent on how or if negotiations were proceeding.
"Last week, VT Damascus received evidence that Americans, US Army Special Forces along with
Israeli chemical weapons officers had been captured in East Ghouta. We were told that not
only was a command facility captured with modern weapons but a stockpile of British made 81mm
poison gas mortar shells, numbering in the hundreds, was seized as well.
"Videos were viewed by former MOD weapons specialists who identified the green stripe on the
shells seized in East Ghouta as VX gas from British stockpiles."
Just pencil in that article.
My comment:
Regarding Russian response, my feeling is Russia recived plenty of assurance the US was
unwilling to hit Russian facilities, and got special corridors for attacks. The Russians
could sit this out and watch and the US failed in a major way again militarily against only
Syrian defenses. I think it is a wise principle for Russia to avoid the temptation to reveal
the real power of its weapons prematurely until there is a real need for them at which time
they may be a rather significant surprise.
-Martin
I view Russia's position as unassailable. After the bombing of Friday night is it even
conceivable that the US could ever gain air superiority over the Russian homeland? Yes the
attack was made with second-tier missiles at third-rate targets without the element of
surprise and poorly coordinated, but it was still easily repelled by a combination of
Soviet-era junk and modern EW equipment and radars. Even those in the West who are apathetic,
if they are listening at all before they change the channel, must at some unconscious level
realize that the US could not have a "perfect" air strike with over a hundred missiles and
destroy only three unoccupied buildings.
A conventional WWIII of any length of time will destroy the Global Economy. The Russians
will win easily simply because they are tougher and more prepared. They may not desire that
outcome, but of all people they probably have the best chance to survive. Except if the nukes
end up being released by accident or through escalation. So the Russians, being just about
the only moral actors around, have a moral responsibility not to fight back until there is no
other choice.
NOTE: Not that all western nations or the people within them are immoral actors, the
greater population and smaller countries are just bystanders.
I am not convinced the US used second-tier missiles. These were launched from active duty
warships and I can only assume it is the standard cruise missile weapon employed. There is
way too much not yet known about the details of this operation.
If, and it is a big "if", the missiles moved along agreed corridors, it is not surprising so
many were shot down.
As I say, so much is not yet known.
I always figure that the best stuff is under wraps, although available in no great quantity.
BTW, I think a technology that isn't discussed much is passive detection systems, which
may have taken the element of surprise away from standoff weapons.
Here comes this important question of purely tactical nature which many flag-waving
uber-patriots miss completely, while, I am sure, Pentagon and not only, is puzzled with what
went wrong. The question is not about excellent performance of Syrian AD–what and how
about this performance are being unveiled with each passing hour. Russian EW? Absolutely, no
doubt it. Massive shooting down of Tomahawks and Scalpel TLAMs? Absolutely. But, but what
about JASSMs. It is conceivable that these were they Trump was bragging about in his idiotic
twits when spoke about those "Smart" missiles that "are coming". There are still no firm
numbers about the number of intercepted JASSMs, what is clear, however, is the fact that many
of them were intercepted. If JASSM passes today for "Smart", it kind of puts good ol'
Tomahawks, logically, into the category of "Dumb". Obviously, as latest Syria's experience
shows, Tomahawks are not an overwhelming threat, as they were positioned as for decades, for
truly (not in Saddam Hussein's, or, rather US media, way) highly integrated and EW capable
air-defense system.
But JASSMs, "stealthy" and supposedly "Smart", even by preliminary data pouring in didn't
fare much better than Tomahawks and this was against Syrian AD assets which are pretty damn
old. So, what about "stealth"? Ah, but in the modern signal processing, including well
developed now sensor-fusion (or data-fusion) techniques it really doesn't matter for advanced
adversary. But that is purely technological aspect, however influential for operational and
strategic levels. Truly global, geopolitical issue is this, as Apps concludes:
Therein lies one of the greatest challenges of this situation. In 1990, after Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the George H. W. Bush administration was
relieved to find that Russia – then still in the hands of Mikhail Gorbachev – was
inclined to avoid turning the conflict into a Cold War-style standoff. In the years that
followed, successive U.S. presidents became used to acting without such worries. Putin has
now successfully signaled that those days are entirely over.
No it ain't over. It has just begun. Call it the great tribulation or Jacob's troubles or
whatever you like but understand we have another half dozen years to go. In any event Daniel
says Damascus will have terror fall upon it at night and become a smoking ruin byvmorning. So
Damascus will fall to align reality with prophecy. The ultimate vanity.
The recent events are complete theatre but the first act is about setting up the second
act.
In the second act, America's tough actions force Iran Russia and Syria to the negotiating
table where a grand accord is hammered out.
In the third act, the Empire cuts its losses and gets the fuck out of the ME because it no
longer has interests there. Israel BTFO. KSA BTFO. They are really the worst allies ever.
In the epilogue Russia becomes the main broker in the ME and balances out the competing
interests while keeping the peace. France and England BTFO. Nobody wants these douche bags
around anymore. America goes back to squabbling in South America and Asia where it arguably
does have strategic interests.
The world Zio-Massonic movement has just shown that it can not dispense with provocations and
plots that can unleash bloody world wars.
The United Nations are a farce and should be dismantled!
Just remembering, it is always England and Judea that press for war as they did in
1938-1939 or release the great and relentless butcher – the only true holocaust –
1914-1918 !
There is another possibility: These "empty strikes" were strictly intended for domestic
consumption. Consider: The US openly telegraphed the coming strikes. Syria and Russia cleared
some areas for the West to hit that would result in no injuries to personnel and limited
damage to infrastructure. The West dutifully hit those evacuated areas and proclaimed
"Mission Accomplished". Syrians danced in the streets for "surviving" the missile strikes
while Russia threatened consequences. What form those consequences take will tell us if these
countries are merely dancing a rather peculiar dance together or whether they are about to
starting fighting in earnest. So far Russia has been playing it cool as a cucumber, but these
strikes – empty as they might have been – demand some sort of response or Russia
will risk looking weak. The fly in the ointment is Israel and their attack on an Iranian base
within Syria that reportedly killed 20 Iranian officers. Will that loss of life influence
Russia's response after the West made every effort to avoid drawing blood?
Saker, many commenters here give me the impression that they will go to any lengths to
reassure themselves that we are not teetering on the brink of all out nuclear war. All of
their theories and reasonings seem to avoid facing that grim reality. Is that also your
impression, or have I misjudged your position?
I think this blog may have misread China. I think I can read the Chinese mind and the
'Western' more subtly since I am ethnic Chinese but educated in the 'West'. But I follow Sun
Tzu and therefore will not expound anymore on China's strategy as far as the Yanks are
concern lest they are wised up.
Suffice to say that a catastrophic decline of the empire ala the Ottoman Empire which led
to WW1 and WW2 due to fighting over the spoils, is on nobody's interests, not even
Russia's.
The best case scenario is to ease the Yanks into a break-up ala the late great USSR.
China's economic, diplomatic and political strength will be critically needed to do this
and to rebuild the new independent states of Western North America, Eastern North America and
the Southern Confederation.
Anonymous. No Chinese empire. The Chinese don't want to occupy other countries. Too
troublesome ruling them. Philippines president Duterte recently suggested half-jokingly that
the Chinese should just make the Philippines a Chinese province. China don't want that. Just
to make the Philippines more prosperous and stable in order to trade with it – which is
far better. If China wanted make the Philippines as its own province, She would have done so
600 years ago when Admiral Zheng He sailed his then unmatchable in the South China Sea and
onwards to India, Persian Gulf, Africa and possibly beyond.
Which means never, unless you're talking about the individual organism, is it "over".
So get over it never being over.
What would you (we) do if it were "over"? Contemplate our navels??
Oh, you mean stress inducing bluster , bluff and brinksmanship of a dying entity. What
else has it got, except blowing itself and everybody else up?
Patience, perserverance. Look at the reaction in the US. Don't forget this terrain, even
if Trump's Unreality Show self destructs.
Is there progress? I think there is. None but the most cretinous deplorables are so stupid
as to cheer the Donald in the last week. Most are dismayed.
And even Alex Jones is allowing open talk of Israel's Empire role in putting DT on this
war mongering course that those who buy his supplements refuse to buy .:
Although Dr P is the one to explicitly state that Israel is a total liability.
So I wouldn't quibble too much about AJ and his mistakes and prejudices. Weaker on Israel
than you would like but as good on Russia as you can expect.
Stupid on China. But Dr P isn't. And anyone watching can see that and see that AJ panders
to his base's fears and prejudices.
But if they are wising up on Israel (as they have!) they can wise up on China and the
whole picture, as well.
Who would want that process of improving consciousness to end, to be "over"??
To relax go back to what??
Actually, I like Snow Leopard's comment the most. And I am contemplating a surgical
procedure on my navel, soon. It's just that Action is part of Being, and I see certain
actions other than handwringing and brow wiping being more productive right now. Especially
in terms of encouraging the process in the US where increasing numbers of people are
realizing they have to think and act to grease the skids for the out of touch geriatrics like
McCain, Feintsein, Pelosi, etc .or DT will go out with them, if he keeps acting just as
ridiculously untruthful as they are.
'ridiculously untruthful' -- - that and deceit is the sea that the Donald has swum in his
entire life, do you really believe that he could recognise reality if it smashed him in the
face like a two ton truck?
Precious little chance of that happening in this lifetime, I'd say. It is by now part of his
cell make-up and ineradicable.
The US has backed Russia into a DEEP, DEEP corner . Sooner or later Russia will have to
respond to the AmeriKKKan madness or surrender and become a vassal State like Europe,
Australia, Canada, Japan and South Korea .After Syria is Iran and China. If Russia goes so is
China. Now is the time to stand upp to AmeriKKKa (the empire of chaos)
Check out the work of Dr. Paul Craig Roberts.org and Professor William Engdahl
All I can say at this stage is that Sun Tzu said not to fight out of anger, fear or enemy's
provocation to a fight. Russia should stay cool. Pick carefully the battlefield (not
necessarily a battlefield like Borodino), pick her own fight (not necessarily in the
battlefield with guns and missiles but just as decisive) and pick the issues to fight for.
This way retain the initiative and not let the enemy drive and maneuver Russia. Drive and
maneuver the enemy instead.
The full-frontal 'love-in' with the Germans in WW2 is a no no type of war to be avoided.
If unavoidable, must be very well prepared. But both the West and the semi-West seem addicted
to the prospect of such an 'orgasmic' love-in. They seems locked into the paradigm of such
logic. But beneath the rationalisation is simply a love for war.
Here is an extract from Richard Lovelace on the English Civil War. He reflects accurately
on what, me as an Oriental, views as what drives the West's and the semi-West's mindset to
war:
1) Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
That from the Nunnery
Of thy chaste breast, and quiet mind,
To War and Arms I flee.
2) True, a new Mistress now I chase,
The first Foe in the Field;
And with a stronger Faith embrace
A Sword, a Horse, a Shield.
3) Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not War.
Some version replace the last line in stanza 3) with: "Loved I not Honour more". But you
get the drift. "war" and "Honour" (in or through war), are essentially the same.
Speaking of Borodino, we must not lose sight of the fact that the Russians not only repelled
Napoleon, but crushed him definitively in the end (thing somehow overlooked in 'histories' of
the 1812-14 war genre 'War and Peace') and reorganized Europe on their own terms. Of course,
it did not last too long (due to the usual British treachery), but the subsequent attempts to
destroy Russia ended in the same way. Now if Hitler has not learned anything from Napoleon,
how do you expect a Tramp like Donald, to learn anything from Hitler (and the Kaiser and
Napoleon, for that matter)?
I am in complete agreement with you Simon. All indications are that Mr Putin and team has a
firm grasp on reality also, whatever that may bring in the future. It may not be too pretty
for the western sphere but delusion and rank stupidity never has a pretty outcome.
Not over. Not even close. The reason this isn't over is that the causes and conditions
causing the root of the problem have not been dealt with. The cause of the problem can only
be dealt peacefully through diplomacy. In the Empire's current configuration diplomacy is
near impossible as there is no competent partner to negotiate with on this side. The Empire
will signal their openness to negotiation by removing Bolton aka Captain Crunch, Haley and
their ilk. This doesn't seem likely and I'm not sure who a competent replacement would be.
Russia needs to sell to Syria and to Iran ~30 nukes each plus delivery vehicles able to reach
New York (thus also Israel, Paris, London). Also S400 systems to protect nukes enough to
guarantee launch. Syria and Iran then declare next attack from any of the Gang of Four states
will mean a nuclear response to all.
You forgot to mention that without adults Mattis & Dunford, WW3 would have started the
last time they "bombed" Syria, now because of they talked the volatile, impulsive and
emotional Trump out of it, it landed on a compromise, on Moscow's terms.
The PRC is one of the only other 2countries that supported the Russian UN resolution, so it's
not clear to me what the Saker is referring to re "just standing by" ? Do you expect PRC to
send troops to Syria? has Syria or Russia made such a request or invitation? Do you know if
such a move by the PRC has wide support by the Chinese public? Please do not respond with
nonsense like public opinions don't matter in china. The Chinese government uses public
opinion polls frequently and widely. Fact is I believe majority of Chinese are also affected
by all the lies from the western msm, especially the well educated elites, most of whom
studied in the West. This explains why their Global Times pieces tend to be much more pro
Russia than their better educated elites
Diplomacy??? It degraded beyond recognition. We used to have the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Now we have geniuses like Samantha Powers and Nikki Haley. We also had a joke of an
ambassador to Saddam's Iraq that triggered 1-st Iraq war, although I tend to think (more and
more lately) that her blurb to Saddam was a deliberate in order to advance Bush's
understanding of his "new world order" idea.
Yes, but the previous UNSC meeting where Russia submitted a text requesting a full and
objective investigation of the chemical attack in Syria only Bolivia voted yes. China
abstained! So Russia looked isolated just prior to the attack
China abstained on the US-sponsored "poison pill" resolution which was set up to be vetoed,
and allowed the US to say they tried to resolve the chemical attack diplomatically but since
the resolution was vetoed the only avenue left is to retaliate by missile strikes. However,
China voted FOR the "clean" Russian-sponsored resolution to investigate but this seems to be
lost.
Yes you are right. So there we're a total 4 resolutions. 3 resolutions on chemical weapons
investigation and 1 on violation of international and UN charter.
For the chemical weapons: Russia submitted 2 resolutions and US 1. None of them passed.
China abstained on one, the US one, which Bolivia and Russia vetoed. Here are the links:
It is impossible to quickly overcome a ~30 years misguided attempt to impose physical
hegemony forever. No complex dynamical system deviates from stable trajectory for too long
and too far without breaking apart. And since nobody wants (or foolish enough not to be
afraid) of a WWIII (a.k.a. breaking the system apart), the US will be forced to change its
guiding principle of perpetuating its sole hegemony. Hopefully sooner than later and
peacefully.
Is Putin not putting himself at a huge disadvantage if he allows the carriers group now
crossing the Atlantic to get close to Syria and Russia. As this confrontation is obviously
not over should Russia not draw a red line at the straits of Gibraltar or somewhere?
I don't understand military issues but can see that the USA/UK/France cannot in the
slightest way, be trusted to do anything other than wait for what they perceive to be a
moment of advantage, then attack.
I understand he has a "Dagger" or six under his arm. Not only will that stop the Carrier
Group, it will place it where it belongs. At the bottom of the sea.
Another possible option would be to simply bring the Warsaw pact again new life.
The US in the past didnt dare to attack pact-members in the cold war. Now we have a
situation that the US considers other States as his toy for torture.
Syria, China Venezuela Belarus, and Donbass even North Korea should become members of
it.
Two days ago Vladimir Putin was handed the worst and most humilliating political (and
military) defeat of his entire life, something that in other, more normal times, would have
immediately forced a man in his stature to resign his post and go away (Chamberlain anyone ?)
yet his own adoring fans seem to be the only ones who haven`t noticed it, preferring instead
to keep living in that universe of denial they have been dwelling in for years already. What
shows best the extent of this attitude of denial is the fact that they were gloating about
the fact that Russia didnt even intervene–contrary to what the man himself had promised
he would do only a month ago if one of Russia`s allies was attacked. By now is evident that
his word is not worth the saliva that was wasted in saying it and that the US has absolutely
no respect for him or for Russia. There are just two things to notice to see the truth in
these words: a gloating, exulting Nimrata in the UNO, knowing well how cheap was for her and
her country, or rather her neocon masters, this victory was (Russia didnt do a thing, so no
WW3) and the headlines in the web "Russia furious". If there is still any doubt about this
conclusion, well, beware, the Gang Of Three now plans to present to the UNSC a proposition
celebrating the illegal attack on Syria of the 14th and they intend to invite ALL members of
it, including Russia, to accept it and take it as a fait accompli. But that will be only a
prelude for what is to come, which is of course the demand by the U.S. that the UNO accepts
her way of conducting business as the norm, as something they will be able to do in every
possible occasion they will wish to do it. Which means, more fake chemical attacks and more
bombing in Syria until Russia is thrown out of the country. So much for our master chess
player in the Kremlin. Only last year he was still insisting, against all caution and the
warning of people as knowledgeable as PCR, that his first priority in foreign policy was a
good relationship with Amerika, see how well he has done in this regard (Chamberlain anyone,
again ?) All in all, things wont become better but much worse after this devastating defeat
of the master chess player, they will only become worse until they get him and Russia
cornered and with only two possible options, which we all know well. This is not about Russia
being alone or being weaker than the US NATO gang, it is all about Putin`s deliberate policy
of putting above everything else his vain and useless attempts at being respected and even
liked by his worst enemies, the Western elites.
Regarding China. China it's a great and powerful nation with a vision and a strategy that
span far in the future. His policy has always been to go on with extreme caution and as low
as possibile exposure. First and foremost she takes care of his own interest, as any other,
however. His main opponent is, that for sure, the "western" empire. In this long term fight,
China finds herself in company of other nations who are fighting the same long term struggle.
Yes, China doesn't share the same cultural, historical, ethnical heritage with Russia, wich
in that regard is part of the Euro family, but shares a vital, long term surviving fight with
Russia (and Iran, Syria). This is a matter of fact that can not be underestimated. So, in
long term, and in spite of some annoying behavior, I'm quite sure that China will stand with
Russia. I read that Chinese warships were placed in front of Syria together with Russian
navy, maybe someone forgot that, this is a strong message to me.
I side with PCR. Only a public military humiliation can stop the Empire. Russia had a
golden opportunity to inflict such an humiliation yesterday and she missed that
opportunity.
Let's suppose that Russia downed as many attacking warplanes as possible, whatever their
location was, plus a few ships like the USS Donal Cook. What would happen next ? Would the
USA launch their strategic missiles on Russia ? I very much doubt it, since the US know as a
hard fact that they would be destroyed in retaliation. MAD has been restored. The would have
no military response at all and the whole world would see it. And this would have been the
end of the Empire, with many vassals leaving it.
Of course, such strikes will happen again. Let's hope that Russia will strike back
then.
The public is brainwashed because they are hooked to the mass media and they are the product
of our "educational" system. Americans are about sports and shopping. A good portrait is the
rabbits of Watership Down.
In 1958, I still believed that there was a significant intellectual difference between the
American bourgeosie and the cattle one sees peering between the slats of large trucks as they
contentedly munch hay on their way to the abattoir.–R. Oliver
Donald T' s inheritance was a loose canon. I'm sure he knew it when he ran, as a proved tower
– builder, against floating sands and the satanic Hillary-fan-club.
America is in psychiatric treatment since 2014 by the spirit of the north.
April 14 was a peace of the art of political wisdom, 'taking two to tango
above the triggers of the planet's doom
Saker, no it is not over by a long shot. Haley again today (it appears she is running US
foreign policy by herself) says empire gonna sanction Russia again via Treasury tomorrow. It
looks like empire trying to ride the false flag chem thing to build a coalition of the
"fools" against Russia or some kind of mass movement to give them cover for military action.
They are furiously trying to bring massive pressure on the Russian leadership so they will
back off and let them have Syria, admit US is almighty god and so they can then go after
Iran. It seems US and Brits so knocked off balance by Putin and his election victory and
weapons announcement that empire frantically trying to reassert that they and only they are
the "decider" of right and wrong and what is moral and immoral. This will go on all of April
and into May as Trump backs out of nuke deal with Iran. Then things will really get ugly and
fast. And that doesn't even factor in North Korea.
I notice that Russian MOD states that the "allies" were configured to launch 300 missiles
not the 110 that were sent. He indicates that they had poor planning and that no one was in
charge. But, it may be that they have decided to come back for another hit when the next
false flag chem attack is perpetrated probably soon. The chem thing is all they have that is
working for them and that isn't much. I finally got emails announcing anti-war protests by
ANSWER and I hope they will continue. I have been to some strong street actions with ANSWER
in the past although impacting these monsters is nearly impossible.
I agree with you that Russia should flood both Syria and Iran with anti missile systems
and they should do it now.
It looks like the Duma gonna finally sanction the US back with some pretty good things
including stuffing US "intellectual" property rights in the US ass by turning Russian
companies loose to use patents without paying license fees. They can also fuck up US space
program and rocket programs.
Actually, Saker, I think what US empire is really up to is to create enough mass hysteria
globally that they think they can build some kind of "coalition of the truly stupid" to
attack Russia and take it. I honestly think they are that stupid and desperate. Because if
that is not it then at some point they are going to have to back off, admit defeat and be
seen as the losers they really are. They just don't have the basic decency to do that.
Yes you are right about the U.S. intention to create mass hysteria , and a " coalition of the
truly stupid."
The lead item on RNZ news at 5 a.m. this morning referred to the silly little girl who is
currently P.M. of N.Z. condoning the U.K. /France / U.S. strike; presumably she will also
support the Israel strike against Iranian assets in Syria.
Every day , the lies and propaganda start in NZ, and are halfway around the world before the
truth gets out of bed.
Count on it. Thank you Rupert.
And Rupert's whores are at it in Australia as well, reporting on the grovelling snot bag
Turnbull's obsequious offering of more Australian lives to lubricate the Anglo Zionist
machine. I say lets put his kids in the first jet to attack Syrian positions and see if he
still thinks it is worth the cost.
In 2001 Australians have marched in their thousands to protest the imminent strike on
Irak.
Today they blabbered non stop about the the 'tampered ball' and protesting the punishment of
the cheaters and hounding the pedophile clergy.
I appreciate your comments but do not share you perceptions. Reportedly, the USA informed
Russia before they dropped the bombs. Does that make sense? Reportedly, they bombed a factory
which has not been in use since 2013. Reportedly, either no one was killed or 4 unfortunate
civilians were killed. Reportedly, no Russian personnel or equipment was affected.
Reportedly, the 3 attacking countries dropped 103 bombs and 71 or 73 or whatever were
intercepted, yet the USA said the complete opposite. "We are confident ..". Amazingly, the
USA has developed a bomb, or a method of bombing, which, if it hits a factory producing
chemical weapons and therefore is full of lethal substances, will not, repeat not, dissipate
these into the air, thereby insuring that no one will be affected!!! (emphasis mine) I agree
that some people might think that the attack actually did something, but who are they? Nobody
I know. My perception is that people working in the our government are isolated and out of
touch and they are the ones who had to be satisfied(?). I also think that Mr. Trump is so
surrounded by liars that he can trust no one. He stated he wanted the US to leave Syria,
then, shortly after, the USA performed this inane bombing attack. Maybe this is Mr. Trump's
response to the immense pressure I think he gets from those around him. It was very confusing
but certainly did not make me feel that our country is great again – I am just
embarrassed. I feel very badly for the citizens of Syria who unfortunately live in a country
located in the center of the world, surrounded by all that gas and oil.
I have seen reports that said they did, and I have seen reports that Moscow was furious
because they were not given notice on the deconfliction channel.
"The western general public is so terminally zombified that false flag attacks can now be
announced 4 weeks in advance"
Even though you live in the US, you seem sadly out of touch with what Americans know and
believe. "America" is NOT your blog audience, any more than "America" is Donald Trump and the
US State Department.
I found out last Thursday that my own mother took seriously the idea that Assad gassed
people in Douma. So, yesterday I asked 4 of my coworkers what they thought about the US led
missile attack. I was actually more interested in finding out whether they believed Assad had
any culpability in Douma.
It turns out that everybody approved, including a guy that I knew for a fact was a Trump
supporter (who, as a candidate, would not have approved of meddling in Syria, or at least
pretended to be such). This particular guy explained by asking a question: "If you saw your
neighbor beating his wife to a pulp, would you jump in to stop him, or just stand around and
let it happen?"
The sense I got from everybody is that intervention was a moral act. Most zombies that I
have seen in movies are, at best, amoral (assuming they have no agency).
Consequently, you are misusing the term "zombified"!
The appropriate term is "brainwashed". They believe in a pseudo-reality.
That is why the absence of a 4th category in your graph is potentially tragic. You are
missing the category of communication/education, which would encompass benign (truthful)
propaganda and benign (truthful) psyops, targeting the American public directly (American
elites more indirectly). While this was better done as prevention, the resultiing
de-legitimization of the American War Party could be thought of as retaliation.
To a person looking at things in a detached manner, prevention (going forward) is better
than retaliation (looking backwards), but such considerations are secondary to solving the
problem of the ignorance and brainwashing of American citizens. Doing so would provide at
least fertile soil for the emergence of corrective political pressure from the bottom,
up.
Do you SERIOUSLY think your own efforts, plus Russian government efforts in the form of
rt.com and sputniknews.com, are sufficient to deprogram and educate Americans? (There is no
disrespect for you efforts intended by asking this question.)
Then please do the following: learn how to use the video feature on your smart phone, or
tablet; then do a walking video poll of passersby on some crowded street near you. (You
probably won't be allowed to do so in a shopping mall, but it might be worth a try.) I
suggest you use the same technique I used when doing a video poll of TPP awareness amongst
the public (which proved, to my satisfaction, that polls showing popular acceptance were a
complete fraud; most American HAD NEVER HEARD OF THE TPP, Pew notwithstanding). I asked
people "May I ask you 1 yes/no question?" About half the people won't give you the time of
day, even for that. Of those that do, maybe 1/3 will be interested in talking about it;
typically, they they will ask the same question of you.
Afterwards, tabulate the results, upload the video to youtube, and write it up here.
Better yet, do this and ask you audience to do the same. Then, include the links to their
youtube channels in your write-up.
You should try to get your results (which are almost sure to be similar to mine) to the
Russian government, because they act AS IF they had the same viewpoint as you.
Putin could reach millions of Americans by tweeting to @realDonaldTrump, but doesn't
bother. I have to wonder, why? If he assumed that the American public are all "zombies",
instead of containing moral but brainwashed citizens in their 10's if not 100's of millions,
then his lack of action would make more sense.
He'd be wrong, but at least his actions would logically follow from his mistaken
notions.
It is over. It was over in 2000 and the hammer came down in 2006. With the defeat of the
anglo/zionists in Lebanon by Hezbollah it marked the beginning of the end for the occultists.
Hezbollah was not actually fighting the iof but rather the combined forces of western zionist
imperialism. And they won.
Iraq, Libya and now Syria are a direct result of the ouster of the baby killers from Lebanon.
The chaos in the ME – the Arab bullshit spring – the propping up of the gulf
monarchy muppets is panic mode by the zionist oligarchy. There is no policy only blind
reactionary behaviour – this is evidenced even in the propaganda of the MSM which not
only makes no sense but speaks continuous transparent lies.
The west has been forced to use moderate and not so moderate head chopper orc mercs to fight
its battles. Proxy war by orc is a sign of desperation and with the collapse of the hegemon
on the horizon.
The Russians and the axis of resistance is simply trying to mitigate the damage that the
oligarchy can still do and keep the US and the western vassals from imploding.
I think the UK is exhibiting signs of genuine fear because it has dawned on the UK elite
after the miserable performance of their Three Amigo's missile strike that Russia has a
special present for instigators of ww3.
The great harlot is going to fall. A smoking ruin no man will ever wish to tread. England
has whored itself to the gallows.
N, it is not over, that much , we agree on. But the Chinese, I believe are not short sighted
nor are they stupid. The will probably not do much for Syria, but I think they will raise
their voice immediately if Russia is seriously threatened. China knows if Russia falls, she
is next. Iran knows this too. So I cant see other than these three will have to stand
together. But other may join India, possibly, Pakistan, possibly. And possibly further some
smaller countries.
But I am 100 % certain that in all these countries, the people, the knowledgeable of the
people, we know that if we end up, in a unipolar world, we will be slaves and remain slaves,
forever.
And those countries I just summed up are more than 3 Billion.
Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Who knows. But
Better die standing, than live crawling.
I think you underestimate how hated and despised the US is around the world. In most of
the non western world, the United States story of oppression and murder is very well known
and it is not forgotten. But fear keeps people in bondage, and the US has shown it will spare
no excesses to reach its goal, so when the battle comes it will be long bloody and
brutal.
And yes it will come.
From today's Global Times editorial, semi-official organ of the Chinese politburo:
"However, the stronger a country is, the greater the responsibility it has to maintain
world peace and order. The military actions of the US and its allies have breached the
framework of the United Nations and violated the foundation of modern international
relations. If the will of Washington and the West represents the will of all mankind and they
can punish whoever they want, why do we need the UN, or international law?
Without UN authorization, the US, UK and France behaved like rogues. No matter how
touching the excuses they find for themselves, they cannot change the fact that they were
lynching Syria without due evidence "
What about a fourth type of retaliation, cleaning out the
financier/Zionist/pro-Western/liberal infestation inside Russia? This wouldn't require
China's approval, and would lead to a much healthier and stronger Russia in the long run.
In my view, China has done far more to get itself out of AZ control and on the path to
pursuing its national interests than Russia has. It is depressing to read most Russian blogs
as they keep harping on what needed to be done years ago.
The Chinese newspaper the Global Times agrees with the Saker:
"Washington's attack on Syria where Russian troops are stationed constitute serious
contempt for Russia's military capabilities and political dignity. Trump, like scolding a
pupil, called on Moscow, one of the world's leading nuclear powers, to abandon its "dark
path." Disturbingly, Washington seems to have become addicted to mocking Russia in this way.
Russia is capable of launching a destructive retaliatory attack on the West. Russia's weak
economy is plagued by Western sanctions and squeezing of its strategic space. That the West
provokes Russia in such a manner is irresponsible for world peace Western countries continue
bullying Russia but are seemingly not afraid of its possible counterattack. Their arrogance
breeds risk and danger."
Yes, I also follow the Global Times editorials, and have friends in China
Simon Chow nails it, in my opinion
America is playing checkers (or some other child's game). Russia is playing Chess, and we
know how good they are at that. China is playing Chinese Chess and that is fking impossible
to understand for a westerner subtle does not cover it .. and China has the father
(godfather?) of all generals and military strategists, Sun Tzu . go figure
I agree, the fat lady is out there somewhere warming her vocal chords.
Talking about chess In my humble opinion all the suffering and foreign occupation of Syria
could end in less than a month if Russia would have the guts to threaten (behind closed doors
or overtly) that if the attacks and occupation of Syria will not stop Russia will provide the
weapons necessary to nullify the military superiority of Israel to all relevant enemy of
Israel and of course to Syria. The timed leak in the news that Russia considers providing
S-300 to Syrian is a good start but obviously not firm and strong enough, According to Paul
Craig Roberts "to restate the point once again, the passivity of the Putin government in the
face of Washington's aggressiveness is leading directly to nuclear war and the end of life on
earth". I think Russia can be "passive" by not attacking US but can be very engage by
threatening were it hurts the most the safety of Israel. Cheers
It is an old metaphor. I think it was used on Atimes years ago: Americans play Monopoly,
Russians play chess. Someone added (it could have been me) and Chinese play Go! That was a
response: Americans play poker, the game of the 'achievers'. The response was: Americans play
poker with loaded dices' and if their bluff is called, they pull the gun and 'take it all'.
If I am not mistaken, the verbal joust originated in Australia!
From the rules:
• Sacrifice: Allowing a group to die in order to carry out a play, or plan, in a more
important area.
Interesting
From the Global Times
'Drill a warning to secessionist forces'
The news that the People's Liberation Army will conduct live-fire military exercises in
the Taiwan Straits on April 18 has shocked Taiwan. It is a clear warning against recent
pro-independence activities on the island, especially head of Taiwan's administrative
authority Lai Ching-te's advocacy for independence.
Secessionists should not fantasize that the US will come to their rescue, even though the
US had passed the Taiwan Travel Act. National unity is in the core interest of China, which
is determined and capable of shattering any foreign intervention. Once Beijing decides to
take action, it won't be stopped by any other force.
We believe that if the mainland were to take a military strike against
"Taiwan-independence" forces, Washington would have no effective means other than
protest.
The planned military drills will be a reconfirmation of Beijing's bottom line. Let the
bombing and shooting drills alert Taiwan, rather than letting them actually occur on the
island. The mainland does not wish to end the Taiwan question with a military showdown,
however, how the situation develops depends on how much rationality remains in the Taiwan
administration.
The Ukraine, North Korea .. Sth China Sea .. Syria
Russia, cold war
China, trade war
America is somewhat busy at the moment.
Could it take on a direct confrontation over Taiwan?
I think Syria is too strategically important to be 'allowed to die' .. but, then, I cannot
play Go
What about the 'rumors' that China will build a base in Vanuatu? "We would view with great
concern the establishment of any foreign military bases in those Pacific Island countries and
neighbours of ours," Mr Turnbull said. Ahem!
Could America take on a direct confrontation over Taiwan?
If Taiwan is 500 kilometers off the coast from California, America just might give it a
try. But alas, Taiwan is 500 kilometer off the coast from Fujian Province. Only a deranged
America would take the bite. Let's see if America is deranged. Lately there are signs it is
down that slippery slope.
What I meant, is the China is choosing its timing and confrontation very carefully
America is the next door neighbour who has watched the plum ripen every day, fearing that
pesky Chinese neighbour will steal it and eat it
Not being careful, or just being plain dumb, the American knocked over a hornets nest and
and now too busy dealing with the angry hornets to keep an eye on the plum
Every single country (!) on this list- except for Bolivia – abstained in the latest
UNSC vote to stop aggression against Syria Russia, China, Bolivia voted in favor. USA, UK,
France vited against. With just ONE vote the resolution would have passed
Kazakhstan is a member of the SCO..why did they not join Russia and China to support this
resolution?? I am beginning to think the SCO is just hype.
One thing's for sure: I'm going to miss Bolivia when their term ends this year
The resolution was never going to pass. The US, the UK and France all posses the veto
power of a permanent member of the UNSC. Thus, it does not matter how many voted in favor.
The resolution was defeated.
I think I remember seeing at least one statement from another country that said that there
was purpose of voting in favor of a veto'd resolution. Why bother. Especially when the US is
infamous for blackmailing and armtwisting nations that vote against them. It was only a few
months ago that Nutti Nikki declared the US was 'taking names' of those who opposed the.
There isn't any reason to vote for a resolution that is already and certainly veto'd.
Actually, you see this alot also in bodies like the US Congress. Once a side has the votes to
know they won (or lost), then a single vote doesn't mean anything. Thus a congressperson can
vote a way that pleases the voters (or the lobbyists) and know that they are doing so with no
impact on whether the measure passes or fails. You sometimes see members of congress voting
for and against the same bill so they can take either position in the next campaign!
Anonymous, you are of course correct. It's the SC and not the GA so any veto will bring down
the resolution. Thank you for correcting my mistake. I also understand perfectly your point
about tactical voting.
However:
It would send a powerful message to the empire (and the world) if Russia were not so
isolated in her diplomatic efforts, even if a resolution is vetoed!..As Saker mentioned above
noone seems to care about the higher values of international law. By keeping a low profile
and abstaining these countries are basically confirming that there is no diplomatic way to
stop the aggression.
what is happening to Russia funnily reminds me of what happened to me as a kid – I was
maybe 9.
there was a bully in our neighborhood park where we used to play – he was 3 or 4 years
older than most of us. He used to beat all of us individually (I was the youngest in the
group) – but then I would come behind him when he was not looking and hit him with a
brick etc.
so one day all the kids gathered (not sure whose idea it was – not mine – but I
approved and joined them) and agreed to circle the bully and at 1..2..3..we were all to jump
at him and to start beating him I thought it was a great idea.
so we went there and did that – 1..2..3 – I jumped on the bully and started
kicking him – only to realize that everybody else just stayed where they were. I was
the only one fighting him Even my brother didn't join me.
I hope the same thing does not happen to Russia – but if it does – just be
prepared – and never trust psychopathic Anglo – west
Bolivia has a democracy that has elected governments that actually favor their people over
corporations, and god forbid, that don't favor foriegn (American) corporations over their own
people.
Thus, the US has already declared Bolivia an enemy. They don't seem to be number 1 on the
American kill list, but they are already on the list.
At this point in time, the UNSC is blocked to both sides. Neither side can pass a UNSC
resolution against the other. One side had 2 and now 3 vetos. The other side has 2 vetos.
Nothing is passing.
Which means that neither side can claim UNSC sanction for their wars. Which in turn really
makes any war illegal. Not that any of the Axis of Evil care about that. For the record,
Trump violated the US Constitution in two ways (at least) by attacking Syria, thus, if the
system were honest, he would now be impeached. Of course, the system is not honest, but it is
highly rigged.
Since Russia and China don't seem to be starting any wars of aggression, that lack of
ability to get a UNSC certificate for wars of aggression won't matter much to them. But, also
don't expect them to pass anything condemning the Axis of Evil through the UNSC.
The UNSC is now only for making speeches. Both sides then use these messages in their
psyOps operations. PsyOps is the right word because both sides now view propaganda as warfare
by other means.
Vietnam brought forth the term "hearts and minds." That's what they psyOps wars are
fighting over. The hearts and minds of everyone. Or at least those who are paying attention,
and of course getting more to pay attention to your psyOps is a part of the battle as
well.
The UNSC is thus a tool in these psyOps wars. The Russians make their case. Nutti Nikki
screams, rants and threatens. Each is then used as propaganda both at their own people at
home and at the rest of the world. It will stay that way as long as no one repeats the Soviet
mistake of the Korean War era and gets so fed up with it that they don't bother to show up
and cast their veto.
One interpretation of these comments is that diplomacy is just a bunch of fancy talk to
create fodder for psyops. While NATO and other military organizations may view it that way,
from another perspective, making speeches in a public meeting like this, where a resolution
is on the line, can serve to entrench or resolve conflict. As part of a larger diplomatic
strategy.
The 'hearts and minds' concept originated in the Malaya campaign in the
50's–counter-insurgency–and it was never about hearts and minds, it was about
'killing people in order to save them'– a precursor of 'humanitarian intervention'
–basic BS, in other words.
Part of the so-called psyop then was head-chopping of communist Chinese by the British
soldiers, I seem to recall.
Kazakhstan is one of the founding members of the Eurasian Economic Union. But it has always
made its position clear that its membership is based upon economic and not political union.
So its vote was not all that surprising. It's called hedging your bets.
Russia has a lot of options and none of them involve attacking US/NATO forces directly.
And General Rudskoy already hinted at one of them, the S300 to Syria and to possibly some
other countries. A great idea, but only one of Russia's options.
Following from that, the first thing Russia should do, a long with Iran, Hizbullah and
Syria, is exactly what it has been doing: securing more and more of Syria. Since the last
time AZ axis did this, Syria's situation on the ground is much improved. By the next time
they try, it will be much better still. Eyes on the prize.
Next, the S300. Russia has to impose a painful cost to the enemy without triggering a war.
That's where Israel comes in. Russia needs to help Syria (Russia should not do this herself)
to bring down a handful of Israeli jets and capture their pilots alive. You will see
immediately of the situation changes once 2, 3 or 4 of those most precious of souls are
captured. Your head will spin. They will trade whatever they have to to get them back.
Capturing American pilots would not have anywhere near the same effect. And British or French
pilots? Don't make me laugh. Nobody really cares about the hired help.
Russia also has the option of soft retaliation. The empire has troops all over the world
and faces insurgencies in many places. I'm just sayin'. Sometimes accidents happen when you
are fighting insurgencies.
Believe me, I understand how disgusted you are by the situation. But this has been
Russia's role in the world forever. Defending Europe and the world from the mongols, the
Prussians, the Swedes, Napoleon, the Turks, Hitler has earned Russia zero gratitude. But
nevertheless, many of us see. Even I, who am not a Christian, can see the analogy clear as
day.
Sinking gas/oil platforms of Levithian field by "unknown assistants" might be a similar
"symbolic" response. Similar to US attack of uninhibited buildings, this response by a third
party against an ally of US (nominally ally, in reality the master) would send the message,
without too much of a risk.
Your comments about the Israeli reaction to the loss of its planes and the capture of their
pilots is right. Read the Israeli press and especially the comments that follow the stories.
Israeli hubris is not to be believed. The commenters (much less the article authors)
can´t acknowledge that US missiles were shot down (albeit, with integrated modern
radars, electronic interference, etc, acknowledged) by Syrians with Soviet era junk.
"... Yes it is annoying that USA keeps bombing Syria, and yes it ruins the lives of the families that lose loved ones in such attacks. But they do not hinder the progress of the Syrian army. Which likely will have wrapped up everything that is politically easy to wrap up in Syria this year. The border with Israel, Idlib and the kurds being the last more politically difficult parts. ..."
The consequence has not come yet. Those that expected that Russia would sink every American
vessels and fire of off thermonuclear weapon at Washington, has no real connection to
reality.
Such an action would be the dream of neocons and liberals in the western world. Russia
will win as long as they can avoid a full on attack on Syria by USA and getting themselves
dragged into a conflict with USA or one of its clients.
Yes it is annoying that USA keeps bombing Syria, and yes it ruins the lives of the
families that lose loved ones in such attacks. But they do not hinder the progress of the
Syrian army. Which likely will have wrapped up everything that is politically easy to wrap up
in Syria this year. The border with Israel, Idlib and the kurds being the last more
politically difficult parts.
In reality, Russia and Assad won from this attack I think, it made them look good
internationally, it made USA look bad, Trumps supporters are in an uproar right now.. This is
not like last year when the democrats supported his attack and his base kinda thought it was
acceptable..
This time everyone thinks Trump is a lunatic, even his most fanatic supporters such as
Alex Jones that has been being over backwards to protect Trump have lost hope in him
When Russia unified with Crimea, it lost the international moral initiative which it had,
now, it is absolutely regained it. This attack while it caused no damage to Russia or the war
effort for Syria also gives Russia an excuse to do whatever it wants back.
The consequence of the USA strike could be something like.
1. Giving Syria better and "forbidden" in the style of S400 or S300.
2. Giving Syria more and more advanced pansirs.
3. Giving Syria advance anti-ship missiles, enabling them to take out every USA ship off
their coast.
4. Arming groups that oppose USA over the world state actors or non-state actors, either
covertly or openly with advanced weapons.
5. Revealing classified information about USA that perhaps USA got Russia to agree it would
not reveal. Could be anything, proof perhaps that the USA gold reserve is empty perhaps that
USA did 9/11, anything really.
6. A purge of USA backed fifth columnists inside of Russia.
The consequence will be something alone the line of causing long term severe consequence
for USA but causing no problem for Russia or even being beneficial.
These skirmishes (not skirmishes to those who live or die because of them), even ones that
are war crimes, as this was, seem to me to be in large part ways in which the major powers test
out their combat systems. I would think the Pentagon would like to test the Russian defense
systems, and the Russians can't be completely sorry they got the opportunity to see how those
new systems worked under operational conditions. The winners are the arms manufacturers. The
losers are everybody else.
Now the color revolution against Trump just does not make any sense. We got to the point
where Trump=Hillary. Muller should embrace and kiss Trump and go home... Nobody care if Trump is impeached anymore.
Donald Trump's far-right loyal fans must be really pissed off right now after permanently
switching himself to pro-war mode with that evil,
warmongering triplet in charge and the second bombing against Syria. Even worse,
this time he has done it together with Theresa May and the neoliberal globalist Emmanuel
Macron.
We can tell that by watching the mind-blowing reactions of one of his most fanatic alt-right
media supporters: Alex Jones. Jones nearly cried(!) in front of the camera, feeling betrayed
from his 'anti-establishment', 'anti-interventionist' idol and declared that he won't support
Trump anymore. Well, what did you expect, Alex? expect, Alex?
A
year before the 2016 US national elections, the blog already warned that Trump is a pure
product of the neoliberal barbarism , stating that the rhetoric of extreme cynicism
used by Trump goes back to the Thatcherian cynicism and the division of people between
"capable" and "useless".
Right after the elections, we supported that the US
establishment gave a brilliant performance by putting its reserve, Donald Trump, in
power, against the only candidate that the same establishment identified as a real threat:
Bernie Sanders. Right after the elections, we supported that the US
establishment gave a brilliant performance by putting its reserve, Donald Trump, in
power, against the only candidate that the same establishment identified as a real threat:
Bernie Sanders.
The only hope that has been left, was to resist against starting a war with Russia, as the US
deep state (and Hillary of course) wanted. Well, it was proven to be only a hope too. Last
year, Trump bombed Syria under the same pretext resembling the lies that led us to the Iraq war
disaster. Despite the fact that the US Tomahawk missile attack had zero value in operational
level (the United States allegedly warned Russia and Syria, while the targeted airport was
operating normally just hours after the attack), Trump sent a clear message to the US deep
state that he is prepared to meet all its demands - and especially the escalation of
confrontation with Russia. Indeed, a year later, Trump already built a pro-war team that
includes the most bloodthirsty, hawkish triplet.
And then, Donnie ordered a second airstrike against Syria, together with his neo-colonial
friends.
It seems that neither this strike was a serious attempt against the Syrian army and its allies.
Yet, Donnie probably won't dare to escalate tension in the Syrian battlefield before the next
US national elections. That's because many of his supporters are already pissed off with him
and therefore, he wants to go with good chances for a second term.
Although we really hope that we are are wrong this time, we guess that, surrounded by all these
warmongering hawks, Donnie, in a potential second term, will be pushed to open another war
front in Syria and probably in Iran, defying the Russians and the consequent danger for a
WWIII.
Poor Alex et al: we told you about Trump from the beginning. You didn't listen ...
I've posted the following deep in the previous thread, so here for those who missed
it:
As to the OPCW making "political decisions", The Intercept had an
interesting piece by Mehdi Hasan recently, about a certain John Bolton.
In 2001, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had penned a letter to [OPCW head
José] Bustani, thanking him for his "very impressive" work. By March 2002, however,
Bolton -- then serving as under secretary of state for Arms Control and International
Security Affairs -- arrived in person at the OPCW headquarters in the Hague to issue a
warning to the organization's chief. And, according to Bustani, Bolton didn't mince words.
"Cheney wants you out," Bustani recalled Bolton saying, referring to the then-vice
president of the United States. "We can't accept your management style."
Bolton continued, according to Bustani's recollections: "You have 24 hours to leave the
organization, and if you don't comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to
retaliate against you."
There was a pause.
"We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York."
Trump became a despicable warmonger. That true. And undisputable after the recent attack on
Syria ("operation Stormy Daniels"). But was it War Party that coerced him or were other processes
involved?
The main weakness of Buchanan hypothecs is that it is unclear wether Trump was coerced by War
Party, or he was "Republican Obama" from the very beginning performing classic "bait and switch"
operation on gullible electorate (as in "change we can believe in") . The second hypothesis is
now strong then the fist and supported by more fact. just look at the "troika" of
Haley-Bolton-Pompeo -- all three were voluntarily selected by the President and all three are
rabid neocons. So it looks liek no or little coercion from the War Party was necessary.
Notable quotes:
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Defense Secretary James Mattis called the U.S.-British-French attack a "one-shot" deal. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson appears to agree: "The rest of the Syrian war must proceed as it will." ..."
"... Clearly, with the U.S. fighting in six countries, Commander in Chief Trump does not want any new wars, or to widen any existing wars in the Middle East. But he is being pushed into becoming a war president to advance the agenda of foreign policy elites who, almost to a man, opposed his election. ..."
"... We have a reluctant president being pushed into a war he does not want to fight. This is a formula for a strategic disaster not unlike Vietnam or George W. Bush's war to strip Iraq of nonexistent WMDs. ..."
"... The assumption of the War Party seems to be that if we launch larger and more lethal strikes in Syria, inflicting casualties on Russians, Iranians, Hezbollah, and the Syrian army, they will yield to our demands. ..."
"... As for Trump's statement Friday, "No amount of American blood and treasure can produce lasting peace in the Middle East," the Washington Post ..."
April
16, 2018, 9:55 PM "Ten days ago, President Trump was saying 'the United States should
withdraw from Syria.' We convinced him it was necessary to stay."
Thus boasted French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday, adding, "We convinced him it was
necessary to stay for the long term."
Is the U.S. indeed in the Syrian Civil War "for the long term"?
If so, who made that fateful decision for this republic?
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley confirmed Sunday there would be no drawdown of the 2,000 U.S.
troops in Syria, until three objectives were reached. We must fully defeat ISIS, ensure
chemical weapons will not again be used by Bashar al-Assad and maintain the ability to watch
Iran.
Translation: whatever Trump says, America is not coming out of Syria. We are going deeper
in. Trump's commitment to extricate us from these bankrupting and blood-soaked Middle East wars
and to seek a new rapprochement with Russia is "inoperative."
The War Party that Trump routed in the primaries is capturing and crafting his foreign
policy. Monday's Wall Street Journal editorial page fairly blossomed with war
plans:
The better U.S. strategy is to turn Syria into the Ayatollah's Vietnam. Only when Russia
and Iran began to pay a larger price in Syria will they have any incentive to negotiate an
end to the war or even contemplate a peace based on dividing the country into ethnic-based
enclaves.
Apparently, we are to bleed Syria, Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran until they cannot stand the
pain and submit to subdividing Syria the way we want.
But suppose that, as in our Civil War of 1861-1865, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, and
the Chinese Civil War of 1945-1949, Assad and his Russian, Iranian, and Shiite militia allies
go all out to win and reunite the nation.
Suppose they choose to fight to consolidate the victory they have won after seven years of
war. Where do we find the troops to take back the territory our rebels lost? Or do we just bomb
mercilessly?
The British and French say they will back us in future attacks if chemical weapons are used,
but they are not plunging into Syria.
Defense Secretary James Mattis called the U.S.-British-French attack a "one-shot" deal.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson appears to agree: "The rest of the Syrian war must
proceed as it will."
The Journal 's op-ed page Monday was turned over to former U.S. ambassador to Syria
Ryan Crocker and Brookings Institute senior fellow Michael O'Hanlon: "Next time the U.S. could
up the ante, going after military command and control, political leadership, and perhaps even
Assad himself. The U.S. could also pledge to take out much of his air force. Targets within
Iran should not be off limits."
And when did Congress authorize U.S. acts of war against Syria, its air force, or political
leadership? When did Congress authorize the killing of the president of Syria whose country has
not attacked us?
Can the U.S. also attack Iran and kill the ayatollah without consulting Congress?
Clearly, with the U.S. fighting in six countries, Commander in Chief Trump does not want
any new wars, or to widen any existing wars in the Middle East. But he is being pushed into
becoming a war president to advance the agenda of foreign policy elites who, almost to a man,
opposed his election.
We have a reluctant president being pushed into a war he does not want to fight. This is
a formula for a strategic disaster not unlike Vietnam or George W. Bush's war to strip Iraq of
nonexistent WMDs.
The assumption of the War Party seems to be that if we launch larger and more lethal
strikes in Syria, inflicting casualties on Russians, Iranians, Hezbollah, and the Syrian army,
they will yield to our demands.
But where is the evidence for this?
What reason is there to believe these forces will surrender what they have paid in blood to
win? And if they choose to fight and widen the war to the larger Middle East, are we prepared
for that?
As for Trump's statement Friday, "No amount of American blood and treasure can produce
lasting peace in the Middle East," the Washington Post on Sunday dismissed this as
"fatalistic" and "misguided." We have a vital interest, says the Post , in preventing
Iran from establishing a "land corridor" across Syria.
Yet consider how Iran acquired this "land corridor." The Shiites in 1979 overthrew a shah
our CIA installed in 1953. The Shiites control Iraq because President Bush invaded and
overthrew Saddam and his Sunni Baath Party, disbanded his Sunni-led army, and let the Shiite
majority take control of the country. The Shiites are dominant in Lebanon because they rose up
and ran out the Israelis, who invaded in 1982 to run out the PLO.
How many American dead will it take to reverse this history?
How long will we have to stay in the Middle East to assure the permanent hegemony of Sunni
over Shiite?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles
That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick
Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators
website at www.creators.com.
Aug 6, 2015 -- Jim Moran (D-VA), told Tikkun Magazine that AIPAC. has pushed [the Iraq
war] from the beginning. I don't think they represent the mainstream of American Jewish
thinking at all, but because they are so well organized, and their members are
extraordinarily powerful -- most of them are quite wealthy -- they
The Iraq war -- What did AIPAC do and when did it do it? -- Mondoweiss
mondoweiss.net/2012/ /the-iraq-war-coverup-what-did-aipac-do-and-when-did-it-do
Feb 2, 2012 -- Let's skip forward to the Iraq war itself, 2003. In The Israel Lobby and US
Foreign Policy, Walt and Mearsheimer clearly show that AIPAC pushed the Iraq war, though
quietly. AIPAC usually supports what Israel wants, and Israel certainly wanted the United
States to invade Iraq. Nathan Guttman made this
Barney Frank says Israel and AIPAC lobbied Congress to support war
mondoweiss.net/2015/03/lobbied-congress-support/
Mar 12, 2015 -- Tempers flared even more, they said, when Frank claimed that Israel and
AIPAC had lobbied members of Congress a decade ago to support the war in Iraq. Remember that
Walt and Mearsheimer were tarred as anti-Semites for saying in 2006 that the Israel lobby
pushed the Iraq war.
Sep 30, 2007 -- He said that AIPAC was in favor of the Iraq war and "pushed this war from
the beginning." And he claimed that on the Iraq war, AIPAC didn't represent "the mainstream
of American Jewish thinking at all." Moran had other things to say -- much of it having to do
with AIPAC's lobbying on U.S. relations to Iran.
AIPAC to deploy hundreds of lobbyists to push for Syria action -- Haaretz
Sep 7, 2013 -- But they had generally wanted the debate to focus on U.S. national security
rather than how a decision to attack Syria might help Israel, a reflection of their
sensitivity to being seen as rooting for the United States to go to war. Obama AIPAC -- AP --
22.5.11 U.S. President Barack Obama arriving at the AIPAC
Dems slam Moran's tying AIPAC to Iraq war -- POLITICO
2012 -- But once inside the hall, the AIPAC attendees heard the sound of war drums.
"Iran's nuclear Nine years ago this month, there was a similar feeling of inevitability --
that despite President George W. Bush's frequent insistence that "war is my last choice," war
in Iraq was coming. Now Israel is moving toward
Feb 21, 2012 -- The bad news is that, as Kampeas also reports, "AIPAC is expected to make
the resolution an 'ask' in three weeks when up to 10,000 activists culminate its Greg
Thielmann of the Arms Control Association notes that, "Even after crushing Iraq in the first
Gulf War, the international coalition only imposed a ..
The technical ability of Porton Down to identify a chemical has never been in doubt, and
the only "finding of the United Kingdom " the OPCW has confirmed is the identity of the
chemical.
But what neither the British Government nor the OPCW have, to the present, acknowledged is
that blood samples from the Skripal's contained two nerve agents, A-234, aka Novichok, plus
3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate, aka BZ or Buzz.
Novichok is a convulsant (which acts by preventing the breakdown of the neurotransmitter
acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction, with the result that muscles go into full
contraction, hence the symptoms of convulsions, vomiting, etc.), whereas BZ is a paralytic
agent (which acts by binding to acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junction without
activating them, thereby preventing muscle contraction, hence the symptoms of paralysis and
ultimately death by asphyxiation).
Thus, BZ will serve as an antidote to Novichok poisoning, wheras Novichok will serve as an
antidote to BZ poisoning. So the presence of Novichok in the Skipal blood samples is not
conclusive evidence that Novichok was the poison, rather than the antidote, as I have
discussed here: 3-Quinuclidinyl
Benzilate: The Antidote to Novichok , and here: Novichok:
Russia's Antidote to Seafood Poisoning .
"... And in the later articles posted here, he writes: "That puts Saudi Arabia (and its client jihadists), Saudi Arabia's close ally Israel, the UK and the USA all in the frame in having a powerful motive in inculcating anti-Russian sentiment prior to planned conflict with Russia in Syria. Any of them could have attacked the Skripals." ..."
I have never ruled out the possibility that Russia is responsible for the attack in
Salisbury, amongst other possibilities. But I do rule out the possibility that Assad is
dropping chemical weapons in Ghouta. In this extraordinary war, where Saudi-funded jihadist
head choppers have Israeli air support and US and UK military "advisers", every time the Syrian
army is about to take complete control of a major jihadist enclave, at the last moment when
victory is in their grasp, the Syrian Army allegedly attacks children with chemical weapons,
for no military reason at all. We have been fed this narrative again and again and again.
We then face a propaganda onslaught from neo-con politicians, think tanks and "charities"
urging a great rain of Western bombs and missiles, and are accused of callousness towards
suffering children if we demur. This despite the certain knowledge that Western military
interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have had consequences which remain to this day
utterly disastrous.
I fear that the massive orchestration of Russophobia over the last two years is intended to
prepare public opinion for a wider military conflict centred on the Middle East, but likely to
spread, and that we are approaching that endgame. The dislocation of the political and media
class from the general population is such, that the levers for people of goodwill to prevent
this are, as with Iraq, extremely few as politicians quake in the face of media jingoism. These
feel like extremely dangerous times.
"I have never ruled out the possibility that Russia is responsible for the attack in
Salisbury"
Time for timid half-truths is over. If by now you haven't identified the Skripal affair as
the joint UK/US production it is, Act I of the AngloZionist war on Syria, Russia and
humanity, your analysis isn't worth the pixels it's written on. There is zero doubt. Case
closed. Especially after this:
I wish you realize that appeals to skepticism and lines like "I'm not fan of Putin/Assad"
get you nowhere. You are facing a brutal, fact-twisting, intellect-insulting, lying,
propaganda machine. Any concession you make to their "arguments" comes with the smell of
blood. They'll mock your "moderate" views and will try to make you look weak and foolish as
Sky-news did. You can't be only half-brave, half-informed and half-right. And why engage
those shameless liars if not to destroy completely their blatant lies?
When Hungary prepared democratically laws to stop Soros meddling in Hungary Soros phoned
Brussels, spoke to Juncker and Tusk, the next day Timmermans tried to intimidate the
Hungarian government.
Just now there have been Hungarian elections, anti migration and anti Soros Orban was
elected.
European parliament member Sargenti now wants to take Hungary's voting right in the EU
away.
Sargenti is on the 231 member list that seem to be followers of Soros.
As Jimmy Carter once said 'those that want war do not expect that they themselves are going
to be hurt'.
That in the next world war anyone will be more than hurt, killed, the war mongers do not
understand, cannot believe.
Please, why don't you mention the other possibilities, instead of "the Russian one"?
Bit harsh to criticise Craig Murray on that score. I see your point, and it would be a
valid point to raise with an establishment journo who has been generally an effective part of
the anti-Russia propaganda campaign, but Murray has discussed the other options on many
occasions (and been the brunt of some pretty harsh establishment bullying in response).
In this case, it can safely be regarded as just efficient writing.
Even if Assad did use gas, which he obviously didn't, who the heck are the Americans, the
British, and the French to lecture anyone on morality, given that they unlike Assad did
practice chemical warfare, and killed uncounted millions around the globe with "conventional"
means in order to loot them, and to "punish" Assad as the bankster with an Oedipus complex
Macron put it?
Mr Murray lost his job because he stood up for the right thing in 2004 and he has been
abused ever since. His sanity has been called into question ever since he suggested the
British government weren't telling the truth. His brief period in an instiuttion after Blair
sacked him has been brought up more than once.
I suspect Craig's position of apparent open-mindedness has arisen from a lengthy Sky News
TV interview with the appalling Kay Burley. He was careful in an eighteen minute segment not
to give cause for Burley to label him as a Putin bot. He was most careful not to take the
focus off the weakness in the British government's position and I think that was correct.
As soon as you see the tissue of lies emanating from London the innocence of Moscow
follows naturally. Mr Murray was correct not to allow himself to be provoked by Kay Burley
and she was visibly annoyed by her failure.
Sky News tried to bury the confrontation but somebody recorded it and you can find the
interview at craigmurray.org
The ever excellent Campaign Against the Arms Trade is back in the English High Court
again today in its continuing attempts to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia. It is against
UK law to sell arms to a country which is likely to use them in breach of international
humanitarian law , and that Saudi Arabia consistently and regularly uses British
weapons to bomb schools, hospitals and civilians is indisputable.
Why didn't the High Court ban arm sales to UK army, which is using them in breach of
international humanitarian law, consistently & regularly since its colonial era, in
Vietnam & Korea wars, Blair's Iraq WMD illegal war, Cameron's illegal Libya bombing, and
now May's illegal attack to Syria.
Saudi arabia Yemen's war pale in comparison to UK long history of atrocities. What a
British hypocrite law enacted in a kangaroo judicial system? A country of government infested
with shameless warmonger liars & paedophiles, yet popularly elected by its people. What a
great Anglosaxon-West civilization & glorious demoncrapcy system to be spread around the
world for easy subversion & regime change.
Proven guilty Iraq war criminal Tony Blair is walking free, repeating his same lies again
to push for illegal Syria attack. Yet not a single war protest from UK people. Touch a LBGT
issue or Trumps visit, British will gone hysteria protest in London, oh what a great nation.
World Capital of paedophiles, war criminals & pathological liars.
How can God save the Queen that connive criminals, with stolen wealth soaking with
innocents blood.
I appreciated the frame you provided.
That's a very serious charge against Great Britain -- sadly, I found it a somewhat
compelling and disconcerting.
I suspect that in all of this there are fears that it's a response to enemies without as
opposed to enemies from within. I have no idea where this notion comes from -- that states
can act as authority for UN missions without the consent of the UN. Great Britain's press
here sounds very much like the legal gymnastic of the US to invade Iraq and has much weight
-- I agree.
The chaos in Libya, Syria, the Ukraine is the direct result of US and EU manipulation. I
just don't know how to support "wrongness" on so many levels and consider myself a person of
integrity. The humanitarian crisis in all of the regions is exacerbated by our own violations
of law and foreign policy best practices.
Not a bad article, but superficial. Does not address the why question and the huge
ideological difference between Russia and the 'West' which leads to war.
Agree. Resisting lying provocation to war should be done with what ZUSA terms "moral
clarity." Said another way, No Quarter, No Mercy. If the need is felt to characterize Assad, the only things that needs be said are that he
is the legitimate leader of a sovereign nation, and that attempts to topple him, by ZUSA
& Anglos, are in direct violation of United Nations charter.
I have never ruled out the possibility that Russia is responsible for the attack in
Salisbury, amongst other possibilities.
And I have never ruled out the word which can not be spoken, that ISRAEL was behind both
attacks, to justify getting their US/UK/French lackeys to do in Syria what they can not
without taking losses, attacking Syrian cities with cruise missiles.
Poisoned toothpaste and exploding phones: New book chronicles Israel's '2,700'
assassination operations
Poisoned toothpaste that takes a month to end its target's life. Armed drones. Exploding
mobile phones. Spare tyres with remote-control bombs. Assassinating enemy scientists and
discovering the secret lovers of Muslim clerics.
A new book chronicles these techniques and asserts that Israel has carried out at
least 2,700 assassination operations in its 70 years of existence. While many failed,
they add up to far more than any other western country, the book says.
The main beneficiary of the recent cruise missile attacks against Syria is Israel, so
let's be honest and see what happens.
From an April 2003 Haaretz article:
The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them
Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them,
journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible.
This is a war of an elite. [Tom] Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25
people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if
you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have
happened.
So, aside from selling weapons to Syria and Iran – and thus, giving up control over
those weapons – what exactly should Putin have done to continue receiving your
approval? Start WW3?
Another question: if this is just a staged play of good cop, bad cop – why does the
puppet master behind the scenes not advance the plot? Why the need for silly diversions into
the bucolic English countryside, and for embarrassing cameos by French boy princes?
Not sure where you are from, but some countries – particularly those that have
experienced it at home – consider war a serious business, not quite the same as a bar
brawl in Dodge City.
I keep hearing that the Qatar – Europe pipeline is the source of the Syria War, what I
cant understand if their so desperate for this why does it need to go through Syria, theres`s
other ways like across SA and up the red sea?
In Murray's first post on the Skripal story, he lists other possible suspects as Orbis
Intelligence (who produced the Steele dossier) and the state of Israel:
And in the later articles posted here, he writes: "That puts Saudi Arabia (and its client
jihadists), Saudi Arabia's close ally Israel, the UK and the USA all in the frame in having a
powerful motive in inculcating anti-Russian sentiment prior to planned conflict with Russia
in Syria. Any of them could have attacked the Skripals."
The West would simply like him to meet his obligations and stop gassing people as there
is an international agreement against killing people that way. Why can't he just stick
to the normal use of high explosives to blast them to pieces?
Why can't he just stick to the normal use of high explosives to blast them to
pieces?
Because that process is still under Israeli patent protection??
Didn't he and various generals plainly state that retaliation would be swift and
immediately delivered to any such platform?
Yes, if Russian military assets in Syria are targeted or hit. The US strike was the
warfare equivalent of a plate smashing fit thrown by a hysterical tranny. Just a loud
demonstration of impotence and fishing for attention. It's better handled unanswered. Now, if
the tranny decides to go in a full abuser mode, Putin may seriously mess up her makeup.
"... Given that a key function of that position is to ensure that the bureaucracy provides the relevant options and most accurate information to the president before major national security decisions, it is hard to think of anyone more ill-suited to that duty. Bolton's method of policy formation has been to try to bully any part of the bureaucracy that does not subscribe to his personal agenda, and to try to bully away any part of the truth that does not serve his objectives. ..."
"... The Senate is about to have an opportunity to weigh in on another highly important foreign policy position, that of secretary of state, for which President Trump has nominated Mike Pompeo. Senators ought to consider that nomination in tandem with the appointment of Bolton as national security adviser, even though the Senate formally has a role with only one of those appointments and not with the other. Senators should consider the two as a package deal. They should not vote to confirm Pompeo if they are uncomfortable with either part of the package. ..."
"... The main reason to approach the Pompeo nomination this way is that the nation currently has a president who, sad to say, needs restraint. He will need restraint all the more during the coming months as troubles of his own making increase the chance that he will lash out in destructive ways . ..."
"... But both Pompeo and Bolton are more likely to accentuate Trump's impulses than to restrain them. Bolton got his job because the sort of things he says on Fox are more what Donald Trump likes to hear than the briefings that H.R. McMaster gave him, which evidently were too long for Trump's taste or for his short attention span. ..."
"... Pompeo did not rise so quickly from being a relatively junior congressman functioning as a partisan attack dog to where he is now, on the verge of occupying Thomas Jefferson's chair, by telling Trump what he needs to hear rather than what he wants to hear. ..."
This week John Bolton assumes the job of national security adviser. Given that a key
function of that position is to ensure that the bureaucracy provides the relevant options and
most accurate information to the president before major national security decisions, it is hard
to think of anyone more ill-suited to that duty.
Bolton's method of policy formation has been to try to bully any part of the bureaucracy
that does not subscribe to his personal agenda, and to try to bully away any part of the truth
that does not serve his objectives. Bolton's objectives are characterized by never meeting
a war or prospective war he didn't like. He still avows that the Iraq War -- with all the costs
and chaos it has caused, from thousands of American deaths to the birth of the group that we
now know as ISIS -- was a good idea. That someone with this perspective has been entrusted with
the job Bolton now has is a glaring example of how there often is no accountability in
Washington for gross policy malpractice.
Appointments as national security adviser are not subject to Senate confirmation. If they
were, it would be appropriate for the Senate to react as it did the last time Bolton came
before that body as a nominee for a job that does require confirmation. In 2005 the Senate
turned down his nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations. The Senate review brought to
light some of the uglier aspects of Bolton's conduct in his previous job as an undersecretary
of state. President George W. Bush gave him a recess appointment to the U.N. job, but
fortunately that meant there was a time limit to the destruction Bolton could wreak in that
position.
The Senate is about to have an opportunity to weigh in on another highly important
foreign policy position, that of secretary of state, for which President Trump has nominated
Mike Pompeo. Senators ought to consider that nomination in tandem with the appointment of
Bolton as national security adviser, even though the Senate formally has a role with only one
of those appointments and not with the other. Senators should consider the two as a package
deal. They should not vote to confirm Pompeo if they are uncomfortable with either part of the
package.
The main reason to approach the Pompeo nomination this way is that the nation currently
has a president who, sad to say, needs restraint. He will need restraint all the more during
the coming months as troubles of his own making increase the chance that
he will lash out in destructive ways . The copious commentary during the fifteen
months of the Trump presidency about having "adults in the room" to restrain the worst urges of
an inexperienced and impulsive president speaks to an important truth. Whether adult
supervision of this sort succeeds or fails depends on the collective impact of all of the
president's senior subordinates. To the extent any one subordinate is especially influential in
this regard on foreign policy, it probably is the national security adviser who is best
positioned either to accentuate or to restrain Trump's impulses. Having Bolton in that job
makes the restraining ability of the secretary of state all the more important.
But both Pompeo and Bolton are more likely to accentuate Trump's impulses than to
restrain them. Bolton got his job because the sort of things he says on Fox are more what
Donald Trump likes to hear than the briefings that H.R. McMaster gave him, which evidently were
too long for Trump's taste or for his short attention span. P
Pompeo's winning of favor with Trump, during what reportedly has been lots of face time with
him at the White House during the past year, has a similar dynamic. Pompeo did not rise so
quickly from being a relatively junior congressman functioning as a partisan attack dog to
where he is now, on the verge of occupying Thomas Jefferson's chair, by telling Trump what he
needs to hear rather than what he wants to hear.
Senators hold up confirmation of nominees, and sometimes vote against them, for all kinds of
reasons unrelated to the resumé of the nominee. It would be proper for them to vote
against a nominee for secretary of state partly because of who the national security adviser
is, given that both of them are in service to an unstable president.
There are other reasons to consider Pompeo and Bolton in tandem. In several respects they
are two hazardous peas in a pod. On North Korea, Bolton's bellicose posture is matched by
Pompeo's statements about seeking ways to
"separate" Kim Jong Un from his nuclear weapons , suggesting a priority to regime change
over keeping a volatile situation on the Korean peninsula from blowing up. Both Pompeo and
Bolton, along with Trump, have sworn eternal hostility to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA), the multilateral agreement that closed all possible paths to an Iranian nuclear
weapon. Neither man bothers to explain how destruction of the agreement, which would free Iran
to produce as much fissile material as it wants and would end the intrusive international
inspections of the Iranian program, could possibly
US officials and the presstitutes tell us that the illegal US missile attack on Syria
destroyed chemical weapons sites where chlorine and sarin are stored/manufactured. If this were
true, would not a lethal cloud have been released that would have taken the lives of far more
people than claimed in the alleged Syrian chemical attack on Douma? Would not the US missile
attack be identical to a chemical weapons attack and thus place the US and its vassals in the
same category as Washington is attempting to place Assad and Putin?
Russia can do nothing alone. NATO is way too strong.
Notable quotes:
"... my honor is called solidarity ..."
"... my honor is loyalty ..."
"... by not taking any action the Russians also failed to deter any future attacks. But what could the Russians have done? ..."
"... Sic transit gloria mundi ..."
"... Trump demonstrated that the U.S. can still bomb non nuclear countries without regard for the Constitution, international law or common decency. The Deplorables demonstrated that elections will not change anything. Only the death of the U.S. dollar will end Anglo/Zio Imperial aggression. ..."
"... Russia was outgunned, so they did not respond. It was probably a wise decision. They did damage control admirably, and now have an opportunity to improve the Syrian arsenal with obvious justification. ..."
"... Slowly but surely, Russia is tightening the noose in Syria. Air defenses are improving. ..."
"... My precious, too many players want to start a real war between the Mercans and Russians. Aside from the casual suspects (KSA and Israel), Chinese also objectively benefit from the confrontation, which explains their aloofness. Should this come to a nuclear war, Chinese will be the one and only winner. For this old smart monkey is still sitting on the tree, and nothing has changed since Chairman Mao times. ..."
"... For Iran, this war will certainly enhance the Iran-Russia axis and thus may postpone the US aggression. Turkey loves it too because it can play both sides. ..."
"... Ironically, only the USA and Russia will be the biggest losers regardless of the outcome. ..."
"... In UNSC, China has surprisingly took abstained neutral stand, allowing it to play the coordinator role & denying US UK Fr to get any legit for attack. This avoid relegating UNSC into two sides shouting. Nikki Harley was thus preempted her wish of striking with or without UNSC mandate since all ended agreed to let UN conduct independent inspection. Overall, this continue to lock US UK Fr inside UNSC framework. ..."
"... The general idea seems to be containment of Russia, hemming them in within their own borders and cutting them off from being able to extend their influence outward. ..."
"... As part of this any allies of theirs such as Syria come under attack; if the west can't own them then they're to be reduced to chaos and rendered into costly burdens for the Russians. ..."
"... It's all a very cynical and calculated plan that fits into the overall picture of encircling the Russians to stymie their development and influence. NATO expansion up to their borders, the Ukraine coup, encirclement, picking off vulnerable allies, economic warfare and political subversion without end, the pattern is clear. At some point an actual clash might come about, not necessarily now with Syria as the trigger but somewhere all along the entire line of points of friction. Unfortunately it seems inevitable that something bad is going to happen somewhere down the line as the irresistible force meets the immovable object. ..."
"... As a fervent anti-war activist since the sixties, I have been appalled at all the regime change the US has and continues to do around the world including both military covert operations and economic warfare. Well Putin had me at his 2007 Munich speech. ..."
About a month ago Nikki Haley announces to the
UNSC that the USA is ready to violate the rules of this very self-same UNSC should a chemical
attack happen in Syria Then the Russians announced that they have evidence that a chemical
false flag is being prepared in Syria Then a chemical attack (supposedly) takes place (in a
location surrounded and, basically, controlled by government forces!) The OPWC sends
investigators (in spite of western powers loudly proclaiming that no investigation was needed)
The AngloZionists then bomb Syria Next, the UNSC refuses to condemn the violation of its own
rules and decisions Finally, the US Americans speak of a 'perfect strike'
Now tell me -- do you get a sense that this is over?
If you tell me that 32/103 is hardly perfect, I will reply that you are missing the point.
In fact, if anything, 32/103 is further incentive to bomb again!
Let's look at the differently for a second and ask this: what has the AngloZionist attack
actually demonstrated?
The western general public is so terminally zombified that false flag
attacks can now be announced 4 weeks in advance The Europeans now live by the motto " my
honor is called solidarity " (a variation of the SS motto " my honor is loyalty
") Led by the USA, western countries have no objections to wars started in violation of their
own national laws The UN Security Council has no objections to wars started in violation of the
UN Charter and International Law The PRC leaders, in their infinite wisdom, act as if they have
nothing personal at stake and act like bystanders The Israelis, via the UN Neocons, are now in
total control of the Empire and use it to "clean house" next door
Oh, I hear the objections. They go something like this:
But the attack was a dismal
failure! So what? the Empire did not pay any price for executing it. But the US Americans did
blink! The attacked from Jordanian airspace and from the Red Sea! They avoided the Russians
completely! They are afraid of them! So what? They still bombed a Russian ally with total
impunity. But, surely you are not suggesting that the Russians should have started a war
against the USA over a strike which did not even kill a single person?
No, of course not, but by not taking any action the Russians also failed to deter any
future attacks. But what could the Russians have done?
Now *that* is the right question!
Let's look at it a little closer. Roughly speaking, the Russians have a choice of 3 types of
retaliatory measures: political, economic and military. However, each one of them has a
specific set of prerequisites which are currently problematic to say the least:
Measures
Political
Economic
Military
Prerequisites
Assumes a minimal amount of decency, integrity and respect for the rule of law by the
rest of the planet.
Assumes that other countries, especially China, would be willing and able to support
such measures.
Assumes that Russia has the military capability to defeat the AngloZionist
"coalition".
Current reality
Russia can moan, bitch, complain, protest, appeal to higher values, logic or facts --
nobody gives a damn.
The Chinese and the rest of them are not willing to do anything at this time to
support Russia.
Russia can militarily defeat the AngloZionists, but only by risking the future of our
planet.
This really can be summarized a simple sentence: the AngloZionist Hegemony is a threat for
the entire planet, but nobody besides Russia and Iran is willing to take it on. Ain't that an
irony!
The so-called "Christian West" has become a willing host for its Zionist parasite and the
only ones with the courage and moral integrity to take it on are Orthodox Christians and
Muslims! Sic transit gloria mundi indeed
But what is even more important is this: while it is true that the US Neocons did not
succeed in delivering the kind of massive attack they would have wanted to, and while it is
true that the US attack was just about as lame as can be, you need to completely forget about
these facts. Facts simply don't matter. And neither does logic. All that matters are
perceptions!
And the perception is that "we" (the AngloZionist rulers and their serfs) "kicked" Assad's
"ass" and that "we" will "do it again" if "we" feel like it. That is all that matters in the
Empire of
Illusions which the AngloZionist Hegemony has become.
As soon as you understand that, you also will have to agree that Trump was right: it was a
"perfect strike" (again, not in reality, but in the world of illusions created around it).
So now we come full circle.
The AngloZionist Hegemony demands that the entire planet bows down and worships
it . Except for Russia and Iran, everybody meekly goes down on their knees or, at most,
meekly looks away. In their own delusional reality, the 'Mericans feel empowered to smack down
Russia or Iran at anytime. There is nothing Iran can do to stop them, and while Russia can, she
can only do that at the risk of the future of our entire planet.
Now you tell me -- do you really think this is over?
That's clearly a civilian assertion. By no way, the US can defeat Iran, unless they are
ready to send 500 000 grunts there. And they are not. No US president will survive a 10 000
body bag return.
They can use air power for sure, but that will never be enough to force Iran to bow.And
I'm quite sure the Russian will provide them everything they have to help Iran.And China
probably too.
Without even mentioning destruction of Barbaric Saudi and closin Ormuz strait. It's
clearly not over but the US are not as powerful as you think.
Well, firstly, I don't think the future of our planet is at risk, if you mean by that
extinction of life on Earth. Current arsenals can't do that, even in the worst case scenario.
Nor even can they extinct human race either. Lots of deaths? Yes, sure. Extinction? Nope.
Secondly, there is no rule of law because there is no punishment. Once punishment is
delivered, things will change quickly. I agree with you that political or economical
punishment will not work. But military punishment will do. Sink some US carriers or destroy
some Israel bases, and you will see how they become well-behaved.
Trump demonstrated that the U.S. can still bomb non nuclear countries without regard for
the Constitution, international law or common decency. The Deplorables demonstrated that
elections will not change anything. Only the death of the U.S. dollar will end Anglo/Zio
Imperial aggression.
It is not only Russia and Iran that does not bow down. North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela,
Phillipines, China etc. Etc. These countries have done as much as the Russians have. Its not
like Russia sank a carrier or anything and it's not like Russia is defender of the world on a
crusade to defend the planet. They are only acting because they are in the crosshairs.
If America was targeting Cuba, Russia would not say or do anything against America.
While both vessels [USS Winston Churchill, USS Donald Cook] carry as many as 90 Tomahawk
missiles -- the main weapon used in the Friday evening strike on Syria -- neither ship in
the end fired a shot. Instead, according to a person familiar with White House war
planning, they were part of a plan to distract Russia and its Syrian ally from an assault
Assad's government could do little to defend itself against.
It worked. Pentagon officials on Saturday said they faced little resistance to their
targeted attack on what they said were three Syrian chemical weapons facilities. Most of
the Syrian countermeasures, including defensive ballistic missiles, were fired after U.S.
and allied weapons hit their targets, Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie said
Saturday.
"No Syrian weapon had any effect on anything we did," McKenzie said. He described the
joint U.S., French and U.K. strike as "precise, overwhelming and effective."
Where can I get correct assessments? For, umm . research yeah.
Russia was outgunned, so they did not respond. It was probably a wise decision. They did
damage control admirably, and now have an opportunity to improve the Syrian arsenal with
obvious justification.
Slowly but surely, Russia is tightening the noose in Syria. Air defenses are
improving. The next step is likely to be an arsenal of anti-ship missile's. If necessary
ICBMs might follow some sort of mutual defense treaty.
At some point, Syria itself will be able to deliver the bloody nose to the USA that is so
necessary for justice and world peace. That point will be reached when Syrian abilities to
inflict pain outweigh the costs of escalation
My precious, too many players want to start a real war between the Mercans and Russians.
Aside from the casual suspects (KSA and Israel), Chinese also objectively benefit from the
confrontation, which explains their aloofness. Should this come to a nuclear war, Chinese
will be the one and only winner. For this old smart monkey is still sitting on the tree, and
nothing has changed since Chairman Mao times.
For Iran, this war will certainly enhance the Iran-Russia axis and thus may postpone
the US aggression. Turkey loves it too because it can play both sides.
Ironically, only the USA and Russia will be the biggest losers regardless of the
outcome. It seems they both realize that and are treading carefully. But can they manage
to get out of the clinch? And for how long they can be avoiding the all-out conflict? So no,
-- it's definitely ain't over. We hates it, but the best is yet to come.
You forget ballsy little Bolivia defends Russia in UN with both votes and condemnation of
barking Nikki. It looks like they are offering all they have -- moral condemnation of Empire
and her vassals.
The reason I give it a lot of weight is that the night before the bombing, either Vanessa
Beasley or Eva Bartlett called in to Israeli News Live and gave 12 points explaining what
Syria was expecting to happen and it seems it pretty well went down as they had said. I'm
sorry I can't find the broadcast link. Apparently the Russians said if the strike went into a
second day they would strike back even if Russians were not hit. Looks like the "strike" was
pretty well pre-determined by both sides.
Gave each side a look at the others capabilities and allowed US a chance to waste missiles
and Northrup sell new ones. Same old, same old.
Every time my country says or does something insane (which is often) this Lee Greenwood
song goes thru my mind with modified lyrics. "Ashamed to be an American, where I'm duped to
think I'm free".
How can it be over ? It is a war in progress. One side of the warring party is creating
they own reality, and present it on the world stage with absolute conviction, and
determination. This fake reality is part of the war game , it should not be considered as
lies or staged events. It is war ! Fake reality is part of the repertoire , just like the
missiles. It is war , no rules just brutal conflict.
The other side not understanding any of it. They are running around , like chickens in the
rain. UNSC talk , talk and talk some more. Nobody give a them. They are counting how many
missiles they intercepted , they are analyzing , they are theorizing . Do something you are
about to be wiped off !
Act 2 . China sells tickets. Total now of two hundred missiles used; nothing much
destroyed. Top brass satisfied. Neocons, mollified. Audience, US, asleep in our seats as
usual.
Act 3 . The big love scene: Trump and Putin do Romeo & Juliet, audience
confused. Back to sleep. China offers no refunds.
The Chinese and the rest of them are not willing to do anything
at this time to support Russia. Russia can militarily defeat the AngloZionists, but
only by risking the future of our planet.
Saker correctly pointed out Russia is showing unnecessary weakness in only moaning &
bitching with empty threats that nobody bother, relegating itself to a weakling gas
station.
But to falsely accused China & the rest not willing to do anything at this time to
support Russia is too far fetch, a foolish remark like a whining self pitied child blaming
everyone for his own spilled milk.
Does Saker expect its few allies China, NK, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, SAA to launch attack on
US Nato when RuA refused/not permit?
Economically, China is known to have financially back the entire costly war, signed
numerous huge deals worth hundreds of Bil with Russia to booster its sanctioned economy,
deliver re-construction materials, medicine & food for tens of millions soldiers &
Syrians. A astromical cost.
Military, it has also supply lot of weapons & ammunition under so called old contract
with SAA, sent in its most senior advisors & Special forces to help fighting & get
train, esp to mop up Uyghur ISIS terrorists(CIA assets).
It even cut short a mammoth 40 vessels Liaoning a/c strike group drill in SCS to declare a
unprecedented proximate live firing drill in Taiwan Straits, literally forcing existing USN
three strike groups to tied down in SCS. This sent a very clear signal that if US start a hot
war in Syria with Russia, China might open another war front to take back Taiwan which USM
will be overstretched to defend.
Also China despatched its Defense Minister in a high profile visit to Russia, declaring
its military solidarity with Russia against US tyranny (a rare glaring mentioned of US
name directly) . This sent a very strong signal to USM, China may intervene directly or
asymmetrically.
China also took an unusual hard stand in a looming trade war, threatened to fight at all
cost without slight compromise, hence refusing Trumps any leeway to back down while he up
ante to save face.
China foreign ministry further declare the trade war will not limit in trade but shall
utilize all asymmetric tools, including non cooporation in strategic issues, sanction of US
hugely profiting investments in China. Also Trumps redneck farming vote bank was purposely
targeted to pressure him in coming Nov election. With China $4T war chess & US people
resistance, US can ill afford to fight China if Syria war breakout. Every major war will see
USD artificially hike >30% historically for expenditure mileage.
In UNSC, China has surprisingly took abstained neutral stand, allowing it to play the
coordinator role & denying US UK Fr to get any legit for attack. This avoid relegating
UNSC into two sides shouting. Nikki Harley was thus preempted her wish of striking with or
without UNSC mandate since all ended agreed to let UN conduct independent inspection.
Overall, this continue to lock US UK Fr inside UNSC framework.
China Prez Xi also in Baao seminar announced expedite opening of China huge financial
market. This stirred the world into frenzy to prepare for huge investment, skillfully denied
US ability to pull EU, Jp & others to joint US trade war. All US financier & trade
bodies will loathe any trade or hot war that will derail their golden opportunity.
What else happen behind door we won't know. But whatever we can see now, China has done
every heavy lifting it could, very comprehensive & well plan, short of attacking USM in
Syria which it can't with limited projection force.
Yet Saker is accusing China & others are doing NOTHING to help Russia, when Putin is
refusing to even take down a Israel airfield as a warning to USM. Killing a chicken to
frighten the monkey.
Is Saker demonstrating a typical Russian nature, unappreciative & endless blaming,
always ready to throw ally under bus? This might explain why Russia has few or no true
trusted ally, even ex-Soviet countries. Assad Syria & Iran interest are seen routinely
been sacrificed.
Will China one day decided Russia is not a trusted ally afterall to reconsider US G2
invitation?
I think the point of the article was precisely that the US is not as strong as it thinks.
Hence, the attack was all for "show" so the US can perpetuate the delusion it can handle
Russia/Iran. The danger is that this delusion may cause a major misstep, especially if (when)
the US starts believing it's own bullshit and really pokes the bear.
The general idea seems to be containment of Russia, hemming them in within their own
borders and cutting them off from being able to extend their influence outward.
As part of this any allies of theirs such as Syria come under attack; if the west
can't own them then they're to be reduced to chaos and rendered into costly burdens for the
Russians.
It's all a very cynical and calculated plan that fits into the overall picture of
encircling the Russians to stymie their development and influence. NATO expansion up to their
borders, the Ukraine coup, encirclement, picking off vulnerable allies, economic warfare and
political subversion without end, the pattern is clear. At some point an actual clash might
come about, not necessarily now with Syria as the trigger but somewhere all along the entire
line of points of friction. Unfortunately it seems inevitable that something bad is going to
happen somewhere down the line as the irresistible force meets the immovable object.
The problem here is that moving to a multi-polar world will require many countries to
contribute what and where they can as we fight a very entrenched international Cabal. But,
the largest responsibility lies with the people living within the Evil Empire and its vassal
states. Those whose counties are committing these atrocities need to step up and call foul on
their own governments. This is difficult to do since the Project Mockingbird press
continues to spew unbelievable lies on a non-stop basis. But those lies are getting more and
more difficult to believe. Unless your brain is totally disconnected, you have to realize
that what they are saying is inconsistent and illogical.
Besides calling and berating my representatives, signing petitions, etc. I have taken to
wearing a teeshirt with a picture of Putin and the Russian bear (Putin in a suit, not riding
the bear bare chested).
I wear it to all social events for the purpose of starting a discussion. Most Americans
are not engaged. They have little trust in their government and most feel like there is
nothing they can do about it. I live in the mountain west where people are more libertarian
and more willing to fight. I try to provide them with ammunition and point them to places to
go to get "real" news. I tell them not to "believe" any news, but get a variety of points of
view and use their own minds to determine what is true.
A few years ago, I was very disturbed when I kept hearing Dr. Stephen Cohen say that Putin
was the greatest statesman of our time. As I had studied Soviet history in school, I had sort
of kept abreast of what was happening in Russia. As an economist, I was aware of how the
West, especially the USA, came to help Russia with Democracy and "free markets". It was
obvious to me that we were just assisting in selling Russia by the pound to the moneyed
class. I had followed Dr. Cohen over the years as well. But sceptical of his assessment of
Putin, I have gone back and watched and read almost everything Putin has said and watched
what Russia has done and I believe Dr. Cohen is correct.
As a fervent anti-war activist since the sixties, I have been appalled at all the
regime change the US has and continues to do around the world including both military covert
operations and economic warfare. Well Putin had me at his 2007 Munich speech. The one
the West called a rant.
Finally someone was calling out this criminal behavior on an international stage! Putin
has continued with these messages and as far as I can see, Russia is operating accordingly.
No one country, not Russia, not China, no one can destroy this international Cabal on its
own. It will take a concerted effort of all peace seeking people from around the world to
force their governments on a different path. Starting in my case with the people of the
USA.
In reality Trump proved again that POTUS does not matter and presidential elections matter very little. In was he is like
drunk Obama, reckelss and jingoistic to the extreme. Both foreign and domestic policy is determined by forces, and are outside POTUS control, with very little input
possible. But the "deep state"
fully control the POTUS, no matter who he/she are.
Notable quotes:
"... To Trump apologists: Trump is the Republican Obama. The follow the same model of government: faux populist leader dogged by crazy critics that want to derail a righteous agenda. ..."
"... Obamabots gave similar excuses. Real populists simply don't get have a chance of being elected in US money-driven elections. ..."
"... Why was there only two populists running for President in 2016? Sanders, Hillay's sheepdog, destroyed the movement that would been the best check on the establishment and the rush to war. That movement was never going to be allowed to take root. Trump, a friend of the Clinton's was probably meant to prevail. ..."
To Trump apologists: Trump is the Republican Obama. The follow the same model of government: faux populist leader
dogged by crazy critics that want to derail a righteous agenda.
Obamabots gave similar excuses. Real populists simply don't get have a chance of being
elected in US money-driven elections.
Why was there only two populists running for President in 2016? Sanders, Hillay's sheepdog, destroyed the movement that would been the best check on the
establishment and the rush to war. That movement was never going to be allowed to take root.
Trump, a friend of the Clinton's was probably meant to prevail.
Rome had bread and circuses. We've got crumbs and tweets.
The reason we voted for Trump is because we are tired of this sanctimonious hypocritical horse shit. Instead we get more of
what we didn't vote for. All Russia did was kindly not sink any of our war ships when we attacked Syria on an assumption.
You got exactly what you voted for... because if you were dumb enough to think you could actually get an outsider maverick
anywhere near the white house I have to think you are too dumb to figure out how to turn on a computer.
Trump's in deep over his head. It was an open question whether he posed any genuine obstacle to the pathocracy, but it seems
more clear now that, one way or another, he has been brought more tightly under their control. THAT, much more than any individual
false-flags or other deceptions or wrongs, should be cause for the rational world to fear. The psychopaths are still on the march,
and Trump is at least paying lip service to their chicanery. The further out on a limb he goes, the more reluctant and then helpless
he will be to backtrack as pathology becomes more extreme and events escalate under their own momentum. With markets looking more
precarious than ever, how long will it be before the psychopaths commit more and bigger false flags?
Cornered animal; that sounds like Trumps modus operandi. Notice that
anyone who criticizes him gets lambasted with personal attacks
instead of a reasoned response.
We need a President who
understands freedom and who is a reasonable person, neither of which
traits are possessed by Trump. He didn't win the election on his own
qualification but on Hillary's lack of qualification. This speaks to
the point, "The lesser of two evils is still evil".
"... And if there's no chance that we can fix it I will recommend to the president that we do our level best to work with our allies to achieve a better outcome and a better deal. ..."
SPEAKER: What is your view as to whether America should withdraw unilaterally from the Iran nuclear agreement?
MIKE POMPEO: I want to fix this deal. That's the objective. I think that's in the best interest of the United States
of America.
SPEAKER: But if the agreement cannot be changed. My question is pretty simple. We're running very close to a deadline
on certification.
MIKE POMPEO:And if there's no chance that we can fix it I will recommend to the president that we do our level
best to work with our allies to achieve a better outcome and a better deal.
SHARMINI PERIES: Pompeo is a member of the Tea Party movement, and is generally viewed as a pro-war hardliner who has previously
vowed to cancel the Iran agreement ...
... ... ...
MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, let's just take the issue of Iran, for starters. There he said at the hearing that he would not try to get
out of the Iran nuclear deal, that he wants a better deal. But in the past he's talked about getting out of the Iran nuclear deal.
And not only that he said that regime change is the only way to deal with Iran. And as CIA director he also downplayed the CIA's
assessment that Iran was complying with the deal although at the hearing he said he has no reason to deny that Iran is complying.
So he says very different things and in different places. But I think his actions and his statements in the past speak louder than
the words at the hearing, which were quite deceptive, and he's trying to win over Democrats. So he was evasive on some of the issues
that he has been very clear about in the past, such as striking Iran, North Korea, and certainly he was open about the president's
right to bomb Syria.
... ... ...
SHARMINI PERIES: Right. Now, speaking of Syria and the tensions that are arising with Russia over the chemical attack that Russia
now says, and in fact Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, is on record saying they have information that some one else, some other
country, initiated this attack in Syria. This is really a heightening the tension between Russia and the United States. So let me
go to you on this, Phyllis, first, and then we'll go back to Medea. But your take on this rising tension between U.S. And Russia?
PHYLLIS BENNIS: This is a very, very dangerous moment, when we have Trump, with all of his own proclivities towards war and against
diplomacy, surrounding himself by what looks like a clear war cabinet. The danger of escalation in Syria is very serious. It could
lead to a direct clash between the two most powerful nuclear weapon states in the world, the United States and Russia. You have completely
opposite claims emerging from Washington and Moscow, with the U.S. claiming that they know, even though they also agree that they
don't have information, but they know that chemical weapons were used as they were used by the regime in Syria. They seem to know
a lot for a government that admits it doesn't know anything yet.
The Russians, on the other hand, have variously said that another country might be involved. Another Russian diplomat has said
that there was no chemical attack at all. So for myself, I don't actually believe any of these claims by any of the governments.
I'm waiting to hear what the report is of the team that's on its way to D ouma right now, the town outside of Damascus where the
alleged chemical weapons attack occurred. The team of the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons. That's the the internationally
acknowledged, internationally credible team that will be determining whether or not chemicals were used, what chemicals were used
if there were any, who was affected, what delivery systems, et cetera. They are not mandated to determine who fired or who gave the
orders to fire. That's a much more political question that will come back to the Security Council and may stall there, we don't know.
But at the moment we don't know at all what happened in Douma on that weekend 10 days ago. So I think that we need to do everything
possible to ramp down this level of rhetoric. When the U.S. continues to talk about the inevitability of new strikes against Syria,
knowing that this is a direct violation of both, again, international law and U.S. domestic law and threatens the possibility of
retaliation against U.S. troops in the region, U.S. warships in the Mediterranean, U.S. warplanes in the skies, and, most importantly,
threatens the possibility, the likelihood, of killing more Syrian civilians. We are facing a very, very urgent crisis even before
we get to the possibility of serious escalation.
So this is something that Congress needs to take very seriously. And unfortunately in what we've seen in the Pompeo hearing there
was simply not enough, not enough pushing for this candidate to be the supposed leader of diplomacy in the United States, to push
him on the necessity not of saying well, we hoped that we could have a diplomatic solution, but if not well then nothing is off the
table. That's not OK. That's not acceptable to the U.S. chief diplomat. And we are simply not hearing enough pressure to make that
position known.
... ... ...
But I was going to put it in the context of remember that we have Bolton as the national security adviser, who did not have to
have a confirmation hearing. This is why somebody like Jeff Merkley, a senator from Massachusetts, came out and said he will not
vote for Pompeo because he recognizes it as part of this larger cabinet, that this is a war cabinet, and therefore a vote for Pompeo
is a vote for war. So I would say continue the fight not to get a confirmation for Mike Pompeo.
SHARMINI PERIES: Phyllis, is that even possible?
PHYLLIS BENNIS: Absolutely. And it's crucial. This is exactly what we need to be focusing on right now. The way the votes come
down, it's very, very tight. There are at least, at least one Republican, Rand Paul, who has said he will vote against Pompeo. It
looks like McCain will not be there because of his illness. That cuts out two votes. So it's certainly a possibility. But it's going
to take an enormous amount of work. Enormous numbers of phone calls and visits and protests and threats of not voting back those
members of Congress who, who would go ahead and vote for this person as being the new head of diplomacy. This is as urgent as it
gets.
SHARMINI PERIES: All right, Phyllis. I thank you so much for joining us. Phyllis is with the Institute for Policy Studies New
Internationalism Project. And Medea Benjamin, thank you so much for joining us. And Medea's from Code Pink. Thank you both.
Nonsense lead . The regime change trope is totally bi-partisan as yesterdays air strikes clearly indicate. Pompeo etal like
most American federal government officialdom are now lackeys and on the payrolls of the MIC , CIA, and banksters. There is no
Iran nuclear deal , Trump is right about that . Iran has moved under Russia's nuclear umbrella as North Korea is now under China's,
making the rush to develop nukes unnecessary at the present time. Obombers treaty was/is a worthless face saving effort, after
the destruction of Libya.. Trump increasing represents the wishes of the duopoly, not the electorate, his latest terror attack
on Syria bumped his popularity 5% across Americas, knocking down the looming Stormy scandal perhaps...
Phyllis: "But at the moment we don't know at all what happened in Douma on that weekend 10 days ago."
We do know, because we listen daily to the other side of the story too. There was NO Chemical attack . The White Helmets
filmed the deception.
These two Workers of the Douma Hospital's Emergency room, are eyewitnesses of the Lie that was sold by the Western MSM,
which is a tool of the Deep State:
-Syrian Eyewitnesses Reveal How Douma Provocation Was Made- (Published by Sputnik, on Apr 13, 2018)
Arguing for a right-wing Congress to overturn decades of executive war making "privilege" is a bit of a lost cause at this
point. Pompeo is the latest iteration in a long line of those at the State Department who have ditched diplomacy in favor of war.
gustave courbet > novychelovek
Consistent theme in caricatures of other nations/groups relates to their inherent "otherness." Be it Clapper's comment
about Russians being "genetically driven" to "co-opt," or Kim Jong-un's reputation as a madman, or Iran's fundamentalist world
view, they have in common the tendency to project a fundamentally irrational disposition on one's adversaries.
In reality, most governments, be they pseudo-democratic, theocratic, etc are motivated by pragmatic self-interest. In Iran's
case, they can use history to compare non-nuclear states to nuclear powers in regards to US bellicosity and see a clear
pattern.
"... People such as Stephen Cohen and myself, who were actively involved throughout the entirety of the Cold War, are astonished at the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the US government and its European vassals toward Russia. ..."
"... In this brief video, Stephen Cohen describes to Tucker Carlson the extreme danger of the present situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvK1Eu01Lz0 Published on Apr 13, 2018 ..."
A normal person would answer "yes" to the three questions. So what does this tell us about
Trump's government as these insane actions are the principle practice of Trump's
government?
Does anyone doubt that Nikki Haley is insane?
Does anyone doubt that John Bolton is insane?
Does anyone doubt that Mike Pompeo is insane?
Does this mean that Trump is insane for appointing to the top positions insane people who
foment war with a nuclear power?
Does this mean that Congress is insane for approving these appointments?
These are honest questions. Assuming we avoid the Trump-promised Syrian showdown, how long
before the insane Trump regime orchestrates another crisis?
The entire world should understand that because of the existence of the insane Trump regime,
the continued existence of life on earth is very much in question.
People such as Stephen Cohen and myself, who were actively involved throughout the entirety
of the Cold War, are astonished at the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the US government
and its European vassals toward Russia. Nothing as irresponsible as what we have witnessed
since the Clinton regime and which has worsened dramatically under the Obama and Trump regimes
would have been imaginable during the Cold War. In this brief video, Stephen Cohen describes to
Tucker Carlson the extreme danger of the present situation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvK1Eu01Lz0
Published on Apr 13, 2018
The failure of political leadership throughout the Western world is total. Such total
failure is likely to prove deadly to life on earth.
"... But when such poison gas attacks are mere false flags, or by the new term, "false news", and are used to provoke war, perhaps an all annihilating war, then humanity has turned to what it never should have become – a lowly-lowly herd of brainless zombies. ..."
"... And the saga continues. The saga to drum up war. That's the purpose of it all. Nothing else – Russia, the evil nation, led by an evil leader, must be subdued and conquered. ..."
"... a totally and unprofessionally staged event. As Russian military quickly discovered and reported. ..."
"... The western aggressors, who seek a reason to mass bomb Syria into even more rubble, causing even more death and destitution ..."
"... the US economy is based on war, is based on weapon manufacturing and international banking which finances weapon manufacturing and the exploitation of mineral resources coveted by weapon manufacturing. ..."
"... But, please, do take all your fakeness, from money, to lies, to hypocrisy and more lies and coercion and sanctions and blackmail with you – never to surface again. And give peace a chance – for those who survive your (almost) terminal assault on humanity. ..."
Poison gas is not only deadly, it often provokes a slow suffocating death. That, perpetrated
on innocent children, is particularly cruel.
But when such poison gas attacks are mere false flags, or by the new term, "false news",
and are used to provoke war, perhaps an all annihilating war, then humanity has turned to what
it never should have become – a lowly-lowly herd of brainless zombies.
Is that what we have become – brainless, greedy, selfish beings, no sense of
solidarity, no respect for other beings; I am not even talking about humans, but any living
being.
Poison gas, the weapon of choice for fear.
Poisoning in Salisbury of the former Russian double-agent, Sergei Skripal and his daughter,
Yulia, visiting her dad from Moscow. Poisoning with a nerve gas, called Novichok that was
allegedly made in Russia. In the meantime, we know that nerve gas made in the former Soviet
Union, now non-existent in Russia, was military grade and deadly. The gas used for the alleged
attack was not deadly. We also know by now that the UK – all of their highest officials,
from PM May down the ladder, lied so miserably that they will have a hard time recovering. It
will backfire. Unlike the foreign secretary, Johnson boy pretended their secret bio-gas /
bio-weapon laboratory Porton Down, just 13 km down the road from Salisbury, where the pair was
allegedly found unconscious on a park bench, assured him the gas was made in Russia. Alas, the
laboratories chief chemists testified later to the media that they could not be sure that the
substance was made in Russia. No, of course not.
In fact, Porton Down, working in close collaboration with the CIA, is a highly sophisticated
chemical warfare facility that can easily make the gas themselves – at the grades they
please, deadly or not so deadly, if it should serve a "false news" purpose – which this
did.
Were father and daughter indeed poisoned? – This is a legitimate question. Who has
seen them since the alleged poisoning occurred on 28 March? – They disappeared from the
public eye. Apparently, they are both recovering, Yulia having been released from hospital a
few days ago, but has not been seen by anyone in public, nor been able to talk to the media,
lest she could say "something" the public is not allowed to know. Her father is also recovering
and may be released soon – released from where? – Is this all a farce?
An aunt talked to Yulia from Moscow, where she noticed that Yulia was not free to talk. The
aunt wanted to visit her niece in the UK but was obviously denied a visa.
Where are father and daughter? – Washington has "offered" them a new home and new
identity in the US, to avoid further poisoning attempts how ridiculous! A blind man or woman
must see that this is another farce, or more correctly, an outright abduction. The two won't
have a chance to resist. They are just taken away – not to talk anymore to anyone ever.
– That's the way the story goes. The lies are protected, and the "Russia did it" syndrome
will prevail – prevail in the dumb folded public, in the herd of pigs that we all have
become, as Goebbels would say.
And the saga continues. The saga to drum up war. That's the purpose of it all. Nothing
else – Russia, the evil nation, led by an evil leader, must be subdued and
conquered. But the empire needs the public for their support. And the empire is almost
there. It disposes of a vicious media corporate army – that lies flagrantly about
anything that money can buy. It's like spitting in the face of the world, and nobody seems to
care, or worse, even to notice.
* * *
On the other side of the Mediterranean is Syria. A vast and noble country, Syria,
with a leader who truly loves his people and country, a leader who has despite a foreign
induced war – not civil war – a proxy war, instigated and funded by
Washington and its vassal allies in Europe and the Middle East; Syria, a highly educated
socialist country that has shared the benefit of her resources, free education, free medical
services, free basic infrastructure, with her people. This Syria must fall. Such strength
cannot be tolerated by the all-dominating west. Like Iraq and Libya, also socialist countries
once-upon-a-time, and like Syria, secular Muslim nations, sharing their countries wealth with
the people, such countries must fall.
According to Pentagon planners and those Zion-neofascist thinktanks that designed the PNAC
(Plan for a New American Century), as the chief instrument of US foreign policy, we know since
Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Allied commander and Chief of NATO in Europe (1997-2000)
talked to Democracy Now in 2007, saying that within 5 years seven countries must fall, one of
them is Syria.
Since 2011, the Syrian people have been bombarded by US and NATO and Saudi funded
terrorists, causing tens of thousands of deaths, and millions of refugees. Now, even more
blatantly, US bases are vying to occupying the northern third of Syria, totally illegally, but
nobody says beep. Not even the UN.
The recent fake gas attack on Douma outside of Damascus, has allegedly killed 80 to 120
people, mostly women and children.
Of course, that sells best in the propaganda theatre – women and children. Strangely,
like last time the infamous White Helmets discovered the gas victims, including a gas
canister-like bomb laying on a bed, having been shot through the roof of a house a totally
and unprofessionally staged event. As Russian military quickly discovered and reported.
They called on an independent investigation, one that could not be bought and corrupted by
Washington. President Assad invited a team of investigators to inspect the scene.
Instead of heeding this invitation, Trump, the bully, calls Mr. Assad an "animal" and a
"monster", twittering his brainless aggressions throughout the world. Tell you what, Mr. Trump,
Bashar al-Assad is a far better human being than you are a monster. You and your dark handlers
don't even deserve being called human. Mr. Assad has regard and respect for his people,
attempts to protect them and has so far succeeded with the help of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah,
recovering the last bits of Syrian territory from the terrorist, except of course, the northern
part, where the chief terrorist and the world's only rogue state has itself installed, the US
of A. – Why in the world would Mr. Assad choose to gas his own people? Especially, when
he is winning the war? – People, ask yourself, cui bono (who benefits?) and the
answer is simple: The western aggressors, who seek a reason to mass bomb Syria into even
more rubble, causing even more death and destitution . That's who.
While you, Donald, and those monsters that direct you from behind the scenes, have no, but
absolutely no respect for your people, for any people on this globe, for that matter, not even
for your kind, for your greed-no-end kind of elite, as you bring the world to the brink of an
all-destructive, all killing annihilating war.
Since the other fake event, 9/11, we are, of course, already in a "soft version" of WWIII,
but that's not enough, the United States needs a hard war, so badly it doesn't shy away from
destroying itself. That's how blinded your own propaganda has made you Americans, you generals,
you corporate "leaders" (sic-sic) – and all you Congress puppets. That is the sheer
truth. You better read this and wake up. Otherwise your dead sentence is hastened by your own
greed and ignorance.
Both Russia and the US drafted a Security Council Resolution – which of course are
both not approved, with Nikki Haley lambasting Russia, accusing them of being responsible for
the countless deaths in Syria – pointing again to the children and women, making up the
majority. Again, it sells best in the world of psychological propaganda, while evil Nikki Haley
knows very well who has caused all these deaths by the millions, destitution and refugees by
the millions, tens of millions throughout the Middle East and the world – her own
country, directly or through NATO, the European puppets allies and proxy wars, paid and funded
by Washington and by elbow-twisting her vassals.
On 9 April – UNSC – while Nikki Haley, repeats and over-repeats her lies and
fake accusations, the Russian Ambassador to the UN, Mr. Vassily Nebenzia, listens. And then in
a twenty-minute statement of sheer intelligence, he dismantles all the lies, and lays bare the
truth, about all the fakeness being played out internationally. The depth with which he
addresses the assembly is concise and so brilliant, none of his UK, French and German
counterparts could have ever come close to a statement of this magnitude and excellence. Even
Ms. Haley can't help glancing over ever-so
often to Vassily Nebenzia, as he speaks . Her eyes reveal some kind of hidden admiration
for what he says. – After all, she can't be as dumb as she is paid for to look and
sound.
By now anybody who dares not just reading and listening to the mainstream presstitute "fake
news", but has the courage to dig into the truth news, RT, TeleSur, CGTN, PressTV – and a
few others, or websites like Global Research, The Saker Blog, ICH, NEO, Greanville Post
CounterCurrent, Dissident Voice and many other trustworthy sources – knows about the lies
and the only, but the very only purpose these false flags cum false news serve:
Provoking a war with Russia, subjugating and dividing Syria, and the Middle East and becoming
the hegemonic masters of the universe.
For the simple reason, and hardly anybody talks or writes about it – the US
economy is based on war, is based on weapon manufacturing and international banking which
finances weapon manufacturing and the exploitation of mineral resources coveted by weapon
manufacturing.
The entire war industry with all its associated civil services and industries, of banking,
electronics, aviation, mining . makes up more than half of the US GDP – but of course,
it's never broken down that way. The chosen people will control the world. Well, they do
already – financially at least the western part of our globe. But it's not enough. They
will not stop, before they burry themselves in their own-dug graves, or rather in one massive
mass-grave. But, please, do take all your fakeness, from money, to lies, to hypocrisy and
more lies and coercion and sanctions and blackmail with you – never to surface again. And
give peace a chance – for those who survive your (almost) terminal assault on
humanity.
Yet here is the even more unexplainable part of this sorry episode that amounts to the Deep
State waging the Donald. The remaining rebels capitulated on Sunday and the government re-upped
the evacuation deal. That is, the remnants of Jaish al-Islam are now all dead or have boarded
busses--along with their families---and are already in Idlib province.
That's right. There is no opposition left in Douma and it has been liberated by the Syrian
army, including release of the 3,200 pro-government hostages who had been paraded around the
town in cages by the Saudi Arabia funded warriors of Islam who had terrorized it.
According to the Syrian government, no traces of chemicals or even bodies have been found.
They could be lying, of course, but with the OPCW investigators on the way to Douma who in
their right mind would not wait for an assessment of what actually happened last Saturday?
That is, if you are not caught up in the anti-Russian hysteria that has engulfed official
Washington and the mainstream media. Indeed, the Syrian government has now even welcomed the
international community to come to Douma, where the Russians claim there is absolutely nothing
to see:
Speaking with EuroNews, Russia's ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizov, said "Russian
military specialists have visited this region, walked on those streets, entered those houses,
talked to local doctors and visited the only functioning hospital in Douma, including its
basement where reportedly the mountains of corpses pile up. There was not a single corpse and
even not a single person who came in for treatment after the attack."
"But we've seen them on the video!" responds EuroNews correspondent Andrei Beketov.
"There was no chemical attack in Douma, pure and simple," responds Chizov. "We've seen
another staged event. There are personnel, specifically trained - and you can guess by whom -
amongst the so-called White Helmets, who were already caught in the act with staged
videos."
In short, if they are lying, it would not be hard to ascertain. Presumably, the Donald could
even send Jared Kushner--flack jacket and all---to investigate what actually happened at
Douma.
Alas, the Donald has apparently opted for war instead in a desperate maneuver to keep the
Deep State at bay.
Either way, we think he's about done, and in Part 2 we will explore why what's about to
happen next should be known to the history books, if there are any, as "Mueller's War".
At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Pompeo boasted that "the Russians met their
match. A couple hundred Russians were killed," referring to a US massacre of military
contractors back in February. Pompeo insisted these killings prove Trump's toughness on
Russia.
The comments threaten to make this incident a bigger diplomatic row. The February 7 incident
came after the US claimed Kurds had come under attack. In reality, an artillery barrage landed
half a kilometer from a Kurdish base, and the US reacted by killing
in excess of 200 pro-Syrian government fighters, declaring the killings "self-defense."
At the time, there were concerns Russian citizens were among the slain, and US officials
ultimately said "scores" of the dead may have been Russian. Now, Pompeo appears to be insisting
they were all Russians, and that the killings were about being "tough" of the Russian
government.
Russia's government denied any knowledge of the incident at the time, and it appears the
slain were private contractors working for the Syrian government, and not in concert with
Russia's government itself. That makes targeting them on the basis of their nationality
potentially even more problematic.
"... Next, there was an consensus view that pleading, reasoning, asking for fairness or justice, or even for common sense, was futile. The Russian view is simple: the West is ruled by a gang of thugs supported by an infinitely lying and hypocritical media while the general public in the West has been hopelessly zombified. The authority of the so-called "western values" (democracy, rule of law, human rights, etc.) in Russia is now roadkill. ..."
"... There was also a broad consensus that the US elites are not taking Russia seriously and that the current Russian diplomatic efforts are futile (especially towards the UK). The only way to change that would be with very harsh measures, including diplomatic and military ones. Everybody agreed that talking with Boris Johnson would be not only a total waste of time, but a huge mistake. ..."
"... Reach your own conclusions. I will just say that none of the "experts" was representing, or working for, the Russian government. Government experts not only have better info, they also know that the lives of millions of people depend on their decisions, which is not the case for the so-called "experts". Still, the words of these experts do reflect, I think, a growing popular consensus. ..."
They all agreed that the AngloZionist (of course, they used the words "USA" or "Western
countries") was only going to further escalate and that the only way to stop this is to
deliberately bring the world right up to the point were a full-scale US-Russian war was
imminent or even locally started.
They said that it was fundamentally wrong for Russia to reply
with just words against Western actions. Interestingly, there also was a consensus that even a
full-scale US attack on Syria would be too late to change the situation on the ground, that it
was way too late for that.
Another interesting conclusion was that the only real question for
Russia is whether Russia would be better off delaying this maximal crisis or accelerating the
events and making everything happen sooner. There was no consensus on that.
Next, there was
an consensus view that pleading, reasoning, asking for fairness or justice, or even for common
sense, was futile. The Russian view is simple: the West is ruled by a gang of thugs supported
by an infinitely lying and hypocritical media while the general public in the West has been
hopelessly zombified. The authority of the so-called "western values" (democracy, rule of law,
human rights, etc.) in Russia is now roadkill.
There was also a broad consensus that
the US elites are not taking Russia seriously and that the current Russian diplomatic efforts
are futile (especially towards the UK). The only way to change that would be with very harsh
measures, including diplomatic and military ones. Everybody agreed that talking with Boris
Johnson would be not only a total waste of time, but a huge mistake.
To my amazement, the
notion that Russia might have to sink a few USN ships or use Kalibers on US forces in the
Middle-East was viewed as a real, maybe inevitable, option. Really – nobody objected.
Reach your own conclusions. I will just say that none of the "experts" was representing, or
working for, the Russian government. Government experts not only have better info, they also
know that the lives of millions of people depend on their decisions, which is not the case for
the so-called "experts". Still, the words of these experts do reflect, I think, a growing
popular consensus.
"... If the chemical attack on Douma really is fictitious – as the Russians insist it is – then for the first time their control of the crime scene puts the Russians in a strong position to prove it. ..."
"... The point was made forcefully by Russia's UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia at the UN Security Council session today, and it also received indirect backing from the UN Secretariat, who admitted that they could not confirm that a chemical weapons attack had happened, and who called upon all sides to show restraint until a proper investigation of the incident had taken place. ..."
"... By now it should surprise no-one that the fact that the Russians are in control of the crime scene and may on this occasion be able to prove conclusively that no chemical weapons attack happened in Douma, instead of deterring a US attack, is actually making it more likely. ..."
"... This is because the credibility of the various 'witnesses' to the Douma attack – who are of course the same witnesses who were previously 'witnesses' to the 2013 East Ghouta and the 2017 Khan Sheikhoun attacks – is now on the line, as is the credibility of those Western governments – first and foremost the US government – who believed or who pretended to believe them. ..."
"... We call upon Western politicians to scale down their hawkish rhetoric, to meaningfully consider possible repercussions and to cease the reckless spill over of threats to global security. What military misadventures of the West brought about is well known to us if we consider the examples of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya. ..."
"... And nobody invested you with the power to act as policemen of the world and as investigators, procurators, judges and executioners all at the same time. ..."
"... We call for your return to the legal fold to comply with the U N Charter and to jointly tackle problems that arise, rather than attempting at each step to advance your egotistical geopolitical game. All of the energy needs to be focused on support for the political process in Syria, to which it is necessary to constructively pull the efforts of all influential players. Russia always stands ready to engage in such cooperation ..."
"... RobinG posted Haley's UN diatribe from yesterday. She hammered away at the "pictures of dead babies" theme. What an embarrassment to the American people. ..."
For the sake of world peace – I am beginning to think that impeaching Trump is a good idea. He is doing harm to the stability
of the world. He truly is a bull in a china shop. Upsetting America's internal status quo is a good thing – but upsetting the
worlds equilibrium is another. The only country in the world that Trump has not pissed off – is Israel – how totally and completely
disgusting.
As a result of the total surrender of the Jihadis previously in control of Douma on Sunday, it is the Russian military who
this time are in control of the alleged crime scene.
This has put the Russians in a position where for the first time they are able both to invite the OPCW inspectors to attend
the crime scene and to provide them with protection if they are there, whilst at the same time monitoring and supervising their
work.
If the chemical attack on Douma really is fictitious – as the Russians insist it is – then for the first time their control
of the crime scene puts the Russians in a strong position to prove it.
The point was made forcefully by Russia's UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia at the UN Security Council session today, and
it also received indirect backing from the UN Secretariat, who admitted that they could not confirm that a chemical weapons attack
had happened, and who called upon all sides to show restraint until a proper investigation of the incident had taken place.
Nebenzia followed this up by inviting OPCW inspectors to the scene as early as tomorrow Tuesday.
By now it should surprise no-one that the fact that the Russians are in control of the crime scene and may on this occasion
be able to prove conclusively that no chemical weapons attack happened in Douma, instead of deterring a US attack, is actually
making it more likely.
This is because the credibility of the various 'witnesses' to the Douma attack – who are of course the same witnesses who
were previously 'witnesses' to the 2013 East Ghouta and the 2017 Khan Sheikhoun attacks – is now on the line, as is the credibility
of those Western governments – first and foremost the US government – who believed or who pretended to believe them.
I would add that not only is the credibility of the US government and of other Western governments on the line. So is the credibility
of Western journalists who also believed or pretended to believe the 'witnesses'.
Ron Unz posted a video of the Russian envoy's speech at UN today (Apr 11 18).
Rough notes from near the end to the conclusion of his remarks:
"And you are misguided if you think tha thou have friends So called friends of yours are only those who cannot say no to you.
And this is the sole criterion for friendship in your understanding . Russia has friends and unlike yourselves we do not have
adversaries.
We do not view the world through that prism. And yes, international terrorism, that is our enemy. However, we continue to propose
cooperation. This need to be respectful and mutual cooperation, it needs to go towards resolving real and not imagined problems.
And you should be just as interested as we are in such a cooperation.
///
26 min: As permanent members of the Security Council, we bear the main responsibility for the maintenance of international
peace and security. Through the relevant channels, we already conveyed to the US that armed force under mendacious pretexts against
Syria, where, at the request of the legitimate government of the country, Russian troops have been deployed, could lead to grave
repercussions.
We call upon Western politicians to scale down their hawkish rhetoric, to meaningfully consider possible repercussions
and to cease the reckless spill over of threats to global security. What military misadventures of the West brought about is well
known to us if we consider the examples of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya.
And nobody invested you with the power to act as policemen of the world and as investigators, procurators, judges and executioners
all at the same time.
We call for your return to the legal fold to comply with the U N Charter and to jointly tackle problems that arise, rather
than attempting at each step to advance your egotistical geopolitical game. All of the energy needs to be focused on support for
the political process in Syria, to which it is necessary to constructively pull the efforts of all influential players. Russia
always stands ready to engage in such cooperation .
To conclude, Mr. President, I wish to take this opportunity to request an open briefing of the Security Council on the outcomes
of the UN assessment mission in Raqqa and the situation in the Rahman camp. We see the way of members of the Commission attempting
to create a smoke screen around this issue, which is a result of their actions in Syria, including the operations to rain Raqqa
to the ground through bombings. No chemical provocations will divert attention from this, from what you've done. Thank you.
–
Nikki Haley was in the room and listening.
RobinG posted Haley's UN diatribe from yesterday. She hammered away at the "pictures of dead babies" theme. What an embarrassment
to the American people.
Theresa May as more evil than Bill Clinton? That will sound odd to some, but I think it is
true. Hillary is the pure evil half of the Clinton marriage. Bill is simply charming and
filled with a desire to amass enough power to have a group adore him as he finds new panties
to explore.
May is English, and she has the very long line of Brit Empire secret service evil at her
disposal. And her move is a bold one. What it means is that she is signaling that at least if
she is PM, the UK could replace the US as Fearless Leader of the actual New World Order...
There is a special breed or neocon female warmonger in the USA -- chickenhawks who feed from crumbs of military industrial complex.
Is not Haley a replays of Samantha Powell ? The article remains mostly right is you simply replace the names...
Of cause, Haley is a little bit more obnoxious and has no respect for truth whatsoever. she can call while to be black with
straight face.
Notable quotes:
"... Though Power is a big promoter of the "responsibility to protect" or "R2P" she operates with glaring selectivity in deciding who deserves protection as she advances a neocon/liberal interventionist agenda. She is turning "human rights" into an excuse not to resolve conflicts but rather to make them bloodier. ..."
"... Thus, in Power's view, the overthrow and punishment of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad takes precedence over shielding Alawites and other minorities from the likely consequence of Sunni-extremist vengeance. And she has sided with the ethnic Ukrainians in their slaughter of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. ..."
"... For instance, in a March 10, 2003 debate on MSNBC's "Hardball" show -- just nine days before the invasion -- Power said, "An American intervention likely will improve the lives of the Iraqis. Their lives could not get worse, I think it's quite safe to say." However, the lives of Iraqis actually did get worse. Indeed, hundreds of thousands stopped living altogether and a sectarian war continues to tear the country apart to this day. ..."
"... Similarly, regarding Libya, Power was one of the instigators of the U.S.-supported military intervention in 2011 which was disguised as an "R2P" mission to protect civilians in eastern Libya where dictator Muammar Gaddafi had identified the infiltration of terrorist groups. ..."
"... Urged on by then-National Security Council aide Power and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama agreed to support a military mission that quickly morphed into a "regime change" operation. Gaddafi's troops were bombed from the air and Gaddafi was eventually hunted down, tortured and murdered. ..."
Exclusive: Liberal interventionist Samantha Power along with neocon allies appears to have prevailed in the struggle over
how President Obama will conduct his foreign policy in his last months in office, promoting aggressive strategies that will lead
to more death and destruction, writes Robert Parry.
Propaganda and genocide almost always go hand in hand, with the would-be aggressor stirring up resentment often by assuming the
pose of a victim simply acting in self-defense and then righteously inflicting violence on the targeted group.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power understands this dynamic having
written about the
1994 genocide in Rwanda where talk radio played a key role in getting Hutus to kill Tutsis. Yet, Power is now leading propaganda
campaigns laying the groundwork for two potential ethnic slaughters: against the Alawites, Shiites, Christians and other minorities
in Syria and against the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine.
Though Power is a big promoter of the "responsibility to protect" or "R2P" she operates with glaring selectivity in deciding who
deserves protection as she advances a neocon/liberal interventionist agenda. She is turning "human rights" into an excuse not to
resolve conflicts but rather to make them bloodier.
Thus, in Power's view, the overthrow and punishment of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad takes precedence over shielding Alawites
and other minorities from the likely consequence of Sunni-extremist vengeance. And she has sided with the ethnic Ukrainians in their
slaughter of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
In both cases, Power spurns pragmatic negotiations that could avert worsening violence as she asserts a black-and-white depiction
of these crises. More significantly, her strident positions appear to have won the day with President Barack Obama, who has relied
on Power as a foreign policy adviser since his 2008 campaign.
Power's self-righteous approach to human rights deciding that her side wears white hats and the other side wears black hats is
a bracing example of how "human rights activists" have become purveyors of death and destruction or what some critics have deemed
" the weaponization
of human rights. "
We saw this pattern in Iraq in 2002-03 when many "liberal humanitarians" jumped on the pro-war bandwagon in favoring an invasion
to overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein. Power herself didn't support the invasion although she was
rather mealy-mouthed in
her skepticism and sought to hedge her career bets amid the rush to war.
For instance, in a March 10, 2003 debate on MSNBC's "Hardball" show -- just nine days before the invasion -- Power said, "An American
intervention likely will improve the lives of the Iraqis. Their lives could not get worse, I think it's quite safe to say." However, the lives of Iraqis actually did get worse. Indeed, hundreds of thousands stopped living altogether and a sectarian war
continues to tear the country apart to this day.
Power in Power
Similarly, regarding Libya, Power was one of the instigators of the U.S.-supported military intervention in 2011 which was disguised
as an "R2P" mission to protect civilians in eastern Libya where dictator Muammar Gaddafi had identified the infiltration of terrorist
groups.
Urged on by then-National Security Council aide Power and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama agreed to support a military
mission that quickly morphed into a "regime change" operation. Gaddafi's troops were bombed from the air and Gaddafi was eventually
hunted down, tortured and murdered.
The result, however, was not a bright new day of peace and freedom for Libyans but the disintegration of Libya into a failed state
with violent extremists, including elements of the Islamic State, seizing control of swaths of territory and murdering civilians.
It turns out that Gaddafi was not wrong about some of his enemies.
Today, Power is a leading force opposing meaningful negotiations over Syria and Ukraine, again staking out "moralistic" positions
rejecting possible power-sharing with Assad in Syria and blaming the Ukraine crisis entirely on the Russians. She doesn't seem all
that concerned about impending genocides against Assad's supporters in Syria or ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
In 2012, at a meeting hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, former U.S. Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith
predicted "the next genocide
in the world will likely be against the Alawites in Syria" -- a key constituency behind Assad's secular regime. But Power has continued
to insist that the top priority is Assad's removal.
Similarly, Power has shown little sympathy for members of Ukraine's ethnic Russian minority who saw their elected President Viktor
Yanukovych overthrown in a Feb. 22, 2014 coup spearheaded by neo-Nazis and other right-wing nationalists who had gained effective
control of the Maidan protests. Many of these extremists want an ethnically pure Ukrainian state.
Since then, neo-Nazi units, such as the Azov battalion, have been Kiev's tip of the spear in slaughtering thousands of ethnic
Russians in the east and driving millions from their homes, essentially an ethnic-cleansing campaign in eastern Ukraine.
A Propaganda Speech
Yet, Power traveled to Kiev to deliver a one-sided
propaganda speech on June 11, portraying the post-coup Ukrainian regime simply as a victim of "Russian aggression."
Despite the key role of neo-Nazis
acknowledged even by the U.S.
House of Representatives Power uttered not one word about Ukrainian military abuses which have included reports of death squad
operations targeting ethnic Russians and other Yanukovych supporters.
Skipping over the details of the U.S.-backed and Nazi-driven coup of Feb. 22, 2014, Power traced the conflict instead to "February
2014, when Russia's little green men first started appearing in Crimea." She added that the United Nations' "focus on Ukraine in
the Security Council is important, because it gives me the chance on behalf of the United States to lay out the mounting evidence
of Russia's aggression, its obfuscation, and its outright lies. America is clear-eyed when it comes to seeing the truth about Russia's
destabilizing actions in your country."
Power continued: "The message of the United States throughout this Moscow-manufactured conflict and
the message you heard from President
Obama and other world leaders at last week's meeting of the G7 has never wavered: if Russia continues to disregard the sovereignty
and territorial integrity of Ukraine; and if Russia continues to violate the rules upon which international peace and security rest
then the United States will continue to raise the costs on Russia.
"And we will continue to rally other countries to do the same, reminding them that their silence or inaction in the face of Russian
aggression will not placate Moscow, it will only embolden it.
"But there is something more important that is often lost in the international discussion about Russia's efforts to impose its
will on Ukraine. And that is you the people of Ukraine and your right to determine the course of your own country's future. Or, as
one of the great rallying cries of the Maidan put it: Ukraina po-nad u-se! Ukraine above all else!" [Applause.]
Power went on: "Let me begin with what we know brought people out to the Maidan in the first place. We've all heard a good number
of myths about this. One told by the Yanukovych government and its Russian backers at the time was that the Maidan protesters were
pawns of the West, and did not speak for the 'real' Ukraine.
"A more nefarious myth peddled by Moscow after Yanukovych's fall was that Euromaidan had been engineered by Western capitals in
order to topple a democratically-elected government."
Of course, neither of Power's points was actually a "myth." For instance, the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy was
sponsoring scores of anti-government activists and media operations -- and NED President Carl Gershman had deemed Ukraine "the biggest
prize," albeit a stepping stone toward ousting Russian President Vladimir Putin. [See Consortiumnews.com's "
A Shadow US Foreign Policy ."]
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland was collaborating with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt how to
"midwife" the change in government with Nuland picking the future leaders of Ukraine "Yats is the guy" referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk
who was installed as prime minister after the coup. [See Consortiumnews.com's "
The Neocons: Masters of Chaos ."]
The coup itself occurred after Yanukovych pulled back the police to prevent worsening violence.
Armed neo-Nazi and right-wing militias,
organized as "sotins" or 100-man units, then took the offensive and overran government buildings. Yanukovych and other officials
fled for their lives, with Yanukovych narrowly avoiding assassination. In the days following the coup, armed thugs essentially controlled
the government and brutally intimidated any political resistance.
Inventing 'Facts'
But that reality had no place in Power's propaganda speech. Instead, she said:
"The facts tell a different story. As you remember well, then-President Yanukovych abandoned Kyiv of his own accord, only hours
after signing an agreement with opposition leaders that would have led to early elections and democratic reforms.
"And it was only after Yanukovych fled the capital that 328 of the 447 members of the democratically-elected Rada voted to strip
him of his powers including 36 of the 38 members of his own party in parliament at the time. Yanukovych then vanished for several
days, only to eventually reappear little surprise in Russia.
"As is often the case, these myths reveal more about the myth makers than they do about the truth. Moscow's fable was designed
to airbrush the Ukrainian people and their genuine aspirations and demands out of the Maidan, by claiming the movement was fueled
by outsiders.
"Yet, as you all know by living through it and as was clear even to those of us watching your courageous stand from afar the Maidan
was made in Ukraine. A Ukraine of university students and veterans of the Afghan war. Of Ukrainian, Russian, and Tatar speakers.
Of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. "
Power went on with her rhapsodic version of events: "Given the powerful interests that benefited from the corrupt system, achieving
a full transformation was always going to be an uphill battle. And that was before Russian troops occupied Crimea, something the
Kremlin denied at the time, but has since admitted; and it was before Russia began training, arming, bankrolling, and fighting alongside
its separatist proxies in eastern Ukraine, something the Kremlin continues to deny.
"Suddenly, the Ukrainian people faced a battle on two fronts: combating corruption and overhauling broken institutions on the
inside; while simultaneously defending against aggression and destabilization from the outside.
"I don't have to tell you the immense strain that these battles have placed upon you. You feel it in the young men and women,
including some of your family members and friends, who have volunteered or been drafted into the military people who could be helping
build up their nation, but instead are risking their lives to defend it against Russian aggression.
"You feel it in the conflict's impact on your country's economy as instability makes it harder for Ukrainian businesses to attract
foreign investment, deepens inflation, and depresses families' wages. It is felt in the undercurrent of fear in cities like Kharkiv
where citizens have been the victims of multiple bomb attacks, the most lethal of which killed four people, including two teenage
boys, at a rally celebrating the first anniversary of Euromaidan.
"And the impact is felt most directly by the people living in the conflict zone. According to the UN, at least 6,350 people have
been killed in the violence driven by Russia and the separatists including 625 women and children and an additional 1,460 people
are missing; 15,775 people have been wounded. And an estimated 2 million people have been displaced by this conflict. And the real
numbers of killed, missing, wounded, and displaced are likely higher, according to the UN, due to its limited access to areas controlled
by the separatists."
One-Sided Account
Pretty much everything in Power's propaganda speech was blamed on the Russians along with the ethnic Russians and other Ukrainians
resisting the imposition of the new U.S.-backed order. She also ignored the will of the people of Crimea who voted overwhelmingly
in a referendum to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia.
The closest she came to criticizing the current regime in Kiev was to note that "investigations into serious crimes such as the
violence in the Maidan and in Odessa have been sluggish, opaque, and marred by serious errors suggesting not only a lack of competence,
but also a lack of will to hold the perpetrators accountable."
Yet, even there, Power failed to note the growing evidence that the neo-Nazis were likely behind the crucial sniper attacks on
Feb. 20, 2014, that killed both police and protesters and touched off the chaos that led to the coup two days later. [A worthwhile
documentary on this mystery is " Maidan Massacre ."]
Nor, did Power spell out that neo-Nazis from the Maidan set fire to the Trade Union Building in Odessa on May 2, 2014,
burning alive scores of ethnic Russians
while spray-painting the building with pro-Nazi graffiti, including hailing the "Galician SS," the Ukrainian auxiliary that helped
Adolf Hitler's SS carry out the Holocaust in Ukraine.
Listening to Power's speech you might not even have picked up that she was obliquely criticizing the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev.
Also, by citing a few touching stories of pro-coup Ukrainians who had died in the conflict, Power implicitly dehumanized the far
larger number of ethnic Russians who opposed the overthrow of their elected president and have been killed by Kiev's brutal "anti-terrorism
operation."
Use of Propaganda
In my nearly four decades covering Washington, I have listened to and read many speeches like the one delivered by Samantha Power.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan would give similar propaganda speeches justifying the slaughter of peasants and workers in
Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, where the massacres of Mayan Indians were later deemed a "genocide." [See Consortiumnews.com's
" How Reagan Promoted Genocide
."]
Regardless of the reality on the ground, the speeches always made the U.S.-backed side the "good guys" and the other side the
"bad guys" even when "our side" included CIA-affiliated "death squads" and U.S.-equipped military forces slaughtering tens of thousands
of civilians.
During the 1990s, more propaganda speeches were delivered by President George H.W. Bush regarding Panama and Iraq and by President
Bill Clinton regarding Kosovo and Yugoslavia. Then, last decade, the American people were inundated with more propaganda rhetoric
from President George W. Bush justifying the invasion of Iraq and the expansion of the endless "war on terror."
Generally speaking, during much of his first term, Obama was more circumspect in his rhetoric, but he, too, has slid into propaganda-speak
in the latter half of his presidency as he shed his "realist" foreign policy tendencies in favor of "tough-guy/gal" rhetoric favored
by "liberal interventionists," such as Power, and neoconservatives, such as Nuland and her husband Robert Kagan (whom
a chastened Obama invited to
a White House lunch last year).
But the difference between the propaganda of Reagan, Bush-41, Clinton and Bush-43 was that it focused on conflicts in which the
Soviet Union or Russia might object but would likely not be pushed to the edge of nuclear war, nothing as provocative as what the
Obama administration has done in Ukraine, now including dispatching U.S. military advisers.
The likes of Power, Nuland and Obama are not just justifying wars that leave devastation, death and disorder in their wake in
disparate countries around the world, but they are fueling a war on Russia's border.
That was made clear by the end of Power's speech in which she declared: "Ukraine, you may still be bleeding from pain. An aggressive
neighbor may be trying to tear your nation to pieces. Yet you are strong and defiant. You, Ukraine, are standing tall for your freedom.
And if you stand tall together no kleptocrat, no oligarch, and no foreign power can stop you."
There is possibly nothing more reckless than what has emerged as Obama's late-presidential foreign policy, what amounts to a plan
to destabilize Russia and seek "regime change" in the overthrow of Russian President Putin.
Rather than take Putin up on his readiness to cooperate with Obama in trouble spots, such as the Syrian civil war and Iran's nuclear
program, "liberal interventionist" hawks like Power and neocons like Nuland with Obama in tow have chosen confrontation and have
used extreme propaganda to effectively shut the door on negotiation and compromise.
Yet, as with previous neocon/liberal-interventionist schemes, this one lacks on-the-ground realism. Even if it were possible to
so severely damage the Russian economy and to activate U.S.-controlled "non-governmental organizations" to help drive Putin from
office, that doesn't mean a Washington-friendly puppet would be installed in the Kremlin.
Another possible outcome would be the emergence of an extreme Russian nationalist suddenly controlling the nuclear codes and willing
to use them. So, when ambitious ideologues like Power and Nuland get control of U.S. foreign policy in such a sensitive area, what
they're playing with is the very survival of life on planet Earth the ultimate genocide.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in
print here or as an e-book
(from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ). You also can order Robert Parry's trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing
operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America's Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer,
click here .
incontinent reader , June 15, 2015 at 6:14 pm
It's too bad that people like Nuland and Power have not not been subjected to a retributive justice in which they would be
forced to feel the same pain that they inflict, or, if that is too much to ask, then just to 'disappear (quietly) in the sands
of time' to save their victims from more misery.
Roberto , June 15, 2015 at 10:03 pm
These dopes have no idea that the compensation is forthcoming.
I would like to propose a new lobby that would also be based on a non-address, X Street.
X Street recognizes that the wars fought by the United States since 2001 have brought no benefit to the American people and
have only resulted in financial ruin,
NATO no longer has any raison d’etre and is needlessly provoking the Russians through its expansion. X Street calls on the
United States to dissolve the alliance.
X Street recognizes that America’s lopsided support of the state of Israel has made the United States a target of terrorism,
has weakened the US’s international standing and damaged its reputation, and has negatively impacted on the American economy.
Washington will no longer use its veto power to protect Israeli interests in the UN and other international bodies.
The United States will publicly declare its knowledge that Israel has a nuclear arsenal and will ask the Israeli government
to join the NPT regime and subject its program to IAEA inspection.
X Street believes that nation building and democracy promotion by the United States have been little more than CIA/MOSSAD covert
actions by another name that have harmed America’s reputation and international standing.
The National Endowment for Democracy should be abolished immediately.
I would think that most people have heard of near death experiences.
One feature of such experiences which has sometimes been reported, and which I find very interesting, is that of the life review,
which focuses on the deeds a person has done throughout his or her life, the motives of the deeds, and the effects of the deeds
on others. It has been reported, for instance, that people have re-experienced their deeds not only from their own perspective
but from the perspective of others whom one's deeds have affected.
There is a youtube video about this, titled The Golden Rule Dramatically Illustrated, and featuring NDE researcher Dr. Kenneth
Ring.
There are no such thing as "liberal war hawks", their policies simply based on idiocy where as the result they need to be called
"liberals", depending on kind of government that govern a corrupt and bankrupt system. American capitalism is one of those system.
These people simply lacking a vision for their understanding that they are "liberal". They might be a social liberalists when
it come to people's rights in living the way of life they chose, otherwise it was Bill Clinton who used such "liberal" idea by
politicalizing using liberalism for his gain, these people follow the same path, but they will backstab people as they have in
the past and as they do now.
michael , June 15, 2015 at 6:26 pm
If a coup had not been instigated by the west on Russia's border, installing Nazis a different more positive outcome might
be available, I am quite sure there are Ukrainians who did not want this and wanted a more independent Ukraine, but that is not
what happened! How were the Russians supposed to react? The United States has 1000 military bases around the world, border most
countries, completely encircle Iran, press right up to Russia's borders and encircle China. Again how are the Russians supposed
to React? If this was Mexico the place would be decimated by the Americans and laid to waste just like Iraq!
hbm , June 15, 2015 at 6:41 pm
Looney bleeding-heart Irishwoman with husband Arch-Neocon lunatic Cass Sunstein shaping her opinions and directing her fanaticism.
That's all one really needs to know.
Nibs , June 16, 2015 at 12:28 pm
Exactly, everywhere there is a goy neocon, just look a little further for the malign influence. You can always find it. Soros
was here too, also in the attempted "colour revolution" in Macedonia. They intend to make out like bandits, big big money. Of
course, as mentioned elsewhere, they are physical cowards and prefer to send ordinary Americans to do their fighting and bleeding
for them.
It's somewhat startling after Iraq that they are still there.
But, and forgive the conspiracy angle, I don't believe this is unconnected to the Epstein sex scandal: just see who visited and
is therefore target of blackmail.
Paulrevere01 , June 15, 2015 at 6:50 pm
and this warmonger-doppleganger-to-Nuland-Kagen is married to Grand-Censor-Cass-des-Hubris-Sunstein more black eyes for Yale
and Harvard.
dahoit , June 16, 2015 at 11:12 am
Yes,the Zionist poison ivy league strikes again,with more Zionist stool pigeons to come.Close down education for sale vs.for
knowledge,it produces zombie quislings.
Larry , June 15, 2015 at 7:12 pm
. and even if the U.S. neocon policy in Ukraine succeeds and a shooting war with Russia is somehow avoided, then the American
neocons will still neither be sated or placated. Like the bloodthirsty jackals they are, these neocons will be only emboldened,
and their next coup in Russia's natural security sphere will be the straw that breaks the nuclear camels' backs. They must be
deterred or stopped.
In some tabulations the neocon hijacking of US policy on behalf of Israel has resulted in American gifts to Iran of Iraq, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, and quite likely Israel. And that's for starters. The rest will implode and do we then have a Persian
Empire.
It looks like a lot of clouds gathering on the horizon, and I cannot say that I find much fault with Pillar's assessment.
The stakes are too high and for all the macho talk all are rightfully very weary of lighting the match.
I rather doubt that there would be much left for anyone to add to their empire. Miles of ruins and deserts, glazed by nuclear
fires do not make for very useful Imperial digs.
I just pray that we are both wrong.
Abe , June 15, 2015 at 7:58 pm
Liberal interventionism is simply left-wing neocon thinking.
“Many eyewitnesses among the Maidan protesters reported snipers firing from the Hotel Ukraina during the massacre of the
protesters, specifically, about killing eight of them. Bullet holes in trees and electricity poles on the site of the massacre
and on the walls of Zhovtnevyi Palace indicate that shots came from the direction of the hotel. There are several similar recorded
testimonies of the eyewitnesses among the protesters about shooters in October Palace and other Maidan-controlled buildings.â€
The “Snipers’ Massacre†on the Maidan in Ukraine
By Ivan Katchanovski, Ph.D.
Boris M Garsky , June 15, 2015 at 8:06 pm
There is nothing to say about Powers; no doubt where she gets her marching orders and script. However, there is no excuse for
being ignorant on the topic of her rantings. I challenge anyone, anywhere to spontaneously assemble and move 100,000 people, even
a few blocks, on 24 hours notice. If you can do it, you are the court magician exemplar. Can't be done. Never has been done; it
takes months to years of preparations and organization before implementation. Yanuckovich was the target of assassination; they
weren't taking chances. No doubt that the Russians told him to skedaddle; that his life was in danger. Doesn't sound spontaneous
to me; sounds like a well planned operation gone wrong- right initially, but wrong eventually. I think that Obama is simply posturing
until the west can figure out how to extricate themselves from another fine mess they got themselves into- AGAIN!
F. G. Sanford , June 15, 2015 at 8:26 pm
I remember during my college days watching "student government" personalities – usually rich kids with no real problems – hurl
themselves into impassioned frenzies over some issue or another. Usually, they were political science(sic) or psychology majors
who were also active in the Speech and Theater Department. The defining characteristic of their existence was to obtain a podium
from which to make impassioned pleas to their fellow students in an effort to demonstrate a proclivity for "leadership". Almost
any issue would do. Samantha Power reminds me of one of those students – ostensibly seeking a role which, if she could have her
way, would make her the prime catalyst in a pivotal issue at the epicenter of a maelstrom that steers the course of human history.
That kind of learned, practiced, studied and rehearsed narcissism doesn't always work out so well. Maybe because the most successful
examples are actually clinical sufferers of…real narcissism. When Power's 'facts' are compared to reality, the obvious conclusions
suggest a range of interpretations from delusional psychosis to criminal perjury. Or, is this a carefully crafted strategy? "Yats"
has recently resorted to the last rabbit he can pull out of a hat: he's turned on the printing presses to pay the bills, and a
currency collapse is imminent. The Nazi factions are impatient with the regime's lack of progress, the people are disgruntled,
those two million refugees have mostly fled to Russia for protection, Northern Europe is being inundated with prostitutes, drug
dealers and the creme de la creme of organized crime from the former Warsaw Pact countries, and in the South, refugees from NATO
destabilizations in North Africa and the Middle East have become an explosive issue. Racism, nationalism and the resurgence of
openly fascist political activity is burgeoning. Europe is boiling with rage. Has Power actually seen the writing on the wall?
If so, why not an impassioned campaign to remind the Ukrainians they have broken institutions, corrupt oligarchs, unscrupulous
kleptocrats, internal corruption and foreign aggression working against them? And by the way, they've failed to adequately investigate
those Nazi atrocities. None of this could POSSIBLY be the fault of U.S. meddling or failed diplomacy. Nope, they brought it on
themselves, but we did everything we could to try and help. The makings of TOTAL collapse are at hand, and one little fillip could
bring down the whole house of cards. So, "You Ukrainians need to stand tall for your freedoms", and if anything goes wrong, you
have nobody to blame but yourselves. Maybe Sammy isn't so delusional after all.
Gregory Kruse , June 16, 2015 at 1:01 pm
She's not delusional, she's just channeling Aleksander Mikhaajlovich Bezobrazov. I guess that does make Obama the Tsar.
Mark , June 15, 2015 at 8:53 pm
All anyone needs to understand about American foreign policy is that anything, including genocide, is not only acceptable but
promoted if it serves "America's corporate or favored campaign funding special interests". The only real principle in play for
all colluding parties -- corporate, mass media, complicit foreign governments (sycophants) and both major domestic political parties
-- is to "win" by compromising or sacrificing everything and everyone required to serve the insatiable hunger for ungodley wealth
and (abusive) power accumulation.
The entire American culture has been corrupted by propaganda and what is irrational human nature and instinct concerning these
matters -- to be accepted among our peers by following the heard -- this reality is being used by the "ruling class" to play the
public like a disposable three dollar fiddle, while they, our "rulers", impose death and destruction along with economic and military
tyranny, directly or by proxy, wherever and whenever they can get away with it.
Bob Loblaw , June 15, 2015 at 9:41 pm
Two words
Electromagnetic Pulse
One well placed warhead will cripple us to the point that we destroy ourselves.
While crude islamists can't pull it off a Russian device is within reach.
Abe , June 15, 2015 at 10:48 pm
As a human-rights entrepreneur who is also a tireless advocate of war, Samantha Power is not aberrant. Elite factions of the
human-rights industry were long ago normalized within the tightly corseted spectrum of American foreign policy.
Power advocates for what she calls "tough, principled, and engaged diplomacy." A more accurate set of adjectives would be "belligerent,
hypocritical, and domineering." The thrust of her work is to make perpetual war possible by designating genocide – real or merely
ideologically constructed – the supreme international crime, instead of war itself. (Under current international law war itself
is the "supreme international crime.") That way the U.S. can perpetually make war for the noblest of purposes without regard for
anachronisms like national sovereignty. Is it any wonder Democrats love her?
The military deployment of US-NATO forces coupled with “non-conventional warfare†â€"including covert intelligence operations,
economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime changeâ€â€" is occurring simultaneously in several regions of the world.
Central to an understanding of war, is the media campaign which grants it legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion. War has
been provided with a humanitarian mandate under NATO’s “Responsibility to Protect†(R2P). The victims of U.S. led wars are
presented as the perpetrators of war.
It sounds to me that these neocons have 2 things in common. They were all born post WW II and have not experienced any war
at home and grew up in a nice suburban area without street crimes. They NEVER were confronted with families who lost their loved
ones in US 'lost' wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan that were initiated WITHOUT UN approval and brought home young soldiers who
had lost their limps and were handicapped for the rest of their lives. But just to keep US defence industry turning out hefty
profits.
Secondly, they have watched to many Hollywood movies showing the superior US army beating the 'evil' empire (Reagan) meaning
Soviet Union. USA never honoured their agreements with Gorbachev to keep NATO out of Eastern Europe. President Putin learned his
lessons, he built a strong military with technological advanced equipment so his country will NOT be run over again by the West
such as Napoleon and Hitler did murdering 25 million Russians. President Putin and the Russians want to live in peace they have
suffered too much in the past.
It's US and its vassal NATO aggression in the World and now in Ukraine that make the Russian show their power and demonstrating
'don't fool with us' . US MSM propaganda in Europe is losing its effects and people realizing US geopolitical or colonization
aggression in the world while losing US dominance as well. Like Abraham Lincoln said: You can lie to some people all the time
and you can lie to all the people some time, but you cannot lie to all the people all the time! However with today's powerful
media TV and radio it will take some more time. But Russia's RT News is changing this and gives the audience News contradicting
US MSM propaganda such as NYT and WP which have been brainwashing the public for so long at the discretion of Washington's neocons.
And US taxpayers are paying the bill, wake up America!
Peter Loeb , June 16, 2015 at 6:46 am
DISTRACTION FROM PALESTINIAN/ISRAELI CONFLICT
Excellent profiles and analyses by Mr. Parry as we have all come
to expect.
"[Power] added that the United Nations focus on Ukraine in the
Security Council.." from Parry above.
Here one MUST add the unsaid "and never, never on Palestine/
Israel"! After all, the US has continued time and again to block
investigation by the Security Council of Israeli actions in that
sphere. Evidently Israel maintains according to Power and
many others that Israel with US support are by definition exempt
from any and all rules of international law, application to save
lives in Palestine, attempts to establish a Mideast Nuclear
Free Zone and much much more. The distraction provided
by Ukraine is not only significant for the people of Ukraine but
is cleverly designed to distract all world and domestic opinion
from the atrocities carried on daily by Israel in Palestine both
past, present and future.
-- -Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA
Gregory Kruse , June 16, 2015 at 10:28 am
She's like John Bolton in drag.
Abe , June 16, 2015 at 5:52 pm
She is the walrus, goo goo g'joob.
Sammy too "seems averse to compromise, and is apparently committed to the belief that the U.N. and international law undermine
U.S. interests" (aka Israeli interests) http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/21/boltonism
"“Remarks such as the references to the 1967 borders show Obama’s continuing lack of real appreciation for Israel’s security.â€
-- Bolton, 2011, interview for National Review online
"There will never be a sunset on America’s commitment to Israel’s security. Never.†-- Power, 2015, speech at American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference
ltr , June 16, 2015 at 11:02 am
What a thoroughly amoral person Samantha Power is, all pretense, all hypocrisy, all for selectively determining which lives
are worth allowing.
Wm. Boyce , June 16, 2015 at 11:14 am
Another example of the lack of differences between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the empire's foreign policy.
It's all about controlling regions and resources, and fueling the U.S. arms industry.
Brendan , June 16, 2015 at 4:29 pm
Samantha Power: "The facts tell a different story. As you remember well, then-President Yanukovych abandoned Kyiv of his own
accord, only hours after signing an agreement with opposition leaders that would have led to early elections and democratic reforms."
There are some glaring omissions in Power's 'facts'. She doesn't explain why Yanukovych suddenly fled Kyiv, so soon after an
agreement with opposition leaders that allowed him to remain as president for several more months.
She didn't mention the rejection of that agreement by the far-right militias who threatened to remove Yanukovych from office
by force if he did not resign by 10 am that day.
That threat might explain his sudden departure. It also might also indicate that his departure wasn't really "of his own accord".
Brendan , June 16, 2015 at 4:34 pm
Samantha Power: "And it was only after Yanukovych fled the capital that 328 of the 447 members of the democratically-elected
Rada voted to strip him of his powers "
The problem with that was that the members of parliament did not have any authority to strip the president of his powers in
the way they did. The only possible conditions to remove a presidential from office are listed in the Ukrainian constitution:
Article 108. The President of Ukraine shall exercise his powers until the assumption of office by the newly elected President
of Ukraine.
The authority of the President of Ukraine shall be subject to an early termination in cases of:
1) resignation;
2) inability to exercise presidential authority for health reasons;
3) removal from office by the procedure of impeachment;
4) his/her death.
Yanukovych was not dead and neither was he unable to exercise his presidential authority due to health reasons. He never resigned,
and in fact continued to state that he was the only legitimate president.
He was not removed from office by the procedure of impeachment, which includes a number of stages, as described in Article
111 of the constitution (see link below). The decision on the impeachment must be adopted by at least three-quarters of the members
of parliament. The number given by Samantha Power was less than three-quarters.
Samantha Power, along with the vast majority of the western media, described the overthrow of President Yanukovych as a normal
democratic vote by parliament. To use Mrs Power's words, "The facts tell a different story". The facts say that it was an unconstitutional
coup.
All of these conflicts seem to be designed to clean out, not only the people, but entire cultures in the regions.
Americans should take heed. What we see the oligarchic criminals in the U.S. doing overseas, is coming to a town near you,
or maybe your own town. Why else do you think they have been dismantling the Constitution and militarizing communities? It looks
like it will be sooner than expected, too.
hammersmith , June 23, 2015 at 10:31 pm
The Bush administration was "little boys on Big Wheels," as one former member described it; The Obama administration is little
girls on Big Wheels.
Roberto , June 15, 2015 at 10:03 pm
These dopes have no idea that the compensation is forthcoming.
I would like to propose a new lobby that would also be based on a non-address, X Street.
X Street recognizes that the wars fought by the United States since 2001 have brought no benefit to the American people and
have only resulted in financial ruin,
NATO no longer has any raison d’etre and is needlessly provoking the Russians through its expansion. X Street calls on the
United States to dissolve the alliance.
X Street recognizes that America’s lopsided support of the state of Israel has made the United States a target of terrorism,
has weakened the US’s international standing and damaged its reputation, and has negatively impacted on the American economy.
Washington will no longer use its veto power to protect Israeli interests in the UN and other international bodies.
The United States will publicly declare its knowledge that Israel has a nuclear arsenal and will ask the Israeli government
to join the NPT regime and subject its program to IAEA inspection.
X Street believes that nation building and democracy promotion by the United States have been little more than CIA/MOSSAD covert
actions by another name that have harmed America’s reputation and international standing.
The National Endowment for Democracy should be abolished immediately.
I would think that most people have heard of near death experiences.
One feature of such experiences which has sometimes been reported, and which I find very interesting, is that of the life review,
which focuses on the deeds a person has done throughout his or her life, the motives of the deeds, and the effects of the deeds
on others. It has been reported, for instance, that people have re-experienced their deeds not only from their own perspective
but from the perspective of others whom one's deeds have affected.
There is a youtube video about this, titled The Golden Rule Dramatically Illustrated, and featuring NDE researcher Dr. Kenneth
Ring.
There are no such thing as "liberal war hawks", their policies simply based on idiocy where as the result they need to be called
"liberals", depending on kind of government that govern a corrupt and bankrupt system. American capitalism is one of those system.
These people simply lacking a vision for their understanding that they are "liberal". They might be a social liberalists when
it come to people's rights in living the way of life they chose, otherwise it was Bill Clinton who used such "liberal" idea by
politicalizing using liberalism for his gain, these people follow the same path, but they will backstab people as they have in
the past and as they do now.
michael , June 15, 2015 at 6:26 pm
If a coup had not been instigated by the west on Russia's border, installing Nazis a different more positive outcome might
be available, I am quite sure there are Ukrainians who did not want this and wanted a more independent Ukraine, but that is not
what happened! How were the Russians supposed to react? The United States has 1000 military bases around the world, border most
countries, completely encircle Iran, press right up to Russia's borders and encircle China. Again how are the Russians supposed
to React? If this was Mexico the place would be decimated by the Americans and laid to waste just like Iraq!
hbm , June 15, 2015 at 6:41 pm
Looney bleeding-heart Irishwoman with husband Arch-Neocon lunatic Cass Sunstein shaping her opinions and directing her fanaticism.
That's all one really needs to know.
Nibs , June 16, 2015 at 12:28 pm
Exactly, everywhere there is a goy neocon, just look a little further for the malign influence. You can always find it. Soros
was here too, also in the attempted "colour revolution" in Macedonia. They intend to make out like bandits, big big money. Of
course, as mentioned elsewhere, they are physical cowards and prefer to send ordinary Americans to do their fighting and bleeding
for them.
It's somewhat startling after Iraq that they are still there.
But, and forgive the conspiracy angle, I don't believe this is unconnected to the Epstein sex scandal: just see who visited and
is therefore target of blackmail.
Paulrevere01 , June 15, 2015 at 6:50 pm
and this warmonger-doppleganger-to-Nuland-Kagen is married to Grand-Censor-Cass-des-Hubris-Sunstein more black eyes for Yale
and Harvard.
dahoit , June 16, 2015 at 11:12 am
Yes,the Zionist poison ivy league strikes again,with more Zionist stool pigeons to come.Close down education for sale vs.for
knowledge,it produces zombie quislings.
Larry , June 15, 2015 at 7:12 pm
. and even if the U.S. neocon policy in Ukraine succeeds and a shooting war with Russia is somehow avoided, then the American
neocons will still neither be sated or placated. Like the bloodthirsty jackals they are, these neocons will be only emboldened,
and their next coup in Russia's natural security sphere will be the straw that breaks the nuclear camels' backs. They must be
deterred or stopped.
In some tabulations the neocon hijacking of US policy on behalf of Israel has resulted in American gifts to Iran of Iraq, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, and quite likely Israel. And that's for starters. The rest will implode and do we then have a Persian
Empire.
It looks like a lot of clouds gathering on the horizon, and I cannot say that I find much fault with Pillar's assessment.
The stakes are too high and for all the macho talk all are rightfully very weary of lighting the match.
I rather doubt that there would be much left for anyone to add to their empire. Miles of ruins and deserts, glazed by nuclear
fires do not make for very useful Imperial digs.
I just pray that we are both wrong.
Abe , June 15, 2015 at 7:58 pm
Liberal interventionism is simply left-wing neocon thinking.
“Many eyewitnesses among the Maidan protesters reported snipers firing from the Hotel Ukraina during the massacre of the
protesters, specifically, about killing eight of them. Bullet holes in trees and electricity poles on the site of the massacre
and on the walls of Zhovtnevyi Palace indicate that shots came from the direction of the hotel. There are several similar recorded
testimonies of the eyewitnesses among the protesters about shooters in October Palace and other Maidan-controlled buildings.â€
The “Snipers’ Massacre†on the Maidan in Ukraine
By Ivan Katchanovski, Ph.D.
Boris M Garsky , June 15, 2015 at 8:06 pm
There is nothing to say about Powers; no doubt where she gets her marching orders and script. However, there is no excuse for
being ignorant on the topic of her rantings. I challenge anyone, anywhere to spontaneously assemble and move 100,000 people, even
a few blocks, on 24 hours notice. If you can do it, you are the court magician exemplar. Can't be done. Never has been done; it
takes months to years of preparations and organization before implementation. Yanuckovich was the target of assassination; they
weren't taking chances. No doubt that the Russians told him to skedaddle; that his life was in danger. Doesn't sound spontaneous
to me; sounds like a well planned operation gone wrong- right initially, but wrong eventually. I think that Obama is simply posturing
until the west can figure out how to extricate themselves from another fine mess they got themselves into- AGAIN!
F. G. Sanford , June 15, 2015 at 8:26 pm
I remember during my college days watching "student government" personalities – usually rich kids with no real problems – hurl
themselves into impassioned frenzies over some issue or another. Usually, they were political science(sic) or psychology majors
who were also active in the Speech and Theater Department. The defining characteristic of their existence was to obtain a podium
from which to make impassioned pleas to their fellow students in an effort to demonstrate a proclivity for "leadership". Almost
any issue would do. Samantha Power reminds me of one of those students – ostensibly seeking a role which, if she could have her
way, would make her the prime catalyst in a pivotal issue at the epicenter of a maelstrom that steers the course of human history.
That kind of learned, practiced, studied and rehearsed narcissism doesn't always work out so well. Maybe because the most successful
examples are actually clinical sufferers of…real narcissism. When Power's 'facts' are compared to reality, the obvious conclusions
suggest a range of interpretations from delusional psychosis to criminal perjury. Or, is this a carefully crafted strategy? "Yats"
has recently resorted to the last rabbit he can pull out of a hat: he's turned on the printing presses to pay the bills, and a
currency collapse is imminent. The Nazi factions are impatient with the regime's lack of progress, the people are disgruntled,
those two million refugees have mostly fled to Russia for protection, Northern Europe is being inundated with prostitutes, drug
dealers and the creme de la creme of organized crime from the former Warsaw Pact countries, and in the South, refugees from NATO
destabilizations in North Africa and the Middle East have become an explosive issue. Racism, nationalism and the resurgence of
openly fascist political activity is burgeoning. Europe is boiling with rage. Has Power actually seen the writing on the wall?
If so, why not an impassioned campaign to remind the Ukrainians they have broken institutions, corrupt oligarchs, unscrupulous
kleptocrats, internal corruption and foreign aggression working against them? And by the way, they've failed to adequately investigate
those Nazi atrocities. None of this could POSSIBLY be the fault of U.S. meddling or failed diplomacy. Nope, they brought it on
themselves, but we did everything we could to try and help. The makings of TOTAL collapse are at hand, and one little fillip could
bring down the whole house of cards. So, "You Ukrainians need to stand tall for your freedoms", and if anything goes wrong, you
have nobody to blame but yourselves. Maybe Sammy isn't so delusional after all.
Gregory Kruse , June 16, 2015 at 1:01 pm
She's not delusional, she's just channeling Aleksander Mikhaajlovich Bezobrazov. I guess that does make Obama the Tsar.
Mark , June 15, 2015 at 8:53 pm
All anyone needs to understand about American foreign policy is that anything, including genocide, is not only acceptable but
promoted if it serves "America's corporate or favored campaign funding special interests". The only real principle in play for
all colluding parties -- corporate, mass media, complicit foreign governments (sycophants) and both major domestic political parties
-- is to "win" by compromising or sacrificing everything and everyone required to serve the insatiable hunger for ungodley wealth
and (abusive) power accumulation.
The entire American culture has been corrupted by propaganda and what is irrational human nature and instinct concerning these
matters -- to be accepted among our peers by following the heard -- this reality is being used by the "ruling class" to play the
public like a disposable three dollar fiddle, while they, our "rulers", impose death and destruction along with economic and military
tyranny, directly or by proxy, wherever and whenever they can get away with it.
Bob Loblaw , June 15, 2015 at 9:41 pm
Two words
Electromagnetic Pulse
One well placed warhead will cripple us to the point that we destroy ourselves.
While crude islamists can't pull it off a Russian device is within reach.
Abe , June 15, 2015 at 10:48 pm
As a human-rights entrepreneur who is also a tireless advocate of war, Samantha Power is not aberrant. Elite factions of the
human-rights industry were long ago normalized within the tightly corseted spectrum of American foreign policy.
Power advocates for what she calls "tough, principled, and engaged diplomacy." A more accurate set of adjectives would be "belligerent,
hypocritical, and domineering." The thrust of her work is to make perpetual war possible by designating genocide – real or merely
ideologically constructed – the supreme international crime, instead of war itself. (Under current international law war itself
is the "supreme international crime.") That way the U.S. can perpetually make war for the noblest of purposes without regard for
anachronisms like national sovereignty. Is it any wonder Democrats love her?
The military deployment of US-NATO forces coupled with “non-conventional warfare†â€"including covert intelligence operations,
economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime changeâ€â€" is occurring simultaneously in several regions of the world.
Central to an understanding of war, is the media campaign which grants it legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion. War has
been provided with a humanitarian mandate under NATO’s “Responsibility to Protect†(R2P). The victims of U.S. led wars are
presented as the perpetrators of war.
It sounds to me that these neocons have 2 things in common. They were all born post WW II and have not experienced any war
at home and grew up in a nice suburban area without street crimes. They NEVER were confronted with families who lost their loved
ones in US 'lost' wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan that were initiated WITHOUT UN approval and brought home young soldiers who
had lost their limps and were handicapped for the rest of their lives. But just to keep US defence industry turning out hefty
profits.
Secondly, they have watched to many Hollywood movies showing the superior US army beating the 'evil' empire (Reagan) meaning
Soviet Union. USA never honoured their agreements with Gorbachev to keep NATO out of Eastern Europe. President Putin learned his
lessons, he built a strong military with technological advanced equipment so his country will NOT be run over again by the West
such as Napoleon and Hitler did murdering 25 million Russians. President Putin and the Russians want to live in peace they have
suffered too much in the past.
It's US and its vassal NATO aggression in the World and now in Ukraine that make the Russian show their power and demonstrating
'don't fool with us' . US MSM propaganda in Europe is losing its effects and people realizing US geopolitical or colonization
aggression in the world while losing US dominance as well. Like Abraham Lincoln said: You can lie to some people all the time
and you can lie to all the people some time, but you cannot lie to all the people all the time! However with today's powerful
media TV and radio it will take some more time. But Russia's RT News is changing this and gives the audience News contradicting
US MSM propaganda such as NYT and WP which have been brainwashing the public for so long at the discretion of Washington's neocons.
And US taxpayers are paying the bill, wake up America!
Peter Loeb , June 16, 2015 at 6:46 am
DISTRACTION FROM PALESTINIAN/ISRAELI CONFLICT
Excellent profiles and analyses by Mr. Parry as we have all come
to expect.
"[Power] added that the United Nations focus on Ukraine in the
Security Council.." from Parry above.
Here one MUST add the unsaid "and never, never on Palestine/
Israel"! After all, the US has continued time and again to block
investigation by the Security Council of Israeli actions in that
sphere. Evidently Israel maintains according to Power and
many others that Israel with US support are by definition exempt
from any and all rules of international law, application to save
lives in Palestine, attempts to establish a Mideast Nuclear
Free Zone and much much more. The distraction provided
by Ukraine is not only significant for the people of Ukraine but
is cleverly designed to distract all world and domestic opinion
from the atrocities carried on daily by Israel in Palestine both
past, present and future.
-- -Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA
Gregory Kruse , June 16, 2015 at 10:28 am
She's like John Bolton in drag.
Abe , June 16, 2015 at 5:52 pm
She is the walrus, goo goo g'joob.
Sammy too "seems averse to compromise, and is apparently committed to the belief that the U.N. and international law undermine
U.S. interests" (aka Israeli interests) http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/21/boltonism
"“Remarks such as the references to the 1967 borders show Obama’s continuing lack of real appreciation for Israel’s security.â€
-- Bolton, 2011, interview for National Review online
"There will never be a sunset on America’s commitment to Israel’s security. Never.†-- Power, 2015, speech at American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference
ltr , June 16, 2015 at 11:02 am
What a thoroughly amoral person Samantha Power is, all pretense, all hypocrisy, all for selectively determining which lives
are worth allowing.
Wm. Boyce , June 16, 2015 at 11:14 am
Another example of the lack of differences between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the empire's foreign policy.
It's all about controlling regions and resources, and fueling the U.S. arms industry.
Brendan , June 16, 2015 at 4:29 pm
Samantha Power: "The facts tell a different story. As you remember well, then-President Yanukovych abandoned Kyiv of his own
accord, only hours after signing an agreement with opposition leaders that would have led to early elections and democratic reforms."
There are some glaring omissions in Power's 'facts'. She doesn't explain why Yanukovych suddenly fled Kyiv, so soon after an
agreement with opposition leaders that allowed him to remain as president for several more months.
She didn't mention the rejection of that agreement by the far-right militias who threatened to remove Yanukovych from office
by force if he did not resign by 10 am that day.
That threat might explain his sudden departure. It also might also indicate that his departure wasn't really "of his own accord".
Brendan , June 16, 2015 at 4:34 pm
Samantha Power: "And it was only after Yanukovych fled the capital that 328 of the 447 members of the democratically-elected
Rada voted to strip him of his powers "
The problem with that was that the members of parliament did not have any authority to strip the president of his powers in
the way they did. The only possible conditions to remove a presidential from office are listed in the Ukrainian constitution:
Article 108. The President of Ukraine shall exercise his powers until the assumption of office by the newly elected President
of Ukraine.
The authority of the President of Ukraine shall be subject to an early termination in cases of:
1) resignation;
2) inability to exercise presidential authority for health reasons;
3) removal from office by the procedure of impeachment;
4) his/her death.
Yanukovych was not dead and neither was he unable to exercise his presidential authority due to health reasons. He never resigned,
and in fact continued to state that he was the only legitimate president.
He was not removed from office by the procedure of impeachment, which includes a number of stages, as described in Article
111 of the constitution (see link below). The decision on the impeachment must be adopted by at least three-quarters of the members
of parliament. The number given by Samantha Power was less than three-quarters.
Samantha Power, along with the vast majority of the western media, described the overthrow of President Yanukovych as a normal
democratic vote by parliament. To use Mrs Power's words, "The facts tell a different story". The facts say that it was an unconstitutional
coup.
All of these conflicts seem to be designed to clean out, not only the people, but entire cultures in the regions.
Americans should take heed. What we see the oligarchic criminals in the U.S. doing overseas, is coming to a town near you,
or maybe your own town. Why else do you think they have been dismantling the Constitution and militarizing communities? It looks
like it will be sooner than expected, too.
hammersmith , June 23, 2015 at 10:31 pm
The Bush administration was "little boys on Big Wheels," as one former member described it; The Obama administration is little
girls on Big Wheels.
This is US specific bank of chickenhawks, who feed from MIC cramps. this breed is really entrenched in State Department too (Madeleine
Albright, Nuland, Powell, Haley, etc)
Notable quotes:
"... War and peace! About 75% of the on-air personalities on Fox Jews are women. Do any of them have a peaceful brain cell – it appears not. They are all 100% on message – bomb Syria! ..."
"... It is feminism gone mad – the traditional female role of hope for peace has been extinguished in America. How sad – how unnatural – how dangerous – how bloody – dare we call them names? ..."
War and peace! About 75% of the on-air personalities on Fox Jews are women. Do any of them have a peaceful brain cell – it
appears not. They are all 100% on message – bomb Syria!
It is feminism gone mad – the traditional female role of hope
for peace has been extinguished in America. How sad – how unnatural – how dangerous – how bloody – dare we call them names?
"... AIPAC's vulgarity is legendary. Despite the Jewish power in the US and the UK, the Israel-firsters are a miserable lot incapable of maintaining the standards of decency. ..."
Israel has no qualms about being a dishonest and lying inciter of a mass murder while
pretending sanctimoniously on some "superior morality" and "eternal victimhood."
AIPAC's vulgarity is legendary.
Despite the Jewish power in the US and the UK, the Israel-firsters are a miserable lot
incapable of maintaining the standards of decency.
"... It must be pointed out that obviously, Saudi and Israeli goals are mutually incompatible. Saudi Arabia cannot be the premier power in the Middle East while Israel retains much influence. Similarly, Israel cannot be hegemon while the Arabs, in the form of Saudi Arabia, remain powerful. ..."
"... So you paint a scenario where Jews and Arabs have joined forces to suppress the Persians. What happens AFTER the Persians are diminished? Do Israel and Saudi Arabia turn on each other? Do they divvy up the Middle East? Do they jointly turn against the Turks? Does one ally with the Turks to gang up on the third? ..."
Saudi's motive was to prevent its spreading Shia influence in the region because it was a
threat to the Sunni throne i.e.,their place as the leading Kings and rulers of the ME
Israel's motive was of course to destroy all states like Syria and Iran who might resist
their aim of being the supreme hegemon of the ME.
I see the pattern, broadly speaking. Let's suppose you're correct.
It must be pointed out that obviously, Saudi and Israeli goals are mutually
incompatible. Saudi Arabia cannot be the premier power in the Middle East while Israel retains
much influence. Similarly, Israel cannot be hegemon while the Arabs, in the form of Saudi
Arabia, remain powerful.
Bit of layman's background.
The modern region we know as the "Middle East" has 4 ethnic-cultural poles. The Israelites
and Persians have been there since antiquity, the Arabs became a force with the coming of
Islam, and finally Asian interlopers, the Turks, smashed in while fleeing from their Inner
Mongolian homelands.
So you paint a scenario where Jews and Arabs have joined forces to suppress the
Persians. What happens AFTER the Persians are diminished? Do Israel and Saudi Arabia turn on
each other? Do they divvy up the Middle East? Do they jointly turn against the Turks? Does one
ally with the Turks to gang up on the third?
What happens AFTER the Persians are diminished? Do Israel and Saudi Arabia turn on each
other? Do they divvy up the Middle East?
Yes they will turn on each other -- the enemy of my enemy is my friend -- for awhile, not
forever
Israel will never quit trying to rule the ME and dip its beak into other countries wealth
and resources.
Saudi will never let them have that much control over Arab countries as that would be as
threatening to their throne as Iranian influence.
Both think they will be able to control and out smart each once their current mutual goal
is achieved.
"... There is not a shred of independent, intelligent journalism left anywhere around here - and interestingly there is an amazing number of people who have completely given up believing the MSM and/or our government. ..."
@ BM: My take on the situation in Germany: the MSM - leftish or rightish, doesn't matter -
mindlessly repeat what our US colonial masters are telling them to.
There is not a shred of independent, intelligent journalism left anywhere around here -
and interestingly there is an amazing number of people who have completely given up believing
the MSM and/or our government.
But what can you do when the published opinions are completely manufactured and anyone has
to suppose his neighbours all believe this idiocy?
That's a bit of a stretch. Germans were demoralized long before, as each sane person knew the war will end in
defeat from mid'42 on. Back in the days I had the somewhat questionable pleasure of talking to German ex-soldiers
(two of my grand-uncles) that were deployed to the Eastern Front. Compared to the kind of warfare that was going
on there, the fighting in the west and south was almost akin to being on vacation - I'm serious about that.
On average the Soviets, mainly comprised of todays Russian peoples, lost 16-18000 people a day, this is
evidence of the fierceness of fighting and, also, to what amount of a beating the Russians can take without
losing sight of their goal.
The Soviet Union did the real fighting against German forces. At all times there'd been about 85% of all
German forces deployed to the east, without this there would had been no bombing campaign against Germany simply
because the number of fighter aircraft available against allied bombers would had been overwhelming.
Except for a few elite units, hastily re-deployed from the east, the main force was inexperienced draftees
with both a lack of proper training and equipment. All other experienced units stayed east in a desperate attempt
to hold back the red army as long as any possible.
A very good friend of mine, who died a couple years back at age 84, was one of these unfortunate souls. When
he turned 17 in late Dec.'44 he received an official letter that read 'A gift from the Fuhrer' - it was his draft
note. That's been the kind of opponent the western allies faced late in the war, a bunch of badly under-equipped
troops consisting of exhausted regulars and youths, that were scared shitless (his words, not mine).
Russia's a different kind of animal. They won WWII - European theater almost singlehandedly but had to pay
dearly.
There's a subconscious racism in the way [neo]liberal westerners treat Russia. Saudis execute
gays and transsexuals but the West focuses on Russian "homophobia," which amounts to little
more than discouraging gay pride marches and sexual orientation education to children. China
has open censorship of the media and doesn't even have elections, yet the West imposes
sanctions on semi-democratic Russia and trades freely with China. Islamists are taking over
in Turkey, yet liberal westerners attack the Russian Orthodox Church for spreading moderately
conservative values.
Basically Russia is bad because it's a white country that's relatively conservative and
does things a bit differently than other white countries. Non-white countries can do whatever
they like because they aren't white as so can't be expected to live up to western liberal
values.
[Russia on Tuesday vetoed a US-drafted United Nations Security Council resolution that
would have set up an investigation into chemical weapons use in Syria following an alleged
toxic gas attack in rebel-held Douma.
It was the 12th time that Russia has used its veto power at the council to block action
targeting its Syrian ally.
Twelve of the 15 council members backed the measure, including France, Britain, African
countries, Kazakhstan and Kuwait. Bolivia voted against the draft resolution, while China
abstained.]
Why petty China always cave in with US. In the latest resolution China AGAIN abstained.
China is a petty colony and people must boycott its garbage, that is called goods. Chinese
criminal 'leaders' still have their slave mentality. They are nothing but petty slaves in the
service of the mass murderers.
They also voted for illegal sanctions against Iran, N. Korea and any other country that
American criminals and mass murderers wanted to kill their children. Chinese petty 'leaders'
are as criminals as US mass murderers. Down with petty colonies and cowards chinese
'leaders'.
Even Bolivia, a small country has more courage than the petty chinses. Long live
Bolivia
California Democrat Zoe Lofgren and Michigan Republican Justin Amash are
circulating
a bipartisan letter to President Trump, insisting that he seek Congressional authorization
before striking the government of Syria.
Defend our Constitution and oppose endless war. Urge your Representative to sign the Lofgren-Amash letter against unconstitutional
war.
Phone calls are best: US Capitol Switchboard (202) 224-3121, ask for your Rep. by
name.
You can leave a message after hours. (Name, zipcode, request.)
The White House: (202) 456-1111
' Don't know how true it is, but this is what Veterans Today says about the captured
spooks and weapons lab '
Thanks for the links
Gordon Duff [Vietnam Marine grunt veteran] and Jim Dean of Veterans Today are well
meaning fellows and are on the 'right team' so to speak
They are often dismissed as Conspiracy Kooks and they sometimes go a bit over the top
I suspect this is because they rely on sources that are perhaps somewhat unreliable [VT
says some of these sources are ex intel guys...so some truth bending might go with the
territory...]
Here is what we do know last month the Syrian government did say it found a 'rebel'
chemical weapons workshop and this was reported in Sputnik
and RT
What has been documented much more extensively especially in RT and Sputnik are huge
conventional weapons caches seized by the SAA as it liberates various locations from
terrorists often these weapons are visibly stamped with manufacturer data plates from US and
Nato countries
This is beyond doubt
So the logical question is how are these holed up bearded fanatics in Ghouta who are
surrounded on all sides getting this stuff for the last five years ?
There is a logistics question here who and how has been smuggling this into the besieged
enclave [including possibly chemical weapons] ?
That is really cloak and dagger stuff no doubt and actual verifiable info would be very
hard to come by
So there could be some truth to this idea that various Western spooks or at
least contractors are involved in this game of smuggling in everything from guns to chlorine
[which is readily available]
However it is doubtful that these personnel would have been caught by the advancing
SAA
Even if SAA did capture various Nato operators or agents there it might not be something
that the Russian side would publicize [I'm just guessing as a layman here...Mr. Giraldi would
certainly have a much better grasp on the nuts and bolts of such things...]
So overall I think this is a case where VT is perhaps a bit too optimistic
' We are still waiting for the first verifiable report of a jhadi and or family that has
been killed by one of these "attacks", or a cemetery of the gassed martyrs, or even a
headstone for such.
The amateur script writers forgot about that part '
That's a very good observation
With all these 'gas victims' churned out by the white helmets how is it that no
such 'martyr' graves have ever turned up ?
Or this observation as to how those chemicals might be used that the headchoppers are
cooking up in their workshops
' As for what these could be used for, how about throwing into a cellar filled with
human shield pro-Damascus family members to generate a nice pile of bodies for our
"un-free" Western media '
Photo showing the buses with the freed prisoners below
On March 26 even the French AFP ran this story
' In the largest city of the East Ghouta district, Douma, civilians and military
personnel have been liberated from the "jail of repentance," where they were kept prisoners
for years by Jaish al-Islam terrorists '
There were hundreds of women and children from the city of Adra, which was
captured by terrorists in December 2013. Adra is one of the largest industrial cities in
the suburbs of Damascus.
"In such places, extremists tortured the abducted people, forcing them to repent of
their sins. Thus, they wanted to realize the doctrine of a peaceful revolution. But what
sins do children, who were the greatest number in the prison, have to repent?" the source
asked.
According to the source, there were 3,500 inmates in the prison. The terrorists
used them as a human shield to put pressure on the Syrian army, which did everything
possible to save the lives of the people of the city '
So these are the 'good guys' for whom Dump is sending the United States to war
?
If he is as stupid as all that then I certainly hope that the Russians don't pull their
punches
At this point Dump is beyond redemption the sooner his disillusioned base cuts him loose
the better
Gordon Duff [Vietnam Marine grunt veteran] and Jim Dean of Veterans Today are well
meaning fellows and are on the 'right team' so to speak
No, they most certainly are NOT. The problem is not with them talking about conspiracies,
conspiracies do take place all the time
Problem is these guys are disinformation, especially Duffy.
The fact that Gordon Duff is a "disinfo toad" is certainly no secret. He has openly
admitted that "about thirty percent of what is on Veterans Today is patently false" and
that at least forty percent of what he writes is "purposely partially false".
Gordon Duff, senior editor of the website Veterans Today, published an article on May
20, 2014, that can only be described as rank disinformation that is meant to obscure the
truth about 9-11. To deliberately spread lies about what caused the deaths of thousands of
people on 9-11 is an egregious and unforgivable offense. The Duff article, which was edited
by Jim W. Dean, is so full of errors that it cannot be taken seriously, except perhaps as
evidence of his role as an agent of disinformation about 9-11.
Also, both Duff and Dean were 100% supporters of the ZUS/NATO war on Libya, and became
furious when several readers protested and confronted them in the comment sections, which led
to censorship. Maybe Duffy boy's defense contracts he claims to have in Africa and the ME had
something to do with that.
Red Crescent Says No Evidence of Chemical Attack in Syria's Douma
Patients treated by aid group not exposed to any chemical agents
Jason Ditz Posted on April 9, 2018
The Syrian Red Crescent issued a statement Monday dismissing the allegations of a
weekend chemical weapon attack in the city of Douma. The statement insisted their medical
personnel in the city had found no evidence any such attack took place.
Y ou might think it would be easier if not more foolproof for the warmongers to
stage a fake chemical attack in Syria by 2018 than it was staging the false flag attack on
the WTC in 2001, but even this simple but bogus narrative crumbles under perfunctory
inspection, and the lies stick out like a pitchfork in a goat's ass, or UA 175 stuck in the
middle at WTC 2, a lie for the ages frozen in pixels.
Not that obvious lies have been any detriment to the warmongers of the past, even when
George W. Bush told his whopper about watching the first WTC crash on the boob tube because
"the TV was obviously on."
Well, Shrub is part of the ruling oligarchy, so he's an untouchable with royal jelly or
something, like Blair, who probably caught it from the Queen.
In October 2001, Rudy Giuliani was even knighted by Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II,
who bestowed upon the NYC mayor the modest title of Knight Commander of the Most Excellent
Order of the British Empire ostensibly for his "outstanding help and support to the
bereaved British families in New York."
Of course, successful destruction of WTC evidence had nothing to do with Rudy's award in
the same way that BBC's foreknowledge of WTC 7′s destruction was just one of those
doggone quirky things that happen, during false flags, when the evils hacks can't get their
timing right.
Just one more thing. I noticed that the slim 9/11 articles section has been removed from
the front page at Unz Review. Linh Dinh's article from August 13, 2017 "George Orwell and
Mohammed Atta Were Here" can be found under his name, as can the earlier sole entry in the
now-defunct 9/11 section, author Philip Giraldi's 10-25-2016 article "9/11 Truth?" which drew
over 1,000 comments.
After seeing the 3 Stooges, May, Macron and Trump, locking arms to start another war, I'd
like ours (Larry?) to know that if he becomes a wartime president, it will be difficult to
spend weekends in Mar Largo golfing. Think about it.
Red Crescent Says No Evidence of Chemical Attack in Syria's Douma
Patients treated by aid group not exposed to any chemical agents
Jason Ditz Posted on April 9, 2018
The Syrian Red Crescent issued a statement Monday dismissing the allegations of a weekend
chemical weapon attack in the city of Douma. The statement insisted their medical
personnel in the city had found no evidence any such attack took place.
Crisis Group's Sam Heller wordsmiths a different question, the next question: Can the U.S. Respond to the Syria Chemical Weapons Attack without Risking
Escalation?
After a seemingly sanguine introduction –
So far, no international party has said definitively or presented conclusive evidence
that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical
weapons use. . . .
Heller tightens the frame to fit a preconceived image:
While the lack of access makes it difficult to immediately verify, chemical weapons
use would be consistent with past behaviour by the Syrian government. The government
has repeatedly employed chlorine and, more infrequently, sarin gas against areas under
rebel control , as documented by nonpartisan international bodies such as the United
Nations-established Joint Investigative Mechanism and the Independent International
Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. Chemical attacks fit within a broader
strategy the government has used of targeting civilians and fighters alike in rebel-held
areas. Through brutal means, this strategy renders these areas highly dangerous and
ultimately unlivable, permitting no viable alternative to government control.
That last bit is problematic: if gassed "areas are rendered unlivable," will the British
be holding hosts of quiet funerals for fallen White Helmet rescuers who entered the areas and
came in body-contact with victims?
Heller next constructs a scenario intended to provide a rationale for the Syrian
government to have made the attack, then reports that
"Syria's T-4 airbase was hit by an apparent Israeli airstrike on the morning of 9 April,
although it remains unclear whether the strike was related to the Douma chemical attack. .
. . from Lebanese airspace . . . killing seven Iranians. . . . "
Though Israel declined to comment, Heller noted that
"Israel also struck the T-4 base in February, after an Iranian drone it said was
launched from the base entered Israeli airspace. "
If all is fair in love and war, one must forebear pointing out the hypocrisy of Israel
attacking a Syrian target from Lebanese airspace in retaliation for Iran flying drones over
Israeli airspace. However, the same logic conveys the right to Iran and/or Syria and/or
Russia to attack an Israeli launching site in retaliation for its attacks on Syria.
But even wars have rules, that civilized people comply with -- statesmen like Sergei
Lavrov and Vladimir Putin understand this. But when the adversary/aggressor is a psychopath
who disdains convention's rules and limits, then what?
Israel is not like a drunk or addict that has hit the wall -- such a person is, at that
point, ready for intensive rehabilitation. But a psychopath is not in that category.
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god?
– W H Auden
How does one deal with a psychopath?
How does one deal with a rabid dog? Can a rabid dog be medicated, or re-trained?
What signals do Israelis send about how an entity that fails to comply with demanded norms
should be treated? Israelis insist that such entities respond "only to force." Projection may
be as close to insight as a psychopath can get.
If it is the case that Israel can only be dealt with by force, that the rabid dog must be
put down, then what are we to make of Phil Weiss's recent claim
that Israel's attacks on Palestinians has caused American Jews to distance themselves from
Israel.
Does that mean they will ignore the mad dog as long as it does not roam on their street, or
does that mean they will agree that for the good of their own neighborhood as well as the
entire community, the dog must be put down?
The press in the USA is more effectively controlled and conformist than in Germany in the
late 1930s
Who controlled the press there and then?
What can be said about the control and conformity of the Soviet, British and American press
of the time?
...and nobody goes around beating up journalists or sending them to a KZ.
That's probably because the usual thugs don't need to do that any longer since
they control virtually everything.
A couple of anecdotes to illustrate my point.:
2 of the reasons we don't hear much about mobsters these days are that the press and
judiciary are owned by them and if you do get something published, you run the risk of getting
snuffed. They probably don't stop at mere blinding anymore.
Victor Riesel was an American newspaper journalist and columnist who specialized in
news related to labor unions. In 1956 a mobster threw sulfuric acid in his face on a public
street in Chicago causing his permanent blindness.
"Treason is a strong word, but not too strong to characterize the situation in which the
Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to
the American people as any invading army could be." This indictment launched a
nine-part series of articles entitled "Treason of the Senate."
-David Graham Phillips, Cosmopolitan magazine, February 1906
In 1911 Phillips was shot multiple t imes by Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, a
Harvard-educated scion of a prominent Maryland family, at Gramercy Park in New York City.
The intent of my post was to show that the MSM here is conformist and doesn't like to
stray far from what the USG is claiming and what other journalists are writing. Rather than
explore the topics you raise, as worthy of exploration as they might be, I thought I'd offer
what newspapers around the USA were saying about Saddam's WMD after Powell's UNSC speech;
seems a bit more germane.
The Powell evidence will be persuasive to anyone who is still persuadable.
The Wall Street Journal
Piling fact upon fact, photo upon photo Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
methodically demonstrated why Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein remains dangerous to his own
people, Iraq's neighbors
The Los Angeles Times
On Wednesday, America's most reluctant warrior, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell,
presented succinct and damning evidence of Saddam's enormous threat to world peace.
Arizona Republic
Saddam Hussein's illicit arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, as well as the
equally illicit means that he possesses to deliver them, poses a tangible and urgent danger
to U.S. and world security. Millions of innocent lives are at risk.
Dallas Morning News
At some point, the world chooses to believe President George W. Bush and Secretary Powell
or the international community chooses to side with Saddam Hussein and those who broadcast
his lies to the world. Powell has painstakingly presented a strong case against Iraq.
Greenville News/South Carolina
Iraq is busted. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell laid out the case clearly. No one
hearing Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council could doubt Iraq's
actions and intentions.
Jacksonville Times-Union/Florida
The threat is real and at our door. Sept. 11, 2001, stripped away the belief that the
United States can peacefully coexist with evil. Prove it, they said. Powell has.
Charleston Daily Mail/West Virginia
We are a country always loath to fight unless provoked. The reluctance of Americans to
initiate a war needlessly does the nation credit. But this is not a needless war, nor is it
unprovoked. Powell laid out the need, and explained the provocation, in step-by-step fashion
that cannot be refuted without resorting to fantasy.
Chicago Sun-Times
The Dispatch repeatedly has called on the Bush administration to make a compelling case
that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction and hiding these
efforts from U.N. inspectors. Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell made that case
before the Security Council.
Columbus Dispatch
Powell has methodically proved Iraq's failure to comply with U.N. mandates. With each
passing day, Iraq's own choices move it closer to a war that full compliance would
prevent.
Indianapolis Star
Secretary of State Colin Powell's 90-minute presentation to the U.N. Security Council,
buttressed with surveillance photographs and recorded phone conversations, should remove all
doubt that Iraq's Saddam Hussein has developed and hides weapons of mass destruction, in
violation of U.N. resolutions.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Powell's speech to the U.N. Security Council presented not just one 'smoking gun' but a
battery of them, more than sufficient to dispel any lingering doubt about the threat the
Iraqi dictator poses.
Denver Post
The United States has made a compelling case that Iraq has failed to rid itself of weapons
of mass destruction. This failure violates the U.N. Security Council resolution of late last
year which ordered Iraq to disarm. As a consequence and it is a grave one, the Security
Council must act now to disarm Iraq by force.
Salt Lake City Tribune
Powell has connected enough dots to tie Iraq to al-Qaeda and show that this alliance is a
threat to all of Europe as well as the United States.
Manchester Union Leader
In fact, the speech provided proof that Saddam continues to refuse to obey U.N.
resolutions. Any amount of time he has now to comply fully and openly with U.N. demands
should be measured in days or a few weeks – and no longer.
These ridiculous, suicidal gas attacks by Assad seem to coincide not only with battleground
victories against the head-choppers, but co-incidentally with Israel's murderous attacks on
unarmed Palestinians "throwing stones".
What nobody seems to have picked up is the emphasis – and red lines – on Gas;
gas, gas attacks. Why is gas so much worse than being dismembered, disembowelled, and
mutilated by high explosives? Certainly I would favour unconsciousness and death by gas
before being smashed to pieces by depleted uranium.
These relentlessly repeated claims are an exercise with the dual purpose of providing a
subliminal message about the greatest tragedy in human history, repeated ad nauseam. The
massive 'gassing' of European Jews some 65 years ago. Lest we forget.
It does look rather like those Syrian chemical weapon attacks that happen whenever the rebels
are about to be defeated.
I am pretty sure that it was not ordered within the British government and that most of
the British government don't know where it came from, but are willing to believe it was
Russia.
While the CIA does have plenty of form on assassinations, the risk if they were found to
be assassinating in Britain seems quite high due to the close CIA links with the UK
intelligence sector. But CIA agents could have paid someone else to do it.
Mossad is the one group that can act freely in the UK, has a record of assassinating
scientists, engineers etc here, and unlike CIA, can take the risk of being caught. So it's a
possibility – OTOH Israel has shown a lot less anti-Russian hatred than the US Deep
State has.
Normally I'd assume it was indeed Russia – I thought there was plenty of evidence
the Polonium poisoning was Russia – and it still seems possible, but US or Mossad must
be at least equally likely in this case. It's just possible it could have been British
initiated but I doubt it.
I do think it's most likely the person who actually poisoned them was not an employee of
any agency.
Regarding fukus shenanigans,
How could we omit the CIA/MI6 'greatest hit ', the 1965 genocide of 3M Indonesians
'leftists suspects' , The mother of all regime changes ???
The Skriptal caper looks like kindergarten stuff compared to that 1965
genocide.
fukus orchestrated that bloodbath to remove prez Sukarno cuZ he's pro Beijing. MI6 planted disinfo in HK media about an imminent China sponsored coup , supported by
ethnic Chinese fifth columns.
CIA planted 'evidence' of Chinese supplied arms , to be conveniently 'discovered' by Indon
police . [1]
That devious plot provoked a bloodbath by jihadists death squads against the PKI communists
members and ethnic Chinese indons.
CIA whistle blower, John Mcgehee,
The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph McGehee, who was in that area
division, and had documents on his desk, in his custody about that operation. He said that
one of the documents concluded that this was a model operation that should be copied
elsewhere in the world. Not only did it eliminate the effective communist party
(Indonesian communist party), it also eliminated the entire segment of the population
that tended to support the communist party – the ethnic Chinese, Indonesian Chinese.
And the CIA's report put the number of dead at 800,000 killed. And that was one covert
action. We're talking about 1 to 3 million people killed in these things.
[2]
[1]
U.S. officials were particularly interested in linking the September 30th plotters to
Beijing. They helped to spread stories about China's alleged involvement and reported on
caches of weapons purportedly "discovered" by the Indonesian army with the hammer and
sickle conveniently stamped on them. "
We have bonanza chance to nail chicoms on disastrous events in Indonesia ," Green
wrote the State Department. He urged a "continuation [of] covert propaganda" as one of the
"best means of spreading [the] idea of chicom complicity
'Company ' veterans are so proud of that CIA'S greatest hit,
they still reminiscent fondly over it around the water cooler, until this very day.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Your decrying confirms that the British has done something wrong and they did poison
Skripals in Salisbury England. This unscrupulous false flag op, crying foul and smearing the
innocent for the crime they committed relentlessly is a special signature of the
British/Anglo culture and trait. The following history provides the evidence the above is not
allegation but fact.
Nov 24, 1784, a British gunner on the ship "Lady Hughes" fired cannon against Chinese law
and killed two Chinese in Guangzhou. The British refused to hand over the gunner to the
Chinese authority for trail and called up few hundred armed sailors to stop the Chinese
authority from searching the perpetrator in the British warehouses and living compound.
Anyhow the British was outwitted and the perpetrator was tried by the Chinese, convicted
and executed in according to the Chinese law; during that time the British law also gave
death penalty for the same crime.
The British had been trampling other people's sovereignty and law like India with impunity
for a couple of hundreds of years already by then. Never a British was tried and punished for
the crimes, murder or not, they committed since they supplanted the Spanish. British viewed
themselves above all human beings and not bound by any other people's law. The execution of
the gunner made the British Council of Supercargos feel humiliated and devastated as well as
being impotent and incompetent in the eyes of their superiors in London and their peers
(other Europeans) in Guangzhou.
In order to cover their crimes and failures, the megalomaniac British decried Chinese
legal system was barbaric and sanguinary relentlessly like Anonymous[338] is doing here to
Russia. All the Europeans jumped on the British mudslinging bandwagon for the effort to gain
extraterritoriality in China, so they could steal, loot, plunder, etc. Chinese wealth with
impunity like Elizabeth I's Sea Dogs. Soon after the "Lady Hughes" incident the view that
entire Chinese legal system was barbaric and sanguinary or there is no law in China become
the dominant representation of China ever since.
The British then engineered Opium Wars for the vengeance of their "Lady Hughes"
humiliation, and set to destroy the last nation denying their piracy and other unscrupulous
deeds on the moral high ground. If history can be any guidance, the Anglo is not going to
stop at smearing Russia; more vicious plot is going to come.
Bernhard over at his blog, Moon of Alabama, is advocating for the poisoning being real,
but being traceable to shellfish poisoning. The Skripals had a shellfish dish at a local
restaurant about 40 minutes prior to their discovery on the park bench. While very serious,
and potentially fatal, if addressed with respiratory and cardiac support in a timely fashion,
this poisoning is survivable.
The toxin involved in classic shellfish poisoning is a naturally occurring
neurotoxin, Saxitoxin, which agent remains toxic even after boiling or steaming, exactly the
food preparation techniques likely to be employed in preparing shellfish for consumption.
This is, indeed, what makes it so pernicious.
That the Brits, primed for lies in aid of the Hate On The Rooskies campaign, lit on their
story is unsurprising. Of course, the denial of the authorities at the hospital that
anyone , the Skripals and the supposedly affected policeman, was suffering from
exposure to a chemical weapon, along with the refusal of Porton Down officials to lend
credence to the hoo haw that this was surely traceable to Novichok series chemical agents
identifiably produced by the Russians kind of shot some holes in the big lies.
Anyway, cast an eye at the post at Moon of Alabama. Bernhard is pretty damn good at
winnowing facts from the chaff of propaganda, and when he makes a mistake, he openly
confesses it instead of doubling down on a falsehood.
"... Repeated requests by Russia to obtain a sample of the alleged nerve agent for testing have been rejected by the British government in spite of the fact that a military grade nerve agent would have surely killed both the Skripals as well as anyone else within 100 yards. ..."
"... It does look rather like those Syrian chemical weapon attacks that happen whenever the rebels are about to be defeated. ..."
"... Actually, I think that in the end Russia has to thank the British for sending a great message to her traitors and gangsters. ..."
Moving along to the present, we have Prime Minister Theresa May. May has been in serious
trouble, politically speaking. After losses suffered in the recent parliamentary elections, she
is clinging to power and is increasingly unpopular even within her own Conservative Party. So
what do you do when you are in trouble at home? You create a foreign crisis that you have to
deal with. If you are someone as venal as former American President and bottom feeder Bill
Clinton you accomplish that end by firing off a few cruise missiles at a pharmaceutical plant
in Sudan and at some mud huts in Afghanistan. If you are Theresa May, you up the ante
considerably, coming up with a powerful enemy who is threatening you, enabling you to appear
both resolute and strong in confronting a formidable foe. That is precisely what we have been
seeing over the past month relating to the alleged poisoning of former Russian intelligence
agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
There is quite a bit that is odd about the Skripal case. Even the increasingly neoconnish
Guardian newspaper has conceded that "the British case [against Russia] has so far relied more
heavily in public on circumstantial evidence and secret intelligence." And secret intelligence,
so called, has all too often been the last refuge of a scoundrel whenever a government is
selling snake oil to the public. In this case, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson rushed to
judgement on Russia less than forty-eight hours after the Skripals were found unconscious on a
bench in Salisbury England, too soon for any chemical analysis of the alleged poisoning to have
taken place.
Theresa May addressed Parliament shortly thereafter to blame the Kremlin and demand a
Russian official response to the event in 36 hours, even though she had to prevaricate
significantly, saying that the apparent poisoning was "very likely" caused by a made-in-Russia
nerve agent referred to by its generic name Novichok. She nevertheless rallied the backbenchers
in Parliament, who responded with a lot of hearty "Hear! Hear!" endorsements. When Labour
Leader Jeremy Corbyn attempted to slow the express train down by suggesting that it might be
wise to wait in see what the police investigation uncovered, he was hooted down. The British
media was soon on board with a vengeance, spreading the government line that such a highly
sensitive operation would require the approval of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin himself. The
expulsion of Russian diplomats soon followed.
One of the strangest aspects of the Skripal case is what is going on now that daughter Yulia
will soon be out of the hospital and Sergei is no longer in critical condition. A cousin
Viktoria Skripal has offered to fly in from Moscow to provide support for her family, but it is
believed that she will not be able to receive a visa from the British. Russian television aired
a recording of a phone call between the two cousins in which Yulia said that she was
disoriented but improving and that neither she nor her father had suffered permanent damage
from the poisoning. The call ended abruptly and Viktoria Skripal believes that it was scripted
by the British government on a controlled phone line.
Repeated requests by Russia to obtain a sample of the alleged nerve agent for testing
have been rejected by the British government in spite of the fact that a military grade nerve
agent would have surely killed both the Skripals as well as anyone else within 100 yards.
As the latest British account of the location of the alleged poison places it on the door
handle of the Scripals' residence, the timetable element is also unconvincing. That means that
the two would have spent three hours, including a stop at a pub and lunch, before succumbing on
a park bench. Military grade nerve agents kill instantly.
A request to have the testing done by the politically neutral Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is in progress, but there is little enthusiasm from the British
side, which does not want a Russian observer to participate in the process. The May government
has already established its own narrative and certainly would have plenty to hide if the whole
affair turns out to be fabricated. And fabricated it might have been as the nerve agent, if it
actually exists, could have been manufactured almost anywhere.
The head of Britain's own chemical weapons facility Porton Down has contradicted claims made
by May, Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, and British Ambassador in Moscow Laurie Bristow. The
lab's Chief Executive Gary Aitkenhead has testified that he does not know if the nerve agent
was actually produced in Russia, a not surprising observation as the chemical formula was
revealed to the public in a scientific paper in 1992 and there are an estimated twenty
countries capable of producing it. There are also possible stocks of Novichok remaining in
independent countries that once were part of the Soviet Union, to include Russia's enemy du
jour Ukraine, while a false flag operation by the British themselves, the CIA or Mossad, is not
unthinkable.
The resort to official Orwellian govspeak by the British is remarkable throughout the
process, but is particularly painful reading regarding the treatment of the Skripals' pets, two
guinea pigs and a cat. A spokesman for the Department of the Environment reported that "The
property in Wiltshire was sealed as part of the police investigation. When a vet was able to
access the property, two guinea pigs had sadly died. A cat was also found in a distressed state
and a decision was taken by a veterinary surgeon to euthanize the animal to alleviate its
suffering. This decision was taken in the best interests of the animal and its welfare."
So the presence of squadrons of technicians and cops in the residence did not permit anyone
to take a minute to feed the cat and guinea pigs. And the cat was killed as a purely
humanitarian gesture – it's "best interest" was apparently to die. Sounds familiar,
doesn't it?
Finally, the best argument against the British government's evasions about what took place
in Salisbury on March 4 th remains the question of motive. So the British would have
one believe that Vladimir Putin personally ordered the killing of a former British double agent
who had been released from a Kremlin prison in a spy swap and who was no longer capable of
doing any damage to Russia. He did that in spite of the fact that he had an election coming up
and would be the host of the World Cup in the summer, an event that he would want to go
smoothly. So he deliberately shot himself in the foot on both counts, allegedly because he
wanted to send a message to traitors and also because just can't help himself since he is a
vindictive KGB type whose impulses are pure evil. Does that make sense to the reader? It
doesn't to me. Mulegino1 ,
April 10,
2018 at 4:49 am GMT
A great man once wrote that the "big lie" had a force of credulity among the broad masses, as
the latter were wont to engage in lying about minor quotidian matters of little or no
significance while the big lies were engaged in by the mainstream press, dominated by the
usual tribal suspects...
But here's something else I don't quite understand:
To be sure, President Donald Trump has been exceptional in that he has followed through
on some of the promises he made in his campaign, insisting periodically that he has to do
what he said he would do. Unfortunately, those choices he has made to demonstrate his
accountability to his supporters have been terrible, including moving the U.S. Embassy in
Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, threatening to end the Iran nuclear agreement and
building a wall along the Mexican border.
Now, Trump is a sense-free random number generator, I will fully agree. But you list three
"choices he has made" that you describe as "terrible:" the US embassy move to Jerusalem, the
threats against Iran, and "building a wall along the Mexican border." The first two Trump has
done, and I agree that "terrible" is the right word to describe them. The third thing -- the
border wall -- he hasn't done. And had he done so, it wouldn't have been
"terrible" it would have been the obvious and sensible thing to do. I think he clearly isn't
serious about building the wall, as far as one can discern the intentions of so random an
individual. But your list presents three items in parallel, with one item being quite unlike
the others.
Logic escapes the rabid Neocons, anti Christian Russia crowd and their paid henchmen, or
henchgirls , the likes of Linda Graham. (Grin) Unfortunatley the now feckless Trump is
going to go along with this British yarn and the Neocon wish of destroying Syria.
BTW as of this post your site has still not recovered from the cyber attack it had
today.
"So the British would have one believe that Vladimir Putin personally ordered the killing of
a former British double agent who had been released from a Kremlin prison in a spy swap and
who was no longer capable of doing any damage to Russia. He did that in spite of the fact
that he had an election coming up and would be the host of the World Cup in the summer, an
event that he would want to go smoothly. So he deliberately shot himself in the foot on both
counts, allegedly because he wanted to send a message to traitors and also because just can't
help himself since he is a vindictive KGB type whose impulses are pure evil. Does that make
sense to the reader?"
Absolutely. Under the Putin regime, the body count of his enemies has grown. He put the
"de Thirty-four Russian journalists in the last decade just somehow "died". Occam's Razor
applies here.
Consider also that Putin played a major role in the Russian "Deep State".
It makes complete sense if one simply looks at the British Establishment's prior behavior of
intentionally starting world wars at the order of the Society of the Elect. It's all in the
CFR's archives. Their guilt in starting WW1 is emphatically admitted and documented in
roughly the first 200 pages of the following book. http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Tragedy_and_Hope.pdf
Who is in the Society of the Elect? Read the back pages of http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/The_Anglo-American_Establishment.pdf
We have moved way beyond the Skripals case now. Simply put, if US shoots in Syria, Russia
will shoot back this time, yes back at US. USS Donald Duck has been placed as a bait to be
sent to the bottom of Mediterrenain sea by the Russians, similar to Arizona et al at Pearl
Harbour.
Many dissenter websites are currently under attack by the cyber forces of the Western
regimes and Israel, one of them being this one. Another site under attack is my favorite
johnhelmer.com. In addition to saying that he is under attack, the current message from John
is:
WHEN THE RULE OF LAW WAS DESTROYED IN SALISBURY, LONDON AND THE HAGUE, AND THE RULE OF FRAUD
DECLARED IN WASHINGTON, THAT LEAVES ONLY THE RULE OF FORCE IN THE WORLD. THE STAVKA MET IN
MOSCOW ON GOOD FRIDAY AND IS READY. THE FOREIGN MINISTRY ANNOUNCED ON SUNDAY "THE GRAVEST
CONSEQUENCES". THIS MEANS ONE AMERICAN SHOT AT A RUSSIAN SOLDIER, THEN WE ARE AT WAR. NOT
INFOWAR, NOT CYBERWAR, NOT ECONOMIC WAR, NOT PROXY WAR. WORLD WAR.
The West is utterly bankrupt, morally as well as financially and we are experiencing the
Western remedial plan and actions – war!
"In 2016 an official British government inquiry determined that Bush and Blair had indeed
together rushed to war. The Global Establishment has nevertheless rewarded Tony Blair for his
loyalty with Clintonesque generosity. He has enjoyed a number of well-paid sinecures and is
now worth in excess of $100 million."
– The character of Blair and the Establishment is well established: Blair is a major
war criminal supported by the major war profiteers. His children and grandchildren are a
progeny of a horrible criminal.
What is truly amazing is the complacency of the Roman Catholic Church that still has not
excommunicated and anathematized the mass murderer. Blair should be haunted and hunted for
his crimes against humanity.
With age, Blair's face has become expressively evil. His wife Theresa Cara "Cherie" Blair
shows the same acute ugliness coming from her rotten soul of a war profiteer.
Keep in mind how long ago all this is: Skripal was recruited around 1990 and arrested in
2004. Guess that the Russian attitude towards Skripal took the chaos of the 90′s as
mitigating circumstances into account.
Skripal served his sentence of only 13 years till 2010 when he was pardoned and given the
option to leave. Russia did not revoke Skripal's citizenship. The UK issued Skripal a
passport too. On arrival in the UK Skripak was extensively debriefed by UK intelligence
services. Skripal has lived for 8 years in the UK now.
And now out of the blue this incident nicely dovetailing with May ratcheted up anti Russia
language only a few months before this false flag incident and the rapidly failing traction
of the Steele/Orbis/MI6 instigated Russia collusion story on the basis of that fake Trump
Dossier. By the way Orbis affiliated Steele and Miller have been among Skripal's
handlers.
Good article. The Skipnal affair has been an utter disgrace from day one. May & Boris are
a shame on the UK fully reminesent of that utter dog, Blair. The fact that the msm still
babbles on about Russia & Skipnal is indicative of their monumental contempt for the
public & factual balanced reporting .well what's new, I guess ?
Paul Craig Roberts is correct when quoting The Saker:
"The Russian view is simple: the West is ruled by a gang of thugs supported by an
infinitely lying and hypocritical media while the general public in the West has been
hopelessly zombified." -- The Saker
These ridiculous, suicidal gas attacks by Assad seem to coincide not only with battleground
victories against the head-choppers, but co-incidentally with Israel's murderous attacks on
unarmed Palestinians "throwing stones".
What nobody seems to have picked up is the emphasis – and red lines – on Gas;
gas, gas attacks. Why is gas so much worse than being dismembered, disembowelled, and
mutilated by high explosives? Certainly I would favour unconsciousness and death by gas
before being smashed to pieces by depleted uranium.
These relentlessly repeated claims are an exercise with the dual purpose of providing a
subliminal message about the greatest tragedy in human history, repeated ad nauseam. The
massive 'gassing' of European Jews some 65 years ago. Lest we forget.
Until some kind of sanity returns to this planet and war mongering gangsters like the Bush
and Clinton Mobs, Blair, Obama and a host of Pentagon generals, along with their boot-licking
MSM are indicted, tried for crimes against humanity and war crimes, found guilty and
sentences carried out, there will be no peace on Earth, just an endless series of False
Flags, hysterical reactions by the ones who were behind the False Flags and more wars.
Balfour already in 1907 announced war against Germany: Patrick J. Buchanan, 'Churchill,
Hitler and "The unnecessary war", How Britain lost its empire and the west lost the world',
New York, 2008, Balfour, to US ambassador Henry White, 1907, page 48/ 49
Because if it is a put up job by the CIA or MI6 part of the plot would have been that they
weren't actually killed. And if the perpetrators were other than those what motive would the
government have for pretending they were alive?
It does look rather like those Syrian chemical weapon attacks that happen whenever the
rebels are about to be defeated.
I am pretty sure that it was not ordered within the British government and that most of
the British government don't know where it came from, but are willing to believe it was
Russia.
While the CIA does have plenty of form on assassinations, the risk if they were found to
be assassinating in Britain seems quite high due to the close CIA links with the UK
intelligence sector. But CIA agents could have paid someone else to do it.
Mossad is the one group that can act freely in the UK, has a record of assassinating
scientists, engineers etc here, and unlike CIA, can take the risk of being caught. So it's a
possibility – OTOH Israel has shown a lot less anti-Russian hatred than the US Deep
State has.
Normally I'd assume it was indeed Russia – I thought there was plenty of evidence
the Polonium poisoning was Russia – and it still seems possible, but US or Mossad must
be at least equally likely in this case. It's just possible it could have been British
initiated but I doubt it.
I do think it's most likely the person who actually poisoned them was not an employee of
any agency.
Theresa May as more evil than Bill Clinton? That will sound odd to some, but I think it is
true. Hillary is the pure evil half of the Clinton marriage. Bill is simply charming and
filled with a desire to amass enough power to have a group adore him as he finds new panties
to explore.
May is English, and she has the very long line of Brit Empire secret service evil at her
disposal. And her move is a bold one. What it means is that she is signaling that at least if
she is PM, the UK could replace the US as Fearless Leader of the actual New World
Order...
THANK YOU, anyone who give Chump credit for anything, is either a useful idiot, or
controlled opposition.
Trump is, like Obama and H. Clinton (and Bush and B. Clinton Reagan though total control
of US government had not yet occurred then) a Zionist agent.
The media is very good at giving these traitors cover, Obama was the "peace
President/Constitutional scholar, as he made war and shredded the Constitution...
I challenge anyone to name a modern war prosecuted by the US government and its allies that
did not involve at its root the direct fabrication of blatant lies on enormous levels, both
as a casus belli and also to manipulate public opinion in favor of hostilities.
The clandestine activity represented by these *provocations* isn't even good spycraft. The
Skripal case and the latest use of chlorine gas in Syria are risible, clumsy, amateur
attempts to wangle the empire into war that the callowest rube could see through. And yet,
it's working its magic on the media. The politicians, suborned by the war machine, give
unanimous bipartisan assent.
Saddam's WMD, Gulf of Tonkin, etc., etc. And now a ridiculous false flag attack in Syria.
Did it take place at all? But the narrative is all. The press in the USA is more effectively
controlled and conformist than in Germany in the late 1930s and nobody goes around beating up
journalists or sending them to a KZ. The Syrian Gov't is winning the civil war, things are
going well but what Assad really needs is to have the crap bombed out of his military by
Uncle Sam. What transparent bullshit.
Churchill advocated both the use of gas as well as terror, so I find it interesting that
so many suddenly tender hearted "officials" and war criminals now affect squeamishness
regarding the use of it, yet fail to condemn Israel for its hideous, terroristic use of white
phosphorous among other crimes
Winston S. Churchill: departmental minute (Churchill papers: 16/16) 12 May 1919 War
Office I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas.
I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas gasses can be used which cause
great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror
from Companion Volume 4, Part 1 of the official biography, WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, by
Martin Gilbert (London: Heinemann, 1976)
The press in the USA is more effectively controlled and conformist than in Germany in
the late 1930s
Who controlled the press there and then?
What can be said about the control and conformity of the Soviet, British and American
press of the time?
and nobody goes around beating up journalists or sending them to a KZ.
That's probably because the usual thugs don't need to do that any longer since they
control virtually everything.
A couple of anecdotes to illustrate my point.:
2 of the reasons we don't hear much about mobsters these days are that the press and
judiciary are owned by them and if you do get something published, you run the risk of
getting snuffed. They probably don't stop at mere blinding anymore.
Victor Riesel was an American newspaper journalist and columnist who specialized in
news related to labor unions. In 1956 a mobster threw sulfuric acid in his face on a
public street in Chicago causing his permanent blindness.
"Treason is a strong word, but not too strong to characterize the situation in which the
Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to
the American people as any invading army could be." This indictment launched a
nine-part series of articles entitled "Treason of the Senate."
-David Graham Phillips, Cosmopolitan magazine, February 1906
In 1911 Phillips was shot multiple t imes by Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, a
Harvard-educated scion of a prominent Maryland family ,at Gramercy Park in New York
City.
Good article.
Still, you authors need to start digging deeper. Trump and his Allies are putting on an
amazing show / act to distract their ( and Humanities going back generations) hidden enemies.
The Bad Guys have for millennia weoponized information, convincing the public, reporters,
and journalists that the rabbit hole ends here, that they don't need to dig any deeper, to
just accept this slightly deeper layer of the onion. That warm and fuzzy feeling from
scratching just a little deeper into to information matrix, isn't enough anymore. You guys
have the intelligence, experience, and ability just do it please!
Actually, I think that in the end Russia has to thank the British for sending a great
message to her traitors and gangsters. Apart from the Skripal case, the UK seems up to
confiscate the wealth Russian expats in the UK looted back home. On the one hand, it's ~
$10bn worth that will be definitely lost for Russia, on the other if the UK's treatment of
Skripal and runaway oligarchs won't heal Russian traitors and gangsters from their blissful
enamourment with England's climate, I don't know what will.
I can't find the comment because the comment archive is down -- I think it was annamaria
who reported that the British were holding assets of Russian oligarchs and that Russia wanted
the funds back. The speculation was that Teresa May would take possession of the assets.
As these two articles state, most of the Russian billionaire oligarchs are Jewish
US Treasury Putin List Features Jewish Billionaires Times of Israel
So at least (conspiracy theory) part of the Skripal scheme is for Teresa May to be an
angel and return their assets to the Jewish billionaires who stole Russian wealth fair and
square.
I am very fond of the British. They have provided a good deal of what makes the US a healthy
and blessed place to live.
But I will admit that I was disappointed in PM Blair on the Iraq invasion and that of
Afghanistan. It seemed so blatantly obvious to me, that I thought there was no way the prime
minister would buy in. I was wrong. But then who would have believed that the Tory's would
abandon natural relations for same sex relations, muchless marriage.
It's unclear how to respond when the leadership is so afraid that they advance anything to
avoid grappling with hard reality. PM May has the hurdle of guiding Great Britain out of the
EU.
I too noticed that and agree with you. Do not understand why the National Guard can only
serve in a supportive, non-enforcement role on the border. Heck, every nation uses its
military to guard its borders. We need to send our military to guard our border. It's really
very simple–no one can enter the US unless they have been admitted legally.
Another thing I don't understand is how these "sanctuary" cities can so blatantly flout
federal law by sheltering illegals from ICE or any federal law enforcement agencies. If any
city does so, the federal government should put them on notice that ALL federal funds will be
cut off.
He makes great points, and I'm encouraged that he's allowed to do so on to a big and
important audience.
I remember when his predecessor, Bill O'Rielly, claimed to have seen the evidence of
Saddam's WMD, and told his audience, on the run up to war, and I was appalled. As indeed, it
turned out he too was lying.
When the ZUSA was entrenched in the highly profitable war on Vietnam, there seemed to be
no way to end it. Protests in the streets and at the universities, and anger at the war and
war pig$ seemed to no avail.
But then a phenomena began. Fragging.
one wonders .
at seven minutes in, Carlson interviews a senator. The senator does his best to lie and
deceive, as only a ZUS senator can. But Tucker eviscerates him on screen.
now if this senator, and others like him, were themselves put into peril by these
serial, treasonous wars for Israel, would they still be so keen to have Americans die,
slaughtering innocent people- to bolster and benefit the main enemy of America; Israel?
I imagine the parent of a young American, who's life was sacrificed to augment the career
of Lindsey Graham. Or other Americans who're fed up with the endless wars for Israel, and are
willing to do something about the treasonous scum who're demanding and foisting all of these
Satanic wars.
Just as Tucker says, any general who advocates for these wars, should be required to
actually visit a battlefield, so too I wonder about the politicians, and how they eventually
have to go home, and live among their constituents. What if some of the worst of them, like
Graham for instance, were to actually suffer some consequence for all the evil he's done, and
continues to do?
Of course I'm not advocating anything illegal. Just ruminating on potential solutions to
the Eternal Wars for Israel – which are nothing more or less than a continuation of the
first two World Wars (for Israel) duh
END the FED!
(or watch your nation bankrupted and looted and made to die for Israel)
Come on yankee , ( as you say USA is a country of unbridled greed. An insatiable appetite
for blood , land , alcohol ,and loot ) . Just return California , Arizona , New Mexico ,
Florida , Nevada , Utah , Colorado and Louisiana to Mexico , and Alaska to Russia ) , and
then, only then , you can talk .
PS , and do not forget to close the 8OO occupation bases the US has around the world , you
will save a lot of money
The intent of my post was to show that the MSM here is conformist and doesn't like to
stray far from what the USG is claiming and what other journalists are writing. Rather than
explore the topics you raise, as worthy of exploration as they might be, I thought I'd offer
what newspapers around the USA were saying about Saddam's WMD after Powell's UNSC speech;
seems a bit more germane.
The Powell evidence will be persuasive to anyone who is still persuadable.
The Wall Street Journal
Piling fact upon fact, photo upon photo Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
methodically demonstrated why Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein remains dangerous to his own
people, Iraq's neighbors
The Los Angeles Times
On Wednesday, America's most reluctant warrior, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell,
presented succinct and damning evidence of Saddam's enormous threat to world peace.
Arizona Republic
Saddam Hussein's illicit arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, as well as the
equally illicit means that he possesses to deliver them, poses a tangible and urgent danger
to U.S. and world security. Millions of innocent lives are at risk.
Dallas Morning News
At some point, the world chooses to believe President George W. Bush and Secretary Powell
or the international community chooses to side with Saddam Hussein and those who broadcast
his lies to the world. Powell has painstakingly presented a strong case against Iraq.
Greenville News/South Carolina
Iraq is busted. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell laid out the case clearly. No one
hearing Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council could doubt Iraq's
actions and intentions.
Jacksonville Times-Union/Florida
The threat is real and at our door. Sept. 11, 2001, stripped away the belief that the
United States can peacefully coexist with evil. Prove it, they said. Powell has.
Charleston Daily Mail/West Virginia
We are a country always loath to fight unless provoked. The reluctance of Americans to
initiate a war needlessly does the nation credit. But this is not a needless war, nor is it
unprovoked. Powell laid out the need, and explained the provocation, in step-by-step fashion
that cannot be refuted without resorting to fantasy.
Chicago Sun-Times
The Dispatch repeatedly has called on the Bush administration to make a compelling case
that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction and hiding these
efforts from U.N. inspectors. Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell made that case
before the Security Council.
Columbus Dispatch
Powell has methodically proved Iraq's failure to comply with U.N. mandates. With each
passing day, Iraq's own choices move it closer to a war that full compliance would
prevent.
Indianapolis Star
Secretary of State Colin Powell's 90-minute presentation to the U.N. Security Council,
buttressed with surveillance photographs and recorded phone conversations, should remove all
doubt that Iraq's Saddam Hussein has developed and hides weapons of mass destruction, in
violation of U.N. resolutions.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Powell's speech to the U.N. Security Council presented not just one 'smoking gun' but a
battery of them, more than sufficient to dispel any lingering doubt about the threat the
Iraqi dictator poses.
Denver Post
The United States has made a compelling case that Iraq has failed to rid itself of weapons
of mass destruction. This failure violates the U.N. Security Council resolution of late last
year which ordered Iraq to disarm. As a consequence and it is a grave one, the Security
Council must act now to disarm Iraq by force.
Salt Lake City Tribune
Powell has connected enough dots to tie Iraq to al-Qaeda and show that this alliance is a
threat to all of Europe as well as the United States.
Manchester Union Leader
In fact, the speech provided proof that Saddam continues to refuse to obey U.N.
resolutions. Any amount of time he has now to comply fully and openly with U.N. demands
should be measured in days or a few weeks – and no longer.
The Skripal affair is better understood in the context of "sir" Savile' knighthood -- when
the influential pedophile had been raping and molesting kids for 40 years and none stood up
to the criminal. The BBC has dutifully refused to publish anything that would upset "sir"
Savile. The Scotland Yard looked the other way -- precisely as the Establishment ordered them
to do. Savile' specialty were orphans. He was the embodiment of British Establishment.
The British Establishment has done with the concepts of honor. The loudest lying voices
against Russia belong either to the whoring "aristocrats," who found that war profiteering
(by any means) pays well, or the opportunistic parvenu like Gavin Williamson representing the
vulgarity and intellectual inadequacy of the Establishment.
the Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile
to the American people as any invading army could be."
-David Graham Phillips, Cosmopolitan magazine, February 1906
and to think that was over a hundred years ago
they've only gotten better at it with time
if you read The Protocols, one thing that I remember was the contemptuous way it referred
to the goyim as having the minds and souls of beasts. Lumbering, mindless cattle, chewing
their cud in a kind of catatonic stupor.
what else can we conclude about the kind of people who would vote for Lindsey Graham or
John McCain? These guys get reelected again and again.
The saddest and most tragic thing about The Protocols is that the goyim seem to be as
accommodating to the Elders as any farm animal can be. At least a pig might be apprehensive
of the trip to the slaughter house. I remember a video where a pig jumped out of a moving
truck, and walked off. But the goyim suit up their children and hand them over as cannon
fodder, to be slaughtered on behalf of their enemies.
In the last century, there may have been an excuse for not knowing the nature of the ZUS
government, being as ((they)) controlled virtually every source of information.
But today it's all out there. Today everybody knows that all of these wars are for Israel,
at the direct expense of America's blood and treasure and (I won't say good) name.
And yet, (especially from the Christian churches) the call to suit up the young people to
die in more wars- slaughtering innocents – for our enemies, will resound in the
nation.
If I were a British soldier, told to kill some Russian soldier, because Putin is Hitler..
as my daughter languishes in a mental hospital, having been gang raped into a shell of a
human being, and my son was brutalized by a British aristocrat, but now I'm called up to kill
Russians in a contrived World War, to benefit the pedophile Peerage and their ((patrons)), I
don't know how I'd resist pointing that weapon away from the Russian, and towards England's
true enemies.
Like a gullible person I at first accepted that there was indeed some event that involved the
Skripals. Now I wonder if the entire thing was a scripted hoax, that nothing had hit them,
that it's all fake. It wouldn't be surprising. We seem to be in an age of rule by sociopaths
whose only compass is that of power and riches. The populations of our countries are being
hustled along for the benefit of the few. This can't have a happy ending for the majority of
people. The much vaunted democracy of the west looks like just a fixed shell game.
The little lie is more difficult because the veracity thereof may be observed. A large lie
or untruth is more difficult to observe. Such as what is visible from outer space is not
something anyone can falsify.
' doesn't this prove I was wrong about Trump and his movement all along?
I was very wrong to discount the role of character, personality, and intelligence: Trump
is simply not fit to be President '
Raimondo's reaction to Dump's incredible imbecility re the Syria 'chemical attacks
'
' A child could see through the fake "chemical attack" supposedly launched by Bashar
al-Assad just as his troops defeated the jihadists and Trump said he wanted out of Syria
'
Yes anyone watching that white helmets footage is immediately cringing for those poor kids
being abused as props in a macabre stage play
"More occupation and killing in Crimea "
-- Evidence? It seems that you are very upset that the Kagans' cookies did not deliver.
"One Year Later, Crimeans Prefer Russia:" https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-02-06/one-year-later-crimeans-prefer-russia
"How Crimeans See Ukraine Crisis:" https://consortiumnews.com/2016/02/11/how-crimeans-see-ukraine-crisis/
"A Pew poll from April 2014 revealed that 91 percent of Crimean respondents believed
the referendum was free and fair, 93 percent had confidence in Putin, and 85
percent believed Kiev should recognize the results.
Another poll in June 2014, this one from Gallup , showed 94 percent of ethnic
Russians in Crimea thought the referendum reflected the views of the people and 68 percent
of ethnic Ukrainians in Crimea agreed . The poll found that 74 percent believed
that joining Russia would make life better.
A GfK poll from February 2015, sponsored by a pro-Ukrainian group in Canada, revealed
93 percent of Crimeans endorsed the referendum."
-- Still not enough for you?
"Ukraine [post-Maidan] under pressure from West over corruption:"
http://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2017/dec/07/ukraine-under-pressure-from-west-over-corruption-1721487.html
"Enough documents have been released -- citing coup-backed snipers killing dozens of
protesters, US embassy officials planning false flag attacks, extremists downing a passenger
airliner and NATO peddling falsified intelligence -- to make it very clear that the "coup" is
more of an invasion than anything else.
The term, roughly translated as Revolution of Dignity, was cooked up at the Jamestown
Foundation in Washington, well in advance of Victoria Nuland's assumption of the throne as de
facto "Queen of the Ukraine," lording over her subjects, playing the role of "donut
dollie."
The roots of the conflict in the Ukraine with thousands dead and the threat of, minimally, a
wider regional conflict, are attributable to extremist elements in the United States -- those
faces and voices seen and heard promoting the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the
supporters of ISIS/Al Qaeda in Syria -- and the cheerleaders of the continued genocide
against the Palestinian people."
"In 1950, the Nuremberg Tribunal defined Crimes against Peace, in Principle VI,
specifically Principle VI(a), submitted to the United Nations General Assembly, as:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation
of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts
mentioned under (i)."
Bravo, indeed, Annamaria. Beautiful, perfect, resounding, harsh, unforgiving words for a
pair of worthless human vermin masquerading as civilised, intelligent professionals with a
moral compass.
The pair of them – and the entire wide set and grouping of their self-loathing,
White-hating racist political henchmen, hangers-on, groupies, freeloaders and Labour party
pirates and race traitors who have brought my nation to the brink in every possible way
should be publicly hanged and left to rot.
Better still that none of the Moslem-loving filth had ever been born.
"... The details of Skripal case are very entertaining, but not necessary for our understanding. The case was used to install in minds the connection between chemical poisoning and Russia. It is unfair, for Russians destroyed all their chemical poisons under the eyes of Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) inspectors, but life is often unfair. ..."
"... The attack had never occurred at all, but it was duly reported by the pro-Western media. Thus the game came to a close. Skripal Affair established the connection of Russia and chemical weapons, Eastern Ghouta allowed to use this connection in order to attack Russia. ..."
"... We should not overestimate importance of these media events. The leading Western powers and their media refused to consider different explanations, refused an open inquiry, they went for jugular. Russia has been demonised in 2018, like Germany was demonised in 1940. It was a long and cautious labour. Have a look at this site theday.co.uk -- it is a site for school children and their teachers. You'll be amazed to discover its fervent hatred of Russia and Putin being pumped into hearts and heads of young generation. Such a long planning can't be dependent on an event like poisoning of an ex-spy or even on the fall of a Syrian underground fortress. ..."
"... we prefer a more simple explanation: Jews are well integrated into Western elites, and they promote and support the goals of these elites. ..."
The diplomats' expulsion flabbergasted the Russians. For days they went around scratching
their heads and looking for an answer: what do they want from us? What is the bottom line? Too
many events that make little sense separately. Why did the US administration expel 60 Russian
diplomats? Do they want to cut off diplomatic relations, or is it a first step to an attempt to
remove Russia from the Security Council, or to cancel its veto rights? Does it mean the US has
given up on diplomacy? (The answer "it's war" didn't come to their minds at that time).
The astonished Russians responded all right. They also expelled 60 diplomats, and they made
it painful: all US diplomats engaged in the political department of the Moscow Embassy were on
the non-grata list. The Political department consisted of three sections, dealing with foreign
policy, internal Russian politics and military analysis; the most important centre of data
collection, of liaison with Russian politicians, of military consequences, of Syria and
Ukraine, of North Korea and China, experienced first-class intelligence officers and field
hands -- all gone, including their Political Officer Christopher Robinson (POL). The Russians
expelled Maria Olson, the Embassy's well-known spokesperson, and the Ambassador's interpreter.
They closed down St Petersburg Consulate, an important centre for connecting, influencing and
interacting with the opposition in this 'second capital' of Russia. The US has lost many of its
Moscow hands, people who knew Russia and had developed personal relations with important
Russians. It will take a lot of time and effort for the US State Department and intelligence
agencies to get back to the positions they had lost. The Brits who initiated the deportations
also lost about fifty of their Moscow Embassy staff.
Surprisingly, the mass deportation of so many Russian diplomats had little effect on the
Russian people, as this strike had been neutralised by another painful event, by the Kemerovo
Mall blaze killing 64 cinema-goers including over 40 children. The blaze, even if it weren't
arson (it has not been proven yet) had triggered a massive onslaught of fake news and internet
trolls on the people of Russia. A million underfed Ukrainians were deployed by the Western
psywar on the web to tell the Russians that hundreds of their children had been incinerated,
and that their authorities lie to them. This operation revealed the level of influence and
integration the Western spy agencies have in Russia.
Kemerovo was a good choice for the operation: it is the only ethnic-Russian region ruled by
an old-style local hero who had outlived his wits, the only region that reported indecently
(and unrealistically) high support for Putin in the recent elections, a depressive region of
mines and miners with a big potential for trouble.
Putin managed it rather well by coming personally and dealing with the situation hands on.
He learned the ropes since 2000, when, at the dawn of his first presidential term, the
Kursk submarine went down with all hands. Putin stayed away from the sailors'
families, and acted callous, people said. "It had sunk", Putin replied to the question "What
happened to Kursk ?" (It is said USS Memphis had fired a torpedo at the
submarine, causing the disaster, while the new president had been reluctant to aggravate
relations with Clinton Administration). Now, in 2018, he was very good, full of empathy and
consideration, conveying strength and decisiveness.
Whatever American agency carried out the psyop around Kemerovo, it was very successful, but
its success undermined another operation, that of the Russian diplomats' expulsion. The
Russians did not pay it sufficient attention.
The alleged reason for the expulsion, the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter, made
very little sense. Even if the old spy were bumped off by his erstwhile employers, such a
reaction would be excessive by all means. He was not a Napoleon (poisoned by the Brits 200
years ago), not a prince of blood, not a great inventor nor a successful spy. He was a retired
ex-spy, a wash-out. Anyway he didn't die, he was just sick for a while. Perhaps he ate
something in the pub that didn't agree with him. This is the opinion of his niece, Victoria,
who is the only person alive who had been in contact with the Skripals since their alleged
hospitalisation.
This affair is so obscure that it beats Rashomon anytime. Russian reporters went around
Salisbury and noticed many incongruences. It is not certain whether Skripals were poisoned at
all, and where they are. Their pets survived the deadly poison, and they had to be destroyed.
This piece of black Russian humour had been forwarded a lot around the net:
Skripal had been poisoned by a most powerful poison, 2 grams will kill half a country
instantly! The Russians
- poisoned him in the restaurant
- no, on the bench
- no, in the car
- No, the door handle was smeared
- No, the suitcase was poisoned
- No, everything in the house was poisoned.
- Oh, and buckwheat was poisoned,
- but they did not die instantly, but walked around somewhere for four hours,
- but the policeman that discovered them almost died on the spot,
- but the poison was instantly identified,
- an antidote was instantly introduced, and Skripals and the policeman were saved;
- The policeman had been discharged next day!
- But they were in coma, and they will never recover!
- but no, the daughter had recovered fast!
- Oh, and dad is revived a miracle!
- and they both are quickly recovering, your strongest poison is useless.
- the restaurant had been surrounded by police in spacesuits
- the park had been surrounded by police in spacesuits
- the house had surrounded by police in spacesuits
- they are in spacesuits, since the poison is deadly dangerous, but next to them are
policemen without protection
- The bench was cut down and removed: it's such a terrible poison that the bench retained
its toxic quality for two weeks;
- but the cat had survived in the poisoned house the policeman had touched Skripal and
nearly died, and the cat survived and the guinea pigs would survive, but they were all
forgotten, and died of hunger in the house;
- and their remains were immediately burned, as they are poisoned by the strongest
poison;
- For two weeks they were poisoned by the strongest poison and survived, and now they had to
be urgently cremated;
- Only guinea pigs died, the cat survived all this poison. It was stressful and hungry, so
they killed it and cremated to make it certain nobody will find the secret etc etc.
The true hero of Skripal saga is the British ex-Ambassador Craig Murray , who followed the
developments and unveiled many of its inconsistencies and outright lies. You may read his
articles and twits to learn the details.
Julia Skripal took a daring step: she called her cousin Viktoria in Moscow. Their
conversation is an amazing document. Julia says that she and her father are in good health;
she doubts Viktoria will be allowed to visit her. Indeed, the British government refused to
grant her visa. The feeling is that Julia is imprisoned.
I spoke with a retired Russian counter-intelligence officer who is familiar with the
subject. He told me Russia never had a Novichok toxic substance: this name was given by
counter-intelligence to A-232 in order to trace the leaks. It worked: a man called Vil
Mirzayanov, an administrator in the chemical labs, leaked the Novichok story, and thus he was
apprehended and arrested. A-232 had been produced in small amounts in 1990s, and some of it
could be stolen and sold in these horrible years, when a full colonel of Russian intelligence
had to moonlight as a taxi driver to supplement his measly $46 monthly salary. In those years,
the poison could be indeed made available, and in one case it was used by criminals.
Theoretically it is not impossible that some of this poison could have been saved and stored by
some criminals; alternatively, it was available to the Americans who dismantled the labs in
1992. Anyway we have no independent proof that Skripals were poisoned by anything at all. If
they survive, if the British and the American intelligence services don't kill them, perhaps we
shall know more. We can definitely exclude the possibility that Russian state agents would go
to Britain to poison an old spy who had been pardoned by Russian president years ago. Even if
he was active in producing Christopher Steele's Trump ("Golden Rain") file, the Russians would
have no compelling reason to kill him at all, and in such an odd way in particular. "If we
would kill him, he would stay killed", concluded my interlocutor.
The details of Skripal case are very entertaining, but not necessary for our
understanding. The case was used to install in minds the connection between chemical poisoning
and Russia. It is unfair, for Russians destroyed all their chemical poisons under the eyes of
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) inspectors, but life is often
unfair.
The connection between chemical poisoning and Russia had been prepared for the forthcoming
event. Eastern Ghouta was an important and well entrenched location of the Syrian rebels. Being
within easy reach from Central Damascus, it provided the rebels with a chance to seize power in
the Syrian capital. As the Syrian army with Iranian and Russian support advanced into Eastern
Ghouta, they learned of the rebel plans to stage a false flag chemical weapon attack, as they
already had done a few times in past. President Putin warned of such a possibility at his joint
(with President Erdogan and President Rouhani) press conference in Ankara last week, a few days
before the alleged attack.
The attack had never occurred at all, but it was duly reported by the pro-Western media.
Thus the game came to a close. Skripal Affair established the connection of Russia and chemical
weapons, Eastern Ghouta allowed to use this connection in order to attack Russia.
We should not overestimate importance of these media events. The leading Western powers
and their media refused to consider different explanations, refused an open inquiry, they went
for jugular. Russia has been demonised in 2018, like Germany was demonised in 1940. It was a
long and cautious labour. Have a look at this site theday.co.uk
-- it is a site for school children and their teachers. You'll be amazed to discover its
fervent hatred of Russia and Putin being pumped into hearts and heads of young generation. Such
a long planning can't be dependent on an event like poisoning of an ex-spy or even on the fall
of a Syrian underground fortress.
The planners of a war on Russia have utilised fear of anti-Semitism for their purposes. I
called this method Anti-semitism Weaponised . Jeremy
Corbyn, the Labour leader, has been blocked and contained by accusations of anti-Semitism. He
was the only leader able to stop Britain's descent into war with Russia. Other Labour MPs and
activists have been attacked over alleged anti-Semitism issue, and -- what a coincidence! --
practically all of them were against demonising Russia; while Friends of Israel -- whether
Conservative or Labour -- were viciously anti-Russian.
This is a correlation that will be discussed at another time, but it is far from obvious
one. Russia has no anti-Semitism; the Russian president is friendly to Israel and to the
powerful Jewish Chabad movement. Russia
has no white nationalism, and little of the alt-right. However, this correlation exists. Shall
we explain it by Jewish hatred of the Orthodox Church, as this Church (active in Russia,
Greece, Palestine and Syria) hasn't been Jewified. Or should we prefer a more simple
explanation: Jews are well integrated into Western elites, and they promote and support the
goals of these elites.
However, people who can withstand accusations of anti-Semitism are the strongest enemies of
the ruling power; they stand against the war with Russia and against attack on Syria, as the
Haaretz newspaper explained in an article called
White Supremacists Defend Assad, Warn Trump: Don't Let Israel Force You Into War With Syria
. The article continues: "Alt-right calls Saturday's chemical attack in Damascus suburb a false
flag operation, claiming it's an effort by Israel and 'globalists' to keep U.S. troops in
Middle East" It quotes David Duke and other untouchables as the only people who reject Israeli
narrative.
Not being a white supremacist (probably I do not qualify) I still applaud these brave men
when they say and do the right thing. Sensitivity to anti-Semitism accusation is a strong
vulnerability of character. Though people like Corbyn have their heart in the right place, they
are weak on this point, and the enemy uses this weakness to neutralize them. There are people
in the left that are not afraid of any accusation, but there aren't many who are resistant to
metum Judaeorum .
Let us hope and pray we shall survive the forthcoming cataclysm.
We have moved way beyond the Skripals case now. Simply put, if US shoots in Syria, Russia
will shoot back this time, yes back at US. USS Donald Duck has been placed as a bait to be
sent to the bottom of Mediterrenain sea by the Russians, similar to Arizona et al at Pearl
Harbour.
Many dissenter websites are currently under attack by the cyber forces of the Western
regimes and Israel, one of them being this one. Another site under attack is my favorite
johnhelmer.com. In addition to saying that he is under attack, the current message from John
is:
WHEN THE RULE OF LAW WAS DESTROYED IN SALISBURY, LONDON AND THE HAGUE, AND THE RULE OF FRAUD
DECLARED IN WASHINGTON, THAT LEAVES ONLY THE RULE OF FORCE IN THE WORLD. THE STAVKA MET IN
MOSCOW ON GOOD FRIDAY AND IS READY. THE FOREIGN MINISTRY ANNOUNCED ON SUNDAY "THE GRAVEST
CONSEQUENCES". THIS MEANS ONE AMERICAN SHOT AT A RUSSIAN SOLDIER, THEN WE ARE AT WAR. NOT
INFOWAR, NOT CYBERWAR, NOT ECONOMIC WAR, NOT PROXY WAR. WORLD WAR.
The West is utterly bankrupt, morally as well as financially and we are experiencing the
Western remedial plan and actions – war!
"In 2016 an official British government inquiry determined that Bush and Blair had indeed
together rushed to war. The Global Establishment has nevertheless rewarded Tony Blair for his
loyalty with Clintonesque generosity. He has enjoyed a number of well-paid sinecures and is
now worth in excess of $100 million."
– The character of Blair and the Establishment is well established: Blair is a major
war criminal supported by the major war profiteers. His children and grandchildren are a
progeny of a horrible criminal.
What is truly amazing is the complacency of the Roman Catholic Church that still has not
excommunicated and anathematized the mass murderer. Blair should be haunted and hunted for
his crimes against humanity.
With age, Blair's face has become expressively evil. His wife Theresa Cara "Cherie" Blair
shows the same acute ugliness coming from her rotten soul of a war profiteer.
Keep in mind how long ago all this is:
Skripal was recruited around 1990 and arrested in 2004. Guess that the Russian attitude
towards Skripal took the chaos of the 90′s as mitigating circumstances into
account.
Skripal served his sentence of only 13 years till 2010 when he was pardoned and given the
option to leave. Russia did not revoke Skripal's citizenship. The UK issued Skripal a
passport too. On arrival in the UK Skripak was extensively debriefed by UK intelligence
services. Skripal has lived for 8 years in the UK now.
And now out of the blue this incident nicely dovetailing with May ratcheted up anti Russia
language only a few months before this false flag incident and the rapidly failing traction
of the Steele/Orbis/MI6 instigated Russia collusion story on the basis of that fake Trump
Dossier. By the way Orbis affiliated Steele and Miller have been among Skripal's
handlers.
Paul Craig Roberts is correct when quoting The Saker:
"The Russian view is simple: the West is ruled by a gang of thugs supported by an
infinitely lying and hypocritical media while the general public in the West has been
hopelessly zombified." -- The Saker
The "sir" Savile -- a vicious heartless pedophile and friend to many influential Brits --
was indeed the Establishment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile
Here are the facts:
"Savile was made a life member of the British Gypsy Council in 1975, becoming the first
"outsider" to be made a member.
Savile became a friend of Margaret Thatcher He reportedly spent eleven consecutive New Year's
Eves at Chequers with Thatcher and her family Letters released in December 2012 by the
National Archives under the thirty-year rule confirm the close friendship between Savile and
Thatcher.
In 1984, he was accepted as a member of the Athenaeum, a gentlemen's club in London's Pall
Mall, after being proposed by Cardinal Basil Hume.
Savile met Prince Charles through mutual charity interests, and Charles reportedly sent him
gifts on his 80th birthday and a note reading: "Nobody will ever know what you have done for
this country, Jimmy. This is to go some way in thanking you for that."
In the 1972 New Year Honours, Savile was appointed Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the
British Empire, entitled to append " OBE " to his signature.
In the 1990 Queen's Birthday Honours he was made a Knight Bachelor "for charitable services",
entitled to use the honorific prefix " Sir ". Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had
made four attempts to have him knighted before succeeding in her final year in office.
Savile was honoured with a Papal knighthood by being made a Knight Commander of the
Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great (KCSG) by Pope John Paul II in
1990.
– There were more awards and prestigious memberships.
It was widely known that Savile was a vicious pedophile. Similar to Blair, Savile had been
protected by his powerful friends.
"Immediately after Savile's death, the BBC's Newsnight programme began an
investigation into reports that he was a sexual abuser. Newsnight also discovered that Surrey
Police had investigated allegations of abuse against Savile. There was no public mention of
the Newsnight investigation into Savile at the time there had been a cover-up by the BBC.
By 19 October 2012, police were pursuing 400 lines of inquiry based on testimony from 200
witnesses via 14 police forces across the UK."
"It is now known that Jimmy Savile sexually abused hundreds of children and women at the
height of his fame. Investigators believe the late Top of the Pops host preyed on around 500
vulnerable victims as young as two years old at institutions including the BBC's broadcasting
studios, 14 hospitals and 20 children's hospitals across England." https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jun/26/jimmy-savile-sexual-abuse-timeline
Ukraine is a debilitated state, created under Soviet auspices, hampered by a difficult
Soviet inheritance, and hollowed out by its own predatory elites during two decades of misrule.
But it is also a nation that is too big and independent for Russia to swallow up. Russia,
meanwhile, is a damaged yet still formidable great power whose rulers cannot be intimidated
into allowing Ukraine to enter the Western orbit. Hence the standoff. No external power or aid
package can solve Ukraine's problems or compensate for its inherent vulnerabilities
vis-à-vis Russia. Nor would sending lethal weaponry to Ukraine's brave but ragtag
volunteer fighters and corrupt state structures improve the situation; in fact, it would send
it spiraling further downward, by failing to balance Russian predominance while giving Moscow a
pretext to escalate the conflict even more. Rather, the way forward must begin with a
recognition of some banal facts and some difficult bargaining.
Russia's seizure of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine do not challenge the entire
post-1945 international order. The forward positions the Soviet Union occupied in the heart of
Europe as a result of defeating Nazi Germany were voluntarily relinquished in the early 1990s,
and they are not going to be reoccupied. But nor should every detail of the post–Cold War
settlement worked out in 1989–91 be considered eternal and inviolate. That settlement
emerged during an anomalous time. Russia was flat on its back but would not remain prostrate
forever, and when it recovered, some sort of pushback was to be expected.
Something similar happened following the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, many of the
provisions of which were not enforced. Even if France, the United Kingdom, and the United
States had been willing and able to enforce the peace, their efforts would not have worked,
because the treaty had been imposed during a temporary anomaly, the simultaneous collapse of
German and Russian power, and would inevitably have been challenged when that power
returned.
Territorial revisionism ensued after World War II as well, of course, and continued
sporadically for decades. Since 1991, there have been some negotiated revisions: Hong Kong and
Macao underwent peaceful reabsorption into China. Yugoslavia was broken up in violence and war,
leading to the independence of its six federal units and eventually Kosovo, as well.
Unrecognized statelets such as Nagorno-Karabakh, part of Azerbaijan; Transnistria, a sliver of
Moldova; Abkhazia and South Ossetia, disputed units of Georgia; and now Donetsk and Luhansk,
parts of Ukraine -- each entails a story of Stalinist border-making.
The European Union cannot resolve this latest standoff, nor can the United Nations. The
United States has indeed put together "coalitions of the willing" to legitimize some of its
recent interventions, but it is not going to go to war over Ukraine or start bombing Russia,
and the wherewithal and will for indefinite sanctions against Russia are lacking. Distasteful
as it might sound, Washington faces the prospect of trying to work out some negotiated larger
territorial settlement.
Such negotiations would have to acknowledge that Russia is a great power with leverage, but
they would not need to involve the formal acceptance of some special Russian sphere of interest
in its so-called near abroad. The chief goals would be, first, to exchange international
recognition of Russia's annexation of Crimea for an end to all the frozen conflicts in which
Russia is an accomplice and, second, to disincentivize such behavior in the future. Russia
should have to pay monetary compensation for Crimea. There could be some federal solutions,
referendums, even land swaps and population transfers (which in many cases have already taken
place). Sanctions on Russia would remain in place until a settlement was mutually agreed on,
and new sanctions could be levied if Russia were to reject negotiations or were deemed to be
conducting them in bad faith. Recognition of the new status of Crimea would occur in stages,
over an extended period.
It would be a huge challenge to devise incentives that were politically plausible in the
West while at the same time powerful enough for Russia to agree to a just settlement -- and for
Ukraine to be willing to take part. But the search for a settlement would be an opportunity as
well as a headache.
NATO expansion can be judged to have been a strategic error -- not because it angered Russia
but because it weakened NATO as a military alliance. Russia's elites would likely have become
revanchist even without NATO's advance, because they believe, nearly universally, that the
United States took advantage of Russia in 1991 and has denied the country its rightful place as
an equal in international diplomacy ever since. But NATO expansion's critics have not offered
much in the way of practicable alternatives. Would it really have been appropriate, for
example, to deny the requests of all the countries east of Germany to join the alliance?
Then as now, the only real alternative was the creation of an entirely new trans-European
security architecture, one that fully transcended its Cold War counterpart. This was an
oft-expressed Russian wish, but in the early 1990s, there was neither the imagination nor the
incentives in Washington for such a heavy lift. Whether there is such capacity in Washington
today remains to be seen. But even if comprehensive new security arrangements are unlikely
anytime soon, Washington could still undertake much useful groundwork.
Critics might object on the grounds that the sanctions are actually biting, reinforced by
the oil price free fall -- so why offer even minimal concessions to Putin now? The answer is
because neither the sanctions, nor the oil price collapse, nor the two in conjunction have
altered Russia's behavior, diminished its potential as a spoiler, or afforded Ukraine a chance
to recover.
Whether they acknowledge it or not, Western opponents of a negotiated settlement are really
opting for another long-term, open-ended attempt to contain Russia and hope for regime change
-- a policy likely to last until the end of Putin's life and possibly well beyond. The costs of
such an approach are likely to be quite high, and other global issues will continue to demand
attention and resources. And all the while, Ukraine would effectively remain crippled, Europe's
economy would suffer, and Russia would grow ever more embittered and difficult to handle. All
of that might occur no matter what. But if negotiations hold out a chance of somehow averting
such an outcome, they are worth a try. And the attempt would hold few costs, because failed
negotiations would only solidify the case for containment in Europe and in the United
States.
It is ultimately up to Russia's leaders to take meaningful steps to integrate their country
into the existing world order, one that they can vex but not fully overturn. To the extent that
the Ukraine debacle has brought this reality into sharper focus, it might actually have been
useful in helping Putin to see some light, and the same goes for the collapse of oil prices and
the accompanying unavoidable devaluation of the ruble. After the nadir of 1998, smart policy
choices in Moscow, together with some lucky outside breaks, helped Russia transform a crisis
into a breakthrough, with real and impressive steps forward. That history could replay itself
-- but whether it will remains the prerogative of one person alone.
"... So the idea that the Israelis were trying to provoke a response directed against US assets in order to escalate the conflict seems plausible. But Syria didn't play. ..."
"... Seems like Israel was used to do the dirty work and get Trump out of the corner he had rapidly painted himself into. Trump's response to the fake Douma chemical attack was so over the top that he would have had to carry out a major attack on Syria to justify it. Major meaning much larger than the last one with 59 tomahawks. So probably a hundred tomahawks at least and against a more important target than last time. This the Russians have said they will not allow. So what to do? Have Israel launch a rather minor harassing attack against a base well away from Damascus and so relieve the pressure on Trump to do something. ..."
" Israeli officials have called on the US to attack the Syrian Army, following what they
called a "shocking attack" in Douma. Israel's own crackdown on Gaza protesters was
"self-defense" and not worthy of attention, they said.
Washington must launch a strike against Damascus in response to the alleged chemical
attack in the city of Douma, the Israeli Strategic Affairs and Public Security Minister Gilad
Erdan told the Army Radio on Sunday, commenting on the reports coming from anti-government
groups in Syria. Erdan also said he personally hopes that the US would take military action
against the Syrian government, which he blamed for the attack, the Jerusalem Post reports.
The minister added that the Douma incident shows the "need" for a US troop buildup in
Syria.
The Israeli construction minister and former IDF major general, Yoav Galant, went even
further and called for a military strike aimed directly against the Syrian president.
"[Bashar] Assad is the angel of death, and the world would be better without him," Galant
said. The Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog called on the US to take "decisive military
action" against Syria."
So the idea that the Israelis were trying to provoke a response directed against US assets
in order to escalate the conflict seems plausible. But Syria didn't play.
Confusion about the number, type, and source of missiles, and the fate of the synchronized
ISIS attacks in various accounts.
Seems like Israel was used to do the dirty work and get Trump out of the corner he had
rapidly painted himself into. Trump's response to the fake Douma chemical attack was so over
the top that he would have had to carry out a major attack on Syria to justify it. Major
meaning much larger than the last one with 59 tomahawks. So probably a hundred tomahawks at
least and against a more important target than last time. This the Russians have said they
will not allow. So what to do? Have Israel launch a rather minor harassing attack against a
base well away from Damascus and so relieve the pressure on Trump to do something.
So far I'd say it looks like this is what happened. If so then the Russians wisely allowed
Trump to save face. Hopefully that will allow things to blow over. Next couple days should
tell.
"... Israel has the leftover al Nusra and AQ in the southwest to keep the 4th DEZ in turmoil at Daraa and Suweida. ..."
"... Please allow me to rephrase your statement that Putin has "never shown courage". The correct statement is that Putin has "never done anything stupid". Now, that makes sense. See the difference? ..."
One common sense thought: no one wants a bigger or wider war. There is no nation that can
handle it.
The West has a strategy to support an insurgency using the leftovers and Kurds. We know the
Kurds in Syria will not fight Assad's forces.
So, there are probably 30,000 fighters of
various sorts the US and Turkey are still feeding and using.
As for the air space over Syria, that will eventually close to the US. All Putin has to do
is move S 400 75-100 kms closer toward the East border from the West enclaves where they now
defend.
The US will be grounded, unable to support their 14+ bases, and will have to leave.
Israel has the leftover al Nusra and AQ in the southwest to keep the 4th DEZ in turmoil at
Daraa and Suweida.
But no one wants to put their Armed Forces into Syria.
So, what happens tonight and the next few days is missiles strikes, unless Bolton can
convince the Military to do something enormous with a huge air strike. How Putin handles this depends on casualties and losses of Russian forces.
Since Russian advisers, Military Police and Reconciliation Officers are all over Syria
North to South, West to East, it will be sheer luck that none are struck by cruise missiles
or other weapons if they come into play.
The Lord Has Risen, and the forces of evil are rabid for more Death and Destruction.
Not exactly sure. Putin can move S-400 close to US presence but in order to Ground US, he
needs to send a message saying that he can shoot them. And in all these episodes Putin never
showed the courage. So you could place S-500 on door step of US airbase but still they will
continue flying!
Please allow me to rephrase your statement that Putin has "never shown courage". The correct
statement is that Putin has "never done anything stupid". Now, that makes sense. See the
difference?
It is hard for me to put into words the utter disgust and anger I feel towards the zio con
clowns in wash dc being led by the nose by Israel/mossad. But I guess, what the hell-zios do
not care what average americas think or feel-they are the fodder..
Might be Israeli that pretends to be USA hoping that Syria or Russia will think it is USA and
fire at USA forces causing a wider war.. Israel has actually done actually this before.
Chemical false flag attacks is the traditional way Syria islamists are calling for the US air support. From comments: "After all
they had lost in Douma - there were no point in Syrian gas attack - the fighting was done. Jaish al Islam must be having a great
laugh at our expensive for falling for their trick of gassing their own people. Let us not help the Islamists."
Anther interesting comment: "With "experts" at president's disposal, seems to me moment Trump announced Syrian withdrawal, at
least one should have anticipated - based on past occurrences - a gas attack aimed to engage US and therefore maintain US presence."
And another " including their mouthpieces at the times manufacture
a chemical attack and claim Assad -- who has no reason whatsoever to do such things -- is some horrible monster that deserves to have
bombs rained down on him. How totally corrupt the MIC has become."
That act reported by White helmets looks like a classic MI6 provocation. Russian investigation has shown that no attack took place.
Moreover the rumors about this false flag were circulating long ago. Russians warned about this possiblity a month or so ago telling
the jihadists prepare such provocation. Looks like all that was needed for Trump is a plausible justification -- the desire to "decapitate"
Assad is too strong to resist.
Notable quotes:
"... Syria is a crappy place primarily because of insane overpopulation and limited water. Getting Assad out is not going to help with population or with water. Moving the entire Syrian population to Europe could be done and they are working on that. ..."
"... With "experts" at president's disposal, seems to me moment Trump announced Syrian withdrawal, at least one should have anticipated - based on past occurrences - a gas attack aimed to engage US and therefore maintain US presence. ..."
President Trump on Monday denounced the suspected chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of people in
Syria over the weekend as a "barbaric act," and said
he will make a decision in the next 24 to 48 hours about whether to retaliate militarily as he did to a similar assault last year.
Congress has skirted their responsibility to authorize war in Syria and Trump is suggesting taking actions that could drag
us into a deep and costly war. The American people deserve to hear this debated in Congress.
Retaliate? They don't even know for sure who it was, could well have been an ally. The place is a mess of competing outside
forces.
Retaliate - and therein lies the problem. Too much to ask that for once they think, discuss, decide a long term policy with
other countries. Last time the 45th tried 'me-big-man-with-bomb' there was no follow up, nothing was done, what was the point?
Look at me I have the biggest, noisiest fire cracker! Pathetic. Careless. Irresponsible. Uniformed. Murderous. The list is endless.
I suppose the President can launch a missile attack, or any military action, based on whatever authority from Congress permitted
the US military to be fighting in Syria in the first place. The more fundamental issue is that Congress long ago ceded to the
President its constitutional responsibility to declare war . This must be corrected with checks restored on the President's power
to deploy the military at will. Otherwise, the US will continue to be in a perpetual state of war, which may be good for the extended
military supply industry but damaging to country as a whole.
What if.....what if this chemical attack was sanctioned not by Assad but by a state or a non-state force that wants the U.S.
to retaliate?
Just why did this chemical attack follow Trump's announced desire to get out of Syria?
Why, also, is Israel urging us to attack now? Could it be to distract from the human rights catastrophe in Gaza?
We all know what John Bolton would have us do.
Where's the proof that this was Assad's work? More WMD ?
Trump wined and dined MBS of Saudi Arabia who has been conducting airstrikes on Yemen with hundreds of casualties, as high
as 68 civilian deaths in one day. It would be hard to imagine a better example of hypocrisy.
Syria is a part of a complex series of issues that make up the problem of Middle Eastern diplomacy. Trump does not have the
capacity to manage any of this. Selling arms to the Saudis to continue their war in Yemen added to the Syrian problem. The cholera
epidemic in Yemen is a form of biological warfare that is killing more civilians than chemical warfare in Syria. Starving the
population of Yemen is also warfare. By supporting the Saudis we have lost the moral high ground in Syria.
Was it the rebels again? Or is it chlorine again? Chlorine is used for several commercial and health purposes--to clean bottles,
to clean water, and for refrigeration. So it is quite easy for a bomb or explosive to hit a container and then there is a serious
gas problem. If pool acid and chlorine are stored together it might be worse when mixed. I do not believe Assad needs to use chemicals
because he has Russians who will do air strikes on his enemies. I call fake news.
The solution to Syria was obvious years ago, if you just wanted to see the obvious. And that was Syria as it had been for years,
in peace, secular, under a government of Assad who, eventually, knew it had to evolve into a more democratic regime . Now that
has changed, and all to Israel´s advantage. It seems as if the whole world has forgotten that the whole Middle East problem was
born, and is still the Occupation of Palestinian Land. Israel is a thorn in Arab Middle East.The only one that has attacked ALL
its neighbours !
We should do nothing. We need to leave Syria to the Syrian. We can't and musn't involve our military in every tragedy in the
world. There is no doubt in my mind that if we mistakenly and stupidly attack the Syrian Army we are aiding the Jihadist who planned
thit attack. After all they had lost in Douma - there were no point in Syrian gas attack - the fighting was done. Jaish al Islam
must be having a great laugh at our expensive for falling for their trick of gassing their own people. Let us not help the Islamists.
The US government LIES about everything. We know this. This has been proved repeatedly.
Yet, here we are with the US government, and its stenographers in the mainstream media, i.e., the stuff that's not Fake News,
right, assuring us that Assad gassed his own people. Again.
Even if we could believe this, or even if we gave the government the benefit of the doubt for . . . what? . . . its integrity?,
we are after all exceptional, right, how is this America's business?
Yes, other countries shouldn't gas their own people. But countries shouldn't commit war crimes either, and that goes on every
day. America is as dirty as any other country. Despite our treaty obligations, even torture is legal here.
We're supposedly the richest country in the world, but we can barely keep our streets paved and lit. And not only that, but
it is a proven fact that one dollar invested in domestic economics brings back much more return than one dollar spent on bombs.
Trump is right. We need to stomp the madness in the Middle East. The oil companies can pay for their own security with all of
the money they don't pay in taxes.
Right now our cities are clogged with people living in tents and defecating on the sidewalks and in the streets. Look at old
pictures from the Depression. It looks the same today.
The left is seeing Russians responsible for every wrong in the world. The right sees itself as the rescuer of the wrongs of
the world. I pray that this does not move this country into a war with Russia.
This nation needs a "policy". Something with careful thought and backed by facts, expert analysis, and wisdom; Aim first and
carefully.
A "Shoot from the Hip" flourish that can be touted at the next Trump self congratulatory ego rally Will Not Do. Either this
nation has a leader or it doesn't - Trump's move!
One of the few things I liked about Trump was his anti-involvement stance in the middle east. We have SO MUCH to fix and worry
about at home. Nothing that Trump does on immigration, environment, or anything else will make me more angry than dragging us
into another war.
I don't see any ink being given to the very likely possibility that the gas attack was a ploy by rebels to get the US (and
their air cover) to stick around. If you ask the question, "Who benefits?" the Assad regime had nothing to gain by gassing a few
civilians -- they're about to win the war, so why would they? OTOH, the rebels need us badly, and know that we will reflexively
blame Assad.
Just a few days ago, Trump talked about withdrawing from Syria. Now, he says he will decide whether to attack Syria within
the next couple of days. One day we're out, the next day we're in. And just a few days ago, Trump said he didn't like to reveal
his military plans in advance. Now, he is announcing to the world that he is consideration retaliation against Syria. His contradictions
make the U.S. look as if it is led by a very confused commander in chief.
Yes, chemical weapons are barbaric, but who launched the attack? Which faction in this complicated civil war? How does trump
know the answer to this question when no one else does? Why would the U.S. "retaliate" based on speculation, especially after
trump recently said, "we need to get out of there and leave it to someone else"? What good would military action do at this point?
Are we anxious to put our "expensive new military" to the test? So many questions...and an administration unable / unwilling to
answer them. Too bad trump can't simply tweet his way out of this one...
The U.S. should respond militarily to Syria's gas attack only on two conditions:
1. The leaders of all key U.S. allies (European countries, Canada, Japan, S. Korea, Australia, etc.) sign a joint declaration
of support for the action.
2. Each of these countries pays a population-weighted share of the expense of the U.S. military operation.
We are either all in this together, or it's not worth doing.
Let's find out if our allies are willing to back up their pious declarations of condemnation.
I don't get it. Subjecting people, women, children and even men, to crushing, burning, lacerating and penetrating wounds is
par for the course. It's war after all. But poison! Oh the (in)humanity!
Also, anyone think it's weird that Assad does this just when the US is making motions to pull out?
It is impossible to know what is really going on as the world's powers continue to fight this proxy war. The only thing that
is certain is the continued suffering of the Syrian people - including the poor sods who will be conventionally incinerated by
American "retaliation" in a day or so.
The President should have no authority to declare war or commit troops, period. So far, there has been no urgent "national
emergency," as required by the War Powers Resolution, which would justify the President to effectively declare war unilaterally
and yet here we are, with presidents on both sides completely ignoring the Constitution, using the WPA as an enabler to bypass
the text which says that only Congress can declare war.
Saddam used gas on the Iranians and we were good with that. It is not clear about this gas in Syria. These "freedom fighters"
have no compunction about using civilians as human shields. How do we know the truth? They are various branches of Al Quaeda and
given their huge birth rate they don't seem to place much weight on human life in the here and now....maybe they focus on the
afterlife more. So why can't we just leave Assad alone and let him be the strong man there? Yes Syria is a crappy place primarily
because of insane overpopulation and limited water. Getting Assad out is not going to help with population or with water. Moving
the entire Syrian population to Europe could be done and they are working on that.
Trump says he was getting us out of Syria. Much to my relief to this endless war.
And I'm pretty sure the president of Syria, Assad, whose regime has been under attack by both the US supported Syrian rebels
and their ISIS allies did not want the US on their soil. So why would he do something like this? I don't believe he did. By the
way if the US was not meddling over in the M.E. there would be no refugees and fewer immigrants.
"Conventional" deaths by artillery and bullets are perfectly acceptable - when bodies are vaporized, ripped and torn apart
unrecognizably. But use a deadly gas and leave the corpses in "beautiful" condition - there you have crossed the line mister.
Lemme get this straight: The US policy doesn't care *how many* Syrians were killed; it only cares *how* they were killed? Nothing
good can come from such an ethically bankrupt policy.
As painful as it is, the possession of chlorine is not in violation of the standards we all signed in to to stop chemical and
biological weapons. Hence, the agreement under Obama, by almost all standards, worked well. Or at least unless we wanted a few
hundred thousands troop on the ground to search the entire country. This use of chlorine is. Maybe Trump will propose a huge tariff
on chlorine exports to Syria?
What is the logic for Assad to provoke the US right after Trump announces his intention to withdraw? Would it not be more strategic
for the regime to hold off until US troops were withdrawn and then go after the rebels? Does Assad assume that the US response
will be more moderate if we still have troops in country? Any chance this was a rogue action to delay or reverse US plans to withdraw?
If so, who benefits from US continuing to maintain troops in Syria?
With "experts" at president's disposal, seems to me moment Trump announced Syrian withdrawal, at least one should have
anticipated - based on past occurrences - a gas attack aimed to engage US and therefore maintain US presence.
To
borrow from the British definition of an ambassador, United States military leaders are honest soldiers promoted in rank to champion
war with reckless disregard for the truth. This practice persists despite the catastrophic waste of lives and money because the untruths
are never punished. Congress needs to correct this problem forthwith.
General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, exemplifies the phenomenon. As reported in The Washington
Post , Dunford recently voiced optimism about defeating the Afghan Taliban in the seventeenth year of a trillion-dollar war that
has multiplied safe havens for international terrorists, the opposite of the war's original mission. While not under oath, Dunford
insisted, "This is not another year of the same thing we've been doing for 17 years. This is a fundamentally different approach [T]he
right people at the right level with the right training [are in place] "
There, the general recklessly disregarded the truth. He followed the instruction of General William Westmoreland who stated at
the National Press Club on November 21, 1967 that the Vietnam War had come to a point "where the end begins to come into view." The
1968 Tet Offensive was then around the corner, which would provoke Westmoreland to ask for 200,000 more American troops. The Pentagon
Papers and Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty have meticulously documented the military's reckless disregard
for the truth throughout the Vietnam War.
Any fool can understand that continuing our 17-year-old war in Afghanistan is a fool's errand. The nation is artificial. Among
other things, its disputed border with Pakistan, the Durand Line, was drawn in 1896 between the British Raj and Afghan Amir Abdur
Rahmen Khair. Afghanistan's population splinters along tribal, ethnic, and sectarian lines, including Pushtans, Uzbeks, Hazara, Tajiks,
Turkmen, and Balochi. Its government is riddled with nepotism, corruption, ineptitude, and lawlessness. Election fraud and political
sclerosis are endemic. Opium production and trafficking replenish the Taliban's coffers.
The Afghan National Army (ANA) is a paper tiger. Desertion and attrition rates are alarming. Disloyalty is widespread. American
weapons are sold to the Taliban or captured. ANA soldiers will not risk that last full measure of devotion for an illegitimate, unrepresentative,
decrepit government.
The Taliban also has a safe haven in Pakistan. A staggering portion -- maybe up to 90 percent -- of United States assistance to
Afghanistan is embezzled, diverted, or wasted. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR),
related to Chatham House in London that "SIGAR was finding waste, fraud, and abuse nearly everywhere we looked in Afghanistan --
from the $488 million worth of aircraft that couldn't fly, to the navy the U.S. bought for a landlocked country, to the buildings
the U.S. paid for that literally melted in the rain ."
"The Taliban are getting stronger, the government is on the retreat, they are losing ground to the Taliban day by day," Abdul
Jabbar Qahraman, a retired Afghan general who was the Afghan government's military envoy to Helmand Province until 2016, told the
New York Times last summer. ISIS has now joined the Taliban and al-Qaeda in fighting the United States. Secretary of Defense
General James Mattis conceded to Congress last June that "we are not winning in Afghanistan right now," but added polyannaishly,
"And we will correct this as soon as possible." Only two months earlier, the Defense Department insisted that dropping the Mother
of All Bombs on Afghanistan would reverse the losing trend.
Upton Sinclair sermonized: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding
it." Thus do military leaders deceive themselves about futile wars to extract more spending, to maintain their professional reputations
and public stature, and to avoid the embarrassment of explaining to Congress and the American people that astronomical sums have
been wasted and tens of thousands of American soldiers have died or were crippled in vain.
To deter such self-deception, Congress should enact a statute requiring the retirement without pension of any general or admiral
who materially misleads legislators or the public about prospective or ongoing wars with reckless disregard for the truth. That sanction
might have prompted General Dunford to acknowledge the grim truth about Afghanistan: that the United States is clueless about how
to win that war.
Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and is the founding partner of Fein & DelValle PLLC.
Trump as a "false flag operation," That's rich ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... So the paradox is this: how are the elites herding people towards a new war, while at the same time encouraging thoughts and movements which will be a solid opposition block against military action? ..."
"... Concur. Clinton is sociopathic. Trump is narcissistic. The Deep State uses both. The former willing tool, she cares nothing for anyone but herself. The latter, the psychologists in CIA have his profile and manipulate him like a woman with a velvet glove. His inadequacies are easily stroked. ..."
There is no doubt that Trump is an elite "false flag". Someone who was intended to be simply
PORTRAYED as being anti-establishment, but in reality, one who carried out and amplified
everything the establishment wanted. That much is clear and solidified now.
But here is the real strangeness in the situation:
A quick scan of Twitter and Facebook commentary on this new Syria situation shows that a
clear majority of Americans are opposed to anything that Trump touches. And this includes
military action in Syria, as evidenced from the social media postings. What was once a simple
matter of anti-war opposition has turned into a magnified anti-war plus anti-Trump
opposition.
So the paradox is this: how are the elites herding people towards a new war, while at
the same time encouraging thoughts and movements which will be a solid opposition block
against military action?
I think a rational explanation is that the elites simply got overconfident. They
overplayed their hand. It will indeed come back to bite them. The American people, whether
pro-Trump or anti-Trump, will resist any military action in Syria no matter what. The elites
will have to stop this movement and come up with a new strategy towards war.
"There is no doubt that Trump is an elite "false flag". Someone who was intended to be
simply PORTRAYED as being anti-establishment, but in reality, one who carried out and
amplified everything the establishment wanted. That much is clear and solidified now."
Exactly. The main reason trump is better than Clinton, in my opinion, is all that
opposition to Trump we see, would not be there against a Clinton regime. Both in the u.s. and
international in the west.
Concur.
Clinton is sociopathic. Trump is narcissistic. The Deep State uses both. The former willing
tool, she cares nothing for anyone but herself. The latter, the psychologists in CIA have his
profile and manipulate him like a woman with a velvet glove. His inadequacies are easily
stroked.
"... Concur. Clinton is sociopathic. Trump is narcissistic. The Deep State uses both. The former willing tool, she cares nothing for anyone but herself. The latter, the psychologists in CIA have his profile and manipulate him like a woman with a velvet glove. His inadequacies are easily stroked. ..."
Concur. Clinton is sociopathic. Trump is narcissistic. The Deep State uses both. The
former willing tool, she cares nothing for anyone but herself. The latter, the psychologists
in CIA have his profile and manipulate him like a woman with a velvet glove. His inadequacies
are easily stroked.
Another hypothesis is that is a "false flag" operation, like Obama was. Or in political
jargon "bait and switch" candidate.
Notable quotes:
"... The case for stupidity is fairly strong: after all, where's the evidence that Assad launched a chemical attack? Like the series of fake "attacks" touted by the jihadist rebels over the years, this one lacks verification – but that doesn't bother the War Party. Since when do they need evidence? ..."
"... The case for craziness – a real mental affliction – is even stronger, in my opinion. When President Obama was confronted with the same phony "attacks," as reported by jihadist "activists" and "medics," Trump urged him to stay out of it . Yet now that's he's in the Oval Office, he's doing what he urged Obama not to do. This is the classic behavior pattern of a schizoid nutjob with multiple personalities: it's " The Three Faces of the Donald ," and the big question is which one will emerge today? ..."
"... He's a Beta male masquerading as an Alpha ..."
"... The top three most powerful foreign lobbies in Washington are pushing the US to not only stay in Syria but to expand the role of US troops: the Saudis, who directly support the jihadist rebels, the Israelis, who have long sought to overthrow Assad, and the British, who are behind the maniacal anti-Russian propaganda campaign, starting with the shenanigans of Christopher Steele. Trump's craven capitulation to these "allies" is yet more evidence of his cowardice under fire. ..."
and wrote about
Trump's various foreign policy pronouncements right up until very recently: as I've pointed out
repeatedly, and exhaustively, the very fact that a successful presidential candidate criticized
the Iraq war ("they lied") and our policy of global intervention – e.g., questioned
NATO's existence – was and still is a great step forward. That Trump isn't living up to
his campaign promises and his post-election rhetoric is another matter entirely. The
"deplorables" are in open rebellion against this new
turn: Trump is losing his base.
So here's the question: is he stupid, like George W. Bush, or is he crazy, in the tradition
of, say, Richard M. Nixon?
The case for stupidity is fairly strong: after all, where's the evidence that Assad
launched a chemical attack? Like
the series of fake "attacks" touted by the jihadist rebels over the years, this one lacks
verification – but that doesn't bother the War Party. Since when do they need
evidence? Last time Trump fell for this routine it turned out that his own Secretary of
Defense
admitted – well after the US bombing raid – that there was "no evidence" that
the Syrian government had launched a chemical attack. The same
dodgy "proof"
beleaguers the Skripal "poisoning" case in
Britain – and, what a coincidence, the same villains are being blamed – Putin
& Co. The idea that Assad had anything to gain from launching such an attack is not even
worth refuting: he'd already won the war. So what would be the point? It isn't hard to
understand this, yet our President is clueless – or pretends to be.
The case for craziness – a real mental affliction – is even stronger, in my
opinion. When President Obama was confronted with the same phony "attacks," as reported by
jihadist "activists" and "medics," Trump urged him to stay out of it . Yet now
that's he's in the Oval Office, he's doing what he urged Obama not to do. This is the
classic behavior pattern of a schizoid nutjob with multiple personalities: it's " The Three Faces of the
Donald ," and the big question is which one will emerge today?
Another issue I was apparently dead wrong about is the ascension of John Bolton as National
Security Advisor: no big deal , I
said. Wrong ! I refuse to believe that Trump is caving in to the War Party on Syria
just as
Bolton gets the keys to his new office . And here's another non-coincidence: this new turn
comes just after Trump got into an argument with his
generals over Syria. He wanted out: they insisted we stay. It didn't take him long to find an
excuse – this bogus "attack" – to cave.
So he's not just stupid, and crazy – he's also a coward. He refuses to confront the
War Party head on, despite his campaign trail rhetoric. Just the other day he was telling
crowds in Ohio how we were on the way out of Syria because "we have to take care of our own
country." The crowd cheered. Would he go back to that same audience and tell them we need to
intervene in a country that's been wracked by warfare for years, with no real hope of a
peaceful settlement? Of course not.
He's a Beta male masquerading as an Alpha .
The top three most powerful foreign lobbies in Washington are pushing the US to not only
stay in Syria but to expand the role of US troops: the Saudis, who directly support the
jihadist rebels, the Israelis, who have long sought to overthrow Assad, and the British, who
are behind the maniacal anti-Russian propaganda campaign, starting with the shenanigans of
Christopher Steele. Trump's craven capitulation to these "allies" is yet more evidence of his
cowardice under fire. And there's no doubt that his blaming Russia – and naming
Putin – as supposedly responsible for this "gas attack" is a ploy to get Robert Mueller
off his back.
I have to say that the future looks grim. This puts Trump's entire foreign policy agenda up
for grabs, including the once-promising Korean peace initiative. Will he sabotage what might
have been his greatest accomplishment – peace on the Korean peninsula?
It's entirely possible.
We are now entering uncharted territory – although, come to think of it, that's been
true since Election Day, 2016. Hold on to your hats, folks, and get a grip on your nerves
– because it's going to be a long, scary ride.
A Note to My Readers : I need to clarify
my column on the current confrontation between the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli
military.
I did not mean to draw an equal sign between the two sides: the Israelis, who are wantonly
slaughtering unarmed protesters, including children – and clearly marked media
representatives – are clearly the aggressors. Their actions are inexcusable and just
another giant step in the direction of complete moral degeneration. While I stand by my
criticism of such actions as the "Knife Intifada," what's clear to me is that this is not the
consequence of some inherent flaw in the Palestinian cause, but a mark of sheer desperation.
Yes, Hamas is a monstrous entity, but the Israelis encouraged its
growth and development from the start, which is something you don't read about very often:
see here .
Let no one misunderstand me: while I never give unconditional support to anyone, and I'm
especially critical of the Palestinian leadership, I stand with the Palestinian people
in their just struggle against an oppressive apartheid state. Period.
Putin really dropped the ball on the Libya No-Fly Resolution trusting the evil empire. Now
the stakes
are even higher. The absolute worse news in all this is that Trump is bringing in Bolton as
his lunatic
wing man at the worst possible time when things were looking like they were wrapping up in
Syria.
Bolton is the male version of Hillary on steroids. Trump is going to hide behind Bolton's
mustache - you know, me good cop; Bolton bad cop; IOW, don't blame me for what needs to be
done. Trump gifted
Jerusalem to Netanyahu, and now he's going to gift him Syria too. The Iran deal will
also get scrapped soon and that's more gasoline on a fire that's about to get out of control.
Here's one way
to distract from the Mueller investigation; start a war and rally the county under
a common cause: war with Syria, ergo Russia and then Iran.
It's as I said from day one: Trump can't help himself; he's always been a Zio-con and
Adelson
is getting his money's worth. It's all going to happen as I always said it would. Trump was
the perfect puppet.
Trump will look like the savior of the realm; a role his big fat ego always dreamed of and
won't resist.
Now, there still might be a way out of this potential catastrophe. Admit it, wouldn't it
be nice if Putin
really was holding back something big regarding Trump?
*sigh* - if only! Very soon would be a good time to drop it. Manafort?
Good institutions that limit cheating and rule violations, such as corruption, tax evasion
and political fraud are crucial for prosperity and development. Yet, even very strong
institutions cannot control all situations that may allow for cheating. Well-functioning
societies also require the intrinsic honesty of citizens. Cultural characteristics, such as
whether people see themselves as independent or part of a larger collective, that is, how
individualist or collectivist a society is, might also influence the prevalence of rule
violations due to differences in the perceived scope of moral responsibilities, which is
larger in more individualist cultures.
If cheating is pervasive in society and goes often unpunished, then people might view
dishonesty in certain everyday affairs as justifiable without jeopardising their self-concept
of being honest. Experiencing frequent unfairness, an inevitable by-product of cheating, can
also increase dishonesty. Economic systems, institutions and business cultures shape people's
ethical values, and can likewise impact individual honesty.
I described Gachter and Schultz's work in April 2016, and thought I could immediately see a
problem with the interpretation that the authors placed on the results. Putting forward a
different perspective took a few days. Getting that new approach published has taken 2 years.
For how long will researchers put up with these absurd delays which impede the prompt
assessment of arguments?
The authors of this very interesting study, having revealed the cheats, interpreted the
national differences as being due to cultural factors, particularly whether there were
institutions in each society which encouraged honesty. Of course, this leaves open why one
society would have such institutions and another would not. Culture must come from somewhere. A
reasonable hypothesis is that the institutions of a county are built by the people who live
there. Here is our reply:
Honesty, rule violation and cognitive ability: A reply to Gächter and Schulz
Heiner Rindermann, David Becker, James Thompson.
Intelligence, Volume 68, May–June 2018, Pages 66–69.
Our argument is that both institutions and honesty are determined by the intelligence of
people, and that bright people can see the long-term benefits of honesty and of institutions
that support honest behaviour. Any institution with a code of conduct leads its members toward
probity, and shows prospective applicants what standards are expected of them. However, those
institution do not arise randomnly.
Gächter & Schulz assumed that institutional rules affect individual honesty.
We added cognitive ability as further factor explaining national differences.
Stronger effect of IQ (total 0.55) than of rule violation (total −0.34) on honesty.
Stronger effect of IQ (total −0.68) than of honesty (total −0.26) on rule
violation.
________________________________________
Abstract
Gächter and Schulz (2016) assumed an effect of institutional rule violation on
individual honesty within societies. In this reply we challenge this approach by including a
nation's cognitive ability as a further factor for cross-national variations in the
prevalence of rule violations and intrinsic honesty. Theoretical considerations,
correlational and path analyses show that a nation's cognitive ability level (on average
β = |.62|) better explains and predicts honesty and rule violation. While
institutional and cultural factors are not unimportant, cognitive factors are more
relevant.
The paper argues that there is a causal link between intellectual development and moral
awareness: the individual process of development represents an advance from cognitive
egocentrism to de-centered thinking, from ethical egocentrism to the consideration of the
interests and rights of others.
Cognitive ability seems to have the strongest causal effect on the honesty of a society:
The same pattern holds true if you assume that social levels of honesty intermediate
individual levels of honesty as shown by rule violation.
Either way, it seems that intelligence explains whether some societies cheat at games and
cheat in real life.
Society rots from top and doesn't matter who is at the top. It still remains valid even when
the so called least intellectually developed honest poor people get shafted for hundred of
years by so called high IQ nations who bring cheating,dishonesty,and violations of existing
laws and destruction of existing institutions without replacing them nationwide. Often these
newly created institutions are nothing but vehicle to whitewash the corrupting and corrupted
new system.
Public moral status has a lot to do with corruption at the top -both local and
international in these days of neoliberalism and post -colonization. It sounds painful and
hurtful though.
Interesting work! I am amazed academics have the patience to deal with such a long lag time
for letting arguments play out.
Is there any chance of you publishing a scatter plot matrix of the variables you used
and/or the data itself?
Do you have the correlation matrix for your variables? By any chance did you try single
and multiple variable models to try to predict rule violation from the other variables? It
would be interesting to see how much variance an assortment of those models explained.
Has anyone explored the idea of "cheater fraction" (analogous to smart fraction) to
explain dishonesty in societies?
It's an interesting question. Some years ago The Economist did a "European Honest Test "
leaving a wallet with a fair amount of cash in it (but also including clear contact details
of the owner), in capital cities around Europe.
The test was to see how many wallets were returned – and they found that the
Scandinavians returned almost all of them, and the Italians returned almost none – with
a clear North/South gradient in the results.
By coincidence, at about the same time, I found a wallet beside some rubbish bins with
€ 400 in it and some credit cards (one from my own bank). So on my next visit, I told
them about it and soon got a call from the owner ( a Spanish carpenter working in Germany).
His reaction was 1) to check that the money was still in the wallet 2) say that not many
people would return a wallet with € 400 in it 3) leave 2 bottles of wine at my front
gate.
I checked this reaction with my secretary at the time, and asked her what she would have
done, with the answer that it would be a "Regalo de Dios" (Gift of God), i.e. it was not
going to be returned to the owner, so there seems to be some anecdotal evidence for the
result.
China's position on the Intrinsic Honesty chart is puzzling both at the macro level
(remarkably honest, competent policy-makers) and at the individual level (above average IQ).
The Edelman Corporation, which has a lock on international surveys of personal and
institutional honesty has consistently found the Chinese to be among the most trusting people
on earth, as have World Values Surveys in their own, independent polls of the Chinese.
The source of the discrepancy appears to be the source of the data: "a n indicator of
political rights by Freedom House that measures the democratic quality of a country's
political practices; the size of a country's shadow economy as a proxy for tax evasion; and
corruption as measured by the World Bank's Control of Corruption Index (Supplementary
Methods)".
Relying on George Soros' Freedom House for information about China is akin to relying on
the neighborhood fox to keep an eye on your chickens while you go on vacation. Garbage in,
garbage out
I would rate Japan pretty high for getting things returned, but this ethic has eroded over
the past three or four decades.
Also, in the past you'd see adult males scolding unrelated misbehaving teens in public,
who'd slink away with their tails between their legs. This you do not currently see: men are
less masculine and assertive and some teens at least are more beligerant.
I think, David Perkins' findings about high IQ-people being also very tribal would make for a
nice addendum here, to better understand how IQ and honesty are related.
I refer to Jonathan Haidt's argument, that he bases explicitly on Perkins' findings, that
because of the tendency of high IQ-people to be even more tribal than the lower IQ ranks, ist
is so crucial, to understand with J. S. Mill's On Liberty (and I add: with Kant and
– – the Kantian Habermas' "Theory of Communicative Action"), that the core
achievement of modernity is the institutionalization of disconformation in the
democratic/liberal rational discourse and liberal public sphere (universities, the media,
etc.).
Here's Jonathan Haidt, referring to Perkins and Mill to make clear, how important the
institutionalization of disconformation actually is:
Correlation≠causation. Maybe honesty leads to brighter minds. Is it your knowing the right
answer that makes you follow it, or is it you looking at the situation, as it is, considering
evidence and proof, and getting the right answer through correct deductive reasoning, which
is then to be followed? You can't be honest and act ideologically, because by definition you
follow your observations of the world, not your ideas of the world. An honest person is bound
to direct observation, an intelligent person is not. Honesty is probably primary to an
accurate understanding of the world.
I think that 16 per cent is a bit arbitrary. In a class or caste dominated society you
might, if of a class which can choose to avoid countries, decide that it really doesn't
matter if your butler and housekeeper have to terrify the lower orders to stop them ripping
you off (and the butler and housekeeper have enough relations they want to place in
employment to keep them to the rules as to how much they cheat you).
I recently lost my wallet for a short time in a supermarket-plus-other-shops complex as I
wheeled my trolley to the car park. I thought my pocket had been picked so went to a nearby
poluce station to see if they could accelerate access to CCTV. Mr Plod was useless and
unhelpful. (Fortunately I didn't start cancelling credit cards immediately as he pretty well
demanded). Back in the shopping centre I was directed to a caretaker's office where a 30 ish
man of Pakistani origin had my wallet that had fallen out of my pocket as I went up a ramp.
He had taken the trouble to count the cash and wrap it separately with a note on it that the
amount was $915 or whatever. I never bothered to count it myself or even unwrap it for
several days. What does that say about the standard of civilisation in one of Australia's
biggest cities?
As anyone who has seen how inadequate religion is today to form moral young people may have
thought, the obvious starting point is to ask oneself how I bring up my children and what
moral rules I rub in (preferably by example as well as preaching). One knows children are not
going to be cunning ruthless sophisticates by nature – unless psychopaths – and
will not benefit from being taught to think immediately how they can get away with some theft
or lie. So you bring them up with rules which will help to make sure they are both trusted
and trustworthy – seeing you return the small amount of change over paid for exsmple to
rub in the message about rules they should still be obeying without thought when they have
children. Morality is about the customs of the tribe, its mores, and children are rarely done
any sort of favour by not being trained to be strictly moral (even if taught Christian
forgiveness, especially for the "poor in spirit"). However ..
It occurs to me that the place of intelligence in this may extend to what hss been called
Divergent Thinking (does this overlap with Lateral Thinking? Or imagination?)
A quick imaginative laterally thinking brain may think of several ways some dishonest
subterfuge may go wrong almost st the moment temptation arises. So honesty for him he quickly
concludes is the best policy. And so down the speculative path on which little evidence is to
be found. After all what is one to make of the arrogant lawyer that one reads about in the
big tax case who thought arrogantly he could get away with something and the Mr Plods of the
tax office would never sus him out and prove his wrongdoing to a court?
I was guided by my recollection of the modelling of neighbourhood crime risk, but it is a
sliding scale, I agree. I assumed, years ago, that at the 16-20% level one would begin to
notice a difference from base rate. See, in this particular example, Fig 2 and Fig 3
What does that say about the standard of civilization in one of Australia's biggest
cities?
It doesn't really say anything. You need some standardized parameters and a reasonable
sample size. Then you can draw some conclusions and assess the level of accuracy – like
The Economist did with their wallet test – quite a good experiment.
However , at the individual level, a continuing positive outcome would be the wallet owner
saying thank you, and being more inclined to return the favor one day.
It occurs to me that 5 per cent might be a horrible worrying prospect if you, as a lawyer
or doctor, thought it applied to the five or ten thousand you might come across as fellow
professionals in your city or state. But then it could be that you rarely gossip about others
and only regard as liars and cheats those who have done it to you (apart from the few who
have been busted for insurance fraud). Maybe 16 per cent sometimes fudge or fiddle something
but you don't know so you remain happily (and honestly) complacent, and proud of your
profession.
More intelligent people may be more adept at calculating the possible negative consequences
of personal dishonesty and they are likely to have more to lose. However, put them in a
corporate situation and no doubt they will be as gung-ho as anyone to figure out ways to rip
off customers.
I've lost a wallet once and then I was visited home by shop owner, who carefuly tracked
where I could live by using data from the wallet. She wanted nothing in exchange.
On university, I also was also given back a wallet once; I got back also a cellphone
(which was quite expansive at the time) I left somewhere few years ago.
OTOH once I left a wallet with cash at university and it was not returned.
So, here you are my anecdotal evidence from Poland: three wallets and one cellphone, one
time not returned, two plus one times returned.
More intelligent people may be more adept at calculating the possible negative
consequences of personal dishonesty and they are likely to have more to lose. However, put
them in a corporate situation and no doubt they will be as gung-ho as anyone to figure out
ways to rip off customers.
The purpose of the institution in question is to "figure out ways to rip off customers."
It's neither dishonesty nor cheating. The trick is not to have a culture that puts
corporate/employer concerns first.
Obviously smarter people are going to tend to be more moral; you need to
know what the fuck morality and ethics even are, and assess the circumstances, before
you can make your decisions. Retards can't even get to the point of making a decision. Stupid
people are great at missing the moral implications of their behavior. Smart people are the
ones who need to come up with rationalizations.
All "honesty" begins with the self. Lying to your self, about your self is the basis of
delusion and
in-authenticity. How can you know reality when reality is constantly reinterpreted to fit the
needs of a run-away ego ?
The general point, that intelligence is linked to long term thinking seems sound to me.
Dishonestly is often about immediate gratification: a question of gaining or avoiding
immediate pleasure/displeasure. Honesty is a strategy that "pays off" over the long term.
Honesty, or truth telling (in so far as one can) is also a factor in an Honour culture. The
liar is a "base" person, a person who has no sense (or no care about) their own social (self
conscious) standing. Honesty also has a close correlation with such things as "loyalty",
"promising" etc.
Oh yes !
That's the joy of the corporate structure: no one is responsible. EVERYONE acts because they
"owe" obligations to another. (Executives to higher executives; Higher executives to the
Board; the Board to Shareholders) Personal, moral responsibility becomes entirely lost in
this deliberately confected ethical melange. The Large organisation is the perfect
environment for crafting crimes safe from individual consequence.
It says you are damn lucky. If I had $ 915 in my wallet I'd super-glue the damn thing to
my chest. Rather lose a couple layers of skin than that kind of dosh.
Self honesty is a long tortuous process.
Ideology is a relief: it removes the constant anxiety of needing to "question".
Science is -- should be -- the strictest form of public honesty.
Its frightening how many reports we so often get now about the systemic "dishonesty" in the
scientific realm. (Dishonesty driven usually (not exclusively) by the demands of corporate
profits)
Sublime opportunism, entwined inside collective incentives, converges into supreme ethics,
moral behaviour.
Sadly, the convergence is beyond the gradients of our elites.
The why of hard-wired human elites as are, cannot transcend to long term survival strategies,
and society resembles a chicken coop.
To add another factor randomly, embedded into the above, it does not matter, how
intelligence plays out between individuals, because individual opportunity feeds back into a
pool of extended family, group, tribe, waves of culture and ad-hocs, lastingly and durably
not encased in cognitive ambition, itself a consequence of cognitive genetic effort. Colleges
and universities worldwide are a better example of petty games.
The "truth" and other concepts of "honesty" are a psychological, relative variant,
depending on context. The agnostic concept of real and it's pursuit is unknown to our
archaic, analogue brain without the preposition of a limited context, opportune in the
now.
I would be interested in how honesty was explicated. And the valuation of cross cultural
rules that note the value of said rule equally across cultures. Now perhaps, these are fully
layed out in the study, but I was unable to access the sight provided.
I would also be interested how the study rated honesty as a national value. Thus far the
model looks to be applied by survey data. As I was reading I kept thinking of the multiple
national scandals in which dishonesty played a central role. Once one figures out the
definition and meaning of what constitutes honesty among individuals and or societal groups
as agreed upon by those groups, then a model of measuring said honesty is built. This is
essential because the article indicates that the difference in variable is largely cultural.
So I have to conclude that a standard was established that recognizes what honesty is across
cultures.
Because even withing culture, honesty varies. If intelligence is the key demarcation than
one would expect those groupings with supposedly higher intelligence to have a higher degree
of honesty. But again, even withing culture an agreed upon understanding of honesty is
required.
Assuming intelligence matters to some set post of morality, in this case honesty -- could the
model replicate supposed intelligence to honesty withing a given system in which the rules
are more readily identifiable and agreed upon. Assuming that the students at the US military
academies rank higher in intelligence than say the students at any comparable sized
university would the students among the military academies rank higher or lower as to the
being or practicing honesty. Considering the value placed on meritocratic institutions such
as Harvard when measuring that intelligence grouping demonstrate a higher degree of honesty
than a comparable public university.
Assuming we agree what the rules are,
"The paper argues that there is a causal link between intellectual development and moral
awareness: the individual process of development represents an advance from cognitive
egocentrism to de-centered thinking, from ethical egocentrism to the consideration of the
interests and rights of others"
it could be interesting whether said tested data is measuring awareness verses
adherence.
Here are a bare list of some developed nation's honesty issues regarding rule
adherence.
Again assuming that the players agree on what the rules are across countries or cultures a
comparison of honesty across varying fields as to scandals and or practices might tell us
something regarding the impact of intelligence to honesty across said cultures.
Found the article interesting and just expressed to thoughts on the read.
Well, I'll speak (honestly) from the other perspective.
I used to ride my bike of a Sunday morning on a scenic route that boasted a few first
class restaurants. Twice I found wallets lying on the pavement just downstream from these
establishments. Apparently, the owners, a little tipsy, had set their wallets on top of their
cars while they fumbled for their keys and then drove off.
The first I took to the local police station. The second I took home and called the owner
(who lived in Canada) using their credit card number to pay for the call and left a message
reassuring her that her wallet (and money) was safe and sound, not to worry (because I knew
she would, having lost it outside her home country). I didn't want to take it to the police
because I figured they'd begin to suspect me of stealing the wallets if I kept showing up
with them.
She and her husband drove down to a prearranged place to meet me for the return. She was
very grateful.
The owner of the first lost wallet called me and asked if they could donate $100 in my
name to my favorite charity.
Another time I found a perfectly nice fleece-lined, leather aviation jacket lying in the
road just outside a golf course. Luckily there was a receipt from his fee for 18 holes in the
pocket. I called him and arranged to return the coat. We met. He treated me as though I had
stolen the jacket from his car. Not so much as a thank you.
I don't know if I'm inclined to honesty because I'm bright, it's just that I've lost my
wallet in the past and it's such a pain in the butt that I feel sorry for anyone who shares
that fate. Credit cards, ID etc. the money is the least of it.
"Good institutions that limit cheating and rule violations, such as corruption, tax
evasion and political fraud are crucial for prosperity and development."
I'd argue that these institutions derive from a well-functioning, high-trust society and
are rarely a catalyst for more honesty in other societies.
As for the connection to intelligence, look at India and China to test your
hypothesis.
"Another time I found a perfectly nice fleece-lined, leather aviation jacket lying in the
road just outside a golf course. Luckily there was a receipt from his fee for 18 holes in the
pocket. I called him and arranged to return the coat. We met. He treated me as though I had
stolen the jacket from his car. Not so much as a thank you."
TC, yep. I found a wallet stuffed with cash and credit cards on the campus of our local
state university. A campus policeman was nearby so I turned the wallet over to him. He
cautioned me that people who recover lost or abandoned property are sometimes blamed by the
owners of that property for any real or imagined loss, damage, or inconvenience to the
owners.
My rough rule of thumb is that if the property can be readily linked to an owner, I return
it. If not, and the property has trivial value, say under USD $100, it's a judgment call.
Found a few bottles of liquor, seals unbroken, in a trash can. Kept them. Found an untagged
but well-kept dog once, which I judged to have strong sentimental value to its owner, so I
placed an ad in a local newspaper, got a response, and returned the dog. His children were
very grateful.
The Gachter experiment on rule violation is based on die throwing in sterile experimental
conditions where the financial incentives are trivial and more seriously there are no
competition between the participants and there are no mechanism to identify specific
individual cheating and no resulting blemish to ones' reputation. So how much of that are
relevant to real life situations?
Real life cheating data where there are great advantage to be gained and also with
consequences that might affect ones future are more appropriate to be studied. One aspect of
the OECD TALIS project dealt with real life cheating in 8645 schools and over 100K? teachers
globally,
Table 2.20.Web. School climate – Frequency of student-related factors
(cheating)
Percentage of lower secondary education teachers whose school principal reports that the
following student behaviours occurred 1 Never, 2 Rarely, 3 Monthly, 4 Weekly, 5 Daily in
their schools.
Answers 3, 4 and 5 are considered to be serious indicator of cheating in schools. With the
intention to mash the TALIS data with the PISA 2012 data, the primary school data were
excluded.
Many popular pre-conceived ideas about cheating in schools were not proven by the data. In
fact considerable efforts were needed to find any significant statistical trend. For example
at the national levels cheating were not correlated to the average PISA scores,
fraction of top or bottom PISA scores, teachers' practice of spliting the class to teach and
to test part of the class differently, etc.
The factor that show statistical significance is the proxy factor for competition or
meritocracy. Countries have adopted various shades of "no child left behind" policy and that
is reflected in the age profile of the class. In country that practice strict "no child left
behind", the students are automatically promoted to the next grade in the next academic year
regardless of the ability of the students with the results that the student will be exclusive
of the same 'academic age'. When meritocracy is practiced, poorly performing students might
have to repeat the same grade one or more times resulting in 'academic age' distribution in
class. Since the PISA project has data of percentage of 15 yo for that grade, the idea can be
tested. To be polite, the marked datapoints are not labelled. Two countries separated by a
narrow channel can have drastically different cheating levels.
The school cheating levels is statistically significant to be linearly dependent on the
percent of the 15 yo in class. The levels of cheating is dependent on the level of
meritocracy practiced. With automatic promotion to the next academic grade there is little
need for the students to cheat. The governments are doing the cheating instead. The
out-criers of cheating in other countries do not realized that they are in countries with
lesser meritocracy.
The paper argues that there is a causal link between intellectual development and moral
awareness: the individual process of development represents an advance from cognitive
egocentrism to de-centered thinking, from ethical egocentrism to the consideration of the
interests and rights of others.
This is what Jean Piaget concluded from his studies of Swiss children. He believed that
empathy was an integral part of a child's intellectual development. It doesn't follow,
however, that there is some kind of genetic linkage between intellectual capacity and the
capacity for empathy. These are two different mental traits. It's more likely that the same
selection pressure that favored an increase in intellectual capacity also favored an increase
in the capacity for empathy.
It's impossible to build an advanced society unless most of its members have a high
capacity for both intelligence and empathy. On an individual level, however, high
intelligence can co-exist with low empathy. There have been many cases of ruthless sociopaths
who are very intelligent and yet totally self-centered. Such people can be very successful as
long as they aren't too numerous. Otherwise, they'll destroy the very society that makes
their existence possible.
An advanced society requires a combination of high intelligence and high empathy, although
this may come about in different ways. In northwest Europeans, a high intellectual capacity
co-exists with high capacities for guilt proneness and affective empathy. In East Asians, a
high intellectual capacity co-exists with high capacities for cognitive empathy and
pro-social behavior. In other words, there is more emphasis in East Asian societies on
learning correct moral rules.
I am not following the credit gift of empathy to East Asians, or the connection of
morality and intelligence to the obeying of complex rules, because of the stolen oranges in
the Book of Rites and the counterfeit antiques that impressed the Emperor. The Chinese
literally explain how to lie in their moral teachings. "Lying" is right there among the
morality-guaranteeing complex rules. There are examples in the Talmud I will not specify, or
regard as unreasonable, but I will note that nobody saw the Talmud as less than a downright
complex system of rules. Some African tribes have rules so stringent (eg, no wet dreams) that
nobody could possibly obey them. If anything I would expect that systems of compelled
obedience to complex rules guarantee dishonesty. The only alternative is Billy Budd getting
the captain to take his side.
What I would start with is power. In China, even in periods of decay or civil war, power is
always centralized to a degree only approached in Europe by a few temporarily competent
monarchs, and with an effectiveness that has never been accomplished in Europe. I think this
and not math scores or cheap shoes is the basis of the elite adoration of the Han. The man
who observes that a cow is not a nightingale, or that two and two are four, when the opposite
is being claimed by an officer of the government (be it communist, imperial, or partisan) is
an idiot. He, and probably his family, maybe his hamlet, will be exterminated with efficiency
the European Enlightened Despots could only dream of. Truth, insofar as it is objective, is
the hair of Liberty. It cannot exist at all except in the empty space left by the rolling
back of power. The trick here is embracing negativism instead of falling into the
positivistic trap. We in the West accidentally stumbled across Liberty and Truth and Science,
not because we are good, objectively not because we are smarter, but because we just couldn't
get that mandate of heaven thing together, despite the unambiguous desires of numerous
monarchs. I predict that this will be an unpopular answer but it will not go away.
(but the Japanese are massively more ethical than the Chinese. Yeah. And they are also all
but European, especially in a lot of their political history. They dreamed of imitating
Chinese centralization but never came close.)
Also, how soon can we expect an update to that graph, now plotting IQ (or PISA, or tetris
scores, etc) against something like the Transparency Index? Apologies if this has already
been done and I missed it.
What can we learn about ourselves from the things we ask online? US data scientist Seth
Stephens‑Davidowitz analysed anonymous Google search results, uncovering disturbing
truths about our desires, beliefs and prejudices
Have no idea where the data come from, but scandals with Dutch politicians seem to increase
all the time, most with Rutte's VVD.
Condemned politicians for fraud etc., a novelty.
But until now just one behind bars.
But about honesty, our prime minister Rutte is nicknamed Pinocchio for his lies.
The VVD quickly rid itself of the chairman Keiser, who manipulated himself into possession of
the crematoria of the organisation he advised.
The Dutch tax authority presented him with a claim of € 12 million, our FIOD, the
authority for fiscal crimes is investigating him.
Condemned business men for fraud, more than we like.
Even the former Philips CEO Boonstra was condemned for trade with foreknowledge.
Solicitors also are not above suspicion any more.
At the recent municipality elections measures were applied to prevent criminals being
elected.
Unreliable policemen, also a novelty, the first serious conviction was a short time ago,
he sold information from police data bases to criminals.
How he was not discovered earlier, unbelievable, police salaries are insufficient for driving
Porsches.
Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen said it best: "It is much easier for an educated person to
rationalize evil".
All one has to do is look at abortion supporters who insist that abortion merely removes "a
clump of cells", when they damn well know better, that it is HUMAN LIFE that they are
destroying.
The old "ends justifies the means" excuse also comes into play, which is used by communist
societies to purge millions of those who oppose them, not unlike the purges in the old Soviet
Union, China, Cuba, and other communist "paradises".
I would state that it is easier for an educated person to rationalize evil–this
including dishonesty
Do I detect a matter of class? The golfer seems not to have been a gentleman belonging to
a golf club where proper behaviour was de rigeur, very likely passed from father, uncle and
club pro to son. The sort of chap who pays green fees could be a wannabe upwardly mobile
agent for subdivided swamp land
PS I gave up golf after my father died 20+ years ago. Not so much that I couldn't match
his ethical standards but that after two heart attacks and hip replacements he was still a
scratch golfer and all I could do was occasionally outdrive him if my slice or pull
allowed.
1. Perhaps smart people are just better at not getting caught?
2. Overall, there is one major factor in the honesty of a society, and that is poverty.
When an overpopulated third-world society is crushed into misery, when people cannot earn a
half-way decent living – or indeed, any living – through honest effort,
eventually they come to cheat. This has been demonstrated in all cultures and all races.
Does integrity promote prosperity? Surely. But the reverse is if anything more powerful:
poverty promotes corruption and nepotism. For people to behave honorably, yes there must be a
culture of this, but it must also be the case that behaving honorably is not cutting your own
throat. Because few people are saints.
"Found a few bottles of liquor, seals unbroken, in a trash can. "
Dumpster-diving is a different thing than keeping lost goods. I think you're *morally* in
the clear, there, even if sorely lacking in judgement. This doesn't seem very wise. Did it
not occur to you that they were probably in the TRASH for a reason? Probably not poisonous or
anything, since the seals were on. Probably some alcoholic decided to quit drinking. But do
you want to take the chance that this wasn't a bootleg batch full of lead? Obviously the
answer was yes. Your butt, I reckon
We have been flooded here at the University of Chicago by Mainland/Communist Chinese
students. There are lots of accusations that the Chinese Communist government assists these
students by cheating, getting other English language proficient students to take the English
part of the SAT tests.
There appear to be lots and lots of Mainland Chinese/Communist China students here who
supposedly aced the English SAT test but can't seem to speak English.
"like The Economist did with their wallet test – quite a good experiment."
But, The Economist is hardly a bastion of truth. I would tend to dismiss their entire
story of the wallet experiment as a fabrication, having caught their writers in so many
lies.
But certainly that accounts for the fact that politicians are dull, ignorant, dissemblers
at best.
In many governments the candidates for the highest stations are above the law; and, if
they can attain the object of their ambition, they have no fear of being called to account
for the means by which they acquired it. They often endeavour, therefore, not only by
fraud and falsehood, the ordinary and vulgar arts of intrigue and cabal; but sometimes
by the perpetration of the most enormous crimes, by murder and assassination, by rebellion
and civil war, to supplant and destroy those who oppose or stand in the way of their
greatness.
Honesty to me seems a cultural phenomenon.
Once people get away with dishonesty, others think 'why not me ?'.
The Dutch erosion, in my recollection, already began in the seventies, with leftist
people, at the time social democrats.
It was said then 'thinking left, filling pockets at the right'.
People as my father, life long socialists, left the party in great numbers.
It took a long time for THE socialist party, PvdA, to disappear, until the last parliamentary
elections.
The self destruction had much to do with EU support, socialism is at odds with globalisation,
even within the EU.
Few in the USA will have followed all the French scandals before the last presidential
elections.
Even Macron was accused of not declaring all his possessions.
And indeed, I also cannot understand how he spent or lost the millions he got while working
for the Rothschild bank.
Another well known politician, presidential candidate, cannot now remember the name,
disappeared after gifts for suits for some € 50.000 were published, there was also a
very expensive watch, the job his wife had, what she in fact did, nobody understands, and the
temporary jobs for his children.
When one sees the small castle where the family lives one understands that he could not buy
his suits himself.
Now at last there seems to be sufficient proof against Sarkozy.
Now many French presidents were persecuted after their immunity ended, when they no longer
were president.
But the frauds etc. they seem to have perpetrated seem worse and worse, in the Sarko case,
intimidating a judge, among other things.
When Hollande will be persecuted, I wonder.
He had a reputation for sacking editors in chief.
Ask Ghandi, alas he does not live, when Britain was an ethical country.
Just a few years ago, in BBCW Hard Talk, I saw an Indian minister getting quite angry 'the
British did not have to teach the Indians anything'.
Cindy, both gut and butt survived my "rescue" hooch. I did some due diligence: examined
the bottles, carefully tasted the contents, etc. My guess was a domestic quarrel in the
parking garage over the high-end vodka and liqueurs, perhaps over someone's drinking problem,
and the quarrel was settled by chucking the booze.
" . . . [S]orely lacking in judgment." Not really. My judgment turned out to be okay,
because I was informed by the totality of the circumstances and then made my call. Had the
booze been low-end stuff found in an unfamiliar location, etc., I might have judged
differently.
BTW-I didn't dumpster-dive. The booze was clearly visible at the top of the trash can.
How did they measure such 'honesty index' ?
Placing 100 wallets in a park and observe how many are returned to the owners ?
But when the anglos lie, they always lie big time !
Goebel famously oberved .
The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one
should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous
Waging wars by false pretexts surely is the highest form of duplicity ?
They dont call them perfidious albions for nuthin you know !
How does the author explain the link between the supposed highest IQ group – the Jews,
and their reputation for utmost dishonesty, greed and lust throughout history? Same goes for
the Chinese.
Propensity for Honesty is the biggest reason why we need to restrict immigration from low
trust cultures, i.e. all 3rd world countries. It's why they're 3rd world, because they are
low trust, everyone is dishonest from the top down, the few honest ones are called "stupid"
and get ripped off left and right. The more we import from these cultures, the more dishonest
our society will become, this includes all of Asia, Latin America, Middle East, Africa,
Southern & Eastern Europe esp. Russia. The only truly honest people in the world are
Northwestern Protestant Europeans, and maybe the Japanese. All other groups are
dishonest.
Interesting work? This article is a pure misuse of statistics, a fabrication and a classic
work of evil minded Eurocentrist attempting to give a new lease of life to their declining
rotten Eurocentrism in facing of the rising progressive, peaceful, and pragmatic East.
Look at the graph, its racist Eurocentrism is glaring, all the Western nations are on the
good side while rest of the world on the bad side. History has shown all those on the good
side are liars, cheaters, murderers, bandits, and pirates, while those on the bad side are
the victims of those perpetrators on the good side. The missing of the USA in the chart makes
this article an unapologetic white supremacy lie.
To study the link between brightness and honesty, it should pull data from the same pool
of population who are in the same environment, i.e. within a nation, then we even can study
whether cognitive ability, intellectual development, moral awareness, culture factor, and
institutions have any effect on honesty and their relationships.
Besides in spite of being bright, and having cognitive ability, intellectual development,
moral awareness, culture factor and strong institutions, the West still bombs, kills and
waterboards others on the fabricated phantom allegations as humanitarian intervention without
showing remorse; and recently the West lied about the poisoning episode in UK, and brought
the world to the edge of anther world war crisis, those evidences prove the Western societies
are not honest despite the qualities they processed as prerequisite for honesty, it seems it
proves the West is either hypocritical or innate psychopathic.
Ask Ghandi, alas he does not live, when Britain was an ethical country.
Exactly. What a pack of criminals. They were much worse and for a longer period of time,
than what they accused the Nazis of doing.
Churchill refused to divert supplies away from already well-supplied British troops at
the same time he allegedly blocked American and Canadian ships from delivering aid to India
either. Nor would he allow the Indians to help themselves: the colonial government forbade
the country from using its own ships or currency reserves to help the starving masses.
Meanwhile, London pushed up the price of grain with hugely inflated purchases, making it
unaffordable for the dying and destitute. Most-chillingly of all, when the government of
Delhi telegrammed to tell him people were dying, Churchill allegedly only replied to ask
why Gandhi hadn't died yet.
If all this is true -- and documents support it -- then Winston Churchill may well
have starved to death as many innocent people as Stalin did in the Ukrainian genocide.
Could the man who held out against Hitler really be capable of such an atrocity? Judging by
the rest of this list, it wouldn't be surprising.
I cannot play golf without committing a certain amount of larceny. In my mind a mulligan
is a reasonable option to excuse a particularly poorly played shot. And I have been known to
sweeten my lie on the not rare occasion, which, of course, is a form of lying.
I have often wondered if my ease at dishonesty on the links might suggest a propensity
towards darker deeds?
And don't even ask me about gimme putts. That for sure must reflect a lower
intelligence!
Who decides who cheats or being dishonesty? Is misleading advertising cheating? Is empty
campaign promises cheating? Is abusing legal loopholes cheating? Is putting one's
self-interest ahead of the ones they supposed to serve cheating? Is price fixing cheating?
Are cartels of all kind cheating? Are selective reporting, wrongful labelling, and spreading
ideology cheating? . . .
Mind you, the people involved in the above activities are all bright, well educated,
intelligent, having strong institutions, within well-functioning societies, and a sense of
moral responsibilities too, would they be more than 16% in the western societes?
The assumptions behind this are so fragile and unsupportable.
Honesty, as with most of the Judeo-Christian values, largely serves to keep the compliant
majority self-correcting while the predatory and parasitic top and bottom of society maintain
a more productive relativistic approach – long term dishonesty for the elites, short
term dishonesty for the undesirables. In-group honesty is always far more valued than
universal honesty – whether you're talking about stockbrokers or Romani.
The most intelligent in any class or group are far more likely to utilize dishonesty when
it best serves their needs. To do otherwise would be a clear sign of lack of
intelligence.
The idea that intelligent people are more likely to see the purpose of honesty in the long
term is not only an unsupportable assumption, it's also ignoring the countless undeniable
historical instances of intelligent leaders deploying adaptive fictions to achieve positive
social goals (anything from religion to the concept of inalienable rights).
Anyone who uses the phrase "speaking truth to power" can absolutely be counted upon to be
utterly dishonest when that power comes knocking.
As a boy I had the privilege to attend a Catholic grade school. Part of the education was to
go to confession. Admitting to a third party your wrongs, is very powerful. Forgiving the
past frees one. Being truthful builds character, and getting over the past is a blessing. It
was a struggle to be totally truthful all the time. As a mid to late teen, I fell away from
Catholicism.
In my early twenties I came back to believing that truthfulness is the best policy. I
attribute that to the Catholic culture and the confessional. I would not say that it was my
intelligence that led me.
Confession has nothing to do with honesty; it breeds psychopath, unrepentance,
irresponsibility and repeat offending. The churches use confession to cleanse perpetrators'
sins, so the perpetrators can repeat their crimes without moral burden; this is not
hypothesis, history bear witness of such fact. This is the trait of the Western culture, it
reflects in all aspects of the westerners' behaviour. Most common expression of such morally
defunct mentality is that the western governments and officials have no trouble to apologize
the wrongs they have done, but they keep on doing the same wrong over and over again after
apologizing. The Native Americans are the most abused victim of such morally defunct
practice.
The churches use confession to recruit and dominate its members (mentally colonized
serfs), expand their domains. Confession is one of the most effective mechanisms that corrupt
the basic decency of humanity.
Adam Smith apparently had their number when he was alive. It seems that little has changed
in the quality of politicians between the 19th and 21st centuries. If anything, today's
politicians are even more dimwitted and venal. The average Congress member is a moron, and
nearly inarticulate in unscripted speaking.
I really enjoyed reading Henry Mencken's observations on political campaigns of the early
20th century. He also seemed to enjoy making those observations as well. It comes through in
the way he describes the candidates.
The government of the UK seems completely unconcerned with ethics, in the same way the US
government is. Most members of both governments seem, to me, to be morally retarded.
Flash! Flash! Flash! Stop the press. This is not yet 1st April.
Currently there are a lot of news about cheating in sports, e.g. cricket. Out of a whim
the relationship of sports with academic cheating is tested. The OECD PISA project has data
on the percentage of students who exercise before or after school PctExercise, and
PctCheatRpt=+1.044*PctExercise-46.25; #n=29; Rsq=0.234; p=0.007889 ** (V Sig)
It is very statistically significant that PctExercise is positively highly correlated
to academic cheating. The effect is more than double that for the other percentage
variables whether they are statistically significant or not. If students spend too much time
on tracks and fields and little time at home studying the results can easily be inferred. Now
you know those loud mouths screaming about cheating in another countries and that the
students there spend too much time studying, they are on average themselves doing most of the
academic cheatings and they might be trying to divert attention away from them.
To be fair, the situation for the nerds should also be checked. The OECD PISA has data on
the percentage of students who have more than 4 hours per week of off-school maths tuition
PctMathTuitGt4hr,
It is statisticaly not significant. What about those academically very competitive, the
percentage who wanted to be the best PctWantBest,
PctCheatRpt=-0.445*PctWantBest+54.07; #n=29; Rsq=0.222; p=0.009944 ** (V Sig)
It is statistically very significant that PctWantBest negatively correlated with
cheating, i.e, on average the more academically competitive they are the lesser they will
cheat.
It is intuitively that most self-confident students will not cheat. The OECD data can be
transformed and normalized into confident quotient CQ similar to the IQ scale where CQ ≥
115 is considered to be over-confident. However,
Most common expression of such morally defunct mentality is that the western governments
and officials have no trouble to apologize the wrongs they have done, but they keep on
doing the same wrong over and over again after apologizing.
Amen!
What's even worse is the goofy idea that one is automatically "forgiven" if s/he's a
"believer." It's the works vs faith idea. Some of those people feel free to break every rule
in the book (even the 10 supposedly written in stone) with complete impunity.
Those people routinely engage in behavior that's as disgusting as those from the the tribe
who think they're "chosen."
G-wd's special ones, goy and non-goy, are forgiven in advance I guess.
If anything, today's politicians are even more dimwitted and venal. The average Congress
member is a moron, and nearly inarticulate in unscripted speaking.
True.
I think much the same could be said for all hierarchical systems and that includes
religious as well as academic ones. I've always been as much amused as amazed at how
dimwitted and venal priests and professors usually are.
Rereading this reaction comes to mind
Edward W. Said & Christopher Hitchens, ed., Blaming the Victims, Spurious scholarship and
the Palestinian question', 1988, London
How did these two 'ethical' countries keep churning out world class psychopaths as
leaders .since 1600 ?
Beg no longer, fine sir! This dude may have an answer.
Henceforth, Britain will do the bidding of her real masters ; she has
become the tool of the schemers against all she holds dear, namely, her
faith, her patriotism, traditions, civilisation. She grants the " returned "
aliens equality of civil rights ; they may and do become mayors over
Christian population, and within a short time Britain is ruled by a
Jewish Prime Minister, Disraeli, first and foremost a Jew and the
flunkey of the powerful Rothschild financiers.
One of the consequences of this disastrous political mistake is the
transformation of the national attitude of Great Britain and her
colonies into that of the British Empire. Disraeli who inspired it
knew what he was scheming for, the British people did not. But with
him, Zionism is carried up to the very heights of the British Throne, a Zionist World Empire is on the high road to realisation.
-Leslie Fry, "the Jews and the British Empire," 1935
In the light of what Jonathan Haidt in the above linked video says with regards to David
Perkin's findings, I tend to say this question of yours
Do Brighter Minds Incline to Honesty?
has to be answered: "Yes. But ."
The But has to do with the the history of the term "honesty".
People might say wrong things, while being (and feeling!) honest, because honesty is not
necessarily rooted in speaking the truth.
Honesty is a social category alltogether (with close ties to knighthood, chivalry and the
like). It therefor is a category, which in it's very core hints at obedience and fellowship,
and that's at times what keeps people away from speaking the truth – cf. David
Perkins and Jonathan Haidt above (ok – full circle).
Hit-and-run is common all over the world not just in China, it is a sign of moral decay,
confusion, and irresponsibility. Those perpetrators must be denounced.
But if one follows the West or the unrepentant war criminal Japanese, it is easy to white
wash those hit-and-run crimes by saying the percentage of such crime in China is way lower
than in the US though the absolute number might be higher, so Chinese is more honest than
average in the world.
On the other hand killing people with car faces less consequences in the West, most
perpetrators in the West get slap on the wrist for such crime, such as suspension of driving
license, insurance company paid compensation, short term imprisonment, or get way free by
claiming medical conditions, but in China the perpetrators may have to pay their lives for
their crimes. It seems the West does not have a balanced morality, harsh on the victims and
lenient on the criminals.
In the honesty index graph,
Germany is higher than China, OK, thats fair.
As for the five eyes lies , their rightful place is right at the
bottom.
UK [half of fukus] the ethical country ? hehehehhe
Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy
by Mark Curtis
In his explosive new book, Mark Curtis reveals a new picture of Britain's role in the
world since 1945 and in the 'war against terrorism' by offering a comprehensive critique of
the Blair government's foreign policy. Curtis argues that Britain is an 'outlaw state',
often a violator of international law and ally of many repressive regimes. He reasons not
only that Britain's foreign policies are generally unethical but that they are also making
the world more dangerous and unequal.
Why do you condemn over 100,000 years of homo sapiens behaviour. Destroying human lives
has been continuously the most effective natural way to achieve important utilitarian ends
tight up to today. And given the ancient Hebrew enthusiasm for genocide is it surprising that
God's Ten Commandments not only said nothing about abortion but assumed that limiting killing
was about the best that could be hoped for.
Did I mention the top 100 hoaxes of the century chart, kid ?
Here's a partial list,
Iraq WMD
IRAQ babies incubators
Racak 'massacre'
RUSSIAGATE,
Chinagate,
Indo./China war 1962
Indon genocide 1965
GCHQ fake foto
Tibet fake foto,
Tibet genocide,
Libya
Syria
Sinking of the Maine,
Gulf of Tonkin,
911
War OF terror,
R2p[lunder]
TAM 'massacre'
Tibet 2008
Xinjiang 2009
100 reasons why fukus should be at the bottom of the 'honesty' chart !
These are not just hit and run. In China you do not run until you make sure the victim is
dead. And if the victim is not dead you hit them second time to make sure he/she is dead and
then you run. This is very pragmatic and congruent with all Chinese philosophical systems.
That's why I suggested to your compatriot (denk) here that a bit of Christian mercy and
compassion would do Chinese some good.
As Amryata Sen has pointed out. The problem in Bengal was not a lack of food but the lack
of purchasing power by the poorest peasants. Hoarding by merchants is a traditional driver of
famine in India. The Punjab actually had a good harvest but Bengal ate rice. Churchill's
nvolvement was ncidental. India was governed com India, often by Indians. Churchill was an
outrageous racist but by no means representative of the British of the time. He lost the post
war election.
I am surprised that you posted that first link. Its 1500 tested people (selected how?)
from 15 countries simply reminded me that the "Climategate" emails also belonged to the
University of East Anglia.
I didn't take the time to understand WTF PUBG was all about (third link).
As to the second link it is indeed interesting to learn of what appears to be a formal
recognition by the Chinese Communist Party that part of what contributed to the earlier
economic success of the West was trust and comparative honesty (as Amy Wax might point
out).
First of all Christians have no mercy, and they only have crusade and conversion.
Christians are cult. The Christians have been committing crimes against humanity, crimes
against peace and war crimes using evil and sadist inquisition methods for a very very long
time. Their forte is racial and culture genocide. Before Columbus time they only did their
carnage between themselves and Muslims within the European continent and ME. After Columbus
they spread their plague all over the world.
The most unfortunate victims are the Americans (from North to South). Christian not only
took the American's land, and killed them into nearly extinct, they also burnt all books of
South Americans, so that there is no indigenous South American civilization left to tell
their history and to refute what the Christian casted them as savages.
In China during the late Qing time, the Christians treated Chinese culture and traditions
as witchcraft, backed by their governments' guns they used extraterritorial right to expand
their control of people and land with organized violence and insidious crimes. Their
unscrupulous activities forced Chinese to resist thru Boxer movement because Qing Court was
incompetent. The West labelled Boxer as terrorists and crashed them with Eight Nations
Alliance armed intervention, Christian was a major force that caused China Century
Humiliation.
Since WWII all wars were led by the Christians, their false Christian mercy calls paved
the way for the Western governments and war mongers to bomb, kill and waterboard on moral
high ground just like their barbaric Christian forebears who have done to the native South
Americans and rest of the world.
That kind of morally defunct drivers are not unique to China, they appeare in the West
too. In some incidences the driver in the West made sure nobody survives in the other car by
pushing the car over the road side, so they have better chance not to be convicted due to no
witness.
While guys using assault rifles mowing down tens of school kids for no reasons and claim
it is their constitution rights to do so, and tens of millions of killed, tortured and maimed
by the NATO false flag wars, why don't you suggest your compatriots in the USA and other NATO
nations that a bit of Christian mercy and compassion would do their souls some good? Is it
because Christian mercy is myth, fantasy and snakeoil?
You are being racist, propagating the pink skin pigs' trashes in HK irresponsibly. You
should know those noxious racist trolls in the SCMP are posted by the pink skin pigs and
their mentally colonized wannabes in HK out of resentment and frustration, because they lost
their colonial privileges in HK and they are being rejected as uneducated unscrupulous
colonials back home. They fell from master caste to the bottom of the society and become
worthless trash.
Japanese are unrepentant war criminals, their whole society are liars and they have been
lying since WWII about their war crimes, their past, their present and their future, they
even are lying about the massive toxic nuclear leaking in the Fukushima cripple nuclear power
plants that are causing millions of people died of cancer and extinction of marine creatures.
While the British is the mentor of the Japanese.
Britain was a ruthless global tyrant and liar, but you seem to believe that all the crimes
against humanity and peace and war crimes British committed around the world can be forgiven
and glossed over by claiming Britain a democracy; what a lie and morally defunct double think
evil psychopathic expression. People said British imitates the Romans and the American is
born out of the British, no wonder the American is adopting the same double think logic to
white wash and gloss over the war crimes, crimes against humanity and peace they have been
committing around the world.
Winston Churchill was a classic imperialist with no moral bearing, he believed for the
empire everything goes. WWII is nothing but a dog-eat-dog play rough over the monopoly to
plunder the rest of the world; they squandered all the wealth they obtained thru stealing,
looting and murdering hundreds of millions of people all over the world in that
scrabbling.
About cheating in the exams you must have never seen what the Greeks and Indian are
capable of. PUBG is sour grape, they cannot beat the Chinese so they banned Chinese on the
fabricated allegation, just like the Opium Wars, the British could not beat Chinese
manufactured goods, so they used Opium and wars to steal and cheat Chinese wealth.
Why do you waste time displaying your prejudices without even acknowledging what question
was asked? Your English is up to it – just – so you have no excuse.
All Utu was pointing out is that deliberately killing someone with a car to escape
prosecution is pretty heinous behavior and does suggest something really wrong with the
Chinese culture at a fundamental level.
And the treatment of animals in China is generally deplorable compared with Western
standards with little concern for their well being. How does this obvious cruelty fit on the
ethical plane?
Ethical behavior among human beings is probably more unusual than we would like to believe
and we can all be better people. The Chinese are no exception to that rule. If Christian
ethics or Buddhist ethics can advance that cause, I support this.
I was intrigued to find on the listverse.com site some readable and/or intriguing stuff,
e.g. on Charles Darwin, but your particular, well debunked, choice of anachronistic and
inaccurate story to believe and post suggests to me that anyone whose intellectual standards
allow them to rely on one of those list (usually of 10) sites should not pollute UR. Are you
aware that people are paid $100 (with possibility of bonuses) for those lists?
You are wrong, not everybody demands the same quality, and Chinese provides different
quality for different needs in the market. Besides you get what you paid for, it is
fundamental principle of capitalism if you don't count the first principle of capitalism
which is monopoly which is charge as much as you can bear and cost is irrelevant, that is not
only cheating and it is also blackmailing and looting.
The video just claims but shows no proof what the guy claims. Chinese machinery and parts
are taking more markets around the world, this simply fact proves the video is made out of
bad faith, and pure propaganda.
Coins can stand up on Chinese High Speed Rail running more than 300km/hr, no German,
Japanese or any other nation can do that, it proves the bearing quality in China HSR is
unprecedented, it further proves the guys in the video is a troll out of jealous, resentful
and fear Chinese achievements.
In China you do not run until you make sure the victim is dead.
cuz you watch some videos from youtube, forchrissake !
Can you give me some credible statistics , the percentage of such alleged crimes in
China ?
How does such alleged crimes stack up against fukus state terrorism like double
tapping , sniping at women and chidlren, obliterating the whole neighborhood of a suspect
hideout just to make sure, ?
And .
How does this elevate fukus from its rightful position at the bottom of that honesty
chart, thats all I wanna know ?
It is propaganda. People tell me that the same stories were circulated when Japan
was becoming a tech powerhouse. It will probably take another 5-10 years before it
dissipates.
I merely point out the misconception about Christians supported by historical facts.
Indian treats animals even worse while China has humane protection laws, it seems you are as
impartial as utu.
Your first paragraph comes over as so silly that perhaps it shouldn't surprise that your
second paragraph is, to say the least, extremely puzzling. Where did Anonymous [216] say or
suggest that China eould collapse? The post you are replying to implies no such thing.
After every of your visit by you at unz.com I keep wondering to what degree your primitive
chauvinism is representative of China. How many millions primitive and hateful Joe Wongs are
there? Then I wonder that perhaps you are not Chinese. That you are employed by enemies of
China. That Chinese are too smart to show their cards that early in the game. If they really
hate they would not show it because only fools show hate.
You, see I carry a positive stereotype of Chinese which is supported by my personal
experience with them but you and your sidekick deng do everything possible to undermine it
and change it into: Yes, Chinese can be really stupid and thus more dangerous than we
thought. Watch, out for stupid and dangerous Chinese. Go to the Plan B: Poke NK and the
Rocket Man more to the point that Japan get so paranoid that it starts arming itself with
nukes. If there is to be a war let it start with the yellow races killing each other. They
hate each other anyway. Ask Joe Wong if you have any doubts.
So what is it? Are you Chinese or an agent of revanchist militarist unreformed Chinese
hating interests of Japanese imperialism? And then, if you are Chinese, how many more stupid
ones like you are there?
It seems your only defense for the Christians is denying historical facts, and stating
something that Christians are not.
Naïve? Are you saying the crimes against humanity, crimes against peace and war
crimes committed by the Christians were carefully planned, deeply thought through, determined
and maturely decided like holocaust?
Bible is zero-sum based narrative, the fundamental dogma of Christianity is "you are
either with us or you are with the devil" therefore all Christians have a mission to convert
everyone else into "one of us" on the moral high ground with whatever means necessary,
Christians believe whatever the Christians do it is necessary with good intention, even
bombing, killing and waterboarding on the fabricated allegations is humanitarian
intervention.
Christianity assumes humans are primitive and born evil, they need divine force to
threaten (go to hell) them not to do harm, and it is tribal. While some other civilizations
believe humans are sane, rational, intelligent and compassionate, humans do not need divine
force to tell them how to behave properly in order to achieve peace, harmony, cooperation,
development and mutual benefits, just logical explanation and some directions will be
suffice.
If the past can be any reference, the crimes have been committed against humanity in the
name of Christianity, it is doubtful that Christians have any morality, mind you it does not
mean the Bible does not have good points in it, there are other way better ways and means to
serve as a framework to guide human behaviour for the good.
Chauvinism is someone claims what he is not and based that false claim to demonize others
what they are not on the moral high ground, this is what the West has been doing since
1492.
Stating facts does not involve emotion, so please refrain yourself from sensationalize any
topic unnecessary that makes dialog on difficult issues impossible, Theresa May and Nikki
Haley are not your role model to follow.
For over seventy years the US has dominated Asia, ravaging the continent with two major
wars in Korea and Indo-China with millions of casualties, and multiple counter-insurgency
interventions in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Timor, Myanmar, Pakistan and
Afghanistan. The strategic goal has been to expand its military and political power, exploit
the economies and resources.
Before WWII, the American is just one of the Western imperialists ravaged and wreaked
havoc of Asia with barbaric wars, illicit drugs like Opium, slavery, stealing, robbing,
looting, plundering, murdering, torturing, exploiting, polluting, culture genocide, 'pious'
fanaticism, unmatchable greed and extreme brutality. In fact it is hard to tell the
difference between the American and the unrepentant war criminal Japanese who is more lethal
and barbaric to Asians until the Pearl Harbour incident.
If the past can be any reference, the crimes have been committed against humanity in
the name of Christianity, it is doubtful that Christians have any morality
Do you really believe this???? No morality in any Christians?
You are even more locked into hate and racism than I thought possible.
Have you attended any of the lectures by the anti-racist Tim Wise??
You might get some talking points from him that can help you in your future postings.
And keep up the good work, you have a bright future in any number of our MSM outlets.
And you have not even met the hardcore commies, who would like to explain that the only
thing that Mao did wrong, terribly wrong was that he did not kill nearly enough people.
And the answer to your question is that there are idiots in every country and race, though
in China they are mostly excluded from political positions(because insanity is not welcome),
so they troll online message boards within and without China.
Like various other fanatics and crazies, they can be entertaining in the appropriate
context. If you've been to Finland, he's the equivalent of the old drunk men yelling
propositions at girls in some train stations of the small towns. Entertaining in small
doses.
So you couldnt even give one good reason why UK should be on top of that 'honesty
chart' eh ?
well I can give you 100 why UK should be right at the bottom,
Perfidious albions
exhibit one
How to ethnic cleanse an entire island ? Declare the residents as tresspassers !
'What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir
Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: "We must surely be
very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain
ours.
There will be no indigenous population except seagulls." At the end of this is a
handwritten note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill:
"Along with the Birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays " Under the heading, "Maintaining the
fiction", another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as "a floating
population" and to "make up the rules as we go along".
@joe Wong You are a foolish, ignorant person. At least in regard to Christianity. The
perpetrators of the holocaust and genocide are Christians? You absolutely have no clue about
Christianity. Yes, they came from a Christian based culture but Nazis (and American war
criminals) have nothing in common with Christianity. The best countries in the world are ones
based on Protestant Christianity, meaning Christianity that is the closest to the Biblical
teachings. I admire Chinese culture and history (especially the technology which benefited
the West) but you need the ability to admit the faults of your culture which has some serious
problems.
Though I am convinced that honesty is more rational in the long term than lying, I definitely
don't believe that people with high IQ are more honest than those more modestly gifted with
intellectual talent. Smart people just know better to juggle with fallacies so they are more
likely to get away with it than dummies, that's all.
Logic does say that truth is lower maintenance, as it exists per se and is always consistent,
and lies so they are not exposed need to be cared of constantly, as they are always
intrinsically inconsistent with reality, but people are people, driven by the seven sins, of
which greed and vanity are possibly the worst, with the former being more evenly distributed
while the latter tends to affect the bright rather than the dim.
Logic and ethics are different categories. Equating them is a sign of, well, vanity.
Only a moron equate honesty = quality using ball bearing as example. There are countries
may be very honest like Bhutan, yet they don't produce high quality product.
The US top elites are very intelligent, are producing lots of quality products like Boeing
plane & precision weapons for murdering everywhere, yet their politicians & bankers
are known habitual liars, with British & French close behind, and Germans
reluctantly.
Japanese is producing high quality products, look how frequently their politicians are
caught outright lying, corrupted & nepotism, and researchers are now caught recently in
their published papers using fake data, with big corporates like Toshiba, Nissan, Steel
factories caught cheating systematically for long period.
Its true Germany make top notch quality, undisputed, better than Japan imo.
But look at the chart, beside Germany, who else is producing better ball bearings than
China, or precision tools that run aerospace, manned space craft, rockets, 5th gen J20,
satellites, nuclear plants(light water pebble), nuclear sub, FSR, a long list to go yet they
are rated more honest than China.
Fyi, only 2 countries are able to produce precision steel ball bearings for tiny ball
point pen tip, Germany & Japan. So China is importing billion of them for its ball point
pen production annually.
Why can't China factory produce it? There was some uproar in China media over this last
year. Guess what? Within a mth, some factory is churning out perfect ball bearings, but in
better material – ceramic that is cheaper & longer lasting. And the producer
explained, its not economical worth the effort & machining to produce those bearings as
they cost only $200K p. a. to import. But for national pride, they do it.
And i highly suspect you are either from HK or Taiwan with some bad memory of old China
that you simply like to smear China without taking a fairer stand that, out of 1.4B Chinese
how many % is doing those crimes, vs 400M murkans more serious crimes.
The new generation Chinese should not be continuously viewed through old communist color
lens & West propaganda, they are not responsible for the history but the future. Pres Xi
is a good example, he is leading China to their peaceful rise now. He suffered in culture
revolution, do you want to blame him for those history?
This chart simply look so questionable. Why not include US, France, Oz, Canada, Bhutan,
India, Brazil, Agentina, Singapore, Thailand, Myanmar, HK, Japan, Korea, HK, Taiwan, to give
a wider comparison. And how the author do his samplings to derive this graph is very much
questionable.
And to say brighter mind = honesty, just look at how honest are most world politicians
that are generally top intellectuals of their cohort. I would say more wise = more
honesty.
To use wallets returning as a test of honesty is also overly simplified. When a country is
poor, these are godsend present unless they are true perfect communist.
As a country get wealthier, their people generally get better education & well off,
become indoctrine with social norm of what is so called good behavior(persuaded by praise
& blame). They are more inclined to return a wallet found with money that aren't so
attractive to them compare to poor. But that can never be equate to genuine honest, im sure
most US Pres & UK PM will return wallets.
Take UK as the most glaring example, with its brightest in parliament are consistently
been outright shameless liars, such as Blairs lies for Iraq WMD war, and now May's lies of
Skripal case, which all getting near unanimous support from their parliament members speak
great volumes.
There is a Unz article written on how UK has been the mecca of paedophiles, global capital
in grooming children for sexual exploitation, with systematic covered up over decades by
their politicians because they & those powerful elites were all involved.
Their police chief even suggested not to criminalize Britons watching/owned child porno as
so high a proportion of their nation are doing will overwhelm their prisons & judicial
system.
So what honesty are we talking about here, UK as over 60% honest? Even their moral value
is highly questionable if you ask most UK white people.
And Malaysia getting 3rd highest honesty of near 80% is a great joke just shy from UK. Its
one of well known highest crimes & corruption that the West themselves criticized much,
even Spore ex-PM LKY openly condemn as violent crime infested. I never know violent criminal
is honest, may be yes for the author country when compared to their politicians.
I think the question of what is best for the world is best left to the 8 million that live
in it; humanity should decide on its government every ten years.
The nation state system fosters uncontrolled capitalism. The nation state system is a middle
man between the global wealth of a very few and the slave poverty of the mass of 8 billion..
The problem with capitalism is that it is such a powerful system of economics nothing can
block its path.
Uncontrolled, capitalism is like the game of monopoly: in that game, payment is due to the
capitalist owner at most landing spots on the playing board; unless the party landing on such
spot already owns the spot landed on with each turn at play. In the end, the game of monopoly
wipes out everyone; it transfers everyone's wealth to but one player, the winner. Everyone
else is a broke worthless loser.
Without internationally enforced rules that prevent powerful, large mega monopolies
corporations (the public is unable to vote to change the corporate nature or to restructure
by voting those Board of Directors who mange the mega-corporation) to reach the size of
nation states and to amass the much more capital to burn than most nation states, nothing is
going to change. Bottom up insistence that nations write laws to control the mega-capitalist
powered, monopoly secured corporations go unheeded because no politicians or group of
politicians is strong enough to write laws that the nations can enforce, hence mega
corporations are virtually operating in a completely lawless environment { meaning mega
corporations can do whatever they want }. There is no nation powerful enough to reel in many
very large corporations; those certain few corporations own and enjoy the security from
competition that monopolies guarantee in most of the extremely profitable markets in the
world.
No one, including Russia and China can expect to survive trying to compete against the masses
of capital, the earning capacities and the wealth building power of monopolies. Monopolies
rule the nation state law makers , not the other way around. If I were you, I would add to
your list of possible MH-17 bashers several global corporations; the one's I have in mind,
cannot be completely identified to a single nation in the world because they are so large
they own the lawmakers, most of the assets and all of the earning power in many of the
nations.
One the 9/11 clouds is the possible corporate involvement.
There are three possibilities: Rebels shot, our thought they shot, at an Ukrainian bomber,
and hit a passenger plane A Ukrainian bomber used the passenger plane as shield, in the
expectation that the rebels would not fire A western plane deliberately shot down the plane,
possibly a stealth plane.
That the plane was ordered to fly lower by Kiev air control might support the last two
possibilities.
In any case, neither the rebels, nor the Russians had any interest in shooting down the
plane. The western interest at the time was clear, the Netherlands objected most to
sanctions, our export to Russia. The 300 deaths changed that literally overnight.
What never has been explained was the telephone call from prime minister Rutte to vice
prime minister Asscher, at the time on holiday on vacation in the south of France.
Rutte phoned Asscher on his mobile, but asked him to call back on a land line 'so that the
Russians could not listen in'.
What at the afternoon of the crash was so secret that the Russians were not allowed to
hear, I have just the suspicion that Rutte told Asscher that the Russian had to be
blamed.
The Dutch investigation, with suspect Ukraine, drags on until now.
You are even more cynical than I am. I have no doubt that the politicians, Dutch, US,
Australian, Ukrainian, and all others, are totally amoral and unscrupulous. Naturally, they
are all venal. As the US saying goes, "honest politician is the one who, once bought, stays
bought".
But I thought that a person who lost someone in that crash would like to know the truth,
rather than "official" US BS. It would be sad to think that none of almost 300 people on
board had anyone who cared about them more than about money. If I were related to any of the
victims, I'd feel vindictive. I'd want to kill whoever is responsible, not whoever the liars
found it expedient to blame. And I'd make damn sure I know who planned this provocation and
who executed it in cold blood.
In my blog 'contraviews' http://www.contraviewing.blogspot.com post 148
you will find a recording of the conversation (mentioned in this article) between the
Estonian Foreign Affairs Minister Urmas Paet and EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Ashton. Go
to the year 2014 in the margin and scroll down to post 148. One may find more interesting
articles on MH17.
Russian foreign ministry presentation provided sensational new details during ambassador briefing claiming that the USA know about
the fact that Boing was short down before Boeing fall on he ground. And deliberately hide satellite information that they have about
the incident that establishedd the sequnce of events in this shooting
Live Russian MFA summons foreign ambassadors to a meeting on Skripal
case -- statement - YouTube
Notable quotes:
"... The Dutch simply accepted that the Ukraine lost all relevant radar data. ..."
The lengths Dutch Prime Minister publicly went (serving quote 'geopolitical interests') to get the EU-Ukraine association agreement
ratified the clear rejection by advisory referendum notwithstanding, ought to make any well informed reader suspicious of how
far Rutte went out of public sight to serve those same 'geopolitical interests' by manipulating both the investigation and public
opinion in relation to MH17.
Rutte recently demonstrated his fealty to those 'geopolitical interests' again. When asked if new evidence was presented in
the Skripal case to justify the Netherlands support for the UK, Rutte answered that 'such evidence wasn't necessary because May
had stated that it was highly likely that Russia was responsible'.
The Dutch Government got a UN mandate to perform the investigation and as such that part of the investigation had to be transparent.
Clearly to serve those 'geopolitical interests' the Dutch separated the technical investigation from the legal liability investigation.
The technical investigation was performed under the UN mandate and the second legal liability investigation was organized separate
from any UN mandate.
The Dutch, Australian, Belgium government colluded with the Ukrainians to organize a 'Joint Investigation Team' which under
the cover of performing a legal investigation refuses any transparency and at regular intervals hints that indictments are close
but not there yet.
Also the Dutch Transport Safety Board technical investigation has concluded that the UkSATSE should have closed the Air Control
area above Eastern Ukraine, but the Dutch government has thus far never taken any action to hold the Ukrainians responsible for
that failure even when 3 days before MNH17 a AN-24 was downed from 6500m and UkSATSE (joint civil-military ATC) continued to control
some 100 civil air liners a day over that area.
The Dutch simply accepted that the Ukraine lost all relevant radar data.
Actually this "Who shot down MH17?" is the wrong question.
The question is "Who is liable?".
Shooting down aircraft above a war zone is SOP. If a civilian air liner is guided and controlled over such war area where 3
days earlier an AN-24 has been downed from 6500m one really ought to question the competence and liability of the ATC involved.
That ATC authority UkSATSE as a joint civil-military ATC was fully informed about the situation and still continued to guide some
100 civil air liners ad day for three days over that war zone.
Shooting down a civil air liner over a war zone is tragic but not necessarily always a crime. There was no motive for the East
Ukrainians, but as shown by the relentless exploitation by the Kiev puppet regime this Kiev regime most definitely had a motive.
Any liability investigation with the Ukrainian secret service as an investigator like in the Dutch/Australian/Ukraine Joint
investigation Team simply can't be trusted to even look for the truth. The JIT was set up with the intention of evading the transparency
requirements associated with the UN mandated investigation.
Thinking people smelled a rat in the case of MH17 straight off. No sensible person can fail to smell it now. Just a few considerations:
1. Donbass freedom fighters (and, by extension, Russia) were blamed by the US, its vassals, and its client states like Ukraine
even before the debris cooled down. Only the perpetrators could have known designated "guilty party" without any investigation.
2. Satellite pictures promised by Kerry four years ago never materialized. The only logical conclusion is that the perpetrators
were not those accused by the US, and the pictures would have revealed real perpetrators, which the US did not want to happen.
3. Malaysia, the owner of that airplane, was not allowed to participate in the investigation. Apparently, someone was afraid
that it might not play ball. This can only happen when the "investigators" meant to hide the truth, not to reveal it.
4. The UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and one of the suspects, Ukraine, signed a non-disclosure agreement. It makes no sense
unless one or more of the signatories is guilty.
5. The "investigation" is going on for four years, longer than any investigation in the history of civil aviation. The experience
shows that a lot less time is needed to uncover the truth. Thus, the length of this "investigation" shows that the real purpose
is cover-up.
6. Ukraine never provided the records of pilots' communications with air traffic controllers, or any other air traffic control
records. Thus, it must have had something to hide.
One can continue in this vein, but what's the point? Suffice it to say that all international airlines drew their conclusions:
they fly over Russia, but avoid Ukrainian airspace, like they avoid Iranian and North Korean airspace. Sapienti sat.
Thinking people smelled a rat in the case of MH17 straight off. No sensible person can fail to smell it now. Just a few considerations:
1. Donbass freedom fighters (and, by extension, Russia) were blamed by the US, its vassals, and its client states like Ukraine
even before the debris cooled down. Only the perpetrators could have known designated "guilty party" without any investigation.
2. Satellite pictures promised by Kerry four years ago never materialized. The only logical conclusion is that the perpetrators
were not those accused by the US, and the pictures would have revealed real perpetrators, which the US did not want to happen.
3. Malaysia, the owner of that airplane, was not allowed to participate in the investigation. Apparently, someone was afraid that
it might not play ball. This can only happen when the "investigators" meant to hide the truth, not to reveal it.
4. The UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and one of the suspects, Ukraine, signed a non-disclosure agreement. It makes no sense
unless one or more of the signatories is guilty.
5. The "investigation" is going on for four years, longer than any investigation in the history of civil aviation. The experience
shows that a lot less time is needed to uncover the truth. Thus, the length of this "investigation" shows that the real purpose
is cover-up.
6. Ukraine never provided the records of pilots' communications with air traffic controllers, or any other air traffic control
records. Thus, it must have had something to hide.
One can continue in this vein, but what's the point? Suffice it to say that all international airlines drew their conclusions:
they fly over Russia, but avoid Ukrainian airspace, like they avoid Iranian and North Korean airspace. Sapienti sat.
See my comment nr 230: There is not one investigation. The Dutch manipulated this into two separate investigations. There was
a technical UN mandated transparent Dutch Safety Board investigation. The Dutch organized a second criminal investigation together
with Australia, Belgium and the Ukraine and instigated A Joint Investigation Team (JIT).
Yes. I can understand the Dutch government: they serve the US overlords first and foremost. They don't give a hoot about the lives
of ordinary Dutch people. What I do not understand is the behavior of the people who lost loved ones in MH17 crash. Don't they
want to know who killed them? Don't they object to being grist for the mill of amoral and cynical politicians?
Well, actually I believe that those points do not contradict my theory.
You:
1. Donbass freedom fighters were blamed by the US, its vassals, and its client states like Ukraine even before the debris cooled
down. Only the perpetrators could have known designated "guilty party" without any investigation
Me:
1. Donbass freedom fighters were blamed by the US, its vassals, and its client states like Ukraine even before the debris cooled
down. They saw, on their monitors, what happened.
You:
2. Satellite pictures promised by Kerry four years ago never materialized. If they could prove that Donbass freedom fighters were
the perpetrators, these pictures would have been publicized by the US more than any Hollywood movie. My conclusion is that the
perpetrators were not those accused by the US, and the pictures would have revealed real perpetrators, which the US did not want
to happen.
Me:
2. Satellite pictures promised by Kerry four years ago never materialized. They could've pointed to actual surveillance capabilities
of the US, either way.
You:
3. Malaysia, the owner of that airplane, was not allowed to participate in the investigation. Apparently, someone was afraid that
it might not play ball. This can only happen when the "investigators" meant to hide the truth, not to reveal it
Me:
3. Malaysia, the owner of that airplane, was not allowed to participate in the investigation. The investigation was supposed to
be as impartial as possible. Interested parties were kept out as much as possible.
Etc .
No need to keep see-sawing this. Being done plenty of times before and it is being done, as we speak, all over Internet.
1. If anyone on the US/Ukraine side saw on their screens anything that could place the blame on Donbass freedom fighters and/or
Russia, they would have presented their evidence straight away. The US and its vassals (e.g., UK) go into lengthy hysterics even
when they have no evidence whatsoever (US elections in 2016, Skripal affair, etc).
2. The US was so eager to hide its surveillance capabilities that Kerry blabbered about it from the get go. Then presented
zilch. Very believable.
3. If Malaysia was excluded to make the investigation impartial, than Ukraine, Netherlands, Australia, and UK should have been
excluded, as well. The investigation should have been conducted by a party who has no stake in the matter. Instead, it is conducted
by one of the prime suspects and countries who lost citizens in that crash. For four years! With non-disclosure agreement, to
boot. Inspires lots of confidence.
I am sure your responses to the rest would be just as "convincing".
Why on earth would Russia gain anything from shooting down the plane? Western sanctions assault on the Russian Federation had
been ongoing for some time before this incident. The US is willing to kill its own people, ala 9/11. The deep state is malicious
and dangerous and it is the alt internet that makes our use of same to glean information that we would never to see in the MSM.
The US has been trying to provoke Russia into a war and Putin hasn't taken the bait. The senseless idiots in the west don't seem
to realise that Russian nuclear weaponry is supperia to our own and life on earth would surely end; except for the wealthy elites
who run our country who would be safe in our D.U.M.B's
After the Skripal affair, is any more proof required that nothingin neoliberal MSM can be taken at face value? Looks like their
motto is "if at first you don't succeed, lie, lie again."
Notable quotes:
"... So politically devastating is the exposure of Britain's lies that yesterday the Foreign Office deleted a text it sent out on March 22 declaring that the "analysis by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down made clear that this was a military-grade novichok nerve agent produced in Russia." ..."
"... The emergency session of the OPCW called at Russia's request received no answers to the serious questions Moscow insisted Britain had to address. Instead, the UK's representative said Russia could not take part in a joint investigation with Britain into the Skripal affair, as it was "a likely perpetrator." This was given unqualified backing by an EU spokesperson, who demanded that Russia respond to the UK's "legitimate questions" about its alleged continued production of novichoks. ..."
"... No less implicated in this criminal affair is the corporate media, especially the New York Times, which has spent the past month disseminating the raw propaganda issued by London and Washington and baying for Moscow's punishment. At no point did the Times raise a single question about the reliability of the claims of the May government. And now its response to the refutation of the lies is to ignore and bury Aitkenhead's statement. The role of the corporate media in the Skripal provocation confirms the political purpose of the hysterical campaign it has been leading against "fake news," and its insistence that social media be regulated, restricted and monitored. ..."
On Tuesday, Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of the UK's chemical weapons facility, the Porton Down Defence Science and Technology
Laboratory, told Sky News that scientists had "not verified the precise source" of the material used in the attack in Salisbury on
March 4. Aitkenhead's statement came on the eve of the convening at Moscow's request of the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical
Weapons (OPCW) at The Hague, which would have exposed the UK government's case. But this resort to damage control only underscores
the monstrous hoax perpetrated by the British and American governments and their European allies.
May told parliament on March 12 that Porton Down was "absolutely categorical" that the "nerve agent" used on the Skripals had
come from Russia. "Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at Porton Down," she said,
"the government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible" for an "attempted murder" on British soil.
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle on March 20 that "the people from Porton Down"
were "absolutely categorical" that the source of the nerve agent used against the Skripals was Russia. "I asked the guy myself,"
he said, "and he said 'there's no doubt.'"
So politically devastating is the exposure of Britain's lies that yesterday the Foreign Office deleted a text it sent out
on March 22 declaring that the "analysis by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down
made clear that this was a military-grade novichok nerve agent produced in Russia."
... ... ...
The emergency session of the OPCW called at Russia's request received no answers to the serious questions Moscow insisted
Britain had to address. Instead, the UK's representative said Russia could not take part in a joint investigation with Britain into
the Skripal affair, as it was "a likely perpetrator." This was given unqualified backing by an EU spokesperson, who demanded that
Russia respond to the UK's "legitimate questions" about its alleged continued production of novichoks.
No less implicated in this criminal affair is the corporate media, especially the New York Times, which has spent the past
month disseminating the raw propaganda issued by London and Washington and baying for Moscow's punishment. At no point did the Times
raise a single question about the reliability of the claims of the May government. And now its response to the refutation of the
lies is to ignore and bury Aitkenhead's statement. The role of the corporate media in the Skripal provocation confirms the political
purpose of the hysterical campaign it has been leading against "fake news," and its insistence that social media be regulated, restricted
and monitored.
Twelve days
after 9/11, on the night of September 23, 2001, the CIA's Islamabad station chief, Robert Grenier, received a telephone
call from his boss, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. "Listen, Bob," Tenet said, "we're meeting tomorrow at
Camp David to discuss our war strategy in Afghanistan. How should we begin? What targets do we hit? How do we sequence our
actions?"
Grenier later wrote in his book,
88 Days to
Kandahar
, that while he was surprised by the call he'd been thinking about these
same questions -- "mulling them over and over and over," as he later told me -- so he was ready. President George Bush's address
to the U.S. Congress just a few days before, Grenier told Tenet, was a good start: demand that Afghanistan's Taliban ruler,
Mullah Omar, turn bin Laden over to the United States. If he refused, the U.S. should launch a campaign to oust him.
Grenier had thought through the plan, but before going into its details with Tenet he abruptly stopped the conversation.
"Mr. Director," he said, "this isn't going to work. I need to write this all down clearly." Tenet agreed.
Grenier set to work, and over the next three hours he laid out the battle for
Afghanistan. Included in the paper was a detailed program of how the CIA could deploy undercover teams to recruit bin
Laden's enemies among Afghanistan's northern Tajik and Uzbek tribes (an uneasy coalition of ethnic militias operating as
the Northern Alliance), supply them with cash and weapons, and use them in a rolling offensive that would oust the Taliban
in Kabul. With U.S. help, which included deploying American Special Forces teams (under CIA leadership) coupled with
American airpower, the Northern Alliance (more properly, the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan) would
start from its Panjshir Valley enclave in Afghanistan's far northeast and, recruiting support from anti-Taliban forces
along the way, roll all the way into Kabul.
Grenier gave the eight-page draft paper to his staff to review, then sent it to Tenet in
Washington, who passed it through the deputies committee (the second-in-command of each of the major national security
agencies), then presented it to Bush. "I regard that cable," Grenier wrote, "as the best three hours of work I ever did in
my twenty-seven-year career."
Three days after the Tenet-Grenier telephone conversation, on September 26, the CIA
landed a covert-operations team in Afghanistan to recruit local allies in the hunt for bin Laden. The quick action was
impressive, but then events slowed to a crawl. It wasn't until October 20 that the first U.S. Special Forces team linked up
with anti-Taliban rebels, and it took another week for U.S. units to land in strength. But by early November al Qaeda was
on the run and the Taliban's grip on the country was slipping away. On November 13, militias of the Northern Alliance
seized Kabul. The Taliban was defeated, its badly mauled units fleeing south and east (its last bastion, in the south, fell
on December 6), and into nearby Pakistan, while what remained of al Qaeda holed up in a series of cave complexes in the
Spin Ghar mountain range of eastern Afghanistan.
By almost any measure, the CIA-led anti-al Qaeda and anti-Taliban offensive (dubbed
Operation Enduring Freedom by George Bush) marked a decisive victory in the war on terror. The U.S. had set out a plan,
marshaled the forces to carry it out, and then seen it to completion.
But this triumph came with problems. The first was that the offensive was hampered by
Washington infighting that pitted the CIA against a puzzlingly recalcitrant U.S. military and a carping Donald Rumsfeld,
who questioned George Tenet's leadership of the effort. This bureaucratic squabbling, focused on just who was responsible
for what (and who exactly was running the Afghanistan war), would remain a hallmark of American efforts well into the Obama
administration. The second problem was that Afghanistan's southern Pashtun tribes were only marginally included in the
effort, and they remained suspicious of their northern non-Pashtun counterparts. The mistrust, CIA officers believed, would
almost certainly plant the seeds of an endless inter-tribal Afghan conflict, embroiling the United States in an effort to
prop up an unpopular Kabul government. The third problem was Pakistan -- or, more precisely, Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence agency, the ISI, and the ISI's "Directorate S," responsible for covertly supplying, training, and arming
Pakistan's Islamist allies, including the Pashtun-dominated Taliban.
♦♦♦
The intractability of these variables, and America's 17-year effort (sometimes focused
but often feckless) to resolve them, form the basis of Steve Coll's
Directorate S
,
a thick but eminently readable account of America's Afghanistan misadventure. While
Directorate S
stands alone as a comprehensive
exposition of the Afghanistan conflict dating from 9/11, it's actually a follow-on of
Ghost Wars
, Coll's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004
narrative of America's efforts to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan following their invasion in December 1979. Given the
breadth of Coll's dual treatments and the depth of his research, it's likely that these books will remain the standard
exposition of the period for years to come.
While the focus of
Directorate S
is on Pakistan and its shady intelligence services, each of the obstacles that confronted the United States in Afghanistan
from the moment the Taliban abandoned Kabul is embraced in detail. These obstacles included America's post-9/11 attention
deficit disorder (the pivot away from al Qaeda to Iraq was being considered in Washington even as the Northern Alliance
cleared the Afghan capital) and the deeply embedded antipathy toward the new Kabul government among Pakistani-supported
southern tribesman. Thus, after the United States ousted al Qaeda and its Taliban supporters, it embarked on a program to
strengthen the new Kabul government, anointing Hamid Karzai as Afghanistan's president and pledging billions in
reconstruction aid. And so, or so it seemed, everything had gone as planned. The Taliban was routed; al Qaeda was on the
run; a new anti-terrorism government was in place in Kabul; and the United States had signed Pakistan on as a willing
accomplice. On May 1, 2003, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld declared an end to major combat operations in Afghanistan. The war
was over. Won.
But of course it wasn't.
Coll's account provides a disturbing catalogue of the U.S. mistakes in the wake of the
Taliban defeat. Almost all of them are well known: Hamid Karzai, the consensus choice of a grand assembly (a loya jirga) as
Afghanistan's interim president, proved to be a weak leader. The monies appropriated for Afghanistan's postwar
reconstruction were woefully inadequate for the task -- "laughable," as one U.S. official put it. American soldiers
responsible for countering the Taliban's return (and hunting al Qaeda terrorist cells) were thinly and poorly deployed
(and, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, of secondary importance in the Pentagon). Tentative Taliban efforts to engage the
United States in political talks were summarily and unwisely spurned. Allegations of prisoner abuse at U.S. detention
facilities consistently undermined U.S. legitimacy. American funds were funneled into Afghan ministries laced with corrupt
officials. Afghani poppy production increased, despite faint-hearted U.S. eradication efforts. And U.S. counter-terrorism
actions proved ham-handed and caused preventable civilian casualties, pushing Afghanis into a resurgent anti-Kabul
resistance.
More crucially, Pakistan's unstinting support for America's Afghanistan efforts proved to
be anything but unstinting. The reason for this was not only entirely predictable but was actually the unintended result of
the American victory. When the Northern Alliance and U.S. airpower pushed what remained of the Taliban (along with the
remnants of al Qaeda) out of Afghanistan, they pushed them into Pakistan, creating conditions that, as Coll tells us,
"deepened resentment among Pakistan's generals, who would come to see their country's rising violence as a price of
American folly . . ." Put simply, for the United States to seal the Operation Enduring Freedom victory, it had to ensure
that its effects did not spill over into the one nation that could ensure that its victory would, in fact, be enduring.
That didn't happen. The result was that the Taliban was able to rebuild and rearm its networks not only in Pakistan, and
under the eyes of the ISI, but also in Afghanistan.
It might have been otherwise. During a series of discussions I had about America's
intervention in Afghanistan in the months immediately following 9/11, a number of currently serving and former senior U.S.
officials told me they believed that, given enough time, the Taliban might well have handed bin Laden over to the
Americans, obviating the need for a full-on invasion. One of these officials was Milton Bearden, a famed CIA officer (his
close friends refer to him as "Uncle Milty") who, during his time as a station chief in Pakistan, had helped to head up the
CIA's war against the Soviets in the mid 1980s.
♦♦♦
After 9/11, Bearden recharged his Pakistan and Afghanistan networks in an effort to
convince the Taliban that turning bin Laden over to the Americans was a better option than the one they were facing. All
the while, Bearden kept senior U.S. officials apprised of what he was doing, even as he was attempting to head off their
rush to war. Bearden told me that, while his efforts had not reached fruition by the time the Bush White House had decided
on a course of action, he believes the United States had not fully explored all of its options -- or thought through the
long-term impact of its intervention. "I don't know what would have happened, I don't know," he says wistfully, "but I
think we have a handhold in history. We should have seen what was coming." He notes that Alexander the Great "took one look
at Afghanistan's mountains and decided against it. He thought his whole army could get swallowed up in there, and he wasn't
going to take that chance. So, well, you tell me if I'm wrong, but Alexander was no slouch, right?"
Not everyone agrees with this, of course. The dissenters include Robert Grenier, the
first drafter of what became the American war plan. Taliban leader Mullah Omar, he told me, was committed to his pledge to
protect Osama bin Laden; he viewed it as a blood oath that could not be broken. Moreover, argues Grenier, "Omar viewed
himself as a kind of world historical figure, a person on whom the axis of history would turn." One result was that he
believed his fight against the Americans would be epochal.
That said, Grenier believes America's foray into Afghanistan, and the mistakes that
followed, might at least have been dampened by a more diligent focus on the inherent divisions of Afghan society. "We [at
the CIA]," he told me several months ago, "were very aware that the march of the Northern Alliance into Kabul would likely
create real difficulties in the south. And we tried to slow it, precisely for this reason. But events overtook us, and it
just wasn't possible. So, yes, things might have been otherwise, but in truth we just don't know."
The value in Coll's
Directorate S
comes not from the elegant telling of a story not fully known, but from the dawning realization that Afghanistan is the
kind of lock for which there is no key. There is no reason to believe that a different outcome would have ensued if other
events had intruded -- for example, more personnel, money, focused diplomacy, or robust and disciplined enemy-defeating and
nation building; or that our war there and the occupation that followed would have yielded the same results that we
realized in, say, Japan after 1945. The real hubris here is not that we tried and failed but that we thought we could
actually succeed. Afghanistan is simply not that kind of place.
There is a term of art for this in the military, which found its first usage in Iraq in
2009, when U.S. commanders adopted it as an appreciation of what could and could not be accomplished. Instead of focusing
on defeating corruption, inefficiency, disunity, and poor leadership, the focus shifted almost exclusively to dampening
violence, to keeping the doors to Iraq open even as its factions battled for its control. More importantly, the adoption of
the phrase marked the abandonment of high expectations and an embrace of realism. The United States would have to yield the
business of replicating a Western-style democracy on the banks of the Euphrates. That goal, if it was going to be
accomplished at all, would have to be realized by the Iraqis.
Analyst Anthony Cordesman, one of America's premier military thinkers, adopted the phrase
and applied to Afghanistan in 2012 in an essay he entitled, "Time to Focus on 'Afghan Good Enough.'" His plan was simply
stated but had all the elegance of actually working: keep the Taliban out of Kabul and the major cities, preserve the
central and provincial government even in the face of endemic corruption, and work to provide security to large numbers of
Afghanis. Cordesman conceded that this was not the kind of victory that Americans had hoped for on September 12. And it was
difficult to describe the outcome as even vaguely passable -- or "good." But it was far better than adopting goals that could
not be realized or embracing an illusion that disappeared even as it was grasped. For the time being at least, it would
have to be "good enough."
Mark Perry is a foreign policy analyst, a contributing editor to
The American Conservative
and the author of
The Pentagon's Wars
.
Just consider 9/11. Mossad was caught with bombs in NYC the day of and yet they were released and there's no mention in the
media. All the evidence Chris Bollyn and others have put together points to a zionist "inside" operation. Over 2,300 engineers
conclude the government's narrative "defies physics", not to mention logic. WTC Building 7 collapses in 7 seconds and this is
ignored without repercussion. 3,000 died that day and millions since as a result (fake "War on Terror", actual "War OF Terror").
The country has been overthrown from within. The question is what to do? How do we wake up the masses suffering from Stockholm
Syndrome? Or is it best to get the heck out of dodge before things unravel and escalate?
We have a fake government, fake media, fake legal system (UCC contract law, no common law), fake education, fake history, fake
air/skies (chemtrails, geo-engineering), fake water (fluoridated), fake food (GMO). 5G is coming, cameras are going up everywhere.
We're close to a police state and martial law can't be far off. Fake President. I deep down knew he wasn't real because it's not
possible. http://themillenniumreport.com
It's a pretty bleak picture. We need an awakening / revolution.
The vampire squid has its much larger and more powerful prey so under control that there is almost no need for it to deliver
orders and commands. The evil parasite has a thought and the host carries out the action as if the blood/brain barrier has been
breached. The only remaining question for sensible realists concerns how much time should pass before they begin to wish for/hope
for/work to bring about the downfall of the host prey as it becomes clearer and more obvious that its downfall is the only way
to destroy the evil parasite and spare the rest of the world.
The critical mistake that the CIA and other institutions of the American deep state made was in failing to understand that media
is critical infrastructure just as much as roads, bridges, ports and the electrical grid and therefore needed to be kept out of
the cartelized control of a tiny ethnic group with foreign allegiances. They allowed this critical infrastructure be bought up
by this foreign minority and thereby used to brainwash the American public and control the perimeter of the debate. This was a
catastrophic mistake which is the primary root cause of most of America's greatest problems from immigration to foreign wars in
the Middle East.
If effect, the American media is controlled by a foreign mafia, until and unless it is dealt with as such, in the same manner
as the Italian mafia, if necessary, America will continue to be run for foreign interests. Most countries are much smarter than
us (e.g., China). They never would have let this happen.
Brian Roberts: Comcast and MSNBC
Aviv Nevo: Time Warner and CNN.
Sulzburger family: NYTimes
Sumner Rothstein: CBS
You won't hear about shooting Gaza protesters on prime time MSNBC, CNN shows for two reasons. The guests either wouldn't
be inclined to speak about it, for ideological and ethic reasons. Or, those that might like to express concern would feel sufficiently
threatened that they would never be asked to come back.
Oh Lord, I want that money is a line from The Producers . But it's applicable here. Many of these cable contributors
know what's expected of them and deliver safe answers so they can continue cashing scale appearance checks. And any show with
a negative focus on Israel would be attacked by the Israel Lobby, forthwith.
I spent several summers in Israel when I was a college student in 1968 and 1969. When I went back to the University of North Carolina
I took a course in the Arab/Israel Dispute; it was a seminar that was methodically fair, telling both sides of the story. After
class the professor and I would walk to our cars in faculty parking areas. He would actually look over his shoulder before admitting
that most to the people in his field were strongly in favor of the Palestinians, since the Jews had such a strangle-hold on every
American university.
Certainly those on the right whose priorities are most directly under attack by powerful jewish lobbies and oligarchs should tactically
support the idea of cutting off any positive connections with Israel, until jewish money stops promoting:
Interventionist wars;
The imposition of speech taboos and ultimately speechcrime laws (as in Europe and the UK) under the pretexts of suppressing
"hate speech" and the political correctness smears (anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, islamophobia etc);
"When Mr. Bush [the lesser] cited its most simplified tenet -- that the US should seek to promote liberal democracy around
the world -- as a key case for invading Iraq, neoconservatism was suddenly everywhere. It was a unified ideology that justified
military adventurism, sanctioned torture and promoted aggressive Zionism."
Normally, on the 50th anniversary of any notable event, there is almost always recognition in the mainstream media not so for
the deliberate Israeli attack on the USS Liberty (GTR-5). The American mainstream media was totally silent -- not a single peep
or mention of this act of war by Israel. This is PROOF that our mainstream media is "owned", lock, stock and barrel by Israel
"One of the most influential neoconservatives in Washington is Robert Kagan, the husband of Victoria Nuland who was the Assistant
Secretary of State for European Affairs under the Obama administration (and one of the architects of the Ukraine's civil war)
describes himself as a "liberal interventionist"
Between the 1950′s and the 1960′s, a political movement known as Neo-conservatism was born under the liberal hawks of the Democratic
Party in the United States. Then came the Vietnam war where the liberal hawks called for military action to prevent the Communists
from taking power in Vietnam. The neocons were also proponents of the Cold War and supporters of Israel's illegal occupation of
Palestine The neocons made their way to the Reagan administration with Eliot Abrams and company with wars in Central America including
Nicaragua and El Salvador."
-- In any civilized society, the Kagans clan et al would have been isolated like a plague from the population. The US has become
truly zionized by the Trotskyists who have been working synergetically with the MIC and the CIA.
.
It is a loosely guarded secret that American "law enforcement" has embraced Israeli "law enforcement" tactics (which are akin
to military practices). As Israel is on a constant "war footing", its tactics are contentious and confrontational. In fact, American
"law enforcement" agencies routinely send their officers to Israel to receive "training" in Israeli police tactics. There is no
room for Israeli tactics in American "law enforcement".
"Escalation of force" used to be the cornerstone of American "law enforcement", but no more. Police expect us mere mundanes
to cower in fear, and obey their (sometimes confusing and ridiculous) commands without question. This goes hand-in-hand with the
militarization of American "law enforcement". Of course, us mere mundanes are expected to embrace the "escalation of force" doctrine
under penalty of law.
SERIOUS question for people that want to roll back borders to where they were over a half century ago (or wherever their 0 year,
they made up, is):
Can we put Instanbul back in charge of the muddy yeast, being as Erdogan seems tremendously trustworthy, or maybe swap ruling
families back to where they were before some of the swaps? Moving royal fams around is near tradition, at this point.
Not a proper history, but, if you are actually interested, there is much more to read. They even put most of this history in
books, which are often the place to go after web comments. Peer review and everything, on a good day.
If you stand in front of a Chinese tank, you die. If you throw rocks at an Israeli tank, you die. Nothing novel in either case.
Russia has been very restrained re: ukies. Was zero reason to turn it into Chechnya, and that is exactly what State was angling
for. On a meddling n garbage angle: Hell, Obummer tried to pull off a coup in Tatarstan (on the Volga ) and I wish I was imagining
it, but they tried to create a Free Tatarstan Army was heavily under-reported by Western media.
Funny how perfectly the Israelis mimic the Nazis they kvetch about all the time, if one believe the stories they tell. They keep
the untermensch Palestinians in ghettos, where they shoot them and gas them, and otherwise treat them like vermin. No doubt some
commenters here agree that they are vermin. How long until Israel builds them showers?
I appreciate Giraldi's articulate and concise summary of the problem. I would also add that Israel had also been designated by
the UN as the world's leader in human slavery and sex trafficking, another thing you'll never hear reported in America's Jewish-controlled
media. Based on that alone we should be enacting sanctions against Israel.
But I have noticed for decades the recurring quiet void that follows the "something must be done" part in the endless articles
I've read on the subject, as if that iron wall of Jewish censorship and power is eternally insurmountable. It isn't.
We should know by now that there is not going to be a political solution, and I have long since stopped dreaming about voting
Israeli collaborators out of our government.
Put simply, Jewish power comes from money and that money comes from us. The populace may complain endlessly about Washington
Post propaganda and its pernicious efforts to overthrow our democratically elected president, but every December Americans will
dump a few billion dollars into Jeff Bezos' pocket. It's time to stop.
You can already see the effects of Americans boycotting Hollywood and the NFL -- it works.
What I would like to see everyone do is offer a solution instead of another explication of the problems. Essentially, how do
we overthrow this Jewish police state we live in and regain control of our own country before it's too late?
My suggestion is a comprehensive economic boycott against all Jewish goods and services.
You have a better solution? Let's hear it. In fact, I would love to see the Unz Review commit to a series of "solution" articles.
8Are you saying that only a response which shows that a civlian's life is not safe if he engages in a peaceful -- and certainly
not life threatening -- demonstration against the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is adequate to deal with such a demonstration
without severely risking the security of Israel?
Your answer, impled by what you have already said, appears to be "Yes". Really!?
Some of this blame has to be put on the lap of the feckless Arab nation. Egypt, Jordan and of course the coward princes in
Saudi Arabia. El Sisi is a banana republic despot looking, poor man's version of Mubarak, the King of Jordan is trying to stay
above it all and the worst is that 'idiot savant' gorilla sized 'clown prince' MBS who has become good buds with that weird (even
for a Jew) Trump son-in-law Jared . Does he own a chain of jewelry stores? (Grin)
The Turkish emir Erdogan is doing the heavy lifting for these weak Arabs. At least he's trading insults with 'Yahoo'.
The United States, my country, unfortunately is Zionist Occupied Territory. I just started picking fights on Beitbart and while
many of the posters I assume are Zionist trolls some have to be real posters and there the pro Zionist posters outnumbered
the anti Zionist ones at least 5 to 1.
I bow my head in shame for my once great and now Zionist occupied country.
The sad truth is, most Americans don't really care what is happening eight thousand miles away, no matter how horrific, and no
matter that their money is being used to support it. They drink the media koolaid, and think mostly about what's for dinner and
where to go on vacation this year. This is how the farce goes on. It makes the zio animals smile.
Yes, there's a lot of fakery going on, Paul. I agree that the "special relationship" benefits Israel exclusively and that it
has reached the stage of being undeniable. I can't quite accept this latest Q, though. His communiques sound too much like the
average blog commenter's repetitive postings, as though the average blog commenter is the target audience.
Everyone should hope that Justin Raimondo and the readership of "Antiwar.com" reads Giraldi's facts as written in this article.
Moreover, all the subscribers of the New York Times and Washington Post should be apprised of the facts that these two publishers
deliberately withhold from readers. U.S. citizens who are taxed to support these war crimes are purposely kept ignorant of the
facts. Nevertheless, the world is aware of U.S. hypocritical support for Israel's disdain of international law and the horrible
war crimes that occur in Israel's unlawful occupation of Palestinian captured land.
sad realization that the blood of many innocent people is, to a considerable extent, on our hands
Sad to say, most Americans don't know, don't want to know and don't care. The US, since the end of the last world war, has
caused millions to die all over the world either directly or indirectly. This has gone on up to the present day. The collective
response of the average American to all that has been a collective yawn. The only fightback came during the Vietnam war when the
costs and body counts started getting too high. Otherwise if the furriners get killed at a low cost to us then no problem. Only
about perhaps 2-5% of the American public evinces any moral misgivings about the mass atrocities it's supposed government has
carried out routinely. Because of this it's safe to conclude that America is a nation of moral defectives so don't expect much
from them. In this context the recent Israeli actions are small change and will be memory-holed quickly. They are America's local
pit bull and therefore have the umbrella of American protection. It's also interesting to note how the Palestinians have been
abandoned by the leadership of some of their supposed fellow Arab states of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, all US client-flunkies.
Non-Arabs seem to be among the ones most discomfited by these recent events.
I would suspect I am not the first to say it (but may be), from the outside, this 'special relationship' looks much like the special
relationship between the face-hugger and the character John Hurt is playing in Alien .
"The sad truth is, most Americans don't really care what is happening eight thousand miles away"
They didn't care what happened in Vegas, either. Illegal gun running, money laundering, mobsters working with the FBI and ATF,
58 innocent Americans dead, hundreds more wounded.
But hey, pretty girls and Harvey Weinstein's wee wee are much more important. Everyone did see that this sex scandal was a
deliberate news bomb to knock Vegas off the news, right?
The Leon Trotsky position was that all gentile Christians must be forced to deny Christ and Church and affirm atheism, and
all nations on the planet must be forced to accept Marxism.
Are you stupid enough to label Trotsky a right winger?
Not many leftists do, but all kinds of leftist Jews and Jewish Neocons call Stalin some type of fascist. Of course, economically,
all fascists are socialists.
Fifteen countries voted against Russia's bid, while six voted for it and 17 abstained.
"Unfortunately, we haven't been able to have two-thirds of the votes in support of that decision. A qualified majority was needed,"
Russian ambassador Alexander Shulgin told reporters, adding " Russia as well as other states that are members of the Executive Committee
have been pushed aside from this investigation ."
UK's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson brushed aside Russia's request, calling it a "ludicrous proposal" designed to "undermine"
the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation.
"Russia has had one goal in mind since the attempted murders on UK soil through the use of a military-grade chemical weapon -
to obscure the truth and confuse the public," Johnson said. " The international community has yet again seen through these tactics
and robustly defeated Russia's attempts today to derail the proper international process ." Johnson also said that "none of us have
forgotten" about the "barbaric" chemical weapons attack in Syria a year ago.
"After the OPCW-UN investigation found that the Syrian regime was responsible, Russia blocked that body from doing any more work,"
he said.
Russia wants to discuss a letter sent by UK Prime Minister Theresa May to the UN Security Council which says it's "highly likely"
that Moscow was behind last month's nerve agent attack.
Meanwhile ,
as we reported yesterday , the chief scientist from the UK's Porton Down military laboratory facility, Gary Aitkenhead, told
Sky News that they had been unable to prove that the novichok nerve agent used to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal came from Russia.
"We were able to identify it as novichok, to identify that it was military-grade nerve agent," Aitkenhead said. " We have not
identified the precise source, but we have provided the scientific info to government who have then used a number of other sources
to piece together the conclusions you have come to. "
**PAGING COLIN POWELL. IS THERE A MR. POWELL IN THE BUILDING?**
The Porton Down chief scientist said that establishing the Novichok's origin required "other inputs," some of which are intelligence
based and which only the government has access to.
Aitkenhead added: " It is our job to provide the scientific evidence of what this particular nerve agent is, we identified that
it is from this particular family and that it is a military grade, but it is not our job to say where it was manufactured ."
So whose job is it to determine where the Novichok was manufactured?
That said, it was also noted that the nerve agent involved required "extremely sophisticated methods to create, something only
in the capabilities of a state actor," and that there is no known antidote to Novichok - nor was any administered to either of the
Skripals.
Aitkenhead would not say whether the Porton Down facility had manufactured or maintained stocks of Novichok - long rumored to
be the case.
" There is no way anything like that could have come from us or left the four walls of our facility ," said the chief.
Boris Johnson has come under fire since the Porton Down chief's statement, as Johnson lied, saying in an interview two weeks ago
that Porton Down officials told him there was "no doubt" that the nerge agent came from Russia .
The Foreign Office told Sky News that Johnson "misspoke," which is apparently UK officialspeak for "he totally lied, but nobody
will hold him accountable for it."
Perhaps Johnson "misspoke" in his rush to locate a hairbrush?
The evil people, Theresa May, Stoltenberg, Trump and the rest, are damming Russia with obvious lies.
The Novichok nerve agents probably don't even exist.
HERE IS THE PROOF:
The Novichok nerve agents are supposedly much more toxic than the nerve gases VX or Sarin.
Mirzayanov's book, published in 2008, contains the formulas he alleges can be used to create Novichoks. In 1995, he explained
that "the chemical components or precursors" of Novichok are "ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical
companies that manufacture such products as fertilizers and pesticides."
Basically, Mirzayanov claims that it is relatively easy to make the Novichok nerve agents.
So, some enterprising Arabs could buy a few chemists to make a few tons of it and then spray it all over the little Satan.
Do you really think that the Jews who run the United States would allow the publication of information that could lead to thousands
of deaths in Israel?
Do you really think they would protect the publisher of such information by giving him residence in the United States?
Remember, Mirzayanov was given residence in the United States after he was kicked out of Russia.
There are also a number of "people who should know" that have stated that there is zero solid evidence for the existence of
the Novichok nerve agents. For example: Robin Black in Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents (2016):
"In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed
in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the 'Foliant' programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive
countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian
military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published."
And, Alexander Shulgin, Russia's representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (2018):
"There has never been a 'Novichok' research project conducted in Russia,... But in the West, some countries carried out such
research, which they called 'Novichok,' for some reason."
CONCLUSION: The Novichok nerve agents don't even exist.
The use of the "projection" technique (essentially accusing your opponents of doing the very things you yourself are doing)
in official circles has become widespread. It's biggest proponent is, of course, Shitlery who, as an example, recently accused
Trump of using his position to enrich himself and his family (Um....?). Now BoJo has the chutzpah to accuse Russia of obfuscation
and lies. Same technique. Specifically:
" Russia has had one goal in mind since the attempted murders on UK soil through the use of a military-grade chemical weapon
- to obscure the truth and confuse the public," Johnson said. " The international community has yet again seen through these tactics
and robustly defeated Russia's attempts today to derail the proper international process ."
And, of course, psychopaths actually believe their projections which allows them to speak with a straight face. And the MSM,
naturally, just blindly "reports" what they say. The internet is the only source of real information and the true investigative
journalism of any integrity. Which is, of course, why they are trying so hard to censor and close the sources of truth.
you can see here their modus operandi - one of the first NSA leaks by Snowden/Greenwald. There is a slide there called the
Gambits For Deception - all the tricks are there - how to never admit when caught lying, how to cover the small move by the big
one - basically all the BS this fat ugly clown is using are there:
projection is everything. America banned the Huwawie Chinese cell phone because they thought it was a threat. What are all
those Apples in China? Not even to speak about domestic use.
Just consider 9/11. Mossad was caught with bombs in NYC the day of and yet they were released and there's no mention in the
media. All the evidence Chris Bollyn and others have put together points to a zionist "inside" operation. Over 2,300 engineers
conclude the government's narrative "defies physics", not to mention logic. WTC Building 7 collapses in 7 seconds and this is
ignored without repercussion. 3,000 died that day and millions since as a result (fake "War on Terror", actual "War OF Terror").
The country has been overthrown from within. The question is what to do? How do we wake up the masses suffering from Stockholm
Syndrome? Or is it best to get the heck out of dodge before things unravel and escalate?
We have a fake government, fake media, fake legal system (UCC contract law, no common law), fake education, fake history, fake
air/skies (chemtrails, geo-engineering), fake water (fluoridated), fake food (GMO). 5G is coming, cameras are going up everywhere.
We're close to a police state and martial law can't be far off. Fake President. I deep down knew he wasn't real because it's not
possible. http://themillenniumreport.com
It's a pretty bleak picture. We need an awakening / revolution.
The vampire squid has its much larger and more powerful prey so under control that there is almost no need for it to deliver
orders and commands. The evil parasite has a thought and the host carries out the action as if the blood/brain barrier has been
breached. The only remaining question for sensible realists concerns how much time should pass before they begin to wish for/hope
for/work to bring about the downfall of the host prey as it becomes clearer and more obvious that its downfall is the only way
to destroy the evil parasite and spare the rest of the world.
The critical mistake that the CIA and other institutions of the American deep state made was in failing to understand that media
is critical infrastructure just as much as roads, bridges, ports and the electrical grid and therefore needed to be kept out of
the cartelized control of a tiny ethnic group with foreign allegiances. They allowed this critical infrastructure be bought up
by this foreign minority and thereby used to brainwash the American public and control the perimeter of the debate. This was a
catastrophic mistake which is the primary root cause of most of America's greatest problems from immigration to foreign wars in
the Middle East.
If effect, the American media is controlled by a foreign mafia, until and unless it is dealt with as such, in the same manner
as the Italian mafia, if necessary, America will continue to be run for foreign interests. Most countries are much smarter than
us (e.g., China). They never would have let this happen.
Brian Roberts: Comcast and MSNBC
Aviv Nevo: Time Warner and CNN.
Sulzburger family: NYTimes
Sumner Rothstein: CBS
You won't hear about shooting Gaza protesters on prime time MSNBC, CNN shows for two reasons. The guests either wouldn't
be inclined to speak about it, for ideological and ethic reasons. Or, those that might like to express concern would feel sufficiently
threatened that they would never be asked to come back.
Oh Lord, I want that money is a line from The Producers . But it's applicable here. Many of these cable contributors
know what's expected of them and deliver safe answers so they can continue cashing scale appearance checks. And any show with
a negative focus on Israel would be attacked by the Israel Lobby, forthwith.
I spent several summers in Israel when I was a college student in 1968 and 1969. When I went back to the University of North Carolina
I took a course in the Arab/Israel Dispute; it was a seminar that was methodically fair, telling both sides of the story. After
class the professor and I would walk to our cars in faculty parking areas. He would actually look over his shoulder before admitting
that most to the people in his field were strongly in favor of the Palestinians, since the Jews had such a strangle-hold on every
American university.
Certainly those on the right whose priorities are most directly under attack by powerful jewish lobbies and oligarchs should tactically
support the idea of cutting off any positive connections with Israel, until jewish money stops promoting:
Interventionist wars;
The imposition of speech taboos and ultimately speechcrime laws (as in Europe and the UK) under the pretexts of suppressing
"hate speech" and the political correctness smears (anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, islamophobia etc);
"When Mr. Bush [the lesser] cited its most simplified tenet -- that the US should seek to promote liberal democracy around
the world -- as a key case for invading Iraq, neoconservatism was suddenly everywhere. It was a unified ideology that justified
military adventurism, sanctioned torture and promoted aggressive Zionism."
Normally, on the 50th anniversary of any notable event, there is almost always recognition in the mainstream media not so for
the deliberate Israeli attack on the USS Liberty (GTR-5). The American mainstream media was totally silent -- not a single peep
or mention of this act of war by Israel. This is PROOF that our mainstream media is "owned", lock, stock and barrel by Israel
"One of the most influential neoconservatives in Washington is Robert Kagan, the husband of Victoria Nuland who was the Assistant
Secretary of State for European Affairs under the Obama administration (and one of the architects of the Ukraine's civil war)
describes himself as a "liberal interventionist"
Between the 1950′s and the 1960′s, a political movement known as Neo-conservatism was born under the liberal hawks of the Democratic
Party in the United States. Then came the Vietnam war where the liberal hawks called for military action to prevent the Communists
from taking power in Vietnam. The neocons were also proponents of the Cold War and supporters of Israel's illegal occupation of
Palestine The neocons made their way to the Reagan administration with Eliot Abrams and company with wars in Central America including
Nicaragua and El Salvador."
-- In any civilized society, the Kagans clan et al would have been isolated like a plague from the population. The US has become
truly zionized by the Trotskyists who have been working synergetically with the MIC and the CIA.
.
It is a loosely guarded secret that American "law enforcement" has embraced Israeli "law enforcement" tactics (which are akin
to military practices). As Israel is on a constant "war footing", its tactics are contentious and confrontational. In fact, American
"law enforcement" agencies routinely send their officers to Israel to receive "training" in Israeli police tactics. There is no
room for Israeli tactics in American "law enforcement".
"Escalation of force" used to be the cornerstone of American "law enforcement", but no more. Police expect us mere mundanes
to cower in fear, and obey their (sometimes confusing and ridiculous) commands without question. This goes hand-in-hand with the
militarization of American "law enforcement". Of course, us mere mundanes are expected to embrace the "escalation of force" doctrine
under penalty of law.
SERIOUS question for people that want to roll back borders to where they were over a half century ago (or wherever their 0 year,
they made up, is):
Can we put Instanbul back in charge of the muddy yeast, being as Erdogan seems tremendously trustworthy, or maybe swap ruling
families back to where they were before some of the swaps? Moving royal fams around is near tradition, at this point.
Not a proper history, but, if you are actually interested, there is much more to read. They even put most of this history in
books, which are often the place to go after web comments. Peer review and everything, on a good day.
If you stand in front of a Chinese tank, you die. If you throw rocks at an Israeli tank, you die. Nothing novel in either case.
Russia has been very restrained re: ukies. Was zero reason to turn it into Chechnya, and that is exactly what State was angling
for. On a meddling n garbage angle: Hell, Obummer tried to pull off a coup in Tatarstan (on the Volga ) and I wish I was imagining
it, but they tried to create a Free Tatarstan Army was heavily under-reported by Western media.
Funny how perfectly the Israelis mimic the Nazis they kvetch about all the time, if one believe the stories they tell. They keep
the untermensch Palestinians in ghettos, where they shoot them and gas them, and otherwise treat them like vermin. No doubt some
commenters here agree that they are vermin. How long until Israel builds them showers?
I appreciate Giraldi's articulate and concise summary of the problem. I would also add that Israel had also been designated by
the UN as the world's leader in human slavery and sex trafficking, another thing you'll never hear reported in America's Jewish-controlled
media. Based on that alone we should be enacting sanctions against Israel.
But I have noticed for decades the recurring quiet void that follows the "something must be done" part in the endless articles
I've read on the subject, as if that iron wall of Jewish censorship and power is eternally insurmountable. It isn't.
We should know by now that there is not going to be a political solution, and I have long since stopped dreaming about voting
Israeli collaborators out of our government.
Put simply, Jewish power comes from money and that money comes from us. The populace may complain endlessly about Washington
Post propaganda and its pernicious efforts to overthrow our democratically elected president, but every December Americans will
dump a few billion dollars into Jeff Bezos' pocket. It's time to stop.
You can already see the effects of Americans boycotting Hollywood and the NFL -- it works.
What I would like to see everyone do is offer a solution instead of another explication of the problems. Essentially, how do
we overthrow this Jewish police state we live in and regain control of our own country before it's too late?
My suggestion is a comprehensive economic boycott against all Jewish goods and services.
You have a better solution? Let's hear it. In fact, I would love to see the Unz Review commit to a series of "solution" articles.
8Are you saying that only a response which shows that a civlian's life is not safe if he engages in a peaceful -- and certainly
not life threatening -- demonstration against the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is adequate to deal with such a demonstration
without severely risking the security of Israel?
Your answer, impled by what you have already said, appears to be "Yes". Really!?
Some of this blame has to be put on the lap of the feckless Arab nation. Egypt, Jordan and of course the coward princes in
Saudi Arabia. El Sisi is a banana republic despot looking, poor man's version of Mubarak, the King of Jordan is trying to stay
above it all and the worst is that 'idiot savant' gorilla sized 'clown prince' MBS who has become good buds with that weird (even
for a Jew) Trump son-in-law Jared . Does he own a chain of jewelry stores? (Grin)
The Turkish emir Erdogan is doing the heavy lifting for these weak Arabs. At least he's trading insults with 'Yahoo'.
The United States, my country, unfortunately is Zionist Occupied Territory. I just started picking fights on Beitbart and while
many of the posters I assume are Zionist trolls some have to be real posters and there the pro Zionist posters outnumbered
the anti Zionist ones at least 5 to 1.
I bow my head in shame for my once great and now Zionist occupied country.
The sad truth is, most Americans don't really care what is happening eight thousand miles away, no matter how horrific, and no
matter that their money is being used to support it. They drink the media koolaid, and think mostly about what's for dinner and
where to go on vacation this year. This is how the farce goes on. It makes the zio animals smile.
Yes, there's a lot of fakery going on, Paul. I agree that the "special relationship" benefits Israel exclusively and that it
has reached the stage of being undeniable. I can't quite accept this latest Q, though. His communiques sound too much like the
average blog commenter's repetitive postings, as though the average blog commenter is the target audience.
Everyone should hope that Justin Raimondo and the readership of "Antiwar.com" reads Giraldi's facts as written in this article.
Moreover, all the subscribers of the New York Times and Washington Post should be apprised of the facts that these two publishers
deliberately withhold from readers. U.S. citizens who are taxed to support these war crimes are purposely kept ignorant of the
facts. Nevertheless, the world is aware of U.S. hypocritical support for Israel's disdain of international law and the horrible
war crimes that occur in Israel's unlawful occupation of Palestinian captured land.
sad realization that the blood of many innocent people is, to a considerable extent, on our hands
Sad to say, most Americans don't know, don't want to know and don't care. The US, since the end of the last world war, has
caused millions to die all over the world either directly or indirectly. This has gone on up to the present day. The collective
response of the average American to all that has been a collective yawn. The only fightback came during the Vietnam war when the
costs and body counts started getting too high. Otherwise if the furriners get killed at a low cost to us then no problem. Only
about perhaps 2-5% of the American public evinces any moral misgivings about the mass atrocities it's supposed government has
carried out routinely. Because of this it's safe to conclude that America is a nation of moral defectives so don't expect much
from them. In this context the recent Israeli actions are small change and will be memory-holed quickly. They are America's local
pit bull and therefore have the umbrella of American protection. It's also interesting to note how the Palestinians have been
abandoned by the leadership of some of their supposed fellow Arab states of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, all US client-flunkies.
Non-Arabs seem to be among the ones most discomfited by these recent events.
I would suspect I am not the first to say it (but may be), from the outside, this 'special relationship' looks much like the special
relationship between the face-hugger and the character John Hurt is playing in Alien .
"The sad truth is, most Americans don't really care what is happening eight thousand miles away"
They didn't care what happened in Vegas, either. Illegal gun running, money laundering, mobsters working with the FBI and ATF,
58 innocent Americans dead, hundreds more wounded.
But hey, pretty girls and Harvey Weinstein's wee wee are much more important. Everyone did see that this sex scandal was a
deliberate news bomb to knock Vegas off the news, right?
The Leon Trotsky position was that all gentile Christians must be forced to deny Christ and Church and affirm atheism, and
all nations on the planet must be forced to accept Marxism.
Are you stupid enough to label Trotsky a right winger?
Not many leftists do, but all kinds of leftist Jews and Jewish Neocons call Stalin some type of fascist. Of course, economically,
all fascists are socialists.
"... The first, perhaps most dominant ingredient of the Cold War is missing: ideological competition. America remains aggressive internationally, determined to transform the world in its image, or at least in its interest. Of course, invading Iraq, nation-building in Afghanistan, blowing up Libya and messing around in Syria all failed dramatically -- even disastrously. Nevertheless, so far Washington's governing elite appears to have learned nothing. ..."
"... Putinism is no philosophy. It is just traditional authoritarian nationalism. Even those in the West who seem to admire him -- reactionary conservatives, intolerant nationalists and wannabe authoritarians -- are more enamored of his methods than his person. There is no Putinist version of the Comintern, no global Putinist revolutionary movement devoted to world conquest. Putin cares about the world only insofar as it affects Russia. ..."
"... Second, Russia's foreign policy is essentially conservative and restrained, though not pacifist. (In contrast, America's is unconstrained and frankly militarist.) This approach explains the conflicts in Georgia and Ukraine, as well as attempts to influence American and European elections. The United States views expansion of NATO up to Russia's borders as the natural evolution of American global domination. Moscow considers the incorporation of Ukraine into the alliance created to constrain Russia as a security threat, rather as Washington might view Mexico's entry into the Warsaw Pact. While to Americans Moscow is wildly inflating the threat -- in truth, the idea of the Europeans attacking Russia sounds like the plot for a fantasy movie -- the United States has not suffered multiple invasions from its European neighbors. ..."
President Donald Trump entered office with praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin and
support for improving Washington-Moscow relations. A year later President Trump surprised even
his aides by congratulating Putin on the latter's reelection and suggesting a summit meeting
between the two leaders.
A chilling political wind is blowing through the capitals of America, Europe and Russia.
There is talk of a new Cold War, as the two sides trade diplomatic expulsions. In the West, at
least, there is even a hint of war as NATO fusses over European defense capabilities (poor) and
the United States deploys more troops to the continent (as usual).
President Trump has stood by, mostly silently, as bilateral relations continued their
slow-motion collapse, demonstrating his essential irrelevance to much of U.S. foreign policy.
For instance, he allowed the State Department to announce the latest expulsion of Russian
diplomats. This is one area where his gut instincts -- the value of an improved relationship --
are correct, but what he personally believes obviously doesn't much matter for policy. That
could change as he asserts himself with a new secretary of state and national security advisor,
but they both have hawkish instincts and have demonstrated no interest in détente with
Moscow.
Despite the diplomatic spiral, however, there is no new Cold War. And there won't be a hot
war unless Washington ignites a confrontation while pursuing an ever more interventionist and
activist foreign policy in areas viewed as vital by Russia.
The first, perhaps most dominant ingredient of the Cold War is missing: ideological
competition. America remains aggressive internationally, determined to transform the world in
its image, or at least in its interest. Of course, invading Iraq, nation-building in
Afghanistan, blowing up Libya and messing around in Syria all failed dramatically -- even
disastrously. Nevertheless, so far Washington's governing elite appears to have learned
nothing.
In contrast, Vladimir Putin clearly grasped the lessons of the Soviet Union's collapse. He
is a pragmatic authoritarian, rather than a communist. His ambitions look far more traditional,
like that of the Tsar and the Russian Empire. His government's greatest concerns are
maintaining control, gaining respect for Russia's interests and safeguarding its
boundaries.
Putinism is no philosophy. It is just traditional authoritarian nationalism. Even those in
the West who seem to admire him -- reactionary conservatives, intolerant nationalists and
wannabe authoritarians -- are more enamored of his methods than his person. There is no
Putinist version of the Comintern, no global Putinist revolutionary movement devoted to world
conquest. Putin cares about the world only insofar as it affects Russia.
Second, Russia's foreign policy is essentially conservative and restrained, though not
pacifist. (In contrast, America's is unconstrained and frankly militarist.) This approach
explains the conflicts in Georgia and Ukraine, as well as attempts to influence American and
European elections. The United States views expansion of NATO up to Russia's borders as the
natural evolution of American global domination. Moscow considers the incorporation of Ukraine
into the alliance created to constrain Russia as a security threat, rather as Washington might
view Mexico's entry into the Warsaw Pact. While to Americans Moscow is wildly inflating the
threat -- in truth, the idea of the Europeans attacking Russia sounds like the plot for a
fantasy movie -- the United States has not suffered multiple invasions from its European
neighbors.
Moreover, Putin and many other Russians believe the West violated its commitment not to
expand the transatlantic alliance eastward. Perhaps Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill
Clinton merely encouraged the Gorbachev and Yeltsin governments to believe what they wanted.
However, newly declassified diplomatic records help explain Moscow's anger. To that must be
added the dismemberment of Serbia, long linked to Russia, and "color revolutions," always to
Moscow's detriment. Again, one can imagine the reaction of U.S. policymakers most exercised
over Vladimir Putin had Russia backed a street putsch against a democratically elected,
pro-American president in Mexico City. Such does not justify Moscow's reaction, but it helps
explain it.
Putin wants to disrupt and divide those countries most directly threatening Russia
(ironically, his actions have done more to unite the fractious transatlantic alliance). He also
wants to prevent NATO from incorporating Georgia and Ukraine (in this he has been more
successful). Ironically, there was nothing in his early years in power which suggested animus
toward the West. Rather, he appeared to be a typically cynical and worldly KGB officer
determined to enhance his nation's domestic power and international standing. From his
perspective Russia's foreign policy is just business, nothing personal.
Even Putin's Syrian adventure demonstrates the limits of his ambition. He backed a long-time
ally to thwart what would be another aggressive U.S. advance. Far from threatening to dominate
the Middle East, Moscow is seeking to preserve a small role in a region long dominated by
America, which is allied with Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf States. Only pretentious
Washington policymakers, who successively intervened militarily to oust established governments
in three Middle Eastern countries and backed an ally's invasion of a fourth country would have
the chutzpah to accuse Russia of aggressive designs for supporting a recognized government in
one.
Third, the world no longer is bipolar. China and the European Union both enjoy economic
wealth and power akin to that of the United States, even though Americans remain wealthier and,
at least until the Trump administration, were the primary drivers of international economic
policy. Beijing is building a significant military while the Europeans are capable of doing so,
in whatever form they desire. India is moving onto center stage as well, with virtually
unlimited possibilities in the future.
In a broad sense the Europeans are on America's side while the People's Republic of China
(PRC) backs Russia, but the divisions are far more complex than during the Cold War. Several
European governments have resisted U.S.-led sanctions against Moscow as well as other American
initiatives, while the PRC and Russia are friends out of necessity, mostly drawn together by
Washington's hostility. Such an alliance, if it deserves to be called that, likely will prove
of little value if truly tested. There is no "Evil Empire," as President Ronald Reagan once
characterized the Soviet Union and its satellite states.
Fourth, there are no essential conflicts between Washington and Moscow. There are no
disputed territories, no vital regions occupied by the opposing power. Neither nation has any
interest in conquering the other. The only genuine area of conflict is the desire of American
policymakers to impose their will virtually everywhere on earth, including areas of
long-standing Russian interest. U.S. policy is an inverted form of the Monroe Doctrine: Other
nations are not allowed to exercise influence even in their own neighborhood. Washington
desires to treat the world as it originally deigned to handle Latin America, viewing any
outside interference as "the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United
States."
This irrationally aggressive approach is evident in Syria, a long-time ally of Moscow.
American policymakers speak with outrage at Russia's military involvement in one nation even
though Washington has spent decades intervening -- often militarily -- virtually everywhere
else in the region: Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Israel, Yemen, Jordan, Sudan, Kuwait and the
other Gulf States. Similarly misguided are Washington's complaints about Russian involvement in
Central Asia, which any map shows to be a lot closer to Russia than America. The denizens of
the District of Columbia might aspire to a world in which America dominates every region, but
such an objective is not important let alone vital to the nation's security. And such an overly
ambitious and unsustainable policy certainly is not worth war.
As for Europe, despite the frenzied complaints of the Baltic states and Poland, there is no
evidence of any aggressive Russian designs. And why would there be? The meal would be
indigestible. Indeed, nearing eighteen years in power Putin has gained nothing but Crimea,
which probably was welcomed by a majority of residents. Beyond that influence over South
Ossetia, Abkhazia, and the Donbass is a pretty pitiful empire, while the United States has
bombed, invaded, occupied and/or dismembered several states. If he was biding his time then he
made a huge error, since the Europeans are finally taking steps to create a more effective and
better coordinated continental defense.
Even if Moscow were to win against a Baltic state, Russia would only gain ravaged territory
along with enduring enmity, brutal sanctions and military retaliation. Worse, if NATO chose to
fight -- as it almost certainly would -- Russia would lose the war. Unsurprisingly, Putin has
done nothing to suggests he wants anything other than to secure Russia itself, a goal he has
advanced by destabilizing, but not conquering, Georgia and Ukraine, to prevent their inclusion
in NATO. The easiest way for Washington to avoid conflict with Moscow is to not
advance its security guarantees and military deployments to Russia's borders in Asia.
Fifth, Russia is no match militarily to the United States. Despite the widespread wailing
and gnashing of teeth about the tragically underfunded American military, Washington spends ten
times as much on the armed services as does Moscow. Congress sometimes votes larger annual
increases in outlays than Russia's total annual expenditures.
Such comparisons obviously are imperfect, but only in nuclear weapons does Moscow have
relative military parity. It possesses one aircraft carrier, sort of, versus ten American
carrier groups. The Russian air force and air defense system are competent, and would force the
Pentagon to plan a war without absolute air superiority, for once, but they likely would not
prevail. The Putin government has rebuilt the army after its less than stellar performance in
Georgia, but there is no adjoining American territory for Moscow to invade. And Russia lacks
air or naval lift to reach the United States, and would regret arriving if it could.
Which leaves Europe. However, the continent enjoys almost twelve times Russia's economic
strength -- Italy alone (as well as Germany, the United Kingdom and France) has a larger GDP
than Russia. The Europeans already spend upwards of five times as much on the military as
Moscow; collectively the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, despite their anemic efforts,
devote almost two and a half times as much as Russia to the military.
True, the Europeans suffer problems of interoperability, coordination, and deployment.
Nevertheless, the idea that Moscow could successfully attack America and Europe is a fantasy.
While the allies should prepare for any eventuality, the primary responsibility should fall on
Europe, which both is relatively more vulnerable and entirely capable of defending itself.
How to pull U.S.-Russia relations out of their tailspin? Federal, state, and local officials
should defend the one vital interest at stake, the integrity of American democracy. Of course,
Washington would have greater credibility in doing so if it acknowledged having interfered in
scores of democratic elections worldwide, including in Russia. U.S. policymakers should stop
meddling to help America's foreign friends, improve electoral safeguards at home, and prepare
to retaliate in response to future interference by Russia or anyone else.
Washington should end the diplomatic tit-for-tats. Communication channels need to remain
open. The more people -- businessmen, tourists, students, family members, athletes, performers
and others -- who visit each way, the better. This would be one way to demonstrate that this is
not Cold War II.
The United States also should address Moscow's security concerns. American policymakers
express shock and sadness that anyone anywhere fears the United States, but any nation on
Washington's naughty list should worry about covert or overt efforts at regime change. The
United States and Europeans should explore a settlement with Russia involving Georgia and
Ukraine which includes the end to NATO expansion. In return, the Putin government would stop
supporting anti-Kiev rebels. Moscow isn't going to return Crimea, which historically was part
of Russia: the United States and Europe should de facto accept the annexation, dropping
sanctions if Moscow stops undermining Ukraine's territorial integrity.
On other issues -- Syria, Iran, North Korea and more -- the two sides should return to
old-fashioned compromise. Russian interests are legitimate and need to be taken into account.
Along the way Washington should look for ways to loosen the China-Russia partnership. The PRC
poses a far greater long-term challenge to America. A friendlier Moscow, like India, could act
as an important counterweight to Beijing.
The state of the U.S.-Russia relationship is bad, but it is not Cold War II. Washington
should ensure that relations do not further deteriorate. The Russian Federation is too
important a country to treat as an enemy. No one would gain from a new conflict, whether cold
or hot.
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to
President Ronald Reagan. He is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire
.
Posted on April 2, 2018 by
Yves Smith Yves
here. Even though most readers no doubt know that the military-industrial complex is the moving
force behind our regular exercises in nation-breaking, it's still instructive to have data on
the scale of America's arms scales. The author, William Hartung, notes that US weapons often
make their way to our enemies. From the perspective of the arms makers, that's a feature, not a
bug.
It's one of those stories of the century that somehow never gets treated that way. For an
astounding 25 of the past 26 years, the United States has been the leading arms dealer on the planet, at some
moments in near monopolistic fashion. Its major
weapons-producers, including Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, regularly pour the latest
in high-tech arms and munitions into the
most explosive areas of the planet with ample assistance from the Pentagon. In recent years, the
bulk of those arms have gone to the Greater Middle East. Donald Trump is only the latest
American president to preside over a global arms sales bonanza. With remarkable enthusiasm,
he's appointed himself America's number one weapons salesman and he couldn't be prouder of the
job he's doing.
Earlier this month, for instance, on the very day Congress was debating whether to end U.S.
support for Saudi Arabia's brutal
war in Yemen, Trump engaged in one of his favorite presidential activities: bragging about
the economic benefits of the American arms sales he's been promoting. He was joined in his
moment of braggadocio by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the chief architect of that
war. That grim conflict has killed thousands of civilians
through indiscriminate air strikes, while putting millions at risk of death from famine,
cholera , and other "natural" disasters caused at least in part by a Saudi-led
blockade of that country's ports.
That Washington-enabled humanitarian crisis provided the backdrop for the Senate's
consideration of a bill co-sponsored by Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders, Utah
Republican Senator Mike Lee, and Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy. It was aimed at
ending U.S. mid-air refueling of Saudi war planes and Washington's additional assistance for
the Saudi war effort (at least until the war is explicitly authorized by Congress). The bill
generated a vigorous
debate . In the end, on an issue that wouldn't have even come to the floor two years ago,
an unprecedented 44 senators voted to halt this country's support for the Saudi war effort. The
bill nonetheless went down to defeat and the suffering in Yemen continues.
Debate about the merits of that brutal war was, however, the last thing on the mind of a
president who views his bear-hug embrace of the Saudi regime as a straightforward business
proposition. He's so enthusiastic about selling arms to Riyadh that he even brought his very
own prop to the White House meeting with bin Salman: a U.S.
map highlighting which of the 50 states would benefit most from pending weapons sales to
the prince's country.
You undoubtedly won't be surprised to learn that Michigan, Ohio, and Florida, the three
crucial swing states in the 2016 presidential election, were specially highlighted. His latest
stunt only underscored a simple fact of his presidency: Trump's arms sales are meant to promote
pork-barrel politics, while pumping up the profits of U.S. weapons manufacturers. As for human
rights or human lives, who cares?
To be fair, Donald Trump is hardly the first American president to make it his business to
aggressively promote weapons exports. Though seldom a highlighted part of his presidency,
Barack Obama proved to be a weapons salesman par excellence. He made
more arms offers in his two terms in office than any U.S. president since World War II,
including an astounding
$115 billion in weapons deals with Saudi Arabia. For the tiny group of us who follow such
things, that map of Trump's only underscored a familiar reality.
On it, in addition to the map linking U.S. jobs and arms transfers to the Saudis, were
little boxes that highlighted four specific weapons sales worth tens of billions of dollars.
Three of those
that included the THAAD missile defense system, C-130 transport planes, P-8 anti-submarine
warfare planes, and Bradley armored vehicles were, in fact, completed during the Obama years.
So much for Donald Trump's claim to be a deal maker the likes of which we've never seen before.
You might, in fact, say that the truest arms race these days is between American presidents,
not the United States and other countries. Not only has the U.S. been the world's top arms exporting nation
throughout this century, but last year it sold
one and a half times as much weaponry as its closest rival, Russia.
Embracing Lockheed Martin
It's worth noting that three of those four Saudi deals involved weapons made by Lockheed
Martin . Admittedly, Trump's relationship with Lockheed got off to a rocky start in
December 2016 when he tweeted
his displeasure over the cost of that company's F-35 combat aircraft, the
most expensive weapons program ever undertaken by the Pentagon. Since then, however,
relations between the nation's largest defense contractor and America's most self-involved
president have warmed considerably.
Before Trump's May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia, his son-in-law, Jared Kusher, new
best buddy to Mohammed bin Salman, was put in charge of cobbling together a
smoke-and-mirrors, wildly exaggerated
$100 billion-plus
arms package that Trump could announce in Riyadh. What Kushner needed was a list of sales
or potential sales that his father-in-law could boast about (even if many of the deals had been
made by Obama). So he
called Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson to ask if she could cut the price of a THAAD
anti-missile system that the administration wanted to include in the package. She agreed and
the
$15 billion THAAD deal -- still a huge price tag and the most lucrative sale to the Saudis
made by the Trump administration -- went forward. To sweeten the pot for the Saudi royals, the
Pentagon even
waived a $3.5 billion fee normally required by law and designed to reimburse the Treasury
for the cost to American taxpayers of developing such a major weapons system. General Joseph
Rixey, until recently the director of the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which
granted that waiver, has since
gone directly through Washington's revolving door and been hired by -- you guessed it --
Lockheed Martin.
In addition, former Lockheed Martin executive John Rood is now the Trump administration's
undersecretary of defense for policy , where one of his responsibilities will be to weigh
in on don't be shocked! major arms deals. In his confirmation hearings, Rood refused to say
that he would recuse himself from transactions involving his former employer, for which he was
denounced by Senators John McCain and Elizabeth Warren. As Warren
asserted in a speech opposing Rood's appointment,
"No taxpayer should have to wonder whether the top policy-makers at the Pentagon are pushing
defense products and foreign military sales for reasons other than the protection of the United
States of America No American should have to wonder whether the Defense Department is acting to
protect the national interests of our nation or the financial interests of the five giant
defense contractors."
Still, most senators were unfazed and Rood's nomination sailed through that body by a vote
of 81 to 7. He is now positioned to help smooth the way for any Lockheed Martin deal that might
meet with a discouraging word from the Pentagon or State Department officials charged with
vetting foreign arms sales.
Arming the Planet
Though Saudi Arabia may be the largest recipient of U.S. arms on the planet, it's anything
but Washington's only customer. According to the Pentagon's annual tally of major agreements
under the Foreign Military Sales program, the most significant channel for U.S. arms exports,
Washington entered into formal agreements to sell weaponry to 130
nations in 2016 (the most recent year for which full data is available). According to a
recent
report from the Cato Institute, between 2002 and 2016 the United States delivered weaponry
to 167 countries -- more than 85% of the nations on the planet. The Cato report also notes
that, between 1981 and 2010, Washington supplied some form of weaponry to 59% of all nations
engaged in high-level conflicts.
In short, Donald Trump has headed down a well-traveled arms superhighway. Every president
since Richard Nixon has taken that same road and, in 2010, the Obama administration managed to
rack up a record $102 billion in foreign arms offers. In a recent
report I wrote for the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy,
I documented more than $82 billion in arms offers by the Trump administration in 2017 alone,
which actually represented a slight increase from the $76 billion in offers made during
President Obama's final year. It was, however, far lower than that 2010 figure,
$60 billion of which came from Saudi deals for F-15 combat aircraft, Apache attack
helicopters, transport aircraft, and armored vehicles, as well as guns and ammunition.
There have nonetheless been some differences in the approaches of the two administrations in
the area of human rights. Under pressure from human rights groups, the Obama administration
did, in the end,
suspend sales of aircraft to Bahrain and Nigeria, both of whose militaries were significant
human rights violators, and also a $1 billion-plus deal for precision-guided bombs to Saudi
Arabia. That
Saudi suspension represented the first concrete action by the Obama administration to
express displeasure with Riyadh's indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen. Conducted largely
with U.S. and British supplied aircraft, bombs, and missiles, it has included strikes against
hospitals, marketplaces, water treatment facilities, and even a funeral. In keeping with his
focus on jobs to the exclusion of humanitarian concerns, Trump
reversed all three of the Obama suspensions shortly after taking office.
Fueling Terrorism and Instability
In fact, selling weapons to dictatorships and repressive regimes often fuels instability,
war, and terrorism, as the American war on terror has vividly demonstrated for the last nearly
17 years. U.S.-supplied arms also have a nasty habit of ending up in the hands of America's
adversaries. At the height of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, for instance, that country's armed
forces lost track of
hundreds of thousands of rifles, many of which made their way into the hands of forces
resisting the U.S. occupation.
In a similar fashion, when Islamic State militants
swept into Iraq in 2014, the Iraqi security forces abandoned
billions of dollars worth of American equipment, from small arms to military trucks and
armored vehicles. ISIS promptly put them to use against U.S. advisers and the Iraqi security
forces as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The Taliban, too, has gotten its hands
on
substantial quantities of U.S. weaponry, either on the battlefield or by buying them at
cut-rate, black market prices from corrupt members of the Afghan security forces.
In northern Syria, two U.S.-armed groups are now fighting each other. Turkish forces are
facing off
against Syrian Kurdish militias that have been among the most effective anti-ISIS fighters and
there is even an ongoing risk that U.S. and Turkish forces, NATO allies, may find themselves in
direct combat with each other. Far from giving Washington influence over key allies or
improving their combat effectiveness, U.S. arms and training often simply spur further conflict
and chaos to the detriment of the security of the United States, not to speak of the peace of
the world.
In the grim and devolving conflict in Yemen, for instance, all sides possess at least some
U.S. weaponry. Saudi Arabia is, of course, the top U.S. arms client and its forces are a
catalogue of American weaponry, from planes and anti-tank missiles to cluster bombs, but
hundreds of millions of
dollars in U.S. military aid were also provided to the forces of Yemeni autocrat Ali Abdullah
Saleh during his 30 years of rule before he was driven from power in 2012. Later, however, he
joined forces
with the Houthi rebels against the Saudi-led intervention, taking large parts of the Yemeni
armed forces -- and their U.S.-supplied weapons -- with him. (He would himself be
assassinated by Houthi forces late last year after a falling out.)
Trump's Plan: Make It Easier on Arms Makers
The Trump administration is poised to release a new policy directive on global arms
transfers. A report by
Politico , based on interviews with sources at the State Department and a National
Security Council (NSC) official, suggests that it will seek to further streamline the process
of approving arms sales, in part by increasing the already extensive role of U.S. government
personnel in promoting such exports. It will also remove what a National Security Council
statement has described as "unreasonable constraints on the ability of our companies to
compete." In keeping with that priority, according to the NSC official, "the administration is
intent on ensuring that U.S. industry has every advantage in the global marketplace."
In January, a Reuters
article confirmed this approach, reporting that the forthcoming directive would emphasize
arms-sales promotion by U.S. diplomats and other overseas personnel. As one administration
official told Reuters, "We want to see those guys, the commercial and military attaches,
unfettered to be salesmen for this stuff, to be promoters."
The Trump administration is also expected to move forward with a plan, stalled as the Obama
years ended, to
ease controls on the export of U.S. firearms. Gun exports now licensed and scrutinized by
the State Department would instead be put under the far-less-stringent jurisdiction of the
Commerce Department. Some firearms could then be exported to allies without even a license,
reducing the government's ability to prevent them from reaching criminal networks or the
security forces of potential adversaries.
In September 2017, Democratic senators Ben Cardin, Dianne Feinstein, and Patrick Leahy sent
a letter to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson raising concerns about such a change. As they
wrote ,
"Combat firearms and ammunition are uniquely lethal; they are easily spread and easily
modified, and are the primary means of injury, death and destruction in civil and military
conflicts throughout the world. As such they should be subjected to more -- not less --
rigorous export controls and oversight."
If Trump's vision of an all-arms-sales-all-the-time foreign policy is realized, he may scale
the weapons-dealing heights reached by the Obama administration. As Washington's
arms-dealer-in-chief, he might indeed succeed in selling American weaponry as if there were no
tomorrow. Given the known human costs of unbridled arms trafficking, however, such a presidency
would also ensure that whatever tomorrow finally arrived would prove far worse than today,
unless of course you happen to be a major U.S. arms maker.
I think a point often overlooked is that US arms sales are not just a means for the US to
spread its influence and fuel wars. Its also the primary manner in which foreign countries
purchase influence in the US (and Russia, and France, and the UK). The Gulf States have long
recognised that strategic arms purchases have more utility for the influence they buy, than
the firepower they purchase. You can see this in the manner that they spread purchases across
the major powers, carefully balancing everyone out. The Saudi's are looking to buy S-400's at
the same time as buying THAADs. Qatar is buying equal amounts of US and European combat
aircraft for exactly the same reason.
Its important to remember that when there is no monopoly on suppliers, the buyer has more
power than the vendor. There is no monopoly on weaponry. Its the rich arms buyers who have
all the leverage. When the US focuses on arms sales as a central foreign policy objective, it
is by definition handing over power to rich arms purchasers.
I believe that nations, like individuals, have their own unique karma and destiny (as well
as the free will to alter it if self aware).
The Law of Karma is like the Law of Gravity. It does not care one whit whether you believe
in it or not, or as the Romans said, "The mills of the gods grind slowly. Though very coarse,
nothing slips through."
Like a lot of similar pieces, this one is naive and borderline dishonest.
There are two basic reasons for arms sales. One is that foreign sales keep production lines
moving and (with luck) feed through into lower unit costs for your own forces. The second is
acquiring and maintaining strategic influence. The US is in a particularly strong position
for the latter, since they effectively control the supply of spare parts through the Foreign
Military Sales system, and can thus ground any air force which uses their aircraft. Of course
the influence is not all one way (as PK says, it's a buyer' market and has been for a while)
but the essential point is that it's about acquiring and maintaining political leverage, not
fighting wars. Indeed, in the case of Saudi Arabia, there has been a clear understanding
since the 1960s (when the British sold Lightning fighters) that what the Saudis were buying
was not primarily military equipment but protection and influence. This lasted until the
present insane leadership in Riyadh decided to rip up the bargain.
From reading this you might think that all arms sales go to the Arab Middle East, which has
never been true. Not only does a lot of US weaponry go to Israel, whose US-made aircraft have
been dropping US-made weapons on civilians for decades without any protest, but countries
such as Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea and most of NATO are also major purchasers. In 1991,
when liberal internationalists supported the war to evict the Iraqis from Kuwait, I asked
them where they imagined the equipment their armed forces would use actually came from. I
asked the same question of human rights advocates who wanted to bomb Serbia in 1999 to "free
the Kosovars" and were simultaneously against the "arms trade". In both cases, as I recall,
reactions included, but were not limited to, threats of physical violence and mutilation.
It's true that small arms are the major killers in conflict today, but the idea that export
controls of them would stop wars, is, I'm afraid, naive. Experts will tell you that almost
all wars today (Yemen is a good example) are fought with weapons that already exist. In the
majority of cases these are not US or Western weapons, which are too expensive and
sophisticated, but Kalashnikovs (model 47 and later) which people can be taught to operate in
a couple of days, and which are often third or fourth hand, many being Chinese copies I saw
plenty of them in Yemen. Certainly, US weapons found their way into the wrong hands in Iraq,
which was stupid, but it wasn't small arms that made the difference. As the article admits,
it was mainly vehicles (including the ubiquitous Nissan) driven by deserters from the Iraqi
Army.
The article incorporates a common fantasy of solving complicated problems with simple
solutions, which we would all like to be true, but unfortunately isn't.
feed through into lower unit costs for your own forces.
Doesn't pumping out massive amounts of weapons to be used to slaughter people all over the
world simply so your own armed forces can get the volume discount strike you as more than a
little perverse?
But I'm not sure that's really the case at all because since when has Uncle Sugar ever
been concerned about the cost of the weapons it purchases? Remember the no-bid contract? And
was there ever a war the US declined to fight because we just couldn't it? Somehow we always
fund the funds, but not when it comes to health care, education and the other services a
civil society requires – those are always somehow too expensive.
And on top of all that, this is a website which promotes MMT so I'm sure you are aware
that taxes do not fund expenditures so there is no need to mass produce arms for other
nations to keep prices low for ours.
I said "with luck", because it often doesn't work like that. But there are cases (logistic
vehicles etc.) where it does seem to have happened, at least for certain countries. I admire
your pacifist principles, but I admire much less the many people who flip in an instant from
demanding an end to the "arms trade" in general, to demanding that we arm this or that
allegedly "friendly" group, or intervene militarily against whoever is the hate figure of the
day. Arming groups in Syria, for example, was a stupid idea anyway, for all sorts of
political and strategic reasons. But I doubt that increased the level of violence in a
country already awash with weapons.
I was pointing out that the article is quite wrong to suggest there's any shortage of small
arms in the world: there is probably a massive surplus, and they are already in the hands of
criminal and terrorist groups, not least in Europe. That particular horse left the stable so
long ago people have forgotten what color it was.
You are right about MMT, of course, but unfortunately government spending isn't yet managed
on that basis.
I'm guessing that those who want to poke holes in any statement of the problem and
discussion of possible changes, that does not involve just throwing up of hands and more of
the same, will get the same kind of reference to how "complex" it all is.
Wealth gets generated by "the economy." Deciders get to decide, whether at the
"government" or corporate level, what that wealth gets channeled into. The "politics" is what
humans have been doing since the species became "civilized.," killing and looting and raping
and taking other humans' stuff and the wealth they have in turn extracted. The "complexity"
is now the global interlocking manufacture and marketing of ever more complicated (and even
simple, like the AK-47, that Northwest Afghanis can make with hand tools not even machine
shop stuff) weapons, and all the code and "doctrine" and strategies and tactics that also get
fought over, and the mind set that goes along with the creation and perception of "threats"
and the countering thereof and attempts to leapfrog to world-dominating ascendancy in the
ability to do mass destruction: "Full spectrum dominance," and all that, in the "Global
Network-Centric Interoperababble Battlespace."
Millions, ever-increasing millions, of humans get their paychecks from the whole
operation, the manufacture and marketing and distribution and maintenance and "deployment"
and activation and use of weapons of all levels of complexity, and have their "careers" and
:opportunities" tied to just more-of-the-same-but-bigger-faster-more-destructive idiocy.
That notation that encourages the sense of futility by telling us that "wars that get
fought (at the ground-game level) with weapons that alreadyalready exist" kind of skips over
the whole business of how those weapons got to "already exist," and of course passes over the
bit about how stuff like guided antitank and antiaircraft missiles actually do "change the
game," when the armamentarians of some Great Power manage to deliver a bunch of them to
"insurgents" in support of some Grand Bit Of Geopolitics or other.
I guess I missed the supposed part of the article that laid out some "fantasy of solving
complicated problems with simple solutions." Sure looks to me a lot more like an accounting
and display of some of the pathogenic features of the US part (mostly) of the whole World At
War structure that has as its capstone the soon to be more "usable" nuclear weapons, and
cyber bombing, and 'WE don't do chemical and biological warfare except in defense of our
Nation" stuff that one has to expect, going by past practices, is lurking in the dark of some
labs where monomaniacal and sociopathic 'scientists" and policy and military players live --
as they have since besiegers lobbed infected human and animal carcasses, and "Greek Fire" and
such, over the 'civilized" walls of "civilized" towns and cities. (We are told that "Joshua
fought the battle of Jericho" with sound weapons of some sort -- it's right there in the Holy
Bible, the Hebrew part of it at least )
But we must preserve the Narrative, and the flows of trillions of dollars and other
currencies into the machinery that sure looks to be headed toward grinding us humans to
radioactive or just high-explosive dust, or full-metal-jacket-pierced rotting carcasses to.
Be tossed over other walls )
Remember the motto of LockheedMartin -- "We Never
Forget Who We Are Working For." And who, exactly, is "who ?"
It's the idea, reflected in the article, that we could end war by ending arms sales. The
idea goes back to the 1930s, and doesn't improve with age. Anyone who thinks that some of
these crises have simple solutions is welcome to post themselves off to the Middle East.
That's a BS reading of the article. And we aren't saying the crisis themselves have simple
solutions, we are saying that arming the (family blog) out of everybody with a grievance
tends to kind of undercut the rule of law, dontcha know?
At best, if people want to kill each other we need to not be the people that supply them
with the means.
Regarding the weapons falling into the hands of enemies, there was a statistic published
with no comment in a recent Harper's index that the US had sold 175 military helicopters to
an Afghan military that had 4 people capable of flying them.
The added bonus is that they will make additional money by having to pay for consultants
and professional trainers to teach the locals how to use complex weapons.
In some cases, they made end up even captured by enemy forces. ISIS for example captured a
number of US AFVs manufactured for the Iraqi government. Sometimes said captured weapons end
up being used against the American military.
In even more strange cases, American defence contractors have been known to sell weapons
for nations that are hostile to the US. They care only about getting rich .
Two interconnected thoughts on US propaganda and the US Military Industrial Complex :
1) The American people are the most propagandized people in the history of history. This is
done not simply through the more predictable outright lies of the mass media but also in
innumerable ways including the false history of the education system, the pictures presented in
commercial ads that normalize definitions of "Americanism", lies of omission throughout the
press (the liberal press is particularly bad here), the film industry, manipulation of language
throughout institutions and so forth.
One of the central themes of this propaganda apparatus is to make US citizens think of
things exclusively in terms of "us", and not of "them." US citizens may put yellow ribbons on
their SUV's to commemorate losses of US lives- (2 thousand KIA; 20K WIA), but there is little
acknowledgement of The Other lives destroyed by US imperialism- (2 million dead, mostly
civilians).
Americans may speak about what the war does to the IT'S countries national finances (e.g.
taxes), but rarely about the destroyed infrastructures and collapsed economies of the Iraqi,
Libyan, Yemeni people etc.
One of the many tragedies of modern Amerika is the complete lack of empathy with the plight
or suffering of anyone who isn't Us- a by-product of being socially isolated from others.This
is not by accident. Of course the M$M isn't going to disturb US with the truth about Amerikan
capitalism or US imperialism- it's bad, not only for business, but for 'politics' as well.
The vast propaganda apparatus (including virtually all educational institutions) of the US
ruling class and its media accomplices is a major factor in the difficulties Americans have in
identifying the reasons behind and the devastating impacts of the non-stop US imperialist wars.
A significant part of this brainwashing is in how the idea is beaten into the heads of the US
populace that their interests are (and should be) aligned with the interests of the US economic
elites and the political class that rubber stamps these imperial slaughters for the profits of
those elites.
This false identification of the American working class with the American capitalist
state rather than with the global working class plays a huge role in duping ordinary citizens
as to the actual and malevolent intent of those who formulate US foreign policy.
This problem appears clearly in the language that the media (including most of the lib/prog
media) use in the U.S. This repeatedly seen in such language as, "Have we learned anything from
My Lai?", "We should not have invaded Iraq", "Why are we in Afghanistan?" and so forth.
Of course '"we", the American working class, did not invade Iraq e.g., that was done by the
U.S. capitalist state. This is not just a matter of language. It reveals a serious obstacle,
national identifications, and is utilized to whip up patriotic fervor as well as to disguise
the reality that those same elites are oppressing the working class citizens here at home in a
thousand different ways.
Once it is understood how the domestic repression and economic collapse in this country is
directly connected to the slaughter abroad that support for these imperial crimes evaporates
overnight.
=========
2) An important aspect to the US Military/Industrial/Financial/Media complex is how it
operates within the political/economic system as a guarantor of large profits for the investor
class due to the massive and guaranteed subsidy it receives from the US taxpayer.
There is a consistent fallacy throughout the liberal intelligentsia that has variations such
as "it's a pointless war" or "a failed strategy" or "there is no end game" and on and on, which
stems from the misunderstanding of the primary functions of these imperial assaults.
Beyond the obvious reasons of plunder the US capitalists have been able to secure the US
Military apparatus as a large-scale business scheme which has a large and guaranteed return on
investment.
In short the investor class is investing someone's else's money (the US taxpayer) for their
"enterprise" (Read: wholesale slaughter and theft of other people's lands and resources) so
even when there are losses those are foisted on to the public's account. And whatever "gains"
there are, they flow in the direction of the business class while the costs are extracted from
the working class.Of course the political sector (your "elected official") validates all of
this through the legislative processes and it becomes what is known as "policy."
This is not exclusive to the more "adventurous" US Military/Industrial actions such as
imperial wars but also entails an entire web of activities both foreign and domestic that
create "investment opportunities" for Wall St. Any and everything from massive boondoggles like
the F-35 to more "modest" programs like radio systems, high frequency antennas, BMS software,
data terminals, touch tablets, field service representatives, and of course all of the training
for installation, operation and maintenance.
So you see all of this is done quite legally (with legality being defined within and by a
corrupt system) and all of this is maintained through a massive propaganda system that hides
the mechanics and realities of the how's and why's of what a Trillion Dollars a Year War
Department really entails.
The Ukraine military shot down another airliner some years before when a missile aimed at a
training drone missed and locked on to the airliner.
I think the Kiev side had been directing airliners across the war zone along the path of
planned bombing runs to allow Ukraine military jets to fly the same course *below* the
airliner and use the airliner's much bigger radar signature (huge compared to a military jet)
as protection i.e. if a missile was fired and missed it might lock on to the airliner
instead.
I don't think the US side wants to admit their allies were using airliners as human
shields and the Russians don't want to admit their surface to air missiles ignore civilian
IFF (as they must in a war zone) hence why both side's stories feel unconvincing.
Apart from the politics it's important because if missiles treat civilian IFF as foe then
it means airliners need to be kept a very long way from any mid-tech war zone.
The parallels are pretty clear. In the case of both 9/11 and this Malaysian airliner, the
western mainstream media had their story ready to go as soon as it happened. And then when
all the evidence starts accumulating that this story is untrue, cannot possibly be true, they
simply ignore all of it. In fact anybody who brings it up is immediately tarred as a
"conspiracy theorist".
Re: "The Ukraine would have no need to shoot AA missiles since so called Rebels had no air
force at the time "
The Kiev regime had no need to put anti-aircraft batteries in the area at all, but they
did!
Please everybody, get real.
Its been months since the shooting down of MH 17 and despite all the accusations made by
the US government and the Kiev regime at the time, not one single piece of credible evidence
has been produced. Obviously the information is being suppressed, and even more obviously it
is not being withheld to protect the rebels or the Russians.
Under Artimovsk there is a gigantic weapons cache. Is it possible that the plane was
downed so that Western investigators could look into an inventory of that site and assess
what the Separatists removed from said weapons dump? Chemical, Nuclear, Biological weapons
stocks?
The HQ for the crash site investigation was set up in Soledar which is a very close to the
Salt Mine cave entrance.
The passengers were just collateral damage in the contest over weapons stocks.
And here is an assessment of the non-surface-to-air-BUK (or 'red herring') theory, going with
the pics and reports of two fighter jets -Ukrainian – seen on each side of MH-17 :
Ray B. March 07, 2015
Here is my analysis, from an ex-Boeing aero engineer standpoint:
The Boeing 777 was initially at 33,000 feet. The aircraft, therefore, was above the Su-25's
ceiling, as listed at wikipedia. (Service ceiling: 7,000 m (22,965 ft) clean,
5,000 m (16,000 ft) with max weapons) I am aware of the Comments both that this is an
artificial, CIA-changed figure and that Su-25 pilots have reached at least 30,000 feet with
supplemental oxygen. For the purpose here, it does not matter. I am presuming the Su-25 was
carrying only two R-60 air-to-air missiles, which are low drag. So, the service ceiling in
this case would have been around 21-22,000 feet. (The upgrades to the Su-25 did not include
engine or aerodynamic changes, so are unlikely to have increased the ceiling.) The 777 was
well within reach of the R-60s, though (66,000 ft, Mach 2.7). As a non-maneuvering, transport
aircraft, it would have been laughably easy to hit. I would have salvoed both missiles, both
for increased hit-chance and to avoid coming back with only one missile (very noticeable, as
opposed to just empty pylons). The above would tie-in with ret. Col Zhilin's testimony. Most
reports indicate the accompanying-fighter was closing from the rear, which is the most
advantageous for infrared guidance. With infrared guidance, the missile would home-in
directly on the hottest area – the engine exhaust. The warhead would probably detonate
in the exhaust cone or adjacent to it. In the Boeing 777, the engine is slung well out in
front of the wing. The expanding-rod warhead would rip up the engine but probably not take
out the wing or flight control cabling. The 'hit' (or hits) might indeed be survivable.
Today's jet engines are built with FAA-mandated 'containment shields'.
They are meant to contain high-velocity fan/compressor/turbine blades if something causes
them to shear off. They are basically armored 'cans' surrounding the rotating
parts. A missile detonating inside this 'can' might have the expanding-rods contained,
rather than punching through the nacelle and into the fuselage. If detonating on the far side
of the 'can' from the fuselage, much the same result Also, Zhilin says, " the Boeing turned
180 degrees to the left." This would be the direct result of losing thrust on the left
engine. The pilots were probably more concerned with staying in the air (under control) than
their heading http://www.boeing.com/assets/pdf/
commercial/startup/pdf/777_perf.pdf "Engine-out altitude capability (MTOW, ISA + 10°C)
Basic: 16,200 ft Maximum Weight: 15,600 ft" After the 777's engine was hit and disabled by
the R-60, the 777 would have descended to around 15-16,000 feet. That is the standard
one-engine-out 'cruise' altitude as above. It may have been lower with the damage.
If I were the pilot, I would have been on a circling descent through and below that
altitude, looking for a nearby airport or good field. Since the R-60 has
such a small warhead, the pilots may not even have known they were hit by a missile and
assumed a simple engine-out problem. That could account for the lack of initial
reporting.
This descent would have put the 777 well within the Su-25's (wikipedia) altitude
capability. So, it would have been possible at that point to conduct a 'strafing' run with
the 30mm cannon. With the 777 turning, that may have presented the opportunity for whatever
angle shot the fighter pilot wanted. As various Commenters have noted, there seems to have
been a concentration on the cockpit and avionics bay. (Grrr.)
Unfortunately, with the 'secrecy agreement' in place, I see no way that any important
evidence will be revealed, barring a Snowden-like mass-release by someone with a
Conscience
Reply
"... One of the most salient points I find, is the fact that no vapour trail had been observed or photographed from the ground. A vapour condensation trail remains visible for quite some time and is visible for I would think at least 15 minutes. ..."
Someone may already have commented on it, but it's impossible to read all the comments.
One of the most salient points I find, is the fact that no vapour trail had been
observed or photographed from the ground. A vapour condensation trail remains visible for
quite some time and is visible for I would think at least 15 minutes.
Surely in this day and age when virtually everyone carries a cell phone capable of
making pictures, such evidence should be available. But apparently there is not.
As a test it would be interesting if Russia would in front of the international press
test fire a BUK missile.
I would very much appreciate comments on this particular aspect of the catastrophe.
Thank you in anticipation.
The JIT in its 29/9 report showed a picture of a smoke trail. If that had been the smoke
trail of the BUK that alledgedly shot down MH 17 than that picture would without a shadow of
doubt been splashed over al the western media within hours. Hundreds may by thousands would
have seen it and scores of pictures and videos would have been taken. The very fact that JIT
now comes up with a smoke trail (which could have been taken any where) proves that it is a
fake. If that is a fake all the other pictures are most likely fakes. Mr Eliot Higgins should
have done better.
Despite the Dutch whitewash (report) which could only be called the 'likely' & 'probably'
'we love to point any finger at Putin report', material at odds with the western line
continues to come out:
The Dutch investigators "can't decipher" the radar data provided by the Russians. As well,
Dutch police have confiscated from journalists raw footage of new witness interviews that
will no doubt be shared with Ukraine as a party to the investigation, endangering those
persons who provided the information on condition of confidentiality:
The lengths Dutch Prime Minister publicly went (serving quote 'geopolitical interests') to
get the EU-Ukraine association agreement ratified the clear rejection by advisory referendum
notwithstanding, ought to make any well informed reader suspicious of how far Rutte went out
of public sight to serve those same 'geopolitical interests' by manipulating both the
investigation and public opinion in relation to MH17.
Rutte recently demonstrated his fealty to those 'geopolitical interests' again. When asked
if new evidence was presented in the Skripal case to justify the Netherlands support for the
UK, Rutte answered that 'such evidence wasn't necessary because May had stated that it was
highly likely that Russia was responsible'.
The Dutch Government got a UN mandate to perform the investigation and as such that part
of the investigation had to be transparent.
Clearly to serve those 'geopolitical interests' the Dutch separated the technical
investigation from the legal liability investigation. The technical investigation was
performed under the UN mandate and the second legal liability investigation was organized
separate from any UN mandate.
The Dutch, Australian, Belgium government colluded with the Ukrainians to organize a
'Joint Investigation Team' which under the cover of performing a legal investigation refuses
any transparency and at regular intervals hints that indictments are close but not there
yet.
Also the Dutch Transport Safety Board technical investigation has concluded that the
UkSATSE should have closed the Air Control area above Eastern Ukraine, but the Dutch
government has thus far never taken any action to hold the Ukrainians responsible for that
failure even when 3 days before MNH17 a AN-24 was downed from 6500m and UkSATSE (joint
civil-military ATC) continued to control some 100 civil air liners a day over that area. The
Dutch simply accepted that the Ukraine lost all relevant radar data.
News
4th June 2014
UkSATSE ensures safety in Ukrainian sky under any conditions
Ukrainian State Air Traffic Services Enterprise (UkSATSE) informs that the enterprise keeps
on providing the whole range of air navigation services. It ensures flight safety in the
airspace of Ukraine, airdromes of Ukraine and in the international airspace over the high
seas at the relevant level. Moreover, UkSATSE ensures trouble-free operation of branches of
Joint Civil-Military System of Air Traffic Management of Ukraine irrespective of foreign
interference in work of air traffic services bodies in Crimea and at the East of Ukraine.
Actually this "Who shot down MH17?" is the wrong question.
The question is "Who is liable?".
Shooting down aircraft above a war zone is SOP. If a civilian air liner is guided and
controlled over such war area where 3 days earlier an AN-24 has been downed from 6500m one
really ought to question the competence and liability of the ATC involved. That ATC authority
UkSATSE as a joint civil-military ATC was fully informed about the situation and still
continued to guide some 100 civil air liners ad day for three days over that war zone.
Shooting down a civil air liner over a war zone is tragic but not necessarily always a
crime. There was no motive for the East Ukrainians, but as shown by the relentless
exploitation by the Kiev puppet regime this Kiev regime most definitely had a motive.
Any liability investigation with the Ukrainian secret service as an investigator like in
the Dutch/Australian/Ukraine Joint investigation Team simply can't be trusted to even look
for the truth. The JIT was set up with the intention of evading the transparency requirements
associated with the UN mandated investigation.
Thinking people smelled a rat in the case of MH17 straight off. No sensible person can fail
to smell it now. Just a few considerations:
1. Donbass freedom fighters (and, by extension, Russia) were blamed by the US, its vassals,
and its client states like Ukraine even before the debris cooled down. Only the perpetrators
could have known designated "guilty party" without any investigation.
2. Satellite pictures promised by Kerry four years ago never materialized. The only logical
conclusion is that the perpetrators were not those accused by the US, and the pictures would
have revealed real perpetrators, which the US did not want to happen.
3. Malaysia, the owner of that airplane, was not allowed to participate in the investigation.
Apparently, someone was afraid that it might not play ball. This can only happen when the
"investigators" meant to hide the truth, not to reveal it.
4. The UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and one of the suspects, Ukraine, signed a
non-disclosure agreement. It makes no sense unless one or more of the signatories is
guilty.
5. The "investigation" is going on for four years, longer than any investigation in the
history of civil aviation. The experience shows that a lot less time is needed to uncover the
truth. Thus, the length of this "investigation" shows that the real purpose is cover-up.
6. Ukraine never provided the records of pilots' communications with air traffic controllers,
or any other air traffic control records. Thus, it must have had something to hide.
One can continue in this vein, but what's the point? Suffice it to say that all international
airlines drew their conclusions: they fly over Russia, but avoid Ukrainian airspace, like
they avoid Iranian and North Korean airspace. Sapienti sat.
In my blog 'contraviews' http://www.contraviewing.blogspot.com post 148
you will find a recording of the conversation (mentioned in this article) between the
Estonian Foreign Affairs Minister Urmas Paet and EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Ashton. Go
to the year 2014 in the margin and scroll down to post 148. One may find more interesting
articles on MH17.
See my comment nr 230: There is not one investigation. The Dutch manipulated this into two
separate investigations. There was a technical UN mandated transparent Dutch Safety Board
investigation. The Dutch organized a second criminal investigation together with Australia,
Belgium and the Ukraine and instigated A Joint Investigation Team (JIT).
Yes. I can understand the Dutch government: they serve the US overlords first and
foremost. They don't give a hoot about the lives of ordinary Dutch people. What I do not
understand is the behavior of the people who lost loved ones in MH17 crash. Don't they want
to know who killed them? Don't they object to being grist for the mill of amoral and cynical
politicians?
"... You think in one dimensional. The warfare & alliance is moving very dynamic, Russia & China are working in all fronts together if you watch carefully. Military & energy are appetizer. Petrol Yuan & BRI are main course. Joint dev of C929 civil plane, space program, agri, .its Eurasia century. ..."
"... Skripal false flag & 2 dozen countries expelling diplomats is full display of bizarre brute force destroying entire international norms. You need to resist before more countries succumb to West pressure. ..."
"... If West can orchestrate diplomatic boycott of Russia, won't China be next? When you see smoke, there is fire. When neighbor house is burning, it will spread to yours. But here you are saying, not my problem let China save its own ass until fire spread to yours. ..."
Oh, we have a copypaste contest? Okay then, i'd copy here my reply at saker's blog
too.
No, i just wanna remind you again, Russia & China have to fight as a team, each with
their best strength, Russia-military, China-economic.
> China will be blackmailed into submission.
Wooop! Then it is not "existential threat" for China.
Clash for power, clash for sovereignty, clash of prosperity -- but not for survival.
If one energy supply is been fully controlled, you are doomed.
> Russia & China are working closely
Which does not mean China's role is making harsh dyplomatic statements in favor of
Russia. At least it was not so before today. So i think it is not today either.
It has very wide implication, West is able to pressure dozens of countries to bend on
false flag, it will spread further to Asia & elsewhere. China will be next. Nib the
bud.
Also remember that Chinese social mindset is build upon idea of "indebting with gifts
and aids" and then requesting payback when they need it.
Since when has the West & Russians, or anyone are more kind than Chinese, giving
without expectation of return of at least gratitude from a Russian like you?
Which means Russia should be very wary about accepting any help from China unless it
wishes to be seen by China as a deeply indebted beggar incapable of sustaining itself.
Yes Russia should, there is never free lunch. But would it be better for Russia to team up
with China to enjoy economic benefits at fair term with a safe South border, than getting
raped by the West again with another hostile South neighbor (China could join West to plunder
Russia, taking back outer Manchuria Siberia land).
And since diplomatic situation for Russia is not deadly critical I do not think Russia
needed that newspaper article. If Russia would request China's support of the kind -- it
would be in official diplomatic venues like UN.
No need to wait for UK US to close all Russia embassies with global sanction like what NK
get. See further my friend.
> Russia needs to save Syria for its own skin
> Iran needs to save its skin
But is it so for China? Is China in critical need of sovereign and friendly Syria? I
doubt it.
Sure Syria is not China concern, but for aftermath implications.
- Stop West eastward
aggression. - BRI node in ME - Uyghur terrorists - West control of all ME Energy supply
Was that article reaction to some new threat to Syria, to russia, or to China itself?
And i believe in the latter option. This article is not linked to any recent events around
Russia, it is caused by Sino-American relations shift.
You think in one dimensional. The warfare & alliance is moving very dynamic,
Russia & China are working in all fronts together if you watch carefully. Military &
energy are appetizer. Petrol Yuan & BRI are main course. Joint dev of C929 civil plane,
space program, agri, .its Eurasia century.
Skripal affair is much less than Olympics was. Even European states many did not jumped
Skripal wagon.
who care about Olympics beside some bruise Russkies pride, Skripal false flag & 2
dozen countries expelling diplomats is full display of bizarre brute force destroying entire
international norms. You need to resist before more countries succumb to West pressure.
Open your narrow vision.
-- but if Russia would soemhow gets politically isolated from the West, what bad is it
for China? Russia would become more dependent on China, like many of the trade with West
would had to go through Chinese "laundry". China gets more influence over Russia. Russia
gets much more limited in its options. Good (for China) develoment, why hurry to cancel it
before Russia even asked for ?
You have asked yourself a good qn, why not joint the West vultures to feast on Russia
bear? Sure, West aggression to Russia is godsend gift to China. But Chinese leaders think
further than greedy West capitalist. Better to have strong Russia as safe Northern backyard
than a Nato military threat encirclement (which Russia dream to join but too bad,
rejected)
> You are silly self center viewer
Frankly, it is exactly the opposite here.
It is you who claim Russia being behing that article in Global Time.
It is me who claims Russia has no any relation to the timing and wording of that
article.
I never claim Russia is solely behind that article. Its entire geopolitical dynamic
situation. If West can orchestrate diplomatic boycott of Russia, won't China be next?
When you see smoke, there is fire. When neighbor house is burning, it will spread to yours.
But here you are saying, not my problem let China save its own ass until fire spread to
yours.
> China special force is operating in Syria.
Maybe it is, but seems no one ever saw those operations.
Open secret. Like Russia, its to fight Chinese terrorists there instead of in China. Also
real war game training by Russia, too good deal to miss.
> Lot of weapons supply to SAA.
Maybe they are, but can you name those Chinese weapons and show me where SAA is
employing it?
It was reported in open news, Syria visited Beijing, then China announced it had old
weapon contracts to fulfil..who will pay? Likely those infantry weapons, ammunition,
artillery, TAW, uniform & gears, whatever construction materials while Russia take care
of high tech equip like S400.
> always throwing allies under bus whenever possible,
.because Putin is evil and just enjoys every opportunity to do bad thing. Always.
I wish i would hear somethign remotely creative from you.
> hence Russia deserve to be raped by West like 1990 is natural.
Oh, i see. Yet another russophobic preaching that "Russians should repent and repay,
repay, and repent", then frustrated when Russia shrugs this lecture off.
I'm Russophile & Putin's fan if you read my comments history. But fact is Russia did
that, which is foolish short sighted. If West has offered Russia G8 on equal term + Nato,
Russia won't hesitate to throw Syria, Iran, China immediately under bus. Then be ready for
another rape fantasy. The West just don't love Russians, no matter how much she plead &
give.
If all Russians think like you, now let China get all the blows since its their trade war,
so Russkies should rest & enjoy the firework, then another bigger 1990′s rape is
awaiting your country.
You have just shown Chinese what its like to be in alliance with Russia.
"... It doesn't matter that China has a larger economy. Their economy can be suffocated so long as they are denied a link to Europe through Eurasia. ..."
The point is not to block off China, the point is to block off China AND Russia from
Europe. Also trade from other Eurasian countries is going to be discouraged unless it goes
through the Straits that the West controlls, but obviously Russia and China are the big
players here.
Russia has a lot of gas and natural resources that the West and ME countries do not want
going to Europe.
And, as you said, the west has many ways of neutralizing China. So to the West, Russia is
the bigger threat since either country could act as a bridge to Europe but Russia has many
more paths of creating these links than China has.
Russia is being singled out, and is being targeted before China, because of Mackinder and
the need to control the "Heartland". Read up on Mackinder as he has a huge influence on the
west.
The empire sees Russia as the greater threat because only Russia and not China is a
threat to control the Heartland and thus the world. This is the real motivation behind
everything.
It doesn't matter that China has a larger economy. Their economy can be
suffocated so long as they are denied a link to Europe through Eurasia.
"... Frankly, Saker reads too much into this Chinese article. It is not about Russia. It is not because Skrypal hoax dialed ritual Russophobia over eleven. It just is a coincidence. Yet before loosing the elections Hillary was promising military war with Russia. Yet before winning the elections Trump was promising economic war with China. ..."
"... Russia`s biggest weakness is the incompetent, useless leaders they had from the 80`s to Yeltsin. The mess that the USSR left behind with unstable states on its borders with no treaty to prevent NATO expansion was a huge gift to the US that just keeps giving!! ..."
"... I`ll go as far as saying this gift to the US might lead to Russia`s end as a country in its present form. You can hardly blame the US I mean in 1990 Russia agreed to basically throw the towel in and live in a US dominated world in practice. Whatever they say about promises at the time that lasted for as long as their breath was warm ..."
"... the problem right now is the Imperial US (ruled from Israel). If it succeeds in destroying Russia, then the Chinese are irrelevant, and have nothing to say about anything. ..."
"... The US public are irretrievably useless and are going to have to go the whole way, with WW3 and/or an economic collapse, with the best bet being on WW3 (which they may well lose). ..."
"That tells you all you need to know about the difference between modern Britain and
the government of Vladimir Putin. They make Novichok, we make light sabers. One a hideous
weapon that is specifically intended for assassination. The other an implausible theatrical
prop with a mysterious buzz. But which of those two weapons is really more effective in the
world of today?".
(Boris Johnson)
Let's begin this discussion with a few, basic questions.
Question one: does anybody
sincerely believe that "Putin" (the collective name for the Russian Mordor) really attempted to
kill a man which "Putin" himself had released in the past, who presented no interest for Russia
whatsoever who,
like Berezovsky , wanted to
return back to Russia , and that to do the deed "Putin" used a binary nerve agent? Question
two: does anybody sincerely believe that the British have presented their "allies" (I will be
polite here and use that euphemism) with incontrovertible or, at least, very strong evidence
that "Putin" indeed did such a thing? Question three: does anybody sincerely believe that the
mass expulsion of Russian diplomats will somehow make Russia more compliant to western demands
(for our purposes, it does not matter what demands we are talking about)? Question four: does
anybody sincerely believe that after this latest episode, the tensions will somehow abate or
even diminish and that things will get better? Question five: does anybody sincerely believe
that the current sharp rise in tensions between the AngloZionist Empire (aka the "West") does
not place the Empire and Russia on collision course which could result in war,
probably/possibly nuclear war, maybe not deliberately, but as the result of an escalation of
incidents?
If in the zombified world of the ideological
drones who actually remain in the dull trance induced by the corporate media there are most
definitely those who answer "yes" to some or even all of the questions above, I submit that not
a single major western decision maker sincerely believes any of that nonsense. In reality,
everybody who matters knows that the Russians had nothing to do with the Skripal incident, that
the Brits have shown no evidence, that the expulsion of Russian diplomats will only harden the
Russian resolve, that all this anti-Russian hysteria will only get worse and that this all puts
at least Europe and the USA, if not the entire planet, in great danger.
And yet what just happened is absolutely amazing: instead of using fundamental principles of
western law (innocent until proven guilty by at least a preponderance of evidence or even
beyond reasonable doubt), basic rules of civilized behavior (do not attack somebody you know is
innocent), universally accepted ethical norms (the truth of the matter is more important than
political expediency) or even primordial self-preservation instincts (I don't want to die for
your cause), the vast majority of western leaders chose a new decision-making paradigm which
can be summarized in two words:
"highly likely" "solidarity"
This is truly absolutely crucial and marks a fundamental change in the way the AngloZionist
Empire will act from now on. Let's look at the assumptions and implications of these two
concepts.
First, "highly likely". While "highly likely" does sound like a simplified version of
"preponderance of evidence" what it really means is something very different and circular:
"Putin" is bad, poisoning is bad, therefore it is "highly likely" that "Putin" did it. How do
we know that the premise "Putin is bad" is true? Well -- he does poison people, does he
not?
You think I am joking?
Check out this wonderful chart presented to the public by "Her Majesty's government"
entitled "A long pattern of Russian malign activity":
In the 12 events listed as evidence of a "pattern of Russian malign activity" one is
demonstratively false (2008 invasion of Georgia), one conflates two different accusations
(occupation of Crimea and destabilization of the Ukraine), one is circular (assassination of
Skripal) and all others are completely unproven accusations. All that is missing here is the
mass rape of baby penguins by drunken Russian sailors in the south pole or the use of a secret
"weather weapon" to send hurricanes towards the USA. You don't need a law degree to see that,
all you need is an IQ above room temperature and a basic understanding of logic. For all my
contempt for western leaders, even I wouldn't make the claim that they all lack these. So here
is where "solidarity" kicks-in:
"Solidarity" in this context is simply a "conceptual placeholder" for Stephen Decatur 's famous " my
country, right or wrong " applied to the entire Empire. The precedent of Meine Ehre
heißt Treue just slightly rephrased into Meine Ehre heißt
Solidarität also comes to mind.
Solidarity simply means that the comprador ruling elites of the West will say and do
whatever the hell the AngloZionists tell them to. If tomorrow the UK or US leaders proclaim
that Putin eats babies for breakfast or that the West needs to send a strong message to "Putin"
that a Russian invasion of Vanuatu shall not be tolerated, then so be it: the entire
AngloZionist nomenklatura will sing the song in full
unison and to hell with facts, logic or even decency!
Solemnly proclaiming lies is hardly something new in politics, there is nothing new here.
What is new are two far more recent developments: first, now everybody knows that these are
lies and, second, nobody challenges or debunks them. Welcome to the AngloZionist New World
Order indeed!
Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a
murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth because there is no truth in him.
When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of
it.
(John 8:44)
ORDER IT NOW
Over the past weeks I have observed something which I find quite interesting: both on
Russian TV channels and in the English speaking media there is a specific type of anti-Putin
individual who actually takes a great deal of pride in the fact that the Empire has embarked on
a truly unprecedented campaign of lies against Russia. These people view lies as just another
tool in a type of "political toolkit" which can be used like any other political technique. As
I have mentioned in the past, the western indifference to the truth is something very ancient
coming, as it does, from the Middle-Ages: roughly when the spiritual successors of the Franks
in Rome decided that their own, original brand of "Christianity" had no use for 1000 years of
Consensus Patrum .
Scholasticism and an insatiable thrust for worldly, secular, power produced both moral
relativism and colonialism (with the Pope's imprimatur in the form of the Treaty of Tordesillas
). The Reformation (with its very pronounced Judaic influence) produced the bases of modern
capitalism which, as Lenin correctly diagnosed, has imperialism as its highest stage. Now that
the West is losing its grip on the planet (imagine that, some SOB nations dare resist!), all of
the ideological justifications have been tossed away and we are left with the true, honest,
bare-bones impulses of the leaders of the Empire: messianic hubris (essentially self-worship),
violence and, above all, a massive reliance on deception and lies on every single level of
society, from the commercial advertisements targeted at children to Colin Powell shaking some
laundry detergent at the UNSC to justify yet another war of aggression.
Self-worship and a total reliance on brute force and falsehoods -- these are the real
"Western values" today. Not the rule of law, not the scientific method, not critical thought,
not pluralism and most definitely not freedom. We are back, full circle, to the kind of
illiterate thuggery the Franks so perfectly embodied and which made them so infamous in the
(then) civilized world (the south and eastern Mediterranean). The agenda, by the way, is also
the same one as the Franks had 1000 years ago: either submit to us and accept our dominion, or
die, and the way to accept our dominion is to let us plunder all your riches. Again, not much
difference here between the sack of the First Rome in 410, the sack of the Second Rome in 1204
and the sack of the Third Rome in 1991. As psychologists well know, the best predictor of
future behavior is past behavior.
Interestingly, the Chinese saw straight through this strategic psyop and they are now
sounding the alarm in their very official Global Times : (emphasis added)
The accusations that Western countries have hurled at Russia are based on ulterior
motives, similar to how the Chinese use the expression "perhaps it's true" to seize upon the
desired opportunity. From a third-person perspective, the principles and diplomatic logic
behind such drastic efforts are flawed, not to mention that expelling Russian diplomats
almost simultaneously is a crude form of behavior. Such actions make little impact other than
increasing hostility and hatred between Russia and their Western counterparts ( ) The fact
that major Western powers can gang up and "sentence" a foreign country without following the
same procedures other countries abide by and according to the basic tenets of international
law is chilling. During the Cold War, not one Western nation would have dared to make such a
provocation and yet today it is carried out with unrestrained ease. Such actions are nothing
more than a form of Western bullying that threatens global peace and justice. ( ) It is
beyond outrageous how the US and Europe have treated Russia. Their actions represent a
frivolity and recklessness that has grown to characterize Western hegemony that only knows
how to contaminate international relations. Right now is the perfect time for non-Western
nations to strengthen unity and collaborative efforts among one another. These nations need
to establish a level of independence outside the reach of Western influence while breaking
the chains of monopolization declarations, predetermined adjudications and come to value
their own judgment abilities. ( ) The West is only a small fraction of the world and is
nowhere near the global representative it once thought it was. The silenced minorities within
the international community need to realize this and prove just how deep their understanding
is of such a realization by proving it to the world through action.
As the French say " à bon entendeur, salut! ": the Chinese position is crystal
clear, as is the warning. I would summarize it as so: if the West is an AngloZionist doormat,
then the East is most definitely not.
[Sidebar: I know that there are some countries in Europe who have, so far, shown the courage
to resist the AngloZionist Diktat . Good for them. I will wait to see how long they can
resist the pressure before giving them a standing ovation]
The decision, therefore, lies here in the East; here must the Russian enemy, this
people numbering two hundred million Russians, be destroyed on the battlefield and person by
person, and made to bleed to death
(Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler)
Still, none of that explain why the leaders of the Empire have decided to engage in a
desperate game of "nuclear chicken" to try to, yet again, force Russia to comply with its
demands to "go away and shut up". This is counter-intuitive and I get several emails each week
telling me that there is absolutely no way the leaders of the AngloZionist Empire would want a
war with Russia, especially not a nuclear-armed one. The truth is that while western leaders
are most definitely psychopaths, they are neither stupid nor suicidal, and neither were
Napoleon or Hitler! And, yes, they probably don't really want a full-scale war with Russia. The
problem is that these rulers are also desperate, and for good cause.
Let's look at the situation just a few months ago. The US was defeated in Syria, ridiculed
in the DPRK, Trump was hated in Europe, the Russians and the Germans were working on North
Stream, the British leaders forced to at least pretend to work on Brexit, the entire
"Ukrainian" project had faceplanted, the sanctions against Russia had failed, Putin was more
popular than ever and the hysterical anti-Trump campaign was still in full swing inside the
USA. The next move by the AngloZionist elites was nothing short of brilliant: by organizing a
really crude false flag in the UK the Empire achieved the following results:
The Europeans
have been forced right back into the Anglosphere's fold ("solidarity", remember?) The Brexiting
Brits are now something like the (im-)moral leaders of Europe again. The Russians are now
demonized to such a degree that any accusation, no matter how stupid, will stick. In the
Middle-East, the US and Israel now have free reign to start any war they want because the
(purely theoretical) European capability to object to anything the Anglos want has now
evaporated, especially now that the Russians have become "known chemical-criminals" from Ghouta
to Salisbury At the very least, the World Cup in Russia will be sabotaged by a massive
anti-Russian campaign. If that campaign is really successful, there is still the hope that the
Germans will finally cave in and, if maybe not outright cancel, then at least very much delay
North Stream thereby forcing the Europeans to accept, what else, US gas.
This is an ambitious plan and, barring an unexpected development, it sure looks like it
might work. The problem with this strategy is that it falls short of getting Russia to truly
"go away and shut up". Neocons are particularly fond of humiliating their enemies (look at how
they are still gunning for Trump even though by now the poor man has become their most
subservient servant) and there is a lot of prestige at stake here. Russia, therefore, must be
humiliated, truly humiliated, not just by sabotaging her participation in Olympic games or by
expelling Russian diplomats, but by something far more tangible like, say, an attack on the
very small and vulnerable Russian task force in Syria. Herein lies the biggest risk.
The Russian task force in Syria is tiny, at least compared to the immense capabilities of
CENTCOM+NATO. The Russians have warned that if they are attacked, they will shoot down not only
the attacking missiles but also their launchers. Since the Americans are not dumb enough to
expose their aircraft to Russian air defenses, they will use air power only outside the range
of Russian air defenses and they will use only cruise missiles to strike targets inside the
"protection cone" of the Russians air defenses. The truth is that I doubt that the Russians
will have the opportunity to shoot down many US aircraft, at least not with their long-range
S-300/S-400 SAMs. Their ubiquitous and formidable combined short to medium range surface-to-air
missile and anti-aircraft artillery weapon system, the Pantsir, might have a better chance
simply because it's location is impossible to predict. But the real question is this: will the
Russians shoot back at the USN ships if they launch cruise missiles at Syria?
My strictly personal guess is that they won't unless Khmeimim, Tartus or another large
Russian objective (official Russian compounds in Damascus) are hit. Striking a USN ship would
be tantamount to an act of war and that is just not something the Russians will do if they can
avoid it. The problem with that is this restraint will, yet again, be interpreted as a sign of
weakness, not civilization, by the "modern Franks" (visualize a Neanderthal with a nuclear club
in his fist). Should the Russians decide to act à la American and use violence to
"send a message", the Empire will immediately perceive that as a loss of face and a reason to
immediately escalate further to reestablish the "appropriate" hierarchy between the
"indispensable nation" and the "gas station masquerading as a country". So here is the dynamic
at work
Russia limits herself to words of protests ==>> the Empire sees that as a sign of
weakness and escalates
Russia responds in kind with real actions==>> The Empire feels humiliated and
escalates
Now look at this from a Russian point of view for a second and ask yourself what you would
do in this situation?
The answer, I think, is obvious: you try to win as much time as possible and you prepare for
war. The Russians have been doing exactly that since at least early 2015.
For Russia this is really nothing new: been there, done that, and remember it very, very
well, by the way. The "western project" for Russia has always been the same since the
Middle-Ages, the only difference today is the consequences of war. With each passing century
the human cost of the various western crusades against Russia got worse and worse and now we
are not only looking at the very real possibility of another Borodino or Kursk, and not even at
another Hiroshima, but at something which we can't even really imagine: hundreds of millions of
people die in the course of just a few hours.
How do we stop that?
Is the West even capable of acting in a different way?
There is one actor which might, perhaps, stop the current skid towards Armageddon: China.
Right now, the Chinese have officially declared that they have what they call a "
comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation " later shortened to " strategic
partnership ". This is a very apt expression as it does not speak of an "alliance": two
countries of the size of Russia and China cannot have an alliance in the traditional sense --
they are too big and different for that. They are, however, in a symbiotic relationship, that
both sides understand perfectly (see this
White Paper for details). What this means in very simple terms is this: the Chinese cannot
let Russia be defeated by the Empire because once Russia is gone, they will be left one on one
with a united, triumphal and infinitely arrogant West (likewise I would argue that Russia
cannot afford to have Iran defeated by the Empire for exactly the same reasons, and neither can
Iran let the Israelis destroy Hezbollah). Of course, in terms of military power, China is a
dwarf compared to Russia, but in terms of economic power Russia is the dwarf when compared to
China in this "strategic community of interests". Thus, China cannot assist Russia militarily.
But remember that Russia does not need this if only because military assistance is what you
need to win a war. Russia does not want to win a war, Russia desperately needs to avoid a war!
And here is where China can make a huge difference: psychologically.
Yes, the Empire is currently taking on both Russia and China, but everybody, from its
leaders to its zombified population, seems to think that these are two, different and separate
foes. [We can use this opportunity to most sincerely thank Donald Trump for so "perfectly"
timing his trade war with China.] They are not: not only are Russia and China symbionts who
share the same vision of a prosperous and peaceful Eurasia united by a common future centered
around the OBOR and, crucially, free from the US dollar or, for that matter, from any type of
major US role, but Russia and China also stand for exactly the same notion of a post-hegemonic
world order: a multi-polar world of different and truly sovereign nations living together under
the rules of international law. If the AngloZionists have their way, this will never happen.
Instead, we will have the New World Order promised by Bush, dominated by the Anglosphere
countries (basically the ECHELON members, aka the "Five Eyes") and, on top of that pyramid, the
global Zionist overlord. This is something China cannot, and will not allow. Neither can China
allow a US-Russian war, especially not a nuclear one because China, like Russia, also needs
peace.
I don't see what Russia could do to convince the Empire to change its current course: the US
leaders are delusional and the Europeans are their silent, submissive servants. As shown above,
whatever Russia does it always invites further escalation from the Empire. Of course, Russia
can turn the West into a pile of smoldering radioactive ashes. This is hardly a solution since,
in the inevitable exchange, Russia herself will also be turned into a similar pile of
smoldering radioactive ashes by the Empire. In spite of that, the Russian people have most
clearly indicated by their recent vote that they have absolutely no intention of caving in to
the latest western crusade against them. As for the Empire, it will never accept the fact that
Russia refuses to submit. It therefore seems to me that the only thing which can stop
Armageddon would be for the Chinese to ceaselessly continue to repeat to the rulers of the
Empire and the people of the West what the wrote in the article quoted above: that " The
West is only a small fraction of the world and is nowhere near the global representative it
once thought it was" and "the silenced minorities within the international
community need to realize this and prove just how deep their understanding is of such a
realization by proving it to the world through action."
History teaches us that the West only strikes against those opponents it sees as defenseless
or, at least, weaker. The fact that the Popes, Napoleon or Hitler were wrong in their
evaluation of the strength of Russia does not change this truism. In fact, the Neocons today
are making exactly the same mistake. So telling them about the fact that Russia is much
stronger than what the western propaganda says and which, apparently, many western rulers
believe (you always end up believing your own propaganda), does not help. Russian "reminders of
reality" will do no good simply because the West is out of touch with reality and lacks the
ability to understand its own limitations and weaknesses. But if China stepped in and conveyed
that crucial message " The West is only a small fraction of the world " and that the
rest of the world will prove this " through action " then other countries will step in
and a war can be averted because even the current delusion-based "solidarity" will collapse in
the face of a united Eurasia.
Russia alone cannot continue to carry the burden of stopping the messianic psychopaths
ruling the Empire.
The rest of the world, led by China, now needs to step in to avert the war.
This plan for global dominance has been over 100 years in the making and has already cost
over 100 million lives so far. How likely is it for them to back off now? The Chinese are far
from stupid so it will be interesting to see how they view the situation and act.
I've stated previously that the people who really can put a halt to it are Americans
themselves but it won't be easy. The ideal situation would be a mass mutiny of US military
personnel and the line, The Empire: by way of deception thou shalt do war should probably
read, The Israeli Empire: by way of deception thou shalt do war. It would be useful to repeat
this ad nauseam until it truly sinks in for US military personnel that the US is a supplicant
to Israel and to understand who they will be fighting and dying for. A mass mutiny would be
the best way to save their families and future.
Again, not much difference here between the sack of the First Rome in 410, the sack of the
Second Rome in 1204 and the sack of the Third Rome in 1991. As psychologists well know, the
best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
But all three Romes were empires too filled with lies.
But I think that if stupid westerners won't wake up, -- nobody will help. China is big and
possibly can think that in world where no Russia, no Europe nor US/Canada are exist, some
place will still be for China.
It's "higly posssible" a mistake, but if silly westerners will continue to munch their MSM
grass their shadows will be printed on the walls of history.
Actually they deserve to be.
"Solidarity" in this context is simply a "conceptual placeholder" for Stephen Decatur's
famous "my country, right or wrong" applied to the entire Empire.
Kind of disappointed in the Saker here. Just like liberals, he omits the rest of Decatur's
famous toast: "Our country -- in her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be
in the right , and always successful, right or wrong. [ Emphasis mine. ]" Decatur
was not trying to encourage amoral behavior, such as that which we now see with the
AngloZionists running Washington.
By the way, I've heard the Russians are now telling a joke about Boris Johnson: they're
saying he was poisoned with durachok (bonehead)!
China has deep ties to the western empire. Russians would be drinking too deeply from their
own propaganda to miss this fact. Indeed, the latest crippling of Trumpist reform was lead by
heavily Chinese invested men Ryan and McConnell. Israel has a strong grip on US foreign
policy for obvious reasons, but Israel has no reason to see Russia bullied into submission.
China does.
It should be plain to any objective observer of global politics that the west is
internally incoherent and will wane in power by the crush weight of demographic change alone.
China observes this and realizes the only long-term competitor to their ascendant position,
one generation hence, is an independent Russia. Far better for the Chinese that Russia is
mortally wounded or harried into Chinese vassal status before the west breaks down into a
third world non-entity.
The real reasons for the expulsions is the revelation of Russia's next generation war
weapons. It was taken up as an invitation to fight, not to make peace, and making it as hard
as possible for Russians to either influence opinion or gather information.
Somebody wanted Skripal dead, and while it may be a useful false flag provocation, with
his involvement with the Steele Dossier a possible trigger, it could be serving more than one
purpose. As usual, we are assigning to the Russkies both more omnipotence and stupidity than
is merited. I supoose it is our own elites who believe their omniscience in surveilling all
of us means they are also smarter than the rest of us. Maybe
Well said and accurate. There is no consensus among the hoipolloi with the neocon push for
war. This will never come about. The west is desperate, no doubt, and will continue to beat
its chest, much to its own detriment. If the west intended on war, it would have come about.
Time is not on their side. The neocons have backed themselves into a corner and, therefore,
must create chaos, camouflage, obfuscation, in order to bamboozle the world until they can
safely go back into their holes. Most likely, they are looking for concessions. Remember the
Wasserman-Schuiltz spy scandal? Remember the many deadly false flags being exposed to the
public for what they are?
Frankly, Saker reads too much into this Chinese article. It is not about Russia. It is
not because Skrypal hoax dialed ritual Russophobia over eleven. It just is a coincidence. Yet
before loosing the elections Hillary was promising military war with Russia. Yet before
winning the elections Trump was promising economic war with China.
USA ruling 1% was making a strategic choice year ago.
When Trump got elected he inherited the raging war. He could not stop it, obviously. Then
he turned it overboard. He started demanding so many wars at once that US Army got
overstretched and paralyzed. Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Itan, Yemen, Korea, new European
garrisons . Trump send Army to prepare to war everywhere and now Pentagon can not scratch
together enough forces to attack anywhere specifically.
By his "clumsy and incompetent bravado" Trump neutralized the army, made and exposed it as
incapable pretend-force.
Now Trump can switch to his programme -- economic war with China.
And that is why Chinese diplomats and media run crazy. Now it is their war, not Russia's.
Now their tails are on the line. Now Russia mostly can move to backlines to lick wounds while
China would exchange blows and collect bruises.
This turned recent Chinese statements so bald and pushing. This, and not a concern for
Russia.
something the Russians might consider -- immediately cutting off all gas to Europe and
restoring such service for payment only in gold or the new "petrol yuan" . Europe depends
heavily on that Russian Gas, and such a move would re-align some European thinking. Replacing
it with US provided LPG would take far too long and be much more expensive having to be
shipped by sea
In fact, maybe if Russia, China, the other brics and aligned countries suddenly cut off
all ties to the west, it would hasten the coming economic collapse of the EU and US, and that
dreamed of multipolar world would arise from the ashes.
Better that than the ashes of a nuclear exchange I would think.
China is too smart to show its hand yet, they are building their economic & military
strength quietly, they don't want to scare the westerners yet with threats.
Russia`s biggest weakness is the incompetent, useless leaders they had from the 80`s
to Yeltsin. The mess that the USSR left behind with unstable states on its borders with no
treaty to prevent NATO expansion was a huge gift to the US that just keeps giving!!
I`ll go as far as saying this gift to the US might lead to Russia`s end as a country
in its present form. You can hardly blame the US I mean in 1990 Russia agreed to basically
throw the towel in and live in a US dominated world in practice. Whatever they say about
promises at the time that lasted for as long as their breath was warm .
A couple centuries ago the phrase "The White Man's Burden" was used to explain why
citizens of Western nations must devote resources to civilize the world. Gore Vidal used "The
Yellow Man's Burden" to explain why citizens of Asian nations were devoting so much wealth to
keep the USA and much of Europe wealthy. If our citizens suddenly lost 30% of their annual
income due to tax increases and spending cuts needed to truly balance our national budgets,
they would be outraged. They might learn that this was the result of "free trade", which
might result in revolution and wars. Those who have profited off "free trade" by selling out
their citizens know its best to let the working class learn this truth slowly.
_____________________
Trump's proclamation to pull out of Syria may be good news, but probably not. He hired
psychopath Bolton, so we can assume the US military is just consolidating forces in Iraq to
hold off attacks whilst they bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. The Iraqis aren't our allies, they just
act to get free stuff, and they will know we are not bombing Iran to save Iranians. It might
be wise to get our troops out of Iraq too!
____________________________
To answer:
Let's begin this discussion with a few, basic questions.
Question one (thru five): does anybody sincerely believe
Yes, this bimbo does, and she's the State Department spokesman. The State Department is
still infected with Clinton-hysteria and uses sexy women to spin lies so the foreign press
doesn't laugh and scorn absurd BS too loudly. The American press are just stenographers and
eagerly copy her lies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL9UxED4uuI
The problem is that Russia/USSR submitted once and the West think it can be achieved again.
Hence everything must be made clear. No partners word should be used and the West must be
clearly warned that violence of unimaginable level will be used if they dare and what will
follow if Russian force anywhere attacked and that any use of nukes against Russia means the
end of humanity.
Unfortunately acting adequately and carefully Russia never was able to avoid war. It is in
the books. Right now bets are life on earth hence being too careful and being perceived as
weak is a bad thing. Russia IMHO must act boldly. Respond to USA and UK harassment by cutting
diplomatic relations and giving straight terse warning.
I think what disturbs China about this whole situation regarding the ENTIRE Western world
(US, Canada, Western Europe, Australia) is not simply that it is an overreaction to Russia,
but the whole idea that one particular people -- the Russian people -- have once again been
SINGLED OUT for collective intimidation and eventually for possible dismemberment.
China has very long and very bitter experience of this itself. In the 19th century, the
imperial powers, for some reason, ganged up on China.
In other parts of the world, the experience of other backward peoples was with but ONE
particular Empire (ex. only the Americans vs the Amerinds, only the Spanish in South America,
only Great Britain in India and Australia, only Russians in Central Asia and Siberia, and
only Japanese in Korea. The British, French, Germans, Italians and Belgians each had separate
RIVAL spheres in Africa, and ditto for South-East Asia.
But when it came to China, ALL these competing powers set aside their differences. It's as
if they said to each other "Hey, China is so enormous and juicy, we should not fight among
ourselves, there's enough for everyone!" Unbelievably vicious.
And now, we see the same pattern. the whole Western world against Russia. I think in this
instance, the Han don't need anyone to tell them what to think -- it is 100% certain they do
not approve of what the collective West is doing.
But if China stepped in and conveyed that crucial message "The West is only a small
fraction of the world"
They can do better than this, and explicitly state that a nuclear war with Russia is a
nuclear war with China -- just to make it clear -- and let the US do some more realistic
calculations.
"war is a path of deceit. When you are strong -- pretend weak ."
Am familiar with Sun-tzu a well. But what are you saying here? That the UK is stronger
than Russia. I would definitely have to disagree with that proposition!
It should be plain to any objective observer of global politics that the west is
internally incoherent and will wane in power by the crush weight of demographic change
alone. China observes this and realizes the only long-term competitor to their ascendant
position, one generation hence, is an independent Russia.
Maybe, but the problem right now is the Imperial US (ruled from Israel). If it
succeeds in destroying Russia, then the Chinese are irrelevant, and have nothing to say about
anything.
The recent THREATENED tariffs have an INTERESTING TIMING to them. It is being used by
Washington to convince China to stay passive as the West takes down Russia. Conversely, if
China "bends the knee", then the West promises that the threats won't materialize. (The West
loves worthless promises). Washington calculates that the mere threat of tariffs will make
China stand by as a neighbor is destroyed. Any turmoil in your neighbor's house, spills over
into yours whether you want it to or not. A neighbor is a neighbor, period.
And THAT, IMHO, is why the protectionist threats are happening NOW. Don't get me wrong,
the tariffs were going to happen anyway, eventually. China, whatever it does, cannot escape
them.
But to threaten a trade war RIGHT NOW with the one power guaranteed to be Russia's
economic lifeline (we know that China couldn't care less what Russia does in its backyard, in
the Ukraine) while preparing to attack Russia itself? Well, the whole thing is WAY TOO
OBVIOUS.
And if someone like me can see, so can a lot of other people in Moscow and Beijing.
Washington thinks its being "smart", but they are so ridiculously easy to read.
No, not that UK is really stronger than Russia but appears weaker. It's that the West is
actually not capable of defeating Russia but loudly shouts that it CAN defeat them easily,
and tries to look powerful and intimidating to Russia. In this situation, the
weaker-positioned West pretends to Russia that we are stronger, and we want Russia to believe
us. That way, it won't come to actual war, and we think Russia will back down. It's an
extremely risky plan.
That could, perhaps, take minds of US citizens from shopping and social media to,
perhaps, more serious matters.
Won't hold my breath.
Taking everything into account, I think the you're right. The US public are
irretrievably useless and are going to have to go the whole way, with WW3 and/or an economic
collapse, with the best bet being on WW3 (which they may well lose).
In fact, it's very possible RUSSIA is NOT, at this time, the target of Western aggression.
Sure, the West shall SURELY try to destroy Russia, but the urgency is not there YET. Maybe
the real target right now is CHINA, shortly to have the world's largest economy in absolute
terms. They must be destroyed NOW! The West is trying to cut a deal with Russia: "Stab China
in the back, and bow down to us. You can live A LITTLE LONGER, before we come for you.
Otherwise we get pissed and kill you TODAY".
An entirely plausible master-plan from Washington, London and Paris. Also a pretty
transparent one, if it's the case. The problem with this "Divide and Conquer" plan, aside
from being easy to read, is that it counts on both Russia and China to be dumb enough to
believe they are not BOTH in the cross-hairs. How stupid does the West think China and Russia
are?
It would have a psychological effect, at most. Russia has 5,000 warheads, China only
admits to having around 500 or 600 strategic city-killers. They may have more, but if you
don't admit something it doesn't count for deterrence. Maybe a decade from now, as China
builds its arsenal, the statement could be much more effective.
No, the Chinese are surely disgusted with this bullying behavior of the West (even many
Europeans are, just read the comments to the news in the different media outlets) but China
cannot seriously confront the West. That would make them lose trillions of dollars in exports
and investments and put an abrupt end to their miraculous but still ongoing economic
development. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
The situation will continue to deteriorate until some sort of modus vivendi is reached
(like at the beginning of the first Cold War). Or perhaps it's just been too long since the
last World War and the time is ripe for the next one.
As for the Skripal murder attempt, it's hard to imagine Putin ordering it at this time and
in that manner but it's not that hard to imagine someone from the Kremlin sewers being behind
it.
In the somewhat less likely scenario of a false flag operation, I would consider an
Israeli asymmetrical response to the recent downing of their jet by the Syrians with obvious
help from the Russians. They have plenty of experience in extraterritorial assassinations and
more than enough knowledge to fabricate a Russian-like nerve agent.
I respect and value Saker as a commentator on Russian and military affairs. Those are his
areas of expertise and professional experience. I do not value him as a historian, because
there enters into his writing a clear bias. I respect the fact of his commitment to his
Orthodox faith, but I don't appreciate being almost hammerlocked into having to take a side
in his prejudices.
He has a way of lumping 1,000 years of exceedingly complex history into what amounts
practically to silly formulas that remind one of adolescent pique. West is characterized by
"thuggery," whereas the "East," is presumably the source -- and is possibly the monopoly --
of the virtues Saker has in mind, while Western-like manifestations of military violence and
conquest are unknown there.
And there is this pearl: "Scholasticism and an insatiable thrust for worldly, secular,
power produced both moral relativism and colonialism " This is downright embarrassing in its
silliness. Of course, after deep study of Aquinas or Bonaventure the light comes on: moral
relativism! Clearly, subtlety and essential distinctions are not the Saker's strong points,
to say the least, when it comes to registering his annoyance and bitterness in his 1000 year
view of "the West," whereas sweeping and frankly spectacularly inept generalizations are. One
is really tempted to accuse him of a lack of intellectual integrity when it comes to these
matters.
At root, Saker is a highly emotional and touchy "rooter" for Orthodoxy. Fine, that's his
right, but he is no scholar. One looks in vain either for impartiality, for breadth and depth
of understanding and sympathy, and hence for generosity of spirit. Thankfully, there are many
great scholars of history, East and West.
In the 19th century, the imperial powers, for some reason, ganged up on
China.
That's the opposite of reality. If they had ganged up on China, each would have taken
large piece for itself. In reality, they were overawed by China, and tried to preserve it
much as they tried to preserve Ottoman rule against both breakup and dismemberment by Russia.
The Ottomans were too far gone, so they failed in both respects. But they did manage to
prevent China's breakup while failing to keep Russia from annexing a large chunk of Chinese
territory.
Heck, they even helped China defeat the millenarian Taiping rebels who racked up a large
body count during their rebellion. Note that when the Jurchens detected internal rebellion
during the Ming dynasty, they waited until the imperial armies were occupied with rebel
suppression before delivering the coup de grace to the Ming dynasty. The Western powers were
too tied up competing with each other to really cooperate in anything more than avenging the
honor of their envoys and getting trading posts set up on Chinese territory.
By "ganging up" I refer to the way in which China was COLLECTIVELY FORCED to extend any
and all concessions granted any single Imperial Power to ALL Imperial powers. And all the
Imperial powers were on-board with this policy , again as a unified group.
For example, if Russia forced a railroad treaty on China, China by unequal, at-gun-point
"Treaty" with the Eight Powers (at the time Great Britain, France, Japan, Germany, Russia,
The United States, Austria-Hungary and Italy) would also have to grant EVERYONE railroad
concessions in their respective zones.
Or say if China was forced to open trade relations by America, China would automatically
be forced to open trade to EVERYONE ELSE , and even the instigators in that case, the United
States, would force China to do it. All in the name of the relevant Treaties, of course.
Also by mutual agreement among the imperial powers, they would not support China in any
efforts to get better terms in any negotiation with any other power . So Russia refused to,
say provide support for Chinese efforts to fend off the Japanese, though normally it might
have done so. This was because, both being part of the Imperial Powers grouping, Russia and
Japan had agreed to co-exist in mutual exploitation of China.
It was all designed so that China would have no ability to shift its favor diplomatically
from one power to another, but had to negotiate from a position of deliberately imposed
weakness. Diplomacy was the only tool available to China in that execrably weak state,
pathetic as that tool was. By collective agreement among the Empires, that tool was taken
away.
In effect, exploitation of China became a COOPERATIVE project between such disparate
rivals as Britain, France and Germany, or United States, Japan and Russia. Such a thing, of a
coordinated desire to apportion one country among many, was not seen anywhere else in the
Colonial Age .
That is my meaning when I referred to the Empires "ganging up" on China.
How absurd. The foremost producer of virtually all modern goods is irrelevant without
Russia? A weakened Russia is a boon to Chinese expansion into their desired role as Eurasian
leader state. The only irrelevant nations are in the West as their post-national suicide
becomes all the more certain.
Ridiculous, China needs Russia as Russia is a perfect complement to Chinas weaknesses. In
fact, neither China nor Russia could have picked a better strategic partner than each other
as neither country could confront the West on it's own but together the West cannot topple
either nation. No other combination between countries would provide near as much
synergies.
China is not looking to expand into Russia. Why would they when they have a shrinking
population. They are expanding into the SCS in order to keep their oil lines free.
The real strategic advantage Russia and China have with each other is the OBOR. This is
key to everything and is the reason why the West is targeting Russia so aggressively.
If Mackinder's Heartland theory is at play, and you want to cut China off from Europe,
taking down Russia would seem to be an enormous effort to accomplish that. There are much
easier ways. Why not just lobby your European "allies" not to trade at all with China?
Mission accomplished, and no war with Russia as a bonus. If the EU won't follow the Empire's
orders, you need to take out not only Russia, but probably Pakistan, and all the Central
Asian nations, plus Iran and Turkey. If not, and you only destroy one or a few of these,
China's One Belt One Road reaches Europe anyway.
Also don't forget the outright blockade of China's maritime trade to be conducted by the
U.S. Navy -- kind of an act of war in itself.
Seems far easier, if you want to slow China down, to just ORDER America's NATO allies to
stop all trade with China. The rest of the world all together won't be able to fill the gap,
not any time soon.
Voila, you lower China's GDP growth by some significant percentage, using just strong-arm
diplomacy in Europe.
Buys America another full decade as number one economy, maybe.
In the fevered dreams of Western strategists, they hope for Russia and China to turn on each
other, sparing the Atlantic powers the trouble. Then, they come in and pick up the pieces.
They hope to replicate the success of Britain in playing off France against Germany pre-World
War One. The problem is they have in fact encouraged the Sino-Russian strategic alignment,
not hindered it.
No matter, after all, there can never be such a thing, thought the British, of a long-term
common interest between France and Germany -- a "European Union" will never come about.
French and Germans naturally hate each other! Right?
And how did Britain make out with that thinking? How will America make out in coming
decades? In geopolitics, not that well. Not as long as we are short-sighted.
Those with the power, and the happily ruled, have always needed synonyms for "obedience."
Solidarity is a choice in line with our social-mediatic times and the related
communication standards.
I mean, like i said above, Johnson and other western politicians are not "boneheads"
(intellectually weak) as you said, no, they are smart (intellectually strong) and pretending,
faking their intellectual weakness (appearance of stupidity)
Answers:-
One and two. Proof beyond reasonable doubt does not mean there is no chance of a
mistake, and the standard necessary for thinking Putin responsible is less than what would be
needed for finding him guilty in a court of law. He cannot hide behind his country and
diplomatic immunity while claiming the protection of British Law for evidence necessary to
convict someone on trial for a capital offence.
Three. We want nothing from Russia , for indeed they have nothing to offer. To go away and
shut up is the most they can do, and that is why are sending the worst of the Russian goons
back were they came from, whether they want to go back or not (they would love to stay in
London*).
Four. Punishment is essential, otherwise they will see weakness.
Five. No chance of nuclear war or any other kind or war. Russia is destined to become the
lonely old man of Europe. It has nothing anyone wants at the price of being treated like an
imbecile, and our diplomats dislike living there*).
Oh, we have a copypaste contest? Okay then, i'd copy here my reply at saker's blog
too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[MORE]
> China will be blackmailed into submission.
Wooop! Then it is not "existential threat" for China.
Clash for power, clash for sovereignty, clash fo prosperity -- but not for survival.
> Russia & China are working closely
Which does not mean China's role is making harsh diplomatic statements in favor of Russia.
At least it was not so before today. So i think it is not today either. Also remember that
Chinese social mindset is build upon idea of "indebting with gifts and aids" and then
requesting payback when they need it. Which means Russia should be very wary about accepting
any help from China unless it wishes to be seen by China as a deeply indebted beggar
incapable of sustaining itself. And since diplomatic situation for Russia is not deadly
critical I do not think Russia needed that newspaper article. If Russia would request China's
support of the kind -- it would be in official diplomatic venues like UN.
> Russia needs to save Syria for its own skin
> Iran needs to save its skin
But is it so for China? Is China in critical need of sovereign and friendly Syria? I doubt
it.
> China has been backing up with big cheque book for last few years, signing hundreds
of billions deal with upfront payments to prop Russia economy for prolong war.
Which is very important, but is not diplomatic statements nor Chinese newspaper
articles.
That is exactly the Chinese role in this fight like i said many times before -- economic
and financial warfare is Chinese responsibility, while military and diplomatic warfare is
Russian's.
> Global times news mostly reflected the China think tank policy that they wish to
propagate to English speaking world.
And here we are getting back to the topic. Why such a harsh, explicitly worded article did
appeared today? Was it because of Russia or of China itself? Was that article reaction to
some new threat to Syria, to russia, or to China itself?
And i believe in the latter option. This article is not linked to any recent events around
Russia, it is caused by Sino-American relations shift.
> China has sensed West is tightened noose around Russia to cut it off from world,
seeing from Olympic & now the Skirpal circus
Skripal affair is much less than Olympics was. Even European states many did not jumped
Skripal wagon. Additionally, if Russia would be "cut off from Western world" -- what the West
did not dared to do even in 2014 on the height of Crimea and MH17 accusations and on the
hopes of "gas station" imminent and fast collapse, so would hardly dare now just because some
Skripal -- but if Russia would somehow gets politically isolated from the West, what bad is
it for China? Russia would become more dependent on China, like many of the trade with West
would had to go through Chinese "laundry". China gets more influence over Russia. Russia gets
much more limited in its options. Good (for China) development, why hurry to cancel it before
Russia even asked for ?
> Trade war will be too bloody for the world
Yes, but the said trade war is not having Russia as primary adversary -- Russian economy i
not that significant to the western world, and for USA in particular it has but zero
significance. The trade war we see igniting -- is the war against China. China can no more be
"wise monkey up the trees", when USA moved their chaingun aim from Russia onto China. Now
China is being shot at, and the article is Chinese response to China being attacked. Not to
anything around Russia.
> You are silly self center viewer
Frankly, it is exactly the opposite here. It is you who claim Russia being behind that
article in Global Time. It is me who claims Russia has no any relation to the timing and
wording of that article.
> China special force is operating in Syria.
Maybe it is, but seems no one ever saw those operations.
> Lot of weapons supply to SAA.
Maybe they are, but can you name those Chinese weapons and show me where SAA is employing
it?
> Lot of money pump in to sustain Syria war,
If they are, then China does it part of the fight, good. Like USA supplied money and
material to fighting European states during WW2. However that has no relation with the Global
Times article being discussed.
> always throwing allies under bus whenever possible,
.because Putin is evil and just enjoys every opportunity to do bad thing. Always. I wish i
would hear somethign remotely creative from you.
> hence Russia deserve to be raped by West like 1990 is natural.
Oh, i see. Yet another russophobic preaching that "Russians should repent and repay,
repay, and repent", then frustrated when Russia shrugs this lecture off.
And, as you said, the west has many ways of neutralizing China.
Don't forget that China has an enormous internal market too, which in time should be
larger than the U.S. and EU combined. European countries that stay out of this vast and
rapidly growing market will be cutting their own throats. Good luck convincing them to do
that.
"... I wanted to investigate whether the growing volume of criticism toward Russia, sometimes by people who could hardly claim to be knowledgeable about the country, concealed a political agenda. ..."
"... I discovered evidence of Russophobia shared by different circles within the American political class and promoted through programs and conferences at various think tanks, congressional testimonies, activities of NGOs, and the media. Russophobia is not merely a critique of Russia, but a critique beyond any sense of proportion, waged with the purpose of undermining the nation's political reputation. ..."
"... To these individuals, Russophobia is merely a means to pressure the Kremlin into submitting to the United States in the execution of its grand plans to control the world's most precious resources and geostrategic sites. In the meantime, Russia has grown increasingly resentful, and the war in the Caucasus in August 2008 has demonstrated that Russia is prepared to act unilaterally to stop what it views as US unilateralism in the former Soviet region. ..."
"... Anti-American attitudes are strongly present in Russian media and cultural products, as a response to the US policies of nuclear, energy, and military supremacy in the world. Extreme hegemonic policies tend to provoke an extreme response, and Russian nationalist movements and often commentators react harshly to what they view as unilateral encroachment on Russia's political system and foreign policy interests. Russia's reactions to these policies by the United States are highly negative and frequently inadequate, but hardly more extreme than the American hegemonic and imperial discourse. ..."
"... The central objective of the Lobby has been to preserve and strengthen America's power in the post-Cold War world through imperial or hegemonic policies. The Lobby has viewed Russia with its formidable nuclear power, energy reserves, and important geostrategic location as a major obstacle in achieving this objective. Even during the 1990s, when Russia looked more like a failing state3 than one capable of projecting power, some members of the American political class were worried about the future revival of the Eurasian giant as a revisionist power. In their percep- tion, it was essential to keep Russia in a state of military and economic weakness-not so much out of emotional hatred for the Russian people and their culture, but to preserve American security and promote its val- ues across the world. To many within the Lobby, Russophobia became a useful device for exerting pressures on Russia and controlling its policies. Although to some the idea of undermining and, possibly, dismembering Russia was personal, to others it was a necessity of power dictated by the realities of international politics. ..."
"... According to this dominant vision, there was simply no place in this "New American Century" for power competitors, and America was destined eventually to assume control over potentially threatening military capabilities and energy reserves of others. As the two founders of the Project for the New' American Century (PNAC), William Kristol and Robert Kagan, asserted when referring to the large military forces of Russia and China, "American statesmen today ought to recognize that their charge is not to await the arrival of the next great threat, but rather to shape the international environment to prevent such a threat from arising in the first place."4 ..."
"... Russia was either to agree to assist the United States in preserving its world-power status or be forced to agree. It had to either follow the U.S. interpretation of world affairs and develop a political and economic system sufficiently open to American influences or live as a pariah state, smeared by accusations of pernicious behavior, and in constant fear for its survival in the America-centered world. As far as the U.S. hegemonic elites were concerned, no other choice was available. ..."
"... This hegemonic mood was largely consistent with mainstream ideas within the American establishment immediately following the end of the Cold War. For example, 1989 saw the unification of Germany and the further meltdown of the Soviet Union, which some characterized as "the best period of U.S. foreign policy ever."5 President Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski envisioned the upcoming victory of the West by celebrating the Soviet Union's "grand failure."6 ..."
"... Charles Krauthammer, went as far as to proclaim the arrival of the United States' "unipolar moment," a period in which only one super- power, the United States, would stand above the rest of the world in its military, economic, and ideological capacity ..."
"... The mid-1990s saw the emergence of post-Soviet Russophobia. The Lobby's ideology was not principally new, as it still contained the three central myths of Sovietophobia left over from the Cold War era: Russia is inherently imperialist, autocratic, and anti-Western. This ideology now had to be modified to the new conditions and promoted politically, which required a tightening of the Lobby's unity, winning new allies within the establishment, and gaining public support.15 ..."
"... During the period of 2003-2008, Vice President Richard Dick Cheney formed a cohesive and bipartisan group of Russia critics, who pushed for a more confrontational approach with the Kremlin. ..."
"... Cheney could not tolerate opposition to what he saw as a critical step in establishing worldwide US hegemony. He was also harboring the idea of controlling Russia's energy reserves.91 ..."
"... In Russia, however, the Cold War story has been mainly about sovereignty and independence, rather than Western-style liberalism. To many Russians it is a story of freedom from colonization by the West and of preserving important attributes of sovereign statehood. ..."
"... In a world where neocolonialism and cultural imperialism are potent forces, the idea of freedom as independence continues to have strong international appeal and remains a powerful alternative to the notion of liberal democracy. ..."
"... The West's unwillingness to recognize the importance of this legitimizing myth in the role of communist ideology has served as a key reason for the Cold War.5 Like their Western counterparts, the Soviets were debating over methods but not the larger assumptions that defined their struggle. ..."
"... Yet another analyst wrote "at the Cold War's end, the United States was given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, the largest nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, his- toric or economic quarrel between us, once communist ideology was interred. We blew it. We moved NATO onto Russia's front porch, ignored her valid interests and concerns, and, with our 'indispensable-nation' arrogance, treated her as a defeated power, as France treated Weimar Germany after Versailles."114 ..."
It was during the spring of 2006 that I began this project. I wanted
to investigate whether the growing volume of criticism toward Russia, sometimes
by people who could hardly claim to be knowledgeable about the country, concealed
a political agenda.
As I researched the subject, I discovered evidence of Russophobia shared
by different circles within the American political class and promoted through
programs and conferences at various think tanks, congressional testimonies,
activities of NGOs, and the media. Russophobia is not merely a critique of Russia,
but a critique beyond any sense of proportion, waged with the purpose of undermining
the nation's political reputation.
... ... ....
Although a critical analysis of Russia and its political system is entirely
legitimate, the issue is the balance of such analysis. Russia's role in the
world is growing, yet many U.S. politicians feel that Russia doesn't matter
in the global arena. Preoccupied with international issues, such as Iraq and
Afghanistan, they find it difficult to accept that they now have to nego- tiate
and coordinate their international policies with a nation that only yesterday
seemed so weak, introspective, and dependent on the West. To these individuals,
Russophobia is merely a means to pressure the Kremlin into submitting to the
United States in the execution of its grand plans to control the world's most
precious resources and geostrategic sites. In the meantime, Russia has grown
increasingly resentful, and the war in the Caucasus in August 2008 has demonstrated
that Russia is prepared to act unilaterally to stop what it views as US unilateralism
in the former Soviet region.
And some in Moscow are tempted to provoke a much greater confrontation with
Western states. The attitude of ignorance and self-righteousness toward Russia
tells us volumes about the United States' lack of preparation for the twenty-first
century's central challenges that include political instability, weapons proliferation,
and energy insecurity. Despite the dislike of Russia by a considerable number
of American elites, this attitude is far from universally shared. Many Americans
understand that Russia has gone a long way from communism and that the overwhelming
support for Putin's policies at home cannot be adequately explained by high
oil prices and the Kremlin's manipulation of the public-despite the frequent
assertions of Russophobic observers.
Balanced analysts are also aware that many Russian problems are typical difficulties
that nations encounter with state-building, and should not be presented as indicative
of Russia's "inherent drive" to autocracy or empire. As the United States and
Russia move further to the twenty-first century, it will be increasingly important
to redefine the relationship between the two nations in a mutually enriching
way.
Political and cultural phobias are, of course, not limited to those of an
anti-Russian nature. For instance, Russia has its share of America-phobia --
a phenomenon that I have partly researched in my book Whose World Order (Notre
Dame, 2004) and in several articles. Anti-American attitudes are strongly
present in Russian media and cultural products, as a response to the US policies
of nuclear, energy, and military supremacy in the world. Extreme hegemonic policies
tend to provoke an extreme response, and Russian nationalist movements and often
commentators react harshly to what they view as unilateral encroachment on Russia's
political system and foreign policy interests. Russia's reactions to these policies
by the United States are highly negative and frequently inadequate, but hardly
more extreme than the American hegemonic and imperial discourse.
The Anti-Russian Lobby
When the facile optimism was disappointed, Western euphoria faded, and
Russophobia returned ... The new Russophobia was expressed not by the
governments, but in the statements of out-of-office politicians, the
publications of academic experts, the sensational writings of jour-
nalists, and the products of the entertainment industry. (Rodric Braithwaite,
Across the Moscow River, 2002)1
....
Russophobia is not a myth, not an invention of the Red-Brovvns, but
a real phenomenon of political thought in the main political think tanks
in the West . .. [T]he Yeltsin-Kozyrev's pro-U.S. "giveaway game" was
approved across the ocean. There is reason to say that the period in
ques- tion left the West with the illusion that Russia's role was to
serve Washington's interests and that it would remain such in the future.
(Sergei Mikoyati, International Affairs /October 2006j)2
This chapter formulates a theory of Russophobia and the anti-Russian lobby's
influence on the U.S. Russia policy. 1 discuss the Lobby's objec- tives, its
tactics to achieve them, the history of its formation and rise to prominence,
and the conditions that preserved its influence in the after- math of 9/11.1
argue that Russophobia has been important to American hegemonic elites in pressuring
Russia for economic and political conces- sions in the post-Cold War era.
1. Goals and Means
Objectives
The central objective of the Lobby has been to preserve and strengthen
America's power in the post-Cold War world through imperial or hegemonic policies.
The Lobby has viewed Russia with its formidable nuclear power, energy reserves,
and important geostrategic location as a major obstacle in achieving this objective.
Even during the 1990s, when Russia looked more like a failing state3 than one
capable of projecting power, some members of the American political class were
worried about the future revival of the Eurasian giant as a revisionist power.
In their percep- tion, it was essential to keep Russia in a state of military
and economic weakness-not so much out of emotional hatred for the Russian people
and their culture, but to preserve American security and promote its val- ues
across the world. To many within the Lobby, Russophobia became a useful device
for exerting pressures on Russia and controlling its policies. Although to some
the idea of undermining and, possibly, dismembering Russia was personal, to
others it was a necessity of power dictated by the realities of international
politics.
According to this dominant vision, there was simply no place in this
"New American Century" for power competitors, and America was destined eventually
to assume control over potentially threatening military capabilities and energy
reserves of others. As the two founders of the Project for the New' American
Century (PNAC), William Kristol and Robert Kagan, asserted when referring to
the large military forces of Russia and China, "American statesmen today ought
to recognize that their charge is not to await the arrival of the next great
threat, but rather to shape the international environment to prevent such a
threat from arising in the first place."4
Russia was either to agree to assist the United States in preserving
its world-power status or be forced to agree. It had to either follow the U.S.
interpretation of world affairs and develop a political and economic system
sufficiently open to American influences or live as a pariah state, smeared
by accusations of pernicious behavior, and in constant fear for its survival
in the America-centered world. As far as the U.S. hegemonic elites were concerned,
no other choice was available.
This hegemonic mood was largely consistent with mainstream ideas within
the American establishment immediately following the end of the Cold War. For
example, 1989 saw the unification of Germany and the further meltdown of the
Soviet Union, which some characterized as "the best period of U.S. foreign policy
ever."5 President Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
envisioned the upcoming victory of the West by celebrating the Soviet Union's
"grand failure."6
In his view, the Soviet "totalitarian" state was incapable of reform. Communism's
decline was therefore irreversible and inevitable. It would have made the system's
"practice and its dogma largely irrelevant to the human conditions," and communism
would be remembered as the twentieth century's "political and intellectual aberration."7
Other com- mentators argued the case for a global spread of Western values.
In 1990 Francis Fukuyama first formulated his triumphalist "end of history"
thesis, arguing a global ascendancy of the Western-style market democracy.®
... ... ...
Marc Plattner declared the emergence of a "world with one dominant principle
of legitimacy, democracy."9 When the Soviet system had indeed disintegrated,
the leading establishment journal Foreign Affairs pronounced that "the Soviet
system collapsed because of what it was, or more exactly, because of what it
was not. The West 'won' because of what the democracies were-because they were
free, prosperous and successful, because they did justice, or convincingly tried
to do so."10 Still others, such as Charles Krauthammer, went as far as to
proclaim the arrival of the United States' "unipolar moment," a period in which
only one super- power, the United States, would stand above the rest of the
world in its military, economic, and ideological capacity.11
In this context of U.S. triumphalism, at least some Russophobes expected
Russia to follow the American agenda. Still, they were worried that Russia may
still have surprises to offer and would recover as an enemy.12
Soon after the Soviet disintegration, Russia indeed surprised many, although
not quite in the sense of presenting a power challenge to the United States.
Rather, the surprise was the unexpectedly high degree of corruption, social
and economic decay, and the rapid disappointment of pro-Western reforms inside
Russia. By late 1992, the domestic economic situation was much worsened, as
the failure of Western-style shock ther- apy reform put most of the population
on the verge of poverty. Russia was preoccupied not with the projection of power
but with survival, as poverty, crime, and corruption degraded it from the status
of the indus- trialized country it once was. In the meantime, the economy was
largely controlled by and divided among former high-ranking party and state
officials and their associates. The so-called oligarchs, or a group of extremely
wealthy individuals, played the role of the new post-Soviet nomenklatura; they
influenced many key decisions of the state and suc- cessfully blocked the development
of small- and medium-sized business in the country.13 Under these conditions,
the Russophobes warned that the conditions in Russia may soon be ripe for the
rise of an anti-Western nationalist regime and that Russia was not fit for any
partnership with the United States.14
The mid-1990s saw the emergence of post-Soviet Russophobia. The Lobby's
ideology was not principally new, as it still contained the three central myths
of Sovietophobia left over from the Cold War era: Russia is inherently imperialist,
autocratic, and anti-Western. This ideology now had to be modified to the new
conditions and promoted politically, which required a tightening of the Lobby's
unity, winning new allies within the establishment, and gaining public support.15
... ... ...
The impact of structural and institutional factors is further reinforced
by policy factors, such as the divide within the policy community and the lack
of presidential leadership. Not infrequently, politicians tend to defend their
personal and corporate interests, and lobbying makes a difference in the absence
of firm policy commitments.
Experts recognize that the community of Russia watchers is split and that
the split, which goes all the way to the White House, has been responsible for
the absence of a coherent policy toward the country. During the period of
2003-2008, Vice President Richard Dick Cheney formed a cohesive and bipartisan
group of Russia critics, who pushed for a more confrontational approach with
the Kremlin. The brain behind the invasion of Iraq, Cheney could not
tolerate opposition to what he saw as a critical step in establishing worldwide
US hegemony. He was also harboring the idea of controlling Russia's energy reserves.91
Since November 2004, when the administration launched a review of its policy
on Russia,92 Cheney became a critically important voice in whom the Lobby found
its advocate. Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and, until November 2004,
Colin Powell opposed the vice president's approach, arguing for a softer and
more accommodating style in relations with Moscow.
President Bush generally sided with Rice and Powell, but he proved unable
to form a consistent Russia policy. Because of America's involvement in the
Middle East, Bush failed to provide the leadership committed to devising mutually
acceptable rules in relations with Russia that could have prevented the deterioration
in their relationship. Since the end of 2003, he also became doubtful about
the direction of Russia's domestic transformation.93 As a result, the promising
post-9/11 cooperation never materialized. The new cold war and the American
Sense of History
It's time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the
United States. (Bret Stephens, "Russia: The Enemy," The Wall Street Journal,
November 28, 2006)
If today's reality of Russian politics continues ... then there is the real
risk that Russia's leadership will be seen, externally and internally, as illegitimate.
(John Edwards and Jack Kemp, "We Need to Be Tough with Russia," International
Herald Tribune, July 12, 2006)
On Iran, Kosovo, U.S. missile defense, Iraq, the Caucasus and Caspian basin,
Ukraine-the list goes on-Russia puts itself in conflict with the U.S. and its
allies . . . here are worse models than the united Western stand that won the
Cold War the first time around.
("Putin Institutionalized," The Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2007) In
order to derail the U.S.-Russia partnership, the Lobby has sought to revive
the image of Russias as an enemy of the United States. The Russophobic groups
have exploited important differences between the two countries' historical self-perceptions,
presenting those differences as incompatible.
1. Contested History
Two versions of history
The story of the Cold War as told from the U.S. perspective is about American
ideas of Western-style democracy as rescued from the Soviet threat of totalitarian
communism. Although scholars and politicians disagreed over the methods of responding
to the Soviet threat, they rarely questioned their underlying assumptions about
history and freedom.' It therefore should not come as surprise that many in
the United States have interpreted the end of the Cold War as a victory of the
Western freedom narrative. Celebrating the Soviet Union's "grand failure"-as
Zbigniew Brzezinski put it2-the American discourse assumed that from now on
there would be little resistance to freedom's worldwide progression. When Francis
Fukuyama offered his bold summary of these optimistic feelings and asserted
in a famous passage that "what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the
Cold War... but the end of history as such,"3 he meant to convey the disappearance
of an alternative to the familiar idea of free- dom, or "the universalization
of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."4
In Russia, however, the Cold War story has been mainly about sovereignty
and independence, rather than Western-style liberalism. To many Russians it
is a story of freedom from colonization by the West and of preserving important
attributes of sovereign statehood.
In a world where neocolonialism and cultural imperialism are potent forces,
the idea of freedom as independence continues to have strong international appeal
and remains a powerful alternative to the notion of liberal democracy.
Russians formulated the narrative of independence centuries ago, as they successfully
withstood external invasions from Napoleon to Hitler. The defeat of the Nazi
regime was important to the Soviets because it legitimized their claims to continue
with the tradition of freedom as independence.
The West's unwillingness to recognize the importance of this legitimizing
myth in the role of communist ideology has served as a key reason for the Cold
War.5 Like their Western counterparts, the Soviets were debating over methods
but not the larger assumptions that defined their struggle.
This helps to understand why Russians could never agree with the Western
interpretation of the end of the Cold War. What they find missing from the U.S.
narrative is the tribute to Russia's ability to defend its freedom from expansionist
ambitions of larger powers. The Cold War too is viewed by many Russians as a
necessarily defensive response to the West's policies, and it is important that
even while occupying Eastern Europe, the Soviets never celebrated the occupation,
emphasizing instead the war vic- tory.6 The Russians officially admitted "moral
responsibility" and apolo- gized for the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.7
They may be prepared to fully recognize the postwar occupation of Eastern Europe,
but only in the context of the two sides' responsibility for the Cold War. Russians
also find it offensive that Western VE Day celebrations ignore the crucial contribution
of Soviet troops, even though none of the Allies, as one historian put it, "paid
dearer than the Soviet Union for the victory. Forty Private Ivans fell in battle
to every Private Ryan."8 Victory over Nazi Germany constitutes, as another Russian
wrote, "the only undisputable foundation of the national myth."9
If the two sides are to build foundations for a future partnership, the two
historical narratives must be bridged. First, it is important to recognize the
difficulty of negotiating a common meaning of freedom and accept that the idea
of freedom may vary greatly across nations. The urge for freedom may be universal,
but its social content is a specific product of national his- tories and local
circumstances. For instance, the American vision of democracy initially downplayed
the role of elections and emphasized selection by merit or meritocracy. Under
the influence of the Great Depression, the notion of democracy incorporated
a strong egalitarian and poverty-fighting component, and it was not until the
Cold War- and not without its influence-that democracy has become associated
with elections and pluralistic institutions.10 Second, it is essential to acknowledge
the two nations' mutual respon- sibility for the misunderstanding that has resulted
in the Cold War. A historically sensitive account will recognize that both sides
were thinking in terms of expanding a territorial space to protect their visions
of security. While the Soviets wanted to create a buffer zone to prevent a future
attack from Germany, the Americans believed in reconstructing the European continent
in accordance with their ideas of security and democracy. A mutual mistrust
of the two countries' leaders exacerbated the situation, making it ever more
difficult to prevent a full-fledged political confronta- tion. Western leaders
had reason to be suspicious of Stalin, who, in his turn, was driven by the perception
of the West's greed and by betrayals from the dubious Treaty of Versailles to
the appeasement of Hitler in Munich. Arrangements for the post-World War II
world made by Britain, the USSR, and the United States proved insufficient to
address these deep-seated suspicions.
In addition, most Eastern European states created as a result of the Versailles
Treaty were neither free nor democratic and collaborated with Nazi Germany in
its racist and expansionist policies. The European post-World War 1 security
system was not working properly, and it was only a matter of time before it
would have to be transformed.
Third, if an agreeable historical account is to emerge, it would have to
accept that the end of the Cold War was a product of mutually beneficial a second
Cold War, "it also does not want the reversal of the U.S. geopolitical gains
that it made in the decade or so after the end of the Cold War."112 Another
expert asked, "What possible explanation is there for the fact that today-at
a moment when both the U.S. and Russia face the common enemy of Islamist terrorism-hard-liners
within the Bush administration, and especially in the office of Vice President
Dick Cheney, are arguing for a new tough line against Moscow along the lines
of a scaled-down Cold War?"113
Yet another analyst wrote "at the Cold War's end, the United States was
given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, the largest
nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost
perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, his- toric or economic quarrel
between us, once communist ideology was interred. We blew it. We moved NATO
onto Russia's front porch, ignored her valid interests and concerns, and, with
our 'indispensable-nation' arrogance, treated her as a defeated power, as France
treated Weimar Germany after Versailles."114
"... The roots of Russophobia's emotional appeal to the left seem clear: It comes as a huge mental relief to the ultrasensitive liberal mind to be able to hate an outside group with impunity, and even to appear virtuous in the process . Of course, the object of that animus is a Christian and European nation that stubbornly refuses to be postmodernized, or become gripped by self-hate and morbid introspection; a nation not ashamed of its past and unwilling to surrender its future to alien multitudes; a nation where nobody obsesses over transgender bathrooms, microaggressions, and other "issues" indicative of a society's moral and intellectual decrepitude. ..."
"... The liberals' ideological and emotional Russophobia has blended seamlessly with the bread-and-butter hostility to Russia shared by Deep State operatives in the intelligence and national-security apparatus, in the military-industrial complex, and in the congressional duopoly. ..."
"... The late Anna Politkovskaya thus wrote in the Los Angeles Times 12 years ago that "it is common knowledge that the Russian people are irrational by nature." It is impossible to imagine a mainstream publication publishing a similar statement about Jews or Muslims. ..."
"... Cheesepopes be gaslighting ..."
"... Nothing give a NYC Wall Street banker more of a wet dream than the possibility of war between the goy. Oil, white slaves, truly a banker's dream come true. ..."
by Srdja Trifkovic via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
There is a paranoid, hysterical quality to the public discourse on Russia and all things Russian
in today's America. The corporate media machine and its Deep State handlers have abdicated reason
and common decency in favor of raw hate and fear-mongering. We have not seen anything like it before,
even in the darkest days of the Cold War.
The roots of Russophobia's emotional appeal to the left seem clear: It comes as a huge mental
relief to the ultrasensitive liberal mind to be able to hate an outside group with impunity, and
even to appear virtuous in the process . Of course, the object of that animus is a Christian and
European nation that stubbornly refuses to be postmodernized, or become gripped by self-hate and
morbid introspection; a nation not ashamed of its past and unwilling to surrender its future to alien
multitudes; a nation where nobody obsesses over transgender bathrooms, microaggressions, and other
"issues" indicative of a society's moral and intellectual decrepitude.
The liberals' ideological and emotional Russophobia has blended seamlessly with the bread-and-butter
hostility to Russia shared by Deep State operatives in the intelligence and national-security apparatus,
in the military-industrial complex, and in the congressional duopoly. The result is a surreal narrative
that mixes supposedly unprovoked "Russian aggression" in Ukraine, hostile intent in the Baltics,
serial war crimes in Syria, political destabilization in Western Europe, and gross interference in
America's "democratic process". The result is an altogether fictitious "existential threat," which
has made President Trump's intended détente with Moscow impossible. He may have been serious about
turning over a new leaf, but the Deep State counterpressure proved just too great. A solid rejection
front emerged, left and right, conservative and liberal, which extends even into his own team and
finally inhibited him from making moves that could have appeared too friendly to Putin.
The Russophobes' narrative is unrelated to Russia's actual policies. It reflects a deep odium
of the elite class toward Russia-as-such. That animosity has been developing in its current form
since roughly the time of the Crimean War, when in his Letters From Russia the Marquis de Custine
said that the country's "veneer of European civilization was too thin to be credible."
"No human beings, black, yellow or white, could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant-in
short, as untrustworthy in every way-as the Russians," President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1905.
John Maynard Keynes, after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1925, wondered whether the "mood of oppression"
might be "the fruit of some beastliness in the Russian nature." J. Robert Oppenheimer opined in 1951
that, in Russia, "We are coping with a barbarous, backward people." More recently, Sen. John McCain
declared that "Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country." "Russia is an anti-Western power
with a different, darker vision of global politics," Slate wrote in early 2014, even before the Ukrainian
crisis reached its climax.
This narrative has two key pillars. In terms of geopolitics, we see the striving of maritime empires-Britain
before World War II, and the United States after - to "contain" and if possible control the Eurasian
heartland, the core of which is of course Russia. Equally important is the already noted cultural
antipathy, the desire not merely to influence Russian policies and behavior but to effect an irreversible
transformation of Russia's identity. Some of the most viscerally Russophobic stereotypes come from
Russia herself, from those members of Moscow's "intelligentsia" who feel more at home in New York
or London than anywhere in their own country. The late Anna Politkovskaya thus wrote in the Los Angeles
Times 12 years ago that "it is common knowledge that the Russian people are irrational by nature."
It is impossible to imagine a mainstream publication publishing a similar statement about Jews or
Muslims.
The Russophobic frenzy comes at a cost. It further devalues the quality of public discourse on
world affairs in the United States, which is already dismally low. It has already undermined the
prospects for a mutually beneficial new chapter in U.S.-Russian relations, based on a realist assessment
that those two powers have no "existential" differences - and share many actual and potential commonalities.
It perpetrates the arrogant delusion that there is a superior, "Western" model of social and cultural
thought and action that can and should be imposed everywhere, but especially in Russia.
Saddest of all, Russophobic mania prolongs the European civil war that exploded in July 1914,
continued in 1939, and has never properly ended - not even with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It would
be in the American interest, as well as Russia's and Europe's, for that conflict to end, so that
the existential challenge common to all- that of resurgent jihad and Europe's demographic crisis
- can be properly addressed.
Nothing give a NYC Wall Street banker more of a wet dream than the possibility of war between
the goy. Oil, white slaves, truly a banker's dream come true.
..it seems like our foreign policy is like an angry poor, innocent "motorist", whacked out
on amphetamines, speeding over 100 mph and destined to drown in his liberal negro lottery swimming
pool.
The United States is closely watching a recent increase in piracy off the coast of Somalia,
a senior U.S. military official said on Sunday as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited an important
military base in Djibouti.
If I ignore your bullshit "but at the maximum..." implication:
So what do you conclude from that. Is it a bad thing to have rivals? Should we strive to turn
every remaining rival into a vassal? Is there a limit on methods allowed toward a rival?
I'll give you a green arrow to make up for the narrow-mindedness of the simpletons who all
gave you red arrows.
We don't need a war with Russia, and the US won't instigate one, either. The juice wouldn't
be worth the squeeze.
With all of that being said, Russia is a rival to the US in other parts of the world. The US
isn't the only country with a desire for influence around the world.
As much as there is a "Russo-phobia" being perpetuated in the US, you can bet a buck that there
is an "Ameri-phobia" being perpetuated out there.
The big difference is that in Russia, they don't have message boards full of people sh*tting
on their own country.
Well, that is kind of how major powers compete for influence. It takes two to tango. We can't
exactly engage in war by proxy if the Russians aren't involved in it, too.
I hate to say it but the so called "elites", in charge of our beloved deep state controlling
everything, are quite stupid -- This continuous news hysteria, against whatever subject du jour
our intelligentsia decides to float publicly, proves beyond any reasonable doubt that said "elites"
suffer from a combination of low IQ, partial education (at best !), and high self-delusion...
We might get to witness nuclear war, just because our "elites" are too idiotic to realize what
a nuclear war really is...
They stick their hook nose into everything because they want to own the whole 4th rock from
the sun. These people are ill, very ill and as I read these comments it's obvious that some just
don't get it yet.
All of this B.S. Russophobia evolved from a convenient distraction from the CONTENT of the
leaked DNC emails, and has been amplified because of the symbiosis with Neoconservative/Globalist
strategies.
What amazes me is how well the propaganda seems to be working. There's a bunch of old farts
(not that I'm really young!) at the gym every morning talking about how awesome it is that we
bombed Syria and it'll show that bastard Putin we're tough and mean business. "America, Fuck yeh!"
I wanted to ask them if they were mentally defective or just fucking retards...
Pretty much. Society has opted to run on emotion rather than fact, emotional manipulation being
the key part of the most popular forms of entertainment. Sadly this bleeds into our dealings with
each other which are increasingly emotional or insulting. Most of human behaviour and attitudes
are due to fear, particularly the egoic fear of inadequacy. As a control mechanism, fear is a
formidable tool. But fear is also a choice.
The Strategic Culture Foundation who published this piece has an evil agenda, and they are
not even friends of Putin. They are very subtle warmongers. You will see when the time comes.
Putin was duped by Iran in Syria, Iran got Syria, not Putin. Trump and Saudi can give Russia
what it needs to survive, if Putin stops being duped by deceptive hegemonial Iran.
This reminds me of when the ZerroHedge owners mentioned that Bloomberg article several months
back that involved an interview of a former Zero Hedge writer blowing the lid off this place.
He mentioned how pro-Russia the ZH owners were. This article suggests that he may have been right
after all!
Yea, we shouldn't be afraid of a country with nukes, that invades it's neigbours, has an uber
crony economy the size of Italy's, dominated by oligarchs in mining and the obligation to keep
friendly with the Kremlin or risk being put in jail and have your assets taken away on trumped
up charges. The country that murders it's opponents and critics with nasty stuff like Polonium,
even abroad, that interferes in others elections with misinformation campaigns and troll factories,
that is on the side of the ayatolla's of Iran and the mass murderer in Syria, helping him by bombing
hospitals and refugees, only to be "recognized as a player again on the world stage" A coutry
of alcoholics with one of the lowest life expectancy in the developed world. Really, a model state.
As Paul Graig Roberts, the inhouse idiot here noted, Putin for the Nobel peace price!
Wikileaks has disclosed the tactic to blame Russia for the election results, Trump's collusion,
etc. back to spring of 2016 --- I remember when they started making those "Russia" comments. They
wanted to start the thoughts about him/his staff being in collusion with the Russians. That was
to hopefully make more decide not to vote for him and in case he won, use it to prove election
fraud, treason and somehow impeach him.
Those who know about the Globalists NWO agenda, Deep State, Neocons, etc. realize we've all
been lied to about Russia (among all the other lies) since the end of the Cold War. for "their"
agenda purposes - need for continuous wars for MIC, etc. also. Putin is not as portrayed at all.
Russia is not the "big bad Commie" beast that wants to take over the world as they want us to
believe to "justify" another war.
Putin is an Eastern Orthodox Chrsitian who protects Christians, hates and fights terrorists
and Globalism. He is not a Globalist. We have those goals in common and Pres. Trump and Putin
would be a fantastic duo that when united, terrorism and Globalism would finally be dealt death
blows,
Our enemies within know that and therefore they're trying to do everything they can to hurt
that relationship and not let it happen because it would mean finally - the end of their evil
world order plan.
Amount of pressure applied commensurate to strength of a country in question. For some of them
all it takes is a stern talk from the ambassador, Russia right now is safely beyond the US ability
to apply the required pressure, including the threat of Nuclear War. What is happening instead
is that world being interconnected the way it is, applying pressure at hardened point that is
Russia is also increasing pressure at other weaker points as well, pretty much all over the world.
EU and NATO are posturing against Russia in display of lunacy that is symptomatic for the West,
it seems that God is taking away humans ability to reason. Day 1, Russia announces indefinite
cuts of gas supplies to Europe, stocks crater, world economy craters, Russia and China who were
hoarding gold watch the West collapse like a house of cards while passing the popcorn. The End.
Afghanistan is about to go full retard again, as taliban cuts ussa out of heroin billions---
as our afghan troops turn their weapons on their masters[1]
The Jewish media has been obsessed with this business about Russia allegedly influencing the
recent 2016 U.S. election. This obsession has concealed the real problem with foreign influence
over the American electoral system. It isn't Russian influence that's the problem, it is Israeli
influence that's the problem.
Below is a list of stories showing how Israelis or Jews substantively connected to Israel have
been subverting the American electoral process.
You know we will have turned the corner when Donald Trump gives the American people a "Fireside
Chat" and tells the public the real reasons the media spearheads a constant barrage of hate filled
anti-Russian LYING PROPAGANDA filled rhetoric... BECAUSE
A) THEY ARE THE WORLDS LEADER IN OIL PRODUCTION B) HAVE NO DEBT C) HAVE THERE OWN BALANCE OF
PAYMENT CREDIT SYSTEM MIR THAT WILL REPLACE THE WESTERN CENTRAL BANK(S) SYSTEM "SWIFT"
And after he delivers that truthful message he will NEVER BE ALLOWED TO EVER AGAIN... He will
probably be shot like HOWARD BEALE in the movie NETWORK... Or WWWIII will be LAUNCHED!!!
"... is an ex-geek turned writer and editor. He hails from Boston and writes about whatever distortions of reality strike his fancy. Currently, he's pedaling a novel chronicling the lives and times of members of a cell of terrorists in Europe, completing a collection of essays on high technology delusions, and can be found barking at progressivepilgrim.review. ..."
The decorated cold-warrior Air Force Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty would have turned 100 last
June. Today few remember him, but those who do may recall him as an arch military
intelligence insider who alerted the nation to the capture of reins of government by the
intelligence establishment, from the Korean Conflict forward to this day. He served his
country under five presidents, first as an Army Air officer who saw service in Africa, South
Asia, and Japan in WWII, ending up an Air Force Major assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
[1] As Chief of Special Operations there, he coordinated CIA and military activities
between JCS, directorates of the CIA, the National Security Council, and teams in the field.
A key player, Prouty was privy to top-secret planning and policy documents and lists of CIA
plants in civilian and military organizations, including CIA front companies. There was
little he didn't know about how the agency operated its clandestine operations and little
anyone around him knew more about. His Rolodex must have been amazing.
But then, having retired with accolades in
1964 to work as a banker and now and then a bit of a fixer, he wrote a book exposing it all
that ruffled a lot of institutional feathers. In almost unbearable detail, The Secret
Team (Prentice-Hall 1973) detailed how from the get-go, Allen Dulles' CIA insinuated
itself into national institutions to become a driver of policies and armed interventions that
few officials would or could resist. Both John F. and Robert F. Kennedy tried to rein in the
agency and tragically failed. Prouty's 1993 book, JFK: The CIA,
Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy , served as grist for Oliver Stone's
film JFK by methodically piecing together evidence for an inside job that brought the
president down.
[2]
That book's Epilog
(inexplicably missing from the paperback version) contains some fairly juicy tidbits,
assuming they weren't fake news. In it, Prouty describes a meeting at a "Businessmen's Club
in Manhattan at which unnamed bankers and defense contractors were in an uproar over the
rumor that JFK would decamp US forces from Vietnam:
An elderly member, who used to visit the Dulles family in their summer home on Henderson
Bay, leaned over toward the center of that small group and almost in a whisper said that
his boys had just completed a ten-year war in Vietnam. The total was in the thousands, and
the cost ran into the billions of dollars. Then he looked around the group of old cronies
and snarled, "That goddamn Kennedy bastard has been working all summer with some of Old
Joe's Irish Mafia and his favorite generals and they are planning every which way to get us
out of Vietnam. This can't happen. He's got to go. Right now he's a sure thing for
reelection and then there is Bobby and after him Teddy. I tell you that Kennedy has got to
go."
But it was The Secret Team that most occasioned the ire of the intelligence
establishment, especially for its workaday descriptions of the methods by which the CIA
usurped power and leveraged authority to become a self-selected branch of the Executive and
the military, using techniques borrowed from Machiavelli to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to get its
way. Ineffectual attempts were immediately made to suppress the book, which was twice
reprinted. More successful was the campaign to deep-six the second edition, a paperback put
out in 1979 by Ballantine Books. Of the 100,000 printed, few remain available today, selling
on Amazon for $342 and up .
(Amazon sells used copies of the original hardback and a Kindle version of it for more
reasonable amounts.)
That notwithstanding, thanks to the efforts of Prouty's widow and acolyte Len Osanic (who
runs The Col. L Fletcher Prouty Reference
Site , from which part of this article was taken), the paperback was reissued in 2011 via
SkyHorse
Publishing , with a Foreword by Jesse Ventura. And, if the most recent version of
TST you crave, eager reader, you needn't bother to buy it.
Go straightaway to a convenient, complete, and free Web edition that ratical.org, has cached for your
inspection.
* * *
Prouty lived in Arlington Virginia, where he died at 84 and continues to occupy from
Arlington National Cemetery. He was writing articles and giving interviews up until the end.
Somehow I doubt he could have made it much past retirement without some protection from the
inside, out of concern for his files and Rolodex if nothing else. His texts continue to exert
influence despite concerted efforts to suppress them. In the Author's Note from what would
have been TST's third edition (taken from ratical.org ) he explains how he
came to publish his book and how the suppression manifested itself:
After I had given the manuscript of the original draft of this book to my editor at
Prentice- Hall, in 1972; and had received the galley proof of the first edition back from
him, he called me to suggest that I keep it in a safe place at all times. He told me that
his home had been broken into the night before, and he suspected it was an attempt to steal
his copy of that galley proof. He said, "They didn't get it. It was under the seat of the
Volkswagon."
A few days later a nationwide release by the well-known Washington columnist, Jack
Anderson, appeared across the country, "Book Bares CIA's Dirty Tricks". In that column,
Anderson reported that the CIA had contacted a well-known bookstore in Washington and asked
one of the employees to see if he could get a copy of the galley from me, and agreed to pay
him $500, if he did. I agreed to meet him at my home that evening.
I suspected his call, but invited him anyway. In the meantime I set up a tape recorder
in the umbrella stand near my front door and arranged for it to turn on when I switched on
the overhead on the front porch. With that arrangement, I recorded the whole visit
including his final burst, "They promised me $500.00, if I got that galley proof." I took
that tape to Anderson, and it was the basis of his March 6, 1973 column. The underground
attack didn't quit there.
After excellent early sales of The Secret Team during which Prentice Hall printed
three editions of the book, and it had received more than 100 favorable reviews, I was
invited to meet Ian Ballantine, the founder of Ballantine Books. He told me that he liked
the book and would publish 100,000 copies in paperback as soon as he could complete the
deal with Prentice-Hall. Soon there were 100,000 paperbacks in bookstores all around the
country.
Then one day a business associate in Seattle called to tell me that the bookstore next
to his office building had had a window full of books the day before, and none the day of
his call. They claimed they had never had the book. I called other associates around the
country. I got the same story from all over the country. The paperback had vanished. At the
same time I learned that Mr. Ballantine had sold his company. I travelled to New York to
visit the new "Ballantine Books" president. He professed to know nothing about me, and my
book. That was the end of that surge of publication. For some unknown reason Prentice-Hall
was out of my book also. It became an extinct species.
Coincidental to that, I received a letter from a Member of Parliament in Canberra,
Australia, who wrote that he had been in England recently visiting in the home of a friend
who was a Member of the British Parliament. While there, he discovered The Secret Team on a
coffee table and during odd hours had begun to read it.
Upon return to Canberra he sent his clerk to get him a copy of the book. Not finding it
in the stores, the clerk had gone to the Customs Office where he learned that 3,500 copies
of The Secret Team had arrived, and on that same date had been purchased by a Colonel from
the Royal Australian Army. The book was dead everywhere.
The campaign to kill the book was nationwide and world-wide. It was removed from the
Library of Congress and from College libraries as letters I received attested all too
frequently.
That was twenty years ago. Today I have been asked to rewrite the book and bring it up
to date. Those who have the book speak highly of it, and those who do not have it have been
asking for it. With that incentive, I have begun from page one to bring it up to date and
to provide information that I have learned since my first manuscript.
In the beginning, this book was based upon my unusual experience in the Pentagon during
1955-1964 and the concept of the book jtself was the outgrowth of a series of luncheon
conversations, 1969-1970, with my friends Bob Myers, Publisher of the New Republic, Charlie
Peters, founder of The Washington Monthly, and Ben Schemmer, editor and publisher of the
Armed Forces Journal, and Derek Shearer. They were all experienced in the ways and games
played in Washington, and they tagged my stories those of a "Secret Team." This idea grew
and was polished during many subsequent luncheons.
After my retirement from the Air Force, 1964, I moved from an office in the Joint Chiefs
of Staff area of the Pentagon to become Manager of the Branch Bank on the Concourse of that
great building. This was an interesting move for many reasons, not the least of which was
that it kept me in business and social contact with many of the men I had met and worked
with during my nine years of Air Force duties in that building. It kept me up-to-date with
the old "fun-and-games" gang.
After graduating from the Graduate School of Banking, University of Wisconsin, I
transfered to a bank in Washington where in the course of business I met Ben Schemmer. He
needed a loan that would enable him to acquire the old Armed Forces Journal. During that
business process I met two of Ben's friends Bob Myers and Charlie Peters. We spent many
most enjoyable business luncheons together. This is where "The Secret Team" emerged from a
pattern of ideas to a manuscript.
As they heard my stories about my work with the CIA, and especially about the role of
the military in support of the world-wide, clandestine operations of the CIA, they urged me
to write about those fascinating nine years of a 23-year military career. During the Spring
of 1970 I put an article together that we agreed to call "The Secret Team", and Charlie
Peters published it in the May 1970 issue of The Washington Monthly.
Before I had seen the published article myself, two editors of major publishers in New
York called me and asked for appointments. I met with both, and agreed to accept the offer
to write a book of the same name, and same concept of The Secret Team from Bram Cavin,
Senior Editor with Prentice-Hall.
After all but finishing the manuscript, with my inexperienced typing of some 440 pages,
I sat down to a Sunday breakfast on June 13, 1971 and saw the headlines of the New York
Times with its publication of the "purloined" Pentagon Papers. [Any reader of the "Pentagon
Papers" should be warned that although they were commissioned on June 17, 1967, by the
Secretary of Defense as "the history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War
II [Sept 2, 1945] to the present" [1968], they are unreliable, inaccurate and marred by
serious omissions. They are a contrived history, at best, even though they were written by
a selected Task Force under Pentagon leadership.]
One of the first excerpts from those papers was a TOP SECRET document that I had worked
on in late 1963. Then I found more of the same. With that, I knew that I could vastly
improve what I had been writing by making use of that hoard of classified material that
"Daniel Ellsberg had left on the doorstep of the Times," and other papers. Up until that
time I had deliberately avoided the use of some of my old records and copies of highly
classified documents. The publication of the Pentagon Papers changed all that. They were
now in the public domain. I decided to call my editor and tell him what we had with the
"Pentagon Papers" and to ask for more time to re-write my manuscript. He agreed without
hesitation. From that time on I began my "Doctorate" course in, a) book publishing and, b)
book annihilation.
As we see, by some time in 1975 The Secret Team was extinct; but unlike the dinosaur and
others, it did not even leave its footprints in the sands of time. There may be some forty
to fifty thousand copies on private book shelves. A letter from a professor informed me
that his department had ordered more than forty of the books to be kept on the shelves of
his university library for assignment purposes. At the start of the new school year his
students reported that the books were not on the shelves and the registry cards were not in
the master file. The librarians informed them that the book did not exist.
With that letter in mind, I dropped into the Library of Congress to see if The Secret
Team was on the shelves where I had seen it earlier. It was not, and it was not even in
that library's master file. It is now an official non-book.
I was a writer whose book had been cancelled by a major publisher and a major paperback
publisher under the persuasive hand of the CIA. Now, after more than twenty years the
flames of censorship still sweep across the land. Despite that, here we go again with a new
revised edition of The Secret Team.
One last caveat. Don't expect to learn anything new on Wikipedia . His page has been
repeatedly doctored to remove any
reference to prouty.org and cast him as an unreliable source. Even in his serviceman's grave,
the longwinded Leroy Fletcher Prouty continues to be cashiered, but still heard.
Notes.
[1] Leroy Fletcher Prouty (January 24, 1917 – June 5, 2001) was Chief of Special
Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy in 1962-63. Prouty
earned the position after nearly ten years in the Pentagon providing military support to CIA
clandestine operations. Prouty was awarded the Legion of Merit for his efforts, and after his
retirement in 1964 was further awarded a Joint Chiefs of Staff Commendation Medal by General
Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the 1970s, Prouty became a writer
and historical commentator, focusing on Cold War history, the activities of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Kennedy assassination. The character "X" in Oliver Stone's
1991 movie JFK was based largely on Prouty, who acted as a consultant on the film. (From
proutypedia
.)
[2] Conservative Marquette University Associate Professor of Political Science John McAdams (currently
suspended for criticizing a graduate assistant on his blog for abridging a homophobic student's First
Amendment rights by preventing him from speaking in class) vociferously disagrees with Prouty
and other JFK assassination conspiracy theorists on his (Marquette) site Kennedy Assassination Home Page . See its subpage labeling Prouty as an
"All-Purpose Conspiracy Expert." Yet, McAdams takes the assessment of Prouty (that he has a
"wacky imagination") by General and regime-change expert Edward Lansdale at face value.
Prouty asserts that Lansdale was present at Dealy Plaza at the moment JFK was killed and had
unaccountably billeted Prouty to Antarctica at the time to chaperone a party of VIPs.
Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Geoff Dutton
Geoff Duttonis an ex-geek turned writer and editor. He hails from Boston and
writes about whatever distortions of reality strike his fancy. Currently, he's pedaling a
novel chronicling the lives and times of members of a cell of terrorists in Europe,
completing a collection of essays on high technology delusions, and can be found barking at
progressivepilgrim.review.
Last year I published Our American Pravda , making the case for
the utter corruption and unreliability of the mainstream American media, both in the past and
especially in recent years. The enormous lacunae I daily noticed in the pages of The New
York Times , The Wall Street Journal , and other leading media outlets were a
major motivation behind my creation of The Review , whose readership has grown
enormously in recent weeks.
A perfect example of this dangerous MSM "conspiracy of silence" may be found in the growing
confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, greatly accelerated by the death of almost 300
passengers aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, shot down last month over Eastern Ukraine. The
American media and its Western counterparts have almost unanimously placed the blame on
anti-government rebels backed by Russia, and darkly insinuate that Russian President Vladimir
Putin has the blood of those hundreds of innocent lives on his hands. London's once-respectedEconomist magazine has repeatedly run shrill covers promoting the great threat of
Putin and Russia to world peace, even featuring a photo of the former under the stark title
"A Web of
Lies." There is the serious likelihood of a renewed Cold War against Russia and with the
neoconized Republicans in Congress proposing legislation to incorporate Ukraine as an American
military ally and deploy American forces there, the actual possibility of a military clash near
the Russian border.
As readers know, I have been overwhelmingly consumed with my own software work in recent
months and aside from closely reading the NYT and WSJ every morning, have
devoted little time or effort to following the disastrous Ukraine situation. But just carefully
reading between the lines of our elite MSM outlets and glancing at a few contrary perspectives
presented on alternative websites have left me highly suspicious of our media narrative,
leading me to wonder where the finger of guilt actually points.
For example, according to the official American story, MH17 was downed by rebels armed with
a BUK anti-aircraft missile battery. As it happens, the pro-American Ukraine government
possesses a large inventory of exactly those weapons, while it is far from clear that the
rebels have a single unit, let alone the expertise to operate such sophisticated devices.
Furthermore, there apparently exists radar evidence demonstrating that Ukraine fighter planes
were in the immediate vicinity of MH17 just before it was shot down and there are firsthand
reports from investigators on the ground that portions of the crashed fuselage showed strong
evidence of having been hit the sort of heavy machine-gun fire employed in air combat. I find
it extremely suspicious that the American government has repeatedly refused to release the
evidence supporting its narrative, while the Russian government has released copious evidence
supporting its contrary perspective.
We must bear in mind that the downing of MH17 and the deaths of the hundreds of mostly
European passengers came as a fortuitous stroke of fortune for the embattled Kiev government
and its neoconservative American backers, given that Germany and most of the other major
European governments had just balked at approving the harsh anti-Russian economic sanctions
being proposed by the White House. Cui bono ?
Furthermore, this terrible suspicion that 300 innocent lives may have been sacrificed in a
ghastly false-flag operation by an American-supported government is somewhat buttressed by
earlier events. Consider that the overthrow of the democratically-elected and neutralist
Ukrainian government was sparked by the massive bloodshed that erupted between riot police and
pro-American demonstrators in the Kievan capital, as many hundreds on both sides were suddenly
killed or wounded by an outbreak of heavy gunfire over a couple of nights. I found it very
intriguing that soon afterward an
intercepted telephone call between the pro-Western foreign minister of Estonia and European
High Commissioner Catherine Ashton, later confirmed to be genuine, revealed that the bullets
found in the bodies of both government police and anti-government demonstrators had apparently
come from the same guns. The most plausible explanation of this strange detail is that the
snipers responsible were professionals brought in to cause the massive bloodshed necessary to
overthrow the government, which is exactly what soon followed. Again cui bono ?
Am I certain about these facts, let alone the analysis built upon them? Absolutely not! As
emphasized, I've been entirely preoccupied with other matters over the last few months. But if
such obvious suspicions are apparent to someone who occasionally glances at the news reports
out of the corner of his mind's eye, the total silence of the American media and its huge corps
of full-time professional journalists constitutes a very telling indictment. Personally, I
think there's a high likelihood that forces aligned with current pro-Western regime were
responsible for the massacre in Kiev's Maidan Square and a better than fifty-fifty chance they
more recently shot down MH17, but I really can't be sure about either of these things. However,
I am absolutely 100% certain that the American MSM has been revealed as a totally worthless
source of information on these crucial world events, although it can be relied upon to provide
every last detail of Robin Williams' troubled life or the endless foibles of the
Kardashians.
In the interests of providing our readers at least some access to alternate accounts of why
we may now be heading into a new Cold War against Russia -- or even a hot one -- I've recently
republished a couple of Mike Whitney's fine Counterpunch columns on the mysteries of
Flight
MH17 , which cautiously raised questions rather than claimed to answer them, as well as
those of the redoubtable Paul Craig Roberts.
Aside from attracting considerable debate from our website's often "excitable" commenters,
whose views range from the sensible to the deranged, our Whitney columns regarding MH17 had a
far more important consequence. One of our left-liberal readers was shocked to read facts
totally absent from the pages of The Nation , the Huffington Post , or any of
the other left-liberal sites she visits. Out of curiosity, she contacted a very prominent
left-liberal American academic, someone with special expertise in exactly that area of Europe.
To her considerable surprise, he largely confirmed the outlandish "conspiracy theory," saying
that the evidence increasingly indicated that the American-backed Kiev government had shot down
Flight MH17, either accidentally or otherwise.
Based on his remarks, it sounded like he and his friends had devoted 100x the time and
effort that I had to investigating the incident, thereby reassuring me that my casual
conclusions were at least not wholly ridiculous. Yet it also appeared that neither he or any of
the other American experts in his circle who apparently share his views had seen fit to publish
their opinions in any of the numerous media outlets to which they have easy access, presumably
for fear of being denounced and stigmatized as "conspiracy nuts." They may regard the
possibility of an American military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia as a terrible
danger, but it pales compared to the horrifying risk that the 22-year-old bookers at MSNBC chat
shows might decide to put a black mark down next to their names.
The following day I lamented this cowardice of our intelligentsia to another
prominent liberal academic with whom I'm friendly, and he immediately sent me the draft by a
friend of his on that very topic that I am now greatly honored to publish. Most of the dead on
MH17 were Dutch citizens and Karel van Wolferen ranks as one of the
world's most prominent Dutch journalists, winner of major awards and someone whose numerous
books that have sold well over a million copies worldwide. His article describes the evidence
regarding MH17, but more importantly focuses on the totally corrupted worlds of journalism and
politics that have enabled this dangerous situation to develop.
I urge everyone to read van Wolferen's long and thoughtful piece and ask themselves why such
basic facts and simple analysis appear nowhere within the mainstream American media. Given his
standing and his credibility, the New York Times should have long since featured his
byline on a major opinion piece, and the absence constitutes powerful evidence. During our
disastrous Iraq War the American media applied exactly the same
boycott to the views of my old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who had run the NSA
for President Ronald Reagan and ranked as one of Washington's leading experts on national
security issues. Our totally incompetent ruling elites refuse to let discordant voices puncture
their bubble of unreality.
For those readers who refuse to admit the possibility that our vaunted MSM might conceal
such vital facts, consider the important point I made at the beginning of my 2013 article . In
recent years, leading scholars have conclusively established that for a decade or two during
the 1930s and 1940s, a small network of Communist spies quietly gained substantial control of
our national government in Washington, DC, successfully diverting the actions of the United
States to their own nefarious ends. If our mainstream media had failed to notice or report that
situation at the time and then spent the next half century ridiculing anyone who suggested this
possibility, why should anyone believe that the media can be trusted on the question of who
actually shot down Flight MH17 in Ukraine? Our American Pravda indeed.
UPDATE: Our long, detailed article by distinguished Dutch journalist Karel van Wolferen has
had enormous traffic, and is now on the verge of becoming the most heavily read piece in the
history of our young webzine, while the nearly 600 Tweets it has so far received indicatie
distribution comparable to that of a major New York Times article. All this has happened in
just the last couple of days.
Furthermore, just as I had hoped, the very lengthy comment threads of the two articles have
provided a wealth of additional information, far beyond anything I had previously encountered,
given my slight familiarity with this issue.
First, I learned that a group of highly-experienced former intelligence officers from the
CIA, FBI, NSA, and other government agencies has issued a public statement sharply criticizing
the lack of evidence substantiating the claims made by American government officials.
Also, the blogsite of Col. Patrick Lang, a very highly regarded former Defense Intelligence
official, has published a lengthy and detailed analysis of the MH17 Incident, raising many of
the same issues:
Furthermore, one of the commenters on our website, who purportedly has a military
intelligence background, pointed us to the very detailed analysis he had published on his own
blogsite regarding MH17:
Although I claim no great expertise in military affairs, these analyses certainly seem to
strengthen my suspicions that the Official Story almost universally accepted by the Western MSM
is far from solid and may indeed be a ridiculous fabrication. I urge others to follow the links
I have provided, and draw their own conclusions, perhaps different from my own. But they should
ask themselves why so many highly-regarded former U.S. intelligence professionals would be
raising these serious doubts and why our mainstream media has totally failed to report
them.
As for me, I've noticed a curious fact. It appears that the people and organizations
promoting the current Official Line on Ukraine have a huge overlap with the people and
organizations that promoted the disastrous Iraq War, based on the notorious WMD Hoax.
Meanwhile, the people providing serious skepticism about government accusations regarding MH17
are exactly the same people who raised doubts and skepticism about Iraq's alleged WMD and the
wisdom of attacking Iraq, while being just as totally ignored by the MSM then as now.
Since none of the Iraq War or WMD Hoax culprits ever received proper punishment for their
crimes, they've mostly remained alive and free and able to promote equally disastrous foreign
policy adventures in the media they continue to control. But that doesn't mean we must be so
gullible as to believe what they say.
Going forward, the crucial unknown is whether our timorous media or even its ideological
fringes, will begin to seriously report these issues, or whether they'll all get into line just
as they did during the WMD Hoax.
UPDATE 2:
Scott Horton has a podcast interview of Karel van Wolferen
The Never Trump cabal can now claim total victory. Unsuccessful at preventing Trump from
winning the nomination or the general election, they have instead co-opted his presidency for
their own policies and programs.
With the nomination of John Bolton, Never Trump interventionists have installed one of the
unrepentant architects of the catastrophic Iraq War to head the National Security Council.
In recent months, ignoring and rejecting his own party's convention platform, Trump has
agreed to send lethal weapons to Ukraine. Besides accelerating the deaths of Ukrainians and
ethnic Russians while laying waste to the civilian population of the Donbas, what advantage to
the people of the United States does this military escalation provide?
Last summer, in one of the strangest speeches in American history, President Trump announced
he would surge troop levels in Afghanistan -- and then in the same breath admitted it was a
mistake and something he didn't really want to do. That should show the conflict here: Trump's
instincts versus the establishment sorts around him.
Never Trumpers are not so secretly celebrating. They got the president they thought they
didn't want. And now, pretending they still don't want him, they can hardly believe their good
fortune.
Achieving their foreign policy goals is just the icing on the cake. They also got the
president to implement the entire Wall Street agenda: lowering taxes on the super rich;
advancing huge subsidies to the medical insurance industry; keeping the Export-Import Bank
funded; re-authorizing the ivory trade; shrinking the size of national monuments so that
multi-national corporations can turn our wilderness areas into strip mines and clear-cut
wastelands.
Then, just this week, in a reckless act of generational theft, Trump endorsed the second
biggest budget in U.S. history, caving in to every demand and desire of the UniParty and the K
Street lobbyists whom they serve.
In the 18th century, the cry went "Millions for defense, but not one penny for tribute!"
Trump's cry is "Billions for defense, but not one penny for a wall!"
Trump justifies his signature on the omnibus bill by claiming it was necessary for national
security. But that claim rings hollow when comparatively little is allocated for the protection
of America's own borders and the defense of its homeland. Americans intuitively know that the
real danger to their safety is not along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border; it's along the
U.S.-Mexico border. But Trump's own laudable instincts have been neutered by the globalist,
interventionist generals and policy wonks who now populate powerful positions at the White
House and the departments of State and Defense.
Many reading this might now protest: what's wrong with passing the omnibus? Isn't it
providing the funds necessary for making America great again? But Donald Trump did not run for
office on a platform of bloating spending; he ran on opposition to massive debt increases and
specifically to many of the programs they pay for. The budget can be summed up in a paraphrase
of a Broadway musical hit tune: whatever crony wants, crony gets.
Has there been a fiercer critic of the Iraq war than Donald Trump? Yet he promotes to the
head of the NSC perhaps that conflict's most vociferous apologist. Trump promised he would end
the wars of choice, that he would refrain from taking sides in other nation's internal
conflicts. He called for a reasonable rapprochement with Russia with the goal of making America
and Americans safer. He specifically said he would wind down the military commitment in
Afghanistan as quickly and safely as possible.
His only bellicose pledge concerned ISIS, which he promised to destroy. As we have seen,
that was one of the few promises he kept. In most other policy areas he has reversed his
campaign pledges. His foreign policy is no longer America First; it's evolved into the same,
old, dangerous, meddling, interventionist program of the last quarter century. Trump has
deepened U.S. involvement in Yemen, Syria, Ukraine, and Afghanistan without clearly defining
the missions, the goals, and the risks. If voters had wanted this, they would have elected
Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.
Yet of all the betrayals, the war on nature is the most grievous and shocking. As someone
who supported Trump from day one in June 2015, who has seen virtually every one of his
speeches, interviews, and tweets, I cannot recall a single word about the national parks or
monuments.
Had Trump forecast during the campaign how he would govern on environmental issues, would he
have been elected? Could those narrow margins of victory in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin,
and Iowa have gone the other way? With his appointment of Ryan Zinke to the Department of the
Interior, Trump needlessly and recklessly alienated tens of thousands of voters who might
otherwise have supported him and who may indeed have voted for him in 2016. Although its hard
to discern exactly why the president's poll numbers are as low as they are, it would be a
mistake to discount the animus engendered by the unexpected assault on wilderness, open space,
endangered species, and America's magnificent national monuments.
The only national monument that Trump has failed to shrink is the Beltway swamp. In fact,
judging from the continuing spread of McMansions in Potomac, Maryland and Falls Church,
Virginia, he has effectively widened its borders. It's as if the chants from all those packed
stadiums during that long ago presidential campaign were "Fill that swamp! Fill that
swamp!"
It is now abundantly clear why the Never Trumpers are tittering over their cocktails. Trump
has staffed most departments of his government with establishment cronies and neoconservative
zealots. He now presides over the implementation of their agenda. In effect, we're
getting a variation on what could be called the third Bush presidency -- minus the decorum.
Trump's is also the all-talk presidency: talk tough on illegal immigration, but fail to
build the wall; talk tough on sanctuary cities, but fail to cut federal subsidies; talk tough
on illegal immigration, then push for the biggest amnesty since 1986; talk tough against the
Export-Import Bank, then fund it; talk tough on Obamacare, then fund big insurance to keep the
subsidies flowing; talk tough on reducing taxes, then screw millions of homeowners across
America by actually raising their taxes; talk tough on trade, then tiptoe around
Mexico and Canada on everything that really matters; talk tough on the deficit, then sign the
second biggest boondoggle spending bill in U.S. history.
Still, it cannot be denied: President Trump has accomplished much -- for the establishment
and their K Street lobbyists. They write the bills, Paul Ryan guides them through the House
amendment-free, and Trump signs them in to law.
For those who packed those campaign rallies, who wore those red "Make America Great Again"
caps, and for the rest of us mere plebs, Donald Trump's presidency is best summed up by The
Bard: "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Ron Maxwell wrote and directed the Civil War motion-pictures Gettysburg ,
Gods & Generals , and Copperhead .
"... North Korea's negotiating position has not really changed with the announcement. They have repeatedly said for years they are willing to agree to denuclearization of the Peninsula in return for security guarantees. I find the media trumpeting this as a new development rather vexing. Anyways, China has been putting the screws on them since about September/October (Apparently, they told Kim Jongun they know they can't overthrow the DPRK government, but they can get rid of him personally), which is also why there have not been any new nuclear tests. ..."
"... I think Yves has got it right: USA threatens PRC with tariffs, so PRC pressures NK to make concessions to the USA. i.e. Two big guys screwing the little guy. ..."
"... In the USA, imperialist machtpolitik is a thoroughly bipartisan affair. It doesn't matter how faithfully NK or PRC might fulfill obligations. Trump's successors, whoever they may be, will simply apply more pressure and demand more concessions. They won't stop until somebody else stops them. ..."
I believe Trump could negotiate a deal. But I also believe he could blow up the whole talk
before it even happens. He has shown that he'll bend quickly to neocon pressure, with
increased interest in foreign war (Bolton hiring) and the ramping up of hostilities by
bouncing Russians from the U.S. over the phony poisoning story in the UK.
I don't disagree with your comment, but not comfortable with the term "bend to". Trump
gets enamored with different people at different times, but he always is looking
down at them. They may get enough rope to scare the rest of us, but they are still on a
rope.
Bolton is horrible, but a lot of other horrible people have come and gone in this really
quick year.
Bolton is horrible but probably won't last long. Nobody at Trump's ear has, including his
own children.
Trump just announced that we're withdrawing from Syria. That's more than Obama ever
did.
Part of being a nationalist demagogue is that you're not as interested in foreign wars
unless they enrich the country. Not a single one of our wars does that. There's nothing
interesting in mercantilism, for instance, that we can't do at home (drill baby drill).
I'm not saying I agree with that view, I'm just saying that if he's a nationalist
demagogue, it only follows that he's not interested in, uh, "non-for-profit warmaking".
I am NO Trump fan or voter, but it does appear that he's the first one to apply sanctions
to those specific Chinese banks handling the trade with North Korea.
(Somewhat) OT, but it strikes me that the best way to look at Trump is through the lense
of what he is – the US version of Sylvio Berlusconi. A sleazy billionaire Oligarch with
no core principles and a fondness for Bunga Bunga parties.
Rather than as LITERALLY HITLER as per the verbiage of hashtag the resistance.
Thus, rather than as a crazed madman bent on "evil" at all times one wonders whether Mr.
Bunga Bunga would do a deal with Lil' Kim. Sure he would, assuming that the ruling military
Junta allows him to. It might be in the interest of the latter to de-escalate this particular
hotspot (as NK crisis/hype fatigue may set in) and simply push Iran as the next flashpoint to
hype.
Indeed! They even sound quite similar -- I recall in a speech that Berlusconi gave when he
was still the Italian president and the Italian left was screaming for his resignation,
Sylvio claimed such demands were making him uneasy, since if he was to go home, and he had 20
homes, it would be difficult for him to decide which house or mansion to go to!
It seems the bottom line for negotiations with North Korea have little to do with this
article which covers Trump's thoughts on nuclear proliferation between major powers that have
massive stockpiles.
North Korea is mainly interested in protecting itself from regime change and from becoming
a US outpost (as in target) butt up against China. It is hard to believe that Kim Jong-Un
would get any advantage whatsoever out of dismantling his nuclear arsenal, however small. One
assumes he is aware of Gaddafi in particular and US's track record on keeping it's promises
– particularly over the span of different administrations – in general.
The above comment assumes full disarmament as the minimum condition of any "negotiation"
since Trump has gone so far out of his way to make that clear.
Oh, and now see the lead story at the Financial Times, China uses economic muscle to bring
N Korea to negotiating table:
China virtually halted exports of petroleum products, coal and other key materials to
North Korea in the months leading to this week's unprecedented summit between Kim Jong Un,
the North Korean leader, and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.
The export freeze -- revealed in official Chinese data and going much further than the
limits stipulated under UN sanctions -- shows the extent of Chinese pressure following the
ramping up of Pyongyang's nuclear testing programme. It also suggests that behind Mr Xi's
talk this week of a "profound revolutionary friendship" between the two nations, his
government has been playing hard ball with its neighbour.
I would normally agree but Kim Jong-Un was just summoned to China. Not even given a state
visit. The Chinese announced North Korea would denuclearlize:
North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un pledged his commitment to denuclearization and to meet
U.S. officials, China said on Wednesday after his meeting with President Xi Jinping, who
promised China would uphold friendship with its isolated neighbour.
China has heretofore pretended that it couldn't do anything about North Korea. It looks
like Trump's tariff threat extracted China jerking Kim Jong-Un's chain as a concession. I
don't see how Kim Jong-Un can defy China if China is serious about wanting North Korea to
denuclearlize. Maybe it will merely reduce its arsenal and stop threatening Hawaii (even
though its ability to deliver rockets that far is in doubt) and just stick to being able to
light up Seoul instead.
Agree. I wasn't aware of the details you mention above regarding the export freeze. (I
won't use Google and my normal 'trick' doesn't work to get around FT's paywall – and I
won't use the trial membership either). I'm hopeless.
Anyway, you make a very convincing case. I can only imagine that Kim Jong Un is one
miserable scared rat. My point about a "silk noose" below was perhaps on the mark.
Kim might agree on paper or through an insincere promise to denuclearize, but I don't see
a closed authoritarian regime like the North agreeing to an inspection regime that would
insure that such a pledge would be lived up to. Reduction, but build-up on the sly w/o
inspections.
China may be interested in a deal to the extent that it prevents a bloody war breaking out
that they'll probably expend manpower to help clean up and it insures the security of a North
Korean buffer that keeps American troops off their border; After all, they've got to keep the
powder dry for "reunification" with Taiwan.
I also don't believe that the US would agree to concessions, such as removing American
troops from the peninsula. the pentagon wouldn't like it, the hawks around Trumps wouldn't
like it, and I believe the SK leadership would not be too crazy about the potential
ramifications for their security with such an agreement.
But, can Trump (by extension, the US), make an agreement that can be relied on over its
term?
For any hope of NK trusting any deal with the US he would have to stand by the Iranian
deal. Then there's Bolton and the Neocon Will To War, for deeply pathological reasons which
by nature cannot be debated.
In this case, the mere possibility of a "deal" is possible, but only if there is a third
party to hold both of them to it.
That's the crazy thing about this. What possible inducement could Kim Jong-Un have gotten
to attend his own funeral? Why would anyone trust the US an inch?
I suppose if he can keep his own people in a suspended state of extreme propaganda, then
he might be vulnerable to his own medicine, but that seems at odds with his behavior so far
(such as the assassination of his uncle). If anything, he would be especially leery of
anything coming out of the US.
And then can he really be that psyched out by Bolton, Pompeo and Torture Lady so
that good cop Trump can hand him is own death certificate with a space for his signature?
Whatever happened during this China trip, the overarching theme must have been how to
manage the US. Here's one rough scenario:
NK 'disarms' to some definition, under the auspices of China, acquiring in return an
explicit Chinese security umbrella for the buffer it presents between them and SK. Nobody
really wants a unified Korea in any case. In return, the US vacates SK militarily, ever so
discretely and over time.
Done correctly, and with the finesse necessary for Trump, China is in a position to
extract all sorts of concessions from the US on other fronts as well. Nothing positive is
going to happen here without China, and they hold most of the cards. If nothing positive
happens, we have to consider the pressure that'd build on Trump to do something, anything,
and that probably being something rash. (Better a big disaster over there than a mammoth one
over here thinking).
"he can't go willy nilly and set nukes a-flying just because it struck him as a good idea
that day."
I mean sure. His "button" isn't literally connected to a missile somewhere, but he sure as
hell can ask that nukes be fired whenever and wherever he wants. You could argue that someone
in the chain of command would prevent that from happening, but that's more of a hope than a
guarantee. For a really good read on how this all works and the history of the nuclear
program I highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/0143125788
With Bolton on board and seemingly everyone with half a brain, a little logic and the
ability to hold their tongue for more than about 5 seconds out, I highly doubt anything will
come of these negotiations. In fact, I'm more worried that the US will get steamrolled by
China and NK.
That isn't true. See the link I provided, which you clearly did not bother to read.
Various people can refuse his order as illegal. Former Secretary of State Jim Baker, in a
Financial Times, before Trump was elected, said the same thing. Bolton is the National
Security Adviser. He may have a lot of informal power by having direct access to the
President, but he does not tie in to the formal chain of command, either at the DoD or
State.
Oh I read it and I've read many other articles and a lot of non-fiction on the issue.
Again, I would call your position and the position of this article hopeful at best. Trump has
the football, he has the codes in his jacket pocket and everyone responsible for carrying out
the order to launch has been raised up through a military system that ensures no one
questions an order from their superior. Relying on various people to refuse his order as
illegal in this system is not a fail-safe I feel comfortable with. I do find it interesting
that you just assume I didn't read the article as if this one article is the end all be all
on the subject.
The article seems a bit confused about what it's trying to say. Stopping nuclear
proliferation has been a major policy priority of the US and other western governments since
the 1960s, and if I recall correctly it was one of Bolton's priorities when he was in Bush
the Lesser's administration. It's something in which all of the declared nuclear powers have
an interest, because the smaller the number of nuclear powers in the world, the greater the
difference between them and the rest. This is much more important than wild fantasies about
rogue attacks: if N Korea becomes a de facto nuclear power like India, Israel and Pakistan,
then all sorts of other countries might be tempted to have a go, starting with S Korea (which
has the capacity and has been caught cheating before). Whilst this risk is objectively small,
an end to the NK programme would make it even smaller. I suspect the deal will be that NK
denuclearizes and China guarantees its security: a non-nuclear NK will be even more of a
client state than it is now.
Nuclear competition among the superpowers is quite different and involves a whole set of
different issues.
Less warfare = more wall
But remember the last time Trump said something in Syria's favor? A chemical attack happened
in small village for no logical reason and the hawks immediately took to framing Assad. Trump
then backed off and took harder line on Assad, launching missiles into Syria.
So I'm inclined to think he wants a deal. But look out for screaming hawks immediately
trying to scuttle anything.
Perhaps 30 years ago, Trump was an international defense luminary, but I see little
evidence of the boasted emotional control and cool Trump claimed. He is unarguably a
successful grifter. Is that what it takes to make peace? What happens when the other guy
realizes he has been lied to by a congenital liar? Back to square 1.
In my take, the recent meeting between the heads of China and N Korea just Trumped any
leverage the US might have had in peace talks. Trump will be there only if a scapegoat is
needed. Both S. Korea and Japan have expressed doubts about our reliability as a defense
shield against powerful China – Japan and the Koreans' neighbor. What Little Rocketman
has likely achieved is diplomatically checkmating the US. Now Trump's tariff threats serve
only to push US allies in the region closer to China. Should that turn out to be the case,
the economic repercussions are as dangerous and unpredictable as nukes in the air or as Trump
himself. I sure hope I got this all wrong.
"no enduring principles" is a feature of politicians everywhere today. Their concern is to
represent the rich and their qualification is to present those biased arguments in a way that
beguiles the electorate into supposing its a good idea for them as well. Step Two is the "who
would have thought it?" response after the country catches on.
In former times the candidate for public office would assert his principles on the
hustings and the voters would remember what they knew of him before voting. Sure, there were
ambitious unreliable people who were willing to exchange their reputations for office but
they were few. We should get back to those days.
We allowed our merchants and spooks to drive USSR to the precipice without any thoughts
about the nukes they had. It appeared then that warheads supposedly in Ukraine were missing.
We will likely discover what happened to them in due course. It is possible that surveillance
of communications is the main reason they are not a thread for the time being but that does
not mean they have dropped out of existence.
Thank you NC for introducing an issue that should concern economists as much as everyone
else.
North Korea's negotiating position has not really changed with the announcement. They have
repeatedly said for years they are willing to agree to denuclearization of the Peninsula in
return for security guarantees. I find the media trumpeting this as a new development rather
vexing. Anyways, China has been putting the screws on them since about September/October
(Apparently, they told Kim Jongun they know they can't overthrow the DPRK government, but
they can get rid of him personally), which is also why there have not been any new nuclear
tests.
Don't forget the United States has itself promised to denuclearize, under the NPT.
It would certainly bring me great pleasure if Trump of all people were to bring about some
great positive change in regards to the Forever War with North Korea. Imagine all the whining
liberals if Trump, unlike Obama, actually did something worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
I think Yves has got it right: USA threatens PRC with tariffs, so PRC pressures NK to make
concessions to the USA. i.e. Two big guys screwing the little guy.
PRC and NK leaders might think that all they have to do is get through a short patch of
bad weather until 2020. If so, they are badly kidding themselves.
In the USA, imperialist machtpolitik is a thoroughly bipartisan affair. It doesn't
matter how faithfully NK or PRC might fulfill obligations. Trump's successors, whoever they
may be, will simply apply more pressure and demand more concessions. They won't stop until
somebody else stops them.
You're reading your own narrative rather than what's in front of you. Russia isn't going
to up and blow away no matter what. Their relationship with China is a matter of course as
well, though you vastly over-state the supposed synergy between the two.
My point is that a diminished Russia is obviously no threat to China and clearly in the
long term interests of China if they wish to be the chief architect and manager of the
Eurasian belt of which they have become enamored.
Taken in broader strokes, a world in which nuclear apocalypse isn't on the menu, due to
elites favoring their own survival, is one in which the West invariably declines into
obscurity due to their ruling class having no qualms about destroying their nations and
states in the name of near term personal benefits. In such a world the only question is who
will take the leading role of new geopolitical master.
China is already poised for this position, but having an assuredly weakened Russian gives
them the sort of leverage they need to siphon out more Eurasian trade profits for their own
geopolitical aims. Geopolitical top players don't simply seek a sufficient position from
which to bargain. They seek a position from which the results of said bargain are largely
foregone.
And this is entirely consistent with Chinese foreign policy toward the West and Russia.
The former is a dead man walking with no chance of rebelling against Beijing's economic
control. The latter is a future regional partner whom they would very much like to see as a
junior when the time comes for them to abandon the western financial system and asset their
peerless status.
Exactly. Very good points. China wants weaker Russia. However China can't allow Russia to
submit to the US that's why they will be propping Russia just enough so Russia does not fold
too soon. The US and China have one common objective: they do not want Russia to hook up with
EU and Germany. Russia+EU would be the only third power that could challenge both the US and
China. That's why China is happy with Zio-Amercian meddling in Central Europe by playing
Poland and Hungary against both Germany and Russia as the wedge between them.
China does not trust Russia because they know how avaricious, unpatriotic and devoid of
any deeper nationalist doctrine and thus how unreliable are Russian elites. They know it
because they know their own Chinese elites with respect to which they must use many tools to
discipline them, the tools that Russia lacks because there sis no supreme ideological
authority. There in Russia nobody really knows who suppose to discipline whom and why.
Saker as usual is naive and let his wishful thinking hijack his analytical abilities.
Russia & China are working closely to counter the West for existential threat, deeper
& broader than what your self centered mind can imagine. Russia needs to save Syria for
its own skin, and its last ME bastion of influence. When Syria down, Israel & Saudi gas
will pipe to EU & cut off Russia lucrative EU gas deal & influence. Iran will be next
to attack, hence complete ME oil & gas come under US UK Fr control, which can be utilized
to sabotage Russia oil export.
China will be then blackmailed into submission for oil supply. Iran will be surrounded by
US allied forces everywhere, fighting West moderate terrorists. Its existential war in Syria
against West hedgmon control for Russia, China & Iran, not just propping up Assad. Russia
has overwhelming sufficient military capability to fight US allies, backed by war hardened
powerful Iran, SAA army, Hezbollah & Iraq Shiah fighters unmatched ground force.
USM knows it can't win such war without nuke, so it has to find either face saving exit or
contented with current occupied oil rich land. It got nothing to do with Trumps stupidity to
overstretch its military as you imagine.
China has been backing up Russia with big cheque book for last few years, signing hundreds
of billions deals with upfront payments to prop Russia economy for prolong war.
Global times news mostly reflected the China think tank policy that they wish to propagate
to West English speaking world. China has sensed West is hysteria tightening noose around
Russia in EU foolish solitude movement with UK.
When Russia is down, China is next, vice versa. China special force has been operating in
Syria to fight terrorists. Lot of weapons ammunition supply to SAA. Lot of money pump in to
sustain Syria war & feed millions of Syrians. Who else do you think is paying these
bills, West controlled UN Red cross?
Now China is largest economy & market by PPP term, with 50% w/w mfg capacity, its
capable to inflict unacceptable damage to US economy in trade war. EU, Japan & Korea all
have huge parts export to China for assembly, so none wanted the disastrous trade war that
will suck down global trade.
So Trumpets is blowing hot air only to blackmail China, soon it will back down as WH
already delay any tariffs to after June, seeking dialogue eagerly with Beijing.
You are just silly self centered like those Russians always throwing allies under bus,
hence Russia will find it has no true ally and will forever licking its wounds alone until
slaughtered by West.
The elder Skripal awakes, tells nurses he is tired of hospital; walks out to find nearest
press mike, tells world Russia had nothing to do with it, just bad food at a Chinese
restaurant!
This slide is a good April 1 joke, courtesy of Her majesty government on Theresa May. By the way, I've heard the Russians are
now telling a joke about Boris Johnson: they're saying he was poisoned with durachok (bonehead)! but many be he is
playing fool, with vicious and calculated intention
Notable quotes:
"... All that is missing here is the mass rape of baby penguins by drunken Russian sailors in the south pole or the use of a secret "weather weapon" to send hurricanes towards the USA. ..."
In the 12 events listed as evidence of a "pattern of Russian malign activity" one is
demonstratively false (2008 invasion of Georgia), one conflates two different accusations
(occupation of Crimea and destabilization of the Ukraine), one is circular (assassination of
Skripal) and all others are completely unproven accusations.
All that is missing here is the
mass rape of baby penguins by drunken Russian sailors in the south pole or the use of a secret
"weather weapon" to send hurricanes towards the USA.
You don't need a law degree to see that,
all you need is an IQ above room temperature and a basic understanding of logic. For all my
contempt for western leaders, even I wouldn't make the claim that they all lack these. So here
is where "solidarity" kicks-in:
"Solidarity" in this context is simply a "conceptual placeholder" for Stephen Decatur 's famous " my
country, right or wrong " applied to the entire Empire. The precedent of Meine Ehre
heißt Treue just slightly rephrased into Meine Ehre heißt
Solidarität also comes to mind.
"... Still, George McGovern was a humble man who carried the burden, and honor, of his military service with grace. Though proud of his service, he was never constrained by it. When he saw a foolish war, an immoral war -- like Vietnam -- he stood ready to dissent. He was an unapologetic liberal and unwavering in his antiwar stance. These days, his kind is an endangered species on Capitol Hill and in the Democratic National Committee. McGovern died in 2012. His party, and the United States, are lesser for his absence. ..."
"... Today's Democrats are mostly avid hawks, probably to the right of Richard Nixon on foreign policy. ..."
"... Heck, even Gen. David "Generational War" Petraeus , once found himself in some hot water when -- in a rare moment of candor -- he admitted that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel." Translation: US policy toward Israel (and, no doubt, the foolhardy 2003 invasion of Iraq) make American soldiers less safe. ..."
"... So does the basic post-9/11 American policy of sovereignty violation and expansive military intervention whenever and wherever Washington feels like it -- so long as it's in the name of fighting (you guessed it) "terrorism." ..."
"... George McGovern -- a true patriot, a man who knew war but loved peace -- wouldn't recognize the likes of Klobuchar, Clinton, Schumer and company. He'd be rightfully embarrassed by their supplication to the national warfare state. ..."
"... In 1972, McGovern's presidential campaign (as, to some extent, Bernie's did) reached out to impassioned youth in the "New Left," and formed a rainbow coalition with African-Americans and other minority groups. His Democrats were no longer the party of Cold War consensus, no longer the party of LBJ and Vietnam. No, McGovern's signature issue was peace, and opposition to that disastrous war. ..."
"... His campaign distributed pins and T-shirts bearing white doves . Could you even imagine a mainstream Democrat getting within 1,000 meters of such a symbol today? Of course not. ..."
He knew war well -- well enough to know he hated it.
George McGovern was a senator from South Dakota, and he was a Democrat true liberals could admire. Though remembered as a staunch
liberal and foreign policy dove, McGovern was no stranger to combat. He
flew 35 missions
as a B-24 pilot in Italy during World War II. He even earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for executing a heroic emergency crash
landing after his bomber was damaged by German anti-aircraft fire.
Still, George McGovern was a humble man who carried the burden, and honor, of his military service with grace. Though proud
of his service, he was never constrained by it. When he saw a foolish war, an immoral war -- like Vietnam -- he stood ready to dissent.
He was an unapologetic liberal and unwavering in his antiwar stance. These days, his kind is an endangered species on Capitol Hill
and in the Democratic National Committee. McGovern died in 2012. His party, and the United States, are lesser for his absence.
Today's Democrats are mostly avid hawks, probably to the right of Richard Nixon on foreign policy. They dutifully
voted for Bush's Iraq war . Then, they won back
the White House and promptly expanded an unwinnable Afghan
war . Soon, they again lost the presidency -- to a reality TV star -- and raised hardly a peep as Donald Trump expanded
America's aimless wars
into the realm of the absurd.
I've long known this, but most liberals -- deeply ensconced (or distracted) by hyper-identity politics -- hardly notice. Still,
every once in a while something reminds me of how lost the Democrats truly are.
I nearly spit up my food the other day. Watching on C-SPAN as Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., gleefully
attended a panel at the
American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference, I couldn't help but wonder what has happened to the Democratic Party.
The worst part is I like her, mostly. Look, I agree with Sen. Klobuchar on most domestic issues: health care, taxes and
more. But she -- a supposed liberal -- and her mainstream Democratic colleagues are complicit in the perpetuation of America's warfare
state and neo-imperial interventionism. Sen. Klobuchar and other Democrats' reflexive support for Israel is but a symptom of a larger
disease in the party -- tacit militarism.
AIPAC is a lobbying clique almost as savvy and definitely as effective as the NRA. Its meetings -- well attended by mainstream
Democrats and Republicans alike -- serve as little more than an opportunity for Washington pols to kiss Benjamin Netanyahu's ring
and swear fealty to Israel. Most of the time, participants don't dare utter the word "Palestinian." That'd be untoward -- Palestinians
are the unacknowledged
elephants in the room .
The far right-wing Israeli government of Netanyahu, who is little more than a co-conspirator and enabler for America's failed
project in the Middle East, should be the last group "liberals" pander to. That said, the state of Israel is a fact. Its people --
just like the Palestinians -- deserve security and liberty. Love it or hate it, Israel will continue to exist. The question is: Can
Israel remain both exclusively Jewish and democratic? I'm less certain about that. For 50 years now, the Israeli military has divided,
occupied and enabled the illegal settlement of sovereign
Palestinian territory , keeping Arabs in limbo without citizenship or meaningful civil rights.
This is, so far as international law is concerned, a war crime. As such, unflinching American support for Israeli policy irreversibly
damages the U.S. military's reputation on the "Arab street." I've seen it firsthand. In Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds and thousands
of miles away from Jerusalem, captured prisoners and hospitable families alike constantly pointed to unfettered US support for Israel
and the plight of Palestinians when answering that naive and ubiquitous American question: "Why do they hate us?"
Heck, even
Gen. David
"Generational War" Petraeus , once found himself in
some hot water when
-- in a rare moment of candor -- he admitted that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception
of US favoritism for Israel." Translation: US policy toward Israel (and, no doubt, the foolhardy 2003 invasion of Iraq) make American
soldiers less safe.
So does the basic post-9/11 American policy of sovereignty violation and expansive military intervention whenever and wherever
Washington feels like it -- so long as it's in the name of fighting (you guessed it) "terrorism." So, which "liberals" are raising
hell and ringing the alarm bells for their constituents about Israeli occupation and America's strategic overreach? Sen. Klobuchar?
Hardly. She, and all but four Democrats, voted for
the latest bloated Pentagon budget with few questions asked. Almost as many Republicans voted against the bill. So, which is
the antiwar party these days? It's hard to know.
Besides, the Dems mustered fewer than 30 votes in support of the
Rand Paul amendment and
his modest call to repeal and replace America's outdated, vague Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). All Sen. Paul,
a libertarian Republican, wanted to do was force a vote -- in six months -- to revisit the AUMF. This wasn't radical stuff by any
means. The failure of Paul's amendment, when paired with the absolute dearth of Democratic dissent on contemporary foreign policy,
proves one thing conclusively: There is no longer an antiwar constituency in a major American political party. The two-party system
has failed what's left of the antiwar movement.
By no means is Amy Klobuchar alone in her forever-war complicity. Long before she graced the halls of the Senate, her prominent
precursors -- Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer (to name just a few) --
rubber-stamped a war of aggression in Iraq and
mostly acquiesced as one president after another (including Barack Obama) gradually expanded America's post-9/11 wars. When will
it end? No one knows, really, but so far, the US military has deployed advisers or commandos to
70 percent
of the world's countries and is actively
bombing at least seven . That's the problem with waging clandestine wars with professional soldiers while asking nothing of an
apathetic public: These conflicts tend to grow and grow, until, one day -- which passed long ago -- hardly anyone realizes we're
now at war with most everyone.
So where are the doves now? On the fringe, that's where. Screaming from the distant corners of the libertarian right and extreme
left. No one cares, no one is listening, and they can hardly get a hearing on either MSNBC or Fox. It's the one thing both networks
agree on: endless, unquestioned war. Hooray for 21st century bipartisanship.
Still, Americans deserve more from the Democrats, once (however briefly) the party of McGovern. These days, the Dems hate Trump
more than they like anything. To be a principled national party, they've got to be more than just anti-Trump. They need to provide
a substantive alternative and present a better foreign policy offer. How about a do-less strategy: For starters, some modesty and
prudent caution would go a long way.
George McGovern -- a true patriot, a man who knew war but loved peace -- wouldn't recognize the likes of Klobuchar, Clinton,
Schumer and company. He'd be rightfully embarrassed by their supplication to the national warfare state.
In 1972, McGovern's presidential campaign (as, to some extent, Bernie's did) reached out to impassioned youth in the "New
Left," and formed a rainbow coalition with African-Americans and other minority groups. His Democrats were no longer the party of
Cold War consensus, no longer the party of LBJ and Vietnam. No, McGovern's signature issue was peace, and opposition to that disastrous
war.
His campaign distributed pins and T-shirts bearing
white doves . Could you even imagine a mainstream Democrat getting within 1,000 meters of such a symbol today? Of course not.
Today's Dems are too frightened, fearful of being labeled "soft" (note the sexual innuendo) on "terror," and have thus ceded foreign
policy preeminence to the unhinged, uber-hawk Republicans. We live, today, with the results of that cowardly concession.
The thing about McGovern is that he lost the 1972 election, by a landslide. And maybe that's the point. Today's Democrats would
rather win than be right. Somewhere along the way, they lost their souls. Worse still, they aren't any good at winning, either.
Sure, they and everybody else "support the troops." Essentially, that means the Dems will at least fight for veterans' health
care and immigration rights when vets return from battle. That's admirable enough. What they won't countenance, or even consider,
is a more comprehensive, and ethical, solution: to end these aimless wars and stop making new veterans that need "saving."
Major Danny Sjursen, anAntiwar.comregular, is a U.S. Army
officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written
a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War,Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians,
and the Myth of the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kansas. Follow him on Twitter at@SkepticalVetand check out his new podcast"Fortress on a Hill,"co-hosted with fellow vet Chris 'Henri' Henrikson.
[ Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect
the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]
The problems with Germany is that it does not have any independent press... German MSM are
probably worse then the USA MSM in being neoliberal stooges, if not to say prostitutes.
Also Merkel is a staunch neoliberal politician hell bent on neoliberal globalization and who
still cling to power and tried to use the USA as a leverage to stay in power
Notable quotes:
"... So in a certain sense, I can imagine that the Russians feel really betrayed by this kind of behavior by Merkel. Now, Merkel has a specific background. You know, many people have always asked themselves, what makes this woman tick? Nobody has been able to answer that question in any satisfying way. But I think the Russians really feel betrayed. ..."
"... Merkel is just obviously following like a puppy-dog -- even though puppies are cuter than Mrs. Merkel, I would say. But I think it's a serious matter, and I think people should absolutely not fall for this, because these are the kinds of things which can get out of control and be the trigger for a new world war, and who would want that? ..."
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think the case of France is a little bit more complicated, because Macron,
who had a slightly different emphasis on the cooperation with the New Silk Road and China, than
Merkel, for example; the French Foreign Minister Yves Le Drian just announced that Macron will
go to Moscow in May. So I think that that looks a little bit different than Mrs. Merkel, who --
really, I mean, it's a complete shame, and obviously this new "Grand Coalition" government,
which is not so grand, given the fact that they are all falling in the polls like a stone; I
think this is really a reflection of the fact that there is presently no German elite worth
being called the name.
And I think that people in Germany should really not accept that. The history of the
German-Russian relationship, given the fact that there were two world wars, the Second World
War being an unbelievable memory in every Russian person; and then the fact that Russia agreed
to the German unification, without any shots being fired or tanks being deployed, -- you know,
in a peaceful way. Russia gave up East Germany and agreed to the unification, and received
promises at that time that NATO would never be expanded to the borders of Russia, a promise
which was broken. And then you had all these escalations.
So in a certain sense, I can imagine that the Russians feel really betrayed by this kind
of behavior by Merkel. Now, Merkel has a specific background. You know, many people have always
asked themselves, what makes this woman tick? Nobody has been able to answer that question in
any satisfying way. But I think the Russians really feel betrayed.
And I think the German people should go back to the kind of Ostpolitik, at minimum, which
was characteristic for German attitude for a very long time, to have a policy of
good-neighborliness, of peaceful dialogue, of cooperation. And I think this is really, really
important that the population in Germany does not fall in line with this aggressive British
policy which Merkel is just obviously following like a puppy-dog -- even though puppies are
cuter than Mrs. Merkel, I would say. But I think it's a serious matter, and I think people
should absolutely not fall for this, because these are the kinds of things which can get out of
control and be the trigger for a new world war, and who would want that?
"... Kennedy, the Lobby and the Bomb: http://www.voltairenet.org/article178401.html ..."
"... Michael Collins Piper – Final Judgement -The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy: http://americanfreepress.net/PDF/Final_Judgment.pdf ..."
"... Muammar Al-Gaddafi – Ben Gurion ordered JFK's death over Israeli Nuke Plant at Dimona: This may have angered them a bit too: http://time.com/4711687/john-f-kennedy-diary-hitler/ ..."
@redmudhooch Trump should call for a real 9/11 investigation, that would drain the swamp,
the American people would all be behind him, what better way to win over America than 9/11
justice that is way past due?
If this is democracy we need something else, if what we done to Libya, Iraq, Syria,
Afghanistan, Latin American countries is democracy, we need to rid ourselves of democracy
The entire system is 100% corrupt, including Judges, prosecutors, lawyers, the whole swamp.
Big money rules.
The media is with the deep state, they clearly have an agenda, and it doesn't seem to be an
American one, something has to be done to shut them up. Hell yes they're spying on us, They use the IRS and state revenue agencies to get back at
dissenters, I have experienced it...
Not only are they spying on us, they're spying on the politicians, judges, literally
everyone, and blackmailing the snot out of them. Using extortion to get their way. The
corruption needs to be punished, all of it, not just who deep state chooses to get back at.
They're all corrupt.
Look at the electoral map for 2016 election, it is nearly completely red, and all that red
is very well armed and very pissed off. If Trump does the things he got elected on, stops
kissing Netanyahus ass he'll be fine. All he would have to do is get on twitter and make the
announcement, tell the people to help him drain the swamp, shut it down, we can protest and
yell just as loud as the well funded made for tv protesters. People have had enough, we can't
go on this way, people feel threatened now, and they will do what needs to be done to protect
their families. We just need an organizer (Trump) to give the word. But if he keeps up the war
mongering and giving in to the establishment on all the issues that won him the election, hes
done.
Look at what happend to Jim Traficant when he got out of line, who goes to jail in DC?
People who do the right thing.. Heres another example of how they get their way: Atlanta Jewish Times featured a column by its owner-publisher suggesting that U.S.-based
Israeli Mossad agents might someday need to "order a hit" on the president of the United
States.
On Jan. 13 the Atlanta Jewish Times featured a column by its owner-publisher suggesting that
Israel might someday need to "order a hit" on the president of the United States.
In the column, publisher Andrew Adler describes a scenario in which Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu would need to "give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president
deemed unfriendly to Israel." The purpose? So that the vice president could then take office and dictate U.S. policies that
would help the Jewish state "obliterate its enemies." Adler wrote that it is highly likely that the idea "has been discussed in Israel's most inner
circles."
I think this is what happened to JFK when he tried shutting down CIA, cracking down on the
Israeli lobby, inspecting Israeli Dimona nuclear facility. END the Fed scam, take away the
blank check.
I think this is what happened to JFK when he tried shutting down CIA, cracking down on the
Israeli lobby, inspecting Israeli Dimona nuclear facility. END the Fed scam, take away the
blank check.
Finally, Kennedy had enough, and in a personal letter dated May 18, 1963, the president
warned that unless American inspectors were allowed into Dimona (meaning the end of any
military activities), Israel would find itself totally isolated. Rather than answering,
Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned.
John F. Kennedy Administration: Summary of Eshkol Reply To Kennedy Letter (November 9,
1963)
In the November 12 talks we hope through open and frank responses to convince the Israeli
representatives of our sympathetic interest in their security concerns and of our genuine
desire to help Israel to the best of our ability. We will press the view that U.S. ability to
deter aggression against Israel makes less imperative the need for Israel to maintain clear
military superiority over the U.A.R. in all fields and underlines the futility of large
expenditures of time, effort and money on a spiralling arms race. We will stress that
Israel's acquisition of missiles could result in a Soviet supply of missiles to the U.A.R.
and that a missile race increases the chance of a missile exchange in which Israel as a
small, compact target would inevitably suffer most.
Details of the JFK-RFK duo's effort to register the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee's (AIPAC) parent organization, the American Zionist Council (AZC) as an Israeli
foreign agent were shrouded in mystery until declassified in mid-2008.
The diary reveals that during his time in Berlin, Kennedy wrote about visiting Hitler's
bunker only months after Germany surrendered in the Second World War.
"You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred
that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived," Kennedy wrote
in his diary in 1945.
"He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the
world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that
will live and grow after him," he added. "He had in him the stuff of which legends are
made."
This hypothesis about JFK preserves currency for along time: "When JFK started dismantling the CIA Deep State and ending the
Cold War with the USSR, Dulles dispatched a CIA hit-squad to gun down the President. (RFK and Nixon immediately understood the assassination
was a CIA-led wet-works operation since they chaired the assassination committees themselves in the past). "
Notable quotes:
"... The liberal order aka the New British Empire, was born 70 years ago by firebombing and nuking undefended civilian targets. It proceeded to launch serial genocidal rampages in the Koreas, SE Asia, Latin America until finally burning down a large portion of the Middle East. ..."
"... The liberal order is dying because it is led by criminally depraved Predators who have pauperized the labor force and created political strife, though the populists don't pose much threat to the liberal-order Predators. ..."
"... However by shipping the productive Western economies overseas to Asia, the US in particular cannot finance and physically support a military empire or the required R&D to stay competitive on the commercial and military front. ..."
The usual self-serving swill from the Best and the Brightest of the Predator Class out of the CFR via Haas.
The liberal order aka the New British Empire, was born 70 years ago by firebombing and nuking undefended civilian targets.
It proceeded to launch serial genocidal rampages in the Koreas, SE Asia, Latin America until finally burning down a large portion
of the Middle East.
The fact that there has not been a catastrophic nuclear war is pure dumb luck. The Deep State came within seconds of engineering
a nuclear cataclysm off the waters of Cuba in 1962. When JFK started dismantling the CIA Deep State and ending the Cold War with
the USSR, Dulles dispatched a CIA hit-squad to gun down the President. (RFK and Nixon immediately understood the assassination
was a CIA-led wet-works operation since they chaired the assassination committees themselves in the past).
The liberal order is dying because it is led by criminally depraved Predators who have pauperized the labor force and created
political strife, though the populists don't pose much threat to the liberal-order Predators.
However by shipping the productive Western economies overseas to Asia, the US in particular cannot finance and physically
support a military empire or the required R&D to stay competitive on the commercial and military front.
So the US Imperialists are being eclipsed by the Sino-Russo Alliance and wants us to believe this is a great tragedy. Meanwhile
the same crew of Liberal -neoCon Deep Staters presses on with wars and tensions that are slipping out of control.
This hypothesis about JFK preserves currency for along time: "When JFK started dismantling the CIA Deep State and ending the
Cold War with the USSR, Dulles dispatched a CIA hit-squad to gun down the President. (RFK and Nixon immediately understood the assassination
was a CIA-led wet-works operation since they chaired the assassination committees themselves in the past). "
Notable quotes:
"... The liberal order aka the New British Empire, was born 70 years ago by firebombing and nuking undefended civilian targets. It proceeded to launch serial genocidal rampages in the Koreas, SE Asia, Latin America until finally burning down a large portion of the Middle East. ..."
"... The liberal order is dying because it is led by criminally depraved Predators who have pauperized the labor force and created political strife, though the populists don't pose much threat to the liberal-order Predators. ..."
"... However by shipping the productive Western economies overseas to Asia, the US in particular cannot finance and physically support a military empire or the required R&D to stay competitive on the commercial and military front. ..."
The usual self-serving swill from the Best and the Brightest of the Predator Class out of the CFR via Haas.
The liberal order aka the New British Empire, was born 70 years ago by firebombing and nuking undefended civilian targets.
It proceeded to launch serial genocidal rampages in the Koreas, SE Asia, Latin America until finally burning down a large portion
of the Middle East.
The fact that there has not been a catastrophic nuclear war is pure dumb luck. The Deep State came within seconds of engineering
a nuclear cataclysm off the waters of Cuba in 1962. When JFK started dismantling the CIA Deep State and ending the Cold War with
the USSR, Dulles dispatched a CIA hit-squad to gun down the President. (RFK and Nixon immediately understood the assassination
was a CIA-led wet-works operation since they chaired the assassination committees themselves in the past).
The liberal order is dying because it is led by criminally depraved Predators who have pauperized the labor force and created
political strife, though the populists don't pose much threat to the liberal-order Predators.
However by shipping the productive Western economies overseas to Asia, the US in particular cannot finance and physically
support a military empire or the required R&D to stay competitive on the commercial and military front.
So the US Imperialists are being eclipsed by the Sino-Russo Alliance and wants us to believe this is a great tragedy. Meanwhile
the same crew of Liberal -neoCon Deep Staters presses on with wars and tensions that are slipping out of control.
"... It should also be noted that Bolton is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations , an organization whose members have influenced the state of geopolitics for the last few generations. Bolton was also a member of the neo-conservative, warhawk think tank, "Project for the New American Century," which was enthusiastically promoting the lie about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction. ..."
"... In 2000, PNAC released a report titled Rebuilding America's Defenses which outlined a strategy of regime change in Iraq and beyond. Under a section titled "Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force," the think tank wrote the following controversial line: ..."
"... "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." ..."
This article was written by Derrick Broze and originally published at
Activist Post
The latest neo-conservative warmonger to join the Trump Administration does not bode well for the people of Iran.
On Thursday Donald Trump announced that John Bolton, a former official in George W. Bush's administration and former ambassador
to the UN, would be his new National Security Advisor. Bolton is a warhawk who called for the invasion of Iraq in search of non-existent
weapons of mass destruction and has for years called for the invasion of Iran.
Middle East Eye collected
a number of quotes from Bolton over the years that indicate his plans for Iran and other nations viewed as a threat to national
security of the U.S. government. And by that I mean the people who secretly wield control of corporate and state power.
In 2009, Bolton said that regime change is "ultimately, the only thing that will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons." As recent
as 2015 Bolton call for a U.S./Israel joint bombing campaign."Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran's
opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran."
Meanwhile, Senator Rand Paul questioned the appointment. "It concerns me that Trump would put someone in charge who is unhinged
as far as believing in absolute and total intervention,"
Paul stated. Bolton's appointment
was also criticized by Trita Parsi, leader of the National Iranian American Council.
Further, it seems that Bolton and former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani have already promised the regime change would be happening
within the next year. "Just eight months ago, at a Paris gathering, Bolton told members of the Iranian exile group, known as the
Mujahedeen Khalq, MEK, or People's Mujahedeen, that the Trump administration should embrace their goal of immediate regime change
in Iran and recognize their group as a 'viable' alternative,"
The Intercept
reports.
"The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime
itself," newly appointed National Security Advisor John Bolton told the crowd. The Intercept also noted that Iranian expatriate
journalist Bahman Kalbasi reported that Bolton ended his talk by promising, "And that's why, before 2019, we here will celebrate
in Tehran!"
At a recent celebration of the Persian New Year, Rudy Giuliani promised the audience that "if anything, John Bolton has become
more determined that there needs to be regime change in Iran, that the nuclear agreement needs to be burned, and that you need to
be in charge of that country." Disturbingly, Giuliani reportedly led the crowd in a chant of "regime change!".
It should also be noted that Bolton is a member
of the Council on Foreign Relations , an organization whose members have influenced the state of geopolitics for the last few
generations. Bolton was also a member of the neo-conservative, warhawk think tank, "Project for the New American Century," which
was enthusiastically promoting the lie about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction.
In 2000, PNAC released a report titled
Rebuilding America's Defenses which outlined a strategy of regime change in Iraq and beyond. Under a section titled "Creating
Tomorrow's Dominant Force," the think tank wrote the following controversial line:
"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."
Less than a year later, 10 of the 18 men who signed the paper became members of the Bush administration. The attacks of 9/11 would
come soon after and the neocons had their "catastrophic and catalyzing event" and an excuse to invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria,
and soon possibly, Iran.
The men included Bush's Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition; William Kristol, editor of
the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, and Richard Perle, chairman of the advisory Defense Science Board.
In addition to the well-known Pearl Harbor quote, the paper goes on to describe the eventual outcome of the initial regime change.
"Thus, this report advocates a two-stage process of change – transition and transformation – over the coming decades." If the last
15 years of war, violence, and death in the Middle East have been the "transition" phase, John Bolton and Trump may be preparing
to shift gears and move into the "transformation" phase – beginning with the invasion of Iran. However, based on PNAC's track record,
they might be looking for a new catastrophic event to generate support for intervention in Iran.
Sebastian Rotella reports
on how many of the people that worked with Bolton remember his tendency to distort intelligence
and ignore facts that contradicted his assumptions:
"Anyone who is so cavalier not just with intelligence, but with facts, and so
ideologically driven, is unfit to be national security adviser," said Robert Hutchings, who
dealt extensively with Bolton as head of the National Intelligence Council, a high-level
agency that synthesizes analysis from across the intelligence community to produce strategic
assessments for policymakers. "He's impervious to information that goes against his
preconceived ideological views." [bold mine-DL]
That assessment lines up with what I understood about Bolton, and it points to one of the
biggest problems with his appointment. I wrote this shortly
before Trump announced that he was choosing Bolton:
The real danger is that he is such an ideologue that he would keep information from the
president that contradicts his views and prevent Trump from getting the best available
advice. Trump is poorly informed to begin with, and having Bolton as his main adviser on
matters of national security and foreign policy would make sure that he stays that way.
Trump is especially susceptible to being manipulated by his advisers into endorsing the
policies they want because he knows so little and responds so favorably to flattery, and he has
shown that he is already more than willing to select a more aggressive option when he is told
that it is the "presidential" thing to do. We should expect that Bolton will feed Trump bad or
incomplete information, present aggressive options in the most favorable light while dismissing
alternatives, and praise Trump's leadership to get him to go along with the hard-line policies
Bolton wants. Bolton will run a very distorted policy process and he will be the opposite of an
honest broker. That won't serve Trump well, and it will be terrible for our foreign policy.
I think this is what happened to JFK when he tried shutting down CIA, cracking down on
the Israeli lobby, inspecting Israeli Dimona nuclear facility. END the Fed scam, take away
the blank check.
Finally, Kennedy had enough, and in a personal letter dated May 18, 1963, the president
warned that unless American inspectors were allowed into Dimona (meaning the end of any
military activities), Israel would find itself totally isolated. Rather than answering,
Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned.
John F. Kennedy Administration: Summary of Eshkol Reply To Kennedy Letter (November 9,
1963)
In the November 12 talks we hope through open and frank responses to convince the Israeli
representatives of our sympathetic interest in their security concerns and of our genuine
desire to help Israel to the best of our ability. We will press the view that U.S. ability to
deter aggression against Israel makes less imperative the need for Israel to maintain clear
military superiority over the U.A.R. in all fields and underlines the futility of large
expenditures of time, effort and money on a spiralling arms race. We will stress that
Israel's acquisition of missiles could result in a Soviet supply of missiles to the U.A.R.
and that a missile race increases the chance of a missile exchange in which Israel as a
small, compact target would inevitably suffer most.
Details of the JFK-RFK duo's effort to register the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee's (AIPAC) parent organization, the American Zionist Council (AZC) as an Israeli
foreign agent were shrouded in mystery until declassified in mid-2008.
The diary reveals that during his time in Berlin, Kennedy wrote about visiting Hitler's
bunker only months after Germany surrendered in the Second World War.
"You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred
that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived," Kennedy wrote
in his diary in 1945.
"He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the
world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that
will live and grow after him," he added. "He had in him the stuff of which legends are
made."
The last paragraph torpedoes the rest of the article! If anyone deserves to be called a
"fatcat" and a member of the "US plutocrat class", it's Donald Trump! If that class is
seeking to "take back" the US from somebody, it can't possibly be Trump. He's one of them.
Isn't it more likely that they are trying to take it back from the "Russian plutocrat
class" of gangsters behind Vladimir Putin and their American supporters? Trying to take
one's country back from foreigners, or prevent foreigners from getting control of it, is
hardly an ignoble enterprise! Certainly not where I come from!
The analysis of the UVA Amsterdam professor Laslo Maracs is that Trump, and his rich
friends, understand that the USA is no longer capable of maintaining an empire, and that war
for enlarging the empire is even more suicide than trying to maintain the empire.
Already around 1910 the British empire no longer could maintain the two fleet standard,
Obama had to lower the USA two war standard to one and a half.
What a half war accomplishes we see in Syria.
WWII destroyed the British empire, as the British said after the war, poor, after Truman
ended LendLease overnight, less food than in the war 'we won the war, and lost the
peace'.
So the fact that Trump is rich, and has rich friends, does not mean he's part of the whole
rich USA clique.
"the US has gone from a reasonably free country where civil liberties were protected under the law, to a state-of-the-art
surveillance state ruled by invisible elites who see the American people as an obstacle to their global ambitions"
One of the clearest telltales that indicate just how far we have deviated from our former "reasonably free country" is how
today, the wealthy, elite corporate and civic leaders have isolated themselves from the general community. Formerly anyone could
find the address of his community's leaders because they lived scattered amongst the common people. Even Who's Who gave out the
city in which a prominent person lived and from there one could consult the telephone directory.
Today, the elite have wiped clean any public trace of where they live. Their phone numbers are not published in a public telephone
directory. It's as though they don't want their fellow citizens to know their whereabouts. Why is that?
As I say, there's no clearer indication that our leaders no longer identify with the people of the communities they rule. Either
they are afraid--and justifiably so because of their treasonous behavior--or they are just plain disdainful--also likely, since
the two are not mutually exclusive. Their fear is the opposite side of the coin of their disdain but at any rate, it's an acknowledgement
by them that the sense of community knitted together by common bonds, is gone.
everything you say is true and it does not matter unless you are an American.
our elites along with the english have been ruling the world for 5 centuries and are now in hysteria because all that is now
drawing to a close. without the usa military acting as a global enforcer for elites wet dreams they remain wet dreams.
Russia now technically has thwarted our elites from using muscle. China's economic rise will supplant the usa within a decade
and by the 2030′s the financial center of the world will move to shanghai from new york/london.
The entire history of mankind speaks the same tale. once and empire collapses it NEVER recovers its former status and power.
the anglosaxon empire is now running on empty ergo the media hysteria of russia this and that. even the serfs ..thats you and
i ..can no longer be trusted to vote the way we are told.
the msm is dying as the go to organization for people control. we no longer live in the 20th century so the iron fist of ruling
is pretty much out as an option.
the elites have their wealth but their power at least here is on the downswing.
ideas and opinion are how societies are controlled and the elite orgs for disseminating these things have become embarassingly
overt which makes their effectivness drop towards zero . hence the hysteria.
when you have nothing to sell or nothing anyone with a brain will purchase you have to appeal to irrational emotions but that
is a futile game plan because maintaining that level of frantic enrgy is exhausting and collapses in time of its own accord.
all the rising east has to do is watch us eat ourselves to death. they have to do nothing aggressive towards our deep state
idiots in power do it for them.
at the end of the day americans will still be stuck with the swamp until it collapses into bankruptcy once the dollar loses
its reserve status still some years ahead . by 2030.
once the dollars loses its status america becomes regular nation. how we pick up the pieces after that will be the real story.
Germany - if I remember correctly - was instrumental on behalf of her client state Croatia
in persuading the U S to acquise in the destruction of Yugoslavia.
Many could see at the time that this would unravel all the balances put into place after the
travail of World War 2 . So it is proving to be . The German peoples' for whatever reasons have
a history of 'overeach'. On one hand the Germans are now - after millennium - within settled
borders but the political and economic wisdom and patience still seems lacking .
"... Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism, Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, Stanford University Press 2018, 280 pages ..."
Millennials and members of Generation Z have spent much of if not their entire lives at war.
As I've noted in these
pages and elsewhere , the
Afghan conflict is now in its 17th year, with
more than 6,000 days having gone by, making it the longest war in American history. I was
12 years old when that war began in 2001; I'm now a month out from my 29th birthday. Beginning
next year, the newly enlisted 18-year-olds who are deployed to Afghanistan will be younger than
the war they are fighting.
The Iraq war began in 2003, saw a major troop withdrawal in 2011, and then was re-escalated
by former President Obama in 2014. American forces remain there today to aid in the fight
against the Islamic State, despite an agreement
with the Iraqis that was supposed to begin a troop drawdown. An American-led regime change
intervention turned Libya into a failed state. And we have blanketed countries such as Pakistan
and Yemen with drone warfare, so much so that
drones now haunt their citizens' dreams . U.S. Special Forces were on
the ground conducting activities in 149 countries as of 2017.
This kind of foreign policy adventurism is hardly unique to the present day. America has
been aggressively deploying its military on foreign soil since the late 19th century. As
Stephen Kinzer shows in his book Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to
Iraq, we got our foot in the door of the regime change business all the way
back in 1893 with our acquisition of Hawaii.
Living in a post-9/11 world has shattered any inclination to view domestic life as separate
from and unaffected by foreign policy, particularly since the 2013 publication of classified
NSA documents leaked to the press by Edward Snowden. Snowden's revelations threw back the
curtain on an omnipresent surveillance apparatus under which very few aspects of our digital
lives were left unmonitored -- all in the name of national security and the global war on
terror.
The Snowden leaks demonstrate how an adventurous foreign policy can have negative
consequences for liberty at home. Now, political economists Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall
have documented this phenomenon in their important new book, Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism .
In their words, "coercive foreign intervention creates opportunities to develop and refine
methods and technologies of social control."
Coyne and Hall, economists at George Mason University and the University of Tampa
respectively, introduce a concept for understanding this phenomenon called the "boomerang
effect." It works like this: the constraints on the activities of the U.S. government in the
realm of foreign policy are generally weak, which enables those involved in foreign
interventions to engage in practices abroad that would meet some institutional resistance on
the home front. Eventually, though, interventions end, the interveners come home, and the
practices employed on foreign soil are imported for use against the domestic population.
This importation happens along three separate channels. First, there is the development of
human capital -- the skills, knowledge, and other characteristics that contribute to one's
productive capacity. All companies, organizations, and agencies have goals they seek to
accomplish, so they hire people with the right kind of human capital to execute said goals.
Foreign intervention is no different.
Among the characteristics necessary for interveners include extreme confidence in their
ability to solve complex problems in other countries, a sense of superiority and righteousness,
comfort with pushing the ethical envelope, limited compassion and sympathy for the targeted
population, and the association of state order with control. Interventionists, as Coyne and
Hall put it, treat "society as a grand science project that can be rationalized and improved on
by enlightened and well-intentioned engineers."
The second phase occurs when the interventionists come home. Some may retire, but many go to
work in various public- and private-sector jobs. The skills and mentalities that served them
well abroad don't disappear, so they begin employing their unique human capital domestically.
Those who land in the public sector are able to influence domestic policy, where they see
threats to liberty becoming manifest. Because of the relative lack of constraints when
operating in a foreign theater, tactics that would otherwise cross the line domestically are
seen as standard operating procedure.
Finally, physical capital plays a significant role in bringing methods of foreign
intervention back home. Technological innovation "allows governments to use lower-cost methods
of social control with a greater reach." The federal government spends billions annually on
research and development, which buys a variety of different capabilities. These technologies,
many originally intended for foreign populations, can be used domestically. One example the
authors point to are the surveillance methods originally used in the Iraq war that found their
way to the Baltimore Police Department for routine use.
The implication of the boomerang effect for policing doesn't end with surveillance. It can
also help explain police militarization, the origins of which lie in the foreign interventions
of the Progressive Era, specifically in the Philippines.
In the wake of the Spanish-American War, Spain ceded its colonial territories to the United
States. This led to the Philippine-American War, a bloody conflict
that directly and indirectly caused the deaths of 200,000 Filipino civilians, and which
ended in 1902.
As veterans returned home from the Philippines, many sought careers in law enforcement where
they were able to implement practices inspired by their days in the military. The effect of
this was to "establish precedents whereby military personnel and tactics not only would be
considered legitimate but welcomed" by police administrations. Police militarization wouldn't
kick into high gear until the latter half of the 20th century, with the introduction of SWAT
teams and the federalization of law enforcement during the LBJ and Nixon years. The men behind
the development of SWAT were veterans of the Vietnam War.
What ultimately creates the conditions for this boomerang effect to take place? One factor,
Coyne and Hall argue, is fear. Fear and crisis, both perceived and real, creates "space for
government to expand the scope of its powers and adopt the techniques of state-produced social
control that it has developed and honed abroad." Fear can lead people to seek assurances from
authorities, which goads them into tolerating and even demanding expansions of state powers --
powers that in less fearful times they would not accept.
Once accumulated, that power becomes a normal part of life, and isn't easily given up, as
the great economic historian Robert Higgs shows in his classic work Crisis and Leviathan . Anyone who has gone through airport
security over the last 17 years understands this, as the fear of terror attacks after 9/11 has
led to ratcheted up airline security measures by the TSA. This has resulted in some fairly
egregious violations of person and privacy, despite very
little evidence that they work.
Coyne's and Hall's book is a great, conceptually holistic investigation into how the state
can threaten our liberty. Economists regularly recognize the unintended consequences of
domestic policy; Coyne and Hall have explained the unintended consequences of foreign policy,
and their costs. It's particularly timely, as President Trump's tenure has seen decision-making
authority at the Pentagon pushed down the chain of command, leaving the United States'
war-making capabilities even less accountable and transparent. This book is an incisive
elucidation of what writer Randolph Bourne recognized a century ago and of which we could use a
perpetual reminder: war truly is the health of the state.
Jerrod A. Laber is a writer and Free Society Fellow with Young Voices. He is a
contributor to the Washington Examiner , and his work has appeared in Real Clear
Defense , Quillette , and the Columbus Dispatch , among others.
"... The problem is CIA impunity. CIA uses it to make money -- and to make plutocrats and keep them in line. You don't like plutocrats? Good for you. Lock up some CIA scumbags, storm Langley and take the files, problem solved. ..."
This article is a tour de force of beating around the bush. It relates a campaign initiated
and led by CIA DCI John Brennan, prosecuted with illegal secret government surveillance,
coerced confessions, and suppressed investigation of the murder of Seth Rich. And it blames
the Plutocrat Class.
How many divisions does the Plutocrat Class have? Does the Plutocrat Class have impunity
for murder, torture, and denial of the rights of trial? Does the Plutocrat Class have
anything like these get-out-jail-free cards?
The Central Intelligence Agency Act, which
put CIA covert crime beyond the reach of any court. The Rogers-Houston MOU permitting the DCI
to abort DoJ investigations with the magic words 'national security.'
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes the identity of CIA criminals a
state secret. The operational files exemption to FOIA, which prohibits public scrutiny of
evidence of CIA crime.
The 'political questions' judicial doctrine which stops judicial review of CIA crimes
condoned, however vaguely or unwittingly, by Congress.
The article outlines criminal coup de main by domestic enemies, and sics us on cartoon
Rich Uncle Pennybags.
Don't get wrapped around the axle overthinking some rock-paper-scissors transitivity
relations of abstract political and economic power -- that's CIA-infiltrated Paris Review
bullshit. Impunity beats money every time. To understand this, just watch what happens when a
plutocrat gets in CIA's way. You see right away who's in charge. Plutocrat Ralph Nacchio
learned his lesson, didn't he?
Plutocrat Elliot Spitzer learned his lesson. Dynastic plutocrats John and Bobby Kennedy
didn't learn their lesson fast enough, but everybody else got the message.
The problem is CIA impunity. CIA uses it to make money -- and to make plutocrats and
keep them in line. You don't like plutocrats? Good for you. Lock up some CIA scumbags, storm
Langley and take the files, problem solved.
Speaking candidly to a Columbia University audience comprised largely of College Republicans
and a few hecklers expecting a debate, Coulter broke down her bitter disappointment with Trump
- recounting one instance in which she and the President engaged in a "profanity-laced shouting
match" in the Oval Office last year over what she felt was his weak follow-through on
immigration promises made during the campaign.
" It kind of breaks my heart, " Coulter acknowledged of her disappointment with the
president, and she recounted a profanity-laced shouting match she had with Trump in the Oval
Office last year over what she saw as his lackluster follow-through on immigration policy. "
He's not giving us what he promised at every single campaign stop ." -
Daily Beast
That said, Coulter still says that Trump was the best house in a bad neighborhood when it
came to voting for the 2016 lineup of candidates.
"I regret nothing. I'd do the exact same thing," said Coulter. "We had 16 lunatics being
chased by men with nets running for president -- and Trump. So of course I had to be
pedal-to-the-metal for Donald Trump. I'd been waiting 30 years for someone to say all these
things " -- i.e., that illegal immigration is hurting low-income American citizens and carries
with it high rates of crime. " I went into this completely clear-eyed ."
"I knew he was a shallow, lazy ignoramus, and I didn't care," said the conservative
pundit.
At one point in the evening, Coulter dispatched a heckler after she blamed income inequality
in California on immigration.
We are bringing in immigrants who are good for the very rich, " she said. "They don't live
in their neighborhoods. They don't fill up their schools or their hospital emergency rooms.
And, oh boy, you should see how clean Juanita gets the bathtub. You can eat off of it after
she's done. "
"You're a racist! " shouted a young man from back.
" No, I'm sorry, the people bringing in Juanita, the maid, and underpaying her, are the
racists, " Coulter fired back. " You are a moron! " she added, to fervent applause. " You're
very stupid. I can't argue with stupid people ."
On Wednesday evening, Coulter joined Fox Business Network 's Lou Dobbs to discuss her
"ignoramus" comment. When Dobbs called her out on it, she said " A switch changed with him ,"
adding "An elegant person would have said the things he was saying. It was precisely that he
was so coarse that allowed him to say these incredibly courageous things. He didn't care what
Manhattan elites thought of him ."
" Now all he wants is for Goldman Sachs to like him ," she continued. "I don't know what
happened. But that's a different president. I haven't changed. He has."
"Affirmation complexes are never attractive and unfortunately I believe there is some truth
to the fact that there are those in the White House who would like to guide him toward this
liberal fantasy that is a nightmare for America and has proved to be such for our middle class
which has been dwindling for the past 20 years," Dobbs said, to Coulter's hearty agreement.
"Under this president, they're starting to grow and money is starting to come in and we're
starting to see housing prices rise."
"... Surprisingly, most Americans have not been taken in by the media's promotional hoopla about elections and democracy. They have a fairly-decent grasp of how the system works and who ultimately benefits from it. ..."
"... That democracy is a sham has been the case for decades. It is doubtful the American electorate has a grasp about anything, but regardless .what will they do about it? ..."
The survey appears to confirm that democracy in the United States is largely a sham. Our
elected representatives are not the agents of political change, but cogs in a vast
bureaucratic machine that operates mainly in the interests of the behemoth corporations and
banks.
Surprisingly, most Americans have not been taken in by the media's promotional
hoopla about elections and democracy. They have a fairly-decent grasp of how the system
works and who ultimately benefits from it.
That democracy is a sham has been the case for decades. It is doubtful the American
electorate has a grasp about anything, but regardless .what will they do about it?
Surprisingly, most Americans have not been taken in by the media's promotional hoopla
about elections and democracy. They have a fairly-decent grasp of how the system works and
who ultimately benefits from it.
One can only hope that is true, but I have my doubts.
Damned good question, Real. Since they have a collection of dossiers on everyone in a
position to do something, I suspect nothing. Oh, they may sacrifice a Brennan, much more
likely McCabe, Struzck (or whatever), Lisa Page. They were the operatives. But then, faced
with ten years, thrown to the wolves, denied his pension, facing jail, with McCabe, maybe
they can play let's make a deal. Brennan would HATE that. Then, those operatives maybe start
having accidents. The trick is to keep everyone quiet. One way or the other. They really want
to protect Hillary, but I don't get it. Maybe if Hillary could tell HER tales it could trade
UP to Soros. He's a monster.
Things roll down hills, Real, DC is a funny place. Believe me, the lights burn furiously
all over Washington these days, the bad guys, the Deep State need to cover all this. The
private recriminations must be hideous. All around them, people that can bring them down and
you really cannot kill everyone. The last one was Monica, that was several departments
working 24/7 for a couple of years. That was blow jobs by actual comparison. But this one is
sizzling. This one means the country, war, the integrity of our systems, or will put the lie
to formerly noble notions. This one tell us if we're the United States with Justice For All,
or if we're a Commercial/Military Junta. We have to pick one.
"That democracy is a sham has been the case for decades."
Yes, I agree, and the biggest sham of all is that somehow the US is SUPPOSED to be a
democracy. That's pure bullshit. The word 'democracy" doesn't appear in the text of the
Constitution, and the early statesmen opposed the very idea, calling it "mob rule", "king
numbers" and "the tyranny of the majority", among other epithets.
Congress members are required to swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, not
to bow to majority opinion on anything, whether that opinion comes from their own
constituency or not. The democracy scam gives Congress members the pretext for disregarding
the Constitution or for cherry picking the provisions of the document using "the will of the
people" as a defense for their malfeasance.
Perversely, this also ends up betraying the interests of their true constituents in favor
of providing for the interests of whoever pays them the biggest bribes. In a democracy, the
representatives allow themselves to do whatever they think will feather their own nests while
claiming that they are bowing to the will of "the people".
You are quite right, Power Elite is more accurate description, but now that the
term Deep State has reached common parlance, is it useful to try to rebrand them?
Well, perhaps, because what we have now is a general misidentification (misdirection!) of
defining the Deep State. Some single out the Intel agencies, others blame think-tanks, some
even blame career civil servants (the 'bureaucrat' smear). Are these accusers really
gatekeepers for the deep money interests?
All the same, how would you do it, and is it worthwhile? We've had the same chatter about
the Fake News, i.e. MSM vs. Legacy News vs. Corporate News vs. Big News, etc. Some good work
is coming out under Deep State -
Misunderstanding the Deep State
CIA Agent Whistleblower Risks All To Expose The Shadow Government
The 'deep state' is not a 'conspiracy theory', it is a basic fact beyond debating. The deep
state by definition means the USA's military industrial complex, i.e. all of the massive
security agencies (Dept of Defense; CIA; State Dept; Pentagon; US Army; CentComm; Navy;
Marines; NSA; NSC; etc) combined with their partners in the corporate sector who sell them
the equipment: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, General
Electric, SAIC, Huntington Ingalls, etc. The 'revolving door' between these two sectors is a
key aspect of the deep state: top ranking brass leave public service to take top positions at
these defense corporations, or become lobbyists for them to continue their multi-billion
dollar contracts at the government trough. The top officials at the security agencies often
have careers spanning decades: these people are 'the deep state' personified. Presidents come
and go, they are window dressing. The deep state calls the shots.
Maybe better to say 'Deep State shoots, and wants far more shooting'.
Just this day a former member of the EU Commission, he did Foreign Affairs, retired, appeared
on the leading German tv channel, with deep doubts about May's assertions, and deep concern
where the anti Russia propaganda will lead to.
He had negotiated with Putin, who he described a very rational man.
He still was quite emotional about the western lies that lead to the attack on Iraq.
BBC, or BBCW, did not watch it myself, broadcast the same interview, also, today.
One cannot fool all people for all times.
BS. The "power elite" in the US is associated with a clearly identifiable group, which
doesn't even hide its own tribal interest and allegiances. A parasite lodged in a host. Its
messianic DNA slowly unfolds and takes over the host's vital functions. Loss of identity and
cognitive ability are only phases preceding total destruction. The complicit host is
apparently fully and gleefully embracing its fate.
Yeah. Distract them with the race issue. Kill extra couple of blacks. Provoke riots. Seen
some money to BLM. And have the right and alt-right and all Sailers write about race , IQ
until they dissipate all energy they got.
It's impossible to overstate the significance of the survey. The data suggest that
representative democracy is a largely a fraud, that congressmen and senators are mostly
sock-puppets who do the bidding of wealthy powerbrokers, and that the entire system is
impervious to the will of the people.
How far-off it it to naming the Jews as the powerbrokers?
How far-off is the JQ – one year – two, three, four?
Lol yep here we go again it must be Russia and Putin,I sure hope nothing happens to
either, for if it did you would have nothing to live for,that grand place you live in would
be awful lonesome with out either to whine about ,.
It seems you may have missed the main thrust of the article. It is that the Deep State is
directing what Trump does or doesn't do. Trump may not like what he is doing but he has
little choice but to eat crap and comfort himself with vacuous bluster on Twitter.
Deep state?
Sounds like what they called "corporate state" a century ago, especially since there's
little hidden and nothing profound about it. Should be called "mafia state."
The Deep State wielded preponderant power over this nation at least by the time Lincoln
was buried, and its main actors then were virtually all pure WASPs (the non-Wasps were all
Protestants of Continental Germanic ancestry, some of them Saxons, as was Martin Luther).
Jews didn't become the major power in the US Deep State until well after WW2. Probably
after the assassination of JFK. Of course, you also need to face the many implications of the facts that Anglo-Saxon
Puritanism was a Judaizing heresy and that archetypal Mr. WASP himself Oliver Cromwell made
the alliance with Jews concrete.
WASP culture is doing what it always was meant to do.
The Deep State was called The Shadow Government in the 9o's.
And its the same thing it always was people and groups with ideologies or money
interest or power interest or foreign interest ..all trying to direct the government to serve
their interest.
And for the most part they have been successful in doing that.
I don't think that "deep state" is a correct term or that "unelected officials" are so
crucial.
What you got here is typical of any country: power elite . This elite is, in most
modern countries, comprised of big money (different sources in different lands), dominant
media & controllers of intellectual discourse through academia, military infrastructure
plus professional politicians, various intelligence agencies etc.
Only, the power elite is not eternally homogeneous & can be engaged in internal
warfare, and sometimes collapse.
says: March 28, 2018 at
1:28 am GMT 200 Words @L.K Michael
Scheuer may be better than the avg but he is still much LESS than honest when he talks about
the wars in Iraq and Syria.
The reality is that ISIS, Al Qaeda in Syria(formerly known as Nusra Front) & all other
Salafist groups which were, from day one, the real "rebel" fighting forces on the ground, were
created/funded and armed by the ZUS led coalition, in order to overthrow the Syrian government
& justify US meddling in Iraq and Syria. There is plenty of evidence for this, and yet M.
Scheuer does not have much to say about it.
From Prof. Anderson's book "The Dirty War on Syria", we read:
In mid-2012, US intelligence reported two important facts about the violence in Syria. Firstly, most of the armed 'insurgency' was being driven by extremist al Qaeda groups, and
second, the sectarian aim of those groups was 'exactly' what the US and its allies wanted
.
The DIA(Defense Intelligence Agency) wrote:
'The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in
Syria There is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality
in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers [The
West, Gulf monarchies and Turkey] to the [Syrian] opposition want, in order to isolate the
Syrian regime' (DIA 2012).
The US also observed (and certainly did not stop) the channelling of arms from Benghazi
in Libya to 'al Qaeda groups' in Syria, in August 2012.
New Evidence US Backed ISIS - Ron Paul
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo2GYQxopbM
Ex-DIA boss Michael Flynn: White House took "willful decision" to fund, train Syria
Islamists ISIS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccdeANvo2bg Agreed, no doubt ISIS was US/Israeli and probably
many others creation. Probably many more groups have spawned from the original that we don't
know of. No telling how many different states and corporations are funding these mercenary
psychos for their own gain. I won't pretend to know everything that goes on over there, I try
my best with the little time I have to keep up with the madness.
It would be nice if he or someone with inside info. and credibility would spill the beans on
9/11, he seems to walk a strait line when it comes to that issue too, maybe he just isn't ready
to be involuntarily suicided.. He is pretty brave to rip into Israel the way he does.
He seems like a pretty honest well meaning dude. One of the few I've heard that I trust.
Sad but true:
FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States
F.Y.I., Solzhenitsyn described a traditional Russian proverb on a person's natural eagerness
to take revenge upon a bad other who does harm to a community.
The proverb goes like this : "Never interfere with someone powerful & bad because they
are in the process of destroying themselves." Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
redmudhooch wrote on: "FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of
United States."
Hi redmudhooch,
Thanks for posting this!
The strategy makes perfect sense.
F.Y.I., Solzhenitsyn described a traditional Russian proverb on a person's natural
eagerness to take revenge upon a bad other who does harm to a community.
The proverb goes like this : "Never interfere with someone powerful & bad because they
are in the process of destroying themselves."
"... "The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a 'blunder,' or even a 'colossal mistake.' It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac citizenry." ..."
The Iraq War architects have been thoroughly rehabilitated and are planning
their next adventure, even as the catastrophic ramifications of their crimes continue to
reverberate around the world. Last week marked the 15th anniversary of the American invasion of
Iraq in 2003. April 9 will be the 15th anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. The consequences of
these events are still playing out today, from Mali to Niger, to the Philippines. Iraq has
never recovered and is only beginning to emerge from the trauma, while American officials plan
the next military adventure.
Writing in the New York Times, Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon
observed : "The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a
'blunder,' or even a 'colossal mistake.' It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at
large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly
amnesiac citizenry."
The rehabilitation of the neocons
Indeed, the rise of Trump has provided the cabal of Iraq War architects with a rebranding
opportunity. After their utter failure in Iraq, these people were largely disgraced and no
longer taken seriously outside of right-wing circles. But Trumpism, and the desire of liberals
to oust the current president, has led to an anti-Trump coalition which includes at its helm
many of the instrumental figures behind the Iraq invasion. The list includes David
"axis
of evil" Frum, former speechwriter to President George W. Bush and now a senior editor
at the Atlantic, as well as neoconservative think tanker Bill Kristol, and
George W. Bush , who is now celebrated as a pragmatic leader – even by nostalgic
Democrats who contrast him with Trump.
Trump's victory in the Republican primary on a seemingly isolationist platform, which was
obviously a facade, sent many of these neoconservatives running toward Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic nominee. Those who lined
up behind Clinton have since been embraced by the Democratic establishment, while the more
extreme neoconservative hawks who stuck by the Republican Party have effectively inserted
themselves into the Trump administration. The most recent and terrifying of these is John
Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN. Bolton played a key role in politicizing the
intelligence that was used to mislead the public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And
now he is Trump's national security advisor.
Bolton is a neoconservative extremist who has never seen a country he didn't want to bomb.
On the top of his hit list is Iran and North Korea, though Bolton has expended most of his
energy
agitating for the US to bomb Iran , which he seeks to hand over to the Mujahedin E Khalq (MEK), a
cultish group of Iranian exiles that has received backing from Israeli intelligence and was
formerly classified as a terrorist organization by the United States.
In light of the Iraq war anniversary and the recent appointment of Bolton, it's a good time
to survey the damage that neocons such as Bolton caused in Iraq. The war left an estimated
1 million Iraqis
dead , 4.5 million displaced, 5 million orphaned, some 2 million widowed, and caused
birth
defects and cancer rates in some
Iraqi cities that are significantly worse than those seen in the aftermath of the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of the Second World War.
The irony is that Trump's rise to the presidency is in many ways the fault of the Iraq War
architects. Their policies in Iraq, which were recycled in Libya and Syria, led to
the rise of Islamic State and the refugee crisis that fueled right-wing populists such as
Trump and his counterparts in Europe. The war in Iraq revived a jihadist movement that was dead
after the first few months of the war on Afghanistan, opening the floodgates to jihadists and
their supporters from around the world.
When the US dismantled the Iraqi state in 2003, instead of replacing it with a functioning
government it punished Sunni areas and installed a sectarian Shiite regime comprised of exiles
with no popular support in the country. The US essentially created a new category known as the
Sunni Arab and, where the state collapsed, it was Al-Qaeda who would fight on their behalf. The
inflammation of sectarian fears and lack of security resulted in a power vacuum that opened the
floodgates to Al-Qaeda in Iraq and ignited a gruesome civil war . AQI eventually morphed into
the Islamic State of Iraq. Before morphing into ISIS, ISI established an Al-Qaeda
offshoot in Syria called Jabhat al-Nusra, the strongest and most disciplined armed opposition
group in the country.
ISIS and Al-Qaeda groups cultivate and thrive off of stateless zones as well as a Sunni
Arab victimhood narrative , which started with the execution of Saddam Hussein and has been
propagated throughout the region by popular gulf-funded
religious figures and media outlets such as Al Jazeera Arabic .
Beheadings became a hallmark of the Al Qaeda branch in Iraq under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who,
unlike Osama bin Laden began to focus on fighting the near enemy -- the Arab dictatorships,
secular people and minorities -- as opposed to the far enemy of the infidel west. We would
later see these beheadings in ISIS propaganda videos aimed at terrifying the west. There was a
theory in the past in bin Laden's era that you should fight the far enemy, the west, before the
near enemy. But under this new and evolved Al Qaeda, whether in Iraq or Yemen or Mali, we saw
local franchises focused on slaughtering their fellow countrymen, with particular genocidal
hatred for Shias.
The American occupation of an Arab country fueled this Salafi jihadist movement on a global
scale. The occupation led to sympathy for this Iraqi jihad throughout the Muslim world, which
meant foreign fighters coming in and a huge amount of funding from the gulf.
This global war on terror framework was also implemented by the US in countries such as
Somalia and Yemen and across North Africa as well.
The Iraq War gave us Donald Trump
In spite of America's criminal disaster in Iraq, Barack Obama continued to implement regime
change policies in both Libya and Syria by funding and arming right-wing insurgencies made up
of none other than Al-Qaeda affiliates, the very ideology the US was supposedly fighting in its
global war on terror. Like in Iraq, US intervention led to the rise of a failed state in Libya
and in much of Syria.
In Syria, these failed state zones were then filled by thousands of foreign fighters coming
in from the Turkish border, which the US tolerated as a means to put pressure on the Syrian
regime, hoping the regime would offer concessions, which of course it never did. ISIS
eventually took over many of these failed state areas and began kidnapping westerners and the
group made millions of dollars in ransom money
as a result.
The massive refugee flows which resulted from the US encouraging war and regime change in
the Middle East led to the destabilization of much of Europe and to some extent, the rise of
Donald Trump, who campaigned on the fear-mongering of ISIS, refugees and Muslims. You can trace
all these and other terrible consequences to the US decision to encourage war and state
collapse rather than to prioritize stability and order in the Middle East. It all started with
the Iraq War.
The gift that keeps on giving
The ramifications of the Iraq War are still playing out today, having inspired Salafi
jihadist movements from the
Philippines to Mali and even
Niger , where US soldiers were recently killed by jihadists.
Moreover, the war in Iraq, according to the very people who architected it, has strengthened
Iran in the region. That isn't necessarily a bad thing given that Iran and its partners, such
as Hezbollah and the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), were crucial to defeating ISIS in
Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. But a strengthened Iran is a nightmare for the US as it threatens
American, Saudi and Israeli hegemony in the region. So, the Iraq war planners are using the
strong position of Iran – created by neoconservative policies – to push for a war
with Iran. They've also expanded their hit list to include Russia, who they're still hoping to
escalate against in Syria.
With Bolton as Trump's national security advisor, a war with Iran is now much more likely.
For the war industry and the neocons who lobby for it, the Iraq war they started is the gift
that keeps on giving.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Rania Khalek is an American journalist, writer and political commentator based in the Middle East.
So how do you reform the Secret Police? It is an interesting idea. The National Security
State has locked out any outside criticism and made reform almost impossible.
Then, there is also the whole indoctrination process. From hire to retire, these three
letter agencies indoctrinate their employees with esprit de corps and being a team player
with the greatest enthusiasm for the mission.
Claim made by high level persons in the link, suggest need for deep investigation into who in
the USA is getting paid to deliver or make available American taxpayer paid for resources to
foreign payee governments conducting terrorism and destabilization programs?
John Brennan is a propaganda whore for the family that owns Comcast. Comcast runs NBC. I
would call them the Roberts family, but none of them look like Henry Fonda, so I won't. I
don't dare speculate what their real name is.
Mike Morell is a propaganda whore for the family that owns Viacom. Viacom runs CBS. I
don't care how convoluted those shysters made the exact corporate control of CBS, they run
it. The family name of these nasty Viacom shysters ain't their real name either.
President Trump should have declared war on the corporate propaganda apparatus and the
Deep State on day number one of his administration. Trump let the shysters who run the
corporate media and the treasonous rats in the Deep State off the hook.
President Trump won the GOP presidential primary and the presidency itself because Trump
promised to put the safety, security and sovereignty of America first. The largest vote
getter in terms of specific issues was the IMMIGRATION issue. Trump had the chance to fire
every damn treasonous rat in the Deep State and he didn't do it. Trump betrayed his voters
who wanted immigration reduced and illegal aliens deported.
President Trump should face a GOP presidential primary challenger. Maybe that will force
Trump to remove the Deep State, remove the current controllers of the corporate media and put
America first.
Trump should also call for an immigration moratorium and begin deporting all illegal
aliens immediately.
Trump's problems with the corporate media and the Deep State stem from the fact that Trump
didn't immediately remove them when he had the chance. Trump's voter base was more than ready
for a "burn the boats on the beach" battle plan to defend the United States against the
treasonous rats in the Deep State and the anti-White, anti-Christian shyster rats in the
corporate media.
"He [Brennan] said that the U.S. President is 'afraid of the president of Russia' and
that the Kremlin 'may have something on him personally.' "
Brennan is PROJECTING.
They have the goods on HIM, and will squeeze out of him every last second of influence
operations as long as he draws breath. Brennan will never be able to get off the HAMSTER
WHEEL alive.
More definitive is Mr. Giraldi's identifying him as a "possible war criminal."
Americans are pragmatic people. Identifying John Brennan as a so-called "war criminal"
because he was involved in all the extraneous crap the American Empire is pulling overseas
won't get the interest of ordinary Americans. Calling John Brennan a "propaganda whore" for
the family that controls Comcast will pique their interest.
I would suggest that John Brennan could be politically damaged the most by stating that
John Brennan supports open borders mass immigration. John Brennan and the rest of the Deep
State are dangerous to Americans because they all support open borders mass immigration. The
corporate media all supports mass immigration.
Over 60 million of us voted for Trump because Trump said he would stop the unnecessary
overseas wars, reduce immigration and scrap the sovereignty-sapping trade deal scams. We
voted for Trump to make the American Empire act more like a republic. We're stuck with the
American Empire until it croaks or is croaked in turn. And the empires all turn into rust
again.
The treasonous rats in the American Empire's Deep State all push nation-wrecking mass
immigration.
But was it CIA or DIA that helped to count Trump votes?
Hmmm, let's see here.
Counted Trump votes but not Clinton's?
Counted but reduced the number of Trump votes?
Counted all of the votes, but inflated Clinton's?
Successfully hacked the voting machines in some states to inflate Clinton votes and deflate
Trump votes?
How Brennon came to power, should draw questions. Was the dethroning of Gen. David Petraeus,
as CIA chief, a palace coup? Was Brennen spying on Petraeus? Was the NSA tapping his phones?
Did the idea that a military man was heading the CIA, anathema to the institution – so
they got rid of him?
Just how much actual power does the CIA have in the American permanent Deep State?
Congress is NO check on the CIA – all the politicians on the intel security
committees are handpicked dedicated worshipers.
The CIA is the most anti democracy organization on the planet. From its beginning, it has
played with, subverted, and toppled democracies and sovereign governments. Today it
assonates, tortures, and bombs people around the world. (Has Trump given them a free
hand?)
The commie cold war is over – let's not start another one. The CIA's covert
activities must stop.
Two reasons for the descent of 'the West' into neo-Nazism stand out. First, the West was
ALWAYS fascistic, racist, hyper-aggressive, destructive, parasitical and genocidal. Just
summon up the shades of the hundreds of millions killed, directly or indirectly, through
Western Imperialism, colonialism, settler genocide and economic exploitation even to the
extent of causing Holocausts of mass death through famine, as in India, and ask them about
the great and glorious West and its stinking 'Moral Values'. Not to forget the tens of
millions of Westerners themselves killed in Western internecine wars, or through class
hatred, or herded into gas-chambers or made to lie in mass graves then be shot along with
their children because they were of the wrong religion, or the same, but they crossed
themselves in the wrong direction. German Nazism simply expressed a rather pure essence of
true 'Western' moral values, and its mission, and many of its personnel and methods, were
simply taken over the USA after WW2.
Of course, the non-Western world was not a collection of lands of milk and honey, but by any
rational calculus Western ideology involves a qualitatively different and incessant
aggression and cancerous expansion, as manifest in that prototypical Western
creation-capitalism. There the lust and capacity for total destruction, as EVERYTHING, living
and inanimate is transmuted into the dead stuff of money, is unbounded, but this planet being
finite, and the exploiters not having yet escaped to bleed alien worlds anew white and
lifeless, capitalism has only succeeded in drowning us on this planet in the waste and filth
of its excesses, of which poisoning we will shortly succumb.
And, second, the rise to global dominance through control of Western politics, fakestream
media and the other brainwashing mechanisms and finance, of the Zionazi elite centred in
Israel, and in the Jewish Diaspora elites, has delivered a final coup de grace to the West,
and hence, the world that the West is now in the process of attacking, everywhere, for the
crimes of not obeying orders from the likes of vermin like Theresa May, John Bolton and the
execrable Macron.
These Zionazi elites are pretty unprecedented in their absolute arrogance and never-ending
demands. Currently they have embarked on a veritable firestorm of hatred, invective and false
accusations in order to destroy Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. If they cannot destroy Corbyn, they
are very happy to destroy UK Labour, because they no longer control it as they did under
their stooge, Blair. The whole stinking process is operating in open collusion with the UK
fakestream media hate-machine, the reeking corpse of the late UK Guardian leading the way.
The Jewish elite grandees leading the onslaught openly declare that it is UK Labour support
for the Palestinians and 'Leftwing policies' and criticism of Israel that is motivating their
typical exercise in Talmudic hatred. So, the work of hundreds of thousands of Labour
supporters invigorated by Corbyn, who have worked, honestly and determinedly, over years and
decades, to attempt to make the UK a better, more decent, society that the filthy dystopia
created by the Tories and Blairites, is to all be destroyed by a tiny cabal of racist
supremacists who see all goyim as their inferiors. A cabal that does not even represent all
Jews, although they typically claim that they do, a favourite tactic of these anti-goyite
thugs. Many Jews support Corbyn, knowing full well that he is a life-long anti-racist, unlike
the Zionazi thugs who traduce him, who are among the vilest racists extant.
This Zionazi thuggery, and numerous other examples like the criminalisation of the BDS
Movement or ANY criticism of Israel or Zionazism, as 'antisemitic', is bound to create a good
deal of hatred in return. But that is PRECISELY what the Zionazi elites WANT-hatred is the
very essence of their existence. Hatred of the Palestinians. Hatred of Arabs. Hatred of
Moslems. Hatred of any goyim that do not share these hatreds, or dare to oppose Zionazism.
These people, and they do only represent a fraction of Jewry, just as the worst of any
community are only a generally small fraction, are the most dangerous and destructive
creatures in existence, in my opinion. They hate Russia for thwarting their ambitions to
destroy Syria as they did Iraq and Libya. They hate China for not ever going to become supine
stooges like the Western kakastocrats. And, as Bibi, Bennett, Sharon, Begin and scores of
other hideous Zionazi psychopaths show, they mix a series of ancient and modern psychoses
into a maelstrom of hatred and destructiveness seen in policies like the Samson Option, the
Oded Yinon Plan and the drive for endless war against their myriad goy enemies, that simply
guarantees Israel's eventual destruction, and that, so they often promise, of us all.
Look beyond the superficial details of the West's hostile actions, and take heart. NOTHING
has changed about the West's intentions to Russia, other than that the pretence is over. West
is full of good people, but the leaderships kneel to a hidden power. It has been that way for
a long time.
The worst possible strategic position was for Russia not to know that, or to be divided by
an enduring pro-west movement.
Russia is now besieged, but it always was, without really knowing it. Now there is
clarity, and the country can unite.
So take heart. Even on this blog, some will not be able to come to terms today, with
West's treachery. As a Serb, I saw it all before, it is not new, it was always there. Russia
was always in the cross-hairs, and now it is their turn again.
There is one chain of command in the west, and it is indeed an empire. If Russia has
awoken from it's naivety, slumber, and need to believe in an imaginary friend, who always had
a hidden knife, then we are good.
I expect every effort will now be made to derail the world cup. Pardon the pun, but it
will be another own goal. Zog showed itself, and we can see its true intentions.
Yes, Russia was naive in it's belief that the US was their 'partner'. I cringe every time I
hear Putin say that. US is NOT their partner, does NOT want Russia to be sovereign, wants
only a vassal Russia, where everything is open to their taking. I'm glad that Putin and many
Russians are now losing some of their naivety and are finally realizing that US does NOT have
Russia's interests at heart at all, but is, in reality, a treacherous, envious rival that
would love to see all Russians bleed and die, if that meant US could take over the land and
assets. The vassal EU and the totally repugnant UK are willing to follow US lead anywhere it
takes them – even like lemmings over a cliff, which is what's happening now. The cliff
is WWIII of which there will be NO winners.
Putin was making an offer when he referred to the 'west' as partners. Take it in that regard.
Putin does not seem to be silly nor naive. But by referring to the west as partners, he was
extending an olive branch and make an offer to the west. That offer has by now obviously been
declined.
I knew the world cup was unlikely when the US was knocked out from qualifying by ..
Guatemala. It was the biggest dive ever in football. No complaints back home from a
cancellation, I thought.
The world cup is proceding as planned. A nuclear war might prevent it, but otherwise its
still on.
Notice that all that's been done is 'diplomatic boycotts'. That's a purely symbolic
measure, and all it means is that Russia won't have to host a group of government officials
who otherwise would take an all expense paid vacation to a futbol tourney.
The English football coach said very openly that he doesn't care what BoJoke says or
thinks. And there is no way the English would withdraw their futbol team. Germany is also
very unlikely to refuse to defend their championship. German fans are highly unlikely to pass
up a short trip to see their team play. And so far even German politicians aren't going the
symbolic diplomatic boycott route. Same with most other EU countries.
What is going on against Corbyn is disgusting, it seems they have gone now in a frontal
attack on all fronts.
It is a sign that something is nearing it's end phase.
The west funded and supported the Russian revolution and installed the communists. Those
communists were also harbored in the west before the revolution. Germany and the U.S. were
financially backing that coup.
"... If the USA empire could have been established and maintained, without a CIA, I doubt. Empires are ruthless, 'perfidious Albion' was the expression for the British empire. ..."
Depends on what you see as bad. If the USA empire could have been established and
maintained, without a CIA, I doubt. Empires are ruthless, 'perfidious Albion' was the
expression for the British empire.
Ian Hernon, 'Britain's Forgotten Wars, Colonial Campaigns of the 19th Century', 2003,
2007, Chalford -- Stroud
How an important British diplomat saw British control of the greater part of the world as
the natural order of things
Lord Vansittart, 'The Mist Procession, The autobiography of LORD VANSITTART', London
1958
Great pity that death prevented the biography from going furher than 1938.
The machinations of Vansittart during the thirties are described in
Philip M. Taylor, 'The Projection of Britain, British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda
1919-1939′, Cambridge 1981
and Lawrence R. Pratt, 'East of Malta, West of Suez', London, 1975
The ideas of Vansittart's friend Leeper one finds in Sir Reginald Leeper, 'When Greek
Meets Greek', London 1950
He more or less ruled Greece from 1945 to say 1950.
1
5 0 On Monday, a number of European countries, as well as the United States and Canada,
announced they were expelling Russian diplomats over the Skripal case. Radio Sputnik discussed
the significance of the diplomatic response by the Western powers with Srdja Trifkovic, a US
journalist and writer on international affairs. Sputnik: What is your overall assessment about
what has happened with this diplomatic response by so many countries? How significant is it?
Srdja Trifkovic: The overall impression is that
rational discourse has given way to collective hysteria and that it is indeed remarkable.
The extent to which the bandwagon has successfully started rolling while we don't even have
elementary answers to the questions concerning the case itself.
The second important and discouraging aspect is that continental European countries have
followed the Anglo-American lead in Russophobia and this represents a further trial of the
Atlanticist domination over Europe. It is indeed remarkable when both Germany and France, the
putative leaders of independent European foreign policy, have been reduced to the status of
automatic followers of the lead supported by Washington especially when we bear in mind that
the initial round of sanctions in 2014 against Russia was dictated by the United States which
had nothing to lose in the proceedings and to the detriments of Europeans' interests.
So overall I think that, one we have the hysterical phase of Russophobic
discourse in the West which is not amenable to any rational arguments and two, we have a
successful degradation of European diplomacy to the status of pliant satellites comparable to
East Germany and Bulgaria vis-à-vis Brezhnev.
Sputnik: Do you think there was some classified evidence that was presented that proves
beyond a shadow of doubt that Russia was involved or do you think that the fact that there are
11 countries who have not joined in the protest perhaps hints at the fact that this was not the
case?
Srdja Trifkovic: Well, first of all, I would say that President Putin, Foreign Minister
Lavrov and others would not have made such categorical denials of Russian involvement if there
was any possibility of a smoking gun which could effectively show to the world that they were
not telling the truth.
And secondly, it is always possible to present some equivocal
evidence in the form that even if that indicates the modus operandi of intelligence
agencies nevertheless does not disclose outright state secrets. In fact, we've seen that in the
past and I don't think that it would be possible for such confidential information to be
disclosed to the diplomats and foreign ministers of EU countries as divergent as the 27 are,
without risking these very sources.
So I really believe that if you look at the countries which have taken measures against
Russia, they almost read like who is who of those who are prepared to follow the US lead and if
you look at those reluctant to do so, including Austria, Hungary, Cyprus, Greece, we are
looking at those who actually have a more independent foreign policy. So I don't think it's a
reflection of the quality of possible intelligence, it is simply a reflection of the
determination of decision-makers of those countries to preserve a modicum of independence.
Sputnik: What would you say about the level to which the actions that were actually taken by
individual countries? What can you say about the numbers game that's being played? What do you
think determined the number of diplomats?
Srdja Trifkovic: Some of these countries are absolutely insignificant countries like the
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, which also expelled one Russian and it's just a pathetic
non country. On the other hand in the United States obviously it is a matter of regret that
President Trump's initially stated intention to have detente with Russia has been subverted by
the deep state, it is a long story but now we have really reached the end of the road with the
appointment of Pompeo to State Department and Bolton as the national security adviser.
So we can really look at Trump as the would-be drainer of the swamp who has been swallowed
by the swamp. And I think that we are in for a long haul. I was in Moscow two weeks ago and
coming again next week and sometimes I am surprised that some of my Russian interlocutors are
insufficiently aware of the animosity or end of the rule Russophobic sentiment that currently
prevails among the Western elites, both political and academic and media. It's almost pathetic
when some Russians still use the term "our Western partners," because for partnership you need
to have a modicum of mutual respect and trust and these people really seriously want to destroy
Russia.
They want to delegitimize the Russian political system and process as we have seen with the
public commentary on President Putin's re-election and they want nothing short of regime
change, which would then lead to a permanent and irreversible change of Russia's national
character and possibly the country's partition along the lines allocated by Zbigniew
Brzezinski. With these people partnership is impossible and Russia needs to be prepared for a
long and sustained
period of confrontation .
The views and opinions expressed by Srdja Trifkovic are those of the speaker and do not
necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
"... "[Sergei Skripal] was handed in to Britain as a result of an exchange. So, why should Russia hand in a man that is of any importance or that is of any value? It's unimaginable. If he's handed in – so Russia quits with him. He's of zero value or zero importance," ..."
"... "America stands ready to help Poland and other European nations diversify their energy supplies so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier," ..."
"... "If we want to have the United States' LNG supplies in Central Europe, we also want to see the United States getting tough on Nord Stream 2, which means getting tough on Russia," ..."
"... "getting tough on Russia." ..."
"... "The draft law makes clear that they're pursuing economic interests and we think that's not acceptable," ..."
"... "Aggressively combining foreign policy issues with American economic interests and saying: 'We want to drive Russian gas out of the European market so we can sell American gas there is definitely not something we can accept.'" ..."
"... "We are determined to maintain open channels of dialogue with Russia," ..."
Once again, the West has tossed out the democratic baby with the bath water, scapegoating
Russia for a mysterious crime on UK territory without a shred of evidence. To understand why,
just follow the money. Any hope that Western capitals would come to their democratic senses and
demand that PM Theresa May provide some proof that Russia was behind an alleged assassination
attempt on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer turned British spy, were
dashed on Monday. Sixteen EU states fell in lockstep behind the US
and UK, taking the dramatic measure of banishing Russian diplomats.
Breaking: US to expel 48 Russian embassy workers in Washington, D.C. and 12 at the Russian
mission to the U.N. U.S. says they were intel officers using diplo status as cover.
pic.twitter.com/mRuwY8Tes6
Meanwhile, back in the land of the free, Trump enthusiastically joined the inquisition,
saying he would expel 60 Russian diplomats 'personae non grata,' and shut down the Seattle
consulate. Good to see that the American leader practices cool-headed moderation in times of
uncertainty.
Short of an actual military conflict with Russia, it would be hard to imagine the situation
getting any worse. Most worrisome is the peddling of pulp-fiction conspiracy theories against
Russia, which compels Western officials to compensate for their wild imaginations with
hysterical, inflammatory outbursts that border on sheer madness.
How else to explain the comment by UK Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson, who spoke like a
kid at the playground when he said Russia "should go away
and shut up;" or that of Boris Johnson, the British foreign minister, who had the audacity
and historical ignorance to compare Russia's hosting
of this year's World Cup to the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.
So, what is motivating self-satisfied Western countries, like the US and Britain, to forward
such slanderous claims against Russia without a hint of legal due process? After all, it cannot
be denied that Russia would have stood to gain nothing from targeting Skripal.
"[Sergei Skripal] was handed in to Britain as a result of an exchange. So, why should
Russia hand in a man that is of any importance or that is of any value? It's unimaginable. If
he's handed in – so Russia quits with him. He's of zero value or zero importance,"
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in an exclusive
interview with RT.
When we ask the question, 'Cui bono' – who stands to benefit the most from an
assassination attempt on a man of absolutely no consequence to Moscow – the most credible
answer always comes back to 'Russia's accusers.'
Follow the money
Since Washington has taken by far the severest steps against Russia over the Skripal
fallout, it would be fair to ask if the US stands to gain anything from the wave of Russophobia
now sweeping the West, which got its start, incidentally, as a direct result of
'Russiagate.'
Against the backdrop of the Skripal scandal are extremely lucrative gas contracts with EU
countries that Russia has dutifully fulfilled since the Soviet heydays. Today, Russia supplies
about 40 percent of Europe's gas. The US, however, with its fracking-backed liquefied natural
gas (LNG) program, is anxious to get a piece of the pie.
In July, Donald Trump paid a visit to Poland, where he pledged to boost exports of LNG to
Central Europe, as well as challenge Russia's market on energy supplies.
"America stands ready to help Poland and other European nations diversify their energy
supplies so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier," Trump told
reporters after talks with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
The comment was odd since, even at the height of the Cold War, Europe never froze due to its
gas being turned off in the middle of the night by Moscow.
Marek Matraszek, founder of the lobby firm CEC Government Relations, offered a very
disturbing comment about Washington's push to supply LNG to Europe.
"If we want to have the United States' LNG supplies in Central Europe, we also want to
see the United States getting tough on Nord Stream 2, which means getting tough on
Russia," Matraszek said
.
I am very curious to know exactly what Matraszek had in mind when he spoke about
"getting tough on Russia." Would he approve of the current bilateral breakdown between
the nuclear powers? I certainly hope not.
In light of the massive prospects for gross profit on the European continent, would Western
capitals not be tempted – tempted, at the very least – to deny Moscow the benefit
of the doubt whenever highly suspicious criminal cases arise, like the present one regarding
Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia?
In an effort to slander Russia and push it out of lucrative markets, they may be tempted to
milk the situation for all its worth – which is exactly what is happening now. To doubt
that possibility would require a deep misunderstanding of the geopolitical realities as they
have played out over the course of the last decade, complete with a massive propaganda campaign
aimed at everything related to Russia – from the Olympic Games to anti-terrorist
operations in Syria to criminal cases in
foreign lands.
Meanwhile, as the showdown between the US and Russia over EU gas supplies festers,
especially in light of Nord Stream 2, the German-Russia venture that would double direct Russia
gas supplies, the ongoing US sanction regime against Russia is beginning to look suspect.
Commenting on Trump's passage in August of brand new sanctions against Russia, then German
Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel was brave enough to mention the elephant in the room.
"The draft law makes clear that they're pursuing economic interests and we think that's
not acceptable," he
said .
"Aggressively combining foreign policy issues with American economic interests and
saying: 'We want to drive Russian gas out of the European market so we can sell American gas
there is definitely not something we can accept.'"
Meanwhile, it is not only in the energy sector where the United States - and to a lesser
degree the UK - stands to gain from wrecked relations with Russia, but in the defense sector as
well.
The UK regularly
ranks as Europe's leading weapons exporter, behind the United States globally, which
remains the world's leading arms exporter. Much of the expenditure comes from NATO member
states, which were just put on notice by Trump to keep their military spending at 2 percent of
GDP, at the very same time Washington was going out of its way to portray
Russia as a belligerent nation, when it has been the West that has been hell-bent on fomenting
regime change around the world. Now that's certainly an interesting sales strategy.
Romanian Prime Minister @VioricaDancila said that the
government decisions to purchase #HIMARS missile
systems and multirole corvettes were important steps in improving the capability of the
Romanian armed forces as a @NATO and EU member #defencepic.twitter.com/EEYk4Sk5MR
Can this propaganda campaign against Russia work? I believe the answer is no, for many
reasons. First, it is not just the Russians who understand that they are being played by major
powers in a conspicuous attempt to gain geopolitical and economic advantage.
Thus far, nearly half of the EU's member states have refrained from
committing a gesture of "solidarity" with London, deciding not to expel Russian diplomats.
Those 'conscientious objectors' are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Luxembourg,
Malta, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia.
"We are determined to maintain open channels of dialogue with Russia," Austrian
government spokesperson Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal told RIA Novosti.
In many ways, this represents a victory for Russia – albeit a bittersweet one –
that London failed to get so many countries on board its anti-Russia juggernaut.
This needs to be emphasized. The majority of the EU countries did not join in this mass
expulsion. As for those that did, expulsions were mostly pro forma, undertaken in order to
keep the British happy. Why then the wildly disproportionate response from Trump? https://t.co/4FldvIS80W
Second, Russia is actively diversifying its economy away from Western markets in preparation
for a worse-case scenario. For example, the "$55bn Power of Siberia pipeline will start
carrying gas 3,000km to China next year. The company is also spending $13bn on a pipeline to
Turkey," the Financial Times reported.
Finally, as Russia understands that they are up against some very dishonest players, the
country has made tremendous inroads to producing many of the things it once depended upon
imports to have, and we are not just talking about cheese. The Russian authorities have even
prepared a backup plan in the
event that Russia is terminated from the SWIFT international payment system. Although, of
course, Russia would prefer not to have to take such drastic steps, the unfortunate situation
in many Western capitals, where otherwise intelligent people are pointing fingers and hurling
unfounded accusations at Russia, without critical evidence or due process – once
hallmarks of the Western judicial system – make such steps absolutely vital.
All things considered, Russia will survive this storm, as it has done so many other times in
the past against far graver enemies, and stronger than ever.
You will gain a better understanding of Vladimir Putin if you study his career as a
sportsman, 3rd degree blackbelt Judoka than by sifting through his career as an ex-spy.
First of all, Judo is a sport. It's not a "martial art". It's not meant to maim or
injure–though of course, people do get injured because they get thrown. Every
particular technique that could inevitably result in injury has been culled from the sport.
You don't "practice" Judo, you "play" it–literally, that's what they say when talking
about participation.
Practice sessions are democratic. Everyone practices against everyone else. Of course,
this results in mismatches as rank beginners will at some point be paired up with advanced
players. But this mismatch doesn't result in humiliation because the advanced take special
pains to play cleanly, pull their throws i.e. execute them perfectly so the person thrown can
land without injury to themselves and it also is an opportunity for every good Judoka to
teach the novices.
There are some people who come to Judo who don't fit in. They standout because they can be
seen really playing rough with those who are lower in rank than them. But this doesn't go
unnoticed. As people cycle through opponents during the practice session, the bully will
eventually be paired up with someone who is better than they are. And they will be taught a
lesson. Either they learn and conform to the rules or they never show up again. Judo weeds
out opportunistic bullies.
Now I hope the above helps people better understand Putin. To sum up: he is competitive
but will try to win fairly, within the prescribed rules. He won't tolerate bullying by the
stronger over the weaker, will, in fact, come to the aid of the weaker. Has a strong sense of
tradition, of belonging to a school of thought and action that is greater than himself and
that is worth preserving for its own sake, believes and more importantly, knows through
experience, that belonging to such a school improves individual character. He is competent.
I've seen film of him in practice and his technique is quite good. His third degree black
belt was honestly earned, it wasn't an honorary award.
From the above it can be seen why he would have little respect for the current crop of
weak, cowardly, politicians who rule America, lacking as they are in discipline, integrity
and dedication to a larger, noble cause. He would, in fact, find it hard not to hold them in
contempt but, keeping his eyes on the long-term goals of what's good for his country, masters
his emotions when dealing with them face to face.
"... My short visit only confirmed my conviction and fear that the invasion would spell disaster for Iraqis. Removing Saddam was just a byproduct of another objective: dismantling the Iraqi state and its institutions. That state was replaced with a dysfunctional and corrupt semi-state. ..."
"... Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, announced the formation of the so-called Governing Council in July 2003. The names of its members were each followed by their sect and ethnicity . Many of the Iraqis we spoke to on that day were upset with institutionalization of an ethno-sectarian quota system. Ethnic and sectarian tensions already existed, but their translation into political currency was toxic. Those unsavory characters on the governing council, most of whom were allies of the United States from the preceding decade, went on to loot the country, making it one of the most corrupt in the world. ..."
"... The next time I returned to Baghdad was in 2013. The American tanks were gone, but the effects of the occupation were everywhere. I had low expectations, but I was still disheartened by the ugliness of the city where I had grown up and horrified by how dysfunctional, difficult and dangerous daily life had become for the great majority of Iraqis. ..."
"... I didn't expect the beautiful Basra I'd seen on 1970s postcards. That city had long disappeared. But the Basra I saw was so exhausted and polluted. The city had suffered a great deal during the Iran-Iraq war, and its decline accelerated after 2003. Basra was pale, dilapidated and chaotic thanks to the rampant corruption. Its rivers are polluted and ebbing. ..."
"... Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion) , and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter . ..."
Photo
A statue of Saddam Hussein
in front of the burning National Olympic Committee in Baghdad in 2003.
Credit
Tyler Hicks/The New
York Times
When I was 12, Saddam
Hussein, vice president of Iraq at the time, carried out a huge purge and officially usurped total power. I was
living in Baghdad then, and I developed an intuitive, visceral hatred of the dictator early on. That feeling only
intensified and matured as I did. In the late 1990s, I wrote my first novel, "I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody," about
daily life under Saddam's authoritarian regime. Furat, the narrator
,
was a young college student
studying English literature at Baghdad University, as I had. He ends up in prison for cracking a joke about the
dictator. Furat hallucinates and imagines Saddam's fall, just as I often did. I hoped I would witness that
moment, whether in Iraq or from afar.
I left Iraq a few months
after the 1991 Gulf War and went to graduate school in the United States, where I've been ever since. In 2002,
when the cheerleading for the Iraq war started, I was vehemently against the proposed invasion. The United States
had consistently supported dictators in the Arab world and was not in the business of exporting democracy,
irrespective of the Bush administration's slogans. I recalled sitting in my family's living room with my aunt
when I was a teenager, watching Iraqi television and seeing Donald Rumsfeld visiting Baghdad as an emissary from
Ronald Reagan and
shaking hands with Saddam
. That
memory made Mr. Rumsfeld's words in 2002 about freedom and democracy for Iraqis seem hollow. Moreover, having
lived through two previous wars (the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988 and the Gulf War of 1991), I knew that the
actual objectives of war were always camouflaged by well-designed lies that exploit collective fear and
perpetuate national myths.
I was one of about 500
Iraqis in the diaspora -- of various ethnic and political backgrounds, many of whom were dissidents and victims of
Saddam's regime -- who signed a petition: "No to war on Iraq. No to dictatorship." While condemning Saddam's reign
of terror, we were against a "war that would cause more death and suffering" for innocent Iraqis and one that
threatened to push the entire region into violent chaos. Our voices were not welcomed in mainstream media in the
United States, which preferred the pro-war Iraqi-American who promised cheering crowds that would welcome
invaders with "sweets and flowers." There were none.
The petition didn't make
much of an impact. Fifteen years ago today, the invasion of Iraq began.
Three months later, I
returned to Iraq for the first time since 1991 as part of a collective to film a documentary about Iraqis in a
post-Saddam Iraq. We wanted to show my countrymen as three-dimensional beings, beyond the binary of Saddam versus
the United States. In American media, Iraqis had been reduced to either victims of Saddam who longed for
occupation or supporters and defenders of dictatorship who opposed the war. We wanted Iraqis to speak for
themselves. For two weeks, we drove around Baghdad and spoke to many of its residents. Some were still hopeful,
despite being drained by years of sanctions and dictatorship. But many were furious and worried about what was to
come. The signs were already there: the typical arrogance and violence of a colonial occupying power.
Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial
board and contributing writers from around the world.
My short visit only
confirmed my conviction and fear that the invasion would spell disaster for Iraqis. Removing Saddam was just a
byproduct of another objective: dismantling the Iraqi state and its institutions. That state was replaced with a
dysfunctional and corrupt semi-state. We were still filming in Baghdad when L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority,
announced the formation
of the so-called Governing Council in July 2003. The names of its members were each
followed by their
sect and ethnicity
. Many of the Iraqis we
spoke to on that day were upset with institutionalization of an ethno-sectarian quota system. Ethnic and
sectarian tensions already existed, but their translation into political currency was toxic. Those unsavory
characters on the governing council, most of whom were allies of the United States from the preceding decade,
went on to loot the country, making it one of the most corrupt in the world.
We
were fortunate to have been able to shoot our film in that brief period during which there was relative public
security. Shortly after our visit, Iraq descended into violence; suicide bombings became the norm. The invasion
made my country a magnet for terrorists ("We'll fight them there so we don't have to fight them here," President
George W. Bush had said), and Iraq later descended into a sectarian civil war that claimed the lives of hundreds
of thousands of civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands more, irrevocably changing the country's
demography.
The
next time I returned to Baghdad was in 2013. The American tanks were gone, but the effects of the occupation were
everywhere. I had low expectations, but I was still disheartened by the ugliness of the city where I had grown up and
horrified by how dysfunctional, difficult and dangerous daily life had become for the great majority of Iraqis.
My last visit was in April
2017. I flew from New York, where I now live, to Kuwait, where I was giving a lecture. An Iraqi friend and I crossed
the border by land. I was going to the city of Basra, in the south of Iraq. Basra was the only major Iraqi city I had
not visited before. I was going to sign my books at the Friday book market of al-Farahidi Street, a weekly gathering
for bibliophiles modeled after the famous
Mutanabbi Street book market
in Baghdad. I was driven around by friends. I didn't expect the beautiful Basra I'd
seen on 1970s postcards. That city had long disappeared. But the Basra I saw was so exhausted and polluted. The city
had suffered a great deal during the Iran-Iraq war, and its decline accelerated after 2003. Basra was pale,
dilapidated and chaotic thanks to the rampant corruption. Its rivers are polluted and ebbing. Nonetheless, I made a
pilgrimage to the famous statue of Iraq's greatest poet, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.
One of the few sources of joy
for me during these short visits were the encounters with Iraqis who had read my novels and were moved by them. These
were novels I had written from afar, and through them, I tried to grapple with the painful disintegration of an
entire country and the destruction of its social fabric. These texts are haunted by the ghosts of the dead, just as
their author is.
No one knows for certain how
many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion 15 years ago. Some credible estimates put the number at more than
one million. You can read that sentence again. The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a
"blunder," or even a "colossal mistake." It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them
have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac citizenry. (A year ago, I
watched Mr. Bush on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," dancing and talking about his paintings.) The pundits and "experts"
who sold us the war still go on doing what they do. I never thought that Iraq could ever be worse than it was during
Saddam's reign, but that is what America's war achieved and bequeathed to Iraqis.
John Bolton Tapped for NSA: What Does It Mean for US-Russia Relations?
John Bolton, a Yale-educated lawyer known as a
foreign policy hawk , has been appointed National Security Adviser (NSA), in a major
reshuffle of President Trump's administration. He officially takes office on April 9. No Senate
confirmation is required. Welcome back, Mr. Straight Talker!
Mr. Bolton has a long history of government service, including in the positions of
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and ambassador to the UN, the organization he once
described as "no such thing" and wants to be defunded . John Bolton
scorns international institutions and
does not believe that engaging much with the world is in keeping with US interests.
This soon-to-be NSA is an experienced lawyer and "think tanker," as well as a foreign-policy
pundit who has written a multitude of books and articles. He's a deft and ready speaker whose
gift of gab can win over an audience at any time. The National Security Advisor-designate even
considered entering the presidential races in 2012 and 2016.
In his frequent television commentaries
, Mr. Bolton has
always advocated tough approaches and never missed an opportunity to support using force
rather than wasting time on fruitless diplomacy. For instance, he has advocated for a military
option to solve the problem with North Korea and for boosting cooperation with Taiwan in order
to irk China. He takes a very hard line on Iran. "
To stop Iran's bomb, bomb Iran ," sums up his position.
Mr. Bolton believes the JCPOA was a blunder. He
wants the US to push Iran out of Syria and topple President Assad's Tehran-friendly government.
With his appointment, the chances of the US certifying the Iran nuclear deal appear to be
somewhere between zero and zilch. Mr. Bolton has always been pro-Israel and backed the idea of
a unilateral Israeli strike against Iran to knock out the facilities there related to its
nuclear program.
The late Jesse Helms, a well-known hawk, once claimed Mr. Bolton would
be the right man "to stand with at Armageddon."
The newest appointee has championed the idea of raising tariffs to unleash trade wars.
With these two very hawkish Republicans -- John Bolton and
Mike Pompeo -- Donald Trump will be under strong pressure to adopt a get-tough approach to
all major issues. Gina Haspel, another hawk, will have frequent access to Donald Trump in her
role as the newly appointed CIA director. The spirit of Barry Goldwater lives on.
John Bolton has always been critical of Moscow and it is almost unanimously believed that
his appointment does not augur well for US-Russia relations.
In response to President Putin's speech in which he unveiled the existence of his new super
weapons, Bolton emphasized the need for "a strategic response ." He
has
called on NATO to offer a strong reaction to what is known as the Scripal case, expressing
his conviction that the POTUS was considering such a response. The latest choice for National
Security Advisor
endorses
the idea of providing Ukraine with lethal weapons and wants the West to take a much tougher
stance on Russia. John Bolton will certainly advocate for expediting Georgia's and Ukraine's
membership in the North Atlantic alliance, as well as granting those nations the status of
Major Non–NATO ally of the US.
He strongly criticized President Obama's "reset policy." Yet despite all that, he never
launched personal attacks against Vladimir Putin. He always seemed to genuinely enjoy his
visits to Russia, including press conferences and visits to think tanks. Despite his tough
talk, he has always been amicable and ready to communicate. He has a long list of personal
acquaintances, including many in senior government positions and academia. John Bolton worked
with Sergey Kiriyenko, Russia's First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration,
back when the latter headed Russia's State Commission on Chemical Disarmament.
Mr. Bolton is an experienced negotiator on strategic arms-control issues. John Bolton was a
strong advocate of the US withdrawal from the 1972 BM Treaty. He took part in the talks over
the 2002 Strategic Offensive
Reductions Treaty (SORT) that was in effect until the New START went into force. John
Bolton sees the New START as a unilateral
disarmament agreement that is at odds with US interests. President Trump
has also decried that treaty.
Being a hawk does not make him a hopeless prospect. He views the interests of his nation in
his own way, but he wants America to lead, not perish in a war it can't win. His experience in
strategic arms talks is invaluable. Mr. Bolton has a good understanding of security-related
issues.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan was a Russia hawk, a tough guy no one could make a deal with.
Remember his " joke "
about dropping bombs on the USSR in five minutes? Or his "Evil Empire" speech? During his
second term, the landmark INF Treaty was
signed and the friendly environment of the US-USSR summits were proof that that bilateral
relationship had clearly evolved beyond its Cold War roots.
The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev believes that
"He has already entered history as a man who was instrumental in bringing about the end of the
Cold War." President Reagan ended the Cold War and made it possible to ease the nuclear
tensions in the 1990s.
Agreements will remain elusive on many issues and negotiations on some key matters may even
break down, but dialog on arms control will probably continue because it meets vital US
interests and Mr. Bolton knows that well.
In the end, the decisions are made by the president, and while advisers may have influence,
they only advise. President Trump has many people around him to help him see issues from
different viewpoints.
Humans are primates. Thus, they are stupid, ignorant, malicious and fearful - mostly the
latter. Pretty much explains everything in human history.
I subscribe to the concept of survival at any cost. But in a rational society that would
entail being aware of the long-term consequences. This, however, is not a rational
society.
Off topic - or maybe not given the topic of human heartlessness - here we have John
Bolton:
Apparently he told the M.E.K. cult that the US would end Iran's leadership before the 40
year anniversary which is February 11, 2019.
That of course is absurd unless somehow the US manages to decapitate the Iranian
leadership with an airstrike or nuclear attack. What actually will happen if the US attacks
Iran is that Iran will fight for the next several decades until the US backs off. There is no
chance short of nuclear bombardment for the US to "defeat" Iran. The US couldn't even
"defeat" Iraq in less than five years and hasn't defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan in 17
years. Iran will be a far harder nut to crack than either of those.
"... Of course the CIA 'interfered' in the 2016 Presidential election. But our Elites do not want that discussed as a mere possibility. We might also look more closely at the CIA and the JFK assassination. ..."
"... The CIA is the child of British imperial secret service, as are the Mossad and the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency. 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse. ..."
"... Why Mueller? Brennan isn't a president, or even a government official at all. He's a former federal employee who is wide open to investigation by the DOJ. Brennan's past terms employment are an open book to the DOJ or to Congress. ..."
"... John Brennan may well be the most dangerous and dirty CIA director in the Company's history. ..."
"... If the USA empire could have been established and maintained, without a CIA, I doubt. Empires are ruthless, 'perfidious Albion' was the expression for the British empire. ..."
"... Which brings us to John Brennan, the Central Intelligence Agency's chief under President Obama, who rushed to MSNBC this week to claim: "The fact that he has had this fawning attitude towards Mr. Putin and has not said anything negative about him, it continues to say something to me that he has something to fear and something serious to fear [from Russia]." ..."
"... Uh huh. Presidents have secrets but they also have power, so if you think they are easily blackmailable, Mr. Brennan may have a third-rate spy novel to sell you. What occurred to anybody who has followed matters closely was a different thought: Mr. Brennan, who has a few things to hide himself, has decided his best defense is a strong offense. ..."
"... For the truth is, Mr. Trump's version of the loudmouth demagogue is increasingly coming out on the better side of the emerging facts on Russia. The Kremlin wasn't the most consequential meddler in the 2016 election: It was James Comey's FBI, with Mr. Brennan standing obscurely at his elbow every step of the way. ..."
"... If a planted Russian intercept was instrumental in the fiasco of Mr. Comey's intervention in the Hillary Clinton email matter, as numerous leaks indicate, then that intercept would have come from Mr. Brennan's CIA. What's more, it likely came not with a shrug, but with a clear expectation that Mr. Comey would act to protect a Clinton presidency from an alleged Russian plot. ..."
"... John Brennan is a propaganda whore for the family that owns Comcast. Comcast runs NBC. I would call them the Roberts family, but none of them look like Henry Fonda, so I won't. I don't dare speculate what their real name is. ..."
"... Mike Morell is a propaganda whore for the family that owns Viacom. Viacom runs CBS. I don't care how convoluted those shysters made the exact corporate control of CBS, they run it. The family name of these nasty Viacom shysters ain't their real name either. ..."
"... Is this trolling or naïvete? All US investigating agencies are complicit, so who is going to investigate investigators? ..."
"... Americans are pragmatic people. Identifying John Brennan as a so-called "war criminal" because he was involved in all the extraneous crap the American Empire is pulling overseas won't get the interest of ordinary Americans. Calling John Brennan a "propaganda whore" for the family that controls Comcast will pique their interest. ..."
Trump is clearly having a perilous time trying to put together a defense team. He is made to
look the fool on an hourly basis. It isn't even news anymore. Fans of his in the media were
complaining about the 60 Minutes broadcast asking isn't "there more" in terms of news
value?
It was with that pending backdrop that we heard from Brennan. It took no courage. Trump is
in the ring and he's battered. Make no mistake others heard what Brennan was making clear.
Yes, Trump is headed for the "dustbin" and it's just a matter of how. Brennan was telling
those that matter to back off and let it happen. Quality legal counsel trust Trump about as
much as Brennan does.
We saw the large number of Russians tossed out yesterday. Trump acquiesced, though made no
statement. The decision was probably taken while the president was preparing for his Florida
break and how best to react to his porn actress assignation, that never happened (in his
mind).
The system is obviously sick to the point of degeneracy yet some still proclaim that it
can still be "reformed" if we somehow manage to magically get the right guy into the
m̶o̶n̶a̶r̶c̶h̶y̶, I mean prezudensy.
'Taint gonna happen goys 'n squirrels.
It is a system that robs all who work for a living.
What, -- did I hear you say that this of which we have spoken, gives employment to lots
of people? That is an insult to the intelligence of any thinking person, yet that statement
is excusable as long as we continue the existing business and political scheme. As things
now are, the main thing aimed at by the wealth grabbers is to use us -- to make of us mere
machines to wear out in producing wealth for them.
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Why is your country at war and what happens to you after the war,
and related subjects, p 36-7. (1917)
Thanks to President Truman for both the CIA and recognizing the spawning of Israel, two
demonic entities that have and continue to give both America and the world an endless amount
of trouble, while leeching money out of our economy.
Thank Mr. Giraldi for not babbling on about the latest washed up porn star who claims that
Trump bedded her, which makes for endless conversations among the rubes, while the CIA
continues on with its world-wide assassination program, moving paid for jihadists to Syria,
helping the head-chopping Saudi dictator remain in office, running opium out of Afghanistan
and making sure 90% of the MSM keeps feeding toxic slop to people in the guise of news.
Of course the CIA 'interfered' in the 2016 Presidential election. But our Elites do
not want that discussed as a mere possibility. We might also look more closely at the CIA and
the JFK assassination.
The CIA is the child of British imperial secret service, as are the Mossad and the
Saudi General Intelligence Presidency. 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Morell:
"commitment to our nation's security: her belief that America is an exceptional nation that
must lead in the world for the country to remain secure and prosperous; her understanding
that diplomacy can be effective only if the country is perceived as willing and able to use
force if necessary; and her capacity to make the most difficult decision of all: whether to
put young American women and men in harm's way."
What a fine chunk of bullsheat. I wonder how long it took him to come up with that.
Everybody with over 100 IQ knows who steers foreign policy, and they are not American
patriots.
The CIA is the USA's secret army, of course the director is a criminal, judged by common
standards.
If the CIA manipulated elections, I doubt, as nearly all military, they're not very
intelligent.
Only a mighty revolution will even begin to drain the massive D.C. swamp of the
deleterious scum and muck that fills it.
However it has to be a revolution of the spirit and it has to be continuous as you no
doubt already know.
Violent revolutions quickly burn themselves out and are soon co-opted by the usual sleaze.
It's very apparent it even happened to the much vaunted Am Rev, and we see the inevitable
results today. There never, ever, shall be any MAGA. It's merely circus time rhetoric and we
all know that there's a sucker born every minute.
"But while I beheld with pleasure the dawn of liberty rising in Europe, I saw with
regret the lustre of it fading in America
But a faction, acting in disguise, was rising in America; they had lost sight of first
principles. They were beginning to contemplate government as a profitable monopoly, and the
people as hereditary property."
THOMAS PAINE TO THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES,
And particularly to the Leaders of the Federal Faction.
LETTER I, Nov 15, 1802
"Brennan should be thoroughly investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, "
Why Mueller? Brennan isn't a president, or even a government official at all. He's a
former federal employee who is wide open to investigation by the DOJ. Brennan's past terms
employment are an open book to the DOJ or to Congress.
It probably wouldn't take a week for felony charges to be brought against him and he could
be in jail waiting for a trial. Any ordinary citizen is subject to being hounded by the FBI
and charged with multiple felonies, having charges piled up against him until he agrees to
bargain with a guilty plea.
That happens all the time to ordinary citizens. The same could be done to Brennan, who is
just another civilian now. I guess, though, that we would need to have an AG who would be
willing to target a fellow Swamp Creature.
The government will never investigate Brennan or any of the other deep state organs as they
are controlled by the Zionists who also control every facet of the gov, and this control was
proven by the fact that Israel and the deep state did 911 and got away with it.
They might as well call for a real investigation of 911, have a snowballs chance in hell
of getting that done.
You will gain a better understanding of Vladimir Putin if you study his career as a
sportsman, 3rd degree blackbelt Judoka than by sifting through his career as an ex-spy.
First of all, Judo is a sport. It's not a "martial art". It's not meant to maim or injure
-- though of course, people do get injured because they get thrown. Every particular
technique that could inevitably result in injury has been culled from the sport. You don't
"practice" Judo, you "play" it -- literally, that's what they say when talking about
participation.
Practice sessions are democratic. Everyone practices against everyone else. Of course,
this results in mismatches as rank beginners will at some point be paired up with advanced
players. But this mismatch doesn't result in humiliation because the advanced take special
pains to play cleanly, pull their throws i.e. execute them perfectly so the person thrown can
land without injury to themselves and it also is an opportunity for every good Judoka to
teach the novices.
There are some people who come to Judo who don't fit in. They standout because they can be
seen really playing rough with those who are lower in rank than them. But this doesn't go
unnoticed. As people cycle through opponents during the practice session, the bully will
eventually be paired up with someone who is better than they are. And they will be taught a
lesson. Either they learn and conform to the rules or they never show up again. Judo weeds
out opportunistic bullies.
Now I hope the above helps people better understand Putin. To sum up: he is competitive
but will try to win fairly, within the prescribed rules. He won't tolerate bullying by the
stronger over the weaker, will, in fact, come to the aid of the weaker. Has a strong sense of
tradition, of belonging to a school of thought and action that is greater than himself and
that is worth preserving for its own sake, believes and more importantly, knows through
experience, that belonging to such a school improves individual character. He is competent.
I've seen film of him in practice and his technique is quite good. His third degree black
belt was honestly earned, it wasn't an honorary award.
From the above it can be seen why he would have little respect for the current crop of
weak, cowardly, politicians who rule America, lacking as they are in discipline, integrity
and dedication to a larger, noble cause. He would, in fact, find it hard not to hold them in
contempt but, keeping his eyes on the long-term goals of what's good for his country, masters
his emotions when dealing with them face to face.
Not all CIA is bad believe it or not..
Meet CIA Intelligence Officer Michael Scheuer, says Parkland and Las Vegas shootings were
false flags and FBI is covering them up. Goes on to encourage Americans to arm themselves and
stockpile ammo, seems he knows something we don't.
Trump should hire this guy, he doesn't mince words when it comes to Israel either, he is da
man.
If only America had more guys like this in govt, how awesome would America be?
Former CIA Intelligence Officer Dr. Michael Scheuer
You have half a point, from my reading, Truman turned OSS into CIA. Do you think there was
some magical and instant change in the organisation?
On Israel, he may have been having his shoulders twisted, but his writings are very clear
that he found the proto-neocons to be very irritating, specifically the new arrivals from
Europe.
As an outside observer, and excepting the cruel continuing of LeMay's firebombing and the
two atomic bombs, the latter and former clearly war crimes, taking their records into
account, I can not think of one U.S.A. president who was any good since Harding. Perhaps
Coolidge.
They all have their moments, whether the moments are good, bad or meaningless, but the bad
is always outweighing the good.
Philip Giraldi wrote: "Time to find out if CIA interfered in the 2016 election."
Hi Phil,
If Brennan's CIA did not interfere in the volatile 2016 election, I'd be rather
disappointed in them. Will explain. CIA Directors are typically partisan to whichever
political party appoints them to serve. The agency has a long history of interference in
foreign government elections, and a willingness to serve major corporate interests and
foreign governments, i.e., Israel, those interests above & beyond dumb goyim basic
needs.
Consequently, when a solid argument (with evidence) is made that CIA interfered in the
2016 presidential election, the first thing that must be cleared up is the "smoke" that the
CIA works to defend the integrity of American "elections" which allot no other citizen option
but to tolerate and accept Jewish Lobbies who influence (determine) both the outcome of
Congressional & Executive offices.
No doubt, our country's sorry fate would be comforted by a high profile investigation into
Brennan. However, who will conduct such investigation. Robert Mueller who was FBI Director
during the uninvestigated 9/11 attacks?
And then we have 9/11′s CIA Director, George Tenet. I have no clue about CIA funding
for it's operations, but given the huge annual budget allotment to the ZUS Department of
Defense, how was it possible for ESPECIALLY the Pentagon to get victimized by a commercial
airplane attack.
Even moreso than Brennan, does ex-Director Tenet deserve to stand accountable to a serious
criminal coverup investigation, which of course would be the nation's first?
Below is a You Tube video that features an interesting interview with Mark Rossini,
former-FBI "Counter Terrorism" agent and who served under Robert Mueller's command.
Minus any reference to (well known) nefarious Mossad activities in the U.S., Mr. Rossini
tells a passionate story about his attempts to call attention to troublesome Saudi operations
in the "Homeland" prior to 9/11 and how his agency was "coddling the Saudis."
Yes, to expose ex-Director Brennan's more recent "lies" is very necessary. But the man
stood atop an agency that set an incredible example of "by deception we do war" and the
collateral damage is
mankind. "Let's roll!"
Thank you, Philip.
Selah, Great and Holy Tuesday Commemoration of the Ten Wise Virgins (Mt 25:14)
"He [Brennan] said that the U.S. President is 'afraid of the president of Russia' and
that the Kremlin 'may have something on him personally.' "
John Brennan may well be the most dangerous and dirty CIA director in the Company's
history. I think he was engaging in projection when he uttered the above comments.
The true darkness at the heart of the 2016 'hacked' election story is that the Podesta
emails revealed the existence of a pedophile cult in the upper echelons of D.C. society. And
that John Podesta, a long-time CIA asset, was running the cult as an influence and blackmail
operation. Brennan's hands were deep into that miasma, and he has been working overtime at
misdirection since the election.
No fan of Trump and his crew here, but the other team, the D.C. establishment, are much
worse.
We had our bipartisan corporate tax reduction, one of only two things our partisans can agree
on. The other is the ongoing war to make Israel Great. Rinse and repeat.
Depends on what you see as bad. If the USA empire could have been established and
maintained, without a CIA, I doubt. Empires are ruthless, 'perfidious Albion' was the
expression for the British empire.
Ian Hernon, 'Britain's Forgotten Wars, Colonial Campaigns of the 19th Century', 2003,
2007, Chalford -- Stroud
How an important British diplomat saw British control of the greater part of the world as
the natural order of things
Lord Vansittart, 'The Mist Procession, The autobiography of LORD VANSITTART', London
1958
Great pity that death prevented the biography from going furher than 1938.
The machinations of Vansittart during the thirties are described in
Philip M. Taylor, 'The Projection of Britain, British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda
1919-1939′, Cambridge 1981
and
Lawrence R. Pratt, 'East of Malta, West of Suez', London, 1975
The ideas of Vansittart's friend Leeper one finds in
Sir Reginald Leeper, 'When Greek Meets Greek', London 1950
He more or less ruled Greece from 1945 to say 1950.
Holman Jenkins Jr, Wall Street Journal columnist, is a cranky writer who was wrong about
which faction to support in a New Hampshire supermarket war, but he is right when he suggests
that John Brennan has decided that a good offense is the best defense. Call it the John
Brennan attempt to replicate the Dan Fouts-era San Diego Chargers strategy of piling up the
passing yards and the points and hoping that you have more points at the end of the game than
your opponent.
Holman Jenkins Jr:
Which brings us to John Brennan, the Central Intelligence Agency's chief under
President Obama, who rushed to MSNBC this week to claim: "The fact that he has had this
fawning attitude towards Mr. Putin and has not said anything negative about him, it
continues to say something to me that he has something to fear and something serious to
fear [from Russia]."
Uh huh. Presidents have secrets but they also have power, so if you think they are
easily blackmailable, Mr. Brennan may have a third-rate spy novel to sell you. What
occurred to anybody who has followed matters closely was a different thought: Mr. Brennan,
who has a few things to hide himself, has decided his best defense is a strong
offense.
For the truth is, Mr. Trump's version of the loudmouth demagogue is increasingly
coming out on the better side of the emerging facts on Russia. The Kremlin wasn't the most
consequential meddler in the 2016 election: It was James Comey's FBI, with Mr. Brennan
standing obscurely at his elbow every step of the way.
If a planted Russian intercept was instrumental in the fiasco of Mr. Comey's
intervention in the Hillary Clinton email matter, as numerous leaks indicate, then that
intercept would have come from Mr. Brennan's CIA. What's more, it likely came not with a
shrug, but with a clear expectation that Mr. Comey would act to protect a Clinton
presidency from an alleged Russian plot.
So how do you reform the Secret Police? It is an interesting idea. The National Security
State has locked out any outside criticism and made reform almost impossible.
Then, there is also the whole indoctrination process. From hire to retire, these three
letter agencies indoctrinate their employees with esprit de corps and being a team player
with the greatest enthusiasm for the mission.
Claim made by high level persons in the link, suggest need for deep investigation into who in
the USA is getting paid to deliver or make available American taxpayer paid for resources to
foreign payee governments conducting terrorism and destabilization programs?
John Brennan is a propaganda whore for the family that owns Comcast. Comcast runs NBC. I
would call them the Roberts family, but none of them look like Henry Fonda, so I won't. I
don't dare speculate what their real name is.
Mike Morell is a propaganda whore for the family that owns Viacom. Viacom runs CBS. I
don't care how convoluted those shysters made the exact corporate control of CBS, they run
it. The family name of these nasty Viacom shysters ain't their real name either.
President Trump should have declared war on the corporate propaganda apparatus and the
Deep State on day number one of his administration. Trump let the shysters who run the
corporate media and the treasonous rats in the Deep State off the hook.
President Trump won the GOP presidential primary and the presidency itself because Trump
promised to put the safety, security and sovereignty of America first. The largest vote
getter in terms of specific issues was the IMMIGRATION issue. Trump had the chance to fire
every damn treasonous rat in the Deep State and he didn't do it. Trump betrayed his voters
who wanted immigration reduced and illegal aliens deported.
President Trump should face a GOP presidential primary challenger. Maybe that will force
Trump to remove the Deep State, remove the current controllers of the corporate media and put
America first.
Trump should also call for an immigration moratorium and begin deporting all illegal
aliens immediately.
Trump's problems with the corporate media and the Deep State stem from the fact that Trump
didn't immediately remove them when he had the chance. Trump's voter base was more than ready
for a "burn the boats on the beach" battle plan to defend the United States against the
treasonous rats in the Deep State and the anti-White, anti-Christian shyster rats in the
corporate media.
He won't tolerate bullying by the stronger over the weaker, will, in fact, come to the
aid of the weaker.
Thanks for your comment. Now I think I have an idea about why he seems so competent, and
why said competence is especially enhanced when he's contrasted with the unmanly screwballs
we've been burdened with for a very long time.
"He [Brennan] said that the U.S. President is 'afraid of the president of Russia' and
that the Kremlin 'may have something on him personally.' "
Brennan is PROJECTING. They have the goods on HIM, and will squeeze out of him every last
second of influence operations as long as he draws breath. Brennan will never be able to get
off the HAMSTER WHEEL alive.
Charles Pewitt wrote: "John Brennan is a propaganda whore for the family that owns
Comcast."
Hi C.P., Above reflects the better part of Brennan' s character. More definitive is Mr.
Giraldi's identifying him as a "possible war criminal." Also, why can not you see that
"treasonous rats" rule? A learning deficiency? Thanks.
More definitive is Mr. Giraldi's identifying him as a "possible war criminal."
Americans are pragmatic people. Identifying John Brennan as a so-called "war criminal"
because he was involved in all the extraneous crap the American Empire is pulling overseas
won't get the interest of ordinary Americans. Calling John Brennan a "propaganda whore" for
the family that controls Comcast will pique their interest.
I would suggest that John Brennan could be politically damaged the most by stating that
John Brennan supports open borders mass immigration. John Brennan and the rest of the Deep
State are dangerous to Americans because they all support open borders mass immigration. The
corporate media all supports mass immigration.
Over 60 million of us voted for Trump because Trump said he would stop the unnecessary
overseas wars, reduce immigration and scrap the sovereignty-sapping trade deal scams. We
voted for Trump to make the American Empire act more like a republic. We're stuck with the
American Empire until it croaks or is croaked in turn. And the empires all turn into rust
again.
The treasonous rats in the American Empire's Deep State all push nation-wrecking mass
immigration.
...here is a Ukrainian joke.
- You say Russia occupied Ukrainian Crimea. So, why don't you fight for it?
- We are not stupid, there is Russian army there.
- But you say that there is Russian army in Donbass, yet you fight
- That's what we say, but in Crimea there really is Russian army.
Within a week after Brennan's 'routine' visit in April 2014 to the Ukraine the Ukrainian army
launched a civil war. That was within 2 weeks of the CIA instigated coup an the end of
February 2014.
(zdnet.com)BeauHD on Tuesday
March 06, 2018 @08:20PM from the plot-twist dept. According to newly released documents by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, federal agents
would pay Geek Squad employees to flag illegal materials on devices sent in by customers
for repairs. "The relationship goes back at least ten years, according to documents
released as a result of the lawsuit [
filed last year ]," reports ZDNet. "The agency's Louisville division aim was to maintain a
'close liaison' with Geek Squad management to 'glean case initiations and to support the
division's Computer Intrusion and Cyber Crime programs.'" From the report: According to the
EFF's analysis of the documents, FBI agents would "show up, review the images or video and
determine whether they believe they are illegal content" and seize the device so an additional
analysis could be carried out at a local FBI field office. That's when, in some cases, agents
would try to obtain a search warrant to justify the access. The EFF's lawsuit was filed in
response to a report that a Geek Squad employee was
used as an informant by the FBI in the prosecution of child pornography case. The documents
show that the FBI would regularly use Geek Squad employees as confidential human sources -- the
agency's term for informants -- by taking calls from employees when they found something
suspect.
(theintercept.com)
it could also help the cybersecurity community discover previously unknown threats . The
Intercept: When the mysterious entity known as the " Shadow Brokers " released a tranche of stolen NSA
hacking tools to the internet a year ago, most experts who studied the material honed in on the
most potent tools, so-called zero-day exploits that could be used to install malware and take
over machines. But a group of Hungarian security researchers spotted something else in the
data, a collection of scripts and scanning tools the National Security Agency uses to detect
other nation-state hackers on the machines it infects. It turns out those scripts and tools are
just as interesting as the exploits. They show that in 2013 -- the year the NSA tools were
believed to have been stolen by the Shadow Brokers -- the agency was tracking at least 45
different nation-state operations, known in the security community as Advanced Persistent
Threats, or APTs. Some of these appear to be operations known by the broader security community
-- but some may be threat actors and operations currently unknown to researchers.
The scripts and scanning tools dumped by Shadow Brokers and studied by the Hungarians
were created by an NSA team known as Territorial Dispute, or TeDi. Intelligence sources told
The Intercept the NSA established the team after hackers, believed to be from China, stole
designs for the military's Joint Strike Fighter plane, along with other sensitive data, from
U.S. defense contractors in 2007; the team was supposed to detect and counter sophisticated
nation-state attackers more quickly, when they first began to emerge online. "As opposed to the
U.S. only finding out in five years that everything was stolen, their goal was to try to figure
out when it was being stolen in real time," one intelligence source told The Intercept. But
their mission evolved to also provide situational awareness for NSA hackers to help them know
when other nation-state actors are in machines they're trying to hack.
What is interesting is a strong Brennan connections with UK and his possiblke role in Steel dossier creation and propogation. Which actually were typical for
many members of Trump administration. He also has connections with Saudi intelligence services
Notable quotes:
"... So Morell is by his own words clearly an idiot, which explains a lot about what is wrong with CIA and is probably why he is now a consultant with CBS News instead of serving as Agency Director under the beneficent gaze of President Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... Back in 2013 John Brennan, then Obama's counter-terrorism advisor, had a difficult time with the Senate Intelligence Committee explaining some things that he did when he was still working at CIA. ..."
"... He claimed that he had only "raised serious questions" in his own mind on the interrogation issue after reading the 525 page summary of the 6,000 page report prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee which detailed the failure of the Agency program. Brennan's reaction, however, suggested at a minimum that he had read only the rebuttal material produced by CIA that had deliberately inflated the value of the intelligence produced. ..."
"... Surprisingly the subject of rendition, which Brennan must surely have been involved with while at CIA, hardly surfaced though two other interesting snippets emerged from the questioning. ..."
"... Brennan was not questioned at all about the conflict of interest or ethical issues raised by the revolving door that he benefited from when he left CIA as Deputy Executive Director in 2005 and joined a British-owned company called The Analysis Corporation (TAC) where he was named CEO. ..."
"... At the Center of the Storm ..."
"... Brennan certainly knew how to feather his nest and reward his friends, but the area that is still murky relates to what exactly he was up to in 2016 when he was CIA Director and also quite possibly working hard to help Hillary get elected. He was still at it well after Trump got elected and assumed office. In May 2017, his testimony before Congress was headlined in a Washington Post ..."
"... The precise money quote by Brennan that the two articles chiefly rely on is "I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind whether or not Russia was able to gain the co-operation of those individuals." ..."
"... The testimony inevitably raises some questions about just what Brennan was actually up to. First of all, the CIA is not supposed to keep tabs on American citizens and tracking the activities of known associates of a presidential candidate should have sent warning bells off, yet Brennan clearly persisted in following the trail. ..."
"... it is clear that Brennan then used that information to request an FBI investigation into a possible Russian operation directed against potential key advisers if Trump were to somehow get nominated and elected, which admittedly was a longshot at the time. That is how Russiagate began. ..."
"... So, Mr. Brennan, for all his bluster and scarcely concealed anger, has a lot of baggage, to include his possible role in coordinating with other elements in the national security agencies as well as with overseas parties to get their candidate Hillary Clinton elected. ..."
Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan, a Barack Obama friend and
protégé as well as a current paid contributor for NBC and MSNBC, has
blasted President Donald Trump for congratulating President Vladimir Putin over his victory
in recent Russian national elections. He said that the U.S. President is "afraid of the
president of Russia" and that the Kremlin "may have something on him personally. The fact that
he has had this fawning attitude toward Mr. Putin continues to say to me that he does have
something to fear and something very serious to fear."
It is an indication of how low we have sunk as a nation that a possible war criminal like
Brennan can feel free to use his former official status as a bully pulpit to claim that someone
is a foreign spy without any real pushback or objection from the talking heads and billionaire
manipulators that unfortunately run our country. If Trump is actually being blackmailed, as
Brennan implies, what evidence is there for that? One might reasonably conclude that Brennan
and his associates are actually angry because Trump has had the temerity to try to improve
relations with Russia.
It is ironic that when President Trump does something right he gets assailed by the same
crowd that piles on when he does something stupid, leading to the conclusion that unless The
Donald is attacking another country, when he is lauded as becoming truly presidential, he
cannot ever win with the inside the Beltway Establishment crowd. Brennan and a supporting cast
of dissimulating former intelligence chiefs opposed Trump from the git-go and were perfectly
willing to make things up to support Hillary and the status quo that she represented. It was,
of course, a status quo that greatly and personally benefited that ex-government crowd which by
now might well be described as the proverbial Deep State.
The claim that Trump is a Russian agent is not a new one since it is an easy mark to allege
something that you don't have to prove. During the campaign, one was frequently confronted on
the television by the humorless stare of the malignant Michael Morell, former acting CIA
Director, who wrote in a mind numbing August 2016
op-ed how he was proud to support Hillary Clinton because of her "commitment to our
nation's security: her belief that America is an exceptional nation that must lead in the world
for the country to remain secure and prosperous; her understanding that diplomacy can be
effective only if the country is perceived as willing and able to use force if necessary; and
her capacity to make the most difficult decision of all: whether to put young American women
and men in harm's way." Per Morell, she was a "proponent of a more aggressive approach [in
Syria], one that might have prevented the Islamic State from gaining a foothold "
But Morell saved his finest vitriol for Donald Trump, observing how Vladimir Putin, a wily
ex-career intelligence officer "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to
exploit them" obtained the services of one fairly obscure American businessman named Trump
without even physically meeting him. Morell, given his broad experience as an analyst and desk
jockey, notes, "In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr.
Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." An "unwitting agent" is a contradiction
in terms, but one wouldn't expect Morell to know that. Nor would John Brennan, who was also an
analyst and desk jockey before he was elevated by an equally witless President Barack
Obama.
So Morell is by his own words clearly an idiot, which explains a lot about what is wrong
with CIA and is probably why he is now a consultant with CBS News instead of serving as Agency
Director under the beneficent gaze of President Hillary Clinton.
Well, Trump's fractured foreign policy aside, I have some real problems with folks like
Michael Morell and John Brennan throwing stones. Both can be reasonably described as war
criminals due to what they did during the war on terror and also as major subverters of the
Constitution of the United States that has emerged as part of the saga of the 2016 election,
the outcome of which, ironically, is being blamed on the Russians.
Back in 2013 John Brennan, then Obama's counter-terrorism advisor, had a difficult time
with the Senate Intelligence Committee explaining some things that he did when he was still
working at CIA. He was predictably
attacked by some senators concerned over the expanding drone program, which he supervised;
over CIA torture; for the kill lists that he helped manage; and regarding the pervasive
government secrecy, which he surely condoned to cover up the questionable nature of the
assassination lists and the drones. Not at all surprisingly, he was forced to defend the
policies of the administration that he was then serving in, claiming that the United States is
"at war with al-Qaeda." But he did cite his basic disagreement with the former CIA
interrogation policies and expressed his surprise at learning that enhanced interrogation,
which he refused to label torture because he is "no lawyer," had not provided any unique or
actionable information. He claimed that he had only "raised serious questions" in his own
mind on the interrogation issue after reading the 525 page summary of the 6,000 page report
prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee which detailed the failure of the Agency program.
Brennan's reaction, however, suggested at a minimum that he had read only the rebuttal material
produced by CIA that had deliberately inflated the value of the intelligence produced.
Surprisingly the subject of rendition, which Brennan must surely have been involved with
while at CIA, hardly surfaced though two other interesting
snippets emerged from the questioning. One was his confirmation that the government
has its own secret list of innocent civilians killed by drones while at the same time
contradicting himself by maintaining that the program does not actually exist and that if even
if it did exist such fatalities do not occur. And more directly relevant to Brennan himself,
Senator John D. Rockefeller provided an insight into the classified sections of the Senate
report on CIA torture, mentioning that the enhanced interrogation program was both "managed
incompetently" and "corrupted by personnel with pecuniary conflicts of interest." One would
certainly like to learn more about the presumed contractors who profited corruptly from
waterboarding and one would like to know if they were in any way punished, an interesting
sidebar as Brennan has a number of times spoken about the need for accountability.
Brennan was not questioned at all about the conflict of interest or ethical issues
raised by the revolving door
that he benefited from when he left CIA as Deputy Executive Director in 2005 and joined a
British-owned company called The Analysis Corporation (TAC) where he was named CEO. He
made almost certainly some millions of dollars when the Agency and other federal agencies
awarded TAC contracts to develop biometrics and set up systems to manage the government's
various watch lists before rejoining the government with a full bank account to help him along
his way. Brennan also reportedly knew how to return a favor, giving his former boss at CIA
George Tenet a compensated advisory position in his company and also hosting in 2007 a book
signing for Tenet's At the Center of the Storm . The by-invitation-only event included
six hundred current and former intelligence officers, some of whom waited for hours to have
Tenet sign copies of the book, which were provided by TAC.
Brennan certainly knew how to feather his nest and reward his friends, but the area that
is still murky relates to what exactly he was up to in 2016 when he was CIA Director and also
quite possibly working hard to help Hillary get elected. He was still at it well after Trump
got elected and assumed office. In May 2017, his testimony before Congress was headlined in a
Washington Post front page featured article as
Brennan's explosive testimony just made it harder for the GOP to protect Trump . The
article stated that Brennan during the 2016 campaign "reviewed intelligence that showed
'contacts and interaction' between Russian actors and people associated with the Trump
campaign." Politico was also in on the chase in an article entitled
Brennan: Russia may have successfully recruited Trump campaign aides .
The precise money quote by Brennan that the two
articles chiefly rely on is "I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that
revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the
Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such
individuals. It raised questions in my mind whether or not Russia was able to gain the
co-operation of those individuals."
The testimony inevitably raises some questions about just what Brennan was actually up
to. First of all, the CIA is not supposed to keep tabs on American citizens and tracking the
activities of known associates of a presidential candidate should have sent warning bells off,
yet Brennan clearly persisted in following the trail. What Brennan did not describe,
because it was "classified," was how he came upon the information in the first place. We know
from Politico and other sources that it came from foreign intelligence services,
including the British, Dutch and Estonians, and there has to be a strong suspicion that the
forwarding of at least some of that information might have been sought or possibly inspired by
Brennan unofficially in the first place. But whatever the provenance of the intelligence,
it is clear that Brennan then used that information to request an FBI investigation into a
possible Russian operation directed against potential key advisers if Trump were to somehow get
nominated and elected, which admittedly was a longshot at the time. That is how Russiagate
began.
So, Mr. Brennan, for all his bluster and scarcely concealed anger, has a lot of baggage,
to include his possible role in coordinating with other elements in the national security
agencies as well as with overseas parties to get their candidate Hillary Clinton elected.
Brennan should be thoroughly investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, to include
subpoenaing all records at CIA relating to the Trump inquiries before requiring testimony under
oath of Brennan himself with possible legal consequences if he is caught lying
"... was developed and originated in extremist circles populated by white supremacists ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... neoliberalism versus neo-nationalism ..."
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
Thank God for the corporate media. If it wasn't for them, and the ADL, I'd have probably
never discovered that I'm a Nazi. Apparently, I've been one for quite some time which is weird,
as I had no idea. Here I was, naively believing that I'd been writing about global capitalism
and the realignment of political power and ideology in the post-Cold War world, when all along
I had really just been persecuting the Jews. I didn't think I was persecuting the Jews. But
such is the insidious nature of thoughtcrime. When you're a Nazi thought criminal (as I
apparently am), it doesn't matter what you think you're thinking. What matters is what the
global capitalist ruling classes tell you you're thinking, which it turns out is often a lot
more complicated and horrible than what you thought you were thinking.
For example, I've been thinking and writing about globalism, which most dictionaries define
as "a national policy of treating the whole world as a proper sphere for political influence,"
or "the development of socioeconomic networks that transcend national boundaries," or something
like that which was more or less my understanding of the term. Little did I know that these
fake "definitions" had been infiltrated into these dictionaries by discord-sowing Strasserist
agents to dupe political satirists like myself into unknowingly spreading anti-Semitism as part
of Putin's Master Plan to destroy the United States of America and establish worldwide Nazi
domination.
Fortunately, the lexicography experts in the corporate media and the Anti-Defamation League
cleared that up for me earlier this month. According to these experts, words like "globalist"
and "globalism" don't really mean anything. They are simply Nazi code words for "the
Jews." There is actually no such thing as "globalism," or "global capitalism," or
"transnational capitalism," or "supranational quasi-governmental entities" like the
International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the European Commission, and the
European Central Bank or, OK, sure, there are such entities, but there is no legitimate reason
to discuss them, or write about them, or even casually mention them, and anyone who does is
definitely a Nazi.
Now, imagine my horror when I took that in, especially given my repeated references to "the
corporatocracy," "global capitalism," and "the global capitalist ruling classes" in the essays I've been publishing recently . I
didn't want to accept it at first, but the more "authoritative sources" I consulted, the more
glaringly obvious my thoughtcrimes became.
These authoritative sources were reacting to Trump referring to Gary Cohn as "a globalist"
in his rambling remarks in the Oval Office, which went a little something like this: "He may be
a globalist, but I still like him. He is seriously a globalist. There's no question in his own
way. But you know what, he's also a nationalist. He loves our country and where is Gary?" While
the experts are still scouring the video for
Nazi gestures and facial expressions, there can be no doubt that Trump said the word
"globalist." The corporate media and the ADL could not allow this transgression to stand.
Peter Beinart, writing in
The Atlantic , explained that "globalist" is "an epithet a modern-day vessel for a
slur" against the Jews, and he linked to a video of Jonathan Greenblatt
, CEO of the ADL, who verified that "the term 'globalist' was developed and originated in
extremist circles populated by white supremacists " (by which I can only assume he meant
the Anti-globalization
Movement , which apparently is just a big Nazi front). Eli Rosenberg,
in The Washington Post , although allowing that "globalist" can sometimes mean
"globalist," emphasized that, "to some observers of extremism," it also "speaks to something
darker." Bret Stephens, in The New York
Times ,couldn't quite decide whether using the word makes you an official
goose-stepping Nazi or just a garden variety anti-Semite. CNN's Don Lemon,
delving into "the ugly history" of the word , explained that "it is shorthand for a
worldview based on racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism" the worldview of "far right
conspiracy theorists obsessed with prominent Jews like George Soros." And these are just a few
of the many examples.
After processing all these "authoritative" statements by these "respected experts" and
"credible news sources," I felt like I'd been walking around with a Swastika branded into my
forehead. I was overcome by a sudden need to signal my anti-anti-Semitism to my friends,
family, and the world at large. After destroying my old Pink Floyd CDs and apologizing to Jerry
Seinfeld on Twitter , I immediately ran and confessed to my wife, who just happens to be "a
globalist," and begged her to call her family members who control the media, the banks, and
Hollywood and ask them to forgive me my thoughtcrimes. Then I drafted an email to the SPLC
asking whether they could possibly squeeze me into their interactive Hate Map somewhere, or at
least let some neo-McCarthyite hack
publish a ridiculous, paranoid smear piece about my Nazi vocabulary on their website.
Seriously, though, all satire aside, this stigmatization of terms like "globalist,"
"globalism," and "global capitalism" is a key component of The War on Dissent which the
global capitalist ruling classes have been waging against a broad assortment of insurgent
elements for the last eighteen months. It isn't just a question of delegitimizing dissidents by
smearing them as anti-Semites, Russian agents, and conspiracy theorists. The goal is also to
conceal the essential nature of the conflict itself. The essential nature of the conflict is
neoliberalism versus neo-nationalism . This is what we are experiencing currently, not
a Russian assault on Western democracy, nor even a resumption of the Cold War, but, rather, the
global capitalist ruling classes putting down a neo-nationalist insurgency the insurgency that
led to the Brexit referendum and the presidency of Donald Trump.
Now, here's where things get a little tricky, particularly for those of us on the Left
(whatever that label even means anymore). The neo-nationalists can come right out and call the
conflict what it is. It is in their interest to call it what it is. They may not be opposing
capitalism, but they are certainly opposing global capitalism. In doing so, they are
attracting people who are not so thrilled about being governed by unaccountable global
corporations and supranational non-governmental bodies, people who are still emotionally
attached to outdated concepts like national sovereignty, national culture, and crazy stuff like
that. Some of these folks are actual neo-Nazis, but most of them are just regular people who
know when they are being pissed on by global capitalism and told it's raining. The point is,
the neo-nationalists can describe their opponents as exactly what they are, global capitalists,
or just plain old globalists. Neoliberals do not have this luxury.
See, the problem for the capitalist ruling classes is that global neoliberalism (i.e.,
globalism) is a really tough sell to regular folks. They can't just come out and explain to
people that national sovereignty is essentially dead, and that political power now resides
among a network of global corporations (which couldn't care less about their "nationality")
exploiting a globalized labor market (which is why their "good jobs" are not coming back) and a
globalized financial market (which is why almost everything is being privatized and their
families are being debt-enslaved). Nor can they admit that the "War on Terror" and the European
refugee crisis it has caused, and the chaos and slaughter in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen,
Syria, et cetera, is the predictable result of global capitalism aggressively restructuring the
Greater Middle East, which it started doing more or less immediately after the collapse of the
Soviet Union (i.e., as soon as the final impediment to its pursuit of global hegemony was
removed). This kind of thing doesn't go over very well, not with most regular working class
people.
So what the global capitalist ruling classes have to do is well, they have to lie. They have
to disseminate a different narrative, a narrative that has nothing to do with the hegemony of
global capitalism, the dissolution of national sovereignty, and the privatization of virtually
everything. Because people aren't total morons, this narrative needs to bear some resemblance
to the actual conflict taking place. So, all right, a little rebranding is in order. Global
neoliberalism becomes "Western democracy," neo-nationalism becomes "Nazism," and Vladimir Putin
becomes Adolf Hitler.
Presto! Now things are nice and simple! History, geopolitics, and socioeconomics vanish into
the ether! Capitalism schmapitalism! This is no time for critical thinking, not with
Putin-Nazis coming out of the woodwork! No, this is a time to rally behind the freedom fighters
at the FBI, the CIA, the corporate media, and the rest of the military industrial complex, and
to mercilessly hunt down Russian infiltrators, Putin sympathizers, crypto-Assadists,
neo-Strasserian, alt-right entryists, and other sowers of division and discord! We need to get
these folks delegitimitized, stigmatized as racists and anti-Semites, or terrorists, or some
other type of "extremist," before they can "influence" anyone else with their Facebook ads and
subversive essays.
You will know them by the words they use, and by the words they do not use. Anybody using
words like "globalist," "global capitalism," or "neoliberal," or suggesting that anyone voted
for Trump or Brexit for any reason other than racism, you can pretty much rest assured that
they're Nazis. Also, anyone writing about "banks" or the "deep state." Absolutely Nazis. Oh
yeah, and the "corporate media," naturally. Only Putin-Nazis talk like that. Oh, and definitely
anyone who hasn't spent the last two years attacking Trump (as if there has been anything else
to focus on), or has implied that "the Russians" aren't out to destroy us, or that the
historical moment we are living through might be just a bit more complex than that well, you
know what they're really saying. They're saying, "we need to exterminate the Jews."
Look, I could go on and on with this, but I don't think I really need to. Remember, I'm a
Nazi thought criminal now. So just go back and read through some of my essays and make note of
all the coded Nazi messages, or check with the Anti-Defamation League, or the SPLC, or the
corporate media, or well, just ask the good
folks at Google .
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . (Republished by permission of
author or representative) ← The Cult of Authority
"... Trump himself has pledged to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal -- "the worst deal ever" -- and reimpose sanctions in May. His new national security adviser John Bolton, who wrote an op-ed titled "To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran," has called for preemptive strikes and "regime change." Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo calls Iran "a thuggish police state," a "despotic theocracy," and "the vanguard of a pernicious empire that is expanding its power and influence across the Middle East." ..."
"... China and Russia would not abrogate the deal but would welcome Iran into their camp. England, France and Germany would have to choose between the deal and the U.S. And if Airbus were obligated to spurn Iran's orders for hundreds of new planes, how would that sit with the Europeans? ..."
"... How would North Korea react if the U.S. trashed a deal where Iran, after accepting severe restrictions on its nuclear program and allowing intrusive inspections, were cheated of the benefits the Americans promised? ..."
The last man standing between the U.S. and war with Iran may be a four-star general
affectionately known to his Marines as "Mad Dog."
Gen. James Mattis, the secretary of defense, appears to be the last man in the Situation
Room who believes the Iran nuclear deal may be worth preserving and that war with Iran is a
dreadful idea. Yet, other than Mattis, President Donald Trump seems to be creating a war
cabinet.
Trump himself has pledged to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal -- "the worst deal
ever" -- and reimpose sanctions in May. His new national security adviser John Bolton, who
wrote an op-ed titled "To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran," has called for preemptive strikes and
"regime change." Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo calls Iran "a thuggish police state,"
a "despotic theocracy," and "the vanguard of a pernicious empire that is expanding its power
and influence across the Middle East."
Trump's favorite Arab ruler, 32-year-old Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, calls Iran's
Ayatollah Khamenei "the Hitler of the Middle East." Bibi Netanyahu is monomaniacal on Iran,
calling the nuclear deal a threat to Israel's survival and Iran "the greatest threat to our
world." U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley echoes them all.
Yet Iran appears not to want a war. U.N. inspectors routinely confirm that Iran is strictly
abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal. While U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf often
encountered Iranian "fast attack" boats and drones between January 2016 and August 2017, that
has stopped. Vessels of both nations have operated virtually without incident. What would be
the result of Trump's trashing of the nuclear deal?
First would be the isolation of the United States.
China and Russia would not abrogate the deal but would welcome Iran into their camp.
England, France and Germany would have to choose between the deal and the U.S. And if Airbus
were obligated to spurn Iran's orders for hundreds of new planes, how would that sit with the
Europeans?
How would North Korea react if the U.S. trashed a deal where Iran, after accepting
severe restrictions on its nuclear program and allowing intrusive inspections, were cheated of
the benefits the Americans promised?
Why would Pyongyang, having seen us attack Iraq, which had no WMD, and Libya, which had
given up its WMD to mollify us, ever consider given up its nuclear weapons -- especially after
seeing the leaders of both nations executed?
And, should the five other signatories to the Iran deal continue with it despite us, and
Iran agree to abide by its terms, what do we do then?
Find a casus belli to go to war? Why? How does Iran threaten us?
A war, which would involve U.S. warships against swarms of Iranian torpedo boats could shut
down the Persian Gulf to oil traffic and produce a crisis in the global economy. Anti-American
Shiite jihadists in Beirut, Baghdad and Bahrain could attack U.S. civilian and military
personnel.
As the Army and Marine Corps do not have the troops to invade and occupy Iran, would we have
to reinstate the draft?
And if we decided to blockade and bomb Iran, we would have to take out all its anti-ship
missiles, submarines, navy, air force, ballistic missiles and air defense system.
And would not a pre-emptive strike on Iran unite its people in hatred of us, just as Japan's
pre-emptive strike on Pearl Harbor united us in a determination to annihilate her empire?
What would the Dow Jones average look like after an attack on Iran?
Trump was nominated because he promised to keep us out of stupid wars like those into which
folks like John Bolton and the Bush Republicans plunged us.
After 17 years, we are still mired in Afghanistan, trying to keep the Taliban we overthrew
in 2001 from returning to Kabul. Following our 2003 invasion, Iraq, once a bulwark against
Iran, became a Shiite ally of Iran.
The rebels we supported in Syria have been routed. And Bashar Assad -- thanks to backing
from Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Shiite militias from the Middle East and Central Asia -- has
secured his throne.
The Kurds who trusted us have been hammered by our NATO ally Turkey in Syria, and by the
Iraqi Army we trained in Iraq.
What is Trump, who assured us there would be no more stupid wars, thinking? Truman and LBJ
got us into wars they could not end, and both lost their presidencies. Eisenhower and Nixon
ended those wars and were rewarded with landslides.
After his smashing victory in Desert Storm, Bush I was denied a second term. After invading
Iraq, Bush II lost both houses of Congress in 2006, and his party lost the presidency in 2008
to the antiwar Barack Obama.
Once Trump seemed to understand this history.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The
Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
"... made a fairly desultory expulsion of a diplomat or two or three, but the United States' act is a kind of declaration of war, all the more surprising given that according to the deep state, and the liberal confluence in the United States, President Trump is Russia's man ..."
"... "precursor to a very sharp deterioration of relations" ..."
"... deep state opponents" ..."
"... "If it were me who was making the decision, I certainly wouldn't proceed on the assumption that being soft will in any way satiate the ravenous beasts that are baying for Russia's blood at this point in time," ..."
"... "As far as I can see there is no investigation, ..."
"... "The verdict was declared before the investigation began and I think there's no investigation because the results of any serious scientific analytical investigation would show that the allegations against Russia are baseless." ..."
"... "I don't believe that Russia is responsible for this act. And the good news is that most of the British public tend to agree," ..."
British politician, broadcaster, and writer George Galloway has slammed Donald Trump's decision to expel 60 Russian diplomats
and close the Russian consulate in Seattle. Galloway regards it as tantamount to a "declaration of war." Galloway contrasted the
US' actions with those of EU member states. Those EU countries who rushed to follow the lead of Britain and the US in response to
the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal are simply acting as "vassal states," doing what they are told.
European states have " made a fairly desultory expulsion of a diplomat or two or three, but the United States' act is a kind
of declaration of war, all the more surprising given that according to the deep state, and the liberal confluence in the United States,
President Trump is Russia's man ," Galloway told RT.
The former British MP said the decision to leave just 40 Russian diplomats to do their jobs in the US was either a "precursor
to a very sharp deterioration of relations" -- or alternatively a "charade " designed to make Trump's " deep state
opponents" lay off him over not being tough enough on Russia.
Galloway said Russia should not assume that being soft in response to Trump's action will have any desirable effect.
"If it were me who was making the decision, I certainly wouldn't proceed on the assumption that being soft will in any way
satiate the ravenous beasts that are baying for Russia's blood at this point in time," he said.
According to Galloway, the UK has not conducted a serious and unbiased investigation into the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter.
"As far as I can see there is no investigation, " he said. "The verdict was declared before the investigation began
and I think there's no investigation because the results of any serious scientific analytical investigation would show that the allegations
against Russia are baseless."
Galloway said there are still many questions which have been left unanswered in the Skripal case.
"I don't believe that Russia is responsible for this act. And the good news is that most of the British public tend to agree,"
he said.
What is interesting is that Trump not only folded, but seeking self-preservation he voluntarily appointed
neocons to the top layer of his administration
Notable quotes:
"... This is why I often say: forget about needing a third political party – we need a second political party! Trump is admitting that to fuel the warfare state and enrich the military-industrial complex, it was necessary to dump endless tax dollars into the welfare state. ..."
"... But no one "forced" President Trump to sign the bill. His party controls both houses of Congress. ..."
"... Defense Secretary James Mattis said at the same press conference that, "As the President noted, today we received the largest military budget in history, reversing many years of decline and unpredictable funding." ..."
"... his statement is misleading. Where are these several years of decline? Did we somehow miss a massive reduction in military spending under President Obama? Did the last Administration close the thousands of military bases in more than 150 countries while we weren't looking? ..."
"... On militarism, the Obama Administration was just an extension of the Bush Administration, which was an extension of the militarism of the Clinton Administration. ..."
"... The military-industrial complex continues to generate record profits from fictitious enemies. The mainstream media continues to play the game, amplifying the war propaganda produced by the think tanks, which are funded by the big defense contractors. ..."
On Friday, President Trump signed the omnibus
spending bill for 2018. The $1.3 trillion bill was so monstrous that it would have made the
biggest spender in the Obama Administration blush. The image of leading Congressional Democrats
Pelosi and Schumer grinning and gloating over getting everything they wanted -- and then some
-- will likely come back to haunt Republicans at the midterm elections. If so, they will
deserve it.
Even President Trump admitted the bill was horrible. As he said in the signing ceremony,
"there are a lot of things that we shouldn't have had in this bill, but we were, in a sense,
forced -- if we want to build our military "
This is why I often say: forget about needing a third political party – we need a
second political party! Trump is admitting that to fuel the warfare state and enrich the
military-industrial complex, it was necessary to dump endless tax dollars into the welfare
state.
But no one "forced" President Trump to sign the bill. His party controls both houses of
Congress. He knows that no one in Washington cares about deficits so he was more than willing
to spread some Fed-created money at home to get his massive war spending boost. And about the
militarism funded by the bill? Defense Secretary James Mattis said at the same press conference
that, "As the President noted, today we received the largest military budget in history,
reversing many years of decline and unpredictable funding."
He's right and wrong at the same time. Yes it is another big increase in military spending.
In fact the US continues to spend more than at least the next seven or so largest countries
combined. But his statement is misleading. Where are these several years of decline? Did we
somehow miss a massive reduction in military spending under President Obama? Did the last
Administration close the thousands of military bases in more than 150 countries while we
weren't looking?
Of course not.
On militarism, the Obama Administration was just an extension of the Bush Administration,
which was an extension of the militarism of the Clinton Administration. And so on. The
military-industrial complex continues to generate record profits from fictitious enemies. The
mainstream media continues to play the game, amplifying the war propaganda produced by the
think tanks, which are funded by the big defense contractors.
This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy fact. Enemies must be created to keep
Washington rich, even as the rest of the country suffers from the destruction of the dollar.
That is why the neocons continue to do very well in this Administration.
While Trump and Mattis were celebrating big military spending increases, the president
announced that John Bolton, one of the chief architects of the Iraq war debacle, would become
his national security advisor. As former CIA analyst Paul Pillar has written, this is a man
who, while at the State Department, demanded that intelligence analysts reach pre-determined
conclusions about Iraq and WMDs. He cooked the books for war.
Bolton is on the record calling for war with Iran, North Korea, even Cuba! His return to a
senior position in government is a return to the unconstitutional, immoral, and failed policies
of pre-emptive war.
Make no mistake: the neocons are back and looking for another war. They've got the
president's ear. Iran? North Korea? Russia? China? Who's next for the warmongers?
"... (this last sentence in English in the original text – trans.) ..."
"... As to who will prevail, your guess is as good a mine. But the fact that today Trump replaced McMaster with a warmongering psychopath like John Bolton is a clear sign that the Neocons are in charge in the US and that the Axis of Kindness is about to get a heck of a lot "kinder". ..."
"... Both Saker and the commenter #1 put accent on the ideological struggle between Russia and the West, contrasting Russian (and) Chinese – we do not interfere with your system of beliefs or who rules you, let us cooperate and do business. This is contrasted against the Western – we are the Borg, you will be regime-changed to be assimilated, aka we are the Exceptional Owners of the World. This is truly the main ideological struggle of the 21. century, forget about left wing – right wing. ..."
"... I do not know how long the Russian initiative will last, but at the moment Russia is in a goldilocks situation: it probably has the best leadership in the world, ..."
"... 'Full Spectrum Dominance', as explicit in US military doctrine, and noted as such by Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel address, and embedded in the F. William Engdahl book 'Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order', was imo both pathological and impossible, but that didn't stop them from trying. ..."
"... Gen. Wesley Clark's rather famous post 9/11 surprise at hearing that 7 countries in five years were slated for – in effect – destruction, euphemistically called regime change is starting to seem like another era. 'Guess what I just heard down the hall. We're gonna go into 5 countries with our mercenaries, and military, and our amazing technology, and bomb them all to hell if we have to, and lie to the world about everything we're doing, and kill and wound and orphan millions of people, because ah, because ah, because ah, actually I'm not sure why, but that's what's on the program. It's sort of a tradition. We bombed the hell out of Korea, then we bombed the hell out of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, actually I lost count, so many, anyway fast forward to remnants of Yugoslavia, boy did we ever destroy that.!' ..."
"... Any similarity between MH17 and Skripal investigations, although both cooked up in the same kitchen, is completely coincidental, of course. ..."
So what is really going on here? Surely nobody seriously believes that the Brits really
think that the Russians had any motive to try to kill Skripal or, for that matter, if they had
a motive, that they would do it in such a stupid manner? And what's the deal with Syria anyway?
Is the US going to execute their false flag and bomb?
I think that at this point we should not get bogged down in the details of all this. There
is a forest behind these trees. What matters most now, is that the most powerful factions of
the AngloZionist Empire's ruling elites are making a concerted effort to create a unified
anti-Russian coalition. In this regard it is quite telling that the US, France, and Germany
issued a statement on March 15 th without even bothering to consult with their
so-called "allies" in NATO or the EU. You can immediately tell "who is boss" in those crisis
situations when the rest of the Euro-riffraff simply doesn't matter (poor East Europeans with
their delusions about being appreciated or even respected by the West!). Furthermore, it is
quite clear that in this case, the "Anglo" component of the AngloZionist Empire is far more
involved than the Zionist one, at least insofar as the front of the stage is concerned (
behind the scenes the Neocons are seething at Trump for calling Putin to congratulate him
and offer negotiations). I think that a number of crucial developments forced the US and the UK
into trying to strong-arm the rest of the western nations to "circle the wagons" around the
Empire:
The US humiliatingly failed in its attempts to frighten and force the DPRK into
submission The AngloZionists have lost the civil war in Syria The UK and the rest of the NATO
are becoming militarily irrelevant The Ukraine has crashed and is burning and a Ukronazi attack
on the Donbass is most likely The political forces in Europe who opposed anti-Russian policies
are on the ascent The Russians are winning many EU countries over by economic means including
North Stream whereas sanctions are hurting the EU much more than Russia The anti-Putin campaign
has miserably failed and Russia is fully united in her stance against the Empire
What this all means is very simple: the Empire needs to either fold or double down and
folding is just not something the imperial elites are willing to consider yet. They are
therefore using the tools which they perceive as most effective:
False flags : this is really a time-honored western tradition used by pretty much all
the western powers. Since the general public is brainwashed and mostly can't even begin to
imagine that "freedom loving liberal democracies" could use methods usually ascribed to evil,
bloodthirsty dictatorial regimes, false flags are an ideal way to get the public opinion in
the correct state of mind to approve of aggressive, hostile and even violent policies against
a perceived threat or obstacle to hegemony. Soft power : have you noticed how the Oscars or the Cannes festival always pick
exactly the kind of "artists" which the Empire happens to politically promote? Well, this is
true not only for the Oscars or the Cannes festival but for almost all of the cultural,
social and political life in the West. This is especially true of so-called "human rights"
and "peace" organizations which are simply political pit-bulls which can be sicked on any
country in need of subversion and/or intervention. Russia has never developed that kind of
political toolkit. Verbal escalation : this tactic is extremely crude yet very effective. You begin by
vociferously proclaiming some falsehood. The fact that you proclaimed it in such vociferous
and hyperbolic matter achieves two immediate results: it sends all your friends and allies a
clear message " you are either with us or against us ", that leaves no room for nuance
or analysis, and it gives otherwise rather spineless politicians no way to back down, thus
strengthening their "resolve". Herding : there is safety in numbers. So when dealing with a potentially dangerous
foe, like Russia, all the little guys flock together so as to appear bigger or, at least,
harder to single out. Also, when everybody is responsible, nobody is. Thus herding is also
politically expedient. Finally, it changed the inter-relational dynamic from one of friends
or allies to one typically found among accomplices in a crime. Direct threats : the Empire got away with making threats left and right for many
decades, and this is a habit which is hard to break. The likes of Nikki Haley or Hillary
Clinton probably sincerely believe that the US is quasi-omnipotent or, conversely, they might
be terrified by the creeping suspicion that it might not. Threats are also an easy, if
ineffective, substitute for diplomacy and negotiations, especially when your position is
objectively wrong and the other side is simply a lot smarter than you.
The big problem is that none of these methods work against Russia or, let me correct that,
don't work anymore (they sure appeared to work in the past). Russian public opinion is fully
aware of all these methods (courtesy of a Russian media NOT controlled by AngloZionists) and
Margarita Simonian beautifully summarized
the feelings that all this elicits in the Russian population:
"all your injustice and cruelty, inquisitorial hypocrisy and lies you forced us to stop
respecting you. You and your so-called "values." We don't want to live like you live,
anymore. For fifty years, secretly and openly, we wanted to live like you, but not any
longer. We have no more respect for you, and for those among us that you support, and for all
those people who support you ( ). For that, you only have yourself to blame ( ) Our people
are capable to forgive a lot. But we don't forgive arrogance, and no normal nation would.
Your only remaining Empire would be wise to learn the history of its allies, all of them are
former empires. To learn the ways they lost their empires. Only because of their arrogance.
White man's burden, my ass!" (this last sentence in English in the original text –
trans.)
The stark truth is that far from wanting to invade, appease or otherwise please the West,
Russia has absolutely no need, or even interest, in it. None. For centuries Russian elites have
been western-focused to some degree or other and none of them could even begin to imagine a
West-less Russia. This is still true today, the Russian "elites" still want to live like (very
rich) Brits or Germans and they still hate the common Russian people and Vladimir Putin. But
those Russian elites have now been crushed by the magnitude of Putin's victory in the
presidential elections. Normally, this should result in an even bigger exile of Russian
"businessmen" to the UK, France or Israel, but the problem now is that the British are making
noises about punishing them for, well, being Russians (even Russophobic, pro-western,
"Russians"). As a result, these "poor" pro-western liberals can only whine on the social media
and in the few pro-western media outlets left in Russia (no, not due to repression, but due to
their political irrelevancy being backed, as they are, by something between 2% and 5% of the
population).
But setting aside the wealthy "elites" for a moment, Russia as a country and as a nation has
simply no use for the West and what it represents. Those who fantasize about Russia being
interested in "Europe", "White identity" or "Western Christianity" are only kidding themselves.
They hope that the current cultural and spiritual revival in Russia will somehow spill over to
them and allow them to extricate themselves from the gutter in which they are currently
prostrated. It won't. Just read again what Simonian said about the western "values" in the
quote above. For most Russians "Europe" reeks of Napoleon, "White identity" of Hitler and
"Western Christianity" of the creation of the Ukraine and the " Eastern Crusades ". No,
Russia has no interest in revenge against any of that, she just has no respect or interest for
what these concepts stand for. (Poland – is possibly the last country where all these
things are taken seriously and fondly remembered). Still, the Russians remain willing to
negotiate to establish a viable coexistence between the Western and Russian civilizational
realms. Putin clearly said so in his speech
There is no need to create more threats to the world. Instead, let us sit down at the
negotiating table and devise together a new and relevant system of international security and
sustainable development for human civilization. We have been saying this all along. All these
proposals are still valid. Russia is ready for this.
But if the AngloZionists are dead set on world domination by means of war, then Russia is
ready for that too. Not a war of aggression, of course, not even against the tiny Baltic
statelets, Putin made that clear too when he said "w e are not threatening anyone, not going
to attack anyone or take away anything from anyone with the threat of weapons. We do not
need anything . Just the opposite " (emphasis added). But if attacked, Russia is now
ready to defend herself:
"And to those who in the past 15 years have tried to accelerate an arms race and seek
unilateral advantage against Russia, have introduced restrictions and sanctions that are
illegal from the standpoint of international law aiming to restrain our nation's development,
including in the military area, I will say this: everything you have tried to prevent through
such a policy has already happened. No one has managed to restrain Russia ( ) Any use of
nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies, weapons of short, medium or any range at all,
will be considered as a nuclear attack on this country. Retaliation will be immediate, with
all the attendant consequences. There should be no doubt about this whatsoever."
Why is the nuclear issue so central? Because the Russians are fully aware of the fact that
the
AngloZionists cannot win a conventional war with Russia . Thus it is crucial for the
Russians to convince the AngloZionists that they are neither militarily superior nor
invulnerable (see here for a full
analysis of these two myths). But once some kind of modus vivendi is achieved with the
West, Russia will focus her efforts in different directions: much needed internal reforms and
development, the work with China on the establishment of a single Eurasian zone of economic
security, peace and prosperity, the restoration of peace in the Middle-East, the development of
the Russian Far East and North – you name it. Russia has plenty of work which needs to be
done, none of which involves the West in any capacity.
And that is, of course, what is so totally unacceptable to the West.
Hence this month's historical developments which have placed Russia and the West in a direct
collision course. As I said above, the Empire can now either fold or double down. If it decides
to fold, war will be averted and meaningful negotiations finally entered into. If it doubles
down, something the Neocons always do, then this means war with Russia. This is a stark and
very difficult choice (no, not for normal people, but for the psychopaths ruling the West). And
there isn't much Russia could, or should, do at this point. As is the case every time a serious
crisis takes place, the apparently united elites running the West will now break-up into
separate factions and each one of these factions will pursue and promote its own, narrow,
interests. There will be an intense, mostly behind the scenes, struggle between those who will
want to double down or even trigger a war against Russia and those who will be horrified by
that notion (not necessarily for profound moral reasons, just out of basic self-interest and a
healthy instinct for self-preservation).
As to who will prevail, your guess is as good a mine. But the fact that today Trump
replaced McMaster with a warmongering psychopath like John Bolton is a clear sign that the
Neocons are in charge in the US and that the Axis of Kindness is about to get a heck of a lot
"kinder".
Those who fantasize about Russia being interested in "Europe", "White identity" or
"Western Christianity" are only kidding themselves. They hope that the current cultural and
spiritual revival in Russia will somehow spill over to them and allow them to extricate
themselves from the gutter in which they are currently prostrated. It won't. Just read
again what Simonian said about the western "values" in the quote above. For most Russians
"Europe" reeks of Napoleon, "White identity" of Hitler and "Western Christianity" of the
creation of the Ukraine and the "Eastern Crusades". No, Russia has no interest in revenge
against any of that, she just has no respect or interest for what these concepts stand for.
(Poland – is possibly the last country where all these things are taken seriously and
fondly remembered).
I think that is very important. I find it rather odd when some people from the alt-right
project their ideals on Russia. Of course, many of these people reject the neoconservative
agenda for legitimate reasons, and therefore, it is normal that they also reject Russophobia,
and that should be welcomed by most people who do not support the neoconservative agenda.
However, they should not think the widespread rejection of Western influence in Russia has
much to do with their own ideology.
For most Russians, the difference between hypocritical Western liberals who want to
dominate the world with their "values" (and military and economic means for spreading them)
and white supremacists is hardly that big, both are a consequence of a similar kind of
arrogance towards the rest of the world. Certainly, some white supremacists may under some
circumstances be ready to accept Russians as fellow whites, but probably, the path back to
regarding them as Asian subhumans is never too long.
Russians are mostly white, but Russia is a multinational and multiracial Eurasian country
that is very far from being "racially pure", even as far as many ethnic Russians are
concerned, and racism in the narrow sense has hardly ever had much support in Russia.
Russia's main religion is Orthodox Christianity, but Islam and Buddhism are also domestic
religions in Russia, and there has been an adversarial relationship between Western
Christianity and Orthodox Christianity for centuries.
Ideologically, Western alt-right ideologues would be much more likely to find relatively
widespread support for their ideas in Poland, the Baltic states, and among nationalists in
Western Ukraine – mainly among the most Russophobic elements of European societies.
Much of the daily hatred against "the Russians" in the Anglophone media is full of unambiguos
bigotry, and even if some of the people believing in Western white identity are currently
less extreme with respect to Russia than the liberal racist bigots who think that they are
progressive because they hate Russians rather than Mexicans, this is rather a kind of
liberals acting as racist supremacists than a genuine split between these two Western
ideologies.
In Russia, the constant aggressive rhetoric from Western countries will hardly lead to
Russians rejecting the liberal West while embracing nationalist Westerners concentrating on
white identity, rather both versions of Western ideology are seen as similarly disgusting. It
is doubtful whether in Soviet times, many people really believed in the official
anti-imperialist Soviet ideology because the propaganda was too artificial. Now, no special
propaganda efforts are needed, the aggressive, arrogant statement of Western politicians and
journalists can simply be shown in the original.
I totally agree with Saker and mostly agree with commenter #1. The only big miss of the
commenter #1 is that he lumps many different factions in the West into only two groups. The
two factions that the commenter describes are as described – much less different than
they themselves realise. But there are also a few factions which could be genuinely
cooperative with Russia, they should not be discarded because they are also the natural
allies in Russian defences against the aggressive West.
Both Saker and the commenter #1 put accent on the ideological struggle between Russia
and the West, contrasting Russian (and) Chinese – we do not interfere with your system
of beliefs or who rules you, let us cooperate and do business. This is contrasted against the
Western – we are the Borg, you will be regime-changed to be assimilated, aka we are the
Exceptional Owners of the World. This is truly the main ideological struggle of the 21.
century, forget about left wing – right wing.
However, there is a very practical component in the Western rabid behavior, especially the
British. The plentiful Russian land was not worth much in the past because it was
predominantly permafrost and marshes. The British Empire of warm lower geographical latitudes
was worth much more than the huge Russian landmass in colder higher latitudes. Even some
Russians did not consider it of much value and this is how Alaska got sold for a pittance by
a gambling Russian Tzar. But the contemporary reality is that the human capability to control
the environment has advanced so much that the cold regions of the planet are not as much of a
challenge that they used to be. On top, they have not been exploited much yet. This is why
the Anglos now have an eye on the Russian land, especially Siberia.
It is commonly accepted that the center of human civilisation is moving from the Atlantic
to the Pacific, but the shift of the center of gravity to the North is not widely
appreciated. Of course, most people still prefer to live in warmer climate but there is more
and more money to be made in colder climate. At the same time that the center of gravity is
shifting Northwards, the human advancement in the warmer climate has broken the Britush
Empire because most of the British colonies have largely caught up in development with the
colonial power. This has left the Anglos with their obsolete principles of domination by the
force of armaments and their attempts to double down in their area of advantage. In other
words, the Anglo leaders do appear to position themselves for: either we maintain our rule or
there will be no World to rule.
IMHO, the main reason for the fervent orgasmic hate displayed by the British parliament,
successfully transferred onto most of the British population, is that the Anglos are in the
process of losing their empire for the second time – first the British, now US. At the
same time, the semi-Asiatic, dirty-Christian Russians (in their racist view) are undeservedly
ascending, even after first the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union dissolved, never
mind that the Russians are now not even creating an empire of the obsolete Anglo kind then
something totally new. The landless Anglo prols versus the landed Russian gentry. Those who
are down on the wheel of fortune could not hate those now on top any more than they do.
Somewhere in there are also ever-expanding Zionist Jews, the cancer of humanity, who just
want to own anything worth owning, but this is worth another long comment.
I do not know how long the Russian initiative will last, but at the moment Russia is
in a goldilocks situation: it probably has the best leadership in the world, with
fantastic ideas and unsurpassed advantages. Even the non-anthropological climate change
appears to work in Russia's favour, opening up a new shorter Northern maritime route and
slowly draining the marshes and exposing virgin fertile land. Both smart and lucky.
Sorry for the long post. What I have been trying to say is that the two biggest current
ills of the world are the Anglo envy and the Zionist greed, whilst Russia and China have been
dealt and have dealt to themselves a magnificent hand of cards.
Interesting read. Just one comment – if Clinton had "won," we would already be "at war"
with Russia. Let's remember, even with the appointments through the revolving door (must get
a bit dizzy for players) of the Trump administration, he is still the Commander in Chief. I
don't see him going to war with Russia. Bolton is just as much "fireable" as the others.
Last thought, this saber rattling by the mouth organs of the Western criminal syndicate
has the colour of desperation to it. Also – attempted misdirection. Good that they're
overplaying their hand today since they'll have little room to escalate the rhetoric should
indictments of the criminals of the Hussein administration be levied some time soon. Let's
hope, anyway.
An .. interesting article. It appears that the author is really getting, fast, detached from
reality. This in particular:
The AngloZionists have lost the civil war in Syria
and this even more.
The Ukraine has crashed and is burning and a Ukronazi attack on the Donbass is most
likely
especially the former. This all is really starting to feel as "online therapy". A little
echo chamber and groupthink simply helping the members to deal with the world around
them.
Question (representative of the US Embassy): It is important in this forum to
demonstrate that we in the United States also stand in complete solidarity with our partners
in the United Kingdom, in the European Union and in NATO. It's important, especially in this
forum, since you have mentioned former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the courage that
you suggest he demonstrated. It is very important that you, instead of demonstrating a
similar type of courage, you attack, attack, attack my British colleague. In this forum in
particular, instead of demonstrating the type of courage that we would hope to have seen in
the 21st century, the Russian Federation continues its tried and true tactics of denying
responsibility, distracting and disinforming. Again, we stand with our colleagues in the
United Kingdom, and we will, as our colleagues in the United Kingdom, hold Russia accountable
for its illegal actions.
Vladimir Yermakov: We are grateful to the respected representative of the US
Embassy for his remarks. It would be interesting to know what American lawyers would make of
them. You probably worked at the US State Department? Have we met before? I used to know
everyone at the US State Department, and everyone there used to know me. That's water under
the bridge In the past, nobody in the US State Department talked to me in this manner. You
are probably on a mission from Washington. Well, everyone has a mission to accomplish.
This has been an under-appreciated trend. North is richer, more liveable, healthier (no
chance of Ebola), and has water. The climate changes and the massive increase in population
are making southern areas slowly uninhabitable.
Western elites know this – they know that in 1-2 generations large parts of the
Third World will collapse, Sub-Saharan Africa, but also partially India, Middle East,
south-east Asia. The spill-over from these regions – that West has foolishly integrated
with – will fatally damage most of the West.
Parts of the West are already suffering from the climate issues and uncontrolled
migration. Inland Australia and Southwest US are becoming deserts. Large cities have been
overrun by Third Worlders, and it is inevitable that more will come.
Russia's large geographic space is unique: very rich in resources, benefiting from climate
changes, and thinly populated by a well educated, unique civilisation. This stands out like a
sore thumb for the West. They have to ' incorporate ' Russia's resources, it is an
economic imperative. West has been failing – mostly due to its own arrogance and
stupidity. But all they know how to do is more of the same, get angry, scream and shout, try
again and again with the same militant approach as before.
When that fails, they go into an outright hysteria: ' No Olympics for you!, and no fish
and chips either, how dare your quote to us our own principles, you impertinent Russian
savages!!! '. Eventually West might end up in a self-imposed cul-de-sac with the only
option to go for the jugular and start an outright war. Then we will be all f ed, but at
least the Western masters will not lose face.
The US humiliatingly failed in its attempts to frighten and force the DPRK into
submission.
The offer of North Koreans to negotiate is a submission, a direct result of the US
pressure.
The AngloZionists have lost the civil war in Syria.
The war is still going on. Assad barely controls half of Syria. As a matter of fact until
recently he did not even control the whole of Damascus. The Turks are in Afrin, Americans
east of the Euphrates River are building new bases.
The UK and the rest of the NATO are becoming militarily irrelevant.
Sure thing. They are so irrelevant that every time they make a move Putin has a major
fit.
The Ukraine has crashed and is burning and a Ukronazi attack on the Donbass is most
likely.
Agree about the possibility of an attack.
The political forces in Europe who opposed anti-Russian policies are on the ascent.
Any evidence?
The Russians are winning many EU countries over by economic means including North Stream
whereas sanctions are hurting the EU much more than Russia.
A pipe dream.
The anti-Putin campaign has miserably failed and Russia is fully united in her stance
against the Empire.
The anti Putin campaign continues, see your own paragraphs above. Most Russians seem to be
behind Putin.
If it doubles down, something the Neocons always do, then this means war with Russia.
This is a stark and very difficult choice (no, not for normal people, but for the
psychopaths ruling the West).
I am sure that deciding to go to war is extremely difficult choice for the psychopaths
whilst for the normal people it is a piece of cake. The entertainment value of this piece is
priceless.
Well, perhaps save that "priceless".
Just the usual Saker, only with one notch up. Increasingly delusional and ratcheting up his
wishful thinking.
Fanbase and grupies here don't mind that. On the contrary, they need it, and increasingly
so. Offsets, at least temporarily, the harsh realities around them.
Assad of course hasn't won. While ISIS might be no more, and there have been real gains
(Aleppo, Damascus suburbs), this is more than counterbalanced by Turkey establishing a real
presence in northern Syria. Not clear how the Syrians can dislodge them, or the US from
Rojava.
The Ukraine has crashed
and is burning for the past four years now too bad The Saker is the only one noticing it
(well, and Ishchenko, I suppose).
Whether the Ukraine will attack or not.
+: If Russia intervenes forcefully, half the participants announce a boycott. $14 billion
or however much all the stadiums + kickbacks cost down the drain.
-: But then the Ukraine will be in for another humiliating defeat, and possibly the gay
dwarves in the Kremlin finally find the balls to recognize the LDNR.
-: If Russia doesn't intervene, then the Ukraine has a basically good chance of conquering
the LDNR.
I'm afraid the Bolton appointment means more that an immoral, horrible war with Iran became
more probable, not so much Russia. Isn't that the main difference between McMaster and
Bolton? Despite the obvious hair differences.
Agree with the spirit of the title of this piece that the month of Mars, the war month, in
2018, feels like an historic watershed.
'Full Spectrum Dominance', as explicit in US military doctrine, and noted as such by
Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel address, and embedded in the F. William Engdahl book 'Full
Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order', was imo both pathological
and impossible, but that didn't stop them from trying.
Putin's announcement to the planet that the Russians had developed a variety of weapons
that were capable of demonstrating dominance over the US, does far more than end American
full spectrum dominance ambitions and pretensions.
The thousand or so American military bases, and its navy around the planet, that have
projected power, are henceforth providing many targets for precise strikes.
It also potentially gives many other countries the ability to purchase the means to be
able to make American or NATO attacks on them far more difficult.
Gen. Wesley Clark's rather famous post 9/11 surprise at hearing that 7 countries in
five years were slated for – in effect – destruction, euphemistically called
regime change is starting to seem like another era. 'Guess what I just heard down the hall.
We're gonna go into 5 countries with our mercenaries, and military, and our amazing
technology, and bomb them all to hell if we have to, and lie to the world about everything
we're doing, and kill and wound and orphan millions of people, because ah, because ah,
because ah, actually I'm not sure why, but that's what's on the program. It's sort of a
tradition. We bombed the hell out of Korea, then we bombed the hell out of Vietnam and Laos
and Cambodia, actually I lost count, so many, anyway fast forward to remnants of Yugoslavia,
boy did we ever destroy that.!'
Absolute power corrupting absolutely, Russia and China providing a counterbalance to the
US attempt at absolute power has saved the Americans perhaps from being corrupted
absolutely.
Karlin, you do understand that you already turned into the cheap pathetic troll, right?
With your zero "expertise" in any military issues (as well as most others related and not)
your opinions on any Russia related military and geopolitical questions are worth as much as
your, well, ignorance. I understand that you have complex of inferiority and are severely
butt-hurt, and having a psychology of a loser-teenager you need to pretend that you somehow
have something to say, but you don't. So, as I suggested in other threads–before you
completely self-destruct and humiliate yourself to the point of becoming a meme for ignorance
matched only by your unconstrained ambition (and you are getting there), try not to parade
yourself as clown since pretty much your any geopolitical "opinion" is a cringe worthy
experience for anyone who have good professional understanding of military issues. You don't
and you have zero background for that, so , as I stated, when I have time I will gladly call
them out. Note though, since you are an amateur in all that, even the way you state your
(butt-hurt) ignorant opinions is such that rational and professional responses are not
possible. It is akin to talking to hysterical girl who was un-liked on Facebook by some boy.
So, just to illustrate how full of shit you are:
The Ukraine has crashed and is burning for the past four years now too bad The Saker is
the only one noticing it (well, and Ishchenko, I suppose).
But then again, you have no faculties to even understand what is going on. Per Ishenko,
LOL. Karlin, read Krylov's famous fable about Elephant and Pug, albeit you are not even
qualified for a role of a pug.
the fact that today Trump replaced McMaster with a warmongering psychopath like John
Bolton is a clear sign that the Neocons are in charge in the US and that the Axis of
Kindness is about to get a heck of a lot "kinder".
I don't care for John Bolton more than most reasonable people do, I suppose, but it's not
clear he's any worse than McMaster. People are readily triggered by the name John
Bolton , but has anything substantively changed?
This speech by a US dummy is a preview of what will come from OPCW "investigation", that
is more of the same as what they concluded regarding Syrian use of chemical weapons. By some
upside down magic privy only to the Exceptional People the countries which have declared,
destroyed and have been verified to have destroyed them, keep using the chemical weapons and
being constantly accused by those who still hold and produce chemical weapons. Those who have
them do not use them, whilst those who do not have them use them. Iraq, Syria now Russia. The
Skripal case is Iraq WMD 3.0.
Therefore, OPCW did not find any problem in that Britain did not follow the procedure
clearly stated in the OPCW Statute, after Britain with Canada even declared that procedure
optional. In reality, it is neither explicitly written nor implied that the procedure of
sharing the samples with the accused is optional. But OPCW keeps silent.
Furthermore, the British are already using own courts to their advantage. Although Miss
Skripal is a Russian citizen they convened a court proceeding about which no Russian
representative was informed and straight out lied in court that the Russians never enquired
about their citizen, contrary to the public announcement by the Russian Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. The British Government appointed a lawyer for Miss Skripal. This court proceeding
was a formality but it is a good sign of the things to come. More details here:
http://johnhelmer.net/the-skripal-case-goes-to-court-for-the-first-time-new-uncertainties-for-the-british-and-russian-governments/#more-18920
My best guess is that OPCW will produce a report full of weasel words, which will then be
blared from all Western MSM as proof of Russian and maybe even Putin's own doing (not sure
how they would make that big jump over in logic, probably through the meme of secret
intelligence that clown Johnson used already).
Any similarity between MH17 and Skripal investigations, although both cooked up in the
same kitchen, is completely coincidental, of course.
Why do you suppose an alt-rightist must view Russia as an extension of what they wish to
have in America? Do you have an example of someone who conflates Russian national interests
with particular American concerns? Why is it not sufficient to recognize a common enemy and
hope for mutual success? At any rate, Putin's multilateralist vision is inherently
conservative (properly understood), and his coherence in absolute terms is admirable (never
mind in comparison to revolting Western politicians).
"We in the United States" are well aware that the British false flag assassination claim
is sheer nonsense, that the UK refuses to allow an investigation precisely because it is a
pack of lies (probably ginned up in an attempt to improve May's approval rating), and that no
"nerve gas" was used, and very likely nobody was killed.
So that's the problem with this ham handed attempt to stir up a pretext for war. Everyone
with a brain knows that it's a lie .There will be no war with Russia, thank God .
Manipulating democracy -- brainwashing the public for a large fee
Cambridge Analytica, the data harvesting firm that worked for the Trump campaign, is in the
midst of a scandal that should make everyone who cares about a clean political process demand
major investigations of anyone who has procured the services of the company, major prosecutions
of those who have violated laws across multiple nations and a wholesale revitalisation of
electoral laws to prevent politicians from ever again procuring the services of unethical
companies like Cambridge Analytica.
Days ago, whistleblower Christopher Wylie went public about his time
working for Cambridge Analytica and specifically about how the firm illegally obtained the
public and private data, including the private messages of 50 million Facebook users. He also
exposed how Cambridge Analytica used this data to run highly scientific social manipulation
campaigns in order to effectively brainwash the public in various countries to support a
certain political candidate or faction.
Cambridge Analytica's dubious methods were used to meddle in the US election after the Trump
campaign paid Cambridge Analytica substantial sums of money for their services. The firm also
meddled in the last two Kenyan Presidential elections, elections in Nigeria, elections in Czech
Republic, elections in Argentina, elections in India, the Brexit campaign, UK Premier Theresa
May's recently election and now stands accused of working with the disgraced former
Pakistani Premier Nawaz Sharif in an attempt to reverse his judicial ban on holding public
office, while helping his PML-N party win the forthcoming general election.
Beyond the scandalous use of personal data from Facebook users and the illegal access to
people's private messages, Cambridge Analytica has now been exposed as a company that, by the
hidden-camera admission of its CEO Alexander Nix, engages in nefarious, illegal and outrageous
activities across the globe.
The UK Broadcaster Channel 4 just released a video of Cambridge Analytica's CEO and Managing
DIrector Mark Turnbull in a conversation with an undercover reporter posing as a Sri Lankan
businessman interested in meddling in domestic elections. During the conversation Nix boasted
of Cambridge Analytica's history of using entrapment, bribery and intimidation against the
political opponents of its wealthy clients. Furthermore, Nix boasted about his firm's ability
to procure Ukrainian prostitutes as a means to entrap adversaries while also procuring the
services of "Israeli spies" as part of dirty smear operations.
The activities that Nix boasted of using in the past and then offered to a prospective
client are illegal in virtually every country in the world. But for Nix and his world of
ultra-rich clients, acting as though one is above the law is the rule rather than the
exception. Thus far, Cambridge Analaytica has been able to escape justice throughout the world
both for its election meddling, data harvesting, data theft and attempts to slander politicians
through calculated bribery and entrapment schemes.
One person who refused to be tempted by Cambridge Analytica was Julian Assange. Alexander
Nix personally wrote to Julian Assange asking for direct access to information possessed by
Wikileaks and Assange refused. This is a clear example of journalistic ethics and personal
integrity on the part of Assange. Justice must be done
Cambridge Analytica stands accused of doing everything and more that the Russian
state was accused of doing in respect of meddling in the 2016 US Presidential election. While
meetings and conversations that Trump campaign officials, including Steve Bannon had with
Cambridge Analyatica big wigs were not recorded, any information as to what was said during
these exchanges should be thoroughly investigated by law enforcement and eventually made public
for the sake of restoring transparency to politics.
Just as the Hillary Clinton campaign openly conspired to deprive Bernie Sanders of the
Democratic Party's nomination, so too did Donald Trump's campaign pay Cambridge Analytica to
conspire against the American voters using a calculated psychological manipulation campaign
that was made possible through the use of unethically obtained and stolen data.
While Facebook claims it was itself misled and consequently victimised by Cambridge
Analytica and has subsequently banned the firm from its platform, many, including Edward
Snowden have alleged that Facebook knew full well what Cambridge Analytica was doing with the
data retrieved from its Facebook apps. Already, the markets have reacted to the news and the
verdict is not favourble in terms of the public perception of Facebook as an ethical company.
Facebook's share prices are down over 7% on the S&P 500. This represents the biggest tumble
in the price of Facebook share prices since 2014. Moreover, the plunge has knocked Facebook out
of the coveted big five companies atop the S&P 500. Furthermore, Alex Stamos, Facebook's
security director has announced that he will soon leave the company.
The Trump myth and Russia myth exposed
Donald Trump has frequently boasted of his expert campaigning skills as being the reason he
won an election that few thought he could have ever won. While Trump was a far more charismatic
and exciting platform speaker than his rival Hillary Clinton, it seems that for the Trump
campaign, Trump ultimately needed to rely on the expensive and nefarious services of Cambridge
Analytica in order to manipulate the minds of American voters and ultimately trick them into
voting for him. It is impossible to say whether Trump would have still won his election without
Cambridge Analaytica's services, but the fact they were used, should immediately raise the
issue of Trump's suitability for office.
Ultimately, the Trump campaign did conspire to meddle in the election, only it was
not with Russia or Russians with whom the campaign conspired, it was with the British firm
Cambridge Analytica. Thus one sees that both the narrative about Trump the electoral "genius"
and the narrative about Trump the Kremlin puppet are both false. The entire time, the issue of
Trump campaign election meddling was one between a group of American millionaires and
billionaires and a sleaze infested British firm.
Worse than Watergate
In 1972, US President Richard Nixon conspired to cover-up a beak-in at the offices of his
political opponents at the Watergate Complex. The scandal ultimately led to Nixon's resignation
in 1974. What the Trump campaign did with Cambridge Analytica is far more scandalous than the
Watergate break-in and cover-up. Where Nixon's cronies broke into offices to steal information
from the Democratic party, Trump's paid cyber-thugs at Cambridge Analytica broke in to the
private data of 50 million people, the vast majority of whom were US citizens.
Richard Nixon, like Donald Trump, was ultimately driven by a love of power throughout his
life. Just as Trump considered running for President for decades, so too did Nixon try to run
in 1960 and lost to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, while he also failed to become governor of
California in 1962 election. By 1968 he finally got into the White House at the height of the
Vietnam War. When time came for his re-election, Nixon's team weren't going to take any chances
and hence the Watergate break-in was orchestrated to dig up dirt on Nixon's opponent. As it
turned out Nixon won the 1972 by a comfortable margin, meaning that the Watergate break-in was
probably largely in vain.
Likewise, Trump may well have won in 2016 even without Cambridge Analytica, but in his quest
for power, Trump has resorted to dealing with a company whose practices have done far more
damage to the American people than the Watergate break-in.
New laws are needed
While existing laws will likely be sufficient to bring the fiends at Cambridge Analytica to
justice, while also determining the role that Trump campaign officials, up to and including
Trump played in the scandal, new laws must be enshrined across the globe in order to put the
likes of Cambridge Analytica out of business for good.
The following proposals must be debated widely and ideally implemented at the soonest
possible date:
-- A total ban on all forms of data mining/harvesting for political purposes.
-- A total ban on the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence in any political
campaign or for any political purpose.
-- A mandatory seizing of the assets of any company involved in data mining/harvesting for
political purposes, after which point such a company would be forcibly shut down
permanently.
-- A mandatory seizing of the assets of any company involved in the use of artificial
intelligence or algorithms in the course of a public political campaign.
-- A total ban on the use of internet based platforms, including social media by political
candidates and their direct associates for anything that could reasonably be classified as a
misinformation and/or manipulation scheme.
-- A total ban on politicians using third party data firms or advertising firms during
elections. All such advertising and analysis must be devised by advisers employed directly by
or volunteering for an individual candidate or his or her party political organisation.
-- A total ban on any individual working for a political campaign, who derives at least half
of his or her income from employment, ownership and/or shares in a company whose primary
purpose is to deliver news and analysis.
-- A total ban on anyone paid by a political candidate to promote his or her election from
an ownership or major share holding role in any company whose primary purpose is to deliver
news and analysis until 2 years after the said election.
If all of these laws were implemented along with thorough campaign finance reform
initiatives, only then can anything remotely resembling fair elections take place.
The elites eat their own
While many of the media outlets who have helped to publish the revelations of whistleblower
Christopher Wylie continue to defame Russia without any evidence about Russian linkage to the
2016 US election (or any other western vote for that matter), these outlets are nevertheless
exposing the true meddling scandal surrounding the Trump campaign which has the effect of
destroying the Russia narrative.
In this sense, a divided elite are turning against themselves. While the billionaire
property tycoon Donald Trump can hardly be described as anything but a privileged figure who
moved in elite public circles for most of his life, his personal style, rhetoric and attitude
towards fellow elites has served to alienate Trump from many. Thus, there is a desire on the
part of the mainstream media to expose a scandal surrounding Trump in a manner that would be
unthinkable in respect of exposing a cause less popular among western elites, for example the
brutal treatment of Palestine by the Zionist regime.
In this sense, Trump's own unwillingness or lack of desire to endear himself to fellow
elites and instead present himself as a 'man of the people', might be his penultimate undoing.
His rich former friends are now his rich present day enemies and many ordinary voters will be
completely aghast at his involvement with Cambridge Analytica, just as many Republicans who
voted for Nixon, became converts to the anti-Nixon movement once the misdeeds and dishonesty of
Richard Nixon were made public. Many might well leave the 'Trump train' and get on board the
'political ethics express'.
Conclusion
This scandal ultimately has nothing to do with one's opinion on Trump or his policies, let
alone any of the other politicians who have hired Cambridge Analytica. The issue is that a
company engaged in the most nefarious, dangerous, sleazy and wicked behaviour in the world, is
profiting from their destruction of political institutions that ought to be based on open
policy debates rather than public manipulation, brainwashing and artificial intelligence.
The issue is also one of privacy. 50 million people have been exploited by an unethical
company and what's more is that the money from the Trump campaign helped to empower this
unethical company. This is therefore as unfair to non-voters as it is to voters. Cambridge
Analytica must be shut down and all companies like it must restrict the scope of their
operations or else face the same consequence.
I ran onto something about that when researching SCL/Cambridge Analytica
The Mercer/Cambridge Analytica US wing of SCL put a lot of funding into the leave campaign
which was undeclared. Like a political campaign, donations above a threshold have to be
declared.
Threshold for declaring donations I think was around 3 to 7000 and CA put in over 300
000.
I have been researching SCL the last few days now. It is starting to look as though,
rather than being political mercenary's working for whoever pays, they seem to back
nationalist leaning groups or individuals. They have a political or geo-political agenda but
not sure what at the moment. Always anti Russia. Involved in operations in most of the ex
soviet countries to create a hatred of ethnic Russians and I think will work with non
nationalist types who are very anti Russia.
... US Senator Ernest Hollings was moved in May 2004 to acknowledge that the US invaded Iraq
"to secure Israel," and "everybody" knows it.
...who played an important role in prodding the US into war: Richard Perle, chair of the
Pentagon's Defense Policy Board; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary; and Charles
Krauthammer, columnist and author.
Hollings referred to the cowardly reluctance of his Congressional colleagues to
acknowledge this truth openly, saying that "nobody is willing to stand up and say what is
going on ."
Due to "the pressures we get politically," he added, members of Congress uncritically
support Israel and its policies.
Remarks by Ernest F. Hollings, May 20, 2004. Congressional Record -- Senate, May 20, 2004,
pages S5921-S5925. Also ""Iraq Was Invaded to Secure Israel
This is about American Imperialism and MIC. Neocons are just well-laid MIC lobbyists. Some
like Bolton are pretty talented guys. Some like Max Boot are simply stupid.
Notable quotes:
"... What sort of political system allows someone with his views to serve in high office, where he helps talk the country into a disastrous war, never expresses a moment's regret for his errors, continues to advocate for more of the same for the next decade, and then gets a second chance to make the same mistakes again? [bold mine-DL] ..."
"... So by all means worry. But the real problem isn't Bolton -- it's a system that permits people like him to screw up and move up again and again. ..."
The conclusion of Stephen Walt's column on
John Bolton is exactly right:
Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to "normalize" this appointment or suggest that it
shouldn't concern you. Rather, I'm suggesting that if you are worried about Bolton, you
should ask yourself the following question: What sort of political system allows someone
with his views to serve in high office, where he helps talk the country into a disastrous
war, never expresses a moment's regret for his errors, continues to advocate for more of the
same for the next decade, and then gets a second chance to make the same mistakes again?
[bold mine-DL]
So by all means worry. But the real problem isn't Bolton -- it's a system that permits
people like him to screw up and move up again and again.
There is a strong bias in our foreign policy debates in favor of "action," no matter how
stupid or destructive that action proves to be. That is one reason why reflexive supporters of
an activist foreign policy will never have to face the consequences of the policies they
support. Bolton has thrived as an advocate of hard-line policies precisely because he fills the
assigned role of the fanatical warmonger, and there is always a demand for someone to fill that
role. His fanaticism doesn't discredit him, because it is eminently useful to his somewhat less
fanatical colleagues. That is how he can hang around long enough until there is a president
ignorant enough to think that he is qualified to be a top adviser.
Bolton will also have reliable supporters in the conservative movement that will make
excuses for the inexcusable. National Review recently published an article by
David French in defense of Bolton whose conclusion was that we should "give a hawk a chance."
Besides being evasive and dishonest about just how fanatical Bolton is, the article was an
effort to pretend that Iraq war supporters should be given another chance to wreck U.S. foreign
policy again. It may be true that Bolton's views are "in the mainstream of conservative
foreign-policy thought," but that is an indictment of the so-called "mainstream" that is being
represented. Bolton has been wrong about every major foreign policy issue of the last twenty
years. If that doesn't disqualify you from holding a high-ranking government position, what
does?
Hawks have been given a chance to run our foreign policy every day for decades on end, and
they have failed numerous times at exorbitant cost. Generic hawks don't deserve a second chance
after the last sixteen-plus years of failure and disaster, and fanatical hard-liners like
Bolton never deserved a first chance.
French asserts that Bolton is "not extreme," but that raises the obvious question: compared
to what?Bolton has publicly, repeatedly urged the U.S. government to launch illegal preventive
wars against Iran and North Korea, and that just scratches the surface of his fanaticism. That
strikes me as rather extreme, and that is why so many people are disturbed by the Bolton
appointment. If he isn't "extreme" even by contemporary movement conservative standards, who
is? How psychopathic would one need to be to be considered extreme in French's eyes? If
movement conservatives can't see why Bolton is an unacceptable and outrageous choice for
National Security Advisor, they are so far gone that there is nothing to be done for them and
no point in listening to anything they have to say.
"... The mainstream media here in Germany, which is entirely and 100% under CIA control ..."
"... yes.... 100% right..... the servility of Germany with Merkel is disgusting and unbearable ..."
"... It's what one expects from Merkel and her NWO domesticated admin. EU gov'ts have been crying wolf for so long that few now believe a word coming from their media. ..."
I have the same worries. The mainstream media here in Germany, which is entirely and
100% under CIA control , has been ramping up anti-Russia propaganda since weeks. I
didn't think it would be possible after the Ukraine conflict but it is even worse now. The
comments of this filthy lunatic Boris Johnson but also of his boss-bitch Theresa May have
been way below any line of decency. It's even below the kind of rhetoric Hitler has used when
he talked about other statesmen such as (this fat, ugly war-criminal and mass murderer)
Winston Churchill.
But it's not "the West" that is going to war, it is the Anglo-American establishment.
"West" is an artificial propaganda term that should not be used anyway, because all it
denotes is the countries dominated by Anglo-America. Germany and France, the only countries
powerful enough to stop Anglo-American madness, are usually dancing to the tune of
Warshington and London, but I am not so sure if they will really go all the way here,
especially with Iran. Also and despite all the propaganda, while German and French people may
not trust Russia and see Putin as a "dictator", they also see the US regime (especially with
the Trumpet in charge) as nothing but a dangerous, trigger-happy war machinery. There is no
way you could sell a war against Iran to them, also not the rest of Europe including Britain.
I even have doubts about whether the American public would swallow such a war.
Either way, it will be a disaster for the "West" - economically, politically, militarily.
In fact, it will be the end of the "West" and of the Anglo-American empire including the
Zionist colony. So in the end there might be a great result of yet another horror. What
Russia really needs to do now is to give both Syria and Iran the full power of Russian air
defence.
Having spent some time in Germany, I have to agree with these comments. If you think the
Propaganda is bad in the US and the UK, in Germany it is even worse. It is almost as if they
are in competition to be the most servile and obedient to their masters. It is if history
doesn't even exist. It is 1941 all over again. The difference being Germany has nothing to
fight with and if it comes to war they will be absolutely pulverized to nuclear ash.
This is how stupid the media is to hype this Anti-Russian propaganda 24/7, 7 days a week.
There is no real "alternative" news that I could find either. If there is a silver lining in
all this though, is that many Germans don't take the media seriously at all anymore. When you
overcook the pot, this is what can happen. Just like that fool Boris Johnson. He has now
compared Putin to Hitler and the 1936 olympics. How stupid can this buffoon be? You think you
can just carry on with business as usual once this stupid provocation with the poisoned spy
blows over after saying something like that? He hasn't just insulted Putin, he has insulted
all of Russia who sacrificed more than any other country to stop Hitler. I can't believe what
low IQ clowns the UK is producing as politicians these days. It is really scraping the bottom
of the barrel.
Has Germany ever had an election without US interference? I would imagine that securing
power for anyone they choose in the EU has been a doddle for the US, even Hitler's daughter.
That would be a sick joke typical of US neocons.
As a former journalist in Germany I agree. All German news and current affairs are
sanitized. People who object to too much power in the hands of the US on German soil or who
are against the wars will be sidelined or blacklisted, depending on what their job is. "They"
prepare for a new war, or they would not need a new billion $ military hospital near
Ramstein. It said in one article that the German government could not prevent it and had to
contribute, too. Pawns.
On the whole, though, what they prepare is NOT a war by the West, it is by the US for Full
Spectrum Dominance. They rope in allies,sure, but I'd like to be optimistic. After the Iraq
and ME experiences the populations (also here in Australia) are not enthusiastic. So maybe
this time it will be US vs .... and they cannot hide behind a coalition.
The governments of Germany and Australia always kowtow of course. Ramstein and Pine Gap
are crucial for the warmongers.
Thank you for recognizing this, but you're wrong about the German alternative scene. I
think it is one of the strongest out there, it is just, well, German. Not so aggressive and
more analytical. If you ask me, what the world needs is German Spirit, but this spirit has
been oppressed (largely voluntarily, I admit) for the past 70 years or so, but it is still
there.
And when I say German, I mean the real meaning of it, so the cultural heritage of the
German language. Switzerland, Austria and others are definitely included. Do you speak
German?
It's what one expects from Merkel and her NWO domesticated admin. EU gov'ts have been
crying wolf for so long that few now believe a word coming from their media. Most sit
there and view it all as a form of entertainment. Maybe it's the reason why many people in
the west are ambivalent.
"... Woah. What kind of bear is that? That's not on the approved play list. Nope, not a black bear, not a grizly bear, not even a teddy bear. What's that you say, all's fair in love and war? Well that means just one thing America. We have a ...... Bear Gap! Yes, a Bear Gap. ..."
"... I demand we take action to close the Bear Gap! and do it soon. We better look to our best and brightest, in the heart of the defense establishment, bowels of the think tanks the swamp. ..."
"... I suggest you try treating the neocons like bridesmaids at a wedding; because they all know they should be the one to marry the groom. ..."
So Coach Trump has brought in Bombing Bolton to strengthen the shooting line? He never did
win a peace but he sure knows how to leave a nation in pieces. Well, as the saying goes,
sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. I wonder what the opposing coach
is going to do? Say "hold my vodka" and surprise the US? That'll get the right wingers
laughing. Send in your best coach, go ahead, we dare ya.
Woah. What kind of bear is that? That's not on the approved play list. Nope, not a black
bear, not a grizly bear, not even a teddy bear. What's that you say, all's fair in love and
war? Well that means just one thing America. We have a ...... Bear Gap! Yes, a Bear
Gap.
I demand we take action to close the Bear Gap! and do it soon. We better look to our
best and brightest, in the heart of the defense establishment, bowels of the think tanks the
swamp. I'm sure there's something right there in the 1,200 page omni-bulls*&$ spending
bill you can use. Just say you read it in there somewhere - because nobody else read that damn
thing before they voted for it either. What do you think they are, responsible leaders? So take
the kind of action only you can do.
No, not that. This takes real strategy. I suggest you try treating the neocons like
bridesmaids at a wedding; because they all know they should be the one to marry the groom.
So give them just what they deserve:
Yep, that ought to do it. We may still have a Bear Gap, but if there is one thing we have no
shortage of in this age of soy-boys and cat ladies in waiting: it's cats. So toss them a bob.
That'll keep'm busy for awhile.
In other words, neither men nor women have gained anything from this otherwise-well-intended
campaign against sexual improprieties. However, this is not the first time the West has allowed
raw emotions to knock the train of progress right off the tracks. History books are replete
with examples of Western campaigns rising out of sheer mass hysteria. But at least in those
wild times there was still some semblance of justice, complete with trials and investigations.
Now compare that with our 'modern' times, when all it took for the United States to win
approval for an illicit attack on Iraq was for Colin Powell to shake a vial of faux anthrax in
front of the UN General Assembly.
With these historical hiccups in mind, it is possible to argue that the West has truly
forgotten the lessons of history because they are certainly repeating them today.
By way of example, consider where the great bulk of US troops are encamped today – in
and around the Middle East – and then ask yourself how they got there.
The answer is by hook and by crook, and not a little public manipulation and chicanery. That
is because, in our insatiable desire to defend victims – the good guys, we are told
– we are allowing ourselves to ignore crucial evidence while placing blind faith in what
we are being told is the truth. Clearly that has not been the case to date.
From the accusations that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction to launch against
innocent people, to the current claims that the Syrian government of Bashar Assad is using
chemical weapons against his own people, the West is gambling that claims based on zero
evidence will always work to fulfill ulterior motives. So far, the ploy seems to be working
with the gullible public, but sooner or later truth will catch up, indeed, as truth usually
does.
Just this month, for example, an assassination attempt was made against Sergei Skripal
– a former double agent who had moved to Salisbury, England following a spy-swap in 2010.
Any guesses as to who the British authorities have ruled – without a
trial, evidence or motivating factor – is the main culprit? Yes, Russia. Yet, even the
usually loyal British press has started
expressing reservations over the dubious claims.
This should come as no surprise since the UK, a member of the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), has staunchly refused to provide samples of the alleged
nerve agent to Russia for analysis. Why would it do that? Would anyone be surprised if this
investigation goes the same way it did for all those Russian athletes who were, unjustly,
banned from the
Winter Olympic Games this year?
Or perhaps the same way it went following the 2016 US presidential elections, when Russia
was accused of meddling on behalf of Donald Trump – zero evidence to back up the
slanderous accusations , which are responsible for putting US-Russia relations into a free
fall.
In conclusion, the unsightly spectacle of Western capitals backtracking on legal precedent
– from domestic cases to international – makes it all the more clear why it is so
anxious to win back the media mountaintops – it has no evidence whatsoever to support the
reasons behind its increasingly illicit behavior. It is therefore incumbent upon them to own
the narrative, as well as the justice system. How long this democratic charade can last is
anybody's guess.
In my opinion the May show is no more than paying the price the EU wants for remaining in
the common market.
The EU on the one hand wants to increase the economic war against Russia, on the other it
must prevent that after Brexit GB develops close economic ties with Russia.
The remain in the common market ticket is temporarily, when the agreed period is over a
further price can be asked, the Brussels imperialists think, I suppose.
Alas, Merkel is on her way out, her minister of police etc. begins playing the nationalist
card, resistance in France against Macron is rising, and how the euro country Italy can be
saved nobody knows.
These two staggering leaders want more Europe.
On top of all this misery, the until some time ago biggest bank in the world, Deutsche
Bank, once 100.000 employees worldwide, now 50.000, may soon collapse, share prices dropping
daily for the past week, transaction volumes in shares from 25.000 to even 35.000, where
8.000 is normal.
The derivates DB owns are said to be staggering, over thirty trillion, the EU total national
income, in comparison, is less than ten trillion.
Varoufakis predicted a world wide crash which will make look 1929 child's play in
comparison.
Cannot imagine that the EU survives this crash, the populations will look to the national
governments for food, the rationing thereof, etc.
John Bolton is in all likelihood a Zionist asset due to the Israelis having some very
powerful kompromat on him.
Numerous sources allege that Bolton forced his wife (now ex-wife) into group sex at a
swinger's club. Did someone get it on film, tape, or some other recording media?
Given the extreme fervor of Bolton's Zionism, the answer seems obvious.
Bolton, to me, is worse than McMaster, is decidedly a neocon, and may well end up being the
intellectual impetus behind a shiny new war in the ME or the Korean peninsula.
Although Trump the candidate offered a sketch of his FP views, including his well known
declaration about the catastrophic Iraq war, today one can itemize where the US military is
currently robustly engaged.
If Bolton can dial back his hawkishness with respect to Russia, not mention--too
much--Iraq, he and POTUS may likely find alignment about which will be the first regime to be
targeted by our standoff capabilities. imao
I agree, people shouldn't imply, they should say straight out what they think.
So allow me.
It appears that the uber Israeli Sheldon Adelson who was the largest campaign donor to
Trump and Nikki Haley and also employs John Bolton is dictating US policy to Trump.
If it trots and barks like an Adelson, then its a Adelson poddle.
Don't forget that Bolton was the one who immediately blamed the Hariri assassination on
Syria.
Immediately assigning blame is one of the signs of a false-flag operation. If Mossad killed
Hariri, Bolton would know about it. He would also know if Mossad whacked the Skripals.
The political dividing line in America may not be Left vs. Right or Democrats vs. Republicans
or anti-war vs. pro-war but Russiagate believers vs. realist who know it is all a false-flag.
Thierry Meyssan believes that Rex Tillerson fell for the
Skripal hoax and that is why Trump fired him. I said something similar
here on MoA
Bolton would be on with this idea. I expect Trump go ahead with a military bombing of
nuclear reactor sites and Government/military sites as envisage by Pompeo. They dare not try
for a full invasion as they will most likely lose. What will be Iran's reaction be?
What could Iran do? They might get Hezbollah to initiate contact with Israel. Try to sink
US navy assets where ever they are. Spread the campaign to Afghanistan. Attack Saudi Arabia
with missiles. However if the US peruses this course I believe it will be a brief attack
lassting 2/3 weeks, whereby a brokered peace to stop US action. But I could be wrong.
Basically McMaster started clearing out the Israel Zios in the department ...including
several who violate security rules on top secret info. The report list person after person
McMaster canned and the ZOA is furious all their inside boys were turned out.
Very cleverly the report is presented to Trump as McMaster firing all the 'Pro Trumpers"
because McMasters is ''anti Trump''.
So the ZOA are now Trump Loyalist..lol...just pledge your loyalty to Trump and he'll
follow you like a puppy.
I am beginning to wonder though if there is a small but growing number of upper rank
military that are trying to weed out the bomb Iran Zionist.
"... The Iranian regime, in my mind, is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East...For all the talk of ISIS and Al Qaida everywhere right now they're a very serious threat. But nothing is as serious in the long term enduring ramifications, in terms of stability and prosperity and some hope for a better future for the young people out there, than Iran. ..."
"... We know that vacuums left in the Middle East seem to be filled by either terrorists or by Iran or their surrogates or Russia In order to restore deterrence, we have to show capability, capacity and resolve. ..."
"... Using our special neocon-speak translator, we see that "capability, capacity and resolve" actually means "weapons, deployments, and wars." No wonder Kristol and company are touting this man as their savior. ..."
The neocons have been in a panic this election season. One by
one, their preferred choice for the Republican presidential nomination has been soundly
rejected by the uncooperative American voting public. Sen. Lindsey Graham made a run for the
nomination saying , "If
you're tired of war, don't vote for me," and nobody did. Perhaps the idea of perpetual war to
the very last US dollar is beginning to wear thin among Republican voters.
Though the two Republicans left standing, Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, have endorsed
sending thousands of troops into the Middle East and even turning the sand into glass with a
nuclear weapon, they are viewed as not reliably neoconservative enough for the Beltway
bombardiers. William Kristol, absolutely forlorn over the American voter's rejection of the
reliable Republican neocons in the race, has thrown his hat in with a very reliable Democrat
neocon, Hillary Clinton. "I would rather see Hillary than Trump,"
said Kristol.
But such a move comes not without risk for the Kristol-ites. The neocons migrated from the
Democratic Party to the Republican Party like a virus to a new host and one promising candidate
does not a happy return necessarily make.
What to do?
Again from Kristol: "We'll have to start a new party if it's Trump." And that's what
they're doing. With the help of the compliant media, of course.
Thanks to Target Liberty for its diligence in "Mad Dog"
spotting , we see the (former) house organ of the CIA, Time Magazine, joining the neocon
cheering section behind the notion of a third party run by retired Major General James "Mad
Dog" Mattis, former Commander of the US Central Command.
What is it about military leaders that has led so many voters to champion them for the
Presidency? After all, it's not like the nation has emerged victorious from its recent wars.
... Retired Marine general James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who hung up his uniform three years ago,
has fervent supporters who want him to run for President.
The very title of the article is a fraud. Who are these "Americans" who are
clamoring for a General to become president? Neocons! What percentage to neocons make up of the
US electorate? Re-read the first paragraph for an indication.
Why are the neocons panting like a dog in heat for "Mad Dog" Mattis? His speech today at the
military-industrial complex funded
Center for Strategic and International Studies tells the tale of the tape. What gets the Mad
Dog all hot and bothered? War with Iran!
The Iranian regime, in my mind, is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace
in the Middle East...For all the talk of ISIS and Al Qaida everywhere right now they're a
very serious threat. But nothing is as serious in the long term enduring ramifications, in
terms of stability and prosperity and some hope for a better future for the young people out
there, than Iran.
And, in what must be music to the ears of all those inside the Beltway who have
become rich robbing the rest of us to pay for their wars, Mattis spells out his foreign policy.
In a word: War!
We know that vacuums left in the Middle East seem to be filled by either terrorists or by
Iran or their surrogates or Russia In order to restore deterrence, we have to show
capability, capacity and resolve.
Using our special neocon-speak translator, we see that "capability, capacity
and resolve" actually means "weapons, deployments, and wars." No wonder Kristol and company are
touting this man as their savior.
General George Washington was a reluctant political leader. He accepted the office of
president only at the insistence of others. His preference after the battle was won was to hang
up his guns and retire to hemp-growing and whiskey-distilling. In these days of
increasingly political military officers , it seems the notion of civilian control of the
military is, like the Constitution itself, just another anachronism.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we give you President Mattis:
The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there
are some a**holes in the world that just need to be shot.
( Business
Insider )
I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my
eyes: If you f*ck with me, I'll kill you all.
( San Diego Union
Tribune )
Find the enemy that wants to end this experiment (in American democracy) and kill every
one of them until they're so sick of the killing that they leave us and our freedoms
intact.
( San Diego Union
Tribune )
Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.
( San Diego Union
Tribune )
You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they
didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a
hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a
hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up there with you. I like
brawling.
( CNN )
I'm going to plead with you, do not cross us. Because if you do, the survivors will
write about what we do here for 10,000 years.
( San Diego Union
Tribune )
For the greater part of a decade the US, the UK and the EU have been carrying out a
campaign to undermine and overthrow the Russian government and in particular to oust President
Putin. Fundamental issues are at stake including the real possibility of a nuclear war. "
Why do the Western regimes now feel Russia is a greater threat then in the past? Do they
believe Russia is more vulnerable to Western threats or attacks? Why do the Western military
leaders seek to undermine Russia's defenses? Do the US economic elites believe it is possible
to provoke an economic crisis and the demise of President Putin's government? What is the
strategic goal of Western policymakers? Why has the UK regime taken the lead in the
anti-Russian crusade via the fake toxin accusations at this time?
Notable quotes:
"... For the greater part of a decade the US, the UK and the EU have been carrying out a campaign to undermine and overthrow the Russian government and in particular to oust President Putin. Fundamental issues are at stake including the real possibility of a nuclear war. ..."
"... First and foremost, during the 1990's the US degraded Russia, reducing it to a vassal state, and imposing itself as a unipolar state. ..."
"... Secondly, Western elites pillaged the Russian economy, seizing and laundering hundreds of billions of dollars. ..."
"... Thirdly, the US seized and took control of the Russian electoral process, and secured the fraudulent "election" of Yeltsin. ..."
"... With the collapse of the Yeltsin regime and the election of President Putin, Russia regained its sovereignty, its economy recovered, its armed forces and scientific institutes were rebuilt and strengthened. Poverty was sharply reduced and Western backed gangster capitalists were constrained, jailed or fled mostly to the UK and the US. ..."
"... As the entire US unipolar fantasy dissolved it provoked deep resentment, animosity and a systematic counter-attack. The US's costly and failed war on terror became a dress rehearsal for the economic and ideological war against the Kremlin ..Russia's historical recovery and defeat of Western rollback intensified the ideological and economic war. ..."
"... Russia is not a threat to the West: it is recovering its sovereignty in order to further a multi-polar world. President Putin is not an "aggressor" but he refuses to allow Russia to return to vassalage. ..."
"... The Western regimes recognize that Russia is a threat to their global dominance; they know that Russia is no threat to invade the EU, North America or their vassals. ..."
"... Western regimes believe they can topple Russia via economic warfare including sanctions. In fact Russia has become more self-reliant and has diversified its trading partners, especially China, and even includes Saudi Arabia and other Western allies. ..."
For the greater part of a decade the US, the UK and the EU have been carrying out a
campaign to undermine and overthrow the Russian government and in particular to oust President
Putin. Fundamental issues are at stake including the real possibility of a nuclear
war.
The most recent western propaganda campaign and one of the most virulent is the charge
launched by the UK regime of Prime Minister Theresa May . The Brits have claimed that Russian
secret agents conspired to poison a former Russian double-agent and his daughter in England ,
threatening the sovereignty and safety of the British people. No evidence has ever been
presented. Instead the UK expelled Russian diplomats and demands harsher sanctions, to increase
tensions. The UK and its US and EU patrons are moving toward a break in relations and a
military build-up.
A number of fundamental questions arise regarding the origins and growing intensity of this
anti-Russian animus.
Why do the Western regimes now feel Russia is a greater threat then in the past? Do they
believe Russia is more vulnerable to Western threats or attacks? Why do the Western military
leaders seek to undermine Russia's defenses? Do the US economic elites believe it is possible
to provoke an economic crisis and the demise of President Putin's government? What is the
strategic goal of Western policymakers? Why has the UK regime taken the lead in the
anti-Russian crusade via the fake toxin accusations at this time?
This paper is directed at providing key elements to address these questions.
The Historical Context for Western Aggression
Several fundamental historical factors dating back to the 1990's account for the current
surge in Western hostility to Russia.
First and foremost, during the 1990's the US degraded Russia, reducing it to a vassal
state, and imposing itself as a unipolar state.Secondly, Western elites pillaged
the Russian economy, seizing and laundering hundreds of billions of dollars. Wall Street
and City of London banks and overseas tax havens were the main beneficiaries Thirdly, the
US seized and took control of the Russian electoral process, and secured the fraudulent
"election" of Yeltsin. Fourthly, the West degraded Russia's military and scientific
institutions and advanced their armed forces to Russia's borders. Fifthly, the West insured
that Russia was unable to support its allies and independent governments throughout Europe,
Asia, Africa and Latin America. Russia was unable to aid its allies in the Ukraine, Cuba,
North Korea, Libya etc.
With the collapse of the Yeltsin regime and the election of President Putin, Russia
regained its sovereignty, its economy recovered, its armed forces and scientific institutes
were rebuilt and strengthened. Poverty was sharply reduced and Western backed gangster
capitalists were constrained, jailed or fled mostly to the UK and the US.
Russia's historic recovery under President Putin and its gradual international influence
shattered US pretense to rule over unipolar world. Russia's recovery and control of its
economic resources lessened US dominance, especially of its oil and gas fields.
As Russia consolidated its sovereignty and advanced economically, socially, politically and
militarily, the West increased its hostility in an effort to roll-back Russia to the Dark Ages
of the 1990's. The US launched numerous coups and military intervention and fraudulent
elections to surround and isolate Russia . The Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Russian
allies in Central Asia were targeted. NATO military bases proliferated.
Russia's economy was targeted : sanctions were directed at its imports and exports.
President Putin was subject to a virulent Western media propaganda campaign. US NGO's funded
opposition parties and politicians.
As the entire US unipolar fantasy dissolved it provoked deep resentment, animosity and a
systematic counter-attack. The US's costly and failed war on terror became a dress rehearsal
for the economic and ideological war against the Kremlin ..Russia's historical recovery and
defeat of Western rollback intensified the ideological and economic war.
The UK poison plot was concocted to heighten economic tensions and prepare the western
public for heightened military confrontations.
Russia is not a threat to the West: it is recovering its sovereignty in order to further
a multi-polar world. President Putin is not an "aggressor" but he refuses to allow Russia to
return to vassalage.
President Putin is immensely popular in Russia and hated by the US precisely because he is
the opposition of Yeltsin -- he has created a flourishing economy; he resists sanctions and
defends Russia's borders and allies.
Conclusion
In a summary response to the opening questions.
The Western regimes recognize that
Russia is a threat to their global dominance; they know that Russia is no threat to invade the
EU, North America or their vassals.Western regimes believe they can topple Russia via
economic warfare including sanctions. In fact Russia has become more self-reliant and has
diversified its trading partners, especially China, and even includes Saudi Arabia and other
Western allies.
The Western propaganda campaign has failed to turn Russian voters against Putin. In the
March 19, 2018 Presidential election voter participation increased to 67% . .Vladimir Putin
secured a record 77% majority. President Putin is politically stronger than ever.
Russia's display of advanced nuclear and other advanced weaponry has had a major deterrent
effect especially among US military leaders, making it clear that Russia is not vulnerable to
attack.
The UK has attempted to unify and gain importance with the EU and the US via the launch of
its anti-Russia toxic conspiracy. Prime Minister May has failed. Brexit will force the UK to
break with the EU.
President Trump will not replace the EU as a substitute trading partner. While the EU and
Washington may back the UK crusade against Russia they will pursue their own trade agenda;
which do not include the UK.
In a word, the UK, the EU and the US are ganging-up on Russia, for diverse historic and
contemporary reasons. The UK exploitation of the anti-Russian conspiracy is a temporary ploy to
join the gang but will not change its inevitable global decline and the break-up of the UK.
Russia will remain a global power. It will continue under the leadership of President Putin.
The Western powers will divide and bugger their neighbors -- and decide it is their better
judgment to accept and work within a multi-polar world.
*
Prof. James Petras is a Research Associate of the CRG.
The fact that Trump is a sad excuse for a human being and a conman has been pretty obvious
since the 1980s. It was never clear to me why conservatives believed this man had really
changed his spots.
The one and only issue where Trump really does seem to have some principles and conviction
is trade. He has certainly defied the Deep State, and most of his donors, on that issue and
he may yet force China to cave and open their economy to Western corporations. If he pulls
that off, he will deserve some credit.
And really, despite his lack of structural change to immigration laws, the ICE does seem
to have become a lot more zealous under Trump's watch than it would have been under Hillary,
so there is that. Problem is Trump is actually looking a lot like Obama – a lot of
symbolic gestures that will probably be instantly reversed by the next President (whether Dem
or GOP), but no real influence over congress and very little substantive legislative changes.
From Carter to Obama and now Trump the record of "outsiders" in the White House is pretty
pathetic.
Rolled is putting things mildly. This is such brazen act of capitulation by the self styled
swamp slayer Trump that he should strongly consider resigning to save face. Trump just took a
giant dump on the people who risked their physical safety to support him at campaign rallies.
At this point I'm throwing him to the wolves and hope Mueller destroys him or the coming
Democrat majority in 2018 impeaches him. He only has his cowardly, lying self to blame.
This is the third spending bill with no wall funding, no reductions in H1B or H2B visas
and no added interior enforcement funding requested by the WH. Trump keeps rubber stamping
these bills then vows to fight next time around only to meekly sign yet again. This all just
seems to be reality TV to him.
This really leaves the deplorables and those opposed to the third worlding of America in
the lurch. Trump was our only and probably last hope and now he's decided to join the swamp
and conduct business as usual. We're totally without political representation at the moment
while the country browns, yellows and blackens at an alarming rate.
I guess we shouldn't be too surprised since Trump has very few core convictions about
anything other than making money and having sex. And of course "winning" which we've done
little of since he assumed office. The only "win" was that he wasn't Hillary but now he
is!
The few political convictions he might possess are very shallow and subject to change
almost hourly depending on who he talks to, Ivanka's emotional state and his PMS like mood
swings. The only thing that's non-negotiable for Trump is slavish support for and devotion to
Israel. Obama was an anti-white and anti-American bigot, but at least he had a world view and
ideology guiding his actions regardless of input he received, his media coverage or his
approval rating.
Trump = Obama = W. Different actors get to play the same role on behalf of the super rich
– it's in the Constitution. It's sad to see a zombie voter express voter's remorse on
social media. An emotional zombie is an obedient slave. They are easy to control since
there's no need for the lash to get them crying about politics.
Trump will have to pound his chest about war like Clinton did with Yugoslavia. This will
make him a well rounded President – he just needs the right supporting cast.
Some actors like General Kelly proudly served the country into 9/11. You'd figure a guy
would get fired for such an enormously bad performance. Instead this moribund ghoul serves as
Chief of Staff. Perhaps it's not his fault and big complicated computers determine when
massive amounts of people need to be killed from time to time.
I have to laugh at the people trying to portray Bonkers Bolton as somehow less insane than he
is.
Yesterday in my Youtube recommended list was at least half a dozen channels with headlines
expressing horror at the appointment of Bolton as National Security Adviser. Clearly there
has been a backlash in quite a few quarters that this appointment is simply lunatic - of a
lunatic.
So naturally today we see people trying to play down the absolute stark insanity of Trump
appointing this clown.
The only thing we can hope for is that before Bolton does too much damage that Trump gets
tired of him, as he has everyone else in his administration, and fires him. But given Trump's
history, all we can expect then is that he appoints Nikki Haley to the same post.
Russia, ever patient, issued a statement saying they're ready to work with Bolton.
Privately they must be wondering why they didn't develop Novichok so they could use it on
him.
Meanwhile the Democrats are trotting out all the hot women they claim had affairs with
Trump. Hello, Democrats! Anyone remember Bill Clinton? At least Trump has a wife good-looking
enough to maybe keep him home at night.
"... When the relevant analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) refused to agree with Bolton's language, the undersecretary summoned the analyst and scolded him in a red-faced, finger-waving rage. ..."
"... The director of INR at the time, Carl Ford, told the congressional committee considering Bolton's nomination that he had never before seen such abuse of a subordinate ..."
> The most egregious recent instances of arm twisting arose in George W. Bush's
administration but did not involve Iraq. The twister was Undersecretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security John Bolton, who pressured intelligence officers to
endorse his views of other rogue states, especially Syria and Cuba. Bolton wrote his own
public statements on the issues and then tried to get intelligence officers to endorse
them.
According to what later came to light when Bolton was nominated to become ambassador to
the United Nations, the biggest altercation involved Bolton's statements about Cuba's
allegedly pursuing a biological weapons program. When the relevant analyst in the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) refused to agree with Bolton's
language, the undersecretary summoned the analyst and scolded him in a red-faced,
finger-waving rage.
The director of INR at the time, Carl Ford, told the congressional committee
considering Bolton's nomination that he had never before seen such abuse of a
subordinate -- and this comment came from someone who described himself as a
conservative Republican who supported the Bush administration's policies -- an orientation I
can verify, having testified alongside him in later appearances on Capitol Hill.
> When Bolton's angry tirade failed to get the INR analyst to cave, the undersecretary
demanded that the analyst be removed. Ford refused. Bolton attempted similar pressure on the
national intelligence officer for Latin America, who also inconveniently did not endorse
Bolton's views on Cuba. Bolton came across the river one day to our National Intelligence
Council offices and demanded to the council's acting chairman that my Latin America colleague
be removed.
John Bolton, US President Donald Trump's incoming hawkish
national security adviser, is reportedly planning a massive dismissal of staff at the National
Security Council, aiming to remove dozens of White House officials.
Sources aware of the changes told Foreign Policy that Bolton is preparing to "clean house"
and remove nearly all of the political appointees brought in by his predecessor.
"Bolton can and will clean house," one former White House official told Foreign Policy. One
other source said, "He is going to remove almost all the political [appointees] McMaster
brought in."
Another former official said that any National Security Council officials appointed under
former President Obama "should start packing their shit."
Trump and Bolton see eye to eye on their hawkish foreign policy, especially when it comes to
North Korea and Iran, and are equally averse to multilateral diplomacy, whether that means the
UN or working with the European Union.
A history of bellicosity
Bolton, an outspoken advocate of military action who served in the administration of former
US president George W. Bush, has called for action against Iran and North Korea.
While serving under Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bolton was also both a cheerleader
and early architect of the Iraq war.
In a February
op-ed for The Wall Street Journal , Bolton made the "legal case for striking
North Korea first" to stop what he deems an "imminent threat" from the nation's nuclear
program.
Bolton is also strongly opposed to the Iran nuclear deal and has been obsessed for many
years with going to war against the Islamic Republic.
"He is unabashed about this," said Mark Groombridge, a former top adviser to Bolton at the
State Department and United Nations pointing to his views on preemptive warfare.
"He has no problems with the doctrine of preemption and feels the greatest threat that the
United States faces is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
The Washington Post reports that at the White House, Bolton is likely to reinforce Trump's
"America First" view of the world. Both Trump and Bolton share a long-standing animosity toward
any treaties, international laws or alliances that limit America's freedom to act on the world
stage.
The more I think about it the more convinced I am that the real danger from Bolton is that,
in Trumpian fashion, he will return to those good old days when the Cold War was ending and the
US went hog wild in Central America.
Like a bruised and beaten bully who's just had his come-uppance in the pub who, returning home,
angry and impotent beats up the wife and kids and threatens the neighbours, Uncle Sam is
returning, his tail between his legs, from the middle east to his home turf.
Look out Cuba! Look out Venezuela!
The Contras are back in business. Ecuador-sorry Julian- looks about to crumble. Honduras,
Paraguay, Haiti, Brazil and Argentina have all been rescued from their own people. Things are
beginning to look like the 80s again except that this time there are hardly any 'communists'
left to kill. Military dictatorships are back, death squads are bigger than ever.
And, best of all, from the Bolton/Trump viewpoint, the dangers of running into Russian or
Chinese backed resistance is negligible, the money to be made is infinite. One Continent from
north pole to south, run by a mafia based in Washington.
Its what Making America Great Again means-a return to the Monroe Doctrine and letting up on the
mad dream of global hegemony. There's plenty of poor suckers for everyone to exploit a billion
or so.
There's only one caveat-Israel. Israel undoubtedly wants a war with Iran, just as it wants to
smash up Syria (or get the US to do it for them) but I just can't see the many local interested
parties allowing it. Perhaps moving the Embassy to Jerusalem and getting the Guatemalans,
Hondurans and Solomon Islanders to do the same, is all that they are going to get from Trump- a
gesture without meaning. A con from the grifter himself.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may have become accustomed to taking flak from
Democratic (and even some G.O.P.) legislators when she testifies on Capitol Hill, but some of
the most ferocious criticism she has recently faced comes from an unlikely source: John Bolton,
the fiery conservative who served under Rice as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. In his
new memoir, Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and
Abroad, Bolton -- known to be close to Vice President Dick Cheney -- outlines some of the
internal foreign policy battles in the Administration of George W. Bush, and paints President
Bush himself as betraying his own gut instinct.
Bolton's book covers his childhood as the son of a Baltimore fireman, his days at Yale Law
School and his service in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. But it's
the brickbats he reserves for Rice and fellow diplomats and civil servants in the current
Administration that grab the most attention. First as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control
and then as U.N. ambassador, Bolton emerges as an outspoken unilateralist and an opponent of
treaties and international institutions ranging from the Kyoto climate convention to the
International Court of Criminal Justice. And he has been a vocal opponent, both inside and
outside the Administration, of negotiations with North Korea and Iran over their nuclear
programs.
Bolton's outspoken policy views have long been familiar, but what's most interesting about
his new book is the sheer enthusiasm with which he has adopted the mantle of the most vocal
neoconservative critic of the Bush Administration's foreign policy, only months after resigning
from the Bush team when the Senate for the second time refused to confirm his nomination to the
U.N. post.
Bolton accuses the Administration of laxity in dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea and
an Iran intent on obtaining the bomb, not to mention its efforts to arrange a Middle East peace
conference. But implicit in Bolton's bomb-throwing is a startling admission: that his
never-ending battle against "pragmatists" and those less ideologically committed inside the
most conservative administration in decades has been lost. In an interview with TIME, Bolton
said: "Secretary Condoleezza Rice is the dominant voice on national security and there is no
one running even a close second; her ascendancy is undisputed."
So where does that leave Bolton allies like Cheney and his hard-line advisers, and the few
remaining neocons scattered through the national security bureaucracy? "You will never know
what the VP's exact interaction with the President is," says Bolton, "But the VP is still
closer to the President's basic instincts than anyone else." Bolton's explanation for the shift
in White House policy: "The President may be distracted by the Iraq war or other events... but
there's no doubt that the President has moved heartbreakingly away from his own deepest
impulses on the three principal issues of controversy (North Korea, Iran and Middle East
peace); what is happening now is contrary to his basic instincts."
On Iran, Bolton says former Secretary of State Colin Powell was too intent on mollifying
U.S. allies like France, Britain and Germany. This caused Powell to offer Iran too many
"carrots" -- trade and commercial inducements -- if Tehran would rein in its pursuit of atomic
materials. To a large degree Rice, in Bolton's view, perpetuated this strategy even though, he
believes, there is almost no chance that Iran will give up its nuclear ambitions. As a result,
he says, the U.S. has wasted time on "four and half years of failed diplomacy" indulging Iran
with unnecessarily accommodationist negotiations, a period Iran has used to advance its nuclear
acquisitions and research.
On North Korea, Bolton cites (unconfirmed) reports of the Hermit Kingdom's collaboration
with Syria on a secret nuclear facility as evidence that the denuclearization deal between the
U.S. and North Korea is not working. Talks with North Korea continue, he notes, and the U.S.
looks set to invite Syria to its Middle East peace conference later this month. Uncomfortable
issues are not being raised, Bolton charges, for fear of disrupting negotiations that he sees
as pointless to begin with.
So what are the prospects for a return to the muscular unilateralism that Bolton favors?
"There's a possibility that events in the external world will validate our position and give
the President a means to return to his gut," the former U.N. ambassador told TIME. "But until
and unless external events prove that current policies are on the wrong track, there is no
countervailing or obvious force inside this administration that is going to produce a course
correction. "
Looks like the rules of neoliberal game for Ukraine are as following: Ukraine should be ready
for fight Russia till the last Ukrainian, serving as cannon fodder for EU geopolitical interests
in Eurasia; (2) As a "debt slave" Ukraine should allow the transfer of ownership of all strategic
assets and commodities to EU corporations for pennies on dollar independently of how Donbass
situation is resolved; (3) Ukraine should buy EU products, no matter how poor they are and local
production should be be iether eliminated ("Baltics style deindustrialization"), or outsourced to
transnational corporations with Ukrainian as a cheap labor force (wage slaves).
Notable quotes:
"... And the Ukraine made a massive mistake. Their situation is completely different to Poland after USSR fell. ..."
And the Ukraine made a massive mistake. Their situation is completely different to
Poland after USSR fell.
Very true. Poland was the first Eastern European country which adopted neoliberal model
and thus served to a certain extent as "photo model" of neoliberalism for the rest of Eastern
Europe and xUSSR space. So standard of living did not drop too low. The country was somewhat
supported by EU and by the USA.
Ukraine was royally raped economically in 1991-2000. Probably as bad as Russia, may be
even worse.
In 2014 Ukrainians were lured by unrealistic dream of getting Western European standard of
living as a gift for breaking with Russia. As well as the resentment toward kleptocrat
Yanukovich (which actually was pretty typical neoliberal politician; not much worse then
Poroshenko )
Now they start to understand that the EU will devour the corpse to the bones and they are
stuck at the Central African level poverty of $2 a day or so (on average), but this is too
late.
A very typical story, a very typical outcome. Neoliberalism is a cancer. As Russian prime
minister quipped about economic rape of Russia by local and Western neoliberals in 1991-2000:
"We strived to get the best [economic] outcome, but it turned out like we got even worse then
average. As always." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Chernomyrdin
)
So in a way they stepped on the same rake twice: once in 1991 and the second time in 2014.
That's unforgivable.
What is interesting that as there are 3.4K dislikes and only 1.2K likes. Looks like people start to decipher the NBC propaganda
machine and neoliberal propaganda machine in general (NBC is not an outlier in this respect; this is run of mill neoliberal outlet)
Looks like Putin really has steel nerves. Megyn Kelly was really disgusting pushing her talking points like there is
not tomorrow. Such a shill... . She also was organically able to listen. she has her prejudices can't shake them and actually does
not want to shake them (may be this is connected with her job security ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Confronting? The job of a real journalist is to ask questions, not to confront. Want to see the actual interview go watch Russian Insider is there in its totality. ..."
"... the moment i heard "American Democracy Under Attack" i stopped watching the video. ..."
"... Wtf NBC, this is ridiculously badly edited to fit an agenda. This is not journalism. ..."
"... It's not a debate if she keeps interrupting him, very disappointed in the way NBC took this golden opportunity to have a proper conversation with one of the super powers of the world and wasted it in "I tell you, you did this" and childish reaction from Megyn part. ..."
"... I am American and I am fully of aware how evil and deceptive this country is. I understand Putin is trying to do the right thing. But it seems as if almost 90-95% of people in this country still don't get it. ..."
"... How many governments in the world have been overthrown by the American CIA? How often does evil USA interfere in other states' elections? The USA government is pure evil. ..."
"... "American democracy, under attack".... by putting $46,000 worth of ads on Facebook, most of which were posted AFTER the election. Come on people, don't be foolish. ..."
"... "You believe that America meddled in your elections?" No Megyn Kelly, that's a historical fact, look up the "Harvard Boys" sponsored by USAID, look at the cover of the July 15, 1996 issue of Time Magazine entitled "Yanks to the Rescue", celebrating America's role in hijacking the Russian political system. ..."
Confronting? The job of a real journalist is to ask questions, not to confront. Want to see the actual interview go watch Russian
Insider is there in its totality.
Mr. Putin, did you intervene in the US elections? No But did you intervene? No And when you intervened, did you intervene?
No Have you intervened with the oligarchs? No Did you help them intervene? No And in the US say you intervened you did it? No
But you did not interfere, huh? Yes Interfered? No
Where is the full interview? I had to go to a Russian government TV channel so I can watch the full interview. And you label
the Russian media as state propaganda. Shame on you.
"Cut and paste" the interview with an agenda of bashing Russia, using "some people say" or "some American experts say" as the
sources without any solid proof and evidence is shameful.
Please, please, please, any US citizen who is watching this, go watch the full interview, just in order to get an idea of what your
media is worth. Listen to the words, also pay attention to how it is filmed and
presented.You really need to know how much you are bullshitted to.
When he talked about principles, why didn't she believe? Please, know that there are many people in the world with principles,
who are not necessarily running and dying for capitalist money, brands, silly talentless pointless half-naked pop-stars, yachts
or florida-like beaches, etc. There are many people who are fine to live without all these but with principles and other values
, which are not that bad even they don't run around money!
Her first and fatal mistake was underestimating his intelligence, thinking she could trip him up with her aggressive tone.
Putin has forgotten more about politics than Kelly has yet to learn. It's easy to see why NBC hacked the interview to pieces -
she was pathetic and out of her league, just another brainwashed, deluded American shill.
Wtf NBC, this is ridiculously badly edited to fit an agenda. This is not journalism. I wasn't a fan of Russia before this,
but you might be changing my mind by showing this edited crap. You're making things between the US and Russia worse not better
by showing this edited crap.
Wow, i am a Russian and i have to say you guys went too far with your propaganda. This is cut and edited beyond reason. Why
you do this? Stop making our president look like the ultimate villain. Honestly, it was such a pleasure to listen to Vladimir
Putin's reasonable approach. WTF NBC?
It's not a debate if she keeps interrupting him, very disappointed in the way NBC took this golden opportunity to have a proper
conversation with one of the super powers of the world and wasted it in "I tell you, you did this" and childish reaction from
Megyn part.
In America, Our political & Media Elite managed to collude Our foreign policy with Democracy promotion.We use Democracy promotion
to achieved our foreign policy agenda.. In Libya we Used democracy promotion to achieve our foreign policy goal of getting ride
of Gadhafi, following the fall of Gadhafi we abandon Libya on moved on to OUR NEXT TARGET, SYRIA.... IN SYRIA, we formed an alliance
with non Democratic ARAB REGIMES to Overthrow A Circular government of ASSAD. when RUSSIA & IRAN INTERVEIN @ THE REQUEST OF THE
SYRIAN GOVERNMENT, we have an issue with that.. OUR FOREIGN POLICY is INCONSISTENT AND UNDERMINES OUR NATIONAL INTEREST/Democracy.
& Corporate Media is a SCAM... HAD WE HAD alternative NEWS SOURCE LIKE(social media) WE DO TODAY, WE WOULDN'T HAVE INVADED IRAQ
ON FAKE EVIDENCE /INTELLIGENCE God Bless America
NBC is the reason why the US and Russia will never be allies. They seem to want war. Putin is probably laughing at the hysteria
of the US media. Make no mistake, the MEDIA is getting in the way of peace with Russia. Putin is no saint, but keep in mind they
have more nuclear weapons than us. Wouldn't hurt to mend the relationship...
This is American propaganda in its purest most undiluted form. The interpreter is putting words into Putin's mouth making him
sound arrogant and brash. Its is Megyn Kelly who is the arrogant one just like the rest of the American mainstream media. I admire
Putin for his patience, one must have the mental stability of a yogi to tolerate the half literate moronic deluge that radiates
from Megyn's mouth. She was going too far, by interrupting Putin at every turn while Putin still has the decency to politely respond.
If she is so democratic, I would advise her to pay a visit to her government's Saudi "allies.
Putin is too smart for Megyn. Do you really think he's gonna tell you what you think when an American journalist asks you such
questions? I don't like Putin either but he's got balls. I bet he knows English too but he knows that speaking a foreign language
will put him at an disadvantage. Smart move by hiring an interpreter. By the way the US government throughout has done things
far worse than rigging election.
This isnt an interview more less the ' pressing' of 'false allegations & speculation'. Every response Putin gives is reasonable.
Putin didnt have to agree with doing this. She sounds like a failed lawyer & wanna be politician. America is not Perfect, Russia
is not perfect, I wish she would sit down with people in her own country & do the same but she doesnt. She acts as if she is asking
these questions on behalf of Americans when really it is based on 'her' own views and for the sake of 'her' interview. This interview
is flawed.
Don't spread lies NBC news. People should not believe this fake news! Glad to see there's more dislikes than likes, people
are starting to know the truth.
How disingenuous can NBC get? Actual quote from the interview: "Maybe, although they were Russian, they work for some American
company. Maybe one of them worked with one of the candidates. I have no idea about this. These are not my problems" And in the
headlines: "Putin on alleged US election interference: I don't care".
American Democracy is run by plutocrats Itching for war against Russia and China and Iran.. USA is a warmonger doing the bidding
for Israel.. As if Russia had Trump elected.. What a joke.. American mainstream media is trying to manufacture consent from its people
to go to war.. Watch and see..
United state have been interfering in African election forcing us to there evil democracy, killing Gaddafi for no reason. Look
at what you guys did in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries that don't want to do your evil democracy. After lying to the shameless
United nations security council about Saddam's building of weapons of mass destruction, Who fight you about that?.
This is quite possibly the WORST interview ever conducted. This one is NOT a journalist. If you want to be a respectable broadcaster,
fire this moron immediately. Horrendously non-factual, terribly edited - this interview is America in a nutshell. The world has
awoken in this age and won't stand still.
Remember that United States interferes in the affairs of other nations ALL THE TIME. The U.S. attempted to influence the elections
of foreign countries as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000. Since 2000, the U.S. has attempted to sway elections in Ukraine,
Kenya, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.
I am American and I am fully of aware how evil and deceptive this country is. I understand Putin is trying to do the right
thing. But it seems as if almost 90-95% of people in this country still don't get it. They actually are repulsed and
angry by the idea that we could be the bad guys. It has turned my family and friends against me. I am all alone...
Megyn Kelly? Pressure Putin? Should I cry or laugh! It's like watching Ahmedinajad destroying King! Even your questions has
no concrete clue to any Russian government connection! None!!!!! Are you really a journalist? Guys seriously if you wanna do tv
then do it right! You can't pressure Putin by saying they are Russians if you don't have any any any any clues on government connection!
You should really consider your questions next time!
There's no "Russian Connection". This is a lie. This whole "Russian interference in US elections" is a political sham invented
by the corrupt American system infiltrated by Zionists and Anti-Christian lobbyists.
Poor work by the journalist. She is supposed to have a dialogue, she is supposed to listen to the interviewee. Instead, it
was just a bunch of questions and it looked quite awkward.
How many governments in the world have been overthrown by the American CIA? How often does evil USA interfere in other states'
elections? The USA government is pure evil.
"American democracy, under attack".... by putting $46,000 worth of ads on Facebook, most of which were posted AFTER the election.
Come on people, don't be foolish.
"You believe that America meddled in your elections?" No Megyn Kelly, that's a historical fact, look up the "Harvard Boys"
sponsored by USAID, look at the cover of the July 15, 1996 issue of Time Magazine entitled "Yanks to the Rescue", celebrating
America's role in hijacking the Russian political system.
"... Kelly and, only later on Mattis will likely be the next to get fired. That will eliminate the last people with access to Trump who have some marginal sanity on war and peace issues. Trump will be completely isolated and easy to manipulate. ..."
"... Fortunately the media in the US has had it's credibility with just about everyone, including anti-Trump people, shredded and I don't think they'll be able to prepare people for a war like they did before the 2016 election, people are finally awake or have a sense of agency. ..."
"... If Mattis will be out at some point along with Kelly, thus destroying the tempering influence of these generals, who hated Iraq as much as Vietnam, the next question is how Trump's apparent judgment on Iraq as disastrous will play out with a Bolton crowd (Bolton one of the first signatories of PNAC in 1998) on what to do when the North Koreans say fuck you loudly and clearly. ..."
"... Trump has surrounded himself with real men who want to go to Tehran. Syria, not so much anymore. Besides, Ukraine 3.0 will be great until the Russians show up. The CIA's Dark Prince is already there. ..."
"... global oligarchy live in harmony while concocting massive Orwellian propaganda of great enemies that must be defeated at all cost, cost of your freedom and your purse. ..."
"... Face it b, Bolton is just a impotent loud barking dog to scare ordinary people for his temporary owner , a flaccid clown of global oligarchy. ..."
...He is also an exceptionally avid bureaucrat who knows how
to get the things he wants done. That quality is what makes him truly dangerous. Bolton is
known for sweet-talking to his superiors, being ruthless against competitors and for kicking
down on everyone below him.
Soon Netanyahoo will have the cabinet in place in DC he always dreamed of. A hawkish Pompeo
at State, a
real torturer as head of the CIA and now Bolton are already sufficient to protect Israel's
further expansion. Kelly and,
only later on Mattis will likely be the next to get fired. That will eliminate the last
people with access to Trump who have some marginal sanity on war and peace issues. Trump will
be completely isolated and easy to manipulate.
Bolton has a hammer and he will find lots of nails. Like
Hillary Clinton he will want to fight with Iran, North Korea, Russia, China and others in no
particular order. He will want to destroy Syria. He is cozy with the Kurds and the
Iranian terror cult MEK. He addressed (vid) their congress eight years in a row
and made lots of money for saying things like this :
"[B]efore 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran."
Bolton has little concern for U.S. allies except, maybe, for Israel.
His first
priority will be to prevent the announced summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un. He will
want more sanctions on North Korea and may argue for a 'preventive' strike against it. He does
not care that such a strike will certainly kill tens of thousands of Koreans in the north and
south and several thousand U.S. soldiers and civilians.
New sanctions on North Korea are problematic as Trump has just
put additional tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. imports of Chinese goods. (The Chinese
response is smart: Tariffs on U.S. agricultural goods from states that Trump won.) Why should
China and Russia (and South Korea) help the U.S. to strangulate North Korea when they
themselves are under fire? To prevent a U.S. strike that may come anyway the very next day?
The Europeans who were part of the nuclear agreement with Iran have to answer
a similar question . Why offer Trump a 'compromise' over the JCPOA when the chances are now
high that he will destroy it anyway?
What will Bolton do on Syria? Will he try to find a new agreement with Erdogan and drag
Turkey away from endorsing Russia's polices in Syria? If he manages to do so, Syria's north
will become a shared Turkish-U.S. entity and will be lost for a long time. New attacks on the
Syrian government, from the north, south and east, where the U.S. re-trains ISIS into a new
'moderate rebel' army, would then open the next phase of the war.
So far the mean time of survival for Trump appointees is some six to eight months. Let us
hope that John Bolton's appointment will - in the end - lower that average.
Posted by b on March 23, 2018 at 11:50 AM | Permalink
These appointments are weird. Ultimately Trump doesn't seem to have an appetite for
large-scale war. What does seem like a dangerous possibility is if Bolton can et al can
provoke a situation that traps Trump in his responses, maybe with a tight timeframe to
respond and leads to a conflict starting that way.
Fortunately the media in the US has had it's credibility with just about everyone,
including anti-Trump people, shredded and I don't think they'll be able to prepare people for
a war like they did before the 2016 election, people are finally awake or have a sense of
agency.
Ultimately it doesn't seem like Trump's election has changed much in terms of foreign
policy among prospective successors. So it seems like eventually they will get their war with
Iran during Trump's term or afterwards. It's utterly incredible how implacable the neo-cons
are despite constant exposure over the last 15-20 years and with at least one President being
elected on the basis of disgust with them. (Obama, could maybe include Trump too)
Kim Jong-un has no good reason for a "summit" with Trump. Indeed, there is no reason for him
or his country to have anything to do with the USA or its catamites.
The best path for Korea is for North and South to plan reunification, as early as
possible. They might as well retain the North's nuclear weapons, just in case anyone cuts up
rough. If the Americans try to interfere, the nuclear weapons are there. Any American attempt
to escalate, right on China's and Russia's front door, would meet with an extremely frigid
response from them.
We must always remember that there was never any "North" or "South" Korea until President
Truman's bureaucrats conjured them up out of thin air - apparently with the aid of a school
atlas - to avoid the hideous tragedy of the whole of Korea "going communist". South Korea is
an occupied nation, and should take immediate steps to kick the American occupiers out. By
force if necessary.
Optimism on Bolton as relatively harmless in yesterday's thread is given an interesting
perspective by this piece (from today), adding to b's pessimism above:
It seems the apparently contradictory move by Trump to appoint Bolton after getting rid of
McMaster, who had a similar view to Bolton (North Korea had to be attacked because it is too
late for diplomacy, their rocket programs too advanced), could be part of a scheme for a "big
victory" effort by Trump who is, according to this view, amidst an artful deal-making moment
of allowing faux-optimism re South-North Korean negotiations.
Bolton calls this "diplomatic shock and awe":
Bolton said Trump had short-circuited North Korea's plan of obtaining the capability to
strike the United States with a nuclear weapon and then stretching out negotiations for
months that could distract the American government before making an official announcement
about achieving the capability. Bolton envisioned the meeting between Trump and Kim as an
opportunity to deliver a threat of military action:
"I think this session between the two leaders could well be a fairly brief session
where Trump says, 'Tell me you have begun total denuclearization, because we're not going to
have protracted negotiations, you can tell me right now or we'll start thinking of something
else.' "
Trump, who only a few weeks back condemned (again) the Iraq War as disastrous, may be
thinking Bolton is just the man to nail down a quivering retreat of the North Koreans into
denuclearizing or else, now that they've had a nice taste of how sweet it could be in talking
with Moon and the South.
If Mattis will be out at some point along with Kelly, thus destroying the tempering
influence of these generals, who hated Iraq as much as Vietnam, the next question is how
Trump's apparent judgment on Iraq as disastrous will play out with a Bolton crowd (Bolton one
of the first signatories of PNAC in 1998) on what to do when the North Koreans say fuck you
loudly and clearly.
This analysis also points out how disturbed Asia is over this appointment, and indicates
that despite his views McMaster had been working with South Korea on the problem, and now has
been jerked. This sounds like what happened in Iraq also, jerking out people who were
building relationships and replacing them with hardnose "bring 'em on" thinking from the
brilliant leadership in that war.
p has surrounded himself with real men who want to go to Tehran. Syria, not so
much anymore. Besides, Ukraine 3.0 will be great until the Russians show up. The CIA's Dark
Prince is already there.
Trump has surrounded himself with real men who want to go to Tehran. Syria, not so much
anymore. Besides, Ukraine 3.0 will be great until the Russians show up. The CIA's Dark Prince
is already there.
I understand that Syrian situation can drive people insane but unfortunately it was and is
interpreted wrongly as a preparation to nuke war, it is not. It is same old same old thing,
it is just more exposed by internet.
US military is in shambles what they showed in Iraq and Syria last year is all they got,
nothing more but a capability of a chicken hawk and D.C. is run by chicken hawks whose
business is intimidation not war about which they have no idea and they know that US military
can only take on shoeless peasants with dilapitated AK 47 and call it even like in
Afghanistan which was utter defeat no one even here want to talk about.
Like Roman Empire before US emporium is an empty shell, and its myth is maintained by US
INSTALLED ELITES to control their own populations.
Recent military posturing on all sides of a global country club dinner table is just
nothing but bail out of MIC and its wall street backers .
Open your even globalization has been accomplished and global oligarchy live in
harmony while concocting massive Orwellian propaganda of great enemies that must be defeated
at all cost, cost of your freedom and your purse.
Face it b, Bolton is just a impotent loud barking dog to scare ordinary people for his
temporary owner , a flaccid clown of global oligarchy.
Show must go on. 160 years after collapse of Roman Empire Roman circuses and theater
continued like Nothing happened.
"Bolton said Trump had short-circuited North Korea's plan of obtaining the capability to
strike the United States with a nuclear weapon and then stretching out negotiations for
months that could distract the American government before making an official announcement
about achieving the capability."
--as, Bolton believes the North Koreans are playing around with negotiations only to delay
toward capability, that Trump knows this, and all of it's a game toward resurrection of the
hostilities.
This attitude suggests a foregone conclusion that the Trump-Kim meeting will fail, which
could set up the next step at (from Bolton): "You see, it's hopeless, we just have to attack
and take out this country, as we did with Iraq and are trying to do with Syria."
Israel has the Epstein tapes which show Trump having sex with underage girls, Saudi Arabia
has billions of dollars to bribe Trump with arms deals, both of these immoral nations want
Iran eliminated as an threat to their agendas. Israel and Saudi Arabia demand that Trump try
and neutralize Iran before Trump is removed from office which will happen before his first
term is up if this nation has any sense of self preservation. Trump is replacing those
opposed to a war against Iran with those who support it. Trump is seriously compromised by
foreign agendas.
1. Iran nuclear deal is dead, EU poodles will fall in line (but not entirely) with
sanctions against Iran. I'm curious how Iran will respond, IMHO will restart all centrifuges
and raise enrichment level? I still think its unlikely Iran would go for the nukes as
ultimate deterrent.
2. US will be more involved in Syria. We can most definitely expect more false flag CW
attacks and "retaliation" missiles. The big question mark if Russia will live up to its
promise to retaliate on launch sites or US planes.
3. There will be no overt war against Iran, Pompeo/Bolton or not, US simply cannot win it.
Covert - most definitely. More sabotage, assassinations, sanctions, etc.
It will be hard to do Libya 3.0 as well, but USrael might try anyway. Arm kurds and
baluchis radicals, activate MEK network, it wont be anywhere as bad as in Syria, but some
damage would be done. Thats the most what they can do.
Bolton is a fruitcake. Imo Trump only hired him to expose his nuttiness and fire him. When he
does, the World will breathe a sigh of relief and Trump's popularity will improve.
Bolton's Achilles Heel is that he doesn't do low-profile and talks too much.
@9 sid.. thanks.. i get that... i am more inclined to view bolton like @8 kalen.. it really
does seem that way to me and if so, suggests trump is still in control and happy to have
these bozos talk the talk, while knowing they are not able to walk the walk.. trump would
throw a real monkey wrench in the spanner if he was to engage in the talks and come away with
a positive resolution.. it would be a a nightmare for the military industrial complex and neo
cons.. i still think he is capable of this...
@11 harry.. i hope you are wrong, but it is completely conceivable and tends to be the
usa/israels pattern when confronted with a loss..
@ 12 When you're powerless, give the opposition what they want and hope they choke on it.
Trump is being underestimated. Dunford, Mattis, Pompeo and Kelly lined up
behind Trump against Tillerson and the White Helmets in Ghouta.
"Trump will be completely isolated and easy to manipulate."
This is nonsense. And you know it B. But you still fancy your idea about a
non-interventionistic Trump, and now, by the time this belief is definitely shattered, you
try a reasoning dangerously near to 'wenn das der Führer wüsste'.
This discussion suggests why Mattis has been successful with a naïve blowhard
president, including the following interesting comment:
John Bolton's arrival in April as the president's new national security adviser will
give Mattis a more ardent and skillful adversary at the National Security Council. Mattis
outranked McMaster in military terms and always considered him his junior, even though Mattis
is retired. He likely won't view Bolton that way, and Bolton prizes his ability to corral the
bureaucracy for his purposes.
We're looking at an upcoming contest Mattis vs. Bolton on such matters as wars with Iran,
North Korea, and whoever.
Glad to see all the optimism here on how harmless Bolton is but would like a little more
substance versus the automatic dismissals.
I don't see the financial thread in all of this and I seriously believe that is #1 on Trumps
mind. He would love for his legacy to be the POTUS that turned around the global economic
collapse and opened the door big business everywhere.
That is his history wrt foreign relations and he could care less for the "blow shit up"
mentality. Not saying that he can't be talked into it, just saying he would prefer the
headline "Trump opens up the world for more US business". I honestly think that he believes
that a trade war (business by other means) leads to US becoming a Mfg powerhouse again. Those
around him might convince him that blowing shit up will have the same outcome.
Banking/finance learned a long time ago that you are better off keeping your customers
around to continue borrowing than imprisoning or kill them off. The world is a market place
and Trump wants to "make deals-not war" as long as America gets the better part of the
deal.
Only other thing that makes since is what CM @ 10 proposes, that Trump is compromised.
Kalen @8 you must have followed the Bolton divorce case.
Iran doesn't need nuclear weapons it just needs a treaty with Russia and China. It might be
of assistance to the dimwitted in Washington if the treaty specifically stated that Iran is
under a nuclear umbrella.
We ought to acknowledge that, as the camarilla of generals surrounding Trump turns into a
junta of bullshitters and blowhards, the dictatorship in DC has never been anything more than
an alliance between billionaires, bullshitters and the American Gestapo.
@20 Trump may be all about deals but he's having a terrible effect on the stock markets. If a
trade war with China wasn't bad enough now they have Bolton to worry about.
What you mean about Bolt-man is he'll be safe in his office, while YOUR father, mother, son,
uncle, brother, sister or other family member dies for HIS idea of how the world should be.
"We will fight fight "till the last drop of.....your blood!" The "inside the Beltway"
gangsters sicken me.
@ 10 Charles,
In New-York Trump's been known as The FRONT GOY even before the Atlantic city heist. Without
Kompromat tapes they can bury him six million different ways before sunday...
A day before Bolton got the job, still a very interesting read as usual, up to the end,
because Nothing can go wrigth in DC those days, in fact nothing can be done.
The Trump meeting with KJU, if it comes off, will give an indication of where Trump is
headed. Much showtime shock and awe and hyperbole leading up to his suddenly agreeing to the
meeting which caught all the US political animals on both sides of the fence by surprise.
Haley constantly yapping like an annoying little dog has achieved what? Haley seems be just
another prop in the shock and awe show.
At the same time, Trump could miscalculate and stumble into major war, or he may be actually
planning a war. Always room for both pessimism and optimism with Trump, depending on the day.
I rather agree with Kalen. Trump is genuinely a blowhard - loud mouth and little action.
Bolton is an unpleasant warmonger, though he didn't get much through before. He was never
confirmed by the Senate as ambassador to the UN. Since then he's had various sidelined
positions as thinktank fellow.
My impression of Trump is that he is too lazy to get the US into a major war. A major war
would be a lot of work, and, whatever the advice from the help, I don't think he'd go for it.
Especially he wouldn't like months or years in a nuclear bunker. He couldn't dandle young
thighs at Mar-a-Lago. That would be a major argument.
An important issue with Trump is that he is unable to keep staff. He must be running out
of potential candidates. That's why Bolton.
re: "libertarian hawk" is an oxymoron . .Bolton is not a libertarian
Libertarianism (from Latin: libertas, meaning "freedom") is a collection of political
philosophies and movements that uphold liberty as a core principle. There are various
interpretations of what libertarianism means to various people, such as the freedom to do as
one pleases.
Bolton is a libertarian in a national sense. His liberty is national liberty. He is
anti-globalist and unilateralist, believing that the country's values should never be
superseded by international agreements and treaties. This thinking coincides with Trump's
position declared during the campaign. "We will no longer surrender this country or its
people to the false song of globalism," Trump said in his defining foreign policy speech as a
candidate in the spring of 2016. "The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness
and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America
down."
Following from this concept of national libertarianism, Bolton goes further to the ready and
unilateral use of armed force to advance foreign policy, without bilateral or multilateral
agreement. He's a hawk, but that's not unusual for Americans in government.
The planet isn't going to survive much longer with Americans and the Tribe infesting it.
Fumigation is in order. Pack the Americans and the antisemite semites into an ICBM and send
them flying into the heart of the sun. A solution as good as any other.
@ 27 and 20: thanks Charles re link to the Alastair Crooke article which reflects Jef's
earlier comment: that is, Trump would likely say: me for war? hell no I'm a peace lover but
I'll drive the good bargain including war threat as needed in my "art of making a deal"(hence
tools to this end such as Pompeo and Bolton). Crooke makes a good point that Tillerson was
too much a conventional diplomat; Trump likes tough, unpredictable guys like Mattis to model
himself after.
But all this is in the fundamentals of the same megalomaniacal type thinking that
drove/drives PNAC and smart-ass know-it-all-ism of the Iraq Invasion and continuation of this
mindset (see Bremer) after "mission accomplished."
This mind-set at base is the problem. I call it megalomania, others might call it hubris
on steroids, or daydreams of the psychopath. For me it's difficult to pull Trump out of this
mindset, because he's essentially the same. At the same time HIS version of it clashes with
State Department Egomania--possibly toward doing some good at times (as with changing the
course of US action in Syria last year; as with low-key response to the Skripal nonsense at
this time) but nonetheless presenting the possibility of a new set of tripwires a la invasion
of Iraq 2003, in terms of North Korea-Iraq.
It seems apparent at this time that Trump is clueless that for North Korea to denuclearize
that would mean a quid pro quo of US forces leaving South Korea--which will never be
acceptable to the neocons or Trump.
I wonder if there are people in the military thinking about resigning before WW3? There is
isn't even a believable narrative put forward in bombing Damascus nor Tehran except for
murder, destruction and conquest, there is literally zero self defensive aspect. I wonder how
special forces troops in Syria who are about to attack the Syrian army and Syrian people on
the side if HTS, Al Qaeda, IS, Nouri al Zinki, FSA feel about their mission; many must know
they are basically committing treason.
Bolton may or may not be a blowhard but the malignant idiocy that billows forth from his
mouth is frightening in its combination of willful ignorance and unrestrained rage. He is the
new National Insecurity Advisor--that would be his more accurate title.
From Off Guardian:
"...as of today, it appears that long battle for Jobar and its neighboring suburbs is finally
over after an agreement was put in place with the primary militant groups there.
"According to a military report from Damascus, the Syrian Army and Faylaq Al-Rahman have
agreed to peace terms in four East Ghouta suburbs, with the latter agreeing to leave to
Idlib.
"Based on the agreement, Faylaq Al-Rahman will surrender all of their weapons, except for
their small arms; they will release all Syrian Army prisoners from their jails; they will
inform the government of all explosives they placed around the suburbs of Zamalka, Jobar,
'Ayn Tarma, and Arbin; and agree to exit these suburbs on Saturday.
"The militants are now scheduled to leave these four East Ghouta suburbs by noon
tomorrow..."
It is evident that US policy in Syria is failing. The original plan was to divide Syria into
weak independent cantons, much as the French wanted in the 1920s. The French didn't succeed.
It would be surprising of the US did.
The only parts which remain, are the jihadis in Idlib, and the Kurds in Jazira. Two
elements which are opposed to one another.
Supposing that the US wants to revive the war in Syria, as the Neocons do, what are they
going to do? Decapitation of the regime in Damascus was a way of getting the Jihadis into
power (you have to wonder about US support for jihadis). Unfortunately, the Russians put
troops into Damascus a few weeks ago to prevent that. Otherwise it's a bit of a nothing. The
Kurds can stay in Jazira, Nobody's going to stop them.
Great analysis - as usual. The thing missing is that this guy is a rabid zionist and the
White House is now a governorate of the AN orthodox American province of Israel.
One of the most discouraging aspects of the musical chairs being played among the members of
the White House inner circle is that every change reflects an inexorable move to the right in
foreign policy, which means that the interventionists are back without anyone at the White
House level remaining to say "no." President Donald Trump, for all his international experience
as a businessman, is a novice at the step-by-step process required in diplomacy and in the
development of a coherent foreign policy, so he is inevitably being directed by individuals who
have long American global leadership by force if necessary.
The resurgence of the hawks is facilitated by Donald Trump's own inclinations. He likes to
see himself as a man of action and a leader, which inclines him to be impulsive, some might
even say reckless. He is convinced that he can enter into negotiations with North Korean leader
Kim Jong-un with virtually no preparations and make a deal that will somehow end the crisis
over that nation's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, for example. In so doing, he
is being encouraged by his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and his Pentagon chief James
Mattis, who believe that the United States can somehow prevail in a preemptive war with the
Koreans if that should become necessary. The enormous collateral damage to South Korea and even
Japan is something that Washington planners somehow seem to miss in their calculations.
The recent shifts in the cabinet have Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. A leading hawk, he
was first in his class of 1986 at the United States Military Academy but found himself as a
junior officer with no real war to fight. He spent six years in uniform before resigning, never
having seen combat, making war an abstraction for him. He went to Harvard Law and then into
politics where he became a Tea Party congressman, eventually becoming a leader of that caucus
when it stopped being Libertarian and lurched rightwards. He has since marketed himself as a
fearless soldier in the war against terrorism and rogue states, in which category he includes
both Iran and Russia.
Pompeo was not popular at the CIA because he enforced a uniformity of thinking that was
anathema for intelligence professionals dedicated to collecting solid information and using it
to produce sound analysis of developments worldwide. Pompeo, an ardent supporter of Israel and
one of the government's leading Iran haters, has been regularly threatening Iran while at the
Agency and will no doubt find plenty of support at State from Assistant Secretary of State for
the Near East David Satterfield, a former
top adviser of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Pompeo has proven himself more than willing to manipulate intelligence produce the result he
desires. Last year, he declassified and then cherry picked
documents recovered from Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan that suggested that
al-Qaeda had ties with Iran. The move was coordinated with simultaneous White House steps to
prepare Congress and the public for a withdrawal from the Iran nuclear arms agreement. The
documents were initially released to a journal produced by the neocon Foundation for Defense of
Democracies, where Pompeo has a number of times spoken, to guarantee wide exposure in all the
right places.
Pompeo's arrival might only be the first of several other high-level moves by the White
House. Like the rumors that preceded the firing of Secretary of State Tillerson two weeks ago,
there have been recurrent suggestions that McMaster will be the next to go as he reportedly is
too moderate for the president and has also been accused of being
anti-Israeli , the kiss of death in Washington. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton has been
a frequent visitor at the White House and it is believed that he is the preferred candidate to
fill the position. He is an extreme hawk, closely tied to the Israel Lobby, who would push hard
for war against Iran and also for a hardline position in Syria, one that could lead to direct
confrontation with the Syrian Armed Forces and possibly the Russians.
Bolton, who
has been described by a former George W. Bush official as "the most dangerous man we had
during the entire eight years," will undoubtedly have a problem in getting confirmed by
Congress. He was rejected as U.N. Ambassador, requiring Bush to make a recess appointment which did not need
Congressional approval.
"... President Trump congratulated Vladimir Putin to his reelection as president of the Russian Federation. It was a matter of simply courtesy to do so. The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (aka the National Security Advisor), three star general McMaster, had advised him to not congratulate Putin. (McMaster now claims differently .) That was bad advice. But it became even worse when McMaster, or someone in his shop, promptly leaked this to the press. The usual Republican nutters like John McCain grumbled and Trump was furious. ..."
President Trump congratulated
Vladimir Putin to his reelection as president of the Russian Federation. It was a matter of
simply courtesy to do so. The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (aka the
National Security Advisor), three star general McMaster, had advised him to not congratulate
Putin. (McMaster now
claims differently .) That was bad advice. But it became even worse when McMaster, or
someone in his shop, promptly leaked this to the press. The usual Republican nutters like John
McCain grumbled and Trump was furious.
Trump decided to fire McMaster the very next day. He had it coming. Both the White House
Chief of Staff Kelly as well as the Secretary of Defense Mattis wanted McMaster out.
Unfortunately for them Trump chose a replacement that they did not want and will find difficult
to live with.
"... After the disastrous Yeltsin rule (which came on the heels of disastrous rule by Gorbachev) Putin and his team rescued Russia economically, politically, and militarily. ..."
"... As far as Western "democracies" are concerned, the author hit the nail on the head. Yet there are lots of problems in Russia that the author does not mention. I think current Russian take on Soviet propaganda summarizes everything nicely: "what they told us about socialism was a pack of lies, but what they told us about capitalism turned out to be perfectly true". ..."
The author is painting Putin as larger-than-life figure, which he isn't. He is a normal
man, capable and intelligent, but he is not by any means that superhuman leader and savior.
He looks much greater than he is because you subconsciously compare him with pathetic
nonentities that the Western world sees as leaders now. In fact, the leadership of the US
Empire and all its vassal countries visibly degenerated in the last decades. Just compare De
Gaulle with sad excuses La Belle France had for presidents lately. Or compare Nixon (he might
have been a nasty person, but he was a great President of the country) with various clintons,
bushes, obamas, and trumps. Or compare Chancellor Kohl with that poor excuse for a chancellor
that Germany has today. You get the drift.
Just like the Soviet Union was not defeated by the US, but actually collapsed due to
internal problems, regime change rampage is over largely because the United States pushed
their luck and overextended themselves, and not just thanks to Putin. Throughout history, all
dominant empires lose their grip and eventually crumble (remember Roman or British), and now
it's the turn of the US Empire. Fortunately or unfortunately, the next will be the Chinese
Empire, not Russian.
After the disastrous Yeltsin rule (which came on the heels of disastrous rule by
Gorbachev) Putin and his team rescued Russia economically, politically, and
militarily.
However, the US played a huge role in increasing Putin's popularity inside Russia, more
than his propaganda machine ever could. Before the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine in 2014,
Putin's approval hovered at about 45%. Nazi takeover in Ukraine and his decisive move to take
Crimea back (it was transferred to Ukraine from Russia by Khruschev in 1956, illegally even
by vague Soviet law; Crimea tried to get away from Ukraine ever since the breakup of the USSR
in 1991; polls by Gallup and German company GfK showed that 80%+ Crimean residents wanted to
join Russia, rather than remain in the madhouse that Ukraine became after the coup) resulted
in his approval soaring above 70%.
Ill-advised sanctions added even more. Now he did not need to rig elections, he got
genuine 70%+ vote, a level of support Western politicians can't even dream of (e.g., Trump
was elected by 26% of eligible voters; Merkel's party in Germany got even less).
As far as Western "democracies" are concerned, the author hit the nail on the head.
Yet there are lots of problems in Russia that the author does not mention. I think current
Russian take on Soviet propaganda summarizes everything nicely: "what they told us about
socialism was a pack of lies, but what they told us about capitalism turned out to be
perfectly true".
This is way too rosy account. Russia has several significant problems with growth of
Muslim population and the fact that this is last term for Putin, which might signify the end
of the period of political stability.
Also economic rape by local and Western neoliberals of Russia in 1991-2000 was so
successful that the country still can't fully recover. Hundreds of billions were stolen and
transferred to the West. The "problem of neoliberal oligarchs" as "fifth column" still
remains and is a threat to the future of the country. Too much depends of Putin personally.
In this sense China is in a better position.
Moreover, Putin was forced into new arm race (by the USA) and military spending now are
high and that creates another set of problems including growing influence of internal
military industrial complex. Add to this the cost of Syria war and related set of external
and internal problems, such as almost complete absence of allies (neither China not Iraq are
reliable allies; most post-Soviet republics, even Kazakhstan, are now hostile to Russia)
And Russia does not have too many degrees of freedom yet, as it still depends on the West
for many technologies and complex machinery. West dominates high technology area. Add to this
brain drain and export of capital from Russia.
Technological dependence means that really crippling sanction are always a possibility.
Availability of some of those technologies in China makes this problem less acute than in the
past, but still in no way Russia can pursue completely independent policy.
Add to this dependence on dollar and the fact that Russian national bank, which remain a
neoliberal institution, controlled by neoliberal Nabibulina ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvira_Nabiullina
, who is close to Gref ) who like any "good" neoliberal keeps natural sovereign fund invested
in US Treasuries. In this sense she is not that different from Kudrin.
And that means that those money can be confiscated anytime, like the USA did with Iran in
the past. Also oligarchs money are now in danger due to clear desire of London to improve its
financial standing at Russian oligarchs expense.
What is true is that neoliberalism as a political system entered deep crisis after 2008.
In the USA political system became dysfunctional and there is some kind of "virtual" civil
war between two factions of neoliberal oligarchy -- classic neoliberals and bastard
neoliberals (aka economic nationalists). Add to this "strange" relations with Israel, which
sometimes suggest that the tail wags the dog and I do not see why the USA can't experience
something similar to processes that took place in Britain after the WWII.
But there is still no alternative social system on the horizon and return to "New deal
capitalism" is impossible as the social alliance of management caste changed.
So Russia remains a neoliberal country which hates neoliberalism (in which by definition
the power belongs to the financial oligarchy) and which tries to fight Western neoliberal
imperialism in ofreign policy including attempts to make is a vassal and appropriate its
natural resources (and Russia was a vassal of the West under Yeltsin) while remaining a
neoliberal country and promoting neoliberalism externally. that's a recipe for a color
revolution in the future, more successfully then 2012 "White" color revolution run by Moscow
comprador class. Which in Moscow might well represent probably one third of the population
(programmers, doctors, accountants, employees of foreign companies, part of "integrated with
West" artistic cicles, writers, journalists, etc.). They were politically decimated by events
in Ukraine and then by Russiagate hysteria in the USA. So "neoliberal compradors" class was
not a player in the current elections. But that situation might eventually change and they
can restore part of their political power.
So, in a way, Putin is some kind of Don Quixote which fight neoliberalism (and neoliberal
globalization) externally, while allowing it to exist and even flourish internally (Medvedev,
BTW looks like classic neoliberal, a Trojan horse in Putin's administration).
And internally neoliberalism naturally produces high level of corruption, which is
amplified by "New Economic Policy" elements on the current Russia political regime (which
allowed free operation of small and medium business, but tried to cut/decimate political
power of large business -- a very difficult, if not impossible undertaking)
I think Professor Brovkin forgot the classic Lenin work "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism". That's sad...
Moreover, former pro-Putin people who are now CEO of large government companies are not
longer Pro-Putin people. Because their position influences their political orientation. In a
sense, people like Gref and Sechin are dangerous strata of Putin-created "nova riches", who
can betray him any moment, especially if their money will be under the treat of confiscation
by the West.
It might well be that Putin was an anomaly and Russian will enter "Maidan" period or some
other form of political crisis after Putin relinquishes his power.
BTW Ukrainians were successfully deceived by the West twice, so I do not see why Russians
can't repeat this trick and step of the same rake again by electing some variation of Yeltsin
who will promise them immediate bright future and jump in the standard of living (which for
the last three year deteriorated due to low oil prices and a huge depreciation of ruble). For
Ukrainians around 20 year was enough to forget all lessons.
My impression is that Russia might experience yet another serious of political cataclysm
in the near future, when "Putinism" will disappear with Putin.
On a related note, this article by Prof. Niels Harrit claims that a document declassified
in 2008 was the basis for the ongoing war in Afghanstian, and that the document is as
evidence free as the Novichok claims:
Is there any forensic evidence provided in this document to serve as a legal basis for
the invocation of Article 5? Nothing. There is absolutely no forensic evidence in support of
the claim that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated from Afghanistan. Only a small part of the
introductory text deals with 9/11, in the form of summary claims like the citation in Lord
Robertson's press release. The main body of the text deals with the alleged actions of
Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the nineties.
On 4 October, NATO officially went to war based on a document that provided only
'talking points' and no evidence to support the key claim.
Sound familiar? Of course, I've no idea if he's right.
The Taliban foreign minister at the time tried to warn the Americans of the attack they
learned about it from a third party that is about as far removed from being behind the attack
as it gets. Didn't help them did it the Americans were after vengeance and wanted to satisfy
their bloodlust by bombing a country which didn't even have a single one of its citizens
involved in the attack. Classic scapegoating.
They had other reasons to want to attack Afghanistan . In fact, they warned the Taliban
that they would if the Taliban did not permit the desired pipeline.
What do you expect from Johnson? A grindingly stupid man who has never got a job on merit
and is now desperately hoping the public don't see through his lies for the Americans. No
wonder the government don't want to bring back grammar schools.
New Viz character; Boris the Bullshitter. Textbook bullshitting:
-- "Let me be clear with you" (though what is to follow is as clear as mud,)
" When I look at the evidence, I mean" (not me, actually, I mean) "the people
from Porton Down, the laboratory So they have the samples They do." (believe me)
"And they were absolutely categorical" (about what?) "and I asked the guy
myself," (what did you ask him, Boris?) "I said, "Are you sure?" And he said there's
no doubt" (no doubt of WHAT, Boris?)
Craig, I have to set you straight on this. Boris is as incapable of lying as he is of
telling the truth. As strange as it may seem to rational minds, the concepts of truth and
falsity simply do not exist in minds such as his. To him, everything is merely an
opportunity for achieving his goals, or a threat to his credibility that needs to be bluffed
over, and to those ends every statement he makes will be as vague as he can get away with
under the circumstances.
How many knows that Obama, the son of Africa , went to the WH with a regime change
feather already in his cap, ?
Obama's Kenya caper ..
During the parliamentary elections of December 2007, a survey funded by USAID announces
the victory of Odinga. On election day, John McCain announced that President Kibaki rigged
the election in favor of his party and that in fact the opposition led by Odinga had won.
The NSA, in conjunction with local phone operators, sent anonymous text messages to the
population.
In areas populated by the Luo (Odinga's ethnic group), they read "Dear Kenyans, the
Kikuyu have stolen our children's future We must treat them in the only way that they
understand with violence."
In areas populated by Kikuyu, they read: "The blood of any innocent Kikuyu will be paid.
We will slaughter them right to the heart of the capital. For Justice, establish a list of
Luos that you know. We will send you the phone numbers to call with such information."
Within days, this peaceful country sank into sectarian violence. The riots caused
over 1 000 deaths and 300 000 displaced. 500 000 jobs were lost .
Madeleine Albright came back. She offered to mediate between President Kibaki and the
opposition trying to overthrow him. With finesse, she stepped aside and placed in the
spotlight the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights. The board of this respected NGO was
newly chaired by the former Prime Minister of Norway, Thorbjørn Jagland.
Breaking with the Center's traditional impartiality, he sent two mediators on site, whose
expenses were entirely footed by Madeleine Albright's NDI (that is to say ultimately out of
the U.S. Department of State's budget): another former Norwegian Prime Minister, Kjell Magne
Bondevik, and former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan (the Ghanaian is very much on the scene
in Scandinavian states since he married the niece of Raoul Wallenberg). Compelled to
accept the compromises forced on him in order to restore civil peace, President Kibaki agreed
to create a prime minister post and to entrust it to Raila Odinga,who immediately
began reducing trade with China.
Small gifts between friends
A simple question: Where is Julia Skripal, a citizen of Russain Federation, who was taken by
the UK secret services and whisked away to some undisclosed location? There have been no
photographs of either her father (British citizen) and Julia since the odd incident in a city
of Salisbury that is a few miles away from the UK's main lab of chemical weaponry research.
"Porton Down is situated just northeast of the village of Porton near Salisbury, in
Wiltshire, England. a site of the Ministry of Defence's Defence Science and Technology
Laboratory (Dstl) – known for over 100 years as one of the UK's most secretive and
controversial military research facilities , occupying 7,000 acres." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porton_Down
Support the [ISIS] troops [in a war for Israel]!
http://thesaker.is/syrian-war-report-march-22-2018-syrian-army-gets-control-of-harasta-militants-withdraw/
"Over 40 tonnes of toxic agents have been found in the areas liberated from militants
Damascus has officially confirmed its readiness to assist in any investigation into a
chemical attack in Syria. However, international organizations have refused to cooperate with
the Syrian government, practically conniving with terrorist organizations in their
illegal activity. The Syrian Foreign Ministry pointed out that more than 40 tonnes of
chemical warfare agents have been discovered on the territories liberated from terrorist
s the international community prefers turning a blind eye to the real facts in which chemical
weapons are used in Syria against the government troops and civilians. .."
"... Ultimately, Britain is not a factor in foreign affairs. Having withdrawn from the EU, they've vanished up the USA's asshole. The US controls their Fisher-Price nuclear deterrent and their increasingly atavistic veto. ..."
"... The determining geopolitical factor is Russia's missile announcement. It re-established MAD, but that's not all. It also created a capability for proportional response to the entire range of US force that effectively counters all US use and threat of force. ..."
Interesting detail about illegal British war propaganda in breach of ICCPR Article 20. Of
particular note is the report of Pompeo's role in the blame game for the failed provocation.
Ultimately, Britain is not a factor in foreign affairs. Having withdrawn from the EU,
they've vanished up the USA's asshole. The US controls their Fisher-Price nuclear deterrent
and their increasingly atavistic veto.
The determining geopolitical factor is Russia's missile announcement. It
re-established MAD, but that's not all. It also created a capability for proportional
response to the entire range of US force that effectively counters all US use and threat of
force. There's no more game of chicken. Russia can discipline the US with localized
humiliation and global rout without recourse to mutual destruction.
The Russian program of coercion to peace is already taking effect:
In these talks, Russia is in a position to impose not just nuclear disarmament but
demilitarization. They've turned the clock back to the Eisenhower/Herter peace plan. That is
a very good thing.
My own country is looking particularly shabby at the moment, over a number of topical news
stories:
The alleged Salisbury attack, and in particular the disgraceful and shameful British
government response to it and the lockstep backing for it by the establishment media. Rush to
judgement, childish government and diplomatic ranting, Iraq War-style manipulation of
seemingly laughably inadequate evidence to "fit the facts around the policy", massive
jingoistic propaganda effort.
Intelligence and security community involvement in the manipulative anti-Trump hysteria in
the US.
Now, the related Cambridge Analytica/SCL Elections story and the comical performance in
presumably giving time to cover up information on that company's servers with a convenient
court delay in issuing a search warrant:
The information commissioner will have to wait until at least Friday to enter the
offices of Cambridge Analytica after a high court judge adjourned the hearing into her
application for a warrant.
The commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, announced on Monday night that she planned to
request an urgent warrant to enter the company's London offices, after it was revealed that
it had been given information from 50m Facebook profiles without users' permission.
.
On Tuesday, crates were seen being removed from the central London office that Cambridge
Analytica shares with other tenants. No one on the scene would comment on the origin of the
crates, and the ICO said it was not involved in their removal.
The effectiveness of US sphere establishment media propaganda can be judged from the
widespread belief that Russia was likely responsible for the alleged attack in Salisbury,
when in reality the case against Russia is almost literally
non-existent . One survey suggested as few as 26% even questioned the state approved and
propaganda-imposed version (poll conducted 14th/15th March):
"... May, who referred to a "Russian mafia state," has blamed Moscow for the attack even though she made plain in her first speech that the investigation was still underway. ..."
"... She did not consider that Vladimir Putin's government would have no good reason to carry out an assassination that surely would be attributed to it, particularly as it was on the verge of national elections and also, more important, because it will be hosting the World Cup later this year and will be highly sensitive to threats of boycott. ..."
"... when Theresa May says that the alleged agent used against the Skripals as being "of a type" associated with a reported Russian-developed chemical weapon called Novichok that was produced in the 1970s and 1980s, she is actually conceding that her own chemical weapons laboratories at Porton Down are, to a certain, extent, guessing at the provenance and characteristics of the actual agent that might or might not have been used in Salisbury. ..."
I don't know what happened in Salisbury England on March 4th, but it appears that the
British government doesn't know either. Prime Minister Theresa May's
speech before Parliament last Monday was essentially political, reflecting demands that she
should "do something" in response to the mounting hysteria over the poisoning of former Russian
double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. After May's presentation there were demands
from Parliamentarians for harsh measures against Russia, reminiscent of the calls for action
emanating from the U.S. Congress over the allegations relating to what has been called
Russiagate.
This demand to take action led to a second Parliamentary address by May on Wednesday in
which she detailed the British response to the incident, which included cutting off all
high-level contacts between Moscow and London and the " persona non grata " (PNG)
expulsion of 23 "spies" and intelligence officers working out of the Russian Federation
Embassy. The expulsions will no doubt produce a tit-for-tat PNG from Moscow, ironically
crippling or even eliminating the MI-6 presence and considerably reducing Britain's own ability
to understand what it going on in the Kremlin.
May, who referred to a "Russian mafia state," has blamed Moscow for the attack even
though she made plain in her first speech that the investigation was still underway. In
both her presentations, she addressed the issue of motive by citing her belief that the
attempted assassination conforms with an established pattern of Russian behavior. She did
not consider that Vladimir Putin's government would have no good reason to carry out an
assassination that surely would be attributed to it, particularly as it was on the verge of
national elections and also, more important, because it will be hosting the World Cup later
this year and will be highly sensitive to threats of boycott. And it must be observed that
Skripal posed no active threat to the Russian government. He has been living quietly in Britain
for eight years, leading to wild tabloid press speculation that the Kremlin's motive must have
been to warn potential traitors that there are always consequences, even years later and in a
far-off land.
To provide additional buttressing of what is a questionable thesis, the case of the
assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 has been repeatedly cited by the media
on both sides of the Atlantic as evidence of Russian turpitude, but the backstory is not the
same. Litvinenko was an FSB officer who fled to the United Kingdom to avoid prosecution in
Russia. In Britain, he became a whistleblower and author, exposing numerous alleged Russian
government misdeeds. Would the Kremlin have been motivated to kill him? He was seen as a
traitor and a continuing threat through his books and speeches, so it is certainly possible.
The story of Skripal was, however, completely different. He was a double agent working for
Britain who was arrested and imprisoned in 2006. He was released and traveled to the UK after a
2010 spy swap was arranged by Washington and his daughter has been able to travel freely from
Moscow to visit him. If the Russian government had wanted to kill him, they could have easily
done so while he was in prison, or they could have punished him by taking steps against his
daughter.
There are a number of problems with the accepted narrative as presented by May and the
media. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a nerve agent as "usually odorless organophosphate
(such as sarin, tabun, or VX) that disrupts the transmission of nerve impulses by inhibiting
cholinesterase and especially acetylcholinesterase and is used as a chemical weapon in gaseous
or liquid form," while Wikipedia explains that it is "a class of organic chemicals that disrupt
the mechanisms by which nerves transfer messages to organs." A little more research online
reveals that most so-called nerve agents are chemically related. So when Theresa May says
that the alleged agent used against the Skripals as being "of a type" associated with a
reported Russian-developed chemical weapon called Novichok that was produced in the 1970s and
1980s, she is actually conceding that her own chemical weapons laboratories at Porton Down are,
to a certain, extent, guessing at the provenance and characteristics of the actual agent that
might or might not have been used in Salisbury.
Beyond that, a military strength nerve agent is, by definition, a highly concentrated and
easily dispersed form of a chemical weapon. It is intended to kill or incapacitate hundreds or
even thousands of soldiers. If it truly had been used in Salisbury, even in a small dose, it
would have killed Skripal and his daughter as well as others nearby. First responders who
showed up without protective clothing, clearly seen in the initial videos and photos taken near
the site, would also be dead. After her first speech, May summoned the Russian Ambassador and
demanded that he address the allegations, but Moscow reasonably enough demanded a sample of the
alleged nerve agent for testing by relevant international bodies like the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons before it could even respond to the British accusations. It was
a valid point even supported in Parliament questioning by opposition Labour leader Jeremy
Corbyn, but May and her government decided to act anyway.
May's language also conveys uncertainty. She used "it appears" and also said it was "highly
likely" that Moscow was behind the poisoning of Skripal but provided no actual evidence that
that was the case, presumably only assuming that it had to be Russia. And her government has
told the public that there is "little risk" remaining over the incident and that those who were
possibly exposed merely have to wash themselves and their clothes, hardly likely if it were a
military grade toxin, which gains it lethality from being persistent on and around a target.
She made clear her lack of corroboration for her claim by offering an "either-or" analysis:
either Russia's government did it or it had "lost control" of its nerve agent.
As noted above, May's argument is, to a certain extent, based on character assassination of
Russians – she even offered up the alleged "annexation" of Crimea as corroboration of her
view that Moscow is not inclined to play by the rules that others observe. It is a narrative
that is based on the presumption that "this is the sort of thing the Russian government headed
by Vladimir Putin does." The British media has responded enthusiastically, running stories
about numerous assassinations and poisonings that ought to be attributed to Russia, while
ignoring the fact that the world leaders in political assassinations are actually the United
States and Israel.
There are a number of other considerations that the May government has ignored in its rush
to expand the crisis. She mentioned that Russia might be somewhat exonerated if it has lost
control of its chemical weapons, but did not fully explain what that might mean. It could be
plausible to consider that states hostile to Russia like Ukraine and Georgia that were once
part of the Soviet Union could have had , and might
still retain, stocks of the Novichok nerve agent. That in turn suggests a false flag, with
someone having an interest in promoting a crisis between Russia and Britain. If that someone
were a country having a sophisticated arms industry possessing its own chemical weapons
capability, like the United States or Israel, it would be quite easy to copy the
characteristics of the Russian nerve agent, particularly as its formula has been known since it
was published in 1992. The agent could then be used to create an incident that would inevitably
be blamed on Moscow. Why would Israel and the United States want to do that? To put pressure on
Russia to embarrass it and put it on the defensive so I would be forced eventually to abandon
its support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Removing al-Assad is the often-expressed
agenda of the Israeli and American governments, both of which have pledged to take "independent
action" in Syria no matter what the United Nations or any other international body says. The
redoubtable Nikki Haley is already using the incident
to fearmonger over Moscow's intentions at the U.N., warning that a Russian chemical attack
on New York City could be coming.
And to throw out a really wild possibility, one might observe that no one in Britain had a
stronger motive to generate a major confrontation with a well-defined enemy than Theresa May,
who has been under fire by the media and pressured to resign by many in her own Conservative
Party. Once upon a time suggesting that a democratically elected government might assassinate
someone for political reasons would have been unthinkable, but the 2016 election in the United
States has demonstrated that nothing is impossible, particularly if one is considering the
possibility that a secret intelligence service might be collaborating with a government to help
it stay in power. An incident in which no one was actually killed that can be used to spark an
international crisis mandating "strong leadership" would be just the ticket.
"... Media outlets based in the US and Britain have long enjoyed dominance in the global news market and have abused their position to manipulate audiences ..."
"... "People are naked against these media wars. They are victims of these media wars," ..."
"... "They are being driven into a certain way of emotions without even understanding that." ..."
"... "Anglo-Saxon media" ..."
"... "They are the most powerful, the most influential, and they have the widest possible reach globally," ..."
"... And, of course, this feeling of monopoly brings a will to manipulate this monopoly. ..."
"... You can use this monopoly as a tool of delivering your point of view, whether it's right or wrong, it doesn't matter, you can adjust it in accordance with the situation -- to simply manipulate the [minds] of people throughout the world." ..."
Media outlets based in the US and Britain have long enjoyed dominance in the global news
market and have abused their position to manipulate audiences , a Kremlin spokesman told
RT in an exclusive interview. Russia is currently being targeted by an unprecedented campaign
in the West, aimed at undermining its resurgence, Dmitry Peskov told RT's Sophie Shevardnadze.
The media are playing a major part in it, as they are selling an anti-Russian narrative to the
people of Western nations. But what those outlets do is a disservice to their audiences, he
argued.
"People are naked against these media wars. They are victims of these media wars,"
he said. "They are being driven into a certain way of emotions without even understanding
that."
Peskov said that for decades "Anglo-Saxon media" enjoyed a virtual global monopoly
on delivering news about economy and politics.
"They are the most powerful, the most influential, and they have the widest possible
reach globally," he said. " And, of course, this feeling of monopoly brings a will
to manipulate this monopoly.
You can use this monopoly as a tool of delivering your point of view, whether it's
right or wrong, it doesn't matter, you can adjust it in accordance with the situation -- to
simply manipulate the [minds] of people throughout the world."
He added that outlets like RT challenge this "huge machine" with alternative
narratives and facts that don't fit into how the Western media wants the world to see things. A
good example of this is coverage of events in Syria and Iraq, Peskov said.
Western media were all too eager to highlight civilian casualties of the operation in
Aleppo, which they blame solely on Russian and Syrian forces, but failed to extend this kind of
reporting to similar operations in Mosul and Raqqa, where the US-led coalition was in
charge.
"... President Trump was said to complain that Tillerson disagreed with him and McMaster talked too much. Bolton seems likely to combine both of those traits in one pugnacious, mustachioed package. ..."
"... Bolton may find that in this job, he's the midlevel munchkin. Remember, the national security adviser is supposed to be the coordinator, conciliator, and honest broker among Cabinet officials, managing a process by which all get a fair say and the president makes well-informed decisions. Outgoing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster reportedly lost favor with Defense Secretary Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly for failing to defer to them, and for being too emotional . ..."
John Bolton has been one of liberals' top bogeymen on national security for more than a decade now. He seems to relish the
role, going out of his way to argue that the Iraq War wasn't really a failure, calling for U.S.-led regime change in Iran and
preventive war against North Korea, and writing the foreword for a
book
that proclaimed President Obama to be a secret Muslim. He is a profoundly partisan creature, having started a
super-PAC whose largest donor was leading Trump benefactor Rebekah Mercer and whose provider of analytics was Cambridge
Analytica, the firm alleged to have improperly used Facebook data to make voter profiles, which it sold to the Trump and
Brexit campaigns, among others.
Recently Bolton's statements have grown more extreme, alarming centrist and conservative national security professionals along
with his longtime liberal foes. He seemed to
say
that the United States could attack North Korea without the agreement of our South Korean allies, who would face the
highest risk of retaliation and casualties; just two months ago he
called for
a regime change effort in Iran that would allow the U.S. to open a new embassy there by 2019, the 40th
anniversary of the Iranian Revolution and the taking of Americans hostage in Tehran. His
hostility toward Islam
points toward a set of extreme policies that could easily have the effect of abridging American
Muslims' rights at home and alienating America's Muslim allies abroad.
As worrying as these policies are, it's worth taking a step back and thinking not about Bolton, but about his new boss, Donald
Trump. Trump reportedly considered Bolton for a Cabinet post early on, but then
soured
on him, finding his mustache unprofessional. His choice of Bolton to lead the National Security Council reinforces
several trends: right now, this administration is all about making Trump's opponents uncomfortable and angry. Internal
coherence and policy effectiveness are not a primary or even secondary consideration. And anyone would be a fool to imagine
that, because Bolton pleases Trump today, he will continue to do so tomorrow.
Yes, Bolton has taken strong stances against the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin (though he has also been
quoted
praising Russian "democracy" as recently as 2013). That's nothing new: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, incoming
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and outgoing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster have called for greater pushback on
Russia as well. But there's every reason to think that, rather than a well-oiled war machine, what we'll get from Bolton's
National Security Council is scheming and discord – which could be even more dangerous.
President Trump was said to complain that Tillerson disagreed with him and McMaster talked too much. Bolton seems likely
to combine both of those traits in one pugnacious, mustachioed package.
Their disagreements are real – Bolton has
famously pooh-poohed the kind of summit diplomacy with North Korea that Trump is now committed to. While Trump famously backed
away from his support for the 2002 invasion of Iraq, courting the GOP isolationist base, Bolton continues to argue that the
invasion worked, and seldom hears of a war he would not participate in. Trump
attempted
to block transgender people from serving in the military, but Bolton has declined to take part in the right's
LGBT-bashing, famously hiring gay staff and
calling for
the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
That's all substance. What really seems likely to take Bolton down is his style, which is legendary – and not in a good way.
His colleagues from the George W. Bush administration responded to Trump's
announcement
with
comments like
"the obvious question is whether John Bolton has the temperament and the judgment for the job" – not exactly
a ringing endorsement. One former co-worker
described
Bolton as a "kiss up, kick down kind of guy," and he was notorious in past administrations for conniving and
sneaking around officials who disagreed with him, both traits that Trump seems likely to enjoy until he doesn't. This is a
man who can't refrain from
telling Tucker Carlson
that his analysis is "simpleminded" – while he's a guest on Carlson's show. Turns out it's not true
that he threw a stapler at a contractor – it was a
tape dispenser.
When Bolton was caught attempting to cook intelligence to suggest that Cuba had a biological weapons
program, he bullied the analyst who had dared push back, calling him a "
midlevel
munchkin
." How long until Trump tires of the drama – or of being eclipsed?
Bolton may find that in this job, he's the midlevel munchkin. Remember, the national security adviser is supposed to be
the coordinator, conciliator, and honest broker among Cabinet officials, managing a process by which all get a fair say and
the president makes well-informed decisions. Outgoing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster reportedly lost favor with
Defense Secretary Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly for failing to defer to them, and for being
too emotional
.
Love Bolton or hate him, no one imagines he will be a self-effacing figure, and no one hires him to run a no-drama process.
It's also hard to imagine that many of the high-quality professionals McMaster brought into the National Security Council
staff will choose to stay. McMaster repeatedly had to fight for his team within the Trump administration, but Bolton seems
unlikely to follow that pattern, or to inspire the kind of loyalty that drew well-regarded policy wonks to work for McMaster,
regardless their views of Trump.
So even if you like the policies Bolton espouses, it's hard to imagine a smooth process implementing them. That seems likely
to leave us with Muslim ban-level incompetence, extreme bellicosity, and several very loud, competing voices – with
Twitter feeds
– on the most sensitive issues of war and weapons of mass destruction.
The worst thing about the appointment of anti-Iran hawk John Bolton is that the Clinton
wing of the Democratic Party 100% supports war with Iran. In fact Hillary was attacking Trump
from the war hawk right on this issue in 2016 (of course alienating key voters as she did
so). So, just like in 2002 with Iraq, the two-party mainstream and all the mainstream media
will be overwhelmed by pro-war voices, and the arguments in favor of peace and basic sanity
will be ostracized. Note in the RT piece below that the only Democrats expressing real,
concrete concern/revulsion are the usual, sheepdog leftie suspects.
'Trump lining up war cabinet'? Bolton's elevation to NSC adviser fuels alarm
"... "With the appointments of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, @realDonaldTrump is successfully lining up his war cabinet. Bolton played a key role in politicizing the intel that misled us into the Iraq War. We cannot let this extreme war hawk blunder us into another terrible conflict," ..."
"... "John Bolton supports proactively bombing Iran & striking North Korea with nuclear weapons first without provocation. Appointing him to be Nat Sec Advisor is a grave danger to the American people & a clear message from @realDonaldTrump that he is gearing up for military conflict," ..."
"... "If you're always wrong on security, you're the wrong person to be National Security Advisor," ..."
"... "drumbeats of war." ..."
"... "absolutely the wrong person to be national security advisor now," ..."
"... "John Bolton was part of the effort to mislead the US into the disastrous Iraq war and has supported military action against North Korea and Iran. He was too extreme to be confirmed as UN ambassador in 2005 and is absolutely the wrong person to be national security advisor now," ..."
"... "John Bolton is a dangerous radical. President Trump's decision to make Bolton his National Security Advisor is deeply disturbing," ..."
"... "John Bolton has spent his entire career pushing fringe conspiracy theories, espousing radical ideas about multilateralism, and undermining key alliances across the world." ..."
"... Like this story? Share it with a friend! ..."
Donald Trump's cabinet reshuffles have fueled concerns, not least after the latest
appointment of hawkish John Bolton as national security adviser, just days after installing a
former CIA chief as the new secretary of state. On Thursday afternoon Donald Trump decided to
sack Gen. HR McMaster from his national security adviser post, replacing him with John Bolton.
The former US envoy to the United Nations will assume office on April 9 – just days after
Mike Pompeo is set to replace Rex Tillerson as the new secretary of state.
The newly formed doublet has caused shockwaves among the Democrats, who have alleged that
Trump seems to be preparing for war. Democratic Senator from Massachusetts Ed Markey warned
that Trump is creating a "war cabinet," warning of "grave danger" following
Bolton's appointment.
John Bolton supports proactively bombing Iran and conducting a first strike on North Korea
without provocation. Appointing him to be Nat Sec Advisor is a grave danger to the American
people and a clear message from @realDonaldTrump that he is
gearing up for military conflict.
"With the appointments of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, @realDonaldTrump is successfully
lining up his war cabinet. Bolton played a key role in politicizing the intel that misled us
into the Iraq War. We cannot let this extreme war hawk blunder us into another terrible
conflict," he tweeted.
"John Bolton supports proactively bombing Iran & striking North Korea with nuclear
weapons first without provocation. Appointing him to be Nat Sec Advisor is a grave danger to
the American people & a clear message from @realDonaldTrump that he is gearing up for
military conflict," Senator Markey added.
John Bolton:
Wanted war w Cuba, arguing wrongly that Cuba had WMD
Wanted war w Iraq, arguing – wrong again – that Iraq had WMD
Believes – wrongly – that Islamic law is taking over America
If you're always wrong on security, you're the wrong person to be National Security
Advisor
-- Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) March 22,
2018
The choice of Bolton as the national security adviser has also been questioned by Senator
Jeff Merkley from Oregon, who has pointed out many flaws with the new appointee's policies.
"If you're always wrong on security, you're the wrong person to be National Security
Advisor," Merkley tweeted.
This is dangerous news for the country and the world. John Bolton was easily one of the
most extreme, pro-war members of the Bush Administration.
Imagine what havoc he could wreak whispering in Donald Trump's ear...I hear the drumbeats
of war. https://t.co/A6ZIyORAM7
Rep. Barbara Jean Lee of California's 13th congressional district was also disappointed by
Trump's choice, claiming she is hearing the "drumbeats of war."
The President is surrounding himself with combative lawyers. He's replacing Tillerson and
McMaster with Pompeo and Bolton.
It's almost like the President is preparing to go to war in the legal and foreign
relations sense...
Fears expressed by some Capitol Hill members and the public seem justified. The notoriously
hawkish former United Nations ambassador was a chief architect of the George W. Bush
administration's justification for the war in Iraq in 2003, that was based on false accusations
that Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Trump's choice of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Mike Pompeo as the new
secretary of state also made many in Washington uneasy. Unlike his predecessor, Rex Tillerson,
Pompeo seems better aligned with Trump's confrontational foreign policy, namely on the Iran
nuclear deal, on North Korea, and on the shift of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Besides politicians, the American public also expressed concern about the feasibility of a
looming armed conflict.
John Bolton was part of the effort to mislead the US into the disastrous Iraq war and has
supported military action against North Korea and Iran. He was too extreme to be confirmed as
UN ambassador in 2005 and is absolutely the wrong person to be national security advisor
now.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders called Bolton "absolutely the wrong person to be national
security advisor now," recalling how he deceived the public about the Iraq war.
"John Bolton was part of the effort to mislead the US into the disastrous Iraq war and
has supported military action against North Korea and Iran. He was too extreme to be confirmed
as UN ambassador in 2005 and is absolutely the wrong person to be national security advisor
now," Sanders tweeted.
"John Bolton is a dangerous radical. President Trump's decision to make Bolton his
National Security Advisor is deeply disturbing," Congressman Brendan F. Boyle (PA-13) said
in a written statement. "John Bolton has spent his entire career pushing fringe conspiracy
theories, espousing radical ideas about multilateralism, and undermining key alliances across
the world."
@66 Say what you will about Bolton he is a shrewd political animal. Here it looks as though
he is trying to appear sane and reasonable....perhaps even likeable.
So on the 15th anniversary of the Iraq debacle, a neocon who cheered it on is rewarded
with a national security post where he can cue up the attack on Iran that was always the
ultimate prize for Israel's US stooges?
Guess we'll be out marching again, just like last time. Bolton's walrus mustache is the
21st century version of Adolph H's toothbrush mustache. Down with the Persian Untermenschen!
/sarc
Of course while working for Cheney Bolton was pretty confident about getting Dubya to
start a war with Iran and that didn't happen. Here's a backgrounder that suggests that Bolton
is tight with both Adelson and the Mossad so one way of looking at this has Russia fading as
a target and Iran falling under the bulls eye. Trump's recent friendly phone call with Putin
was contrary to instructions from his NSC and therefore presumably McMaster.
Looked at optimistically it could be out of the frying pan and into a smaller frying pan
(for us if not for Iran but that remains to be seen).
Of course looked at pessimistically it's terrible news but if the public and Congress are
afraid of Trump gratuitously starting a new war then perhaps they should take away his power
to do so. Seems the Constitution did have something to say about that.
Tol'ja so these miserable wretches simply cannot die resurrection a promise any time a
misfit administration takes power all that audition time on FoxNews paid off Trump stripping
the cable channels of right-wing bloviators "best people for the jawb", don't you know.
Let's get over the McMaster ouster. The fact is that he was completely unqualified to be the
National Security advisor. McMaster was uneducated in history and international politics.
McMaster (1) was excellent as an army unit leader and (2) obtained a PhD with a thesis that
claimed that the US lost in Vietnam because generals weren't listened to, which is complete
BS.
Now we may not like Bolton, but at least he's qualified. Does the NSA have the authority to
start a war? No. The simple fact is that in the most likely war scenarios, Korea and Iran,
the US has bases, ships etc. within easy reach of prospective enemies. Forward basing, it's
called. The Pentagon knows this very well. They hate it when bases are destroyed and ships
are sunk.
Currently the US is crowing about an evacuation exercise in Korea -- with a hundred people,
when there are tens of thousands of Americans in South Korea endangered by any war.
So let's cheer up.
As I understand it, Mc Master's thesis was worse than 'generals weren't listened to", it
was that Generals knew what it would take to win but were reluctant to press their case.
I think McMaster's view gets watered-down and sugar-coated into: "Generals should provide
true info to civilian authority" when it seems to me that the message he conveys to Generals
is simply this: be stubborn; insist on full and unconditional support of civilian authority
for any military action. We see this attitude reflected in "The Powell Doctrine" and now
Trump's hand's-off approach to the military.
I see this as civilian authority (the President) essentially handing the keys to the
Generals once any military action is authorized.
@jr 49
Vietnam, a US attempt at nation-building within a nation (stupid), was a lost cause to begin
with and so what generals "knew" was irrelevant.
Harry Truman got it right.
A couple of President Harry Truman quotes: "It's the fellows who go to West Point and are
trained to think they're gods in uniform that I plan to take apart". . ."I didn't fire him
[General MacArthur] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not
against the law for generals. If it was, half to three quarters of them would be in jail."
Now currently generals aren't any smarter, they are still dumb SOBs who rise up by sucking
up, but at least they are smart enough to realize that forward basing dooms any offensive
attacks against countries that have the capability to counter-attack against US bases and
ships. That would be North Korea and Iran, for starters. Bolton's ascendance won't change
that simple truth, so the sky isn't falling.
Yes, agreed, let's please cheer up. We live in a age of miracles, when Russia and China
see fit to ally, and preserve, or create, world stability.
Trump has always been surrounded by completely vile people, and none of this has stopped
Russia from laying down the gauntlet. Bolton is as much a nothing, I suggest, as Boris
Johnson across the ocean. Neither of them holds power. The west doesn't hold power any
longer. It's been checkmated at every turn - by Russia militarily and China economically.
Power is the ability to force things to your will, and it's backed up by a gun or it fails
in the end. Trump's button may be big but it's old and maybe rusted and the odds are good it
doesn't even work very well, especially against next generation jamming and hypersonic
speeds.
So the west can bluster and parade its theater all it wants, it means nothing as the
caravans all move on into the future. And even the theater is getting found out in advance
now, with chemical-weapon caches and plans rendered visible before they can act.
As for the bluster, it only works on domestic populations, who have no power and thus
cannot affect reality, and whose governments have no power and thus cannot use a mandate to
war even if given one by their populations, gulled by propaganda. It's a useless, circular
mechanism whose paradigm has ended, is defunct.
I find it encouraging beyond words to watch the real power on the ground in this Eurasian
Century, as the west declines. And I'll quote just one last time, because I love the potency
of this equation: "Power. The one quality of the human condition that you can't fake."
I find it rather interesting that none of the comments address the last part of Shamir's
article. If it's correct, the Brits made a very nasty error that shows the true nature of
their establishment.
Rick Merlotti , March 19, 2018 at 10:39 am
Perfidious Albion
A short statement of the reasons why the British are now staging the Skripal provocation
can be found in a March 14 London Sunday Telegraph call to arms by Allister Heath, who
rants:
"We need a new world order to take on totalitarian capitalists in Russia and China Such an
alliance would dramatically shift the global balance of power, and allow the liberal
democracies finally to fight back. It would endow the world with the sorts of robust
institutions that are required to contain Russia and China Britain needs a new role in the
world; building such a network would be our perfect mission."
Across the pond, as they say, a similar foundational statement was made by 68 former Obama
Administration officials who have formed a group called National Security Action, aimed at
securing Trump's impeachment and attacking Russia and China.
As visitors to the LaRouchePAC website know, Russia and China have embarked on a massive
infrastructure building project in Eurasia, the center of all British geopolitical fantasies
since the time of Halford MacKinder. Moreover, China's Belt and Road Initiative now
encompasses more than 140 nations in the largest infrastructure-building project ever
undertaken in human history. This project is a true economic engine for the future, while
neo-liberal economies continue to see their productive potentials sucked dry by the massive
mound of debt they have created since the 2008 financial collapse. This debt is now on a hair
trigger for implosion. It is estimated by banking insiders that the City of London is sitting
on a derivatives powderkeg of $700 trillion with over-the-counter derivatives accounting for
another $570 trillion. The City of London will bear the major impact of the derivatives
collapse.
In this strategic geometry, President Trump's support of peaceful collaboration with
Russia during the campaign and his personal friendship with President Xi, marked him for the
relentless coup against him waged by the British and their U.S. friends.
On top of that, President Putin delivered a mammoth strategic shock on March 1, showing
new Russian weapons systems based on new physical principles which render present U.S. ABM
systems and much of current U.S. war-fighting doctrine obsolete, together with the vaunted
first strike capacity with which NATO has surrounded Russia. Not only is the West sitting on
a new financial collapse; its vaunted military superiority has just been flanked.
Allister Heath pretends to be a pole-bearer for liberal democracies. And what exactly is
so precious about Heath and his "liberal democracy" in the UK?
Is it the sudden expertise in chemical weaponry by Boris Johnson, who "knew" immediately
that "Russians did it?" This Boris Johnson: "'I am a passionate Zionist,' declares Boris
Johnson: http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/boris-johnson-zionist/
Compare Boris pronouncements to the expert conclusion by a real expert in chemical
weaponry:
"This so-called "nerve agent" [novichok] has never been placed on the OPCW list of banned
chemical weapons because it has never existed. Its non-existence was confirmed by Dr. Robin
Black, until recently he was a head of the detection laboratory at the Defence Science and
Technology Laboratory (Porton Down). He wrote in his review: " emphasizes that there is no
independent confirmation of Mirzayanov's claims about the chemical properties of these
compounds: Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly
originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent
confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published.
(Black, 2016)"
"... I think that in much of the world The World Cup is a bigger deal than the Olympics. I knew some athletes here in Canada who had their athletic careers ended by our boycott of the 1980 Olympics (after years and years of hard work). I'm surprised western intelligence agencies have not done more to undermine Russia's world cup. They may yet. ..."
"... Outside of North America the World Cup is definitely a much bigger event than the Olympics. ..."
"... I just thought we would see the same nonsense we saw to undermine the Sochi Olympics, this just seems much more than just derogatory media coverage, or officials boycotting attending the event. I was interested to see Professor Richard Sakwa, his book on the Ukraine crisis is probably the best out there, interviewed on RT regarding this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcKQ-4Qqel0 ..."
I think that in much of the world The World Cup is a bigger deal than the Olympics. I
knew some athletes here in Canada who had their athletic careers ended by our boycott of the
1980 Olympics (after years and years of hard work). I'm surprised western intelligence
agencies have not done more to undermine Russia's world cup. They may yet.
Outside of North America the World Cup is definitely a much bigger event than the
Olympics. I already have my tickets for England v Panama in Nizhny Novgorod, as well as
a second round match in Moscow.
I don't care much for the Olympics, although I do like the Winter Olympics. I just
thought we would see the same nonsense we saw to undermine the Sochi Olympics, this just
seems much more than just derogatory media coverage, or officials boycotting attending the
event. I was interested to see Professor Richard Sakwa, his book on the Ukraine crisis is
probably the best out there, interviewed on RT regarding this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcKQ-4Qqel0
Of course it was a coup, though not a South American style with colonels in charge. It was
brought about in the first instance by American meddling, with the obligatory tidal wave of
cash in the cover of so called Orange Revolutions and aided by the neo-Nazi faction among the
Ukrainians.
However fragile there was a constitutional order in the Ukraine, which held the Ukrainian
and Russian speaking peoples of the Ukraine together. But the Westerners held the carrots of
a Western lifestyle, which the Russians could not match. The bloodshed in that part of the
world was instigated by the usual cabal of troublemakers. Putin was inclined to see the
Ukrainians more as misguided Russians rather than anything else.
''SJ Res 54, the Senate's War Powers Act challenge to the US military involvement in the
Yemen War, was killed Tuesday by the Senate, meaning it will not get a direct floor vote. The
bill noted that Congress never authorized the Yemen War, and would've compelled the US to
withdraw its participation. The vote was 55-44.''
''Merkel stressed that a U.S. withdrawal would divide the west. According to the German
official, Merkel said to Netanyahu: "It will put us, the Brits and the French on the same
side with Russia, China and Iran when the U.S. and Israel will be on the other side. Is this
what you want?"
Merkel must know the answer to her question to Netanyahu...Israel will use the US as a
battering ram against the entire world until it falls into splinters.
"... The UK has a long record of misdoings, he said, including the support of coup in Ukraine and the invasion of Iraq. "This is like talking to overweight alcoholics and drug users that have lost any sense of dignity." ..."
"... Their plan was to fabricate an attack against an ex-double agent in Salisbury and at the same time a chemical attack against the " moderate rebels " in the Ghouta. The conspirators' intention was to profit from the efforts of Syria to liberate the suburbs of its capital city and the disorganisation of Russia on the occasion of its Presidential election. Had these manipulations worked, the United Kingdom would have pushed the USA to bomb Damascus, including the Presidential palace, and demand that the United Nations General Assembly exclude Russia from the Security Council. ..."
"... However, the Syrian and Russian Intelligence Services got wind of what was being plotted. They realised that the US agents in the Ghouta who were preparing an attack against the Ghouta were not working for the Pentagon, but for another US agency. ..."
"... And there's the additional evidence that some kind of False Flag attempt fell apart at Eastern Ghouta + Trump's discovery that the Deep State was planning to take him by surprise (the immediate dismissal of Tillerson). ..."
Lord Robertson, Secretary General of NATO, wrote a draft resolution invoking Article 5 in
the Washington treaty -- the famous 'musketeer clause' -- as a consequence of the terror
attacks: "The Council agreed that if it is determined that this attack was directed from
abroad against the United States, it shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of
the Washington Treaty, which states that an armed attack against one or more of the Allies in
Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all."
There was a reservation. Article 5 would not be formally activated before "it is
determined that this attack was directed from abroad". Apparently, NATO had a suspect. But
the forensic evidence was still pending, and hence also the formal invocation of Article
5.
Formally, this evidence was provided by Frank Taylor, a diplomat with the title of Ambassador
from the US State Department . The first bombs fell in Kabul on 7 October 2001 [the
slaughter of civilians by the US/NATO had begun].
Article 5 of the Washington Treaty emphasises the right to self-defense and reads:
"Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective
self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, ." That is,
military action is forbidden in the absence of an armed provocation , and the legality
of the attack on Afghanistan depends exclusively on the evidence presented in Frank Taylor's
report. But it was classified together with the minutes from the pertinent
meetings.
We are still at war seventeen years later. Five countries have been destroyed, hundreds of
thousands of people killed and millions displaced. Refugees are swarming the roads of Europe,
trillions of dollars have been spent on weapons and mercenaries and our grandchildren have
been shackled with endless debt."
-- Oded Yinon plan' fanatics, oilmen, banksters, MIC, "ambassadors," "lords," and "elected
leaders of the free world " -- None of the war criminals has been punished. Guess, their
children and grandchildren will be paying for the scoundrels' cowardice and lies.
"The Day, a news website that produces short articles about current affairs meant to be
used as teaching aids in British schools , has offered students two alternatives to
believe about Vladimir Putin: he is either Europe's "most dangerous leader since Hitler," or
a puffed up figure attacking other nations out of weakness."
-- Was it a Friend of Israel that has concocted the definitions?
"Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko has held a press conference in London, denying the
Kremlin was involved in the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia using
military-grade nerve agent.
"Britain has without any evidence blamed Russia for poisoning three people and continues
to refuse to cooperate," he said.
The UK authorities are violating Vienna Convention by not giving Russia access to
Skripals, because Skripal has dual citizenship (the UK and Russia), Russian Ambassador to the
UK Alexander Yakovenko said.
The Russian embassy has immediately requested details and materials of the case, the envoy
stated.
While 10 days have passed, Moscow has received no response, while London has refused to
pass samples of the poisonous substance allegedly used to attack Skripal.
Then Yakovenko turned a little darker, seemingly indicating concerns that this was nothing
but a false-flag operation (via SputnikNews)
The envoy called for checking how could British experts find out the exact type of the
nerve gas used to poison Skripal . [Good question!]
Commenting on the death of former top manager of Russian Aeroflot airline Nikolai
Glushkov, the ambassador stated that "we cannot take Britain's words on trust."
Alexander Yakovenko said that Britain has provided no proof of Russia's alleged
involvement in the nerve agent attack.
He suggested that the samples of the so-called Novichok nerve gas could have already been
in possession of a laboratory, which is located just miles away from Salisbury .
"We have been refused consular access to our Russian citizen Yulia Skripal ,"
Russian Ambassador to the UK Alexander Yakovenko said.
The UK is ignoring requests on case of Russian businessman Glushkov who died in London,
ambassador stated.
Russian experts puzzled how UK managed to determine type of nerve gas in Skripal
case, in days, but not weeks or months.
The UK has a long record of misdoings, he said, including the support of coup in
Ukraine and the invasion of Iraq. "This is like talking to overweight alcoholics and drug
users that have lost any sense of dignity."
Boris Johnson [the self-proclaimed "passionate Zionist") compared Russia's hosting of this
year's World Cup to the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. Russians respond: "Nobody has the
right to insult the Russian people, who defeated the Nazis."
"The US special forces deliver 20 tons of chlorine gas to Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria
order to execute a false flag for the purposes of blaming Damascus and Moscow."
"It seems that there is a significant effort by the United States, the United Kingdom,
France and Germany to provoke a military confrontation with Moscow. How else are we able to
interpret threats from Macron to strike Damascus, together with his ominous advice to foreign
journalists not to go to Damascus in the coming days and, for those already there, to leave
the capital immediately? There has even been chatter within diplomatic circles that suggest
that UN personnel are leaving Damascus.
This could be psychological warfare, or it could be a prelude to war. With the stakes so
high, we cannot afford to ignore any detail, even if it may be disinformation. The American
attack seems imminent, with mounting signs of movements of American and Russian warships in
the Mediterranean in attack formation.
Russian military representatives have reiterated that in the event of an attack, they will
respond by hitting both the missiles launched as well as the ships from which the missiles
were launched. Things are getting pretty dicey, and the risk of a direct confrontation
between the United States and the Russian Federation are rising with every passing hour. The
transfer of numerous US aircraft from Incirlik, Turkey, to Al-Azrak, Jordan, is another
indication of preparations for an attack, since the forces moved to Jordan are close to the
Al-Tanf base. The proposed strategy could involve an assault on the city of Daraa, for the
purposes of securing the borders between Syria and Jordan and Syria and Israel.
The warnings raised by Lavrov and Gerasimov appear unprecedented, given that they detail a
plan already set in course, evidently approved at the highest levels and aimed at
provoking and justifying an attack on Syria ; and attack that would encompass the Russian
forces in Syria. "
The Zionists control Britain and the U.S. and are planning to start WWIII using Syria and
Iran as the precursor and nothing is going to stop this Zionist drive for a Zionist NWO no
matter what the cost in lives or money, these satanic bastards are bound and determined to
have a war with Russia and so it shall be done.
These satanic bastards have deep underground military bases that they think they can
survive a nuclear war in and so they might, but what will be left, by the way these bases are
known as DUMBs, and are connected by a tunnel system through out the U.S. and Britain, if
anyone doubts this , do some research , it is true.
Mr. Meyssan wrote the first book, in 2002, to assert that 9/11 was a False Flag attack by
what we now call the 'Deep State". 9/11 The Big Lie came out in English in 2003. I believe
that Meyssan is living in exile from France in Syria. He was one of the first reporters to
show that the attacks upon Assad and Syria were being run by foreign intelligence operatives
and their terrorist minions like ISIS.
I am glad that Mr. Unz has run this very important article on the present intrigue.
This excellent article is why I visit this site. Doing the work that the Jewstream media
refuses to do. I knew "something was rotten in Denmark"! It is very, very good that the world
has leaders such as our great President Trump and powerful (take no bull) Putin. As far as
Merkel and May go the sooner the door hits them on the Ass the better.
Hilarious nonsense! Thierry Meyssan is a specialist in conspiracy theories and could be
called a "9/11 negationist". One can assume that, in his eyes, the Salisbury attack,
regardless of who might have carried it out, has not worked to Putin's advantage.
Dutch voters behaved badly, so the toys are taken away. No more 'referanda' for you.
The disintegration will accelerate: more new faces, local parties, rebellion parties. And,
of course, more clowns (hello Boris, now climb down from that tree).
Brussels is having urgent off-sites with think-tank geniuses how to stop it. So far they
have come up with: more 'media control' (propaganda), more outreach, drastic new restrictions
('you like the old Europe? -- xenophobe!, no travel for you'), and a circular management
refresh, Macronism .
One thing I doubt the globo-liberal EU obsessives will ever do is to actually listen to
the 'misguided' people. It has been preliminary decided to simply label any resistance as '
Russian subversion '. That buys some time, but they have no long term solutions, or
even coherent ideas. This will get more entertaining. Boris J-man might actually climb up
that tree before this is over
There is structural Globalist government and all participants as Theresa May are only
puppets. All western leaderships are only participants. So far only Trump is the one who is
resisting.
The orders are coming from Rothschild. He ordered now that Russia must be destroyed or at
least neutralized. I am convinced that Russia's government is fully aware of what is going
on.
Just a while ago Russia commissioned three nuclear armed submarines. Not long time ago
Putin ordered nuclear drill over all country. I would guess that Russia already a while ago
is on war preparation mode. Looks like the west lost its mind.
Concerning economy Britain is in trouble. French were strongly opposing Britain to join
EU. That was because England is the main competitor for French food exports. One thing from
this will be good. Barb be qui season is coming and beef will be now cheep.
Well I felt so unattracted by what I had read that I thought it would be helpful to see if
any of the UR Commenters who can make sense would give an assessment.
Thank you for the information. It doesn't make him sound like a person who is well placed
to make the claims to knowledge he has about what went on in England.
The main Brussels' battle cry is 'populism'. In my opinion, populism is simply opposing
political mainstream. But this mainstream is disintegrating, Hollande abolished the French
socialist party, Parti Socialiste.
In Germany Schulz, former EU top man, SPD member, the Socialist Party Germany, even had to
step down as chairman in order to make SPD members agree with the SPD coalition with Merkel's
CDU. Schulz obviously left his overpaid Brussels job in order to become chancellor.
But also Merkel policies are breaking down. Her minister of the Interior, police, border
control, immigration, naturalisation, granting asylum, Seehofer, states that he will
reinstate border controls, as the EU does nothing. Polls show that 76% of Germans agree with
him.
What most Germans do not know is that oral instructions were given in Merkel's former
chancellor period to customs and border police, not to stop any immigrant at the borders.
Merkel and Seehofer now disagree on Islam, Merkel 'the Islam belongs to Germany', Seehofer
'the Islam is in Germany'. But in how far the German people and culture can be saved in the
long run one wonders. Demographic calsulations show that with present differences in birth
rates in 30 to 40 years time 30 to 40% of the Germans will be Muslims. As Merkel said
'they're here already'. What Merkel's objectives are or were, she if often compared to the
sfinx. In any case Mutti, mom, cannot last much longer.
E European countries reject Muslim immigrants. However, after the Muslim immigrants have
been naturalised, under present EU rules, they can settle anywhere in the EU, so the eastern
countries cannot keep them away. If they want to settle in hostile communities is the
question.
" Looks like the west lost its mind. " Rothschild, Bilderberg, is not the west, nor is
AIPAC and AEI. However, former Shell CEO Van der Veer is chairman of a NATO strategic
advisory committee.
Now go back and read the article and then re-assess what A436 said, Wally.
It doesn't make him sound like a person who is well placed to make the claims to
knowledge he has about what went on in England.
He's talking about whether Thierry Meyssan would really have access to the people and
information that could confirm this story of conspiracy and its uncovering.
The British government and certain of its allies, including US Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson, have attempted to launch a Cold War against Russia.
Their plan was to fabricate an attack against an ex-double agent in Salisbury and at
the same time a chemical attack against the " moderate rebels " in the Ghouta. The
conspirators' intention was to profit from the efforts of Syria to liberate the suburbs of
its capital city and the disorganisation of Russia on the occasion of its Presidential
election. Had these manipulations worked, the United Kingdom would have pushed the USA to
bomb Damascus, including the Presidential palace, and demand that the United Nations
General Assembly exclude Russia from the Security Council.
However, the Syrian and Russian Intelligence Services got wind of what was being
plotted. They realised that the US agents in the Ghouta who were preparing an attack
against the Ghouta were not working for the Pentagon, but for another US agency.
In Damascus, the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Fayçal Miqdad, set up an
emergency Press conference for 10 March, in order to alert his fellow citizens. From its
own side, Moscow had first of all tried to contact Washington via the diplomatic channels.
But aware that the US ambassador, Jon Huntsman Jr, is the director of Caterpillar, the
company which had supplied tunneling materials to the jihadists so that they could build
their fortifications, Moscow decided to bypass the usual diplomatic channels.
No, you don't need to be IN England. But you do need to have at least a small record of
qualifications and credibility to get readers to move past those first paragraphs which look
like the script of a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence as an FSB triple-agent.
A comment from Randal on another thread that gets to the point:
The only suggestions that the Russians were responsible for the incident come from
exactly the same kinds of people who told us about Iraq's WMD and the supposed Libyan
humanitarian emergency. And yes, about supposed suicidal Syrian government uses of chemical
weapons that are conveniently just big enough to provide their enemies with yet another big
stick to beat them with, but not enough to give them any material advantage.
And there's the additional evidence that some kind of False Flag attempt fell apart at
Eastern Ghouta + Trump's discovery that the Deep State was planning to take him by surprise
(the immediate dismissal of Tillerson).
"... We see that the British authorities are becoming increasingly nervous, which is logical. The clock is ticking. They have driven themselves into a corner. Ultimately, they will have to answer a growing number of questions, but they have no answers. ..."
"... The inference that they have made a mess of things but Russia is responsible anyway and must be held accountable is the wrong kind of logic. This logic may be good for a British or US movie, but it does not work in real life, especially in relations with Russia. ..."
"... It is becoming increasingly obvious that the attack on the Skripals in Salisbury is most likely a clumsy staged provocation. We must expose those who have orchestrated this attack and the reasons behind it. ..."
"... To be continued ..."
"... I have not watched the whole video. Will watch later. It appears, UK is defining the ground and terrain to fight, and Russia is obviously following. In that way, Russia is always on the defensive of what UK is dictating.. even if it is false which it is and that is the fight. ..."
"... Cut it short, Russia must realise that this is the new way to fight now. It cannot rely on facts and international laws and conventions alone as a defense.. Its not enough like the way it is doing now. It must quickly turn the situation around and determine the space to fight and how UK is to fight this of course without going to war. ..."
We are glad to see you at the Foreign Ministry on this cold wintry day that nevertheless
carries a promise of spring.
We are grateful to you for responding so quickly to our invitation, which we issued only
yesterday.
The situation is indeed unusual. There is an urgent need for a non-politicised and highly
professional discussion of the Skripals' poisoning case. We have distributed a position paper.
We ask you to bring it to the notice of your governments.
The language of this position paper, just as any other such paper, is dry legalese with
technical details.
It would be wrong to invite you here just to say this. I propose that we hold an open
discussion in this closed diplomatic group.
Let us look at hard facts, beginning with the humanitarian aspects of the case at hand.
On March 4, 2018, two people, one of them Russian citizen Yulia Skripal, were attacked in
Salisbury, a flourishing city in the south of England.
Various versions of the circumstances of this tragedy have been voiced in the UK. They
highlight the use of chemical agents, which the British call Novichok, for some reason. All of
these versions do not stand up to any criticism.
In this situation, UK officials have laid the blame on Russia hastily, hysterically and
without presenting any evidence, and demanded explanations from us.
I would like to repeat that it was a Russian citizen who has been attacked in the UK. Logic
suggests two possible variants. Either the British authorities are unable to ensure protection
against such terrorist attacks on their territory, or they were directly or indirectly involved
in the preparation of this attack on a Russian citizen. There is no other alternative.
We are surprised, to put it mildly, that the British authorities had denied even consular
access to the Russian citizen who has been attacked contrary to the elementary norms of
civilised interstate relations. They are prevaricating, but at the same time they distribute
video footage from the hospital where the Skripals are allegedly being treated. But this only
raises more questions.
The British have refused to share the information obtained by their investigators and have
not replied to the Russian requests regarding Yulia Skripal. We have no reliable information
about what happened to this Russian citizen over the past two weeks and why this happened to
her. This is hard to comprehend: these events are unfolding in the 21st century in a country
that is considered civilised.
Naturally, demanding any explanations from Russia in this situation is simply absurd. Russia
does not owe anything to anyone in this context, and it cannot be held accountable for the
activities or inactivity of the British authorities in their national territory.
We see that the British authorities are becoming increasingly nervous, which is logical.
The clock is ticking. They have driven themselves into a corner. Ultimately, they will have to
answer a growing number of questions, but they have no answers.
The inference that they have made a mess of things but Russia is responsible anyway and
must be held accountable is the wrong kind of logic. This logic may be good for a British or US
movie, but it does not work in real life, especially in relations with Russia.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the attack on the Skripals in Salisbury is most
likely a clumsy staged provocation. We must expose those who have orchestrated this attack and
the reasons behind it.
Doubling down by the Empire. Russia is hardening up fast but still displaying manners and
offering goodwill! I'm afraid that is going nowhere excepting support is offered by the
traditional friends of Russia as usual.
So far, no answer to the question: "And what is next?"
Things on the war front? Well, the Empire wants their war dammit! And how dare Russia
deprive them of it!
I'm afraid tensions were only ratcheted up and the word de-escalation has been removed
from all Empire Dictionaries. Oh Boy!
I listened to all this. The idiot who represented the UK (actually not an idiot, she was just
doing her job and no doubt in private would admit it was stupid) just parroted out May's
previous words and never addressed any of the substantive questions raised; the EU and US
speakers merely talked about solidarity with the UK.
Telling was the fact that the Russian main man referred to the US rep as someone he had
never seen before, and was presumably from the State Dept.
None of the Russian requests for data or access to their citizens were dealt with.
The Russian side were well prepared, and the fact that they are pursuing this in this way
indicates they have nothing to hide and are pissed off.
I'm increasingly convinced that Russia is playing for a bit more time. It truly does feel
like a game of chess.
"I'm increasingly convinced that Russia is playing for a bit more time."
But why? IMHO the only possible reason could be gaining sufficient time to clear the
roaches from East Ghouta in Syria -- why? because it would eliminate one more of the possible
false flag locations, and possibly provide more time to beef up the defenses in Syria.
I get the feeling that Russia is adopting a posture, a bit like a boxer puts up his dukes
to guard against his opponents blows.
Kudos to the Venezuelan representative, who 1) stood up in Russia's defense against a
backdrop of "solidarity" with the UK (I guess meaning whatever story they concoct we will
pretend to believe) and 2) seems to be the only foreign diplomat in Moscow who bothered to
learn Russian.
"Concerned that Americans may be watching "foreign propaganda" (or something different
than what is offered on the mainstream media menu) Representatives Seth Moulton (D-MA) and
Elise Stefanik (R-NY) introduced the Countering Foreign Propaganda Act.
In practice, it would force RT to do even more reporting to the US government than it
currently does under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and will also force it to
broadcast every 30 minutes a message saying it is funded by, and is "under editorial control"
of, a foreign government. Apparently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will also
be the arbiter of who is under editorial control and who is not, because the BBC and France
24 would not be forced to disclose the origins of their funding, according to Foreign Policy
(FP) -- presumably, because their messaging is simply accidentally, sort of, in line with
that of the British and French governments respectively.
RT's stance on a potential crackdown in the US was summarized by its editor-in-chief,
Margarita Simonyan: "When the high from FARA is no longer hard enough, the representatives
switch to even harder legislation."
The US branch of RT came into the focus of the American mainstream public after the
election of Donald Trump as president. The channel starred in a controversial report by the
Office of the Director for National Intelligence, which alleged that RT's coverage of
American problems like fracking or the killings of black people by police amounted to
infringing on US democratic institutions."
Headline story on RT: "Peskov says ex-spy has zero value; no need to poison him."
Implication: "We only poison people of value."
If I were the spokesperson of Russia, I wouldn't even entertain the idea that Russia
poisons people. If I were a pro Russian television network, I wouldn't treat this story as
anything but Milli Vanilli.
Still think Margie "the true liberal" is your friend?
I would like to make an observation regarding the name given by Briton and others of this
lethal nerve agent, "Novichok". It seems to have appeared out of thin air, or the
imaginations of some. As has been pointed out, here in the conference, this was a fictional
name used in a TV show in Briton.
The point is this, "Novichok" is perhaps as to what the "Khorasan Group" was in the waning
days of the Obama regime. Do you remember the "Aboslute Terror!.com"(tm) that was surrounding
this fictional group of terrorists as trumpeted by Obama himself? Similarities are not
inconsequential in that a nefarious political goal is the point of the obfuscation and
lies.
What is that goal? I can't answer that question, but to speculate, I would guess that the
oligarchs of the West have decided that the potential for nuclear annihilation is worth
risking for unrestricted free market economic world domination in the short term.
I have not watched the whole video. Will watch later. It appears, UK is defining the
ground and terrain to fight, and Russia is obviously following. In that way, Russia is always
on the defensive of what UK is dictating.. even if it is false which it is and that is the
fight.
In that way, no matter what facts are presented (which is what Russia is doing) Russia
will always start from what they are accused of. Right there, UK is choosing what Russian
reaction would be.
Cut it short, Russia must realise that this is the new way to fight now. It cannot
rely on facts and international laws and conventions alone as a defense.. Its not enough like
the way it is doing now. It must quickly turn the situation around and determine the space to
fight and how UK is to fight this of course without going to war.
A very good point, well made. I've learned myself that conforming to Marquis of Queensbury
rules when engaged in a conflict with a street fighter can be somewhat counter-productive.
You cannot counter lies and medacity with an appeal to truth. I wonder how these mouthpieces
reading their government's lines can truly sleep at night.
its heartbreaking watching this. It reminds me of the poaching of the great animals of Africa
-- Russia does everything right and just -- and the shameful poachers use nothing honorable
or decent in their wish to destroy. There has been nothing but dishonesty and untruth from
Britain (and the west) in this whole affair -- no one even knows where or how the victims of
this 'chemical attack' are -- and that there's only be two victims -- a chemical attack kills
multiple people
I shall listen to the whole thing to get a better grasp of the context of certain speeches,
remarks. TASS yesterday posted a report ( http://tass.com/politics/995445 ) that represents their
own summary: "Russian Foreign Ministry suggests US could have orchestrated Skripal saga."
While appreciating Russian humor, I dashed off a message to my German friends, as follows
(translated):
Incredible! -- No I believe it. Watch the selected-emphasized sections below. The Russians
have the knife in, and they are turning it, very slowly. Delicious!
"It is likely that this could have been orchestrated from across the pond. [Note
that Yermakov -- and he comes from the MoD, not the MFA -- throws May's "highly probable"
back into her face, but he provides indirect evidence, which May did not do. Note also that
it is indeed "likely". That has been my argument the whole time, except that I told you the
Americans -- the Trump-Americans -- set a trap for May and she walked into it. Yermakov is
saying the same thing: just watch and listen.]
„It is no secret to anyone that the UK's closest partner is the only state
officially keeping the largest arsenals of chemical weapons in the world." [How true, but ist
he USA theUK's "closest partner" really? Actually, since the British launched their
anti-Trump cvampaign -- with Christopher Steele / MI6 -- the two have been at war with one
another. Yermakov seems to play innocent on that point, even naive, but if the Americans set
the trap, then the British set themselves up by believing that what May did was wha their
closest partner wanted them to do. And now May is in deep sh**.]
Yermakov further,"is most likely a new grossly falsified and unlawful
provocation." Against Russia, yes, of course, fa false flag, and illegal. But also against
the UK? That is left ambiguous.?
"It only has to be solved who stood behind this and which goals pursued." -- Yes,
indeed, who was behind the false flag, and what were the aims? This hast o be solved,
clarified. Yermakov poses these questions openly and round about, not limited to Russia. Do
the British know who was behind the false flag, and what the aims were? Do they have any
interest in finding out? Yermakov does not launch counter-accusations at the British.
„Only one thing is clear that Russia has absolutely no complicity in this
at least for one simple reason: such a scheme is simply inadmissible and it is
disadvantageous for us by all parameters." Russia's innocence is clear, and, in fact, the
British know that themselves. It would be insulting to claim the British believe their own
propaganda. And,
"At the same time, Great Britain has quite a different track record," the senior
diplomat said, adding that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had openly admitted his lies
about the situation around Iraq." Ah, yes, Blair lying about Irak WMD, but whether he was
trapped into that lie or not, at least it is obvious he was doing it to justify actions that
were not in the first place British actions, it was Bush's war.
„"One only has to guess who and for what purpose is now trying to plunge
Great Britain into a new dirty and again losing venture for London from the very outset
against Russia *this time,*" -- "One" has to guess, and "one" can be Russian, some Russsian
who guesses, or it can be a Brit. And "one" is going to "guess" about who is plunging Britain
into a dirty and loosing venture against Russia. Wow! -- Let's unravel this. Russia has
nothing to do with intelligence war-maneuvers of the Americans against England. If -- that
thatg is "highly likely" -- the Americans set the trap, plunging Britain into a losing
venture agaisn Russia, implied not to be in British interests, the Russians did not
„collude" in setting the trap. Leave Russia out of the game. England is being dragged
into something. Yermakov has "empathy" for the British in this dilemma. The British may well
think that they were dragged into the Irak-WMD charade and the war, so who is dragging
Britain into a losing game „this time"?]
„"the British authorities are beginning to get ever more nervous" as "they
have driven themselves into a deadlock" -- [Really a pity, right? That really hurts, you are
invited / or dragged onto the gang-plank, thinking you are doing the right thing, and their
your "closest partner" steps off the plank and you plunge into the depths. Sure you get
nervous, sure you see you brought onto yourself, you are in a blind-alley. -- You can only do
what Yermakov did if you have the upper-hand and you know it. Russia via Yermakov is not out
for retaliation, Russia extends the open hand , Russia is merciful. Remember the scene in
Schindler's list, where a Nazi camp-commander was about to shoot a little boy because there
were still stains in the bathtub the boy was supposed to have cleaned? And Schindler tells
the Nazi: real power ist to forgive, and the Nazi, who thinks he is powerful and wans power,
lays down his rifle. How merciful the Russias are is ytilll to come. ]
Moscow considers the Salisbury attack to be an act of terror against Russian
citizens carried out on UK soil, he stressed. -- -- So Moscow wants access to the Skripals,
Yulia in particular.
Now comes the icing on the cake, the knife begins to turn. "The senior Russian
diplomat called on the British to put their hatred against Russia aside for a moment, as well
as their "island way of thinking." "I mean no offence, I think highly of the British
diplomacy and this is the reason why I feel ashamed for you when I hear such things,"
Yermakov added, stressing that in the past, Russian diplomats had learned much from their
British colleagues and British experts and now they were calling them for dialogue.. [Of
course the British hate the Russians, but don't let that hate get in the way of properly
assessing the British situation in this trap. If Russians are anything, they are professional
and objective. Of course, Russian diplomats learned from British diplomas: they know
double-dealing also, but Russians do it openly -- open double dealing, and that is what
Yermakov was doing the whole time. Why would Russia do that? -- It's simple: "to split
Europe." That is what the British accuse Russia of doing, but Russia is not doing it the way
the British think, they are going to split Europe because the British have handed over the
lever to do it, because the British are shaming themselves with their nonsense propaganda,
and they know they are losing because it is so shameful. The British were tricked, Russia
does not play tricks. The Russians win because they put truth on the table: if the British
continue with their shameful behavior, they have no chance to play any leaves in Europe. They
know it, that is why they are nervous, that is their own dead-end. Now, when Blair lied,
dragging Britain into the Iraq war, it unleashed destruction, which does not bother the
British as long as others are destroyed. But now they are on the receiving end, it is their
own destruction which is at stake.
wow -- the British diplomat in the audience has a brutal speech -- well written -- its so
hard to defend oneself against untruth -- when its calculated -- at 53:55
It is foolish to believe that explanation will bring to your side those who are implacably
oriented against you because they take it as a sign of weakness.
"A military grade, novichok, nerve agent developed by Russia". So they didn't make then ?
'Developing' isn't making, just in case your education didn't cover this rather unsubtle
distinction. "Barrage of distortion and disinformation" Have you looked in the mirror of late
?? Pathetic.
I think the UK representative went a bit off-script when she said "Russia produced" -- the
official script is "Russian developed". I suspect that she may get a reprimand for that.
One the one hand I am amazed, on the other hand, not. Has anyone listened to the full session
or read the TASS release? ( http://tass.com/politics/995445 ) If not, please do so,
and show some of what the Russians call "respect," which means just listen carefully.
I do not wish to offend, as the Russian "senior diplomat" said, but I am ashamed to hear
such baseless gossip as "It appears, UK is defining the ground and terrain to fight, and
Russia is obviously following" or "You cannot counter lies and medacity with an appeal to
truth" (cited examples being by no means exhasutive).
Do you realize, have you registered the *fact* that the Russians said "Russian Foreign
Ministry suggests US could have orchestrated Skripal saga"?, which a load of backup to that
suggesion.
"... By doing do, the British government adopted the theories of Professor Amy Knight. On 22 January 2018, this US Sovietologist published a very strange book -- Orders to Kill -- the Putin régime and political murder . The author, who is " the " specialist on the ex-KGB, attempts to demonstrate that Vladimir Putin is a serial killer responsible for dozens of political assassinations, from the terrorist attacks in Moscow in 1999 to the attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013, by way of the execution of Alexandre Litvinenko in London in 2006 or that of Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in 2015. However, she admits herself that there is absolutely no proof of her accusations. ..."
"... The European Liberals then joined the fray. Ex-Prime Minister of Belgium Guy Verhofstadt, who presides their group in the European Parliament, called on the European Union to adopt sanctions against Russia. His counterpart at the head of their British party, Sir Vince Cable, proposed a European boycott of the World Football Cup. And already, Buckingham Palace announced that the royal family has canceled their trip to Russia. ..."
"... Responding to the Prime Minister, Blairist deputy Chris Leslie qualified Russia as a rogue state and demanded its suspension from the UN Security Council. Theresa May agreed to examine the question, but stressed that the outcome could only be decided by the General Assembly in order to avoid the Russian veto. ..."
"... During the public debate which followed, UK chargé d'affaire Jonathan Allen represented his country. He is an agent of MI6 who created the British War Propaganda Service and gives active support to the jihadists in Syria. He declared -- " Russia has already interfered in the affairs of other countries, Russia has already violated international law in Ukraine, Russia has comtempt for civilian life, as witnessed by the attack on a commercial aircraft over Ukraine by Russian mercenaries, Russia protects the use of chemical weapons by Assad ( ) The Russian state is responsible for this attempted murder ". The permanent representative for France, François Delattre, who, by virtue of a derogation by President Sarkozy, was trained at the US State Department, noted that his country had launched an initiative to end the impunity of those who use chemical weapons. He implied that the initiative, originally directed at Syria, could also be turned against Russia. ..."
"... Russian ambassador Vasily Nebenzya pointed out that the session had been convened at London's request, but that it is public at Moscow's request. He observed that the United Kingdom is violating international law by treating this subject at the Security Council while keeping the OPCW out of its enquiry. He noted that if London had been able to identify the " Novotchik ", it's because it has the formula and can therefore make its own. He noted Russia's desire to collaborate with the OPCW in the respect for international procedures. ..."
"... Throughout its long history, England has never hesitated to lie and betray its oath in order to defend its interests. This is how it earned its French nickname of " perfide Albion " (after the Latin name for England) ..."
"... local parties are the winners, winners also are national anti establishment parties, despite the demonizing of these populists, that represent the opinions of a significant portion of the population. ..."
"... As Belgium and Germany, governing our country becomes more and more difficult. The country seems to be more and more divided between those who trust the government, and those with deep distrust. ..."
The British government and certain of its allies, including US Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson, have attempted to launch a Cold War against Russia.
Their plan was to fabricate an attack against an ex-double agent in Salisbury and at the
same time a chemical attack against the " moderate rebels " in the Ghouta. The conspirators'
intention was to profit from the efforts of Syria to liberate the suburbs of its capital city
and the disorganisation of Russia on the occasion of its Presidential election. Had these
manipulations worked, the United Kingdom would have pushed the USA to bomb Damascus, including
the Presidential palace, and demand that the United Nations General Assembly exclude Russia
from the Security Council.
However, the Syrian and Russian Intelligence Services got wind of what was being plotted.
They realised that the US agents in the Ghouta who were preparing an attack against the Ghouta
were not working for the Pentagon, but for another US agency.
In Damascus, the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Fayçal Miqdad, set up an
emergency Press conference for 10 March, in order to alert his fellow citizens. From its own
side, Moscow had first of all tried to contact Washington via the diplomatic channels. But
aware that the US ambassador, Jon Huntsman Jr, is the director of Caterpillar, the company
which had supplied tunneling materials to the jihadists so that they could build their
fortifications, Moscow decided to bypass the usual diplomatic channels.
The Syrian army seized two chemical weapons laboratories, the first on 12 March in Aftris,
and the second on the following day in Chifonya. Meanwhile, Russian diplomats pushed the
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to get involved in the criminal
investigation in Salisbury.
In the House of Commons, British Prime Minister Theresa May violently accused Russia of
having ordered the attack in Salisbury. According to her, the ex-double agent Sergueï
Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by a military nerve gas of a type " developed by
Russia " under the name of " Novitchok ". Since the Kremlin considers Russian citizens who
have defected as legitimate targets, it is therefore highly likely that they ordered the
crime.
" Novitchok " is known by what has been revealed by two Soviet personalities, Lev Fyodorov
and Vil Mirzayanov. The scientist Fyodorov published an article in the Russian weekly Top
Secret (Совершенно
секретно) in July 1992, warning about the
extremely dangerous nature of this product, and warning against the use of old Soviet
weaponry by the Western powers to destroy the environment in Russia and make it unlivable. In
October 1992, he published a second article in the News of Moscow
(Московские
новости) with a counter-espionage executive,
Mirzayanov, denouncing the corruption of certain generals and the traffic of " Novitchok " in
which they were involved. However, they did not know to whom they may have sold the product.
Mirzayanov was first of all arrested for high treason, then released. Fyodorov died in Russia
last August, but Mirzayanov is living in exile in the United States, where he collaborates
with the Department of Defense.
Russian ex-counter intelligence officer Vil Mirzayanov defected to the United States. Now
83 years old, he comments on the Skripal affair from Boston.
" Novitchok " was fabricated in a Soviet laboratory in Nurus, in what is now Uzbekistan.
During the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was destroyed by a US team of specialists.
Uzbekistan and the United States, by necessity, have therefore possessed and studied samples
of this substance. They are both capable of producing it.
British Minister for Foreign Affairs Boris Johnson summoned the Russian ambassador in
London, Alexandre Iakovenko. He gave him an ultimatum of 36 hours to check if any " Novitchok
" was missing from their stocks. The ambassador replied that none was missing, because Russia
had destroyed all of the chemical weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union, as
witnessed by the OPCW, which had drawn up a certified report.
After a telephone discussion with Boris Johnson, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in
turn condemned Russia for the attack in Salisbury.
Meanwhile, a debate was under way at the UN Security Council concerning the situation in
the Ghouta. The permanent representative for the US, Nikki Haley, declared -- " About one
year ago, after the sarin gas attack perpetrated in Khan Cheïkhoun by the Syrian
régime, the United States warned the Council. We said that faced with the systematic
inaction of the international community, states are sometimes obliged to act on their own.
The Security Council did not react, and the United States bombed the air base from which al
Assad had launched his chemical attack. We are reiterating the same warning today ".
The Russian Intelligence Services handed out documents from the US staff. They showed that
the Pentagon was ready to bomb the Presidential palace and the Syrian Ministries, on the
model of what it had done during the taking of Baghdad (3 to 12 April 2003).
Commenting the declaration by Nikki Haley, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who
had always called the attack in Khan Cheïkhoun a " Western manipulation ", revealed that
the false information which had led the White House into error and triggered the bombing of
the Al-Chaayrate air base, had in fact come from a British laboratory which had never
revealed how it came to possess its samples.
The Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs published a Press release condemning a possible
US military intervention, and announcing that if Russian citizens were harmed in Damascus,
Moscow would riposte proportionally, since the Russian President is constitutionally
responsible for the security of his fellow citizens.
Bypassing the official diplomatic channels, Russian Chief of Staff General Valeri
Guerassimov contacted his US counterpart General Joseph Dunford to inform him of his fear of
a false flag chemical attack in Ghouta. Dunford took this information vey seriously, and
alerted US Defense Secretary General Jim Mattis, who referred the matter to President Donald
Trump. In view of the Russian insistence that this piece of foul play was being prepared
without the knowledge of the Pentagon, the White House asked the Director of the CIA, Mike
Pompeo, to identify those responsible for the conspiracy.
We do not know the result of this internal enquiry, but President Trump acquired the
conviction that his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was implicated. The Secretary of State
was immediately asked to interrupt his official journey in Africa and return to
Washington.
Theresa May wrote to the General Secretary of the United Nations accusing Russia of having
ordered the attack in Salisbury, and convened an emergency meeting of the Security Council.
Without waiting, she expelled 23 Russian diplomats.
Published one month and a half before the attack in Salisbury, Amy Knight's book presents
what was to become MI5's thesis. The author herself maintains that she has not the slightest
proof of what she is claiming.
At the request of President of the House of Commons Interior Committee Yvette Cooper,
British Secretary for the Interior Amber Rudd announced that MI5 (Military Interior Secret
Services ) is going to re-open 14 enquiries into deaths which, according to US sources, were
ordered by the Kremlin.
By doing do, the British government adopted the theories of Professor Amy Knight. On
22 January 2018, this US Sovietologist published a very strange book -- Orders to Kill --
the Putin régime and political murder . The author, who is " the " specialist on
the ex-KGB, attempts to demonstrate that Vladimir Putin is a serial killer responsible for
dozens of political assassinations, from the terrorist attacks in Moscow in 1999 to the
attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013, by way of the execution of Alexandre Litvinenko in
London in 2006 or that of Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in 2015. However, she admits herself that
there is absolutely no proof of her accusations.
The European Liberals then joined the fray. Ex-Prime Minister of Belgium Guy
Verhofstadt, who presides their group in the European Parliament, called on the European
Union to adopt sanctions against Russia. His counterpart at the head of their British party,
Sir Vince Cable, proposed a European boycott of the World Football Cup. And already,
Buckingham Palace announced that the royal family has canceled their trip to Russia.
The UK communications regulator, Ofcom, announced that it might ban the channel Russia
Today as a retaliatory measure, even though RT has on no occasion violated British
law.
The Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs summoned the British ambassador in Moscow to
inform him that reciprocal measures would soon be indicated in retaliation for the expulsion
of Russian diplomats from London.
President Trump announced on Twitter that he had fired his Secretary of State, with whom
he had not yet been in contact. He was replaced by Mike Pompeo, ex-Director of the CIA, who,
the night before, had confirmed the authenticity of the Russian information transmitted by
General Dunford. On his arrival in Washington, Tillerson obtained confirmation of his
dismissal from White House General Secretary General John Kelly.
The ex-CEO of the largest
multinational in the world, ExxonMobil, thought he was untouchable. But to his great
surprise, Rex Tillerson was brutally dismissed by Donald Trump. The former believed he was
serving the Anglo-Saxon world, while the latter considers him to be a traitor to his country.
Ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is a product of the Texan middle class. He and his
family worked for the US Scouts, of whom he became the National President (2010-12).
Culturally close to England, he did not hesitate, when he became President of the
mega-multinational Exxon-Mobil (2006-16), not only to wage a politically correct campaign
favouring the acceptance of young gays into the Scouts, but also to recruit mercenaries in
British Guiana. He is said to be a member of the Pilgrims Society, the most prestigious of
Anglo-US clubs, presided by Queen Elizabeth II, a number of whose members were part of the
Obama administration.
During his functions as Secretary of State, the quality of his education provided a bond
for Donald Trump, considered by US high society to be a buffoon. He was in disagreement with
his President on three major subjects which allow us to define the ideology of the
conspirators -
Like London and the US deep state, he thought it would be useful to diabolise Russia in
order to consolidate the power of the Anglo-Saxons in the Western camp ;
Like London, he thought that in order to maintain Western colonialism in the Middle East, it
was necessary to favour Iranian President Cheikh Rohani against the Supreme Leader of the
Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khamenei. He therefore supported the 5+1 agreement.
Like the US deep state, he considered that the swing of North Korea towards the United
States should remain secret, and be used to justify a military deployment which would be
directed in reality against the People's Repubic of China. He was therefore in favor of
official talks with Pyongyang, but opposed to a meeting between the two heads of
state.
While Washington was still in shock, Theresa May spoke once again before the House of
Commons to develop her accusation, while all around the world, British diplomats spoke to
numerous inter-governmental organisations in order to broadcast the message. Responding
to the Prime Minister, Blairist deputy Chris Leslie qualified Russia as a rogue state and
demanded its suspension from the UN Security Council. Theresa May agreed to examine the
question, but stressed that the outcome could only be decided by the General Assembly in
order to avoid the Russian veto.
The North Atlantic Council (NATO) met in Brussels at the request of the United Kingdom.
The 29 member states drew a link between the use of chemical weapons in Syria and the attack
in Salisbury. They then decided that Russia was " probably " responsible for these two
events.
In New York, the permanent representative of Russia, Vasily Nebenzya, proposed to the
members of the Security Council that they adopt a declaration attesting to their common will
to shed light on the attack in Salisbury and handing over the enquiry to the OPCW in the
respect of international procedures. But the United Kingdom refused any text which did not
contain the expression that Russia was " probably responsible " for the attack.
During the public debate which followed, UK chargé d'affaire Jonathan Allen
represented his country. He is an agent of MI6 who created the British War Propaganda Service
and gives active support to the jihadists in Syria. He declared -- " Russia has already
interfered in the affairs of other countries, Russia has already violated international law
in Ukraine, Russia has comtempt for civilian life, as witnessed by the attack on a commercial
aircraft over Ukraine by Russian mercenaries, Russia protects the use of chemical weapons by
Assad ( ) The Russian state is responsible for this attempted murder ". The permanent
representative for France, François Delattre, who, by virtue of a derogation by
President Sarkozy, was trained at the US State Department, noted that his country had
launched an initiative to end the impunity of those who use chemical weapons. He implied that
the initiative, originally directed at Syria, could also be turned against Russia.
Russian ambassador Vasily Nebenzya pointed out that the session had been convened at
London's request, but that it is public at Moscow's request. He observed that the United
Kingdom is violating international law by treating this subject at the Security Council while
keeping the OPCW out of its enquiry. He noted that if London had been able to identify the "
Novotchik ", it's because it has the formula and can therefore make its own. He noted
Russia's desire to collaborate with the OPCW in the respect for international
procedures.
The United Kingdom published a common declaration which had been cosigned the night before
by France and Germany, as well as Rex Tillerson, who at that moment was still US Secretary of
State. The text reiterated British suspicions. It denounced the use of " a neurotoxic agent
of military quality, and of a type developed by Russia ", and affirmed that it was " highly
probable that Russia is responsible for the attack ".
The Washington Post published an op-ed piece by Boris Johnson, while the US
Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, established new sanctions against Russia. These
are not connected to the current affair, but to allegations of interference in US public
life. The decree nonetheless mentions the attack in Salisbury as proof of the underhand
methods of Russia.
Throughout its long history, England has never hesitated to lie and
betray its oath in order to defend its interests. This is how it earned its French nickname
of " perfide Albion " (after the Latin name for England)
British Secretary for Defence, the young Gavin Williamson, declared that after the
expulsion of its diplomats, Russia should " shut up and go away " (sic). This is the first
time since the end of the Second World War that a representative of a permanent member state
of the Security Council has employed such a vocabulary in the face of another member of the
Council. Sergueï Lavrov commented -- " He's a charming young man. He must want to ensure
his place in History, by making shock declarations [...] Perhaps he lacks education ".
In the space of four days, the United Kingdom and its allies have laid the premises of a new
division of the world, a Cold War.
However, Syria is not Iraq and the UNO is not the G8 (from which Russia has been excluded
because of its adhesion to Crimea and its support of Syria). The United States are not going to
destroy Damascus, and Russia will not be excluded from the Security Council. After having
resigned from the European Union, then having refused to sign the Chinese declaration about the
Silk Road, the United Kingdom thought to improve its stature by eliminating a competitor. By
this piece of dirty work, it imagined that it would acquire a new dimension and become the "
Global Britain " announced by Madame May. But it is destroying its own credibility.
Yesterday were the Dutch municipal elections. The losers were the governing parties at
national level. Winners the local parties. Trust in 'elite' politicians is diminishing
further.
We yesterday also had our last referendum, the referendum law no longer exists. As with
all previous referenda, we voted against government policy, this time the law that gives
secret services the legal right to spy on anyone.
As with all referenda, our vote will not have any effect, as when in 2005 we voted against
the EU, and two years ago against the EU Ukraine association treaty.
Nevertheless, democracy functions. As I wrote, local parties are the winners, winners
also are national anti establishment parties, despite the demonizing of these populists, that
represent the opinions of a significant portion of the population.
As Belgium and Germany, governing our country becomes more and more difficult. The
country seems to be more and more divided between those who trust the government, and those
with deep distrust.
Two of the worst American false flags are responsible for the killing in North Korea and
Vietnam. The killing of it's own people is not a moral dilemma for the Deep State.
Meyssan has often voiced the opinion that Trump & Putin have an understanding. We can't,
and will probably never know the truth of this opinion, but when one watches their body
language and behaviour together such as was openly displayed at the APEC summit in Vietnam,
one sees that they are very comfortable with each other.
One of the things that the Kremlin understands is that the US, and specifically its
foreign policy determinations, is rat's nest of various vested and/or rogue interests pulling
in their various directions, and that by virtue of Washington's chaotic politics much of what
seems to be foreign policy is executed without the knowledge, much less control of the
President, or even the State & Defence Departments.
The reality is that both Russia and China want (for different reasons) a healthy USA to
sit at a newly constituted round table of Great Powers. There are factions within the
US that agree with them, and that the road to Global Hegemony is a dead end. Trump's election
has opened a window of opportunity to allow the US to de-throttle, and even back away from
that goal should those factions gain the upper hand. From what we see, they are making
progress.
There's still a political battle royal ahead for them, but there's also factions within
the US' allies whose fortunes will take a turn for the worse should they succeed. They will
naturally ally with those in the US who's goal is Empire. As it is, with current developments
in DC, and the Syrian gambit backfiring, said factions are panicking and it should surprise
no-one to see ill-conceived and executed attempts to reverse their fortunes.
I think the Skripal case is a textbook example of just that kind of thing happening. A
farcical caricature of a false flag operation gone awry, and no plausible narrative in
sight.
That the once great UK is reduced to 3 blind mice standing in for Ministers of what are
normally a nation's 3 most powerful ministries shows just how far from its moorings the West
has drifted. One is almost embarrassed for them as they thrash around.
Saker posted a video on his site of a meeting called by the Kremlin of all ambassadors.
It's astonishing, frankly.
MAY-DAY, MAY-DAY don't write checks with insufficient funds on hand, May, America doesn't
need the UK pimping a war with Russia, we can't pay for the ones with have now!
The anger and righteous disgust by the chief RF MFA spokesman at around 1:45 from recall (I
did just skip to snippets -- but got stopped there) is worth seeing. He talks of the
Malaysian Boeing downed in Ukraine to the US rep in audience, pointing out US knows exactly
what happened because of its satellites directly overhead, and says something I'd never heard
-- repeated it a couple of times at least -- again in accusatory disgust -- that the first
accusations Russia shot down the plane came BEFORE the plane was hit!
This is true, the plane was still flying when the first accusations were made. The fact that
it hit the ground moments later belies the lies that Opolchensya and/or Russia did it. The
plane was not hit by a missile, there are entry and exit aircraft cannon holes in the left
cockpit outer skin. I have no doubts that the photos of that damning piece of evidence are
long gone but not to worry, I'm sure someone has them.
Auslander
Another chickenhawk in Trump administration. Sad...
Notable quotes:
"... Bolton's high-profile advocacy of war with Iran is well known. What is not at all well known is that, when he was under secretary of state for arms control and international security, he executed a complex and devious strategy aimed at creating the justification for a U.S. attack on Iran. Bolton sought to convict the Islamic Republic in the court of international public opinion of having a covert nuclear weapons program using a combination of diplomatic pressure, crude propaganda, and fabricated evidence. ..."
"... Despite the fact that Bolton was technically under the supervision of Secretary of State Colin Powell, his actual boss in devising and carrying out that strategy was Vice President Dick Cheney. Bolton was also the administration's main point of contact with the Israeli government, and with Cheney's backing, he was able to flout normal State Department rules by taking a series of trips to Israel in 2003 and 2004 without having the required clearance from the State Department's Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs. ..."
"... During multiple trips to Israel, Bolton had unannounced meetings, including with the head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, without the usual reporting cable to the secretary of state and other relevant offices. Judging from that report on an early Bolton visit, those meetings clearly dealt with a joint strategy on how to bring about political conditions for an eventual U.S. strike against Iran. ..."
"... Unfortunately, John Bolton is not just your typical neocon pathological liar and warmonger. Even by their abysmal standards he's pretty unhinged. He is one of the most dangerous people around these days. ..."
"... Bolton, Gen. Jack Keane, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters and the whole warmongering crowd that frequent the air waves at FOX will not rest until they have us at war with Iran and Russia. ..."
"... So Trump is thinking of hiring a loudmouthed incompetent who is a known conduit for botched Israeli spy service forgeries used to gin up war with Iran. What a sick farce. ..."
"... Bolton is a cancer for the US. As a warmonger, he thrives in hostile environnements so no wonder Bolton wants to create them with no regards for consequences. ..."
"... I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that Bolton was duped by Israeli forgers (very droll story, by the way). You'd think that no serious person would consider giving him a National Security Council post, particularly given the current level of concern about "foreign meddling". ..."
"... I do not agree that Iran could prevent a conventional bombing/invasion of their country. But they could make it sooo expensive, the dollar ceases to be the world reserve currency, and if they do that, they will have done mankind a favor. ..."
"... But after the conquest, imagine the guerrilla war! The US basically had to fight an insurgency from amongst 5 million Sunni Arabs in Iraq. Iran is much more ethnically homogeneous. So even if you get some minorities to turncoat and work for the occupiers, you are still left with about 60 million ethnically Persian Shiites. That is a 12 times larger insurgency than what you had in Iraq. ..."
"... Bolton and Cheney must have been livid about Stuxnet, for all the wrong reasons ..."
"... Hiring a ghoul like Bolton will mark a new low even for the Trump administration. And that's saying something. These chickenhawk bastards should all be required to fight on the front lines of the wars they push. That was true, I'll guarantee you Bolton would shut up in a hurry. ..."
"... Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to ..."
John Bolton (Gage Skidmore/Flikr)
In my reporting on U.S.-Israeli policy, I have tracked numerous episodes in which the
United States and/or Israel made moves that seemed to indicate preparations for war against Iran. Each time -- in
2007
,
in
2008,
and again in 2011
-- those moves, presented in corporate media as presaging
attacks on Tehran, were actually bluffs aimed at putting pressure on the Iranian government.
But the strong likelihood that Donald Trump will now choose John Bolton as his next
national security advisor creates a prospect of war with Iran that is very real. Bolton is no ordinary neoconservative
hawk. He has been obsessed for many years with going to war against the Islamic Republic, calling repeatedly for bombing
Iran in his regular appearances on Fox News, without the slightest indication that he understands the consequences of
such a policy.
His is not merely a rhetorical stance: Bolton actively conspired during his tenure as
the Bush administration's policymaker on Iran from 2002 through 2004 to establish the political conditions necessary for
the administration to carry out military action.
More than anyone else inside or outside the Trump administration, Bolton has already
influenced Trump to tear up the Iran nuclear deal. Bolton parlayed his connection with the primary financier behind both
Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump himself -- the militantly Zionist casino magnate Sheldon Adelson -- to get Trump's ear
last October, just as the president was preparing to announce his policy on the Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He spoke with Trump by phone from Las Vegas after
meeting
with Adelson
.
It was Bolton who
persuaded
Trump
to commit to specific language pledging to pull out of the JCPOA if
Congress and America's European allies did not go along with demands for major changes that were clearly calculated to
ensure the deal would fall apart.
Although Bolton was passed over for the job of secretary of state, he now appears to
have had the inside track for national security advisor.
Trump
met with Bolton on March 6
and told him, "We need you here, John," according
to a Bolton associate. Bolton said he would only take secretary of state or national security advisor, whereupon Trump
promised, "I'll call you really soon." Trump then replaced Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with former CIA director
Mike Pompeo, after which White House sources
leaked
to the media
Trump's intention to replace H.R. McMaster within a matter of
weeks.
The only other possible candidate for the position
mentioned
in media accounts
is Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was
acting national security advisor after General Michael Flynn was ousted in February 2017.
Bolton's high-profile advocacy of war with Iran is well known. What is not at all well
known is that, when he was under secretary of state for arms control and international security, he executed a complex
and devious strategy aimed at creating the justification for a U.S. attack on Iran. Bolton sought to convict the Islamic
Republic in the court of international public opinion of having a covert nuclear weapons program using a combination of
diplomatic pressure, crude propaganda, and fabricated evidence.
Despite the fact that Bolton was technically under the supervision of Secretary of
State Colin Powell, his actual boss in devising and carrying out that strategy was Vice President Dick Cheney. Bolton
was also the administration's main point of contact with the Israeli government, and with Cheney's backing, he was able
to
flout
normal State Department rules
by taking a series of trips to Israel in 2003
and 2004 without having the required clearance from the State Department's Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs.
Thus, at the very moment that Powell was saying administration policy was not to
attack Iran, Bolton was working with the Israelis to lay the groundwork for just such a war. During a February 2003
visit, Bolton
assured Israeli
officials in private meetings
that he had no doubt the United States would
attack Iraq, and that after taking down Saddam, it would deal with Iran, too, as well as Syria.
During multiple trips to Israel, Bolton had
unannounced
meetings, including with the head of Mossad,
Meir Dagan, without the usual
reporting cable to the secretary of state and other relevant offices. Judging from that report on an early Bolton visit,
those meetings clearly dealt with a joint strategy on how to bring about political conditions for an eventual U.S.
strike against Iran.
Mossad played a very aggressive role in influencing world opinion on the Iranian
nuclear program. In the summer of 2003, according to journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in their book
The
Nuclear Jihadist
, Meir Dagan created a new Mossad office tasked with
briefing the world's press on alleged Iranian efforts to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. The new unit's
responsibilities included circulating documents from inside Iran as well from outside, according to Frantz and Collins.
Bolton's role in a joint U.S.-Israeli strategy, as he
outlines
in his own 2007 memoir
, was to ensure that the Iran nuclear issue would be
moved out of the International Atomic Energy Agency and into the United Nations Security Council.
He
was determined to prevent IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei from reaching an agreement with Iran that would make
it more difficult for the Bush administration to demonize Tehran as posing a nuclear weapons threat.
Bolton began accusing Iran of having a covert nuclear weapons program in mid-2003, but
encountered resistance not only from ElBaradei and non-aligned states, but from Britain, France, and Germany as well.
Bolton's strategy was based on the claim that Iran was hiding its military nuclear
program from the IAEA, and in early 2004, he came up with a dramatic propaganda ploy: he sent a set of satellite images
to the IAEA showing sites at the Iranian military reservation at Parchin that he claimed were being used for tests to
simulate nuclear weapons. Bolton demanded that the IAEA request access to inspect those sites and leaked his demand to
the Associated Press in September 2004. In fact, the satellite images showed nothing more than bunkers and buildings for
conventional explosives testing.
Bolton was apparently hoping the Iranian military would not agree to any IAEA
inspections based on such bogus claims, thus playing into his propaganda theme of Iran's "intransigence" in refusing to
answer questions about its nuclear program. But in 2005 Iran allowed the inspectors into those sites and even let them
choose several more sites to inspect. The inspectors found no evidence of any nuclear-related activities.
The U.S.-Israeli strategy would later hit the jackpot, however, when a large cache of
documents supposedly from a covert source within Iran's nuclear weapons program surfaced in autumn 2004. The documents,
allegedly found on the laptop computer of one of the participants, included technical drawings of a series of efforts to
redesign Iran's Shahab-3 missile to carry what appeared to be a nuclear weapon.
But the whole story of the so-called "laptop documents" was a fabrication. In 2013, a
former senior German official
revealed
the true story
to this writer: the documents had been given to German
intelligence by the Mujahedin E Khalq, the anti-Iran armed group that was well known to have been used by Mossad to
"launder" information the Israelis did not want attributed to themselves. Furthermore, the drawings showing the redesign
that were cited as proof of a nuclear weapons program were clearly done by someone who didn't know that Iran
had
already abandoned the Shahab-3's nose cone
for an entirely different design.
Mossad had clearly been working on those documents in 2003 and 2004 when Bolton was
meeting with Meir Dagan. Whether Bolton knew the Israelis were preparing fake documents or not, it was the Israeli
contribution towards establishing the political basis for an American attack on Iran for which he was the point man.
Bolton reveals in his memoirs that this Cheney-directed strategy took its cues from the Israelis, who told Bolton that
the Iranians were getting close to "the point of no return." That was point, Bolton wrote, at which "we could not stop
their progress without using force."
Cheney and Bolton based their war strategy on the premise that the U.S. military would
be able to consolidate control over Iraq quickly. Instead the U.S. occupation bogged down and never fully recovered.
Cheney proposed taking advantage of a high-casualty event in Iraq that could be blamed on Iran to
attack
an IRGC base in Iran in the summer of 2007.
But the risk that pro-Iranian
Shiite militias in Iraq would retaliate against U.S. troops was a key argument against the proposal.
The Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were also well aware that Iran had the
capability to retaliate directly against U.S. forces in the region, including against warships in the Strait of Hormuz.
They had no patience for Cheney's wild ideas about more war.
That Pentagon caution remains unchanged. But two minds in the White House unhinged
from reality could challenge that wariness -- and push the United States closer towards a dangerous war with Iran.
I believe "War With Iran" is on the agenda.
I wrote the article below some time ago.
"Will There Be War With Iran"?
Is it now Iran's turn to be subjected to the planned and hellish wars that have already engulfed Iraq, Libya,
Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan and other countries? Will, the gates of hell be further opened to include an attack
on Iran?
Unfortunately, John Bolton is not just your typical neocon pathological liar and warmonger. Even by their abysmal
standards he's pretty unhinged. He is one of the most dangerous people around these days.
The re-emergence of Bolton is the result of Trump's electoral victory, a phenomenon that resembles the upheavals
that followed when an unhinged hereditary ruler would take the reins of power in bygone empires.
There's a big difference between the wars with Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Somalia, and a war with Iran. The
difference is, this is a war the United States could lose. And lose very, very badly. As Pompeo remarked, it would
take "only" 2000 airstrikes to eliminate the Iranian nuclear facilities. But what will it take to land 20,000
marines on the northern coast of the Persian Gulf to secure the straits, and there fend off 1.7 million Iranian
regulars and militia on the ground? How will the navy cope with hundreds and hundreds of supersonic cruise
missiles fired in volleys? What about the S-300 missiles that are by now fully operational in Iran?
A look at
the map shows that this is a war that the US simply cannot win.
Unless it uses nuclear weapons and simply sets out to kill every last man, woman, and child in Iran, all 80
million of them.
Which I suppose is not out of the question. As all options are sure to be on the table.
"Everyone worshipped the dragon because he had given his authority to the beast. They worshipped the beast also,
saying, 'Who is like the beast? Who can fight against it?'" Revelation 13:4
Who can fight against the U.S/NATO?
Bolton, Gen. Jack Keane, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters and the whole warmongering crowd that frequent the air waves at
FOX will not rest until they have us at war with Iran and Russia.
So Trump is thinking of hiring a loudmouthed incompetent who is a known conduit for botched Israeli spy service
forgeries used to gin up war with Iran. What a sick farce.
Bolton is a cancer for the US. As a warmonger, he thrives in hostile environnements so no wonder Bolton wants to
create them with no regards for consequences.
Well, we need the John Bolton's of this world for times in which a uncompromising use of force is required.
But I don't need background to know that advocating for wars that serve little in the way of US interests
because we simply are not in any "clear and present danger".
Odd that so many "old schoolers" have abandoned some general cliche's that serve as sound guide.
Just when you think you've heard the last of the various catastrophes, blunders, and odd capering about involving
Bolton, you hear that voice from the old late night gadget commercials barking "wait,
there's more
!!"
I
doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that Bolton was duped by Israeli forgers (very droll story, by the way). You'd think that no serious person would consider giving him a National Security Council post, particularly
given the current level of concern about "foreign meddling".
"The Boltons, Frums, and Boots of the world never have to fight the wars they start."
Hey now, Bolton's service
in the Maryland National Guard made sure the North Vietnamese never landed in Baltimore. Can you imagine the
horror if the Russians had captured our supply of soft shell crab?
John Bolton a 75 year old loser, a has Never-been, which is the mouth piece of the Zionists who keep him on the
pay roll. He likes to hear his own voice and to feel important because he wants war with Iran or all the Middle
East. He's actions and speeches are all emotional and lack logic and reasoning.
So, what is he good for?!
Re: "Well, we need the John Bolton's of this world for times in which a uncompromising use of force is required."
Not sure about that. We definitely need Roosevelts and Lincolns, Grants and Shermans and Eisenhowers and Pattons.
I'm not clear on what function the likes of Bolton serve.
I do not agree that Iran could prevent a conventional bombing/invasion of their country. But they could make it
sooo expensive, the dollar ceases to be the world reserve currency, and if they do that, they will have done
mankind a favor.
But after the conquest, imagine the guerrilla war! The US basically had to fight an insurgency
from amongst 5 million Sunni Arabs in Iraq. Iran is much more ethnically homogeneous. So even if you get some
minorities to turncoat and work for the occupiers, you are still left with about 60 million ethnically Persian
Shiites. That is a 12 times larger insurgency than what you had in Iraq.
And if the Iranians had any sense RIGHT NOW, they would make sure every family had a stock of 10 powerful
anti-vehicle mines, REALLY powerful mines. Make sure all are safely buried with locations memorized. And make sure
everyone had the training to use them, even older children (who will be the front-line guerrillas in 5 years).
So if that devil Bolton gets his way, his own country will pay a price too, and deservedly too. I want my
country to be peaceful and friendly to the world like the Germans are now. But it may take the same type of "WWII
treatment" to get my hateful war-loving countrymen to walk away from their sin.
The guerrilla war in Iraq was fought against only 5 million Sunni Arabs, the US occupiers having successfully
pealed away the Kurds and Shia to be collaborators, or at least stay uninvolved with the insurgency.
But Iran is
not just bigger than Iraq, but much more ethnically and religiously homogeneous. Imagine what kind of insurgency
you might get from 60 million ethnically Persian Shiites?
My advice to the Iranians RIGHT NOW is to mass-produce the most lethal anti-vehicle mines possible and
distribute them to the entire civilian population. Train everyone how to use them, then once trained, bury maybe
20 mines per family, all in known but hidden locations.
THAT will stop the Bolton/Zionist plan dead in its tracks.
Maybe it was a career-enhancing move. It is a legitimate question, along
with "follow the money"? Regardless of why sociopaths like Keith Payne or John Bolton become obsessed with
"winning nuclear war" or "bombing Iran" . How do they make a living? Who would bankroll somebody – over many decades – to not just consider or plan, but actively provoke illegal
acts of aggressive war, against declared policy of the government and the demands of the Constitution they have
sworn an oath to uphold?
It is also educational to see that the fabrications and other "war-program related activities" in regards to
Iran resemble the same stovepipelines that provide the Iraq 2003 pretexts – with Powell reprising his role as
useful idiot – which clashes badly with the "blunder" narrative that anybody in the US government actually
believed Iraq had WMD – was beyond "the point of no return".
This also bodes ill for a Bolton-formulated policy on Korea, and any "National Security Advice" he would see
fit to fabricate and feed to the Bomber In Chief.
Furthermore, we learn just how unhinged Cheney et.al. really were – expecting Iraq to be a mere stepping stone
along their adventures on the "Axis of Evil" trail. If these are our gamblers, nobody would suspect them of
counting cards.
We must look into our very national soul and ask why are we entertaining a war with Iran? The answer is clear. It
is to further the goals of a fanatical, right-wing, group of Zionists. When a truthful history is written about
this era of endless wars, the errant and disgraceful behavior of this group will be clearly identified and they
will not have anywhere to hide. You may fool some of the folks, some of the time, but not all the folks, all of
the time.
Hiring a ghoul like Bolton will mark a new low even for the Trump administration. And that's saying something.
These chickenhawk bastards should all be required to fight on the front lines of the wars they push. That was
true, I'll guarantee you Bolton would shut up in a hurry.
Israel and the Zionists are exactly the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington warned us about. Bolton is
a neocon-Zionist who wants the United States blood and taxes to ensure Israel's dominance of the Middle East.
So Gareth Porter cites his own Truthout article as authority for the assertion that the "laptop documents" are
fabrications. Most of the cited article seems to be devoted to "Curveball", the impeached source of Iraqi
intelligence, in order to prop up the bona fides of the German who claims the Iranian intelligence is a forgery.
Any other sourcing for this allegation available?
Judging from a quick look at what else Truthout has on offer,
I'm not sure about the credibility of Mr. Porter.
Thank you Mr. Porter for your insightful and intelligent articles, being that I am from Iran Originally brings
tears to my eyes to even imagine such tragedy, I pray this will never happen. Having lived in America more than
half of my life and having children that are Americans makes these thoughts even more horrifying . I am however
thankful to read all the comments from so many intelligent , decent and true Americans and that gives me hope that
such disaster will not take place. The people of Iran are decent and kind and cultured , I am hopeful that they
will find their way and bring about a true democracy soon and again become a positive force to the humanity.
WASHINGTON -- Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the battle-tested Army officer tapped
as President Trump's national security adviser last year to stabilize a turbulent foreign
policy operation, will resign and be replaced by John R. Bolton, a hard-line former United
States ambassador to the United Nations, White House officials said Thursday.
General McMaster will retire from the military, the officials said. He has been discussing
his departure with President Trump for several weeks, they said, but decided to speed up his
departure, in part because questions about his status were casting a shadow over his
conversations with foreign officials.
The officials also said that Mr. Trump wanted to fill out his national security team before
his meeting with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un. He
replaced Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson with the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, last
week.
Officials emphasized that General McMaster's departure was a mutual decision and amicable,
with none of the recrimination that marked Mr. Tillerson's exit. They said it was not related
to a leak on Tuesday of
briefing materials for Mr. Trump's phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia.
In the materials, Mr. Trump was advised not to congratulate Mr. Putin on his re-election,
which the president went ahead and did during the call.
Mr. Bolton, who will take office April 9, has met regularly with Mr. Trump to discuss
foreign policy, and was on a list of candidates for national security adviser. He was in the
West Wing with Mr. Trump to discuss the job on Thursday.
MUNICH -- Just hours after the Justice Department indicted 13 Russians in what it charged
was a broad conspiracy to alter the 2016 election, President Trump's national security adviser,
Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, accused Moscow of engaging in a campaign of "disinformation,
subversion and espionage" that he said Washington would continue to expose.
The evidence of a Russian effort to interfere in the election "is now incontrovertible,"
General McMaster said at the Munich Security Conference, an annual meeting of European and
American diplomats and security experts, including several senior Russian officials. On Friday,
just hours before the indictment, the top White House official for cyberissues accused Russia
of "the most destructive cyberattack in human history," against Ukraine last summer.
Taken together, the statements appeared to mark a major turn in the administration's
willingness to directly confront the government of President Vladimir V. Putin. Defense
Secretary Jim Mattis and C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo also attended the Munich conference, and
while they did not speak publicly, in private meetings with others here they reiterated similar
statements.
The comments highlighted a sharp division inside the administration about how to talk about
the Russian covert efforts, with only Mr. Trump and a few of his close advisers holding back
from acknowledging the Russian role or talking about a larger strategy to deter future
attacks.
The indictment characterized the cyberattacks and social media fraud as part of a larger
effort by Russia to undermine the United States. A senior administration official called the
effort to confront Russia "a significant point of contention" within the administration.
After the indictment on Friday Mr. Trump declared in a Twitter post that "the results of the
election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong -- no collusion!" He made no
mention of Russia as a "revisionist power," the description used in his own National Security
Strategy, or of the elaborate $1.2 million-a-month effort that the indictment indicated
Russia's Internet Research Agency spent in an effort to discredit the election system and
ultimately to support his candidacy.
Vice President Mike Pence, speaking this past week in Washington, misstated American
intelligence conclusions about the election hacking, arguing "it is the universal conclusion of
our intelligence communities that none of those efforts had any effect on the outcome of the
2016 election." The intelligence chiefs have said they have not, and cannot, reach such a
conclusion.
Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, cited Mr. Pence's comments during the
session here Saturday to make the case that Russia did nothing wrong. "So until we see the
facts, everything else is just blabber," he said.
The man who served as the Russian ambassador to the United States during the period covered
by the indictments, Sergey I. Kislyak, picked up on a favorite theme of Mr. Trump's:
questioning the credibility of the F.B.I. and intelligence agency assessments.
"I have seen so many indictments and accusations against Russians," Mr. Kislyak said on
Saturday afternoon. "I am not sure I can trust American law enforcement to be the most truthful
source against Russians." He added, "The allegations being mounted against us are simply
fantasies."
Mr. Kislyak, who has been caught up in the investigation because of meetings with Trump
campaign officials during his time as ambassador, went on to cite a study, which he said he was
keeping in his briefcase, that proved the "main source of computer attacks in the world is not
Russia. It is the United States."
robert e williamson jr , March 20, 2018 at 12:44 pm
Ray good stuff. Let us talk about the Israelis and the problems they have created in this
country. I'm 69 drafted in May 1968 no Vietnam, I was a spook attached to the 592nd Signal Co
of the Berlin Brigade. I got hooked and I haven't really been a "TRUE BELIEVER" since. I mean
that in the sense that I have suspected the activities of the state ever since.
I'm no genius and you may already gather that , no matter, but I know B.S. from Shinola
which was a famous shoe polish.
I have been anti-Israeli Government since I realized who they were. The Israelis
compromised J.J. Angleton and our country has been adversely affected ever since. They have
compromised our sovereignty ever since.
Shapiro spirited SNM-fissile out of the country. The Israelis I believe needed JFK dead so
they made sure he became deceased. He was in the way and with so many others hating him and
his brother after he challenged the CIA, his days were numbered. Then it was Bobbies turn.
The damned guy just wouldn't quit, so when it became obvious he was likely to be elected
president in 68 he had to go also. Nice Irish Catholic boy scout like him wasn't about to let
those who murdered his brother get away with it. But it much more involved than simply him
getting his brothers killers. RFK had front row knowledge of his brother battles with the
Israelis over their nuclear weapons program.
Sometime during 1967 John Hadden learned that Portsmouth Ohio HEU-235 was present in
Isreal. In April or May Helms contacted the attorney general about this and then the FBI
contacted him, Ramsey Clark, in May about opening an investigation in Zalmon Shaprio of NUMEC
fame. At that point in time I can see that RFK must go. If RFK had learned of the Portsmouth
Ohio U-235 in Israel he would have known immediately who had what to hide and why. His
friggin' security detail should have been beefed up. Nothing of the sort happened. So
depending on how you count the days from the time that CIA and FBI contacted the AG R Clark
about the U-235 in Israel and FBI contacted the AG was a matter or 30 or so days. RFK died on
June 6, 1968 and it was no Dogdamned coincident.
I have done limited research on the CIA machinations and FBI investigations connected with
the NUMEC saga. The pursuit of the investigation was hampered because "The Fix" was in and I
think you know this.
The present time is the best time I've seen in my life to expose this bullshit for what it
is. Keep up the great work.
"... "the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." ..."
The Nuremberg judges rejected the Nuremberg defense, and both Jodl and Keitel were hanged.
The United Nations International Law Commission later codified the
underlying principle from Nuremberg as "the fact that a person acted pursuant to order
of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international
law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
This is likely the most famous declaration in the history of international law and is as
settled as anything possibly can be.
However, many members of the Washington, D.C. elite are now stating that it, in fact, is a
legitimate defense for American officials who violate international law to claim they were just
following orders.
Specifically, they say Gina Haspel, a top CIA officer whom President
Donald Trump has designated to be the agency's next director, bears no responsibility for the
torture she supervised during George W. Bush's administration.
Haspel
oversaw a secret "black site" in Thailand, at which prisoners were waterboarded and
subjected to other severe forms of abuse. Haspel later participated in the destruction of the
CIA's videotapes of some of its torture sessions. There is informed
speculation that part of the CIA's motivation for destroying these records may have been
that they showed operatives employing torture to generate false "intelligence" used to justify
the invasion of Iraq.
John Kiriakou, a former CIA operative who helped capture many Al Qaeda prisoners, recently
said that Haspel was known to some at the agency as "Bloody Gina" and that "Gina and people
like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of
torture, not for the sake of gathering information." (In 2012, in a convoluted
case , Kiriakou
pleaded guilty to leaking the identity of a covert CIA officer to the press and spent a
year in prison.)
Article of interest at link below.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"WASHINGTON BREAKS OUT THE "JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS" NAZI DEFENSE FOR CIA DIRECTOR-DESIGNATE
GINA HASPEL"
Jon Schwarz
You are in a tiny bubble, and just because your small, smart sample seems "woke," don't
imagine IQ is any barometer for resistance to group-think and propaganda.
Furthermore, don't assume that humans, high IQ or otherwise, are capable of extrapolation.
My lunch group was composed of Christian activists who have [each] spent decades advocating
for Palestinians. They are intimately aware of how propaganda has biased Americans for
Israel. They have seen the film, Occupation of the American Mind . They know that only
by persistent clever marketing, the Zionists sold the fraudulent "noble little Israel"
myth.
And yet, they accept unquestioningly the MSM fake news about ANY OTHER SUBJECT. I find
this particularly galling, but I believe it's a form of denial they use because the cognitive
dissonance would be just too much to bear.
Alas, I stayed with USA friends, well educated middle class, where CNN was the only
'news' source.
Three other USA acquaintances I visited in their homes, cannot remember having seen a
newspaper other than a local one about marriages and funerals.
The USA reminded me of the Peking court, that, when British warships were reported on
the coast, responded with 'there had been so many pirates already'.
In the Badlands, in a very small café, I identified myself as Dutch, from
Holland, Netherlands. When all this did not ring bell I mentioned Europe, the first time in
my life. This was understood.
Jilles, maybe your American friends are simply ignorant and easily fooled. That is the
type of people who make CNN their sole source of news. This doesn't make them average
Americans, just CNN fans.
If I came to visit a friend in Holland, and based my opinion of all Nederlanders on that
friend and three others like him that I met while there, would you agree with me if I said
that the average person in the Netherlands thought like my friend and his three friends?
As such Russia still gravitates towards "a strong man" style of leadership.
Ironically it was the US and its ((advisers)) that first handed all of the Russian wealth
over to the ((oligarchs)), and then, later, supported Yeltsin when he illegally dissolved the
Rada and arrested their leaders (generally known as the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis)
(they had also supported him earlier, back when he was only President of the Russian Soviet
Socialist Republic and Gorbachev was head honcho, when Yeltsin sent tanks to bomb the
Rada/Parliament, during the so-called "August coup"). As a result, so that "their man" had
all the authority he needed to crush any dissent, the US and "West" fully supported the
"authoritarian" Constitution adopted later that year to cement Yeltsin's powers.
But of course now they blame Putin and the "Russian character" for it. Because, you know,
that is how the "West" rolls.
taking on democratic principle is just not as breezy as assumed
Yes and that is why there is not one country, aside perhaps from Switzerland, that is even
remotely democratic. The US is an utter oligarchic tyranny. Some other countries in Europe
may have some minimal claim at a semblance of democracy but it all collapses under closer
scrutiny. Heck many European countries still have their monarchies, including, probably in
the most extreme form, the UK.
Russia has yet to untangle some several hundred years of central authority style
leadership and taking on democratic principle is just not as breezy as assumed.
This is such a cliche phrase. Could you specify where exactly do you see stellar examples
of "democratic principles" ? In the UK with its unelected upper chamber of the parliament and
the Prime Minister, also not elected directly by the citizens? In the US, with its two-party
system in indirect elections? In Australis, with its compulsory voting?
Today's Russia is as democratic as any Western country, more so than some. Whatever
peculiarities our political system has is due to our history, the same as in any other
country. The same as in the UK, with their "constitutional" monarchy in the absence of actual
constitution. The same as in the US, with their voting system designed by Founding Fathers.
Russia is large and divers; some centralized authority is needed to keep it together
structurally and mentally, that is all.
The whining is coming for the land of Bush the lesser, Cheney five deferments, Rice
mushroom cloud, Chicago-style elections, and the Lobby strict censorship over the US Congress
(only Israel-firsters are allowed). Wouldn't it be great if the US first punish her own
criminals, including banksters and dual-citizenship spies? Four million civilians --
including a multitude of children -- were slaughtered in the Middle East since 1999 to
satisfy the desires of Israel-firsters, MIC, and oilmen. And yet, the major war criminals who
pushed for the wars of aggression (a supreme crime) are wondering free: from Bush and Kristol
to Clinton and Powers
Comment section: " all these statements by Votel are true and it took a good deal of
courage to make them in public." -- Get it? Just stating truthfully that Syria has won a
civil war is an anathema to the Lobby and it takes a great personal courage by a four-star
general in the United States Army who has been commander of United States Central Command to
testify the truth for the US Congress.
Russian Federation is an independent state. The US is ZUSA -- Ziocon United States of
America. Ukraine has become the Kaganat of Nuland, and the UK has become a personal estate of
the Friends of Israel. For example, Boris Johnson proclaimed himself a committed Zionist:
http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/boris-johnson-zionist/
"... It is an open secret that the CIA has been leaking like the proverbial sieve over the last two years or so to its favorite stenographers at the New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post. ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... On April 6, 2017 I attended a panel discussion on "Russia's interference in our democracy" at the Clinton/Podesta Center for American Progress Fund. In my subsequent write-up I noted that panelist Palmieri had inadvertently dropped tidbits of evidence that I suggested "could get some former officials in deep kimchi -- if a serious investigation of leaking, for example, were to be conducted." ..."
"... Palmieri was asked to comment on "what was actually going on in late summer/early fall [2016]." She answered: "It was a surreal experience so I did appreciate that for the press to absorb the idea that behind the stage that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton was too fantastic for people to, um, for the press to process, to absorb . ..."
"... But she lost. And a month ago, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) threw down the gauntlet, indicating that there could be legal consequences, for example, for officials who misled the FISA court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and associates. ..."
"... John Brennan is widely reported to be Nunes's next target. Does one collect a full pension in jail? ..."
"... Unmasking: Senior national security officials are permitted to ask the National Security Agency to unmask the names of Americans in intercepted communications for national security reasons -- not for domestic political purposes. ..."
"... Brennan's words and attitude are a not-so-subtle reminder of the heavy influence and confidence of the deep state, including the media -- exercised to a fare-thee-well over the past two years. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the Washington Post ..."
"... The Post, incidentally, waited until paragraph 41 of 44 to inform readers that it was the FBI's own Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General of the Department of Justice that found McCabe guilty, and that the charge was against McCabe, not the FBI. A quite different impression was conveyed by the large headline "Trump escalates attacks on FBI" as well as the first 40 paragraphs of Sunday's lead article. ..."
"... "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," Schumer told Maddow. "So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." Did Maddow ask Schumer if he was saying President of the United States should be afraid of the intelligence community? No, she let Schumer's theorem stand. ..."
With former CIA Director John Brennan accusing President Donald Trump of "moral turpitude"
for his "scapegoating" of Andy McCabe, it remains to be seen whether a constitutional crisis
will be averted, writes Ray McGovern.
What prompted former CIA Director John Brennan on Saturday to accuse President Donald Trump
of "moral turpitude" and to predict, with an alliterative flourish, that Trump will end up "as
a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history"? The answer shines through the next sentence
in Brennan's threatening tweet : "You
may scapegoat Andy McCabe [former FBI Deputy Director fired Friday night] but you will not
destroy America America will triumph over you."
It is easy to see why Brennan lost it. The Attorney General fired McCabe, denying him full
retirement benefits, because McCabe "had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and
lacked candor -- including under oath -- on multiple occasions." There but for the grace of God
go I, Brennan must have thought, whose stock in trade has been unauthorized disclosures.
In fact, Brennan can take but small, short-lived consolation in the fact that he succeeded
in leaving with a full government pension. His own unauthorized disclosures and leaks probably
dwarf in number, importance, and sensitivity those of McCabe. And many of those leaks appear to
have been based on sensitive intercepted conversations from which the names of American
citizens were unmasked for political purposes. Not to mention the leaks of faux intelligence
like that contained in the dubious "dossier" cobbled together for the Democrats by British
ex-spy Christopher Steele.
It is an open secret that the CIA has been leaking like the proverbial sieve over the
last two years or so to its favorite stenographers at the New York Times and
Washington Post. (At one point, the obvious whispering reached the point that the
Wall Street Journal saw fit to complain that it was being neglected.) The leaking can
be traced way back -- at least as far as the Clinton campaign's decision to blame the Russians
for the publication of very damning DNC emails by WikiLeaks just three days before the
Democratic National Convention.
This blame game turned out to be a hugely successful effort to divert attention from the
content of the emails, which showed in bas relief the dirty tricks the DNC
played on Bernie Sanders. The media readily fell in line, and all attention was deflected from
the substance of the DNC emails to the question as to why the Russians supposedly
"hacked into the DNC and gave the emails to WikiLeaks."
This media operation worked like a charm, but even Secretary Clinton's PR person, Jennifer
Palmieri, conceded later that at first it strained credulity that the Russians would be doing
what they were being accused of doing.
Magnificent Diversion
On April 6, 2017 I attended a panel discussion on "Russia's interference in our
democracy" at the Clinton/Podesta Center for American Progress Fund. In my subsequent write-up I noted that panelist
Palmieri had inadvertently dropped tidbits of evidence that I suggested "could get some former
officials in deep kimchi -- if a serious investigation of leaking, for example, were to be
conducted." (That time seems to be coming soon.)
Palmieri was asked to comment on "what was actually going on in late summer/early fall
[2016]." She answered: "It was a surreal experience so I did appreciate that for the press to
absorb the idea that behind the stage that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to
defeat Hillary Clinton was too fantastic for people to, um, for the press to process, to absorb
.
"But then we go back to Brooklyn [Clinton headquarters] and heard from the -- mostly our
sources were other intelligence, with the press who work in the intelligence sphere, and that's
where we heard things and that's where we learned about the dossier and the other story lines
that were swirling about; and how to process And along the way the administration started
confirming various pieces of what they were concerned about what Russia was doing. So I do
think that the answer for the Democrats now in both the House and the Senate is to talk about
it more and make it more real."
So the leaking had an early start, and went on steroids during the months following the
Democratic Convention up to the election -- and beyond.
As a Reminder
None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, or other activities directed against the Trump
campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind that it was considered a sure
thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which point illegal and extralegal
activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not prison.
But she lost. And a month ago, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA)
threw down the gauntlet, indicating
that there could be legal consequences, for example, for officials who misled the FISA court in
order to enable surveillance on Trump and associates. His words are likely to have sent
chills down the spine of yet other miscreants. "If they need to be put on trial, we will put
them on trial," he said. "The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we
created."
John Brennan is widely reported to be Nunes's next target. Does one collect a full
pension in jail?
Unmasking: Senior national security officials are permitted to ask the National Security
Agency to unmask the names of Americans in intercepted communications for national security
reasons -- not for domestic political purposes. Congressional committees have questioned
why Obama's UN ambassador Samantha Power (as well as his national security adviser Susan Rice)
made so many unmasking requests. Power is reported to have requested the unmasking of more than
260 Americans, most of them in the final days of the administration, including the names of
Trump associates.
Deep State Intimidation
Back to John Brennan's bizarre tweet Saturday telling the President, "You may scapegoat Andy
McCabe but you will not destroy America America will triumph over you." Unmasking the word
"America," so to speak, one can readily discern the name "Brennan" underneath. Brennan's
words and attitude are a not-so-subtle reminder of the heavy influence and confidence of the
deep state, including the media -- exercised to a fare-thee-well over the past two
years.
Later on Saturday, Samantha Power, with similar equities at stake, put an exclamation point
behind what Brennan had tweeted earlier in the day. Power also saw fit to remind Trump where
the power lies, so to speak. She warned him publicly that it is "not a good idea to piss off
John Brennan."
Meanwhile, the Washington Post is dutifully playing its part in the deep-state
game of intimidation. The following excerpt from Sunday's lead article conveys the intended
message: "Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI. 'This
is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI's going to win,' said one ally, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to be candid. 'You can't fight the FBI. They're going to torch him.'"
[sic]
The Post, incidentally, waited until paragraph 41 of 44 to inform readers that it was
the FBI's own Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General of the Department
of Justice that found McCabe guilty, and that the charge was against McCabe, not the FBI. A
quite different impression was conveyed by the
large headline "Trump escalates attacks on FBI" as well as the first 40 paragraphs of Sunday's
lead article.
Putting Down a Marker
It isn't as though Donald Trump wasn't warned, as are all incoming presidents, of the power
of the Deep State that he needs to play ball with -- or else. Recall that just three days
before President-elect Trump was visited by National Intelligence Director James Clapper, FBI
Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Michael Rogers, Trump was put
on notice by none other than the Minority Leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer. Schumer has been
around and knows the ropes; he is a veteran of 18 years in the House, and is in his 20th year
in the Senate.
On Jan. 3, 2017 Schumer said it all, when he told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, that
President-elect Trump is "being really dumb" by taking on the intelligence community and its
assessments on Russia's cyber activities:
"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday
at getting back at you," Schumer told Maddow. "So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed
businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." Did Maddow ask Schumer if he was saying
President of the United States should be afraid of the intelligence community? No, she let
Schumer's theorem stand.
With gauntlets now thrown down by both sides, we may not have to wait very long to see if
Schumer is correct in his blithe prediction as to how the present constitutional crisis will be
resolved.
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as a CIA analyst under seven Presidents and nine
CIA directors and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).
" As far as we all know now are quite hard times to Russia and to the world as a whole.
"
Why do we have these hard times ?
Could it be globalisation, western greed, and western aggression ?
Well, probably it can be more clear for those who are attacking and humiliating Russia in
all directions? The West-ZUS-UK
But I think it's just an agony of Empire seeing the world order is about to change. And
yes it's "western greed" which have a "western aggression" as a consequence.
The "globalisation" actually IS that world order which the West trying to
establish. Russia in all times in all its internal structure was a subject of annexation and
submission. But we never agreed and never will do it, until alive. The West is too stupid to
get that simple thing to know and leave us to live as we are about to.
Aside from the obvious legalized bribery (Citizens United), the absolute control of the
corrupt 2-party system, the oligarchic and utterly undemocratic mass media, etc., we also had
the case in 2000 that a bunch of unelected dictators-for-life "decided" the US election,
clearly unlawfully. Bush vs. Gore.
Yes, US is in no position to be lecturing anybody about "democracy". But US is not short
on chutzpah in any political realm.
If elections resulted in real change, Yankees wouldn't have them. All theater for the
zombies, aka the voting class. Only zombies would argue over the merits of the candidates.
The US needs very little from its citizens. These includes obedience, widespread ignorance
and the unquestioned belief they live in a Democracy because voting happens.
The best slaves are the ones that lack the intelligence to recognize their own slavery.
The happiest slaves know that voting is a rigged sham but don't care because the right master
leads them.
Now, that I believe. Due to dismal school system (purely parochial, no national standards,
local boards full of ignoramuses decide what kids are taught in school) too many Americans
sincerely believe that the world consists of three roughly equal parts: Main street,
out-of-town, and overseas. I guess the election results in the last few decades show this
clearly.
Alas, I stayed with USA friends, well educated middle class, where CNN was the only 'news'
source.
Three other USA acquaintances I visited in their homes, cannot remember having seen a
newspaper other than a local one about marriages and funerals.
The USA reminded me of the Peking court, that, when British warships were reported on the
coast, responded with 'there had been so many pirates already'.
In the Badlands, in a very small café, I identified myself as Dutch, from Holland,
Netherlands. When all this did not ring bell I mentioned Europe, the first time in my life.
This was understood.
Anon from TN
Maybe I overestimate American citizens (I work at a top-rate University and communicate
mostly with faculty and grad students), but I'd like to come to their defense. CNN (as well
as FOX news, NYT, and other MSM) represent the views of the lower half of US citizens by IQ.
As far as I can tell, blatant lies of Western propaganda achieved among the people with
brains the same result as the Soviet propaganda: even if they state something truthful for a
change, people would doubt that.
You're truly delusional if you think CNN does NOT represent average American thinking, at
least a large paart of it. Last week I suffered through a luncheon of 5 mature adults
extolling Rachel Maddow. Sickening.
"... Well, the party lime is pretty different: "Treat Russia Like the Terrorist It Is. Whether the Skripal poisoning can be conclusively pinned on Moscow is beside the point." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-09/u-k-spy-poisoning-treat-russia-like-the-terrorist-it-is ..."
"... The fact that neither Putin personally nor Russia benefits from the death of Skripal is obvious to any sane person. ..."
"... In addition, statements that gas called "Novichok could be made only in Russia is a known lie. This poison was created forty years ago in the USSR, so to have this gas can, at a minimum, all countries of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The inventor of the gas has fled to the US, and the chemical composition of the gas is known and now it can be manufactured it any relatively developed country. ..."
"... It would be possible not to poison Skripal by gas, but simply to strike on the head by the bust of Dzerzhinsky. It would be the same level of evidence, of the guilt of the FSB, the KGB successor of the successor of the VChK. ..."
"... Basically, we have a political elite who needs an enemy to distract their own people from what they are doing and oh, do they miss the Soviet Union. ..."
I'm a socialist. I don't understand how a conservative is getting this so right! There is a mad
rush to judgment and anyone who wants to ask questions is getting accused of being unpatriotic.
Quite a sensible article. The fact that neither Putin personally nor Russia benefits from
the death of Skripal is obvious to any sane person.
In addition, statements that gas called "Novichok could be made only in Russia is a
known lie. This poison was created forty years ago in the USSR, so to have this gas can, at a
minimum, all countries of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The inventor of the gas
has fled to the US, and the chemical composition of the gas is known and now it can be
manufactured it any relatively developed country.
It would be possible not to poison Skripal by gas, but simply to strike on the head by
the bust of Dzerzhinsky. It would be the same level of evidence, of the guilt of the FSB, the
KGB successor of the successor of the VChK.
At the end of 1980s there was a project started by KGB supposed (1) to detect possible channels
of security leakage, and (2) to begin spreading misinformation to potential adversaries.
Different names were used to test different security leaks. The name "NOVICHOK" used to
identify misinformation given to one of suspects, Vil Mirzayanov who was not chemist but rather
a clerk. Very soon this security leakage was detected, and tons of other misinformation
supplied to Mirzayanov, who was immediately secretly discharged from access to any real
project. Mirzayanov was allowed to publish this fake info in NYT (around 1992-95?), and then to
escape from Russia in 1995.
Since that time NATO has spent about $10 billions to develop protection tools against this
fake "NOVICHOK"
P.S. The Russian word NOVICHOK stands for "a newbie"; from Russian grammar point of view,
there is no chance such word to be assigned to any chemical weapon. It was assigned to
Mirzayanov who was "a newbie" to this sort of projects at that time.
Cui bono: every murder of a Russian dissident/defector/oligarch/critical journalist, cannot
possibly have happened on Putin's orders or with his tacit approval, because it reflects badly
on Russia.
So, we have two possible explanations: some Western intelligence agency is murdering those
people, probably without the knowledge of their own government (you'd have think that someone
in elected office would have stopped such a programme by now); or the Russian Putin opposition
is killing its own people, both in Russia and abroad. If the goal of such an operation is the
destabilization of the Putin regime through Western sanctions, it is obviously not working.
You say cui bono, I say Occam's razor. Putin takes out those who might threaten him, raises
his popularity, the sanctions are used to cover up his own disastrous economical policies, and
in the end nothing changes.
We *knew* Iraq had no nukes, and we knew that the Bush administration lied, and we knew that
"WMD" is the kind of BS we make up when there are no nukes.
Buchanan is not arguing in good faith. What Maine, Tonkin and WMD are about is *lies*, lies
in service of criminal acts of aggression, lies to facilitate a premeditated violation of the
Constitution as well as international law.
That is frankly a more important issue than the – justified and necessary –
doubts regarding the attempted Skripal assassination and the motives behind it.
This is also true of an ongoing campaign employing drones – some controlled by CIA
illegal combatants – and kill teams to implement collective punishment and ideological
cleansing by means of sustained assassination – based on "signatures" provided by the
likes of Google or Booz Allen. The US has no standing to judge the assassination attempts of
others, just as our government can no longer meaningfully speak out on aggressive acts of war,
collective punishment, and torture. A house divided cannot stand for anything.
You say that the burden of proof is on the accused? That works in many parts of the world,
but I hope that we here in the US have had a better standard of Justice. The burden of proof
falls upon the accuser, in this case Britain. There is no ther standard that America should
accept if we are to remain true to American principals. Not that I expect that our current
oligarchy will care about principals.
Exactly. Putin's long term strategy is an integrated Pan-Eurasian economic architecture in
which Europe would be a major customer segment. That is why the EAEU was stood up by Russia and
the BRI stood up by China. With supporting investment platforms like the AIIB to enable the
initiatives.
Given that objective, why would Russia/Putin seek to totally wreck its relationship with
Europe? More importantly what would be the motive and objectives for Russia to attack Poland
and the Baltic Republics – the fear-monger threats du jour? When an overrun of Poland
would create 30+ million subversive malcontents that Russia would have to govern, and when
there are only minority ethnic Russian populations in the Baltics?
The driving force behind the illogical and incoherent demonization of Russia is the
Washington War Party that froths up the political environment with the militarized
fear-mongering. Because as Fran Macadam notes, there's Big Money in it. And the Neocon
war-monger mouthpieces need some Big Enemies to keep themselves relevant, busy and living very
large on the $200K – $600K salaries they collect at the bought off Think
Pimp Tanks.
A crazed U.S. foreign policy that has been completely militarized is a train wreck waiting
to happen. And us taxpayers will yet again be stuck with the bills to clean up the
wreckage.
Sovietologists? Now this, more than anything else, explains the reflexive anti-Russia
hysteria. Who cares what historians dealing with the twentieth century Soviet Union think about
current events? Historians provide useful insight, yes, but that does not mean they are
conversant with current events. What you are doing is throwing in a fear laden buzzword.
Basically, we have a political elite who needs an enemy to distract their own people from
what they are doing and oh, do they miss the Soviet Union.
Our leaders are enthusiastic about being aggressive with the Russians, but the America Empire
has a problem attracting enough volunteers to join the military.
For example, the Air Force has a shortage of 2,000 pilots and the Navy has a shortage of
mechanics that they need to work on their on their aircraft.
The U.S. and Britain showed more respect to Joseph Stalin, the Butcher, than it has shown to
Putin. The demonization of Putin in all the mainstream media outlets is the tip-off to me that
Putin must be a pretty good guy doing some good things for Russia.
"If the world hates you know that it has hated me first. If the world loves you it is
because you belong to the world." -- Jesus Christ
>>Given the poison used it means one to two things -- either it was Russian secret
services or the Russians have lost control over their poisons. Either one is a nasty thought.
Why? It was presumably created 40 years ago. Pretty much to time for information to spread
around.
E.g., Kim's brother was presumably (again) poisoned by VX. Does it mean that it was MI-6? It's
a British invention after all.
In any case, this story stinks, pardon for a word pun. A 'military grade agent' and no
casualties. How could it be?
>>Why do it? To prove they can. To prove that no matter where you go they can get
you -- that there is no safety.
Safety from what? This guy was non-entity, nobody knew him. More importantly, he has been
already punished and pardoned, so double no sense.
>>I am sure Gary Kasparov is feeling a bit worried right now and Bill Browder is
thinking of moving somewhere new.
Well, I'd suspect that Rodchenko and Khodorkovskiy are more evident sacrificial targets.
Pat asks important questions. Unless we ever see the "evidence" to which Boris Johnson refers,
or other direct evidence that this hit (and others) in Britain was directed by the Kremlin,
it's worth continuing to ask them.
"Who benefits?" Indeed, it could be rogue Russian agents or Western agents attempting to
further drive a wedge between the West and Russia.
But it could also be Putin signalling that the Russia which held onto traitorous spies
between 2006 and 2010 is over.
It could be him simply trying to show that he can reach people inside the West, a pure flexing
of muscle, a warning to future would-be traitors and Western governments. It could be to
make America's allies nervous about Putin's relationship with his American puppet, Trumpolini.
It could be just Putin sowing chaos and attempting to create discord among Western
governments.
Skepticism about the latest pronouncements is valid, but Occam's Razor still applies. If it
growls like a Russian bear and kills like a Russian bear
Who could be so phillistine as to suggest, on the eve of the World Cup, that Premier Andropov's
KGB protege', Major Putin, would one day stoop to whacking a traitorous defector from the Party
Line ?
>>Skepticism about the latest pronouncements is valid, but Occam's Razor still
applies. If it growls like a Russian bear and kills like a Russian bear
Occam's Razor, my backside. Some guys from MI-5 tried to kill him like they killed David
Kelly and Gareth Williams before. It's as credible as it gets, exactly the same amount of
evidence.
"... We don't want to live like you live, anymore. For fifty years, secretly and openly, we wanted to live like you, but not any longer. We have no more respect for you, and for those amongst us that you support, and for all those people who support you. That's how this 5% came to be. ..."
"... For that you only have yourself to blame. And also your Western politicians and analysts, newsmakers and scouts. Our people are capable to forgive a lot. But we don't forgive arrogance, and no normal nation would. Your only remaining Empire would be wise to learn history of its allies, all of them are former empires. To learn the ways they lost their empires. Only because of their arrogance. ..."
"... (in English in the original text -- trans. ..."
"... Neo-Liberalism is the worst because under this pseudo science they consider all things including the land, the air, the water, the human beings and the same life (all nature) as their rightful commodities. ..."
"... Unfortunately in this case Karl Rove is only making reference to what has been decided in political circles in Washington at that time. This habit of "defining new realities" is what all MSM and most Western politicians work after today. At any time at any case the MSM and the West system can change one reality perception to another without being held responsible for the factual truth. ..."
And that's your fault, my Western friends. It was you who pushed us into "Russians never
surrender" mode.
I've been telling you for a long time to find normal advisers on Russia. Sack all those
parasites. With their short-sighted sanctions, heartless humiliation of our athletes (including
athletes with disabilities ), with their "skripals" and ostentatious disregard of the most
basic liberal values, like a presumption of innocence, that they manage to hypocritically
combined with forcible imposition of ultra-liberal ideas in their own countries, their
epileptic mass hysteria, causing in a healthy person a sigh of relief that he lives in Russia,
and not in Hollywood, with their post-electoral mess in the United States, in Germany, and in
the Brexit-zone;
with their attacks on RT, which they cannot forgive for taking advantage of the freedom of
speech and showing to the world how to use it, and it turned out that the freedom of speech
never was intended to be used for good, but was invented as an object of beauty, like some sort
of crystal mop that shines from afar, but is not suitable to clean your stables, with all your
injustice and cruelty, inquisitorial hypocrisy and lies you forced us to stop respecting you.
You and your so called "values."
We don't want to live like you live, anymore. For fifty years, secretly and openly, we
wanted to live like you, but not any longer. We have no more respect for you, and for those
amongst us that you support, and for all those people who support you. That's how this 5% came
to be.
For that you only have yourself to blame. And also your Western politicians and
analysts, newsmakers and scouts. Our people are capable to forgive a lot. But we don't forgive
arrogance, and no normal nation would. Your only remaining Empire would be wise to learn
history of its allies, all of them are former empires. To learn the ways they lost their
empires. Only because of their arrogance.
(in English in the original text --
trans. )
But the only Empire, you have left, ignores history, it doesn't teach it and refuses to
learn it, meaning that it all will end the way it always does, in such cases.
In meantime, you've pushed us to rally around your enemy. Immediately, after you declared
him an enemy, we united around him.
Before, he was just our President, who could be reelected. Now, he has become our Leader. We
won't let you change this. And it was you, who created this situation.
It was you who imposed an opposition between patriotism and liberalism. Although, they
shouldn't be mutually exclusive notions. This false dilemma, created by you, made us to chose
patriotism.
Even though, many of us are really liberals, myself included.
Get cleaned up, now. You don't have much time left.
I agree with you, Margarita, and I am American! I remember as a child, being taught about
that horrid USSR - to be so feared, ready at any moment to bomb us into oblivion! I remember
the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. - not knowing the full details, but being told that Kennedy saved us
all from WWIII. As time went on, we'd watch humorous shows detailing the large percentage of
Russians in USSR wanting to AND defecting to America. We were shown Russians lined up around
city blocks to buy toilet paper, shoes (any size, any color would do). Russians naivety was
always made fun of, casting the majority of you as either clowns or criminals capable of all
heinous crimes. Then came the 90s. I watched Yeltsin tottering around drunk, watched in
horror as the USSR collapsed, wondering what had happened to you. Then came Putin - this
young man being handed the reins of your collapsed, ruined country. Suddenly it seemed, we
saw more and more of him. I remember watching his face when he had to explain to the tearful,
waiting parents and friends of the mariners from the Kursk. His remark that if he could go
down there himself and rescue them he would! I knew then, that this was a man to be watched,
because I admired him at that moment. Over the years, after one successful term after
another, I saw Russia rising like a Phoenix from the ashes of the USSR. I saw the pride
returning to the Russian faces, saw smiles returning to their faces, watched you regaining
your honor, your sovereignty as we started losing ours. Watching and listening, in horror and
fear as more and more of our rights were taken away after 9/11. Discovering that it was a
false flag (one of many, it seems), that took the lives of ordinary Americans and used their
deaths to start killing more people in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attack. More
time going by, more rights taken away here, yet for you, rising ever more to greater economy,
more business friendly environments in Russia, more world trade with an increasing number of
trading partners.
Then started the demonization again - not of USSR, but of Russia - same story, different
name. Putin - guilty of all crimes of mankind, blamed for everything under the sun, capable
and willing to kill people around the globe with impunity, using chemicals and all other
nefarious things! I watched the crimes committed in Ukraine, which deposed the legally
elected president, and that tried to kill him after a coup that put Nazis in his place. I
watched Crimea hold it's referendum, saw the fireworks display afterwards with all the happy
faces. Russia was demonized even more and sanctioned greatly for that. Now to 2017 - I prayed
that Putin would run again - (he waited a long time before stating he would run.) I knew that
Russia sorely needed him to remain at the reins, guiding Russia (and the world, it seems)
around the icebergs of hate, crimes against humanity, local wars, demise of any empathetic
feelings towards others as we are all dragged along to the next, last war. Putin has been the
one who has prevented it from happening in several situations, where it could have been
started. But the demonization continues - little wonder America has lost it's appeal to most
of you!
The deep state has us in thrall - (no Kennedy here now to protect us). I pray daily that
all of us will survive to realize our hopes - yours and ours, but feel on a deep level that
this time it won't happen. It seems that some people here truly want a war - feel they could
survive the strike and retaliate to ruin your country, but that ours would remain mainly
untouched. They think their bunkers will protect them - their expansive underground cities
built for the richest and 'best' of America, while the rest of us are collateral damage. I am
not rich - have no real savings, so am definitely not one of those to be saved - like so
others around me. I'm sure many of you are in the same position, have the same fears and
dreams as I do. I offer all of you my best wishes for a happy, healthy, free and safe world.
Maybe your Putin actually does have a rabbit in his hat, or that silver bullet - the magic
needed to save us all! I truly hope so.
As a Canadian, thank you for your excellent summary of what I have concluded for some
time. Sadly, the US is no longer a Constitutional Republic as established by the founders; it
is not even a representative democracy. What the US has become is an Evil American Empire
that is the greatest threat to peace and prosperity in the US and throughout the entire
world. The good news is that a growing number of people in the US and the Western World
realize this and are working very hard to return America to its founding ideals. The first
stage in this process is the exposure of powerful members of the Deep State who have
infiltrated and corrupted the essential institutions of government, freedom and justice.
I used to be liberal before liberalism became a symbol of stupidity, war mongering and
affiliated with the Deep State and it's rush to rule the world by destroying every society
whose people chose to live life as they saw fit. The translation mechanism for understanding
US leadership is projection. If the mouthpieces ramble on about their values, the meaning is
that they are stating the values of their opponent or target country. If they're accusing a
country of terrorism, they're talking about their own support for terrorism for geopolitical
gains. If they're accusing a country of using chemical weapons, they're really talking about
their own use of chemical weapons to launch another war and destroy yet another country's
society. So one can easily see the true meaning of these psychopaths rantings and rhetoric by
merely using the simple mechanism of projection to determine the truth.
Many times I am completely confused by the use that Americans make of traditional
political or economic terms. "Socialism", for example, applied to Democrats? Calling
"Liberals" those who like to defy society's traditional customs? "Marxism" is no longer a
theory about the conflict of classes, or a dialectical understanding of society! Many
political discussions are due to the different interpretations that people give to the same
words. The US political science vocabulary is in chaos- along with many other US things!
Seventy years ago, George Orwell wrote the prophetic essay, "Politics
and the English Language," in which he noted that politicians,
journalists and academics were increasingly using meaningless words and
euphemisms to make "lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and...
give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Source:
https://www.alternet.org/el...
Totally agree. Fundamental or Philosophical Liberalism has to be with the human being and
his liberties and rights.
Economic Liberalism has to be with the commodities trade and physical money, financial money,
and their privileges put over the human beings, of course this is a euphemism because whom
are really self conceded such privileges are the owners of those goods i.e. International
Usurers.
Economic Liberalism morphed into the worst; into Neo-(Economic)-Liberalism (They call it only
"liberalism" in order to confuse their enemies, all the people). Neo-Liberalism is the worst because under this pseudo science they consider all things
including the land, the air, the water, the human beings and the same life (all nature) as
their rightful commodities.
You're absolutely correct! We've had the worst of the worst running and influencing those
that run the country and this man was a psycho, but we have more, too many!
The arrogance of the man. I do hope he lives long enough to see the fruits of his labor
whilst the economy collapses around him. I guess when that happens he and his other hapless
miscreants will keep their heads down and rely on security to protect them from the karma
hurtling towards them.
Nothing this man has done has benefited the American people.
Unfortunately in this case Karl Rove is only making reference to what has been decided
in political circles in Washington at that time. This habit of "defining new realities" is
what all MSM and most Western politicians work after today. At any time at any case the MSM
and the West system can change one reality perception to another without being held
responsible for the factual truth.
March 20 marks a major anniversary. You'd be forgiven for not knowing it. Fifteen years
after we invaded Iraq, few in the US are addressing our legacy there. But it's worth recalling
we shattered that country.
We made it a terrorist hotspot, as expected. US and British intelligence, in the months
preceding the invasion, expected Bush's planned assault would invigorate Al-Qaeda. The group "
would see an opportunity
to accelerate its operational tempo and increase terrorist attacks," particularly "
in the US and UK ," assessments warned. Due course for the War on Terror.
Follow-up reports confirmed these predictions. "The Iraq conflict has become the 'cause
celebre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and
cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement," Washington analysts explained in
2006.
Fawaz Gerges
lists two groups this milieu produced: Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), "a creature of the 2003
US-led invasion," and ISIS, "an extension of AQI."
There were good reasons for anyone -- not just jihadists -- to resent US involvement.
Consider sectarianism. "The most serious sectarian and ethnic tensions in Iraq's modern history
followed the 2003 US-led occupation," Sami Ramadani affirmed .
Nabil Al-Tikriti concurs , citing US
policies that "led to a progressive, incessant increase in sectarian tensions." The Shia death
squads "
organized by U.S. operatives" were one such decision.
The extent to which these squads succeeded is, in part, what scholars debate when they tally
the war deaths. Low estimates, like Iraq Body Count's, put civilians killed at just over 200,000. One research
team determined
some "half million deaths in Iraq could be attributable to the war." Physicians for Social
Responsibility concluded "that the war has, directly or
indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq," plus 300,000 more in Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
Iraqis surviving the inferno confronted a range of nightmares. The UN " reported that over 4.4
million Iraqis were internally displaced, and an additional 264,100 were refugees abroad," for
example. US forces dealt with Iraqi prisoners -- 70-90% of whom were " arrested by
mistake " -- by "arranging naked detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;" "breaking
chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;" and "forcing groups of male
detainees to masturbate themselves," to list some of the ways we imparted , with the approval of top
Bush administration officials, democratic principles.
Then there are the generations of future Iraqis in bomb-battered cities: Fallujah, Basra. In
the former, "the reported increases in cancer and infant
mortality are alarmingly high" -- perhaps "
worse than Hiroshima " -- while "birth defects reached in 2010 unprecedented
numbers." In the same vein, "a pattern of increase in congenital birth defects" plagues Basra, and
"many suspect that pollution created by the bombardment of Iraqi cities has caused the current
birth defect crisis in that country."
This bombardment began decades before 2003, it's crucial to clarify. We can recall UN
Under-Secretary-General Martti Ahtisaari's mission to Baghdad after Operation Desert Storm. He
and his team were familiar with the literature on the bombings, he wrote in March 1991, "fully
conversant with media reports regarding the situation in Iraq," but realized upon arrival "that
nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation"
-- "near-apocalyptic" -- "which has now befallen the country," condemning it "to a
pre-industrial age" for the foreseeable future. This was the scale of ruin when the UN Security
Council imposed sanctions. The measures were "at every turn
shaped by the United States," whose "consistent
policy " was "to inflict the most extreme economic damage possible on Iraq."
The policy was, in this respect, a ripping success. The UN estimated
in 1995 that the sanctions had murdered over a half-million children -- " worth it ," Madeleine Albright said --
one factor prompting two successive UN Humanitarian Coordinators in Iraq to resign. Denis
Halliday
thought the sanctions "criminally flawed and genocidal;" Hans von Sponeck
agreed , citing evidence of "conscious violation of human rights and humanitarian law on
the part of governments represented in the Security Council, first and foremost those of the
United States and the United Kingdom."
Eliminating hundreds of thousands of starving children was just the prequel to the
occupation -- "the biggest cultural disaster since the descendants of Genghis Khan destroyed
Baghdad in 1258," in one writer's judgment
. But try to find more than a handful of commentators reflecting on any of these issues on this
dark anniversary. Instead, silence shows the deep US capacity for forgetting.
Nick Alexandrov lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He can be reached at: [email protected]
"... . Mirzoyanov as a source of leakage was identified immediately. In the 1990, he was removed from all real work, through he remained a conduit of disinformation. In 1992, he revealed himself voluntarily by publishing the well-known article. From that moment, the Novichok attracted media interests. In the 1995, NYT wrote about the "new Russian super-weapon". ..."
"... What actually happened in Salisbury is unclear; nor the behavior of the poisoned, nor the actions of the police, doctors, special services do not add up to the whole picture. More or less plausible is the poisoning with a synthetic neurotoxin, similar to the toxin of fugu fish. ..."
"... Brief summary: "Novichok" is not the name of the CW, but the code of the KGB operation carried out to identify the mole (the information leakage channel), as well as the supply of disinformation. ..."
This brief note by Andrey Lazarchuk has been published in the social networks. It is
interesting, and it agrees with revealed facts. Whether it is true or not – remains to
be seen. Here is his text in verbatim translation:
Do not ask for the source of the information, I will not give it up. Everything written
below is very different from what you can find on the web.
1. Already in the early 1980s, the Soviet Army ceased to treat CW (Chemical Weapons) as a
weapon that could be used in real war conditions: approximately in 1983-84 it was decided to
cease CW supplies to the army, reduce operational reserves and take out CW from the troops to
long-term storage warehouses and landfills for destruction. At the same time and until 1996,
there were no new CW products supplied to the army, neither new instructions for use and
protection.
2. Mirzoyanov, majoring in chemistry and analytics, never worked at theoretical
developments or practical synthesis. All 1980s he worked in the administration (First
Department).
3. In the second half of the 1980s, the KGB carried out a large-scale operation to
dis-inform the enemy, which also had the side-line task of identifying information leakage
channels. Twenty "fake" but very detailed projects were developed for "a new chemical
super-weapon that is not detected by existing NATO detectors and from which there is no
protection" (NOVA with indices, "Novichok" with indices, ASD and others). The Novichok passed
through the hands of Mirzoyanov.
4. The factory-laboratory in Kantyubek in the late 70′s was re-profiled from the
creation and testing of CW and BW for the production and testing of herbicides and defoliants
– mainly for the needs of the cotton industry.
5. Mirzoyanov as a source of leakage was identified immediately. In the 1990, he was
removed from all real work, through he remained a conduit of disinformation. In 1992, he
revealed himself voluntarily by publishing the well-known article. From that moment, the
Novichok attracted media interests. In the 1995, NYT wrote about the "new Russian
super-weapon".
6. NATO had spent more than $ 10 billion on defence against this fake weapon.
7. What actually happened in Salisbury is unclear; nor the behavior of the poisoned, nor
the actions of the police, doctors, special services do not add up to the whole picture. More
or less plausible is the poisoning with a synthetic neurotoxin, similar to the toxin of fugu
fish.
Brief summary: "Novichok" is not the name of the CW, but the code of the KGB operation
carried out to identify the mole (the information leakage channel), as well as the supply of
disinformation.
"... It parallels 9/11, whereby contradictory evidence has been 'pushed.' The targets seem to be two, 1) the proles [as usual] and 2) Putin/Russia [danger, nukes!] ..."
"... But (1) makes no sense; as no Iraqi WMDs showed, a) the CCC [= covert criminal cabal] went ahead anyway, telling the proles: "Bite your bum!" The proles are powerless passengers, and voting is futile anyway since x = y. ..."
"... And (2) should have *no* effect at all; Putin was always going to be and has now been re-elected, and from Crimea, E.Ukr and especially Syria, Russia appears to have the rogue-regimes' measure. A proof = refugees now streaming out of Ghouta into [comparative] freedom, say. ..."
"... Let us posit some 3rd party, whose name some dare not mention? "Do what we say and nobody gets hurt" seems to have lost its oomph and 'smartest crims on the planet' looks definitely jaded. Confounded by inconvenient reality, perhaps? ..."
So if the Mossad did it on British soil, you can bet your last penny that both the CIA
and MI5/6 not only knew before hand but participated in the details
It's a publicity stunt; recall Bernays' "torches of freedom." It parallels 9/11,
whereby contradictory evidence has been 'pushed.' The targets seem to be two, 1) the proles
[as usual] and 2) Putin/Russia [danger, nukes!]
But (1) makes no sense; as no Iraqi WMDs showed, a) the CCC [= covert criminal cabal]
went ahead anyway, telling the proles: "Bite your bum!" The proles are powerless passengers,
and voting is futile anyway since x = y.
And (2) should have *no* effect at all; Putin was always going to be and has now been
re-elected, and from Crimea, E.Ukr and especially Syria, Russia appears to have the
rogue-regimes' measure. A proof = refugees now streaming out of Ghouta into [comparative]
freedom, say.
So, given the apparently threadbare psyop, a) with what purpose, and b) cui bono?
Especially (b), UK could end up with a very bad case of 'egg all over its face.'
Let us posit some 3rd party, whose name some dare not mention? "Do what we say and
nobody gets hurt" seems to have lost its oomph and 'smartest crims on the planet' looks
definitely jaded. Confounded by inconvenient reality, perhaps?
When it comes to choosing between a conspiracy and a stuff-up? Well, here we seem to have
both. In spades. *OR* : We haven't seen the 'surprise' ending yet?
There is absolutely nothing totally duplicitous, nothing evil, that British secret service
(meaning both MI5 and MI6) will not do, and in fact has not done.
The British Empire operated as something at least akin to utterly amoral. It saw itself as
beyond good and evil in any historic sense. As it was born of rebellion against Christendom,
that not only makes sense but also was all but inevitable.
Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was a Judaizing heresy. Judaizing heresy will produce culture that
is pro-Jewish specifically and more generally will reflect ways of doing and being and
thinking, ways of defining morality, that are in step with the Talmud. And that may be summed
as: amoral will to power based on faith that one's group is the superior race/nation that
should rule the world by any means necessary.
The British Empire did not die in any sense. The British Empire's direct rule simply moved
to DC and NYC. America is now the chief operating officer of the British Empire. WASP culture
and its rather unique form of amoral imperialism still rules the world and intends to crush
every opposition into dust – for the uplifting of poor brown and black brothers and
sisters, and for freedom for all, and other selfless good works.
Who poisoned the hapless idiot Russian double agent and his daughter? In general, some
part of the British secret service, which includes the CIA and the Mossad and the Saudi
General Intelligence Presidency.
"... May accusations implies that the British authorities have both a control sample (to determine if the quantities found would
be lethal) and samples from a few different labs to confirm that the fingerprint was from lab A not lab B for example. How did they
got those ? ..."
"... Also from scant information available suggests that the most plausible hypothesis is a false flag operation which probably
proceeded in two steps (with the first step not necessary accomplished by those who run the second step; it can be two different groups).
..."
"... There is certainly a reasonable list of suspects, most more credible than the Russian state. Perhaps one can also separate
out the crime in to two parts, those who committed it, and those who have sought to exploit it. ..."
May and Johnson are probably examples of the level of the degeneration of British elite.
May accusations implies that the British authorities have both a control sample (to determine if the quantities found would
be lethal) and samples from a few different labs to confirm that the fingerprint was from lab A not lab B for example. How did
they got those ?
Also from scant information available suggests that the most plausible hypothesis is a false flag operation which probably
proceeded in two steps (with the first step not necessary accomplished by those who run the second step; it can be two different
groups).
First some poison like Fentanyl was mixed into food or drinks or taken by Skripals themselves either as masked as some other
medication, or as a part of narcoaddict fix. Fentanyl is known for previous use in assassinations. It killed more than 21K people
in the USA in 2016
On the second stage, which occurred when Skripals were already hospitalized nerve agent was planted in several places, including
home and the police investigator became the first victim. Poisoning of "opponent of the regime" provides ideal conditions for
a false flag operation as the cloud of secrecy can be used to subvert the investigation and pursue the agenda with the complete
impunity. The government can essentially decree the "truth" in such cases. It also provides tremendous propaganda effect.
And British are not shy from experimenting on humans with poison gases either. It took 50 years for Porton Down chemical research
centre to come clean on poisoning a British soldier with Sarin telling him it was a flu test. Poor fella.
The first step can also be plot by some group connected with William Browder of Magnitsky death fame (
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25190975 ), Berezovsky
associates or some other "Russian mafia in London" groups. The fact that Skripal has such an expensive car suggests that he was
participating in some business dealings, probably as a part of some London-based exiles group. UK government is not know for extreme
generosity toward such people as Skripal.
The question arise why the UK government went this path. It well might be the USA pressure (like in case of Iraq invasion)
or internal considerations that such step will be beneficial to the May government survival. Or both.
My impression is that his is just a first (and somewhat clumsy executed) step in multi step gambit in which Scripals were just
sacrificial lamps. Pawns is a bigger game.
The next steps might be related to Would Cup and/or confiscation of assets of Russian oligarchs in London to put pressure on
Putin and possibly initiate with their hands a "regime change" in Russia.
Available timelines suggest that initial poisoning took around half an hour to incapacitate them, which is not typical for
a nerve gas.
CCTV footage shows them walking around 3:47 p.m. 16:15 GMT: emergency services received the first report of an incident ??:??
Police found the pair on a bench outside Zizzi in an "extremely serious condition"
If we assume that they were poisoned at Zizzi with fentanyl or something similar they survived for more then an hour, which
is not atypical in cases of narcotics overdose. Moreover Scripal lost emotional control at the restaurant which also happens when
a narcoaddict wants to take his fix and can't. That does not explain why the daughter was also affected, though.
Only this sequence of events can explain what the doctor who treated the daughter for 30 min and first responders suffered
no consequences.
The "Doctor" who, so the BBC reported, "asked not to be named" is surely a prime suspect. Not only was she the only person
known to be in the vicinity of the Skripals closest to the time they were poisoned, but she was aksi the person best able to have
planted nerve agent contamination where the Skripals were allegedly incapacitated.
As for the Skripals, who have disappeared from view and to whom the daughter has been denied contact by a Russian embassy representative,
perhaps they are already settling into new identities, their old selves eventually to be declared dead, despite heroic efforts
by, um, well we're not sure who, since no one subjected to a nerve agent was admitted as a patient by the local hospital.
There is certainly a reasonable list of suspects, most more credible than the Russian state. Perhaps one can also separate
out the crime in to two parts, those who committed it, and those who have sought to exploit it.
The "hate for Trump" by the establishment, is a total canard.
Trump is OWNED by the same Zionist mafia filth that own May, which is the same Zionists
that own the media in America and Britain.
As when Obama (also a Zionist puppet, mainly because Obama was a coward, unlike Trump
who has been groomed to be a zionist puppet) was in office, he was provided a FAKE conflict
with the "birthers". American politics are all about subterfuge, distraction, divide and
conquer.
The so called "attacks on Trump", are simply meant to drive the right to support him,
precisely the way the "attacks on Obama", drove the left to ignore Obama's neocon ways, and
defend him.
England is run by the Zionists, Washington is run by the Zionists, Wall Street IS
Zionist, as it the media and the entire entertainment industry, as well as the "social
Media", Trump is from Jew York City, owes his fortune to Jewish Bankers, and yet, so many
buy this ridiculous narrative of Trump, the anti establishment warrior, a meme that is
ludicrous.
So, instead of discussing Trump's lies about border enforcement, his lies about leaving
Syria, his lies about rebuilding infrastructure, he are distracted with lies about "sexual
harassment", and "Russia Gate"...and sadly many buy right into it.
" [...] The so called "attacks on Trump", are simply meant to drive the right to support
him, precisely the way the "attacks on Obama", drove the left to ignore Obama's neocon ways,
and defend him. [...]"
Exactly. Orange Clown's whole campaign was a calculated "bait and switch" scam from the
beginning, IMO.
I believe that Orange Clown is a "deep cover" or "sleeper" agent that's been groomed and
"waiting in the wings" for his masters' beck and call. And the call came at the end of the
Obama administration, with the agenda not only stalled but exposed like never before; with
Russia and China rising; and the U.S. falling behind. As I see it, the political ascendancy
of Orange Clown is a sign of his masters' increasing desperation.
I believe that Orange Clown's mission – as puppet president of last resort –
is to present (apparently by way of a series of reckless provocations) ultimatum to Russia
and China: "either cede your sovereignty to the empire and start taking orders, or it's war"
or something like that.
And I believe the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem was intended to show the
world (in case there's any doubt) just who it is that's calling the shots here and running
everything in the U.S. (IOW they're taking off the mask as they demand surrender).
Some people woke up when Orange Clown attacked the Syrian airbase with cruise missiles,
but unfortunately it seems there are still many people who absolutely refuse to accept that
Orange Clown is a fraud, no matter what he does (or fails to do). Paul Craig Roberts is an
example of someone who should know better, but who continues to imply that Orange Clown is
just a helpless "babe in the woods"; a nice guy in a bad situation.
Probably Brits. Maybe Benyammerin? Certainly US thug state aware. Most likely the 3 Axis
of Evil members conspired. Fellow was expendable. Daughter murdered for shock value.
Judaized West not ethical not moral.
Any way this event only helped Pres Putin. And 1500 international observers certify legit.
US will need 1500 for NYC alone in 2020 to prevent Demos from stealing.
"... Mirzoyanov, majoring in chemistry and analytics, never worked at theoretical developments or practical synthesis. All 1980s he worked in the administration (First Department). ..."
"... Mirzoyanov as a source of leakage was identified immediately. In the 1990, he was removed from all real work, through he remained a conduit of disinformation. In 1992, he revealed himself voluntarily by publishing the well-known article. From that moment, the Novichok attracted media interests. In the 1995, NYT wrote about the "new Russian super-weapon". ..."
"... What actually happened in Salisbury is unclear; nor the behavior of the poisoned, nor the actions of the police, doctors, special services do not add up to the whole picture. More or less plausible is the poisoning with a synthetic neurotoxin, similar to the toxin of fugu fish ..."
"... Brief summary: "Novichok" is not the name of the CW, but the code of the KGB operation carried out to identify the mole (the information leakage channel), as well as the supply of disinformation. ..."
The Salisbury poisoning played an important role in the Russian elections. Practically all
Russian publications expressed indignation and didn't propose any explanation. This brief note
by Andrey Lazarchuk has been published in the social networks. It is interesting, and it agrees
with revealed facts. Whether it is true or not – remains to be seen. Here is his text in
verbatim translation:
Do not ask for the source of the information, I will not give it up. Everything written
below is very different from what you can find on the web.
1. Already in the early 1980s, the Soviet Army ceased to treat CW (Chemical Weapons) as a
weapon that could be used in real war conditions: approximately in 1983-84 it was decided to
cease CW supplies to the army, reduce operational reserves and take out CW from the troops to
long-term storage warehouses and landfills for destruction. At the same time and until 1996,
there were no new CW products supplied to the army, neither new instructions for use and
protection.
2. Mirzoyanov, majoring in chemistry and analytics, never worked at theoretical
developments or practical synthesis. All 1980s he worked in the administration (First
Department).
3. In the second half of the 1980s, the KGB carried out a large-scale operation to
dis-inform the enemy, which also had the side-line task of identifying information leakage
channels. Twenty "fake" but very detailed projects were developed for "a new chemical
super-weapon that is not detected by existing NATO detectors and from which there is no
protection" (NOVA with indices, "Novichok" with indices, ASD and others). The Novichok passed
through the hands of Mirzoyanov.
4. The factory-laboratory in Kantyubek in the late 70′s was re-profiled from the
creation and testing of CW and BW for the production and testing of herbicides and defoliants
– mainly for the needs of the cotton industry.
5. Mirzoyanov as a source of leakage was identified immediately. In the 1990, he was
removed from all real work, through he remained a conduit of disinformation. In 1992, he
revealed himself voluntarily by publishing the well-known article. From that moment, the
Novichok attracted media interests. In the 1995, NYT wrote about the "new Russian
super-weapon".
6. NATO had spent more than $ 10 billion on defence against this fake weapon.
7. What actually happened in Salisbury is unclear; nor the behavior of the poisoned,
nor the actions of the police, doctors, special services do not add up to the whole picture.
More or less plausible is the poisoning with a synthetic neurotoxin, similar to the toxin of
fugu fish .
Brief summary: "Novichok" is not the name of the CW, but the code of the KGB operation
carried out to identify the mole (the information leakage channel), as well as the supply of
disinformation.
Of course, like most articles about Putin, no evidence is provided.
I'm sick of fake news. I'm sick of the constant barrage of claims with no evidence. I
don't care who makes them. If you want people to pay any attention, provide evidence.
Otherwise, I might as well waste my time watching CNN.
As it turns out, Ulbricht's lawyers were on to something.
In a blockbuster report published Tuesday in
the Intercept, reporter Sam Biddle cited several documents included in the massive cache of
stolen NSA documents that showed that the agency has been tracking bitcoin users since 2013,
and has potentially been funneling some of this information to other federal agencies. Or, as
Biddle puts it, maybe the conspiracy theorists were right.
It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something. Classified documents provided
by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently
to target Bitcoin users around the world - and wielded at least one mysterious source of
information to "help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins," according to a top-secret
passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have
leveraged the NSA's ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also
exploiting an unnamed software program that purported to offer anonymity to users, according
to other documents.
Using its ability to siphon data directly from the fiber-optic cables, the NSA managed to
develop a system for tracing transactions that went well beyond simple blockchain analysis. The
agency relied on a program called MONKEYROCKET , a sham Internet-anonymizing service that,
according to the documents, was primarily deployed in Asia, Africa and South America with the
intention of thwarting terrorists.
The documents indicate that "tracking down" Bitcoin users went well beyond closely
examining Bitcoin's public transaction ledger, known as the Blockchain, where users are
typically referred to through anonymous identifiers; the tracking may also have involved
gathering intimate details of these users' computers.
The NSA collected some Bitcoin users' password information, internet activity, and a type
of unique device identification number known as a MAC address, a March 29, 2013 NSA memo
suggested. In the same document, analysts also discussed tracking internet users' internet
addresses, network ports, and timestamps to identify "BITCOIN Targets."
...
The NSA's budding Bitcoin spy operation looks to have been enabled by its unparalleled
ability to siphon traffic from the physical cable connections that form the internet and
ferry its traffic around the planet. As of 2013, the NSA's Bitcoin tracking was achieved
through program code-named OAKSTAR, a collection of covert corporate partnerships enabling
the agency to monitor communications, including by harvesting internet data as it traveled
along fiber optic cables that undergird the internet.
...
Specifically, the NSA targeted Bitcoin through MONKEYROCKET, a sub-program of OAKSTAR,
which tapped network equipment to gather data from the Middle East, Europe, South America,
and Asia, according to classified descriptions. As of spring 2013, MONKEYROCKET was "the sole
source of SIGDEV for the BITCOIN Targets," the March 29, 2013 NSA report stated, using the
term for signals intelligence development, "SIGDEV," to indicate the agency had no other way
to surveil Bitcoin users. The data obtained through MONKEYROCKET is described in the
documents as "full take" surveillance, meaning the entirety of data passing through a network
was examined and at least some entire data sessions were stored for later analysis.
Naturally, once the NSA got involved, the notion of anonymity - whether with bitcoin, or
even some of the privacy-oriented coins like Zcash - was completely crushed.
Emin Gun Sirer, associate professor and co-director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies
and Contracts at Cornell University, told The Intercept that financial privacy "is something
that matters incredibly" to the Bitcoin community, and expects that "people who are privacy
conscious will switch to privacy-oriented coins" after learning of the NSA's work here.
Despite Bitcoin's reputation for privacy, Sirer added, "when the adversary model involves the
NSA, the pseudonymity disappears. You should really lower your expectations of privacy on
this network."
Green, who co-founded and currently advises a privacy-focused Bitcoin competitor named
Zcash, echoed those sentiments, saying that the NSA's techniques make privacy features in any
digital currencies like Ethereum or Ripple "totally worthless" for those targeted.
While bitcoin appeared to be the NSA's top target, it wasn't the agency's only priority. The
NSA also used its unparalleled surveillance powers to take down Liberty Reserve - a kind of
proto-ICO that was involved in money laundering. Though the company was based in Costa Rica,
the Department of Justice partnered with the IRS and Department of Homeland Security to arrest
its founder and hand him a 20-year prison sentence.
The March 15, 2013 NSA report detailed progress on MONKEYROCKET's Bitcoin surveillance and
noted that American spies were also working to crack Liberty Reserve, a far seedier
predecessor. Unlike Bitcoin, for which facilitating drug deals and money laundering was
incidental to bigger goals, Liberty Reserve was more or less designed with criminality in
mind. Despite being headquartered in Costa Rica, the site was charged with running a $6
billion "laundering scheme" and triple-teamed by the U.S. Department of Justice, Homeland
Security, and the IRS, resulting in a 20-year conviction for its Ukrainian founder. As of
March 2013 -- just two months before the Liberty Reserve takedown and indictment -- the NSA
considered the currency exchange its No. 2 target, second only to Bitcoin. The indictment and
prosecution of Liberty Reserve and its staff made no mention of help from the NSA.
Of course, several of the agency's defenders argued that the notion that the NSA would use
these programs to spy on innocuous bitcoin users is "pernicious", according to one expert
source.
The hypothesis that the NSA would "launch an entire operation overseas under false
pretenses" just to track targets is "pernicious," said Matthew Green, assistant professor at
the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. Such a practice could spread
distrust of privacy software in general, particularly in areas like Iran where such tools are
desperately needed by dissidents. This "feeds a narrative that the U.S. is untrustworthy,"
said Green. "That worries me."
But forget bitcoin: the notion that the NSA has been illegally feeding intelligence to other
federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies has been a watershed issue for civil
libertarians, with implications far beyond cryptocurrency money laundering . The process, known
as "parallel construction", would, if definitive proof could ever be obtained by a defense
attorney, render an entire case as inadmissible.
Civil libertarians and security researchers have long been concerned that otherwise
inadmissible intelligence from the agency is used to build cases against Americans though a
process known as "parallel construction": building a criminal case using admissible evidence
obtained by first consulting other evidence, which is kept secret, out of courtrooms and the
public eye. An earlier investigation by The Intercept, drawing on court records and documents
from Snowden, found evidence the NSA's most controversial forms of surveillance, which
involve warrantless bulk monitoring of emails and fiber optic cables, may have been used in
court via parallel construction.
The timing of the Intercept's report is also interesting.
We reported last year that a Russian national named Alexander Vinnick, the alleged
mastermind of a $4 billion bitcoin-based money laundering operation, had been arrested
following an indictment that levied 21 counts of money laundering and other crimes that could
land him in a US prison for up to 55 years.
And given the justice system's treatment of other cryptocurrency-related criminals, the
notion that Vinnick might spend multiple decades in prison is not beyond the realm of
possibility. Of course, if the case against him is built on illegally obtained evidence, one
would think his defense team would want to know.
Heavily redacted versions of the Snowden documents
are available on the Intercept's website.
"NSA Has Been Tracking Bitcoin Users Since 2013, New Snowden Documents Reveal"
Yep, I knew it! I've been trying to tell the crypto-enthusiasts that the gov't is on their
trail, but they are in utter denial. They think their tech is superior. Sad mistake.
So again I ask... can you say... "Poof it's gone!"
I don't believe the NSA knows the content of crypto transactions due to packet data
encryption. They do likely know the identities of frequent Bitcoin users via traffic
tracking. Infrequent users very unlikely. That's what the IT programmer in me says. But we're
talking Ed Snowden who knows a lot about networks and encryption. This suggests that NSA has
a man-in-the-middle attack.
Nobody cracked TOR and the code is open source. Identities were determined via the host
site communications not in TOR transit. The govt does have https keys - isp told me. But
software encrypted data in packets - no they don't. TOR and OpenPGP are very good to have
with govts and social media getting more abusive collecting/selling any data that will bring
a buck.
Western journalists, with a very small exception (real outliers), are experts at presenting
one-sided arguments, whatever the facts and evidence. Look at Meagan Kelly interviews for the inspiration.
They know how to wear down any dissident who does not buy into government talking points
If you spend any time on Twitter, you'll probably be familiar with the latest pathetic attempt to defend and insulate the U.S.
status quo from criticism. It centers around the usage of an infantile and meaningless term, "whataboutism."
Let's begin with one particularly absurd accusation of "whataboutism" promoted by
NPR
last year:
When O'Reilly countered that "Putin is a killer," Trump responded, "There are a lot of killers. You got a lot of killers. What,
you think our country is so innocent?"
This particular brand of changing the subject is called "whataboutism" -- a simple rhetorical tactic heavily used by the Soviet
Union and, later, Russia. And its use in Russia helps illustrate how it could be such a useful tool now, in America. As Russian
political experts told NPR, it's an attractive tactic for populists in particular, allowing them to be vague but appear straight-talking
at the same time.
The idea behind whataboutism is simple: Party A accuses Party B of doing something bad. Party B responds by changing the subject
and pointing out one of Party A's faults -- "Yeah? Well what about that bad thing you did?" (Hence the name.)
It's not exactly a complicated tactic -- any grade-schooler can master the "yeah-well-you-suck-too-so-there" defense. But it
came to be associated with the USSR because of the Soviet Union's heavy reliance upon whataboutism throughout the Cold War and
afterward, as Russia.
This is a really embarrassing take by NPR .
First, the author tries to associate a tactic that's been around since humans first wandered into caves -- deflecting attention
away from yourself by pointing out the flaws in others -- into some uniquely nefarious Russian propaganda tool. Second, that's not
even what Trump did in this example.
In his response to O'Reilly, Trump wasn't using "whataboutism" to deflect away from his own sins. Rather, he offered a rare moment
of self-reflection about the true role played by the U.S. government around the world. This isn't "whataboutism," it's questioning
the hypocrisy and abuse of power of one's own government. It's an attempt to take responsibility for stuff he might actually be able
to change as President. It's the most ethical and honest response to that question in light of the amount of violence the U.S. government
engages in abroad. If our leaders did this more often, we might stop repeatedly jumping from one insane and destructive war to the
next.
Had O'Reilly's question been about the U.S. government's ongoing support of Saudi Arabia's war crimes in Yemen and Trump shifted
the conversation to Russian atrocities, he could then be fairly accused of changing the subject to avoid accountability. In that
case, you could condemn Trump for "whataboutism" because he intentionally deflected attention away from his own government's sins
to the sins of another. This sort of thing is indeed very dangerous, especially when done by someone in a position of power.
But here's the thing. You don't need some catchy, infantile term like "whataboutism" to point out that someone in power's deflecting
attention from their own transgressions. I agree wholeheartedly with Adam Johnson when he states:
He's absolutely right. One should never rely on the lazy use of a cutesy, catchy term like "whataboutism" as a retort to someone
who points out a glaring contradiction. If you do, you're either a propagandist with no counterargument or a fool who mindlessly
adopts the jingoistic cues of others. Responding to someone by saying "that's just whataboutism" isn't an argument, it's an assault
on one's logical faculties. It's attempt to provide people with a way to shut down debate and conversation by simply blurting out
a clever sounding fake-word. Here's an example of how I've seen it used on Twitter.
One U.S. citizen (likely a card carrying member of "the resistance") will regurgitate some standard intel agency line on Syria
or Russia. Another U.S. citizen will then draw attention to the fact that their own government plays an active role in egregious
war crimes in Yemen on behalf of the Saudis. This person will proceed to advocate for skepticism with regard to U.S. government and
intelligence agency war promotion considering how badly the public was deceived in the run up to the Iraq war. For this offense,
they'll be accused of "whataboutism."
The problem with this accusation is that this person isn't switching the subject to bring up another's transgression to deflect
from scrutiny of his or her behavior. In contrast, the person is putting the conversation in its rightful place, which is to question
the behavior of one's own country. When it comes to issues such as nation-state violence, the primary duty of a citizen is not to
obsess all day about the violence perpetrated by foreign governments, but to hold one's own government accountable. This is as true
for an American citizen in American as it is for a Russian citizen in Russia.
NPR explained how the Russian government used "whataboutism" to deflect away from it's own crimes, but Trump actually did the
opposite in his interview with O'Reilly. He wasn't deflecting away from his own country's crimes, he was pointing out that they exist.
That's precisely what you're supposed to do as a citizen.
The problem arises when governments deflect attention away from their own crimes for which they are actually responsible, by pointing
out the crimes of a foreign government. This is indeed propaganda and an evasion of responsibility. Calling out your own government's
hypocrisy in matters of state sanctioned murder abroad is the exact opposite sort of thing.
Noam Chomsky put it better than I ever could. Here's what he said
in
a 2003 interview
:
QUESTION: When you talk about the role of intellectuals, you say that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country.
Could you explain this assertion?
CHOMSKY: One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the anticipated consequences of your own
actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis Khan, but there isn't much that you can do about them. If Soviet intellectuals
chose to devote their energies to crimes of the U.S., which they could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those
who recognized that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country. And it is interesting that no one ever asks for an explanation,
because in the case of official enemies, truisms are indeed truisms. It is when truisms are applied to ourselves that they become
contentious, or even outrageous. But they remain truisms. In fact, the truisms hold far more for us than they did for Soviet dissidents,
for the simple reason that we are in free societies, do not face repression, and can have a substantial influence on government
policy. So if we adopt truisms, that is where we will focus most of our energy and commitment. The explanation is even more obvious
than in the case of official enemies.
Naturally, truisms are hated when applied to oneself. You can see it dramatically in the case of terrorism. In fact one of
the reasons why I am considered "public enemy number one" among a large sector of intellectuals in the U.S. is that I mention
that the U.S. is one of the major terrorist states in the world and this assertion, though plainly true, is unacceptable for many
intellectuals, including left-liberal intellectuals, because if we faced such truths we could do something about the terrorist
acts for which we are responsible, accepting elementary moral responsibilities instead of lauding ourselves for denouncing the
crimes official enemies, about which we can often do very little.
Elementary honesty is often uncomfortable, in personal life as well, and there are people who make great efforts to evade it.
For intellectuals, throughout history, it has often come close to being their vocation. Intellectuals are commonly integrated
into dominant institutions. Their privilege and prestige derives from adapting to the interests of power concentrations, often
taking a critical look but in very limited ways. For example, one may criticize the war in Vietnam as a "mistake" that began with
"benign intentions". But it goes too far to say that the war is not "a mistake" but was "fundamentally wrong and immoral". the
position of about 70 percent of the public by the late 1960s, persisting until today, but of only a margin of intellectuals. The
same is true of terrorism. In acceptable discourse, as can easily be demonstrated, the term is used to refer to terrorist acts
that THEY carry out against US, not those that WE carry out against THEM. That is probably close to a historical universal. And
there are innumerable other examples.
For saying the above, Noam Chomsky would surely be labeled the godfather of "whataboutism" by Twitter's resistance army, but he's
actually advocating the most ethical, logical and courageous path of citizenship. U.S. taxpayers aren't paying for Russia's military
operations, but they are paying for the U.S. government's. The idea that U.S. citizens emphasizing U.S. violence are committing the
thought-crime of "whataboutism" when it comes to foreign policy is absurd. Our primary responsibility as citizens is our own aggressive
and violent foreign policy, not that of other countries.
Naturally, this isn't how neocon/neoliberal and intelligence agency imperialists want you to think. Proponents of the American
empire need the public to ignore the atrocities of the U.S. government and its allies for obvious reasons, while constantly obsessing
over the atrocities of the empire's official enemies. This is the only way to continue to exert force abroad without domestic pushback,
and it's critical in order to keep the imperial gravy train going for those it benefits so significantly. How do you shut down vibrant
foreign policy debate on social media that exposes imperial hypocrisy? Accuse people of "whataboutism."
That's what I see going on. I see the weaponization of a cutesy, catchy term on social media in order to prevent people from
questioning their own government. It's completely logical and ethical for U.S. citizens to push back against those arguing for more
regime change wars by pointing out the evils of our own foreign policy.
In fact, the unethical position is the one espoused by those who claim the U.S. can do no wrong, but when an adversary country
does what we permit ourselves to do, they must be bombed into oblivion. These people know they have no argument, so they run around
condemning those trying to hold their own government accountable of "whataboutism." It's a nonsensical term with no real meaning
or purpose other than to defend imperial talking points.
Accusations of "whataboutism" amount to a cynical, sleazy attempt to stifle debate without actually engaging in argument.
It's also the sort of desperate and childish propaganda tactic you'd expect during late-stage imperial decline.
* * *
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The plausibility of the doping charges disappeared when, at a time when Russian athletes
were under extreme scrutiny in the Winter Olympics, they were accused of doping in the curling
and bobsleigh events. At that point credibility of the charges flew out of the window.
Good God. How disgusting. You're suggesting that the plebeian mass of ignorant white trash
calling themselves the British nation should actually rule themselves by way of a
democratically elected parliament, their national loyalty centered on a constitutional
monarch who is head of the English national Christian church.
Good God, the first thing that scum would do is vote to send the immigrants home,
beginning with the mayor of London, followed by the rape gangs of Rotherham and
elsewhere.
Fortunately, that can never happen. The media and the K-to-middle-aged education system
tell the people how to despise themselves and their natural inclination to self-preservation,
while the political machines tell the people who they can have to represent them. Thus, the
so-called parliamentary representatives of the people are not representatives of the people
in government, but representative of government to the people. Propagandist, that is, i.e.,
traitors.
"... Please do not insult Britain because it does not need any other party (Ukraine, Georgia) to organize a false-flag such as this. Any reasonable person would understand that such mad rush to judgment and frantic lying by the British regime are closely related to the organizers of the poisoning. They could be one and only. ..."
"... I predicted at the start of the Skripal affair that will end up the same as the MH17 case: "truth established" without any good facts or based on secret facts, we move on. ..."
"... If somehow truth does surface, as with Iraqi WMD, then exactly the same strategy will be used by the British regime as by the US regime before: faulty intelligence and misleading (Porton Down) scientists. ..."
"... How many Porton Down scientists will be suicided a few weeks before daughters wedding, if the truth of the Russian WMD comes out, just as David Kelly regarding Iraqi WMD? ..."
"... Britain had a stronger motive to generate a major confrontation with a well-defined enemy than Theresa May, who has been under fire by the media and pressured to resign by many in her own Conservative Party. ..."
"... Really don't understand why Giraldi classifies this as "wild". Has he completely missed the numerous 'false flags' by UK initiated and financed 'White Helmets'? Every time UK/US intend to incite public outrage some 'chemical' incident was faked in Syria. ..."
"... The hate of the UK establishment for Trump is only rivaled by its hate for Russia, so MI5/6 playing May (who only a few weeks before Salisbury out of the blue ratcheted up her anti Russia rhetoric) like a fiddle was provided with what she needed. However looks like given the number of exotic deaths concentrated in the UK some MI5/6 idiot now made the mistake of more than he can fake. ..."
"... Quite astonishingly, given the lack of news coverage – At a London airport in public view, Prince Bandar apparently 'committed suicide' over a week ago, on 12 March 2018, when the UK refused entry to Bandar video said to be of Bandar jumping to his death, on YouTube ..."
"... So we have one of the best-known celebrity Saudi Arabian princes – who had threatened Russia – suddenly dead in a shocking and dramatic public 'suicide' at a London airport – yet this is 'not news' according to our overlords, tho Bandar's death and funeral prayers etc seem leading news across Muslim outlets ..."
"... Obviously we have a Western Permitted News Committee telling all major Western media outlets what is 'news', for our own good ..."
"... British media intel 'sources' have proposed different employ of the poison, from a 'hit squad' followed Yulia from Moscow, to the poison was planted in her luggage at Moscow, to the poison was introduced to Skripal's car via the ventilation system. ..."
"... When the 'backstop' lies differ so widely, it points to likelihood the British haven't a clue as to what actually happened, but the default position is 'the Russians did it' ..."
Please do not insult Britain because it does not need any other party (Ukraine, Georgia)
to organize a false-flag such as this. Any reasonable person would understand that such mad
rush to judgment and frantic lying by the British regime are closely related to the
organizers of the poisoning. They could be one and only.
I predicted at the start of the Skripal affair that will end up the same as the MH17 case:
"truth established" without any good facts or based on secret facts, we move on.
If somehow truth does surface, as with Iraqi WMD, then exactly the same strategy will be
used by the British regime as by the US regime before: faulty intelligence and misleading
(Porton Down) scientists.
How many Porton Down scientists will be suicided a few weeks before daughters wedding, if
the truth of the Russian WMD comes out, just as David Kelly regarding Iraqi WMD?
"And to throw out a really wild possibility, one might observe that no one in Britain had a
stronger motive to generate a major confrontation with a well-defined enemy than Theresa May,
who has been under fire by the media and pressured to resign by many in her own Conservative
Party."
Really don't understand why Giraldi classifies this as "wild". Has he completely missed
the numerous 'false flags' by UK initiated and financed 'White Helmets'? Every time UK/US
intend to incite public outrage some 'chemical' incident was faked in Syria.
Look 'Rusiagate' Trump dossier has UK tail waggles US dog all over it. That Russiagate has
been faltering increasingly over the last few months with recently the House Intelligence
Committee declaring there is none. So some new impetus was required. Steele is too closely
connected to MI5/6 to presume innocence on their behalf.
The hate of the UK establishment for Trump is only rivaled by its hate for Russia, so
MI5/6 playing May (who only a few weeks before Salisbury out of the blue ratcheted up her
anti Russia rhetoric) like a fiddle was provided with what she needed. However looks like
given the number of exotic deaths concentrated in the UK some MI5/6 idiot now made the
mistake of more than he can fake.
On the topic of Russia-related deaths in Britain -
Everyone knows Saudi Prince Bandar – 'Bandar Bush' thanks to his close public ties
with the George Bush family – Bandar who reportedly threatened Putin with
Saudi-sponsored terrorist attacks inside Russia Bandar has long been the perhaps best-known
Saudi prince in the world
Quite astonishingly, given the lack of news coverage – At a London airport in public
view, Prince Bandar apparently 'committed suicide' over a week ago, on 12 March 2018, when
the UK refused entry to Bandar video said to be of Bandar jumping to his death, on
YouTube
So we have one of the best-known celebrity Saudi Arabian princes – who had
threatened Russia – suddenly dead in a shocking and dramatic public 'suicide' at a
London airport – yet this is 'not news' according to our overlords, tho Bandar's death
and funeral prayers etc seem leading news across Muslim outlets
Obviously we have a Western Permitted News Committee telling all major Western media
outlets what is 'news', for our own good
British media intel 'sources' have proposed different employ of the poison, from a 'hit
squad' followed Yulia from Moscow, to the poison was planted in her luggage at Moscow, to the
poison was introduced to Skripal's car via the ventilation system.
When the 'backstop' lies differ so widely, it points to likelihood the British haven't
a clue as to what actually happened, but the default position is 'the Russians did
it'
"... After her first speech, May summoned the Russian Ambassador and demanded that he address the allegations, but Moscow reasonably enough demanded a sample of the alleged nerve agent for testing by relevant international bodies like the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons before it could even respond to the British accusations. It was a valid point even supported in Parliament questioning by opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, but May and her government decided to act anyway. ..."
"... That in turn suggests a false flag, with someone having an interest in promoting a crisis between Russia and Britain. If that someone were a country having a sophisticated arms industry possessing its own chemical weapons capability, like the United States or Israel, it would be quite easy to copy the characteristics of the Russian nerve agent, particularly as its formula has been known since it was published in 1992. The agent could then be used to create an incident that would inevitably be blamed on Moscow. Why would Israel and the United States want to do that? To put pressure on Russia to embarrass it and put it on the defensive so I would be forced eventually to abandon its support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Removing al-Assad is the often-expressed agenda of the Israeli and American governments, both of which have pledged to take "independent action" in Syria no matter what the United Nations or any other international body says. The redoubtable Nikki Haley is already using the incident to fearmonger over Moscow's intentions at the U.N., warning that a Russian chemical attack on New York City could be coming. ..."
"... Once upon a time suggesting that a democratically elected government might assassinate someone for political reasons would have been unthinkable, but the 2016 election in the United States has demonstrated that nothing is impossible, particularly if one is considering the possibility that a secret intelligence service might be collaborating with a government to help it stay in power. An incident in which no one was actually killed that can be used to spark an international crisis mandating "strong leadership" would be just the ticket. ..."
There are a number of problems with the accepted narrative as presented by May and the
media. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a nerve agent as "usually odorless organophosphate
(such as sarin, tabun, or VX) that disrupts the transmission of nerve impulses by inhibiting
cholinesterase and especially acetylcholinesterase and is used as a chemical weapon in gaseous
or liquid form," while Wikipedia explains that it is "a class of organic chemicals that disrupt
the mechanisms by which nerves transfer messages to organs." A little more research online
reveals that most so-called nerve agents are chemically related. So when Theresa May says that
the alleged agent used against the Skripals as being "of a type" associated with a reported
Russian-developed chemical weapon called Novichok that was produced in the 1970s and 1980s, she
is actually conceding that her own chemical weapons laboratories at Porton Down are, to a
certain, extent, guessing at the provenance and characteristics of the actual agent that might
or might not have been used in Salisbury.
Beyond that, a military strength nerve agent is, by definition, a highly concentrated and
easily dispersed form of a chemical weapon. It is intended to kill or incapacitate hundreds or
even thousands of soldiers. If it truly had been used in Salisbury, even in a small dose, it
would have killed Skripal and his daughter as well as others nearby. First responders who
showed up without protective clothing, clearly seen in the initial videos and photos taken near
the site, would also be dead. After her first speech, May summoned the Russian Ambassador
and demanded that he address the allegations, but Moscow reasonably enough demanded a sample of
the alleged nerve agent for testing by relevant international bodies like the Organization for
the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons before it could even respond to the British accusations. It
was a valid point even supported in Parliament questioning by opposition Labour leader Jeremy
Corbyn, but May and her government decided to act anyway.
May's language also conveys uncertainty. She used "it appears" and also said it was "highly
likely" that Moscow was behind the poisoning of Skripal but provided no actual evidence that
that was the case, presumably only assuming that it had to be Russia. And her government has
told the public that there is "little risk" remaining over the incident and that those who were
possibly exposed merely have to wash themselves and their clothes, hardly likely if it were a
military grade toxin, which gains it lethality from being persistent on and around a target.
She made clear her lack of corroboration for her claim by offering an "either-or" analysis:
either Russia's government did it or it had "lost control" of its nerve agent.
As noted above, May's argument is, to a certain extent, based on character assassination of
Russians – she even offered up the alleged "annexation" of Crimea as corroboration of her
view that Moscow is not inclined to play by the rules that others observe. It is a narrative
that is based on the presumption that "this is the sort of thing the Russian government headed
by Vladimir Putin does." The British media has responded enthusiastically, running stories
about numerous assassinations and poisonings that ought to be attributed to Russia, while
ignoring the fact that the world leaders in political assassinations are actually the United
States and Israel.
There are a number of other considerations that the May government has ignored in its rush
to expand the crisis. She mentioned that Russia might be somewhat exonerated if it has lost
control of its chemical weapons, but did not fully explain what that might mean. It could be
plausible to consider that states hostile to Russia like Ukraine and Georgia that were once
part of the Soviet Union could have had , and might
still retain, stocks of the Novichok nerve agent. That in turn suggests a false flag, with
someone having an interest in promoting a crisis between Russia and Britain. If that someone
were a country having a sophisticated arms industry possessing its own chemical weapons
capability, like the United States or Israel, it would be quite easy to copy the
characteristics of the Russian nerve agent, particularly as its formula has been known since it
was published in 1992. The agent could then be used to create an incident that would inevitably
be blamed on Moscow. Why would Israel and the United States want to do that? To put pressure on
Russia to embarrass it and put it on the defensive so I would be forced eventually to abandon
its support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Removing al-Assad is the often-expressed
agenda of the Israeli and American governments, both of which have pledged to take "independent
action" in Syria no matter what the United Nations or any other international body says. The
redoubtable Nikki Haley is already using the incident
to fearmonger over Moscow's intentions at the U.N., warning that a Russian chemical attack
on New York City could be coming.
And to throw out a really wild possibility, one might observe that no one in Britain had a
stronger motive to generate a major confrontation with a well-defined enemy than Theresa May,
who has been under fire by the media and pressured to resign by many in her own Conservative
Party. Once upon a time suggesting that a democratically elected government might
assassinate someone for political reasons would have been unthinkable, but the 2016 election in
the United States has demonstrated that nothing is impossible, particularly if one is
considering the possibility that a secret intelligence service might be collaborating with a
government to help it stay in power. An incident in which no one was actually killed that can
be used to spark an international crisis mandating "strong leadership" would be just the
ticket.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
.
9/11 was less important than the Anthrax show thereafter
¿Qué?
IIRC, the Anthrax show was seen [from my viewpoint = external], as akin to sending out a
sheep-dog to shepherd the outliers = oppress any 'casual dissidents' = get everybody onto the
same page = GWoT, 1st step = invade Afghanistan = rearrange some sand. The latter more than a
bit puzzling, since Afghanistan was not the likeliest place to want to go, to punish any
alleged hijackers. To add 'interest,' it was fairly quickly revealed that the Anthrax was a
'domestic' strain = US-produced. Then they hounded Ivins to death, but that was *much* later.
At the time = 2001, there was almost no '9/11 inside-job' discussion -- except for the
Anthrax. A different puzzling. What did I miss? rgds
Without the Anthrax (which, was not "weaponised" btw), there would not have been a case
for Iraq war and Powell showing vials at the UN nor the Patriot Act and assorted other
totalitarian retardations. One could have looked into the Saudis-finagled-it angle, into the
Israel-knew-about-it angle, into the FBI dropped the ball-years-before angle , into
too-convenient-for-PNACistas-angle,
into-we-found-the-passports-but-we-didnt-find-the-flight-recorders angle. And maybe Shrubby
wouldn't even have been re-elected. Before Anthrax, it was just "an attack on the WTC"
– there had been one of those via the parking garage a couple of years earlier btw, by
the same team. But after Anthrax, hysteria took hold. And everyone was taking Cipro.
This timeline alleges that people were even taking Cipro before 9/11 (don't take
antibiotica until you absolutely, totally, must, idiots – maybe they look too much at
Dark Winter: http://washingtonsblog.com/2014/10/anthrax-dark-winter.html
):
Here's an interesting related piece that was linked to in Craig Murray's comments page. It
deals with the quote by the UK government, in support of their accusation of Russia, of
Putin's words in 2010, when he said: "Traitors will kick the bucket, believe me. Those other
folks betrayed their friends, their brother in arms, whatever they got in exchange for it,
those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them." The context as stated by
the UK government was "when we think about who benefits" [from the attack on the Skripals],
and the clear intention was to try to create the impression that Putin had threatened to kill
traitors, which is of course exactly how this quote was subsequently misrepresented.
There is of course a familiar "track record", or "pattern of behaviour" here, when one
considers how Israel lobbies of various kinds intentionally misrepresented Iranian words
about the Zionist regime "vanishing from the pages of history" as a threat to attack
Israel.
The piece is long, and I've posted it below for reference because I do not know if the
website in question will necessarily be around for long. Hopefully the moderators will put it
under a [More] tag so it remains, but does not clog up the thread. There are embedded
reference links in the text at the source.
No, on the occasion in question Putin did not say that traitors would be killed. The
quote in your question comes from a March 5, 2018 broadcast of BBC Newsnight. It is a
concatenation of three soundbites from a three-minute statement in which Putin says that
Russia no longer kills traitors. The soundbites come from the last paragraph of his
statement in which Putin paints a melodramatic picture of traitors as broken men living out
their remaining days in abject misery leading to an early death.
The actual fate of enemies of the Russian state is beyond the scope of the question and
this answer. Instead we will discuss the beliefs on this subject which Putin was attempting
to instill. He was inviting the Russian people to picture traitors dying friendless and
alone Men Without a Country in apartments strewn with empty vodka bottles.
The translation in the BBC broadcast alters the tone of Putin's statement and broadens
the meaning of his words to the point that, when they are read in the style used by Western
comedians portraying Putin, they seem to convey veiled threats of violence.
The Story Spreads
The next day (March 6th) the composite soundbite from the BBC broadcast appeared at the
head of article on the website of The Sun, now shorn of all even the context provided in
the BBC broadcast. The article describes the statement as a "threat to 'choke traitors'",
thereby changing the BBC's poor translation into an unambiguously false one.
The day after that (March 7th) the Independent put up an article with its own version of
the BBC video. The article incorrectly identifies it as a video which "re-emerged online"
and describes Putin's words as "apparent death threats".
Also on March 7th the Telegraph described Putin's words unambiguously as a "death
threat". This despite the fact that in 2010 they had reported on the very same statement
and found exactly the opposite meaning in it. What is more, now Putin's words were not
simply spoken close to the time of Sergei Skripal's release, they are now actually about
him.
On March 7th on Good Morning Britain Piers Morgan asked Alexander Nekrassov (former
Kremlin adviser) what Putin had meant by "kick the bucket". They each considered the
other's interpretation of the phrase ridiculous. (Not surprising since Mr. Morgan was
interpreting the Putin's words in the BBC's poor translation while Mr. Nekrassov was
presumably interpreting Mr. Putin's actual words which, at least for this phrase, can be
heard in the BBC broadcast.) Neither one of them seemed to know the context of the
quote.
On March 12th the video was mentioned in an editorial in the New York Times. The
editorial links to the March 7th article in the Independent and quotes the translation from
the video. The editors seem to have obtained some information about the TV show during
which the statement was made, but this is a bit garbled too. In particular their
description of the question is incorrect and they make no mention of the overall import of
Putin's answer.
Earlier Western Press Coverage of Putin's Statement
Putin's statement attracted some press coverage in the West at the time he made it. At
the time the press had the full text of the statement and did not interpret it as a threat
against traitors:
•Vladimir Putin: Russian secret services don't kill traitors (The Telegraph)
•Vladimir Putin says Russian secret service no longer kills traitors (Mirror)
Putin refers to the exposure and arrest of agents of the Illegals Program on June 27,
2010. The Illegals Program (which is the name given it by the US Department of Justice)
planted Russian sleeper agents in the United States under cover as private citizens.
In July of 2010 the ten spies arrested in the United States were exchanged for three
Russian nationals who had been convicted of high treason for espionage one of whom was
Sergei Skripal. (This appears to be his only connection to the affair.) In August the
deported Russian spies were "warmly greeted" by Vladimir Putin who "led them in singing
patriotic songs".
After the program was exposed, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service began an
investigation in an attempt to determine whether the agents had been betrayed. Suspicion
fell on one Colonel Aleksander Poteyev who was in charge of undercover spying in the US. He
is thought to have fled Russia a few days before the arrest of the undercover agents. Where
he is now is unclear, but the opinion in the Russian press is that he went to the US, that
his children are also in the US, and that he may or may not have died in 2016.
The Statement
In the quote in question Putin is commenting on this affair. He is speaking during the
program Direct Line: A Conversation with Vladimir Putin in December 2010. Direct Line is a
marathon ask-me-anything-style show which he does once a year. The broadcast is on Youtube
(the question is asked at about 3:12:15 and Putin concludes his answer at about 3:15:15)
and there is a written transcript. Here is an English translation. The parts included in
some form in the quote from your question are in bold:
M. Sittel: Vladimir Vladimirovich, I'm taking a question from the website, this time it
is a personal one. It is clearly written by someone who loves memoirs. "When you spoke of
the recent spy scandal, you noted: traitors do not live long. The leaders of many
countries, as know from recollections, have signed orders for the the liquidation of the
enemies of the homeland oversees. The French have done so, the Israelis. Have you, as the
head of state, had occasion to make such a decision in the past?"
V.Putin: I do not think that the leaders of state signed such orders personally even in
the past. That is the work of the special services. And during Soviet times, in Stalin's
time, it is no secret, there were special subunits which carried out, including (these were
military subunits, it was not all they did), which when necessary carried out such
assignments: the liquidation of traitors. Such subunits were themselves liquidated long
ago.
It is known that actual many, say the Israeli special services used such methods, yes,
all things considered, as for today, far from all have given this up even now. The Russian
special services do not use such means.
With regard to traitors, they will curl up on their own, I assure you. That's because
Here we have this latest instance of betrayal in which they exposed a group of our
illegals. And these are officers! Do you get it? Officers. A man betrayed his friends, his
comrades in arms. These are people who laid their entire lives on the altar of patriotism.
What is it like to learn a language at native level, leave behind one's relatives, not to
be able to bury one's loved ones? Think about that for a minute! Someone has given his
entire life to serve his homeland and now this brute comes along who betrays people like
that. How is he going to live with that for the rest of his life? How will he look his
children in the eye, the swine?! Whatever went on there, whatever 30 pieces of silver those
people may have gotten, they will stick in their throat, I assure you. To spend your whole
life trying to keep out of view, to be unable to talk with your loved ones, it means that
someone who chooses such a fate will be regretting it a thousand times over.
So the quotation in the form you cite is garbled and has been interpreted in a manner
which is at odds with the original context which is a specific denial that Russia
assassinates traitors.
Notes on Translation
The word "загнуться" famously
translated "kick the bucket" literally means "to curl up" or "to curl down". What it means
here is open to interpretation. The translation "kick the bucket" can be found in
Wiktionary as a possible translation of a very informal use of the word. @bashbino's
assertion that such use refers to decline and death rather than sudden death is probably
correct. I suspect it is an allusion to the way plants whither and die. In 2010 the phrase
was translated "they will croak all by themselves" (The Telegraph, NBC News)
In translating "прятаться" as
"trying to keep out of view" I am trying to leave the question of whether the traitor is
hiding from assassins or simply from people he cannot look in the eye up to the reader's
interpretation. This word can refer to social avoidance such as the behavior of a child who
hides behind his mother's skirt.
The phrase "колом
станут у них в
горле" refers to difficulty swallowing due to revulsion, not
difficulty breathing. To make this clear I have translated it "will stick in their
throat".
Various readers, fans, blog commenters, Facebook trolls, and
auditors twanged on me all last week about my continuing interest in the RussiaRussiaRussia hysteria,
though there is no particular consensus of complaint among them -- except for a general "shut up,
already" motif. For the record, I'm far more interested in the hysteria itself than the
Russia-meddled-in the-election case, which I consider to be hardly any case at all beyond 13 Russian
Facebook trolls.
The hysteria, on the other hand, ought to be a matter of grave concern,
because it
appears more and more to have been engineered by America's own intel community, its handmaidens in the
Dept of Justice, and the twilight's last gleamings of the Obama White House, and now it has shoved
this country in the direction of war at a time when civilian authority over the US military looks
sketchy at best.
This country faces manifold other problems that are certain to reduce the
national standard of living and disrupt the operations of an excessively complex and dishonest
economy,
and the last thing America needs is a national war-dance over trumped-up grievances
with Russia.
The RussiaRussiaRussia narrative has unspooled since Christmas and is blowing back badly
through the FBI,
now with the firing (for cause) of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe hours short
of his official retirement (and inches from the golden ring of his pension). He was axed on the
recommendation of his own colleagues in the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, and they may
have been influenced by the as-yet-unreleased report of the FBI Inspector General, Michael Horowitz,
due out shortly.
The record of misbehavior and "collusion" between the highest ranks of the FBI, the
Democratic Party,
the Clinton campaign, several top political law firms, and a shady cast of
international blackmail-peddlars is
a six-lane Beltway-scale evidence trail compared to the
muddy mule track of Trump "collusion" with Russia.
It will be amazing if a big wad of criminal cases are not dealt out of it, even as
The
New York Times
sticks its fingers in its ears and goes, "La-la-la-la-la ."
It now appears that Mr. McCabe's statements post-firing tend to
incriminate his former
boss, FBI Director James Comey
-- who is about to embark, embarrassingly perhaps, on a tour
for his self-exculpating book,
A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership
.
A great aura of sanctimony surrounds the FBI these days.
Even the news pundits
seem to have forgotten the long, twisted reign of J. Edgar Hoover (1924 – 1972), a dangerous rogue who
excelled at political blackmail. And why, these days, would any sane American take pronouncements from
the CIA and NSA at face value?
What seems to have gone on in the RussiaRussiaRussia matter
is that various parts of the executive branch in the last months under Mr. Obama gave each other tacit
permission, wink-wink, to do anything necessary to stuff HRC into the White House and, failing that,
to derail her opponent, the Golden Golem of Greatness.
The obvious lesson in all this huggermugger is that the ends don't justify the means.
I suspect
there are basically two routes through this mess
.
One is that
the misdeeds of FBI officers, Department of Justice lawyers, and Intel
agency executives get adjudicated by normal means,
namely, grand juries and courts. That
would have the salutary effect of cleansing government agencies and shoring up what's left of their
credibility at a time when faith in institutions hangs in the balance.
The second route would be for the authorities to ignore any formal response to an evermore
self-evident trail of crimes, and to
allow all that political energy to be funneled into
manufactured hysteria and eventually a phony provocation of war with Russia
.
Personally, I'd rather see the US government clean house than blow up the world over an engineered
hallucination.
Tags
Politics
Semiconductors - NEC
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warned on Monday that Washington "remains
prepared to act if we must," if the U.N. Security Council failed to act on Syria.
Votel said the best way to deter Russia, which backs Assad, was through political and
diplomatic channels.
"Certainly if there are other things that are considered, you know, we will do what we are
told. ... (But) I don't recommend that at this particular point," Votel said, in an apparent
to reference to military options.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether it was too strong to say that with Russia
and Iran's help, Assad had "won" the civil war in Syria.
"I do not think that is too strong of a statement," Votel said.
Graham also asked if the United States' policy on Syria was still to seek the removal of
Assad from power.
"I don't know that that's our particular policy at this particular point. Our focus
remains on the defeat of ISIS," Votel said, using an acronym for Islamic State. "
Zerohedge
Votel would never say anything like this if he were not in agreement with Mattis and
Dunford. This is illustrative of a weakening of Israeli/AIPAC/Saudi influence in US Middle East
policy. It will be interesting to see if Votel is rebuked for these statements. pl
''This is illustrative of a weakening of Israeli/AIPAC/Saudi influence in US Middle East
policy. It will be interesting to see if Votel is rebuked for these statements. pl ''
Hooray !!
I am sure the boys at JINSA and the Fifth Column will be furious....let them rage. The more
they show themselves the better.
After an hour of searches have not found a single major media outlet or press has quoted
anything Votel said in the hearing about the Iran deal.
Instead they have headlines and coverage/quotes only about Russia's meddling in Syria.
Therefore the public will not know that those like Tillerson, Mattis and JCS Dunford all
agree on keeping the Iran deal...they will only read bad Russia.
i didn't say we were "out of the woods" but it is a good start. IMO all these statements
by Votel are true and it took a good deal of courage to make them in public. pl
Catherine notes that the MSM has said zero about what Votel, Mattis and Dunford have said or
thought about Iran and Syria. Even if our host had not made his confirming statement about
Votel's true commitment to his statements, I would have offered the secondary supposition
that Votel's commitment to these statements is true.
I would say that because of the MSM silence on them that Catherine has noted. If Votel was
making these statements as false-fog noise to hide the movement of men and materiel to use
against Iran and Syria, as WillyBilly theorizes, the MSM would be broadcasting and
highlighting the false-fog in order to keep the buildup hidden and keep Syria and Iran off
guard. The fact that the MSM is so silent makes me think the MSM wants Votel's statements to
die in silence under the MSM Cone of Silence. Meaning the MSM and its masters reject these
statements but can only hope to starve them of attention because the MSM couldn't prevent
Votel from making them.
"then we will have to have another way to deal with their nuclear weapons program," said U.S.
Army General Joseph Votel."
Iran does not have and has never had a "nuclear weapons program" with the possible
exception of a "feasibility study" back when they were afraid Saddam had one. I believe this
was the opinion of the DIA in the run up to the 2007 Iran NIE which did not make it into the
NIE. But this is consistent with the publicly available information and Iran's own
statements.
"... these statements by Votel are true and it took a good deal of courage to make them in
public."
-- If true they constitute a strong expression of patriotism. God, give us more outspoken
patriots.
(This is a paradoxical time in the US when truth and patriotism are not a norm.)
What had been happening and what I expect to see is that, as during the George II
Administration, the US would loudly accuse Iran of breaking faith with agreements and demand
unlimited access for 'inspectors'. The Iranians know how that cartoon ends, so they'd refuse,
unlike Mr Saddam. And then the US would call on the client states in the EU to join them in
tightening sanctions. Eventually provocation could be arranged and the US would "have no
choice but to respond." - some patrol boats being shot at by Iranians as has happened. We all
will recall how Obama was cast as a creampuf appeaseer when 'our boys' were caught zooming
around Iranian waters.
Too many powerful actors on the American political stage have determined hat Iran must be
collapsed (It was on the famous hit-list after all) for them to let this go.
"... The vast majority of people have already had drummed into them the fact (sic) that novichok could only be produced in Russia, so this will of course be interpreted as conclusive proof that "Putin did it". The real push for dramatic measures (e.g., World Cup) will begin at that point. ..."
It is reported that the OPCW is already carrying out tests on "samples taken from Salisbury".
This will presumably take some time, but eventually (2 weeks?) there will be an announcement
that it is indeed Novichok.
The vast majority of people have already had drummed into them the fact (sic) that
novichok could only be produced in Russia, so this will of course be interpreted as
conclusive proof that "Putin did it". The real push for dramatic measures (e.g., World Cup)
will begin at that point.
there had to be a physical person who did it and that means that person can be found
– the beauty of the luggage story was that it could be written off as a clever remote
attack
BMW has a good security system; this would require a risky break-in with a non-zero chance
of getting caught
the release of the substance in a car cannot be controlled – it could happen in a
crowded place, there could be an accident, Skripal could loan the car, etc
So I am skeptical, no 'intelligence' agency is this un-intelligent. Someone is releasing
more scenarios (luggage, car, drinks, ) to confuse the narrative and let it linger in the
media as in 'well, it was possible and if not that, maybe this was possible'. I don't know
who that 'someone' is, but it is not Boris Johnson or Teresa May. They clearly know
nothing.
"... My impression is that the nerve agent was introduced to the scene after Skripals were hospitalized as a doctor attended the
daughter for 30 min before the ambulance came. She did not develop any symptoms. So at this moment they lost conscience at the bench
there was no nerve gas on the scene. It might well be something else. ..."
I think the Skripals won't be able to talk at all. They are in a coma
How do you know that?
Has there been any public report on the medical condition of the Skripals? I haven't been able to find one. If you know of
such a report, will you please provide a link. In the meantime, one should keep in mind the statement of the Salisbury hospital
consultant, Steohen Davies, that:
no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury
So either (1) the Skripal's were not exposed to Novichok or any other nerve agent, or (2) though exposed to a nerve agent,
they were not treated at the hospital, which would be odd, though not impossible. Perhaps they were taken to the British chemical
weapons lab at Porton Down, just seven miles from Salisbury, where, presumably, there are specialists in detoxification of those
exposed to nerve agents.
But unless you adhere to (1) or (2), it would seem that you have to conclude that the Skripal's were not exposed to a nerve
agent. In other words, that the whole story is probably a sham, a fake terror attack, a story concocted to befuddle the plebs
and justify some new imperial aggression.
My impression is that the nerve agent was introduced to the scene after Skripals were hospitalized as a doctor attended the
daughter for 30 min before the ambulance came. She did not develop any symptoms. So at this moment they lost conscience at the
bench there was no nerve gas on the scene. It might well be something else.
IMHO this looks like an opening salvo in multi-step combination. Clumsy first step. It might well be designed to confiscate
a part of Russian money in London banks and thus create the motive for Russian oligarchs to remove Putin. Kind of color revolution
launched by disgruntled oligarchs.
That's probably why the UK government does not really care, if that is told to people true or not. Officials produce crazy
statements and generally behave quite carelessly, as if they completely despise public and truth dos not matter for them one bit.
The support of the USA is all that matter. Look for example at the most recent statement of Boris Johnson. But they needed the
pretext for further actions, be it another witch hunt or something more serious and they succeeded.
Their actions look completely logical if the resulting hysteria is needed just for a few weeks to start the next round of sanctions
against Russia. It might well be that the real goal is confiscation of "ill gotten" money of Russian oligarchs both to push them
to act against Putin and to compensate for Brexit losses
Seriously...I think these 'conspiracy theorists' have been watching too many Hollywood movies.
This is what I want to SCREAM every time I hear this shit...Why the HELL would Russia, or anyone else, bother to use such a
messy, traceable and complicated method to kill this guy? Especially when there are SO MANY WAYS it could have been done that
wouldn't have garnered all the attention, and that would have left no traces? They could have sent someone to shove him in front
of a train or something, or staged a 'botched robbery'.
Reminds me of the stupid assassination methods the CIA wanted to use on Castro...poisoning his beard? Really? Well, aside from
the fact that it is just too 'Wile E. Coyote' to be taken seriously, did anyone ask, if such an assassin could get close enough
to poison his beard, why he wouldn't go with a more dependable method?
I blame the wildly dumbed down and complicit media here in the US and in our "allies" abroad. They spit out whatever the government
feeds to them without a single ounce of effort to validate the stories they frantically preach to the ignorant public. Damn, I
can't believe how many times people will be duped into trillion dollar wars and they still are die hard believers in the ethics
and truthfulness of the US gov't. Morons---
It makes little sense that Russia would assassinate someone using a technique that would immediately implicate them. I'm surprised
they didn't happen to "find" the assassin's Russian passport lying on the ground next to the victims! <
I disagree. If a government is going to terminate a spy they don't botch the job by letting him get to a hospital. In Putin's
Russia they know how to terminate most efficiently. I may be wrong but this is a pretext for something more aggressive/dangerous.
"... Iran yielded a great deal, but they were never going to give up their entire nuclear program. That is not just because Iran is permitted to have such a program under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but also because Iran had already invested so many resources at significant cost that retaining some part of it was a matter of national pride. ..."
Uri Friedman reviews
Mike Pompeo's hard-line foreign policy views. Here he quotes Pompeo's criticism of the
negotiations leading up to the nuclear deal with Iran:
The Obama administration failed to take "advantage of crushing economic sanctions to end
Iran's nuclear program," he declared when the deal was struck. "That's not foreign policy;
it's surrender."
Pompeo's statement is ridiculous, but it does provide us with a useful window into how he
understands foreign policy issues. Like many other Iran hawks, he opposes the nuclear deal
because it "failed" to bring an end to Iran's nuclear program. He dubs Iran's major concessions
on the nuclear issue as "surrender" by the U.S. because they were not forced to give up
absolutely everything. That reflects the absurd all-or-nothing view of diplomacy that prevails
among hard-line critics of the JCPOA.
Iran yielded a great deal, but they were never going to give up their entire nuclear
program. That is not just because Iran is permitted to have such a program under the
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but also because Iran had already invested so many resources at
significant cost that retaining some part of it was a matter of national pride. If the Obama
administration had insisted on the elimination of Iran's nuclear program, the negotiations
would have failed and the restrictions on that problem that are now in place would not exist.
There would have been no nuclear deal if the U.S. had insisted on maximalist demands. What Pompeo calls surrender is what sane people call compromise. Putting someone so inflexible and
allergic to compromise in charge of the State Department is the act of a president who has
nothing but disdain for diplomacy, and Pompeo's all-or-nothing view of the nuclear deal bodes
ill for talks with North Korea.
"If We Should Have to Leave Our Bleached Bones on These Desert Sands in Vain, Then Beware the Anger of the Legions."
Quote Investigator
Notable quotes:
"... Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously spoke of the " fog of war ," the confusion created by and inherent uncertainty built into that complex human endeavor. As thick as that fog often is, in these years the fog of phony war has proven even thicker and more disorienting. ..."
A bizarre version of blitzkrieg overseas and an even stranger version of sitzkrieg at home could be said to define this peculiar
American moment. These two versions exist in a curiously yin-yang relationship to each other. For how can a nation's military be
engaged in warfare at a near-global level -- blitzing people across vast swaths of the globe -- when its citizens are sitting on
their collective duffs,
demobilized
and mentally disarmed? Such a schizoid state of mind can exist only when it's in the interest of those in power. Appeals to "patriotism"
(especially to revering "our" troops) and an overwhelming
atmosphere
of secrecy to preserve American "safety" and "security" have been remarkably effective in
controlling and stifling interest in the
country's wars and their
costs
, long before such an interest might morph into dissent or opposition. If you want an image of just how effective this has been,
recall the moment in July 2016 when small numbers of earnest war protesters quite literally had the
lights turned
off on them at the Democratic National Convention.
To use an expression I heard more than a few times in my years in the military, when it comes to its wars, the government treats
the people like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them bullshit.
The Fog of Phony War
Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously spoke of the "
fog of war ," the confusion created by and inherent uncertainty
built into that complex human endeavor. As thick as that fog often is, in these years the fog of phony war has proven even thicker
and more disorienting.
By its very nature, a real war of necessity, of survival, like the Civil War or World War II brings with it clarity of purpose
and a demand for results. Poorly performing leaders are relieved of command when not killed outright in combat. Consider the number
of mediocre Union generals Abraham Lincoln cycled through before he found Ulysses S. Grant. Consider the number of
senior officers relieved
during World War II by General George C. Marshall, who knew that, in a global struggle against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, subpar
performances couldn't be tolerated. In wars of necessity or survival, moreover, the people are invariably involved. In part, they
may have little choice, but they also know (or at least believe they know) "
why we fight " -- and generally approve of it.
Admittedly, even in wars of necessity there are always those who will find ways to duck service. In the Civil War, for example,
the rich could pay others to fight in their place. But typically in such wars, everyone serves in some capacity. Necessity demands
it.
The definition of twenty-first-century phony war, on the other hand, is its lack of clarity, its lack of purpose, its lack of
any true imperative for national survival (despite a never-ending hysteria over the "terrorist threat"). The fog it produces is especially
disorienting. Americans today have little idea "why we fight" other than a vague sense of fighting them over there (Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Niger, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, etc.) so they won't kill us here, to cite George W. Bush's
rationale for launching the war on terror. Meanwhile, with
such a lack of national involvement and accountability, there's no pressure for the Pentagon or the rest of the national security
state to up its game; there's no one even to point out that wherever the U.S. military has gone into battle in these years, yet more
terror groups have subsequently sprouted like so many malignant weeds. Bureaucracy and mediocrity go unchallenged;
massive boosts in military spending reward incompetency and the creation of a series of quagmire-like "
generational
" wars.
Think of it as war on a Möbius strip. More money shoveled into the Pentagon brings more chaos overseas, more imperial overreach,
and undoubtedly more
blowback
here at home, all witnessed -- or rather largely ignored -- by a sitzkrieg citizenry.
Of course, for those fighting the wars, they are anything but phony. It's just that their experience remains largely isolated
from that of the rest of us, an isolation that only serves to elevate
post-traumatic stress disorder rates,
suicides , and the like. When
today's troops come home, they generally suffer in silence and among themselves.
America's New (Phony) National Defense Strategy
Even phony wars need enemies. In fact, they may need them more (and more of them) than real wars do. No surprise then that the
Trump administration's recently announced
National Defense Strategy (NDS) offers a laundry list of such enemies. China and Russia top it as "revisionist powers" looking
to reverse America's putative victory over Communism in the Cold War. "Rogue" powers like North Korea and Iran are singled out as
especially dangerous because of their nuclear ambitions. (The United States, of course, doesn't have a "rogue" bone in its body,
even if it is now devoting at least $1.2
trillion to building a new generation of more usable nuclear
weapons.) Nor does the NDS neglect Washington's need to
hammer
away at global terrorists until the end of time or to extend "full-spectrum dominance" not just to the traditional realms of
combat (land, sea, and air) but also to
space and cyberspace.
Amid such a plethora of enemies, only one thing is missing in America's
new defense strategy
, the very thing that's been missing all these years, that makes twenty-first-century American war so phony: any sense of national
mobilization and shared sacrifice (or its opposite,
antiwar resistance ). If the United
States truly faces all these existential threats to our democracy and our way of life, what are we doing frittering away more than
$45
billion annually in a quagmire war in Afghanistan? What are we doing spending staggering sums on exotic weaponry like the F-35
jet fighter (total projected program cost:
$1.45 trillion ) when we
have far more pressing national needs to deal with?
Like so much else in Washington in these years, the NDS doesn't represent a strategy for real war, only a call for more of the
same raised to a higher power. That mainly means more money for the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and related "defense"
agencies, facilitating more blitz attacks on various enemies overseas. The formula -- serial blitzkrieg abroad, serial sitzkrieg
in the homeland -- adds up to
victory , but only for the military-industrial complex.
Solutions to Sitzkrieg
Of course, one solution to phony war would be to engage in real war, but for that the famed American way of life would actually
have to be endangered. (By Afghans? Syrians? Iraqis? Yemenis? Really?) Congress would then have to declare war; the public would
have to be mobilized, a draft undoubtedly reinstated, and taxes raised. And those would be just for starters. A clear strategy would
have to be defined and losing generals demoted or dismissed.
Who could imagine such an approach when it comes to America's forever wars? Another solution to phony war would be for the American
people to actually start paying attention. The Pentagon would then have to be starved of funds. (With less money, admirals and generals
might actually have to think.) All those attacks overseas that blitzed innocents and spread chaos would have to end. Here at home,
the cheerleaders would have to put down the pom-poms, stop mindlessly praising the troops for their service, and pick up a few protest
signs.
In point of fact, America's all-too-real wars overseas aren't likely to end until the phony war here at home is dispatched to
oblivion.
A final thought: Americans tell pollsters that, after all these years of failed wars abroad, they continue to
trust the
military more than any other societal institution. Consistent with phony war, however, much of that trust is based on ignorance,
on not really knowing what that military is doing overseas. So, is there a chance that, one of these days, Americans might actually
begin to pay some attention to "their" wars? And if so, would those polls begin to change and how might that military, which has
experienced its share of blood, sweat, and tears, respond to such a loss of societal prestige? Beware the
anger of the legions .
Faith in institutions undergirds democracy. Keeping the people deliberately demobilized and in the dark about the costs and carnage
of America's wars follows a pattern of governmental lying and deceit that stretches from the
Vietnam War to the
Iraq Wars of
1991 and 2003
, to military operations in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere today. Systemic lies and the phony war that goes with them continue
to contribute to a slow-motion process of political and social disintegration that could result in a much grimmer future for this
country: perhaps an authoritarian one; certainly, a more chaotic and less democratic one.
Societal degradation and democratic implosion, caused in part by endless phony war and the lies associated with it, are this country's
real existential enemies, even if you can't find them listed in any National Defense Strategy. Indeed, the price tag for America's
wars may in the end prove not just heavy but catastrophic.
The text of the letter in French as it appeared in "Les Centurions" [LCJL] has been appended near the bottom of this post. Here
is the English language version published in the 1962 edition of "The Centurions" [TCJL]:
We had been told, on leaving our native soil, that we were going to defend the sacred rights conferred on us by so many
of our citizens settled overseas, so many years of our presence, so many benefits brought by us to populations in need of our
assistance and our civilization.
We were able to verify that all this was true, and, because it was true, we did not hesitate to shed our quota of blood,
to sacrifice our youth and our hopes. We regretted nothing, but whereas we over here are inspired by this frame of mind, I
am told that in Rome factions and conspiracies are rife, that treachery flourishes, and that many people in their uncertainty
and confusion lend a ready ear to the dire temptations of relinquishment and vilify our action.
I cannot believe that all this is true and yet recent wars have shown how pernicious such a state of mind could be and to
where it could lead.
Make haste to reassure me, I beg you, and tell me that our fellow-citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we
ourselves are protecting the glory of the Empire.
If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on these desert sands in vain, then beware of the
anger of the Legions!
Marcus Flavinius,
Centurion in the 2nd Cohort of the Augusta Legion,
to his cousin Tertullus in Rome
William Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and history professor, is a
TomDispatch
regular . He blogs at Bracing Views .
I'm not sure why the US's actions overseas are called "wars". They're attacks upon weak 3rd and 4th world countries with little
capability to resist. The US has never fought a peer enemy despite all it's self-promotion. It moved in on the Germans at the
last moment after they were already on the ropes, despite all the WWII movie hype. All other enemies have been carefully chosen
for their vulnerability. But who actually wants a "real" war? Only an insane person wants that. These phony wars serve as an income
transfer scheme siphoning tax money upward from the masses to the upper classes. Funny how that works. An actual war with a country
that can defend itself and inflict real damage might have the effect of upsetting this racket they have going and they don't want
that. Of course the money spent for Afghanistan could be better put to use domestically for roads, medical research and other
ways of spending our money on ourselves but apparently that's not in the cards. What's important is to keep the hysteria going
so as to maintain the .1% in the style to which they're entitled. The people getting killed are the expendables and of no importance.
It's all just a money transfer. Ya have to be in the thick of things around DC, the Pentagon, the likes of Lockheed, the spooks
at NSA, certain aspects of Federal Law Enforcement, the whole Alphabet Soup. The dough is a-flowing and they're up to their hand-sewn
collars in it. Their mansions, their 5 BMWs or whatever, the Rolexes, the vacations, beautiful women at home AND on the road.
They intend to hand it all over to their children as their fathers handed it over to them. They are NOT giving this up. Ever.
Get in the way, Mr. Senator or Congressman or President? Here's what we have on YOU sir, usually a girlfriend or some depravity,
they're politicians after all. End of the day, these are the people that get richer every day by killing people. They're very
good at it. Even in Britain, the UK, even Russians aren't safe in the quest to keep it all going. Get in the way of the cabal
and their income streams in any way, they can disappear you and blame it on Putin. These are the people that kill people. Remember
that, you'll be well-served.
But: there IS sacrifice. All those trillions of dollars wasted on pointless winless foreign wars are coming out of the standard
of living of the United States, one way or the other. It's just indirect and hard to trace.
One is reminded that Donald Trump, during his presidential campaign, suggested that we stop wasting all these trillions on
stupid wars, and spend it on ourselves. For this he was excoriated as "literally Hitler." A lot of Americans voted for him because,
propaganda aside, they are not stupid and they don't want this phony war nonsense. After the election, though, he finally caved,
and now it's back to business as usual. The elites really like their war profits and they will not shy away from playing dirty
to keep them. That's why these phony wars continue.
Remember: IN THE LAST ELECTION THE AMERICAN PEOPLE VOTED AGAINST PHONY WARS. It's just that we don't live in a Democracy.
But there is an alternate view. One is reminded that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were only possible because the immigration
policy of the United States is increasingly open to people from unstable nations full of extremists. That attack could not have
happened a decade or so earlier.
Even if the United States had the most benevolent foreign policy imaginable, it's a big messy world. There will always be people
who hate the United States, for whatever reason. In the past these people would just stew in their own misery and kill each other.
Now they can come here no questions asked. Now every extremist group in Tyrannia or Fanatistan is our concern, and we need to
break up any potentially hostile organized faction anywhere in the world. So maybe – maybe – these stupid wars aren't that stupid
after all. Maybe these phony wars is just one more price for "there shall be open borders."
Minding our own business was never a strong suit of our ruling classes, but it would have saved the world a lot of grief. However,
it would have shaved the profits of the bankers and other war profiteers.
The "war for profit group" seem to labor under the impression that it is their war, and that it shall be their material
gain. That group, surely is the cause of wars
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Why is your country at war and what happens to you after the war, and related subjects" p77, (1917)
In the battle of Manchuria ( China ) , August 1945 , or " August Storm " , the Russians defeated the imperial japanese army
, the road to Japan was open for the Red Army and the chinese . Then the yankees threw the atomic bombs to Japan to threaten the
Russians ( who still did not have the atomic bomb at the time ) to not to invade Japan .
Japan was completeley defeated , there was not any military need to throw atomic bombs on Japan . The Americans have a sad
record for bombing unarmed civilians : Corea , Vietnam , Germany , Irak, Afganistan , Libia , Siria , Japan , etc ..
Americans are no longer allowed to see the reality of war, as some old movies showed. From my blog:
Jun 8, 2017 – Patriotic Nonsense
Do you become angry when you hear nonsense that our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting for our freedoms? Do you become
enraged when the death of soldiers is explained by claiming they protected us? This is nothing new, as shown in this short movie
clip with Korean War vet James Garner. Most blame the Generals and politicians, but he also blames the people back home for glorifying
wars, thus allowing the deadly ruse to continue. He stated: "It is always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parade" as
though their husbands died by accident.
Back when Reagan was doing his impersonation of POTUS, the defense deficit was some measly amount and the cry went out to privatize
defense because the free market could do it for less. Pretty funny in retrospect.
They also fixed our inefficient corporations and markets, then went on to fix housing, inequality and end poverty. As if that
wasn't enough, they also fixed healthcare and banking. I'm surprised we're still afloat. I expect a Wiley Coyote moment soon.
"It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on,
in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands
playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every
hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering
wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide
avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and
sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the
packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory with stirred the deepest deeps of
their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the
tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to
flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in
outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.
It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to
disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern
and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and
offended no more in that way.
Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was
filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of
the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the
flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender!
Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of
glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and
friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for
the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter
from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst
that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating
hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:
God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest,
Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!
Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading
and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful
and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort,
and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and
the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible
in the bloody onset; help them crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country
imperishable honor and glory --
An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his
eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his
head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face
unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he
made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there
waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving
prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms,
grant us the victory, O Lord and God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"
The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister
did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with
solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:
"I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house
with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of
His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger,
shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like
unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of
-- except he pause and think. "God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused
and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, and the other not. Both
have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken.
Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest
without intent you invoke a curse upon your neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the
blessing of rain on your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a
curse on some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God
to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your
hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was
so! You heard the words 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole
of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary.
When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow
victory -- must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell
also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
"Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle -- be Thou
near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved
firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with
our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;
help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;
help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts
of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with
their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and
hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in
spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it --
For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their
bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white
snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the
ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and
contrite hearts. Amen.
(After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most
High waits."
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what
he said
The Secretary of Defense has
written to Congressional leaders to express his opposition to S.J.Res. 54, the resolution
that would end U.S. involvement in the war on Yemen:
In a letter sent to congressional leaders Wednesday and obtained by The Washington Post,
Mattis wrote that restricting military support the United States is providing to the
Saudi-led coalition "could increase civilian casualties, jeopardize cooperation with our
partners on counterterrorism, and reduce our influence with the Saudis -- all of which would
further exacerbate the situation and humanitarian crisis."
He urged Congress not to impose restrictions on the "noncombat," "limited U.S. military
support" being provided to Saudi Arabia, which is "engaging in operations in its legitimate
exercise of self-defense."
The Pentagon has been putting forward very weak legal
arguments against S.J.Res. 54, and Mattis'
statement of the policy arguments against the resolution are not any better. The Saudi-led
coalition would have great difficulty continuing their war without U.S. military assistance.
U.S. refueling allows coalition planes to carry out more attacks than they otherwise could, so
it is extremely unlikely that ending it could possibly result in more civilian casualties than
the bombing campaign causes now. Mattis is taking for granted that U.S. military assistance
somehow makes coalition bombing more accurate and less likely to result in civilian casualties,
but that is hard to credit when coalition forces routinely target civilian structures on
purpose and when the military
admits that it doesn't keep track of what happens after it refuels coalition planes.
Secretary Mattis says that cutting off support could jeopardize cooperation on
counter-terrorism, but the flip side of this is that continuing to enable the Saudi-led war
creates the conditions for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the local ISIS affiliate to
flourish. The coalition's war has made AQAP stronger than it was before, and AQAP members have
sometimes even fought alongside coalition forces on the ground. Instead of worrying about
whether the U.S. is jeopardizing cooperation with these states, we should be asking whether
that cooperation is worth very much in Yemen.
He claims that the Saudis and their allies are engaged in "a legitimate exercise of
self-defense," and this is simply not true. The Saudis and their allies were not attacked and
were not threatened with attack prior to their intervention. Saudi territory now comes under
attack because the coalition has been bombing Yemen for years, but that doesn't make continuing
the war self-defense. If an aggressor launches an attack against a neighboring country, it is
the neighbor that is engaged in self-defense against the state(s) attacking them.
Mattis also warns that ending support for the Saudi-led coalition would have other
undesirable consequences:
As Mattis put it in his letter to congressional leaders Wednesday, "withdrawing U.S.
support would embolden Iran to increase its support to the Houthis, enabling further
ballistic missile strikes on Saudi Arabia and threatening vital shipping lanes in the Red
Sea, thereby raising the risk of a regional conflict."
These claims also don't hold water. Iranian support for the Houthis remains limited, but it
has increased as a direct result of the war. The longer that the war goes on, the greater the
incentive the Houthis and Iran will have to cooperate. The absurdity of this intervention is
that it was dishonestly sold as a war against Iranian "expansionism" and yet it has done more
to aid Iran than anything Iran's government could have done on its own. Missile strikes on
Saudi Arabia wouldn't be happening if the Saudis and their allies weren't regularly bombing
Yemeni cities. If the coalition halted its bombing, the missile strikes would almost certainly
cease as well. Continuing the war is a guarantee that those attacks will continue, and U.S.
military assistance ensures that the war will continue. Every reason Mattis gives here for
continuing U.S. support for the war is actually a reason to end it.
Shipping lanes weren't threatened before the intervention and won't be threatened after it
ends. Yemenis have every incentive to leave shipping lanes alone, since these are their
country's lifeline. Meanwhile, the cruel coalition blockade is slowly starving millions of
Yemenis to death by keeping out essential commercial goods from the main ports that serve the
vast majority of the population. Mattis is warning about potential threats to shipping from
Yemen while completely ignoring that the main cause of the humanitarian disaster is the
interruption of commercial shipping into Yemen by the Saudi-led blockade. The regional conflict
that Mattis warns about is already here. It is called the Saudi-led war on Yemen. If one wants
to prevent the region from being destabilized further, one would want to put an end to that war
as quickly as possible.
Mattis mentions that the U.S. role in the war is a "noncombat" and "limited" one, but for
the purposes of the debate on Sanders-Lee resolution that is irrelevant. It doesn't matter that
the military assistance the U.S. is providing doesn't put Americans in combat. That is not the
only way that U.S. forces can be introduced into hostilities. According to the War Powers Resolution
, the U.S. has introduced its armed forces into hostilities under these circumstances:
For purposes of this joint resolution, the term "introduction of United States Armed
Forces" includes the assignment of member of such armed forces to command, coordinate,
participate in the movement of, or accompany [bold mine-DL] the regular or irregular military
forces of any foreign country or government when such military forces are engaged, or there
exists an imminent threat that such forces will become engaged, in hostilities.
Any fair reading of this definition has to apply to the regular U.S. refueling of coalition
planes that are engaged in an ongoing bombing campaign. The U.S. is obviously participating in
the "movement" of coalition forces when it provides their planes with fuel. Indeed, our forces
are making the movement of their forces possible through refueling. U.S. involvement in the war
on Yemen clearly counts as introducing U.S. forces into hostilities under the WPR, and neither
administration has sought or received authorization to do this. No president is permitted to do
this unless there is "(1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a
national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or
its armed forces." There has obviously been no action from Congress that authorizes this, and
there is certainly no emergency or attack that justifies it. U.S. involvement in the war on
Yemen is illegal, and the Senate should pass S.J.Res. 54 to end it.
"Mattis wrote that restricting military support the United States is providing to the
Saudi-led coalition "could increase civilian casualties, jeopardize cooperation with our
partners on counterterrorism, and reduce our influence with the Saudis -- all of which would
further exacerbate the situation and humanitarian crisis.""
Wow. So MBS is blackmailing us. He's threatening to kill more civilians, to stop
anti-terror cooperation, and to shut us out of other Saudi regional security decisions if we
don't help him starve and wreck Yemen.
Maybe the situation is a little clearer, but how can anyone take Trump seriously after
this embarrassing confession by Mattis?
We may assume that Trump has no self-respect, but doesn't he have any respect for his
office? Is he really going to let this disgusting little torture freak jerk him around like
this? When it implicates all Americans in Saudi war crimes?
Re: "Mattis' Weak Case for Supporting the War on Yemen"
Unfortunately, in this day of warped Military Exceptionalism as the civic religion, a
4-Star pedigree fronting weak arguments makes them essentially unassailable. No matter how
immoral, idiotic or costly to the taxpayers.
Mad Dog Mattis got a free ride with his logically incoherent, hyper-belligerent
pronouncements related to the National Security Strategy. Expect no different response to his
perverse rationalizations of the Yemen catastrophe.
Generals and Admirals now pop off stupid and dangerous opinions right and left and are
never challenged by an MSM that is bedazzled by anyone wearing stars on their shoulders.
Mattis' case for Yemen is not only weak, it's pathetic. Too bad the co-opted and seduced
MSM will never suggest that to the public at large deluded by the omnipresent propaganda of
the National Security State.
Nothing will change until the undeserved fawning adoration of the War Machine Elite is
substantially attenuated.
The neocons will stop at nothing to bring down anyone they suspect of threatening Israel or
U.S. military hegemony in the Middle East.
First, they lied about WMDs in Iraq and started a completely illegal war, killing millions
and devastating that country for generations. That led directly to the creation of ISIS and
the havoc it has wrought on both Iraq and Syria (and increasingly in other countries).
Then under Obama and Sec. Clinton, they allowed the military takeover of Egypt by the
murderous and oppressive El-Sisi and launched an aggressive war of regime change in Libya,
throwing both North African countries into turmoil.
Then they supported the brutal and savage ongoing Saudi war against Yemen to curb
non-existent Iranian influence, followed by politically isolating Qatar for its supposed
chumminess with Iran.
The neocons will do absolutely anything to bring down the Iranian regime, no matter how
many foreign and American lives and destroyed to achieve that end.
The details of Mattis' letter of indulgence do not matter as much as the fact that he is
willing to defend the indefensible. Even if his professed concerns were not only genuine, but
actually reflected reality, he also has to know better than anybody else within the
administration about the consequences of the US-backed Saudi/UAE invasion of Yemen.
Mattis has joined Graham and Albright in the "worth it" campaign to sustain and extend
perfectly predictable atrocities.
If he wants to make the case that we cannot accept uncertainty with respect to an alleged
Iranian aggression towards Saudi Arabia – and with even more unlikely acquiescence by
the Houthi to let Iran use them the way the US uses the Kurds – or even assuming that
Mattis wants to misrepresent possible Houthi blowback against Saudi Arabia as "Iranian" just
for convenience – then it should be clear that he is claimng we can easily accept
uncertainty with respect to Yemeni blowback against the US – blowback that he also uses
to justify the US campaign inside Yemen, and that fueled Obama's pathological obsession with
ideological cleansing in Yemen and other prospective "safe harbors".
Mattis is proving the validity of the actual Powell Doctrine – if you join it, you
own it – both with respect to US co-belligerence in Yemen, and with respect to Mattis
personally. He is also proving the observation that anybody who is willing to join an
administration as criminal as that of Bush, Obama or Trump is unlikely to do any good –
by their voluntary association they have irredeemably tainted themselves.
We do not want to get in the middle of this Sunni vs. Shiite war. The Saudis want to destroy
the Shiites in Yemen and we are fools at best and criminals at worst to help them. The people
of Yemen are no threat to the US and for theAmerican Government to cooperate with the Saudis
in the murderof Yemeni women and children is revolting.
Americans have heard for years that supporting "democracy" and popular uprisings throughout
the Middle East are in our national interests, the basis being that oppressed people are more
likely to resort to terrorism.
Yet in the cases of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and now Yemen popular revolutions of Shias
demanding equal rights are actually deemed a threat to our national security.
The neocons have gotten so deep in the Gulf/Israel v. Iran conflict that they're not even
keeping to the ostensible reasons for interventionism.
Everything that Saker wrote is true, but he also makes it read a little bit complicated.
Things are much simpler. During my career as a market researcher in a Western country, I once slipped in into some commercial
research that I was doing a test of what kind of message do people react to. The results were really shocking (to me): in rounded
figures, 91% of people reacted to an emotional message and only 9% reacted to a rational message. In other words, if you want
to promote almost anything, appeal to the emotional or even animal part of the human nature not to the ratio. This is exactly
what the Western propaganda is doing and this is why it works.
Think for a moment about the implications of the fact that 91% of people are prone to being emotionally manipulated (including
hysterics):
1) on democracy,
2) on drive towards war and so on.
Again, if you want to manipulate people forget about facts and just employ words and images that can elicit emotions and a
large (democratic) majority will follow you even off the cliff .
If you have not been feeling depressed already, maybe this post of mine will do it for you. That is how I feel as well.
It took a long time for you to discover (in a 'commercial research') what was known for a much longer time, the application
of these principles in advertising and propaganda 'discovered' by Edward Bernays and exposed in his 'influential book' "Propaganda"
1928. One of the techniques of propaganda is to make the recipients believe that the ideas instilled in their heads were their
own discovery.
It did not take me as long as you think. As a marketing and advertising professional (with appropriate qualifications) I was always
aware that emotional works better than rational, but I never had an idea by how much. My most extreme supposition was 2/3 to 1/3.
To end up 10:1, I never expected that.
It appears that such high proportion enables the government's/manipulators to silence the rational fraction who oppose the
dragging into a war. Without any firm evidence I do feel that if the proportion was 2/3 to 1/3 then such manipulation, leading
subjects often to mass suicide, would not be possible.
Therefore, I posit that the human society consists of three strata:
But you succeeded in creating a diversion – we are discussing your stupidity instead of an important inclination in the human
nature. Virtually all of the "democratic" system manipulations, especially the dragging of a nation into a war is based on emotional
manipulations such as the Germans bayoneting the Belgian babies, the Iraqis throwing babies out of incubators onto the cold floor,
and so on and so on. Around 91% swallow the regime's emotional crap, the remaining 9% are denounced as traitors and threatened
wth sedition laws.
"The first terrorist attack with chemical weapon on a territory of a NATO nation by a rogue state."
"Virtually all of the "democratic" system manipulations, especially the dragging of a nation into a war is based on emotional
manipulations such as the Germans bayoneting the Belgian babies, the Iraqis throwing babies out of incubators onto the cold floor,
and so on and so on."
If you are going to make this claim, then you are going to have to offer specific research studies, along with their methodologies
and sources, i.e. past studies they based their research on. Because what one person calls "emotional manipulations", another
person calls "facts".
"Around 91% swallow the regime's emotional crap, the remaining 9% are denounced as traitors and threatened wth sedition laws."
Doubling down I see without the requisite verification. Was your own "study" even replicated? You do realize that studies need
to be replicated as to offer further evidence of your conclusions. Can you even name one such study?
The first time I realized how low things would likely get was when Ruth Marcus, deputy editor of the Washington Post
, sent out the following tweet in
March of 2017, squealing with delight at the thought of a new Cold War with the world's other nuclear superpower: "So excited to
be watching The Americans, throwback to a simpler time when everyone considered Russia the enemy. Even the president."
Not only did Marcus's comment imply that it was great for the U.S. to have an enemy, but it specifically implied that there was
something particularly great about that enemy being Russia.
Since then, the public discourse has only gotten nastier. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – who notoriously
perjured himself before Congress about warrantless spying on Americans –
stated on Meet the Press last
May that Russians were uniquely and "genetically" predisposed toward manipulative political activities. If Clapper or anyone else
in the public eye had made such a statement about Muslims, Arabs, Iranians, Jews, Israelis, Chinese or just about any other group,
there would have been some push-back about the prejudice that it reflected and how it didn't correspond with enlightened liberal
values. But Clapper's comment passed with hardly a peep of protest.
More recently, John Sipher , a retired CIA station
chief who reportedly spent years in Russia – although at what point in time is unclear – was interviewed in Jane Mayer's recent New
Yorker
piece
trying to spin the Steele Dossier as somehow legitimate. On March 6, Sipher took to Twitter with the following
comment : "How can one not be a Russophobe?
Russia soft power is political warfare. Hard power is invading neighbors, hiding the death of civilians with chemical weapons and
threatening with doomsday nuclear weapons. And they kill the opposition at home. Name something positive."
In fairness to Sipher, he did backpedal somewhat after being challenged; however, the fact that his unfiltered blabbering reveals
such a deep antipathy toward Russians ("How can one not be a Russophobe?") and an initial assumption that he could get away with
saying it publicly is troubling.
Glenn Greenwald re-tweeted with a comment asking if Russians would soon acceptably be referred to as "rats and roaches." Another
person replied with: "Because they are
rats and roaches. What's the problem?"
This is just a small sampling of the anti-Russian comments and attitudes that pass, largely unremarked upon, in our media landscape.
There are, of course, the larger institutional influencers of culture doing their part to push anti-Russian bigotry in this already
contentious atmosphere. Red Sparrow , both the
book and the
movie , detail the escapades of a female
Russian spy. The story propagates the continued fetishization of Russian women based on the stereotype that they're all hot and frisky.
Furthermore, all those who work in Russian intelligence are evil and backwards rather than possibly being motivated by some kind
of patriotism, while all the American intel agents are paragons of virtue and seem like they just stepped out of an ad for Nick at
Nite's How to be Swell .
The recent Academy Awards continued their politically motivated trend of awarding Oscars for best documentary to films on topics
that just happen to coalesce nicely with Washington's latest adversarial policy. Last year it was the White Helmets film
to support the regime change meme in Syria. This year it's Icarus about the doping scandal in Russia.
"At this stage, only gross ignorance or dishonesty can explain anyone seriously claiming
there's a rational motive for the Russian government to have done this."
Notable quotes:
"... When Putin's cruising to an easy win and the only concern is whether the turnout is 60% or 70%, the claims he wants it for election purposes are pretty stupid, and become untenable when you consider the very real diplomatic, propaganda and soft power costs Russia will bear for this, and coming at a particularly bad time as well on several counts, with Syria on a knife edge in relation to (even more) open US military aggression, the NordStream II pipeline facing new attempts to block it, and the World Cup coming up. ..."
"... Frankly, if the idea of trying to murder someone in Britain, using a "wmd" in the most hysteria-inducing propaganda-favouring method possible, had been suggested to Putin by one of his security apparatchiks I suspect the man would have been guarding ice floes in the Arctic within a few hours. ..."
"... And that's not even considering that this individual (Skripal) wasn't a thuggish, troublemaking fugitive from Russian justice like Litvinenko, but rather a former spy who had already been unmasked, tried and imprisoned by the Russians (his offence was considered so serious he got a whole 13 years), and then exchanged after a few years inside. He was considered so endangered by British intelligence that they didn't even bother hiding his identity, and his address was in the public domain. ..."
"... At this stage, only gross ignorance or dishonesty can explain anyone seriously claiming there's a rational motive for the Russian government to have done this. ..."
"... And by the same exact token, there's no reason to get breathless about the idea that it could have been one of the parties who are real beneficiaries of this propaganda surge -- any of the countries currently engaged in confrontation of Russia in Syria and elsewhere, or that criminal elements connected to the Russian exile "mafia" types could have obtained it from a lab in, say, Ukraine, or that some of the shadowy US and UK security state contacts involved in the campaign to overturn the election of Trump might have used it as a twofer – to get rid of Skripal if he had information they wanted kept secret and set the pretext for the currently ongoing campaign against Russia. ..."
"... All a lot more plausible than the idea that the Russian government was stupid enough to do this to itself, gratuitously ..."
Scenarios for operations are written by somebody. Possibly the same people who also write
screenplays for TV and Hollywood. We know many writers who worked for intelligence services
(Flemming, Greene, LeCarre.) In Six Days of Condor they wanted to keep the scenario secret
and have it removed form popular circulation in a thriller books. But here is opposite
situation. The operation is basically a psy-op so it is public where you want to convince
people that something happened. I can see a point of injecting it as movie drama first so it
will become more believable when it eventually happens. But still the simplest explanation of
laziness and plagiarism can't be excluded.
Others have already explained why Purin and cronies might decide now was a good time to
kill a traitor and be accused of it.
Nobody has yet credibly done so. When Putin's cruising to an easy win and the only concern
is whether the turnout is 60% or 70%, the claims he wants it for election purposes are pretty
stupid, and become untenable when you consider the very real diplomatic, propaganda and soft
power costs Russia will bear for this, and coming at a particularly bad time as well on
several counts, with Syria on a knife edge in relation to (even more) open US military
aggression, the NordStream II pipeline facing new attempts to block it, and the World Cup
coming up.
Frankly, if the idea of trying to murder someone in Britain, using a "wmd" in the most
hysteria-inducing propaganda-favouring method possible, had been suggested to Putin by one of
his security apparatchiks I suspect the man would have been guarding ice floes in the Arctic
within a few hours.
And that's not even considering that this individual (Skripal) wasn't a thuggish,
troublemaking fugitive from Russian justice like Litvinenko, but rather a former spy who had
already been unmasked, tried and imprisoned by the Russians (his offence was considered so
serious he got a whole 13 years), and then exchanged after a few years inside. He was
considered so endangered by British intelligence that they didn't even bother hiding his
identity, and his address was in the public domain.
At this stage, only gross ignorance or dishonesty can explain anyone seriously claiming
there's a rational motive for the Russian government to have done this.
Do I think Russia is involved with the Skripal hit? Of course. .Because of the poison
involved, they (Rus/Putin) almost certainly did it.
That's the poison that Porton Down declined to claim they could identify as having come
from Russia and were only prepared to say is "of a type developed by Russia"?
The poison that the main source for (a former Soviet dissident living in the US) put the
formulae for in his book published ten years ago, and who was quoted a few days ago as saying
that either Russia did it, or someone else who'd read his book?
Of course, exiled dissidents backing up the latest US propaganda campaign against their
former home's government is hardly anything new – that was one of the main methods by
which we were lied into the Iraq War. It's rather cutely naïve for one such to openly
admit that anybody else with the resources (such as the UK, the US or Israel, for a start,
and probably anybody else with access to state resources, such as Ukraine) could have
manufactured the supposedly incriminating substance over the past ten years.
So the idea that the particular chemical allegedly used is in the slightest evidence of
its origin is completely untenable. Nevertheless, that seems to be the only real piece of
"evidence" relied upon for the convenient rush to judgement by the usual suspects.
I just happen to be reading "Rise and Kill First" – the secret history of Israel's
targeted assassinations.
Roughly 700 pages of text and notes about one country's targeted killings so I'm really
not in a 'how could this be' frame of mind with regard to Russia.
Absolutely. And by the same exact token, there's no reason to get breathless about the
idea that it could have been one of the parties who are real beneficiaries of this propaganda
surge -- any of the countries currently engaged in confrontation of Russia in Syria and
elsewhere, or that criminal elements connected to the Russian exile "mafia" types could have
obtained it from a lab in, say, Ukraine, or that some of the shadowy US and UK security state
contacts involved in the campaign to overturn the election of Trump might have used it as a
twofer – to get rid of Skripal if he had information they wanted kept secret and set
the pretext for the currently ongoing campaign against Russia.
All a lot more plausible than the idea that the Russian government was stupid enough to do
this to itself, gratuitously.
bad faith and parochial bellicosity on the part of the all the major powers of the
time
Some of it sounds familiar, but not all. I was pointing out that there are major
differences between today and 1914, but it is extremely volatile and dangerous like then.
At least some in the West have made a decision to deal with Russia now before it gets
stronger. Or to create a much better 'defensive' perimeter for the future. Ukraine, Baltics
and probably Georgia, maybe Turkey have been lined up on Russia's border, with Nato bases and
soldiers. There was the failed attempt to push Russia out of its key Navy base in Crimea.
Syria war will go on to bleed and demoralise Russia, maybe in a few other places. Squeeze the
economy by financial isolation. Use media demonisation to create pressure on the Westernised
Russian elites.
Will that start a war like in 1914? That's where the differences come in. Russia cannot be
today described as ' bellicose ', and neither can large parts of the West. Only some
in the West are bellicose. Germany, Italy and to some extent France want to continue or even
increase business with Russia.
There is also no such thing as a traditional war between Russia and the West – it
would be over in 1-2 days (if that), basically a suicide. It could still happen, but we need
more events before we get there.
"... You have obviously been at the crime scene, have witnessed the comatose bodies of the Skripals and after analyzing the Novitchok samples you meticulously collected, have reached the inescapable conclusion ..."
"... Nice sarcasm. Well deserved for those "Novichok hot heads", who claim that it is plausible that a military grade nerve gas was used. Actually initial reports were about a synthetic opioid, not any nerve gas ( https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ex-russian-agent-sergei-skripal-critical-condition-was-poisoned-by-fentanyl-1665286 ) ..."
"... I am amazed that people do not understand the level of absurdity of using nerve gas in such a case. It's really like ignorance has no boundaries. I understand that some people did not manage to graduate from a university or take a decent organic chemistry course, but still, this is simply amazing and very disturbing to read such posts. Especially here. ..."
You have obviously been at the crime scene, have witnessed the comatose bodies of the
Skripals and after analyzing the Novitchok samples you meticulously collected, have reached
the inescapable conclusion
I am amazed that people do not understand the level of absurdity of using nerve gas in
such a case. It's really like ignorance has no boundaries. I understand that some people did
not manage to graduate from a university or take a decent organic chemistry course, but
still, this is simply amazing and very disturbing to read such posts. Especially here.
If it was a nerve gas my question to "Novichok hot heads" here is who the assassin
was?
You need either to place a can or some punctured packet under the bench (probably
impossible) or spray the liquid on the victim from a short distance. The latter is a very
dangerous exercise if you are not wearing a respirator and protection gear.
Remember the place was under surveillance -- bad for any assassination. Also in lethal
concentrations, the gas kills the victims in several minutes. But Skripals survived
unattended for an hour or more and there was only one other seriously affected person -- a
policeman, while doctor who treated Skriplal's daughter on the bench was unaffected.
I do not see any reasonable way to administer the gas in this environment without
affecting many other people including any passerby, or the doctor who treated Skripal's
daughter
Yes, it certainly looks like a provocation, the "false flag" operation. The Brits and the Banks needed the US and the EU to join
the fight.
Notable quotes:
"... The most plausible goal of the whole "Operation Skripal" was poisoning UK-Russia relations and hopefully bringing the US and EU to impose new round of sanctions on Russia. In this sense it reminds Litvinenko case (which brought huge propaganda benefits to the UK and the hysteria lasted several months, if memory does not fail me). ..."
"... One thing I can't understand in "Operation Skripal" is how such an assassination (if we assume that this is an assassination) was accomplished. ..."
"... The gas (if it really exists, which is yet another question) supposedly is really deadly. If this was not gas but some substance infused with this agent (which would be extremely strange and risky method), you need to get it into the drinks, which means 100% chances of your detection. ..."
"... Moreover in case of the gas the difficulties look insurmountable -- to get it to the victim you need to mix components and shortly after spray it from a short distance, hoping the you mixed them correctly. The place where Skripals were found unconscious is a really bad place for such an exercise as there probably several cameras which record the events on the bench. ..."
"... So IMHO it looks like assassination without an assassin ..."
"... suggested traces of the opiate fentanyl -- a synthetic toxin many times stronger than heroin -- had been detected at the scene. ..."
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best
he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia,
nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine
the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictorship, or a
parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked (by a Russian sounding chemical weapon Novichok), and
denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism (https://www.craigmurray.org.uk - Craig Murray has been most viciously attacked
for not accepting the official story without any evidence) and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Hermann Göring
That's a perfectly applicable variation of the famous quote.
The most plausible goal of the whole "Operation Skripal" was poisoning UK-Russia relations and hopefully bringing the US and
EU to impose new round of sanctions on Russia. In this sense it reminds Litvinenko case (which brought huge propaganda benefits
to the UK and the hysteria lasted several months, if memory does not fail me).
BTW exiled Russian oligarchs like Khodorkovski ( https://www.voltairenet.org/article168007.html
) also could easily stage such a false flag operation using their interconnections with both Russia and Israel.
One thing I can't understand in "Operation Skripal" is how such an assassination (if we assume that this is an assassination)
was accomplished.
The gas (if it really exists, which is yet another question) supposedly is really deadly. If this was not gas but some
substance infused with this agent (which would be extremely strange and risky method), you need to get it into the drinks, which
means 100% chances of your detection.
Moreover in case of the gas the difficulties look insurmountable -- to get it to the victim you need to mix components
and shortly after spray it from a short distance, hoping the you mixed them correctly. The place where Skripals were found unconscious
is a really bad place for such an exercise as there probably several cameras which record the events on the bench.
Unless it was the daughter who did this (in this case authorities have definitely all the necessary evidence of the crime committed)
chances of an attacker to survive such an attack are slim, and changes not being recorded on one or more camera are virtually
non existent.
If there was a human assassin, he/she risks to be immediately dead or severely injured as even in minimal concentrations such
a gas reliably kills a person within two minutes or so. Antidote might help to survive, but how effective it is depends on the
dose you can get.
If some robotic disperser was used, then it will be found as unlike in case of an explosive device the activation does no destroy
it.
Also unclear why target the daughter, unless we are dealing with some botched amateur false flag operation in best traditions
of ISIS Syria false flag operations.
Moreover, Skripals spent around an hour on a bench in a comatose state and were helped by a doctor who was not affected in
any way. See timeline at
So IMHO it looks like assassination without an assassin . There are some absurd statements that the poison was spiked
in their drinks either in the pub or at the restaurant:
Later their collapse was used to stage a false flag operation, when in fact there was no any gas involved, and at this point,
a grandiose propaganda show with the decontamination of the area started.
Even if the Russian government had ordered Skripal's kidding, no way would they be so sloppy
as to spew toxins all over the place sickening innocent people. If the backward North Koreans
can do a targeted chemical-based assassination, the Russians certainly can. This is yet
another Anglo-Zionist insult against Russian technical knowhow.
We all know the KGB is smart and crafty and so is Putin. So for unknown reasons, they want to
kill a retired Russian spy living openly in London. Do these brilliant people choose to:
1. Use a dangerous nerve agent that must be smuggled into England, is easily traceable to
Russia, is dangerous to the assassin, and difficult to employ and ensure a kill?
Or:
2. Pay a desperate drug addict to club him on the head on the street and steal his
wallet?
Considering UK behavior towards Russia as a slap on face , Russia not only should but must
demand immediate release of all information available to UK on this case and samples. It
should be done in aggressive manner and backed by international law to which UK is a signer.
Someone must put the money where mouth is or shut up and go away .
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior
Depends. If you have little or no prior behavior to go on, then social status can be a
good predictor as well.
The "higher" you go, the bigger the asshole*.
Trust me, I've experienced it aplenty.
Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house.
-Diogenes of Sinope, quoted by Stobaeus, iv. 31c. 88
But if you will take note of the mode of proceedings of men, you will see that all those
who come to great riches and great power have obtained them either by fraud or by force;
and afterwards, to hide the ugliness of acquisition, they make it decent by applying the
false title of earnings to things they have usurped by deceit or by violence.
- Niccolo Machiavelli , HISTORY OF FLORENCE AND OF THE AFFAIRS OF ITALY, Book 3 chap
3Para 8
" wealth is no proof of moral character; nor poverty of the want of it. On the contrary,
wealth is often the presumptive evidence of dishonesty; and poverty the negative evidence
of innocence."
THOMAS PAINE, DISSERTATION ON FIRST-PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT, 1795
Aaron Maté of The Real News joins Scott to discuss two of his latest pieces for The
Nation, " Hyping the Mueller
Indictment " and " What We've
Learned in Year 1 of Russiagate ." Maté explains why he thinks the Trump-Russia
collusion case is much ado about nothing and how Trump's pre-election attempts to de-escalate
tensions with Russia have been misconstrued as collusion. Scott and Maté then discuss
how the centrist left, with the help of Facebook and corporate media, is using the Russiagate
conspiracy to double down on the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic party.
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing
them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to
repudiate morality while laying claim to it ( ) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely
believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it
becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to
deny the existence of objective reality"
In an essay "The Decay of Lying" (1889), Oscar Wilde launched that famous sentence: "Life
imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life".
In November 2017 British TV presented the 6th session episode 5 of 'Strike Back", a
British/American action-adventure/spy-drama television series based on a novel of the same
name by novelist and former Special Air Service (SAS) soldier Chris Ryan. In it the Section
20 ("a secretive unit of British military intelligence, a team of special operations
personnel conducting several high risk missions across the globe") foiled a terrorist attack
with the gas Novichok made by Karim Markov, a Russian scientist who allegedly killed his
colleagues who invented the gas. The team duly trace the labs where Markov continues to
produce more Novichok, in Ukraine and Belarus. The cast is full with the assorted jihadis,
Russian Mafia bosses with their cruel henchmen, Hungarian white supremacists and nasty
Serbians.
You find summaries of the episodes
@https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Back:_Retribution
"It is strange that a British-American intelligence TV drama Strike Back had several
episodes featuring Novichok nerve agent and Evil Russkies last year. Someone orchestrating
political theater in the UK watches a lot of TV, or is advised by its producers."
Nobody will miss the fact that the countries which emitted the 'Joint statement' blaming
Russia's aggression are the countries which repeatedly aggressed and invaded Russia or allied
themselves with Russia's enemies. None of them were ever invaded by Russia but in pursuit of
the repelled invaders. None of them were ever threatened by a Russian invasion.
It took a long time for you to discover (in a 'commercial research') what was known for a
much longer time, the application of these principles in advertising and propaganda
'discovered' by Edward Bernays and exposed in his 'influential book' "Propaganda" 1928. One
of the techniques of propaganda is to make the recipients believe that the ideas instilled
in their heads were their own discovery.
It did not take me as long as you think. As a marketing and advertising
professional (with appropriate qualifications) I was always aware that emotional works better
than rational, but I never had an idea by how much. My most extreme supposition was 2/3 to
1/3. To end up 10:1, I never expected that.
It appears that such high proportion enables the government's/manipulators to silence the
rational fraction who oppose the dragging into a war. Without any firm evidence I do feel
that if the proportion was 2/3 to 1/3 then such manipulation, leading subjects often to mass
suicide, would not be possible.
Therefore, I posit that the human society consists of three strata:
"... How do you know Skripal was murdered? Even the British haven't claimed that. In fact we don't even know that Skripal was injured. There have been no photos, no medical statements, we are just expected to believe all the fake news. ..."
"There are only three scenarios explaining the murder of Skripal "
How do you know Skripal was murdered? Even the British haven't claimed that. In fact we
don't even know that Skripal was injured. There have been no photos, no medical statements,
we are just expected to believe all the fake news.
But hey, highly likely has become overwhelmingly likely so why should we quibble.
"... For requesting evidence of Russian culpability in the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been denounced by PM Theresa May and even members of his own party. ..."
"... he British government demanded that Russia offer an explanation, but then rejected a Russian request to share a sample of the nerve agent that was used in the poisoning. ..."
"... JEREMY CORBYN: Our response must be both decisive and proportionate, and based on clear evidence. If the government believes that it is still a possibility that Russia negligently lost control of a military grade nerve agent, what action is being taken through the OPCW with our allies? I welcome the fact the police are working with the OPCW, and has the prime minister taken the necessary steps under the Chemical Weapons Convention to make a formal request for evidence from the Russian government under Article 9.2? How has she responded to the Russian government's request for a sample of the agent used in the Salisbury attack to run its own tests? Has high resolution trace analysis been run on a sample of the nerve agent? And has that revealed any evidence as to the location of its production or the identity of its perpetrators? ..."
"... My first reaction having listened to the clip you played by Jeremy Corbyn is that's one very courageous man. It's not clear even his own Labour Party supports what he said. ..."
"... So, I kind of quarrel with your opening sentence that relations are as bad as they've been since the end of the Cold War. I say, no they're worse than they were during the Cold War. I jotted down just a few reasons. Let me just rattle them off and then we'll get to this, any other event you want to talk about. The reason this new Cold War is more dangerous is we already have three fronts that are fraught with hot war. That's where the NATO buildup in the North Baltic and the Black Sea, Ukraine, and Syria. Remember in Syria, it appears to be the case that American proxies have already killed Russian citizens. So, we don't know what's going to come next. ..."
"... Secondly, two of these fronts are directly on Russia's borders, not in Berlin as was the case during the preceding Cold War, right on Russia's borders in the Baltic region and in Ukraine. Thirdly, there has been such demonization of the Kremlin leader, Putin, unlike anything that was the case during the old Cold War with Kremlin communist leaders, and along with it a kind of a Russophobic attack on Russia itself the old Cold War was about communism. This one seems to be about Russia just in general. And then you get this lightning speed of news as with this nerve agent, with people weighing in without any authority or any knowledge, very very quickly, and it's spreading before anybody has a time has time to reflect, and think, an actual expert opinion come to the fore. ..."
"... Theresa May is, perhaps, among the weakest prime ministers in modern history. She's holding on for dear life. Jeremy Corbyn is an extraordinary figure. His party, his Labour Party, which is not very good on Russia related issues either, didn't approve of what he said. But he said the right thing. He said, "There's no evidence. While we search for evidence, we need to continue a robust dialogue with Russia." That's exactly right. ..."
"... And whether he'll prevail or not, I don't know, but it is interesting, isn't it, that unlike in the United States, the leader of the opposition, which is what Corbyn is, and potentially a prime minister, is setting himself against this reckless Cold War behavior on the part of the British government. All I can say is I wish we had such a person in American high politics. ..."
"... The latest in a continuing campaign of fear and violence, staged for a hapless public, designed to lend legitimacy to authoritarianism and fascism foisted upon our domestic population; brought to you by the same Fear Inc. that capitalized on the Charlie Hebdo massacre ..."
"... With such careless rush to judgement, circumventing due process, as has been demonstrated time and again by a class of corrupt and covetous warmongers posing as public officials and their equally corrupt mainstream propaganda machine, literally everything uttered by the likes of Teresa May and her cohort of psychopathic political charlatans must be viewed with incredulity. ..."
For requesting evidence of Russian culpability in the poisoning of former
spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been denounced by PM Theresa May and even members of his
own party. We discuss the case with Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at New York University and Princeton
AARON MATÉ: It's The Real News. I'm Aaron Maté. Ties between Russia and the West are at their lowest point since The Cold War,
and a new spat over a poisoning in Britain has sunk them even lower. The British government is blaming Russia for the poisoning of
former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the British town of Salisbury.
The two remain in critical condition after ingesting what the British government says is a military-grade nerve agent made by
Russia. The British government demanded that Russia offer an explanation, but then rejected a Russian request to share a sample of
the nerve agent that was used in the poisoning. Speaking today in parliament, British Prime Minister Theresa May said Russia's response
so far proves their culpability.
THERESA MAY: There is no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian state was culpable for the attempted murder of
Mr. Skripal and his daughter. And for threatening the lives of other British citizens in Salisbury, including Detective Sergeant
Nick Bailey. This represents an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom. And as I set out on Monday,
it has taken place against the backdrop of a well established pattern of Russian state aggression across Europe and beyond. It
must therefore, be met with a full and robust response, beyond the actions we have already taken since the murder of Mr. Litvinenko
and to counter this pattern of Russian aggression elsewhere.
AARON MATÉ: As part of the measures against Russia, May announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats, the single biggest such
expulsion in three decades. That drew a response from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who pressed May to hand over evidence.
JEREMY CORBYN: Our response must be both decisive and proportionate, and based on clear evidence. If the government believes
that it is still a possibility that Russia negligently lost control of a military grade nerve agent, what action is being taken
through the OPCW with our allies? I welcome the fact the police are working with the OPCW, and has the prime minister taken the
necessary steps under the Chemical Weapons Convention to make a formal request for evidence from the Russian government under
Article 9.2? How has she responded to the Russian government's request for a sample of the agent used in the Salisbury attack
to run its own tests? Has high resolution trace analysis been run on a sample of the nerve agent? And has that revealed any evidence
as to the location of its production or the identity of its perpetrators?
AARON MATÉ: The dispute over the poisoning has gotten so serious, that there has been speculation of NATO invoking Article 5,
which bounds member states to defend others in the event of an attack. So far, Downing Street has tamped down talk of Article 5,
but Theresa May has been summoning support from key allies, including the US
Joining me is professor Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton. Welcome, Professor
Cohen.
You have been warning for a long time that we are in the midst of a new Cold War. What are your thoughts today as you see now
tensions escalating between Britain and Russia, with now Britain ordering the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats following the expulsions
that have happened in the US to Russian diplomats as a result of the Russiagate controversy?
STEPHEN COHEN: My first reaction having listened to the clip you played by Jeremy Corbyn is that's one very courageous man.
It's not clear even his own Labour Party supports what he said. In the essence of what he said is Theresa May has no evidence,
and yet she's prepared to ratchet up already a bad relationship with Russia based on this. They haven't produced any evidence. Let's
put it like that. This alarms me because, I've said this before on your broadcast, but it's almost never said in the mainstream and
it's hard to get an American discussion of it, is that whether we call our relationship with Russia a new cold war or not, it certainly
is. The point is it's so much more dangerous than the preceding Cold War. I could even argue that the situation today is in some
ways more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So, I kind of quarrel with your opening sentence that relations are as bad as they've been since the end of the Cold War. I say,
no they're worse than they were during the Cold War. I jotted down just a few reasons. Let me just rattle them off and then we'll
get to this, any other event you want to talk about. The reason this new Cold War is more dangerous is we already have three fronts
that are fraught with hot war. That's where the NATO buildup in the North Baltic and the Black Sea, Ukraine, and Syria. Remember
in Syria, it appears to be the case that American proxies have already killed Russian citizens. So, we don't know what's going to
come next.
Secondly, two of these fronts are directly on Russia's borders, not in Berlin as was the case during the preceding Cold War, right
on Russia's borders in the Baltic region and in Ukraine. Thirdly, there has been such demonization of the Kremlin leader, Putin,
unlike anything that was the case during the old Cold War with Kremlin communist leaders, and along with it a kind of a Russophobic
attack on Russia itself the old Cold War was about communism. This one seems to be about Russia just in general. And then you get
this lightning speed of news as with this nerve agent, with people weighing in without any authority or any knowledge, very very
quickly, and it's spreading before anybody has a time has time to reflect, and think, an actual expert opinion come to the fore.
AARON MATÉ: One person who has been pillared in the media today is Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader who we heard from before.
And I wanna play more of his speech of his comments today, to the British parliament.
JEREMY CORBYN: And while suspending planned high level contact, does the prime minister agree that it is essential to maintain
a robust dialogue with Russia in the interest of our own and wider international security?
AARON MATÉ: That's Jeremy Corbyn speaking today, calling today for. "a robust dialogue with Russia." So, Professor Cohen, for
saying that, Corbyn was widely mocked, including by members of his own party. I'm wondering if you can comment on that, the import
of that, not just for this specific case, but overall, this attitude towards having dialogue, calling for dialogue with Russia being
somehow worthy of scorn and contempt.
... ... ...
STEPHEN COHEN: But I've heard some of these people saying privately that we need this, but I don't hear them saying it publicly.
Look, I did live in England and get educated there partly many, many years ago, and I followed British politics. So, I don't have
great authority, but two things come to mind. Theresa May is, perhaps, among the weakest prime ministers in modern history. She's
holding on for dear life. Jeremy Corbyn is an extraordinary figure. His party, his Labour Party, which is not very good on Russia
related issues either, didn't approve of what he said. But he said the right thing. He said, "There's no evidence. While we search
for evidence, we need to continue a robust dialogue with Russia." That's exactly right.
And whether he'll prevail or not, I don't know, but it is interesting, isn't it, that unlike in the United States, the leader
of the opposition, which is what Corbyn is, and potentially a prime minister, is setting himself against this reckless Cold War behavior
on the part of the British government. All I can say is I wish we had such a person in American high politics.
AARON MATÉ: Well, that's a good segue to the next part of our discussion where we're gonna talk more about the role right now
of Russiagate in US politics. Professor Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York
University, thank you.
And thank you for joining us on The Real News.
Stephen F. Cohen is professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University.
The latest in a continuing campaign of fear and violence, staged for a hapless public, designed to lend legitimacy to authoritarianism
and fascism foisted upon our domestic population; brought to you by the same Fear Inc. that capitalized on the Charlie Hebdo
massacre (See Youtube | StormCloudsGathering | 02m:43s " Charlie Hebdo Shootings - Censored Video " [
https://youtu.be/yJEvlKKm6og ])
With such careless rush to judgement, circumventing due process, as has been demonstrated time and again by a class
of corrupt and covetous warmongers posing as public officials and their equally corrupt mainstream propaganda machine, literally
everything uttered by the likes of Teresa May and her cohort of psychopathic political charlatans must be viewed with incredulity.
The very first announcement made by Boris Johnson after the alleged terrorist act on the
British soil was " British footballers will not attend the championship in Russia" -- before
(BEFORE!) any investigation has been conducted.
The UK still refuses to provide the
required-by-law materials to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapon.
The
whole "communication" with Russian re Skripal case has exposed a stunning incompetence of the
UK government across all departments, beginning with the incompetent Mrs. May and Mr. Johnson
and down to the US Sec of Def Gavin Williamson (a Diaper-Boy with the expertise in fine china
and ceramic countertops).
"... "Has high-resolution trace analysis been run on a sample of the nerve agent that revealed any evidence as to the location of its production or identity of its perpetrators? The government should work with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons." ..."
Such a strong expression of righteousness from peterAUS -- and careful omission, a la
Quartermaster, of a simple fact articulated by Corbin:
"Has high-resolution trace analysis
been run on a sample of the nerve agent that revealed any evidence as to the location of its
production or identity of its perpetrators? The government should work with the Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons."
But the UK government refuses to provide samples to
the OPCW. Why, peterAUS?
Is it too much to ask for the evidence? Or you want to compete with
the soy-boy Gavin Williamson, the former seller of ceramic countertops? Perhaps you should
watch the BBC documentary about Gladio before making your allegedly righteous rants re Saker.
And please, spare us your ziocon' "defense" of Western society.
The Saker's most important theme in this article is that the whole Western so called
Civilization is built largely on the capacity to LIE, (IE not tell the truth when one knows
the truth). Lying is the most fundamentally destructive actions in any culture and in the
West it is not only essential for success it is revered. I am so disgusted with the West that
it is best for this charade and circus to come to an end, and it seems that the Lying Liars
as Al Franken called them years ago have internalized there own Bull $hit and believe it
absolutely. Yes, Johnny, you can put your hand on the red hot stove and nothing will happen.
Go ahead, put it on there and see!!! Dumber than Dirt and God Damn F-n Proud of it too!! The
new Western Motto!!
The former Soviet scientist, Vil Mirzanyanov, who 'blew the whistle' and wrote about the
'Novichoks', now lives in a $1 million home in the United States. The AFP news agency just
interviewed him about the recent incident:
Mirzayanov, speaking at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, said he is convinced Russia
carried it out as a way of intimidating opponents of President Vladimir Putin.
"Only the Russians" developed this class of nerve agents, said the chemist. "They kept
it and are still keeping it in secrecy."
The only other possibility, he said, would be that someone used the formulas in his book
to make such a weapon.
"Russia did it", says Mirzanyanov, "OR SOMEONE WHO READ MY BOOK".
The book was published in 2008 and is available at Amazon as hardcover, paperback or for
$8.16 as an electronic file. It includes a number of formulas which, Mirzanyanov says, could
be used to produce those chemical agents.
..But neither Porton Down nor the OPCW seem convinced that this is possible. They may
believe that Mirzanyanov is just full of it.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has not recognized
Novichoks as chemical weapons because it found scant evidence that they exist at all. The
U.S. and the UK are both part of the organization and both agreed with this evaluation:
The name "Novichok" is used in a publication of a former Soviet scientist who reported
investigating a new class of nerve agents suitable for use as binary chemical weapons. The
OPCW's Scientific Advisory Board states that it has insufficient information to comment on
the existence or properties of "Novichoks". (OPCW, 2013)
As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK's only
chemical weapons facility at Porton Down , a former colleague of Dr David Kelly,
published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence
of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.
In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve
agents, 'Novichoks' (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of
the 'Foliant' programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive
countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly
originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent
confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. Robin
Black. (2016) Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents. Royal
Society of Chemistry
... I know about people who challenged the system and paid or are still paying the price.
Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, just to name a few of the most recognizable
names.
I know dozens of people who have left the US because of disagreements with its foreign
policy. They walk the walk and talk the talk.
Sure they are the minority because most people are conforming cowards or unthinking fools
who can be pulled on a boiled noodle. I have far more esteem for the members of that minority
though than for somebody who figures than spewing forth a couple of thousands words once a
week represents some form of serious resistance.
The French philosopher Alain Soral is quite right when he says that modern "journalists
are either unemployed or prostitutes"
An interesting observation. I will refrain from drawing any conclusions.
With "principles" such as the end justifies the means and the wholesale violation of the
Ten Commandants all "for the greater glory of God" the western civilization got cozy with
the idea that there was no real, objective truth
Excuse me? What about western civilization before the ten commandments? Was it better or
worse in your eyes? What's so damn special about your ten commandments that their (forced)
acceptance by westerners should mark some sort of magical beginning of the true western
civilization? So we had no morality of any kind before this?
I can think of other civilizations that have nothing – and I mean nothing – to
be proud of. They make us look like amateurs in the rejection of real, objective truth.
"... Ask this, "who is pathologically obsessed with execution by gas?" Who is spearheading the "Russia is Evil" propaganda campaign? ..."
"... If Russian leadership wanted KGB/FSB/GRU/SVR to kill him, they'd done it while the man was in Russia in their custody. He would have never left the Russian prison alive, and nobody would be wiser. ..."
"... He is just not that important, that is why he was let out in a swap after spending only a few years in jail. The orchestrated hysterics and the oversize overreaction by the NATO gang is clear tell that they are the one who did it. ..."
"... Do you remember the Wikileaks about CIA having hacking tools whereby they could spoof cyber attacks form their computers yet have the signature they came from Russia (or some other country)? ..."
"... There is nothing uniquely Russian about the poison. There are no unique poisons or nerve agents. Everybody has the same things. All is being said is that the nerve agent is military grade. And England is refusing to give samples to Russia for analysis, so we don't know what it is. ..."
"... why wouldn't FSB off him by simply clubbing him to death and making it look like a mugging gone wrong: why use a military grade nerve agent of all things. Ridiculous that _anyone_ believes Russians did it. ..."
"... Boris Johnson confirmed widespread suspicions that the attack on Skripal was part of a recycled WMD hoax to justify another U.S. war of aggression, this time in Syria instead of Iraq. ..."
Because of the poison involved, they (Rus/Putin) almost certainly did it. Just
because something like this is stupid doesn't mean it should be written off. Stupid things
happen.
As I constantly iterate, never attribute to complex conspiracy what can be easily
explained by gross stupidity. Look at the Billion plus followers of the lunatic ramblings of
a desert cave dwelling freak, or the State of Utah and Planet Kolob. But your Occam's Razor
analysis also fails the smell test.
If I want to assassinate someone, using a gas, in public, is about the dumbest way to go
about it. Russia may well have wanted to send a message "for the encouragement of others" not
to betray mother Russia, but why a gas rather than oral or injected poison? Why not the old
favorite of defenestration? Or a simple GSW using Russian manufactured firearm/ammo?
Ask this, "who is pathologically obsessed with execution by gas?" Who is spearheading
the "Russia is Evil" propaganda campaign?
If Russian leadership wanted KGB/FSB/GRU/SVR to kill him, they'd done it while the man was
in Russia in their custody. He would have never left the Russian prison alive, and nobody
would be wiser.
He is just not that important, that is why he was let out in a swap after spending only a
few years in jail. The orchestrated hysterics and the oversize overreaction by the NATO gang
is clear tell that they are the one who did it.
{Do I think Russia is involved with the Skripal hit? Of course.}
Based on what?
{Because of the poison involved, they (Rus/Putin) almost certainly did it.}
Really?
Do you remember the Wikileaks about CIA having hacking tools whereby they could spoof cyber
attacks form their computers yet have the signature they came from Russia (or some other
country)?
There is nothing uniquely Russian about the poison. There are no unique poisons or nerve
agents. Everybody has the same things. All is being said is that the nerve agent is military
grade. And England is refusing to give samples to Russia for analysis, so we don't know what
it is.
{Just because something like this is stupid doesn't mean it should be written off.
Stupid things happen}
Well, yeah: stupid things happen, and smart individuals sometimes do stupid things –
but almost always for a reason, even if their actions are stupid. This should be written off,
for a very simple reason: what is the Russian motivation? This guy was released in 2010. He
was arrested in 2004: whatever damage he caused was very long ago. Why would Russian
leadership risk almost certain exposure? for what?
And as poster [Meyer] posits above in #23, why wouldn't FSB off him by simply clubbing him
to death and making it look like a mugging gone wrong: why use a military grade nerve agent
of all things. Ridiculous that _anyone_ believes Russians did it.
Speaking of "great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies," in an article in the
Washington Post on Wednesday, Boris Johnson confirmed widespread suspicions that the
attack on Skripal was part of a recycled WMD hoax to justify another U.S. war of aggression,
this time in Syria instead of Iraq.
The fact that Prime Minister May has produced no evidence that Russia was behind the
attack on Skripal, and that Secretary of Defense Mattis admits he has no evidence the Syrian
government used sarin against its own people, doesn't deter Boris Johnson from blaming Russia
for chemical attacks in both England and Syria.
From Johnson's article:
How much easier does it become for a state [Russia] to deploy chemical weapons when its
government has already tolerated and sought to hide their use by others? I would draw a
connection between Putin's indulgence of Assad's atrocities in Syria and the Russian
state's evident willingness to employ a chemical weapon on British soil.
So a neocon-orchestrated Russiagate hoax merges with a neocon-orchestrated WMD hoax in
Syria. It's all coming together.
The neocon strategy of "regime change by jihadi" in Syria has failed, and they're now
forced to dust off the bogus WMD script that wreaked so much havoc on Iraq. Unfortunately for
the neocons, Vladimir Putin has decided that Russia has nothing to lose, and probably much to
gain, by taking a stand against imperialism now, in Syria, instead of later in Iran.
Now the world is both hostage and spectator to a game of nuclear chicken. If neither
player swerves in time, planet Earth dies.
If Trump orders a climb down, the neocons will impeach him for losing Syria. But more
appeasement by Putin would only embolden the neocons to further acts of aggression.
So Putin asks: "why do we need a world if Russia ceases to exist?" He is right to frame
the showdown in Syria as a fight for Russia's existence, and Trump knows it.
Trump will have to take his chances with Mueller and the neocon crazies. Maybe the neocons
will overplay their hand and bring about their own downfall, a happy outcome for all of
humanity.
"... the fact that freedom of speech is under threat shows that the rise of mere emotive speech is still a long way from dominant. Facts and logic can still be heard and make a difference. This is why the political media elite cannot tolerate reasoned evidenced argument and is so concerned to censor dissenting voices. ..."
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing
them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to
repudiate morality while laying claim to it ( )
To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has
become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from
oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality"
Whilst there is much to be said in favour of the argument, the fact that freedom of speech is
under threat shows that the rise of mere emotive speech is still a long way from dominant.
Facts and logic can still be heard and make a difference. This is why the political media
elite cannot tolerate reasoned evidenced argument and is so concerned to censor dissenting
voices.
Up until now, I was in favor of Putin trying to keep cool demeanor and be reasonable. Time
works in favor of Russia, so simply trying to wait the Western collapse out is not
unreasonable strategy. But with the West starting to resort to something as extreme as
poisoning its own lapdogs and blaming Russia for it without presenting a single shred of
evidence, it might be a good time to reconsider and join the escalation train in earnest.
If we are in the age of ultimatums, then Moscow may want to start issuing a few of its
own. One would be to warn the West about its intention to abandon START framework within a
year and ultimately rearm to Soviet levels – 20000 strategic warheads at a minimum.
Another would be to ask Syrian government to outsource its air-defense to Russia, then issue
blanket no-flight order to all aircraft not authorized by Damascus.
Third, start arming insurgencies around the world that struggle against NATO/US presence.
Fourth, eliminate USD and GBP from its trade completely. Fifth, consider formalizing military
alliance with Iran.
There are many more steps that Russia can undertake. But whatever it chooses to do, the
somnolent posture it maintained until yesterday is no more feasible.
Respectfully, I think what he means is something that I've learned to do in the last few
years in a rather automatic fashion. Namely, it's to realise that, in the immediate aftermath
of any event, it's best to just sit back and wait a bit before you come to any sort of
conclusion about blame. In the very short term, the water, the stream is very muddy and
clouded as anybody and everybody who has – or think that they have – an interest
in the event du jour tries to spin it to their own advantage.
The truth will reveal itself inasmuch as the Internet is the World's best fact checker.
The initial story will *always* be shown to have a good deal of exaggerations,
contradictions, anomalies and omissions. But those revelations take a (usually relatively
short) bit of time. So better to look at whatever the immediate story might be with a good
deal of patient skepticism and not immediately fly off the rails in a fit of hand-waving,
eye-rolling and pearl-clutching hysterics.
Do this consistently, and I think you'll discover that:
-The truth of the matter is usually gray, with plenty of blame to go around.
-And/or you're being fed a line of pandering BS by people who think that you're a naive
and trusting idiot.
In short, act like an adult and not a dimwitted child. Use your brain and not your
emotions.
Hope this helps.
Just a thought.
VicB3
P.S. A pithy thought from Mike Rivero:
If it doesn't affect you directly, then it's either advertising or propaganda.
Re: "Almost from day one, the early western civilization began by, shall we say, taking
liberties with the truth, which it could bend, adapt, massage and repackage to serve the
ideological agenda of the day. It was not quite the full-blown and unapologetic relativism of
the 19th century yet, but it was an important first step. With "principles" such as the end
justifies the means and the wholesale violation of the Ten Commandants all "for the greater
glory of God" the western civilization got cozy with the idea that there was no real,
objective truth, only the subjective perception or even representation each person might have
thereof."
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
Saker is a good military analyst, but as a historian he is a laughable dilettante. He is a
very self-righteous, touchy Orthodox Christian ideologue and moralist.
As we approach the fifteenth anniversary of the unwarranted invasion of Iraq, which we are still paying for in so many ways, it
is important to remember the misuse of intelligence that provided a false justification for war. It is particularly important to
do so at this time because President Donald Trump has talked about a military option against North Korea or Iran (or Venezuela for
that matter). Since there is no cause to justify such wars, it is quite likely that politicized intelligence would once again be
used to provide a justification for audiences at home and abroad.
In 2002 and 2003, the White House, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency collaborated in an effort to
describe the false likelihood of a nuclear weapons program that had to be stopped. In the words of Bush administration officials,
the United States was not going to allow the "smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." On September 8, 2002, Vice President Cheney and
national security adviser Condi Rice used that phrase on CNN and NBC's "Meet the Press," respectively, to argue that Saddam Hussein
was "using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon."
In October 2002, the CIA orchestrated a national intelligence estimate to argue falsely that Iraq was acquiring uranium from Niger
for use in a nuclear weapon. Senior officials throughout the intelligence community knew that the so-called Niger report was a fabrication
produced by members of the Italian military intelligence service, and several intelligence officials informed Congressional and White
House officials that they doubted the reports of Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger. Nevertheless, the national intelligence estimate
spun a fictitious tale of a clear and present danger based on false reports of alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons;
nuclear weapons; unmanned aerial vehicles; and ties between Iraq and al Qaeda that were nonexistent.
In December 2002, President George W. Bush found the CIA's case for war inadequate and asked for "something that Joe Public would
understand or gain a lot of confidence from." Bush turned to CIA director George Tenet and remarked, "I've been given all this intelligence
about Iraq having WMD and this is the best we've got?" Instead of being truthful, Tenet replied, "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk!"
Several days later, Alan Foley, the chief of the Weapons Intelligence, Proliferation and Arms Control Staff, told his analysts to
prepare a briefing for the president. "If the president wants intelligence to support a decision to go to war," Foley said, "then
it is up to the agency to provide it." In early January, CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin gave the phony "slam dunk" briefing
at the White House.
The Pentagon's Office of Special Plans distributed the unsubstantiated and flawed intelligence that not even the CIA would vouch
for. The Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith supplied bogus intelligence to the White House on Iraqi WMD and links
to terrorist organizations to make the case for war, and then "leaked" this intelligence to key journalists such as Judith Miller
at The New York Times . Miller had a front page article in the Times on September 8, 2002, citing administration
officials claiming that Saddam was seeking "specially designed" aluminum tubes to enrich uranium, the so-called "smoking gun." Several
days later, President Bush inserted the Times' claim in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly.
The aluminum tube issue was central to Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN in February 2003, which was based on
the phony CIA estimate from October 2002. As Powell's chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson wrote in The New York Times in
February 2018, the secretary's "gravitas was a significant part of the Bush administration's two-year-long effort to get Americans
on the war wagon. It was CIA Deputy Director McLaughlin who lied to Secretary of State Powell about the reliability of the intelligence
in Powell's speech. McLaughlin was the central advocate for the phony intelligence on mobile biological laboratories that ended up
in that speech.
President Bush would have gone to war with or without intelligence, and once again we are confronted by a president who might
consider going to war with or without intelligence. Fifteen years ago, we had a CIA director from Capitol Hill who was loyal to the
president and unwilling to tell truth to power. Once again, we have a CIA director, Gina Haspel, who is a White House loyalist and
cannot be counted on to tell truth to power. She was one of the Agency's leading cheerleaders for torture and abuse, and sent the
message that order the destruction of the torture tapes. And former CIA director Mike Pompeo, a neoconservative hardliner, is now
secretary of state, who earned his new position by being a total loyalist who would never tell truth to power. Is there a voice for
moderation left in the White House?
Bush's war destabilized the entire Middle East. Any Trump war could lead to the use of nuclear weapons that would destabilize
the entire world.
"... I'd define coup in this case as a potentially "illegal seizure of power" in the form of a slowly unfolding, unresolved constitutional crisis that sticks over time. ..."
"... The 1933 coup plot was funded by Wall Street money in hopes of subverting the power of Franklin Roosevelt, a leader deemed by many wealthy men of the time to be a traitor to his blue-blood class. ..."
"... The Plot to Seize the White House ..."
"... "War is a racket. It always has been," is how Butler's booklet War Is a Racket opens. "A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many." The little book ends this way: "Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. But victory will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists. If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building a greater prosperity for all peoples." ..."
"... The Wall Street cabal's coup plot was based on the idea of insinuating a disciplined military man into a White House operation deemed irresponsible and out of control. The plan was to install Butler into a newly created cabinet-level position called the Secretary for General Affairs. Negative press would be arranged to inform the American people that the President of the United States was a cripple. The "man on a white horse" was there to save a problematic administration from itself -- all for the good of the country. ..."
"... Today's politics are very different; the similarity is in the troublesome situation of a sitting president deemed a national security problem. In FDR's case, it was weakness due to sympathy for the downtrodden; while in Trump's case, it's unprecedented governmental inexperience linked with a volatile narcissism contributing to chaos in the highest reaches of the government. ..."
I'd define coup in this case as a potentially "illegal seizure of power" in the form of
a slowly unfolding, unresolved constitutional crisis that sticks over time. Like the
oft-cited frog being boiled to death in a pot of water rising in temperature very slowly.
Center right Times columnist David Brooks had a column recently in which he compared Trump USA
to Berlusconi Italy and how, once democracy has been sullied by a right-wing populist like
Berlusconi (or Trump), getting democracy back within its previous (constitutional) lines is
difficult to impossible.
Some like to call the 2000 election of George W. Bush a "coup" legitimized by a conservative
Supreme Court. Whatever one calls the 2000 election, it did put a permanent stain on US
democracy. I have no doubt in this age of "fake news" and sophisticated PR that an unresolved
constitutional crisis cum coup in Washington D.C. would be spun by info wizards as a
pro-American, patriotic event. All this, of course, has helped ratchet up political
polarization to new heights.
Instead of seeing a military coup as restricted to melodramatic fiction like the film Seven
Days In May, it might be instructive, beneficial and even patriotic to think of it as possible
with at least one very real historical antecedent to consider.
The 1933 White House Plot
We don't hear much about the 1933 American "coup" -- here, put in quotes because it was
always ambiguous and it was thwarted. The plot has effectively been deep-sixed into historical
oblivion. Why might that be? Might it be because it amounted to just another example of the
dirty little secret that hovers over everything in America: the power of money married to the
power of violence? Just another day in the history of America. Maybe one has to be a
left-leaning antiwar activist born under the sign of the National Security State to understand
this. But, to me, the antiwar left is perennially at a loss in this equation: Not only is it
oriented on peace versus war, but it's also unarmed in the sense of an NRA obsession with guns.
Furthermore, the left tends to be crippled thanks to the Cold War that established left-leaning
ideas as association with subversion and the enemy.
The 1933 coup plot was funded by Wall Street money in hopes of subverting the power of
Franklin Roosevelt, a leader deemed by many wealthy men of the time to be a traitor to his
blue-blood class. Had the whistle not been blown on the plot by a Marine general named
Smedley Butler, it could have succeeded in politically crippling FDR and his New Deal
government. Had it gone differently, it could have changed history. (The 1933 coup attempt is
described by Jules Archer in a 1973 book titled The Plot to Seize the White House .
Also, The History Channel produced a 41-minute
documentary on the plot .)
As the depression set in, the nation watched the rise of fascism in Europe. FDR was opposed
on the right by people like the popular hero Charles Lindbergh who cozied up with the Nazis.
Much of this ugly, polarized political struggle has slipped from our popular history, in large
part due to the unifying power of World War Two that helped end the depression and ended up
consuming both sides of the right/left battle. The internal political struggles of the thirties
shifted into a focus on military dominance. The US ended up top of the heap at the end of World
War Two. It also ended up at odds with the other victor in the war, the Soviet Union. It was at
this juncture that US leaders formulated The National Security Act of 1947, thus creating the
National Security State we live under today.
MacArthur busting Bonus Marchers, Butler speaking to them and the Mussolini incident
Smedley Butler was raised a Hicksite Quaker in West Chester, Pennsylvania. One side of a
major 19th century split, the Hicksites saw "the inner light" contained within each of us as
the primary source of truth, while Orthodox Quakers were more like fundamentalist who saw The
Bible as the primary source of truth. The young, idealistic Butler learned the US Marines was
expanding and recruiting new officers. He lobbied his parents (his father was a US congressman)
to let him join, and in 1898 at age sixteen, a fresh Second Lieutenant Butler was dropped off
at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was first exposed to hostile fire. He went on to the
Philippines. He fought in counter-insurgency wars in places like Nicaragua and Haiti. He
undertook spy missions in Mexico. His career was unique. At one point, he took leave of the
Marines and became police commissioner of Philadelphia, only to quit when he grasped the level
of corruption in the city. He was awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor, and at the end of
his career he was court martialed by Secretary of War Stimson for calling Benito Mussolini a
bum in a speech. He, then, began speaking out in public, effectively undermining the charges.
Today, amongst leftist, antiwar activists he's considered a hero thanks to a small book he
wrote in 1935 called War Is a Racket. On the other hand, I mentioned him once to General
Stanley McChrystal at a book signing and the respected Iraq "surge" leader cited him back at me
as, in his mind, one of the great US military heroes. Both views paradoxically prevail. In
1939, he expressed opposition to war in Europe. But, then, he conveniently died in 1940. How he
would have responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor remains an intriguing question.
Butler got involved in the 1933 coup when he was asked by the Wall Street cabal to be their
"man on a white horse" to lead the plot. Due to his humility and his bravery, Butler was
beloved by the common soldier -- even when he pushed them. In one story, a soldier has fallen
out of a long march and General Butler, wearing no insignia of rank, gets the man back up and
walking by carrying his pack. The plotters' modeled their efforts on the rising fascist states
in Europe and the various colored-shirt thug organizations significantly made up of WWI
veterans. Fatefully, Butler was a terrible choice; he supported FDR. Smelling a rat, he played
along with the plotters' front-man, Gerald MacGuire, a fat, cigar-chomping stock broker paid to
go to Europe and study the various colored-shirt groups. The idea was to install Butler as the
commander of the American Legion, whose 500,000 members -- many disgruntled WWI vets -- had
been used to smash union strikers with baseball bats. The Legion outnumbered the US military at
the time. With the help of a reporter from the Philadelphia Record, Butler got the goods and
went to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which held hearings and exposed the
right-wing plot. (It's the very same HUAC that went on to notoriety as a prosecutor of the
left.) Those named in the coup all denied they were plotting anything, and the story
disappeared into obscurity. No charges were made.
Had the cabal, instead, set up General Douglas MacArthur as the "man on a white horse" --
who they had considered -- it might have turned out differently. MacArthur had an arrogant
"fascist" character, but he was not loved by the common soldier. Butler and MacArthur had
crossed paths in July 1932 during the Bonus March encampment in Washington DC. Butler was
sympathetic and spoke to the encamped veterans seeking their promised bonus for WWI service.
"They may be calling you tramps now, but in 1917 they didn't call you bums!" the cragey,
diminutive general hollered at them. "You are the best-behaved group of men in the country
today. I consider it an honor to be asked to speak to you." MacArthur, of course, led the
troops who burned the Bonus Marchers out, killing one veteran and wounding 50.
"War is a racket. It always has been," is how Butler's booklet War Is a Racket opens. "A
racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of
people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of
the very few, at the expense of the very many." The little book ends this way: "Secretly each
nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale.
But victory will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists. If we put them to
work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of
destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building a greater prosperity
for all peoples."
The Wall Street cabal's coup plot was based on the idea of insinuating a disciplined
military man into a White House operation deemed irresponsible and out of control. The plan was
to install Butler into a newly created cabinet-level position called the Secretary for General
Affairs. Negative press would be arranged to inform the American people that the President of
the United States was a cripple. The "man on a white horse" was there to save a problematic
administration from itself -- all for the good of the country.
Today's politics are very different; the similarity is in the troublesome situation of a
sitting president deemed a national security problem. In FDR's case, it was weakness due to
sympathy for the downtrodden; while in Trump's case, it's unprecedented governmental
inexperience linked with a volatile narcissism contributing to chaos in the highest reaches of
the government. In both cases, the overarching issue is a very dangerous world and the
need for experience and discipline. Is General Kelly today's "man on a white horse" insinuated
into the White House to represent the interests of the National Security State?
There are no neat or absolute answers to these questions. We tend to associate the idea of a
"coup" with coup d'etat in Third World nations. Our CIA and military have notoriously been up
to their eyeballs in foreign coups; there's classics like Iran 1953 and Guatemala 1954.
Venezuela 2002 and Honduras 2009 had the stink of US complicity, but they are more current and,
thus, there was lots of plausible deniability and lots of fog. And fog and doubt only get worse
in this internet age.
"... is an ex-geek turned writer and editor. He hails from Boston and writes about whatever distortions of reality strike his fancy. Currently, he's pedaling a novel chronicling the lives and times of members of a cell of terrorists in Europe, completing a collection of essays on high technology delusions, and can be found barking at progressivepilgrim.review. ..."
I wonder how Rex Tillerson feels about being the first high-level federal official to be fired publically and online, in one brutal
tweet. I'm sure he expected the hammer to come down on him, but not like that. And I wonder if he will come forward to describe what
led up to it. Unlikely, as he's an extremely wealthy and still influential corporate player who would have little to gain from telling
all. Still, some intrepid journalist should take Rex to lunch and encourage him to cry in his beer.
The events unfurled in typical chaotic Trumpian fashion.
According
to The Atlantic,
The White House said Tuesday that Tillerson was informed last Friday that he would be replaced as secretary of state. But the
statement released Tuesday by Steve Goldstein, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, suggested Tillerson did not see
it coming until he saw the president's tweet Tuesday morning that he would be replaced by Mike Pompeo, the CIA director. Goldstein
himself has been fired since making the statement.
Chief of Staff John Kelly claimed to have informed Tillerson three days previously that a tweet would be forthcoming, and let
it hang. That's how long it took for the triumvirate behind the throne (Kelly, DoD Secretary James Mattis, and National Security
Advisor H.R. McMaster) to line up a B team. These military officers have become Trump's minders, nudging him toward decisions that
implement deep state war plans. John Grant writes in
CounterPunch :
The ex-Nixon dirty trickster Roger Stone, who Kelly blocked from Trump access, is cited in Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside
the Trump White House as telling people, "Mattis, McMaster and Kelly had agreed that no military action would ever be taken unless
the three were in accord -- and that at least one of them would always remain in Washington if the others were away."
And so, here we have a junta minding the store whose collective wisdom had determined that State under Tilllerson wasn't accommodating
US bellicosity as enthusiastically as it should. Their solution? Elevate CIA Chief Mike Pompeo to replace Tillerson. Pompeo, whom
NPR glowingly
described as having "an extraordinary résumé. He graduated at the top of his class at West Point. He served as a tank officer
in Europe. He went to Harvard Law School." He's also a bombastic Tea-Party Republican and a national security hawk who takes a hard
line no matter what crisis is at hand. I'm sure that résumé will be useful in convincing North Korea to disarm and Putin to back
off from Syria. At least, that seems to be the troika's current calculus. Trump seems amenable to their choice: "With Mike, we've
had a very good chemistry from the beginning," he told reporters. And Pompeo says he's equally chill with the Tweeter-in-Chief: "We
have a half-hour, 40 minutes every day. He asks lots of hard questions as any good intelligence consumer would. He's very engaged."
Before that hammer hit Tillerson, they had already cleared the way to replace Pompeo with seasoned spook Gina Haspel, who proved
her loyalty to the Company by destroying evidence of systematic torture. "She ran the 'black site' prison in Thailand where al-Qaida
suspect Abu Zabaydah was waterboarded 83 times," NPR
reported last winter. "Those sessions were videotaped but the tapes were destroyed in 2005, two years after a member of Congress
called on the CIA to preserve such tapes." Who ordered or at least expedited their destruction? Gina Haspel herself. Running a torture
center was a "dirty job," John Bennett, the chief of the CIA's clandestine service at the time later told NPR, but Gina bravely stepped
up to do it. " it was not only legal but necessary for the safety of the country. And they did it – Gina did it – because they felt
it was their duty."
Obama apparently felt that way, since he declined to prosecute any CIA officials for engaging in torture. Had he had the guts
to go after them, Gina might be wearing a jumpsuit now instead of a business suit. As Dexter Filkins
wrote in the New
Yorker last year after Trump named Haspel Deputy Director,
When Obama took office, in 2009, he declared that he would not prosecute anyone involved in the C.I.A.'s interrogation programs,
not even senior officers, among whom Haspel was one. At the time, Obama said he wanted to look forward and not back. But the past,
as Obama well knows, never goes away. With the prospect of American torture looming again, I wonder if Obama regrets his decision.
After all, people like Haspel, quite plausibly, could have gone to prison.
When Edward Snowden heard of her advancement, he tweeted (
March 13, 2018 )
Interesting: The new CIA Director Haspel, who "tortured some folks," probably can't travel to the EU to meet other spy chiefs
without facing arrest due to an @ECCHRBerlin
complaint to Germany's federal prosecutor. Details: https://t.co/7q4euQKtm7
Such team spirit clearly deserves a promotion. A round of applause, then, for Gina Haspel, someone who has known no calling besides
black ops, winner of the George H. W. Bush Award for excellence in counterterrorism, and the first of her sex to crash through CIA's
bulletproof glass ceiling to the Director's office. Her résumé implies she must have been born at Langley HQ. There's no paper trail
for her prior to 1985, when she joined the agency.
The one bright spot is that both Pompeo and Haspel will have to testify before Congress votes of on their appointments. John McCain
and Ron Wyden are already on record as being opposed to Haspel's appointment. Intense public pressure may help to drag skeltons of
torture victims out of the agency's closet, but don't expect it to matter. The deep state is used to getting what it wants and doesn't
let things like due process get in the way.
Now that the Department of State is to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA, America can rest easy. No more mister nice guy.
Diplomacy is for wimps. Let's show all those upstart nations and that upstart commander-in-chief who's boss.
Join the debate on Facebook More articles
by: Geoff Dutton
Geoff Duttonis an ex-geek turned writer and editor. He hails from Boston and writes about whatever distortions of
reality strike his fancy. Currently, he's pedaling a novel chronicling the lives and times of members of a cell of terrorists in
Europe, completing a collection of essays on high technology delusions, and can be found barking at progressivepilgrim.review.
"... The FAZ angle (and therefore the angle of Germans in Washington) is, that Tillerson was displaced because he was too bellicose towards Russia. Pompeo is seen as moderate towards Russia but as a hawk regarding Iran. The British noise about the alleged nerve gas agent is then nothing more but another attempt to force Washingtons´s hand to increase hostility towards Russia. ..."
For what its worth: there was a very long and detailed analysis by the Frankfurter Allgmeine
Zeitung yesterday regarding Tillersons dismissal. You can take this analysis as something
like the "official" German position as FAZ journalists are the equivalent of Pravda
journalists. That is fully in the know but only writing what is desired.
The FAZ angle (and therefore the angle of Germans in Washington) is, that Tillerson was
displaced because he was too bellicose towards Russia. Pompeo is seen as moderate towards
Russia but as a hawk regarding Iran. The British noise about the alleged nerve gas agent is
then nothing more but another attempt to force Washingtons´s hand to increase hostility
towards Russia.
Interestingly enough today Germany´s defense minister who is a close confident of
Merkel echoed the outrage about the alleged nerve gas attack but called for a "UN
investigation". That is she didn´t endorse the British claim.
Another background to the British provocation might be the Nord Stream gas pipeline from
Russia to Germany. Construction is to start now and once it is finished Ukraine can´t
blackmail Europe anymore by holding up gas delivery. Poland, the Baltics, the US and of
course Ukraine are violently opposed to Nord Stream 2.
"... "We believe that Russia was responsible for this attack, and we call on the Russian government to answer all questions related to this incident, and to provide full information to the OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]. No nation -- Russia, China, or anybody else, any other nation -- should be using chemical weapons and nerve agents," McMaster said, following what critics have called a belated Wednesday statement casting blame on Moscow for the attack on Skripal. ..."
If H.R. McMaster is on his way out of the White House, he's going out with two middle fingers raised and pointed in the direction
of the Kremlin.
"Russia is also complicit in [Syrian dictator Bashar] Assad's atrocities," McMaster, President Trump's national security adviser,
said Thursday during an appearance at a discussion of the Syrian civil war held at the U.S. Holocaust memorial museum.
His voice raised, McMaster used harsher and more moralistic language than his boss does in characterizing Russia's geopolitical
influence, and unequivocally blamed the Kremlin for "the abhorrent nerve agent attack" on a former double agent,
Sergei Skripal , and proposed "serious political and economic consequences" for Russian aggression.
"We believe that Russia was responsible for this attack, and we call on the Russian government to answer all questions related
to this incident, and to provide full information to the OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]. No nation --
Russia, China, or anybody else, any other nation -- should be using chemical weapons and nerve agents," McMaster said, following
what critics have called
a belated Wednesday statement casting blame on Moscow for the attack on Skripal.
McMaster's brief remarks, lasting under 20 minutes, came as the Army three-star general is the subject of furious speculation
that Trump will soon fire him and install hardliner ex-ambassador John Bolton atop the National Security Council. His capstone achievement
thus far has been a Russia-and-China-centric
security strategy
that has been conspicuously out of step with Trump's rhetoric and actions toward both countries.
"Russia has done nothing to encourage Assad to ensure delivery of humanitarian aid, to respect ceasefires and de-escalation agreements
or to comply with U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254's call for a U.N.-monitored political process," McMaster said.
Those remarks suggested that Trump got suckered during his 2017 rounds of personal diplomacy with Vladimir Putin. In November,
Trump and Putin issued a joint statement firmly
pledging support for what is known as the 2254 Process -- though critics considered it a cover for Moscow to continue ensuring support
for its client, Assad -- that "took note" of Assad's "recent commitment to the Geneva process and constitutional reform and elections
as called for under UNSCR 2254."
"... Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? ..."
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his
life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?
Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that
matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who
determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is
a democracy or fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no
voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you
have to do is tell them they are being attacked (by a Russian sounding chemical weapon
Novichok), and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism
( https://www.craigmurray.org.uk – Craig Murray has
been most viciously attacked for not accepting the official story without any evidence) and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Rattlesnakes have a terrible reputation. Here were I live, in Florida, we have the biggest
rattlesnakes on the planet, the Eastern Diamondback (
Crotalus adamanteus ). They are huge and can reach well over 2m (6ft) in length and
weigh up to 15kg (30lbs). The Eastern Diamondback's venom is not the most potent out there, but
they can deliver *a lot* of it. So, yes, it is a formidable creature. But it is also a gentle
creature and truly very shy one.
Eastern Diamonbacks are also a stunningly beautiful creatures. I confess that I absolutely
love them.
For all their reputation for nastiness, Eastern Diamonbacks will never ever attack you if
they can avoid it . I have seen a lot of these snakes on my hikes, I have manipulated them
(with a hook), and I have seen my German Shepherd come nose to nose with one (literally) and
that Eastern Diamondback did not strike. Why? Because these snakes will do everything they can
to avoid having to bite you.
First and foremost, they hide. Really well. You can stand right next to a large Eastern
Diamondback and never notice it. You can walk right by, and it won't move, or rattle its tail,
and you will never know that it was there. Camouflage is their first line of defense.
Then, if discovered, they will rattle their tails. If needed, very loudly. You can easily
hear the rattle from an Eastern Diamondback from 5m (15ft) away. More than enough distance to
easily avoid it.
Furthermore, if given the chance, the Eastern Diamondback will retreat and hide.
Finally, when cornered a lot of them try what is called a "dry bite": they do bite you, but
deliver no venom. Why? Because you are not prey, so what would be the point of envenomating
you? The Eastern Diamondback does not want you dead, it wants you to let it live!
I was once told by a park ranger in Arizona that the profile of a typical rattlesnake bite
victim is: white, male, with tattoos and the famous last words " hold my beer and watch
this! ".
Why am I telling you all this?
Because that is exactly what I see happening before my horrified eyes.
Russia is the Eastern Diamondback desperately trying to do all it can to avoid to have to
strike. The West is the drunk idiot full of hubris, arrogance and a very mistaken sense of
invulnerability saying " hold my beer and watch this! ".
Keep in mind that in a confrontation with a drunken human the Eastern Diamondback is most
unlikely to survive. And it knows that, and that is why it does everything it can to avoid such
a confrontation in the first place. But if cornered or attacked the Diamondback will strike.
Hard. Want to see what such a strike looks like?
Here's a thought: maybe the Soviet Union looked into the manufacture of these "novichoks" but decided that, nah, they don't work
all that well in practice e.g. mixing the binary components in the field isn't an exact science, so the end result can range from
Instant Death to Oh, Shit, Nobody Has Died And A Lot Of Innocents Are In Hospital.
Utterly unacceptable for any respectable KGB agent.
But some of the dudes who were working on those "novichoks" (dudes now out of work, remember) defected to the West with some
diagrams and some tall tales of how stupendously clever they are and how astonishingly lethal their wares.
So places like Porton Down test the chemistry in the laboratory and, sure enough, under lab conditions the chemistry is astonishingly
lethal.
They don't test it in the field because, well, why would they?
Fast forward to this week, and Someone has the Bright Idea to use some "novichoks" in a false-flag operation.
Why not? Everyone tells them that they are astonishingly lethal, and the lab tests back that up. What could go wrong?
So they do, and they find out what the Soviets found out decades ago.
Which is that this stuff is utter shit under field conditions: your target's don't die an instant death and innocent people
who come to their aid get very, very sick.
Because that is the point that everyone in the MSM won't talk about: if this was supposed to be a hit then it was badly botched.
The nerve agent didn't kill, the assassins didn't *confirm* the kill, the radius of the effect wasn't contained, and other people
were contaminated.
Hardly the hallmarks of an agency that DEVELOPED this nerve agent, is it. But maybe the hallmark of no-hopers who didn't really
understand what they were using.
Earlier this week, British Prime Minister Theresa May announced in the House of Commons that Russia was "highly likely" to have
been involved in the attempted murder of a former Russian spy and his daughter. The incident left Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter
Yulia, 33, critically ill in hospital.
As Statista's Niall McCarthy notes
, The UK has now announced that it will expel 23 Russian diplomats after
Russia failed to explain how a military-grade nerve agent
was used in the attack in Salisbury.
Even though the Kremlin has vehemently denied any involvement, insiders have said that
all signs point to Moscow and if that's
true, it raises some troubling questions ahead of the country's presidential election on Sunday.
Some observers have suggested that rogue elements of the Russian government could be responsible for the attack while others are
pointing their fingers firmly towards Vladimir Putin.
Even though there is no evidence that Putin gave the order to carry out a high-profile killing in public, the decision to use
nerve agents that could be linked to Russia carries considerable risk. Some have claimed that Putin might have arranged the attack
to engineer a confrontation with the west in order to improve turnout at the polls.
If the UK goes a step beyond expelling diplomats and imposes sanctions, Russia could find itself more isolated and that has proven
deeply unpopular with the country's electorate .
Putin
is expected to win Sunday's election easily and even if Russian media portrays the events in Salisbury as some kind of western
conspiracy to rally voters, the president's image is still likely to worsen internationally .
The most recent polling into how Putin is viewed abroad was conducted in August 2017 by the Pew Research Center. Even before the
events in Salisbury, Putin was very unpopular across the world.
In Poland where the relationship with Russia has never been easy, 89 percent of Pew's respondents said they have no confidence
in Putin doing the right thing regarding world affairs.
In France, the share was also high at 80 percent.
In the United Kingdom and the United Stated, 76 and 74 percent of people have no faith in the Russian president doing the right
thing on the world stage.
At the other end of the scale, Nigeria and India are more confident than not confident in Putin doing the right thing.
It seems the global propaganda machine has not been able to reach there quite yet.
If you don't have some appreciation of Putin's intellect and skill as a leader you're not paying attention. Additionally he's
shown real composure and self control given the provocations he has been subject to.
If he has indeed tossed out the Rothschild bankers he is a hero of the ages. That is no light work.
This is complete horseshit straight from the same people who give us WaPo and the New York Times. How does he not have Putin's
popularity in Russia. Where is that?
Also, The author's view of the world is extremely skewed.
No country disapproves of America more than Russia, where 82% of survey respondents said they disapproved of U.S. leadership.
This was also the worst rating from Russia in the history of the survey. While many Russians do not like America, residents of
many other countries do not approve of Russia. The median disapproval rating of Russian leadership was greater than the median
approval rating, the only country to claim this distinction. And while a majority of residents in 15 countries disapprove of the
U.S., a majority of residents in 42 countries disapprove of Russia's leadership. Russia's disapproval rating of U.S. leadership
worsened considerably from 2013, increasing 12 percentage points. Recently implemented U.S.-led Western sanctions on Russia have
likely intensified Russians' disapproval. According to historical data from the Levada Center, Russia's independent public opinion
tracker, negative attitudes towards the United States spiked during the invasion of Iraq and worsened again in 2008 after the
Russia-Georgia conflict. More recently, the U.S. sided with Ukraine after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
The West doesn't make Statesmen anymore. It produces whores and pedophiles who sell to the highest bidders and don't have the
capacity to think beyond their tenures.
Because Western governments are dominated by cucks and sellouts, they feel threatened by Putin's unwavering determination,
backbone and geopolitical mastery, hence the concerted propaganda campaign to discredit him, which by the way is pretty fucking
pathetic.
This excerpt has a mainstreaming for the Western mainstream media elites dynamic:
" My point here is not to exonerate Putin or Russia for the many bad things that he (and we) has perpetrated. Plenty of
people have died in Syria and Ukraine as the result of his decisions. Russia's history with its European neighbors to the West
has been checkered at best, and I can more than understand the fear and apprehension with which peoples in the Baltic States,
Poland and other countries view any sort of resurgence or posturing ."
****
Plenty more people might've died in Ukraine and Syria without Putin's action. Poland has had its own aggressive past with Russia
– granted that Russia has had the overall upper hand. Besides Poland, some other parts of central/eastern Europe have been strategically
used against Russia, over the course of history.
From elsewhere, here's another piece favoring Putin:
" Scott Shane's February 17 New York Times article 'Russia Isn't the Only One Meddling in Elections – We Do It, Too', distinguishes
the US and Russian activity in question by claiming that American actions are done for a good cause unlike Russia – a thought
shared by former CIA Director James Woolsey. Shane's piece notes the US role in influencing the 1996 Russian presidential election,
without noting an otherwise glaring particular. Many generally believe that the US government intervention in that vote (whether
you want to describe it as direct or indirect) tipped the balance in favor of Boris Yeltsin.
Yeltsin went on to appoint Vladimir Putin as his successor. If one accepts the US role as the deciding factor in the 1996 Russian
presidential election, I wholeheartedly welcome that move which enabled Putin to become Russian president – something that very
well might not have happened if Yeltsin didn't win in 1996."
"My point here is not to exonerate Putin or Russia for the many bad things that he (and we) has perpetrated. Plenty of people
have died in Syria and Ukraine as the result of his decisions. Russia's history with its European neighbors to the West has been
checkered at best, and I can more than understand the fear and apprehension with which peoples in the Baltic States, Poland and
other countries view any sort of resurgence or posturing."
I see where it is all coming from. So, the only position Russia is allowed is doggy style butt up?
History like normal history not much different in this respect form majority. USA seems to have checkered history with practically
the rest of the world and caused millions deaths by now and so what? So are other countries in Europe and Asia.
Russia is denied by the author legitimate right to defend her legitimate interests.
I basically sense same school of thought with minor variations as Anatoly Karlin's minus mammoths on Russian plain of course.
So, the best critical information that UNZ can provide is a Russian, who doesn't know and understand Russia today. This is not
really promoting UNZ as an interesting site. – I am a Danish sociologist, who have collected some information that better explains,
why most Russians think that Putin is the absolutely best choice today.
http://homosociologicus.com/russia --
critical-information
"anything for israel..." http://politicalhotwire.com/world-politics/57199-american-soldiers-dying-israel.html
"Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack
Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. ... According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of
the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11
Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the 'real threat' from Iraq was not a
threat to the United States. The 'unstated threat' was the 'threat against Israel', Zelikow
told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. 'The American government,'
he added, 'doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular
sell.'
That was then Today with have this situation: http://silentcrownews.com/wordpress/?p=5814
"Washington and Israel have signed an agreement which would see the US come to assist Israel
with missile defense in times of war according to Haimovitch [Israeli IDF Brig. Gen.] "I am
sure once the order comes we will find here US troops on the ground to be part of our
deployment and team to defend the state of Israel"
General Clark, the US Army: "We are ready to commit to the defense of Israel and anytime
we get involved in a kinetic fight there is always the risk that there will be casualties
"
"... All this speech to stifle speech comes in reaction to the first publication in the start of WikiLeaks' "Vault 7" series. Vault 7 has begun publishing evidence of remarkable CIA incompetence and other shortcomings. This includes the agency's creation, at a cost of billions of taxpayer dollars, of an entire arsenal of cyber viruses and hacking programs -- over which it promptly lost control and then tried to cover up the loss. These publications also revealed the CIA's efforts to infect the public's ubiquitous consumer products and automobiles with computer viruses. ..."
"... President Theodore Roosevelt understood the danger of giving in to those "foolish or traitorous persons who endeavor to make it a crime to tell the truth about the Administration when the Administration is guilty of incompetence or other shortcomings." Such "endeavor is itself a crime against the nation," Roosevelt wrote. President Trump and his officials should heed that advice ..."
Mike Pompeo, in his first speech as director of the CIA, chose to declare war on free speech
rather than on the United States' actual adversaries. He went after WikiLeaks, where I serve as
editor, as a "non-state hostile intelligence service." In Pompeo's worldview, telling the truth
about the administration can be a crime -- as Attorney General Jeff Sessions quickly
underscored when he described my arrest as a "priority." News organizations reported that
federal prosecutors are weighing whether to bring charges against members of WikiLeaks,
possibly including conspiracy, theft of government property and violating the Espionage
Act.
All this speech to stifle speech comes in reaction to the first publication in the start
of WikiLeaks' "Vault 7" series. Vault 7 has begun publishing evidence of remarkable CIA
incompetence and other shortcomings. This includes the agency's creation, at a cost of billions
of taxpayer dollars, of an entire arsenal of cyber viruses and hacking programs -- over which
it promptly lost control and then tried to cover up the loss. These publications also revealed
the CIA's efforts to infect the public's ubiquitous consumer products and automobiles with
computer viruses.
When the director of the CIA, an unelected public servant, publicly demonizes a publisher
such as WikiLeaks as a "fraud," "coward" and "enemy," it puts all journalists on notice, or
should. Pompeo's next talking point, unsupported by fact, that WikiLeaks is a "non-state
hostile intelligence service," is a dagger aimed at Americans' constitutional right to receive
honest information about their government. This accusation mirrors attempts throughout history
by bureaucrats seeking, and failing, to criminalize speech that reveals their own failings.
President Theodore Roosevelt understood the danger of giving in to those "foolish or
traitorous persons who endeavor to make it a crime to tell the truth about the Administration
when the Administration is guilty of incompetence or other shortcomings." Such "endeavor is
itself a crime against the nation," Roosevelt wrote. President Trump and his officials should
heed that advice .
Jeepers Cripes, y'all need to get a room and ass-hammer it out!
Latter Day America, there are no pristine people to choose from to populate any goddamned
post in government, period! Everybody has baggage, everybody is compromised.
This is the latter days of Rome 2.0 dipshits, got it? It is why one batch of clowns find
it impossible to see one thing Trump (or anybody in any country...except Czar Valdimir Putin
in Russia...for whatever reason...default/nobody else to pick...when the real answer even
there is none of the above though many people refuse to see it) can do right and while the
other batch is mystified at those incapable of seeing (albeit sometime thin) distinctions
between evils in the era of this-is-as-good-as-it'll-get. Cue the inevitable endless circle
jerk.
Trump, and all of DC have as much power to affect what is coming as a flea does trying to
bench press 300 lbs. Those of them who are aware of the true situation are scared shit less.
Pompeo's appointment is just validating what is really about to come down! When they can't
intimidate the public into submission, they will try using a club.
Thanks for saying that. I detest Clinton and I want JUSTICE for what the evil treasonous
psychopaths did in 2016, but I also know Bibi and MBS have Trump on a short leash and
Islamaphobes fill his home and cabinet.
The soft coup is now complete and a war with Iran inevitable.
Hmmmm.....let's see. Pompeo hates Julian Assange. Assange has told us a lot of truth but
won't even consider that 911 was an inside job. Pompeo hates Iran and Assad, but he's not
about 911 truth at all either. The 911 myth is the basis for all US foreign policy. Trump
hates Rosie O'Donnell, who seems to be about the only media figure who'll admit that the
Trade Centers came down by controlled demolition. In the midst of all these powerful world
leaders, if Rosie O'Donnel is the only person speaking the truth, i'd say we are royally
fucked. And I don't even especially like Rosie O'Donnell. Doesn't seem likely we will avoid a
catastrophic war. What a world.
Trump hates Rosie O'Donnell, who seems to be about the only media figure who'll admit
that the Trade Centers came down by controlled demolition.In the midst of all these
powerful world leaders, if Rosie O'Donnel is the only person speaking the truth, i'd say we
are royally fucked.
One Donald J Trump was interviewed on TV on the day of 9/11. He said that's not the way
planes hit buildings. There were explosives of some sort involved. Moreover, the same Donald
J Trump as a contender for the Republican nomination in the debate in South Carolina in
February 2016 stated that if he won the presidency he would publish the secret documents
about 9/11.
You have to be paying attention to figure out who Trump really is. Why is that? It is
because Judaia as a conscious policy of that quasi-state has for long had total control of
the minds of the whole West. The brains of Americans have been turned to oatmeal (as Russians
put it) and most of what Trump says has to be oatmeal-to-oatmeal. Trump's brilliance is never
challenging directly the memes (such as 9/11 or the Holocaust or false flag shootings) that
Judaia has so laboriously constructed. That would be foolish. Rather, he takes one strand of
received discourse and short circuits it with another under high voltage. Only rarely and
briefly does Trump address clued-in supporters directly (perhaps he's doing it indirectly
through Q Anon). You have to be paying attention.
A lot of Trump administration double-talk is a game, his way of strongly playing a weak
hand. The anti-Iran bit seems to be a key gambit, going all the way back to Flynn
co-authoring an anti-Iran book with Neocon Ledeen. But Tillerson seems to have turned traitor
by taking over the script. Declaring that America was going go hang on to territory in Syria
was not a 'globalist' gambit in the script. Trump had to tweet that defeating ISIS was
America's only aim in Syria and that had been almost accomplished. Similarly, a limited
anti-Russia posture is necessary to deal with the Muller caper. But supporting the Empire's
Russian poisoning absurdity seems not to be where Trump wants America to be. Tillerson had to
go.
If Pompeo is talking a load of shit, and sounding surprisingly uneducsted for someone who
was number one at West Point and an editor (unlike Obama, under his own steam) at the Harvard
Law Review, be sure there is a game involved.
I instinctively like Trump, and have over a long period, Maybe Trump is at the head of a
huge world-historical change. It's looking good, actually, and I'm willing to wait and
see.
"... The problem is that this would have some semblance of solubility were it not for Israel. Israel desperately, repeat desperately, wants the U.S. to go to war in a very big way in the ME. That could tip the scales. ..."
"... I hope you are wrong, but Trump sees very clearly what "Wartime President" did for the cipher Bush. It's the only straw left for him to grasp at ..."
This post was about Mattis being the only "grown-up in the room".
I'm not sure that's something to be reassured about. Brian Cloughley is a seasoned
military writer and analyst. A few years ago he wrote a piece on Mattis that was not very
complimentary. If even half of it is right, we should all be worried.
Trump's mojo has evaporated. He has no coattails. He has negative coattails. So it is time
for war.
The problem is that this would have some semblance of solubility were it not for
Israel. Israel desperately, repeat desperately, wants the U.S. to go to war in a very big way
in the ME. That could tip the scales.
I hope you are wrong, but Trump sees very clearly what "Wartime President" did for the
cipher Bush. It's the only straw left for him to grasp at .
"... Iraq is a country, in which, even the most pro-American Iraqis (outside of the Kurdish dominated region), will, at this very moment (2017.09.28.17h03 NA EDT) be 100% deciding that they have been screwed! And not very nicely, at that. ..."
First of all, thank you Andrei Martyanov for the very informative analysis/article. Also, thank you Ron Unz for this supporting
addendum.
I am very much interested in further information concerning the U.S. military establishments seeming (increasingly alluded
to) weak assessment/intelligence of Russian military capability, especially armaments.
Iraq is going to be a topic of (likely dramatically) increasing heat and attention (in the uncensored press which reports on
the issues that are the most important to everyone alive, like this web site). The 'referendum' in the Kurdish dominated area
of Iraq will make the 24 month long reverse polarization of Turkey (from NATO/US partner to Russian partner) look like an indecisive
epic.
If anyone thought the 'war' in Iraq was going poorly for the Americans before, 'they ain't seen nothing yet'! Also, the passing
the point of no return for Turkey; they've had enough lies and disingenuous promises from the Euroangangstas; their future association
to the U.S. and (western) Europe will be exclusively from the Eurasian-centric multi-polar world perspective, under which they
will prosper as well or better than they ever have before.
Iraq is a country, in which, even the most pro-American Iraqis (outside of the Kurdish dominated region), will, at this
very moment (2017.09.28.17h03 NA EDT) be 100% deciding that they have been screwed! And not very nicely, at that.
With all of this Russiaphobia (let us not forget that this emanating as a deflection from the revelations a corrupt candidate
who was cheating to win a party's nomination for the U.S. presidential candidate), it is highly politically incorrect to reference
how far ahead V. Putin's geopolitical movement is compared to the west, especially the civil war crippled U.S.A..
One can see so much thoughtfulness and 'communication' in the completely unnecessary flight path, through Iraq of the
bombers delivering their payloads. In fact, it could be the most telling aspect of the entire operation!
Iraq is lost to the western empire.
Unfortunately, the response to on-ground western-empire supported aggression in the Kurdish-dominated region of Iraq, and likely
in other Kurdish dominated middle eastern regions (outside of Iran), will like be decisive and therefore brutal (but, alas, understandable).
The event develop under scenario, which is very close to Litvinenko poisoning and MH17
investigation. Both now are suspected to be false flag operation to demonize Russia.
How about conducting a chemical WMD strike in the heart of U.K? How about Mr. Putin,
O.J. Simpson style, saying "I didn't do it" while at the same time saying "the man deserves
to die." How about poisoning a British police officer who did his duty to render aid along
with about 20 other people? How about that even if the victims, your traitor along with
innocent U.K. citizens survive the immediate effects, they can become permanently disabled
and end up in a nursing home with people having to feed you and clean you up?
How about you admitting that you have not a shred of credible evidence for all your
hysterical hyperventilation about this trivial incident?
How about you admitting that you cannot produce any remotely credible motivation for
Russia doing this, when the costs to Russia of increased confrontation will massively
outweigh any possible gains?
The only suggestions that the Russians were responsible for the incident come from exactly
the same kinds of people who told us about Iraq's WMD and the supposed Libyan humanitarian
emergency. And yes, about supposed suicidal Syrian government uses of chemical weapons that
are conveniently just big enough to provide their enemies with yet another big stick to beat
them with, but not enough to give them any material advantage.
Basically your idea is that the Syrians and Russians do these things just because they
can, because in your opinion they are evil and stupid. And simultaneously, of course, so
fiendishly cunning that they are threats to the world if not suppressed.
God bless Putin and Russia for standing against the Zionist NWO
You are correct Desert Fox. The prime variable in history is economics. Economics before
politics and before war.
Our illuminist friends manipulate the strings of international bank capital for their one
world government. In effect, the West has been infested with a tiny cadre of plutocrats, who
operate a usury mechanism to extract wealth from host peoples and nations.
Russia was to be broken up into parts. ((Harvard boys)) came to the 'rescue" and
privatized Russia with various schemes, the most important of which was to saddle Russian's
with "dollar" debts. Russians as hewers of wood and drawers of water, were to sell their
"earth" in exchange for finished dollar priced goods. Middle Class Russian labor is then cut
out of wealth production inherent in making finished goods. For example, Russian platinum is
used to make high value catalytic converters elsewhere, while only a few Russian's get
wealthy (in dollar terms) by poking holes in Russian land to extract minerals. Former Russian
nuclear scientists walk around drunk as they are not fit for being good labor to extract oil,
platinum, etc.
In effect, our ((friends)) turned Russia into African economy, never mind that Russian's
aren't African's. This desire to rape and pillage the earth, to then take rents on the world,
to then think of yourselves as god (note a little g) is a sophisticated, yet criminally
insane method akin to parasitism.
Russian's were infested by parasites, and yet Russian people as hosts have become stronger
year on year, to eject their parasite. Putin was instrumental in this transformation.
All nationalist economies in the past, which had the temerity to eject these parasites
have come under attack. I'm thinking Nazi Germany as well – oh the horror. This
economic attack is often under the guise of liberalism, which has a knock on effect of
breaking down civil society. In other words, liberalism is a symptom of parasitic financial
oligarchy (and illuminism) a control method to make a host weak, to then be re-colonized.
Russia DOES need to take full control of its Central Bank and eject its fifth columnists
(atlantacists), a final act that hasn't been done yet. On this point, it is factual and fair
to criticize Putin, because once Russian's have their own money power, they can accelerate
even faster. http://www.sovereignmoney.eu
What is US interest in the Middle East? I don't see any. We've got plenty of oil. And the
Canadians will happily sell us more.
The millenia old conflicts there are really no business of ours. The possibility that
we'll go to war with Russia and risk our own population to further Israeli perceptions shows
how far down the rabbit hole we've gone. The zionists "own" our political, media,
governmental establishments lock stock and barrel for this possibility to exist.
If Putin is so diabolical and his information operations so elegant and effective he
should execute one that breaks the chain of zionist influence on the US polity. That would
prevent Armageddon and the world would be thankful.
Honestly I have no idea what the firing of Tillerson and his replacement by Pompeo means.
Maybe it's because Tillerson called Trump a moron and Pompeo is an ass licker. Hillary,
Rubio, etc al wanted a no-fly-zone over Syria. That would have brought instant conflict with
Russia. If Nikki Haley's threats come to pass we'll get there.
Trump is attempting to change many past arrangements. One being trade where the US has
bled for decades running massive trade deficits. How the GOP does in the mid-terms will
influence his position on many issues.
"... Angleton embodied and shaped the CIA's operational ethos and its internal procedures, especially in the realm of counterintelligence. His theories of Soviet penetration dominated the thinking of Western intelligence agencies, and their legacy can even be seen in the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign and allegations of collusion with Russia. I want to emphasize that I only use the term deep state as a colloquial shorthand term for the array of US national security agencies that operate under the shroud of official secrecy. ..."
"... Angleton, I'm going to put to you, was a founding father of what we call the deep state. ..."
"... With the passage of the National Security Act in July 1947, Angleton went to work at the CIA. The CIA came into existence and Angleton became the chief of the foreign intelligence staff with responsibility for intelligence collection operations worldwide. ..."
"... Angleton became the CIA's exclusive liaison with the Mossad in 1951. ..."
"... He was introduced to Amos Manor, chief of counterespionage for Israel's domestic security service known as Shabak or Shin Bet. ..."
"... "I didn't know exactly what to do, but I had the idea of giving them material we had gathered a year earlier about the efforts of the Eastern Bloc to use Israel to bypass an American trade embargo. We edited the material and informed them that they should never ask us to identify our sources." From such arrangements, the CIA-Mossad relationship began to grow. Manor would be friends with Angleton for the rest of his life. ..."
"... Asher Ben-Natan, Angleton's source dating back to the OSS days, was playing a key procurement role in the secret Israeli program to obtain nuclear weapons. Teddy Kollek, one of Angleton's closest contacts and friends in Washington, later became the mayor of Jerusalem. Angleton's Israeli friends in short were really the architects, some of the architects of the Zionist state. ..."
"... As I came to learn his story from talking to CIA veterans and Israelis and reading a lot, a couple of things stood out to me. First of all, the Israeli recruitment of Angleton was extremely astute. In the early 1950s, Angleton was a rising star at this new agency, the CIA, but he was not a senior figure and not even particularly powerful. The Israelis recognized the latent qualities that would make him powerful. ..."
"... In 1954 Angleton became the chief of the CIA's counterintelligence staff, the first one. In 1956 Amos Manor passed him a copy of Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech to the Soviet Communist Party in which he criticized the cult of personality around the deceased dictator, Joseph Stalin. This intelligence coup made Angleton a legend within the CIA and the power within the agency as well, and it was very much made possible by the Israelis. ..."
"... Angleton's formative and sometimes decisive influence on US policy towards Israel can be seen in many areas – from the impotence of US nuclear nonproliferation policy in the region, to Israel's triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War, to the feeble US response to the attack on the Liberty, to the intelligence failure represented by the Yom Kippur War of 1973. ..."
"... The question, which was put to me by Grant but is right on point, was why didn't the CIA help the FBI investigate the diversion of US weapons-grade material from the United States to Israel in the 1960s and 1970s? The short answer is because Jim Angleton didn't want to. Angleton played a key role in enabling Israel to obtain nuclear weapons, and he did so in a subtle way that characteristically left few fingerprints. He was not a man to investigate himself. Many of these details are now known thanks to Grant Smith, Roger Mattson, John Hadden, Jr. and others. ..."
"... the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, otherwise known as NUMEC, started processing highly-enriched uranium in the United States in 1959. NUMEC had been created by David Lowenthal, a Zionist financier who financed the postwar boatlift from Europe to Palestine that was romanticized in the book and movie Exodus. He hired Zalman Shapiro, a brilliant young metallurgist to run the company. ..."
"... By October 1965, the AEC estimated that 178 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium had gone missing from the NUMEC facility, by March 1968, that figure was 267 kilograms. ..."
"... John Hadden was the CIA station chief in Israel from 1964 to 1967. He worked very closely with Angleton throughout this period. He would later concur with the near unanimous assessment of CIA's nuclear scientist that Israel had indeed stolen fissile material from NUMEC and used it to build their nuclear arsenal. ..."
"... With the fissile material diverted from NUMEC, Israel was able to construct its first nuclear weapon by 1967 and become a full-blown nuclear power by 1970 – the first and still the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Angleton, it is fair to say, thought collaboration with Israel was more important than US nonproliferation policy. ..."
"... When Angleton left government service 20 years later, Israel held twice as much territory as it had in 1948. The CIA and Mossad collaborated on a daily basis and the governments of the United States and Israel were strategic allies knit together by expansive intelligence sharing, multibillion-dollar arms contracts and coordinated diplomacy. ..."
"... Angleton's influence on U.S.-Israeli relations between 1951 and 1974 exceeded that of any Secretary of State with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger. His influence was largely unseen by Congress, the press, other democratic institutions, and much of the CIA itself. He was empowered by his own ingenuity and the clandestine arrangements rationalized by doctrines of national security and counterintelligence. The arc of his career breathes life into the concept of the deep state. ..."
"... Angleton, more than any other American, enabled the Americans to gain and hold this strategic high ground in the Middle East. He was, as his friend Meir Amit said, the biggest Zionist of the lot ..."
Angleton embodied and shaped the CIA's operational ethos and its
internal procedures, especially in the realm of counterintelligence. His theories of Soviet
penetration dominated the thinking of Western intelligence agencies, and their legacy can even
be seen in the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign and allegations of
collusion with Russia. I want to emphasize that I only use the term deep state as a colloquial
shorthand term for the array of US national security agencies that operate under the shroud of
official secrecy.
Let's not forget there are a dozen, at least a dozen such agencies based here in Washington.
The CIA with its $15 billion a year budget is the largest. The NSA with a budget of about $10
billion is the second largest. The Defense Intelligence Agency is about $4 billion. Then along
with some other obscure but still very large agencies like the NGIA. Never heard of the NGIA? I
didn't think so. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is a $4.9 billion a year agency.
Collectively, these agencies spend probably $50 billion to $60 billion a year, which make them
a very small but powerful potent sector in the American scheme of power.
Want to know how the NGIA spent your $4.9 billion? Good luck. Want to see a line item budget
of CIA activities in Africa last year? Move along. It's true that Congress nominally has
oversight powers over these agencies. Our elected officials do have their security clearances
that we don't have, so they can go in and look at selected operations. But the intelligence
oversight system is very weak as even its defenders will admit. The intelligence committees
polarized and politicized can't even agree on what kind of secret activities they're supposed
to monitor. The FISA court system is supposed to protect Americans from surveillance by their
government, but it largely functions as a rubberstamp of the secret agencies. A secret
government is the norm in America in 2018 which is why the discourse of the deep state has such
currency today.
Angleton, I'm going to put to you, was a founding father of what we call the deep state. So who was he? Born in
December 1917, James Angleton grew up as the oldest son of James Hugh Angleton, a brash self-made American businessman who moved
to Milan, Italy during the Depression and made a fortune during the time Benito Mussolini selling cash registers. Angleton
attended private school in England. He went to Yale College, and then to Harvard Law school. He was a precocious good-looking
young man with sophisticated manners and a literary frame of mind.
As an undergraduate, he befriended his fellow expatriate – Ezra Pound – in
Italy. Pound was the modernist poet in the mad tribune of Mussolini's fascism. In their
correspondence, which I found at Yale, Angleton sometimes ape the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Ezra
Pound. For example, criticizing the Jewish book merchants who he thought overcharged for
Pound's books.
In 1943, Angleton was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, America's first
foreign intelligence service stationed in Rome during and after World War II. He excelled at
secret intelligence work. I tell a story in The Ghost of how he rescued a leading Nazi and a
leading Italian fascist from postwar justice. Among other tasks, he reported on the flow of
Jews escaping from Germany and heading for Palestine. The revelations of the Holocaust
transformed his disdain for Jews into something of sympathy. He began to develop sources among
the leaders of the Jewish and Zionist organizations – including Teddy Kollek who was a
British intelligence agent, and a German operative named Arthur Pier who later became known as
Asher Ben-Natan.
With the passage of the National Security Act in July 1947, Angleton went to work at the
CIA. The CIA came into existence and Angleton became the chief of the foreign intelligence
staff with responsibility for intelligence collection operations worldwide. In those days, the
CIA was right here in the heart of Washington. It's hard for people to believe now, but the CIA
was located in a series of temporary buildings located along the reflecting pool next to the
Lincoln Memorial. The tempos, as they were called by CIA people, were drafty in the winter, hot
in the summer, and devoid of charm year-round. But this is where Angleton worked, at what was
known as the Office of Special Operations.
Angleton, while sympathetic to Jewish suffering, was still very wary of Israel when he
started his career at the CIA. Before the 1948 war, the Jewish army had been largely armed by
Czech arms manufacturers and communist Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union was the first country
to recognize the state of Israel in 1948. Angleton initially feared that the Soviets would use
Israel as a platform for injecting spies into the West. The Israelis, for their part, were
looking to cultivate American friends. Stalin's anti-Semitic purges in 1948 showed that his
allegiance to the Jewish state was superficial at best.
In 1950 a man named Reuven Shiloah, the founder of Israel's first intelligence organization,
came to Washington. He visited the CIA and he came away very impressed with how it was
organized. He went back to Israel and in April 1951, he created out of a very fractious
collection of security forces what was known as the Institute for Intelligence and Special
Tasks – inevitably known as Mossad, Hebrew for institute.
In 1951 Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion came to the United States and brought Shiloah with
him. Ben-Gurion met privately with President Truman, and Angleton arrange for Ben-Gurion to
also have lunch with his friend Allen Dulles who would shortly become the director of the CIA.
The purpose of this meeting, Efrain Halevy, a retired director of the Mossad and a longtime
friend of Angleton's told me in an interview in Tel Aviv, the purpose was in Halevy's words to
clarify in no uncertain terms that notwithstanding what had happened between Israel and United
States 1948 and notwithstanding that Russia had been a key factor in Israel's survival, Israel
considered itself part of the Western world and would maintain the relationship with the United
States in this spirit.
Shiloah stayed on in Washington to work out the arrangements with Angleton. Shiloah,
according to his biographer, soon developed a special relationship – quote/unquote
– and Angleton became the CIA's exclusive liaison with the Mossad in 1951. Angleton
return the favor by traveling to Israel often. He was introduced to Amos Manor, chief of
counterespionage for Israel's domestic security service known as Shabak or Shin Bet.
Manor headed up Operation Balsam which was the Israeli's conduit to the Americans. "They
told me I had to collect information about the Soviet bloc and transmit it to them," Manor
recalled about the Americans. "I didn't know exactly what to do, but I had the idea of giving
them material we had gathered a year earlier about the efforts of the Eastern Bloc to use
Israel to bypass an American trade embargo. We edited the material and informed them that they
should never ask us to identify our sources." From such arrangements, the CIA-Mossad
relationship began to grow. Manor would be friends with Angleton for the rest of his life.
In 1963 a man named Isser Harel was succeeded as the chief of Mossad by a military
intelligence officer named Meir Amit. Amit found Angleton to be a little eccentric, but he
noted that his – quote – identification with Israel was a great asset for Israel.
Asher Ben-Natan, Angleton's source dating back to the OSS days, was playing a key procurement
role in the secret Israeli program to obtain nuclear weapons. Teddy Kollek, one of Angleton's
closest contacts and friends in Washington, later became the mayor of Jerusalem. Angleton's
Israeli friends in short were really the architects, some of the architects of the Zionist
state.
As I came to learn his story from talking to CIA veterans and Israelis and reading a lot, a
couple of things stood out to me. First of all, the Israeli recruitment of Angleton was
extremely astute. In the early 1950s, Angleton was a rising star at this new agency, the CIA,
but he was not a senior figure and not even particularly powerful. The Israelis recognized the
latent qualities that would make him powerful.
Second, Angleton's creative intellect and his operational audacity inspired deep feelings of
loyalty among the Israelis. While Angleton's counterintelligence vision would become very
controversial within and bitterly divisive within the CIA, he was widely admired in Israel as a
stalwart friend. He still is to this day.
In 1954 Angleton became the chief of the CIA's counterintelligence staff, the first one. In
1956 Amos Manor passed him a copy of Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech to the Soviet Communist
Party in which he criticized the cult of personality around the deceased dictator, Joseph
Stalin. This intelligence coup made Angleton a legend within the CIA and the power within the
agency as well, and it was very much made possible by the Israelis.
Angleton's formative and sometimes decisive influence on US policy towards Israel can be
seen in many areas – from the impotence of US nuclear nonproliferation policy in the
region, to Israel's triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War, to the feeble US response to the attack on
the Liberty, to the intelligence failure represented by the Yom Kippur War of 1973. I tell a
lot of the story in The Ghost, but the story of Angleton in Israel is really so large and so
profound that it probably deserves its own book. I could certainly not do justice to it in the
18 minutes that I have, so I'm going to confine myself to one narrow question about the
tradeoffs that became implicit in this arrangement between the CIA and the Mossad and its
implications for us.
The question, which was put to me by Grant but is right on point, was why didn't the CIA
help the FBI investigate the diversion of US weapons-grade material from the United States to
Israel in the 1960s and 1970s? The short answer is because Jim Angleton didn't want to.
Angleton played a key role in enabling Israel to obtain nuclear weapons, and he did so in a
subtle way that characteristically left few fingerprints. He was not a man to investigate
himself. Many of these details are now known thanks to Grant Smith, Roger Mattson, John Hadden,
Jr. and others.
I want to just give you a sense of how this transpired. So the Nuclear Materials and
Equipment Corporation, otherwise known as NUMEC, started processing highly-enriched uranium in
the United States in 1959. NUMEC had been created by David Lowenthal, a Zionist financier who
financed the postwar boatlift from Europe to Palestine that was romanticized in the book and
movie Exodus. He hired Zalman Shapiro, a brilliant young metallurgist to run the company.
At that time, the US government owned all of supplies of nuclear fuel which private
companies, like NUMEC, were allowed to use but ultimately had to return to the government.
Within a few years the Atomic Energy Commission noticed worrisome signs that the Apollo Plant
– NUMEC had a plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania – that the plant's security and
accounting were very deficient. Unexplained losses of nuclear material did happen at other
companies, but NUMEC's losses were proportionately much larger. By October 1965, the AEC
estimated that 178 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium had gone missing from the NUMEC
facility, by March 1968, that figure was 267 kilograms.
John Hadden was the CIA station chief in Israel from 1964 to 1967. He worked very closely
with Angleton throughout this period. He would later concur with the near unanimous assessment
of CIA's nuclear scientist that Israel had indeed stolen fissile material from NUMEC and used
it to build their nuclear arsenal. This story is now very well documented. In the spring of
1965, a technician working at the night shift at NUMEC went out on a loading dock for a breath
of fresh air and saw an unusual sight. Zalman Shapiro was pacing on the dock while a foreman
and truck driver loaded cylindrical storage containers, known as stovepipes, onto a flatbed
truck.
The technician saw a clipboard saying that the material was destined for Israel. It was
highly unusual to see Dr. Shapiro in the manufacturing section of the Apollo nuclear facility,
the technician said. It was unusual to see Dr. Shapiro there at night, and it was very unusual
to see Dr. Shapiro so nervous. The next day NUMEC's personnel manager visited the technician
and threatened to fire him if he did not keep his mouth shut, that's a quote, concerning what
he had seen. It would be 15 years before the employee told the story to the FBI.
What did Angleton know about NUMEC? Well, he knew that the AEC and the FBI were
investigating starting in 1965. As the Israel desk officer of the CIA, he talked about the
NUMEC case with liaison agent Sam Papich who was monitoring the investigation for the FBI. He
also spoke about it with his colleague John Hadden.
On the crime scene particulars, Hadden defended his former boss. "Any suggestion that
Angleton had help the Israelis with the NUMEC operation was totally without foundation," he
told journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn. But Hadden didn't deny that Angleton had helped
the Israeli nuclear program. Why would somebody whose whole life was dedicated to fighting
communism have any interest in preventing a very anti-Communist nation for getting the means to
defend itself, Hadden asked. The fact they stole it from us didn't worry him in the least, he
went on. I suspect that in his inmost heart he would have given it to them if they had asked.
Hadden knew better than to investigate any further. I never sent anything to Angleton on this
– the nuclear program – because I knew he wasn't interested, Hadden later told his
son, and I knew he'd try to stop it if I did.
With the fissile material diverted from NUMEC, Israel was able to construct its first
nuclear weapon by 1967 and become a full-blown nuclear power by 1970 – the first and
still the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Angleton, it is fair to say, thought
collaboration with Israel was more important than US nonproliferation policy. He believed that
the results proved his point. When he started as chief of the counterintelligence staff in
1954, the state of Israel and its leaders were regarded warily in Washington – especially
at the State Department. When Angleton left government service 20 years later, Israel held
twice as much territory as it had in 1948. The CIA and Mossad collaborated on a daily basis and
the governments of the United States and Israel were strategic allies knit together by
expansive intelligence sharing, multibillion-dollar arms contracts and coordinated
diplomacy.
Angleton's influence on U.S.-Israeli relations between 1951 and 1974 exceeded that of
any Secretary of State with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger. His influence was
largely unseen by Congress, the press, other democratic institutions, and much of the CIA
itself. He was empowered by his own ingenuity and the clandestine arrangements rationalized by
doctrines of national security and counterintelligence. The arc of his career breathes life
into the concept of the deep state.
I thought of this story when I visited one of the memorials to Angleton in Israel in 2016.
The memorial is located on a winding road outside the city of Mevaseret Zion, which is now
really a suburb of Jerusalem. Historically, control of this high ground has been seen as key to
the control of Jerusalem and of Palestine itself. A nearby ruins of a castle built by
12th-century Christian crusaders for exactly that purpose stands in mute testimony to the
importance of its strategic location.
The Angleton memorial consists of a pedestal of stones topped with a black plaque. To James
Angleton, a friend it says. This plaque was dedicated in 1987, a few months after Angleton
died, and it has been maintained by his Israeli friends ever since. It's still in perfect
condition. The location is no accident. In the course of his extraordinary career,
Angleton, more than any other American, enabled the Americans to gain and hold this
strategic high ground in the Middle East. He was, as his friend Meir Amit said, the biggest
Zionist of the lot . Thank you.
Do some of you ding-a-lings actually think Trump can go off the rails
against the bureaucracy when he's got Mueller trying to crawl up his
ass? He's got to find a balance somehow. He's got to stay alive. Both
politically and personally.
Pompeo is in for a rude awakening in the diplomatic arena if he tries to spar with Lavrov.
Lavrov IMO will bloody Pomepo's nose before he knows what hit him.
Where's Jim Jones when you need him to serve up some of his koolaid to the numerous
politicos and propagandists pushing the Russiagate Big Lie, for they surely deserve several
pitchers full each.
Given the degree of effort Pompeo's used in pushing Russiagate, I can't wait for his first
meeting with Lavrov or Putin.
The sooner Corbyn is able to become British PM, the better for all excepting the
corrupt.
Jeepers Cripes, y'all need to get a room and ass-hammer it out!
Latter Day America, there are no pristine people to choose from to populate any goddamned post in government, period! Everybody
has baggage, everybody is compromised.
This is the latter days of Rome 2.0 dipshits, got it? It is why one batch of clowns find it impossible to see one thing Trump
(or anybody in any country...except Czar Valdimir Putin in Russia...for whatever reason...default/nobody else to pick...when the
real answer even there is none of the above though many people refuse to see it) can do right and while the other batch is mystified
at those incapable of seeing (albeit sometime thin) distinctions between evils in the era of this-is-as-good-as-it'll-get. Cue
the inevitable endless circle jerk.
Trump, and all of DC have as much power to affect what is coming as a flea does trying to bench press 300 lbs. Those of them
who are aware of the true situation are scared shit less. Pompeo's appointment is just validating what is really about to come
down! When they can't intimidate the public into submission, they will try using a club.
Thanks for saying that. I detest Clinton and I want JUSTICE for what the evil treasonous psychopaths did in 2016, but I also
know Bibi and MBS have Trump on a short leash and Islamaphobes fill his home and cabinet.
The soft coup is now complete and a war with Iran inevitable.
Unfortunately, it gets worse. Much worse. For all his flaws, Rex Tillerson had a
surprisingly sane take on the Middle East, at least relatively. He was known for being against
the idiotic Saudi-UAE attempt blockade of Qatar, as well as in favor of keeping the Iran deal
active. Pompeo shares no such sentiments.
Pompeo, named as his pick for secretary of state by Trump on Tuesday shortly after he
announced Tillerson's departure on Twitter, has taken a notoriously tough stance on Iran in
the past in his erstwhile role as director of the CIA.
"Thuggish police state." Similar to Saudi Arabia then, which Pompeo had no problem bestowing
with a CIA medal last year.
back" its 2015 nuclear deal.
"Thuggish police state." Similar to Saudi Arabia then, which Pompeo had no problem bestowing
with a CIA medal last year.
... ... ...
But there's more
In November 2016, when Pompeo was appointed to lead the CIA, he warned that Tehran is
"intent of destroying America" and called the nuclear deal "disastrous." He added that he was
looking forward to "rolling back" the agreement.
Differences
of opinion over how Iran should be treated are said to be the source of discord between
Trump and Tillerson, whose firing followed a clash over the nuclear deal, the president said
Tuesday.
"If you look at the Iran deal I think it's terrible and I guess he thought it was OK We
weren't really thinking the same," Trump said in a statement outside the White House. He said
he and Tillerson got on "quite well" but had "different mindsets."
Iran has been increasingly marginalized during the Trump administration, which has sided
with Saudi Arabia in the regional battle for influence in the Middle East.'
Here's the bottom line. As I outlined multiple times last year, Trump is determined to have
a war with Iran and Rex Tillerson was standing in the way. Putting unhinged war hawk Pompeo in
place as Secretary of State is simply Trump getting his ducks in a row ahead of confrontation.
Watch as the sales pitch for another war in the Middle East picks up considerably in the months
ahead.
I believe this forthcoming war against Iran will have almost no international support.
Probably just autocratic regimes in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as
Israel and possibly the UK depending on who's Prime Minister when it gets going. The rest of
the world will be against it, which will lead to spectacular failure.
It's become increasingly clear that a huge military error, such as a new major confrontation
in the Middle East is what will spell the end of the U.S. empire. Such a confrontation is now
increasingly likely with Tillerson out of the picture
Oh, and the person Trump picked to head the CIA to replace Pompeo is Gina Haspel, a 33-year
CIA careerist who
ran a torture black site in Thailand .
... ... ...
Donny boy sure has a strange way of "draining the swamp."
* * *
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J,
Haspel isn't alone in her views on torture - according to your link Mattis, Trump and Pompeo
also think waterboarding is an excellent intelligence tool.
According to your article Pompeo answered to Feinstein's torture criticism that agents who
had tortured people were " heroes, not pawns in some liberal game. "
*sob* ... poor heroes ... *sob*
Apparently it was all that heroism that made Haspel destroy evidence about the CIA torture
site in Tailand which she led.
One of the men, known as Abu Zubayda, was waterboarded 83 times in one month and was
slammed into walls by the head. He was deprived of sleep and kept in a coffin-like box.
Interrogators later decided he didn't have any useful information.
ProPublica found that Haspel personally signed cables to CIA headquarters that detailed
Zubayda's interrogation.
CIA videos of the torture were destroyed in 2005, on the orders of a cable drafted by
Haspel.
Indeed, apparently these heroes (and their leaders) needed to be protected from that odd
and unpleasant "liberal game" called 'prosecution for crimes'.
Military Contractors have 400 lobbyists, revolving doors with military officers and
civilian officials, jobs in congressional districts; plus, corporations and their employees
contribute to election campaigns. Most importantly, they are part of the connected elite. You
are groomed to succeed and are paid handsomely if you belong to their exclusive club.
Unfortunately, today the system is corrupt and the global establishment has absolutely no
concern for the well-being of American citizens.
Blaming Russia for the 2016 election and Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatening U.S. troops in
Manjib Syria are signs of the House of Cards collapsing around us.
Until recently I considered these nonsense, after reading a nearly hour to hour
description on how the emperor could end the war, I had to change my view.
Have you read Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan by
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a Japanese-American historian who was apparently the first to make
significant use of documents from all 3 countries (Russia, Japan, USA). His basic conclusion
is that:
Rather, what decisively changed the views of the Japanese ruling elite was the Soviet
entry into the war. It catapulted the Japanese government into taking immediate action. For
the first time, it forced the government squarely to confront the issue of whether it
should accept the Potsdam terms. In the tortuous discussions from August 9 through August
14, the peace party, motivated by a profound sense of betrayal, fear of Soviet influence on
occupation policy, and above all by a desperate desire to preserve the imperial house,
finally staged a conspiracy to impose the "emperor's sacred decision" and accept the
Potsdam terms, believing that under the circumstances surrendering to the United States
would best assure the preservation of the imperial house and save the emperor.
The quote above is from an article of his replying to some of his critics.
I read
Japan's Decision to Surrender
Robert J. C. Butow
A day to day description of what went on in the critical days, sometimes by the hour, or by
minute.
I cannot completely accept the above quote.
What was at the time the ruling elite ?
Since the mid or early thirties the military ruled Japan.
The fanatical military were prepared to wage war on the Japanese mainland, accepting 20
million deaths.
The Okinawa ratio US Japanese deaths was, from memory, 7000 to 150000.
If one accepts this ratio continuing the war with an invasion on the mainland this would have
cost over 900.000 USA deaths.
Therefore the concept of unconditional surrender was left, as had been the case in
Italy.
And about imposing, the emperor played an active role in ending the war, risking his own
life.
Even after the recording had been made of the emperor announcing, in not too explicit terms,
the surrender, by radio, the very first time Japanese heard his voice, fanatics tried to get
hold of the recording.
As I stated, the two atomic bombs, plus the annihilation of the Kwantung army, made it
possible.
"... The bloodthirsty neocons are dangerous fools. At least the Japanese Imperial Forces wore uniforms and flew their flag when attacking, even if a sneak attack. Neocons are silent killers of their host. ..."
Our military record is not so great. Russia, on the other hand, has held its lands for a
millennia. The only war we (the USA) have truly won since the War of 1812 was the Pacific
Theater of WWII. Everything else was done by others (WWII European Theater was mostly Russian
work), or a miserable stand-off (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan) or a totally unnecessary fiasco
(War Between The States, WWI, Iraq ) such that "winning" was no benefit to the "victor".
You might say the Mexican War gave us some good territory but the Mexicans are winning
their Reconquista invasions while we sleep and dilly dally.
The bloodthirsty neocons are dangerous fools. At least the Japanese Imperial Forces
wore uniforms and flew their flag when attacking, even if a sneak attack. Neocons are silent
killers of their host.
Neocons are like clogged arteries -- you know they will be a problem but failing to
comprehend the danger, that heart attack can occur most unexpectedly, killing the host.
You know you need to clean the crud out of those clogged arteries but you just don't do
what is needed to clean out and become safe.
Looks like Tillerson was yet another Big Lie junkie whose entire worldview is based on bullshit
Notable quotes:
"... Mattis sometimes calming influence over Trump on military issues will now become less effective. ..."
"... Haspel would be in jail if former president Barack Obama had not decided against prosecuting the CIA torture crimes. Torturing prisoners is a war crime. Obstruction of courts and destruction of evidence are likewise crimes. ..."
"... This is getting messy for the empire. Trump wants to attack Iran and be friends with Russia. The US neo-cons want to attack both Iran and Russia. UK and France want to be friends with Iran and attack Russia. ..."
"... The current anti Russia propaganda ["axis of evil" ] - Haley, Macron, May. Veto wielding members of the UNSC Russia, China vs US, France, UK...? ..."
"... I think the US, UK and Israel want to battle Russia in Syria. There will be more collateral damage done to Russians. ..."
Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson
for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!
According to the anti Russian propagandists
(vid) Tillerson got the job because Trump loves Russia and Tillerson was in good standing with Putin. The same people
now claim that Tillerson was fired from his job
because Trump loves Russia and Tillerson was not in good standing with Putin.
Neither is correct. The plan to oust Tillerson and elevate Pompeo to State has been rumored and written about
for several
month . The plan was "developed by John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff". It had nothing to do with Russia.
Tillerson never got traction as Secretary of State. Congress disliked him for cutting down some State Department programs. Trump
overruled him publicly several times.
There is some contradiction in the statements coming from the White House and the State Department. According
to the Washington Post:
Trump last Friday asked Tillerson to step aside, and the embattled top diplomat cut short his trip to Africa on Monday to return
to Washington.
Last Friday Tillerson suddenly
fell ill while traveling
in Africa and canceled several scheduled events.
... ... ...
Thus ends the 2018 insurrection at State.
With Tillerson leaving Secretary of Defense Mattis is losing
an ally in the cabinet:
[I]t starts with me having breakfast every week with Secretary of State Tillerson. And we talk two, three times a day, sometimes.
We settle all of our issues between he and I, and then we walk together into the White House meetings. That way, State and Defense
are together.
Mattis sometimes calming influence over Trump on military issues will now become less effective.
CIA head Pompeo, the new Secretary of State, is a neoconservative with a
racist anti-Muslim
attitude and a
special hate
for Iran which he
compared
to ISIS . That he will now become Secretary of State is a bad sign for the nuclear agreement with Iran. The Europeans especially
should take note of that and should stop to look for a compromise with Trump on the issue. The deal is now dead. There is
no chance that a compromise will happen.
The new CIA director Gina Haspel is
well
known for actively directing and participating in the torture of prisoners at 'black sites':
Beyond all that, she played a vital role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed the torture of detainees both
at the black site she ran and other secret agency locations. The concealment of those interrogation tapes, which violated multiple
court orders as well as the demands of the 9/11 commission and the advice of White House lawyers, was condemned as "obstruction"
by commission chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Keane.
Haspel would be in jail if former president Barack Obama had not decided against prosecuting the CIA torture crimes. Torturing
prisoners is a war crime. Obstruction of courts and destruction of evidence are likewise crimes.
Both, Pompeo and Haspel, will need to be confirmed by Congress. Both will receive a significant number of 'yes'-votes from the
Democratic side of the aisle.
I think last straw to fire him been TRex stance toward russians -give up Crimea and we cease sanction(WHAT A JOKE) same toward
eastern republics of Ukraine LNR,DPR..good move VSGPDJT !!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is getting messy for the empire. Trump wants to attack Iran and be friends with Russia. The US neo-cons want to attack both
Iran and Russia. UK and France want to be friends with Iran and attack Russia.
The current anti Russia propaganda ["axis of evil" ] - Haley, Macron, May. Veto wielding members of the UNSC Russia, China vs US, France, UK...?
Poor Syria. At least one more fierce year of war. But more likely, endless 2,3,4 more years of war.
Israel and US are getting the rebels in Daraa (DEZ #4) primed to start up fighting again. I think the US, UK and Israel want to battle Russia in Syria. There will be more collateral damage done to Russians.
(My notes)
Tillerson says:
- got call today, afternoon from president, also spoke to Kelly (implies that this was the firing)
- hopes for smooth transition
- Deputy Sec State Sullivan will be acting Sec State
- Tillerson job officially terminates March 31
to DoD and State:
- bound by office oath, support constitution, ...
- always stay by oath, (sounds crying)
to people in uniform:
- great relationship State DOD - thanks Mattis and Dunford, all soldiers
work review:
- DPRK pressure campaign was success
- Afghanistan commitment also
- Syria, Iraq - work remains
- nothing goes without allies, partner
- work to be done on China and "troubling behavior" of Russia
- predicts more isolation if Russia doesn't knee
- nothing on Iran
Didn't say thank you to Trump. Emphasized oath to constitution, not to president. Nothing on Iran, Saudis or Palestine.
This was a f*** you to the White House and its priorities. The endorsement by name of Mattis and Dunlap makes them targets.
A Professor for political science from the United Arab Emirates just posted this:
"History will record that a GCC country had a role in the sacking of the foreign minister of a great power, and this is only the
beginning of more"
There is one way this could all happen naturally: I think it's possible that the most
idiotic conspiracy theorists are flocking to alternative websites that are dissenting from
The Narrative. The Unz Review (probably also RT and other sites) is an obvious candidate for
such spontaneous activity. But yes, there's a possibility that some conscious effort is made
to make these websites look bad.
One interesting thing I noticed is that some 8-10 years ago I spent a lot of time debating
911 truthers. I found a number of websites dedicated to debunking conspiracy theories. The
strange thing is, just a couple of years ago, I tried to search for some information on 911,
and basically it appeared from Google and YouTube searches as if the debunking (anti-truther)
websites have greatly decreased in visibility. I needed to do targeted searches on them (and
even so, the results always contained a large number of the truther websites or videos) to
find them. I once debated a "moderate" 911 truther guy. He basically believed most of the
official narrative (i.e. that Osama did it), except he thought either that Osama was a CIA
agent or patsy or that at least he was allowed to proceed by TPTB. He thought that the
idiotic conspiracy theories (the "controlled demolition" crowd or the more extreme "the
planes were holograms") were actually spread by the CIA (or some other similar organization)
in order to crowd out the more intelligent questions about the event. Basically, most people
think that either the official narrative is true to a dot or it's a controlled demolition.
Now I happen to more or less believe the official narrative on 911, but it was an interesting
thought, and could be applied to other things.
It is interesting to think about. There are many unknowns. How many people just visit and
read the articles without paying attention to the comments? (Of course we have quite a few
above the fold articles that match or exceed the bizarreness of the comments). I check
several sites and have never even read the comments at most of them. I only read a few of the
contributors at Unz and regularly comment at fewer still. I am impressed by many of the
knowledgeable comments that can be found here. One has to wade through quite a bit of muck to
get to the worthwhile stuff. (I am sure some feel the same about some of my comments,
especially when I am down in the muck wrestling with the pigs.)
Back to the particulars of your comment. Would the CIA be interested in sowing distrust of
alternative media and limiting its distribution and influence? I can see where they would
have an interest. As in, if everyone had complete trust in someone, say like Uncle Walter,
then it would be simple enough to see that Uncle Walter got the material that you wanted him
to have. If we have anarchy in the media and the populace's trust is all over the place then
peddling the influence that you want would be complicated. You couldn't just drop a Tonkin
Gulf incident into the hopper and get the predictable results that you used to be able to get
with minimal effort.
Just in case they have their eye on you and your interlocutors, I'm putting my hat back
on.
Read "Solving 911″ by Christopher Bollyn. It gives very good details and names about
the who and why of 911. Buildings falling in their footprints, thin skinned passenger planes
going through thick steel framed towers (3 of them), passport of "hijacker" in the dust --
obviously we are not getting the full picture in our MSM.
"All my life I have been fighting against the spirit of narrowness and violence,
arrogance, intolerance in its absolute, merciless consistency. I have also worked to
overcome this spirit with its evil consequences, such as nationalism in excess, racial
persecution, and materialism. In regards to this, the National Socialists are correct in
killing me.
I have striven to make its consequences milder for its victims and to prepare the way for
a change. In that, my conscience drove me – and in the end, that is a man's duty."
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke,
Executed in Plötzensee Prison on 23 January 1945
"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to
speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Executed in Flossenbürg Camp on 9 April 1945
As journalist activist Carl von Ossietzky put it, 'we cannot hope to affect the conscience of
the world when our own conscience is asleep.'
Heroic virtue shines across the vast seas of history like beacons to those in the troubled
waters of general deception.
"... If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. ..."
"... Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation, assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice. ..."
"... The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD; ..."
"... Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century. ..."
"... The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated." ..."
"... The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies glorifying American spies and assassins ..."
"... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks . ..."
"... This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine. ..."
"... The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. ..."
"... The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments. ..."
In a three-part series published last week, the
World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and
military operatives into the Democratic Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence
candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant
seats and those with Republican incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant
swing to the Democrats.
If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control
of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department
officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. The
presence of so many representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus in the legislature
is a situation without precedent in the history of the United States.
Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry
Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the
activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation,
assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice.
In the wake of the Watergate crisis and the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon,
reporter Seymour Hersh published the first devastating exposure of the CIA domestic spying, in
an investigative report for the New York Times on December 22, 1974. This report
triggered the establishment of the Rockefeller Commission, a White House effort at damage
control, and Senate and House select committees, named after their chairmen, Senator Frank
Church and Representative Otis Pike, which conducted hearings and made serious attempts to
investigate and expose the crimes of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.
The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against
foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in
Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly
subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD;
Operation Mockingbird, in
which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an
effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the
telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century.
The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating
political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA
became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was
widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated."
In that period, it would have been unthinkable either for dozens of "former"
military-intelligence operatives to participate openly in electoral politics, or for them to be
welcomed and even recruited by the two corporate-controlled parties. The Democrats and
Republicans sought to distance themselves, at least for public relations purposes, from the spy
apparatus, while the CIA publicly declared that it would no longer recruit or pay American
journalists to publish material originating in Langley, Virginia. Even in the 1980s, the
Iran-Contra scandal involved the exposure of the illegal operations of the Reagan
administration's CIA director, William Casey.
How times have changed. One of the main functions of the "war on terror," launched in the
wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has been to
rehabilitate the US spy apparatus and give it a public relations makeover as the supposed
protector of the American people against terrorism.
This meant disregarding the well-known connections between Osama bin Laden and other Al
Qaeda leaders and the CIA, which recruited them for the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in
Afghanistan, waged from 1979 to 1989, as well as the still unexplained role of the US
intelligence agencies in facilitating the 9/11 attacks themselves.
The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies,
backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies
glorifying American spies and assassins ( 24 , Homeland , Zero Dark
Thirty , etc.)
The American media has been directly recruited to this effort. Judith Miller of the New
York Times , with her reports on "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, is only the most
notorious of the stable of "plugged-in" intelligence-connected journalists at the
Times , the Washington Post , and the major television networks. More
recently, the Times has installed as its editorial page editor James Bennet, brother
of a Democratic senator and son of the former administrator of the Agency for International
Development, which has been accused of working as a front for the operations of the Central
Intelligence Agency.
The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based
entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either
unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been
accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly
paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks .
In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while
essentially ignoring Trump's attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with
ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs like Medicaid and food
stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the
agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political
voice.
This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and
expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United
States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the
Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate
the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.
The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of
resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the
campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. A chorus of
media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire
editorial board of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part
of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip up support on alleged "human rights" grounds
for an expansion of the US war in Syria.
The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence
operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in
Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are
"former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however,
purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the
Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.
The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not
covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic
primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat
experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on
their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party
officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.
The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand,
the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other
previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a
"friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.
The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an
expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the
extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state
apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working
class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.
Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right
policies. But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects
the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of
military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade
unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary,
working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled
two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.
"... If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress. ..."
"... Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the field for a favored "star" recruit. ..."
"... The Democratic leaders are promoting CIA agents and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. At the same time, such people are choosing the Democratic Party as their preferred political vehicle. ..."
An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA,
Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic
candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of
military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political
history.
If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely
predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as
half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the
lower chamber of Congress.
Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting
candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the
best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the
field for a favored "star" recruit.
A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, who
worked as Iraq director for the National Security Council in the Obama White House and as a top
aide to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. After her deep
involvement in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a principal
deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, her areas of
responsibility included drone warfare, "homeland defense" and cyber warfare.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has designated Slotkin as one of its
top candidates, part of the so-called "Red to Blue" program targeting the most vulnerable
Republican-held seats -- in this case, the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan, which
includes Lansing and Brighton. The House seat for the district is now held by two-term
Republican Representative Mike Bishop.
The Democratic leaders are promoting CIA agents and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. At
the same time, such people are choosing the Democratic Party as their preferred political
vehicle. There are far more former spies and soldiers seeking the nomination of the Democratic
Party than of the Republican Party. There are so many that there is a subset of Democratic
primary campaigns that, with a nod to Mad magazine, one might call "spy vs. spy."
"... He has cultivated ties with Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists who are patrons of conservative causes. They invested in Thayer Aerospace, a company Pompeo started with friends from West Point in 1998. He turned to Koch Industries, the Wichita-based conglomerate which has holdings in oil and other sectors, to help bankroll his 2010 congressional race. Pompeo was criticized by liberals for hiring a Koch Industries lawyer as his chief of staff and for introducing legislation that would benefit Koch interests. ..."
"... Pompeo has hawkish views on a range of policy issues, including torture, surveillance and the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. ..."
Pompeo graduated from both the United States Military Academy at West Point and Harvard and served three terms as a representative
for Kansas's fourth district. As a member of the House select committee on intelligence, he was an aggressive critic of
US foreign policy under the Obama administration,
particularly regarding the nuclear deal with Iran.
... ... ...
He has
cultivated ties with Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists who are patrons of conservative causes. They invested
in Thayer Aerospace, a company Pompeo started with friends from West Point in 1998. He turned to Koch Industries, the Wichita-based
conglomerate which has holdings in oil and other sectors, to help bankroll his 2010 congressional race. Pompeo was criticized by
liberals for hiring a Koch Industries lawyer as his chief of staff and for introducing legislation that would benefit Koch interests.
Pompeo has hawkish views on a range of policy issues, including torture, surveillance and the National Security Agency whistleblower
Edward Snowden.
... ... ...
He has, however, diverged from Trump on Russia. In his confirmation hearing, he appeared to share with CIA staff an adversarial
view of Russia and Vladimir Putin.
The Senate approved his nomination 66-32.
The Democratic minority leader, Chuck Schumer, who voted to confirm Pompeo, said in a statement on Tuesday: "If he's confirmed [as
secretary of state] we hope that Mr Pompeo will turn over a new leaf and will start toughening up our policies towards Russia and
Putin."
There's some speculation, based on the timing and the targeting, that the recent Russian
cruise missile attacks in Idlib may have targeted US SOF in retaliation for Deir Ezzor and
northern Hama. The US couldn't respond because to do so would be an admission that SOF are
working with HTS and HTS-supporting groups.
Notable quotes:
"... Russian military thinking seems to have reached the point now where the idea of using force intentionally in conflicts with peer-state adversaries has been almost completely ruled out. This seems a radical move. But there has been a clear recognition within this military that better strategic outcomes for Russia will result from the use of non-violent 'asymmetric warfare' activities rather than those which will or can involve the use of force -- such as conventional war or hybrid warfare. ..."
"... There's some speculation, based on the timing and the targeting, that the recent Russian cruise missile attacks in Idlib may have targeted US SOF in retaliation for Deir Ezzor and northern Hama. The US couldn't respond because to do so would be an admission that SOF are working with HTS and HTS-supporting groups. ..."
Russia defends the JCPOA but Israel and USA wants to renege on it. Russia agreed to
General Soleiman's request to provide support for Syria. Russia and Iran are under economic
sanctions from you know who and barter oil and gas in non dollar trade. Russia nixed
Netanyahoo's request to keep Iran and PMUs or Hezbollah out of Quneitra. But according to you
Russia is big bad wolf and Iran is sheep.
The skin is quite real. Russia is learning lessons and prefer to fight enemies as far as
possible before they attack or destabilize Russia proper. This whole article and stand off
weapons is about Russia trying to fight enemies from a far and preventing threats from
materializing destroying them before too late.
All the talk of technical specs and capabilities of the various weapons systems are above my
pay grade, but my worst fears have been realized and it seems the U.S. and Israel are trying
to provoke Russia into a reaction that will justify wider war for the purpose of "securing
the realm". Things in Syria were not to Israel's liking and Syria will not be bifurcated nor
does it appear that a puppet leader subservient to America and Israel will supplant Assad.
This is probably why Israel attacked a Hezbollah position recently so they could stir
things up a bit and try to regain some momentum towards their ultimate objective. Israel
knows it can start another military conflagration then quietly exit the scene with little
cost to itself while their American vassal will take over and do the rest. And if America
doesn't take the bait then Izzy's innumerable agents in the media and Congress will scream
anti-semitism and moan about how the president has turned his back on our greatest ally in
the region until the desired outcome is achieved.
Agree. In the long run the best thing for Iran is to stop its military involvement in
Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon; and limit its relations to culture and economy. Iranian military
coming into battle with American forces in these countries is no good for Iran. Furthermore,
eventually Iraqis and Syrians will rebel against Iranian domination of their countries
despite their religious affinities to Iran. That is the nature of the nation state. Iranians
should be smart enough to understand this. It is a question of when to begin the
withdrawal.
" the Zionist warmongers are going to destroy America and in case of war with Russia both
nations will be destroyed ."
You nailed it that is the plan! Stack up the best and brightest of the Caucasian males
against each other, Nato vs. Russia , with modern weapons they will most effectively wipe out
each other.They are the only ones who can hinder the plan of NWO. , so they have to be
discarded. the remaining goyims will be forcefully crossbred , and microchiped , hence NWO.
Nirvana for some lunatics , humanity for none.
Ok, what you say is true -- there has been no proof of S400 capabilities. This may be:
A) because Russia did not want to reveal its capabilities in the heavily monitored Syrian
military theater, to avoid giving US and Israel a chance to develop counter measures
B) because they could not find a volunteer, such as you, till now who is willing to verify
how poor the performance of S400 is by flying a military plane into its defensive zone.
Perhaps, the Russians also wanted to know how effective S400 would be in detecting F22
Raptors flying from Incirlik. Smaller Radar Cross Section typically means only detection at a
reduced distance, not invisibility as the US MIC marketing says. This could have been an even
more important task, relevant to the whole of mother Russia, than defending the Russian
contingent in Syria.
It depends on your war scenario. A US carrier hit by Iran might make its way home and be
repaired. That was how the US Navy operated in WW2 before armored flight decks. Interestingly
the British carriers operating off Okinawa absorbed kamikazi attacks and stayed on station
while the wooden flight decks on American carriers were not so robust.
Today in a major war I tend to believe you go to war with what you have on day one and who
can hit hardest in the first few days will prevail. There will be no time to move factories
beyond the Urals or create an 'Arsenal of Democracy' out of range of enemy attack. In that
scenario a carrier becomes, like everything else, an expendable platform.
One of the parties involved gotta be sane to avoid really bad things happening. It is
Russia. You have to have similar historical experience and cultural background to understand
and appreciate wisdom and restrain. Otherwise we all would have been like chimps throwing
crap at each other at smallest cause, except we can throw a lot more dangerous things than
doing.
the American brand is just more attractive. Sorry, comrades.
When go for it. You leaders, however, appear to be smarter and understand better what
usually happens to the ones choosing such "attractive brand".
A strong and independent Iran is completely unpalatable to Russia. Why do you think
Russia is in Syria? Because an Iranian gas pipeline to Europe would undermine Russian
energy hegemony over Europe.
Of course. And that is precisely why Russia was instrumental in pushing that Iranian
agreement through, the agreement that would lift the Iranian sanctions and allow Iran to sell
its oil again. BTW your "attractive brand" people are trying their damnedest to renege on
that deal.
Why does nutty yahoo fly to Moscow with meetings with Putin? Because they need to
communicate securely.
If you mean Netanyahu, then of course he did want to meet in secret, because he tried to
convince Putin to boot Iran out of Syria. Israel is getting positively hysterical about the
Iranian presence in Syria. Iran, in case you haven't noticed, has not just the US but also
Israel as its enemy. Putin, however, sent Netanyahu on his way. Russia maintains reasonably
friendly relations with Israel but not about to let Israel dictate its actions.
Its now standard on the PLAN 052D and coordinated with their versions of AEGIS. The world
doesn't stop developing weapons just because the US has gone dumb, you know.
I believe that an old saying with regards to Russian forces is that they are slow to
saddle up but they ride very fast. This is advice to take to heart based on historical events
alone.
Agree. Don't know for sure, but having operated in that military-legislative influence
sphere for a time, I'd almost guarantee that this $700B defense increase was driven by the
"surprise" effectiveness of Russian weapons systems. I'd bet that it's almost exclusively an
RDTE increase on top of the ongoing O&M war fighting (re: imperial) budget structure of
the last 15 years. It's been zero sum between those two categories, but I suspect now that's
no longer the case.
Tomahawk is a dog slow museum piece. There is strong evidence that the Russians 'splashed'
the first batch of Tomahawks fired at the Syrian airbase and that is why they had to fire a
second batch. I think Russia 'EW' capabilities are not fully known and understood.
I don't think I would want to be on any US naval assets and have to try and shoot down
multiple missiles. As one strategist commented – there are targets and there are subs.
The article did not mention that these missiles can be launched in a number of ways –
from land, sea, under the sea and from the air and outside the defensive capabilities of the
intended targets.
How ironic. Meanwhile looks like that it has been working just fine for Rusian side which
deployed miniscule resources in the region. The thing is that outcome pretty much confirms
who is right and who is wrong. There is also no need to make rush moves at the moment. Things
are going in right direction. It is not dick swinging contest if you have not noticed.
They're both 800 lb gorillas, the only difference is the Russian gorilla is fluent in six
languages and reads Tolstoy and Pushkin while the American gorilla has type 2 diabetes, a
sixth grade education and spends its day jerking off to internet porn.
Russian military thinking seems to have reached the point now where the idea of
using force intentionally in conflicts with peer-state adversaries has been almost
completely ruled out. This seems a radical move. But there has been a clear recognition
within this military that better strategic outcomes for Russia will result from the use of
non-violent 'asymmetric warfare' activities rather than those which will or can involve the
use of force -- such as conventional war or hybrid warfare.
Asymmetric warfare, of course, and in a nutshell, is a method of warfare employed by the
weak against the strong where the former seeks to level the battlefield with the latter.
The weaker party, using its own relative advantages, attempts to turn the strengths of its
opponent into vulnerabilities, which can then be exploited. The means used are ones which,
in essence, cannot be used in return -- reciprocated -- by the target ('asymmetrical' means
that which cannot be mirror-imaged). Fundamentally, asymmetric warfare is all about
activity that, rather than bludgeoning a target into strategic, operational and tactical
defeats, actually manipulates it into them. And it is all done, ideally, with no use of
force. As Sun Tzu, the 'father' of asymmetric thinking, told us, the acme of skill in the
conduct of warfare is to defeat the adversary without the use of any force. See, for
instance my book titled Asymmetric Warfare: Threat and Response in the 21st Century.
[...]
Other articles present similar arguments for the use of asymmetric warfare by the
Russian military. The overall message for this military, and as the influential military
newspaper Red Star (Krasnaya Zvezda) summed up last year, is that when it comes to the
conduct of warfare in the current era, 'The main emphasis must be placed on asymmetrical
means and methods'.
The principal aim of Russian asymmetric warfare is to create degrees of destabilisation
(destabilizatsiya) within targeted states and within collectives of targeted states (e.g.
NATO, EU). A target that is destabilised (in whatever sense) is one that, in Russian
military thinking, is more susceptible to Russian leverage, i.e. it can be manipulated more
easily.[...]
Conventional military assets are still needed, of course. But these days they may be
seen to be acting in a supporting role for the asymmetric warfare campaign against NATO
interests. Their outwardly sabre-rattling movements, deployments and activities are seen as
means of creating 'indirect leverage' that can, in turn, manipulate western actors into
making counter moves that actually suit Moscow's purposes.
The Russian military is now also employing asymmetric warfare methods that these western
actors find very difficult to retaliate against on a like-for-like basis -- reciprocity is
largely denied. Russian democracy has become very much a 'managed' one and this closes down
many avenues of retaliation. Russia is also not open to cyber attack in the same way that
western states are and defences in the country are more pronounced.
The Russian military can and is using non-violent asymmetric means to considerable
strategic advantage against NATO. They are, wherever one looks, destabilising and
manipulating to good effect. Given this continuing situation and the strategic results that
are patently being produced in NATO countries, why would the Russian military need to
consider the conventional use of force? What utility does it have?
No. You're thinking about the former Soviet Union. Russia is not the same thing. Also no,
the USA military exists for no other purpose than profit making. It is the most corrupt on
earth by its definition. The pentagon pays thousands of dollars for a bolt which exists with
the same part number in a GM catalogue for less than ten dollars. That was years old but
typical of the utter joke the US military is. Did we forget the 6 trillion dollars the
Pentagon lost the day before 9/11 in 2001? Or the more recent announcement of a similar
amount LOST? Nobody else even has a budget the size of the missing money in the US one.
Russia is very corrupt in some ways -- but it has cleaned up on the military side.
Remember that the US is only less corrupt because we define lobbying to be legal.
It's excellent propaganda and a great movie about the early Soviet Program. Actually a
better space themed movie since I don't know when, maybe since Appolo 13. Which ironically is
the American version.
There's an understandable post-Soviet tendency in the US sphere to discount Russian
capabilities in terms of high tech weapons.
There could be books written about the complete failure of the US to foresee Russia's
achievement of parity+ with the West in advanced weaponry. The Donald Cook incident in 2014
gave a shock about Russian EW capabilities on the order of the shock the U2 incident gave
about Soviet air defense capabilities. Something quietly queered the TLAM attack on the
Syrian airbase earlier this year. The image that the US kept of Russia was left over from the
1980s, that the Soviet Army was a mighty but unwieldy big iron force with plenty of firepower
but wanting in capabilities related to advanced technology. During the first Chechen War in
1996, the Russian Army was referred to in US media as a "glorified Third World army." That's
an exact quote. The performance of Soviet-designed aerial weaponry, largely during the
mideast wars of 1973 to 1982, gave a distinct impression of a disadvantage related to
avionics. But that may have been misleading, as the performance of export aircraft could have
been inferior to that of the home fleet. Either the US estimate of Soviet technology in the
1980s was way off or post-Soviet Russia developed advanced technology at a remarkable pace,
even more so since it occurred during such chaotic times.
There's some speculation, based on the timing and the targeting, that the recent
Russian cruise missile attacks in Idlib may have targeted US SOF in retaliation for Deir
Ezzor and northern Hama. The US couldn't respond because to do so would be an admission that
SOF are working with HTS and HTS-supporting groups.
Sanctions on Russia are being ignored. China is investing its US Trillions. Under US imposed
sanctions, ExxonMobil withdrew and China said "Thank You" and took the partnership.
Chinese state-controlled Huarong Asset Management has bought a 36.2 percent stake in the unit
of CEFC China Energy through which CEFC is acquiring a $9.1 billion stake in Russian oil
giant Rosneft.
According to CEFC filings seen by Reuters, Huarong has bought the stake in CEFC in two
tranches, one in December and one in February. Huarong is controlled by China's Ministry of
Finance.
In September, CEFC Energy announced plans to acquire 14.16 percent of Rosneft shares from
Glencore and the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA).
"The final structure of Rosneft's shareholders has been formed," Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin
told Rossiya 24 television.
As part of a long-term agreement, Rosneft and CEFC Energy inked a deal on crude oil
deliveries in 2017. According to the agreement, the Russian oil major will supply CEFC with
60.8 million tons of oil annually until 2023.
The agreement covers the development of exploration and production projects in Siberia.
The two companies plan to cooperate in refining, petrochemicals and crude trading.
Could Tillerson dismissal be related to:
"@realDonaldTrump son-in-law Jared #Kushner told Trump to back the #Saudi/#UAE blockade on
#Qatar after Qatar refused to invest in Kushner's indebted property at 666 Fifth Avenue in
New York City."
When this blockade happened, Tillerson supported Qatar and clashed with Kushner. Now that
Kushner's loan issue is public, could Trump be lashing out at Tillerson, could someone at
State have publicized the loan?
Posted by: likklemore | Mar 13, 2018 7:48:34 PM | 69
" Betcha Rex is so so sorry he went to D.C. "
Nah I wouldn't be fretting 'bout l'il rexie; these 1%ers don't make a move unless they
know there is gonna be a top earner or 57 in it for themselves.
I have no doubt tillerson pulled off a mob of smart (for himself n maybe exxonMobil) deals
whilst SecState. That is what 'these people' do.
Tillerson is more than enough evidence for the premise that the first move of any truly
revolutionary political movement must be to put the entire elite up against a wall and shoot
them.
For, as debilitating as such a move can be for the moral hygiene of a revolution, history
has taught us that allowing sociopathic scum such as he to keep breathing, ultimately costs
the lives of millions of ordinary decent, non-sociopathic humans. Sad but true.
"... "Christopher Steele the man behind the Trump dossier: how the ex-spy tried to warn the world about Trump's ties to Russia" ..."
"... Mayer tries to take the high road by asserting that the Republicans are "trying to take down the intelligence community." It is an odd assertion coming from her as she has written a book called "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals," ..."
"... A Steele friend describes the man as a virtual Second Coming of Jesus, for whom "fairness, integrity and truth trump any ideology." Former head of MI-6 and Steele boss Sir John Dearlove, who once reported how the intelligence on Iraq had been "sexed-up" and "fixed around the policy" to make the false case for war, describes Steele as "superb." ..."
"... Former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who himself was involved in lying to support America's journey into Iraq, similarly sees Steele as honest and credible in his claims, while a former CIA Station Chief in Moscow is called upon to cast aspersions on the "Russian character" that impels them to engage in lies and deception. ..."
"... Another major blooper in the Mayer story relates to how one unnamed "senior Russian official" reported that the Kremlin had blocked the appointment of Mitt Romney, a noted critic of Russia, as secretary of state. How exactly that was implemented is not clear from the Steele reporting and there has been no other independent confirmation of the allegation, but Mayer finds it credible, asserting that "subsequent events could be said to support it." What events? one might ask, though the national media did not hesitate and instead reported Mayer's assertion as if it were itself a credible source in a forty-eight hour news cycle frenzy relating to Romney and Trump. ..."
"... Steele's work history also raises some questions. He served in Moscow as a first tour officer for MI-6 under diplomatic cover from 1990 to 1993. Russia was in tumult and Mayer describes how "Boris Yeltsin gained ultimate power, and a moment of democratic promise faded as the KGB -now called the FSB-reasserted its influence, oligarchs snapped up state assets, and nationalist political forces began to emerge." Not to go into too much detail, but Mayer's description of Russia at that time is dead wrong. Yeltsin was a drunkard and a tool of American and European intervention and manipulation. He was no agent of "democratic promise" and only grew more corrupt as his time in office continued into the completely manipulated election of 1996, when the IMF and U.S. conspired to get him reelected so the looting, a.k.a. "democratization," could go on. Mayer goes on to depict in negative terms a "shadowy" former "KGB operative" Vladimir Putin who emerged from the chaos. ..."
"... Sweeping judgements by Mayer also include "[Steele's] allegation that the Kremlin favored Trump in 2016 and was offering his campaign dirt on Hillary has been borne out. So has his claim that the Kremlin and WikiLeaks were working together " As noted above, the WikiLeaks/Kremlin allegations have not been demonstrated, nor have the claims about Kremlin provision of information to discredit Hillary, who was doing a find job at the time discrediting herself. ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. ..."
The latest salvo in the Russiagate saga is a 15,000 word New Yorker article entitled "Christopher Steele the man behind the Trump
dossier: how the ex-spy tried to warn the world about Trump's ties to Russia" by veteran
journalist Jane Mayer. The premise of the piece is clear from the tediously long title, namely
that the Steele dossier, which implicated Donald Trump and his associates in a number of high
crimes and misdemeanors, is basically accurate in exposing an existential threat posed to our
nation by Russia. How does it come to that conclusion? By citing sources that it does not
identify whose credibility is alleged to be unimpeachable as well as by including testimony
from Steele friends and supporters.
In other words, the Mayer piece is an elaboration of the same "trust me" narrative that has
driven the hounding of Russia and Trump from day one. Inevitably, the Trump haters both from
the left and the right have jumped on the Mayer piece as confirmation of their own presumptions
regarding what has allegedly occurred, when, in reality, Trump might just be more right than
wrong when he claims that he has been the victim of a conspiracy by the Establishment to
discredit and remove him.
Mayer is a progressive and a long-time critic of Donald Trump. She has written a book
denouncing "the Koch brothers' deep influence on American politics" and co-authored another
book with Jill Abramson, formerly Executive Editor of the New York Times.
Abramson reportedly carries a small plastic replica of Barack Obama in her purse which she
can take out "to take comfort" whenever she is confronted by Donald Trump's America. Mayer's
New Yorker bio-blurb describes her as a journalist who covers national security,
together with politics and culture.
The problem with the type of neo-journalism as practiced by Mayer is that it first comes to
a conclusion and then selects the necessary "facts" to support that narrative. When the
government does that sort of thing to support, one might suggest, a war against Iraq or even
hypothetically speaking Iran, it is called cherry picking. After the facts have been cherry
picked they are "stovepiped" up to the policy maker, avoiding along the way any analysts who
might demur regarding the product's veracity. In journalistic terms, the equivalent would
perhaps be sending the garbage up directly to a friendly editor, avoiding any fact check.
Mayer tries to take the high road by asserting that the Republicans are "trying to take
down the intelligence community." It is an odd assertion coming from her as she has written a
book called "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on
American Ideals," a development which was pretty much implemented by the intelligence
community working hand-in-hand with Congress and the White House. But she is not the first
liberal who has now become a friend of CIA, the FBI and the NSA as a response to the greater
threat allegedly posed by Donald Trump.
A Steele friend describes the man as a virtual Second Coming of Jesus, for whom
"fairness, integrity and truth trump any ideology." Former head of MI-6 and Steele boss Sir
John Dearlove, who once reported how the intelligence on Iraq had been "sexed-up"
and "fixed
around the policy" to make the false case for war, describes Steele as "superb." Other
commentary from former American CIA officers is similar in nature. Former CIA Deputy
Director John McLaughlin, who himself was involved in lying to support America's journey into
Iraq, similarly sees Steele as honest and credible in his claims, while a former CIA Station
Chief in Moscow is called upon to cast aspersions on the "Russian character" that impels them
to engage in lies and deception.
My review of the Mayer rebuttal of criticism of Steele revealed a number of instances where
she comes to certain conclusions without presenting any real supporting evidence or accepts
"proof" that is essentially hearsay because it supports her overall narrative. She asserts that
Russia and WikiLeaks were working together on the release of the Democratic National
Committee/Hillary Clinton emails without providing any substantiation whatsoever. She surely
came to that judgment based on something she was told, but by whom and when?
Another major blooper in the Mayer story relates to how one unnamed "senior Russian
official" reported that the Kremlin had blocked the appointment of Mitt Romney, a noted critic
of Russia, as secretary of state. How exactly that was implemented is not clear from the Steele
reporting and there has been no other independent confirmation of the allegation, but Mayer
finds it credible, asserting that "subsequent events could be said to support it." What events?
one might ask, though the national media did not hesitate and instead reported Mayer's
assertion as if it were itself a credible source in a forty-eight hour news cycle frenzy
relating to Romney and Trump.
Steele's work history also raises some questions. He served in Moscow as a first tour
officer for MI-6 under diplomatic cover from 1990 to 1993. Russia was in tumult and Mayer
describes how "Boris Yeltsin gained ultimate power, and a moment of democratic promise faded as
the KGB -now called the FSB-reasserted its influence, oligarchs snapped up state assets, and
nationalist political forces began to emerge." Not to go into too much detail, but Mayer's
description of Russia at that time is dead wrong. Yeltsin was a drunkard and a tool of American
and European intervention and manipulation. He was no agent of "democratic promise" and only
grew more corrupt as his time in office continued into the completely manipulated election of
1996, when the IMF and U.S. conspired to get him reelected so the looting, a.k.a.
"democratization," could go on. Mayer goes on to depict in negative terms a "shadowy" former
"KGB operative" Vladimir Putin who emerged from the chaos.
Mayer also cites a Steele report of April 2016, a "secret investigation [that] involved a
survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union," but she
neither produces the report itself or the sources used to put it together. The report allegedly
concluded that the "Kremlin's long-term aim was to boost extremist groups and politicians at
the expense of Europe's liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to destroy the E.U "
The precis provided by Mayer is a bit of fantasy, it would seem, and is perhaps a reflection of
an unhealthy obsession on the part of Steele, if he actually came to that conclusion. As it
stands it is hearsay, possibly provided by Steele himself or a friend to Mayer to defend his
reputation.
Mayer also reports and calls potentially treasonous Steele's claims that "Kremlin and Trump
were politically colluding in the 2016 campaign 'to sow discord and disunity both with the
U.S.' and within the transatlantic alliance." And also, "[Trump] and his top associates had
repeatedly accepted intelligence from the Kremlin on Hillary Clinton and other political
rivals." As Robert Mueller apparently has not developed any information to support such wild
claims, it would be interesting to know why Jane Mayer considers them to be credible.
Sweeping judgements by Mayer also include "[Steele's] allegation that the Kremlin
favored Trump in 2016 and was offering his campaign dirt on Hillary has been borne out. So has
his claim that the Kremlin and WikiLeaks were working together " As noted above, the
WikiLeaks/Kremlin allegations have not been demonstrated, nor have the claims about Kremlin
provision of information to discredit Hillary, who was doing a find job at the time
discrediting herself.
The account of Donald Trump performing "perverted sexual acts" in a Moscow hotel is likewise
a good example of what is wrong with the article. Four sources are cited as providing details
of what took place, but it is conceded that none of them was actually a witness to it. It would
be necessary to learn who the sources were beyond vague descriptions, what their actual access
to the information was and what their motives were for coming forward might be. One was
allegedly a "top-level Russian intelligence officer," but the others were hotel employees and a
Trump associate who had arranged for the travel.
Finally, from an ex-intelligence officer point of view I have some questions about Steele's
sources in Russia. Who are they? If they were MI-6 sources he would not be able to touch them
once he left the service and would face severe sanctions under the Official Secrets Act should
he even try to do so. There are in addition claims in the Mayer story that Steele did not pay
his sources because it would encourage them to fabricate, an argument that could also be made
about Steele who was being paid to produce dirt on Trump. So what was the quid pro quo
? Intelligence agents work for money, particularly when dealing with a private security firm,
and Steele's claim, if he truly made it, that he has sources that gave him closely held, highly
sensitive information in exchange for an occasional lunch in Mayfair rings hollow.
Jane Mayer's account of the Steele dossier seems to accept quite a lot on faith. It would be
interesting to know the extent to which Steele himself or his proxies were the source of much
of what she has written. Until we know more about the actual Russian sources and also about
Mayer's own contacts interviewed for the article, her "man behind the Trump dossier" will
continue to be something of a mystery and the entire Russiagate saga assumption that Moscow
interfered in the 2016 U.S. election must be regarded as still to be demonstrated.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
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Good article, in the the sense that it seems largely correct, but very gentle ? It really
pulls its punches.
"The problem with the type of neo-journalism as practiced by Mayer is that it first comes to
a conclusion and then selects the necessary "facts" to support that narrative"
Neo-journalism ? More like pure propaganda. Shoddy doesn't even begin to cover the apparent
systematic lying by commission & omission.
Skripal springs to mind. He was recruited by MI6 whilst Steele was in Russia and he worked
for the Steele outfit Orbis, which was paid for the Trump dossier, after he was released.
Last night I watched "The Real Bravo Two Zero", a movie available through Amazon Prime. It
tells the story of 8 British special ops soldiers who were helecoptered down behind Iraqi
lines during the first Gulf War. Their mission was to locate and radio back the co-ordinates
of the mobile missile launchers Saddam was using to hurl Scuds at Israel.
Everything in the mission that could go wrong, did. However the basic fault lay not with
the soldier but rather with the planners back at headquarters. Ultimately a number of the
British soldiers were killed and captured but one of them escaped capture and made a heroic
trek of 200 kilometers to the relative safety of Syria.
Later, after the war, at least two of the survivors authored books that described the
mission. In those books, the authors claimed that the party of 8 had engaged in numerous fire
fights with well armed Iraqi combat teams which resulted in the death of approx. 250 of the
Iraqi soldiers. Other acts of heroism and bravery were delineated as well.
The movie follows the footsteps of an investigative journalist–himself a former
soldier–who is literally retracing the steps of the soldiers. With his fluent Arabic he
interviews those local Bedouin farmers for their take on what happened in their encounter
with the British team.. What he discovers–to his dismay–is that much of what
happens in the books is pure fabrication, fantasy ginned up to stoke patriotic feelings of
pride in the prowess of the British special forces while boosting popularity for the war back
home. Fairy tales.
Now the guy narrating the movie doesn't go so far as to accuse the establishment British
propaganda machine of fabricating this trash but he does explicitly note the discrepancy
between what really occurred and what is put forward as non-fiction account of these
events.
We are all familiar with the charges of lying and deception made against the British by
Charles Lindbergh, Ford and other populist patriots during the lead up to WW2. With this in
mind, why should we believe that anything that comes from England (such as these claims made
by Steele), which recognizes no right to free speech or an unfettered press, is anything but
pure propaganda?
If you have Amazon, please watch the movie. It is excellent.
"... If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress. ..."
"... Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the field for a favored "star" recruit. ..."
"... The Democratic leaders are promoting CIA agents and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. At the same time, such people are choosing the Democratic Party as their preferred political vehicle. ..."
An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA,
Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic
candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of
military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political
history.
If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely
predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as
half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the
lower chamber of Congress.
Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting
candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the
best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the
field for a favored "star" recruit.
A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, who
worked as Iraq director for the National Security Council in the Obama White House and as a top
aide to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. After her deep
involvement in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a principal
deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, her areas of
responsibility included drone warfare, "homeland defense" and cyber warfare.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has designated Slotkin as one of its
top candidates, part of the so-called "Red to Blue" program targeting the most vulnerable
Republican-held seats -- in this case, the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan, which
includes Lansing and Brighton. The House seat for the district is now held by two-term
Republican Representative Mike Bishop.
The Democratic leaders are promoting CIA agents and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. At
the same time, such people are choosing the Democratic Party as their preferred political
vehicle. There are far more former spies and soldiers seeking the nomination of the Democratic
Party than of the Republican Party. There are so many that there is a subset of Democratic
primary campaigns that, with a nod to Mad magazine, one might call "spy vs. spy."
"... We are at a dangerous crossroads in our history. ..."
"... The dangers of a Third World War are routinely obfuscated by the media. A world of fantasy permeates the mainstream media which tacitly upholds the conduct of nuclear war as a peace-making endeavor. ..."
"... "Fake News" has become "Real News". ..."
"... And "Real News" by the independent online media is now tagged as Russian propaganda. ..."
"... In turn, the independent media (including Global Research) is the object of censorship via the search engines and social media. ..."
"... What we are dealing with is a War against the Truth. Objective reporting on the dangers of a Third World war is being suppressed. Why? ..."
"... The future of humanity is at stake. The danger of nuclear annihilation is not front-page news. ..."
"... The unfolding consensus among Pentagon war planners is that a Third World War is "Winnable". ..."
"... Concepts are turned upside down. Political insanity prevails. ..."
"... Author's note: the later part of this article entitled The Road Ahead was first formulated in 2010. ..."
The dangers of a Third World War are routinely obfuscated by the media. A world of
fantasy permeates the mainstream media which tacitly upholds the conduct of nuclear war as a
peace-making endeavor.
World War III is terminal. Albert Einstein understood the perils of nuclear war and the
extinction of life on earth, which has already started with the radioactive contamination
resulting from depleted uranium, not to mention Fukushima.
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be
fought with sticks and stones."
The media, the intellectuals, the scientists and the politicians, in chorus, obfuscate the
untold truth, namely that war using nuclear warheads destroys humanity.
"Fake News" has become "Real News".
And "Real News" by the independent online media is now tagged as Russian
propaganda.
In turn, the independent media (including Global Research) is the object of censorship
via the search engines and social media.
What we are dealing with is a War against the Truth. Objective reporting on the dangers
of a Third World war is being suppressed. Why?
The future of humanity is at stake. The danger of nuclear annihilation is not front-page
news.
The unfolding consensus among Pentagon war planners is that a Third World War is
"Winnable".
Nuclear War as an "Instrument of Peace"
Concepts are turned upside down. Political insanity prevails.
A diabolical discourse is unfolding. The so-called "more usable" tactical nuclear weapons
(B61-11, B61-12) with an explosive capacity between one third and twelve times a Hiroshima bomb
are heralded (by scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon) as "peace-making" bombs,
"harmless to the surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground".
These are the weapons which are contemplated for use against North Korea (or Iran) in what
is described by the Pentagon as "a bloody nose operation", with limited civilian casualties.
And the corporate media applauds.
Fake News : these nuclear bombs are WMD. The "Bloody Nose" ("safe for civilians") Concept is
"Fake News"
Lest we forget, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (see image below),
100,000 people died within the first seven seconds following the explosion. Needless to say,
today's nuclear weapons are far more advanced than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
August 1945.
When war becomes peace, the world is turned upside down. Conceptualization is no longer
possible. Insanity prevails. The institutions of government are criminalized and so is the
media.
The Pentagon and NATO are beating the drums of war. What is at stake is a Worldwide media
disinformation campaign in support of a Third World War, which almost inevitably would lead to
nuclear annihilation.
In the words of Fidel Castro: " In a nuclear war the "collateral damage" would be the life
of all humanity".
"The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity.
Today there is an imminent risk of war with the use of that kind of weapon and I don't
harbour the least doubt t hat an attack by the United States and Israel against the Islamic
Republic of Iran would inevitably evolve towards a global nuclear conflict.
There would be "collateral damage", as the American political and military leaders always
affirm, to justify the deaths of innocent people.
In a nuclear war the "collateral damage" would be the life of all humanity.
Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything
that is used to make war, must disappear!" ( Complete text and video
recording , October 2010 Interview with Fidel Castro by Michel Chossudovsky)
When the lie becomes the truth there is no turning backwards.
When war is upheld as a humanitarian endeavor endorsed by the self proclaimed international
community, pacifism and the antiwar movement are criminalized. yet it should be noted that in
the course of the last 15 years, the anti-war movement has largely become defunct, civil
society organizations have been coopted.
How do we reverse the tide: a cohesive grassroots counter-propaganda campaign
The Road Ahead
There are no easy solutions. What is required is t he development of a broad based
grassroots network which seeks to disable patterns of authority and decision making pertaining
to war. This is by no means an easy and straightforward undertaking.
This network would be established nationally and internationally at all levels in society,
towns and villages, work places, parishes. Trade unions, farmers organizations, professional
associations, business associations, student unions, veterans associations, church groups would
be called upon to integrate the antiwar organizational structure. Of crucial importance, this
movement should extend into the Armed Forces as a means to breaking the legitimacy of war among
service men and women.
The first task would be to disable war propaganda through an effective campaign against
media disinformation. (including support of the online independent and alternative media).
The corporate media would be directly challenged, leading to boycotts of major news outlets,
which are responsible for channelling disinformation into the news chain. This endeavor would
require a parallel process at the grass roots level, of sensitizing and educating fellow
citizens on the nature of the war and the global crisis, as well as effectively "spreading the
word" through advanced networking, through alternative media outlets on the internet, etc. It
would also require a broad based campaign against the search engines involved in media
censorship on behalf of the Pentagon.
The creation of such a movement, which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of the
structures of political authority, is no easy task. It would require a degree of solidarity,
unity and commitment unparalleled in World history. It would require breaking down political
and ideological barriers within society and acting with a single voice . It would also require
eventually unseating the war criminals, and indicting them for war crimes.
Abandon the Battlefield: Refuse to Fight
The military oath taken at the time of induction demands unbending support and allegiance to
the US Constitution, while also demanding that US troops obey orders from their President and
Commander in Chief:
"I,____________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the
Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear
true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of
the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the
regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God"
The President and Commander in Chief has blatantly violated all tenets of domestic and
international law. So that making an oath to "obey orders from the President" is tantamount to
violating rather than defending the US Constitution.
"The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) 809.ART.90 (20), makes it clear that military
personnel need to obey the "lawful command of his superior officer," 891.ART.91 (2), the
"lawful order of a warrant officer", 892.ART.92 (1) the "lawful general order", 892.ART.92
(2) "lawful order". In each case, military personnel have an obligation and a duty to only
obey Lawful orders and indeed have an obligation to disobey Unlawful orders, including orders
by the president that do not comply with the UCMJ. The moral and legal obligation is to the
U.S. Constitution and not to those who would issue unlawful orders, especially if those
orders are in direct violation of the Constitution and the UCMJ." (Lawrence Mosqueda, An
Advisory to US Troops A Duty to Disobey All Unlawful Orders,
The Commander in Chief is a war criminal. According to Principle 6 of the Nuremberg
Charter:
"The fact that a person [e.g. Coalition troops] acted pursuant to order of his Government
or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a
moral choice was in fact possible to him."
Let us make that "moral choice" possible, to enlisted American, British, Canadian and
US-NATO Coalition servicemen and women.
Disobey unlawful orders! Abandon the battlefield! Refuse to fight in a war which blatantly
violates international law and the US Constitution!
But this is not a choice which enlisted men and women can make individually.
It is a collective and societal choice, which requires an organizational structure.
Across the land in the US, Britain, Canada and in all coalition countries, the new anti-war
movement must assist enlisted men and women to make that moral choice possible, to abandon the
battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now in Syria and Yemen.
This will not be an easy task. Committees at local levels must be set up across the United
States, Canada, Britain, Italy, Japan and other countries, which have troops engaged in US led
military operations.
We call upon veterans' associations and local communities to support this process.
This movement needs to dismantle the disinformation campaign. It must effectively reverse
the indoctrination of coalition troops, who are led to believe that they are fighting "a just
war": "a war against terrorists", a war against the Russians, who are threatening the security
of America.
The legitimacy of the US military authority must be broken.
What has to be achieved:
Reveal the criminal nature of this military project,
Break once and for all the lies and falsehoods which sustain the "political consensus" in
favor of a pre-emptive nuclear war.
Undermine war propaganda, reveal the media lies, reverse the tide of disinformation, wage
a consistent campaign against the corporate media
Break the legitimacy of the war-mongers in high office.
Dismantle the US sponsored military adventure and its corporate sponsors.
Bring Home the Troops
Repeal the illusion that the State is committed to protecting its citizens.
Expose the "fake crises" such as the global flu pandemic as a means to distract public
opinion from the dangers of a global war.
Uphold 9/11 Truth. Reveal the falsehoods behind 9/11 which are used to justify the Middle
East Central Asian war under the banner of the "Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT)
Expose how a profit driven war serves the vested interests of the banks, the defense
contractors, the oil giants, the media giants and the biotech conglomerates
Challenge the corporate media which deliberately obfuscates the causes and consequences
of this war,
Reveal and take cognizance of the unspoken and tragic outcome of a war waged with nuclear
weapons.
Call for the Dismantling of NATO
Implement the prosecution of war criminals in high office
Close down the weapons assembly plants and implement the foreclosure of major weapons
producers
Close down all US military bases in the US and around the World
Develop an antiwar movement within the Armed Forces and establish bridges between the
Armed Forces and the civilian antiwar movement
Forcefully pressure governments of both NATO and non-NATO countries to withdraw from the
US led global military agenda.
Develop a consistent antiwar movement in Israel. Inform the citizens of Israel of the
likely consequences of a US-NATO-Israeli attack on Iran.
Confront Target the pro-war lobby groups including the pro-Israeli groups in the US
Dismantle the homeland security state, call for the repeal of the PATRIOT
legislation
Call for the removal of the military from civilian law enforcement. Call for the
enforcement of the Posse Comitatus Act
Call for the demilitarization of outer space and the repeal of Star Wars
People across the land, nationally and internationally, must mobilize against this
diabolical military agenda, the authority of the State and its officials must be forcefully
challenged.
This war can be prevented if people forcefully confront their governments, pressure their
elected representatives, organize at the local level in towns, villages and municipalities,
spread the word, inform their fellow citizens on the implications of a nuclear war, initiate
debate and discussion within the armed forces.
What is required is the development of a broad and well organized grassroots antiwar network
which challenges the structures of power and authority, the nature of the economic system, the
vast amounts of money used to fund the war, the shear size of the so-called defense
industry.
What is required is a mass movement of people which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of
war, a global people's movement which criminalizes war.
What is needed is to break the conspiracy of silence, expose the media lies and
distortions, confront the criminal nature of the US Administration and of those governments
which support it, its war agenda as well as its so-called "Homeland Security agenda" which has
already defined the contours of a police State.
The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has
embarked on a military adventure, "a long war", which threatens the future of humanity.
It is essential to bring the US war project to the forefront of political debate,
particularly in North America and Western Europe. Political and military leaders who are
opposed to the war must take a firm stance, from within their respective institutions. Citizens
must take a stance individually and collectively against war.
We call upon people across the land, in North America, Western Europe, Israel, The Arab
World, Turkey and around the world to rise up against this military project, against their
governments which are supportive of US-NATO led wars, against the corporate media which serves
to camouflage the devastating impacts of modern warfare.
The military agenda supports a profit driven destructive global economic system which
impoverishes large sectors of the world population.
This war is sheer madness.
The Lie must be exposed for what it is and what it does.
It sanctions the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children.
It destroys families and people. It destroys the commitment of people towards their fellow
human beings.
It prevents people from expressing their solidarity for those who suffer. It upholds war and
the police state as the sole avenue.
It destroys both nationalism and internationalism.
Breaking the lie means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest
for profit is the overriding force.
This profit driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into
unconscious zombies.
Let us reverse the tide.
Challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which
support them.
Break the American inquisition.
Undermine the US-NATO-Israel military crusade.
Close down the weapons factories and the military bases.
Bring home the troops.
Members of the armed forces should disobey orders and refuse to participate in a criminal
war.
The crisis of neoliberalism is at the core of current anti-Russian campaign.
Notable quotes:
"... So, as long as Russia remained open to the West's political maneuvering and wholesale thievery, every thing was hunky-dory. But as soon as Vladimir Putin got his bearings (during his second term as President) and started reassembling the broken state, then western elites became very concerned and denounced Putin as an "autocrat" and a "KGB thug." ..."
"... As the Western countries' elites were implementing a policy of political and economic containment of Russia, old threats were growing and new ones were emerging in the world, and the efforts to do away with them have failed. I think that the main reason for that is that the model of "West-centric" globalization, which developed following the dismantling of the bipolar architecture and was aimed at ensuring the prosperity of one-seventh of the world's population at the expense of the rest, proved ineffective. It is becoming more and more obvious that a narrow group of "chosen ones" is unable to ensure the sustainable growth of the global economy on their own and solve such major challenges as poverty, climate change, shortage of food and other vital resources . ..."
"... The American people need to look beyond the propaganda and try to grasp what's really going on. Russia is not Washington's enemy, it's a friend that's trying to nudge the US in adirection that will increase its opportunities for peace and prosperity in the future. Lavrov is simply pointing out that a multipolar world is inevitable as economic power becomes more widespread. This emerging reality means the US will have to modify its behavior, cooperate with other sovereign nations, comply with international law, and seek a peaceful settlement to disputes. It means greater parity between the states, fairer representation in global decision-making, and a narrower gap between the world's winners and losers. ..."
"... Admit it: The imperial model has failed. It's time to move on. ..."
The United States has launched a three-pronged offensive on Russia. First, it's attacking Russia's economy via sanctions and oil-price
manipulation. Second, it's increasing the threats to Russia's national security by arming and training militant proxies in Syria
and Ukraine, and by encircling Russia with NATO forces and missile systems. And, third, it's conducting a massive disinformation
campaign aimed at convincing the public that Russia is a 'meddling aggressor' that wants to destroy the foundation of American democracy.
(Elections)
In response to Washington's hostility, Moscow has made every effort to extend the olive branch. Russia does not want to fight
the world's biggest superpower any more than it wants to get bogged down in a bloody and protracted conflict in Syria. What Russia
wants is normal, peaceful relations based on respect for each others interests and for international law. What Russia will not tolerate,
however, is another Iraq-type scenario where the sovereign rights of a strategically-located state are shunted off so the US can
arbitrarily topple the government, decimate the society and plunge the region deeper into chaos. Russia won't allow that, which is
why it has put its Airforce at risk in Syria, to defend the foundational principle of state sovereignty upon which the entire edifice
of global security rests.
The majority of Americans believe that Russia is the perpetrator of hostilities against the United States, mainly because the
media and the political class have faithfully disseminated the spurious claims that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections. But the
allegations are ridiculous and without merit. Russia-gate is merely the propaganda component of Washington's Full Spectrum Dominance
theory, that is, disinformation is being used to make it appear as though the US is the victim when, in fact, it is the perpetrator
of hostilities against Russia. Simply put, the media has turned reality on its head. Washington wants to inflict as much pain as
possible on Russia because Russia has frustrated its plan to control critical resources and pipeline corridors in Central Asia and
the Middle East. The Trump administration's new National Defense Strategy is quite clear on this point. Russia's opposition to Washington's
destabilizing interventions has earned it the top spot on the Pentagon's "emerging rivals" list. Moscow is now Public Enemy#1.
Washington's war on Russia has a long history dating back at least 100 years to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Despite the
fact that the US was engaged in a war with Germany at the time (WW1), Washington and its allies sent 150,000 men from 15 nations
to intervene on behalf of the "Whites" hoping to staunch the spread of communism into Europe. In the words of British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill, the goal was "to strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib."
According to Vasilis Vourkoutiotis from the University of Ottawa:
" the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.. was a failed attempt to eradicate Bolshevism while it was still weak .As
early as February 1918 Britain supported intervention in the civil war on behalf of the Whites, and in March it landed troops
in Murmansk. They were soon joined by forces from France, Italy, Japan, the United States, and ten other nations. Eventually,
more than 150,000 Allied soldiers served in Russia
The scale of the war between the Russian Reds and Whites, however, was such that the Allies soon realized they would have little,
if any, direct impact on the course of the Civil War unless they were prepared to intervene on a far grander scale. By the end
of April 1919 the French had withdrawn their soldiers .British and American troops saw some action in November 1918 on the Northern
Front but this campaign was of limited significance in the outcome of the Civil War. The last British and American soldiers were
withdrawn in 1920. The main Allied contributions to the White cause thereafter were supplies and money, mostly from Britain .
The chief purpose of Allied intervention in Soviet Russia was to help the Whites defeat the Reds and destroy Bolshevism." (Allied
Intervention in the Russian Revolution", portalus.ru)
The reason we bring up this relatively unknown bit of history is because it helps to put current events into perspective. First,
it helps readers to see that Washington has been sticking its nose in Russia's business more than a century. Second, it shows that–
while Washington's war on Russia has ebbed and flowed depending on the political situation in Moscow– it has never completely ended.
The US has always treated Russia with suspicion, contempt and brutality. During the Cold War, when Russia's global activities put
a damper on Washington's depredations around the world, relations remained stretched to the breaking point. But after the Soviet
Union collapsed in December, 1991, relations gradually thawed, mainly because the buffoonish Boris Yeltsin opened the country up
to a democratization program that allowed the state's most valuable strategic assets to be transferred to voracious oligarchs for
pennies on the dollar. The plundering of Russia pleased Washington which is why it sent a number of prominent US economists to Moscow
to assist in the transition from communism to a free-market system. These neoliberal miscreants subjected the Russian economy to
"shock therapy" which required the auctioning off of state-owned resources and industries even while hyperinflation continued to
rage and the minuscule life savings of ordinary working people were wiped out almost over night. The upshot of this Washington-approved
looting-spree was a dramatic uptick in extreme poverty which intensified the immiseration of tens of millions of people. Economist
Joseph Stiglitz followed events closely in Russia at the time and summed it up like this:
"In Russia, the people were told that capitalism was going to bring new, unprecedented prosperity. In fact, it brought unprecedented
poverty, indicated not only by a fall in living standards, not only by falling GDP, but by decreasing life spans and enormous
other social indicators showing a deterioration in the quality of life ..
(Due to) the tight monetary policies that were pursued firms didn't have the money to even pay their employees . they didn't
have enough money to pay their pensioners, to pay their workers .Then, with the government not having enough revenue, other aspects
of life started to deteriorate. They didn't have enough money for hospitals, schools. Russia used to have one of the good school
systems in the world; the technical level of education was very high. (But they no longer had) enough money for that. So it just
began to affect people in every dimension of their lives .
The number of people in poverty in Russia, for instance, increased from 2 percent to somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, with
more than one out of two children living in families below poverty. The market economy was a worse enemy for most of these people
than the Communists had said it would be. It brought Gucci bags, Mercedes, the fruits of capitalism to a few .But you had a shrinking
(economy). The GDP in Russia fell by 40 percent. In some (parts) of the former Soviet Union, the GDP, the national income, fell
by over 70 percent. And with that smaller pie it was more and more unequally divided, so a few people got bigger and bigger slices,
and the majority of people wound up with less and less and less . (PBS interview with Joseph Stiglitz, Commanding Heights)
So, as long as Russia remained open to the West's political maneuvering and wholesale thievery, every thing was hunky-dory.
But as soon as Vladimir Putin got his bearings (during his second term as President) and started reassembling the broken state, then
western elites became very concerned and denounced Putin as an "autocrat" and a "KGB thug." At the same time, Washington continued
its maniacal push eastward using its military catspaw, NATO, to achieve its geopolitical ambitions to control vital resources and
industries in the most populous and prosperous region of the coming century, Eurasia. After promising Russian President Gorbachev
that NATO would never "expand one inch to the east", the US-led military alliance added 13 new countries to its membership, all of
them straddling Russia's western flank, all of them located, like Hitler, on Russia's doorstep, all of them posing an existential
threat to Russia's survival. NATO forces now routinely conduct provocative military drills just miles from the Russian border while
state-of-the-art missile systems surround Russia on all sides. (Imagine Russia conducting similar drills in the Gulf of Mexico or
on the Canadian border. How would Washington respond?)
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave an excellent summary of post Cold War history at a gathering of the Korber Foundation
in Berlin in 2017. Brainwashed Americans who foolishly blame Russia for meddling in the 2016 elections, should pay attention to what
he said.
LAVROV– "Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall we have shown our cards, trying to do our best to assert the values of equal
partnership in international affairs .Back in the early 1990s, we withdrew our troops from Eastern and Central Europe and the
Baltic states and dramatically downsized our military capacity near our western borders
When the cold war era came to an end, Russia was hoping that this would become our common victory – the victory of both the
former Communist bloc countries and the West. The dreams of ushering in shared peace and cooperation seemed near to fruition.
However, the United States and its allies decided to declare themselves the sole winners, refusing to work together to create
the architecture of equal and indivisible security. They made their choice in favor of shifting the dividing lines to our borders
– through expanding NATO and then through the implementation of the EU's Eastern Partnership program
As the Western countries' elites were implementing a policy of political and economic containment of Russia, old threats
were growing and new ones were emerging in the world, and the efforts to do away with them have failed. I think that the main
reason for that is that the model of "West-centric" globalization, which developed following the dismantling of the bipolar architecture
and was aimed at ensuring the prosperity of one-seventh of the world's population at the expense of the rest, proved ineffective.
It is becoming more and more obvious that a narrow group of "chosen ones" is unable to ensure the sustainable growth of the global
economy on their own and solve such major challenges as poverty, climate change, shortage of food and other vital resources .
The latest events are clear evidence that the persistent attempts to form a unipolar world order have failed .The new centers
of economic growth and concomitant political influence are assuming responsibility for the state of affairs in their regions.
Let me reiterate that the emergence of multipolar world order is a fact and a reality. Seeking to hold back this process and keep
the unfairly gained privileged positions is going to lead nowhere. We see increasing examples of nations raising their voice in
defense of their right to decide their own destiny ." (Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister)
The American people need to look beyond the propaganda and try to grasp what's really going on. Russia is not Washington's
enemy, it's a friend that's trying to nudge the US in adirection that will increase its opportunities for peace and prosperity in
the future. Lavrov is simply pointing out that a multipolar world is inevitable as economic power becomes more widespread. This emerging
reality means the US will have to modify its behavior, cooperate with other sovereign nations, comply with international law, and
seek a peaceful settlement to disputes. It means greater parity between the states, fairer representation in global decision-making,
and a narrower gap between the world's winners and losers.
Who doesn't want this? Who doesn't want to see an end of the bloody US-led invasions, the countless drone assassinations, the
vast destruction of ancient civilizations, and the senseless slaughter of innocent men, women and children? Who doesn't want to see
Washington's wings clipped so the bloodletting stops and the millions of refugees and internally displaced can return to their homes?
Lavrov offers a vision of the future that all peace-loving people should welcome with open arms.
Admit it: The imperial model has failed. It's time to move on.
"... This,,,"Russia appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war." Should be changed to "The Guardian appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war." ..."
"... The Guardian has consistently propagandised for regime changes inspired by Washington NeoCons, those of Libya, Syria, Ukraine and is ramping up their propaganda machine toward North Korea, Venezuela and now Russia itself having promoted destabilisation on its borders in Ukraine. ..."
"... On top of what I said yesterday, if Russian oligarchs do pull all their money out of Britain, the British economy would crash, it being highly dependent on the services sector (constituting 80% of Britain's GDP in 2016 according to Wikipedia) and the financial services industry in particular. So if all those Russian billions swirling through Britain's financial system are "dodgy", that's because the system itself encouraged those inflows. ..."
"... "Poor little Britain" which actually spends on par with Russia in terms of its military budget, despite the fact that a) it's a much smaller country to defend and is surrounded by water, and b) it's part of NATO with the US as its staunch defender so it really doesn't need a standalone military anyway. ..."
"... From what's emerging now, it seems there simply were no assassins wandering round Salisbury. Instead, it appears Mr Skripal for some reason has a house full of nerve gas, or enough of it at least to take out himself, his daughter and a policeman who inspected the premises. ..."
"... There is one key element that proves that the Russians didn't do it: The Russians aren't so clumsy as to poison over a dozen other people at the same time. ..."
"... The whole piece is an emotionally charged rant, bordering on hysteria, based on a transparent tissue of lies, distortions and absolutely stunning hypocrisy; and this coming from the 'liberal' 'left of centre' Guardian! ..."
Mark Rice-Oxley,
Guardian columnist and the first in line to fight in WWIII.
The alleged poisoning of ex-MI6 agent Sergei Skripal has caused the Russophobic MSM to go into overdrive. Nowhere is the desperation
with which the Skripal case has been seized more obvious than the Guardian. Luke Harding is spluttering incoherently about a
weapons lab that might not even exist anymore . Simon Jenkins gamely takes up his position as the only rational person left at
the Guardian, before being heckled in the comments and dismissed as a contrarian by Michael White on twitter. More and more the media
are becoming a home for dangerous, aggressive, confrontational rhetoric that has no place in sensible, adult newspapers.
Oh, Russia! Even before we point fingers over poison and speculate about secret agents and spy swaps and pub food in Salisbury,
one thing has become clear: Russia appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during
the cold war.
Read this. It's from a respected "unbiased", liberal news outlet. It is the worst, most partisan political language I have ever
heard, more heated and emotionally charged than even the most fraught moments of the Cold War. It is dangerous to the whole planet,
and has no place in our media.
If everything he said in the following article were true, if he had nothing but noble intentions and right on his side, this would
still be needlessly polarizing and war-like language.
To make it worse, everything he proceeds to say is a complete lie.
Usually we would entitle these pieces "fact checks", but this goes beyond that. This? This is a reality check.
Its agents pop over for murder and shopping
FALSE: There's no proof any of this ever happened. There has been no trial in the Litvinenko case. The
"public
inquiry" was a farce, with no cross-examination of witnesses, evidence given in secret and anonymous witnesses. All of which
contravene British law regarding a fair trial.
even while its crooks use Britain as a 24/7 laundromat for their ill-gotten billions, stolen from compatriots.
TRUE sort of: Russian billionaires do come to London, Paris, and Switzerland to launder their (stolen) money. Rice-Oxley is too
busy with his 2 minutes of hate to interrogate this issue. The reason oligarchs launder their money here is that WE let them. Oligarchs
have been fleeing Russia for over a decade. Why? Because, in Russia, Putin's government has jailed billionaires for tax evasion and
embezzling, stripped them of illegally acquired assets and demanded they pay their taxes. That's why you have wanted criminals like
Sergei Pugachev doing interviews with Luke Harding, complaining he's down to
his
"last 270 million" .
When was the last time a British billionaire was prosecuted for financial crimes? Mega-Corporations owe
literally billions in tax , and our government lets them
get away with it.
Its digital natives use their skills not for solving Russia's own considerable internal problems but to subvert the prosperous
adversaries that it secretly envies.
FALSE: Russiagate is a farce,
anyone with an open-mind can see that . The reference to Russians envying the west is childish and insulting. The 13, just thirteen,
Russians who were indicted by Mueller have no connection to the Russian government, a
nd allegedly
campaigned for many candidates , and both for and against Trump. They are a PR firm, nothing more.
It bought a World Cup,
FALSE: The World Cup bids are voted on, and after years and years of investigation the US/UK teams have found so little evidence
of corruption in the Russia bid that they simply stopped talking about it. If the FBI had found even the slightest hint of financial
malpractice, would we ever have stopped hearing about it?
Regarding the second "neighbour": Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are not at war. Ukraine has claimed to have been "invaded" by Russia
many times but has never declared war. Why? Because they rely on Russian gas to live, and because they know that if Russia were to
ever REALLY invade, the war would last only just a big longer than the Georgian one. The
"anti-terrorist operation" in Ukraine was started by the coup government in 2014. Since that time over 10,000 people have died.
The vast majority killed by the governments mercenaries and far-right militias many of whom
espouse outright fascism
.
bombed children to save a butcher in the Middle East.
MISLEADING: The statement is trying to paint Russia/Assad as deliberately targeting children, which is clearly untrue. Russia
is operating in Syria in full compliance with international law. Unlike literally everybody else bar Iran. When Russia entered the
conflict, at the invitation of the legitimate Syrian government, Jihadists were winning the war. ISIS had huge swathes of territory,
al-Qaeda affiliates had strongholds in all of Syria's major cities. Syria was on the brink of collapse. Rice-Oxley is unclear whether
or not he thinks this is a good thing.
Today, ISIS is obliterated, Aleppo is free
and the war is almost over. Apparently Syria becoming another Libya is preferable to a secular government winning a war against terrorists
and US-backed mercenaries.
And now it wants to start a new nuclear arms race.
FALSE: America started the arms race when they pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
Putin warned at the time it was a dangerous move . America then moved their
AEGIS "defense
shield" into Eastern Europe . Giving them the possibility of first-strike without retaliation. This is an untennable position
for any country.
Putin warned, at the time, that Russia would have to respond. They have responded. Mr Rice-Oxley should take this up with Bush
and Cheney if he has a problem with it.
And before the whataboutists say, "America does some of that stuff too", that may be true, but just because the US is occasionally
awful it doesn't mean that Russia isn't.
MISLEADING: America doesn't do "some of that stuff". No, America aren't "occasionally awful". They do ALL of that stuff, and have
been the biggest destructive force on the planet for over 70 years. Since Putin came to power America has carried out aggressive
military operations against Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria. They have sanctioned and threatened
and carried out coups against North Korea, Ukraine, Iran, Honduras, Venezuela and Cuba. All that time, the US has also claimed the
right to extradite and torture foreign nationals with impunity. The war crimes of American forces and agencies are beyond measure
and count.
We are so used to American crimes we just don't see them anymore. Imagine Putin, at one his epic four-hour Q&A sessions, off-handedly
admitting to torturing people in illegal prison camps .
Would we ever hear the end of it?
Even if you cede the utterly false claim that Russia has "invaded two neighbours", the scale of destruction just does not compare.
Invert the scale of destruction and casualties of Georgia and Iraq. Imagine Putin's government had killed 500,000 people in Georgia
alone, whilst routinely condemning the US for a week-long war in Iraq that killed less than 600 people. Imagine Russia kidnapped
foreign nationals and tortured them, whilst lambasting America's human rights record.
The double-think employed here is literally insane.
Note to Rice-Oxley and his peers, pointing out your near-delusional hypocrisy is not "whataboutism". It's a standard rhetorical
appeal to fairness. If you believe the world shouldn't be fair, fine, but don't expect other people not to point out your double
standards.
As for poor little Britain, it seems to take this brazen bullying like a whipping boy in the playground who has wet himself.
Boycott the World Cup? That'll teach them!
FALSE: Rice-Oxley is trying to paint a picture of false weakness in order to promote calls for action. Britain has been anything
but cooperative with Russia. British forces operate illegally in
Syria , they arm and train rebels. They refused to let Russian authorities see the evidence in the Litvinenko case, and refused
to let Russian lawyers cross-examine witnesses. Britain's attitude to Russia has been needlessly, provocatively antagonistic for
years.
Russians have complained that the portrayal of their nation in dramas such as McMafia is cartoonish and unhelpful, a lazy smear
casting an entire nation as a ludicrous two-dimensional pantomime villain with a pocketful of poisonous potions .Of course, the
vast majority of Russians are indeed misrepresented by such portrayals, because they are largely innocent in these antics.
TRUE: Russians do complain about this, which is entirely justifiable. The western representation of Russians is ignorant and racist
almost without exception. It is an effort, just like Rice-Oxley's column, to demonize an entire people and whip up hatred of Russia
so that people will support US-UK warmongering.
Most ordinary Russians are in fact also victims of the power system in their country, which requires ideas such as individual
comfort, aspiration, dignity, prosperity and hope to be subjugated to the wanton reflexes of the state
FALSE: Putin's government has decreased poverty by
over 66% in 17 years . They have increased life-expectancy, decreased crime, and increased public health. Pensions, social security
and infrastructure have all been rebuilt. These are not controversial or debated claims. The Guardian published them itself just
a few years ago. That is hardly a state where hope and aspiration are put aside.
Why is Russian power like this: cynical, destructive, zero-sum, determined to bring everything down to a base level where everyone
thinks the worst of each other and behaves accordingly?
MISLEADING FALLACY: This is simply projection. There is no logical basis for this statement. He is simply employing the old rhetorical
trick of asking WHY something exists, as a way of establishing its existence. This allows the (dishonest) author to sell his own
agenda as if it solves a riddle. Before you can explain something, you need to establish an explanandum something which requires
explaining. This is the basic logical process that our dear author is attempting to circumvent. We don't NEED to explain why
Russian power is like this, because he hasn't yet established that it is .
I think there are two reasons. The most powerful political idea in Russia is restoration. A decade of humiliation – economic,
social and geopolitical – that followed its rebirth in 1991 became the defining narrative of the new nation.
MISLEADING LANGUAGE: Describing the absolute destruction caused by the fall of the USSR as "rebirth" is an absurd joke. People
sold their medals, furniture and keepsakes for food, people froze to death in the streets.
At times, even the continued existence of the Russian Federation appeared under threat.
TRUE: This is true. Russia was in danger of Balkanisation. The possibility of dozens of anarchic microstates, many with access
to nuclear weapons, was very real. Most rational people would consider this a bad thing. The achievement of Putin's government in
pulling Russia back from the brink should be applauded. Especially when compared with our Western governments who can barely even
maintain the functional social security states created by their predecessors. Compare the NHS now with the NHS in 2000, compare Russia's
health service now to 17 years ago. Who do you think is really in trouble?
The second reason is that the parlous internal state of Russia – absurdist justice, a threadbare social safety net, a pyramid
society in which a very few get very rich and the rest languish – creates moral ambivalence.
PROJECTION: he actually makes this statement without even a hint of irony. The Tory government has killed people by slashing their
benefits, and homeless people froze to death during the recent blizzards. The overall trend of British social structure has been
down, for decades.
Poverty is increasing all the time ,
food banks are opening and people are increasingly desperate. We are trending down. 20%, one in five British people,
now live in poverty .
In that same time, as stated above, Russia's poverty has gone down and down. 13% of Russians live in poverty, almost half the
UK rate. In 2014, before we sanctioned Russia, it was only 10%. Even the briefest research would show this. Columnists like Rice-Oxley
go out of their way to avoid inconvenient facts.
What is to be done? I wouldn't respond with empty threats, Boris Johnson. No one cares.
Here we come to the centre of the shrubbery maze, up until now the column was just build up. Establishing a "problem" so he can
pitch us a "solution".
There are only two weaknesses in this bully's defences. The first is his money. Britain needs to do something about the dodgy
Russian billions swilling through its financial system. Make it really hard for Kremlin-connected money to buy football clubs
or businesses or establish dodgy limited partnerships; stop oligarchs from raising capital on the London stock exchange. Don't
bother with sanctions. Just say: "No thanks, we don't want your business."
FALSE: This shows not even the most basic understanding of the way money works. Money being made in Russia and spent in London
is bad fo Russia. Sending billionaires back to Russia would inject money INTO the Russian economy. Either Rice-Oxley is actually
a moron, or he is being deliberately dishonest.
What he REALLY means is that we should put pressure on the oligarchs, not to the hurt the Russian economy, but in the hopes the
oligarchs will turn on Putin and remove him by undemocratic means.
He is pushing for backdoor regime change. And if you think I'm reading too much into this, then here
The second is public opinion. The imminent presidential election is a foregone conclusion, but the mood in Russia can turn
suddenly, as we saw in 1991, 1993 and 2011-2012.
Notice how quickly he dismisses the democratic will of the Russian people. Poor, stupid, "envious" Russians aren't equipped to
make their own decisions. We need to step in. "Public opinion" turning means a colour revolution. It means US backed regime change
in a nuclear armed super-power. Backed by the cyberwarriors paid to spread Western propaganda online.
Maybe it's time to try some new digital hearts-and-minds operation. In the internet age, Russians have already shown how public
opinion can be manipulated. Perhaps our own secret digital marvels can embark on the kind of information counter-offensive to
win over the many millions of Russians who share our values. Perhaps they already are.
The hypocrisy is mind-blowing, when I read this paragraph I was dumb-founded. Speechless. For months we've been hearing about
how terrible Russia is for allegedly interfering in the American election. Damaging democracy with reporting true news out of context
and some well placed memes.
Our response? Our defense of our "values"? Use the armies of online propagandists our governments employ –
their existence
was reported in the
Guardian – in order to undermine, or undo the democratic will of the Russian people. Rice-Oxley is positing this with a straight
face.
Russia is such a destabilising threat to "our democratic values", such a moral vacuum, that we must use subterfuge to undermine
their elections and remove their popular head of state.
Rice-Oxley wants to push and prod and provoke and antagonise a nuclear armed power that, at worst, is guilty of nothing but playing
our game by our rules and winning. He wants to build a case for war with Russia, and he's doing it on bedrock of cynical lies.
It's all incredibly dangerous. Hopefully they'll realise that before it's too late. For all our sakes.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Putin's 10 year plan for the future of Russia. Putin is a builder, like Peter the Great. He
is a seeker after excellence, like Catherine the Great. If his 10 year plan can achieve the half of what he set out in his recent
speech, the name Putin will go down in history with the same sobriquet.
The most important part of Putin's March 1st speech:
And on the village level, because that's where most of the real work of the world is done, a snippet BTL from Auslander who
lives in the Crimea: "the first implications of anti corruption efforts are obvious in our little village. We'll see how it pans
out but everyone can, and should, assist in this task. The proof will be in the pudding when The West starts screaming about certain
kind, gentle and innocent 'businessmen' who end up counting trees [in Siberia?] for a decade or three."
I wonder how much longer the general readership over there will cotton on to the pro-war and propaganda agenda of the Guardian
and leave it en masse? It's as dishonest as The Sun.
"Poor little Britain", with half the population, a much smaller territory ,and being part of the largest military alliance in
the world, spends only 10 billions less than Russia in "defense". One of those "defense" strategies included in the budget, one
that all those commentators vilifying Russia conveniently ignore, is to blow up weddings, funerals and entire villages with missiles
fired from drones. No trial, no public kill list, no record of people killed, no accountability. That is sanctioned, extra-judicial
murder of suspects and everyone around them. And these progressive commentators, eager to spread prosperity by any mean, seem
to be ok with it.
Update: as I was writing this I noticed that The Guardian has a piece by (of all people!), Simon Jenkins, which, yes, takes
for granted that the assassination attempt was carried out by the Russians, but asks if there is a moral difference between that
and killing suspects with drone strikes. For that, he has been labeled an useful idiot and "an apologist for attempted mass murder
on British soil". Highly amusing if you ask me, but also a terrifying example of how straying if only a little bit from the official
line ("yes, the Russians tried to kill this guy, they are the worst, but maybe we should have a look at ourselves and our (kind
of) inappropriate tendency to murder everyone we want") has to be punished. There are no ifs or buts while at the two minutes
of hate. Now even the pieces that are there to give a semblance of balance have to be torn apart by those liberal, prosperity
loving persons that can´t seem to be able to condemn the murder of children at will. Now it is time to express hatred towards
Goldstein, I mean, of course, Putin and everything Russia.
This,,,"Russia appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war."
Should be changed to "The Guardian appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during
the cold war."
All suffering from PTDS AKA Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The Russophobes over at the Guardian (and the rest of the corporate media) would be well advised to review the trial of Julius
Streicher at the Nuremberg Tribunal.
The Guardian has consistently propagandised for regime changes inspired by Washington NeoCons, those of Libya, Syria, Ukraine
and is ramping up their propaganda machine toward North Korea, Venezuela and now Russia itself having promoted destabilisation
on its borders in Ukraine.
I find it the ultimate paradox that a publication purporting to be 'liberal' acts so enthusiastically
for deadly regime changes from this once Trotskyist but now extreme Right Wing group. There is nothing 'liberal', 'humanitarian',
or moral about promotion of deadly regime changes that have destroyed previously peaceful nations and murdered hundreds of thousands
in the process. Guardian for the geopolitical goals of the self-declared 'exceptional' Empire, the new 'master race' that of the
US.
One final observation on the Skripal case (for now): this stuff is so toxic. We don't know what the stuff is: nevertheless,
we know it is so toxic, can only be made by a state, and needs careful expert handling. We know this because every paper
and TV channel has by now emphasised that this stuff is so toxic, etc. If we missed the "nerve agents and what they do
to you" coverage: we can ascertain for ourselves from the men in the hazmat suits, the this stuff must be so toxic. The
Army have now been deployed: on hand after completing the largest CW exercise ever held, 'Toxic Dagger'; they are now employing
their specialist skills to carry out "Sensitive Site Operations" because this stuff is you get it by now. In another piece of
pure theater: police in hazmat suits were examining the grave of Alexander and Liudmila Skripal because even after a year or more
buried underground, you can't be too careful, because this stuff is A woman from the office next to Zizzi was taken ill (maybe
she had the risotto con pesce) because even after a week, and next door, traces of this stuff can still be
11 (or 16) people were hospitalised from the effects of 'this stuff': the first attending officer, Nick Bailey, is only just
out of ICU and lucky to be alive. The Skripal's are not so lucky: and on "palliative care" according to H de Bretton-Gordon. Yet
the eye-witness calling himself 'Jamie Paine' was close enough to get coughed on; and the unnamed passing doctor and nurse that
attended the Skripals at the scene, clearing their airways, are all fine (despite being hospitalised). Yet PC Bailey nearly died?
Funny that?
When first you practice to deceive: someone in the propaganda department must have noticed this glaring inconsistency. Enter,
stage right, former Met Chief Ian (now Lord) Blair (guess who was leading the Met when Litvinenko was poisoned?): to clarify that
PC Bailey was contaminated when he was the first officer to enter the Skripal's home – not attend them in Salisbury. This allowed
the Torygraph and Fox to speculate that Yulia brought a contaminated present for her father (which she kept in a drawer for a
week, because this stuff is so toxic?). The Torygraph's previous spin: that Skripal was poisoned for his contributions
to the Pissgate dossier were torpedoed by Orbis (Steele's company). Speaking on Radio 4: after pushing the Buzzfeed "14 other
deaths" dodgy dossier; Blair said "So there maybe some clues floating around in here." Yes, clues that you are lying? This is
pure theater: only it is more Morecambe and Wise than Shakespeare.
Check out the report from
C4News (mute the sound).
Two guys plodding around in fluorescent breather suits, another couple with gas masks, but behind them firemen in normal uniform
and no gas masks and the reporter 20 feet in front, in civvies wih no protective gear at all.
Virulent nerve agent threat? Theatre, and not very convincing at that.
Flaxgirl: a bit OT, but not too much as this event does not seem to have too much basis in reality: on the question of fabrication
the UK Home Office held an event this week – Security and Policing 2018 – where the "Live Demo Area" was sponsored by Crisis Cast.
I though you might interested? Are they providing critical incident training: or the critical incidents themselves is a legitimate
question after the events in Salisbury?
I suppose by now we should be used to the nauseating, self-righteous bluster dished out on a daily basis by the Anglo-Zionist
media. The two minutes hate by the flabby 'left' liberals who now have apparently joined forces with the demented US neo-cons
in openly baying for a war against Russia. How, exactly did these people expect Russia to react to the abrogation of the ABM agreement,
marching NATO right up to Russia's doorstep, staging coups in the Ukraine and Georgia, having the US sixth fleet swanning around
in the Black Sea? Of course, Russia reacted as any other self-respecting state would react to such blatant provocations. And this
includes the US during the Cuba crisis and its self-proclaimed right to intervene in its sphere of influence – Latin America –
and for that matter anywhere else on the planet. And it does so A L'outrance.
But I was foregetting, the Anglo-Zionist axis has a divine mission mandated by the deity to reconfigure the world and bring
democracy and freedom to those "Lesser breeds without the Law" (Kipling). Of course, this updated version of 'taking up the white
man's burden' by the 'exceptional people' may involve mass murder, mayhem, destruction and chaos, unfortunately necessary in the
short(ish) run. But these benighted peoples should realise it is for their own good, and if this means starving to death 500,000
Iraqi children through sanctions, well, it was 'worth it' according to the lovely Madeline Albright. This is the language and
methodology of a totalitarian imperialism. As someone has remarked the Anglo-zionist empire is not on the wrong side of history,
it is the wrong side of history.
The arrogance, ignorance and crass venality of these people is manifest to the point of parody.
I agree with Mark Rice-Oxley that Russian oligarchs should pull their money out of Britain and return it to Russia to invest in
businesses there. That would be the ethical thing for them to do, to fulfill their proper tax obligations and stop using Britain
as a tax haven.
I hear that Russia has had another bumper wheat harvest and is now poised to take over from Australia as the major wheat exporter
to Egypt and Indonesia, the world's biggest buyers of wheat. So if Russian oligarchs are wondering where to put their money in,
wheat production, research into improving wheat yields and the conditions wheat is grown in are just a few areas they can invest
in.
Be careful what you wish for, Mr Rice-Oxley – your wish might come true bigger than you realise!
On top of what I said yesterday, if Russian oligarchs do pull all their money out of Britain, the British economy would crash,
it being highly dependent on the services sector (constituting 80% of Britain's GDP in 2016 according to Wikipedia) and the financial
services industry in particular. So if all those Russian billions swirling through Britain's financial system are "dodgy", that's
because the system itself encouraged those inflows.
"Poor little Britain" which actually spends on par with Russia in terms of its military budget, despite the fact that a) it's
a much smaller country to defend and is surrounded by water, and b) it's part of NATO with the US as its staunch defender so it
really doesn't need a standalone military anyway.
"It's them, over there, they are evil. We must stop them. They are coming for us, they will take our children and steal our i
phones !!! Arrgh!!!" "I'll have another strong short black thanks"
Their world is falling apart- in Korea and the Middle East the Empire is on the verge of eviction. All the certitudes of yesteryear
are dissolving. Even the Turks, who, famously, held the line in Korea when the PLA attacked and the US Eighth Army fled south,
are now on the other side. The same Turks who hosted US nuclear armed strategic missiles so openly that the USSR sent missiles
of its own to Cuba.
As to the UK, the economy is contracting and the economic infrastructure is cracking up- living standards are plummeting and the
only recourse of those responsible for the mess-the officers on the bridge- is propaganda. Like the Empire the British Establishment
has been living on the fruits of its own propaganda for so long that, when it is exposed as merely empty bullying, there is nothing
left but to resort to more lies in the hope that they will obscure raw and looming reality.
In The Guardian newsroom the water
is three feet deep and rising inexorably, the ship is sinking and all hands are required to bail or the screens will go black.
There is no time to wait for developments, for investigations to be completed, for evidence- every ounce of strength must be thrown
into the defiance of nature, the shocking nakedness of reality.
There is something very significant about the way that simultaneous attacks of impotent russophobic dementia are eating away
the brains of the rulers on both sides of the Atlantic.
The game, which has been going the same way for about 500 years, is up. The maritime empire is becoming marginal and the force
that it has used, throughout these centuries, no longer overwhelms. The cruisers and carriers no longer work except to intimidate
those not worth frightening.
There is only one thing left for the Empire and its hundreds of thousands of apparatchiki-from cops to pundits, from Professors
to jailers- either they adjust to a new dispensation because the Times are Changing or they blow themselves and the whole planet
up.
From what's emerging now, it seems there simply were no assassins wandering round Salisbury. Instead, it appears Mr Skripal
for some reason has a house full of nerve gas, or enough of it at least to take out himself, his daughter and a policeman who
inspected the premises.
Cleary the Guardian was swallowed up by England's fascist regime controlled by the City of London when it surrendered its hard
drives to the regime for examination and/or destruction in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
The Guardian ownerships also sold their souls -- although the Guardian had already been in decline before they nabbed Glenn
Greenwald. When he left, the Guardian lost ALL presumptive credibility.
Now The Guardian is just an organ of regime propaganda like the BBC (thank GOd for OffGuardian) and here is the island nation
AGAIN asserting its dominance over the whole world, but this time on behalf of his brawnier brother, the EUSE, aka Exceptional
US Empire.
One wonders how much longer the Russians will put up with this now that it is CLEAR that -- for the first time ever -- the
Russians have complete military and nuclear superiority over "The West."
I'll bet Putin won't invade Ukraine, Germany, France, Brussels and England from the North and from the sea in the wintertime.
The Big Problem Is YThat Americans are afraid -- frightened -- but they are NOT afraid or frightened of a particular tbhing
-- it is a generic fright. So they are no longer afraid of nuclear war. Trotsky said A'meria was the strongest nation but also
the most terrified' and nothing has changed except military and nuclear superiority along with economic clout has shifted to Russia
and China. Were Americans afraid of nuclear war -- or say, of an invasion from Saskatchewan or Tamaulipas -- there might be hope.
But somewhere along the time beginning with Clinton, Americans didn't worry their pretty little heads about nuclear war or
American wars on everybody anywhere any longer so long as it didn't disturb their creature comforts and shopping and lattes by
coming to the homeland. The Nuclear Freeze movement was, after all, a direct response to Reagan's "evil empire" military buildup
in the 1980s and then voila he and Gorbachev negotiated away a whole class of nuclear weapoms and Old Bush promised NAto wouldn;t
expand. Hope. Then that sneaky little bastard Clinton started expanding Nato on behalf of the Pentagon / CKIA / NSA / miklitary
/congressional industyrial complex.
Maybe it's time to try some new digital hearts-and-minds operation. In the internet age, Russians have already shown
how public opinion can be manipulated. Perhaps our own secret digital marvels can embark on the kind of information counter-offensive
to win over the many millions of Russians who share our values. Perhaps they already are.
He really is taking Russians for idiots and fools!
There is one key element that proves that the Russians didn't do it: The Russians aren't so clumsy as to poison over a dozen
other people at the same time.
The whole piece is an emotionally charged rant, bordering on hysteria, based on a transparent tissue of lies, distortions
and absolutely stunning hypocrisy; and this coming from the 'liberal' 'left of centre' Guardian!
It's rather scary. The Guardian screaming for a crusade aimed at toppling the Russian system and replacing it with something
else, something closer to 'our values.' The moralizing is shocking and grotesque. I really wish the ground would just open up
and swallow the Guardian whole. We'd be far better off with out it.
"... Jones proceeds to suggest the Tuesday hearing is an important step in the effort to wake up Americans who will spread the word that Congress is "brain dead" concerning its constitutional responsibility in regard to war. ..."
According to the Congressional Research Service, the 2001 AUMF has been cited as statutory
authority for unclassified military or related actions at least 41 times in 18 countries. Both
President George W. Bush and President Obama used it, and now President Trump is following the
same path.
That is a portion of the cogent analysis Reps Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Justin Amash
(R-MI) offer in their Wednesday The Hill editorial explaining why they support repealing the AUMF
that has facilitated members of the United States Congress abdicating their authority over US
wars and three presidents exercising unrestrained use of military force abroad. The editorial
came the day after Lee and Amash
hosted a joint hearing of the United States House of Representatives Progressive Caucus and
Liberty Caucus focused on exploring repealing the AUMF.
Watch here the Progressive
Caucus and Liberty Caucus' fascinating hearing. The hearing includes testimony of Michael
McPhearson from Veterans from Peace, Daniel L. Davis from Defense Priorities, and Rita Siemion
from Human Rights First, as well as statements and questions from Reps. Lee, Amash, Walter Jones
(R-NC), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), Thomas Massie (R-NC), Jan Schakowski (D-IL), Jim Jordan
(R-OH). Mark Sanford (R-SC), Warren Davidson (R-OH), Jim McGovern (D-MA), and Dave Brat
(R-VA).
We'll see if the bipartisan movement in the House for a repeal of the 2001 AUMF ultimately
gains enough support to force a debate and vote on the House floor. Over the years, House Speaker
Paul Ryan (R-WI) and his predecessor
John Boehner (R-OH) have ducked their constitutional responsibility by withstanding pressure
from members to hold such a debate and vote.
During the hearing, Jones frankly addressed Ryan and Boehner's responsibility for preventing a
House floor debate and vote on the AUMF. "The one man blocking this debate is Paul Ryan,"
declared Jones. Jones elaborates:
The speaker of the House has the authority to order the committees of jurisdiction to mark up a
new AUMF. We have written letters individually and also in a bipartisan way; we still have not
had a debate. We started that request under John Boehner -- no debate.
Jones proceeds to suggest the Tuesday hearing is an important step in the effort to wake
up Americans who will spread the word that Congress is "brain dead" concerning its constitutional
responsibility in regard to war.
Jones and Massie are members of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Advisory
Board.
Looks like neocons represent a trap in which the US society got and out of which there is not easy end. That trap
which can be fatal.
Notable quotes:
"... American power elites, the majority of whom have never served a day in uniform nor ever attended serious military academic institutions and whose expertise on serious military-technological and geopolitical issues is limited to a couple of seminars on nuclear weapons and, in the best case scenario, the efforts of the Congressional Research Service are simply not qualified to grasp the complexity, the nature, and application of military force. They simply have no reference points ..."
"... In the " Empire of Illusions ," facts simply don't matter at all. In fact, I predict that the now self-evidently useless ABM program will proceed as if nothing had happened. ..."
"... The zombified US general public won't be told what is going on, those who will understand will be marginalized and powerless to make any changes, as for the corrupt parasites who have been making millions and billions from this total waste of taxpayer money, they have way too much at stake to throw in the towel ..."
"... In fact, since the US is now run by Neocons, we can very easily predict what they will do. They will do what Neocons always do: double down. So, after it has become public knowledge that the entire US ABM deployment is useless and outdated, expect a further injection in cash into it by "patriotic" "Congresspersons" (my attempt at being politically correct!), surrounded by flags who will explain to the lobotomized public that they are "taking a firm stance" against "the Russian dictator" and that the proud US of A shall not cave in to the "Russian nuclear blackmail". These colors don't run! United we stand! Etc. etc. etc. ..."
Bringing a sense of reality to a deeply delusional Empire
The leaders of the Empire, along with their brainwashed ideological
drones , live in a world completely detached from reality. This is why Martyanov writes
that the US " still continues to reside in her bubble which insulates her from any outside
voices of reason and peace " and that Putin's speech aimed at " coercing America's
elites into, if not peace, at least into some form of sanity, given that they are currently
completely detached from the geopolitical, military and economic realities of a newly emerging
world ". Martyanov explains that:
American power elites, the majority of whom have never served a day in uniform nor ever
attended serious military academic institutions and whose expertise on serious
military-technological and geopolitical issues is limited to a couple of seminars on nuclear
weapons and, in the best case scenario, the efforts of the Congressional Research Service are
simply not qualified to grasp the complexity, the nature, and application of military force.
They simply have no reference points. Yet, being a product of the American pop-military
culture, also known as military porn and propaganda, these people -- this collection of
lawyers, political "scientists", sociologists and journalists who dominate the American
strategic kitchen which cooks non-stop delusional geopolitical and military doctrines, can
understand one thing for sure, and that is when their poor dears get a bulls-eye on their
backs or foreheads.
The fact that in the real world these elites have had a bulls-eye on their backs for decades
doesn't change the fact that they also managed to convince themselves that they could remove
that bulls-eye by means of withdrawing from the ABM treaty and by surrounding Russia with
anti-missile launchers. The fact that some (many? most?) US politicians realized, at least in
the back of their minds, that their ABM systems would never truly protect the US from a Russian
counter-strike did not really matter because there were some uniquely American psychological
factors which made the notion of an ABM system irresistibly attractive:
1) An ABM system promised the US impunity : impunity is, along with military superiority,
one of the great American myths (as discussed here ). From Reagan
with this "weapons which kill weapons" to the current crisis in Korea, Americans have always
strived for impunity for their actions abroad: let all countries drown in an ocean of fire,
murder and mayhem as long as our "homeland" remains the untouchable sacrosanct citadel. Since
WWII Americans have killed many millions of people abroad, but when 9/11 came (nevermind that
it was obviously a false flag) the country went into something like clinical shock from the
loss of about 3'000 innocent civilians. Soviet, and then later, Russian nuclear weapons
promised to deliver many tens of millions of deaths if the USSR/Russia was attacked and that is
why spinning the fairy tale about an ABM "shield" was so appealing even if it was
technologically speaking either a pipe-dream (Reagan's "Star Wars") or an extremely limited
system capable of stopping maybe a few missiles at most (the current ABM system in Europe).
Again, facts don't matter at all, at least not in American politics or in the US collective
psyche.
2) An ABM system promised a huge financial bonanza for the fantastically corrupt US
Military-Industrial Complex for which millions of Americans work and which made many of them
fantastically rich. Frankly, I suspect that many (most?) folks involved in the ABM programs
fully realized that this was a waste of time, but as long as they were getting their bank
accounts filled with money, they simply did not care: hey, they pay me – I will take
it!
3) The US military culture never had much of an emphasis on personal courage or
self-sacrifice (for obvious reasons). The various variations of the ABM fairy tale make it
possible for Americans to believe that the next war would be mostly fought by pressing buttons
and relying on computers. And if real bombs start falling, let them fall somewhere else,
preferably on some remote brown people who, well, ain't quite as precious to God and humanity
as us, the White "indispensable nation".
Add to this a quasi-religious belief (a dogma, really) in the myth of American technological
superiority and you understand that the Russian leaders began to realize that their US
counterparts were gradually forgetting that they did have a bulls-eye painted on their backs.
So what Putin did is simply paint a few more, different ones, just to make sure that US leaders
come back to reality.
The goal of Putin's speech was also to prove both Obama ("the Russian economy is in
tatters") and McCain ("Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country") wrong. The Russian
message to the US ruling elites was simple: no, not only are we not lagging behind you
technologically, in many ways we are decades ahead of you, in spite of sanctions, your attempts
to isolate us, the dramatic drop in energy prices or your attempts at limiting our access to
world markets (the successful development of this new generation of weapons systems is a clear
indicator of the real state of fundamental research in Russia in such spheres are advanced
alloys, nanotechnology, super-computing, etc.).
To the warmongers at the Pentagon, the message was equally clear and tough: we spend less
than 10% of what you can spend on global aggression; we will match your quantitative advantage
with our qualitative superiority. Simply put, you fight with dollars, we will fight with
brains. US propagandists, who love to speak about how Russia always uses huge numbers of
unskilled soldiers and dumb but brutal weapons now have to deal with a paradigm which they are
completely unfamiliar with: a Russian soldier is much better trained, much better equipped,
much better commanded and their morale and willpower is almost infinitely higher than one of
the typical US serviceman. For a military culture used to mantrically repeat that everything
about it is "the best in the world" or even "the best in history" this kind of new reality will
come as a very painful shock and most will respond to it by going into deep denial. To those
who believed in the (historically completely false) narrative about the US and Reagan
bankrupting the USSR by means of a successful arms race, it must feel very strange to have sort
of "traded places" with the bad old USSR and being in the situation of having to face
military-spending induced bankruptcy.
Nothing will change in the Empire of Illusions (at least for the foreseeable
future)
Speaking of bankruptcy. The recent revelations have confirmed what the Russians have been
warning about for years: all the immense sums of money spent by the US in ABM defenses have
been completely wasted. Russia did find and deploy an asymmetrical response which makes the
entire US ABM program completely useless and obsolete. Furthermore, as Martyanov also points
out, the current force structure of the US surface fleet has also been made basically obsolete
and useless, at least against Russia (but you can be sure that China is following close
behind). Potentially, this state of affairs should have immense, tectonic repercussions:
immense amounts US taxpayer money has been completely wasted, the US nuclear and naval
strategies have been completely misguided, intelligence has failed (either on the acquisition
or the analytical level), US politicians have made disastrous decisions and this is all a total
"cluster-bleep" which should trigger God knows how many investigations, resignations, and
numerous sanctions, administrative or even criminal ones. But, of course, absolutely nothing of
this, nothing at all, will happen. Not a single head will roll
In the " Empire of
Illusions ," facts simply don't matter at all. In fact, I predict that the now
self-evidently useless ABM program will proceed as if nothing had happened. And, in a way, that
is true.
The zombified US general public won't be told what is going on, those who will
understand will be marginalized and powerless to make any changes, as for the corrupt parasites
who have been making millions and billions from this total waste of taxpayer money, they have
way too much at stake to throw in the towel.
In fact, since the US is now run by Neocons, we
can very easily predict what they will do. They will do what Neocons always do: double down.
So, after it has become public knowledge that the entire US ABM deployment is useless and
outdated, expect a further injection in cash into it by "patriotic" "Congresspersons" (my
attempt at being politically correct!), surrounded by flags who will explain to the lobotomized
public that they are "taking a firm stance" against "the Russian dictator" and that the proud
US of A shall not cave in to the "Russian nuclear blackmail". These colors don't run! United we
stand! Etc. etc. etc.
"... The drooling left-wing talking heads insist endlessly that Julian Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, is a Russian agent and WikiLeaks is a Russian front. Therefore, they reason that obtaining and passing such documents to Trump would be a treasonous crime. ..."
I
AM UNDER ATTACK In the 40 years that I have spent in American Politics, I have never seen a
more hysterical lynch mob than the one at MSNBC , and other "Trump Hating" fake news
sites. If you read the Washington Post, Salon or Vice , they would have you
believe that I am on the verge of being indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for
obtaining copies of the allegedly hacked DNC emails acquired and published by Julian Assange,
and passing them to Donald Trump and his campaign.
The drooling left-wing talking heads insist endlessly that Julian Assange, the publisher
of WikiLeaks, is a Russian agent and WikiLeaks is a Russian front. Therefore, they reason that
obtaining and passing such documents to Trump would be a treasonous crime.
There is only one little problem with this conspiracy theory. I never received anything from
Wikileaks, or the Russians, or anyone else. I never sent Donald Trump anything. In fact, I
never discussed the Wikileaks disclosures or allegedly hacked DNC emails with Donald Trump
before during or after the election.
I testified for four hours before the House Intelligence Committee months ago, debunking
this left-wing conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, although members of the Committee disparaged
me in public session, I was only allowed to respond behind closed doors. Suggestions by the
grumbling Democratic minority and amplified by Politico that my testimony was less than
honest are completely and categorically false.
Last week someone on the staff of the House of Intelligence Committee leaked a carefully
doctored and truncated screenshot of the direct message exchange I had with WikiLeaks. This
material was long ago supplied to the House Intelligence Committee and even in its heavily
edited form, proves yet again that I had no coordination or collaboration with WikiLeaks.
"... In the comedy movie " Wag the Dog ," a fictitious U.S. president is on the cusp of losing an election over a real scandal. So a political spin doctor and Hollywood producer hired by his campaign instead distract the public by manufacturing "the appearance of a war" with Albania. The spin doctor explains: "It's not a war, it's a pageant. We need a theme, a song -- some visuals." The producer ascribes Albania a false motive against the United States: "They want to destroy our way of life!" The story line keeps changing to explain away emerging, inconvenient realities. ..."
"... The ever-changing "Russia narrative" in American politics is today's "Wag the Dog" scenario. Technology and the disintegration of evidence-based journalism permit a surprisingly small number of individuals to destroy bilateral or multilateral relations. Their motivation in shifting from an inconvenient reality into their desired reality is power and military-industrial commercial interests. ..."
"... Ignore Donald Trump and increase your defense budget to 2 percent, because the generals who are 'operationalizing policy' remain in charge ..."
"... When you owe the world $18 trillion, the only way to get them to "pay 2 percent for defense" is to manufacture a boogeyman. Russian novelist and pacifist Leo Tolstoy observed: "There is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people." ..."
"... they simply follow the "Wag the Dog" playbook: We don't need it to prove to be true. We need it to distract them. ..."
"... President Theodore Roosevelt once cautioned ..."
"... The distractions no longer can mask these "unholy alliances." The wife of a central architect of the Department of Justice's "Russia narrative" secretly worked for the dossier-peddling Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson attempted -- according to his own congressional admissions -- to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election ..."
"... Yet on March 16, 2017, Daniel Jones -- himself a team member of Fusion GPS, self-described former FBI agent and, as we now know from the media, an ex-Feinstein staffer -- met with my lawyer, Adam Waldman, and described Fusion as a "shadow media organization helping the government," funded by a "group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros." My lawyer testified these facts to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Nov. 3. Mr. Soros is, not coincidentally, also the funder of two "ethics watchdog" NGOs (Democracy 21 and CREW) attacking Rep. Nunes' committee memo. ..."
"... A former Obama State Department official, Nuland, has been recently outed as another shadow player, reviewing and disseminating Fusion's dossier, and reportedly, hundreds of other dossiers over a period of years. "Deep State-proud loyalists" apparently was a Freudian slip, not a joke. ..."
In the comedy movie " Wag the Dog ," a
fictitious U.S. president is on the cusp of losing an election over a real scandal. So a
political spin doctor and Hollywood producer hired by his campaign instead distract the public
by manufacturing "the appearance of a war" with Albania. The spin doctor explains: "It's not a
war, it's a pageant. We need a theme, a song -- some visuals." The producer ascribes Albania a
false motive against the United States: "They want to destroy our way of life!" The story line
keeps changing to explain away emerging, inconvenient realities.
The ever-changing "Russia narrative" in American politics is today's "Wag the Dog"
scenario. Technology and the disintegration of evidence-based journalism permit a surprisingly
small number of individuals to destroy bilateral or multilateral relations. Their motivation in
shifting from an inconvenient reality into their desired reality is power and
military-industrial commercial interests.
When I attended the Munich Security Conference in
February, the extraordinary, coordinated message of a panel of U.S. senators was summarized by
moderator Victoria Nuland, former assistant secretary of state under President Barack Obama,
as: "Deep State-proud loyalists giv[ing] broad reassurance about continuity." One of the
panelists, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), said: "What the Breitbart crowd would call the
'Deep State' is what many of us would call 'knowledgeable professionals.'" The panel's uniform
message was essentially: Ignore Donald Trump and increase your defense budget to 2 percent,
because the generals who are 'operationalizing policy' remain in charge .
When you owe the world $18 trillion, the only way to get them to "pay 2 percent for
defense" is to manufacture a boogeyman. Russian novelist and pacifist Leo Tolstoy observed:
"There is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent
of the interests of the people."
What has been inelegantly termed the "Deep State" is really this: shadow power exercised by
a small number of individuals from media, business, government and the intelligence community,
foisting provocative and cynically false manipulations on the public. Out of these
manipulations, an agenda of these architects' own design is born.
Unfortunately, I am personally familiar with this group. Before they moved to their current,
bigger ambitions of reversing the U.S. presidential election results, they scurrilously
attacked me and others from the shadows for two decades. The various story lines and roles they
have created for me don't survive close scrutiny and are internally inconsistent, yet they
simply follow the "Wag the Dog" playbook: We don't need it to prove to be true. We need it to
distract them.
President Theodore Roosevelt once cautioned : "Behind the ostensible government
sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility
to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between
corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task."
The distractions no longer can mask these "unholy alliances." The wife of a central
architect of the Department of Justice's "Russia narrative" secretly worked for the
dossier-peddling Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson attempted -- according to his own
congressional admissions -- to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its
aftermath, to attack Russia and to "embarrass" me and cause trouble for the company I
founded.
This inconvenient disclosure necessitated a new story line. Former Democratic National
Committee chairwoman and CNN commentator Donna Brazile attacked
the memo prepared by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on
television as "the weaponization of classified information." It is ironic that someone who once
ran the organization that allegedly rigged the primary nomination process and who was fired
from CNN for allegedly rigging a presidential debate is now producing "Russian-rigging"
stories.
World War II hero and former U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) once
observed , in a different context: "There exists a shadowy government with its own
fundraising mechanism." Wagging the dog costs money. So, who is the "funding mechanism" of this
"shadowy government?"
Fusion GPS's Simpson, in a New York Times op-ed describing his own Judiciary Committee
testimony, claimed a neoconservative website "and the Clinton campaign" were "the Republican
and Democratic funders of our Trump research." The Judiciary Committee's Sen. Dianne Feinstein
(D-Calif.) then unilaterally released, over the objection of committee chairman Sen. Chuck
Grassley (R-Iowa), Simpson's testimony to "set the record straight." Fusion GPS "commended
Senator Feinstein for her courage."
Yet on March 16, 2017, Daniel Jones -- himself a team member of Fusion GPS,
self-described former FBI agent and, as we now know from the media, an ex-Feinstein staffer --
met with my lawyer, Adam Waldman, and described Fusion as a "shadow media organization helping
the government," funded by a "group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros." My lawyer
testified these facts to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Nov. 3. Mr. Soros is, not
coincidentally, also the funder of two "ethics watchdog" NGOs (Democracy 21 and CREW) attacking
Rep. Nunes' committee memo.
A former Obama State Department official, Nuland, has been recently outed as another
shadow player, reviewing and disseminating Fusion's dossier, and reportedly, hundreds of other
dossiers over a period of years. "Deep State-proud loyalists" apparently was a Freudian slip,
not a joke.
Invented narratives -- not "of the people, by the people, for the people," but rather just
from a couple of people, cloaked in the very same hypocritical rhetoric of "freedom" and
"democracy" that those are actively undermining -- impede internationally shared efforts on the
world's most pressing, real issues, like global health, climate change and the future of
energy. My own "Mother Russia" has many problems and challenges, and my country is still in
transition from the Soviet regime -- a transition some clearly wish us to remain in
indefinitely.
But we need to stop this old movie.
Oleg Deripaska is the founder of UC Rusal, the world's leading producer of aluminum
using clean, renewable hydropower.
Russiagate is being used for a host of multipurpose items. Including the suppression of
any disagreement with the Mainstream Media, and any dissent with the official line.
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George
Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.
Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it
is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat
it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.
Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered
a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving
forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before
any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.
John McCain is a war veteran and a policy maker, who has seen war closer than Marshal or Ike
still he will shy away from any war even with nuclear Russia.
While McCain is a war veteran, his career was not in any way distinguished - rather he pretty
clearly was given "hall pass" after "hall pass" given his father and grandfather. It also
seems pretty clear his time as a POW has probably significantly influenced his view of the
world.
"The Nightingale's Song" has an excellent treatment of his Naval Academy and service time,
along with and in contrast to Ollie North, Jim Webb, admiral Poindexter and Bud MacFarlane.
Not a pretty picture..
John McCain is a war veteran and a policy maker, who has seen war closer than Marshal or
Ike still he will shy away from any war even with nuclear Russia.
Seeing generations of your close and remote relatives killed and your property destroyed
as a result of war is usually a very sobering collective experience. McCain, apart from being
a rather exceptional warmonger, doesn't know what it is, despite experiencing some serious
trials while being a POW. Ike saw, for starters, concentration camps and, unlike, McCain was
mostly on the ground. This is a crucial distinction.
"It also seems pretty clear his time as a POW has probably significantly influenced his view
of the world."
I agree, and, that was the point I tried to make, not all veterans are necessary qualified
MINDS for deciding future of the coming generations. I have the same suspicion for General
Kelly, having lost a son in Afghanistan and having power to influence the war in Afghanistan,
I think is this situation, like judges, one has to recuse him/herself to be part of planers.
"... Obvious failure everywhere the supposed electorate look. Of course they want an alternative. ..."
"... You have a good point, but I often think that, a the machinery of surveillance and repression becomes so well oiled and refined, the ruling oligarchs will soon stop even paying lip service to 'American workers', or the "American middle class" and go full authoritarian. ..."
"... The Clintonoid project seems set on taking it to the late 16th century. Probably with a return of chattel slavery. I recall during the George II administration someone in congress advocating for he return of debtor's prisons during the 'debat' over ending access to bankruptcy ..."
I'm increasingly coming tip the conclusion that the Russia stuff is caused by the economic failures of the ruling classes in the
UK and US. No noticeable advance in living standards since 1985.
An American oligarch is now a trillionaire and doesn't pay tax.
Obvious failure everywhere the supposed electorate look. Of course they want an alternative. Its lucky the Russians
chose now to become aggressive cos otherwise the Dem party leaders would be fired for incompetence.
You have a good point, but I often think that, a the machinery of surveillance and repression becomes so well oiled and
refined, the ruling oligarchs will soon stop even paying lip service to 'American workers', or the "American middle class" and
go full authoritarian.
Karl Rove's dream to return the economy to the late 19th Century standard.
The Clintonoid project seems set on taking it to the late 16th century. Probably with a return of chattel slavery. I recall
during the George II administration someone in congress advocating for he return of debtor's prisons during the 'debat' over ending
access to bankruptcy
likbez -< Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg...
Late Sheldon Wolin (who died Oct. 21, 2015) claimed that the current US political system should be called "inverted totalitarism".
He stressed that the democracy and the republican form of government are incompatible with
Powerful national intelligence agencies, which inevitably tend to escape civilian control and convert the state into national
security state
MIC which enforces the imperial foreign policy which is associated with such terms as "super power" and global neoliberal
Empire. This was noted much earlier by President Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation.
High level of concentration of media ownership. In the USA six corporations control the lion share of MSM.
Neoliberalism as a social system, with its inescapable tendency to replace representative democracy with "one dollar, one
vote" regime and institualized corruption of politicians (via "revolving door" mechanism, mechanism of financing the election
campaign, and the power of lobbyists on Capital Hill )
"Empire" and "superpower" accurately symbolize the projection of American power abroad, but for that reason they obscure
the internal consequences. Consider how odd it would sound if we were to refer to "the Constitution of the American Empire"
or "superpower democracy." The reason they ring false is that "constitution" signifies limitations on power, while "democracy"
commonly refers to the active involvement of citizens with their government and the responsiveness of government to its citizens.
For their part, "empire" and "superpower" stand for the surpassing of limits and the dwarfing of the citizenry. The increasing
power of the state and the declining power of institutions intended to control it has been in the making for some time. The
[two] party system is a notorious example.
...Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by
an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the
major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power,
are consistently deferential to the claims of national security.
Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information
about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media.
Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media's reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly
veiled threats... and by their own fears about unemployment.
What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional
limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic.
...At the same time, it is corporate power, as the representative of the dynamic of capitalism and of the ever-expanding
power made available by the integration of science and technology with the structure of capitalism, that produces the totalizing
drive
.. a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a corporate economy of ruthless downsizing, withdrawal or reduction of pension
and health benefits; a corporate political system that relentlessly threatens to privatize Social Security and the modest health
benefits available, especially to the poor.
With such instrumentalities for promoting uncertainty and dependence, it is almost overkill for inverted totalitarianism
to employ a system of criminal justice [to suppress dissent, like in classic totalitarism. ]
"... For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. ..."
"... Ultimately the US government's anti-Russian animus does not matter. US government propaganda intensifies in lockstep with Washington's impotence and discredit. These beltway tantrums are a good sign. ..."
"... But in fact, comprehensive and exhaustive evidence shows that the US is more repressive than Russia. ..."
"... Russia is no longer a communist totalitarian state. In the intervening 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet empire, the yankee imperium itself has completed its morph into a quasi-fascist empire begun over the cold war decades. It is, therefore, imperative that Mr. Buchanan's wise counsel be followed if we are to survive. ..."
"... Few Americans understand the extent of the anti-Russian propaganda and the massive profiteering by military contractors that results. Watch this recent Jimmy Dore clip to learn more. Most are shocked to learn the USA spends twelve times more. Our increase this year alone is much greater than Russian entire military budget! ..."
"... The antipathy to Russia comes from the US Deep State, not Trump or the American people. Anti-Russian hysteria is derived entirely from America's Jewish press and Deep State with their "Russian hacking" and "influencing elections" stories – as if the Israel lobby doesn't influence US elections?? ..."
"... Neocons, Izzy firsters, and globalist banksters, mostly. Then there are the stooges like the McCainiacs and the Hillaryhyenas Then we have stupid, gullible people who believe their rot, essentially the rot believed by preceding generations including the brain dead, unquestioning, "greatest" generation of pseudo tough guy servile suck ups. ..."
"And Russians today enjoy freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, travel, politics, and
the press that the generations before 1989 never knew."
And these are freedoms that Americans, since 2001, are enjoying less and less. To add
insult to injury, it's not only our gov't., but our neighbors who seek to curtail Freedom of
Speech. One is likely to be ostracized for not succumbing to the Russiagate hysteria.
This excellent interview discusses motives for this propaganda.
Will Russiagate Help the Israel Lobby Censor Al Jazeera?
Most Americans would have no 'Russophobia' if not for the crazy media. After all, most
Americans, Demmy or Repuby, are wholly oblivious to world affairs. They only care about pop
culture.
So, why did Russia become a big deal?
Not because of the people. It was because of the media and deep state. Who runs them?
Jewish globalists. Why do Jews hate Russia? It's historic.
So, the real problem is Jewish Supremacism. 'Russophobia' is just a symptom of it.
Jewish globalists HATE anything that stands in the way of their total domination.
Russia clearly isn't anti-Jewish. Jews are 0.2% of the population but make up 20% of the
richest people there. So, why do Jews hate Russia? They haven't been allowed to gain total
power as in the US. And Jews fear that the Russian example might inspire other white nations.
And only total mastery and domination will please Jewish globalists who are in supremacist
mode.
That's what this is about. All this hysteria about Russia hacking blah blah is just Jewish
globalists trying to discredit Russia in the eyes of goyim.
Now, given the Jewish globalist mindset, why would they abandon anti-Russian hysteria?
It's not about Russia. It's about them. They will do ANYTHING to serve their own
interests.
Unfortunately, we will not get over it for the following reasons:
1. The military industrial complex needs an enemy to keep Western Europe in line. The
Russians serve this role as Boogeyman.
2. The LA-NYC-DC media axis has a strong hatred of Russians because they are White and
opposed to gays; never mind the fact that the public at large could care less. The axis
controls the megaphone, so Russiophobia it is.
3. Russiophobia is the means by which these Deep State traitors and axis allies are
attempting to overthrow our elected president. Not a single day has gone by that I haven't
seen some BS Russia gate crap from these late night propaganda shows or the controlled media.
Russiophobia is literally the only thing they have going because their immigration and trade
policies are unpopular.
4. Money. Lots of cash to be made in weapon sales from a new Cold War. Since the Chinese
are Chinese, a Cold War with them would be 'racist' but since Russia is white
5. The Israel lobby has their sights set on Iran and Russia stands in the way. Thus, the
lobby fiercely opposes Putin.
For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for
the absence of one.
Putin should come to realize that, whatever his grievances, a policy of military
impositions would produce another Cold War. For its part, the United States needs to avoid
treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by
Washington. Putin is a serious strategist -- on the premises of Russian history.
Understanding U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding
Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers.
Leaders of all sides should return to examining outcomes, not compete in posturing.
But what Russian leader, save Yeltsin, has not been an autocrat?
How was Yeltsin not an autocrat? He illegally dissolved the parliament by military force
killing hundreds, illegally ousted his own vice president who was elected on the same ticket
as himself, had a new constitution accepted by a plebiscite with massive fraud, then had
himself re-elected with massive fraud, while some 100% of the media and 90+% of the press
were under his or his allies' control. He then handpicked a successor who was elected in 2000
with near total control of the media (and massive fraud, though probably it was only needed
to avoid a second round).
If that's not an autocrat, then what is? How could Yeltsin be any less of an autocrat than
Putin?
Where is the threat? What have they done? Yes they have good weapons and thank God they do or
the crazy Israeli led US Generals would surely have nuked someone by now.
The economy? About the same as Italy, big whoop.
Resource rich, peaceful, mind their own business sort of folks not being led around by Gays
goofs and assholes like the USA, why not do business with em? They are not the BOOGIE
MAN!
I'm sure trump would have been over there cutting deals a year ago if it weren't for the
Hillary crazies. What a bunch of looser's they are, they make me sick.
Very good collection of Buchanan's erros and omissions, but you missed one:
Neither Putin nor Franklin Roosevelt were autocrats. They were (or are about to be)
elected by their people 4 times. They were and are very popular leaders.
The Constitutional Amendment limiting a President to 2 terms should have never been passed
and should be repealed (or if not, then add all of Congress to that 2 term limit
nonsense).
The only reason for a 2-term limit was hatred of Roosevelt by idiots like Buchanan, and
the so-called "tradition" of Presidents only staying or lasting for 2 terms.
Both reasons are obvious poppycock. Buchanan and his ilk never complain about the 10 terms
of many Senators and House members. Yet a beloved and popular President is somehow an
autocrat?
What a moronic smear. Mirriam-Webster's definition of autocrat is: a person (such as a
monarch) ruling with unlimited authority; one who has undisputed influence or power.
FDR like Putin did not have unlimited power, neither did(do) either have undispouted power
or influence.
You are dead wrong about both Presidents, Pat. Shame on you, you know that you know
better.
Ultimately the US government's anti-Russian animus does not matter. US government propaganda
intensifies in lockstep with Washington's impotence and discredit. These beltway tantrums are
a good sign.
When this article says 'us,' I don't think it conflates the US police state and the
American people. Many Americans suffer from induced Russophobia. They feel they have to
qualify any opinion with a general complaint about Russian oppression.
But in fact, comprehensive and exhaustive evidence shows that the US is more repressive
than Russia.
The Russian government has put itself on a self-improvement treadmill of ongoing
independent review by all the nations that commit themselves to human rights. The US
government evades independent review and undermines your rights with bureaucratic red tape
and bad faith.
Russians get a better deal than you do. What happens when we all realize it? We'll do to
the USA what we did to the USSR. We'll knock it over, rip it apart, replace it with a country
based on rights and rule of law. That's the underlying panic of the bureaucrats at Langley.
Their real enemy is rights and rule of law.
I agree, and Mr. Buchanan comes off sounding naive in quite a few of his columns. He knows
what's going on in the world. He also knows American politics, but only in terms of who is on
this committee, who will vote yea on that bill there, whether there is a precedent for this,
etc. and lots of history on all this. What he does not seem to understand is that it is not
1965 or even 1990, as far as the way things get actually run in this country.
There are no civil agreements "across the aisle" that will be held to, no precedent from a
court decision from 1995 that will, of course, be upheld by rule-of-law judges, and that sort
of thing. It is anarcho-tyranny at this point, from top to bottom .
Neither Putin nor Franklin Roosevelt were autocrats. They were (or are about to be)
elected by their people 4 times. They were and are very popular leaders.
I don't know Russian politics that well, but I imagine Putin would be very popular. As far
as relations with American is concerned he's a great guy to have there, and things would be
lots better between our countries without the American Deep State .
Buchanan needs to address the Jewish Power directly. WE are not behind anti-Russianism. If Jews were call a halt to anti-Russianism, everyone else would follow suit since most of
the goys inside the Beltway are shabbos cucks.
Russia is no longer a communist totalitarian state. In the intervening 30 years since the
collapse of the Soviet empire, the yankee imperium itself has completed its morph into a
quasi-fascist empire begun over the cold war decades. It is, therefore, imperative that Mr.
Buchanan's wise counsel be followed if we are to survive.
There WAS a referendum in the Crimea -- I have a copy of it before me, as I write,
provided by my wife, a Ukrainian -- and it asks whether you (the voter), wish to retain the
Constitution of '56, by which the Crimea was ceded by Khruschev to Ukraine, as a gift, or
whether you (the voter) wish to return to Russian hegemony?
The vote for the latter was 97%.
All the talk of "annexation" was nonsense. There were no troops involved, no movement of
military, and the Russian Federation Base, which contractually was allowed to host 10,000
troops, was not involved.
It was a perfectly peaceful SECESSION from Ukraine
Few Americans understand the extent of the anti-Russian propaganda and the massive
profiteering by military contractors that results. Watch this recent Jimmy Dore clip to learn
more. Most are shocked to learn the USA spends twelve times more. Our increase this year
alone is much greater than Russian entire military budget!
"Pat, you need to get over the Putinist propaganda. There was no coup in Ukraine."
Literally the next sentence: "The people rose up because they refused to be betrayed into Russian hands by
Yanukovich." These State Department paid trolls really need to get some better training. State Dept Gets $40 Million to Fund Troll Farm:
Syria was never about "Assad putting down peaceful protests". It is about pipelines –
both existing Russian and potential new ones from Qatar that need a route (a la Trans
Afghanistan Pipeline), geopolitical dominance, regional destabilization (for Israel and the
MIC), and revenge for Putin derailing the imminent US invasion of Syria by brokering a deal
for Assad to eliminate chemical weapons.
It isn't us, Pat, at least not ordinary people like you and me who have no input into
policy decisions. It's the neocons, zionists, and the lunatics in government who are pushing
this Russophobia. They have a goal in mind and it looks as though they are afraid to reveal
what it is.
Whatever that goal is, it's not likely to be good for either the US or Russia.
Yet, what is also clear is that Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of
Trump, Russia might be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United
States.
Clearly, Putin wanted that, as did Trump.
That's what it looked like, and Trump clearly said that he wanted better relations with
Russia.
The antipathy to Russia comes from the US Deep State, not Trump or the American people.
Anti-Russian hysteria is derived entirely from America's Jewish press and Deep State with
their "Russian hacking" and "influencing elections" stories – as if the Israel lobby
doesn't influence US elections??
USA as a country, has been hopelessly captured by Zionist Jews who have their own agenda
directed against Russia (and the US public).
Neocons, Izzy firsters, and globalist banksters, mostly. Then there are the stooges like
the McCainiacs and the Hillaryhyenas Then we have stupid, gullible people who believe their
rot, essentially the rot believed by preceding generations including the brain dead,
unquestioning, "greatest" generation of pseudo tough guy servile suck ups.
Boycott 'em, mock 'em, and play the victim card just like the imaginary heroes and
bureaucrat messiahs typically do.
That's because Bibi is playing good cop while he outsources the role of bad cop to the
Jewish diaspora in the West and specifically AIPAC. This is in keeping with the age old
Jewish strategy of betting on both horses so only a certain segment of Jewry gets blamed and
reaps the consequences.
Putin has to know this and the power American Jews and their goy auxiliaries have over
U.S. foreign policy.
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''
The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.
'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet
Union'
In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms
the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by
inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets.
Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981.
Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal
fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the
Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski
favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of
Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]
'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain
Soviet Union'
State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea
"that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc
of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007,
pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White
House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the
Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is
based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization
of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in
what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the
Soviet Union
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin
later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support
for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I
don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war
planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved
ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around
the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in
aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows
what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti
air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an
escalation.
Soros might well be a front company for an intelligence agency.
Notable quotes:
"... a former FBI investigator, Feinstein staffer and now a Fusion GPS operative ..."
"... This is quite plausible. Silicon Valley billionaires are definitely "investing" in their PC propaganda agenda. The Seattle billionaire and now the world's wealthiest man owns the neocon rag published from our nation's capital. He's also got lucrative contracts from our IC. Alexa is quite happy to listen into all your private conversations at home. ..."
"... "This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight," said Steve Goldstein, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs." ..."
"... I have often wondered if Soros is not a front company for an intelligence agency. ..."
"... i think it was the open Russia foundation that was funded by Soros, but i see former owner of yukos - Mikhail Khodorkovsky has his name attached to it... ..."
"... It seems the Magnitsky Act is a critical juncture in all the developments towards singling out russia for everything.. ..."
"... i don't know soros or khodorkovskys connection to bill browder in all of this, but would be curious to know. it seems they are all operating to bring down russia, in some way, shape or form.. ..."
"... My understanding is that Mr. Soros has funded, participated and closely associated himself with US' IC community, for various regime change and copes mostly Eastern Europe in past decades. We know that US IC community has the agenda ( a hard on) for discrediting and removing legally elected president of US from his office. We know US Democratic Party has paid and hired members of foreign intelligence for connecting presidential campaign of DT to Russians, for a possible killing of 2 birds with one shot. We know the cheassy silicon billionaires, are no other than the same old Move on Organization which to the bone are clintonian DLC, or the latter day Obamachies. We know Mr. Soros an Easter European migrant like Zbig is totally and fiercely anti anti Russian. ..."
"... When all facts put to gather, sounds like all these elements, entities, and personalities share a common motif and goal, which centers on anti Trump and anti Puttin Russia. When put together, makes a villain's marriage in haven. ..."
"In a Daily Caller op-ed calling the Russian meddling narrative a "
false public manipulation ," Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska claims that Daniel Jones -
a former FBI investigator, Feinstein staffer and now a
Fusion GPS operative - told the Russian Oligarch's lawyer in March, 2017 that Fusion
GPS was funded by " a group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros. "" Zerohedge
------------
Now, this is something different. I have no idea what the relative truthiness of this may
be, but... pl
This is quite plausible. Silicon Valley billionaires are definitely "investing" in their
PC propaganda agenda. The Seattle billionaire and now the world's wealthiest man owns the
neocon rag published from our nation's capital. He's also got lucrative contracts from our
IC. Alexa is quite happy to listen into all your private conversations at home.
I appreciate your use of the phrase ' relative truthiness', and I suggest this latest
truthiness is just part of the movie, and a great movie it is.
Still, it's about time Soros
showed up and he's in good company too, along with this week's poisoned Russian spy and a
paid prostitute with a Trump story to tell. Next ?
We're probably due for a
Clinton/Russia-related Julian Assange document dump, some Russian intel officer arrests in DC
and....a new Steele-equivalent originator offering a more respectable document since after
all any evidence is good evidence.
Anything to keep the show going and the audience enthralled !
As for Soros himself, I suggest that there are plenty of Soros's with plenty of attached
money trails, but George has the watch.
All he is missing is the white cat on his lap.
"This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign
influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies,
Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight," said Steve Goldstein, undersecretary of
state for public diplomacy and public affairs."
Soros? All NGO's that apear in MSM articles, I look up their funding. Most funding traces
back to State Dep NED and Soros, along with other older money 'philanthropist' type
foundations.
I have often wondered if Soros is not a front company for an intelligence agency.
i think it was the open Russia foundation that was funded by Soros, but i see former owner
of yukos - Mikhail Khodorkovsky has his name attached to it...
It seems the Magnitsky Act is a critical juncture in all the developments towards
singling out russia for everything..
i don't know soros or khodorkovskys connection to bill browder in all of this, but would
be curious to know. it seems they are all operating to bring down russia, in some way, shape
or form..
My understanding is that Mr. Soros has funded, participated and closely associated
himself with US' IC community, for various regime change and copes mostly Eastern Europe in
past decades. We know that US IC community has the agenda ( a hard on) for discrediting and
removing legally elected president of US from his office. We know US Democratic Party has
paid and hired members of foreign intelligence for connecting presidential campaign of DT to
Russians, for a possible killing of 2 birds with one shot. We know the cheassy silicon
billionaires, are no other than the same old Move on Organization which to the bone are
clintonian DLC, or the latter day Obamachies. We know Mr. Soros an Easter European migrant
like Zbig is totally and fiercely anti anti Russian.
When all facts put to gather, sounds like all these elements, entities, and
personalities share a common motif and goal, which centers on anti Trump and anti Puttin
Russia. When put together, makes a villain's marriage in haven.
Interesting that a former staffer from Senator Feinstein is implicated in the mess. How many
others are there who have been doing the same thing? I wonder if Congresswoman Debbie
Wasserman-Schultt's IT staffer Mr. Arwan was accessing any relevant information while he was
on her payroll and for whom?
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'
In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background,
which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate
about him not being president.'
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion
GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.
This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or
some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both
in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.
And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it
was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the
area.
Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which
clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander
Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on
your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.
The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.
In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry
– the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.
Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier,
which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein
in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.
Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling
attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio
4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets,
backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.
The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available
– evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes
of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played
a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.
Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind
of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction
of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.
What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest
a sale had been completed.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very
happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent
spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.
All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich
and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder.
For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.
(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews
both with Mogilevich and Levinson at
In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to
prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.
Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential
threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions
north of the Litani.
These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that
somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later
to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.
What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the
part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian
side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.
Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking
'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.
Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic
downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William
Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.
So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that
material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem
that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.
All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen
for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella
was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's
personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was
sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who
then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence
which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate
Russia in supplying materials.
There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether
Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears
that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian
intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)
It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which
claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional,
Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's
offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.
It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here,
a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.
Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called
Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.
In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe
World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the
Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.
Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's
death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain,
but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as
Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)
That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase
nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:
'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve
year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents
state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear
limited life components and you can read for weeks).'
What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility,
in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of
ones which lasted longer.
For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.
What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily
smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide
to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring
to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.
In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited
for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'
According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would
you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?
As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned
with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to
ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.
In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been
describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties,
and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another
day.
A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according
to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious
of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.
Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full
dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation
suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.
thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..
it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy
and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..
Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone
I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.
Re: Levinson
# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier
by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved
he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.
# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson
went to Jablonski with it.
# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum
czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson?
The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing
came of it.
I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.
As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg
is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.
I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive
solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that
the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields.
Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have
been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. "
David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making.
Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf
of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration
cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but
not fundamentally.
I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their
policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.
It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing
themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace
to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of
defiance which they will not tolerate.
And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear.
That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to
defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.
So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a
counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.
Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.
In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry
favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness
would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two
birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage
and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.
Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming
media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century
endorsed her.
Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in.
Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything
possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is
clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling
the Borg pundits.
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.
Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called
consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda
in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp.
This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous
American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously
and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier
on atlantic side.
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''
The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.
'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'
In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG)
dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded
as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that
with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a
former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski
favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241,
251 - 256]
'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'
State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used
against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the
Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task
force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition
of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization
of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis"
and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time."
Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since
he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know
how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion,
did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental
people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan
back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that
in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting,
even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports
and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the
terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start
to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such
an escalation.
I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain
more pointers.
It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.
An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander
Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian
attempts to get hold of him. An extract:
'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and
afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the
largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'
Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which
Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.
Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:
'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge
on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing
charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly
smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to
win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'
So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has
changed.
For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always
judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial
Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:
'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [Ł1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent
political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign
passports for its "very, very special clients".
'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that
it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars
stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".
Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us
think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter,
Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:
'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He
said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he
must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko
by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would
have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'
When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about
the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was
immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.
She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator,
David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting
the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.
Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as
a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.
What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary
claim about Shvets:
'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government
quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically
motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable
posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq,
Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.
'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the
National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll
at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general
who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding
Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.
'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated
the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky
and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's
Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky
contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia
Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb
in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'
Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many
things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What
later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling
her as to the side for which he was working.
It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the
Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like
others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.
An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation
specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria'
was actually credible.
This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of
the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have
been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking,
and for similar action against Syria.
Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with
Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.
There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been
another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.
A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing.
This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or
indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High')
might be a start.
Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story
had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that
is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')
The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one
feel as though one wanted to throw up.
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.}
No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the
fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian
Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy
of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were
spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George
Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.
Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it
is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat
it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.
Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered
a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving
forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before
any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914.
Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information
on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention
of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the
matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption
the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the
memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and
dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.
The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem
for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At
that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones
in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems
ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They
are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet
and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google
also allows searches with more than one term. This link -
- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories"
on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.
If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what
you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.
"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in
the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.
The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations"
(hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping
boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many
of the contributors know it from inside.
In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle
between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product
of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible,
but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never
going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the
Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for
the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative
Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.
So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly
not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact
with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government
pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.
The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the
Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.
Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will
be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative
appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat
of the BEF.
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break
- David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname
comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament
names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
The hard, blinding truth:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it,
and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting
their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out
all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and
even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.
And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments
being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.
Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article
he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions
by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."
Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case
being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information
to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.
"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily
redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department
last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "
I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress
will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's
court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI
is lying.
What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos
on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that
are based on classified documents.
We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status.
You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am
thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak
their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are
anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a
political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.
Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are,
in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you.
You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant
to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from
Northeestern
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist.
I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians
- they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.
David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of
material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though
not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That
you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities
are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the
States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because
of that.
The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as
"salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other
professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling
around unsupervised?
The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't
seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm
boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever
they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon
might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about
what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced
with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but
for the general public, that bit more untenable.
So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he
was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have
to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far
as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group
then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.
I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up
on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out
so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least
as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type,
they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to
pay him until he left UK service. pl
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.
Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of
the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet
I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK
side.
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about
the "golden showers"? "
I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations
and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public
wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.
So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media
is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.
Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I
doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.
But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK
get mixed up in it?
When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on
SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised
and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.
A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played
a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact
that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario
Scaramella.
When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European
Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.
His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques,
and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium
forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.
So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case
as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract
from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their
prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'
The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive
summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.
The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and
Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December
2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:
'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War
to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic-
Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'
Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet
Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:
'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references
to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations
made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them
[presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had
been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti
warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say
that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company
of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange
Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'
The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':
'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's
sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations
made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news
and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI.
Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there
were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the
assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella
notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for
the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini.
Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'
In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward
Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation
had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography
– which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella
which had been described in the wiretap request.
As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who
could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the
three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.
In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from
Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.
Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes
to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.
'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to
the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies
implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed
by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with
him.'
From a fax dated 7 November 2005:
'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged
sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document
file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get
him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re:
Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even
then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'
From a fax dated 5 December 2005:
'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with
regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who
gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA
disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to
London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella
on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling
file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'
In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was
unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be
in a chaotic state.
However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp
unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed
to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves
for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus
justifications.
Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on
the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June
and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.
(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)
And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided
to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence
in the Inquiry.
Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come
from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.
Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin
years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the
supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.
The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged
about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame
Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')
The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis
itself or its instrumentation.
The paragraph that you have quoted:
"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his
team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to
brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."
And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics
- which did not and could not exist in this situation.
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was
managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there
is to know?
I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too
complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri
Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele
Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.
Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality?
Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.
By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the
date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage
in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.
Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to
obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.
Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those?
The German link is different. How about the Iranian?
another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime
and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s
More of the past? Nope. It is just a question of how many goyim will be
nuked.
It's all very simple. Fundamentally, Jews have been disliked because, as part of their
Jewish identity, those with power pursue, often successfully, their perceived interests which
often conflict with the perceived interests of another group(s).
"... Russia is acting again as a great power. And she sees us as having slapped away her hand, extended in friendship in the 1990s, only to humiliate her by planting NATO on her front porch. ..."
"... Yet what is also clear is that Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United States. Clearly, Putin wanted that, as did Trump. Yet with the Beltway in hysteria over hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, and the Russophobia raging in Washington, we appear to be paralyzed when it comes to engaging with Russia. ..."
"... The U.S. political system, said Putin this week, "has been eating itself up." Is his depiction that wide of the mark? What is the matter with us? ..."
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, ..."
"... . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com. ..."
"... " If Russia wanted friendly relations with the US why meddle in our elections?" ..."
"... "However, Europeans are not irrational, but perfectly logical in being wary of Russia." ..."
That's pretty naive article. The Russophobia is used to cement fracturing neoliberal society
and create the commonenemy, more important the neoliberal elite which looted the country for
the last 40 years or so.
Russia is just a very convenient target which allow to reuse Cold War stereotypes and play
to the crowd instincts.
Another problem that Russa refuses to the be a Washington vassal (the status it enjoyed
under drunk Yeltsin) and neoliberal empire accept only vassal not eaul partners in thier
ranks.
Unless there is a late surge for Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, who is running in
second place with 7 percent, Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia for
another six years on March 18.
Once he is, we must decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or to
engage Russia, as every president sought to do in Cold War I.
For our present conflict, Vladimir Putin is not alone at fault. His actions have often
been reactions to America's unilateral moves.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, we brought all of the Warsaw Pact members and three
former republics of the USSR into our military alliance, NATO, to corral Russia. How friendly
was that?
Putin responded with his military buildup in the Baltic.
George W. Bush abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that Richard Nixon had
negotiated. Putin responded with a buildup of the offensive missiles he put on display last
week. The U.S. helped to instigate the Maidan Square coup that dumped over the elected
pro-Russian government in Ukraine. To prevent the loss of his Sevastopol naval base on the
Black Sea, Putin countered by annexing the Crimean Peninsula.
After peaceful protests in Syria were put down by Bashar al-Assad, we sent arms to Syrian
rebels to overthrow the Damascus regime. Seeing his last naval base in the Med, Tartus,
imperiled, Putin came to Assad's aid and helped him win the civil war.
The Boris Yeltsin years are over.
Russia is acting again as a great power. And she sees us as having slapped away her
hand, extended in friendship in the 1990s, only to humiliate her by planting NATO on her
front porch.
Yet what is also clear is that Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of
Trump, Russia might be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United
States. Clearly, Putin wanted that, as did Trump. Yet with the Beltway in hysteria over
hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, and the Russophobia raging in Washington, we
appear to be paralyzed when it comes to engaging with Russia.
The U.S. political system, said Putin this week, "has been eating itself up." Is his
depiction that wide of the mark? What is the matter with us?
... ... ...
Japan negotiates with Putin's Russia over the southern Kuril Islands lost at the end of
World War II. Bibi Netanyahu has met many times with Putin, though he is an ally of Assad,
whom Bibi would like to see ousted, and has a naval and air base not far from Israel's
border.
We Americans have far bigger fish to fry with Russia than Bibi. Strategic arms control.
De-escalation in the Baltic, Ukraine, and the Black Sea. Ending the war in Syria. North
Korea. Space. Afghanistan. The Arctic. The war on terror. Yet all we seem to hear from our
elites is endless whining that Putin has not been sanctioned enough for desecrating "our
democracy."
Get over it.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon's White House Wars: The
Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever . To find out more
about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the
Creators website at www.creators.com.
Good article, Pat, although it will probably send commenter Michael Kenny into apoplexy.
Yes, we have all heard the official lines about why we should beware of Putin. Like so many
official spins (Saddam's WMDs, etc.) it is probably an intentional distraction from the
actual truth.
It's the same nonsense in other places of the world, North Korea agitates against America,
Israel against Iran, Iran against Israel, China against Japan, etc. What all of these have
in common is that it is easier to point out the distant foreigner as the cause of so many
problems instead of looking inward and asking what REALLY is causing problems.
And with absolute certainty all the liberal comments here will say that this is false
and that Russia is to blame for all the problems.
Russia is neither America's "best friend" nor our "implacable enemy". What it is is a very
powerful competitor, with its own agenda and its own interests. Sometimes those interests
will align with ours, sometimes they will clash. Certainly it is a good thing for our
relationship with them to be on as amicable terms as possible, in order to facilitate our
mutual benefit wherever possible.
But for you to insist that their direct meddling in our electoral process is a non-issue
that should be ignored, is to declare that the United States is not a sovereign state, that
we have no right to determine our own form of government. That we in fact exist as a puppet
of Russia. You may think that is an acceptable position to take. I do not.
So this article is a basically a softball way of pitching the reactionary motto
"America Is A Communist Country". Why did the elites favor engagement with the Soviet
premiers? Because they liked communism. Why are they enraged by Putin, who is in every
significant way less oppressive than his predecessors? Because he's not a communist.
While I agree with you that the expansion of NATO did a lot of damage to the relationship
with Russia I have to say that you seem remarkably sanguine about a foreign power
influencing the American election so much that the clear favorite ended up losing.
I wonder how easily you would have been able to 'get over it' if Russia had leaked
letters from the Republicans which lead to Carter beating Reagan in 1980 or Gore beating
Bush in 2000? I'm no fan of Clinton and am glad she lost but I am a fan of Democracy and a
foreign power undermining it is tantamount to an act of war. Are you really so partisan
that you would rather your side win than the country have a reliable democracy?
If Russia had no military designs on the new NATO members, why was their membership
considered an affront? If Russia had no economic designs on Ukraine, why was it's joining
the EU considered a treat? If Russia wanted friendly relations with the US why meddle in
our elections?
Is Russia the great bogey-man of yesteryear? Perhaps not. Do they have legitimate issues
and grievances? Possibly. Can we perhaps reach an accommodation with them? Maybe. Is Trump
doing anything to curtail their mucking about in our political process? Nope. There's the
rub.
Patrick Buchanan is an apologist for Kremlin kleptocrats who not only foment trouble
abroad, but oppress their own people to stay in power.
The U.S. did not instigate the Maidan protest, unless you think that upwards of a
million ordinary people in Kyiv and millions more across Ukraine protested for dignity and
the rule of law in the dead of winter for nearly four months, then perhaps Mr. Buchanan has
a point. He does not.
Again, I quote verbatim from comments I made last month to pieces by Robert Merry and
Mr. Buchanan: "The Ukrainian president wasn't toppled; he fled,doubting the loyalty of his
own security forces and despite an agreement with the opposition to stay in power pending a
new election within 10 months."
I lean liberal and it's not that much much about what Russia is up to but If Meuller
actually came out with solid evidence that Trump himself and his people, did collude with
Russia to influence the 2016 election will his followers even care at this point?
I really wonder how Americas next generation is going to behave now that Trump and his
cronies have done so much to damage to any ideas of truth, integrity, honesty, decency, the
common good I could go on.
And something like 70% of Republicans think Trump is a good role model for children
according to a January Quinnipiac poll.
If you want to stop Russiaphobia, then Putin and Trump need to come clean about the 2016
activity. Period. Trump will not be impeached. End the Russian trolling for alt-right
causes or otherwise Democrats will attack hard.
Otherwise, the Manafort trial starting in July is going to be the biggest trial since OJ
and every night cable news will analyze every detail of Manafort working with Russian
government and money laundering for the Russians. (And there will be plenty of details of
expensive area rugs!)
And if there are any connections of Manafort or witness Gates to the Russian trolls it
will not be pretty. (Or Roger Stone to the hacked DNC e-mails.)
The usual double-talk: "Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia", i.e. the
Russian Federation, a sovereign state which has existed only since 1991, but then, "we must
decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or to engage Russia, as every
president sought to do in Cold War I, "Russia" here meaning the now defunct "Soviet Union".
Mr Buchanan is locked in his cold war mindset and is simply unable to get his mind around
the idea that the Russian Federation isn't the Soviet Union, nor is it even the sole
successor state to the Soviet Union. It is merely one of 15 former Soviet republics and if
Mr Buchanan believes the US should "engage" with the former Soviet Union, shouldn't it also
engage with, Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic Republics etc.? Engaging only with the Russian
Federation implies taking sides with Putin against the other 14 former Soviet republics,
which, of course, contradicts Mr Buchanan's much proclaimed belief in "non-intervention"!
It's perfectly true to say that US wrongdoing created Putin, not least the US neocon
attempt to use him as a useful idiot to destroy the EU, but how does US wrongdoing give
Putin the right to violate Ukrainians' rights? This is in fact the standard pro-Putin
nonsense argument: A violates B's rights. C is to be allowed to punish A by also violating
B's rights! If the US is at fault, it must put right its wrongdoing by getting Putin out of
Ukraine. One way or the other. Any other course of action is just one more step towards the
collapse of the US.
All that I know to be the truth is that Russia seems to support the truth more than we
Americans! We have lost our soul. If we cannot recuperate our "soul", we need to die the
death of all failed empires!
During an event in October, 2017, the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir V.
Putin blamed the collapse of the U.S.S.R. on Soviet Union trusting the West "too much,"
describing the move as "our biggest mistake!"
"You interpreted our trust as weakness, and you exploited that," said the Russian
president, adding:
"Unfortunately, our Western partners, having divided the U.S.S.R.'s geopolitical legacy,
were certain of their own incontestable righteousness having declared themselves the
victors of the 'Cold War'."
"They started to openly interfere in the sovereign affairs of countries and to export
democracy in the same way as in their time the Soviet leadership tried to export the
Socialist revolution to the whole world."
Re: Thaomas, " If Russia wanted friendly relations with the US why meddle in our
elections?"
The jilted Left has mutated a huge bogus "Russian meddling" junk narrative into a
self-licking ice cream cone of political insanity.
The late, great journalist Robert Parry (RIP) had been tracking the Russia meddling
story assiduously before he died unexpectedly in January. Parry's Consortium News is one of
the few remaining sites of genuine journalistic integrity. It has no affection for Donald
Trump, only the Truth. It swings a 2X4 in every direction. Read the final assessment of the
Russia Meddling ruse by Parry published last December:
And then tell us how Parry had it wrong. Americans, including Thaomas are being played
for chumps by the corrupted MSM and crony Political Hacks. Reject the Big Lie and the Crony
Tools that sustain it.
P.S. Save consortiumnews to your browser favorites and visit it occasionally to wash off
the slime of MSM Fake News propaganda.
The truth is this. Russia is the irreplaceable adversary of the United States because they
are the one significant nation on this planet whose peoples do not fit neatly into our post
modern western concepts of race and ethnicity. Slavic people have and never will be
understood in the United States. They will always be the backwards, unelightened, barbaric,
undemocratic people. The one whom both Churchill and Hitler stated were inferior to both
the Anglo and Germanic peoples.
While your critique of America's unnecessary post-Cold War antagonism is correct, it is
hardly relevant to 2018.
"Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might be able to
restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United States." >? What?!
Putin has and continues to attempt to meddle in and create chaos in our elections. He
clearly "has something" on Trump personally. He's using Trump as an agent of disruption
within the United States to get vengeance on the US for its post-Cold War activities.
It may very well make sense to attempt to reach out to the Russians, but this is hardly
the president or the time to do that.
Pat Buchanan is far from my favourite American (ex)politician, but this article is a model
of pure reason. Indeed, it ranks up there with the best ones on the current topic of
Washington's childish and dangerous Russophobia.
It really is high time that the Democrats and their fellow travellers, the neocons, gave
up on their poorly designed anti-Russia, anti-Putin propaganda narrative. Ever more
Americans are not buying it, Washington's vassal states have never bought it (although, as
obedient vassals the leaders of those states don't dare say so), and the rest of the world
is simply enjoying the clownish performance of American victimization and injured
innocence.
Good article.
What snowflakes we are -- has our house of Democracy always been built on the sands of
hypocrisy and hubris? The recent demonization of Russia, it seems to me, is a gift to the
War Machine which always needs an enemy to justify $billions in weaponry. I am much more
concerned about John Bolton calling shots from the White House, than I am about Putin, or
even Kim Jungun.
"Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might be able to restore
respectful if not friendly relations with the United States. Clearly, Putin wanted that, as
did Trump. [..] What is the matter with us?"
Let us not pretend to be naive, and let us give credit where credit is due. Whereas the
Republican Party's principled stance against the political opponents focused on "stained
dress" and "birth certificate", the Clinton/Obama leadership of the *other* war mongering
party managed to strike a strategic alliance with the neocons and the "national insecurity"
apparat, and, together with the "Real GOP", has prevented Trump from changing US foreign
policy for the better as effectively as the business wings of the "Biparty" have co-opted
Trump into Reagonomics 2.0 – now as farce.
There is a reason why the GOP refused to focus on the Benghazi CIA pipeline channeling
Libyan arsenals to Syrian islamists.
The authors recap makes rather clear that the US elites, since before the end of WW2,
committed themselves to the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the subordination of its
parts. US policy towards Russia is not driven by negligence or incompetence, and we should
not ever forget that US talk of "winneable" nuclear war, decapitation strikes and "regime
change" goes far back – to Eisenhower, in fact, who denied that nuclear weapons were
different from other means of "mass destruction" in war. The continuity of US aggressive
posture – and posturing – is exemplified by the career of Keith Payne, with GWB
and now Trump, and his sponsors – like Rumsfeld – with Reagan, Bush and Bush
– posturing that culminated in Able Archer, which led Thatcher to concern herself
with containing and rolling back US nuclear blackmail.
The Biparty and other camp followers of the war profiteering classes and the global
oligarchy are not concerned with "defending" The People, much less our "allies", as South
Korea is learning at cost – the Endsieg over Russia and, eventually, China, is their
multi-generational project. If you wonder whether the 2016 election was rigged or fixed in
any way, you have to go back to the primaries that were supposed to only offer us a choice
between two warmongers intent to outdo each other.
In Clinton, the establishment succeeded in promoting another Judas goat in the mold of
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, for the Democratic Party. The Republican leadership failed
in this task, but it turns out that Trump is not merely a flawed champion of the
discontent, a hollow man, but the perfect Judas goat of our time – he even believed
himself.
Anybody voting for "pocket change" in 2018 will lead us to another goat rodeo in 2020.
Meanwhile, we are heading for a repeat of Able Archer and another change to "win" ourselves
a profitable nuclear war at "a level compatible with national survival and recovery."
A phobia is an irrational fear, not based on reason. The term "Russophobia" is used to
proactively belittle and discredit arguments critical of Russia.
However, Europeans are not irrational, but perfectly logical in being wary of Russia.
The Soviet Union occupied and violently oppressed Eastern Europe for 50 years, while
building the capability to wage massive nuclear war on Western Europe on short notice.
It is now perfectly sensible for former Warsaw Pact allies or Soviet republics to seek
maximum integration with any and all institutions of the West, such as NATO and the EU. It
is also their right to do so as sovereign nations. Russia has no legitimate "sphere of
interest" beyond her own borders.
And NATO in its current form is but a shadow of the Cold War alliance in Europe. US
troop levels there are at 1/5 of Cold War numbers. NATO does not have an offensive posture
in Europe, hardly even a good defensive one. It does not threaten Russia in any way, even
if you might think otherwise from the incessant complaining by Putin and some of his
American fellow travellers.
Re: DanJ, "However, Europeans are not irrational, but perfectly logical in being wary
of Russia."
Talk is cheap. The actual level of European fear of Russia is implied by the level of
military spending by the Europeans to defend themselves against that supposed threat. Those
military spending levels are almost universally below the relatively modest GDP targets,
especially compared to the out of control U.S. "defense" spending.
The perverse irony is that the low levels of military spending by Europe would indicate
masochistic irrationality if the Russian threat were genuine.
Agree NATO does not militarily threaten Russia. The Russian objection is to the Global
Cop Gorilla that consciously throws wrenches in the normalization of Russian/European
relationships by militarizing every element of foreign policy. Simply because the U.S.
Security State apparatus needs an existential enemy to justify its TRILLION dollar War
Machine.
The Europeans currently accept U.S. hegemony because it doesn't cost them anything.
The U.S. war-monger led foreign policy model is completely bankrupt. The Crony Elite
Hacks in Washington just haven't realized it yet. Because as parasites, they make too much
money from it. They will feed on the carcass until it collapses.
@ Aleks "They will always be the backwards, unelightened, barbaric, undemocratic people. The one
whom both Churchill and Hitler stated were inferior to both the Anglo and Germanic
peoples."
If what you wrote isn't racist, then I dunno what to say.
Something else to keep in mind is this: In the 1960s, Russia detonated an H-bomb that
was–I forget the exact ratio–about 10,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped
on Hiroshima. And now we're worried about a country–North Korea–that a half
century later detonated a bomb five times as powerful as the one that obliterated
Hiroshima.
How crazy is it to demonize Putin when, if push came to shove, they could annihilate the
U.S.? Yes, we could annihilate them, even if they launched a first strike with strategic
(as opposed to tactical) nuclear weapons. But it's no offense to the country that produced
the incomparable Tolstoy to say that against the ruin of Moscow and St. Petersburg would be
measured the ruin of New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia,
Washington, D.C., San Diego, and Denver. Russia can destroy far more human capital in
America than we can destroy in Russia. Advantage, Russia.
The moral of this story: It's unwise to poke the bear–much less to poke the bear
in the eye, as we have been doing since the presidency of Bill Clinton, who started NATO's
misguided project of encircling Russia.
Guys, if you trully believe that 13 superheroes with 100 K$ can overcome +1Bn$ plethora of
PACs|SuperPACS|and all other whatnots you should quit watching all these fine Marvel movies
about superheroes.
And, btw, leaving aside total lack of proofs, how did this DNC hack played out? Was it
some dirty invented lies about Whight Knigtess? Or was it blatant truth? ) I'm really
amused how lemmings started to sing 'DNC hacks!DNC hacks!' being completely oblivious to
the content of this leaked emails. You don't care that you're being, hmm, 'abused' by your
ruling class all the time, don't you?
Finally, do you care that US meddled (and this fact is 1000% proven) in internal politics
in quite a number of different countries, Russia included?
"If what you wrote isn't racist, then I dunno what to say."
I fail to see the racism in what I wrote since they were both well-known beliefs (and
quotes) held by both Churchill and Hitler. But I'm sure you knew that.
I will follow Buchanan's reasoning to its logical conclusion and say that, well, the guy,
and maybe his daughter to, were spies and deserved the classic kgb response. What putin
does, we deserve. It is getting hard to swallow so much putin and kgb love here at TAC.
Like, most americans are not suffering from russophobia nearly as much as so many are
enamored by authoritarianism and the murderous kgb agent putin. The don himself admires
putin for the head oligarch the don wishes he himself could be. Putin is head of an
organized crime syndicate masquerading as a great state. Social conservatives have even
crowned putin an advocate for western christian civilization. Russians gladly kiss his
hand. It may not pay them anything, but the consequences of not kissing his hand have been
demonstrated. You know, something right wingers admire. The don is doing the same thing
here. Like, if we could see his tax returns, we could readily anticipate his policy
actions. Hey, and get rich too.
I will be surprised though, if US steel does much more than become the middle man in
marking up steel they import and stamp USA on to. I do not know, but expect a large part of
the imported steel the US buys, is bought from middlemen companies that buy chinese steel
and stamp it canadian. Canada does produce allot of aluminum. Most of china sits on a 15k
foot plateau of minerals. The rest of the world will buy from their glut. We might really
not want to depend on chinese steel if we are planning to war. Europe is beholding to putin
to stay warm in the winter, so it will be interesting to see how they respond to the
collateral damage from assassinations carried out in their own countries. Like, I wonder if
their punditry will claim they probably deserve it. Churchill has been gone for quite a
while after all. Russophobia? Is that where people show illegitimate concern when putin
proclaims to have shiny new nukes that we have no defense against. Yepper, we deserve that
too. Once you put the victims mantle on, it is hard to be anything but a victim, and much
easier to excuse yourself anything while projecting your fear onto, well, defenseless
snowflakes are an easy target.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-ex-spy-sergei-skripal-his-daughter-poisoned-nerve-agent-n854516
The Democratics are obsessed with Putin and the Russians, blaming them for the most
ignominious shellacking in modern electoral history, and yet refuse to do the necessary
groundwork to win the presidency in 2020. They've placed all their cards on the collusion
narrative, hoping for the best. BTW, good article, Pat.
I think cdugga expresses best the mentality that defines the present moment: 'If Russia is
accused of something, it means that they are guilty.' Can't imagine how that assumption
could ever be abused, can you?
One of your better articles, Pat, was glad to see it. Let's hope a few more of our
leaders start thinking along these same lines and decide it might be just as well not to
nuke the planet out of pique over some bleeping facebook ads.
2 cdugga
>> I will follow Buchanan's reasoning to its logical conclusion and say that, well,
the guy, and maybe his daughter to, were spies and deserved the classic kgb response.
Could you please provide some proofs that they were poisoned by some Russian secret
service? Why on Earth would these aforementioned services like to kill the guy? He's 100%
non-entity.
On the other hand, it's a very convenient target if someone wants to frame FSB or GRU, so
I'll bet on British MI-###. Tough luck for this guy, you're fired in this way in this
business.
@ Aleks
I'm aware that Hitler and Churchill believed those. I apologize for taking your comment out
of context and calling out racism where none was intended. I feel kinda silly now.
"... It would also require the FBI to investigate all requests by U.S.-based Russian diplomats to travel 50 miles outside his or her official post to ensure those diplomats have properly notified the U.S. Government of their travel plans. No Russian diplomats could travel outside of that 50 mile perimeter unless all of their colleagues have followed travel rules in the three months prior. The FBI would also be required to notify Congress that the Russians have followed the rules before the travel is cleared by the State Department. The purpose is to ensure the Russians are following proper protocol in their travel. ..."
Dr. Strangelove already back, McCarthy coming! 02/07/2016 Senate Committee Looks
To Revive Cold-War Era Body To Catch Russian Spies
By Ali Watkins
A new intelligence bill also proposes tightening how Russian diplomats can travel.
Congress is pushing the White House to revive a Cold War-era committee to crack down on
Russian spies, underscoring just how uneasy Washington is about its adversaries in Moscow.
In its 2017 Intelligence Authorization Bill, the Senate Intelligence Committee is asking the
White House to reinstate a presidentially-appointed group to unmask Russian spies and uncover
Russian-sponsored assassinations. The group, which would include personnel from the State
Department, intelligence community and several other executive offices, would meet monthly.
Along with spies and covert killings, the committee would also investigate the funding of front
groups -- or cover organizations for Russian operations -- "covert broadcasting, media
manipulation" and secret funding.
A similar interagency body called the
"Active Measures Working Group" existed during the Cold War, but it hasn't been active in
decades. This new group would be modeled after its Cold War predecessor, one U.S. intelligence
official said on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive bill.
The intelligence bill
passed through the Senate committee in May, and now must be passed by the full Senate.
It would also require the FBI to investigate all requests by U.S.-based Russian
diplomats to travel 50 miles outside his or her official post to ensure those diplomats have
properly notified the U.S. Government of their travel plans. No Russian diplomats could travel
outside of that 50 mile perimeter unless all of their colleagues have followed travel rules in
the three months prior. The FBI would also be required to notify Congress that the Russians
have followed the rules before the travel is cleared by the State Department. The purpose is to
ensure the Russians are following proper protocol in their travel.
"... Russophobia is extremely profitable to the armaments, security and spying industries and Russophobia reinforces intellectually challenged voters in their Tory loyalty. Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack. ..."
The former British ambassador Craig Murray suspects a different motive and culprit:
Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg - 10:21 AM - 8 Mar 2018 Russophobia is extremely profitable to the armaments, security and spying industries and Russophobia reinforces
intellectually challenged voters in their Tory loyalty. Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal
attack.
When we look at how the corporate media is spinning this story, it seems to me that Craig
Murray's theory about using the incident to ramp up Russophobia has its merits.
"... The custom software program was secretly built last year to comply with a classified US government directive. The program scanned hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts, according to revelations first reported by Reuters. ..."
"... Surveillance experts told Reuters this is the first case to surface of an US internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to requests for stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time. ..."
The custom software program was secretly built last year to comply with a
classified US government directive. The program scanned hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail
accounts, according to revelations first reported by
Reuters.
It is not known whether the directive, which was sent to the company's legal team, came from
the National Security Agency or the FBI, according to the two former Yahoo employees. It is
also not known what the intelligence officials were seeking, except wanting the company to
search for a set of characters, which could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment.
The former employees said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to follow the directive angered
some senior executive and led to the departure of Alex Stamos, the company's chief information
officer.
When Stamos discovered Mayer had authorized the program, he told his subordinates that he
had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a
programming flaw, he told them, hackers could have accessed the stored emails.
Yahoo said in a statement issued to Reuters about the intelligence demand that it "is a law
abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States."
Surveillance experts told Reuters this is the first case to surface of an US internet
company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to
requests for stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.
"... by Norman Solomon Posted on March 09, 2018 ..."
"... "If you have information that bears on deception or illegality in pursuing wrongful policies or an aggressive war," he said in a statement released last week, "don't wait to put that out and think about it, consider acting in a timely way at whatever cost to yourself . Do what Katharine Gun did." ..."
"... That's the kind of reality George Orwell was referring to when he wrote: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." ..."
"... What Ellsberg read in the newspaper story "was a cable from the NSA asking GCHQ to help in the intercepting of communications, and that implied both office and home communications, of every member of the Security Council of the UN. ..."
"... Now, why would NSA need GCHQ to do that? Because a condition of having the UN headquarters and the Security Council in the US in New York was that the US intelligence agencies promised or were required not to conduct intelligence on members of the UN. Well, of course they want that. So, they rely on their allies, their buddies in the British GCHQ, to commit these criminal acts for them. And with this clearly I thought someone very high in access in Britain intelligence services must dissent from what was already clear the path to an illegal war. ..."
Those Who Controlled the Past Should Not Control the Future
by Norman Solomon
Posted on
March 09, 2018
Daniel Ellsberg has a message that managers of the warfare state don't
want people to hear.
"If you have information that bears on deception or illegality in pursuing wrongful
policies or an aggressive war," he said in a statement released last week, "don't wait to put
that out and think about it, consider acting in a timely way at whatever cost to yourself . Do
what Katharine Gun did."
If you don't know what Katharine Gun did, chalk that up to the media power of the war
system.
Ellsberg's
video statement went public as this month began, just before the 15th anniversary of when a
British newspaper, the Observer , revealed a secret NSA memo – thanks to
Katharine Gun. At the UK's intelligence agency GCHQ, about 100 people received the same email
memo from the National
Security Agency on the last day of January 2003, seven weeks before the invasion of Iraq got
underway. Only Katharine Gun, at great personal risk, decided to leak the document.
If more people had taken such risks in early 2003, the Iraq War might have been prevented.
If more people were willing to take such risks in 2018, the current military slaughter in
several nations, mainly funded by U.S. taxpayers, might be curtailed if not stopped. Blockage
of information about past whistleblowing deprives the public of inspiring role models.
That's the kind of reality George Orwell was referring to when he wrote: "Who controls
the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
Fifteen years ago, "I find myself reading on my computer from the Observer the most
extraordinary leak, or unauthorized disclosure, of classified information that I'd ever seen,"
Ellsberg recalled, "and that definitely included and surpassed my own disclosure of top-secret
information, a history of US decision-making in Vietnam years earlier." The Pentagon Papers
whistleblower instantly recognized that, in the Observer article, "I was looking at
something that was clearly classified much higher than top secret . It was an operational cable
having to do with how to conduct communications intelligence."
What Ellsberg read in the newspaper story "was a cable from the NSA asking GCHQ to help
in the intercepting of communications, and that implied both office and home communications, of
every member of the Security Council of the UN.
Now, why would NSA need GCHQ to do that? Because a condition of having the UN
headquarters and the Security Council in the US in New York was that the US intelligence
agencies promised or were required not to conduct intelligence on members of the UN. Well, of
course they want that. So, they rely on their allies, their buddies in the British GCHQ, to
commit these criminal acts for them. And with this clearly I thought someone very high in
access in Britain intelligence services must dissent from what was already clear the path to an
illegal war. "
"... Nobody of us can really know what happened in London with the Russian ex-double agent they tried to kill. But Russians would be foolish to let the agent leave from Russia to try to assassinate him many years afterwards, at the eve of their Presidential Election. DK ..."
"... By Robert Stevens ..."
"... Financial Times, ..."
"... Under conditions in which the NATO powers, including Britain, are seeking to utilise any pretext to justify their ongoing encirclement of Russia's border, Putin authorising the murder of two people on the streets of the UK would be a propaganda gift to his opponents. ..."
Nobody of
us can really know what happened in London with the Russian ex-double agent they tried to kill.
But Russians would be foolish to let the agent leave from Russia to try to assassinate him many
years afterwards, at the eve of their Presidential Election.
DKAnti-Russia campaign follows alleged poisoning of former UK/Russian double agent and
daughter
By Robert Stevens 8 March 2018
The British government and mass media have mounted a hysterical anti-Russian campaign
centred on the still unexplained circumstances surrounding the hospitalisation of former
British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, after they were found unconscious on a
bench in Salisbury on Sunday.
Initial reports Monday stated that Skripal, aged 66, may have ingested fentanyl, a synthetic
opioid many times stronger than heroin, which can be fatal in small doses.
On Tuesday, the other person hospitalised was identified as Skripal's 33-year-old daughter,
Yulia, who was also said to be in a critical condition.
Skripal is a former colonel in Russia's GRU, the military intelligence service. He spent
four years in jail in Russia after being found guilty in 2006 of passing secrets to MI6, the
UK's foreign intelligence service. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Skripal served four years before being released in 2010, when he was pardoned by Russia as
part of a well-publicized 10-person spy swap between the US, the UK and Russia. He moved to the
UK where he has lived for the past seven years.
The pair were found unconscious and slumped on a bench near the Maltings shopping centre.
Police stated that two became ill at around 13.30 p.m. Police arrived on the scene at around
16.15 p.m., after being alerted by a concerned member of the public. It was announced Wednesday
that a police officer is also in critical condition after attending the incident. The Skripals
visited a nearby restaurant, Zizzi's, which was cordoned off, as well as a local pub, The
Bishop's Mill.
By Tuesday, despite nothing of substance being reported by the police, the government and
media had effectively declared the incident an act of terrorism, with the finger pointing at
Russia's Putin government. References to an opioid being involved were dropped, with media
reports saying the government's secret chemical lab at Porton Down was as yet unable to
identify the substance. Wiltshire police announced that London's Metropolitan Police
counter-terrorist unit would be taking over the investigation. In parliament, Foreign Secretary
Boris Johnson spoke about the "disturbing incident in Salisbury" and stated, "Although I am not
now pointing fingers, because we cannot point fingers, I say to governments around the world
that no attempt to take innocent life on UK soil will go either unsanctioned or unpunished," He
then referred to Russia as a "malign and destructive force" and warned that if Moscow were
found to be involved, the government would "take whatever measures we deem necessary to protect
the lives of the people in this country, our values and our freedoms."
In another pointed reference to Russia, he stated that the case had "echoes of the death of
Alexander Litvinenko in 2006" -- the former officer in Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB,
the successor to the KGB), who died on November 23, 2006 after having been granted asylum in
Britain in 2000. The UK, backed by the US have long claimed that the Putin regime ordered the
killing despite no evidence being presented in an official British inquiry in 2016 -- other
than the presence of the radioactive substance polonium.
Johnson threatened that England could consider boycotting the soccer World Cup in Russia
this summer.
Every newspaper, apart from the Financial Times, led with hysterical anti-Russian
headlines . The Sun blared, "Red Spy in UK Poison Terror," with an accompanying story
referring to "fear over a Kremlin backed hit " The Daily Mirror's headline was "
'Assassins' on British street".
In an article in the Spectator , columnist Ed West posed the question, "Will
Britain stand up to Russia?" By the evening, despite Newsnight anchor Kirsty Wark introducing
the story by saying, "so far we know nothing about what happened to them, if they were poisoned
and if they were, by whom," the BBC's flagship news programme was dedicated to a narrative that
Russia was responsible and that Skripal and his daughter were likely victims of an attack by
Russia intelligence operatives.
The media have reported the deaths of Skripal's wife, his son and his older brother as
mysterious events requiring investigation. His wife died of cancer in 2012 in Britain.
The following day the DailyTelegraph asserted that "Putin swore death on
poisoned Russian spy." The Times went with "MI5 believes Russians tried to kill former
spy."
On Wednesday morning, the government convened its COBRA committee, which meets during
periods of national emergencies. On Wednesday evening, Met Police Assistant Commissioner Mark
Rowley announced that Skripal and his daughter were subjected to an attack by a "nerve agent,"
with it being classified as a case of "attempted murder."
No information released by the authorities can be taken at face value. All reports attest
that Skripal was supposedly politically inactive. He evidently did nothing to hide his
identity, buying a house for £260,000 in his real name and applying to join a railway
social club. He regularly bought lottery scratch cards and purchased food from a local Polish
food store.
If the Putin regime were indeed set on killing Skripal and his daughter, some explanation
needs to be made as to motive. Skripal's daughter lived and worked in Russia and made regular
trips back and forth.
At least one other person released from jail in Russia would appear to have been a much more
likely target of the Putin regime than Skripal, if indeed its intention was to prevent
anti-Russian activities. Igor Sutyagin developed into a prominent anti-Putin figure in the UK,
becoming a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defence and intelligence
think-tank.
RUSI is central to the formulation of British imperialism's anti-Russian policy. Even the
Guardian's main advocate against the Putin regime, columnist Luke Harding, was forced
to acknowledge that Sutyagin "gave lectures on Vladimir Putin's darkening state, and kept a
high public profile. Skripal, by contrast, eschewed London. He settled with Liudmilla [his
wife] in the comparative quiet of Wiltshire." Asking the question who would benefit from the
deaths of Skripal and his daughter, there would appear to be no obvious reason why the Putin
government would authorize such an act. Putin is currently campaigning in the last stretch of
the 2018 presidential election, which takes place on March 18. He is expected to be
re-elected.
Under conditions in which the NATO powers, including Britain, are seeking to utilise any
pretext to justify their ongoing encirclement of Russia's border, Putin authorising the murder
of two people on the streets of the UK would be a propaganda gift to his opponents.
The response of the government and media to these events must be placed in the context of
the concerted drive by London to demonize Russia. Only last week the Times devoted its
front page, an op-ed piece and an editorial to bellicose calls by senior military figures,
including second in command of the armed forces, Sir Gordon Messenger, for an increase in
military spending, naming Russia as the power that must be confronted.
This followed a January speech given at RUSI by General Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of the
General Staff of the British Armed Forces, in which he declared that the UK had to actively
prepare for war with Russia and other geo-political rivals:
Dickerson: "What keeps you awake at night?" Mattis: "Nothing, I keep other people awake at night." and. . . MATTIS: A conflict in North Korea, John, would be probably the worst kind of fighting in most
people's lifetimes. Why do I say this? The North Korean regime has hundreds of artillery cannons and rocket
launchers within range of one of the most densely populated cities on earth, which is the
capital of South Korea.
We are working with the international community to deal with this issue. This regime is a
threat to the region, to Japan, to South Korea, and in the event of war, they would bring
danger to China and to Russia as well.
But the bottom line is, it would be a catastrophic war if this turns into combat, if we are
not able to resolve this situation through diplomatic means.
here
We shouldn't expect that any meeting and talks would actually solve anything, because the
DPRK and US positions are basically irreconcilable. DPRK wants the US out of Korea, US wants
DPRK to denuke (disarm).
The DPRK strategy, probably, is to spawn endless meetings for a long
time. The Vietnam peace talks serve as a model, first with the parties discussing the shape
of the table, etc. I look for DPRK to play this game.
It's a basic east vs. west gambit, where the east has the patience to endure years whereas
the west expects quick results.
There is huge difference: Stalinist were convinced that communism is a bright future of
mankind and were determine (with the religious zeal_ to eliminate allthe resistance to tits
coming.
Neoliberalism is clearly experience both ideological (since 2008) and now social crisis in
the USA. So here the purges are designed to prolong the like of decaying regime which lost its
legitimacy in the eyes of population. As such is is not similar to the Stalin Doctors' plot - Wikipedia -- the purge of
Jewish doctors at the end of this reign.
Notable quotes:
"... Militarily, since World War II Washington has relied on its armed predominance to dictate to the world. But now the President of Russia has announced possession of what are from the US perspective super weapons that do not, as some claim, give Russia parity with the US, but give Russia immense military superiority over the US, indeed over the entire Western alliance. ..."
This year could turn out to be a defining year for the United States. It is clear that the
US military/security complex and the Democratic Party aided by their media vassals intend to
purge Donald Trump from the presidency. One of the open conspirators declared the other day
that we have to get rid of Trump now before he wins re-election in a landslide.
It is now a known fact that Russiagate is a conspiracy of the military/security complex,
Obama regime, Democratic National Committee, and presstitute media to destroy President Trump.
However, the presstitutes never present this fact to the American public. Nevertheless, a
majority of Americans do not believe the Democrats and the presstitutes that Trump conspired
with Putin to steal the election.
One question before us is: Will Mueller and the Democrats succeed in purging Donald Trump,
as Joseph Stalin succeed in purging Lenin's Bolsheviks, including Nikolai Bukharin, who Lenin
called "the golden boy of the revolution," or will the Democratic Party and the presstitutes
discredit themselves such that the country moves far to the right.
Stalin didn't need facts and could frame-up people at will as he had absolute power. In the
US the presstitute media, like Stalin, does not concern itself with facts, but the presstitutes
do not have absolute power. Indeed, few people trust the presstitutes, and even fewer trust
Mueller.
Many are puzzled that President Trump has not moved against his enemies as they have no
evidence for their charges. Indeed, Mueller's indictments have nothing whatsoever to do with
the Russiagate accusations. Why are not Mueller, Comey, Rosenstein, and all the rest indicted
for their clear and obvious crimes?
America's future turns on the answer to this question. Is it because the Trump regime is
letting the presstitutes and the Democrats destroy their credibility, or is it because Trump is
weak, confused, and doesn't know how to use the powers of his office to slay those who intend
to slay him?
If it is the former, then America will move far to the right. If it is the latter, America
will have had its own Stalinist purge, and the purge is likely to follow the Stalin model and to
extend down to those who voted for Trump.
The failure of the integrity of the liberal/progressive/left has left the US facing two
unpalatable outcomes. One is a right-wing government empowered by the left's self-defeat. The
other is the rise of the Identity Politics state in which oppression will be based on gender,
race, and beliefs.
This is not the only issue that could be resolved in 2018. There are others, and the other
two major ones are the economic situation and the military situation.
For a decade the central banks of the West and Japan have printed money far in excess of the
increase in real goods and services. This money printing has not caused massive inflation of
consumer prices. Instead it has caused inflation in financial instruments and real estate.
The high Dow Jones average is the product of this money printing. Can the central banks stop
printing money and allow interest rates to rise, thus collapsing equity prices and pension
funds? What would be the consequences?
Militarily, since World War II Washington has relied on its armed predominance to dictate to
the world. But now the President of Russia has announced possession of what are from the US
perspective super weapons that do not, as some claim, give Russia parity with the US, but give
Russia immense military superiority over the US, indeed over the entire Western alliance.
"... Still worse, Putin and "Putin's Russia" have been so demonized that it is hard to imagine any leading American political figures or editorial commentators responding positively to what is plainly his hope for a new beginning in US-Russian relations. If nothing else, strategic parity always also meant political parity -- recognizing that Soviet Russia, like the United States, had legitimate national interests abroad. The years of American vilifying Putin and Russia are essentially an assertion that neither has any such legitimacy. ..."
Does Putin really believe Washington will "listen now"? He may still have some
"illusions," but we should have none. In recent years, there has been ample evidence that
US policy-makers and, equally important, mainstream media commentators do not bother to
read what Putin says, or at least not more than snatches from click-bait wire-service
reports.
Still worse, Putin and "Putin's Russia" have been so demonized that it is hard to
imagine any leading American political figures or editorial commentators responding
positively to what is plainly his hope for a new beginning in US-Russian relations. If
nothing else, strategic parity always also meant political parity -- recognizing that
Soviet Russia, like the United States, had legitimate national interests abroad. The years
of American vilifying Putin and Russia are essentially an assertion that neither has any
such legitimacy.
And making matters worse, there are the still unproven allegations of "Russiagate"
collusion. Even if President Trump understands, or is made to understand, the new --
possibly historic -- overture represented by Putin's speech, would the "Kremlin puppet"
allegations made daily against him permit him to seize this opportunity? Indeed, do the
promoters of "Russiagate" care?
"... What has however become clear in recent days is that the 'Gerasimov Doctrine' was not invented by its supposed author, but by a British academic, Mark Galeotti, who has now confessed – although in a way clearly designed to maintain as much of the 'narrative' as possible. ..."
"... Three days ago, an article by Galleoti appeared in 'Foreign Policy' entitled 'I'm Sorry for Creating the "Gerasimov Doctrine": I was the first to write about Russia's infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.' ..."
"... The translation of the original article by Gerasimov with annotations by Galeotti which provoked the whole hysteria turns out to be a classic example of what I am inclined to term 'bad Straussianism.' ..."
"... What Strauss would have called the 'exoteric' meaning of the article quite clearly has to do with defensive strategies aimed at combatting the kind of Western 'régime change' projects about which people like those who write for 'Lawfare' are so enthusiastic. But Galeotti tells us that this is, at least partially, a cover for an 'esoteric' meaning, which has to do with offensive actions in Ukraine and similar places. ..."
More material on the British end of the conspiracy.
Commenting on an earlier piece by PT, I suggested that a key piece of evidence pointing to
'Guccifer 2.0' being a fake personality created by the conspirators in their attempt to
disguise the fact that the materials from the DNC published by 'WikiLeaks' were obtained by a
leak rather than a hack had to do with the involvement of the former GCHQ person Matt
Tait.
To recapitulate: Back in June 2016, hard on the heels of the claim by Dmitri Alperovitch
of 'CrowdStrike' to have identified clinching evidence making the GRU prime suspects, Tait
announced that, although initially unconvinced, he had found a 'smoking gun' in the
'metadata' of the documents released by 'Guccifer 2.0.'
A key part of this was the use by someone modifying a document of 'Felix Edmundovich'
– the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky, the Lithuanian-Polish noble who created the
Soviet secret police.
As I noted, Tait was generally identified as a former GCHQ employee who now ran a
consultancy called 'Capital Alpha Security.' However, checking Companies House records
revealed that he had filed 'dormant accounts' for the company. So it looks as though the
company was simply a 'front', designed to fool 'useful idiots' into believing he was an
objective analyst.
As I also noted in those comments, Tait writes the 'Lawfare' blog, one of whose founders,
Benjamin Wittes, looks as though he may himself have been involved in the conspiracy up to
the hilt. Furthermore, a secure income now appears to have been provided to replace that from
the non-existent consultancy, in the shape of a position at the 'Robert S. Strauss Center for
International Security and Law', run by Robert Chesney, a co-founder with Wittes of
'Lawfare.'
A crucial part of the story, however, is that the notion of GRU responsibility for the
supposed 'hacks' appears to be part of a wider 'narrative' about the supposed 'Gerasimov
Doctrine.' From the 'View from Langley' provided to Bret Stephens by CIA Director Mike Pompeo
at the 'Aspen Security Forum' last July:
'I hearken back to something called the Gerasimov doctrine from the early 70s, he's now
the head of the – I'm a Cold War guy, forgive me if I mention Soviet Union. He's now
the head of the Russian army and his idea was that you can win wars without firing a single
shot or with firing very few shots in ways that are decidedly not militaristic, and that's
what's happened. What changes is the costs; to effectuate change through cyber and through RT
and Sputnik, their news outlets, and through other soft means; has just really been lowered,
right. It used to be it was expensive to run an ad on a television station now you simply go
online and propagate your message. And so they have they have found an effective tool, an
easy way to go reach into our systems, and into our culture to achieve the outcomes they are
looking for.'
What has however become clear in recent days is that the 'Gerasimov Doctrine' was not
invented by its supposed author, but by a British academic, Mark Galeotti, who has now
confessed – although in a way clearly designed to maintain as much of the 'narrative'
as possible.
Three days ago, an article by Galleoti appeared in 'Foreign Policy' entitled 'I'm
Sorry for Creating the "Gerasimov Doctrine": I was the first to write about Russia's infamous
high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.'
'Gerasimov was actually talking about how the Kremlin understands what happened in the
"Arab Spring" uprisings, the "color revolutions" against pro-Moscow regimes in Russia's
neighborhood, and in due course Ukraine's "Maidan" revolt. The Russians honestly –
however wrongly – believe that these were not genuine protests against brutal and
corrupt governments, but regime changes orchestrated in Washington, or rather, Langley. This
wasn't a "doctrine" as the Russians understand it, for future adventures abroad: Gerasimov
was trying to work out how to fight, not promote, such uprisings at home.'
The translation of the original article by Gerasimov with annotations by Galeotti
which provoked the whole hysteria turns out to be a classic example of what I am inclined to
term 'bad Straussianism.'
What Strauss would have called the 'exoteric' meaning of the article quite clearly has
to do with defensive strategies aimed at combatting the kind of Western 'régime
change' projects about which people like those who write for 'Lawfare' are so enthusiastic.
But Galeotti tells us that this is, at least partially, a cover for an 'esoteric' meaning,
which has to do with offensive actions in Ukraine and similar places.
Having now read the text of the article, I can see a peculiar irony in it. In a section
entitled 'You Can't Generate Ideas On Command', Gerasimov suggests that 'The state of Russian
military science today cannot be compared with the flowering of military-theoretical thought
in our country on the eve of World War II.'
According to the 'exoteric' meaning of the article, it is not possible to blame anyone in
particular for this situation. But Gerasimov goes on on to remark that, while at the time of
that flowering there were 'no people with higher degrees' or 'academic schools or
departments', there were 'extraordinary personalities with brilliant ideas', who he terms
'fanatics in the best sense of the word.'
Again, Galeotti discounts the suggestion that nobody is to blame, assuming an 'esoteric
meaning', and remarking: 'Ouch. Who is he slapping here?'
Actually, Gerasimov refers by name to two, utterly different figures, who certainly were
'extraordinarily personalities with brilliant ideas.'
If Pompeo had even the highly amateurish grasp of the history of debates among Soviet
military theorists that I have managed to acquire he would be aware that one of the things
which was actually happening in the 'Seventies was the rediscovery of the ideas of Alexander
Svechin.
Confirming my sense that this has continued on, Gerasimov ends by using Svechin to point
up an intractable problem: it can be extraordinarily difficult to anticipate the conditions
of a war, and crucial not to impose a standardised template likely to be inappropriate, but
one has to make some kinds of prediction in order to plan.
Immediately after the passage which Galeotti interprets as a dig at some colleague,
Gerasimov elaborates his reference to 'extraordinary people with brilliant ideas' by
referring to an anticipation of a future war, which proved prescient, from a very different
figure to Svechin:
'People like, for instance, Georgy Isserson, who, despite the views he formed in the
prewar years, published the book "New Forms Of Combat." In it, this Soviet military
theoretician predicted: "War in general is not declared. It simply begins with already
developed military forces. Mobilization and concentration is not part of the period after the
onset of the state of war as was the case in 1914 but rather, unnoticed, proceeds long before
that." The fate of this "prophet of the Fatherland" unfolded tragically. Our country paid in
great quantities of blood for not listening to the conclusions of this professor of the
General Staff Academy.'
Unlike Svechin, whom I have read, I was unfamiliar with Isserson. A quick Google search,
however, unearthed a mass of material in American sources – including, by good fortune,
an online text of a 2010 study by Dr Richard Harrison entitled 'Architect of Soviet Victory
in World War II: The Life and Theories of G.S. Isserson', and a presentation summarising the
volume.
Ironically, Svechin and Isserson were on opposite sides of fundamental divides. So the
former, an ethnic Russian from Odessa, was one of the 'genstabisty', the former Tsarist
General Staff officers who sided with the Bolsheviks and played a critical role in teaching
the Red Army how to fight. Meanwhile Isserson was a very different product of the
'borderlands' – the son of a Jewish doctor, brought up in Kaunas, with a German Jewish
mother from what was then Königsberg, giving him an easy facility with German-language
sources.
The originator of the crucial concept of 'operational' art – the notion that in
modern industrial war, the ability to handle a level intermediate between strategy and
tactics was critical to success – was actually Svechin.
Developing the ambivalence of Clausewitz, however, he stressed that both the offensive and
the defensive had their places, and that the key to success was to know which was appropriate
when and also to be able rapidly to change from one to the other. His genuflections to
Marxist-Leninist dogma, moreover, were not such as to take in any of Dzerzhinsky's
people.
By contrast, Isserson was unambiguously committed to the offensive strand in the
Clausewitzian tradition, and a Bolshevik 'true believer' (although he married the daughter of
a dispossessed ethnically Russian merchant, who had their daughter baptised without his
knowledge.)
As Harrison brings out, Isserson's working through of the problems of offensive
'operational art' would be critical to the eventual success of the Red Army against Hitler.
However, the specific text to which he refers was, ironically, a warning of precisely one of
the problems implicit in the single-minded reliance on the offensive: the possibility that
one could be left with no good options confronting an antagonist similarly oriented –
as turned out to be the case.
As Gerasimov intimates, while unlike Svechin, executed in 1938, Isserson survived the
Stalin years, he was another of the victims of Dzerzhinsky's heirs. Arrested shortly before
his warnings were vindicated by the German attack on 22 June 1941, he would spend the war in
the Gulag and only return to normal life after Stalin's death.
So I think that the actual text of Gerasimov's article reinforces a point I have made
previously. The 'evidence' identified by Tait is indeed a 'smoking gun.' But it emphatically
does not point towards the GRU.
Meanwhile, another moral of the tale is that Americans really should stop being taken in
by charlatan Brits like Galeotti, Tait, and Steele.
I dunno I think the whole air of ineptitude around The Company is just a cover. Why else
would GHW Bush have been in Dallas at the time and then rocket just a few years later to its
top job? Yeah, I know, it could have been KBR pulling all the strings, but I would still
assert The Company was used as the vehicle to pre-position all the other necessary elements,
like Papa Cruz, a former anti-Batista foot soldier, showing up a few years to UT just in time
to radicalise LHO and set him up as the fall guy. And at the centre of all this, though I'm
not sure how except that he ran against Jeb! and Ted, is Donald J Trump.
"... The figures contained in the recent budget deal that kept Congress open, as well as in President Trump's budget proposal for 2019, are a case in point: $700 billion for the Pentagon and related programs in 2018 and $716 billion the following year. ..."
"... Though the Pentagon's budget was already through the roof, it will get an extra $165 billion over the next two years, thanks to the congressional budget deal reached earlier this month. ..."
"... Ben Freeman of the Center for International Policy put the new Pentagon budget numbers in perspective when he pointed out that just the approximately $80 billion annual increase in the department's top line between 2017 and 2019 will be double the current budget of the State Department; higher than the gross domestic products of more than 100 countries; and larger than the entire military budget of any country in the world, except China's. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the majority of Republican fiscal conservatives were thrilled to sign off on a Pentagon increase that, combined with the Trump tax cut for the rich, funds ballooning deficits as far as the eye can see -- a total of $7.7 trillion worth of them over the next decade. ..."
"... Although Congress is likely to rein in the administration's most extreme proposals, the figures are stark indeed -- a proposed cut of $120 billion in the domestic spending levels both parties agreed to. The biggest reductions include a 41% cut in funding for diplomacy and foreign aid; a 36% cut in funding for energy and the environment; and a 35% cut in housing and community development. And that's just the beginning. The Trump administration is also preparing to launch full-scale assaults on food stamps, Medicaid, and Medicare. It's war on everything except the US military. ..."
"... Items that snagged billions in new funding in Trump's proposed 2019 budget included Lockheed Martin's overpriced, underperforming F-35 aircraft, at $10.6 billion; Boeing's F-18 "Super Hornet," which was in the process of being phased out by the Obama administration but is now written in for $2.4 billion; Northrop Grumman's B-21 nuclear bomber at $2.3 billion; General Dynamics' Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine at $3.9 billion; and $12 billion for an array of missile-defense programs that will redound to the benefit of you guessed it: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing, among other companies. These are just a few of the dozens of weapons programs that will be feeding the bottom lines of such companies in the next two years and beyond. For programs still in their early stages, like that new bomber and the new ballistic missile submarine, their banner budgetary years are yet to come. ..."
"... Trump wants to create jobs, jobs, jobs he can point to, and pumping up the military-industrial complex must seem like the path of least resistance to that end in present-day Washington. Under the circumstances, what does it matter that virtually any other form of spending would create more jobs and not saddle Americans with weaponry we don't need? ..."
"... The list of wasteful expenditures is already staggeringly long and early projections are that bureaucratic waste at the Pentagon will amount to $125 billion over the next five years. Among other things, the Defense Department already employs a shadow work force of more than 600,000 private contractors whose responsibilities overlap significantly with work already being done by government employees. Meanwhile, sloppy buying practices regularly result in stories like the recent ones on the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency losing track of how it spent $800 million and how two American commands were unable to account for $500 million meant for the war on drugs in the Greater Middle East and Africa. ..."
"... Most important of all, this flood of new funding, which could crush a generation of Americans under a mountain of debt, will make it easier to sustain the seemingly endless seven wars that the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. So call this one of the worst investments in history, ensuring as it does failed wars to the horizon. ..."
The Military-Industrial Complex Is on Corporate WelfareThe Pentagon will get an
extra $165 billion over the next two years -- that's even more than Donald Trump asked
for.
Imagine for a moment a scheme in which American taxpayers were taken to the cleaners to the
tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and there was barely a hint of criticism or outrage.
Imagine as well that the White House and a majority of the politicians in Washington, no matter
the party, acquiesced in the arrangement. In fact, the annual quest to boost Pentagon spending
into the stratosphere regularly follows that very scenario, assisted by predictions of imminent
doom from industry-funded hawks with a vested interest in increased military outlays. Most
Americans are probably aware that the Pentagon spends a lot of money, but it's unlikely they
grasp just how huge those sums really are. All too often, astonishingly lavish military budgets
are treated as if they were part of the natural order, like death or taxes.
The figures contained in the recent budget deal that kept Congress open, as well as in
President Trump's budget proposal for 2019, are a case in point: $700 billion for the Pentagon
and related programs in 2018 and $716 billion the following year.
Remarkably, such numbers far exceeded even the Pentagon's own expansive expectations.
According to Donald Trump, admittedly not the most reliable source in all cases, Secretary of
Defense Jim Mattis reportedly said, "Wow, I can't believe we got everything we wanted" -- a
rare admission from the head of an organization whose only response to virtually any budget
proposal is to ask for more. The public reaction to such staggering Pentagon budget hikes was
muted, to put it mildly.
Unlike last year's tax giveaway to the rich, throwing near-record amounts of tax dollars at
the Department of Defense generated no visible public outrage. Yet those tax cuts and Pentagon
increases are closely related. The Trump administration's pairing of the two mimics the failed
approach of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s -- only more so. It's a phenomenon I've termed
"Reaganomics on steroids." Reagan's approach yielded oceans of red ink and a severe weakening
of the social safety net. It also provoked such a strong pushback that he later backtracked by
raising taxes and set the stage for sharp reductions in nuclear weapons.
Donald Trump's retrograde policies on immigration, women's rights, racial justice, LGBT
rights, and economic inequality have spawned an impressive and growing resistance. It remains
to be seen whether his generous treatment of the Pentagon at the expense of basic human needs
will spur a similar backlash. Of course, it's hard to even get a bead on what's being lavished
on the Pentagon when much of the media coverage failed to drive home just how enormous these
sums actually are. A rare exception was an Associated Press story headlined "Congress, Trump
Give the Pentagon a Budget the Likes of Which It Has Never Seen." This was certainly far closer
to the truth than claims like that of Mackenzie Eaglen of the conservative American Enterprise
Institute, which over the years has housed such uber-hawks as Dick Cheney and John Bolton. She
described the new budget as a "modest year-on-year increase." If that's the case, one shudders
to think what an immodest increase might look like.
The Pentagon Wins Big
So let's look at the money.
Though the Pentagon's budget was already through the roof, it will get an extra $165
billion over the next two years, thanks to the congressional budget deal reached earlier this
month. To put that figure in context, it was tens of billions of dollars more than Donald
Trump had asked for last spring to "rebuild" the US military (as he put it). It even exceeded
the figures, already higher than Trump's, Congress had agreed to last December. It brings total
spending on the Pentagon and related programs for nuclear weapons to levels higher than those
reached during the Korean and Vietnam wars in the 1950s and 1960s, or even at the height of
Ronald Reagan's vaunted military buildup of the 1980s. Only in two years of Barack Obama's
presidency, when there were roughly 150,000 US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or about seven
times current levels of personnel deployed there, was spending higher.
Ben Freeman of the Center for International Policy put the new Pentagon budget numbers
in perspective when he pointed out that just the approximately $80 billion annual increase in
the department's top line between 2017 and 2019 will be double the current budget of the State
Department; higher than the gross domestic products of more than 100 countries; and larger than
the entire military budget of any country in the world, except China's.
Democrats signed on to that congressional budget as part of a deal to blunt some of the most
egregious Trump administration cuts proposed last spring. The administration, for example, kept
the State Department's budget from being radically slashed and it reauthorized the imperiled
Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for another 10 years. In the process, however, the
Democrats also threw millions of young immigrants under the bus by dropping an insistence that
any new budget protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or "Dreamers," program.
Meanwhile, the majority of Republican fiscal conservatives were thrilled to sign off on a
Pentagon increase that, combined with the Trump tax cut for the rich, funds ballooning deficits
as far as the eye can see -- a total of $7.7 trillion worth of them over the next
decade.
While domestic spending fared better in the recent congressional budget deal than it would
have if Trump's draconian plan for 2018 had been enacted, it still lags far behind what
Congress is investing in the Pentagon. And calculations by the National Priorities Project
indicate that the Department of Defense is slated to be an even bigger winner in Trump's 2019
budget blueprint. Its share of the discretionary budget, which includes virtually everything
the government does other than programs like Medicare and Social Security, will mushroom to a
once-unimaginable 61 cents on the dollar, a hefty boost from the already startling 54 cents on
the dollar in the final year of the Obama administration.
The skewed priorities in Trump's latest budget proposal are fueled in part by the
administration's decision to embrace the Pentagon increases Congress agreed to last month,
while tossing that body's latest decisions on non-military spending out the window.
Although Congress is likely to rein in the administration's most extreme proposals, the
figures are stark indeed -- a proposed cut of $120 billion in the domestic spending levels both
parties agreed to. The biggest reductions include a 41% cut in funding for diplomacy and
foreign aid; a 36% cut in funding for energy and the environment; and a 35% cut in housing and
community development. And that's just the beginning. The Trump administration is also
preparing to launch full-scale assaults on food stamps, Medicaid, and Medicare. It's war on
everything except the US military.
Corporate Welfare
The recent budget plans have brought joy to the hearts of one group of needy Americans: the
top executives of major weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman,
Raytheon, and General Dynamics. They expect a bonanza from the skyrocketing Pentagon
expenditures. Don't be surprised if the CEOs of these five firms give themselves nice salary
boosts, something to truly justify their work, rather than the paltry $96 million they drew as
a group in 2016 (the most recent year for which full statistics are available).
And keep in mind that, like all other US-based corporations, those military-industrial
behemoths will benefit richly from the Trump administration's slashing of the corporate tax
rate. According to one respected industry analyst, a good portion of this windfall will go
towards bonuses and increased dividends for company shareholders rather than investments in new
and better ways to defend the United States. In short, in the Trump era, Lockheed Martin and
its cohorts are guaranteed to make money coming and going.
Items that snagged billions in new funding in Trump's proposed 2019 budget included
Lockheed Martin's overpriced, underperforming F-35 aircraft, at $10.6 billion; Boeing's F-18
"Super Hornet," which was in the process of being phased out by the Obama administration but is
now written in for $2.4 billion; Northrop Grumman's B-21 nuclear bomber at $2.3 billion;
General Dynamics' Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine at $3.9 billion; and $12 billion for
an array of missile-defense programs that will redound to the benefit of you guessed it:
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing, among other companies. These are just a few of the
dozens of weapons programs that will be feeding the bottom lines of such companies in the next
two years and beyond. For programs still in their early stages, like that new bomber and the
new ballistic missile submarine, their banner budgetary years are yet to come.
In explaining the flood of funding that enables a company like Lockheed Martin to reap $35
billion per year in government dollars, defense analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group
noted that "diplomacy is out; air strikes are in In this sort of environment, it's tough to
keep a lid on costs. If demand goes up, prices don't generally come down. And, of course, it's
virtually impossible to kill stuff. You don't have to make any kind of tough choices when
there's such a rising tide."
Pentagon Pork Versus Human Security
Loren Thompson is a consultant to many of those weapons contractors. His think tank, the
Lexington Institute, also gets contributions from the arms industry. He caught the spirit of
the moment when he praised the administration's puffed-up Pentagon proposal for using the
Defense Department budget as a jobs creator in key states, including the crucial swing state of
Ohio, which helped propel Donald Trump to victory in 2016. Thompson was particularly pleased
with a plan to ramp up General Dynamics's production of M-1 tanks in Lima, Ohio, in a factory
whose production line the Army had tried to put on hold just a few years ago because it was
already drowning in tanks and had no conceivable use for more of them.
Thompson argues that the new tanks are needed to keep up with Russia's production of armored
vehicles, a dubious assertion with a decidedly Cold War flavor to it. His claim is backed up,
of course, by the administration's new National Security Strategy, which targets Russia and
China as the most formidable threats to the United States. Never mind that the likely
challenges posed by these two powers -- cyberattacks in the Russian case and economic expansion
in the Chinese one -- have nothing to do with how many tanks the US Army possesses.
Trump wants to create jobs, jobs, jobs he can point to, and pumping up the
military-industrial complex must seem like the path of least resistance to that end in
present-day Washington. Under the circumstances, what does it matter that virtually any other
form of spending would create more jobs and not saddle Americans with weaponry we don't
need?
If past performance offers any indication, none of the new money slated to pour into the
Pentagon will make anyone safer. As Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies has noted, there is a danger that the Pentagon will just get "fatter not stronger" as
its worst spending habits are reinforced by a new gusher of dollars that relieves its planners
of making any reasonably hard choices at all.
The list of wasteful expenditures is already staggeringly long and early projections are
that bureaucratic waste at the Pentagon will amount to $125 billion over the next five years.
Among other things, the Defense Department already employs a shadow work force of more than
600,000 private contractors whose responsibilities overlap significantly with work already
being done by government employees. Meanwhile, sloppy buying practices regularly result in
stories like the recent ones on the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency losing track of how it
spent $800 million and how two American commands were unable to account for $500 million meant
for the war on drugs in the Greater Middle East and Africa.
Add to this the $1.5 trillion slated to be spent on F-35s that the nonpartisan Project on
Government Oversight has noted may never be ready for combat and the unnecessary
"modernization" of the US nuclear arsenal, including a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers,
submarines, and missiles at a minimum cost of $1.2 trillion over the next three decades. In
other words, a large part of the Pentagon's new funding will do much to fuel good times in the
military-industrial complex but little to help the troops or defend the country.
Most important of all, this flood of new funding, which could crush a generation of
Americans under a mountain of debt, will make it easier to sustain the seemingly endless seven
wars that the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia,
and Yemen. So call this one of the worst investments in history, ensuring as it does failed
wars to the horizon.
It would be a welcome change in 21st-century America if the reckless decision to throw yet
more unbelievable sums of money at a Pentagon already vastly overfunded sparked a serious
discussion about America's hyper-militarized foreign policy. A national debate about such
matters in the run-up to the 2018 and 2020 elections could determine whether it continues to be
business-as-usual at the Pentagon or whether the largest agency in the federal government is
finally reined in and relegated to an appropriately defensive posture.
"... We're keeping our eyes out for another report confirming that Hick's account had been hacked (by shadowy Russia-affiliated hackers, no doubt). ..."
As
NBC News pointed out, Hicks' hacking claim raises questions about who hacked the account and why. But the committee wasn't able
to pursue those questions because Hicks, like many other members of the White House staff who have appeared before the House Intel
Committee, has refused to answer questions about her time at the White House or her experiences during the transition -- and also
because she was appearing voluntarily and not under a subpoena for her testimony.
It is standard practice for lawmakers to ask witnesses about phone numbers and email accounts. However, it is uncommon, according
to people familiar with the committee process, for a witness to tell lawmakers that he or she no longer has access to past accounts.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has famously been pursuing the emails of Trump associates and other records from the campaign period,
transition and the Trump administration.
Mueller recently sent a subpoena to former Trump aide Sam Nunberg ordering Nunberg to turn over documents relating in any way
to 10 current and former Trump associates, including Hicks.
As
NBC points out, Corey Lewandowski, Trump's first campaign manager (who reportedly dated Hicks during the campaign while he was
married to another woman), is slated to testify before the committee on Thursday.
We're keeping our eyes out for another report confirming that Hick's account had been hacked (by shadowy Russia-affiliated hackers,
no doubt).
What is always a mystery to me is why these email servers are attached and available to the public Internet. Any script kiddie
with a version of "crack" can eventually guess a password that is composed of regular words or favorite clichés. Not to mention
some inherently hackable OSs.
Are your email accounts all hosted on servers not attached to the internet?
Email servers, even ones attached to the internet, can be protected. Not perfectly, but well enough. Throw in proper use of
non-trivial passwords and you become even safer in a relatively private environment such as a corporation or campaign committee
might set up. When email services are offered freely to everyone you are always at risk, because the hosts will have full access
to whatever you send and receive.
One more thing: make certain you can trust those running your servers. Then you won't have to hire someone to kill them when
they steal stuff via direct access to the servers. Think Seth Rich.
"... he Dems disgust me with their neo-McCarthyism and the Repubs disgust me because of the way they are playing out their hand right now as well. Games within corrupt games, and yet normal behavior especially in waning empires (or other types of polities, including powerful int'l corporations). ..."
"... Chapter 14 of Guns, Germs and Steel is titled "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy" and it used to be available online but my old link is dead and I couldn't find a new one. But a basic definition should suffice: "Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service." I have no idea how one turns this around and I doubt it's even possible. ..."
"... The Real Reason Establishment Frauds Hate Trump and Obsess About Russia https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/02/20/the-real-reason-establishment-frauds-hate-trump-and-obsess-about-russia/ ..."
"... Blaming Russia for all the nation's problems serves several key purposes for various defenders of the status quo. For discredited neocons and neoliberals who never met a failed war based on lies they didn't support, it provides an opportunity to rehabilitate their torched reputations by masquerading as fierce patriots against the latest existential enemy. Similarly, for those who lived in denial about who Obama really was for eight years, latching on to the Russia narrative allows them to reassure themselves that everything really was fine before Trump and Russia came along and ruined the party. ..."
jsn @16 & 40, in complete agreement with you. Great comments! T he Dems disgust me
with their neo-McCarthyism and the Repubs disgust me because of the way they are playing out
their hand right now as well. Games within corrupt games, and yet normal behavior especially in
waning empires (or other types of polities, including powerful int'l corporations).
Chapter 14 of Guns, Germs and Steel is titled "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy" and
it used to be available online but my old link is dead and I couldn't find a new one. But a
basic definition should suffice: "Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, is a
form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the
personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the
wider population, often without pretense of honest service." I have no idea how one turns this
around and I doubt it's even possible.
Back when I used to subscribe to STRATFOR, founder George Friedman always made a point of
evaluating the elites of whatever country he was analyzing and how they operated amongst
themselves and relative to the people and how effective they were or were not in governing a
country. But he never did that for the US. I would have paid extra for that report! But of
course he could not stay in business if he did such a thing as those people are his
clients.
I think Mike Krieger over at Liberty Blitzkrieg nails it from another perspective with this
post:
Blaming Russia for all the nation's problems serves several key purposes for various
defenders of the status quo. For discredited neocons and neoliberals who never met a failed war
based on lies they didn't support, it provides an opportunity to rehabilitate their torched
reputations by masquerading as fierce patriots against the latest existential enemy. Similarly,
for those who lived in denial about who Obama really was for eight years, latching on to the
Russia narrative allows them to reassure themselves that everything really was fine before
Trump and Russia came along and ruined the party.
By throwing every problem in Putin's lap, the entrenched bipartisan status quo can tell
themselves (and everybody else) that it wasn't really them and their policies that voters
rejected in 2016, rather, the American public was tricked by cunning, nefarious Russians.
Ridiculous for sure, but never underestimate the instinctive human desire to deny
accountability for one's own failures. It's always easier to blame than to accept
responsibility.
That said, there's a much bigger game afoot beyond the motivations of individuals looking to
save face. The main reason much of the highest echelons of American power are united against
Trump has nothing to do with his actual policies. Instead, they're terrified that -- unlike
Obama -- he's a really bad salesman for empire. This sort of Presidential instability threatens
the continuance of their well oiled and exceedingly corrupt gravy train. Hillary Clinton was a
sure thing, Donald Trump remains an unpredictable wildcard.
... Obama said all the right things while methodically doing the bidding of oligarchy. He
captured the imagination of millions, if not billions, around the world with his soaring
rhetoric, yet rarely skipped a beat when it came to the advancement of imperial policies. He
made bailing out Wall Street, droning civilians and cracking down on journalists seem
progressive. He said one thing, did another, and people ate it up. This is an extraordinarily
valuable quality when it comes to a vicious and unelected deep state that wants to keep a
corrupt empire together.
Trump has the exact opposite effect. Sure, he also frequently says one thing and then does
another, but he doesn't provide the same feel good quality to empire that Obama did. He's
simply not the warm and fuzzy salesman for oligarchy and empire Obama was, thus his inability
to sugarcoat state-sanctioned murder forces a lot of people to confront the uncomfortable
hypocrisies in our society that many would prefer not to admit.
------------
I can't stand Kushner's smirky face and got a good chuckle from this prince's fall as I am
not a fan of his passion for Israel. But I don't think he's a stupid idiot either. He's
probably very smart in business, but he seems to have no feel for politics. Trump is much
better at it than Kushner. Of course they are going after Kushner as a way to attack and
disadvantage Trump. Politics is a form of warfare after all.
My take is that Trump survives but mostly contained by the Borg
"... Kissinger has always been influenced by Munich, if not always directly or humanely. His and President Richard Nixon's opening to China in order to undermine the Soviet Union while they sought détente with Moscow; their unwillingness to quit Vietnam without first wreaking havoc and spilling blood; their support of odious yet pro-American regimes in Greece and Chile; and their brilliantly executed face-off with Syria and the Soviet Union in 1970, at the time of the terrorist challenge to Jordan's pro-Western regime -- all flowed to a significant extent from Kissinger's determination to avoid the slightest show of weakness, for which read "appeasement." Kissinger regularly mixed violence and the threat of it with diplomacy, so that the diplomacy had credibility. He preserved what he saw as the legitimate order, in which the Soviet Union was both contained and accepted, so that revolutionary chaos was confined to the edges of the superpower battlefield, in the Third World. [emphasis added] ..."
"... America's power elites, "are simply not qualified to grasp the complexity, the nature and application of military force. They simply have no reference points," is proven by today's article, which infuriates me in its sophomoric arrogance, posted on The Hill by "Tom Nichols a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School." ..."
"... I read somewhere that the art of diplomacy was the ability to say " Nice Doggie, Nice Doggie until one had obtained a rock" . I suspect that the Russians have found the working Reset button that Hillary and her associates couldn't. ..."
"... The American global track record of the last few decades does not require any special elaborations -- it is a record of military and humanitarian disasters. ..."
"... Yet, somehow, the Americans have always managed to benefit from those disasters. On the other hand, the very educated country full of graduates of very famous institutions, particularly the military academies, has disintegrated. In case you are wondering I am talking about USSR. ..."
"... let me ask you: how many NATO divisions did it take to conquer Ukraine? That's right, zero. US did spend 5 billion dollars, organized QUANGOS, CIA was involved, no doubt. All the missiles in the world wouldn't have helped Ukraine. Economic sanctions, propaganda and intelligence warfare are the biggest threats to Russia, as far as West is concerned, not open military confrontation. ..."
"... Probably we should accept that Karl Doenitz was right about the future of naval warfare -- nothing on the surface. ..."
"... Since the whole purpose of America's military is to force the host, the United States and its population, to fork over wealth to the parasite, the military industrial complex, the news that all the technology is junk could not be better for them. Now they can throw that all away and make us pay for new useless junk. ..."
"... Nothing drains a country's resources more than wasting them on war and soldiers, rather than on its own people. ..."
"... In layman's lingo, the United States lacks geographic, historic, cultural, economic and technological pressures to develop and have a coherent defensive military doctrine and weapons which would help to implement it. ..."
"... US "elites" simply have no grasp what real war is. ..."
"... After 20 years in the Air Force in air operations and 26 years as a government contractor in finance and procurement, I offer the F-35 as the paradigm of the "death of the US military". Bad design compounded by troubled procurement compounded by non-stop lobbying by politicians and contracts to ignore the obvious = a procurement disaster. ..."
"... Is it not clear that the US generals have sold out America's defenses to Israel – J-MIC rules the Pentagon. We fight wars for Israel – we are NOT defending America. We have lost our Twentieth century defensive edge. We now have a military that is good at assassinating village chiefs (and their families). The US generals keep expanding the geography of their killing until there is going to be a true world war. The cold-hard fact is that our US generals are defending Israel not America. Our US generals are not doing American defense – they are doing Israeli offence. ..."
"... Again, the whole nature of the American military posture since 1970s is lack of any desire to play by the rules, including within the more-or-less stable framework of MAD. In fact, the US constantly tries to exit MAD framework. ..."
"... My main comment on these weapons. How to pay for all this, infrastructure renewal, double the growth rate alongside a huge decline in work force and all those new pensioners seeking healthcare? ..."
"... Can you name one friend the United States has that's not bought and paid for – including Israel? You can't be serious in trotting out the assertion the US has any friends who would remain friends more than 30 minutes following failure on delivery of the latest foreign aid check. ..."
"... Obviously, beyond the greed focused MIC there is a much more serious implication of US last experiencing, but only a medium intensity, war in its Civil War so long ago. The much more serious implication is that it is dishing out war mush more readily than any other nation on the planet. ..."
"... The reason that Ziocon parasites have found such a fertile ground in the US is almost like an isolated island, whose people consider war to be entertainment (shock & awe), have never had any serious family or home losses from it and are dumb and uneducated enough to be pulled by their noses through their MSM to any war that Ziocons fancy. ..."
"... In short, [MIC is a bunch of] smart parasites feeding on dumb f*cks. ..."
"... Therefore, US winning a war against Russia? Not in the next hundred years militarily but possibly through subterfuge: assasinations and regime change. ..."
Putin's speech was brilliant. The neocons couldn't have asked for better content. A CIA
writer like Tom Friedman couldn't glorify militarism any better. The US has no choice but to
ramp up defense spending to even more extreme levels to counter the new Russian threat.
Henry Kissinger's first book, on the Napoleonic Wars, explains Kissinger's foreign
policy better than any of his memoirs, and is striking as an early display of brilliance and
authority
Kissinger has always been influenced by Munich, if not always directly or humanely. His
and President Richard Nixon's opening to China in order to undermine the Soviet Union while
they sought détente with Moscow; their unwillingness to quit Vietnam without first
wreaking havoc and spilling blood; their support of odious yet pro-American regimes in
Greece and Chile; and their brilliantly executed face-off with Syria and the Soviet Union
in 1970, at the time of the terrorist challenge to Jordan's pro-Western regime -- all
flowed to a significant extent from Kissinger's determination to avoid the slightest show
of weakness, for which read "appeasement." Kissinger regularly mixed violence and the
threat of it with diplomacy, so that the diplomacy had credibility. He preserved what
he saw as the legitimate order, in which the Soviet Union was both contained and accepted,
so that revolutionary chaos was confined to the edges of the superpower battlefield, in the
Third World. [emphasis added]
. . .
When, in 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, Kissinger argued for military force against Saddam
Hussein. The legitimate order in the Gulf had been disrupted by a revolutionary chieftain;
to react merely with sanctions would constitute appeasement, and Kissinger said as
much.
Thank God for Russia and Putin, at last their is a country and a man who the Zionist neocons
in the U.S. and Israel and Britain can not invade and destroy for the Zionist NWO, the tide
has changed.
This is one of the best articles that I have recently read. The validity of the points made
is enhanced by some superb expressions and descriptions (pop-military culture, American
strategic kitchen etc.) Eminemtly readable. Well done!
From William Mallinson, author of 'The Danger of Geopolitics to International Relations:
Obsession with the Heartland'.
What I find both galling and frightening, which proves Andrei's point about America's power
elites, "are simply not qualified to grasp the complexity, the nature and application of
military force. They simply have no reference points," is proven by today's article, which
infuriates me in its sophomoric arrogance, posted on The Hill by "Tom Nichols a professor of
national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor at the
Harvard Extension School."
"The only thing that could have made Russian President Vladimir Putin's speech about
Russia's nuclear arsenal better is if he had given it wearing a Mao jacket and stroking a
white cat, like the evil character Blofeld from a James Bond movie.
"Putin's theatrics represented a farrago of theater, fantasy and bluster. For some reason,
Putin said he was unveiling a nuclear-powered cruise missile with virtually unlimited range.
This is a strange thing to claim, for several reasons. It is technologically difficult to do
(which is why the Americans never built one, even after considering it more than 50 years
ago), but more to the point, it serves no purpose. Why build a cruise missile that takes
hours to reach its target when intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) or
submarine-launched ballistic missiles can reach the same targets in minutes?
... ... ...
I think these excerpts prove the idiot has no idea that his much beloved carrier groups
are now effectively rendered useless. Either he's in denial or he's that stupid or he's
lying, preaching to the "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" choir.
Unfortunately the neocons will need a demonstration. Hopefully this can be done without
the sinking of an aircraft carrier and the inevitable escalation that would follow
Thank you for your kind words, William. My upcoming book deals with those issues in much
more expanded form. The title is: "Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American
Strategic Planning." It is not often in one's life that one begins to realize in terror that
present West's in general and US in particular so called "elites" and policy makers are for
the most part ignorant amateurs.
Interesting how many commenters bring back this to neocons. Should Russia disarm so that
peace-loving Americans don't have to endure the neocons' militaristic ramblings?
Don't be–this is the "level" of current American "national security expertdom" which
is a mix of ignorance, arrogance and huge insecurity. There are, of course, many fluffy
"credentials" but for the most part those people are nothing more than empty suites, such as
this "professor" from Naval War College. Actually, the butt-hurt oozes from his filled with
BS piece. I think they got the message.
The Triad appears to have become a duo.
The boomers and the silos.
As it appears that the latest generation of Russian airframes are very stealthy, so it would
extrapolate that the lead in stealth has "vanished."
I wonder when the Russians will announce the breakthrough that makes the oceans transparent
to their satellites.
I read somewhere that the art of diplomacy was the ability to say " Nice Doggie, Nice Doggie
until one had obtained a rock" . I suspect that the Russians have found the working Reset
button that Hillary and her associates couldn't.
The American global track record of the last few decades does not require any special
elaborations -- it is a record of military and humanitarian disasters.
Yet, somehow, the Americans have always managed to benefit from those disasters. On the
other hand, the very educated country full of graduates of very famous institutions,
particularly the military academies, has disintegrated. In case you are wondering I am
talking about USSR.
The Pre-Shoigu Russian Army, for all its real and perceived shortcomings, disposed of
the US-trained and partially equipped Georgian force in a matter of five days -- the
Russian Army's technology, personnel and operational art was simply better.
The mighty Russians defeated a tiny country. What an achievement! At least they had enough
sense not to boast about it. At the beginning of the conflict the Russians were actually
quite a bit disorganized, as is the habit of all Slavs. They were caught by surprise. That
much for their better personnel and operational art.
American power elites, the majority of whom have never served a day in uniform nor ever
attended serious military academic institutions and whose expertise on serious
military-technological and geopolitical issues is limited to couple of seminars on nuclear
weapons and, in the best case scenario, the efforts of the Congressional Research Service
are simply not qualified to grasp the complexity, the nature and application of military
force. They simply have no reference points.
You seem to know so much one is almost tempted to believe you rub shoulders with those
elites on a daily basis. We all know by now that the only person in the world who can
understand those issues is the greates general of all times, Andrei Martyanov, formerly known
as Smoothie ( I wonder what happened ). The power elites do not have to understand those
issues. That is not their job. Believe it or not they have plenty of experts, real experts,
not bloggers who take care of those issues. Whose expert are better? You can measure that by
the position of a country in the world. As far as the pathetic talk about USA collapsing
every minute now I have been hearing that for 60 years. Here is a short list of the countries
which really disintegrated. USSR, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria,Lybia,Ukraine,etc.
After that he proceeded with what can only be described as a military-technological
Pearl-Harbor meets Stalingrad. The strategic ramifications of the latest weapon systems
Putin presented are immense.
I am sure they are. After the slaughter of several hundred Russian mercenaries in Syria
the mighty Russian stand off capabilities, to use your term, showed to the whole world that
they can only stand down. The Russians did not do much in a way of response after the killing
of their general, attack on their base, attack on their embassy, shooting down of their
plane, etc. I know. Their technology is so good they do not have to. It is enough to talk
about it.
In the end, to be attacked from the South Pole, through South America, is not a
contingency the US military is capable of facing. Probably not for very many years.
They do not have to. It is an idiotic proposal.
In any case if only half of your exagerated claims are true you should leave United States
immediately unless of course you are suicidal.
I am pleased –thrilled–to hear from the author of this unemotional, rational,
factual analysis. "Butt-hurt" indeed or delusion. The problem as the "Empire" doubles down as other comments and even your friend The Saker
posted in: http://thesaker.is/how-far-can-the-americans-be-pushed/ is that the hubris and stupidity may escalate into violence, i.e. direct conflict.
You're a better judge perhaps than I of American political and military stupidity. The
C.I.A. controlled Hollywood keeps showing apocalyptic films so as to prepare the masses for
mass death. In addition to making Russians bad guys.
Do Russians understand -- its leadership -- that the extermination of their peons,
namely us, is not a "bug" but a feature to the so-called Western elites? That is, they hold
us in contempt. Look at the recent mass censorship by YouTube of even Christians.
My concern is that a military conflict is unavoidable, except perhaps the Mad Dogs are
such cowards and want to maintain invincibility maybe they'll just stick to proxies in
Ukraine and Syria for now. Thanks for the concise and wise reply.
I agree, they are very, very dumb, but not so dumb to neglect something that may end their
miserable little lives. Therefore, the "professor's" write up is a butt hurt soothing piece.
Just note the amount of hate and frustration reserved for the messenger, because they cannot
even kill the messenger.
The Academies have long been staffed by Cult. Marxist faculties. That is why you see so many military officers who seem to
have astonishingly Liberal political and cultural views. The long march through the institutions has swept over all the major
institutions in the West including the military. The military has been used as the perfect vehicle for instituting the changes
the Left wants because it is based on strict obedience to orders from above. From racial integration in the forties to gay
rights, tranny rights, combat roles for women, and racially equalized outcomes, the Left has used the military as the cutting
edge. I remember an article in American Spectator on Clinton's first inauguration. There was a flyover of military aircraft at
the ceremony. The Spectator reporter saw a Clinton campaigner jeering at the planes, and one of his comrades interrupted him
saying, "Hey, it's cool, those are ours now".
Absolutely excellent point; they can't win wars against real adversaries they can only
murder and bully to spread an agenda. And now their bluff has been called. Ray McGovern's essay on Consortium News is good but none of the State Department morons
and Pentagon fools will understand.
Meh. Good for Russia, but let me ask you: how many NATO divisions did it take to conquer
Ukraine? That's right, zero. US did spend 5 billion dollars, organized QUANGOS, CIA was
involved, no doubt. All the missiles in the world wouldn't have helped Ukraine. Economic
sanctions, propaganda and intelligence warfare are the biggest threats to Russia, as far as
West is concerned, not open military confrontation.
I've been reading your site for a long time. Some points on your response to
Martyanov:
The USA should return to the method used before the 1980s where government organizations
developed weapons and then contracted production to the private sector. Most of these
military/government organizations still exist, but have been sidelined, so crap is
developed by a free market profit seeking monopoly, like the F-35.
Is this really accurate? There was plenty of development by commercial organizations prior
to the 1980s, and military arsenals have their own failure records. Examples of commercial
successes in the past:
*Most aircraft produced until the F-111 (which ultimately matured into a fine aircraftt),
and then afterwards the entire teen series of fighters as well as the A-10
*The original AR-15, which the army chose to screw up royally
Then we have examples of arsenal and lab failures such as:
*Refusing the .276 round for the M1 Garand and later insisting on the 7.62 NATO in
contravention of the superior British alternative
*The aforementioned M16 screwup
*BuOrd's disgraceful WW2 torpedo foulup
Now one thing that has changed substantially is that most ship classes used to be
developed by the Navy itself and its government yards, but now they're developed by
contractors (badly, as shown by the Gerald Ford class, the Zumwalt class, and the LCS joke).
But the old navy did solicit commercial designs as well.
Some more competition is needed. This can come from renewed development by arsenals, but
also we need trust busting in the defense industry.
Program management is obviously a huge disaster, but who knows why? Cost-plus contracts?
Officers and politicians effectively playing for the contractors rather than the country?
Ignorance, as Martyanov suggested?
2. The use of small lasers to blind combatants. The US Marine Corps recently added
expensive "dazzlers" to its machine guns that will prove more effective than the gun
itself. (pictured)
Skeptical. Against trained infantry gunfire is largely suppressive. The enemy is destroyed
by indirect fires and making use of microterrain to maneuver.
That said adds another useful weapon for relatively little weight, and depending on the
power of the laser and the weather that day it could outperform gunfire at longer ranges.
3. The inability to replace munitions stocks in a timely manner. Most nations have
limited stockpiles and the complexity of some make rapid production impossible. If the USA
becomes involved in a major war that lasts longer than a month, it will have to pause for
several months until new munitions are produced and delivered.
This was an issue even in the Cold War (NATO officially planned on 30 days warstocks, but
based on the experience of the Yom Kippur war it probably had one-two weeks). It was also an
issue for all combatants in the early stages of both world wars.
It seems difficult to plan for this, especially as politicians are likely to balk at huge
warstocks which must be frequently replaced or refurbished.
More important may be simply maintaining a strong industrial base–woops.
5. The millions of civilian vehicles on the world's roads. It is impossible to tell if
they are friend or foe unless inspected up close. Soldiers can use this to their advantage,
which makes urban operations very dangerous for both civilians and soldiers.
This, incidentally, also makes the interdiction mission for airpower that was so
successful in the summer of 1944 effectively useless against any industrialized opponent.
In the summer of 1944 we had 11,000 fighters (as well as medium bombers, unsure how many)
in Western Europe facing a few thousand German trucks and a small number of rail lines.
In a modern conflict we'd have a few hundred fighters and attack aircraft against
millions of trucks. Modern aircraft can attack more targets successfully, but the
disparity is too huge to overcome.
9. Modern body armor has made 5.56mm and even 7.62mm bullets less lethal.
This is solvable problem in my view. Increase the sectional density and length of the
bullet, and increase muzzle velocity.
Explosive and raufoss rounds might work as well, though the small size of bullets makes me
skeptical.
Precision-guided glide weapons of relatively small size (e.g. 40mm in diameter) are
another option.
You also don't need to kill an opponent to achieve mission kill, and even someone in
hard-kill body armor will be suppressed by gunfire which then allows for attack by indirect
fires.
10. Fleets of surface ships cannot hide for long in big oceans.
Embarrassingly the USN's official response to the Chinese demonstration of an antiship
ballistic missile was that battlegroups would be hard to find. Sure. Even if that were true, to attack the enemy on land the battlegroups must get close to
shore, where they are easily found and attacked. The USN basically stopped even bothering to defend its surface fleet against serious
opponents after the cancellation of the F-111B.
The F-111B was a logical response to the threat of Soviet naval aviation. With a combat
range of over 2,000 nautical miles on internal fuel, it could credibly keep Soviet maritime
patrol bombers out of launch range for their anti-ship missiles (which were to be armed with
tactical nuclear warheads).
The replacement F-14 only had a range of about 500 nautical miles. While a fine aircraft
in many respect, it was useless in its planned role of fleet defense.
Advanced long-range SAMs could do the job instead of long-range interceptors, but the US
lags Russia badly here and has no long-range SAMs of any kind.
This leaves missile defense and CIWS (where the US also lags many foreign nations, even
small European ones!) to protect the fleet.
Good luck with that. Serious things that might defend the fleet:
*Long-range interceptors
*Long-range SAMs (USN equivalent of S-300/400/500 family)
*High energy microwaves (with enough energy a bubble field could destroy missile
electronics)
*Upgraded and more numerous CIWS, ideally with lasers and rail guns if they ever get those to
work
*Actually armoring ships
But even if all of these expensive technologies work as intended, they'll still vulnerable
to being overwhelmed by salvos as well as nuclear warheads.
Probably we should accept that Karl Doenitz was right about the future of naval
warfare -- nothing on the surface.
The navy should instead be made up mostly of submarines and long range aircraft. Surface
forces would be limited to mine sweepers, ASW corvettes, and green/brown water small boats
(like the LCS except not expensive and trash).
The entire amphibious assault concept is ridiculous as well. Amphibious assaults were hard
enough to pull off in WW2 against inferior opponents hard pressed on other fronts. Against a prepared opponent with modern technology they will fail spectacularly.
And against an UNPREPARED opponent no specialized and expensive amphibious forces are
needed. They can be quickly conducted using improvised equipment as the Germans did in 1917
and again in 1940.
Technology is not the factor that makes this leapfrog so hopeless for the US MIC. The
structure of Russia's defense industrial base is inherently more agile and efficient because
it's a resource of the state and not exclusively a private profit center.
Back when the USSR had just collapsed in the expectation of peace and disarmament, Russian
defense industries lost interest in weapons and looked to commercial markets. They pitched
projects like satellite systems they could field at one percent of the cost of existing
systems. You read that right. Comparable US systems were two orders of magnitude more
expensive. Russia's defense industrial base continued to out-innovate the Pentagon.
The US counter is to spend ten times more and piss away 95% of it. The inherent drain on
procurement includes loading, such as marketing for more and more programs, and McMansions
for the C-Suite parasites, from performance bonuses whose intended incentives can always be
negated with revenue growth. It's as if you decided to bulk up, but instead of lifting
weights you injected yourself with CIA's metastasizing-cancer toxin. The beltway cannot
possibly keep up.
Since the whole purpose of America's military is to force the host, the United States and its
population, to fork over wealth to the parasite, the military industrial complex, the news
that all the technology is junk could not be better for them. Now they can throw that all
away and make us pay for new useless junk.
The US exports War and Terrorism as its number one export, all for the profit of the rich.
The taxpayers pay for all sorts of military equipment that gets paid for but most of it is
never really delivered. How many ICBM missiles do you think the thieving rich have in those
silos in North Dakota? I would bet zero. Much more profit in pocketing the money and telling
the suckers you buried their missiles in the ground where the Russkies, and the taxpayers,
never can see them. Why would any of the super wonderful people who rule us lie about
anything? Why would super wonderful Putin lie about anything? Only commie pinkos don't trust
their Government or the stuff they read on the internet.
After the slaughter of several hundred Russian mercenaries in Syria
most likely less than 20, but, doesn't affect your point. All this "online therapy" about all powerful Russia is just that.
Good for them. Beats pills and alcohol. The war between The Empire and Russia won't be with high tech weaponry.
It will be by dissent, insurrections and ethic warfare, as in Ukraine. We'll see how will all that "high tech" work in next flareup there.
"The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is on the run around the globe" said chief Pentagon
spokesman Dana W. White last year.
"We're not surprised by the statements and the American people should rest assured that we
are fully prepared," said Pentagon tranny Dana White a week ago.
The US military exists to enslave the majority and to force them to pay the majority of
their incomes in taxes. What do Americans get in exchange for their taxes? Do they get health
insurance? No. Do they get retirement benefits? No, unless you consider $1000 or less a month
in social security a "retirement." Maybe if you live in your car. Do they get decent roads?
No. Do they get decent public transportation? No. Do they get anything positive of any sort?
No, except their "Freedoms" and their "Specialness" and "Preparation" by the world's greatest
Ponzi scheme. Nothing drains a country's resources more than wasting them on war and
soldiers, rather than on its own people.
You can be absolutely 100% sure that huge amount of money will be thrown at Pentagon, but
as some people here astutely observed, most of it will be wasted or stolen. US will continue
to invest into totally bankrupt weapons systems since they are not designed to fight but to
make money. The track record of military-technological whopping disasters of the last decade
or so is simply stunning–from F-35, to LCS, to now emerging unproven and fantastically
expensive technologies for Columbia-class sub, to, basically not working air-defense and
anti-missile complexes. This is simply unprecedented in human history.
Technology is not the factor that makes this leapfrog so hopeless for the US MIC. The
structure of Russia's defense industrial base is inherently more agile and efficient
because it's a resource of the state and not exclusively a private profit center.
I agree with your thesis but the major factor here is a cultural one–a dramatically
different attitude to war between Russia and US. I wrote about this here:
In layman's lingo, the United States lacks geographic, historic, cultural, economic and
technological pressures to develop and have a coherent defensive military doctrine and
weapons which would help to implement it.
One cannot buy a history (albeit many in Washington think that it is possible) one has to
experience it and built national institutions accordingly. US "elites" simply have no grasp
what real war is.
In the 1970s, NATO sponsored seminars on the Soviet Union's military weaponry. I attended
the seminars. We had "hands-on" access to Soviet tanks and other equipment. I was impressed.
It was the biggest "bang for the buck" as opposed to the US model of letting private,
for-profit contractors design and cost weapons for you. We left the seminars with a heartfelt
fear of the Soviet Union's military capability.
BTW: Due to a few soldiers going "postal", we
were not allowed access to our unit weapons except in the case of an emergency or, maybe a
war.
After 20 years in the Air Force in air operations and 26 years as a government contractor
in finance and procurement, I offer the F-35 as the paradigm of the "death of the US
military". Bad design compounded by troubled procurement compounded by non-stop lobbying by
politicians and contracts to ignore the obvious = a procurement disaster.
The F-111 program proved that it was not possible to develop a common design that could
meet the requirements of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. Carriers vs. land-based
airfields. It cannot be done. The contracts and politicians made the case that it could be
done. The F-35 is the dismal result.
Russian weapons are designed by the military and then outsourced to government-industries
or private contractors for production. US weapons are designed by contractors to maximize
profits and then forced on the military services by politicians. Go figure the outcomes.
The US military exists to enslave the majority and to force them to pay the majority of
their incomes in taxes.
This is a silly comment. All taxing authority (which in turn also implies monetary
authority) is dependent on state power. Military power is but one aspect of state power. To
that we can add police forces, courts, and of course the the tax authorities themselves.
There are also the non-coercive aspects of state power such as propaganda, legitimacy, social
services, public employees, etc.
If the primary purpose of the US military were to enslave the domestic population, both
its deployment and its weapons would be completely different. Instead of a global empire of
bases which won't even protect the Southern border, armed forces would be arrayed in bases
located outside of major metropolitan areas.
The army would have a lot more armor, artillery, infantry, and airpower. The air force
would have low performance aircraft with large payloads. The navy would be more of a
gendarmerie.
And almost no one in America pays the majority of his income in taxes. Some people far
into the top bracket in California who are very bad at tax planning and hate capital gains
and qualified dividends perhaps.
What do Americans get in exchange for their taxes? Do they get health insurance? No. Do
they get retirement benefits? No, unless you consider $1000 or less a month in social
security a "retirement." Maybe if you live in your car. Do they get decent roads? No. Do
they get decent public transportation?
In other words you're a social democrat, and for that matter your statements aren't
correct.
Poor Americans and elderly Americans get health insurance from the government.
The maximum monthly social security benefit is $3,538.
The roads are not bad at all in most of the country.
Can't argue with you on mass transit of course.
I'd rather have minimal safety nets and an expansive private sector (stripped of
rent-seeking, monopolistic, and parasitic elements to be sure). This is a class and
ideological issue with trade-offs.
What is damning is the relative inefficiency of public spending in America relative to
many other industrial countries, and this isn't all owing to the bloated military-industrial
complex (which is also inefficient). The country spends as much tax money on health
insurance as many other countries but fails to cover the entire population. The pay-as-you
pension system has an abysmal rate of return. Infrastructure projects are cartoonishly
expensive compared to other rich countries.
You can be absolutely 100% sure that huge amount of money will be thrown at Pentagon,
but as some people here astutely observed, most of it will be wasted or stolen.
May be that was Putin's idea. Let them outspend and enlarge the astronomic budget US's
deficit. In the end with 2500 strategic nukes on each side, MAD will remain firmly in place
with or whithout NMD.
Is it not clear that the US generals have sold out America's defenses to Israel – J-MIC
rules the Pentagon. We fight wars for Israel – we are NOT defending America. We have
lost our Twentieth century defensive edge. We now have a military that is good at
assassinating village chiefs (and their families).
The US generals keep expanding the geography of their killing until there is going to be a
true world war. The cold-hard fact is that our US generals are defending Israel not America. Our US
generals are not doing American defense – they are doing Israeli offence.
Why is every US general a supporter of Israel? The trillions of dollars spent on the ME are depleting our defenses at home. Is this not
obvious? The J-MIC must be taken on!
Think Peace -- Art
p.s. In true fascist order, Netanyahu is meeting Trump today – in un-American
fashion, there will be no free press asking questions.
p.s. How does that bastard get to dictate to our country – ignoring our values.
May be that was Putin's idea. Let them outspend and enlarge the astronomic budget US's
deficit. In the end with 2500 strategic nukes on each side, MAD will remain firmly in place
with or whitout NMD.
The main idea was to show futility of most American strategies re: Russia, including
useless and immensely expensive ABM program. This, by definition, should "coerce" American
"elites" into more constructive mode.
Again, the whole nature of the American military
posture since 1970s is lack of any desire to play by the rules, including within the
more-or-less stable framework of MAD. In fact, the US constantly tries to exit MAD framework.
Now it is over for US, it may try to exit MAD whatever it wants–it doesn't matter: US
is completely defenseless against both nuclear and conventional HPWs. Again, since 2010
Russia's Military Doctrine, reiterated in 2014 edition of same, the use of high precision
conventional weapons IS stated as means of strategic power containment. Obviously, most of US
"experts" seldom comprehend what they read from Russia, but it is their problem.
As per bankrupting itself–sorry, but the US is already bankrupt and the only exit
from this situation for US is coercion of Europe and American re-industrialization. Is it
possible at this stage? I doubt it but we still have to wait and see. A huge part of the US
"dominance" was its claim to being capable to power wrestle anyone on the planet. This is
absolutely NOT the case anymore. hasn't been for quite some time, without this military
mythology the globalist economic "order" begins to crumble–a process we all observe
today. So, in summary–it is not one or the other thing, it is many things together
working both in concert and providing synergistic effect. On March 1st Putin declared
Russia's absolute sovereignty–as I said, we are entering new post-Pax American world,
and I mean right this very moment as I type this.
I've often thought there should be international war games where, for example, the
Russians are authorized to launch a missile "attack" on some deserted area with dummy
warheads, and we're obliged to shoot them down to thwart the attack, and vice versa.
The USA should return to the method used before the 1980s where government organizations
developed weapons and then contracted production to the private sector.
This is a blatant admission that free market economy which is the source of innovation and
efficiency is a hoax and a failure. Free market economy is nothing but a façade and a 3
Cup Scam to stealing from the people en masse without raising a fuss.
Second will Russia use their new and potentially superior position to offer protection
to its neighbours and eventually kick America out of Eurasia.
As Syria's example shows, one of the major Russian exports of the future will be, in
fact–already is, a political stability and defense against "regime changes". This
"product" will be in a very high demand.
Putin offered Bush superior sites for a radar to monitor Iran. Bush refused and insisted
on a site that monitored Russia as least as well. After that, Putin lost trust in US
intentions. Bush screwed up so much.
My main comment on these weapons. How to pay for all this, infrastructure renewal, double the
growth rate alongside a huge decline in work force and all those new pensioners seeking
healthcare? World class Big Data too. Productivity growth needs new investment which needs
modest interest rates. That's not really happening, a Rotenberg project or so excluded.
As Syria's example shows, one of the major Russian exports of the future will be, in
fact–already is, a political stability and defense against "regime changes". This
"product" will be in a very high demand.
Whatever the next major conflict, who are friends are will matter -- especially on the
question of the breadth and scope extended operations.
Can you name one friend the United States has that's not bought and paid for –
including Israel? You can't be serious in trotting out the assertion the US has any friends
who would remain friends more than 30 minutes following failure on delivery of the latest
foreign aid check.
Not to mention the numerous and immensely large sums (Trillions?) that have simply
disappeared "in" the Pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld made one such announcement on 10/11/2001.
Obviously, beyond the greed focused MIC there is a much more serious implication of US
last experiencing, but only a medium intensity, war in its Civil War so long ago. The much
more serious implication is that it is dishing out war mush more readily than any other
nation on the planet.
The reason that Ziocon parasites have found such a fertile ground in
the US is almost like an isolated island, whose people consider war to be entertainment
(shock & awe), have never had any serious family or home losses from it and are dumb and
uneducated enough to be pulled by their noses through their MSM to any war that Ziocons
fancy.
In short, [MIC is a bunch of] smart parasites feeding on dumb f*cks.
Another point is that the parasites control and profit from the fully enclosed war
cycle:
Media,
Weapon building industry,
Post-war reconstruction industry and
More stolen oil, water and land for Israel.
In such system, the efficiency is an absolutely last (unprofitable) consideration.
Therefore, US winning a war against Russia? Not in the next hundred years militarily but
possibly through subterfuge: assasinations and regime change.
"... The neocons are nothing if not survivors: they've managed to escape being totally shunned despite their disastrous leadership of the Iraq war, and they're now enjoying a new vogue in "liberal" and even leftist circles on account of their pioneering efforts on behalf of the NeverTrump movement. ..."
"... yet in this era of "America First" nationalism and the explicit anti-globalism of some in the higher reaches of the Trump administration, this time they may well be facing a humiliating defeat. ..."
The neocons are nothing if not survivors: they've managed to escape being totally
shunned despite their disastrous leadership of the Iraq war, and they're now enjoying a new
vogue in "liberal" and even leftist circles on account of their pioneering efforts on behalf of
the NeverTrump movement.
This attack on their longtime stronghold in government is bound to call out the Furies, and
yet in this era of "America First" nationalism and the explicit anti-globalism of some in
the higher reaches of the Trump administration, this time they may well be facing a humiliating
defeat. The NED is a rich source of grants and other government goodies: for the neocons
to lose this is hitting them where they live.
Yes, the good news is breaking out all over! Enjoy it while it lasts
"... #Russiagate, from the start, was framed as an indictment not just of one potentially traitorous Trump, but all alternative politics in general. The story has evolved to seem less like a single focused investigation and more like the broad institutional response to a spate of shocking election results, targeting the beliefs of discontented Americans across the political spectrum. ..."
"... it might be more scary then insane actually given how many are being suckered into this stupidity.. ..."
"... The US is under a psychotic mind massage that requires daily doses of Russophobic "medicine". ..."
"... All they have is their own crippled view of reality. But it is very dangerous. Projecting their own fears and hatreds often self-triggers into violence when schizoidal patients act out. ..."
"... The silver lining here though is that it is not working. Take the case of Matteo Renzi in Sunday's general election in Italy. He had tried to copy his neoliberal colleagues in other countries and allege victimization at the hands of Russian hackers and bots, but he eventually threw in the towel because the absurdity of his claims were roundly dismissed by the public. His Democratic Party polled under 20% and he announced his resignation the other day. The neoliberals can keep peddling their Russophobia but it doesn't work at the polls. ..."
"... "This Russiagate nonsense has do be debunked at each and every corner to prevent its further abuse against dissent on everything else." To me it looks like a Sisyphos work. Where I look I am confronted with cheating Russians, faking Russians, murdering Russians, they are just evil, evil, evil. I honestly doubt you can do anything against this avalanche of genuine demonizing. It's disgusting but apparently the ruling circles want to go to war. And even you won't stop them. ..."
"... The morons who peddle this "Russia did it" nonsense fully realize it isn't true, but it distracts the masses, so the bought and paid for idiots who now own the U$A, can dismantle any Govt. interference to their plan for global market share capture. ..."
"... Taibbi is right and that makes 'progressive' embrace of the Russiagate hoaxes that much more sinister. It is fundamentally pro-war, pro-establishment and pro-censorship ..."
"... "...but I rather doubt "the ruling circles" want a hot war with Russia/China and their allies as that will destroy their Casino-economy faster than most anything else..." ..."
"... Let's hope you're right. Brit General Sir Gordon Messenger views the "next big fight," most likely against nuclear-armed Russia, as winnable. (Times 18.03.01) And he isn't the only confident warmonger. ..."
"... Really folks, what the hell do people expect the rest of the globe to do, as the U$A's corporate empire continues to surround and attempt to strangle other nations? If other nations of the globe didn't push back, I for one, wouldn't respect them. Other nations of the world have the legitimate right to push back, and should. ..."
It is unlikely that the headline was chosen by the author of the op-ed. The editors of the
Washington Post opinion page wrote it. I also doubt that she would have chosen a
picture of the FCC head to decorate her piece.
For the record: The headline is false.
The op-ed is about a request for comments the Federal Communications Commission issued last
year in preparation of its net-neutrality decision. Anyone, and anything, could comment
multiple times. Various lobbying firms, political action groups and hacks abused the public
comment system to send copy-paste comments via single-use email accounts or even without giving
any email address.
But this had and has nothing to with Russia or Russians.
Here are the top graphs of the the WaPo op-ed with the "Russia-did-it" headline:
What do Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), deceased actress Patty Duke, a 13-year-old from upstate
New York and a 96-year-old veteran from Southern California have in common?
They appear to have filed comments in the net neutrality record at the Federal
Communications Commission. That ought to mean they went online, submitted their names and
addresses, and typed out their thoughts about Internet regulatory policy. But appearances can
be deceiving. In fact, each of these individuals -- along with 2 million others -- had their
identities stolen and used to file fake comments.
These fake comments were not the only unnerving thing in the FCC net neutrality record. In
the course of its deliberations on the future of Internet openness, the agency logged about
half a million comments sent from Russian email addresses . It received nearly 8 million
comments from email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com with almost identical
wording.
I have emphasized the only words in the whole op-ed that are related to Russia. They are
wrong. The author of that op-ed does not understand the FCC public comment system. Public
comments are made by filling
out a form on the FCC website leaving ones comment, some address data and an email address.
Public comments are not "send" by email. Thus the FCC did not log any comments "sent from
Russian email". It logged comments made in a web form where the human (or program) making the
comment provided a Russian email address as a means of contact. (It is obviously not expertise
on communication issues that qualifies Mrs. Rosenworcel for her position as FCC
commissioner.)
At least 12-13 million of the 21.7 million comments to the FCC were fake. 8 million email
addresses entered in the form the FCC had set up were generated with www.fakemailgenerator.com , half a million were entered
with *.ru Internet domains.
FakeMailGenerator can use foreign domains for generating throw-away email addresses. In the
screenshot below it generated an Hungarian one for me.
If I would comment at the FCC and enter [email protected] into the FCC form I
would be counted as Hungarian. I would not have "sent" that comment from an Hungarian email
address. Nor did the entering of the comment make me Hungarian. Neither do *.ru email domains
mean that the people (ab-)using them have anything to do with Russia.
The Pew Research Center
analyzed the 21.7 million comments the FCC received:
Fully 57% of comments used temporary or duplicate email addresses, and seven popular comments
accounted for 38% of all submissions
The FCC and other agencies are required by law to accept public comments. But, as the op-ed
says, it is utterly useless to request such public comments on the Internet without having some
authentication system in place. The FCC did have some email address verification system in
place. But it did not use it. As the Pew Center writes:
[T]he Center's analysis shows that the FCC site does not appear to have utilized this email
verification process on a consistent basis. According to this analysis of the data from the
FCC, only 3% of the comments definitively went through this validation process . In the vast
majority of cases, it is unclear whether any attempt was made to validate the email address
provided.
As a result, in many cases commenters were able to use generic or bogus email addresses
and still have their comments accepted by the FCC and posted online.
It is obvious that the FCC had no interest at all in receiving legitimate public comments.
But the FCC at least did not blame Russia. The Washington Post editors do that when
they chose a headline that has no factual basis in the piece below it. They abuse the op-ed
which has the presumed authority of an FCC commissioner to reinforce their anti-Russian
campaign.
C. J. Hopkins notes that such a cult of authority is
systematically used to make the lunatic claims of Russiagate believable.
Matt Taibbi writes that the aim of the Russiagate campaign was and is to
target all dissent :
If you don't think that the endgame to all of this lunacy is a world where every
America-critical movement from Black Lives Matter to Our Revolution to the Green Party is
ultimately swept up in the collusion narrative along with Donald Trump and his alt-right
minions, you haven't been paying attention.
That's because #Russiagate, from the start, was framed as an indictment not just of one
potentially traitorous Trump, but all alternative politics in general. The story has evolved
to seem less like a single focused investigation and more like the broad institutional
response to a spate of shocking election results, targeting the beliefs of discontented
Americans across the political spectrum.
Some commenters here lament about my posts about the Steele and or Russiagate issues. "It's
enough already." But the issue is, as Taibbi points out, much bigger. This Russiagate nonsense
has do be debunked at each and every corner to prevent its further abuse against dissent on
everything else.
Posted by b on March 7, 2018 at 04:17 PM | Permalink
thanks b.. this Russiagate thing is insane... i like the counter punch article you linked to
and appreciate your breaking these fcc thing apart... it might be more scary then insane
actually given how many are being suckered into this stupidity..
b: "This Russiagate nonsense has do be debunked at each and every corner to prevent its
further abuse against dissent on everything else."
Concur 100% Truth must be used in the constant battle against Big Lie Nation and its
perverse billionaire Deep State. Bezos should be wary he now wears a bullseye on his back
none of his billions can remove. I see Taibbi has finally gotten part of his head out of his
ass and is finally beginning to recognize Russiagate to be the Big Lie that it is, although
he hasn't yet extracted his mouth so he can tell the world it's all a Big Lie--bet Deep State
affiliated Rolling Stone would fire him if he did so. That's why we're treated to his
poorly written article that's almost two years too late.
b, glad to have your expert mind cutting through the maze of crapola. The US is under a psychotic mind massage that requires daily doses of Russophobic
"medicine".
All they have is their own crippled view of reality. But it is very dangerous.
Projecting their own fears and hatreds often self-triggers into violence when schizoidal
patients act out. We see this in America with school and concert shootings. With Russia as its enemy, the Exceptional Nation is taunting a great power with more nukes
than the US has. Every stupid American statement, thus, must be challenged. We can't be silent or laugh.
It's too serious.
The silver lining here though is that it is not working. Take the case of Matteo Renzi in
Sunday's general election in Italy. He had tried to copy his neoliberal colleagues in other
countries and allege victimization at the hands of Russian hackers and bots, but he
eventually threw in the towel because the absurdity of his claims were roundly dismissed by
the public. His Democratic Party polled under 20% and he announced his resignation the other
day. The neoliberals can keep peddling their Russophobia but it doesn't work at the polls.
Sorry to go off topic but the Syrian Arab Army has just marched thru East Gouta town of
Al-Hammouriyah to the joy of locals who are demanding that the arseholes of Faylaq al-Rahman
and Jaysh al-Islam take the next stage outta Beit Sawa.
There is a vid from
Al Masdar Newshereand another
here if you want to use facebook links as the vids are mounted on FB. Both vids show
support for the SAA by the population of East Gouta.
"This Russiagate nonsense has do be debunked at each and every corner to prevent its further
abuse against dissent on everything else."
To me it looks like a Sisyphos work. Where I look I am confronted with cheating Russians,
faking Russians, murdering Russians, they are just evil, evil, evil. I honestly doubt you can
do anything against this avalanche of genuine demonizing. It's disgusting but apparently the
ruling circles want to go to war. And even you won't stop them.
"It is obvious that the FCC had no interest at all in receiving legitimate public comments.
..." hahaha. too true, B!! quite simply, democracy and capitalism can no longer co-habitate under the same roof
The morons who peddle this "Russia did it" nonsense fully realize it isn't true, but it
distracts the masses, so the bought and paid for idiots who now own the U$A, can dismantle
any Govt. interference to their plan for global market share capture.
Taibbi is right and that makes 'progressive' embrace of the Russiagate hoaxes that much more
sinister. It is fundamentally pro-war, pro-establishment and pro-censorship and thus not
progressive -- depending on how we define progress of course...
"...but I rather doubt "the ruling circles" want a hot war with Russia/China and their allies
as that will destroy their Casino-economy faster than most anything else..."
Let's hope you're right. Brit General Sir Gordon Messenger views the "next big fight," most
likely against nuclear-armed Russia, as winnable. (Times 18.03.01) And he isn't the only
confident warmonger.
Yes, we (patriotic) dissenters are "swept up in the collusion narrative" when we are labeled
"Russians." This has happened to me. When I comment a lot on military sites about the
ridiculous waste of money they are, I occasionally get the Russian treatment. "You're a
Russian." Once it was hilarious when the "Russian" label on me was deemed authentic by one
genius blogger. He said I must be Russian because I had used the word "kilometers." That
proved my Russian-ness to him. . . .Currently Trump is denigrated for being a Russia-lover,
but calling him a Russian is not likely (but possible).
Really folks, what the hell do people expect the rest of the globe to do, as the U$A's
corporate empire continues to surround and attempt to strangle other nations? If other
nations of the globe didn't push back, I for one, wouldn't respect them. Other nations of the
world have the legitimate right to push back, and should.
The US Power Elite ... would be rightfully called the „Deep State" of the USA (
http://tinyurl.com/ho2nz87
).
And this Deep State has become more and more ruthless over the time. They have brought
nightmares over the Southern Hemisphere by installing brutal dictatorships ( http://tinyurl.com/kkpvcf7 ) in their
interest and waging bloody colonial wars, in the last one and a half decades especially with
their „War on Terror" ( http://tinyurl.com/nrxxej5 ).
One of their aims is to prevent countries of Africa, Latin America, Near and Middle East and
Southern Asia from choosing their trade partners freely and from making use of their resources
and industrialize, since that would mean a division of resources and allowing them their part
of „consuming ecologic Earth capacity".
Ever since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 US presidential
election , the Democratic Party establishment has held tightly to the belief that her shock
defeat was not the result of her and their shortcomings, but rather due to a nefarious Russian
plot to "hack" the election in "collusion" with the winner.
Instead of examining why Donald Trump was able to connect with voters in economically
distressed parts of the country in a way that Democrats failed to do, adherents of the
Russiagate narrative hoped that investigations would quickly find a smoking gun, leading to
Trump's impeachment and undoing an election result they consider aberrant and unjust.
On Friday, I spoke at a conference in Washington, DC, titled The Israel Lobby and American Policy , sponsored
by The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and IRmep , a group that researches the lobby's influence.
As I note in my talk, a handful of journalists – especially Max Blumenthal and
Aaron Maté of The Real News – have consistently debunked the wild, exaggerated
and sometimes fabricated claims of Russian interference made by members of the self-styled but
woefully ineffectual "Resistance" to Trump.
Watch the video above.
True, over the course of the last year, special counsel Robert Mueller has made a number of
indictments, but none of those cases – including the recent
indictment of 13 Russians linked to a St. Petersburg troll farm – substantiates the
heavily hyped claim that Russia helped Trump win the White House.
Perhaps the most high-profile indictment of someone in Trump's inner circle, the president's
first national security adviser Michael Flynn , actually shows that
rather than colluding with Russia, senior members of Trump's team were really
working with Israel to
advanceits agenda.
And while no one has pinpointed evidence of Trump auctioning off his foreign policy to any
Russian oligarchs, he has definitely
tailored his policy toward Israel to the demands of casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson , his biggest campaign
donor .
Adelson's immediate priority was securing US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital
and moving the American embassy there – and Trump duly
obliged .
New censorship helps Israel
In my talk I consider how the Russiagate narrative is actually helping Israel and its lobby
in particular ways.
I point out that the Russiagate hysteria being adopted by many liberals is legitimizing
censorship that helps Israel clamp down on free speech and a free press.
Last year, the Russian-funded network RT was forced to register under the Foreign Agents
Registration Act (FARA).
As Maté has noted, free speech advocates and journalists were largely
silent about it , perhaps thinking this tool of government control over the media would
never be used against them.
But now, Israel's supporters in Congress –
including Senator Ted Cruz – are demanding
that Al Jazeera be investigated by the Department of Justice and forced to register as an agent
of Qatar. They are explicitly citing the US government crackdown on RT as their precedent.
Al Jazeera's transgression is that it produced an undercover documentary on the workings of
the Israel lobby in the US.
Qatar has come under intense pressure from that lobby to make sure the documentary is never
aired. Five months after the network's head of investigations Clayton Swisher
announced it would be released "very soon," the film has yet to be broadcast.
According to a source who has seen it, the film identifies a number of lobby groups as
working with Israel to spy on American citizens using sophisticated data gathering techniques.
It is also said to cast light on covert efforts to smear and intimidate Americans seen as too
critical of Israel.
True, FARA is being used only against foreign networks, but the point is that these outlets
– whatever their flaws – are providing space for discussion and dissent that docile
US mainstream media keep closed.
It's simply impossible to imagine CNN, ABC – or for that matter the BBC –
showing true independence and taking on the power of the Israel lobby.
While organizers diligently informed media about the Washington conference, the only outlets
that invited me on to talk about the Israel lobby were the The Real News and RT. I know that
other speakers were shut out of mainstream media as well.
And besides, there are other forms of high-tech censorship that are being used to stifle or
stigmatize dissent in domestic media: Partly as an outgrowth of Russiagate, Silicon Valley
giants Google and
Facebook have succumbed to political
pressure to effectively
throttle the exposure
of independent outlets in the name of fighting extremism, "fake news" and alleged foreign
interference.
The perverse effect has been to reassert state and elite control over media and erode the
freedom that those of us shut out of mainstream outlets rely on. Nothing could suit Israel and
its lobby better.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was
secretary of state in the run-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, issued a stark warning that the US ramping up its
military presence in Syria may be a prelude to launching a war on Iran on behalf of Israel.
Wilkerson said that Israel and its ally Saudi Arabia are encouraging the US to fight a
regime-change war against Tehran that they would be incapable of mounting on their own.
"We've already done Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan," Wilkerson said, "so we'd just be seen
as continuing the trend."
He warned that an Israeli confrontation and war with Lebanon – perhaps on the pretext
of disputed gas fields in the Mediterranean – could provide the pretext.
In an ominous parallel, he likened the current situation to 1914, the eve of World War I
– any spark could generate a broad regional or even global conflagration.
Wilkerson singled out the role of the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of
Democracies as leading the campaign for war on behalf of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and his defense minister Avigdor Lieberman.
Notably, the source who spoke to The Electronic Intifada about Al Jazeera's suppressed
Israel lobby film said that the documentary reveals that the same think tank may be acting as
an agent for Israel in its covert efforts to undermine support for Palestinian rights in the
US.
In spite of Wilkerson's worrying thesis, it must be said that, however powerful, the Israel
lobby cannot alone force the US to undertake foreign military conquests. For one thing, US
elites have never needed encouragement from anyone to wage devastating wars around the
world.
When the US establishment sees a critical interest at stake, it pursues it regardless of
what the lobby may want. That is why the US signed the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement despite
all of Israel's efforts to sabotage it. Of course whether that deal survives the Trump
administration
remains to be seen .
In his keynote
address , Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy stated that Israel's
military rule over Palestinians "is today one of the most brutal, cruel tyrannies on
Earth."
He asserted that the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights
is a "legitimate tool" and the "only game in town" to force Israel to end this injustice.
Looks like in order to make such a statement Putin should have intelligence information
about a real threat of attack from the USA, or some large scale provocation in Syria or
Ukraine. Only in this case his statement makes some sense. As a open warning: do not do
it.
It's an interesting commentary, and I came to the same conclusion. Threats, braggadocio
(We Are Empire) and general hubris are features of 21st century American foreign policy
– not Russian, so I have to interpret Putin's statement as reactive. There is something
out there that Putin is aware of, and he's saying "Don't do It".
America is incapable of viewing itself through the eyes of others, and has the kind of
blind arrogance that I would best compare to late 19th and early 20th Century German
militarism – the deeply embedded German worldview (long before Hitler) of superiority,
destiny, and the corresponding natural right to Empire. Hitler was only the last in a long
line of German exponents of this view when he said "According to the laws of nature, the soil
belongs to he who conquers it. The fact of having children who want to live, the fact that
our people is bursting out of its cramped frontiers – these justify all of our claims
to the Eastern spaces."
It took two World Wars, and Russian troops in Berlin, to rid the world of this cancer
– and the same dynamic is now at work again. The crazed Imperialist is the USA (or at
least its Zio-Glob leadership), but with the difference that a technological WW3 will be over
in a matter of days if not hours.
"... The deep state (the oligarchs, MIC, and intelligence community, which controls the media and most politicians) whether or not it actually helped Trump by harming Hillary is immaterial. The election is over and there was never any real resolve in the deep state to impeach Trump or to jail Hillary and their never will be. The reason should be obvious. ..."
"... The only thing consistent in the Russian collusion and election rigging nonsense is the groundless and unrelenting vilification of Russia, blaming Putin for everything. Just as we see grandiose deep state theatrics for the US to obtain access to strategic rare-earth resources in North Korea, we see the similar deep state orchestrated theatrics falsely alleging that Russians rigged or interfered in the US Presidential election. Russia's Putin is the main obstacle to the Western bankster-corporate cabal obtaining resource and geopolitical hegemony over the entire planet. That is the main fact. It is the main reason to subject that nation to constant vilification, sanctions, and military aggression and provocation. ..."
"... The deep state cabal will likely spend tens, if not hundreds, of billions of US dollars interfering in the Russian election. Presently they are most likely bribing, blackmailing, and intimidating thousands of people to swing and rig the election to ensure Putin does not win. "You did it to us." Will be their justification when Putin complains. ..."
Well of course there are. We've been told repeatedly that the Obama administration was on the job and focused like a laser
on Russia collusion and meddling.
Unfortunately, the hard drive all that was stored on crashed and it was all lost.
If we really want the truth then we have to stop relying on what people say just because we like them, or we think they are
on our side, and instead we have to examine the interests of the various sources. Only then we can make better decisions. At this
stage of the game the deep state can no longer blame with any credibility Russian hacking as the source of the alleged leak. The
know it came directly from the DNC. However, the deep state has a priority (a very strong interest) to keep the heat on Russia.
The deep state (the oligarchs, MIC, and intelligence community, which controls the media and most politicians) whether
or not it actually helped Trump by harming Hillary is immaterial. The election is over and there was never any real resolve in
the deep state to impeach Trump or to jail Hillary and their never will be. The reason should be obvious.
The only thing consistent in the Russian collusion and election rigging nonsense is the groundless and unrelenting vilification
of Russia, blaming Putin for everything. Just as we see grandiose deep state theatrics for the US to obtain access to strategic
rare-earth resources in North Korea, we see the similar deep state orchestrated theatrics falsely alleging that Russians rigged
or interfered in the US Presidential election. Russia's Putin is the main obstacle to the Western bankster-corporate cabal obtaining
resource and geopolitical hegemony over the entire planet. That is the main fact. It is the main reason to subject that nation
to constant vilification, sanctions, and military aggression and provocation.
The disproportionate ongoing emphasis on the fake story that Russia meddled in the US election, not only serves to stir up
suspicions and fears regarding Russia in the generally brain-numbed population, but mainly at this stage, and by the sheer fact
that the deep state has carried this rouse so far down the field, the only rational conclusion one can make is that the deep state
is going to interfere in the Russian elections in a very major way to ensure that Putin and his cronies - those wicked oil and
gas nationalizers, those heinous enemies of the Rothschild banksters and their plans for an expanded US Fed to the auspices of
their proposed One World Bank; those upstart renegades who support nations which choose to trade oil without US petrodollars;
those evil monsters who oppose globalism and defend their own nation's sovereignty and other nations like Syria which call for
help.
The deep state cabal will likely spend tens, if not hundreds, of billions of US dollars interfering in the Russian election.
Presently they are most likely bribing, blackmailing, and intimidating thousands of people to swing and rig the election to ensure
Putin does not win. "You did it to us." Will be their justification when Putin complains.
The thing with "neocons" is that they're pathological liars and narcissists. And the first
victims of their dishonesty are themselves. In fact even describing them as "liars" who've
deceived themselves is being generous. To put it another way, they've created a false reality
for themselves. Actual facts and reasoned arguments, especially any kind of moral reasoning,
bounce off such creatures like bullets bounce off Superman.
that's not exactly what I've been saying and what concerns me. That's the easy, nice
option. There is only one, very little snag there. TRUST.
That's an astute observation, but it cuts both ways. You also need to take into account
the level of Neo-McCarthyism in the USA and resulting growing distrust toward neoliberals and
compradors in Russia. Despite efforts of Putin personally and Putin administration (Lavrov,
Medvedev) to suppression growing anti-Americanism, soon Russian people might start throwing
eggs at neoliberals/comparadors rallies. Look at the travails of the elite prostitute who is
the most neoliberal and pro-Western candidate for Presidents in the current race:
Add to that a distinct desire by the "Collective West" to expropriate Russian oligarchs
holdings during the next six years of Putin rule (which they now probably understand, or at
least start to understand after the most recent "blacklist"). That creates some links with
the motherland even for the most cosmopolitan Russian bankers
$21 trillion of unauthorized spending by US govt discovered by economics
professor
Published time: 16 Dec, 2017
[MORE]
The US government may have misspent $21 trillion, a professor at Michigan State
University has found. Papers supporting the study briefly went missing just as an audit was
announced.
Two departments of the US federal government may have spent as much as $21 trillion on
things they can't account for between 1998 and 2015. At least that's what Mark Skidmore, a
Professor of Economics at MSU specializing in public finance, and his team have found.
They came up with the figure after digging the websites of departments of Defense (DoD)
and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as well as repots of the Office of the Inspector
General (OIG) over summer.
The research was triggered by Skidmore hearing Catherine Austin Fitts, a former
Assistant Secretary in the HUD in the first Bush administration, saying the Inspector
General found $6.5 trillion worth of military spending that the DoD couldn't account for.
She was referring to a July 2016 report by the OIG, but Skidmore thought she must be
mistaking billion for trillion. Based on his previous experience with public finances, he
thought the figure was too big even for an organization as large as the US military.
"Sometimes you have an adjustment just because you don't have adequate transactions so
an auditor would just recede. Usually it's just a small portion of authorized spending,
maybe one percent at most. So for the Army one percent would be $1.2 billion of
transactions that you just can't account for," he explained in an interview with
USAWatchdog.com earlier this month.
After discovering that the figure was accurate, he and Fitts collaborated with a pair of
graduate students to comb through thousands of reports of the OIG dating back to 1998, when
new rules of public accountability for the federal government were set and all the way to
2015, the time of the latest reports available at the time. The research was only for the
DoD and the HUD.
"This is incomplete, but we have found $21 trillion in adjustments over that period. The
biggest chunk is for the Army. We were able to find 13 of the 17 years and we found about
$11.5 trillion just for the Army," Skidmore said.
I think Americans might be able to get along just fine without the USA?
If the USA wants to threaten or mute those who offer an opinion?
As stupid as Americans are said to be,
they do feel the pains of fake news, loss of freedom of speech,
spying, corporate dominance, and corrupt in purpose leadership?
Another possibility is that even the best technology can't compensate for human
factor.
From the crew being overworked, untrained to being on drugs. Or vodka. Pick the one more
likely.
Perhaps you've seen the article linked below.
Some excerpts from the summation follow:
"Russia appears to have won at least a partial victory in Syria, and done so with
impressive efficiency, flexibility, and coordination between military and political
action."
" Russia's "lean" strategy, adaptable tactics, and coordination of military and diplomatic
initiatives offer important lessons for the conduct of any military intervention in as
complex and volatile an environment as the Middle East."
" Washington should pay close attention to the Russian intervention and how Moscow
achieved its objectives in Syria."
Leaving the requisite downplaying of what happened in Syria ("partial victory"?, really?)
aside, the authors seem a little envious, frankly.
Your points are of course valid, but the Russians seem to have answered those calls and a
few others besides, at least in the Syrian theatre. One can expect a similar or better
performance in any conflict involving Russian soil, especially as only the creme de la creme
of missile crews would be assigned to game changing weaponry.
Putin's announcement represents a massive FAIL on the part of a $1T's worth of
intelligence agencies, military think tanks, political analysts and military planners who
collectively didn't see it coming . They're all now in either panic, the foundation of
America's geo-political goals utterly undermined, or in denial.
Denial is winning, so their next big FAIL is already underway. Heads aren't rolling. The
Pentagon thinks it can save the day by doubling down and demanding more of the useless crap
they've got now. We can expect the CIA et al will roll out even more failing propaganda and
politically destabilizing activity to continue trying their hand at regime change. Even the
Afghans are on to them, so good luck with that.
The US simply must internalize the strategic significance of these developments, and
change everything about their postures and behaviours in the world. There's little sign of
that happening, Mad Dogs can't learn new tricks, so we're sailing into very treacherous
waters indeed.
The Deep State, also known as the Swamp, holds Trump in contempt because he put Deep State
people into so many positions. The Secretary of the Air Force is a Lockheed agent – she
took in $600k from Lockheed while she was a politician. Mattis is in favour of trannies in
the military – 50% suicide rate and $100k a pop. Tillerson was in favour of the Paris
climate treaty, so was Mattis. There are signs that reality is sinking in though –
putting Trophy systems on M1 tanks for example. The increase in the bomb production rate is a
sign that it is not business as usual. A much larger warstock is necessary for the coming
conflict with China. Nobody in the system has the guts to end the F-35. Mattis, for all his
bravado, is just a political creature.
One thing that struck me about Putin's speech on the new missile systems is that he
understood the technical detail of how the things worked to the extent of having a genuine
personal interest in knowing such stuff. Corruption and the Russian mafia are still Russia's
biggest problem but I see that Russian wheat production is finally increasing near 20 years
after the fall of communism.
These was reported some time ago. Pentagon needs another 911 to remove all evidents that
they did after 5+Trillions unknown usage was discovered.
Tip of iceberg how many trillions US is printing from air for its lavish unproductive
lives & endless wars over last many decades unreported. The world having their foreign
reserves tied by IMF to 5 currencies, is picking up the tabs of US, EU, Japan & UK free
currency printing QE to artificially prop up their collapsing economy based on stupid theory
of growth by borrowing.
These countries run on deficit(except jp with high export & artificial low ex-ch
rate), high debts, high salary, high property price, overspending with budget deficit, and
financial banking scams to prop up high Nominal GDP.
When music stop, someone will miss the seat.
China & Russia know, they stored up time proven gold reserve, & Petrol Yuan
started. When China replaced Petrol $ with yuan, slash its 3T US treasury reserve, the music
stop.
I see that Russian wheat production is finally increasing near 20 years after the fall
of communism.
Food commodity price is controlled by big oligarchs. West has big subsidy to artificially
lowered their cost/ export price in name of food security, to the tune that all subsidies are
enough to feed all hungries on earth. But its aim to destroy developing countries agri
sector. Latin America was hit badly in past that agri no longer sustainable, when land bcom
barren, capitalist swoop in to buy land dirt cheap.
China & Russia aren't stupid to let West control their food chain, but they imported
these subsidized food without ruin own agri ability, esp for animal feeds. When sanction
started, Putin simply activated its standby agri program. When trade war start, China will do
the same, already its probing US sorghum subsidy.
Looks like in order to make such a statement Putin should have intelligence information
about a real threat of attack from the USA, or some large scale provocation in Syria or
Ukraine. Only in this case his statement makes some sense. As a open warning: do not do
it.
Look at the keyword, allies. Putin emphasized, if Russia or its allies are attacked .. so
its Syria potential hyper escalation, Ukraine brewing collision with new lethal weapons, to
some lesser extent, Iran & Venezuela with Russia high investment.
12. China has less than 300 nuclear weapons and still is regarded as a formidable
nuclear power, probably spending 20 times less money in this area.
China might have to do something similar to Putin later just to ensure US won't took the
wrong calculated risk to do something stupid. However China style is always keep secretive of
its killer weapon that worry US most. Its said in every Wargaming, whenever Red team losing
to Blue, they launch China Murderer Mace(Trump card), then everything end in Red favour.
In another topic, some said China has est 400 nukes, with only 20~40 that can reach US
which might tempted US to believe it could survive an exchange. So a large upgrade is
necessary. Anyone got better idea?
In last year during South China Seas confrontation, China actually sent out all its navy
to conduct live exercise till eve of fake Hague court judgement, with nuclear subs in high
profile despatched to US Guam & Indian ocean bases(where their nuclear bombers station).
Two strike groups that with its Adm Harry threaten war start tonight, were reportedly hiding
in East Philippine Seas to get out of H6k bomber missiles(aircraft carrier killer) range.
WH panick of real war escalation, Obama sent its top general to China, with NSA advisor
Rice also visited Xi to resolve. This shows US isn't ready for a military clash with nuke
China, with much lesser warheads than Russia.
The new $14 billion USS Ford aircraft carrier has a launch system that cannot be fixed
because it never worked. It remains an experimental system that after 20 years of
development is not ready for use, and may never be. Replacing it with a proven steam system
will cost over $5 billion.
EMALS works! Carrier Ford completes first flight operations
By: Mark D. Faram July 29, 2017
Construction of the third carrier is expected to start next year and will use
electromagnetic launch rather than steam-powered catapults. The carrier is expected to have
80,000 ton displacement which would put it in the super carrier class.
China was confident about its EMALS technology now that it was able to produce its own
insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) chips, a key component of the high-efficiency
electric energy conversion systems used in variable-speed drives, trains, electric and hybrid
electric vehicles, power grids and renewable energy plants.
All things described like "realism", "order" and references to Napoleon is all contrived
pseudo-academic bunk. In the end another "great" strategic minds such as neocons wrote
(Kagan's cabal) what is touted as the "best" history pf Peloponnese Wars. And look where this
"academic brilliance" based on those ideas brought the United States and the world to.
American elites of the 20th and 21st Century, with some minor exceptions, have no grasp of
the nature of the military force (power) and how it applies. None and this can not be fixed.
It is also a tragedy for many, including the US itself.
Mr. Martyanov -- Does the ECM/EMP capability that the USS Donald Cook allegedly ran into
in the Black Sea enter into these deliberations at all?
No. Russia does have the best EW capabilities in the world–the fact admitted even by
US military's top brass, but USS Donald Cook's alleged "shutting down" of her radar by SU-24
never happened. It is all, hm, as strange as it sounds, Russian amateurs' and fanboys'
propaganda. SU-24 is not capable to "shut down" anything on a ship with energy capacity of
Arleigh Burke-class DDG. Two different weight categories. Most likely SU-24 simply put out
what is known as pomehi (interference) which may have created multiple targets
picture–this is possible. It is still very unpleasant and unnerving situation but
nothing as dramatic as what became now a consistent and false meme.
and I'm just guessing, but for the same reasons successful anti-laser techniques could be
devised once that becomes a reality (even in clear day conditions)
Andrei, I don't know if you're still reading comments on this thread, but ZeroHedge posted
confirming what you wrote, yet somehow analysts are still dismissive. Still to quote you
"butt hurt."
Quote: "From a national security perspective, Putin's claims of hypersonic weapons should
not be underestimated but should be analyzed in an attempt to parse fact from fiction.
"The team of analysts at The Drive precisely did that, and made several conclusions: In
particular, one of the weapons Putin mentioned in his speech was an air-launched hypersonic
anti-ship missile launched from a Mikoyan MiG-31 Foxhound. Upon closer examination, the Drive
team found the hypersonic weapon closely resembles the Iskander short-range ballistic
missile."
End quotation.
I wonder if Putin will deploy the laser system to Syria, now that America is making
threats.
"A potential decision by Washington to take new military actions against Damascus would
mark the second US strike on Syria in less than a year."
The elder Kagan's Peloponnesian war history is actually instructive from a neocon point of
view. He identifies with the Athenian side, and with the most belligerent Athenian
politicians, so completely that he shows not the least understanding of why the other side,
or neutrals, or less aggressive Athenian politicians acted as they did. So although he uses a
respectable scholarly apparatus, he has no conception of how history should be written.
Thanks for the reply but my point primarily is that the A.Z. (to quote The Saker) Empire
is doubling down. Its attitude is still "what're you gonna do about it" and the recent news
indicates they're pushing in Syria.
A nuclear strike from Russia that kills 99% of the population doesn't bother them in the
slightest. Or they think Putin is bluffing.
My concern is about the plane crash in Syria: why were so many pilots (allegedly) on board
and thus so vulnerable. Not that it's necessarily true that the "Deep State" caused this.
The self-confessed military analysts "Q" with millions of followers states, incidentally,
that CIA caused the recent jetliner crash to kill Rosatom executives and scientists. I don't
trust him. He says Snowden now is in China; was CIA all along and was deliberately sent to
Russia for mischief making.
Finally, if you have any idea about my hypothesis discussed with F.B. above whether the
glider manipulates plasma using electric fields and a small on-board nuclear reactor or just
uses an undiscovered and unknown to America composite. But from what F.B. wrote we have no
how idea how it would work, hence the skepticism by the fake experts.
I hope you can comment since you're the expert and can separate truth from the
bullshit.
Putin's character makes me think he doesn't bluff. Western politicians are such liars they
don't believe Putin tells the truth.
Your points are of course valid, but the Russians seem to have answered those calls and
a few others besides, at least in the Syrian theatre. One can expect a similar or better
performance in any conflict involving Russian soil,
Agree.
Keywords "Syria" and "similar".
How about:
A new flareup in Novorossya->in, say, 3 months of "engagement" that part of Ukraine starts
looking as parts of Syria now.
An ethnic unrest in one of remote regions->reaction by the Kremlin->that part of RF
starts looking as parts of Syria now.
So, based on that, this
.the foundation of America's geo-political goals utterly undermined, or in denial.
and
They're all now in either panic, the foundation of America's geo-political goals utterly
undermined, or in denial
sounds .wrong?
Perhaps those advising Kremlin are in denial?
So, related to
We can expect the CIA et al will roll out even more failing propaganda and politically
destabilizing activity to continue trying their hand at regime change.
how about:
We can expect the Kremlin et al will roll out even more failing propaganda and internal
politically destabilizing activity to continue trying their hand against The Empire.
My concern is about the plane crash in Syria: why were so many pilots (allegedly) on
board and thus so vulnerable.
Systemic failure. Somewhere between acquiring spare parts, through maintenance and general
processes and procedures to, last, but not least .vodka.
More to come in coming months.
So although he uses a respectable scholarly apparatus, he has no conception of how
history should be written.
True, but to add insult to injury neocons generally do not know actual military
history–one is bound to fail to know it when they are in the business of erasing
causalities, rather than finding them. That is why they suck as strategists, have a very
vague understanding of operational and tactical issues and, of course, none of them
understands serious military-technological problems. Just to reiterate my point–they
have no idea what warfare is.
{ ., he has no conception of how history should be written.}
I think he does, so do his ilk.
They mind-bend history to fit their narrative, to confuse the multitudes into seeing the
world through their Neocon lens. Part and parcel of the full spectrum
disinformation/propaganda/brainwashing campaign. History (books & movies), "news",
analysis, commercials, nothing is off the table.
I am assuming the laser is state-of-the-art anti-missile defense: better chance of
shooting down Patriot missiles and making a point if another attack comes and prove the
system exists and he's not a liar. A real field test.
I am saddened, incidentally, by the death of so many brave Russian personnel in the plane
crash, which I notice you didn't remark upon. If it was an accident, I am sure the callous
Americans are saying, "See, they kill themselves, we don't have to bother trying" unless
there was duplicity involved and not just a gross failure due to negligence, etc.
I assume also that there is no evidence CIA (or Mossad) did target Rosatom executives in
the jet liner crash or Russia would not want that to get out, clear act of war.
Of course, sadly, American Deep State is at war with Russia. They just use duplicity and
proxies and it's too bad since we could have been friends and not enemies. So many voted for
Trump hoping for the best.
American Deep State won't change (neocons) until they get a bloody nose. Not sure when or
if that will ever happen.
The thing with "neocons" is that they're pathological liars and narcissists. And the first
victims of their dishonesty are themselves. In fact even describing them as "liars" who've
deceived themselves is being generous. To put it another way, they've created a false reality
for themselves. Actual facts and reasoned arguments, especially any kind of moral reasoning,
bounce off such creatures like bullets bounce off Superman.
My contention is that the factions are not so clear cut and most people that matters can
switch sides. That is why I think, the compradors will eventually win if a sweeping cleaning
is not done as such a setup is open to external manipulation for tipping the balance on one
side.
Currently, the wind is blowing from the side of patriots so many people that are
influential position themselves on this side. But as said before, a patriot billionaire is an
oxymoron and they would switch sides when they feel themselves or their wealth are
threatened. That is why the military-security bureaucracy that spearheads the Russian
nationalist faction will eventually have to make a choice if they want to sustain their
power: either clean them up or try to juggle a a difficult balancing act while also not
completely alienating western elites. In my view, this cannot be done. But, since the
difference among them is not day and night for many an reverse transition of power in a
similar manner like the smooth transition from Yeltsin to Putin is most likely.
"... How is Trump different from Hillary? Here's how: Trump is MUCH better at playing the crowd. He is a MUCH better faux populist and distractor. Please take note: The left hates Trump for being a playboy and colluding with Russia!! Real issues like inequality and militarism are back page material. ..."
"... It's all political games now. One side promises too much, the other side corrects that, then goes overboard themselves. This back and forth APPEARS to rock the boat but no one of any importance ever falls out. Only the occasional wildcard - like Assange and Putin - give the establishment pause. ..."
Russia this and Russia that. It's a circus. It's a spectacle. Nothing more. US has one
party: the war party. US has one establishment that wants MOAR.
Why did Al Gore choose not to fight for the Presidency? Why did "liberal lion" Ted Kennedy
throw his support to Obama, the sneaky warmongering neoliberal? Why did Sanders not walk away
from the Democratic Party when it became clear that they conspired with the Hillary
campaign?
How is Trump different from Hillary? Here's how: Trump is MUCH better at playing the
crowd. He is a MUCH better faux populist and distractor. Please take note: The left hates Trump
for being a playboy and colluding with Russia!! Real issues like inequality and militarism are
back page material.
It's all political games now. One side promises too much, the other side corrects that,
then goes overboard themselves. This back and forth APPEARS to rock the boat but no one of any
importance ever falls out. Only the occasional wildcard - like Assange and Putin - give the
establishment pause.
"... Frankly; I'm so bloody fed up with this whole narrative; I don't care if it's true or not! What difference does it make? Russia, Russia, Russia; bloody hell; get over it! It's a massive distraction from many other vile things being done; war against Yemen; illegal US occupation of Syria; ongoing war in Ukraine; massive violations of the US constitution within the borders of the continental US; militarized police violence against US citizens; the list goes on ad infinitum... ..."
"... I'm shocked! Mayer has a stellar reputation, but this piece is riddled with errors and misinformation. Are they all sellouts in the MSM???? ..."
"... The term "presstitute" which is used for attacking pro-establishment media shills comes to mind. Formerly respectable outlets such as the New Yorker and their writer, Jane Mayer, have gone over into war crimes by in effect fomenting a new cold war based on falsehoods, similar to what the postwar less corrupt yankee imperium considered war crimes in the four power Nuremberg trial which convicted the editor of Der Stuermer, a Nazi sheet, on that basis. ..."
"... The reason why this whole Russiagate seems to go beyond the usual partisan tit-for-tat when it comes to the executive branch (Kenneth Star v. Clinton, Birthers v. Hussein-Obama, liberal-educated dems v. A fundamentalist-protestant dumbass W. Bush), is the absolute certainty which the MSM, the dems, and neocons spew their Russophobic spittle onto anyone that happens to be listening; meanwhile dragging Trump through the mud. The usual partisan coverage of prior executive branches were more evenhanded by news outlets (it resembled news). The current atmosphere resembles pure propaganda and smacks of utter desperation and globalist panic. ..."
"... The New Yorker refused to allow Sy Hersh to publish "The Red Line and the Rat Line", about the covert US effort to transfer weapons from Libya to Syrian jihadist groups, so he had to go to the London Review of Books. At that point it became clear the New Yorker had gone over into partisan pro-government propaganda publishing. ..."
"... These days the corporate media will often start a story with a lie. They think it's funny or something ..."
"... Mayer is no Judith Miller, but if it's not "selling out", she may be suffering from a case of incipient Judith Miller Syndrome. ..."
"... This New Yorker disinfomation piece is most likely not exclusively Ms Mayer's doing alone. David Remnick (NYer Publisher & Ms. Mayers boss) is a full fledged participant in the MSM'S ongoing 'Russian Collusion' narrative. ..."
"... Remnick is a full fledged supporter of our oligarchical, neocon establishment that's hell bent on establishing a US/Israel centered global hegemony since the break-up of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... So, we have yet another fraud promoting the initial fraud as Big Lie Nation manufactures and exports its #1 commodity. Those of us knowing Russiagate's yet another Big Lie ought to be shocked by the further digging of this massive excavation that can no longer be called a deep hole but aren't because the desperation's become all too predictable. The exceptional witch is melting live in living color! ..."
"... The Slate is another publication that wants to go to war with Russia, 'Why are we letting the Russians get away with it' ... https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/why-is-america-letting-russia-get-away-with-meddling-in-our-democracy.html What does Fred Kaplan want to do? Oh nothing crazy, just cyber espionage on the order of Stuxnet, or at least outing Putin's secret foreign bank accounts (or pilfering them). ..."
Frankly; I'm so bloody fed up with this whole narrative; I don't care if it's true or
not! What difference does it make? Russia, Russia, Russia; bloody hell; get over it! It's a
massive distraction from many other vile things being done; war against Yemen; illegal US
occupation of Syria; ongoing war in Ukraine; massive violations of the US constitution within
the borders of the continental US; militarized police violence against US citizens; the list
goes on ad infinitum...
CNN had another lengthy special report on alleged Trump-Russia collusion over the weekend.
Remember CNN was the lead-dog on the dossier with its release of the dossier fake news on Jan
10, 2017, just ten days before the Trump inauguration. But also remember what a CNN producer
said last summer about Trump-Russia collusion: " Could be
bullshit. I mean, it's mostly bullshit right now. Like, we don't have any big giant
proof ."
And twice Ms Mayer repeats the lie about "all US intelligence agencies concluding that Russia
interfered in the US election". Her phrasing: "that major U.S. intelligence agencies had
unanimously endorsed this view'" then: "It [the report] contained the agencies' unanimous
conclusion that, during the Presidential campaign, Putin had directed a cyber campaign aimed
at getting Trump elected."
These are obvious references to the January 6th 2017 "report" that was full of unsupported
assertions and distraction. Ms Mayer doesn't appear to be familiar with reasons to avoid
citing that report.
The New York Times has had to retract the "17 agencies lie"--did so at the end of June
2017. Ms Mayer doesn't appear to have noticed, or worse thought she could get away with
changing the phrasing of the lie slightly to "major intelligence agencies".
I too seemed to remember that Yahoo news had published on the Steele report in advance of
others in the press. Obviously the New Yorker staff didn't.
All very embarrassing for the New Yorker and Ms Mayer, will now of course be used to
question the validity of other Jane Mayer reporting.
I'm shocked! Mayer has a stellar reputation, but this piece is riddled with errors and
misinformation. Are they all sellouts in the MSM????
exiled off mainstreet , Mar 6, 2018 11:04:37 AM |
18
The term "presstitute" which is used for attacking pro-establishment media shills comes
to mind. Formerly respectable outlets such as the New Yorker and their writer, Jane Mayer,
have gone over into war crimes by in effect fomenting a new cold war based on falsehoods,
similar to what the postwar less corrupt yankee imperium considered war crimes in the four
power Nuremberg trial which convicted the editor of Der Stuermer, a Nazi sheet, on that
basis.
Ah, so the elitist award-winning (((culprit))) of
global warming propaganda and niece of "dark money" oligarch henchmen such as Emanuel Lehman
and Allan Nevins has written a eulogy for the creatures of the Imperial Swamp?
As a former, longtime New Yorker reader I can attest that the New Yorker's supposed fact
checking is basically non-existent. They do check rigorously for spelling and grammar to fit
the writing style of the magazine, but incorrect facts have riddled articles for decades.
They do publish a few letters each issue and occasionally allow criticisms through but for
the most part as long as the narrative fits what "the right sort of people believe" there
seems to be no standard for actually, you know, basing statements on reality.
My guess is that the Democratic Party, so addled at the top, splits by 2020. All it has for
the voters, which it repetitiously blares from its many organs -- CNN, MSNBC, NYT, New Yorker
-- is Russophobia. For instance, I ran into a guy last night who regularly watches MSNBC and
he said the network has not once mentioned the statewide teachers strike underway in West
Virginia. How's that for "leaning forward"?
The reason why this whole Russiagate seems to go beyond the usual partisan tit-for-tat
when it comes to the executive branch (Kenneth Star v. Clinton, Birthers v. Hussein-Obama,
liberal-educated dems v. A fundamentalist-protestant dumbass W. Bush), is the absolute
certainty which the MSM, the dems, and neocons spew their Russophobic spittle onto anyone
that happens to be listening; meanwhile dragging Trump through the mud. The usual partisan
coverage of prior executive branches were more evenhanded by news outlets (it resembled
news). The current atmosphere resembles pure propaganda and smacks of utter desperation and
globalist panic.
It makes the whole situation seem like Trump really is anti-establishment. That is where
the hope came from which won him the election and it continues on in his fanbase.
@24 nemesiscalling.. ditto your comment as well.. thanks..
The New Yorker refused to allow Sy Hersh to publish "The Red Line and the Rat Line",
about the covert US effort to transfer weapons from Libya to Syrian jihadist groups, so he
had to go to the London Review of Books. At that point it became clear the New Yorker had
gone over into partisan pro-government propaganda publishing.
It's also curious how the article doesn't really touch on Wall Street and the fossil fuel
industry in the United States; that sector also donates heavily to Democrats, which is likely
why. There could be some issues there related to sanctions-dodging by ExxonMobil but digging
into that doesn't serve the political agenda, so. . . . Still nothing credible on the
evidence side as far as iI can tell.
Mayer has a stellar reputation, but this piece is riddled with errors and
misinformation. Are they all sellouts in the MSM????
____________________________________
Some well-regarded Amerikan investigative journalists seem deeply ambivalent when
reporting on US government, military, and intelligence (spook agencies) affairs.
They can be appropriately skeptical and critical some of the time-- admirable "watchdogs"
or "gadflies" in the best muckraking tradition. Their critical stories are even a form of
"speaking truth to power", and their reputation and popularity is deserved.
OTOH, at other times they seem to display a core uncritical regard, respect, and even
admiration for these institutions and their personnel. I've seen interviews with Mayer
following some exposé in which she comes across as being either deliberately
naïve, or reluctant to follow her own findings to an unacceptably radical logical
conclusion.
As in this article, Mayer is far more trusting and credulous of official sources than her
experience of their habitual mendacity dictates.
Sorry that I can't provide precise examples off the top of my head, but I think this is an
occupational hazard of journalists who spend their careers working (too) closely with
government insiders. Seymour Hersh and Jeremy Scahill come to mind.
In a nutshell, I think they're trying to be disinterested, dispassionate
journalists who report without fear or favor though the heavens fall, etc. But my
pop-psychology guess is that they also develop an affinity with their sources that
occasionally trips them up, and/or renders them vulnerable to manipulation by their vaunted
insider connections.
Or maybe it's comparable to the undercover drug enforcement agent who ends up getting
addicted and engaging in criminal activity after becoming too immersed in the life they're
supposed to be policing.
Mayer is no Judith Miller, but if it's not "selling out", she may be suffering from a
case of incipient Judith Miller Syndrome.
An autotranslated article about a pending(?) cw false flag in Syria with the usual cast of
cute children, fake wounds and the White "False Flags 'R US" Helmets. If they do pull
something off it may be worth keeping an eye open for these actors.
Fakebook and LiveJournal have already pulled the original articles this item was based
on.
This New Yorker disinfomation piece is most likely not exclusively Ms Mayer's doing
alone. David Remnick (NYer Publisher & Ms. Mayers boss) is a full fledged participant in
the MSM'S ongoing 'Russian Collusion' narrative.
Remember, even the great Sy Hersh had to go to the independent European press to publish
his 'controversial' article that methodically debunked the deep states fairy tale narrative
of events on what exactly went down in the infamous OBL Abottabad compound raid in 2011.
Hersh, up until then, exclusively published most of his investigative "bombshell" articles
in the New Yorker. Remnick is a full fledged supporter of our oligarchical, neocon
establishment that's hell bent on establishing a US/Israel centered global hegemony since the
break-up of the Soviet Union.
So, we have yet another fraud promoting the initial fraud as Big Lie Nation manufactures
and exports its #1 commodity. Those of us knowing Russiagate's yet another Big Lie ought to
be shocked by the further digging of this massive excavation that can no longer be called a
deep hole but aren't because the desperation's become all too predictable. The exceptional
witch is melting live in living color!
V.ARNOLD #7 ..You forget very important stuff....since 11/9/16 Dems they still wage war
against legally elected president PDJT...those whores did try everything..and nothing is
working......
BTW I do not believe that Putin has billions socked away offshore. If he did then Obama
would have revealed it on his way out the door and even if Obama didn't the CIA / FBI /
Treasury would have leaked it. Instead what they did was claim he had billions without
providing any proof.
Some Faraday bags allow you to reveive calls if placed in the front pouch and block all
signals at back pouch, while still offering complete EMP protection front or back
If you are able to receive a call on your cellphone - in a Faraday bag, or not, you are still
completely vulnerable to hacking and/or tracking. No "back of the bag EMP protection" claim
is gonna be able to block invasive signals - unless the pouch, or bag, or whatever it's
stored in is COMPLETELY impenetrable - period!
You can make your own Faraday bag with rolls of aluminum or tin foil spun around a crayon
box.
Anyway, cell phones are unavoidable tracking devices and can not be immunized from
surveillance and hacking http://hpub.org/article-64217/ so anybody with secrets
would avoid using one unless your name is Her Haughtiness Hillary Clinton and you keep an
unencrypted email server in your personal bathroom or, your name is Podesta and your google
account password is "password."
End to end encryption is available but requires cooperation on both ends.
I seem to recall that Steele was involved in the Magnitsky and Litvinenko cases and that he
has long made a living out of defending oligarchs against the Russian government's attempts
to collect taxes from them.
It is sad that Steele is polluting the air of Farnham an ancient town with a long history
which includes being the birthplace of some of the greatest English writers.
The Australian diplomat whose 2016 tip resulted in the FBI's Trump-Russia
counterintelligence investigation had previously arranged one of the largest donations to
Clinton charities, documents reveal.
...
Downer tipped off Australian authorities after a conversation with Trump campaign advisor
George Papadopoulos at a London bar, in which Papadopoulos reportedly said the Russians had
"dirt" on Hillary Clinton. After Australian authorities alerted the FBI, a
counterintelligence probe was launched according to reports
Greta work
It only proves that western journalist have become stenographers and propagandist for
pax-americana/anglo-zionist.
15000 word readers digest entry on the so called fourth estate. It only shows how desperate
they are in trying to keep the perception of the Russians ate my lunch. Seeing that the
Russian Federation just recently revealed that their invincibility as a Military force is
questionable Nato must be rethinking their first strike capacity.
Post Scriptum: It is sad to see not one nation in the west speaking of peace and detente but
of aggression and conquest. It smells like 1913 all over again especially since the Trump
regime has now opened up the can of worms TRADE WARS. If any individual with a semblance of
grey matter can critically analyse these moves one could see WAR on the horizon .
Firts currency wars then trade wars and docius in fundem Firing wars. How sad the weste has
become.
Alexander Downer has never been a diplomat, he was always a particularly sleazy politician
- may even have been leader of the opposition as head of Oz's conservative & misnamed
Liberal Party. The guy is the worst of the worst, a small time suburban solicitor (lawyer who
doesn't go to court), whose play was posing as a mock englander gentleman but never quite
pulling it off.
Anything Downer gets his sticky fingers into has two common features 1) It benefits A.Downer
and 2) It is a lie.
Tobin Paz @ 48, Debsisdead @ 54: I thought Alexander Downer had been sent overseas to play at
being ambassador or diplomat so as to limit the amount the damage he could cause just by his
very existence. Instead he hoovers up money faster than a pig can sniff out truffles.
I'm sorta enjoying it all it's so over the top I doubt anyone apart from the usual dingbats
& drongos, takes it seriously.
Just as the Steele dossier with its outrageous fictions led the way, the englanders are
outdoing themselves sledging Russia and Russians.
Even the seemingly innocuous 'weatherman' has been getting in on the act, England has been
even colder than usual and before the freeze over actually began the incessant weather
reports which dominate englander 'news' was warning of a cold wind from Siberia that was in
evil Russian fashion about to "freeze the balls off Her Majesty's brass monkey".
The cooler air a direct result of western europe's (including england) two century long
penchant for burning shit up which had raised the temperature of the Arctic seas to the point
where even in the middle of winter the North Pole waters no longer freeze. Warm seas=warmer
air which rises and cooler air comes in to fill the gap blah, blah but that didn't stop the
weather reports, which by the time england was frozen the cause had been casually abbreviated
into "the beast from the east". Cold are you englanders? Don't forget to blame Russia and
Russians while you salute Stephenson's Rocket (the instigator) and you wait for a train which
will never come thanks to Thatcherism/neoliberalism/can't pick Johnnie Foreigner's pocket any
more, better pick Johnnie Neighbours.
But blaming the weather on Russia is so last week, this week it is all about some
treasonous former KGB colonel and his daughter who prolly offed themselves in the most public
way possible
since their lives turned to shit . Natch the englander media being what it is, the
traitor was executed at the behest of the man himself Vladimir Putin. Except of course the
timing is inexplicable as Prez Putin is about to have an election - sorry 'election'
(elections in Russia have to have single quotes around em because the winner is not supported
by any englander newspaper and must therefore be a put up job cos englander fishwraps never
get it wrong). The old cui bene is relevant since this death happened at a bad time for
Russia one is left asking if the traitor didn't top himself who else would want it right now,
certainly not Russia's leadership.
I can still remember 50 years later exactly how gobsmacked I was the first time I read a
serious englander newspaper and discovered that these otherwise seemingly intelligent journos
actually believed all this Cold War horseshit that we used to laugh at in the South. Yeah
amerika sure they believe anything they are told to, but the englanders subscribe to this
nonsense - how can that be? I was young and naive and didn't realise that the most truthful
parts of englander media are in the boxes around the edges of the articles. The real
commercials are the news stories. In england in the 1970's all the foreign correspondents had
two jobs, there was the newspaper gig which paid well but felt sleazy and the other gig with
the SIS aka MI6 which was a good way to rub shoulders with the elite plus it covered the
kids' public school fees.
Nothing about englander media can be believed, for a long time the audience was entirely
captive so the earn was guaranteed with more money if you could tell a really big lie. Big
enough to generate headlines and start a fleet street feeding frenzy. Those days are gone the
journos know no other way to work so the stories are getting more tawdry and less believable
by the day.
This is the poisonous atmosphere the Steele dossier came out of. There is certain to be a
few doubles in the generation of this yarn That is the double giggers englander journo by day
wannabe 'secret' agent by night. Steele wasn't allowed into Russia so who else is he gonna
call?
It's becoming more amusing. From Stars and Stripes--
WASHINGTON, Mar 6 -- Senators grilled the top intel chief Tuesday, pushing for details of a
U.S. plan to stave off attempts of Russian meddling and cyberattacks .
In a tense congressional hearing examining worldwide threats, the lawmakers expressed
frustration that the U.S., hampered by President Donald Trump, hasn't done enough to
address past and future Russian cyberattacks.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats testified before the Senate Armed Services
Committee that while counterintelligence work is underway, the details of those operations
are classified.
"The American people deserve to know whether or not the president directed his top
intelligence officials to effectively counter this continuing act of war on our
country ," Sen. Richard Blumethal, D-Conn., said in a sharp exchange with Coats.
The comments come a week after a hearing before the same committee when U.S. Cyber
Command Chief Adm. Mike Rogers said that Russia has paid little for its interference in
the 2016 elections , and that he hasn't been authorized by Trump to combat future
attempts.
There are growing concerns that Russia will target this year's elections and that the
U.S. hasn't done enough to counter that effort.
"We're taking steps, but we're probably not doing enough ," Rogers told the
committee last week. . .
here
President Putin must be enjoying this. I know I am.
"... Politically the situation we see in Ukraine is that the ordinary people don't really care about the politics they are genuinely concerned about bread and butter it is quite sad actually that the US is treating the Ukraine as a pawn and a quite cheap one at that in its game with Russia ..."
1. There is some mystery in this Putin "bragging" about new formidable weapons. This is
not his style. Why now? Why do it when sanctions are in place and can be easily be tightened
as the result? Looks like in order to make such a statement Putin should have intelligence
information about a real threat of attack from the USA, or some large scale provocation in
Syria or Ukraine. Only in this case his statement makes some sense. As a open warning: do not
do it. Otherwise this is just an open invitation for the new, more destructive and expensive
stage in nuclear arms race. The scenario that Russia should try to avoid.
2. Also the rule is: if your adversary is making a mistake, you should not try to stop
him. If missile defense systems and aircraft carriers are useless why not to allow the USA to
put another 100 billion dollars into it ? Something does not compute here. BTW both remain
perfectly viable as the first strike weapons (you never know what those tubes contain and
they can hold cruise missiles as well). The fact that they will perish is just part of the
cost of the whole operation.
3. Russia has way too many problems, both economic and political. So each dollar put into
military technology is stolen from the civilian sector and makes sanctions more effective. So
succumbing to the arm race is like self-sanctions.
4. After 2012 it is clear that the way the USA will try to undermine Russia is most
probably via political interference during the next election, in which there will be a power
vacuum as Putin finishes his last term, and there is no Putin II. The problem of the leader
succession is a well-known Achilles' spot of Russia. In 2012 the "collective West" achieved
pretty significant success in staging color revolution in Russia using pro-West (aka
Zapadniki) and comprador sector in Moscow as the fifth column. The political situation in
Moscow will always favor pro-European forces, as this city has a huge concentration of
employees of foreign companies, professionals and entrepreneurs who depend on the West and
earn money from the West (compradors) . Efforts to put in power a classic neoliberal like
Macron in France will be multiplied for elections in 2024. I do not see, why they can't be
more successful then in 2012.
5. While weakened by the recent McCarthyism campaign in the USA, Russian comprador sector
and neoliberals are still a very powerful political force and control a significant part of
media and oligarch money. Russian constitution was written by the USA. And scars from the
economic rape of Russia in 90th still did not fully heal. In other words, pro-Western forces
in Russia are powerful enough to serve as a base to stage another color revolution. Probably
along with crashing oil prices before the elections again, or some other nasty trick. In this
case you do not need any missiles. As long as Russia is a neoliberal country Putin and his
policies remain a political anomaly. And Putin himself a maverick. There will be no another
Putin, but there can well be another Gorbachov, or, worse, Yeltsin. The same is true for
China, but at least China has political control of the Communist Party and state ownership of
the financial sector. The latter is not true for Russia and is a huge political risk. While
neoliberalism entered the stage of decline there is no viable alternatives on the
horizon.
6. Loss of Ukraine was/is a huge geopolitical defeat of Putin (and Russia as a country)
which can't be compensated any bragging about new weapon systems. It was and still is a
geopolitical knockdown.
7. Hopes about "some sensible conversation on the new world order may start between key
geopolitical players" are naïve. The US elite is hell-bent on world superiority as this
is a pre-condition of the existence of the dollar as the primary world currency. This
situation will not probably change until the end of cheap oil, which might take another
twenty years or more.
8. If time is working against the USA, why not to sit quiet and try not to anger aging
hegemon as China supposedly does (having also advantage of host of "offshored" manufacturing
from the USA and having the USA as debtor).
9. The level of brain drain from Russia actually is a huge limiting factor, which makes a
claim about cruising missile with a nuclear reactor as a part of propulsion engine highly
suspect.
10. The network of intelligence agencies around Russia (which now include Estonia and
Ukraine) probably represents much more serious threat then the "first strike" capability of
the USA, if such thing can ever exist.
11. "Collective West" can easily tighten sanction expanding them on more technological
sectors, thus damaging Russia economic growth. So bragging about new weapons is bad diplomacy
when the opponent is much stronger economically and politically.
12. China has less than 300 nuclear weapons and still is regarded as a formidable nuclear
power, probably spending 20 times less money in this area.
13. The claim that "The Kinzhal effectively removes any non-suicidal surface force
thousands of miles away from Russia's shores and renders its capabilities irrelevant" is
highly questionable. The idea of the first strike includes the elimination of the possibility
of launching most (or all) Kinzhal missiles carriers, as a necessary part required for the
success of the operation. Any losses of forward deployed units are acceptable in such a huge
game.
Just a pre-empt, tiring if you say you don't understand Ukraine, etc. then twenty
comments; dem Jews.
No rain, too much rain, dem Jews.
Well, you did utter the trigger word.
Guess your family believes religiously in the eternal victimhood and in the right of
Jewish people to demand special treatment from "others"– "because of Holocaust." --
This is over. After the fraternization of the Kagans' clan (via Nuland-Kagan) with neo-Nazi
in Ukraine and after Israeli's support for ISIS, Jewish pretenses on superior morality (and
similar fantastic inventions) have become unrealistic.
Putin should have intelligence information about a real threat of attack from the USA,
or some large scale provocation in Syria or Ukraine.
I'd go for Ukraine.
Something does not compute here.
Well, "if we can't have it it's not good."
Sour grapes.
Russia has way too many problems, both economic and political. So each dollar put into
military technology is stolen from the civilian sector and makes sanctions more effective.
So succumbing to the arm race is like self-sanctions.
Agree.
In other words, pro-Western forces in Russia are powerful enough to serve as a base to
stage another color revolution. In this case you do not need any missiles.
...While neoliberalism entered the stage of decline there is no viable alternatives on the
horizon.
Agree.
Loss of Ukraine was/is a huge geopolitical defeat of Putin (and Russia as a country)
which can't be compensated any bragging about new weapon systems. It was and still is a
geopolitical knockdown.
Agree.
But, perhaps that's not true. In any case, the resident "Team Russia" will now explain that.
As victory, of course.
Hopes about "some sensible conversation on the new world order may start between key
geopolitical players" are naïve. The US elite is hell-bent on world superiority as
this is a pre-condition of the existence of the dollar as the primary world currency.
Agree.
If time is working against the US, why not to sit quiet and try not to anger aging
hegemon as China supposedly does (having also advantage of host of "offshored"
manufacturing from the USA and having the USA as debtor).
and
The level of brain drain from Russia actually is a huge limiting factor, which makes a
claim about cruising missile with a nuclear reactor as a part of propulsion engine highly
suspect.
and
"Collective West" can easily tighten sanction expanding them on more technological
sectors, thus damaging Russia economic growth. So bragging about new weapons is bad
diplomacy when the opponent is much stronger economically and politically.
"Team Russia" coming up. You are about to see the light. Somehow.
Putin and those around him would better do concentrate on internal issues or eventually
issues will concentrate on them.
Agree.
This obsession with high tech is actually puzzling.
Not only that, but, overall, which "military" is better. "Whose father/older brother is
stronger" kid talk.
The Empire shall go for the Russia's internal problems and try to capitalize on that.
Ukraine was taken down using that approach. Oh, wait, not only Ukraine but all those who
didn't tow the line. Thinking that, somehow, a conventional war, only, will settle the issue
is not only delusional but stupid. Why would The Empire do that? No reason whatsoever.
It will try to do exactly what's been doing since '91. Internal dissent.
So, while Russian elites will keep building high tech weaponry (remember USSR), The Empire
will keep working on getting all those "unhappy" with Putin regime onboard and using them for
weakening the regime.
If the regime in Moscow can't, or doesn't want to see it, well, it doesn't deserve that
position. True, weapons industry is good for making money and stashing most of it offshore.
Not sharing that wealth, though, with general population is not that smart, just, they simply
can't help it. That's the way of the world there. Czars and serfs.
The problem is, of course, they can't step down even if they wanted to. Nobody wants
kangaroo courts and hanging. Or public murder broadcast live on Internet. Conundrum.
You make some interesting observations and your comment is thought-provoking
However I think the intent of the article was to explore some of the technical
issues of what we saw on March 1 not so much the political dimension and certainly your
approach is to try to get an overall wide angle picture that gets every possible Russia issue
into the frame
which by necessity means you give up some resolution or granularity if you will compared
to a more tightly focused article
You start with an initial premise of why announce these weapons now and question the
wisdom the simple answer may be technical related these weapons may be already mature
technically and now is the time to show them ?
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
A couple more points you mention sanctions quite a bit but we have seen that Russia is
able to carry on just fine sanctions or not
The key indicator there is that sanctions are having a much bigger blowback on the US
itself i.e. the US is losing Europe
Germany has been quite vocal about US going a step too far in trying to dictate energy
policy which is key to German industrial export economy and besides they may finally be
finding their sea legs after years of subservience to an increasingly unhinged country that
is heading for the cliff
The Germans are going to get Nordstream 2 because they want it. It is actually more
important to Germany than to Russia Russia has been supplying energy to Europe for many
decades going back to Soviet times but is just now starting to feed the biggest energy
consumer in the world China
Other, smaller EU countries notably Italy have become quite vocal about Russia sanctions
hurting them we saw just now an election in Italy where the ruling claque were turfed
So it seems that the days of US dictating the politics to its European vassals may be over
the kind of friction they are making with sanctions and their increasing hysteria is only
hastening this process of vassals breaking off
The other issue is Ukraine you bring to this the the typical US perspective of 'losing' a
country this again goes back to the vassal game
The US gained all of Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union but did Russia
lose anything sensible people will say the lost they burden of empire long after it had
ceased being profitable as with the British previously
Ukraine is historically something of an artificial country the original Kievan Rus
[Rurivik dynasty] was the original Russia it fell apart after the Mongol invasions but the
Russian and Ukrainian language and people are mostly indistinguishable other than the
Galician Catholic minority
For several hundred years the peoples of the Ukraine [ie even then it was more than a
single national people] were under rule by the Poles and Lithuania while the new Russian
empire based in Moscow gained strength and eventually took over 300 years ago
There are and have always been Ukrainian nationalists that do not like Russia but they are
in the minority the best way to think of Ukraine is similar to Scotland even the Irish are
more distant from the English than Ukrainians from Russians
Politically the situation we see in Ukraine is that the ordinary people don't really care
about the politics they are genuinely concerned about bread and butter it is quite sad
actually that the US is treating the Ukraine as a pawn and a quite cheap one at that in its
game with Russia
I don't believe the Russians look at the situation that way there is real fraternity among
many Russians and Ukrainians that goes to a fundamental level again similar to Scotland where
the country is divided on the issue of the English
So unless the EU and US are prepared to do a full Marshall plan to drag Ukraine into a
reasonable living standard then this 'win' will turn out to be something of a chimera
Heck the polls even in eastern Europe are trending against the post Cold War direction
with about half the people now questioning if the new boss is really better than the old
boss
And finally if you are going to do a wide angle shot like this then get the crazy cousin
into the picture also ie the US and its failing Ponzi economy that is bound to collapse just
on the principles of mathematics
China and Russia are working to bury the source of all US strength the petrodollar this is
literally kryptonite the US is quite simply toast once the petrodollar sinks
China is the world's biggest economy and biggest energy buyer Russia is the world's
biggest energy seller other nations too that are not so strong and have felt the body blows
of US economic warfare such as Iran, Venezuela and other will gladly join in
It's starting to feel like US has used up all its chips and all its markers
The entire developing world wants real prosperity not economic colonialism and corporate
plunder
These are some large and powerful currents that have to be taken into account if one is
going to take a wide angle shot of geopolitics
Ukraine is historically something of an artificial country the original Kievan Rus
[Rurivik dynasty] was the original Russia it fell apart after the Mongol invasions
Relationship of Kievan Rus to modern Russia and Ukraine is somewhat analogous to the
relationship of Charlemagne's Frankish Empire to modern France or Germany. Although both
Germany and France would have to be in the same linguistic family for the analogy to be more
accurate.
For several hundred years the peoples of the Ukraine [ie even then it was more than a
single national people] were under rule by the Poles and Lithuania
Correct. This meant not only political separation but largescale settlement (about 10% of
the population were Polish settlers – these were absorbed by the natives, so most
Ukrainians have some Polish roots), centuries of schooling, etc. And this was enough to lead
to a different culture, language, identity.
eventually took over 300 years ago
The eastern half of Ukraine was linked to Moscow in the 1650s (so indeed about 300 years),
but the western half in the 1770s (so 200 years) and Galicia not until 1939.
but the Russian and Ukrainian language and people are mostly indistinguishable
Incorrect. Ukrainian is about as close to Russian as it is to Polish (Ukrainian grammar
and pronunciation is closer to Russian, but Ukrainian vocabulary actually has more words in
common with Polish than with Russian). The Scandinavian languages are closer to each other
Russian is to Ukrainian. The catch is that in everyday life about half of Ukrainians, and
most urban Ukrainians other than people in Lviv, use Russian rather than Ukrainian. Kiev is a
Russian-speaking city (and Dublin an English-speaking one).
the best way to think of Ukraine is similar to Scotland
Anatol Lieven correctly observed that Ukraine's relationship to Russia is somewhere
between that of Scotland and that of Ireland, to England. Viewing it as Scotland is too
positive, as Ireland too negative. Given that Scotland itself nearly separated, it is natural
to see Ukraine as separate.
Obviously, beyond the greed focused MIC there is a much more serious implication of US
last experiencing, but only a medium intensity, war in its Civil War so long ago. The much
more serious implication is that it is dishing out war mush more readily than any other
nation on the planet. The reason that Ziocon parasites have found such a fertile ground in
the US is almost like an isolated island, whose people consider war to be entertainment
(shock & awe), have never had any serious family or home losses from it and are dumb and
uneducated enough to be pulled by their noses through their MSM to any war that Ziocons
fancy.
In short, smart parasites feeding on dumb f*cks.
Another point is that the parasites control and profit from the fully enclosed war
cycle:
Media,
Weapon building industry,
Post-war reconstruction industry and
More stolen oil, water and land for Israel.
In such system, the efficiency is an absolutely last (unprofitable) consideration.
Therefore, US winning a war against Russia? Not in the next hundred years militarily but
possibly through subterfuge: assasinations and regime change.
This part of the New Yorker article could be sheer comedy gold:
'... Regardless of what others might think, it's clear that Steele believed that his
dossier was filled with important intelligence. Otherwise, he would never have subjected it,
his firm, and his reputation to the harsh scrutiny of the F.B.I. "I'm impressed that he was
willing to share it with the F.B.I.," [former CIA spook John Sipher] said. "That gives him
real credibility to me, the notion that he'd give it to the best intelligence professionals
in the world."...'
FBI, best intelligence professionals in the world? Didn't the FBI along with the CIA miss
most indications of a looming terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in the months
leading up to September 11, 2001?
A former CIA officer called John Sipher, calling a rival organisation 'the best
intelligence professionals in the world'?
"...looked much like the other businessmen heading home, except for the fact that he kept his
phones in a Faraday bag -- a pouch, of military-tested double-grade fabric, designed to block
signal detection..."
A practical man, Steele also kept a giant roll of telephone line attached to his belt.
Unrolling it as he proceeded down the high street, he glanced upwards.
A Pteranodon, perched upon the slate roof was watching him closely. A bead of sweat
appeared on his temple, just showing underneath the rim of his bowler hat, trickling down the
side of his face, the leaving a streak that resembled a long forgotten river delta.
A chimmney sweet was approaching him on his right, whistling a jaunty tune, his bag of
extendable brushes jingling and clanking, just like Steele's nerves. Obviously a Russian
operative, the sweep was whistling an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, an ominous
warning...
"... It was President Bill Clinton who moved NATO eastwards, abrogating a 1991 agreement with the Russians not to recruit former members of the Warsaw Pact that is at the root of current tensions with Moscow. And, while the U.S. and NATO point to Russia's annexation of the Crimea as a sign of a "revanchist" Moscow, it was NATO that set the precedent of altering borders when it dismembered Serbia to create Kosovo after the 1999 Yugoslav war. ..."
"... And it was President Barack Obama who further chilled relations with the Russians by tacitly backing the 2014 coup in the Ukraine, and whose "Asia pivot" has led to tensions between Washington and Beijing. ..."
"... In speaking at Johns Hopkins, Defense Secretary James Mattis warned , "If you challenge us, it will be your longest and worst day" -- a remark aimed directly at Russia. ..."
"... NATO ally Britain went even further. Chief of the United Kingdom General Staff, Nick Carter, told the Defense and Security Forum that "our generation has become used to wars of choice since the end of the Cold War," but "we may not have a choice about conflict with Russia." He added , "The parallels with 1914 are stark." ..."
"... Certainly the verbiage about Russia and China is alarming. Russia is routinely described as "aggressive," "revisionist," and "expansionist." In a recent attack on China, U.S. Defense Secretary Rex Tillerson described China's trade with Latin America as " imperial ," an ironic choice of words given Washington's more overtly imperial history in the region. ..."
"... While Moscow is certainly capable of destroying the world with its nuclear weapons, Russia today bears little resemblance to 1914 Russia -- or, for that matter, the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The U.S. and its NATO allies currently spend more than 12 times what Russia does on its armaments, and even that vastly underestimates Washington's actual military outlay. A great deal of U.S. spending is not counted as "military," including nuclear weapons, currently being modernized to the tune of $1.5 trillion. ..."
"... The balance between China and the U.S. is more even, but the U.S. still outspends China almost three to one. Fact in Washington's major regional allies -- Japan, Australia, and South Korea -- and that figure is almost four to one. In nuclear weapons, the ratio is vastly greater: 26 to 1 in favor of the U.S. Add NATO and the ratios are 28 to 1. ..."
"... Meanwhile, China has two military goals: to secure its sea-borne energy supplies by building up its navy, and to establish a buffer zone in the East and South China seas to keep potential enemies at arm's length. To that end it has constructed smaller, more agile ships, and missiles capable of keeping U.S. aircraft carriers out of range, a strategy called "area denial." It has also modernized its military, cutting back on land-based forces and investing in air and sea assets. However, it spends less of its GDP on its military than does the U.S.: 1.9 percent as opposed to 3.3 percent as of 2016. ..."
"... But China has been invaded several times, starting with the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856, when Britain forced the Chinese to lift their ban on importing the drug. Japan invaded in 1895 and 1937. If the Chinese are touchy about their coastline, one can hardly blame them. ..."
"... Is this a new Cold War, when the U.S. attempted to surround and isolate the Soviet Union? There are parallels, but the Cold War was an ideological battle between two systems, socialism and capitalism. The fight today is over market access and economic domination. When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned Latin America about China and Russia, it wasn't about "Communist subversion," but trade. ..."
"... For one, the big arms manufacturers -- Lockheed Martian, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics -- have lots of cash to hand out come election time. "Great power competition" will be expensive, with lots of big-ticket items: aircraft carriers, submarines, surface ships, and an expanded air force. ..."
"... And many of the Democrats are ahead of the curve when it comes to demonizing the Russians. The Russian bug-a-boo has allowed the party to shift the blame for Hillary Clinton's loss to Moscow's manipulation of the election, thus avoiding having to examine its own lackluster campaign and unimaginative political program. ..."
"... Piling onto Moscow may have consequences as well. Andrei Kostin, head of one of Russia's largest banks, VTB, told the Financial Times that adding more sanctions against Russia " would be like declaring war ." ..."
The U.S. has never taken its eyes off its big competitors.
It was President Bill Clinton who moved NATO eastwards, abrogating a 1991 agreement with the
Russians not to recruit former members of the Warsaw Pact that is at the root of current
tensions with Moscow. And, while the U.S. and NATO point to Russia's annexation of the Crimea
as a sign of a "revanchist" Moscow, it was NATO that set the precedent of altering borders when
it dismembered Serbia to create Kosovo after the 1999 Yugoslav war.
It was President George W. Bush who designated China a "strategic competitor," and who tried
to lure India into an anti-Chinese alliance by allowing New Delhi to violate the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. Letting India purchase uranium on the international market -- it was
barred from doing so by refusing to sign the NPT -- helped ignite the dangerous nuclear arms
race with Pakistan in South Asia.
And it was President Barack Obama who further chilled relations with the Russians by tacitly
backing the 2014 coup in the Ukraine, and whose "Asia pivot" has led to tensions between
Washington and Beijing.
So is jettisoning "terrorism" as the enemy in favor of "great powers" just old wine, new
bottle? Not quite. For one thing the new emphasis has a decidedly more dangerous edge to
it.
1914 vs. Today
In speaking at Johns Hopkins, Defense Secretary
James Mattis warned , "If you challenge us, it will be your longest and worst day" -- a
remark aimed directly at Russia.
NATO ally Britain went even further. Chief of the United Kingdom General Staff, Nick
Carter, told the Defense and Security Forum that "our generation has become used to wars of
choice since the end of the Cold War," but "we may not have a choice about conflict with
Russia."
He added , "The parallels with 1914 are stark."
Certainly the verbiage about Russia and China is alarming. Russia is routinely described
as "aggressive," "revisionist," and "expansionist." In a recent attack on China, U.S. Defense
Secretary Rex Tillerson described China's trade with Latin America as "
imperial ," an ironic choice of words given Washington's more overtly imperial history in the
region.
But there are differences between now and the run up to the First World War. In 1914, there
were several powerful and evenly matched empires at odds. That is not the case today.
While Moscow is certainly capable of destroying the world with its nuclear weapons,
Russia today bears little resemblance to 1914 Russia -- or, for that matter, the Soviet
Union.
The U.S. and its NATO allies currently spend
more than 12 times what Russia does on its armaments, and even that vastly underestimates
Washington's actual military outlay. A great deal of U.S. spending is not counted as
"military," including nuclear weapons, currently being modernized to the tune of $1.5
trillion.
The balance between China and the U.S. is more even, but the U.S. still outspends China
almost three to one. Fact in Washington's major regional allies -- Japan, Australia, and South
Korea -- and that figure is almost four to one. In nuclear weapons, the ratio is vastly
greater: 26 to 1 in favor of the U.S. Add NATO and the ratios are 28 to 1.
This isn't to say that the military forces of Russia and China are irrelevant. Russia's
intervention in the Syrian civil war helped turn the tide against the anti-Assad coalition put
together by the United States. But its economy is smaller than Italy's, and its "aggression" is
arguably a response to NATO establishing a presence on Moscow's doorstep.
Meanwhile, China has two military goals: to secure its sea-borne energy supplies by
building up its navy, and to establish a buffer zone in the East and South China seas to keep
potential enemies at arm's length. To that end it has constructed smaller, more agile ships,
and missiles capable of keeping U.S. aircraft carriers out of range, a strategy called "area
denial." It has also modernized its military, cutting back on land-based forces and investing
in air and sea assets. However, it spends less of its GDP on its military than does the U.S.:
1.9 percent as
opposed to 3.3 percent as of 2016.
Beijing has been heavy-handed in establishing "area denial," alienating many of its
neighbors -- Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan -- by claiming most of the South
China Sea and building bases in the Paracel and Spratly islands.
But China has been invaded several times, starting with the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856,
when Britain forced the Chinese to lift their ban on importing the drug. Japan invaded in 1895
and 1937. If the Chinese are touchy about their coastline, one can hardly blame them.
China is, however, the United States' major competitor and the second largest economy in the
world. It has replaced the U.S. as Latin America's largest trading partner and successfully
outflanked Washington's attempts to throttle its economic influence. When the U.S. asked its
key allies to boycott China's new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, with
the exception of Japan , they ignored Washington.
However, commercial success is hardly "imperial."
Is this a new Cold War, when the U.S. attempted to surround and isolate the Soviet
Union? There are parallels, but the Cold War was an ideological battle between two systems,
socialism and capitalism. The fight today is over market access and economic domination. When
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned Latin America about China and Russia, it wasn't about
"Communist subversion," but trade.
Behind the Shift
There are other players behind this shift.
For one, the big arms manufacturers -- Lockheed Martian, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems,
Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics -- have lots of cash to hand out come election time.
"Great power competition" will be expensive, with lots of big-ticket items: aircraft carriers,
submarines, surface ships, and an expanded air force.
This is not to say that the U.S. has altered its foreign policy focus because of arms
company lobbies, but they do have a seat at the table. And given that those companies have
spread their operations to all 50 states, local political representatives and governors have a
stake in keeping -- and expanding -- those often high paying jobs.
Nor are the Republicans going to get much opposition on increased defense spending from the
Democrats, many of whom are as hawkish as their colleagues across the aisle. That's true even
though higher defense spending -- coupled with the recent tax cut bill -- will rule out funding
many of the programs the Democrats hold dear. Of course, for the Republicans that dilemma is a
major side benefit: cut taxes, increase defense spending, then dismantle social services,
Social Security, and Medicare in order to service the deficit.
And many of the Democrats are ahead of the curve when it comes to demonizing the
Russians. The Russian bug-a-boo has allowed the party to shift the blame for Hillary Clinton's
loss to Moscow's manipulation of the election, thus avoiding having to examine its own
lackluster campaign and unimaginative political program.
There are other actors pushing this new emphasis as well, including the Bush
administration's neoconservatives who launched the Iraq War. Their new target is Iran, even
though inflating Iran to the level of a "great power" is laughable. Iran's military budget is
$12.3 billion. Saudi Arabia alone spends $63.7 billion on defense, slightly less than Russia,
which has five times the population and eight times the land area. In a clash between Iran and
the U.S. and its local allies, the disparity in military strength would be closer to 60 to 1 .
However, in terms of disasters, even Iraq would pale before a war with Iran.
The most dangerous place in the world right now is the Korean Peninsula, where the Trump
administration appears to be casting around for some kind of military demonstration that will
not ignite a nuclear war. But how would China react to an attack that might put hostile troops
on its southern border?
Piling onto Moscow may have consequences as well. Andrei Kostin, head of one of Russia's
largest banks, VTB, told the Financial Times that adding more sanctions against Russia "
would be like
declaring war ."
"... Therefore, if we must see this in terms of conflict, we see a dramatically less powerful and dramatically poorer but essentially unified Russia facing up to a threat from a West that is far superior militarily and economically but that is divided in itself and slipping further into decline. ..."
"... This does of course lead to the unstable world you say we are faced with. Dangerously unstable. But I do not believe you are admitting to yourself that it is an instability we in the West are causing. ..."
I don't understand the last three paragraphs of your comment so I may be missing
your central point. However, I believe this sentence taken in isolation could do with
qualifying:-
"No doubt there is a lot of noise, but the reality is that economically Russia is a basket
case and the US is rapidly joining them."
The picture one gets of Russia is of a country slowly digging itself out of the
disintegrative corruption of the 90's. Putin's recent remarks indicate how slowly.
President Carter's characterisation of the US as now being an oligarchy shows the US
slowly going the other way. Even including Germany that is the general picture in the
West.
Some recent remarks and examples from DH show the Russian people, or rather a substantial
number of them, soberly and consciously preparing to address the threat from the West. Unless
it's all Russian PR there is a sense of national unity there, at least for many, and that is
reflected by the Russian leadership.
I'm afraid our host is correct when he characterises the current anti-Russian sentiment in
the West as hysterical. That, however, is I believe largely top down. It is a product of PR
from the media and from the Western politicians. Behind it is no deep sense of unity or
national resolve. In fact we see the reverse - most Western countries are deeply divided
within themselves.
The Russians seem also to have escaped the demoralising effects of the more far out social
trends in the US and other Western countries.
Therefore, if we must see this in terms of conflict, we see a dramatically less
powerful and dramatically poorer but essentially unified Russia facing up to a threat from a
West that is far superior militarily and economically but that is divided in itself and
slipping further into decline.
This does of course lead to the unstable world you say we are faced with. Dangerously
unstable. But I do not believe you are admitting to yourself that it is an instability we in
the West are causing.
President Trump
reportedly berated former White House communications director Hope Hicks the day before her resignation, according
to a new report.
CNN's Erin Burnett reported Wednesday
that Trump was angry with Hicks following her closed-door testimony to the House Intelligence
Committee, in which she reportedly revealed she was sometimes required to tell "white lies" as
part of her work in the White House.
Burnett reported one of Trump's "close allies" told CNN that Trump asked Hicks after her
testimony "how she could be so stupid."
"Apparently, that was the final straw for Hope Hicks," Burnett said.
"There are no words to adequately
express my gratitude to President Trump. I wish the president and his administration the very
best as he continues to lead our country," Hicks said in a statement announcing her departure.
The 29-year-old has served as a top adviser to Trump since he launched his presidential
campaign in 2015.
Hicks has set no departure date but is expected to leave the White House in the next few
weeks, White House officials said.
Her departure comes one day after her lengthy interview with the House Intelligence panel as
part of its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
"... The inherent drain on procurement includes loading, such as marketing for more and more programs, and McMansions for the C-Suite parasites, from performance bonuses whose intended incentives can always be negated with revenue growth. It's as if you decided to bulk up, but instead of lifting weights you injected yourself with CIA's metastasizing-cancer toxin. The beltway cannot possibly keep up. ..."
"... One cannot buy a history (albeit many in Washington think that it is possible) one has to experience it and built national institutions accordingly. US "elites" simply have no grasp what real war is. ..."
"... Therefore, US winning a war against Russia? Not in the next hundred years militarily but possibly through subterfuge: assasinations and regime change. ..."
Technology is not the factor that makes this leapfrog so hopeless for the US MIC. The structure of Russia's defense industrial
base is inherently more agile and efficient because it's a resource of the state and not exclusively a private profit center.
Back when the USSR had just collapsed in the expectation of peace and disarmament, Russian defense industries lost interest
in weapons and looked to commercial markets. They pitched projects like satellite systems they could field at one percent of the
cost of existing systems. You read that right. Comparable US systems were two orders of magnitude more expensive. Russia's defense
industrial base continued to out-innovate the Pentagon.
The US counter is to spend ten times more and piss away 95% of it. The inherent drain on procurement includes loading, such
as marketing for more and more programs, and McMansions for the C-Suite parasites, from performance bonuses whose intended incentives
can always be negated with revenue growth. It's as if you decided to bulk up, but instead of lifting weights you injected yourself
with CIA's metastasizing-cancer toxin. The beltway cannot possibly keep up.
Technology is not the factor that makes this leapfrog so hopeless for the US MIC. The structure of Russia's defense industrial
base is inherently more agile and efficient because it's a resource of the state and not exclusively a private profit center.
I agree with your thesis but the major factor here is a cultural one -- a dramatically different attitude to war between Russia
and US. I wrote about this here:
In layman's lingo, the United States lacks geographic, historic, cultural, economic and technological pressures to develop
and have a coherent defensive military doctrine and weapons which would help to implement it.
One cannot buy a history (albeit many in Washington think that it is possible) one has to experience it and built national
institutions accordingly. US "elites" simply have no grasp what real war is.
Obviously, beyond the greed focused MIC there is a much more serious implication of US last experiencing, but only a medium
intensity, war in its Civil War so long ago. The much more serious implication is that it is dishing out war mush more readily
than any other nation on the planet. The reason that Ziocon parasites have found such a fertile ground in the US is almost like
an isolated island, whose people consider war to be entertainment (shock & awe), have never had any serious family or home losses
from it and are dumb and uneducated enough to be pulled by their noses through their MSM to any war that Ziocons fancy.
In short, smart parasites feeding on dumb f*cks.
Another point is that the parasites control and profit from the fully enclosed war cycle:
Media,
Weapon building industry,
Post-war reconstruction industry and
More stolen oil, water and land for Israel.
In such system, the efficiency is an absolutely last (unprofitable) consideration.
Therefore, US winning a war against Russia? Not in the next hundred years militarily but possibly through subterfuge: assasinations
and regime change.
McMaster is a danger tot he USA and the world as a whole. Trump disingaged from forign policy and now generals are
running it.
Notable quotes:
"... I stopped listening to McMaster at one point. Quite early really. I wish there was a transcript around. But on first sight there isn't. But yes, 'revisionist' surfaced. ..."
"... Senator Lindsey Graham wants to attack North Korea. China promises to defend North Korea if attacked by the USA. If nuclear weapons are used by anyone; destroying Seoul, Pyongyang, Kyoto, Tokyo or Guam, the war will explode. China has 65 hardened ICBMs that can survive a first attack and destroy every major American city. Russia cannot sit out a world war blowing up directly South of Siberia. ..."
"... Simply put, Washington DC has become unhinged. The military is free to do whatever it wants. The western economic system is in slow-motion collapse. There is too much debt. Either the people will force the oligarchs to write down the debt and end the wars; or, fighting over the remains, the corrupt elite will kill off mankind. ..."
"... He has given the quartet too much leeway and they for some naïve reason are far too willing to listen to the Israelis always whispering in their ears. GC Marshall was right when he warned Truman against a future dominated by the existence of Israel. pl ..."
I have been reflecting about Reagan too in recent contributions here. Not least since Trump
seemed to try to emulate the GOP's greatest hero.
From the original Strategic Statement, casting Russia and China as 'rivals and
competitors', the subsequent Defense Posture Statement elevated the latter from mere rivals,
to 'revisionist powers'
I stopped listening to McMaster at one point. Quite early really. I wish there was a
transcript around. But on first sight there isn't. But yes, 'revisionist' surfaced. As
curiously enough this did: "rogue regimes (ME north East Asia) are developing the most
destructive weapons on earth."
Maybe I listen to him now. Relevant parts start at 1:45.
******
That said, what I still have huge troubles seemingly is to wrap my head around is the huge
applause Trump got on SST, while it left me more then a little irritated, when delivering his
foreign policy speech in April 2016. That was before Russia-Gate made news.
"These US generals have shown themselves to be shallow-minded believers in a doctrine of US
invincibility and universal dominance that is no longer applicable to the world we live in."
General Ali, if I remember correctly you reside in Canada, those who are brought up in and
under US system, majority think of their country in this way, it's part of the mentality that
the system educates and trains it's constituency, to think they are exceptional, invincible
and above all others. From what I have learned, this is not unique to just these four
generals, this is how even the regular police thinks regardless of state or community they
serve. This is how every child has been thought early on.
This week NBC News described the White House as "unglued". The owner of Comcast that owns
NBC, Brian L. Roberts (Barrack Obama's friend), and the five other media moguls want Donald
Trump gone. All that has stopped them so far are four Generals. This is highly unstable. The
USA has already killed Russians in Syria. Turkey is heading towards attacking American troops
in Manbij. U.S. trainers are in the trenches with Ukraine troops in the Donbass. Anyone who
is against this madness is labeled as a Russian collaborator.
Senator Lindsey Graham wants to attack North Korea. China promises to defend North
Korea if attacked by the USA. If nuclear weapons are used by anyone; destroying Seoul,
Pyongyang, Kyoto, Tokyo or Guam, the war will explode. China has 65 hardened ICBMs that can
survive a first attack and destroy every major American city. Russia cannot sit out a world
war blowing up directly South of Siberia.
Simply put, Washington DC has become unhinged. The military is free to do whatever it
wants. The western economic system is in slow-motion collapse. There is too much debt. Either
the people will force the oligarchs to write down the debt and end the wars; or, fighting
over the remains, the corrupt elite will kill off mankind.
If somehow, the use of nuclear weapons is avoided; at best, South Korea, the heart of the
Asian Economy, will be destroyed. The drumbeats for war with North Korea, Iran and/or Russia
is crazy.
I agree that the "Four of Hearts" among the generals now running US foreign policy are a
great danger. These men seem incapable of rising above the Russophobia that grew in the
atmosphere of the Cold War. They yearn for world hegemony for the US and to see Russia and to
a lesser extent China and Iran as obstacles to that dominion for the "city on a hill."
Trump is as yet indifferent to such matters and is in pursuit of his mercantilist view of
economics. He has given the quartet too much leeway and they for some naïve reason
are far too willing to listen to the Israelis always whispering in their ears. GC Marshall
was right when he warned Truman against a future dominated by the existence of Israel.
pl
It's the way to achieve mass-indoctrination, which the Ministry of Truth specializes in.
Thus, among the reader-comments to that bold article, the top-listed one under "sort by best"
(in other words, the most popular) was the anti -Russian "Have you counted how many neo-Nazis
are in the Russian army as well?"
Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blasted the United States on Friday saying that
the Russian Foreign Ministry will allocate special seats for American journalists at press
briefings if the US continues to infringe on the rights of Russian reporters.
The aggressive response came as US State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert rudely and
condescendingly rejected questions from a Russian reporter at a press briefing on Thursday.
"You're from Russian TV too? OK! Enough said then, I'll move on," Nauert interrupted.
Nauert's outburst even received condemnation from some American journalists who also wanted
the spokesperson to clarify her remarks about Putin's speech.
"This behavior is unacceptable! If the State Department once again dares to label our
journalists who are present at press briefings 'journalists from Russia' and stop communicating
with them because of that, we will carry out what we promised," Zakharova said.
"We will arrange special seats for the so-called journalists from the US at the Foreign
Ministry's press center so that your journalists could feel this time what it is all about,"
she said.
"Earlier, literally several decades ago, people with different skin color were not allowed
to ride on the same bus in the United States. It is necessary to overcome that instead of
returning to the flawed practice of the early 19th century, dividing journalists into countries
and nationalities. You have no right to deny them access to information due to their
nationality," Zakharova stressed.
She then also went onto thank "those American reporters who defended their Russian
counterparts' right to access information and be treated equally."
"... Maher released a helpful summary of "rules for identifying fake news" - which everybody who posts on social media about the campaign-era predations of shadowy Russian trolls ..."
"... In his monologue "explainer" on how to spot fake news, Maher admits that Trump voters have good reasons to be suspicious of the mainstream media and its tendency toward hyperbole and exaggeration that often leads CNN, the Huffington Post, Slate and their peers to manufacture controversies out of thing air. ..."
"... "I used to think something was news if a journalist reported it. But really I live in a world where its news if Mariah Carey's tit flops out because Twitter will respond and then a journalist reports on the controversy. If a boob flops in the forest and nothing is heard about it doesn't make a sound. But if three jackasses tweet about it, it's news." ..."
"... This is not an outlier, this is a constant and prominent part of today's journalism. Creating some bullshit non-issue that a few trolls will go apeshit over, then reporting on those tweets like all of America's talking about nothing else ..."
"... No wonder fake news resonates so much with Trump fans - because so much of it is fake! Just nonsense made to keep you perpetually offended with an endless stream of controversy that aren't controversial. And outrages that aren't outrageous. ..."
"... Because places like the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed and Salon - they make their money based on how many clicks they get. Yes, the people who see themselves as morally superior are actually ignoring their sacred job of informing citizens of what's important and instead creating divisions to pursue their own selfish ends. Wait isn't that what Russia was doing to us? Yes it is . ..."
"... And no, it's not easy: in fact, as the media's current business model shows, clickbait works, which is why it is easier to just blame someone else for creating it and "sowing discord", when the real culprit is America's endless superficial, scandal-seeking obsession, always eager to to click on the next catchy, if idiotic news story, and then cover up its guilt by blaming, why who else, Russia. ..."
Every once in a while, Bill Maher reminds us that he's the only liberal pundit on TV who
will call "the tolerant" left on its BS. In his latest weekly show, Maher released a helpful
summary of "rules for identifying fake news" - which everybody who posts on social media about
the campaign-era predations of shadowy Russian trolls and the mechanics of "internalized
misogyny" would do well to watch: "Fake News" isn't some made-up phenomenon concocted by
pro-Trump bloggers. It's a very real and disturbing trend that goes much further in tearing at
the social fabric of American society than $100,000 of spending on Facebook ads ever could.
In his monologue "explainer" on how to spot fake news, Maher admits that Trump voters have
good reasons to be suspicious of the mainstream media and its tendency toward hyperbole and
exaggeration that often leads CNN, the Huffington Post, Slate and their peers to manufacture
controversies out of thing air. Or, as he puts it, just because a few people on Twitter with no
followers and no real-life influence are angry, doesn't mean the rest of America feels that
way...
"Since so much of what passes for today's journalism is anything but...how about some
rules for identifying actual news.
"If anybody is demanding an apology... unless they have hostages, that's not news.
"And when the offended group are identified as the internet, twitter or people - it's
nobody. I guarantee when you click on the story the internet is three losers with a combined
twitter following of their mom."
"I used to think something was news if a journalist reported it. But really I live in a
world where its news if Mariah Carey's tit flops out because Twitter will respond and then a
journalist reports on the controversy. If a boob flops in the forest and nothing is heard
about it doesn't make a sound. But if three jackasses tweet about it, it's news."
Maher gives several examples of what passes as news, including the "controversy surrounding
Jennifer Lawrence's performance in the movie "Red Sparrow". The mainstream press reported that
a shot of Lawrence with a group of men was unforgivably sexist...because Lawrence wasn't
wearing a coat (while the men in the shot were).
Maher threw up all over the "story" which just happened to be reported in dozens of
"serious" media outlets, despite having zero social import or even any grounding in
reality.
Here's the headline from Elle online and a hundred other sites: 'Jennifer Lawrence's
latest red sparrow protocol has twitter calling out gender inequality. See because the men
are wearing coats but she's not. And even though that was her choice, somebody with 11
followers didn't like it so the the story was reported in the New York Times, the Washington
Post, the New York Post, Fox News..."
" Now all these esteemed news organizations aren't saying they think it's a big deal
because they're serious journalists. They'd rather be writing about Syria or the oceans dying
but oh the humanity, Jennifer Lawrence didn't have a coat. Wrap her up, wrap her up!"
Such "clickbait" stories like this aren't rare, in fact as Maher admits they have become the
norm, to an extent that most consumers of news hardly recognize how ridiculous they sound.
"This is not an outlier, this is a constant and prominent part of today's journalism.
Creating some bullshit non-issue that a few trolls will go apeshit over, then reporting on
those tweets like all of America's talking about nothing else."
Justin Timberlake used a protection of Prince for his Superbowl halftime show and people
are furious...nope nobody cared.
People are really mad that Sean White dragged the American flag after he won the
gold...nope not even a little you fucking liars.""Weight Watchers is targeting teens and
twitter is outraged. No it isn't, it's the same three people. And it's not hard to find three
people who are mad at anything. I could say good morning and three people on twitter would
object: 'Good in your privileged world, Bill Maher'."
Yet considering the mainstream media's obsession with these types of stories, it is no
surprise that a sizable chunk of the US population has lost its faith in the validity and and
motivations of news organizations like CNN. What is surprising is that people like Maher are
finally admitting what is really going on...
"No wonder fake news resonates so much with Trump fans - because so much of it is fake!
Just nonsense made to keep you perpetually offended with an endless stream of controversy
that aren't controversial. And outrages that aren't outrageous.
And what is really going on is that as Maher admits, what the US media is doing is no
different than the alleged "discord-sowing" misinformation campaign that Mueller recently
accused 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies of perpetrating on the US population?
"Because places like the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed and Salon - they make their money
based on how many clicks they get. Yes, the people who see themselves as morally superior are
actually ignoring their sacred job of informing citizens of what's important and instead
creating divisions to pursue their own selfish ends. Wait isn't that what Russia was doing to
us? Yes it is .
And we need to stop both of them from using us as the cocks in their cock fights. And so I
saw to the people who were unable to go on after seeing Kendal Jenner tweet the wrong colored
emoji A bit of advice: If you didn't like what Kendal did with a brown fist...then don't
watch her sister's sex tape."
So, next time you're reading about the epidemic of teenagers eating Tide Pods, or rushing to
be the first to know all about the latest Kardashian clickbait du jour, don't: not only will it
stop rewarding hollow headlines designed for clicks, it will force the US media to once again
focus on news that truly matters. The real news.
And no, it's not easy: in fact, as the media's current business model shows, clickbait
works, which is why it is easier to just blame someone else for creating it and "sowing
discord", when the real culprit is America's endless superficial, scandal-seeking obsession,
always eager to to click on the next catchy, if idiotic news story, and then cover up its guilt
by blaming, why who else, Russia.
"... Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act ..."
"... "This has happened as the Russia-gate claims have fallen to pieces All across the media spectrum, from the big name corporate stenographers like The New York Times, CNN, National Public Radio, The Washington Post to The Atlantic and Nation magazines and other "leftist" publications such as Mother Jones and Who What Why, the Russia and Putin bashing has become hysterical in tone, joined as it is with an anti-Trump obsession "Russia Sees Midterm Elections as a Chance to Sow Fresh Discord ( NY Times , 2/13), "Russia Strongman [Putin] haspulled off one of the greatest acts of political sabotage in modern history" ( The Atlantic , Jan. /Feb. 2018), "Mueller's Latest Indictment Shows Trump Has Helped Putin Cover Up a Crime" ( Mother Jones , 2/16/18), "A Russian Sightseeing Tour For Realists" ( whowhatwhy.com , 2/7/18), etc." ..."
The compulsive hatred of President Putin
in élite western circles has surpassed anything witnessed during the Cold War. Western
states have been hyping political hostility in almost every sphere: In Syria, in Ukraine,
across the Middle East, in Eurasia, and now, this hatred has leached into the Security Council,
leaving it irretrievably polarised -- and paralysed. This hostility has percolated too, across
to all Russia's allies, contaminating them. It potends – almost inevitably –
further sanctions on Russia (and its friends) under the catch-all Countering America's
Adversaries Through Sanctions Act . But the real question is: Does this collective
hysteria portend war ?
Ed Curtis reminds us of
the almost parabolic escalation of antagonism in recent weeks:
"This has happened as the Russia-gate claims have fallen to pieces All across the media
spectrum, from the big name corporate stenographers like The New York Times, CNN, National
Public Radio, The Washington Post to The Atlantic and Nation magazines and other "leftist"
publications such as Mother Jones and Who What Why, the Russia and Putin bashing has become
hysterical in tone, joined as it is with an anti-Trump obsession "Russia Sees Midterm Elections
as a Chance to Sow Fresh Discord (
NY Times , 2/13), "Russia Strongman [Putin] haspulled off one of the greatest acts of
political sabotage in modern history" ( The Atlantic ,
Jan. /Feb. 2018), "Mueller's Latest Indictment Shows Trump Has Helped Putin Cover Up a Crime" (
Mother Jones , 2/16/18), "A Russian Sightseeing Tour For Realists" ( whowhatwhy.com
, 2/7/18), etc."
By casting Russia's interference in the US presidential election as "an attack on American
democracy" and thus "an act of war", the 'Covert American State' is saying – implicitly -
that just as the act of war at Pearl Harbour brought a retaliatory war upon Japan, so, pari
passu , Russia's effort to subvert America require similar retribution.
Across the Middle East – but especially in Syria – there is ample dry tinder for
a conflagration, with incipient or existing conflicts between Turkey and the Kurds; between the
Turkish Army and the Syrian Army; between Turkish forces and American forces in Manbij; between
Syrian forces and American forces; between American forces and the USAF, and Russian servicemen
and Russia's aerospace forces; between American forces and Iranian forces, and last but not
least, between Israel and Syria.
This is one heck of a pile of combustible material. Plainly any incident amidst such
compressed volatility may escalate dangerously. But this is not the point. The point is: Does
all this Russia hysteria imply that the US is contemplating a war of choice
against Russia, or in support of a re-set of the Middle East landscape to
Israel's and Saudi Arabia's benefit ? Will the US deliberately provoke Russia – by
killing Russian servicemen, for example – in order to find pretext for a 'bloody nose'
military action launched against Russia itself – for responding to the American
provocation?
Inadvertent war is a distinct possibility, of course: Both Israel and Saudi Arabia are
experiencing domestic leadership crises. Israel may overreach, and America may overreach, too,
in its desire to support Israel. Indeed the constant portrayal of the US President as Putin's
puppet is pursued, of course, to taunt Trump into proving the opposite - by authorizing some or
other action against Russia – albeit against his better instincts.
At the Munich Security Conference, PM Netanyahu
said :
"For some time I've been warning about this development [Iran's alleged plan to complete a
Shi'i crescent] I've made clear in word and deed that Israel has red lines it will enforce.
Israel will continue to prevent Iran from establishing a permanent military presence in Syria
We will act without hesitation to defend ourselves. And we will act, if necessary, not just
against Iran's proxies that are attacking us, but against Iran itself."
And, at the same conference, US National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster warned
Saturday against increased Iranian efforts to support its proxies in the Middle East, saying
the "time is now" to act against Tehran.
But what did McMaster mean by "time is now to act" ? Is he encouraging Israel to
attack Hizbullah or Iranian-linked forces in Syria? This, almost certainly, would lead to a
three or four front war for Israel; yet there are good grounds for believing that the Israeli
security establishment does not want to risk a three front war. Possibly, McMaster was
thinking more of full-spectrum hybrid, or COIN war, but not conventional war, especially since
Israel cannot, any longer (after the shoot down of its F16), be sure of
its air dominance , without which, it cannot expect, or hope, to prevail.
As senior Israeli officials complain about
the gap between US rhetoric and action, General Josef Votel, the commander of
Centcom , stated explicitly, by way of confirmation of the differing view, at a
hearing in Congress on 28 February that, "countering Iran is not one of the coalition missions
in Syria".
So – back to the Russia hysteria. I do not believe that Syria is a practical locus for
a war of choice either for the United States or Russia. Both are circumscribed by the
realities of Syria. American forces there are not numerous: they are isolated, and dependent on
allies – the Kurds – who are a minority in that part of Syria, who are divided, and
who are disliked
by the Arab population. And Russian forces mostly consist of no more than 37 aircraft, and
small numbers of Russian advisers and Russian supply lines are extended and vulnerable (in the
Bosphorous).
No, the US aim in Syria is limited to denying any political success to either Presidents
Putin or Assad. It is pure schadenfreude. The American occupation of north-east Syria is
primarily about spitting in the face of Iran – i.e. the pursuit of a COIN war against an
American, generational enemy.
And at the same time, at the macro, geo-strategic level, America has precisely been trying
to 'disarm' Russia's nuclear defences, and seize the advantage, by withdrawing from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, and by deliberately surrounding Russia on its borders with
anti-ballistic missiles (the ABM treaty provided for only one site on its territory -
for each party - that would be protected from missile attack). The US strategy effectively left
Russia naked, in the nuclear sense. And that clearly was the intent. "With the build-up of the
global US ABM missile system, the New START Treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) is
devaluated, and the strategic balance [was] broken", Russian President Vladimir Putin
said in his State of the Nation
Address yesterday.
But then, as 'the quartet of generals' (effectively, General Petraeus is a part of the WH
trinity of generals), having usurped America's foreign policy out from the prerogative of the
President and into their control, so US defence policy has metamorphosed beyond 'Cold War', to
something far more aggressive - and dangerous: a precursor to 'hot war'.
From the original Strategic Statement, casting Russia and China as 'rivals and competitors',
the subsequent Defense Posture Statement elevated the latter from mere rivals, to 'revisionist
powers', which is to say, dubbed them as seditionists committed to overturning the global order
by military force (the definition of revisionist power). The Statement placed great power
competition above terrorism, as the primordial threat facing America, and implied that
this 'revisionist' threat to the American-led global order needed to be met. American generals
complained that their erstwhile, unchallenged global dominance of the skies, and of terrain,
was being
eroded by Russia acting as 'arsonist' [of stability] whilst presenting itself as the
"fire-fighter" [in Syria]. America's air dominance must be reasserted, General Votel
implied .
But in a startling upending of the strategic balance and missile encirclement, that America
has been seeking to impose on Russia, President Putin
announced yesterday that:
"Those who for the past 15 years have been fueling the arms race, seeking advantages over
Russia, imposing restrictions and sanctions, which are illegal from the standpoint of
international law, in order to hinder our country's development, particularly in the defence
field, must hear this: all that you have been trying to prevent by this policy has happened.
Attempts to restrain Russia have failed."
The Russian President announced a series of new weapons (including new nuclear-powered
missiles invulnerable to any missile defence, hypersonic weapons, and underwater drones,
inter alia ), that remarkably
return the situation to the status quo ante – one of mutually assured
destruction (MAD), were NATO to contemplate attacking Russia.
President Putin said that he had repeatedly warned Washington not to deploy ABM missiles
around Russia – "Nobody listened to us: [But] Listen now!", he said:
"Our nuclear doctrine says Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons only in response
to a nuclear attack or an attack with other weapons of mass destruction against her or her
allies, or a conventional attack against us that threatens the very existence of the
state."
"It is my duty to state this: Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its
allies , be it small-scale, medium-scale or any other scale, will be treated as a
nuclear attack on our country. The response will be instant - and with all the relevant
consequences" (emphasis added).
President Putin underlined that he was not threatening America, nor did Russia have
revanchist ambitions. It was rather Russia simply using the only language that Washington
understands.
Putin's speech, accompanied by visuals of the new Russian weaponry, explains at least
something of what has been going on in DC: America's recent seizure by a madness for spending.
The Pentagon must have got (some) wind of Russia's advances – hence the huge increase in
the budget for Defence planned for this year, and another 9% next year, and an
unbudgeted commitment to fund a new nuclear submarine fleet, a replacement for the Minuteman
missile system, and the development of new nuclear (tactical) weapons (costs unspecified).
The expense will be prodigious for the US government. But Russia already has stolen the
lead, and did this with government debt, as a percentage of nominal GDP, standing
at only 12.6%, whereas America debt's already is at 105% of GDP (before the weapons upgrade
has begun). President Reagan is credited with busting the USSR economically by forcing it into
an arms race, but now it is the US that is vulnerable to its mountain of debt – should
the US try to reverse Putin's Spring 'surprise', and (if it can), restore its global
conventional and nuclear primacy.
So, America has a choice: either to re-set the relationship with Russia (i.e. pursue
détente), or, risk running a US borrowing requirement that busts the credibility of the
dollar. The US, culturally, is accustomed to acting militarily 'where, when and how' it decides
so to do. It will probably be culturally unable to abstain from this well-practiced habit.
Therefore, a weak dollar and rising debt servicing costs seems inevitable: thus, the
rôles seem set for a reversal from the Reagan era. Then it was Russia that overreached,
trying to catch up with the US. Now, it may be the vice versa .
The hysteric anti-Russian rhetoric will continue – so deeply embedded is it as an
'article of faith' - but it seems likely that America will need to reconsider before further
provoking Russia in Syria. If America is now unwilling to 'bloody Russia's nose' over some
escalation in Syria, then its isolated and vulnerable military outposts in eastern Syria will
loose much of their point, or begin to take casualties, or both.
The question now must be how Russia's exercise in speaking 'truth to power' will play on
America's policy towards North Korea. The US 'generals' will not like President Putin's
message, but there is probably little that they can do about it. But North Korea is different.
Just as Britain, at its moment of weakness, in the wake of WW2, wanted the world to know that
it remained strong (though the signs of its weakened state were evident to all), it sought to
demonstrate its continued power through the disastrous Suez Campaign. Let us hope North Korea
does not become America's 'Suez moment'.
It seems Russia was able to develop all these weapons, right up to the testing phase, in
total secrecy. Testing, impossible to conceal, would have been undertaken over the last two
years or so, which fits the time frame for US looking at upgrading their weapons. US ABM
defense, a big part of US military future, what twenty years in the making for US? is now
null and void.
If I know my country our reaction will be, 'we beat them in space race, we beat them in the
80's arms race, and dog gone it, we will beat them again'.
We have no interest in examining how we got here or who triggered it. All we see is that a
gauntlet has been thrown down. We will go into even more massive deficit spending to whip
them again and won't think about it again until we are eating out of garbage cans.
I'm angry at the professional Cold Warriors but even more angry at the MSM. Just today, I
heard a Russian expert (aka hater) on FOX intone that Russia never had anything to worry
about with our ABM systems because it can't a massive first strike. I naively expected the
lady host to ask, 'but maybe they are worried that it would be able to stop a retaliatory
strike after we send them to hades'. Needless to say, I was disappointed. Instead, Eboni
Williams (mentioning her name to show that I'm not hallucinating, any of them would have
reacted the same way), her eyes opened wide, 'we must improve our defenses to stop them'.
There you go, the FOX host, not only didn't see through the guests straw man argument but
took it as a given that the U.S. should be able to nuke Russia out of existence with no
consequences for us. The entire premise of the START treaty was to preserve MAD with a
smaller nuke force to reduce accidents. Mr. Naive again, why should I expect the host to know
that or the expert to inform her that MAD is the expected norm.
''The point is, ladies and gentleman, that war, for lack of a better word, is good. War is
right, war works. War clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary
spirit. War, in all of its forms; war for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the
upward surge of mankind.''
So say the fellows who qualify to sit it out in well stocked gov bunkers and watch it on
TV.
When you qualify any anti-Russian sentiment as "hysteric", you lose a lot of credibility. No
doubt there is a lot of noise, but the reality is that economically Russia is a basket case
and the US is rapidly joining them.
For the next decade, we are faced with an unstable world and that will cause a lot of
damage. However, it is unlikely that it will result in the massive land wars of the past. The
biggest potential adversary to both the US and Russia is China. The battle field will be the
communications platforms. The good new is that they will remain fragmented and technology
will more than likely make it even more so, which will thankfully and eventually localize
information, as global solutions are increasingly rejected.
As with these pages, there are a lot of conspiracies published right now, but as they are
increasingly dispatched, a standard will be developed. Some will agree with it and others
will not and will thus migrate elsewhere. This will be repeated all over the Internet.
I was an early user of the Internet and it quickly became a rather awful place where
people were exchanging views. It soon became evident that was not sustainable and things
changed. Like in a pond, the scum will rise, until encountering sunlight, when it is
transformed and sinks to the bottom, never to be seen again, unless you dig very deep. But
the cream will assemble at the top.
The compulsive hatred of President Putin in élite western circles has surpassed
anything witnessed during the Cold War. Western states have been hyping political hostility
in almost every sphere: In Syria, in Ukraine, across the Middle East, in Eurasia, and now,
this hatred has leached into the Security Council, leaving it irretrievably polarised --
and paralysed. This hostility has percolated too, across to all Russia's allies,
contaminating them. It potends – almost inevitably – further sanctions on
Russia (and its friends) under the catch-all Countering America's Adversaries Through
Sanctions Act. But the real question is: Does this collective hysteria portend war?
Not necessary. With MAD temporary restored on a new level the benefits of the
first strike against Russia (if such plans existed) are null and void.
Moreover spending on the current generation of missile defense systems should be partially
written off, as their efficiency is now highly questionable (but they can be repurposed into
offensive weapons carrying cruise missiles and such)
But the new neo-McCarthyism campaign, which is now in full force in the USA, serves a
different purpose than the preparation to the WWIII, and reached such scale and intensity for
a quite different reason.
Neoliberalism, which was the social system that the USA adopted in 1970th and spread
around the globe entered a deep crisis. And Russia is a very convenient scapegoat, which
allows to avoid the most difficult question: what to do next as neoliberalism entered the phase of
decline (also Russia as a scapegoat allows just to reuse Cold War stereotypes firmly engraved
in minds of the considerable part of the US population.)
The collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008. and the collapse of support by the US
population of neoliberal elite in 2016, threatens the USA role in the world and thus the
existence of global neoliberal empire. And, in a more distant perspective (a decade, or two),
the status of dollar as a global reserve currency.
And nobody knows what to do with this situation, how to approach it.
First it looked to me that the election of Trump was a sign that a more forward looking part
of the US elite was trying to organize a soft landing: declare victory for neoliberalism and
slowly retreat from the large part of the expenses for maintaining the global neoliberal
empire. Partially off-loading those costs on EU, Japan, Australia, etc.
In this case enormous resources spent on MIC and empire per se can be redirected internally
to placate restive population, and the deepening of the internal crisis in governance and the
loss of confidence of population in the ruling elite, which demonstrated itself is such a
dramatic manner in Hillary loss in 2016, can be probably be averted.
I was wrong. Multinationals fully and tightly control the US neoliberal elite (and are an
important part of it) and they will never allow this. Also a large part of neoliberal elite is
hell bent on world domination, and, like French aristocracy, "forgot nothing, and learned
nothing" after 2016 elections.
With the alarming level of degeneration of the elite clearly visible in both Trump
Administration and Congress. But the process itself started long ago (people say that Nixon
was the last "real" president ;-). To say nothing about top intelligence agencies
honchos.
In any case, it is clear that the US neoliberal elite still is hell-bent on world
domination and is resistant to any change of the status quo . And I also noticed that,
like in Rome, there is now an influential caste of "imperial servants", also hell-bent on
maintaining the status quo.
Which includes not only Pentagon, and State Department which have a lot of staff living
abroad for years. But also major intelligence agencies, closely connected with their counterparts (note
role of UK-USA connections in Steele dossier) and as such fully "globalized/neoliberalized",
at least ideologically. As well as the majority of the US Senate and House
That blocks any possibility of change in the US foreign policy and budget priorities. It
looks like MIC needs to be fed at all costs. And the power of the "deep state" is such that
it took them just three months to emasculate Trump, and put him in line with previous
policies.
I would like to remind that Trumpism (or "economic nationalism" as it sometimes it is
called) initially was pretty attractive proposition which included the following elements
(most of which are anathema to classic neoliberalism):
Rejection of neoliberal globalization;
Rejection of unrestricted immigration;
Fight against suppression of wages by multinationals via cheap imported labor;
Fight against the elimination of meaningful, well-paying jobs via outsourcing and
offshoring of manufacturing;
Rejection of wars for enlargement and sustaining of neoliberal empire, especially
NATO role as global policemen and wars for Washington client Israel in the Middle
East;
Détente with Russia;
More pragmatic relations with Israel and suppression of Israeli agents of
influence;
Revision of offshoring of manufacturing and relations with China and India, as well as
addressing the problem of trade
deficit;
Rejection of total surveillance on all citizens;
The cut of military expenses to one third or less of the current level and
concentrating on revival on national infrastructure, education, and science.
Abandonment of maintenance of the "sole superpower" status and global neoliberal
empire for more practical and less costly "semi-isolationist" foreign policy;
Closing of
unnecessary foreign military bases and cutting aid to the current clients.
The truth is that the moment, when the USA could change direction to the regime of
"splendid isolation", or whatever such move can be called, was lost.
Moreover, despite Trump capitulation, the color revolution against him continued because
he is not accepted as a legitimate POTUS by neoliberal elite, and, especially, by neocons. Which
further weakens the state. That's another reason why neo-McCarthyism hysteria is still in
full swing: it helps to compensate for the damage caused by slash-and-burn political
infighting (which is a kind of soft civil war, if you wish)
The problem with witch hunt against Russia is that can speed up the alliance of China and
Russia, on most beneficial for China terms. If and when China-Russia alliance materialize,
the containment of China would be even more difficult and costly, the threat to dollar more
pronounced and all bets are off for the US led global neoliberal empire as "Silk road"
project will eat it in Europe and Asia chunk by chunk.
Neo-McCarthyism in this respect might be not such an absurd policy (and it does provide
internal benefits in the form of consolidation of society against the fake external enemy --
a classic trick described by Hermann Göring in his famous quote https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/33505-why-of-course-the-people-don-t-want-war-why-should
) as Putin is not eternal and this will be his last term in office. With clear signs of
possible political crisis in Russia due to the weakness of the mechanisms for smooth
transition of the power to a new leader, or even the selection of the new one.
The danger is that instead of desirable new pro-European president (or at least a person
who is inclined to cooperate with the West, but only on equal terms, like Putin) the next
Russian president can be a fierce nationalist.
NBC's Megyn Kelly has tried to establish herself as the US media's preeminent "Putin
whisperer" since confronting the Russian president last year over allegations he sanctioned
interference by hacking groups in the 2016 US presidential election. In a formal
interview with the Russian president, Kelly asked the Russian leader about the latest
development in the ongoing controversy, Mueller's indictment of
13 Russians and 3 Russian entities for election meddling.
Ignoring that the indictment stated that the alleged activities of the trolls at the
Internet Research Agency had no impact on the outcome of the election, Kelly insisted on
pressing the Russian president about why Russia hadn't acted to prosecute the men - including
Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a wealthy Russian businessman.
Putin pointed out that no formal requests had been made by the US government, and no effort
to share the incriminating information had been made.
"I have to see first what they've done. Give us a document, give us an official request"
Putin said in the NBC interview adding that "We can not respond to that if they do not violate
Russian laws."
Kelly responded by listing some of the allegations, before Putin insisted that they
shouldn't be presented to him personally - but to Russia's general prosecutor.
"This has to go through official channels, not through the press, or yelling and hollering
in the United States Congress," Putin said.
The broadcast aired a day after Putin grabbed headlines in Western media by revealing that
Russia had recently finished testing a range of nuclear weapons that were capable of evading US
anti-ballistic missile batteries, showing animated footage and digital representations of the
missiles' capabilities striking Florida which
prompted an uproar at the US State Department .
Meanwhile, even though Russia has repeatedly criticized the US and NATO for installing
anti-ballistic missile shields in Eastern Europe that Russia says more closely resemble
offensive missile batteries, Putin pushed back against questions about whether the US and
Russia were entering a new Cold War. The Russian leader said anybody spreading these
accusations are more concerned with propaganda than accurate representations of the
relationships between the two countries.
"My point of view is that the individuals that have said that a new Cold War has started
are not analysts. They do propaganda."
Repeating a claim that has been made by many Russian officials, Putin said the arms race
between the US and Russia began when George W Bush withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile
treaty in 2002.
"If you were to speak about an arms race, then an arms race began exactly at the time and
moment the U.S. opted out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty," he said.
When asked, Putin refused to answer direct questions about the missile tests, saying only
that "every single weapons system that I have discussed today easily surpasses and avoids a
missile defense system."
Whatever interview is shown of Putin on any lamestream outlet, you can bet your bottom
dollar that they will twist it to fit their narratives that Putin is bad, and the Swamp is
good. In fact, it don't matter that the US pulls out of treaties and acts
unilaterally.......laws and treaties are optional to the evil empire. Non-agreement capable
comes to mind.
So this pro-Hillary bastion of Neoliberal innuentndo -- Guardian -- does not not like Hicks.
As onecommneter noted " The poisonous Guardian which is so toxic I would advise folks not to use
it even as an ass wipe, did not allow comments as is their custom now."
Source
What is despicable pressitute is this guy: "The Washington Post has
found that "members of the Trump campaign interacted with Russians at least 31 times
throughout the campaign" in "at least 19 known meetings"."
Hicks, 29, had the high-pressure job last summer of
crafting , with the president, an explanation for his son Donald Trump Jr's secret
meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in New York in 2016 – an explanation later
revealed as false. More recently, Hicks was said to have run the botched White House response
to domestic abuse allegations
against former aide Rob Porter, with whom she has been linked romantically.
... ... ...
Hicks aggressively defended the president-elect and his team against charges of
inappropriate ties to Russian figures.
"The campaign had no contact with Russian officials," she said. Two days after the
election, she said: "We are not aware of any campaign representatives that were in touch with
any foreign entities before yesterday, when Mr Trump spoke with many world leaders."
The Washington Post has
found that "members of the Trump campaign interacted with Russians at least 31 times
throughout the campaign" in "at least 19 known meetings".
Discrepancies such as those have perhaps accelerated Hicks' political education. On
Tuesday, the House intelligence committee questioned her for close to nine hours about the
campaign's Russia ties.
Hicks refused to answer some of the most sensitive questions, including about the
explanation for Trump Jr's meeting with Russians, according to House Democrat Adam
Schiff.
But Hicks was said to have made one concession, admitting to having told, on an
unspecified number of occasions, certain "white lies" on the president's behalf.
"... he Dems disgust me with their neo-McCarthyism and the Repubs disgust me because of the way they are playing out their hand right now as well. Games within corrupt games, and yet normal behavior especially in waning empires (or other types of polities, including powerful int'l corporations). ..."
"... Chapter 14 of Guns, Germs and Steel is titled "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy" and it used to be available online but my old link is dead and I couldn't find a new one. But a basic definition should suffice: "Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service." I have no idea how one turns this around and I doubt it's even possible. ..."
"... The Real Reason Establishment Frauds Hate Trump and Obsess About Russia https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/02/20/the-real-reason-establishment-frauds-hate-trump-and-obsess-about-russia/ ..."
"... Blaming Russia for all the nation's problems serves several key purposes for various defenders of the status quo. For discredited neocons and neoliberals who never met a failed war based on lies they didn't support, it provides an opportunity to rehabilitate their torched reputations by masquerading as fierce patriots against the latest existential enemy. Similarly, for those who lived in denial about who Obama really was for eight years, latching on to the Russia narrative allows them to reassure themselves that everything really was fine before Trump and Russia came along and ruined the party. ..."
"... he doesn't provide the same feel good quality to empire that Obama did. He's simply not the warm and fuzzy salesman for oligarchy and empire Obama was, thus his inability to sugarcoat state-sanctioned murder forces a lot of people to confront the uncomfortable hypocrisies in our society that many would prefer not to admit. ..."
"... I can't stand Kushner's smirky face and got a good chuckle from this prince's fall as I am not a fan of his passion for Israel. But I don't think he's a stupid idiot either. He's probably very smart in business, but he seems to have no feel for politics. Trump is much better at it than Kushner. Of course they are going after Kushner as a way to attack and disadvantage Trump. Politics is a form of warfare after all. ..."
"... My take is that Trump survives but mostly contained by the Borg ..."
jsn @16 & 40, in complete agreement with you. Great comments! T he Dems disgust me
with their neo-McCarthyism and the Repubs disgust me because of the way they are playing out
their hand right now as well. Games within corrupt games, and yet normal behavior especially
in waning empires (or other types of polities, including powerful int'l corporations).
Chapter 14 of Guns, Germs and Steel is titled "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy" and
it used to be available online but my old link is dead and I couldn't find a new one. But a
basic definition should suffice: "Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, is a
form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the
personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of
the wider population, often without pretense of honest service." I have no idea how one turns
this around and I doubt it's even possible.
Back when I used to subscribe to STRATFOR, founder George Friedman always made a point of
evaluating the elites of whatever country he was analyzing and how they operated amongst
themselves and relative to the people and how effective they were or were not in governing a
country. But he never did that for the US. I would have paid extra for that report! But of
course he could not stay in business if he did such a thing as those people are his
clients.
I think Mike Krieger over at Liberty Blitzkrieg nails it from another perspective with
this post:
Blaming Russia for all the nation's problems serves several key purposes for various
defenders of the status quo. For discredited neocons and neoliberals who never met a failed
war based on lies they didn't support, it provides an opportunity to rehabilitate their
torched reputations by masquerading as fierce patriots against the latest existential enemy.
Similarly, for those who lived in denial about who Obama really was for eight years, latching
on to the Russia narrative allows them to reassure themselves that everything really was fine
before Trump and Russia came along and ruined the party.
By throwing every problem in Putin's lap, the entrenched bipartisan status quo can tell
themselves (and everybody else) that it wasn't really them and their policies that voters
rejected in 2016, rather, the American public was tricked by cunning, nefarious Russians.
Ridiculous for sure, but never underestimate the instinctive human desire to deny
accountability for one's own failures. It's always easier to blame than to accept
responsibility.
That said, there's a much bigger game afoot beyond the motivations of individuals looking
to save face. The main reason much of the highest echelons of American power are united
against Trump has nothing to do with his actual policies. Instead, they're terrified that --
unlike Obama -- he's a really bad salesman for empire. This sort of Presidential instability
threatens the continuance of their well oiled and exceedingly corrupt gravy train. Hillary
Clinton was a sure thing, Donald Trump remains an unpredictable wildcard.
... Obama said all the right things while methodically doing the bidding of oligarchy. He
captured the imagination of millions, if not billions, around the world with his soaring
rhetoric, yet rarely skipped a beat when it came to the advancement of imperial policies. He
made bailing out Wall Street, droning civilians and cracking down on journalists seem
progressive. He said one thing, did another, and people ate it up. This is an extraordinarily
valuable quality when it comes to a vicious and unelected deep state that wants to keep a
corrupt empire together.
Trump has the exact opposite effect. Sure, he also frequently says one thing and then does
another, but he doesn't provide the same feel good quality to empire that Obama did. He's
simply not the warm and fuzzy salesman for oligarchy and empire Obama was, thus his inability
to sugarcoat state-sanctioned murder forces a lot of people to confront the uncomfortable
hypocrisies in our society that many would prefer not to admit.
------------
I can't stand Kushner's smirky face and got a good chuckle from this prince's fall as
I am not a fan of his passion for Israel. But I don't think he's a stupid idiot either. He's
probably very smart in business, but he seems to have no feel for politics. Trump is much
better at it than Kushner. Of course they are going after Kushner as a way to attack and
disadvantage Trump. Politics is a form of warfare after all.
My take is that Trump survives but mostly contained by the Borg
"... Based on historical evidence, to believe that Trump (with his party - Republican control of House and Senate) will change our course is naive. By contrast, Obama D had both houses also - we got WAR, cash for clunkers, foreclosures, bank bailouts and health care by AHIP with runaway costs. ..."
In fifty years, very little has been done by US Federal Government which benefits the common citizen. A great deal has been done
to facilitate the degradation of the common citizen by the global one percent. We have a new world order as called for by GHW
Bush.
Based on historical evidence, to believe that Trump (with his party - Republican control of House and Senate) will change
our course is naive. By contrast, Obama D had both houses also - we got WAR, cash for clunkers, foreclosures, bank bailouts and
health care by AHIP with runaway costs.
Trump is and has been carrying out his own policies to enrich those that already have everything and to repeal any regulations
that were put into place to protect the people. Have you not noticed that he lined his cabinet with Goldman Sachs (which he blasted
HRC for associating her self with.
Like I said he and his gang are doing what they want to help enrich themselves on the backs of the rest of us. Wake up and
quit upholding these lying pieces of excrement they are no different than the ones before them.
Trump is a dirty businessman the things that he is doing are to benefit him and his family and to screw the rest of us and
tell us how great it is for us. You my man have drank from the Trump cup and think that anything that speaks against him is "fake
news" when in reality Trump and the likes of Breitbart are the "fake news" a little truth but a bunch of spin
In this state the current war between factions of the US elite reminds Stalin fight against "globalists" like Trotsky, who were
hell-bent of the idea of world revolution.
Notable quotes:
"... I would define Trump_vs_deep_state as "bastard neoliberalism" which tries to combine domestic "100% pure" neoliberalism with the rejection of neoliberal globalization as well as partial rejection of expensive effort for expansion of US led neoliberal empire via color revolutions and military invasions, especially in the Middle East. ..."
"... That makes screams of "soft neoliberals" from Democratic Party at "hard neoliberals" at Republican Party really funny indeed. Both are essentially "latter-day Trotskyites", yet they scream at each other, especially Obama/Clinton supporters ;-) ..."
"... But in reality Democratic sheeple are just a different type of wolfs -- wolfs in sheep clothing. And Hillary was an old, worn "classic neoliberal" shoe, which nobody really wants to wear. ..."
"... Trump does not intend to change the neoliberal consensus of what government should do domestically, and what should be the relationship between US government and business community. ..."
I would define Trump_vs_deep_state as "bastard neoliberalism" which tries
to combine domestic "100% pure" neoliberalism with the rejection of neoliberal globalization as well
as partial rejection of expensive effort for expansion of US led neoliberal empire via color revolutions
and military invasions, especially in the Middle East.
That's what seems to be the key difference of Trump_vs_deep_state from "classic neoliberalism" or as Sklar
called it "corporate liberalism".
From Reagan to Obama all US governments pray to the altar of classic neoliberalism. Now we have
a slight deviation.
That makes screams of "soft neoliberals" from Democratic Party at "hard neoliberals" at Republican
Party really funny indeed. Both are essentially "latter-day Trotskyites", yet they scream at each
other, especially Obama/Clinton supporters ;-)
In this sense Krugman recent writings are really pathetic and signify his complete detachment
from reality, or more correctly attempt to create an "artificial reality" in which bad wolf Trump
is going to eat Democratic sheeple. And in which media, FBI, and Putin are responsible entirely for
Hillary's loss.
But in reality Democratic sheeple are just a different type of wolfs -- wolfs in sheep clothing.
And Hillary was an old, worn "classic neoliberal" shoe, which nobody really wants to wear.
Trump does not intend to change the neoliberal consensus of what government should do domestically,
and what should be the relationship between US government and business community.
But the far right movement that he created and led has different ideas.
But Trump himself was quickly neutered (in just three month) and now does not represents
"Trumpism" (rejection of neoliberal globalization, unrestricted immigration for suppression of
wages, rejection of elimination of jobs via outsourcing and offshoring of manufacturing,
rejection of wars for enlargement and sustaining of neoliberal empire, especially NATO role as
global policemen and wars for Washington client Israel in Middle east, detente with Russia etc)
in any meaningful way. He is just an aging Narcissist in power.
Looks like Trump became a variant of Hillary minus sex change operation.
Notable quotes:
"... He supports same sex relations and marriage of the same. ..."
"... He is by nature a situational leader -- not typically a conservatives methodology of leadership ..."
"... . He mistakes support and loyalty for agreement. ..."
"... He seems too weak to stand his ground on key issues. Syria, (missile attack) ..."
"... His willingness to ignore -- Israel-US problematic relationship. ..."
"... I am leary of anyone who says tough things about immigration, but quietly backpedals or openly does the same -- DACA. ..."
it's easy to come away from CPAC energy and enthusiasm thinking your headline is an accurate
description of what is happening in the GOP. I am more conservative thankfully in my views
than most members at CPAC. And while I may not be the typical voter. I can say categorically,
that :trumoing" is not in my blood. Let's look what a consevative had to consider when
evaluating Pres Trump:
3. He supports same sex relations and marriage of the same.
... ... ...
5. He is by nature a situational leader -- not typically a conservatives methodology
of leadership
... ... ...
8 . He mistakes support and loyalty for agreement.
9. He seems too weak to stand his ground on key issues. Syria, (missile
attack)
10. His willingness to ignore -- Israel-US problematic relationship.
11. He thinks that Keynesian policy is a substitute for economic growth. monetary
policy.
12. I am leary of anyone who says tough things about immigration, but quietly
backpedals or openly does the same -- DACA.
"Note about Miss Mona Charin: the two agree on so many points on foreign policy, especially
Israel, it's hard to see her disdain. I think she rejects his troublesome demeanor and attitude.
Presidential decorum is a big deal to many."
Notable quotes:
"... The sixty plus millions of people who voted Trump are politically diverse. They have one thing in common. They were not persuaded by the loud, continuous and shameless lying of the corporate media. Rather they were motivated by it. ..."
Now his other supporters might say, considered against all the other candidates -- he's
better. Hmmmm, well, that's why I voted for him.
Thank you. My bullet points would differ from yours but in the end I also voted for Trump.
The sixty plus millions of people who voted Trump are politically diverse. They have one
thing in common. They were not persuaded by the loud, continuous and shameless lying of the
corporate media. Rather they were motivated by it.
The deplorables, having found one another, need to hang together until we find real
leadership. Trump, whatever he is, is not a leader.
With Ukrainian officials continuing to
talk up their hostility with neighboring Russia, the Pentagon announced on Thursday that
approval has been granted for the sale of Javelin anti-tank systems to Ukraine.
Russia is protesting the sale, however, arguing that the sale of the missiles would
encourage Ukraine to resume the use of force against Eastern Ukraine's ethnic Russian rebels,
with the idea that they would deploy the missiles against any rebel tanks, and also against
any Russian tanks that might join the fight.
Pentagon officials downplayed the issue, saying they don't believe the Javelin missiles
will materially change the military balance of power in the region. Despite obvious offensive
uses for such missiles, the US is trying to spin this as another "defensive" sale to
Ukraine.
The first line of the Ukrainian national anthem is "Ukraine has not yet died," one
interviewee says in "Breaking Point," a fierce documentary about that country and its recent
clashes with Russia. For a land often perched on the edge of ruin, she says, mere survival is
something to celebrate.
Directed by Mark Jonathan Harris and Oles Sanin, the film starts with a rundown of a history
that has repeated itself for centuries -- invaders have long prized Ukraine for its resources
and geography, and modern times are no exception.
... ... ...
The filmmakers supply terrifying footage: At civilian rallies, we see nightstick beatings
and bloody riots. During military battles, bullets whiz by and explosions shake the cameras.
Nerve-racking scenes follow Ukraine's extraordinarily bold volunteer soldiers.
At the core of Trumpism is the rejection of neoliberalism
Pat Buchanan does not understand neoliberalism well and mixes apples with oranges, but the key idea expressed here stands: " Consider
this crazed ideology of free trade globalism with its roots in the scribblings of 19th-century idiot savants, not one of whom ever built
a great nation. Adhering religiously to free trade dogma, we have run up $12 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I. Our cities have
been gutted by the loss of plants and factories. Workers' wages have stagnated. The economic independence Hamilton sought and Republican
presidents from Lincoln to McKinley achieved is history."
Notable quotes:
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever." ..."
"I walk through this world with greater courage and hope when I find myself in a relation of friendship and intimacy with this
great man, whose fame has gone out not only over all Russia, but the world. We regard Marshal Stalin's life as most precious to the
hopes and hearts of all of us."
Returning home, Churchill assured a skeptical Parliament, "I know of no Government which stands to its obligations, even in its
own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government."
George W. Bush, with the U.S. establishment united behind him, invaded Iraq with the goal of creating a Vermont in the Middle
East that would be a beacon of democracy to the Arab and Islamic world.
Ex-Director of the NSA Gen. William Odom correctly called the U.S. invasion the greatest strategic blunder in American history.
But Bush, un-chastened, went on to preach a crusade for democracy with the goal of "ending tyranny in our world."
... ... ...
After our victory in the Cold War, we not only plunged into the Middle East to remake it in our image, we issued war guarantees
to every ex-member state of the Warsaw Pact, and threatened Russia with war if she ever intervened again in the Baltic Republics.
No Cold War president would have dreamed of issuing such an in-your-face challenge to a great nuclear power like Russia. If Putin's
Russia does not become the pacifist nation it has never been, these guarantees will one day be called. And America will either back
down -- or face a nuclear confrontation. Why would we risk something like this?
Consider this crazed ideology of free trade globalism with its roots in the scribblings of 19th-century idiot savants, not one
of whom ever built a great nation. Adhering religiously to free trade dogma, we have run up $12 trillion in trade deficits since
Bush I. Our cities have been gutted by the loss of plants and factories. Workers' wages have stagnated. The economic independence
Hamilton sought and Republican presidents from Lincoln to McKinley achieved is history.
But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, is the annual importation of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants,
many from the failed states of the Third World, in the belief we can create a united, peaceful and harmonious land of 400 million,
composed of every race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, creed, culture and language on earth.
Where is the historic evidence for the success of this experiment, the failure of which could mean the end of America as one nation
and one people?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and
Divided America Forever."
Pat Buchanan does not understand neoliberalism well and mixes apples with oranges, but the key idea expressed here stands:
" Consider this crazed ideology of free trade globalism with its roots in the scribblings of 19th-century idiot savants,
not one of whom ever built a great nation. Adhering religiously to free trade dogma, we have run up $12 trillion in trade deficits
since Bush I. Our cities have been gutted by the loss of plants and factories. Workers' wages have stagnated. The economic
independence Hamilton sought and Republican presidents from Lincoln to McKinley achieved is history."
The truth is that now Trump does not represent "Trumpism" -- the movement that he created which includes the following:
– rejection of neoliberal globalization;
– rejection of unrestricted immigration;
– fight against suppression of wages by multinationals via cheap imported labor;
– fight against the elimination of meaningful, well-paying jobs via outsourcing and offshoring of manufacturing;
– rejection of wars for enlargement and sustaining of neoliberal empire, especially NATO role as global policemen and wars for
Washington client Israel in the Middle East;
– détente with Russia;
– more pragmatic relations with Israel and suppression of Israeli agents of influence;
– revision of relations with China and addressing the problem of trade deficit.
– rejection of total surveillance on all citizens;
– the cut of military expenses to one third or less of the current level and concentrating on revival on national infrastructure,
education, and science.
– abandonment of maintenance of the "sole superpower" status and global neoliberal empire for more practical and less costly "semi-isolationist"
foreign policy; closing of unnecessary foreign military bases and cutting aid to the current clients.
Of course, the notion of "Trumpism" is fuzzy and different people might include some additional issues and disagree with some
listed here, but the core probably remains.
Of course, Trump is under relentless attack (coup d'état or, more precisely, a color revolution) of neoliberal fifth column,
which includes Clinton gang, fifth column elements within his administration (Rosenstein, etc) as well from remnants of Obama
administration (Brennan, Comey, Clapper) and associated elements within corresponding intelligence agencies. He probably was forced
into some compromises just to survive. He also has members of the neoliberal fifth column within his family (Ivanka and Kushner).
So the movement now is in deep need of a new leader.
That's a good summary of what the public voted for and didn't get.
And whether Trump has sold out, or was blackmailed or was a cynical manipulative liar for the beginning is really irrelevant.
The fact is that he is not doing it – so he is just blocking the way.
At some point the US public are going to have to forget about their "representatives" (Trump and Congress and the rest of
them) and get out onto the street to make themselves heard. The population of the US is 323 million people and if just 1/2
of 1% (1,6 million) of them decided to visit Congress directly the US administration might get the message.
pyrrhus, March 3, 2018 at 2:15 am GMT
@anon
Finally, Pat understands that the American [Neoliberal] Empire and habit of intervention all over the world is a disaster.
This past September, in one of his regular interviews with the newspaper Parlamentní Listy, retired Czech Major General
Hynek Blaško commented on the possibility of a conflict between Russia and NATO with a following anecdote:
"I have seen a popular joke on the Internet about Obama and his generals in the Pentagon debating on the best timing to
attack Russia. They couldn't come to any agreement, so they decided to ask their allies.
The French said: " We do not know, but certainly not in the winter. This will end badly. "
The Germans responded: "We do not know, either, but definitely not in a summer. We have already tried."
Someone in Obama's war room had a brilliant idea to ask China, on the basis that China is developing and always has new
ideas.
The Chinese answered: "The best time for this is right now. Russia is building the Power of Siberia pipeline, the North
Stream Pipeline, Vostochny Cosmodrome Spaceport, the MegaProject bridge to Crimea; also Russian is upgrading the Trans-Siberian
railroad with a new railway bridge across Lena River and the Amur-Yakutsk Mainline. Russia is also building new sports facilities
for the World Cup and athletics, and has in development over 150 production projects in the Arctic Well, now they really need
as many POWs as possible!"
"... So, albeit the USSR registered up to 17% of GDP spending on the "military" (as some sources claim) -- you have to take it with a grain of salt. ..."
"... Another problem with this "too much military" theory is the logic behind it. During the 50s and 60s, the USSR was also spending a lot on the military, but it didn't stop it growing 15%-10% yoy ..."
"... It was only after the mid-70s, when the USSR begun to stagnate (it never had a recession), that the military spending theorists begun to sprout. The question is the same about the ill fate of the welfare state in Western Europe in the end of the 70s: which came first, the egg or the chicken. Putting it in another way: was it the Soviet was spending that caused its long stagnation or was it its long stagnation that made its military spending look big? ..."
The war hawks in my beloved country are the Soviet Politburo clamoring for a larger army,
navy, air force to be equipped with the most expensive weaponry. Back in the 80's the
Soviet Union had an army of 5M, they it is less than 1M and is purely defensive. We on the
other hand have built up our Defense Budget to epic levels and have consultant after
consultant telling us that it is at an all time low.
- Posted by: Christian Chuba | Mar 1, 2018 4:14:46 PM | 20
The USSR had deeper problems than that.
It's not that the Soviet expenditure with the military was a problem. On the opposite: the
Soviet were very familiar with the concept of dual industry, them being the masters of WWII.
Many industries in the USSR that were officially military were actually civilian: the most
colorful example being the airplane industry, which could produce either civilian or military
aircraft. Another example: the USSR was the biggest agriculture tractor producer in the world
at one point. These tractors were produced in the same industrial plants as the one used to
produce battle tanks. So, albeit the USSR registered up to 17% of GDP spending on the
"military" (as some sources claim) -- you have to take it with a grain of salt.
Another problem with this "too much military" theory is the logic behind it. During
the 50s and 60s, the USSR was also spending a lot on the military, but it didn't stop it
growing 15%-10% yoy .
It was only after the mid-70s, when the USSR begun to stagnate (it never had a
recession), that the military spending theorists begun to sprout. The question is the same
about the ill fate of the welfare state in Western Europe in the end of the 70s: which came
first, the egg or the chicken. Putting it in another way: was it the Soviet was spending that
caused its long stagnation or was it its long stagnation that made its military spending look
big?
Don't worry about republicans ..democrats are ruining themselves all alone .every time the
deplorables see something like this they will double down on anything but a Dem.
Regardless of one's view on blacks or whites this is a major Stupid for a politician.
Chuck Schumer votes against South Carolina federal judge nominee because he's
white
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected President Donald Trump's nominee for a
long-vacant South Carolina federal judgeship not because of his qualifications but because of
his race.
The decision drew the quick ire of South Carolina's two U.S. senators and U.S. Rep. Trey
Gowdy, R-Spartanburg, a former federal prosecutor.
Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in a Senate floor speech Wednesday he would not support
Greenville attorney Marvin Quattlebaum for a vacancy on the U.S. District Court in South
Carolina
Voting for Quattlebaum, he said, would result in having a white man replace two
African-American nominees from the state put forth by former President Barack Obama.
Schumer said he would not be a part of the Trump administration's pattern of nominating
white men.
"The nomination of Marvin Quattlebaum speaks to the overall lack of diversity in President
Trump's selections for the federal judiciary," Schumer said.
"It's long past time that the judiciary starts looking a lot more like the America it
represents," he continued. "Having a diversity of views and experience on the federal bench
is necessary for the equal administration of justice."
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the Senate's sole black Republican, pushed back on
Schumer's rationale and urged other Senate Democrats to instead address diversity issues by
starting with their offices.
"Perhaps Senate Democrats should be more worried about the lack of diversity on their own
staffs than attacking an extremely well-qualified judicial nominee from the great state of
South Carolina," Scott tweeted Thursday morning.
Offensive weapons are cheaper the comprehensive defense. For example specialized supersonic
missile for destroying anti-missile sites are much cheaper then anti-missile sites. So Putin
gamble against US anti-missile system is a right one and much cheaper, which is important for
Russia. But with Ukraine under total US control Putin still suffered a huge geopolitical
defeat.
Mr. Putin said Russia had developed the weaponry because the United States had rejected
established arms control treaties and was deploying new missile defense systems in Europe and
Asia.
... ... ..
The new Russian weapons would render such defenses obsolete... and if anyone found a
workaround, "our boys will think of something new."
... ... ...
Mr. Putin's guns-and-butter, Russia-can-do-it-all speech came 17 days before the March 18
election. It seemed intended to reassure voters that expanded social spending would help solve
the economic problems of the past four years, while sending the message that Mr. Putin was
their best hope in protecting a Russia portrayed as a besieged fortress.
... ... ...
On the social front, Mr. Putin promised to double government spending on health care and
raise pensions. He said Russia would reduce the poverty rate -- official statistics indicate
that around 14 million Russians live below the poverty line -- by 2024.
... ... ...
Mr. Putin also said that life expectancy, currently at 73, a leap from when he first took
office in 2000, should exceed 80 by 2030.
... ... ...
For years, Mr. Putin has chafed at the perceived disrespect showed to him and Russia by the
United States. "Nobody listened to Russia," he said near the end of the speech, to huge
applause. "Well, listen up now."
"... The U.S. establishment is not content simply to have domination over the media narratives on critical foreign policy issues, such as Syria, Ukraine and Russia. It wants total domination. Thus we now have the " Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act " that President Obama signed into law on Dec. 23 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017 , setting aside $160 million to combat any "propaganda" that challenges Official Washington's version of reality. ..."
"... The new law is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least because it merges a new McCarthyism about purported dissemination of Russian "propaganda" on the Internet with a new Orwellianism by creating a kind of Ministry of Truth – or Global Engagement Center – to protect the American people from "foreign propaganda and disinformation." ..."
"... Justifying this new bureaucracy, the bill's sponsors argued that the existing agencies for " strategic communications " and " public diplomacy " were not enough, that the information threat required "a whole-of-government approach leveraging all elements of national power." ..."
"... The law also is rife with irony since the U.S. government and related agencies are among the world's biggest purveyors of propaganda and disinformation – or what you might call evidence-free claims, such as the recent accusations of Russia hacking into Democratic emails to "influence" the U.S. election. ..."
"... Of course, there is a long history of U.S. disinformation and propaganda. Former CIA agents Philip Agee and John Stockwell documented how it was done decades ago, secretly planting "black propaganda" and covertly funding media outlets to influence events around the world, with much of the fake news blowing back into the American media. ..."
"... In more recent decades, the U.S. government has adopted an Internet-era version of that formula with an emphasis on having the State Department or the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy supply, train and pay "activists" and "citizen journalists" to create and distribute propaganda and false stories via "social media" and via contacts with the mainstream media. The U.S. government's strategy also seeks to undermine and discredit journalists who challenge this orthodoxy. The new legislation escalates this information war by tossing another $160 million into the pot. ..."
The U.S. establishment is not content simply to have domination over the media
narratives on critical foreign policy issues, such as Syria, Ukraine and Russia. It wants total
domination. Thus we now have the " Countering
Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act " that President Obama signed into law on Dec. 23
as part of the National Defense
Authorization Act for 2017 , setting aside $160 million to combat any "propaganda" that
challenges Official Washington's version of reality.
The new law mandates the U.S. Secretary of State to collaborate with the Secretary of
Defense, Director of National Intelligence and other federal agencies to create a Global
Engagement Center "to lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to
recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and
disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests." The law
directs the Center to be formed in 180 days and to share expertise among agencies and to
"coordinate with allied nations."
The legislation was initiated in March 2016, as the demonization of Russian President
Vladimir Putin and Russia was already underway and was enacted amid the allegations of "Russian
hacking" around the U.S. presidential election and the mainstream media's furor over supposedly
"fake news." Defeated Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton voiced strong support for
the bill: "It's imperative that leaders in both the private sector and the public sector step
up to protect our democracy, and innocent lives."
The new law is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least because it merges
a new
McCarthyism about purported dissemination of Russian "propaganda" on the Internet with
a new
Orwellianism by creating a kind of Ministry of Truth – or Global Engagement Center
– to protect the American people from "foreign propaganda and disinformation."
As part of the effort to detect and defeat these unwanted narratives, the law authorizes the
Center to: "Facilitate the use of a wide range of technologies and techniques by sharing
expertise among Federal departments and agencies, seeking expertise from external sources, and
implementing best practices." (This section is an apparent reference to proposals that Google,
Facebook and other technology companies find ways to block or brand certain Internet sites as
purveyors of "Russian
propaganda" or "fake news." )
Justifying this new bureaucracy, the bill's sponsors argued that the existing agencies
for " strategic
communications " and " public
diplomacy " were not enough, that the information threat required "a whole-of-government
approach leveraging all elements of national power."
The law also is rife with irony since the U.S. government and related agencies are among
the world's biggest purveyors of propaganda and disinformation – or what you might call
evidence-free claims, such as the recent accusations of Russia hacking into Democratic emails
to "influence" the U.S. election.
Despite these accusations -- leaked by the Obama administration and embraced as true by the
mainstream U.S. news media -- there is little or no
public evidence to support the charges. There is also a contradictory analysis
by veteran U.S. intelligence professionals as well as statements by Wikileaks
founder Julian Assange and an associate, former British Ambassador Craig
Murray , that the Russians were not the source of the leaks. Yet, the mainstream U.S. media
has virtually ignored this counter-evidence, appearing eager to collaborate with the new
"Global Engagement Center" even before it is officially formed.
Of course, there is a long history of U.S. disinformation and propaganda. Former CIA
agents Philip Agee and John Stockwell documented how it was done decades ago, secretly planting
"black propaganda" and covertly funding media outlets to influence events around the world,
with much of the fake news blowing back into the American media.
In more recent decades, the U.S. government has adopted an Internet-era version of that
formula with an emphasis on having the State Department or the U.S.-funded National Endowment
for Democracy supply, train and pay "activists" and "citizen journalists" to create and
distribute propaganda and false stories via "social media" and via contacts with the mainstream
media. The U.S. government's strategy also seeks to undermine and discredit journalists who
challenge this orthodoxy. The new legislation escalates this information war by tossing another
$160 million into the pot.
Propaganda and Disinformation on Syria
Syria is a good case study in the modern application of information warfare. In her memoir
Hard Choices , former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote that the U.S. provided
"support for (Syrian) civilian opposition groups, including satellite-linked computers,
telephones, cameras, and training for more than a thousand activists, students and independent
journalists."
Indeed, a huge amount of money has gone to "activists" and "civil society" groups in Syria
and other countries that have been targeted for "regime change." A lot of the money also goes
to parent organizations that are based in the United States and Europe, so these efforts do not
only support on-the-ground efforts to undermine the targeted countries, but perhaps even more
importantly, the money influences and manipulates public opinion in the West.
In North America, representatives from the Syrian "Local Coordination
Committees" (LCC) were frequent guests on popular media programs such as "DemocracyNow."
The message was clear: there is a "revolution" in Syria against a "brutal regime" personified
in Bashar al-Assad. It was not mentioned that the "Local Coordination Committees" have been
primarily funded by the West, specifically the Office for Syrian Opposition Support, which was
founded by the U.S. State Department and the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
More recently, news and analysis about Syria has been conveyed through the filter of the
White Helmets, also known as Syrian Civil Defense. In the Western news media, the White Helmets
are described as neutral, non-partisan, civilian volunteers courageously carrying out rescue
work in the war zone. In fact, the group is none of the above.
It was initiated by the U.S. and U.K. using a British military contractor and Brooklyn-based
marketing company.
While they may have performed some genuine rescue operations, the White Helmets are
primarily a media organization with a political goal: to promote NATO intervention in Syria.
(The manipulation of public opinion using the White Helmets and promoted by the New York Times
and Avaaz petition for a "No Fly Zone" in Syria is documented here.
)
The White Helmets hoax continues to be widely believed and receives uncritical promotion
though it has increasingly been exposed at alternative media outlets as the creation of a
"shady PR firm ." During critical times in the conflict in Aleppo, White Helmet individuals
have been used as the source for important news stories despite a track record of deception.
Recent Propaganda: Blatant Lies?
As the armed groups in east Aleppo recently lost ground and then collapsed, Western
governments and allied media went into a frenzy of accusations against Syria and Russia based
on reports from sources connected with the armed opposition. CNN host Wolf Blitzer described
Aleppo as "falling" in a "slaughter of these women and children" while CNN host Jake Tapper
referred to "genocide by another name."
The Daily Beast published the claims of the Aleppo Siege Media Center under the title
"Doomsday is held in Aleppo" and amid accusations that the Syrian army was executing
civilians, burning them alive and "20 women committed suicide in order not to be raped." These
sensational claims were widely broadcast without verification. However, this "news" on CNN and
throughout Western media came from highly biased sources and many of the claims – lacking
anything approaching independent corroboration – could be accurately described as
propaganda and disinformation.
Ironically, some of the supposedly "Russian propaganda" sites, such as RT, have provided
first-hand on-the-ground reporting from the war zones with verifiable information that
contradicts the Western narrative and thus has received almost no attention in the U.S. news
media. For instance, some of these non-Western outlets have shown videos of popular
celebrations over the "liberation of Aleppo."
There has been further corroboration of these realities from peace activists, such as Jan
Oberg of Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research who published a photo
essay of his eyewitness observations in Aleppo including the happiness of civilians from
east Aleppo reaching the government-controlled areas of west Aleppo, finally freed from areas
that had been controlled by Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate and its jihadist allies in Ahrar
al-Sham.
Dr. Nabil Antaki, a medical doctor from Aleppo, described the liberation of Aleppo in an
interview titled
"Aleppo is Celebrating, Free from Terrorists, the Western Media Misinformed." The first
Christmas celebrations in Aleppo in four years are shown here, replete with marching band members in
Santa Claus outfits. Journalist Vanessa Beeley has published testimonies of civilians from east Aleppo.
The happiness of civilians at their liberation is clear.
Whether or not you wish to accept these depictions of the reality in Aleppo, at a minimum,
they reflect another side of the story that you have been denied while being persistently
force-fed the version favored by the U.S. State Department. The goal of the new Global
Engagement Center to counter "foreign propaganda" is to ensure that you never get to hear this
alternative narrative to the Western propaganda line.
Even much earlier, contrary to the Western mythology of rebel "liberated zones," there was
strong evidence that the armed groups were never popular in Aleppo. American journalist James
Foley described the situation in 2012 like this
:
"Aleppo, a city of about 3 million people, was once the financial heart of Syria. As it
continues to deteriorate, many civilians here are losing patience with the increasingly violent
and unrecognizable opposition -- one that is hampered by infighting and a lack of structure,
and deeply infiltrated by both foreign fighters and terrorist groups. The rebels in Aleppo are
predominantly from the countryside, further alienating them from the urban crowd that once
lived here peacefully, in relative economic comfort and with little interference from the
authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad."
On Nov. 22, 2012, Foley was kidnapped in northwestern Syria and held by Islamic State
terrorists before his beheading in August 2014.
The Overall Narrative on Syria
Analysis of the Syrian conflict boils down to two competing narratives. One narrative is
that the conflict is a fight for freedom and democracy against a brutal regime, a storyline
promoted in the West and the Gulf states, which have been fueling the
conflict from the start . This narrative is also favored by some self-styled
"anti-imperialists" who want a "Syrian revolution."
The other narrative is that the conflict is essentially a war of aggression against a
sovereign state, with the aggressors including NATO countries, Gulf monarchies, Israel and
Jordan. Domination of the Western media by these powerful interests is so thorough that one
almost never gets access to this second narrative, which is essentially banned from not only
the mainstream but also much of the liberal and progressive media.
For example, listeners and viewers of the generally progressive TV and radio program
"DemocracyNow" have rarely if ever heard the second narrative described in any detail. Instead,
the program frequently broadcasts the statements of Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations Samantha Power and others associated with the U.S. position. Rarely do you hear
the viewpoint of the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations, the Syrian Foreign Minister or
analysts inside Syria and around the world who have written about and follow events there
closely.
"DemocracyNow" also has done repeated interviews with proponents of the "Syrian revolution"
while ignoring analysts who call the conflict a war of aggression sponsored by the West and the
Gulf monarchies. This blackout of the second narrative continues despite the fact that many
prominent international figures see it as such. For example, the former Foreign Minister of
Nicaragua and former President of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel D'Escoto, has said,
"What the U.S. government is doing in Syria is tantamount to a war of aggression, which,
according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, is the worst possible crime a State can commit against
another State."
In many areas of politics, "DemocracyNow" is excellent and challenges mainstream media.
However in this area, coverage of the Syrian conflict, the broadcast is biased, one-sided and
echoes the news and analysis of mainstream Western corporate media, showing the extent of
control over foreign policy news that already exists in the United States and Europe.
Suppressing and Censoring Challenges
Despite the widespread censorship of alternative analyses on Syria and other foreign
hotspots that already exists in the West, the U.S. government's new "Global Engagement Center"
will seek to ensure that the censorship is even more complete with its goal to "counter foreign
state and non-state propaganda and disinformation." We can expect even more aggressive and
better-financed assaults on the few voices daring to challenge the West's "group thinks"
– smear campaigns that are already quite extensive.
In an article titled "Controlling the Narrative on
Syria" , Louis Allday describes the criticisms and attacks on journalists Rania Khalek and
Max Blumenthal for straying from the "approved" Western narrative on Syria. Some of the
bullying and abuse has come from precisely those people, such as Robin Yassin-Kassab, who have
been frequent guests in liberal Western media.
Reporters who have returned from Syria with accounts that challenge the propaganda themes
that have permeated the Western media also have come under attack. For instance, Canadian
journalist Eva Bartlett recently returned to North America after being in Syria and Aleppo,
conveying a very different image and critical of the West's biased media coverage. Bartlett
appeared at a United Nations press conference and then did numerous
interviews across the country during a speaking tour. During the course of her talks and
presentation, Bartlett criticized the White Helmets and questioned whether it was true that Al
Quds Hospital in opposition-held East Aleppo was attacked and destroyed as claimed.
Bartlett's recounting of this information made her a target of Snopes, which has been a
mostly useful website exposing urban legends and false rumors but has come under criticism
itself for some internal
challenges and has been inconsistent in its investigations. In one report entitled "
White
Helmet Hearsay," Snopes' writer Bethania Palmer says claims the White Helmets are "linked
to terrorists" is "unproven," but she overlooks numerous videos , photos, and other reports showing
White Helmet members celebrating a Nusra/Al Qaeda battle victory, picking up the bodies of
civilians executed by a Nusra executioner, and having a member who alternatively appears as a
rebel/terrorist fighter with a weapon and later wearing a White Helmet uniform. The "fact
check" barely scrapes the surface of public evidence.
The same writer did another shallow "investigation" titled
"victim blaming" regarding Bartlett's critique of White Helmet videos and what happened at
the Al Quds Hospital in Aleppo. Bartlett suggests that some White Helmet videos may be
fabricated and may feature the same child at different times, i.e., photographs that appear to
show the same girl being rescued by White Helmet workers at different places and times. While
it is uncertain whether this is the same girl, the similarity is clear.
The Snopes writer goes on to criticize Bartlett for her comments about the reported bombing
of Al Quds Hospital in east Aleppo in April 2016. A statement at the website of Doctors Without Borders says the
building was "destroyed and reduced to rubble," but this was clearly false since photos show
the building with unclear damage. Five months later, the September 2016 report by Doctors Without
Borders says the top two floors of the building were destroyed and the ground floor Emergency
Room damaged yet they re-opened in two weeks.
The many inconsistencies and contradictions in the statements of Doctors Without Borders
resulted in an
open letter to them. In their last report, Doctors Without Borders (known by its French
initials, MSF) acknowledges that "MSF staff did not directly witness the attack and has not
visited Al Quds Hospital since 2014."
Bartlett referenced satellite images taken before and after the reported attack on the
hospital. The images do not show severe damage and it is unclear whether or not there is any
damage to the roof, the basis for Bartlett's statement. In the past week, independent
journalists have visited the scene of Al Quds Hospital and report that that the top floors of
the building are still there and damage is unclear.
The Snopes' investigation criticizing Bartlett was superficial and ignored the broader
issues of accuracy and integrity in the Western media's depiction of the Syrian conflict.
Instead the article appeared to be an effort to discredit the eyewitness observations and
analysis of a journalist who dared challenge the mainstream narrative.
U.S. propaganda and disinformation on Syria has been extremely effective in misleading much
of the American population. Thus, most Americans are unaware how many billions of taxpayer
dollars have been spent on yet another "regime change" project. The propaganda campaign –
having learned from the successful demonizations of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Muammar
Gaddafi and other targeted leaders – has been so masterful regarding Syria that many
liberal and progressive news outlets were pulled in. It has been left to RT and some Internet
outlets to challenge the U.S. government and the mainstream media.
But the U.S. government's near total control of the message doesn't appear to be enough.
Apparently even a few voices of dissent are a few voices too many.
The enactment of HR5181, "Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation," suggests that
the ruling powers seek to escalate suppression of news and analyses that run counter to the
official narrative. Backed by a new infusion of $160 million, the plan is to further squelch
skeptical voices with operation for "countering" and "refuting" what the U.S. government deems
to be propaganda and disinformation.
As part of the $160 million package, funds can be used to hire or reward "civil society
groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and
development centers, private companies, or academic institutions."
Among the tasks that these private entities can be hired to perform is to identify and
investigate both print and online sources of news that are deemed to be distributing
"disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda directed at the United States and its allies
and partners."
In other words, we are about to see an escalation of the information war.
Rick Sterling is an independent investigative journalist. He lives in the San Francisco Bay
Area and can be reached at [email protected]
Joe Tedesky , February 28, 2018 at 4:08 pm
If Russia-Gate hadn't been about providing a distraction from Hillary's blasted emails, it
would have been something else to create this need to combat 'fake news', because for my
whole life of 68 years most of everything our government and media has told us is a lie, so
now truthful reporting will be censored. Now all alternative news is being attacked by the
very establishment of people who have been lying to us for so long, as their constant lies
have made necessary a market for honest news. Rather the corporate owned media tell the
truth, they instead rally behind a patriotically draped 'news ban', as this is the MSM's fix
for all that's fake, or to tell the truth their fake news hammer to squash all that's honest.
We are in the bottom of the ninth whereas our police state nation is about to lose it's free
press god help us, god help the world.
" their constant lies have made necessary a market for honest news." yes, Joe, perhaps
that's the only good thing that has come out of their monopoly of MSM.
Joe Tedesky , February 28, 2018 at 5:02 pm
Yes being able to find truthful journalism is a commodity these days, but how long before
we lose that, is the question?
Joe Tedesky , February 28, 2018 at 4:54 pm
Lt. Col. Daniel L Davis says it's time to quit going to war with the AUMF. After you read
this let's see how much media attention the good Lt. Col. gets.
Here's an interesting view[1] and a classic on patriotic peer pressure for war[2]. There
must have been ample profit for stakeholders in the Vickers maxim gun production during the
Boer Wars and WW1[3,4].
Thank you very much. I watched the first video and got the book, I also am going to enjoy
'the Four Feathers' movie since it is one of my favorites.
Here something where moonofalabama is suggesting of how the NYT is back to their old
tricks like before the Iraq WMD invasion, where now the NYT is claiming N Korea is selling
nuclear weapons parts to Syria.
Checked out all of your links. I have downloaded, and saved as favorites. I have some
reading to do. I'll watch the youtube links that you have provided first. Thanks
godenrich.
John W , March 1, 2018 at 11:19 am
Keep those links coming Joe Tedesky. People need actual reality, not reality derived by
the criminally insane.
Bruce , March 1, 2018 at 5:57 am
Excellent comment. To paraphrase Orwell .telling the truth has become a revolutionary
act.
Joe Tedesky , March 1, 2018 at 5:51 pm
Orwell was so right, that sometimes I swear we in this century should be looking to see if
he is amongst us .a true time traveler. Joe
John W , March 1, 2018 at 11:13 am
I concur Joe Tedesky. The shit is indeed hitting the fan. Destroying the very thing that
gives them live(Earth) is complete insanity. But, psychopaths want control, and I believe
that these humanoids in control do not want anything to grow, live, prosper, or be, unless
they say so. Unless they have ultimate control over it(trees, grass, flowers, birds, animals,
humans, bacteria, planets, suns, etc). This geoengineering and other agendas that they are
doing, is killing off everything. This I believe is where their GMO's comes in. Kill all off,
then replace it with that they have created to live in the environment they have created.
Nothing or no one has a child or offspring unless they deem it ok, give their acceptance for
it to be. Entirely psychopathic, or an extremely primitive beastial mind. But, no one says
that what we call psychopathic is anywhere near sane. A bit off the tracks, but it does
coincide with controlling narratives or 'truths' for their agendas.
Nancy , March 1, 2018 at 1:07 pm
In a crazy way, it makes sense!
Joe Tedesky , March 1, 2018 at 5:50 pm
John W if more people were to investigate the harmful effects of GMO food products, and
they were to take what they found seriously, why this alone would be a good reason to stand
up and say to our corporate masters, 'enough is enough'.
Glad you enjoyed the links, because I was fearful that I had over done it with all those
posted links get this I had even more, but thought I was going overboard with what I had
already posted. So thanks for the approval John W. Joe
"the State Department or the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy supply, train
and pay "activists" and "citizen journalists" to create and distribute propaganda and false
stories via "social media" and via contacts with the mainstream media." and yet they
hyperventilate about "Russian trolls". How many of these pseudo patriotic agencies have been
financed with our taxes?
mark , March 1, 2018 at 5:22 pm
They paid just one British PR company, Bell Pottinger, $540 million to produce fake
material about Iraq and Syria and get it on to the Internet. This firm is run by a British
Lord, Lord Bell. He and his firm have a very shady record. They were hired by corrupt South
African politicians to divert attention from corruption scandals by fomenting hatred towards
the white minority there.
mike k , February 28, 2018 at 4:17 pm
Mind control is an essential feature of the project to enslave the world. If you think
there is no such project, you may already be a victim of it. Realizing that this is happening
is essential for defending against it. Those who are waging this war against your freedom
will do everything in their power to make you unaware of being brainwashed.
For a person to awaken to being brainwashed requires humility, openness, honesty, courage,
and the right kind of help from those already awakening.
mike k , February 28, 2018 at 5:43 pm
And if you lack the qualities mentioned, welcome to zombiehood!
ranney , February 28, 2018 at 4:20 pm
Last Sunday 60 minutes had a segment on the White Helmets so full of lies I wanted to
barf. I hope everyone who reads this comments section will write 60 minutes and tell them
that lying to the public is a big no-no and that White Helmets is an ISIS organization that
gasses their own people and leaves "evidence" to prove Assad did it.
Lois Gagnon , February 28, 2018 at 6:46 pm
Once in a while I go on the networks' Facebook pages and link an article that contradicts
what they just reported. Sometimes the next night they will add what the critics of US policy
are saying. They go out of their way to minimize that content, but it's good to let them know
there are people paying attention to the reality on the ground. It also exposes those
commenting on the FB page to alternative information.
It may not make a big difference, but even putting a dent in the official propaganda is
better then nothing.
Realist , March 1, 2018 at 3:48 am
I make it a point not to watch 60 Minutes any more, because I have a low tolerance for
deceit. However, I am aware of the false narratives they have been propagating on this
country's foreign policy for a long time. Other media outlets that have taken on that role
with zest these days include the History Channel, with a scathing systematic slander of
"Public Enemy Number One," President Vladimir Putin, and the National Geographic Channel.
Like PBS and NPR, both try to pass themselves off as dispensers of a refined intellectual
approach to news. Frankly, there is more thoughtful analysis given to the purchases of
backyard junk made by Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz on the History Channel's "American
Pickers."
john wilson , March 1, 2018 at 5:23 am
60 minutes is part of the MSM deep state mouth piece. You don't seriously think they will
take the slightest bit of notice of letters complaining about their shyty programme do you?
We need to support and donate to genuine alternative media, news and comment like the late Mr
Parry's great site. Further, good, informative articles and alternative news clips should be
printed out and left on public transport for others to read. If each of us only printed out
10 copies of informative alternative news and left them on public transport for others to
read, then we might get at least a bit of the alternative (no, not alternative but truth
news) out there.
Nancy , March 1, 2018 at 1:10 pm
That's a great idea.
Virginia , March 1, 2018 at 2:51 pm
I second that idea.
Dan Good , February 28, 2018 at 7:04 pm
It is quite amazing to see that America is creating a class of American dissidents.
Growing up in the 50's and 60's it was hard to understand how the USSR could treat its
writers as outcasts. But it is about to happen now in the US of A.
Sobering recap in reprint of this Rick Sterling article, to realize that things continue
as bad or worse since this was published. There is a very well written opinion piece on
Sputnik by Finian Cunningham, "American Collapse -- The Spectacle of Our Time". The US power
structure, rather than address US internal societal rot, he says, doubles down on its rogue
nation behavior and militarism. The US is now as bad as Nazi Germany was and ought to receive
a "Judgement at Nuremberg" condemnation, is my opinion, but read Finian's piece at Sputnik,
very good.
geeyp , March 1, 2018 at 12:24 am
Particularly good choice to reprint as many have awoken since then to the last president's
sedition and cutting of the last thin thread of what was left of US democracy. And, he didn't
even have to pay for it. He allotted for it, and you paid for it.
robjira , March 1, 2018 at 1:12 am
It was the one sided reporting on Syria that was the last straw for me regarding DN, of
which I had been a financial supporter. Cracks in the veneer appeared (for me, at any rate)
as far back as the release of the Collateral Murder video (I distinctly recall Amy Goodman
relentlessly badgering Julian Assange to confirm it was [Bradley] Chelsea Manning who
provided the material to Wikileaks, while Assange with obvious discomfort repeatedly told
Goodman Wikileaks did not reveal the identities of sources), and continued with her ignorant
and insulting treatment of a member of Iraq Veterans Against The War who acknowledged during
a segment on the CM video, that he had friends among the squad of ground troops who arrived
after the massacre (he didn't want to reveal their names, and Goodman tore into him
questioning his enthusiasm for transparency, displaying stunning ignorance of the bonds
formed by soldiers serving together in combat). My misgivings deepened with the enthusiastic
support for the vilification of Putin as a monolithic representation of all that is brutally
and nefariously, "Russian." This coincided with DN's somewhat murky reporting on the
Ukrainian crisis, but it was Syria and the coverage of the 2016 election that did it for me
as far as DN is concerned.
Thank the stars for Consortium News. RIP Robert Parry.
robjira – thanks for the observations on Democracy Now. It has really been quite
amazing to watch Amy and company continue to shill for amoral neocon war mongering while
continuing to promote themselves as some sort of challenge to power. I'm really not sure how
that crew sleeps at night given the amount of civilian blood on their hands from their
reporting both Libya and Syria. Glad to see Aaron Mate left and now is able to do important
ethical journalism over at RealNews. Meanwhile a senior reporter Shane Bauer at "Mother
Jones" openly calls for censorship by the web platform "Medium" of those posting views that
challenge the official government narrative on Syria. And "Counterpunch" seems to have
stopped publishing the work of Andre Vitchek, as its editorial selection of articles becomes
more and more milk-toast "McResistance" by the week. As the ranks of "alternative media"
willing to actually stand up and oppose U.S. imperialism continues to shrink, those (like
Consortiumnews) that have maintained their integrity become that much more important.
Nancy , March 1, 2018 at 1:21 pm
The times we are living in are separating the real truth-seekers from the phonies. This is
a good thing, as Democracy Now, Counterpunch, etc. are exposing themselves as part of the
problem, not the solution. The truth is hard to face but as the saying goes–will set us
free –someday.
The good news is that there are other independent sources that keep popping up. They may
have occasional links to MSM(when relevant) but the bias is toward uncovering corruption and
international hypocrisy. One such website I recently discovered was Defend Democracy Press
with an emphasis on European news.
Robjira, Gary, Nancy -- I observed the same thing with DN and Amy Goodman. I recall a
piece here at CN that show DN not to be the independent news source it used to be, some huge
contribution was mentioned. DN is compromised now.
Maybe you saw Amy interview Glenn Greenwald who early on debunked Russia hacking the DNC.
He made a good case but she, as did MSM's reporters, stopped using the word "alleged" hacking
almost right away.
Two good articles not to miss on RT today: one on White Helmets, the other on Putin's
speech.
mark , March 1, 2018 at 5:15 pm
Not really all that amazing.
DemocracyNow is funded by Soros.
Just follow the money.
It's the same story with a lot of these "radical", "alternative" sites.
Realist , March 1, 2018 at 3:37 am
Wonderful, this gives me another chance to say it: Thanks, Obama! NOT!!!
KiwiAntz , March 1, 2018 at 4:39 am
What a godsend Consortiumnews & other alternative news outlets like RT & Sputnik
are which provide real news rather than the Fakestream American & Western Media? I can't
even watch or read Western Media now, I just cringe in disgust at the endless, baseless &
24 hr propagandist lies & bull crap, it makes me sick to my stomach! Consortiumnews has
really opened my eyes to the real situation behind World events? As a thinking person, I
reached a sort of "Road to Damascus moment" & that's when one comes to the realisation
that everything our Leaders & Countries have told us are blatant lies & brainwashing
lies at that? Some Americans, especially those who read alternative news & refuse to be
brainwashed by their Govt, are slowly coming to this realisation, that their Country has
become a evil, murderous, Fascist, Oligarchy state & when that happens the scales really
come off the eyes (just like the Apostle Paul) & you really start to understand the
serious threat to every human being on Earth, that this evil, scumbag, American deepstate
elite class are, with their demented agenda, seeking to manipulate, deceive & enslave the
World with their murderous, money making schemes. Using Nazi style, fake media propaganda as
demonstrated in this article, that Joseph Goebels would have rejoiced in, they fail to
recognise that just as Hitler's fascist Empire fell, it is the fate of this current false US
Empire as well, to collapse under its own imperialistic weight? Americans need a "storming
the Bastille" revolution like the French Revolution, where they round up this elite class
& dispense justice by gullotine? It worked out fine for the French & it could work
for American citizens, fed up with this bunch of crooks? That's the only way to get rid of
these satanic nutcases? The Writings on the Wall, the rot has set in, & hopefully we will
be around to see the American empire collapse, it's going to happen & the sooner the
better before it's drags us into WW3?
john wilson , March 1, 2018 at 5:31 am
Hey there KiwAntz, there is another great site out there called 'information clearing
house info' and it has great articles by people like John Pilger and others. Just type in the
usual www, etc and you will find it.
Well of course the USG has to quiet the Alternative News army – how else can one
have successful False Flags or assisted ones , when you have someone – spilling the
beans. And there is a big one coming folks – you can bet on it – but they have to
silence the Truth News – first. The Deep State , MIC, Corporations, Bankers, Wall
Street, and many many USG employees along with State and Muni Govs. are going to throw all
their chips into the pot on this Global poker game – they're all in – Look out
World !
backwardsevolution , March 1, 2018 at 6:32 am
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been hired by Google to police the content of YouTube
for hate speech. IOW, one hate group gets to stifle their opposition.
anastasia , March 1, 2018 at 8:10 am
Is this why I have noticed that google and youtube are taking down comments, youtube
channels, etc of alternative media; why I also noticed that new bogus websites are going up
purporting to be "alternative" websites (but who clearly are not) that are putting up false
information and are very threatening, etc. Is google, Amazon, etc. doing this in accordance
with this new law? What is our President doing about it? What about Congress? Eventually will
they close down Trump's Twitter account and claim that they are only complying with the
National Defense Authorization Act for 2017? This is very disturbing.
backwardsevolution , March 1, 2018 at 8:45 am
anastasia – yes, it is disturbing. I think Congress is putting pressure on Google
(who owns YouTube), Facebook and Twitter to censor. Of course, some say that these outfits
are merely an arm of the U.S. government. Who knows what's really happening.
The upshot is that freedom of speech is being strangled right in front of our eyes. I hope
everyone will stop using Google, Facebook and Twitter. Boycott them.
backwardsevolution , March 1, 2018 at 8:47 am
As Paul Craig Roberts said:
"Who asked Google to transform itself from search engine to gatekeeper? Is there a
conspiracy here against the First Amendment? What are Google's qualifications for determining
what is fake news and extremist views? Is what are we witnessing here the elite's use of a
private company to control explanations in behalf of the One Percent?
How does a private company get to overrule the First Amendment of the US Constitution? [
]
Why do people use Google, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter when the companies are in a
conspiracy against freedom of the press? Is the answer that Americans would rather be
entertained than to be free?"
E. Leete , March 1, 2018 at 11:03 am
I remember Paul Craig Roberts saying that the neoliberal economic agenda is getting enough
pushback that it will have to use nuclear weapons to succeed, and make no mistake the
neoliberal economic agenda means. to. succeed.
I can't fathom why the 99% underpaid are not campaigning united for an end to allowing
overpay. When will humans snap awake and stop shoveling world wealth to a fraction few in
exchange for tyranny? Tyranny is where overfortunes are – money is power – power
to influence power to control power to make human history be what they say it will be –
!! – the government is bought by people with overfortunes who are writing the laws and
putting themselves above the laws they write – because they can – the gigarich
are behind all the disinformation, the waste of wealth, the chaos, violence, corruption, the
psychopathological militarism we cannot afford – divide and conquer –
distractions instead of focus on the root cause – people endlessly discuss myriad
CONsequences of allowing overpayoverpower but won't go near the one idea that would reverse
the colossal destruction of everyone's everything. Getting good government and an unbiased
press requires turning to justice and obeying her. Peace, safety, prosperity, a bright
future? Spread world wealth as evenly as world work is spread and outlaw once and for all
time any human being's being able to keep an overfortune. The madness is not going to stop
until we resolve ourselves to end the stealing – legal thefts are too numerous to count
right now and the gigarich obviously have the power to keep inventing new ones even if you
can manage to shut one legal theft down now and then – see the biggest picture,
humanity – or perish by your own lack of seeing. Endlessly attacking the consquences of
allowing overpayoverpower is getting you nowhere but deeper in the hole.
"Who asked Google to transform itself from search engine to gatekeeper?" exactly, it's the
loose end of a long rope that tends to choke dissent on the internet at best, it induces
paranoia one never knows whether that "glitche" is intended to censor or is merely a
technical aberration
jools , March 1, 2018 at 12:22 pm
Just wait until Net Neutrality "officially" kicks in, when the Stasi will go full throttle
in interrupting many of the progressive channels esp. on UTube. On a side note, I was
wondering, does Consortiumnews have a podcast? Again, thanks for enlightening us all w/your
hard hitting journalism for I fear that much darker days awaits this nation.
Liam , March 1, 2018 at 12:27 pm
Excellent article Rick Sterling and Consortium News. For those wanting to learn more about
the White Helmets (FSA terrorists) this link includes hundreds of pics from their own
Facebook accounts proving that they are indeed terrorists posing as rescuers of little
kids.
Huge Cache of White Helmets Exposed Links All In One Massive Volume For Sharing and Red
Pilling – Over 400 Images in 22 Files
Also worth noting: A huge purge of You Tube alternative information channels took place in
the wake of the Parkland shooting event. Looks like the school shooting has been used not
just as a gun grab, but also to assert control via purging of a large number of popular You
Tube channels that were critical of the children's acting skills. It would be great to see
Consortium News cover this attack on free speech, and also the Google/You Tube connections to
the Deep State and why they should be looked at as a government entity and not simply as a
corporate entity that has the right to ban and censor people. They have almost complete
control of information.
Massive list of channels removed from YouTube #The1984IsREAL
Liam – great post! People need to open their eyes. I too hope that more and more
articles are written on this very topic. I know Tucker Carlson at Fox tries to bring this to
people's attention on a weekly basis. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. We had
better smarten up quickly.
me under the circumstances , March 1, 2018 at 3:10 pm
Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett are targeted by the "pure white never mistaken good guys"
ie the Fawning Corporate Media, as Ray McGovern calls them, as fake news providers,
indicating to fair observers that they are actually the reporters on the scene in many parts
of the globe who record what is really happening and how it affects the people involved.
Even when evidence is staring people in the face, many refuse to change their stereotyped
images of who is to blame.
Lucifer Christ , March 1, 2018 at 3:49 pm
The problem with this propaganda is that the US government is calling its own ticked off
citizens trolls.
The American people should not be paying for propaganda against their own interests.
This money is being spent by the Deep State to destroy the American people.
The American people are aware of the evil that lives in Washington, DC and how people in
Washington, DC within the Deep State care nothing about them or their families. No matter of
money will change that fact!
People's actions say much. Over time the American people have learned that the Deep State
and the majority of politicians in DC are all about their own agenda and padding their own
pockets – not serving Americans.
Washington DC is evil. Everybody knows!
mark , March 1, 2018 at 5:02 pm
DemocracyNow is just controlled opposition.
It is constantly shilling for regime change and "humanitarian bombing".
It gets its funding from Soros.
It is just another faux Left outfit like the Guardian.
backwardsevolution , March 1, 2018 at 10:22 pm
From Paul Craig Roberts again:
"The Trump presidency is the perfect timing for the oligarchs to take over control of all
information. The liberal/progressive/left hate Trump so much that they are willing to ignore
the proven fact that Russiagate was a FBI/Obama/Hillary conspiracy against Trump in order to
use the false accusation as a weapon against Trump.
Gun control advocates and Identity Politics are willing to turn a blind eye to the
unanswered questions about school shootings and terrorist bombings in order to get more gun
control and police power to suppress "white supremacists." Partisan in their approach, they
do not consider that the same power will be used against them.
As far as I can tell, the vast majority of young Americans have no idea what is at stake.
Most will never realize that their reality consists of controlled explanations. They will
never know the truth about anything."
The Lefties are playing right into their trap. Like I said, useful idiots.
Drew Hunkins , March 2, 2018 at 12:55 am
There were two points in very recent history when the Putin vilification operations really
began to ramp up in the West:
1.) The anti Putin propaganda campaign escalated in 2006 when Kemp & Edwards published
their CFR paper in which they made the absurd charge that Putin was "rolling back democracy"
in Russia. What a sick joke. They made no such breathless accusations during the rape and
pillage of Russia during the 1990s when j. Sachs and his Harvard boyz provided the
intellectual muscle for the massive exploitation and plunder. No, it was only when Putin put
a halt to a lot of the looting and capital flight that the Western liberal intellectual class
became alarmed and proceeded to assail and decry the Putin "regime" ( it is almost always
deemed a regime, rarely is it referred to as the Putin "administration.")
2.) Then the anti Putin propaganda campaign began to escalate even more so in 2013 when
Putin pulled off one of the finest diplomatic moves of the last 30 years: he talked Obama
down from bombing Damascus to remove Assad. This made Putin enemy number one in the eyes of
the Zio-Saudi-Washington militarist Terror Network. They wanted ever so desperately to topple
Assad and turn Syria into a wasteland and miserable failed state. They were apoplectic.
From here on out the Rachelle Maddows & Masha Gessens were off and running, fomenting
Russophobia and putting the world on the brink of thermo nuclear Armageddon.
Gerry , March 2, 2018 at 2:45 am
I wrote a small comment thanking Rick (whom I know) and even that comment was not
published.
I cannot find a moderation policy, but perhaps non-US citizens are not allowed on this site?
I cannot find any way of contacting anybody either.Probably because I said a few more things
that were upsetting the status quo here.
Well, so much for the most censored site I have ever seen: nice website but operated by
controlling journalists, so better stick to non-US sites as this is really ridiculous. You
publish whatever somebody says (Abe) who exposes anybody who dares to disagree with his idea
about those of us who do not agree with Zionism, but no rebuttal allowed. Nobody will see
this comment probably, so censor that as well and you are right up there with all the other
Americans who pretend they have a broader view and yet censor anybody who says something
slightly critical. Goodbye and good luck with the effect of this site on the media while your
part of the same policies in the end if it does not suit you.
Loretta , March 2, 2018 at 5:11 am
What about Israel's foreign propaganda and meddling in elections?
Biggest blunder in our lifetimes was not inviting Russia to join NATO, but I guess after
years of anti-Russian propaganda the Neocons figured China would never be quite the bogeyman
that we had built the Sovs into, big enough to keep the defense-dollars gravy-train flowing
while we re-jiggered the mission to find another bogey man. Then, one day, we woke up and
realised the Chicoms held enough of our debt to destroy us, while the Russians don't, so we
keep kicking at the old bogeyman.
"... Yes but very slowly. Russia consistently confounds my western sense of escalation by slicing all situations into tiny increments, smaller than I would have guessed they could be sliced, but on inspection completely realistic and sane. ..."
"... And at the end of each gradual path of escalation sits a hammer blow so final that every time it strikes the world has changed, in the blink of an eye. ..."
"... You wake up and Russia's in Syria. You wake up and every map of Crimea needs to be changed. You wake up and it takes the sane perspective of people like b to narrate how the Munich speech warning of consequences spent 11 years in the preparation, and on this day the Kremlin decided the time to announce this had come. ..."
"... The US has shown nothing but developmental incompetence for some years now. No amount of forced science on special projects can compensate for the systemic failures of a naval fleet that can't steer straight, a trillion-dollar 5th-gen plane that actually doesn't work to 5th-gen standards, and the clear display of a Military Complex saturated with corruption. The gang that can't shoot straight is incapable of peer warfare. You'd hate to be a village without some nuclear arms to protect you in the next 3-4 years, but otherwise the US is done as a world force, and Putin's speech is the milestone of that. ..."
"... The stupidity that the US is trapped it is fealty to the God of Mammon. If your first priority is to make profit then making good stuff become secondary and your competitors have you for lunch ..."
"... Pushing the US into an arms race will be the final nail in its bankruptcy coffin. Are the other nations of the world going to continue to buy Treasuries so we can build weapons to suppress them more? ..."
@39 V. Arnold - "I sense the gloves are coming off"
Yes but very slowly. Russia consistently confounds my western sense of escalation by
slicing all situations into tiny increments, smaller than I would have guessed they could be
sliced, but on inspection completely realistic and sane.
And at the end of each gradual path of escalation sits a hammer blow so final that every
time it strikes the world has changed, in the blink of an eye.
You wake up and Russia's in
Syria. You wake up and every map of Crimea needs to be changed. You wake up and it takes the
sane perspective of people like b to narrate how the Munich speech warning of consequences
spent 11 years in the preparation, and on this day the Kremlin decided the time to announce
this had come.
And with the announcement of the fruition of the last warning comes also the next warning,
that new systems are in development and they will be developed.
~~
@14 karlof1
I like what you're saying about an arms race. And so let the US try. Let it either do
nothing and bluster in its media, or else attempt to catch up and step into the real world to
match the forces playing at the table. Either way it achieves nothing of substance.
The US has shown nothing but developmental incompetence for some years now. No amount of
forced science on special projects can compensate for the systemic failures of a naval fleet
that can't steer straight, a trillion-dollar 5th-gen plane that actually doesn't work to
5th-gen standards, and the clear display of a Military Complex saturated with corruption. The
gang that can't shoot straight is incapable of peer warfare. You'd hate to be a village
without some nuclear arms to protect you in the next 3-4 years, but otherwise the US is done
as a world force, and Putin's speech is the milestone of that.
The US is trapped in its own stupidity.
I'd say, stick a fork in it, but Putin could probably describe the 36 gradations of
fork-sticking, and advise me to be patient ;)
@ Grieved who wrote: "The US is trapped in its own stupidity."
The stupidity that the US is trapped it is fealty to the God of Mammon. If your first
priority is to make profit then making good stuff become secondary and your competitors have
you for lunch
Pushing the US into an arms race will be the final nail in its bankruptcy coffin. Are the
other nations of the world going to continue to buy Treasuries so we can build weapons to
suppress them more?
Pushing the US out of Syria will be the test of Putin's strategy. Will it work? I suspect
we will know soon enough.
More than likely the same clown as went by the username milomilo back in the aussie
ambassador thread.
The username this time round links back to a junk news site.
Grieved | Mar 1, 2018 8:58:39 PM | 44
Indeed, Putin seems a man of infinite patience; but calculating and analyzing might be a
better descriptive.
And then there is NATO; standing naked in front of the Bear. When will its citizens (of so
many countries) realize they'll be the first recipients of nuclear wrath wrought by a corrupt
hegemon and its sycophant vassals (redundant?) following an insane behavior not their own? Or
rather, do they realize they now own that inane behavior?
Greived 44 "You'd hate to be a village without some nuclear arms to protect you in the next
3-4 years, but otherwise the US is done as a world force"
I have felt for some time that Putin's aim is to see the US empire done and dusted before
he retires. 3-4 years looks about right as he will be getting on a bit by the end of the next
term.'
America's Beltway wonks admit the USA won't be able to keep up with Russia, bring idea of
abolishing nukes altogether. I have to admit that although I view condition of the United
States as dire and hopeless, I didn't expect to see first signs of folding so soon.
It is Daniel 8. The watchman (Trump) will unfortunately decide to have a big go at
eliminating Syria. The descendant of the Greek shaggy goat is RF. This announcement will be
misread. The US will fall into the Daniel 8 trap. 2017 it erected its first facilities
between the holy mountain and the sea. We are being puppeted into Armageddon. And for a
little tickle consider the Sanhedrin minted coin celebrating Trump's movement of the US
embassy to Jerusalem...he is put on same level as Cyrus...the anointed one...messiah...Cyrus
is considered by the Judaics as a messiah...Trump is being lauded by them as a new messiah in
the vein of Cyrus.
p
You are right on. The hypersonic Russian cruise missile rules; the US has nothing like it. And
we have seen that the evolution of battleship-->carrier-->cruise missile is complete.
First planes from carriers out-distanced battleship rounds, now cruise missiles have
out-distanced carrier planes (plus speed and maneuver). Bye-bye carrier fleets in peer
conflict. At 12 billion each, plus the cost of the escorts and the 5,000 crew (prospects for
Davey Jones's locker). Still effective against third world.
Actually they have a small presence anyhow because they are high maintenance. Currently, as
usual, only two carriers of the US eleven are deployed as seen here . Two of eleven!!
Posted by: Don Bacon | Mar 1, 2018 10:24:24 PM |
52
"... Mainstream Media: Trump Victorious At CPAC, Economic Nationalist 'Takeover of Conservatism Is Complete, ..."
"... Witness the celebration of neocon pundit Mona Charen (pictured right) a marginal talent whose career of purported conservatism while actually accepting liberal clichés is endangered by the rise of nationalism in the GOP. Her condemnation of CPAC as a "disgrace" because it invited Marion Le Pen of France led to gleeful celebration in the MSM. Charen was promptly rewarded with an op-ed in the New York Times, ..."
"... CPAC panelist reveals in NYT op-ed that she was happy to be booed ..."
"... National Review's ..."
"... Speaking Truth ..."
"... National Review ..."
"... Europe in Crisis ..."
"... Marion Marechal Le Pen's Dynamic Speech, The American Conservative ..."
"... But, of course, what do they care? After all, it's increasingly clear that many Conservatism Inc. functionaries, such as Bill Kristol, always regarded their fellow American citizens as the real enemy anyway . ..."
"... Wanna Be a Player at CPAC? Write a Check First ..."
"... Daily Beast, ..."
"... The Coming Clash of the GOP Titans ..."
"... The American Conservative, ..."
"... WesternJournalism, ..."
"... Kentucky Democrat wins state House in Trump stronghold ..."
"... In blow to Trump, Supreme Court won't hear appeal of DACA ruling ..."
"... I was good with Kucinich and Nader. I'm neither Conservative nor Republican. I voted for McGovern. Yet I am a card carrying deplorable. Bernie is a fraud and Trump is the only real opposition to the entrenched thieves and murderers in Washington. Your Conservative grass roots have a significant cohort of fellow travelers. Trump could not have won the upper midwest without us. ..."
It was only two years ago that then-candidate Trump avoided the annual Conservative
Political Action Conference [CPAC] because it looked likely he would be booed by "true
conservatives." At this year's CPAC, both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence
were treated as conquering heroes, leading the Main Stream Media to declare the president's
victory conclusive [ Trump's Takeover of Conservatism Is Complete and Total, by Tim Alberta,
Politico, February 25, 2018]. But there are still real dangers for
National Conservatives aiming to use the GOP as a vehicle to achieve patriotic immigration
reform. Chief among them: the possibility that President Trump will continue to show weakness
on immigration. With midterms approaching, time is running out, and Trump
simply has not yet given his base a compelling reason to follow him .
This is inexcusable given President Trump's remarkable capture the GOP . Pat Buchanan correctly observed on
the most recent McLaughlin Group that the "Bush party has become a Trump party" on immigration,
trade and foreign policy [ Pat Buchanan: The Bush Party Has Become A Trump Party On Immigration, Trade, Staying Out of
Foreign Wars, by John Binder, Breitbart, February 25, 2018]. The
rank-and-file conservative activists at CPAC showed utter contempt for Bush-era talking points,
lustily booing the ritualistic references to Hispanic immigrants as "natural Republicans."
An astonishing 93 percent of CPAC attendees gave the president a favorable approval rating,
with almost 80 percent demanding the GOP Congress do a better job of working with him [
Trump tweets CPAC straw poll showing favorable approval rating, by John
Boweden, The Hill, February 24, 2018].
With any other Republican, this could simply be dismissed as the grassroots backing their
leader. but with Donald Trump, it shows that much of the official Conservative Movement has
bent the knee to a man they regarded as a usurper during his candidacy.
And those who would dethrone Trump and, more importantly, Trumpism, are still rallying their
forces. Thus Alberta began: "If you're a conservative with something critical to say about
President Trump, watch your back" -- implying the conservative faithful will ruin the careers
of anyone who attacks the Commander-in-Chief. But attacking Trump is in reality a great
professional move for ambitious conservative mediocrities, who can become more prominent in the
Main Stream Media by trashing the president.
Witness the celebration of neocon pundit
Mona Charen (pictured right) a marginal talent whose career of purported conservatism
while actually accepting liberal clichés is endangered by the rise of nationalism in the
GOP. Her
condemnation of CPAC as a "disgrace" because it invited Marion Le Pen of France led to
gleeful celebration in the MSM. Charen was promptly rewarded with an op-ed in the New York
Times, where she got to brag about how she was "glad to be booed at CPAC" [
CPAC
panelist reveals in NYT op-ed that she was happy to be booed, by Alessia
Grunberger, CNN, February 25, 2018]. Charen thus joins the ranks of people like
Charlie Sykes ,
Rick Wilson , and Jennifer Rubin , professional
"conservatives" who, somehow, never have anything positive to say about Republicans but instead
validate the MSM line of the day.
Of more interest was National Review's celebration of Charen. Yuval Levin praised
her and presenting her antics as a Time For
Choosing : "Mona's comments and the ugly reaction of some in the audience lay out before us
two possible paths for the Right," he said sanctimoniously. "Let's hope we ultimately choose
the right one. It certainly isn't the one we have generally been choosing lately" [ Speaking
Truth, February 25, 2018].
Yet what Levin is urging is not some return to an idealized intellectual conservatism, but a
turn back to the lame slogans which marked the George W. Bush years and a refusal to confront
the issues of today. The Islamization of Europe is occurring before our eyes, and has even been
described in National Review itself [ Europe in Crisis, by David Pryce-Jones, July 10, 2017]. Marion Le
Pen (pictured right) also offered, by far, the most intellectually sophisticated and
authentically conservative address of the conference, which even Rod Dreher admitted avoided
the usual "conservative boilerplate" that passes for wisdom at these increasingly embarrassing
junkets [ Marion
Marechal Le Pen's Dynamic Speech, The American Conservative, February 22,
2018]. Yet even at this moment of existential civilization danger, the parasites of the
Respectable Right are determined to make sure there is no effective resistance until it's
too late -- just as they purged everyone
who warned of America's immigration disaster which now threatens the entire GOP with
annihilation.
This intellectual bankruptcy won't prevent Conservatism Inc. from simply retaking the
movement once President Trump is gone, or politically defeated. While the grassroots is with
Trump and CPAC could not openly oppose the president, the panels were still ultimately
controlled by the Donor Class, which pushed cheap labor, mass immigration and resistance to
America First trade and immigration policies [ Wanna Be a
Player at CPAC? Write a Check First, by Lachlan Markay, Daily
Beast, February 23, 2018]
2/ was somehow responsible for those wage increases, not increased immigration enforcement
and thus a tighter labor market with less cheap, foreign competition. This assertion seems to
be common among the Reagan-nostalgic wing of the GOP,
And Mitt Romney is also clearly setting himself up as the "anti-Trump,"
denouncing identity politics from the crypto-ethnostate of Utah. Once
he gets his chance, he'll go back to making sure Republicans continue politely losing the way
they did over the past decade [ The
Coming Clash of the GOP Titans, by Daniel Depetris, The American
Conservative, February 23, 2018].
And Romney may get his chance soon. Rasmussen has President Trump's approval rating at 50
percent, but it only polls likely voters. Groups that poll all registered voters have the
president's approval rating as far lower, even in the mid 30's [ Trump Hits 50% by Dick
Morris, WesternJournalism, February 25, 2018]
This is significant because in 2018 there is likely to be far more voter turnout than usual
in a midterm election, as the Main Stream Media has whipped the Democrat base into a frenzy.
Democrats are also scoring a number of special election victories in districts President Trump
and the Republicans won handily in 2016 [ Kentucky
Democrat wins state House in Trump stronghold, by Maegan Vasquez,
CNN, February 22, 2018].
The defeat of Roy Moore in Alabama (albeit due to his
betrayal by a terrified GOP Establishment ) should also be considered a warning sign.
Yet Republicans appear complacent -- and this includes the "nationalists." And with the
Supreme Court's recent decision to allow DACA recipients to stay in the country until the issue
is litigated through the appeals court level, President Trump's peculiar decision to try
to pose as a
pro-DACA moderate on immigration no longer makes any sense because Democrats will not be
under any pressure to "save the Dreamers" [
In blow to Trump, Supreme Court won't hear appeal of DACA ruling, by Pete
Williams, NBC News, February 26, 2018]. The March 5 "deadline" is now gone for
good.
Trump needs to change the equation on immigration and find new sources of pressure to put on
the Democrats. One of the easiest moves:
advocate a remittance tax to pay for the border wall. With the Supreme Court's DACA ruling,
an action like this practically becomes a political necessity.
CPAC shows the conservative grassroots are with the president and that the Beltway elites
are cowed. But they are still hostile. They will only accept the president while he is strong.
Today, he appears weak, as even foreign leaders such as former Mexican President Vicente Fox
are mocking him, saying Mexico
will never pay for the wall.
It is time for President Trump to show leadership and strength on his signature issue. And
if he doesn't act soon, the anti-Trump wing of the GOP will join the incipient coup against
him.
CuckPAC has never represented any conservative values and has always been a display of
Zionist ass kissing. That they now love them some Donald just shows what a worthless Israel
firster Trump has shown himself to be.
"This intellectual bankruptcy won't prevent Conservatism Inc. from simply retaking the
movement once President Trump is gone, or politically defeated."
When Trump is gone or politically defeated it will be due to the efforts of Conservative
Inc. for which CuckPAC has always been the showcase.
CPAC shows the conservative grassroots are with the president and that the Beltway
elites are cowed.
I was good with Kucinich and Nader. I'm neither Conservative nor Republican. I voted for
McGovern. Yet I am a card carrying deplorable. Bernie is a fraud and Trump is the only real
opposition to the entrenched thieves and murderers in Washington. Your Conservative grass
roots have a significant cohort of fellow travelers. Trump could not have won the upper
midwest without us.
I thought Trump's offer of amnesty in exchange for moving toward a sane immigration policy
WAS leadership. It's easier to stop immigration than to reverse it. And he exposed the
Democrats. They have lost the dreamers as a political tool.
Where Trump is losing me is with his stupid and dangerous foreign policy. That's where I
would like to see some leadership.
Hope Hicks, President Trump's communications director and one of his longest-serving advisers, said
Wednesday that she planned to leave the White House in the next few weeks.
When Hope Hicks walked into
President Trump's private study on Wednesday to inform him that she planned to leave the White House -- concluding a
can't-make-it-up run in which Ms. Hicks, a woman with zero political experience three years ago,
became the closest aide to the most
powerful man in the world
-- the president responded like a father whose daughter had outgrown the nest.
According to a person with
knowledge of their conversation, Mr. Trump expressed an understanding of Ms. Hicks's desire to pursue a new phase of
her life. But, the person added, he also acknowledged something else: that Ms. Hicks's happiness in her role had
begun to wane lately, after a trying few weeks in the public glare.
The
departure
of Ms. Hicks, arguably the least experienced person to ever hold the job of White House communications director,
capped an astounding rise for a political neophyte whose seemingly implausible career hinged on a deep understanding
of, and bottomless patience for, her mercurial charge.
But as someone with a pull
toward discretion -- Ms. Hicks, 29, who grew up in the buttoned-up suburb of Greenwich, Conn., the daughter and
granddaughter of prominent public relations men -- seeing her name splashed across international tabloids had taken a
toll.
In
explaining her decision to friends, Ms. Hicks, a communications director who rarely spoke publicly, made clear that
she had no interest in being at the center of the public conversation.
That
aversion to the spotlight had become increasingly difficult to maintain.
Ms. Hicks's role in helping
write a statement by Donald J. Trump Jr. about a 2016 meeting with Russian officials has
drawn attention
from federal investigators. On Tuesday, she
testified
for eight hours before the House Intelligence Committee and made headlines for admitting that she had
sometimes told fibs as part of her job.
Last month, the man she had
been dating, the former White House staff secretary Rob Porter, was accused by his former wives of domestic abuse,
sparking an ongoing scandal that offered a glimpse of her closely guarded personal life and drew paparazzi to her
apartment building. There were rumblings that Mr. Trump questioned Ms. Hicks's judgment after the White House
initially defended Mr. Porter, although a bevy of administration officials, including the president's daughter Ivanka
Trump, later vouched for Ms. Hicks in on-the-record interviews.
Ms. Hicks had stopped
monitoring news coverage of herself, restricting her television intake to Fox News, which she often watched on mute,
assuming that the Trump-friendly network would rarely include her name on its chyrons.
Friends who reached out to
her, offering support or guidance, acknowledged that Ms. Hicks had been distressed. But they also received text
messages from her in which she declared that she was tougher than people assumed.
Ms. Hicks's career followed a
curious trajectory. As a young model, she appeared on the covers of young adult paperbacks and in Ralph Lauren
catalogs before going to work for Ms. Trump's apparel and licensing brand. Even after she had begun serving as an
Oval Office gatekeeper, she maintained a low public profile, which fueled the fascination -- and sometimes disdain --
of those who watch national politics closely.
Recent Comments
paula
1 hour ago
"I don't worry about Hope, I fully expert her to land on her feet," says Feldman.Seems she should
land in jail on obstruction of justice...
MS
1 hour ago
One can already foresee the title of her future tell all book, ''Little White Lies".
Emma
1 hour ago
No one cares about hope hicks. I hope she never gets another job.
Trump's relationship with Hope was always puzzling and oddly salacious. Hicks dated Trump's
campaign manager Corey Lewandowski while he was still married, to Alison Hardy. She later began dating former White
House Staff Secretary Rob Porter. This is not acceptable in the Me too and Times Up era. I am a woman and I have seen
inappropriate office romances that adversely affected everyone in the office.
Point is Trump's penchant for surrounding himself with beauty queens is inappropriate. Her behavior is also
inappropriate. Then, there are the lies. Sometimes known as, "Alternative facts".
Beautiful girl. She will have a great career at Fox.
"Ms. Hicks's success was viewed as a product of other qualities, including her nuanced
understanding of Mr. Trump's moods, her ability to subtly nudge him away from his coarser impulses..."
She did that? When? And what on earth is a "nuanced understanding of Mr. Trump's moods?" Angry and angrier?
Soon-to-be-former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks hasn't even left the West
Wing yet, but unsurprisingly, she's already received a flood of offers from powerful publishers
and producers promising eight-figure paydays if she's wiling to provide juicy insider details
like those.
A friend of Hicks' who spoke with the
Daily Mail said the communications director - who once handled as many as 250 media
requests per day - was "overwhelmed" by the response. As the Mail points out, the desirability
of Hicks' story has increased because of her informal position as the "most glamorous person in
the West Wing."
One anonymous source from inside the publishing industry even went so far as to compare
Hicks with Jackie Kennedy.
One insider told the Mail that Hicks kept a diary of her time in the White House, which
could be an incredible resource should she decide to write a memoir.
What would it take to do your story as a mini-series or on the big screen? I can get the
financing, like tomorrow, and make you rich and even more famous. You have an incredible
story. Let's talk!'
And since then Hick has been overwhelmed with messages offering millions of dollars in
advances for book deals by major publishers, and offers from Hollywood to make biopics about
her glamorous political and scandalous life.
As one publishing executive told DailyMail.com, 'Next to Ivanka and Melania, Hope is the
woman closest to the president, and knows all the secrets, all the foibles, all the
quirks.
'She's also the most glamorous White House female since Jackie Kennedy. Her story will be
a blockbuster. I have the authority to offer her an advance of $10 million, and we're open to
negotiate.'
If she does decide to publish, it'd be prudent for Hicks to hold an auction. Hicks could
probably walk away with an agreement to keep 15% of total sales.
'If a book were to happen, it would undoubtedly be the subject of an auction among the
major publishers, which would be a key factor in driving up the amount of the advance.'
Another prestigious literary agent who has represented Pulitzer Prize-winning political
journalists, among other high-profile, celebrity clients – and receives a fifteen
percent commission on every book sold -- told DailyMail.com: 'Hope Hicks was a star
Washington insider.
'I always saw a book coming from her when the time was right. Now the time's right.
Overnight she's become a potential goldmine.
Several Trump confidants, employees and advisers have books in the works. Corey Lewandowski,
Trump's first campaign manager who briefly dated Hicks during the campaign while he was married
to another woman, published a book last year that earned high praise from Trump.
Former Press Secretary Sean Spicer announced in December that he was publishing a West Wing
tell-all of his own.
And while we imagine Spicer knows where at least some of the bodies are buried, James
Comey's book - "A Higher Honor: Truth, Lies and Leadership" - is set to be published in
mid-April. It already has a sizable backlog of preorders.
Hicks is turning 30 in October. During her time running the communications department, Hicks
rarely gave interviews or on-the-record statements - which only deepened the mystique
surrounding her personality. That and she famously dated Lewandowski and former Staff Secretary
Rob Porter.
We imagine, after all those months of silence, Hicks probably has something to say. The
question is: Will she risk her relationship with the president to say it?
What Washington really haptes about Putin is that he has refused to comply with their diktats and has openly rejected their
model of a "unipolar" world order.
Notable quotes:
"... The attacks on Putin began sometime in 2006 during Putin's second term when it became apparent that Russia was going to resist the looting and exploitation the US requires of its vassal states. ..."
"... That's right, Russia was thrown under the bus because they wanted to control their own oil and their own destiny. ..."
"... John Edwards and Jack Kemp were appointed to lead a CFR task force which concocted the absurd pretext that that Putin was "rolling back democracy" in Russia. ..."
"... What Washington really despises about Putin is that he has refused to comply with their diktats and has openly rejected their model of a "unipolar" world order. ..."
"... Despite Russia's efforts to assist the US in its War On Terror, Washington has continued to regard Putin as an emerging rival that would eventually have to be confronted. The conflict in Ukraine added more gas to the fire by pitting the two superpowers against each other in a hot war that remains unresolved to this day. ..."
"... But Syria was the straw that broke the camel's back. Russia's intervention in the Syrian War in September 2015 proved to be the turning point in the 7 year-long conflagration. By rolling back the CIA-trained militants, Putin bloodied Washington's nose and forced the Pentagon to adopt a backup plan that relied heavily on Kurdish proxies east of the Euphrates. ..."
"... The Syria humiliation precipitated the Russia-gate Information Operation (IO) which is the propaganda component of the current war on Russia. The scandal has been an effective way to poison public perceptions and to make it look like the perpetrator of aggression is really the victim. ..."
"... Putin clearly blames the United States for the rise of ISIS and the surge in global terrorism. He also condemns Washington's strategy to use terrorist organizations to achieve its own narrow strategic objectives. (regime change) More important, he uses his platform at the United Nations to explain why he has deployed the Russian Air-force to bases in Syria where it will it will be used to conduct a war against Washington's jihadist proxies on the ground. ..."
"... The only place where people have a negative view of Putin is in the United States (14 percent) and EU (28 percent), the two locations where he is relentlessly savaged by the media and excoriated by the political class. ..."
"... The problem is that the propaganda power structure behind the yankee imperium is probably too powerful for rationality to triumph, so we are in for serious trouble. ..."
"... After having spent 36 years in the West and having seen Westerners vote for the likes of Blair, Sarkozy or Macron, I have a very low opinion of Western intelligence, and Western moral relativism and indifference with regards to the crimes their elected leaders committed abroad. ..."
"... China is a rival but an odd kind of rival. Let's not forget that the US, over the last 30 whatever years has enthusiastically facilitated China's rise. China has become the world's factory because the US and other countries Co's want CHEAP labour. ..."
"... American liberals support lifting living standards and ending poverty? You mean, the same American liberals who support 'free' trade and importing unlimited amounts of scab labor? You must have us confused with some other country, Mike. ..."
"... not like he had a choice. dc was about to have it's hands on his throat and he finally reacted. That was ukraine. syria was him trying to protect another one of his naval bases. the bear simply reacted to attempts at cutting off it's legs. ..."
"... Putin inherited a broken Russia in 2000. A Russia on the verge of collapse due to misrule of drunkard Yeltsin and body blows administered by US/NATO. A broken down military; economy in shambles; demographic collapse. During his presidency US/EU/NATO engineered a collapse of oil prices and assaults on ruble: what exactly was Putin supposed to non-passively do to counter the collapse of world oil prices, for example? ..."
"... Putin was wise enough and cautious enough not to go head-to-head with US/NATO until his military and economy were in good enough shape to do and make a difference, as in Syria for example. It would have been very bad for Russia to act prematurely and get bled dry, which warmongering US Neocons were hoping for. ..."
"... Obviously Putin knows the strengths and weaknesses of Russia better than any of us here. He is butting heads with the combined military industrial might of US+EU: that block has a lot of human resources, wealth, worldwide financial and political influence. Also Putin has to – has to – improve the living standards of citizens of RF, so he cannot afford to get into an expensive arms race with the West. Putin is doing very well with what he has, as far as human and military-industrial resources Russia has. ..."
"... When asked by a Germany-based academic where Russia had most seriously gone wrong in the past decade and a half, Putin said he had too readily laid his trust in the West, which he then accused of having abused its relationship with Moscow to further its own interests." ..."
"... America is in a very ugly spot and getting worse everyday. Living here I can sense it. Americans are going crazy. Pathetic how they are trying and build hate for Russia/Putin mainly because America got triple fucked across the ME and especially in Syria. Very sad. ..."
"... America's greatest historical truth: in foreign policy the USA just cannot learn from experience. We keep making the same mistakes. Stupid, idiotic, nation building b/s. ..."
"... In my opinion, the USA, until now, could afford to conduct foreign policy for internal reasons ..."
"... The reason why the US empire will follow the British empire into the graveyard is because they are based on the same model – trying to prevent others from becoming equal to them instead of trying to get better than the competitors. ..."
"... GB was preoccupied with preventing Germany from surpassing them – and guess what? They succeeded. And where is the British empire now? ..."
"... US is on a similar path of self-destruction. First they made China an economic superpower and now they want to contain them militarily. Good luck with that. ..."
"... The money that the US spent on military misadventures – they could have bribed with far lesser amount of money the various "dictatorships" that they were so democratically inclined to topple – and would have achieved better results. Instead of using those money to make US better – for their citizens, they are trying to prevent the world from catching up with them – British style. ..."
"It is essential to provide conditions for creative labor and economic growth at a pace that would put an end to the division
of the world into permanent winners and permanent losers. The rules of the game should give the developing economies at least
a chance to catch up with those we know as developed economies. We should work to level out the pace of economic development,
and brace up backward countries and regions so as to make the fruit of economic growth and technological progress accessible to
all. Particularly, this would help to put an end to poverty, one of the worst contemporary problems." Vladimir Putin, President
Russian Federation, Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club
Putin wants to end poverty? Putin wants to stimulate economic growth in developing countries? Putin wants to change the system
that divides the world into "permanent winners and losers"? But, how can that be, after all, Putin is bad, Putin is a "KGB thug",
Putin is the "new Hitler"?
American liberals would be surprised to know that Putin actually supports many of the same social issues that they support. For
example, the Russian President is not only committed to lifting living standards and ending poverty, he's also a big believer in
universal healthcare which is free under the current Russian Constitution. Naturally, the Russian system has its shortcomings, but
there has been significant progress under Putin who has dramatically increased the budget, improved treatment and widened accessibility.
Putin believes that healthcare should be a universal human right. Here's what he said at the annual meeting of the Valdai International
Discussion Club:
"Another priority is global healthcare . All people in the world, not only the elite, should have the right to healthy, long
and full lives. This is a noble goal. In short, we should build the foundation for the future world today by investing in all
priority areas of human development." (Vladimir Putin, President Russian Federation, Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion
Club)
How many "liberal" politicians in the US would support a recommendation like Putin's? Not very many. The Democrats are much more
partial to market-based reforms like Obamacare that guarantee an ever-increasing slice of the pie goes to the giant HMOs and the
voracious pharmaceutical companies. The Dems no longer make any attempt to promote universal healthcare as a basic human right. They've
simply thrown in the towel and moved on to other issues.
Many Americans would find Putin's views on climate change equally surprising. Here's another clip from the Valdai speech:
"Ladies and gentlemen, one more issue that shall affect the future of the entire humankind is climate change. I suggest that
we take a broader look at the issue .What we need is an essentially different approach, one that would involve introducing new,
groundbreaking, nature-like technologies that would not damage the environment, but rather work in harmony with it, enabling us
to restore the balance between the biosphere and technology upset by human activities.
It is indeed a challenge of global proportions. And I am confident that humanity does have the necessary intellectual capacity
to respond to it. We need to join our efforts, primarily engaging countries that possess strong research and development capabilities,
and have made significant advances in fundamental research. We propose convening a special forum under the auspices of the UN
to comprehensively address issues related to the depletion of natural resources, habitat destruction, and climate change. Russia
is willing to co-sponsor such a forum .." Valdai)
Most people would never suspect that Putin supports a global effort to address climate change. And, how would they know, after
all, bits of information like that– that help to soften Putin's image and make him seem like a rational human being– are scrubbed
from the media's coverage in order to cast him in the worst possible light. The media doesn't want people to know that Putin is a
reflective and modest man who has worked tirelessly to make Russia and the world a better place. No, they want them to believe that
he's is a scheming tyrannical despot who's obsessive hatred for America poses a very real threat to US national security. But it's
not true.
Putin is not the ghoulish caricature the media makes him out to be nor does he hate America, that's just more propaganda from
the corporate echo-chamber. The truth is Putin has been good for Russia, good for regional stability, and good for global security.
He pulled the Russian Federation back from the brink of annihilation in 2000, and has had the country moving in a positive direction
ever since. His impact on the Russian economy has been particularly impressive. According to Wikipedia:
"Between 2000 and 2012 Russia's energy exports fueled a rapid growth in living standards, with real disposable income rising
by 160%. In dollar-denominated terms this amounted to a more than sevenfold increase in disposable incomes since 2000. In the
same period, unemployment and poverty more than halved and Russians' self-assessed life satisfaction also rose significantly."
Inequality is a problem in Russia just like it is in the US, but the vast majority of working people have benefited greatly from
Putin's reforms and a system of distribution that –judging by steady uptick in disposable incomes – is significantly superior to that
in the United States where wages have flatlined for over 2 decades and where virtually all of the nation's wealth trickles upward
to the parasitic 1 percent.
Since Putin took office in 2000, workers have seen across-the-board increase in wages, benefits, healthcare and pensions. Poverty
and unemployment have been reduced by more than half while foreign investment has experienced steady growth. Onerous IMF loans have
been repaid in full, capital flight has all-but ceased, hundreds in billions in reserves have been accumulated, personal and corporate
taxes have been slashed, and technology has experienced an unprecedented renaissance. The notorious Russian oligarchs still have
a stranglehold on many privately-owned industries, but their grip has begun to loosen and the "kleptocracy has begun to fade."
Things are far from perfect, but the Russian economy has flourished under Putin and, generally speaking, the people are appreciative.
This helps to explain why Putin's public approval ratings are typically in the stratosphere. (70 to 80 percent) Simply put: Putin
the most popular Russian president of all time. And his popularity is not limited to Russia either, in fact, he typically ranks at
the top of most global leadership polls such as the recent Gallup International End of Year Survey (EoY) where Putin came in third
(43 percent positive rating) behind Germany's Angela Merkel (49 percent) and French President Emmanuel Macron. (45 percent) According
to Gallup: "Putin has gone from one in three (33 percent) viewing him favourably to 43 percent, a significant increase over two years."
The only place where people have a negative view of Putin is in the United States (14 percent) and EU (28 percent), the two locations
where he is relentlessly savaged by the media and excoriated by the political class. This should come as no surprise to Americans
who know that the chances of stumbling across an article that treats Putin with even minimal objectivity is about as likely as finding
a copper coin at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The consensus view of the western media is that Putin is a maniacal autocrat who
kills journalists and political opponents (no proof), who meddles in US elections to "sow discord" and destroy our precious democracy
(no proof), and who is conducting a secret and sinister cyberwar against the United States. (no proof). It's a pathetic litany of
libels and fabrications, but its impact on the brainwashed American people has been quite impressive as Gallup's results indicate.
Bottom line: Propaganda works.
The attacks on Putin began sometime in 2006 during Putin's second term when it became apparent that Russia was going to resist
the looting and exploitation the US requires of its vassal states. This is when the powerful Council on Foreign Relations funded
a report titled "Russia's Wrong Direction" that suggested that Russia's increasingly independent foreign policy and insistence that
it control its own vast oil and natural gas resources meant that "the very idea of a 'strategic partnership' no longer seems realistic."
That's right, Russia was thrown under the bus because they wanted to control their own oil and their own destiny.
John Edwards and Jack Kemp were appointed to lead a CFR task force which concocted the absurd pretext that that Putin was "rolling
back democracy" in Russia. They claimed that the government had become increasingly authoritarian and that the society was growing
less "open and pluralistic". Kemp and Edwards provided the ideological foundation upon which the entire public relations campaign
against Putin has been built. Twelve years later, the same charges are still being leveled at Putin along with the additional allegations
that he meddled in the 2016 presidential elections.
Needless to say, none of the nation's newspapers, magazines or broadcast media ever publish anything that deviates even slightly
from the prevailing, propagandistic narrative about Putin. One can only assume that the MSM's views on Putin are either universally
accepted by all 325 million Americans or that the so-called "free press" is a wretched farce that conceals an authoritarian corporate
machine that censors all opinions that don't promote their own malign political agenda.
What Washington really despises about Putin is that he has refused to comply with their diktats and has openly rejected their
model of a "unipolar" world order. As he said at the annual Security Conference at Munich in 2007:
"The unipolar world refers to a world in which there is one master, one sovereign; one center of authority, one center of force,
one center of decision-making. At the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for
the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within."
Despite Russia's efforts to assist the US in its War On Terror, Washington has continued to regard Putin as an emerging rival
that would eventually have to be confronted. The conflict in Ukraine added more gas to the fire by pitting the two superpowers against
each other in a hot war that remains unresolved to this day.
But Syria was the straw that broke the camel's back. Russia's intervention in the Syrian War in September 2015 proved to be the
turning point in the 7 year-long conflagration. By rolling back the CIA-trained militants, Putin bloodied Washington's nose and forced
the Pentagon to adopt a backup plan that relied heavily on Kurdish proxies east of the Euphrates. At present, US Special Forces and
their allies are clinging to a strip of arid wasteland in the Syrian outback hoping that the Pentagon brass can settle on a forward-operating
strategy that reverses their fortunes or brings the war to a swift end.
The Syria humiliation precipitated the Russia-gate Information Operation (IO) which is the propaganda component of the current
war on Russia. The scandal has been an effective way to poison public perceptions and to make it look like the perpetrator of aggression
is really the victim. More important, failure in Syria has led to a reevaluation of how Washington conducts its wars abroad. The
War on Terror pretext has been jettisoned for a more direct approach laid out in the Trump administration's National Defense Strategy.
The focus going forward will be on "Great Power Competition", that is, the US is subordinating its covert proxy operations to more
flagrant displays of military force particularly in regards to the "growing threat from revisionist powers", Russia and China. In
short, the gloves are coming off and Washington is ramping up for a land war.
Putin has become an obstacle to Washington's imperial ambitions which is why he's has been elevated to Public Enemy Number 1.
It has nothing to do with the fictitious meddling in the 2016 elections or the nonsensical "rolling back democracy" in Russia. It's
all about power. In the United States the group with the tightest grip on power is the foreign policy establishment. These are the
towering mandarins who dictate the policy, tailor the politics to fit their strategic vision, and dispatch their lackeys in the media
to shape the narrative. These are the people who decided that Putin must be demonized to pave the way for more foreign interventions,
more regime change wars, more bloody aggression against sovereign states.
Putin has repeatedly warned Washington that Russia would not stand by while the US destroyed one country after the other in its
lust for global domination. He reiterated his claim that Washington's "uncontained hyper-use of force" was creating "new centers
of tension", exacerbating regional conflicts, undermining international relations, and "plunging the world into an abyss of permanent
conflicts." He has pointed out how the US routinely displayed its contempt for international law and "overstepped its national borders
in every way." As a result of Washington's aggressive behavior, public confidence in international law and global security has steadily
eroded and "No one feels safe. I want to emphasize this," Putin thundered in Munich. "No one feels safe."
On September 28, 2015 Putin finally threw down the gauntlet in a speech he delivered at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly
in New York. After reiterating his commitment to international law, the UN, and state sovereignty, he provided a brief but disturbing
account of recent events in the Middle East, all of which have gotten significantly worse due to Washington's use of force. Here's
Putin:
"Just look at the situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa Instead of bringing about reforms, aggressive intervention
destroyed government institutions and the local way of life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty,
social disasters and total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life
The power vacuum in some countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa obviously resulted in the emergence of areas of anarchy,
which were quickly filled with extremists and terrorists. The so-called Islamic State has tens of thousands of militants fighting
for it, including former Iraqi soldiers who were left on the street after the 2003 invasion. Many recruits come from Libya whose
statehood was destroyed as a result of a gross violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 ."
US interventions have decimated Iraq, Libya, Syria and beyond. Over a million people have been killed while tens of millions
have been forced to flee their homes and their countries. The refugee spillover has added to social tensions across the EU where
anti-immigrant sentiment has precipitated the explosive growth in right wing groups and political organizations. From Northern
Africa, across the Middle East, and into Central Asia, global security has steadily deteriorated under Washington's ruthless stewardship.
Here's more from Putin:
"The Islamic State itself did not come out of nowhere. It was initially developed as a weapon against undesirable secular regimes.
Having established control over parts of Syria and Iraq, Islamic State now aggressively expands into other regions .It is irresponsible
to manipulate extremist groups and use them to achieve your political goals, hoping that later you'll find a way to get rid of
them or somehow eliminate them ."
Putin clearly blames the United States for the rise of ISIS and the surge in global terrorism. He also condemns Washington's strategy
to use terrorist organizations to achieve its own narrow strategic objectives. (regime change) More important, he uses his platform
at the United Nations to explain why he has deployed the Russian Air-force to bases in Syria where it will it will be used to conduct
a war against Washington's jihadist proxies on the ground.
Putin: "We can no longer tolerate the current state of affairs in the world."
Less than 48 hours after these words were uttered, Russian warplanes began pounding militant targets in Syria.
Putin again: "Dear colleagues, relying on international law, we must join efforts to address the problems that all of us are
facing, and create a genuinely broad international coalition against terrorism .Russia is confident of the United Nations' enormous
potential, which should help us avoid a new confrontation and embrace a strategy of cooperation. Hand in hand with other nations,
we will consistently work to strengthen the UN's central, coordinating role. I am convinced that by working together, we will make
the world stable and safe, and provide an enabling environment for the development of all nations and peoples."
So, here's the question: Is Putin "evil" for opposing Washington's regime change wars, for stopping the spread of terrorism, and
for rejecting the idea that one unipolar world power should rule the world? Is that why he's evil, because he won't click his heels
and do as he's told by the global hegemon?
The dumbest thing about the US focus on Russia and Putin is that it leaves China, our actual rival, free to continue its march
to overwhelming mastery of the entire Eastern Hemisphere. Without firing a shot or wasting a bullet China has moved into a position
of influence the US has dreamed of for a century.
The next war, if it comes, will be over something like Cobalt. The future lies in big and plentiful electric batteries and China
and Russia between them control almost 50% of the known supply of Cobalt, while the US has none. Stand by and wait, folks.
The only place where people have a negative view of Putin is in the United States (14 percent) and EU (28 percent), the
two locations where he is relentlessly savaged by the media and excoriated by the political class.
I would be staggered is only 14 percent of Americans had a negative view of Putin – almost everybody I have spoken to
has completely swallowed the media line. In Europe UK in particular has been brainwashed against him – southern Europe far less
so. The 28 percent is more realistic.
Is China trying to trash our constitution? Is China invading other countries, killing people with missiles and bombs all over
the world, staging "color revolutions" and subverting legitimate governments in the "West"? Is China patrolling the Gulf of Mexico
and putting missiles in Mexico and Canada? China hasn't done anything bad to me or to anyone I know, so please explain how China
is "our" "rival"?
This is a great article. The problem is that the propaganda power structure behind the yankee imperium is probably too powerful
for rationality to triumph, so we are in for serious trouble.
There's a simple reason why Putin is talking sense. He's doing nothing more than stating customary international law. Those
economic quotes have been set out in a series of UN resolutions including A/RES/41/128 on the right to development. This is the
acquis of the civilized world. No country in the world opposes it – except the USA. The US votes alone against it every time it
comes up, even though customary international law is US federal and state common law under the Supreme Court decision, The Paquete
Habana.
Mr. Whitney has accepted the official framing that it's all about Putin. That clever decision makes his article more provocative.
Calm appraisal of the current official foreign devil is inherently inflammatory. However, this has nothing to do with Putin. Rigid
legalist that he is, his hands are tied. Russia has ratified the ICESCR.
Russia has ratified the ICESCR. The USA has not. Here are some of the rights Russians have that you do not:
OHCHR has a convenient compilation showing how each government meets its legal obligations and commitments. The synoptic heatmap
below shows the US deep down in the shithole with Wahhabi headchoppers and neocolonial African presidents-for-life.
The exhaustively documented fact here is, the Russian state meets world standards. The US government does not. The Russian
government respects, protects, and fulfils human rights. The US government fights tooth and nail to keep them out of your reach,
and negates your incomplete half-assed constitutional rights with statist red tape. Russians get a better deal than you do. Merely
by reciting the law as he does, Putin would win a fair election here with Roosevelt-scale majorities, again and again. That's
why he drives the US government up the wall.
Where is it the propaganda campaign going? We have seen this before as preparation for a war or a regime change. In Russia both
are unlikely to succeed. That leaves an ever increasing propaganda bombast in the West, people brainwashed to the point where
outright racism against anything 'Russian' will become widespread. Then what? Move movies with white Russian villains, as if that
is what threatens West the most?
Russia can neither be isolated, nor 'collapsed' economically, nor ignored. It is too resource rich and powerful. Russia could
possibly be checked in a second tier conflict (Syria?), but that would be of minimal consequence. Ukraine could be escalated,
but there Russia has an enormous local logistics advantage, it would be a disaster for Kiev. And Russia is on friendly terms with
China, its only potential military threat on land.
Propaganda by itself does nothing, it is only means to an end. West is in no position to go beyond propaganda, so we might
experience a bizarre example of a mindless propaganda that goes on and on. As with all propaganda the main target is the domestic
population – in other words it is the common people in the West who are being propagandised and in effect made more stupid, less
capable of making rational decisions.
Even a slight u-turn is at this point unthinkable, almost all elites have too visibly engaged in the evil-Russia talk, how
could they let go of it? We are stuck, we might get saved by an unrelated 'big event' somewhere else. If not, this could just
be fatal, after all this belligerent talk we could perish because somebody dared to call Clinton a satan on Facebook. And they
didn't use their real name – the horror .
My own view is that Putin is probably as trustworthy and honest as any other ex-KGB man. On the other hand he does come across
as intelligent, cautious, and calm. Especially when compared to the crook Hillary or the oaf Trump.
The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
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This is starting to bother me. Stuff is disappearing from the web. Look at the link below to an Al Jazeera documentary which
has disappeared from YouTube and the web.
Si1ver1ock, interesting problems you're having. I had no problem with the links, but then the magic of Tor means I'm reaching
them from the Netherlands. State censorship is harder when you can access suppressed URLs from a couple dozen different countries.
Please do respond, and in good faith, to the reply of commenter Harold Smith. I share his apparent concern that you may be
conflating the interests of the American people with the imperial ambitions of their Uncle Sam.
I feel we have a problem with the term 'rival' here. All the negatives you describe represent a rivalry that I in no way imply
in my statements. Rivalry can be strictly limited to trade and business and not in the war-making processes you are citing. I
tried to point out that we as a nation miss the mark in constantly demonizing Russia, who is certainly no rival in trade and business,
while China certainly is.
Our zealous attacking of rivals has a long history and is not easily abandoned. However, I am afraid our national focus in this
unproductive way will cause us as a people to not be aware of where our serious competition is actually coming from and be able
to deal with it in a timely fashion.
"I feel we have a problem with the term 'rival' here. All the negatives you describe represent a rivalry that I in no way imply
in my statements. Rivalry can be strictly limited to trade and business and not in the war-making processes you are citing."
In your original comment you said:
"The dumbest thing about the US focus on Russia and Putin is that it leaves China, our actual rival, free to continue its march
to overwhelming mastery of the entire Eastern Hemisphere. Without firing a shot or wasting a bullet China has moved into a position
of influence the US has dreamed of for a century."
Since a big part of the U.S. "focus" on Russia is military encirclement, confrontation by proxy, the threat of direct conflict
even nuclear war, etc., this statement clearly suggests a "military solution" to "contain" an economically "rising" China, IMO.
(After all, when the only tool the U.S. "government" has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail).
But so what if China has some kind of "mastery" of the Eastern hemisphere? To the extent that's true, at least they didn't
do it by way of lawless imperial treachery.
The U.S. is losing influence all over the world because it's making itself hated; it's imposing itself everywhere and squandering
everything of value on the hopeless pursuit of world domination and control.
"I tried to point out that we as a nation miss the mark in constantly demonizing Russia, who is certainly no rival in trade
and business, while China certainly is."
The thing is "we" don't demonize Russia "as a nation"; rather, it's done by the Satanic ruling class that hates Russia – not
for any rational reason, but for the same reason that Cain hated Abel: because "evil" hates a "good" example.
"Our zealous attacking of rivals has a long history and is not easily abandoned."
Unless you're going change the definition of "rival" again, I should point out that the U.S. "government" doesn't generally
attack "rivals" but deems any country that asserts its sovereign independence and refuses to take orders an "enemy", subject to
economic, political and military attack.
"However, I am afraid our national focus in this unproductive way will cause us as a people to not be aware of where our serious
competition is actually coming from and be able to deal with it in a timely fashion."
You seem to be conflating "us as a people" with the U.S. "government" which has by now lost even the pretense of moral and
constitutional legitimacy, and thus has nothing remotely to do with what's in the best interests of "us as a people".
Here is the explanation. China is economic rival to US. That is not only inconvenient, rival, it is the most efficient and
most dangerous rival, because who is wining the economic competition is pushing out the opponent from world markets.
That people in the West believe the lies that TPTB concoct for their consumption, I can conceive, though only after a convoluted
intellectual effort, for given all the now exposed deceit, one is left in wonder as to why the masses still believe proven liars.
After having spent 36 years in the West and having seen Westerners vote for the likes of Blair, Sarkozy or Macron, I have a very
low opinion of Western intelligence, and Western moral relativism and indifference with regards to the crimes their elected leaders
committed abroad.
Still, I can't figure out if TPTB believe their own narrative. It takes a very peculiar mindset to be able to live in permanent
lies. Contrary to truth which can exist per se and is therefore essentially cost-free, lies demand permanent maintenance and have
high maintenance cost.
So, TPTB of the West are either delusional in thinking they can maintain their lies ad vitam aeternam, or they are mythomaniacs.
Either way, just think what happens when lies cannot be maintained any more and the liars don't want to relinquish power.
Bear in mind that lying being effectively irrational, they cannot be considered as rational actors. Prepare your shelters folks.
Very seldom, I've read such a realistic article on President Putin and his policy. I've been following not only his administration
but also that of the US Empire, and I'm always flabbergasted about the US elites demonization of this leader. He belongs to the
few leaders who got their act together compared to the political exorcists in Washington. The real thugs and psychopaths are the
members of the American political elite and their cheerleaders in the fawning US mainstream media. Following their analysis, I
often think they stem from lunatics who are coming from outer space.
Yes, China is a rival but an odd kind of rival. Let's not forget that the US, over the last 30 whatever years has enthusiastically
facilitated China's rise. China has become the world's factory because the US and other countries Co's want CHEAP labour.
So -- Dr Frankenstein is now scared of his own monster. Oh the irony !
In the last two weeks a virtual book burning has begun on YouTube. Scores of independent truth seeking channels have been deleted.
Some were pretty amateur and sensationalist, many were good, top notch investigative fact checking in nature. Many had large numbers
of subscribers, a few had 100,000s subscribers.
Common denominator seemed to question official mainstream media narrative on mass shootings, 9/11, war on terror, human sex
trafficking, Clinton Foundation corruption, and even UFO coverups. One channel was a woman skilled at body language commenting
on videos of people like John Podesta being interviewed as to whether he was lying.
None of these channels advocated violence, quite the contrary. Most couched opinion alongside probable facts by asking deductive
and inductive questions. The YouTube virtual book burning appears to have gathered pace in last week.
So much for free speech in the fake but very slickly fake Western democracies. Where the geopolitical narrative is uniformly
uniform.
American liberals would be surprised to know that Putin actually supports many of the same social issues that they support.
For example, the Russian President is not only committed to lifting living standards and ending poverty, he's also a big believer
in universal healthcare which is free under the current Russian Constitution.
American liberals support lifting living standards and ending poverty? You mean, the same American liberals who support 'free'
trade and importing unlimited amounts of scab labor? You must have us confused with some other country, Mike.
"I suggest that we take a broader look at the issue .What we need is an essentially different approach, one that would involve
introducing new, groundbreaking, nature-like technologies that would not damage the environment, but rather work in harmony
with it "
I note that he says nothing about 'cap and trade,' or any other Western bankster-scam. I have nothing against renewable energy–whether
or not global warming is real.
not like he had a choice. dc was about to have it's hands on his throat and he finally reacted. That was ukraine. syria was him
trying to protect another one of his naval bases. the bear simply reacted to attempts at cutting off it's legs.
"China has become the world's factory because the US and other countries Co's want CHEAP labour. "
We all know the drill here. China makes stuff cheap so that WalMart can undercut competitors and grow rich. Therefore, alas,
what can be done?
Except that WalMart has over four hundred stores IN CHINA and plans to build forty more! So what's our excuse now for not being
able to compete?
Putin inherited a broken Russia in 2000. A Russia on the verge of collapse due to misrule of drunkard Yeltsin and body blows
administered by US/NATO.
A broken down military; economy in shambles; demographic collapse. During his presidency US/EU/NATO engineered a collapse of oil prices and assaults on ruble: what exactly was Putin supposed
to non-passively do to counter the collapse of world oil prices, for example?
Putin was wise enough and cautious enough not to go head-to-head with US/NATO until his military and economy were in good enough
shape to do and make a difference, as in Syria for example.
It would have been very bad for Russia to act prematurely and get bled dry, which warmongering US Neocons were hoping for.
Obviously Putin knows the strengths and weaknesses of Russia better than any of us here. He is butting heads with the combined
military industrial might of US+EU: that block has a lot of human resources, wealth, worldwide financial and political influence.
Also Putin has to – has to – improve the living standards of citizens of RF, so he cannot afford to get into an expensive arms
race with the West. Putin is doing very well with what he has, as far as human and military-industrial resources Russia has.
Alden, sounds like you stopped with the maps and didn't read any of the underlying documents because of the preconceptions you
wear on your sleeve: "idealistic pie in the sky by and by UN treaties impossible to effect." Those preconceptions happen to coincide
with the residual message of one persistent strand of US statist propaganda.
Have you ever read, in any US institution or medium, criticism as comprehensive and incisive as this?
IGs can't do this. Courts can't begin to do this. Congress wouldn't dare do this. Media would never do it if they could. The
recommendations are legally binding and the US government knows it. Each review is videoed. You haven't lived until you've seen
State and Justice bureaucrats crawling and sniveling and tying themselves in logical knots, making fools of themselves in the
most public forum in the world. You get to watch the US regime bleeding influence and standing and 'soft power.' It's public disgrace
in front of the 96% of the world outside the US iron curtain. You may not want to watch impartial legal experts make a laughingstock
of the USG, but everybody else in the world watches with amusement, so you might as well know.
Treaty body review has driven more reforms than Congress ever did. You know perfectly well how bad your government sucks, what
a useless parasite it is. The treaty bodies and charter bodies give you more say than either state-controlled political party.
Face it, human rights review is all you got. When your government sucks, you go over its head to the world.
"During a policy talk at the Valdai Discussion Club, the Russian leader spoke on a number of issues, especially criticizing
U.S. foreign policy moves across the globe and lauding Russia's increasingly relevant role as a world power. When asked by a Germany-based
academic where Russia had most seriously gone wrong in the past decade and a half, Putin said he had too readily laid his trust
in the West, which he then accused of having abused its relationship with Moscow to further its own interests."
Well maybe you can make Vladimir Putin feel better about this. You can tell him that blindly trusting the corrupt "West" (in
the face of shamelessly obvious provocations) was actually not a mistake at all, since Russia couldn't have done a single thing
about it anyway, right?
This is a ridiculous statement. When Putin came aboard, there was no Russian economy to speak of. Now it's grown strong enough
to withstand the events in Ukraine, sanctions and what not and even derive benefits from these challenges. I am not saying everything's
coming up roses but it could hardly be expected considering the deep hole Russia dug itself into in the 1990s.
the entire region is upset with Putin's behavior as they have seen Putin's behavior in Crimea and the Donbas.
The entire region, it you mean our Eastern European neighbors, can like it or lump it. They, Poland in particular, participated
very willingly and actively in the coup in Ukraine. Crimea and Donbass are direct, and perfectly predictable, consequences of
that coup. If they forgot the law of physics that every action has a reaction, this is just as good a reminder as any.
the thing is, because of the recent study by J. Leroy Hulsey, Putin could still do it, but I predict that he unfortunately
will do nothing of the kind.
blindly trusting the corrupt "West" (in the face of shamelessly obvious provocations) was actually not a mistake at all,
since Russia couldn't have done a single thing about it anyway, right?
Actually, it could've done a lot. Right at the beginning, Russia could've refused to trust in the word of the West's leaders
about the NATO expansion and demand guarantees. A formal treaty plus a couple of remaining military bases, say, in Poland and
East Germany, would've sufficed. This likely would've saved Yugoslavia as well.
Russia could've refrained from stopping the development of many weapon system and from destroying others. It could've also
kept its own industry (civil aviation comes to mind) instead of relying on cooperation with the West. It could've refrained from
allowing the US troops to use the Russia territory to move supplies to Afghanistan. Even recently it did occur to someone exceedingly
smart to order aircraft carriers in France – speaking about trust! I do hope they learned their lesson, finally.
America is in a very ugly spot and getting worse everyday. Living here I can sense it. Americans are going crazy. Pathetic
how they are trying and build hate for Russia/Putin mainly because America got triple fucked across the ME and especially in Syria.
Very sad.
America's greatest historical truth: in foreign policy the USA just cannot learn from experience. We keep making the same mistakes.
Stupid, idiotic, nation building b/s. Come on dudes !
This is just a phase, we will turn it around and make America great again ( as opposed to israel which was never great anyway).
It is just a question of how long it will take.
It will start the day when we'll tell that terrorist, shit-hole country called israel to go the hell, fight your own wars,
pay for your own wars.
In my opinion, the USA, until now, could afford to conduct foreign policy for internal reasons.
Because of this the Sept 11 shock, while in reality it meant very little, as USA citizens working in the Netherlands soon afterwards
said 'we have 30.000 traffic deaths each year'.
Good comeback there that was one of the best ones in a while!
I'm sorry, but no we're not. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we here in the "West" are living under a Satanic judeo-communist
dictatorship, bent on world domination and control at any cost.
The difference between corporate state, and totalitarian state like old Soviet system is getting blurier all the time. Like
planned economies of command systems, now they just create money for the cronies, who might as well be commies, and they don't
give a care about what's true or honest, they lie and that's, like you mentioned, (Satanic), the truth isn't in 'em.
' I note that he says nothing about 'cap and trade,' or any other Western bankster-scam. I have nothing against renewable
energy–whether or not global warming is real '
Good comment however the environment is about more than just 'global warming' which may or may not be man-caused there is no
scientific certainty but certainly what looks like a concerted push by certain quarters
But there is also habitat loss the toxins introduced through pollution industrial farming and the problems it causes with erosion,
bad food etc
Putin's comments and Mike's citation of them reflect a thoughtful and realistic approach to at least start looking at these
problems
Anon from TN
The author is painting Putin as larger-than-life figure, which he isn't. Just like the Soviet Union was not defeated by the US,
but actually collapsed due to internal problems, regime change rampage is over largely because the United States pushed their
luck and overextended themselves, and not just thanks to Putin. Throughout history, all dominant empires lose their grip and eventually
crumble (remember Roman or British), and now it's the turn of the US Empire. Fortunately or unfortunately, the next will be the
Chinese Empire, not Russian. (PS. Muslims missed the train. Again)
It's not like he used the term 'enemy,' which too many unfortunately resort to in these discussions. During Cold War 1.0, a
lot of us referred to the Sovs as the 'Adversary' because it was a less loaded term than enemy, though many equate the two. Are
the Chinese rivals? Sure. Are they adversaries? You bet, especially when we keep stepping into their back yard. Are they enemies?
The will be if we keep stepping into their back yard and telling them how to behave with their next door neighbours. All of this
applies to Russia as well.
The reason why the US empire will follow the British empire into the graveyard is because they are based on the same model – trying
to prevent others from becoming equal to them instead of trying to get better than the competitors.
GB was preoccupied with preventing Germany from surpassing them – and guess what? They succeeded. And where is the British
empire now?
From an empire on which the sun never sets, pretty soon they'll be a country where the sun never rises – thanks to their stupid
immigration policies and preoccupations with Russia (still!), like they (the British) are still even a factor in the global power
games.
US is on a similar path of self-destruction. First they made China an economic superpower and now they want to contain them
militarily. Good luck with that.
The money that the US spent on military misadventures – they could have bribed with far lesser amount of money the various
"dictatorships" that they were so democratically inclined to topple – and would have achieved better results. Instead of using
those money to make US better – for their citizens, they are trying to prevent the world from catching up with them – British
style.
If anything the British military record was at least better than US's, at least they used to win wars – they pretty much went
down undefeated – but they did went down and US military doesn't have the same success rate and even if they did, they will not
accomplish holding the world back – same as Britain didn't.
American liberals would be surprised to know that Putin actually supports many of the same social issues that they support.
For example, the Russian President is not only committed to lifting living standards and ending poverty, he's also a big believer
in universal healthcare which is free under the current Russian Constitution
I do not see anything 'liberal' in Putin's ideas, certainly not as in the liberal agendas in the US.
I see him advocating Balance . creating a better order for the needs of populations and interactions between nations
. therefore preserving nations, people and earth. Balance is not rocket science .nature is the ultimate example of balance, when it is tampered with all species eventually suffer.
The neocons were/are Zionist in essence and mainly Jewish in thought leadership – this is inarguable.
Also inarguable, though I am not aware of very many well-written essays on the topic, is that under Yeltsin, brought to power
in no small part by US meddling, there was a fire sale of Russian assets – something arranged very largely by Jewish economists
and Jewish bureaucrats. And the new 'oligarchs?' Why 6 of 7 of the most enriches were Jews in a nation <3% Jewish.
Ukraine was largely a coup by Nuland, Pyatt, Feltman ato help Jewish oligarchs in Ukraine who suddenly found themselves in
the very top of the new govt. Jewish names pop up inordinately as to authors and editors of unhinged Russophobic articles. At what point do we say that the mideast wars are driven by Jews, so, disproportionately (maybe even mainly as to the media)
is the aggression and disinfo on Russia.
The Jewish Problem is to be taken seriously. We need to find a way to discuss it, rescued from Zionists and bona fide Judeophobes. Our lives may well depend on it.
Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for
materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum
tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich
uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum
tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the
intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.
The infamous aluminum tubes Iraq sought to buy from Italy were for short range rockets, not
for uranium enrichment centrifuges as the Bush administration claimed. That was a fact well
known to several U.S. agencies like the Energy and State Departments. But the claim, first
propagandized by the NY Times, was repeated by then President Bush in a speech to the UN and
became a
main basis for the war on Iraq. The Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) Washington Bureau, but
not the NY Times, reported
about the many doubts experts had about such Weapon of Mass Destruction claims.
North Korea has been shipping supplies to the Syrian government that could be used in the
production of chemical weapons, United Nations experts contend.
...
The supplies from North Korea include acid-resistant tiles, valves and thermometers,
according to a report by United Nations investigators .
...
The possible chemical weapons components were part of at least 40 previously unreported
shipments by North Korea to Syria between 2012 and 2017 of prohibited ballistic missile parts
and materials that could be used for both military and civilian purposes , according to the
report, which has not been publicly released but which was reviewed by The New York Times.
The valves, thermometers and acid resistance tiles Syria may have sought to acquire could be
used for medical facilities, the production of candy or for dozens of other civilian purposes.
They could be used to produce something for the military with chemical weapons probably being
the most unlikely.
But like the discredited aluminum tube story, the current NYT piece, written by its UN
reporter Michael Schwirtz, obfuscates the doubts about WMD connections of the issue. It makes
false claims and is full of war-mongering assertions by hawkish figures. It is a scare story
constructed to vilify various opponents to U.S. hegemony on meager factual grounds.
The reporter does not understand the issue he writes about. The "possible chemical weapons
components" are not such. Chemical weapons obviously do not contain valves,
thermometers or acid resistance tiles. To increase the "be afraid" effect of his piece the
author mentions an alleged 2007 accident "in which several Syrian technicians, along with North
Korean and Iranian advisers, were killed in the explosion of a warhead filled with sarin gas
and the extremely toxic nerve agent VX." No weapon designer ever thought of "a warhead" that
was filled with both - Sarin and VX. That would be lunacy and reports thereof are obviously
bogus.
The "United Nations investigators" are a bunch of spooks selected by individual Security
Council members who collect claims of North Korean breaches of sanctions. The group was set up
in 2006 under the UN Security Council resolution 1718 as a "Committee of the Security Council
consisting of all the members of the Council". The Committee is not part of the UN bureaucracy
and they are not "UN experts" or "UN investigators". The reports of the committee list various
claims made by single UN member countries without judging their veracity.
[The report] said, a visit by a technical delegation from North Korea in August 2016
"involved the transfer to Syria of special resistance valves and thermometers known for use
in chemical weapons programmes".
That information came from another member state , which also reported that North Korean
technicians "continue to operate at chemical weapons and missile facilities at Barzeh, Adra
and Hama", the report said.
The valve and thermometer point in the Committee report are based on the claims of one
country alone. But the NY Times lists those claims as "the [UN] report says" giving them a
false aura of neutrality. That one country also claims that Syria still has chemical weapons
facility. In 2013 the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) verified (pdf)
that all Syrian production facilities for chemical weapons and under control of the government
were rendered unusable or destroyed. The OPCW can request to inspect additional facilities it
deems suspicious. It has not done so. The AP, but not the New York Times, notes that the Syrian
government officially denied that any North Korean technicians are working there.
The New York Times discredited itself over its support for the false Bush administration
claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It later issued a lame mea culpa and fired
one reporter while the responsible editors and managers stayed on.
The paper has obviously not changed. It is again creating false pretexts for wars by
publishing unobjective, one sided and intended-to-scare pieces about alleged weapons of mass
destruction.
Posted by b on February 28, 2018 at 08:36 AM |
Permalink
It's amazing that these diplomats could get copies of key documents.
NYTimes -- The report, which is more than 200 pages long, includes copies of contracts
between North Korean and Syrian companies as well as bills of lading indicating the types
of materials shipped. Much information was provided by unidentified United Nations member
states.
But hey, why release the details when the US propaganda public diplomacy
mill is working.
The UN declined to comment on the report, which was written by a panel of eight experts
tasked with checking North Korea's compliance with sanctions. It may never be publicly
released, but a spokesperson stressed that the "overarching message is that all member
states have a duty and responsibility to abide by the sanctions that are in place."
"The valves, thermometers and acid resistance tiles Syria may have sought to acquire could be
used for medical facilities, the production of candy or for dozens of other civilian
purposes. They could be used to produce something for the military with chemical weapons
probably being the most unlikely"
Funny how their is no mention of the simple fact that most 'western' homes have numerous
devices which could be identified as 'suspect' if TPTB needed an excuse. Where I'm from there
is a big push for households to obtain pressure cookers, as 'a roast from frozen in two
hours' fit's a hyper active stressful cancer causing lifestyle and eating out is becoming
prohibitively expensive even for those of us on the west side of town.
How many households
have old cell phones? Got a pool/hot tub? Bromine/chlorine anyone? Like to garden, oops might
be some NPK fertilizers around. Like to hunt? Gunpowder, I wont even go into the over the
counter kinetic explosives that are the target shooter rage ATM. Got kids' then you probably
have electronic kits and RC vehicles, likely in doubles.
Western society bows to authority regardless how illegitimate it shows itself to be. How
else can you explain a belief that fires at the top of three buildings caused them to free
fall into their own footprints against the laws of gravity taught in grade school and still
practiced and verified daily in universities and regular life.
You quoted: "Much information was provided by unidentified United Nations member
states" The NYT has given everyone on this planet permission to identify themselves as from a UN
member state. This post came to you courtesy of a UN Member state.
All these lies based and hidden under the auspices of a UN Panel of Experts which
consists of 8 members: P5 + Japan , South Korea and South Africa , sitting on their a---s @
Turtle Bay.
Did they visit Syria or North Korea or any port to check on those shipments ?
This "report" coincides with US charges on chemical use in Ghouta.
Diplomatic sources have said the chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, opened an investigation into attacks in eastern Ghouta to
determine whether banned munitions were used. U.S. disarmament ambassador Robert Wood said
on Wednesday that Russia has violated its duty to guarantee the destruction of Syria's
chemical weapons stockpile and prevent the Assad government from using poison gas. . .
here
"Russia has..." -- In a larger sense this is part of an updated US diplomatic offensive
against Russia. From recent testimony of General Votel, CENTCOM Commander:
>On the diplomatic front, Moscow is playing the role of arsonist and
firefighter–fueling the conflict in Syria between the Syrian Regime, YPG, and Turkey,
then claiming to serve as an arbiter to resolve the dispute. Moscow continues to advocate
for alternate diplomatic initiatives to Western-led political negotiations in Syria and
Afghan-led peace processes in Afghanistan, attempting to thwart the UN's role and limit the
advance of American influence.
> Russia is also trying to cultivate multi-dimensional ties to Iran. Though historic
rivals, Moscow and Tehran share interests across the region, including an overarching
desire to sideline, if not expel, the U.S. from the region.
> Russia also maintains significant influence in Central Asia,where the countries of the
former-Soviet Union rely on Russia to varying degrees for their economic and security
needs. This is problematic as Russia's efforts could limit U.S. engagement options and
provide Moscow additional levers of influence, particularly as NATO forces deployed in
Afghanistan are dependent on Central Asian partners for logistical support. . .
here
Meanwhile, the sanctions on North Korea shipping are a joke. More than 50 ships and shipping
companies were cited by the Treasury Department for evading existing U.S. and international
sanctions. While most of those named were based in North Korea, companies and ships from
China, Singapore, Taiwan, Panama, Tanzania, the Marshall Islands and the Comoros were also
included.
Bloomberg reports on the "name game":
The Jin Teng, sanctioned by the U.S. in March 2016, became the Shen Da 8 and then the Hang
Yu 1 last November, according to Kharon, a Los Angeles-based firm that identifies sanctions
risks for banks and companies. The Jin Tai 7, also sanctioned by the U.S. in March 2016,
changed its name to Sheng Da 6 two months later and then to Bothwin 7 last November, Kharon
said. That was before a new round of UN sanctions was agreed on in December. Both ships
remain on the U.S.'s sanctions list despite the name changes.The Bothwin 7 visited the port
of Lianyungang, China, in January, the same month that the Hang Yu 1 stopped at the Port of
Ningbo-Zhoushan, also in China. Both ships, once part of a fleet owned by Ocean Maritime
Management Co., based in Pyongyang and sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department and the
UN, changed their names to evade detection, according to Kharon, whose researchers drill
down into company releases as well as court and corporate filings to establish links
between front companies and sanctioned entities.
"Sanctions against North Korea are largely symbolic gestures of disapproval that do not
demonstrate any capability to change the political behavior of the Kims," said Robert
Huish, an associate professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who has been
monitoring the country's shipping traffic. . .
here
And we have the recent striking news that the Pentagon doesn't believe Syria used Sarin
last year.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis made it very clear recently that "aid groups and
others" had provided the U.S. with evidence that was insufficient to conclude that
President Bashar Assad had recently used the chemical weapon Sarin against Syrian
civilians . In other words, the Pentagon does not believe what has been presented to
it as evidence, chiefly because of the dubious provenance of the providers. . .
here
Remember that almost a year ago a UN commission concluded that the Syrian government
was responsible for a widely discussed incident in Khan Sheikhoun. An alleged gas attack by
air happened in April in an al-Qaeda controlled area in Syria. It was used by the White
House to justify its bombing of a Syrian airbase.
The Guardian link has one of the most comical requests that the U.N. tends to make on the
accused in the vein of 'prove you are not a witch' ...
"The UN experts added that they had not yet received a reply with documents supporting
this claim and a list of all North Koreans who had travelled to Syria."
Syria, 'there were no Korean technicians, military, or official visits'.
U.N. - 'Prove it, give us a list of the Koreans'
The Syrians should give the U.N. an empty list.
They did this to Syria before when they were accused of a WMD bombing of civilians. The
Syrians said that they didn't have any military flights that day, 'give us a list of
flights, what, no list? GUILTY!'
thanks b... i think what you are doing here, if i could be so bold, is that you are tearing
apart of merits of this reporter michael schwirtz's talking points... this is very
important to do, as no one is doing it! in looking at what the dolt has written for the nyt
the past few months, it becomes very clear the agenda is to carry water for the neo con
crowd, facts be dammed... this is his job... he does need to be taken to the woodshed and
given a beating! and why is it these ambiguous types are always given clearance in such
papers as the nyt, wapo or wsj? it would be hard not to conclude the folks who own these
papers are very intent on doing the same - carrying water for the military and financial
industry in a move towards war, or a desire for war..
your story is not going to get the coverage the nyt story gets... how do we change
that?
@don bacon - reading the usa daily press propaganda briefings is always informative...
why it was just yesterday that the quote you gave from today, was served up yesterday
thanks heather nauert.. this from yesterday "MS NAUERT: Russia signed on to this. That's
first of all. Russia signed on to this as an entity that agreed to this UN Security Council
resolution. Let me remind you also that Russia had agreed to help, years ago, Syria with
getting rid of its chemical weapons. Russia has failed to do that. I want to point that out
as well." who needs facts, when you can lie, make shit up and etc. etc.?? https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2018/02/278913.htm
@1 librel.. i agree with you - change the word, again to still... the nyt is 'still'
shilling for the war machine...
Is it some surprise that US sanctioned countries trade with other US sanctioned countries
(for benign, commercial reasons)? It apparently is to some.
(Warning: sweeping statement alert...) This GLOBAL US sanctions regime only hastens the
formation of a non-US/alternative commercial trade collective, the end of the dollar as
"world trade currency," and the subsequent end of the US ability to fund global war (as US
T-Bill interest rates jack up - currently at ZERO - correspondingly, US sovereign debt
becomes unsupportable by the economy, and the end of economic life as we in the US know
it). Perpetual war, as a function of the end of empire, do have that effect.
The Syrian attempt to end militants in Ghouta has elicited an incredibly strong, and for
me, unexpected response. Why are the NATO/zionist/neocon crowd going crazy over a small
plot of land that was obviously going to be recaptured? Are they concerned that the
inability of the jihadists to shell Damascus will be too beneficial to Assad? Is this just
an attempt by Bibi to save his skin? Maybe the jihadist backers have finally come to
realize that this little game is coming to a close?
@17 alaric - "Reading media reports of the fighting in east Ghouta over the last few days
has triggered an eery sense of déjà vu.
It is like taking a time machine back to the autumn of 2016 and listening to all the
arguments over the fighting in Aleppo all over again." the article is here
Thanks b and also Yul | 6 for shedding light on that matter.
Those "UN experts" are being cited on German state media again and again, with some new
report on this or that, establishing Syria as guilty party. But whenever that happens and I
go on the UN's website to find s.th. on said report, like a press statement, just anything
official, there's nothing to be found. So clearly they're misusing the official 'UN' tag,
and no-one's stopping them.
As for the latest expert ruse, it's eye-opening to have a look at the people from the
document which Yul posted. On the face of it, it might look like a pretty diverse crew, ppl
from all regions of the world with names no-one has ever heard of, so why not trust
them?
It gets bad when you take a closer look. The French boy (born '84) is from law and has
dealt with nothing but law so far, yet poses as an expert on "missile issues and other
technologies". Would you believe it?
This just goes on, the Britisher ("air transport") has a background in political science
(or "science" rather).
Rounding things off, there's this American lady with her no doubt common English name
Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt. If you're confused as to her actual nationality you can at
least be sure that she's a deep-state outgrowth. Council on Foreign Relations, Council of
Europe, council here, council there. Political science by training too, probably's never
done a day's work in her life. But quite the expert on "finance and economics", I hear.
PS: Those tiles, I remember we had tables clad with those in the chemistry labs, back in
high school. So maybe they were justmeant for one of the schools they're rebuilding in
Aleppo, another thought.
These reports (allegations) are part of a psychological war waged by the US and its allies
on Syria et al. There may be a military attack in the works, maybe not, but one thibg's for
sure -- serious allegations like these serve to keep the Syrians and their allies on their
tippy toes, and intended to make them think twice before they make moves contrary to US
interests. So yes the reports are for domestic consumption but also part of a warning to
foreign foes.
@ 19 Scotch
Don't forget who has got the permanent post for the USG of Political Affairs at the UN . A
US citizen- currently Jeffrey Feltman who is leaving soon to be replaced by another ilk - a
woman this time around. Ban Ki-Moon couldn't sneeze w/o the approval of Jeffrey. Looks like
Antonio is in the same boat - guess that's how and why he got elected - another US puppet
as UNSG.
The NYT piece so obviously contradicts itself internally to boil down to a leaked document
without official imprimatur, containing unverified information from unnamed UN member
states, information which may or may not appear sinister, should it ever be confirmed,
depending on one's point of view. That's very thin gruel, and yet the story has been
amplified by other outlets and presented to the public as representing some sort of
established fact. Yes, that is exactly the Iraqi WMD propaganda playbook.
.... Abdulmonam Eassa AFP News February 28, 2018
Syrian civil defence volunteers pray over the body of a victim who died in a building
collapse following reported regime bombardment in Haza, in the besieged Eastern Ghouta
region on February 26, 2018 More In Syria's rebel-held Eastern Ghouta enclave, the bombs
have stopped falling from the sky but the dead are still being raised from the
rubble.
In the town of Hazeh, volunteers from the Syrian Civil Defence known as the "White
Helmets" pull one body from the basement of a collapsed home. And minutes later, a second
one.
"It's carnage down there," says Ali Bakr, a young man looking on with other
residents. "People hide underground to shelter from the strikes but even that doesn't
guarantee you're safe."
Syrian regime forces, backed by Russia's military, intensified their bombardment of
Eastern Ghouta on February 18, carrying out one of the bloodiest assaults of the country's
seven-year war.
More than 600 civilians have been killed in 10 days of air strikes, barrel bombs
dropped from helicopters and rocket fire on the area, which is controlled by Islamist and
jihadist groups....
The „churnalists" live up to their real name. They did the same stunt in 2017 –
even more brazenly rehashing what the press agency „said" (in turn relying on what
anonymous „officials" and reports „said"):
The „sources":
1 a „confidential" (read: secret) report by ANONYMOUS authors (called:
„independent experts" in manipulative press jargon):
„The report by a panel of independent U.N. experts, which was submitted to the
U.N. Security Council earlier this month and seen by Reuters on Monday, gave no details on
WHEN or WHERE the interdictions occurred or WHAT the shipments contained".
(Give me a break )
2 the allegations of 3 UNIDENTIFIED „(UN) member states": 2 „interdicted
shipments " and 1 „HAD REASONS TO BELIEVE" :
(REUTERS) " Two MEMBER STATES interdicted shipments destined for Syria. Another Member
state informed the panel that it HAD REASONS TO BELIEVE that the goods were part of a KOMID
contract with Syria," according to the report.
„KOMID is the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation. It was blacklisted by the
Security Council in 2009 and DESCRIBED AS Pyongyang's key arms dealer and exporter of
equipment related to ballistic missiles and conventional weapons. In March 2016 the council
also blacklisted two KOMID representatives in Syria."
The consignees were Syrian entities DESIGNATED by the European Union and the United States
as front companies for Syria's Scientific Studies and Research Centre (SSRC), a Syrian
entity identified by the Panel as cooperating with KOMID in previous prohibited item
transfers," the U.N. experts wrote. SSRC has overseen the country's chemical weapons
program since the 1970s."
The latest „reporting" is using the same methods: secret sources, innuendo,
conjecture, confirmation bias, framing, etc.
The report is UNPUBLISHED, the authors („experts on what?) are NOT KNOWN but the
insinuation is that it contains „new evidence" for criminal activities between the
DPRK and Syria (criminal only because of the unwarranted sanctions)
So the „multiplicators" write about what Reuters says is in the report (as if it
were true) although no journalist has tried to verify the claims but when the Syrian
government refutes the allegations they dutifully point out that
„The UN panel said Syrian officials had not responded to a request for documents
that would support this assertion "
BENOIT CAMGUILHEM (F) – missile issues
a French university lecturer in public / administrative law - an expert on missiles?
HUGH GRIFFITHS (UK) - air transport
leads the panel this guy is a dangerous fraud ... infiltrating SIPRI and earlier involved
in the black "human rights" propaganda about Serbia and Kosovo (director of field mission,
medecins du monde (1999-2001)- as "authentic" as the White Helmets...)
(„he worked for governments" (!) and the „Institute for War &
Peace":
„Institute for War & Peace Reporting (or IWPR for short) is an international
media development charity, established in 1991. It runs major programmes in Afghanistan,
the Caucasus, Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, the Philippines, Southeastern Europe, Syria, Uganda
and Southern Africa. (nice choice of countries !)
"IWPR builds democracy at the frontlines of conflict and change through the power of
professional journalism. IWPR programs provide intensive hands-on training, extensive
reporting and publishing, and ambitious initiatives to build the capacity of local media ."
(haven't we heard this crap before ?)
„Also we are managing a special reporting project on war crimes tribunals" .
„managing" indeed:
Edward Herman's great analysis about the Milosevic trial (Marlise Simons: A Study in
Total Propaganda Service) contains this reference:
Marlise Simons, "Prosecutors SAY Documents Link Milosevic to Genocide," New York Times,
June 20, 2003
„Simons swallowed the Office of the Prosecutor's bait, its revelation of a
document that "MAY PROVE TO BE crucial evidence in support of their case that the former
Yugoslav president is guilty of genocide." (First published on the webpage of the
highly-compromised Institute for War & Peace Reporting..)" Sound familiar?
The Simonses of this world have multiplied like cancer cells and as Herman
remarked:
„Framing and sourcing are closely linked, as the use of a particular source
allows that source to define the issues and to fix the frames of reference, presumably
those acceptable to or preferred by the journalist"
By the way, the IWPR (their "democracy-loving" directors) seem to be very unpopular
in Iraq .. I wonder why:
The newly-appointed Iraq Director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting
(IWPR) has been found dead in suspicious circumstances at an Istanbul airport.
(„hanged herself with shoelaces") The ex-BBC journalist had been returning from a
memorial service in London for the former IWPR Iraq director, Ammar Al Shahbander, who was
killed in a car bomb attack in Baghdad in May.
I hate to admit it, but clearly the AZ Empire is not "finished" with Syria yet. The
division of this ancient society with the storied Euphrates River serving as one border (as
"Promised" in Genesis 15:18) is enforced by thousands of US troops, artillery pieces,
warplanes and at least a dozen US military bases. That gives about 1/3 of Syria's land and
1/2 of its oil to the proposed Kurdistan (with Kurdish people making up 6% of Syria's
population).
I sincerely hope that Syria's allies, Russia and Iran, are themselves sincere in their
commitment to preserve Syria's sovereignty and the integrity of its borders.
Another story came out of this devastated land and people.
Syria conflict: Women 'sexually exploited in return for aid'
It's been going on since "revolution" began. The first UN report on it was 3 years ago,
but nothing has been done. And of course, it is the Sharia Councils we pay for that set the
terms for trading food for women and girls (and no doubt boys).
Senator Lindsey Graham said Iran is testing President Donald Trump and warned Israel was
preparing to start a war in southern Lebanon over an Iranian-backed Hezbollah rocket
factory.
You write: "the folks who own these papers are very intent on doing the same - carrying
water for the military and financial industry in a move towards war, or a desire for war..
"
Have you considered that the owners of the media also own large parts of the military
industrial complex, as well as controlling interest in the financial institutions?
The media is not a separate fourth estate seeking objectivity, it is a useful tool to
create popular support for policies that go against the interest of the majority. They are
not separate.
Excellent points! I shun most "traditional" media of all types as most are corrupted in
some manner, with some more than others. I'm reminded of the closed door meeting FDR had
with the major media CEOs just prior to 7 Dec and the resulting lock-step they all
displayed afterwards--a lock-step continuing as we breathe.
This is a black propaganda two-fer, casting aspersions upon both Syria and North Korea. Let
us now forget it was the U.S. that enabled sales of chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein. It
was the U.S. that most likely used Sarin gas during the Vietnam War. And it was the U.S.
that amnestied the worst biological warfare criminals from Japan's Unit 731 complex and
then used their expertise to conduct a large-scale experimental campaign of germ warfare
against both China and North Korea during the Korean War. Regarding the latter, readers are
referred to
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-long-suppressed-korean-war-report-on-u-s-use-of-biological-weapons-released-at-last-20d83f5cee54
Castellio @ 28, James and Karlof1: In the case of Rupert Murdoch, who through News
Corporation owns newspapers, journals, magazines, TV and online news channels, at least one
major film studio (20th Century Fox), publishing company HarperCollins Publishers and other
media outlets, the link between the media and the military industrial complex is between
the two hemispheres of his brain. Murdoch is on the Board of Directors of Genie Energy
(along with ex-US President of Vice Dick Cheney) which owns a company that has a licence
(granted by an Israeli court) to explore and drill for oil and natural gas in Syria's Golan
Heights.
How much more incestuous can the media be with the military industrial complex?
Wait while I hunt out the connection between The Guardian newspaper's management and
investment bank NM Rothschild & Sons Ltd ...
What is up here? Apart from the horror of the NYT story, why are so many commenters in this
thread too damn lazy to use the html tags provided. It is 2018 and I find it impossible to
accept that so many are still incapable of posting to a blog.
The only reason I can deduce is that far too many still sit at ancient desktops and don't
comprehend the disaster their laziness causes for those who use tablets & phones.
A new movie "Revolution Man" directed by Syrian director Najdat Aznour. Deals with rebel
propaganda ie. #WhiteHelmets fakery, child soldiers & the role of western media in
demonizing the government.
A new movie "Revolution Man" directed by Syrian director Najdat Aznour. Deals with rebel
propaganda ,#WhiteHelmets fakery, child soldiers & the role of western media in
demonizing the government
Such incestuousness was uncovered during the Merchants of Death Congressional hearings
during the 1930s and helped enact the Neutrality Acts. Prominent US Historians Charles and
Mary Beard were decrying the evils of media consolidation soon after WW1, a message that
only increased in volume as time moved forward. Imagine what we might have if anti-trust
legislation were enforced as rigorously as Taft(!) did 100+ years ago.
"... It has been a long year ever since January 20 th of last year. Not only because of the ever-ensuing embarrassments of the Commander in Chief with such frequency it can be difficult to follow, but also – and I would say especially – because of the incessant daily media focus on the so called "Russiagate" scandal, a conspiracy which seeks to prove a collusion between the Putin and the Trump administration in order to successfully steal the 2016 presidential election win away from Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton. ..."
It has been a long year ever since January 20 th of last year. Not only because of the ever-ensuing embarrassments
of the Commander in Chief with such frequency it can be difficult to follow, but also – and I would say especially – because of the
incessant daily media focus on the so called "Russiagate" scandal, a conspiracy which seeks to prove a collusion between the Putin
and the Trump administration in order to successfully steal the 2016 presidential election win away from Democrat nominee Hillary
Clinton.
The United States and the Russian Federation have a long history of mutual hostility – famously dividing the East and West into
a bipolar world during the Cold War – and the vision of Russia is among many Americans still that of the Soviet
bad guys . The Cold War was not a pleasant time for many
obvious reasons, but in the minds of the American left, the McCarthy era is one that still sticks, and
its apparent return is something
that seems to concern only a minority on the left – including myself. Now for the unacquainted, McCarthyism can be described as "
the vociferous campaign against alleged communists in the US government and other institutions carried out under Senator Joseph
McCarthy in the period 1950–4. Many of the accused were blacklisted or lost their jobs, though most did not in fact belong to the
Communist Party " ( source ). It was a
clever way used by the US government to frame and condemn all the big left leaning civil rights and social justice movements that
were happening during the Cold War era. Professors, academics, independent media platforms, politicians or activists with left leaning
messages were being labelled as Soviet agents by the US government, discrediting them completely of any legitimacy in the eyes of
the American people through the widespread Red Scare
. What has been happening in the last year can be seen as a mirror of the same mentality, except that " Soviet spy " has today
been replaced by labels such as " Kremlin agent " or " Russian bot ".
It isn't news that what is often referred to as the " American Left" of the Democratic party is in reality nothing more
than a neo-liberal party slightly more to the center/left than the GOP. So in this article, when I am referring to the terminology
"American Left" , and the one subject to the revamped McCarthyism, I am in fact talking about the often anti-establishment,
anti-imperialistic and even sometimes anti-capitalistic left – the one that threatens the current neo-liberal status quo. So as I
elaborate my case, I just want to make it clear that I am referring to the latter.
One of the greater, larger left-wing media presence on US ground is undoubtedly RT America (RT short for Russia Today). Hosting
many US critical segments such as Redacted Tonight
by Lee Camp, On Contact with Chis Hedges and Breaking The Set with Abby Martin, RT America comes
out as a prominent side-narrative to the mainstream medias such as MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CNN, NPR and so forth. Yet last year,
RT America has had to register itself as a "foreign agent" , on the basis of a
very weak report by the Director of National Intelligence
. Reasons for this decision as stated in the report claims to be that RT regularly covers surveillance, civil liberties, protest
movements, the environmental impacts of fracking and Wall Street greed. Other more establishment friendly foreign news media on US
soil such as BBC America have not had to register as a foreign agent. So far, only RT. Facebook (known for working closely with the
US government) has even gone as far as marking RT articles shared on its platform
as spam The Intercept
Where the delegitimization of leftist media really strikes is in the realm of "fake news"-stamping and propaganda-flagging.
The Washington Post backed the website project PropOrNot.com which frames in a sort of 'blacklist' news medias that they believe
are Russian Propaganda, with usually no evidence to back up their claims. Many independent news outlets are to be found on their
list, and none of the major media conglomerates (unless they're Russian, of course). In the same vein, Facebook has decided to team
up with established media outlets such as AP and ABC News to find out and
decide what is or is
not "Fake News" .
Apparently, Americans are believed to be too unwise to figure it out for themselves, and if alternate narratives and opinions
are being held, it must be because they have fallen victim of fake news. BBC has even gone as far as taking the
teaching role in spotting "fake news" . The concept
seems to be that social media platforms and mainstream media outlets are to tell the population what is real and what is a lie. The
same outlets that pushed the war in Iraq, Syria, Libya, as well as the current Russiagate narrative. Media outlets that are
ramping up on US intelligence spokesmen for their news
segments, despite the fact that they are
historically known to lie
and deceive the American people . These same people are to tell us what is the truth. It is my belief that one of the only way
such a development has become possible lies in the fact that the Democratic party and its voters have a
newfound love for the FBI, NSA and
CIA, thanks to the Russiagate conspiracy.
During the last year, James Comey and
Robert Mueller have incessantly been praised
by the media as American heroes and patriots saving the American people from the Kremlin puppets that Trump and his administration
are accused to be (with very little evidence so far). It would seem that in this day and age, the Democrats would rather side with
the deep state than with reason. Through programs such as COINTELPRO
and Operation
Mockingbird , the FBI and CIA have spent decades and millions of dollars deceiving and crushing any movement that dared to challenge
the two-party system. For " the resistance " movement to embrace US intelligence agencies and the lies they propagate is an
extremely reckless and dangerous move, and by doing so they are not only consciously trying their best to harm the current administration,
but unconsciously harming the many media outlets, journalists, activists and politicians who hold a different view on the world than
the Washington narrative, and who are now all being flagged as Kremlin agents pushing Russian propaganda.
During the last year we have been told not only that Trump's campaign colluded with the Kremlin, but also that
Bernie Sanders, Green Party leader Jill Stein and even that UK's
Jeremy Corbyn did. So have we been told about whistleblowers
Julian Assange ,
Edward Snowden
and
Chelsea Manning , and many of RT America's journalists who have their shows and articles published on RT America for the sole
reason that RT is one of the only outlets allowing their differing viewpoints on American politics. Many Russiagate sceptics on Twitter
have
r
eceived messages directly from Twitter informing them that they might have fallen victim to Russian propaganda because they had
retweeted or were following certain accounts they deemed to be associated with the Kremlin. From my own personal experience, I cannot
count how many times I have seen Russiagate sceptics being called-out by liberals for being Kremlin agents or Russian bot accounts
– all because of the many, many Russia-Kremlin-Trump stories that have been promulgated over the last year. It has paralyzed a large
portion of the centre-left to not even move an inch more towards the left, and has condemned those who have.
There is a paranoia happening in the US political establishment, remarkably similar to the one experienced during the Cold War
era. It doesn't matter whether the Russia-Collusion story is true or not (let's not forget the United States has itself
meddled in countless foreign elections ever since the end of WWII , even in
Russia in 1996 ), it matters more what this ongoing investigation and grotesque media-hype is doing to the American public –
and by extension to the rest of the world. The
US-Russia relation
is worse today than at the high point of the Cold War , all thanks to this constant Putin bashing and the fact that NATO is slowly
encircling the Russia in Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, the Arctic, the Middle-East and Asia. Despite the West
promising
not to expand NATO an inch Eastwards as part of the German reunification deal, such promises have not been kept. But of course,
most of the general population is fine this politically unwise expansion of NATO, " because you know, Russians are bad " (satire).
If there is a threat to national and global security today, and a threat to free speech and independent media, it is not coming
from Putin or the Kremlin – but rather from the United States. And until the American left gathers itself and stops listening to
the warmongering pundits and establishment journalists parroting the Washington narrative, we have nothing but a bleak future in
front of us with regards to the relation between thte two old nemesis nuclear superpowers.
*
Jonathan Sigrist is a student at the University of Tromsř in Northern Norway, currently studying the geopolitical, environmental,
cultural and economic relations between the Arctic nations (The US, Canada, Russia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark/Greenland and
Iceland), as well as the future of the Arctic's role in global politics. He has lived in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and France, and
is a fervent observer and critic of US foreign policy.
there has been dramatic improvement in number of soldiers, usability of
equipment
That is the show.
The Ukrainian army's battlefield performance after February 2015 has not improved, nor
will the odds ever again be as favourable as they were in Mid-2014. Kiev has assembled an
army suitable for skirmishing and the occasional terrorist attack, nothing more strenuous.
Building an army capable of winning the war would entail discipline and sacrifice, and the
effort would be for nothing since the RF forces would move in and crush Kiev's army if it
were ever on the point of victory.
Kiev is content with the status quo – it's far from ideal for them but it's not so
bad as to justify the risks involved in a new offensive (this will never happen). Barring
black swan events, the Ukraine is meta-stable and can muddle along indefinitely, so long as
Moscow does not pull its finger out of its backside and resolve the situation properly.
Kiev is content with the status quo – it's far from ideal for them but it's not so
bad as to justify the risks involved in a new offensive (this will never happen). Barring
black swan events, the Ukraine is meta-stable and can muddle along indefinitely, so long as
Moscow does not pull its finger out of its backside and resolve the situation properly.
Two consideration:
1. Ukraine decides very little. Government was outsourced to Washington, DC. If creation
of tension with Russia is necessary, they will launch offensive.
2. Nationalist movements, especially far-right, have their own often destructive dynamics and
can do things that are illogical and/or highly harmful for the country. They also are ready
to fight and die for their ideas. In this sense Poroshenko is a hostage of Galician far right
"revolutionaries. "
Looks like Poroshenko is playing with fire. the longer Donetsk and Lugansk republics exists as a separate political
entities the more difficult and costly will be to bring them back. Each year matters in this respect. After, say, ten year
probably no compromise could ever emerge, unless Russia is weakened and /or dissolved into smaller statelets (the permanent
problem for Russia is change of leadership, so 2024 will be a very important year, as Putin does not have any realistic successor
who can continue his policies. So iether Russian "economic nationalists" (to borrow Bannon's term) or Pro-European faction
will come to power. In both cases foreign policies change. Or the US economy crash again and military budget will be
drastically cut, leaving no money for foreign military adventure and the protection of neoliberal empire. Direct attach
might elicit Russian response and as such is highly risky (especially in view of Russia being pissed by the USA all the time now
and might want to make Ukraine, as a US client, a boy for beating) , but periodic skirmishes just run this territory into
wasteland that Syria regions now are. They also drive population out.
Notable quotes:
"... IMO the emerging partition is likely to last a long time. Syria is only 80 years old as a state and a prolonged de facto partition as opposed to wartime occupation can easily become more or less perm ..."
"... If the Kurds of Afrin throw themselves on the mercy of the Syrian government in Damascus then Kurdish autonomy is squashed in that enclave. And, when it is all said and done, isn't that what Erdogan really wants? ..."
You don't understand what I mean. IMO the emerging partition is likely to last a long
time. Syria is only 80 years old as a state and a prolonged de facto partition as opposed to
wartime occupation can easily become more or less permanent as was the case with Turkey's
acquisition of Hatay. pl
I certainly don't dispute that Turkey is invading Afrin. And I agree with you that if things
continue to stand as they are now then that invasion will continue until all of Afrin has
been overrun.
But to simply extrapolate from what has happened into the future suggests that
circumstances won't change or - if they do - that Erdogan will continue on like some wind-up
automaton.
If the Kurds of Afrin throw themselves on the mercy of the Syrian government in Damascus
then Kurdish autonomy is squashed in that enclave. And, when it is all said and done, isn't
that what Erdogan really wants?
If the Kurds are too stupid or too proud to play that card then, yeah, sure, you and I
both agree that they will be ground into the dirt.
But if they do supplicate to Assad then the situation changes.
You (I assume) believe that in that circumstance Erdogan will continue to grind on with
this invasion regardless.
I believe he will beat his chest and then go home.
One of us will be wrong, and one of us will be right.
"... This is why Washington has adopted a strategy of bashing Russia. The US wants to break our country and withdraw it from the game, deprive it of sovereignty and subjectivity in world politics, as was the case in the 1990s, so that at the hour of the decisive clash, Russia was not an independent player capable of making decisions based on its interests. ..."
"... Thus, the minimum and maximum goals of the US are pursued: the first is to neutralize Russia, and since today it reliably covers China's rear, create threats for China from the Russian direction. ..."
"... The second is to establish a power in Moscow that would act together with Washington against China in a decisive battle. In recent years, we have seen elements of the implementation of this strategy. These are sanctions in Ukraine, attempts at financial and economic strangulation, involvement in mediated wars and a new arms race in order to provoke a split in elite Russian circles, and between the masses and the leader -- in order to ruin Putin's power and establish a puppet regime in Russia. ..."
The US is no longer a superpower: Washington's nuclear strategy tells us this.
By now, the United States has already adopted a deterrence strategy with respect to
Beijing and methodically pursues a policy of encircling the PRC with the help of its partners
and allies. China has with almost all its neighbours conflicts and problems that the US
traditionally skilfully uses to create an anti-China coalition. Countries that can form its
core include Japan, India, Vietnam, the Philippines and Australia. Over time, other states
may join them.
... And now - the most important thing. Against the backdrop of a possible battle between
the two giants in the foreseeable future, Russia's role and significance are incredibly
increasing. Obviously, having huge nuclear-missile potential, vast spaces and immense
resources, Russia can, with its participation on the side of one of the giants in the battle,
decide the fate of the confrontation.
I personally get the impression that Washington strategists understand this perfectly.
However, they do not believe that by improving relations with Moscow, they can make it a
reliable ally in the case of a head-on confrontation with China. And because the future
destiny of the United States is at stake, facing an impending existential challenge, any
miscalculation can prove fatal.
This is why Washington has adopted a strategy of bashing Russia. The US wants to break our
country and withdraw it from the game, deprive it of sovereignty and subjectivity in world
politics, as was the case in the 1990s, so that at the hour of the decisive clash, Russia was
not an independent player capable of making decisions based on its interests.
Thus, the
minimum and maximum goals of the US are pursued: the first is to neutralize Russia, and since
today it reliably covers China's rear, create threats for China from the Russian direction.
The second is to establish a power in Moscow that would act together with Washington against
China in a decisive battle. In recent years, we have seen elements of the implementation of
this strategy. These are sanctions in Ukraine, attempts at financial and economic
strangulation, involvement in mediated wars and a new arms race in order to provoke a split
in elite Russian circles, and between the masses and the leader -- in order to ruin Putin's
power and establish a puppet regime in Russia.
Will the Americans succeed in implementing their strategy? This is highly doubtful,
despite the enormous resources that the collective West, led by the United States, can
mobilize. First, the Western world and the States are not experiencing the best of times.
America has overextended itself over almost the past two decades in a series of endless wars
and external adventures. Secondly, Russia cannot be broken by applying crude, direct pressure
on it. If it breaks down, as we know from our history, it is only because of internal
conflicts and confrontations. So, in the medium term, external pressure can only consolidate
Russian society and power.
Third. The history of the White House's pressure on North Korea suggests that this huge
country cannot cope even with this small state, which has taken a firm stand.
Fourth. The solidarity of Western countries with the United States also has its limits.
They are unlikely to become willing hostages to the confrontation of the US vs Russia, and
then the US vs China.
And lastly, I like to hope that in Beijing they understand (or very soon will realize)
that the main target of the States is not Russia. Thus, the Kremlin is now resisting the
White House both for itself and, as we used to say in the USSR, for the other guy.
And it seems to me that if in this confrontation China more vigorously defends Russia,
then it is likely that the US will understand the hopelessness of the strategy of bashing
Russia and change the paradigm of its policy. Otherwise, they themselves are at risk of being
broken because of the exorbitant imperial overstrain.
No wonder Patrick Buchanan, one of the most astute patriarchs of American politics and
analysts of US foreign and domestic policy, published a few years ago a book with the very
characteristic title "Suicide of a superpower: will the US survive until 2025?"
Interesting observation: "This is what happens when you have 'Five Eyes' but no brains!"
Notable quotes:
"... The entire U.S. MSM is a F'ing troll farm, disinformation, Orwellian world on steroids. The U.S. public is fed a constant never ending stream of complete Bull sh**, self serving crap. ..."
"... It's surprising to see the NYT admit the US does it, too. The alt media has been all over this including Corbett's recent video with the Woolsey interview with Fox News where he laughs it off and then says it was for a good cause. ..."
"... I've been writing to my favorite websites telling them that the Russians could not possibly compete with the U.S. when it came to manipulation of twitter/facebook etc. Where is the comparative analysis? How could the Russians possibly compete with US Internet-manipulation, US-election-funding? Look at the most basic numbers, US population compared to Russian population... ..."
"... The whole Russiagate thing has been proven to be nothing but a cover for the Democratic Party's real manipulation of the last election to cut out the only progressive in the race (Sanders) and get the worst possible opponent (Trump) for the elite's favorite candidate (Clinton). The stupid little people of middle America just didn't follow orders like their ever so sophisticated compatriots on the east and west coasts and now the 0.01% have to cover their tracks. Mueller's indictment of 13 interns in some sadsack little St Petersburg troll farm would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic (well actually it is pretty funny). ..."
"... It's McCarthyism on steroids, and as usual, the real targets are progressives and the "real left" fighting for workers. We are allowed to have all the social justice we want, but don't you dare discuss economic justice that threatens the bank accounts of the 0.01%, or watch any of that evil alternative news that provides a different perspective from our govt/corporate approved sources. ..."
It went much further than that . Google actually tweaked its algorithms to alter search
recommendations in favor of the Clinton campaign. A comparative analysis of search engines
Google, Bing and Yahoo showed that Google differed significantly from the other two in
producing search recommendations relevant to Clinton.
The entire U.S. MSM is a F'ing troll farm, disinformation, Orwellian world on steroids. The
U.S. public is fed a constant never ending stream of complete Bull sh**, self serving crap.
How to stop it is the only question, to stop the impunity with which these criminals like
Bush and Trump and Obama and Mattis et.al. lie with their pants on fire and .....they all
suck .01% dick.
It's surprising to see the NYT admit the US does it, too. The alt media has been all over
this including Corbett's recent video with the Woolsey interview with Fox News where he
laughs it off and then says it was for a good cause.
Finally, I do not believe my eyes. I've been writing to my favorite websites telling them
that the Russians could not possibly compete with the U.S. when it came to manipulation of
twitter/facebook etc. Where is the comparative analysis? How could the Russians possibly compete with US Internet-manipulation,
US-election-funding? Look at the most basic numbers, US population compared to Russian
population...
"Russia is attracted to Canada because destabilizing it will 'undermine the cohesion' of
the broader NATO alliance. Moreover it could serve to undermine Canadian policy in
Europe..."
More money for CSIS, CSE, 'Five Eyes' etc. Maybe we'll build a Trudeau troll-farm too.
Gee gosh golly a NATO researcher thinks Russia is threatening Canada and the CBC acts as a
megaphone for this BS.
The whole Russiagate thing has been proven to be nothing but a cover for the
Democratic Party's real manipulation of the last election to cut out the only progressive in
the race (Sanders) and get the worst possible opponent (Trump) for the elite's favorite
candidate (Clinton). The stupid little people of middle America just didn't follow orders
like their ever so sophisticated compatriots on the east and west coasts and now the 0.01%
have to cover their tracks. Mueller's indictment of 13 interns in some sadsack little St
Petersburg troll farm would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic (well actually it is pretty
funny).
Who exactly is Putin going to support in a Canadian election? The liberals and
conservatives are both reliable lapdogs of Washington and even the NDP (No Difference Party)
is infected with Russophobia and Whitehelmetphilia. Between supporting an overtly fascist
regime in Kiev, contributing to every "bombing brown people to save them" campaign concocted
by Washington, and leading a NATO battle group in Latvia some 250 miles from Moscow, it's
pretty hard to make a case that Canada is a passive little angel looking for world peace
anymore.
Very sad what the neo-liberal imposter Trudeau is doing to Canada. The guy is Harper with
ridiculous socks and a bit of identity politics thrown in to fool whatever passes as
center-left in Canada these days. What a change and almost nobody makes a fuss or cares. Of
course the Canadian media attacks anyone suggesting better relations with Russia and Canada
might be worth trying. It's McCarthyism on steroids, and as usual, the real targets are
progressives and the "real left" fighting for workers. We are allowed to have all the social
justice we want, but don't you dare discuss economic justice that threatens the bank accounts
of the 0.01%, or watch any of that evil alternative news that provides a different
perspective from our govt/corporate approved sources.
"When people ask about what is most threatening to humanity and all of
life on Earth today, they usually mention nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons, but forget about one more
truly terrible weapons of mass destruction, aimed primarily at the human brain. This is information, propaganda
and agitation."
Valentin Falin, who recently died aged 92.
More on what he thought (some of it quite extreme) here:
"... "This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight," said Under Secretary Goldstein. "It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take, we also need to be on the offensive. ..."
"... Israel is long known for such information operations in which its paid trolls not only comment on issues on social media but actively manipulate Wikipedia entries. Such astroturfing has since become a common tool in commercial marketing campaigns. ..."
"... With regard to the larger issue, it seems that the US is getting more and more like its allies Ukraine (drives out any press concerned with printing the truth, relies on a bombastic and entirely false narrative to try and convince its hapless citizens that all is great and everything is Russia's fault) and Israel (an early leader in manipulating online info as b states). ..."
"... If it sounds like a PR monkey banging away on a regurgitated theme, it probably is. For example, the endless repetition in US media about "Syrian chemical weapons attacks" with no on-the-ground supporting evidence is typical of a Rendon Group disinformation campaign; so then they hire a hundred trolls to post outraged comments about 'Syrian chemical weapons use' in comment sections and on twitter; then they hire some State Department intern to write a book about the horrors of the Assad regime, and at the end they collect their $10 million paycheck. ..."
"... The hypocrisy of the U$A continues to be staggering.. If the collective IQ's of the general public approached double digits, the disinformation and propaganda afoot, couldn't gain much traction. As comedian Richard Pryor once said, " Who you gonna' believe, the propagandists, or your lying eyes." ..."
"... money for propaganda... that was back in 1984 - we have progressed from Orwell's version of reality to a new one where reality is what you make of it... meanwhile there will be more dead people that the sponsors of these troll farms, could care less about... although they will frame it - 180% of that... ..."
The U.S. State Department will increase its online trolling capabilities and up its support
for meddling in other countries. The Hill
reports :
The State Department is launching a $40 million initiative to crack down on foreign
propaganda and disinformation amid widespread concerns about future Russian efforts to
interfere in elections.
The department announced Monday that it signed a deal with the Pentagon to transfer $40
million from the Defense Department's coffers to bolster the Global Engagement Center, an
office set up at State during the Obama years to expose and counter foreign propaganda and
disinformation.
The professed reason for the new funding is the alleged but unproven "Russian meddling" in
the U.S. election campaign. U.S. Special Counsel Mueller indicted 13 Russians for what is
claimed to be interference but which
is likely mere commercial activity.
The announcement by the State Department
explains that this new money will not only be used for measures against foreign trolling but to
actively meddle in countries abroad:
Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Steve Goldstein said the
transfer of funds announced today reiterates the United States' commitment to the fight.
"This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to
malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our
allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight," said Under Secretary Goldstein.
"It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take, we also need to be on the
offensive. "
The mentioning of Silicon Valley is of interest. The big Silicon Valley companies Google,
Facebook and Twitter were heavily involved in the U.S. election campaign. The companies
embedded
people within the campaigns to advise them how to reach a maximum trolling effect:
While the companies call it standard practice to work hand-in-hand with high-spending
advertisers like political campaigns, the new research details how the staffers assigned to
the 2016 candidates frequently acted more like political operatives, doing things like
suggesting methods to target difficult-to-reach voters online, helping to tee up responses to
likely lines of attack during debates, and scanning candidate calendars to recommend ad
pushes around upcoming speeches.
Hillary Clinton's well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one
that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet's worst instincts. Correct the
Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton's campaign, is spending some $1 million to find
and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic
front-runner.
In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of
trolling that already exists online.
Clinton is quite experienced in such issues. In 2009, during protests in Iran, then
Secretary of State Clinton pushed Twitter to defer
maintenance of its system to "help" the protesters. In 2010 USAid, under the State Department
set up a
Twitter-like service to meddle in Cuba.
The foreign policy advisor of Hillery Clinton's campaign, Laura Rosenberger,
initiated and runs the Hamilton68 project which
falsely explains any mentioning of issues disliked by its neo-conservative backers as the
result of nefarious "Russian meddling".
The State Department can build on that and other experience.
Since at least 2011
the U.S. military is manipulating social media via sock puppets and trolls:
A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command
(Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop
what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman
or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
...
The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing
background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be
able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by
sophisticated adversaries".
It was then wisely predicted that other countries would follow up:
The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to
users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments,
private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.
Israel is long known for such information
operations in which its paid trolls not only comment on issues on social media but
actively
manipulate Wikipedia entries. Such astroturfing has since become a common tool in
commercial marketing campaigns.
With the new money the State Department will expand its Global Engagement Center
(GEC) which is running "public diplomacy", aka propaganda, abroad:
The Fund will be a key part of the GEC's partnerships with local civil society organizations,
NGOs, media providers, and content creators to counter propaganda and disinformation. The
Fund will also drive the use of innovative messaging and data science techniques.
Separately, the GEC will initiate a series of pilot projects developed with the Department
of Defense that are designed to counter propaganda and disinformation. Those projects will be
supported by Department of Defense funding.
This money will be in addition to the large funds the CIA
traditionally spends on manipulating foreign media:
"We've been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947," said Mr. Johnson,
now at the University of Georgia. "We've used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners -- you
name it. We've planted false information in foreign newspapers. We've used what the British
call 'King George's cavalry': suitcases of cash."
...
C.I.A. officials told Mr. Johnson in the late 1980s that "insertions" of information into
foreign news media, mostly accurate but sometimes false, were running at 70 to 80 a day.
Part of the new State Department money will be used to provide grants. If online trolling or
sock puppetry is your thing, you may want to apply now.
Posted by b on February 26, 2018 at 02:02 PM |
Permalink
"to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic
front-runner"
I call these social media watchers rather than trolls. Rather than simply trying to
disrupt any and all social media threads they don't like, social media watchers look for
comments or comment threads that are disparaging or damaging to their employer.
#2 @Peter AU 1 - I would say the language "to find and CONFRONT" sounds pretty much like
troll behavior.
With regard to the larger issue, it seems that the US is getting more and more like its
allies Ukraine (drives out any press concerned with printing the truth, relies on a bombastic
and entirely false narrative to try and convince its hapless citizens that all is great and
everything is Russia's fault) and Israel (an early leader in manipulating online info as b
states).
That $40 million will probably be pissed away on a couple sweetheart contracts to Tillerson
friends and nobody will see a difference. US State Department propaganda programs, labeled as
"public diplomacy" and other monikers, have been around for a long time but haven't been
executed very well.
From the State Dept. historian office, 2013: . .(excerpt):
Public Diplomacy Is Still in Its Adolescent Stage in the State Department , etc.
. . . The process of convergence has been evolutionary. Secretary Powell grasped the power
of the information revolution, reallocated positions and resources from traditional
diplomatic posting to new areas and recognized the power of satellite television to move
publics and constrain governments even in authoritarian regimes. Secretary Rice forwarded
this reconceptualization under the rubric of "Transformational Diplomacy," which sought to
help people transform their own lives and the relationship between state and society.
Secretary Clinton continued the theme under the concept of "Smart Power." "Person-to-person
diplomacy in today's work is as important as what we do in official meetings in national
capitals across the globe," Clinton said in 2010.The work done by PD officials in Arab
Spring countries beginning in 2011 was as much about capacity-building as advocating U.S.
policies or directly trying to explain American culture. . . here
Prior efforts were targeted more at traditional news outlets, this is just an expansion into
social media along the lines of previous work, example A being the Rendon Group in Iraq,
etc. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Rendon_Group
If it sounds like a PR monkey banging away on a regurgitated theme, it probably is. For
example, the endless repetition in US media about "Syrian chemical weapons attacks" with no
on-the-ground supporting evidence is typical of a Rendon Group disinformation campaign; so
then they hire a hundred trolls to post outraged comments about 'Syrian chemical weapons use'
in comment sections and on twitter; then they hire some State Department intern to write a
book about the horrors of the Assad regime, and at the end they collect their $10 million
paycheck.
Media watchers target specific comments or comment threads, in the case stated by b, those
disparaging or damaging to Clinton.
What I term trolls target blogs or social media accounts that are considered targets, no
matter the content of a particular article or comment thread. Social media media watchers are
a little more specialized than trolls and look for specific content.
P.S. it's funny that you can find out what these clowns are up to by looking for job listings
and salary reports:
The Rendon Group Social Media Specialist Salary | Glassdoor
Average [monthly] salaries for The Rendon Group Social Media Specialist: $2,520. The Rendon
Group salary trends based on salaries posted anonymously by The Rendon Group employees.
Talk about a soul-destroying job. Right up there with Wikipedia page editor.
I see what you are alluding to, but the only problem with it is that, irrespective of the
differing definitions, at heart, these infiltrators are a disrupting force on the message
boards, whether paid to be or not. Their medium is disruption and obfuscation. I tried to
wade into the neoliberal viper's den at slate.com un the past to post "alt-right" stuff and
was quickly attacked by multiple avatars.
In essence, one troll disrupts because he has a need for recognition, and the latter
disrupts for money. Both are netgain for the troll and loss for the rest of us.
The hypocrisy of the U$A continues to be staggering.. If the collective IQ's of the general public approached double digits, the disinformation
and propaganda afoot, couldn't gain much traction. As comedian Richard Pryor once said, " Who you gonna' believe, the propagandists, or your
lying eyes."
thanks b... troll farms looks like a good name for it... farming for the empire.. they could
call it that too.. russia as trend setter, lol.. i don't think so!
speaking of troll farms, i see max Blumenthal came out with some 'about time' comments on
the sad kettle of fish called 'democracy now'... here is his tweet - "If @democracynow is
going to push the neocon project of regime change in Syria so relentlessly and without
debate, it should drop the high minded literary NPR aesthetic and just host Nikki Haley for a
friendly one-on-one #EstablishmentNow https://twitter.com/democracynow/status/967123918237655041
7:07 AM - Feb 25, 2018 "
money for propaganda... that was back in 1984 - we have progressed from Orwell's version of
reality to a new one where reality is what you make of it... meanwhile there will be more
dead people that the sponsors of these troll farms, could care less about... although they
will frame it - 180% of that...
The silver lining here is that the state dept. is in a sense admitting that there is nothing
"in the pipe" relating to outright censorship whether through nefarious agreements between
ISP providers and the IC via the repeal of net neutrality.
$40 mil is a lot for liberal college graduates however.
Nonsense Factory @ 8, Peter AU 1 @ 9: There are plenty of communities in rural Australia
who'd be glad to have troll farms paying that sort of money (even as Australian dollars - 1
Australian dollar being worth about US$0.76 at this time of posting) a month. Real farmers
could do trolling on the side during slow seasons of the year and make some money.
What we need are some Mole Trolls, or maybe that's Troll Moles--double agents if you will
that work for 6-12 months recording 100% of all they do then reveal it all in an expose.
Getting ready for mid-terms. It's going to be interesting to see if the Democrats get wiped
off the map. They should be able to hire quite a few people for $40 million. Don't be
surprised if they deploy AI in the first wave, then follow up with a real person.
ben @13:
Turn off your I phones, and think a little.
ROFL After wandering aimlessly in the mall with Her Majesty over the weekend, I'm not sure
if that's even possible now.
"The big Silicon Valley companies Google, Facebook and Twitter were heavily involved in the
U.S. election campaign. The companies embedded people within the campaigns to advise them how
to reach a maximum trolling effect:"
It went much further than that . Google actually tweaked its algorithms to alter search
recommendations in favor of the Clinton campaign. A comparative analysis of search engines
Google, Bing and Yahoo showed that Google differed significantly from the other two in
producing search recommendations relevant to Clinton.
The entire U.S. MSM is a F'ing troll farm, disinformation, Orwellian world on steroids. The
U.S. public is fed a constant never ending stream of complete Bull sh**, self serving crap.
How to stop it is the only question, to stop the impunity with which these criminals like
Bush and Trump and Obama and Mattis et.al. lie with their pants on fire and .....they all
suck .01% dick.
It's surprising to see the NYT admit the US does it, too. The alt media has been all over
this including Corbett's recent video with the Woolsey interview with Fox News where he
laughs it off and then says it was for a good cause.
Two days before 9/11, Condoleeza Rice received the draft of a formal National Security
Presidential Directive that Bush was expected to sign immediately. The directive contained
a comprehensive plan to launch a
global war on al-Qaeda , including an "imminent" invasion of Afghanistan to topple the
Taliban. The directive was approved by the highest levels of the White House and officials
of the National Security Council, including of course Rice and Rumsfeld. The same NSC
officials were simultaneously running the Dhabol Working Group to secure the Indian power
plant deal for Enron's Trans-Afghan pipeline project. The next day, one day before 9/11,
the Bush administration formally agreed on the
plan to attack the Taliban.
The Highlands Forum has thus played a leading role in defining the Pentagon's entire
conceptualization of the 'war on terror.' Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a retired IMB vice
president who co-chaired the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee from 1997
to 2001, described his experience of
one 2007 Forum meeting in telling terms:
"Then there is the War on Terror, which DoD has started to refer to as the Long War, a term
that I first heard at the Forum. It seems very appropriate to describe the overall conflict
in which we now find ourselves. This is a truly global conflict the conflicts we are now in
have much more of the feel of a battle of civilizations or cultures trying to destroy our
very way of life and impose their own."
Yeah well since the writer of the 'quiz' exposes themself as bein a troll of the worst
sort there is nothing to be said. I'm currently attempting to ingest only those newstories
where the publisher provides space for feedback from readers since if a story is truthful it
should be able to withstand challenge. yeah riight cos that means there's bugger all out
there anymore. The biggest 'win' populism has had this far is in driving all feedback off all
sites with a readership of more than a few hundred. Many of those that do allow feedback only
permit humans with credentialed facebook or google accounts to indulge and the comments are
only visible to similarly logged in types. That tells us a lot about the lack of faith the
corporate media actually have in the nonsense they publish.
Of course 'trolls' are the ones held to be the guilty for causing this but if you actually
watch what happens in a feedback column such as the rare occasions when the graun still
permits CIF comments it isn't the deliberately offensive arseholes spouting the usual cliches
who get deleted, it is those who put forward a considered argument which details why the
original writer has reached a faulty conclusion.
We all know this yet it seems as though none of us are prepared to confront it properly as
the censorship it is.
IMO media outlets which continually lie or at least distort the truth to advance a particular
agenda need to be called to account.
Massed pickets outside newsrooms would be a good way cos as much as media hate us loudmouths
who won't swallow their bromides, they like their competition even less. A decently organised
picket of NYT, WaPo or the Graun would be news in every other spineless, propagandising &
slug-featured media entity.
Said troll was published in Richmond and God only knows who else picked it up. I refuted
it in the comments as best I could, also excerpting MOA. Regardless:
Among Rendon's activities was the creation of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC)
on behalf of the CIA, a group of Iraqi exiles tasked with disseminating propaganda,
including much of the false intelligence about WMD . That process
had begun concertedly under the administration of George H W. Bush, then rumbled along
under Clinton with little fanfare, before escalating after 9/11 under George W. Bush.
Rendon thus played a large role in the manufacture of inaccurate and false news stories
relating to Iraq under lucrative CIA and Pentagon contracts -- and he did so
in the period running up to the 2003 invasion as an advisor to Bush's National
Security Council: the same NSC, of course, that planned the invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq, achieved with input from Enron executives who were simultaneously engaging the
Pentagon Highlands Forum.
Mass surveillance and data-mining also now has a distinctive operational purpose in
assisting with the lethal execution of special operations, selecting targets for the CIA's
drone strike kill lists via dubious algorithms, for instance, along with providing
geospatial and other information for combatant commanders on land, air and sea, among many
other functions. A single social media post on Twitter or Facebook is enough to trigger
being placed on secret terrorism watch-lists solely due to a vaguely defined hunch or
suspicion; and can potentially even land a suspect on a kill list.
In 2011, the Forum hosted two DARPA-funded scientists, Antonio and Hanna Damasio, who are
principal investigators in the 'Neurobiology of Narrative Framing' project at the
University of Southern California. Evoking Zalman's emphasis on the need for Pentagon
psychological operations to deploy "empathetic influence," the new DARPA-backed project
aims to investigate how narratives often appeal "to strong, sacred values in order to evoke
an emotional response," but in different ways across different cultures
This goes a long way toward explaining what is occurring in Hollywood and Nashville.
Carter Page FISA warrant does much, much more than surveille Page himself -- it
permits surveillance of most of the Trump campaign.
Notable quotes:
"... The whole Memo discussion above concerns the FBI's data manipulations to cast Carter Page as a spy worthy of an Article 1 warrant by the FISC. As I explained above, once Admiral Rogers closed the FBI's access to the NSA mega-file, the Bureau developed several work-arounds to explain how the FBI had data from the mega-file that they were mining through our Ambassador to the UN. ..."
"... Fusion GPS immediately hired the wife of FBI manager Bruce Ohr, Nellie, and Christopher Steele. Bruce handed material to Nellie, Nellie to Christopher. He repackaged the material claiming it was provided by very personal "Russian contacts" and the FBI then handed that laundered Steele material to the FISC. ..."
"... This laundering operation was exposed with a mistake concerning Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen was actually attending a family celebration and a ball game here in the US when he supposedly met Steele's "Russian contacts" in Prague. Steele's contacts, who exist only in his mind, dutifully confirmed that the meeting took place in Prague. ..."
"... Bill Binney, on Jimmy Dore show, said that FISA warrant enabled "two hop" surveillance. If so, then Carter Page FISA warrant does much, much more than surveille Page himself -- it permits surveillance of most of the Trump campaign. ..."
"... My "dog that didn't bark" question about Carter Page - if Carter Page was such a known danger, why didn't the FBI warn the Trump Campaign against letting him become involved in the campaign? ..."
"... The dog that didn't bark - if the Schiff Memo were so powerful, such a slam dunk, every MSM outlet in the western world would be trumpeting it to the skies and talking about nothing but. They seem to be barely able to acknowledge the existence of the Memo. ..."
"... As it happens, I think the suggestion that Steele's role may have been, in very substantial measure, to give the impression that material from other source was the product of a high-quality 'humint' investigation merits being taken extremely seriously. ..."
"... Schiff's defence sounded so, pardon the pun, shifty and did nothing to really counter the main point Nunes made when he released his memo. ..."
"... Schiff's memo was basically a vendetta against persons. Page and Papadopolis (sp?) are obviously the unpopular kids in the minds of the "mean girl" Democrats because they had links to Trump, the real threat to the popular girl Democrats. ..."
"... Funnily enough the question raised in your excerpt is exactly what I've been thinking since reading a post by TTG about Carter Page being an important FBI informant and state witness to the prosecution of Russian espionage. ..."
"... If the FBI believed Page had become a Russian spy it would have been easy due to their prior relationship with him to interview him and if he lied, to prosecute him for the process crime of perjury. That is such a slam dunk that the fact they didn't do that makes it seem there's something fishy there. ..."
"... And they never verified Steele's allegation that Page met with Sechin and Divyekin which would have been easy to do and now it seems was pure fabrication. Instead the FBI and DOJ lied and misrepresented to FISC to get a surveillance warrant on Page. This seems rather fishy. I speculate they did that to gain incidental collection on members of the Trump campaign. ..."
"... I note that Page hasn't been charged by the DOJ for any crime. ..."
"... Instead of working hard to protect national security, the FBI/CIA/DOJ' senior-idiots (accustomed to comfort and hefty checks) have been politicking and meddling in the electoral process. Meanwhile, the foreign nationals were left free to surf congressional computers – for years! (See Awan affair) and the "natives" like Clinton et al have been making a lot of money by getting huge bribes from Russians and Saudis (see Uranium One, involving Mueller for all other people). ..."
"... Carter Page during his period of cooperation with the FBI, almost certainly was handled by Agents assigned to a field office. I wonder what they had to say, assuming they even knew, about HQ opening a CI case targeting their former cooperating witness for FISA coverage. It will be very interesting to see who handled Steele. Strzok? ..."
"... What was the compelling evidence and who furnished it to turn a US Naval Academy graduate, and presumably a Naval Officer with a readily accessible track record in service, into the targeted subject of an espionage investigation. Did he even have any current access to classified information? This is not looking good. ..."
"... Carter Page is indeed a puzzlement. I don't see any account of him being an FBI informant, but he was a witness in the investigation and trial of the three SVR officers who tried to recruit him in 2013. ..."
"... Obama claimed something to the effect that, it turns out I am pretty good at killing people. This was in reference to the drone program and assume I don't need to footnote. Perhaps he got the notion that his administration was pretty good at intelligence. ..."
Devin
Nunes and his team have saved me the effort of pointing out the problems with the Schiff
rebuttal. I am presenting that in full. Here is the bottomline--we now know that Christopher
Steele was not a "one-time Charlie." He had a longstanding covert relationship as an FBI
intelligence asset. The Democrat memo does nothing to dispute that fact.
It also is clear that DOJ and FBI personnel engaged in unprofessional (and possibly illegal)
conduct with respect to making representations to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
(FISC). Three key points on this front--1: The so-called Steele dossier was proffered as
evidence to the FISC without fully disclosing that Steele was a covert asset being paid for his
work and that Democrat political operatives were also paying him; 2: Senior DOJ officials,
particularly Bruce Our, were totally comprised yet continued to be involved in the process; and
3: The Democrats insist that Carter Page is a bad guy and deserves to be investigated. Yet, no
charges have been filed against him and the allegations leveled in the Steele dossier were
dismissed by former FBI Director Comey as "salacious and unverified."
Anyway, here are the main points from the Democrat memo and the Republican response.
"George Papadopoulos revealed [redacted] that individuals linked to Russia, who took
interest in Papadopoulos as a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, informed him in late
April 2016 that Russia [two lines redacted]. Papadopoulos's disclosure, moreover, occurred
against the backdrop of Russia's aggressive covert campaign to influence our elections, which
the FBI was already monitoring. We would later learn in Papadopoulos's plea that the
information the Russians could assist by anonymously releasing were thousands of Hillary
Clinton emails."
my problem with this is wikileaks released the e mails via a search-able archive on march
16th 2016...
i still don't see how anything papadopolous said is relevant time wise.. what am i missing
here, other then the obvious fact papadopolous looks like a lousy liar.. apparently he got
this from Joseph Mifsud who as it turns out was 'director of the London Academy of Diplomacy'
and etc - according to the nyt here -
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/world/europe/russia-us-election-joseph-mifsud.html
and from the nyt article "Mr. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about
his conversations with the "professor." Mr. Mifsud is referred to in the papers only as "the
professor," based in London, but a Senate aide familiar with emails involving Mr. Mifsud --
lawmakers in both the Senate and the House are investigating Russia's role in the election --
confirmed that he was the person cited."
the whole thing of russia influencing the usa election seems built on via a number of
sketchy characters at best..
at any rate - this is what emptywheel thinks is relevant in an otherwise irrelevant memo
from schiff... i don't get how it is!
The whole Memo discussion above concerns the FBI's data manipulations to cast Carter Page
as a spy worthy of an Article 1 warrant by the FISC. As I explained above, once Admiral
Rogers closed the FBI's access to the NSA mega-file, the Bureau developed several
work-arounds to explain how the FBI had data from the mega-file that they were mining through
our Ambassador to the UN.
Fusion GPS immediately hired the wife of FBI manager Bruce Ohr, Nellie, and Christopher
Steele. Bruce handed material to Nellie, Nellie to Christopher. He repackaged the material
claiming it was provided by very personal "Russian contacts" and the FBI then handed that
laundered Steele material to the FISC.
This laundering operation was exposed with a mistake concerning Trump's lawyer Michael
Cohen. Michael Cohen was actually attending a family celebration and a ball game here in the
US when he supposedly met Steele's "Russian contacts" in Prague. Steele's contacts, who exist
only in his mind, dutifully confirmed that the meeting took place in Prague.
I wish I might be a sock-puppet, but too many of my condo neighbors know otherwise. My
favorite hobby in retirement is writing films for children, in which white hats succeed and
black hats don't.
Bill Binney, on Jimmy Dore show, said that FISA warrant enabled "two hop" surveillance. If
so, then Carter Page FISA warrant does much, much more than surveille Page himself -- it
permits surveillance of most of the Trump campaign.
In some ways, being a sock-puppet and napping, in a bureau drawer (?), between soliloquies
would be rather peaceful. Alas, too many of my condo neighbors know me to be otherwise !
Do check out sites such as The Conservative Treehouse and you will discover that Admiral
Rogers' closing the NSA mega-file to the FBI led to Nellie Ohr's & Christopher Steele's
information laundering operation. Other sites yet will introduce you to FISC Chief Judge
Rosemary Collyer's 99-page rebuke of the FBI for their defalcations.
At a minimum, you won't be surprised when a plethora of FBI / DOJ / State Department
employees are found guilty and sent to prison.
My "dog that didn't bark" question about Carter Page - if Carter Page was such a known
danger, why didn't the FBI warn the Trump Campaign against letting him become involved in the
campaign?
The memo does note that "the FBI also interviewed Page multiple times about his Russian
intelligence contacts." Apparently, these interviews stretch back to 2013. The memo also
lets slip that there was at least one more interview with Page in March 2016, before the
counterintelligence investigation began. We must assume that Page was a truthful
informant since his information was used in a prosecution against Russian spies and Page
himself has never been accused of lying to the FBI .
So . . . here's the question: When Steele brought the FBI his unverified allegations
that Page had met with Sechin and Divyekin, why didn't the FBI call Page in for an
interview rather than subject him to FISA surveillance? Lest you wonder, this is not an
instance of me second-guessing the Bureau with an investigative plan I think would have
been better. It is a requirement of FISA law.
When the FBI and DOJ apply for a FISA warrant, they must convince the court that
surveillance -- a highly intrusive tactic by which the government monitors all of an
American citizen's electronic communications -- is necessary because the
foreign-intelligence information the government seeks "cannot reasonably be obtained by
normal investigative techniques." (See FISA, Section 1804(a)(6)(C) of Title 50, U.S. Code.)
Normal investigative techniques include interviewing the subject. There are, of course,
situations in which such alternative investigative techniques will inevitably fail -- a
mafia don or a jihadist is not likely to sit down with FBI agents and tell them everything
he knows. But Carter Page was not only likely to do so, he had a documented
history of providing information to the FBI .
There's a reason why Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley are focused on the Clinton commissioned
Fusion GPS dossier, Christopher Steele and the FISA Title 1 warrant on Carter Page. It is the
simplest path to the conspiracy at the Obama administration.
My, street sense, and experience as a lawyer tells me that -- "tips, confessions.." from
informants is true Steve. But the bar for going after a drug dealer, or fence, or kiddie porn
type, is supposed -- one assumes -- to be a hell of a lot lower than going after the nominee for
President of a major political party.
Welcome to the criminal defense world. Everyday, hundreds of warrants based on the statements
of criminals, paid informers, bitter ex-girlfriends, lying cops, and even non-existent
"confidential informants" are issued. With all but the most blatant provably false
affidavits, questionable searches are upheld by judges.
At this point I'm just waiting for Mueller's final indictments and the report. The facts
will be there, or they won't.
If they are, try arguing a Motion to Suppress Evidence in the impeachment trial. That'll
get you far . . .
The dog that didn't bark - if the Schiff Memo were so powerful, such a slam dunk, every MSM
outlet in the western world would be trumpeting it to the skies and talking about nothing
but.
They seem to be barely able to acknowledge the existence of the Memo.
It really does help if, when you make claims, you link to the source so that others can
evaluate them. In the case of the claims you are making, the source is clearly a post two days ago by
'sundance' on the 'Conservative Treehouse' site entitled 'Tying All The Loose Threads
Together – DOJ, FBI, DoS, White House: "Operation Latitude" '
As it happens, I think the suggestion that Steele's role may have been, in very
substantial measure, to give the impression that material from other source was the product
of a high-quality 'humint' investigation merits being taken extremely seriously.
However, to repeat claims by 'sundance', while not taking the – rather minimal
– amount of trouble required to provide the link which allows others to evaluate them,
simply puts people's backs up and makes them less likely to take what you are suggesting
seriously.
In the words of Emily Dickinson, I'm nobody. So., I come here to test my reaction when I
read what the Democrats wrote -- though it was hard to get any continuity while reading because
of all the big black lines--I was completely underwhelmed. I hate it when someone claims that
what he/she is going to say will be something that will change my entire Weltanschauung and
it turns out to be a nothing burger, in today's parance.
So thank you for confirming my opinion of the memo and thanks to others who have commented
and who have way more experience and knowledge about how our Swam works (or doesn't
work?).
My first reaction before I even tried to read the memo was correct. My first instinct was
to judge on the basis of personality, which I know is not often logical. I felt that nothing
put out under Schiff's authority could change my mind about the point Nunes made when he put
out his mamo. Schiff's defence sounded so, pardon the pun, shifty and did nothing to really
counter the main point Nunes made when he released his memo.
Schiff's memo was basically a vendetta against persons. Page and Papadopolis (sp?) are
obviously the unpopular kids in the minds of the "mean girl" Democrats because they had links
to Trump, the real threat to the popular girl Democrats. All we have to do is hear their
names and we should automatically decide that if we want to be popular, we should malign them
also so as to malign Trump and gain our entrance into the popular group in the cafeteria.
Funnily enough the question raised in your excerpt is exactly what I've been thinking
since reading a post by TTG about Carter Page being an important FBI informant and state
witness to the prosecution of Russian espionage.
If the FBI believed Page had become a Russian spy it would have been easy due to their
prior relationship with him to interview him and if he lied, to prosecute him for the process
crime of perjury. That is such a slam dunk that the fact they didn't do that makes it seem
there's something fishy there.
And they never verified Steele's allegation that Page met with Sechin and Divyekin which
would have been easy to do and now it seems was pure fabrication. Instead the FBI and DOJ
lied and misrepresented to FISC to get a surveillance warrant on Page. This seems rather
fishy. I speculate they did that to gain incidental collection on members of the Trump
campaign.
I note that Page hasn't been charged by the DOJ for any crime. I agree with you that the
investigation of the "conspiracy" is moving along well despite the roadblocks by the DOJ. Goodlatte who has seen the FISA application has now requested all the DOJ testimony from
FISC. In a recent interview Rep. Ratcliffe who has also seen the FISA application made an
interesting point that since in a FISC proceeding the accused has no ability to challenge the
prosecution's claims, the prosecution has an affirmative obligation under FISA to present all
the evidence, which the DOJ did not do but instead knowingly mislead the court.
It looks like we're heading towards another special counsel to investigate law enforcement
and the IC regarding both the Trump and Clinton counter-intelligence investigations as well
as the IC and media propaganda efforts to build hysteria around the meme of collusion of the
Trump campaign with the Russian government. That investigation could lead all the way into
the Obama White House.
See post No 14: "...the FBI also interviewed Page multiple times about his Russian
intelligence contacts." Apparently, these interviews stretch back to 2013. The memo also lets
slip that there was at least one more interview with Page in March 2016, before the
counterintelligence investigation began. We must assume that Page was a truthful informant
since his information was used in a prosecution against Russian spies and Page himself has
never been accused of lying to the FBI."
The case is not closed – it is closing on the high-placed violators of the US
Constitution --as well as on their lack of professionalism, sheer incompetence and
promiscuous opportunism
Instead of working hard to protect national security, the FBI/CIA/DOJ' senior-idiots
(accustomed to comfort and hefty checks) have been politicking and meddling in the electoral
process. Meanwhile, the foreign nationals were left free to surf congressional computers
– for years! (See Awan affair) and the "natives" like Clinton et al have been making a
lot of money by getting huge bribes from Russians and Saudis (see Uranium One, involving
Mueller for all other people).
There is another big Q: To what extend both the FBI and the CIA have been infiltrated by
Israel-firsters that are loyal to Zion, and how extensive is the damage inflicted by the
"duals" on the US.
Most unusual, I would say, for an Agent in an upper management position in FBI HQ to open a
counter intelligence case and then for all intents and purposes assign it to himself. Cases
are normally worked and directly supervised in field offices.
Carter Page during his period of cooperation with the FBI, almost certainly was handled by
Agents assigned to a field office. I wonder what they had to say, assuming they even knew,
about HQ opening a CI case targeting their former cooperating witness for FISA coverage.
It will be very interesting to see who handled Steele. Strzok?
What was the compelling evidence and who furnished it to turn a US Naval Academy graduate,
and presumably a Naval Officer with a readily accessible track record in service, into the
targeted subject of an espionage investigation. Did he even have any current access to
classified information?
This is not looking good.
Carter Page is indeed a puzzlement. I don't see any account of him being an FBI informant,
but he was a witness in the investigation and trial of the three SVR officers who tried to
recruit him in 2013.
If he was an informant, the FBI would not have had to obtain a FISA
warrant to surveil him in 2014. That also raises doubts about how cooperative he was during
that investigation and the 2015 Russian spy trial.
Obviously he didn't obstruct the
investigation or prosecution or he would have been charged for that long ago. I get the
impression he is a lot more wily than most people give him credit for.
Obama claimed something to the effect that, it turns out I am pretty good at killing people.
This was in reference to the drone program and assume I don't need to footnote.
Perhaps he got the notion that his administration was pretty good at intelligence.
Looks like neoliberals decided to equate widespread anti-neoliberalism and anti-globalization sentiment with pro-Russian
propaganda. A very clever and very dirty trick.
What is funny is that Steele dossier and FBI Mayberry Machiavellians machinations actually deprived Sanders a chance to
represent Democratic Party. nt that he wanted this badly, he folded eve without major pressure (many be under behind the scenes
intimidation due to business dealing of his wife)
Notable quotes:
"... Instead of standing up to the crazies – by which I mean the Democratic party Establishment – and saying that the whole Russia-phobic campaign is based on nothing but hot air and fantasy, he's kowtowing to the very people who are trying to smear him as a Russian agent. Here he is signing on to the Clintonite canon of faith that poor Hillary " had to run against the Russian government " as well as Trump. ..."
"... This is laughable: there's no evidence for this other than Mueller's comical "indictment," which shows that something called the "Internet Research Agency," run by an out-of-work chef, spent a grand total of $100,000 – mostly after the election – on Facebook ads that were both anti-Clinton and anti-Trump. Michael Moore attended one "Russian-sponsored" event – a rally of thousands targeting Trump Tower, and, by the way, the only successful "Russian" event (the pro-Trump events were flops). ..."
"... Not only is Bernie buying into Russia-gate, now that the case for it is collapsing – nearly two years later and there's still no evidence of "collusion" – but he's calling for a full-fledged witch-hunt: ..."
"... Sanders' followers have taken up the hate-on-Russia battle cry with alacrity, with material by the fraudulent fanatic Luke Harding all over the web site of the Democratic Socialists of America. And being the left edge of the Democratic party, DSA will be supporting the very Democratic officeholders and officials who are shouting the loudest about Russia. ..."
"... Oh, he's got money-laundering charges on Paul Manafort and associates, but that has nothing to do with the Trump campaign: it all happened years before Trump ran. He's got Carter Page pleading guilty to lying to the FBI – but it's not clear what this means, exactly, since he's not been charged with a crime after all this time. ..."
"... So no matter what you may think of Trump and his policies, the real question is: will the Deep State and their allies in the media succeed in their bid for power? Will they oust a sitting President and institute a new era in our politics, one in which the political class can exercise its veto over the democratic will of the people? ..."
"... A SPECIAL NOTE : Yes, our matching funds have arrived: a group of donors has gotten together and pledged $30,000 – but there's a catch. We have to match that amount in smaller donations. So now it's up to you. We need your support so we can get back to doing our job – exposing the lies of the War Party. But we can't do it without your tax-deductible donations. ..."
One by one, the plaster gods fall,
cracked and crumbled on the ground: the latest is Bernie Sanders, the Great Pinko Hope of the
(very few) remaining Democrats with a modicum of sense who reject the "Russia! Russia! Russia!"
paranoia of Rep. Adam Schiff and what I call the party's California Crazies. The official
Democratic leadership seems to have no real commitment to anything other than fealty to a few
well-known oligarchs, who provide the party with needed cash, a burning hatred of Russia
– an issue no ordinary voter outside of the Sunshine State loony bin and Washington, D.C.
cares about – and exotic issues of interest only to the upper class virtue-signalers who
are now their main constituency (e.g., where will trans people go to the bathroom?). Overlaying
this potpourri of nothingness, the glue holding it all together, is pure unadulterated hatred:
of President Trump, of Trump voters, of Middle America in general, and, of course, fear and
loathing of Russia and all things Russian.
And now the one supposedly bright spot in this pit of abysmal darkness has flickered out,
with Bernie Sanders, the Ron Paul of the Reds, jumping
on the Russia-did-it bandwagon and cowering in the wake of Robert Mueller's laughable
"indictment," in which the special prosecutor avers that $100,000 in Facebook ads were designed
to throw the election to Trump – and to help Bernie!
Oh no, says Bernie, from his place of exile in the wilds of Vermont, where the
Russians
did not take over the electrical grid: It wasn't me!
Instead of standing up to the crazies – by which I mean the Democratic party
Establishment – and saying that the whole Russia-phobic campaign is based on nothing but
hot air and fantasy, he's kowtowing to the very people who are trying to smear him as a Russian
agent. Here he is signing on to the Clintonite canon of faith that poor Hillary " had to run against
the Russian government " as well as Trump.
This is laughable: there's no evidence for this other than Mueller's comical
"indictment," which shows that something called the "Internet Research Agency," run by an
out-of-work chef, spent a grand total of $100,000 – mostly after the election – on
Facebook ads that were both anti-Clinton and anti-Trump.
Michael Moore attended one "Russian-sponsored" event – a rally of thousands targeting
Trump Tower, and, by the way, the only successful "Russian" event (the pro-Trump events were
flops).
Not only is Bernie buying into Russia-gate, now that the case for it is collapsing –
nearly two years later and there's still no evidence of "collusion" – but he's calling for a
full-fledged witch-hunt:
"The key issues now are: 1) How we prevent the unwitting manipulation of our electoral
and political system by foreign governments. 2) Exposing who was actively consorting with the
Russian government's attack on our democracy."
This is the real goal of anti-Trump groups like the "
Alliance for Securing Democracy " and their "Hamilton dashboard," which purports to track
"pro-Russian" sentiment online: it's the explicit intention of #TheResistance to censor the
media with the cooperation of the tech oligarchs like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. It's back
to the 1950s, folks, only this time the Thought Police are "liberals," and "socialists" like
Bernie and the Bernie Bros.
Sanders' followers have taken up the hate-on-Russia battle cry with alacrity, with material
by the fraudulent fanatic
Luke Harding all over the web site
of the Democratic Socialists of America. And being the left edge of the Democratic party, DSA
will be supporting the very Democratic officeholders and officials who are shouting the loudest
about Russia.
Coming soon: a congressional "investigation" into "pro-Russian" Americans using the
"Hamilton dashboard" and the Southern Poverty Law Center as templates. Remember the House
UnAmerican Activities Committee? Well, it's coming back. That's always been in the cards, and
now those cards are about to be dealt.
I'll tell you one thing: I would have colluded with the Klingon Empire to prevent Hillary
and her band of authoritarian statists and warmongering nutcases from taking the White House.
If only the Russians had intervened, they'd have been doing this country – and the
world – a great service. Alas, there's not one lick of solid evidence – forensic,
documentary, witness testimony – that shows this. Which is what the Mueller investigation
is all about: the Democrats are claiming there was interference, and Mueller is out to find
corroboration. Except it's been over a year and he's come up with nothing.
Oh, he's got money-laundering charges on Paul Manafort and associates, but that has nothing
to do with the Trump campaign: it all happened years before Trump ran. He's got Carter Page
pleading guilty to lying to the FBI – but it's not clear what this means, exactly, since
he's not been charged with a crime after all this time.
The Deep State's bid for power has hit several roadblocks recently, but it could yet
succeed. First, Mueller could indict the President for "obstruction of justice" – a
charge derived not from any real criminal activity, but from the investigation itself. I think
this is the most probable outcome of all this.
Barring that, however, there is one road they could and probably would go down, given the
intensity of their hatred for this President and their overweening power lust. Having gone this
far in an attempt to overthrow a sitting President, they can't just stop halfway to their goal.
They have to go all the way, or else suffer the consequences – public exposure, and
possible criminal charges. In short, if they fail to get Trump on some semi-legal basis, I
think they'd welcome his assassination.
The Deep State cannot allow the Trump administration to stand for a number of reasons, the
chief one being that the coup is already in progress and there's no stopping it now. The
President's enemies are legion, they are powerful, and they are abroad as well as here on
American shores. They cannot allow his brand of "America First" nationalism to succeed, or seem
to succeed: it conflicts too violently with their globalist vision of a borderless
America-centric empire ruled by a coalition of oligarchs, technocrats, and Deep State
operatives who've been shaping world events from the shadows for generations.
So no matter what you may think of Trump and his policies, the real question is: will the
Deep State and their allies in the media succeed in their bid for power? Will they oust a
sitting President and institute a new era in our politics, one in which the political class can
exercise its veto over the democratic will of the people?
That's the issue at hand and that's why I spend so much time writing about Trump and his
enemies' efforts to destroy him. Because if the Deep State succeeds, the America we knew and
loved will be no more. Something else will take its place – and believe me, it won't be
pretty.
A SPECIAL NOTE : Yes, our matching funds have arrived: a group of donors has gotten
together and pledged $30,000 – but there's a catch. We have to match that amount in
smaller donations. So now it's up to you. We need your support so we can get back to doing our job –
exposing the lies of the War Party. But we can't do it without your tax-deductible
donations.
If we all get together and make that final push we can make our goal. Every donation counts,
no matter the amount. This is how we'll finally win the battle for peace: by uniting, despite
superficial differences, to support the institutions that are in the front lines of the
struggle for a rational foreign policy. And leading the charge is Antiwar.com.
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here . But please note that my tweets are sometimes
deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
This is mainly about the defense of neoliberal empire which is challenge by Russia who does not wants to be Washington
vassal and China who is rising economic power that challenge the US world dominance and status quo of dollar as the main reserve
currency. There are also some oil related consideration as weakening and dismembering Russia while capturing its oil and gar
resources can postpone the day of becoming for the USA and Western Europe.
Notable quotes:
"... `We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists, but great-power competition – not terrorism – is now the primary focus of US national security.' Henceforth Russia and China will be America's main enemies, with Iran and North Korea thrown in for good measure. ..."
"... At the same time, the US is fast running out of Muslim targets to bomb, now that the bogeyman ISIS has vanished into thin air and US air attacks in Syria are being minimized for fear of clashing with Russia. Iran still remains on the US potential hit list. ..."
"... Which brings us back to General 'Mad Dog' Mattis. He is quite right that so-called terrorists (that's anyone who actively opposes the Lex Americana) pose no real life or death threat to the US mainland. ..."
"... Of course, this supposes the US is ready for war. In truth, neither the US and NATO nor Russia are in any way prepared to fight a real war on land, sea and air. Military forces on both sides have been so run down and depleted by little wars and budget cuts that there are serious shortages of war stocks and aging equipment. ..."
"... Key NATO member Germany is in a shambles. Its feminized military, run by a nice but incompetent lady defense minister, could not fight its way out of a paper bag. France is not much better off. The US armed forces and Britain are critically short of spares, munitions, transport, and armor. Russia's once mighty Red Army is short of everything. Both east and west are simply unready for a real war. ..."
"... As if there is any reason for one. There is not. Those jackanapes in the US Congress and media trying to inflate online mischief by 20-something Russian hackers into a second Pearl Harbor are crying 'fire' in a crowded theater. ..."
"... A final respectful note to Gen. Mattis (my dad was a marine): A good general does not pick a fight with two, far–away major powers at once. The trick is to turn them against one another. Declaring a future war against China and Russia is a crazy idea. Only draft-dodgers and generals who lost the Vietnam War could come up with it. ..."
`We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists, but great-power competition
– not terrorism – is now the primary focus of US national security.' Henceforth
Russia and China will be America's main enemies, with Iran and North Korea thrown in for good
measure.
So declared US Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, last week in a statement of profound
importance for the world.
For the past seventeen years, the US military has been laying waste to the Muslim world in
the faux `war on terrorism.' Afghanistan, Iraq, much of Syria, Somalia, Pakistan – all
have been heavily bombed. US B-52's and B-1 heavy bombers have tried to pound those resisting
American 'guidance' into submission.
In Afghanistan, America's longest war, President Donald Trump ordered a doubling of bombing
against Taliban forces battling US occupation. Now, the US is running very low on bombs, guided
munitions and even air-to-air missiles for some reason. Stores of munitions are being rushed
from the US Pacific command to the Mideast.
At the same time, the US is fast running out of Muslim targets to bomb, now that the
bogeyman ISIS has vanished into thin air and US air attacks in Syria are being minimized for
fear of clashing with Russia. Iran still remains on the US potential hit list.
Which brings us back to General 'Mad Dog' Mattis. He is quite right that so-called
terrorists (that's anyone who actively opposes the Lex Americana) pose no real life or death
threat to the US mainland.
But if so, how then to maintain the $1 trillion US military budget? Well, of course, trot
out those good old 'Reds Under Our Beds.' Actually, the Pentagon has been planning a new war
with China for the past three years, a mainly air and naval conflict to dominate China's coasts
and seas. The Pentagon is loading up on new aircraft, missiles, satellites and naval craft for
the next Pacific War, and trying to enlist India as an ally against China.
But what then about Russia? Not so easy. The likely theater for a US-Russia clash is on the
Baltic coast, Ukraine, the Black Sea or Syria. In this case, the US would be confronted by the
same problem that afflicted France in the fall of 1939.
Few people know that it was France that first attacked Germany, not the other way around.
Responding to the German invasion of Poland, France and Britain declared war on Germany. French
divisions began to invade Germany's Rhineland. But after a few skirmishes the French high
command, under the inept Gen. Maurice Gamelin, didn't know what to do next. Germany was large,
and the defensive-minded French did not anticipate occupying its entire country.
After a brief demonstration, the French Army withdrew behind the Maginot Line. Hitler did
not counter-attack in hope he could forge a peace treaty with London and Paris. Winston
Churchill and his fellow imperialists furiously sought to push Britain into war with Germany.
But months of inactivity went by, known as the 'Sitzkrieg' or ' drôle de guerre'
until Germany acted decisively.
This would also be America's problem in a war against Russia. How deep into Russia to attack
(assuming no use of nuclear weapons)? How to protect ever lengthening supply lines? Napoleon
and Hitler faced the same challenges and failed.
Of course, this supposes the US is ready for war. In truth, neither the US and NATO nor
Russia are in any way prepared to fight a real war on land, sea and air. Military forces on
both sides have been so run down and depleted by little wars and budget cuts that there are
serious shortages of war stocks and aging equipment.
Key NATO member Germany is in a shambles. Its feminized military, run by a nice but
incompetent lady defense minister, could not fight its way out of a paper bag. France is not
much better off. The US armed forces and Britain are critically short of spares, munitions,
transport, and armor. Russia's once mighty Red Army is short of everything. Both east and west
are simply unready for a real war.
As if there is any reason for one. There is not. Those jackanapes in the US Congress and
media trying to inflate online mischief by 20-something Russian hackers into a second Pearl
Harbor are crying 'fire' in a crowded theater.
A final respectful note to Gen. Mattis (my dad was a marine): A good general does not
pick a fight with two, far–away major powers at once. The trick is to turn them against
one another. Declaring a future war against China and Russia is a crazy idea. Only
draft-dodgers and generals who lost the Vietnam War could come up with it.
Somehow in numerous statements in this thread, mostly boiling down to "mine is more
Russian than yours", the key issues were missed. I am not even talking about obvious trolls
trying to denigrate Putin's foreign policy feats. He achieved a lot more with a relatively
weak hand than the US with a much stronger one, both in Syria and in Ukraine.
Admittedly, Ukraine does not count: only Americans, who have no history and don't know the
history of other countries, could have stepped into that particular pile of s Ukraine brings
ruin to anyone it supports. At the beginning of the eighteens century Ukrainian Hetman Mazepa
betrayed Russia and joined the Swedes. Peter the Great decimated Swedes in the battle near
Poltava. That was the end of Sweden as a great European power. Western Ukrainians fought for
Austro-Hungarian Empire in WWI. Where is that Empire now? Then "independent" Ukraine
supported Germans. Well, they lost WWI. Then Ukrainians served Hitler in WWII. USSR smeared
Nazi Germany over he wall. Then Ukrainians were "holier then thou" supporters of the Soviet
Union. Where is it now? So, if I were in the US or EU leadership, I'd make sure that Ukraine
is not my friend, simply for the sake of self-preservation.
Syria is a totally different story. The Empire, on behalf of Israel and Saudis, tried to
break it up into a bunch of powerless Bantustans. The plan seemed to be close to bearing
fruit until Putin threw a wrench into the works. With ridiculously small ground and air force
he turned the tide of the war. The Empire was frustrated. Hence the hysterics.
Anyway, IMHO Putin's Russia has two major weaknesses. One is the profusion of oligarchs
who stole their riches from the state and hid the loot offshore. He does not seem inclined to
tackle them, likely honoring the deal he made in 2000. "Protected" appear to include even
such notorious figures as Chubais (if you ask Russians, ~90% would say that oligarchs should
be stripped of their wealth, tried, and imprisoned; but as many or more would say that
Chubais should be publicly hanged). The other weakness is that it remains a one-man show,
i.e., the absence of credible state institutions and an obvious successor. The rest is
chaff.
"what we see is that western democracies are run by gangs of oligarchs and bureaucrats who
have almost nothing in common with the people they are supposed to represent."
Just for a moment I will take you seriously, although you sometimes write truly silly
stuff, and respond.
Yes, the AngloZionist would prefer to turn and absorb the Russian and Chinese elite, but
only as low subordinates. This is what they have been doing in other conquered countries
– generating a mix of the new and compliant part of the old elite with a greater
proportion of the new elite. The Russian neo-Liberals are ready and waiting for the job,
looking down on their compatriots as cattle (the same word as goyim, what an amazing
coincidence!?). Read what this Felix writes about the Russians. This gang turned Russia into
killing fields in 1917 and will gladly do it again given half a chance by their foreign
masters.
The masters are underwriting the full-time writing of puppets such as Karlin.
Karlin is the Russian Elliot Higgins , interpreting data without a faintest idea of
solid data analysis, a paid full-time hack drawing the right conclusions for the empire.
Perhaps he sees himself as a minister in the Russian puppet government after the successful
regime change.
Therefore, this group of regular trolls (about 10 nicks) on all Saker's
writings are aiming to be that future new Russian servant elite when Russia would be
absorbed. They are truly the last thing that Russian people need.
As I said above, I have seen it all before, it is deja vu all over again (Yogi Bear).
Actually life in Ukraine was not that bad in 2010-2014. Hopefully "After-Maydan" deterioration might be temporary,
although without new markets for Ukrainian industrial goods recovery is almost impossible. Also the level of foreign
debt is now much higher, so they dig a deeper hole for themselves to climb out. Other probable scenario is bankruptcy.
See also
Bill
Black Once a Poster Child for Austerity, Latvia Becomes a Hotbed of Corruption naked capitalism
Poland's level of GDP per capita is 6 times bigger than Ukraine's. They started out
around the same level in 1991 and were supposed to follow the same playbook. To the extent
that their paths diverged can be explained by Ukrainian corruption and incompetence.
Poland received hundreds of billions of dollars in EU subsidies and transfers. Not a fair
comparison. Even still today they are receiving this transfer of wealth from net contributor
countries in the EU (there's another good reason EU became unpopular in net contributor
countries like the UK and the Netherlands):
Energy subsidies from Russia to the Ukraine are estimated at hundreds of billions of
dollars since 1991. The Ukraine has been well subsidized since independence. What they have
been desperately lacking is governance.
"... The Russian independent TV Rain, also known as Dozhd, found (Russian, machine translation ) that one management person of the IRA was missing in the Mueller indictment. That women, Agata Burdonova, has recently moved with her husband to the United States. She had run the "translator" department of the IRA that created English language social marketing campaigns. She has now applied for a U.S. Social Security number. ..."
"... On June 15, 2017, Dmitry Fyodorov says he received an employment offer from Facebook. On August 8, 2017 Fyodorov marries Burdonova. Employer (presumably, Facebook) sponsors both of their visas -- prob. H1B. ..."
"... On December 7 2017 both moved to Bellevue, Washington. Two month later Mueller indicts the alleged IRA owner and management, but not Burdonova. This smells of a deal made by some US agency to get insight into the IRA. In return, an opportunity to move to the US was offered. ..."
Automated Twitter accounts, or trolls, repeated a tweet about a MoA piece
on Muller's indictment of "Russian trolls" . Funny but not really important. There is
interesting news though related to the original Muller indictment. Mueller accused with little
evidence 13 persons involved in the private Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) of meddling
with the U.S. election campaign.
The Russian independent TV Rain, also known as Dozhd,
found (Russian,
machine translation ) that one management person of the IRA was missing in the Mueller
indictment. That women, Agata Burdonova, has recently moved with her husband to the United
States. She had run the "translator" department of the IRA that created English language social
marketing campaigns. She has now applied for a U.S. Social Security number.
On June 15, 2017, Dmitry Fyodorov says he received an employment offer from Facebook. On
August 8, 2017 Fyodorov marries Burdonova. Employer (presumably, Facebook) sponsors both of
their visas -- prob. H1B.
On December 7 2017 both moved to Bellevue, Washington. Two month later Mueller indicts the
alleged IRA owner and management, but not Burdonova. This smells of a deal made by some US
agency to get insight into the IRA. In return, an opportunity to move to the US was
offered.
An interesting discussion with two polar views on the situation. There is no good guys in the
story anyway. Nether the USA, or Russia, or Ukrainian nationalists, or separatists qualify. Truth
probably lies somewhere in between. The debate itself reminds the current political debate in the
USA between neoliberals/globalists and "economic nationalists"/isolationalists : the two sides do
not hear other and their positions are irreconcilable. Each has its own set of grievances. Its
own version of history. And its own vision of the desirable future.
Independence by itself meant huge stimulus to Western Ukrainian nationalists (who
historically lived a long time under Hapsburg empire). So their political ascendance were given
and Maydan was just the culmination point of a long process (actually encouraged by EU members
such as Germany, Poland , Baltic republics and Sweden)
The USA clearly tried to secure it geopolitical interests via forcefully turning Ukraine to
the West. Despite the fact that it was not completely ready for such a move yet; although were
slowly moving in this direction since independence. Germany (and EU in general) played the same
fatal role of "accelerator" as well. They wanted new markets for their goods and also have
geopolitical interests in weakening Russia (which did happened; Ukraine was the biggest strategic
defeat of Putin). The Nazi Lebensraum was, after all, about Ukraine.
But the process of "separation" from Russia was pretty much under way since independence and
proceeded at a brisk pace under Yanukovich too, who actually supported Ukrainian nationalists
during his term (especially Svoboda, hoping to create something like the USA two party systems:
nationalists vs Party of Regions). And it was Yanukovich government which prepared and intended
to sign the association agreement with the EU. Then Yanukovich hesitated to sign it and at this
point was doomed as pro-Western forces has already their own dynamics and financial support from
abroad. With the financial. organizational and political support support of the USA and EU were
able to depose him. Large (for Ukraine political scene) amount of money was injected, protesters
bused from Western Ukraine, and eventually yet another color revolution (the first was so called
Orange revolution which brought to power Yushchenko government) took care of Yanukovich regime.
The problem is that this "alternative" political course and a new vision of Ukrainian future
proved to be a minefield. Also the association agreement with EU was very unfair to Ukrainian
economic interests and essentially downgraded the status of Ukraine to the status of neo-colony
openly promoting deindustrialization like in Baltic Republics.
Some unrealistic dreams about benefits of Ukraine association with EU were pretty widespread
and become a political factor in the success of the Maydan. nobody understood that by trying to
balance between Russia and the West Yanukovich postponed the day of reckoning and kept economics
expanding. Everybody hated corrupt Yanukovich although some members of his cabinet were pretty
competent technocrats. Nobody calculated losses from the separation of economic ties with Russia
and having a hostile Russia as a neighbor. Hopes that EU will open its market for Ukrainian
agricultural goods and to Ukrainian gastarbeiters proved to be exaggerated. To say nothing about
the danger (or even mere possibility) of civil war as the result of Maydan. All those dreams
about improving the standard of living via association with EU were buried after the Maydan very
soon. The currency dropped around 300% after 2014 from 8.5 to 27 grivna per dollar. Markets in
Russia are almost completely lost.
Ukrainian nationalists decided that the success of Maydan gave them carte blanche on
neo-colonization of Eastern Ukraine as well as the suppression of Russian language and culture.
They miscalculated. This policy was similar to "Polinization of Western Ukraine" by Poles and it
faced growing resistance. Lugansk and Donetsk republic are direct results of this resistance (not
without Russia help). In other words this policy backfired, and now those regions represent a
Gordian knot for both the USA, EU, Russia and Ukraine. For Poroshenko government to agree on
federalization (which Minsk accords presuppose) means to lose face politically (Why to organize
Maydan in such cases, if the net result is a huge drop of the standard of living, loss of Crimea,
and federalization of Ukraine?), and they prefer military solution to the problem. The USA under
Trump administration are only happy to sell weapons to them (as well as coal to replace lost coal
from Donetsk region). And nuclear fuel to electrical stations inread of Russia. Meanwhile
economics is not improving and that also represents a political threat to Poroshenko, making push
for the military solution more probable.
Notable quotes:
"... Any agreement, however -- at least as far as the U.S. State Department is concerned -- would require that Russia must make the first move to ease tensions. ..."
"... Secretary Tillerson has made it abundantly clear that Russia must take the first steps to de-escalate violence and resolve this conflict by fully implementing the Minsk Accords." ..."
"... Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for ..."
"... . You can follow him on Twitter: ..."
"... This country is screwed, alas. Peacekeepers will not change much, but they could help stop shellings and thus help regular people who suffer the most. ..."
"... Strelkov came into Donbass on April 12, 2014 and the acting president Turchinov announced ATO (Anti terrorist operation) on April 7. The people of Donbass protested peacefully for months and no one wanted to talk with them. They sent tanks and jets instead. ..."
"... "And yes, his self-promotion as the "governor of Donetsk" was both illegal and unpopular with the locals." ..."
"... Indeed, that is why there is a civil war in Ukraine. "Red Cross officially declares Ukraine civil war" https://www.thelocal.ch/201... ..."
Any agreement, however -- at least as far as the U.S. State Department is concerned --
would require that Russia must make the first move to ease tensions. However, it is
unclear is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson or anyone in his department truly speaks for the
Trump Administration.
"It's important to be clear about U.S. policy towards the conflict: Crimea is Ukraine. The
Donbas is Ukraine. We will never accept trading one region of Ukraine for another. We will
never make a deal about Ukraine without Ukraine," John J. Sullivan, deputy secretary of state,
said during a speech in at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Diplomatic Academy in Kiev on
Feb.
21 . "To advance these fundamental goals, Secretary Tillerson appointed Ambassador Kurt
Volker as Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations in July of last year. And his mandate
is to break the deadlock with Russia over Ukraine. Secretary Tillerson has made it
abundantly clear that Russia must take the first steps to de-escalate violence and resolve this
conflict by fully implementing the Minsk Accords."
Time will tell if any progress will be made in solving the Donbas situation.
Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for The National Interest . You can follow
him on Twitter:@davemajumdar.
If that's the case, then America needs to pull it's own illegal occupation forces out of
eastern Syria ASAP too! Eastern Syria is Syria. Eastern Syria is NOT part of Kurdistan! What
a bunch of hypocrites.
"One potential approach -- which as been proposed by U.S. special representative to
Ukraine Kurt Volker -- is where peacekeepers would be deployed in phases while Ukraine
implements some of the measures it agreed to under the Minsk agreements."
It stipulates that Ukraine should complete a number of things, and by the end of it
Donbass will be returned to Ukraine. If you add phased peacekeepers to this it could work,
the peacekeepers would start between Donbass and Ukraine, and then move into Donbass and get
more control the more of the Minsk 2 agreement Ukraine completed.
The peacekeepers could not be NATO or Russian troops for each side to agree obviously
Europe and the US have nothing of value to offer to Ukraine because there's little to
exchange it for. There is no economy and too few natural resources to fight for. Thus,
Ukraine will remain a suitcase without a handle despite wet dreams of its ultra-nationalists
(should be represented in the troll section of this thread).
It will remain useless as an economical ally to Russia in the upcoming years because
Ukraine is divided within itself.
The only thing it will be good for, is to serve as an example for everybody on how foolish
it is to overthrow democratically elected governments for the sake of fairy tales.
The conflict there will be frozen for decades, as it was frozen in Moldova and Georgia.
Without Russian and European investments, there will be no economical development in
Ukraine.
This country is screwed, alas. Peacekeepers will not change much, but they could help
stop shellings and thus help regular people who suffer the most.
Vadim, if Ukraine is not important, why do you spend so much of your precious time writing
about it? Why does Russia keep financing the war in Donbass if its so uninteresting to invest
in Ukraine? Why did Russia steal Ukrainian gas in the Azov Sea? Or why does it steal
ukrainian coal in Donbass? Where did the machinery from the Donbass factories go, Vadim?
-The coal belongs to the people of Donbass, not Ukraine, and Ukraine itself banned buying
gas from these territories in hope that it will cause more misery to the civilians living
there, just like Ukraine stole their pensions and their social welfare in hope for causing
maximal suffering.
The Donbass is internationally recognized as part of Ukraine. Second Ukraine is not
obliged to pay for the Russian occupation of its territory. The occupation force is
responsible for everything that happens inside that territory, even the payment or not of
pensions.
That is a pure lie, the conflict between Donbass and Ukraine is a civil war. Russia is not
occupying those territories. And Donbass will return to Ukraine if they can follow thru on
the Minsk 2 agreement like they agreed to, but never will of course, because the
hyper-corrupt Ukrainian government need the legitimacy and distraction that war brings both
domestically to avoid coup and internationally as an excuse.
Strelkov, referring to the war he helped start in Donbas: "In the beginning, nobody there
wanted to fight."
Pro-Russian agitators like Pavel Gubarev tried to illegally take over government buildings
in E Ukraine, and also tried to organize protests, but they had little support from the local
population. The local population was cynical about Kiev, but they certainly weren't
interested in starting a civil war. That is why Strelkov and other Russians had to start the
war.
"but they certainly weren't interested in starting a civil war. That is why Strelkov
and other Russians had to start the war."
-Nobody wanted a war of course, that is one reason why the Kiev government became so
dependent on volunteer n4zists, they were the only one that was eager and willing to kill
their brothers at the whims of the unconstitutional coup regime. The average Ukrainian
soldiers didn't want to fight and a lot of the Donbass fighters came from defected Ukrainian
soldiers.
Again, all I have to do is point to Strelkov: "In the beginning, nobody there wanted to
fight."
"I dream of a Russia in its natural borders," he says. "At least those of 1939." He claims
to have been the one who convinced Putin to intervene militarily in Ukraine, at a time, he
says, when the Kremlin was still debating the proper approach to the country."
"I was the one who pulled the trigger for war," Strelkov boasts."
Doesn't matter at all what some commanders "boasts" , the war was started when the
unconstitutional and unelected government of Ukraine sent its army to crush the rebels.
Strelkov came into Donbass on April 12, 2014 and the acting president Turchinov
announced ATO (Anti terrorist operation) on April 7.
The people of Donbass protested peacefully for months and no one wanted to talk with them.
They sent tanks and jets instead.
"and also tried to organize protests, but they had little support from the local
population. "
Strelkov took Slavyansk on April 12 - that's not when he arrived. As for the ATO, yes, it
was announced on April 7, after armed separatists stormed regional government buildings in
Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkov, raised Russian flags, and said they would hold an independence
referendum. What would Russia do if Karelia was taken over by pro-Finnish separatists? And
keep in mind, when the ATO was announced, Turchynov promised amnesty for separatists who laid
down arms.
No, the "people" of Donbass did not protest peacefully (Gubarev and others were not
representative of the people of Donbass). Gubarev and others repeatedly tried to seize
buildings and declare self-rule/independence. But polls during that time clearly showed that
people did not want independence, even if they were unhappy about Yanukovych being ousted
from the presidency. Public opinion did not really shift towards independence until after the
fire of Odessa and Mariupol, when Donbass regions were under separatist control and
influenced by Russian propaganda.
"Strelkov, referring to the war he helped start in Donbas: "In the beginning, nobody there
wanted to fight.""
-The civil war was started when the unelected and unconstitutional coup government sent
the army to kill the rebels in Donbass for just wanting their language rights protected.
"Pro-Russian agitators like Pavel Gubarev tried to illegally take over government
buildings in E Ukraine,"
-Pavel is a Ukrainian, and it is pretty far fetched to call it illegal to resist to an
illegal unconstitutional coup government.
I have not seen any proof that there was a coordinated coup to remove Yanukovych. On Feb
21st, Western powers got what they wanted when Yanukovych agreed to form a coalition
government with Yatsenyuk, Klitschko, and Tyahnybok (OK, maybe Tyahnbok wasn't they're first
choice) and have early elections. Yanukovych fled because the security forces abandoned him.
They most likely abandoned him because the Feb 21st agreement called for investigation into
violence on the Maidan, and they thought they would be blamed for everything.
I never said Gubarev wasn't Ukrainian. But he was clearly a pro-Russian agitator. And yes,
his self-promotion as the "governor of Donetsk" was both illegal and unpopular with the
locals.
He was in Kharkiv, but not on an official visit. He was fleeing. And sorry, but protests
attended by a few thousand people do not mean that Gubarev had widespread support.
"And yes, his self-promotion as the "governor of Donetsk" was both illegal and unpopular
with the locals."
-Hardly illegal, quite the opposite, more like it was a duty to resist an unconstitutional
coup government. And while I have not found a opinion poll on rebel controlled areas, the
closes I found suggest that the rebels has a very high support among the Donbass
population.
"An opinion poll that was taken on the day of the referendum and the day before by a
correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Washington Post, and five other
media outlets found that of those people who intended to vote, 94.8% would vote for
independence. The poll did not claim to have scientific precision, but was carried out to get
a basis from which to judge the outcome of the referendum, given that independent observers
were not present to monitor it. Even with those who said they would not vote counted in, a
65.6% majority supported separation from Ukraine"
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/...
You should probably try reading the actual article, instead of quoting Wikipedia. The
journalists polled 186 people, and of those 110 supported independence. That's a tiny and
insignificant sample size. People voting for independence had been going through a war
started by pro-Russian separatists, they were under the martial law of pro-Russian
separatists, and their only news was Russian propaganda telling them that Kiev was all Nazis
who wanted to exterminate Russia. Also, as you no doubt saw while reading Wikipedia, polls
taken before Strelkov and the others started the war showed that the locals were not
supportive of independence.
" them that Kiev was all Nazis who wanted to exterminate Russia"
-Pretty close to the truth actually, Kiev certainly did and are doing everything they can
do exterminate the local civilians in Donbas, but stealing their pensions, cutting of social
pay, hindering and stoping food, medicine and water.
Actually I mentioned that in my comment, there are no opinion polls but the closes we get
is the opinion polls from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Washington Post, which shows a
massive support for the rebels. Which is no surprise as we are talking about an illegal
unconstitutional pro-nazi government seizing power.
"tthe locals were not supportive of independence.
-The support for rebels are as all sources show quite high, of course nobody wanted the
war, but that was forced on them by the unelected coup government. If Ukraine had just
language right of the Donbass people there would have been no war.
No, Kiev was not filled with Nazis. Russia engaged in fearmongering to get Crimeans to
vote for independence. And what happened? The Ukrainian Army in Crimea resisted all
provocations to start a war. Kiev thought that the international community would come to its
aid. Remember the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2014? Svoboda and Right Sector
barely had any public support at all. The lie that Kiev was filled with Nazis was just that -
a lie.
Again, your Frankfurter Allgemeine poll was less than 200 people who happened to be
willing to talk to Western journalists. Only 110 of them said they wanted independence, and
this was after living under martial law and Russian propaganda for months. There were plenty
of actual scientific polls conducted in April before the "referendum" which showed that there
was no support for secession - at most, people wanted decentralisation.
Well, depends on what you mean with proof I suppose, is an American marxist oligarchs
admitting they spent millions to training demonstrators to subvert Ukrainian democracy
proof?
Is the fact that 100% of NATO controlled media support the Ukrainian opposition proof?
Is that fact that USA leaders went down to Ukraine and gave out cookies to the undemocratic
opposition and held speeches encouraging them to overthrow their government proof?
Is leaked phone calls from USA telling Ukraine which leaders should be installed(which later
were installed) proof?
Is Obama openly admitting they handled the "transition of power" in Ukraine proof?
Is the fact that the fascist and ultra-nationalist groups used used to overthrow the
democratic government of Ukraine(OUN) known CIA assets proof? I mean, basically, it was the
most blatant coup in world history. But if you literally want the USA government to totally
in details describe and admit to every detail you will just have to wait a few years or
decades until it is released in a FOI report like the fact that USA created ISIS.
- I'm assuming you mean the $5 billion the US invested over 20+ years? Russia invested $40
billion in the same time frame - 8x as much as the US (see Sergey Glazyev's March 24, 2014
interview with National Review). Financial investments in democratic institutions are not
proof of a coup, but nice try.
- NATO controlled media? There's no such thing.
- Why is it such a big deal with Nuland giving out cookies?
- John McCain didn't encourage them to "overthrow their government". When did he say that?
He said "We are here to support your just cause, the sovereign right of Ukraine to determine
its own destiny freely and independently. And the destiny you seek lies in Europe."
- Did you know that government officials from European countries and the EU also
encouraged the protesters?
- Nuland and the US were clearly operating to keep the opposition united, and yes, they
pushed their interests by encouraging Yatsenyuk to take the lead. But Yatsenyuk, Klitschko,
and Tyahnybok were already established as opposition politicians in general, and had been
accepted by the Maidan protesters before the US arrived on the scene. And besides, the Feb
21st agreement was what the US wanted - it would have placed those three figures in a
coalition government with Yanukovych, followed by early elections. All of that considered,
the fact that they emerged as leaders after Yanukovych left is really not surprising.
- Obama admitted what everyone knew - the US had entered into the crisis on the side of
the EU to push Yanukovych to listen to the protesters. Russia, of course, was pushing
Yanukovych to crack down. I remember when RT and Sputnik tried to twist it to mean Obama was
claiming the US was behind a coup - it was the most blatant spin/propaganda I've ever seen.
Go back and watch Obama's interview with Fareed Zakaria.
- You'll have to provide at least an ounce of proof that ultranationalist, far-right, or
neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine are "CIA assets". Otherwise you're just another baseless
conspiracy theorist.
- Yes, the US and USSR (Russia) have engaged in regime changes in the past. There's zero
proof though, that there was a coup in Ukraine.
lol, yes, that is what is called a coup. Not only a coup but the most blatant coup in
history I would say, I can only imagine if Russia funded trained and funded demonstrators
Mexico, Russian leaders went to Mexico handing out cookies and giving support to the
demonstrators, and ordering the opposition which leaders should be installed after the coup
and so forth,and then afterwards openly admitting it did it.Hilarious. But I guess you are
paid troll, and even when FYI releases information where USA planned the entire thing in
detail, like it has with its creation of ISIS and al-qaeda you will deny it still.
Here is the head of Stratfor by the way, the "Shadow CIA" saying the exact same thing,
xD
"Head of Stratfor, 'Private CIA,' Says Overthrow of Yanukovych Was 'The Most Blatant Coup
in History'"
http://www.washingtonsblog....
Watch the video of Obama's interview (
https://www.youtube.com/wat... - he clearly states "Yanukovych then fleeing after we had
brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine." In other words, he openly admits to helping
form the February 21st "Agreement on settlement of political crisis in Ukraine". Obviously
he's not talking about the Rada removing Yanukovych from office.
Nuland's conversation backs this up. It shows the Obama administration was helping
Yatsenyuk, Klitschko, and Tyahnybok stay united. Yanukovych was individually offering them
posts in his government. The US was pushing them to resist those offers. This culminated in
the February 21st agreement, where the US and EU got additional concessions from Yanukovych -
a coalition government with those three leaders, early elections, and investigations of the
violence on Maidan.
As for the head of Stratfor, George Friedman went on to write an article in which he said
that his quote was completely taken out of context (
http://www.businessinsider.... .
You think handing out cookies means people are funding coups. I'll have to remember that
when giving cookies to my children.
Russia does not steal anything, the Crimean people voted to join Russia and that is their
democratic right.
"With two studies out of the way, both Western-based, it seems without question that the
vast majority of Crimeans do not feel they were duped into voting for annexation, and that
life with Russia will be better for them and their families than life with Ukraine. A year
ago this week, 83% of Crimeans went to the polling stations and almost 97% expressed support
for reunification with their former Soviet parent."
https://www.forbes.com/site...
Crimea was a coup, initiated on February 27, 2014 when armed/masked militants (Spetsnaz?)
stormed the Crimean parliamentary building, raised the Russian flag over the building, and
barricaded themselves inside. During this occupation, an emergency parliamentary session was
called. It is unknown how many MPs participated - a number have said they were not there,
even though they were claimed to have been there. But in that emergency session, the Crimean
PM (Anatolii Mohyliov) was illegally removed and replaced with an unpopular pro-Russian MP
(Sergey Aksyonov). Aksyonov immediately called for the independence referendum. Just to
emphasize, all of this happened while the parliamentary building was under armed occupation
from unknown pro-Russian forces (most likely Spetsnaz), and against the will of the current
Crimean and Ukrainian governments. Interestingly, just the day before (February 26), the
Crimean government had told pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian protesters outside the building
that there would be no effort to seek independence from Ukraine.
Derp, there is quite literally a source right above you debunking your lies and linking to
several USA and Germany opinion polls verifying that the result of the referendum was
reflective of the democratic will of the Crimean people.
I didn't dispute the poll. What I said is that before the referendum Russia instigated a
coup, suppressed protests, and created a sense of fear in Crimea that drove people to think
Kiev was filled with Nazis. Of course they voted to join Russia after that.
Isn't that what happened throughout Ukraine when "protestors" (more accurately thugs) took
over the Regional Administration buildings and occupied them? Well, before the coup in Kiev,
numerous government buildings in other regions were occupied.
You said that it was a big propaganda exercise to portray being pro-Ukraine as being
pro-Nazi. Then why was the Euromaidan far right? Why were the most prominent activists and
leaders of the "revolution" associated with Svodoba and Right Sector? Why were there thugs
destroying monuments to Lenin? Why were many activists extolling Stepan Bandera and Roman
Shukhevych?
The people on the Maidan behaved like far-right lunatics and brigands. No wonder why there
it isn't difficult to conceive of them as Nazis.
If I were a woman in Crimea, I would be grateful that I am not living under the jackboot
of the Maidan thugs.
"... Nevertheless, the US retains its political clients in the Baltic , the Balkans and Eastern and Central European regimes. However, these clients are unruly and often eager to confront a nuclear-armed Russia, confident that the US-NATO will intervene, in spite of the probability of being vaporized in a nuclear Armageddon. ..."
"... Despite President Trump's campaign promises to 'pull-back', the US has re-entered Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in a big way. The Trump shift from global containment and realism to 'rollback and aggression' against Russia and China has failed to secure a positive response from past and present allies. ..."
"... China has increased economic ties with the EU. Russia and the EU share strategic gas and oil trade ties. Domestically, the US military budget deepens the fiscal deficit and drastically threatens social spending. This creates a scenario of increasing US isolation with its futile aggression against a dynamic and changing world. ..."
Russia has reduced and challenged the US pursuit of a uni-polar global empire following the
recovery of its sovereignty and economic growth after the disaster of the 1990's. With the
ascent of President Putin, the US-EU empire lost their biggest and most lucrative client and
source of naked pillage.
Nevertheless, the US retains its political clients in the Baltic , the Balkans and
Eastern and Central European regimes. However, these clients are unruly and often eager to
confront a nuclear-armed Russia, confident that the US-NATO will intervene, in spite of the
probability of being vaporized in a nuclear Armageddon.
Washington's efforts to recapture and return Russia to vassalage have failed. Out of
frustration Washington has resorted to a growing series of failed provocations and conflicts
between the US and the EU, within the US between Trump and the Democrats; and among the
warlords controlling the Trump cabinet.
Germany has continued lucrative trade ties with Russia, despite US sanctions, underscoring
the decline of US power to dictate policy to the European Union. The Democratic Party and the
ultra-militaristic Clinton faction remains pathologically nostalgic for a return to the 1990's
Golden Age of Pillage (before Putin). Clinton's faction is fixated on the politics of
revanchism . As a result, they vigorously fought against candidate Donald Trump's campaign
promises to pursue a new realistic understanding with Russia. The Russia-Gate Investigation is
not merely a domestic electoral squabble led by hysterical 'liberals.' What is a stake is
nothing less than a profound conflict over the remaking of the US global map. Trump recognized
and accepted the re-emergence of Russia as a global power to be 'contained', while the
Democrats campaigned to roll-back reality, overthrow Putin and return to the robber baron
orgies of the Clinton years. As a result of this ongoing strategic conflict, Washington is
unable to develop a coherent global strategy, which in turn has further weakened US influence
in the EU in Europe and elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the intense Democratic onslaught against Trump's initial foreign policy
pronouncements regarding Russia succeeded in destroying his 'pivot to realism' and facilitated
the rise of a fanatical militaristic faction within his cabinet, which have intensified the
anti-Russia policies of the Clintonite Democrats. In less than a year, all of Trump's realist
advisers and cabinet members have been purged and replaced by militarists. Their hard core
confrontational anti-Russia policy has become the platform for launching a global military
strategy based on vast increases in military spending, demands that the EU nations increase
their military budgets, and open opposition to an EU-centered military alliance, such as the
one recently proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Despite President Trump's campaign promises to 'pull-back', the US has re-entered
Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in a big way. The Trump shift from global containment and realism
to 'rollback and aggression' against Russia and China has failed to secure a positive response
from past and present allies.
China
has increased economic ties with the EU. Russia and the EU share strategic gas and oil trade
ties. Domestically, the US military budget deepens the fiscal deficit and drastically threatens
social spending. This creates a scenario of increasing US isolation with its futile aggression
against a dynamic and changing world.
The reality of Russiagate is that the corrupt neoliberal system and its institutions were laid bare in an
unprecedented way. The Democratic Party is toast. The Republican Party is a vile sham. And the MSM has exposed itself as attack
dogs of intelligence agencies like never before. People are waking up to the corrupt
and useless system in place. The reality of the system was exposed in magnifying Russiagate lens. That's probably the only
good thing about it
Notable quotes:
"... John Sipher (ha ha) starts out by re-asserting the lie that Russians "hacked" the DNC ..."
"... Why are the people who work for this guy trying to sell opinions being called trolls? This is just another way to give credence to the FBI narrative that trolls tried to sway the election. If anyone was a troll, ..."
"... And Rachel? Quit lying to yourself and others. My gawd! You have come a long way from your time at Air America that I don't even recognize you anymore. You are creating hysteria and you have become a raving lunatic. Enjoy your $30,000/day, $7 million a month salary for selling out to the people who you used to despise. I despise you! ..."
"... He retorts that 'there's enough hot spots -- Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, China' -- but fails to acknowledge that for example, the Iraq invasion and subsequent insurgency/civil war/rise-of-ISIS is all about what Aaron pointed to, the ginning up intelligence to create the Iraq invasion - which then spilled over into Syria. The role that the US is playing in all the other place he mentions, they have constantly resorted to lethal force and refused negotiation. ..."
"... The establishment media leaves out the essential context: The US is on a single superpower, Pax Americana global empire gambit; with everyone else playing for time while building their defences. ..."
"... And 'Russian Doctrine' is just recycled Soviet Doctrine - but the US always lead arms escalations during the old cold war - the so called soviet doctrine was in fact defence against US pressure and aggression. ..."
"... The Democratic Party is toast. The Republican Party is a vile sham. And the main stream media has exposed itself like never before. People are waking up to the corrupt and useless system in place. The reality of the system is being laid bare in an unprecedented way. As bad as things seem, this is a good thing, if we can keep those in power from destroying the earth before we can recover it. ..."
"... Unless something more comes of this, the Dems and their media cohorts will do a repeat of the Repubs and that same media when the WMD failed to materialize in Iraq. The wonderful thing about The Homeland, though, is that being wrong, all the time, in no way disqualifies you for remaining an important and serious person. ..."
"... Black Lives Matter ..."
"... Bernie Sanders ..."
"... Yeah, I think the point of this is not to change opinions, the point was to try to either suppress voters on one side, or to get people to hardened opinions, and get people to come out to vote, and we've even seen the same troll farm, looks like they're doing this now around the Parkland shooting in Florida. They were going around Black Lives Matter, they're trying to spin up divisions to get us working against each other, as much as electing Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders. ..."
AARON MATÉ: Now, Maddow makes at least one error here. The indictment does say that
the operation had a monthly budget of $1.25 million dollars, but that was for its entire global
operations, of which the U.S. was only a part. And more importantly, can we say conclusively
that this was the work of Russian intelligence? Well, joining me is John Sipher, national
security analyst with Cipher Brief, and a former member of the CIA's clandestine service.
John Sipher (@john_sipher) is a former Chief of Station for the C.I.A. He worked for
over 27 years in Russia, Europe and Asia and now writes for various publications and works as a
consultant with CrossLead and New Media Frontier.
Here's what Mr CIA guy 'Sipher' is selling: The indicted 13 Russian trollers
interfered w the 2016 POTUS election- NOT by hacking US voting machines & flipping
votes to Repug Trump, but by sowing discord among the US electorate which even 'Sipher'
admits already existed. Most of the Face-Book posts by these alleged Russian trollers
were either posted AFTER Nov 8, 2016 &/or were seen by virtually NO-One, thus
'Sipher' effectively admits he now ilk in the US intel biz can even assess how much
alleged impact these alleged Russian trollers had on the 2016 POTUS election -But- I can:
Virtually ZERO!!
Now compare that to the US' notorious track-record of nefariously 'meddling' in other
countries' political processes- Mainly by Mr CIA guy 'Sipher's' so-called 'ex'
employer:
- In 1996 the US actively & blatantly interfered in Russia's presidential election to
get Slick Willy's pal & chum(p) that drunk Boris Yeltsin guy elected, & even
openly bragged about it. And then orchestrated a fire-sale of Russia's resources, that
resulted in great hardship to the Russian people.
In 2014 while Putin's attention was on the Winter-Olympics in Sochi, Killary Clinton's
protege' Vikky Nuland actively stoked a Neo-NAZI coup vs Ukraine's democratically elected
president -- In an blatant attempt to push NATO right up into Russia's face / west-flank
& to try to grab Russia's naval base in Crimea [which up till the 1950s was actually
officially Russian territory].
In 1953 the CIA in tandem w MI6 actively worked to overthrow Iran's democratically
selected leader Mosadeq, in an out-right COUP, that brought that notorious dictator the
Shah of Iran to power!
In 1954 the CIA actively worked to overthrow Guatemala's democratically elected leader
Arbenz, in an out-right COUP!
In 1960-61 the CIA in tandem w the Belgiums [& even the UN] actively worked to
overthrow Congo's democratically elected leader Patrice Lumuba, in an out-right COUP the
resulted in Lumumba's DEATH [w the OK of Ike Eisenhower's & Alan Dulles' CIA]! A coup
that brought the notorious despot Mobutu to power.
In 1961 Dulles' & 'Tricky Dick' Nixon's CIA talked JFK into allowing the CIA to
try to over-throw Castro in Cuba, in the 'Bay of Pigs' fiasco.
In 1966 LBJ's CIA helped to overthrow Ghanaian leader Kwame' Nkruma in a military
coup.
In 1973 Nixon's & Kissinger's CIA helped to overthrow the democratically elected
leader of Chile' Allende' in an out-Right coup, the resulted in Allende's DEATH! And
brought the notoriously murderous military regime of Pinochet to power!!
In 1991 Mr CIA POTUS Bush Sr OKed an out-right Coup vs the democratically elected
leader of Haiti Aristide. And Bush Sr's son, Bush Jr would do a repeat vs Aristide yet
again in 2004- Which was Haiti's bicentennial anniversary of its independence from
Napoleon's France [in 1804] as France's notorious [ex] slave-colony. The US & France
have been causing misery in Haiti ever since!!
In 2002 the US [likely spear-headed by the CIA] tried to pull a coup vs Venezuela's
democratically elected leader Hugo Chavez, which failed. But the US has been actively
meddling in Venezuela ever since, & is apparently plotting a coup vs Chavez'
democratically elected successor Maduro.
In 2003 the Bush-Cheney-Bliar nexus used false intel from Mr 'Sipher's' CIA, launched
that disastrous Iraq Attack Pt2 based on LIES, which resulted in over 1 Million Iraqis'
death, in an nefarious Neo-CONian / Neo-Liberal regime-change scheme!! This CIA backed
disaster directly resulted in the rise of AL-CIAeda in Iraq & then ISIS!!
In 2009 under Dim Obama & Billary HRC as his Sec of State, the US OKed a coup vs
Honduras' democratically elected leader Zelaya. And Honduras remains in turmoil to this
day!
In 2011 Dim OBomber & Killary [I came,. I saw, He died, Ha, ha, ha- Yes!] Clinton
in combo w France's Sarkozy, the UK's Cameron & those 'bastions of democracy' the
Saudi-GCC oil monarchs- actively overthrew Libya's leader Col Khadaffi via FUK-US NATO's
relentless 9 month 'R2P' bombing assault in yet another notorious Neo-CONian / NeoLiberal
regime-change scheme [based on LIES yet again]- Resulting in Khadaffi's brutal murder
[that KIllary openly called for just a few days before & then hideously cackled over
afterwards] mass chaos in what was Africa's most prosperous country, & brought to
power a regime that's directly linked to AL-CIAeda & even ISIS, & who are now
openly selling Black Libyans & African immigrants on Libyan SLAVE-Markets!!
In 2012 the US under then Sec of State Billary HRC tried to interfere in Russia's
elections [yet again] to block Putin's regaining Russia's presidency.
In 2011 the US under Slick Willy Clinton [as the UN's Gov of Haiti] & wife Billary
HRC as Sec of State, actively interfered in Haiti's elections yet again to bring that
neo-Duvalier guy Martelli to power, while outlawing Aristide's political party which is
the most popular party in Haiti.
In 2015 the US covertly backed a 'parliamentary coup' vs Brazil's democratically
elected leader Delma Roussef!
And oh let's NOT forget the US' & it allies [UK, the Saudis, the Turks, the IAF,
etc] actively involvement in the on-going Syrian disaster- In yet another Neo-CONian /
Neo-Liberal nefarious regime-change scheme!! And how Mr CIA guy Sipher's CIA & other
intel' agencies have been trying to bait first Dim OBomber & now Repug Trump into an
all out attack on Syria to accomplish it, using dubious 'intel' ala 'WMD redux'!!
I mean seriously Mr CIA guy 'Sipher' & all you other Russia-Gaters [IE: Rachael
Mad-cow & even Bernie]?? All this BS hype over 13 Russians trolling click-bait on
Face-Book, vs all that I've outlined above [just a short-list] that the CIA & even
so-called 'liberal' Dims have actively supported, w DISASTROUS results- Literally
destroying MILLIONS of lives in the process!! PLEASE!!
John Sipher (ha ha) starts out by re-asserting the lie that Russians "hacked" the DNC.
Everything that follows is just blah, blah,blah....Why is TRN interviewing this
buffoon?
No, sorry. I have great respect for Aaron, but TRN is not doing us any favors by
helping spread this noxious propaganda. They legitimize it by acknowledging it.
Meanwhile, there is other news they could be giving us.Check this out:
http://bit.ly/2EMOl4S Sad we have to depend upon comedians to give us the
news....
BTW. Why are the people who work for this guy trying to sell opinions being called
trolls? This is just another way to give credence to the FBI narrative that trolls tried
to sway the election. If anyone was a troll,
I'd say it was the Correct the Record folks
who were the trolls. Hillary's campaign paid over a million dollars for people to go into
websites and if anyone was being critical of Hillary, they tried to get them to change
their minds. How is that not election interference? And was that even legal? It was
unethical if not against campaign finance laws.
It arose inside the country, though Hillary is, without a doubt, scum. Hillbots were
actual 'Murkins, a lot of them still suffering from Hillbotulism. Elections featuring two
absolutely unacceptable candidates are a real drag, and, unfortunately, probably the
OFFICIAL end of the United States (though in reality, the US died in March 2003).
Unbelievable. Aaron: I don't believe that the Mueller investigation has delivered
solid proof that Russia did anything against the country.
Sipher:
Well I think that he and the FBI are reputable sources and I'm going to
believe them and what they tell me. Even if they haven't proven anything, we know that
Putin is a bad man and he wants to sow divisions here and besides he's using chemical
weapons in Syria (even though that's so totally off topic) and when I go to bed at night
I see Putin in my dreams and yackity, yack, yack! So there. I'm a poopy head and you're
not.
Good grief, how can people believe anything by this time? And Rachel? Quit lying to
yourself and others. My gawd! You have come a long way from your time at Air America that
I don't even recognize you anymore. You are creating hysteria and you have become a
raving lunatic. Enjoy your $30,000/day, $7 million a month salary for selling out to the
people who you used to despise. I despise you!
This guys arguments are so weak he must be interacting the very ignorant audience most
of the time (I think the great majority of Americans don't pay attention to what their
own foreign policy is -- and MSM the vast majority of the time offers nothing but safe
softball foreign policy questions).
He retorts that 'there's enough hot spots -- Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, China' -- but
fails to acknowledge that for example, the Iraq invasion and subsequent insurgency/civil
war/rise-of-ISIS is all about what Aaron pointed to, the ginning up intelligence to
create the Iraq invasion - which then spilled over into Syria. The role that the US is
playing in all the other place he mentions, they have constantly resorted to lethal force
and refused negotiation.
The establishment media leaves out the essential context: The US is on a single
superpower, Pax Americana global empire gambit; with everyone else playing for time while
building their defences.
And 'Russian Doctrine' is just recycled Soviet Doctrine - but the US always lead arms
escalations during the old cold war - the so called soviet doctrine was in fact defence
against US pressure and aggression.
MoonofAlabama gives a good analysis of the marketing scheme aspect of these
"meddlings". Max Blumenthal mentions it in his discussion with Mate from earlier in the
week, but this is a very detailed look into the matter:
http://www.moonofalabama.or...
I suppose it is ok for Aaron to interview guys like this CIA agent but the agent
clearly doesn't understand the validity of an indictment. An indictment doesn't prove
anything; If it did, we wouldn't need trial courts.
The Department of Justice could
indict a ham sandwich if they wanted.
The DOJ knows that this case will never go to trial
and they will never have to prove anything. It is depressing that the Democrats and MSNBC
have lost all credibility. We are very lucky to have Aaron and Max looking at this sutff.
The Democratic Party is toast. The Republican Party is a vile sham. And the main
stream media has exposed itself like never before. People are waking up to the corrupt
and useless system in place. The reality of the system is being laid bare in an
unprecedented way. As bad as things seem, this is a good thing, if we can keep those in
power from destroying the earth before we can recover it.
I just got done reading the Mueller indictment. For the MSM and the Dems to continue
their pathetic witch hunt is a true indictment of the corruption at the heart of this
country's political and media elites. No doubt there was an attempt, weak as it was, to
influence Americans, but for anyone to think this is the smoking gun that proves it was
decisive in determining the 2016 election, or that the Russian government definitely
orchestrated it, or that Trump, whom I despise as much as anyone else, colluded with
them, reveals a startling lack of intellectual honesty.
The effort put forth by the Russians involved seemed to have two objectives; first to
take advantage of the tribalization of American society to advance the Trump campaign,
and secondly, to make money off it.
Worst of all, if nothing more comes out of this, then the Dems, as corrupt as they are
incompetent, will have added more fuel to the Trump charges of fake news and will have
served only to weaken any resistance they claim to represent as this clown leads this
country on an ever accelerating demise.
I take issue with advancing the Trump campaign as an objective. Some ads, etc., were
anti-Trump and some were about kittens. I haven't seen any predominant political message,
at all, in that "effort". Also, it was so paltry that they had to know that it would have
no effect, at all, and never could have any effect. Implying otherwise is part of what
makes the whole story look like a bumbling, comedic farce to most thinking people.
If you read the Mueller indictment, it's clearly stated that they did contact various
American groups working for Trump, locally, that is, and arranged events, paid for
various materials, even someone to dress up as HRC and be in a jail, and also travel to
the states to do some first hand research, but as you say, the effort was minor, at best,
and was no factor in Trump winning, especially compared to the billions of $ of free air
time he got when running in the Repub primary, he was a cash cow for the networks, after
all, and the DNC advancing his cause during those same primaries, thinking he was an
easier opponent than Cruz or Rubio.
Unless something more comes of this, the Dems and
their media cohorts will do a repeat of the Repubs and that same media when the WMD
failed to materialize in Iraq. The wonderful thing about The Homeland, though, is that
being wrong, all the time, in no way disqualifies you for remaining an important and
serious person.
I haven't seen ANY evidence of traveling to the US for "first hand research". WHERE
does this crap come from? It comes from people desperate to keep the war budget higher
than any war budget in the history of planet earth. I still see nothing in that
"indictment" that serves as any real evidence that Trump colluded with any Russians, much
less any Russians definitively working for the Government of Russia, or any evidence that
the campaign was affected or that Russians were trying to create "discord" in the US.
If they bothered to look at the same types of activities and even direct money given
to candidates by Israeli, Saudi, UK, and other nationals, I think it would dwarf anything
Russian citizens used to fund or further any campaign. They won't look elsewhere, though,
because nothing perpetrates the fraud on the American people that is the Defense budget
like the word "Russians" and most of the "defense" (i.e., war) budget is completely
unnecessary. They should be cut by a third right now, with further cuts pending.
The indictment gives the names and dates of two Russians who made it here for a few
days; a third was unable to secure a visa. There are dates and places named in the
indictment, but nothing that could of had any influence on the election. If the Dems are
so worked up over having lost two elections this century even though their candidate had
more popular votes, you'd think they'd be screaming for a change in determining the
presidential election. We all know the Repubs would.
We are in total agreement as to what really mattered and matters regarding this issue
and the reasons behind the Dems sudden embrace of McCarthyism and their overall need to
point to Russia or anyone else to maintain the unmaintainable American empire. If you
haven't read the indictment, it's not that long, 37 short pages, several of which can be
skipped because they simply list names or laws broken.
If the dems really cared, they would be calling for publicly funded elections, cuts of
a quarter or more of the war budget (i.e., "defense"), and public health care and
education, and jobs programs with benefits. They care about nothing but their own
butts.
Aaron Mate is an excellent, intelligent, sincere, and questioning journalist--in
short, what everything one would expect from a real journalist. So, what is it the
naysayers don't like about him? Is it because he does not support their narrative. Is it
his laid back style? What in particular?
Glen Ford penetrates all the BS and gets right down to the real agenda, Black or
otherwise. He called out Obama back in 2007, when nearly everyone else on the so called
left were coming in their pants over that fake.
CIA staff exhibit two qualities in abundance: 1) Suspicious incredulity regarding all
apparent statements, actions and motivations of subjects in the field, and 2) Studied,
refined, and highly purposeful public mendacity regarding their and their government's
apparent statements, actions and motivations.
Mr Sipher is lying and the tell is his amazing degree of credulity regarding numerous
US entities paired with across the board mistrust and outright defamation of numerous
non-US entities. Virtually every accusation Sipher made against Russia, Putin and the
indicted, is a menu item on standard CIA operational plans for disrupting the elections
of foreign nations and has been practiced continuously for several decades, technology
permitting.
As a companion to this interview it might be nice to solicit an interview with a CIA
antagonist who knows how to expose--point by point, in policy, practice and
tradition--one of the most destructive covert entities in world history.
Mr. Sipher is throwing everything at the wall to see what might stick, attempting to
conflate what he laughably refers to as the "Russian Black Arts" with the Parkland
shooting. He talks in circles; on one hand acknowledging pre-existing social
"hyperpartisan", "tribal", divisions", while on the other hand dismissing genuine
political movements Black Lives Matter , Democratic Socialism ( Bernie
Sanders ), and the Environmental Movement ( Jill Stein ) as products of
Russian propaganda that is at once both sophisticated and simple.
JOHN SIPHER: Yeah, I think the point of this is not to change opinions, the point
was to try to either suppress voters on one side, or to get people to hardened
opinions, and get people to come out to vote, and we've even seen the same troll farm,
looks like they're doing this now around the Parkland shooting in Florida. They were
going around Black Lives Matter, they're trying to spin up divisions to get us working
against each other, as much as electing Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders.
His assessment lacks any measure of self/social-awareness or self/social-consciousness
that should be a pre-requisite before laying out criticism of another. It seems to me Mr.
Sipher might be protecting his CIA pension.
Hey there Munk! True believers will lay down their lives for their preferred criminal
syndicate because they are of one body; pensions are just icing. Your observations among
others are exactly why I said Sipher is lying.
Bill Binney, Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou are the first three that come to mind as
potential contrarians, although I am sure there are others as well. Perhaps the Clapper
lyings will come up in part two?
A few months ago, while waiting for wifey to come out of Target, I saw a preteen kid
wearing a T shirt that said, "I speak fluent sarcasm." I want one of those.
Muhammad Ali used rope a dope to defeat George Foreman; Mate let's these idiots expose
themselves with their own words; nothing is more effective than letting a fool speak.
"... He basically is a Senator for Israel. He totally supports the Israeli foreign policy viewpoint, which is a very hawkish, if you were a Republican you would call him a neocon. ..."
"... Schumer criticized the Obama administration for abstaining on this very basic resolution, which every other country voted for. So the US was still a pariah, because the US didn't vote for it, it just abstained on it. But to Schumer that was not enough, he wanted it to be completely vetoed, because anything that Israel does is sacrosanct, and anyone who criticizes it, in Schumer's eyes, is not someone he wants to ally with politically, so he'd rather affectively ally with Trump. ..."
"... The most recent showing of that allegiance was last month, when Schumer supported Trump's decision to launch an air strike on an Air Force base in Syria, something Israel also strongly supported. ..."
"... The criticism of the Democratic Party is it is the Wall Street and war party. That is Chuck Schumer, and so for him to have this kind of pretend progressive image, it's just so obviously fraudulent. ..."
"... Chuck Schumer has replaced Joe Lieberman as the Senator representing Israeli interests in the Senate. US interests are usually secondary to his machinations ..."
"... Great development and exposure of this hillary-look-alike. Love the phrase 'pretend progressive,' as it describes Schumer to a T. Great piece. ..."
"... Schumer and Clinton must be understood in relation to Israel. Israel to both of them are sacrosant. Israel can do no wrong. Both these two war hawks for Israel takes their orders from Netanyahu. He is like a vice president for Israel in the United States. ..."
"... Schumer (sic) is a scum bucket who ought to be trounced out of the Senate, through the revolving door to his sinecure on Wall Street. Schumer's ultimately loyalties are to his corporate benefactors on Wall Street. Which too is his constituency. ..."
"... Schumer is a puppet for the deep state and the deep state may have some "dirt" on him in order to keep him in line...and his famous quote about the security state: "they have 6 ways to Sunday to get back at you" or something to this effect...makes me wonder what he knows? ..."
"... Israel is the driving force behind disruption of the middle east...the more the middle east is neutralized, the better for Israel...Chuck is one of their best foot soldiers ..."
"... Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses. Evil minds that plot destruction, sorcerer of death's construction. In the fields the bodies burning, as the war machine keeps turning. Death and hatred to mankind, poisoning their brainwashed minds...Oh lord yeah! ..."
"... Politicians hide themselves away They only started the war Why should they go out to fight? They leave that role to the poor ..."
"... Time will tell on their power minds Making war just for fun Treating people just like pawns in chess Wait `till their judgement day comes, yeah! ♪ ..."
Thomas Hedges: In the 2007 book he published, Positively American, in the midst of his campaign against the war, Schumer
admitted that his opposition that year and the year before, was as much about ending a failed policy as it was about getting votes.
In reality Schumer had been one of the war's most ardent supporters, beyond his public display against the war carefully timed for
the 2006 Congressional elections, Schumer in fact pitted much of the blame on Iraqis themselves, arguing that Sunis, Shiites and
Kurds seemed more interested in starting a civil war in Iraq than in receiving help from the Americans and constructing any democratic
central government.
He even said, that in a similar future situation, he might vote again to authorize the use of force against a country like Iraq.
"Today," he wrote in his book, "I still believe that when our country is under attack the chief executive deserves a degree of latitude,
if God forbid, we were attacked again, I could well vote to give it to a future President, Democrat or Republican." And when a Real
News correspondent pressed Schumer in 2007 on US reparations to the Iraqi people, this is what he had to say.
Sam Husseini: Do we owe something to the Iraqi people other than just getting out? Do we owe them reparations for having
brought about this war?
Chuck Schumer: I don't believe that.
Ben Norton: It's hard to find a Democrat that's more gung-ho about war than Chuck Schumer. Not only did he support the
Iraq war, and fearmonger about weapons of mass destruction, he tepidly criticized the Bush administration for how it carried out
the war.
Thomas Hedges: In fact, tepid criticism seems to be Schumer at his most radical. In general, he is someone who supports
hard-line policy decisions, atoning for mistakes only years down the line, and usually because it's politically expedient to do so,
as in an election is about to take place.
Chuck Schumer: If you don't give up and you keep fighting and you're right, you win!
Thomas Hedges: In his early days, Schumer wasn't as focused on foreign policy, in the years before 911 would shift America's
attention to the Middle East, Congressman Schumer, along with the new Democrats like Bill Clinton among others, would exploit the
crime scare of the 1990's in order to gain more votes and more power. During those years, Schumer supported the Omnibus Crime Bill
of 1994, which spiked the prison population. And in 1995 he sponsored the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act, which became the foundation
from which the Patriot Act six years later, was built.
Ben Norton: When it comes to the war on terror he was a very enthusiastic supporter and remains so. He voted for the Patriot
Act, and again this is a supposed Democratic leader, who voted for the Bush administration to take away Americans civil liberties.
Thomas Hedges: In the years straddling 911, he supported many of the same policies Republicans supported. From his tough
on crime approach to supporting war in the Middle East, to defending the surveillance of Muslim groups in New York after 911. Schumer
and the GOP had very few differences, in fact despite shedding tears at a press conference earlier this year after the Muslim ban
that Trump implemented, Schumer himself had proposed something eerily similar.
Ben Norton: In November of 2015, not that long ago, less than two years ago, Schumer also said that the US government should
consider a so called pause on the re-settlement of Syrian refugees. He also, in one of the most egregious yet under reported aspects
of Schumer, previously said that torture should be considered in some places, and he said that, "Oh well if you oppose torture, you
say this now, but you need to put yourself in the shoes of people in these particular situations etc." So he really left torture
on the table.
Before Trump was President, he had actually donated money to Schumer, that of course, represents something, this is not a progressive
Democrat. Schumer actually represents the segment, the influential powerful segment of the Democratic Party, that has helped pave
the way for Donald Trump to carry out many of the policies he's already implementing.
Thomas Hedges: But for voters who have paid attention to Schumer for a long time, the Senator's policy choices are anything
but surprising.
Kevin Zeese:He basically is a Senator for Israel. He totally supports the Israeli foreign policy viewpoint, which
is a very hawkish, if you were a Republican you would call him a neocon.
Ariel Gold: He has come out in strong opposition to the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement and was very supportive
of New York Governor Cuomo's order to ban BDS in New York state, and Schumer made a direct statement in support of that.
Thomas Hedges: Schumer's staunch support for Israel has prompted him for example, to criticize the Obama administration,
when in 2016, the United States abstained from a UN Security Council resolution re-affirming something the Council had almost unanimously
upheld since 1979. Namely, that Israel's settlement building projects on Palestinian land violated international law.
Ben Norton:Schumer criticized the Obama administration for abstaining on this very basic resolution, which every other
country voted for. So the US was still a pariah, because the US didn't vote for it, it just abstained on it. But to Schumer that
was not enough, he wanted it to be completely vetoed, because anything that Israel does is sacrosanct, and anyone who criticizes
it, in Schumer's eyes, is not someone he wants to ally with politically, so he'd rather affectively ally with Trump.
Thomas Hedges:The most recent showing of that allegiance was last month, when Schumer supported Trump's decision to
launch an air strike on an Air Force base in Syria, something Israel also strongly supported.
Chuck Schumer: On Syria, I salute the professionalism and skill of our armed forces, who took action last night. The
people of Syria have suffered untold horrors and violence at the hands of Bashar al-Assad and his supporters in Tehran and in
Putin's Russia, making sure that Assad knows when he commits such despicable atrocities he will pay a price, is the right thing
to do.
Thomas Hedges: But perhaps Schumer's greatest show of allegiance to Israel, was his decision to oppose the Iran nuclear
deal, without which experts have warned, would put the United States and Iran on a collision course.
Ben Norton: Under President Obama, Schumer was one of the most prominent Democrats to oppose the Iran nuclear deal, and
he was of course fearmongering about Iran, which to him is the devil incarnate, and he actually made factually false statements about
the nuclear agreement, and claimed that it would allow Iran in 10 years to produce nuclear weapons etc.
Thomas Hedges: Leading up to his decision, Schumer reassured Zionists that he was consulting the most credentialed men
in Washington, including Henry Kissinger, an opponent of the deal, and the man who orchestrated the violent coup in Chile that toppled
its democratically elected leader, as well as the architect of the very bloody Vietnam war.
Chuck Schumer: I spent some time with Dr. Kissinger, I'm spending time with excellence.
Ariel Gold: So it threatened to pull us into another war, and we're back in that threat again with Trump winning the election
we hear a lot about undoing the Iran nuclear deal, and it's one of the things that Israel has been saying they would like to see
come out of the Trump administration.
Thomas Hedges: Schumer's willingness to oppose the deal early on, which created an opening for other undecided Democrats
to do the same, is a strong display of support for Israel.
News Anchor: Schumer's support here really would have been key for the White House, but coming out overnight against
this deal saying in a statement quote, "I will vote to disapprove the agreement, not because I believe war is a viable or desirable
option, not to challenge the path of dis-plomacy it is because, I believe Iran will not change."
Thomas Hedges: It also put him in yet the same camp as current President Donald Trump in terms of pursuing a Middle East
policy that is in line with Washington's most hawkish advocates. In the end, Schumer's a friend of the neo conservative foreign policy
agenda. While he may cry over Trump's Muslim ban and purport to have the same inclinations as America's most progressive members
of the Senate, he's fundamentally in agreement with the United States forceful efforts abroad.
Kevin Zeese:The criticism of the Democratic Party is it is the Wall Street and war party. That is Chuck Schumer, and
so for him to have this kind of pretend progressive image, it's just so obviously fraudulent.
Thomas Hedges: As the United States nears yet another arms deal with Middle East ally Saudi Arabia, this time for
a hundred billion dollars, and coupled with its four billion dollar annual aid to Israel, we can expect Schumer not only to support
an even more militarized Middle East, but to continue to rail against countries like Iran that pose a threat to US and Israel's hegemony
in the region.
Chuck Schumer has replaced Joe Lieberman as the Senator representing Israeli interests in the Senate. US interests are
usually secondary to his machinations
Schumer and Clinton must be understood in relation to Israel. Israel to both of them are sacrosant. Israel can do no wrong.
Both these two war hawks for Israel takes their orders from Netanyahu. He is like a vice president for Israel in the United States.
"I only take up causes in which I know I'll find no allies. And often I wait for a cause to become successful before
attacking it."
Schumer (sic) is a scum bucket who ought to be trounced out of the Senate, through the revolving door to his sinecure on
Wall Street. Schumer's ultimately loyalties are to his corporate benefactors on Wall Street. Which too is his constituency.
Anything in the way of progressiveness that you suggest will be only, like Obama's eloquent blackness, to run cover for favors
for the war party. Which at this late date ought also be christened the "hastening to collective extinction" party.
Schumer is a puppet for the deep state and the deep state may have some "dirt" on him in order to keep him in line...and
his famous quote about the security state: "they have 6 ways to Sunday to get back at you" or something to this effect...makes
me wonder what he knows?
Israel is the driving force behind disruption of the middle east...the more the middle east is neutralized, the better
for Israel...Chuck is one of their best foot soldiers
♪ Generals gathered in their masses,
just like witches at black masses.
Evil minds that plot destruction,
sorcerer of death's construction.
In the fields the bodies burning,
as the war machine keeps turning.
Death and hatred to mankind,
poisoning their brainwashed minds...Oh lord yeah!
Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor
Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait `till their judgement day comes, yeah! ♪
US intelligence bodies haven't particularly enjoyed their time in the spotlight these last
few years. The National Security Agency, or NSA, occupies a particularly complicated and
frustrating place in the collective unconscious: It's an institution we must trust with our
wellbeing on a daily basis, but it is also fundamentally unaccountable and untrustworthy. When
was the last time you voted for an NSA director?
So it might feel like schadenfreude to watch this feared and reviled agency fall into
disarray over the past half decade. But the truth is that the NSA still serves a vital purpose,
now more than ever, yet it is barely any longer able to do its job (ie. monitoring malign
foreign actors, anticipating the future moves of national governments, and keeping America's
intel safe from prying eyes). The latest crisis: the NSA's hemorrhaging of talent.
Hey,
Where's Everyone Going?
Of the country's 17 intelligence-gathering apparatuses, the NSA is the most prolific. The
agency's headquarters, located in Fort Meade, Md., staffs some 21,000 individuals. But their
heavy workload is now imperiled by a chronic flight of talent from the agency, described from
within as an "epidemic". It's hard to know exactly how bad of a situation we're talking about
because, of course, the NSA won't tell us details. But we do have some rough numbers:
• The NSA's current attrition rate for science, math and technology specialists is 5.6
percent.
• The attrition rate for hackers and cyberattack specialists is as high as 9
percent.
• And some teams within the NSA have lost as much as
half their staff .
Interestingly, between 2016 and 2017, the agency made the conspicuous decision to remove all
references to "openness," "honor" and "trust" from its core values and mission statements.
Which begs the question: Is it any wonder nobody wants to work there?
... ... ...
Kate Harveston is a journalist and a member of the CODEPINK communications team.
The size of funds that Democrats and Republicans operated were in billions. And , IRA
staffers purchased just $100,000 worth of Facebook ads, 56% of which ran after Election
Day. So only $44K was spent during election campaign.
There author is wrong about color revolution against Trump. It is progressing.
One interesting side effect will be ruthless suppression of the US influence in Russian
elections. Bismark famously remarked that "the Russians are slow to saddle up, but ride fast."
Here media dogs also are off leash and there will be innocent victims, blamed in treason and
other nefarious activities just to voicing dissent. Russiagate discredited neoliberal fifth
column in Russia, making them all "enemies of the people".
Notable quotes:
"... After nine months of labor, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller thus brought forth a mouse. Even if all the charges are true – something we'll probably never know since it's unlikely that any of the accused will be brought to trial -- the indictment tells us virtually nothing that's new. ..."
"... Yes, they persuaded someone in Florida to dress up as Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform and stand inside a cage mounted on a flatbed truck. And, yes, they also got another "real U.S. person," as the indictment terms it, to stand in front of the White House with a sign saying, "Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss," a tribute, apparently, to IRA founder Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the convicted robber turned caterer whose birthday was three days away. Instead of a super-sophisticated spying operation, the indictment depicts a bumbling freelance operation that is still giving Putin heartburn months after the fact. ..."
"... Not that this has stopped the media from whipping itself into a frenzy. "Russia is at war with our democracy," screamed a headline in the Washington Post. "Trump is ignoring the worst attack on America since 9/11," blared another. " Russia is engaged in a virtual war against the United States through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda," declared the New York Times, while Daily Beast columnist Jonathan Alter tweeted that the IRA's activities amounted to nothing less than a "tech Pearl Harbor." ..."
"... This makes the Dems seem crass, unscrupulous, and none too democratic. But then Mudde gave the knife a twist. The real trouble with the strategy, he said, is that it isn't working: ..."
"... No collusion means no impeachment and hence no anti-Trump "color revolution" of the sort that was so effective in Georgia or the Ukraine. Moreover, while 53 percent of Americans believe that investigating Russiagate should be a top or at least an important priority according to a recent poll , figures for a half-dozen other issues ranging from Medicare and Social Security reform to tax policy, healthcare, infrastructure, and immigration are actually a good deal higher – 67 percent, 72 percent, or even more. ..."
"... " the Russia-Trump collusion story might be the talk of the town in Washington, but this is not the case in much of the rest of the country." Out in flyover country, rather, Americans can't figure out why the political elite is more concerned with a nonexistent scandal than with things that really count, i.e. de-industrialization, infrastructure decay, the opioid epidemic, and school shootings. As society disintegrates, the only thing Democrats have accomplished with all their blathering about Russkis under the bed is to demonstrate just how cut off from the real world they are. ..."
"... But Russiagate is not just about regime change, but other things as well. One is repression. Where once Democrats would have laughed off Russian trolls and the like, they're now obsessed with making a mountain out of a molehill in order to enforce mainstream opinion and marginalize ideas and opinions suspected of being un-American and hence pro-Russian. If the RT (Russia Today) news network is now suspect -- the Times described it not long ago as "the slickly produced heart of a broad, often covert disinformation campaign designed to sow doubt about democratic institutions and destabilize the West" – then why not the BBC or Agence France-Presse? How long until foreign books are banned or foreign musicians? ..."
"... "I'm actually surprised I haven't been indicted," tweets Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky. "I'm Russian, I was in the U.S. in 2016 and I published columns critical of both Clinton and Trump w/o registering as a foreign agent." When the Times complains that Facebook "still sees itself as the bank that got robbed, rather than the architect who designed a bank with no safes, and no alarms or locks on the doors, and then acted surprised when burglars struck," then it's clear that the goal is to force Facebook to rein in its activities or stand by and watch as others do so instead. ..."
"... But Russiagate is about something else as well: war. As National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster warns that the "time is now" to act against Iran, the New York Times slams Trump for not imposing sanctions on Moscow, and a spooky "Nuclear Posture Review" suggests that the US might someday respond to a cyber attack with atomic weapons, it's plain that Washington is itching for a showdown that will somehow undo the mistakes of the previous administration. The more Trump drags his feet, the more Democrats conclude that a war drive is the best way to bring him to his knees. ..."
"... Thus, low-grade political interference is elevated into a casus belli while Vladimir Putin is portrayed as a supernatural villain straight out of Harry Potter. But where does it stop? Libya has been set back decades, Syria, the subject of yet another US regime-change effort, has been all but destroyed, while Yemen – which America helps Saudi Arabia bomb virtually around the clock – is now a disaster area with some 9,000 people killed, 50,000 injured, a million-plus cholera cases, and more than half of all hospitals and clinics destroyed. ..."
"... The more Democrats pound the war drums, the more death and destruction will ensue. The process is well underway in Syria, the victim of Israeli bombings and a US-Turkish invasion, and it will undoubtedly spread as Dems turn up the heat. If the pathetic pseudo-scandal known as Russiagate really is collapsing under its own weight, then it's not a moment too soon. ..."
"... The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy ..."
"... A minor quibble was how at the end the author kept referring to how the "U.S" or "Washington" were the forces for the regime changes or flat-out destruction of nations Israel wants destroyed. The crappy little pesthole has been the barely-concealed mastermind of all the "Wars For Israel" which have turned the US of A into a bankrupt laughingstock. ..."
"... As ludicrous as Russiagate became, it was no joke, and became a real amplifier of the threat of nuclear war, and the relentlessly increasing militarization of America. Without the enthusiastic help of the corporate media, the whole phony narrative would never have got off the ground. Of course the criminals we call the intelligence community did all they could to give it legs, as well. We can only pray that it fades away now, and is not replaced with something else like a shooting war. But that hope is fading now on several fronts ..."
"... That was NOT to remove Trump, which was always a long shot and would only produce Pence and angry motivated Trump voters in the next election. ..."
"... The Trump derangement syndrome had a calculated purpose to keep donors giving after they were outraged by the waste of their donations. They'd been acting like a donor-strike was in progress. This cured that. ..."
"... This fed off the Stages of Grief reactions of those who'd so confidently expected a Hillary win. That helped do it, but was not the real motive. Those who initiated and shaped it were more directed, and aimed at the money. That is why the more likely things to blame, like Comey, were set aside in favor of the easy target of a foreign enemy which was familiar from recent Cold War. ..."
"... Having only as reference my own personal take on our news media the infamous MSM, is that these journalistic bandits are only in the game of twisting the news for the ratings, and to promote their own opportunistic careers. The corporate owned media has replaced responsible reporting with salaisuus promotions of often tragic events in a way that tends to in my eyes be a mere exploitation of these tragedies, as we viewers become glued to our TV screens. ..."
Fads and scandals often follow a set trajectory. They grow big, bigger, and then, finally,
too big, at which point they topple over and collapse under the weight of their own internal
contradictions. This was the fate of the "Me too" campaign, which started out as an
exposé of serial abuser Harvey Weinstein but then went too far when Babe.net published a
story about one
woman's bad date with comedian Aziz Ansari. Suddenly, it became clear that different types of
behavior were being lumped together in a dangerous way, and a once-explosive movement began to
fizzle.
So, too, with Russiagate. After dominating the news for more than a year, the scandal may
have at last reached a tipping point with last week's indictment of thirteen Russian
individuals and three Russian corporations on charges of illegal interference in the 2016
presidential campaign. But the indictment landed with a decided thud for three reasons:
It
failed to connect the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the alleged St. Petersburg troll factory
accused of political meddling, with Vladimir Putin, the all-purpose evil-doer who the corporate
media say is out to destroy American democracy. It similarly failed to establish a connection
with the Trump campaign and indeed went out of its way to describe contacts with the Russians
as "unwitting." It described the meddling itself as even more inept and amateurish than many
had suspected.
After nine months of labor, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller thus brought forth a
mouse. Even if all the charges are true – something we'll probably never know since it's
unlikely that any of the accused will be brought to trial -- the indictment tells us virtually
nothing that's new.
Yes, IRA staffers purchased $100,000 worth of Facebook ads, 56 percent of which ran
after Election Day. Yes, they persuaded someone in Florida to dress up as Hillary
Clinton in a prison uniform and stand inside a cage mounted on a flatbed truck. And, yes, they
also got another "real U.S. person," as the indictment terms it, to stand in front of the White
House with a sign saying, "Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss," a tribute, apparently, to IRA
founder Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the convicted robber turned caterer whose birthday was three days
away. Instead of a super-sophisticated spying operation, the indictment depicts a bumbling
freelance operation that is still giving Putin heartburn months after the fact.
Not that this has stopped the media from whipping itself into a frenzy. "Russia is at
war with our democracy,"
screamed a headline in the Washington Post. "Trump is ignoring the worst attack on America
since 9/11,"
blared another. " Russia is engaged in a virtual war against the United States through
21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda," declared the New York
Times, while Daily Beast columnist Jonathan Alter tweeted that the IRA's
activities amounted to nothing less than a "tech Pearl Harbor."
All of which merely demonstrates, in proper backhanded fashion, how grievously Mueller has
fallen short. Proof that the scandal had at last overstayed its welcome came five days later
when the Guardian, a website that had previously flogged Russiagate even more vigorously than
the Post, the Times, or CNN, published a
news analysis by Cas Mudde, an associate professor at the University of Georgia, admitting
that it was all a farce – and a particularly self-defeating one at that.
Mudde's article made short work of hollow pieties about a neutral and objective
investigation. Rather than an effort to get at the truth, Russiagate was a thinly-veiled effort
at regime change. "[I]n the end," he wrote, "the only question everyone really seems to care
about is whether Donald Trump was involved – and can therefore be impeached for
treason.
With last week's indictment, the article went on, "Democratic party leaders once again
reassured their followers that this was the next logical step in the inevitable downfall of
Trump." The more Democrats play the Russiagate card, in other words, the nearer they will come
to their goal of riding the Orange-Haired One out of town on a rail.
This makes the Dems seem crass, unscrupulous, and none too democratic. But then Mudde
gave the knife a twist. The real trouble with the strategy, he said, is that it isn't
working:
"While there is no doubt that the Trump camp was, and still is, filled with amoral and
fraudulent people, and was very happy to take the Russians help during the elections, even
encouraging it on the campaign, I do not think Mueller will be able to find conclusive evidence
that Donald Trump
himself colluded with Putin's Russia to win the elections. And that is the only thing that will
lead to his impeachment as the Republican party is not risking political suicide for anything
less."
Other Objectives of "Russiagate"
No collusion means no impeachment and hence no anti-Trump "color revolution" of the sort
that was so effective in Georgia or the Ukraine. Moreover, while 53 percent of Americans
believe that investigating Russiagate should be a top or at least an important priority
according to a recent poll ,
figures for a half-dozen other issues ranging from Medicare and Social Security reform to tax
policy, healthcare, infrastructure, and immigration are actually a good deal higher – 67
percent, 72 percent, or even more.
Summed up Mudde: " the Russia-Trump collusion story might be the talk of the town in
Washington, but this is not the case in much of the rest of the country." Out in flyover
country, rather, Americans can't figure out why the political elite is more concerned with a
nonexistent scandal than with things that really count, i.e. de-industrialization,
infrastructure decay, the opioid epidemic, and school shootings. As society disintegrates, the
only thing Democrats have accomplished with all their blathering about Russkis under the bed is
to demonstrate just how cut off from the real world they are.
But Russiagate is not just about regime change, but other things as well. One is
repression. Where once Democrats would have laughed off Russian trolls and the like, they're
now obsessed with making a mountain out of a molehill in order to enforce mainstream opinion
and marginalize ideas and opinions suspected of being un-American and hence pro-Russian. If the
RT (Russia Today) news network is now suspect -- the Times
described it not long ago as "the slickly produced heart of a broad, often covert
disinformation campaign designed to sow doubt about democratic institutions and destabilize the
West" – then why not the BBC or Agence France-Presse? How long until foreign books are
banned or foreign musicians?
"I'm actually surprised I haven't been indicted," tweets Bloomberg columnist
Leonid Bershidsky. "I'm Russian, I was in the U.S. in 2016 and I published columns critical of
both Clinton and Trump w/o registering as a foreign agent." When the Times complains
that Facebook "still sees itself as the bank that got robbed, rather than the architect who
designed a bank with no safes, and no alarms or locks on the doors, and then acted surprised
when burglars struck," then it's clear that the goal is to force Facebook to rein in its
activities or stand by and watch as others do so instead.
Add to this the classic moral panic promoted by #MeToo – to believe charges of sexual
harassment and assault without first demanding evidence "is to disbelieve, and deny due process
to, the accused,"
notes Judith Levine in the Boston Review – and it's clear that a powerful wave of
cultural conservatism is crashing down on the United States, much of it originating in a
classic neoliberal-Hillaryite milieu. Formerly the liberal alternative, the Democratic Party is
now passing the Republicans on the right.
But Russiagate is about something else as well: war. As National Security Adviser H.R.
McMaster warns
that the "time is now" to act against Iran, the New York Times slams
Trump for not imposing sanctions on Moscow, and a spooky "Nuclear Posture Review"
suggests that the US might someday respond to a cyber attack with atomic weapons, it's
plain that Washington is itching for a showdown that will somehow undo the mistakes of the
previous administration. The more Trump drags his feet, the more Democrats conclude that a war
drive is the best way to bring him to his knees.
Thus, low-grade political interference is elevated into a casus belli while
Vladimir Putin is portrayed as a supernatural villain straight out of Harry Potter. But
where does it stop? Libya has been set back decades, Syria, the subject of yet another US
regime-change effort, has been all but destroyed, while Yemen – which America helps Saudi
Arabia bomb virtually around the clock – is now
a disaster area with some 9,000 people killed, 50,000 injured, a million-plus cholera
cases, and more than half of all hospitals and clinics destroyed.
The more Democrats pound the war drums, the more death and destruction will ensue. The
process is well underway in Syria, the victim of Israeli bombings and a US-Turkish invasion,
and it will undoubtedly spread as Dems turn up the heat. If the pathetic pseudo-scandal known
as Russiagate really is collapsing under its own weight, then it's not a moment too
soon.
Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the
Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).
Zachary Smith , February 24, 2018 at 1:25 pm
First thing I checked before reading this was to check for instances of misuse of the term
"liberal". When I found none at all, the piece suddenly looked very promising. And it
was a fine essay!
A minor quibble was how at the end the author kept referring to how the "U.S" or
"Washington" were the forces for the regime changes or flat-out destruction of nations Israel
wants destroyed. The crappy little pesthole has been the barely-concealed mastermind of all
the "Wars For Israel" which have turned the US of A into a bankrupt laughingstock.
With that small objection on record, I will declare this was great.
Zachary, I wouldn't get too hung up on words like "liberal" which have been used and
abused to become almost meaningless but yes, "the Democratic Party is now passing the
Republicans on the right." Somehow I think they believe they can pick up enough "moderate"
Republicans in the midterms to make up for the "angry white males"(& intellectuals) they
lost in the last election the same losing strategy.
mike k , February 24, 2018 at 1:41 pm
As ludicrous as Russiagate became, it was no joke, and became a real amplifier of the
threat of nuclear war, and the relentlessly increasing militarization of America. Without the
enthusiastic help of the corporate media, the whole phony narrative would never have got off
the ground. Of course the criminals we call the intelligence community did all they could to
give it legs, as well. We can only pray that it fades away now, and is not replaced with
something else like a shooting war. But that hope is fading now on several fronts
Mark Thomason , February 24, 2018 at 1:41 pm
From its first moment, this was a Team Hillary exercise, decided on by her in the days
right after the election and promoted through her media contracts that had been an extension
of her campaign.
Why? At first they seemed to imagine it possible to reverse the election outcome.
Then it shifted to Trump hate. Why?
That was NOT to remove Trump, which was always a long shot and would only produce Pence
and angry motivated Trump voters in the next election.
The Trump derangement syndrome had a calculated purpose to keep donors giving after they
were outraged by the waste of their donations. They'd been acting like a donor-strike was in
progress. This cured that.
This fed off the Stages of Grief reactions of those who'd so confidently expected a
Hillary win. That helped do it, but was not the real motive. Those who initiated and shaped
it were more directed, and aimed at the money. That is why the more likely things to blame,
like Comey, were set aside in favor of the easy target of a foreign enemy which was familiar
from recent Cold War.
It was completely cynical, guided by the same greed that had produced the candidacy of
Hillary and run it the whole time, doing fund raising in friendly places instead of
campaigning in swing states.
JDQ , February 24, 2018 at 2:00 pm
..please do read this. It gives Liberals more a bashing than Conservatives
Joe Tedesky , February 24, 2018 at 2:40 pm
Having only as reference my own personal take on our news media the infamous MSM, is that
these journalistic bandits are only in the game of twisting the news for the ratings, and to
promote their own opportunistic careers. The corporate owned media has replaced responsible
reporting with salaisuus promotions of often tragic events in a way that tends to in my eyes
be a mere exploitation of these tragedies, as we viewers become glued to our TV screens.
This
is the way the MSM sell too many needless pharmaceutical products, and their drugs are
products, to insurance ad's and somehow make commercial space for the MIC defense
contractors. This is how the MSM makes real money, as they forfeited our learning of anything
worthwhile, as to pave the way for more exploitation of our country's struggles with
everything and anything, but all forfeited simply to make the MSM more money.
It goes without saying that we the American public aren't necessarily as fooled, and
tricked, as our masters would like to believe we are. So to explain away the Empire's
failings certain forces from within our nation's Beltway are hard at work trying to blame all
of their misgivings on another, and that another is Vladimir Putin and his American
engineered misunderstood Russians. For this reason our MSM hardly ever put the real Putin on
our television screens. No never, these American media producers always when describing
Putin, use a prop, or a slimy squinty eyed shirtless Russian stereotype instead. For our MSM
ever to air a speech of Putin, or do as Oliver Stone did, is beyond question, so don't wait
up kids to see ever steady Vladimir on our American TV sets because it just isn't going to
happen.
So now our MSM is exploiting the Florida mass shooting, and it is with their slants and
predisposed opinions where I lose faith in anything our media does. Even as terrible as this
Florida school shooting was, our MSM must politicize and adhere left right slants to this
story as in their daff journalistic heads this is what they must do. Like I said this is my
opinion taken from my own experiences, so take my comment for what it is, and not from any
references I happened upon.
So one year ago McMaster was under attack and survived. Note that this was the time of
appointment of the Special Prosecutor which changed the dynamics, probably preserving his scalp.
This time might be different.
The Afghanistan strategy McMaster is pushing, with the support of Defense Secretary James
Mattis, would send roughly 3,000-5,000 U.S. and NATO troops to Afghanistan, according to a
separate source familiar with the internal deliberations. These troops would be sent to help
bulk up the Afghan National Security Forces, which, after years of U.S. assistance, are still
struggling against the Taliban, al Qaeda, and a small Islamic State presence in the
country.
According to the Washington Post , the new strategy "would authorize the Pentagon, not the White
House, to set troop numbers in Afghanistan and give the military far broader authority to use
airstrikes to target Taliban militants." The hope is that by increasing pressure on the
Taliban, it will force them to the negotiating table with more favorable terms for Kabul and
Washington. Sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan follows a decision made last year by
then-President Barack Obama, who
announced in July that 8,400 U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan through January 2017
because of the "precarious" security situation there, undoing his previous plan to draw down to
5,500 by the time he left office.
The Post reported that "those opposed to the plan have begun to refer derisively to
the strategy as 'McMaster's War,'" and this particular criticism is repeated in a handful of
negative stories about McMaster that have already cropped up this week. For those plugged into
the dicey world of Trump administration power plays, this slur has the hallmarks of a hit job
by Bannon's team. (It's worth noting that the same people who oppose McMaster are no fans of
Mattis's moderating influence on the president, but he's seen as politically untouchable for
now.)
Interesting information Guccifer II. He falsified the evidence.
Follow the money. Along with a smoke screen for Hillary political fiasco, Russiagate is a swindle to get more money for intelligence
agencies and MIC. For about 15 companies who run the US foreign policy.
Notable quotes:
"... The CIA and NSA, and other intelligence agencies all work on behalf of these corporate entities. There main objective is to keep us all uninformed and dumber than a bag of hammers, so they can extort all the wealth from our great nation ..."
"... If this video won't stop the brainless McCarthyist regressives from knowing the truth about Russiagate, nothing will. And I mean absolutely nothing. Except maybe if they come here to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NYC. We got lots of Russian immigrants here and they are just normal people ..."
"... Russiagate is an excuse to spend more on the military. Wow- surprising, yet somehow not surprising. American Empire is the biggest destabilizing force in the world ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0 is the United States government. Either the CIA, FBI, NSA or DHS. I'd say it was the CIA with the NSA being a close second ..."
Also, when did Russian hackers become so stupid? Since when has the GRU being unable to get even the basics like the up to
date email list for the Clinton campaign, started using two-year-old obsolete malware instead of 0-day exploits, completely forgetting
that VPN's exist and how to spoof an IP address, and on and on and on. These aren't the guys who cloned Nasdaq!
Thank you jimmy so much for doing this interview and thank you Bill Binney for so clearly explaining the technical and structural
reasons why Russiagate is both false and ceaselessly pushed. Amazing interview!
My experience working on the Mississippi democratic party executive committee, the Hinds county Executive committee, and working
for the state employees union here in Mississippi has educated me on the fact that democratic reps and republican reps work together
to pass legislation to benefit the corporate class i.e. business. All you who have replied to my comment make sense, but we must
remember that there is no difference between the Democratic and Republician parties, they all work for their corporate masters.
The CIA and NSA, and other intelligence agencies all work on behalf of these corporate entities. There main objective is
to keep us all uninformed and dumber than a bag of hammers, so they can extort all the wealth from our great nation. In other
words they our commiting treason upon the American people and our constitution and all should be through in prison for the rest
of their lives and all ill-gotten wealth given back to the people of these great nation by rebuilding the infrastructure of America,
investing in the education of our people to secure a prosperous future, and provide healthcare for all Americans. We can ensure
this happens in two ways, pass the 28th amendment and pass FDR's 2nd bill of rights(worker's bill of rights). This will ensure
that corporations will never take control of our country again.
Can we please now move onto whom the person was that stole the data from the DNC? Can I take a stab in the dark (or maybe two
shots to the back of the head?) and guess his name was Seth Rich?
I know I commented this already in the last segment, but this guy is absolutely awesome. Everything he says is substantial,
non-speculative and supported by facts. You're becoming a proper journalist Jimmy. More of people like this please. I got my credit
card again. I will donate shortly. Keep up.
As long as they keep lying about Russia they can continue the sanctions against Russia. Russia is holding it's own even with
the sanctions but originally under Putin Russia had paid off all it's debt to the IMF (World Bank). Now their debt is increasing,
partly because of the sanctions and partly because of helping Syria and preparing for the US to cause a great war. Russia is a
threat to the IMF (World Bank). Russia and China want trade outside of the Petrol Dollar. When Russia was debt free from the IMF
(World Bank) it was completely independent of them. Russia did not have to take orders from the international bankers. That is
why they lie about Russia.
If this video won't stop the brainless McCarthyist regressives from knowing the truth about Russiagate, nothing will. And
I mean absolutely nothing. Except maybe if they come here to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NYC. We got lots of Russian immigrants
here and they are just normal people.
Russiagate is an excuse to spend more on the military. Wow- surprising, yet somehow not surprising. American Empire is
the biggest destabilizing force in the world
As I tried to tell you the previous time you had referenced the "conclusions" of the CIA groups, this data nonsense he is handwaving
about is all quite feasible, by using a nearby national server, and much skepticism is deserved! Also he doesn't seem to know
what he is talking about, from all of the paraphrasing.
I am also quite reminded of the psychological incorporation into personal behaviors by habit of the standards and policies
of the industry or professional standards, which for the US Intelligence community includes an explicit policy of disinformation
and dishonesty.
How the hell would the NSA's "man in the middle" logging servers see that the transfer occurs to a local USB2 drive (he assumes
this is the case because 40 megabytes per second is approximately the rate of the USB2 protocol of 400 megabits per second...
Very few USB flash drives were manufactured with solid state storage chips fast enough to reach that full transfer rate before
the widespread adoption of USB3, or the modern USB3.1. Essentially, your chosen headline title is a false clickbait, because as
of today there is insufficient evidence to draw ANY conclusion
Just as they smeared Joe Wilson & his wife, and other great Courageous Americans that came out AGAINST the invasion of Iraq!
Until we start DEMANDING those LIARS leave their seats in Washington, put on the Military Gear, and GO to the Countries they want
to invade! I am past FED UP with them sacrificing our Troops, they return home to be MISTREATED, and kicked to the curb! Americans,
wake up and DEMAND that they GO!
A very interesting interview. It is almost one year old.
When intelligence agencies use the phase "with high confidence" means that they do not have evidence. This is one of
the biggest lie intelligence agencies resort to. They are all professional liars and should be treated as such.
If DNC email offloading was done over Internet (which means it was a hack not an internal leak) NSA should have the direct evidence.
They do not. So this is a progpaganda move by Brennan and Clapper to unleash MSM witch hunt, which is a key part of the color revolution
against Trump.
Another question is who downloaded this information to Wikileaks. Here NSA also should have evidence. And again they do not.
They have already to direct attention from the main issues. Oversight of intelligence agencies is joke. They can lie with impunity.
BTW NSA has all Hillary emails, including deleted.
He also exposes the NSA penchant for "swindles", such as preventing the plugging of holes in software around the world, to preserve
their spying access.
It's almost comical to hear that they lie to each other. No wonder why these retards in the mid-east and every other third
world country gets the better of us.
The Clinton campaign to divert attention to Russia instead of her myriad of crimes that were revealed during the election must
be stopped and the alt media needs to start talking about her and Obama's crimes again and demand justice...control the dialogue
"... The low-calorie Jan. 6 ICA was clumsily cobbled together: "We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks." ..."
"... Binney and other highly experienced NSA alumni, as well as other members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), drawing on their intimate familiarity with how the technical systems and hacking work, have been saying for a year and a half that this CIA/FBI/NSA conclusion is a red herring , so to speak. Last summer, the results of forensic investigation enabled VIPs to apply the principles of physics and the known capacity of the internet to confirm that conclusion. ..."
"... Oddly, the FBI chose not to do forensics on the so-called "Russian hack" of the Democratic National Committee computers and, by all appearances, neither did the drafters of the ICA. ..."
"... What troubles me greatly is that the NYT and other mainstream print and TV media seem to be bloated with the thin gruel-cum-Kool Aid they have been slurping at our CIA trough for a year and a half; and then treating the meager fare consumed as some sort of holy sacrament. That goes in spades for media handling of the celebrated ICA of Jan. 6, 2017 cobbled together by those "handpicked" analysts from CIA, FBI, and NSA. It is, in all candor, an embarrassment to the profession of intelligence analysis and yet, for political reasons, it has attained the status of Holy Writ. ..."
"... And Democrats like Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, were kicking the ball hard down the streets of Washington. On Jan. 25, 2017, I had a chance to confront Schiff personally about the lack of evidence -- something that even Obama had acknowledged just before slipping out the door. I think our two-minute conversation speaks volumes. ..."
"... Now I absolutely look forward to dealing with Adam Schiff from my new position as CIA director. I will ask him to show me the evidence of "Russian hacking" that he said he could not show me on Jan. 25, 2017 – on the chance his evidence includes more than reports from the New York Times ..."
"... Intelligence analysts put great weight, of course, on sources. The authors of the lede, banner-headlined NYT article of Jan. 7, 2017 were Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger; Sanger has had a particularly checkered career, while always landing on his feet. Despite his record of parroting CIA handouts (or perhaps partly because of it), Sanger is now the NYT's chief Washington correspondent. ..."
"... More instructive still, in May 2005, when firsthand documentary evidence from the now-famous "Downing Street Memorandum" showed that President George W. Bush had decided by early summer 2002 to attack Iraq, the NYT ignored it for six weeks until David Sanger rose to the occasion with a tortured report claiming just the opposite. The title given his article of June 13 2005 was "Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made." ..."
"... Against this peculiar reporting record, I was not inclined to take at face value the Jan. 7, 2017 report he co-authored with Michael D. Shear – "Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds." ..."
"... Nor am I inclined to take seriously former National Intelligence Director James Clapper's stated views on the proclivity of Russians to be, well, just really bad people – like it's in their genes. I plan to avail myself of the opportunity to discover whether intelligence analysts who labored under his "aegis" were infected by his quaint view of the Russians. ..."
"... I shall ask any of the "handpicked" analysts who specialize in analysis of Russia (and, hopefully, there are at least a few): Do you share Clapper's view, as he explained it to NBC's Meet the Press on May 30, 2017, that Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever"? I truly do not know what to expect by way of reply. ..."
"... In sum, my priority for Day One is to hear both sides of the story regarding "Russian hacking" with all cards on the table. All cards. That means no questions are out of order, including what, if any, role the "Steele dossier" may have played in the preparation of the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment. ..."
Now that I have been nominated again – this time
by author Paul Craig Roberts – to be CIA director, I am preparing to hit the ground
running.
Last time my name was offered in nomination for the position – by The Nation
publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel – I did not hold my breath waiting for a call from the
White House. Her nomination came in the afterglow of my fortuitous, four-minute debate with
then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when I confronted him on his lies about the attack on
Iraq , on May 4, 2006 on national TV. Since it was abundantly clear that Rumsfeld and I
would not get along, I felt confident I had royally disqualified myself.
This time around, on the off-chance I do get the nod, I have taken the time to prepare the
agenda for my first few days as CIA director. Here's how Day One looks so far:
Get former National Security Agency Technical Director William Binney back to CIA to join me
and the "handpicked" CIA analysts who, with other "handpicked" analysts (as described by former
National Intelligence Director James Clapper on May 8, 2017) from the FBI and NSA, prepared the
so-called Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017. That evidence-impoverished
assessment argued the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his minions "to help
President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton."
When my predecessor, CIA Director Mike Pompeo invited Binney to his office on Oct. 24, 2017
to discuss cyber-attacks, he told Pompeo that he had been fed a pack of lies on "Russian
hacking" and that he could prove it. Why Pompeo left that hanging is puzzling, but I believe
this is the kind of low-hanging fruit we should pick pronto.
The low-calorie Jan. 6 ICA was clumsily cobbled together: "We assess with high
confidence that Russian military intelligence used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to
release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets
and relayed material to WikiLeaks."
Binney and other highly experienced NSA alumni, as well as other members of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), drawing on their intimate familiarity with how
the technical systems and hacking work, have been
saying for a year and a half that this CIA/FBI/NSA conclusion is a red
herring , so to speak. Last summer, the results of forensic investigation enabled VIPs to
apply the principles of physics and the known capacity of the internet to confirm that
conclusion.
Oddly, the FBI chose not to do forensics on the so-called "Russian hack" of the
Democratic National Committee computers and, by all appearances, neither did the drafters of
the ICA.
Again, Binney says that the main conclusions he and his VIPs colleagues reached are based
largely on principles of physics – simple ones like fluid dynamics. I want to hear what
that's all about, how that applies to the "Russian hack," and hear what my own CIA analysts
have to say about that.
I will have Binney's clearances updated to remove any unnecessary barriers to a
no-holds-barred discussion at a highly classified level. After which I shall have a transcript
prepared, sanitized to protect sources and methods, and promptly released to the media.
Like Sisyphus Up the Media Mountain
At that point things are bound to get very interesting. Far too few people realize that they
get a very warped view on such issues from the New York Times . And, no doubt, it
would take some time, for the Times and other outlets to get used to some candor from the CIA,
instead of the far more common tendentious leaks. In any event, we will try to speak truth to
the media – as well as to power.
I happen to share the view of the handful of my predecessor directors who believed we have
an important secondary obligation to do what we possibly can to inform/educate the public as
well as the rest of the government – especially on such volatile and contentious issues
like "Russian hacking."
What troubles me greatly is that the NYT and other mainstream print and TV media seem to
be bloated with the thin gruel-cum-Kool Aid they have been slurping at our CIA trough for a
year and a half; and then treating the meager fare consumed as some sort of holy sacrament.
That goes in spades for media handling of the celebrated ICA of Jan. 6, 2017 cobbled together
by those "handpicked" analysts from CIA, FBI, and NSA. It is, in all candor, an embarrassment
to the profession of intelligence analysis and yet, for political reasons, it has attained the
status of Holy Writ.
The Paper of (Dubious) Record
I recall the banner headline spanning the top of the entire front page of the NYT on Jan. 7,
2017: "Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says;" and the electronic version headed "Putin
Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds." I said to myself sarcastically,
"Well there you go! That's exactly what Mrs. Clinton – not to mention the NY Times, the
Washington Post and The Establishment –
have been saying for many months."
Buried in that same edition of the Times was
a short paragraph by Scott Shane: "What is missing from the public report is what many
Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims that the
Russian government engineered the election attack. That is a significant omission."
Omission? No hard evidence? No problem. The publication of the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment got
the ball rolling. And Democrats like Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) ranking member of the House
Intelligence Committee, were kicking the ball hard down the streets of Washington. On Jan. 25,
2017, I had a chance to confront Schiff personally about the lack of evidence -- something that
even Obama had acknowledged just before slipping out the door. I think our
two-minute conversation speaks volumes.
Now I absolutely look forward to dealing with Adam Schiff from my new position as CIA
director. I will ask him to show me the evidence of "Russian hacking" that he said he could not
show me on Jan. 25, 2017 – on the chance his evidence includes more than reports from the
New York Times .
Sources
Intelligence analysts put great weight, of course, on sources. The authors of the lede,
banner-headlined NYT article of Jan. 7, 2017 were Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger; Sanger
has had a particularly checkered career, while always landing on his feet. Despite his record
of parroting CIA handouts (or perhaps partly because of it), Sanger is now the NYT's chief
Washington correspondent.
Those whose memories go back more than 15 years may recall his promoting weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq as flat fact. In a July 29, 2002 article co-written with Them Shanker, for
example, Iraq's (nonexistent) "weapons of mass destruction" appear no
fewer than seven times as flat fact.
More instructive still, in May 2005, when firsthand documentary evidence from the
now-famous "Downing Street Memorandum" showed that President George W. Bush had decided by
early summer 2002 to attack Iraq, the NYT ignored it for six weeks until David Sanger
rose to the occasion with a tortured report claiming just the opposite. The title
given his article of
June 13 2005 was "Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made."
Against this peculiar reporting record, I was not inclined to take at face value the
Jan. 7, 2017 report he co-authored with Michael D. Shear – "Putin Led a Complex
Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds."
Nor am I inclined to take seriously former National Intelligence Director James
Clapper's stated views on the proclivity of Russians to be, well, just really bad people
– like it's in their genes. I plan to avail myself of the opportunity to discover whether
intelligence analysts who labored under his "aegis" were infected by his quaint view of the
Russians.
I shall ask any of the "handpicked" analysts who specialize in analysis of Russia (and,
hopefully, there are at least a few): Do you share Clapper's view, as he explained it to NBC's
Meet the Press on May 30, 2017, that Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to
co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever"? I truly do not know what to expect by way of
reply.
End of Day One
In sum, my priority for Day One is to hear both sides of the story regarding "Russian
hacking" with all cards on the table. All cards. That means no questions are out of order,
including what, if any, role the "Steele dossier" may have played in the preparation of the
Jan. 6, 2017 assessment.
I may decide to seek some independent, disinterested technical input, as well. But it should
not take me very long to figure out which of the two interpretations of alleged "Russian
hacking" is more straight-up fact-based and unbiased. That done, in the following days I shall
brief both the Chair, Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and ranking member Schiff of the House
Intelligence Committee, as well as the Chair and ranking member of its counterpart in the
Senate. I will then personally brief the NYT's David Sanger and follow closely what he and his
masters decide to do with the facts I present.
On the chance that the Times and other media might decide to play it straight, and that the
"straight" diverges from the prevailing, Clapperesque narrative of Russian perfidy, the various
mainstream outlets will face a formidable problem of their own making. Mark Twain put it this
way: "It is easier to fool people than it is to convince them they have been fooled."
And that will probably be enough for Day One.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and CIA analyst
for a total of 30 years and now servers on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Reprinted with permission from Consortium News .
"... For weeks the unfolding story in Washington has been how a cabal of conspirators in the heart of the American federal law enforcement and intelligence apparat ..."
"... Are you reading this commentary? ..."
"... To the extent that Russiagate was less about Trump than ensuring that enmity with Russia will be permanent and will continue to deepen , this latest Mueller indictment is a smashing success already. ..."
For weeks the unfolding story in Washington has been how a cabal of conspirators in the
heart of the American federal law enforcement and intelligence apparat colluded to
ensure the election of Hillary Clinton and, when that failed, to undermine the nascent
presidency of Donald Trump. Agencies tainted by this corruption include not only the FBI and
the Department of Justice (DOJ) but the Obama White House, the State Department, the NSA, and
the CIA,
plus their British sister organizations MI6 and GCHQ , possibly along with the British
Foreign Office (with the involvement of former
British ambassador to Russia Andrew Wood ) and even Number 10 Downing Street.
Those implicated form a regular rogue's gallery of the Deep State: Peter Strzok (formerly
Chief of the FBI's Counterespionage Section, then Deputy Assistant Director of the
Counterintelligence Division; busy bee Strzok is implicated not only in exonerating Hillary
from her email server crimes but initiating the Russiagate investigation in the first place,
securing a FISA warrant using the dodgy "Steele Dossier," and nailing erstwhile National
Security Adviser General Mike Flynn on a
bogus charge of "lying to the FBI "); Lisa Page (Strzok's paramour and a DOJ lawyer
formerly assigned to the all-star Democrat lineup on the Robert Mueller Russigate inquisition);
former FBI Director James Comey, former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, former
Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and – let's not forget – current Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein,
himself implicated by having signed at least one of the dubious FISA warrant requests .
Finally, there's reason to believe that former CIA Director John O.
Brennan may have been the mastermind behind the whole operation .
Not to be overlooked is the possible implication of a pack of former Democratic
administration officials, including former Attorney General Loretta Lynch,
former National Security Adviser Susan Rice , and President Barack Obama himself, who
according to text communications between Strzok and Page "wants to know everything we're
doing." Also involved is the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and Clinton operatives Sidney
Blumenthal and Cody Shearer – rendering the ignorance of Hillary herself totally
implausible.
On the British side we have "former" (suuure . . . ) MI6 spook Christopher Steele, diplomat
Wood, former GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan (who resigned a
year ago under mysterious circumstances ), and whoever they answered to in the Prime
Minister's office.
The growing sense of panic was palpable. Oh my – this is a curtain that just cannot be
allowed to be pulled back!
What to do, what to do . . .
Ah, here's the ticket – come out swinging against the main enemy. That's not even
Donald Trump. It's Russia and Vladimir Putin. Russia! Russia! Russia!
Hence the unveiling of an indictment against 13 Russian citizens
and three companies for alleged meddling in U.S. elections and various ancillary crimes.
For the sake of discussion, let's assume all the allegations in the indictment are true,
however unlikely that is to be the case. (While that would be the American legal rule for a
complaint in a civil case, this is a criminal indictment, where there is supposedly a
presumption of innocence. Rosenstein even mentioned that in his press conference, pretending
not to notice that that presumption doesn't apply to Russian Untermenschen – certainly not to
Olympic athletes and really not to Russians at all, who are presumed guilty on "genetic"
grounds .)
Based on the public announcement of the indictment by Rosenstein – who is effectively
the Attorney General in place of the pro forma holder of that office, Jeff Sessions
(R-Recused) – and on an initial examination of the indictment, and we can already draw a
few conclusions:
Finally, "collusion" is dead! If Mueller and the anti-constitutional cabal had any hint
that anyone on the Trump team cooperated with those indicted, they would have included it.
They didn't. That means that after months and months of "investigation" – or really,
setting "perjury traps" and trying to nail people on unrelated accusations, like Paul Manafort's alleged circumvention of lobbying and financial reporting laws – and wasting
however many millions of dollars, Mueller and his merry band got nothing. Zip. Zilch. Bupkes.
Nada.The fake charge that Trump colluded with the Russians is exposed as the fraud it always
was.
And yet, "collusion" still lives! But while there is no actual allegation (much less
evidence) that any American, much less anyone on the Trump team, "colluded" with the indicted
Russians, the indictment makes it clear that Moscow sought to support Trump and disparage
Hillary. Thus, Trump is guilty of being favored by Russia even if there was no actual
cooperation. It's a kind of zombie walking dead collusion, collusion by intent (of someone
else) absent actual collusion. Its purpose in the indictment is to discredit Trump as a
Russian puppet, albeit an unwitting one. The indictment says the Russian desperados supported
Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein too – so they're also Putin's dupes.
Any and every Russian equals Putin. Incredibly, nothing in the indictment points to any
connection of those indicted to the Russian government! This is on a par with the hysteria
over social media placements by "Russian interests" on account of which hysterical Senators demanded that tech
giants impose content controls , or dimwit
CIA agents getting bilked out of $100,000 by a Russian scam artist in Berlin in exchange
for – well, pretty much nothing. ( The CIA denies it , which
leads one to suspect it is true.) Paragraph 95 of the indictment points to what amounted to a
click-bait scam to fleece American merchants and social media sites from between $25 and $50
per post for promotional content. Paragraph 88 refers to "self-enrichment" as one motive of
the alleged operation. That makes a lot more sense than the bone-headed claim in the
indictment that the Russian goal was to "sow discord in the U.S. political system" by posting
content on "divisive U.S. political and social issues." What! Americans disagree about stuff?
The Russians are setting us against each other! In announcing the indictment,
Rosenstein said the Russians wanted to "promote discord in the United States and
undermine public confidence in democracy. We must not allow them to succeed." (He wagged his
finger with resolve at that point.) It evidently doesn't occur to Rosenstein that he and his
pals have undermined public confidence in our institutions by perverting them for political
ends.
Demonizing dissent. Those indicted allegedly sought to attract Americans' attention to
their diabolical machinations through appeal to hot-button issues (immigration, Black Lives
Matter, religion, etc.) and popular hashtags (#Trump2016, #TrumpTrain, #MAGA,
#Hillary4Prison). Have you taken a stand on divisive issues, Dear Reader? Have you used any
of these hashtags? Are you reading this commentary? You too might be an unwitting
Russian stooge! Vladimir Putin is inside your head! Hopefully DOJ will set up a hotline where
patriotic citizens influenced without their knowledge can now report themselves, now that
they've been alerted. Are you a thought criminal, comrade ?
An amateurish, penny-ante scheme with no results – compared to what the U.S. does.
At worst, even if all the allegations in the indictment are true – a big "if" –
it would still amount to the kind of garden-variety kicking each other under the table that a
lot of countries routinely engage in. As described in the indictment this gargantuan Russian
scheme was (as reported
by Politico ) an "expensive [sic] effort that cost millions of dollars and
employed as many as hundreds of people." Millions of dollars! Hundreds of
people! How did the American republic manage to survive the onslaught? Rosenstein was keen to
point out for the umpteenth time that nothing the Russians are alleged to have done (never
mind what they actually might have done, which is far less) had any impact on the election.
That stands in sharp contrast to the lavishly funded, multifaceted, global political
influence and meddling operations the U.S. conducts in nations around the world under the
guise of "democracy promotion." The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), along with its
Democratic and Republican sub-organizations, can be considered the flagship of a community of
ostensibly private but government-funded or subsidized organizations that provides the soft
compliment to American hard military power. The various governmental, quasi-governmental, and
nongovernmental components of this network – sometimes called the " Demintern " in
analogy to the Comintern , an organization
comparable in global ambition if differing in ideology and methods – are also
coordinated
internationally at the official level through the less-well-known " Community of Democracies ." It is often
difficult to know where the "official" entities (CIA, NATO, the State Department,
Pentagon, USAID) divide from ostensibly nongovernmental but tax dollar-supported groups (NED,
Freedom House, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) and privately funded organizations that
cooperate with them towards common goals (especially the Open Society organizations funded by
billionaire George Soros). Among the specialties of this network are often
successful "
color revolutions " targeting leaders and governments disfavored by Washington for regime
change – a far cry from the pathetic Russian operation alleged in the indictment.
"
Mitt Romney was right ." Already many of Trump's supporters are not only crowing with
satisfaction that the indictment proves there was no collusion but refocusing their gaze from
the domestic culprits within the FBI, DOJ, etc., to a bogus foreign threat. "This whole saga
just brings back the 2012 election, and the fact that Mitt Romney was right" for "suggesting
that Russia is our greatest geopolitical foe," is
the new GOP meme . To the extent that Russiagate was less about Trump than ensuring that
enmity with
Russia will be permanent and will continue to deepen , this latest Mueller indictment is
a smashing success already.
The Mueller indictment against the Russians is a well-timed effort to distract Americans'
attention from the real collusion rotting the core of our public life by shifting attention to
a foreign enemy. Many of the people behind it are the very officials who are themselves
complicit in the rot. But the sad fact is that it will probably work.
In January, McMaster quashed rumors of his departure, telling reporters "I have a job and it is my
intention to go as long and hard as I can in service of the President of the nation," adding that it
was "a tremendous honor to do this job every day."
Trump's first National Security Advisor, Michael
Flynn, resigned shortly after taking office amid a controversy over whether he lied to Vice President
Mike Pence about his contacts with Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.
On Thursday, the Pentagon directed all inquiries about McMaster to the White House. "General
McMaster works for President Trump. Any decision with regards to staff, the White House will make
those determinations," said chief spokesperson Dana White. Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary
Sarah Sanders told reporters on Tuesday that Trump "still has confidence in General McMaster."
A Source within the White House, leaking to CNN, reports that Trump can't stand McMaster's demeanor
during briefings - and that the President considers his National Security Advisor to be "gruff and
condescending."
He prefers the briefing style of someone like CIA Director Mike Pompeo or Defense Secretary
James Mattis, who patiently answer his questions, regardless of the premise. McMaster, meanwhile,
is the person who delivers the news that Trump doesn't want to hear on a daily basis, according to
the senior Republican source.
The issue is not political but mostly stylistic, as McMaster and Mattis tend to discuss
information before it is presented to the President, the same source added. -
CNN
Kelly and McMaster both declined to comment,
however Reuters' sources were quick to add that
"tensions could blow over, at least for now, as have previous episodes of discord between the
president and other top officials who have fallen out of favor."
McSinister is the essence of Goldfinger in the old James Bond fiction. One
couldn't envision a more stereotypical "worm-tonguesque" villain in charge
of our armed forces and acting presidential "advisor".
McMaster Finally Out? Pentagon Paving Way For Return To Military:
Report
My response: Looks like the POTUS is prepping for the Return
of General Flynn.
McMaster has some very suspicious associations and has been
referenced in Q-ANON posts. He was an "OBOZO" plant.
Also, it appears that "OBOZO's" LEGAL problems are growing by the
day.
"OBOZO" maybe the first POTUS in US history to be charged
with TREASON. Also, KERRY is in a DEEP PILE OF SHIT as well. He
directed the US State Department to provide 9 million dollars to her
charity. This is ladies and gentlemen of ZH is BULLSHIT!!!!!!
CORRUPTION and CRIME as far as the EYE can see for the last four
POTUS office holders. It make me ashamed of my nation at times.
May GOD bless, guide and protect President TRUMP and the TRUMP
administration as they "DRAIN THE SWAMP".
Flynn blew the whistle on Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous
Seditious Psychopath Obama, the CIA & State Dept. arming,
funding & training terror organizations.
The Criminal Deep State has had it for him ever since.
Boy you sure get a different news feed than I do.... Mine says we
have heavy ground presence in Syria (didnt under Obowel), are on
the verge of war with the NORKs after the Olympics, and our CIA
has been stirring the shit pot in Iran....
Does your news
coverage come before of after the episodes of My little pony?
The only difference between Trump and Hillary is Hillary has
better hair. Follow what Trump actually does and not what he
Tweets, HUGE difference. WE ARENT WINNING.
SecDef knows him (from in the sandbox) and might want/need him to fill a CinC
slot. The pussified O crowd cut off the balls of many of the flag ranks and
they need to be purged (Regan did that and brought in/up Starry and Papa Bear
and Vuono and Art C-ski and the other knuckle draggers).
POTUS might be
getting his foreign policy situation sorted out. McMaster hasn't ever been a
smooth team player within the Army structure--that would also endear him to
Jim, but not suit him to a staff/advisor role.
We can always blame it on Global Climate Change and the Rooskies--cover all
the bases.
Monster McMaster opening greeting to the Munich security conference, "I know OUR
good friend John McCain can't be here, as unfortunately he can't, but he brings you
good wishes"....Then he proceeded to outline Russian Election bullshit. Cyber bot
farm meddling invading Georgia BLA BLA BLA. This is why war is plausible, McMaster
is Military SWAMP.
Oh boy, some oversized ego tripping....the sheer hubris of it all....fuckers cannot
see or admit to the gross amount of meddling they have done to the world, and yet
react like little bitches when allegations are merely cooked up.
I cannot believe
that this is the
lowly
state of American political discourse in 2018 AD.
Just another Rome, only with a much bigger budget for bullshit and weaponry.
Fire him. Forget the fourth star. He is undeserving. Another scumbag trying to
upend President Trump's agenda/objectives. The scumbag conveniently doesn't
mention that the Russian Hacking didn't have an impact on the election. This
untrustworthy piece of shit never should have been brought into the fold. And
don't even think about allowing him back into the military. Fuck off you
turncoat.
This guy was the commanding officer of 3rd ACR while I was in. Only time I saw
him in Iraq was when he flew down to tell us how sorry he was, or something like
that, after we lost 1/3 of our platoon. The rest of the time he was in northern
Iraq where it was safe. While those of us unlucky enough to be in 3rd Squadron
were stuck down on the south side of Baghdad. If you read his bio they make it
out like he personally did all kinds of Rambo shit. I guess that's they way it is
for officers. Those guys will slit your throat for the next shiny thing to stick
on their uniform.
Even back then my buddy SSG Judy, just talked to him an hour
ago, told me McMaster was being groomed for bigger roles. He definitely nailed
that one.
These two and Mad Dog keep whispering "Evil Russia" at Trump and demanding US
troops keep poking a stick at the bear - meanwhile Trump knows there is no
collusion. How does that square up?
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."
Ever since US Crude Oil peaked its production in 1970, the US has known that at some point
the oil majors would have their profitability damaged, "assets" downgraded, and borrowing
capacity destroyed. At this point their shares would become worthless and they would become
bankrupt. The contagion from this would spread to transport businesses, plastics manufacture,
herbicides and pesticide production and a total collapse of Industrial Civilisation.
In anticipation of increasing Crude Oil imports, Nixon stopped the convertibility of
Dollars into Gold, thus making the Dollar entirely fiat, allowing them to print as much of
the currency as they needed.
They also began a system of obscuring oil production data, involving the DoE's EIA and the
OECD's IEA, by inventing an ever-increasing category of Undiscovered Oilfields in their
predictions, and combining Crude Oil and Condensate (from gas fields) into one category (C+C)
as if they were the same thing. As well the support of the ethanol-from-corn industry began,
even though it was uneconomic. The Global Warming problem had to be debunked, despite its
sound scientific basis. Energy-intensive manufacturing work was off-shored to cheap
labour+energy countries, and Just-in-Time delivery systems were honed.
In 2004 the price of Crude Oil rose from $28 /barrel up to $143 /b in mid-2008. This
demonstrated that there is a limit to how much business can pay for oil (around $100 /b).
Fracking became marginally economic at these prices, but the frackers never made a profit as
over-production meant prices fell to about $60 /b. The Government encourages this destructive
industry despite the fact it doesn't make any money, because the alternative is the end of
Industrial Civilisation.
Eventually though, there must come a time when there is not enough oil to power all the
cars and trucks, bulldozers, farm tractors, airplanes and ships, as well as manufacture all
the wind turbines and solar panels and electric vehicles, as well as the upgraded
transmission grid. At that point, the game will be up, and it will be time for WW3. So we
need to line up some really big enemies, and develop lots of reasons to hate them.
Thus you see the demonisation of Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela for reasons that don't
make sense from a normal perspective.
Ukraine is crucial in this Russian sense of territorial imperative. It's a tragically split
country, with part tilting toward the West and part facing eastward toward Russia. That makes
for a delicate political and geopolitical situation, but for centuries that delicate political
and geopolitical situation has been overseen by Russia. Now the West wants to end that.
Upending a duly elected (though corrupt) Ukrainian president was part of the plan. Getting
Ukraine into NATO is the endgame.
Note that the Ukrainian revolution occurred in 2014, which just happened to be the year,
according to the U.S. indictments, that Russia initiated its grand program to influence
America's 2016 elections. Kennan was right: Russia inevitably would react badly to the NATO
encirclement policy, and then America's anti-Russian cadres would cite that as evidence that
the encirclement was necessary all along. That's precisely what's happening now.
Which brings us to the fifth and final fundamental reality surrounding the revelation of
Russia's grand effort to influence the U.S. election. It was an incredible blunder. Given all
that's happened in U.S.-Russian relations this century, there probably wasn't much prospect
that those relations could ever be normalized, much less made cordial. But that is now utterly
impossible.
Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of seeking better relations with Russia. After getting
elected he repeatedly asserted in his first news conference that it would be "positive,"
"good," or "great" if "we could get along with Russia." Unlike most of America's elites, he
vowed to seek Moscow's cooperation on global issues, accepted some U.S. share of blame for the
two countries' sour relations, and acknowledged "the right of all nations to put their
interests first."
This suggested a possible dramatic turn in U.S.-Russian relations -- an end to the
encirclement push, curtailment of the hostile rhetoric, a pullback on economic sanctions, and
serious efforts to work with Russia on such nettlesome matters as Syria and Ukraine. That was
largely put on hold with the narrative of Russian meddling in the U.S. election and vague
allegations of campaign "collusion" with Russia on behalf of Trump's presidential
ambitions.
It doesn't appear likely that investigators will turn up any evidence of collusion that
rises to any kind of criminality. But it doesn't matter now, in terms of U.S.-Russian
relations, because these indictments will cement the anti-Russian sentiment of Americans for
the foreseeable future. No overtures of the kind envisioned by Trump will be possible for any
president for a long time. It won't matter that every nation does it or that America in
particular has done it or that the West's aggressive encirclement contributed to the Russian
actions. The U.S.-Russian hostility is set. Where it leads is impossible to predict, but it
won't be good. It could be tragic.
Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington, D.C., journalist and publishing executive, is
editor of The American Conservative . His latest book,President McKinley: Architect of the American Century, was
released in September.
"... Among Global Research's most popular articles in 2016. ..."
"... Hillary is Dangerous. She Means What She says? Or Does She? (M. C. GR. Editor) ..."
"... On July 3, 2015, presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton addressed a hand-picked audience at a Dartmouth College campaign event. She lied calling Iran an "existential threat to Israel I hope we are able to get a deal next week that puts a lid on (its) nuclear weapons program." ..."
Among Global Research's most popular articles in 2016.
Hillary is Dangerous. She Means What She says? Or Does She? (M. C. GR. Editor)
* * *
On July 3, 2015, presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton addressed a hand-picked audience at a Dartmouth College campaign event.
She lied calling Iran an "existential threat to Israel I hope we are able to get a deal next week that puts a lid on (its) nuclear
weapons program."
Even if we do get such a deal, we will still have major problems from Iran. They are the world's chief sponsor of terrorism.
They use proxies like Hezbollah to sow discord and create insurgencies to destabilize governments. They are taking more and
more control of a number of nations in the region and they pose an existential threat to Israel.
We have to turn our attention to working with our partners to try to reign in and prevent this continuing Iranian aggressiveness.
Fact: US and Israeli intelligence both say Iran's nuclear program has no military component. No evidence whatever suggests Tehran
wants one. Plenty indicates otherwise.
As a 2008 presidential aspirant, she addressed AIPAC's annual convention saying:
The United States stands with Israel now and forever. We have shared interests .shared ideals .common values. I have a bedrock
commitment to Israel's security.
(O)ur two nations are fighting a shared threat" against Islamic extremism. I strongly support Israel's right to self-defense
(and) believe America should aid in that defense.
I am committed to making sure that Israel maintains a military edge to meet increasing threats. I am deeply concerned about
the growing threat in Gaza (and) Hamas' campaign of terror.
No such campaign exists. The only threats Israel faces are ones it invents.
Clinton repeated tired old lies saying Hamas' charter "calls for the destruction of Israel. Iran threatens to destroy Israel."
"I support calling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard what it is: a terrorist organization. It is imperative that we get both
tough and smart about dealing with Iran before it is too late."
She backs "massive retaliation" if Iran attacks Israel, saying at the time:
" I want the Iranians to know that if I'm president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly
consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."
She endorses using cluster bombs, toxic agents and nuclear weapons in US war theaters. She calls them deterrents that "keep the
peace." She was one of only six Democrat senators opposed to blocking deployment of untested missile defense systems – first-strike
weapons entirely for offense.
*
Stephen Lendmanlives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].
His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."
This is an old method to unite the nation against external enemy. Carnage (with so much oil and gas) needs to be
destroyed. And it's working only partially with the major divisions between Trump and Hillary supporters remaining
open and unaffected by Russiagate witch hunt.
Notable quotes:
"... It is an age-old statecraft technique to seek unity within a state by depicting an external enemy or threat. Russia is the bête noire again, as it was during the Cold War years as part of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... Russophobia -- "blame it all on Russia" -- is a short-term, futile ploy to stave off the day of reckoning when furious and informed Western citizens will demand democratic restitution for their legitimate grievances. ..."
"... The dominant "official" narrative, from the US to Europe, is that "malicious" Russia is "sowing division;""eroding democratic institutions;" and "undermining public trust" in systems of governance, credibility of established political parties, and the news media. ..."
"... A particularly instructive presentation of this trope was given in a recent commentary by Texan Republican Representative Will Hurd. In his piece headlined, "Russia is our adversary" , he claims: "Russia is eroding our democracy by exploiting the nation's divisions. To save it, Americans need to begin working together." ..."
"... He contends: "When the public loses trust in the media, the Russians are winning. When the press is hyper-critical of Congress the Russians are winning. When Congress and the general public disagree the Russians are winning. When there is friction between Congress and the executive branch [the president] resulting in further erosion of trust in our democratic institutions, the Russians are winning." ..."
"... The endless, criminal wars that the US and its European NATO allies have been waging across the planet over the past two decades is one cogent reason why the public has lost faith in grandiose official claims about respecting democracy and international law. ..."
"... The US and European media have shown reprehensible dereliction of duty to inform the public accurately about their governments' warmongering intrigues. Take the example of Syria. When does the average Western citizen ever read in the corporate Western media about how the US and its NATO allies have covertly ransacked that country through weaponizing terrorist proxies? ..."
"... The destabilizing impact on societies from oppressive economic conditions is a far more plausible cause for grievance than outlandish claims made by the political class about alleged "Russian interference". ..."
"... Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV. ..."
Russophobia - "blame it all on Russia" - is a short-term, futile ploy to stave off the day of reckoning when furious
and informed Western citizens will demand democratic restitution for their legitimate grievances
It is an age-old statecraft technique to seek unity within a state by depicting an external
enemy or threat. Russia is the bête noire again, as it was during the Cold War years as
part of the Soviet Union.
But the truth is Western states are challenged by internal problems. Ironically, by denying their own internal democratic challenges, Western authorities are
only hastening their institutional demise.
Russophobia -- "blame it all on Russia" -- is a short-term, futile ploy to stave off the day
of reckoning when furious and informed Western citizens will demand democratic restitution for
their legitimate grievances.
The dominant "official" narrative, from the US to Europe, is that "malicious" Russia is
"sowing division;""eroding democratic institutions;" and "undermining public trust" in systems
of governance, credibility of established political parties, and the news media.
This narrative has shifted up a gear since the election of Donald Trump to the White House
in 2016, with accusations that the Kremlin somehow ran "influence operations" to help get him
into office. This outlandish yarn defies common sense. It is also running out of thread to keep
spinning.
Paradoxically, even though President Trump has rightly rebuffed such dubious claims of
"Russiagate" interference as "fake news", he has at other times undermined himself by
subscribing to the notion that Moscow is projecting a campaign of "subversion against the US
and its European allies." See for example the National Security Strategy he signed off in
December.
Pathetically, it's become indoctrinated belief among the Western political class that
"devious Russians" are out to "collapse" Western democracies by
"weaponizing disinformation" and spreading "fake news" through Russia-based
news outlets like RT and Sputnik.
Totalitarian-like, there seems no room for intelligent dissent among political or media
figures.
British Prime Minister Theresa May has chimed in to
accuse Moscow of "sowing division;" Dutch state intelligence claim Russia
destabilized the US presidential election; the European Union commissioner for security, Sir
Julian King, casually lampoons Russian news media as "Kremlin-orchestrated
disinformation" to destabilize the 28-nation bloc; CIA chief Mike Pompeo recently warned
that Russia is stepping up its efforts to tarnish the Congressional mid-term elections later
this year.
On and on goes the narrative that Western states are essentially victims of a nefarious
Russian assault to bring about collapse.
A particularly instructive presentation of this trope was given in a recent commentary by Texan
Republican Representative Will Hurd. In his piece headlined, "Russia is our adversary"
, he claims: "Russia is eroding our democracy by exploiting the nation's divisions. To save
it, Americans need to begin working together."
Congressman Hurd asserts: "Russia has one simple goal: to erode trust in our democratic
institutions It has weaponized disinformation to achieve this goal for decades in Eastern and
Central Europe; in 2016, Western Europe and America were aggressively targeted as
well."
Lamentably, all these claims above are made with scant, or no, verifiable evidence. It is
simply a Big Lie technique of relentless repetition transforming itself into "fact"
.
It's instructive to follow Congressman Hurd's thought-process a bit further.
He contends: "When the public loses trust in the media, the Russians are winning. When
the press is hyper-critical of Congress the Russians are winning. When Congress and the general
public disagree the Russians are winning. When there is friction between Congress and the
executive branch [the president] resulting in further erosion of trust in our democratic
institutions, the Russians are winning."
As a putative solution, Representative Hurd calls for "a national counter-disinformation
strategy" against Russian "influence operations" , adding, "Americans must
stop contributing to a corrosive political environment".
The latter is a chilling advocacy of uniformity tantamount to a police state whereby any
dissent or criticism is a "thought-crime."
It is, however, such anti-democratic and paranoid thinking by Western politicians -- aided
and abetted by dutiful media -- that is killing democracy from within, not some supposed
foreign enemy.
There is evidently a foreboding sense of demise in authority and legitimacy among Western
states, even if the real cause for the demise is ignored or denied. Systems of governance,
politicians of all stripes, and institutions like the established media and intelligence
services are increasingly held in contempt and distrust by the public.
Whose fault is that loss of political and moral authority? Western governments and
institutions need to take a look in the mirror.
The endless, criminal wars that the US and its European NATO allies have been waging across
the planet over the past two decades is one cogent reason why the public has lost faith in
grandiose official claims about respecting democracy and international law.
The US and European media have shown reprehensible dereliction of duty to inform the public
accurately about their governments' warmongering intrigues. Take the example of Syria. When
does the average Western citizen ever read in the corporate Western media about how the US and
its NATO allies have covertly ransacked that country through weaponizing terrorist proxies?
How then can properly informed citizens be expected to have respect for such criminal
government policies and the complicit news media covering up for their crimes?
Western public disaffection with governments, politicians and media surely stems also from
the grotesque gulf in social inequality and poverty among citizens from slavish adherence to
economic policies that enrich the wealthy while consigning the vast majority to unrelenting
austerity.
The destabilizing impact on societies from oppressive economic conditions is a far more
plausible cause for grievance than outlandish claims made by the political class about alleged
"Russian interference".
Yet the Western media indulge this fantastical "Russiagate" escapism instead of campaigning
on real social problems facing ordinary citizens. No wonder such media are then viewed with
disdain and distrust. Adding insult to injury, these media want the public to believe Russia is
the enemy?
Instead of acknowledging and addressing real threats to citizens: economic insecurity,
eroding education and health services, lost career opportunities for future generations, the
looming dangers of ecological adversity, wars prompted by Western governments trashing
international and diplomacy, and so on -- the Western public is insultingly plied with corny
tales of Russia's "malign influence" and "assault on democracy."
Just think of the disproportionate amount of media attention and public resources wasted on
the Russiagate scandal over the past year. And now gradually emerging is the real scandal that
the American FBI probably colluded with the Obama administration to corrupt the democratic
process against Trump.
Again, is there any wonder the public has sheer contempt and distrust for "authorities" that
have been lying through their teeth and playing them for fools?
The collapsing state of Western democracies has got nothing to do with Russia. The
Russophobia of blaming Russia for the demise of Western institutions is an attempt at
scapegoating for the very real problems facing governments and institutions like the news
media. Those problems are inherent and wholly owned by these governments owing to chronic
anti-democratic functioning, as well as systematic violation of international law in their
pursuit of criminal wars and other subterfuges for regime-change objectives.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several
languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a
scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For
over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and
Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation
and Press TV.
Nunes chances to bring perpetrators to justice are close to zero. The Deep State controls the Washington, DC and can
withstand sporadic attacks.
It is an extremly courageous of Devin Nunes to give this interview.
Notable quotes:
"... Throwing down the gauntlet on alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by the Department of Justice and the FBI, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) stated that there could be legal consequences for officials who may have misled the FISA court. "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said. "The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created." ..."
"... Nunes took this highly unusual, no-holds-barred stance during an interview with Emmy-award winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson , which aired on Sunday. ..."
"... He unapologetically averred that, yes, a criminal trial might well be the outcome. "DOJ and FBI are not above the law," he stated emphatically. "If they are committing abuse before a secret court getting warrants on American citizens, you're darn right that we're going to put them on trial." ..."
"... The stakes are very high. Current and former senior officials -- and not only from DOJ and FBI, but from other agencies like the CIA and NSA, whom documents and testimony show were involved in providing faulty information to justify a FISA warrant to monitor former Trump campaign official Carter Page -- may suddenly find themselves in considerable legal jeopardy. Like, felony territory. ..."
"... On the other hand, the presumptive perps have not run into a chairman like Nunes in four decades, since Congressmen Lucien Nedzi (D-Mich.), Otis Pike (D-NY), and Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) ran tough, explosive hearings on the abuses of a previous generation deep state, including massive domestic spying revealed by quintessential investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in December 1974. (Actually, this is largely why the congressional intelligence oversight committees were later established, and why the FISA law was passed in 1978.) ..."
"... At this point, one is tempted to say plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose ..."
"... One glaring sign of the media's unwillingness to displease corporate masters and Official Washington is the harsh reality that Hersh's most recent explosive investigations, using his large array of government sources to explore front-burner issues, have not been able to find a home in any English-speaking newspaper or journal. ..."
"... On this point, Nunes said, "In the last administration they were unmasking hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of Americans' names. They were unmasking for what I would say, for lack of a better definition, were for political purposes." ..."
"... It is real courageous of Devin Nunes to give this interview. It is not only the accountability to law that is at stake in U.S., but the Whole World is imperiled with what happens in Washington. But as many have written before in comments about this complete moral collapse of the Entire West, I am afraid, it is all going to be swept under the rug. We have to just keep the fingers crossed. ..."
"... I have never seen such media bias against a sitting president in my lifetime, not even against Richard Nixon when they at least practiced decorum and feigned objectivity even if they were secretly cheering on his demise. I will reiterate here that I do not champion the man but rather due process under our constitution, which has been made a travesty from the moment of Clinton's loss at the polls. ..."
"... I completely agree with you Realist. I am not Trump's fan or supporter of his agenda, in fact, in many things quite the opposite of it. However, he raised some very valid points about the the domestic economy and other issues, and about the need to stop interventions in foreign countries, and getting along Russia, and the need to rebuild country's manufacturing system again. He was duly elected by the people, and he should have been given the support to pursue what he promised. But it did not happen. ..."
"... Although it's being done for the wrong reasons, I am nevertheless looking forward to seeing our out-of-control intelligence agencies being put in their place. If I were president and my party controlled both houses of Congress, you'd better believe I'd be looking to dismantle the national surveillance state and reduce the military budget to a "mere" $250 billion annually. ..."
"... The post 9-11 wars of aggression, massive surveillance, torture and other war crimes were sold to the American public as only to be inflicted on foreigners, i.e. "we fight them over there so we don't fight them here." But the blowback has now turned America's schools, malls, workplaces, concerts and churches into war zones and little by little, the disinformation ops, "regime change" know-how and other accoutrements of perpetual war (the fool's errand of gaining full spectrum dominance over the rest of the world) have been turned inward on the American people, including powerful American officials themselves. So it would seem to be a good thing that some politicians like Nunes have finally seen the light exactly as Frank Church did -- only when they themselves began to reap the negative consequences of what they thought would only negatively impact other, lesser people. ..."
"... But there is more to it, as some have pointed out in comments above, there are some intra-party quarrels going on in Washington to take the upper hand. Regarding foreign policy, National Security State and surveillance, and other such issues, both parties are joined at the hip. ..."
"... It is instructive to read the comments on any NYT article on this subject. The comments are clearly written by intelligent, well-educated individuals – who parrot the Deep State's anti-Russian propaganda as if they were the dumbest of the "Better dead than Red!" 50s McCarthyites. ..."
"... The new McCarthyites are actually stupider and more authoritarian than their sad fore-bearers, because they could pierce the Deep States lies with 30 minutes of online research, but they prefer tribalism and ignorance, instead. ..."
"... Trump started going head to head with the intel folks, but has backed down a lot now. Let's hope Nunes et al hang in there and keep the pressure on these despicable criminals who hide behind governmental powers. ..."
"... Somehow I don't think Nunes or his committee is capable of reigning in Frankenstein. His "constitutuents"" are not likely to allow it and although the monster was pieced together from many body parts its instincts for self-preservation are formidable. Nevertheless, I would applaud anyone who makes the effort. ..."
"... Note that after saying the Russians are indicted for interfering in the election, and spending 5 minutes on this, at the 5 minute 20 second mark Rosenstein says there is no evidence that the Russians had any affect [sic] on the election! So what we have is the Deputy Attorney General of the United States announcing an indictment for which he says there is no evidence! ..."
"... In the world of cypher espionage I have no knowledge, but if Russia does hang out in it well then I'm sure the U.S. is already there to do what it must to defend it's cypher security. So that's a wash, but this insane Russia-Gate distraction was originally a way to deflect attention from Hillary & Debbie's putting the screws to Socialist Sanders . then Russia-Gate became a MSM driven coup to oust Trump from his Electoral won presidential office. ..."
"... Impossible to get the whole Gorgon's head, anyway, in such a corrupt system as we have ..."
"... Ray, do you think Trump has made a deal: he'll allow escalations against Russia, and in return the Deep State will leave him alone? If so, does that portend that this will fizzle out? ..."
"... While the shiny ball, smoke and mirrors psychological operation known as "Russiagate" has begun running on fumes before the gas tank finally runs dry, the major revelation of the Clinton WikiLeaks emails describing Saudi/Qatari financing of ISIS drops further down the memory hole. There's nothing like success ..."
House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes has stated that "DOJ and FBI are not above
the law," and could face legal consequences for alleged abuses of the FISA court, reports Ray
McGovern.
Throwing down the gauntlet on alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) by the Department of Justice and the FBI, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes
(R-Calif.) stated that there could be legal consequences for officials who may have misled the
FISA court. "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said. "The reason
Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created."
Attkisson said she had invited both Nunes and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member
Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) but that only Nunes agreed. She asked him about Schiff's charge that
Nunes' goal was "to put the FBI and DOJ on trial." What followed was very atypical bluntness --
candor normally considered quite unacceptable in polite circles of the Washington
Establishment.
Rather than play the diplomat and disavow what Schiff contended was Nunes' goal, Nunes said,
in effect, let the chips fall where they may. He unapologetically averred that, yes, a
criminal trial might well be the outcome. "DOJ and FBI are not above the law," he stated
emphatically. "If they are committing abuse before a secret court getting warrants on American
citizens, you're darn right that we're going to put them on trial."
Die Is Cast
The stakes are very high. Current and former senior officials -- and not only from DOJ
and FBI, but from other agencies like the CIA and NSA, whom documents and testimony show were
involved in providing faulty information to justify a FISA warrant to monitor former Trump
campaign official Carter Page -- may suddenly find themselves in considerable legal jeopardy.
Like, felony territory.
This was not supposed to happen. Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in, remember? Back when the FISA
surveillance warrant of Page was obtained, just weeks before the November 2016 election, there
seemed to be no need to hide tracks, because, even if these extracurricular activities were
discovered, the perps would have looked forward to award certificates rather than legal
problems under a Trump presidency.
Thus, the knives will be coming out. Mostly because the mainstream media will make a major
effort -- together with Schiff-mates in the Democratic Party -- to marginalize Nunes, those who
find themselves in jeopardy can be expected to push back strongly.
If past is precedent, they will be confident that, with their powerful allies within the
FBI/DOJ/CIA "Deep State" they will be able to counter Nunes and show him and the other
congressional investigation committee chairs, where the power lies. The conventional wisdom is
that Nunes and the others have bit off far more than they can chew. And the odds do not favor
folks, including oversight committee chairs, who buck the system.
Staying Power
On the other hand, the presumptive perps have not run into a chairman like Nunes in four
decades, since Congressmen Lucien Nedzi (D-Mich.), Otis Pike (D-NY), and Sen. Frank Church
(D-Idaho) ran tough, explosive hearings on the abuses of a previous generation deep state,
including massive domestic spying revealed by quintessential investigative reporter Seymour
Hersh in December 1974. (Actually, this is largely why the congressional intelligence oversight
committees were later established, and why the FISA law was passed in 1978.)
At this point, one is tempted to say plus ça change, plus c'est la même
chose -- or the more things change, the more they stay the same -- but that would be only
half correct in this context. Yes, scoundrels will always take liberties with the law to spy on
others. But the huge difference today is that mainstream media have no room for those who
uncover government crimes and abuse. And this will be a major impediment to efforts by Nunes
and other committee chairs to inform the public.
One glaring sign of the media's unwillingness to displease corporate masters and
Official Washington is the harsh reality that Hersh's most recent explosive investigations,
using his large array of government sources to explore front-burner issues, have not been able
to find a home in any English-speaking newspaper or journal. In a sense, this provides
what might be called a "confidence-building" factor, giving some assurance to deep-state perps
that they will be able to ride this out, and that congressional committee chairs will once
again learn to know their (subservient) place.
Much will depend on whether top DOJ and FBI officials can bring themselves to reverse course
and give priority to the oath they took to support and defend the Constitution of the United
States against all enemies foreign and domestic. This should not be too much to hope for, but
it will require uncommon courage in facing up honestly to the major misdeeds appear to have
occurred -- and letting the chips fall where they may. Besides, it would be the right thing to
do.
Nunes is projecting calm confidence that once he and Trey Gowdey (R-Tenn.), chair of the
House Oversight Committee, release documentary evidence showing what their investigations have
turned up, it will be hard for DOJ and FBI officials to dissimulate.
In Other News
In the interview with Attkisson, Nunes covered a number of other significant issues:
The
committee is closing down its investigation into possible collusion between Moscow and the
Trump campaign; no evidence of collusion was found. The apparently widespread practice of
"unmasking" the identities of Americans under surveillance. On this point, Nunes said, "In
the last administration they were unmasking hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of Americans'
names. They were unmasking for what I would say, for lack of a better definition, were for
political purposes." Asked about Schiff's criticism that Nunes behaved improperly on what
he called the "midnight run to the White House," Nunes responded that the stories were untrue.
"Well, most of the time I ignore political nonsense in this town," he said. "What I will say is
that all of those stories were totally fake from the beginning."
Not since Watergate has there been so high a degree of political tension here in Washington
but the stakes for our Republic are even higher this time. Assuming abuse of FISA court
procedures is documented and those responsible for playing fast and loose with the required
justification for legal warrants are not held to account, the division of powers enshrined in
the Constitution will be in peril.
A denouement of some kind can be expected in the coming months. Stay tuned.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Savior in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is co-founder of
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Skip Scott , February 19, 2018 at 9:38 am
Thanks Ray for another great article. One can only hope that Nunes is successful. However,
like you say, the MSM is now complicit with the "Deep State", so the fight for justice
becomes much harder. One also has to remember Schumer's "six ways from Sunday" applies
equally to the congress as it does to the president. I hardly ever watch TV news, but
recently I've been subjected to it, and I've seen a deluge of fluff pieces on our so-called
Intelligence Agencies. I would love to see Trump give a speech (instead of a tweet) directly
to the American people letting them know what rascals like Brennan, Clapper, et al have been
up to.
Bob Van Noy , February 19, 2018 at 12:51 pm
This may be the best broadcast tv journalism in many years, read Sharyl Attkisson's story,
"Stonewalled" (I will link the commentary page to that book for thorough readers). And thank
you Nat, Ray McGovern & CN
An excellent and very timely article by Ray McGovern. Lawlessness, greed, complete
subservience to Wall Street Finance and other Powers, insanity, and utter inhumanity prevails
in present day Ruling Establishment in Washington. Obama, "the hope and change" Con Artist
for whose election, being democrats we worked so hard in 2008 turned to be the biggest
perpetrator of this lawlessness and responsible for fanning the flames still further in
starting a new Cold War.
It is real courageous of Devin Nunes to give this interview. It is not only the
accountability to law that is at stake in U.S., but the Whole World is imperiled with what
happens in Washington. But as many have written before in comments about this complete moral
collapse of the Entire West, I am afraid, it is all going to be swept under the rug. We have
to just keep the fingers crossed.
Howard Dean just said yesterday that Nunes and people like him belong in jail. Now can you
believe it, how low these so called liberal democrats have come to? Looking at the pictures
of Adam Schiff, Howard Dean, and others in their company, I literally feel sick in the
stomach. And one asks the essential question: "did not their parents teach them any honesty
or moral principles in young age?".
Abbybwood , February 19, 2018 at 3:54 pm
But what he said is very confusing. First he says that Congress has no way to prosecute the DOJ/FBI for wrong doing then at
the end he says Congress will need to prosecute the DOJ/FBI if necessary. Either Congress has the ability to prosecute the DOJ/FBI and issue indictments and set up
Grand Juries or they don't.
Somebody needs to find out, Constitutionally, what the solution is when the DOJ/FBI at the
highest levels become the criminals. WHO has the power to indict/convict these individuals??
Sam F , February 19, 2018 at 10:36 pm
A special prosecutor (Mueller's position) is appointed by the Pres or AG.
Annie , February 19, 2018 at 3:20 pm
From what I've heard expressed by a few FBI people, you don't come before a court, but a
judge, one person, and they are known to rubber stamp almost everything. So they should be
investigated too.
Realist , February 19, 2018 at 5:02 pm
I have never seen such media bias against a sitting president in my lifetime, not even
against Richard Nixon when they at least practiced decorum and feigned objectivity even if
they were secretly cheering on his demise. I will reiterate here that I do not champion the
man but rather due process under our constitution, which has been made a travesty from the
moment of Clinton's loss at the polls.
Dave P. , February 19, 2018 at 7:56 pm
I completely agree with you Realist. I am not Trump's fan or supporter of his agenda, in
fact, in many things quite the opposite of it. However, he raised some very valid points
about the the domestic economy and other issues, and about the need to stop interventions in
foreign countries, and getting along Russia, and the need to rebuild country's manufacturing
system again. He was duly elected by the people, and he should have been given the support to
pursue what he promised. But it did not happen. We would not know now what he actually wanted
to accomplish.
Sam F , February 19, 2018 at 10:41 pm
Yes, neither party nor the mass media shows concern for the Constitution or for the
people. As the propaganda agency, the mass media are primarily responsible. The
zionist/WallSt/MIC oligarchy have consolidated control over mass media, secret agencies, and
elections, but not without factions.
Although it's being done for the wrong reasons, I am nevertheless looking forward to
seeing our out-of-control intelligence agencies being put in their place. If I were president
and my party controlled both houses of Congress, you'd better believe I'd be looking to
dismantle the national surveillance state and reduce the military budget to a "mere" $250
billion annually.
Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 11:09 am
Michael I hear ya. Yes, there is a civil war of sorts going on in DC, and yes it would be
a wonderful thing to rid our bureaucracy of all the slim that is in it, but taking Jiminy
Cricket's good advice to heart would be so much more fruitful to if you and I would only
sing;
'When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires will come to you"
Now that song will be stuck in my head all day .got any Journey? Joe
Coleen Rowley , February 19, 2018 at 3:27 pm
It's true that people generally do not care when bad practices, policies or violence is
inflicted on others and not on themselves. Of course that's stupid because it's just a matter
of time before "blowback" occurs (as the CIA euphemistically labeled how doing unto others
eventually boomerangs back on perpetrators). Going back to the Church Committee and how that
bit of accountability finally happened, it only got off the ground when Frank Church and
other Senators found THEMSELVES in the crosshairs of FBI Cointelpro; CIA's "CHAOS" and NSA's
"Minaret" surveillance.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/09/25/secret-cold-war-documents-reveal-nsa-spied-on-senators/
(To this day, only 7 of the 1000 or so Americans targeted by the NSA during the Vietnam War
have been discovered but their identities are telling.)
The post 9-11 wars of aggression, massive surveillance, torture and other war crimes were
sold to the American public as only to be inflicted on foreigners, i.e. "we fight them over
there so we don't fight them here." But the blowback has now turned America's schools, malls,
workplaces, concerts and churches into war zones and little by little, the disinformation
ops, "regime change" know-how and other accoutrements of perpetual war (the fool's errand of
gaining full spectrum dominance over the rest of the world) have been turned inward on the
American people, including powerful American officials themselves. So it would seem to be a
good thing that some politicians like Nunes have finally seen the light exactly as Frank
Church did -- only when they themselves began to reap the negative consequences of what they
thought would only negatively impact other, lesser people.
BobS , February 19, 2018 at 4:50 pm
" the blowback has now turned America's schools, malls, workplaces, concerts and churches
into war zones"
"blowback" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, if you're referring specifically to
"post 9-11 wars of aggression, massive surveillance, torture and other war crimes". Whenever
the incidents have had a political agenda attached, it's more often than not been of the
domestic right-wing variety. And of course, all of them have been facilitated by easy
civilian access to hardware that was originally developed by the military (ours and the
Soviets) to efficiently kill/incapacitate large numbers of enemy fighters.
Gregory Herr , February 19, 2018 at 7:30 pm
BobS fails to understand that blowback encapsulates more than "revenge". "Forever war" and
all Colleen mentions that goes with it has had societal impact because violence is glorified
as a "solution" and feelings of suspicion and antagonism become part of the dark
undertow.
Sam F , February 19, 2018 at 10:54 pm
Well said, Colleen. Let us hope that Nunes is not merely acting the part. I wonder whether
the greatest secrets of domestic spying are now so compartmentalized and controlled that only
those most dependent upon their agency could blow the whistle.
Annie , February 19, 2018 at 4:23 pm
This is not to be compared to spying on citizens, which is unacceptable, but they tried to
undermine a presidency, whether you like Trump or not, and at the same time it allowed them
to push their cold war agenda. I remember Clinton's campaign manager coming out right after
the e-mail dump that said the Russians did it. And didn't Obama send a lot of those Russian
ambassadors packing? They should be investigated, as should the FISA court itself. Perhaps if
Trump didn't have this charge of colluding with Russia he might have been able to be more
diplomatic on that score. Now, they made sure he would never be getting along with Russia.
What they have now is a bunch of Russians acting on their own that allegedly interfered in
our elections and created political discord, which is absurd, since the democrats are mainly
responsible for this nonsense, as is the FBI and DOJ. I was a democrat, but no more.
Dave P. , February 19, 2018 at 4:52 pm
Annie, you are right on that. However, Coleen Rowely has also made some very good
observations in her comments. But there is more to it, as some have pointed out in comments
above, there are some intra-party quarrels going on in Washington to take the upper hand.
Regarding foreign policy, National Security State and surveillance, and other such issues,
both parties are joined at the hip.
Gregory Herr , February 19, 2018 at 7:42 pm
I wouldn't completely discount the idea that Nunes' sense of responsibility has been
activated by being a close witness to what is blatant wrongdoing. But then my cynicism is
still tempered by the belief that sometimes people are compelled to do what's right just
because it's what's right. Silly me.
Virginia , February 19, 2018 at 10:34 am
Me, too, Michael, to " dismantle the national surveillance state and reduce the military
budget to a 'mere' $250 billion annually."
Thanks to Ray McGovern for another good article with link to interview. Good to hear they
will finally be closing the Mueller investigation (Nunes was straightforward about that, no
there there) and will likely be investigating the FBI and DOJ.
Applause goes to David Nunes. Keep up the good work.
Abbybwood , February 19, 2018 at 4:03 pm
But I see where Trump asked for nearly one TRILLION dollars for the military and got
it.
Pandas4peace , February 19, 2018 at 10:24 am
Where can we get access to Seymour Hersh's "recent explosive investigations" even if they
are written in German?
"On June 25th 2017 the German newspaper, Welt, published the latest piece by Seymour
Hersh, countering the "mainstream" narrative around the April 4th 2017 Khan Sheikhoun
chemical attack in Syria."
Consortiumnews.com publishes and comments on everything Pulitzer Prize winning Sy Hersh
does. The problem is that he is BANNED from English-language pubs -- simply banned and even
kept off erstwhile "liberal" TV and radio programs. Amy Goodman, for example, has ALWAYS had
Sy on when he had a new story until this one. She would not touch it; these days prefers to
go with the "White Helmets" of this world. O Tempora, O Mores. Sad.
So, in sum, the problem is a very basic one. Sy does not publish until he has nailed down
every significant detail and, since he is so well plugged in with many longtime, trusted
sources to sift through, that takes a while for a bit story -- as all of them are. And when
he is ready to publish, he hears folks whisper "Leper" as he gets close to an editorial
office. It really IS that bad. We owe the op-ed editor at die Welt our thanks.
Btw: The Consortiumnews.com main page has a SEARCH button that I find very handy. Try to
search on Seymour Hersh. Same goes for easily searchable raymcgovern.com, my website.
Ray
David Otness , February 19, 2018 at 5:37 pm
The London Review of Books has been publishing Hersh's work. That's one source.
The ostracizing of Sy Hersh is a major -- if highly depressing -- story in and of itself.
But he is irrepressible. I do not think he is going to silently steal away any time soon.
Ray McGovern
Kim Dixon , February 19, 2018 at 10:32 am
Can anyone imagine the Neocon WashPo, or the NYT (or CBS, or CNN, or ) committing actual
journalism, as this story progresses?
That, and the DNC's commitment to the DNC to the Russia Did It!™ canard, will ensure
that real revelations go nowhere.
It is instructive to read the comments on any NYT article on this subject. The comments
are clearly written by intelligent, well-educated individuals – who parrot the Deep
State's anti-Russian propaganda as if they were the dumbest of the "Better dead than Red!"
50s McCarthyites.
The new McCarthyites are actually stupider and more authoritarian than their sad
fore-bearers, because they could pierce the Deep States lies with 30 minutes of online
research, but they prefer tribalism and ignorance, instead.
Lois Gagnon , February 19, 2018 at 1:01 pm
You got that right! I live in the 5 college area in Massachusetts. Plenty of those types
around here playing activists. They fit your description. I can't stand to be in the same
room with any of them. They may as well be from Mars.
Nancy , February 19, 2018 at 2:47 pm
I agree. The average working person has more common sense than the so-called intelligent,
educated class. I suspect their views reflect the fact that they are very comfortable,
financially, with the status quo, and don't want any real change.
mike k , February 19, 2018 at 10:35 am
Trump started going head to head with the intel folks, but has backed down a lot now.
Let's hope Nunes et al hang in there and keep the pressure on these despicable criminals who
hide behind governmental powers. When you allow people to do whatever they want in secret
with no oversight, you can expect them to abuse their power. The basic question all this
leads to is "who is running this country and making crucial decisions about war and peace, or
fascism and democracy"?
Somehow I don't think Nunes or his committee is capable of reigning in Frankenstein. His
"constitutuents"" are not likely to allow it and although the monster was pieced together
from many body parts its instincts for self-preservation are formidable. Nevertheless, I
would applaud anyone who makes the effort.
Thanks BobH, that's an excellent rant, thanks for passing it along.
Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 10:58 am
The only way any trail that Nunes could even begin to make magically appear to happen
before our weary eyes will happen only, and I say only, will appear because it will be good
for tv ratings. Enforcing Constitutional law, I mean who does that anymore? Why today in our
nation's capital we have congressional people asking the opposite of what Ben Franklin warned
us good citizens about as the swamp critters are saying, 'Constitution how can we lose it'.
You know this Ray that these crooks and crookettes in DC think that the U.S. Constitution is
so passé and so anciently colonial that they hear Jefferson saying, 'ignore this
stupid document, I was drunk with Adams and Franklin when I wrote it. It was all a big
mistake.' Or something like that, but Constitutional law we don't need no stink'n
Constitutional law, now get back to your part time work. (Whip cracking sound)
Hey Ray this whole fiasco does what is most important in this new American century, this
fiasco is entertaining and the ratings are going through the roof so with that what more
could a red blooded good American ask for now pass the tv remote.
Note that after saying the Russians are indicted for interfering in the
election, and spending 5 minutes on this, at the 5 minute 20 second mark Rosenstein says
there is no evidence that the Russians had any affect [sic] on the election! So what
we have is the Deputy Attorney General of the United States announcing an indictment for
which he says there is no evidence!
If we take Roberts' statement at face value, he may have inadvertenly mischaracterized
Rosenstein's statement. According to Roberts, Rosenstein said there is no evidence of an
effect on the election, but it does not follow from that that Rosenstein is saying that there
is no evidence of interference. There may have been "interference" that had no impact. And,
of course, there is the question, just what is meant by "interference" in this context?
I share the frustration many commenters have about the entire "Russiagate" narrative, but
I think it is important to be careful in how we evaluate these statements. It may all be a
"nothinburger," but it is important to describe things carefully and correctly. Otherwise,
one ends up inadvertently setting up a straw man for someone else to knock down.
Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 10:25 pm
I share the stress you do blimblax that you and all who stay on this Russia-Gate pay-ops
suffer, but the way this crooked nail investigation has been going, mostly distorted by the
press coverage, your argument about the interpretation of Rosenstein's words to the general
public will be like splitting hairs with bald people . they just won't get it, and why,
because I'm not sure the vast amount of Americans get it now. They got turned off along time
ago back when the FBI didn't produce Trump performing his much heard about Steele Dossier
acclaimed Water Sports in his Moscow Obama's Presidential Suite sick, yes, but it's the
truth. No pictures, no believe you.
Personally I have never doubted any Russian influence in the way of statements, or essays,
but this contribution of opinion is to be expected from any well thinking country, or nation
if you'd rather of the world. Plus the Russians spending wasn't even close to any real
fraction of what both U.S. Presidential candidate spend on their campaigns, get real.
In the world of cypher espionage I have no knowledge, but if Russia does hang out in it
well then I'm sure the U.S. is already there to do what it must to defend it's cypher
security. So that's a wash, but this insane Russia-Gate distraction was originally a way to
deflect attention from Hillary & Debbie's putting the screws to Socialist Sanders . then
Russia-Gate became a MSM driven coup to oust Trump from his Electoral won presidential
office.
We could argue to how Trump,should be questioned, or even brought up on impeachment
charges, but not for this particular Russia interference into our so well guarded American
democracy. In fact we Americans don't need any Russian help at bringing our American
democracy down, because we Americans already did that with the Patriot Act as among a few
many other things. Joe
Somehow many Democrats are convinced that the FBI/DOJ did nothing wrong with regards to
the FISA warrants. And they're still convinced that Trump colluded with Putin. Nothing will
change their minds, it's hopeless.
Lois Gagnon , February 19, 2018 at 4:17 pm
It is indeed surreal to watch people who classify themselves as the left undermining the
left by supporting the very agencies whose sole purpose from their inception is to destroy
the left.
As David William Pear put it at OpEd News, "I don't think even Orwell has a scene like
this: anti-authoritarian dissidents endorse more authoritarian means to weed out
authoritarians resulting in authoritarians having more control to weed out dissidents."
The Deep State is very, very deep, and we're "Knee Deep in the Big Muddy" (Pete Seeger).
Anybody knows the US Deep State was thoroughly entrenched by Reagan's time. It's overdue not
to let this deep state corruption harden to concrete. I support neither party until there is
a course correction, and Nunes makes valid points in support of a correction. Thanks,
Ray.
BobS , February 19, 2018 at 11:58 am
Thin skinned too, eh Ray?
You're right, of course- Russia analysts at the CIA did stellar work in the 1980s.
Joe Tedesky , February 19, 2018 at 12:01 pm
No BobS it's you with your thickhead that doesn't get it. Keep it up BobS, because
eventually you are going to say something funny. Take care. Joe
Will Nunes or any conservative go after the thousands of illegal acts perpetrated by
conservatives??? NO! Nunes, along with every conservative traitor in America (republican or
democrat) needs to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The conservative agenda is
not moral or constitutional.
BobS , February 19, 2018 at 1:09 pm
Considering their disregard for law as well as their worship of authoritarianism
(exercised against the proper targets, of course), I'd say it's more than "self-enrichment"
that drives conservatives, both ancient and modern.
Deniz , February 19, 2018 at 1:58 pm
Perhaps that is an issue, but I am unclear precisely what is wrong in Nunes position that
he is relying on Gowdy, an undeniably sharp, precise, prosecutor, to review the examined
material. Watching both Nunes and Gowdy in sessions, I would have probably, and gladly, made
the same decision. It also make sense politically that they cover for each other, one person
is expendable and takes the heat – Nunes, while the other – Gowdy, an upward star
of the party, who probably ran the whole investigation anyway, keeps his hands clean.
BobS , February 19, 2018 at 2:09 pm
The always partisan "upward star" Trey 'BENGHAZI!!!' Gowdy announced his retirement from
congress last month due to his being "sick of hyper-partisanship".
And let me show you this bridge I'm selling
Deniz , February 19, 2018 at 2:32 pm
In fact, I would greatly enjoy a discussion on weapons transfers from Libya to Erdogan to
Al – Qaeda via Clinton. This is actually one of my favorite topics. So have it.
Deniz , February 19, 2018 at 5:34 pm
So what is your argument, that we should be loyal to our crime family and not theirs?
Or do you think Hillary, "We came, we saw, he died" or Mueller, of nothing to see here on
9/11 notoriety are the sort of people we should be defending.
Impossible to get the whole Gorgon's head, anyway, in such a corrupt system as we have.
Why else are we in such a mess? Both GOP and Democrats have not served the people, so we
should therefore give up trying to address any abuse?
Antiwar7 , February 19, 2018 at 12:35 pm
Ray, do you think Trump has made a deal: he'll allow escalations against Russia, and in
return the Deep State will leave him alone? If so, does that portend that this will fizzle
out?
Gregory Herr , February 19, 2018 at 8:14 pm
So you are privy to the briefings in question. Just because Reagan bloated the military
budget doesn't mean he was being fed false intelligence by McGovern.
On the other hand, it is well publicized that Cheney twisted arms at Langley and Tenet
obliged and Rummy worked the Iraq angle as well. We also had the Downing Street Memo and the
Powell fiasco and Valerie Plame. Ray was right to be indignant.
While the shiny ball, smoke and mirrors psychological operation known as "Russiagate" has
begun running on fumes before the gas tank finally runs dry, the major revelation of the
Clinton WikiLeaks emails describing Saudi/Qatari financing of ISIS drops further down the
memory hole. There's nothing like success
Drew Hunkins , February 19, 2018 at 3:59 pm
Good point Mr. Alatalo. The Saudi-Zio Terror Network gets away with murder, literally and
figuratively and of course the Saudi-Zio Terror Network NEVER, EVER interferes in ANY
elections in the United States, no never.
Thank you Paul E. Merrell, J.D. I have been convinced from the beginning of all of this
that this was the line to Wikileaks. Now if we could only get a real investigation into
Seth's murder.
Stop Bush and Clinton , February 19, 2018 at 7:34 pm
"We found that they broke a vast number of laws, did surveillance of a competitor with a
warrant based on fake evidence, all adding up to treason worse than Watergate. But we think
that no reasonable prosecutor would file charges .."
-- The FBI
Mueller was the person responsible for investigation of 911. That fact alone tells you all as for what we can
expect.
Notable quotes:
"... NO actual physical proof has been presented to the public to substantiate claims that Russia hacked the DNC ..."
"... There is NO proof (only allegations) of collusion between Trump's campaign and the Kremlin ..."
"... Social media efforts by Russian trolls to influence the election were minimal in the extreme, laughably amateurish and completely ineffective ..."
"... Glenn Greenwald has spent the past year documenting in detail the large volume of fake anti-Russian "news" generated by the MSM (see GG at The Intercept) ..."
"... There is NO connection between the Russian government and the 13 private citizens recently indicted for their pathetic and ineffectual activity as part of a troll farm ..."
"... Thanks to the paranoid, xenophobic, Russia-bashing nationalistic propaganda that is being promoted by our military-industrial-intelligence-media complex, the U.S. now believes it is acceptable to launch a first strike nuclear attack in retaliation for breeches of cyber security ..."
"... Trump won't be impeached over Russiagate for the simple reason that Russiagate is nothing but a psyops perpetrated against the American people by the national-security bureaucracy (and their corporate media propagandists) for the purposes of reigniting a second Cold War and maintaining U.S. global hegemony. ..."
"... Thanks to the hysterical McCarthyism now rampant among Democrats - and that is being used to great effect by Washington's bipartisan neocon warmongers - we may just end up in a nuclear war. The good news: it will be a short war and the Democrats will never have to accept responsibility for Clinton's loss. ..."
"... How about that Clinton got the CIA to partner with neo-Nazis in Ukraine to stage a coup, kick out Putin's friend, and install a billionaire capitalist as President? - something the media never mentions. ..."
"... Ultimately, I see the Russia story as getting its legs from the efforts of the dominant Hillary wing of the Democratic party, backed by big media, to continue to assert that Hillary really won the presidency in 2016, and that their wing should continue to have control of the party. ..."
"... That an immensely dangerous war fever is being whipped up in the process is of no importance to them. And, by no means incidentally, they are ignoring all of the real atrocities being committed by the Trump administration against the American people and the earth's environment. ..."
"... It has been thus since the creep moved into the White House. Dreyfuss, perky Rachel Maddow, Colbert, Maher, and many others have been the true "useful idiots". ..."
"... This same media never gave Sanders any media exposure during the primary. ..."
"... I would add that the election manipulations which the Clinton forces engaged in to defeat Sanders during the Democratic primaries dwarfs, by orders of magnitude, anything alleged against the Russians by even the most hawkish backers of the Russia probe. ..."
"... tweet by Peter Van Buren, former US foreign intelligence officer "Just did a quick read of the '13 Russian' indictment. Missing are a) any connections between the 13 and the Russian government and/or Trump campaign; b) any discussion of the impact (if any) their social media efforts had. It describes them buying Facebook ads, but nothing about if it affected votes; c) no connection shown between any of this and DNC, Wikileaks, hacking of emails; d) no discussion of motive; e) assumption that anything anti-Clinton was defacto pro-Bernie and/or pro-Trump. And all indicted persons are Russians, and outside the U.S., so highly unlikely this is going anywhere further legally. ..."
"... BTW, today the media put up that scumbag Podesta as a spokesperson for the Democrats. ..."
"... Seems that the end justifies the means. No matter what is the truth. In the mean-time, they're actually harming the opposition to Trump. I suppose nobody asked Podesta why the DNC never offered their computers for FBI forensics. ..."
"... The MSM never asks the hard questions anymore. It seems all pre-scripted and sanitized for corporate media. ..."
"... It's been a year since Mueller went to work and what's he got? A couple of Republican political operatives being political operatives. Their crime was not reporting to the USG that they were working for Ukraine. Now we're down to social media posts. You're probably one of those people who say, I saw it on the internet so it must be true. If the government is going to be upset about crap they see on social media from foreign parties, they need to start by telling said social media that they can't solicit advertising from foreign entities with political overtones as facebook did of RT. ..."
"... So we are going to limit global free speech by spending $Trillions more on building a nuclear arsenal - total madness - driven by [un] Democratic whining. ..."
"... Apparently, it comes down to trolls who planted various "fake news" stories. Stipulate to all of that; the worst of it. How does THAT begin to stack–up against the murderous coup that the USA OPENLY fomented in the Ukraine a couple of years earlier by bankrolling dozens of Non-governmental organizations whose sole purpose was "regime change"? ..."
"... Maybe come back to me about all of this when the FBI can convincingly prove that the Russian government armed and funded a Neo–nazi para–military group that assaulted and burned–down the North Carolina State House. ..."
"... You mean like Clinton and the CIA did in Ukraine, for economic domination over Russia, don't you? ..."
"... Tell me, as soon as you can, when having skepticism on the Russia/Election Meddling story is finally permitted. I heard tell, we've lately dropped the "Treason" narration. Now the spin du jour is that Trump & Co were all duped by them clever Ruskies. Whatever floats your boat. ..."
"... Stephen Cohen's take on Russiagate makes a lot of sense, to me. I've followed Russia/soviet/US relations very closely since Gorbachev. Open your eyes, Mattis has labeled Russia our mortal enemy, we just upped defense spending to an obscene level that shall keep our schools, hospitals, social services, and infrastructure in their bad state. ..."
NO actual physical proof has been presented to the public to substantiate claims that
Russia hacked the DNC
There is NO proof (only allegations) of collusion between Trump's campaign and the
Kremlin
Social media efforts by Russian trolls to influence the election were minimal in the
extreme, laughably amateurish and completely ineffective
Glenn Greenwald has spent the past year documenting in detail the large volume of fake
anti-Russian "news" generated by the MSM (see GG at The Intercept)
There is NO connection between the Russian government and the 13 private citizens recently
indicted for their pathetic and ineffectual activity as part of a troll farm
Thanks to the paranoid, xenophobic, Russia-bashing nationalistic propaganda that is being
promoted by our military-industrial-intelligence-media complex, the U.S. now believes it is
acceptable to launch a first strike nuclear attack in retaliation for breeches of cyber
security
Read number six again and think about it. The U.S. is ready and willing to launch a
preemptive nuclear attack against any nation it accuses of undermining our cyber security -
no proof necessary. The Democratic establishment, which has spent the past year engaging in
baseless Kremlin-baiting (and very little else), is directly responsible for this
insanity.
Trump won't be impeached over Russiagate for the simple reason that Russiagate is nothing
but a psyops perpetrated against the American people by the national-security bureaucracy
(and their corporate media propagandists) for the purposes of reigniting a second Cold War
and maintaining U.S. global hegemony.
Thanks to the hysterical McCarthyism now rampant among
Democrats - and that is being used to great effect by Washington's bipartisan neocon
warmongers - we may just end up in a nuclear war. The good news: it will be a short war and
the Democrats will never have to accept responsibility for Clinton's loss.
Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:30 pm
Who gives a shit really?
How about that Clinton got the CIA to partner with neo-Nazis in Ukraine to stage a coup,
kick out Putin's friend, and install a billionaire capitalist as President? - something the
media never mentions.
Caleb Melamed says: February 18, 2018 at 9:12 am
As I open the online edition of The Nation this morning, there are two lead stories. One
of them tells how Trump is planning to evict 5 million poor people from public housing. A
very important story.
The second story by Bob Dreyfuss is probably the 10,000th one I've seen about the Russia
probe. The public housing story is obviously much more important and substantial, yet the
Democrats have been focusing almost exclusively on the flimsy Russia probe. Not even the
pressing need to regulate assault rifles has really grabbed their full attention, even in the
wake of the latest dreadful Florida high school massacre. In perusing the news stories this
Sunday morning, the Russia probe continues to hold first place in coverage by a big
margin.
Ultimately, I see the Russia story as getting its legs from the efforts of the dominant
Hillary wing of the Democratic party, backed by big media, to continue to assert that Hillary
really won the presidency in 2016, and that their wing should continue to have control of the
party.
That an immensely dangerous war fever is being whipped up in the process is of no
importance to them. And, by no means incidentally, they are ignoring all of the real
atrocities being committed by the Trump administration against the American people and the
earth's environment.
Clark M Shanahan says: February 18, 2018 at 9:52 am
Amen, Caleb It has been thus since the creep moved into the White House.
Dreyfuss, perky Rachel Maddow, Colbert, Maher, and many others have been the true "useful
idiots".
Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:33 pm
This same media never gave Sanders any media exposure during the primary.
Caleb Melamed says: February 18, 2018 at 9:42 am
I would add that the election manipulations which the Clinton forces engaged in to defeat
Sanders during the Democratic primaries dwarfs, by orders of magnitude, anything alleged
against the Russians by even the most hawkish backers of the Russia probe.
Clark M Shanahan says: February 18, 2018 at 8:24 am
FYI tweet by Peter Van Buren,
former US foreign intelligence officer "Just did a quick read of the '13 Russian' indictment. Missing are a) any connections
between the 13 and the Russian government and/or Trump campaign; b) any discussion of the
impact (if any) their social media efforts had. It describes them buying Facebook ads, but
nothing about if it affected votes; c) no connection shown between any of this and DNC,
Wikileaks, hacking of emails; d) no discussion of motive; e) assumption that anything
anti-Clinton was defacto pro-Bernie and/or pro-Trump. And all indicted persons are Russians,
and outside the U.S., so highly unlikely this is going anywhere further legally.
Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:37 pm
There is nothing illegal or unethical about any individual of government supporting one
candidate over another. BTW, today the media put up that scumbag Podesta as a spokesperson for the Democrats.
Clark M Shanahan says: February 19, 2018 at 9:02 am
Seems that the end justifies the means.
No matter what is the truth.
In the mean-time, they're actually harming the opposition to Trump. I suppose nobody asked Podesta why the DNC never offered
their computers for FBI forensics.
Fred Caruso says: February 19, 2018 at 12:31 pm
The MSM never asks the hard questions anymore. It seems all pre-scripted and sanitized for
corporate media.
Richard Phelps says: February 18, 2018 at 2:52 am
There is one issue that no media is talking about regarding the "memos". Trump is clearly
a "person of interest", if not a suspect in some parts of the investigation. Given Trump's
entanglement how is it not an absolute conflict of interest for Trump being the person who
decides what memos get to be public and what redactions must be made.
Imagine a judge being a suspect in a crime or a major stockholder in a corporate civil
suit. S/he would never be allowed to make any rulings on what evidence the jury gets to see
or anything about the case. Some non-interested 3rd party needs to make those decisions.
Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:38 pm
Quit feeding this beast.
Jeffrey Harrison says: February 16, 2018 at 8:15 pm
The other interesting and fun fact not mentioned anywhere. Three Names won by 3 million
votes. Crafty Ruskis.
Carla Skidmore says: February 16, 2018 at 7:33 pm
This investigation by Mueller is just beginning. In other words, and to use the
vernacular, "We "ain't seen nothing," yet."
Fred Caruso says: February 18, 2018 at 9:40 pm
You are right. This is nothing but bullshit and it may be just the beginning. The
Democrats have an endless supply of donkey-shit.
Jeffrey Harrison says: February 16, 2018 at 6:08 pm
It's interesting that the Russians set this all up to boost Trump and disparage Three
Names before Trump even announced he was running. The basic set up for this was going on in
2014 whereas Trump announced in 2015.
Carla Skidmore says: February 16, 2018 at 7:29 pm
No, not really. Trump was making gestures of interest in the presidency in 2012
Clark M Shanahan says: February 18, 2018 at 10:28 am
Since when have you been so trusting of our FBI & CIA, Carla?
From what we've experienced together from the Gulf of Tonkin onward, I'm a wee-tad taken
aback.
Please read the ex-foreign intelligence officer's twitter posting that I posted above.
Jeffrey Harrison says: February 16, 2018 at 8:30 pm
Pfui. He also made noises about running in the 2012 election. People don't set up
organizations to do stuff just on the off chance that some politician or wannabe is going to
run. These guys ain't got nothin'. It's been a year since Mueller went to work and what's he
got? A couple of Republican political operatives being political operatives. Their crime was
not reporting to the USG that they were working for Ukraine. Now we're down to social media
posts. You're probably one of those people who say, I saw it on the internet so it must be
true. If the government is going to be upset about crap they see on social media from foreign
parties, they need to start by telling said social media that they can't solicit advertising
from foreign entities with political overtones as facebook did of RT.
Fred Caruso says: February 19, 2018 at 3:35 pm
So we are going to limit global free speech by spending $Trillions more on building a
nuclear arsenal - total madness - driven by [un] Democratic whining.
Francis Louis Szot says: February 16, 2018 at 6:05 pm
Apparently, it comes down to trolls who planted
various "fake news" stories. Stipulate to all of that; the worst of it. How does THAT begin to stack–up against the
murderous coup that the USA OPENLY fomented
in the Ukraine a couple of years earlier by bankrolling
dozens of Non-governmental organizations whose
sole purpose was "regime change"?
Maybe come back to me about all of this when the FBI
can convincingly prove that the Russian government
armed and funded a Neo–nazi para–military group
that assaulted and burned–down the North Carolina State House.
Fred Caruso says: February 19, 2018 at 3:37 pm
You mean like Clinton and the CIA did in Ukraine, for economic domination over Russia,
don't you?
Clark M Shanahan says: February 16, 2018 at 3:44 pm
I'm hoping the hush-money passed on to two of Trump's romantic caprices, during the election, gets traction.
Tell me, as soon as you can, when having skepticism on the Russia/Election Meddling story is finally permitted. I heard
tell, we've lately dropped the "Treason" narration. Now the spin du jour is that Trump & Co were all duped by them clever
Ruskies. Whatever floats your boat.
Clark M Shanahan says: February 17, 2018 at 10:13 am
Yes David, I'm still a skeptic.
In fact, I think this move to indict 13 suspects, that have a snowball in Hell's chance of
ever being tried, is simply a dog and pony show to placate the public.
Debrief yourself, read Binney's report and listen to Stephen F Cohen's latest, here on the
Nation.
Clark M Shanahan says: February 17, 2018 at 5:25 pm
Stephen Cohen's take on Russiagate makes a lot of sense, to me. I've followed Russia/soviet/US relations very closely
since Gorbachev.
Open your eyes, Mattis has labeled Russia our mortal enemy, we just upped defense spending to
an obscene level that shall keep our schools, hospitals, social services, and infrastructure
in their bad state.
As if Hill, who stole the primaries actually ran a competent campaign.
"... The Deep State (Oligarchs and the MIC) is totally fucking loving this: they have Trump and the GOP giving them everything they ever wanted and they have the optics and distraction of an "embattled" president that claims to be against or a victim of the "deep state" and a base that rally's, circles the wagons around him, and falls for the narrative. ..."
"... They know exactly who it was with the memory stick, there is always video of one form or another either in the data center or near the premises that can indicate who it was. They either have a video of Seth Rich putting the stick into the server directly, or they at least have a video of his car entering and leaving the vicinity of the ex-filtration. ..."
"... This would have been an open and shut case if shillary was not involved. Since it was involved, you can all chalk it up to the Clinton body count. I pray that it gets justice. It and the country, the world - needs justice. ..."
Kim Dotcom has once again chimed in on the DNC hack, following a Sunday morning tweet from President Trump clarifying his previous
comments on Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
In response, Dotcom tweeted " Let me assure you, the DNC hack wasn't even a hack. It was an insider with a memory stick. I know
this because I know who did it and why," adding "Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him
twice. He never replied. 360 pounds! " alluding of course to Trump's "400 pound genius" comment.
Dotcom's assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name Forensicator , who determined
that the DNC files were copied at
22.6 MB/s - a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network - yet a speed
typical of file transfers to a memory stick.
The local transfer theory of course blows the Russian hacking narrative out of the water, lending credibility to the theory that
the DNC "hack" was in fact an inside job, potentially implicating late DNC IT staffer, Seth Rich.
John Podesta's email was allegely successfully "hacked" (he fell victim to a
phishing scam
) in March 2016, while the DNC reported suspicious activity (the suspected Seth Rich file transfer) in late April, 2016 according
to the
Washington Post.
On May 18, 2017, Dotcom proposed that if Congress includes the Seth Rich investigation in their Russia probe, he would provide
written testimony with evidence that Seth Rich was WikiLeaks' source.
On May 19 2017 Dotcom tweeted "I knew Seth Rich. I was involved"
Three days later, Dotcom again released a guarded statement saying "I KNOW THAT SETH RICH WAS INVOLVED IN THE DNC LEAK," adding:
"I have consulted with my lawyers. I accept that my full statement should be provided to the authorities and I am prepared
to do that so that there can be a full investigation. My lawyers will speak with the authorities regarding the proper process.
If my evidence is required to be given in the United States I would be prepared to do so if appropriate arrangements are made.
I would need a guarantee from Special Counsel Mueller, on behalf of the United States, of safe passage from New Zealand to the
United States and back. In the coming days we will be communicating with the appropriate authorities to make the necessary arrangements.
In the meantime, I will make no further comment."
Dotcom knew.
While one could simply write off Dotcom's claims as an attention seeking stunt, he made several comments and a series of tweets
hinting at the upcoming email releases prior to both the WikiLeaks dumps as well as the publication of the hacked DNC emails to a
website known as "DCLeaks."
In a May 14, 2015
Bloomberg article entitled "Kim Dotcom: Julian Assange Will Be Hillary Clinton's Worst Nightmare In 2016 ": "I have to say it's
probably more Julian," who threatens Hillary, Dotcom said. " But I'm aware of some of the things that are going to be roadblocks
for her ."
Two days later, Dotcom tweeted this:
Around two months later, Kim asks a provocative question
Two weeks after that, Dotcom then tweeted "Mishandling classified info is a crime. When Hillary's emails eventually pop up on
the internet who's going to jail?"
It should thus be fairly obvious to anyone that Dotcom was somehow involved, and therefore any evidence he claims to have, should
be taken seriously as part of Mueller's investigation. Instead, as Dotcom tweeted, "Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in
my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him twice. He never replied. "
The Deep State (Oligarchs and the MIC) is totally fucking loving this: they have Trump and the GOP giving them everything
they ever wanted and they have the optics and distraction of an "embattled" president that claims to be against or a victim of
the "deep state" and a base that rally's, circles the wagons around him, and falls for the narrative.
Meanwhile they keep enacting the most Pro Deep State/MIC/Police State/Zionist/Wall Street agenda possible. And they call it
#winning
"Had to be a Russian mole with a computer stick. MSM, DNC and Muller say so."
They know exactly who it was with the memory stick, there is always video of one form or another either in the data center
or near the premises that can indicate who it was. They either have a video of Seth Rich putting the stick into the server directly,
or they at least have a video of his car entering and leaving the vicinity of the ex-filtration.
This would have been an open and shut case if shillary was not involved. Since it was involved, you can all chalk it up
to the Clinton body count. I pray that it gets justice. It and the country, the world - needs justice.
Kim is great, Assange is great. Kim is playing a double game. He wants immunity from the US GUmmint overreach that destroyed
his company and made him a prisoner in NZ.
Good on ya Kim.
His name was Seth Rich...and he will reach out from the grave and bury Killary who murdered him.
There are so many nuances to this and all are getting mentioned but the one that also stands out is that in an age of demands
for gun control by the Dems, Seth Rich is never, ever mentioned. He should be the poster child for gun control. Young man, draped
in a American flag, helping democracy, gunned down...it writes itself.
They either are afraid of the possible racial issues should it turn out to be a black man killing a white man (but why should
that matter in a gun control debate?) or they just don't want people looking at this case. I go for #2.
Funny that George Webb can figure it out, but Trump, Leader of the Free World, is sitting there with his dick in his hand waiting
for someone to save him.
Whatever he might turn out to be, this much is clear: Trump is a spineless weakling. He might be able to fuck starlets, but
he hasn't got the balls to defend either himself or the Republic.
Webb's research is also...managed. But a lot of it was/is really good (don't follow it anymore) and I agree re: SR piece of
it.
I think SR is such an interesting case. It's not really an anomaly because SO many Bush-CFR-related hits end the same way and
his had typical signatures. But his also squeels of a job done w/out much prior planning because I think SR surprised everyone.
If, in fact, that was when he was killed. Everything regarding the family's demeanor suggests no.
MANY patterns in shootings: failure in law enforcement/intelligence who were notified of problem individuals ahead of time,
ARs, mental health and SSRIs, and ongoing resistance to gun control in DC ----these are NOT coincidences. Nor are distractions
in MSM's version of events w/ controlled propaganda.
Children will stop being killed when America wakes the
fuck up and starts asking the right questions, making the right demands. It's time.
I don't think you know how these hackers have nearly ALL been intercepted by CIA--for decades now. DS has had backdoor access
to just about all of them. I agree that Kim is great, brilliant and was sabotaged but he's also cooperating. Otherwise he'd be
dead.
Bes is either "disinfo plant" or energy draining pessimist. Result is the same - to deflate your power to create a new future.
Trump saw the goal of the Fed Reserve banksters decades ago and spoke often about it. Like Prez Kennedy he wants to return
USA economy to silver or gold backed dollar then transition to new system away from the Black Magic fed reserve/ tax natl debt
machine.
The Globalist Cabal has been working to destroy the US economy ever since they income tax April 15th Lincoln at the Ford theater.
125 years. But Bes claims because Trump cannot reverse 125 years of history in one year that it is kabuki.
Disobedient Media previously opined on the dagger-in-the-back publication of a hit piece
against Wikileaks' Julian Assange just one day after a UK magistrate, with blatant conflict of
interest in the matter, shot down his legal representatives' attempt to finally free him from
the confines of the Ecuadorian embassy.
What that article did not address was the patently obvious terminal illness suffered by The
Intercept. That is, the outlet claims to publish "fearless, adversarial" reporting, while it is
funded by a billionaire. Ken Silverstein
, formerly employed at The Intercept and by Omidyar's First Look Media, has described endemic
problems at the outlet that have risen directly out of Omidyar's leadership or lack
thereof.
The fundamental problem facing The Intercept is not ultimately about how or why the outlet
published a smear specifically timed to cut support away from Assange, even though that is in
and of itself despicable. It's that doing so acts in support of the very deep state and
moneyed, military interests that The Intercept purports to critique "fearlessly."
Adding to a sense of betrayal of The Intercept's principals in the wake of the outlet's
hit-piece is the fact that a number of writers at the publication are by all accounts on good
terms with Assange, and have worked with mutual supporters including the superb Italian
journalist Stefania Maurizi. Maurizi collaborated with Wikileaks on the verification of
documents for many years, and worked with Glenn Greenwald on preparation for the disclosure of
the Snowden files.
Adding to the years of support Greenwald has shown Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder also
sent Wikileaks' own Sarah Harrison to
the aid of Snowden after he was marooned in Hong Kong in 2013, an act which Stefania Maurizi
revealed very likely cost the publisher his freedom.
After the publication of the Snowden files, the UK ceased any attempt to create a legal
process by which Assange might have been safely freed , and in the same year pressured
Sweden to continue its investigation after the country's authorities expressed their intent to
drop the matter. Likewise, in the wake of Assange's actions towards Snowden, the Obama White
House changed its stance from a reluctant acceptance that prosecution of WikiLeaks for
publishing might not be possible given that US publishers had also published the same
material.
Snowden's revelations also provided much of the impetus for the launch of The Intercept as
an outlet, after Glenn Greenwald departed from The Guardian . In this way, Assange's story and his fate in the
Ecuadorian embassy is inextricably linked with the origin of The Intercept's rise on the back
of the Snowden revelations.
Only a few months later, in October 2013 while Snowden was still stuck in a Moscow airport
and out of reach of US authorities and The Intercept was gearing up for launch, the UK made it
clear to the Swedish prosecutor that she should not drop her investigation and European Arrest
Warrant for Assange, even though Sweden's law on proportionality required her to do so.
In the wake of Snowden's escape to Russia, Assange remained trapped in 30 square meters of
an embassy and lost any hope that had existed earlier in 2013 that he would soon be released
from that space, where we now know he cannot receive even the most basic medical care.
Meanwhile, The Intercept has become what it set out to destroy.
The relationship between Assange and The intercept makes it impossible to see the
organization's publication of an intrinsically flawed smear piece aimed at Assange as anything
other than a deep betrayal.
Which brings us inevitably to Pierre
Omidyar . That the multi-billionaire Ebay founder despises Trump and would have preferred
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to assume the mantle of the Presidency is an
understatement, but to focus only on his political outlook also misses the point of the larger
issue facing The Intercept.
The billionaire's incoherent vision of the First Amendment
(disturbing for someone who funds journalistic endeavors) aside, the nature of The Intercept's
fatal catch-22 would remain if Omidyar woke up tomorrow to become a MAGA-hat wearing,
NRA-supporting conservative. That is, a media outlet cannot perform as an 'independent and
adversarial' entity when it is birthed within and nurtured by the very establishment it must
confront.
When USA
Today reported that Omidyar would contribute $250 million to pursue "independent
journalism," a genetic malfunction was written into the Intercept's DNA. One cannot operate in
an adversarial manner when one is supported directly by the same moneyed interests that require
the most scrutiny and transparency of all.
That the magnate's influence would seep, tide-like, into the reporting and editorial
decisions of The Intercept seems difficult to ignore, but it is that inevitable creep itself
and not the flavor of his beliefs which makes the situation so damning for The Intercept.
I've previously
written at length in an effort to describe the chilling uniformity that ultimately pervades
the plutocratic class. Being a billionaire makes Pierre Omidyar much more like one of the Koch
Brothers than any liberal without access to the same magnitude of wealth and influence in the
US political sphere. The fact that wealth translates to political influence was described in a
Princeton University study, indicating
that the United States operates as a plutocracy. In that light, it is the wealth that binds
Omidyar, the Kochs and their ilk, as opposed to political outlook.
When Omidyar made use of Citizens' United to supply
an anti-Trump super PAC with $100,000 in 2016, it's not the flavor of the political activism
that he bought – it's that he bought it at all. Omidyar is a power-player within the same
corrupt establishment that WikiLeaks and The Intercept – in principle – aim to
critique regularly.
Omidyar has also provided funds to
the Clinton Foundation. As indicated by Wikileaks via Twitter , the Freedom Of The Press Foundation recently made the
controversial decision to terminate processing of Wikileaks donations. The move represented an
end to the role that was a central cause for the Foundation's creation, according to a
statement by Assange.
Ironically, the initial financial
blockade that made the Freedom Of The Press necessary was in part initiated by Paypal,
which was a spin-off from Ebay, a company that Omidyar founded. Omidyar served on the board of the
company until last year.
Sarah Harisson expressed the conflict of interest that Omidyar's involvement with The
Intercept represents to German Press ,
saying: " How can you take something seriously when the person behind this platform went along
with the financial boycott against WikiLeaks?"
Here lies the gulf between an adversarial organization like WikiLeaks and a news outlet that
purports to be fearless while subsisting on the payroll of a member of the plutocratic
elite.
The issue here goes beyond Omidyar's politics and the petty, obsessively personal
derangement of The Intercept's Micah Lee towards Julian Assange. The crux of the terminal
illness suffered by The Intercept is that it cannot stand as an outlet that wishes to both
participate in adversarial, anti-establishment reporting while it also relies on the funds of a
billionaire – any billionaire.
The rough beast born of the marriage between Omidyar's funds and the yearning for freedom
that surrounded the release of the Snowden Files cannot help but spiral towards its inevitable
fate.
At The Intercept, the center cannot hold in the widening gyre between its best journalists
and its worst impulses.
More like attempt to unite the nation which crumbles die to crisis of
neoliberalism and decimation of neoliberal ideology. And resore even on
false pretext trust for neoliberal ruling elite that is sitting in Congress
and major government institutions.
As well as swipe Hillary political fiasco under the rug and prevent loss of
power by Clinton wing of Democratic Party.
With the almost non stop Russian bashing in the US one has to wonder if something
else is at play here. Like priming the US psych to cheer on an inevitable war
with Russia. If one digs into the revelations it's obvious they are bunk, unless
your reading Wapo, New York Times, Time, and other neocon mouthpieces which are
full of fiction not facts, but America is a soundbite nation. We stop reading
after the headline and the way stories are structured that do have some truth in
them never get read.
No matter what the US has done to crash the Russian
economy Putin has strengthened it and is working hard to make it impervious to
outside forces.
Unlike the US where the government and the CEO's can't destroy it
fast enough while filling their wallets. The more successful Putin is, especially
on foreign policy, the more desperate and dangerous the neocons will become.
Remember they have nice luxurious bunkers to wait out the inevitable while you
die a slow death.
"... The author is a prominent American social critic, blogger, and podcaster , and we carry his articles regularly on RI . His writing on Russia-gate has been highly entertaining. ..."
"... He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in an excellent 2009 profile , along with the brilliant Dmitry Orlov, another regular contributor to RI (archive) . These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up. ..."
"... You can find his popular fiction and novels on this subject, here . To get a sense of how entertaining he is, watch this 2004 TED talk about the cruel misery of American urban design - it is one of the most-viewed on TED. ..."
"... If you like his work, please consider supporting him on Patreon . ..."
"... Why Does Trump Ignore Top Officials' Warnings on Russia? , ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Sport's Illustrated ..."
"... Actually the Times's editorial seems to have CIA / NSA fingerprints all over it, or at least Deep State paw prints. By stating that the Russians are already "meddling" in 2018 elections that haven't happened yet, aren't our own security agencies setting up the public to lose faith in the electoral process and fight over election results? Oh, by the way, the Times ..."
"... The longer this fantasy about Russia continues from the Left side of the political transect, the deeper the nation sinks into a dangerous collective psychosis. After all this time, the only known instances of American political figures "colluding" with Russians involve the shenanigans between the DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and US intel services including the FBI and CIA, in paying for the "Steele Dossier" and the activities of the Fusion GPS company that claimed Russia hacked Hillary's and John Podesta's email. ..."
"... There is now a ton of evidence about all this monkey business, and no sign (yet) that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller may be taking a good hard look at it, not to mention the professional misconduct of a half dozen senior FBI, NSA, and CIA officials, especially former CIA chief John Brennan, who has now morphed into a CNN "analyst," taking an active role in what amounts to a psy-ops campaign to shove the public toward war. ..."
"... We are already choking this polity to death by endlessly litigating the past, insuring that the country doesn't have the time or the fortitude to deal with much more important quandaries of the present -- especially a financial system that is speeding into the most colossal train wreck in history. That will de-rail Mr. Trump soon enough, and then all the rest of us will have enough to do to keep our lives together or to refashion them in some that will work in a very different economy. ..."
He is one of the better-known thinkers
The New Yorker
has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in
an
excellent 2009 profile
, along with the brilliant Dmitry Orlov, another
regular
contributor to RI (archive)
. These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful
crack-up.
If you like his work, please consider supporting him on
Patreon
.
Forget about sharks. In their Valentine's Day editorial:
Why
Does Trump Ignore Top Officials' Warnings on Russia?
,
The New York Times
jumped several
blue whales (all the ones left on earth), a cruise ship, a subtropical archipelago, a giant vortex of plastic
bottles, and the
Sport's Illustrated
swimsuit shoot. The lede said:
The phalanx of intelligence chiefs who testified on Capitol Hill delivered a chilling message: Not only did
Russia interfere in the 2016 election, it is already meddling in the 2018 election by using a digital strategy to
exacerbate the country's political and social divisions.
Hmmm . After almost two years of relentless public paranoia about Russia and US elections, don't you suppose these
Ruskie gremlins would find some other way to make mischief in our world -- maybe meddle in the NHL playoffs, or hack
WalMart's bookkeeping department, or covertly switch out the real Dwayne Johnson with a robot? I kind of completely
and absolutely doubt that they'll bother with our elections.
Actually the Times's editorial seems to have CIA / NSA fingerprints all over it, or at least Deep State paw
prints. By stating that the Russians are already "meddling" in 2018 elections that haven't happened yet, aren't our
own security agencies setting up the public to lose faith in the electoral process and fight over election results?
Oh, by the way, the
Times
presented no evidence whatsoever that this alleged "meddling" is taking place.
They just assert it, as if it were already adjudicated.
But then they take it another step, making the case that because Mr. Trump does not go along with the Russian
Meddling story, he is obstructing efforts to prevent Russian interference in the elections that haven't happened yet,
and is therefore by implication guilty of treason. A fine piece of casuistry.
The longer this fantasy about Russia continues from the Left side of the political transect, the deeper the nation
sinks into a dangerous collective psychosis. After all this time, the only known instances of American political
figures "colluding" with Russians involve the shenanigans between the DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and US intel
services including the FBI and CIA, in paying for the "Steele Dossier" and the activities of the Fusion GPS company
that claimed Russia hacked Hillary's and John Podesta's email.
There is now a ton of evidence about all this monkey business, and no sign (yet) that Special Prosecutor Robert
Mueller may be taking a good hard look at it, not to mention the professional misconduct of a half dozen senior FBI,
NSA, and CIA officials, especially former CIA chief John Brennan, who has now morphed into a CNN "analyst," taking an
active role in what amounts to a psy-ops campaign to shove the public toward war.
The "resistance" may think it is getting some mileage out of this interminable narrative, but its arrant
inconsistencies only undermine faith in all our political institutions, and that is really playing with fire.
We are already choking this polity to death by endlessly litigating the past, insuring that the country doesn't
have the time or the fortitude to deal with much more important quandaries of the present -- especially a financial
system that is speeding into the most colossal train wreck in history. That will de-rail Mr. Trump soon enough, and
then all the rest of us will have enough to do to keep our lives together or to refashion them in some that will work
in a very different economy.
Very weak analysis The authors completely missed the point. Susceptibility to rumors (now
called "fake new" which more correctly should be called "improvised news") and high level of
distrust to "official MSM" (of which popularity of alternative news site is only tip of the
iceberg) is a sign of the crisis and tearing down of the the social fabric that hold the so
social groups together. This first of all demonstrated with the de-legitimization of the
neoliberal elite.
As such attempt to patch this discord and unite the US society of fake premises of Russiagate
and anti-Russian hysteria look very problematic. The effect might be quite opposite as the story
with Steele dossier, which really undermined credibility of Justice Department and destroyed the
credibility o FBI can teach us.
In this case claims that "The claim that, for example, Mrs. Clinton's victory might aid Satan
" are just s a sign of rejection of neoliberalism by voters. Nothing more nothing less.
Notable quotes:
"... It has infected the American political system, weakening the body politic and leaving it vulnerable to manipulation. Russian misinformation seems to have exacerbated the symptoms, but laced throughout the indictment are reminders that the underlying disease, arguably far more damaging, is all American-made. ..."
"... A recent study found that the people most likely to consume fake news were already hyperpartisan and close followers of politics, and that false stories were only a small fraction of their media consumption. ..."
That these efforts might have actually made a difference, or at least were intended to,
highlights a force that was already destabilizing American democracy far more than any
Russian-made fake news post: partisan polarization.
"Partisanship can even alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgment," the
political scientists Jay J. Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira wrote in a recent paper . "The human attraction to fake and
untrustworthy news" -- a danger cited by political scientists far more frequently than
orchestrated meddling -- "poses a serious problem for healthy democratic functioning."
It has infected the American political system, weakening the body politic and leaving it
vulnerable to manipulation. Russian misinformation seems to have exacerbated the symptoms, but
laced throughout the indictment are reminders that the underlying disease, arguably far more
damaging, is all American-made.
... ... ...
A recent study found
that the people most likely to consume fake news were already hyperpartisan and close followers
of politics, and that false stories were only a small fraction of their media
consumption.
Americans, it said, sought out stories that reflected their already-formed partisan view of
reality. This suggests that these Russians efforts are indicators -- not drivers -- of how
widely Americans had polarized.
That distinction matters for how the indictment is read: Though Americans have seen it as
highlighting a foreign threat, it also illustrates the perhaps graver threats from
within.
An Especially Toxic Form of Partisanship
... ... ...
"Compromise is the core of democracy," she said. "It's the only way we can govern." But, she
said, "when you make people feel threatened, nobody compromises with evil."
The claim that, for example, Mrs. Clinton's victory might aid Satan is in many ways just a
faint echo of the partisan anger and fear already dominating American politics.
Those emotions undermine a key norm that all sides are served by honoring democratic
processes; instead, they justify, or even seem to mandate, extreme steps against the other
side.
In taking this approach, the Russians were merely riding a trend that has been building for
decades.
Since the 1980s , surveys have found that Republicans and Democrats' feelings toward the
opposing party have been growing more and more negative. Voters are animated more by distrust
of the other side than support for their own.
This highlights a problem that Lilliana Mason, a University of Maryland political scientist,
said had left American democracy dangerously vulnerable. But it's a problem driven primarily by
American politicians and media outlets, which have far louder megaphones than any Russian-made
Facebook posts.
"Compromise is the core of democracy," she said. "It's the only way we can govern." But, she
said, "when you make people feel threatened, nobody compromises with evil."
The claim that, for example, Mrs. Clinton's victory might aid Satan is in many ways just a
faint echo of the partisan anger and fear already dominating American politics.
Those emotions undermine a key norm that all sides are served by honoring democratic
processes; instead, they justify, or even seem to mandate, extreme steps against the other
side.
"... The Dulles brothers, with Allan as head of Sullivan and Cromwells' CIA were notorious facilitators for the international banksters and their subsidiary corporations which comprise the largest oil and military entities which have literally plainly stated in writing, need to occasionally "GALVANIZE" the American public through catastrophic and catalyzing events in order for Americans to be terrified into funding and fighting for those interlocked corporations in their quest to spread "FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE," throughout the globe. ..."
"... The book by Peter Dale Scott, "The American Deep State Wall Street, Big Oil And the Attack on American Democracy" covers in detail some of the points you mention in your reply. It is a fascinating book. ..."
Your link to the Giraldi piece is appreciated, however, Giraldi starts off on a false
premise: He claims that people generally liked and trusted the FBI and CIA up until or
shortly after 9/11. Not so! Both agencies were complicit in the most infamous assassinations
and false flag episodes since the Kennedy/MLK Vietnam days. Don't forget Air America CIA drug
running and Iran/Contra / October Surprise affairs.
The Dulles brothers, with Allan as head of Sullivan and Cromwells' CIA were notorious
facilitators for the international banksters and their subsidiary corporations which comprise
the largest oil and military entities which have literally plainly stated in writing, need to
occasionally "GALVANIZE" the American public through catastrophic and catalyzing events in
order for Americans to be terrified into funding and fighting for those interlocked
corporations in their quest to spread "FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE," throughout the globe.
The political parties are theatre designed to fool the people into believing we are living
in some sort of legitimate, representative system, when it's the same old plutocracy that
manages to get elected because they've long figured out the art of polarizing people and
capitalising on tribal alignments.
We should eliminate all government for a time so that people can begin to see that
corporations really do and most always have run the country.
It's preposterous to think the stupid public is actually discussing saddling ourselves and
future generations with gargantuan debt through a system designed and run by banksters!
it should be self evident a sovereign nation should maintain and forever hold the rights
to develop a monetary/financial system that serves the needs of the people, not be indentured
servants in a financial system that serves the insatiable greed of a handful of parasitic
banksters and corporate tycoons!
Joe Tedesky , February 17, 2018 at 5:08 pm
You are so right, in fact Robert Parry made quite a journalistic career out of exposing
the CIA for such things as drug running. I gave up on that agency a longtime ago, after JFK
was murdered, and I was only 13 then. Yeah maybe Phil discounts the time while he worked for
the CIA, but the CIA has many, many rooms in which plots are hatched, so the valiant truth
teller Giraldi maybe excused this one time for his lack of memory .I guess, right?
Good comment Lee. Joe
Annie , February 17, 2018 at 5:56 pm
Yes, but he's referring to the public's opinion of these agencies, and if they didn't
continue to retain, even after 9/11, a significant popularity in the public's mind how would
we have so many American's buying into Russia-gate? In my perception of things they only lost
some ground after 9/11, but Americans notoriously have a short memory span.
Gregory Herr , February 17, 2018 at 6:42 pm
And films that are supposed to help Americans feel good about the aims and efficacy of the
agencies like Zero Dark Thirty and Argo are in the popular imagination.
Skeptigal , February 17, 2018 at 7:19 pm
The book by Peter Dale Scott, "The American Deep State Wall Street, Big Oil And the Attack
on American Democracy" covers in detail some of the points you mention in your reply. It is a
fascinating book.
Disobedient Media previously opined on the dagger-in-the-back publication of a hit piece
against Wikileaks' Julian Assange just one day after a UK magistrate, with blatant conflict of
interest in the matter, shot down his legal representatives' attempt to finally free him from
the confines of the Ecuadorian embassy.
What that article did not address was the patently obvious terminal illness suffered by The
Intercept. That is, the outlet claims to publish "fearless, adversarial" reporting, while it is
funded by a billionaire. Ken Silverstein
, formerly employed at The Intercept and by Omidyar's First Look Media, has described endemic
problems at the outlet that have risen directly out of Omidyar's leadership or lack
thereof.
The fundamental problem facing The Intercept is not ultimately about how or why the outlet
published a smear specifically timed to cut support away from Assange, even though that is in
and of itself despicable. It's that doing so acts in support of the very deep state and
moneyed, military interests that The Intercept purports to critique "fearlessly."
Adding to a sense of betrayal of The Intercept's principals in the wake of the outlet's
hit-piece is the fact that a number of writers at the publication are by all accounts on good
terms with Assange, and have worked with mutual supporters including the superb Italian
journalist Stefania Maurizi. Maurizi collaborated with Wikileaks on the verification of
documents for many years, and worked with Glenn Greenwald on preparation for the disclosure of
the Snowden files.
Adding to the years of support Greenwald has shown Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder also
sent Wikileaks' own Sarah Harrison to
the aid of Snowden after he was marooned in Hong Kong in 2013, an act which Stefania Maurizi
revealed very likely cost the publisher his freedom.
After the publication of the Snowden files, the UK ceased any attempt to create a legal
process by which Assange might have been safely freed , and in the same year pressured
Sweden to continue its investigation after the country's authorities expressed their intent to
drop the matter. Likewise, in the wake of Assange's actions towards Snowden, the Obama White
House changed its stance from a reluctant acceptance that prosecution of WikiLeaks for
publishing might not be possible given that US publishers had also published the same
material.
Snowden's revelations also provided much of the impetus for the launch of The Intercept as
an outlet, after Glenn Greenwald departed from The Guardian . In this way, Assange's story and his fate in the
Ecuadorian embassy is inextricably linked with the origin of The Intercept's rise on the back
of the Snowden revelations.
Only a few months later, in October 2013 while Snowden was still stuck in a Moscow airport
and out of reach of US authorities and The Intercept was gearing up for launch, the UK made it
clear to the Swedish prosecutor that she should not drop her investigation and European Arrest
Warrant for Assange, even though Sweden's law on proportionality required her to do so.
In the wake of Snowden's escape to Russia, Assange remained trapped in 30 square meters of
an embassy and lost any hope that had existed earlier in 2013 that he would soon be released
from that space, where we now know he cannot receive even the most basic medical care.
Meanwhile, The Intercept has become what it set out to destroy.
The relationship between Assange and The intercept makes it impossible to see the
organization's publication of an intrinsically flawed smear piece aimed at Assange as anything
other than a deep betrayal.
Which brings us inevitably to Pierre
Omidyar . That the multi-billionaire Ebay founder despises Trump and would have preferred
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to assume the mantle of the Presidency is an
understatement, but to focus only on his political outlook also misses the point of the larger
issue facing The Intercept.
The billionaire's incoherent vision of the First Amendment
(disturbing for someone who funds journalistic endeavors) aside, the nature of The Intercept's
fatal catch-22 would remain if Omidyar woke up tomorrow to become a MAGA-hat wearing,
NRA-supporting conservative. That is, a media outlet cannot perform as an 'independent and
adversarial' entity when it is birthed within and nurtured by the very establishment it must
confront.
When USA
Today reported that Omidyar would contribute $250 million to pursue "independent
journalism," a genetic malfunction was written into the Intercept's DNA. One cannot operate in
an adversarial manner when one is supported directly by the same moneyed interests that require
the most scrutiny and transparency of all.
That the magnate's influence would seep, tide-like, into the reporting and editorial
decisions of The Intercept seems difficult to ignore, but it is that inevitable creep itself
and not the flavor of his beliefs which makes the situation so damning for The Intercept.
I've previously
written at length in an effort to describe the chilling uniformity that ultimately pervades
the plutocratic class. Being a billionaire makes Pierre Omidyar much more like one of the Koch
Brothers than any liberal without access to the same magnitude of wealth and influence in the
US political sphere. The fact that wealth translates to political influence was described in a
Princeton University study, indicating
that the United States operates as a plutocracy. In that light, it is the wealth that binds
Omidyar, the Kochs and their ilk, as opposed to political outlook.
When Omidyar made use of Citizens' United to supply
an anti-Trump super PAC with $100,000 in 2016, it's not the flavor of the political activism
that he bought – it's that he bought it at all. Omidyar is a power-player within the same
corrupt establishment that WikiLeaks and The Intercept – in principle – aim to
critique regularly.
Omidyar has also provided funds to
the Clinton Foundation. As indicated by Wikileaks via Twitter , the Freedom Of The Press Foundation recently made the
controversial decision to terminate processing of Wikileaks donations. The move represented an
end to the role that was a central cause for the Foundation's creation, according to a
statement by Assange.
Ironically, the initial financial
blockade that made the Freedom Of The Press necessary was in part initiated by Paypal,
which was a spin-off from Ebay, a company that Omidyar founded. Omidyar served on the board of the
company until last year.
Sarah Harisson expressed the conflict of interest that Omidyar's involvement with The
Intercept represents to German Press ,
saying: " How can you take something seriously when the person behind this platform went along
with the financial boycott against WikiLeaks?"
Here lies the gulf between an adversarial organization like WikiLeaks and a news outlet that
purports to be fearless while subsisting on the payroll of a member of the plutocratic
elite.
The issue here goes beyond Omidyar's politics and the petty, obsessively personal
derangement of The Intercept's Micah Lee towards Julian Assange. The crux of the terminal
illness suffered by The Intercept is that it cannot stand as an outlet that wishes to both
participate in adversarial, anti-establishment reporting while it also relies on the funds of a
billionaire – any billionaire.
The rough beast born of the marriage between Omidyar's funds and the yearning for freedom
that surrounded the release of the Snowden Files cannot help but spiral towards its inevitable
fate.
At The Intercept, the center cannot hold in the widening gyre between its best journalists
and its worst impulses.
"... The author is a prominent American social critic, blogger, and podcaster , and we carry his articles regularly on RI . His writing on Russia-gate has been highly entertaining. ..."
"... He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in an excellent 2009 profile , along with the brilliant Dmitry Orlov, another regular contributor to RI (archive) . These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up. ..."
"... You can find his popular fiction and novels on this subject, here . To get a sense of how entertaining he is, watch this 2004 TED talk about the cruel misery of American urban design - it is one of the most-viewed on TED. ..."
"... If you like his work, please consider supporting him on Patreon . ..."
"... Why Does Trump Ignore Top Officials' Warnings on Russia? , ..."
He is one of the better-known thinkers
The New Yorker
has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in
an
excellent 2009 profile
, along with the brilliant Dmitry Orlov, another
regular
contributor to RI (archive)
. These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful
crack-up.
If you like his work, please consider supporting him on
Patreon
.
Forget about sharks. In their Valentine's Day editorial:
Why
Does Trump Ignore Top Officials' Warnings on Russia?
,
The New York Times
jumped several
blue whales (all the ones left on earth), a cruise ship, a subtropical archipelago, a giant vortex of plastic
bottles, and the
Sport's Illustrated
swimsuit shoot. The lede said:
The phalanx of intelligence chiefs who testified on Capitol Hill delivered a chilling message: Not only did
Russia interfere in the 2016 election, it is already meddling in the 2018 election by using a digital strategy to
exacerbate the country's political and social divisions.
Hmmm . After almost two years of relentless public paranoia about Russia and US elections, don't you suppose these
Ruskie gremlins would find some other way to make mischief in our world -- maybe meddle in the NHL playoffs, or hack
WalMart's bookkeeping department, or covertly switch out the real Dwayne Johnson with a robot? I kind of completely
and absolutely doubt that they'll bother with our elections.
Actually the Times's editorial seems to have CIA / NSA fingerprints all over it, or at least Deep State paw
prints. By stating that the Russians are already "meddling" in 2018 elections that haven't happened yet, aren't our
own security agencies setting up the public to lose faith in the electoral process and fight over election results?
Oh, by the way, the
Times
presented no evidence whatsoever that this alleged "meddling" is taking place.
They just assert it, as if it were already adjudicated.
But then they take it another step, making the case that because Mr. Trump does not go along with the Russian
Meddling story, he is obstructing efforts to prevent Russian interference in the elections that haven't happened yet,
and is therefore by implication guilty of treason. A fine piece of casuistry.
The longer this fantasy about Russia continues from the Left side of the political transect, the deeper the nation
sinks into a dangerous collective psychosis. After all this time, the only known instances of American political
figures "colluding" with Russians involve the shenanigans between the DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and US intel
services including the FBI and CIA, in paying for the "Steele Dossier" and the activities of the Fusion GPS company
that claimed Russia hacked Hillary's and John Podesta's email.
There is now a ton of evidence about all this monkey business, and no sign (yet) that Special Prosecutor Robert
Mueller may be taking a good hard look at it, not to mention the professional misconduct of a half dozen senior FBI,
NSA, and CIA officials, especially former CIA chief John Brennan, who has now morphed into a CNN "analyst," taking an
active role in what amounts to a psy-ops campaign to shove the public toward war.
The "resistance" may think it is getting some mileage out of this interminable narrative, but its arrant
inconsistencies only undermine faith in all our political institutions, and that is really playing with fire.
We are already choking this polity to death by endlessly litigating the past, insuring that the country doesn't
have the time or the fortitude to deal with much more important quandaries of the present -- especially a financial
system that is speeding into the most colossal train wreck in history. That will de-rail Mr. Trump soon enough, and
then all the rest of us will have enough to do to keep our lives together or to refashion them in some that will work
in a very different economy.
PS:
Readers may wonder why I did not devote this space to the school shooting in Parkland,
Florida. It is exactly what you get in a society that wants to erase behavioral boundaries. It is especially
dangerous where adolescent boys are concerned. The country has a gigantic boundary problem.
We have also created perfect conditions -- between the anomie of suburbia and the dreariness of our school systems
-- to induce explosions of violent despair. That's why these things happen.
Until we change these conditions, expect ever more of it.
"I swear that Russiagate is nothing more than trying to cover up the blatant corruption of
the DNC, Hillary Clinton, the FBI, CIA and The Department of Justice. Keep everybody busy with
Russiagate and don't allow the corruption (with the help of the press) to see the light of day.
Otherwise, people in high places would be going to jail.
Notable quotes:
"... As many commentators have pointed out, we are a country of completely brain washed people now. Schiff, Schumer, Sanders . . . they are all cut from the same cloth. There is not one politician left in the country who will challenge the The Ruling Power Structure's narrative. Even in Russia, there are lot of opposition leadership voices who are making noises against the System they disagree with. ..."
"... They can't make "hacking" stick 'cause it's false. They can't make "Trump is a Putin puppet" stick 'cause it's false. So now the whole damn dumb show–regurgitated by either shameless war profiteers or straight-faced useful idiots–comes down to so-called Russian social media trolls exercising the same "speech" that we are supposedly so proud to call "free" in this country. ..."
"... The Thought Police use surveillance and psychological monitoring to find and eliminate members of society who challenge the party's authority and ideology. ..."
"... Anyone who has questioned the intelligence agencies narrative that Russians and Trump colluded to win the election are viewed with suspicion as potential enemies of the state. ..."
"... What is the end goal? The end goal is to prop up a long in the tooth multi-decade cold war with Russia to justify massive military spending. Do you want to know the answer to your question of whether or not the US defense industry and our intelligence agencies are trying to spark a war with Russia? ..."
"... The answer is yes they are. As crazy as that sounds, the hungry defense industry with its insatiable appetite for more weapons has decided to go for the ultimate win the lottery strategy and foment war with Russia. It had been happening under Obama and now it is happening under Trump. They are trying to box him into a corner where he will feel enough pressure to go against Russia. Perhaps they can goad him into attacking Russia which is what I believe they want to do. Our national media plays along and is in bed with the intelligence agencies as much as ever just like they spouted the lies of Chalabi in Iraq War II falsely believing his claims that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and chemical and biological weapons. ..."
"... "Yet still they want more as Caitlin Johnstone pointed out. What they want now to do is to do the same thing they have been doing under Obama and enlist Trump on the grandest military adventure of all. War with Russia." ..."
"... The Russiagate affair has been going on for almost a year and I would think Mueller is under a lot of pressure to find something to stick. This indictment may be it. ..."
"... Once again, Russia's reputation will be taken down a few notches and made to suffer another humiliation. And the US will move on to the next allegation, "UK and US blame Russia for the malicious NotPetya cyberattack" (headline on BBC). ..."
Essentially, all Mueller did yesterday was to indict a bunch of private Russian citizens
for expressing their opinions about the candidates in the last presidential election via
public media (mainly Facedbook and Twitter), and the individual Russians contacted by the
press about it did not deny doing so. Mueller made no links to the Russian government, Putin,
the FSB or even their alleged puppet Donald Trump. Just private individuals being persecuted
for expressing an opinion on American politics in public because they are foreigners. Doesn't
matter whether the opinions were true, false, complementary or disparaging because they were
subjective just like anyone else's opinions (you know, opinions are like a-holes, everybody's
got one).
So, if that move by Mueller is allowed to stand and serve as a precedent in American
jurisprudence, doesn't that mean that journalists from foreign lands, like Caitlin herself,
are at risk of being indicated at any moment by the US Justice Department if they express
opinions that the insiders in the Deep State do not like? And, what about all the foreign
nationals who post here in this forum on this blog? I daresay most offer opinions not
complementary of the US government and its political menagerie. And, to be honest, many do so
in order to either change minds or solidify shared beliefs with others, including great
swirling drifts of snowflake Americans.
This free exchange of thoughts is now to be verboten because someone other than Uncle Sam
may have an influence or even change the mind of a precious American citizen? This is
madness. That the most educated and articulate amongst us do not see this, but rather
participate in the feeding frenzy upon the carcass of what is left of our liberal democracy
is absolutely stupifying. As I have been saying for some time now, someone or some force must
be imposing a form of mass hypnosis upon the population and only a few of us (including most
here) seem to be immune to its effects. Maybe something we consume acts as an antidote.
Perhaps your Italian grandma's muffalettas or calzones, Joe? Or my mother's German
rouladen?
Dave P. , February 17, 2018 at 5:01 pm
Realist –
"As I have been saying for some time now, someone or some force must be imposing a form of
mass hypnosis upon the population and only a few of us (including most here) seem to be
immune to its effects."
You are dead right on that. My wife was yelling and screaming last night that why I was
not watching this "Russia trolls" show with her on CNN, MSNBC, and PBS; to learn how the
Russians have destroyed our beautiful democracy. She had seen the World too, mostly for fun
and experiences; she taught English in Malaysia – British colony until 1957 – as
a peace Corps volunteer during 1960's. There you have it. As many commentators have pointed
out, we are a country of completely brain washed people now. Schiff, Schumer, Sanders . . .
they are all cut from the same cloth. There is not one politician left in the country who
will challenge the The Ruling Power Structure's narrative. Even in Russia, there are lot of
opposition leadership voices who are making noises against the System they disagree with.
Gregory Herr , February 17, 2018 at 6:21 pm
They can't make "hacking" stick 'cause it's false. They can't make "Trump is a Putin
puppet" stick 'cause it's false. So now the whole damn dumb show–regurgitated by either
shameless war profiteers or straight-faced useful idiots–comes down to so-called
Russian social media trolls exercising the same "speech" that we are supposedly so proud to
call "free" in this country. They not only take us for moronic fools, but they can't even see
that that they are insulting us further by insinuating that our voting decisions are
completely unsophisticated and easily swayed to the point that 13 Russians could have an
impact amidst a sea of election season campaign "propaganda" from both major parties and an
array of special interest influence peddling. Like the Clinton campaign didn't hire Facebook
trolls!
Bye Bye First Amendment no one in the halls of power takes it seriously enough to defend it
unless you're spouting groupthink right Bernie?
Zachary Smith , February 17, 2018 at 8:00 pm
Essentially, all Mueller did yesterday was to indict a bunch of private Russian citizens
for expressing their opinions about the candidates in the last presidential election via
public media (mainly Facedbook and Twitter), and the individual Russians contacted by the
press about it did not deny doing so.
I'll echo Drew Hunkins in calling this a brilliant condensation of the issue. What worries
me is what the morons-in-charge might have in mind as a follow-up to this lunacy.
CitizenOne , February 18, 2018 at 2:31 am
Perhaps we are entering into the Orwellian dawn of Thought Crimes which are any feelings
or thinking a Citizen has which are counter to the State Propaganda put out by the Ministry
of Truth. The Thought Police (thinkpol in Newspeak) are the secret police of the novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is their job to uncover and punish thoughtcrime. The Thought Police
use surveillance and psychological monitoring to find and eliminate members of society who
challenge the party's authority and ideology.
Anyone who has questioned the intelligence agencies narrative that Russians and Trump
colluded to win the election are viewed with suspicion as potential enemies of the state.
It would appear to be allegations of thought crime because 15 foreign nationals posted
things on social media. We have been under the perception that social media is a free forum
for discourse but now, like China, we are seeing the formation of a witch hunt for foreign
devils who have infiltrated the social mediascape and are on trial for the results of a
national election.
We are literally burning some innocent teenager for the calamity we are convinced was not
of our own making. We need to find a witch to brew some witchcraft to explain how our current
situation has arisen.
Not sure if anyone alive today believes the Salem Witch Trials served justice and created
a restoration of civil harmony. I'm fairly sure that everyone looks at those dark days as a
travesty of justice.
Yes we are living in a time of universal deceit and the act of telling the truth has
become a revolutionary act just as Orwell portrayed in his novel.
Thought crimes are fairly scary and they imply that our government is willing to indict
the thoughts of whoever it deems to be an enemy of the state and bring the thinkers of
thought crime as defined by the state as anyone who questions the official fake narrative of
Russia Gate to "justice".
What is the end goal? The end goal is to prop up a long in the tooth multi-decade cold war
with Russia to justify massive military spending. Do you want to know the answer to your
question of whether or not the US defense industry and our intelligence agencies are trying
to spark a war with Russia?
The answer is yes they are. As crazy as that sounds, the hungry defense industry with its
insatiable appetite for more weapons has decided to go for the ultimate win the lottery
strategy and foment war with Russia. It had been happening under Obama and now it is
happening under Trump. They are trying to box him into a corner where he will feel enough
pressure to go against Russia. Perhaps they can goad him into attacking Russia which is what
I believe they want to do. Our national media plays along and is in bed with the intelligence
agencies as much as ever just like they spouted the lies of Chalabi in Iraq War II falsely
believing his claims that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and chemical and biological weapons.
Even the analysis on North Korea which opines that NK will use all weapons first as a
first strike in a scenario the USA has called the "Use it or Lose it" fell short and was
proved a false scenario or that there were really no actual WMDs in Iraq as the UN
claimed.
Either way, the likely outcomes of a WMD armed Iraqi leader facing imminent demise which
would cause him to use all available weapons at his disposal did not happen. There are only
two conclusions to the outcome. Saddam did not have these weapons or the likely scenario of
"Use it or Lose it" is all wrong.
Either way the premise of the war was shown to be false.
Unfortunately in the aftermath of that war there was no US counterpart to the British
Chilcot Report and the US went on to engage in regime change in other nations like Ukraine,
Syria, Libya and elsewhere.
There is no sense to it other than to destabilize nations, foment violence and create
international tensions which have the effect of causing our elected leaders to pony up more
money for defense to combat the new enemies we just created.
Yet still they want more as Caitlin Johnstone pointed out. What they want now to do is to
do the same thing they have been doing under Obama and enlist Trump on the grandest military
adventure of all. War with Russia.
I agree with her assessment that this is crazy. This is the most irresponsible thing yet
but it has been enabled by a fake news press just as it was enabled by the fake news media
all the times before.
I agree with you Joe that a form of mass hypnosis has gripped our democrat officials and a
large segment of our population. We have been handed a leader they don't like and they are
ready and able to make hay with the election outcome to persuade us by force to support more
military adventures.
Dave P. , February 18, 2018 at 3:53 am
Citizen One –
"Yet still they want more as Caitlin Johnstone pointed out. What they want now to do is to
do the same thing they have been doing under Obama and enlist Trump on the grandest military
adventure of all. War with Russia."
I agree with her assessment that this is crazy. This is the most irresponsible thing yet
but it has been enabled by a fake news press just as it was enabled by the fake news media
all the times before."
Yes. This scenario is getting more and more likely. All steps point to that direction.
Skeptigal , February 17, 2018 at 11:10 pm
Unfortunately I'm not as confident. Here is the complete indictment at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43091945
. There are three counts (with almost 70 allegations): 1. Conspiracy to Defraud the United
States 2. Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud And Bank Fraud and 3. Aggravated Identity Theft. It
ends with a forfeiture allegation seeking property, real or personal from the defendants.
The Russiagate affair has been going on for almost a year and I would think Mueller is
under a lot of pressure to find something to stick. This indictment may be it. Mueller will
be the hero; Trump may be saved as the interference started in 2014, before his campaign
began; the Hillary emails and Nunes memo will be cast aside; and the USA can say to the world
"see I told you so."
Once again, Russia's reputation will be taken down a few notches and made to suffer
another humiliation. And the US will move on to the next allegation, "UK and US blame Russia
for the malicious NotPetya cyberattack" (headline on BBC).
Martin - Swedish citizen , February 18, 2018 at 1:15 am
If the allegations are true, they need to be put in perspective:
– what might be the rational behind? Eg tit-for-tat for Western meddling, arms
race,
– do other nations engage in similar projects? What are the scale of those?
Starting in 2014 could it have been triggered by the Kiev coup and Nuland's was it five
billion?
This dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia is extremely lucrative for the war
profiteers, the retired generals & intelligence members who prostitute themselves as
media pundits, the members of Congress who get $$$ from the war profiteers, and the corporate
media which thrives on links to the war profiteers as well as on war reporting.
That's why we must all be kept fearful, so we don't demand that annual trillion dollar
military "defense" budgets be slashed and that money instead be spent on social safety net
programs and infrastructure.
That's also why tensions with not only Russia, but Iran, Syria, North Korea, and China
must be maintained, and our endless wars and global empire of military bases continued.
As long as war and militarism are such profitable rackets, it doesn't matter that all life
on earth is threatened. That is the essence of capitalism in a nutshell: profits are more
important than life itself.
Joe Tedesky , February 17, 2018 at 12:55 pm
You got that right, and the sooner the American public wise up to all these lies the
better. If you want this maddening insanity to stop, well then my fellow Americans quit
buying into their lies. Just go ahead and board the damn plane, oh BTW one of the reasons NFL
attendance is down is well think of the new security rules put in place plus who knows the
rules of football anymore (our football is even tainted with screwiness). Sorry for the rant,
but we Americans got to start calling our officials out on this stuff. It's that plain and
simple. Nice post REDPILLED. Joe
Virginia , February 17, 2018 at 1:06 pm
REDPILLED,
I'm just imagining how it must feel, if you're Putin, to be able to rein in your emotions,
to not react no matter how much baited, and to stay above the fray while warmongers, like
dogs, are barking at your feet. That degree of self-composure, resting on a strong necessity
to try to prevent WWIII and nuclear annihilation, well, I'm afraid not many of us will ever
know or feel that exactly, but we can imagine! To do this with grace and dignity, insult
after insult! There are lessons to be learned here.
Joe Tedesky , February 17, 2018 at 1:10 pm
Virginia we Americans better hope patient Putin stays in power. Joe
irina , February 17, 2018 at 3:19 pm
Exactly. I can't imagine who the Creatures of the Deep think would be a
good successor to Putin, but I do think they should be very careful of
what they wish for. Case in point, the Ukraine. What exactly happened
to "Our Man Yats" anyway ? He seems to have (been ?) disappeared. . .
Joe Tedesky , February 17, 2018 at 3:30 pm
There is a bit of a warring nature still left in this old fighter cat, and during these
imaginary moments of destruction I struggle with I see Russian T72 tanks driving down Maiden
Square looking for old Yats and his friends. Not to worry though, I seriously don't want
anyone, anywhere, to have to suffer even one minute of war, but on a bad day, well need I say
more? Joe
ranney , February 17, 2018 at 5:45 pm
I agree Virginia. I am so depressed by Mueller's actions my head swims. I had hoped that
Mueller was actually an honest investigator who believed in the rule of law as everyone said.
Now I can't imagine what game he is playing. Now it seems like all hope has vanished that
anything even vaguely resembling the truth will come out.. Mueller"s indictments of these
poor people seals the deal: Russia is the evil bugbear that must be destroyed and all right
thinking patriots will agree to that when we launch nuclear war.
I keep feeling like we're all in a Kafka exercise or a Harold Pinter play where motives and
truths are hidden behind an impenatrable wall. Even the new Consortium article by McGovern
and Binney seems to hint at much more than they are telling, leaving me to wish they'd just
come out and say what they are worried about given their knowledge and expertise. Instead I'm
left with the sense that there is a coded message in there that I have missed.
So yes, I too worry about how patient Putin can be when we have already in so many ways
performed a dozen or more acts of war on Russia in the past year and he has not reacted
violently.
p.s. Once again Caitlin has provided great links. Click on one of the first about the
government telling us lies. It'll get you a great 4 minute cartoon based on Chomskys book
Manufacturing Consent. It's about propaganda. You'll like it.
Virginia , February 17, 2018 at 8:50 pm
Ranney -- One thing that has lifted my spirit somewhat, I heard a real thinker say that
the Deep State (DS) is losing ground now because its anointed candidate HRC was defeated in
2016. So 2016 marks a positive time of turning and healing. Putin and Xi seem to both be
working for the good of the world. Wonderful if Donald Trump could drain the swamp and get on
board. Either way, those two Leaders together can lead us out of this morass.
There's a state of thought that remains composed no matter what the valley of the shadow
of death. The more I learn -- and sometimes what I learn is vastly darker than I could ever
conceive -- the deeper grows my joy. It's been a puzzle to me that I could read something
truly devastating here on CN and walk away with more joy than I had before reading it (and
believe me, it's not because of the evil news). It's partly because I'm grateful that my eyes
have been opened. There is absolutely nothing I can do without being well informed about it.
I feel I'm learning all this for a reason; a very real big good reason. Don't you? There's a
state of thought that refuses to be fearful no matter what. Adopt that one, Ranney.
Just look at those Olympiads doing the impossible! They start with, "I can."
Dave P. , February 18, 2018 at 4:07 am
Virginia,
Yes. Regarding the barking dogs, I read some where this Putin's answer to a question a few
days ago on that list of 200 sanctioned Russians put out by U.S. Treasury Department. Putin
said: Let the barking dogs bark, but the caravan goes on.
Taking oil price to 30th or 40th is a strategic goal of the USA in relation to Russia. Listen at 3:30.
Notable quotes:
"... Appeasing interview with a shockingly cheap incompetent former CIA head Woolsey. If this man seriously represents the intellectual level of the CIA, then the USA will implode even faster than in ten years. ..."
"... You are exactly right. U$ politicians are uninformed, stupid, detached from reality, selfish and they think like schoolyard kids do. ..."
"... They are the product of the US society as a whole. ..."
"... Craig Murray nailed this issue stone dead for all time a few years ago, when he wrote:"[neo]liberal interventionism, the theory that bombing brown people is good for them". ..."
"... In the former The Ukraine, the Jewish Quisling oligarch dictator, Poroshenko, has been appointing foreigners to positions of power (SackOfShvilli is but one). He supported this by stating: "Ukrainians are too corrupt to rule themselves." When will we in America hear such a statement from our leaders to justify the appointment of Jews and paid Judaeophiles to all positions of power? ..."
"... I'm just waiting for Yevgeny Prigozhin to hold a press conference in Russia to claim that Hillary Clinton paid him to run the Internet Research Agency to besmirch her opponent- watch the fireworks :) It's all a hall of mirrors. ..."
"... The Internet Research Agency couldn't have possibly been more ineffective, which points to it's main purpose being to besmirch Trump (more more likely it was just an unimportant hobby of Prigozhin). ..."
"... Sure the United States has, they have been doing it since 1953 with the overthrow of Iran, to as recently as 2012 Russian Election, 2014 Ukraine Election, the UK referendum on 23 June 2016 on Brexit and currently trying to overthrow it this year. These are just a few and there is a very long list of other countries also. The United States in now in Russia and Hungry today meddling it their elections. Got to get the right people in office so they will cow-tow to the United States. ..."
"... What an admission! trump doesn't want more drilling for oil to Americans to use. It is for export and for foreign interference ..."
"... and if the price of oil would go down to 30/40$ that would make a unhappy input and so would be the saudis and you fracking industry would go down the toilet and thy will drag the banks with them. What a moron. And US oil companies would like that alot too ..."
Another tiresome, butthurt yank/wank? Between the new One Belt, One Road Chinese initiative, the Russians taking control of
ME oil production and the fact that america has NO answers to help it's declining empire, it would seem to the non-partisan observer
that america is well and truly f***ed. You must be talking about their debt expansionism, $20 TRILLION and rising by the second.
Thank you Mario......let's not forget Ukraine, Kosovo, Bosnia, the entirety of eastern Europe, the entirety of northern Africa,
Rwanda, the Congo, Venezuela, Chili, Guatemala, Panama, Jeeeeeeeze etc......
Russia condemned and defined as the enemy of America with laughably little evidence (effing Facebook posts being about the
extent of it) .... not a word about JEWISH MONEY controlling the entire political system in the USA. When Netanyahu gets 29 standing
ovations from Congress should that not have triggered an FBI "Investigation"? Nah ... nothing happening there. It is breathtaking
that THIS is the Alice-In-Wonderland world we inhabit.
Appeasing interview with a shockingly cheap incompetent former CIA head Woolsey. If this man seriously represents the intellectual
level of the CIA, then the USA will implode even faster than in ten years.
Craig Murray nailed this issue stone dead for all time a few years ago, when he wrote:"[neo]liberal interventionism, the theory that bombing brown people is good for them".
Yeah, that's hilarious. Join the murdering creep in a giggle, Laura, that's cute. Here's a global criminal who should have
been hung years ago for crimes against humanity. No one in their right mind would treat this creep with anything but contempt
and horror, let alone find him funny.
In the former The Ukraine, the Jewish Quisling oligarch dictator, Poroshenko, has been appointing foreigners to positions of
power (SackOfShvilli is but one). He supported this by stating: "Ukrainians are too corrupt to rule themselves." When will we
in America hear such a statement from our leaders to justify the appointment of Jews and paid Judaeophiles to all positions of
power?
My profound and sincere condolences. You are getting the 'Democracy Treatment' by the West. I hope some of you survive to tell
the tale and take revenge.
Are those ears or bat-wings? WOW! Yet another Jewe, pretending not be be. I guess he would say that the USA murdered all the
Indians and enslaved Africans 'for their own good' as well.
Talmudo-Satanism is the pernicious underlying ideology of the people who have taken over, not just the USA, but, lets face it,
the entire West.
Lets not forget that the U.$.A. meddled in Australia's election of the Whitlam Government. (And several governments there after
as soon as they realised they could get away with it an nothing would happen to them). The United States are a bunch of sick puppies;
really sick puppies the way they have treated Australia.
So much for being allies. With allies like the United States you don't need enemies (Unless the U.$. doctors them up for you
to force you to pay them more money for weapons and protection).
And it makes me sick that so many 'naive' people around the world keep falling for the SH*T that comes out of their mouths.
When dealing with the United States there are a few rules to follow. (Apologies to the innocent Americans out there but 'they'
allow their government to do some unspeakable horrors to the world.)
Rule One: If an American politician is speaking, then they are lying to you.
Rule Two: If an American Politician is quiet, they they want you to believe a lie.
Rule Three: If you have relations with the United States, you will be lied to.
And that goes for the entire planet no matter who the United States is speaking to.
Worst part is the our Gov can't think ahead, if they keep antagonising China on behalf of the Seppo's China will eventually
pull their mineral imports and our economy will crash overnight.
Yes, nobody doubts that the US interferes with elections in other countries - we're the good guys, so this is ok :)
I'm just waiting for Yevgeny Prigozhin to hold a press conference in Russia to claim that Hillary Clinton paid him to run the
Internet Research Agency to besmirch her opponent- watch the fireworks :) It's all a hall of mirrors.
The Internet Research Agency couldn't have possibly been more ineffective, which points to it's main purpose being to besmirch
Trump (more more likely it was just an unimportant hobby of Prigozhin).
Sure the United States has, they have been doing it since 1953 with the overthrow of Iran, to as recently as 2012 Russian Election,
2014 Ukraine Election, the UK referendum on 23 June 2016 on Brexit and currently trying to overthrow it this year. These are just
a few and there is a very long list of other countries also. The United States in now in Russia and Hungry today meddling it their
elections. Got to get the right people in office so they will cow-tow to the United States.
Frederick the Great concluded that to allow governments to be dominated by the majority would be
disastrous: "A democracy, to survive, must be, like other governments a minority persuading a majority to let itself be led by
a minority."
and if the price of oil would go down to 30/40$ that would make a unhappy input and so would be the saudis and you fracking
industry would go down the toilet and thy will drag the banks with them. What a moron. And US oil companies would like that alot too
...and the US bombed half of the world's countries for their own good too. US made Libya a slave market for humanity's good
as well. Oboomer even got the Nobel Peace Prize for it.
MIC controls Trump, not the other way around. That's why Trump deflated just three months
after inauguration. He can tell all he wants, but his actions speak louder then his words. His
actions are typical neocon actions.
Notable quotes:
"... However inadvertently, Trump has thereby bestowed on the American people a singular gift, putting a presidential imprimatur on a point that critics have been making for years, to no avail. Pointing out that our post-9/11 wars have resulted in a multitrillion-dollar waste of lives and treasure represents easily the greatest achievement of his young administration. ..."
"... Now let's look at the rest of the story. I will claim that most US military adventures, since Korea has been a failure often with unintended consequences, squandering taxpayer dollars while the national infrastructure and national psyche crumble. Involving ourselves in Vietnam after the French abandoned it was a horrific mistake with the loss of many lives and the expenditure of immeasurable political and economic capital. Somebody tell me again what Bay of Pigs and Grenada accomplished? There have been numerous other short term in-and-out deployments of troops and materiel since Korea. See Wikipedia's "Timeline of United States military operations." ..."
"... Let's face it. The military-industrial complex continues to lead the country into deeply unfortunate places and situations. Let's tie all this back to the recent school massacre in Parkland FL, one of many in recent years. Military surplus has been given away by the federal government to build up highly militarized SWAT teams in cities, armed with tanks, missile launchers and automatic weapons. Citizens easily and quickly arm themselves with semi-automatic weapons, seizing on loopholes that regulate the buying of hand guns but not AK-15s, all because the NRA owns too many members of Congress. ..."
"... Let's go beyond Trump's simplistic pronouncement. The United States has been and is a bellicose and violent nation. Unfortunately, President Trump's words have been equally bellicose, especially toward North Korea. I have little faith that our country will dial back its aggressiveness under the Trump regime. ..."
In a typically offhand remark, President Trump the other day rendered his personal
assessment of our various post-9/11 wars, interventions, and punitive expeditions. "
Seven trillion dollars. What a mistake ," he said. "But it is what it is."
The seven trillion is merely a guesstimate, of course. No one, least of all the lords of the
Pentagon, really knows how much our sundry military campaigns, large and small, have cost. Yet
at this point, total expenditures certainly reach well into the trillions. And whatever the
current tally, that sum will inevitably increase as our wars drag on and as downstream
obligations – care for veterans, for example – pile up for decades to come.
That Trump himself should characterize those wars as mistaken represents a moment of plain
speaking rare in today's Washington. After all, as the current commander in chief, he owns that
mistake and its myriad consequences. We may doubt that the generals occupying senior positions
in his administration share their boss's assessment. Nor, in all likelihood, does the national
security establishment as a whole. Yet it qualifies as more than mildly interesting that the
individual exercising supreme authority views the entire enterprise as misbegotten.
Imagine the head of Planned Parenthood declaring herself a pro-lifer. Imagine Amazon CEO
Jeff Bezos criticizing the American penchant for conspicuous consumption. Imagine Tom Brady
announcing that his son will never play a brutal and dangerous sport like football. A sitting
American president characterizing ongoing American wars as mistaken is hardly less notable and
ought to command widespread public attention.
Imagine the head of Planned Parenthood
declaring herself a pro-lifer. Imagine Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos criticizing the American penchant
for conspicuous consumption. Imagine Tom Brady announcing that his son will never play a brutal
and dangerous sport like football. A sitting American president characterizing ongoing American
wars as mistaken is hardly less notable and ought to command widespread public attention. Of
course, Trump is an improbable source of truth. His many critics have become accustomed to
dismissing his every word as either false or hateful or simply bizarre. Yet in this instance, I
submit, he has uttered a genuine truth of profound importance.
Unfortunately, Trump's bottom line obscures the implications of that truth: "It is what it
is." There are at least two ways of interpreting that remark. The first is fatalistic: We're
stuck in a heckuva mess and there's no way of getting unstuck. The second is pragmatic: Here
are facts that we dare not ignore.
... ... ...
In Hans Christian Andersen's familiar tale "The Emperor's New Clothes," a young child states
the obvious: The monarch is naked. Now we have the emperor himself making a comparably
self-evident point: Our wars aren't working.
However inadvertently, Trump has thereby bestowed on the American people a singular gift,
putting a presidential imprimatur on a point that critics have been making for years, to no
avail. Pointing out that our post-9/11 wars have resulted in a multitrillion-dollar waste of
lives and treasure represents easily the greatest achievement of his young administration.
We tend to think that the story of that administration thus far has been one of ineptitude
combined with persistent scandal. Yet the real scandal will occur if the American people and
their elected representatives in Washington fail to treat Trump's verdict regarding our recent
wars with the respect and seriousness it deserves.
Thank you, Mr. President, for your candor. If for nothing else, on this score, we owe you
one.
Andrew J. Bacevich is the author, most recently, of "America's War for the Greater
Middle East: A Military History."
Reubenhop 02/16/18 09:49 AM The
trouble is Trump criticizes these wars only because they are not his wars. He needs to be the
outsider who will do better than those that preceded him. But what does he do? He builds up
the military for future wars (even nuclear wars) and engages in dangerous saber rattling and
shows of strength. He learned nothing from his criticisms.
bernieman
02/16/18 09:57 AM said this before: arm both sides with our most destructive weapons, nukes
included, withdraw from the midevil east and let them kill each other. problem solved in
probably less than a year.
MassGuy2 02/16/18 09:57 AM Another
big mistake we're continuing to make is paying for these wars without raising taxes. In
fact, Trump is lowering taxes. Its like a homeowner taking out an expensive loan to buy
something he can't afford, and then cutting back on his work hours. As long as these wars
are being funded by future debt, most Americans will not seriously question the need to
spend money on foolish wars. If Trump is really serious, he should propose taxes be
immediately raised to pay for these wars, bring back the draft, and scrap the volunteer
army. Then see how fast the American people demand good answers as to why we're fighting
these wars.
CambridgeMAry 02/16/18 12:07 PM
I agree. Getting rid of the draft was a mistake, and it does not redound to the credit of
those who opposed the Vietnam War that most of their opposition to it evaporated when the
draft was abolished.
The draft during WWII applied to all men, including the sons of Members of Congress.
Hitler was devastating Europe, and attempting to bomb and strafe the UK into submission,
but the US did not really become involved until we were actually attacked at Pearl
Harbor.
Now, it is too easy for us to dismiss the dangers we send our service persons into
because "They volunteered."
no-name- 02/16/18 04:20
PM "Getting rid of the draft was a mistake, and it does not redound to the credit of
those who opposed the Vietnam War that most of their opposition to it evaporated when
the draft was abolished."
you're misinformed. there was strong and ever-growing opposition to the war until it
ended.
Eurydice9276 02/16/18 01:29 PM
Not at all defending Trump - but stating the obvious doesn't have to be an original
thought.
NinjaLibn 02/16/18 10:15 AM
I've long admired Andrew's insights and incisive writing. It would have been interesting to
hear his recommendations for disentangling ourselves from these wars.
Ben-Myers-not-gutless-anonymous
02/16/18 10:51 AM Trump was almost right, and he did not go far enough. Bush 41's quick
in-and-out adventure in Kuwait makes some sense. Bush 41 and his advisors smartly realized
that a surgical removal of Saddam Hussein's troops from Kuwait would have few long term
implications.
Now let's look at the rest of the story. I will claim that most US military adventures,
since Korea has been a failure often with unintended consequences, squandering taxpayer
dollars while the national infrastructure and national psyche crumble. Involving ourselves
in Vietnam after the French abandoned it was a horrific mistake with the loss of many lives
and the expenditure of immeasurable political and economic capital. Somebody tell me again
what Bay of Pigs and Grenada accomplished? There have been numerous other short term
in-and-out deployments of troops and materiel since Korea. See Wikipedia's "Timeline of
United States military operations."
Let's face it. The military-industrial complex continues to lead the country into deeply
unfortunate places and situations. Let's tie all this back to the recent school massacre in
Parkland FL, one of many in recent years. Military surplus has been given away by the
federal government to build up highly militarized SWAT teams in cities, armed with tanks,
missile launchers and automatic weapons. Citizens easily and quickly arm themselves with
semi-automatic weapons, seizing on loopholes that regulate the buying of hand guns but not
AK-15s, all because the NRA owns too many members of Congress.
Let's go beyond Trump's simplistic pronouncement. The United States has been and is a
bellicose and violent nation. Unfortunately, President Trump's words have been equally
bellicose, especially toward North Korea. I have little faith that our country will dial
back its aggressiveness under the Trump regime.
MNMoore 02/16/18 12:00 PM Right.
Our economy is addicted to war. The goal is not to win the war. It is to sustain it.
"... Lockheed Martin, after all, gets nearly as much money from the US government as the State Department. CEO Marilyn Hewson is, by the reckoning of some analysts, as powerful as most US cabinet secretaries. ..."
Lockheed Martin, after all, gets nearly as much money from the US government as the
State Department. CEO Marilyn Hewson is, by the reckoning of some analysts, as powerful as most
US cabinet secretaries.
Teal Group's Richard Aboulafia has the gold medal quote on this – "
diplomacy is out; airstrikes are in. " From the F-35 on, Lockheed is a key facilitator of
airstrikes, and soaring demands for its products are leading to soaring revenue and rising
profit margins.
Reports on the company brag about "juicy" shipbuilding deals, and the money pouring in from
nuclear weapons upgrades. Lockheed Martin's status as a main seller of US arms and the US
obsession with growing its military seem to ensure that the company will remain rich, and
wildly influential, for years to come.
"... How about Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa? Fuck Allen Dulles, Mike Pompeo, and everybody in-between! ..."
"... BTW, Victoria Noodles will be very disappointed Ukraine didn't make the list after all of her hard work. ..."
"... Victoria "F*ck the EU" Nuland and the CIA were all over the Ukrainian "coup", but of course no mention of that on "Fair and Balanced". Laura Ingram is a typical Fox News Zio-Nazi bitch, hiding behind a cross, who apparently believes her own BS, and along others like Hannity have blood on their hands. ..."
"... You can always spot a psychopathic liar by their predisposition to smile or laugh at questions that are not humorous. Laura Ingraham is a neocon mouth-peice for the establishment. ..."
Former CIA chief James Woolsey appeared on Fox News to push the narrative of how dastardly 'dem Russkies' are in their meddling
with the sacred soul of America's democracy.
Woolsey did his patriotic deep-state-duty and proclaimed the evils of "expansionist Russia" and dropped 'facts' like "Russia has
a larger cyber-army than its standing army," before he moved on to China and its existential threats.
But then, beginning at around 4:30 , the real debacle of the conversation begins as Ingraham asks Woolsey,
"Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries' elections?"
Hes responds, surprisingly frankly...
"Oh probably... but it was for the good of the system..."
To which Ingraham follows up...
"We don't do that now though? We don't mess around in other people's elections?"
Prompting this extraordinary sentence from a former CIA chief...
"Well...hhhmmm, numm numm numm numm... only for a very good cause...in the interests of democracy"
So just to clarify - yes, the CIA chief admitted that Democracy-spreading 'Murica meddled in the Democratic elections of other
nations "in the interests of democracy."
In case you wondered which ones he was referring to, here's a brief selection since 1948...
2016: UK (verbal intervention against Brexit)
2014: Afghanistan (effectively re-writing Afghan constitution)
2014: UK (verbal intervention against Scottish independence)
2011: Libya (providing support to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi)
2009: Honduras (ousting President Zelaya)
2006: Palestine (providing support to oust Prime Minister Haniyeh)
2005: Syria (providing support against President al-Assad)
2003: Iran (providing support against President Khatami)-
2003: Iraq (ousting of President Hussein)
2002: Venezuela (providing support to attempt an overthrow of President Chavez)
1999: Yugoslavia (removing Yugoslav forces from Kosovo)
1994: Iraq (attempted overthrow of President Hussein)
1991: Haiti (ousting President Aristide)
1991: Kuwait (removing Iraqi forces from Kuwait)
1989: Panama (ousting General Noriega)
1983: Grenada (ousting General Austin's Marxist forces)
1982: Nicaragua (providing support
1971: Chile (ousting President Allende)
1967: Indonesia (ousting President Sukarno)
1964: Brazil (ousting President Goulart)
1964: Chile (providing support against Salvador Allende)
1961: Congo (assassination of leader Lumumba)
1958: Lebanon (providing support to Christian political parties)
1954: Guatemala (ousting President Arbenz)
1953: Iran (ousting Prime Minister Mossadegh)
1953: Philippines (providing support to the President Magsaysay campaign)
1948: Italy (providing support to the Christian Democrats campaign)
This Russia bullshit has gotta stop. For the love of God, it's been like two and a a half years now. If Vladimir Putin was
as twice as evil as we're told, he still wouldn't be half as evil as the Clintons are on any given Thursday.
Democracy? Annnnnnnd it's gone! No wonder the rest of the world thinks we've collectively lost our minds. BTW, Victoria
Noodles will be very disappointed Ukraine didn't make the list after all of her hard work.
Victoria "F*ck the EU" Nuland and the CIA were all over the Ukrainian "coup", but of course no mention of that on "Fair
and Balanced". Laura Ingram is a typical Fox News Zio-Nazi bitch, hiding behind a cross, who apparently believes her own BS, and
along others like Hannity have blood on their hands.
The whole purpose of the Mueller indictment was to give the mainstream outlets something to report so idiot Americans will
believe the crap put out about Russia since the Winter Olympics in Sochi and set the tone to justify a military conflict with
Russia that won't end well for anyone, IMO
mary, just a touch catty tonight, don't cha' think?
Zio-Nazi? How dat work?
Whole purpose of the Mueller indictments is to give the folks a show to prove that their money hasn't been wasted on a Trump
collusion charge for collusion that started in 2014 when Trump was prolly out schlongin' some playmate or other..
I kinda wondered why they missed that one, too. I've seen that list on here before. I guess messing with Israel's elections
doesn't fit the ZH narrative?
No way he believes it. One thing about people who lack human empathy is that they would NEVER fall for the same tricks that
the empathy having population does. They will always see the angle. It's what their brain is devoted to. All the capacity that
we use to be reflective, emotional or caring all goes to angling for advantage with them. He knows exactly why people are tortured
and couldn't give a shit less. You are either shark or mutilated gold fish as far as he is concerned.
Woolsey is an evil man, for a certainty. But, au contraire, I bet he does believe it is for their own good. Whoever "they"
are that he's doin' shit to. Like the Jesuits in Andalusia, purging the non-believers.
You can always spot a psychopathic liar by their predisposition to smile or laugh at questions that are not humorous. Laura
Ingraham is a neocon mouth-peice for the establishment.
It really would be a new dawn for this country if the entire Deep State were outed, and publicly executed. I know that sounds
like tinfoil hat talk, but hey, I'm sure the NSA is all over me right about now. Too bad they can't seem to find serial killers
that say they're going to shoot up a school online. Too busy trying to shut up those that don't like the Deep State.
They have always done this and every single other accusation that they have levied against other "tyrants". The crazy train
continues to pick up speed.
Ummm, Fidel Castro, Cuba, 1962 ? Leading up to Dallas? Which led to LBJ and ramp up of Indochina. If you look closely you will
see that there was a huge little war going on in Laos, lots of bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail from fighter bombers based in
Thailand.
Also, Australia. The 1972 Whitlam dismissal was a bloodless coup d'état. Whitlam recognized North Vietnam which pissed off
a bunch of people in Langley. The pilots were on strike and they couldn't fly parts and crew into Alice Springs (Pine Gap Satellite
facility). The Aussies have long memories and it will be a cold day in hell before they trust the Yanks like before. This is a
country with a strong sense of injustice. The Aussies still talk about the "bodyline" cricket scandal with the Brits, and that
happened in the 1930's....
Here is an interesting article that points to the new American strategy with respect to Iran and central Asia. Iran is already
being attacked from West and East in the North. And central Asia is next. This might force Iran to pull back some forces from Syria
and Iraq.
But thankfully we now have Stephen Miller, the 32-year old Trump advisor and immigration hard-liner recently blamed by Democratic
senators for scuttling their desired amnesty deal for illegal immigrants. Transparently, the Dems are trying to spoil Trump's relationship
with Miller, as they did with Bannon,
by insinuating that
Miller is pulling Trump's strings. Of course it is absurd to suggest that Trump is anything but his own man. But Miller is a
crucially important figure in the Trump administration and his influence is, from what I can tell, entirely positive for the interest
of Americans concerned with mass immigration and the very tangible threat of
Europeans and people of European descent becoming
minorities in their own countries.
Jews, and Americans overall, need more Stephen Millers. Brash, unafraid, quick-witted, verbally formidable, and unabashedly "America
First," Miller is a powerful spokesman for
economic nationalist positions
,
anti-globalism , and for preserving this country's original culture and people against the Democratic scheme to flood it with
illegal and legal immigrants whose main gift to America will be their reliable Democratic votes in every future election. Miller
is roundly despised by the establishment for his positions and rhetoric.
Nancy
Pelosi has called Miller a "White supremacist," while others on the left have
compared him to Joseph Goebbels . He's the only Jew I can think of offhand that the mainstream media actively encourages the
country to hate.
But we Jews should be honest: for every mensch like Miller, we have shmucks like
Tim Wise ,
Noel Ignativ ,
Rob Reiner , Charles Schumer, and thousands
of other high-profile Jews who seem to hate or fear White Christian Americans and seek to hasten their demise as the ethnic majority
of this country. Yes, we Jews have Miller, but we also have the ADL and the SPLC -- powerful well-funded groups who conduct witch
hunts against anyone who dares speak out against multiculturalism, open-borders, globalist doctrine, or who dares to criticize Jews.
Jewish political influence in the US is still overwhelmingly negative, despite the great work of a few good Jews.
As an American (first) and Jew (second) who supports Trump and Trumpism, the European New Right, and anyone concerned with the
long-term impacts of mass immigration, I want to see more Jews, particularly younger, Generation Z Jews move to our ideological side.
I have tried to explore my own motivations for this. Why do I find myself so far to the Right on the issue of immigration and of
protecting European cultures and peoples? Why do I hope other Jews follow me on this ideological journey? And there is
growing indication
they are.
First of all, it has nothing to do with being "self-hating", a common but largely asinine Jewish slur used against Jews who step
out of line. I neither hate myself or Jews collectively. Like many non-Jewish critics of Jews, I just want Jews to stop attacking
Europeans and their descendants in their former colonies by pushing destructive ideologies and policies.
Secondly, I agree with the major criticism of Jews and certainly of Jewish activists: that they seek to do what they think is
good for Jews, while hiding their ethnocentrism by pretending their interests are universalist. Self-interest is often disguised
as "tikun olam," bringing light to the world.
Most importantly, accepting some of the recent critique of the JQ, or the Jewish role in the West's current situation -- without
thinking the situation is simple, monocausal, or part of a grand conspiracy, I view it as important to think about what Jews can
do positively in the current year.
It seems clear that ethnic Jewish activists in the 20 th century had a conscious or subconscious fear of European Christians
maintaining their ethnic or cultural identities, and this manifested itself in the various movements MacDonald brilliantly analyzes
in the Culture of Critique : the anthropology of race, psychoanalysis, communism, the Frankfort School and Cultural Marxism.
When Jewish activists pushed through immigration reform in the US, the effects were absolutely transformative. Jews largely achieved
their goals, or maybe even surpassed them. Now, more than 50 years later, we can re-examine the question: was this actually good
for the Jews?
To me the answer to this question is a resounding NO. To look at just one simple factor: the people pouring into the US in recent
years are no more Jew-friendly then the White Americans who made up almost 90% of the county in 1960 were. In fact, they are likely
to be considerably less Jew friendly. Mexicans have no special relationship with Jews or with Israel. Neither do Somalis, or Syrians,
or Afghans, or MS-13. Identity-politics obsessed leftist college activists have already made it quite clear that
Jews who side against them are to be viewed as White s -- their Jewishness will not protect them. This trend will continue, and
Jews will become Whites in the eyes of the many people who hate Whites. However different things may have looked to our parents'
or grandparents' generation, there is no tangible benefit today to ordinary American Jews today from the importation of quarter of
Mexico's population, or to ordinary French Jews from a million new Muslims. To think otherwise is to deny reality.
A main motivation for Jewish activism on immigration and other related issues was Jewish fear of being a major outgroup in American
society. Perhaps these fears may have seemed real in the wake of the Second World War, or perhaps even then they were delusional.
Today, they seem absurd. Maybe it is a generational thing, or maybe my Jewish identification is too weak, or maybe it was the context
I grew up in; but I just can't understand American Jews having feelings of fear or hostility towards White Christian Americans in
general. I grew up around White Christians; work with them; live amongst them; and count many as friends, neighbors, colleagues or
teachers. Jewish neurosis or not, a generalized Jewish fear of American Whites is, in my view, insane. Granted, things could change
in the future if we reach such a desperate state that American Whites begin to focus on some of the negative influence Jews have
had in changing their society, and collectively determine to do something about it. But flooding the country with immigrants doesn't
lessen the possibility that will happen. Quite the opposite, it increases it.
Given that, what is really best for the Jews? As American Whites slowly begin to wake up to the reality of their own ethnic interests,
what kind of Jews do we want as our representatives in the public sphere: Stephen Miller or Charles Schumer?
From my point of view, what is "best for the Jews" is to realize that while Jewish elites have been pushing a corrosive and destructive
agenda for 50 years or more, the rest of us are under no obligation to support it. Being Jewish doesn't mean one has to be a leftist
or multiculturalist booster, or work to disenfranchise White majorities in traditionally White countries. Stephen Miller is proof
of that.
But there is another response to the question "what is good for the Jews?" that is also worth serious consideration by American
Jews. The response is: who cares? Seriously, look at the current state of Jews in America. Jews have an extremely disproportionate
share of control over the media, entertainment industry, banking and financial sector, law, medicine, academia, and important policy-making
institutions. Jews are the wealthiest ethnic group in the country. I don't allege any conspiracy here. Jews' tendency to position
ourselves close to power is well described in Benjamin Ginsberg's The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Jews have high
IQs and are excellent verbalists, and obviously Jewish nepotism exists as well. While I abhor the contemporary politicized notion
of "privilege" that minority groups use to cover up their lack of rational argument, it would be dishonest to not admit that if there
is a privileged ethnic group in the US today, that group is not Whites as a whole, but Jews.
It is impossible to look at the situation objectively and not see that generally things have been going very well for American
Jews, and certainly for Jewish elites, for some time. There is thus no reason to spend time and energy thinking about what is good
for the Jews. Even if things do go wildly wrong for diaspora Jews in the future, we have a viable ethnostate that we know will take
us in; a luxury few other peoples in the world possess.
There are abundant reasons however to worry about the welfare of Europeans and people of European descent. The migration crisis
in Europe and the reality of looming major demographic increases in Africa and the Middle East that could drive much larger waves
of migrants are rapidly creating a potential future in which entire peoples could become minorities in their own countries. In the
US, demographic changes due to migration and considerably higher fertility rates among immigrants will alter the country permanently
unless drastic changes to immigration policies are made. Jews need to focus our "tikun olam" on the moral necessity of protecting
ethnic homelands and cultures in Europe, and the neo-Europes. In Stephen Miller we see a Jew who seems to understand what needs to
be done. There is no reason other American Jews can't follow his lead.
In my view, in 2018 what's good for the Jews is for us to stop thinking about what's good for the Jews and start thinking about
the right to self-determination and survival for the people we live amongst: the people who have facilitated the most stunning successes
of our tribe's history in diaspora to date, Americans, Europeans, and people of European descent. (Republished from
The Occidental
Observer by permission of author or representative)
"... The concern of the American ruling class is not Russian or Chinese "subversion," but the growth of social opposition within the United States. The narrative of "Russian meddling" has been used to justify a systematic campaign to censor the Internet and suppress free speech. ..."
The concern of the American ruling class is not Russian or Chinese "subversion," but the
growth of social opposition within the United States. The narrative of "Russian meddling" has
been used to justify a systematic campaign to censor the Internet and suppress free
speech.
Senator Mark Warner
The performance of Senator Mark Warner , the ranking Democrat on the committee, was
particularly obscene. Warner, whose net worth is estimated at $257 million, appeared to be
doing his best impersonation of Senator Joe McCarthy . He declared that foreign subversion
works together with, and is largely indistinguishable from, "threats to our institutions from
right here at home."
Alluding to the publication of the so-called Nunes memo, which documented the fraudulent
character of the Democratic-led investigation of White House "collusion" with Russia, Warner
noted,
"There have been some, aided and abetted by Russian Internet bots and trolls, who have
attacked the basic integrity of the FBI and the Justice Department."
Responding to questioning from Warner, FBI Director Christopher Wray praised the US
intelligence agencies' greater "engagement" and "partnership" with the private sector,
concluding,
"We can't fully police social media, so we have to work with them so that they can police
themselves."
Wray was referring to the sweeping measures taken by social media companies, working
directly with the US intelligence agencies, to implement a regime of censorship, including
through the hiring of tens of thousands of "content reviewers," many with intelligence
backgrounds, to flag, report and delete content.
The assault on democratic rights is increasingly connected to preparations for a major war,
which will further exacerbate social tensions within the United States. Coats prefaced his
remarks by declaring that "the risk of inter-state conflict, including among great powers, is
higher than at any time since the end of the Cold War."
As the hearing was taking place, multiple news outlets were reporting that potentially
hundreds of Russian military contractors had been killed in a recent US air strike in Syria.
This came just weeks after the publication of the Pentagon's National Defense Strategy, which
declared,
"Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US
national security."
However, the implications of this great-power conflict are not simply external to the US
"homeland." The document argues that "the homeland is no longer a sanctuary," and that "America
is a target," for "political and information subversion" on the part of "revisionist powers"
such as Russia and China.
Since "America's military has no preordained right to victory on the battlefield," the only
way the US can prevail in this conflict is through the "seamless integration of multiple
elements of national power," including "information, economics, finance, intelligence, law
enforcement and military."
In other words, America's supremacy in the new world of great-power conflict requires the
subordination of every aspect of life to the requirements of war. In this totalitarian
nightmare, already far advanced, the police, the military and the intelligence agencies unite
with media and technology companies to form a single seamless unit, whose combined power is
marshaled to manipulate public opinion and suppress political dissent.
The dictatorial character of the measures being prepared was underscored by an exchange
between Wray and Republican Senator Marco Rubio , who asked whether Chinese students were
serving as spies for Beijing.
"What is the counterintelligence risk posed to US national security from Chinese students,
particularly those in advanced programs in the sciences and mathematics?" asked Rubio.
Wray responded that
"the use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting, whether it's
professors, scientists, students, we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around
the country, not just in major cities, small ones as well, basically every discipline."
This campaign, with racist overtones, recalls the official rationale -- defense of "national
security" -- used to justify the internment of some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during
the Second World War.
In its open letter calling for a
coalition of socialist, antiwar and progressive websites against Internet censorship, the
World Socialist Web Site noted that
"the ruling class has identified the Internet as a mortal threat to its monopolization of
information and its ability to promote propaganda to wage war and legitimize the obscene
concentration of wealth and extreme social inequality."
It is this mortal threat -- and fear of the growth of class conflict -- that motivate the
lies and hypocrisy on display at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
"... or like viewing old photos of the Robber Barons. The msm has stopped trying to convince middle class readers it's 'on their side', imo. A few have gone full plutocrat friendly. Anything that rocks the plutocrats boats must be caused by 'russians, russians, russians', or outside agitators, or foreigners of one kind or another – not 'real' Americans. ..."
"... Exactly the kind of things the robber barons and their press said 100+ years ago about working class workers striking for better wages and working conditions. ..."
"... I agree in the regard to the seeming reduction in analytical quantity and quality. I think you're right with it being caused by reductions in newsroom staff, but I think the type of journalists we have has also changed drastically. ..."
"... In this real world context, this guy wants to promote an unnecessary new cold war to get Democrats elected. Truly disgusting and insane. ..."
"... Not only disgusting and insane, but politically stupid. Any Democrat politician who thinks that promoting Unhinged Russia Hysteria is a winning political strategy is guilty of political malpractice. ..."
"... seems to be what she and they are pushing(unhinged Russia hysteria ) as a winning political strategy. ..."
"... That's what people are going to remember when they go to the voting booth in 2018 (if they even bother) – while the Democrats where whining about Putin and Russia and doing nothing productive whatsoever to improve people's lives, Trump gave everybody more $$$. ..."
"... The "official" narratives from much of the MSM are increasingly removed from any reality experienced by the majority. For example, the latest is a report from Hamilton that much of the social media activity concerning the Florida school shooting is now infested and promoted by Russian bots "to sow division". How more absurd could it be? ..."
"... I have it on good authority that the whole rebranding of the KKK first as the CCC than as the NRA was a long-term Soviet Russian plot to cause an epidemic of mass shootings that would undermine not only US 'Democracy', but the entire capitalist juggernaut! ..."
"... Following up on something Lambert wrote once, it seems that pundits who are incapable of using the term "working class" without somehow attaching the word "white" to it are -- besides not really being on the left -- also more likely than others to push the "Russia ate my Election" nonsense. ..."
"... I think what the horrid warmongering article in Useless News misses is that the flyover states, which supply the troops for the wars, are getting war weary (and why not). Trump capitalized on this in the election, and there was a positive correlation at IIRC the county level between war casualities and troop support. ..."
"... An anti-war candidate who could make the case in the flyover states might really make an impact. ..."
"... I wholeheartedly agree about how a significant factor is that the mainstream media insists on viewing everything through ridiculously contrived "lenses" (Trump, "Russia-gate", Brexit, harassment) and, intentionally I would claim, deliberately obscuring the real problems (wealth distribution, neoliberalism, collapse of the social contract). ..."
"... whatever other news there is seems weirdly predictable and is based around personalities, rather than communities and systems. ..."
"... Animals become agitated in advance of earthquakes. It may be that the reason for angst does not lie in the past, but in the future. In general, so many of the stories are predictable self-parodies, from the Democrats relentless pursuit of the mythical 'moderate insurgents' in republican suburbs, and their comical screeching about Putin, to the drumbeat stories attacking Trump for Obama policies, to the contortions of the neocon policy apparatus trying to justify occupation and regime change in Syria, without mentioning those goals ..."
"... For me, this is key. When I cast my eye upon the news I'm greeted with unrelenting bleakness. Trump's cruel and terrible health plan was big news for months, then his terrible tax cut plan, now his terrible budget. Foreign affairs are equally bleak: the Democrats are busy stirring up a second Cold War. There's no end in sight to the trillions of dollars our nation spends every year on waste and destructive mayhem. Sociopathic corporations and octogenarian billionaires own this country. It's difficult to see anything positive on the horizon. ..."
"... There are two Americas. The news is mostly for and from the one that protects the rentier or elite class. They send their children to private schools. The second one has children who go to public schools who get shot and killed by gunmen that the school and law authorities have been warned about and then decide it's not worth their attention. ..."
"... I think we have reached America's breaking point. Shitty jobs, shitty pay, shitty hours, no hope of affordable housing anywhere, no advancement, massive amounts debt, no easy access to medical care, uneven safety nets, denigration, lack of mutual respect, a lifetime of working with little hope of a safe retirement it's just not pretty out here. ..."
"... I think we are still in a Wile E. Coyote moment where he has gone off the cliff but gravity has not taken hold yet (cartoons don't understand parabolic arcs, similar to central banks and politicians). One of the purposes of financial crises like 2008 is to reset the playing field. The inequality and inefficiency of the Roaring 20s got reset in the 1930s where many people who had paper wealth, but large debt, collapsed and regulation followed that survived for 60 years in preventing similar scenarios. The 2009-2016 period missed that window of opportunity as the focus became preserving the people who had destabilized the system. That meant the damage was one-sided to the bottom 90%. The top 10% are largely disconnected, deliberately, from what is going on with the bottom 90% and as a result are baffled about the swelling unrest in the country. That unrest is still largely unfocused and just burps out random things right now like the Tea Party, Trump, Sanders etc. ..."
"... The only good news to come out of the Florida shooting is that the young people are beginning to realize that they are cannon fodder (literally) in the cynical political battles waged by their elders. ..."
"... I've done my stint in living through the chaotic end to the 1970's and endured the major social upheavals in Thatcher's show-no-mercy early 1980's. Those were bad times. But this is worse in a lot of ways, if only for the crushing atmosphere of a powerless proletariat. ..."
"... The Dem commitment to Russiagate has become their WMD story, it has to be stuck with lest its proponents admit their lying ..."
"... The Russo-Resistance strategy has had the effect of exacerbating divisions in the potential opposition to neoliberalism. Not a bug. ..."
"... Compare and contrast with Putin and Xi, who are personally untouched by corruption taint, and whom their population actually believes has their nations' long-term interests at heart ..."
"... The general consensus was that we simply cannot go on as we are. ..."
"... I think you've hit the nail on the head. Whether it's skyrocketing measures of income inequality, health insurance premiums rising faster than wages, college tuition rates and student loan balances rising faster than wages, mindlessly skyrocketing stock markets and asset bubbles fueled by stupid central bank policies, or whatever other unsustainable woe you choose to pick, these things cannot go on forever ..."
"... And we're incredibly divided. Most of the MSM has been sucked into personality conflicts and the us-vs-them mindset. They actively feed it now. You're expected to pick a team and learn to hate the other guys. ..."
"... I too suspect that "tweaking round the edges" will prove totally inadequate, but I have no desire for revolution. I've seen too many of them start off well but then go off the rails in horrible, terrifying directions. Revolutions can be terribly sloppy affairs, with real people getting hurt in the process. And they usually don't end where we really want them to. ..."
"... Just yesterday I was asked, "Aren't you a liberal Democrat?" I answered, "No, I hate both parties equally." That set them back on their laurels. They expected me to say "Yes." ..."
"... The general consensus was that we simply cannot go on as we are ..."
"... Waiting for Godot ..."
"... A seemingly endless loop of outrage that yields nothing, except the feeling of powerlessness -- that all that is important in life is out of our hands, and in the hands of those who look at us and see nothing but another source of revenue. ..."
"... I rather think that our "feeling of powerlessness" is the goal aimed for by the msm. And identity politics serves a divide and conquer function. (But you can buy T-shirts! so it's all good. /s) ..."
"... I hope to draw some response to the second part of my complaint, which is that in the dog-eat-dog world of a society ordered solely by markets, we are reduced: First, from being to citizens to consumers, then from being consumers to being marks, rubes, suckers. The "news" (such as it is) isn't reported to us, it's sold to us. ..."
"... Corporate media has been pumping out Trump Derangement Syndrome stories for 18+ months. [if you're cynical] not only because the media genuinely dislike trump, but to drive clickbait and subscription sign-ups ..."
"... From my reading of history, when countries have been in the grip of anxiety it is often a relief when a feared thing happens – such as when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour it was widely reported that the response of the public, including anti-war activists, was great relief. ..."
"... I've read that much the same feeling descended over much of Europe at the start of WWI. While the same situation doesn't quite apply in the US, I do fear that there is a craving for some sort of decision, a decisive act. ..."
"... I think Trump understands more than he reveals. I think we are looking at the tempered effects of MSM froth by all the good, sensible internet bloggers and commenters which serve to neutralize the nonsense. What I see is angst failure – nobody bought this farcical onslaught of propaganda. Everyone questioned it. Something happens to the "news" when opposite views and facts collide – it gets emulsified like vinegar and oil into much less drastic possibilities. ..."
"... Interesting reminds me of how some torturers have learned that the fear of the pain can be worse than the pain itself in terms of emotional distress and breaking down ego-barriers to cooperation/submission. When the fear is worse than the feared experience, the feared experience itself is a relief. ..."
"... ur–Angst? ..."
"... Our Jerri-Lynn, who mainly lives overseas, was briefly in the US last month and dropped by our NYC meetup. She commented to me that she was very eager to leave because she could sense how high the general tension level was. ..."
"... Few people I know feel secure; a lot of it is about the basic stuff, health care and jobs. ..."
"... True, but can they address those concerns? The Occupy movement was such an effort, but the police seem to have stifled it. Then Sen. Sanders appeared on the scene with his Presidential campaign and that too was suppressed. If people are in fact not engaged it probably indicates an absence of what is important and meaningful for them in the larger society ..."
"... The LAT had truly turned into a piece of garbage the past years, they'd get scooped on stories in their own backyard, the writing was what you'd expect from a newspaper emanating from a city of 48,424, and it would be a given that new reporter hires should go at least a page into google when investigating. ..."
"... We've been watching a German TV series called Babylon Berlin, which is set in Wiemar Germany, 1929, just before the crash. It's fascinating to compare those times to our own, there are many parallels. The show is extremely well done. https://newrepublic.com/article/147053/babylon-berlin-sees-weimar-republic ..."
"... ah, yes. this has been on my mind lately. More the best lacking all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity than the rough beast part He's already ensconced in Washington and doesn't seem to be able to do much of anything [brain glancing off the specter of all those judges]. ..."
"... post the nation state ..."
"... When war comes it will not be fought by "post-nation states." ..."
"... These are middle aged and middle class professionals about to be thrown on the scrap heap. ..."
"... Colonel Smithers, I observed something similar during the Sanders campaign's peak here in Tucson. That would be during late 2015 and early 2016. Let's just say that people weren't flocking to Bernie because their lives were going well. ..."
"... If the subtext to the MSM's Trump coverage is, "He's a racist authoritarian so he must be stopped at all costs," then you'd think they'd cover police brutality every day. If they're so concerned about racism and authoritarianism. Instead, we're seeing the FBI, CIA, etc., cast in the role of 'oppressed minorities standing up to The System, Maaan!' ..."
"... Plus, as a fan of paranoia, I can say. . . I've never seen a more unsatisfying, overly-abstract conspiracy in my life. It's not that they are rehabilitating CIA goons, but they're doing so specifically in order to obsess over memos, and reports about memos, and memos about reports about leaks about other memos. ..."
"... It's like an episode of The Office if everyone in the office had nukes. ..."
"... that attitude is nearly universal, across all layers of society ..."
"... I am in my late 50s, and for most of my life there was an air of seriousness and competence about national leaders. Even when they were doing something you didn't like, you could generally assume they were adequate to the situation, or at least had access to people who were. E.g., the moronic Reagan at least supposedly had a coterie of serious people in his administration who could keep the train on the tracks. ..."
"... Now we seem to be at a point where the people in charge are unapologetic about their greed, their lack of ability or even interest in their jobs and consitiuents, their lack of intellect and integrity, and the absence of any pretense of doing anything useful for the population or the society ..."
"... I guess what I'm saying is, as one surveys the landscape, there is a marked loss of hope coupled with a tearing urgency that something needs to be done. It's a terrible, very volatile and dangerous condition. ..."
' orthodox MSM outlets like the New York Times and the WaPo seem to be presenting us
with stale fare right now '
Such as this [paywalled] bombshell from the WaPo: 'With McCain's retreat, some turn to
Romney to carry his torch.'
Riveting. Like reviewing old photos of the Soviet Politburo to see who got airbrushed out. To paraphrase the WaPo's slogan, 'Democracy dies in decadence. '
or like viewing old photos of the Robber Barons. The msm has stopped trying to convince
middle class readers it's 'on their side', imo. A few have gone full plutocrat friendly.
Anything that rocks the plutocrats boats must be caused by 'russians, russians, russians', or
outside agitators, or foreigners of one kind or another – not 'real' Americans.
Exactly
the kind of things the robber barons and their press said 100+ years ago about working class
workers striking for better wages and working conditions.
I agree in the regard to the seeming reduction in analytical quantity and quality. I think
you're right with it being caused by reductions in newsroom staff, but I think the type of
journalists we have has also changed drastically.
Most of the younger generation that is
being brought in has gone directly to journalism school, but has no other experience in the
real world. I think many of the older guard had other careers, expertise or experience before
they started writing.
So much of what passes for "analysis" nowadays reveals very shallow
knowledge of the subject being covered by the writer. This is often most apparent in tech or
science articles. I would say some overlap to "management" culture – managers are
interchangeable, no matter the industry, since they are experts on managing. Same thing with
journalism – if you can write something, you can write about anything .
For one thing, the, MSM has become heavily dependent on election coverage in the last
decade or so, both (I assume) in revenue from political advertising, and in fountains of
easy-to-write daily horse race articles about the state of the election.
I think 2017, a post-election year, kind of got a free pass because of the election of
Trump, who was either going to make everything great (again!) or blow everything up, and the
media was able to sustain an electoral-style energy and reader involvement well beyond the
2016 elections.
Now that (a) Trump has turned out to be an incompetent and ineffectual idiot who does
nothing but watch TV, (b) we are seeing the tired old GOP program of screwing the population
instead of anything new, and ( c) the Dems have done absolutely nothing for 13 months beyond
foam at the mouth about Trump, perhaps the energy of the 2016 election is finally wearing
off.
This strategy was already starting to become implicit, as the Mueller-related
"wolf"-crying drags on (and counter-investigations of Clintons are brandished as a M.A.D.
deterrent), and as we read that Trump's tax cuts are playing well among likely swing voters
both in Congress and in the low-middle income electorate, while it gets ever-closer to "too
late" (to be credible before the 2018 midterms) for the Democratic establishment to show any
new seriousness about the issues raised and pursued by Bernie Sanders, and by the many local
candidates being sabotaged (of necessity more openly than in the past) by the donor-addicted
Democratic establishment.
In the real world, we have growing social needs with an aging population that will require
Social Security and Medicare. This guy is basically saying to ignore that, which will likely
result in a mass die-off of the middle-aged and elderly like that which occurred in 1990s
Russia when social programs were gutted under neoliberal shock-therapy "advisors" to the
puppet Yeltsin.
Meanwhile, climate change advances requiring massive investment in adaptation, and
mitigation if Democrat concerns about climate change are to be taken at face value. (I
believe we are 30 years too late, but should do what we can. Democrats claim to be concerned
about climate change with their posturing around the Paris Agreement – how does this
new cold war lower emissions?)
Nuclear waste from nuclear power and weapons needs to be secured before climate change
kicks in, but instead we are spending trillions on new weapons that will create new
radioactive waste. The new arms race with Russia and China will be incredibly expensive and
dangerous, taking money from real societal and economic needs. Arms spending by the US will
result in arms spending in Russia and China, multiplying the problem on a global scale.
Unsecured nuclear waste in Russia and China, like unsecured nuclear waste in the US, affects
the entire globe.
In this real world context, this guy wants to promote an unnecessary new cold war to get
Democrats elected. Truly disgusting and insane.
In this real world context, this guy wants to promote an unnecessary new cold war to
get Democrats elected. Truly disgusting and insane.
Not only disgusting and insane, but politically stupid. Any Democrat politician who thinks
that promoting Unhinged Russia Hysteria is a winning political strategy is guilty of
political malpractice.
On that note, I'll try harder to go to that Sen. Jeanne Shaheen talk on Tuesday, as that
seems to be what she and they are pushing(unhinged Russia hysteria ) as a winning political
strategy.
I got paid today and since the Republican tax cut, my take home pay is larger. Not a
dollar or two larger, but enough that it's very easy to notice.
That's what people are going to remember when they go to the voting booth in 2018 (if they
even bother) – while the Democrats where whining about Putin and Russia and doing
nothing productive whatsoever to improve people's lives, Trump gave everybody more $$$.
Not everything is about money and its not going to affect the majority of people who will
be going to the polls, we are already set in our objections of the POTUS and unless he
becomes Presidential quickly none of us are changing our minds. This brought to you by a
swing voting independent. I will not vote for a republican in 2018 sans what I said.
. . . articulating and advocating a strategy of the Democratic establishment making
anti-Russia hysteria (and resulting surveillance and military spending and probably
adventures), as a core campaigning plank, the new normal, completely independent of any
impeachment or even re-election defeat of Trump.
The "official" narratives from much of the MSM are increasingly removed from any reality
experienced by the majority. For example, the latest is a report from Hamilton that much of
the social media activity concerning the Florida school shooting is now infested and promoted
by Russian bots "to sow division". How more absurd could it be?
I think that sort of disconnect produces both a numbness and an anxiety and a belief that
we are governed and led by institutions completely clueless and out of control. Therefore,
people just hunker down in disbelief.
this. this seems important. coupled with the fact that enough of the news consumers today
are wholly cynical regarding any ability of the hoi poloi to make change.
I have it on good authority that the whole rebranding of the KKK first as the CCC than as
the NRA was a long-term Soviet Russian plot to cause an epidemic of mass shootings
that would undermine not only US 'Democracy', but the entire capitalist juggernaut!
I've definitely been noticing a fairly obvious breakdown in people's ability to be on top
of even basic things. We're all fried. I've got really reliable clients suddenly bouncing
payments, unable to track projects I've also had first hand encounters with both the
law/court system and the medical industry/health care system and the IT processes are
byzantine and hugely ineffective.
I think Lambert used the phrase "boom exhaustion ". I think it's apt. We're spinning so
hard and nothings getting better or easier.
That story is a classic example of a dominant minority resorting to archaism to address
the present crisis they face. It won't work either. The US government had an extraordinarily
high amount of social trust and support heading into the external crisis that was the Cold
War. They eventually frittered it away into the present and the expectation that events will
turn out the same is why the creative minority of our past is now a dominant minority in the
present. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, for the sake of clarity. We live in a
target rich environment for people who've studied Toynbee.
Following up on something Lambert wrote once, it seems that pundits who are incapable of
using the term "working class" without somehow attaching the word "white" to it are -- besides not really being on the left -- also more likely than others to push the
"Russia ate my Election" nonsense.
I think what the horrid warmongering article in Useless News misses is that the flyover
states, which supply the troops for the wars, are getting war weary (and why not). Trump
capitalized on this in the election, and there was a positive correlation at IIRC the county
level between war casualities and troop support.
An anti-war candidate who could make the case in the flyover states might really make an
impact. And the only candidate I can see doing that is Sanders, and I'm not sure Sanders has
the inclination, or even the stones, to do it. That F-35 base in Vermont rankles. Is
that really the kind of bacon to bring home?
1) Do you think this might be an age-related experience? The elders among us may have a
feeling of deja-vu, been here, seen that there's not much new in the world, just the same
scenes endlessly repeated with new actors, or an incremental worsening of situations that
have already been in decline for years. How long can endless war be news? Or endless
corruption? Or endless neo-liberalism etc?
2) Here in the UK, I personally am sick to death with everything being seen through the
prism of Brexit. Yes it is an existential crisis for our politics and our way of life but
no-one is addressing the ways in which it will improve/demolish our daily lives – food
being an obvious one. Yes it is referred to but not in such terms as ordinary people can
identify with. It's all about abstracts – treaties/reciprocal arrangements/customs and
tariffs/values and volumes of exports/imports etc. And in the meantime, we get stories about
how Europeans leaving us will damage our NHS and crop picking without addressing the
underlying causes of WHY we need imported labour and why the NHS is still deteriorating
despite having those immigrants.
3) Following on from 2, whatever other news there is seems weirdly predictable and is
based around personalities, rather than communities and systems. Whatever source one chooses
to read, this predictability leads one to end up agreeing with Mandy Rice-Davies "Well, he
would say that, wouldn't he?", no matter who the subject is.
4) Now we are leaping on the Russiabus but it is largely met with a huge yawn, unless you
like to foam at the mouth at ConservativeHome.
I wholeheartedly agree about how a significant factor is that the mainstream media insists
on viewing everything through ridiculously contrived "lenses" (Trump, "Russia-gate", Brexit,
harassment) and, intentionally I would claim, deliberately obscuring the real problems
(wealth distribution, neoliberalism, collapse of the social contract).
Here in the UK, I personally am sick to death with everything being seen through the
prism of Brexit.
I read the following article from today's Links fully expecting it to be about Brexit and
the political fallout from a possible hard border. Instead, the pivotal issue in the split
between Sinn Fein and the DUP apparently revolves around efforts to secure offical status for
the Irish language in the North. While that issue too may well be a distraction, it had
nothing to do with Brexit, and I was surprised.
Animals become agitated in advance of earthquakes. It may be that the reason for angst
does not lie in the past, but in the future.
In general, so many of the stories are predictable self-parodies, from the Democrats
relentless pursuit of the mythical 'moderate insurgents' in republican suburbs, and their
comical screeching about Putin, to the drumbeat stories attacking Trump for Obama policies,
to the contortions of the neocon policy apparatus trying to justify occupation and regime
change in Syria, without mentioning those goals
" The centre does not hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ".
Yes! I've never seen anything like this by any measure. It's the scope and magnitude and
number and inter-relatedness and intractability of all the issues at once. Population,
climate change, economic disaster systems as in Capitalism going nuts, exploding Military
Industrial Complex and perpetual wars , 2 Bat -- - Crazy and utterly corrupt political
parties playing nuclear Russian Roulette, Baghdad Bob like main stream media, transformation
from a democracy into a police state, open and protected killing of blacks for being black
(the fact that isn't exaggerated is mind-numbing), technological tsunamis being co-opted and
twisted into iron fisted dystopias by all of the above.
The mind simply can't keep up with it – particularly the reality of it (as in the
Democrats going stark raving mad with Russia-Gate – never mind just being corrupt and
hypocritical to the core) and the body or something inside sends out a sort of anesthetic to
help the mind deal with the increasing perception of the trauma.
I do "get" the analogy of calm before the storm and perhaps that is indeed what we are
going through right now but to me it feels like we are simultaneously in the middle of the
disaster and constantly waking up to just how horrific it really is.
"Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered
from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a
nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something."
-- Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
For me, this is key. When I cast my eye upon the news I'm greeted with unrelenting
bleakness. Trump's cruel and terrible health plan was big news for months, then his terrible
tax cut plan, now his terrible budget. Foreign affairs are equally bleak: the Democrats are
busy stirring up a second Cold War. There's no end in sight to the trillions of dollars our
nation spends every year on waste and destructive mayhem. Sociopathic corporations and
octogenarian billionaires own this country. It's difficult to see anything positive on the
horizon.
It could also come down to low Vitamin D and an unusually cold (thanks to climate change)
winter.
There are two Americas. The news is mostly for and from the one that protects the rentier
or elite class. They send their children to private schools. The second one has children who go to public schools who get shot and killed by gunmen
that the school and law authorities have been warned about and then decide it's not worth
their attention.
I think we have reached America's breaking point. Shitty jobs, shitty pay, shitty hours,
no hope of affordable housing anywhere, no advancement, massive amounts debt, no easy access
to medical care, uneven safety nets, denigration, lack of mutual respect, a lifetime of
working with little hope of a safe retirement it's just not pretty out here.
Where I live, they post the real estate sales in the newspaper and there are many weeks
where not a single house sold for over $500k. But in SF, it is news that something sold for
$500k because nothing is ever that cheap.
So you have many areas of the country (not accidental they voted for Trump) where $500k is
a fabulously high price for a house because the economies are in a rut but the places where
all the people carrying huge student debt loads are supposed to go to work to be part of the
future are completely unaffordable for all but a few.
I think we are still in a Wile E. Coyote moment where he has gone off the cliff but
gravity has not taken hold yet (cartoons don't understand parabolic arcs, similar to central
banks and politicians). One of the purposes of financial crises like 2008 is to reset the
playing field. The inequality and inefficiency of the Roaring 20s got reset in the 1930s
where many people who had paper wealth, but large debt, collapsed and regulation followed
that survived for 60 years in preventing similar scenarios. The 2009-2016 period missed that
window of opportunity as the focus became preserving the people who had destabilized the
system. That meant the damage was one-sided to the bottom 90%. The top 10% are largely
disconnected, deliberately, from what is going on with the bottom 90% and as a result are
baffled about the swelling unrest in the country. That unrest is still largely unfocused and
just burps out random things right now like the Tea Party, Trump, Sanders etc.
The only good news to come out of the Florida shooting is that the young people are
beginning to realize that they are cannon fodder (literally) in the cynical political battles
waged by their elders. We may start to see more passion for change occurring.
https://www.thecut.com/2018/02/florida-school-shooting-survivors-share-powerful-messages.html
Hopefully the 70 years old politicians will move out of the way and allow a new generation
with new ideas to start to emerge. However, it will take a lot to displace the current
political inertia from funding allowed for the wealthy 70 year olds by Citizens United.
Strangely enough, I've been thinking the exact same things, obviously from a U.K. framed
perspective. I've not commented on this on posts nor have I discussed this with either
Jerri-Lynn, Lambert, Yves, Richard Smith or any of the regular crowd here. I just passed it
off to myself as my usual neurotic preoccupations.
I can't really put it into words properly. Which can be one of the reasons why I've not
put my thoughts down in writing. Musing on this earlier this week, the best way I could come
up with capturing the vibe was to quote from E M Forster who (describing an English country
house, the people in it and as a metaphor for the country as a whole at the time) as "being
not yet actually in decline, but in the torpor which precedes it". That fit both the mood
that I sense and the cause of the pervasive anxiety.
It also, he says, opening a can of worms which he'll probably regret, but here goes,
covers and explains several conversations I've had with fellow Brexit voters. The U.K.
government is screwing things up royally with regards to the implementation of Brexit. The
national division is just as bad as ever. And we're alienating the neighbors who we really
need to keep in with for the sake of the long term. We may yet end up as being something akin
to Mordor-on-Sea. But, among the friends and relatives I've had these discussions with, none
of us could, if we were being honest, really say we cared that much. The nihilism was
slightly shocking. What was the reason for that?
The general consensus was that we simply cannot go on as we are. Something --
anything -- is better than years and years, decades and decades of more of the same.
A shake up is long overdue and we're way past the point that tweaking round the edges is
going to be good enough.
I'm still slightly stunned to have stumbled across this unsettling zeitgeist.
I've done my stint in living through the chaotic end to the 1970's and endured the major
social upheavals in Thatcher's show-no-mercy early 1980's. Those were bad times. But this is
worse in a lot of ways, if only for the crushing atmosphere of a powerless proletariat.
I do think there are some safety valves. And at least in the past decade we've come to
recognise in our shared culture the harms done by things like inequality and how corrupt our
governments and corporations really are. And we've channels of common communication (like
Naked Capitalism, amongst a few others) which didn't exist a decade or so ago. I'm just not
sure they're enough.
Completely agree with "none of us could, if we were being honest, really say we cared that
much". My friends and I are in the same boat. I'm not sure it's nihilism sometimes I think
this is the point of our news coverage – to grind us down with boring mediocrity until
we accept whatever settlement suddenly becomes acceptable to TPTB. But then maybe THAT is
nihilistic too.
Important question! Let me serve up a goulash of inertial fear and loathing:
1. Attacks on Trump have failed to wing him legally. Passage of the corporatophilic tax
bill is going to produce a short term stimulus that many of us suspect will undermine the
reversal of fortune the policy-thin Dems hoped to pull off. So in part we're stuck with
watching a dreary theme in political economy play out in as margin estimates drift
downward.
2. The Dem commitment to Russiagate has become their WMD story, it has to be stuck with
lest its proponents admit their lying. Down on the ground, I was flummoxed to get a forwarded MoveOn email from a friend encouraging me to participate in flash demonstration at the
capitol if Mueller is fired. I was moved to explain that this worried me since it likely
hinged on Russophobia. A coolness ensued. This is happening broadly. The Russo-Resistance
strategy has had the effect of exacerbating divisions in the potential opposition to
neoliberalism. Not a bug.
3. The Syrian conflict has entered yet another crucial phase. I expect the Israelis to
kick over the table, and the Trump administration doesn't have the necessary resolution to
stop them with guaranteed threats. Militaristic cretins might be given a chance to run with
the ball. And then there's North Korea. Breath holding here.
4. Personally, I have very little gut-level understanding of the cadences of crisis
politics. Given the seriousness of the issues and the obviousness of the targets, I'd expect
Sanders or someone else to be sounding the trumpets. Instead, it seems to be more a matter of
setting out rebuttals, worrying about exhausting or boring the audience. I realize that we're
not in an "in the streets" phase, but are supposed to be building organizations, finding
candidates, etc. But the methodical, deliberate pace of that effort starts to seem inadequate
to the moment.
5. And then there's climate warming, which so easily gives rise to that deck chairs
feeling. Hard to suppress it at times.
I hate to concede much to the importance of national leadership, but in the absence, as
yet, of a broad, thoroughly anti-neoliberal social democratic organization that provides a
"culture of solidarity," (as Rick Fantasia described it in his fine book) we need it. And so
we're left with moods and presentiments, while trying to deflate fake leader trial balloons
-- another Kennedy? Cory Booker?
I would argue that there's a basic need for most human beings to feel like part of
something greater, that they're working towards something more meaningful than ever more
crass consumerism, ala Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you .."
So when push comes to shove, a credible national leader who is able to cajole everyone to
start pulling together in the same direction can make a serious go at solving or at least
addressing / amerliorating some of our pressing issues. I don't think there's anyone in the
US political circles right now that fits the bill ..
Compare and contrast with Putin and Xi, who are personally untouched by corruption taint,
and whom their population actually believes has their nations' long-term interests at
heart
I'd say national leadership will make all the difference when push comes to shove. Been
telling that to US friends for a couple of years, fwiw.
" The general consensus was that we simply cannot go on as we are. "
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Whether it's skyrocketing measures of income
inequality, health insurance premiums rising faster than wages, college tuition rates and
student loan balances rising faster than wages, mindlessly skyrocketing stock markets and
asset bubbles fueled by stupid central bank policies, or whatever other unsustainable woe you
choose to pick, these things cannot go on forever . Indeed, you can almost feel the
"major social upheaval" lurking around the corner.
And we're incredibly divided. Most of the MSM has been sucked into personality conflicts
and the us-vs-them mindset. They actively feed it now. You're expected to pick a team and
learn to hate the other guys.
I too suspect that "tweaking round the edges" will prove totally inadequate, but I have no
desire for revolution. I've seen too many of them start off well but then go off the rails in
horrible, terrifying directions. Revolutions can be terribly sloppy affairs, with real people
getting hurt in the process. And they usually don't end where we really want them to.
So where does this leave us? Unsettled and full of angst, to say the least, with no good
solutions in sight.
Just yesterday I was asked, "Aren't you a liberal Democrat?" I answered, "No, I hate both
parties equally." That set them back on their laurels. They expected me to say "Yes."
A seemingly endless loop of outrage that yields nothing, except the feeling of
powerlessness -- that all that is important in life is out of our hands, and in the hands
of those who look at us and see nothing but another source of revenue.
Yes, I agree with the "endless loop of outrage" weariness that has set in, the best
example being the (ho-hum) shooting of a dozen high school students that in a normal society
would prompt mobilization for change and quick marginalization of any leader who said, Let's
do nothing! When murder becomes routine, an overall numbness is unavoidable. I had a visitor
from Mexico with me recently who asked why I was watching a documentary about serial killer
John Wayne Gacey (as someone who hitchhiked nearby around that time, I take a personal
interest) and remarked, "In Mexico serial killers are not news."
"A seemingly endless loop of outrage that yields nothing, except the feeling of
powerlessness–"
I rather think that our "feeling of powerlessness" is the goal aimed for by the msm. And
identity politics serves a divide and conquer function. (But you can buy T-shirts! so it's
all good. /s)
I hope to draw some response to the second part of my complaint, which is that in the
dog-eat-dog world of a society ordered solely by markets, we are reduced: First, from being
to citizens to consumers, then from being consumers to being marks, rubes, suckers. The
"news" (such as it is) isn't reported to us, it's sold to us.
Corporate media has been pumping out Trump Derangement Syndrome stories for 18+ months.
[if you're cynical] not only because the media genuinely dislike trump, but to drive
clickbait and subscription sign-ups
but just as 'likes' juice the happy-chemical parts of your brain, Trump-related outrage
stories juice the angry-chemical parts of your brain.
After 18 months of being triggered by the news media [sometimes by Trump, sometimes by DNC
pundits, sometimes by real life], your brain basically says -- 'so what? i'm not angry any
more.'
I was idly wondering yesterday where the current hysteria surrounding Trump will lead
everyone. There have been hysterical political situations before, but they have tended to be
'single issue' ones – I can't recall any time when so many people on the main political
parties have been so singlemindedly determined to whip up anger. When its a 'single issue' or
generated by one side it can run out of steam or diffuse but when its multiple issues I think
its liable to either result in an explosion, or, conversely, lead to a sort of nervous
exhaustion. Looking at it from the outside, I would really fear what could happen in the US
if there was a major economic reversal. A sense of a rising tide can ease over a lot of
worries, but if things go into reverse, it can curdle into real anger. In historical
situations it can help if the anger has a particular focus, but a huge problem in the US
seems to me to be that there is no focus – its all so diffuse – anger at Trump,
at inequality, at feminists, at equality, at Russia, at Iran, at pretty much everyone.
From my reading of history, when countries have been in the grip of anxiety it is often a
relief when a feared thing happens – such as when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour it was
widely reported that the response of the public, including anti-war activists, was great
relief. A feeling that at least a course had been set, a key decision made, even if it was a
potentially disastrous one.
I've read that much the same feeling descended over much of
Europe at the start of WWI. While the same situation doesn't quite apply in the US, I do fear
that there is a craving for some sort of decision, a decisive act. While I think Trump is by
nature someone who prefers to stir the pot rather than take decisive action, he is also very
sensitive to the darker drives of the public feeling. I do fear that he might feel inclined
to do something really stupid, and there is nobody sensible around him to stop it
happening.
I think Trump understands more than he reveals. I think we are looking at the tempered
effects of MSM froth by all the good, sensible internet bloggers and commenters which serve
to neutralize the nonsense. What I see is angst failure – nobody bought this farcical
onslaught of propaganda. Everyone questioned it. Something happens to the "news" when
opposite views and facts collide – it gets emulsified like vinegar and oil into much
less drastic possibilities.
On the one hand – on the other hand. The internet was able
to neutralize the MSM because the MSM does only superficial "reporting". There seems to be a
state of angst withdrawal, lots of confusion, and no direction. As if "time goes on like
nothing is important." And lately a very interesting thing has happened – there is
almost no hysteria about "the debt. I have the vague feeling that there are some few people
who are actually in control of their senses and the sea change is approaching critical mass.
Things will change for the better not only because everyone is fed up but probably more
because our dear leaders, including the banksters, are clueless and they don't know how to
make capitalism work using the old rules. It's gonna be interesting. Thank you NC.
Interesting reminds me of how some torturers have learned that the fear of the pain can be
worse than the pain itself in terms of emotional distress and breaking down ego-barriers to
cooperation/submission. When the fear is worse than the feared experience, the feared
experience itself is a relief.
Our Jerri-Lynn, who mainly lives overseas, was briefly in the US last month and
dropped by our NYC meetup. She commented to me that she was very eager to leave because she
could sense how high the general tension level was.
I can assure you, what she feels is very, very real.
My wife and I travel at least once a year back to Canada , where my wife is from – the
difference in tension is palpable. I feel so loose and calm when I am there.
"Do you sense, as Lambert and I do, that the news tide has receded?"
My primary news source is the print edition of the Wall Street Journal and I've noted to
myself a similar observation recently. The first time I saw the gymnist doctor sex abuse
story featured prominetly on the first page I thought it odd. When the story was featured
promintely on the front page multiple times after that it felt bizzare. My reaction was
wondering how can this possibly be that important compared to everything else happening in
the world.
"If so, to resort to Warren Buffett's image, who do you think it has exposed as swimming
naked?"
My interpetation has been the news media has been exposed as swimming naked. They are
unable or unwilling to spend the money required to deliver professional reporting. Since
election season they have depended on reporting on Trump's controversies to fill their pages.
That is cheap and easy to do. Without that they have to spend time, money and talent to
report on other complex matters.
The quaility and quantity of the print edition of the WSJ has been a noticeable decline
the last few years. Little things like a front page lead in to what was supposed to be on
page B1 was instead on B4. I've been reading the WSJ for probably twenty years now and never
seen that happen before.
Twice during the presidential election they had what looked like at
first a normal section of the newspaper but was actually a "paid advertisement" from China
and Japan. It was blatant propaganda from their governments. It was shocking that the WSJ
would take money to print foreign government's propaganda on election matters. There have
been many other observations like that which have lead me to the conclusion news reporting
capabilities have been gutted more than most people realize.
True, but can they address those concerns? The Occupy movement was such an effort, but the
police seem to have stifled it. Then Sen. Sanders appeared on the scene with his Presidential
campaign and that too was suppressed. If people are in fact not engaged it probably indicates
an absence of what is important and meaningful for them in the larger society.
I have had the same or at a least similar feeling of late, but for the most part
considered it as me reflecting my own circumstances on the world, as well as worrying items
of news particularly from Syria. A bit like an increasing tightness of breath, within the
increasingly stale & pressurized air of an expanding balloon.
It has been a rather dull time for news, and i'm not really feeling any angst, other than
when I went to a neighbor's dinner party surrounded by reign of error supporters that seemed
to be doubling down on their choice in an assertive manner, with absolutely no prompting from
me.
I found that disturbing, the group-sink mentality, a blackjack equivalent of doubling down
on a 16, with the dealer showing a face card, why?
The LA Times got sold this week, which came with the SD Union Tribune as 2 for 1 deal for
$500 million.
The LAT had truly turned into a piece of garbage the past years, they'd get scooped on
stories in their own backyard, the writing was what you'd expect from a newspaper emanating
from a city of 48,424, and it would be a given that new reporter hires should go at least a
page into google when investigating.
Why would somebody pay half a billion for something that's broken down and even if you
fixed it, where is the upside?
My take is we are in the period just before WW1 and the last garden parties. Everything
seems warm, slightly off. The skirts are hobbling, the hats large and the military medals
shiny on gold braid. The politicians are making noise, but we all know that for all the strum
and bother, they will come to a resolution.
Did you hear the Austrian heir and his wife were shot? Try the sandwiches .
Ummm, those sandwiches are simply MARVELOUS I *must* get your recipe.
My neighbors sons both joined the Uhlan Regiment, and we are organizing a party for them
before they go to the academy. They look sooooo precious in their uniforms, I want to be sure
we have the best in food and drink for their send off party!
And yes, those dang Serbians. Such troublemakers. Rest assured they will be dealt with
swiftly and severely.
We've been watching a German TV series called Babylon Berlin, which is set in Wiemar
Germany, 1929, just before the crash. It's fascinating to compare those times to our own,
there are many parallels. The show is extremely well done. https://newrepublic.com/article/147053/babylon-berlin-sees-weimar-republic
There's an Ingmar Bergman film from the 1960s called Winter Light where one of the
characters finds out the Red Chinese have acquired the bomb and kills himself. Surely it's
the news media who are creating the current wave of high anxiety and even tragedies like
school shootings seem to be egged on by the media since most shooters are copycats.
Which is why some of us have taken to getting our news from sites like this one. A sanity
filter is needed. A sense of perspective may also be useful as in world historical terms
there have been much worse periods than this. Time does heal wounds, perhaps even elites who
have lost their marbles.
ah, yes. this has been on my mind lately. More the best lacking all conviction and the
worst full of passionate intensity than the rough beast part He's already ensconced in
Washington and doesn't seem to be able to do much of anything [brain glancing off the specter
of all those judges].
This is an astute post by NC and lots of great comments -- little to add but I'll see your
Yeats and raise you one Gramsci:
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be
born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
Well as long as we're talking poetry, I think Auden's September 1, 1939 might be even
more relevant today than it was back when it was written. So much so that I can't decide
which part of it to excerpt (and it's a bit too long to just quote the whole thing!).
Actually, no, I do know -- here is the last stanza of the poem, which just happens to
describe exactly the kind of thing that NC -- at its best -- can provide in opposition to the
"waves of anger and fear [ ] obsessing our private lives."
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
The DOJ Inspector General report will be out in March. After one look at a draft of the
report, Randall Wray fired McCabe. And remember, the DOJIG has all of the Strzok e-mails,
including the ones the FBI "inadvertently destroyed." Hopes–and fears–are high
that this report will expose all of the Russiagate corruption in complete detail. If so, even
mainstream media stars won't have a place to hide. They went all in too long ago and pushed
the story way too hard.
So to answer Yves's questions: yes, there is deep fear that a receding tide is about to
reveal a lot of naked swimmers and that yes, it will be a tsunami.
Professor Kendall Thomas, director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at
Columbia Law School, spoke at Goethe House New York recently. He designated Trump a
'post-president,' saying that the mythological status of the US presidency has been exploded
(my word). An audience member asked if we were also post the nation state; Kendall replied
that the questioner had answered his own question.
Perhaps here we have the source, or one major source, of the generalized angst?
(No video, or no video yet, however, see https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/sta/ney/ver.cfm
? fuseaction=events.detail&event_id=21154521)
I suppose it might have been private eye, a very changed publication from my first
introduction, suggested that the offspring of the firm were far more interested in
discotheques and tax free beaches than than the fealty of the field mice in their
property.
A little disinterested resignation might go a long way.
NCO smithers, sorry to hijack your thread; But if I'm going to do it within the headline post: Iraq war protests: The one in edinburgh was glorious, people flowing in from the mound, the west est end and
leith street, blocking the roads, g galloway and t sheridan doing what they do best.
I retired and watched the news on the bbc and that is why I have hardly looked at since
then.
What your have gifted me is contributions is that nothing is rational as family business,
and extra-family is hopeless romance.
I'll jog along (to use the contemporary parlance),
1) gaslighting with news that doesn't matter
2) feeeling of an echo chamber and the same ol same ol
3) unclear ways of taking action and identifying those persons who can fix the mess that
those persons impmementing neoliberalism and warmongering have created
I don't have much contact with the 1% now, having changed jobs in mid-2016, but agree with
you and get that sense from friends / former colleagues who do.
I work in the City of London. To use the euphemism en vogue at my employer, many people
will be "rolling off the platform", ours, over the spring. It's the same at my former
employer and another firm I know well. These are middle aged and middle class professionals
about to be thrown on the scrap heap.
Colonel Smithers, I observed something similar during the Sanders campaign's peak here in
Tucson. That would be during late 2015 and early 2016. Let's just say that people weren't
flocking to Bernie because their lives were going well.
Just to clarify, these are Bernie folks I'm talking about, with no love of corporate
Dems/Hillary, but I fear they don't realize how very real the threat is that the energy of
the base will be coopted by the leadership.
The news tide has receded because by blurring the line between news/information and
entertainment, for most people, it looses all relevance in conducting daily life. People are
tuned out and apathetic. Those watching the MSM closely are either entirely satisfied with
society as is, brainwashed, social voyeurs titilated by the access to human suffering in ever
expanding forms, or for professional interest. The weird atmosphere is that people realize
how precarious their social positions have become, but are offered no outlet to relieve the
growing anxiety. There is no leadership attempting to address these grievances, and when
movements do surface, the same set of characters jump to the forefront and successfully
diffuse the energy building for something different.
There is no accountability.
The MSM is ubiquitous in its constant drone of irrelevance. Just as the constant flashing
of advertising becomes harder and harder to see, it just stops carrying any useful
information regardless of what is being said or shown.
My sense for years has been the thought, "what will it take to break the malaise". Society
has gone from the Deep Water Horizon disaster, Fukushima meltdown, endless small wars, and
growing ecological disasters. Not to mention growing economic inequality with no end in
sight. The response is indifference and obfuscation.
Democracy requires civic action, but without proper leadership, Democracy is impossible.
Democracy requires institutions that citizens can participate in, and the current crop of
leaders undermines that participation at every turn.
So what is left is that everyone conducts their lives on autopilot- until forced to act
otherwise. It is a weird atmosphere where the general consensus is one of quiet despair, but
easier to pretend that all is well.
I will note that years after I stopped biting my nails I have started again. And this time
it is worse. I never endangered the quick, but am now so anxious And I have eliminated most
traditional sources of news from my life.
I am powerless. A seismic event that should have caused at least a small path change has
not. Instead the road is even more closed to alteration, the real news is the same or worse.
And the bread and circuses is not considered necessary because nothing really changed. The
shootings, the growing early deaths of the populace, and so on are normal. I do not know if
the slow boil of the frogs/populace will only end with their total collapse and that we have
merely turned up the heat to speed things up. Or if another seismic event that is more
violent and revolutionary is going to happen as the restricted road is overrun by those
supposed to die quickly and quietly. A Russian and French Revolution level up rising where
our current system is bludgeoned to death.
I try to ignore that sense, that prediction. But as my admission makes clear I cannot. We
are cursed to live in interesting times.
The firehose of information (shit?) being sprayed at me during my waking hours by the industrial-information complex was
chipping away at my soul one clickbait headline at a time, one junk email at a time, one advertisement at a time. So I made a
choice and l 'opted out' as best I could. I have only 3 news bookmarks (NC on of them). I dropped all social media in the
summer of '16. I've been cable free for nearly two years.
My overall mood has improved greatly over this time. I am not feeling the angst but I see the effect the 24×7 bombardment
is having on people close to me.
I am beginning to wonder if this constant bombardment is someone's grand design to wear us down, divide us, and keep us in
a permanent state of fear and paralysis.
Brilliant! I felt a similar Lightness of Being after giving up Facebook a few months ago. But this has been undermined by
recently taking up Twitter. Twitter is like having a stranger run up to you every few minutes shouting the same piece of
nonsense in your face. Then someone else shouts the exact opposite. And so on and so on.
I share your sense of "bombardment," and for me it's an on-going fight with my husband who
wants to watch MSNBC, CNN, etc. We have a very small house, so it's almost impossible for me
to get away from the audio, and it's winter, so going outside to escape is more
challenging.
I find the yelling of Rachel Maddow et al. actually like a physical assault on my senses.
I say to my husband, "you know things in the world are crap. Do you need to have that fact
repeated to you again and again? And don't you feel that this assault wears you down and
makes you less able to take positive action? That's its effect on me."
Gosh, Kokuanani, I am in much the same situation. My recently-retired husband turns the TV
on first thing in the morning and almost never shuts it down until bedtime. We have downsized
to a small condo, which fortunately has a small second bedroom/sitting room, so I can escape
for a time.
He watches CNN and the local news stations a lot and, as I stroll through the living room
or work in the adjacent kitchen, I am assaulted with the tension-laden voices of the news
anchors, pushing the latest disaster. I was almost grateful for the school shooting, since it
did make a change from the incessant prattling about l'affaire Porter.
What I find most horrifying are the daytime TV shows that feature white male authority
figures telling hapless people who have supposedly screwed up their lives and relationships,
exactly where they have gone wrong and what they need to do to straighten themselves out. The
audience, or should it be the 'mob,' acts as a chorus, egging on the participants.
I now realize how insulated from the 'real world' I have been for decades.
It is interesting that you feel the verbal yelling as as an almost physical assault. I
feel the same about constant background noise; it hurts. My spouse, on the other hand, seems
to need the stimulation of the verbal stream. (Might have something to do with his
dyslexia).
I frequently like to have the television on – often as background while I do other
things. I do have cable (as part of an integrated telephone/internet/television package) and
when I have broadcast television playing, as opposed to DVD's etc., I find I gravitate to old
comedy reruns. I've rewatched the entirety of the Mary Tyler Moore show multiple times this
winter along with many other 50's through early 80's television. The only breakthrough from
the hurricane of angst whirling through the U.S. media has been the commercials. The ads are
often made up of 50% promotion of a new pharmaceutical or medical product and 50% an
invitation to join a class action suit against the makers of a slightly older pharmaceutical
or medical product. It's an odd juxtaposition.
The wheels keep turning in place with no movement forward, backward, or in a circle. Case
in point: Yet one more mass shooting in a school. Yet one more disturbed, angry, and/or
obsessed personal with a semi-automatic weapon. Shock, horror, thoughts, prayers; we need
'sensible' gun controls; it's not the time to talk about guns, etc., etc. Same script every
time and it fades away until the next time. Does no one notice?
What can I add to what has already been said? I am sick to death of slippery empty words
and sly tactics and thievery. I want to say to hell with it all, but I cannot not care.
The reason most news is dull is that most of it is fake. I was watching an old interview
that Kerry Cassidy did with Jim Marrs the other day and he was riveting. A lot of people
classify Marrs as a conspiracy nut but he described himself as a journalist. One of the most
memorable things he said (this is not an exact quote) is that he still tried to do
journalism, but we really don't have journals any more. They are more like advertising
circulars and the stories are almost all government or corporate public relations pieces.
There are plenty of stories to write. The pieces you guys run on Uber and Calpers are rare
and not dull. It is obvious when a competent journalist has taken the time to do research and
investigate and double-check things and think about what they are doing.
The manipulated dope the government releases on the latest shooting is not news. It is
propaganda. It isn't worth reading.
my 2 cents: the FOX NEWS-ification of the MSM is now complete, and that's why it's
weird.
If the subtext to the MSM's Trump coverage is, "He's a racist authoritarian so he must be
stopped at all costs," then you'd think they'd cover police brutality every day. If they're
so concerned about racism and authoritarianism. Instead, we're seeing the FBI, CIA, etc.,
cast in the role of 'oppressed minorities standing up to The System, Maaan!'
Plus, as a fan of paranoia, I can say. . . I've never seen a more unsatisfying,
overly-abstract conspiracy in my life. It's not that they are rehabilitating CIA goons, but
they're doing so specifically in order to obsess over memos, and reports about memos, and
memos about reports about leaks about other memos.
It's like an episode of The Office if everyone in the office had nukes. Sheesh, give me P2
and the Vatican Bank any day.
TLDR: It's weird because of the sudden growth of the disconnect between [the very real
anxieties we news consumers feel in our daily lives] . . . . and the news reports which
attempt to leverage those anxieties into outrage at [whatever media elites are mad at that
day].
A question I'm pondering lately that may be related: suppose a general pulled a Julius
Caesar, crossed the Rubicon/Potomac and seized control of the US government. What would the
response be?
Sixty years ago, there would have been staunch support for the civilian government,
politicians of both parties would have rallied their supporters to defend our democratic
heritage, and I believe ordinary citizens would have actively opposed the military government
in a number of ways up to and including taking up arms.
Today? I just can't see it. I don't know if anyone would really give a [family_blog]
beyond some outrage on Facebook or Twitter. The nihilism and ennui are palpable.
Mark Blyth tells the story of speaking to a room full of fund managers and other monied
types, and he asked them if they would have trusted the politicians they supported twenty or
thirty years prior to manage one of their accounts, to general assent. But when he asked if
they would trust any of the politicians they currently support to do the same, they all
laughed out loud. In the US, that attitude is nearly universal, across all layers of
society .
Could you see yourself risking your life to go fight for our democracy under the banner of
Chuck Schumer? The DNC? Any of the ghouls in the GOP? I can't. And I think that's
meaningful.
If I didn't know any better, I'd say the MSM is getting revenge on us. They got the 2016 election wrong, were exposed as out-of-touch, and rightly ridiculed.
Lacking credibility and unwilling to do stories that would upset their owners (i.e. stories
ABOUT average American problems), the only tool left in their 'keep people reading us'
toolkit is. . .'aaaaah read this or the country dies!!!!'
And what do you know, the 'anxiety' tool just also happens to inflict a lot of psychic
punishment on the same news consumers that ridiculed them. So that's a two-fer!
I'm having trouble articulating the pile of words in my head to describe my thinking on
current news media. I'll just say that I've suspected an "establishment agenda" in most news
for years and Trump has mostly confirmed that suspicion. I'm sure it has, to some extent,
always been that way with the press (we can't escape our culture), but the stakes of
milquetoast (or outright nefarious) new media seem bigger now than ever (US empire collapse,
climate change, ballooning global inequality). I'm only 31 so let me know if I'm off base
thinking the sky is falling.
I think the hosts are right that the news seems to be drying up as of late, but I think
that is more a feature than a bug. There is plenty to discuss and dissect. They are just not
the kinds of things that capitalist media wants to even acknowledge much less cover.
I don't know if there are any Aussies in this thread, but I'll include a link to a
comedian from Australia who has excellent and usually funny commentary on Australian
politics. He posts a great deal on Youtube and has a pretty excellent take down of Vice News.
BTW the ever edgy Vice has a 5% stake owned by Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox and his boy
James is/was a board member, figure that one out. The comedian says more pointedly what I was
trying to say above to a particular example of the problem, and I think the critique of Vice
News is within the topic of the thread. As a heads up, you may need to see his initial video to get any context. I recommend
both.
I think one thing that is new recently is that the people supposedly driving the bus are
*obviously* incompetent and in over their heads.
I am in my late 50s, and for most of my life there was an air of seriousness and
competence about national leaders. Even when they were doing something you didn't like, you
could generally assume they were adequate to the situation, or at least had access to people
who were. E.g., the moronic Reagan at least supposedly had a coterie of serious people in his
administration who could keep the train on the tracks. Various government departments were
staffed by people who had a lifetime of experience in their affairs, and there was thus a
deep bench of skill and experience the national leaders could rely on when needed. Government
seemed serious and purposeful for the most part, and the nation seemed in reasonably good
hands.
It's impossible to say how much of this sensibility was real and how much carefully
maintained illusion; my guess is a lot of what was going on was the latter, but at least
leaders and the media realized seriousness was an important front to maintain.
Now we seem to be at a point where the people in charge are unapologetic about their
greed, their lack of ability or even interest in their jobs and consitiuents, their lack of
intellect and integrity, and the absence of any pretense of doing anything useful for the
population or the society. Important national institutions (e.g. the State Department! The
CDC!) are being left to languish or being actively dismantled. Who will fill the void? No one
cares. The media, meanwhile, not only fails to lament these things but actually seems to have
some glee about the situation and delights in spotlighting incompetence and even criminality
in the leadership
(I write from the US, obviously; however, the same seems to be true, perhaps even more so,
in the UK, from what I read.)
As a result, a deadly sense of futility sets in. At best, we can head off the bigger
disasters. Nothing is likely to actually improve. The will and leadership to face our many
impending disasters (climate change, nuclear war, inequality, racism, financial collapse,
infrastructure collapse) seems utterly absent.
I guess what I'm saying is, as one surveys the landscape, there is a marked loss of hope
coupled with a tearing urgency that something needs to be done. It's a terrible, very
volatile and dangerous condition.
"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation -- the test
of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same
time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that
things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
Russians Spooked by Nukes-Against-Cyber-Attack Policy February 16, 2018
New U.S. policy on nuclear retaliatory strikes for cyber-attacks is raising concerns, with
Russia claiming that it's already been blamed for a false-flag cyber-attack – namely the
election hacking allegations of 2016, explain Ray McGovern and William Binney.
By Ray McGovern and William Binney
Moscow is showing understandable concern over the lowering of the threshold for employing
nuclear weapons to include retaliation for cyber-attacks, a change announced on Feb. 2 in the
U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).
A nuclear test detonation carried out in Nevada on April 18, 1953.
Explaining the shift in U.S. doctrine on first-use, the NPR cites the efforts of potential
adversaries "to design and use cyber weapons" and explains the change as a "hedge" against
non-nuclear threats. In response, Russia described the move as an "attempt to shift onto others
one's own responsibility" for the deteriorating security situation.
Moscow's concern goes beyond rhetoric. Cyber-attacks are notoriously difficult to trace to
the actual perpetrator and can be pinned easily on others in what we call "false-flag"
operations. These can be highly destabilizing – not only in the strategic context, but in
the political arena as well.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has good reason to believe he has been the target of a
false-flag attack of the political genre. We judged this to be the case a year and a half ago,
and said so. Our judgment was fortified last summer – thanks to forensic evidence
challenging accusations that the Russians hacked into the Democratic National Committee and
provided emails to WikiLeaks. (Curiously, the FBI declined to do forensics, even though the
"Russian hack" was being described as an "act of war.")
Our conclusions were based on work conducted over several months by highly experienced
technical specialists, including another former NSA technical director (besides co-author
Binney) and experts from outside the circle of intelligence analysts.
On August 9, 2017, investigative reporter Patrick Lawrence
summed up our findings in The Nation. "They have all argued that the hack theory is wrong
and that a locally executed leak is the far more likely explanation," he explained.
As we wrote in an open letter to Barack Obama dated January 17, three days before he left
office, the NSA's programs are fully capable of capturing all electronic transfers of data. "We
strongly suggest that you ask NSA for any evidence it may have indicating that the results of
Russian hacking were given to WikiLeaks," our letter said. "If NSA cannot produce such evidence
– and quickly – this would probably mean it does not have any."
A 'Dot' Pointing to a False Flag?
In his article, Lawrence included mention of one key, previously unknown "dot" revealed by
WikiLeaks on March 31, 2017. When connected with other dots, it puts a huge dent in the
dominant narrative about Russian hacking. Small wonder that the mainstream media immediately
applied white-out to the offending dot.
Lawrence, however, let the dot out of the bag, so to speak: "The list of the CIA's
cyber-tools WikiLeaks began to release in March and labeled Vault 7 includes one called
Marble Framework
that is capable of obfuscating the origin of documents in false-flag operations and leaving
markings that point to whatever the CIA wants to point to."
If congressional oversight committees summon the courage to look into "Obfus-Gate" and
Marble, they are likely to find this line of inquiry as lucrative as the Steele "dossier." In
fact, they are likely to find the same dramatis personae playing leading roles in both
productions.
Two Surprising Visits
Last October CIA Director Mike Pompeo invited one of us (Binney) into his office to discuss
Russian hacking. Binney told Pompeo his analysts had lied and that he could prove it.
In retrospect, the Pompeo-Binney meeting appears to have been a shot across the bow of those
cyber warriors in the CIA, FBI, and NSA with the means and incentive to adduce "just
discovered" evidence of Russian hacking. That Pompeo could promptly invite Binney back to
evaluate any such "evidence" would be seen as a strong deterrent to that kind of operation.
Pompeo's closeness to President Donald Trump is probably why the heads of Russia's three top
intelligence agencies paid Pompeo an unprecedented visit in late January. We think it likely
that the proximate cause was the strategic danger Moscow sees in the
nuclear-hedge-against-cyber-attack provision of the Nuclear Posture Statement (a draft of which
had been leaked a few weeks before).
If so, the discussion presumably focused on enhancing hot-line and other fail-safe
arrangements to reduce the possibility of false-flag attacks in the strategic arena -- by
anyone – given the extremely high stakes.
Putin may have told his intelligence chiefs to pick up on President Donald Trump's
suggestion, after the two met last July, to establish a U.S.-Russian cyber security unit. That
proposal was widely ridiculed at the time. It may make good sense now.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, was chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and
briefed the President's Daily Brief one-on-one from 1981-1985. William Binney worked for NSA
for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical
analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA.
mike k , February 16, 2018 at 5:36 pm
Those Russians had a strange mission coming to CIA headquarters to try to negotiate with
soulless mass murderers in the name of maintaining a precarious semblance of peace, knowing
full well that these men's words and assurances were worth less than nothing. Ah well, I
guess in a mad situation one is reduced to making desperate gestures, hoping against hope
.
Mild-ly -Facetious , February 16, 2018 at 5:42 pm
F Y I :> Putin prefers Aramco to Trump's sword dance
Hardly 10 months after honoring the visiting US president, the Saudis are open to a
Russian-Chinese consortium investing in the upcoming Aramco IPO
By M.K. BHADRAKUMAR
FEBRUARY 16, 2018
[extract]
In the slideshow that is Middle Eastern politics, the series of still images seldom add up
to make an enduring narrative. And the probability is high that when an indelible image
appears, it might go unnoticed – such as Russia and Saudi Arabia wrapping up huge
energy deals on Wednesday underscoring a new narrative in regional and international
security.
The ebb and flow of events in Syria – Turkey's campaign in Afrin and its threat to
administer an "Ottoman slap" to the United States, and the shooting down of an Israeli F-16
jet – hogged the attention. But something of far greater importance was unfolding in
Riyadh, as Saudi and Russian officials met to seal major deals marking a historic challenge
to the US dominance in the Persian Gulf region.
The big news is the Russian offer to the Saudi authorities to invest directly in the
upcoming Aramco initial public offering – and the Saudis acknowledging the offer. Even
bigger news, surely, is that Moscow is putting together a Russian-Chinese consortium of joint
investment funds plus several major Russian banks to be part of the Aramco IPO.
Chinese state oil companies were interested in becoming cornerstone investors in the IPO,
but the participation of a Russia-China joint investment fund takes matters to an entirely
different realm. Clearly, the Chinese side is willing to hand over tens of billions of
dollars.
Yet the Aramco IPO was a prime motive for US President Donald Trump to choose Saudi Arabia
for his first foreign trip. The Saudi hosts extended the ultimate honor to Trump – a
ceremonial sword dance outside the Murabba Palace in Riyadh. Hardly 10 months later, they are
open to a Russian-Chinese consortium investing in the Aramco IPO.
Riyadh plans to sell 5% of Saudi Aramco in what is billed as the largest IPO in world
history. In the Saudi estimation, Aramco is worth US$2 trillion; a 5% stake sale could fetch
as much as $100 billion. The IPO is a crucial segment of Vision 2030, Saudi Crown Prince
Mohammad bin Salman's ambitious plan to diversify the kingdom's economy.
"Last October CIA Director Mike Pompeo invited one of us (Binney) into his office to
discuss Russian hacking. Binney told Pompeo his analysts had lied and that he could prove
it."
That was about some Dm. Alperovitch for CrowdStrike fame, who had discovered the "hacking" in
10 sec. Guess Alperovitch, as an "expert" at the viciously Russophobic Atlantic Council
(funded by the State Dept., NATO, and a set of unsavory characters like Ukrainian oligrach
Pinchuk) decided to show his "understanding" of the task. The shy FBI did not even attempt to
look at the Clinton's server because the bosses "knew better."
Alperovitch must be investigated for anti-American activities; the scoundrel has been sowing
discord into the US society with his lies while endangering the US citizenry.
"... Paul Brian is a freelance journalist. He has reported for BBC, Reuters, and Foreign Policy, and contributed to the Week, The Federalist, and others. He covered the fledgling U.S. alt-right at a 2014 conference in Hungary as well as the 2015 New Hampshire primary, and also made a documentary about his time living in the Republic of Georgia in 2012. You can follow him on Twitter @paulrbrian or visit his website www.paulrbrian.com . ..."
The hawks and internationalists who set our house on fire don't now deserve the contract to rebuild it.
While it may have significant popular support, much of the anti-Trump "Resistance" suffers from a severe weakness of message.
Part of the problem is with who the Resistance's leading messengers are: discredited neoconservative poltroons like former president
George W. Bush, unwatchable alleged celebrities like Chelsea Handler, and establishment Republicans who routinely
slash and burn the middle class like Senator Jeff Flake. Furthermore, what exactly is the Resistance's overriding message? Invariably
their sermonizing revolves around vague bromides about "tolerance," diversity, unrestricted free trade, and multilateralism. They
routinely push a supposed former status quo that was in fact anything but a status quo. The leaders of the Resistance have in their
arsenal nothing but buzzwords and a desire to feel self-satisfied and turn back to imagined pre-Trump normality. A president like
Donald Trump is only possible in a country with opposition voices of such subterranean caliber.
Remember when Trump steamrolled a crowded field of Republicans in one of the greatest electoral upsets in American history? Surely
many of us also recall the troupes of smug celebrities and Bushes and Obamas who lined up to take potshots at Trump over his unacceptably
cruel utterances that upset their noble moral sensibilities? How did that work out for them? They lost. The more that opposition
to Trump in office takes the same form as opposition to him on the campaign trail, the more hypocritical and counterproductive it
becomes. Further, the resistance to Trump's policies is coming just at the moment when principled opposition most needs to up its
game and help turn back the hands of the Doomsday Clock. It's social conservatives who are also opposed to war and exploitation of
the working class who have the best moral bona fides to effectively oppose Trump, which is why morally phrased attacks on Trump from
the corporate and socially liberal wings of the left, as well as the free market and interventionist conservative establishment,
have failed and will continue to fail. Any real alternative is going to have to come from regular folks with hearts and morals who
aren't stained by decades of failure and hypocrisy.
A majority of Democrats now have
favorable views
of George W. Bush, and that's no coincidence. Like the supposedly reasonable anti-Trump voices on their side, Bush pops up like a
dutiful marionette to condemn white supremacy and
"nativism," and to
reminisce about the good old days when he was in charge. Bush also lectures about how Russia is ruining everything by meddling in
elections and destabilizing the world. But how convincing is it really to hear about multilateralism and respect for human rights
from Bush, who launched an unnecessary war on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and left thousands of American
servicemen and women dead and wounded? How convincing is it when former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who famously remarked
that an estimated half a million Iraqis dead from our 1990s sanctions was "worth it," haughtily claims that she's
"offended" by Trump's travel ban ? "Offended" -- is that so, Madame Secretary? I have a feeling millions of Muslims in the Middle
East may have also been "offended" when people like you helped inflame their region and turned it into an endless back-and-forth
firestorm of conflict between U.S.-backed dictators and brutal jihadists, with everyone else caught in between.
Maybe instead of being offended that not everyone can come to America, people like Albright, Kerry, and Bush shouldn't have contributed
to the conditions that wrecked those people's homes in the first place? Maybe the U.S. government should think more closely about
providing military aid to 73 percent of the world's dictatorships? Sorry, do excuse the crazy talk. Clearly all the ruthless
maneuvering by the U.S. and NATO is just being done out of a selfless desire to spread democratic values by raining down LGBT-friendly
munitions on beleaguered populations worldwide. Another congressman just gave a speech about brave democratic principles so we can
all relax.
Generally, U.S. leaders like to team up with dictators before turning on them when they become inconvenient or start to upset
full-spectrum dominance. Nobody have should been surprised to see John Kerry fraternizing in a friendly manner with Syrian butcher
Bashar al-Assad and then moralistically threatening him with war several years later, or Donald Rumsfeld grinning with Saddam Hussein
as they cooperated militarily before Rumsfeld did an about-face on the naďve dictator based on false premises after 9/11. Here's
former president Barack Obama
shaking Moammar Gaddafi's hand in 2009 . I wonder what became of Mr. Gaddafi?
It's beyond parody to hear someone like Bush sternly opine that there's
"pretty clear evidence" Russia meddled in the 2016 election. Even if that were deeply significant in the way some argue, Bush
should be the last person anyone is hearing from about it. It's all good, though: remember when Bush
laughed about how there hadn't been weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2004? It's all just a joke; don't you get it? (Maybe Saddam Hussein had already
used all the chemical weapons
the U.S. helped him get during the 1980s on Iran in the Iran-Iraq War, which killed over one million people by the time the coalition
of the willing came knocking in 2003). That's the kind of thing people like Bush like to indirectly joke about in the company of
self-satisfied press ghouls at celebratory dinners. However, when the mean man Mr. Trump pals around with Russian baddie Vladimir
Putin, mistreats women, or spews out unkind rhetoric about "shitholes," it's far from a joke: it's time to get out your two-eared
pink hat and hit the streets chanting in righteous outrage.
To be fair, Trump is worthy of opposition. An ignorant, reactive egotist who needs to have his unfounded suppositions and inaccuracies
constantly validated by a sycophantic staff of people who'd be rejected even for a reality show version of the White House, he really
is an unstable excuse for a leader and an inveterate misogynist and all the other things. Trump isn't exactly Bible Belt material
despite his stamp of approval from Jerry Falwell Jr. and crew; in fact he hasn't even succeeded in
getting rid of the Johnson Amendment and allowing churches to get more involved in politics, one of his few concrete promises
to Christian conservatives. He's also a big red button of a disaster in almost every other area as commander-in-chief.
Trump's first military action as president reportedly killed numerous innocent women and children (some unnamed U.S. officials
claim some of the women were militants) as well as a Navy SEAL. Helicopter gunships strafed a Yemeni village for over an hour in
what Trump called a
"highly successful" operation against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). A senior military official felt differently,
saying that
"almost
everything went wrong." The raid even killed eight-year-old American girl Nawar al-Awlaki, daughter of previously killed extremist
leader Anwar al-Awlaki, whose other innocent child, 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was also droned while eating outdoors at a
restaurant in 2010 (with several friends and his 17-year-old cousin). The Obama administration dismissed Abdulrahman's death at the
time as
no big deal .
The list goes on with the Trump administration, a hollow outfit of Goldman Sachs operatives and detached industry and financier
billionaires helping out their hedge fund friends and throwing a small table scrap to the peasants every now and then. As
deformed babies are born in Flint, Michigan , Ivanka grandstands about
paid parental leave
. Meanwhile, Trump and Co. work to
expand the war in Afghanistan
and Syria. It's a sad state of affairs.
So who are the right voices to oppose the mango man-child and his cadre of doddering dullards? Not degenerate celebrities, dirty
politicians of the past, or special interest groups that try to fit everyone into a narrow electoral box so mainline Democrats can
pass their own version of corporate welfare and run wars with more sensitive rhetoric and politically correct messaging. Instead,
the effective dissidents of the future will be people of various beliefs, but especially the pro-family and faith-driven, who are
just as opposed to what came before Trump as they are to him. The future of a meaningful political alternative to the underlying
liberalism, materialism, and me-first individualism on the left and right will revolve around traditionalists and pro-family conservative
individuals who define their own destinies instead of letting themselves be engineered into destinies manufactured by multinational
corporations and boardroom gremlins with diversity outreach strategies. It's possible, for example, to be socially conservative,
pro-worker, pro-environment, and anti-war. In fact, that is the norm in most countries that exist outside the false political
paradigm pushed in America.
If enough suburbanite centrists who take a break from Dancing With The Stars are convinced that Trump is bad because
George W. Bush and Madeleine Albright say so, it shows that these people have learned absolutely nothing from Trump or the process
that led to him. These kind of resistors are the people nodding their heads emphatically as they read Eliot Cohen talk about why
he and his friends
can't stomach the evil stench of Trump or
Robert Kagan whine about fascism in The Washington Post. Here's a warning to good people who may not have been following
politics closely prior to Trump: don't get taken in by these charlatans. Don't listen to those who burned your town down as they
pitch you the contract to rebuild it. You can oppose both the leaders of the "Resistance" and Trump. In fact, it is your moral duty
to do so. This is the End of the End of History As We Know It, but there isn't going to be an REM song or Will Smith punching an
alien in the face to help everyone through it.
Here's a thought for those finding themselves enthusiastic about the Resistance and horrified by Trump: maybe, just maybe
, the water was already starting to boil before you cried out in pain and alarm.
Paul Brian is a freelance journalist. He has reported for BBC, Reuters, and Foreign Policy, and contributed to the Week, The
Federalist, and others. He covered the fledgling U.S. alt-right at a 2014 conference in Hungary as well as the 2015 New Hampshire
primary, and also made a documentary about his time living in the Republic of Georgia in 2012. You can follow him on Twitter @paulrbrian
or visit his website www.paulrbrian.com .
"The future of a meaningful political alternative to the underlying liberalism, materialism, and me-first individualism on the
left and right will revolve around traditionalists and pro-family conservative individuals who define their own destinies instead
of letting themselves be engineered into destinies manufactured by multinational corporations and boardroom gremlins with diversity
outreach strategies."
They will have to lose their faith in "Free Market God" first. I don't believe that will happen.
I enjoyed the heat. The comments made are on point, and this is pretty much what my standard response to reactionary trump dissidents
are. Trump is terrible, but so is what came before him, he is just easier to dislike.
Even with inadequate opposition, Trump has managed to be the most unpopular president after one year, ever. I'm guessing this
speaks to his unique talent of messing things up.
Wow! Paul! Babylon burning. Preach it, brother! Takes me back to my teenage years, Ramparts 1968, as another corrupt infrastructure
caught fire and burned down. TAC is amazing, the only place to find this in true form.
Either we are history remembering fossils soon gone, or the next financial crash – now inevitable with passage of tax reform
(redo of 2001- the rich got their money out, now full speed off the cliff), will bring down this whole mass of absolute corruption.
What do you think will happen when Trump is faced with a true crisis? They're selling off the floorboards. What can remain standing?
And elsewhere in the world, who, in their right mind, would help us? Good riddance to truly dangerous pathology. The world
would truly become safer with the USA decommissioned, and then restored, through honest travail, to humility, and humanity.
You are right. Be with small town, front porch, family and neighborhood goodness, and dodge the crashing embers.
The Flying Burrito Brothers: 'On the thirty-first floor a gold plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain '
The depressing thing to me is how hard it is to get people to see this. You have people who still think Trump is doing a great
job and on the other side people who admire the warmongering Resistance and think Hillary's vast experience in foreign policy
was one of her strengths, rather than one of the main reasons to be disgusted by her. Between the two categories I think you have
the majority of American voters.
One year later we can say with confidence, yes he morphed into a neocon in foreign policy.
What is especially bad is that Trump executed "bait and switch" maneuver as smoothly as Obama. Devastating.
Notable quotes:
"... So now it gets me thinking like this: Who are Mr. Bandow's clients today? ..."
"... Some say that the reason for Trump's total reversal of his campaign-position on Russia is the American Deep State (the U.S. aristocracy and its agents). I agree with that view. ..."
"... I believe the American people are beginning to realize the CIA has the obsession for multiple, unending wars all for the benefit of Wall Street. ..."
"... It appears "military-industrial complex" or "deep state" refuses to take step back and insists on sucking more money from taxpayers. On first glance all is great for them, bombing of Middle East will continue, and so will military expansion at cost of civilian programs. However, ramifications to rest of the world should not be dismissed. EU countries are divided on following Washington hard line against Russia or diverge with USA. Currently, EU is cracking and might fall apart. Some in USA would cheer it but in long run it will mean loss of strongest US supporter against China. Regarding Middle East, Trump punished victims of AlQaeda and did nothing against financiers of AlQaeda, which will only increase local tensions. So indeed, not a great start... ..."
"... While I basically agree that Trump is not following through on his campaign, we must keep in mind that the campaign of his opponent was for MUCH more of the same, new wars, vastly increased fighting in current wars. So more of the same is in fact a big step down from the alternative. ..."
"... Stop those wars. They don't serve us. ..."
"... Trump's a liar, and his whole campaign was a calculated fraud from the beginning. We're the victims of a "bait-and-switch" scam. ..."
"... Because he lied. Just like he lied about draining the swamp and just restocked it with new varmints from Goldman Sachs and even an ex-Soros employee. Nothing new for me. Been watching elections for about 60 years and this is same ole. America can't take much more of this before it collapses and splits apart. The world isn't going to take much more from dc either. God help us. We are in a pickle! ..."
Candidate Donald Trump offered a sharp break from his predecessors. He was particularly critical of neoconservatives, who
seemed to back war at every turn.
Indeed, he promised not to include in his administration "those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except
responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war." And he's generally kept that commitment, for
instance rejecting as deputy secretary of state Elliot Abrams, who said Trump was unfit to be president.
Substantively candidate Trump appeared to offer not so much a philosophy as an inclination. Practical if not exactly realist, he
cared more for consequences than his three immediate predecessors, who had treated wars as moral crusades in Somalia, the
Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. In contrast, Trump promised: "unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and
aggression will not be my first instinct."
Yet so far the Trump administration is shaping up as a disappointment for those who hoped for a break from the liberal
interventionist/neoconservative synthesis.
The first problem is staffing. In Washington people are policy. The president can speak and tweet, but he needs others to turn
ideas into reality and implement his directives. It doesn't appear that he has any foreign policy realists around him, or anyone
with a restrained view of America's international responsibilities.
Rex Tillerson, James Mattis and H. R. McMaster are all serious and talented, and none are neocons. But all seem inclined toward
traditional foreign policy approaches and committed to moderating their boss's unconventional thoughts. Most of the names
mentioned for deputy secretary of state have been reliably hawkish, or some combination of hawk and centrist-Abrams, John Bolton,
the rewired Jon Huntsman.
Trump appears to be most concerned with issues that have direct domestic impacts, and especially with economic nostrums about
which he is most obviously wrong. He's long been a protectionist (his anti-immigration opinions are of more recent vintage). Yet
his views have not changed even as circumstances have. The Chinese once artificially limited the value of the renminbi, but
recently have taken the opposite approach. The United States is not alone in losing manufacturing jobs, which are disappearing
around the world and won't be coming back. Multilateral trade agreements are rarely perfect, but they are not zero sum games.
They usually offer political as well as economic benefits. Trump does not seem prepared to acknowledge this, at least
rhetorically. Indeed he has brought on board virulent opponents of free trade such as Peter Navarro.
The administration's repudiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was particularly damaging. Trump's decision embarrassed
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who had offered important economic concessions to join. More important, Trump has abandoned
the economic field to the People's Republic of China, which is pushing two different accords. Australia, among other U.S. allies,
has indicated that it now will deal with Beijing, which gets to set the Pacific trade agenda. In this instance, what's good for
China is bad for the United States.
In contrast, on more abstract foreign policy issues President Trump seems ready to treat minor concessions as major victories and
move on. For years he criticized America's Asian and European allies for taking advantage of U.S. defense generosity. In his
March foreign policy speech, he complained that "our allies are not paying their fair share." During the campaign he suggested
refusing to honor NATO's Article 5 commitment and leave countries failing to make sufficient financial contributions to their
fate.
Yet Secretaries Mattis and Tillerson have insisted that Washington remains committed to the very same alliances incorporating
dependence on America. Worse, in his speech to Congress the president took credit for the small uptick in military outlays by
European NATO members which actually began in 2015: "based on our very strong and frank discussions, they are beginning" to "meet
their financial obligations." Although he declared with predictable exaggeration that "the money is pouring in," no one believes
that Germany, which will go from 1.19 to 1.22 percent of GDP this year, will nearly double its outlays to hit even the NATO
standard of two percent.
Trump's signature policy initiative, rapprochement with Russia, appears dead in the water. Unfortunately, the president's strange
personal enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin undercut his desire to accommodate a great power which has no fundamental, irresolvable
conflicts with the America. Contrary to neocon history, Russia and America have often cooperated in the past. Moreover, President
Trump's attempt to improve relations faces strong ideological opposition from neoconservatives determined to have a new enemy and
partisan resistance from liberal Democrats committed to undermining the new administration.
President Trump also appears to have no appointees who share his commitment on this issue. At least Trump's first National
Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, wanted better relations with Russia, amid other, more dubious beliefs, but now the president seems
alone. In fact, Secretary Tillerson sounded like he was representing the Obama administration when he demanded Moscow's
withdrawal from Crimea, a policy nonstarter. Ambassador-designate Huntsman's views are unclear, but he will be constrained by the
State Department bureaucracy, which is at best unimaginative and at worst actively obstructionist.
"Unfortunately, the president's strange personal enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin undercut his desire to accommodate a great power
which has no fundamental, irresolvable conflicts with the America."
I did my due diligence on the writer after this absolutely baffling argument that has no basis on certain fundamental laws
of geopolitics. Referring to this:
https://www.bloomberg.com/n...
So now it gets me thinking like this: Who are Mr. Bandow's clients today? Figures...
Some say that the reason for Trump's total reversal of his campaign-position on Russia is the American Deep State (the U.S.
aristocracy and its agents). I agree with that view.
And other say you're a sap for believing a bunch of half-baked one-liners that Trump often contradicted in the same sentence...
He never had a coherent policy on anything, no less foreign policy... so don't complain now that he's showing his true colors
The USA should FORCE other nations to use DIPLOMACY as a means to preventing wars. If they don't, they lose all support, financial
and otherwise, from the USA. This would include Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The only thing Trump should take a look at in all this
is the INHUMANE policies that previous administrations have used to placate the military/industrial clique's appetite for money
and blood! If it's going to be "America First" for Trump's administration, it better start diverting this blood money to shore
up America's people and infrastructures!
Most of these issues come down to the fact that President Trump doesn't have anything resembling a "grand strategy", or even
a coherent foreign policy. His views are often at odds with each other (his desire to counter China economically and his opposition
to the TPP, for example), and I suspect that most were motivated by a desire to get votes more than any kind of deep understanding
of global affairs.
Most of his supporters, at least from what I can tell, are actually quite resolutely against entering a new war, and are strongly
condemnatory of the neo-conservatism that involved the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In fact, according to the polls taken at the time, more Democrats favored military intervention in Syria than Republicans did.
It appears "military-industrial complex" or "deep state" refuses to take step back and insists on sucking more money from taxpayers.
On first glance all is great for them, bombing of Middle East will continue, and so will military expansion at cost of civilian
programs. However, ramifications to rest of the world should not be dismissed. EU countries are divided on following Washington
hard line against Russia or diverge with USA. Currently, EU is cracking and might fall apart. Some in USA would cheer it but in
long run it will mean loss of strongest US supporter against China. Regarding Middle East, Trump punished victims of AlQaeda and
did nothing against financiers of AlQaeda, which will only increase local tensions. So indeed, not a great start...
While I basically agree that Trump is not following through on his campaign, we must keep in mind that the campaign of his
opponent was for MUCH more of the same, new wars, vastly increased fighting in current wars. So more of the same is in fact a
big step down from the alternative.
That does not excuse doing more of the same, but just asserts that we did get some of what we voted for/against.
We should get the rest of it. Stop those wars. They don't serve us.
There are similarities between Trump and Putin . The GOP and its rich corporate members have decided to use Trump as the oligarchs
in Russia used Yeltsin. The oligarchs used a drunken Yeltsin to pry the natural resources out of the public commons for the grabbing
by the oligarchs. Likewise, our rich are going to use an unwitting Trump to lower their taxes to nothing while delivering austerity
to the 99%.
To the oligarchs' surprise and dismay, Yeltsin's incompetence led to Putin and his scourge of the oligarchs. So will Trump's incompetence
lead to the end of our system of crony capitalism and the rebirth of socialism such as the New Deal, and higher taxes.
The crooked bastards can never be satisfied even with 3/4 ths of the whole pie, so no-one should pity them for being hoisted on
their own petard.
I'm sorry --- Trump had a foreign policy? As near as I can tell, he just said whatever the crowd in front of him wanted to
hear. Or do you have evidence to the contrary? Remember that this is a man who can be shown, in his own words, to have been on
all sides of almost every issue, depending on the day of the week, and the phase of the moon.
He, they, the US, that is, must obey Israel. Israel wants Assad gone in the end for their territorial expansion. It also helps
the oil companies and isolates Russia further into a geostrategic corner.
This headline is way over the top. The first and foremost foreign policy statement which brought numerous voters to Trump was
the US-Mexico wall and at least some of that wall will be constructed. Hence it is the only promise which has not (yet) changed
except for who will pay for it.
Why must we give Trump the benefit of the doubt and assume that his campaign presentations were made in good faith? That is
a very generous assumption.
There's a simple and more logical explanation for what's going on with "foreign policy" in the "Trump" administration:
Trump's
a liar, and his whole campaign was a calculated fraud from the beginning. We're the victims of a "bait-and-switch" scam.
Because he lied. Just like he lied about draining the swamp and just restocked it with new varmints from Goldman Sachs and
even an ex-Soros employee. Nothing new for me. Been watching elections for about 60 years and this is same ole. America can't
take much more of this before it collapses and splits apart. The world isn't going to take much more from dc either. God help
us. We are in a pickle!
The fundamental problem of exonerating Trump and blaming this non-reversal on the non-existing "deep state" is believing that
anything a candidate said on the campaign trail can be executed when that candidate becomes president. Such reversal has happened
so frequently in our history that it is truly amazing that " he does not do what he promised" still has adherents.
There is no reversal. I see reality clashing with words. I do not blame Trump for reversals. I see some shift from unrealistic
to more realistic. It is called learning on the job.
Every political position on the planet is stuck in the 80s. There is no one with a will to change what is happening, mostly
because no one wants to get tarred and feathered once the:
a) economy implodes upon itself in the most glorious Depression to
ever happen, and;
b) world war 3 erupts but engaging such a variety of opponents, from Islam to China and Russia and even minor
trivial players such as North Korea, and;
c) civil disobedience in the western world rivals that of even third world revolutions
as people revolt against a failure to protect them from Islamic violence, to preserve their standard of living and their perceived
futures. Lots of change coming, but nothing that any politician is promising.
Politicians are dinosaurs. We are entering a world
where large numbers of people will make things happen. It's called Democracy.
Trump will remain close to Putin ideologically and he might continue to admire the man as a strong leader BUT there is one
thing that neither Putin nor Trump can change and it is that Russia and America are natural rivals. Geopolitics. Land vs Sea.
Eurasia vs Atlantic. Heartland vs Outer Rim.
Trump is hawk, don't be mislead. You cannot have a great country if you're not willing
to kill and die for it. Russia knows that. Which is why Putin made Russia great again after the horror of the Yeltsin years. Now
America knows that too.
Is not "included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump ("Trump Campaign") and disparaging
Hillary Clinton . " (or vise versa) by posting on social media an example of free speech ?
But usage of fake identities clearly is not: "The Russians tracked the metrics of their effort in reports and budgeted for their efforts. Some,
as described below, traveled to the U.S. to gather intelligence for the surreptitious campaign. They
used stolen U.S. identities, including fake driver's licenses, and contacted news media outlets to
promote their activities."
The question is how those unquestionable very talented Russians managed to learn English language without living in the USA and
operate such a sophisticated operation from oversees? English is a very difficult language for Russians to master and
Russian immigrants who came to the USA being older then 16 and living in the USA for ten or twenty years typically still have
horrible accent and bad or very bad grammar (tenses, "a" and "the" usage, you name it). Actually Russian woman are noticeably better
then men in this area, especially if they are married to a US spouse. Ass to this dismal understanding of the USA politics
including differences between Democratic and Republican parties (you probably need to live in the USA for ten years to start
appreciate those differences ;-) . How they managed to learn local political culture to be effective? That's a strong argument
in favor of false flag operation -- in case they have puppeteers from the USA everything is more or less rationally explainable.
Notable quotes:
"... It gets better: the defendants reportedly worked day and night shifts to pump out messages, controlling pages targeting a range of issues, including immigration, Black Lives Matter, and they amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. They set up and used servers inside the U.S. to mask the Russian origin of the accounts. ..."
"... The Russian organization named in the indictment - the Internet Research Agency - and the defendants began working in 2014 - so one year before the Trump candidacy was even announced - to interfere in U.S. elections, according to the indictment in Washington. They used false personas and social media while also staging political rallies and communicating with "unwitting individuals" associated with the Trump campaign, it said. ..."
"... The Russians tracked the metrics of their effort in reports and budgeted for their efforts. Some, as described below, traveled to the U.S. to gather intelligence for the surreptitious campaign. They used stolen U.S. identities, including fake driver's licenses, and contacted news media outlets to promote their activities. ..."
"... Defendant ORGANIZATION had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Defendants posted derogatory information about a number of candidates, and by early to mid-2016, Defendants' operations included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump ("Trump Campaign") and disparaging Hillary Clinton . ..."
"... Defendants, posing as U.S. persons and creating false U.S. personas, operated social media pages and groups designed to attract U.S. audiences. These groups and pages, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists when, in fact, they were controlled by Defendants. Defendants also used the stolen identities of real U.S. persons to post on ORGANIZATION-controlled social media accounts. Over time, these social media accounts became Defendants' means to reach significant numbers of Americans for purposes of interfering with the U.S. political system, including the presidential election of 2016 ..."
"... Sixteen thousand Facebook users said that they planned to attend a Trump protest on Nov. 12, 2016, organized by the Facebook page for BlackMattersUS, a Russian-linked group that sought to capitalize on racial tensions between black and white Americans. The event was shared with 61,000 users. ..."
"... As many as 5,000 to 10,000 protesters actually convened at Manhattan's Union Square. They then marched to Trump Tower, according to media reports at the time . ..."
"... 13 Russians can influence US elections meanwhile US CIA and State Department spend $1 BIllion every year on opposition groups inside Russia without success. ..."
"... Indict AIPAC. That is the real foreign interference in ALL US elections. Such hypocrisy. At the very least, make them register as a foreign operation! Information warfare using social media ? What, you mean like the Israeli students who are paid to shape public opinion thru social media? This is no secret and has been in the news. I fail to find the difference? Psychologists call this projection, that is where you accuse others of the crimes you commit . ..."
"... It looks like Mueller would have these people for identity theft if he had them in the US, which he probably doesn't. ..."
"... Deep state pivot to keep the Russian hate alive. ..."
"... Fucking hilarious - Mueller has indicted an anti-Russian CIA operation that was run out of St. Petersburg. http://thesaker.is/a-brief-history-of-the-kremlin-trolls/ ..."
"... The bigger question is "when is Mueller going to be indicted for covering up the controlled demolition of the WTC buildings on nine eleven??" ..."
Mueller charges "defendants knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other (and with persons
known and unknown to the Grand Jury)
to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing,
and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of
interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes,
including the presidential
election of 2016."
The indictment adds that the Russians "
were instructed to post content
that focused on 'politics in the USA' and to 'use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest
(except Sanders and Trump -- we support them)'
."
It gets better: the defendants reportedly worked day and night shifts to pump out messages,
controlling pages targeting a range of issues, including immigration, Black Lives Matter, and they
amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. They set up and used servers inside the U.S. to mask the
Russian origin of the accounts.
Ultimately, and this is the punchline,
the goal was to disparage Hillary Clinton and to
assist the election of Donald Trump.
In other words,
anyone who was disparaging Clinton, may have "unwittingly" been a
collaborator of the 13 Russian "specialists" who cost Hillary the election.
The Russian organization named in the indictment - the Internet Research Agency -
and the
defendants began working in 2014
-
so one year before the Trump candidacy was even
announced
- to interfere in U.S. elections, according to the indictment in Washington.
They used false personas and social media while also staging political rallies and
communicating with "unwitting individuals" associated with the Trump campaign, it said.
The Russians "had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system," according to the
indictment in Washington.
The Russians also reportedly bought advertisements on U.S. social media, created numerous Twitter
accounts designed to appear as if they were U.S. groups or people, according to the indictment. One
fake account, @TEN_GOP account, attracted more than 100,000 online followers.
The Russians tracked the metrics of their effort in reports and budgeted for their efforts. Some,
as described below, traveled to the U.S. to gather intelligence for the surreptitious campaign. They
used stolen U.S. identities, including fake driver's licenses, and contacted news media outlets to
promote their activities.
The full list of named defendants in addition to the Internet Research Agency, as well as Concord
Management and Consulting and Concord Catering, include:
MIKHAIL IVANOVICH BYSTROV,
MIKHAIL LEONIDOVICH BURCHIK,
ALEKSANDRA YURYEVNA KRYLOVA,
ANNA VLADISLAVOVNA BOGACHEVA,
SERGEY PAVLOVICH POLOZOV,
MARIA ANATOLYEVNA BOVDA,
ROBERT SERGEYEVICH BOVDA,
DZHEYKHUN NASIMI OGLY ASLANOV,
VADIM VLADIMIROVICH PODKOPAEV,
GLEB IGOREVICH VASILCHENKO,
IRINA VIKTOROVNA KAVERZINA,
VLADIMIR VENKOV
YEVGENIY VIKTOROVICH PRIGOZHIN
Mueller's office said that none of the defendants was in custody.
So how is Trump involved? Well, he isn't, as it now seems that collusion narrative is dead, and
instead Russian involvement was unilateral. Instead, according to the indictment, the Russian
operations were unsolicited and pro bono, and included "
supporting Trump... and disparaging
Hillary Clinton,' staging political rallies, buying political advertising while posing as grassroots
U.S. groups.
Oh, and communicating "
with unwitting individuals associated with the
Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.
"
Defendant ORGANIZATION had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system,
including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Defendants posted derogatory information
about a number of candidates, and by early to mid-2016, Defendants' operations included supporting
the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump
("Trump Campaign")
and
disparaging Hillary Clinton
.
Defendants made various expenditures to carry out those
activities, including buying political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons
and entities. Defendants also staged political rallies inside the United States, and while posing
as U.S. grassroots entities and U.S. persons, and without revealing their Russian identities and
ORGANIZATION affiliation, solicited and compensated real U.S. persons to promote or disparage
candidates.
Some Defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian
association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with
other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.
Furthermore, the dastardly Russians created fake accounts to pretend they are Americans:
Defendants, posing as U.S. persons and creating false U.S. personas, operated social media pages
and groups designed to attract U.S. audiences. These groups and pages, which addressed divisive
U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists when, in fact,
they were controlled by Defendants. Defendants also used the stolen identities of real U.S. persons
to post on ORGANIZATION-controlled social media accounts.
Over time, these social media
accounts became Defendants' means to reach significant numbers of Americans for purposes of
interfering with the U.S. political system, including the presidential election of 2016
Mueller also alleges a combination of traditional and modern espionage...
Certain Defendants traveled to the United States under false pretenses for the purpose
of collecting intelligence to inform Defendants' operations.
Defendants also procured and
used computer infrastructure, based partly in the United States, to hide the Russian origin of
their activities and to avoid detection by U.S. regulators and law enforcement.
Mueller also charges that two of the defendants received US visas and from approximately June 4,
2014 through June 26, 2014, KRYLOVA and BOGACHEVA "
traveled in and around the United States,
including stops in Nevada, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana, Texas, and
New York to gather intelligence, After the trip, KRYLOVA and BURCHIK exchanged an intelligence report
regarding the trip."
* * *
The indictment points to a broader conspiracy beyond the pages of the indictment,
saying
the grand jury has heard about other people with whom the Russians allegedly conspired in their
efforts.
I wonder if any of these Russians were behind the anti-Trump rallies
of November 2016?
Thousands attended protest organized by Russians on
Facebook.
Thousands of Americans attended a march last November organized by
a Russian group that used social media to interfere in the 2016
election.
The demonstration in New York City, which took place a few
days after the election, appears to be the largest and most
successful known effort to date pulled off by Russian-linked groups
intent on using social media platforms to influence American
politics.
Sixteen thousand Facebook users said that they planned to attend a
Trump protest on Nov. 12, 2016, organized by the Facebook page for
BlackMattersUS, a Russian-linked group that sought to capitalize on
racial tensions between black and white Americans. The event was
shared with 61,000 users.
As many as 5,000 to 10,000 protesters actually convened at
Manhattan's Union Square. They then marched to Trump Tower, according
to media reports at the time
.
The BlackMattersUS-organized rally took advantage of outrage among
groups on the left following President Trump's victory on Nov. 8 to
galvanize support for its event. The group's protest was the fourth
consecutive anti-Trump rally in New York following election night,
and one of many across the country.
"Join us in the streets! Stop Trump and his bigoted
agenda!" reads the Facebook event page for the rally. "Divided is the
reason we just fell. We must unite despite our differences to stop
HATE from ruling the land."
13 Russians can influence US elections meanwhile US CIA and State
Department spend $1 BIllion every year on opposition groups inside
Russia without success.
Indict AIPAC.
That is the real foreign
interference in ALL US elections. Such hypocrisy. At the
very least, make them register as a foreign operation! Information
warfare using social media
?
What,
you mean like the Israeli students who are paid
to shape public opinion
thru social media? This is
no secret and has been in the news. I fail to find the
difference? Psychologists call this projection, that is where
you
accuse others of the crimes you commit
.
Boy Hillary sure didnt get her money's worth. She
shoulda hired these people.
Is it ok for MSM for
to make all of their disparaging commentary, but
not ok for people to do the same? Mueller
mustve forgot about the craigslist ads hiring
protesters to attack Trump rallies. What a fucking
clown show.
I guess that's it Mueller gets his indictments
to save face and Trump is pleased its over.
This ties directly into the October 31, 2017
testimony from Facebook, Twitter and Google
regarding Russian media presence on social
media. Mueller is grasping here, and given that
it talks about visas granted for short visits,
I'm led to believe that most of these people are
actually not on US soil to be arrested. This
means political grandstanding via an indictment
that is never going to see a courtroom where the
evidence can be examined and witnesses can be
cross examined. It looks like Mueller would
have these people for identity theft if he had
them in the US, which he probably doesn't.
I'm going to get called a Russian bot over
this elsewhere. Well, maybe facetiously here.
#WeAreAllRussianBotsNow
Wow, I am going to have to keep the
radio off for a couple of days.
They are going to be wall to wall on
this. Maybe even bump the stories
where fakely sympathetic reporter
cunts (FSRC) ask mother's if they
miss their dead kids.
This is a
fucking clownshow anymore. Jesus,
THIS is what the investigation
brought home? Holy fuckshit, this
is a joke. Some guy had 100k
followers? Really? Like anyone GAF
about that? We have AIPAC making
candidates kneel before them and yet
some guys on Tweeter fucked around.
I think that is even bullshit. If
Russians really did that, they
wouldn't "work in shifts" they would
program some fucking bots to do
this.
I can just imagine the fake
outrage that that worthless kike
from NY Chuckie "don't get between
me and a camera" Schumer has to say
about this.
This is a Matrix alright, and a
cheap ass one at that.
Mueller should be taken out and
horsewhipped for bringing this shit
home.
Hey Mueller, I read a comment on
Yahoo news that was in broken
English. Go get um!
I was gonna vote for
Hillary then I read tweets where
she bullied the woman her husband
raped to keep quiet. And how her
foundation got hundreds of
$millions from countries with
business before her at the state
dept. ALEKSANDRA YURYEVNA
KRYLOVA mislead me.
WANHUA CHEMICAL, A
$10
billion chemical company
controlled by the Chinese
government, now has an avenue
to influence American
elections.
On Monday, Wanhua joined
the American Chemistry
Council, a lobby organization
for chemical manufacturers
that is unusually aggressive
in intervening in U.S.
politics.
The ACC is a prominent
recipient of so-called dark
money -- that is, unlimited
amounts of cash from
corporations or
individuals the origins of
which are only disclosed to
the IRS, not the public.
During the
2012
,
2014
,
and
2016
election
cycles, the ACC took this dark
money and spent
over
$40 million
of it on
contributions to super PACs,
lobbying, and direct
expenditures. (Additional
money flowed directly to
candidates via the ACC's
political action
committee.).....
~" In other words, anyone
who was disparaging Clinton, may
have "unwittingly" been a
collaborator of the 13 Russian
"specialists" who cost Hillary
the election. "~
Wait,
does this mean that "disparaging
Hillary" was just for the
witless? I've been doing that for
years, (without any Russian
influence at all), and have found
it to be rather witty virtually
all the time.
Can we
NOW
get to the point where we appoint
a special prosecutor to
investigate Hillary?
any of us who
spread "fake news"
are now "conspirators" who
gave "support" to foreign
agents
with the goal of
undermining the "democratic
process"
by denying Hillary the
presidency.
tsk, tsk.
ignorance can be no excuse
for such wanton lawlessness.
Yes, Mueller is a clown
show, but he came up w/ this crap
in an attempt to divert media
attention away from his & McCabes
direct involvement in trying to
cover up Uranium 1 for
Hillary...The Truth!
The FBI going
DEEP
(#sarc)
into its playbook for this one.
Simultaneously distracting from their
incompetencies with regards to domestic
threats (school shooters/government
collusion to subvert presidential
election), and exonerating Hillary AGAIN.
"Using lies and deception to cover our
lies and deceptions, so that we can
enslave the populace to our will"
(visualize
Meuller/Comey/Strzok/Page/Ohr/Rosenstein/Obama/Rice/
with left hands on Satanic Bible and right
arms extended giving oath in Temple of
Mammon before upside down American flag).
The DoJ and Miller
activities are anti-American. What else is new
in occupied America?
PS
Note Trump does nothing about this
unprecedented assault on Freedom of Speech and
Assembly in the USA. Therefore, Trump is a
willing player in these criminal activities.
Mueller is going to go until he gets some meat.
Maybe this lean and stringy meat is enough to
satisfy. Of course, nobody will look at AIPAC and
all of the foreign influence money funneling into
senators coffers.
He said they stole identities, posting anti-Hillary remarks on
Russian-controlled sites, using the stolen identities. They must do that
through hacking, which is illegal.
They also organized rallies, he
said. There were ads on job sites, advertising for paid
[leftist] protestors, long before Trump emerged as a candidate. People
posted them on American sites. Some attribute it to Soros. I am a little
skeptical that Soros controls the world, anymore than Russians, but that
is what people often believe, when it is leftist ads.
Advertisements are all over the Internet. Is that illegal? He called
it fraud, referring to the misrepresentation of identity, I guess. They
should not be manipulating unknowing people.
But, I wonder if he has the same vigilance when illegal aliens use
fake SS cards to acquire jobs, while their girlfriends use real SS cards
of US-born kids to get $450 on average in EBT food assistance, in
addition to other welfare, making it easy for illegal aliens to undercut
American citizens in jobs. Using a fake SS number -- i.e. posing as an
American to get a job -- is fraud.
As long as the illegal aliens have sex after illegal border
crossings, reproduce and say they misrepresent their identities for the
good of their kids, this is legal and deserving of pay-per-birth welfare
/ child-tax-credit freebies and citizenship, whereas these Russians are
committing fraud.
They should not be doing that in either case, but the double standard
is interesting.
And if people cannot post freely on the internet without revealing
their real names, a lot of internet activity (and a lot of related
commerce) will cease. Many people post anonymously, often due to jobs or
other factors that have nothing to do with elections.
In fact, FBI agents post under identities (personas) that are not
their own. There are many articles, describing how police agencies
use fake identities on the internet to track down criminals, including
those who abuse children. They do the same thing to monitor terrorists;
they use fake identities.
Where are these indictments ? Obama, Hillary
Clinton, Victoria Nuland, Geoffrey Pyatt and John McCain.
The US has been meddling and interfering in other countries
elections and internal affairs for decades. Not only does
the US meddle and interfere in other countries elections it
overthrows democratically elected governments it simply
doesn't like, and then installs its own puppet leaders. Our
deep-state MIC owned neocons casually refer to this as
"regime change".
I can only imagine the hell that would break loose if
Russia fomented, paid for, and assisted in a violent
overthrow of the legitimately and democratically elected
government in Mexico. Imagine Russian spymasters working
from the Russian Embassy in Mexico City training radicals
how to use social media to bring out angry people and foment
violent pubic unrest. Then Russian Duma members in Mexico
City handing out tacos, and tamales emboldening and urging
these angry people to riot, and overthrow the government and
toss the bums out. Then Putin's executive group hand picking
all the new (anti-USA) drug cartel junta puppet leaders and
an old senile Russian senator in Mexico City stating at a
podium on RT, there are no drug cartels here, that's all
propaganda!
On the other side of the world Obama's neocon warmongers
spent billions doing exactly this. Instead of drug cartels
it was Banderist Neo-Nazis. Obama and our neocons, including
John McCain intentionally caused all of this fucking mess,
civil war and horrific death in Ukraine on Russia's border
and then placed the blame on Putin and Russia.
Thanks to John McCain and our evil fucking neocons - the
regime change policy implemented by Obama, Clinton and
Nuland's minions, like Geoffrey Pyatt, the Ukraine today is
totally fucked. It is now a corrupt banana republic
embroiled in a bloody civil war. For the US and NATO the
golden prize of this violent undemocratic regime change was
supposed to be the Crimea. This scheme did not play out as
intended. No matter what sanctions the warmongering neocons
place on Russia they will NEVER give back the Crimea!
Our neocon fuck heads spent billions of our hard earned
taxpayer dollars to create pain, suffering, death and a
civil war in Ukraine on the border with
Russia.
This is a case of don't do what we do, only do what we
tell you to do. It's perfectly okay when we meddle. We don't
like it when we think it may have been done to us. It's
hypocrisy and duplicity at its finest!
Tech Camp NGO
- operating out of US
Embassy in Kiev
(using social media to help bring out radicals-and cause
civil war-pre Maidan 2013)
Dubbed "Marble," the part 3 of CIA files contains 676 source code files of a secret anti-forensic Marble Framework, which is basically
an obfuscator or a packer used to hide the true source of CIA malware.
Notable quotes:
"... And the USA has indeed thoroughly developed means to falsely laying blame for cyber attacks it actually performs itself (next to it's proven credentials of falsely laying blame with chemical and terrorist attacks). ..."
"... And the USA has indeed thoroughly developed means to falsely laying blame for cyber attacks it actually performs itself (next to it's proven credentials of falsely laying blame with chemical and terrorist attacks). ..."
There indeed doesn't seem to be a motive to why the Russian authorities would launch a cyber attack that economically disrupts
both itself, allies and other countries. Either the virus writers didn't care for a solution, hoped that a solution that never
works might panic the victims even more so they make more cash transfers or enjoyed reaping money while seeing their victims suffer
of something where there is no solution for. The last 2 reasons are short term because news that there is no solution for the
ransomware will stop victims from making cash transfers. More convincing would be a cyber attack initiated by USA authorities
that would hit already crumbling Ukraine businesses even further and create even more mistrust between Ukraine and Russia.
And the USA has indeed thoroughly developed means to falsely laying blame for cyber attacks it actually performs itself
(next to it's proven credentials of falsely laying blame with chemical and terrorist attacks). On 31 March 2017:
WikiLeaks published hundreds of more files from the Vault 7 series today which, it claims, show how CIA can mask its hacking
attacks to make it look like it came from other countries, including Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.
Dubbed "Marble," the part 3 of CIA files contains 676 source code files of a secret anti-forensic Marble Framework, which
is basically an obfuscator or a packer used to hide the true source of CIA malware.
The CIA's Marble Framework tool includes a variety of different algorithm with foreign language text intentionally inserted
into the malware source code to fool security analysts and falsely attribute attacks to the wrong nation.
...
The White House has condemned the revelations made by Wikileaks, saying that those responsible for leaking classified information
from the agency should be held accountable by the law.
There indeed doesn't seem to be a motive to why the Russian authorities would launch a cyber attack that economically disrupts
both itself, allies and other countries. Either the virus writers didn't care for a solution, hoped that a solution that never
works might panic the victims even more so they make more cash transfers or enjoyed reaping money while seeing their victims
suffer of something where there is no solution for. The last 2 reasons are short term because news that there is no solution
for the ransomware will stop victims from making cash transfers. More convincing would be a cyber attack initiated by USA authorities
that would hit already crumbling Ukraine businesses even further and create even more mistrust between Ukraine and Russia.
And the USA has indeed thoroughly developed means to falsely laying blame for cyber attacks it actually performs itself
(next to it's proven credentials of falsely laying blame with chemical and terrorist attacks). On 31 March 2017:
WikiLeaks published hundreds of more files from the Vault 7 series today which, it claims, show how CIA can mask its
hacking attacks to make it look like it came from other countries, including Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.
Dubbed "Marble," the part 3 of CIA files contains 676 source code files of a secret anti-forensic Marble Framework, which
is basically an obfuscator or a packer used to hide the true source of CIA malware.
The CIA's Marble Framework tool includes a variety of different algorithm with foreign language text intentionally inserted
into the malware source code to fool security analysts and falsely attribute attacks to the wrong nation.
...
The White House has condemned the revelations made by Wikileaks, saying that those responsible for leaking classified
information from the agency should be held accountable by the law.
Source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This
would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was
not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even
more strongly to the wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages.
The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and
Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware
creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators
even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages.
When the White House (doesn't matter who's ostensibly in charge) claims leaker's like Julian Assange should be accountable
by the law, it of course means the malleable arbitrary law which none of the serpents in the White House, Langley, ... are
accountable to.
"... People read these accusational headlines, probably just the headlines, and it acts as a virus and penetrates the membrane of the collective subconscious, without even a moments thought to question the assertion. In time, the virus breaks down the will of the rational consumer to weigh evidence fairly, though it is also aided by further bombardment of fake news, which increases the rate of infection. ..."
One of the best bits about the indictment is the mention ;"arranging for a Real US person
to stand in front of the White House in the district of Colombia with a sign that read;
"Happy 55th birthday dear boss" (May 29, in 2016)" America must have trembled. (or maybe they
were shaking with laughter?).
People read these accusational headlines, probably just the headlines, and it acts as a virus
and penetrates the membrane of the collective subconscious, without even a moments thought to
question the assertion. In time, the virus breaks down the will of the rational consumer to
weigh evidence fairly, though it is also aided by further bombardment of fake news, which
increases the rate of infection.
The virus then blossoms into a fairly beautiful and uniform
flower with clean, geometric edges and universal appeal which catches the gaze of others and
so is able to double the rate of infection from this secondary source.
This flower, the Ruskiesdidittous, is the result of haphazard propogation, though its ability to survive and
thrive is notable due to a carrier population already enfeebled by a diet of Dr. Pepper and a
lack of discernible vegetables.
The indictment includes charges not yet proven in a court of law, yet prominent Americans
are treating the indictment as fact. from CNN:
>House Speaker Paul Ryan called the Russians' alleged actions "a conspiracy to subvert
the process, and take aim at democracy itself." "We have known that Russians meddled in the
election, but these indictments detail the extent of the subterfuge," Ryan said in a
statement.
>Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement that given the indictments,
Trump should "immediately" implement the Russia sanctions that Congress passed last summer
to punish Moscow for its election meddling. "The administration needs to be far more
vigilant in protecting the 2018 elections, and alert the American public any time the
Russians attempt to interfere," Schumer said.
>House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement that the indictments "make
absolutely clear" that Russians tried to influence the presidential election to support
Trump's campaign and continue to try to interfere with our elections. "We are on the eve of
the 2018 midterm elections," the statement added. "There is no time to waste to defend the
integrity of our elections and our democracy."
>Robby Mook, Clinton's former campaign manager, tweeted: "The intelligence community
has repeatedly told us Russia meddled. Now criminal indictments from DOJ. We were attacked
by a foreign adversary. Will our Congress and President stand strong and take action? Or
let it happen again?"
There has never been any "integrity" in US elections, nor is there such a thing as "democracy" within the USA.
IMO, Congresscritters have never before looked and acted so damn stupid -- clearly they are merely mutts being led by a
leash and told to bray at a moon called Russia.
The Outlaw US Empire totally lacks integrity and clearly isn't a democracy; it is merely another of history's failed
empires destroyed by its own hubris; it really needs to gouge its eyes out and wander in the forest until it dies.
If anything, recent weeks have offered remarkable evidence of just how
victorious this country's losingest commanders and their colleagues really are in our
nation's capital. In the bipartisan style that these days usually applies only to the U.S.
military, Congress has just settled on giving an extra $165 billion
to the Pentagon over the next two years as part of a formula for keeping the government open.
As it happens, the 2017 Pentagon budget was already as large as the defense spending of the next
seven
nations combined. And that was before all those extra tens of billions of dollars ensured
that the two-year military budget (for 2018 and 2019) would crest at a total of more than
$1.4 trillion .
That's the sort of money that only goes to winners, not losers. And if this still seems a
little strange to you, given that military's
dismal record in actual war-fighting since 9/11, all I can say is: don't bring it up. It's
no longer considered polite or proper to complain about our wars and those who fight them or
how we fund them, not in an age when every American soldier is a " hero ," which
means that what they're doing from
Afghanistan to
Yemen , Syria to
Somalia , must be heroic indeed.
In a draft-less
country, those of us not in or connected to our military are expected to say "
thank you " to the warriors and otherwise go about our lives as if their wars (and the
mayhem
they continue to generate abroad) were not a fact of global life. This is the definition of a
demobilized
public. If you happen to be that rarest of all creatures in our country these days -- someone
in active opposition to those wars -- you have a problem. That means Stephanie Savell, who
co-runs the Costs of War
Project , which regularly provides well-researched and devastating information on the
spread of those wars and the money continually being
squandered on them, does indeed have a problem. It's one she understands all too well and
describes vividly today.
The New York Timesreports on the
Trump administration's poor grasp of diplomacy:
American officials were more guarded, saying they were open to talks but not a
full-fledged negotiation.
The United States, they said, would reiterate its demands that North Korea make
concessions and did not plan to offer any in return.
This is being billed as the administration's willingness to "open the door" to holding talks
with North Korea, but as we can see here there is no real interest in pursuing a diplomatic
solution. If U.S. officials just want to deliver an ultimatum in person to North Korean
officials, it is a pointless exercise that would make it harder to enter into real negotiations
later. North Korea knows what the U.S. wants it to do, and it has said many times that it will
never do that, so why would they agree to talks where the same demands will be put to them once
again? The U.S. is not willing to make confidence-building gestures that might lead to more
substantive negotiations down the road, and it has no intention of offering North Korea
anything in exchange for any concessions it might conceivably make.
In the very unlikely event that North Korea agreed to a meeting with administration
officials, they would have nothing to gain from the encounter and every incentive to stay away.
The problem isn't just that the administration won't offer North Korea the tiniest of carrots,
but that it doesn't accept the idea of using carrots in diplomacy in the first place. The
administration's posturing is what a government does when it wants to feign support for
diplomacy even as it rejects diplomacy at every turn. If people here at home can see through
this ploy, North Korea will definitely take it as more proof of Washington's bad faith.
Mattis is probably mentally ill. He'll gleefully kill millions more.
The terrorists are mentally ill. They would kill millions if they could.
Implacable.
Thus, the reason for the rise of Russia and the influence and respect for Putin. Russians
will kill terrorists but embrace Islamic people who want peaceful cooperation.
Peace is a long way off. The Hegemon abhors Peace and has the means and ideology to create
chaos, death and destruction anywhere on the globe.
The American economic system depends on MIC expenditures, debt, waste, corruption, and
fiscal abuse.
Nothing much will change until multi-polar economic forces come into dominance and coerce
the American changes. Those are a long way off, also, though a few of those forces are coming
into view.
Posted by: Red Ryder | Feb 12, 2018 12:21:31 PM |
2
Pentagon statement today: 550 million dolar, 2018 budget, for PKK.
(Meaning: You can defeat terrorism, but you can't you beat our purse!)
There is a massive propaganda campaing targeting Turkey in the past 2-3 days. It's coming
from international sources. BBC, AFP etc.
This is the main theme
"Turks, beware of Russia, Syria and Iran! They are your enemy. Israel is your friend! The
USA is a superpower, obey!"
I believe nobody, no muslim targets America or ordinary American people for that mater! So
any incident should be received as provocation.
Those who pull the strings in the USA, behind the doors, maybe under risk though.
@colin 3, Yes, I used to try to update the wikipedia page on the TAPI pipeline and while some
things remained on the site, most of it was edited away. Anything to do with Exxon, Chevron,
US military actions along the pipeline route, Hillary Clinton's cheerleading for the project
during the Obama era, actions taken by the US State Department in summer 2001 (pre 9-11)
aimed at pressuring the Taliban into signing off on the deal (in exchange for handing over
bin Laden, etc.) all gone. Not worth the bother; you're up against PR firms with full-time
staff devoted to sanitizing everything.
@4 CP, the corporate media PR stream, it's something I can't even watch anymore (I follow
it with Google News search just to see what the headlines are, but it's basically predictable
content so that's enough). Here and there across the web there are some honest discussions
though: https://thewire.in/219467/russia-turkey-iran-triangle-economic-interests-paramount/
I really can't see what Tillerson and Mattis have to offer Turkey other than
threats.
"If America Wasn't America, The United States Would Be Bombing It".
Damn, that's funny
yeah, i just read
the article , and while the title is indeed humorous, the content is decidedly not. but
it's a good synopsis of the unprecedented amount of death and destruction wrought on this
undeserving planet by the US of Argh.
The West and in particular Amerikkans constantly use the Circular Argument in its public
relation and propaganda statements. That kind of attitude works with an allies, nominal or
otherwise, in the cases where sovereignty/national interest is threatened that kind of
deception is treated just like that, deception.
Unfortunately Tayyip has been used as client state for long time, from Libya to Syria where
he experienced sudden awakening.
The US has reiterated that it has no plans to withdraw its forces from Manbij.
Paul Funk, the commander of US forces in Syria and Iraq, made a recent visit to Manbij
and said that the US and its partners in Syria would hit back if attacked.
"You hit us, we will respond aggressively. We will defend ourselves," Funk said.
Erdogan took aim at that, saying: "It is obvious that those, who say they will 'give a
sharp response' if they were hit, have not been hit by the Ottoman slap."
Note: this article is part of a symposium included in the
March/April 2018 issue of the National Interest .
OF COURSE
there's a Deep State. Why wouldn't there be? Even a cursory understanding of human nature tells
us that power corrupts, as Lord Acton put it; that, when power is concentrated and entrenched,
it will be abused; that, when it is concentrated and entrenched in secrecy, it will be abused
in secret. That's the Deep State.
James Burnham saw it coming. The American philosopher and political theorist
(1905–87), first a Trotskyist, then a leading conservative intellectual, wrote in 1941
that the great political development of the age was not the battle between communism and
capitalism. Rather, it was the rise of a new "managerial" class gaining dominance in business,
finance, organized labor and government. This gathering managerial revolution, as he called it,
would be resisted, but it would be impervious to adversarial counteractions. As the managerial
elites gained more and more power, exercised often in subtle and stealthy ways, they would
exercise that power to embed themselves further into the folds of American society and to
protect themselves from those who might want to bust them up.
Nowhere is this managerial elite more entrenched, more powerful and more shrouded in secrecy
than in what Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, augmented by
intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. That's where America's relentless drive for global
hegemony meshes with defense manufacturers only too willing to provide the tools of
dominance.
Now we have not only a standing army, with hundreds of thousands of troops at the ready, as
in Cold War days. We have also permanent wars, nine of them in progress at the moment and not
one with what could even remotely be called proper congressional approval. That's how power
gets entrenched, how the managerial revolution gains ever greater force and how the Deep State
endures.
Few in the general public know what really happened with regard to the allegations of Trump
campaign "collusion" with Russia, or how the investigation into those troubling allegations
emerged. But we know enough to know we have seen the Deep State in action.
We know that U.S. agencies released an "Intelligence Community Assessment" saying that
Russia and President Putin were behind the release of embarrassing Democratic emails in a plot
to help Trump win the presidency. But we also know that it wasn't really a National
Intelligence Assessment (a term of art denoting a particular process of expansive intelligence
analysis) but rather the work of a controlled task force. As Scott Ritter, the former Marine
intelligence officer and arms-control official,
put it , "This deliberate misrepresentation of the organizational bona fides of the Russia
NIA casts a shadow over the viability of the analysis used to underpin the assessments and
judgments contained within." Besides, the document was long on assertion and short on evidence.
Even the New York Times initially
derided the report as lacking any "hard evidence" and amounting "essentially . . . to
'trust us.'"
It is an age-old statecraft technique to seek unity within a state by depicting an external
enemy or threat. Russia is the bête noire again, as it was during the Cold War years as
part of the Soviet Union. But the truth is Western states are challenged by internal
problems.
Ironically, by denying their own internal democratic challenges, Western authorities are
only hastening their institutional demise.
Russophobia -- "blame it all on Russia" -- is a short-term, futile ploy to stave off the day
of reckoning when furious and informed Western citizens will demand democratic restitution for
their legitimate grievances.
The dominant "official" narrative, from the US to Europe, is that "malicious" Russia is
"sowing division;""eroding democratic institutions;" and "undermining public trust" in systems
of governance, credibility of established political parties, and the news media.
This narrative has shifted up a gear since the election of Donald Trump to the White House
in 2016, with accusations that the Kremlin somehow ran "influence operations" to help get him
into office. This outlandish yarn defies common sense. It is also running out of thread to keep
spinning.
Paradoxically, even though President Trump has rightly rebuffed such dubious claims of
"Russiagate" interference as "fake news" , he has at other times undermined himself by
subscribing to the notion that Moscow is projecting a campaign of "subversion against the US
and its European allies." See for example the National Security Strategy he signed
off in December.
Pathetically, it's become indoctrinated belief among the Western political class that
"devious Russians" are out to "collapse" Western democracies by "weaponizing disinformation"
and spreading "fake news" through Russia-based news outlets like RT and Sputnik.
Totalitarian-like, there seems no room for intelligent dissent among political or media
figures.
British Prime Minister Theresa May has chimed in to
accuse Moscow of "sowing division;" Dutch state intelligence claim Russia destabilized the
US presidential election; the European Union commissioner for security, Sir Julian King,
casually lampoons Russian news media as "Kremlin-orchestrated disinformation" to destabilize
the 28-nation bloc; CIA chief Mike Pompeo recently warned that Russia is stepping up its
efforts to tarnish the Congressional mid-term elections later this year.
On and on goes the narrative that Western states are essentially victims of a nefarious
Russian assault to bring about collapse.
A particularly instructive presentation of this trope was given in a recent commentary by Texan
Republican Representative Will Hurd. In his piece headlined, "Russia is our adversary" , he
claims: "Russia is eroding our democracy by exploiting the nation's divisions. To save it,
Americans need to begin working together."
Congressman Hurd asserts: "Russia has one simple goal: to erode trust in our democratic
institutions. It has weaponized disinformation to achieve this goal for decades in Eastern and
Central Europe; in 2016, Western Europe and America were aggressively targeted as well."
Lamentably, all these claims above are made with scant, or no, verifiable evidence. It is
simply a Big Lie technique of relentless repetition transforming itself into "fact" .
It's instructive to follow Congressman Hurd's thought-process a bit further.
He contends: "When the public loses trust in the media, the Russians are winning. When the
press is hyper-critical of Congress the Russians are winning. When Congress and the general
public disagree the Russians are winning. When there is friction between Congress and the
executive branch [the president] resulting in further erosion of trust in our democratic
institutions, the Russians are winning."
As a putative solution, Representative Hurd calls for "a national counter-disinformation
strategy" against Russian "influence operations" , adding, "Americans must stop contributing to
a corrosive political environment".
The latter is a chilling advocacy of uniformity tantamount to a police state whereby any
dissent or criticism is a "thought-crime."
It is, however, such anti-democratic and paranoid thinking by Western politicians -- aided
and abetted by dutiful media -- that is killing democracy from within, not some supposed
foreign enemy.
There is evidently a foreboding sense of demise in authority and legitimacy among Western
states, even if the real cause for the demise is ignored or denied. Systems of governance,
politicians of all stripes, and institutions like the established media and intelligence
services are increasingly held in contempt and distrust by the public.
Whose fault is that loss of political and moral authority? Western governments and
institutions need to take a look in the mirror.
The endless, criminal wars that the US and its European NATO allies have been waging across
the planet over the past two decades is one cogent reason why the public has lost faith in
grandiose official claims about respecting democracy and international law.
The US and European media have shown reprehensible dereliction of duty to inform the public
accurately about their governments' warmongering intrigues. Take the example of Syria. When
does the average Western citizen ever read in the corporate Western media about how the US and
its NATO allies have covertly ransacked that country through weaponizing terrorist proxies?
How then can properly informed citizens be expected to have respect for such criminal
government policies and the complicit news media covering up for their crimes?
Western public disaffection with governments, politicians and media surely stems also from
the grotesque gulf in social inequality and poverty among citizens from slavish adherence to
economic policies that enrich the wealthy while consigning the vast majority to unrelenting
austerity.
The destabilizing impact on societies from oppressive economic conditions is a far more
plausible cause for grievance than outlandish claims made by the political class about alleged
"Russian interference".
Yet the Western media indulge this fantastical "Russiagate" escapism instead of campaigning
on real social problems facing ordinary citizens. No wonder such media are then viewed with
disdain and distrust. Adding insult to injury, these media want the public to believe Russia is
the enemy?
Instead of acknowledging and addressing real threats to citizens: economic insecurity,
eroding education and health services, lost career opportunities for future generations, the
looming dangers of ecological adversity, wars prompted by Western governments trashing
international and diplomacy, and so on -- the Western public is insultingly plied with corny
tales of Russia's "malign influence" and "assault on democracy."
Just think of the disproportionate amount of media attention and public resources wasted on
the Russiagate scandal over the past year. And now gradually emerging is the real
scandal that the American FBI probably colluded with the Obama administration to corrupt
the democratic process against Trump.
Again, is there any wonder the public has sheer contempt and distrust for "authorities" that
have been lying through their teeth and playing them for fools?
The collapsing state of Western democracies has got nothing to do with Russia. The
Russophobia of blaming Russia for the demise of Western institutions is an attempt at
scapegoating for the very real problems facing governments and institutions like the news
media. Those problems are inherent and wholly owned by these governments owing to chronic
anti-democratic functioning, as well as systematic violation of international law in their
pursuit of criminal wars and other subterfuges for regime-change objectives.
Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published
in several languages. He is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a
scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a
career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he
worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish
Times and Independent.
Anyone who believes MSM is totally indoctrinated since it has been proven over and over that
they won't tell the truth of the matter. The only REAL thing this country supplies or
produces is war. Most other industries have been outsourced and given subsidies to so, thus
taking American jobs from our lives. And now they want to take Social Security and Medicare
to PAY for our military buildup????
It is without a doubt true that the political class and their oligharchic owners are falling
and falling fast. They need a war to sustain their enrichment and attempted control of the
world. They have run out of potential victims , while on the home front the naive Amrikan is
starting to reject their nonsense. They can't really afford to take on China as they could
easily dump their US treasuries and sink the financing arrangements for a war. They would
like to stop the OBOR ; but how? Ah Russia. Smaller population but lethal in central Europe
and perhaps beyond. Good geographic position for cutting OBOR. After all why would anyone be
allowed to put in such a mega project and not let the US oligharchic class control it?
A big part of the problem with Washington DC is that they are ruled by the Rothschild
oligarchs and function first and foremost for Rothschild interests such as Israel and other
Rothschild programs. Washington is not focused on the states it was designed to serve.
Rothschild's and other oligarchs, fascists and the like control Washington crippling them.
Countries like China, Russia are making their own destinies while Washington languishes and
dissolves under a Rothschild fascist flag.
"Intel chief: Federal debt poses 'dire threat' to national security"
The above was the title to an article in The Hill, yesterday. The comment was attributed
to Dan Coates, DNI in testimony to Congress. To me, since elected officials CREATE the
federal debt, what the DNI is REALLY saying is that the elected officials are a dire threat
to national security. Their spending and fake borrowing from the Federal Reserve is the
threat-not Syria, Yemen, or other countries that have not attacked the US. The elected
officials, both Democrat and Republicans are on the way to destroying the US. Not Russia,
China, ISIS, or international terrorism.
I recently read a horrifying commentary by John Whitehead on the burgeoning sex trade in this
country where young girls are abducted and sold for sexual favors to deviants in every major
city in the US. Many of these girls are as young a three and four years old, and the average
age of these victims is 13! Thousands of missing children end up as sex slaves and are forced
to be with as many as 40 men a night.
This great evil has become extremely lucrative, and numerous monsters, both men, and women
are reaping billions of dollars from the unspeakable crime of destroying children's lives,
not only physically, but mentally and spiritually as well.
The West has reached a new level of rottenness. Moral decay is actively gnawing at the
very fabric of our society. The Cabal and its rampant criminality in Washington is a
reflection of this terrible decline we are witnessing around us.
The hypocritical cry and hue from our government officials about the terrible human rights
abuses in other countries as they seek to deflect the attention away from their own
criminality and murderous abuses at home and abroad is indeed sickening.
UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was killed in a suspicious plane crash in 1961. He
dared speak Truth to the Power. His quote from over 60 years ago is so relevant to what is
going on Today. It has spread like never before to affect the judgments of the Politicians,
the news media, and the Public.
-The Assembly has witnessed over the last weeks how historical truth is established; once
an allegation has been repeated a few times, it is no longer an allegation, it is an
established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.
American propaganda is scapegoating Russia to absolve Americans of responsibility for
creating their own political divisions.
Observing from CanaDa, this anti-Russia/Putin Propaganda is confirming this Vision of the
Future published 41 years ago.
On September 13, 1976, the major daily THE KANSAS CITY TIMES published this Vision of the
FUTURE: "He came to town for the Republican National Convention and will stay until the
election in November TO DO GOD'S BIDDING: To tell the world, from Kansas City, this country
has been found wanting and its days are numbered [...] He gestured toward a gleaming church
dome. "The gold dome is the symbol of Babylon," he said." [...] He wanted to bring to the
Public's attention an "idea being put out subtly and deceptively" by the government that we
have to get prepared for a war with Russia.
It's taken over 40 years, but that 1976 FUTURE is NOW with the Revelation of the details
GENERALLY unfolding in the spirit of the letter. The World is finally waking up to see Trump
just may hasten "its days are numbered" part of the 1976 Public record.
The KANSAS CITY TIMES did a follow up report on ALL SOULS DAY, November 2, 1976. When the TV
movie 'THE DAY AFTER' Kansas City was incinerated in a Nuclear Holocaust appeared in 1983,
most likely, I was the only Human on Earth, including the newspaper reporters, to note at the
END, the movie pauses at the very same picture frame THE KANSAS CITY TIMES chose for the ALL
SOULS DAY record 7 years earlier.
Any way you look at it, that HISTORICAL FACT is a confirming SIGN for our Generations, the
World has arrived at this point of Decision, of an "idea being put out subtly and
deceptively" by the government that we have to get prepared for a war with Russia."
Multitudes! Multitudes in the Valley of Decision. The Day of the LORD IS NEAR in the Valley
of Decision.
Not many will recognize, "this country has been found wanting and its days are numbered"
as the 1st two parts, of the 3 part 'Writing on the Wall" from Daniel 5 and the Captivity of
Babylon some 2600 years ago. The whole world saw The Writing on the Wall for the 1st TIME at
the same TIME, with the Global Financial Meltdown-Economic Pearl Harbour in September of
2008, even if the world does not recognize it as such.
The 3rd part of the Writing on the Wall tells of the decline of Babylon, the 1st Biblical
model of the Nation that reaches Imperial Military-Economic Superpower Status, and the rise
of Persia
Ancient Babylon is now Iraq, and ancient Persia is now Iran.
The US is the latest, greatest of all the Nations reaching Imperial Military-Economic
Superpower Status in the 2600 year old Biblical Babylonian superstructure.
The TAIL struck the HEAD, causing the unravelling of the Earthly Babylonian superstructure
and infrastructure, ushering in the Law of the Jungle to the Middle East and this World.
The Iranian Revolution happened in 1979, 2-1/2 years after the record in the 1976 KANSAS
CITY TIMES Timeline.
All the chaos in the Middle East since then, including the carnage in Syria, is the
consequence of the vain attempt to reverse that God ordained, repeat of History, as a SIGN
for our Generations. http://ray032.com/2013/09/01/signs-of-the-times/
Bulldoze them Georgia Guidestones.
Erase that Denver Airport Artwork.
Send Lady Liberty back to France.
Neandertals, behaving badly.
Stars and Stripes gilded cheap pennant should be changed to Skull n Bones.
What the U.S. political and Deep State accused of Russia today is exactly what they
themselves have done to much of the world. Entire Wikipedia is not big enough to write about
the dirty tricks of the CIA and NSA.
Russia of course has no need to do what was accused. But they are surely laughing at being
accused. Indeed, keep the accusation coming. The more the accusations, the longer they last,
the more sure Russia know the corrupt terror empires of the west are going down.
Without firing a single shot. Now isn't that funny? Just ask the Chinese!
February 14, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Every
empire needs a scary external threat, led by a singular menacing villain, to justify its massive military expenditures, consolidation
of authoritarian powers, and endless wars. For the five decades after the end of World War II, Moscow played this role perfectly.
But the fall of Soviet Union meant, at least for a while, that the Kremlin could no longer sustain sufficient fear levels. After
some brief, largely unsuccessful auditions for possible replacements -- Asian actors
like China and
a splurging Japan were considered
-- the post-9/11 era elevated a cast of Muslim understudies to the starring role: Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, ISIS and Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, and "jihadism" generally kept fear alive.
The lack of any 9/11-type catastrophic attack on U.S. (or any Western) soil for the past 17 years, along with the killing of a
pitifully aged, ailing bin Laden and the erosion of ISIS, has severely compromised their ongoing viability as major bad guys. So
now -- just as a film studio revitalizes a once-successful super-villain franchise for a new generation of moviegoers -- we're back
to the Russians occupying center stage.
That Barack Obama spent eight years (including up through his final year-end news conference) mocking the notion that Russia posed
a serious threat to the U.S. given their size and capabilities, and that he
even tried
repeatedly to accommodate and partner with Russian President Vladimir Putin, is of no concern: In the internet age, "2016" is
regarded as ancient history, drowned out by an endless array of new threats pinned by a united media on the Russkie Plague. Moreover,
human nature craves a belief in an existential foreign threat because it confers a sense of purpose and cause, strengthens tribal
unity and identity, permits scapegoating, shifts blame for maladies from internal to external causes, and (like religion) offers
a simplifying theory for understanding a complex world.
One of the prime accusations sustaining this script is that the Kremlin is drowning the West in "fake news" and other forms of
propaganda. One can debate its impact and magnitude, but disinformation campaigns are something the U.S., Russia, and countless other
nations have done to one another for centuries, and there is
convincing evidence that Russia does this
sort of thing now. But evidence of one threat does not mean that all claimed threats are real, nor does it mean that that tactic
is exclusively wielded by one side.
Over the past year, there have been numerous claims made by Western intelligence agencies, mindlessly accepted as true in the
Western press, that have turned out to be baseless, if not deliberate scams. Just today, it
was revealed
that Dutch Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra lied when he claimed he was at a meeting with Putin, in which the Russian president "said
he considered Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states as part of a 'Greater Russia.'"
"Fake news" is certainly something to worry about when it emanates from foreign adversaries, but it is at least as concerning
and threatening, if not more so, when emanating from one's own governments and media. And there are countless, highly significant
examples beyond today's of such propaganda that emanates from within.
... ... ...
If there's any lesson that should unite everyone in the West, it's that the greatest skepticism is required when it comes to government
and media claims about the nature of foreign threats. If we're going to rejuvenate a Cold War, or submit to greater military spending
and government powers in the name of stopping alleged Russian aggression, we should at least ensure that the information on which
those campaigns succeed are grounded in fact. Even a casual review of the propaganda spewing forth from Western power centers over
the last year leaves little doubt that the exact opposite is happening.
This article was originally published by "
The Intercept "
Russia accusations are a false flag!!-No evidence-Zero NADA!!
Rather than Russia how about Mossad false flags??!
More likely .............and the silence is deafening.......... at theZionist owned MSMs in the USA!!!!
Dollars to Doughnuts-Israel is the perpetrator
I suppose I am too naive to understand the
hysteria and indignation that claims of Russia
Interference in the 2016 american electoral process garners.
The US openly calls for regime change in Syria. Hung Saddam
Hussein after a show trial. Arranged Muammar Gaddafi's sodomization
and assassination.
Do americans not realize that in levelling the accusation that Putin-Russia
successfully subverted the US electoral process that you are conceding that Russia has the power to subjugate (bring under domination
or control, especially by conquest.) the US electoral process, its government, institutions and public perception.
If americans are going to continue to make this outlandish claim for which no evidence has yet to be produced then Putin's Russia
must be recognized as the world hegemon and the indispensable- Exceptional nation. What does that do to the narrative of the "shining
city set upon a hill".
The US is blinded by its own conceit.
Frankly, what I have seen in the past 20 years, the people in San Francisco might be better off under Russian federation management
than it has been under the selected, elected, salaried, privileged 527 USA neo clowns who manage Americans in America. At least
the Russians might not give USA money to foreigners, prevent Americans from drilling their own gas and oil, tax Americans so the
USA can give the tax revenues to the corporations, and send American jobs and educational knowledge to far away places; as the
NEO CLOWN management has done.
My personal experience with Russia people with whom I have worked is they are just exactly like Americans, quite a bit better
educated, may be a little more honest.. so the question becomes under which managing government would 340,000,000 Americans be
better off: the Russian Federation or the 527 neocon-selected, media-elected, salaried, privileged USA neo clowns? Actually, i
think both governments are in need of being better arranged to respond to the needs and intentions of their people instead of
using those they govern to satisfy the Oligarchs.
"9/11-type catastrophic attack on U.S." a self-inflicted "catastrophic attack". Perhaps the USI should quit murdering people at
home and abroad... maybe that way some semblence of symathy could be mustered up.
Oh and the "shooter" in Florida.. notuce it's not a "terrorist"? So this kid was a "shooter". Pfft. Call it what it is. He was
and is a terrorist. Treat him as one would treat the invented funded and propped up "terrorists" abroad. Send the kid to 'Gitmo'
(how i loathe that americanized word)
Damon Linker chides
Americans for the lies we tell ourselves about our unending wars:
The honest and alarming truth that we seem all-too-eager to evade is that America is
already at war around the world. Someone desperately needs to pay attention, demand
accountability, and keep tabs on the steep monetary, human, and geopolitical costs.
Linker is right that Americans should pay attention to and demand accountability for the
endless wars waged in their name, but he also acknowledges that most have no interest in doing
so. Another alarming truth is that many Americans seem content to allow perpetual war to
continue so long as the steep costs are borne mostly by people in other countries. Those costs
tend to be ignored or mentioned only in passing when assessing the damage done, and even when
they are acknowledged they are not given much weight in our policy debates. The hundreds of
thousands that died because of the 2003 invasion of Iraq have practically been reduced to a
footnote in subsequent debates over military intervention.
One reason for this indifference is that many of our leaders tell us other comforting lies
about these wars: that they are necessary and waged in self-defense. The reality is that
virtually none of the military interventions that the U.S. has carried out in the last thirty
years was unavoidable or required for the defense of the United States and its allies. Our wars
are usually wars of choice fought for reasons unrelated to defending ourselves or the nations
we are obliged by treaty to protect, and they are typically fought in places where the U.S. has
no vital interests at stake.
The U.S. is at war around the world because our government chooses to be at war around the
world. For the most part, this was not forced on us, but rather it is something that our
leaders and pundits have willingly embraced again and again. Perhaps the biggest lie of all is
that the U.S. goes to war reluctantly and grudgingly. In fact, no other government resorts to
the use of force in international affairs so often and so casually as ours has in the last
twenty-five years. On the rare occasions when the public recoils from this, as they did in the
2006 midterms and again in 2013 at the prospect of attacking Syria, our leaders and pundits
shake their heads and warn against the dangers of "retreat" from the world. Of course, the myth
of retreat is another lie used to justify the next unnecessary war, and if that doesn't work
then they tell us the lie that the rest of the world supposedly craves and demands U.S.
"leadership" in its most destructive form.
Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, but served as a bulwark against Iran and kept down Sunni
fanatics as well. He was no threat to the US. Why did we go to war with Iraq and topple him?
How have things gone in Iraq since the US invasion?
The whole concepts of premptive war and regime change is insanity. I want the United
States to be a republic not an empire.
Adam Johnson has been good at pointing out all the times the US is being described as
"accidentally" or "reluctantly" being pulled into a war somewhere.
We need to bring back the draft. Not until is it THEIR CHILDREN in the line of fire will the
people of the US revolt. The draft was the reason why the war in Vietnam was so unpopular.
After it was done with, war became a spectator sport, to be viewed from the comfort of ones
couch.
The All-Volunteer arm (A.K.A. mercenaires) made perpetual war possible.
How many people voted for Trump because he was the only one of the bunch on either side
saying anything other than "SYRIA/IRAN/ISRAEL/ RUSSIA/WIN"..??
Yes; we find(probably should have known) that he is a filthy low-life . but in
desperation
I think a lot of us gave him a chance
What is missing from this otherwise healthy and needed essay is a description of lies. Being
cagey and silent is not the same as telling lies.
After all, the fact that we are engaged in persistent conflicts, these past few decades,
is not being denied. I haven't heard the U.S. government say: 'We are at peace with all the
world.' Saying so would indeed be a lie. But, to the contrary, the US government boldly
announces that it is fighting -- in Syria, for example. Though ISIS is defeated, the Defense
Dept. recently stated that U.S. army personnel are staying in Syria, with the goal of regime
change, despite having no legal basis whatsoever to do so.
So here we have one example of a lie -- our government's earlier excuse for being in Syria
('to defeat ISIS'). What other lies of this sort has our government been telling us? THAT
would be an article that warrants this essay's title.
The honest and alarming truth that we seem all-too-eager to evade is that America is
violating its own Constitution, the UN Charter, and the ratified international order around
the world. We all need to pay attention, demand the impeachment of Presidents, Senators and
Representatives, and vote any incumbent that aided, abetted or authorized illegal acts of
aggression out of office regardless of the cost.
Thank you for making a principled statement to refute a deeply misleading observation by
Linker. If Linker's is the best published opinion can do, then we are still content to be
cognitively captured by War Profiteers "R" US.
Given the exercise of collective punishment that the US engages in in Yemen and has
engaged in elsewhere, this is on *us*, whether we accept it or not.
"Americans seem content to allow perpetual war to continue so long as the steep costs are
borne mostly by people in other countries "
.. and states, and counties.
It is to the eternal shame of the Democratic Party that Trump apparently won additional
votes in the districts across the nation where the military casualties and related "cost" of
our wars for chosen profits are born the most.
The "National Securities" con is the textbook example of bipartisan comity and national
unity that anybody could conceive. Why anybody would be asking for more "consensus" is beyond
me.
"Bacevich suggested a number of explanations for why the overwhelming majority of
Americans, from elected officials on down to ordinary voters, display such indifference about
our frenzied military actions abroad. They include: because casualty rates on our side are
low; because, despite President Trump's rhetoric, no one really keeps track of and demands
public accountability for just how much money is being spent, and wasted, around the world;
because the wars are fought by an all-volunteer force in which a tiny percentage of the
population serves, allowing most Americans to go about their lives without ever being touched
by the human consequences; and because the threat of terrorism is hyped, and most people just
want to feel safe. Voters want to be protected, and politicians want to avoid the blame
either for a successful attack on the homeland or a humiliating defeat abroad. The result is
that no war ever comes to a decisive end, the total number of wars increases over time, and
we never speak of any of them."
Neither he nor Bacevich mention what I consider the most relevant aspects – many
Americans benefit from these wars, and most are not taxed by the cost of debt-financed war
and "defense" spending.
"Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of the its population
. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in
the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain
this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we
will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day dreaming; and our attention will have
to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive
ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. This process
cannot be a liberal or peaceful one."
We are willingly sacrificing both living humans being and our unborn children for our own
personal, immediate profit. How fitting for a nation born in tax evasion and collapsing by
defunding itself in public-private partnerships for profit extraction.
Think of all the jobs that are made necessary by endless wars. Somebody has to make the
bullets, the tanks, they planes, helicopters, uniforms, etc. Americans don't care how many
thousands of little brown people die, as long as Uncle Joe has a job at Boeing.
To clarify an earlier post (in case my first sentence is misinterpreted) -- of course the US
government regularly lies, especially about its 'foreign policy', endless wars, etc. My point
was simply that this article needed to focus on the nature of those lies and bogus
justifications. It's an almost inexhaustible subject, enough to keep an army of journalists
busy for many years.
The problem, of course, is not the need for such analysis: what could be more obvious? The
problem is that digging too deep in that way is taboo. And taboos are enforced here. Ask
Chuck Schumer.
Judah Grunstein
dubs Trump "the generals' president" because of his total capitulation to whatever the
current and former generals around him want:
Trump's generals have instead gone back to the future, restoring the model of a U.S.
military that faces no fiscal or strategic constraints, while preparing for a conflict -- a
conventional war with either or both of its nuclear-armed big power competitors -- that is
not just unlikely, but unwinnable.
While it is true that Trump voiced some objections to foreign wars long after they were over
or when it was no longer very risky to do so, it is important to remember that he was always in
favor of throwing more money at the military from the beginning of his campaign. He seized on
the nonsense talking point that the military had been "depleted" under Obama, and he has
continued to use it until now, and he made undoing the imaginary "depletion" one of the main
planks of his platform. Since Trump is a militarist, and since he now comes from the more
hawkish of the two parties, it was more or less a given that he would waste huge sums on higher
military spending while agreeing to the policies favored by Mattis, McMaster, et al. Add to
this his fetish for "strength" and "greatness," and you have a recipe for massive wasteful
spending on weapons and programs that the U.S. doesn't need. When there are already Pentagon
agencies losing
track of how they spend hundreds of millions of dollars , throwing more money at a huge
department with inadequate oversight is pure folly.
The increase in military spending that Trump has endorsed reflects his impulse to give the
military whatever they want. In addition to being completely unnecessary, higher military
spending will
indulge the Pentagon in all its worst habits:
The Pentagon budget request for 2019 puts the military on a course of spending unmatched
since the Reagan-era buildup, boosting the number of troops, warplanes and bombs, according
to documents and analysts.
But, defense analysts say, the $716 billion spending plan risks flooding too much money
into a Defense Department that may not spend it wisely.
"The risk is that when the budget is flowing freely, policy makers are usually reluctant
to make hard choices," said Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, a non-partisan think tank.
"While this is not a record increase, it comes on top of a budget that was already higher
than the peak of the Reagan buildup when adjusted for inflation [bold mine-DL]," Harrison
said.
The fantasy claim that the military budget suffered significant reductions in the last
decade has been one of the standard hawkish criticisms of the previous administration, and
Trump takes that falsehood as gospel. The truth is that an already bloated military budget has
continued to grow, and Trump proposes to make it grow even faster. Everyone in Washington was
so desperate to have the generals rein in Trump that most of them never thought through what it
meant for Trump to be the military's unthinking yes-man.
Oct 10, 2016 In last night's debate, the Republican nominee said, apropos military policy:
"General George Patton, General Douglas MacArthur are spinning in their grave at the stupidity
of what we're doing in the Middle East."
In most of his speeches Trump mentions those same two generals. Reader Marcus Hall assesses
what the reliance on Patton and MacArthur might tell us about Trump:
It is easy to see why these two military legends are attractive to Trump:
1) Both were known as showmen and motivators. This is clearly Trump's modus operandi as
well; he is most comfortable being the showman and motivator. When he isn't in the granted
position of head of the dais, he looks, seems, and acts out of place. (For example, think
back to the instance in Flint where the pastor takes the initiative to challenge him as a
person.)
2) Both were known to take personal animus against rivals on their own side to extremes.
Think of Patton's constant infighting with Montgomery, and his less than amicable
relationship to Bradley after Sicily.
3) Both were known for strident aggressive stances against an enemy without consideration
for larger picture effects. MacArthur's blunders with antagonizing the Chinese after Inchon,
and Patton's immediate post-war desire to go to war with the Soviets before the armed forces
and the country (or its non-Russian allies) could even recover from WWII.
4) Both faced disgrace at the hands of the media and at the hands of those who were better
able to handle the larger context of events (Eisenhower for Patton, and Truman for
MacArthur).
"... anti-Trump movements combined with critics of the liberal/democrat apparatus to build broader movements and especially oppose growing war-fever. ..."
"... Abroad, bi-partisan wars have failed to defeat independent state and mass popular resistance struggles for national sovereignty everywhere – from North Korea, Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Venezuela and beyond. ..."
"... Even the fight within the two-headed reactionary party of the US oligarchy has had a positive effect. Each side is hell-bent on exposing the state-sponsored crimes of the other. In an unprecedented and historic sense, the US and world public is witness to the spies, lies and crimes of the leadership and elite on prime time and on the wide screen. We head in two directions. In one direction, there are the threats of nuclear war, economic collapse, environmental disasters and a full blown police state. In the other direction, there is the demise of empire, a revived and renewed civil society rooted in a participatory economy and a renewed moral order. ..."
President Trump has pursued an agenda mirroring the police state operations of the FBI
– only on a global scale. Trump's violation of international law includes collaboration
and support for Saudi Arabia's tyrannical invasion and destruction of the sovereign nation of
Yemen; intensified aid and support for Israel's ethnic war against the Palestinian people;
severe sanctions and threatened nuclear first-strike against North Korea (DPRK); increased
deployment of US special forces in collaboration with the jihadi terrorist war to overthrow the
legitimate government of Syria; coup-mongering, sabotage, sanctions and economic blockade of
Venezuela; NATO missile and nuclear encirclement of Russia; and the growing naval threats
against China.
... .. ...
In the face of the national-political debacle local and regional movements became the
vehicle to support the struggles. Women organized at some workplaces and gained better
protection of their rights; African-Americans vividly documented and published video evidence
of the systematic brutal violation of their rights by the police state and effectively acted to
restrain local police violence in a few localities; immigrant workers and especially their
children gained broad public sympathy and allies within religious and political organizations;
and anti-Trump movements combined with critics of the liberal/democrat apparatus to build
broader movements and especially oppose growing war-fever.
Abroad, bi-partisan wars have failed to defeat independent state and mass popular resistance
struggles for national sovereignty everywhere – from North Korea, Iran, Yemen, Syria, and
Venezuela and beyond.
Even the fight within the two-headed reactionary party of the US oligarchy has had a
positive effect. Each side is hell-bent on exposing the state-sponsored crimes of the other. In
an unprecedented and historic sense, the US and world public is witness to the spies, lies and
crimes of the leadership and elite on prime time and on the wide screen. We head in two
directions. In one direction, there are the threats of nuclear war, economic collapse,
environmental disasters and a full blown police state. In the other direction, there is the
demise of empire, a revived and renewed civil society rooted in a participatory economy and a
renewed moral order.
So Korean anger at Ramo's comments finally induced
NBC to give him the flick . Unfortunately Ramo won't be sweating it as the article I linked
to by Japanese academic Joseph Essertier points out. Ramo is thoroughly entangled with the DC
political/intelligence elite. He is a former CEO of mercenary zionist lobby corp Kissinger
Associates, ex-senior editor of Time magazine as well as a host of other elite gigs
which doubtless came his way thanks to grandaddy who put the 'R' in TRW . It amazes me that many amerikans remain
largely unaware of TRW, now a division of Northrop Grumman. TRW took a PR hit in the 70's when
Christopher
Boyce one of their operatives got caught hawking the communications between Langley and the
amerikan embassy in Canberra that laid out the strategy for the 1974 coup against the Gough
Whitlam government. Yeah yeah I know, ancient history - well that is certainly the way that all
Oz politicians and media look at it but for some of us the rage will never subside. Amerikans's
fixation with the JFK assassination, a pretty odd fixation since Kennedy was just another
arsehole, comes close, but in the case of Gough he did have principles, acted on them, albeit
reluctantly, and the smoking gun to the CIA is established.
TRW is interesting - well not really I got pissed with a bunch of mid-level TRW execs at the
Frankfurt Hilton one night and what a boring bunch of straightlaced & unimaginative
fuckwits. I had just arrived from Northern Thailand, was jonesing like fuck - I had staggered
across to the joint and booked a room & hit the bar to get sorted for Europe. The Frankfurt
Hilton is right by the airport.
This probably didn't help my sense of tolerance but honestly these guys had no class, it was
a wonder they let them outta Cleveland. As standard the bar was chocka with German sex workers
looking to make an earner. This was pre 1990 so they were mainly German, but I've never seen
the like of these TRW blokes. The women were attractive in that painted manner certain
amerikans prefer, no doubt about their beauty and skill, but they were the end result of
amerikan post euro war imperialism - preying on victims has no interest. These idjits from TRW
were obviously really attracted to the young women, so they were pulling all sorts of weird
stunts to engage with the workers while seeming disapproving of their occupational choice. One
even pulled out a bible! The women appeared to be well used to this nonsense, after all, a sex
worker's primary training is in how to overcome humiliation and go home better than than she/he
arrived, so on one level it was amusing.
AFAIK TRW has been winning contracts to provide 'clerical and communications support' to
military and intelligence services since euro-war part 1. The communication stuff was beyond
the abilities of the double entry bookkeepers; just like with the NSA, inviting smart
imaginative fellows in proved their undoing.
This then is Ramo, an unimaginative trust-funder who has sold his soul to empire.
I have no doubt that he knew Koreans would react badly to the insult but that was of no
concern. The point was to sow the seed among the great amerikan herd that Koreans are notorious
for their ingratitude so one just shouldn't stress over their possible nuking - North or South
Koreans. South Korea's kissy kiss to their friends and family in the North should be considered
in that light, just another manifestation of that ingratitude.
There is no reason to suppose Ramo's handlers are incorrect in this assumption, after all
the most egregious act of the post war amerikan-japanese war criminal conjunction, the proven
rendition of Japanese biological warfare research scientists to Fort Dietrick and the
subsequent use of germ warefare weapons containing bubonic plague, anthrax and smallpox on
Koreans during the 1950 amerikan invasion is unknown to most amerikans and those who are aware,
airily dismiss this horror as "propaganda".
In a lot of ways there is nothing at all noteworthy about any of this. Tune your
discriminators correctly, and this manner of deliberately subjective, misleading dross
comprises the majority of every 'news bulletin'. The difference here of course is that this
wasn't a news bulletin, it was a sportscast, allegedly a celebratory sportscast. The
celebration was meant to be congratulating South Korea on their capitalist victory over 'the
stalinist' North. Nirvana by outproduction of disposable techno tat. Hmm.
Instead of appreciating the opportunity provided by amerika and Japan to pollute their
nation and turn the fuckers at the bottom into toxic, diseased slaves, those ungrateful Koreans
were cuddling up to the 'stalinists' - Those fucking unappreciative parasites!
We can analyse this stuff and see exactly how transparent it all is, but for the bloke
relaxing into his couch with a beer looking forward to an evening trying to check out the latex
enveloped skater's bods, political analysis is the last thing on their mind. The next time the
subject comes up with the boys in the bar, they will know why 'we' have to stay
intransigent - "those koreans are just ungrateful assholes - remember that family which had the
7-11 on Jefferson? Everything was overpriced and past its use-by".
That stuff works which is why the arseholes have been using it for centuries - and that is
why the seeming nonsense such as "the Russkies stole the election" must be resisted - fought
hard. The net has provided the world with a wide vista of alternative viewpoints - even though
most of us hang where we see what we want to see, alternative points of view still slip thru in
a way that they never did before. The arseholes are working that out now which is why this site
like every other woke joint is subjected to an increasing barrage of lunatic nonsense - no
wonder b needs some time off; not only are his threads getting congested with haters (ask
yourself if MoA is so awful why do these derps hang around here like spare pricks at a
wedding?) some site users are perpetuating the nonsense by engaging with them.
I dunno what to say unity doesn't come about by some little arsehole issuing orders, it happens
when people decide for themselves to put the interest of a group asset ahead of their need to
purge their liver at an obvious fuckwit. I realise that the concept of unity is alien to most
amerikans and increasing numbers of non-amerikans, but of itself that should be considered
objectively and the subtle indoctrinations which created that resistance considered before
acting out.
The New York Timesreports on the
Trump administration's poor grasp of diplomacy:
American officials were more guarded, saying they were open to talks but not a
full-fledged negotiation.
The United States, they said, would reiterate its demands that North Korea make
concessions and did not plan to offer any in return.
This is being billed as the administration's willingness to "open the door" to holding talks
with North Korea, but as we can see here there is no real interest in pursuing a diplomatic
solution. If U.S. officials just want to deliver an ultimatum in person to North Korean
officials, it is a pointless exercise that would make it harder to enter into real negotiations
later. North Korea knows what the U.S. wants it to do, and it has said many times that it will
never do that, so why would they agree to talks where the same demands will be put to them once
again? The U.S. is not willing to make confidence-building gestures that might lead to more
substantive negotiations down the road, and it has no intention of offering North Korea
anything in exchange for any concessions it might conceivably make.
In the very unlikely event that North Korea agreed to a meeting with administration
officials, they would have nothing to gain from the encounter and every incentive to stay away.
The problem isn't just that the administration won't offer North Korea the tiniest of carrots,
but that it doesn't accept the idea of using carrots in diplomacy in the first place. The
administration's posturing is what a government does when it wants to feign support for
diplomacy even as it rejects diplomacy at every turn. If people here at home can see through
this ploy, North Korea will definitely take it as more proof of Washington's bad faith.
Mattis is probably mentally ill. He'll gleefully kill millions more.
The terrorists are mentally ill. They would kill millions if they could.
Implacable.
Thus, the reason for the rise of Russia and the influence and respect for Putin. Russians
will kill terrorists but embrace Islamic people who want peaceful cooperation.
Peace is a long way off. The Hegemon abhors Peace and has the means and ideology to create
chaos, death and destruction anywhere on the globe.
The American economic system depends on MIC expenditures, debt, waste, corruption, and
fiscal abuse.
Nothing much will change until multi-polar economic forces come into dominance and coerce
the American changes. Those are a long way off, also, though a few of those forces are coming
into view.
Posted by: Red Ryder | Feb 12, 2018 12:21:31 PM |
2
"It's worth noting that intentionally deceiving a federal judge is a felony."
It's also worth noting that sometimes the judge is in on it.
For the Trump Admin surveillance warrants the FISA judge was probably Contreras. So goes
the rumor. He was probably in on it or halfway in on it. All the major players in DC know
each other and trade favors.
And Gen Mike Flynn is in the process of getting his case dismissed. The only thing left to
determine is how much the Federales will have to reimburse him for his lawyers fees, which
are a million plus.
Rudolph Contreras was the FISA Judge who issued a warrant to spy on Carter Page because
of a Yahoo News article and a Phony Probably have already. He needs to go
Recused Judge in Flynn Prosecution Served on FISA Court
Did Judge Contreras OK electronic surveillance of Recused Judge in Flynn
Prosecution Served on FISA Court Did Judge Contreras OK electronic surveillance of
Federal FISA Judge Recuses Himself From Michael Flynn Case
Blows the whole FISA Court to hell in a hand basket and Judge Contreras is getting the
hell out of dodge. This a helluva mess for the FISA Court and it's victims. Rule 5.
Authority of the Judges. (b) Referring Matters to Other Judges.
"... The liberals and Democrats and their allies in the FBI, political police and other elements of the security state apparatus
were deeply involved in an attempt to implicate Russian government officials in a plot to manipulate US public opinion on Trump's behalf
and corrupt the outcome of the election. However, the FBI, the Justice Department and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller have produced
no evidence of collusion linking the Russian government to a campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton's candidacy in favor of Trump. This
is despite thousands of interviews and threats of long prison sentences against former Trump campaign advisers. Instead, they focus
their attack on Trump's early campaign promise to find common ground in improving economic and diplomatic ties between the US and Russia,
especially in confronting jihadi terrorists. ..."
"... The liberal-progressive FBI cohort turned into rabid Russia-bashers demanding that Trump take a highly aggressive stance against
Moscow, while systematically eliminating his military and security advisors who expressed anti-confrontation sentiments. In the spirit
of a Joe McCarthy, the liberal-left launched hysterical attacks on any and every Trump campaign adviser who had spoken to, dined with
or exchanged eyebrows with any and all Russians! ..."
"... The conversion of liberalism to the pursuit of political purges is unprecedented. Their collective amnesia about the long-term,
large-scale involvement by the FBI in the worst criminal violations of democratic values is reprehensible. The FBI's anti-communist
crusade led to the purge of thousands of trade unionists from the mid-1940's onward, decimating the AFL-CIO. They blacklisted actors,
screen writers, artists, teachers, university academics, researchers, scientists, journalists and civil rights leaders as part of their
sweeping purge of civil society. ..."
"... President Trump has pursued an agenda mirroring the police state operations of the FBI – only on a global scale. Trump's violation
of international law includes collaboration and support for Saudi Arabia's tyrannical invasion and destruction of the sovereign nation
of Yemen; intensified aid and support for Israel's ethnic war against the Palestinian people; severe sanctions and threatened nuclear
first-strike against North Korea (DPRK); increased deployment of US special forces in collaboration with the jihadi terrorist war to
overthrow the legitimate government of Syria; coup-mongering, sabotage, sanctions and economic blockade of Venezuela; NATO missile and
nuclear encirclement of Russia; and the growing naval threats against China ..."
"... Domestically, Trump's response to the FBI's blackmail has been to replace the original political leadership with his own version;
to expand and increase the police state powers against immigrants; to increase the powers of the major tech companies to police and
intensify work-place exploitation and the invasion of citizens' privacy; to expand the unleash the power of state agents to torture
suspects and to saturate all public events, celebrations and activities with open displays of jingoism and militarism with the goal
of creating pro-war public opinion. ..."
"... Even the fight within the two-headed reactionary party of the US oligarchy has had a positive effect. Each side is hell-bent
on exposing the state-sponsored crimes of the other. In an unprecedented and historic sense, the US and world public is witness to the
spies, lies and crimes of the leadership and elite on prime time and on the wide screen. We head in two directions. In one direction,
there are the threats of nuclear war, economic collapse, environmental disasters and a full blown police state. In the other direction,
there is the demise of empire, a revived and renewed civil society rooted in a participatory economy and a renewed moral order ..."
Few government organizations have been engaged in violation of the US citizens' constitutional rights for as long a time and against
as many individuals as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Seldom has there been greater collusion in the perpetration of
crimes against civil liberties, electoral freedom and free and lawful expression as what has taken place between the FBI and the
US Justice Department.
In the past, the FBI and Justice Department secured the enthusiastic support and public acclaim from the conservative members
of the US Congress, members of the judiciary at all levels and the mass media. The leading liberal voices, public figures, educators,
intellectuals and progressive dissenters opposing the FBI and their witch-hunting tactics were all from the left. Today, the right
and the left have changed places: The most powerful voices endorsing the FBI and the Justice Department's fabrications, and abuse
of constitutional rights are on the left, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and famous liberal media corporations and public
opinion makers.
The recently published Congressional memo, authored by Congressman Devin Nunes, provides ample proof that the FBI spied on Trump
campaign workers with the intent to undermine the Republican candidate and sabotage his bid for the presidency. Private sector investigators,
hired by Trump's rival Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, worked with pro-Clinton operatives within the FBI and
Justice Department to violate the national electoral process while flouting rules governing wiretaps on US citizens. This was done
with the approval of the sitting Democratic President Barack Obama.
The liberals and Democrats and their allies in the FBI, political police and other elements of the security state apparatus
were deeply involved in an attempt to implicate Russian government officials in a plot to manipulate US public opinion on Trump's
behalf and corrupt the outcome of the election. However, the FBI, the Justice Department and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller have
produced no evidence of collusion linking the Russian government to a campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton's candidacy in favor
of Trump. This is despite thousands of interviews and threats of long prison sentences against former Trump campaign advisers. Instead,
they focus their attack on Trump's early campaign promise to find common ground in improving economic and diplomatic ties between
the US and Russia, especially in confronting jihadi terrorists.
The liberal-progressive FBI cohort turned into rabid Russia-bashers demanding that Trump take a highly aggressive stance against
Moscow, while systematically eliminating his military and security advisors who expressed anti-confrontation sentiments. In the spirit
of a Joe McCarthy, the liberal-left launched hysterical attacks on any and every Trump campaign adviser who had spoken to, dined
with or exchanged eyebrows with any and all Russians!
The conversion of liberalism to the pursuit of political purges is unprecedented. Their collective amnesia about the long-term,
large-scale involvement by the FBI in the worst criminal violations of democratic values is reprehensible. The FBI's anti-communist
crusade led to the purge of thousands of trade unionists from the mid-1940's onward, decimating the AFL-CIO. They blacklisted actors,
screen writers, artists, teachers, university academics, researchers, scientists, journalists and civil rights leaders as part of
their sweeping purge of civil society.
The FBI investigated the private lives of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, even threatening their family members. They illegally
spied on and infiltrated civil liberties organizations, and used provocateurs and spies in anti-war groups. Individuals lives were
destroyed, some were driven to suicide; important popular American organizations were undermined to the detriment of millions. This
has been its focus since its beginning and continues with the current fabrication of anti-Russian propaganda and investigations.
President Trump: Victim and Executor
President Trump has pursued an agenda mirroring the police state operations of the FBI – only on a global scale. Trump's violation
of international law includes collaboration and support for Saudi Arabia's tyrannical invasion and destruction of the sovereign nation
of Yemen; intensified aid and support for Israel's ethnic war against the Palestinian people; severe sanctions and threatened nuclear
first-strike against North Korea (DPRK); increased deployment of US special forces in collaboration with the jihadi terrorist war
to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria; coup-mongering, sabotage, sanctions and economic blockade of Venezuela; NATO missile
and nuclear encirclement of Russia; and the growing naval threats against China .
Domestically, Trump's response to the FBI's blackmail has been to replace the original political leadership with his own version;
to expand and increase the police state powers against immigrants; to increase the powers of the major tech companies to police and
intensify work-place exploitation and the invasion of citizens' privacy; to expand the unleash the power of state agents to torture
suspects and to saturate all public events, celebrations and activities with open displays of jingoism and militarism with the goal
of creating pro-war public opinion.
In a word: From the right to the left there are no political options to choose from among the two ruling political parties. Popular
political movements and mass demonstrations have risen up against Trump with clear justification, but have since dissolved and been
absorbed. They came together from diverse sectors: Women against sexual abuse and workplace humiliation; African-Americans against
police impunity and violence; and immigrants against mass expulsion and harassment. They staged mass demonstrations and then declined
as their 'anti-Trump' animus was frustrated by the liberal-democrats hell-bent on pursuing the Russian connection.
In the face of the national-political debacle local and regional movements became the vehicle to support the struggles. Women
organized at some workplaces and gained better protection of their rights; African-Americans vividly documented and published video
evidence of the systematic brutal violation of their rights by the police state and effectively acted to restrain local police violence
in a few localities; immigrant workers and especially their children gained broad public sympathy and allies within religious and
political organizations; and anti-Trump movements combined with critics of the liberal/democrat apparatus to build broader movements
and especially oppose growing war-fever.
Abroad, bi-partisan wars have failed to defeat independent state and mass popular resistance struggles for national sovereignty
everywhere – from North Korea, Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Venezuela and beyond.
Even the fight within the two-headed reactionary party of the US oligarchy has had a positive effect. Each side is hell-bent
on exposing the state-sponsored crimes of the other. In an unprecedented and historic sense, the US and world public is witness to
the spies, lies and crimes of the leadership and elite on prime time and on the wide screen. We head in two directions. In one direction,
there are the threats of nuclear war, economic collapse, environmental disasters and a full blown police state. In the other direction,
there is the demise of empire, a revived and renewed civil society rooted in a participatory economy and a renewed moral order
.
Conway appeared Sunday on CNN's State of the Union with Jake Tapper to address
questions surrounding Porter's departure, which came last week after accusations that he had
abused his two ex-wives.
Tapper asked about Porter's reported relationship with Hicks, and concerns expressed by
Jennie Willoughby, Porter's second ex-wife, that Porter would abuse Hicks, too. Conway said
that she did not worry about Hicks because she is "strong."
"... The world had a great opportunity in March of 1953 to reverse course rather than this insane military spending that was beginning. On March 5th, 1953, Stalin died. The Soviet leaders reached out to the United States. They offered the Americans an olive branch. They talked about changing the direction of our relations. They talked about, basically, ending the Cold War. We could've ended the Cold War as early as March 5, 1953, taken a different route. Eisenhower and the others in his administration debate what to do, how to respond. Churchill, who was now re-elected and back in office in England, begged the United States to hold a summit with the Soviet leaders and move toward peace, rather than belligerence and hostility. Eisenhower doesn't say anything publicly in response for six weeks. Then he makes a speech. It's a visionary speech. It's the kind of vision that Eisenhower represented at his best, and he says there ..."
"... PRESIDENT EISENHOWER: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ..."
"... two days later, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, makes a speech reversing the whole thing. Instead of an olive branch, he gives the Soviets a middle finger and he accuses the Soviet Union of trying to overthrow every Democratic government in the world. The exact wrong message. ..."
"... Did Eisenhower speak for it or did Dulles speak for it? Was Eisenhower the militarist or was Dulles the militarist? In many ways, the '50s was a very, very dangerous time. And there were so many harebrained schemes that were going on. ..."
"... The great independent journalist I.F. Stone mentioned that the word for lunar, for moon, in Latin is Luna. And he said, we should have a new department in the cabinet and call it the Department of Lunacy because of the crazy ideas that were being promulgated at the time. ..."
"... Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis is very important because now we're going through the Korean Missile Crisis, and if Trump has his way, we'll also go through the Iranian Missile Crisis. And the last time we were this close to nuclear war was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What happens there is that Khrushchev, in order to try to accomplish two things, or three things, really. ..."
"... And so, we were planning, we had the plans in place to overthrow the Cuban government, number one. Number two, Khrushchev wanted a credible deterrent. The Americans learned, Kennedy says, "Let's find out what the reality of the Missile Gap is." And he has McNamara do the study. We find out that there is a Missile Gap. By October of '61, we find out that there is a Missile Gap, and it's in our favor. The United States is ahead between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1 over the Soviet Union in every important category. ..."
"... He said, "We would've definitely destroyed Cuba and probably wiped out the Soviet Union as well." So, that's how close we came at this time. Which is again, as Robert Gates, another hawk, warns, "The United States should not invade Syria," he said. "Or should not bomb Syria because haven't we learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, that whenever these things happen, you never know what the consequences are going to be. It's always the unintended consequences that are going to get you." ..."
"... It takes two to tango. The idea that the US is solely to blame for the continuation of the Cold War, or that the US is solely to blame for a revival is Soviet/Russian propaganda. Great powers are aggressive, and rarely circumspect. ..."
"... And given Churchill's anathema toward Communism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, and given that he was the architect of the Cold War from the West I find the idea of him being a peacenik to be bizarre. ..."
"... They do not appreciate that there are different manifestations of both economic models. (Neoliberalism is eating us alive.) They do not appreciate that communism was probably the salvation of both post-war Russia and China. They conflate socialism with communism, view high taxes as communistic, and ignore that the countries with the highest standard of living are quite socialist. ..."
"... Ike was so right about the Military-Industrial complex, and yet we have only enabled it to grow to the point that it dominates every political decision – every law – every regulation in ways that ensure weapons are expended so more can take their place; and more weapons need to be developed because the boogeyman out there (pick a regime) probably, maybe, could be building an even nastier weapon. Make no mistake, Sputnik was viewed as evidence that the Russians already had better weapons and that they would take over "outer space" and we would thus be at their mercy. Back in the 60s the US did worry that communism was working better than capitalism, and that fear enabled a lot of foreign policy (gunboat diplomacy). ..."
"... Capitalism has fatal flaws, but we should all thank Communism died the way it did. ..."
"... not like capitalism didn't murder a few proletarians if murder is the standard, both are condemned ..."
"... the vast bulk of provocations and exacerbations in that now-reprised Cold War were a pas de deluxe, not mostly driven by our own insane US leaders, like the ones discussed in small detail in the post. Conveniently ignoring the whole escalation process of the Exceptional Empire doing the "policies" of the Dulleses and their clan, the craziness of stuff like the John Birchers and the McCarthy thing, and the madness of MAD (which I believe was a notion coined by that nest of vipers called RAND, that "we have to be understood to be insane enough to commit suicide, to kill the whole planet, for the 'deterrent effect' of Massive Retaliation (forget that the US policy and military structure very seriously intended a first strike on the Evil Soviets for quite a long time, and are now building "small nukes" for 'battlespace use' as if there are no knock-on consequences.) ..."
"... Russia suffered 20 million dead in WW II, pretty much won that war against fascism, and the leaders there get dang little decrepit for being (so far) so much more the "grownups in the room" in the Great Game Of RISK! ™ that our idiot rulers are playing. Go look up how many times, however, beyond that vast set of slapstick plays that led to the "Cuban Missile Crisis", the human part of the world skated up, by combinations of accident and error, to getting its death wish. And the main impetus for the nuclear "standoff" has been the US and the "policies" forwarded by "our" insane rulers and militarists. ..."
"... Guys, I generally treasure the NC comments section, and I am not singling anyone out, but some of the rhetoric here is starting to remind me of ZeroHedge doomp&rn. Let's please recover some perspective. ..."
"... Every year of human history since the expulsion from Eden will let us cherry pick overwhelming evidence that the lunatics were running the asylum. Or that every generation of our forebears gleefully built our civilization atop heaps of skulls of [insert oppressed groups here]. ..."
"... Such faith we have in ourselves, and such little evidence other than maybe a couple of world wars and long histories of the loonies playing stupid with whole populations, that we don't need to worry about the concentrated efforts of the sociopathic lunatics to rise to positions of great power and do stupid stuff. ..."
"... "It's the kind of vision that Eisenhower represented at his best, and he says there" Was he subsequently co-opted, or BSing? ..."
"... But that doesn't help the millions who would die on the peninsula. Further, whats known as a Nuclear Famine could still occur, which would be pretty damn devastating for civilization, even if mankind itself manages to survive. ..."
"... Science is about doubt and skepticism. That's what the scientific process is. Doubt a nuclear winter: Ok, I'll bite. We have examples – Large Volcanic eruptions, and we have the year without a summer sometime in the 1830s I believe – that is in recorded History. The we searched to archeological record for more evidence, and found large die-offs following a layer of volcanic dust. Again and again, I believe. Quoting scientists who "doubt nuclear winter" requires more examination: ..."
"... Humanity might survive as a species but not as an idea. Am about halfway through the Ellsberg book and, yes, it does make Dr. Strangelove look like a documentary. Current thinking does not seem much changed. ..."
"... Something missing from the sequence of events here is that the main reason that the Kremlin put nuclear missiles in Cuba was the fact that more than 100 Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles were deployed in Italy and Turkey in 1961 by the US, thus cutting down any reaction time by Moscow to minutes in case of a US attack. ..."
"... The main – unacknowledged – part of the climb down from the Cuba missile crisis was that as Russia pulled its nuclear missiles out of Cuba, the US would do the same in Europe. It cooled things down again until Reagan was electe ..."
"... I had forgotten that the 50s had just as many crazies as present times – the Dulles brothers, Curtis LeMay, Edward Teller, J. Edgar Hoover – really scary people and probably founding members of the deep state. ..."
"... The Jupiter missile agreement was a secret at the time. Kennedy wanted to minimize the appearance of a quid-pro-quo. The subsequent presence of Pershings and Tomahawks in Europe (but not Turkey) was a reaction to the mobile IRBMs deployed by the Soviet Union. Which they still have. France and Britain have their own independent deterrents. Which is just as well, since the Pershings and Tomahawks were traded away as part of START/SALT. ..."
"... The more recent escalation of NATO into E Europe, the Baltics and the Ukraine are a definite violation of the spirit of the Cuban Missile Crisis agreement, and are pure aggression against a Russia that was seen as too weak to do anything about it until they did do something about it in 2014. ..."
"... An aggressive NATO is something I view with horror. One does not poke the bear. But Kissinger (the German) and Berzhinski (the Pole) are fanatically anti-Russian. They made up for the passing of Churchill. ..."
"... LeMay had suggested that we should perhaps wipe out the Soviet Union before they had the chance to catch up to us in nukes. It was an era ruled by fear of nuclear war–a fear that was unleashed by the use of the bomb in Japan. Truman and Byrnes (the latter in a meeting in his hometown–my hometown) rejected calls by some of the Los Alamos scientists to share the nuclear secrets with the Russians and forestall this arms race or so they hoped. ..."
"... This isn't accurate. Stalin tried repeatedly and even towards the end, desperately, to sign a treaty with the Britain and France. They rebuffed him because [he was a] Commie. He signed up with Hitler only after those efforts had clearly failed. It was a self-preservation move. It probably did buy him less time than he thought. But let's not kid ourselves: Hitler's first move otherwise would have been to the East. What were later the Allies would have been delighted to see him take over the USSR. This was why British aristos were so keen on Hitler, that he was seen as an answer to Communism and therefore "our kind of man". ..."
"... General LeMay was responsible for the death of a fifth (some say a third) of the North Korean population by saturation bombing with napalm, was he not? A third? Isn't that one in three? ..."
"... Additional books that shed light on both leaving the new deal behind and the Cuban missile crisis are (1) "The Devil's Chessboard" by Talbot and (2) "JFK and The Unspeakable" by Douglass. The first is mostly about Allen Dulles but has interesting chapters on McCarthy, Eisenhower, Nixon, etc. It is reasonably well foot-noted. The second is about the assassination and has loads of detail about the missile crisis and its power players. It is meticulously foot-noted. ..."
Jerri-Lynn here: Lest anyone be deluded into thinking that the current lunacy of Trump foreign policy is unprededented and ahistoric,
part eight of
an excellent
Real News Network series on Undoing the New Deal reminds us this simply isn't so.
That series more generally discuses who helped unravel the New Deal and why. That was no accident, either. In this installment,
historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to
end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the
world of the eve of destruction.
Three things I've seen recently made me think readers might appreciate this interview. First, I recently finished reading
Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers
, about the baleful consequences of the control over US foreign policy by Dulles brothers– John Foster and Alan. These continue to
reverberate to today. Well worth your time.
Over the hols, I watched Dr. Strangelove again. And I wondered, and this not for the first time: why has the world managed to
survive to this day? Seems to me just matter of time before something spirals out of control– and then, that's a wrap.
Queued up on my beside table is Daniel Ellsberg's
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of
a Nuclear War Planner . Haven't cracked the spine of that yet, so I'll eschew further commentary, except to say that I understand
Ellsberg's provides vivid detail about just how close we've already come to annihilation.
PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network, I'm Paul Jay. We're continuing our series of discussions on the Undoing of the New
deal, and we're joined again by Professor Peter Kuznick, who joins us from Washington. Peter is a Professor of History, and Director
of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. Thanks for joining us again Peter.
PETER KUZNICK: My pleasure, Paul.
PAUL JAY: So, before we move on to Kennedy, and then we're going to get to Johnson, you wanted to make a comment about Eisenhower,
who made a couple of great sounding speeches about reducing military expenditure but I'm not sure how much that actually ever got
implemented. But talk about this speech in, I guess, it's 1953, is it?
PETER KUZNICK: Yes. The world had a great opportunity in March of 1953 to reverse course rather than this insane military
spending that was beginning. On March 5th, 1953, Stalin died. The Soviet leaders reached out to the United States. They offered the
Americans an olive branch. They talked about changing the direction of our relations. They talked about, basically, ending the Cold
War. We could've ended the Cold War as early as March 5, 1953, taken a different route. Eisenhower and the others in his administration
debate what to do, how to respond. Churchill, who was now re-elected and back in office in England, begged the United States to hold
a summit with the Soviet leaders and move toward peace, rather than belligerence and hostility. Eisenhower doesn't say anything publicly
in response for six weeks. Then he makes a speech. It's a visionary speech. It's the kind of vision that Eisenhower represented at
his best, and he says there
PRESIDENT EISENHOWER: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a
theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber
is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half
million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I
repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.
Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
PETER KUZNICK: This is not a way of life at all. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.�
What a great speech and the Soviets were thrilled. They republished this. They reprinted it. They broadcast it over and over, and
then two days later, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, makes a speech reversing the whole thing. Instead of an olive branch,
he gives the Soviets a middle finger and he accuses the Soviet Union of trying to overthrow every Democratic government in the world.
The exact wrong message.
And so, it's sort of like Trump, where Tillerson says something sane and then Trump will undermine it two days later when it comes
to North Korea. The same thing happened in 1953 with Eisenhower and Dulles. We're really much more on the same page, but if you look
at the third world response, you've got the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955, and the third world leaders are all saying,
"We have to be independent. We have to be neutral." They say, "It is insane to spend all these dollars and all these rubles on the
military when we need money for development."
PAUL JAY: So, what went on with Eisenhower, making that kind of speech? He's not known for any big increase in social spending
domestically. He helps build, as you said, the military industrial complex, especially the nuclear side of it. So, what was that
speech about, and then how does he allow Dulles to contradict him two days later?
PETER KUZNICK: That's one of the mysteries. That's why writing books on the debate, what was going on in that administration.
Did Eisenhower speak for it or did Dulles speak for it? Was Eisenhower the militarist or was Dulles the militarist? In many ways,
the '50s was a very, very dangerous time. And there were so many harebrained schemes that were going on.
We talked a little bit about Sputnik but one of the proposals after that was to blast a hydrogen bomb on the surface of the moon
to show the world that we really are the strongest. And they talked about putting missile bases on the moon, and then the idea was
to have the Soviets respond by putting their own missile bases on the moon. We could put ours on distant planets, so that we could
then hit the Soviet bases on the moon. The great independent journalist I.F. Stone mentioned that the word for lunar, for moon,
in Latin is Luna. And he said, we should have a new department in the cabinet and call it the Department of Lunacy because of the
crazy ideas that were being promulgated at the time.
This comes across, really, with the nuclear policies. So, when McGeorge Bundy asks Dan Ellsberg in 1961 to find out from the Joint
Chiefs what would be, how many people would die as a result of America's nuclear launch in the event of a war with the Soviet Union,
the Pentagon comes back with the idea that between 600 and 650 million people would die from America's weapons alone in our first
PSYOP. And that doesn't even account for nuclear winter, which would have killed us all, or the numbers who would be killed by the
Soviet weapons. That includes at least 100 million of our own allies in Western Europe.
We are talking about a period the lunacy and insanity was captured best by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove in 1964. That policy
was so close to what was actually occurring at the time. Did Eisenhower speak for this? When Eisenhower wanted to, one of his visions
was for planetary excavation using hydrogen bombs. People should study the lunacy of Project Plowshare.
PAUL JAY: They used to have tourism to go look at nuclear tests outside of Las Vegas and people would sit just a few miles away
with sunglasses on.
PETER KUZNICK: And we sent American soldiers into the blast area, knowing that they were going to be irradiated. Yeah, the irrationality
in these times. People are going to look back at the Trump administration and if we're here later, maybe they'll laugh at us. If
we survive this period, they'll laugh. They'll look back and say, "Look at the craziness of this period." Well, if you look at the
history of the '50s and early '60s, you see a lot of that same kind of craziness in terms of the policies that were actually implemented
at the time, and the ones, for example, one of the ideas was to melt the polar ice caps using hydrogen bombs. We wanted to increase
polar melting. We wanted to increase the temperature on the planet by exploding nuclear bombs.
PAUL JAY: And this was to do, to what end?
PETER KUZNICK: For what end? I'm not sure. I mean, one-
PAUL JAY: Well, they may get their way, the way things are heading right now. They may get that.
PETER KUZNICK: And one of the things from Trump's National Security speech was to not talk about, or to say that global warming
is not a National Security concern as Obama and others had believed it was. But they wanted to actually redirect hurricanes by setting
off hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere in the path of the hurricane, so they could redirect hurricanes. They wanted to build new harbors
by setting off hydrogen bombs. They wanted to have a new canal across the, instead of the Panama canal, with hydrogen bombs and reroute
rivers in the United States.
I mean, crazy, crazy ideas that was considered American policy. And actually, it was the Soviets who saved us because Eisenhower
wanted to begin to do these programs, but the Soviets would not allow, would not give the United States the right to do that because
there was a temporary test ban in the late 1950s. And Eisenhower would have had to abrogate that in order to begin these projects.
PAUL JAY: Okay. Let's catch up. So, we had just, the last part dealt with some of Kennedy. We get into the 1960s. Kennedy is as
preoccupied with the Cold War, the beginning of the Vietnam War, Cuba, the Missile Crisis. And we had left off right at the moment
of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Give us a really quick recap because I think on this issue of militarization and former policy, we kind
of have to do a whole nother series that focuses more on that. We're trying to get more into this issue of the New Deal and what
happened to domestic social reforms in the context of this massive military expenditure. But talk a bit about that moment of the
Cuban Missile Crisis.
PETER KUZNICK: Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis is very important because now we're going through the Korean Missile Crisis,
and if Trump has his way, we'll also go through the Iranian Missile Crisis. And the last time we were this close to nuclear war was
during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What happens there is that Khrushchev, in order to try to accomplish two things, or three things,
really.
One is to, he knows the United States is planning an invasion of Cuba. The United States had been carrying out war games, massive
war games, 40,000 people participating in these war games. Like now, we're carrying out war games off the Korean coast. And the war
game that was planned for October of '62 was called Operation Ortsac. Anybody who doesn't get it? Certainly the Soviets did. Ortsac
is Castro spelled backwards.
And so, we were planning, we had the plans in place to overthrow the Cuban government, number one. Number two, Khrushchev
wanted a credible deterrent. The Americans learned, Kennedy says, "Let's find out what the reality of the Missile Gap is." And he
has McNamara do the study. We find out that there is a Missile Gap. By October of '61, we find out that there is a Missile Gap, and
it's in our favor. The United States is ahead between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1 over the Soviet Union in every important category.
Still, the pressure was to increase America's missiles and so, the Strategic Air Command in the Air Force wanted to increase
our missiles by 3,000. McNamara figures that the least number he can get away with is to increase our intercontinental ballistic
missiles by 1,000 even though we're ahead 10 to 1 already at that point. The Kremlin interpreted that, and said, "Why is the US increasing
its missiles when it's so far ahead of us?" They said, "Obviously, the United States is preparing for a first strike against the
Soviet Union." That was the Kremlin interpretation. It needed a credible deterrent.
They knew that, initially they thought, "Well, the fact that we can take out Berlin will be a credible enough deterrent. The Americans
will never attack." Then they realized that that wouldn't be a sufficient deterrent to some of the hawks in the American military,
the Curtis LeMays, who had a lot of influence at the time. Or before that, the Lemnitzers. And so, they decide, "Well, we've got
to put missiles in Cuba, which is a more credible deterrent."
And the third is that Khrushchev wanted to appease his hawks. Khrushchev's strategy was to build up Soviet consumer economy. He
said, "The Soviet people want washing machines. They want cars. They want houses. That's what we need." And so, he wanted to decrease
defense spending and one of the cheap ways to do that was to put the missiles in Cuba. So, they do that foolishly. It's a crazy policy
because they don't announce it. It's very much like the movie Strangelove, where Khrushchev was planning to announce that the missiles
were in Cuba on the anniversary of the Soviet Revolution. That was coming up in a couple-
PAUL JAY: You mean Dr. Strangelove, meaning what's the point of a doomsday machine if you don't tell people you've got it?
PETER KUZNICK: As Strangelove says, "Well what's the point of the doomsday machine if you don't announce that you have it?" And
then, the Americans didn't, the Soviets didn't announce that they had the, if they had announced that the missiles were there, then
the United States could not have invaded Cuba the way the military wanted. They could not have bombed Cuba. It would've been an effective
deterrent, especially if they announced that also, that the missiles were there, that the warheads were there and that they also
had put 100 battlefield nuclear weapons inside Cuba.
That would have meant that there was no possibility of the United States invading and that the deterrent would've actually worked.
But they didn't announce it. And so, the United States plans for an invasion and we got very close to doing so. But again, the intelligence
was abysmal. We knew where 33 of the 42 missiles were. We didn't find the other missiles. We didn't know that the battlefield nuclear
weapons were there. We didn't know that the missiles were ready to be armed.
And so, the United States was operating blind. We thought that there were 10,000 armed Soviets in Cuba. Turns out, there were
42,000 armed Soviets. We thought that there were 100,000 armed Cubans. Turns out, there were 270,000 armed Cubans. Based on the initial
intelligence, McNamara said, "If we had invaded, we figured we'd suffer 18,000 casualties, 4,500 dead." When he later finds out how
many troops there actually were there, he says, "Well, that would've been 25,000 Americans dead." When he finds out that there were
100 battlefield nuclear weapons as well, he doesn't find that out until 30 years later, and then he turns white, and he says, "Well
that would've meant we would've lost 100,000 American Troops." Twice as many, almost, as we lost in Vietnam.
He said, "We would've definitely destroyed Cuba and probably wiped out the Soviet Union as well." So, that's how close we
came at this time. Which is again, as Robert Gates, another hawk, warns, "The United States should not invade Syria," he said. "Or
should not bomb Syria because haven't we learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, that whenever these things happen,
you never know what the consequences are going to be. It's always the unintended consequences that are going to get you."
Which we learned in Cuba. We learned in Iraq and Afghanistan or we should've learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously, Trump
hasn't learned it and we had better learn before we do something crazy now in Korea.
PAUL JAY: All right, thanks, Peter. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
It takes two to tango. The idea that the US is solely to blame for the continuation of the Cold War, or that the US is
solely to blame for a revival is Soviet/Russian propaganda. Great powers are aggressive, and rarely circumspect. The existence
of nuclear weapons, was what prevented either the US or the Soviet Union/Russia from attacking each other. Otherwise the sport
of kings would have continued as usual.
And given Churchill's anathema toward Communism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, and given that he was the
architect of the Cold War from the West I find the idea of him being a peacenik to be bizarre.
It's always that word, "communism", isn't it? As long as that word is used, everything is justifiable. If you look at it closely,
it would seem that the Russians have discovered that communism is every bit as susceptible to corruption as capitalism. Communism
has been, in fact, MORE discredited than capitalism (for now.) With Russia on the other side of the planet, what would be the
harm in letting whatever failed ideologies they have fail like Kansas failed? As Jesus might say, "Ah Ye of little faith."
The vast majority of Americans today have no idea what communism is. Most cannot even thing about communism in terms of it
being just another economic system different from capitalism. (No, it is slavery!) They do not appreciate that there are different
manifestations of both economic models. (Neoliberalism is eating us alive.) They do not appreciate that communism was probably
the salvation of both post-war Russia and China. They conflate socialism with communism, view high taxes as communistic, and ignore
that the countries with the highest standard of living are quite socialist.
In many cases, Americans vote against their own interests just because some pol labels a new social program as communist so
he can give his new bill and edge.
Ike was so right about the Military-Industrial complex, and yet we have only enabled it to grow to the point that it dominates
every political decision – every law – every regulation in ways that ensure weapons are expended so more can take their place;
and more weapons need to be developed because the boogeyman out there (pick a regime) probably, maybe, could be building an even
nastier weapon. Make no mistake, Sputnik was viewed as evidence that the Russians already had better weapons and that they would
take over "outer space" and we would thus be at their mercy. Back in the 60s the US did worry that communism was working better
than capitalism, and that fear enabled a lot of foreign policy (gunboat diplomacy).
Trump is anything if he is not politically and strategically a dim wit. Thus he probably buys into the communist boogeyman
scenario common in our culture. He is likely attracted to the economic stimulus that more guns and less butter offer in the short
run. Our problems seems to hinge on leaders who limit their action to the short run, and the long run (ensuring survival of the
human species?), well, they never get around to that.
I would not be so loving over the "communistic ideals". My great grandparents were murdered for the fact that one was a postal
office manager, another was a sock factory owner. Believe what you want, but communism is far from just an economic theory.
Communism, once you force the politics into the economic theory, is this: equality of all men, regardless of abilities, and
damn if you started off well because everything will be taken from you. Your life is not your own, your family is not your own,
your work is not your own: it belongs to the state.
Capitalism has fatal flaws, but we should all thank Communism died the way it did.
Yaas, it's just Putin friendly propaganda, that's all. Let us persuade ourselves that the vast bulk of provocations and
exacerbations in that now-reprised Cold War were a pas de deluxe, not mostly driven by our own insane US leaders, like the ones
discussed in small detail in the post. Conveniently ignoring the whole escalation process of the Exceptional Empire doing the
"policies" of the Dulleses and their clan, the craziness of stuff like the John Birchers and the McCarthy thing, and the madness
of MAD (which I believe was a notion coined by that nest of vipers called RAND, that "we have to be understood to be insane enough
to commit suicide, to kill the whole planet, for the 'deterrent effect' of Massive Retaliation (forget that the US policy and
military structure very seriously intended a first strike on the Evil Soviets for quite a long time, and are now building "small
nukes" for 'battlespace use' as if there are no knock-on consequences.)
How does one break the cycle of ever-increasing vulnerability and eventual destruction, that includes the extraction and combustion
and all the other decimations of a livable planet? how to do that when the Imperial Rulers are insane, by any sensible definition
of insanity? And the Russians sure seem to be wiser and more restrained (barring some provocation that trips one of their own
Doomsday Devices that they have instituted to try to counter the ridiculous insane provocations and adventures of the Empire?
Maybe revert to "Duck and cover?" Or that Civil Defense posture by one of the Reaganauts, one T.K. Jones, who wanted Congress
to appropriate $252 million (1980 dollars) for Civil Defense, mostly for SHOVELS: in the firmly held belief that "we can fight
and win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union:"
Three times Mr. Jones – or someone speaking in his name – agreed to testify. Three times he failed to appear. The Pentagon
finally sent a pinch-hitter, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. But the Senate wants Mr. Jones. It wants an authoritative
explanation of his plan to spend $252 million on civil defense. Evidently, most of that money will go for shovels.
For this is how the alleged Mr. Jones describes the alleged civil defense strategy: "Dig a hole, cover it with a couple
of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it."
Mr. Jones seems to believe that the United States could recover fully, in two to four years, from an all-out nuclear
attack. As he was quoted in The Los Angeles Times: "Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around."
Dig on, Senator Pressler. We're all curious.
Russia suffered 20 million dead in WW II, pretty much won that war against fascism, and the leaders there get dang little
decrepit for being (so far) so much more the "grownups in the room" in the Great Game Of RISK! ™ that our idiot rulers are playing.
Go look up how many times, however, beyond that vast set of slapstick plays that led to the "Cuban Missile Crisis", the human
part of the world skated up, by combinations of accident and error, to getting its death wish. And the main impetus for the nuclear
"standoff" has been the US and the "policies" forwarded by "our" insane rulers and militarists.
"Tu Quoque" is an especially weak and inapposite and insupportable argument in this context.
SPOT ON! IF Robby Mook and the gang can stir up a Russian frenzy from hell based on nothing more than sour grapes, and IF what
we know about the deep state is only the tip of the iceberg, and IF the media is largely under the control of the 'Gov, THEN a
logical human must at least be open to the possibility that there is also such a thing as American propaganda, must (s)he not?
Yes. Nobody invaded Argentina when Juan Peron et al took over. Hitler and Mussolini could have died as dictators decades later
if they had simply kept their armies home.
Guys, I generally treasure the NC comments section, and I am not singling anyone out, but some of the rhetoric here is
starting to remind me of ZeroHedge doomp&rn. Let's please recover some perspective.
Every year of human history since the expulsion from Eden will let us cherry pick overwhelming evidence that the lunatics
were running the asylum. Or that every generation of our forebears gleefully built our civilization atop heaps of skulls of [insert
oppressed groups here].
Yet during the Cold War, there were plenty of prominent people calling out the McCarthys and Lemays of the world as loons (and
behind the Curtain, even Stalin was removed from key posts before his death). Guess what, sane generally wins out over the mad
king. The arc of history indeed bends toward justice, though never without sacrifice and diligent truthseeking. The ones to worry
about are the snake oil merchants, who pee on our shoes and tell us it's raining.
g.
Such faith we have in ourselves, and such little evidence other than maybe a couple of world wars and long histories of
the loonies playing stupid with whole populations, that we don't need to worry about the concentrated efforts of the sociopathic
lunatics to rise to positions of great power and do stupid stuff.
Yes, this is what the world gets when technological advancement is combined with a socio-economic system that rewards sociopathic
tendencies. A system advanced by propaganda (disguised as entertainment and education) backed up with the barrell of a gun and
cameras everywhere.
This article is not scary enough. Find out that in 1983 there was almost a nuclear war. Both sides have a first strike strategy
and a Russian general thought that actions of Reagan were getting ready for the first strike and he was going to strike first.
And during the Cuban missile crisis, Russian subs had nuclear weapons on them and we dropped low level depth charges on them and
we didn't know that they were armed.
This is a very long interview of Daniel Ellsberg in Seattle on Jan 9, 2018.
Now that everyone, except many in the USA, knows that when the USA changes a government that the country is ruined, this may
have forced North and South Korea to get together.
Ellsberg says that any nukes used in the Korean Peninsula would result in at least 1 million dead and while 60 million in WWII
were killed during the course of the war, with nukes that many cold be killed in a week. And then, nuclear winter would finish
off the rest of us.
To be fair, there are now doubts among scientists that Nuclear Winter as classically described would even be a thing.
But that doesn't help the millions who would die on the peninsula. Further, whats known as a Nuclear Famine could still
occur, which would be pretty damn devastating for civilization, even if mankind itself manages to survive.
Science is about doubt and skepticism. That's what the scientific process is. Doubt a nuclear winter: Ok, I'll bite. We
have examples – Large Volcanic eruptions, and we have the year without a summer sometime in the 1830s I believe – that is in recorded
History. The we searched to archeological record for more evidence, and found large die-offs following a layer of volcanic dust.
Again and again, I believe. Quoting scientists who "doubt nuclear winter" requires more examination:
List them, together with their credentials and "donor$."
You can google nuclear winter early enough. And yes, there are scientists who are skeptical for various reasons. The only group
that has written a paper on it in recent years is composed of some of the same scientists who originally proposed it and they
think it is real.
Reasons for skepticism include doubt about the amount of smoke that would be produced. And the volcano and asteroid comparisons
are imperfect because the details are different. People used to talk about volcanic dust, and now it is mostly sulfuric acid droplets.
With asteroids the initial thought was the KT boundary layer represented trillions of tons of submicron size dust and then Melosh
proposed ejects blasted around the world heated the upper atmosphere and ignited global fires and created soot and then his grad
student Tamara Goldin wrote her dissertation saying the heat might not be quite enough to do that and then people suggested it
was ( I won't go into why) and others suggested the bolide hit sulfur layers .
The point is that there is not a consensus about the detailed atmospheric effects of either large asteroid impacts or of super
volcanoes like Toba and yet we do have some evidence because these things happened. We don't have an example to study in tge geologic
record where hundreds of cities were hit simultaneously with nuclear weapons.
I could go on, but I don't want to give the impression I have a strong opinion either way, because I don't. But I think the
case for global warming is overwhelming because vastly more people are working on it and it is happening in front of us. It is
not just computer models.
Forget possible nuclear winter, the economic effects alone would be worth 10 Lehman brothers (2008 meltdowns). And then the
knock on effects would cause other knock on effects like other wars. Even without a nuclear winter, civilization would probably
collapse within 18 months anyway.
All this, while true, only change the details not the results. The Chicxulub impact almost certainly exterminated the
majority of then living species, and the Toba Supervolcano probably almost caused our extinction. That suggest throwing massive
amounts of anything into the atmosphere is not good.
As a student I would like to know the details, but in practice, it's like arguing whether a snow storm or a blizzard killed
someone. Humanity as a species would probably survive a nuclear war okay, but many(most?) individuals as well as our planetary
civilization would be just as dead. The numbers dying would be slightly different is all.
Humanity might survive as a species but not as an idea. Am about halfway through the Ellsberg book and, yes, it does make
Dr. Strangelove look like a documentary. Current
thinking does not seem much changed.
Something missing from the sequence of events here is that the main reason that the Kremlin put nuclear missiles in Cuba
was the fact that more than 100 Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles were deployed in Italy and Turkey in 1961
by the US, thus cutting down any reaction time by Moscow to minutes in case of a US attack.
The main – unacknowledged – part of the climb down from the Cuba missile crisis was that as Russia pulled its nuclear missiles
out of Cuba, the US would do the same in Europe. It cooled things down again until Reagan was elected.
I had forgotten that the 50s had just as many crazies as present times – the Dulles brothers, Curtis LeMay, Edward Teller,
J. Edgar Hoover – really scary people and probably founding members of the deep state.
The Jupiter missile agreement was a secret at the time. Kennedy wanted to minimize the appearance of a quid-pro-quo. The
subsequent presence of Pershings and Tomahawks in Europe (but not Turkey) was a reaction to the mobile IRBMs deployed by the Soviet
Union. Which they still have. France and Britain have their own independent deterrents. Which is just as well, since the Pershings
and Tomahawks were traded away as part of START/SALT.
The more recent escalation of NATO into E Europe, the Baltics and the Ukraine are a definite violation of the spirit of
the Cuban Missile Crisis agreement, and are pure aggression against a Russia that was seen as too weak to do anything about it
until they did do something about it in 2014.
An aggressive NATO is something I view with horror. One does not poke the bear. But Kissinger (the German) and Berzhinski
(the Pole) are fanatically anti-Russian. They made up for the passing of Churchill.
Just recently Russia deployed more nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to the Kaliningrad enclave between Poland and Lithuania.
Maybe something to do with all those special forces NATO keeps stationing on the Russian border?
And all the a -- -oles who Command and Rule, and most of the commentariat and punditry, all treat these affairs as if they
are playing some Brobdingnagian Game of Risk ™, where as with Monopoly (which was originally intended to teach a very different
lesson) the object of the game is all about TAKING OVER THE WHOLE WORLD, WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA an idiotic froth on top of an ever more
dangerous brew of exponentially increasing,and largely ignored, mutual if often asymmetric, deadly vulnerability.
Stupid effing humans and their vast stupid monkey tricks
LeMay had suggested that we should perhaps wipe out the Soviet Union before they had the chance to catch up to us in nukes.
It was an era ruled by fear of nuclear war–a fear that was unleashed by the use of the bomb in Japan. Truman and Byrnes (the latter
in a meeting in his hometown–my hometown) rejected calls by some of the Los Alamos scientists to share the nuclear secrets with
the Russians and forestall this arms race or so they hoped.
So no the crazy didn't start with Trump and Trump had even advocated we make nice with the Russians until the Dems, their remnants
at State and Defense and the press forced him to change course (on threat of impeachment). The elites who have gained more or
less permanent power over the direction of this country are a threat to us all.
Anyhow, thanks for the above post. Those who forget history ..
Different world. The first generation of nuclear weapons had yields (around 20-30Kt) that were comprehensible in terms of conventional
bombing, which of course would have required many more aircraft but was also much more efficient per tonne of explosives. For
the formative years after 1945, therefore, people thought of nuclear weapons as weapons in the classic sense and, at that time,
nobody really knew that much about the effects of radiation and fallout. This all changed with the advent of the hydrogen bomb,
but even then it took a long time for the likely catastrophic effects of the use of such weapons in large numbers to sink in.
Nuclear technology, and both delivery and guidance systems, evolved far more quickly than rationales for their use could be found.
Indeed, you can say that the Cold War was a period when nuclear powers found themselves acquiring weapons with technologies that
couldn't actually be used, but couldn't be un-invented either. Enormous intellectual effort went into trying to provide post-hoc
rationales for having these weapons, some of it very ingenious, most of it wasted.
Don't forget the role of paranoia either. NSC-68, the report that formalized US strategy during the Cold War, reads today like
the ravings of a group of lunatics, seeing, almost literally, Reds under the beds. And if Stalin was dead, the Soviet leadership
had just gone through a war which had cost them almost 30 million dead, and any, literally any, sacrifice was worth it to make
sure that they prevented another war, or at least won it quickly.
US military casualties in WW2: 407,300
US civilian casualties in WW2: 12,100
USSR military casualties in WW2: estimated by various sources [see the footnotes] between 8,668,000 to 11,400,000.
USSR civilian casualties in WW2: 10,000,000 [plus another 6-7 million deaths from famine, a line in the table that is completely
blank for the US]
Simply put, for every American that died, somewhere between a thousand to two thousand of their Russian counterparts were killed.
And somehow people in the US were convinced and worried that Russia wanted to start yet another war when they still hadn't finished
burying the dead from the last one.
1. Stalin made his pact with the devil that gave Hitler free rein to invade Poland and France. Hitler then invaded Russia from
Poland as the jumping off point. Stalin miscalculated big-time.
2. Invaded countries always have many more civilian countries than un-invaded ones.
3. Germany started WW II only 20 years after the end of WW I that also slaughtered 2 million German soldiers. Past losses generally
does not appear to impact the decision-making of dictators regarding new wars. So it would have been irrational for the West to
think that the USSR had no intent to expand its borders. That was the blunder that France and Britain made in 1938-39. However,
the paranoia did get extreme in the Cold War.
This isn't accurate. Stalin tried repeatedly and even towards the end, desperately, to sign a treaty with the Britain and
France. They rebuffed him because [he was a] Commie. He signed up with Hitler only after those efforts had clearly failed. It
was a self-preservation move. It probably did buy him less time than he thought. But let's not kid ourselves: Hitler's first move
otherwise would have been to the East. What were later the Allies would have been delighted to see him take over the USSR. This
was why British aristos were so keen on Hitler, that he was seen as an answer to Communism and therefore "our kind of man".
The Poles have been the Germans and Russians chewtoy ever since it was completely partitioned. All the countries immediately
around Russia have been horribly abused by Russia. Putin is doing his country no favors by reminding everyone of that. He can
cow them into submission, but like the American government is finding, just because they are doesn't mean they cannot cause trouble.
Heck, the current Great Game could be said to have started with the Soviet-Afghanistan War.
Going into the war every country was unprepared and unwilling to fight and had difficulty choices. The German military
itself was not prepared. It was Hitler's choice to start when and where and by 1938 everyone knew it. Hitler was surprised that
France and Great Britain honored their guarantee to Poland.
As evil as Stalin's regime was, and his invasion of Poland was just as bad as Hitler's at first, I don't think most people
really understood just how evil the Nazis were and what they were planning on doing for Germany's living space. It was worse than
anything that Stalin did and between the Ukrainian famine, the Great Purges, the takeover of the Baltic States, the invasion of
Finland, etc he did serious evil.
General LeMay was responsible for the death of a fifth (some say a third) of the North Korean population by saturation
bombing with napalm, was he not? A third? Isn't that one in three?
Additional books that shed light on both leaving the new deal behind and the Cuban missile crisis are (1) "The Devil's
Chessboard" by Talbot and (2) "JFK and The Unspeakable" by Douglass. The first is mostly about Allen Dulles but has interesting
chapters on McCarthy, Eisenhower, Nixon, etc. It is reasonably well foot-noted. The second is about the assassination and has
loads of detail about the missile crisis and its power players. It is meticulously foot-noted.
I was going to post the text of the short review, but all I got at the moment is this blankety iPhone and its limits with cut
and paste.
Not many read books anyway these days, and what sufficient moiety of them will form the groundswell that tips over the Juggernaut
we are all pushing and pulling and riding toward the cliff?
I read this stuff mostly to sense which hand holds the knife and not to go down asking "What happened? What did it all mean?"
Trump has been bellicose re NK and Iran, but I see him as resisting the Syrian adventure, while cia plus military hawks pushing
forward.
Dems today are real hawks, itching to confront Russia in both Syria and Ukraine the latter another place trump may be resisting
hawks, the area has been quiet since the election, I.e. since dems were in charge.
It's an odd thought that in some theaters trump may be the sane one
Yaas, nothing is happening in Ukraine, all is quiet on the Eastern Front of NATO:
http://ukraine.csis.org/ Nuland has gone on to other conquests, and all
that. The CIA and War Department have lost interest in that Conflict Zone. Nothing is happening. You are getting sleepy. Sleepy.
Yeah, the title of this post would lead one to believe that their is something uniquely horrible about Trump's foreign policy.
From anything I can detect, her bellicose statement about a no-fly zone in Syria and her abject destruction of Libya, HRC's FP
would have been even worse.
If she had been elected, we might already be in a ground war with the Russians in Syria. The only hopeful sign is that while
Trump spends his day watching TeeVee, State, DOD, and CIA are all working at cross purposes and getting in each other's way.
Foreign policy? We have a foreign policy? If anybody finds it, will they please explain it to me?
I almost never comment, although I rely on NC for most of my news and blood pressure control. You are a treasure.
May I recommend another book – "All Honorable Men" – by James Stewart Martin. Published in 1950 and shortly thereafter all
bookstore copies were hoovered-up and burned by the CIA. It might have been referenced in one of the RNN segments, but I haven't
slogged through all of them yet.
You can get a hardback at Amazon for a mere $298. An i-book is cheaper.
After reading "The Brothers," and "The Devil's Chessboard," I considered starting a non-profit using GPS technology – Piss-on-their-Graves.org.
The Forbidden Bookshelf series by Open Media
is fantastic. Sadly for dinosaurs like me, it is mostly ebooks, but they do the occasional hard copy reprints, and since much
in the series would be out of print without Open Media, even the ebooks are great to have.
And it is interesting to see how many bothersome books just go away even without any "censorship" even with the First Amendment
being the one right courts have consistently, and strongly, enforced.
This article reminded me of an interesting/disturbing thing I saw on tv last night – a local news show had a bit on what to
do in case of nuclear attack!
Boomers & older probably remember the drill: go to the basement or innermost room of the house, have 72 hours of food & water
stashed & don't go outside for at least 3 days, etc. (yeah, that's the ticket).
Thought I was having a flashback to the 60's
Of course the best advice I ever heard on the subject was "Squat down, put your head between your knees & kiss your sweet [rear
end] goodbye."
Well, as I recall they were trying to give us the illusion of control so that we would not go all nihilistic or into a drunken
fatalistic stupor. I don't know if telling people, like little JBird, that the bombs might start dropping anytime in which case
you're just f@@@@d would have done any good.
One interpretation of the Cold War, that I found revealing, was that the two "opposing" militaries colluded to magnify the
threat so as to pump up their respective budgets. So both were essentially conning their own governments – and putting the whole
world at risk in the process.
Of course, another big factor, equally obvious at the time, was (and is) that world "leaders," elected or not, can't resist
the temptation to play chess with live pieces. They don't seem to care that people wind up dead, or that occasionally they put
the whole world in danger.
It's SIOP, not PSYOP. SIOP stands for Single Integrated Operating Plan, which was what the first nuclear war plan was called.
PSYOPS are Psychological Operations.
Having served in the first Cold War, it simply is beyond my comprehension that the Democrats restarted it all over again. Even
weirder are the neo-con proponents of a First Strike. If the USA wins, at least one or two major cities (if not all) will be destroyed.
New Zealand becomes the sequel to "On the Beach". We are in the same position as Germany in the 1930s except we know that the
world war will destroy us. Tell me, how in the hell, did a few thousand U.S. soldiers and contractors ended up in the middle of
Eastern Syria surrounded by Russians, the Syrian Arab Army and Shiite militias at risk of attack by Turkey?
Tell me, how in the hell, did a few thousand U.S. soldiers and contractors ended up in the middle of Eastern Syria surrounded
by Russians, the Syrian Arab Army and Shiite militias at risk of attack by Turkey?
Why they are needed to fight the evil-doers of course! Anything to protect our Freedom and the American Way. Now, ifyou keep
asking these inconvenient questions, then "they" might start asking if you support the terrorists.
It's like when my half blind aged mother, and her possibly weaponized cane, is scrutinized as a possible al-Qaeda terrorist
with a super hidden weapon, and I ask why it's 9/11 and the very bad people might hurt us.
Nuclear winter. How quaint. Soot and dust. Rapid cooling. Crop failures. Starvation. Billions -perhaps- dead.
But life, certainly, will find a way!
Not in my world. All-out thermonuclear war means 250 nuclear reactors melt down simultaneously and several hundred thousand
tons of loosely stored nuclear waste becomes aerosoled.
The resulting radiation blast burns the atmosphere off and the earth becomes a dead planet.
We can never look the thing straight in the eye. Take North Korea. We have been told, repeatedly, endlessly, that they have
20,000 artillery pieces trained on Seoul!
Again, how quaint. How SCARY! What we should be reading about, are the priority targets, the game changers:
"People should study the lunacy of Project Plowshare."
__
Yeah. In 1992 my wife was serving as the QA Mgr for the Nevada Test Site (NTS) nuke remediation project contractor. In 1993
a successful FOIA filing unearthed the Alaskan "Project Chariot." One of the brilliant Project Plowshare ideas was the potential
utility of nuke detonations to carve out deep water harbors (they now deny it), so they took a bunch of irradiated soil from NTS
and and spread it around on the tundra 130 miles N of the Arctic circle on the coast of the Chukchi Sea to "study potential environmental
impacts."
The nuke "dredging" idea went nowhere, so they just plowed the irradiated crap under the surface, where it remained secret
until the FOIA revelation decades later. DOE told my wife's company "go clean this shit up" (Eskimo tribes were freaking after
finding out), so off goes my wife and her crew to spend the summer and fall living in tents guarded by armed polar bear guards
(they had to first plow out a dirt & gravel runway, and flew everyone and all supplies in on STOL aircraft). They dug the test
bed area all up (near Cape Thompson), assayed samples in an onsite radlab, put some 30 tons of "contaminated" Arctic soil in large
sealed containers, barged it all down to Seattle, loaded it on trucks and drove it all back down to be buried at NTS.
Your tax dollars.
She looked so cute with her clipboard, and her orange vest, steel toed boots and hardhat.
As a teenager I read in a newspaper a proposal to use nuclear blasts to form a canal that would bring the sea to the middle
of Australia and form an inland sea from which water could be drawn. We already had nuclear weapon being tested here (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_tests_in_Australia
) so there was no appetite for ideas like this.
"... Last year, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime noted that while West Africa "has long been a transit zone for cocaine and heroin trafficking, it has now turned into a production zone for illicit substances such as amphetamines and precursors" and that drug use "is also a growing issue at the local level." Meanwhile, heroin trafficking has been on the rise in East Africa , along with personal use of the drug. ..."
"... In the spring of 2001, American experts concluded that a ban on opium-poppy cultivation by Afghanistan's Taliban government had wiped out the world's largest heroin-producing crop. Later that year, the U.S. military invaded and, since 2002, America has pumped $8.7 billion in counternarcotics funding into that country. A report issued late last month by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction detailed the results of anti-drug efforts during CENTCOM's 16-year-old war: "Afghanistan's total area under opium cultivation and opium production reached an all-time high in 2017," it reads in part. "Afghanistan remains the world's largest opium producer and exporter, producing an estimated 80% of the world's opium." ..."
"... While AFRICOM and, to a lesser extent, CENTCOM have made changes in how they track counternarcotics aid, both seemingly remain hooked on pouring money into efforts that have produced few successes. More effective use of spreadsheets won't solve the underlying problems of America's wars or cure an addiction to policies that continue to fail. ..."
More troubling than the findings in the IG's report or CENTCOM's apparent refusal to heed
its recommendations may be the actual trajectory of the drug trade in the two commands' areas
of responsibility: Africa and the Greater Middle East. Last year, the United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime
noted that while West Africa "has long been a transit zone for cocaine and heroin
trafficking, it has now turned into a production zone for illicit substances such as
amphetamines and precursors" and that drug use "is also a growing issue at the local level."
Meanwhile,
heroin trafficking has been on the
rise in
East Africa , along with personal
use of the drug.
Even the Pentagon's Africa Center for Strategic Studies is sounding an alarm. "Drug
trafficking is a major transnational threat in Africa that converges with other illicit
activities ranging from money laundering to human trafficking and terrorism," it
warned last November. "According to the 2017 U.N. World Drug Report, two-thirds of the
cocaine smuggled between South America and Europe passes through West Africa, specifically
Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Nigeria, and Togo. Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania
are among the countries that have seen the highest traffic in opiates passing from Pakistan and
Afghanistan to Western destinations." As badly as this may reflect on AFRICOM's efforts to
bolster the counter-drug-trafficking prowess of key allies like Kenya, Mali, and Nigeria, it
reflects even more dismally on CENTCOM, which oversees Washington's long-running war in
Afghanistan and its seemingly ceaseless
counternarcotics mission there.
In the spring of 2001, American experts concluded
that a ban on opium-poppy cultivation by Afghanistan's Taliban government had wiped out the
world's largest heroin-producing crop. Later that year, the U.S. military invaded and, since
2002, America has pumped
$8.7 billion in counternarcotics funding into that country. A report issued
late last month by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction detailed the
results of anti-drug efforts during CENTCOM's 16-year-old war: "Afghanistan's total area under
opium cultivation and opium production reached an all-time high in 2017," it reads in part.
"Afghanistan remains the world's largest opium producer and exporter, producing an estimated
80% of the world's opium."
In many ways, these outcomes mirror those of the larger counterterror efforts of which these
anti-drug campaigns are just a part. In 2001, for example, U.S. forces were fighting just two
enemy forces in Afghanistan: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Now, according to a recent
Pentagon report , they're battling more than 10 times that number. In Africa, an official
count of
five prime terror groups in 2012 has expanded, depending on the Pentagon source, to more
than
20 or even closer to
50 .
Correlation doesn't equal causation, but given the outcomes of significant counternarcotics
assistance from Africa Command and Central Command -- including some $500 million over just
three recent years -- there's little evidence to suggest that better record-keeping can solve
the problems plaguing the military's anti-drug efforts in the greater Middle East or Africa.
While AFRICOM and, to a lesser extent, CENTCOM have made changes in how they track
counternarcotics aid, both seemingly remain hooked on pouring money into efforts that have
produced few successes. More effective use of spreadsheets won't solve the underlying problems
of America's wars or cure an addiction to policies that continue to fail.
160 billion plus 160 billion are pretty serious money. money that were stolen from ordinary Americans.
PRESIDENT EISENHOWER: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a
theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money
alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern
heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000
population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter
plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000
people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at
all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. (cited from
The Age of Lunacy The Doomsday Machine naked
capitalism )
Notable quotes:
"... The military talks about needing all these scores of billions to "rebuild." And, sure, there are ships that need to be refitted, planes in need of repairs, equipment that needs to be restocked, and veterans who need to be cared for. But a massive increase in military and war spending, perhaps as high as $320 billion over two years, is a recipe for excessive waste and even more disastrous military adventurism. ..."
"... Perhaps you've heard of the expression, "Spending money like drunken sailors on shore leave." Our military has been drunk with money since 9/11. Is it really wise to give those "sailors" an enormous boost in the loose change they're carrying, trusting them to spend it wisely? ..."
The new Congressional budget boosts military spending in a
big way . Last night's PBS
News report documented how military spending is projected to increase by $160 billion over
two years, but that doesn't include "overseas contingency funding" for wars, which is another
$160 billion over two years. Meanwhile, spending for the opioid crisis, which is killing
roughly 60,000 Americans a year (more Americans than were killed in the Vietnam War), is set at
a paltry $6 billion ($25 billion was requested).
One thing is certain: Ike was right about the undue
influence of the military-industrial-Congressional complex.
The military talks about needing all these scores of billions to "rebuild." And, sure, there
are ships that need to be refitted, planes in need of repairs, equipment that needs to be
restocked, and veterans who need to be cared for. But a massive increase in military and war
spending, perhaps as high as $320 billion over two years, is a recipe for excessive waste and
even more disastrous military adventurism.
Even if you're a supporter of big military budgets, this massive boost in military spending
is bad news. Why? It doesn't force the military to think . To set priorities. To define limits.
To be creative.
Perhaps you've heard of the expression, "Spending money like drunken sailors on shore
leave." Our military has been drunk with money since 9/11. Is it really wise to give those
"sailors" an enormous boost in the loose change they're carrying, trusting them to spend it
wisely?
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen
years at military and civilian schools and blogs at Bracing Views . He can be reached at [email protected] . Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author's permission.
"... Hardware and software vendors that are complicit -- most of which are American, British or Israeli -- give the CIA the opportunity to achieve informational full-spectrum dominance, relegating privacy to extinction. Such a convergence of power, money and technology entails major conflicts of interest, as can be seen in the case of Amazon AWS (Amazon's Cloud Service), cloud provider for the CIA , whose owner, Jeff Bezos, is also the owner of The Washington Post ..."
"... In general, when the 16 US spy agencies blamed Russia for the hacking of the elections, they were never specific in terms of forensic evidence. Simply put, the media, spies and politicians created false accusations based on the fact that Moscow, together with RT ..."
"... Now what is revealed through Wikileaks' publications in Vault 7 is the ability of a subsection of the CIA, known as Umbrage , to use malware, viruses, trojans and other cyber tools for their own geopolitical purposes. The CIA's Umbrage collects, analyzes and then employs software created variously from foreign security agencies, cyber mafia, private companies, and hackers in general. ..."
"... These revelations are yet more reason why countries targeted by Washington, like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, should get rid of European and American products and invest in reducing technological dependence on American products in particular. ..."
"... This article first appeared on Strategic-Culture.org and was authored by Federico Pieraccini. ..."
New revelations from Wikileaks' 'Vault 7' leak shed a disturbing light on the safeguarding of privacy. Something already known
and largely suspected has now become documented by Wikileaks. It seems evident that the CIA is now a state within a state, an entity
out of control that has even arrived at the point of creating its own hacking network in order to avoid the scrutiny of the NSA and
other agencies.
Reading the revelations contained in the documents
released by WikiLeaks and adding them to those already presented in recent years by Snowden, it now seems evident that the
technological aspect regarding espionage is a specialty in which the CIA, as far as we know, excels. Hardware and software vendors
that are complicit -- most of which are American, British or Israeli -- give the CIA the opportunity to achieve informational full-spectrum
dominance, relegating privacy to extinction. Such a convergence of power, money and technology entails major conflicts of interest,
as can be seen in the case of Amazon AWS (Amazon's Cloud Service),
cloud provider for the
CIA , whose owner, Jeff Bezos, is also the owner of The Washington Post . It is a clear overlap of private interests
that conflicts with the theoretical need to declare uncomfortable truths without the need to consider orders numbering in the millions
of dollars from clients like the CIA.
While it is just one example, there are thousands more out there. The perverse interplay between media, spy agencies and politicians
has compromised the very meaning of the much vaunted democracy of the land of the Stars and Stripes. The constant scandals that are
beamed onto our screens now serve the sole purpose of advancing the deep interest of the Washington establishment. In geopolitical
terms, it is now more than obvious that the deep state has committed all available means toward sabotaging any dialogue and détente
between the United States and Russia. In terms of news, the Wikileaks revelations shed light on the methods used by US intelligence
agencies like the CIA to place blame on the Kremlin, or networks associated with it, for the hacking that occurred during the American
elections.
Perhaps this is too generous a depiction of matters, given that the general public has yet to see
any evidence of the hacking of the DNC servers. In addition to this, we know that the origin of Podesta's email revelations stem
from the
loss of a smartphone and the low
data-security measures
employed by the chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. In general, when the 16 US spy agencies blamed Russia for
the hacking of the elections, they were never specific in terms of forensic evidence. Simply put, the media, spies and politicians
created false accusations based on the fact that Moscow, together with
RT and other media (not directly
linked to the Kremlin), finally enjoy a major presence in the mainstream media. The biggest problem for the Washington establishment
lies in the revelation of news that is counterproductive to the interests of the deep state. RT, Sputnik, this site and many others
have diligently covered and reported to the general public every development concerning the Podesta revelations or the hacking of
the DNC.
Now what is revealed through Wikileaks' publications in Vault 7 is the ability of a subsection of the CIA, known as
Umbrage , to use malware, viruses, trojans and
other cyber tools for their own geopolitical purposes. The CIA's Umbrage collects, analyzes and then employs software created variously
from foreign security agencies, cyber mafia, private companies, and hackers in general. These revelations become particularly
relevant when we consider the consequences of these actions. The main example can be seen in the hacking of the DNC. For now, what
we know is that the hacking – if it ever occurred – is of Russian origin. This does not mean at all that the Kremlin directed it.
It could actually be very much the opposite, its responsibility falling into the category of a cyber false-flag. One thing is for
sure: all 16 US intelligence agencies are of the view that "the Russians did it". That said, the methods used to hack vulnerabilities
cannot be revealed, so as to limit the spread of easily reusable exploits on systems, such as the one that hosted the DNC server.
It is a great excuse for avoiding the revelation of any evidence at all.
So, with little information available, independent citizens are left with very little information on which to reliably form an
opinion on what happened. There is no evidence, and no evidence will be provided to the media. For politicians and so-called mainstream
journalists, this is an acceptable state of affairs. What we are left with instead is blind faith in the 16 spy agencies. The problem
for them is that what WikiLeaks revealed with Vault 7 exposes a scenario that looks more likely than not: a cyber false-flag carried
out by the Central Intelligence Agency using engineered malware and viruses made in Russia and hypothetically linking them back to
hacking networks in Russia. In all likelihood, it looks like the Democrats' server was hacked by the CIA with the clear objective
of leaving Russian fingerprints and obvious traces to be picked up by other US agencies.
In this way, it becomes easier to explain the unique views of all 16 spy agencies. Thus, it is far more likely that the CIA intentionally
left fake Russian fingerprints all over the DNC server, thereby misleading other intelligence agencies in promoting the narrative
that Russia hacked the DNC server. Of course the objective was to create a false narrative that could immediately be picked up by
the media, creating even more hysteria surrounding any rapprochement with Russia.
Diversification of computer systems.
The revelations contained in the Wikileaks vault 7 (
less than 1 % of the total data in Wikileaks'
possession has been released to date) have caused a stir, especially by exposing the astonishing complicity between hardware and
software manufacturers, often intentionally creating backdoors in their products to allow access by the CIA and NSA. In today's digital
environment, all essential services rely on computer technology and connectivity. These revelations are yet more reason why countries
targeted by Washington, like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, should get rid of European and American products and invest in
reducing technological dependence on American products in particular.
The People's Republic has
already started down this track, with the replacement of many network devices with local vendors like Huawei in order to avoid
the type of interference revealed by Snowden.
Russia has been doing the same in terms of software, even laying the groundwork to launch of
its own operating system, abandoning American
and European systems. In North Korea, this idea was already put
into practice years ago and is an excellent tool for deterrence for external interference. In more than one computer security
conference, US experts have praised the capabilities of the DPRK to
isolate its Internet network from the rest of the world, allowing them to have strong safety mechanisms. Often, the only access
route to the DPRK systems are through the People's Republic of China, not the easiest way for the CIA or NSA to infiltrate a protected
computer network.
An important aspect of the world in which we live today involves information security, something all nations have to deal with.
At the moment, we still live in a world in which the realization of the danger and effect of hacking attacks are not apparent to
many. On the other hand, militarily speaking, the diversification and rationalization of critical equipment in terms of networks
and operability (smartphones, laptops, etc) has already produced
strong growth in non-American and European manufacturers, with the aim of making their systems more secure.
This strengthening of technology also produces deleterious consequences, such as the need for intelligence agencies to be able
to
prevent the spread of data encryption so as to always enjoy access to any desired information. The birth of the Tor protocol,
the deployment of Bitcoin, and apps that are more and more encrypted (although the WikiLeaks documents have shown that the collection
of information takes place on the device b
efore the information is encrypted ) are all responses to an exponential increase in the invasion of privacy by federal or American
government entities.
We live in a world that has an enormous dependence on the Internet and computer technology. The CIA over the years has focused
on the ability to make sure vulnerable systems are exploited as well as seeking out major security flaws in consumer products without
disclosing this to vendors, thereby taking advantage of these security gaps and leaving all consumers with a potential lack of security.
Slowly, thanks to the work and courage of people like Snowden and Assange, the world is beginning to understand how important it
is to keep personal data under control and prevent access to it by third parties, especially if they are state actors. In the case
of national security, the issue is expanded exponentially by the need to protect key and vital infrastructure, considering how many
critical services operate via the Internet and rely on computing devices.
The wars of the future will have a strong technological basis, and it is no coincidence that many armed forces, primarily the
Russian and Chinese, have opted in recent years to training troops, and conducting operations, not completely relying on connectivity.
No one can deny that in the event of a large-scale conflict, connectivity is far from guaranteed. One of the major goals of competing
nations is to penetrate the military security systems of rival nations and be able to
disarm the internal networks that operates major systems
of defense and attack.
The Wikileaks revelations are yet another confirmation of how important it is to break the technological unipolar moment, if it
may be dubbed this way, especially for nations targeted by the United States. Currently Washington dictates the technological capacities
of the private and government sectors of Europe and America, steering their development, timing and methods to suit its own interests.
It represents a clear disadvantage that the PRC and its allies will inevitably have to redress in the near future in order to achieve
full security for its vital infrastructure.
This article first appeared on Strategic-Culture.org and was authored
by Federico Pieraccini.
"... The new weapons for Ukraine coincides with an increase in US troop deployments in the Baltic region on Russia's border, prompting Russia to accuse the United States of violating the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, and position nuclear-capable ballistic missiles in response. ..."
One consequence of the Trump-Russia fixation is the overshadowing of the far-right agenda
that Trump and his Republican allies are carrying out, including, inexorably, policies that
undermine the narrative of Trump-Russian collusion. But as that narrative is also used as a
cudgel against Trump's presidency, it is worth asking if some of those policies are now even a
direct result.
In December, Trump
authorized the sale of new weapons to Ukraine for its fight against Russian-backed
separatists. President Obama had rejected the arms shipments, "fearing that it would only
escalate the bloodshed," as The New York Times noted in 2015. Trump had also opposed such a move during the
campaign, but was swayed by lobbying from
advisers and congressional neoconservatives
. "Overall,"
observed Andrew Weiss , a Russia expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, "I see this discussion [on Trump-Russia] as fitting within a broader effort by people
within the national security bureaucracy to box Trump in on Ukraine."
The new weapons for Ukraine coincides with an increase in US troop deployments in the
Baltic region on Russia's border, prompting Russia to accuse the United States of violating the
1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, and position nuclear-capable ballistic missiles in
response.
Fletcher Prouty's suspicions re Kennedy's assassination were later confirmed by Chauncey
Holt before he died (there are several versions online). His recorded testimony proves the
CIA/MAFIA connection(without knowing who gave the order). Historically the 9/11 Commission
seems to mirror the same CIA infiltration as the Warren Commission did.
More on topic the MSM deification of Mueller reminds me much of their similar
glorification of J Edgar Hoover at that time.
After 16 years of war in Afghanistan, experts have stopped asking what victory looks like
and are beginning to consider the spectrum of possible defeats.
All options involve acknowledging the war as failed, American aims as largely unachievable
and Afghanistan's future as only partly salvageable. Their advocates see glimmers of hope
barely worth the stomach-turning trade-offs and slim odds of success.
"I don't think there is any serious analyst of the situation in Afghanistan who believes
that the war is winnable," Laurel Miller, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, said
in a
podcast last summer, after leaving her State Department stint as acting special
representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This may be why, even after thousands have died and over $100 billion has been spent, even
after the past two weeks of shocking bloodshed in
Kabul , few expect the United States to try anything other than the status
quo.
It is a strategy, as Ms. Miller described it, to "prevent the defeat of the Afghan
government and prevent military victory by the Taliban" for as long as possible.
Though far from the most promising option, it is the least humiliating. But sooner or later,
the United States and Afghanistan will find themselves facing one of Afghanistan's endgames --
whether by choice or not.
From comments: We are the new Roman Empire but far less honest about it. This is why we our military is grossly underfunded. It isn't about defense. It is about domination.
Notable quotes:
"... Those who great assurance and aplomb stated that McMaster and Mattis et al would serve as "the adults in the room" are fools. But then we knew that already, didn't we? Because those who said things like that about Mattis and McMaster were in many cases the same people who pushed us into stupid wars in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. ..."
"... This is exactly how you find out if Trump is a dog and pony show ..."
"... Looks like Trump's foreign policy is the same as Hillary Clinton's would have been, endless war. ..."
"... I fear that we have developed a mentality where we fully expect to be able to exert military force in countries like Syria as if we are an auxiliary police force and expect the locals to behave. The day they actually shoot down a U.S. aircraft will be so shocking that the Hawks in this country will demand that we have to respond to an act of aggression and anyone who says otherwise will be dismissed as a traitor. We are the new Roman Empire but far less honest about it. This is why we our military is grossly underfunded. It isn't about defense. It is about domination. ..."
Secretary Mattis
claims not to understand why pro-regime forces advanced on U.S.-backed rebels in eastern Syria:
In Washington, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis described the situation as "perplexing," and said he had "no idea why they would
attack" the base. Both Russian and Syrian-aligned forces on the ground had long known the U.S. and allied forces were there, he
said.
Perhaps Mattis is only feigning confusion here, but it isn't encouraging that the head of our Defense Department claims not to
know why forces aligned with the Syrian government might want to attack a base where the enemies of that government are located.
They attacked the base because they "had long known the U.S. and allied forces were there." They oppose the presence of
"U.S. and allied forces" there. This should be clear by now. If our top leaders don't know something as basic as this about the situation
they are putting our soldiers in, that is deeply troubling. Mattis also "denied that the attack and the U.S. response constituted
American engagement in the Syrian civil war," but this is preposterous. By providing support to armed groups inside Syria and deploying
our own forces alongside them, the U.S. is taking sides in the Syrian civil war whether our leaders want to acknowledge that involvement
or not. By attacking pro-regime forces and killing dozens of their men, the U.S. has committed acts of war against another government
on its own soil without Congressional or U.N. authorization.
As the threat of ISIS recedes, it becomes increasingly difficult use that threat to justify a U.S. military presence inside Syria.
The pretense that an open-ended mission in Syria is solely aimed at opposing ISIS is not credible when U.S. officials explicitly
state that an indefinite U.S. military presence is also intended to deny the Syrian government and its allies control over parts
of Syria. The Syrian government and its allies did not try to stop U.S. intervention in Syria when it began in 2014, but they have
never agreed to our military presence. As it happens, the Syrian government and its allies are correct when they describe our military
presence there as illegal. Secretary Mattis isn't able to counter those claims because there is absolutely no legal justification
for having our troops in Syria and there never has been.
The smart thing to do now is to remove U.S. forces from Syria as soon as possible to ensure that there are no further clashes
like this. If the Trump administration doesn't do that, it will be inexorably pulled deeper into conflicts that serve no American
interest.
I mean, it's becoming really ludicrous isn't it? Mattis what is he even saying ? He sounds like a completely clueless buffoon.
Those who great assurance and aplomb stated that McMaster and Mattis et al would serve as "the adults in the room" are fools.
But then we knew that already, didn't we? Because those who said things like that about Mattis and McMaster were in many cases
the same people who pushed us into stupid wars in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen.
I should have taken a picture: there was a Ford plant outside Damascus in Assad's Syria as late as 2008.
One time, coming out of Zahle and heading back to Damascus, there was a range of drivers available to cross the border. Of
course, I chose the guy with the musclebound 70s Chevy. He floored it on the Syrian plain for the better part of an hour, relishing
his love for American machinery in front of me, knowing how to drive it like every farm boy in the rural US Midwest.
"U.S. counter-attack in Syria included Air Force AC-130 gunships, F-15s, F-22s, Army Apache helicopter gunships and Marine Corps
artillery killing 100 Russian and Assad-backed fighters in 3-hour battle beginning around midnight last night."
I question the veracity of the Pentagon's account but in any case what happens when the Syrian army fights back against U.S. forces
in one of these 'unexpected' encounters?
I fear that we have developed a mentality where we fully expect to be able to exert military force in countries like Syria
as if we are an auxiliary police force and expect the locals to behave. The day they actually shoot down a U.S. aircraft will
be so shocking that the Hawks in this country will demand that we have to respond to an act of aggression and anyone
who says otherwise will be dismissed as a traitor. We are the new Roman Empire but far less honest about it. This is why we our
military is grossly underfunded. It isn't about defense. It is about domination.
Throughout Donald Trump's campaign and relentlessly chaotic presidency, the single constant presence at his side, outside of his
family, has been the 29-year-old former Ralph Lauren model and White House communications director Hope Hicks.
While aides and advisers fall in and out of favor, Hicks has remained Trump's Oval Office gatekeeper, companion and sounding board,
offering consistent loyalty.
But now Hicks has herself been cast into two plotlines currently playing out in the presidential daytime reality-soap.
In one, Hicks features as a likely target in the special counsel Robert Mueller's effort to acquire cooperating witnesses in the
investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Hicks has
reportedly
been interviewed by Mueller's investigators.
Publicly, Trump has offered his support for Hicks, saying: "Hope is absolutely fantastic. She was with the campaign from the beginning,
and I could not ask for anything more. Hope is smart, very talented and respected by all."
But in private, the president is believed to have issued rare criticism of a woman who by some estimates is the most influential
figure in the administration after Trump himself.
At issue is whether Hicks, who also served as communications director during the campaign, relaxed her judgment owing to her relationship
with Porter.
White House officials have said Hicks knew that an ex-girlfriend of Porter's had informed aides that both of Porter's ex-wives
had said he was violent. Hicks continued to see him and did not tell the president. Porter denies the allegations against him.
If the unfolding episode calls into question the maturity of Hicks' judgement, she clearly is invaluable as a personal assistant.
In his campaign memoir, Let Trump Be Trump, Corey Lewandowski, the early campaign strategist – with whom, coincidentally, Hicks also
had an affair – described her steaming Trump's suit while he is wearing it.
"She's really quite talented and able," Christopher Ruddy, a close friend of the president and chief executive of the conservative
website Newsmax,
told the Washington Post .
But her professional experience, especially where is comes to matters that carry potentially legal consequences, is limited. Hicks
came to the Trumps through a PR firm that represented the Trump Organization. The family later hired her away to work exclusively
for them, furnishing her with responsibilities that included working on Ivanka Trump's fashion line.
A GQ magazine profile in June
2016 described her: "She is a hugger and a people pleaser, with long brown hair and green eyes, a young woman of distinctly all-American
flavor – the sort that inspires Tom Petty songs, not riots."
But her looks and fashion background can cause people to underestimate her. She has a background in PR and is a graduate of Dallas'
Southern Methodist University.
"... The post WW2 promotion process in the armed forces has produced a group at the top with a mentality that typically thinks rigorously but not imaginatively or creatively. ..."
"... These men got to their present ranks and positions by being conformist group thinkers who do not stray outside the "box" of their guidance from on high. They actually have scheduled conference calls among themselves to make sure everyone is "on board." ..."
"... If asked at the top, where military command and political interaction intersect, what policy should be they always ask for more money and to be allowed to pursue outcomes that they can understand as victory and self fulfilling with regard to their collective self image as warrior chieftains. ..."
"... In Trump's time his essential disinterest in foreign policy has led to a massive delegation of authority to Mattis and the leadership of the empire's forces. Their reaction to that is to look at their dimwitted guidance from on high (defeat IS, depose Assad and the SAG, triumph in Afghanistan) and to seek to impose their considerable available force to seek accomplishment as they see fit of this guidance in the absence of the kind of restrictions that Obama placed on them. ..."
"... Like the brass, I, too, am a graduate of all those service schools that attend success from the Basic Course to the Army War College. I will tell you again that the people at the top are not good at "the vision thing." They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers ..."
"... Academia reinforces the groupthink. The mavericks are shunned or ostracized. The only ones I have seen with some degree of going against the grain are technology entrepreneurs. ..."
"... "They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers." I have found this to be the case with 80 to 90% of most professions. A good memory and able to perform meticulously what they have been taught, but little thinking outside that narrow box. Often annoying, but very dangerous in this case. ..."
"... Since Afghanistan and the brass were mentioned in the editorial statement, here is an immodest question -- Where the brass have been while the opium production has been risen dramatically in Afghanistan under the US occupation? "Heroin Addiction in America Spearheaded by the US-led War on Afghanistan" by Paul Craig Roberts: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/06/heroin-addiction-america-spearheaded-us-led-war-afghanistan/ ..."
"... A simple Q: What has been the role of the CENTCOM re the racket? Who has arranged the protection for the opium production and for drug dealers? Roberts suggests that the production of opium in Afghanistan "finances the black operations of the CIA and Western intelligence agencies." -- All while Awan brothers, Alperovitch and such tinker with the US national security? ..."
"... God help the poor people of Syria. ..."
"... thanks pat... it seems like the usa has had a steady group of leaders that have no interest in the world outside of the usa, or only in so far as they can exploit it for their own interest... maybe that sums up the foreign policy of the usa at this point... you say trump is disinterested.. so all the blather from trump about 'why are we even in syria?', or 'why can't we be friends with the russia?' is just smoke up everyone's ass... ..."
"... Predictably there is always someone who says that this group is not different from all others. Unfortunately the military function demands more than the level of mediocrity found in most groups ..."
"... A lot of technology entrepreneurs--especially those active today--are stuck in their own groupthink, inflated by their sense that they are born for greatness and can do no wrong. ..."
"... The kind of grand schemes that the top people at Google, Uber, and Facebook think up to remake the universe in their own idea of "good society" are frightening. That they are cleverer (but not necessarily wiser) than the academics, borgists, or generals, I think, makes them even more dangerous. ..."
"... They [the generals] seem to have deliberately completely ignored the issues and policy positions Trump ran on as President. It isn't a case of ignorance but of wilful disregard. ..."
"... So true and as others commented this is a sad feature of the human race and all human organizations. Herd mentality ties into social learning ..."
"... Our massive cultural heritages are learned by observing and taken in as a whole. This process works within organizations as well. ..."
"... I suspect a small percentage of the human race functions differently than the majority and retains creative thinking and openness along with more emphasis on cognitive thinking than social learning but generally they always face a battle when working to change the group "consensus", i.e. Fulton's folly, scepticism on whether man would ever fly, etc. ..."
"... This is an interesting discussion. The top in organisations (civil and military) are increasingly technocrats and thinking like systems managers. They are unable to innovate because they lack the ability to think out of the box. Usually there is a leader who depends on specialists. Others (including laymen) are often excluding from the decision-making-proces. John Ralston Saul's Voltaires Bastards describes this very well. ..."
"... Because of natural selection (conformist people tend to choose similar people who resemble their own values and ways-of-thinking) organizations have a tendency to become homogeneous (especially the higher management/ranks). ..."
"... In combination with the "dumbing" of people (also of people who have a so-called good education (as described in Richard Sale's Sterile Chit-Chat ) this is a disastrous mix. ..."
"... That's true not only of the US military but of US elites in general across all of the spectra. And because that reality is at odds with the group-think of those within the various elements that make up the spectra it doesn't a hearing. Anyone who tries to bring it up risks being ejected from the group. ..."
"... "The United States spent at least $12 billion in Syria-related military and civilian expenses in the four years from 2014 through 2017, according to the former U.S. ambassador to the country. This $12 billion is in addition to the billions more spent to pursue regime change in Syria in the previous three years, after war broke out in 2011." https://goo.gl/8pj5cD ..."
"... "They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers." I've often pondered that concept. Notice how many of radical extremist leaders were doctors, engineers and such? Narrow and deep. ..."
"... Long ago when I was a professor, I advised my students that "the law is like a pencil sharpener, it sharpens the mind by narrowing it." I tried to encourage them to "think backwards". ..."
"... Col, I think it might help people to think of "the Borg" - as you have defined & applied it - in a broader context. It struck me particularly as you ID'd the launching of our modern military group-think / careerism behavior coming from the watershed of industrialized scale & processes that came out of WWII. ..."
"... We note parallel themes in all significant sectors of our civilization. The ever-expanding security state, the many men in Gray Flannel Suits that inhabit corporate culture, Finance & Banking & Big Health scaling ever larger - all processes aimed to slice the salami thinner & quicker, to the point where meat is moot ... and so it goes. ..."
"... I just finished reading Command & Control (about nuclear weapons policy, systems design & accidents). I am amazed we've made it this far. ..."
The Borgist foreign policy of the administration has little to do with the generals. To comprehend the generals one must understand their collective mentality and the process that raised them on high as a collective
of their own. The post WW2 promotion process in the armed forces has produced a group at the top with a mentality that typically
thinks rigorously but not imaginatively or creatively.
These men got to their present ranks and positions by being conformist group thinkers who do not stray outside the "box" of
their guidance from on high. They actually have scheduled conference calls among themselves to make sure everyone is "on board."
If asked at the top, where military command and political interaction intersect, what policy should be they always ask for
more money and to be allowed to pursue outcomes that they can understand as victory and self fulfilling with regard to their collective
self image as warrior chieftains.
In Obama's time they were asked what policy should be in Afghanistan and persuaded him to reinforce their dreams in Afghanistan
no matter how unlikely it always was that a unified Western oriented nation could be made out of a collection of disparate mutually
alien peoples.
In Trump's time his essential disinterest in foreign policy has led to a massive delegation of authority to Mattis and the
leadership of the empire's forces. Their reaction to that is to look at their dimwitted guidance from on high (defeat IS, depose
Assad and the SAG, triumph in Afghanistan) and to seek to impose their considerable available force to seek accomplishment as they
see fit of this guidance in the absence of the kind of restrictions that Obama placed on them.
Like the brass, I, too, am a graduate of all those service schools that attend success from the Basic Course to the Army War
College. I will tell you again that the people at the top are not good at "the vision thing." They are not stupid at all but they
are a collective of narrow thinkers. pl
IMO, this conformism pervades all institutions. I saw when I worked in banking and finance many moons ago how moving up the
ranks in any large organization meant you didn't rock the boat and you conformed to the prevailing groupthink. Even nutty ideas
became respectable because they were expedient.
Academia reinforces the groupthink. The mavericks are shunned or ostracized. The only ones I have seen with some degree of
going against the grain are technology entrepreneurs.
You remind me of an old rumination by Thomas Ricks:
Take the example of General George Casey. According to David Cloud and Greg Jaffe's book Four Stars, General Casey, upon learning
of his assignment to command U.S. forces in Iraq, received a book from the Army Chief of Staff. The book Counterinsurgency Lessons
Learned from Malaya and Vietnam was the first book he ever read about guerilla warfare." This is a damning indictment of the degree
of mental preparation for combat by a general. The Army's reward for such lack of preparation: two more four star assignments.
"They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers."
I have found this to be the case with 80 to 90% of most professions. A good memory and able to perform meticulously what they
have been taught, but little thinking outside that narrow box. Often annoying, but very dangerous in this case.
Since Afghanistan and the brass were mentioned in the editorial statement, here is an immodest question -- Where the brass have
been while the opium production has been risen dramatically in Afghanistan under the US occupation? "Heroin Addiction in America
Spearheaded by the US-led War on Afghanistan" by Paul Craig Roberts:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/06/heroin-addiction-america-spearheaded-us-led-war-afghanistan/
" in 2000-2001
the Taliban government –with the support of the United Nations (UNODC) – implemented a successful ban on poppy cultivation. Opium
production which is used to produce grade 4 heroin and its derivatives declined by more than 90 per cent in 2001. The production
of opium in 2001 was of the order of a meager 185 tons. It is worth noting that the UNODC congratulated the Taliban Government
for its successful opium eradication program. The Taliban government had contributed to literally destabilizing the multibillion
dollar Worldwide trade in heroin.
In 2017, the production of opium in Afghanistan under US military occupation reached 9000 metric tons. The production of opium
in Afghanistan registered a 49 fold increase since Washington's invasion. Afghanistan under US military occupation produces approximately
90% of the World's illegal supply of opium which is used to produce heroin. Who owns the airplanes and ships that transport heroin
from Afghanistan to the US? Who gets the profits?"
---A simple Q: What has been the role of the CENTCOM re the racket? Who has arranged the protection for the opium production
and for drug dealers? Roberts suggests that the production of opium in Afghanistan "finances the black operations of the CIA and
Western intelligence agencies." -- All while Awan brothers, Alperovitch and such tinker with the US national security?
There needs to be a 're-education' of the top, all of them need to be required to attend Green Beret think-school, in other
words they need to be forced to think outside the box, and to to think on their feet. They need to understand fluid situations
where things change at the drop of a hat, be able to dance the two-step and waltz at the same time. In other words they need to
be able to walk and chew gum and not trip over their shoe-laces.
By no means are they stupid, but you hit the nail on the head when you said 'narrow thinkers'. Their collective hive mentality
that has developed is not a good thing.
thanks pat... it seems like the usa has had a steady group of leaders that have no interest in the world outside of the usa, or
only in so far as they can exploit it for their own interest... maybe that sums up the foreign policy of the usa at this point...
you say trump is disinterested.. so all the blather from trump about 'why are we even in syria?', or 'why can't we be friends
with the russia?' is just smoke up everyone's ass...
i like what you said here "conformist group thinkers who do not stray outside the "box" of their guidance from on high. They
actually have scheduled conference calls among themselves to make sure everyone is "on board." - that strikes me as very true
- conformist group thinkers... the world needs less of these types and more actual leaders who have a vision for something out
of the box and not always on board... i thought for a while trump might fill this bill, but no such luck by the looks of it now..
As a young person in eighth grade, I learned about the "domino theory" in regard to attempts to slow the spread of communism.
Then my generation was, in a sense, fractured around the raging battles for and against our involvement in Vietnam.
I won't express my own opinion on that. But I mention it because it seems to be a type of "vision thing."
So, now I ask, what would be your vision for the Syrian situation?
Westmoreland certainly, Macarthur certainly not. This all started with the "industrialization" of the armed forces in WW2.
we never recovered the sense of profession as opposed to occupation after the massive expansion and retention of so many placeholders.
a whole new race of Walmart manager arose and persists. pl
The idea of the Domino Theory came from academia, not the generals of that time. They resisted the idea of a war in east Asia
until simply ordered into it by LBJ. After that their instinct for acting according to guidance kicked in and they became committed
to the task. Syria? Do you think I should write you an essay on that? SST has a large archive and a search machine. pl
I am talking about flag officers at present, not those beneath them from the mass of whom they emerge. There are exceptions.
Martin Dempsey may have been one such. The system creates such people at the top. pl
Your usual animosity for non-left wing authority is showing. A commander like the CENTCOM theater commander (look it up) operates
within guidance from Washington, broad guidance. Normally this is the president's guidance as developed in the NSC process. Some
presidents like Obama and LBJ intervene selectively and directly in the execution of that guidance. Obama had a "kill list" of
jihadis suggested by the IC and condemned by him to die in the GWOT. He approved individual missions against them. LBJ picked
individual air targets in NVN. Commanders in the field do not like that . They think that freedom of action within their guidance
should be accorded them. This CinC has not been interested thus far in the details and have given the whole military chain of
command wide discretion to carry out their guidance. pl
"I am not sure that I understand what makes a Borgist different from a military conformist." The Borg and the military leaders
are not of the same tribe. they are two different collectives who in the main dislike and distrust each other. pl
Anna. Their guidance does not include a high priority for eradicating the opium trade. Their guidance has to do with defeating
the jihadis and building up the central government. pl
Predictably there is always someone who says that this group is not different from all others. Unfortunately the military function
demands more than the level of mediocrity found in most groups. pl
Trump would like to better relations with Russia but that is pretty much the limit of his attention to foreign affairs
at any level more sophisticated than expecting deference. He is firmly focused on the economy and base solidifying issues like
immigration. pl
The medical profession comes to mind. GP's and specialists. Many of those working at the leading edge of research seem much wider
thinking and are not locked into the small box of what they have been taught.
Combat Applications Group and SEALS don't even begin to compare, they're not in the same league as 'real deal' GBs. The GBs are
thinkers as well as doers, whereas Combat Applications Group and SEALs all they know is breach and clear, breach and clear.
There is more to life than breach and clear. Having worked with all in one manner or another, I'll take GBs any day hands down. It makes a difference when the brain is
engaged instead of just the heel.
A lot of technology entrepreneurs--especially those active today--are stuck in their own groupthink, inflated by their sense that
they are born for greatness and can do no wrong.
The kind of grand schemes that the top people at Google, Uber, and Facebook think
up to remake the universe in their own idea of "good society" are frightening. That they are cleverer (but not necessarily wiser)
than the academics, borgists, or generals, I think, makes them even more dangerous.
They are indeed "narrow thinkers", but I think the problem runs deeper. They seem to be stuck in the rut of a past era. When
the US was indeed the paramount military power on the globe, and the US military reigned supreme. They can't seem to accept the
reality of the world as it is now.
Of course, these policies ensure that they continue to be well-funded, even if the US is bankrupting itself in the process.
They [the generals] seem to have deliberately completely ignored the issues and policy positions Trump ran on as President. It isn't a case of
ignorance but of wilful disregard.
I've been reading this blog for some time. My question was facetious and written with the understanding of your statement about
the generals not having a good grasp of "the vision thing" on their own.
So true and as others commented this is a sad feature of the human race and all human organizations. Herd mentality ties into
social learning. Chimps are on average more creative and have better short term memory than humans. We gave up some short term
memory in order to be able to learn quickly by mimicking. If shown how to open a puzzle box but also shown unnecessary extra steps
a chimp will ignore the empty steps and open the box with only the required steps. A human will copy what they saw exactly performing
the extra steps as if they have some unknown value to the process. Our massive cultural heritages are learned by observing and
taken in as a whole. This process works within organizations as well.
I suspect a small percentage of the human race functions differently than the majority and retains creative thinking and openness
along with more emphasis on cognitive thinking than social learning but generally they always face a battle when working to change
the group "consensus", i.e. Fulton's folly, scepticism on whether man would ever fly, etc.
One nice feature of the internet allows creative thinkers to connect and watch the idiocy of the world unfold around us.
"A natural desire to be part of the 'in crowd' could damage our ability to make the right decisions, a new study has shown."
The military by definition is a rigid hierarchical structure.
It could not function as a collection of individuals.
This society can only breed conforming narrow leaders as an "individual" would leave or be forced out.
That part of our brain responsible for the desire to be part of the 'in crowd' may affect our decision-making process, but it
is also the reason we keep chimps in zoos and not the other way around. Or, to put it another way; if chimps had invented Facebook,
I might consider them more creative than us.
This is an interesting discussion. The top in organisations (civil and military) are increasingly technocrats and thinking like systems managers. They are unable
to innovate because they lack the ability to think out of the box.
Usually there is a leader who depends on specialists. Others (including laymen) are often excluding from the decision-making-proces.
John Ralston Saul's Voltaires Bastards
describes this very well.
Because of natural selection (conformist people tend to choose similar people who resemble their own values and ways-of-thinking)
organizations have a tendency to become homogeneous (especially the higher management/ranks).
In combination with the "dumbing" of people (also of people who have a so-called good education (as described in Richard Sale's
Sterile Chit-Chat ) this is a disastrous
mix.
Homogeneity is the main culprit. A specialists tends to try to solve problems with the same knowledge-set that created these.
Not all (parts of) organizations and people suffer this fate. Innovations are usually done by laymen and not by specialists.
The organizations are often heterogeneous and the people a-typical and/or eccentric.
(mainly the analytical parts of ) intelligence organizations and investment banks are like that if they are worth anything.
Very heterogeneous with a lot of a-typical people. I think Green Berets are also like that. An open mind and genuine interest
in others (cultures, way of thinking, religion etc) is essential to understand and to perform and also to prevent costly mistakes
(in silver and/or blood).
It is possible to create firewalls against tunnel-vision. The
Jester performed such a role. Also think of the
Emperors New Clothes . The current trend
of people with limited vision and creativity prevents this. Criticism is punished with a lack of promotion, job-loss or even jail
(whistle-blowers)
IMO this is why up to a certain rank (colonel or middle management) a certain amount of creativity or alternative thinking
is allowed, but conformity is essential to rise higher.
I was very interested in the Colonel's remark on the foreign background of the GB in Vietnam. If you would like to expand on this
I would be much obliged? IMO GB are an example of a smart, learning, organization (in deed and not only in word as so many say
of themselves, but who usually are at best mediocre)
Would you then say that a rising military officer who does have the vision thing faces career impediments? If so, would you
say that the vision thing is lost (if it ever was there) at the highest ranks? In any case, the existence of even a few at the top, like Matthis or Shinseki is a blessing.
"When the US was indeed the paramount military power on the globe, and the US military reigned supreme. They can't seem to
accept the reality of the world as it is now."
That's true not only of the US military but of US elites in general across all of the spectra. And because that reality is at
odds with the group-think of those within the various elements that make up the spectra it doesn't a hearing. Anyone who tries
to bring it up risks being ejected from the group.
I forget an important part. I really miss an edit-button. Comment-boxes are like looking at something through a straw. Its easy
to miss the overview.
Innovations and significant new developments are usually made by laymen. IMO mainly because they have a fresh perspective without
being bothered by the (mainstream) knowledge that dominates an area of expertise.
By excluding the laymen errors will continue to be repeated. This can be avoided by using development/decision-making frameworks,
but these tend to become dogma (and thus become part of the problem)
Much better is allowing laymen and allowing a-typical people. Then listen to them carefully. Less rigid flexible and very valuable.
Apparently, according to the last US ambassador to Syria Mr. Ford, from 2014-17 US has spent 12 Billion on Regime change in Syria.
IMO, combinedly Iran and Russia so far, have spent far less in Syria than 12 billion by US alone, not considering the rest of
her so called coalition. This is a war of attrition, and US operations in wars, are usually far more expensive and longer than
anybody else's.
"The United States spent at least $12 billion in Syria-related military and civilian expenses in the four years from 2014 through
2017, according to the former U.S. ambassador to the country.
This $12 billion is in addition to the billions more spent to pursue regime change in Syria in the previous three years, after
war broke out in 2011." https://goo.gl/8pj5cD
It may "demand" it - but does it get it? Soldiers are just as human as everyone else.
I'm reminded of the staff sergeant with the sagging beer belly who informed me, "Stand up straight and look like a soldier..."
Or the First Sergeant who was so hung over one morning at inspection that he couldn't remember which direction he was going down
the hall to the next room to be inspected. I'm sure you have your own stories of less than competence.
It's a question of intelligence and imagination. And frankly, I don't see the military in any country receiving the "best and
brightest" of that country's population, by definition. The fact that someone is patriotic enough to enter the military over a
civilian occupation doesn't make them more intelligent or imaginative than the people who decided on the civilian occupation.
Granted, if you fail at accounting, you don't usually die. Death tends to focus the mind, as they say. Nonetheless, we're not
talking about the grunts at the level who actually die, still less the relatively limited number of Special Forces. We're talking
about the officers and staff at the levels who don't usually die in war - except maybe at their defeat - i.e., most officers over
the level of captain.
One can hardly look at this officer crowd in the Pentagon and CENTCOM and say that their personal death concentrates their
mind. They are in virtually no danger of that. Only career death faces them - with a nice transition to the board of General Dynamics
at ten times the salary.
All in all, I'd have to agree that the military isn't much better at being competent - at many levels above the obvious group
of hyper-trained Special Forces - any more than any other profession.
That is well put.most important is the grading system that is designed to fix a person to a particular slot thereby limiting his
ability to think "outside the box" and consider the many variables that exist in one particular instant.
Creative thinking allows
you to see beyond the storm clouds ahead and realize that the connectedness of different realities both the visible and invisible.
For
instance the picture of the 2 pairs of korean skaters in the news tells an interesting story on many levels. Some will judge them
on their grade of proffiency, while others will see a dance of strategy between 2 foes and a few will know the results in advance
and plan accordingly
"They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers." I've often pondered that concept. Notice how many of radical extremist leaders were doctors, engineers and such? Narrow and
deep. STEM is enormously useful to us but seems to be a risky when implanted in shallow earth.
These narrow "but deep" thinkers were unable to grasp the nature of the Iraq War for the first couple of years. They thought
of it as a rear area security problem, a combat in cities problem, anything but a popular rebellion based on xenophobia and anti-colonialism
The IED problem? They spent several billion dollars on trying to find a technology fix and never succeeded. I know because they
kept asking me to explain the war to them and then could not understand the answers which were outside their narrow thought. pl
War College selectees, the national board selected creme de la creme test out as 50% SJs (conformists lacking vision) in Myers-Briggs
terms and about 15% NTs (intellectuals). To survive and move upward in a system dominated by SJs, the NTs must pretend to be what
they are not. A few succeed. I do not think Mattis is an intellectual merely because he has read a lot. pl
Long ago when I was a professor, I advised my students that "the law is like a pencil sharpener, it sharpens the mind by narrowing
it."
I tried to encourage them to "think backwards".
My favorite example was a Japanese fisherman who recovered valuable ancient Chinese
pottery. Everyone knew where an ancient ship had sunk, but the water was too deep to dive down to the wreck. And everyone knew
the cargo included these valuable vases. And the fisherman was the first to figure out how to recover them. He attached a line
to an octopus, and lowered it in the area, waited awhile, and pulled it up. Low and behold, the octopus had hidden in an ancient
Chinese vase. The fisherman was familiar with trapping octopuses, by lowering a ceramic pot (called "takosubo") into the ocean,
waiting awhile, then raising the vase with octopus inside. His brilliance was to think backwards, and use an octopus to catch
a vase.
the original GBS were recruited in the 50s to serve in the OSS role with foreign guerrillas behind Soviet lines in th event
of war in Europe. Aaron Bank, the founder, recruited several hundred experienced foreign soldiers from the likely countries who
wanted to become American. By the time we were in VN these men were a small fraction of GBs but important for their expertise
and professionalism. pl
Col, I think it might help people to think of "the Borg" - as you have defined & applied it - in a broader context. It struck
me particularly as you ID'd the launching of our modern military group-think / careerism behavior coming from the watershed of
industrialized scale & processes that came out of WWII.
We note parallel themes in all significant sectors of our civilization.
The ever-expanding security state, the many men in Gray Flannel Suits that inhabit corporate culture, Finance & Banking & Big
Health scaling ever larger - all processes aimed to slice the salami thinner & quicker, to the point where meat is moot ... and
so it goes.
I note many Borgs... Borgism if you will. An organizational behavior that has emerged out of human nature having difficulty adapting
to rapidly accelerating complexity that is just too hard to apprehend in a few generations. If (as many commenters on STT seem
to...) one wishes to view this in an ideological or spiritual framework only, they may overlook an important truth - that what
we are experiencing is a Battle Among Borgs for control over their own space & domination over the other Borgs. How else would
we expect any competitive, powerful interest group to act?
In gov & industry these days, we observe some pretty wild outliers... attached to some wild outcomes. Thus the boring behavior
of our political industries bringing forth Trump, our promethean technology sector yielding a Musk (& yes, a Zuckerberg).
I find it hard to take very seriously analysts that define their perspective based primarily upon their superior ideals & opposition
to others. Isn't every person, every tribe, team or enterprise a borglet-in-becoming? Everybody Wants to Rule the World ... &
Everybody Must Get Stoned... messages about how we are grappling with complexity in our times. I just finished reading Command
& Control (about nuclear weapons policy, systems design & accidents). I am amazed we've made it this far.
Unfortunately, I would
not be amazed if reckless, feckless leaders changed the status quo. I was particularly alarmed hearing Trump in his projection
mode; "I would love to be able to bring back our country into a great form of unity, without a major event where people pull together,
that's hard to do.
But I would like to do it without that major event because usually that major event is not a good thing." It
strikes me that he could be exceptionally willing to risk a Major Event if he felt a form of unity, or self-preservation, was
in the offing. I pray (& I do not pray often or easily) that the Generals you have described have enough heart & guts to honor
their oath at its most profound level in the event of an Event.
As a time traveler from another age, I can only say that for me it means devotion to a set of mores peculiar to a particular
profession as opposed to an occupation. pl
Another springs to mind: James Lovelock (of Gaia hypothesis fame) was once part of the NASA team building the first probe to
go to Mars to look for signs of life. Lovelock didn't make any friends when he told NASA they were wasting their time, there was
none. When asked how he could be so sure, he explained that the composition of the Martian atmosphere made it impossible. "But
Martian life may be able to survive under different conditions" was the retort. Lovelock then went on to explain his view that
the evolution of microbial life determined the atmospheric composition on Earth, so should be expected to do the same if
life had evolved on Mars. Brilliant backwards thinking which ought to have earned him the Nobel prize IMHO (for Gaia). Lovelock,
a classic cross-disciplinary scientist, can't be rewarded with such a box-categorized honor, as his idea doesn't fit well into
any one.
Another example of cross-disciplinary brilliance was Bitcoin, which has as much to do with its creator's deep knowledge of
Anthropology (why people invented & use money) as his expertise in both Economics and Computer Science.
This is they key to creative thinking in my view - familiarity with different fields yields deeper insights.
"... CIA killed Kennedy. This pretty much removes all doubt. They are willing to do anything. ..."
"... It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist passports floating gently down from the sky. ..."
"... What was Oswald's reason to kill JFK? And yeah, he picked the very building he worked at to commit the crime. He wasn't THAT stupid!... ..."
"... RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn Monroe. ..."
"... The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b) in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the Cold War... ..."
"... Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit stationary targets reliably. ..."
It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald
firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a
building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT
being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping
backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in
front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist
passports floating gently down from the sky.
RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had
CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban
hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief
of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn
Monroe.
The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a
thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b)
in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the
Cold War...
Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope
needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle
attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit
stationary targets reliably.
"... think tanks are essentially lobby groups for their donors. The policy analyses and reform schemes that they produce are tailored to support the material interests of donors. None of the studies are reliable as objective evidence. They are special pleading. ..."
"... Think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and the Atlantic Council, speak for those who fund them. Increasingly, they speak for the military/security complex, American hegemony, corporate interests, and Israel ..."
"... Bryan MacDonald lists those who support the anti-Russian think tanks such as the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, German Marshall Fund of the US, and Institute for Study of War. The "experts" are mouthpieces funded by the US military security complex. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48755.htm US government agencies use taxpayer dollars to deceive taxpayers. ..."
A couple of decades or more ago when I was still in Washington, otherwise known as the snake
pit, I was contacted by a well-financed group that offered me, a Business Week and Scripps
Howard News Service columnist with access as a former editor also to the Wall Street Journal,
substantial payments to promote agendas that the lobbyists paying the bills wanted
promoted.
To the detriment of my net worth, but to the preservation of my reputation, I declined.
Shortly thereafter a conservative columnist, a black man if memory serves, was outed for
writing newspaper columns for pay for a lobby group.
I often wondered if he was set up in order to get rid of him and whether the enticement I
received was intended to shut me down, or whether journalists had become "have pen will
travel"? (Have Gun -- Will Travel was a highly successful TV Series 1957-1963).
Having read Bryan MacDonald's article on Information Clearing House, "Anti-Russia Think
Tanks in US: Who Funds them?," I see that think tanks are essentially lobby groups for their
donors. The policy analyses and reform schemes that they produce are tailored to support the
material interests of donors. None of the studies are reliable as objective evidence. They are
special pleading.
Think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and the
Atlantic Council, speak for those who fund them. Increasingly, they speak for the
military/security complex, American hegemony, corporate interests, and Israel.
Bryan MacDonald lists those who support the anti-Russian think tanks such as the Atlantic
Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, German Marshall Fund of the US, and Institute
for Study of War. The "experts" are mouthpieces funded by the US military security complex.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48755.htm
US government agencies use taxpayer dollars to deceive taxpayers.
In other words insouciant Americans pay taxes in order to be brainwashed. And they tolerate
this.
"... The "Newspeak" we experience is straight out of Orwell's 1984. From Wikipedia: Newspeak is the fictional language in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell. It is a controlled language created by the totalitarian state Oceania as a tool to limit freedom of thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality, and peace. Any form of thought alternative to the party's construct is classified as "thoughtcrime". ..."
"... It is truly scary how Orwellian our current situation has become reminding me that there are always two two takeaways from any story or historical record. Those that view it as a cautionary tale and those who use it as an instruction manual. ..."
"... We are also controlled through Doublespeak another Orwellian concept. From Wikipedia: Doublespeak is a language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Some common examples are the branding of liberals by pundits in the media as Fascists in order to eliminate the historical understanding of exactly what that word refers to. Another example is the appearance of the term Alt Right which is used to confuse and obscure the true nature of these groups. A great example of the doublespeak the media exercises in service to the state is the instantaneous adoption of the term Alt Right and nary ever a mention of its former names such as White Supremacist, Neo Nazi, Racist, Hate Group etc. They just rename these movements and hide all the other terms from sight. Another example is scapegoating the same group of people but under a different term. Today the term is Liberal but in the past, the Nazi movement called them Jews, Communists, Intellectuals etc. Whatever the term, the target of these attacks are always the ones that threaten the Power Structure. ..."
"... Joseph Goebbels was in charge of the war propaganda for the Nazis during WWII. He said: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." ..."
The reason we are in the pickle barrel is exactly the reasons stated in the article and by Annie. We are exposed to exactly
what they want to show us and are blinded by other narratives which do not support the group think. It is as if the politicians,
the intelligence community and the media are all involved in a conspiracy. Remember that word means a plan by two or more people.
No tin foil hat required. But anyone suggesting conspiracy is instantly branded a nut hence the universal use of the term conspiracy
nut as a derogatory term to label anyone with a different message that somehow captures the attention of a wider audience. It
is not so much that all Holly Wood stars are liberal socialists. They are a diverse group. However they all have one thing in
common which is they have the public's ear. They are also not on point with the approved messaging and so must be continuously
branded as conspiracy nuts and socialist subversives. We all have seen the 24/7 bashing of these folks. Control is the reason.
The "Newspeak" we experience is straight out of Orwell's 1984. From Wikipedia: Newspeak is the fictional language in the
novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell. It is a controlled language created by the totalitarian state Oceania as
a tool to limit freedom of thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality,
and peace. Any form of thought alternative to the party's construct is classified as "thoughtcrime".
It is truly scary how Orwellian our current situation has become reminding me that there are always two two takeaways from
any story or historical record. Those that view it as a cautionary tale and those who use it as an instruction manual.
I am appalled by how the media at first put Trump in the game in the first place for economic gain (see Les Moonvies article)
and then created another fictional fantasy which serves the goal of permawar and control of the citizenry through fear, confusion
and ignorance. We are all exposed to the Daily Two Minutes of Hate another Orwellian concept. From Wikipedia: The Two Minutes
Hate, from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a daily period in which Party members of the society of Oceania must
watch a film depicting the Party's enemies (notably Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers) and express their hatred for them for
exactly two minutes. The difference is we can find it 24/7 on our technological wonder machines.
Another Orwellian concept is The Ministry of Truth: The Ministry of Truth (in Newspeak, Minitrue) is the ministry of propaganda.
As with the other ministries in the novel, the name Ministry of Truth is a misnomer because in reality it serves the opposite:
it is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events. From Wikipedia: As well as administering truth, the ministry
spreads a new language amongst the populace called Newspeak, in which, for example, "truth" is understood to mean statements like
2 + 2 = 5 when the situation warrants. In keeping with the concept of doublethink, the ministry is thus aptly named in that it
creates/manufactures "truth" in the Newspeak sense of the word. The book describes the doctoring of historical records to show
a government-approved version of events.
We are also controlled through Doublespeak another Orwellian concept. From Wikipedia: Doublespeak is a language that deliberately
obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Some common examples are the branding of liberals by pundits
in the media as Fascists in order to eliminate the historical understanding of exactly what that word refers to. Another example
is the appearance of the term Alt Right which is used to confuse and obscure the true nature of these groups. A great example
of the doublespeak the media exercises in service to the state is the instantaneous adoption of the term Alt Right and nary ever
a mention of its former names such as White Supremacist, Neo Nazi, Racist, Hate Group etc. They just rename these movements and
hide all the other terms from sight. Another example is scapegoating the same group of people but under a different term. Today
the term is Liberal but in the past, the Nazi movement called them Jews, Communists, Intellectuals etc. Whatever the term, the
target of these attacks are always the ones that threaten the Power Structure.
Joseph Goebbels was in charge of the war propaganda for the Nazis during WWII. He said: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep
repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield
the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State
to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is
the greatest enemy of the State."
If these things seem eerily similar to what is going on today then we probably have a power structure which is a grave threat
for peace. Okay, we do have a power structure that is a grave threat to peace but oddly not democracy. Noam Chomsky wrote about
propaganda stating, "it's the essence of democracy" This notion is contrary to the popular belief that indoctrination is inconsistent
with democracy. The point is that in a totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter what people think because you can control what
they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force and when the voice of the people can be
heard, you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to
be called propaganda. Manufacture of consent. Creation of necessary illusions.
The folks who contribute here on this website are few indeed and what lies beyond the haven of the oasis is a vast barren dessert
filled with scorpions, snakes and a whole bunch of lies.
Well said for Annie and the authors.
Democracy may be the ultimate tool of control of the masses.
More wisdom from Goebbels:
Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will
A media system wants ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity.
We are striving not for truth, but effect.
The worst enemy of any propaganda, it is intellectualism.
For the lie to be believable, it should be terrifying.
A lie repeated thousands of times becomes a truth.
Some day the lie will fall under its own weight and the truth will rise.
I like that last one a lot but unfortunately it will not come to pass until things get bad.
Citizen One – You have beautifully & precicely nailed the means ( "how" ) the
USA has gotten in such a mess : Newspeak, Daily Two Minutes of Hate, The Ministry of Truth,
DoubleSpeak and the way and why of how Propaganda actually works. George Orwell was a
seer.
AND now it would be helpful to understand "why" the USA has gotten in such a mess. The
polarity of American politics tells a very long story but in short, polarity means there are
only two ways and when the going gets tough, each way is in the extreme – the right way
or the wrong way, it flips depending on each individual's political persuasion. When the
going gets tough the extremes become the tail that wags the dog.
So my question is : WHY after the seemingly happy years under Obama did the going get so
tough so fast?
My pet theory is that Trump threatened to "drain the swamp" which was understood –
seemingly now quite rightly – that he was going to expose some very significant wrong
doing in very high places. I believe that he was on "NYC/DC" friendly terms with the Clintons
and both parties knew each other for the true devil they were. Thus the big red flag he waved
in her face brought about what is turning in to a multi billion dollar ongoing attempt to
discredit him in the eyes of the people, in the eyes of the World and in the eyes of the
highest courts " America be damned".
And politically this is quite necessary because she is not only an icon of all that is
American,"apple pie and motherhood"; she is to the under 45 age group the great white mother
of democracy via Democrat rule. And the bad part of that iconography is that if she goes down
so does the party. It was also critical for her to win because of all the swamp people who
had chosen to compromise their life's work, thus had to continue in that compromise in the
hope that they would come out clean since they believed that both Trump and the ordinary
American were so naive, thus would be easily played for fools.
So all this crap to destroy Trump is about saving her hide to save the party. Things are
so desperate now because there is nothing yet in place to replace her in the mind's eye of
the Democratic half the voting public. All who might have been in 2nd place were kept
diminished to raise her higher. It now is quite obvious that she has been told to shut up and
lie low, to come out only when she is in safe company – as at the Golden Globes. So the
big picture today as is being painted and hyped to intensify mass hysteria is that Mueller
needs to be protected from Trump where really what is needed are the names and numbers to be
called on for more $$$, more social media propaganda pages and to vote in November 2018.
Why only that? Because Trump is not going to fire Mueller; remember Mueller was a Bush man
and so was Comey. They have a long history of going both ways. Survival is tricky business
– especially in DC. The scapegoats are already cornered; possibly the new "lie" is
already in draft form. Remember – "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,
people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as
the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of
the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress
dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is
the greatest enemy of the State."
It is going to be an interesting next few months!! But we can hope that, from this one of
many previous American political exercises in democracy, the ordinary defenders of those
democratic values (the voters) will learn some significant truths about governance,
transparency and the rule of law. The guys at the top are not gods and are not above the law;
they must not only do right but be seen to do right.
CitizenOne , February 10, 2018 at 7:57 pm
The only thing I can tell you is that the conspirators who concocted Russia Gate have
figured out all the pieces to the puzzle of how to control events via the means I mentioned
and many other means. We are as manipulated as a light switch. One way we are all fired up
about some BS and flip the switch and we are all calm and mellow. Hopefully if you follow the
threads here you will find out a lot of alternative information much of it thoroughly
researched by highly respected and qualified individuals who are in a position to know the
truth.
Mariam , February 10, 2018 at 7:11 pm
I agree with you wholeheartedly. They call themselves "liberals" in fact they are "new
liberals."
Alas, these false ("new) liberals" are very well represented by the Obamas, the Clintons, the
Trudeaus, the Macrons and so on.
If you truly believe in the "left" and call yourself "progressive" you couldn't stand for
useless and pointless wars, period.
"... Walmart employs 1.4 million Americans. The military employs 1.3 million active duty soldiers. That's a problem. Peace can't be allowed to break out. And the best way to insure that it doesn't is to kill the minimum number of people and export the maximum number of arms to keep people fighting with each other around the world. ..."
Walmart employs 1.4 million Americans. The military employs 1.3 million active duty
soldiers. That's a problem. Peace can't be allowed to break out. And the best way to insure
that it doesn't is to kill the minimum number of people and export the maximum number of arms
to keep people fighting with each other around the world.
That is all about as far as conceivable away from any notion of a professional
soldier.
How do you stop this? Who will employ those 1.3 million... 1.3 million who have been
brainwashed about "terrorism", "communism", "democracy", "muslims", etc. etc. etc.?
Particularly in the context of the tsunami of social change that is about to hit with the
advent of real artificial intelligence. Doctors? Their jobs are on the line and I suspect
they don't know it. Lawyers? Even worse.
The following article was the start of an epochal change in medicine:
Lasko TA, Denny JC, Levy MA (2013) Computational Phenotype Discovery Using Unsupervised
Feature Learning over Noisy, Sparse, and Irregular Clinical Data. PLoS ONE 8(6): e66341.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0066341
I guess I should add, although it should be obvious, that the one thing that absolutely
cannot under any circumstances be allowed to happen is real war. Then you have to figure out
how to employ both the soldiers and the Walmart employees. Those that are still alive. And of
course if you look at the behavior of the U.S. in Syria you see that we are about as
interested in real war as we are in the arts.
But the "assessment" served a useful purpose for the never-Trumpers: it applied an official
imprimatur on the case for delegitimizing Trump's election and even raised the long-shot hope
that the Electoral College might reverse the outcome and possibly install a compromise
candidate, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the White House. Though the
Powell ploy fizzled, the hope of somehow removing Trump from office continued to bubble, fueled
by the growing hysteria around Russia-gate.
Virtually all skepticism about the evidence-free "assessment" was banned. For months, the
Times and other newspapers of record repeated the lie that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies
had concurred in the conclusion about the Russian "hack." Even when that falsehood
was belatedly acknowledged , the major news outlets just shifted the phrasing slightly to
say that U.S. intelligence agencies had reached the Russian "hack" conclusion. Shane's blunt
initial recognition about the lack of proof disappeared from the mainstream media's approved
narrative of Russia-gate.
Doubts about the Russian "hack" or dissident suggestions that what we were witnessing
was a "soft coup" were scoffed at by leading media commentators. Other warnings from
veteran U.S. intelligence professionals about the weaknesses of
the Russia-gate narrative and the danger of letting politicized intelligence overturn a
constitutional election were also brushed aside in pursuit of the goal of removing Trump from
the White House.
It didn't even seem to matter when new Russia-gate
disclosures conflicted with the original
narrative that Putin had somehow set Trump up as a Manchurian candidate. All normal
journalistic skepticism was jettisoned. It was as if the Russia-gate advocates started with the
conclusion that Trump must go and then made the facts fit into that mold, but anyone who noted
the violations of normal investigative procedures was dismissed as a "Trump enabler" or a
"Moscow stooge."
The Text Evidence
But then came the FBI text messages, providing documentary evivdence that key FBI officials
involved in the Russia-gate investigation were indeed deeply biased and out to get Trump,
adding hard proof to Trump's longstanding lament that he was the subject of a "witch hunt."
"... The whole situation with Russia, of which, be it her economy, history, military, culture etc., is not known to those people, is a monstrous empirical evidence of a complete professional inadequacy of most people populating this bubble. ..."
"... Most of those people are badly educated (I am not talking about worthless formal degrees they hold) and cultured. In dry scientific language it is called a "confirmation bias", in a simple human one it is called being ignorant snobs, that is why this IC-academic-political-media "environment" in case of Russia prefers openly anti-Russian "sources" because those "sources" reiterate to them what they want to hear to start with, thus Chalabi Moment is being continuously reproduced. ..."
"... Again, the level of "Russian Studies" in Anglophone world is appalling. In fact, it is clear and present danger since removes or misinterprets crucial information about the only nation in the world which can annihilate the United States completely in such a light that it creates a real danger even for a disastrous military confrontation. I would go on a limb here and say that US military on average is much better aware of Russia and not only in purely military terms. In some sense--it is an exception. But even there, there are some trends (and they are not new) which are very worrisome. ..."
Another limitation on their understanding is that the last thing they are interested in
his how the world outside the bubbles they prefer to inhabit operates, and they commonly have
absolutely contempt for 'deplorables', be they Russian, British or American. This can lead to
political misjudgements.
It is not just "can" it very often does. The whole situation with Russia, of which, be
it her economy, history, military, culture etc., is not known to those people, is a monstrous
empirical evidence of a complete professional inadequacy of most people populating this
bubble.
Most of those people are badly educated (I am not talking about worthless formal
degrees they hold) and cultured. In dry scientific language it is called a "confirmation
bias", in a simple human one it is called being ignorant snobs, that is why this
IC-academic-political-media "environment" in case of Russia prefers openly anti-Russian
"sources" because those "sources" reiterate to them what they want to hear to start with,
thus Chalabi Moment is being continuously reproduced.
In case of Iraq, as an example, it is a tragedy but at least the world is relatively safe.
With Russia, as I stated many times for years--they simply have no idea what they are dealing
with. None. It is expected from people who are briefed by "sources" such as Russian fugitive
London Oligarchy or ultra-liberal and fringe urban Russian "tusovka".
Again, the level of
"Russian Studies" in Anglophone world is appalling. In fact, it is clear and present danger
since removes or misinterprets crucial information about the only nation in the world which
can annihilate the United States completely in such a light that it creates a real danger
even for a disastrous military confrontation. I would go on a limb here and say that US
military on average is much better aware of Russia and not only in purely military terms. In
some sense--it is an exception. But even there, there are some trends (and they are not new)
which are very worrisome.
"... What 'StratCom' means in practical terms is propaganda, usually involving the creation of a 'narrative' -- in which the complexities of the world are elided in favour of a simplistic picture of 'good guys' versus 'bad guys.' Commonly it is difficult to know how far the people doing this are deliberately dishonest, how far they have simply succumbed to 'double think' and 'crimestop.' ..."
"... It has become amply apparent that with MI6, and other intelligence and indeed law enforcement agencies, the activity of attempting to understand the world has become inextricably involved with that of trying to shape it by covert action and 'perception management', or 'StratCom.' ..."
"... The structures involved, moreover, are inextricably linked with ostensibly non-governmental institutions, like King's College and the Atlantic Council, and related organisations in a range of countries, as Rid's career strongly suggests. ..."
"... It has also however become amply apparent that these structures create ample opportunities for 'information operations' groups such as those which were associated with the late Boris Berezovsky and the Menatep oligarchs. ..."
My apologies -- it was sloppy of me to use the term.
I was using it interchangeably with 'propaganda.' One reason for this is that I have been
looking at the website of the 'Department of War Studies' at King's College London. This has
a 'Centre for Strategic Communications', which 'aims to be the leading global centre of
expertise on strategic communications.'
An 'Associate Fellow' is my sometime BBC Radio colleague Mark Laity, who, according to his
bio on the site, 'is the Chief Strategic Communications at SHAPE, the first post holder, and
as such he has been a leading figure in developing StratCom within NATO.' In this capacity,
he produces presentations with titles like ' "Bocca della veritas" or "Perception becomes
Reality."
The same ethos penetrates other parts of the War Studies Department -- Eliot Higgins is
involved, as also Thomas Rid, who backed up the claims made by Dmitri Alperovitch of
'CrowdStrike', along with the former GCHQ person Matt Tait. (It appears that Rid, who has now
moved to SAIS at Johns Hopkins, is a German who has earlier worked at IFRI in Paris, RAND,
and in Israel.)
What 'StratCom' means in practical terms is propaganda, usually involving the creation
of a 'narrative' -- in which the complexities of the world are elided in favour of a
simplistic picture of 'good guys' versus 'bad guys.' Commonly it is difficult to know how far
the people doing this are deliberately dishonest, how far they have simply succumbed to
'double think' and 'crimestop.'
It has become amply apparent that with MI6, and other intelligence and indeed law
enforcement agencies, the activity of attempting to understand the world has become
inextricably involved with that of trying to shape it by covert action and 'perception
management', or 'StratCom.'
The structures involved, moreover, are inextricably linked with ostensibly
non-governmental institutions, like King's College and the Atlantic Council, and related
organisations in a range of countries, as Rid's career strongly suggests.
It has also however become amply apparent that these structures create ample opportunities
for 'information operations' groups such as those which were associated with the late Boris
Berezovsky and the Menatep oligarchs.
So in describing what these people got up to I sloppily used 'StratCom', when I should
have said propaganda.
New figures published this week on obscene inequality show how the capitalist economic
system has become more than ever deeply dysfunctional. Surely, the depraved workings of the
system pose the greatest threat to societies and international security. Yet, Western leaders
are preoccupied instead with other non-existent threats – like Russia.
Take British prime minister Theresa May who this week was
speaking at a posh banquet in London. She told the assembled hobnobs, as they were sipping
expensive wines, that "Russia is threatening the international order upon which we depend".
Without providing one scrap of evidence, the British leader went to assert that Russia was
interfering in Western democracies to "sow discord".
May's grandstanding is a classic case study of what behavioral scientists call "displacement
activity" – that is, when animals find themselves in a state of danger they often react
by displaying unusual behavior or making strange noises.
For indeed May and other Western political leaders are facing danger to their world order,
even if they don't openly admit it as such. That danger is from the exploding levels of social
inequality and poverty within Western societies, leading to anger, resentment, discontent and
disillusionment among increasing masses of citizens. In the face of the inherent, imminent
collapse of their systems of governance, Western leaders like May seek some relief by prattling
on about Russia as a threat.
This week European bank Credit Suisse published figures showing that the wealth gap between
rich and poor has reached even more grotesque and absurdist levels. According to the bank, the
world's richest 1% now own as much wealth as half the population of the entire planet. The
United States and Britain are among the top countries for residing multi-millionaires, while
these two nations have also emerged as among the most unequal in the world.
The data calling out how dysfunctional the capitalist system has become keeps on coming. It
is impossible to ignore the reality of a system in deep disrepair, yet British and American
politicians in particular – apart from notable exceptions like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie
Sanders – have the audacity to block out this reality and to chase after risible
phantoms. (The exercise makes perfect sense in a way.)
Last week, a
report from the US-based Institute of Policy Studies found that just three of America's
wealthiest men – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett – own the same level of
wealth as the poorest half of the entire US population. That is, the combined monetary worth of
these three individuals – reckoned to be $250 billion – is equivalent to that
possessed by 160 million citizens.
What's more, the study also estimates that if the Trump administration pushes through its
proposed tax plans, the gap between rich elite and the vast majority will widen even further.
This and other studies have found that over 80% of the tax benefits from Trump's budget will go
to enrich the top 1% in society.
All Western governments, not just May's or Trump's, have over the past decades overseen an
historic trend of siphoning wealth from the majority of society to a tiny elite few. The tax
burden has relentlessly shifted from the wealthy to the ordinary workers, who in addition have
had to contend with decreasing wages, as well as deteriorating public serves and social
welfare.
To refer to the United States or Britain as "democracies" is a preposterous misnomer. They
are for all practical purposes plutocracies; societies run by and for a top strata of obscenely
wealthy.
Intelligent economists, like the authors at the IPS cited above, realize that the state of
affairs is unsustainable. Morally, and even from an empirical economics point of view, the
distortion of wealth within Western societies and internationally is leading to social and
political disaster.
On this observation, we must acknowledge the pioneering work of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels who more than 150 years ago identified the chief failing of capitalism as being the
polarization of wealth between a tiny few and the vast majority. The lack of consumption power
among the masses owing to chronic poverty induced by capitalism would result in the system's
eventual collapse. Surely, we have reached that point in history now, when a handful of
individuals own as much wealth as half the planet.
Inequality, poverty and the denial of decent existence to the majority of people stands out
as the clarion condemnation of capitalism and its organization of society under private profit.
The human suffering, hardships, austerity and crippled potential that flow from this condition
represent the crisis of our time. Yet instead of an earnest public debate and struggle to
overcome this crisis, we are forced by our elites to focus on false, even surreal problems.
American politics has become paralyzed by an endless elite squabble over whether Russia
meddled in the presidential elections and claims that Russian news media continue to interfere
in American democracy. Of course, the US corporate-controlled news media, who are an integral
part of the plutocracy, lend credibility to this circus. Ditto European corporate-controlled
media.
Then we have President Donald Trump on a world tour berating and bullying other nations to
spend more money on buying American goods and to stop cheating supposed American generosity
over trade. Trump also is prepared to start a nuclear war with North Korea because the latter
is accused of being a threat to global peace – on the basis that the country is building
military defenses. The same for Iran. Trump castigates Iran as a threat to Middle East peace
and warns of a confrontation.
This is the same quality of ludicrous distraction as Britain's premier Theresa May this week
lambasting Russia for "threatening the world order upon which we all depend". By "we" she is
really referring to the elites, not the mass of suffering workers and their families.
May and Trump are indulging in "perception management" taken to absurdity. Or more crudely,
brainwashing.
How can North Korea or Iran be credibly presented as global threats when the American and
British are supporting a genocidal blockade and aerial slaughter in Yemen? The complete
disconnect in reality is testimony to the pernicious system of thought-control that the vast
majority of citizens are enforced to live under.
The biggest disconnect is the obscene inequality of wealth and resources that capitalism has
engendered in the 21 st century. That monstrous dysfunction is also causally related
to why the US and its Western allies like Britain are pushing belligerence and wars around the
planet. It is all part of their elitist denial of reality. The reality that capitalism is the
biggest threat to humanity's future.
Do we let these mentally deficient, deceptive political elites and their media dictate the
nonsense? Or will the mass of people do the right thing and sweep them aside?
"... On Strategy : A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, ..."
"... In his own work, Summers marginalized all Vietnamese actors (as would so many later military historians), failed to adequately deal with the potential consequences, nuclear or otherwise, of the sorts of escalation he advocated, and didn't even bother to ask whether Vietnam was a core national security interest of the United States. ..."
"... A more sophisticated Clausewitzian analysis came from current National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in a highly acclaimed 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty ..."
"... McMaster is a genuine scholar and a gifted writer, but he still suggested that the Joint Chiefs should have advocated for a more aggressive offensive strategy -- a full ground invasion of the North or unrelenting carpet-bombing of that country. In this sense, he was just another "go-big" Clausewitzian who, as historian Ronald Spector pointed out recently, ignored Vietnamese views and failed to acknowledge -- an observation of historian Edward Miller -- that "the Vietnam War was a Vietnamese war." ..."
"... The Army and Vietnam ..."
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... A Better War : The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The Daily Show with Jon Stewart ..."
"... Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife : Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... David Petraeus and current Secretary of Defense James Mattis, co-authors in 2006 of FM 3-24, the first ( New York Times ..."
"... On Strategy ..."
"... Dereliction of Duty ..."
"... The Army and Vietnam ..."
"... Most of the generals leading the war on terror just missed service in the Vietnam War. They graduated from various colleges or West Point in the years immediately following the withdrawal of most U.S. ground troops or thereafter: Petraeus in 1974 , future Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal in 1976 , and present National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in 1984 . Secretary of Defense Mattis finished ROTC and graduated from Central Washington University in 1971 , while Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly enlisted at the tail end of the Vietnam War, receiving his commission in 1976 . ..."
"... Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, and the others entered service when military prestige had reached a nadir or was just rebounding. And those reading lists taught the young officers where to lay the blame for that -- on civilians in Washington (or in the nation's streets) or on a military high command too weak to assert its authority effectively. They would serve in Vietnam's shadow, the shadow of defeat, and the conclusions they would draw from it would only lead to twenty-first-century disasters ..."
"... Meanwhile, President Trump's hearts-and-minds faction consists of officers who have spent three administrations expanding COIN-influenced missions to approximately 70% of the world's nations. Furthermore, they've recently fought for and been granted a new "mini-surge" in Afghanistan intended to -- in disturbingly Vietnam-esque language -- "break the deadlock ," "reverse the decline," and "end the stalemate " there. Never mind that neither 100,000 U.S. troops (when I was there in 2011) nor 16 full years of combat could, in the term of the trade, "stabilize" Afghanistan. The can-do, revisionist believers atop the national security state have convinced Trump that -- despite his original instincts -- 4,000 or 5,000 (or 6,000 or 7,000) more troops (and yet more drones , planes , and other equipment) will do the trick. This represents tragedy bordering on farce. ..."
"... The hearts and minders and Clausewitzians atop the military establishment since 9/11 are never likely to stop citing their versions of the Vietnam War as the key to victory today; that is, they will never stop focusing on a war that was always unwinnable and never worth fighting. None of today's acclaimed military personalities seems willing to consider that Washington couldn't have won in Vietnam because, as former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak (who flew 269 combat missions over that country) noted in the recent Ken Burns documentary series, "we were fighting on the wrong side." ..."
"... Today's leaders don't even pretend that the post-9/11 wars will ever end. In an interview last June, Petraeus -- still considered a sagacious guru of the Defense establishment -- disturbingly described the Afghan conflict as " generational ." ..."
"... Vietnam lost in the end. Its greedy corrupt elites are now puppets of US. They allow open prostitution in Ho Chi Minh city. They allow Vietnamese women to be a bunch of hookers again. ..."
"... "America tends to gain from commerce what it thinks it will get by warfare. Not so much the other way around" Rather like 20th century Germany, don't you think? ..."
"... The Vietnam war killed the draft. The draft is involuntary servitude, slavery in a sense. For ordinary Americans this was the only positive thing to come from the war. ..."
"... Ultimately, the victory of WW2 due to sheer weight of industrial productivity ramp and hence massive output of planes, tanks, submarines, etc. made defense a large part of the US economy. Since that time, too many entrenched interests just never want the military to downsize. Hence, the US has to keep invented new demand for a product that otherwise would not have such demand, but keeps some major entrenched interests powerful. ..."
"... The BIGGEST lesson to come out of the illegal and immoral War against Vietnam is that the draft was impeding the MIC's effort to sell Americans on the idea of supporting endless war. ..."
"... The same generals who let 911 happen and started the Iraq war still run the show. All of them should have faced a firing squad for that, but instead, the grossly incompetent General Kelly runs the White House and the grossly incompetent Mattis runs the military. ..."
"... The warhawk imperialists – some of them Clausewtizians and most COINdinistas – rule everything. No matter how many lives are lost, no matter how much money is wasted, they demand we remain on the same path of playing world hegemon. George Washington fought the British Empire for our freedom, so our subsequent leaders, starting most importantly with Lincoln, could remake the country into the British Empire 2.0. ..."
"... No; it's psychotic, psychopathic mayhem and mass-murder. Lemma: At any crime-scene, there are one or more perpetrators, possibly accessories, apologists and/or 'idle' bystanders. It is incumbent upon *all* witnesses to attempt to a) restrain malefactors and where possible b) rescue victims from harm. *All* present and not in active resistance to the crime attract proportional guilt. Addendum: Any person profiting from crime also makes him/herself an accessory, like all residents in the 'illegitimate entity' and/or the puppet executives, manufacturers of the means and their enablers = the whole MIC[*] plus all their dependents, say. ..."
"... The US rogue regime = US-M/I/C/4a†-plex, with dog-wagging-tail, its illegitimate sprog the Zionist/Israeli rogue regime + Js = I/J/Z-plex, all components rife with corruption. ..."
"... Save the BS for your fellow geezer drunks at the VFW lounge. Vietnam featured a complete collapse of the conscripted US military, rampant drug use, fragging, insubordination, faked injuries, disintegration of the chain of command, mass murder of civilians, and finally TOTAL DEFEAT after turning tail and running following the negotiation of a charitable "decent interval" allowing the yanks to save some face. Pathetic. ..."
"... Wars fought to make countries like Vietnam open to big corporations to move American jobs there. Corporate money backed by the fist of the Marines has worked all their lives, all their parents' lives, and all the modern history of America. "Why not now?", the sheep ask. ..."
"... According to Bobbie McNamara, American efforts resulted in the murder of over 4 million Vietnamese and the maiming of millions of others .MOSTLY CIVILIANS. ..."
"... If the war mongers had had an all-volunteer army like the one they have today, they could have and would have kept the Vietnam War going indefinitely. But, since they didn't, draftees and their parents wised-up to the Pentagon's money-making scam and put a stop to it by refusing to participate. ..."
"... Very rich families and corporatists started their own think tanks after World War II. This is when the looting began for RAND. These are the bastards Eisenhower was afraid of. Abe Lincoln feared the large corporations born of business profiteering during the U.S. Civil War -- the military industrial complex of the day -- easily constituted the greatest threat to the American republic. ..."
"... Remember that Eisenhower's definition of the complex included among the bastards, not only the military defense industry corporations, but also right alongside them the news media and the university and private research establishments. ..."
"... That war was a cluster fuck and a crime against humanity. It's only purpose was to make a few rich men richer. The murder and destruction in the MENA is just more of the same. ..."
Vietnam: it's always there. Looming in the past, informing American futures.
A 50-year-old war, once labeled the longest in our history, is still alive and well and
still being refought by one group of Americans: the military high command. And almost half a
century later, they're still losing it and blaming others for doing so.
Of course, the U.S. military and Washington policymakers lost the war in Vietnam in the
previous century and perhaps it's well that they did. The United States really had no business
intervening in that anti-colonial civil war in the first place, supporting a South Vietnamese
government of questionable legitimacy, and stifling promised nationwide elections on both sides
of that country's artificial border. In doing so, Washington presented an easy villain for a
North Vietnamese-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency, a group known to Americans
in those years as the Vietcong.
More than two decades of involvement and, at the war's peak, half a million American troops
never altered the basic weakness of the U.S.-backed regime in Saigon. Despite millions of Asian
deaths and 58,000 American ones, South Vietnam's military could not, in the end, hold the line
without American support and finally collapsed under the weight of a conventional North
Vietnamese invasion in April 1975.
There's just one thing. Though a majority of historians (known in academia as the "orthodox"
school) subscribe to the basic contours of the above narrative, the vast majority of senior
American military officers do not. Instead, they're still refighting the Vietnam War to a far
cheerier outcome through the books they read, the scholarship they publish, and (most
disturbingly) the policies they continue to pursue in the Greater Middle East.
The Big Re-Write
In 1986, future general, Iraq-Afghan War commander, and CIA director David Petraeus penned
an article
for the military journal Parameters that summarized his Princeton doctoral
dissertation on the Vietnam War. It was a piece commensurate with then-Major Petraeus's
impressive intellect, except for its disastrous conclusions on the lessons of that war. Though
he did observe that Vietnam had "cost
the military dearly" and that "the frustrations of Vietnam are deeply etched in the minds of
those who lead the services," his real fear was that the war had left the military unprepared
to wage what were then called "low-intensity conflicts" and are now known as
counterinsurgencies. His takeaway: what the country needed wasn't less Vietnams but
better-fought ones. The next time, he concluded fatefully, the military should do a far better
job of implementing counterinsurgency forces, equipment, tactics, and doctrine to win such
wars.
Two decades later, when the next Vietnam-like quagmire did indeed present itself in Iraq, he
and a whole generation of COINdinistas (like-minded officers
devoted to his favored counterinsurgency approach to modern warfare) embraced those very
conclusions to win the war on terror. The names of some of them -- H.R. McMaster and James
Mattis, for instance -- should ring a bell or two these days. In Iraq and later in Afghanistan,
Petraeus and his acolytes would get their chance to translate theory into practice. Americans
-- and much of the rest of the planet -- still live with the results.
Like Petraeus, an entire generation of senior military leaders, commissioned in the years
after the Vietnam War and now atop the defense behemoth, remain fixated on that ancient
conflict. After all these decades, such "thinking" generals and "soldier-scholars" continue to
draw all the wrong lessons from what, thanks in part to them, has now become America's
second longest war.
Rival Schools
Historian Gary Hess identifies two main schools
of revisionist thinking.
Both schools, however, agreed on something basic: that the U.S. military should have won in
Vietnam.
The danger presented by either school is clear enough in the twenty-first century. Senior
commanders, some now serving in key national security positions, fixated on Vietnam, have
translated that conflict's supposed lessons into what now passes for military strategy in
Washington. The
result has been an ever-expanding war on terror campaign waged ceaselessly from South Asia
to West Africa, which has essentially turned out to be perpetual war based on the can-do belief
that counterinsurgency and advise-and-assist missions should have worked in Vietnam and can
work now.
The Go-Big Option
The leading voice of the Clausewitzian school was U.S. Army Colonel and Korean War/Vietnam
War vet Harry Summers, whose 1982 book, On Strategy : A
Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, became an instant classic within the military. It's
easy enough to understand why. Summers argued that civilian policymakers -- not the military
rank-and-file -- had lost the war by focusing hopelessly on the insurgency in South Vietnam
rather than on the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. More troops, more aggressiveness, even
full-scale invasions of communist safe havens in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, would have
led to victory.
Summers had a deep emotional investment in his topic.
Later , he would argue that the source of post-war pessimistic analyses of the conflict lay
in "draft dodgers and war evaders still [struggling] with their consciences." In his own
work, Summers marginalized all Vietnamese actors (as would so many later military historians),
failed to adequately deal with the potential consequences, nuclear or otherwise, of the sorts
of escalation he advocated, and didn't even bother to ask whether Vietnam was a core national
security interest of the United States.
Perhaps he would have done well to reconsider a famous post-war
encounter he had with a North Vietnamese officer, a Colonel Tu, whom he assured that "you
know you never beat us on the battlefield." "That may be so," replied his former enemy, "but it
is also irrelevant."
Whatever its limitations, his work remains influential in military circles to this day. (I
was assigned the book as a West Point cadet!)
A more sophisticated Clausewitzian analysis came from current National Security Adviser
H.R. McMaster in a highly acclaimed 1997 book, Dereliction of
Duty . He argued that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were derelict in failing to give
President Lyndon Johnson an honest appraisal of what it would take to win, which meant that
"the nation went to war without the benefit of effective military advice." He concluded that
the war was lost not in the field or by the media or even on antiwar college campuses, but in
Washington, D.C., through a failure of nerve by the Pentagon's generals, which led civilian
officials to opt for a deficient strategy.
McMaster is a genuine scholar and a gifted writer, but he still suggested that the Joint
Chiefs should have advocated for a more aggressive offensive strategy -- a full ground invasion
of the North or unrelenting carpet-bombing of that country. In this sense, he was just another
"go-big" Clausewitzian who, as historian Ronald Spector pointed
out recently, ignored Vietnamese views and failed to acknowledge -- an observation
of historian Edward Miller -- that "the Vietnam War was a Vietnamese war."
COIN: A Small (Forever) War
Another Vietnam veteran, retired Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Krepinevich, fired the opening
salvo for the hearts-and-minders. In The Army and Vietnam , published in 1986, he
argued
that the NLF, not the North Vietnamese Army, was the enemy's chief center of gravity and that
the American military's failure to emphasize counterinsurgency principles over conventional
concepts of war sealed its fate. While such arguments were, in reality, no more
impressive than those of the Clausewitzians, they have remained popular with military
audiences, as historian Dale Andrade points
out , because they offer a "simple explanation for the defeat in Vietnam."
Krepinevich would write an influential 2005 Foreign Affairspiece , "How to Win
in Iraq," in which he applied his Vietnam conclusions to a new strategy of prolonged
counterinsurgency in the Middle East, quickly winning over the New
York Times 's resident conservative columnist, David Brooks, and generating "discussion in
the Pentagon, CIA, American Embassy in Baghdad, and the office of the vice president."
In 1999, retired army officer and Vietnam veteran Lewis Sorley penned the definitive
hearts-and-minds tract, A Better War : The
Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam . Sorley boldly
asserted
that, by the spring of 1970, "the fighting wasn't over, but the war was won." According to his
comforting tale, the real explanation for failure lay with the "big-war" strategy of U.S.
commander General William Westmoreland. The counterinsurgency strategy of his successor,
General Creighton Abrams -- Sorley's knight in shining armor -- was (or at least should have
been) a war winner.
Critics
noted that Sorley overemphasized the marginal differences between the two generals'
strategies and produced a remarkably counterfactual work. It didn't matter, however. By 2005,
just as the situation in Iraq, a country then locked in a sectarian civil war amid an American
occupation, went from bad to worse, Sorley's book found
its way into the hands of the head of U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid, and State
Department counselor Philip Zelikow. By then, according
to the Washington Post 's David Ignatius, it could also "be found on the
bookshelves of senior military officers in Baghdad."
Another influential hearts-and-minds devotee was Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl. (He even
made it
onto The Daily Show with Jon Stewart .) His Learning to Eat Soup with
a Knife : Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam followed Krepinevich in
claiming that "if [Creighton] Abrams had gotten the call to lead the American effort at the
start of the war, America might very well have won it." In 2006, the Wall Street
Journalreported that Army Chief of Staff
General Peter Schoomaker "so liked [Nagl's] book that he made it required reading for all
four-star generals," while the Iraq War commander of that moment, General George Casey, gave
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a copy during a visit to Baghdad.
David Petraeus and current Secretary of Defense James Mattis, co-authors in 2006 of
FM 3-24, the first ( New York Times -reviewed ) military field manual for counterinsurgency since
Vietnam, must also be considered among the pantheon of hearts-and-minders. Nagl wrote a
foreword for their manual,
while Krepinevich provided a glowing back-cover endorsement .
Such revisionist interpretations would prove tragic in Iraq and Afghanistan, once they had
filtered down to the entire officer corps.
Reading All the Wrong Books
In 2009, when former West Point history professor Colonel Gregory Daddis was deployed
to Iraq as the command historian for the Multinational Corps -- the military's primary tactical
headquarters -- he noted that corps commander Lieutenant General Charles Jacoby had assigned a
professional reading list to his principal subordinates. To his disappointment, Daddis also
discovered that the only Vietnam War book included was Sorley's A Better War . This
should have surprised no one, since his argument -- that American soldiers in Vietnam
were
denied an impending victory by civilian policymakers, a liberal media, and antiwar protestors
-- was still resonant among the officer corps in year six of the Iraq quagmire. It wasn't the
military's fault!
Officers have long distributed professional reading lists for subordinates, intellectual
guideposts to the complex challenges ahead. Indeed, there's much to be admired in the concept,
but also potential dangers in such lists as they inevitably influence the thinking of an entire
generation of future leaders. In the case of Vietnam, the perils are obvious. The generals have
been assigning and reading problematic books for years, works that were essentially meant to
reinforce professional pride in the midst of a series of unsuccessful and unending wars.
Just after 9/11, for instance, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers -- who spoke at my
West Point graduation -- included Summers's On
Strategy on his list. A few years later, then-Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker
added
McMaster's Dereliction of Duty . The trend continues today. Marine Corps Commandant
Robert Neller has kept McMaster and added Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger (he of the
illegal bombing of both Laos and Cambodia and war
criminal fame). Current Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley kept Kissinger and
added good
old Lewis Sorley. To top it all off, Secretary of Defense Mattis has included
yet another Kissinger book and, in a different list , Krepinevich's
The Army and Vietnam .
Just as important as which books made the lists is what's missing from them: none of these
senior commanders include newer scholarship
,
novels , or journalistic accounts which might raise thorny, uncomfortable questions about
whether the Vietnam War was winnable, necessary, or advisable, or incorporate local voices that
might highlight the limits of American influence and power.
Serving in the Shadow of Vietnam
Most of the generals leading the war on terror just missed service in the Vietnam War.
They graduated from various colleges or West Point in the years immediately following the
withdrawal of most U.S. ground troops or thereafter: Petraeus in
1974 , future Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal in 1976 , and present National Security Adviser H.R.
McMaster in 1984 .
Secretary of Defense Mattis finished ROTC and graduated from Central Washington University in
1971 , while
Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly enlisted at the tail end of the Vietnam War, receiving his
commission in 1976
.
In other words, the generation of officers now overseeing the still-spreading war on terror
entered military service at the end of or after the tragic war in Southeast Asia. That meant
they narrowly escaped combat duty in the bloodiest American conflict since World War II and so
the professional credibility that went with it. They were mentored and taught by academy
tactical officers, ROTC instructors, and commanders who had cut their teeth on that conflict.
Vietnam literally dominated the discourse of their era -- and it's never ended.
Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, and the others entered service when military prestige had
reached a nadir or was just rebounding. And those reading lists taught the young officers where
to lay the blame for that -- on civilians in Washington (or in the nation's streets) or on a
military high command too weak to assert its authority effectively. They would serve in
Vietnam's shadow, the shadow of defeat, and the conclusions they would draw from it would only
lead to twenty-first-century disasters .
From Vietnam to the War on Terror to Generational War
All of this misremembering, all of those Vietnam "lessons" inform the U.S. military's
ongoing "surges" and "advise-and-assist" approaches to its wars in the Greater Middle East and
Africa. Representatives of both Vietnam revisionist schools now guide the development of the
Trump administration's version of global strategy. President Trump's in-house Clausewitzians
clamor for -- and receive
-- ever more delegated authority to do their damnedest and what retired General (and Vietnam
vet) Edward Meyer called for
back in 1983: "a freer hand in waging war than they had in Vietnam." In other words, more
bombs, more troops, and carte blanche to escalate such conflicts to their hearts' content.
Meanwhile, President Trump's hearts-and-minds faction consists of officers who have
spent three administrations expanding COIN-influenced missions to approximately 70%
of the world's nations. Furthermore, they've recently fought for and been granted a new
"mini-surge" in Afghanistan intended to -- in disturbingly Vietnam-esque language -- "break the
deadlock ," "reverse the decline," and "end the
stalemate " there. Never mind that neither 100,000 U.S. troops (when I was
there in 2011) nor 16 full years of combat could, in the term of the trade, "stabilize"
Afghanistan. The can-do, revisionist believers atop the national security state have convinced
Trump that -- despite his original
instincts -- 4,000 or 5,000 (or
6,000 or 7,000) more troops (and yet more
drones ,
planes , and other equipment) will do the trick. This represents tragedy bordering on
farce.
The hearts and minders and Clausewitzians atop the military establishment since 9/11 are
never likely to stop citing their versions of the Vietnam War as the key to victory today; that
is, they will never stop focusing on a war that was always unwinnable and never worth fighting.
None of today's acclaimed military personalities seems willing to consider that Washington
couldn't have won in Vietnam because, as former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak (who
flew
269 combat missions over that country) noted in the
recent Ken Burns documentary series, "we were fighting on the wrong side."
Today's leaders don't even pretend that the post-9/11 wars will ever end. In an
interview last June, Petraeus -- still considered a sagacious guru of the Defense establishment
-- disturbingly described the Afghan conflict as " generational ."
Eerily enough, to cite a Vietnam-era precedent, General Creighton Abrams predicted something
similar. speaking to the White House as the war in Southeast Asia was winding down. Even as
President Richard Nixon slowly withdrew U.S. forces, handing over their duties to the South
Vietnamese Army (ARVN) -- a process known then as "Vietnamization" -- the general warned
that, despite ARVN improvements, continued U.S. support "would be required indefinitely to
maintain an effective force." Vietnam, too, had its "generational" side (until, of course, it
didn't).
It's not that our generals don't read. They do. They just doggedly continue to read the
wrong books.
In 1986, General Petraeus ended his influential Parametersarticle
with a quote from historian George Herring: "Each historical situation is unique and the use of
analogy is at best misleading, at worst, dangerous." When it comes to Vietnam and a cohort of
officers shaped in its shadow (and even now convinced it could have been won), "dangerous"
hardly describes the results. They've helped bring us generational war and, for today's young
soldiers, ceaseless tragedy.
[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an
unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of
the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]
The book that needs to be written is the one that explores the question, "Does this war need
to be fought by us?"
The guys running the show now were mid-grade officers when I served in the '80s. They know
we already were waging a war on terror, but it was a quiet one, e.g "low-intensity conflict,"
the kind that doesn't pump up budgets or put lots of ribbons and badges on the chests of more
than a few of them, much less punch the ticket for promotion.
The problem here is one of governance: Civilians who should be reigning in and questioning
the military leadership (including the senior civilian leadership at DoD and apparently
State) when it wants to take us on yet another foreign adventure seem instead to be be
captive to them, because the spoils of war accrue to their benefit via procurement in their
districts.
Vietnam and the GWOT are merely symptoms of a bigger problem.
BTW, re Vietnam: Vietnam went through its Communist phase, but in a rather short time came
back to pseudo-capitalism, much like China, so aside from nearly 60k US troops and a few
million Viets killed and 20 years of lost time, what did we gain from fighting there?
America tends to gain from commerce what it thinks it will get by warfare. Not so much the
other way around.
Didn't US realize that it can win any war with bribes and trade?
Vietnam lost in the end. Its greedy corrupt elites are now puppets of US. They allow
open prostitution in Ho Chi Minh city. They allow Vietnamese women to be a bunch of hookers
again.
And Vietnam even has homo parades because it comes with more gibs and bribes.
They established a myth that we almost won in Vietnam but the politicians wouldn't let us
finish the job, claiming we never lost a battle in Vietnam. That is false, so I posted a list
of 104 "Lost Battles of the Vietnam War" that squashed this myth.
"America tends to gain from commerce what it thinks it will get by warfare. Not so
much the other way around" Rather like 20th century Germany, don't you think?
Thanks for that link. I agree, whitewashing those tragedies is a grave disservice to our
soldiers who had to fight in those conditions (how are we supposed to learn from our mistakes
if we can't even come to terms with what we did wrong?).
No the JCS initially said SE Asia was strategically a backwater and not worth the
concentrating of America's limited resources. But military high command were operating within
longstanding army protocols of subordinating the military to civilian policymakers. It was
the CIA's job to say whether the war could be won and they were always skeptical.
America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War makes clear who was responsible for
pressing for escalation and bombing in Vietnam, who was the optimist, and who continued to
insisted after it had finished that the war had stabilized a domino.
If one's fundamental image of the world is as a place full of Quislings, McCains and assorted
dual nationals; then it follows that one will be militarily a Coindinista. If only third
world citizens were like American pols and stayed bought, but they aren't and they don't. If
one's fundamental image is that it is a world full of nationalists, patriots and Churchills:
then the bomb them back to non-existence; then it follows that one is a Summer's soldier.
Unfortunately, if one wishes to debate other nuanced alternatives to this dichotomy; the
enemy gets to shoot first. A policeman walks a beat in his city because he is paid to do it,
the "world's indispensable policeman" is unnecessary to the rest of the world but inevitable
to himself.
The Vietnam war killed the draft. The draft is involuntary servitude, slavery in a sense.
For ordinary Americans this was the only positive thing to come from the war.
Blah blah blah. That war was a cluster fuck and a crime against humanity. It's only purpose
was to make a few rich men richer. The murder and destruction in the MENA is just more of the
same.
It's also weird that the idea of Vietnam War as a missionary conflict is never discussed. The
colonial Vietnam & later South Vietnam government gave preference to christians in
governmental positions, bureaucracy & had a monopoly on education. The prevailing
narrative in the west, is that somehow christianity is better & that people flock to it
due to this, just like their ancestors did. Mosmaiorum.org/persecution_list.html
For example, the anti Buddhist discriminatory laws in Korea are never discussed, neither
is the flooding of Japan with bibles post ww2. In the present age you have missionaries
following closely behind the USA army & organizations like the US council on religious
freedom being headed by missionaries sic. soul vultures.
From that pov, if white nationalists cannot control the predatory instincts of 'their'
people nor disavow them by becoming Pagan; then, they deserve their fate & should expect
no support from outsiders. As others have remarked, tariffs & protectionism help accrue
capital as do socially conservative views. The pushing of free trade & social liberalism
on 2nd/3rd world countries is akin to kicking the ladder. It's probably in everyone's
interest for the Protestant west to collapse under Afro-Islamic demographic pressure so the
great clean up can begin. Tldr yes state power leads to liberalism & liberal views but,
if you view that as the legacy of your people, fuck your people.
we are deeply at odds. We did not lose the Vietnam conflict. I am confident that billions
of dollars have been spent drilling that myth into the minds of well everyone. I remember
being a young poli-sci student in KS. And as I listened to the lecture on Vietnam, did the
reading my conclusion was so distant from his as to cause me no small amount of turmoil. The
contention that we lost Vietnam is so counter to the data -- it makes the Twilight Zone look
like Gilligan's Island, the twists on reality are directionless -- but conclude we lost, when
nothing could be further from the truth.
I have another theory, the reason that Vietnam remains etched in the psyche is because the
analysis was political as opposed to what actually occurred. This kind of hyperventilated
self flagellating recriminations will distort truth. Perception over reality -- then becomes
self fulling history.
_________________
But to the point. The US has lost two wars: The war of 1812 and in my view, the Iraq
conflict -- no direct fault of those on the ground doing the fighting. And we may lose the
Afghanistan gambit. It's a loss because it fell apart during our occupation. The guerrilla
warfare (asymmetrics) was not the issues for that failure. The failure was in
1. unjustifiable cause
2. poor implementation
3. under resourced
4. an inability to maintain order among communities -- (1-3)
5. and just a lot of bad decisions
Trying compare Vietnam to Iraq is like trying compare a stone to water in similarity. You
might be able to some generic references and very tiny specifics, but overall: the
environment politically and strategically, just never mesh. We didn't invade Vietnam. They
had a functioning government. There were clear lines of who was who based on borders (I am
not ignoring the insurgency -- Vietcong, etc.
It was the cold war and unlike Iraq there were not six varying countries throwing a myriad
of combatants into the fray with varying agendas and varying religious convictions. Even the
physical environment demanded a different strategy, insurgents or no insurgents.
One has to plan for insurgent warfare as invading any country is bound to have those who
get the best defense is one of stealth when your foe is as large a target as the US was in
Iraq. But for all of the complaints about Counter-Insurgency the one that no one seems
willing to state is the simplest. Don't invade countries for which there is no clean or clear
motive to do so. It's that simple. There was never a need to invade Iraq, if anything we
should have readjusted our dynamic and began a process of easing sanctions for their aide in
countering terrorism.
There was no reason to invade Afghanistan -- even to distribute more bikinis and advance
killing children in the womb. We wanted twenty guys and instead we stirred a hornet's nest .
. . ok well, more than one.
Vietnam really was an act of selflessness, we wanted to shore up a small republic seeking
a different course to communism. It bolstered our own ideas against the grand schema of the
Soviet Union, rightly or wrongly. Now you are not the only one who has a gripe with
counterinsurgency.
And I think it's a debate/discussion worth having, and while it may be useful to examine
COIN as to Vietnam strategically -- I think it can be done minus the incorrect and yet
incessant sack cloth and ashes built on mountains of liberal psychological faux trauma as if
the trauma of war is somehow unique to Vietnam,. It is not. As you know war is a nasty filthy
business, best left alone. But on occasion one gets pushed into a fight as did S. Vietnam and
when that screw is turned -- well history is replete of the consequences, the waste, the
blood, the brokenness . . . The tragedy of war does not mean one loses a war.
How true! If only the US had recognized the power of man's baser instincts and did what
the US does best -- continue selling its culture of consumerism and hedonism, Vietnam would
have arrived at the point much sooner and with virtually no loss of life.
Ultimately, the victory of WW2 due to sheer weight of industrial productivity ramp and
hence massive output of planes, tanks, submarines, etc. made defense a large part of the US
economy. Since that time, too many entrenched interests just never want the military to
downsize. Hence, the US has to keep invented new demand for a product that otherwise would
not have such demand, but keeps some major entrenched interests powerful.
I mean, the Korean war started just 5 years after WW2 ended. They could barely wait for a
new crop of boys to turn 18 and become cannon fodder. 50,000 in Korea right after the 300,000
in WW2.
When casualties became politically incorrect (after VietNam), the focus shifted towards
lengthy 'nation building', that was not meant to succeed, but just to cost a lot for a long
time. In theory, the Iraq War could have worked, IF the true objective was the installation
of a moderate regime in Iraq, coupled with no extended US occupation. But that was not the
true objective after all, so it did not work.
The BIGGEST lesson to come out of the illegal and immoral War against Vietnam is that the
draft was impeding the MIC's effort to sell Americans on the idea of supporting endless
war.
Get rid of the draft and there will be no protests hell raised back home by people of
draft age–and their families and friends–who don't want to get drafted to fight
wars so colonels can become generals; Wall Street can make a killing on the killing and so
the Pentagon can try out its new 'gee-whiz' weapons in the field on actual people.
The next biggest lesson was that the media must be tamed and brought under control with
embedding, so they'll push the Pentagon's and Wall Street message of duty, honor, Mom and
apple pie onto gullible Americans, who now damn near get orgasmic when they see a
multi-billion dollar killing machine–the B-2–fly over the upcoming gladiator
battle in the newest billion dollar coliseum and go into the State-mandated 'Two Minutes
Hate' whenever they see or hear the word Muslim or Islam.
For the record, I did my time in the US Army with the 82nd Airborne.
So America worships Ares/Mars and doesn't expect the god of War to want to eat them too?
There shall be wars and rumors of wars .I so look forward to watching this love of war spread
itself from sea to shining sea.
Until the young wise up and realize that the military operations in other countries have
nothing to do with the freedoms we have here and that they're being used as fodder for the
investments that the MIC has in the companies that make the tools of war, we will keep having
this nonsense. The kids need to wise up. The government has at its disposal all it needs to
'win' if it wants to. But if you 'win' , the sales and manufacturing of the
goodies is curtailed. They'd rather send the kids into the meat grinder all pumped up
thinking they're 'preserving freedom' LOL!
Nice, thank U. I´d never before had figured out, never outlined such a precise
conceptual sight of the two still remaining American mindsets on HOW to win.
Yes, cause for them Amerika must obviously must always win. So there are two viewpoints, that
in plain clear English we citizens of the shitholin´ countries wherever -- express as
follows:
Yes, you say tariffs and proteccionism help accrue capital.
Have you got any objection against a large, populous but still poor country (like Nigeria,
Indonesia, India or Brazil) sticking to higher (though not sky high) tariffs and
protectionism to raise their production, their income and their living standards?
That was PRECISELY HOW the US, Uk, Germany and the Meiji era Japan, not to mention China
from 1949 to Chu enLai) acted and because of it rose the heights of the present status and
well being societies.
Yes, you naive repeater, let´s us first protect ourselves from the globalist wolves
and THEN, we can sit down and talk but from a firm solid position, not the other way round.
cut the frack! We southern people are fed up with that northern hemispheric sales talk
– it ´s so convenient to you – but the web exists and times change.
It's not that our generals don't read. They do. They just doggedly continue to read the
wrong books.
It's not just the generals. The whole idea of the state is to control the uncontrollable
in order to continue "growing". That's why we conducted Vietnam as we did and why we conduct
operations as we do all over the world. Rather than Total War that produces winners and
losers we are trying to keep a lid on behavioral sinks and modify behavior so that economic
"growth" can continue.
I am not advocating Total War, but I am predicting that horrible war is coming.
How many dead men will it take
To build a dike that will not break?
The Zionists have been the root cause of every war that America has been in since WWI and
right on through the wars in the Mideast and the wars in the Mideast were perpetrated by the
Israeli and Zionist controlled deep state attack on 911.
America is under Zionist control and if anyone doubts this, just remember Israel did the
attack on 911 and got away with and every thinking American knows that Zionist Israel did the
attack which killed 3000 Americans, that is control.
. . .supporting a South Vietnamese government of questionable legitimacy
Actually the US created the "Republic of Vietnam" within Vietnam, which was rather
unusual, and then fought Vietnam. The US grabbed a Christian out of a New Jersey seminary
(Ngo Dinh Diem) to run the Buddhist "country," that didn't help. More recently the US has
overthrown governments (Iraq and Afghanistan) and then fought the natives. Whatever, it
doesn't work. The citizens (AKA dissidents, insurgents, terrorists, etc.) so effected don't
want US troops in their countries, and who can blame them.
Why do credulous Americans read anti-war books written by war criminals? Only brainwashed
people support the troops. Most Americans hated soldiers after Vietnam. They had seen
soldiers raping wives and daughters, burning houses and huts and crops and wiping out entire
villages. They knew that men who agree to kill for a paycheck do other bad things like raping
and looting and then writing books about it later.
The cons put a stop to all those "incorrect" ideas American slaves had developed by
ramping up the propaganda in the 1980s. Movies kicked in and "learned" the zombies about the
wonderfulness of war and killing and how American soldiers kill with love in their hearts and
the tragedy of the boy baby killers left behind – probably by "communists in the US
Government."
The United States really had no business intervening
That's a, maybe "the," key concept. The US has always had enough internal problems
of its own to deal with and it should always have tended to its own interest first. Damned
know-it-all, brainless busybodies!
I suspect most of them would wise up if their elders did so first, and would teach 'em.
One of the most annoying sights to me is to see some ancient fart wearing some sign that he's
a vet. Even though I was once a sucker too, I always make it a point to remind them that we
had no business in whatever war they happen to be glorifying and still wallowing in. How old
does one have to be to get a clue?
Nothing quite says freedom like heavily armed soldiers on the streets demanding papers. Soon
the US will have the same situation, with the "freedom loving" Americans willingly
surrendering all their freedoms for "safety." Today the US government spies on everyone's
communications, conducts over 80,000 SWAT raids a year, locks over 2 million people in actual
slavery, and lets the cops execute people on the street. Nothing quite says Freedom when cops
can execute poor people without any repercussions. Nothing quite says Freedom when opiate
casualties in one year exceed the American total in Vietnam. Nothing quite says zombie when
Americans can't see the war that is being waged on them right now.
Is that true? The Military simply harvested the poors out of the hills, the South and
other rural areas the same way they would have drafted 'em. All the kids respond once the
Government offers them a way out of potential starvation and hopeless poverty. That's just a
better way to draft people, although they won't call it that.
The same generals who let 911 happen and started the Iraq war still run the show. All of
them should have faced a firing squad for that, but instead, the grossly incompetent General
Kelly runs the White House and the grossly incompetent Mattis runs the military.
"The danger presented by either school is clear enough in the twenty-first century."
Apparently it is not close to clear. The warhawk imperialists – some of them
Clausewtizians and most COINdinistas – rule everything. No matter how many lives are
lost, no matter how much money is wasted, they demand we remain on the same path of playing
world hegemon. George Washington fought the British Empire for our freedom, so our subsequent
leaders, starting most importantly with Lincoln, could remake the country into the British
Empire 2.0.
"Because we are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every go*k is an American
trying to get out." Replace 'Vietnamese' with 'Middle Easterners' and 'gook' with 'Arab' or
'Moslem,' and you have the Neocon position. Replace 'Vietnamese' with 'the world' and replace
'gook' with 'dark skinned non-Christian' and place the word "liberal' before 'American,' and
you have the Liberal/Leftist position.
As a youth during that time it seemed like a strange idea that they were pushing. How could
Vietnamese be invading Vietnam? They already live there. The Americans had to travel
thousands of miles to prevent this. Years later I realize my youthful intuition was right;
Vietnamese can't invade Vietnam. This North-South dichotomy was just a made up propaganda
tool. The South was an artificial concoction set up by the West to divide someone else's
country. This question of how could we have won is absurd nonsense. What would 'winning' have
looked like? The South would just have been a multi-billion millstone around our neck.
The can-do, revisionist believers atop the national security state have convinced Trump
that -- despite his original instincts -- 4,000 or 5,000 (or 6,000 or 7,000) more troops
(and yet more drones, planes, and other equipment) will do the trick. This represents
tragedy bordering on farce.
No; it's psychotic, psychopathic mayhem and mass-murder. Lemma: At any crime-scene,
there are one or more perpetrators, possibly accessories, apologists and/or 'idle'
bystanders. It is incumbent upon *all* witnesses to attempt to a) restrain malefactors and
where possible b) rescue victims from harm. *All* present and not in active resistance to the
crime attract proportional guilt. Addendum: Any person profiting from crime also makes
him/herself an accessory, like all residents in the 'illegitimate entity' and/or the puppet
executives, manufacturers of the means and their enablers = the whole MIC[*] plus all their
dependents, say.
[*] The US rogue regime = US-M/I/C/4a†-plex, with dog-wagging-tail, its
illegitimate sprog the Zionist/Israeli rogue regime + Js = I/J/Z-plex, all components rife
with corruption.
a = academic = econ, psy, leg et al.; 4 = MSM+PFBCs, † = churches
add a few significant stragglers like $ = banksters & ¿ = spies
=====
It's a lot, and here I point for emphasis to all the citizens of the two named entities;
silence is acquiescence. Take a look at the result, not 'just' in Afghanistan but Libya,
Syria etc., the WC7in5 [fortunately not
yet Iran]; wherever the US/Zs deploy their 'hammers.'
In the fewest words: The US/Zs including their 'ordinary people' are all true monsters,
with the only exception being the actively objecting few.
Not so BTW, from the above [but not only] I conclude that there can be no 'god' –
for surely, any such would strike all the US/Z villains down.
Again a 'special case' for emphasis, the intellectuals and academics who really should
know better but where again, silence is acquiescence.
*Guilty, your honour; may they all hang by the neck until dead!* rgds
American sheep can't see war even though they are in one. What better weapon than to have a
group of writers spreading disinformation and colorful propaganda that revolves around
discrediting the other propaganda with falsehoods and romanticization of the war that came
before. Let's have yet another debate about the thing that happened half a century ago
because driving the flock in circles gets them no where closer to resistance.
Meanwhile the real war. If the financial crisis wasn't a terrorist attack because the
press never told you, what will you believe? If more men and women die in one year because of
opiates than in the entire Vietnam effort, will the real owners tell you in their newspapers
that they do it because they want to win?
I think the kids are more pumped up with college tuition, VA health , a chance to learn a
civilian applicable skill , citizenship and something to do other than competing with illegal
Indios for low wages.
Save the BS for your fellow geezer drunks at the VFW lounge. Vietnam featured a
complete collapse of the conscripted US military, rampant drug use, fragging,
insubordination, faked injuries, disintegration of the chain of command, mass murder of
civilians, and finally TOTAL DEFEAT after turning tail and running following the negotiation
of a charitable "decent interval" allowing the yanks to save some face. Pathetic.
The Vietnam war was not a "civil-war" but was an INVASION by the North Vietnamese
communists, who were not amenable to letting people decide for themselves what political
system they chose to live under. They wanted "the whole pie". The South Vietnamese and
American military fought courageously, with one hand tied behind their backs, as they were
not permitted to attack the supply lines, logistics and staging areas of the North Vietnamese
communists. The American news media played a large part in the sympathetic attitudes they had
towards the communists, taking every chance to denigrate American and South Vietnamese
troops, a prime example was communist sympathizer Walter Cronkite reporting that the 1968
"Tet offensive" was a "major loss" for Americans and south Vietnamese, despite it being a
total slaughter of North Vietnamese communists and the Viet Cong. In fact, the Viet Cong
operating in the South were almost all totally decimated.
Yes, the final result of the Vietnam war was communist control, BUT, it was not due to the
efforts of South Vietnamese and American troops. The Vietnamese "boat people" who risked life
and limb to escape that communist "paradise" have a totally different story to tell, but
which had been rarely reported. Ken Burns is a communist sympathizer whose "documentary" on
the Vietnam war was so one-sided, even the communists admitted that his whole premise on the
Vietnam war was one-sided and false. Communist sympathizer Ken Burns inadvertently "let it
slip" that "re-education" by the communists was not a "six month deal" (as he claimed) in
which those in positions of power in South Vietnam would be "re-educated", but were actually
prisons, in which "enemies of the (communist) state were to be interned for as long as 20
years. It is interesting to note that the communists could not exert the same harsh level of
control as was the case in the North, to the people in the South.
Apparently unfamiliar with my long and detailed discussions here and at TAC about the
Vietnam War. I don't think you will find a single suggestion in mt two or more years of
discussion on Vietnam , that it was a civil war -- it was not. In every way, the North
Vietnamese were the aggressors. And if anyone looking at the political issues and objectives
of what happened in Vietnam – those who protested got nearly every aspect about Vietnam
wrong, nearly every contention they make was predicated on the incorrect information, except
one.
war is a nasty filthy affair in which a lot hoes wrong – because that is part and
parcel to the nature of war so many moving pieces on so many potential unpredictable planes.
The entire enterprise is best avoided, but sometimes as in the case of S. Vietnam, you are
left little choice but to defend yourself. Boys and girls afraid to fight screaming "Give
peace a chance" at the defenders like pushing a drowning men under the waves and telling him
all he need do is swim.
You are preaching to the choir and the preacher.
I am going to avoid rehashing the conflict, I think the data sets are on my side in tons.
But I think the authors intentions are to really dismantle the cadre and their advocacy of
COIN. Given that the current President has reneged on his campaign agenda to avoid needless
wars violating the territory of others to regime change. The issue of counter insurgency is
relevant. Because it looks like we are in for more than we bargained for. No doubt, SAS, the
French Legionaries, CIA and a spec ops contingents are pre-prepping for insurgencies of our
own.
A brief look suggests that the only effective response to counter insurgency is
intelligence and brutal response. though intended to suggest finesse, in the end -- it's root
them out and destroy them. I think this is one those the cure is worse than the illness,
because without indigenous support for your political and strategic goals in country --
brutal reprisals eventually reignite acts of terror as a means of self defense.
What are you a troll playing the same old broken record spewing forth the same old line,
for there was a vote coming up by the Geneva Accord, to decide just what kind of government
the two Vietnam's wanted, a vote that would'nt go the way we wanted thus the false flag to
get us involved.
FDR had made a deal with Ho that if they would rise up and drive out the Japs that Vietnam
could choose their own destiny, colonialism was dead he said, well until that little man in
the to big a house got into office and then once again America's word wasn't worth a mouth
full of warm spit and its never changed
Today's officer corps would spare us all a great deal of cost, blood and grief and we
Americans would all do much better if the cadets', midshipmen's, officer candidates' and
officer corps' reading list began with the Bernard Fall book Rue Sans Joie .
Rand? American Conservative? Tom's Dispatch? All fake news for the sheep, i.e COIN. If
people want change, they have to refuse to cooperate. That means no voting. Voting means you
agree with the basic trends and just want to tweak the system. All of us have gotten cheated
by the Government all of our lives. Destruction of schools so people can't learn. Wars
fought to make countries like Vietnam open to big corporations to move American jobs there.
Corporate money backed by the fist of the Marines has worked all their lives, all their
parents' lives, and all the modern history of America. "Why not now?", the sheep
ask.
The religious aspect of the Vietnamese CIVIL WAR is overlooked by the senile VFW geezers
posting here. The patriots were mostly Buddhists the quislings were mostly Catholics
(inherited from the French). In between perving little kids, American Cardinals and Bishops
demanded even more war and Vietnamese blood. The bloodthirsty homo, Cardinal Spellman, would
even visit the troops in person and exhort them to create more carnage and mayhem.
According to Bobbie McNamara, American efforts resulted in the murder of over 4 million
Vietnamese and the maiming of millions of others .MOSTLY CIVILIANS. The role of the vile
bloodthirsty Homo Cult of the Seven Hills has been mostly overlooked.
Note, I list of sites is not definitive. There are articles critical and article
supportive of COIN. Some articles are just descriptive of what COIN means. COIN has been a
subject of a good deal of debate for a very long time. Most articles are from TAC because
that is the site I most frequently read and comment. And as Dr. Unz will tell you, they
invite a host of articles by a host of authors -- with varying view points.
About Rand, they are one of the most noteable contributors to government policy via
research and while one may not appreciate their advocacy, it's not a bad idea to read what
they are presenting on issues, in this case COIN. Even considering broad definitions of fake
news -- it is unlikely that Rand would be included as such an outlet.
One of the advances launched in the late sixties -- forward was that Vietnam was a MIC
windfall and in fact manufactured by the MIC.
I don't think there is much evidence of that. Pres Johnson and most of the leadership
actually saw it as a case for democracy against the Chinese, the Soviets -- etc. You are not
going to be able to escape the private sector profiting from war. Sure had democracy and
capitalism actually won the day , I don't think there is any question money would have been
made -- capitalism is a very healthy system -- if operated minus manipulation/unfair
dealings. But that is not unique. One does business where business is. but cold war strategic
aims made money for lots of people -- that doesn't deny that there was actually a system of
proxy engagements for democracy and communism.
I am not a member of the VFW. I don't drink and have never been drunk. There was drug use
how prevalent it was is unclear. not enough to prevent mission readiness, it appears.
A lot has been made of fragging, but if you can find the numbers -- The evidence is very
sparse that this practice was anywhere close to a staple. Here's an estimate 800 such
incidents attempted. But given that there are only about 13 confirms that estimations is
suspect. Some 3 million service members service in Vietnam that's a percentage of
0.026666666666% attempted. The actual number of men who died as the result of fragging
0.0005% and i used the highest number of fifteen actuals.
There were tragic incidents of mass killings, but those two were rare. The next series of
complaints are hard to quantify -- but suffice it to say, whatever the complaints -- when
push came to shove the US service member repeatedly got the job done. And contrary to your
comments, the process of the US withdrawal is well documented. More than anything, they
secured a line of defense, and the situation at home was the most pressing. There is no
evidence that the US ran from the battle field.
OI think the evidence is clear that we should maintained support via air and sea power to
ensure the victory was maintained on behalf of the S. Vietnamese who fought and died to
defend their country. kudos to the Aussie's for their loyal support.
If the war mongers had had an all-volunteer army like the one they have today, they could
have and would have kept the Vietnam War going indefinitely. But, since they didn't, draftees
and their parents wised-up to the Pentagon's money-making scam and put a stop to it by
refusing to participate.
Money's made fighting wars not winning them. 1945 was the last time the US made the
mistake of winning a war, and may not have made that one had Russia not been on the verge of
invading and occupying Japan, thus forcing the US into bringing the war to a close.
Very rich families and corporatists started their own think tanks after World War II.
This is when the looting began for RAND. These are the bastards Eisenhower was afraid of. Abe
Lincoln feared the large corporations born of business profiteering during the U.S. Civil War
-- the military industrial complex of the day -- easily constituted the greatest threat to
the American republic.
Remember that Eisenhower's definition of the complex included among the bastards, not
only the military defense industry corporations, but also right alongside them the news media
and the university and private research establishments.
Tom Jefferson thought periodic revolution against wealth and authority was desirable to
keep these bastards in check. Which implies that he figured they would inevitably get us by
the throat down on the floor from time to time.
I don't think that you understand at all the history of the USG involvement in
VietNam–an act of selflessness??? What a crock.
The entire foreign policy of the united states has been controlled by the
military/industrial/security/espionage etc etc complex since, at least, the end of WWII. that
group doesn't really care about victory–on going conflict somewhere is the only goal.
Personally, I doubt that the USG has ever committed a selfless act in it's entire history.
VietNam was just one stop in a long line of USG aggression.
Of course, the U.S. military and Washington policymakers lost the war in Vietnam in
the previous century and perhaps it's well that they did.
LOL.. True enough. Yet an assortment of "Church of Rambo" true believers in civilian life,
including several here on Unz, continue to insist that that the US never lost the war, hell,
never even lost a battle -- claims all debunked by credible historians and military men who
fought there.
the vast majority of senior American military officers do not. Instead, they're still
refighting the Vietnam War to a far cheerier outcome through the books they read, the
scholarship they publish, and (most disturbingly) the policies they continue to pursue in
the Greater Middle East.
The weakness of the piece is that you don't say exactly which Vietnam approach today's
generals are following. Are they doing the "big battalions" approach of Westmoreland's
"search and destroy"? Are they doing the "Expanding Inkblot" of Marine General Krulak,
Sorley's "Better war", or John Paul Vann's "Hearts and Minds"?? You say these are all things
from Vietnam but exactly which one is in place, and why is it losing?
Blah blah blah. That war was a cluster fuck and a crime against humanity. It's only
purpose was to make a few rich men richer. The murder and destruction in the MENA is just
more of the same.
Two decades later, when the next Vietnam-like quagmire did indeed present itself in
Iraq, he and a whole generation of COINdinistas (like-minded officers devoted to his
favored counterinsurgency approach to modern warfare) embraced those very conclusions to
win the war on terror.
Again questionable. Petraeus had the correct approach to counter the previous "lets just
invade and beat Saddam" approach of Rumsfeld. Rummy's "lean force" package backed by almost
unlimited air power was enough to win the conventional struggle but was woefully short of the
numbers needed for occupation and pacification. Same thing happened to Hitler in the Balkans.
Initial smooth success, grinding guerrilla attrition for years afterward.
Both schools, however, agreed on something basic: that the U.S. military should have
won in Vietnam.
"Winning" by 1972 did not contemplate victorious US troops marching into Hanoi, or total
abandonment of the field by PAVN/VC but a better final political settlement enabling the
southern regime to survive, and/or a "decent interval" for the US to save face.
n 1999, retired army officer and Vietnam veteran Lewis Sorley penned the definitive
hearts-and-minds tract, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of
America's Last Years in Vietnam. Sorley boldly asserted that, by the spring of 1970, "the
fighting wasn't over, but the war was won." According to his comforting tale, the real
explanation for failure lay with the "big-war" strategy of U.S. commander General William
Westmoreland. The counterinsurgency strategy of his successor, General Creighton Abrams --
Sorley's knight in shining armor -- was (or at least should have been) a war
winner.
You are misrepresenting Sorley's full argument somewhat. Sorley did not envision or claim
that there would have been any sweeping US victory with US troops marching into Hanoi, or
that the VC/NVA would flee and abandon the struggle. A big part of his argument is for "a
better war" – that is- the end game of which inevitably would be a BETTER NEGOTIATED
SETTLEMENT. Sorley knew quite well that the VC would not disappear (their political apparatus
was still in place) and that the NVA would not simply pack up and return north. Sorley's book
"A Better War" contemplates a BETTER FINAL POLITICAL SETTLEMENT as part of the bottom line,
not US troops marching triumphantly into downtown Hanoi, as PAVN armies scurried away into
the jungle.
To his disappointment, Daddis also discovered that the only Vietnam War book included
was Sorley's A Better War. This should have surprised no one, since his argument –
that American soldiers in Vietnam were denied an impending victory by civilian
policymakers, a liberal media, and antiwar protestors – was still resonant among the
officer corps in year six of the Iraq quagmire. It wasn't the military's fault!
Keep in mind that Daddis wrote a book on the Vietnam War called 'No Sure Victory' in which
he pins US failure on not being versed ENOUGH on hearts and minds counterinsurgency war,
hence the reliance on massive and unworkable statistical and reporting systems of
"progress."
"The army's unpreparedness for counterinsurgency in the early 1960s surely encouraged
this confusion. Conventional officers had little experience in developing a
counterinsurgency reporting system and applying it within a larger strategic context.. So
it was for the U.S. Army in Vietnam. Insufficiently versed in the mysteries of
counterinsurgency, officers turned to statistics to assist them in measuring and reporting
progress and effectiveness. Statistics, though, bred more statistics, and the MACV
headquarters soon became awash in a flood of numbers, facts, and figures."
–Daddis, No Sure Victory
but also potential dangers in such lists as they inevitably influence the thinking of
an entire generation of future leaders. In the case of Vietnam, the perils are obvious. The
generals have been assigning and reading problematic books for years, works that were
essentially meant to reinforce professional pride in the midst of a series of unsuccessful
and unending wars.
You are barking up the wrong tree somewhat. Daddis laments reading list limitations as far
as Iraq, but the reading list did not make any difference given 3 issues:
(a) the decision to go to war in Iraq, when it was not necessary
(b) the woefully inadequate number of troops provided the commanders for conquest and
occupation and
(c) the cavalier, careless nature of planning for postwar Iraq.
What was or was not on the reading list is of limited impact given these 3 big realities
the civilian leadership saddled commanders with.
The Second Amendment (Amendment II) to the United States Constitution protects the right of the people to
keep and bear arms... and, as The
Duran's Alex Christoforou writes, according to California Congressman Adam Schiff, those pesky Russians are
using bots to promote the second amendment with an ultimate goal of having Americans"'kill each other."
Once again, another brilliant plan hatched by Putin... good thing Schiff caught on to it and can now begin
seizing American's guns so as to thwart Russia's evil plan.
On Thursday Democrat Schiff spoke to a crowd at the University of
Pennsylvania, where the TDS – "Russia hysteria virus" infected Schiff told the crowd Russian ads promoted the
Second Amendment during the 2016 election "so we will kill each other."
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Thursday that Russia promoted content that supported the Second Amendment on
social media during the 2016 election because they wanted Americans to kill one another.
In the period preceding the World War I how many Europeans suspected that their lives would
soon be forever changed – and, for millions of them, ended?
Who in the years, say, 1910 to 1913, could have imagined that the decades of peace,
progress, and civilization in which they had grown up, and which seemingly would continue
indefinitely, instead would soon descend into a horror of industrial-scale slaughter,
revolution, and brutal ideologies?
The answer is, probably very few, just as few people today care much about the details of
international and security affairs. Normal folk have better things to do with their lives.
To be sure, in that bygone era of smug jingosim , there was always the entertainment
aspect that "our" side had forced "theirs" to back down in some exotic locale, as in the
Fashoda incident
(1898) or the Moroccan
crises (1906, 1911). Even the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 seemed less a harbinger of the
cataclysm to come than local dustups on the edge of the continent where the general peace had
not been disturbed even by the much more disruptive Crimean or Franco-Prussian wars.
Besides, no doubt level-headed statesmen were in charge in the various capitals, ensuring
that things wouldn't get out of hand.
Until they did.
A notable exception to the prevailing mood of business-as-usual, nothing-to-see-here-folks
was Pyotr Durnovo, whose remarkable February 1914
memorandum to Tsar Nicholas II laid out not only what the great powers would do in the
approaching general war but the behavior of the minor countries as well. Moreover, he
anticipated that in the event of defeat, Russia, destabilized by unchecked socialist
"agitation" amid wartime hardships, would "be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which
cannot be foreseen." Germany, likewise, was "destined to suffer, in case of defeat, no lesser
social upheavals" and "take a purely revolutionary path" of a nationalist hue.
When the great powers blundered into war in August 1914, each confident of its ability
speedily to dispatch its rivals, the price (adding in the toll from the 1939-1945 rematch) was
upwards of 70 million lives. But the cost of a comparable mistake today might be literally
incalculable – if there's anyone left to do the tally.
During the first Cold War between the US and the USSR, there was a general sense that a
World War III was, in a word, unthinkable. As summed up by Ronald Reagan: " A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be
fought ." Then, it was understood that all-out war, however it started, meant massed ICBMs
over the North Pole and the "
end of civilization as we know it ."
'The 2018 NPR has a vision of nuclear conflict that goes far beyond the traditional
imagery of mass missile launches. While ICBMs and manned bombers will be maintained on a
day-to-day alert, the tip of the nuclear spear is now what the NPR calls "supplemental"
nuclear forces – dual-use aircraft such as the F-35 fighter armed with B-61 gravity
bombs capable of delivering a low-yield nuclear payload, a new generation of nuclear-tipped
submarine-launched cruise missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles tipped with a
new generation of low-yield nuclear warheads. The danger inherent with the integration of
these kinds of tactical nuclear weapons into an overall strategy of deterrence is that it
fundamentally lowers the threshold for their use. [ ]
'Noting that the United States has never adopted a "no first use" policy, the 2018 NPR
states that "it remains the policy of the United States to retain some ambiguity regarding
the precise circumstances that might lead to a US nuclear response." In this regard, the NPR
states that America could employ nuclear weapons under "extreme circumstances that could
include significant non-nuclear strategic attacks." The issue of "non-nuclear strategic
attack technologies" as a potential precursor for nuclear war is a new factor that previously
did not exist in American policy. The United States has long held that chemical and
biological weapons represent a strategic threat for which America's nuclear deterrence
capability serves as a viable counter. But the threat from cyber attacks is different. If for
no other reason than the potential for miscalculation and error in terms of attribution and
intent, the nexus of cyber and nuclear weapons should be disconcerting for everyone. [ ]
'Even more disturbing is the notion that a cyber intrusion such as the one perpetrated
against the Democratic National Committee and attributed to Russia could serve as a trigger
for nuclear war. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. The DNC event has been
characterized by influential American politicians, such as the Armed Services Committee
Chairman John McCain, as "
an act of war ." Moreover, former vice president Joe Biden hinted that, in the aftermath
of the DNC breach, the United States was launching a retaliatory
cyberattack of its own, targeting Russia. The possibility of a tit-for-tat exchange of
cyberattacks that escalates into a nuclear conflict would previously have been dismissed out
of hand; today, thanks to the 2018 NPR, it has entered the realm of the possible.'
The idea that a first-strike Schlieffen Plan could knock out the
Russians (and no doubt similar contingencies are in place for China) at the outset of
hostilities reflects a dangerous illusion of predictability. Truth may be the first casualty of
war, but "the plan" is inevitably the second. That's because war planners generally don't
consult the enemy, who – annoyingly for the planners – also gets a vote.
Recently
US Secretary of State James Mattis declared that "great power competition – not
terrorism – is now the primary focus of US national security," specifying Russia and
China as nations seeking to "create a world consistent with their authoritarian models,
pursuing veto authority over other nations' economic, diplomatic and security decisions." At
least we can drop the pretense that US policy has been to fight jihad terrorism, not to use it
as a policy tool in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. And of course
Washington never, ever meddles in "other nations' economic, diplomatic and security decisions"
. . .
At this point Trump is fastened to the neocons' and generals' axle, and all he can do is
spin. Echoing Mattis, in his State of the Union speech Trump lumped "rivals like
China and Russia" together with "rogue regimes" and "terrorist groups" as "horrible dangers" to
the United States. (Note: The word "horrible" does not appear in the
posted text . That evidently was Trump's adlib.) The recently issued "name and shame" list
of prominent Russians is a veritable Who's Who of government and business, ensuring that
there's no
American engagement with anyone within screaming distance of the Kremlin .
To be fair, the Russians and Chinese are making their own war preparations. Russia's
"Kanyon," a doomsday nuclear torpedo carrying a massive warhead, is
designed to obliterate the U.S east and west coasts , rendering them inhabitable for
generations. (Wait a minute. Is it any coincidence, Comrade, that the coastal cities are just
where the Democrats' electoral strength is? Talk about "collusion!" Somebody call Bob Mueller!)
For its part, China is developing means to eliminate our white elephant carrier groups –
handy for pummeling Third World backwaters but useless in a war with a major power – with
drone swarms and
hypersonic missiles .
Just as in 1914, when Durnovo referred to "presence of abundant combustible material in
Europe," there is any
number of global flashpoints that could turn Mattis's "great power competition" into a
major conflagration that probably was not desired by anyone. However, if the worst happens, and
the lamps go
out again – maybe this time forever – Americans will not again be immune from
the consequences as we were in the wars of the 20th century. The remainder of our lives,
however brief, might turn out very differently from what we had anticipated
Watch: Bernie Sanders' Response to Trump State of the Union
"Here's the story that Trump failed to mention "
Following President Donald Trump's State of the Union address on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) offered a response.
"I want to take a few minutes of your time to respond to Trump's State of the Union speech," Sanders announced. "But I also want
to talk to you about the major crises facing our country that, regrettably, Trump chose not to discuss."
And, he added, "I want to offer a vision of where we should go as a nation which is far different than the divisiveness, dishonesty,
and racism coming from the Trump Administration over the past year."
Watch:
... ... ...
The complete text of Sanders' prepared remarks follow:
Good evening. Thanks for joining us.
Tonight , I want to take a few minutes of your time to respond to President Trump's State of the Union speech. But I want
to do more than just that. I want to talk to you about the major crises facing our country that, regrettably, President Trump chose
not to discuss. I want to talk to you about the lies that he told during his campaign and the promises he made to working people
which he did not keep.
Finally, I want to offer a vision of where we should go as a nation which is far different than the divisiveness, dishonesty,
and racism coming from the Trump Administration over the past year.
President Trump talked tonight about the strength of our economy. Well, he's right. Official unemployment today is 4.1 percent
which is the lowest it has been in years and the stock market in recent months has soared. That's the good news.
But what President Trump failed to mention is that his first year in office marked the lowest level of job creation since
2010. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 254,000 fewer jobs were created in Trump's first 11 months in office
than were created in the 11 months before he entered office.
Further, when we talk about the economy, what's most important is to understand what is happening to the average worker. And
here's the story that Trump failed to mention tonight .
Over the last year, after adjusting for inflation, the average worker in America saw a wage increase of, are you ready for
this, 4 cents an hour, or 0.17%. Or, to put it in a different way, that worker received a raise of a little more than $1.60 a week.
And, as is often the case, that tiny wage increase disappeared as a result of soaring health care costs.
Meanwhile, at a time of massive wealth and income inequality, the rich continue to get much richer while millions of American
workers are working two or three jobs just to keep their heads above water. Since March of last year, the three richest people in
America saw their wealth increase by more than $68 billion. Three people. A $68 billion increase in wealth. Meanwhile, the average
worker saw an increase of 4 cents an hour.
Tonight , Donald Trump touted the bonuses he claims workers received because of his so-called "tax reform" bill. What he forgot
to mention is that only 2% of Americans report receiving a raise or a bonus because of this tax bill.
What he also failed to mention is that some of the corporations that have given out bonuses, such as Walmart, AT&T, General
Electric, and Pfizer, are also laying off tens of thousands of their employees. Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Kleenex and Huggies,
recently said they were using money from the tax cut to restructure -- laying off more than 5,000 workers and closing 10 plants.
What Trump also forgot to tell you is that while the Walton family of Walmart, the wealthiest family in America, and Jeff
Bezos of Amazon, the wealthiest person in this country, have never had it so good, many thousands of their employees are forced onto
Medicaid, food stamps, and public housing because of the obscenely low wages they are paid. In my view, that's wrong. The taxpayers
of this country should not be providing corporate welfare to the wealthiest families in this country.
Trump's Broken Promises
Now, let me say a few words about some of the issues that Donald Trump failed to mention tonight , and that is the difference
between what he promised the American people as a candidate and what he has delivered as president.
Many of you will recall, that during his campaign, Donald Trump told the American people how he was going to provide "health
insurance for everybody," with "much lower deductibles."
That is what he promised working families all across this country during his campaign. But as president he did exactly the
opposite. Last year, he supported legislation that would have thrown up to 32 million people off of the health care they had while,
at the same time, substantially raising premiums for older Americans.
The reality is that although we were able to beat back Trump's effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, 3 million fewer Americans
have health insurance today than before Trump took office and that number will be going even higher in the coming months.
During his campaign, Trump promised not to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.
As president, however, he supported a Republican Budget Resolution that proposed slashing Medicaid by $1 trillion and cutting
Medicare by $500 billion. Further, President Trump's own budget called for cutting Social Security Disability Insurance by $64 billion.
During Trump's campaign for president, he talked about how he was going to lower prescription drug prices and take on the
greed of the pharmaceutical industry which he said was "getting away with murder." Tonight he said "one of my greatest priorities
is to reduce the price of prescription drugs."
But as president, Trump nominated Alex Azar, a former executive of the Eli Lilly Company -- one of the largest drug companies
in this country -- to head up the Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump spoke about how in other countries "drugs cost far less," yet he has done nothing to allow Americans to purchase less
expensive prescription drugs from abroad or to require Medicare to negotiate drug prices – which he promised he would do when he
ran for president.
During the campaign, Donald Trump told us that: "The rich will not be gaining at all" under his tax reform plan.
Well, that was quite a whopper. As president, the tax reform legislation Trump signed into law a few weeks ago provides 83
percent of the benefits to the top one percent, drives up the deficit by $1.7 trillion, and raises taxes on 92 million middle class
families by the end of the decade.
During his campaign for president, Trump talked about how he was going to take on the greed of Wall Street which he said "has
caused tremendous problems for us.
As president, not only has Trump not taken on Wall Street, he has appointed more Wall Street billionaires to his administration
than any president in history. And now, on behalf of Wall Street, he is trying to repeal the modest provisions of the Dodd-Frank
legislation which provide consumer protections against Wall Street thievery.
What Trump Didn't Say
But what is also important to note is not just Trump's dishonesty. It is that tonight he avoided some of the most important
issues facing our country and the world.
How can a president of the United States give a State of the Union speech and not mention climate change? No, Mr. Trump, climate
change is not a "hoax." It is a reality which is causing devastating harm all over our country and all over the world and you are
dead wrong when you appoint administrators at the EPA and other agencies who are trying to decimate environmental protection rules,
and slow down the transition to sustainable energy.
How can a president of the United States not discuss the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision which allows billionaires
like the Koch brothers to undermine American democracy by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates who will represent
the rich and the powerful?
How can he not talk about Republican governors efforts all across this country to undermine democracy, suppress the vote and
make it harder for poor people or people of color to vote?
How can he not talk about the fact that in a highly competitive global economy, hundreds of thousands of bright young people
are unable to afford to go to college, while millions of others have come out of school deeply in debt?
How can he not talk about the inadequate funding and staffing at the Social Security Administration which has resulted in
thousands of people with disabilities dying because they did not get their claims processed in time?
How can he not talk about the retirement crisis facing the working people of this country and the fact that over half of older
workers have no retirement savings? We need to strengthen pensions in this country, not take them away from millions of workers.
How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in our election in 2016, is interfering
in democratic elections all over the world, and according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections
that we will be holding. How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship with Mr. Putin?
What Trump Did Talk About
Now, let me say a few words about what Trump did talk about.
Trump talked about DACA and immigration, but what he did not tell the American people is that he precipitated this crisis
in September by repealing President Obama's executive order protecting Dreamers.
We need to seriously address the issue of immigration but that does not mean dividing families and reducing legal immigration
by 25-50 percent. It sure doesn't mean forcing taxpayers to spend $25 billion on a wall that candidate Trump promised Mexico would
pay for. And it definitely doesn't mean a racist immigration policy that excludes people of color from around the world.
To my mind, this is one of the great moral issues facing our country. It would be unspeakable and a moral stain on our nation
if we turned our backs on these 800,000 young people who were born and raised in this country and who know no other home but the
United States.
And that's not just Bernie Sanders talking. Poll after poll shows that over 80 percent of the American people believe that
we should protect the legal status of these young people and provide them with a path toward citizenship.
We need to pass the bi-partisan DREAM Act, and we need to pass it now.
President Trump also talked about the need to rebuild our country's infrastructure. And he is absolutely right. But the proposal
he is bringing forth is dead wrong.
Instead of spending $1.5 trillion over ten years rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, Trump would encourage states to
sell our nation's highways, bridges, and other vital infrastructure to Wall Street, wealthy campaign contributors, even foreign governments.
And how would Wall Street and these corporations recoup their investments? By imposing massive new tolls and fees paid for
by American commuters and homeowners.
The reality is that Trump's plan to privatize our nation's infrastructure is an old idea that has never worked and never will
work.
Tonight , Donald Trump correctly talked about the need to address the opioid crisis. Well, I say to Donald Trump, you don't
help people suffering from opioid addiction by cutting Medicaid by $1 trillion. If you are serious about dealing with this crisis,
we need to expand, not cut Medicaid.
Conclusion/A Progressive Agenda
My fellow Americans. The simple truth is that, according to virtually every poll, Donald Trump is the least popular president
after one year in office of any president in modern American history. And the reason for that is pretty clear. The American people
do not want a president who is compulsively dishonest, who is a bully, who actively represents the interests of the billionaire class,
who is anti-science, and who is trying to divide us up based on the color of our skin, our nation of origin, our religion, our gender,
or our sexual orientation.
That is not what the American people want. And that reality is the bad news that we have to deal with.
But the truth is that there is a lot of good news out there as well. It's not just that so many of our people disagree with
Trump's policies, temperament, and behavior. It is that the vast majority of our people have a very different vision for the future
of our country than what Trump and the Republican leadership are giving us.
In an unprecedented way, we are witnessing a revitalization of American democracy with more and more people standing up and
fighting back. A little more than a year ago we saw millions of people take to the streets for the women's marches and a few weeks
ago, in hundreds of cities and towns around the world, people once again took to the streets in the fight for social, economic, racial
and environmental justice.
Further, we are seeing the growth of grassroots organizations and people from every conceivable background starting to run
for office – for school board, city council, state legislature, the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.
In fact, we are starting to see the beginning of a political revolution, something long overdue.
And these candidates, from coast to coast, are standing tall for a progressive agenda, an agenda that works for the working
families of our country and not just the billionaire class. These candidates understand that the United States has got to join the
rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all as a right, not a privilege, through a Medicare for All, single-payer
program.
They understand that at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the top one-tenth of one percent now owns almost
as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, we should not be giving tax breaks for billionaires but demanding that they start paying
their fair share of taxes.
They know that we need trade policies that benefit working people, not large multi-national corporations.
They know that we have got to take on the fossil fuel industry, transform our energy system and move to sustainable energies
like wind, solar and geothermal.
They know that we need a $15 an hour federal minimum wage, free tuition at public colleges and universities, and universal
childcare.
They understand that it is a woman who has the right to control her own body, not state and federal governments, and that
woman has the right to receive equal pay for equal work and work in a safe environment free from harassment.
They also know that if we are going to move forward successfully as a democracy we need real criminal justice reform and we
need to finally address comprehensive immigration reform.
Yes. I understand that the Koch brothers and their billionaire friends are planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars
in the 2018 mid-term elections supporting the Trump agenda and right-wing Republicans. They have the money, an unlimited amount of
money. But we have the people, and when ordinary people stand up and fight for justice there is nothing that we cannot accomplish.
That has been the history of America, and that is our future.
"... This Putin paranoia is insane and ridiculous. Our homegrown problems regarding every aspect of government far exceed, by orders of magnitudes, Putin tinkering. All of you making hysterical claims about Putin and impugning Americans as Russian stooges are diverting attention from our real homegrown problems. ..."
"... The root of the situation is FISA, as amended after September 11. ..."
"... History tells us that if a government gets a law enforcement tool, somebody in the government will try to abuse it in ways the legislators who provided the tool did not think of. History also teaches us to keep a sharp eye on the law enforcement organizations – trust but verify! ..."
"... Law enforcement is made of normal people, who bring with them all the qualities and defects of human nature. Abusing power is one of the defects, and since September 11, we gave law enforcement much power ..."
"... We need to find out if any of the candidates broke the law. We need to find out if the FBI and the DOJ abused their power. This is not about political preferences, this is about keeping the country a democracy. For those who might have forgotten it, I will remind what Martin Niemöller said: "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -- Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ ..."
"... The land of the surreal; I see the usual in denial left-wing commenters hanging around Buchanan columns are now defending a corrupt, politicized FBI. ..."
"... After Mr. Trump secured the nomination, Fusion GPS was hired on behalf of Mrs. Clinton's campaign and the D.N.C. by their law firm, Perkins Coie, to compile research about Mr. Trump, his businesses and associates -- including possible connections with Russia. It was at that point that Fusion GPS hired Mr. Steele, who has deep sourcing in Russia, to gather information. ..."
"... Is is surprising that all the hoopla for both Republicans, Democrats, the media is about "Trump did it", "Clinton did it, "Putin did it". Only one reader – #Max Charles – made the very intelligent observation that the real beneficiaries of the situation are the Chinese. ..."
"... Democrats and liberals had nothing but disdain for the FBI and other spook organizations until they were 'militarized' by King 'Bama and became the Democrat secret police. Now they love the FBI. This scandal must be dragged into the light of day and cleaned up, folks fired and/or charged and put in prison. OR it will be settled in the streets. When half of the country is 'down with a one party state and secret police,' we're on the same glide path that Venezuela was on. ..."
This Putin paranoia is insane and ridiculous. Our homegrown problems regarding every aspect
of government far exceed, by orders of magnitudes, Putin tinkering. All of you making
hysterical claims about Putin and impugning Americans as Russian stooges are diverting
attention from our real homegrown problems. Look in the mirror everyone. It is in the
reflection that you will find what really ails us.
The root of the situation is FISA, as amended after September 11.
History tells us that if a government gets a law enforcement tool, somebody in the
government will try to abuse it in ways the legislators who provided the tool did not think
of. History also teaches us to keep a sharp eye on the law enforcement organizations –
trust but verify!
Law enforcement is made of normal people, who bring with them all the qualities and
defects of human nature. Abusing power is one of the defects, and since September 11, we gave
law enforcement much power
We need to find out if any of the candidates broke the law. We need to find out if the FBI
and the DOJ abused their power. This is not about political preferences, this is about
keeping the country a democracy. For those who might have forgotten it, I will remind what
Martin Niemöller said: "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for
me." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_
After Mr. Trump secured the nomination, Fusion GPS was hired on behalf of Mrs. Clinton's
campaign and the D.N.C. by their law firm, Perkins Coie, to compile research about Mr.
Trump, his businesses and associates -- including possible connections with Russia. It was
at that point that Fusion GPS hired Mr. Steele, who has deep sourcing in Russia, to gather
information.
Is is surprising that all the hoopla for both Republicans, Democrats, the media is about
"Trump did it", "Clinton did it, "Putin did it".
Only one reader – #Max Charles – made the very intelligent observation that the
real beneficiaries of the situation are the Chinese.
Since the departure of the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, China has followed a highly focused
and highly effective path towards becoming #1 in the world.
There is a combination of economic policy, internal policy and foreign policy which brought
this country to move quietly into such a position.
Could they be behind the circus?
It is very possible, since the Chinese are now using what Fukuyama presented as "the good
emperor" model.
An intelligent, non-democratic system can be so efficient!
Democrats and liberals had nothing but disdain for the FBI and other spook organizations
until they were 'militarized' by King 'Bama and became the Democrat secret police. Now they
love the FBI. This scandal must be dragged into the light of day and cleaned up, folks fired
and/or charged and put in prison. OR it will be settled in the streets. When half of the
country is 'down with a one party state and secret police,' we're on the same glide path that
Venezuela was on.
The so called facts should not be released unless all of the facts are released –
not simply an interpretation of the facts, least of all Nunes' (or maybe the
Whitehouse's?)
You are being disingenuous in simply stating that all memos should be released when you know
that the Schiff memo will never be placed in the public sphere.
There is also an impact on the public which is being overlooked. No person in their right
mind will ever come forward with information for the FBI ever again. Everyone now knows that
if some political opportunist wants to "out you" and embarrass you, you do not stand a
chance. This release made no pretense that it was a political hit, not some kind of sunlight
on a nefarious practice.
That is not to say that a political hit piece is not legitimate or has its proper place
– because it does. Its just that this memo masquerades as something that it is not, and
as a man of intellectual integrity, you should say so.
Can you remind us of what the lib's said about Nixon's operation engaging in political
surveillance of his opponent?
Also, what was the date that Putin and the Trump campaign met and agreed to hack the DNC
servers? They were hacked from the outside, right? We have proof?
Does this mean it is now fair game if the Trump campaign hires some hack to meet with
foreign operatives who make up nasty stories about his Democratic opponent, Trump's DOJ can
go to the FISA court and get permission to spy on his opponents during the campaign, and then
get a Special Prosecutor to "investigate" fabricated allegations and try to snare the new
leadership in process crimes? Or is this a special right that only Democrats get to exercise
because they wear white hats?
It was not only that Steele memo enabled eavesdropping. More troubling fact that FBI considered both Trump and Sanders as
insurgents and was adamant to squash them and ensure Hillary victory. In other word it tried to play the role of kingmaker.
Notable quotes:
"... The former British spy Steele had been hired by the Democratic Party via Fusion GPS to dig up dirt about Donald Trump. He came back with a package of "reports" which alleged that Trump was "colluding" with Russia or even a puppet of Putin. The content of the reports is hilarious and so obviously made up that one wonders how anyone could have treated it seriously. ..."
"... Getting a FISA warrant on Carter Page meant that all his communication with the Trump campaign was effectively under surveillance of the Obama administration. While Page was no longer an official member of the campaign at the time of the warrant it is likely that he had kept contact. All internal communication that Page had access to was thereby also accessible for at least some people who tried to prevent a Trump election victory. ..."
"... One may (like me) dislike Trump and the Republican party and all they stand for. But this looks like an extremely dirty play by the Democrats and by the Obama administration far outside of any decency and fairness. The Steele dossier is obviously made up partisan nonsense. To the use it for such a FISA warrant was against the most basic rules of a democratic system. It probably broke several laws. ..."
Over the last month political enemies of U.S. President Trump and the FBI and Justice
Department have desperately tried to prevent the publishing of a memo written by the Republican
controlled House Intelligence Committee.
The memo (pdf) describes parts of the process that let to court sanctioned spying on the
Trump campaign. The
key points of the memo that was just published:
* The Steele dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA
applications against Carter Page.
* Andrew McCabe confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court
without the Steele dossier information.
* The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials,
but excluded from the FISA applications.
* DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to
DOJ information about Steele's bias. Steele told Ohr that he, Steele, was desperate that
Donald Trump not get elected president and was passionate about him not becoming
president.
If the above memo proves to be correct one can conclude that a Democratic front organization
created "evidence" that was then used by the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to get FISA
warrants to spy on someone with intimate contacts into the Trump campaign.
The Democrats as well as the FBI have done their utmost to keep this secret.
Carter Page was a relative low ranking volunteer advisor of the Trump campaign with some
business contacts to Russia. He had officially left the campaign shortly before the above FISA
warrant was requested.
Andrew McCabe was an FBI assistant director. A few month earlier his wife ran for a Virginia
State Senate seat with the help of $700,000 she had received from Clinton allies.
The wife of DOJ official Bruce Ohr worked for Fusion GPS, the outlet hired by the Democrats
to find Trump dirt. Fusion GPS hired the former British agent Steele.
The former British spy Steele had been hired by the Democratic Party via Fusion GPS to dig
up dirt about Donald Trump. He came back with a package of "reports" which alleged that Trump
was "colluding" with Russia or even a puppet of Putin. The content of the reports is hilarious
and
so obviously made up that one wonders how anyone could have treated it seriously.
Getting a FISA warrant on Carter Page meant that all his communication with the Trump
campaign was effectively under surveillance of the Obama administration. While Page was no
longer an official member of the campaign at the time of the warrant it is likely that he had
kept contact. All internal communication that Page had access to was thereby also accessible
for at least some people who tried to prevent a Trump election victory.
One must wonder if the FISA warrant and eavesdropping on Page was the only one related to
the Trump campaign.
One may (like me) dislike Trump and the Republican party and all they stand for. But this
looks like an extremely dirty play by the Democrats and by the Obama administration far outside
of any decency and fairness. The Steele dossier is obviously made up partisan nonsense. To the
use it for such a FISA warrant was against the most basic rules of a democratic system. It
probably broke several laws.
There are still many questions: What was, exactly, the result of the surveillance of Carter
Page and the Trump campaign? Who was getting these results - officially and unofficially? How
were they used?
I am pretty sure now that more heads of those involved will role. Some of the people who
arranged the scheme, and some of those who tried to cover it up, may go to jail.
If Trump and the Republicans play this right they have practically won the next
elections.
"... The abuse summarized in the Republican memo apparently spans the last year of the Obama administration and the first year of the Trump administration. If it comes through as advertised, it will show the deep state using the government's powers for petty or political or ideological reasons. ..."
"... The use of raw intelligence data by the NSA or the FBI for political purposes or to manipulate those in government is as serious a threat to popular government -- to personal liberty in a free society -- as has ever occurred in America since Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which punished speech critical of the government. ..."
"... No politician gives a hoot about what the people who vote for them think. I am sure, even if any house member or a senator knew of this memo, the bill would still have passed. ..."
"... It appears that the judge doesn't understand how the US government is run these days. ..."
"... Among other Establishment officials, "Robert Mueller, the no-nonsense special counsel investigating whether any Americans aided the Russian government in its now well-known interference in the 2016 American presidential election" (Andrew Napolitano, 12/7/17) helped conduct unlawful, mass surveillance in his FBI gig, and thus violated his "oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution." Right, "Judge"? ..."
"... Senator Wyden knew when Mr. Clapper was lying about governmental spying on every American in a public hearing years ago, Mr. Snowden pulled back the curtain for all to see, and Congress has since flopped. Right, "Judge"? ..."
I have argued for a few weeks now that House Intelligence Committee members have committed
misconduct in office by concealing evidence of spying abuses by the National Security Agency
and the FBI. They did this by sitting on a four-page memo that summarizes the abuse of raw
intelligence data while Congress was debating a massive expansion of FISA.
FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which was written to enable the
federal government to spy on foreign agents here and abroad. Using absurd and paranoid logic,
the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which only hears the government's lawyers,
has morphed "foreign intelligence surveillance" into undifferentiated bulk surveillance of all
Americans.
Undifferentiated bulk surveillance is the governmental acquisition of fiber-optic data
stored and transmitted by nearly everyone in America. This includes all telephone
conversations, text messages and emails, as well as all medical, legal and financial
records.
Ignorant of the hot potato on which the House Intelligence Committee had been sitting,
Congress recently passed and President Donald Trump signed a vast expansion of spying
authorities -- an expansion that authorizes legislatively the domestic spying that judges were
authorizing on everyone in the U.S. without individual suspicion of wrongdoing or probable
cause of crime; an expansion that passed in the Senate with no votes to spare; an expansion
that evades and avoids the Fourth Amendment; an expansion that the president signed into law
the day before we all learned of the House Intelligence Committee memo.
The FISA expansion would never have passed the Senate had the House Intelligence Committee
memo and the data on which it is based come to light seven days sooner than it did. Why should
22 members of a House committee keep their 500-plus congressional colleagues in the dark about
domestic spying abuses while those colleagues were debating the very subject matter of domestic
spying and voting to expand the power of those who have abused it?
The answer to this lies in the nature of the intelligence community today and the influence
it has on elected officials in the government. By the judicious, personalized and secret
revelation of data, both good and bad -- here is what we know about your enemies, and here is
what we know about you -- the NSA shows its might to the legislators who supposedly regulate
it. In reality, the NSA regulates them.
This is but one facet of the deep state -- the unseen parts of the government that are not
authorized by the Constitution and that never change, no matter which party controls the
legislative or executive branch. This time, they almost blew it. If just one conscientious
senator had changed her or his vote on the FISA expansion -- had that senator known of the NSA
and FBI abuses of FISA concealed by the House Intelligence Committee -- the expansion would
have failed.
Nevertheless, the evidence on which the committee members sat is essentially a
Republican-written summary of raw intelligence data. Earlier this week, the Democrats on the
committee authored their version -- based, they say, on the same raw intelligence data as was
used in writing the Republican version. But the House Intelligence Committee, made up of 13
Republicans and nine Democrats, voted to release only the Republican-written memo.
Late last week, when it became apparent that the Republican memo would soon be released, the
Department of Justice publicly contradicted President Trump by advising the leadership of the
House Intelligence Committee in very strong terms that the memo should not be released to the
public.
It soon became apparent that, notwithstanding the DOJ admonition, no one in the DOJ had
actually seen the memo. So FBI Director Chris Wray made a secret, hurried trip to the House
Intelligence Committee's vault last Sunday afternoon to view the memo. When asked by the folks
who showed it to him whether it contains secret or top-secret material, he couldn't or wouldn't
say. But he apparently saw in the memo the name of the No. 2 person at the FBI, Deputy Director
Andrew McCabe, as one of the abusers of spying authority. That triggered McCabe's summary
departure from the FBI the next day, after a career of 30 years.
The abuse summarized in the Republican memo apparently spans the last year of the Obama
administration and the first year of the Trump administration. If it comes through as
advertised, it will show the deep state using the government's powers for petty or political or
ideological reasons.
The use of raw intelligence data by the NSA or the FBI for political purposes or to
manipulate those in government is as serious a threat to popular government -- to personal
liberty in a free society -- as has ever occurred in America since Congress passed the Alien
and Sedition Acts of 1798, which punished speech critical of the government.
The government works for us; we should not tolerate its treating us as children. When raw
intelligence data is capable of differing interpretations and is relevant to a public dispute
-- about, for example, whether the NSA and the FBI are trustworthy, whether FISA should even
exist, whether spying on everyone all the time keeps us safe and whether the Constitution even
permits this -- the raw data should be released to the American public.
Where is the personal courage on the House Intelligence Committee? Where is the patriotism?
Where is the fidelity to the Constitution? The government exists by our consent. It derives its
powers from us. We have a right to know what it has done in our names, who broke our trust, who
knew about it, who looked the other way and why and by whom all this was intentionally hidden
until after Congress voted to expand FISA.
Everyone in government takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. How
many take it meaningfully and seriously?
Copyright 2018 Andrew P. Napolitano. Distributed by Creators.com.
Where is the personal courage on the House Intelligence Committee? Where is the
patriotism? Where is the fidelity to the Constitution? The government exists by our
consent. It derives its powers from us. We have a right to know what it has done in our
names, who broke our trust, who knew about it, who looked the other way and why and by whom
all this was intentionally hidden until after Congress voted to expand FISA.
The Judge is wrong. The government exists by Israel's/AIPAC's consent. The fidelity is to
the state of Israel. No politician gives a hoot about what the people who vote for them
think. I am sure, even if any house member or a senator knew of this memo, the bill would
still have passed.
Everyone in government takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution (
State of Israel ). How many take it meaningfully and seriously?
The additions and bolds are mine. It appears that the judge doesn't understand how the
US government is run these days. The US government is for Israel, of Israel, and by
Israel . Every dishonorable house member and every dishonorable senator knows that. Pure and
simple.
Let us see how the Judge's own FOX channel reports on this story.
He'll soon get back to his Russophobia, but Mr. Napolitano's chore today is to create cover
for as much Establishment backside as possible by blaming the recent, further statutory
enshrinement of our police state on the members of a single committee within the House of
Representatives. (He leaves himself room to point his finger at unnamed others who knew about
what has now been summarized in a memorandum supposedly soon to be released.) But he fails to
address the flaws in this narrative.
1. Among other Establishment officials, "Robert Mueller, the no-nonsense special
counsel investigating whether any Americans aided the Russian government in its now
well-known interference in the 2016 American presidential election" (Andrew Napolitano,
12/7/17) helped conduct unlawful, mass surveillance in his FBI gig, and thus violated his
"oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution." Right, "Judge"?
2. This article, foreshadowed in his published here last week, pounds on the farcical
notion that only members of a single House committee have known, and have known only
recently, about "[t]he abuse summarized in the Republican memo," that if "just one
conscientious senator had changed her or his vote on the FISA expansion -- had that senator
known of the NSA and FBI abuses of FISA concealed by the House Intelligence Committee -- the
expansion would have failed." But Senator Wyden knew when Mr. Clapper was lying about
governmental spying on every American in a public hearing years ago, Mr. Snowden pulled back
the curtain for all to see, and Congress has since flopped. Right, "Judge"?
3. Building on his article of last week, Mr. Napolitano wants his readers to think that,
daggum it, there's nothing to be done about this now, as though the tablets have been carved
and sent back up the mountain for several years. But "one conscientious senator" could take
the floor today to introduce a bill to repeal any of these previous or new FISA provisions.
Right, "Judge"?
4. None of this law matters because all these people are above it. Right, "Judge"?
I used to think that the 2 Parties just traded off every few elections and that the
President, being only a figure head, was predetermined. Julian Assange, before the election,
stated, very firmly, that the powers that be would never let Trump become President. I
believed him. I still can't figure out how Trump slipped in under the radar.
In case it is not clear, the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is a neocon. Strong evidence
of this unfortunate fact is his speech on January 17, 2018 at Stanford's Hoover Institute.
After warmly acknowledging his debt to Dr. Condoleezza Rice and George Shultz, Tillerson goes
into his " Remarks on the Way Forward for
the United States Regarding Syria."
What do we hear? " it is crucial to our national defense to maintain a military and
diplomatic presence in Syria, to help bring an end to that conflict, and assist the Syrian
people as they chart a course to achieve a new political future." He wants the US to stay in
Syria indefinitely, its purposes being to defend the American nation, to cause the war to end,
and to create a new government/state in Syria.
We've heard the same neocon language in the past 17 years regarding Iraq, Afghanistan,
Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and other countries. None of these countries are "crucial" to
American security. Entry by US forces into each and every one of them has increased American
insecurity, generating ever more Muslim terrorist forces. None of these places posed state-led
threats to Americans and none posed non-state forces that could not have been addressed by
means other than the failed methods that the US government adopted, symbolized by the entirely
unnecessary and counter-productive
War on Terror .
In his speech, Tillerson presents new elaborations, new rationales, and new flowerings of
neocon thought, but the root of it all remains unchanged. It's the same old rot we've heard for
the past 17 years and longer. The War on Terror remains fixed firmly in his mind. This he makes
clear, saying "The fight against ISIS is not over." And he says "Similarly, we must persist in
Syria to thwart al-Qaida " The secondary excuse for the uninvited US presence inside Syria is
to get rid of the Assad government and create a new state. "Additionally, a total withdrawal of
American personnel at this time would restore Assad and continue his brutal treatment against
his own people. A murderer of his own people cannot generate the trust required for long-term
stability."
Baloney. Tillerson's language echoes the language used against Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi.
The US always resorts to holier-than-thou language like this when it wants to justify the
empire's presence in some place that has nothing to do with American security.
Tillerson knows enough not to name "nation-building" in Syria as US policy. Instead he uses
a euphemism: "STABILIZATION".
The world is not a pretty place everywhere, not even in parts of the Americas that I'll
refrain from naming; but some are close to the White House. This doesn't justify a costly US
presence that, in any event, is very likely not only to fail but also to produce a worse
situation.
It's not the role of the US government to dry out an alcoholic world, or to get it off
drugs, pretty it up, wash it clean, apply new makeup, get it a paying job, find it a mate, turn
it into a responsible citizen, and have it raise its children as good parents. Why not? Because
it cannot! It doesn't know enough to do it and it cannot know enough to do it, so that when it
tries the results are no better and often worse than doing nothing at all, not to mention the
costs.
People in power who use lofty language as in this speech present to us a scenario, which is
that they have surveyed the turf, discovered the issues, and formulated a plan. They make out
that they actually understand human problems and can do something about them using the powers
of their office. We should believe none of this. The processes that they think are predictable
and governable are neither. Non-ergodicity rules much of human life.
NON-ERGODIC: "Attribute of a behavior that is in certain crucial respects incomprehensible
through observation either for lack of repetition, e.g., by involving only transient states
which are unique, or for lack of stabilities, e.g., when transition probabilities (see
probabilities) are so variable that there are not enough observations available to ascertain
them. Evolution and social processes involving structural changes are inherently non-ergodic.
To understand non-ergodic behavior requires either reference to the underlying organization of
the system exhibiting it or the study of a large sample of systems of the same kind (see
ergodic). (Krippendorff)"
"... Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the "Nunes Memo" could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States. ..."
"... "Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale," said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. ..."
"... If we take away the people's faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that's left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons. ..."
With the moment of truth - over-hyped dud or Democratic-establishment-crushing dream - looming in less than 24 hours, the headlines,
finger-pointing, pettiness, and back-stabbing has reached 11 on the Spinal Tap amplifier of debacle... to the point where some humor
in this FISA farce may help everyone get through the weekend.
The following is the latest to cross the wires...
Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the "Nunes
Memo" could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States.
"Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal
or judicial system on an international scale," said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American
people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or
subvert religious and political groups.
"If we take away the people's faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that's left is an extensive
network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally
personal, reasons."
At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating
constitutional rights.
"... Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the "Nunes Memo" could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States. ..."
"... "Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale," said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. ..."
"... If we take away the people's faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that's left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons. ..."
With the moment of truth - over-hyped dud or Democratic-establishment-crushing dream - looming in less than 24 hours, the headlines,
finger-pointing, pettiness, and back-stabbing has reached 11 on the Spinal Tap amplifier of debacle... to the point where some humor
in this FISA farce may help everyone get through the weekend.
The following is the latest to cross the wires...
Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the "Nunes
Memo" could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States.
"Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal
or judicial system on an international scale," said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American
people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or
subvert religious and political groups.
"If we take away the people's faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that's left is an extensive
network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally
personal, reasons."
At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating
constitutional rights.
In my opinion there is method to Trump's apparent madness. We must first remember he came
into office faced with foes from the Deep State apparatus which has infiltrated every aspect
of American government. Every government entity has been (sometime openly) hostile to
anything he has wanted to do so he has been swimming against the stream all the way along. He
inherited several disastrous situations and most without hope of ending.
The Korean War (it is still active declared war and only in an unsigned armistice) is
hopeless. The PRNK has carefully observed that the US acts as a rogue nation, reneges on all
treaties and promises, and kills anyone who opposes them. Faced with that the development of
nuclear weapons was necessary to survival. What can Trump do to end that after the horse has
left the stable?
He can scare the piss out of the South Koreans and show that we are more than willing to
sacrifice their entire Peninsula for our own bizarre needs. Trump, by acting out the Deep
State's wildest fantasy is actually bringing both Koreas together and likely we will be
invited to leave the Peninsula.
The same thing is happening with Turkey. It will take a miracle to avoid the deaths of
Americans who have illegally invaded Syria and are attempting to create a separate Kurdistan.
Once this gets out of control, and that is a certainty, the Turkes will throw us out of
Turkey entirely. The alternative is to leave Syria completely.
Ukraine is being ramped up for yet another confrontation and a complete break from the
Minsk II agreement. Again, Trump is fulfilling the Deep State's orgasmic fantasy to challenge
Russia at her doorstep. As we have seen now repeatedly the US fails to back up these gambits
and walks away in disgrace. No one is taking American threats seriously. For example Trump
very clearly said he doesn't like the EU. Was there any reaction at all? The European and
American markets were up yet again. This is clear evidence none of this is seriously being
considered.
Afghanistan is America's new tar baby and Trump is pissing off the entire Muslim world and
especially Pakistan. Only a madman would do that unless there is a different motive.
We cannot exist in Afghanistan without a land route in and out of the country. Russia has
cut the US off from all other countries (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) with road
access and now we have pissed off the Pakistani's so they will close the roads to us.
That leaves Trump with no option except to pull out. Again, he does this by acting on Deep
State fantasies which they are at first dazzled by and then when they realize the
repercussions are horrified. He has them all running for cover now.
The release of the memo today will be a game changer and the dominoes will start to fall
exposing the Deep State actors for who they really are and name will be revealed.
Maybe The other 95% of Snowden's material plus whatever Assange is holding back on. Maybe
we will finally see Hillary's deleted emails?
All bets are off now and it looks to me like Trump is going to close out all this insane
business in Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine through his efforts. Then maybe we can
finally focus on our enormous problems at home.
In theory, the USA could anihilate any single country it wishes to.
But that's not the problem. The problem is that you don't bomb other countries just for
the sake of bombing them. You bomb them to achieve a goal.
And America's goal is to maintain its status as the sole global superpower. You can't
achieve it by bombing and invading Syria only. You have to anihilate Russia and China first,
and them proceed to the Middle East in order to control the Heartland -- the core of human
civilization. Adolf Hitler knew that -- that's why he didn't stop in France and North Africa,
instead proceeding to conquer and enslave the Soviet Union.
With due respect; I think you see today's realities accurately.
But I disagree with your conclusions/assumptions.
The U.S. will not give up Afghanistan easily because of China's BRI; Afghanistan is a key
element of that.
If BRI is successful, it spells the end of western economic hegemon. The U.S. will go down
fighting to stop it; and go down it will; one way or the other.
If I may suggest; expand your horizons; geo-politics are changing rapidly, mostly against
U.S. interests; and it's only the beginning...
Such a war effort would be a vast improvement over fixing pot holes at home; unless, of
course, one could put up a privately owned but publicly subsidized toll booth at every pot
hole and then, rather than fix them, force people to sign a waiver or somehow get off the
road then and there.
A good all round nuclear war would take care of everything at once.
"... For being "intelligence" agencies who no one is apparently allowed to question or criticize, they sure make a lot of "mistakes", "lose" a lot of documents, and just get a lot of things "wrong". ..."
"... Iraq was invaded and occupied as well. Control resources!! That is the end game...As a Combat Veteran served during 9/11 and tip of the spear in 2003 we found ZERO weapons of mass destruction....So many young Americans impacted and suffered for pure profit at the hands of greedy Men... ..."
His comments came hours after SIGAR said in
a quarterly report on the conflict that the Pentagon prohibited the inclusion of information on the number of districts in Afghanistan,
and the population therein, controlled by the Afghan government or the Taliban or contested by both sides.
"The number of districts controlled or influenced by the Afghan government had been one of the last remaining publicly available
indicators for members of Congress -- many of whose staff do not have access to the classified annexes to SIGAR reports -- and for
the American public of how the 16-year-long U.S. effort to secure Afghanistan is faring," SIGAR said in a statement. "This is the
first time SIGAR has been specifically instructed not to release information marked 'unclassified' to the American taxpayer."
In his emailed statement, Gresback said that, as of October 2017, about 56 percent of the country's 407 districts were under Afghan
government control or influence, 30 percent remained contested, and roughly 14 percent were now under insurgent control or influence.
R Roger47 yesterday
Afghanistan is too big and too poor for their own government and military to ever be able to control. Much of the country is
controlled by tribal leaders associated loosely with the Taliban. They want to continue to live their lives as they have done
for hundreds of years. We can either let them do so, or occupy their country forever. I say make an agreement to leave them alone
as long as they keep terrorists out, and bring our troops home.
e edward yesterday
For being "intelligence" agencies who no one is apparently allowed to question or criticize, they sure make a lot of "mistakes",
"lose" a lot of documents, and just get a lot of things "wrong".
C CBVET2003 yesterday
Iraq was invaded and occupied as well. Control resources!! That is the end game...As a Combat Veteran served during 9/11
and tip of the spear in 2003 we found ZERO weapons of mass destruction....So many young Americans impacted and suffered for pure
profit at the hands of greedy Men...
V Vegasvince 22 hours ago
Several things he promised to work on are traditional Democratic issues. Since they also agree, I'd hope we can see quick
congressional action. Infrastructure, prescription drug costs, terminal patients access to drug trials, Job training investment,
Paid family leave, former prisoner job training, etc... These should be fast tracked through Congress and to the Presidents. We
can agree on things in America and need a productive governement to get thing s done!
"... General Flynn had warned Trump during the campaign before election and afterward that CIA briefers were lying to him. Flynn took over briefing Trump himself and that ended when they got Flynn out. ..."
In the WH it will be NSC adviser and chief lunatic McMaster. He will levitate with
enthusiasm for more war.
The briefings Trump gets are packed with lies and he has grown to trust them.
The entire foreign policy is so different from his stated goals and intentions that it is
clear he is fed fairy tales of success and bogus estimates of what the US can accomplish.
Last weeks Voltairnet.org piece by Thierry Meyssan indicated that Trump did not know what
his planners were doing.
"The president Trump had not been informed of the plan Votel-McGurk. The secretary of
Defense, James Mattis, confirmed to his men the instructions of the White House against the
jihadists. However Votel and McGurk are still in place." -- Thierry Meyssan
General Flynn had warned Trump during the campaign before election and afterward that
CIA briefers were lying to him. Flynn took over briefing Trump himself and that ended when
they got Flynn out.
We have a President misled who is told bogus results based on biased input data and
reports.
Meyssan has been crazy in love with Trump for a year, so for him to report this shows he
knows things are being setup for Trump to be trapped in Syria.
"... It has got to the point where I cannot read/listen/view to ANY news stories in the mainstream media without doubting their accuracy. And that, I began to think, was a tragedy. But no, it's actually liberating: be a skeptic. Ask why. Ask who benefits from the story. And what their sources are – If unnamed, simply disregard. And remember that the MSM is beholden to very powerful media groups with their own agendas along with deep and opaque ties to various governments/agencies. ..."
"... In the USSR, before the collapse of communism, party members used to lament that Russians didn't believe any of their media output but were also amazed and full of awe that people in the West tended to believe their own media ..."
"... Another nail in the coffin of the legacy news media. The more the years go bye the more the alternative media becomes mainstream. ..."
I have just returned from Syria. The narrative on the Ghouta alleged "chemical attacks" is
coming from the Al Qaeda affiliated, UK FCO/US multi-million-financed White Helmets and has
not basis in fact.
Meanwhile the terrorist groups supported by the White Helmets and the UK/US coalition of
terror, have launched a series of murderous mortar attacks on the civilian areas of Damascus,
Old City (Christian areas). I was leaving Damascus on Monday this week, when they targeted
hundreds of school children pouring out of the schools for the school buses parked in the
streets of the Old City and just outside its walls. 9 people were killed including one 3 year
old child, Elias Khoury. Christine Hourani is a beautiful Syrian teenager, her leg has been
amputated below the knee as a result of this indiscriminate and deliberate attack on children
by the same "moderate" extremists who are feeding the corporate media with the Fake News that
the Guardian relies upon to maintain its anti Syria and New Cold War narrative.
The Guardian is one of the chief fire-stokers for the UK FCO and acts as its main attack
dog when the UK FCO is under threat of exposure for its funding of terrorism in Syria with
taxpayer funds – hence the ridiculous Solon article trying to discredit myself and Eva
Bartlett, among others – while never addressing the facts and hard evidence against the
UK FCO and the various entities it is financing, such as the White Helmets, the Local
Councils in Syria & the Free Syrian Police (to name only a few). The latest CW attack
story is to distract from the crimes against humanity being comitted by the terrorist
factions in the eastern suburbs of Damascus and to further foment the escalation of military
conflict between Russian and the US on Syrian soil. The role of the Guardian is a criminal
one – and it must not be underestimated, they will take us to war, if allowed to
continue.
What the Guardian and others don't mention is. 1. the terrorist attacks on civilians and
the massacre of children & civilians on a daily basis. 2. Russia delivered a humanitarian
aid convoy to eastern Ghouta on 19th January, why are these aid deliveries not mentioned and
who benefits from them (see East Aleppo and Madaya to know exactly who does receive and
stockpile these supplies). 3. How are the terrorist receiving weapon supplies to facilitate
the murder of Syrian civilians in the residential areas of the city? The Guardian is at the
vanguard of the UK FCO dirty intelligence operation in Syria, you only have to create a
timescale of their reports on the alleged Khan Sheikhoun attacks to see who led that
narrative for the British public based upon spurious claims and unverified testimony from
known terrorist operators. Of course the Guardian does not allow comment, it knows perfectly
well that it has been rumbled.
Not expecting anything from the Graun really but this SIS memo is a new low . The mystery for
me is why do they bother even . Who are their target readership ?
This chemical attack has been "in preparation" for a while – several comments on blogs
with sources more credible than either the White Helmets or SOHR. In particular, on Moon of
Alabama – here's a quote:
"Asaad Hanna @AsaadHannaa 4:26pm · 22 Jan 2018
Assad army dropped chlorine bombed barrels on Abo Aldhoor military base #Idlib countryside in
a big attempt to take control of it.
The above is from an anti-Syrian "Media Adviser, researcher and freelance journalist"
previously published or quoted by Al Jazeerah, The Guardian, Business Insider and several
other outlets. His twitter account has a "Verified" mark.
"There is only a tiny problem with the tweet about the Abu Duhur air base. Since Saturday
the base is in government hands. Yesterday the Syrian Ministry of Defense officially
announced the full capture of the air base."
"Whoever conducted the attacks, Russia ultimately bears responsibility for the victims
in East Ghouta and countless other Syrians targeted with chemical weapons, since Russia
became involved in Syria," Tillerson told reporters.
Tillerson told reporters, and reporters just wrote it down! I was following the Twitter
exchange just now between OffG and the BBC reporter – Dan something – about the
recent new round of Russia fear porn , and it's just the same ; "I just write what the
general said": this alleged journalist.
Glad OffG reminded him what journalism actually is. You are supposed to check your
facts!
"There is simply no denying that Russia, by shielding its Syrian ally, has breached its
commitments to the US as a framework guarantor. At a bare minimum, Russia must stop
vetoing, or at the very least abstain, from future security council votes on this issue,"
he added.
But what if the "rebels" did the attack? or – even more likely – what if the
"attack" never happened like the one featured in "Saving Syria's Children"?
A good reporter could have had this fellow on the ropes, having to explain the nonsense
he's talking – but no, they just obediently type it all up and publish it.
When I first read the Solon article in the Guardian my hackles rose alarmingly. At the
time of publication, there was already widespread information as to the true nature of the
White Helmets, including about origin and funding.
As well as subsequently reading many articles in independent media about the Solon piece,
I have belatedly read your linked article above. The emails you received from Solon inviting
comment were, as you rightly imply, damning 'evidence' as to the nature of her proposed
story. It simply beggars belief.
It has got to the point where I cannot read/listen/view to ANY news stories in the
mainstream media without doubting their accuracy. And that, I began to think, was a tragedy.
But no, it's actually liberating: be a skeptic. Ask why. Ask who benefits from the story. And
what their sources are – If unnamed, simply disregard. And remember that the MSM is
beholden to very powerful media groups with their own agendas along with deep and opaque ties
to various governments/agencies.
In the USSR, before the collapse of communism, party members used to lament that Russians
didn't believe any of their media output but were also amazed and full of awe that people in
the West tended to believe their own media. Not any more. We've finally come full circle
Thanks – comments are a great initiative on some of these Guardian propaganda stories.
Amazing the way US officials can in one breath condemn a nation (Syria Govt in this case) and
at the same time announce they are establishing an illegal and permanent garrison in the
country (Syria in this case). These US officials must have skin made of rawhide – or
snake leather. Surprised our Foreign Minister Bishop hasn't been applauding this new
development.
Another nail in the coffin of the legacy news media. The more the years go bye the more the
alternative media becomes mainstream. Once the reset happens good bye to the lame street
media and hello to good old fashion news where journos question more.
The Guardian like all legacy news sights are on life support.
Russia ate my homework to western economic recovery to Takfiri rebranding as freedom fighters
have all be revealed as simple good old fashion propaganda how Orwellian and fascistic the
times we r living
It is censorship. When the Guardian promoted the White Helmet bid for the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2016, it shamelessly lobbied for their success. The hundreds, if not thousands of comments
reflected public outrage at their blatant PR for an organisation that has clear affiliations
to Al Qaeda in Syria and which is financed by the UK FCO with taxpayer funds. To dismiss this
outrage as "trolling" merely echoes the lexicon employed by the Guardian to dismiss those who
are exposing the UK regime's nefarious role in Syria and its project to destabilize a
sovereign nation and to bring about regime change yet again, in favour of a puppet regime
more in tune with UK imperialist designs in the region.
When Solon wrote her appalling
lynch-mob-hack piece attacking myself, Eva Bartlett, Tim Anderson etc she used the same
terminology – and the Guardian exercised the same censorship – even, illegally,
denying myself and others named in the article, the right to reply.
Rather than attack the
"standard of debate", I would be asking, why has the rage against the criminal misdirecting,
omission & misrepresenting of facts in Syria, reached such a fever pitch? You may
consider those "trolling" remarks to be beneath you but I say, that is an insult to the
public that the Guardian is asking to fund their efforts .that makes the Guardian answerable
to its audience, however they may express their disgust.
"... members of Washington's smart set, Republicans and Democrats alike, declared that the opportunities now presenting themselves went beyond the merely stupendous. Indeed, history itself had ended. With the United States as the planet's sole superpower, [neo]liberal democratic capitalism was destined to prevail everywhere. ..."
"... In the 1990s, rampant victory disease fueled extraordinary hubris and a pattern of reckless behavior informed by an assumption that the world would ultimately conform to the wishes of the "indispensable nation." In the years to come, an endless sequence of costly mishaps would ensue from Mogadishu to Mosul. ..."
"... Trump is not a revolutionary, and he is not the devil. He simply represents an attempt late in a systemic downward cycle to correct few excesses and buy some time. ..."
"... The beneficiaries of the excess policies – cheap labor businesses, ethnic castes, trans-gender professionals, open border fanatics, military extremists – are fighting tooth and nail to keep any change from happening. They are at this point beyond hysteria, they sense the goodies might be slipping from their hands (it is mostly about their jobs and careers). ..."
"... Two fundamental omissions from the analysis are: in domestic policies the devastating impact of affirmative action on the next generation of young, white males. And in foreign policy the equally devastating impact of Bill Clinton's attack on Serbia (to create a 'Muslim' Kosovo statelet in Europe) had on the international law and norms. Iraq inevitably followed Serbia. ..."
1989: The Fall of the Berlin Wall. As the Cold War wound down, members of Washington's
smart set, Republicans and Democrats alike, declared that the opportunities now presenting
themselves went beyond the merely stupendous. Indeed, history itself had ended. With the United
States as the planet's sole superpower, [neo]liberal democratic capitalism was destined to
prevail everywhere.
There would be no way except the American Way. In fact, however, the passing of the Cold War
should have occasioned a moment of reflection regarding the sundry mistakes and moral
compromises that marred U.S. policy from the 1940s through the 1980s. Unfortunately, policy
elites had no interest in second thoughts -- and certainly not in remorse or contrition.
In the 1990s, rampant victory disease fueled extraordinary hubris and a pattern of reckless
behavior informed by an assumption that the world would ultimately conform to the wishes of the
"indispensable nation." In the years to come, an endless sequence of costly mishaps would ensue
from Mogadishu to Mosul.
When, in due time, Donald Trump announced his intention to dismantle the establishment that
had presided over those failures, many Americans liked what he had to say, even if he spoke
from a position of total ignorance.
Those who hate Trump, will hate Trump. And very little of what they write will not be
colored by the hatred.
The analysis – although based on a sound historical premise – is off by miles.
It focuses on personalities and avoids mentioning the systemic failures by Western
institutions, from media to academia, from Hollywood to UN. Trump is not a revolutionary, and
he is not the devil. He simply represents an attempt late in a systemic downward cycle to
correct few excesses and buy some time.
The beneficiaries of the excess policies –
cheap labor businesses, ethnic castes, trans-gender professionals, open border fanatics,
military extremists – are fighting tooth and nail to keep any change from happening.
They are at this point beyond hysteria, they sense the goodies might be slipping from their
hands (it is mostly about their jobs and careers).
Two fundamental omissions from the analysis are: in domestic policies the devastating
impact of affirmative action on the next generation of young, white males. And in foreign
policy the equally devastating impact of Bill Clinton's attack on Serbia (to create a
'Muslim' Kosovo statelet in Europe) had on the international law and norms. Iraq inevitably
followed Serbia.
Why are these points left out? Because they would make the neo-liberal Democrats look bad?
Right, Gore as president, that would had fixed it all
Bacevich didn't write a word about the Open Borders fetish of both parties from which Trump
dissented, or seemed to. Not a word. And this played no small part in Trump winning the GOP
nomination and the election.
One of the mysteries of the Snowden affair was why none (almost none) of the 40,000 employees
of the disgusting 4th Amendment-trampling NSA blew the whistle on what they likely would have
known was massive illegal spying. It seems logical to assume they used their own technology
to screen applicants and I have it third hand that they screened each applicant or
nomination, for any left wing activity, any boat-rocking history, any standing up to
authority, emerging with a Stepford culture of fartcatching milquetoasts, who meekly and
submissively did what they were told and nothing else.
I now ask the same question of the disgraceful Guardian, which is nearly unrecognizably
distant from the aims of the family trust establishing it in the wake of Peterloo. Why have
none of their columnist railed publicly against the perverse mutilation of a grand old
establishment gad fly and formerly a beacon of integrity?
To read the Fraudian now, you have to discount nearly everything they say and decipher the
tiresome code for what they really think. Unless you can be sustained by mindless
gender-counting and lifestyle advice preceded by the things you 'must' do , delivered by
yapping non-experts, bulwarked by doctrinaire moderatrices.
This was a paper to which a whistleblower, not long ago might choose to go. They would be
mad to go there now after the Fraudian threw Snowden under the bus in their uninhibited
headlong fanatical drum eating for the dreaded Hillary. The pant-suited one wants him home
"to face the music". Nice. There were many lessons from Hillary's defeat and they have
learned none of them.
We live in an era where lying to Congress can be done with impunity cf. Alexander,
Clapper, Brennan et al. There was no consequence for them There could be a consequence for
the Fraudian.
"... Like the Romans, we have become an empire, committed to fighting for scores of nations, with troops on every continent and forces in combat operations of which the American people are only vaguely aware. "I didn't know there were 1,000 troops in Niger," said Senator Lindsey Graham when four Green Berets were killed there. "We don't know exactly where we're at in the world, militarily, and what we're doing." ..."
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, ..."
"... . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com. ..."
Forward Operating Base Torkham, in Nangahar Province, Afghanistan (army.mil) If Turkey is not bluffing, U.S. troops in Manbij, Syria,
could be under fire by week's end, and NATO engulfed in the worst crisis in its history.
Turkish President Erdogan said Friday his forces will cleanse Manbij of Kurdish fighters, alongside whom U.S. troops are embedded.
Erdogan's foreign minister demanded concrete steps by the United States to end its support of the Kurds, who control the Syrian
border with Turkey east of the Euphrates all the way to Iraq.
If the Turks attack Manbij, America will face a choice: stand by our Kurdish allies and resist the Turks, or abandon the Kurds.
Should the U.S. let the Turks drive the Kurds out of Manbij and the entire Syrian border area, as Erdogan threatens, American
credibility would suffer a blow from which it would not soon recover.
But to stand with the Kurds and oppose Erdogan's forces could mean a crackup of NATO and a loss of U.S. bases inside Turkey, including
the air base at Incirlik.
Turkey also sits astride the Dardanelles entrance to the Black Sea. NATO's loss would thus be a triumph for Vladimir Putin, who
gave Ankara the green light to cleanse the Kurds from Afrin.
Yet Syria is but one of many challenges facing U.S. foreign policy.
The Winter Olympics in South Korea may have taken the menace of a North Korean ICBM out of the news, but no one believes that
threat is behind us.
Last week, China charged that the USS Hopper, a guided missile destroyer, sailed within 12 nautical miles of Scarborough Shoal,
a reef in the South China Sea claimed by Beijing, though it is far closer to Luzon in the Philippines. The destroyer, says China,
was chased off by one of her frigates. If we continue to contest China's territorial claims with our warships, a clash is inevitable.
In a similar incident Monday, a Russian military jet came within five feet of a U.S. Navy EP-3 Orion surveillance jet in international
airspace over the Black Sea, forcing the Navy plane to end its mission.
U.S. relations with Cold War ally Pakistan are at rock bottom. In his first tweet of 2018, President Trump charged Pakistan with
being a false friend.
"The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given
us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools," Trump declared. "They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt
in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!"
As for America's longest war in Afghanistan, now in its 17th year, the end is nowhere on the horizon. A week ago, the International
Hotel in Kabul was attacked and held for 13 hours by Taliban gunmen who killed 40. Midweek, a Save the Children facility in Jalalabad
was attacked by ISIS, creating panic among aid workers across the country.
Saturday, an ambulance exploded in Kabul, killing 103 people and wounding 235. Monday, Islamic State militants attacked Afghan
soldiers guarding a military academy in Kabul. With the fighting season two months off, U.S. troops will not soon be departing. If
Pakistan is indeed providing sanctuary for the terrorists of the Haqqani network, how does this war end successfully for the United
States? Last week, in a friendly fire incident, the U.S.-led coalition killed 10 Iraqi soldiers. The Iraq war began 15 years ago.
Yet another war, where the humanitarian crisis rivals Syria, continues on the Arabian Peninsula. There, a Saudi air, sea, and
land blockade that threatens the Yemeni people with starvation has failed to dislodge Houthi rebels who seized the capital Sanaa
three years ago. This weekend brought news that secessionist rebels, backed by the United Arab Emirates, seized power in Yemen's
southern port of Aden from the Saudi-backed Hadi regime fighting the Houthis. These rebels seek to split the country, as it was before
1990.
Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE appear to be backing different horses in this tribal-civil-sectarian war into which America has
been drawn. There are other wars -- Somalia, Libya, Ukraine -- where the U.S. is taking sides, sending arms, training troops, flying
missions.
Like the Romans, we have become an empire, committed to fighting for scores of nations, with troops on every continent and
forces in combat operations of which the American people are only vaguely aware. "I didn't know there were 1,000 troops in Niger,"
said Senator Lindsey Graham when four Green Berets were killed there. "We don't know exactly where we're at in the world, militarily,
and what we're doing."
No, we don't, Senator. As in all empires, power is passing to the generals. And what causes the greatest angst today in the imperial
city? Fear that a four-page memo worked up in the House Judiciary Committee may discredit Robert Mueller's investigation of Russia-gate.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President
and Divided America Forever . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists,
visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
"... By Major Danny Sjursen, a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, ..."
"... He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kansas. Follow him on Twitter at ..."
"... and check out his new podcast ..."
"... . Originally published at TomDispatch ..."
"... On Strategy : A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, ..."
"... Dereliction of Duty ..."
"... The Army and Vietnam ..."
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... A Better War : The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The Daily Show with Jon Stewart ..."
"... Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife : Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... On Strategy ..."
"... Dereliction of Duty ..."
"... The Army and Vietnam ..."
"... War Comes to Long An ..."
"... I. Laying Plans ..."
"... 1. Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the State. ..."
"... 2. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected. ..."
"... 3. The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one's deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions obtaining in the field. ..."
"... 4. These are: (1) The Moral Law; (2) Heaven; (3) Earth; (4) The Commander; (5) Method and discipline. ..."
"... 5,6. The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger. ..."
"... 7. Heaven signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons. ..."
"... 8. Earth comprises distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passes; the chances of life and death. ..."
"... 9. The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerely, benevolence, courage and strictness. ..."
"... 10. By method and discipline are to be understood the marshaling of the army in its proper subdivisions, the graduations of rank among the officers, the maintenance of roads by which supplies may reach the army, and the control of military expenditure. ..."
"... 11. These five heads should be familiar to every general: he who knows them will be victorious; he who knows them not will fail. ..."
"... 12. Therefore, in your deliberations, when seeking to determine the military conditions, let them be made the basis of a comparison, in this wise:– ..."
"... 13. (1) Which of the two sovereigns is imbued with the Moral law? (2) Which of the two generals has most ability? (3) With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth? (4) On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced? (5) Which army is stronger? (6) On which side are officers and men more highly trained? (7) In which army is there the greater constancy both in reward and punishment? ..."
"... 14. By means of these seven considerations I can forecast victory or defeat. ..."
"... 15. The general that hearkens to my counsel and acts upon it, will conquer: let such a one be retained in command! The general that hearkens not to my counsel nor acts upon it, will suffer defeat:–let such a one be dismissed! ..."
"... The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation. ..."
"... Chaque fois que les incidents de guerre obligent l'un de nos officiers à agir contre un village [ ], il ne doit pas perdre de vue que son premier soin, la soumission des habitants obtenue, sera de reconstruire le village, d'y créer un marché, d'y établir une école. C'est de l'action de la politique et de la force que doit résulter la pacification du pays et l'organisation à lui donner plus tard. ..."
"... Every time one of our officers is forced to act against a village because of war incidents, he must not lose sight of his first concern, which, after the submission of the inhabitants, is to rebuild the village, to create a market, to establish a school. It is the joint action of policy and force that must result in the pacification of the country and in its later organization. ..."
"... The Bridge on the River Kwai ..."
"... A Bright Shining Lie ..."
"... The Best and the Brightest ..."
"... The Ugly American is a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. The Ugly American depicts the failures of the U.S. diplomatic corps, whose insensitivity to local language, culture, customs and refusal to integrate was in marked contrast to the polished abilities of Eastern Bloc (primarily Soviet) diplomacy and led to Communist diplomatic success overseas [sic]. The book caused a sensation in diplomatic circles. John F. Kennedy was so impressed with the book that he sent a copy to each of his colleagues in the United States Senate. The book was one of the biggest bestsellers in the country, has been in print continuously since it appeared and is one of the most politically influential novels in all of American literature. ..."
"... The title of the novel is a play on Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American and was sometimes confused with it. ..."
"... The "Ugly American" of the book title refers to the book's hero, plain-looking engineer Homer Atkins, whose "calloused and grease-blackened hands always reminded him that he was an ugly man." Atkins, who lives with the local people, comes to understand their needs, and offers genuinely useful assistance with small-scale projects such as the development of a simple bicycle-powered water pump.[2] ..."
"... as it very properly attempted to conceal from the Japanese, ..."
By Major Danny Sjursen, a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West
Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a
memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War,Ghost Riders of Baghdad:
Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . He lives with his wife and four sons
in Lawrence, Kansas. Follow him on Twitter at@SkepticalVetand check out his new podcastFortress on
a Hill. Originally published at TomDispatch
[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an
unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of
the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]
Vietnam: it's always there. Looming in the past, informing American futures.
A 50-year-old war, once labeled the longest in our history, is still alive and well and
still being refought by one group of Americans: the military high command. And almost half a
century later, they're still losing it and blaming others for doing so.
Of course, the U.S. military and Washington policymakers lost the war in Vietnam in the
previous century and perhaps it's well that they did. The United States really had no business
intervening in that anti-colonial civil war in the first place, supporting a South Vietnamese
government of questionable legitimacy, and stifling promised nationwide elections on both sides
of that country's artificial border. In doing so, Washington presented an easy villain for a
North Vietnamese-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency, a group known to Americans
in those years as the Vietcong.
More than two decades of involvement and, at the war's peak, half a million American troops
never altered the basic weakness of the U.S.-backed regime in Saigon. Despite millions of Asian
deaths and 58,000 American ones, South Vietnam's military could not, in the end, hold the line
without American support and finally collapsed under the weight of a conventional North
Vietnamese invasion in April 1975.
There's just one thing. Though a majority of historians (known in academia as the "orthodox"
school) subscribe to the basic contours of the above narrative, the vast majority of senior
American military officers do not. Instead, they're still refighting the Vietnam War to a far
cheerier outcome through the books they read, the scholarship they publish, and (most
disturbingly) the policies they continue to pursue in the Greater Middle East.
The Big Re-Write
In 1986, future general, Iraq-Afghan War commander, and CIA director David Petraeus penned
an article
for the military journal Parameters that summarized his Princeton doctoral
dissertation on the Vietnam War. It was a piece commensurate with then-Major Petraeus's
impressive intellect, except for its disastrous conclusions on the lessons of that war. Though
he did observe that Vietnam had "cost
the military dearly" and that "the frustrations of Vietnam are deeply etched in the minds of
those who lead the services," his real fear was that the war had left the military unprepared
to wage what were then called "low-intensity conflicts" and are now known as
counterinsurgencies. His takeaway: what the country needed wasn't less Vietnams but
better-fought ones. The next time, he concluded fatefully, the military should do a far better
job of implementing counterinsurgency forces, equipment, tactics, and doctrine to win such
wars.
Two decades later, when the next Vietnam-like quagmire did indeed present itself in Iraq, he
and a whole generation of COINdinistas (like-minded officers
devoted to his favored counterinsurgency approach to modern warfare) embraced those very
conclusions to win the war on terror. The names of some of them -- H.R. McMaster and James
Mattis, for instance -- should ring a bell or two these days. In Iraq and later in Afghanistan,
Petraeus and his acolytes would get their chance to translate theory into practice. Americans
-- and much of the rest of the planet -- still live with the results.
Like Petraeus, an entire generation of senior military leaders, commissioned in the years
after the Vietnam War and now atop the defense behemoth, remain fixated on that ancient
conflict. After all these decades, such "thinking" generals and "soldier-scholars" continue to
draw all the wrong lessons from what, thanks in part to them, has now become America's
second longest war.
Rival Schools
Historian Gary Hess identifies two main schools
of revisionist thinking. There are the "Clausewitzians" (named after the nineteenth century
Prussian military theorist) who insist that Washington never sufficiently attacked the enemy's
true center of gravity in North Vietnam. Beneath the academic language, they essentially agree
on one key thing: the U.S. military should have bombed the North into a parking lot.
The second school, including Petraeus, Hess labeled the "hearts-and-minders." As
COINdinistas, they felt the war effort never focused clearly enough on isolating the Vietcong,
protecting local villages in the South, building schools, and handing out candy -- everything,
in short, that might have won (in the phrase of that era) Vietnamese hearts and minds.
Both schools, however, agreed on something basic: that the U.S. military should have won in
Vietnam.
The danger presented by either school is clear enough in the twenty-first century. Senior
commanders, some now serving in key national security positions, fixated on Vietnam, have
translated that conflict's supposed lessons into what now passes for military strategy in
Washington. The
result has been an ever-expanding war on terror campaign waged ceaselessly from South Asia
to West Africa, which has essentially turned out to be perpetual war based on the can-do belief
that counterinsurgency and advise-and-assist missions should have worked in Vietnam and can
work now.
The Go-Big Option
The leading voice of the Clausewitzian school was U.S. Army Colonel and Korean War/Vietnam
War vet Harry Summers, whose 1982 book, On Strategy : A
Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, became an instant classic within the military. It's
easy enough to understand why. Summers argued that civilian policymakers -- not the military
rank-and-file -- had lost the war by focusing hopelessly on the insurgency in South Vietnam
rather than on the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. More troops, more aggressiveness, even
full-scale invasions of communist safe havens in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, would have
led to victory.
Summers had a deep emotional investment in his topic.
Later , he would argue that the source of post-war pessimistic analyses of the conflict lay
in "draft dodgers and war evaders still [struggling] with their consciences." In his own work,
Summers marginalized all Vietnamese actors (as would so many later military historians), failed
to adequately deal with the potential consequences, nuclear or otherwise, of the sorts of
escalation he advocated, and didn't even bother to ask whether Vietnam was a core national
security interest of the United States.
Perhaps he would have done well to reconsider a famous post-war
encounter he had with a North Vietnamese officer, a Colonel Tu, whom he assured that "you
know you never beat us on the battlefield."
"That may be so," replied his former enemy, "but it is also irrelevant."
Whatever its limitations, his work remains influential in military circles to this day. (I
was assigned the book as a West Point cadet!)
A more sophisticated Clausewitzian analysis came from current National Security Adviser H.R.
McMaster in a highly acclaimed 1997 book, Dereliction of
Duty . He argued that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were derelict in failing to give
President Lyndon Johnson an honest appraisal of what it would take to win, which meant that
"the nation went to war without the benefit of effective military advice." He concluded that
the war was lost not in the field or by the media or even on antiwar college campuses, but in
Washington, D.C., through a failure of nerve by the Pentagon's generals, which led civilian
officials to opt for a deficient strategy.
McMaster is a genuine scholar and a gifted writer, but he still suggested that the Joint
Chiefs should have advocated for a more aggressive offensive strategy -- a full ground invasion
of the North or unrelenting carpet-bombing of that country. In this sense, he was just another
"go-big" Clausewitzian who, as historian Ronald Spector pointed
out recently, ignored Vietnamese views and failed to acknowledge -- an observation
of historian Edward Miller -- that "the Vietnam War was a Vietnamese war."
COIN: A Small (Forever) War
Another Vietnam veteran, retired Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Krepinevich, fired the opening
salvo for the hearts-and-minders. In The Army and Vietnam , published in 1986, he
argued
that the NLF, not the North Vietnamese Army, was the enemy's chief center of gravity and that
the American military's failure to emphasize counterinsurgency principles over conventional
concepts of war sealed its fate. While such arguments were, in reality, no more
impressive than those of the Clausewitzians, they have remained popular with military
audiences, as historian Dale Andrade points
out , because they offer a "simple explanation for the defeat in Vietnam."
Krepinevich would write an influential 2005 Foreign Affairspiece , "How to Win
in Iraq," in which he applied his Vietnam conclusions to a new strategy of prolonged
counterinsurgency in the Middle East, quickly winning over the New
York Times 's resident conservative columnist, David Brooks, and generating "discussion in
the Pentagon, CIA, American Embassy in Baghdad, and the office of the vice president."
In 1999, retired army officer and Vietnam veteran Lewis Sorley penned the definitive
hearts-and-minds tract, A Better War : The
Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam . Sorley boldly
asserted
that, by the spring of 1970, "the fighting wasn't over, but the war was won." According to his
comforting tale, the real explanation for failure lay with the "big-war" strategy of U.S.
commander General William Westmoreland. The counterinsurgency strategy of his successor,
General Creighton Abrams -- Sorley's knight in shining armor -- was (or at least should have
been) a war winner.
Critics
noted that Sorley overemphasized the marginal differences between the two generals'
strategies and produced a remarkably counterfactual work. It didn't matter, however. By 2005,
just as the situation in Iraq, a country then locked in a sectarian civil war amid an American
occupation, went from bad to worse, Sorley's book found
its way into the hands of the head of U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid, and State
Department counselor Philip Zelikow. By then, according
to the Washington Post 's David Ignatius, it could also "be found on the
bookshelves of senior military officers in Baghdad."
Another influential hearts-and-minds devotee was Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl. (He even
made it
onto The Daily Show with Jon Stewart .) His Learning to Eat Soup with
a Knife : Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam followed Krepinevich in
claiming that "if [Creighton] Abrams had gotten the call to lead the American effort at the
start of the war, America might very well have won it." In 2006, the Wall Street
Journalreported that Army Chief of Staff
General Peter Schoomaker "so liked [Nagl's] book that he made it required reading for all
four-star generals," while the Iraq War commander of that moment, General George Casey, gave
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a copy during a visit to Baghdad.
David Petraeus and current Secretary of Defense James Mattis, co-authors in 2006 of
FM 3-24, the first ( New York Times -reviewed ) military field manual for counterinsurgency since
Vietnam, must also be considered among the pantheon of hearts-and-minders. Nagl wrote a
foreword for their manual,
while Krepinevich provided a glowing back-cover endorsement .
Such revisionist interpretations would prove tragic in Iraq and Afghanistan, once they had
filtered down to the entire officer corps.
Reading All the Wrong Books
In 2009, when former West Point history professor Colonel Gregory Daddis was deployed
to Iraq as the command historian for the Multinational Corps -- the military's primary tactical
headquarters -- he noted that corps commander Lieutenant General Charles Jacoby had assigned a
professional reading list to his principal subordinates. To his disappointment, Daddis also
discovered that the only Vietnam War book included was Sorley's A Better War . This
should have surprised no one, since his argument -- that American soldiers in Vietnam
were
denied an impending victory by civilian policymakers, a liberal media, and antiwar protestors
-- was still resonant among the officer corps in year six of the Iraq quagmire. It wasn't the
military's fault!
Officers have long distributed professional reading lists for subordinates, intellectual
guideposts to the complex challenges ahead. Indeed, there's much to be admired in the concept,
but also potential dangers in such lists as they inevitably influence the thinking of an entire
generation of future leaders. In the case of Vietnam, the perils are obvious. The generals have
been assigning and reading problematic books for years, works that were essentially meant to
reinforce professional pride in the midst of a series of unsuccessful and unending wars.
Just after 9/11, for instance, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers -- who spoke at my
West Point graduation -- included Summers's On
Strategy on his list. A few years later, then-Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker
added
McMaster's Dereliction of Duty . The trend continues today. Marine Corps Commandant
Robert Neller has kept McMaster and added Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger (he of the
illegal bombing of both Laos and Cambodia and war
criminal fame). Current Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley kept Kissinger and
added good
old Lewis Sorley. To top it all off, Secretary of Defense Mattis has included
yet another Kissinger book and, in a different list , Krepinevich's
The Army and Vietnam .
Just as important as which books made the lists is what's missing from them: none of these
senior commanders include newer scholarship
,
novels , or journalistic accounts which might raise thorny, uncomfortable questions about
whether the Vietnam War was winnable, necessary, or advisable, or incorporate local voices that
might highlight the limits of American influence and power.
Serving in the Shadow of Vietnam
Most of the generals leading the war on terror just missed service in the Vietnam War. They
graduated from various colleges or West Point in the years immediately following the withdrawal
of most U.S. ground troops or thereafter: Petraeus in
1974 , future Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal in 1976 , and present National Security Adviser H.R.
McMaster in 1984 .
Secretary of Defense Mattis finished ROTC and graduated from Central Washington University in
1971 , while
Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly enlisted at the tail end of the Vietnam War, receiving his
commission in 1976
.
In other words, the generation of officers now overseeing the still-spreading war on terror
entered military service at the end of or after the tragic war in Southeast Asia. That meant
they narrowly escaped combat duty in the bloodiest American conflict since World War II and so
the professional credibility that went with it. They were mentored and taught by academy
tactical officers, ROTC instructors, and commanders who had cut their teeth on that conflict.
Vietnam literally dominated the discourse of their era -- and it's never ended.
Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, and the others entered service when military prestige had
reached a nadir or was just rebounding. And those reading lists taught the young officers where
to lay the blame for that -- on civilians in Washington (or in the nation's streets) or on a
military high command too weak to assert its authority effectively. They would serve in
Vietnam's shadow, the shadow of defeat, and the conclusions they would draw from it would only
lead to twenty-first-century disasters.
From Vietnam to the War on Terror to Generational War
All of this misremembering, all of those Vietnam "lessons" inform the U.S. military's
ongoing "surges" and "advise-and-assist" approaches to its wars in the Greater Middle East and
Africa. Representatives of both Vietnam revisionist schools now guide the development of the
Trump administration's version of global strategy. President Trump's in-house Clausewitzians
clamor for -- and receive
-- ever more delegated authority to do their damnedest and what retired General (and Vietnam
vet) Edward Meyer called for
back in 1983: "a freer hand in waging war than they had in Vietnam." In other words, more
bombs, more troops, and carte blanche to escalate such conflicts to their hearts' content.
Meanwhile, President Trump's hearts-and-minds faction consists of officers who have spent
three administrations expanding COIN-influenced missions to approximately 70%
of the world's nations. Furthermore, they've recently fought for and been granted a new
"mini-surge" in Afghanistan intended to -- in disturbingly Vietnam-esque language -- "break the
deadlock ," "reverse the decline," and "end the
stalemate " there. Never mind that neither 100,000 U.S. troops (when I was
there in 2011) nor 16 full years of combat could, in the term of the trade, "stabilize"
Afghanistan. The can-do, revisionist believers atop the national security state have convinced
Trump that -- despite his original
instincts -- 4,000 or 5,000 (or
6,000 or 7,000) more troops (and yet more
drones ,
planes , and other equipment) will do the trick. This represents tragedy bordering on
farce.
The hearts and minders and Clausewitzians atop the military establishment since 9/11 are
never likely to stop citing their versions of the Vietnam War as the key to victory today; that
is, they will never stop focusing on a war that was always unwinnable and never worth fighting.
None of today's acclaimed military personalities seems willing to consider that Washington
couldn't have won in Vietnam because, as former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak (who
flew
269 combat missions over that country) noted in the
recent Ken Burns documentary series, "we were fighting on the wrong side."
Today's leaders don't even pretend that the post-9/11 wars will ever end. In an interview
last June, Petraeus -- still considered a sagacious guru of the Defense establishment --
disturbingly described the Afghan conflict as " generational ." Eerily
enough, to cite a Vietnam-era precedent, General Creighton Abrams predicted something similar.
speaking to the White House as the war in Southeast Asia was winding down. Even as President
Richard Nixon slowly withdrew U.S. forces, handing over their duties to the South Vietnamese
Army (ARVN) -- a process known then as "Vietnamization" -- the general warned
that, despite ARVN improvements, continued U.S. support "would be required indefinitely to
maintain an effective force." Vietnam, too, had its "generational" side (until, of course, it
didn't).
That war and its ill-fated lessons will undoubtedly continue to influence U.S. commanders
until a new set of myths, explaining away a new set of failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
elsewhere, take over, possibly thanks to books by veterans of these conflicts about how
Washington could have won the war on terror.
It's not that our generals don't read. They do. They just doggedly continue to read the
wrong books.
In 1986, General Petraeus ended his influential Parametersarticle
with a quote from historian George Herring: "Each historical situation is unique and the use of
analogy is at best misleading, at worst, dangerous." When it comes to Vietnam and a cohort of
officers shaped in its shadow (and even now convinced it could have been won), "dangerous"
hardly describes the results. They've helped bring us generational war and, for today's young
soldiers, ceaseless tragedy.
I know there is a book with the name; "The Arrogance of Power", but it is apt when applied
to US attempt to obliterate the nation of Vietnam. We continue to spread this filthy type of
"war" around the globe only because we have not really met our "match" but, we will .oh yes,
we will. Every book that has been written about either the war itself or the tactics used to
try to "win" has contributed to more understanding of that brutal war. The military must
relearn the rule of war that war itself alone cannot win, it takes the political side also.
It has been infernally "easy" since 9/11 for the politicians, the military industrial complex
to construct a world of "terror" and most Americans believe in that world. It has been
immensely profitable. No compulsory military service; a bunch of "little" wars around the
globe being run by private enterprises; no excess war profits taxes; a Pentagon budget that
includes the propagandizing of the American sports public .and on and on and on. What's not
to like for the profit mongers and the ideologically bent?? Ho Chi Min and the people of
Vietnam were outright betrayed by WW1 (just like the Arabs) treaties; by the US in it's
treatment of Vietnam in the treaties of WW2 (Roosevelt died but he already had an
understanding with the French (DeGaulle)) to not interfere with their retaking over of
Vietnam after WW2 so as to get French cooperation with the birth of NATO.
May I add another book: "Ho Chi Min" "A Life" William J. Duiker. Pub. 2000.
Well if they are looking for good books on 'Nam, might I suggest some of the books from my
own collection?
"Long Time Passing" – Myra MacPherson
"About Face" – David H. Hackworth
"Nam" – Mark Baker
"Dispatches" – Michael Herr
"One Soldier"- John H. Shook
"The Only War We Had" – Michael Lee Lanning
"To Heal a Nation" – Jan C. Scruggs
Also, the novel (based on the authors experience as an NVA soldier), 'The Sorrows of War'
by Bao Ninh. It shows many NVA soldiers were as cynical of their political masters as the
average US grunt.
Oh, I'd forgotten 'The Quiet American', incredible book – I kept having to check the
inside page when I read it to confirm that it was in fact written before the Vietnam War
– its prescience was amazing. It should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in
foreign policy of any type.
George Martin Windrow's "The Last Valley" (1996) displaces Bernard Fall as the definitive
work on Dien Bien Phu, prelude to America's debacle. I work a lot in Vietnam, and his
description of how their society organizes and moblilizes is spot on. He also has blood
curdling descriptions of what artillery does to human bodies. And there is the entertaining
interlude where the US briefly entertained atomic bombing to break the siege.
From Bernard Fall's Newport lecture at the Naval War College in about 1964:
"Let me state this definition: RW = G + P, or, "revolutionary warfare equals guerrilla
warfare plus political action." This formula for revolutionary warfare is the result of the
application of guerrilla methods to the furtherance of an ideology or a political system.
This is the real difference between partisan warfare, guerrilla warfare, and everything else.
"Guerrilla" simply means "small war," to which the correct Army answer is (and that applies
to all Western armies) that everybody knows how to fight small wars; no second lieutenant of
the infantry ever learns anything else but how to fight small wars. Political action,
however, is the difference. The communists, or shall we say, any sound revolutionary warfare
operator (the French underground, the Norwegian underground, or any other European anti-Nazi
underground) most of the time used small-war tactics–not to destroy the German Army, of
which they were thoroughly incapable, but to establish a competitive system of control over
the population. Of course, in order to do this, here and there they had to kill some of the
occupying forces and attack some of the military targets. But above all they had to kill
their own people who collaborated with the enemy."
Also worth a look: War Comes to Long An by Jeffrey Race, which essentially
discloses that the U.S. war effort, as understood by the Vietnamese themselves, was to keep
the French colonial oligarchy in place.
Race learned Vietnamese on the boat over to Vietnam and interviewed the Vietnamese
themselves to find out why they continued to fight. Basically, the oligarchy promised only
continued oppression by the rentiers.
I didn't need to read books about Vietnam. I simply listened to the stories and night-time
screams of my new roommates returning to school on the GI Bill in '68 and '69. The lives
ruined, on both sides, stays with me today.
One of those room-mates was on Hamburger Hill in May of '69 and was attempting college in
the Fall. PTSD was apparent and he soon enough dropped out (of life).
The sad part is we Americans do everything we keep to keep snatching defeat from victory's
teeth. The Vietnamese as a whole were happy with us before our government (read CIA)
sabotaged the elections, and handed power over to the Catholic minority and its most corrupt
part at that. (When you have to pay/bribe someone for artillery support during a battle ) Ho
Chi Min and company did not ally themselves to their worst enemy, the Chinese, because they
wanted too.
Same with Iraq. It was probably unwindable, but scrapping detailed State Department plans
on what when, and if, Iraq was occupied because you don't want to spend the money, defend
only the oil ministry's offices, let the entire country just collapse, and then fire not only
anyone a member of the Ba'ath Party as well as the entire Iraqi Army. Of course, if wanted to
be a teacher or have a job in the government, you had to be a Ba'athist, and to secure any of
the weapons and ammunition of the army is something. I am not what that something is, but
it's really something. And then the Bush Administration basically says it's going to invade
Iran once everything settles, which gave the Iranians incentive to keep arming anyone in Iraq
fighting the Americans and British.
I am raaaanting now and I can feel my blood rising so I am gonna stop now. It's just so
hard seeing our government's foreign policy and its intelligence services being run by well
educated morons.
Can't comment on Iraq, but Vietnam was a MAJOR F-up by USA. Ho Chi Min was actually very
much pro-USA – until they handed them back to French after WW2.
With even a bit of US support Vietnam could have been fairly firmly pro-US (it always was
anti-China, so the "it will go to Chinese like Koreans did" fears were fearmongering/PR at
worst and lack of understanding at best), aiming to build a sort of social-democratic regime
rather than full-on Communist one. Yes, it would have upset the French. What's not to like,
given how deGaule was trying to screw everyone around to push their national interests? (much
better than British at the time, one should say).
The Cold War was spinning up in Europe, and the U.S. was trying to get France on its side.
The price for that was allowing France to attempt to reassert itself in Indochina.
I know the usual excuse – but there was about zero chance that France would really
go into bed with USSR.
deGaule definitely threatened it, but I very much doubt he would go the full hog –
if nothing else, he didn't want to be anyone's, and that included USSR's, puppet. At the very
very worst, they might end up Yugoslavia-like, although I'd say that once proto-EU was cooked
up, France would jump there pretty quick, as otherwise it would have lost pretty much all
influence in Europe.
Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were all, arguably, 'winnable' – the common thread in
all three is the US failure to understand local political dynamics. With Vietnam, it was the
failure to understand that what was happening was primarily a civil war with the 'Communists'
not necessarily being anti-American – they saw (and still see) China as their long
historical enemy. In Iraq the dismembering of the existing Ba'ath party structures without
having anything (apart from the free market of course) to replace it proved fatal, along with
an ignorance of Shia/Sunni dynamics. In Afghanistan the 'victory' was blown by an insistence
on chasing phantom Al-Q enemies when the Taliban was more or less destroyed.
When you read the history of long lived empires, from Rome to the British Empire, a common
characteristic they all have is an acute awareness of how to manipulate local dynamics in
order to maintain control without expending too much manpower. The US military seems to
completely lack this capacity. In fact, rather than being in charge, a common feature seems
to be that US military power is all too easily manipulated by local powerbrokers for their
own ends.
Yep, I'll sign under that. I do wonder how much it has to do with the American psyche, and
how much with the fact that even British or Roman empires had sort of hard limitations (not
just in terms of manpower, but more importantly in the ability to get the manpower to the
sharp end pronto).
I think an element of it is quite simply the sheer wealth and power of America means it
doesn't have to think through the consequences of interventions too much. Even in the heyday
of the European empires, military adventures were very expensive operations – two or
three failures in a row could fatally set an empire back.
I think another major issue is the lack of skin in the game for decision makers. I think
the early days of WWII was the last time there was a major cull of military officers for
incompetence in the US. And even in WWII, it was rare for officers to get killed. Even more
so since then, and with the ending of the draft, it means no risks for their sons or
daughters, and minimal ones for anyone they would be likely to know.
There is simply little or no price paid for failure. At least not by the people
responsible.
"All, arguably, winnable." For what definition of "WIN?"
Our military rulers are supposed to "study war." The curriculum supposedly includes not
only Clausewitz, Mr. "Center of Gravity," on "modern" war, but also that hoary old classic
under the nom de plume "Sun Tzu," called "The Art of War." Said rulers, for some reason, skip
over the first part of Sun Tzu's advice, the part about asking whether going to war is wise
at all, at all:
I. Laying Plans
1. Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the State.
2. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a
subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.
3. The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into
account in one's deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions obtaining in the
field.
4. These are: (1) The Moral Law; (2) Heaven; (3) Earth; (4) The Commander; (5) Method
and discipline.
5,6. The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so
that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.
7. Heaven signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons.
8. Earth comprises distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and
narrow passes; the chances of life and death.
9. The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerely, benevolence, courage and
strictness.
10. By method and discipline are to be understood the marshaling of the army in its
proper subdivisions, the graduations of rank among the officers, the maintenance of roads by
which supplies may reach the army, and the control of military expenditure.
11. These five heads should be familiar to every general: he who knows them will be
victorious; he who knows them not will fail.
12. Therefore, in your deliberations, when seeking to determine the military
conditions, let them be made the basis of a comparison, in this wise:–
13. (1) Which of the two sovereigns is imbued with the Moral law? (2) Which of the two
generals has most ability? (3) With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth?
(4) On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced? (5) Which army is stronger? (6) On
which side are officers and men more highly trained? (7) In which army is there the greater
constancy both in reward and punishment?
14. By means of these seven considerations I can forecast victory or defeat.
15. The general that hearkens to my counsel and acts upon it, will conquer: let such a
one be retained in command! The general that hearkens not to my counsel nor acts upon it,
will suffer defeat:–let such a one be dismissed!http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html
There's a lot more in "The Art of War" about the idiocy of doofus war-fighting in absence
of the Moral Law and true national interest at the end of immense logistics and supply
chains, war that bankrupts the peasants, getting stuck in quagmires and such. The current
rulers just jump (if they pay any attention at all to the work any more) straight to all the
chestnuts ("All war is deception," duh, "Attack where he is weak, retreat where he is
strong," duh) about how to conduct strategy and tactics.
When was the last time any of these fundamental "Think before shooting" considerations Sun
Tzu distilled from millennia of earlier wars and his own experiences was given ANY attention
by the rotter nihilists ("Mutual Assured Destruction, Massive Retaliation, "counterinsurgency
always and everywhere, the F-35 model of logistics?) who commit "the nation" and the peasants
to their programs and "operations"? And even the attempts to "get the peasants on side" via
Bernays saucing, one of the necessary conditions per Sun Tzu, have been completely bollixed,
or simply plowed over.
All this sh!t-storm activity is conducted from within the same kind of bubble that got
inflated around the French High Command in the run up to the Great War, and seems to
regularly envelop "high commands" which are maybe experiencing a "contact high" from
breathing, inside that bubble, the heady fumes of their self-generated hallucinogenic
"designer drugs."
Many of our cities and towns already look a lot like Fallujah and Raqqa after
"liberation-by-destruction." Waiting for a massive collapse, maybe slow-mo or maybe
tipping-point quick, with huge collateral damage, in three, two, one
The problem is, many will argue that the parts of Sun Tzu you so correctly pointed out
aren't really the US military's job, they are the responsibility of the US Congress.
But something other than "Congress" is what's loosing the dogs of war. There's how it's
supposed to work, on paper, per that "quaint document," and how it actually works. Like so
much of "the Republic." Which ain't.
"When you read the history of long lived empires, from Rome to the British Empire, a
common characteristic they all have is an acute awareness of how to manipulate local dynamics
in order to maintain control without expending too much manpower."
+ 100
It won't surprise readers that Petraeus' "masterpiece" on counterinsurgency bears a strong
similarity to a publication by the late Sir Frank Kitson. Sir Frank commanded British forces
in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and UK Land Forces soon after. He also served in colonial
insurgencies in the 1950s. Kitson gave a talk, based on his publication, on such matters to
his alma mater, which I attended, in the mid-1980s. He was also the speaker at "speech day"
around then.
When the Iraq and Afghanistan War started, the British military were full of confidence
that their experience in counterinsurgency would allow them to show the US how it was done.
They had to be rescued in somewhat ignominious manner from both Basra and Kandahar as they
were shown to be completely out of their depth. It is part of British Army mythology that
they defeated the IRA using sound and sensible COIN, but the reality is much more
complicated.
Incidentally, it is said that Mao (and possibly Ho Chi Minh too) were avid readers of the
biographies of early 20th Century IRA leaders, including Michael Collins and Tom Barry, both
experts in counter-counter insurgency. Tom Barry was the leader of the most effective unit,
the West Cork Brigade. Collins was a master in using intelligence against intelligence
services, while Tom Barry was capable of using limited resources to keep an enormous number
of soldiers tied up. Both knew the skills of provoking the State into over-reactions which
pushed civilians over onto the rebels side.
Yes – despite its obligations under the Good Friday Agreement the British Government
is still sitting on files which would likely shed light on the dirty war in Northern Ireland.
Its pretty clear that both the main loyalist groups were to a large extent run by the
intelligence services to kill suspected IRA members, and were very likely involved in
bombings that resulted in mass casualties in Dublin and Monaghan. While they did undoubtedly
manage to neutralise some IRA Units in reality they stoked up as much violence as they
stopped.
In advance of a Corbyn government, many papers, some going back to the smearing of Labour
in the 1920s, have been "lost". The cache lost include the papers on the "sexed up dodgy
dossier", written by the UK's current envoy to the UN (Matthew Ryecroft) and sexed up by the
loathsome Alistair Campbell, and the death of the weapons inspector. The form of death
officially recorded, as with George Michael's, is disputed by many pathologists, including
former colleagues of my father.
Indeed. Document "disappearance" is a serious problem, with a long history, addressed
pretty well in Ian Cobain's recent title The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the
Shaping of a Modern Nation.
Whatever approach Petraeus & Co proposed, "hearts and minds" counter-insurgency was
basically a century old. Here:
Chaque fois que les incidents de guerre obligent l'un de nos officiers à agir
contre un village [ ], il ne doit pas perdre de vue que son premier soin, la soumission des
habitants obtenue, sera de reconstruire le village, d'y créer un marché, d'y
établir une école. C'est de l'action de la politique et de la force que doit
résulter la pacification du pays et l'organisation à lui donner plus
tard.
I.e. Every time one of our officers is forced to act against a village because of war
incidents, he must not lose sight of his first concern, which, after the submission of the
inhabitants, is to rebuild the village, to create a market, to establish a school. It is the
joint action of policy and force that must result in the pacification of the country and in
its later organization.
From the "fundamental instructions" of General Gallieni from 22nd May 1898, in the midst
of the "pacification" of Madagascar. Its estimated death toll was about 100000.
These generals remind me of the character of Colonel Nicholson (played by Alec Guinness)
in The Bridge on the River Kwai . They're so focused on the task in front of them,
they can't seem to step back and think about the wider picture.
In the Netflix film The Siege of Jadotville ,
the real life Commandant Pat Quinlan is quoted as saying 'Soldiers do tactics, politicians do
strategy'. The US miliitary always seems to have a surfeit of tactics with no discernable
strategy.
And of course Nicholson, at the end of the film, was going to stop the demolition of that
so painfully built bridge by the "inglorious bastards" on his nominal own team. Only dumb
luck and the timing of a bullet from a "Jap" led to his falling on the detonator as he died,
and blowing up the span .
re: wider picture.
The wider picture is the political picture. The military in the US is supposed to be and
remain non-political. The politicians send the military to wars. The military does not choose
what war, where, why to fight. Those decisions are Congress and the prez's job.
adding: When then (2003) Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki told the Senate Armed
Services Committee the truth about what an Iraq invasion required he displeased the Bush
admin and DoD, and was shortly edged out of his command by retirement. That in-essence
"sacking" had a large effect on the thinking of the entire chain of command, imo.
Thank you Yves for posting this article. It is rather disheartening but explains a lot of
what I have been wondering about for years – Didn't we learn anything from Vietnam?
Obviously the answer is no; but even worse is the attitude of "we could/should have won"
displayed by the current military brass.
I remarked to wifey the other day that kids who were only a year old on 9/11 will be old
enough to join the military this year
I first heard of Ghost Riders of Baghdad by following various military Twitter accounts,
like Angry Staff Officer, or the account of Robert Bateman ( who sometimes writes for
Esquire). Angry Staff officer also has a blog with very informative posts. I thought of, Is
The Amy's Professional Military Education Broken?, after reading the above post. A sample, "
All military education must stem from the fundamental that war is a human endeavor, and as
such cannot be prosecuted without understanding basic factors of humanity".
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/07/18/is-the-armys-professional-military-education-system-broken/
It is never mentioned here but how about the possibility that some wars simply cannot be
won – ever. It is not for nothing that Afghanistan is know as the place that empires go
to die nor that a geopolitical axiom is to never fight a land war in Asia. There was no
possible time-line where the US won in Vietnam using either military means or COIN
operations. The terrible truth is that most of those 58,00 Americans died long after it was
know that they could never win.
The COINdinistas had their chance in Iraq but younger offices at the time were furious with
senior officers in how out of touch they were with what was going on so it was a repeat of
the Vietnam experience all over again, including the notorious body-counts. And this whole
we-would-have-won-if-not-for-the-politicians-and-hippies is as much crap as the post WW1
German officers with their we-were-stabbed-in-the-back obsession. I see this even here in
Australia. Years ago I saw an Army show that featured the history of the Army. When they got
to the Vietnam war era they had Aussie soldiers naming the dead bodies in a mock-up of the
Battle of Long Tan while of the other side of the arena they had hippies shouting peace
slogans and the like. The message was clear – you betrayed us!
And that "you never beat us on the battlefield" was apparently not true either according to
an article I read last year setting out a few hard truths. The truth is that the training of
American officers is badly broken and that sycophants do very well in it. The whole system
needs to be junked as America is not bringing out the best officers that it can – not
by a long shot – and it was this system that produced leaders like Petraeus. They may
have been presented as the Great White Hope once but I invite other commentators find out how
his superior, Admiral William Fallon, regarded him. Nothing less than a root and branch
overhaul of the American officer training regime will counter how we see wars being fought
now. Otherwise we will continue to see more of the same.
Its worse than that: the US military is the cutting edge of a political Imperialist policy
completely contradicted by the
21st C environment. This is failure at the DNA level.
Two things that need to be understand about the Vietnam war that the US military does not
get.
The first is that the US did not lose the Vietnam war, we were beaten by the Vietnamese.
If we just "lost" the war, then all the "Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics" crap where the
only to lose is through a failure of will, (protesters and namby-pamby members of Congress)
becomes the dominant explanation.
We were beaten, and so we need to know why our military was beaten, and what the
military/Pentagon did wrong.
The second thing is the idea that the
Vietnamese won no battles in the war is patently false .
There are at least 70 battles that were lost.
The reason that the Pentagon insists on ignoring both of these is because the "stab in the
back from protesters" means that there is no accountability for the failures of our
military.
So, like the Bourbon kings, our military has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
The article states "Two decades later, when the next Vietnam-like quagmire did indeed
present itself in Iraq "
In fact, the next Vietnam-like quagmire was engineered much sooner than that, and is still
running.
From an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, US National Security Adviser at the time:
" it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the
opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the
president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a
Soviet military intervention The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote
to President Carter, essentially: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its
Vietnam war.' " http://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interview
Popular insurgencies can be beaten. There are many examples, especially in Latin America.
The common enabling condition appears to be exhaustion of the peasantry over a period of
years, after which they choose 'peace and order' enforced by thugs with badges over the
guerrillas who cannot restore economic life, even in 'liberated zones'.
Pastoral mountain tribesmen are probably the least susceptible to this exhaustion and
subjugation can take generations: witness the Scots.
I think you're getting at something that the win/lose focus misses: whether or not the US
ultimately failed to maintain a client regime in Vietnam, it brutally demonstrated the costs
of resistance.
In Yves' intro she writes
but decided to stay at war because they deemed the damage to US prestige of winding down
the war to be too great.
US prestige = certainty of monumental costs to resistance. Prestige is honorspeak for
legitimate terrorism.
I think you are missing the point of all of this and in fact trivializing the war.
Vietnam was not a popular insurgency (whatever that means). It was an all out war to rid
that nation of colonial domination and unify the country. It was not the "Viet Namese war"
for these people, but the war against America.
"Popular insurgency" is the Orwellian term used by those in power. A good example is the
American war of independence. From the British Empire's point of view, it was a "popular
insurgency".
It would be instructive if you could define "popular insurgency" more clearly and provide
some context.
The issue is that they can only be done by governments in their own nations or the nations
that they are very close by.
Even then, the success record is mixed and it requires a willingness to be totally
ruthless. Otherwise the subjugated people eventually will be able to win some form of
independence, like the Irish.
The US is different. It is dealing with self inflicted and totally pointless wars in the
Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan.
The insurgencies in Latin America can hardly be compared to Vietnam, as they were for the
most part beaten by CIA dirty work rather than crushed by a full-on military operation.
The long, sad record is so awful, maybe we just turn over the whole military to the Civil
Air patrol and the Coast Guard! They could not possibly do worse, and might be much
better!
In no time flat, either of those organizations (already peopled by nascent Petraeuses and
Mattises) would revert to the mean that we already know too well. Nice thought, though. The
Coast Guard's multi-missions mission: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missions_of_the_United_States_Coast_Guard
Unlike all the other "branches" of the MIC hydra, the CG suffers from cost cutting and
neoliberalism. "More and more work, for fewer and fewer people, for less and less money,
under tighter and tighter constraints, with every more detailed metrics " and their recent
acquisitions of new cutters are kind of F-35/littoral-combat-ships-ish "Billions Later, Plan
to Remake the Coast Guard Fleet Stumbles," http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/us/09ship.html
One thing that is rarely, if ever, mentioned is the type of person who joins the officer
corps. The school I attended has produced (British) generals and admirals (only, not the
ranks). Many, if not most, of the pupils who joined, or were encouraged to join, and only as
officers were considered dunces. Goodness knows what the soldiers and sailors, especially
NCOs, thought of the "young ruperts".
One contemporary, now a well regarded and well known painter (deservedly so), stayed in
the same class / year for three years. He was encouraged into the Welsh Guards and served a
few years. His elder brother joined the same regiment and is a general. Ian Duncan Smith,
formerly of the Scots Guards, is similar.
Read The Pentagon Papers to see why we couldn't win hearts and minds. The Vietnamese hated
the French and we ended up doing everything the French did to make the Vietnamese hate us
too.
Two good books that give a historical perspective of American involvement in the Pacific
and Asia are James Bradley's,The Imperial Cruise, and The China Mirage- The Hidden History of
American Disaster in Asia. Both books are written in a narrative style that is very
approachable and entertaining. Bradley tells a great story. They describe some long standing
American policy that go unreported and bring new understanding to todays events.
These titles led me to Barbara Tuchman's, Stilwell and the American Experience in China-
1911-45. I haven't read this one yet, but Stilwell seems an interesting American character.
Someone on the ground, seeing reality for what it is, and ignored by the upper brass. Another
typical American story- a tragedy.
One of the criticisms of American foreign policy made by the British has always been the
lack of political foresight and strategic thinking. I came across these criticisms in the
context of WWII policy, but at their core, I think they say much about the character of
American leadership. American founding principles and the needs of Empire are contradictory
to the citizenry. America has become an Empire by luck and default. Luck in the unmatched
bounty the North American continent has bestowed on the Nation and Europeans wearing
themselves out. This point is driven home by the fact that American standing in the world is
falling like a rock in many metrics.
I believe this explains why Americans still are reluctant to view themselves as being an
Empire. Too many tricky contradictions when dealing with their own citizens and reason for
being. It is what lies behind the lie of spreading "Democracy" to the world. The British
Empire faced no such dilemma. At least they brought law, order, and culture to those they
conquered. American Empire spreads chaos. Resisting cultures are treated to the political
ideology of annihilation. American policy is, "bombing them into the stone age."
Another great read is Halford Mackinder, The Geographical Pivot of History. In a way, his
thesis ties up all the loose ends of the Great Game being played by our political and social
betters. The Anglo-Saxon mode of rule has been to carve up the world. Asian cultures are much
older and as humanity moves forward in time, people are truly tiring of war. A united
Eurasian Continent would be a supreme power to set living standards and future goals. True
power is moving East.
What has the West to offer, but more blood and bombs. The embrace of cultural diversity
moves away from war and embodies political power in the melding of culture not its
extermination. I think that was the policy of Alexander the Great.
The great fear of American political leaders is being labeled provincials. Failed world
leadership lends credence to this charge. We are not ready to lead, and it shows by the
mediocracy of our leaders. An Empire that kills itself has to be a first. Is it any wonder
that the leadership now embrace the kill anything that moves mentality. It is all they have
in the form of power projection and vision.
All this to get to the point that maybe a multipolar world is not such a bad thing. Trying
something new when everything else seems to fail.
Eh I'm no fan of the West but I wouldn't paint the East in very pretty colors either, for
sure. Humanity has a tendency to suck. Look close to home to make things better I would
say.
You want a multipolar world, me too but what's with this "supreme" "United Eurasian
Continent"??? I want to have to at least take my shoes off to count the world's power
centers.
We have all forgotten the "Forgotten War". In another Asian byproduct of WWII, Curtis
LeMay channeled Clausewitz to the max as we flattened North Korea. How did that work out?
Does it have any ramifications for the USA in 2018?
Books to "explain" Vietnam and sequelae: Why no mention of a really seminal tome, "The
Ugly American"? Dated 1958. I read it, avidly, several times over, as a young,
testosterone-poisoned American Boy Scout Youth, and its mythos helped in getting me to enlist
in the Imperial Army in 1966. From Wiki:
The Ugly American is a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. The
Ugly American depicts the failures of the U.S. diplomatic corps, whose insensitivity to local
language, culture, customs and refusal to integrate was in marked contrast to the polished
abilities of Eastern Bloc (primarily Soviet) diplomacy and led to Communist diplomatic
success overseas [sic]. The book caused a sensation in diplomatic circles. John F. Kennedy
was so impressed with the book that he sent a copy to each of his colleagues in the United
States Senate. The book was one of the biggest bestsellers in the country, has been in print
continuously since it appeared and is one of the most politically influential novels in all
of American literature.
The title of the novel is a play on Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American and
was sometimes confused with it.
The "Ugly American" of the book title refers to the book's hero, plain-looking
engineer Homer Atkins, whose "calloused and grease-blackened hands always reminded him that
he was an ugly man." Atkins, who lives with the local people, comes to understand their
needs, and offers genuinely useful assistance with small-scale projects such as the
development of a simple bicycle-powered water pump.[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American
Another of the hero's engineering triumph was getting the women of "Dong Ba" (?) to unbend
their backs by changing to a New, Improved, longer model of the bamboo brooms they used to
sweep the dirt floors of their huts. A relatively innocuous form of Coca-Colonialism But the
part that I got all hepped up about was the engineer's innovation, borrowing from the Soviet
"multiple launch rocket systems" known as "Katyushas," https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F2lPpPVlDhg ,
of fitting a truck with a several dozen rocket-launching rails, which he used to fire a
volley of "spin-stabilized folding-fin air-to-ground rockets (SSFFARs)" into a bamboo grove
where Evil Insurgents were having a meeting of their cabal -- "in the glare, you could see
body parts spinning up into the night sky " Heady Stuff for young mopes.
Apparently the myth of "The Ugly (But Big-Hearted, Local-Language-Speaking) American
settled nicely into the mind and mindset of Saint Kennedy, too
Tradition is durable. I recall Haitians, like some African forebears, preferred to cook
with charcoal, which one gets by burning wood in a low oxygen furnace before burning it in
your clay stove. Vastly wasteful. Now a good part of local effort goes into long walks to
find bits of shrubbery to reduce to charcoal. And they denuded the whole country of trees and
woody shrubs. Efforts made to change the custom met resistance -- "good enough for
grandemere, good enough for.me." Like trying to get Americans to stop smoking, or worse, to
drive smaller cars let alone kick the deadly automobile habit that has so many knock-on
deleterious effects on people and planet.
The degradation of the Haitian portion of Santo Dimingo was as much a result of the soil
erosion caused by that mono-crop, sugar cane. The French merchants were making "boo koo"
bucks deploying as many slaves as possible to harvest this cash crop. (Too many slaves on too
little land.)
The other half of Santo Domingo Island is the Dominican Republic and it has little of the
resource devastation apparent in Haiti.
I see VietNam as the perfect example of successful neo liberal economic policies. Military
Keynesianism, the workings of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and corporate profiteering are
more pertinent than Clausewitz or Coin. As with the thoroughly neo liberal DNC, it's never
been about winning or losing. It's just about the next consulting or munitions contract.
Forever war means forever contract. The Mt. Pelerin society didn't start in 1947 for nothing.
Keep them talking about winning and losing while the money flows in. Tough about the GI Joe
collateral damage.
The destined warriors are misused. International Law has no problem with wars of defense.
I have a right to defend myself. The State has a monopoly on the use of force.
Sports aren't enough for the action figures.
Couldn't beat the Vietnamese so beating the Beats
at home, in the homeland develops into for profit prisons
& the recreation of the Gulag. American Gulags
& how much of that labor for pennies is done for Koch Industries?
Meltoy?
I could found an entire nation on a love & war movie. South Koreans have made the
theaters called 4D. Shakes you around and blows wind and smells on you.
Spies fail in concert with their employers, the diplomats.
Haley is at the UN taking names.
Economic Warfare is universal. I mean there has been all my life
War against me. I went to Canada, so I am the enemy & the Wall is to keep me here where I
can be found & made to pay.
One term President Carter pardoned dodgers.
Wear sweaters.
On goes the petrodollar war. 100 Year Oil War.
Law of unintended consequences.
No care.
10,000 a year die from just small arms, in Mexico, not even artillery.
US Police kill 2,000 or is it 3? or is it 4? A year.
Now it is striking that Scandinavia, the Netherlands?
Nations other places & until France so few do big
murders of their countrymen or even within the EU.
They have lived where war means everything is
bombed or destroyed by cannons.
Germany won economically in capitalism matured
Because debts were to NAZIs enabling a great write off
of debt, not happening and inflated by Hedge Funds
for anybody else till Greece is enslaved & Puerto Rico
& whose next?
Doesn't matter, the US Military & its Bankers
& its police have been & will be at war with or
just at all Territories.
Unitary Power but as Gov. of Govs, can't be
That.
Why? Why Not?
War is not a war against spaceship aliens
So war is to destroy the Earth.
Kill anyone because you are destined
to kill.
Great Generals Have a Zest for Killing the Enemy.
Read "Our Jungle Road to Tokyo" by Robert L. Eichelberger who
is a great and perfect General of the 8th Army
in the Pacific.
Long as a General & an Army has one job only
At the behest of its Civilians.
All will be well.
Or at least rational, which is better.
Obviously Econ War is war.
Declaration of Econ War is Sanctions
Declared.
Because of illegal War.
I insist that the ICAO demand that
Kim Y. Un & DPRK give Notices to Airmen
When launching their Rockets.
My Rocket Program is called
The "Message Rocket Program".
Beat, I'm Beat.
"Army censorship concealed from
the American public, as it very properly
attempted to conceal from the Japanese, How weak we were.
The ethical weakness of the US
has become so profound.
All it does is war piratical parasitical
& everywhere all the time
on the ground or in the mind.
Out flow of all territory is by right
The Unitary Power's.
No Territory is won or lost.
Revisionist history is in full swing across the MSM spectrum. Take, for instance, the new
movie – 'The Post' – that pretends to be an accurate drama about Daniel Ellsberg,
the Pentagon Papers, and the "heroic" roll played by the Washington Post. It's fake history,
as this excellent review makes clear, but it fits a certain preferred narrative. https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/22/the-post-and-the-pentagon-papers/
adding: one the the self-serving fictions the Dem party estab tells itself is that the
working class voted for Nixon and other GOP candidates because the working class is racist.
That neatly sidesteps the then growing belief that Vietnam – a Dem war, LBJ's war
– was unwinnable, the Dem power establishment new it was unwinnable, and yet kept
drafting working class boys to go fight and die because LBJ and others' egos were at stake.
The Dems have never dealt with that betrayal of the working class.
The reading list is missing the books that describe the actual horrors of combat that our
soldiers endured:
Hamburger Hill – the movie does not do full justice to the total clusterfuck that
battle was. I guarantee that you will weep bitter tears as you read accounts of the stupidity
of commanding officers from general to lieutenant, and of the tragic waste of life of young
draftees.
We Were Soldiers Once – The first 3/4 of the movie closely follows the book -- and
then goes all Hollywood at the end. It had to, because what actually happened was a stinging
defeat of the American troops and a template for the rest of the war. A REMF staff officer
needed to "get his ticket punched" for promotion with combat command experience, so was put
in charge of a battalion that took part in the latter phases of the battle. While withdrawing
from the battlefield afterward, he led the unit into an NVA ambush and lost 2/3 of his men
(155 KIA, 124 WIA and 4 MIA out of about 450 troopers present).
For somewhat more sanitized versions of what the grunts endured, see the half-dozen books
(extended after-action reports) by S. L. A. Marshall.
Nothing has changed from Nam to GWOT as far as the utter stupidity of America's military
leaders, and their need for constant wars to advance their careers and feed their patrons in
the MIC. One thing they *did* learn, after getting their sorry asses fragged by young
draftees fed up with dying at the hands of incompetent dolts, was to ditch the draft and pay
for mercenary -- called "volunteer" -- enlisted ranks. The wonder is, after 16 years of
endless, futile deployemnts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Syria, that the mercs aren't
murdering their idiot officers now as well ..
"Go tell the spartans" did without the hollywood ending, us military assistance and Burt
Lancaster ponied up the 150k USD required to finish it.
Set in 1964, says it was clearly fucked then.
Worth a look.
Yeah, Go Tell the Spartans is an excellent Nam flick.
Another is Platoon. Oliver Stone served in the 25th Infantry Division in Quang Tin
Province in 1967. The last big battle of Platoon is based on an actual event in Quang Tin in
1971, when the VC overran Firebase Mary Ann and inflicted 33 KIA and 83 WIA on the 23rd
Division.. Sappers in the Wire is a very good book about that fiasco.
Books by S. L. A. Marshall may have to be read with caution, even though I have never read
them. The reason that I say this is a book that I recommended in this series of posts called
"About Face" by David H. Hackworth. Hackworth was detailed to escort Marshall around Vietnam
and he "described his initial elation at an assignment with a man he idolized, and how that
elation turned to disillusion after seeing Marshall's character and methods firsthand.
Hackworth described Marshall as a "voyeur warrior," for whom "the truth never got in the way
of a good story", and went so far as to say, "Veterans of many of the actions he 'documented'
in his books have complained bitterly over the years of his inaccuracy or blatant bias". The
guy was always chasing a buck.
One significant action this piece left out was Congress' cutting off aid to South Vietnam
after the US military withdrawal in '72 on. When the final tank-led NVA push came in Apr 75
most of the ARVN forces remained at their bases for lack of fuel and ammunition. Could the
NVA Apr 75 campaign have met with similar lack of success as the '71 and '68 campaigns had
Congress continued support for South Vietnam? Guess we'll never know.
Tom Hagel, at one point, calls the wars in Iraq and Afganistan stupid but I can't find it
in the transcript. However, he also said this;
WE DISTRUST OUR INSTITUTIONS, WE DISTRUST THE GOVERNMENT, BOTH POLITICAL PARTIES. WE ARE
ANGRY AND WE JUST WANT TO SMASH IT. IN A WAY, I THINK THE CHICKENS HAVE COME HOME TO WRIST
BECAUSE OUR CURRENT POLITICIANS TOO OFTEN, I DON'T TRUST THEM, EITHER. I THINK THEY
CONTINUALLY LIE TO US, BUT WE'VE ALLOWED OURSELVES TO BE LIED TO BECAUSE WE ELECT THEM ALL
THE TIME. THEY FORGOT THAT THEY WORK FOR US. WE ARE CITIZENS, WE RUN THE SHOW. THEY WORK FOR
US. FOR SOME REASON, AS A SOCIETY, WE HAVE LOST THAT. WE JUST LET IT GO ON. CONSEQUENTLY, A
LOT OF THE DISTRUST IN THE POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS CAN BE TRACKED BACK TO THE VIETNAM WAR.
BECAUSE IT WAS SO CLEAR UP OR A WHILE,. ESPECIALLY WITH ALL THE ARCHIVES AND THE MATERIALS
THAT HAVE BEEN RELEASED IN THAT, THE SOCIETY AND THE TROOPS WERE LIED TO,
Basics (I learned this at a military University, informally, not as coursework):
The objective of the military in war is to cause the enemy's economy to collapse.
This can be achieved by other means: eg Sanctions (an act of war) and Venezuela as an
example.
It would have been easier to control Vietnam in the '60s, by becoming the largest customer
for their major product, Rubber, and having American corporations, such as Coca-Cola,
"colonize" the country.
My experience of the Vietnamese, in the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam, is
they are Capitalists.
The various wars the US is fighting around the world have all the appearance of draining
the US economy and forcing it to collapse. Which in the world of soccer is referred to as an
"own goal."
That is, the US' largest enemy appears as itself.
1914 there were a number of Empires, British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman,
Russian, et, and the US.
By the 1920s there were many less.
By the 1960s few.
Today, one, the US.
In California, where I live, manufactured goods used to come from the east, over the
mountains. Today it appears few goods come over the mountains from the east.
One wonders if the union will last, for how long, and if it's ending will be bloody or
peaceful.
I came back from Vietnam feeling that I had just bathed in a septic lagoon. It was a war
based on a false moral premiss, and the obvious was apparent to anyone properly informed. In
a war that is at its foundation a moral outrage, even if you win you lose. Added to our
present situation is the fact that no one will read the Koran READ THE KORAN ..(the Penguin
Classic translation will do nicely) then come back and we'll talk about "hearts and minds".
The halls of power are everywhere stacked with sociopaths, narcissists, and culpable
morons.
David Halberstam from the Best and Brightest:
"The truth of the war never entered the upper-level American calculations; that this was a
revolutionary war, and that the other side held title to the revolution because of the
colonial war which had just ended. This most simple fact entered into the estimates of the
American intelligence community and made them quite accurate. But it never entered into the
calculations of the principals, for a variety of reasons; among other things to see the other
side in terms of nationalism or as revolutionaries might mean a re-evaluation of whether the
United States was even fighting on the right side. In contrast, the question of Communism and
anti-Communism as opposed to revolution and anti-revolution was far more convenient for
American policy."
The Vietnam War could never have been won by the USA. Invasion of the North at worst would
have started a nuclear war (as Russia threaten) or at best a wider war with the Chinese
Peoples Army which had ended in a tie a decade before in Korea.
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are repeats except without the draft there is inadequate
manpower. The USA's Great Game uses proxy forces that they supply and then fight; the
Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS. Kurds will soon be added to the list. These wars likewise cannot
be won. Counter insurgency wars have been won against minorities who do not have outside
support or safe havens; the American Indian Wars or Australia for example. This is fairly
clear. Then why don't the experts, West Point graduates, see it? First, it is hard to admit
that it all for nothing. Second, the ruling ideology in the West; neo-liberalism, advocates
the free movement of people, goods and services. The way mankind ends wars is with strong
borders, home based militias and peace treaties. This is antithesis to western plutocrats.
The military is doing what their bosses want them to do.
I think the thing that always needs to put out in front of any discussion of the
euphemistically named 'Vietnam War' is that there literally wouldn't have been a war if not
for US interference. Debates about whether we could have 'won' or not, or if the US should
have 'intervened' in the first place always seem to ignore the fact that this wasn't just
some regional conflict that the US decided to interject itself into. If we had allowed the
elections stipulated by the 1954 Geneva Accords to happen, rather than seeking to make the
South into a permanent puppet regime, there wouldn't have been any war. Going even further
back, if we hadn't given our support to the French to continue their colonial rule there
probably wouldn't have even been a First Indochina War, or it would have at least been far
shorter.
Memorable books that I was reading at the time and shortly thereafter:
"A Viet Cong Memoir," by Truong Nhu Tang, a massively detailed account of his own personal
journey from a privileged family serving the French, to a leader of the Viet Cong war against
the US invaders.
Frances Fitzgerald's "The Fire in the Lake" What the American invaders did not understand
nor care to learn about Vietnamese society and customs, that did them in as much as anything
else in that war.
"Betrayal" by Marine Colonel William Corson;
"Our Own Worst Enemy" by William J Lederer;
"The Viet-Nam Reader," edited by Marcus Raskin and Bernard Fall
Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam"
"Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia" by William Shawcross (This
is an explosive, massively researched, highly detailed and horrifying account of Kissinger's
deliberate destruction of the land and the people of what until then had been the "bread
basket of SE Asia" and the most contented society on earth.)
Why would anyone blame de Gaulle WRT to anything in Indochina? De Gaulle didn't take over
France until several years after their Vietnam debacle, and de Gaulle was the man who got the
French out of Algeria (he nearly got assassinated for this). De Gaulle was an authoritarian
French nationalist, but he was neither an imperialist nor a sabre-rattler.
As the author alludes, the war in Vietnam was essentially unwinnable because it failed to
meet a basic precept for success in any war: It did not have a higher purpose. Ditto
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Raises fundamental questions regarding military action as the geopolitical default option
of choice, which as the title to the post suggests, is not desired by the MIC.
"... According to the official, "his worldview is utterly lacking in empathy." ..."
"... Few people understand the burr as well as he does. Much of his grating personality is intentional, but he's like a foreign policy version of Newt Gingrich. His chief concern is power," says another former State Department official under Bush 43. ..."
Who would replace McMaster? A leading candidate is John Bolton, the Fox News staple,
former UN ambassador, veteran defense intellectual and avatar for Mustache Magazine. His influence
in the White House hit a nadir in August -- when he
publicly complained that he couldn't get a meeting with 45. But since then he's mounted a
vociferous internal comeback.
His plan to exit the Iran Deal, penned in National
Review (which backed him for Secretary of State in 2016) late last year, was feted in the
White House, though as of yet, not fully implemented (though the president has put the JCPOA on
a deathclock
).
As I reported in 2017, that plan was written at the behest of former White House chief
strategist Steve Bannon, and hailed by hawkish hardliners like Frank Gaffney. Though Bannon's
relationship with the president is, of course, now more fraught, his ally Bolton continues to
receive positive press in many of the nationalist-populist staples. Today's headlines on him
are: "WATCH -- Amb John Bolton Eviscerates Sky News's Kay Burley Live: 'You Are a Munchkin in
the Media'" in Breitbart News and "John Bolton Says Trump Is Taking 'America First'
into 'the Lion's Den' in Davos" in LifeZette , the Laura Ingraham project. Bolton is "a smart, highly-competent, nice
guy," says a former State Department official from the George W. Bush administration.
According
to the official, "his worldview is utterly lacking in empathy." "Whip smart.
Few people
understand the burr as well as he does. Much of his grating personality is intentional, but
he's like a foreign policy version of Newt Gingrich. His chief concern is power," says another
former State Department official under Bush 43.
Julius Krein, editor of American
Affairs, who once ran The Journal for American Greatness (JAG) together with
Michael Anton, now a senior National Security Council spokesman, is a fan of Bolton. Whither
McMaster? Still active duty, he'd move within the army, according to several sources in the
Pentagon, likely the Asia Pacific, where he's cut his teeth -- as the administration's leading
North Korea hawk.
But there is a holdup. "One of the problems," says a defense source. "Is that
there is no four star slot open."
It's possible McMaster was considered for another position in
the army before -- heading up the mission in Afghanistan -- but a source tells me that was
nixed by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
But this would make sense for this administration, who
have fired people by promotion before. Think K.T. McFarland, the former deputy of National
Security Advisor to Michael Flynn, who was to be shipped to Singapore as ambassador (but that's
been stalled by the broader Russia probe).
Bolton is an enemy to the American people. All he cares about is pushing for war for a
foreign country's interests: Israel. He should be arrested for treason.
That's a bit obscene. And it's also ludicrous to propose that the US takes or doesn't take
military action based on the skin color or shade of the people irritating it.
This news is indeed very depressing but I'm a little wary about this author's agenda. He
had Tillerson out the door and was discussing replacements before Tillerson had made any
announcement. (The article was evidently deemed premature and was quickly pulled.)
Sometimes eager anticipation is not a good tactic, particularly in a trump admin.
Continuing on with the wrong policy from the past administration, the current strategy
aims to pave the way for WW III. Not only is it out of touch with reality from political
and economic point of view, it reflects the immoral component of the policy. Instead of
fostering peace, US uses NATO and moving troops to contain Russia in Ukraine and in
central and eastern Europe. Also, instead of upholding the international regime of Non
Proliferation Treaty (NPT) through the United Nations, the US put THAAD to destroy
China's defense capability to defense itself from the US attack. Somehow the US fails to
realize that North Korea is adjacent to Russia and China. And this week, an old obsolete
man that belongs to the past not the future, the retire General Mattis went to Vietnam
with the blue print of war against China. Mattis and Trump must realize that America is a
democratic Christian country that will not allow any tyrant to move the country and the
world towards the potential of WW III.
Racial prejudice runs deep among some American elites. In 1829 when Alexis de
Tocqueville observed American society, he said America has 'three naturally distinct
inimical races. Education, law, origin, and even the external form of their features have
raised an almost insurmountable barrier between them; fortune has gathered them on the
same soil, but it has mixed them without being able to intermingle them, and each pursues
its destiny separately. Among these men, the first in enlightenment, in power, in
happiness, is the white man, man par excellence; below him appear the Negro and the
Indian' (p.303). Russia, China and developing countries need to put their efforts to
rapidly develop their countries because only the Balance of Power can protect themselves
from war with the US.
Completely unrealistic assessment of the situation. Essentially "kicking the can down the road:" approach. Looks
like Trump administration is now neocon administration. Kind of Obama II or Bush III.
Military Keysianism (in the style of national socialism) all over again. But the US empire requires now spending that can
hardly be afforded by US economy. Add to this care of disabled veterans, number of which is growing each year (while casualties
rate due to modern medicine is low, number of disabled soldiers is substantial).
Hopefully over $100
per barrel oil will sober some hot Pentagon heads. Neocons, who now dominate foreign policy of Trump administration, are hopeless in this respect, they will
pursue the dream of global dominance and American empire ("America uber alles") till the last American (excluding of cause themselves
-- 99% of them are chickenhawks -- and their families)
So 700 billion dollars will be spent not matter what suffering and deprivations for ordinary
Americans (no jobs, no hope) it entails
The USA population lose much treasure and has a deteriorating standard of living to maintain
an empire at the behest of neoliberal elite... This sentiment is merely confirming the US public
discontent with interventionism and neocon foreign policy that had been revived by the 2003 Iraq
invasion. The recent J. Wallin Opinion Research
survey revealed that 71 percent of Americans believed Congress should pass legislation that
restrained military action. Due to power of MIC an overblown defense budget does not get proper
the scrutiny of any other form of public spending. the United States' annual military budget
around $700 billion. Those guys need war to justify it.
Much of those costs have been borne by ordinary Americans -- from paying for war debts to
being at greater risk of terrorist attacks -- while the war profits go to a select group of
corporations. It is difficult to imagine any single decision in any other realm of policy that
has cost so much, delivered little, and harmed America and the rest of the world so
irreparably.
Notable quotes:
"... our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare, air, land, sea, space and cyberspace, and it is continuing to erode. ..."
"... to keep the peace for one more year, one more month, one more week, one more day. To ensure our diplomats who are working to solve problems do so from a position of strength ..."
"... It is incumbent upon us to field a more lethal force if our nation is to retain the ability to defend ourselves and what we stand for. The defense strategy's three primary lines of effort will restore our comparative military advantage. ..."
"... We're going to build a more lethal force. We will strengthen our traditional alliances and building new partnerships with other nations. And at the same time we'll reform our department's business practices for performance and affordability. ..."
"... We will modernize key capabilities, recognizing we cannot expect success fighting tomorrow's conflicts with yesterday's weapons or equipment. Investments in space and cyberspace, nuclear deterrent forces, missile defense, advanced autonomous systems, and resilient and agile logistics will provide our high-quality troops what they need to win. ..."
"... And again, the 40-odd nations that stand shoulder-to-shoulder in NATO's mission in Afghanistan. ..."
"... Our third line of effort serves as the foundation for our competitive edge: reforming the business practices of the department to provide both solvency and security, thereby gaining the full benefit from every dollar spent, in which way we will gain and hold the trust of Congress and the American people. ..."
We face growing threats from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia are from
each other, nations that do seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models,
pursuing veto authority over other nations' economic, diplomatic and security decisions.
Rogue regimes like North Korea and Iran persist in taking outlaw actions that threaten
regional and even global stability. Oppressing their own people and shredding their own
people's dignity and human rights, they push their warped views outward.
And despite the defeat of ISIS' physical caliphate, violent extremist organizations like
ISIS or Lebanese Hezbollah or al Qaida continue to sow hatred, destroying peace and murdering
innocents across the globe.
In this time of change, our military is still strong. Yet our competitive edge has
eroded in every domain of warfare, air, land, sea, space and cyberspace, and it is continuing
to erode.
Rapid technological change, the negative impact on military readiness is resulting from the
longest continuous stretch of combat in our nation's history and defense spending caps, because
we have been operating also for nine of the last 10 years under continuing resolutions that
have created an overstretched and under-resourced military.
Our military's role is to keep the peace; to keep the peace for one more year, one more
month, one more week, one more day. To ensure our diplomats who are working to solve problems
do so from a position of strength and giving allies confidence in us. This confidence is
underpinned by the assurance that our military will win should diplomacy fail.
When unveiling his national security strategy, President Trump said, "Weakness is the surest
path to conflict, and unquestioned strength is the most certain means of defense."
Ladies and gentlemen, we have no room for complacency, and history makes clear that America
has no preordained right to victory on the battlefield. Simply, we must be the best if the
values that grew out of the Enlightenment are to survive.
It is incumbent upon us to field a more lethal force if our nation is to retain the
ability to defend ourselves and what we stand for. The defense strategy's three primary lines
of effort will restore our comparative military advantage.
We're going to build a more lethal force. We will strengthen our traditional alliances
and building new partnerships with other nations. And at the same time we'll reform our
department's business practices for performance and affordability.
In doing this, we will earn the trust of the American people and Congress, if their defense
dollars are well spent.
But let me go through each of the lines of effort. And I want to start with lethality,
because everything we do in the department must contribute to the lethality of our
military.
The paradox of war is that an enemy will attack any perceived weakness. So we in America
cannot adopt a single preclusive form of warfare. Rather we must be able to fight across the
spectrum of conflict.
This means that the size and the composition of our force matters. The nation must field
sufficient capable forces to deter conflict. And if deterrence fails, we must win.
We will modernize key capabilities, recognizing we cannot expect success fighting
tomorrow's conflicts with yesterday's weapons or equipment. Investments in space and
cyberspace, nuclear deterrent forces, missile defense, advanced autonomous systems, and
resilient and agile logistics will provide our high-quality troops what they need to
win.
Changing our forces' posture will prioritize readiness for warfighting for major combat,
making us strategically predictable for our allies and operationally unpredictable for any
adversary.
Increasing the lethality of our troops, supported by our defense civilians, requires us to
reshape our approach that managing our outstanding talent, reinvigorating our military
education and honing civilian workforce expertise.
The creativity and talent of the department is our deepest wellspring of strength, and one
that warrants greater investment.
And to those who would threaten America's experiment in democracy, they must know: If you
challenge us it will be your longest and your worst day. Work with our diplomats; you don't
want to fight the Department of Defense.
The second line of effort I noted was to strengthen alliances as we build new partnerships,
as well.
In my past, I fought many times and never did I fight in a solely American formation. It was
always alongside foreign troops.
Now, as Winston Churchill once said, the only thing harder than fighting with allies is
fighting without them. But we are going to be stronger together in recognizing that our
military will be designed and trained and ready to fight alongside allies.
History proves that nations with allies thrive, an approach to security and prosperity that
has served the United States well in keeping peace and winning war. Working by, with and
through allies who carry their equitable share allows us to amass the greatest possible
strength.
We carried a disproportionate share of the defense burden for the democracies in the
post-World War II era. The growing economic strength of today's democracies and partners
dictates they must now step up and do more.
When together we pool our resources and share responsibility for the common defense,
individual nations' security burdens become lighter. This has been demonstrated right now,
today, for example, by over 70 nations and international organizations of the Defeat-ISIS
campaign that is successfully conducting operations in the Middle East. And again, the
40-odd nations that stand shoulder-to-shoulder in NATO's mission in Afghanistan.
To strengthen and work jointly with more allies, our organizations, processes and procedures
must be ally-friendly. The department will do more than just listen to other nations' ideas. We
will be willing to be persuaded by them, recognizing that all not -- that not all good ideas
come from the country with the most aircraft carriers.
This line of effort will bolster an extended network capable of decisively meeting the
challenges of our time. So we're going to make the military more lethal, and we are going to
build and strengthen traditional alliances, as well as go out and find some new partners --
maybe nontraditional partners -- as we do what the Greatest Generation did, coming home from
World War II, when they built the alliances that have served us so well, right through
today.
Our third line of effort serves as the foundation for our competitive edge: reforming
the business practices of the department to provide both solvency and security, thereby gaining
the full benefit from every dollar spent, in which way we will gain and hold the trust of
Congress and the American people.
"... Occasionally, it is actually delusional, as when it refers to consolidating "gains we have made in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere." ..."
"... At times Mattis' supplementary "remarks" were more bombastic than reassuring, as when he warned " those who would threaten America's experiment in democracy: if you challenge us, it will be your longest and worst day." He did not exactly go into what the military response to hacking a politician's emails might be and one can only speculate, which is precisely the problem. ..."
"... Some of the remarks by Mattis relate to China and Russia. He said that "We face growing threats from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia, nations that seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models - pursuing veto authority over other nations' economic, diplomatic and security decisions." There is, however, no evidence that either country is exporting "authoritarian models," nor are they vetoing anything that they do not perceive as direct and immediate threats frequently orchestrated by Washington, which is intervening in local quarrels thousands of miles away from the U.S. borders. And when it comes to exporting models, who does it more persistently than Washington? ..."
"... The report goes on to state that Russia and China and rogue regimes like Iran have " increased efforts short of armed conflict by expanding coercion to new fronts, violating principle of sovereignty, exploiting ambiguity, and deliberately blurring the lines between civil and military goals." As confusing civil and military is what the United States itself has been doing in Libya, Iraq and, currently, Syria, the allegation might be considered ironic. ..."
"... What might that mean in practice? Back in 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney had requested "a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States... [including] a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons ... not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States." ..."
"... Pentagon planners clearly anticipate another year of playing at defense by keeping the offense on the field. An impetuous and poorly informed president is a danger to all of us, particularly as he is surrounded by general-advisers who see a military solution to every problem. Hopefully wiser counsel will prevail. ..."
"... how should China, Russia and Iran be responding to the strategic plans of Mattis, the US War Hawks and neocons who surround Trump? Who is it that is threatening the United States, that is not responding to threats first against them? ..."
"... This appears to me to be the same dangerous, belligerent talk justifying preemptive strike thinking that separates out the United States from its' perceived enemies. And probably the rest of the world! And brought us, according to the Concerned Scientists, again to "two minutes to midnight." It seems, to me, quite rational for Russia and China to respond accordingly, like good boy scouts, and also be prepared. ..."
"... The U.S. since it very first day of founding is offense. The Revolutionary War is offense against the British Empire. It built its first navy ships, not for defense but to fight a war in the Med Sea across the ocean. No one attacked the U.S ..."
"... The U.S. is 100% offense since day one to today. There is no department of defense. But its department of aggression and war was founded in 1776. ..."
"... The physics of nuclear war allow no winners because we all share this earth. ..."
"... Of course here in America we have no public shelters so threats by our plutocracy puppets must be absorbed by our fellow American Sheep. After the bombs come down are you one of those politicians holding a ticket to those vast hidden U.S. government shelters where sheep are not allowed? Doubtful ..."
"... Wake up folks aka sheep / slaves before it's too late! No one is going to protect you! You and me are being played! ..."
"... Putin, a Russian patriot if there ever was one, recognized that western capital could not be resisted by the Soviet system. In defense of Russia he liberated the economy, gradually but inexorably eliminating the evils of the Yeltsin years, and releasing the social forces needed for national strength and productivity. He reversed the isolation of Soviet times, establishing international relations based on mutual advantage and trust, not coercion. Despite western propaganda, he has established himself as a good neighbor, and as a reliable partner and ally. His stewardship has made Russia stronger and more impervious to US hegemonic ambitions. ..."
"... Putin is no lackey of US imperialism. He together with China and Iran form the chief bulwarks against it. ..."
"... It seems that Mattis is a fool; he's reading something in which he has no comprehension for its ramifications in the long run. ..."
"... Maybe the Lockheed Martin CEO written the document so that idiot would read it to the sheeple....Who knows. ..."
Reading the summary is illuminating, to say the least, and somewhat disturbing, as it
focuses very little on actual defense of the realm and relates much more to offensive military
action that might be employed to further certain debatable national interests. Occasionally, it
is actually delusional, as when it refers to consolidating "gains we have made in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria and elsewhere."
At times Mattis' supplementary "remarks" were more bombastic than reassuring, as when he
warned " those who would threaten America's experiment in democracy: if you challenge us, it
will be your longest and worst day." He did not exactly go into what the military response to
hacking a politician's emails might be and one can only speculate, which is precisely the
problem.
One of the most bizarre aspects of the report is its breathtaking assumption that
"competitors" should be subjected to a potential military response if it is determined that
they are in conflict with the strategic goals of the U.S. government. It is far removed from
the old-fashioned Constitutional concept that one has armed forces to defend the country
against an actual threat involving an attack by hostile forces and instead embraces preventive
war, which is clearly an excuse for serial interventions overseas.
Some of the remarks by Mattis relate to China and Russia. He said that "We face growing
threats from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia, nations that seek to create a
world consistent with their authoritarian models - pursuing veto authority over other nations'
economic, diplomatic and security decisions." There is, however, no evidence that either
country is exporting "authoritarian models," nor are they vetoing anything that they do not
perceive as direct and immediate threats frequently orchestrated by Washington, which is
intervening in local quarrels thousands of miles away from the U.S. borders. And when it comes
to exporting models, who does it more persistently than Washington?
The report goes on to state that Russia and China and rogue regimes like Iran have "
increased efforts short of armed conflict by expanding coercion to new fronts, violating
principle of sovereignty, exploiting ambiguity, and deliberately blurring the lines between
civil and military goals." As confusing civil and military is what the United States itself has
been doing in Libya, Iraq and, currently, Syria, the allegation might be considered ironic.
The scariest assertion in the summary is the following: "Nuclear forces - Modernization of
the nuclear force includes developing options to counter competitors' coercive strategies,
predicated on the threatened use of nuclear or strategic non-nuclear attacks." That means that
the White House and Pentagon are reserving the option to use nuclear weapons even when there is
no imminent or existential threat as long as there is a "strategic" reason for doing so.
Strategic would be defined by the president and Mattis, while the War Powers Act allows Donald
Trump to legally initiate a nuclear attack.
What might that mean in practice? Back in 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney had
requested "a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack
on the United States... [including] a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both
conventional and tactical nuclear weapons ... not conditional on Iran actually being involved
in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."
Possible employment of "weapons of mass destruction" responded to intelligence suggesting
that conventional weapons would be unable to penetrate the underground hardened sites where
Iran's presumed nuclear weapons facilities were reportedly located. But as it turned out, Iran
had no nuclear weapons program and attacking it would have been totally gratuitous. Some other
neocon inspired plans to attack Iran also included a nuclear option if Iran actually had the
temerity to resist American force majeure.
Pentagon planners clearly anticipate another year of playing at defense by keeping the
offense on the field. An impetuous and poorly informed president is a danger to all of us,
particularly as he is surrounded by general-advisers who see a military solution to every
problem. Hopefully wiser counsel will prevail.
Possible employment of "weapons of mass destruction" responded to intelligence suggesting
that conventional weapons would be unable to penetrate the underground hardened sites where
Iran's presumed nuclear weapons facilities were reportedly located. But as it turned out, Iran
had no nuclear weapons program and attacking it would have been totally gratuitous. Some other
neocon inspired plans to attack Iran also included a nuclear option if Iran actually had the
temerity to resist American force majeure.
Pentagon planners clearly anticipate another year of playing at defense by keeping the
offense on the field. An impetuous and poorly informed president is a danger to all of us,
particularly as he is surrounded by general-advisers who see a military solution to every
problem. Hopefully wiser counsel will prevail.
By Philip M. Giraldi Ph.D., Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest. This article was originally published by
Strategic Culture Foundation
well.
as a combat vet it's ALWAYS better to be PREPARED THAN SORRY.
and you DON'T sit on your Butt waiting for your enemies to attack FIRST when you can PREVENT
IT.
In that case James; how should China, Russia and Iran be responding to the strategic plans
of Mattis, the US War Hawks and neocons who surround Trump?
Who is it that is threatening the United States, that is not responding to threats first
against them?
This appears to me to be the same dangerous, belligerent talk justifying preemptive strike
thinking that separates out the United States from its' perceived enemies. And probably the
rest of the world! And brought us, according to the Concerned Scientists, again to "two
minutes to midnight."
It seems, to me, quite rational for Russia and China to respond accordingly, like good boy
scouts, and also be prepared.
However; It is very dangerous, for if they detect there is an incoming missile or potentially
nuclear armed plane what are they expected to do? They won't be sitting on their hands,
that's for sure!
Just look at how the ordinary people of Hawaii responded to a "false alarm" recently. I put
"false alarm" in brackets because who knows what the United States neocons get up to
nowadays.
This is all very wearying and repeated so often there is a danger of people giving up.
Isn't it interesting how we are surrounded by folktales and the warnings of the old
Prophets and new which we ignore at our peril? Like crying wolf.
God help us all if some deluded idiot with authority, including that self-styled "genius" and
Supreme Commander, General Trump, miscalculate.
I imagine what remains of the sidelined, but still rational thinking Generals and Admirals
and military realists in the lower ranks are really sweating it out worrying what the morons
in charge might do.
The U.S. since it very first day of founding is offense. The Revolutionary War is offense
against the British Empire. It built its first navy ships, not for defense but to fight a war
in the Med Sea across the ocean. No one attacked the U.S.
The U.S. is 100% offense since day one to today. There is no department of defense. But
its department of aggression and war was founded in 1776.
There is not one human being on the planet that would have the inclination to want to invade
USA Inc. We watch and read and only need a minuscule amount of imagination to know that USA
Inc is the "sh*th*le " of the world populated by "ar*eh*les".
The only solution is for NK to invite China and Russia to send in missile batteries to
defend NK and if they are attacked, all US military bases in Asia will be obliterated with
Hawaii and Mainland in quick succession if USA Inc escalates.
Cities of Seoul and Tokyo need be left with no doubt that they will be tripled glazed,
Russia and China need to lift sanctions on NK immediately .
The rest of the world needs boycott USA Inc to the Olympics, just as the fascist West did to
Russia when it went to the rescue of Afghanistan.
Persons inciting war need to be prosecuted, those who incite use of WMD must be put in a
special category and immediately stopped from traveling outside their country and from
speaking at the UN.
A resolution must be passed at the United General Assembly to put above suggestion into
practice, and see if we can not get a resounding "vote" for it, as was the case for support
of Palestine recently.
America's National Defense Is really to terrorize the sheep / slaves into submission. The
physics of nuclear war allow no winners because we all share this earth.
Of course here in America we have no public shelters so threats by our plutocracy puppets
must be absorbed by our fellow American Sheep. After the bombs come down are you one of those
politicians holding a ticket to those vast hidden U.S. government shelters where sheep are
not allowed? Doubtful! You can just turn around and try to kiss your hind quarter Ba Ba a a
aaa.
Wake up folks aka sheep / slaves before it's too late! No one is going to protect you! You
and me are being played!
Time to replace all politicians with AI Robots. Who needs rulers anyway? Let politicians be
the first to be replaced with robots
Dave above has one cockeyed view of Putin, and of those sources of opinion that support him.
Soviet Russia imploded because it could not deliver the goods.An endless arms race, a
population regimented, harnessed, and stifled in service to a centrally planned economy, run
by a vast self-serving bureaucracy, It it was an experiment in state capitalism that, in
hindsight, could not but fail. The west tried to strangle it in its crib but in the event it
died of old age.
Putin, a Russian patriot if there ever was one, recognized that western capital could not
be resisted by the Soviet system. In defense of Russia he liberated the economy, gradually
but inexorably eliminating the evils of the Yeltsin years, and releasing the social forces
needed for national strength and productivity. He reversed the isolation of Soviet times,
establishing international relations based on mutual advantage and trust, not coercion.
Despite western propaganda, he has established himself as a good neighbor, and as a reliable
partner and ally. His stewardship has made Russia stronger and more impervious to US
hegemonic ambitions.
Putin is no lackey of US imperialism. He together with China and Iran form the chief
bulwarks against it. Dave's view is perverse.
"... A conspiracy of US government agencies, tax-exempt think tanks funded by the ruling interests, and media acting in behalf of a war and police state agenda work to shape perceived reality as it is described in George Orwell's book, 1984 ..."
"... Nothing stated in the Western presstitute media and no statement by any Western government or subservient vassal state can be trusted to comply with the facts. Truth is the enemy of the state, and the state is eliminating the truth. ..."
A conspiracy of US government agencies, tax-exempt think tanks funded by the ruling
interests, and media acting in behalf of a war and police state agenda work to shape perceived
reality as it is described in George Orwell's book, 1984 , and in the film, The
Matrix . Controlled perception-based reality is only a Facebook "like" away from killing
one person or one million or elevating a liar or the warmonger responsible for the killing to
hero status or to the conrol of the CIA or FBI or the US presidency.
... ... ...
...Nothing stated in the Western presstitute media and no statement by any Western
government or subservient vassal state can be trusted to comply with the facts. Truth is the enemy of the state, and the state is eliminating the truth.
Peoples in the United States, Europe, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the
various vassal states, such as Japan, all live day in, day out, an orchestrated lie that serves
interests directly opposed to the interests of the peoples.
Governments that do not rest on truth rest on tyranny.
"... This propaganda campaign is part and parcel of the roll-out of a new "official narrative." If it wasn't so completely depressing, I would say it is awe-inspiring to watch. This full-spectrum type of mass indoctrination, or "reality adjustment," doesn't happen that often. It used to only happen on the national level, typically during times of war, when the ruling classes of nation states needed to temporarily unite their populaces and demonize their enemy. It is happening now on a global level, for the second time in the 21st Century. ..."
"... The global capitalist ruling classes (which now reigned unopposed over the entire planet) needed a new official narrative to unite, not just a nation, or region, but everyone within the new global market. This narrative needed a convincing enemy that would function on a global level. "Terrorism" is that enemy. ..."
"... The key to understanding both the original War on Terror official narrative and the expanded variation we are being sold currently is the fact that terrorism is an insurgent tactic employed by weaker militant forces against a ruling government or occupation force. This makes it the perfect bogeyman (in essence, the only bogeyman) for our brave new global capitalist world, where global capitalism takes the place of that "ruling government or occupation force." ..."
"... we we no longer live in a world where nation-against-nation conflict is driving the course of political events. We live in a world where global capitalism is driving the course of political events. The economies of virtually every nation on the planet are hopelessly interdependent. Capitalist ideology pervades all cultures, despite their superficial differences. It is a globally hegemonic system, so it has no external enemies. None. The only threats it faces are internal. Its "enemies" are, by definition, insurgent in other words, "extremist" or "terrorist." ..."
"... This even holds true for the Russia paranoia the ruling classes are pumping out currently it's all just part of the "reality adjustment," and the launch of a new official narrative, not a prelude to war with Russia. The USA is not going to war with Russia. The notion is beyond ridiculous. Have you noticed, despite all their warlike verbiage, that no one has put forth a single scenario in which war between Russia and the West makes sense? That's because it doesn't make sense. Not for Russia, the USA, or anyone else. This is why "the Russian threat" is being marketed as an "attack on democratic values" and "an attempt to sow division," and so on. Because the war the corporatocracy is waging is not a war against Russia, the nation. The war they are fighting is a counter-insurgency, an ideological counter-insurgency. "Russia" has just been added to the list of "terrorists" and "extremists" who "hate us for our freedom." ..."
"... The message is, "you're either with us or against us." The message is, "we will tolerate no dissent, except for officially sanctioned dissent." The message is, "try to fuck with us, and we will marginalize you, and demonize you, and demonetize you, and disappear you." ..."
"... The message is, "we control reality, so reality is whatever the fuck we say it is, regardless of whether it is based in fact or just some totally made-up story we got The Washington Post to publish and then had the corporate media repeat, over and over, for fourteen months. " If that doesn't qualify as full-blown Orwellian, I'm not sure what, exactly, would. ..."
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
Just when you thought the corporatocracy couldn't possibly get more creepily Orwellian, the
Twitter Corporation starts sending
out emails advising that they "have reason to believe" we have "followed, retweeted," or
"liked the content of" an account "connected to a propaganda effort by a Russia
government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency." While it's not as
dramatic as the Thought Police watching you on your telescreen, or posters reminding you "Big
Brother Is Watching," the effect is more or less the same.
And if that's not creepily Orwellian enough for you, Facebook has established a Ministry of Counterspeech , manned by "a
dedicated counterterrorism team" of "former intelligence and law-enforcement officials," to
"disrupt ideologies underlying extremism" ( see Chris Hedges' recent essay
for details ). The Google Corporation is systematically disappearing
,
deranking , and maliciously
misrepresenting non-corporate news and opinion sources, and the "thought criminals" who
contribute to them. Meanwhile, the corporate media continues to pump out Russia paranoia
propaganda like
this Maddow segment on MSNBC about "the remarkable number of Russian financiers who'll be
rubbing elbows with the Trump team in Davos."
These are just the latest salvos in the corporate establishment's War on Dissent, an
expanded version of the War on Terror, which they've been relentlessly waging for over a year
now. As you may have noticed, the ruling classes have been using virtually every propaganda
organ at their disposal to whip up mass hysteria over a host of extremely dubious threats to
"the future of democracy" and "democratic values," Russia being foremost among them, followed
closely by white supremacy, then a laundry list of other "threats," from Julian Assange to
Bernie Bros to other, lesser "sowers of division."
This propaganda campaign is part and parcel of the roll-out of a new "official
narrative." If it wasn't so completely depressing, I would say it is awe-inspiring to watch.
This full-spectrum type of mass indoctrination, or "reality adjustment," doesn't happen that
often. It used to only happen on the national level, typically during times of war, when the
ruling classes of nation states needed to temporarily unite their populaces and demonize their
enemy. It is happening now on a global level, for the second time in the 21st Century.
The first time it happened on a global level was 2001-2002, when the War on Terror narrative
was launched to supplant the defunct Cold War narrative that had functioned since the end of
World War II. The End of History/New World Order narrative, which had served as a kind of
ideological stop-gap from 1990 to 2001, never really sold that well. It was far too vague, and
there was no clear enemy. The global capitalist ruling classes (which now reigned unopposed
over the entire planet) needed a new official narrative to unite, not just a nation, or region,
but everyone within the new global market. This narrative needed a convincing enemy that would
function on a global level. "Terrorism" is that enemy.
In the official War on Terror narrative, the term "terrorism" does not refer to any type of
actual terrorism (although of course such terrorism does occur) as much as to "terrorism" as a
general concept, an essentially meaningless pejorative concept, one which can be expanded to
include almost anything and anyone the ruling classes need it to which is what is taking place
at the moment. It is being expanded, rather dramatically, to include virtually any type of
dissent from global capitalist ideology. In order to understand what's happening, we need to
understand how terms like "terrorism" and "extremism" function ideologically, not just as terms
to dehumanize "bad guys" but to designate a type of ur-antagonist , one that conforms to
the official narrative. So let's take a few minutes and try to do that.
The key to understanding both the original War on Terror official narrative and the
expanded variation we are being sold currently is the fact that terrorism is an insurgent
tactic employed by weaker militant forces against a ruling government or occupation force. This
makes it the perfect bogeyman (in essence, the only bogeyman) for our brave new global
capitalist world, where global capitalism takes the place of that "ruling government or
occupation force."
I've written a
number of essays about this , so I won't reiterate all that here. The short version is,
we we no longer live in a world where nation-against-nation conflict is driving the course
of political events. We live in a world where global capitalism is driving the course of
political events. The economies of virtually every nation on the planet are hopelessly
interdependent. Capitalist ideology pervades all cultures, despite their superficial
differences. It is a globally hegemonic system, so it has no external enemies. None. The only
threats it faces are internal. Its "enemies" are, by definition, insurgent in other words,
"extremist" or "terrorist."
This even holds true for the Russia paranoia the ruling classes are pumping out
currently it's all just part of the "reality adjustment," and the launch of a new official
narrative, not a prelude to war with Russia. The USA is not going to war with Russia. The
notion is beyond ridiculous. Have you noticed, despite all their warlike verbiage, that no one
has put forth a single scenario in which war between Russia and the West makes sense? That's
because it doesn't make sense. Not for Russia, the USA, or anyone else. This is why "the
Russian threat" is being marketed as an "attack on democratic values" and "an attempt to sow
division," and so on. Because the war the corporatocracy is waging is not a war against Russia,
the nation. The war they are fighting is a counter-insurgency, an ideological
counter-insurgency. "Russia" has just been added to the list of "terrorists" and "extremists"
who "hate us for our freedom."
Thus, our new official narrative is actually just a minor variation on the original War on
Terror narrative we've been indoctrinated with since 2001. A minor yet essential variation.
From 2001 to 2016, the constant "terrorist threat" we were facing was strictly limited to
Islamic terrorism, which made sense as long as the corporatocracy was focused on restructuring
the Middle East. White supremacist terrorism was not part of the narrative, nor was any other
form of terrorism, as that would have just confused the audience.
That changed, dramatically, in 2016.
The Brexit referendum and the election of Trump alerted the global capitalist ruling classes
to the existence of another dangerous insurgency that had nothing to do with the Greater Middle
East. While they were off merrily destabilizing, restructuring, privatizing, and
debt-enslaving, resentment of global capitalism had grown into a widespread neo-nationalist
backlash against globalization, the loss of sovereignty, fiscal austerity, and the soulless,
smiley-face, corporate culture being implemented throughout the West and beyond. That this
backlash is reactionary in nature does not change the fact that it is an insurgency just as
Islamic fundamentalism is. Both insurgencies are doomed attempts to revert to despotic social
systems (nationalist in one case, religious in the other) and so reverse the forward march of
global capitalism. The global capitalist ruling classes are not about to let that happen.
The corporatocracy wasted no time in dealing with this new insurgency. They demonized and
hamstrung Trump, as they'll continue to do until he's well out of office. But Trump was never
the significant threat. The significant threat is the people who elected him, and who voted for
Brexit, and the AfD, and Sanders, and Mélenchon, and Corbyn, and who just stayed home on
election day and refused to vote for Hillary Clinton. The threat is the attitude of these
people. The insubordinate attitude of these people. The childish attitude of these people (who
naively thought they could challenge the most powerful empire in the annals of human history
one that controls, not just the most fearsome military force that has ever existed, but the
means to control "reality" itself).
The corporatocracy is going to change that attitude, or it is going to make it disappear. It
is in the process of doing this now, using every ideological weapon in its arsenal. The news
media. Publishing. Hollywood. The Internet. Intelligence agencies. Congressional inquiries.
Protests. Marches. Twitter's "advisory emails." Google's manipulation of its search results.
Facebook's "counterspeech" initiative. Russiagate. Shitholegate. Pornstargate. The ruling class
is sending us a message. The message is, "you're either with us or against us." The message
is, "we will tolerate no dissent, except for officially sanctioned dissent." The message is,
"try to fuck with us, and we will marginalize you, and demonize you, and demonetize you, and
disappear you."
I wish I had some rallying cry to end this depressing assessment with, but I have no
interest in being one of these Twitter-based guerrilla leaders who tell you we can beat the
corporatocracy by tweeting and donating to them on Patreon, and then going about our lives as
"normal." It's probably going to take a little more than that, and the obvious truth is, the
odds are against us. That said, I plan to make as much noise about The War on Dissent as
humanly possible, until they marginalize me out of existence or the corporate-mediated
simulation that so many of us take for existence these days. What do you say, want to join
me?
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Until now, I have considered C. J. Hopkins to be only a playwright or whatever and not a
serious political scientist or political critic. But now, I see that he has grown out to be a
serious political voice.
I consider Hopkins' manifesto to be not unlike the old Communist Manifesto of 1848. Just
as more than 170 years ago the Communist Manifesto could note that "a specter is haunting
Europe," so today we could say that "a specter is haunting the world." But whereas back then
the hunted people had a name -- "communists" -- today those who are wanted for 'terrorism'
have no name or flag under which to come together. Perhaps the most appropriate name for
these people is "Dissidents."
Several individuals come to mind as perhaps having leadership potential for the
Dissidents. First, there is Ai Weiwei, who is known as a dissident artist and also as an
enemy of the state -- so the word for these dissident artists may be "anarchists." But since
anarchists would seem to have to eschew all political organization, they can't be anything
like the old Communist Party. Nonetheless, they can certainly be a specter to haunt the
globalized world, the world that pretends to be based on humanist globalism.
Two other examples, along with Ai Weiwei, are: Jello Biafra in the USA and Varg Vikernes
in Europe (at least in Northern and Central Europe). Both have arisen from the world of music
but have not been particularly shy about getting involveed in politics. So far Jello has
managed to avoid prosecution/persecution, while Varg is actually a convicted murderer and
also convicted of "hate crime" under the infamous "hate crime" statutes of France. Jello is a
Green, however, and it's note-worthy that the current leader (POTUS candidate) of the Green
Party USA (Dr. Jill Stein) has recently been singled out by congressional "intel" committees
as a person of interest in the so-called "Russiagate" affair.
As Hopkins says,
The ruling class is sending us a message. The message is, "you're either with us or
against us."
Maybe that's what has happened with the USA Greens: the global PTB have sent the message,
and it appears that the Greens' leader has responded by chosing to cooperate with the witch
hunt -- "discretion is the better part of valor" (as the old expression goes).
It seems to me a lot like the real California 'hippies' back in the the mid-60s -- not the
war protesters but the real hippies who were too stoned to know that there was a war going
on. They just knew that they did not want any part of the world as we know it. Oh, they
wanted the natural world all right, they just didn't want the so-called "civilized" world.
Rightists tended to place them somewhere on the Left side of the spectrum of the
Right-Left-Right-ya-Left-ya Right-ya-left-right-left (as drill sergeants might express it). I
was there in the 60s, although I was already too old to be trusted according to the political
pseudo-hippies (I was already over 30 years of age) but what I would call the real hippies,
they trusted me just fine. Anyway, Rightists and all the journalists and commentators never
came close to realizing what it was all about. You almost had to have some experience
first-hand of LSD, you know.
Maybe that's where this is all heading -- right back to LSD, psilocybin and good old
Cannabis. I note in this respect that the Trump administration has recently come down strong
to suppress the "Movement" in Colorado and elsewhere. One of Trump's numerous sell-outs or
cop-outs (to use the old 60s terminology). Contrary to his campaign statements, of
course.
Yes, I think that Hopkins way off there in the capital of rationalism, Berlin, probably
has no idea of how this is likely to play out back in the US of A it's going to be all about
illicit drugs and I don't mean factory-produced opioids or amphetamine. This battle will
definitely divide the goats from the sheep -- the real "libertarian" anarchists from the
pretend libertarians. I could be wrong but I think it's going to be a BFD. Yeah, I admit to
it: I hope it's going to be a BFD. Anything else and it's too boring for tears.
No one wanted the First World War, but given the build up of propaganda, tensions, mistrust,
and the alliances, a mere act of terrorism by Gavrilo Princip was enough to ignite a
conflagration that no one could stop.
This is an excellent and exceptional piece. Correct on all points, as we have come to expect
of C. J. Hopkins, one of the most clear-sighted contributors to this site. Fewer comic
flourishes than in his earlier essays, probably reflecting how desperate things are becoming
for independent and fair-minded people trying to make their voices heard. Surprising to see
so few comments, though perhaps that's not a bad thing, given how intemperate some commenters
can be.
"No one wanted the First World War, but given the build up of propaganda, tensions,
mistrust, and the alliances, a mere act of terrorism by Gavrilo Princip was enough to
ignite a conflagration that no one could stop." -- Steve Hayes
I guess that Hayes' comment here at C.J. Hopkins' article is all about demonstrating the
effectiveness of terrorism so then the War on Terror makes sense? but whatever to respond to
Hayes' contention that no one wanted the First World War, I would ask Hayes: "No one? Not
even greedy internationalist central bankers with international connections?"
It is OK for an empire to be hated and feared, it doesn't work so good when Glory slowly fades and he empire instead
becomes hated and despised
Notable quotes:
"... There's only one explanation: Tillerson must be so blinded by hubris that he couldn't figure out what Erdogan's reaction would be. He must have thought that, "Whatever Uncle Sam says, goes." Only it doesn't work like that anymore. ..."
"... Simply put, Washington is losing the war quite dramatically due in large part to the emergence of a new coalition (Russia-Syria-Iran-Hezbollah) that has made great strides in Syria and that is committed to preserve the Old World Order, a system that is built on the principles of national sovereignty, self determination and non intervention. ..."
"... Tillerson's blunder will only make Washington's task all the more difficult by drawing Turkey into the fray in an effort to quash Uncle Sam's Kurdish proxies. ..."
"... In an effort to add insult to injury, Tillerson didn't even have the decency to discuss the matter with Erdogan– his NATO ally– before making the announcement! ..."
"... One day you're a terrorist, and the next day you're not depending on whether Washington can use you or not. ..."
"... Now the US has to choose between its own proxy army (The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces) and a NATO ally that occupies the critical crossroads between Asia and Europe ..."
"... "In response to President Erdoğan's call on the United States to end the delivery of weapons to the [Democratic Union Party] PYD-YPG, President Trump said that his country no longer supplied the group with weapons and pledged not to resume the weapons delivery in the future," the sources added." (Hurriyet) ..."
"... So far, the only clear winner in this latest conflagration has been Vladimir Putin, the levelheaded pragmatist who hews to Napoleon's directive to "Never interfere with an enemy while he's in the process of destroying himself." ..."
"... Putin gave Erdogan the green light to conduct "Operation Olive Branch" in order to pave the way for an eventual Syrian takeover of the Northwestern portion of the country up to the Turkish border. Moscow removed its troops from the Afrin quarter (where the current fighting is taking place) but not before it presented the Kurds with the option of conceding control of the area to the central government in Damascus. The Kurds rejected that offer and elected to fight instead. ..."
"... Erdogan's demand that Trump stop the flow of weapons to the SDF will benefit Russia and its allies on the ground even more than they will benefit Turkey. It's another win-win situation for Putin. ..."
So why did Tillerson think Erdogan would respond differently?
There's only one explanation: Tillerson must be so blinded by hubris that he couldn't figure
out what Erdogan's reaction would be. He must have thought that, "Whatever Uncle Sam says,
goes." Only it doesn't work like that anymore.
The US has lost its ability to shape events in
the Middle East, particularly in Syria where its jihadist proxies have been rolled back on
nearly every front. The US simply doesn't have sufficient forces on the ground to determine the
outcome, nor is it respected as an honest broker, a dependable ally or a reliable steward of
regional security. The US is just one of many armed-factions struggling to gain the upper hand
in an increasingly fractious and combustible battlespace. Simply put, Washington is losing the
war quite dramatically due in large part to the emergence of a new coalition
(Russia-Syria-Iran-Hezbollah) that has made great strides in Syria and that is committed to
preserve the Old World Order, a system that is built on the principles of national sovereignty,
self determination and non intervention.
Washington opposes this system and is doing everything
in its power dismantle it by redrawing borders, toppling elected leaders, and installing its
own stooges to execute its diktats. Tillerson's blunder will only make Washington's task all
the more difficult by drawing Turkey into the fray in an effort to quash Uncle Sam's Kurdish
proxies.
In an effort to add insult to injury, Tillerson didn't even have the decency to discuss the
matter with Erdogan– his NATO ally– before making the announcement! Can you imagine
how furious Erdogan must have been? Shouldn't the president of Turkey expect better treatment
from his so-called friends in Washington who use Turkish air fields to supply their ground
troops and to carry out their bombing raids in Syria? But instead of gratitude, he gets a big
kick in the teeth with the announcement that the US is hopping into bed with his mortal
enemies, the Kurds. Check out this excerpt from Wednesday's Turkish daily, The Hurriyet ,which
provides a bit of background on the story:
"It is beyond any doubt that the U.S. military and administration knew that the People's
Protection Units (YPG) had organic ties with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which
Washington officially recognizes as a terrorist group .The YPG is the armed wing of the
Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is the political wing of the PKK in Syria. They share the
same leadership the same budget, the same arsenal, the same chain of command from the Kandil
Mountains in Iraq, and the same pool of militants. So the PYD/YPG is actually not a
"PKK-affiliated" group, it is a sub-geographical unit of the same organization .
Knowing that the YPG and the PKK are effectively equal, and legally not wanting to appear
to be giving arms to a terrorist organization, the U.S. military already asked the YPG to
"change the brand" back in 2015. U.S.
Special Forces Commander General Raymond Thomas said during an Aspen Security Forum
presentation on July 22, 2017 that he had personally proposed the name change to the YPG.
"With about a day's notice [the YPG] declared that it was now the Syrian Democratic Forces
[SDF]," Thomas said to laughter from the audience. "I thought it was a stroke of brilliance
to put 'democracy' in there somewhere. It gave them a little bit of credibility."
(Hurriyet)
Ha, ha, ha. Isn't that funny? One day you're a terrorist, and the next day you're not
depending on whether Washington can use you or not. Is it any wonder why Erdogan is so pissed
off?
So now a messy situation gets even messier. Now the US has to choose between its own proxy
army (The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces) and a NATO ally that occupies the critical
crossroads between Asia and Europe. Washington's plan to pivot to Asia by controlling vital
resources and capital flowing between the continents depends largely on its ability to keep
regional leaders within its orbit. That means Washington needs Erdogan in their camp which, for
the time being, he is not.
Apparently, there have been phone calls between Presidents Trump and Erdogan, but early
accounts saying that Trump scolded Erdogan have already been disproven. In fact, Trump and his
fellows have been bending-over-backwards to make amends for Tillerson's foolish slip-up.
According to the Hurriyet:
"The readout issued by the White House does not accurately reflect the content of
President [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan's phone call with President [Donald] Trump," "President
Trump did not share any 'concerns [about] escalating violence' with regard to the ongoing
military operation in Afrin." The Turkish sources also stressed that Trump did not use the
words "destructive and false rhetoric coming from Turkey."
Erdoğan reiterated that the People's Protection Units (YPG) must withdraw to the East
of the Euphrates River and pledged the protection of Manbij by the Turkish-backed Free Syrian
Army (FSA)
"In response to President Erdoğan's call on the United States to end the delivery of
weapons to the [Democratic Union Party] PYD-YPG, President Trump said that his country no
longer supplied the group with weapons and pledged not to resume the weapons delivery in the
future," the sources added." (Hurriyet)
If this report can be trusted, (Turkish media is no more reliable than US media) then it is
Erdogan who is issuing the demands not Trump. Erdogan insists that all YPG units be redeployed
east of the Euphrates and that all US weapons shipments to Washington's Kurdish proxies stop
immediately. We should know soon enough whether Washington is following Erdogan's orders or
not.
So far, the only clear winner in this latest conflagration has been Vladimir Putin, the
levelheaded pragmatist who hews to Napoleon's directive to "Never interfere with an enemy while
he's in the process of destroying himself."
Putin gave Erdogan the green light to conduct "Operation Olive Branch" in order to pave the
way for an eventual Syrian takeover of the Northwestern portion of the country up to the
Turkish border. Moscow removed its troops from the Afrin quarter (where the current fighting is
taking place) but not before it presented the Kurds with the option of conceding control of the
area to the central government in Damascus. The Kurds rejected that offer and elected to fight
instead. Here's an account of what happened:
Nearly a week ago, [a] meeting between Russian officials and Kurdish leaders took place.
Moscow suggested Syrian State becomes only entity in charge of the northern border. The Kurds
refused. It was immediately after that that the Turkish Generals were invited to Moscow.
Having the Syrian State in control of its Northern Border wasn't the only Russian demand. The
other was that the Kurds hand back the oil fields in Deir al Zor. The Kurds refused
suggesting that the US won't allow that anyway.
Putin has repeatedly expressed concern about US supplies of advanced weapons that had been
given to the Kurdish SDF. According to the military website South Front:
"Uncontrolled deliveries of modern weapons, including reportedly the deliveries of the
man-portable air defense systems, by the Pentagon to the pro-US forces in northern Syria,
have contributed to the rapid escalation of tensions in the region and resulted in the launch
of a special operation by the Turkish troops." (SouthFront)
Erdogan's demand that Trump stop the flow of weapons to the SDF will benefit Russia and its
allies on the ground even more than they will benefit Turkey. It's another win-win situation
for Putin.
The split between the NATO allies seems to work in Putin's favor as well, although, to his
credit, he has not tried to exploit the situation. Putin ascribes to the notion that relations
between nations are not that different than relations between people, they must be built on a
solid foundation of trust which gradually grows as each party proves they are steady, reliable
partners who can be counted on to honor their commitments and keep their word. Putin's honesty,
even-handedness and reliability have greatly enhanced Russia's power in the region and his
influence in settling global disputes. That is particularly evident in Syria where Moscow is at
the center of all decision-making.
As we noted earlier, Washington has made every effort to patch up relations with Turkey and
put the current foofaraw behind them. The White House has issued a number of servile statements
acknowledging Turkey's "legitimate security concerns" and their "commitment to work with Turkey
as a NATO ally." And there's no doubt that the administration's charm offensive will probably
succeed in bringing the narcissistic and mercurial Erdogan back into the fold. But for how
long?
At present, Erdogan is still entertains illusions of cobbling together a second Ottoman
empire overseen by the Grand Sultan Tayyip himself, but when he finally comes to his senses and
realizes the threat that Washington poses to Turkish independence and sovereignty, he may
reconsider and throw his lot with Putin.
In any event, Washington has clearly tipped its hand revealing its amended strategy for
Syria, a plan that abandons the pretext of a "war on terror" and focuses almost-exclusively on
military remedies to the "great power" confrontation outlined in Trump's new National Defense
Strategy. Washington is fully committed to building an opposition proxy-army in its east Syria
enclave that can fend off loyalist troops, launch destabilizing attacks on the regime, and
eventually, effect the political changes that help to achieve its imperial ambitions.
Tillerson's announcement may have prompted some unexpected apologies and back-tracking, but
the policy remains the same. Washington will persist in its effort to divide the country and
remove Assad until an opposing force prevents it from doing so. And, that day could be sooner
than many people imagine. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Mike Whitney
Truth is the first victim of war. This is also true about the Cold War II with Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... MSNBC's Chris Hayes recently asked a question of his Twitter following that was so heavily loaded it wouldn't be permitted on most interstate highways: "Aside from genuine cranks, is there anyone left denying it was the Russians that committed criminal sabotage in the American election?" ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... You can begin finding your way toward the answer to that question by envisioning the following hypothetical scenario. Imagine what would happen if, instead of promoting the Russiagate narrative, the faces of the consent-manufacturing machine known as the mass media began telling mainstream America that in order to ensure that the US will remain capable of dominating the other countries on this planet, there's going to have to be an aggressive campaign to re-inflame the Cold War with the goal of disrupting and undermining China and its allies ..."
"... This is what Russiagate is ultimately about. Democrats think it's about impeaching Trump and protecting the world from a nigh-omnipotent supervillain in Vladimir Putin, Trump's supporters think it's a "deep state coup" to try and oust their president, but in reality this has nothing to do with Trump, and ultimately not a whole lot to do with Russia either. When all is said and done, Russiagate is about China. ..."
"... In an essay titled "Russia-China Tandem Changes the World", US-Russia relations analyst Gilbert Doctorow explains how the surging economic power China depends upon Russia's willingness to go head-to-head with America and its extensive experience with US attempts to undermine the USSR during the Cold War. Alone both nations are very vulnerable, but together their strengths are complimentary in a way that poses a direct threat to America's self-appointed role as world leader ..."
"... So the strategic value of taking Russia out of the equation is clear, and that's exactly what the US power establishment is attempting to do. California Representative Eric Swalwell, one of the lead congressional promoters of both anti-Russia sentiment and the Trump-Russia "collusion" narrative, admitted last year that he'd like to see tougher sanctions stacked up until they "isolate Russia from the rest of the world" ..."
"... The US oligarchs, the oligarch-owned media outlets, and the oligarch-aligned intelligence/defense agencies can't just come right out and say "Hey America, we need to ensure our power structures remain unrivalled for the foreseeable future, so we're going to have to try and shut down Russia's influence using ever-tightening economic sanctions, NATO expansionism, proxy wars and troops along Russia's border to squeeze them until they lose the capacity to interfere with our ability to crush China. We'll also need a vastly inflated military budget to help facilitate our geopolitical agendas and prepare for a possible world war, please." A few Americans might consent to it, but by and large the US public would rather see those resources spent on making their lives better. ..."
"... So they lie. They use America's deliberately constructed partisan enmity and culture wars to fan the flames of mass hysteria about a new president so that enough Americans will permit continuous escalations with Russia under the mistaken impression that they are helping to resist Trump. ..."
MSNBC's Chris Hayes recently asked a question
of his Twitter following that was so heavily loaded it wouldn't be permitted on most interstate highways: "Aside from genuine cranks,
is there anyone left denying it was the Russians that committed criminal sabotage in the American election?"
Hayes asked this fake question because he works for MSNBC and it is therefore his job, and he asked it in response to a report
first made viral by deranged espionage LARPer
Eric Garland that a Dutch intelligence agency had been observing Russian hackers attacking US political parties in advance of
the 2016 election. Like all "bombshell" Russiagate reports, this one roared through social media like wildfire carried on the wings
of liberal hysteria about the current administration, only to be exposed as being riddled with gaping plot holes as
documented here
by independent journalist Suzie Dawson. The report revolves around an allegedly Russian cyber threat now known in the west as "Cozy
Bear," which as Real News ' Max Blumenthal
notes is not a network of hackers but "a Russian-sounding name the for-profit firm Crowdstrike assigned to an APT to market its
findings to gullible reporters desperate for Russiagate scoops."
This "bombshell" overlapped with another as it was reported by the New York
Times that at one point many months ago Trump had wanted to fire Robert Mueller, but then didn't.
*Cough.*
Why does this keep happening? Why does the public keep getting sold a mountain of suspicion with zero substance? Over and over
and over again these "bombshell" stories come out about Trump and Russia, Russia and Trump, only to be
debunked ,
retracted , or
erased from the spotlight after people start actually reading the allegations and thinking critically about them and see they're
not the shocking bombshells they purport to be? These allegations are all premised upon claims made the US intelligence community,
which has an extensive and well-documented history of lying to advance its agendas, as well as
porous claims made by an
extremely shady and insanely profitable
private cyber security company, and yet all we're ever shown is smoke and mirrors with no actual fire.
Why is that?
You can begin finding your way toward the answer to that question by envisioning the following hypothetical scenario. Imagine
what would happen if, instead of promoting the Russiagate narrative, the faces of the
consent-manufacturing machine known as the mass media began
telling mainstream America that in order to ensure that the US will remain capable of dominating the other countries on this planet,
there's going to have to be an aggressive campaign to re-inflame the Cold War with the goal of disrupting and undermining China and
its allies.
That would be a very different narrative with a very different effect, wouldn't it? But that's exactly what's going on here, and
if the US power establishment and its propaganda machine were in the business of telling people the truth, that's precisely what
they'd say.
It's not a secret that China has been working to surpass the United States as the world's leading superpower as quickly as possible.
Hell, Xi Jinping
flat-out said so during a three and a half hour address last October, and
many experts think it might happen a lot
sooner than Xi's 30-year deadline. An editorial from China's state press agency about the Davos World Economic Forum
asserts that the time has come for the world to choose between the "Xi-style collaborative approach" and Trump's "self-centred
America First policy (which) has led his country away from multiple multilateral pacts and infused anxiety into both allies and the
broader world." China has been collaborating with Russia to
end the hegemony of the US dollar , to
shore up control
of the Arctic as new resources become available, and just generally build up its own power and influence instead of working to
remain in Washington's good graces as most western nations have chosen to do.
Preventing this is the single most important goal of the US power establishment, not just its elected government but the unelected
plutocrats, defense and intelligence agencies which control the nation's affairs behind the scenes. This agenda is so important that
in a letter to his successor the outgoing President Barack Obama made the "indispensable"
nature of American planetary leadership his sole concrete piece of advice, and pro-establishment influence firms like Project for
a New American Century have made preventing the rise of a rival superpower their
stated primary goal
.
This is what Russiagate is ultimately about. Democrats think it's about impeaching Trump and protecting the world from a nigh-omnipotent
supervillain in Vladimir Putin, Trump's supporters think it's a "deep state coup" to try and oust their president, but in reality
this has nothing to do with Trump, and ultimately not a whole lot to do with Russia either. When all is said and done, Russiagate
is about China.
In an essay titled
"Russia-China Tandem Changes the World", US-Russia relations analyst
Gilbert Doctorow explains how the surging economic
power China depends upon Russia's willingness to go head-to-head with America and its extensive experience with US attempts to undermine
the USSR during the Cold War. Alone both nations are very vulnerable, but together their strengths are complimentary in a way that
poses a direct threat to America's self-appointed role as world leader .
"Russia is essential to China because of Moscow's long experience managing global relations going back to the period of the Cold
War and because of its willingness and ability today to stand up directly to the American hegemon," writes Doctorow, "whereas China,
with its heavy dependence on its vast exports to the U.S., cannot do so without endangering vital interests. Moreover, since the
Western establishment sees China as the long-term challenge to its supremacy, it is best for Beijing to exercise its influence through
another power, which today is Russia."
So the strategic value of taking Russia out of the equation is clear, and that's exactly what the US power establishment is
attempting to do. California Representative Eric Swalwell, one of the lead congressional promoters of both anti-Russia sentiment
and the Trump-Russia "collusion" narrative, admitted last year that
he'd like to see tougher sanctions stacked up until they "isolate Russia from the rest of the world" after much badgering from
Fox's Tucker Carlson about his incendiary claims that the alleged cyberattacks constituted an "act of war." It is worth noting here
that despite Swalwell's repeated hysterical claims about Trump and Russia, he
recently voted to renew the treasonous Kremlin-colluding president's godlike surveillance powers anyway.
Establishment muppets like Swalwell and the unelected elites who own them don't care about Trump, they care about crippling China's
right arm Russia so that they can set about sabotaging the agendas of a potential rival superpower unimpeded by the skilful opposition
of a nuclear superpower. But, getting back to the hypothetical situation I asked you to envision earlier, they can't just come right
out and say that.
They can't. The US oligarchs, the oligarch-owned media outlets, and the oligarch-aligned intelligence/defense agencies can't
just come right out and say "Hey America, we need to ensure our power structures remain unrivalled for the foreseeable future, so
we're going to have to try and shut down Russia's influence using ever-tightening economic sanctions, NATO expansionism, proxy wars
and troops along Russia's border to squeeze them until they lose the capacity to interfere with our ability to crush China. We'll
also need a vastly inflated military budget to help facilitate our geopolitical agendas and prepare for a possible world war, please."
A few Americans might consent to it, but by and large the US public would rather see those resources spent on making their lives
better.
Just as importantly, the rest of the world would recoil in revulsion.
So they lie. They use America's deliberately constructed partisan enmity and culture wars to fan the flames of mass hysteria
about a new president so that enough Americans will permit continuous escalations with Russia under the mistaken impression that
they are helping to resist Trump. They think they're lying to you for your own good, because you can't understand how important
it is that they do what they're trying to do. That's why there are so many gaping plot holes and none of this ever quite adds up;
they're lying to you like a parent telling a child he needs to eat his broccoli if he doesn't want a lump of coal for Christmas.
Except instead of eating broccoli it's consenting to dangerous escalations and military expansionism, and instead of a parent it's
a class of elitist sociopaths, and you're always going to get coal.
And sure, an argument can be made that the world is better off under the watchful domination of the US power establishment than
it would be with multipolar power arrangements, and I encounter many establishment loyalists who make precisely that argument. Personally
I would argue that the
death, destruction
and mayhem caused by the intrinsically evil things the US establishment must do in order to maintain dominance completely invalidate
that argument, but it's a debate that people deserve to have, and they can't have it when they're being lied to about what's really
going on.
Insist on the truth. Keep pushing back against this pernicious psyop. Spread the word.
Support Caitlyn Johnstone's work on Patreon or
Paypal . Reprinted with author's permission from her
website .
"... As president, Kennedy maintained some distance from the Israeli government. He supported the right of return of Palestinian refugees and vigorously opposed Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons. The CIA had obtained evidence of the Israeli nuclear project in the desert at Dimona– claimed to be a fabric factory, Brod says– and in the year before he was assassinated, Kennedy had pushed Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi Eshkol, to account for the activities. ..."
"... Johnson ultimately suppressed intelligence reports that Israel was becoming a nuclear power. "By 1968, the President had no intention of doing anything to stop the Israeli bomb," Hersh writes. ..."
Brod believes that Mathilde Krim was strategic in forming the friendship.
From the day they first met which was at the party for JFK at the Krim residence in the
city– from that day forward she speaks proudly of having nurtured a relationship with
Johnson because Johnson was not part of the JFK inner circle. I don't think it was an
accident that she approached Johnson and developed this ongoing relationship. I have a
feeling that from her entry into the United States if not before there was a plan of how she
could best serve Israel and she began serving them when she was living in Switzerland in her
first marriage and her work with the Stern gang. She had a strong stomach to involve herself
with that kind of terror, and she certainly lived up to it here.
The transition from Kennedy to Johnson in 1963 was an important moment in the history of the
special relationship.
Kennedy had bridled at the pro-Israel influence. In 1960, his campaign was in trouble when a
group of Jewish leaders gave him $500,000 at the Pierre Hotel in New York, and then
"interrogated Kennedy stringently on matters affecting Jews and Israel," (as
Abba Eban later related ). "As an American citizen [Kennedy] was outraged" by the effort to
take "control" of JFK's Middle East policy, his friend the newspaperman Charles Bartlett told
Seymour Hersh.
As president, Kennedy maintained some distance from the Israeli government. He supported the
right of return of Palestinian refugees and vigorously opposed Israel's acquisition of nuclear
weapons. The CIA had obtained evidence of the Israeli nuclear project in the desert at Dimona– claimed to be a fabric factory, Brod says– and in the year before he was
assassinated, Kennedy had pushed Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi
Eshkol, to account for the activities.
His successor had fewer scruples about backing Israel. Johnson's political career was
interwoven with Jews, as his wife later reflected, and he saw that nuclear nonproliferation
"made for bad politics," as Hersh says in The Samson Option, because it alienated the Jewish
community. Johnson ultimately suppressed intelligence reports that Israel was becoming a
nuclear power. "By 1968, the President had no intention of doing anything to stop the Israeli
bomb," Hersh writes.
Mathilde Krim was undoubtedly a factor in that policymaking. Throughout his presidency, the
Krims were among Johnson's very closest friends. They had a room in the White House and built a house on Lake
Lyndon B. Johnson in the Texas hill country so as to be near his ranch in Stonewall when he was on vacation
there. Johnson stayed at their house in New York.
It has been suggested that Mathilde Krim was LBJ's lover. "It was a barely hidden secret in
leading government circles in Israel and the United States at the time that Mrs. Krim was extremely close to
Lyndon Johnson," Helena Cobban wrote in
her blogpost on Krim
last week. While Brod points out that Johnson was a "competitive womanizer," according to
his aide Bill Moyers, and certainly the president had social opportunities alone with Mathilde Krim.
... ... ...
They are missing a fascinating story about the ability of a charismatic intelligent zealot
to gain the audience of the most powerful man in the world as history was unfolding.
"One of the things that made Israel's miracle come true was Israel's ability to use people
like Abe Fortas and Arthur Goldberg," Brod says. "They had a huge Rolodex of influential
people, whether mass media or fundraisers, that they could contact and effectively use
depending on the situation, and there was no one more needed during the Six Day War than
Mathilde Krim."
When Abba Eban told a disapproving Johnson in Texas that Israel could no longer hold off its
attack, it was Johnson and Mathilde who flew back to the White House, leaving Lady Bird behind
at the ranch. It was Johnson who awakened Krim in her White House bedroom to tell her the news
of the war beginning. It was Mathilde Krim who who even as she was forced to get back to work
in New York left Johnson a pro-Israel speech to quiet a pending Jewish demonstration.
As for Johnson's willingness to turn a blind eye to the Israeli nuclear program, or its
attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, we can only guess at Mathilde Krim's advice to him.
As she later advised others, anyone can have an influence over policy– you just have to
throw yourself into it.
"Lyndon Johnson was so willing to be Mathilde Krim's hero that he would do almost anything
he could get away with," Brod concludes. "And that was quite a lot."
Remember how the USA ignited the Ukraine to punish the Russians for their thwarting of the
planned US attack on Syria? Well, the very same Ukraine has recently passed a law abolishing
the "anti-terrorist operation" in the Donbass and declaring the Donbass "occupied territory".
Under Ukie law, Russia is now officially an "aggressor state". This means that the Ukronazis
have now basically rejected the Minsk Agreements and are in a quasi-open state of war with
Russia. The chances of a full-scale Ukronazi attack on the Donbass are now even higher then
before, especially before or during the soccer World Cup in Moscow this summer (remember
Saakashvili?). Having been ridiculed (again) with their Border Security Force in Syria, the US
Americans will now seek a place to take revenge on the evil Russkies and this place will most
likely be the Ukraine. And we can always count the Israelis to find a pretext to continue to
murder Palestinians and bomb Syria. As for the Saudis, they appear to be temporarily busy
fighting each other. So unless the Empire does something really crazy, the only place it can
lash out with little to lose (for itself) is the eastern Ukraine. The Novorussians understand
that. May God help them.
Saker, interesting analysis. 1 tiny point of criticism:
Remember how the USA ignited the Ukraine to punish the Russians for their thwarting of
the planned US attack on Syria?
If I am not mistaken the CIA fomented "Orange revolution" in Ukraine was in 2014, whereas
Russia stepped into the Syrian war in 2015. So in the quoted sentence, it seems you got the
sequence of events back to front.
Ha-ha! Goddam Russkies scorched the Amero-ISIS arse and now Russo-Turks are gaslighting the
Kurds and their ten 'Murican lilypads. It's time for a diversionary Great Patriotic Ukrainian
War, just as soon as Porko sobers up.
What occurred in 2014 was the Maidan psy-op. As far as I recall, the only thing
significant that happened in Ukraine in 2010 was the election of Yanukovych.
In an article about Syria, Russia is omnipresent and the article ends by talking about
Ukraine. Nothing could better illustrate the fact that Putin has painted himself into a
corner in both places. He is irreversibly bogged down in Syria and any deal he makes with the
Kurds will just bog him down even more. Putin is a sitting duck. The US can lower the boom on
him at any time by relaunching the war and there's nothing he can do about it. And, of
course, the author makes clear that all this is "about" Ukraine. Syria is a proxy war. But in
Ukraine also, Putin has painted himself into a corner. He can't go forward, he can't go
backwards and he can't stay where he is!
Looks to me like he has done very well, the Ukraine is a basket case, surviving on little
more than borrowed money(I see on the QT that they are back to having to buy coal from Russia
AGAIN) and sooner rather than later there will be another coup as they find that even the EU
don';t want them.Syria why does he need to make a deal with the Kurd's for they are not his
problem,if anyone makes a deal with the Kurd's it will have be Syria,as far as that little
chunk we carved out just what good is it landlocked with no access to a water port,as normal
your trolling along with the mighty U.S. which is little more than a paper tiger with its
involvement in Afghanistan Africa and other places of interest as it tries to save what can't
be saved,the EMPIRE
I am not sure there is any evidence that Pres Putin needs t do anything.
He has no intention of raking the Ukraine. Not an issue. He's responding the consequences
of a western incited violent revolution that spun out of control -- and is protecting "ethnic
Russians" a dynamic that plagues Europe and Asia.
In Syria he is not launching a campaign of conquest but supporting. Anyone who thinks
Russia is caught in a vice is sorely mistaken. I can see from the comments that
misunderstanding the motivations of pothers remains in play and that is not encouraging.
Yo be clear, I have full faith of US might. we can bring a formidable amount of force on
any situation -- it's frightening, just how formidable we are. The question remains
first should we
second how long we need to sustain it
third tested against multiple adversaries (of our own making) in multiple locations
fourth tested against other modern states who themselves have engaged in tech superior
forces
fifth the strategic advantages -- short verses long term
Just because one can -- doesn't . . .
Nor am I ignoring that we have allies willing to take on Russia, but when push comes to
shove . . . who knows. I think we are the ones getting played and as for trapped -- and
bogged down --
"... As a former service member, Uncle Sam paid me to live in Europe for a couple years and sure opened my eyes (though they got their money out of me from an Iraq and A-stan deployment). I realized that many parts of US are overrated, crime ridden dumps even when compared to most places even in Eastern Europe. ..."
"... Europeans can thank US promoted defense freeloading so they can focus on beating the US on all quality of life measure including crime rates, mortality, longevity, health care, and other measures of happiness other than GDP such as not worrying about your kids getting massacred at school from yet another mass shooting. ..."
"... I'm a proud American but these infinitely proved wrong neocons keep resurrecting themselves. ..."
@deef, the ad hominem you begin with against the author shows where you are coming from.
George the Lesser revisionists like you never learn.
Where is the ROI on global policing? Selective sampling of wars? Where have you been for
the last 15 years as the US digs deeper within the biggest strategic blunder in the history
of the US? We could have done more useful things with the $5,000,000,000,000+ that was spent
on these dumb wars of choice such as manned mission to mars, universal insurance, pave the
freeways in gold
The US causes more unintended consequences and greater conflicts and deaths than the good
intentions they believe they are performing. See Syria, Iraq, Yemen, et al.
What's the casualty/death/missing numbers of Iraqis during the US's invasion vs. Saddam's
time? Is the average Iraqi happy to be there? I guess all that matters is that the US is
supposedly safer. Would any US citizen agree to that for the past 15 years?
And let's not kid ourselves, the State Dept. in any neocon administration is an extension
of the Department of Defense.
As a former service member, Uncle Sam paid me to live in Europe for a couple years and
sure opened my eyes (though they got their money out of me from an Iraq and A-stan
deployment). I realized that many parts of US are overrated, crime ridden dumps even when
compared to most places even in Eastern Europe.
Europeans can thank US promoted defense freeloading so they can focus on beating the US on
all quality of life measure including crime rates, mortality, longevity, health care, and
other measures of happiness other than GDP such as not worrying about your kids getting
massacred at school from yet another mass shooting.
I'm a proud American but these infinitely proved wrong neocons keep resurrecting
themselves.
I stand corrected, it is 17 years of continuous hole digging, tax dollar burning, and
amortization of the decline of future prosperity continues un-abated.
Sons and daughters born in 2001 of vets of these stupid wars of choice are now eligible to
fight the same end-stateless, no condition of victory wars with an expanded enemy set to
include peer competitors of Russia, China, N. Korea.
The annual soldier that dies on Jan. 1 of year X hand wringing editorial can continue
indefinitely.
@jk "I'm a proud American but these infinitely proved wrong neocons keep resurrecting
themselves."
Because we let them. We don't laugh them off television programs or kick them out of the
auditoriums where they keep inviting each other to appear. We don't punish elected
politicians (like Trump) who keep hiring them because they think we won't notice.
As far as I remember his posts Michael Kenny is "Israel-firster."
He does not care much about the US national security by definition, having different
priorities.
BTW it's a news for me that AEI launched such neocon stalwarts as "Frederick Kagan, John
Bolton, former vice president Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Cohen,
Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, David Frum, and Danielle Pletka."
It is a sad fact that Trump administration now is infiltrated with neocons, but in reality
how it can be different.
POTUS no longer defines the US foreign policy; MIC does (neocons can probably be better
understood as professional lobbyists of MIC). In a way, POTUS is now by-and-large ceremonial
figure, although Trump at least during the election campaign (and shortly after, say, before
April 2017 and Mueller commission) has had somewhat more isolationist views (his bellicosity
toward Iran and NK notwithstanding.) But he was quickly brought into the fold. Now he acts
like a regular Republican President, say, like Bush III.
The latter just demonstrates the power of MIC.
That's why there a surprising level of continuity of foreign policy between different
administrations.
My impression is that Israel also is effectively acting as a MIC lobbyist injecting some
money they got via military help into the USA politics directly, or indirectly.
"... at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack ..."
"... Return to Moscow ..."
"... The demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia is where the neocons and the liberal interventionists most significantly come together. The U.S. media's approach to Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. For instance, the full story of the infamous Magnitsky case cannot be told in the West, nor can the objective reality of the Ukrane coup in 2014 . The American people and the West in general are carefully shielded from hearing the "other side of the story." Indeed to even suggest that there is another side to the story makes you a "Putin apologist" or "Kremlin stooge." ..."
The claim of Russian meddling in the US election has brought US-Russia relations to what may
be an all-time low, substantially contributing to the near-universal demonization of Russian
president Vladimir Putin and of Russia itself in virtually all major media, with little or no
discussion of the supposed evidence for the claim. A stellar exception is the London Review
of Books, which published a critically important essay by Rutgers University professor
Jackson Lears in the January 4, 2018 issue. Titled "What We Don't Talk about When We Talk about
Russian Hacking," the article is an excellent overview and analysis of many of the issues the
title suggests.
The claim of Russian meddling in the election remains to this day
evidence-free, although you would never know that from the treatment of the topic in the
mainstream media. As Professor Lears observes:
Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on
evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and
their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free 'assessment'
produced last January by a small number of 'hand-picked' analysts – as James Clapper,
the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the
NSA. The claims of the last were made with only 'moderate' confidence. The label Intelligence
Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of unanimity, given that only three of
the 16 US intelligence agencies contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself
contained this crucial admission: 'Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof
that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is
often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.' Yet the
assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing
journalists to assume what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for
the intelligence agencies, or at least for those 'hand-picked' analysts.
But although Professor Lears refers to the reports of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity in his discussion of "Russian hacking," it seems clear there must have been a leak, not
a hack, because "the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds
an Internet capability for a remote hack ." ("Was the 'Russian Hack' An Inside Job?", July
25, 2017, https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/25/was-the-russian-hack-an-inside-job/
.)
In any case, definitive claims about who was responsible (assuming, purely arguendo
, it was a hack) face the fact that, according to Ray McGovern and William S. Binney, two
members of VIPS,
McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years; Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, was the
agency's technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting, and
created many of the collection systems still used by NSA.
In other words, as Russian president Vladimir Putin has explained,
today's technology is such that the final address can be masked and camouflaged to an
extent that no one will be able to understand the origin of that address. And, vice versa, it
is possible to set up any entity or any individual [so] that everyone will think that they
are the exact source of that attack. (Valdimir Putin's televised interview on NBC (June 4,
2017), by NBC News' Megyn Kelly, text published on the website of the President of
Russia, June 5, 2017.)
[9]
Demonization of Putin and Russia
The demonization of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Russia itself is just part, albeit
the most dangerous part, of a disinformation campaign flowing from the mainstream media. I
don't propose to present a full treatment of the subject here. But in broad outline, it's my
understanding that when the Cold War ended in 1991, Russian president Boris Yeltsin accepted
the advice of Western neoliberal planners and dismantled much of the Russian "safety net," with
the result that the Russian economy tanked and millions of people faced terrific hardship.
Vladimir Putin has been attempting to repair that situation, and his initial success is part of
the reason for his popularity in Russia. That understanding comes from a number of articles
I've read over the years, but primarily from Tony Kevin's book Return to Moscow ,
mentioned above. I'm hardly an expert on internal Russian politics. But I've read many of the
extensive public statements Mr. Putin has made since 2007, and with my primary concern being
his role in international relations and with respect to the control of Russia's nuclear
arsenal, he strikes me as a statesman.
[10] . Yet as investigative journalist Robert Parry observes,
The demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia is where the neocons and
the liberal interventionists most significantly come together. The U.S. media's approach to
Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. For instance, the full story of the
infamous
Magnitsky case cannot be told in the West, nor can the objective reality of the Ukrane
coup in 2014 . The American people and the West in general are carefully shielded from
hearing the "other side of the story." Indeed to even suggest that there is another side to
the story makes you a "Putin apologist" or "Kremlin stooge."
Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that
otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia. Ironically, many "liberals" who
cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam
War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S. intelligence community feeds us,
even if we're told to accept the assertions on faith.
[11] .
One result is a needless heightening of the dangers and risks outlined in this article.
Facebook Accuses Russia of Creating Events, But Unsure if They Took Place
A written statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee from Google, Twitter, and Facebook
revealed that they have found absolutely no evidence of any attempt by Russia to influence any
US votes within the past year (2017) and were unaware of any state-sponsored attempts to
interfere at all.
With Congress increasingly desperate to turn up something that they can pin on Russia
interference-wise, there is growing pressure on major technology companies to dig through their
logs and try to find something conceivably Russia-related.
Facebook has appeared to be the most eager to come up with something, having claimed that
129 "events" were created by people they suspect of being in league with the Russians, though
later conceding that they had no information if any of those events ever actually took
place.
Facebook did, however, claim an "insignificant" overlap between the putative Russian and the
Trump campaign. That's somewhat surprising, as oftentimes attempts to label someone a secret
Russian hinge heavily on them being perceived as pro-Trump in such after the fact
investigations.
Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz
President Donald Trump flew to Davos for the World Economic Forum, and completely
electrified it,
according to reports .
Although the "America First" slogan had raised concern in the global economic community that
this meant the United States would disregard the needs and concerns of other world economic
powers, the President dispelled this worry handily. Members of his cabinet had been in Davos a
bit before his arrival, and were involved in interview and panels already, and when he arrived,
he and his assistants were able to explain more what this philosophy actually means.
"America first is not America alone", said Gary Cohn, the president's economic adviser. The
point of this idea is not for the United States to dominate and control the world, but in
Trump's view, to make better deals and better trade agreements around the world, and to also
cement and strengthen the diplomatic relations between the USA and her allies, most notably
England and Israel.
The President met with both Prime Ministers Netanyahu of Israel and Theresa May of the
United Kingdom. In each meeting he affirmed the very close ties between nations, and also waved
away the rumors that the US and Britain were in a fractious state with one another in his
meeting with PM Theresa May.
"... Here's another map that's a little different than the one linked by Peter AU1. The Kurdish Project - https://thekurdishproject.org/kurdistan-map/ (remove the space) ..."
"... Notice the potential for deep water ports on the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas. Tillerson's role with Exxon provided him with an unique understanding of exactly how much $$ that Erdogan was able to steal without consequence and leaves the pit bulls' jowels dribbling with saliva, as if a rib eye steak's aroma was wafting thru the room, with jealous envy. ..."
I think you're on target with your comment. Also, I don't believe Jared has asked the Kurds themselves whether they're on board
or not. Let me explain.
Remember that both Pence and Tillerson were outspoken Never Trumpers. Pence was promised that he'd be 100% in charge of
policy and all day to day decisions. When he asked Trump what he intended to be doing he replied: "I'll be busy making America
Great Again." Whatever deal and contract wound up being signed between them, I think the tomahawk missile attack on Syria violated
the details and revoked most of Pence's authority.
Several, including Bannon have stated that Jared is in charge of ME policy. So, what did Jared offer to Exxon and Tillerson
in exchange for the SOS position? I believe he / they are slated to become the King of Kurdistan. "King" is the only thing
that Tillerson hasn't had in his life; yet.
Notice the potential for deep water ports on the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas. Tillerson's role with Exxon provided
him with an unique understanding of exactly how much $$ that Erdogan was able to steal without consequence and leaves the pit
bulls' jowels dribbling with saliva, as if a rib eye steak's aroma was wafting thru the room, with jealous envy.
Bernie Sanders figured out that he could double down and REALLY monetize the scam that Ron Paul executed against the Republican
voters in 2012; which he executed to perfection.
I believe Exxon / Tillerson have figured out that they are going to REALLY monetize the oil theft that Erdogan executed with
Kurdistan and his name will be written in the history books as a King.
Trump wants out of Nato. The Pentagon wants ports, runways and to surround Russia. Whether Turkey remains in Nato or not is
inconsequential to Jared and Greater Israel.
"... The risk has been with us since the 1950s, but has become scarier beginning with the US-backed coup in Ukraine, and increased with US involvement in the war on Syria. It's been heightened by plans for "modernization" of US warheads and delivery systems -- plans initiated by President Obama and continuing or expanded by President Trump. ..."
"... The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. ..."
"... Return to Moscow ..."
"... The whole Bush II thing, the elections, Iraq, 9-11 were kind of "through the looking glass" events in which political corruption became mainstream acceptable in a surreal kind of way. I take events like the "Russian Hack" as a kind of ready-reckoner of political consciousness: if you accept or support such muck the only question remains – are you a gull or a knave? An idiot or a cynical bastard? ..."
"... "Sleepwalking into nuclear war" is a haunting and apt metaphor for what is happening to us as a society. Reading Robert Roth's provocative musings on the collective insanity currently enveloping us, I was reminded of William Shirer's accounts of the period he was stationed in Nazi Germany as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune before the outbreak of WWII. ..."
"... Even with all the propaganda the Germans were subjected to, said Shirer, Germans realized that Hitler was taking them into an unwinnable war against the rest of the world that they really didn't want. They knew they were headed into the abyss, yet the political climate was so paranoid that resistance seemed unpatriotic, if not treasonous. They went along in the hope that the national nightmare would dissipate of its own accord, that things weren't as bad as they seemed. ..."
"... Mr. Roth's observations about the blights of willful public ignorance and mass media disinformation are important. Commenter "animalogic" (#7) aptly describes those party to the widespread deceit as either "a gull or a knave." The Establishment needs and therefore nurtures both. ..."
"... Roth has gone straight to the relevant point, nuclear war , for it is already clear that the prospective outcome of any permutation of a 'conventional' war will see the Empire hegemony, USA/Israel and vassal states, lose against Russia, who will be supported, by mutually recognized need, with China. No matter how it is considered, a Russia-China alliance will defeat the empire hegemony if nuclear weapons are not used. ..."
"... One positive thing in US policy is a stability and progress – dummy president replaced by stupid one, that replaced by insane; after him goes imbecile. I can't imagine who's going to be next :-). But there are many of old crazy women and men ready to help if current imbecile went down. ..."
"... There will be no nuclear war as Russia and the U.S. can wipe each other off the map, however the Zionists will continue to keep America at war for the Zionist NWO as that is the game plan and we goyim Americans will continue to be sent to the slaughter house for greater Israel. ..."
"... One honest, generally morally competent man holding the ever-more-powerful office of president of the U.S., could fix many things. Unfortunately, Donald John Trump is not that man. ..."
"... Let's consider one example: Many people believe that a real investigation into 9/11 would destroy the "deep state". Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey et al. have recently completed a study of the "collapse" of WTC7, whereby they've proven that "fire" was not the cause of the "collapse" of that building. This finding directly contradicts the NIST report. For the first time in 16 years there is now incontrovertible scientific evidence in the public domain that 9/11 was an "inside job". Why won't Donald John Trump take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity and order an investigation? ..."
"... The world is not about to end, but the Western public space has become very stupid. Most politicians, media and academics have managed to redefine basic terms into idiotic caricatures. Concepts like meddling, trolls, collusion, etc don't mean what we are told they mean. They are all an eternal part of human society, exchange of ideas, disagreements. Expressing one's opinions is not 'propaganda', or 'meddling' in elections – it is freedom of speech. The idea that there is only one correct view – the Western liberal one – is medieval. ..."
"... Nobody will deliberately start nuclear war, but the probability that it might start as the result of series of mistakes has increased. ..."
"... The US and its vassals (including other NATO countries) moved NATO troops close to Russian borders, destabilized Ukraine, Syria, cooked up "Russiagate" (which is really an FBI-gate, but sore losers would not admit it) to justify further increases in Pentagon budget (a trough where very fat pigs feed). ..."
"... The main danger is that in its death throes the Empire will start a war, although we can only hope that even degenerate US elites understand that dead people cannot benefit by their wealth. Hope springs eternal. ..."
"... Agree with much of the sentiment and some of the proposals here regarding the need to ratchet down rhetoric, pledge no first strike, and generally try much harder to reduce the risk of even a "small" nuke exchange. ..."
"... Well, hope is always nice. But we might not understand the dynamic nature of the global-liberal overreach that we have been experiencing. People don't behave the way Western elites have been acting without some measure of disconnect from reality. And hubris. When a substantial part of elite climbs on an irrational high horse of invincibility they become paralysed by the framework they have created. They don't want to hear other views because it makes them uncomfortable. They have given up on both principles and institutions – it is anything goes world now. ..."
"... The Trotskyites who became in America first anti-Stalinist Democrat Hawks and then anti-Russian/Israel-first Republican Hawks have worked things so that they control foreign affairs for both political parties. And they have an insatiable bloodlust. Like the godfather of their movement, they are amoral with genocidal desires when it comes to peoples they despise. They are the type of self-righteous bullies who aspire to rule the globe to overreach and push and shove and threaten and sucker punch until the worst for the world happens. ..."
"... Good to see you posting. I hear they are muling Ophrah. Really good choice for next president. Woman, black, fat and wealthy. Not gay or transvestite though but that's coming next. ..."
"... Makes me wonder what after Putin. I do it like him that much but he still intelligent, cool and calculating man that is not doing stupid things but neither genius. ..."
"... Regarding Americans, unfortunately they never felt real pain. Like a kid who does not know that fire is dangerous. I think financial collapse gonna be trouble sooner or later with them. The best thing Russia and China can do is to undermine us dollar status and the whole financial system which was built by uncle Sam for uncle Sam benefit. ..."
My goal in writing about these things is to alert you to the problems and encourage you to
share your concerns with people you know and with federal policy-makers. Right now, the entire
gamut of political discussion all but excludes the topic nuclear war, so if some Senators,
Members of Congress, and the President were to begin hearing from people that we're concerned
about the threat, and how easily it could happen, and that we want that threat removed, it
would be some progress.
Why the focus on nuclear war? Because of all the pending potential disasters we may have to
face, it's the most sudden, inescapable, irrevocable. At some level, people know that, though
they don't like to think about it. Author Carl Boggs describes the reaction of the people of
Hawaii when they received a false alarm about an incoming ICBM attack:
People scattered frenetically, mostly without logic or purpose or hope. Where to go? If
this turned out to be one of Kim Jong Un's powerful ICBMs, it could be over in 20 minutes.
Repair to a shelter? None exist. Go to the basement? Sure suicide. Find a car or taxi and
head for the hills? No time. [T]he response was utter psychological numbness, paralysis -- a
dysfunctional yet comprehensible state of mind in the face of nuclear oblivion. [T]he end
seemed inescapable.
And because, as Mr. Boggs says upon hearing a talk by former nuclear war planner Daniel
Ellsberg, it's a lot less unlikely than most of us have been led to believe.
The American people have been lulled to sleep, distracted by endless media and political
spectacles, while busy warmakers keep refining their insane nuclear blueprints . More than 70
years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pentagon elites still theorize and fantasize about the
unthinkable, their demented plans far removed from the realm of political debate or even
public awareness.
[1]
The risk has been with us since the 1950s, but has become scarier beginning with the
US-backed coup in Ukraine, and increased with US involvement in the war on Syria. It's been
heightened by plans for "modernization" of US warheads and delivery systems -- plans initiated
by President Obama and continuing or expanded by President Trump. And it's heightened
further by a Pentagon plan to develop a "low-yield" warhead for the submarine-based Trident
missile, and a new nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile.
[2] I believe that expanding the range of options in this way would
increase the likelihood that the weapons will actually be used.
In case you think I'm overstating the problem, you should know that almost everything in
"Dr. Strangelove" -- the Stanley Kubrick film in which nuclear war is started by a rogue
military officer -- was true.
[3] . "Doomsday" is an "Actual War
Plan," as Daniel Ellsberg says in a December 13, 2017 interview discussing his new book,
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
[4].
Dan Ellsberg proposes a Six-Step Program for dismantling the Doomsday Machine:
A U.S.
no-first-use policy;
Probing investigative hearings on our war plans in the light of nuclear
winter;
Eliminating our ICBMs;
Foregoing the delusion of preemptive damage-limiting by our
first-strike forces;
Giving up the profits, jobs, and alliance hegemony based on maintaining
that pretense;
Otherwise dismantling the American Doomsday Machine.
Of course none of that will happen under present circumstances. It's Ellsberg's goal to
contribute to developing an informed electorate that, recognizing the risk, will demand such
actions.
... ... ...
Regarding the two nuclear-armed superpowers, who between them possess some 15,000 nuclear
warheads, the Cold War that ended in 1991 has lately been replaced by a New Cold War. U.S. and
NATO provocations to Russia have reached a largely unheard crescendo in Ukraine, where a
U.S.-backed coup installed a regime, essentially in the Russian belly, that's riddled with
neo-Nazis and hostile to Russia; in eastern Europe generally, where NATO war games have been
held repeatedly just across the Russian border; and in Syria, where the U.S. continues to
maintain an unlawful presence in proximity to Russian forces legitimately there at the
invitation of the internationally recognized and constitutionally elected Syrian government.
And in both Syria and Ukraine, there are signs the situation is becoming even more dangerous
than it's been for some time.
[7]
These situations raise the risk of unintended nuclear war, as confrontation may lead at any
time to escalation spiraling out of control. Dr. William Polk, a member of the White House team
that handled the Cuban Missile Crisis, describes how in a confrontational situation, the logic
of events could force the Russians and us to the next step and that step also to the next and
so on, to the ultimate disastrous result without anyone having initially intended it.
[8] . Mr. Shatz concludes that what we once mistook for safety was more like sleepwalking.
Former Australian diplomat Tony Kevin sums up the situation in similar terms:
"Under the false and demonizing imagery of 'Putin's Russia' which has now taken hold in the
United States and NATO world, the West is truly 'sleepwalking', as Kissinger, Gorbachev,
[University of Kent professor Richard] Sakwa, [Princeton emeritus professor Stephen F.] Cohen
and others have urgently warned, into a potential nuclear war with Russia. It is the Cuban
missile crisis all over again, but actually worse now [in part] because American policy under
recent U.S. presidents has been so lacking in statesmanship, consistency or historical
perspective where Russia is concerned." ( Return to Moscow , University of Western
Australia, 2017, p. 255).
Think you're pretty spot with all you say. The whole Bush II thing, the elections, Iraq,
9-11 were kind of "through the looking glass" events in which political corruption became
mainstream acceptable in a surreal kind of way.
I take events like the "Russian Hack" as a kind of ready-reckoner of political consciousness:
if you accept or support such muck the only question remains – are you a gull or a
knave? An idiot or a cynical bastard?
"Sleepwalking into nuclear war" is a haunting and apt metaphor for what is happening to us as
a society. Reading Robert Roth's provocative musings on the collective insanity currently
enveloping us, I was reminded of William Shirer's accounts of the period he was stationed in
Nazi Germany as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune before the outbreak of WWII.
His account of attending a Nazi rally where he appeared to be the only member of the
audience not mesmerized by Hitler's delusional rants reminds me of my own reaction to the
Russiagate hysteria being orchestrated by neocons and Clinton dead-enders. Who are these
people and what is the matter with them? The current state of our Union is a testament to the
power of propaganda, which Hitler and Goebbels understood so well.
Even with all the propaganda the Germans were subjected to, said Shirer, Germans realized
that Hitler was taking them into an unwinnable war against the rest of the world that they
really didn't want. They knew they were headed into the abyss, yet the political climate was
so paranoid that resistance seemed unpatriotic, if not treasonous. They went along in the
hope that the national nightmare would dissipate of its own accord, that things weren't as
bad as they seemed.
But as it turned out, things were even worse than they seemed. The nightmare was real and
there was no waking from it.
The USA/Russia/China/Israel/France/UK/India/Pakistan have collectively been playing Russian
Roulette for 65 years.
Probability dictates sooner or later, one of the chambers will contain a live round.
What an excellent essay. It appears to have been submitted initially to The Unz Review, which
should enhance the reputation of both the author and publisher.
Mr. Roth's observations about the blights of willful public ignorance and mass media
disinformation are important. Commenter "animalogic" (#7) aptly describes those party to the
widespread deceit as either "a gull or a knave." The Establishment needs and therefore
nurtures both.
Great article and great comments so far (11 of them).
We have a scenario much like those scenarios prior to the Great War (WWI) and the second
world war, and the same shadowy 'hidden hand' orchestrating the entire pending disaster so
they can yet further augment their control and expand their illegal land theft.
The consolidation of the mass media agencies, now almost pure propaganda/perception
management agencies controlled by the competing factions of the 0.1%, and the advent of the
internet and 'big data' have enabled this psychopathic cabal to attain previously undreamt of
control over the common 99%, including control over their perception.
Roth has gone straight to the relevant point, nuclear war , for it is already clear
that the prospective outcome of any permutation of a 'conventional' war will see the Empire
hegemony, USA/Israel and vassal states, lose against Russia, who will be supported, by
mutually recognized need, with China. No matter how it is considered, a Russia-China alliance
will defeat the empire hegemony if nuclear weapons are not used.
It is because of this point that the entirety of humanity must rally and do 'what ever it
takes' to stop the terrorist empire from sustaining the current tyranny. The psychopaths of
the empire, not exposed to public scrutiny, hidden in the shadows, can and will nudge the
world into unwinnable (for anyone) nuclear war; their egos are the definition of human
depravity.
Exposing the grand charade to a critical mass of the general population is the first
objective, then exposing the 'hidden hands' in the shadows is the next.
The parasite must be stopped, and we, the people who have seen glimpses of the enemy, are
incumbent to spread the word.
I left this comment on a different article ( http://thesaker.is/listening-to-mattis/ ), but
seems it could be in place here also. Cause we're talking approximately same and nothing gonna
change
-- -- -
Well, it's getting boring a little. I mean the descriptions of the insanity of US's
rulers.
One positive thing in US policy is a stability and progress – dummy president
replaced by stupid one, that replaced by insane; after him goes imbecile. I can't imagine
who's going to be next :-).
But there are many of old crazy women and men ready to help if current imbecile went
down.
Thanks God, we, Russians, not that happy. After imbecile alcoholic Yeltsin we've got not
bad alternative (your media and stupid people in power call him a killer). Who (with his sanity) the only chance for this world to survive.
But, actually we're very tired from all this stuff and the possibility of US generals to
test our conventional and even nuke arms constantly increasing. They can also test if our
soldiers who've seen Napoleon, Hitler and many others got worse or still the same. I'm asking US citizens – Is it really interesting to you to get know it for
sure?
There will be no nuclear war as Russia and the U.S. can wipe each other off the map, however
the Zionists will continue to keep America at war for the Zionist NWO as that is the game
plan and we goyim Americans will continue to be sent to the slaughter house for greater
Israel.
"But as Mr. Shatz observes, the problems run much deeper than President Trump."
This statement is misleading. One honest, generally morally competent man holding the
ever-more-powerful office of president of the U.S., could fix many things. Unfortunately, Donald John Trump is not that man.
Let's consider one example: Many people believe that a real investigation into 9/11 would
destroy the "deep state". Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey et al. have recently completed a study of the
"collapse" of WTC7, whereby they've proven that "fire" was not the cause of the "collapse" of
that building. This finding directly contradicts the NIST report. For the first time in 16
years there is now incontrovertible scientific evidence in the public domain that 9/11 was an
"inside job". Why won't Donald John Trump take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity
and order an investigation?
There is only one plausible explanation: I believe that Donald John Trump was the "deep
state" candidate of choice in the 2016 election. I believe that's why they ran wild-eyed
madwoman Hillary Clinton against him rather than the more electable Sanders. I believe that's
why, in the early fall of 2016, as the election was coming into the home stretch, Obama
started ramping up tensions with Russia; i.e., so as to nudge the disgruntled anti-war
Democrats (Sanders supporters) into Trump's camp, swinging the election to him.
I believe that Donald John Trump is a "deep cover" or "sleeper" agent that's been groomed
and waiting in the wings for his masters' call. I believe that Donald John Trump was called
to power in a desperate now or never moment to save the "deep state" (Zionist) agenda.
Donald John Trump is a liar. Donald John Trump is a fraud. Donald John Trump is a con man.
Donald John Trump is a mass-murderer.
I don't think anyone in the West is sleepwalking into anything, esp the USA. I think the
American people see the writing on the wall and that if the American Empire loses status the
economy of the USA will revert to being a labor intensive existence of working the ground
just to have enough food to eat and water to drink. So entitled and lazy Americans are and
horrified to be relegated back to a 1920/30′s quality of life (loss of Bread &
Circuses), that if the Military Industril Complex has to threaten the entire planet with nuclear
annihilation if they don't tithe 10% of their GDP (Roman Empire) so fat ass Yankees can
continue to be fat asses – then just burn the place to the ground.
If the BRIC countries attempt to dethrone the petro dollar lazy entitled Americans will
BEG Washington to do whatever it takes to bring back $3.00 t-shirts at Wal-Mart.
The world is not about to end, but the Western public space has become very stupid. Most
politicians, media and academics have managed to redefine basic terms into idiotic
caricatures. Concepts like meddling, trolls, collusion, etc don't mean what we are told they
mean. They are all an eternal part of human society, exchange of ideas, disagreements.
Expressing one's opinions is not 'propaganda', or 'meddling' in elections – it is
freedom of speech. The idea that there is only one correct view – the Western liberal
one – is medieval.
We are at a point when views other than BBC, CNN, NY Times , are routinely dismissed as
'meddling', 'trolling, or sometimes 'hatred'. The objective is to suppress and dismiss them.
That is very dangerous for any civilisation, but for a system that was built on celebrating
free speech, it is fatal.
I often hear that it is a 'natural' pendulum swing, that most people in the West don't
agree with it, that it is an angry reaction to an unexpected loss ('Clinton dead-enders'),
that it will self-correct over time. In my view that is missing the point and overlooks the
permanent damage this hysteria has caused. If the more rational members of the elite are
unable to defend rationality and freedom today – when it is still easy – they are
co-responsible for the madness.
"After the Maidan the leaders of two right wing neo-Nazi organisations were rewarded with
control of four ministries
Andriy Parubiy, co-founder of the fascist Social National Party (SNPU) , which later
changed its name to Svoboda, became the new top commander of the National Defense and
Security Council (covering the military, police, courts and intelligence apparatus). The CIA
renamed the organisation to "Svoboda," meaning "Freedom," to make it more acceptable to
Americans.
Dmytro Yarosh, Right Sector commander, was second-in-command of the National Defense and
Security Council. This is the man who organized and ran Ukraine's February 22nd Coup in Kiev,
and the May 2nd Massacre of Its Opponents in Odessa, for Barack Obama. Yarosh's teams
carry out the most violent operations for the CIA in Ukraine. They are responsible for the
atrocities committed in the Donbass, for the crimes against humanity .
Oleh Tyahnybok, co founder of the SNPU and currently the party leader of Svoboda, a self
confessed neo-Nazi. He opposed the introduction of the Russian language as the second
official state language; called for the lustration of former communist officials. He also
proposed recognition of the fighting role of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and
Ukrainian Insurgent Army during World War II."
-- Where are the Lobby, the Anti-Defamation League, the Friends of Israel in UK, and the
whole Holocaust business? Where are the fighters with BDS?
Nobody will deliberately start nuclear war, but the probability that it might start as the
result of series of mistakes has increased.
The US and its vassals (including other NATO
countries) moved NATO troops close to Russian borders, destabilized Ukraine, Syria, cooked up
"Russiagate" (which is really an FBI-gate, but sore losers would not admit it) to justify
further increases in Pentagon budget (a trough where very fat pigs feed).
The Empire is
afraid of losing its position, but shortsighted elites do everything to accelerate its
demise. The main danger is that in its death throes the Empire will start a war, although we
can only hope that even degenerate US elites understand that dead people cannot benefit by
their wealth. Hope springs eternal.
Agree with much of the sentiment and some of the proposals here regarding the need to ratchet
down rhetoric, pledge no first strike, and generally try much harder to reduce the risk of
even a "small" nuke exchange.
But giving up our inter-continental ballistic missiles would be foolhardy, even more so if
it's done unilaterally. With rivals / potential enemies like China and eventually India, who
in time will be able to muster conventional forces and troop contingents far larger than
ours, we cannot give up the nuke deterrent.
And the reference "the TWO nuclear-armed superpowers" is out of date. That would be at
least THREE nuke-armed superpowers: China, the USA, and Russia.
"But giving up our inter-continental ballistic missiles would be foolhardy, even more so
if it's done unilaterally. With rivals / potential enemies like China and eventually India,
who in time will be able to muster conventional forces and troop contingents far larger than
ours, we cannot give up the nuke deterrent."
because it will keep the victims of ZIO/U$A imperial policy at bay for the victims request
for REPARATIONS, when that time comes
understand that dead people cannot benefit by their wealth. Hope springs eternal
Well, hope is always nice. But we might not understand the dynamic nature of the
global-liberal overreach that we have been experiencing. People don't behave the way Western
elites have been acting without some measure of disconnect from reality. And hubris. When a substantial part of elite climbs on an irrational high horse of invincibility they
become paralysed by the framework they have created. They don't want to hear other views
because it makes them uncomfortable. They have given up on both principles and institutions
– it is anything goes world now.
So where is the assurance that rationality would prevail in a crisis? It didn't in 1914.
Who would step in and tell the morons that they have been living a lie of their own creation?
That constraints are still there, that their verbal acuity has not changed how the world is,
that 'soft power' is called soft for a reason – it doesn't add up to a hill of beans
when it matters. The risk for any dissenter of consequence is very high (see Trump for a
related, imperfect example).
Let's hope. Most bad scenarios don't actually end life on the planet, they just make life
more miserable. That's what happened in the past. We might see a 'nuclear' version of that.
One thing I know for sure: none of the liberal fire-eaters in Washington, Brussels or London
will ever own up to this. They are born 'victims', so they will go on whining
The Dutch government tries to get a law accepted now that greatly increases the legal
possibilities of our secret service to spy on anyone.
March 21 there is a referendum on the law, I expect that we will reject it, but the
politicians already stated that they will reject a negative referendum.
By accident, of course, today our secret service made public that they spied on Russian
interference in the USA elections, without being specific of course, 'classified', as a lot
in the USA.
The Trotskyites who became in America first anti-Stalinist Democrat Hawks and then
anti-Russian/Israel-first Republican Hawks have worked things so that they control foreign
affairs for both political parties. And they have an insatiable bloodlust. Like the godfather
of their movement, they are amoral with genocidal desires when it comes to peoples they
despise. They are the type of self-righteous bullies who aspire to rule the globe to
overreach and push and shove and threaten and sucker punch until the worst for the world
happens.
Most regular readers of Unz Review can agree with the above. What they also need to accept
is that those problems did not enter the US, or more generally the Anglosphere, with the
flight of mostly Jewish Trotskyites from the USSR and Europe. The same attitudes of
insufferable hubris that was basically amoral in regard to national and ethnic groups it most
despised marked the British Empire.
The British WASP Elite form certainly was more refined
and pleasant-seeming than the Jewish Neocon form, and other groups of people within that
world usually proved able to bring the most crazed WASP Elite monsters back from the edge of
the cliff. But they existed, and they caused needless trouble around the globe.
It is the mix of the two that makes the American hawkish anti-Russian, Israel-first
foreign policy insane enough to try to start a nuclear exchange.
Anon from TN
You may be right, but we can't do anything about it now: much hyped democracy is a pure ruse
(look at presumably two party system in the US: Republicrats always win). I just hope that
the sense of self-preservation in those degenerate elites is stronger than their lies that
they apparently believe themselves (even mice are smart enough for that). If not, then those
morons along with innocent bystanders (99.9% of world population) would be dead. Look on the
bright side: rodents and insects would be happy to inherit the Earth.
Unpopular jerk-boy opinion incoming. I honestly think the Hawaii response is pretty typical
but shameful. I like the response of the guy who just tweets, 'OK, if I die goodbye, I'm
golfing anyway' and turns his stupid phone off.
Good to see you posting. I hear they are muling Ophrah. Really good choice for next
president. Woman, black, fat and wealthy. Not gay or transvestite though but that's coming
next. What makes me wonder how this sort of imbeciles gets elected without collapsing the
state. I think it is moving slowly in this direction but there was enough to have just 2 morons in top positions and
look -- no
more USSR. Talk about "Checks and balances."
Makes me wonder what after Putin. I do it like him that much
but he still intelligent, cool and calculating man that is not doing stupid things but
neither genius.
Regarding Americans, unfortunately they never felt real pain. Like a kid who does not know that fire is dangerous. I
think financial collapse gonna be trouble
sooner or later with them. The best thing Russia and China can do is to undermine us dollar
status and the whole financial system which was built by uncle Sam for uncle Sam benefit.
Anon from TN
You are right: Dutch government has already thrown away negative results of the referendum on
EU association with Ukraine. What's more, it betrayed its own citizens by still pretending to
investigate the crash of MH-17, even though everyone with a brain knows that Ukrainian puppet
government is to blame (international airlines made this conclusion long time ago: they fly
over Russia, but avoid Ukraine, flying around it, just like they fly around North Korea).
I
am tempted to say that you guys elected this scum, but then you'd say that I elected Trump,
which I didn't (anyway, what choice did we have: corrupt to the core mad witch would have
been even worse).
today our secret service made public that they spied on Russian interference in the USA
elections
Spying is like a recursive algorithm. Next Russia will announce that they ' spied on
the Dutch spies who were spying on them '. Maybe we can skip the ' motivations ':
they are all spying on each other, all the time, it is their job description.
I am still waiting for someone to explain to us how is ' interference ' or '
meddling ' different from having an opinion about an election. And we all know that
Americans (or Dutch) have never, ever, expressed any opinions about other countries'
elections. Right. My democracy promotion is your meddling.
It is bad when you kill my cow. It is very good when I kill your cow. Monkey reasoning
level?
"... Many Americans do not seem to understand what is at stake. What America is confronted with is a coup conspiracy organized by top officials of the Obama Justice Department, FBI, CIA, the Hillary DNC, and the presstitute media to overturn the result of a democratic election and remove the president from office. The basis of the coup is a fake dossier purchased for money that consists of unsupported allegations against Trump and that was used to obtain warrants from the FISA count to spy on Trump and various associates hoping to find something that can be used against Trump. Regardless, the false allegations could be fed to the CIA's media assets and used to create a scandal requiring a special prosecutor to investigate Russiagate. ..."
"... If the highest reaches of the police state agencies can get away with an attempted or successful coup against the president of the United States, then that is the complete end of democracy and all accountability in government. The House, Senate, and judiciary will become as powerless as the Roman senate under the caesars. We will live under a dictatorship ruled by police state agencies. ..."
"... This is not minor stuff. This goes to the heart of whether any form of liberty will exist. We all know that the ability of the people to hold government accountable is not assured by democracy. However, there is no prospect of holding government accountable if it is a police state, a road that the US has been going down for some time. The audacious coup attempt against President Trump is our opportunity to stop the momentum to a police state. ..."
"... When Admiral Rodgers, director of the National Security Agency, discovered that the FBI and DOJ were misusing the spy system for partisan political reasons, he let it be known that he was going to inform the FISA court. This caused the FBI and DOJ to rush to the court in advance and confess to "mistakes" and to promise to tighten up procedures so as not to make mistakes in the future. It is these "mistakes" and corrections that the FISA court document reveals. ..."
"... In other words, the information already exists in the pubic domain that proves that Russiagate was a conspiracy organized for the purpose of bringing down the elected president of the United States ..."
"... A case can be made that it would be just as well if the coup succeeds as it would bring an end to Washington's cover as the government of a great democracy with liberty and justice for all. Most other governments, and one would hope certainly the Russian and Chinese governments, would see the coup as America's final transition into a police state and give up their utopian ideas of reaching accommodation with Washington. The constraints on Washington's ability to bully the world would be greatly strengthened by the universal perception that the government of the United States had devolved into a police state. ..."
The Republicans' delay in releasing the summary of the House Intelligence Committee's Russiagate investigation is giving weight
to the presstitutes' claim that the report is not being released, because it is a hack attempt at a Trump cover-up that is not believable.
Only Republicans are stupid enough to put themselves in such a situation.
Readers ask me why the summary memo is not released if it is real. There must be some reasons besides the stupidity of Republicans.
Yes, that is so. Among the many reasons that might be blocking release are:
1) Republicans are very national security conscious. They don't want to provide precedents for the release of classified information.
2) Many Republican congressional districts host installations of the military/security complex. Upsetting a large employer
and directing campaign financing to a challenger is a big consideration.
3) The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime was a neoconservative regime. One consequence is that Republicans are influenced by
neoconservatives who stress the alleged "Russian threat."
4) The Israel Lobby can unseat any member of the House and Senate. The Israel Lobby is allied with the neoconservatives and
this alliance intends to keep the US militarily active against perceived threats to Israel's hegemony in the Middle East and against
Russia, which supports Syria and Iran, countries perceived as threats by Israel.
5) Many Republicans are themselves invested in false Russiagate allegations against Trump and would like to replace him with
Pence. Other Republicans believe that Trump is undermining Washington's expensively-purchased foreign alliances and, thereby,
undermining US power.
Many Americans do not seem to understand what is at stake. What America is confronted with is a coup conspiracy organized by top
officials of the Obama Justice Department, FBI, CIA, the Hillary DNC, and the presstitute media to overturn the result of a democratic
election and remove the president from office. The basis of the coup is a fake dossier purchased for money that consists of unsupported
allegations against Trump and that was used to obtain warrants from the FISA count to spy on Trump and various associates hoping
to find something that can be used against Trump. Regardless, the false allegations could be fed to the CIA's media assets and used
to create a scandal requiring a special prosecutor to investigate Russiagate.
Once the investigation was under way, the presstitutes kept the scandal alive hoping to convince enough Americans that Trump must
have done something -- "where there is smoke, there is fire" -- that justifies his removal. It worked against Richard Nixon, but
not against Ronald Reagan, and Trump is no Reagan. If the highest reaches of the police state agencies can get away with an attempted
or successful coup against the president of the United States, then that is the complete end of democracy and all accountability
in government. The House, Senate, and judiciary will become as powerless as the Roman senate under the caesars. We will live under
a dictatorship ruled by police state agencies.
Many Americans say they don't need the House Intelligence Report, because they don't believe the Russiagate BS in the first place.
They miss the point. They need the report, because those responsible for this attempt at a coup must be identified, charged, and
prosecuted for their act of high treason.
This is not minor stuff. This goes to the heart of whether any form of liberty will exist. We all know that the ability of the
people to hold government accountable is not assured by democracy. However, there is no prospect of holding government accountable
if it is a police state, a road that the US has been going down for some time. The audacious coup attempt against President Trump
is our opportunity to stop the momentum to a police state.
Despite my recent postings, many people do not understand that the somewhat redacted FISA court document that has been declassified
and released and explained
by myself, William Binney, and former US Attorney Joe di Genova contains admissions by the FBI and DOJ that they improperly spied
and obtained warrants from the court under false pretenses. In other words, we have it on the authority of the FISA court itself
that the FBI and DOJ have admitted to the court their transgressions. When Department of Justice (sic) congressional liaison Stephen
Boyd says the DOJ is "unaware of any wrongdoing," he is lying through his teeth. The DOJ has already confessed its wrongdoing to
the FISA court.
(See
Lendman
on Boyd's claim that releasing the memo would harm national security and ongoing investigations. This is always the claim made when
government has to cover up its crimes. )
When Admiral Rodgers, director of the National Security Agency, discovered that the FBI and DOJ were misusing the spy system for
partisan political reasons, he let it be known that he was going to inform the FISA court. This caused the FBI and DOJ to rush to
the court in advance and confess to "mistakes" and to promise to tighten up procedures so as not to make mistakes in the future.
It is these "mistakes" and corrections that the FISA court document reveals.
In other words, the information already exists in the pubic domain that proves that Russiagate was a conspiracy organized for
the purpose of bringing down the elected president of the United States.
A case can be made that it would be just as well if the coup succeeds as it would bring an end to Washington's cover as the government
of a great democracy with liberty and justice for all. Most other governments, and one would hope certainly the Russian and Chinese
governments, would see the coup as America's final transition into a police state and give up their utopian ideas of reaching accommodation
with Washington. The constraints on Washington's ability to bully the world would be greatly strengthened by the universal perception
that the government of the United States had devolved into a police state.
"Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K., for one morning, without having
done anything wrong, he was arrested."
Thus begins The Trial , Franz Kafka's 1925 work, in which Joseph K., ordinary bank employee,
is arrested at his home by mysterious agents and notified of legal proceedings against him.
He is not informed of the offense or crime of which he would allegedly be guilty – he
is only given to understand that he must have broken some unknown law – and is notified
of a summons to court a certain day, without knowing the exact time or place.
The protagonist is dragged into a completely absurd circle, wavering between inspectors,
bailiffs, lawyers and judges, and not knowing at any time for what or against whom he must
defend himself.
He is finally executed by three distinguished executioners who, with "odious politeness",
plant a butcher's knife in his heart.
This is really a "soft coup", a color revolution against Trump
Notable quotes:
"... It would have been unfortunate enough for Strzok and Page to have their adolescent-sounding texts merely exposed, revealing the reckless abandon of star-crossed lovers hiding (they thought) secrets from cuckolded spouses, office colleagues, and the rest of us. However, for the never-Trump plotters in the FBI, the official release of just a fraction (375) of almost 10,000 messages does incalculably more damage than that. ..."
"... We suddenly have documentary proof that key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were trying to short-circuit the U.S. democratic process. And that puts in a new and dark context the year-long promotion of Russia-gate. It now appears that it was not the Russians trying to rig the outcome of the U.S. election, but leading officials of the U.S. intelligence community, shadowy characters sometimes called the Deep State. ..."
"... More of the Strzok-Page texting dialogue is expected to be released. And the Department of Justice Inspector General reportedly has additional damaging texts from others on the team that Special Counsel Robert Mueller selected to help him investigate Russia-gate. ..."
"... But the main casualty is the FBI's 18-month campaign to sabotage candidate-and-now-President Donald Trump by using the Obama administration's Russia-gate intelligence "assessment," electronic surveillance of dubious legality, and a salacious dossier that could never pass the smell test, while at the same time using equally dubious techniques to immunize Hillary Clinton and her closest advisers from crimes that include lying to the FBI and endangering secrets ..."
"... Ironically, the Strzok-Page texts provide something that the Russia-gate investigation has been sorely lacking: first-hand evidence of both corrupt intent and action. After months of breathless searching for "evidence" of Russian-Trump collusion designed to put Trump in the White House, what now exists is actual evidence that senior officials of the Obama administration colluded to keep Trump out of the White House – proof of what old-time gumshoes used to call "means, motive and opportunity ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Besides this wildly improbable storyline, there were flat denials from WikiLeaks, which distributed the supposedly "hacked" Democratic emails, that the information came from Russia – and there was the curious inability of the National Security Agency to use its immense powers to supply any technical evidence to support the Russia-hack scenario. ..."
"... on Jan. 6, 2017, President Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released an evidence-free report that he said was compiled by "hand-picked" analysts from the CIA, FBI and NSA, offering an "assessment" that Russia and President Putin were behind the release of the Democratic emails in a plot to help Trump win the presidency. ..."
"... Despite the extraordinary gravity of the charge, even New York Times correspondent Scott Shane noted that proof was lacking. He wrote at the time: "What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies' claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to 'trust us.'" ..."
"... Virtually all skepticism about the evidence-free "assessment" was banned. For months, the Times and other newspapers of record repeated the lie that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had concurred in the conclusion about the Russian "hack." Even when that falsehood was belatedly acknowledged , the major news outlets just shifted the phrasing slightly to say that U.S. intelligence agencies had reached the Russian "hack" conclusion. Shane's blunt initial recognition about the lack of proof disappeared from the mainstream media's approved narrative of Russia-gate. ..."
"... Doubts about the Russian "hack" or dissident suggestions that what we were witnessing was a "soft coup" were scoffed at by leading media commentators. Other warnings from veteran U.S. intelligence professionals about the weaknesses of the Russia-gate narrative and the danger of letting politicized intelligence overturn a constitutional election were also brushed aside in pursuit of the goal of removing Trump from the White House. ..."
"... Justified or not, Trump's feeling of vindication could hardly be more dangerous -- particularly at a time when the most urgent need is to drain some testosterone from the self-styled Stable-Genius-in-Chief and his martinet generals. ..."
"... On the home front, Trump, his wealthy friends, and like-thinkers in Congress may now feel they have an even wider carte blanche to visit untold misery on the poor, the widow, the stranger and other vulnerable humans. That was always an underlying danger of the Resistance's strategy to seize on whatever weapons were available – no matter how reckless or unfair – to "get Trump." ..."
"... Beyond that, Russia-gate has become so central to the Washington establishment's storyline that there appears to be no room for second-thoughts or turning back. The momentum is such that some Democrats and the media never-Trumpers can't stop stoking the smoke of Russia-gate and holding out hope against hope that it will somehow justify Trump's impeachment. ..."
"... Yet, the sordid process of using legal/investigative means to settle political scores further compromises the principle of the "rule of law" and integrity of journalism in the eyes of many Americans. After a year of Russia-gate, the "rule of law" and "pursuit of truth" appear to have been reduced to high-falutin' phrases for political score-setttling, a process besmirched by Republicans in earlier pursuits of Democrats and now appearing to be a bipartisan method for punishing political rivals regardless of the lack of evidence. ..."
"... In June and July 2017 Strzok was the top FBI official working on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia, but was taken off that job when the Justice Department IG learned of the Strzok-Page text-message exchange and told Mueller ..."
"... At this point, the $64 question is whether the various congressional oversight committees will remain ensconced in their customarily cozy role as "overlook" committees, or whether they will have the courage to attempt to carry out their Constitutional duty. The latter course would mean confronting a powerful Deep State and its large toolbox of well-practiced retaliatory techniques, including J. Edgar Hoover-style blackmail on steroids, enabled by electronic surveillance of just about everything and everyone. Yes, today's technology permits blanket collection, and "Collect Everything" has become the motto. ..."
"... Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, with almost four decades of membership in the House and Senate, openly warned incoming President Trump in January 2017 against criticizing the U.S. intelligence community because U.S. intelligence officials have "six ways from Sunday to get back at you" if you are "dumb" enough to take them on. ..."
"... If congressional investigators have been paying attention, they already know what former weapons inspector Scott Ritter shared with Veteran intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues this week; namely, that Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson, who commissioned the Russia dossier using Democratic Party money, said he reached out to Steele after June 17, just three days before Steele's first report was published , drawing on seven sources. ..."
"... How, you might ask, could Strzok and associates undertake these extra-legal steps with such blithe disregard for the possible consequences should they be caught? The answer is easy; Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in, remember? This was just extra insurance with no expectation of any "death benefit" ever coming into play -- save for Trump's electoral demise in November 2016. The attitude seemed to be that, if abuse of the FISA law should eventually be discovered -- there would be little interest in a serious investigation by the editors of The New York Times and other anti-Trump publications and whatever troubles remained could be handled by President Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... As you know Mr. McGovern the police state seldom loses. ..."
"... Compared to the criminal and corrupt US political system, the mafia is an honor society oriented on values. More and more evidence appears that the whole Russian Gate was precooked by the Obama and Clinton mafia together with crooks like Clapper, Brennan, Comey. Lynch and many of the top brass in the FBI and the DoJ. The installment of Bob Mueller who is hugely biased and a Comey body hired only Clinton supporters as his lawyers. But such a team shows how corrupt the US justice system has already become. ..."
"... Considering all the experience gleaned from 7+ decades of subverting and overthrowing governments around the world, the Deep State thugs must of thought securing the WH for their Killer Queen was a 'slam dunk.' ..."
"... The FBI answers to the CIA. This essay is absurd. ..."
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate in 2016, during which Clinton called Trump Vladimir Putin's
"puppet.
Special Report: In the Watergate era, liberals warned about U.S. intelligence agencies manipulating U.S. politics, but now
Trump-hatred has blinded many of them to this danger becoming real, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern notes.
Russia-gate is becoming FBI-gate, thanks to the official release of unguarded text messages between loose-lipped FBI counterintelligence
official Peter Strzok and his garrulous girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. (Ten illustrative texts from their exchange appear at the
end of this article.)
Despite his former job as chief of the FBI's counterintelligence section, Strzok had the naive notion that texting on FBI phones
could not be traced. Strzok must have slept through "Surity 101." Or perhaps he was busy texting during that class. Girlfriend Page
cannot be happy at being misled by his assurance that using office phones would be a secure way to conduct their affair(s).
It would have been unfortunate enough for Strzok and Page to have their adolescent-sounding texts merely exposed, revealing
the reckless abandon of star-crossed lovers hiding (they thought) secrets from cuckolded spouses, office colleagues, and the rest
of us. However, for the never-Trump plotters in the FBI, the official release of just a fraction (375) of almost 10,000 messages
does incalculably more damage than that.
We suddenly have documentary proof that key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were trying to short-circuit the U.S.
democratic process. And that puts in a new and dark context the year-long promotion of Russia-gate. It now appears that it was not
the Russians trying to rig the outcome of the U.S. election, but leading officials of the U.S. intelligence community, shadowy characters
sometimes called the Deep State.
More of the Strzok-Page texting dialogue is expected to be released. And the Department of Justice Inspector General reportedly
has additional damaging texts from others on the team that Special Counsel Robert Mueller selected to help him investigate Russia-gate.
Besides forcing the removal of Strzok and Page, the text exposures also sounded the death knell for the career of FBI Deputy Director
Andrew McCabe, in whose office some of the plotting took place and who has already announced his plans to retire soon.
But the main casualty is the FBI's 18-month campaign to sabotage candidate-and-now-President Donald Trump by using the Obama
administration's Russia-gate intelligence "assessment," electronic surveillance of dubious legality, and a salacious dossier that
could never pass the smell test, while at the same time using equally dubious techniques to immunize Hillary Clinton and her closest
advisers from crimes that include lying to the FBI and endangering secrets.
Ironically, the Strzok-Page texts provide something that the Russia-gate investigation has been sorely lacking: first-hand
evidence of both corrupt intent and action. After months of breathless searching for "evidence" of Russian-Trump collusion designed
to put Trump in the White House, what now exists is actual evidence that senior officials of the Obama administration colluded to
keep Trump out of the White House – proof of what old-time gumshoes used to call "means, motive and opportunity."
Even more unfortunately for Russia-gate enthusiasts, the FBI lovers' correspondence provides factual evidence exposing much of
the made-up "Resistance" narrative – the contrived storyline that The New York Times and much of the rest of the U.S. mainstream
media deemed fit to print with little skepticism and few if any caveats, a scenario about brilliantly devious Russians that not only
lacks actual evidence – relying on unverified hearsay and rumor – but doesn't make sense on its face.
The Russia-gate narrative always hinged on the preposterous notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin foresaw years ago what
no American political analyst considered even possible, the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. According to the narrative, the
fortune-telling Putin then risked creating even worse tensions with a nuclear-armed America that would – by all odds – have been
led by a vengeful President Hillary Clinton.
Besides this wildly improbable storyline, there were flat denials from WikiLeaks, which distributed the supposedly "hacked"
Democratic emails, that the information came from Russia – and there was the curious inability of the National Security Agency to
use its immense powers to supply any technical evidence to support the Russia-hack scenario.
The Trump Shock
But the shock of Trump's election and the decision of many never-Trumpers to cast their lot with the Resistance led to a situation
in which any prudent skepticism or demand for evidence was swept aside.
So, on Jan. 6, 2017, President Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released an evidence-free report that
he said was compiled by "hand-picked" analysts from the CIA, FBI and NSA, offering an "assessment" that Russia and President Putin
were behind the release of the Democratic emails in a plot to help Trump win the presidency.
Despite the extraordinary gravity of the charge, even New York Times correspondent Scott Shane noted that proof was lacking.
He wrote
at the time: "What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence
to back up the agencies' claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. Instead, the message from the agencies
essentially amounts to 'trust us.'"
But the "assessment" served a useful purpose for the never-Trumpers: it applied an official imprimatur on the case for delegitimizing
Trump's election and even raised the long-shot hope that the Electoral College might reverse the outcome and possibly install a compromise
candidate, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the White House. Though the Powell ploy fizzled, the hope of somehow
removing Trump from office continued to bubble, fueled by the growing hysteria around Russia-gate.
Virtually all skepticism about the evidence-free "assessment" was banned. For months, the Times and other newspapers of record
repeated the lie that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had concurred in the conclusion about the Russian "hack." Even when that
falsehood was belatedly
acknowledged , the major news outlets just shifted the phrasing slightly to say that U.S. intelligence agencies had reached the
Russian "hack" conclusion. Shane's blunt initial recognition about the lack of proof disappeared from the mainstream media's approved
narrative of Russia-gate.
Doubts about the Russian "hack" or dissident suggestions that what we were
witnessing was a "soft coup" were
scoffed at by leading media commentators. Other warnings from veteran U.S. intelligence professionals about
the weaknesses of the Russia-gate
narrative and the danger of letting politicized intelligence overturn a constitutional election were also brushed aside in pursuit
of the goal of removing Trump from the White House.
It didn't even seem to matter when new
Russia-gate disclosures conflicted
with the original narrative
that Putin had somehow set Trump up as a Manchurian candidate. All normal journalistic skepticism was jettisoned. It was as if the
Russia-gate advocates started with the conclusion that Trump must go and then made the facts fit into that mold, but anyone who noted
the violations of normal investigative procedures was dismissed as a "Trump enabler" or a "Moscow stooge."
The Text Evidence
But then came the FBI text messages, providing documentary evidence that key FBI officials involved in the Russia-gate investigation
were indeed deeply biased and out to get Trump, adding hard proof to Trump's longstanding lament that he was the subject of a "witch
hunt ."
Peter Strzok, who served as a Deputy Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, second in command of counterintelligence.
Justified or not, Trump's feeling of vindication could hardly be more dangerous -- particularly at a time when the most urgent
need is to drain some testosterone from the self-styled Stable-Genius-in-Chief and his martinet generals.
On the home front, Trump, his wealthy friends, and like-thinkers in Congress may now feel they have an even wider carte blanche
to visit untold misery on the poor, the widow, the stranger and other vulnerable humans. That was always an underlying danger of
the Resistance's strategy to seize on whatever weapons were available – no matter how reckless or unfair – to "get Trump."
Beyond that, Russia-gate has become so central to the Washington establishment's storyline that there appears to be no room
for second-thoughts or turning back. The momentum is such that some Democrats and the media never-Trumpers can't stop stoking the
smoke of Russia-gate and holding out hope against hope that it will somehow justify Trump's impeachment.
Yet, the sordid process of using legal/investigative means to settle political scores further compromises the principle of
the "rule of law" and integrity of journalism in the eyes of many Americans. After a year of Russia-gate, the "rule of law" and "pursuit
of truth" appear to have been reduced to high-falutin' phrases for political score-setttling, a process besmirched by Republicans
in earlier pursuits of Democrats and now appearing to be a bipartisan method for punishing political rivals regardless of the lack
of evidence.
Strzok and Page
Peter Strzok (pronounced "struck") has an interesting pedigree with multiple tasks regarding both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump.
As the FBI's chief of counterespionage during the investigation into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's unauthorized use of
a personal email server for classified information, Strzok reportedly changed the words "grossly negligent" (which could have triggered
legal prosecution) to the far less serious "extremely careless" in FBI Director James Comey's depiction of Clinton's actions. This
semantic shift cleared the way for Comey to conclude just 20 days before the Democratic National Convention began in July 2016, that
"no reasonable prosecutor" would bring charges against Mrs. Clinton.
Then, as Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, Strzok led the FBI's investigation into alleged Russian
interference in the U.S. election of 2016. It is a safe bet that he took a strong hand in hand-picking the FBI contingent of analysts
that joined "hand-picked" counterparts from CIA and NSA in preparing the evidence-free, Jan. 6, 2017 assessment accusing Russian
President Vladimir Putin of interfering in the election of 2016. (Although accepted in Establishment groupthink as revealed truth,
that poor excuse for analysis reflected the apogee of intelligence politicization -- rivaled only by the fraudulent intelligence
on "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq 15 years ago.)
In June and July 2017 Strzok was the top FBI official working on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible
links between the Trump campaign and Russia, but was taken off that job when the Justice Department IG learned of the Strzok-Page
text-message exchange and told Mueller.
There is no little irony in the fact that what did in the FBI sweathearts was their visceral disdain for Mr. Trump, their cheerleading-cum-kid-gloves
treatment of Mrs. Clinton and her associates, their 1950-ish, James Clapperesque attitude toward Russians as "almost genetically
driven" to evil, and their (Strzok/Page) elitist conviction that they know far better what is good for the country than regular American
citizens, including those "deplorables" whom Clinton said made up half of Trump's supporters.
But Strzok/Page had no idea that their hubris, elitism and scheming would be revealed in so tangible a way. Worst of all for them,
the very thing that Strzok, in particular, worked so hard to achieve -- the sabotaging of Trump and immunization of Mrs. Clinton
and her closest advisers is now coming apart at the seams.
Congress: Oversee? or Overlook?
At this point, the $64 question is whether the various congressional oversight committees will remain ensconced in their customarily
cozy role as "overlook" committees, or whether they will have the courage to attempt to carry out their Constitutional duty. The
latter course would mean confronting a powerful Deep State and its large toolbox of well-practiced retaliatory techniques, including
J. Edgar Hoover-style blackmail on steroids, enabled by electronic surveillance of just about everything and everyone. Yes, today's
technology permits blanket collection, and "Collect Everything" has become the motto.
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, with almost four decades of membership in the House and Senate, openly warned incoming President
Trump in January 2017 against criticizing the U.S. intelligence community because U.S. intelligence officials have "six ways from
Sunday to get back at you" if you are "dumb" enough to take them on.
Thanks to the almost 10,000 text messages between Strzok and Page, only a small fraction of which were given to Congress four
weeks ago, there is now real evidentiary meat on the bones of the suspicions that there indeed was a "deep-state coup" to "correct"
the outcome of the 2016 election. We now know that the supposedly apolitical FBI officials had huge political axes to grind. The
Strzok-Page exchanges drip with disdain for Trump and those deemed his smelly deplorable supporters. In one text message, Strzok
expressed visceral contempt for those working-class Trump voters, writing on Aug. 26, 2016, "Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart.
I could SMELL the Trump support. it's scary real down here."
The texts even show Strzok warning of the need for an "insurance policy" to thwart Trump on the off-chance that his poll numbers
closed in on those of Mrs. Clinton.
An Aug. 6, 2016 text message, for example, shows Page giving her knight in shining armor strong affirmation: "Maybe you're meant
to stay where you are because you're meant to protect the country from that menace [Trump]." That text to Strzok includes a link
to a David Brooks
column
in The New York Times, in which Brooks concludes with the clarion call: "There comes a time when neutrality and laying low become
dishonorable. If you're not in revolt, you're in cahoots. When this period and your name are mentioned, decades hence, your grandkids
will look away in shame."
Another text message shows that other senior government officials – alarmed at the possibility of a Trump presidency – joined
the discussion. In an apparent reference to an August 2016 meeting with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok wrote to Page on
Aug. 15, 2016, "I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office -- that there's no way he [Trump] gets
elected -- but I'm afraid we can't take that risk." Strzok added, "It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event that you die
before you're 40."
Insurance Policy?
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, says he will ask Strzok to explain the "insurance policy" when he calls
him to testify. What seems already clear is that the celebrated "Steele Dossier" was part of the "insurance," as was the evidence-less
legend that Russia hacked
the DNC's and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails and
gave them to WikiLeaks .
If congressional investigators have been paying attention, they already know what former weapons inspector Scott Ritter shared
with Veteran intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues this week; namely, that Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson, who commissioned
the Russia dossier using Democratic Party money, said he reached out to Steele after June 17, just three days before Steele's
first report was published
, drawing on seven sources.
"There is a snowball's chance in hell that this is raw intelligence gathered by Steele; rather he seems to have drawn on a single
'trusted intermediary' to gather unsubstantiated rumor already in existence."
Another VIPS colleague, Phil Giraldi, writing out of his own experience in private sector consulting, added: "The fact that you
do not control your sources frequently means that they will feed you what they think you want to hear. Since they are only doing
it for money, the more lurid the details the better, as it increases the apparent value of the information. The private security
firm in turn, which is also doing it for the money, will pass on the stories and even embroider them to keep the client happy and
to encourage him to come back for more. When I read the Steele dossier it looked awfully familiar to me, like the scores of similar
reports I had seen which combined bullshit with enough credible information to make the whole product look respectable."
It is now widely known that the Democrats ponied up the "insurance premiums," so to speak, for former British intelligence officer
Christopher Steele's "dossier" of lurid -- but largely unproven -- "intelligence" on Trump and the Russians. If, as many have concluded,
the dossier was used to help justify a FISA warrant to snoop on the Trump campaign, those involved will be in deep kimchi, if congressional
overseers do their job.
How, you might ask, could Strzok and associates undertake these extra-legal steps with such blithe disregard for the possible
consequences should they be caught? The answer is easy; Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in, remember? This was just extra insurance with
no expectation of any "death benefit" ever coming into play -- save for Trump's electoral demise in November 2016. The attitude seemed
to be that, if abuse of the FISA law should eventually be discovered -- there would be little interest in a serious investigation
by the editors of The New York Times and other anti-Trump publications and whatever troubles remained could be handled by President
Hillary Clinton.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee of Judiciary on Crime and Terrorism, joined Sen.
Grassley in signing the letter referring Christopher Steele to the Justice Department to investigate what appear to be false statements
about the dossier. In signing, Graham noted the "many stop signs the Department of Justice ignored in its use of the dossier." The
signature of committee ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, however, was missing -- an early sign that a highly partisan
battle royale is in the offing. On Tuesday, Feinstein unilaterally released a voluminous transcript of Glenn Simpson's earlier testimony
and, as though on cue, Establishment pundits portrayed Steele as a good source and Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson as a victim.
The Donnybrook is now underway; the outcome uncertain.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.
He was an Army and CIA intelligence analyst for 30 years; prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan;
and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Thanks for the article, Mr. McGovern. I sure wish this could be published where some liberal eyeballs could get a look at it.
I would also be interested in your opinion on the strange stuff found in some of the John Podesta emails. Although I can understand
why you may not want to swim in those murky waters.
The world is controlled by Corporate Fascist Military Industrial Intelligence Police States. They will pick the leaders of the
world and no one will tell the differently. This FBI scandal goes through all the intelligence agencies and begins with Obama
who basically runs the government in his "third term." This entire election was rigged by Dems starting with the exclusion of
Sanders. Unfortunately, for the Dems their plan failed because Hillary was such a terrible candidate. If this is not brought out
in the open we will never have a chance of getting a legitimate candidate again.
As you know Mr. McGovern the police state seldom loses.
An excellent, factual summary. (And, in light of the last two weeks, prescient.) This is true journalism, long gone from the rotten
husks of what used to be known as the Press.
But the passages about Mr. Strzok helping to alter Mr. Comey's letter picked a scab: Why is there such widespread acceptance
of the notion that Mrs. Clinton can not now be charged? I don't believe that Mr. McGovern shares that notion, other than seeing
how immunizing people, etc., makes her prosecution more difficult. But many Americans on each "side" seem to see Mr. Comey's exercise
of what was Mrs. Lynch's discretion to begin with as the equivalent of a Presidential pardon. In the meantime, applicable statutes
of limitation run
The more sunlight, the better. But before getting your hopes up about any of this hullabaloo, or expecting any change in how
the USG functions, go back and look for those pictures of Mr. Trump golfing with Mr. Clinton, the Clintons at his wedding(s),
etc.
Compared to the criminal and corrupt US political system, the mafia is an honor society oriented on values. More and more
evidence appears that the whole Russian Gate was precooked by the Obama and Clinton mafia together with crooks like Clapper, Brennan,
Comey. Lynch and many of the top brass in the FBI and the DoJ. The installment of Bob Mueller who is hugely biased and a Comey
body hired only Clinton supporters as his lawyers. But such a team shows how corrupt the US justice system has already become.
The mainstream media are involved in this witch hunt against Trump from the very beginning. Perhaps some of its bog shots were
even paid for fabricated political reporting. The NYT, the Post, CNN, MSNBC and all the other so-called opinion leaders spread
fake news and kept the legend of "Russian collusion" going over a year, despite presenting not a single piece of evidence. Their
task was to manipulate and brainwash the American public.
Just listen to this interview. One understands what was and still is going on in this crooked US political system.
" thanks to the official release of unguarded text messages between loose-lipped FBI counterintelligence official Peter
Strzok and his garrulous girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page."
Despite the efforts to destroy a significant part of the data trail. You know, in the good old days, evidence of the affair
would be enough for their clearances to be revoked, and use of Government telecomms for such purposes would be grounds for firing.
Don't know what Sessions is waiting for, but this bubba would like some red meat already. For that matter, he should have told
Mueller where to put his subpeona. Sessions really is an empty suit.
Well in reality it began with Bush the Stupid and his remark that the Constitution was only a GD piece of paper and promptly
tore it up,and as long as we continue to have the best government "money can buy" nothing will change,anymore than it will change
under Trump, as he switches from the war on terror to the war on competitors (Russia and China)and world domination and its resources..
We suddenly have documentary proof that key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were trying to short-circuit the
U.S. democratic process.
Considering all the experience gleaned from 7+ decades of subverting and overthrowing governments around the world, the
Deep State thugs must of thought securing the WH for their Killer Queen was a 'slam dunk.' My believe is that Trump actually
got around 70% of the vote, a number that overwhelmed their computerized vote fixing.
All the grief, misery and destruction we've visited upon nations around the world is now coming back to haunt Americans. Only
part missing is the violent overthrow or assassination of a leader and don't put the Deep State thugs beyond that.
On the home front, Trump, his wealthy friends, and like-thinkers in Congress may now feel they have an even wider carte
blanche to visit untold misery on the poor, the widow, the stranger and other vulnerable humans.
This looks like a disingenuous conflation of Trump (and his handful of presumably more or less dependable allies/minions) with
the Ryan-Koch- US Chamber of Commerce GOP establishment. Despite what Jeff Flake says, he's not a dictator, so he has to make
concessions to the donor class-controlled wing of the party. This stuff is so obvious I'm embarrassed as I type it out.
Keep right on sucking up that kool-aid,the economy has an up-tick because of government spending, which of course will add
another $1.7 trillion (per David Stockman Reagan's budget directer) to the debt that you just wished onto your children,g children
and their children (ain't you proud/) and lol if you believe those government figures on the unemployment stats than you must
believe in the tooth fairy,and of course along with those bonuses comes the lay-offs, a thousand here a thousand there (on the
Lay-off list) as the work is out sourced to other countries,meanwhile a few more billion goes to the military/industrial group.Ah
yes utopia at last,well while it last that is .
"It would have been unfortunate enough for Strzok and Page to have their adolescent-sounding texts merely exposed, revealing
the reckless abandon of star-crossed lovers hiding (they thought) secrets from cuckolded spouses, office colleagues, and the
rest of us."
True One of the first thoughts I had was that these were, at most, highschool level communications. To think this is 'high
level' government in action is, at once, amusing and disturbing.
Now, many companies are cutting corners by using "contract workers" on a temporary basis.
Concur all, but this especially. In the DC area starting with the internet boom and dot.com busts of the late 90s, Indians
started coming in and all of a sudden, everyone in IT and computer technologies was being replaced with a contract. After spending
years getting certs and continuously upgrading skills and certs, people were ruined with imported contractors. It started at FannyMae
and Freddie Mac, the entire board and hierarchy there read like the New Delhi phone book for twenty years now. Between the Chins
and Indians, there's been an enormous overclass installed and it's not going anywhere. Someone here recently wrote an article
about it but it isn't recent. With the handwriting on the wall so long ago, I gave up chasing Microsoft certs and contracts and
went back to analog phone systems and infrastructure and electrical, but I saw a lot of people that tried to follow the professional
IT path ruined. Throw in the racial and sexual politics in the offices and the environment is pretty miserable anyway..
Pretty bad as is, but with AI coming about, whole classes of Democrat folks unconcerned with immigration will be replaced by
Bots of all sorts, making the immigration hardships look like Disney World.
"Strzok reportedly changed the words "grossly negligent" (which could have triggered legal prosecution) to the far less
serious "extremely careless" in FBI Director James Comey's depiction of Clinton's actions. This semantic shift cleared the
way for Comey to conclude just 20 days before the Democratic National Convention began in July 2016, that "no reasonable prosecutor"
would bring charges against Mrs. Clinton."
It's a thin line between "gross negligence" and "extreme carelessness." While "gross negligence" usually involves unintentional
acts, they can border on intentional conduct by the very recklessness of the activity. A senior government moving vast amounts
of classified data on unsecured networks can't begin to assert she didn't know the risks she was taking. Semantics here are irrelevant:
The substance of the law is that HRC was grossly negligent.
As a seasoned lawyer, Comey would know that a prosecutor could very reasonably equate the two and charge on a violation of
18 USC 793 (Gathering, transmitting, or losing defense information) There are a couple paragraphs that could be applied, but (f)
looks most likely. The mere act of storing classified data on a personal server could also be a violation of 18 USC 798 (Disclosure
of classified information). Destroying the same data might also be charged as violations of the 2009 Federal Records Act, and
there is plenty of reason to pursue the limb of Obstruction of Justice in light of the other serious charges that could reasonably
be made.
In order to be credible, justice must be seen to be done. The longer Sessions and Trump let this charade go uninvestigated
for fear that investigating it looks overtly political, the more political it actually becomes, and the less credible the rule
of law in America becomes ("Laws and regulations are for the little people!)
The deep state coup was the appointment of Trump or it could have been Clinton. You have no choice when you vote. The work of
retired spooks like McGovern is to convince you that you live in a Democracy where voting matters. There's no evidence that voting
serves anyone other than appearances for the ruling elite.
The FBI is an inherently political organization. I would expect the FBI to tweet things like " that motherfucker is goin' down"
or "fuck her" or "Orange son of a bitch, let's make some noise" or more racist "those nigger motherfuckers in the city" or "think
you're anonymous on the internet lil'boy?" Those would be the tweets of the FBI that we all know and love.
This interference into a presidential election by an agency such as the FBI raises the question of whether there's been manipulation
of other previous elections. Were some of our previous presidents installed through machinations of an intelligence agency?
Sure they are these companies and corporations are saving millions upon millions due to Trump and the republicans, while throwing
a few crumbs to the workers who are suppose to lick their hands, many who only make $10-$11 dollars per hour, and seeing they
are bonuses the government will take more than their share, and down the road these same workers will be paying it back in spades
,after all someone has to fund the military/industrial racket
Trump needs to be impeached. The entire Government is a bad bit of fiction, why not use the symbolic figure head of empire to
generate excitement in the mass of American sheep? To that end, throw up any accusation that will stick, make it sound like a
Constitutional crisis but simple enough for the average begrudged redneck to understand. The FBI has an agenda, what part of the
Government doesn't? The whole point of elections is to have different groups employ every tactic under the sun to manipulate said
sheep. Let's get the impeachment show started.
This whole affair also totally destroys the G-Man mythos. From the outside Strzok looks the part. Yet both he and Page write texts
like they're particularly dim 20 year old girls.
Strzok – God Hillary should win. 100,000,000-0.
Page– I don't know. But we'll get it back. We're America. We rock.
Page – He's not ever going to become president, right? Right?!
Strzok – OMG did you hear what Trump just said?
Page – Yep. Out to lunch with (redacted) We both hate everyone and everything.
Page – Just riffing on the hot mess that is our country.
Strzok– Donald just said "bad hombres"
This is the level of discourse (Of course this could just be a biased sample to humiliate Strzok but leave the really bad conspiring
out of frame) he has with his mistress on an FBI phone as he plans dirty tricks on his own country?
The sad part will be to see how they will all, one after the other, get away with everything they've done.
If any of them will even go to trial for anything other than some procedural point, they'll all make a deal with DC-Democratic
prosecutors, Hollywood will make a film casting them as heroes and they'll all get a slap on the wrist, a la Petraeus.
The politicians will claim that they have to hide the truth so that the public will not loose their 'trust' in these institutions,
they'll name some RINO as the 'compromise' candidate to lead these institutions and it'll be back to business as usual in the
heart of the empire, as in all previous times, see James Bovard's article:
Page– I don't know. But we'll get it back. We're America. We rock.
Such vacuous shallowness, imagining themselves to be the heroes of some cheap Hollywood movie, not even suspecting how 2 dimensional,
delusional, and sophomoric it all sounds (of course, it only sound moronic because we found out about it before the plan reach
its planned conclusion).
After 14 years of non-stop wars and mass murder, we find out the empire is run by the cheerleading squad, motivating each other
with high fives while trying to take 'democracy' down. Still, I suspect there were adults at table also who mad sure to say one
step out of the spotlight.
"It's a thin line between "gross negligence" and "extreme carelessness." "
Not in the context of legal language. In fact, it's a great divide. "Extremely careless" is not a federal criminal charge,
while "gross negligence" actually is. Never mind about the difference in degree when speaking of the two terms, one is a crime,
and the other is merely grounds for an investigation.
Watch this and you will understand why ((((They)))) blew off his head in the streets of
Dallas. Kennedy would not give David Ben - Gurion any nuclear technology and was threatening
the pigs regarding Dimona. Jack Rubenstein AKA Jack Ruby was ordered by Giancanna who was
ordered by Lansky to be a foot soldger in the operation. CIA and Mob did their part But the
bottom line is Kennedy stepped on the Jew Fed's Usury game with EO 11110 Which put legal
Constitutional money backed by silver into circulation. This would put the Fed out of
business over time.
John Kennedy understood very well who the true enemy of his country was and I believe was
determined to destroy them. He foolishly did not protect himself even though he was well
aware he was in ((((Their)))) crossfire.
And here we sit today with the Nation ripped apart. Americans at each other throats and
blaming each other never perceiving the iron fist of the Zionists ruling above them.
Divide and conquer is their main tool to destroy us.
I was home sick from school. In those days a TV gets rolled into your room if you are
sick. Otherwise only Mom and Dad had a TV in the bedroom. We had two TVs in 1963.
I was watching the only thing on TV the president in DALLAS and WHAM The President has
been SHOT comes over .
I run Mommy Mommy President Kennedy has been shot.
SHE WHACKED me across the face. How can you say such a thing. I don't recall the exact
words but the whack hurt. That was common in 1963 when you did something "wrong" or
whatever.
Obviously 5 minutes later she was crying and flipping out.
It sure seems like he was a good man but what the fuck was he smoking to get in an open
fucking car?
They're not treating us like children. They're treating us like chumps. I don't think I'm
the only American citizen who's tired of it. Impanel a grand jury and get to the bottom of
the massive corruption going on in our country.
Next week we will be mad when we get the memo and find it blacked out every other
sentence... That's why they need 19 days to go over 4 lousy pages, To make sure the people don't
see anything that might make any sense.
treating Americans like children - more like treating Americans like subjects, vote cows
without them having any authority. Americans don't have to give up their authority as
employers of Congressmen, the Americans chose to be treated 'like children'.
The correct argument is not that universal spying on the public doesn't work, but that
it's inconsistent with our way of life. Freedom isn't free and one of the costs is not having
some of the options a dictator has to deal with adversaries.
"... The FBI used to spy on Russians. This time they spied on us. what this story is about - a brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law with regard to the way she handled classified information with her classified server. Absolutely a crime, absolutely a felony . It's about finding out why - as the Inspector General is doing at the department of justice - why Comey and the senior DOJ officials conducted a fake criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton . Followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, no grand jury, no subpoenas, no search warrant. That's not an investigation, that's a Potemkin village. It's a farce. ..."
"... DiGenova condemned the FBI for working so closely with the controversial Fusion GPS, a political hit squad paid by the DNC and Clinton campaign to create and spread the discredited Steele dossier about President Donald Trump . Without a justifiable law enforcement or national security reason, he says, the FBI "created false facts so that they could get surveillance warrants. Those are all crimes. " He adds, using official FISA-702 "queries" and surveillance was done "to create a false case against a candidate, and then a president. " - Daily Caller ..."
"... This feels like the most significant American political scandal that has taken place in my lifetime, and I was born in the 60's. ..."
"... The entire collection program needs to be shut down, the data deleted and the program replaced by the one William Binney originally created that collected and analyzed only metadata unless a warrant is obtained first. The current program is clearly a violation of our 4th Amendment rights even without NDAA section 702. ..."
"... He forgot to mention Weissman: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-15/fbi-probe-russian-uranium-bri ..."
"... " unauthorized disclosures of raw intelligence on Americans]. This is stunning stuff. " "Stunning" only for the willfully deluded among us. ..."
"... Pretty soon, the MSM is gonna have to do a false flag ..."
"... Is he gonna sit there and let these bastards have another shot at him? ..."
In this highly recommended 30 minute interview with Joe diGenova, the former Special Counsel
who went after both the Teamsters and former NY Governor Elliot Spitzer, paints a very clear
picture of collusion is painted between the Obama administration, the FBI, the Clinton campaign
and opposition research firm Fusion GPS.
The FBI used to spy on Russians. This time they spied on us. what this story is about - a
brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law with regard to the
way she handled classified information with her classified server. Absolutely a crime,
absolutely a felony . It's about finding out why - as the Inspector General is doing at the
department of justice - why Comey and the senior DOJ officials conducted a fake criminal
investigation of Hillary Clinton . Followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break
in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, no grand
jury, no subpoenas, no search warrant. That's not an investigation, that's a Potemkin
village. It's a farce.
And everybody knew it was a farce. The problem was, she didn't win. And because she didn't
wain, the farce became a very serious opera. It wasn't a comic opera anymore, it was a tragic
opera. And she was going to be the focus.
What this is about, this is about a lavabo, a cleansing of FBI and the upper echelons of
the Department of Justice.
We're going to discover that the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, her deputy Sally Yates,
the head of the national security division John Carlin, Bruce Ohr and other senior DOJ
officials, and regrettably, lying attorneys . People who were senior career civil servants
violated the law, perhaps committed crimes, and covered up crimes by a presidential candidate
- but more than that, they tried to frame an incoming president with a false Russian
conspiracy that never existed, and they knew it, and they plotted to ruin him as a candidate
and then destroy him as a president. That's why this is important. That's why connecting the
dots is important.
DiGenova condemned the FBI for working so closely with the controversial Fusion GPS, a
political hit squad paid by the DNC and Clinton campaign to create and spread the discredited
Steele dossier about President Donald Trump . Without a justifiable law enforcement or national
security reason, he says, the FBI "created false facts so that they could get surveillance
warrants. Those are all crimes. " He adds, using official FISA-702 "queries" and surveillance
was done "to create a false case against a candidate, and then a president. " - Daily
Caller
During the interview, DiGenova holds up and references a previously unreported and
heavily redacted 99-page FISA court opinion from April, 2017, which " describes systematic and
on-going violations of the law [by the FBI and their contractors using unauthorized disclosures
of raw intelligence on Americans]. This is stunning stuff."
NSA Admiral Mike Rodgers: An American Hero
diGenova also discusses the immense risks taken by retiring NSA director, Mike Rogers - who
briefed Trump on Nov. 7, 2016 about the Obama administration's surveillance of the Trump team.
The next day, the Presidental transition team was moved out of Trump tower and into the
president-elect's Bedminster, NJ golf course until they could sweep for bugs.
Paul Craig Roberts says he's been too hard on the NSA. I don't think so. The FISA warrant
only allowed the FBI to unmask people in surveillance the NSA is already doing on everybody.
If the dirt is being collected and stored, eventually somebody will find a way to use it.
The
entire collection program needs to be shut down, the data deleted and the program replaced by
the one William Binney originally created that collected and analyzed only metadata unless a
warrant is obtained first. The current program is clearly a violation of our 4th Amendment
rights even without NDAA section 702.
Trump has known all of this all along. The only pre-emptive move that he could make would
be to declare martial law , and have the military move on the traitors. For Chrissake, look
what's at stake here. Is he gonna sit there and let these bastards have another shot at
him?
(Shakes head in puzzlement).
A spokesman for the House Intelligence Committee took a shot at
Democrats for pushing the false narrative.
"When Democrats demand investigations of a hashtag but find no cause for concern after the
FBI loses five months' of critical evidence concerning the Strzok text messages, then someone's
priorities are out of whack," Jack Langer told The Daily Caller.
"... GDP growth, which is way ahead of schedule under my administration, will be one of America's truly greatest weapons. ..."
"... We also face rival powers, Russia and China, that seek to challenge American influence, values, and wealth. We will attempt to build a great partnership with those and other countries, but in a manner that always protects our national interest. ..."
"... It calls for a total modernization of our military, and reversing previous decisions to shrink our armed forces -- even as threats to national security grew. It calls for streamlining acquisition, eliminating bloated bureaucracy, and massively building up our military, which has the fundamental side benefit of creating millions and millions of jobs. ..."
"... Fourth and finally, our strategy is to advance American influence in the world, but this begins with building up our wealth and power at home. ..."
At home, we are keeping our promises and liberating the American economy. We have created
more than 2 million jobs since the election. Unemployment is at a 17-year-low. The stock market
is at an all-time high and, just a little while ago, hit yet another all-time high -- the 85th
time since my election. (Applause.)
We have cut 22 regulations for every one new regulation, the most in the history of our
country. We have unlocked America's vast energy resources.
As the world watches -- and the world is indeed watching -- we are days away from passing
historic tax cuts for American families and businesses. It will be the biggest tax cut and tax
reform in the history of our country. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
And we are seeing the response we fully expected. Economic growth has topped 3 percent for
two quarters in a row. GDP growth, which is way ahead of schedule under my administration,
will be one of America's truly greatest weapons.
Optimism has surged. Confidence has returned. With this new confidence, we are also bringing
back clarity to our thinking. We are reasserting these fundamental truths:
A nation without borders is not a nation. (Applause.)
A nation that does not protect prosperity at home cannot protect its interests
abroad.
A nation that is not prepared to win a war is a nation not capable of preventing a
war.
A nation that is not proud of its history cannot be confident in its future.
And a nation that is not certain of its values cannot summon the will to defend
them.
Today, grounded in these truths, we are presenting to the world our new National Security
Strategy. Based on my direction, this document has been in development for over a year. It has
the endorsement of my entire Cabinet.
Our new strategy is based on a principled realism, guided by our vital national interests,
and rooted in our timeless values.
This strategy recognizes that, whether we like it or not, we are engaged in a new era of
competition. We accept that vigorous military, economic, and political contests are now playing
out all around the world. We face rogue regimes that threaten the United States and our allies.
We face terrorist organizations, transnational criminal networks, and others who spread
violence and evil around the globe.
We also face rival powers, Russia and China, that seek to challenge American influence,
values, and wealth. We will attempt to build a great partnership with those and other
countries, but in a manner that always protects our national interest.
As an example, yesterday I received a call from President Putin of Russia thanking our
country for the intelligence that our CIA was able to provide them concerning a major terrorist
attack planned in St. Petersburg, where many people, perhaps in the thousands, could have been
killed. They were able to apprehend these terrorists before the event, with no loss of life.
And that's a great thing, and the way it's supposed to work. That is the way it's supposed to
work.
But while we seek such opportunities of cooperation, we will stand up for ourselves, and we
will stand up for our country like we have never stood up before. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank
you. Thank you.
We know that American success is not a forgone conclusion. It must be earned and it must be
won. Our rivals are tough, they're tenacious, and committed to the long term. But so are
we.
To succeed, we must integrate every dimension of our national strength, and we must compete
with every instrument of our national power.
Under the Trump administration, America is gaining wealth, leading to enhanced power --
faster than anyone thought -- with $6 trillion more in the stock market alone since the
election -- $6 trillion.
With the strategy I am announcing today, we are declaring that America is in the game and
America is going to win. (Applause.) Thank you.
Our strategy advances four vital national interests. First, we must protect the American
people, the homeland, and our great American way of life. This strategy recognizes that we
cannot secure our nation if we do not secure our borders. So for the first time ever, American
strategy now includes a serious plan to defend our homeland. It calls for the construction of a
wall on our southern border; ending chain migration and the horrible visa and lottery programs;
closing loopholes that undermine enforcement; and strongly supporting our Border Patrol agents,
ICE officers, and Homeland Security personnel. (Applause.)
In addition, our strategy calls for us to confront, discredit, and defeat radical Islamic
terrorism and ideology and to prevent it from spreading into the United States. And we will
develop new ways to counter those who use new domains, such as cyber and social media, to
attack our nation or threaten our society.
The second pillar of our strategy is to promote American prosperity. For the first time,
American strategy recognizes that economic security is national security. Economic vitality,
growth, and prosperity at home is absolutely necessary for American power and influence abroad.
Any nation that trades away its prosperity for security will end up losing both.
That is why this National Security Strategy emphasizes, more than any before, the critical
steps we must take to ensure the prosperity of our nation for a long, long time to come.
It calls for cutting taxes and rolling back unnecessary regulations. It calls for trade
based on the principles of fairness and reciprocity. It calls for firm action against unfair
trade practices and intellectual property theft. And it calls for new steps to protect our
national security industrial and innovation base.
The strategy proposes a complete rebuilding of American infrastructure -- our roads,
bridges, airports, waterways, and communications infrastructure. And it embraces a future of
American energy dominance and self-sufficiency.
The third pillar of our strategy is to preserve peace through strength. (Applause.) We
recognize that weakness is the surest path to conflict, and unrivaled power is the most certain
means of defense. For this reason, our strategy breaks from the damaging defense sequester.
We're going to get rid of that. (Applause.)
It calls for a total modernization of our military, and reversing previous decisions to
shrink our armed forces -- even as threats to national security grew. It calls for streamlining
acquisition, eliminating bloated bureaucracy, and massively building up our military, which has
the fundamental side benefit of creating millions and millions of jobs.
This strategy includes plans to counter modern threats, such as cyber and electromagnetic
attacks. It recognizes space as a competitive domain and calls for multi-layered missile
defense. (Applause.) This strategy outlines important steps to address new forms of conflict
such as economic and political aggression.
And our strategy emphasizes strengthening alliances to cope with these threats. It
recognizes that our strength is magnified by allies who share principles -- and our principles
-- and shoulder their fair share of responsibility for our common security.
Fourth and finally, our strategy is to advance American influence in the world, but this
begins with building up our wealth and power at home.
America will lead again. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but we will
champion the values without apology. We want strong alliances and partnerships based on
cooperation and reciprocity. We will make new partnerships with those who share our goals, and
make common interests into a common cause. We will not allow inflexible ideology to become an
obsolete and obstacle to peace.
We will pursue the vision we have carried around the world over this past year -- a vision
of strong, sovereign, and independent nations that respect their citizens and respect their
neighbors; nations that thrive in commerce and cooperation, rooted in their histories and
branching out toward their destinies.
That is the future we wish for this world, and that is the future we seek in America.
(Applause.)
With this strategy, we are calling for a great reawakening of America, a resurgence of
confidence, and a rebirth of patriotism, prosperity, and pride.
And we are returning to the wisdom of our founders. In America, the people govern, the
people rule, and the people are sovereign. What we have built here in America is precious and
unique. In all of history, never before has freedom reigned, the rule of law prevailed, and the
people thrived as we have here for nearly 250 years.
We must love and defend it. We must guard it with vigilance and spirit, and, if necessary,
like so many before us, with our very lives. And we declare that our will is renewed, our
future is regained, and our dreams are restored.
Every American has a role to play in this grand national effort. And today, I invite every
citizen to take their part in our vital mission. Together, our task is to strengthen our
families, to build up our communities, to serve our citizens, and to celebrate American
greatness as a shining example to the world.
As long as we are proud -- and very proud -- of who we are, how we got here, and what we are
fighting for to preserve, we will not fail.
If we do all of this, if we rediscover our resolve and commit ourselves to compete and win
again, then together we will leave our children and our grandchildren a nation that is
stronger, better, freer, prouder, and, yes, an America that is greater than ever before.
God Bless You. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause.)
"... Unable to come to terms with losing the 2016 election, Democrats are still pushing the 'Russiagate' probe and blocking the release of a memo describing surveillance abuses by the FBI, former Congressman Ron Paul told RT. ..."
"... I don't think anybody is seeking justice or seeking truth as much as they're seeking to get political advantage ..."
"... "I would be surprised if they haven't spied on him. They spy on everybody else. And they have spied on other members of the executive branch and other presidents." ..."
"... "The other day when they voted to get FISA even more power to spy on American people, the president couldn't be influenced by the fact that they used it against him. And I believe they did, and he believes that." ..."
"... "I've always maintained that government ought to be open and the people ought to have their privacy. But right now the people have no privacy and all our government does is work on secrecy and then it becomes competitive between the two parties, who get stuck with the worst deal by arguing, who's guilty of some crime," the politician explained. ..."
"... Paul also blasted the infamous 'Russian Dossier' compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, and which the Democrats used in their attack on Trump, saying it ..."
"... "has no legitimacy being revealing [in terms of] of Trump being associated with Russia. From the people I know The story has been all made up, essentially." ..."
"... "I'm no fan of Trump. I'm not a supporter of his, but I think that has been carried way overboard. I think the Democrats can't stand the fact that they've lost the election, and they can't stand the fact that Trump is a little bit more independent minded than they like," he said. ..."
Unable to come to terms with losing the 2016 election, Democrats are still pushing the
'Russiagate' probe and blocking the release of a memo describing surveillance abuses by the
FBI, former Congressman Ron Paul told RT.
A top-secret intelligence memo, believed to reveal political bias at the highest levels of
the FBI and the DOJ towards President Trump, may well be as significant as the Republicans say,
Ron Paul told RT. But, he added, "there's still to many unknowns, especially, from my view
point."
"Trump connection to the Russians, I think, has been way overblown, and I'd like to just
get to the bottom of this the new information that's coming out, maybe this will reveal
things and help us out," he said.
"Right now it's just a political fight," the former US Congressman said. "I think they're
dealing with things a lot less important than the issue they ought to be talking about Right
now, I don't think anybody is seeking justice or seeking truth as much as they're seeking to
get political advantage."
Trump's claims that he was wiretapped by US intelligence agencies on the orders of the Obama
administration may well turn out to be true, Paul said.
"I would be surprised if they haven't spied on him. They spy on everybody else. And they
have spied on other members of the executive branch and other presidents."
However, he criticized Trump for doing nothing to prevent the Senate from voting in the
expansion of warrantless surveillance of US citizens under the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) earlier this week.
"The other day when they voted to get FISA even more power to spy on American people, the
president couldn't be influenced by the fact that they used it against him. And I believe
they did, and he believes that."
"I've always maintained that government ought to be open and the people ought to have
their privacy. But right now the people have no privacy and all our government does is work
on secrecy and then it becomes competitive between the two parties, who get stuck with the
worst deal by arguing, who's guilty of some crime," the politician explained.
The fact that Democrats on the relevant committees have all voted against releasing the memo
"might mean that Trump is probably right; there's probably a lot of stuff there that would
exonerate him from any accusation they've been making," he said.
Paul also blasted the infamous 'Russian Dossier' compiled by former British spy Christopher
Steele, and which the Democrats used in their attack on Trump, saying it
"has no legitimacy being revealing [in terms of] of Trump being associated with Russia.
From the people I know The story has been all made up, essentially."
"I'm no fan of Trump. I'm not a supporter of his, but I think that has been carried way
overboard. I think the Democrats can't stand the fact that they've lost the election, and
they can't stand the fact that Trump is a little bit more independent minded than they like,"
he said.
Donald Trump Jr. called for the release of a memo that allegedly contains information about
Obama administration surveillance abuses and suggested that Democrats are complicit with the
media in misleading the public.
"It's the double standard that the people are fed by the Democrats in complicity with the
media, that's why neither have any trust from the American people anymore," Trump said on Fox
News Friday.
Everyone in the world can see that the United States has become a bitterly divided country, but still has a really amazing level
of continuity in foreign policy between various administrations.
Notable quotes:
"... The long-awaited National Defense Strategy is a vision of US imperialism besieged on all sides and in mortal danger of losing global dominance. ..."
"... "Great power competition -- not terrorism -- is now the primary focus of US national security," Mattis said in his speech, which accompanied the release of an 11-page declassified document outlining the National Defense Strategy in broad terms. A lengthier classified version was submitted to the US Congress, which includes the Pentagon's detailed proposals for a massive increase in military spending. ..."
"... Russia, it charges, is attempting to achieve "veto authority over nations on its periphery in terms of their governmental, economic, and diplomatic decisions, to shatter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and change European and Middle East security and economic structures to its favor." ..."
"... "China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea," it states. "Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of its neighbors." ..."
"... Both Moscow and Beijing issued statements condemning the US defense strategy. A Chinese spokesman denounced the document as a return to a "Cold War mentality." Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, meanwhile, told a United Nations press conference: "It is regrettable that instead of having a normal dialog, instead of using the basis of international law, the US is indeed striving to prove their leadership through such confrontational strategies and concepts." A government spokesman in Moscow characterized the document as "imperialistic." ..."
The long-awaited National Defense Strategy is a vision of US imperialism besieged on all sides and in mortal danger of losing
global dominance.
The Trump administration's defense secretary, former Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, rolled out a new National Defense Strategy
Friday that signals open preparations by US imperialism for direct military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia and China.
Speaking at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, Mattis made clear that the strategy, the first such document to be issued by
the Pentagon in roughly a decade, represented an historic shift from the ostensible justification for US global militarism for nearly
two decades: the so-called war on terrorism.
"Great power competition -- not terrorism -- is now the primary focus of US national security," Mattis said in his speech, which
accompanied the release of an 11-page declassified document outlining the National Defense Strategy in broad terms. A lengthier classified
version was submitted to the US Congress, which includes the Pentagon's detailed proposals for a massive increase in military spending.
Much of the document's language echoed terms used in the National Security Strategy document unveiled last month in a fascistic
speech delivered by President Donald Trump. Mattis insisted that the US was facing "growing threat from revisionist powers as different
as China and Russia, nations that seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models."
Russia, it charges, is attempting to achieve "veto authority over nations on its periphery in terms of their governmental, economic,
and diplomatic decisions, to shatter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and change European and Middle East security and economic
structures to its favor."
"China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South
China Sea," it states. "Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and
security decisions of its neighbors."
In what appeared to be a threat directed against both Russia and China, Mattis warned, "If you challenge us, it will be your longest
and worst day."
Both Moscow and Beijing issued statements condemning the US defense strategy. A Chinese spokesman denounced the document as a
return to a "Cold War mentality." Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, meanwhile, told a United Nations press conference: "It
is regrettable that instead of having a normal dialog, instead of using the basis of international law, the US is indeed striving
to prove their leadership through such confrontational strategies and concepts." A government spokesman in Moscow characterized the
document as "imperialistic."
"... For Germany, the idea of Europeanism has provided the country's elites with the perfect alibi to conceal their hegemonic project behind the ideological veil of 'European integration' ..."
"... "That may sound absurd given that today's Germany is a successful democracy without a trace of national-socialism – and that no one would actually associate Merkel with Nazism. But further reflection on the word 'Reich', or empire, may not be entirely out of place. The term refers to a dominion, with a central power exerting control over many different peoples. According to this definition, would it be wrong to speak of a German Reich in the economic realm?" ..."
"... More recently, an article in Politico Europe ..."
"... Even though the power exercised by Europe's 'colonial masters' is now openly acknowledged by the mainstream press, it is however commonplace to ascribe Germany's dominant position as an accident of history: according to this narrative, we are in the presence of an 'accidental empire', one that is not the result of a general plan but that emerged almost by chance – even against ..."
"... Germany (and France) have been the main beneficiaries of the sovereign bailouts of periphery countries , which essentially amounted to a covert bailout of German (and French) banks, as most of the funds were channelled back to the creditor countries' banks, which were heavily exposed to the banks (and to a lesser degree the governments) of periphery countries. German policy, Helen Thompson wrote , overwhelmingly 'served the interests of the German banks'. ..."
"... This is a telling example of how Germany's policies (and the EU's policies more in general), while nominally ordoliberal – i.e., based upon minimal government intervention and a strict rules-based regime – are in reality based on extensive state intervention on behalf of German capital, at both the domestic and European level. ..."
"... German authorities have also been more than happy to go along with – or to encourage – the European institutions' 'exercise of unrestrained executive power and the more or less complete abandonment of strict, rules-based frameworks' – Storey is here referring in particular to the ECB's use of its currency-issuing monopoly to force member states to follows its precepts – 'to maintain the profitability of German banks, German hegemony within the Eurozone, or even the survival of the Eurozone itself'. ..."
"... Germany (and France) are also the main beneficiaries of the ongoing process of 'mezzogiornification' of periphery countries – often compounded by troika -forced privatisations –, which in recent years has allowed German and French firms to take over a huge number of businesses (or stakes therewithin) in periphery countries, often at bargain prices. A well-publicised case is that of the 14 Greek regional airports taken over by the German airport operator Fraport. ..."
"... France's corporate offensive in Italy is another good example: in the last five years, French companies have engaged in 177 Italian takeovers, for a total value of $41.8 billion, six times Italy's purchases in France over the same period. This is leading to an increased 'centralisation' of European capital, characterised by a gradual concentration of capital and production in Germany and other core countries – in the logistical and distribution sectors, for example – and more in general to an increasingly imbalanced relationship between the stronger and weaker countries of the union. ..."
"... In short, the European Union should indeed be viewed a transnational capitalist project, but one that is subordinated to a clear state-centred hierarchy of power, with Germany in the dominant position. In this sense, the national elites in periphery countries that have supported Germany's hegemonic project (and continue to do so, first and foremost through their support to European integration) can thus be likened to the comprador bourgeoisie ..."
"... Exportnationalismus' ..."
"... Modell Deutschland ..."
"... Even more worryingly, Germany is not simply aiming at expanding its economic control over the European continent; it is also taking steps for greater European military 'cooperation' – under the German aegis, of course. As a recent article in Foreign Policy ..."
"... In other words, Germany already effectively controls the armies of four countries. And the initiative, Foreign Policy ..."
Originally from: Germany's dystopian plans for Europe: from fantasy to reality?By Thomas
Fazi 4 December 2017
For Germany, the idea
of Europeanism has provided the country's elites with the perfect alibi to conceal their
hegemonic project behind the ideological veil of 'European integration'
After Emmanuel Macron's election in France, many (including myself) claimed that this
signalled a revival of the Franco-German alliance and a renewed impetus for Europe's process of
top-down economic and political integration – a fact that was claimed by most
commentators and politicians, beholden as they are to the Europeanist narrative, to be an
unambiguously positive development.
Among the allegedly 'overdue' reforms that were said to be on the table was the creation of
a pseudo-'fiscal union' backed by a (meagre) 'euro budget', along with the creation of a
'European finance minister', the centre-points of Macron's plans to 're-found the EU' – a
proposal that raises a number of very worrying issues from both political and economic
standpoints,
which I have discussed at length elsewhere .
The integrationists' (unwarranted) optimism, however, was short-lived. The result of the
German elections, which saw the surge of two rabidly anti-integrationist parties, the
right-wing FDP and extreme right AfD; the recent collapse of coalition talks between Merkel's
CDU, the FDP and the Greens, which most likely means an interim government for weeks if not
months, possibly leading to new elections (which polls show would
bring roughly the same result as the September election); and the growing restlessness in
Germany towards the 13-year-long rule of Macron's partner in reform Angela Merkel, means that
any plans that Merkel and Macron may have sketched out behind the scenes to further integrate
policies at the European level are now, almost certainly, dead in the water. Thus, even the
sorry excuse for a fiscal union proposed by Macron is now off the table, according to most
commentators.
At this point, the German government's most likely course in terms of European policy
– the one that has the best chance of garnering cross-party support, regardless of the
outcome of the coalition talks (or of new elections) – is the 'minimalist' approach set
in stone by the country's infamous and now-former finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, in
a 'non-paper' published shortly
before his resignation.
The main pillar of Schäuble's proposal – a long-time obsession of his –
consists in giving the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which would go on to become a
'European Monetary Fund', the power to monitor (and, ideally, enforce) compliance with the
Fiscal Compact. This echoes Schäuble's previous calls for the
creation of a European budget commissioner with the power to reject national budgets – a
supranational fiscal enforcer.
The aim is all too clear: to further erode what little sovereignty and autonomy member
states have left, particularly in the area of fiscal policy, and to facilitate the imposition
of neoliberal 'structural reforms' – flexibilisation of labour markets, reduction of
collective bargaining rights, etc. – on reluctant countries.
To this end, the German authorities even want to make the receipt of EU cohesion funds
conditional on the implementation of such reforms , tightening the existing arrangements
even further. Moreover, as noted by Simon
Wren-Lewis , the political conflict of interest of having an institution lending within the
eurozone would end up imposing severe austerity bias on the recovering country.
Until recently, these proposals failed to materialise due, among other reasons, to France's
opposition to any further overt reductions of national sovereignty in the area of
budgetary policy; Macron, however, staunchly rejects France's traditional
souverainiste stance, embracing instead what he calls 'European sovereignty', and thus
represents the perfect ally for Germany's plans.
Another proposal that goes in the same direction is the
German Council for Economic Experts' plan to curtail banks' sovereign bond holdings.
Ostensibly aimed at 'severing the link between banks and government' and 'ensuring long-term
debt sustainability', it calls for: (i) removing the exemption from risk-weighting for
sovereign exposures, which essentially means that government bonds would no longer be
considered a risk-free asset for banks (as they are now under Basel rules), but would be
'weighted' according to the 'sovereign default risk' of the country in question (as determined
by credit rating agencies); (ii) putting a cap on the overall risk-weighted sovereign exposure
of banks; and (iii) introducing an automatic 'sovereign insolvency mechanism' that would
essentially extend to sovereigns the bail-in rule introduced for banks by the banking union,
meaning that if a country requires financial assistance from the ESM, for whichever reason, it
will have to lengthen its sovereign bond maturities (reducing the market value of those bonds
and causing severe losses for all bondholders) and, if necessary, impose a nominal 'haircut' on
private creditors.
As noted by the German economist Peter Bofinger , the only member of the German Council of
Economic Experts to vote against the sovereign bail-in plan, this would almost certainly ignite
a 2012-style self-fulfilling sovereign debt crisis, as periphery countries' bond yields would
quickly rise to unsustainable levels, making it increasingly hard for governments to roll over
maturing debt at reasonable prices and eventually forcing them to turn to the ESM for help,
which would entail even heavier losses for their banks and an even heavier dose of
austerity.
It would essentially amount to a return to the pre-2012 status quo, with governments once
again subject to the supposed 'discipline' of the markets, particularly in the context of a
likely tapering of the ECB's quantitative easing (QE) program. The aim of this proposal is the
same as that of Schäuble's 'European Monetary Fund': to force member states to implement
permanent austerity.
Of course, national sovereignty in a number of areas – most notably fiscal policy
– has already been severely eroded by the complex system of new laws, rules and
agreements introduced in recent years, including but not limited to the six-pack, two-pack,
Fiscal Compact, European Semester and Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure (MIP).
As a result of this new post-Maastricht system of European economic governance, the European
Union has effectively become a sovereign power with the authority to impose budgetary rules and
structural reforms on member states outside democratic procedures and without democratic
control.
The EU's embedded quasi-constitutionalism and inherent (structural) democratic deficit has
thus evolved into an even more anti-democratic form of 'authoritarian constitutionalism' that
is breaking away with elements of formal democracy as well, leading some observers to suggest
that the EU 'may easily become the postdemocratic prototype and even a pre-dictatorial
governance structure against national sovereignty and democracies'.
To give an example, with the launch of the European Semester, the EU's key tool for economic
policy guidance and surveillance, an area that has historically been a bastion of national
sovereignty – old-age pensions – has now fallen under the purview of supranational
monitoring as well. Countries are now expected to
(and face sanctions if they don't): (i) increase the retirement age and link it with life
expectancy; (ii) reduce early retirement schemes, improve the employability of older workers
and promote lifelong learning; (iii) support complementary private savings to enhance
retirement incomes; and (iv) avoid adopting pension-related measures that undermine the long
term sustainability and adequacy of public finances.
This has led to the introduction in various countries of several types of automatic
stabilizing mechanisms (ASMs) in pension systems, which change the policy default so that
benefits or contributions adjust automatically to adverse demographic and economic conditions
without direct intervention by politicians. Similar 'automatic correction mechanisms' in
relation to fiscal policy can be found in the Fiscal Compact.
The aim of all these 'automatic mechanisms' is clearly to put the economy on 'autopilot',
thus removing any element of democratic discussion and/or decision-making at either the
European or national level. These changes have already transformed European states into
'semi-sovereign' entities, at best. In this sense, the proposals currently under discussion
would mark the definitive transformation of European states from semi-sovereign to de
facto (and increasingly de jure ) non-sovereign entities.
Regardless of the lip service paid by national and European officials to the need for
further reductions of national sovereignty to go hand in hand with a greater 'democratisation'
of the euro area, the reforms currently on the table can, in fact, be considered the final
stage in the thirty-year-long war on democracy and national sovereignty waged by the European
elites, aimed at constraining the ability of popular-democratic powers to influence economic
policy, thus enabling the imposition of neoliberal policies that would not have otherwise been
politically feasible.
In this sense, the European economic and monetary integration process should be viewed, to a
large degree, as a class-based and inherently neoliberal project pursued by all
national capitals as well as transnational (financial) capital. However, to grasp the processes
of restructuring under way in Europe, we need to go beyond the simplistic capital/labour
dichotomy that underlies many critical analyses of the EU and eurozone, which view EU/EMU
policies as the expression of a unitary and coherent transnational (post-national) European
capitalist class.
The process underway can only be understood through the lens of the geopolitical-economic
tensions and conflicts between leading capitalist states and regional blocs, and the
conflicting interests between the different financial/industrial capital fractions located in
those states, which have always characterised the European economy. In particular, it means
looking at Germany's historic struggle for economic hegemony over the European continent.
It is no secret that Germany is today the leading economic and political power in Europe,
just as it is no secret that nothing gets done in Europe without Germany's seal of approval. In
fact, it is commonplace to come across references to Germany's 'new empire'.
A controversial Der Spiegel editorial from a few years back event went as far as
arguing that it is not out place to talk of the rise of a 'Fourth Reich':
"That may sound absurd given that today's Germany is a successful democracy without a trace
of national-socialism – and that no one would actually associate Merkel with Nazism. But
further reflection on the word 'Reich', or empire, may not be entirely out of place. The term
refers to a dominion, with a central power exerting control over many different peoples.
According to this definition, would it be wrong to speak of a German Reich in the economic
realm?"
More recently, an article in
Politico Europe – co-owned by the German media magnate Axel Springer AG
– candidly explained why 'Greece is de facto a German colony'. It noted how, despite
Tsipras' pleas for debt relief, the Greek leader 'has little choice but to heed the wishes of
his "colonial" masters', i.e., the Germans.
This is because public debt
in the eurozone is used as a political tool – a disciplining tool – to get
governments to implement socially harmful policies (and to get citizens to accept these
policies by portraying them as inevitable), which explains why Germany continues to refuse to
seriously consider any form of debt relief for Greece, despite the various commitments and
promises to that end made in recent years: debt is the chain that keeps Greece (and other
member states) from straying 'off course'.
Even though the power exercised by Europe's 'colonial masters' is now openly acknowledged by
the mainstream press, it is however commonplace to ascribe Germany's dominant position as an
accident of history: according to this narrative, we are in the presence of an 'accidental
empire', one that is not the result of a general plan but that emerged almost by chance –
even against Germany's wishes – as a result of the euro's design faults, which
have allowed Germany and its satellites to pursue a neo-mercantilist strategy and thus
accumulate huge current account surpluses.
Now, it is certainly true that the euro's design – strongly influenced by Germany
– inevitably benefits export-led economies such as Germany over more internal
demand-oriented economies, such as those of southern Europe. However, there is ample evidence
to support the argument that Germany, far from having accidently stumbled upon European
dominance, has been actively and consciously pursuing an expansionary and imperialist strategy
in – and through – the European Union for decades.
Even if we limit our analysis to Germany's post-crisis policies (though there is much that
could be said about Germany's post-reunification policies and subsequent offshoring of
production to Eastern Europe in the 1990s), it would be very naïve to view Germany's
inflexibility – on austerity, for example – as a simple case of ideological
stubbornness, considering the extent to which the policies in question have benefited Germany
(and to a lesser extent France).
Germany (and France) have been
the main beneficiaries of the sovereign bailouts of periphery countries , which essentially
amounted to a covert bailout of German (and French) banks, as most of the funds were channelled
back to the creditor countries' banks, which were heavily exposed to the banks (and to a lesser
degree the governments) of periphery countries. German policy, Helen Thompson wrote ,
overwhelmingly 'served the interests of the German banks'.
This is a telling example of how Germany's policies (and the EU's policies more in general),
while nominally ordoliberal – i.e., based upon minimal government intervention
and a strict rules-based regime – are in reality based on extensive state
intervention on behalf of German capital, at both the domestic and European level.
As Andy Storey notes, not only did the German government, throughout the crisis, show a
blatant disregard for ordoliberalism's non-interference of public institutions in the workings
of the market, by engaging in a massive Keynesian-style programme in the aftermath of the
financial crisis and pushing through bailout programmes that largely absolved German banks from
their responsibility for reckless lending to Greece and other countries; German authorities
have also been more than happy to go along with – or to encourage – the European
institutions' 'exercise of unrestrained executive power and the more or less complete
abandonment of strict, rules-based frameworks' – Storey is here referring in particular
to the ECB's use of its currency-issuing monopoly to force member states to follows its
precepts – 'to maintain the profitability of German banks, German hegemony within the
Eurozone, or even the survival of the Eurozone itself'.
Germany (and France) are also the main beneficiaries of the ongoing process of
'mezzogiornification' of periphery countries – often compounded by troika
-forced privatisations –, which in recent years has allowed German and French firms to
take over a huge number of businesses (or stakes therewithin) in periphery countries, often at
bargain prices. A well-publicised case is that of the 14 Greek regional airports taken over by
the German airport operator Fraport.
France's corporate offensive in Italy is another good example: in the last five years,
French companies have engaged in 177 Italian takeovers, for a total value of $41.8 billion, six
times Italy's purchases in France over the same period. This is leading to an increased
'centralisation' of European capital, characterised by a gradual concentration of capital and
production in Germany and other core countries – in the logistical and distribution
sectors, for example – and more in general to an increasingly imbalanced relationship
between the stronger and weaker countries of the union.
These transformations cannot simply be described as processes without a subject: while there
are undoubtedly structural reasons involved – countries with better developed economies
of scale, such as Germany and France, were bound to benefit more than others from the reduction
in tariffs and barriers associated with the introduction of the single currency – we also
have to acknowledge that there are loci of economic-politic power that are actively driving and
shaping these imperialist processes, which must be viewed through the lens of the unresolved
inter-capitalist struggle between core-based and periphery-based capital.
From this perspective, the dichotomy that is often raised in European public discourse
between nationalism and Europeanism is deeply flawed. The two, in fact, often go hand in hand.
In Germany's case, for example, Europeanism has provided the country's elites with the perfect
alibi to conceal their hegemonic project behind the ideological veil of 'European integration'.
Ironically, the European Union – allegedly created as an antidote to the vicious
nationalisms of the twentieth century – has been the tool through which Germany has been
able to achieve the 'new European order' that Nazi ideologues had theorised in the 1930s and
early 1940s.
In short, the European Union should indeed be viewed a transnational capitalist project, but
one that is subordinated to a clear state-centred hierarchy of power, with Germany in the
dominant position. In this sense, the national elites in periphery countries that have
supported Germany's hegemonic project (and continue to do so, first and foremost through their
support to European integration) can thus be likened to the comprador bourgeoisie of
the old colonial system – sections of a country's elite and middle class allied with
foreign interests in exchange for a subordinated role within the dominant hierarchy of
power.
From this point of view, the likely revival of the Franco-German bloc is a very worrying
development, since it heralds a consolidation of the German-led European imperialist bloc
– and a further 'Germanification' of the continent. This development cannot be understood
independently of the momentous shifts that are taking place in global political economy –
namely the organic crisis of neoliberal globalisation, which is leading to increased tensions
between the various fractions of international capital, most notably between the US and
Germany.
Trump's repeated criticisms of Germany's beggar-thy-neighbour mercantilist policies should
be understood in this light. The same goes for Angela Merkel's recent call – much
celebrated by the mainstream press – for a stronger Europe to counter Trump's
unilateralism. Merkel's aim is not, of course, that of making 'Europe' stronger, but rather of
strengthening Germany's dominant position vis-à-vis the other world powers (the US but
also China) through the consolidation of Germany's control of the European continental economy,
in the context of an intensification of global inter-capitalist competition.
This has now become an imperative for Germany, especially since Trump has dared to openly
challenge the self-justifying ideology which sustains Germany's mercantilism – a
particular form of economic nationalism that Hans Kundnani has
dubbed ' Exportnationalismus' , founded upon the belief that Germany's massive
trade surplus is uniquely the result of Germany's manufacturing excellence ( Modell
Deutschland ) rather than, in fact, the result of unfair trade practices.
This is why, if Germany wants to maintain its hegemonic position on the continent, it must
break with the US and tighten the bolts of the European workhouse. To this end, it needs to
seize control of the most coveted institution of them all – the ECB –, which
hitherto has never been under direct German control (though the Bundesbank exercises
considerable influence over it, as is well known). Indeed, many commentators openly acknowledge
that Merkel now has her eyes on the ECB's presidency. This would effectively put Germany
directly at the helm of European economic policy.
Even more worryingly, Germany is not simply aiming at expanding its economic control over
the European continent; it is also taking steps for greater European military 'cooperation'
– under the German aegis, of course.
As a recent article in Foreign Policy revealed , 'Germany is quietly building a
European army under its command'.
This year Germany and two of its European allies, the Czech Republic and Romania, announced
the integration of their armed forces, under the control of the Bundeswehr. In doing so, the
will follow in the footsteps of two Dutch brigades, one of which has already joined the
Bundeswehr's Rapid Response Forces Division and another that has been integrated into the
Bundeswehr's 1st Armored Division.
In other words, Germany already effectively controls the armies of four countries. And the
initiative, Foreign Policy notes, 'is likely to grow'. This is not surprising: if
Germany ('the EU') wants to become truly autonomous from the US, it needs to acquire military
sovereignty, which it currently lacks.
Europe is thus at a crossroads: the choice that left-wing and popular forces, and periphery
countries more generally, face is between (a) accepting Europe's transition to a fully
post-democratic, hyper-competitive, German-led continental system, in which member states
(except for those at the helm of the project) will be deprived of all sovereignty and autonomy,
in exchange for a formal democratic façade at the supranational level, and its workers
subject to ever-growing levels of exploitation; or (b) regaining national sovereignty and
autonomy at the national level, with all the short-term risks that such a strategy entails, as
the only way to restore democracy, popular sovereignty and socioeconomic dignity. In short, the
choice is between European post-democracy or post-European democracy.
There is no third way. Especially in view of the growing tensions between Germany, the US
and China, periphery countries should ask themselves if they want to be simple pawns in this
'New Great Game' or if they want to take their destinies into their own hands.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon once told Ivanka Trump: "You're just
another staffer who doesn't know what you're doing," according to a new book.
Related: Ivanka Trump's "special place in hell" for child predators comment trolls Roy Moore
rally
Bannon, who has long critiqued and clashed with Ivanka's and her husband Jared Kushner's
roles in the White House, tried to put the president's daughter in her place in one instance
detailed in the book.
"My daughter loves me as a dad...You love your dad. I get that. But you're just another
staffer who doesn't know what you're doing," Bannon said, The Washington Post reported when it
published excerpts on Monday.
The revelation is part of the latest book about life inside the White House. Howard Kurtz, host
of the Fox News show Media Buzz, wrote the book Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press, And The
War Over The Truth, set to be released on January 29.
The new book, though perhaps not as sensational as the explosive tell-all Fire and Fury:
Inside the Trump White House, contains several new alleged revelations about the
administration. Along with reports of the turbulent relationship between Ivanka Trump and
Bannon, are claims that the president himself leaked information to journalists, that his aides
referred to his behavior as "defiance disorder" and that his staff was "blindsided" when he
accused former President Barack Obama of wiretapping his phones.
Last week,
Twitter sent out a creepy email to over 677,775 users letting them know that the platform
was actively working to understand "Russian-linked activities" that took place during the 2016
presidential election.
Twitter claimed that they had identified and suspended a "number of accounts that were
potentially connected to propaganda efforts by a Russian government-linked organization known
as the Internet Research Agency [IRA]".
One of the 677,775 users to receive the message was "Liquid IQ", the only problem is that the Liquid IQ twitter
account was created in July 2017. That is a full eight months after the US elections.
The 2017 Liquid IQ account was definitely not spreading Russian propaganda during the 2016
US presidential election on twitter, unless Liquid IQ magically found a way to follow "Russian
trolls" on twitter without having an actual twitter profile.
The is a single party of neoliberal oligarchy with two wings. Both are afraid of citizens and would like to sly on them.
Notable quotes:
"... Despite being in the minority, Democrats last week had enough Republican votes on their side to curb the president's ability, enhanced since 9/11, to spy on citizens and non-citizens alike. ..."
"... In the House, a majority of Democrats were willing to join a small minority of Republicans to do just that. But 55 Democrats – including the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi; the minority whip, Steny Hoyer; and other Democratic leaders of the opposition to Trump – refused. ..."
"... After the House voted for an extension of the president's power to spy, a group of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans attempted to filibuster the bill. The critical 60th vote to shut down the filibuster was a Democrat. ..."
"... This is despite the fact that the surveillance bill gives precisely the sorts of powers viewers of an Academy Award-winning film about the Stasi from not long so ago ..."
"... Pelosi: 'We Must Fight Even Harder Against Trump's Authoritarian Impulses Now That We've Voted to Enable Them' ..."
"... But in the same way that discourse of authoritarianism misses the democratic forest for the anti-democratic tweets, so does it focus more on the rhetoric of an abusive man than the infrastructure of an oppressive state, more on the erosion of norms than the material instruments of repression. ..."
You'd think that Democrats in Congress would jump at the opportunity to impose a constraint on Donald Trump's presidency – one
that liberals and Democrats alike have characterized as authoritarian. Apparently, that's not the case.
Despite being in the minority, Democrats last week had enough Republican votes on their side to curb the president's ability,
enhanced since 9/11, to spy on citizens and non-citizens alike.
In the House, a majority of Democrats were willing to join a small minority of Republicans to do just that. But 55 Democrats
– including the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi; the minority whip, Steny Hoyer; and other Democratic leaders of the opposition to
Trump – refused.
After the House voted for an extension of the president's power to spy, a group of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans
attempted to filibuster the bill. The critical 60th vote to shut down the filibuster was a Democrat.
With the exception of Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept, a press that normally expresses great alarm over Trump's amassing and
abuse of power has had relatively little to say about this vote (or this vote or this vote).
This is despite the fact that the surveillance bill gives precisely the sorts of powers viewers of an Academy Award-winning
film about the Stasi from not long so ago would instantly recognize to a president whose view of the media a leading Republican
recently compared to Stalin.
It was left to the Onion to offer the best (and near only) comment:
Pelosi: 'We Must Fight Even Harder Against Trump's Authoritarian Impulses Now That We've Voted to Enable Them'
Last week, I wrote in these pages how the discourse of Trump's authoritarianism ignores or minimizes the ways in which democratic
citizens and institutions – the media, the courts, the opposition party, social movements – are opposing Trump, with seemingly little
fear of intimidation.
But in the same way that discourse of authoritarianism misses the democratic forest for the anti-democratic tweets, so does
it focus more on the rhetoric of an abusive man than the infrastructure of an oppressive state, more on the erosion of norms than
the material instruments of repression.
"... Imagine a Russia in which Putin was no longer around and the hawks, with plenty of stored up grievances, were in power. The Russians have their neocons too and if they came out on top we'd be worse off than now ..."
"... The European elites wish to see Europe as a world power. Unrealistic, perhaps, but say that entity did become a dominant force. They complain about the lack of democratic control in the States, but that's nothing to the lack of democratic control in Europe. And we've already seen what the Europeans, including us, are capable of when it comes to predatory foreign intervention. Give the Europeans enough things that go bang and we could be yearning for the good old days. ..."
Babak - "The only sensible thing to do is to cut and run; in my opinion. Just work through
the implications as US cuts and run in the Levant, in the Persian Gulf, in South Korea."
As you point out, that could have unexpected effects. We saw what happened when a previous
dominant power - Great Britain, though by no means as overwhelmingly dominant and not at all
so at the end - effectively cut and ran after the Second World War. It ended up more of a
mess than it started out as.
Even in an ideal world, a world in which the current style of Great Power politics was
universally abandoned, the sudden withdrawal of the US would cause instability and chaos. The
disengagement would have to be gradual.
But there is no such ideal world as that and there will not be. Therefore the sudden
withdrawal of the US would leave a power vacuum that others would fill.
What others? Imagine a Russia in which Putin was no longer around and the hawks, with
plenty of stored up grievances, were in power. The Russians have their neocons too and if
they came out on top we'd be worse off than now .
The European elites wish to see Europe as a world power. Unrealistic, perhaps, but say
that entity did become a dominant force. They complain about the lack of democratic control
in the States, but that's nothing to the lack of democratic control in Europe. And we've
already seen what the Europeans, including us, are capable of when it comes to predatory
foreign intervention. Give the Europeans enough things that go bang and we could be yearning
for the good old days.
I'm one of those that still hope that the non-interventionist policy that was voted for in
America in 2016 will be carried through. But if that is indeed Trump's intention then there
is more in his way than local political or administrative difficulties. To engineer such a
transition would require great care. It's no good if the US just steps back and worse comes
forward to take its place.
It's not overly idealistic, or even that unrealistic, to hope for a world in which defense
forces (AND defensive alliances) are used for the proper purpose of defence and not for
expensive and destructive enterprises dreamed up by some bubble elite. That's part of what
Trump 2016 was about. But getting to such a world would require a considerably more careful
transition than we've seen in similar circumstances in the past.
There are some analogies here with the recent Poroshenko government desire to take Donbass area back by military force.
Notable quotes:
"... How will this breakup of Syrian national territory affect the situation between the Donbass region and the Ukraine junta? ..."
"... True and very sad. The Syrians have been caught in the crossfire since the beginning. We have theorized over the various causes of the war, but, in the end, when the superpowers are hanging around, Syrians are the first row of pieces to be sacrificed. ..."
"... The Afrin war plays several roles. It will demonize and demoralize further the 'independentist' Kurds, awake the nationalist Turkish feeling by displaying military power that has been damaged by the coup, boost the Islamist flame among the rural Turks so the Turks can forget about their grudge over the EU and the declining buying power. ..."
"... All the actors are tributaries flowing into the main river, and all moving in the same general direction, because the river is actually the tide of history. All players are advancing to meet their inevitable destinie ..."
Let me see if I understand all this? The Erdogan Turks fully back the terrorists in Syria
aiming to dislodge the Assad Syrian government. The USA et al fully backs the same.
The USA also backs the PKK/YPG Kurd faction in Syria as a means to at least break up
Syrian national territory, as originally in their plans, even if they do remove the Assad
government as originally planned.
Erdogan has wanted to expand Turkey's national boundaries at the expense of Syria's. This
latest encroachment, as with Euphrates Shield, accomplishes this goal especially if they can
subsume their terrorist proxies occupied areas in Idlib Province as the USA has by using
their newest Kurd proxies in eastern Syria. Erdogan need only create some new proxy
(Turkmen?) and go after the terrorists and Kurds in western Syria. No doubt with American
help.
Erdogan and the USA disagree only on what future the Kurdish people will play in the
eastern territories of Syria and Turkey. So what will be the necessary accommodation between
them?
If a Kurdish state is declared and backed by NATO and a UN resolution what if anything can
Syria and her allies do about it as war is simply out of the question.
How will this breakup of Syrian national territory affect the situation between the
Donbass region and the Ukraine junta?
This would not be some devious plot by Turks/US to prolong the war in Syria and give cover to
send more troops in ... troops that never leave? The whole thing seems a bit too ...
convenient.
True and very sad. The Syrians have been caught in the crossfire since the beginning.
We have theorized over the various causes of the war, but, in the end, when the superpowers
are hanging around, Syrians are the first row of pieces to be sacrificed.
And I would never put my faith in any international community ruling after Syria. We are
in uncharted territory, I believe. Dance with the one you came with and if you have to stand
on Putin's toes to keep up, then hold him close.
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong
do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." -- Thucydides
"These oilfields seem to be the big prize and one of the main reasons the US wants to hold
onto this corner of Syria."
Posted by: financial matters | Jan 21, 2018 10:37:30 AM | 18
The goal of the MIC and Deep State is just to keep the chaos going as long as possible to
sell arms and benefit careers. However, Trump has been enticed to go along with it by the
promise that the US will "take their oil."
You may be correct that those Kurds aren't Syrian, but not necessarily so. The areas of
Syria that have actually had Kurdish, or for instance Armenian, majorities have enjoyed a
large measure of de facto autonomy, which has only increased in the last 20 years. So while
nominally required to use Arabic in schools, if the school is staffed with Kurdish teachers
and administrators with Kurdish students, there is little to stop them from simply teaching
in Kurdish. Or Armenian, or Aramaic, etc.
We had wrongly predicted that Turkish threats against the Kurdish held north-west area of
Afrin were empty:
Maybe not. Maybe your first analysis was correct. If the Kurdish militias do fight, it will
take many weeks, and lead to substantial Turkish losses. So it is really too early to say
that Erdogan will attempt to conquer Afrin no matter the cost, and too early to say that the
US will not put effective pressure on Erdogan, or offer him some sort of deal.
So far, Erdogan has upped the ante, but he hasn't gone all in.
Erdogan is obsessed by keeping power and winning his re election in 2018 or 2019 . To get
that, he needs to neutralize the Turkish Kurds who don't vote for him. Sunni conservative
Kurds worship Erdogan for his promotion of Sunni Islam. For them Islam is the unifying factor
of Turks especially Sunni Islam. They all vote for the AKP.
Erdogan has emasculated the burgeoning liberal Kurdish party, the HDP, by demonizing the
liberal Kurds and throwing its leader in prison just to get more votes in the previous
parliamentary election that he reran to win with a very small margin.
For the next election, he is very worried about the growth of other centrist parties, the
weakness of his ally the MHP, a nationalist party archi-enemy of the Kurds and about the
insatisfaction of the Turks with the deteriorating relation with the EU and the fall of the
lira.
The Afrin war plays several roles. It will demonize and demoralize further the
'independentist' Kurds, awake the nationalist Turkish feeling by displaying military power
that has been damaged by the coup, boost the Islamist flame among the rural Turks so the
Turks can forget about their grudge over the EU and the declining buying power.
The question is will he win fast enough not to create the impression of failure and a
quagmire that would reflect negatively on his voters? And what will be the aftermath of
Afrin? early elections?
It's a multiple win-win, a great demonstration of congruent interests all doing their own
thing. Lots of things remain to play out. But there are no downsides to this situation, no
matter who holds what piece of Syrian territory for what temporary short time.
All the actors are tributaries flowing into the main river, and all moving in the same
general direction, because the river is actually the tide of history. All players are
advancing to meet their inevitable destinies: Turkey moves closer to Russia, and closer,
despite much bad blood, to restoring the friendship between itself and Syria (over time); the
Kurds get their final lesson about the perfidious US and settle into their lands in Syria, as
Syrians; Dr. Assad gets his entire country back for his people (over time); terrorists die;
the US is further marginalized and its generals scream mayhem, in words only.
The Ukrainian Parliament has practically declared
the Minsk agreements null and void and decided to militarily "liberate" Donetsk, Lugansk and
Crimea from the will of the people living there. Just in time the neo-nazi fanatics of the Azov
Battalion
received a U.S. military delegation and U.S. arms.
The 2015 Minsk II agreement (
full text ) demanded that the Ukraine creates a new law for the administration of these
regions:
Without delays, but no later than 30 days from the date of signing of this document, a
resolution has to be approved by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, indicating the territory
which falls under the special regime in accordance with the law "On temporary Order of Local
Self-Governance in Particular Districts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts," based in the line
set up by the Minsk Memorandum as of Sept. 19, 2014.
Russia is not a party of the agreement. But when the resolution by the Ukrainian parliament
was not forthcoming western propaganda falsely blamed Russia for "not fulfilling the Minsk
agreement" and the west has since bound the sanctions on Russia to this fake conclusion.
The National Bank of Ukraine announced
that an independent accountant found that PrivatBank, then owned by the coup financier and
billionaire
Ihor Kolomoyskiy , was plundered of $5.5 billion shortly before it went bankrupt and
nationalized by the coup government. In connection with that an IMF loan of $1.8 billion to the
Ukraine
allegedly went directly into Kolomoyskiy's pockets. How much of this stolen money was paid
to U.S. politicians?
While the anti-Trump politicians and media still fret about "Russian influence" on U.S.
social media everyone seems to have forgotten that in early 2016 the Ukraine set up a massive
troll farm and a Ministry of Truth. Back then even the U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine
disliked that . If every troll tweeting in Russian or with Cyrillic letters in its name is
under the direct command of Vladimir Putin where then are those Ukrainians trolls?
The last round in Ukraine erupted while the winter games finished in Sochi. I see the
empire positioning things to repeat the treatment during FIFA. Ukraine is being primed and
the clock is set to create incidents that will force Russia's hand.
This potential very public shaming of Russia is what is restraining Russia from responding
to many of the US and Israeli (and Turkish?) provocations in Syria. Perhaps they are hoping
their present silence will gain them some grace for that showcase event.
Personally, I doubt it.
And should some incidents happen during the FIFA world cup events, we will see the real
Putin - which might be for the best in the long run.
re:?The Ukrainian Parliament has practically declared the Minsk agreements null and void and
decided to militarily "liberate" Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea from the will of the people
living there. Just in time the neo-nazi fanatics of the Azov Battalion received a U.S.
military delegation..."
And also just in time Russia is voting on legalizing militias in Africa and elsewhere; just
in time for Spring in the Ukraine? http://russiafeed.com/russia-legalize-private-military-contractors-get-leg-africa/
I'm curious about Ukraine & its neo-nazi's. How do the Israelis who work there, knowing
the past-present? After all, mention the word nazi in their presence, and they go out of
their collective minds attacking the source. Or maybe there's some sort of collusion taking
place?
A more interesting question is how those testimonies might affect Bannon -- he is in a very hot water now. If he thought that the
meeting was so incriminating why he did not contact FBI and just decided to feed juicy gossip to Wolff?
Also he was not present at the meeting and was not a member of Trump team until two months later. From who he got all this information
? Was is just a slander by disgruntled employee?
Notable quotes:
"... To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr. ..."
"... Bannon has denied that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government during the election ..."
"... Wolff also quotes the former White House strategist as saying, "This is all about money laundering. [Robert] Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner . . . It's as plain as a hair on your face." ..."
"... Bannon then zeroed in on Kushner specifically, adding that "[i]t goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They're going to go right through that. They're going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me." ..."
"The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the
conference room on the 25th floor -- with no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers," Bannon is quoted as saying in Fire and Fury.
"Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should
have called the F.B.I. immediately." Bannon reportedly speculated that the chance the eldest Trump son did not involve his father
in the meeting "is zero."
When Bannon's comments became public, Trump excoriated his former strategist, whom
he accused of having "lost his mind."
But while Bannon has since apologized for the remarks and sought to walk back a number of the quotes, he's stopped short of denying
that he viewed the Trump Tower meeting as treasonous. Instead, he's merely shifted the blame away from Trump Jr. and onto Manafort.
"My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort, a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate.
He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning, and not our friends. To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr.
," Bannon said in
a statement to Axios. ( Bannon has denied that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government during the election
.)
... ... ...
Though the Trump Tower meeting took place before Bannon joined the Trump campaign, Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House
panel, told
CNN last week that he plans to question Bannon about "why this meeting at Trump Tower represented his treason and certainly unpatriotic
at a minimum."
Jared Kushner's "greasy shit"
Wolff also quotes the former White House strategist as saying, "This is all about money laundering. [Robert] Mueller chose
[senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul
Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner . . . It's as plain as a hair on your face." (Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort have all
denied wrongdoing.) Bannon then zeroed in on Kushner specifically, adding that "[i]t goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner
shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They're going to go right through that. They're going to roll those two guys up and say play me
or trade me."
He and Trump's son-in-law have never seen eye to eye; their White House feuds were a poorly kept secret, and following his ouster,
Bannon has given numerous interviews knocking Kushner, including one to my colleague Gabriel Sherman in which he
questioned Kushner's
maturity level. If Bannon has dirt on Kushner, he will likely get his chance to reveal it; Schiff also
declared
his intent to question Bannon on "the basis of his concern over money laundering."
I am afraid, if one is to believe Mathis words, that the Syrian, Ukrainian and Korean potential confrontations will lead to
exchanges that will force us into wars on several theaters in the very near future.
As of today, Gen. Mathis exposing the sew Us Defense Strategy warned that: The US will counter any "threat to America's democracy
experiment" in the world, if necessary with military force, the Pentagon chief threatened.
He singled out Russia and China as "adversaries", a far cry form the "partners" designation used by Russia in designing the
USA. He vowed: the US will respond with lethal force.
So the stage is set for escalation of escalation in several theaters. How long will the bear be poked and the dragon provoked
before retaliation ensues?
I am afraid that war looks more and more certain in 2018.
@40 b... thanks for that... the place was getting out of hand.. you are becoming too popular..
@56 carl... it is an outrageous statement from mattis, any way you read it!
"The US will counter any threat to America's democracy experiment in the world..."
usa as country that gets to dictate its agenda anywhere in the world.. it would explain why they want to circumvent any international
body that they don't already control too, like the un.. america's democracy experiment is imposing the us$ as world currency under
the threat of their military.. it is already starting to fall apart on all accounts which explains mattis's anxiousness in representing
these same undemocratic structures and institutions he refers to as 'america's ''democracy'' experiment'... he needs to get a
gig in hollywood at comedy central.. he never found his true calling..
"We will modernize key capabilities," Mattis said. "Investments in space and cyberspace, nuclear deterrent forces, missile defense,
advanced autonomous systems and resilient and agile logistics will provide our high-quality troops what they need to win." [Sputnik
News]
Just two quotes from 'Mad dog' Mattis which prove he needs to be put in an asylum.
"I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you
all".
"Find the enemy that wants to end this experiment (in American democracy) and kill every one of them until they're so sick of
the killing that they leave us and our freedoms intact."
He singled out Russia and China as "adversaries", a far cry form the "partners"
designation used by Russia in designing the USA. He vowed: the US will
respond with lethal force.
Actions speak louder than words. The US is scared of two things: 1) a military conflict where its troops get slaughtered wholesale,
and 2) going up against any army or regular military force it can't destroy from the air. Whatever happens in the near future
we can rest assured Uncle Scam won't be engaging in direct hostilities with China or Russia.
@63 "Investments in space and cyberspace, nuclear deterrent forces, missile defense, advanced autonomous systems and resilient
and agile logistics will provide our high-quality troops what they need to win."
Nice for the high-quality troops. Sounds like they should be totally risk-free. But I don't share Mad Dog's faith in technology.
Looks like an accident waiting to happen.
Mattis opens his mouth and reveals his level of ignorance when it comes to understanding the Outlaw US Empire's history--it's
certainly not a "democracy experiment," nor has it ever tried to install a democracy anywhere on the planet. I'd bet he's
just as ignorant when it comes to military history, too. He reminds me of the ignorant brute Sgt. Snorkel from the Beatle Bailey
comic strip. The so-called "new" "defense posture" is no more than a tidied-up version of the two that preceded it: What we say
goes; either you're with us or against us.
By way of rebuttal, I highly recommend reading
this interview of Hassan Nasrallah from 3 Jan 2018, particularly his remarks about differences in the quality of soldiers
from The Resistance versus those of the enemy--IDF, NATO, USA, Daesh--and why they exist.
Contrary to all the hype about the Empire being a new energy exporting colossus,
it needed to import LNG
to keep its East Coast dwellings warm, but the cargo seems to have found a better price elsewhere. Just how will it displace Russian
gas from the market when it can't provide enough domestic supply?
Meanwhile, Tillerson pulls an Albright
: "Signs of starvation and death in North Korea indicate that US diplomatic strategy works fine, says the secretary of state."
Is he being two-faced? You bet! From last year
: "We're not your enemy, we're not your threat..."
Ignorant, lying, immoral are just a few of the important behavioral traits of those leading faces of the Outlaw US Empire.
And my historical investigations prove such traits have been in the forefront since its inception. Guess we can thank its tutor,
the British Empire.
The US administration either is very smart in bluffing to temporarily reassure its panicking regional allies, Israel and Saudi
Arabia or it is living in the la-la land of an incompetence close to stupidity.
Do they really believe that the Russians will allow the USA to rob their victory in Syria over ISIS? Or that the Turks will
stay idle while the USA is building a Kurdish military entity on their border? Or that Iran and Syria will allow the partitioning
of Syria and the US illegal long term presence in the region?
The USA administration is posed for dramatic blowbacks and reshuffling of alliances in the region.Maybe that is why it is running
like a headless hen!
This will damage Trump with his base. Reducing the involvement of the United States military abroad was one of the more important
commitments he made to his base and now he has broken that commitment and quite a few of his base are disappointed. Even if it's
just a couple of hundred thousand of them, there goes the next presidential election for Trump and the Republicans. By forgetting
about Russia-gate, focusing on his foreign military involvements, and provided the Democratic candidate is not a Clinton, the
presidency is for there for taking by the Democrats. Having Tulsi Gabbard on the ticket would help.
The only reservation I have is if Trump is stiffing the generals in the White House and sometime in the future pulls the plug
on all those interventions then he'll remain in the White House for another four years.
Tillerson could have been speaking for Trump, or Obama, or Bush - under whose regime the Likudnik/neocons/Zionists were able to
foment a policy coup while using the OSP to concoct lies for Israel's long-desired war.
While there are generally multiple motives for entry into wars, only one is whitewashed. As Phil Giraldi put it:
""Why doesn't anyone ever speak honestly about the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Nobody has mentioned Israel in this
conference and we all know it's American Jews with all their money and power who are supporting every war in the Middle East for
Netanyahu? Shouldn't we start calling them out and not letting them get away with it?"
Here's where we are, as the same cabal cheerlead for war on Iran (Lebanon must be first) a you are either committed to stopping
the drive to war by all cognizable social and pitical forces, or you are not.
The time for letting cries of 'anti-Semite' preclude FAIR dis ussuon of the role of Jews and the Israel Lobby is over.
Those who censor this necessary component of analysis should be deemed confederates of the bankers, MIC, transnationals, and
Zionist Jews who have been driving wars for decades.
With millions dead, playtime is over. Those censoring the truth side with the warmongers.
The empire is getting a bit tattered around the edges
by Justin Raimondo Posted on
January 17, 2018 January 16, 2018
While the population of Hawaii dove under manhole covers, and #TheResistance screeched that The Orange Monster had finally done
it and forced Kim Jong Un to nuke the island paradise, it took Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the levelheaded, and quite personable representative
from that state, to issue a statement countermanding the "take cover" message sent out by the military earlier.
Rep. Gabbard did this within minutes, thus avoiding a major panic with potentially dangerous consequences, while the Authorities
took nearly an hour to issue a retraction.
How did this happen? The Official Story is that "someone pushed the wrong button." As to the identity of this Someone, or the
consequences that have befallen him or her, we hear nary a word.
This bizarre incident underscores the utter absurdity and darkness of the permanent state of emergency which we live under.
For it turns out that there was no system in place capable of countermanding the emergency alert once it went out. A tacit understanding
of the reality behind our military strategy: it's a suicide pact.
It also underscores the Potemkin Village aura of what is routinely referred to as our National Security Establishment: in this
case, it amounted to some guy in Hawaii wearing flip flops and all too eager to go off duty and get back in the water after going
through the unending drill he'd complete hundreds, probably thousands of times before.
So who was the culprit, and what happened to him? The Hawaii authorities refuse to identify him – because "he would be a pariah."
Which is a military disciplinary system that has to be unique in all the world. The administrator in chief of the system, a Mr.
Miyagi, explained it
this way :
"Looking at the nature and cause of the error that led to those events, the deeper problem is not that someone made a mistake;
it is that we made it too easy for a simple mistake to have very serious consequences. The system should have been more robust,
and I will not let an individual pay for a systemic problem."
What about the individual architects of the system? You can be your bottom dollar none of them will bear any consequences for
almost starting World War III. Gee, I recall an incident that occurred on September 11, 2001, in which the "defenses" we'd spent
billions on simply did not function and thousands dies as a result – and not a single person was fired.
Inefficiency and outright incompetence are built into structures as large, unwieldy, and unresponsive as the American Empire,
and this is what the concept of decadence really entails: the slipshod slips in, the shiny surfaces get to looking a little ramshackle,
overconfidence and complacency infiltrate both leaders and led, and pretty soon you're the Austro-Hungarian Empire: big, garish,
unsustainable, and basically ready to fall to pieces.
Which is not to say that the Empire is really on its last legs and will fall of its own weight – although that's entirely possible.
Look at what happened to the Soviets. Yet the rulers – and inhabitants – of such empires always overestimate their strength and
endurance: they live inside the bubble of their own hubris.
That popping sound you hear may augur more than anybody bargained for
A SPECIAL NOTE : My apologies for the abbreviated column, but this is being written on the fly as I get ready to travel
to San Francisco to receive my fifth infusion of the anti-cancer drugs Keytruda and Alimta. I have to say I'm feeling a lot better
since the treatments started, but I still have a ways to go: I'll keep you posted.
The empire is getting a bit tattered around the edges
by Justin Raimondo Posted on
January 17, 2018 January 16, 2018
While the population of Hawaii dove under manhole covers, and #TheResistance screeched that The Orange Monster had finally done
it and forced Kim Jong Un to nuke the island paradise, it took Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the levelheaded, and quite personable representative
from that state, to issue a statement countermanding the "take cover" message sent out by the military earlier.
Rep. Gabbard did this within minutes, thus avoiding a major panic with potentially dangerous consequences, while the Authorities
took nearly an hour to issue a retraction.
How did this happen? The Official Story is that "someone pushed the wrong button." As to the identity of this Someone, or the
consequences that have befallen him or her, we hear nary a word.
This bizarre incident underscores the utter absurdity and darkness of the permanent state of emergency which we live under.
For it turns out that there was no system in place capable of countermanding the emergency alert once it went out. A tacit understanding
of the reality behind our military strategy: it's a suicide pact.
It also underscores the Potemkin Village aura of what is routinely referred to as our National Security Establishment: in this
case, it amounted to some guy in Hawaii wearing flip flops and all too eager to go off duty and get back in the water after going
through the unending drill he'd complete hundreds, probably thousands of times before.
So who was the culprit, and what happened to him? The Hawaii authorities refuse to identify him – because "he would be a pariah."
Which is a military disciplinary system that has to be unique in all the world. The administrator in chief of the system, a Mr.
Miyagi, explained it
this way :
"Looking at the nature and cause of the error that led to those events, the deeper problem is not that someone made a mistake;
it is that we made it too easy for a simple mistake to have very serious consequences. The system should have been more robust,
and I will not let an individual pay for a systemic problem."
What about the individual architects of the system? You can be your bottom dollar none of them will bear any consequences for
almost starting World War III. Gee, I recall an incident that occurred on September 11, 2001, in which the "defenses" we'd spent
billions on simply did not function and thousands dies as a result – and not a single person was fired.
Inefficiency and outright incompetence are built into structures as large, unwieldy, and unresponsive as the American Empire,
and this is what the concept of decadence really entails: the slipshod slips in, the shiny surfaces get to looking a little ramshackle,
overconfidence and complacency infiltrate both leaders and led, and pretty soon you're the Austro-Hungarian Empire: big, garish,
unsustainable, and basically ready to fall to pieces.
Which is not to say that the Empire is really on its last legs and will fall of its own weight – although that's entirely possible.
Look at what happened to the Soviets. Yet the rulers – and inhabitants – of such empires always overestimate their strength and
endurance: they live inside the bubble of their own hubris.
That popping sound you hear may augur more than anybody bargained for
A SPECIAL NOTE : My apologies for the abbreviated column, but this is being written on the fly as I get ready to travel
to San Francisco to receive my fifth infusion of the anti-cancer drugs Keytruda and Alimta. I have to say I'm feeling a lot better
since the treatments started, but I still have a ways to go: I'll keep you posted.
The United States cannot be a moral or ethical country until it faces up to the realities of US empire and the destruction it
causes around the world. The US undermines governments (including democracies), kills millions of people, causes mass migrations
of people fleeing their homes, communities and countries and produces vast environmental damage.
A new coalition, The Coalition Against US Foreign Military Bases , held
its inaugural event January 12-14, 2018 at the University of Baltimore in Maryland. The meeting was framed by a
Unity Statement that brought together numerous peace and justice organizations.
The basis for unity was:
"U.S. foreign military bases are the principal instruments of imperial global domination and environmental damage through wars
of aggression and occupation, and that the closure of US foreign military bases is one of the first necessary steps toward a just,
peaceful and sustainable world."
... ... ... (image deleted)
US foreign military bases as of 2015. Source BaseNation.us
Responsibility to End Global Empire of Bases
Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace and the vice presidential candidate for the Green Party in 2016 opened the conference,
describing the responsibility of the people of the United States (USians) to protect the world from US aggression. He
argued :
"The only logical, principled and strategic response to this question is citizens of the empire must reject their imperial
privileges and join in opposing ruling elites exploiting labor and plundering the Earth. To do that, however, requires breaking with
the intoxicating allure of cross-class, bi-partisan 'white identity politics.'"
This reality conflicts with one of the excuses the US uses to engage in war – so-called 'humanitarian wars', which are based on
the dubious legal claim that the US has a "responsibility to protect." The
United
States is viewed as "the greatest threat to peace in the world today" by people around the world. Thus, USians need to organize
to protect the world from the United States.
US empire is not only a threat to world peace and stability but also a threat to the United States.
Chalmers Johnson , who wrote a series of books on empire,
warned in his 2004 book, " The
Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic ," that there were four "sorrows" the United States would
suffer. In the 14 years since they have all come true:
"If present trends continue, four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative
impact guarantees that the United States will cease to bear any resemblance to the country once outlined in our Constitution. First,
there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a growing reliance on
weapons of mass destruction among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second, there will be a loss of
democracy and constitutional rights as the presidency fully eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from an "executive branch"
of government into something more like a Pentagonized presidency. Third, an already well-shredded principle of truthfulness will
increasingly be replaced by a system of propaganda, disinformation, and glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly,
there will be bankruptcy, as we pour our economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchange the education,
health, and safety of our fellow citizens."
The footprint of US empire are what Chalmers Johnson called an "empire of bases." David Vine, the author of
Base Nation, put US empire in context by describing 800 US bases in 80 countries
and US military personnel in more than 170 countries. Bases range from so-called Lily Pad Bases of hundreds of troops to town-sized
bases of tens of thousands of troops and their families. He noted many bases have schools and they do not need to worry about heating
or air conditioning,
unlike schools in
Baltimore where parents bought space heaters to keep children warm and where schools were closed due to lack of heat.
The contrast between Baltimore schools and military base schools is one example of many of the heavy price USians pay for the
military. Vine reported that $150 billion is spent annually to keep US troops on bases abroad and that even a Lily Pad base could
cost $1 billion. More is spent on foreign military bases than on any agency of the federal government, other than the Pentagon and
Veterans Administration.
The Pentagon is not transparent about the number of US foreign bases it manages or their cost. They usually publish a Base Structure
Report but have not done so in several years. The Pentagon only reports 701 bases, but researchers have found many, even significant
bases, not included in their list of bases.
"95% of all foreign military bases in the world are US bases. In addition, [there are] 19 Naval air carriers (and 15 more planned),
each as part of a Carrier Strike Group, composed of roughly 7,500 personnel, and a carrier air wing of 65 to 70 aircraft – each of
which can be considered a floating military base."
The military footprint of the United States shows it is the largest empire in world history. In
our interview with
historian Alfred McCoy , author of In The Shadows of the
American Century , he describes how some of the key characteristics of US empire are secrecy and covert actions. This are
some of the reasons why it is rare to ever hear US empire discussed in the corporate media or by politicians. McCoy told us this
was true for some other empires too, and that it is often not until the empire begins to falter that their existence becomes part
of the political dialogue.
Strategies for Closing US Foreign Military Bases
David Vine described an unprecedented opportunity to close bases abroad, to do so we need to build a bigger movement. We also
need to elevate the national dialogue about US Empire and develop a national consensus to end it.
Vine pointed to Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric about pulling back from US involvement abroad and focusing on the necessities
at home as indicative of the mood of the country. In fact,
a
recent survey found that "78 percent of Democrats, 64.5 percent of Republicans, and 68.8 percent of independents supported restraining
military action overseas."
McCoy argued that after the globalization of President Barack Obama, which included the Asian Pivot and efforts to pass major
trade agreements, in particular the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP),
created a backlash desire to focus on "America First." Both trade agreements, the TPP and TTIP, failed as a result of a political
shift in the country, in part created by grassroots movements.
McCoy describes Obama as one of three "Grandmasters of the Great Game" (the other two being Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's
National Security Adviser, and Elihu Root, former Secretary of War and Secretary of State at the beginning of the 20th Century) who
excelled in being strategic on behalf of US empire. In addition to trade agreements and the Asian Pivot, Obama built on the intelligence
apparatus of the George W. Bush era. Even though Obama was a "grandmaster," he did not slow the weakening of US empire. McCoy sees
the inability to account for the unpredictable complexities of US and global political developments as a common weakness of empire
strategists.
The conference was divided into regions of the world (with the exception of one session on the impact of military bases on the
environment and health). There will be reports and videos published on each section of the conference on the
No Foreign Bases webpage . One common denominator around the world is opposition
to US military bases. According to the Unity Statement of the coalition:
"Many individual national coalitions – for example, Okinawa, Italy, Jeju Island Korea, Diego Garcia, Cyprus, Greece, and Germany
– are demanding closure of bases on their territory. The base that the US has illegally occupied the longest, for over a century,
is Guantánamo Bay, whose existence constitutes an imposition of the empire and a violation of International Law. Since 1959 the government
and people of Cuba have demanded that the government of the US return the Guantánamo territory to Cuba."
One important strategy for success is for US activists to work in cooperation with people around the world who want US military
bases to be closed and for the US military to leave their country. Attendees at the conference had traveled to South Korea, Okinawa
and other places to protest in solidarity with US activists.
Another strategy that many in the conference urged was the need for education about US imperialism and to tie US militarism abroad
with militarized police at home. Similarly, the reality of the US military focusing on black and brown countries abroad highlights
a white supremacy philosophy that infects foreign policy and domestic policy. Members of the No US Foreign Bases coalition also engage
in domestic efforts for racial and environmental justice.
Further, the no bases coalition highlights the environmental and health damage caused by foreign and domestic military bases.
As the Unity Statement notes, "military bases are the largest users of fossil fuel in the world, heavily contributing to environmental
degradation." Pat Elder and David Swanson described
the degradation in and around the Potomac River, writing:
"The Pentagon's impact on the river on whose bank it sits is not simply the diffuse impact of global warming and rising oceans
contributed to by the US military's massive oil consumption. The US military also directly poisons the Potomac River in more ways
than almost anyone would imagine."
The conference attendees decided on some next steps. A national day of action against foreign military bases is being planned
for February 23, the anniversary of the US seizing Guantanamo Bay, Cuba through a "perpetual lease" that began in 1903. Activists
are encouraged to plan local actions. If you plan an event, contact [email protected]and we'll post it on the events page. The demands will include closing the base and prison in Guantanamo, returning the land
to Cuba and ending the US blockade.
The conference also decided to hold a conference outside of the United States in one of the countries where the US has a foreign
military base within the next year. People from some countries were not allowed to attend the inaugural conference this weekend.
And, the coordinating committee will reach out to other peace and justice groups to select a date and place for a national mass
action against US wars. This will be organized as quickly as possible because the threat of more wars is high.
This is a key moment for the antiwar movement in the US to make itself more visible and to demand the closure of US foreign bases.
In this report on
living in a post-primacy world , even the Pentagon recognizes what many commentators are seeing – the US empire is fading. One
great risk as the empire ends is more wars as the US tries to hang on to global hegemony. We must oppose war and work for the least
damaging end of empire.
Indeed, if the US becomes a cooperative member of the global community, rather than being a dominator, it would be a positive
transition. Imagine how much better it would be for everyone in the world if the US collaborated on addressing the climate crisis
in a serious way, obeyed international law and invested in positive programs to solve the many crises we face at home and abroad.
During the Baltimore conference, World Beyond War sponsored
a billboard nearby that read, "3% of US military spending could end starvation on earth." Imagine what a peace budget could look
like. The US could invest in domestic necessities including rebuilding infrastructure, a cleaner and safer public transportation
system, education, housing and health care. The US could provide aid to other countries to repair the damage it has caused. Members
of the US military could transition into a civilian jobs program that applies their expertise to programs of social uplift.
It is imperative that as the US Empire falls, we organize for a smooth transition to a world that is better for everyone. The
work of the new coalition to end US foreign military bases is a strong start.
Homeless encampment in the foreground of a Baltimore, MD billboard that read, "3% of US military spending could end starvation
on earth." Source World Beyond War.
"... Take Nadia Schadlow, for instance. Never heard of her? Unless you've been navigating the rice paddies of Washington's post-9/11 national security enterprise for the last several years, there's no reason you would have. But she has been at the National Security Council since last winter, and is set to replace Dina Powell as deputy national security advisor , at the right hand of NSC chief H.R. McMaster. She was also the lead on the White House National Security Strategy , released last month. ..."
"... This was Schadlow's first position in government. Her résumé includes doctoral degrees from Johns Hopkins Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) under the tutelage of vocal Never Trumper and Iraq war promoter Eliot Cohen, who runs the largely neoconservative Strategic Studies program there, and whose last book, The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power, argued that the U.S., backed by a more robust military, must be the "guardian of a stable world order." ..."
"... What is significant about Schadlow's role in the White House -- she's reportedly a "trusted confidant" of General McMaster, who was lionized in the New Yorker for his T.E. Lawrence approach to counterinsurgency in Tal Afar in 2006 -- is not her bibliography, but her vast connections to Washington's foreign policy and national security clique, especially its neoconservative elite. If one were using the metaphor of chain migration, she would have plenty of friends on either side of the Potomac to tap for high-level placement, consulting, and advice. ..."
"... The foundation has a rich history cleaved to neoconservative pioneers such as Irving Kristol, father of Bill, who in his own memoirs credits the philanthropic institution and its then-director Randall Richardson (heir to the Vicks fortune) with helping him jumpstart the Public Interest, known as the premier neoconservative organ, a label Irving fully embraced . The foundation also served as a key backer of Commentary magazine after Norman Podhoretz took the helm in 1960. ..."
"... Meanwhile, since 1998, the foundation has given over $10 million to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI was built, literally, on Smith Richardson money), which fielded many of the Iraq war architects and promoters, including Frederick Kagan, John Bolton, former vice president Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Cohen, Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, David Frum, and Danielle Pletka. ..."
"... No surprise, then, that the worldview of people like Nadia Schadlow is no different from the wider Washington policy orbit that has enjoyed a pipeline of patronage from her former employer. She is not only affiliated with the Foreign Policy Institute, but is a full member of the Council on Foreign Relations. When she was named to the NSC staff in March 2017, along with "Kremlinologist" and former Eurasian Foundation strategist Fiona Hill, national security establishment courtier Thomas Ricks called them both "well-educated, skeptical, and informed. In other words, the opposite of the president they serve." ..."
"... That is why there seemed to be such relief upon the recent release of the Trump administration's National Security Strategy, with Washington scribblers lauding it as " well within the bipartisan mainstream of American foreign policy " and "a well crafted document that should reassure allies and partners." ..."
"... What it actually does is to reinforce Trump's turn towards a harder line against Iran, as evidenced in McMaster's recent speeches . Nikki Haley, ambassador to the UN, is threatening fellow members on the Security Council , and the Trump administration is seen as taking sides with Israel in the fragile Middle East peace process (or what's left if it). Meanwhile, the White House has just given a green light to arming Ukraine against Russia. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is executive editor of ..."
"... Follow her on Twitter @Vlahos_at_TAC. ..."
"... It turns to new parties, this endless Democrat/Republican cycle is a joke. Surely there are no more people out there that can rationally argue for the two party state as being a good setup for America. ..."
"... There is a term soldiers sometimes use to characterize those who have never fought, will never fight, but are nevertheless positive that fighting is the answer to their dissatisfactions. Chickenhawks. ..."
"... The Neocons are a cancer upon the American Body Politik. When Trump was elected I and many others were hopeful that this cancer could be effectively treated, but it could not for the cancer has spread to all vital organs and is terminal and our nation will die because of it. ..."
"... "Neocons?" Actually what they are is Neocoms or Neocommunists. World domination is the name of their game. ..."
"... The folks who thought President Trump would have a less belligerent foreign policy than Sec. Clinton would have deserve as much intellectual sympathy as those who thought that he would lower premiums and increase coverage of ACA. ..."
Over the last year critics have warned of the returning neoconservative influence on the
executive branch's national security apparatus, each day a little less confident that President
Donald Trump will keep to the seeming anti-interventionist impulses he demonstrated during the
2016 campaign.
News flash: We're already there.
Of course the most garish of the pro-war set -- Sebastian Gorka, K.T. McFarland, John Bolton
-- are easy to identify in or on the periphery of Trump's orbit (in Gorka's case, he was cast
out of the White House, only to
flak away in any media outlet that will pay attention). Meanwhile, elite neoconservative
voices like
Bill Kristol and
Max Boot have become darlings of the "Never Trump" cadre, finding new life as conservative
tokens on "Resistance" media like MSNBC.
What has been less obvious, but has become much clearer in these last few months, is that
other neoconservatives are quietly filling the vacuum left by Obama's cadre of liberal
interventionists. Many of them had taken a pass on "Never Trumping" publicly, and are now
popping up at the elbows of top cabinet officials.
Take Nadia Schadlow, for instance. Never heard of her? Unless you've been navigating the
rice paddies of Washington's post-9/11 national security enterprise for the last several years,
there's no reason you would have. But she has been at the National Security Council since last
winter, and is set to replace Dina
Powell as deputy national security advisor , at the right hand of NSC chief H.R. McMaster.
She was also the lead on the White House National Security
Strategy , released last month.
This was Schadlow's first position in government. Her résumé includes
doctoral degrees from Johns Hopkins Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) under
the tutelage of vocal Never Trumper and Iraq war promoter Eliot Cohen, who runs the largely
neoconservative Strategic Studies program
there, and whose last book, The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power, argued that the U.S., backed by a more
robust military, must be the "guardian of a stable world order." In that vein, Schadlow
published a book last year, War and the Art of
Governance , that extols the virtues of long-term military intervention for "achieving
sustainable political outcomes," requiring "the consolidation of combat gains through the
establishment of stable environments." Schadlow has repeated this for
years as a mantra for reordering military strategy in the wake of the disastrous wars she
and her contemporaries helped sustain, in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. Call it nation-building
by another name.
In a 2012 Weekly Standardcommentary , she
criticized the Obama administration for saying "the tide of war is receding," and exclaimed
"the line of thinking that now pervades the Pentagon avoids recognizing that combat and the
restoration of political order go hand and hand." While she gives a nod to "civil-military
operational planning and execution," she never utters the words "State Department." No surprise
there, either, since her neocon friends were responsible for the long slide of Foggy Bottom's
resources and influence in favor of military leadership, beginning with the "political
reconciliation" and reconstruction of Iraq, and then Afghanistan.
What is significant about Schadlow's role in the White House -- she's reportedly a
"trusted confidant" of General McMaster, who was lionized in the
New Yorker for his T.E. Lawrence approach to counterinsurgency in Tal Afar in 2006 -- is
not her bibliography, but her vast connections to Washington's foreign policy and national
security clique, especially its neoconservative elite. If one were using the metaphor of chain
migration, she would have plenty of friends on either side of the Potomac to tap for high-level
placement, consulting, and advice.
Why? As recent senior program director for the expansive, multi-million dollar International
Security and Foreign Policy Program under the Smith Richardson
Foundation , she has helped to fund and facilitate countless authors, conferences, think
tanks, and university programs since 9/11, most of which hew to the doctrine of sustained
military intervention towards the goal of U.S. global power and influence. That includes
preemptive war strategy, counterinsurgency, democracy promotion, and the continued push for
bigger military budgets and solutions to regional conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. If
there was a prominent player in the U.S. security community over the last 20 years, you can bet
Schadlow and Smith Richardson were more often than not connected to him.
But it goes back so much further than that. The foundation has a rich history cleaved to
neoconservative pioneers such as Irving Kristol, father of Bill, who in his own memoirs credits
the philanthropic institution and its then-director Randall Richardson (heir to the Vicks fortune) with helping him
jumpstart the Public Interest, known as the premier neoconservative organ,
a label Irving fully embraced . The foundation also served as a key backer of
Commentary magazine after Norman Podhoretz took the helm in 1960.
It is in international affairs that Smith Richardson has made some of its biggest impacts,
during the
anti-communist Reagan era and into the Middle East conflicts under Presidents Clinton,
Bushes, Obama, and Trump. To say the foundation was involved at every level in the lobbying for
and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement.
Example: Former Smith Richardson research director Devon Gaffney Cross became a director of the
Project for a New American Century, the intellectual vehicle that drove the removal of Saddam
Hussein and shaped George W. Bush's foreign policy. In 2000, Cross was listed as one of the
participants in PNAC's seminal treatise,
"Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century." The rest
of the contributors are a who's who of Washington's war theocracy, most of whom have benefitted
from Smith Richardson support.
Meanwhile, since 1998, the foundation has given over $10 million to the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI was built,
literally, on Smith Richardson money), which fielded many of the Iraq war architects and
promoters, including Frederick Kagan, John Bolton, former vice president Dick Cheney, Richard
Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Cohen, Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, David Frum, and Danielle
Pletka.
Just as telling is Smith Richardson's continued backing of the Institute for the Study of War , headed by Kimberly
Kagan, wife of Frederick, with whom she was a "de facto advisor"
to General Petraeus for a year as he set about his then-vaunted COIN strategy in
Afghanistan. ISW, chaired by retired General Jack Keane, known as the " godfather
of the surge ," was founded in part by the generosity of Smith Richardson in 2007. It not
only promoted more troops, but an extended occupation in Afghanistan, regime change in
Syria , and ongoing hostilities with Iran. No surprise, then, that ISW has numerous
intertwining relationships with the military and the defense industry. It received $895,000 for
program work from Smith Richardson between 2014 and 2016 alone.
According to Philip Rojc of Inside Philanthropy, other recipients of Smith Richardson grants since 1998
include the the Hudson Institute ($6,032,230), the Jamestown Institute ($5,779,475), the Hoover
Institution ($3,645,314), and the Center for a New American Security ($1,595,000). Totals have
been adjusted to include 2016 numbers.
The last one -- CNAS -- is more indicative of Smith Richardson's broader strategy, in that
it doesn't only give to hardline neoconservative outfits like, say, the Foundation
for the Defense of Democracies (which has received no less than $500,000 since 2014 and
says it helped write Trump's new Iran policy ). On the contrary, Smith Richardson has been
a major patron of the conventional establishment, too, even largely Democratic think tanks like
CNAS, Brookings Institute, and the Carnegie Endowment -- all of which invariably host scholars
and programs that promote America's military-driven global influence, counterinsurgency
doctrine (CNAS was a
virtual hothouse for COIN early in Obama's presidency), and democracy
promotion in places like Russia and Ukraine, a major yet failed project of humanitarian
interventionists in the Obama administration.
No surprise, then, that the worldview of people like Nadia Schadlow is no different from the
wider Washington policy orbit that has enjoyed a pipeline of patronage from her former
employer. She is not only affiliated with the Foreign Policy Institute, but is a full member of
the Council on Foreign Relations. When she was named to the NSC staff in March 2017, along with
"Kremlinologist" and former Eurasian Foundation strategist
Fiona Hill, national security establishment courtier Thomas Ricks called them
both "well-educated, skeptical, and informed. In other words, the opposite of the president
they serve."
You know the "right" kind of operator has arrived in the White House when establishment
commentariat like Ricks and
Josh Rogin get all gushy about their calming, "soft power" influence over Trump, which
sounds like a lot of bunk when you consider their well-documented points of view.
Simply put, after years of cross-pollination brought on by a slush fund of wealthy private
donors like Smith Richardson and an even more eager defense industry, neoconservative views are
no longer distinguishable from the sanctioned goals of the Washington policy establishment.
They are all working, really, as proper stewards of the military-industrial complex, which is
essential for advancing their (sometimes competing) visions of world power politics and
American exceptionalism. There is little room for realism and restraint, as voiced by this
magazine and other critics.
Call it the new "adults in the room," if you want, or peg it as the neoconservative
influence that it is. Strikingly, Dan Drezner writes that the NSS is
"Straussian" in that its "subtext matters at least as much as the text." The preeminent
scholar Leo Strauss is considered one of the key founders of the neoconservative movement, a
fact the Washington Post columnist should be well aware of. Like most of the elites
here in Washington, however, Drezner is trying to have it both ways -- calling it neocon
without have the guts to say it outright.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is executive editor of The American Conservative. Follow
her on Twitter @Vlahos_at_TAC.
It is a sad state of affairs when the American people are literally dependent on sane people
in Beijing, Moscow, Ankara, Tehran, and other capitals to keep a completely out of control
neo-con foreign and defense policy establishment from plunging our people on the world into
yet more pointless warfare.
Mainstream media seems "All Neocon." A star studded group of rationalizers. We are being
gently taught to hate what the neocons hate. South Pacific had the recipe. Not for the
reasons intended. Au contraire.
So. Well-heeled foreign interests and interventionists are buying nosebagger politicians and
shaping our foreign policy under Trump, just like they did under Obama, Bush II, and Clinton.
Why do we bother having elections if neocon crap is the only item on the menu?
It's incredible. No matter how often they lie and fail, no matter how many colossally
expensive disasters they cause, someone keeps letting the filth back in. They're as hardy and
resilient as cockroaches, and we need to start dealing with them as such.
Trump 'needs a war' to be re-elected. He knows this and who else to better start one than the
neo-cons?
What is terrifying is that these same people and their ancestors actually attempted to
convince Reagan that the US could win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Reagan wisely
chose 'Trust but Verify' over their strongest objections. Trump is a far cry from a
Reagan.
The generations long war to destroy the State Department appears to have completely
obscured the greatest US victory of last century. The defeat of the Soviet Union with little
more than skirmishes.
The gloved fist approach, while frustrating to the military, was a massive success.
Military solutions fail badly. One look at the history of military governments confirms their
abysmal record. Yet, we have an administration preparing for war. Not at all certain, the
people will follow.
Good article. Trump is easily distracted from his (often right) gut feelings on policy
(China, NATO, etc.) by titles: military rank, highbrow think tanks, Wall St. moguls, and
power elites from the Council on Foreign Relations. With no moral compass or basic
understanding of the Constitution or the ways Washington works, he is hapless and his agenda
is hamstrung.
I wondered how far down I'd have to go down in the article before Ukraine and Putin popped
up! It's the usual "let Putin win in Ukraine" propaganda. What astonishes me as a European is
why people who call themselves "conservatives", whom you would naturally expect to be
patriotic, often indeed excessively so, are frantically trying to persuade their fellow
citizens to submit to a foreign power inflicting a humiliating defeat on their country,
possibly the most humiliating that it has ever suffered in its history. I couldn't imagine
Europeans behaving like that.
Interesting article with good info. I believe "the Trump White House" is just continuing the
policies of the past occupants of "The House of Blood."
[More info at link below]
August 9, 2016
The House of Blood
Its color is white but it is red with blood
The residents' name should really be mud
Instead they get fancy honors and titles
Wars for them is a musical recital
The hum of their drones flying through the air
Are killing children without due care
This is hellishly called "collateral damage"
These are the words of the resident savage
Immaculately dressed in a business suit
An eloquent speaker is this callous brute
Surrounded by sycophants and flunkeys too
Evil is what these people plan and do
War and more war is their hellish aim
Are they all devils and bloody insane?
Countries are reduced to smoking rubble
These well-dressed maniacs are big trouble
People are fleeing and dying too
From the hell produced by this satanic crew
Refugees are drowning in deadly waters
Trying to escape the endless slaughters
These helpless victims once had homes
Now they have nothing, and just roam
Helpless, homeless people on the move
With nothing really left to improve
The perpetrators call their crimes "bringing democracy"
Surely creating hell on earth is really hypocrisy
But when criminals rule there is no justice
And law and order is totally corrupted
The war criminals slogan is "responsibility to protect"
They tell that to the people whose countries they wrecked
Those still alive can hear the bombs explode and thud
A hellish "courtesy" from the House of Blood
It turns to new parties, this endless Democrat/Republican cycle is a joke. Surely
there are no more people out there that can rationally argue for the two party state as being
a good setup for America.
There is a term soldiers sometimes use to characterize those who have never fought, will
never fight, but are nevertheless positive that fighting is the answer to their
dissatisfactions. Chickenhawks.
The Neocons are a cancer upon the American Body Politik. When Trump was elected I and
many others were hopeful that this cancer could be effectively treated, but it could not for
the cancer has spread to all vital organs and is terminal and our nation will die because of
it.
Trump won with a coalition of conservative and populist support. The two partners agree on
judges, but not too much else. For those of the latter persuasion, you at least have a seat
at the table in the current administration (thank you, Lord, for Stephen Miller!) Populists
need to run candidates at all levels and start to groom future leaders. Somebody with Rand
Paul's FP views and Tom Cotton's immigration views would be perfect.
@Michael Kenny,
Why should America care what Putin wins in Ukraine? Why doesn't the EU fight its own battles?
Go on, oppose Putin. You have more to lose than America does.
The folks who thought President Trump would have a less belligerent foreign policy than
Sec. Clinton would have deserve as much intellectual sympathy as those who thought that he
would lower premiums and increase coverage of ACA.
What was behind the false missile attack alarm in Hawaii yesterday. Poynter
has some context:
One of the big stories in the Honolulu
Star-Advertiser Saturday morning was that military "brass" updated island officials on
how the military would respond to a nuclear attack from North Korea . Military authorities
warned there was a "real" threat.
At 8:07 a.m. Saturday, Hawaiian residents saw a terrifying alert message on their
phones.
It took 38 minutes to correct the "mistake". A missile from North Korea would take 32-35
minutes from launch to impact in Hawaii.
But of interest is the newspaper report hyping the "threat" followed by the false alarm.
Coincidence? And the "
leaking " of the Draft Nuclear Posture Review this week, in which the military demands
hundreds of new "small" nuclear weapons to fight North Korea and Russia, is also just a
coincidence? Or is all of this part of a public relation campaign designed to increase the
acceptance of new nuclear weapons and "limited" nuclear warfare? A preparation for war on North
Korea? (Related: Deconstructing the North
Korean 'Threat' and Identifying America's Strategic Alternatives
What was behind the false missile attack alarm in Hawaii yesterday. Poynter has
some context:
One of the big stories in the Honolulu
Star-Advertiser Saturday morning was that military "brass" updated island officials on
how the military would respond to a nuclear attack from North Korea . Military authorities
warned there was a "real" threat.
At 8:07 a.m. Saturday, Hawaiian residents saw a terrifying alert message on their
phones.
It took 38 minutes to correct the "mistake". A missile from North Korea would take
32-35 minutes from launch to impact in Hawaii.
But of interest is the newspaper report hyping the "threat" followed by the false
alarm. Coincidence? And the "
leaking " of the Draft Nuclear Posture Review this week, in which the military demands
hundreds of new "small" nuclear weapons to fight North Korea and Russia, is also just a
coincidence? Or is all of this part of a public relation campaign designed to increase the
acceptance of new nuclear weapons and "limited" nuclear warfare? A preparation for war on
North Korea? (Related: Deconstructing the North
Korean 'Threat' and Identifying America's Strategic Alternatives (pdf))
Scott Creighton has been working up collateral to his theory that the Hawaii false alert was
part of a test to sell the Aegis radar system to Japan. Aegis controls the alert system in
Hawaii. The sales contract is $2 billion. Japanese and Pentagon officials were in the area
last Thursday as part of an ongoing demonstration of the system. This is his written post (he
has a later post in a 20-minute video for those who prefer):
So, while it could be a false flag test of some kind, and while it could be tied to the
talks between the two Koreas, I can see it could just as easily be corrupt MIC business as
usual. It seems unlikely this alert was sent in error. But could it have been sent so the
Japanese could see the warning system in action? And US officials reason, well, it's only
Korea and Hawaii's closest, so we have a plausible scenario and neither area has any clout to
complain? And that's as far as their thinking needed to go, because at that point it all
looks perfectly explainable?
Re: Hawaii and nukes. This behavior is to be expected when generals are placed in charge of
foreign affairs because generals are: > ignorant of anything besides warfare. > taught
to believe that they are always right and their detractors are always wrong. >of the
belief that only wars, properly conduced with maximum force, solve problems.
A couple of President Harry Truman quotes: "It's the fellows who go to West Point and are
trained to think they're gods in uniform that I plan to take apart". . ."I didn't fire him
[General MacArthur] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not
against the law for generals. If it was, half to three quarters of them would be in
jail."
The Pentagon apparently will investigate the "leaked amateur non-professional" video of the
truck driver assault, not the assault itself, and the people connected with the video will be
punished, not the shooter. Memories of Chelsea Manning and the video of the
helicopter-shooting of the Iraqi Journalists, resulting in Manning's court-martial and
imprisonment.
Military investigating shooting in newly leaked Afghan combat video
U.S. commanders have launched an investigation into video footage that appears to show
an American service member firing into the cab of a civilian truck as the two vehicles pass
on a road in Afghanistan, an action that could have violated the military's rules of
engagement and may hamper the alliance with the Afghan government. The shooting briefly
appears during a gritty montage of combat footage allegedly recorded by U.S. troops
battling the Islamic State's Afghan affiliate. An anonymous user recently uploaded the
video to YouTube under the title "Happy Few Ordnance Symphony," then quickly removed it.
"The amateur video posted on a public website gives us serious concern," the U.S. Central
Command told POLITICO in a statement. "The video in question is not official, not
authorized and does not represent the professionalism of the service members of U.S.
Central Command. "We are conducting an investigation into this video, and will take
appropriate actions as a result of this investigation," it added. . .
here
The best treat today is to listen to all those that experienced yesterday's 'nuclear
attack'.
Many of us did not receive a missile attack message at all. This was not due to lack of
cell phone reception. Their phones worked, but they were not alerted. They also use the
same provider. Then, alert messages were different. Some said that the ballistic missile
threat would expire at 6pm. Right.
Here are my own experiences. You be the judge:
Driving towards Pahoa and reaching the High School intersection, I saw cops coming from
the Kalapana direction with lights and sirens on. They stopped at every pulled over vehicle
to talk to the driver. Then they turned into Pahoa road and I also pulled to the side of
the road, thinking whom they are after this time.
I had just turned down the radio, where HPR had started the news. That was at 8:01
AM.
The cop told me (both of his windows were rolled down): "The guy in North Korea has
fired three missiles at us. You should go home and stay with your family." He drove off to
Paul's gas station to talk to other drivers. His co-cop did the same at the propane
place.
My first thought was "That's bullshit." Cops driving around talking to folks
individually while the ICBM's are homing in. It would take those things 20 minutes to hit
their target.
Fuck that shit, I am going to have breakfast as intended. Should that be true, I had at
least a last break fast.
At the store the news had already created panic among those who are easily manipulated.
The hysteria was quite impressive and my reassuring them that things are okay went in the
one ear and out the other.
Mind you that I know these people for years and I am well known for being level
headed.
I get my breakfast and sit outside. A few other guys are rolling in. Then, at 8:07 AM,
the emergency alert appears on our phones. Those who knew, were all filled in by the cops
BEFORE the alert.
The alert caused the store to close. I did my best to calm people down. Explaining to
them that they should listen to their body, instead to anything the government says. George
Carlin's made that clear a long time ago.
But people are now so disconnected from the 'Here and Now' have been so propagandized
and brainwashed, that they are incapable to keep cool and THINK.
IF that would have been the real McCoy, we would have had twenty minutes left from the
time the cops 'informed' people.
Then, when it became apparent that it was bullshit, the cops drove around and appeared
to be taking license plates of those who did not panic, but have breakfast instead.
Around 8:30 AM, Tulsi Gabbard's tweets had made it around enough for people to calm down
somewhat.
The alert cancellation came at 8:45 AM.
Here are some questions.
Who will be the first to become aware of a ballistic missile taking off?
Whom would they inform about that?
Why were cops driving around and telling people personally about the impending
attack?
Flight time is approximately 20 minutes, which means that there were only ten minutes
left from the emergency alert counted from when I was told.
Likely less than ten minutes from 8:07 AM down to impact.
The excuses and explanations that followed made it even more clear that this was an
intentionally triggered false alarm.
That in turn is the dictionary definition of a TERROR ATTACK. To create fear, to
terrorize the population. This was not Kim Jong UN terrorizing Hawai'i, this was the US
regime creating a false flag Emergency Alert to terrorize the Hawai'ian people.
Who would be the first to be informed about an actually and factually happening
attack?
The so called "Commander in Chief"?
Or Bill Maher?
Hopefully, of the flood of people having inundated the islands - especially the Big
Island - most will go back where they came from. Ask anybody that lives here, or was born
here "WHY?".
Yes, they can. Manifest Destiny, WW1, WW2, State of Israel, Coup in Iran, Korean War,
JFK. Gulf OF Tonkin, Viet Nam, Oil Shortages, Oil Wars, Persian Gulf War, 911 and so
on....
Tulsi GAbbard's declarations after the false alarm point to the fact that she is one of the
few the very few U.S. representatives witha spine and a real understanding of the Korean
issue.
She wants talks without preconditions and give and take to reach the point where Kim no
longer feels he needs nuclear clout.
here's what actually happened to cause the false alarm quote Emergency Management Agency
Administrator Vern Miyagi said that the employee who made the mistake felt terrible for
triggering the alarm.
Miyagi apologized for the "trouble" and "heartbreak" caused by alert. "I accept the
responsibility for this," he said. "This is my team. We made a mistake."
But Miyagi also used the opportunity to highlight the fact that if the missile threat
were real, Hawaii residents would only have 12 to 15 minutes to react and find shelter.
"I regret what happened this morning," Miyagi said. "But it brings us up to speed again
about what to expect and what to do."
Miyagi explained that the mistake happened during a drill that occurred around a shift
change at the agency. He said an employee, was using a computer program as part of the
drill, and clicked on the wrong button, which sent out the mass alert.
"It's human error," Miyagi said. "There is a screen that says, 'Are you sure you want to
do this?'"
According to Miyagi, the employee clicked through the warning prompt, which resulted in
thousands of residents receiving an alert that a missile was headed toward the islands.
It's unclear how many people actually received the warning.
Miyagi said he was uncertain why some emergency sirens around the state also went
off.
Ige said that testing of the alert system will be suspended for now. He also said that
two people will now have to approve an alert before it goes public.
The testing on Saturday was part of Hawaii's efforts to upgrade its alert system to
provide earlier warning to residents in case of a missile attack.
Ige and Miyagi acknowledged that the state's emergency agency did not have a process in
place to cancel a false warning. Furthermore, the agency didn't realize until several
minutes later that it had accidentally sent out the warning to the public, Miyagi said.
"We didn't have a message scripted that said this is a false alarm," Ige said. "We were
not prepared for that."
"So we have built that now," he added.
While state officials could instantaneously send out the erroneous alert, they required
approvals from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to send out the corrected alert --
and that process contributed to the 38-minute delay, officials said.
"We have to clear that to make sure that we can get that out," Miyagi said. On Saturday
morning, information technology staff with the emergency agency scrambled to get those
approvals "as fast as they could," he added. Civil Defense head Verne Miyagi apologizes to
our community/public via media during press conference held at the Diamond Head Emergency
Operations Center.
Typical government incompetence. Having a dialog box " Are you sure? Y/N "
doesn't cut it anymore, as people have been conditioned for years to click on the OK
button without reading the prompt, to get to what they want. Waiting for a request of
federal funding to upgrade their systems. I can only imagine on what the price tag will be.
I suppose the silver lining is that the Japanese government observing the drill, now knows
what not to do regarding issuing public alerts.
Interesting comment about the police taking note of non-responders.
... It took 38 minutes to correct the "mistake". A missile from North Korea would take
32-35 minutes from launch to impact in Hawaii. ...
Wow! Good catch, And a nice piece of sleuthing, b... Oz's reptilian MSM didn't bother
acquainting its 'consumers' with that vital snippet of relevance. So, was the alert a
mistake or was it just another big chunk of pre-emptive Yankee Arseholery from The
Swamp?
I'll not waste time on whether or not the warning was legitimate; but rather, on the
expressed behavior of the people; it's a sure sign they're scared; which translates to; the
U.S. propaganda campaign has been very effective. This is truly frightening and a marker of
the true mental state of the populace. I must add; I'm very concerned; it exceeds my
vision/perception of today's reality. IMO; we've really crossed the Rubicon I'll re-adjust
my perception meter immediately to extreme.
"...Emergency Management Agency Administrator Vern Miyagi said that the employee who
made the mistake felt terrible for triggering the alarm..."
Miyagi should feel worse about remaining on his job despite his lack of management
skills and complete absence of system controls. He should also feel bad about having a
pre-programmed missile alert message that can be sent without any such alert from Pacific
Command and requires nothing more than a few clicks by a low-level employee.
"...But Miyagi also used the opportunity to highlight the fact that if the missile
threat were real, Hawaii residents would only have 12 to 15 minutes to react and find
shelter. "I regret what happened this morning," Miyagi said. "But it brings us up to speed
again about what to expect and what to do..."
Bad, bad time to look for a teachable moment here, Miyagi. I have to doubt the sincerity
of his earlier apology if he immediately morphs into a psychopathic, patronizing Homeland
Security bureaucrat and takes the opportunity to dispense a few words of government wisdom
to the little people since he has their attention. Jesus - I would have punched him in the
face at this point.
"...Miyagi explained that the mistake happened during a drill that occurred around a
shift change at the agency. He said an employee, was using a computer program as part of
the drill, and clicked on the wrong button, which sent out the mass alert..."
There is no such 'drill' or test performed anywhere else in the US that sends anything
but the canned test message to the Integrated Public Alert Warning System (IPAWS) on a
weekly or monthly schedule.
"It's human error," Miyagi said. "There is a screen that says, 'Are you sure you want
to do this?'"
The error is using the damn live IPAWS console for your 'drill'. No home-brew drill or
test should ever involve any access to the live IPAWS console for this exact
reason. I'm glad Miyagi never crewed a nuclear missile silo - we would all be dead by
now.
"...According to Miyagi, the employee clicked through the warning prompt, which
resulted in thousands of residents receiving an alert that a missile was headed toward the
islands. It's unclear how many people actually received the warning..."
Another reason for Miyagi's immediate dismissal. When you punch in an alert on the IPAWS
console, it goes directly to the FEMA IPAWS server, where it is then disseminated to
all your other client messaging systems. Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) is one of
those systems. WEA feeds every cell phone provider in the area (all of Hawaii in this
case). Any modern smartphone that's turned on and using a Hawaiian network will
automatically display the message with some obnoxious audio alert. 1.5 million people and
he thinks this message only reached 'thousands'? He's either a horrible liar or he's a
complete idiot.
"...Miyagi said he was uncertain why some emergency sirens around the state also went
off..."
Well, that was because his agency programmed IPAWS to fire the sirens for Civil
Emergency-type messages. Mostly because that's how you're suppose to activate them
if you're using IPAWS. That's what it's for. Didn't he just start testing the 'nuclear
attack' sirens last year? Don't tell me this message set off the Tsunami warning horns
instead. And why only some of them? Does this HEMA terrorist understand how to make any of
his DHS/FEMA junk in Hawaii work properly?
"...Furthermore, the agency didn't realize until several minutes later that it had
accidentally sent out the warning to the public, Miyagi said..."
What, NONE of these guys had a cellphone? Everyone in the building with one should have
seen/heard the alert within tens of seconds. That's how WEA works. They knew right away -
that's why they sent out FB and Twitter messages minutes later.
"We didn't have a message scripted that said this is a false alarm," Ige said. "We
were not prepared for that."
Doesn't he know anything about IPAWS? You don't NEED a pre-approved, scripted message.
There may be a specific message to deactivate WEA rebroadcasts, but there's nothing that
should have prevented them from sending a simple update for everyone to disregard the
earlier warning. This is done all the time in IPAWS - they must
really be confused or just not know how to use it at all. One would think they would take
the trouble to learn since they're inexplicably using the live console for testing.
"...While state officials could instantaneously send out the erroneous alert, they
required approvals from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to send out the corrected
alert -- and that process contributed to the 38-minute delay, officials said..."
More painfully-obvious made-up BS to cover their butts. HEMA *is* the messaging
authority there, period. FEMA has nothing to do with approving any messages for
them. The other US operators must be shaking their heads in disbelief.
"...information technology staff with the emergency agency scrambled to get those
approvals "as fast as they could," he added..."
Oh, I get it now. Contract IT that had no clue. They had to call FEMA to figure out what
to do, since they were apparently as unfamiliar with the system as the HEMA guys and
couldn't get it to work either. Good thing they didn't call the overseas help desk -
unplugging it for ten seconds wouldn't have fixed much.
What really worries me is how the Pacific Command in Hawaii reacted when all their
cellphones suddenly alerted them that THEY had 'detected an incoming ballistic missile'.
That's not the kind of erroneous alert I want my nuclear-armed military to see - ever.
According to Miyagi, the employee clicked through the warning prompt, which resulted in
thousands of residents receiving an alert that a missile was headed toward the
islands."
@Mauisurfer
How come, that cops were driving around telling everybody to go home and stay with their
families, because "the guy in North Korea" had fired three missiles? Plenty of people can
attest to that. If the error was with "this employee", than that would mean that there
could have been no prior knowledge of the cops about this ballistic missile threat. How did
the cops know before the employee made "a mistake"? That is not possible. The employee made
'the mistake' at 8:07 AM. We here in Pahoa we're warned before 8:07 AM.
There is obviously much more to this than meets the eyes and ears.
The ballistic missile threat was not created by 'this employee'.
Please take the time to read this excellent written review of Daniel Ellsberg's new book
about the "Doomsday Machine". It should further the under standing about the scope of the
Doomsday Machine that would have responded to any ballistic missile fired at Guam, Hawai'i,
or the mainland. https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/09/rational-insanity-a
the-mad-logic-of-americas-nuclear-doomsday-machine/
Thank You so much. While I am not familiar with
the intricacies of the IPAWS warning system, I
have experienced a number of tsunami and hurricane
alerts through this system. The cancellation was
always as immediate as the website would report.
(PTWC / CPHC respectively).
I get must be impeached and with all lower level
employees be prosecuted and terminated.
This 'event' has caused PTSD among a number of
people, especially the countless mother's with
infant babies.
This was not an accident, but it shall serve as
a wake up call to dismantle the nuclear Doomsday
machine.
North Korea aquired ICBM's to protect itself from
the people that almost entirely exterminated it
by the likes of Curtis LeMay.
The country with the most nukes must start unilaterally
to abolish its Doomsday Machine. Others will follow.
The threat by North Korea is a psychological projection
by the only people to ever have dropped nuclear bombs.
...
In that case North Korea would have lots of targets to chose from.
Posted by: somebody | Jan 15, 2018 5:43:22 AM | 60
Yes, interesting point reinforced, somewhat, by this extract from SST's January 13 post
about domestic US Military base closures...
"What's more, at the same time that the domestic base closings are proceeding, the
U.S. military footprint abroad is expanding. According to American University professor
David Vine, there are presently 800 American military bases abroad, in 70
countries, with an annual cost of $160-200 billion, including American theaters of
combat--Iraq and Afghanistan. Recent Pentagon studies of the need to devise a "third offset
strategy" to address the increased vulnerabilities of American military bases around the
globe raise further questions about the viability of the current military posture."
Unfortunately for the Yankees, Kim (correctly) regards the US Homeland as the top
priority target for NK retaliation to US Military violence inflicted on North Korea. Why
Nuke Hawaii, or some other island outpost, when he can Nuke Washington, New York, Boston,
plus the 5 biggest US freight ports and airports - at the same time on the same day? He
only has to convince the Yankees that it's "do-able" and NK will be AmeriKKKa-proof.
And let's not forget that China has said that if NK is attacked, China will respond on NK's
behalf.
Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 15, 2018 6:33:15 AM |
62Heros , Jan 15, 2018 6:58:12 AM |
63
@54 nottheonly1
"The threat by North Korea is a psychological projection by the only people to ever have
dropped nuclear bombs."
This reminds me of a famous expression out of 16th century Poland:
"The jew cries out in pain as he strikes you"
The evidence here clearly indicates that by signalling this alarm, which automatically
sent it out to IPAWS/HEMA/FEMA/PACCOM/NORAD/[who knows else where], someone was trying to
provoke a missile exchange and start a war.
Some miracle or god prevented this war that the MIC is so horny for from getting started
and the US nuking North Korea. It must be the same god that in 1967 prevented the Zionists
from sinking the Liberty after 2 hours of bombs and torpedoes, which would have directly
pulled the US into Israel's war against her Arab neighbors.
Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Jan 15, 2018 6:33:15 AM | 62
NK has been America-proof since the last war. The difference being that they have
convinced the US now that they can act on their own - without Chinese or Russian support.
That means the US will have to talk to North Korea directly.
"Rex Tillerson has been advocating for a diplomatic approach to this crisis, that is a
point of view that Canada shares, and so the purpose of this meeting is to talk about
economic and diplomatic ways of getting North Korea to the table," Paris said.
"I think it's the main purpose of this meeting," said Shin Maeng-ho, South Korea's
Ambassador to Canada, who is attending the meeting.
During an interview on CBC's The House with guest host Alison Crawford, Shin added: "I
think diplomacy is the only option left to us. War on the Korean peninsula means death of
millions of people."
"All foreign ministers in Vancouver will seek all the ways and means for diplomatic
solution," Shin said.
"... Regarding North Korean US military targets, the Guardian failed to include what might its primary target. Camp Humphreys which is 57 miles from the DMZ, in DPRK 300mm rocket range, and currently houses 12,000 Americans and is growing. So DPRK can't be attacked unless those Americans are evacuated first, and that won't happen. The host country would no permit it, and go crazy if they did. It would be mass mayhem. ..."
"... In fact the whole concept of forward basing actually puts a damper on any Pentagon aggression. Another example is the 40,000 Americans at various bases in the western Persian Gulf, well within Iran rocket and missile range. That means no attack against Iran. ..."
"... Finally, these bases are financially supported by host countries. In South Korea the current Camp Humphreys $10 billion expansion is reportedly being funded by ROK. ..."
> Regarding North Korean US military targets, the Guardian failed to include what might
its primary target. Camp Humphreys which is 57 miles from the DMZ, in DPRK 300mm rocket
range, and currently houses 12,000 Americans and is growing. So DPRK can't be attacked unless
those Americans are evacuated first, and that won't happen. The host country would no permit
it, and go crazy if they did. It would be mass mayhem.
> In fact the whole concept of forward basing actually puts a damper on any Pentagon
aggression. Another example is the 40,000 Americans at various bases in the western Persian
Gulf, well within Iran rocket and missile range. That means no attack against Iran.
> Finally, these bases are financially supported by host countries. In South Korea the
current Camp Humphreys $10 billion expansion is reportedly being funded by ROK.
Watch A Sitting Congresswoman Shred The MSM Narrative In Under A Minute
by Tyler Durden
Mon, 01/15/2018 - 16:34 155 SHARES
Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard appeared on multiple Sunday news shows a day after her
state's false ICBM
emergency alert sent the islands into a tense 40 minutes of panic before it was revealed to
be a message sent in error, where she slammed the mainstream media's reporting on the North
Korean nuclear threat, saying , "We've got to
understand that North Korea is holding onto these nuclear weapons because they think it is
their only protection from the United States coming in and doing to them what the United States
has done to so many countries throughout history."
She further called for Trump to hold direct talks with Kim Jong Un in order to prevent the
real thing from ever happening.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) Gabbard is an Army reserve officer who previously served two tours
in the Middle East, including in Iraq. Image via the Ron Paul Institute
On Saturday Gabbard had
immediately criticized President Trump for mishandling North Korea, taking to MSNBC to
proclaim that "our leaders have failed us. Donald Trump is taking too long... he's not taking
this [nuclear] threat seriously..." During Sunday interviews she elaborated on a plan of
action, advising
Trump to enter talks with Pyongyang which should "happen without preconditions" and that Trump
should "sit across the table from Kim Jong Un" in order stamp out the climate of fear which
contributed to the "unacceptable" alert issued on Saturday.
"We've got to get to the underlying issue here of why are the people of Hawaii and this
country facing a nuclear threat coming from North Korea today, and what is this President doing
urgently to eliminate that threat?" Gabbard said on
CNN's State of the Union. She added that Pyongyang sees its nuclear weapons program as "the
only deterrent against the U.S. coming in and overthrowing their regime there " after decades
of the US exhibiting a pattern of regime change when dealing with rogue states, which she said
makes setting up preconditions for talks a self-defeating step.
And concerning the potential for an "unintentional" nuclear war, Gabbard said, "It's not
just the President making a decision to launch a nuclear weapon . It's these kinds of mistakes
that we have seen happen in the past that bring us to this brink of nuclear war that could be
unintentional."
The Hawaii lawmaker, who has garnered a lot of attention over her non-interventionist stance
on Syria while angering establishment pundits for doing things like visiting
Damascus last year on a fact-finding mission, left ABC's George Stephanopoulos visibly
flustered during an
interview on Sunday's "This Week" . She said:
We know that North Korea has these nuclear weapons because they see how the United States
in Libya for example guaranteed Gadaffi - 'we're not going to go after you, you should get
rid of your nuclear weapons.' He did, then we went and led an attack that toppled Gaddafi,
launching Libya into chaos that we are still seeing the results of today. North Korea sees
what we did in Iraq with Saddam Hussein, with those false reports of weapons of mass
destruction. And now seeing in Iran how President Trump is decertifying a nuclear deal that
prevented Iran from developing their nuclear weapons, threatening the very existence and the
agreement that was made.
At this point an incredulous Stephanopoulos stopped the Congresswoman and asked, " Was it a
mistake for the United States to take out Gaddafi and Hussein ?" Gabbard responded firmly with,
"It was, absolutely." Apparently this was enough to end the interview as a presumably shocked
Stephanopoulos had no response at that point.
For those unfamiliar, Gabbard is an Army reserve officer who previously served two tours in
the Middle East, including in Iraq, and has been an outspoken critic of regime change and
Washington's interventionist foreign policy.
"... What do you think? Perhaps almost 60,000 Americans dying in Vietnam was a darker time. Or maybe when Hitler's armies rolled across Europe, Japan surprise attacked Pearl Harbor, and 400,000 American soldiers died World War II. ..."
"... Anyone who thinks Trump's Presidency is the darkest time in American history is a poor student of American history. And I must assume their lives are pretty amazing if this is the worst they have ever felt. ..."
I saw someone refer to the Trump Presidency as "possibly the darkest time in American
history." I've heard some iteration of that many times from people still in a frenzy over the
Trump Administration.
I'm not a big Trump fan. I wasn't a big Obama fan either. But their presence in office did
not and does not hang over my life like a dark cloud. They really aren't that important.
Yes, they have the ability to make life more difficult for many. It is unfortunate that any
politicians have that much control over our day to day lives.
But the darkest time in American history ?
What do you think? Perhaps almost 60,000 Americans dying in Vietnam was a darker time. Or
maybe when Hitler's armies rolled across Europe, Japan surprise attacked Pearl Harbor, and
400,000 American soldiers died World War II.
For Japanese Americans, FDR's
presidency was likely a darker time, as they sat in detainment facilities. Their crime was
having Japanese ancestors.
In 1918 the Spanish Flu swept across the globe killing at least 20 million people worldwide,
675,000 Americans. At the same time, soldiers were coming home from WWI blinded by chemicals
and mutilated by bombs.
And that is just going back one century. American history also includes the Civil War,
slavery, and
the Whiskey Rebellion .
Anyone who thinks Trump's Presidency is the darkest time in American history is a poor
student of American history. And I must assume their lives are pretty amazing if this is the
worst they have ever felt.
... ... ...
Look at where it left the global
warming alarmists . They wanted to reduce pollution, which is a noble cause. But they lied
about the goals, they lied about the causes, and they exaggerated the timetable. It's the
classic boy who cried wolf.
... ... ...
I used to be paranoid about the government. Obviously, some of that paranoia is well
founded. They do monitor communications and
disrupt online discourse . They do violate
rights . They are oppressive
in many ways.
While Trump was emasculated after just three months of his presidency, the reality is that Trump does not matter. It is
the deep state that controls the Us foreign policy...
Over the weekend, the people of
Hawaii were temporarily terrorized by a notification sent to their mobile phones that a ballistic
missile was headed straight for them
and they needed to seek shelter immediately. They were
not notified that it was a false alarm
for
38 minutes
, despite its reportedly being a simple human error triggered by an employee who "pushed
the wrong button".
Many who are less trusting of official CNN narratives when it comes to the US power establishment
have been
voicing skepticism
of this explanation,
finding the timing highly suspect given that the Trump administration
just caused international controversy by
giving the okay
for a $133 million sale of an anti-ballistic missile system to Japan
. A
sale which,
according to Russia,
violates international ballistic missile treaties and will put a strain on
Moscow's relationship with Tokyo.
The general idea is that this deal has a lot less to do with the threat posed by North
Korea, its ostensible object, and a lot more to do with the
Russia-China
tandem
that the US power establishment is continually working to undermine.
Placing an
anti-ballistic missile system in the hands of a US ally right on the east edge of Asia weakens the
effectiveness of
mutually assured
destruction (MAD)
, the understanding that if any nation launches a nuclear attack on another
nuclear-armed country there will be full-scale retaliation and both countries will be destroyed. If
some American officials get it into their heads that their country's rivals can be taken out via
nuclear strikes and any retaliatory strikes nullified via missile defense systems, MAD is no longer a
deterrent to this and we're looking at potentially billions of deaths and possible planetary
extinction.
Regardless of whether the false alarm was a psyop designed to manufacture support for the
anti-ballistic missile sale or a genuine human error, the fact remains that the deal itself is
undeniably a move taken by the Trump administration against the will and interests of the Kremlin.
This is just the latest in a string of maneuvers against Russia that have been made by this
administration, despite Trump's continued outward assurances that he wants to improve relations with
Moscow. As is so often the case, a US president is saying one thing and doing something very
different.
And it completely kills the Russiagate narrative.
Just a few days ago Russiagaters were having yet another "BOOM! We got him!" social media
parade
about
an article
from the
Clinton-directed
Daily
Beast, claiming that a senior national security aide within the Trump administration had suggested
scaling down the US troop presence along Russia's border, a dangerous escalation which all peace
advocates support eliminating. In the first sentence of the article's second paragraph, the author
Spencer Ackerman acknowledges that "the proposal was ultimately not adopted."
Huh?
So President Trump, alleged to have been groomed early and at great expense by the
Kremlin in anticipation of a presidential victory nobody else imagined possible at that time, was
pitched a recommendation to scale down new cold war escalations with Russia... and he refused?
That's how you're starting your article about the "return on Russia's election-time investment in
President Trump"?
Russiagate is so weird.
You need to plug yourself into Louise Mensch and
Rachel Maddow ramblings so extensively that you can contort your sense of reason to the point where it
looks perfectly rational to believe that Putin was omniscient enough to know that Trump could defeat
all primary opponents and take the fight to the heir apparent Hillary Clinton back when virtually no
one else imagined such a thing was possible, recruited his team reportedly at the
cost of billions of dollars
, poured all kinds of intel and resources into ensuring Trump's
election using hackers and bots to influence American opinion, only to get a US president who is, when
it comes to facts in evidence, already just a year into his administration demonstrably more hawkish
towards Russia than his predecessor was.
Again: huh?
Nobody wants to think about this because it doesn't fit in with America's stale partisan models;
Democrats would have to admit that their best shot at getting a rival president impeached
is pure gibberish, and Trump supporters would have to acknowledge that their swamp-draining populist
hero is actually just one more corrupt globalist neocon like his predecessors.
But when
it comes to actual facts in evidence, that's exactly what we're looking at.
Over and over and over again this alleged Russian asset has been choosing to undermine
Moscow instead of advancing its interests.
He approved the sale of arms to Ukraine, a
move loudly
encouraged by DC
neocons
which
Obama refused to do
because of the dangerous tensions it would inflame with Russia. His
administration forced
first RT
and
now Sputnik
to register as foreign agents,
expanded NATO
with the addition of
Montenegro, assigning
established Russia hawk
Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine,
shutting
down a Russian consulate
in San Francisco and throwing out Russian diplomats as part of continued
back-and-forth hostile diplomatic exchanges, and
signing the Russian
sanctions bill
despite loud protests from Moscow. If he is indeed an expensive Russian asset, then
Russia got ripped off.
The one area Russiagaters can claim Trump hasn't gone against Russian interests is in Syria, where
the administration has cooperated with Putin in fighting terrorist forces. Or at least, they would
have been able to make that argument
had Obama not been in favor of it as well
. If Syria proves Trump is a Putin puppet, then the White
House must have been offering a two-for-one deal, because they bought Obama as well.
Russiagaters can claim "Well, Trump colluded with Russia, but because we're putting
political pressure on him not to align with Putin he isn't able to do anything to advance Moscow's
interests."
Okay, but what's the charge, then? That Russia bought Trump, and accomplished
absolutely nothing other than bringing new sanctions and cold war escalations down upon itself? Again,
the Steele dossier upon which the collusion narrative is based alleges that Trump was recruited at
great expense long before anyone in the US thought of him as a serious presidential contender. We're
expected to believe that Putin was psychic enough to know Trump could win with enough confidence to
invest accordingly, but not psychic enough to know that collusion and election meddling could be
detected by America's sprawling surveillance networks and cause backlash, sanctions and escalations?
No part of any of this makes any sense at all. If you can see past the stupid corporate
media-fed filters of Trump_vs_deep_state and anti-Trump_vs_deep_state enough to look at what's actually happening, the
collusion narrative is nonsense on its face.
Maybe the false missile alarm wasn't a psyop, but Russiagate definitely is. America's unelected
power establishment had a plan to manufacture support for new escalations to hobble the Russia-China
tandem regardless of who won the 2016 presidential election, and since their prefered candidate didn't
win they've been employing what is surely the most extensive single psychological operation ever
performed in human history.
And it's working so far. Sure will cause a lot of problems for them if people start waking up to
it, though.
"No part of this makes any sense"...author is a fucking retard. It makes perfect sense when
you realize that the Democrats are traitorous greedy deranged lunatics who have disconnected
from reality.
Sanctions must be placed on the US immediately. Put all US Nationals on Foreign Soil under
House/Base-Arrest, in particular, the Real Psychotic Banker/MIC/Neocon Types. Then Close their
Internment/Training Camps, cutting off their WMD Supply Routes and hence, their ability to form
Militias for Regime Change purposes.
article is bullshit.... If Trump even thinks about cooperating with RUSSIA he is "completely a
russian agent" if he tries to sabotage Russia then he is "totally being played and is a deep
state play-along"
he can't win. like in 90% of all the press............. Trump is hated
because he is against the Deep STate.
I always go with the exact opposite of what the mainstream says. That is , more often than
not, the closest thing to the truth.
What was behind the false missile attack alarm in Hawaii yesterday. Poynter
has some context:
One of the big stories in the Honolulu
Star-Advertiser Saturday morning was that military "brass" updated island officials on
how the military would respond to a nuclear attack from North Korea . Military authorities
warned there was a "real" threat.
At 8:07 a.m. Saturday, Hawaiian residents saw a terrifying alert message on their
phones.
It took 38 minutes to correct the "mistake". A missile from North Korea would take 32-35
minutes from launch to impact in Hawaii.
But of interest is the newspaper report hyping the "threat" followed by the false alarm.
Coincidence? And the "
leaking " of the Draft Nuclear Posture Review this week, in which the military demands
hundreds of new "small" nuclear weapons to fight North Korea and Russia, is also just a
coincidence? Or is all of this part of a public relation campaign designed to increase the
acceptance of new nuclear weapons and "limited" nuclear warfare? A preparation for war on North
Korea? (Related: Deconstructing the North
Korean 'Threat' and Identifying America's Strategic Alternatives
What was behind the false missile attack alarm in Hawaii yesterday. Poynter has
some context:
One of the big stories in the Honolulu
Star-Advertiser Saturday morning was that military "brass" updated island officials on
how the military would respond to a nuclear attack from North Korea . Military authorities
warned there was a "real" threat.
At 8:07 a.m. Saturday, Hawaiian residents saw a terrifying alert message on their
phones.
It took 38 minutes to correct the "mistake". A missile from North Korea would take
32-35 minutes from launch to impact in Hawaii.
But of interest is the newspaper report hyping the "threat" followed by the false
alarm. Coincidence? And the "
leaking " of the Draft Nuclear Posture Review this week, in which the military demands
hundreds of new "small" nuclear weapons to fight North Korea and Russia, is also just a
coincidence? Or is all of this part of a public relation campaign designed to increase the
acceptance of new nuclear weapons and "limited" nuclear warfare? A preparation for war on
North Korea? (Related: Deconstructing the North
Korean 'Threat' and Identifying America's Strategic Alternatives (pdf))
Scott Creighton has been working up collateral to his theory that the Hawaii false alert was
part of a test to sell the Aegis radar system to Japan. Aegis controls the alert system in
Hawaii. The sales contract is $2 billion. Japanese and Pentagon officials were in the area
last Thursday as part of an ongoing demonstration of the system. This is his written post (he
has a later post in a 20-minute video for those who prefer):
So, while it could be a false flag test of some kind, and while it could be tied to the
talks between the two Koreas, I can see it could just as easily be corrupt MIC business as
usual. It seems unlikely this alert was sent in error. But could it have been sent so the
Japanese could see the warning system in action? And US officials reason, well, it's only
Korea and Hawaii's closest, so we have a plausible scenario and neither area has any clout to
complain? And that's as far as their thinking needed to go, because at that point it all
looks perfectly explainable?
Re: Hawaii and nukes.
This behavior is to be expected when generals are placed in charge of foreign affairs because
generals are:
> ignorant of anything besides warfare.
> taught to believe that they are always right and their detractors are always wrong.
>of the belief that only wars, properly conduced with maximum force, solve problems.
A couple of President Harry Truman quotes: "It's the fellows who go to West Point and are
trained to think they're gods in uniform that I plan to take apart". . ."I didn't fire him
[General MacArthur] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not
against the law for generals. If it was, half to three quarters of them would be in
jail."
The Pentagon apparently will investigate the "leaked amateur non-professional" video of the
truck driver assault, not the assault itself, and the people connected with the video will be
punished, not the shooter. Memories of Chelsea Manning and the video of the
helicopter-shooting of the Iraqi Journalists, resulting in Manning's court-martial and
imprisonment.
Military investigating shooting in newly leaked Afghan combat video
U.S. commanders have launched an investigation into video footage that appears to show
an American service member firing into the cab of a civilian truck as the two vehicles pass
on a road in Afghanistan, an action that could have violated the military's rules of
engagement and may hamper the alliance with the Afghan government.
The shooting briefly appears during a gritty montage of combat footage allegedly recorded
by U.S. troops battling the Islamic State's Afghan affiliate. An anonymous user recently
uploaded the video to YouTube under the title "Happy Few Ordnance Symphony," then quickly
removed it.
"The amateur video posted on a public website gives us serious concern," the U.S. Central
Command told POLITICO in a statement. "The video in question is not official, not
authorized and does not represent the professionalism of the service members of U.S.
Central Command.
"We are conducting an investigation into this video, and will take appropriate actions as a
result of this investigation," it added. . .
here
The best treat today is to listen to all
those that experienced yesterday's 'nuclear
attack'.
Many of us did not receive a missile attack
message at all. This was not due to lack of
cell phone reception. Their phones worked,
but they were not alerted. They also use
the same provider.
Then, alert messages were different. Some
said that the ballistic missile threat
would expire at 6pm. Right.
Here are my own experiences. You be the
judge:
Driving towards Pahoa and reaching the
High School intersection, I saw cops
coming from the Kalapana direction with
lights and sirens on. They stopped at
every pulled over vehicle to talk to
the driver.
Then they turned into Pahoa road and
I also pulled to the side of the road,
thinking whom they are after this time.
I had just turned down the radio, where
HPR had started the news. That was at
8:01 AM.
The cop told me (both of his windows were
rolled down):
"The guy in North Korea has fired three
missiles at us. You should go home and
stay with your family."
He drove off to Paul's gas station to
talk to other drivers. His co-cop did
the same at the propane place.
My first thought was "That's bullshit."
Cops driving around talking to folks
individually while the ICBM's are
homing in. It would take those things
20 minutes to hit their target.
Fuck that shit, I am going to have
breakfast as intended. Should that
be true, I had at least a last break fast.
At the store the news had already created
panic among those who are easily manipulated.
The hysteria was quite impressive and my
reassuring them that things are okay went
in the one ear and out the other.
Mind you that I know these people for years
and I am well known for being level headed.
I get my breakfast and sit outside. A few
other guys are rolling in. Then, at 8:07 AM,
the emergency alert appears on our phones.
Those who knew, were all filled in by the
cops BEFORE the alert.
The alert caused the store to close. I did
my best to calm people down. Explaining to
them that they should listen to their body,
instead to anything the government says.
George Carlin's made that clear a long time
ago.
But people are now so disconnected from the
'Here and Now' have been so propagandized
and brainwashed, that they are incapable
to keep cool and THINK.
IF that would have been the real McCoy,
we would have had twenty minutes left
from the time the cops 'informed' people.
Then, when it became apparent that it was
bullshit, the cops drove around and appeared
to be taking license plates of those who did
not panic, but have breakfast instead.
Around 8:30 AM, Tulsi Gabbard's tweets had
made it around enough for people to calm
down somewhat.
The alert cancellation came at 8:45 AM.
Here are some questions.
Who will be the first to become aware of a
ballistic missile taking off?
Whom would they inform about that?
Why were cops driving around and telling
people personally about the impending
attack?
Flight time is approximately 20 minutes,
which means that there were only ten minutes
left from the emergency alert counted from
when I was told.
Likely less than ten minutes from 8:07 AM down
to impact.
The excuses and explanations that followed
made it even more clear that this was an
intentionally triggered false alarm.
That in turn is the dictionary definition
of a TERROR ATTACK. To create fear, to
terrorize the population. This was not
Kim Jong UN terrorizing Hawai'i, this
was the US regime creating a false flag
Emergency Alert to terrorize the Hawai'ian
people.
Who would be the first to be informed about
an actually and factually happening attack?
The so called "Commander in Chief"?
Or Bill Maher?
Hopefully, of the flood of people having
inundated the islands - especially the
Big Island - most will go back where they
came from. Ask anybody that lives here, or
was born here
"WHY?".
Yes, they can. Manifest Destiny, WW1, WW2, State of Israel, Coup in Iran, Korean War,
JFK. Gulf OF Tonkin, Viet Nam, Oil Shortages, Oil Wars, Persian Gulf War, 911 and so
on....
Tulsi GAbbard's declarations after the false alarm point to the fact that she is one of the
few
the very few U.S. representatives witha spine and a real understanding of the Korean issue.
She wants talks without preconditions and give and take to reach the point where Kim
no longer feels he needs nuclear clout.
@somebody 60
> Regarding North Korean US military targets, the Guardian failed to include what might its
primary target. Camp Humphreys which is 57 miles from the DMZ, in DPRK 300mm rocket range, and
currently houses 12,000 Americans and is growing. So DPRK can't be attacked unless those
Americans are evacuated first, and that won't happen. The host country would no permit it, and
go crazy if they did. It would be mass mayhem.
> In fact the whole concept of forward basing actually puts a damper on any Pentagon
aggression. Another example is the 40,000 Americans at various bases in the western Persian
Gulf, well within Iran rocket and missile range. That means no attack against Iran.
> Finally, these bases are financially supported by host countries. In South Korea the
current Camp Humphreys $10 billion expansion is reportedly being funded by ROK.
Posted by: Don Bacon | Jan 15, 2018 10:08:20 AM |
76
Okay, the segment with the shooting through the truck window is still only 5 seconds but
I'd argue that the fact that it is part of a 3 minute montage 'our guys are kicking ass in
Afghanistan' actually gives it a much worse context. If this was some innocent procedural,
'we had to reluctantly do it' incident, no one in their right mind would have popped it into
such a sequence.
Shortly before panicked Hawaiians stuffed children into storm drains and said their goodbyes on the
morning of January 13, an unnamed employee at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (H-EMA)
accidentally selected the wrong dropdown menu choice
, resulting in a live broadcast to the
cell phones of Hawaii residents and tourists which read "
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO
HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL
," according to officials.
Around 8:05 a.m., the Hawaii emergency employee initiated the internal test, according to a
timeline released by the state. From a drop-down menu on a computer program,
he saw two
options: "Test missile alert" and "Missile alert."
He was supposed to choose the former;
as much of the world now knows, he chose the latter, an initiation of a real-life missile alert.
At 8:07, the alert went out, with a more detailed message scrolling across television screens,
reading:
"Civil authority has issued A CIVIL DANGER WARNING for the following counties or areas: Hawaii:
At 8:07 AM on Jan 13, 2018... Message from IPAWSCAP. The U.S. Pacific Command has detected a
missile threat to Hawaii. A missile may impact on land or sea within minutes. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
If you are indoors, stay indoors. If you are outdoors, seek immediate shelter in a building. Remain
indoors well away from windows. If you are driving, pull safely to the side of the road and seek
shelter in a building or lay on the floor."
38 minutes later,
a wireless alert went out letting people know "There is no
missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. Repeat. False Alarm."
By then it was too late: the fake warning had ignited mass panic among residents - many of whom
thought they had minutes to live. One resident had a little girl get into a manhole during the
threat.
Authorities were apologetic, with Governor David Ige (D) apologizing for the "pain and confusion"
caused by accidentally telling millions of people death was imminent, saying in a press conference "
a
mistake made during a standard procedure at the changeover of a shift and an employee pushed the wrong
button."
The following day, there were far more questions than answers. Brand new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said
the alert was "absolutely unacceptable," and that a full investigation was underway. Pai seemed to
initially lay blame at state officials for the mistake.
"Based on the information we have collected so far, it appears that the government of Hawaii did
not have reasonable safeguards or process controls in place to prevent the transmission of a false
alert," said Pai, adding "Federal, state, and local officials throughout the country need to work
together to identify any vulnerabilities to false alerts and do what's necessary to fix them. We also
must ensure that corrections are issued immediately in the event that a false alert does go out."
Technical Difficulties
A major factor in the 38 minute gap between the erroneous warning and the subsequent "false alarm"
alert was the fact that while the state has permission from FEMA to
issue
the emergency
broadcast, there is no system in place to send out a subsequent "false alarm" alert.
"We had to double back and work with FEMA [to craft and approve the false alarm alert] and that's
what took time," said HEMA spokesman Richard Rapoza.
Rapoza says that has now been remedied with a cancellation option that can be selected within
seconds of a mistake. "In the past there was no cancellation button. There was no false alarm button
at all," Rapoza said. "Now there is a command to issue a message immediately that goes over on the
same system saying 'It's a false alarm. Please disregard.' as soon as the mistake is identified."
The Emergency Management Agency also said it suspended all drills until the completion of their
investigation, as well as a
"two-person activation/verification rule"
to initiate
tests and missile launch notifications.
According to the
Washington Post,
"The agency said it would issue a preliminary report of
findings and corrective actions next week.
The employee in question has been temporarily
reassigned, Rapoza said, but there are no plans to fire him
.
"Part of the problem was it was too easy -- for anyone -- to make such a big mistake," Rapoza said.
"We have to make sure that we're not looking for retribution, but we should be fixing the problems in
the system. . . . I know that it's a very, very difficult situation for him."
Of course no one is going to get fired. Most government "jobs" are
nothing more than welfare. Turd counters collecting checks. This guy
probably saw the word "test" and said, ain't no way I am takin' a test
today.
Don't be so harsh on the guy. He was probably petting his
therapy puppy and reading "How to Properly Punch a Nzai," and
by axident hit the wrong button.
Lets face it, all those words on the screen are confusing!
I'm making over $14k a month working part time. I kept
hearing other people tell me how much money they can make
online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true
and has totally changed my life. This is what I do...
http://disq.us/url?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.Jobzon3.com%3Ab8eR_DQLwGRPVGtFv
It was a rioting test, plain and simple. See what
people do when they think they are going to be dead
real soon. Please notice this did not happen
stateside where the panic could not have been
contained to a few islands.
More to this than that. This is from Moon of
Alabama. Action precedes the official timeline.
Many of us did not receive a missile attack
message at all. This was not due to lack of
cell phone reception. Their phones worked,
but they were not alerted. They also use
the same provider.
Then, alert messages were different. Some
said that the ballistic missile threat
would expire at 6pm. Right.
Here are my own experiences. You be the
judge:
Driving towards Pahoa and reaching the
High School intersection, I saw cops
coming from the Kalapana direction with
lights and sirens on. They stopped at
every pulled over vehicle to talk to
the driver.
Then they turned into Pahoa road and
I also pulled to the side of the road,
thinking whom they are after this time.
I had just turned down the radio, where
HPR had started the news. That was at
8:01 AM.
The cop told me (both of his windows were
rolled down):
"The guy in North Korea has fired three
missiles at us. You should go home and
stay with your family."
He drove off to Paul's gas station to
talk to other drivers. His co-cop did
the same at the propane place.
My first thought was "That's bullshit."
Cops driving around talking to folks
individually while the ICBM's are
homing in. It would take those things
20 minutes to hit their target.
Fuck that shit, I am going to have
breakfast as intended. Should that
be true, I had at least a last break fast.
At the store the news had already created
panic among those who are easily manipulated.
The hysteria was quite impressive and my
reassuring them that things are okay went
in the one ear and out the other.
Mind you that I know these people for years
and I am well known for being level headed.
I get my breakfast and sit outside. A few
other guys are rolling in. Then, at 8:07 AM,
the emergency alert appears on our phones.
Those who knew, were all filled in by the
cops BEFORE the alert.
The alert caused the store to close. I did
my best to calm people down. Explaining to
them that they should listen to their body,
instead to anything the government says.
George Carlin's made that clear a long time
ago.
But people are now so disconnected from the
'Here and Now' have been so propagandized
and brainwashed, that they are incapable
to keep cool and THINK.
IF that would have been the real McCoy,
we would have had twenty minutes left
from the time the cops 'informed' people.
Then, when it became apparent that it was
bullshit, the cops drove around and appeared
to be taking license plates of those who did
not panic, but have breakfast instead.
Around 8:30 AM, Tulsi Gabbard's tweets had
made it around enough for people to calm
down somewhat.
I'm actually kind of amazed that they
actually have a missile warning system at
all. I always assumed that we'd find out
that kind of thing when the flash came.
If legit, the post is enough evidence to know
the whole thing was absolutely intentional.
Some sort of exercise. As we know,
"exercises" seem to be accompanied by the
real thing with uncommon frequency. It's a
marker for false flags. If you're not
wondering whether some serious shit wasn't
actually happening over there, you belong on
HuffPo, not the Hedge.
Should have been more like MS Windows> "Are you sure you
want to proceed?" > 'Are you really, really sure?" >
"Press ESC-CTRL-HELLYES to continue" > "Are you sure?"
Yes, like a huge, red, flashing and audible warning
stating 'warning, submitting this drop down option will
open all manhole covers and cause certain residents to
believe cowering under a car will shield them from an
inbound thermonuclear warhead'.. that would work. I'm
all for it.
That assumes you are familiar with the software and
protocols. It is highly unlikely that this sort of thing
would be a one screen event, given that just to purchase
a $1 item online has a confirmation screen, even two.
It is also highly probable the state protocols require
not only a second screen, but a second person. "bad
software" ... you just earned a troll point on ZH.
Congratulations!
More to the point, having the test and real alerts in the
same drop-down menu, is asking for a mis-click. Also,
having a stereotype "Are you sure?" popup is asking for
the average moron to click right through and realize his
mistake afterwards.
Come on now - how many of us have
shut down or rebooted something important by mistake
because we thought the "Are you sure?" was a response to
something different, like "Save configuration" or "Send
coffee and donuts."
That's just plain bad software design by people who
didn't think about the consequences of making the "Nuke
Alert" button exactly like any other. Try this:
Missile Alert button pops up a panel with a Big Red
"Live alert NOW" button, an Amber "this is a drill"
button, and a green "Send the All Clear" button. If you
hit the "Live alert NOW" button, you get a very lurid
confirmation panel with something like "LIVE MISSILE
ALERT WILL BE SENT - ARE YOU SURE??" this confirmation
panel should be ENTIRELY different from the "just a
drill" confirmation, and not at all like any standard
confirmation panel. The confirmation popup should occupy
most of the screen, and the big red "YES" and the Green
"CANCEL" buttons should be large enough and well
separated enough to avoid any possible wrong selection.
Yes, folks, when it comes to emergency alert buttons,
it is time to "lift and separate 'em" so there is no
mistake what you are touching!!
Why is this function not under the control of the military. Any
alert would come from the military anyway. Civilians don't have
the knowhow to maintain such a system. Hawaii put that on clear
display.
Procedures are probably antiquated and should be reviewed by
improved process standards. This is how things get better in all
industries. When an incident occurs, root cause is reviewed and a
process to prevent a re-occurrence. For equipment, methods of
increasing reliability, and remedies for failures, you train it
out, engineer it out or replace it.
Human error is due to lack
of training or inadequate program. Management is responsible as it
is in any industry and should review the current training program
and testing. Management, a CEO was forced to resign for an
altercation on a plane where a passenger was seriously injured by
security. He sued and won compensation. It's no different in any
industry.
Fair enough. But if you read the main article, the suggested
fix was to ad another layer of bureaucracy to the process.
That is always the proffered solution to any governmental
process failure. It fixes nothing, but eventually so many
people and committees are involved in the process that nobody
can be found to take the blame, and job security is maximized.
Note, also, that it took 38 minutes to issue the correction
because the workers were too scared of maybe violating some
unknown rules and regulations by taking charge and doing the
obvious retraction immediately. I can see them sweating
bullets while pouring over their regulatory manuals looking for
a mandated procedure which would tell them exactly how to do a
retraction of an erroneous doomsday proclamation.
I can readily see the implementation of a "fix" that will
require the participation of many other government employees
before the warning gets issued, and create a policy which, when
followed step-by-careful step, results in the warning being
issued about 30 minutes after the missile has arrived.
Not that it matters. The lucky ones will already be
incinerated by then.
That's what Gov't is all
about and why they are inefficient and expensive. There are
many patronage jobs in Gov't. They don't always hire the
brightest people, but ones that might be connected or
related in someway with a higher ups in management.
So it's not a failure attributed to the employee, but the
structure and it's inability to remove all probabilities of
failure. Nothing was fixed by firing the individual, but it
satisfies upper management that a remedy was implemented?
The Guy's manager is responsible for the failure.
As a manager it was my responsibility to ensure my
people's training records were up to date. If there were any
gaps, it was my fault. Any failures were investigated to
determine root cause of failure and training records of the
individual were part of the investigation.
Hawaii is a real libtard and amazingly corrupt shithole. Endless
years if using HI to import illegals, scammy C*I*A shit through Bank
of Hawaii, Bishop Land Trust scam and military scam shit.
Govt
worker presses the wrong button and keeps their job? LOL! What a
joke.
The retards on the islands including wealthy libs and actors all
go into a panic actually believing NK would launch a nuke at HI or
even have the technology to do it. SUCKERS.
There was an incident at a bakery here where an individual was
inside a dough kneading machine working on the agitator. An
operator came and started the machine killing the mechanic inside.
The operator was not fired nor charged with murder. The result of
the investigation was that it was the mechanics fault for not
following lock out, tag out procedures. They will review the
procedures to see if they are adequate for both persons involved,
operators and mechanics. They might add, if it isn't in there,
that the operator do a pre-start inspection of the equipment for
his safety as well.
No need to fire people for making a mistake
without reviewing current procedures. Pilots make mistakes as well
and when they miscalculate, people die. The transportation
ministry does an extensive review on the cause of failure. They
don't just fire the pilot on the spot. In a non union environment
the company can just fire you even if it was a deficiency of the
company's part. They'll fix their deficiency but won't call you
back and apologize to you and offer you yoar job back. Firing
someone will not prevent a repeat of the incident if it's the
process or training that is inadequate.
Unions ensure fair treatment in the work place. They don't
protect bad employees and their membership are people like you.
They don't support anyone that doesn't perform his duties either.
They'll report it to their union Stewart and they will issue a
warning and or termination if it is on going. Terminations have to
have an adequate reason not because there is a personality
conflict between you and someone above you, that has moar say or
is connected to upper management. I've seen people baited, so that
they can fire them.
Root cause of failure investigations are very valuable in
preventing re-occurrences of negative events.
I am Canadian, but I honestly don't recall ever posting the
incident. I've been in the maintenance and reliability field
over 40 years. So I follow industrial accidents and see how
they are handled. It's still of interest to me.
That's a misconception flaunted by MSM. The corporatocracy hates
it when the slaves have something to say or the corporatocracy
can't kick people around, hire and fire without just cause. Fire
you and hire a nephew or brother in law. A union request fair
treatment and by labor standards set forth by the Gov't. If you
were in a union and there was a Guy that was sitting in the
washroom reading the paper all day, wouldn't you complain? Sure
you would. Go to yoar union Stewart and tell him. They'll deal
with him. If it continues, the company will fire him and the union
won't contest it. I don't know why people get the impression that
the unions support undesirables. They manage the employees for
management, especially the thousands in the auto industry.
Management has to only deal with the union reps not every employee
one at a time. I've work in union environments and I prefer not
to, because I like direct contact with management and a
partnership. Some employers are real assholes and I've worked in
those places. Drive 30 miles to work and they tell you that
they're not busy today so you can go home. Want a job tomorrow?
Ya, keep yoar mouth shut, is best. Not busy today, you clock out
early. Our regular hours are 44/week before OT. No paid lunch, no
benefits. No sick pay. 2 weeks vacation, never moar. If I don't
like yoar tattoos yoar fired, the boss said so.
Interesting that no one thought to put in some kind of check: "Are
you absolutely sure you want to cause chaos and confusion, and
frighten the living whatsits out of everyone?"
I imagine all around
the world these alert messages are getting re-engineered today, with
a little dialogue box added - "Are you a) absolutely, definitely, all
going to die, or b) a muppet?"
Bannon backed candidate later lost. So much for this Bannon "success".
This idea of Trump playing 6 dimensional chess is a joke. It's the same explanation that was pushed for Obama disastrous neocon
foreign policy. Here is one very apt quote: "What Trump has done are disasters, and equates to treason. Selling billions of dollars
of weapons the our enemies the terrorists/Saudis, killing innocent people in Syria, and Yemen, sending more troops to
Afghanistan..." What 6-dimetional chess?
According to Occam razor principle the simplest explanation of Trump behaviour is probably the most correct. He does not control
foright policy, outsourcing it to "generals" and be does not pursue domestic policy of creating jobs as he promised his
electorate. In other words, both in foreign policy and domestic policy, he became a turncoat,
betraying his electorate, much like Obama. kind of Republican Obama.
And as time goes by, Trump looks more and more like Hillary II or Republican Obama. So he might have problems with the candidates he supports
in midterm elections. His isolationism, if it ever existed, is gone. Promise of jobs is gone. Detente with Russia is gone.
What's left?
Note the level disappointment of what used to be Trump base in this site comment section...
Notable quotes:
"... In a serious rebuke for President Trump (and perhaps moreso for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), ousted judge and alt-right favorite Roy Moore has won the Alabama Republican Primary by a landslide ..."
"... The Steve Bannon-backed candidate, who defied court orders to remove the Ten Commandments from his courtroom and refused to recognize gay marriage after the Supreme Court's June 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, is leading by 9.6 points with 92% of the votes counted... ..."
"... These attacks on Bannon were one of the most prominent news stories in the first week following Trump's election victory. It didn't take long, however, for a counter-attack to emerge - from the right-wing elements of the Jewish community. ..."
"... Bannon is a true fucking patriot trying to pull this once great country from the sinkhole. ..."
"... I think the reality is that this was a message to McConnell much more than Trump. That message is simple: I'm coming to kill your career. Bannon went out of his way to say he fully supports Trump (despite backing the opposite candidate). And, let's face it, if Bannon buries McConnell, he's doing everyone a service, Trump included. ..."
"... The echo chamber media "is so surprised" that in Germany and the US we are seeing a rising tide of pissed off people, well imagine fucking that? Leaving the echo chamber and not intellectually trying to understand the anger, but living the anger. ..."
"... Well, we can only hope that Trump gets the message. He was elected to be President of the USA, not Emperor of the World. Quote from that Monty Python film: "He's not the Messiah; he's a very naughty boy!" ..."
"... A cursory background reading on Roy Moore tells me that he is one of the worst types for public office. And he might just turn out to be like Trump -- act like an anti-swarm cowboy and promise a path to heaven, then show his real colors as an Establishment puppet once the braindead voters put him in office. ..."
"... When Trump won the Republican nomination, and then the Presidency it was because people were rebelling against the establishment rulers. There is considerable disgust with these big government rulers that are working for themselves and their corporate cronies, but not for the US population. ..."
"... Trump seems to have been compromised at this point, and his support of the establishment favourite, Luther Strange is evidence that he isn't really the outsider he claimed to be. Moore's victory in Alabama says the rebellion still has wheels, so there is some hope. ..."
"... In Missouri where I live, the anti-establishment Republican contender for the upcoming US Senatorial 2018 race is Austin Peterson. It will be interesting to see how he, and his counterparts in other states do in the primaries. Both of the current Missouri Senators are worthless. ..."
"... I remember well the last "3-Dimensional Chess master" Obama while he too was always out maneuvering his apponents, per the media reports... ..."
"... Every now and then Trump tends to make huge blunders, and sometimes betrayals without knowing what he is doing. "Champions"- (great leaders) do not do that. ..."
"... What Trump has done are disasters, and equates to treason. Selling billions of dollars of weapons the our enemies the terrorists/Saudis, killing innocent people in Syria, and Yemen, sending more troops to Afghanistan... ..."
"... It is epitome of self-delusion to see people twisting themselves into pretzels, trying to justify/rationalize Trump's continuing display of disloyalty to America ..."
"... YOU CAN'T BE A ZIONIST AND AN AMERICAN FIRSTER, IT IS ONE OR THE OTHER. ..."
Congratulations to Roy Moore on his Republican Primary win in Alabama. Luther Strange started way back & ran a good race. Roy,
WIN in Dec!
In a serious rebuke for President Trump (and perhaps moreso for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), ousted judge and
alt-right favorite Roy Moore has won the Alabama Republican Primary by a landslide
The Steve Bannon-backed candidate, who defied court orders to remove the Ten Commandments from his courtroom and refused to
recognize gay marriage after the Supreme Court's June 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, is leading by 9.6 points with 92%
of the votes counted...
... ... ...
However, as Politco
reported this evening, President Donald Trump began distancing himself from a Luther Strange loss before ballots were even cast,
telling conservative activists Monday night the candidate he's backing in Alabama's GOP Senate primary was likely to lose ! and suggesting
he'd done everything he could do given the circumstances.
Trump told conservative activists who visited the White House for dinner on Monday night that he'd underestimated the political
power of Roy Moore, the firebrand populist and former judge who's supported by Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon, according
to three people who were there.
And Trump gave a less-than full-throated endorsement during Friday's rally.
While he called Strange "a real fighter and a real good guy," he also mused on stage about whether he made a "mistake" by backing
Strange and committed to campaign "like hell" for Moore if he won.
Trump was encouraged to pick Strange before the August primary by son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner as well as other aides,
White House officials said. He was never going to endorse Alabama Republican Rep. Mo Brooks, who has at times opposed Trump's agenda,
and knew little about Moore, officials said.
... ... ...
Déjŕ view -> Sanity Bear •Sep 26, 2017 11:19 PM
AIPAC HAS ALL BASES COVERED...MIGA !
On Sept. 11, the Alabama Daughters for Zion organization circulated a statement on Israel by Moore, which started by saying
the U.S. and Israel "share not only a common Biblical heritage but also institutions of representative government and respect
for religious freedom." He traced Israel's origin to God's promise to Abram and the 1948 creation of modern Israel as "a fulfillment
of the Scriptures that foretold the regathering of the Jewish people to Israel."
Moore's statement includes five policy positions, including support for U.S. military assistance to Israel, protecting Israel
from "Iranian aggression," opposing boycotts of Israel, supporting Israel at the United Nations, and supporting direct Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations without outside pressure. He added, "as long as Hamas and the Palestinian Authority wrongly refuse to recognize Israel's
right to exist, such negotiations have scant chance of success."
While those views would give Moore common ground with much of the Jewish community regarding Israel, most of the state's Jewish
community has been at odds with Moore over church-state issues, such as his displays of the Ten Commandments in courthouses, and
his outspoken stance against homosexuality, both of which led to him being ousted as chief justice.
moore misreads the Bible as most socalled christians do. they have been deceived, they have confused the Israel of God( those
who have been given belief in Christ) with israel of the flesh. They cant hear Christs own words, woe is unto them. they are living
in their own selfrighteousness, not good. they are going to have a big surprise for not following the Word of God instead following
the tradition of men.
They were warned over and over in the Bible but they cant hear.
I Claudius -> VinceFostersGhost •Sep 27, 2017 6:27 AM
Forgive? Maybe. Forget? NEVER!! He tried to sell "US" out on this one. We now need to focus on bringing "Moore" candidates
to the podium to run against the RINO's and take out McConnell and Ryan. It's time for Jared and Ivanka to go back to NYC so Jared
can shore up his family's failing empire. However, if his business acumen is as accurate as his political then it's no wonder
the family needed taxpayer funded visas to sell the property. Then on to ridding the White House of Gen Kelly and McMaster - two
holdover generals from the Obama administration - after Obama forced out the real ones.
Clashfan -> Mycroft Holmes IV •Sep 26, 2017 11:33 PM
Rump has hoodwinked his supoprt base and turned on them almost immediately. Some refuse to acknowledge this.
These attacks on Bannon were one of the most prominent news stories in the first week following Trump's election victory.
It didn't take long, however, for a counter-attack to emerge - from the right-wing elements of the Jewish community. The
Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) came to Bannon's defense and accused the ADL of a "character assassination" against Bannon.
The Wizard -> Oh regional Indian •Sep 26, 2017 10:12 PM
Trump should figure out the Deep State elites he has surrounded himself with, don't have control of the states Trump won. Trump
thought he had to negotiate with these guys and his ego got the best of him. Bannon was trying to convince him he should have
stayed the course and not give in.
~"American politics gets moore strange by the day..."~
Technically speaking OhRI, with Moore's win politics became less Strange, or "Strange less", or "Sans Luther", depending on
how one chose to phrase it [SMIRK]
Adullam -> Gaius Frakkin' Baltar •Sep 26, 2017 11:05 PM
Trump needs to fire Jared! Some news outlets are saying that it was his son in law who advised him to back Strange. He has
to quit listening to those who want to destroy him or ... they will.
overbet -> Killtruck •Sep 26, 2017 9:41 PM
Bannon is a true fucking patriot trying to pull this once great country from the sinkhole.
Juggernaut x2 -> overbet •Sep 26, 2017 10:07 PM
Trump better pull his head out of his ass and quit being a wishy-washy populist on BS like Iran- the farther right he goes
the greater his odds of reelection because he has pissed off a lot of the far-righters that put him in- getting rid of Kushner,
Cohn and his daughter and negotiating w/Assad and distancing us from Israhell would be a huge help.
The whole Russiagate ploy was a diversion from (((them)))
NoDebt -> Killtruck •Sep 26, 2017 9:42 PM
I think the reality is that this was a message to McConnell much more than Trump. That message is simple: I'm coming to
kill your career. Bannon went out of his way to say he fully supports Trump (despite backing the opposite candidate). And, let's
face it, if Bannon buries McConnell, he's doing everyone a service, Trump included.
Oldwood -> NoDebt •Sep 26, 2017 10:08 PM
I think it was a setup.
Bannon would not oppose Trump that directly unless there was a wink and a nod involved.
Trump is still walking a tightrope, trying to appease his base AND keep as many establishment republicans at his side (even
for only optics). By Trump supporting Strange while knowing he was an underdog AND completely apposed by Bannon/his base he was
able to LOOK like he was supporting the establishment, while NOT really. Trump seldom backs losers which makes me think it was
deliberate. Strange never made sense anyway.
But what do I know?
Urahara -> NoDebt •Sep 27, 2017 12:20 AM
Bannon is hardcore Isreal first. Why are you supporting the zionist? It's an obvious play.
general ambivalent -> Urahara •Sep 27, 2017 2:23 AM
People are desperate to rationalise their failure into a victory. They cannot give up on Hope so they have to use hyperbole
in everything and pretend this is all leading to something great in 2020 or 2024.
None of these fools learned a damn thing and they are desperate to make the same mistake again. The swamp is full, so full
that it has breached the banks and taken over all of society. Trump is a swamp monster, and you simply cannot reform the swamp
when both sides are monsters. In other words, the inside is not an option, so it has to be done the hard way. But people would
prefer to keep voting in the swamp.
Al Gophilia -> NoDebt •Sep 27, 2017 3:58 AM
Bannon as president would really have those swamp creatures squirming. There wouldn't be this Trump crap about surrounding
himself with likeminded friends, such as Goldman Sachs turnstile workers and his good pals in the MIC.
Don't tell me he didn't choose them because if he didn't, then they were placed. That means he doesn't have the clout he pretends
to have or control of the agenda that the people asked him to deliver. His backing of Stange is telling.
Bobbyrib -> LindseyNarratesWordress •Sep 27, 2017 5:38 AM
He will not fire Kushner or Ivanka who have become part of the swamp. I'm so sick of these 'Trump is a genius and planned this
all along.'
To me Trump is a Mr. Bean type character that has been very fortunate and just goes with the flow. He has nearly no diplomacy,
or strategic skills.
NoWayJose •Sep 26, 2017 10:35 PM
Dear President Trump - if you like your job, listen to these voters. Borders, Walls, limited immigrants (including all those
that Ryan and McConnell are sneaking through under your very nose), trade agreements to keep American jobs, and respect for our
flag, our country, and the unborn!
I had hope for Trump, but as someone who reads ZH often, and does not suffer from amnesia (like much of America), I knew he
was way too good to be true.
We all know his back tracking, his flip flops...and while the media and many paid bloggers like to spin it as "not his fault",
it actually is.
His sending DACA to Congress was the last straw. Obama enacted DACA with a stroke of his pen, but Trump "needed to send it
to Congress so they could "get it right". The only thing Congress does with immigration is try and get amnesty passed.
Of course while Trump sends DACA to Congress, he does not mind using the military without Congress, which he actually should
do.
Why is it when it's something American's want, it has to go through the "correct channels", but when its something the Zionists
want, he does it with the wave of his pen? We saw the same bull shit games with Obama...
Dilluminati •Sep 26, 2017 11:02 PM
Anybody surprised by this is pretending the civility at the workplace isn't masking anger at corporate America and Government.
I'll go in and put in the 8 hours, I'm an adult that is part of the job. However I'm actually fed up with allot of the stupid
shit and want the establishment to work, problem is that we are witnessing failed nations, failed schools, failed healthcare,
even failed employment contracts, conditions, and wages.
The echo chamber media "is so surprised" that in Germany and the US we are seeing a rising tide of pissed off people, well
imagine fucking that? Leaving the echo chamber and not intellectually trying to understand the anger, but living the anger.
You haven't seen anything yet in Catalonia/Spain etc, Brexit, or so..
This is what failure looks like: That moment the Romanovs and Louis XVI looked around the room seeking an understanding eye,
there was none.
Pascal1967 •Sep 26, 2017 11:19 PM
Dear Trump:
Quit listening to your moron son-in-law, swamp creature, Goldman Sachs douchebag son-in-law Kushner. HE SUCKS!! If you truly
had BALLS, you would FIRE his fucking ass. HE is The Swamp, He Is Nepotism! THE AMERICAN PEOPLE HATE HIM.
MAGA! LISTEN TO BANNON, DONALD.
DO NOT FUCK THIS UP!
ROY MOORE, 100%!!!!
You lost, Trump ... get your shit together before it is too late!
ElTerco •Sep 26, 2017 11:28 PM
Bannon was always the smarts behind the whole operation. Now we are just left with a complete idiot in office.
Also, unlike Trump, Bannon actually gives a shit about what happens to the American people rather than the American tax system.
At the end of the day, all Trump really cares about is himself.
samsara •Sep 26, 2017 11:25 PM
I think most people get it backwards about Trump and the Deplorables.
I believed in pulling troops a from all the war zones and Trump said he felt the same
I believed in Legal immigration, sending people back if here illegal especially if involved in crime, Trump said he felt the
same.
I believed in America first in negotiating treaties, Trump said he felt the same.
I didn't 'vote' for Trump per se, he was the proxy.
We didn't leave Him, He left us.
BarnacleBill •Sep 26, 2017 11:31 PM
Well, we can only hope that Trump gets the message. He was elected to be President of the USA, not Emperor of the World.
Quote from that Monty Python film: "He's not the Messiah; he's a very naughty boy!" It's high time he turned back to the
job he promised to do, and drain that swamp.
napper •Sep 26, 2017 11:47 PM
A cursory background reading on Roy Moore tells me that he is one of the worst types for public office. And he might just
turn out to be like Trump -- act like an anti-swarm cowboy and promise a path to heaven, then show his real colors as an Establishment
puppet once the braindead voters put him in office.
America is doomed from top (the swarm) to bottom (the brainless voters).
Sid Davis •Sep 27, 2017 1:40 AM
When Trump won the Republican nomination, and then the Presidency it was because people were rebelling against the establishment
rulers. There is considerable disgust with these big government rulers that are working for themselves and their corporate cronies,
but not for the US population.
Trump seems to have been compromised at this point, and his support of the establishment favourite, Luther Strange is evidence
that he isn't really the outsider he claimed to be. Moore's victory in Alabama says the rebellion still has wheels, so there is some hope.
In Missouri where I live, the anti-establishment Republican contender for the upcoming US Senatorial 2018 race is Austin Peterson.
It will be interesting to see how he, and his counterparts in other states do in the primaries. Both of the current Missouri Senators
are worthless.
nevertheless -> pfwed •Sep 27, 2017 7:33 AM
I remember well the last "3-Dimensional Chess master" Obama while he too was always out maneuvering his apponents, per the
media reports...
LoveTruth •Sep 27, 2017 2:56 AM
Every now and then Trump tends to make huge blunders, and sometimes betrayals without knowing what he is doing. "Champions"-
(great leaders) do not do that.
nevertheless -> LoveTruth •Sep 27, 2017 7:16 AM
What Trump has done are disasters, and equates to treason. Selling billions of dollars of weapons the our enemies the terrorists/Saudis,
killing innocent people in Syria, and Yemen, sending more troops to Afghanistan...
But most treasonous of all was his sending DACA to "get it right", really? Congress has only one goal with immigration, amnesty,
and Chump knows dam well they will send him legislation that will clearly or covertly grant amnesty for millions and millions
of illegals, dressed up as "security".
Obama enacted DACA with the stroke of a pen, and while TRUMP promised to end it, he did NOT. Why is it when it's something
Americans want, it has to be "Constitutional", but when it comes form his banker pals, like starting a war, he can do that unilaterally.
It is epitome of self-delusion to see people twisting themselves into pretzels, trying to justify/rationalize Trump's continuing
display of disloyalty to America, and loyalty to Zionism.
Trump should always have been seen as a likely Zionist shill. He comes form Jew York City, owes everything he is to Zionist
Jewish bankers, is a self proclaimed Zionist...
YOU CAN'T BE A ZIONIST AND AN AMERICAN FIRSTER, IT IS ONE OR THE OTHER.
Either Zero Hedge is over run with Zionist hasbara, giving cover to their boy Chump, or Americans on the "right" have become
as gullible as those who supported Obama on the "left".
"... As for Bannon himself, his downfall has been fast and unceremonious: trashed by the president after he gossiped to Michael Wolff, abandoned by his deep-pocketed Mercer family funders, sacked by Breitbart, and then forced to watch as Trump indicated in a meeting earlier this week that he could sign a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Marat's downfall saw him elevated into a revolutionary martyr; Bannon has been banished into exile. ..."
"... But revolutions don't die with their figureheads. Bannonism won't either because, unlike the ethereal ideas behind liberalism and conservatism, it's found visceral real-world resonance -- among blue collars who see economic nationalism as a glimmer of hope among boarded-up plants, service-members frustrated with fruitless wars, young men flummoxed by modern feminism, right-wing activists frustrated with their political party's perceived impotence. Taunt Bannon all you like, but the imprint he leaves behind will be far larger than one spurious tell-all. ..."
"... The last blast of paleconservatism was Perot and the strong late 1990s economy halted that movement. ..."
"... The biggest thing lacking of the Bannon/Trump movement is how push back against the economic elite. Trump is governing exactly like an establishment Republican. Look at Trump/Perry ideas on saving coal which was properly turned down. This plan was unbelievably awful and not the right way for a better electric system and was simply handing Murray and First Energy a bunch money. ..."
"... Conservatism stands for stability and community. The accretions of "limited government" and "lower taxes", charming they may be as mantras, are more libertarian (Classic Liberal) than they are conservative ..."
"... A bomb-throwing Bolshevik like Bannon truly belongs on The Left, but in these days of abysmal ignorance of civics, it doesn't matter. "Bannonism" may live on, but thanks to the crackpot nature of its cobbled-together ideology, will remain a niche religion much like hard-core anarcho-libertarianism. ..."
"... Given the current atmosphere of outrage porn, willful ignorance and gleeful brutality, I do not have much hope for a Burkean conservatism to thrive, at least until after the pending social collapse ..."
"... Bannon will likely fade into oblivion via the Bourbon barrel, and the name Trump may become synonymous with "traitor" (but not like the media elite would hope). These men did not create a movement nor inspire anything. They were both savvy enough to see the political reality in this country and to give it voice. They will go, but the reality will remain. Ironically, but predictably, both men will likely be laid low by their own egos. But, so it goes ..."
"... The reality that supersedes these egotistical, narcissistic men is the fact that the traditional core of the American people have "woke" to the fact of their betrayal by the elite class to whom they have entrusted the leadership of this country for decades. They have awakened to find decay and rot throughout every American institution and to discover that these elites have enriched themselves beyond measure with the wealth of the nation at the cost of the workers and taxpayers who make that wealth possible. They have awakened to their own replacement and now realize the disdain with which they are viewed by those who would be their "masters." ..."
"... These Deplorables, white, working, taxpaying, Bible-believing, gun-owning MEN(!), are not going back into the opioid sleep of blissed out suburbia. They are now aware of the ill-hidden hatred which the elite class has for them and the future of serfdom to which these elites have fated them and their children. Gentlemen, a beast is being born out here in the hinterlands. It will not be put back in the cage ..."
Bannon is an imperfect ideologue. He has a gargantuan ego that often leads him astray, perhaps lately towards the delusion that
he himself would be a better populist messenger than the man he helped elect. But he's also hit on a paradox at the core of today's
American conservatism. Conservatives, in theory at least, look with skepticism upon grand projects and giant leaps, which too often
end up rupturing with the societal traditions they hold dear. Yet much of what conservatives support today is actually quite radical:
banning all or most abortions, rolling back the regulatory state, rejecting decades of orthodoxy on the issue of climate change,
a massive downshift of power from the federal government to states and localities, a moral ethic rooted in Christianity rather than
identity politics -- and lately questioning the "liberal international order" in favor of something more nationalist and protectionist.
The enactment of such an agenda would cause a good deal of upheaval and uncertainty, exactly the sort of void conservatives' forebears
feared most.
Some have wrangled with this contradiction by scaling back their proposals, claiming great problems can be addressed with light-touch
solutions, like child tax credits to arrest sagging birth rates. Others, much of Conservative Inc. it seems, are fine pretending
this tension doesn't exist at all. Bannon's approach has been to gleefully embrace conservatism's radical side. Disagree with him
all you like (and I do), but his is a perfectly logical position. His ascent -- some would say his transformation -- is a predictable
consequence of conservatives yearning for something increasingly distant from the modern world, just as did young people in the quietly
simmering 1950s. Indeed, there are many stylistic similarities between the radicals of today and those half a century ago: the "for
the lulz" performance art of a Milo Yiannopoulos contains an echo of the prankster Yippies, for example. Those who lack cultural
power can sell out, they can evolve, they can retreat to the catacombs -- or they can take Bannon's approach, they can transgress
and pump their fists and try to burn it all down.
Bannon's digestible binaries -- establishment versus the people, globalists versus Americans -- are easily superimposed on an
electorate that's itself divided both economically and culturally. Red states and the Rust Belt have for decades been the victims
of bad federal policy; Bannonism gives them an abstract enemy to blame, a valve for their fury. The algorithmic and library-voiced
Mitt Romney and the earnest Paul Ryan seem woefully inadequate by comparison: have those praying they run for higher office again
learned nothing? In The Constitution of Liberty , F.A. Hayek critiques conservatism by defining it as "a brake on the vehicle
of progress" and observing that a mere decrease in speed "cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving." Likewise,
while conventional taxes-and-terrorism Republican rhetoric doesn't feel like much of a heave on the ship's wheel, Bannonism furnishes
a clear vision, a real change, swords to wield, dragons to slay. Guess which one has greater appeal right now?
The modern right has always had a whiff of radicalism about it, with origins in pushback against the 60s counterculture, a second
wind in Newt Gingrich's legislative reformation, and late-life vitality in the Saul Alinsky-invoking tea party. But it's with Bannon
that the odor has become most pungent. He is an unlikely revolutionary. An
early profile from Bloomberg Businessweek
in 2015 portrays him as more of an operative than anything, determined to professionalize a conservative movement that had made too
many unforced errors. Other pre-Trump appearances found Bannon worrying about the national debt and extolling his Catholic faith.
It's a windy road from there to storming the barricades under Donald Trump's sigil, but it's one many conservatives have traveled
in recent years. The challenge for more traditional Republicans will be fashioning a new politics that quenches voters' burning thirst
for change -- a position they've arrived at themselves, not been brainwashed into by Fox News -- while circumventing Bannonism's
conflagrations and The Camp of the Saints ugliness.
As for Bannon himself, his downfall has been fast and unceremonious: trashed by the president after he gossiped to Michael Wolff,
abandoned by his deep-pocketed Mercer family funders, sacked by Breitbart, and then forced to watch as Trump
indicated in
a meeting earlier this week that he could sign a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Marat's downfall saw him elevated into
a revolutionary martyr; Bannon has been banished into exile.
But revolutions don't die with their figureheads. Bannonism won't either
because, unlike the ethereal ideas behind liberalism and conservatism, it's found visceral real-world resonance -- among blue collars
who see economic nationalism as a glimmer of hope among boarded-up plants, service-members frustrated with fruitless wars, young
men flummoxed by modern feminism, right-wing activists frustrated with their political party's perceived impotence. Taunt Bannon
all you like, but the imprint he leaves behind will be far larger than one spurious tell-all.
Matt Purple is the managing editor of The American Conservative
There is always a level of Bannonism /Paleoconservatism in the US politics but who knows how impactful it will be.
Probably the biggest issue for Bannon was Trump was elected in 2016 and our nation did not want or need a Leninist. (It
wasn't 2008 anymore) Frankly most conservatives were satisfied that HRC and Obama were not President and did not want massive changes.
The whole the people and globalist division is too simplistic and there are a lot 'People' that support free trade or relatively
open borders. (For instance I don't see the economic benefit of steel tariffs at all.)
The last blast of paleconservatism was Perot and the strong late 1990s economy halted that movement.
We still don't know how much a pushback on Trump/Bannonism will be. Trump is not popular and the House is endangered.
5) The biggest thing lacking of the Bannon/Trump movement is how push back against the economic elite. Trump is governing
exactly like an establishment Republican. Look at Trump/Perry ideas on saving coal which was properly turned down. This plan was
unbelievably awful and not the right way for a better electric system and was simply handing Murray and First Energy a bunch money.
It is a cardinal error to confuse conservatism with The Right, as much as it is to conflate liberalism with The Left.
Conservatism stands for stability and community. The accretions of "limited government" and "lower taxes", charming they
may be as mantras, are more libertarian (Classic Liberal) than they are conservative. (Thanks loads, Frank Meyer.)
A bomb-throwing Bolshevik like Bannon truly belongs on The Left, but in these days of abysmal ignorance of civics, it doesn't
matter. "Bannonism" may live on, but thanks to the crackpot nature of its cobbled-together ideology, will remain a niche religion much
like hard-core anarcho-libertarianism.
Given the current atmosphere of outrage porn, willful ignorance and gleeful brutality, I do not have much hope for a Burkean
conservatism to thrive, at least until after the pending social collapse.
Bannon will likely fade into oblivion via the Bourbon barrel, and the name Trump may become synonymous with "traitor" (but
not like the media elite would hope). These men did not create a movement nor inspire anything. They were both savvy enough to
see the political reality in this country and to give it voice. They will go, but the reality will remain. Ironically, but predictably,
both men will likely be laid low by their own egos. But, so it goes.
The reality that supersedes these egotistical, narcissistic men is the fact that the traditional core of the American people
have "woke" to the fact of their betrayal by the elite class to whom they have entrusted the leadership of this country for decades.
They have awakened to find decay and rot throughout every American institution and to discover that these elites have enriched
themselves beyond measure with the wealth of the nation at the cost of the workers and taxpayers who make that wealth possible.
They have awakened to their own replacement and now realize the disdain with which they are viewed by those who would be their
"masters."
These Deplorables, white, working, taxpaying, Bible-believing, gun-owning MEN(!), are not going back into the opioid sleep
of blissed out suburbia. They are now aware of the ill-hidden hatred which the elite class has for them and the future of serfdom
to which these elites have fated them and their children. Gentlemen, a beast is being born out here in the hinterlands. It will
not be put back in the cage.
The writer's allusion to the French Revolution is somewhat telling. The history of the West is replete with moments of savagery
and destruction directed inwardly. It will be so again. When these Deplorables turn on their keepers, it will not be pretty. The
Progressive elites who believe that they can control and shape "narratives" to harness that power are fools. The cloistered intellectuals
who believe that they can "opt" out of the coming clash are dreaming.
The traditional core of the American people are no different than their ancestors. They just don't live as close to the edge
as those folks did. But when they are backed up to that edge, when betrayal has been made clear and the institutions are revealed
for the Oz that they have become, they will recall that old hatred that still courses in the Western man's veins and will react
in ways that will chill the blood. The imaginary "crimes" with which "privileged whites" are damned by the rioting Cultural Marxists
will escape imagination and leap into reality. God help us.
Re: The last blast of paleconservatism was Perot and the strong late 1990s economy halted that movement.
Perot, for whom I voted in 1992 but not 1996, was not a paleoconservative, but rather a pragmatic centrist. Compare his position
on social issues with Pat Buchanan's (Buchanan being Mr. Paleoconservative -- and who ran in 1992 too)
"... I view Trump as a failing would be reformer. I have already stated on this site that Trump's bid to enter the reformers club is pretty much hampered by his reaching power without having a strong third party behind him. He is bound by the diktats of the deep state and the most he can manage is to sabotage the system through guile. His mission is truly impossible. ..."
"... Gorbachov was another failed reformer who nevertheless managed to destroy the old system but his victory was worse than a phyrric one as he moved the situation from a bad system to total chaos of the uncreative destruction type as the Soviet Union morphed into oligarchic Russia. ..."
"... The US could have had a visionary reformer in JFK but unfortunately he was prematurely decommissioned by the deep state but Trump is light years behind JFK in intellect and articulation. Overall I would stick to Gerald Celente's definition of the political establishment as cowards, fools, freaks and liars, a fact that is hard to swallow but true nonetheless. ..."
I view Trump as a failing would be reformer. I have already stated on this site that
Trump's bid to enter the reformers club is pretty much hampered by his reaching power without
having a strong third party behind him. He is bound by the diktats of the deep state and the
most he can manage is to sabotage the system through guile. His mission is truly impossible.
Gorbachov was another failed reformer who nevertheless managed to destroy the old system but
his victory was worse than a phyrric one as he moved the situation from a bad system to total
chaos of the uncreative destruction type as the Soviet Union morphed into oligarchic
Russia.
Truly, the only 20th century impressive reformer, notwithstanding the controversy
surrounding his name, was Adolf Hitler. He was guided by a vision and after he cumulated many
successes started to act on intuition bypassing the guidance of his party and state
apparatus, both the civil and the military one, which led him to commit some grave strategic
errors that proved finally to be his undoing. Here I repeat what I have already stated on
this site that Hitler came to power within weeks from FDR's ascendency, but Hitler managed to
do in two years what FDR failed to do in six years of the New Deal with German unemployment
falling from 25% under the Weimar Republic to 3%. Yet despite his successes, he did fight the
recalcitrance of the bureaucracy by relying on the SA and the SS. Trump has nothing of this
luxury and will invariably have to kowtow to the power structure to stay in power.
That leaves the one truly successful Western reformer who managed to materialise his
vision, the one and only Otto Von Bismarch, who knew how to play the different layers of the
German societies against each other and managed to rule unhindered by the establishment
guided by a visionary plan that was supported by extremely competent military and civilian
officials.
The US could have had a visionary reformer in JFK but unfortunately he was prematurely
decommissioned by the deep state but Trump is light years behind JFK in intellect and
articulation. Overall I would stick to Gerald Celente's definition of the political
establishment as cowards, fools, freaks and liars, a fact that is hard to swallow but true
nonetheless.
Institute for Policy Studies Co-founder Marcus Raskin will be remembered, among many other
noteworthy achievements, for coining the term "national security state." In congressional
testimony in 1967, he used the phrase to describe the complex web of war institutions he feared
would drive continuous conflict abroad while turning the United States into a "garrison and
launching pad for nuclear war."
Raskin died on December 24, 2017, at age 83 -- just as the current president of the United
States was about to make nuclear threats via Twitter. And as for his fears about the country
becoming a garrison, Raskin wasn't far off. Over the five decades after Raskin's testimony, the
number of inmates in U.S. state and federal prisons grew from 188,000 to 1.5 million , with the vast majority of them
poor and people of color.
While progressive activists have tended to treat these issues separately, Raskin
consistently connected the dots between America's military adventures overseas and economic and
racial injustice at home.
In a 2008 book with Robert Spero, for example, he used President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
"four essential human freedoms" as a clever frame for exposing the extent to which the national
security state had accelerated poverty and inequality while undermining other basic rights.
Roosevelt laid out these four freedoms in his 1941 State of the Union address. They included
freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. FDR's notion
of "freedom from want" built on this famous line from his 1937 inaugural address: "The test of
our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether
we provide enough for those who have too little."
Institute for Policy Studies Co-founder Marcus Raskin will be remembered, among many other
noteworthy achievements, for coining the term "national security state." In congressional
testimony in 1967, he used the phrase to describe the complex web of war institutions he feared
would drive continuous conflict abroad while turning the United States into a "garrison and
launching pad for nuclear war."
Raskin died on December 24, 2017, at age 83 -- just as the current President of the United
States was about to make nuclear threats via Twitter. And as for his fears about the country
becoming a garrison, Raskin wasn't far off. Over the five decades after Raskin's testimony, the
number of inmates in U.S. state and federal prisons grew from 188,000 to 1.5 million , with the vast majority of them
poor and people of color.
While progressive activists have tended to treat these issues separately, Raskin
consistently connected the dots between America's military adventures overseas and economic and
racial injustice at home.
In a 2008 book with Robert Spero, for example, he used President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
"four essential human freedoms" as a clever frame for exposing the extent to which the national
security state had accelerated poverty and inequality while undermining other basic rights.
Roosevelt laid out these four freedoms in his 1941 State of the Union address. They included
freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. FDR's notion
of "freedom from want" built on this famous line from his 1937 inaugural address: "The test of
our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether
we provide enough for those who have too little."
In Four Freedoms Under Siege , Raskin and Spero concede that the Cold War
superpower rivalry did contribute to some progress towards Roosevelt's dream of freedom from
want. Raskin was a young aide in Kennedy's National Security Council during a period of high
tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union that were playing out with deadly
consequences in Cuba, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
And while he was horrified by the existential threat posed by the superpower standoff,
Raskin later recognized that the competition with the Soviet Union did give a boost to the U.S.
labor unions and other forces that were pushing for progressive economic reforms.
The elites, Raskin and Spero explained, feared that movements for "social and economic
justice, from rhetoric to out-and-out radicalism, would transform the power structure in such a
way as to open up the society to democracy that displaces overlapping economic oligarchies. The
right, especially big business, also feared that this would be just the prelude to the
redistribution of resources, or at least access to them."
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Raskin and Spero point out, "people at the top no
longer had to concern themselves with the people at the bottom." And the permanence of the
national security state obliterated any hope of a post-Cold War "peace dividend" that could've
helped realize FDR's dream of freedom from want.
Raskin and Spero wrote their book during the militarily aggressive administration of
President George W. Bush. As Halliburton and other private military contractors lined up to
feed at the Iraq War trough, the period perfectly illustrated the danger of a war economy
without end.
"This kind of 'let 'er rip' corruption policy did not originate with Bush II conservatives,"
Raskin and Spero wrote, "but they pushed the idea of a corporate controlled state to the limit
as a partner to military expansion."
In his final weeks, Marc Raskin was excited to learn about plans for a Poor People's Campaign that, like his own work,
will take on the inter-connected problems of the War Economy, poverty, racism, and ecological
devastation.
The campaign will mark the 50th anniversary of a similar effort led by the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. and other leaders who saw the need to build on the civil rights cause by
tackling the militarism that had led to the Vietnam War and the poverty that plagued too many
Americans of all races. Back then in 1968, Institute for Policy Studies staff included leaders
of both the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. Raskin himself was indicted that year
for conspiracy to aid resistance to the draft.
The new Poor People's Campaign, led by two prominent faith leaders -- the Rev. Liz Theoharis
and the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II -- held a kick-off event in Washington on December 4. The
Institute for Policy Studies prepared a report for
the launch that includes data on each of the campaign's focus areas. Theoharis and Barber
announced plans for a historic 40-day wave of civil disobedience across the country in the
spring of 2018, culminating in a mass demonstration in the capital in June.
At a December 12 follow-up meeting at the Institute for Policy Studies, Raskin asked one of
the lead organizers of the new Poor People's Campaign who they expect to be their strongest
opponents. From his six decades of experience in Washington, he had a keen sense of the
challenges ahead. Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for
Policy Studies and is a co-editor of Inequality.org.
Looks like Bannon is really weak in political economy. He does not even use the term neoliberalism. Go
here to read the full transcript of his speech.
One very interesting quote is ""I believe we've come partly off-track in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union and we're
starting now in the 21st century, which I believe, strongly, is a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the
West, a crisis of capitalism."
Notable quotes:
"... That war triggered a century of barbaric -- unparalleled in mankind's history -- virtually 180 to 200 million people were killed in the 20th century, and I believe that, you know, hundreds of years from now when they look back, we're children of that: We're children of that barbarity. This will be looked at almost as a new Dark Age. ..."
"... I believe we've come partly offtrack in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union and we're starting now in the 21st century, which I believe, strongly, is a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism. ..."
"... I see that every day. I'm a very practical, pragmatic capitalist. I was trained at Goldman Sachs, I went to Harvard Business School, I was as hard-nosed a capitalist as you get. I specialized in media, in investing in media companies, and it's a very, very tough environment. And you've had a fairly good track record. So I don't want this to kinda sound namby-pamby, "Let's all hold hands and sing 'Kumbaya' around capitalism." ..."
"... One is state-sponsored capitalism. And that's the capitalism you see in China and Russia. I believe it's what Holy Father [Pope Francis] has seen for most of his life in places like Argentina, where you have this kind of crony capitalism of people that are involved with these military powers-that-be in the government, and it forms a brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people. And it doesn't spread the tremendous value creation throughout broader distribution patterns that were seen really in the 20th century. ..."
"... The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism. And, look, I'm a big believer in a lot of libertarianism. I have many many friends that's a very big part of the conservative movement -- whether it's the UKIP movement in England, it's many of the underpinnings of the populist movement in Europe, and particularly in the United States. However, that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call the "enlightened capitalism" of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost -- as many of the precepts of Marx -- and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger generation [that] they're really finding quite attractive. And if they don't see another alternative, it's going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of "personal freedom." ..."
Buzzfeed has the remarks of Stephen Bannon, former CEO of Breitbart News ,
and currently appointed by President Elect Trump to be his chief advisor, at a conference at
the Vatican in the summer of 2014:
Steve Bannon:
Thank you very much Benjamin, and I appreciate you guys including us in
this. We're speaking from Los Angeles today, right across the street from our headquarters in
Los Angeles. Um. I want to talk about wealth creation and what wealth creation really can
achieve and maybe take it in a slightly different direction, because I believe the world, and
particularly the Judeo-Christian west, is in a crisis. And it's really the organizing principle
of how we built Breitbart News to really be a platform to bring news and information to people
throughout the world. Principally in the west, but we're expanding internationally to let
people understand the depths of this crisis, and it is a crisis both of capitalism but really
of the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian west in our beliefs.
It's ironic, I think, that we're talking today at exactly, tomorrow, 100 years ago, at
the exact moment we're talking, the assassination took place in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand that led to the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of the bloodiest century
in mankind's history. Just to put it in perspective, with the assassination that took place 100
years ago tomorrow in Sarajevo, the world was at total peace. There was trade, there was
globalization, there was technological transfer, the High Church of England and the Catholic
Church and the Christian faith was predominant throughout Europe of practicing Christians.
Seven weeks later, I think there were 5 million men in uniform and within 30 days there were
over a million casualties.
That war triggered a century of barbaric -- unparalleled in mankind's history --
virtually 180 to 200 million people were killed in the 20th century, and I believe that, you
know, hundreds of years from now when they look back, we're children of that: We're children of
that barbarity. This will be looked at almost as a new Dark Age.
But the thing that got us out of it, the organizing principle that met this, was not
just the heroism of our people -- whether it was French resistance fighters, whether it was the
Polish resistance fighters, or it's the young men from Kansas City or the Midwest who stormed
the beaches of Normandy, commandos in England that fought with the Royal Air Force, that fought
this great war, really the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists, right? The underlying
principle is an enlightened form of capitalism, that capitalism really gave us the wherewithal.
It kind of organized and built the materials needed to support, whether it's the Soviet Union,
England, the United States, and eventually to take back continental Europe and to beat back a
barbaric empire in the Far East.
That capitalism really generated tremendous wealth. And that wealth was really
distributed among a middle class, a rising middle class, people who come from really
working-class environments and created what we really call a Pax Americana. It was many, many
years and decades of peace. And I believe we've come partly offtrack in the years since the
fall of the Soviet Union and we're starting now in the 21st century, which I believe, strongly,
is a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of
capitalism.
And we're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if
the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I
feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs,
but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that's starting, that will completely
eradicate everything that we've been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.
Now, what I mean by that specifically: I think that you're seeing three kinds of
converging tendencies: One is a form of capitalism that is taken away from the underlying
spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity and, really, Judeo-Christian belief.
I see that every day. I'm a very practical, pragmatic capitalist. I was trained at
Goldman Sachs, I went to Harvard Business School, I was as hard-nosed a capitalist as you get.
I specialized in media, in investing in media companies, and it's a very, very tough
environment. And you've had a fairly good track record. So I don't want this to kinda sound
namby-pamby, "Let's all hold hands and sing 'Kumbaya' around capitalism."
But there's a strand of capitalism today -- two strands of it, that are very
disturbing.
One is state-sponsored capitalism. And that's the capitalism you see in China and
Russia. I believe it's what Holy Father [Pope Francis] has seen for most of his life in places
like Argentina, where you have this kind of crony capitalism of people that are involved with
these military powers-that-be in the government, and it forms a brutal form of capitalism that
is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people. And it
doesn't spread the tremendous value creation throughout broader distribution patterns that were
seen really in the 20th century.
The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the
Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism. And, look, I'm a big believer in
a lot of libertarianism. I have many many friends that's a very big part of the conservative
movement -- whether it's the UKIP movement in England, it's many of the underpinnings of the
populist movement in Europe, and particularly in the United States.
However, that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I
call the "enlightened capitalism" of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really
looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost -- as many of
the precepts of Marx -- and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger generation
[that] they're really finding quite attractive. And if they don't see another alternative, it's
going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of "personal
freedom."
The other tendency is an immense secularization of the West. And I know we've talked
about secularization for a long time, but if you look at younger people, especially millennials
under 30, the overwhelming drive of popular culture is to absolutely secularize this rising
iteration.
"... "I'm not a white nationalist, I'm a nationalist. I'm an economic nationalist," Bannon told the news outlet earlier this week. "The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f -- ed over." ..."
"... "Look, are there some people that are white nationalists that are attracted to some of the philosophies of the alt-right? Maybe," Bannon told Mother Jones in August. "Are there some people that are anti-Semitic that are attracted? Maybe. Right? Maybe some people are attracted to the alt-right that are homophobes, right? But that's just like, there are certain elements of the progressive left and the hard left that attract certain elements." ..."
"... "It's everything related to jobs," Bannon said and seemingly bragged about how he was going to drive conservatives "crazy" with his "trillion-dollar infrastructure plan." ..."
"... "With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up," he proposed. "We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution -- conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement." ..."
"... Bannon, in the Reporter interview, also gave some insight into how he viewed his political foes (presumably, liberals and the media) -- and the "darkness" he touts in fighting against them. ..."
Steve Bannon, the chief strategist and right-hand man to President-elect Donald Trump,
denied in an interview that he was an advocate of white nationalism -- and gave hints instead
about how his brand of "economic" nationalism will shake up Washington.
In The Hollywood Reporter, Bannon, the controversial former head of Breitbart News who went
on to chair Mr. Trump's presidential campaign, discussed why he believed his candidate won the
election.
"I'm not a white nationalist, I'm a nationalist. I'm an economic nationalist," Bannon told
the news outlet earlier this week. "The globalists gutted the American working class and
created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f -- ed
over."
Bannon's appointment to the White House has drawn criticism from Democrats and several civil
liberties groups, in part because of his (and Breitbart's) strong association with
the alt-right , a political movement with strains of white supremacy.
In the past, the former Breitbart CEO has admitted the alt-right's connections to racist and
anti-Semitic agendas.
"Look, are there some people that are white nationalists that are attracted to some of the
philosophies of the alt-right? Maybe,"
Bannon told Mother Jones in August. "Are there some people that are anti-Semitic that are
attracted? Maybe. Right? Maybe some people are attracted to the alt-right that are homophobes,
right? But that's just like, there are certain elements of the progressive left and the hard
left that attract certain elements."
In the Reporter interview, Bannon challenged the notion that racialized overtones dominated
the Trump campaign on the trail. He predicted that if the administration delivered on its
election promises, "we'll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and
Hispanic vote and we'll govern for 50 years."
"It's everything related to jobs," Bannon said and seemingly bragged about how he was going
to drive conservatives "crazy" with his "trillion-dollar infrastructure plan."
"With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild
everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up," he proposed. "We're just going to
throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater
than the Reagan revolution -- conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist
movement."
Bannon, in the Reporter interview, also gave some insight into how he viewed his political
foes (presumably, liberals and the media) -- and the "darkness" he touts in fighting against
them.
"Darkness is good," Bannon said. "Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only
helps us when they...get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."
I'm in the UK as well and now find it quite alarming how the BBC shapes the news.
Recently on Radio 4 I listened to the BBC talking of a terrorist group related to or derived from Al Qaeda merely as "rebels",
and giving the impression that their actions were part of a legitimate insurgency. That's not how 9/11 was described.
It's all too like the BBC's Ukraine reporting, in which the neo-Nazi component was played down and the indiscriminate shelling
of civilian areas in Donetsk and Lugansk spoken of as legitimate warfare.
Crazy. And not only the PR. All those journalists and expensive editors and more admin staff than you can shake a stick at,
and there's more fact to be got on some one man and a dog Russian news outlet. I heard recently of an old BBC hand describing
the way the BBC changed after David Kelly. What with that and what with the material we now see put out by the BBC, I reckon that
as far as foreign news goes we've got ourselves our very own Pravda on the Thames.
"... When Donald Trump burst onto the scene, Bannon had found what he is quoted describing as a "blunt instrument for us," a man who had "taken this nationalist movement and moved it up twenty years." ..."
"... the rise of Bannon and Trump holds lessons for the Dissident Right. One of them: despite how powerful the Establishment may appear, there are fatal disconnects between it and the people it rules -- for example, on social and identity issues. Thus, many members of this Ruling Class, such as the Republican strategists who predicted a Jeb or Rubio victory, have been more successful in deluding themselves than they have been in building any kind of effective base. Similarly, Clinton campaign operatives believed, without much evidence, that undecided voters would eventually break in their favor. Because the thought of a Trump presidency was too horrifying for them to contemplate, they refused to recognize polls showing a close race, ignored the Midwest and sauntered their candidate off to Arizona in the final days. ..."
"... Of course, currently the ideas that Bannon fought for appear to be on the wane, leading him to declare upon leaving the White House that the "Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over." [ Weekly Standard, August 18, 2017] ..."
"... But this is probably somewhat of an exaggeration. I doubt that Bannon laments the fact that the current president is Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio. But it has proved much more difficult to change government policy than to win an election. Unlike GOP strategists, the Deep State appears to know what it is doing. ..."
Throughout 2016, I would occasionally turn on the television to see how the punditocracy was
responding to the mounting
Trump tsunami . If you get most of your news online, watching cable news is frustrating.
The commentary is so dumbed down and
painfully
reflective of speaker's biases, you can always basically guess what's coming next. With a
few exceptions -- above all Ann Coulter 's famous June 19, 2015
prediction of a Trump victory on
Bill Maher -- these pundits again and again told us that Trump would eventually go away,
first after he made this or that gaffe, then after he "failed" in a debate, then after people
actually started voting in the primaries.
The most interesting cases to me: the "
Republican strategists ," brought on to CNN and MSNBC to give the audience the illusion
that they were hearing both sides: Nicole Wallace, Steve Schmidt, Ana Navarro, Rick Wilson,
Margaret Hoover, Todd Harris.
Mike Murphy even convinced donors to hand him over $100 million to make Jeb Bush the
next president -- [
Jeb's 2016 departure draws out Mike Murphy critics , By Maeve Reston, February 22,
2016]
With campaigns and donors throwing money at these people, and the Main Stream Media touting
them, it was easy to assume they must know what they were talking about. Significantly, each of
these pundits was a national security hawk, center-right on economic issues, and just as
horrified by "
racism " and " sexism
" as their
Leftist counterparts . By a remarkable coincidence, the "
strategic " advice that they gave to Republican candidates lined up perfectly with these
positions. Their prominence was a mirage created by the fact that the MSM
handed this token opposition the Megaphone
because they did not challenge the core prejudices of the
bipartisan Ruling Class.
And of course they were all humiliated in a spectacular fashion, November 8 being only the
climax.
Joshua Green begins his book Devil's
Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by giving us a
view inside the Trump campaign on election night, before tracing Steve Bannon's path up to that
point. Reliving the journey is one of the joys of Green's work, which is mostly an intellectual
biography of Steve Bannon,
with a special focus on his relationship with Trump and the election.
Bannon
joined the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016 without any previous experience in
electoral politics. But like the candidate himself, the Breitbart editor showed that he
understood the nature of American politics and the GOP base
better than Establishment Republicans. The "strategists'" supposed "expertise," "strategic
advice," and "analysis" was in reality built on a house of cards. (In fact, the
Bannon-Trump view of the electorate is closer to the consensus
among political scientists that, unlike more nationalist and populist policies,
Republican Establishment positions have relatively little popular support. [ Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyon d | Tensions Between and Within the Two
Parties, Voter Study Group, June 2017]).
Bannon at Breitbart.com gave the Republican base what it wanted. Moral: in a democracy, you
always have a chance at winning when public opinion (or at least intraparty opinion) is on your
side.
Green traces Bannon's journey from his Irish-Catholic
working-class roots and traditionalist upbringing, to his time in the Navy, at Harvard
Business School and Goldman Sachs, and finally Breitbart.com and the pinnacle of American
politics. The picture
that emerges is of a man with principles and vigor, refusing to submit to the inertia that
is part of the human condition, with enough confidence to realize that life is too short to not
make major changes when staying on the current path is not going to allow him to accomplish his
goals.
For example, Bannon originally wanted a career in defense policy, and took a job in the
Pentagon during the Reagan administration. Yet he was off to Harvard Business School when he
realized that the rigid bureaucracy
that he was a part of would not let him move up to a high-level position until he was
middle-aged. Decades later, after taking over his website upon the unexpected death of Andrew Breitbart in
2012, it would have been easy to go low-risk -- sticking to Establishment scripts, making life
comfortable for Republican elites, implicitly submitting to the taboos of the Left.
Instead , he helped turn Breitbart News into a major voice of the populist tide that has
been remaking center-right politics across the globe.
When Donald Trump burst onto the scene, Bannon had found what he is quoted describing as
a "blunt instrument for us," a man who had "taken this nationalist movement and moved it up
twenty years."
From Green, we learn much about Bannon's intellectual influences. Surprisingly, although he
was raised as a Roman Catholic and maintains that faith today, we find out that Bannon briefly
practiced Zen Buddhism while in the Navy. There are other unusual influences that make
appearances in the book, including Rightist philosopher Julius
Evola and
René Guénon, a French occultist who eventually became a Sufi Muslim. Although
not exactly my cup of tea, such eccentric intellectual interests reflect a curious mind that
refuses to restrict itself to fashionable influences.
It's incorrect to call Devil's Bargain a biography. There is practically no mention
of Bannon's personal life -- wives, children. I had to Google to find out that he has three
daughters. His childhood is only discussed in the context of how it may have influenced his
beliefs and political development.
Rather, we get information on Bannon's intellectual and career pursuits and his
relationships with consequential figures such as mega-donor Robert Mercer, Andrew Breitbart and
Donald Trump.
As Bannon exits the White House and returns to Breitbart, we must hope that Bannon and the
movement he's helped to create accomplish enough in the future to inspire more complete
biographies.
But the rise of Bannon and Trump holds lessons for the Dissident Right. One of them:
despite how powerful the Establishment may appear, there are fatal disconnects between it and
the people it rules -- for example, on social and identity issues. Thus, many members of this
Ruling Class, such as the Republican strategists who predicted a Jeb or Rubio victory, have
been more successful in deluding themselves than they have been in building any kind of
effective base. Similarly, Clinton campaign operatives believed, without much evidence, that
undecided voters would eventually break in their favor. Because the thought of a Trump
presidency was too horrifying for them to contemplate, they refused to recognize polls showing
a close race, ignored the Midwest and sauntered their candidate off to Arizona in the final
days.
Of course, currently the ideas that Bannon fought for appear to be on the wane, leading
him to declare upon leaving the White House that the "Trump presidency that we fought for, and
won, is over." [
Weekly Standard, August 18, 2017]
But this is probably somewhat of an exaggeration. I doubt that Bannon laments the fact
that the current president is Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio. But it
has proved much more difficult to change government policy than to win an election. Unlike GOP
strategists, the Deep State appears to know what it is doing.
In his memoir Nixon's White House Wars , Pat Buchanan writes about how, despite
playing a pivotal role in the election of 1968, the conservative movement was
mostly shut out of high-level jobs:
Then there was the painful reality with which the right had to come to terms. Though our
movement had exhibited real power in capturing the nomination for Barry Goldwater and helping
Nixon crush the Rockefeller-Romney wing of the Republican Party, and though we were
playing a pivotal role in the election of 1968, the conservative movement was
mostly shut out of high-level jobs:
Then there was the painful reality with which the right had to come to terms. Though our
movement had exhibited real power in capturing the nomination for Barry Goldwater and helping
Nixon crush the Rockefeller-Romney wing of the Republican Party, and though we were veterans
of a victorious presidential campaign, few of us had served in the executive branch. We
lacked titles, resumes, credentials Our pool of experienced public servants who could
seamlessly move into top positions was miniscule compared to that of the liberal Democrats
who had dominated the capital's politics since FDR arrived in 1933.
History repeated itself in 2016, when Donald Trump would win the presidency on a nationalist
platform but find few qualified individuals who could reliably implement his agenda.
If nationalists want to ensure that their next generation of leaders is able to effectively
implement the policies they run on, they are going to have to engage in the slow and tedious
project of working their way up through powerful institutions.
Bannon may have been and remains an "outsider" to the political Establishment. But
nonetheless, throughout his life he has leveraged elite institutions such as Harvard, Goldman
Sachs, the Republican Party, and even Hollywood in order to become financially independent and
free to pursue his political goals.
If enough of those on the Dissident Right forge a similar path, we can be sure that future
nationalist political victories will be less hollow. Jeremy Cooper is a specialist in
international politics and an observer of global trends. Follow him at @NeoNeoLiberal .
@Clyde
Wilson Is there any evidence that Trump even tried to find the right people to fill the
offices? Having dabbled ever so slightly in this process in the spring, my impression is that
there is a mechanism run largely by lawyers from the big DC law firms (presumably one for
each party) who are the gatekeepers for applicants. The result of this system, which I have
little doubt that the "Trump Team" did not try to take on (after all, they had only a couple
of months to put together the beginnings of a team, and that left little or no time replacing
The Swamp Machine ) is that the key positions throughout the administration are largely
filled with lawyers from connected law firms. After all, who better to administer the
government than lawyers -- ? -- ?
At any rate, my experience with the process was: on your marks, get set, nothing. 30 years
experience in and around federal government, but not a lawyer. Don't call us, we don't want
to talk to you. (I also made clear in my cover letter that the key motivator for my
application -- and first ever political contributions -- was Trump and his agenda. In
retrospect, this "admission" was probably a kiss of death. I was a Trumpite. Eeeewww -- -- --
(I may well not have been qualified for anything, but I'm SURE I was disqualified by my
support for Trump )
Too little, too late. Also Bannon by demonizing Russians has shown that his is a dangerous warmonger. And a weak
politician.
Notable quotes:
"... Bannon added that his comments to Wolff were "aimed at Paul Manafort," the former Trump campaign manager who has been charged as part of an investigation into possible collusion between the Russian government and members of Trump's team. Manafort was also at the 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Manafort, Bannon said, "should have known how the Russians operate. He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends. ..."
"... Bannon released the statement after a three-day barrage of criticism from Trump and his allies. The president dubbed Bannon "Sloppy Steve." Bannon's statement also followed a CNN appearance on Sunday by Stephen Miller, the president's senior policy adviser and former Bannon ally, who eviscerated his comments to Wolff as "grotesque." ..."
The former White House aide said Donald Trump Jr. is a "patriot and a good man."
Steve Bannon backpedaled on comments to journalist Michael Wolff, whose explosive new book
sparked
a backlash against the former top Donald Trump aide over his remarks about a meeting at
Trump Tower in June 2016. According to the book, released a week early due to high demand, the
former White House strategist called the infamous meeting in New York between Donald Trump Jr.
and Russian operatives at Trump Tower "treasonous."
In a
statement to Axios on Sunday, Bannon heaped praise on Trump and his agenda, and called Don
Jr. a "patriot and a good man." "My comments about the meeting with Russian nationals came from
my life experiences as a Naval officer stationed aboard a destroyer whose main mission was to
hunt Soviet submarines to my time at the Pentagon during the Reagan years when our focus was
the defeat of 'the evil empire' and to making films about Reagan's war against the Soviets and
Hillary Clinton's involvement in selling uranium to them, " Bannon said in the statement.
Bannon
added that his comments to Wolff were "aimed at Paul Manafort," the former Trump campaign
manager who has been charged as part of an investigation into possible collusion between the
Russian government and members of Trump's team. Manafort was also at the 2016 Trump Tower
meeting. Manafort, Bannon said, "should have known how the Russians operate. He should have
known they are duplicitous, cunning and not our friends.
To reiterate, those comments (about
the meeting with the Russians) were not aimed at Don Jr." In the statement, Bannon again denied
that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. And though he did not deny any of the remarks
that were attributed to him in the book, Bannon said he regretted "that my delay in responding
to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr has diverted attention from the president's
historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency."
Bannon released the statement
after a three-day barrage of criticism from Trump and his allies. The president dubbed Bannon
"Sloppy Steve." Bannon's statement also followed a CNN appearance on Sunday by Stephen Miller,
the president's senior policy adviser and former Bannon ally, who eviscerated his comments to
Wolff as "grotesque."
Earlier Sunday, Trump railed about what he called Wolff's "Fake Book" on
Twitter:
"Controlling the narrative" is politically correct term for censorship.
Notable quotes:
"... I suspect most of the people who write all that furious invective on the Internet, professional polemicists and semiliterate commenters alike, are lashing out because they've been hurt -- their sense of fairness or decency has been outraged, or they feel personally wounded or threatened. ..."
"... "controlling the narrative" by neoliberal MSM is the key of facilitating the neoliberal "groupthink". Much like was in the USSR with "communist" groupthink. This is a step in the direction of the theocratic society (which the USSR definitely was). ..."
"... In other words "controlling the narrative" is the major form of neoliberal MSM "war on reality" as the neoliberal ideology is now completely discredited and can be sustained only by cult-style methods. ..."
Maybe this is the same kind of clinical detachment doctors have to cultivate, a way of distancing oneself from the subject,
protecting yourself against a crippling empathy. I won't say that writers or artists are more sensitive than other people, but
it may be that they're less able to handle their own emotions.
It may be that art, like drugs, is a way of dulling or controlling pain. Eloquently articulating a feeling is one way to avoid
actually experiencing it.
Words are only symbols, noises or marks on paper, and turning the messy, ugly stuff of life into language renders it inert
and manageable for the author, even as it intensifies it for the reader.
It's a nerdy, sensitive kid's way of turning suffering into something safely abstract, an object of contemplation.
I suspect most of the people who write all that furious invective on the Internet, professional polemicists and semiliterate
commenters alike, are lashing out because they've been hurt -- their sense of fairness or decency has been outraged, or
they feel personally wounded or threatened.
"controlling the narrative" by neoliberal MSM is the key of facilitating the neoliberal "groupthink". Much like was in the
USSR with "communist" groupthink. This is a step in the direction of the theocratic society (which the USSR definitely was).
In other words "controlling the narrative" is the major form of neoliberal MSM "war on reality" as the neoliberal ideology
is now completely discredited and can be sustained only by cult-style methods.
They want to invoke your emotions in the necessary direction and those emotions serve as a powerful filter, a firewall which
will prevents you from seeing any alternative facts which taken as whole form an "alternative narrative".
It also creates certain taboo, such as "don't publish anything from RT", or you automatically become "Putin's stooge." But
some incoherent blabbing of a crazy neocon in Boston Globe is OK.
This is an old and a very dirty game, a variation of method used for centuries by high demand cults:
"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best
that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece.
Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany.
That is understood.
But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people
along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell
them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works
the same way in any country."
– Hermann Goering (as told to Gustav Gilbert during the Nuremberg trials)
You need to be able to decipher this "suggested" set of emotions and detach it from the set of facts provided by neoliberal
MSM. It might help to view things "Sine ira et studio" (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_ira_et_studio
)
That helps to destroy the official neoliberal narrative.
Here skepticism (whether natural or acquired) can be of great help in fighting groupthink pushed by neoliberal MSM.
We are all guilty of this one sidedness, but I think that we need to put some efforts to move in direction of higher level
of skepticism toward our own views and probably provide at least links to alternative views.
"... Economic nationalism is a term used to describe policies which are guided by the idea of protecting domestic consumption, labor and capital formation, even if this requires the imposition of tariffs and other restrictions on the movement of labour, goods and capital. It is in opposition to Globalisation in many cases, or at least on questions the unrestricted good of Free trade. It would include such doctrines as Protectionism, Import substitution, Mercantilism and planned economies. ..."
"... Examples of economic nationalism include Japan's use of MITI to "pick winners and losers", Malaysia's imposition of currency controls in the wake of the 1997 currency crisis, China's controlled exchange of the Yuan, Argentina's economic policy of tariffs and devaluation in the wake of the 2001 financial crisis and the United States' use of tariffs to protect domestic steel production. ..."
"... Think about what a trade war with China would do. It would crash the world economy as China tried to cash in on it US Treasury holdings with the US likely defaulting......just one possible scenario. ..."
"... Here is Bannon's latest: Bannon dismissed the far-right as irrelevant: "Ethno-nationalism!it's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more." "These guys are a collection of clowns," he added. Bannon is no friend of White Nationalists. ..."
"... I think Bannon is an authentic economic nationalist, and one that Trump feels is good counsel on those matters. If this is so, then Bannon cannot be trying to provoke a trade war with China, since that would be an economic catastrophe for the US (and China and the rest of the world). I'm hoping he's playing bad cop and eventually Trump will play good cop in negotiations for more investment by China in the US and other goodies in exchange for 'well, not much' from the US. Similar to what the US dragged out of Japan in the 80s nd 90s. ..."
"... Bannon (and most of his followers) have no trust in the corporate sector as they are to a large degree Globalists - they used the US and then threw it aside in pursuit of profit elsewhere. For that, he would even call them traitors. So you could call him a Nationalist. ..."
"... Bannon does not seem himself as an "ethno-nationalist". Yet his slanderous contempt for the liberal ethos/values of many Americans would tend to make one question if he can be called a Nationalist. ..."
"... If Bannon was a Zionist, he would never make the comments he does against the financial sector ..."
"... Isn't exceptionalism the same as narcissism? ..."
"... At least the concern for 10 million in Seoul (mostly missing in the discussion of other leaders) show he is not a psychopath ..."
So lets start parsing this economic nationalism that Bannon is making happen with Trump.
Economic nationalism is a term used to describe policies which are guided by the idea of protecting domestic consumption, labor
and capital formation, even if this requires the imposition of tariffs and other restrictions on the movement of labour, goods
and capital. It is in opposition to Globalisation in many cases, or at least on questions the unrestricted good of Free trade.
It would include such doctrines as Protectionism, Import substitution, Mercantilism and planned economies.
Examples of economic nationalism include Japan's use of MITI to "pick winners and losers", Malaysia's imposition of currency
controls in the wake of the 1997 currency crisis, China's controlled exchange of the Yuan, Argentina's economic policy of tariffs
and devaluation in the wake of the 2001 financial crisis and the United States' use of tariffs to protect domestic steel production.
Think about what a trade war with China would do. It would crash the world economy as China tried to cash in on it US Treasury
holdings with the US likely defaulting......just one possible scenario.
At least now, IMO, the battle for a multi-polar (finance) world is out in the open.....let the side taking by nations begin.
I hope Bannon is wrong about the timing of potential global power shifting and the US loses its empire status.
Here is Bannon's latest: Bannon dismissed the far-right as irrelevant: "Ethno-nationalism!it's losers. It's a fringe element.
I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more." "These guys are a collection
of clowns," he added. Bannon is no friend of White Nationalists.
Bannon can be perfectly mature, adult and realist on some points and be totally blinded by biases on others - him wanting total
economic war against China is proof enough. So I don't rule out that he has a blind spot over Iran and wants to get rid of the
regime. I mean, even Trump is realist and adult in a few issues, yet is an oblivious fool on others.
Kind of hard to find someone who's always adult and realist, actually. You can only hope to pick someone who's more realist
than most people. Or build a positronic robot and vote for him.
I think Bannon is an authentic economic nationalist, and one that Trump feels is good counsel on those matters. If this is so,
then Bannon cannot be trying to provoke a trade war with China, since that would be an economic catastrophe for the US (and China
and the rest of the world). I'm hoping he's playing bad cop and eventually Trump will play good cop in negotiations for more investment
by China in the US and other goodies in exchange for 'well, not much' from the US. Similar to what the US dragged out of Japan
in the 80s nd 90s.
@ Everybody who bought into the MSM Steve Bannon promoted white supremacy and through Breitbart. Suggested you read his world
view expressed in remarks at Human Dignity Institute, Vatican Conference 2014
Progressives and Steve Bannon have something surprising in common: hating Wall Street
Pop quiz! Which major American political figure said the following:
"The 2008 crisis is really driven I believe by the greed, much of it driven by the greed of the investment banks."
"I think the bailouts in 2008 were wrong."
"[N]ot one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with 2008 crisis."
"The Republican Party "is really a collection of crony capitalists that feel that they have a different set of rules"
and are "the reason that the United States' financial situation is so dire."
In the Vatican talk, Bannon described in length and detail how he views the biggest issues of the day:
He wants to tear down "crony capitalism": "a brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and
creating value for a very small subset of people.[.]
He is against Ayn Rand's version of libertarianism: "The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing,
is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism.[.]
He believes the West needs to wage "a global war against Islamic fascism": "They have a Twitter account up today,
ISIS does, about turning the United States into a "river of blood" if it comes in and tries to defend the city of Baghdad.
And trust me, that is going to come to Europe.[.]
He believes the capitalism of the "Judeo Christian West" is in crisis: "If you look at the leaders of capitalism
at that time, when capitalism was I believe at its highest flower and spreading its benefits to most of mankind, almost
all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian West.[.]
He believes the racists that are attracted to Trump will become increasingly irrelevant: [.]
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
this recent Bannon interview with The American Prospect will now go viral. Drudgereport headlines the WAPO spin.
Except for the selective Zion-flavored warmongering, Bannon appears to be an intelligent and thoughtful person. Also crafty. Is
he not "Trump's Brain" in the way that Rove was Bush's Brain?
Agree. I think Bannon's quite bright and very very clever and crafty.
However, if anyone believes the lies he spewed yesterday about white supremacists, let me enlighten you that that's what's
called "good PR" or something. Bannon is someone whom I hold quite responsible for contributing to the rise of White Supremacy
in the USA, which I consider a clear and present danger. Bannon's dismissive hand waving yesterday is meant to dissemble. Guess
some are willing to buy what he was selling yesterday. Not me.
The first group to call themselves Progressives were the 19th century Populists. Their mantle was adopted by T. Roosevelt and
other like-minded Republicans. Lafollette and Wallace are perhaps the best remembered Progressives--yes, FDR is portrayed as one,
but when examined really isn't: Eleanor was far more Progressive and since she was people also thought he was too. Once Wallace
was ousted from government, Democrats reverted to their old ways, although Truman did order the military to desegregate--perhaps
his only Progressive act. JFK was in the process of becoming a Progressive in the months prior to his murder. LBJ very reluctantly
made some Progressive noises in his War on Poverty that he was essentially forced into thanks to massive ethnic strife and related
riots during the 60s. But essentially since the beginning of WW2, Progressives and their goals vanished from the political landscape.
Nader brought it back to the fringe from the wilderness, but the so-called Progressive Caucus really isn't Progressive thanks
to its war promotion.
Admittedly, I don't know much about Steve Bannon; he certainly isn't a Progressive, but he doesn't seem to be a Regressive
either. The points he made at the Vatican Talk supplied by likklemore @28 are rather encouraging in an anti-Deep State manner.
So, his interaction with The American Prospect I don't see as surprising--he's seeking allies: "'It's a great honor to
finally track you [Robert Kuttner] down. I've followed your writing for years and I think you and I are in the same boat when
it comes to China. You absolutely nailed it.'... Bannon explained that his strategy is to battle the trade doves inside the administration
while building an outside coalition of trade hawks that includes left as well as right. Hence the phone call to me." I think Kuttner
will discover Bannon will "still [be] there" after Labor Day, so he might as well make his travel plans.
I won't give you a pass. Your bias and lack of intelligence is on great display.
Read and understand as Bannon is proven right on events.
The $28 - trillion (US dollar) global bailouts in 2008 is proven to have failed. A handful on Wall Street became trillionaires
instead of being suited in special stripes.
Negative interest rates steal the retirement savings of seniors. Pensions and Insurance companies cannot meet promised payouts.
And all is fine. Corruption flourishes. Judeo-Christian moral values are not in crisis.
@12... "Bannon is a fascist" I'm not so sure. Mussolini defined fascism as being an alliance of corporate and state powers...
but Bannon (and most of his followers) have no trust in the corporate sector as they are to a large degree Globalists - they used
the US and then threw it aside in pursuit of profit elsewhere. For that, he would even call them traitors. So you could call him
a Nationalist.
@ 8 as you say... Bannon does not seem himself as an "ethno-nationalist". Yet his slanderous contempt for the liberal ethos/values
of many Americans would tend to make one question if he can be called a Nationalist.
@ 9 If Bannon was a Zionist, he would never make the comments he does against the financial sector (see @28).
@28 Bannon would never call himself a Socialist, but the most logical expression of his individualist views when applied to
the business world are expressed by none other than Ayn Rand. The financial world simply got legal cover to act on the views that
he rails against. Bannon does not like what he sees when the rules he claims for himself are given to the rest of the world. Which
makes him an "Exceptionalist"??
Isn't exceptionalism the same as narcissism?
At least the concern for 10 million in Seoul (mostly missing in the discussion of other leaders) show he is not a psychopath.
I wish Robert Parry quick and full recovery after his minor stoke. He is a magnificent journalist !
Notable quotes:
"... In the past, America has witnessed "McCarthyism" from the Right and even complaints from the Right about "McCarthyism of the Left." But what we are witnessing now amid the Russia-gate frenzy is what might be called "Establishment McCarthyism, " traditional media/political powers demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives. ..."
"... This extraordinary assault on civil liberties is cloaked in fright-filled stories about "Russian propaganda" and wildly exaggerated tales of the Kremlin's "hordes of Twitter bots," but its underlying goal is to enforce Washington's "groupthinks" by creating a permanent system that shuts down or marginalizes dissident opinions and labels contrary information – no matter how reasonable and well-researched – as "disputed" or "rated false" by mainstream "fact-checking" organizations like PolitiFact. ..."
"... For instance, PolitiFact still rates as "true" Hillary Clinton's false claim that "all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies" agreed that Russia was behind the release of Democratic emails last year. Even the Times and The Associated Press belatedly ran corrections after President Obama's intelligence chiefs admitted that the assessment came from what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called "hand-picked" analysts from only three agencies: CIA, FBI and NSA. ..."
"... And, the larger truth was that these "hand-picked" analysts were sequestered away from other analysts even from their own agencies and produced "stove-piped intelligence," i.e., analysis that escapes the back-and-forth that should occur inside the intelligence community. ..."
"... And this was not a stand-alone story. Previously, the Times has run favorable articles about plans to deploy aggressive algorithms to hunt down and then remove or marginalize information that the Times and other mainstream outlets deem false. ..."
"... Congress has authorized $160 million to combat alleged Russian "propaganda and disinformation," a gilded invitation for "scholars" and "experts" to gear up "studies" that will continue to prove what is supposed to be proved – "Russia bad" – with credulous mainstream reporters eagerly gobbling up the latest "evidence" of Russian perfidy. ..."
"... And, given the risk of thermo-nuclear war with Russia, why aren't liberals and progressives demanding at least a critical examination of what's coming from the U.S. intelligence agencies and the mainstream press? ..."
"... So, as we have moved into this dangerous New Cold War, we are living in what could be called "Establishment McCarthyism," a hysterical but methodical strategy for silencing dissent and making sure that future mainstream groupthinks don't get challenged. ..."
In the past, America has witnessed "McCarthyism" from the Right and even complaints from the Right about "McCarthyism of the
Left." But what we are witnessing now amid the Russia-gate frenzy is what might be called
"Establishment McCarthyism,
" traditional media/political powers demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives.
This extraordinary assault on civil liberties is cloaked in
fright-filled stories about "Russian
propaganda" and wildly
exaggerated tales of the Kremlin's "hordes of Twitter bots," but its underlying goal is to enforce Washington's "groupthinks"
by creating a permanent system that shuts down or marginalizes dissident opinions and labels contrary information – no matter how
reasonable and well-researched – as "disputed" or "rated false" by mainstream "fact-checking" organizations like PolitiFact.
It doesn't seem to matter that the paragons of this new structure – such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and,
indeed, PolitiFact – have a checkered record of getting facts straight.
For instance, PolitiFact still
rates as "true" Hillary Clinton's false claim that "all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies" agreed that Russia was behind the release
of Democratic emails last year. Even the Times and The Associated Press belatedly
ran corrections after
President Obama's intelligence chiefs admitted that the assessment came from what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
called "hand-picked" analysts from only three agencies: CIA, FBI and NSA.
And, the larger truth was that these "hand-picked" analysts were
sequestered away
from other analysts even from their own agencies and produced "stove-piped intelligence," i.e., analysis that escapes the back-and-forth
that should occur inside the intelligence community.
Yet, the Times and other leading newspaper routinely treat these findings as flat fact or the unassailable "consensus" of the
"intelligence community." Contrary information, including WikiLeaks' denials of a Russian role in supplying the emails, and
contrary judgments from former
senior U.S. intelligence officials are ignored.
The Jan. 6 report also tacked on a seven-page addendum smearing the Russian television network, RT, for such offenses as sponsoring
a 2012 debate among U.S. third-party presidential candidates who had been excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates. RT also
was slammed for reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests and the environmental dangers from "fracking."
How the idea of giving Americans access to divergent political opinions and information about valid issues such as income inequality
and environmental dangers constitutes threats to American "democracy" is hard to comprehend.
However, rather than address the Jan. 6 report's admitted uncertainties about Russian "hacking" and the troubling implications
of its attacks on RT, the Times and other U.S. mainstream publications treat the report as some kind of holy scripture that can't
be questioned or challenged.
Silencing RT
For instance, on Tuesday, the Times published a front-page story entitled "
YouTube Gave Russians Outlet
Portal Into U.S ." that essentially cried out for the purging of RT from YouTube. The article began by holding YouTube's vice
president Robert Kynci up to ridicule and opprobrium for his praising "RT for bonding with viewers by providing 'authentic' content
instead of 'agendas or propaganda.'"
The article by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Nicholas Confessore swallowed whole the Jan. 6 report's conclusion that RT is "the Kremlin's
'principal international propaganda outlet' and a key player in Russia's information warfare operations around the world." In other
words, the Times portrayed Kynci as essentially a "useful idiot."
Yet, the article doesn't actually dissect any RT article that could be labeled false or propagandistic. It simply alludes generally
to news items that contained information critical of Hillary Clinton as if any negative reporting on the Democratic presidential
contender – no matter how accurate or how similar to stories appearing in the U.S. press – was somehow proof of "information warfare."
As Daniel Lazare wrote at Consortiumnews.com
on Wednesday, "The web version [of the Times article] links to an RT interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that ran shortly
before the 2016 election. The topic is a September 2014
email obtained by Wikileaks in which Clinton acknowledges that 'the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia are providing clandestine
financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.'"
In other words, the Times cited a documented and newsworthy RT story as its evidence that RT was a propaganda shop threatening
American democracy and deserving ostracism if not removal from YouTube.
A Dangerous Pattern
Not to say that I share every news judgment of RT – or for that matter The New York Times – but there is a grave issue of press
freedom when the Times essentially calls for the shutting down of access to a news organization that may highlight or report on stories
that the Times and other mainstream outlets downplay or ignore.
And this was not a stand-alone story. Previously, the
Times has run favorable
articles about plans to deploy aggressive algorithms to hunt down and then remove or marginalize information that the Times and
other mainstream outlets deem false.
Nor is it just the Times. Last Thanksgiving, The Washington Post ran
a fawning front-page article
about an anonymous group PropOrNot that had created a blacklist of 200 Internet sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other
independent news sources, that were deemed guilty of dispensing "Russian propaganda," which basically amounted to our showing any
skepticism toward the State Department's narratives on the crises in Syria or Ukraine.
So, if any media outlet dares to question the U.S. government's version of events – once that storyline has been embraced by the
big media – the dissidents risk being awarded the media equivalent of a yellow star and having their readership dramatically reduced
by getting downgraded on search engines and punished on social media.
Meanwhile, Congress has
authorized $160 million to combat alleged Russian "propaganda and disinformation," a gilded invitation for "scholars" and "experts"
to gear up "studies" that will continue to prove what is supposed to be proved – "Russia bad" – with credulous mainstream reporters
eagerly gobbling up the latest "evidence" of Russian perfidy.
There is also a more coercive element to what's going on. RT is facing demands from the Justice Department that it register as
a "foreign agent" or face prosecution. Clearly, the point is to chill the journalism done by RT's American reporters, hosts and staff
who now fear being stigmatized as something akin to traitors.
You might wonder: where are the defenders of press freedom and civil liberties? Doesn't anyone in the mainstream media or national
politics recognize the danger to a democracy coming from enforced groupthinks? Is American democracy so fragile that letting Americans
hear "another side of the story" must be prevented?
A Dangerous 'Cure'
I agree that there is a limited problem with jerks who knowingly make up fake stories or who disseminate crazy conspiracy theories
– and no one finds such behavior more offensive than I do. But does no one recall the lies about Iraq's WMD and other U.S. government
falsehoods and deceptions over the years?
Often, it is the few dissenters who alert the American people to the truth, even as the Times, Post, CNN and other big outlets
are serving as the real propaganda agents, accepting what the "important people" say and showing little or no professional skepticism.
And, given the risk of thermo-nuclear war with Russia, why aren't liberals and progressives demanding at least a critical
examination of what's coming from the U.S. intelligence agencies and the mainstream press?
The answer seems to be that many liberals and progressives are so blinded by their fury over Donald Trump's election that they
don't care what lines are crossed to destroy or neutralize him. Plus, for some liberal entities, there's lots of money to be made.
For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union has made its "resistance" to the Trump administration an important part of its
fundraising. So, the ACLU is doing nothing to defend the rights of news organizations and journalists under attack. When I asked
ACLU about the Justice Department's move against RT and other encroachments on press freedom, I was told by ACLU spokesman Thomas
Dresslar: "Thanks for reaching out to us. Unfortunately, I've been informed that we do not have anyone able to speak to you about
this."
Meanwhile, the Times and other traditional "defenders of a free press" are now part of the attack machine against a free press.
While much of this attitude comes from the big media's high-profile leadership of the anti-Trump Resistance and anger at any resistors
to the Resistance, mainstream news outlets have chafed for years over the Internet undermining their privileged role as the gatekeepers
of what Americans get to see and hear.
For a long time, the big media has wanted an excuse to rein in the Internet and break the small news outlets that have challenged
the power – and the profitability – of the Times, Post, CNN, etc. Russia-gate and Trump have become the cover for that restoration
of mainstream authority.
So, as we have moved into this dangerous New Cold War, we are living in what could be called "Establishment McCarthyism,"
a hysterical but methodical strategy for silencing dissent and making sure that future mainstream groupthinks don't get challenged.
"... Bannon is almost universally loathed by the Washington press corps, and not just for his politics. When he was the CEO of the pro-Trump Breitbart website, he competed with traditional media outlets, and he has often mercilessly attacked and ridiculed them. ..."
"... The animosity towards Bannon reached new heights last month, when he incautiously told the New York Times that "the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while." He also said the media was "the opposition party" to the Trump administration. To the Washington media, those are truly fighting words. ..."
"... Bannon's comments were outrageous, but they are hardly new. In 2009, President Obama's White House communications director, Anita Dunn, sought to restrict Fox News' access to the White House. She even said, "We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent." The media's outrage over that remark was restrained, to say the least. ..."
"... Reporters and pundits are also stepping up the effort to portray Bannon as the puppet master in the White House. Last week, MSNBC's Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski said, "Legitimate media are getting word that Steve Bannon is the last guy in the room, in the evening especially, and he's pulling the strings." Her co-host, Joe Scarborough, agreed that Bannon's role should be "investigated." ..."
"... I'm all for figuring out who the powers behind the curtain are in the White House, but we saw precious little interest in that during the Obama administration. ..."
"... Liberal writer Steven Brill wrote a 2015 book, America's Bitter Pill , in which he slammed "incompetence in the White House" for the catastrophic launch of Obamacare. "Never [has there] been a group of people who more incompetently launched something," he told NPR's Terry Gross, who interviewed him about the book. He laid much of the blame at Jarrett's doorstep. "The people in the administration who knew it was going wrong went to the president directly with memos, in person, to his chief of staff," he said. "The president was protected, mostly by Valerie Jarrett, from doing anything. . . . He didn't know what was going on in the single most important initiative of his administration." How important was Jarrett inside the Obama White House? Brill interviewed the president about the struggles of Obamacare and reported Obama's conclusion: "At this point, I am not so interested in Monday-morning quarterbacking the past." ..."
"... five of the highest-ranking Obama officials had told him that "as a practical matter . . . Jarrett was the real chief of staff on any issues that she wanted to weigh in on, and she jealously protected that position by making sure the president never gave anyone else too much power." When Brill asked the president about these aides' assessment of Jarrett, Obama "declined comment," Brill wrote in his book. That, in and of itself, was an answer. Would that Jarrett had received as much media scrutiny of her role in eight years under Obama as Bannon has in less than four weeks. ..."
"... I've had my disagreements with Bannon, whose apocalyptic views on some issues I don't share. Ronald Reagan once said that if someone in Washington agrees with you 80 percent of the time, he is an ally, not an enemy. I'd guess Bannon wouldn't agree with that sentiment. ..."
Bannon is almost universally loathed by the Washington press corps, and not just for his politics. When he was the
CEO of the pro-Trump Breitbart website, he competed with traditional media outlets, and he has often mercilessly attacked
and ridiculed them.
The animosity towards Bannon reached new heights last month, when he incautiously told the New York Times that "the media
should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while." He also said the media was "the opposition
party" to the Trump administration. To the Washington media, those are truly fighting words.
Joel Simon, of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told CNN that "this kind of speech not [only] undermines the work of the
media in this country, it emboldens autocratic leaders around the world." Jacob Weisberg, the head of the Slate Group, tweeted that
Bannon's comment was terrifying and "tyrannical."
Bannon's comments were outrageous, but they are hardly new. In 2009, President Obama's White House communications director,
Anita Dunn, sought to restrict Fox News' access to the White House. She even said, "We're going to treat them the way we would treat
an opponent." The media's outrage over that remark was restrained, to say the least.
Ever since Bannon's outburst, you can hear the media gears meshing in the effort to undermine him. In TV green rooms and at Washington
parties, I've heard journalists say outright that it's time to get him. Time magazine put a sinister-looking Bannon on its
cover, describing him as "The Great Manipulator." Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor of Time , boasted to MSNBC that
the image was in keeping with a tradition of controversial covers that put leaders in their place. "Likewise, putting [former White
House aide] Mike Deaver on the cover, the brains behind Ronald Reagan, that ended up bringing down Reagan," he told the hosts of
Morning Joe . "So you've got to have these checks and balances, whether it's the judiciary or the press."
Reporters and pundits are also stepping up the effort to portray Bannon as the puppet master in the White House. Last week,
MSNBC's Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski said, "Legitimate media are getting word that Steve Bannon is the last guy in
the room, in the evening especially, and he's pulling the strings." Her co-host, Joe Scarborough, agreed that Bannon's role should
be "investigated."
I'm all for figuring out who the powers behind the curtain are in the White House, but we saw precious little interest in
that during the Obama administration.
It wasn't until four years after the passage of Obamacare that a journalist reported on just how powerful White House counselor
Valerie Jarrett had been in its flawed implementation. Liberal writer Steven Brill wrote a 2015 book, America's Bitter Pill
, in which he slammed "incompetence in the White House" for the catastrophic launch of Obamacare. "Never [has there] been a group
of people who more incompetently launched something," he told NPR's Terry Gross, who interviewed him about the book. He laid much
of the blame at Jarrett's doorstep. "The people in the administration who knew it was going wrong went to the president directly
with memos, in person, to his chief of staff," he said. "The president was protected, mostly by Valerie Jarrett, from doing anything.
. . . He didn't know what was going on in the single most important initiative of his administration." How important was Jarrett
inside the Obama White House? Brill interviewed the president about the struggles of Obamacare and reported Obama's conclusion: "At
this point, I am not so interested in Monday-morning quarterbacking the past."
Brill then bluntly told the president that five of the highest-ranking Obama officials had told him that "as a practical matter
. . . Jarrett was the real chief of staff on any issues that she wanted to weigh in on, and she jealously protected that position
by making sure the president never gave anyone else too much power." When Brill asked the president about these aides' assessment
of Jarrett, Obama "declined comment," Brill wrote in his book. That, in and of itself, was an answer. Would that Jarrett had received
as much media scrutiny of her role in eight years under Obama as Bannon has in less than four weeks.
I've had my disagreements with Bannon, whose apocalyptic views on some issues I don't share. Ronald Reagan once said that
if someone in Washington agrees with you 80 percent of the time, he is an ally, not an enemy. I'd guess Bannon wouldn't agree with
that sentiment.
But the media's effort to turn Bannon into an enemy of the people is veering into hysterical character assassination. The Sunday
print edition of the New York Times ran an astonishing 1,500-word story headlined: "Fascists Too Lax for a Philosopher Cited
by Bannon." (The online headline now reads, "Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists.") The Times based this
headline on what it admits was "a passing reference" in
a speech by Bannon at a Vatican conference in 2014 . In that speech, Bannon made a single mention of Julius Evola, an obscure
Italian philosopher who opposed modernity and cozied up to Mussolini's Italian Fascists.
Think of this as but the latest episode in an upside down geopolitical fairy tale, a grim,
rather than Grimm, story for our age that might begin: Once upon a time -- in October 2001, to
be exact -- Washington launched its war on terror. There was then just one country targeted,
the very one where, a little more than a decade earlier, the U.S. had ended a
long proxy war against the Soviet Union during which it had financed, armed, or backed an
extreme set of Islamic fundamentalist groups, including a rich young Saudi by the name of Osama
bin Laden.
By 2001, in the wake of that war, which helped send the Soviet Union down the path to
implosion, Afghanistan was largely (but not completely) ruled by the Taliban. Osama bin Laden
was there, too, with a relatively modest crew of cohorts. By early 2002, he had fled to
Pakistan, leaving many of his companions dead and his organization, al-Qaeda, in a state of
disarray. The Taliban, defeated, were pleading to be allowed to put down their arms and go back
to their villages, an abortive process that Anand Gopal vividly described in his book, No Good Men Among the
Living .
It was, it seemed, all over but the cheering and, of course, the planning for yet greater
exploits across the region. The top officials in the administration of President George W. Bush
and Vice President Dick Cheney were geopolitical dreamers of the first order who couldn't have
had more expansive ideas about how to extend such success to -- as Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld indicated only days after the 9/11 attacks --
terror or insurgent groups in more than 60 countries. It was a point President Bush would
reemphasize
nine months later in a triumphalist graduation speech at West Point. At that moment, the
struggle they had quickly, if immodestly, dubbed the Global War on Terror was still a
one-country affair. They were, however, already deep into preparations to extend it in ways
more radical and devastating than they could ever have imagined with the invasion and
occupation of Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the domination of the oil heartlands of the planet that
they were sure would follow. (In a comment that caught the moment exactly, Newsweekquoted a British official
"close to the Bush team" as saying, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to
Tehran.")
So many years later, perhaps it won't surprise you -- as it probably wouldn't have surprised the
hundreds of thousands of protesters who turned out in the streets of American cities and towns
in early 2003 to oppose the invasion of Iraq -- that this was one of those stories to which the
adage "be careful what you wish for" applies.
Seeing War
And it's a tale that's not over yet. Not by a long shot. As a start, in the Trump era, the
longest war in American history, the one in Afghanistan, is only getting longer. There are
those U.S. troop levels
on the rise ; those air strikes
ramping up ; the Taliban
in control of significant sections of the country; an Islamic State-branded terror group
spreading
ever more successfully in its eastern regions; and, according to the
latest report from the Pentagon, "more than 20 terrorist or insurgent groups in Afghanistan
and Pakistan."
Think about that: 20 groups. In other words, so many years later, the war on terror should
be seen as an endless exercise in the use of multiplication tables -- and not just in
Afghanistan either. More than a decade and a half after an American president spoke of 60 or
more countries as potential targets, thanks to the invaluable work of a single dedicated group,
the Costs of War Project at
Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, we finally have a
visual representation of the true extent of the war on terror. That we've had to wait so long
should tell us something about the nature of this era of permanent war.
America's war on terror across the globe (from the Costs of War Project). Click on the map
to see a larger version.
The Costs of War Project has produced not just a map of the war on terror, 2015-2017
(released at TomDispatch with this article), but the first map of its kind ever. It
offers an astounding vision of Washington's counterterror wars across the globe: their spread,
the deployment of U.S. forces, the expanding missions to train foreign counterterror forces,
the American bases that make them possible, the drone and other air strikes that are essential
to them, and the U.S. combat troops helping to fight them. (Terror groups have, of course,
morphed and expanded riotously as part and parcel of the same process.)
A glance at the map tells you that the war on terror, an increasingly complex set of
intertwined conflicts, is now a remarkably global phenomenon. It stretches from the Philippines
(with its own ISIS-branded group that just fought an almost five-month-long campaign that
devastated Marawi, a city of 300,000) through South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East,
North Africa, and deep into West Africa where, only recently, four Green Berets died
in an ambush in Niger.
No less stunning are the number of countries Washington's war on terror has touched in some
fashion. Once, of course, there was only one (or, if you want to include the United States,
two). Now, the Costs of War Project identifies no less than 76 countries, 39% of those on the
planet, as involved in that global conflict. That means places like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq,
Yemen, Somalia, and Libya where U.S. drone or other air strikes are the norm and U.S. ground
troops (often Special
Operations forces ) have been either directly or indirectly engaged in combat. It also
means countries where U.S. advisers are training local militaries or even militias in
counterterror tactics and those with bases crucial to this expanding set of conflicts. As the
map makes clear, these categories often overlap.
Who could be surprised that such a "war" has been eating American taxpayer dollars at a rate
that should stagger the imagination in a country whose infrastructure is now visibly crumbling ? In a
separate study , released in November, the Costs of War Project estimated that the price
tag on the war on terror (with some future expenses included) had already reached an
astronomical $5.6 trillion. Only recently, however, President Trump, now escalating those
conflicts, tweeted
an even more staggering figure: "After having foolishly spent $7 trillion in the Middle East,
it is time to start rebuilding our country!" (This figure, too, seems to have come in some
fashion from the Costs of War estimate that "future interest
payments on borrowing for the wars will likely add more than $7.9 trillion to the national
debt" by mid-century
.)
It couldn't have been a rarer comment from an American politician, as in these years
assessments of both the monetary and human costs of war have largely been left to small groups of scholars and activists. The
war on terror has, in fact, spread in the fashion today's map lays out with almost no serious
debate in this country about its costs or results. If the document produced by the Costs of War
project is, in fact, a map from hell, it is also, I believe, the first full-scale map of this
war ever produced.
Think about that for a moment. For the last 16 years, we, the American people, funding this
complex set of conflicts to the tune of trillions of dollars, have lacked a single map of the
war Washington has been fighting. Not one. Yes, parts of that morphing, spreading set of
conflicts have been somewhere in the news regularly, though seldom (except when there were
"lone wolf" terror attacks in the United States or Western Europe) in the headlines. In all
those years, however, no American could see an image of this strange, perpetual conflict whose
end is nowhere in sight.
Part of this can be explained by the nature of that "war." There are no fronts, no armies
advancing on Berlin, no armadas bearing down on the Japanese homeland. There hasn't been, as in
Korea in the early 1950s, even a parallel to cross or fight your way back to. In this war,
there have been no obvious retreats and, after the triumphal entry into Baghdad in 2003, few
advances either.
It was hard even to map its component parts and when you did -- as in an August New York Times map of territories controlled by the Taliban in Afghanistan -- the
imagery was complex and of limited impact. Generally, however, we, the people, have been
demobilized
in almost every imaginable way in these years, even when it comes to simply following the
endless set of wars and conflicts that go under the rubric of the war on terror.
Mapping 2018 and Beyond
Let me repeat this mantra: once, almost seventeen years ago, there was one; now, the count
is 76 and rising. Meanwhile, great cities have been turned into rubble
; tens of millions of human beings have been displaced from their homes; refugees
by the millions continue to cross borders, unsettling ever more lands; terror groups have
become brand names across significant parts of the planet; and our American world continues to
be militarized
.
This should be thought of as an entirely new kind of perpetual global war. So take one more
look at that map. Click on it and then enlarge it to consider the map in full-screen mode. It's
important to try to imagine what's been happening visually, since we're facing a new kind of
disaster, a planetary militarization of a sort we've never truly seen before. No matter the
"successes" in Washington's war, ranging from that invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to the
taking of Baghdad in 2003 to the recent destruction of the Islamic State's "caliphate" in Syria
and Iraq (or most of it anyway, since at this moment American planes are
still dropping bombs and firing missiles in parts of Syria), the conflicts only seem to
morph and tumble on.
We are now in an era in which the U.S. military is the leading edge -- often the only edge
-- of what used to be called American "foreign policy" and the State Department is being
radically
downsized . American Special Operations forces were deployed to 149
countries in 2017 alone and the U.S. has so many troops on so many bases in so many places
on Earth that the Pentagon can't even account for the whereabouts of
44,000 of them. There may, in fact, be no way to truly map all of this, though the Costs of
War Project's illustration is a triumph of what can be seen.
Looking into the future, let's pray for one thing: that the folks at that project have
plenty of stamina, since it's a given that, in the Trump years (and possibly well beyond), the
costs of war will only rise. The first Pentagon budget of the Trump era, passed with bipartisan
unanimity by Congress and signed by the president, is a staggering $700
billion . Meanwhile, America's leading military men and the president, while escalating the
country's conflicts from Niger to
Yemen ,
Somalia to Afghanistan, seem eternally in search of yet more wars to launch.
Pointing to Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, for instance, Marine Corps Commandant
General Robert Neller recently
told U.S. troops in Norway to expect a "bigass fight" in the future, adding, "I hope I'm
wrong, but there's a war coming." In December, National Security Adviser Lieutenant General
H.R. McMaster similarly suggested
that the possibility of a war (conceivably nuclear in nature) with Kim Jong-un's North Korea
was "increasing every day." Meanwhile, in an administration packed with Iranophobes, President
Trump seems to be preparing to tear up the
Iran nuclear deal, possibly as early as this month.
In other words, in 2018 and beyond, maps of many creative kinds may be needed simply to
begin to take in the latest in America's wars. Consider, for instance, a recent
report in the New York Times that about 2,000 employees of the Department of
Homeland Security are already "deployed to more than 70 countries around the world," largely to
prevent terror attacks. And so it goes in the twenty-first century.
So welcome to 2018, another year of unending war, and while we're on the subject, a small
warning to our leaders: given the last 16 years, be careful what you wish for.
Looks like false analysis to me. IMHO Trump betrayed his election platform with ease,
especially in foreign policy.
It is kind of wishful thinking that is used by some to justify voting for Trump and hide the sense of great betrayal.
The fact that Trump won is nothing special. I think Sanders would win too, if given a change. The level of
disappointment with the establishment was way too high.
What follows is an attempt to divine Trump's foreign policy. It proceeds from the assumption
that he does know what he's doing (as he did when he decided to run in the first place) and
that he does have a destination in mind. It proceeds with the understanding that his foreign
policy intentions have been greatly retarded by the (completely false) allegations of Russia
connections and Russian interference. There was no Russian state interference in the election
(the likelihood is that Moscow would have preferred known Clinton) and, as I have written
here , the story doesn't even make sense. I expect when the Department of Justice Inspector
General completes his report that the Russiagate farrago will be revealed as a conspiracy
inside the US security organs. We do not have a date yet, but mid-January is suggested. Readers
who want to follow the story are recommended to these websites: Dystopiausa , CTH and Zerohedge .
To the neocon and humanitarian intervention crowd, who have been driving US foreign policy
for most of the century, these four points, when properly understood (as, at some level, they
do understand them), are a fatal challenge. Trump is saying that
The post 911 military interventions did nothing for the country's security;
Foreign interventions impoverish the country;
The alliance system is neither useful nor a good deal for the country;
Russia is not the once and future enemy.
A Chinese leader might call these the Three Noes (no regime change wars, no overseas
adventures, no entangling alliances) and the One Yes (cooperation with Russia and other
powers).
Which brings us to his slogan of Make America Great Again. We notice his campaign themes of
job loss, opiates, lawlessness, infrastructure, illegal immigration, the stranglehold of
regulations, the "swamp", the indifference of the mighty, the death of the "American Dream".
None of these can be made better by overseas interventions, carrier battle groups or foreign
bases. But they can be made worse by them. There is every reason to expect that by MAGA he
means internal prosperity and not external might.
If I am correct in this and this is indeed his aim, how can he do it?
There is a powerful opposition in the United States to the Three Noes and One Yes. And it's
not just from the neocon/humanitarian interventionists: most Americans have been conditioned to
believe that the USA must be the world's policeman, arbiter, referee, example. Perhaps it's
rooted in the City on a Hill exceptionalism of the early dissenter settlers, perhaps it's a
legacy of the reality of 1945, perhaps it's just the effect of unremitting propaganda, but most
Americans believe that the USA has an obligation to lead. Gallup informs us that, in this
century, well over half of the population has agreed that the USA should play the leading or a
major role in the world . The percentage in the punditocracy believing the USA must lead
would be even higher.
If I have understood him right, what would Trump see if he read this stuff? Lead, lead,
lead... everything everywhere. The South China Sea, the Middle East and North Korea
specifically but everywhere else too. More infrastructure repairs foregone so as to ensure
what?... That ships carrying goods to and from China safely transit the South China Sea?
"Friendly" governments installed in " Kyrzbekistan
"? Soldiers killed in countries not even lawmakers knew they were in?
40,000 troops out there somewhere ? Trying to double the Soviet record for being stuck in
Afghanistan? How many bridges, factories or lives is that worth? Trump sees more entanglements
but he sees no benefit. He's a businessman: he can see the expense but where's the profit?
How to get out of these entanglements? It's too late to hope to persuade the legions
bleating that "America must lead" and, even if they could be persuaded, there isn't enough time
to do so: they salivate when the bell rings. President Trump can avoid new entanglements but he
has inherited so many and they are, all of them, growing denser and thicker by the minute.
Consider the famous story of the Gordian Knot: rather than trying to untie the fabulously
complicated knot, Alexander drew his sword and cut it. How can Trump cut The Gordian Knot of
American imperial entanglements?
The Three Noes and One Yes policy will be achieved by others: others who realise that the
USA is no longer going to lead and they will have to lead themselves. Or not. Perhaps, as the
neocons love to say, US leadership was necessary in the immediate postwar situation, perhaps
NATO served a stabilising purpose then but there has been nothing stabilising about US
leadership in this century. Endless wars and destruction and chaos and loss. Thus abroad and
– the part that Trump cares about – so at home. It's not
incompetence , as the people who fail Adams' test tell themselves; it's a strategy.
(All real theories must be falsifiable; let's see in a year's time whether the US is more
entangled or less entangled. It should be pretty apparent by then and, by the end of Trump's
first term, obvious to all.)
well, if your income, assets, and investments are denominated in US dollars, you better
hope the "denial" and privilege continues as long as possible.
Maybe if the petro dollar collapses there will be people who "get what they deserve"...and
I'm not all sure who those people are. As for me, when I'm paying $11 a gallon for gasoline
and a $1,000 per/month utility bill, I'm not going to be praising the fall of the petro
dollar, and I'd be willing to be the other ZH petro-dollar bashers won't be liking that too
much either.
PS...I'm in Houston, and would actually benefit from $11 gasoline.
Just when you thought that the intravenous feed of fake news/phony psyopin/double down
b.s. into the veins of TARDNATION couldn't get any
tackier... we get
Not a professional politician begging for funds but a rich man who spent his own money
and raised money on his own name: he arrived in office unencumbered with obligations. Free
from a history in politics, he owes nothing to anyone.
Hello? That the Drumpster raised pon the knee of daddy FRED "hump the HUD' Drumpf, and
mentored by Roy "hump the rumps - o boyz" Cohn.. to stick his small hands in every orifice
when the sun don't shine but the leprachauns hide their shiny sinful loot -
that POTUS with the mostest debt burden ever... to luabvitcher usurers of the usual dual
passport type....
has 'nothin to hide... and is ha ha ha... 'free of obligations' ... and 'owes nuthin to no
one...
signals that today... we reach PEAK PROPAGANDA of previously unimaginable proportions...
and that the desperation of tards to be told SOME KINDA GOOD NEWS... in the shitstorm of
trouble that the maggots of the MAGA kind find themselves in
is not just INSANITY BY DEFINITION... but the CAPITULATION we have awaited in eager
anticipation... showing that these retards are finally on empty... and can soon be lowered
into their shallow graves to be gradually turned into some kind of useful topsoil
material.
Mentally ill...OK. Most qualified candidate in history...give me a fucking break!
What many do not realize, including this author, is if there was a viable third party, and
their candidate was Satan, they would have won the presidency.
The voter turn out says a lot. If Trump and Clinton (and those they ran against!) were the
best leaders the US had to offer up we are so fucked. Fucked with a big ball of rusty barbed
wire coated in shit.
and Tyler is speeding that process along by posting articles that pander to racial
divides, man with longest penis, and other rubbish, which only attracts more of the
lowlifes.
this used to be a terrific site back in 2011 when we joined, was a real education in
finance back then.
but, as the USA continues its decline, more people will want someone to blame instead of
taking responsibility - as a nation, Americans have been asleep at the wheel, they've
abdicated responsibility for government spending run amuck, for the social security Ponzi
scheme, for American military adventurism, for the Clinton and bush crime families, for the
fed bleeding the country dry like a nightmarish vampire.
its hard to admit that, yes, we behaved stupidly and evilly, we squandered vast fortunes
and ruined other nations that never attacked us, we accepted a criminally corrupt
"leadership" who claimed to rule in the interest of the public but served their own secret
agendas.
much easier to blame the Jews (or other group of choice) because, you know we're the good
guys, the situation couldn't possibly be our fault.
Is anyone else watching the "The Trump-Russia Investigation" one-and-half hour special
report on CNN? Fuck this is yellow journalism at its dirtiest. Because, if it is on CNN it
must be true. Fucking swine.
I don't know if the U.S. will be more or less entangled in one years time. I do know that
after one year of Trump, deportations of illegal immigrants are down, being less in 2017 than
they were in 2016!
Hes cut off the Palestinians and the Pakistani's,the Afghan situation is worsening,there's
no cutting losses and running in Syria,Mogadishu,Nigeria,the US is arming Ukrainians,building
up with Nato in the Baltics and Eastern Europe,actively talking about nuclear war in North
Korea,pissing the Chinese off,Iran,Venezuela etc etc....have a guess he is not cleaning up
he's making a bloody great mess.
Yep, it's a huge mess, mostly because they are trying very, very hard to start a war and
nobody wants to play. So, like playing chess with a pigeon, we knock over the pieces, strut
around, shit everywhere and think we are awesome. Trump and the gang's complete lack of
diplomatic skills (USA is #1 andthe world will kiss our asses or face consequences (excepting
Israel)) is isolating us and not by their choice. Isolation means no petro-dollar which means
seriously hard times at home. No wall. No MAGA. No freedom.
One by one countries are turning their backs on the US. Trump thinks he's CEO of the
world. In reality, nothing better could happen to the world that Trump with hold ALL foreign
aid, pull troops and bases out of every country they're in, concentrate on lowering debt and
rebuilding infrastructure and stop being such a fucking bomb dropping bully. That would be
good for the planet.
But it's not what the banks and the MIC want. He's beginning to make oblahblah look good
which may be his biggest accomplishment yet.
Where does the Executive get the authority to maintain a personal military empire, to
launch wars unilaterally without a declaration of war by the Legislature, to build bases on
another nation's property, to wage terrorism against other nations, etc? Trump is still doing
these things, just like his predecessors. They all go to the "wailing wall", put on the
yarmulke, and carry out a ritual to antichrist.
Congress may be informed after the war begins is the mentality of the regime. Meanwhile,
the Constitution the men and women who volunteer as mercenaries swear to uphold and defend,
requires a declaration of war by the Legislature before the President may act as Commander in
Chief. There is no authority for an army for him to command without the declaration. So, what
gives? Those "soldiers" are violating their oath by even volunteering to serve the regime
violating the Constitution. They are ultimately the ones enabling and empowering the illegal
regime.
He is still doing them. Not only that, but he has expanded, increased involvement in the
attack on Yemen, occupying and building bases illegally on Syrian soil, etc. If someone tells
me they're trying to lose weight, while they're spooning down a gallon of ice cream, I'll
call them a liar to their face. Stop making excuses.
Open another tab, put in US troops Yemen. You'll see there has been no drawback under
Trump, but rather an increase in support for attacks in Yemen, as well as for Saudi
Arabia.
Pull up US forces remain in Syria while you're at it. They're not going anywhere. They're
building bases. Trump rails about illegals coming into the US while he oversees illegal
invasion of other nations.
Do I need to post the links, or can you operate a search engine?
Trump believes in the importance of projecting toughness- the image that he is tough and
not to be trifled with. That means at least some military engagement, from time to time,
regardless of whether or not it makes geostrategic sense. In his mind, projecting toughness
is in and of itself a geostrategically sensible thing to do. Show the enemy what you're
capable of, both in terms of resolve and hardware. I don't think he sees an imminent danger
to the planet. He seems comfortable with MAD. He also appears to place a lot of faith in the
judgments of his generals. If they say we need to keep throwing good money after bad (Iraq,
Afghanistan, Syria) he'll follow their orders...err, I mean suggestions. In my opinion, the
Trump of 20 years ago was a more sensible, realpolitik person than the Trump of today.
So, the US regime is a bully that needs to make sure to knock someone down in front of the
crowd from time to time, to keep the fear and intimidation factor fresh in their minds.
It's a nationalist economic, yes fascist, group of policies. The projection of foreign
policy only exists to make our own economics stronger in terms of sum. Less incentives to
multinationals to screw us by taking advantage of cucked and sellout trade agreements. Less
incentives for aliens to come and suck the taxpayer tit. It's economic pragmatism, much like
you would run your own small business. More cream for us, less cream for them.
For us in Australia it looks very much like the global bloodsucker corporations are in
Delaware with accounts in the Cayman Islands. They take our money and don't give anything in
return, except a few lowly paid hours in the gig economy.
"... The upshot? It's quite acceptable, on the Left and the pseudo-Right, to casually quip about troops in Niger and Norway . "We
have soldiers in Niger and Norway? Of course we do. We need them." With neoconservatism normalized, there is no debate, disagreement
or daylight between our dangerously united political factions. ..."
"... How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism: In 2016, liberals accused candidate Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives
-- aka Conservatism Inc. -- did the same. ..."
"... No one should be surprised by Trump promoting Israeli interests über alles. For decades he was so involved in Israel events
in New York I debated whether he was actually Jewish or not. Bannon said the embassy move to Jerusalem was at the behest of Adelson,
Trump's old casino buddy. In the campaign Trump got a lot of support from NY Jewish billionaires (Icahn, Feinberg, Paulson, et al.).
They know him and how he operates. ..."
"... But being pro-Israel doesn't necessarily equate to neocon. The neocons are the dumb Jews with serious inadequacy issues who
could never make it in business and instead went into politics and journalism. The latter are still staunchly opposed to Trump even
after a lot of pro-Israel moves. They might warm up to Trump's bellicosity towards a lot of Israel's enemies (a long list with degrees
of separation), but so far they've simply moved left. ..."
"... I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a business and deal-making position than
from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g., Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic
and will avoid conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are virtuous in going to war and/or
attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!). ..."
"... Lastly, I like to think Trump surrounded himself with neocons (McMaster, Haley, et al.) to placate the GOP establishment because
he knows he has to play the game. ..."
"... People are inclined to believe that any activity -- in this instance, voting for the red/blue puppets in Washington -- in which
their participation is patronized must be legitimate and effectual. Many duped in November 2016, even those who now feel betrayed by
that farce, were still around here a few weeks ago acting like a Senator Moore in Alabama would be pivotal to reform, his defeat devastating.
That's how Ms. Mercer and her pundit ilk (Buchanan, Napolitano, etc.) thrive -- supporting the Empire by never questioning its legitimacy,
just taking sides within the Establishment. And they'll be buying into the 2018 congressional contests, ad nauseum. ..."
"... Of course, what is done to us, and to others in our name and with our money, never changes to any meaningful degree. Americans
might realize this if they thought critically about it, so they don't. Instead, they lap up the BS and vote for who tells them the lie
they like to hear. When there are identity politics involved, the delusion seems even deeper. There are self-styled "progressives" who
used to advocate single-payer, nationalized health care who are elated over the retention of so-called "Obamacare," the legislation
for which was written by and for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. ..."
"... Far from all Neocons are Jews. However, virtually all Neocons are militantly pro-Israel to the point of making Israel's foreign
policy desires central to their assessment of what America needs in foreign policy. ..."
"... Pres Trump is a situational leader. It's a rare style, for good reason. However, he is openly situational. That was clear during
the campaign season. however, ..."
"... I thought his positions were sincere. I don't think that this was any kind of slight of hand, "watch me pull a rabbit out of
my hat". His positions on Israel, same sex behavior, marijuana, healthcare remain what they were going in. His foreign policy and immigration
positions have been buffered and he seems incapable of standing where he came in. ..."
"... It was no secret he intended an assertive military. However, he seems easily convinced that strong means aggressive, and that
needlessly aggressive policy is a substitute for a strong US -- that is a mistake. Syria cruise strike was the first sign that he was
giving in to the men whom he chose as advisers. As it it turns out winning the election has been easier than governing. I assumed he
had a much stronger backbone, than he has been willing to exhibit in office. ..."
"... Pardon the earlier tag. I thought that you just had to be joking. Nikki Haley was inflicted upon the world at large because
Trump doesn't actually know anybody in this new world he fell into once he was inaugurated. ..."
"... Trump is so arrogant about his cluelessness that we'll be lucky to avoid a nuclear war caused by his bumbling. As in the final
line of an old proverb: "He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool. Shun him. ..."
It's fact: Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump's foreign policy.
A couple of months back, Bloomberg's Eli Lake let it know he was in neoconservative nirvana:
" for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. 'The United States has taken important steps to
hold the regime accountable,' Trump said. 'We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its
path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'"
... ... ...
No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of
Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of "sovereignty," but in watered-down words.
The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested
(not!) "vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors."
These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose.
"It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'"
wrote historian
Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US
foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without
any debate in Congress or the media."
Indeed, while outlining his "new" Afghanistan plan, POTUS had conceded that "the American people are weary of war without victory."
(Make that war, full-stop.) Depressingly, the president went on to promise an increase in American presence in Afghanistan. By sending
4000 additional soldiers there, President Trump alleged he was fighting terrorism, yet not undertaking nation building.
This is tantamount to talking out of both sides of one's mouth.
Teasing apart these two elements is near-impossible. Send "4,000 additional soldiers to add to the 8,400 now deployed in Afghanistan,"
and you've done what Obama and Bush before you did in that blighted and benighted region: muddle along; kill some civilians mixed
in with some bad guys; break bread with tribal leaders (who hate your guts); mediate and bribe.
Above all, spend billions not your own to perfect the credo of a global fighting force that doesn't know Shiite from
Shinola .
The upshot? It's quite acceptable, on the Left and the pseudo-Right, to casually quip about troops in Niger and
Norway . "We have soldiers in Niger and Norway? Of course we do. We need them." With neoconservatism normalized, there is no
debate, disagreement or daylight between our dangerously united political factions.
This is the gift President Trump has given mainstream neoconservatives -- who now comfortably include neoliberals and all Conservatism
Inc., with the exceptions of Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.
How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism: In 2016, liberals accused candidate Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives
-- aka Conservatism Inc. -- did the same.
Having
consistently complained of his isolationism , the Left and the phony Right cannot but sanction President Trump's interventionism
. The other option is to admit that we of
the callused Old Right,
who rejoiced at the prospects and promise of non-interventionism, were always right. Not going to happen. To some, the normalizing
of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics.
To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand.
I think Bannon's ouster and his subsequently being attacked by Trump is just further evidence of Trump the Neocon. McConnell and
the establishment are piling on with glee. Welcome to the swamp.
Trump isn't a neoconservative or a turncoat, but he was not nearly aggressive enough in purging the unelected bureaucracy or in
preparing replacements. By the end of his first term I expect it will be different. He has appointed many federal judges and sent
consistent signals to law enforcement agencies. Also, sending Nikki Haley to the UN was a prank. Kushner's indefensible though.
"Trump attacking Bannon" was Trump reacting hastily and badly to a misreported non-story from half a year ago. Bannon has now
irritated the Mercers and will go through some sort of hair shirt thing.
> establishment gleefully piling
When have they ever done anything else? Do you expect them to admit they were wrong? Remember when Trump could not possibly be
the nominee?
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all
the time.
But you can fool the whole country all the time in American bi-partisan system. ,Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump each were brought
to power by fooling their electorate.
So Trump did morph into Hillary.
Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but expected, considering that I view presidents
as empty suits, and the National Security State calling the shots.
I'm waiting for another one of those "Trump's Truth in Action" moments when describes the real political atmosphere in Washington.
Trump was asked about something he said in a previous interview: "When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do."
"You'd better believe it," Trump said. "If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of the people on this stage I've given
to, just so you understand, a lot of money."
I think its time to dump the label "neoconservative". The appropriate term is "interventionists without a cause" (IWAC or IWC)
or some other descriptor.
The real problem that Pres Trump has and I remain a Pres Trump supporter is two fold:
He seems to have forgotten he won the election.
He seems to have forgotten what he was elected to do.
And nearly everyone of these issues on foreign policy the answer rests in respecting sovereignty – that of others and our own.
I didn't need to read,"Adios, America" to comprehend the deep state damage our careless immigration policy has on the country.
I don't need to reread, "Adios, America" to grasp that our policies of intervening in the affairs of other states undermines our
own ability to make the same case at home.
If I weren't already trying to plow my way through several other books, documentaries and relapsing to old school programming
such as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and now the Dick Van Dyke show, i would reread, "Adios , America."
In Col. Bacevich's book, Washington Rules, he posits a distressing scenario that the foreign policy web is so tangled and entrenched,
the executive branch is simply out his league. The expectation was that Pres trump had the will to turn the matter. I hold out
hope, but maybe not. There's time.
The Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018 equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey
Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within.
Jews and the Jewish Media normalized Jewish NeoCons by guaranteeing that they always have a voice and airtime in American
culture and media. Never called out by the WashingtonPost and NY Times for their previous blunders, they continue to shape
American foreign policy. And, of course, the end game here is Israel and the Israeli agenda at all costs, you Jews are one
issue folk. And You definitely do your part, with the subtle subterfuge at work in the articles that you write.
No one should be surprised by Trump promoting Israeli interests über alles. For decades he was so involved in Israel events
in New York I debated whether he was actually Jewish or not. Bannon said the embassy move to Jerusalem was at the behest of Adelson,
Trump's old casino buddy. In the campaign Trump got a lot of support from NY Jewish billionaires (Icahn, Feinberg, Paulson, et
al.). They know him and how he operates.
But being pro-Israel doesn't necessarily equate to neocon. The neocons are the dumb Jews with serious inadequacy issues
who could never make it in business and instead went into politics and journalism. The latter are still staunchly opposed to Trump
even after a lot of pro-Israel moves. They might warm up to Trump's bellicosity towards a lot of Israel's enemies (a long list
with degrees of separation), but so far they've simply moved left.
I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a business and deal-making position than
from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g., Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic
and will avoid conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are virtuous in going to war
and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!).
Lastly, I like to think Trump surrounded himself with neocons (McMaster, Haley, et al.) to placate the GOP establishment
because he knows he has to play the game.
Classical Liberalism may be very principled, but Trump was not elected promising to halt intervention. Make America Great said
nothing about the morality of the means he would be employing.
People are inclined to believe that any activity -- in this instance, voting for the red/blue puppets in Washington --
in which their participation is patronized must be legitimate and effectual. Many duped in November 2016, even those who now feel
betrayed by that farce, were still around here a few weeks ago acting like a Senator Moore in Alabama would be pivotal to reform,
his defeat devastating. That's how Ms. Mercer and her pundit ilk (Buchanan, Napolitano, etc.) thrive -- supporting the Empire
by never questioning its legitimacy, just taking sides within the Establishment. And they'll be buying into the 2018 congressional
contests, ad nauseum.
Of course, what is done to us, and to others in our name and with our money, never changes to any meaningful degree. Americans
might realize this if they thought critically about it, so they don't. Instead, they lap up the BS and vote for who tells them
the lie they like to hear. When there are identity politics involved, the delusion seems even deeper. There are self-styled "progressives"
who used to advocate single-payer, nationalized health care who are elated over the retention of so-called "Obamacare," the legislation
for which was written by and for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
Me? I cope by boycotting national elections and mass media, participating in forums like this, and hoping that when the tottering
tower of debt and gore tips over, as few innocents and as many guilty as practicable are among those crushed.
The Zionist neocons and Israel did 911 and got away with it and everyone in the U.S. gov knows it and they tried to sink the USS
LIBERTY and got away with it and so normal is an Orwellian society where Zionists can kill Americans and destroy the Mideast and
nobody does jack shit about it.
The neocons are Satanists warmongers and will destroy America.
Basically the illegal immigrants are coming in ever larger numbers because they know that there will be no crackdown on them.
Likewise deportations are declining.
Neocons are about as evil as proudly proclaimed Leftists, and they are obviously more duplicitous.
Either Neocons will be refuted and publicly rebuked and rejected, or Neocons will eventually destroy the country. Their long
term fruits are destruction of that which they have used to destroy so many others.
Far from all Neocons are Jews. However, virtually all Neocons are militantly pro-Israel to the point of making Israel's
foreign policy desires central to their assessment of what America needs in foreign policy.
And the source is Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which was a Judaizing heresy. Judaizing heresy necessarily produces pro-Jewish culture.
WASP culture is inherently pro-Jewish, as much as it is anti-Catholic and anti-French and and anti-Spanish and anti-Irish, etc.
And all that means that WASP is opposed to the best interests of the vast majority of white Christians while being pro-Jewish.
Jews did not cause any of that. Anglo-Saxon Puritan heretics did.
Pres Trump is a situational leader. It's a rare style, for good reason. However, he is openly situational. That was clear
during the campaign season. however,
I thought his positions were sincere. I don't think that this was any kind of slight of hand, "watch me pull a rabbit out
of my hat". His positions on Israel, same sex behavior, marijuana, healthcare remain what they were going in. His foreign policy
and immigration positions have been buffered and he seems incapable of standing where he came in.
It was no secret he intended an assertive military. However, he seems easily convinced that strong means aggressive, and
that needlessly aggressive policy is a substitute for a strong US -- that is a mistake. Syria cruise strike was the first sign
that he was giving in to the men whom he chose as advisers. As it it turns out winning the election has been easier than governing.
I assumed he had a much stronger backbone, than he has been willing to exhibit in office.
Pardon the earlier tag. I thought that you just had to be joking. Nikki Haley was inflicted upon the world at large because
Trump doesn't actually know anybody in this new world he fell into once he was inaugurated.
Trump is so arrogant about his cluelessness that we'll be lucky to avoid a nuclear war caused by his bumbling. As in the
final line of an old proverb: "He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool. Shun him."
Iranians have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between 1975-2015; Saudi Arabians murdered 2369!
Given that this juden woman's kind were clearly aware of the impending murder of 2369 people, the correct statement would be;
Saudi Arabians and IsraHellis murdered 2369!
The Israeli/AIPAC bribery of American bible thumper preachers, especially in the fundamentalist southern American states has
more to do with it than the reformation. The preachers get huge donations to pay for their churches and TV shows. They get free
trips to Israel for themselves and their families all the time.
On their Israel trips they pay more attention to the OT Jewish and holocaust sites than the Christian ones. It's true that
the reformation was a return to Judaism and a rejection of Christianity, but that was 500 years ago. What's important now is the
vast amounts of money the Israeli government and the lobby funnels into those fundamentalist churches. If the southern fundamentalists
only knew what Jews think of them. I really got an earful of Jewish scorn and hate for southerners and fundamentalists during
the recent Roy Moore election.
Read Jewish publications if you want to learn what they think of southern fundamentalists
"... The first year of the Trump administration saw much more than the continuity in U.S. foreign policy that many of us expected. Trump's candidacy and then his election were greeted with alarm by almost everyone in the foreign policy establishment, with an overwhelming consensus that he stood for a so-called "isolationist" withdrawal from international affairs. This interpretation was a serious misreading of Trump's rhetoric and led to the usual knee-jerk reflex to define anything that differed from post-Cold War foreign policy as an outright rejection of all international engagement. ..."
"... Trump is not interested in disentangling the United States from foreign conflicts. Instead, he continues and expands them, as well as stoking new crises that could erupt into conflict. Trump is easily persuaded to accept conventional foreign policy positions so long as they are the more aggressive alternatives available. When he does break from consensus views, he does so in a unilateral and nationalist fashion that repudiates diplomatic compromises, rejects the legacy of his predecessor, and panders to some of his core constituencies at home. ..."
"... As 2018 begins, America is now even more deeply involved in the multiple wars that Trump inherited from Obama. There are a growing number of U.S. forces in Syria, more American soldiers have been sent to Afghanistan to continue our longest war, and U.S. backing for the Saudi-led war on Yemen has ratcheted up as well. In each case, Trump has signed off on increased U.S. involvement. ..."
"... Tensions with Iran and North Korea have both increased over the last year, and in both cases the Trump administration is to blame. Between the travel ban, the decertification of the nuclear deal, bombing Syrian government forces in the spring, belligerent speeches at the U.N. and elsewhere, and an overall regional policy defined by unremitting hostility towards Iran, Trump has mishandled relations with Tehran about as badly as a new president can. ..."
"... Considering how poorly Trump has managed issues related to Iran, it is remarkable that his handling of a much more sensitive and potentially explosive situation in the Korean Peninsula has been even worse. ..."
The first year of the Trump administration saw much more than the continuity in U.S.
foreign policy that many of us expected. Trump's candidacy and then his election were greeted
with alarm by almost everyone in the foreign policy establishment, with an overwhelming
consensus that he stood for a so-called "isolationist" withdrawal from international affairs.
This interpretation was a serious misreading of Trump's rhetoric and led to the usual knee-jerk
reflex to define anything that differed from post-Cold War foreign policy as an outright
rejection of all international engagement. As Trump's policies have shown, he is open to a
kind of international engagement, but it is one that is heavily militarized and defined by
zero-sum contests with adversaries and allies alike.
Trump is not interested in disentangling the United States from foreign conflicts.
Instead, he continues and expands them, as well as stoking new crises that could erupt into
conflict. Trump is easily persuaded to accept conventional foreign policy positions so long as
they are the more aggressive alternatives available. When he does break from consensus views,
he does so in a unilateral and nationalist fashion that repudiates diplomatic compromises,
rejects the legacy of his predecessor, and panders to some of his core constituencies at
home.
As 2018 begins, America is now even more deeply involved in the multiple wars that Trump
inherited from Obama. There are a growing number of U.S. forces in Syria, more American
soldiers have been sent to Afghanistan to continue our longest war, and U.S. backing for the
Saudi-led war on Yemen has ratcheted up as well. In each case, Trump has signed off on
increased U.S. involvement. There is evidence that the number of Americans fighting in
Afghanistan will increase in the coming year, and U.S. forces operating in Syria are set to
remain there indefinitely. U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition is even greater than it was
under Obama, and there is no sign that it will be reduced anytime soon. Unfortunately, the one
thing Trump refuses to abandon are the wars that Obama bequeathed to him.
Tensions with Iran and North Korea have both increased over the last year, and in both
cases the Trump administration is to blame. Between the travel ban, the decertification of the
nuclear deal, bombing Syrian government forces in the spring, belligerent speeches at the U.N.
and elsewhere, and an overall regional policy defined by unremitting hostility towards Iran,
Trump has mishandled relations with Tehran about as badly as a new president can. If he
next reneges on U.S. commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Trump
will risk creating a new crisis over Iran's nuclear program. If the nuclear deal does fall
apart, the risk of war with Iran would significantly increase.
Considering how poorly Trump has managed issues related to Iran, it is remarkable that
his handling of a much more sensitive and potentially explosive situation in the Korean
Peninsula has been even worse. For most of the last year, Trump has answered North Korean
provocations with bellicose rhetoric and reckless threats, and repeatedly dismissed the
possibility of entering into talks with Pyongyang to reduce tensions. He and his national
security advisor, H.R. McMaster, have been talking down the possibility of deterring North
Korea and instead insisting on an impossible goal of denuclearization. Senior members of the
Trump administration bizarrely seem to believe they can take military action against North
Korea without it escalating into a major war. On this issue, the one where Trump most needs to
be reined in by his advisors, it appears he's instead being egged on by them. There is a much
greater chance of war with North Korea today than there has been in decades. The current
administration has helped bring this about, and alarmingly it doesn't seem to have sunk in with
members of Congress or the public.
As we look ahead to 2018, the picture is not at all encouraging for those interested in
peace and restraint. The danger that the U.S. may foolishly plunge into at least one new
avoidable war is greater than it has been perhaps since the period leading up to the Iraq
invasion in 2002. It will be up to members of Congress and the public to keep the
administration from committing such a monumental blunder.
Daniel Larison is a senior writer at The American Conservative. Follow his blog and at
Twitter @DanielLarison
.
None of us who voted for him did so because we wanted him to start new wars.
We didn't want any new wars for Israel or Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, and we didn't
want new wars against Russia, China, or North Korea.
We wanted him to crush ISIS and then bring our troops home to protect our own borders.
Instead he's digging in to the Middle East and letting illegal and legal immigrants flood
into America.
The way he's going, he could be worse than Clinton, Bush II, and Obama COMBINED. And I
think we may have made a terrible mistake.
"... Ukraine. Putin's remarks on the state of affairs in Ukraine are, of course, wholly at odds with what Washington puts out on the subject. But they are not at odds with reality: Washington is. ..."
"... Those terms remain Putin's point of reference. They appear to remain the European Union's, too. Washington, which the Europeans and Russia excluded from the Minsk talks for the wisest of reasons, does not seem to have a point of reference, busy as it is pretending there is progress on the corruption front and that Kiev is not dependent on a frightening collection of militias, many of them led by neo–Nazi fanatics. ..."
"... These groups still present the threat of a massacre in the eastern provinces, as Putin reminded his audience. He spoke with notable ease of Russian assistance in those regions, suggesting this can end when they are capable of self-defense. ..."
Ukraine. Putin's remarks on the state of affairs in Ukraine are, of course, wholly at
odds with what Washington puts out on the subject. But they are not at odds with reality:
Washington is. As Putin calmly noted, the number-one obstacle to a settlement in Ukraine
is, as it has been for three years come next February, the profoundly corrupt government
installed in Kiev after the American-cultivated coup in 2014.
I say three years next February because it was then the settlement framework known as Minsk
II (for the city where it was negotiated and signed) was put in place.
Those terms remain Putin's point of reference. They appear to remain the European
Union's, too. Washington, which the Europeans and Russia excluded from the Minsk talks for the
wisest of reasons, does not seem to have a point of reference, busy as it is pretending there
is progress on the corruption front and that Kiev is not dependent on a frightening collection
of militias, many of them led by neo–Nazi fanatics.
These groups still present the threat of a massacre in the eastern provinces, as Putin
reminded his audience. He spoke with notable ease of Russian assistance in those regions,
suggesting this can end when they are capable of self-defense.
We would do well to understand where the force of inertia lies in Ukraine. This was Putin's
topic. A settlement in Ukraine remains possible via the framework fixed three years ago. Let us
not forget this. Moscow has not deviated from Minsk II -- another point worth noting. The
spoilers are in Kiev, and behind them are those in Washington, which continues to encourage the
irresponsible behavior of the Poroshenko government and other Ukrainian elites.
@Paul Well, the
real enemy of the people are the real terrorists behind the scenes. Those who planned the
9/11 false flag. Those who sent the Anthrax letters to resisting congress members. Those who
pre-planned the wars of aggression in the whole middle east.
So any appeal to the "White House" is almost pointless since the White House is one
element of the power structure captured by the war-criminal lunatics.
To change something people in the US should at first stop buying their war criminal lying
mass media.
Then they should stop supporting ANY foreign intervention by the US and should stop
believing any of the preposterous lies released by the media, the state dept., or any other
neocon outlet.
Actually Trump was probably elected because he said he was anti-intervention and
anti-media. But did it help?
The US needs mass resistance (demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, non-participation,
sit-ins, grass-root information, or whatever) against their neocon/zionist/mafia/cia power
groups or nothing will change.
We need demonstrations against NATO, against war, against false flag terrorism, against
using terrorists as secret armies, against war propaganda!
B.t.w. Iran has always been one of the main goals. Think of it: Why did the US attack
Afghanistan and Iraq? What have those two countries in common? (Hint: a look on the map helps
to answer this question.) I am beginning to get interested in why some people are sure 9/11
was a false flag affair covered up by a lot of lies. So may I try my opening question on you.
How much, if any of it, have you read of the official 9/11 commission report?
ho is Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the 30-year-old White House aide who could be a key player in the blockbuster
investigation into Russian ties to President Trump and his campaign?
Cohen-Watnick, 30, who
The New York Times reports
provided key information in the probe, is a once fast-rising protege of ousted
Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn with deep roots in suburban Washington's Jewish community.
The paper identified him as one of two staffers who explosively gave information on intelligence gathering in
the Russia probe to Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a move that potentially
compromised the lawmaker's role in the bombshell probe.
Cohen-Watnick grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside the nation's capital, and attended the nearby
Conservative synagogue Ohr Kodesh. Last November he celebrated his engagement to Rebecca Miller at the synagogue.
He attended the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2008. Cohen-Watnick began working as an intelligence
analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency after college. At the DIA, Cohen-Watnick met Flynn, the then-director
who was later removed from his position during the Obama administration.
After Trump won the November election, Flynn brought Cohen-Watnick from the DIA to the Trump transition team,
where the young staffer, according to
The Washington Post,
was among the few Trump advisers to hold a top security clearance. He participated in
high-level intelligence briefings and briefed Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and their team on national security
issues.
When Flynn was appointed to lead the National Security Council, he hired Cohen-Watnick to work with him there.
But Flynn served as national security adviser for less than a month before being asked to leave following
revelations that he had maintained ties with Russia during the campaign.
Flynn's successor, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, sought to remove Cohen-Watnick from the team, following input from
the CIA director who pointed to problems intelligence officers had when dealing with Cohen-Watnick. Questions were
raised about his ability to carry out the position of senior NSC director for intelligence programs, who oversees
ties with intelligence agencies and vets information that should reach the president's desk.
But Cohen-Watnick was spared when Trump personally intervened, reportedly after top White House aides Sphen
Bannon and Jared Kushner stepped in. Cohen-Watnick still serves as senior director at the NSC.
Cohen-Watnick is known for holding hawkish views on national security issues and of being a proponent of an
American tough line toward Iran.
The Times said that Cohen-Watnick became swept up in the Russia probe this month, shortly after Trump wrote on
Twitter about unsubstantiated claims of being wiretapped on the orders of the former president Barack Obama.
Cohen-Watnick apparently was reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of
foreign officials that consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about how they were
trying to curry favor with Trump's family and inner circle in advance of his inauguration.
He and another aide, identified as Michael Ellis, came across information that Trump aides may have been
inadvertently caught on some of the surveillance.
Nunes says he went to the White House to meet with the aides, whom he has refused to identify. Nunes wolud not
share the information with his colleagues on the committee but did brief Trump, raising major questions about his
independence.
Cohen-Watnick, 30, who
The New York Times reports
provided key information in the probe, is a once fast-rising protege of ousted
Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn with deep roots in suburban Washington's Jewish community.
The paper identified him as one of two staffers who explosively gave information on intelligence gathering in
the Russia probe to Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a move that potentially
compromised the lawmaker's role in the bombshell probe.
Cohen-Watnick grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside the nation's capital, and attended the nearby
Conservative synagogue Ohr Kodesh. Last November he celebrated his engagement to Rebecca Miller at the synagogue.
He attended the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2008. Cohen-Watnick began working as an intelligence
analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency after college. At the DIA, Cohen-Watnick met Flynn, the then-director
who was later removed from his position during the Obama administration.
After Trump won the November election, Flynn brought Cohen-Watnick from the DIA to the Trump transition team,
where the young staffer, according to
The Washington Post,
was among the few Trump advisers to hold a top security clearance. He participated in
high-level intelligence briefings and briefed Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and their team on national security
issues.
When Flynn was appointed to lead the National Security Council, he hired Cohen-Watnick to work with him there.
But Flynn served as national security adviser for less than a month before being asked to leave following
revelations that he had maintained ties with Russia during the campaign.
Flynn's successor, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, sought to remove Cohen-Watnick from the team, following input from
the CIA director who pointed to problems intelligence officers had when dealing with Cohen-Watnick. Questions were
raised about his ability to carry out the position of senior NSC director for intelligence programs, who oversees
ties with intelligence agencies and vets information that should reach the president's desk.
But Cohen-Watnick was spared when Trump personally intervened, reportedly after top White House aides Sphen
Bannon and Jared Kushner stepped in. Cohen-Watnick still serves as senior director at the NSC.
Cohen-Watnick is known for holding hawkish views on national security issues and of being a proponent of an
American tough line toward Iran.
The Times said that Cohen-Watnick became swept up in the Russia probe this month, shortly after Trump wrote on
Twitter about unsubstantiated claims of being wiretapped on the orders of the former president Barack Obama.
Cohen-Watnick apparently was reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of
foreign officials that consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about how they were
trying to curry favor with Trump's family and inner circle in advance of his inauguration.
He and another aide, identified as Michael Ellis, came across information that Trump aides may have been
inadvertently caught on some of the surveillance.
Nunes says he went to the White House to meet with the aides, whom he has refused to identify. Nunes wolud not
share the information with his colleagues on the committee but did brief Trump, raising major questions about his
independence.
"... The central groupthink around Russia-gate is the still unproven claim that Russia hacked Democratic emails in 2016 and publicized them via WikiLeaks, a crucial issue that NSA experts say should be easy to prove if true, reports Dennis J. Bernstein. ..."
"... Binney: We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an article on this in July. First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic world, the NSA would know. Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points on the fiber lines, taking in everything. ..."
"... The other data that came out from Guccifer 2.0, a download from the DNC, has been a charade. It was a download and not a transfer across the Web. The Web won't manage such a high speed. It could not have gotten across the Atlantic at that high speed. You would have to have high capacity lines dedicated to that in order to do it. They have been playing games with us. There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here. ..."
"... Bernstein: Let me come at this from the other side. Has the United States ever tried to hack into and undermine Russian operations in this way? ..."
"... Binney: Oh, sure. We do it as much as anybody else. In the Ukraine, for example, we sponsored regime change. When someone who was pro-Soviet was elected president, we orchestrated a coup to put our man in power. ..."
"... Did the US meddle in the Russian elections that brought Yeltsin to power? ..."
"... I believe they did. We try to leverage our power and influence elections around the world. ..."
"... Binney: Yes, to defend privacy but also to defend the Constitution. Right now, our government is violating the first, fourth and fifth amendments in various ways. Mueller did it, Comey did it, they were all involved in violating the Constitution. ..."
"... Bernstein: There seems to be a new McCarthyite operation around the Russia-gate investigation. It appears that it is an attempt to justify the idea that Clinton lost because the Russians undermined the election. ..."
"... Bernstein: It was initially put out that seventeen intelligence agencies found compelling evidence that the Russians hacked into our election. You're saying it was actually selected individuals from just three agencies. Is there anything to the revelations that FBI agents talked about taking action to prevent Trump from becoming president? ..."
"... Binney: It certainly does seem that it is leaning that way, that is was all a frame-up. It is a sad time in our history, to see the government working against itself internally ..."
"... Bernstein: What concerns do you have regarding the Russia-gate investigation and the McCarthyite tactics that are being employed? ..."
"... Binney: Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with Russia. We should definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars. I am also concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the fundamental principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to start indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly unconstitutional. ..."
The central groupthink around Russia-gate is the still unproven claim that Russia hacked
Democratic emails in 2016 and publicized them via WikiLeaks, a crucial issue that NSA experts
say should be easy to prove if true, reports Dennis J. Bernstein.
A changing-places moment brought about by Russia-gate is that liberals who are usually more
skeptical of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially their evidence-free claims, now question
the patriotism of Americans who insist that the intelligence community supply proof to support
the dangerous claims about Russian 'hacking" of Democratic emails especially when some veteran
U.S. government experts say the data would be easily available if the Russians indeed were
guilty.
One of those experts is William Binney, a former high-level National Security Agency
intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement, blew the whistle on the extraordinary
breadth of NSA surveillance programs. His outspoken criticism of the NSA during the George W.
Bush administration made him the subject of FBI investigations that included a raid on his home
in 2007.
Even before Edward Snowden's NSA whistleblowing, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had
access to telecommunications companies' domestic and international billing records, and that
since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 trillion to 20 trillion communications. Snowden
has said: "I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the
rules."
I spoke to Binney on Dec. 28 about Russia-gate and a host of topics having to do with
spying and America's expanding
national security state.
Dennis Bernstein: I would like you to begin by telling us a little about your background at
the NSA and how you got there.
William Binney: I was in the United States Army from 1965 to 1969. They put me in the
Army Security Agency, an affiliate of the NSA. They liked the work I was doing and they put me
on a priority hire in 1970. I was in the NSA for 32 years, mostly working against the Soviet
Union and the Warsaw Pact. I was solving what were called "wizard puzzles," and the NSA was
sometimes referred to as the "Puzzle Palace." I had to solve code systems and work on cyber
systems and data systems to be able to predict in advance the "intentions and capabilities of
adversaries or potential adversaries."
Bernstein: At a certain point you ran amiss of your supervisors. What did you come to
understand and try to tell people that got you in dutch with your higher-ups?
Binney: By 1998-1999, the "digital issue" was basically solved. This created a
problem for the upper ranks because at the time they were lobbying Congress for $3.8 billion to
continue working on what we had already accomplished. That lobby was started in 1989 for a
separate program called Trailblazer, which failed miserably in 2005-2006. We had to brief
Congress on how we were progressing and my information ran contrary to the efforts downtown to
secure more funding. And so this caused a problem internally.
We learned from some of our staff members in Congress that several of the corporations that
were getting contracts from the NSA were downtown lobbying against our program in Congress.
This is the military industrial complex in action. That lobby was supported by the NSA
management because they just wanted more money to build a bigger empire.
But Dick Cheney, who was behind all of this, wanted it because he grew up under Nixon, who
always wanted to know what his political enemies were thinking and doing. This kind of approach
of bulk acquisition of everything was possible after you removed certain segments of our
software and they used it against the entire digital world. Cheney wanted to know who his
political enemies were and get updates about them at any time.
Bernstein: Your expertise was in the Soviet Union and so you must know a lot about
bugging. Do you believe that Russia hacked and undermined our last election? Can Trump thank
Russia for the result?
Binney: We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an
article on this in July. First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic
world, the NSA would know. Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points
on the fiber lines, taking in everything. Mark Klein exposed some of this at the AT&T
facility in San Francisco.
This is not for foreigners, by the way, this is for targeting US citizens. If they wanted
only foreigners, all they would have to do was look at the transatlantic cables where they
surface on the coast of the United States. But they are not there, they are distributed among
the US population.
Bernstein: So if, in fact, the Russians were tapping into DNC headquarters, the NSA
would absolutely know about it.
Binney: Yes, and they would also have trace routes on where they went specifically,
in Russia or anywhere else. If you remember, about three or four years ago, the Chinese hacked
into somewhere in the United States and our government came out and confirmed that it was the
Chinese who did it, and it came from a specific military facility in Shanghai. The NSA had
these trace route programs embedded by the hundreds across the US and all around the world.
The other data that came out from Guccifer 2.0, a download from the DNC, has been a
charade. It was a download and not a transfer across the Web. The Web won't manage such a high
speed. It could not have gotten across the Atlantic at that high speed. You would have to have
high capacity lines dedicated to that in order to do it. They have been playing games with us.
There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here.
Bernstein: So was this a leak by somebody at Democratic headquarters?
Binney: We don't know that for sure, either. All we know was that it was a local
download. We can likely attribute it to a USB device that was physically passed along.
Bernstein: Let me come at this from the other side. Has the United States ever tried
to hack into and undermine Russian operations in this way?
Binney: Oh, sure. We do it as much as anybody else. In the Ukraine, for example, we
sponsored regime change. When someone who was pro-Soviet was elected president, we orchestrated
a coup to put our man in power.
Then we invited the Ukraine into NATO. One of the agreements we made with the Russians when
the Soviet Union fell apart was that the Ukraine would give them their nuclear weapons to
manage and that we would not move NATO further east toward Russia. I think they made a big
mistake when they asked Ukraine to join NATO. They should have asked Russia to join as well,
making it all-inclusive. If you treat people as adversaries, they are going to act that
way.
Bernstein:Did the US meddle in the Russian elections that brought Yeltsin to
power?
Binney:I believe they did. We try to leverage our power and influence elections
around the world.
Bernstein: What has your group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, been
up to, and what has been the US government's response?
Binney: We have been discussing privacy and security with the European Union and with a
number of European parliaments. Recently the Austrian supreme court ruled that the entire bulk
acquisition system was unconstitutional. Everyone but the conservatives in the Austrian
parliament voted that bill down, making Austria the first country there to do the right
thing.
A slide from material leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden to the Washington Post,
showing what happens when an NSA analyst "tasks" the PRISM system for information about a new
surveillance target.
Bernstein: Is it your goal to defend people's privacy and their right to communicate
privately?
Binney: Yes, to defend privacy but also to defend the Constitution. Right now,
our government is violating the first, fourth and fifth amendments in various ways. Mueller did
it, Comey did it, they were all involved in violating the Constitution.
Back in the 1990's, the idea was to make our analysts effective so that they could see
threats coming before they happened and alert people to take action so that lives would be
saved. What happens now is that people go out and kill someone and then the NSA and the FBI go
on a forensics mission. Intelligence is supposed to tell you in advance when a crime is coming
so that you can do something to avert it. They have lost that perspective.
Bernstein: They now have access to every single one of our electronic conversations,
is that right? The human mind has a hard time imagining how you could contain, move and study
all that information.
Binney: Basically, it is achievable because most of the processing is done by machine
so it doesn't cost human energy.
Bernstein: There seems to be a new McCarthyite operation around the Russia-gate
investigation. It appears that it is an attempt to justify the idea that Clinton lost because
the Russians undermined the election.
Binney: I have seen no evidence at all from anybody, including the intelligence
community. If you look at the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) report, they state on the
first page that "We have high confidence that the Russians did this." But when you get toward
the end of the report, they basically confess that "our judgment does not imply that we have
evidence to back it up."
Bernstein: It was initially put out that seventeen intelligence agencies found
compelling evidence that the Russians hacked into our election. You're saying it was actually
selected individuals from just three agencies. Is there anything to the revelations that FBI
agents talked about taking action to prevent Trump from becoming president?
Binney: It certainly does seem that it is leaning that way, that is was all a
frame-up. It is a sad time in our history, to see the government working against itself
internally.
Bernstein: I take it you are not a big supporter of Trump.
Binney: Well, I voted for him. I couldn't vote for a warmonger like Clinton. She
wanted to see our planes shooting down Russian planes in Syria. She advocated for destabilizing
Libya, for getting rid of Assad in Syria, she was a strong backer of the war in Iraq.
Bernstein: What concerns do you have regarding the Russia-gate investigation and
the McCarthyite tactics that are being employed?
Binney: Ultimately, my main concern is that it could lead to actual war with
Russia. We should definitely not be going down that path. We need to get out of all these wars.
I am also concerned about what we are doing to our own democracy. We are trampling the
fundamental principles contained in the Constitution. The only way to reverse all this is to
start indicting people who are participating in and managing these activities that are clearly
unconstitutional.
"... What's puzzling is why that capacity for outrage and demand for accountability doesn't extend to our now well-established penchant for waging war across much of the planet. ..."
"... Compare their culpability to that of the high-ranking officials who have presided over or promoted this country's various military misadventures of the present century. Those wars have, of course, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and will ultimately cost American taxpayers many trillions of dollars. Nor have those costly military efforts eliminated "terrorism," as President George W. Bush promised back when today's G.I.s were still in diapers. ..."
"... Bush told us that, through war, the United States would spread freedom and democracy. Instead, our wars have sown disorder and instability, creating failing or failed states across the Greater Middle East and Africa. In their wake have sprung up ever more, not fewer, jihadist groups, while acts of terror are soaring globally. These are indisputable facts. ..."
"... For starters, there is no "new strategy." Trump's generals, apparently with a nod from their putative boss, are merely modifying the old "strategy," which was itself an outgrowth of previous strategies tried, found wanting, and eventually discarded before being rebranded and eventually recycled. ..."
"... Thus far, Trump's interventionism has been a fragment of what the Hillary campaign promised. ..."
"... This is the center of a world empire. It maintains a gigantic military which virtually never stops fighting wars, none of them having anything to do with defense. It has created an intelligence monstrosity which makes old outfits like Stazi seem almost quaint, and it spies on everyone. Indeed, it maintains seventeen national security establishments, as though you can never have too much of a good thing. And some of these guys, too, are engaged full-time in forms of covert war, from fomenting trouble in other lands and interfering in elections to overthrowing governments. ..."
"... It's unlikely that the USA would be remaining in Afghanistan if its goals were not being attained. So the author has merely shown that the stated goals cannot be the real goals. What then are the real goals? I propose two: 1) establish a permanent military presence on a Russian border; 2) finance it with the heroin trade. Given other actions of the Empire around the globe, the first goal is obvious. The bombing of mud huts containing competitors' drug labs, conjoined with the fact that we do not destroy the actual poppy fields (obvious green targets in an immense ocean of brown) make this goal rather obvious as well. The rest of the article is simply more evidence that the Empire does not include mere human tragedy in its profit calculation. ..."
"... Andrew Bacevich calls for a Weinstein moment without realizing that it already happened more than ten years ago. The 2006 midterm elections were the first Weinstein moment, which saw the American people deliver a huge outpouring of antiwar sentiment that inflicted significant congressional losses on the neocon Republicans of George W. Bush. ..."
What makes a Harvey Weinstein moment? The now-disgraced Hollywood mogul is hardly the first
powerful man to stand accused of having abused women. The Harveys who preceded Harvey himself
are legion, their prominence matching or exceeding his own and the misdeeds with which they
were charged at least as reprehensible.
In the relatively recent past, a roster of prominent offenders would include Bill Clinton,
Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, and, of course, Donald Trump. Throw in various jocks,
maestros, senior military officers, members of the professoriate and you end up with quite a
list. Yet in virtually all such cases, the alleged transgressions were treated as instances of
individual misconduct, egregious perhaps but possessing at best transitory political
resonance.
All that, though, was pre-Harvey. As far as male sexual hijinks are concerned, we might
compare Weinstein's epic fall from grace to the stock market crash of 1929: one week it's the
anything-goes Roaring Twenties, the next we're smack dab in a Great Depression.
How profound is the change? Up here in Massachusetts where I live, we've spent the past year
marking John F. Kennedy's 100th birthday. If Kennedy were still around to join in the
festivities, it would be as a Class A sex offender. Rarely in American history has the cultural
landscape shifted so quickly or so radically.
In our post-Harvey world, men charged with sexual misconduct are guilty until proven
innocent, all crimes are capital offenses, and there exists no statute of limitations. Once a
largely empty corporate slogan, "zero tolerance" has become a battle cry.
All of this serves as a reminder that, on some matters at least, the American people retain
an admirable capacity for outrage. We can distinguish between the tolerable and the
intolerable. And we can demand accountability of powerful individuals and
institutions.
Everything They Need to Win (Again!)
What's puzzling is why that capacity for outrage and demand for accountability doesn't
extend to our now well-established penchant for waging war across much of the planet.
In no way would I wish to minimize the pain, suffering, and humiliation of the women preyed
upon by the various reprobates now getting their belated comeuppance. But to judge from
published accounts, the women (and in some cases, men) abused by Weinstein, Louis C.K., Mark
Halperin, Leon Wieseltier, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Garrison
Keillor, my West Point classmate Judge Roy Moore, and their compadres at least managed
to survive their encounters. None of the perpetrators are charged with having committed murder.
No one died.
Compare their culpability to that of the high-ranking officials who have presided over or
promoted this country's various military misadventures of the present century. Those wars have,
of course, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and will
ultimately cost American taxpayers many
trillions of dollars. Nor have those costly military efforts eliminated "terrorism," as
President George W. Bush promised back when today's G.I.s were still in diapers.
Bush told us that, through war, the United States would spread freedom and democracy.
Instead, our wars have sown disorder and instability, creating failing or failed states across
the Greater Middle East and Africa. In their wake have sprung up ever more, not fewer, jihadist
groups, while acts
of terror are soaring globally. These are indisputable facts.
It discomfits me to reiterate this mournful litany of truths. I feel a bit like the doctor
telling the lifelong smoker with stage-four lung cancer that an addiction to cigarettes is
adversely affecting his health. His mute response: I know and I don't care. Nothing the doc
says is going to budge the smoker from his habit. You go through the motions, but wonder
why.
In a similar fashion, war has become a habit to which the United States is addicted. Except
for the terminally distracted, most of us know that. We also know -- wecannot not
know -- that, in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. forces have been unable to
accomplish their assigned mission, despite more than 16 years of fighting in the former and
more than a decade in the latter.
It's not exactly a good news story, to put it mildly. So forgive me for saying it (
yet again ), but most of us simply don't care, which means that we continue to allow a free
hand to those who preside over those wars, while treating with respect the views of pundits and
media personalities who persist in promoting them. What's past doesn't count; we prefer to
sustain the pretense that tomorrow is pregnant with possibilities. Victory lies just around the
corner.
By way of example, consider a
recent article in U.S. News and World Report. The headline: "Victory or Failure in
Afghanistan: 2018 Will Be the Deciding Year." The title suggests a balance absent from the text
that follows, which reads like a Pentagon press release. Here in its entirety is the nut graf
(my own emphasis added):
"Armed with a new strategy and renewed support from old allies, the Trump
administration now believes it has everything it needs to win the war in Afghanistan.
Top military advisers all the way up to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis say they can accomplish
what two previous administrations and multiple troop surges could not: the defeat of the
Taliban by Western-backed local forces, a negotiated peace and the establishment of a
popularly supported government in Kabul capable of keeping the country from once again becoming
a haven to any terrorist group."
Now if you buy this, you'll believe that Harvey Weinstein has learned his lesson and can be
trusted to interview young actresses while wearing his bathrobe.
For starters, there is no "new strategy." Trump's generals, apparently with a nod from their
putative boss, are merely modifying the old "strategy," which was itself an outgrowth of
previous strategies tried, found wanting, and eventually discarded before being rebranded and
eventually recycled.
Short of using nuclear weapons, U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan over the past decade and
a half have experimented with just about every approach imaginable: invasion, regime change,
occupation, nation-building, pacification, decapitation, counterterrorism, and
counterinsurgency, not to mention various surges ,
differing in scope and duration. We have had a big troop presence and a smaller one, more
bombing and less, restrictive rules of engagement and permissive ones. In the military
equivalent of throwing in the kitchen sink, a U.S. Special Operations Command four-engine prop
plane recently deposited the largest non-nuclear weapon in the American arsenal on a cave
complex in eastern Afghanistan. Although that MOAB made a big
boom, no offer of enemy surrender materialized.
$65
billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars. And under the circumstances, consider that a mere down
payment.
According to General John Nicholson, our
17th commander in Kabul since 2001, the efforts devised and implemented by his many
predecessors have resulted in a "stalemate" -- a generous interpretation given that the Taliban
presently controls more
territory than it has held since the U.S. invasion. Officers no less capable than Nicholson
himself, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal among them, didn't get it done. Nicholson's
argument: trust me.
In essence, the "new strategy" devised by Trump's generals, Secretary of Defense Mattis and
Nicholson among them, amounts to this: persist a tad longer with a tad more. A modest uptick in
the number of U.S. and allied
troops on the ground will provide more trainers, advisers, and motivators to work with and
accompany their Afghan counterparts in the field. The Mattis/Nicholson plan also envisions an
increasing number of air strikes, signaled by the recent use of B-52s to attack illicit
Taliban "
drug labs ," a scenario that Stanley Kubrick himself would have been hard-pressed to
imagine.
Notwithstanding the novelty of using strategic bombers to destroy mud huts, there's not a
lot new here. Dating back to 2001, coalition forces have already dropped tens of thousands of
bombs in Afghanistan. Almost as soon as the Taliban were ousted from Kabul, coalition efforts
to create effective Afghan security forces commenced. So, too, did attempts to reduce the
production of the opium that has funded the Taliban insurgency, alas with essentially
no effect whatsoever . What Trump's generals want a gullible public (and astonishingly
gullible and inattentive members of Congress) to believe is that this time they've somehow
devised a formula for getting it right.
Turning the Corner
With his trademark capacity to intuit success, President Trump already sees clear evidence
of progress. "We're not fighting anymore to just walk around," he remarked in his
Thanksgiving message to the troops. "We're fighting to win. And you people [have] turned it
around over the last three to four months like nobody has seen." The president, we may note,
has yet to visit Afghanistan.
I'm guessing that the commander-in-chief is oblivious to the fact that, in U.S. military
circles, the term winning has acquired notable elasticity. Trump may think that it
implies vanquishing the enemy -- white flags and surrender ceremonies on the U.S.S. Missouri . General Nicholson knows better. "Winning," the field commander
says , "means delivering a negotiated settlement that reduces the level of violence and
protecting the homeland." (Take that definition at face value and we can belatedly move Vietnam
into the win column!)
Should we be surprised that Trump's generals, unconsciously imitating General William
Westmoreland a half-century ago, claim once again to detect light at the end of the tunnel? Not
at all. Mattis and Nicholson (along with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and National
Security Adviser H.R. McMaster) are following the Harvey Weinstein playbook: keep doing it
until they make you stop. Indeed, with what can only be described as chutzpah, Nicholson
himself recently announced that we have "
turned the corner " in Afghanistan. In doing so, of course, he is counting on Americans not
to recall the various war managers, military and civilian alike, who have made identical claims
going back years now, among them Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in 2012
.
From on high, assurances of progress; in the field, results that, year after year, come
nowhere near what's promised; on the homefront, an astonishingly credulous public. The war in
Afghanistan has long since settled into a melancholy and seemingly permanent rhythm.
The fact is that the individuals entrusted by President Trump to direct U.S. policy believe
with iron certainty that difficult political problems will yield to armed might properly
employed. That proposition is one to which generals like Mattis and Nicholson have devoted a
considerable part of their lives, not just in Afghanistan but across much of the Islamic world.
They are no more likely to question the validity of that proposition than the Pope is to
entertain second thoughts about the divinity of Jesus Christ.
In Afghanistan, their entire worldview -- not to mention the status and clout of the officer
corps they represent -- is at stake. No matter how long the war there lasts, no matter how many
"
generations " it takes, no matter how much blood is shed to no purpose, and no matter how
much money is wasted, they will never admit to failure -- nor will any of the
militarists-in-mufti cheering them on from the sidelines in Washington, Donald Trump not the
least among them.
Meanwhile, the great majority of the American people, their attention directed elsewhere --
it's the season for holiday shopping, after all -- remain studiously indifferent to the charade
being played out before their eyes.
It took a succession of high-profile scandals before Americans truly woke up to the plague
of sexual harassment and assault. How long will it take before the public concludes that they
have had enough of wars that don't work? Here's hoping it's before our president, in a moment
of ill temper, unleashes "
fire and fury " on the world.
It's astonishing to see people make the claim that "victory" is possible in Afghanistan.
Could they actually believe this or are they lying in order to drag this out even longer and
keep the money pit working overtime? These are individuals that are highly placed and so
should know better. It's not really a war but an occupation with the native insurgents
fighting to oust the foreign occupier. The US has tried every trick there is in trying to
tamp down the insurgency. They know what we're trying to do and can thwart us at every step.
The US lost even as it began it's invasion there but didn't know it yet in the wake of it's
initial success in scattering the Taliban, not even a real army and not even a real state.
They live there and we don't; they can resist for the next thirty years or fifty years. When
does the multi-billion bill come due and how will we pay it?
"How long will it take before the public concludes that they have had enough of wars that
don't work?"
It already happened, but Progressives like you failed to note that Republican voters
subbed the Bush clan and their various associates for Trump in the Primary season, precisely
because he called the Iraq and Afghan wars mistakes. The Americans suffer under a two party
establishment that is clearly antagonistic to their interests. As a part of that regime, a
dutiful Progressive toad, you continue to peddle the lie that it was the war-weary White
Americans who celebrated those wars. In reality, any such support was ginned up from tools
like you who wrote puff pieces for their Neocon Progressive masters.
Thus far, Trump's interventionism has been a fragment of what the Hillary campaign
promised. Might you count that among your lucky stars? Fat chance. You cretinous Progressive
filth have no such spine upon which to base an independent thought. You trot out the same old
tiresome tropes week after week fulfilling your designated propagandist duty and then you
skulk back to your den of iniquity to prepare another salvo of agitprop. What a miserable
existence.
This is the center of a world empire. It maintains a gigantic military which virtually never
stops fighting wars, none of them having anything to do with defense. It has created an
intelligence monstrosity which makes old outfits like Stazi seem almost quaint, and it spies
on everyone. Indeed, it maintains seventeen national security establishments, as though you
can never have too much of a good thing. And some of these guys, too, are engaged full-time
in forms of covert war, from fomenting trouble in other lands and interfering in elections to
overthrowing governments.
Obama ended up killing more people than any dictator or demagogue of this generation on
earth you care to name, several hundred thousand of them in his eight years. And he found new
ways to kill, too, as by creating the world's first industrial-scale extrajudicial killing
operation. Here he signs off on "kill lists," placed in his Oval Office in-box, to murder
people he has never seen, people who enjoy no legal rights or protections. His signed orders
are carried out by uniformed thugs working at computer screens in secure basements where they
proceed to play computer games with real live humans as their targets, again killing or
maiming people they have never seen.
If you ever have wondered where all the enabling workers came from in places like Stalin's
Gulag or Hitler's concentration camps, well, here is your answer. American itself produces
platoons of such people. You could find them working at Guantanamo and in the far-flung
string of secret torture facilities the CIA ran for years, and you could find them in places
like Fallujah or Samarra or Abu Ghraib, at the CIA's basement game arcade killing centers,
and even all over the streets of America dressed as police who shoot unarmed people every
day, sometimes in the back.
ZOG has now asserted the right to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime, for any reason. No trial,
no hearing, no witnesses, no defense, no nothing. Is this actually legal? Any constitutional
lawyers out there care to comment? Has ZOG now achieved the status of an all-powerful
all-knowing deity with the power of life and death over all living things?
It's unlikely that the USA would be remaining in Afghanistan if its goals were not being
attained. So the author has merely shown that the stated goals cannot be the real goals. What
then are the real goals? I propose two: 1) establish a permanent military presence on a
Russian border; 2) finance it with the heroin trade. Given other actions of the Empire around
the globe, the first goal is obvious. The bombing of mud huts containing competitors' drug
labs, conjoined with the fact that we do not destroy the actual poppy fields (obvious green
targets in an immense ocean of brown) make this goal rather obvious as well. The rest of the
article is simply more evidence that the Empire does not include mere human tragedy in its
profit calculation.
The Native Born White American Working Class Teenage Male Population used as CANNON FODDER
for Congressman Steven Solarz's and Donald Trump's very precious Jewish only Israel .
Israel and the deep state did the attack on 911 and thus set the table for the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Syria and the Zionist neocons who control every facet of
the U.S. gov and the MSM and the MIC and the FED ie the BANKS set in motion the blood
sacrifice for their Zionist god SATAN, that is what they have done.
The Zionist warmongers and Satanists will destroy America.
It's not so much that America is addicted to war as that the American "business model" makes
permanent war inevitable. US global dominance rests on economic domination, in particular,
the dollar as world reserve currency. That has allowed the US economy to survive in spite of
being hollowed out, financialised and burdened with enormous sovereign debt. Economic
dominance derives from political dominance, which, in its turn, flows from military
dominance. For that military dominance to be credible, not only must the US have the biggest
and best military forces on the planet, it must show itself willing to use those forces to
maintain its dominance by actually using them from time to time, in particular, to
unequivocally beat off any challenge to its dominance (Putin!). It also, of course, must win,
or, more correctly, be able to present the outcome credibly as a win. Failure to maintain
military dominance will undermine the position of the dollar, sending its value through the
floor. A low dollar means cheap exports (Boeing will sell more planes than Airbus!), but it
also means that imports (oil, outsourced goods) will be dear. At that point the hollowed out
nature of the US economy will cut in, probably provoking a Soviet-style implosion of the US
economy and society and ruining anyone who has holdings denominated in dollars. I call that
the Gorbachev conundrum. Gorby believed in the Soviet Union and wanted to reform it. But the
Soviet system had become so rigid as to be unreformable. He pulled a threat and the whole
system unravelled. But if he hadn't pulled the thread, the whole system would have unravelled
anyway. It was a choice between hard landing and harder landing. Similarly, US leaders have
to continue down the only road open to them: permanent war. As Thomas Jefferson said of
slavery, it's like holding a wolf by the ears. You don't like it but you don't dare let go!
"How long will it take before the public concludes that they have had enough of wars that
don't work?" Answer: Never.
In Alabama when people would rant about how toxic Roy Moore was, I would politely point
out that his opponent for Senate was OK with spending trillions of dollars fighting pointless
winless wars on the other side of the planet just so politically connected defense
contractors can make a buck, and ask if that should be an issue too? The response,
predictably, was as if I was an alien from the planet Skyron in the galaxy of Andromeda.
We are sheep. We are outraged at these sexual transgressions because the corporate press
tells us to be outraged. We are not outraged at these stupid foreign wars, because the
corporate press does not tell us to be outraged. It's all mass effect, and the comfort of
being in a herd and all expressing the same feelings.
Andrew Bacevich is wrong about a couple of things in this article.
First, he says that the American public is both apathetic and credulous. I agree
that we have largely become apathetic towards these imperial wars, but I disagree that we
have become credulous. In fact, these two states of mind exclude one another; you cannot be
both apathetic and credulous with respect to the same object at the same time. The credulity
charge is easy to dismiss because virtually no one today believes anything that comes out of
Washington or its mouthpieces in the legacy media. The apathy charge is on point but it needs
qualification. The smarter, more informed Americans have seen that their efforts to change
the course of American policy have been to no avail, and they've given up in frustration and
disgust. The less smart, less informed Americans are constrained by the necessity of getting
on with their meager lives; they are an apolitical mass that possesses neither the
understanding nor the capacity to make any difference on the policy front whatsoever.
Second,Andrew Bacevich calls for a Weinstein moment without realizing that it
already happened more than ten years ago. The 2006 midterm elections were the first Weinstein
moment, which saw the American people deliver a huge outpouring of antiwar sentiment that
inflicted significant congressional losses on the neocon Republicans of George W. Bush. An
echo of that groundswell happened again in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected to office on an
explicitly antiwar platform. But Obama turned out to be one of the most pro-war presidents
ever, and thus an angry electorate made one final push in the same direction by attempting to
clean house with Donald Trump. Now that Donald has shown every sign of having cucked out to
the war lobby, we seem to be left with no electoral solutions.
The only thing that's going to work is for the American Imperium to be handed a
much-deserved military and financial defeat. The one encouraging fact is that if the top ten
percent of our political and financial elite were planed off by a foreign power, the American
people would give as few damns about that as they currently do about our imperial wars.
Very good but some little errors. Concerning Russia and China, Russia vent all or
nothing.
China was much smarter. First they allowed self employment, than small business and long time
after they started to sell state enterprises,
If Tom's Dispatch continues to be successful, Americans will continue to be asleep.
Masterful propaganda. War, according to our favorite spooks, is necessary to win, but
otherwise reprehensible.
Sex is otherwise necessary for human life but Harvey Weinstein is ugly. Hold tightly to
your cognitive dissonance, because you're expected to remember John F Kennedy who got it on,
but is the expendable martyr you should care about, not that other guy
Let's review: terror attacks are wins. Superior or effective anti-war propaganda comes
from the military
itself. They really don't want war, but really they do.
We're trying to make Afghanistan not Afghanistan: aka, trying to be a miracle worker. We
can throw as much money as we like at that place, and it isn't going to happen, least of all
with troops on nine month shifts.
Let Iran and Pakistan squabble over it. Good riddance.
1) doesn't really make much sense, given that Poland and the Baltic States would be more
than happy to take all US forces in Europe to give us a presence near Russia in a part of the
world that would be far easier to justify to the American public-and to the international
community. Afghanistan? Who exactly is Russia going to mess with? Iran is their-for now,
longer term, the two have conflicting agendas in the region, but don't expect the geniuses in
the Beltway to pick up on that opportunity-ally, and unlike the USSR, the Russians don't want
to get involved in the India-Pakistan conflict. Russia's current tilt toward China makes a
strategic marriage with India of the kind that you found in the Cold War impossible, but they
obviously don't want to tilt toward the basketcase known as Pakistan. The only reason that
Russia would want to get involved with Afghanistan beyond having a more preferable status
than having American troops there is power projection among ex-Soviet states, and there are
far more effective ways to do than muddle about with Afghanistan.
2, on the other hand, given Iran-Contra who knows? The first generation of the Taliban
pretty much wiped the heroin trade out as offensive to Islamic sensibilities, but the newer
generations have no such qualms.
I think you give America's rulers far too much credit. The truth is probably far scarier:
the morons who work in the Beltway honestly believe their own propaganda-that we can make
Afghanistan into some magical Western democracy if we throw enough money at it-and combine
that with the usual bureaucratic inertia.
According to General John Nicholson, our 17th commander in Kabul since 2001,
We have been killing these people for 17 years. Now our generals say that if we
indiscriminately kill enough men, women, and children who get in the way of our B52s, that
they will see the light and make peace. How totally wonderful.
My solution is to gage the Lindsey Grahams for a year.
What will do more good for peace – B52s or shutting up Graham's elk?
I remember when Trump said he knew more than the generals and was viciously attacked for it.
It turns out he did know more than the generals just by knowing it was a waste. Trump was
pushed by politics to defer to the generals who always have an answer when it comes to a war
– more men, more weapons, more time.
"The less smart, less informed Americans are constrained by the necessity of getting on
with their meager lives; they are an apolitical mass that possesses neither the understanding
nor the capacity to make any difference on the policy front whatsoever."
I wonder if any Abolitionists criticized the slaves for failing to revolt? Probably not;
I'm guessing they were mostly convinced that the negro required intervention from outside,
whether due to their nature or from overwhelming circumstance.
If the enslaved American public is liberated, I hope we'll know what to do with ourselves
afterwards. It'd be a shame to simply end up in another kind of bondage, resentful and
subject to whatever oppressive system replaces the current outrage. Perhaps the next one will
more persuasively convince us that we're important and essential?
We are sheep. We are outraged at these sexual transgressions because the corporate press
tells us to be outraged. We are not outraged at these stupid foreign wars, because the
corporate press does not tell us to be outraged. It's all mass effect, and the comfort of
being in a herd and all expressing the same feelings.
Thank you, Andrew J. Bacevich, for your words of wisdom and thank you, Mr. Unz, for this
post.
This corporation needs to be dissolved. I've read about "the inertia" of Federal Government
that has morphed into a cash cow for a century of wasted tax dollars funding the MIIC, now
the MIIC. Does our existence have to end in financial ruin or, worse yet, some foreign entity
creating havoc on our soil?
The Founders NEVER intended that the US of A become a meddler in other Sovereignty's internal
affairs or the destroyer of Nation States that do not espoused our "doctrine." Anyone without
poop for brains knows that this is about Imperialism and greed, fueled by money and an
insatiable luster for MORE.
This should be easier to change than it appears. Is there no will? After all, it Is our
Master's money that lubricates the machinery. So, we continue to provide the lubrication for
our Masters like a bunch of imbeciles that allow them to survail our words and movements.
Somebody please explain our stupidity.
the folks in the US are sick of the wars, contrary to Bacevich. They simply will vote come
next election accordingly. They register their disgust in all the polls.
This article is not very useful. More punditry puff.
No comments on the Next War for Israel being cooked up by the new crop of neocon
youngsters, I guess, and Trump who will trump, trump, trump into the next War for the
Jews.
How about some political science on Iran, Syria, Hisbollah, Hamas and the US, Arabia,
Judenstaat axis of evil?
Hey Bacevich? When you link to WashPost and NYTimes to make your points, you don't. They
block access if you've already read links to those two papers three times each and can no
longer, for the month, read there. When folks link to papers that won't let you read, it
makes one wonder why.
I believe Americans are damned sick and tired of the stupid, needless war in Afghanistan. But
then they should have been sick and tired of stupid , needless wars like Korea, Vietnam and
Iraq, and probably most of them were. But it's easy to be complacent when someone else's son
is doing the fighting and dying And it's easy to be complacent when your stomach is full and
you have plenty of booze and pain killers available. There will be a day of reckoning when
the next big economic bust arrives and which may make the Great Depression paltry by
comparison. America is a far different place then it was in the 1930s when our population was
140 million. Americans were not so soft and the conveniences we now take for granted not
available. When the supermarkets run out of food, watch out. There may not even be any soup
lines to stand in.
In truth, U.S. commanders have quietly shelved any expectations of achieving an actual
victory -- traditionally defined as "imposing your will on the enemy" -- in favor of a more
modest conception of success.
Your assumptions are wrong about the US goal of the invasion of Afghanistan. Afghanistan and Iraq were not invaded to establish democracy or impose American will
whatever that is. Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded to establish a temporary military staging ground for a
US invasion of Iran, the designated regional enemy of Israel. As long as the current regime in Iran remains, the US will remain in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
And minerals! Eric Prince himself recently tried to sell the idea of having his private
militias do the fighting in Afghanistan for the US and finance it by mining said country's
minerals, thus making himself even richer.
I was onboard with Mr. Bacevich, until I got to this:
Almost as soon as the Taliban were ousted from Kabul, coalition efforts to create
effective Afghan security forces commenced. So, too, did attempts to reduce the production
of the opium that has funded the Taliban insurgency
What utter rubbish! The Taliban was instrumental in shutting down the poppy production
until the CIA came along and restarted it to fund their black ops.
We have the reverse Midas touch. Everything we touch (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc.,
etc.) turns to shit. We supposedly attack countries to liberate them from their tyrants who
are supposedly killing their own people, and end up killing more people than all of them put
together. And, oh yes, we have our favorite tyrants (Saudis, Israelis) whom we provide with
horrible weapons (like cluster bombs) to help them kill people we hate.
Mr. Bacevich is right about the lack of outrage about our wars, but the current Weinstein
explosion consists of hordes of mostly American female victims, mostly white, a (very) few
jews, and a few men, who have the stage to complain about their oppressors. What would be the
counterpart of that w.r.t. the wars? Millions of brown victims in far away lands that most of
us couldn't even find on a map? How likely is that to happen?
So yes, no outrage, and none likely. The last 17 years have proven that.
You don't know the American has been paying everything through monopoly money printed
through the thin air since WWI, i.e. a keystroke on the Federal Reserve's computer? No wonder
the Americans have been waging reckless wars all over the world on the fabricated phantom WMD
allegations as humanitarian intervention relentlessly.
Romans did not stop waging reckless wars until their empire collapsed; the British
imitates the Romans and the American is born out of the British, hence the Americans will no
stop waging reckless wars until their empire collapsed like the Romans.
It you need to read a singe article analyzing current anti-Russian hysteria in the USA this in the one you should read. This is
an excellent article Simply great !!! And as of December 2017 it represents the perfect summary of Russiagate, Hillary defeat and, Neo-McCarthyism
campaign launched as a method of hiding the crisis of neoliberalism revealed by Presidential elections. It also suggest that growing
jingoism of both Parties (return to Madeleine Albright's 'indispensable nation' bulling. Both Trump and Albright assume that the
United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena) and loss of the confidence and paranoia of the US
neoliberal elite.
It contain many important observation which in my view perfectly catch the complexity of the current Us political landscape.
Bravo to Jackson Lears !!!
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress ..."
"... Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton's defeat. Then everything changed. ..."
"... A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton's chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s. ..."
"... The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. ..."
"... Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free 'assessment' produced last January by a small number of 'hand-picked' analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. ..."
"... It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role. When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's putative weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the long history of disinformation (a.k.a. 'fake news') as a tactic for advancing one administration or another's political agenda. Once again, the established press is legitimating pronouncements made by the Church Fathers of the national security state. Clapper is among the most vigorous of these. He perjured himself before Congress in 2013, when he denied that the NSA had 'wittingly' spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. ..."
"... In May 2017, he told NBC's Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump's campaign because they are 'almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique'. The current orthodoxy exempts the Church Fathers from standards imposed on ordinary people, and condemns Russians – above all Putin – as uniquely, 'almost genetically' diabolical. ..."
"... It's hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump's election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It's true that Trump's menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. ..."
"... Trump is committed to continuing his predecessors' lavish funding of the already bloated Defence Department, and his Fortress America is a blustering, undisciplined version of Madeleine Albright's 'indispensable nation'. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because it's the greatest country in the world, Albright because it's an exceptional force for global good. ..."
"... Besides Trump's supposed uniqueness, there are two other assumptions behind the furore in Washington: the first is that the Russian hack unquestionably occurred, and the second is that the Russians are our implacable enemies. ..."
"... So far, after months of 'bombshells' that turn out to be duds, there is still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference in the American election. Meanwhile serious doubts have surfaced about the technical basis for the hacking claims. Independent observers have argued it is more likely that the emails were leaked from inside, not hacked from outside. On this front, the most persuasive case was made by a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, former employees of the US intelligence agencies who distinguished themselves in 2003 by debunking Colin Powell's claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, hours after Powell had presented his pseudo-evidence at the UN. ..."
"... The crucial issue here and elsewhere is the exclusion from public discussion of any critical perspectives on the orthodox narrative, even the perspectives of people with professional credentials and a solid track record. ..."
"... Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes – like the stories about Russian interference in the French and German elections – they are not retracted even after they have been discredited. These stories have been thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. ..."
"... The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. ..."
"... More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders's supporters. ..."
"... Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin's interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. ..."
"... Yet the FBI apparently took the Steele dossier seriously enough to include a summary of it in a secret appendix to the Intelligence Community Assessment. Two weeks before the inauguration, James Comey, the director of the FBI, described the dossier to Trump. After Comey's briefing was leaked to the press, the website Buzzfeed published the dossier in full, producing hilarity and hysteria in the Washington establishment. ..."
"... The Steele dossier inhabits a shadowy realm where ideology and intelligence, disinformation and revelation overlap. It is the antechamber to the wider system of epistemological nihilism created by various rival factions in the intelligence community: the 'tree of smoke' that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. ..."
"... Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale rehabilitation of the intelligence community – or at least the part of it that supports the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party's base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about 'treason' like a reconstituted John Birch Society. ..."
"... The Democratic Party has now developed a new outlook on the world, a more ambitious partnership between liberal humanitarian interventionists and neoconservative militarists than existed under the cautious Obama. This may be the most disastrous consequence for the Democratic Party of the new anti-Russian orthodoxy: the loss of the opportunity to formulate a more humane and coherent foreign policy. The obsession with Putin has erased any possibility of complexity from the Democratic world picture, creating a void quickly filled by the monochrome fantasies of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. ..."
"... For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open for business. This view is difficult to challenge when it cloaks itself in humanitarian sentiment. There is horrific suffering in the world; the US has abundant resources to help relieve it; the moral imperative is clear. There are endless forms of international engagement that do not involve military intervention. But it is the path taken by US policy often enough that one may suspect humanitarian rhetoric is nothing more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics – one that defines the national interest as global and virtually limitless. ..."
"... The prospect of impeaching Trump and removing him from office by convicting him of collusion with Russia has created an atmosphere of almost giddy anticipation among leading Democrats, allowing them to forget that the rest of the Republican Party is composed of many politicians far more skilful in Washington's ways than their president will ever be. ..."
"... They are posing an overdue challenge to the long con of neoliberalism, and the technocratic arrogance that led to Clinton's defeat in Rust Belt states. Recognising that the current leadership will not bring about significant change, they are seeking funding from outside the DNC. ..."
"... Democrat leaders have persuaded themselves (and much of their base) that all the republic needs is a restoration of the status quo ante Trump. They remain oblivious to popular impatience with familiar formulas. ..."
"... Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and maintenance of American empire. ..."
"... This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. 'The Democratic Party's claims of fighting for "working families" have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people,' Autopsy announces. ..."
"... Clinton's record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war. ..."
"... If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished. It's a long shot, but there is something happening out there. ..."
American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are
troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership's failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign.
Bernie Sanders's challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump's triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as
usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington.
Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means
of fighting evil in order to secure global progress . Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered
their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a
widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more
capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton's defeat. Then everything changed.
"... The Russia Investigation shifts to Clinton's Political Rivals ..."
"... Let me get this straight: The Democrats think Stein siphoned votes away from Hillary, so Stein must be a "Russian agent". Is that it? ..."
"... The persecution of Jill Stein strips away the facade once and for all exposing Russia-gate as a complete fraud that is being used to exact revenge on the adversaries of Hillary Clinton and her reprobate friends. The New York Times even admits as much. ..."
"... That's what's really really going on, the fatcat honchos behind the scenes are just settling scores for Hillary's lost election. It's payback time for the Clinton Mafia. Here's more baloney from the Times: ..."
"... Give me a break. Does anyone on the Senate Intelligence Committee honestly believe that Jill Stein is a Russian agent? ..."
"... Of course not. They're just harassing her to send a message to anyone who might be thinking about running for president in the future. They're saying, "You'd better watch your step or we'll trump-up charges against you and make your life a living hell. Isn't that the message?You're damn right it is! ..."
"... "This is a witch hunt. It is neo-McCarthyism, plain and simple. The people who are outright calling Stein a Russian agent are making a complete mockery of themselves and of the American political process ..."
"... Dragging Stein into this mess shows Clinton Democrats up for what they really are. It proves that the 'Resist' crowd's crusade is not just about Trump and "collusion" -- it's also about discrediting all dissenting American voices and establishing their own definition of what political opposition is supposed to look like -- and for the Clinton cult, it's not supposed to look like Jill Stein . ..."
"... Anyone who disagrees with the Democrats is a Putin puppet -- and if you've ever been to Moscow, forget it -- don't even bother trying to defend yourself. Off with your head." ("McCarthy-style targeting of Jill Stein proves Democrats have truly lost the plot", RT) ..."
"... "The Socialist Equality Party condemns the targeting of Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate in the 2016 election, by the neo-McCarthyite witch-hunters on the Senate Intelligence Committee . The attack on Stein, spearheaded by the Democratic Party, is an unconstitutional attempt to delegitimize and suppress political opposition to the monopoly of the capitalist two-party system . ..."
"... This is the Orwellian reality of America in 2017, ruled by two right-wing, oligarchic parties that can and will tolerate no political opposition . ..."
"... If you're a liberal and you hate Donald Trump, then you probably see the Russia-gate investigation as your best chance to achieve the Golden Grail of "impeachment". But are you willing to compromise your principles, join forces with the sinister and unscrupulous Clinton cabal, and throw allies like Jill Stein under the bus to achieve your goal? ..."
"... How high a price are you willing to pay to get rid of Trump? That's the question that every liberal in America should be asking themselves. And they'd better answer it fast before it's too late. ..."
"... Mueller is clearly not the upstanding 'protector of American values' he is painted he is a servile political degenerate. A lifetime of betrayal has rendered him ethically autistic. He is blind to the way his own actions condemn him before reasonable minds. Hopefully he will wake up when condemned hiself in an American Court of Law at some future date. ..."
"... According to Edward Aguilar of Project for Nuclear Awareness, cancelling construction of the new submarines, reducing the current number of such subs, and retiring rather than replacing nuclear warheads and a couple hundred ICBMs would save $270 billion. ..."
"... The weapons oligarchy appears to be a racketeering-influenced and corrupt organization. Luckily, the RICO Act provides for heavy criminal penalties for such death-dealing corruption. ..."
This review way written almost two year ago. The new President is now sitting in White house. Nothing changed.
The problem with Bacevich' views is that neoliberalism dictates expansion and maintenance of neoliberal empire as well in best
Trotskyism tradition "export of neoliberal revolution" using bayonets, if other means do not work. So this is the nature of the
neoliberal beast, not an aberration like he assumes. Militarism is essence of US foreign policy under neoliberalism.
Notable quotes:
"... This book, Bacevich's eighth, extends his string of brutal, bracing and essential critiques of the pernicious role of reflexive militarism in American foreign policy. As in past books, Bacevich is thought-provoking, profane and fearless. Assailing generals, journalists and foreign policy experts alike, he links together more than a dozen military interventions that span 35 years and declares them a single war. Bacevich analyzes each intervention, looking for common themes from Carter's late 1970s missteps to Barack Obama's widespread use of assassination by drone strike today. ..."
"... A presumption that using military power signified to friends and foes that Washington was getting serious about a problem diminished the role of diplomats and diplomacy. " 'Getting serious' also implied a preference for uniforms over suits as the principal agents of U.S. policy," Bacevich writes. "Henceforth, rather than military power serving as the handmaiden of diplomacy, the reverse would be true." ..."
"... In another repeated mistake, triumphalist American commanders prematurely declare victory without realizing that their opponent has simply withdrawn to fight another day as a guerrilla force, as occurred in Afghanistan in 2001. They also personalize the enemy, wrongly assuming that the removal of figures like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi will instantly end conflict. ..."
"... From Somalia in 1993 to Yemen today, American commanders and policy makers overestimated the advantage American military technology bestows on them. And most crucially of all, the United States has failed to decide whether it is, in fact, at war. ..."
"... "In the war for the greater Middle East, the United States chose neither to contain nor to crush, instead charting a course midway in between," Bacevich writes. "Instead of intimidating, U.S. military efforts have annoyed, incited and generally communicated a lack of both competence and determination." ..."
"... For all that, Bacevich is right that the United States' reflexive use of armed intervention in the Middle East is folly. An unquestioning faith in military might and an underinvestment in diplomacy has tied Washington in a policy straitjacket. Bacevich's call for Americans to rethink their nation's militarized approach to the Middle East is incisive, urgent and essential. ..."
BOOK REVIEW: AMERICA'S WAR FOR THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST (A Military History) By Andrew J. Bacevich
Illustrated. 453 pp. Random House. $30.
In the opening chapter of his latest book, the military historian Andrew J. Bacevich blames Jimmy Carter, a president commonly
viewed as more meek than martial, for unwittingly spawning 35 years of American military intervention in the Middle East. Bacevich
argues that three mistakes by Carter set precedents that led to decades of squandered American lives and treasure.
First, Carter called on Americans to stop worshiping "self-indulgence and consumption" and join a nationwide effort to conserve
energy. Self-sacrifice, he argued in what is now widely derided as Carter's "malaise speech," would free Americans from their dependence
on foreign oil and "help us to conquer the crisis of the spirit in our country."
The president came across as more hectoring pastor than visionary leader, Bacevich argues in "America's War for the Greater Middle
East." His guileless approach squandered an opportunity to persuade Americans reeling from high foreign oil prices to trade "dependence
for autonomy."
Carter's second mistake was authorizing American support to guerrillas fighting a Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan, a move
that eventually helped fuel the spread of radical Islam. Finally, in a misguided effort to counter views that he was "too soft,"
Carter declared that the United States would respond with military force to any outside effort to seize Persian Gulf oil fields.
"This statement, subsequently enshrined as the Carter Doctrine, inaugurated America's war for the greater Middle East," Bacevich
writes.
This book, Bacevich's eighth, extends his string of brutal, bracing and essential critiques of the pernicious role of reflexive
militarism in American foreign policy. As in past books, Bacevich is thought-provoking, profane and fearless. Assailing generals,
journalists and foreign policy experts alike, he links together more than a dozen military interventions that span 35 years and declares
them a single war. Bacevich analyzes each intervention, looking for common themes from Carter's late 1970s missteps to Barack Obama's
widespread use of assassination by drone strike today.
Washington's penchant for intervention, Bacevich contends, is driven by more than America's thirst for oil or the military-industrial
complex's need for new enemies. In addition to these two factors, he argues that "a deeply pernicious collective naďveté" among both
Republicans and Democrats spawns interventions doomed by "confusion and incoherence."
The ultimate responsibility for the United States' actions lies with an "oblivious" American public engrossed in "shallow digital
enthusiasms and the worship of celebrity," Bacevich writes. Americans support freedom, democracy and prosperity in other nations,
he tells us, as long as they get the lion's share of it. "Ensuring that Americans enjoy their rightful quota (which is to say, more
than their fair share) of freedom, abundance and security comes first," Bacevich says. "Everything else figures as an afterthought."
Bacevich's argument is heavy-handed at times, but when he writes about military strategy, he is genuinely incisive. Citing numerous
examples, he convincingly argues that destructive myths about the efficacy of American military power blind policy makers, generals
and voters. The use of overwhelming lethal force does not immediately cause dictators or terrorists to turn tail and run, even if
that's what politicians in Washington want to believe. Rather, it often leads to resentment, chaos and resistance.
A presumption that using military power signified to friends and foes that Washington was getting serious about a problem
diminished the role of diplomats and diplomacy. " 'Getting serious' also implied a preference for uniforms over suits as the principal
agents of U.S. policy," Bacevich writes. "Henceforth, rather than military power serving as the handmaiden of diplomacy, the reverse
would be true."
In another repeated mistake, triumphalist American commanders prematurely declare victory without realizing that their opponent
has simply withdrawn to fight another day as a guerrilla force, as occurred in Afghanistan in 2001. They also personalize the enemy,
wrongly assuming that the removal of figures like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi will instantly end conflict.
From Somalia in 1993 to Yemen today, American commanders and policy makers overestimated the advantage American military technology
bestows on them. And most crucially of all, the United States has failed to decide whether it is, in fact, at war.
"In the war for the greater Middle East, the United States chose neither to contain nor to crush, instead charting a course
midway in between," Bacevich writes. "Instead of intimidating, U.S. military efforts have annoyed, incited and generally communicated
a lack of both competence and determination." The historical forces at work in the Middle East are different from the dynamics
that led to American victories in World War II and the Cold War. American officials have failed to understand that. What's more,
a deluded Washington foreign policy establishment believes that an American way of life based on "consumption and choice" will be
accepted over time in the "Islamic world."
But it is here, in his description of the "Islamic world," that Bacevich stumbles. What is missing in this book about "the greater
Middle East" are the people of the greater Middle East. Bacevich's most highly developed Muslim character in these pages is Saddam
Hussein. The former Afghan president Hamid Karzai is a distant second. Beyond those two, the rest of the world's estimated 1.6 billion
Muslims come across as two-dimensional caricatures.
And so Bacevich lumps together vastly different nationalities - from Bosnians to Iraqis to Somalis - often referring to all of
them primarily as "Muslims." The dizzying complexities of each country's history, politics, culture, resources and rivalries are
missing. And when it comes to how "Muslims" view the world, Bacevich veers into the simplistic essentialism that he accuses Washington
policy makers of following.
Bacevich suggests that in the "Islamic world" lifestyles based on "consumption and choice" might not work. Such broad-brush statements
might well be considered simplistic and even bigoted if applied to other faiths. Can one contend that a "Christian world," "Hindu
world" or "Jewish world" exists? Are such generalizations analytically useful? Do the world's hundreds of millions of Muslims practice
their faith identically?
As a result of this essentialism, Bacevich glosses over a vital point about the Middle East today: A historic and brutal struggle
between radicals and modernists for the future of the region is underway. One can argue that the United States has no place in that
fight, but making sweeping generalizations about Muslims as Bacevich does limits our understanding of the forces at work in the region.
It also plays into the hands of extremists who seek to divide the world by faith.
In the most troubling passage of the book, Bacevich breezily questions pluralism itself. "According to one of the prevailing shibboleths
of the present age, this commingling of cultures is inherently good," he writes. "It fosters pluralism, thereby enriching everyday
life. Yet cultural interaction also induces friction, whether spontaneously generated or instigated by demagogues and provocateurs."
We do live in a dangerous world, but it is also an inevitably interconnected one. The commingling of cultures cannot be stopped.
Nor should it be.
For all that, Bacevich is right that the United States' reflexive use of armed intervention in the Middle East is folly. An
unquestioning faith in military might and an underinvestment in diplomacy has tied Washington in a policy straitjacket. Bacevich's
call for Americans to rethink their nation's militarized approach to the Middle East is incisive, urgent and essential.
David Rohde is the national security investigations editor for Reuters and a contributing editor for The Atlantic.
Essentially CIA dictates the US foreign policy. The tail is wagging the dog. The current Russophobia hysteria mean
additional billions for CIA and FBI. As simple as that.
The article contain some important observation about self-sustaining nature of the US
militarism. It is able to create new threats and new insurgencies almost at will via CIA activities.
The key problem is that wars are highly profitable for important part of the ruling elite,
especially representing finance and military industrial complex. Also now part of the US
ruling elite now consists of "colonial administrators" which are directly interested in maintaining
and expanding the US empire. This is trap from which nation might not be able to escape.
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S. Davies. ..."
"... Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. ..."
"... No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them. ..."
"... The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book Roots of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing," Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination." ..."
"... Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991. ..."
"... Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. ..."
"... Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any actual military threat to the United States. ..."
"... U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy. ..."
"... The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for war. ..."
"... The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years. ..."
"... Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out. ..."
"... Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq. ..."
"... But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant ..."
"... The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror," would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy objective. ..."
"... This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental scale. ..."
"... China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business." ..."
"... As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash on others. ..."
"... But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike. ..."
"... Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized Crime : How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy. ..."
"... In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to "make the economy scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. ..."
"... The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction. ..."
"... Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most expensive military budge t of any president since World War Two. ..."
"... Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction. ..."
The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington
seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer,
writes Nicolas J.S. Davies.
As the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American officials
ever believed that the United States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he committed
hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment
that had already killed millions of people.
As conversations tape-recorded in the White House reveal, and as other writers have documented,
the reasons for wading into the Big Muddy, as
Pete Seeger satirized it
, and then pushing on regardless, all came down to "credibility": the domestic political credibility
of the politicians involved and America's international credibility as a military power.
Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the
1954 Geneva Accords
and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die
was cast. The CIA's support for the repressive
Diem regime and its successors
ensured an ever-escalating war, as the South rose in rebellion, supported by the North. No U.S. president
could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could
achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited
from them.
The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book
Roots
of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing,"
Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination."
Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived
the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere,
but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of
Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991.
Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized
intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across
every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility
as Johnson and Nixon did. His predictable response has been to escalate ongoing wars in Syria, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and West Africa, and to threaten new ones against North Korea, Iran and
Venezuela.
Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries
across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only
become more entrenched over time, as
President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now,
the lack of any actual military threat to the United States.
Ironically but predictably, the U.S.'s aggressive and illegal war policy has finally provoked
a real military threat to the U.S., albeit one that has emerged only in response to U.S. war plans.
As I explained in a recent article , North Korea's discovery in 2016 of a U.S. plan to assassinate
its president, Kim Jong Un, and launch a Second Korean War has triggered a crash program to develop
long-range ballistic missiles that could give North Korea a viable nuclear deterrent and prevent
a U.S. attack. But the North Koreans will not feel safe from attack until their leaders and ours
are sure that their missiles can deliver a nuclear strike against the U.S. mainland.
The CIA's Pretexts for War
U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs
of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and
around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book,
The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World ,
was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores
and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher
sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role
of the CIA in U.S. policy.
Prouty surprisingly described the role of the CIA as a response by powerful people and interests
to the abolition of the U.S. Department of War and the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947.
Once the role of the U.S. military was redefined as one of defense, in line with the United Nations
Charter's
prohibition against the threat or use of military force in 1945 and similar moves by other military
powers, it would require some kind of crisis or threat to justify using military force in the future,
both legally and politically. The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such
pretexts for war.
The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence
and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating
pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years.
Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National
Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions
to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment,
ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out.
Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis
in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed
VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts
for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq.
CIA in Syria and Africa
But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations
to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty
meant. In late 2011, after destroying Libya and aiding in the torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi,
the CIA and its allies began
flying fighters
and weapons from Libya to Turkey and infiltrating them into Syria. Then, working with Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, Turkey, Croatia and other allies, this operation poured
thousands of tons of weapons across Syria's borders to ignite and fuel a full-scale civil war.
Once these covert operations were under way, they ran wild until they had unleashed a savage Al
Qaeda affiliate in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra, now rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), spawned the even
more savage "Islamic State," triggered
the heaviest
and
probably the deadliest U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam and drawn Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel,
Jordan, Hezbollah, Kurdish militias and almost every state or armed group in the Middle East into
the chaos of Syria's civil war.
Meanwhile, as Al Qaeda and Islamic State have expanded their operations across Africa, the U.N.
has published a report titled
Journey to Extremismin Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment
, based on 500 interviews with African militants. This study has found that the kind of special operations
and training missions the CIA and AFRICOM are conducting and supporting in Africa are in fact the
critical "tipping point" that drives Africans to join militant groups like Al Qaeda, Al-Shabab and
Boko Haram.
The report found that government action, such as the killing or detention of friends or family,
was the "tipping point" that drove 71 percent of African militants interviewed to join armed groups,
and that this was a more important factor than religious ideology.
The conclusions of Journey to Extremism in Africa confirm the findings of other similar
studies. The Center for Civilians in Conflict interviewed 250 civilians who joined armed groups in
Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya for its 2015 study,
The People's Perspectives: Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict . The study
found that the most common motivation for civilians to join armed groups was simply to protect themselves
or their families.
The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and
the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror,"
would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take
on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy
objective.
"The more intimate one becomes with this activity," Prouty wrote, "The more one begins to realize
that such operations are rarely, if ever, initiated from an intent to become involved in pursuit
of some national objective in the first place."
The U.S. justifies the deployment of 6,000 U.S. special forces and military trainers to
53 of the 54 countries in Africa as a response to terrorism. But the U.N.'s Journey to Extremism
in Africa study makes it clear that the U.S. militarization of Africa is in fact the "tipping
point" that is driving Africans across the continent to join armed resistance groups in the first
place.
This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early
60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations
that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed
resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on
a continental scale.
Taking on China
What seems to really be driving the CIA's militarization of U.S. policy in Africa is China's growing
influence on the continent. As Steve Bannon put it in an
interview with the Economist in August, "Let's go screw up One Belt One Road."
China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine
named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every
10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against
the wall, just to show we mean business."
China is too powerful and armed with nuclear weapons. So, in this case, the CIA's job would be
to spread violence and chaos to disrupt Chinese trade and investment, and to make African governments
increasingly dependent on U.S. military aid to fight the militant groups spawned and endlessly regenerated
by U.S.-led "counterterrorism" operations.
Neither Ledeen nor Bannon pretend that such policies are designed to build more prosperous or
viable societies in the Middle East or Africa, let alone to benefit their people. They both know
very well what Richard Barnet already understood 45 years ago, that America's unprecedented investment
in weapons, war and CIA covert operations are only good for one thing: to kill people and destroy
infrastructure, reducing cities to rubble, societies to chaos and the desperate survivors to poverty
and displacement.
As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies
into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the
safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash
on others.
But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely
about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop
the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which
we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike.
Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist,
beginning with his book on
The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled
The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's
analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many
ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy.
The Three Scapegoats
In
Trump's speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he named North Korea, Iran and Venezuela as his
prime targets for destabilization, economic warfare and, ultimately, the overthrow of their governments,
whether by coup d'etat or the mass destruction of their civilian population and infrastructure.
But Trump's choice of scapegoats for America's failures was obviously not based on a rational reassessment
of foreign policy priorities by the new administration. It was only a tired rehashing of the CIA's
unfinished business with two-thirds of Bush's "axis of evil" and Bush White House official
Elliott Abrams'
failed 2002 coup in Caracas, now laced with explicit and illegal threats of aggression.
How Trump and the CIA plan to sacrifice their three scapegoats for America's failures remains
to be seen. This is not 2001, when the world stood silent at the U.S. bombardment and invasion of
Afghanistan after September 11th. It is more like 2003, when the U.S. destruction of Iraq split the
Atlantic alliance and alienated most of the world. It is certainly not 2011, after Obama's global
charm offensive had rebuilt U.S. alliances and provided cover for French President Sarkozy, British
Prime Minister Cameron, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Arab royals to destroy Libya,
once ranked by the U.N. as the
most developed country
in Africa , now mired in intractable chaos.
In 2017, a U.S. attack on any one of Trump's scapegoats would isolate the United States from many
of its allies and undermine its standing in the world in far-reaching ways that might be more permanent
and harder to repair than the invasion and destruction of Iraq.
In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President
Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to
"make the economy
scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. But the
solid victory of Venezuela's
ruling Socialist Party in recent nationwide gubernatorial elections, despite a long and deep
economic crisis, reveals little public support for the CIA's puppets in Venezuela.
The CIA has successfully discredited the Venezuelan government through economic warfare, increasingly
violent right-wing street protests and a global propaganda campaign. But the CIA has stupidly hitched
its wagon to an extreme right-wing, upper-class opposition that has no credibility with most of the
Venezuelan public, who still turn out for the Socialists at the polls. A CIA coup or U.S. military
intervention would meet fierce public resistance and damage U.S. relations all over Latin America.
Boxing In North Korea
A U.S. aerial bombardment or "preemptive strike" on North Korea could quickly escalate into a
war between the U.S. and China, which has reiterated
its commitment to North
Korea's defense if North Korea is attacked. We do not know exactly what was in the
U.S. war plan discovered by North Korea, so neither can we know how North Korea and China could
respond if the U.S. pressed ahead with it.
Most analysts have long concluded that any U.S. attack on North Korea would be met with a North
Korean artillery and missile barrage that would inflict unacceptable civilian casualties on Seoul,
a metropolitan area of 26 million people, three times the population of New York City. Seoul is only
35 miles from the frontier with North Korea, placing it within range of a huge array of North Korean
weapons. What was already a no-win calculus is now compounded by the possibility that North Korea
could respond with nuclear weapons, turning any prospect of a U.S. attack into an even worse nightmare.
U.S. mismanagement of its relations with North Korea should be an object lesson for its relations
with Iran, graphically demonstrating the advantages of diplomacy, talks and agreements over threats
of war. Under the
Agreed Framework
signed in 1994, North Korea stopped work on two much larger nuclear reactors than the small experimental
one operating at Yongbyong since 1986, which only produces 6 kg of plutonium per year, enough for
one nuclear bomb.
The lesson of Bush's Iraq invasion in 2003 after Saddam Hussein had complied with demands that
he destroy Iraq's stockpiles of chemical weapons and shut down a nascent nuclear program was not
lost on North Korea. Not only did the invasion lay waste to large sections of Iraq with hundreds
of thousands of dead but Hussein himself was hunted down and condemned to death by hanging.
Still, after North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006, even its small experimental
reactor was shut down as a result of the
"Six Party Talks" in
2007, all the fuel rods were removed and placed under supervision of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, and the cooling tower of the reactor was demolished in 2008.
But then, as relations deteriorated, North Korea conducted a second nuclear weapon test and again
began reprocessing spent fuel rods to recover plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.
North Korea has now conducted six nuclear weapons tests. The explosions in
the first five tests increased gradually up to 15-25 kilotons, about the yield of the bombs the
U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but estimates for the yield of the 2017 test range
from 110
to 250 kilotons , comparable
to a small hydrogen bomb.
The even greater danger in a new war in Korea is that the U.S. could unleash part of its arsenal
of
4,000 more powerful weapons (100 to 1,200 kilotons), which could kill millions of people and
devastate and poison the region, or even the world, for years to come.
The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks
in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate
defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see
a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction.
China has proposed a
reasonable framework for diplomacy to address the concerns of both sides, but the U.S. insists
on maintaining its propaganda narratives that all the fault lies with North Korea and that it has
some kind of "military solution" to the crisis.
This may be the most dangerous idea we have heard from U.S. policymakers since the end of the
Cold War, but it is the logical culmination of a
systematic normalization of deviant and illegal U.S. war-making that has already cost millions
of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. As historian Gabriel Kolko
wrote in Century of War in 1994, "options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous
and irrational become not merely plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy
that is possible in official circles."
Demonizing Iran
The idea that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program is seriously contested by the IAEA,
which has examined every allegation presented by the CIA and other Western "intelligence" agencies
as well as Israel. Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed many details of this wild
goose chase in his 2011 memoir,
Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times .
When the CIA and its partners reluctantly acknowledged the IAEA's conclusions in a 2007 National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE), ElBaradei issued
a press release confirming that, "the agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons
program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran."
Since 2007, the IAEA has resolved all its outstanding concerns with Iran. It has verified that
dual-use technologies that Iran imported before 2003 were in fact used for other purposes, and it
has exposed the mysterious "laptop documents" that appeared to show Iranian plans for a nuclear weapon
as forgeries. Gareth Porter thoroughly explored all these questions and allegations and the history
of mistrust that fueled them in his 2014 book,
Manufactured
Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare , which I highly recommend.
But, in the parallel Bizarro world of U.S. politics, hopelessly poisoned by the CIA's
endless disinformation campaigns, Hillary Clinton could repeatedly take false credit for disarming
Iran during her presidential campaign, and neither Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump nor any corporate
media interviewer dared to challenge her claims.
"When President Obama took office, Iran was racing toward a nuclear bomb," Clinton fantasized
in a
prominent foreign policy speech on June 2, 2016, claiming that her brutal sanctions policy "brought
Iran to the table."
In fact, as Trita Parsi documented in his 2012 book,
A Single
Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy With Iran , the Iranians were ready, not just
to "come to the table," but to sign a comprehensive agreement based on a U.S. proposal brokered by
Turkey and Brazil in 2010. But, in a classic case of "tail wags dog," the U.S. then rejected its
own proposal because it would have undercut support for tighter sanctions in the U.N. Security Council.
In other words, Clinton's sanctions policy did not "bring Iran to the table", but prevented the U.S.
from coming to the table itself.
As a senior State Department official told Trita Parsi, the real problem with U.S. diplomacy with
Iran when Clinton was at the State Department was that the U.S. would not take "Yes" for an answer.
Trump's ham-fisted decertification of Iran's compliance with the JCPOA is right out of Clinton's
playbook, and it demonstrates that the CIA is still determined to use Iran as a scapegoat for America's
failures in the Middle East.
The spurious claim that Iran is the world's greatest sponsor of terrorism is another CIA canard
reinforced by endless repetition. It is true that Iran supports and supplies weapons to Hezbollah
and Hamas, which are both listed as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. But they are
mainly defensive resistance groups that defend Lebanon and Gaza respectively against invasions and
attacks by Israel.
Shifting attention away from Al Qaeda, Islamic State, the
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and other groups that actually commit terrorist crimes around the
world might just seem like a case of the CIA "taking its eyes off the ball," if it wasn't so transparently
timed to frame Iran with new accusations now that the manufactured crisis of the nuclear scare has
run its course.
What the Future Holds
Barack Obama's most consequential international achievement may have been the triumph of symbolism
over substance behind which he expanded and escalated the so-called "war on terror," with a vast
expansion of covert operations and proxy wars that eventually triggered the
heaviest U.S.
aerial bombardments since Vietnam in Iraq and Syria.
Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and
the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the
most expensive military budget of any president since World War Two.
But Obama's expansion of the "war on terror" under cover of his deceptive global public relations
campaign created many more problems than it solved, and Trump and his advisers are woefully ill-equipped
to solve any of them. Trump's expressed desire to place America first and to resist foreign entanglements
is hopelessly at odds with his aggressive, bullying approach to every foreign policy problem.
If the U.S. could threaten and fight its way to a resolution of any of its international problems,
it would have done so already. That is exactly what it has been trying to do since the 1990s, behind
both the swagger and bluster of Bush and Trump and the deceptive charm of Clinton and Obama: a "good
cop – bad cop" routine that should no longer fool anyone anywhere.
But as Lyndon Johnson found as he waded deeper and deeper into the Big Muddy in Vietnam, lying
to the public about unwinnable wars does not make them any more winnable. It just gets more people
killed and makes it harder and harder to ever tell the public the truth.
In unwinnable wars based on lies, the "credibility" problem only gets more complicated, as new
lies require new scapegoats and convoluted narratives to explain away graveyards filled by old lies.
Obama's cynical global charm offensive bought the "war on terror" another eight years, but that only
allowed the CIA to drag the U.S. into more trouble and spread its chaos to more places around the
world.
Meanwhile, Russian President Putin is winning hearts and minds in capitals around the world by
calling for a recommitment to the
rule of international
law , which
prohibits
the threat or use of military force except in self-defense. Every new U.S. threat or act of aggression
will only make Putin's case more persuasive, not least to important U.S. allies like South Korea,
Germany and other members of the European Union, whose complicity in U.S. aggression has until now
helped to give it a false veneer of political legitimacy.
Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition,
as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor.
France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their
own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and
destruction.
Americans had better hope that we are not so exceptional, and that the world will find a diplomatic
rather than a military "solution" to its American problem. Our chances of survival would improve
a great deal if American officials and politicians would finally start to act like something other
than putty in the hands of the CIA
Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction
of Iraq . He also wrote the chapters on "Obama at War" in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card
on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader .
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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Matthew Walther The failure and delusions of the adults in the room 
Matthew Walther The 2020 Democratic frontrunner is a Republican
© Reuters /
Jonathan Ernst Inconvenient thoughts on Cold War and other news. Intelligence agencies, Nikki
Haley, sanctions, and public opinion. 1. National intelligence agencies have long played major
roles, often not entirely visible, in international politics. They are doing so again today, as
is evident in several countries, from Russiagate in the United States and the murky Skripal
assassination attempt in the UK to the apparent murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi
consulate in Turkey. Leaving aside what President Obama knew about Russiagate allegations
against Donald Trump and when he knew it, the question arises as to whether these operations
were ordered by President Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) or were "
rogue " operations unknown in advance by the leaders and perhaps even directed against
them.
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1978: The year
today's world was made
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Biggest rift in
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Image
copyright
REUTERS
the creation of the Office of Homeland Security and the vote for a voluminous
anti-terrorist Code which had been drawn up long beforehand, the USA Patriot
Act. For affairs which the administration itself qualifies as " terrorist ",
this text suspends the Bill of Rights which was the glory of your country. It
unbalances your institutions. Two centuries later, it validates the triumph
of the great landowners who wrote the Constitution, and the defeat of the heroes
of the War of Independence who demanded that the Bill of Rights must be added.
Erdogan urges Turks
to dump dollar to support lira
No Russian
interference in Brexit referendum - YouTube exec tells parliamentary committee (VIDEO)
'Son of b***h
got fired': Joe Biden forced Ukraine to sack prosecutor general 'in six hours'
© Wiktor
Dabkowski / Global Look Press You'd have to have a real sense of humor failure not to laugh.
The news that US billionaire Soros donated £400k to an anti-Brexit group came on the day
that YouTube said they found no evidence of Russian interference in Brexit. Repeat After Me
(with robotic arm movements): "Unproven Russian involvement in Brexit – terrible!
Impose more sanctions on Moscow! A £400k check from an American billionaire for an
anti-Brexit campaigning group – that's no problem; it's helping our democracy!"
Soros-backed
anti-Brexit group is 'undemocratic' – cofounder Gina Miller
The passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has refuted any notion that
Trump's ascension to the White House would mark an end to neoliberalism. Poor whites who
supported Trump expected him to offer America a new version of conservativism that would break
with neoliberalism. Instead, furthering neoliberal policies has become a critical objective
that works in tandem with Trump's xenophobic rhetoric
Ryan Cooper Trump vs. the West 
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Russia should be
back in G7 as 'we spend 25% of time' talking about it anyway – Trump
'Marx would be
turning in his grave' – Britain's UN envoy appears to think she's debating Soviets
Entangling
alliances or scoring at home? Why US went out of its way with Russian diplomat expulsions
